Let’s take a recent example of some Colorado business news that might have caught your attention. The Castle Rock (Colorado) Economic Development Council just announced that MyWedding.com, a Seattle and Portland based business, will locate its corporate headquarters in their fair city.

Pretty cool news if you live in Colorado, operate a wedding oriented business, or even if you’re just looking for some positive news about the economy.

And, let’s say you’d like to see if Twitter could help you network with some of the folks related to this business story. Perhaps you’re a job hunter, a wedding vendor, or, heck, simply wanna’-be-journalists like us.

Search Twitter Like a Pro

By now, if you read this blog (Just the Guy We Need, Going Next Door for a Drink), you know you have to start your search, not on Twitter, but at their sister-search site, Search.Twitter.com. And, you likely know that you should search for:

mywedding.com colorado

That way, you’ll find anyone who has tweeted a message that includes both the words, “mywedding.com” and “colorado.”

But, here’s the problem. If you do this search, you’ll quickly see that the Twitter River is now a polluted stream, indeed. Many of the people who tweeted or re-tweeted this story are either wannabes, fruitcakes or auto-tweeters. Yes, it’s true, they now offer automatic re-tweeting programs. Ugh.

So, Look Elsewhere

The amazing thing is, you’ll find better connections by simply targeting your search terms more specifically to something like:

mywedding.com “castle rock”

Isn’t that amazing? By adding more specific terms, your results turn up no pollution and offer you five potentially cool people, companies or organizations:

Design Works – a floral supply company, specializing in weddings.

Mike Reid – a designer at the Colorado Springs Business Journal

Christian Eppers – an economic gardening expert in Highlands Ranch

Nicole McGee – of the very intriguing Colorado Stem Network

The Metro Denver Economic Development Commission

Twitter Really Can Handle That

Finally, isn’t it remarkable that while Twitter experts abound, almost none of them teach you even a smidgeon of proper etiquette?

When you refer to someone in a Twitter message, it’s best to refer to them by their Twitter handle. That provides a link and it alerts them to the fact that they were mentioned (which gives them a chance to thank you back).

In the case of MyWedding.com, their Twitter handle is “@myweddingdotcom.”

So, try your search terms combined with their handle, instead of their company name. In this case:

@myweddingdotcom colorado

@myweddingdotcom “castle rock”

@myweddingdotcom jobs

The results will show fewer goofballs and more savvy and experienced Twitter users, like the Oxford and Curtis hotels in the example below. We’re thinking these hotels host a few weddings on occasion, huh?

Yes, it’s still possible to fish for important contacts in “Twitter River” with your ole search fishing pole. But, it does take a little more work. Give it a try with better bait and let us know what your next catch looks like.

Want to find out how to keep up with what’s being said about you? Head straight to a cool new Internet resource called Filtrbox.com. But first, we’d like to tell you the story behind the Filtrbox story, and why you should care.

Broadcast News

The Internet has brought vast change at lightning speed to the business world. But, perhaps the biggest and least understood is the change from “broadcast” to “conversation.”

Without going all philosophical on you, whether you like it or not, you and your business are now part of an ongoing conversation. This conversation is multifaceted and it’s happening in a multitude of online locations.

The conversation is about the changes in your industry and the latest developments in the kinds of products you sell. But, it’s more than that. Now, folks are “conversing” about you, your brand and even your own (and your employees’) performance.

This new conversation also has a dark side. Whether you are famous for your inventions, ideas, products or services more and more people want to steal them from you – or just “borrow” them for a while without your knowledge. People want your trademark, your newest product release and even your turn of phrase. Increasingly, they don’t even think of it as stealing.

Location, Location, Location

Where is all of this going on? They’re writing web articles and blogs that use your own thoughts, ideas and exact words. They’re selling rip-offs of your stuff on their web sites and copying your good ideas on their blogs. And, they’re often slamming and damning your customer service on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

How can you keep track of all this? And do you even need to? For an answer to that, just ask any company who has ignored the bloggers and Twitterers. As they can testify, conversations can grow, get out of hand and turn into firestorms.

Are the Solutions Worse than the Problem?

But, how can you keep up? How can you tune in to the first whispers of discontent? How can you know that someone is using your trademarked phrase? How can you track your competitor so closely you’ll know when they burp? Will you see them hawking your products on their web site?

Well, let’s see, you could cobble together some Google News alerts,  a sprinkling of RSS feeds, dozens of blog subscriptions, a few web site change alarms, and top it off with a smattering of newsletters. If you do this, however, you’ll have a control panel about as complex as a fighter jet. And, you’ll spend more time manning the controls than you will evaluating the information you gather.

But, what if there was one solution? And, what if the controls for all of this were simple and accessible?

1 if by Air, 2 if by Land, 3 if by Sea

The place to try out that “one-stop Internet information shop” is at Filtrbox.com. What these guys can do with their Internet listening devices should make the FBI and the CIA a little green with envy.

Unlike a lot of other forms of web and news alerts, Filtrbox covers virtually all the bases AND acts as both a search resource and an alert tool.

You can receive Filtrbox alerts in your favorite RSS reader or in your email. Or, you can ignore these types of constant notifications, go on vacation for a month, and then fiddle with the Filtrbox controls so that you quickly catch up on only the most important stuff you missed.

Tracking your company name and intellectual property? You’ll probably want to monitor all sources – mainstream news, the blog world and Twitter. Tracking a topic in your industry? You may just want to keep up with the mainstream news sources.

At the Controls

So, why is Filtrbox different? Because in one place, you can view and adjust your different topics, time frames, sources and the relative importance of those conversations in one place.

Here’s what I mean. When it comes to your company name, your own name and your trademarked phrases, I’m sure you’d like to know whenever someone says anything – both good and bad.

When it comes to keeping up on your industry’s hot topics and issues, you likely might want to know only when more important or trusted sources have something to say. In the screen shot below we’re only picking up mainstream press articles for a very, very popular term, “information overload“:

And, for all of your terms and phrases you can adjust the amount of time you’re looking at – longer for obscure topics and shorter for popular ones:

Here’s the thing, though. You’ve got to try this. There’s a free version and a free trial – giving you a chance to kick the tires and look under the hood of this remarkable tool.

Why do you even need to try? Because, as the Rolling Stones sang way back in 1965, people really are “talkin’ about you.”

Editors Note: We do not accept referral fees or payments for any sites mentioned in our blogs, speeches or workshops. We do accept “review copies” and “press passes” in order to be able to demonstrate resources and sites.

Raise your hand if you have heard someone say, “I can get anything I need on Google.” Now raise your hand if you’ve said it yourself. Thanks, you may put your hands down now.

The preconception that Google finds everything you need is the topic of one of our recent blog articles, “Can You Speak the Language of the 21st Century?” Read it and you’ll find out that the best search engines (including Google) actually reach only a tiny fraction of the Internet’s vast information.

Here’s another preconception. It’s the one that says that Google shows you the best stuff. They don’t. You just think they do.

When You Want to Find the Very Best

Here’s a cautionary tale that reveals not only the limits of the best search engines, but also how rapidly the entire world of searching the Internet is changing.

The Executive Director of the Colorado Society of Association Executives, Joan Tezak, called us not long ago and asked:

“Can you get me a recommendation for silent auction software? Our current program is getting old and we think there are better programs out there.”

Just so you know, “silent auctions” are a popular and effective way for associations to raise money at their conventions and events.

Now, we know NOTHING about silent auction software. So, like many of you, we did our patriotic duty and logged on to Google. There, we found a host of both paid ads and what are called, somewhat misleadingly, “organic” results, all of which are pictured below:

The organic results were surrounded by those scads of ads that have made Google one of the richest companies in the world. Advertisers pay dearly for the listings that appear above and just to the right of the regular Google results.

The top two companies listed in Google’s organic results were Auction123Software.net and BarCodedAuctions.com.

However, there were a bunch of other possible results and we didn’t have time to research each of them. That made us wonder how else we could quickly get back to Joan with a reliable answer.

Twitter Followers, Do Your Thing

Curious about something we’ve been testing the last few months, I logged on to my @MichaelBenidt Twitter account. There I “tweeted” my followers the question that is shown at the beginning of this blog article. Translated slightly from Twitter language, I wrote:

“Who knew there were so many “silent auction” programs for managing a non-profit’s fundraising event! Let me know if you know of a good one.”

Now, I don’t have that many Twitter followers (around 250 back then). But, in only a couple of minutes, @EilSmi wrote back:

Eileen Smith told us that the Minnesota Council of Health Plans, for whom she serves as Director of Communications and PR, had used AuctionAnything.com for several years – and they loved it.

Think about that. In about the same time it took to get scads of untested results from Google, we were able to get a top level recommendation from a trusted source.

Eileen vs. Google

But what about those top two Google silent auction programs – wouldn’t they be the best? Might Eileen’s program be good, but not very popular? After all, AuctionAnything.com did not even show up on the first page of Google’s healthy organics.

The Baloney Detector

We’ve grown fond of using a free Internet site called Compete.com (we call it the “Baloney Detector“) to test Internet traffic claims. In this case we compared the traffic of the top two Google results to Eileen’s recommendation to see which had the most traffic. Eileen’s won in a walk.

How can that be?! Aren’t the top Google results the best? And, if not, aren’t they the most popular? And, beyond that, if they are neither the most popular nor the best – what the heck are they?

Google, of course, keeps their exact secret sauce under wraps. Experts agree, however, that the top results in Google merely have the most links from other web sites. That’s a little bit of a letdown, if you think about it.

You see, something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has hit the big time. It promises placement at the top of the Google results page. If those promises are to be believed, then what you find in a Google search has been jiggered by cadres of SEO folks.

The Biggest Threat to Google is You

Does that mean that you shouldn’t use Google? Absolutely not. Does that mean that asking a question on Twitter can replace reliable research? Nope. What it does mean is that we all have to lose our preconceptions about searching the Internet if we’re going to get reliable information quickly.

The fact is that Google is threatened – and not by another search company. It’s threatened by you. Google just might not be able to compete with an informed you, searching for just what you need in just the right place with just the right tools – without preconceptions.

ZoomInfo.com is one of the most important online business resources on the Internet. You’ve likely run across this site without realizing it when you search for almost anyone.

They use sophisticated web mining technology to find the latest contact information about people. But, that’s also why folks with a common name, a varied work history or very little web presence might find their information in need of more than just a face.

And, that’s why it is crucial for you to check your contact information on ZoomInfo.com.

SO STOP! Yes, stop reading this article right now and look yourself up. It’s likely that the information ZoomInfo lists about you could use some grooming. Just be sure you are in the “Find People” tab when you look yourself up:

Are you back? Yup, I thought so. Your picture looks just like the knobby little man below, doesn’t it?

So, you’d better put your face on! Ian did – and now his photo looks like the one at the beginning of this article.

But, that’s not the least of it. Ian Griffin also corrected his work history, added his association relationships (he’s president of his National Speakers Association chapter this year) and made sure that the other information about him was correct.

He also added a professional biography to further clarify his credentials. Totally legal:

If you don’t correct your own ZoomInformation, how will anyone know which “you” is “you.” Big deal, I hear you saying. Well, that’s a big mistake.

Think about it. So far we’ve left out a little secret. We’ve only introduced you to the free version of ZoomInfo.

But, they also offer reasonably priced, but robust tools like PowerSearch, ZoomExec, PowerSell, ZoomLists and more. These allow their subscribers incredible power to identify prospects by zip code radius, job title, company name and about 47,000 other cool criteria. We’ve written about this aspect of ZoomInfo in “The Butch Cassidy Approach to Sales Calls.”

Now, one last clarification before you hurry away to fix your ZoomInfo profile. Who do you think shells out for sophisticated contact databases like this?

I’ll give you a minute….

Yes, you’re right!! – human resource departments, sales directors, top executives, recruiters, meeting planners, speaker agencies and, well, you get the picture.

So, this is the last question, class. Do you want Mr. Knobby Figure to represent you with the folks who have the money, make the hiring decisions and might just provide you with your next big break? Or, do you want your profile to be groomed and looking its best, like Ian’s?

And, if you’re still not convinced, even by doing your own vanity search, consider reading what Meridith Levinson had to say January 9th in CIO Magazine: “The Two Websites Every Job Seeker Needs to Join.”

To be clear, Ian Griffin is not looking for a job. He already has several, thank you. But, as someone very wise once said – you should start your job search as soon as your get your new one. And, in this economy, who can argue with that?

So, before you head back out into the online world, for goodness sakes, remember my mother and put your face on!

Try looking up your industry or a general topic in Google, Yahoo or Ask. Go ahead, try it! Try using your favorite search engine to learn about healthcare, the credit card industry, biotechnology or even, what the heck, shipping and shipbuilding.

You’ll get millions of results – and that’s a waste of time if you are researching a specific topic for background such as recent surveys, industry overviews and the professional inside scoop.

Despite our best efforts, people still think that Google “gets” everything. In fact, even the best search engines only “get” a tiny fraction of what’s available on the Web. One reason is that some of the best information is hidden on the “Invisible Web” behind paid passwords. Some things, however, are are worth paying for.

Consider the James J. Hill Business Reference Library. This remarkable site offers Fortune 500-like research power to start-up companies and individual entrepreneurs. The cost? Less than your monthly cell phone bill.

The Hill Library offers databases that help you find new sales leads, resources to get the scoop on your competition, backgrounding tools that profile companies and individuals and much more.

Any one of these databases would be worth the price of admission, but let’s consider just their Special Issues Index.

Why Waste Your Time on Research? Just “Dial it Up!”

The Hill Library’s Special Issues Index is truly special – because nobody else has anything quite like it. Available only to members, you’ll just have to read the rest of this article and watch our 2-Minute video called “What’s So Special about the Hill Library?.”

Here’s how the Special Issues Index works. You see, as magazines, trade journals, and other industry publications come in to the Hill Library, they are combed for statistics, trend reports and industry profiles – and then indexed and filed into neat little topic folders just for you.

So, instead of using a search engine to get millions of results – most of which are not relevant to your search – you simply type in the industry or topic you are looking for and get all the articles in one place.

More topic examples? Just to name an alphabetical few from a random slice:

Cable Television
Canada
Candy Industry
Ceramic Industry
Chemical Industry
Children
Children’s Products
Clothing Industry
Coffee Industry

But, What About My Industry?

Wonder if your industry, topic or interest is included? Just give us a call and we’ll tell you if it is or not. Or, take advantage of a 10-day free trial at www.jjhill.org. You can even download the list of topics at this page called “Publications & Guides.”

Patricia Hoskins, Hill’s Technical Services Supervisor, gave us these background numbers:

Out of the 2400 articles listed in the Special Issues Index, 1100 are not available on the free web and a little over 1100 are not available in one of our databases. Even when available in a database or on the web, sometimes the accompanying graphics & tables are not fully available.

Even when available online in some form, learning about their existence can sometimes be difficult in the ocean of articles and websites out there.

Which is our point, entirely. People are always asking us how to find reliable, trusted information. The Special Issues Index gives you a great running start, with just one click. Try Google to see if they can match that kind of quick, concentrated value.

Beginning to see that background information like this can be critical in other ways? You undoubtedly work with any number of various people and companies – keep Special Issues at your side for the background you need for those future business deals.

And, speaking of dialing it up – as a James J. Hill member you can simply pick up the phone, send an email or chat online with their expert researchers – sending them out to lead you to whatever escapes you the first time.

Astonishing, actually. Some things really are worth paying for.

For a salesperson (yeah, that would be most of us), the problem with Google is that it finds too much. Instead, ZoomInfo is so powerful because it finds a lot less.

These Zoom guys specialize in finding people. In fact, they specialize in finding the people who might be your next customers – and then in giving your their phone number, address and some juicy details.

If you are trying to find out where your great-great grandfather is buried, you don’t need ZoomInfo. If you are pining for your high school sweetheart and wonder if she is likewise thinking of you, again, ZoomInfo is not the right site.

However, if you make sales or business calls, ZoomInfo is worth a million bucks.

Here’s a secret, though – it doesn’t cost a million bucks. The basic version of ZoomInfo, which is one of the fastest growing business reference sites on the web, is free.

Yes, FREE. Our friend Steve Lishansky has been using the “free Zoom” now for some time for his coaching business. “In many cases with just a click I can get the information I need and prepare me for my call – everything in one place.”

ZoomInfo will find companies and even find you a new job (not kidding), but in this case we’ll concentrate on their people finding powers.

It works like this. You have a name, but no contact or background information. Let’s say a friend told you that Clyde Thomas might need your service for his new company in Scottsdale .

If you searched Google for Clyde you’d come up with over 2 million results. If you knew enough to put Clyde’s name in quotation marks (”Clyde Thomas”) you’d still get over 14 thousand results.

If you use ZoomInfo.com to find Clyde, you’ll get 62 results, so it might take you some time to figure out which Clyde is your Clyde. But, pssst, you already know where he lives – and over there, yes, up in the left hand corner, you will see a box that says, “Filter Your Results.” So, go ahead, click on the state of Arizona.

Now you have only one Clyde Thomas – and he’s your guy. Try this on Clyde – and then try it on a few people you’d like to get your grubby hands on.

What do you get from ZoomInfo for free? You get his company name, web site, phone number, address, previous employment and even that he is on the Technology Advisory Board of the University of New England.

One name – one sort by state – and you’re pretty prepared to dial Mr. Thomas up. That’s almost always much faster than wading through a search Engine’s vast results.

Oh, by the way, just in case you’re wondering, ZoomInfo doesn’t know diddley about Bo Diddley, either. But then, Bo hasn’t worked for a corporation in, oh, about… well, never. He is still singing, however, wonderful as ever, at age 78.

Note: ZoomInfo.com offers more power in several paid versions. Their paid versions are examples of “Pay a Little, Get a Lot.” Look for more on that soon. And, as always, ZoomInfo does not pay us referral fees. We write about ZoomInfo (and all other resources we feature on this blog) because they offer true value, not because we’re getting paid for it. We call ‘em like we see ‘em.

Matt Lee is a Business Information Specialist and librarian at theJames J. Hill Reference Library, specializing in   digital libraries and other online initiatives. 

• Copyscape (copyscape.com) – Compare the copy on your Web site to other sites across the Internet. Just paste in your URL and Copyscape returns other sites with similar language.
• ArticleChecker (articlechecker.com) – Paste smaller snippets of your text into the site’s search box or upload larger files of complete text. ArticleChecker runs these through several search engines and returns sites with similar copy.
• Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) and
  Yahoo! Alerts (alerts.yahoo.com) – Set up alerts to notify you if a site appears using key pieces of your copy.
• Wayback Machine (archive.org/web/web.php) – Research the history of a site you think might be using your copy. If the suspect site posted copy closely after you created it, you may have found a pirate.

But what if you do find someone using your copy? How do you make them stop?

1. Send an email to the perpetrator if their contact info is listed on the site. If your copy shows up on a blog, leave a comment. Here’s an example of a cease and desist letter.
2. Contact the host of the infringing site and ask them to take the site down. Locate a site’s host using DomainTools (domaintools.com).
3. Complain to search engines. Most search engines accept complaints involving copyright issues and will remove offenders from results pages.

Great copy is an investment. You’ve put time and energy into the creation of your content; make sure that content pays dividends for you, and not some Internet pirate.

The same coach, in a previous email newsletter, had written an article called “How to Make People Like You.” It was a pretty darn good article.

The problem is that is was too pretty darn good. You see, the business coach who offered the article under his own name, was not the author of the article at all.

In fact, the article had been copied word for word from a 2001 article for the prestigious and unbelievably practical newsletter called Bottom Line Secrets.

Yes, “How to Make People Like You: Secrets of Instant Rapport” was written by Nicholas Boothman, a leading speaker and author, and an expert on the ways human beings connect and communicate.

How did we know this? Something about the tone and voice of the coach’s article just didn’t ring true.

Search Engines offer a great deterrent to copyright infringement. Teachers have long known this and are able to spot which of their students are not writing their own term papers.

So, how did I test my suspicions? I put a phrase from the article into Google (almost any phrase will do) and made sure that phrase was in quotation marks, like this:

“Your attitude sets the quality and mood of your thoughts”

When I did this I found Nicholas’ article in Bottom Line from 6 years ago. Hmmm… So, was the “great seminar” coach really the author of his newsletter article, or was Nicholas Boothman the author?

To make sure, we wrote an email to Mr. Boothman and received a telephone call from the Canadian author a few days later. Within minutes we had no trouble telling that he was not only the author of the article, but also the author of several books published by Workman, one of which is How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less.

This guy is not making false claims – we liked him in less than a minute. Mr. Boothman was engaging, brilliant, funny and generous. He was surprised to know that someone had stolen his article, but decided to let his attorneys deal with the issue. (Note: the links from the business coach’s article have since been removed, so his attorneys must have been persuasive).

On the Internet people are swiping stuff all the time. In fact, they’ve invented computer programs to do the stealing for them. The term “blog scraping” is now so common that Wikipedia even has an entry about it.

I have often read advice to newsletter and blog writers that it doesn’t matter what they write. “Just write something,” the aspiring writers are told, “the search engines will love your new content.”

Well, it does matter what you write. When you write original content, it becomes a part of you. When someone else steals it, they steal that part of you.

Today, you can see who is stealing Nicholas’ stuff if you do the same kind of search. First read his article, and then choose a portion of almost any sentence and let Google or Yahoo do the rest (just make sure to put that sentence portion in quotation marks).

You can also test out other suspicious “original” content of the newsletters and blogs you read. You just might be surprised.

And don’t forget to pay attention to your own material. Someone out there is not only swiping Nicholas Boothman’s stuff, they’re swiping yours, too.

News Alerts are easy to create if your topic is straightforward. For instance, if your customer is “Ball Aerospace” or your industry is “lumber products” all you have to do is to remember to put quotation marks around your terms and you are pretty much home free. (For an introduction to News Alerts, read “News Alerts Make YOU the Expert” )

But what if you need a news alert for a topic that doesn’t fit into an easily captured phrase? For instance, what if you’d like to keep up-to-date on the general issues surrounding “influence” and “persuasion?” Whether it’s in politics, business or All-Star balloting, the science of influence and the process of persuasion is increasingly leaving its imprint on our daily lives.

The problem is that you can’t simply do a news alert for either of those words or your inbox will be flooded. Testing them in the Google News search box we get:

Influence – 74,041 results
Persuasion – 1,650 results

Since Google searches the last 30 days of news in thousands of newspapers across the world, that would mean that your news alerts would capture close to 2,500 alerts per day for “influence” and 55 per day for “persuasion.” No one has the time for that much information.

The solution would seem to be to do an alert for both words – limiting your results to articles where both words are mentioned. A search for both terms returned 159 results in our test, which means you could expect an average of 5 alerts per day, perhaps a manageable number.

The problem is that even though you’ve reduced your results, you haven’t reduced the irrelevant ones. For instance: You could get this alert for “Real Estate Sales Tumble in June:”

Home buyers are of the persuasion to wait out the latest economic slowdown in Quebec. More people are just giving up, and the influence of those decisions could be catastrophic for the building industry.

This is not, of course, what you had in mind. It happens because Google and other search engines are not very smart – they just look to see if your words appear ANYWHERE on the page.

In order to avoid this, we could pair them by doing an alert for “influence and persuasion,” (the quotation marks are necessary) but that would give us only articles that have that exact phrase: “influence and persuasion.” We’d see only 2 or 3 news alerts cross our desk each month. Thankfully, they’d usually be relevant, but we’d miss a lot of other good stuff.

If you want to make your search for current news about these two topics hit more pay dirt, you’ll have to use what are called “Google Wildcards” (we’ll use Google because the statistics show that over 60% of you are using Google, more than twice as many as are using their distant search competitor, Yahoo).

A “wildcard” holds the place of a word and substitutes for any word. It’s very much like a blank square in Scrabble, only it substitutes for a whole word. The symbol you need to use for a wildcard is the asterisk symbol (*), which sits proudly above the number “8″ on your keyboard.

Quotation marks are again necessary when using wildcards – like this:

“influence * persuasion”

Such a news search or news alert will retrieve for you articles that include phrases like:

“influence and persuasion”
“influence without persuasion”
“influence through persuasion”
“influence, power, persuasion”

You get the idea. In fact, the week we did our example news searches “influence and persuasion” did return two results – and both were good results. However, it missed one that “influence * persuasion” added. This article was from the Vancouver Sun about a Canadian political issue that included the phrase, “influence through persuasion.” The whole sentence was:

Their game was “soft power,” influence through persuasion, peacekeeping and diplomacy.

Think about it. If influence and persuasion is your topic – then this reference to “soft power” might well be vitally important to you.

When we further searched “soft power” in Google the first result was a Wikipedia entry on the topic:”

Soft power is a term used in international relations theory to describe the ability of a political body, such as a state, to indirectly influence the behavior or interests of other political bodies through cultural or ideological means.

As an expert in influence and persuasion, you might well already know about “Soft Power,” but you might not. More importantly, those reading your blog or newsletter may need a little brushing up on it! And, the term itself could be creatively borrowed to describe a topic in your own materials about influence and persuasion, even if those materials are not politically oriented.

No matter what your topic or interest, try using wildcards on your next search or news alert. You’ll get fewer results, which will save you time. You’ll also get more targeted and more powerful results, which will make you look like a genius.

There ought to be a cautionary label posted on every entrepreneurial speech, workshop and class: “Warning: the advice you are about to hear skips the most important part. Good luck.”

But, at the annual AIIP Convention (Association of Independent Information Professionals) in Minneapolis this past weekend, Sam Richter didn’t skip the most important part.

He was talking to an audience of information professionals. Believe me, these folks earn that title because they can find anything for anyone – online or off.

Even so, “information professionals” can be just as challenged when it comes to operating a small business as the next person. We understand — we face those same challenges.

So what did Sam include in his speech that everyone else seems to ignore? Let’s take a look at three key words– and then connect the dots.

The first word is “differentiation.” It may sound cliché, but this is THE watchword for any small business (or medium or large one, for that matter) Whether it’s a 30-minute stand-up routine, a 3-hour workshop or a weeks-long series of classes on entrepreneurship, it doesn’t matter. Everyone will tell you that you’d better differentiate yourself. Successful business owners understand what an essential element “differentiation” has become.

Sam then added the concept that in order to have “differentiation,” you have to have “creativity.” Creativity is right behind “differentiation” as the BIG concept in business these days – everyone wants it and many claim it, but the truth is very few have figured out how to get it.

Differentiate. Be creative. So far, so good. Everyone seems to agree on these concepts. But here’s the important part. Creativity needs a partner – and that partner is the third key word – “information.”

It comes down to this: you can’t have “differentiation” without “creativity” – and you can’t have “creativity” without a healthy dose of “information.” And that’s the missing link. In this day and age, it’s that last piece – “information” – that’s essential for success. And the vast majority of today’s entrepreneurial experts are not connecting the dots. They may understand how important the first two concepts are, but it’s that essential third piece that is missing.

Today, information is your business no matter what business you’re in. That shift has happened at lightning speed in just the past few years, and few business classes and workshops have kept up with the implications for entrepreneurs.

But, in his speech, Sam Richter put it all together. You see, Sam happens to be the President of the James J. Hill Business Research Library in St. Paul, Minnesota. Information is his business – big time. The James J. Hill Library and its online service at jjhill.org offer small businesses the equivalent information support of a huge corporate library. Just like the big guys, a small business can get sales lead databases, benchmarking resources, business intelligence, industry profiles, expanded news services and even personal (and I do mean personal) research support.

It’s the mission of the James J. Hill Library “to provide access to and assistance in finding the practical business information our clients need to succeed.” They package it all into your own low-cost, easy-to-use research department. We don’t want to sound like an advertisement, but a James J. Hill membership is still very much a hidden treasure – which makes it a huge opportunity for you. Sam calls it, “Business. Smarter.”

The next time you attend a class, read an article or hear a speech about small business success, ask yourself if they understand the power of information. Sam Richter does.