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The Future of Marketing

I'm amazed that search advertising, the most pervasive new marketing tool, was not included in your New Basics of Marketing feature. Small and medium-size businesses are bailing out of traditional offline marketing mediums, like the yellow pages, in droves. That's because the vast majority of consumers are using the Internet to search for local goods and services. A recent study showed that 60 percent of customers are now using search engines as their primary source instead of telephone books. So as important as it was to educate your readership on the basics of marketing, search advertising is an obvious omission. It's the biggest slice of the digital marketing pie and quickly trending upward.

Zorik Gordon
co-founder and CEO
ReachLocal
Woodland Hills, California

Under the heading "Where should I go for ideas?" the authors write that you should visit your competitors' websites. I'd say a better plan would be to enlist a competent Internet marketing company to come up with fresh strategies and ideas. Just because your competitor has a website with different features than yours doesn't mean it's effective. Finding what works for your company's website takes planning, implementation, and testing.

Todd Muffley
President
Plan B Marketing
Carmel, Indiana

The Reell Deal

Bo Burlingham's article about Reell Precision Manufacturing was intriguing [Paradise Lost]. Employee-owned companies are at their best when they can help their employees focus on how the company makes money, and when they give employees the freedom to help increase revenue. Companies like Jack Stack's Springfield ReManufacturing, for instance, are classic "loose-tight" organizations, with lots of individual and team responsibilities offset by a lot of latitude from management in how to do things. Reell is trying to be just that kind of company, despite the upheaval in its market. Burlingham suggests that the fact that the company is 43 percent owned by its employees is an impediment to raising outside capital. Actually, many employee-owned companies have done that quite well, including Reflexite, which appeared on the cover of Inc. when all its employee owners were named Entrepreneurs of the Year. Other employee-owned companies have gone public, merged with other companies, or been through private placements.

Corey Rosen
Executive director
National Center for Employee Ownership
Oakland, California

Bo Burlingham's article about Reell Manufacturing illustrates one of the biggest dilemmas facing American businesses: How do you keep your company competitive while supporting the position that people are your most important assets? The article points out how tough it is to keep employees attuned to a new mission and vision after significant changes in strategy. In these situations there's always too much change and no one managing the change process. In my experience, Jack Stack's approach in The Great Game of Business is the best way to give employees the critical information they need to make the right decisions for a business.

Bill Lisowski
Naperville, Illinois

I suspect that if Reell Manufacturing didn't have a culture that valued employees, the struggles it went through would have been much worse. It's like the old "relationship bank accounts" concept. Reell made a lot of deposits to its relationship bank account, and it withdrew that capital when it laid off workers. For what it's worth, some of these problems could probably have been avoided if Reell had had a much greater sense of urgency about diversifying its products.

Michael Lee Stallard
President
E Pluribus Partners
Greenwich, Connecticut

The Five-Year IPO

Your story about the initial public offering of Reed's was accurate as far as it went, but I'm dismayed by the lack of detail regarding Chris Reed's misdeeds, micromanagement, and absurd decision-making process [His Way, February].

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