Inbound Social Marketing and Nonprofits

I recently read Heather Mansfield’s book, Social Media for Social Good: A How-To Guide for Nonprofits. As I finished the book several thoughts came to my mind:

1. Why have few nonprofits made major investments in inbound social marketing?
2. How come nonprofits do not seem to understand the ROI or value of integrating social media across the organization?
3. When will more nonprofits have a dedicated person for inbound social marketing?
4. Why do many nonprofits think of inbound social marketing as an optional or add-on part of their overall marketing, PR, and donor development strategies?

As I thought through these questions, several possibilities came to mind based on my experience with nonprofits across the country:

1. The entry cost for social media management and inbound marketing tools seems too expensive for many donation-based nonprofits.
2. Determining the ROI for inbound social marketing campaigns means having a solid handle on existing data trends and intensely tracking and comparing the impact of social marketing campaigns across all channels.
   1. Integrating social across the organization is rarely heard of and usually relegated to the marketing department – never being considered for customer service, donor development, public relations, support, R&D, nor sales.
3. Dedicated resources cost, yet if you want to do inbound marketing right it is worth the investment to get the right person or team in the door to monitor and manage it daily.
4. Inbound social marketing is here to stay and works best when it is integrated across all departments: operations, HR, marketing, PR, IT, broadcasting, customer service, and development.

Certainly, some will push back on these ideas it is built on my experience interacting with nonprofits. It is unfortunate, but I can count on one hand the nonprofits that have a dedicated resource for inbound social marketing.

This is where Heather’s book comes in. Every nonprofit C-Level should read this book. While a few may see this resource as a primer, everyone will get nuggets of wisdom to apply to their organization. An excellent companion book for ROI and social analysis would be Social Media ROI by Olivier Blanchard.

Start With Benchmarks

Below is a list of benchmarks that Heather has seen through her years of experience with nonprofits. While these are not strictly to be adhered to they are excellent goals to shoot for.

• 5000 fans/followers as a first tier goal
• 10,000 fans/followers as a second tier goal
• $2,500 – $10,000 annual budget for:
• eNewsletters
• List building
• Donation landing pages
• 20% email opens as a first tier goal
• 25% – 35% email opens as a second tier goal
• eNewsletter of 500 words with 1-2 updates per month
• $12.48 is the average value of an email subscriber
• Online giving should equal 25% of all organizational giving
• 40-50 hours a week for social media management

Best Practices

I have also included a list of best practices that Heather recommends. Look at your organization and weigh these in light of your current situation.

Facebook

• 6-10 posts per week (1-2 day)
• Goal is for 1 comment and 3 thumbs up per each status update per 1000 fans
• Ads equal $1.07 spent to acquire a fan

Twitter

• “Old school” retweet 80% of the time
• Auto-RT (retweet) 20%
• 25% of all tweets should be replies and retweets
• 4-6 tweets a day (20-30 tweets a week) 8am-8pm

YouTube

• 1 video per quarter (3-4 per year)
• Create a “Favorites” channel
• Customize and brand your YouTube page

LinkedIn

• 1-2 updates per week
• 2 hours a month participating in online groups
• Comment or participate 1-2 times per month to get your name out
• Goal of group size should be 5000
• Rotate “Manager’s Choice” discussions 2 times a month
• Send group announcements 1 time a month featuring 3 articles
• Launch a sub-group after the main group has reached 5000 members

Blog

• Post 1-2 articles per week
• Post summaries from events 1-2 days afterward
• Choose only 1 category per post

FourSquare

• Create a FourSquare Business Page
• Add a reward for checking in or stopping by

Mobile

• Link to mobile channels from mobile site
• Text message open rate should be 90%
• Send no more than 2-3 text messages per month
• Expect to budget $10,000 to build a custom smartphone app
• Promote apps for 2-3 months per year

Heather’s book if full of good information and how-to advice. You will especially like the checklists for getting started and tactical planning.

If you’re part of a nonprofit, purchase a copy of Social Media for Social Good and begin implementing the information immediately. If you have already been involved in social media marketing then compare your benchmarks for success to those above. You do not need to start with a big budget but in today’s world you have to be involved with inbound social marketing. It is not too late to catch up and you surely don’t want to get left behind.

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Competitive Behaviors versus Competitive Strategies

By Dan Coughlin

There has been a lot of talk lately about what the U.S. needs to do to be more competitive on the global stage. On March 13, 2009, Charlie Rose interviewed Michael Porter about his eight steps to fix the U.S. economy. Here is the link: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12809.

These types of conversations are about strategy. A strategy is a guideline for making decisions that affect the type of organization you will be and the type of activities your organization will do in the future. Strategies are important for businesses and for countries. Without a strategy there will likely be no connection between the types of activities people in the organization are doing or the people they are working to serve. Without a strategy, either written or unwritten, guiding your organization, you will likely end up with a very weak brand, virtually no effective innovations, and very poor results.

However, even with the most brilliant strategy, you cannot compete effectively as an organization if the people in the organization are not acting in a competitive way. In this article, I’m going to focus on how individual competitive behaviors can make an organization more successful. You can extrapolate these behaviors for the members of your organization, and for the citizens of the U.S. and for any other country in the world. We don’t just need the U.S. to be more competitive. We need every country to be more competitive. That’s how we raise the bar on a global basis. It starts with individuals behaving in competitive ways.

What Competitive Behaviors Are Not

There are certain behaviors that some people think demonstrate competitiveness, but I argue that they don’t. I call these behaviors The Three Killer B’s: bravado, boorish, and brutal. Bravado is synonymous with brag, bluster, and bombast, and it means a swaggering display of courage. Boorish is synonymous with uncouth, unmannered, and insensitive, and it means a coarse and blatant lack of sensitivity to the feelings or values of others. Brutal is synonymous with ferocious, gross, and rude, and means to act in a savage, cruel, and inhuman way. (Source: dictionary.com) Bragging about your past experiences, eating like an animal or dressing like a slob or swearing like a drunken fool just because no one will tell you to stop, and putting people down and having to win every single conversation in the hallway does not make a person competitive. Repulsive perhaps, but not competitive.

Talking with bravado, acting boorish, or being brutal might intimidate other people in the short term, but they do not help the intimidator or his or her organization compete more successfully. There is a dramatic difference between intimidating people and competing successfully.

Look for Analogous Competitive Situations

I suggest you think of a competitive situation you’ve been in outside of the business world. It could be sports, music, acting, academics or some other activity where you had to compete against other people or your own past performance in order to win. You can then use insights from that activity to see more clearly how to be competitive in the business world. For me, sports provide that analogy.

Competitive Business Behavior #1:
Define Winning

Winning in sports is very easy to understand. You get a schedule of games to play in, and then in each game you either win or lose. At the end of the season, you either win the championship or not. In practice many drills are set up to immediately determine whether or not you won in a particular activity.

Winning in business is not always as short term or easy to figure out. However, in order to compete, you have to define what winning means in your role as a business leader and you have to be able to measure it.

Some parts of business are easy to define in terms of winning: growing revenue, reducing cost, increasing profit, beating last year’s sales numbers, adding five new customers, and so on.

Other times winning is not as obvious, but these aspects can be more important in terms of being successful over the long term. This might include improving the reliability of small parts in a product that no one ever sees, reducing the complexity of a customer’s instruction guide for one of your products, or improving the impact of a presentation on an audience member’s future behaviors, which can only be loosely measured by anecdotal information down the road and somewhat by his or her actual results.

I like to think about Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios. It takes them four years to make a film, and then over the course of a few weekends their financial success is largely determined. Certainly they include box office receipts and DVD sales and video downloads as one way of defining whether or not they won, but I also believe they define winning as improving the quality of the images and the development of their characters and the impact of the message within the film.

Within your role in your organization, what would have to happen for you to be able to say you’re winning? I’m not talking about your title or income or authority level. Those are by-products of winning. Increasing your salary so you can do meaningful things for other people might very well be fueling your energy at work, but that’s not the type of winning I’m referring to. I’m talking about what would have to happen in terms of an outcome for your organization in order for you to say that you and your team have won? If you don’t know how to define a victory, then how can you compete?

In order to win in business, you can’t just plow through a ton of activities and work a million hours and call yourself a winner. You actually have to impact some outcome, some measure of success. What is yours?

Competitive Business Behavior #2:
Prepare to Win

If you’re a competitor, you don’t just show up and perform. You prepare as well as you can to deliver a winning performance. I think if people spent less time talking about being competitive and more time preparing to win in their organizations, they would actually become much more competitive. Talking about winning is in-the-public-eye, exciting and sexy. Preparing to win is behind-the-scenes, mundane, and ordinary. Take that improved instruction manual as an example. No one in the media is going to write a front-page story about how much easier it was for customers to understand the instruction manual or how it helped the customer to assemble the product in 40% less time, but that’s an example of winning within an organization that helps the organization to be much more competitive in the long run. To improve the instruction manual perhaps the person studied the competition’s materials and studied instruction manuals from other industries. Maybe this person prepared himself or herself by taking courses on effective writing. All of this behind-the-scenes preparation pays off in fewer customer complaints and more loyal customers.

Competitive Business Behavior #3:
Bring an Intense, Sustained Desire to Win

Do you show up just for the paycheck, or do you have an intense, burning desire to win within the framework of how you have defined winning?

Let’s switch back to my sports analogy. The athletes regardless of their sport who win consistently over the long term have a burning desire to constantly prepare and improve within their sport.

It doesn’t matter what role you have or what industry you work in. If you want to be a competitive person at work, you have to have a burning desire to do what you do as well as you can do it. I’ve been writing monthly articles on business leadership at this desk since September 1999, and right now I’m trying my very best to craft a message that will hopefully have a tremendous impact on your competitiveness as a business leader. This article might not help you, but I have an intense desire to try to help you be a great business leader. What is your intense desire at work? What are you willing to work for?

Competitive Business Behavior #4:
Persevere through Challenges

Life is difficult. These are the three famous opening words from Scott Peck’s book, The Road Less Traveled. They are powerful because they are true. On the road to winning you are going to face challenges on a daily basis. We all know that. We also all know that we have to persevere in order to win. The tricky part is to actually keep going. This is where a sense of purpose comes in. You need a purpose, a reason for working, a reason to be competitive, a reason to keep on keeping on. What is yours? Why do you want to win at work? Do you want a greater salary so you can provide for your family and pay college tuitions and help your aging parents? Those are noble reasons to keep on keeping on.

There are other reasons why people persevere. They want to leave a legacy of having mattered. They want, as the late Steve Jobs used to say, to put a “dint in the universe.” They want to fulfill something deep inside of themselves. These are also noble reasons to keep on keeping on.

For an athlete to compete, he or she has to persevere within a practice, a game, a season, and a career. For a business leader to compete, he or she has to persevere within a meeting, a project, an organization, and with suppliers and customers. You have to keep going in order to have an opportunity to win.

Competitive Business Behavior #5:
Analyze Performances and Improve in the Details

Being competitive doesn’t mean that you have to be always performing. Sometimes, or maybe more like a LOT of times, you need to stop doing and step back and reflect on what you’ve done. Look at your performance and ask yourself what you’re doing that is helping your chances of winning, what you are doing that is hurting your chances of winning, and what you could be doing that might increase your chances of winning. Reflection and discernment are perhaps the two most underrated aspects of competitive business behaviors, but they are two of the most important. Rather than wasting time on bravado and boorish, brutal behaviors, I encourage you to step away from your activities and really think about what would make them even more effective.

One caveat: don’t cheat. Cheating might help you “win” in the short term, but it can also ruin your career and destroy your organization. Winning only counts if you are competing in an honest way.

Competitive Business Behavior #6:
Be Comfortable with Other People Getting Uncomfortable

On the road to trying to win you will likely encounter people who simply don’t want to put in the physical or mental effort necessary to win on a consistent basis. It’s okay to be honest and professional with them and to point out in a very clear way why they need to make some adjustments. This is where your leadership skills come into play. To me, business leadership means influencing how other people think so they make decisions that improve results for the organization in a sustainable way. That’s a long way of saying that business leadership is about competing to win. As Tom Landry, the long-time coach of the Dallas Cowboys, used to say, “Coaching is about getting people to do what they don’t want to do so they can achieve what they want to achieve.”

Even if you have hired competitive people, you are likely going to make them uncomfortable in some way at some point in time. That’s okay. It may very well be that discomfort, okay let’s call it pain, that will help them to learn how to be more competitive in the future.

If you’ve hired people who are not competitive and who aren’t willing to learn how to compete, then you are facing a very difficult decision. Do you move forward with folks who are friendly and who do a good job but who are unlikely to do what it takes to win as an organization, or do you decide to move on without them? Competitiveness and competitive behaviors are essential elements in a winning organization. I encourage you to teach and develop competitive behaviors in your organization, but also realize that some people are not going to want to compete in order to continually improve and to press on for victory. In those cases, you have to decide what you are going to do. It’s not about bravado, boorishness, or brutality. You can still maintain professionalism and integrity in whatever you decide to do.

Conclusion

Intelligent strategies that affect the type of business you will be in and the types of activities your organization will do in the future are important to consider carefully and to create.

However, an organization will not be competitive in the marketplace, and a country won’t be competitive in the world, just because it has a good competitive strategy. What organizations and countries need are employees and citizens who consistently demonstrate competitive behaviors. There is nothing in the world that is wrong with being competitive, as long as we’re clear about what that means. Competitive behaviors include defining what winning means, preparing to win, maintaining a burning desire to win, persevering through obstacles, analyzing performances, and influencing other people even if it means causing them to get very uncomfortable.

About Dan Coughlin

Visit Dan at www.thecoughlincompany.com

Dan Coughlin works with senior-level executives and managers to improve their impact as business leaders on teamwork, execution, innovation, and branding. His clients include McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Abbott, GE, Marriott, Coca-Cola, Shell, Toyota, Boeing, BJC HealthCare, RE/MAX, Subway, St. Louis Cardinals, Jack in the Box, Denny’s, Prudential, Land O’Lakes, ACE Hardware, Holder Construction, Kiewit, McCarthy, and more than 200 other organizations.

14 Tips For A More Effective Online Survey

By Dana Fine

Developing a useful, well-written online survey that extracts the information you need from your users can be a challenge. In this article, I will review 14 tips for creating a useful online survey.

1. Write a brief, concise survey. Start with a mental framework that focuses on only what is essential to know. Ask questions only if the answers will give you the data you need and can use. Try to envision each question as its own specific theory that you are testing. In addition, research has shown that people skim and skip on the web, so your online survey completion rate will be higher if the survey is short and succinct.
2. Try to begin the survey with interesting questions. Interesting questions will inspire the respondent to keep reading and complete the survey.
3. Develop questions with answers in the proper format for your purposes. For example, if you believe your students need more time to complete the questions in your lesson, ask, “How long did it take you to complete the unit and accompanying questions?” with various time intervals as possible answers.
4. Plan ahead of time how you and your company will analyze the information before you send out the final version of the survey. This may affect your questions and format when you realize that the statistical analysis you need to perform.
5. Use the simplest language possible and respect the respondent’s dignity when constructing questions. Your survey respondents will undoubtedly come from many different groups.
6. Use neutral language. The online survey is being developed to find out what your audience thinks and is not a forum for you to air your perceptions or opinions.
7. Relax your grammar a bit so your questions do not sound too formal.
8. Be sure to ask only one question at a time and put them in a logical order.
9. Avoid double negatives, difficult concepts, and specific recall questions. Respondents are easily perplexed when trying to interpret the meaning of a question that uses double negatives.
10. Try to use more closed-ended questions, with no more than one or two open-ended questions. Respondents usually have a better understanding of closed-ended questions because they are more straightforward and offer responses they can choose from. Open-ended questions require a written response.
11. Scaled response questions should have answers that are at balanced, comparable intervals. For example, offering choices of excellent, very good, good, and terrible would cause you to miss important information in between the values of good and terrible.
12. Whenever possible, responses should be developed as discrete amounts instead of general statements of quantities, with specific options from which to choose. It’s better to ask, “How many times a month do you go to the movies?” “0”, “1 to 3 times a month”, “3 to 5 times a month or more”, instead of “How often do you go to movies?” “almost never”, “once in a while”, “I am there at least once a week”, etc.
13. Name your survey and write a brief introduction. It prepares them for what is to come.
14. Craft a well-written subject line for the email you send with the survey to capture your respondents’ attention.

In summary, a well-written online survey has higher completion rates and is an effective method for gathering information.

About the Author:

Dana Fine is a Senior Instructional Designer at SyberWorks, Inc http://www.syberworks.com. SyberWorks is a custom e-Learning solutions company that specializes in Learning Management Systems, e-Learning solutions, and custom online course development. Dana is also a frequent contributor to the Online Training Content Journal.

Web Strategy: Doing The Right Things

This is an article I wrote for the Five Q blog – Enjoy!

“Strategy is doing the right thingsand tactics are doing things right.” Everything rises and falls on your web strategy, which is why it is critical to place such emphasis on it being part of the project process, no matter how large or small.

Strategy questions are the foundation for any organization’s web initiatives. Without a solid web strategy, everything else will crumble and fall. Imagine building a house. You don’t start by nailing siding to the framing; you begin by determining the purpose and needs for the house:

• How you will use the house?
  • Do you like to entertain or do you like private spaces?
• How many people will be living in it?
  • Will you have occasional overnight guests or will your in-laws need a suite to live out their years?
• How much money and time can you afford to spend on building the house?
  • What are the features you need to have now, and which ones can wait until later?

Having these determined first ensures that the plan foundation will be solid. A website is much the same way.

Preparing The Foundation

To build a web presence that you will not quickly outgrow, start with the following questions:

• Who are you talking to? Do you have a clear understanding of your existing web audience? Why do they come to your website? Why should they come? What are their unique needs compared to another audience type (e.g., a Baby Boomer vs. a Gen Xer)? How many different audience types do you expect to reach? How do they each use the Internet?
• Where is your audience going? If you have a website, where do you get most of your traffic on the website…and do you know why? Are you providing for your visitors’ needs or only your own? Where do you want people to go on your website (i.e., what are the main calls to action)?
• What media draws your audience? Are they looking for community and social interaction? Are you using audio and video content to engage your visitors? What formats and platforms should you make your content accessible in: desktop/laptop, mobile phones, tablets, impairment friendly?
• How do you build the right web team? Are you planning on maintaining the website and content yourself? Do you have an in-house web team? Does your team have all the necessary skills to take care of your web-related needs? Do you need the assistance of outside partners—vendors, agencies, interns, volunteers?
• When will you see a return on investment? What will you be measuring and analyzing? What are your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)? How will you know when you are meeting your targets? How do you know what strategies you will need to change or revise?

Can you see how these impact your project from the start?

Ready to Strategize?

These questions should be reviewed and revisited through your web project process as well as regularly after launch. Successful organizations are the ones that stay flexible enough to change, adapt, and grow when it makes good strategic sense.

Ready to get started? Take our self-evaluation form and take the first step toward building your successful web presence.

Comment Below:

• Have you tried to create a web strategy? What parts did you find most and least valuable?
• What other core questions need to be answered before building a website?

Mobile Websites: Strategy Plus Tactics Equal Success

This is an article I wrote for the Five Q blog. Enjoy!

With the rise of mobile devices–laptops, tablets, and smart phones–having a clear mobile strategy is a must. If “strategy” is doing the right things, and tactics are “doing things right”, then there are multiple things to consider when creating a mobile strategy.

Data Analysis

Good decisions are made with good data. Reviewing your mobile trends in your web analytics tool will help you see trends as well as learn more about your mobile audience.

Key items to review in your analytics for mobile:

• Mobile traffic on your website
• Mobile devices used: iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, etc.
• Mobile browser usage
• Top entry pages
• Top exit pages
• Bounce rate and more

Having a good understanding of how mobile users are accessing and viewing your web content will help you better set the direction for your goals and metrics.

Goals and Metrics

All good strategies begin by identifying your key goals for building and delivering your mobile brand. Some examples could include:

• Expanding your reach
• Increasing sales/donations
• Usability for mobile users
• New market outreach

Once your goals are established, then you can set your clear and concrete metrics for success. Some metrics for success could include:

• 50% increase in page views for the website
• 100% increase in time on website site
• 25% increase in donations
• 20% increase in contact form inquiries
• Adding 1,000 new Twitter followers
• Increase to 5,000 new Facebook fans

Remember that your goals and metrics should be grounded in data as well as flexible enough to adjust to keep pace with the activity your users are experiencing on their mobile devices.

Best Practices

Now that your goals and metrics have been established, you can consider some best practices in developing your comprehensive mobile strategy:

• Mobile Visitor Goals and Mobile Surfing:
  • Visitor’s goals will be different when visiting the mobile website than when visiting the desktop website.
  • A Nielsen study from May 2010 showed that Americans spend the bulk of their time on their mobile phones checking email, visiting social networks, and reading the news.
  • Mobile users will often be interacting with mobile websites in 5-7 minute chunks of time.
  • Therefore, they will have less time and desire to read content.
• Mobile Content:
  • The best mobile websites do not simply make the original website viewable in a mobile browser, but restructure the website to meet the needs and goals of the mobile user.
  • Content blocks need to be shorter than they are on the desktop version of a website.
  • Navigation needs to be limited to meet the immediate information needs of mobile users and should be action oriented.
• Mobile Donations:
  • Making a donation may not be the first thing a mobile user thinks to do, but if the timing and ask are appropriate to the channel, increasing donations via mobile is an attainable goal.
  • For text message donations, you are limited to $5 or $10 per gift.
    • This may not be strategically aligned with your ministry/organization’s objectives to further develop donors who are able to give more or those who would be willing to donate more if approached properly.
    • The dollar limit may likely cause someone who would be willing to donate a larger amount to settle for donating $5 or $10 since it is the path of least resistance.
  • If using a donation form, make it as easy to use as possible, including pre-populating it with the visitor’s information when they access the link from email on their mobile device.

Responsive Design & Progressive Enhancement

A trending discussion about mobile design revolves around Responsive Design and Progressive Enhancement.

Responsive Design allows your site to be designed to perfectly fit a specific platform/environment–smart phone, tablet, or desktop–with a single design. Through specific adjustments to the website code and style sheets, the design scales and responds accordingly per the device. Here is additional information about responsible web design and its adaptations for mobile.

Progressive Enhancement, on the other hand, “is a way of designing web pages so that the more features a user agent supports, the more features the web page will have. It is the opposite of the design strategy graceful degradation that builds pages for the most modern browsers first and then converts them to work with less functional browsers.” (About.com) A how-to guide for progressive enhancement is provided by Webdesigner Depot.

Knowing that the design is also part of the user experience is something to consider when crafting your mobile strategy.

Deliverables for Your Mobile Strategy

Keeping the goals, metrics, data, and best practices in mind when developing your mobile strategy will lead to success. You will also want to include in your strategy:

• Audience Analysis: clear definitions of your mobile users, trends for different demographics, and usage patterns
• Mobile Sitemap: defining the core website navigation and pages for your mobile offering.
• Mobile Wireframes: taking into careful consideration that your mobile audience will interact with your mobile website differently than on a desktop, establishing a clear information architecture for mobile will be key to ensuring no gaps exist in the user experience.
• Mobile Design: with the information design complete, you can elevate your wireframes to life through your mobile design.

Be sure to work closely with your web team to ensure that your goals and metrics are clearly being met throughout the mobile production process. As technology continues to evolve, you want to be sure that your mobile strategic efforts grow with your brand.

Comment Below:

• Have you started thinking through a mobile strategy yet? Why or why not?
• What about a mobile website vs a mobile app? Are you seeing your organization lean more toward one or the other?

The Collapse Of Distinction – Book Review

By Eric Brown

It has taken me a while to write this review. Not from lack of reading time, I assure you, I often have 2-3 books going at once. Scott McKain’s book, The Collapse Of Distinction: Stand Out and Move Up While Your Competition Fails, is not a book you skim through. I found myself taking it a bite-at-a-time. I often paused to reflect on and look for ways to apply the action steps outlined in the book. I have many pages dog-eared and chunks of the content underlined.

Some of the questions early in the book that bear reflection are:

• How can your customers distinguish you from your competition?
• Do you bring a higher value to customers?
• Besides product and price, what do you really sell?
• Why would your customer pay for you over your competition?

If you are new to brand development or in the process of reviving your brand, answering these initial questions may be all you need in order to set yourself head and shoulders above your competitors. Yet, you would be doing yourself a disservice if you did not process the remainder of McKain’s material.

Understanding The 3 Destroyers

According to the author, there are 3 destroyers of distinction:

1. Incremental Advances – emulation; replicating small advances your competitors make.
2. New Competitors – new challenges; trying to be like competitors and not staying on top of the competitive landscape.
3. Familiarity Breeds Complacency – customer boredom; being so familiar you are taken for granted.

Think about it – what have you changed in the last year about yourself or your organization to freshen the approach with your customers and constituents?

Don’t Be Different – Be Distinct!

McKain goes on to define what he calls “The Ebert Effect” named after movie critic, Roger Ebert.

When people, from their perspective, are inundated with indistinguishable choices, they perceive a product, service, approach, or experience with a specific point of differentiation to be superior.

This means creating small strategies that are recognizable as different from your competition. This is only one step to being different in the customers eyes. We are encouraged to move toward being distinct. The only way to do this, says McKain, is to create a foundation of distinction built on the following four pillars:

• Clarity – Who are you? Be specific about what your organization is and is not.
• Creativity – McKain says, “Creativity without clarity is devoid of distinction.” What creative strategies are you employing to enhance the quality of customer contacts?
• Communication – Know the benefits of compelling story telling. Tweak your distinct communication for your audiences.
• Customer Experience Focus – Create a unique customer centric experience that cements loyalty.

Each of the pillars works with the next. You cannot have one without the others if you wish to truly be distinct.

Final Thoughts

The book was more than a business book, it was a work book. It is laid out for those people who have the time to consume the book page by page. It also has executive summaries at the end of each chapter followed by action steps to put the material into practice – which I would highly recommend.

The publisher, Thomas Nelson, also added a unique feature. Published as a “Nelson Free” title allows the buyer access to three formats for the price of one! I got the hardback version and that gave me access to both an ebook and an audio version of the book. At this writing, it looks as though Thomas Nelson has continued this practice with only a small handful of their titles. A nice perk but not a must-have for many readers.

Nevertheless, if you are wanting to improve your brand distinction, The Collapse Of Distinction, is definitely worth the read. It is full of practical tips throughout and resources at the back of the book that can help you dig further into differentiating your company from the myriad of others vying for consumer attention.

Was this helpful? Please comment below

Enjoy!

Trends Come And Go While Direction Is Here To Stay

The company I work for, Five Q,  has Subject Matter Experts or SMEs (pronounced “smees”) on a variety of topics. Our staff has expertise in web and marketing related areas, including but not limited to web strategy, usability, SEO, social media, information design, mobile strategy, user experience, email marketing, and project management. Our SMEs are continually researching new trends and directions in web technology. The distinguishing factor between a trend and a direction is that trends come and go, but a direction is a solid shift and movement in web usage and technologies. For our client partners, here are some of the prominent directions we see for 2011 are:

• Mobile-optimized Websites: Web users are “going mobile” at an alarming rate. If you do not have your web content optimized for this platform, you will be behind the curve.
• Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Are you prepared for inbound marketing? Traditionally, we think of marketing as outward focused, but good customer service creates influence that leads to word-of-mouth marketing to generate sales and donations. Are you making an impact?
• Online Brand Management: How are you managing your online brand? Does your audience perceive you as relevant or as a “has-been”? What do people think of when they think of your brand? Taking control of your online reputation is something you can and should do.

How do these new directions fit with your web strategy? Is your plan flexible enough to accommodate change? Five Q can help. Contact us today for more information.

Tight Budgets Breed The Best Innovations

By Dan Coughlin

Innovative thinking means searching for and implementing a better way.

That’s it. Nothing more. Do not overcomplicate this topic. It’s not about pontificating on highly theoretical concepts and wasting a lot of money. Innovation is improvement in motion.

A business innovation is the process of creating additional value for your customers that they will pay for at a greater profit for your business. Your innovations have to do both: increase value to customers and increase the profits that your organizations make. Creating value that erodes profit is not a business innovation. It’s actually a self-induced death blow to your business.

The Process of Innovation

Step One: Focus, don’t spend.

For many years I worked with executives in one of the world’s largest companies. Each quarter we would study the business results of the industry in a wide variety of categories. Every quarter one of my client’s competitors, which was much smaller and had far fewer resources than my client, would win in several key performance categories.

I didn’t understand what was happening. The people at my client organization worked incredibly hard on a large number of projects to create and deliver more value to the customers. They invested enormous resources into these innovative projects. And yet this small competitor kept outperforming them quarter after quarter.

Then one day my client hired one of the key executives from this competitor. On her second week on the job I asked her, “How in the world did your former company keep outperforming your new company?” What she said I will never forget.

She said, “We had very, very limited resources. We couldn’t try a lot of things. We had to succeed with the few projects we could afford to do. We were forced to concentrate on delivering great value on one thing at a time. Here we have tons of resources. And that’s the problem. It allows us not to have to focus in order to survive. So we end up doing too many projects and overwhelming our front-line employees and customers.”

Within a few years my client’s organization was achieving incredible results that were lasting far longer than ever before. What was the difference? In spite of having massive resources to work with my client narrowed their focus to a few key areas. No longer did they allow themselves to go off on three dozen wild tangents. They poured all of their effort and concentration into improving just those few areas. Today they are achieving truly remarkable results quarter after quarter.

Note: recessions are good for innovation. It forces every company to operate within a tight budget and be extremely focused. This tight area of concentration generates far more useful innovations than the conceptual free-for-all that companies often use during good economic times.

In the past six months I have served as a business speaker to the National Automobile Dealers Association, National Association of Home Builders, and a national conference of a major residential real estate company. These were three of the hardest hit industries in the past three years. Yet I didn’t hear talk about gloom and doom at any of the meetings. I saw and heard a lot of ideas about how people were working to create greater practical value for their customers in a few concentrated areas. It was clear that everyone understood that innovative thinking was a requirement to survive through this recession and thrive on the other side of it.

What is the one area that you are going to focus on improving for your customers?

Step Two: Ask.

Of course, one way to find out the best area to focus on for customers is to ask the customers. I suggest a simple question such as, “If there was one thing about your experience with this product (or service) that you would like improved, what would it be?”

Now be patient. Customers don’t have the answer on the tip of their tongues. Allow them to think. If they can’t think of anything, you can follow up with probing questions on specific aspects of the product or service. Another approach is to ask, “What was of value to you with this product, what was not of value to you, and what would have been of greater value to you?”

Before you start to come up with an innovative product or service, identify the statement you are trying to fulfill. Write a one- to three-sentence description of the desired outcome. Say you want to create a new countertop in public bathrooms for the sinks and faucets. Your statement might say, “In the end, we want a countertop that stays dry so people can place a book or small bag on the countertop and the item won’t get all wet.”

Innovations don’t have to be about computers or cell phones or medicine. Innovation is about searching for and implementing a better way. That “better way” can happen in any industry.

Step Three: See.

Remember: insight comes from sight. If you want to understand the customer experience in order to improve it, then go see for yourself what it is that customers go through. Don’t just ask them for ideas on how to improve the experience. Go look for yourself.

A few weeks ago I bought a quarter-sheet cake for a Valentine’s Party at my church. I went to the bakery, and asked the baker if I could see the cake before I paid for it. She opened the box, and it said, “Happy Valentine’s Day, St. Lucas Women in Red”. I looked at the cake, I looked at the baker, and then I said, “Why does it say, ‘St. Lucas Women in Red’?”

She pulled out a sheet of paper, and said, “It says right here, ‘St. Lucas Women in Red’.” I looked at it, and I said, “I meant I wanted the frosting in red, not the words.” She said, “No problem.” She scooped off the red letters and replaced it with vanilla frosting.

At the party that night I told that story. Someone else said, “I had that same experience at that bakery.” If the owner of the bakery had been a customer of the bakery, then he or she may have gained the insight necessary to create a better experience for customers.

Step Four: Stop and start over.

Sometimes you have to start over from scratch. Don’t feel compelled to merely tweak what you’ve always done.

Several years ago McDonald’s sold Salad Shakers. The idea was to put the salad dressing in a cup with the salad ingredients. Then you shook it up and, voila, you had a salad. Only problem was there were a lot of problems. You had to ask for a plate to pour the salad onto after you shook it up, and the salad dressing oftentimes ended up on the customer’s clothing.

So McDonald’s stopped and started over. They gained insights from customers. They went and observed the Salad Shaker in action at restaurants. And then they came out with a completely new salad, their Premium Salad. This new salad has been wildly popular for several years and helped to significantly increase sales of Happy Meals.

Don’t be married to your current way of doing things. Once you’ve identified the statement you are trying to fulfill and have gained insights into what customers really want be willing to take out a blank sheet of paper and start with new ideas on what will deliver the value that you want to deliver.

Step Five: Improve.

A prototype is a model that represents what your idea will look like when it’s put into action. You can create simple prototypes for both products and services. Use cheap, basic materials to assemble your prototype. Use paper, napkins, paper towels, paper clips, cardboard, and Styrofoam. Don’t use expensive materials to make fancy looking models. That’s a waste of money.

When you are explaining your concept you can refer to the prototype and that may very well help the other person understand better what it is you’re trying to get across. My all-time favorite book on innovation is The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, who is the general manager of IDEO. My favorite quote from that book is, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand pictures.”

Start with five or six prototypes under the area of focus that you selected earlier. Study the prototypes, capture the best ideas, and then continue to make prototypes as quickly as you can as better ideas evolve.

Notice so far you have not spent very much money. You’ve invested time in talking with customers, observing customers, and developing prototypes. The process of innovation is not expensive. The primary investment is a mental investment, not a financial one.

Keep improving the prototypes until you land on the one that you are ready to actually create and deliver into the marketplace. This is where the costs primarily occur. You will have to spend some money in producing the product, training people on the new service they will be delivering, and on marketing the new product or service. However, notice that if you hold off on the spending until this stage you are able to provide something into the marketplace that has a far better chance of success at a lower overall investment from your business.

Step Six: Sell.

At some point you have to attempt to sell your innovation. You can’t innovate in a vacuum forever. You’ve got to put your idea out in the market and see how people respond to it. Innovation does not end with the first sale. Innovation is an on-going process. Find out what customers like and don’t like in your new product or service. And then keep working to make it better and better.

Step Seven: Find out if the proper connection has occurred

One important question to ask after your product or service has been in the market for awhile is, “Do customers feel they received the value that we intended to deliver to them?”

There is value to you regardless of the answer to that question. If customers feel they are receiving the value you wanted to deliver, then you can tell how much this value is worth to them. If customers believe they are receiving some other value that was unintended, then what is it? Perhaps that unintended value can lead to great profits for your business. If customers feel they are receiving no value from this new product or service, then you can work to determine if you need to scratch the idea or merely modify it.

My point is that I don’t want you to just stop after you’ve sent the new product or service into the marketplace. Allow customers to teach you what you don’t know about this new innovation. It doesn’t matter what value you think you put into the marketplace. What does matter is what value your customers think you put into the marketplace.

Keep searching for and implementing a better way. It is the key to surviving in tough times and thriving in good times.

About Dan Coughlin

Dan Coughlin teaches practical ideas that improve business performance. His purpose is to work with executives and managers so they achieve great performances. He is a business keynote speaker, management consultant, executive coach, and author of three books on management performance, including Accelerate, Corporate Catalysts, and The Management 500. Dan’s new book Find a Way to Win: Management Insights from Terry Michler, America’s All-Time Winningest Soccer Coach, will be published in May 2010.

Why You Do Not Want A Job

By E. Brown (Repost)

Did you know that many people use the words, job, career, and vocation synonymously? Are you one of them? These words are actually very distinct with distinct definitions.

The Dictionary says of these:

Job – A paid position, responsibility, or piece of work.

Career – Time spent in an occupation for a significant period of one’s life.

Vocation – A strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or a person’s main occupation.

When thinking about your work, how do you see yourself positioned? Many newbies to the workforce see themselves in particular jobs for the money. Yet studies have shown that after 5 to 10 years, money is not the prime motivator many thought it was. Many lack passion in what they do, but it pays the bills so they stick it out in an environment they dread returning to each Monday morning. Today, employees are asking themselves if they are truly making a difference with their lives in regard to work. After all, in the western world, work is such a big part of one’s life, you cannot help but wonder if there is any lasting impact. “Is this all there is?” many are asking.

So, how about you? Are you in a job, a career, or a vocation?

Dan Miller offers the following definitions as you think about your life and its purpose as related to work. Read on.

Job - A job is the most specific and immediate of the three terms. It has to do with one’s daily activities that produce income. The average job is 3.2 years in length, meaning the average person will have 14 to 16 different jobs in his/her working lifetime. Jobs will come and go….

Career - Career comes originally from the Latin word for “cart” and later from the Middle French word for “racetrack.” In other words, you can go real fast for a long time but never get anywhere. That is why in today’s work environment, even physicians, attorneys, CPAs, and engineers may choose to get off the expected track and choose another career. You can have different careers at different points in your life.

Vocation - Vocation is the most profound of the three, incorporating calling, purpose, mission, and destiny. This is the big picture many people never identify for themselves. It’s what you’re doing in life that makes a difference and builds meaning for you, which you can review in your later years to see the impact you’ve made on the world. Stephen Covey says that we all want “to live, to love, to learn, and to leave a legacy.” Our vocation will leave a legacy. The word vocation comes from the Latin vocare, which means “to call.” It suggests that you are listening for something that is calling out to you. Everyone has a vocation or calling. (48 Days To The Work You Love, pages 38-40)

Anyone can do a job. The question is, have you been listening for your vocation? Are you fulfilling a purpose beyond the weekly grind? Are you proud and excited about the legacy you are leaving?

These are not easy questions to answer. They will take some introspection but in the end you will find the time you took was worthwhile. You will approach work with exuberance.

You will have fun.

You will find yourself content.

Contentment is not a word used much anymore. Yet, isn’t that something we all want at the end of the day - contentment?

Go. Pursue your vocation and at the end of your life you will find contentment!

Now tell me about you — are you in a job or vocation?

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How To Improve Your Job Search – Deliver A Great Performance

By Dan Coughlin

Before you can deliver a great performance, you need to have an opportunity to perform. With at least 15 million Americans out of work, the importance of searching for and gaining a desired type of job may be of importance to you now or in the future or for someone you know. Or you might have a job, but want a different job.

The Definition of a Job
A job is an opportunity to create and deliver value for other people for which you are financially reimbursed. Both parts of that definition are important.

If you create and deliver value but don’t get paid for it, that’s a volunteer activity. I’m a big fan of volunteer activities. I’ve invested a great deal of time over the past fifteen years volunteering as the president of three different associations, teaching Sunday School classes at my church, and coaching youth sports. I’m guessing you have volunteered a great deal of time as well. Volunteer efforts are critically important. First, you might make a great positive impact on other people’s lives. Second, you might sharpen your skills in important areas. Third, you might meet someone who enhances your career. Volunteering is important, but it is not a job.

If a person receives financial reimbursement for an activity that does not create and deliver value for other people, he or she may be surprised when that activity is no longer considered valuable enough to keep around. Be sure that as you are being financially compensated you are also creating and delivering value. During a terrible recession sometimes valuable contributions are eliminated. But even during the best of times organizations will examine the value contribution of every role and decide if they are worth keeping around.

A Job Search is a Microcosm of a Business
Everything that is important in searching for a job is also important in running a successful business. Entrepreneurs naturally understand this because entrepreneurs are always searching for the next job, even though they call it the next “project” or “assignment.”

Every business, small, medium, or large, focuses on preparation, operations, research and development, marketing, branding, selling, innovation, problem solving, finances, legal issues, and building value-added relationships with customers and potential customers. Every one of these items is critically important in searching for a job.

Job Search Action #1: Be prepared.
Be ready for an employer BEFORE the employer is ready for you.

If a person has had a job for twenty years and then suddenly finds himself or herself without a paycheck, it can be a very difficult blow to the person’s self-esteem. The person may not clearly see the value he or she brings to life’s party. Consequently, I think it’s very important for the person to take exceptionally good care of himself or herself.

So my very first suggestion when you’re looking for a job is to physically exercise and get in the best condition you can be in. This is something you are in control of. Rather than working eight hours a day searching for a job, I suggest you carve out ninety minutes a day to warm up properly, exercise, and warm down properly. Even if this means walking around the block one time to get started, do it. As you begin to get in much better physical shape, you will strengthen your self-esteem and remind yourself that you are to a large degree in charge of your destiny.

Also, continually sharpen your mind and your skills. This is where volunteering can help you. Put yourself in situations where you have to execute in the types of areas you want to be hired for. If you want a senior-level executive position, volunteer to be a board member for a local or national organization. If you want a sales manager’s position, volunteer to organize a fundraising effort in your community.

Be prepared for an employer before the employer finds out about you.

Job Search Action #2: Research Before You Search
Before you start searching for a job, research the industry and any targeted companies you would like to work for. Learn everything you can. Talk to customers, go on line and study their websites, know the trends and challenges and opportunities in the industry and the organizations, and know who the most important movers and shakers are in that industry or organization.

Before I speak to an audience I always interview at least a dozen people, study as much information as I can get my hands on about the organization, and usually volunteer to go on site and observe people in their normal workday activities. When the actual job opportunity opens up, you will be infinitely better prepared if you’ve been doing your research all along.

Job Search Action #3: Clarify Your Value
Businesses sell products and services. You are selling yourself. You are the product and service that you are selling. Your product consists of your values, strengths, passions, knowledge, skills, and experience. Take out a sheet of paper. Under each of those headlines describe what you bring to a potential employer. Then think of an example that supports why you feel you bring that characteristic. Invest sixty minutes in this exercise. Pretty soon you’ll see that some employer is going to be very fortunate to hire you.

Job Search Action #4: Use a Comprehensive Marketing Program
When I speak to entrepreneurs and salespeople I often explain how some of my biggest business opportunities came from people I never would have expected to help me. I just didn’t know who was going to open a door for me or how big the room was going to be. And neither do you. Never write off the possibility that someone you don’t expect to ever help you might turn out to be the most important person in your career.

I used to be a high school teacher. I wanted to be a management consultant and business speaker. That was thirteen years ago. I taught freshmen algebra. The father of a sophomore whom I had taught the year before worked for McDonald’s Corporation. We connected on a very small school event. A year later he invited me to speak to a group of department heads at McDonald’s. That one speech led to me serving as an executive coach for more than 60 people at McDonald’s and to more than five hundred presentations to executives and managers at a wide range of organizations in over thirty industries.

Think of yourself as a business. Now think of all the ways this business can market what it has to sell to prospective buyers. When it comes to a job search you only need one perspective buyer to actually buy/”hire you.” The key is you may need to attract a mountain of opportunities in order to land one that you are really excited about.

Take out several sheets of paper. Start writing down every single person you know. Really challenge yourself to think of people who might know you. Write their names down. Let these individuals know specifically what type of job you want and what type of organization you want to work for. Remember: clarity is powerful, vagueness is not. You are trying to stir up a wide range of people who can recommend you to a potential employer. If they don’t specifically know what you want, what are the odds they are going to be successful in recommending you?

Go on the internet and be creative. Put in search words for the type of industry, organization, or job that you want. See what you come up with. Keep searching on-line to see if you can find a key person to contact. Intelligently use Facebook and Twitter to reach out to people to see if you can uncover opportunities for the type of job you want and the type of company you want to work for.

Attend meetings at organizations that help people find out about jobs. I’ve spoken at these organizations many times, and I’m always impressed by the quality of folks who attend their meetings. You never know who might know someone that you need to know. Don’t think of a job search as an embarrassing activity. Think of yourself as the CEO of a major company and you are letting the marketplace know about a great new product/service that will be of tremendous benefit to some customer/employer. Be proud of your job search and of what you have to offer. You are like a professional baseball player who just became a free agent. Be selective in whom you decide to play for. And make sure the financial compensation is what you consider to be fair and appropriate. If you go to work every day feeling that you are being taken advantage of, you may very well further hurt your self-esteem.

Job Search Action #5: Establish Your Desired Brand
A brand is the value customers think they get when they buy from a particular organization or prospective customers think they would get if they did buy from that organization. Companies don’t own the brand. The brand exists in the minds of their customers and prospective customers.

You have a brand as well. When potential employers think of you what is the value they think they would be receiving if they hire you? Do they think you are the best at resolving difficult obstacles, a master at negotiating complex contracts, or an expert at explaining in-depth technical information in ways that ordinary people can understand it?

Just as customers and potential customers rank products in their mind for a given category, potential employers rank candidates in their mind for a given position inside their organizations. What can you do to enhance your ranking in the minds of employers for the positions you want to be considered for? This is no simple assignment. It requires thought.

Job Search Action #6: Close the Deal and Sign the Contract
Searching for a job is not a job. A job is when you receive an opportunity to create and deliver value for other people for which you are financially compensated. You don’t have a job until you close the deal. That is, stay focused until you have worked out the details of what you are agreeing to do and the way in which you will be financially compensated. Then sign that contract or shake that hand, and get started on the job.

Instead of thinking of a job search as a once-a-decade activity, think of it as part of your professional life. Whether you have a job right now or not isn’t the point. The point is I encourage you to always sharpen your ability to search for a job. It’s really like running your own business, with you serving as head of research and development, marketing, and sales. Get yourself ready and go after the marketplace. It’s an exciting and challenging adventure, and it will bring out the best in you.

(Note: If you want the MP3 recording of this article, please send an e-mail to dan@thecoughlincompany.comwith “Job Search Article” in the subject heading.)

About Dan Coughlin
Dan is a student and teacher of practical processes that improve business performance. His purpose is to work with executives and managers so they achieve great performances. He is a business keynote speaker, management consultant, executive coach, and author of three books on management performance, including his newest, The Management 500: A High-Octane Formula for Business Success (AMACOM 2009). Read Chapter One from this new book free of charge. Dan’s clients include Coca-Cola, Abbott, Toyota, Prudential, Shell, Boeing, Marriott, McDonald’s, and the St. Louis Cardinals.

38 Tools To Listen To The Social Media Buzz

Sebastian Barros, at Penn Olson, has put together a nice list of 38 free tools for monitoring social media. Evaluating return on investment (ROI) or, for social media enthusiasts, return on engagement (ROE) is a must! Seeing results is often challenging for many that want to get a handle on what is happening related to their online brand.

Check out Sebastian’s article and be sure to visit the links to the resources listed. I think you’ll find some that will definitely need to be added to your tool box.

If this was helpful, let me know by commenting below. Enjoy!

Kindle’s For Kids

By E. Brown

How many of you have kids in school? How many of you have kids carrying HUGE backpacks to school? How many of you are paying doctor bills for your child’s back problems because of lugging around heavy books? Even the packs with wheels are a pain – literally. Ever seen a child try to roll one over a curb on his way to school? Not a pretty sight.

Here’s an idea for Amazon — why not work with the National Education Association, State Departments of Education, or the U.S. Department of Education and give K-12 school kids Kindles with all these “heavy books” loaded into them? The schools own the Kindle’s and when the child graduates, he or she will certainly want to have one of their own. Did someone say, next generation adopters/consumers?

I’ll bet, once parents see the Kindle up close and in action, they will want to buy one for themselves. Talk about market share and saturation. I hear the distant sounds of Ka-ching!

Let me see, off the top of my head here are some ways this could be of benefit:

1. Less paper consumed
2. Less trees cut
3. Easier to update published content
4. Less trash from out-dated school books
5. Lighter pack backs
6. Less stress on children’s backs and bodies
7. Lower family medical bills
8. RSS feeds to teacher assignments
9. Bookmarks to teacher blogs
10. Exposure to Kindle eReaders
11. Create raving fans

I am sure the list could go on. Also, if you’re an Amazon employee, this is another opportunity for you to help out your local community. School administrators will thank you and parents will love you.

If you think this is a worthwhile idea, let Jeff Bezos know. Send him a quick email and let’s see what happens.

Feel free to comment here as well and let me know your thoughts or if there is anything missing on the list of benefits. If you do not see an upside to this idea, let me know that too.

The Economics Of Social Media

This provocative clip gives you some data to chew on if you are wondering about the ROE and ROI of Social Media. Thanks Socialnomics – Social Media Blog.

Be Sure To Leave A Lasting Impression

By Roy Williams (The Wizard of Ads)

What will be your customer’s memory of you?

“It [the Cheshire Cat] vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.” – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

I never ask the graduates of Wizard Academy, “What could we have done differently? How might we improve?” To do so would be to ask them to search their memories for disappointing moments. These are not the images I want to cement in their minds.

Instead, I ask, “What was your favorite moment during your time with us?” This causes the students to recall each of the high-impact moments during of their time on campus and relive those moments in their mind. It doesn’t matter what they choose as their favorite, I just want to flood their minds with happy memories.

The grin will remain after the rest of it is gone.

It is important to control the Last Mental Image (LMI.) What procedures do you employ to make sure your customer has a positive LMI of their experience with you? Comment below.

Related Link
- Monday Morning Memo

Social Media Summit Day 2 – Take Aways

By E. Brown

Day 2 is down but not out. In today’s line up was Mari Smith, Jason Alba, and Ann Handley. Mari covered the in’s and out’s of using Facebook for business while Jason revealed the power and reach of using LinkedIn. Finally, Ann ended the day with her Top 5 reasons to be on Twitter and listed some of the tools she uses.

My take aways from the today’s Summit are listed below. I have broken then down by Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Facebook
Create a loyal following by:

1. Optimizing your profile
2. Choosing your core message
3. Creating a fan page
4. Adding “friends” strategically
5. Thinking about relationships first
6. Creating viral visibility
7. Running tests with social ads
8. Adding Facebook to your overall marketing strategy

Also, use Friendfeed.com as another means to networking and creating community. You can pull your Twitter tweeps, Facebook friends, and Google contacts in as well.

LinkedIn

• Create a comprehensive and complimentary Social Strategy for your organization
• Tie your Twitter tweets to your LinkedIn status updates
• Use keyword phrases in your profile summary
• Export your LinkedIn contacts to a personal database for backup and mining
• Use the Slideshare app for displaying presentations
• 2-Minute Per Week Strategy = accepting/rejecting connections and asking/answering questions

Twitter
Why use Twitter? Here are several reasons:

• Create a strong community of followers
• Use it to provide Customer Service
• Stronger brand awareness
• Networking
• Monitoring the online community conversation in regard to your organization

Tools to use:
- search.twitter.com
- backtweets.com
- bit.ly
- Tweetie (iPhone app)

Related Links
- Social Media Summit Day 1
- Social Media Summit Day 2

Social Media Success Summit ’09 – Keynote Take Aways

By E. Brown

Last nights keynote at SMSS09 with Gary Vee (Vaynerchuk) was high energy. The attendees especially liked the Q&A session afterward. Nothing like free business coaching.

Gary spoke for about 45 minutes (too short) but could have gone on for another 45 easily. The tweets were flying throughout the entire session. My take aways from the evening were:

• Use search.twitter.com or you’re making a BIG mistake
• Facebook Fan pages are far more important than Twitter as an “outpost”
• Look into and start using Tumblr
• Live-Streaming has  a huge fan base – leverage it
• Take ownership of your online brand
• Always have an affirmative call-to-action on your “homebase” (e.g. blog, homepage, etc.)
• Capture your visitors
• Work hard, but be sure to spend time with your family
• Enjoy what you are doing — be passionate about it

I am looking forward to the next group of sessions regarding LinkedIn and Facebook. I’ll keep you updated.

Have fun!

Related Links
- Gary Vaynerchuk
- Tumblr
- Social Media Success Summit
- TweetChat
- Social Media Summit Day 2

Strengthen Your Mantle for Greatness

By Dan Coughlin

Assume success.

Assume that all of your hard work over all these years has suddenly paid off in the form of you achieving what you’ve always wanted. You now have the income, title, responsibilities, authority, scope of influence, skills, reputation, clients, and flow of opportunities that you’ve always dreamed of having.

Now the real work begins.

It is far harder to handle success successfully than it is to persevere through tough times. Are you really ready to demonstrate long-term greatness if great success suddenly comes your way?

A Brief History of Being Good with Bad Times and Bad with Good Times

Over the past one hundred years, Americans have demonstrated they are very good at dealing with bad times and very bad at dealing with good times.

During the U.S. involvement in World War I (1915-1918) Americans pulled together and demonstrated extraordinary levels of sacrifice, commitment, and teamwork to pull through the country’s worst catastrophe since the Civil War. This was followed by the Roaring 20s when many Americans thought they had discovered the secret to wealth in the stock market and danced their hearts away.

That was followed by the Great Depression and World War II, a time once again marked by long-term sacrifice, focus, commitment, and teamwork. In the relatively affluent 50s, American companies flourished and Americans bought toasters, washing machines, televisions, cars, and refrigerators like they were going out of style, which they often did. This was followed by the tumultuous late 60s and the economic recession throughout much of the 70s.

The materialism and economic growth of the 80s were followed by the recession of the early 90s. The wild prosperity fueled by the dot com craze of the late 90s was followed by the dot com bubble burst in March 2000 and the ensuing recession that marked those years. U.S. citizens bonded together after the terrorist attack of September 11th 2001 in ways many people had never seen before. The rise in home prices and the stock market in 2003-2006 were followed by the prolonged recession from December 2007 through today. Once again Americans are becoming good at sacrifice, commitment, and teamwork.

But why are we so bad at handling good times in ways that could allow us to continually improve our results? Why are we so often are own worst enemy when we are in the best position to generate long-term sustainable success? And what lessons can be learned from history that an individual can apply in his or her own career to sustain greatness when success finally arrives?

Lesson #1: Remember there ain’t no free lunch, no silver bullets, and no secret fountains of money.

During good times, Americans have consistently thought they had it all figured out. Somehow we forget that we’ve had short-term success in the past that didn’t work out very well.

In the mid-1920s, mid-1980s, late 1990s, and mid-2000s, many Americans thought buying stocks would automatically move them up the economic ladder. The greatest piece of business advice I’ve ever learned is “there ain’t no free lunch.” In the late 1890s people thought finding gold was the key and in the late 1990s people thought buying dot-com “gold” was the answer. Don’t ever assume that a stock purchase, a good relationship with your boss, a degree from the “right” university, or employment at a “great” company will ensure your long-term greatness. It won’t. The stock market collapses in 1929, 1987, 2000, and 2008 have shown what goes up doesn’t necessarily always continue to go up.

Based on the amazing sales of American manufactured products and the extraordinary rise in the standard of living for Americans in the 1950s, many people thought that U.S. managers had discovered a silver bullet and would continue to generate incredible economic growth forever. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. Many key U.S. executives in the 1960s focused more on profits than on constantly improving the quality and safety of what their companies were producing and they made their companies and industries vulnerable to attacks from a host of other companies.

They quickly learned through the painful 70s that customers don’t care about their profits. They also learned that customers do care about quality, safety, and value. Many executives in the financial industry from 2003-2007 thought they had figured out a way to turn bad loans into great products until one day they found out that wasn’t a secret fountain of money either.

When your great day of success shows up, don’t waste any energy thinking you have it all figured out. Keep striving to get better. Success just means you have a better foundation to work off of for the future. It doesn’t mean you have a guaranteed incredible future.

Lesson #2: Great performance creates great value, and poor performance ruins it.

Jason Jennings has written a tremendous new book called, Hit The Ground Running: A Manual for New Leaders (Portfolio 2009). I’ve decided to rename the subtitle: A Manual for Leaders Who Aspire for Greatness because I believe any executive or manager in any for-profit or not-for-profit organization would benefit tremendously from this remarkably powerful book.

Jason Jennings is the rare person who has the energy to climb the massive mountain of research necessary to really understand an issue and the patience to climb down the mountain and explain what he has learned in practical ways that people can actually use. He and his research team took the 1,000 largest publicly-owned U.S. companies and searched for the best performers from 2001-2007. He wanted the whole focus to be on performance that occurred in the 21st century. Through a series of extraordinarily stringent filters, he narrowed his list to the nine best-performing American companies in this century. He then personally interviewed the ten CEOs (one company has co-CEOs) of these companies. What he found re-energized me. These ten CEOs did, and did not do, some very unusual things.

They were clearly anti-fancy. When they inherited large personal offices, they got rid of the fancy furniture, brought in conference tables and whiteboards, and created working functional spaces for themselves and their team members. One took out his private bathroom and asked why in the world he would need his own bathroom.

They were anti-buzzwords. None of them talked about six-month strategic development processes, stated lofty and complicated visions, spent insane amounts of money for big-name consulting firms to tell them what to do, or hung posters with catchy themes at every one of their business locations.

They talked with employees, board members, managers, and past CEOs. These high-performing CEOs are very down-to-earth individuals. Consistently, they said they didn’t have all the answers and wanted to get to know and learn from as many people connected with their organizations as they could. They were not acting like the proverbial superhero action figures ready to save people from peril. They were genuine individuals who simply wanted to learn anything they could to help their companies succeed in the short and long term.

They clarified a destination and practical steps to achieve that destination in a reasonable time frame. They simply refused to get caught up in making wild predictions to drive their stock price higher. They were maniacal about establishing practical plans and continually monitoring progress to make sure those plans were on track. They remained flexible in making adjustments to hit their desired destination. They kept their businesses as simple as they possibly could in order to optimize efficiency and productivity.

The single biggest takeaway for me from the very best CEOs and their companies is that they maintained a singular focus on improving the performance they felt would benefit their customers the most in terms of creating real value for them.

If you want to be able to strengthen your mantle for greatness, the absolute key is to always improve your performance, which is the actual creation of value that other people will want to use and will benefit from in a meaningful way. If you develop the ability to always do exactly that in good economic and bad economic times, you will be able to handle success and maintain the capacity for greatness over the long term.

Lesson #3: Avoid the “So what are you up to lately?” dilemma.

I think this is the most subtle and pervasive problem in the history of U.S. economics. No matter how successful a company or an individual becomes, the first question asked of him or her by friends and family is, “So what are you up to lately?” In other words, “What have you achieved lately, what is your salary, what new homes are you buying, what vacation homes are you building, and where is the next fancy resort you’re going to visit?” The problem isn’t with the question or the questioners. The problem is the distraction that individuals allow it to create.

This obsession with more, more, more, bigger, bigger, bigger, and faster, faster, faster throws out of whack the steady, plain, simple, consistent, and boring process of creating greater value that customers will want to purchase at reasonable fees that will generate long-term growth. This is not a modern phenomenon. At least since the 1920s, and then repeated at least every couple of decades, Americans have become maniacal about taking some short-term success and wanting to convert it immediately into much greater success. Whatever happened to the tortoise beating the hare?

I encourage you to improve, create greater value, achieve some success, and then repeat that formula consistently over the entire period of your working life. It is what made you successful once and it is what will consistently make you successful in the future. Just don’t force the future into today’s envelope. Be patient and let your improvements generate greater success when the time is right.

Lesson #4: Values matter and so do lack of values.

Nothing has ever destroyed future greatness faster than a breakdown in personal values. Values are beliefs that determine behaviors. You get to choose six. What six values do you want guiding your behaviors? Ok, if you really want, you can choose eight, but that’s it. Here are mine: integrity, curiosity, friendliness, open-mindedness, innovation, and empathy. OK, two more: tenacity and accountability. That’s it.

Choose your values carefully. If you want to build a personal mantle that can handle success and sustain itself for a lifetime of greatness, then you have to live by the values you’ve chosen carefully. I’ve never met the person who chose cheating, lying, and stealing to be the values that would guide his or her life. For some people, those things snuck in when they weren’t watching their values. Watch your values carefully and let greatness sneak in when you’re not looking.

If you lie about little things, you’ll lie about big things. If you’ll take more money than your company can realistically afford to pay you just because you can get away with it, you’ve shown where your priorities are for the long term. Don’t reward yourself today based on dreams for tomorrow. If you’re honest in little things, you will be in big things as well. Values have a way of repeating themselves.

Be ready for success. It can happen at any moment.

About Dan Coughlin

He is a business keynote speaker, management consultant, and author of ACCELERATE: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Business Momentum. He speaks on leadership, branding, sales, and innovation. His next book, The Management 500: A High-Octane Formula for Business Success, which is about practical management lessons from the history of professional auto racing, will be published in May 2009.

Comprehensive List of Best Business Books

Once again, friend and author, Dan Coughlin does his research and puts together a very comprehensive list of some of the best business books through the ages. I hope you find this list helpful. If you see some you have not read, I recommend adding it to your library this year. Enjoy!

By Dan Coughlin

In her terrific book, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, Alice Schroeder wrote, “Benjamin Graham’s book, The Intelligent Investor had mesmerized Warren. For years, he had been going down to the library and checking out every book available on stocks and investing. Warren wanted a system, something that would work reliably. Warren more or less memorized the course textbook, Security Analysis, by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd. Buffett says, ‘The truth was I knew the book even better than Dodd. At that time, literally, almost in those seven or eight hundred pages, I could quote from any part of it. I had just sopped it up.’”

Through intense reading and experimentation, Warren Buffett became the world’s greatest investor and one of the richest individuals in the world. Imagine what such in-depth reading can do for your career.

Here are a variety of books I’ve read that I encourage you to consider. My hope is you will scan this list of more than 100 recommended titles, purchase two books for yourself, and read them. I really believe that business leaders are readers, and that one way you can improve your performance is by reading. But don’t just read your two books. Read them, capture a few key ideas that you want to implement, and move those ideas into action.

Here are my recommendations, which have been organized by topics:

Productivity
Less is More by Jason Jennings
Think Big, Act Small by Jason Jennings
It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small, It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow by Jason Jennings

Leadership
On Leadership by John Gardner
Personal History by Katherine Graham
My American Journey by Colin Powell
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. edited by Clayborne Carson
My Experiments with Truth by Mohandas Gandhi
Walt Disney by Neal Gabler
Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton
They Call Me Coach by John Wooden
Wooden by John Wooden
Leading with the Heart by Mike Krzyzewski
Leadership & Self-Deception by The Arbinger Institute
The Education of a Coach by David Halberstam
Gifted Hands by Ben Carson and Cecil Murphey
Think Big by Ben Carson and Cecil Murphey
Leadership is an Art by Max Depree
The Gettysburg Gospel by Gabor Boritt
Abraham Lincoln Great Speeches unabridged by Abraham Lincoln, John Grafton, and Roy Basler

Management
Inside Steve’s Brain by Leander Kahney
The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
The Practice of Management by Peter Drucker
The Unofficial Guide to Power Managing by Alan Weiss
Winning by Jack Welch and Suzy Welch
Setting the Table by Danny Meyer
The Spirit to Serve by Bill Marriott

Teamwork
Organizing Genius by Warren Bennis and Patricia Biedermann
Sacred Hoops by Phil Jackson
Gung Ho! by Ken Blanchard
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Russell Rules by Bill Russell
The Winner Within by Pat Riley
A World Waiting to be Born by Scott Peck

Strategy
Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove
Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
The Discipline of Market Leaders by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema
Profit from the Core by Chris Zook
Beyond the Core by Chris Zook
Top Management Strategy by Ben Tregoe and John Zimmerman

Marketing/Branding
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin
Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy

Innovation
The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley
The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley
The Elegant Solution by Matthew May

Organizational Performance
Built to Last by Jim Collins
Good to Great by Jim Collins
The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker
The Google Story by David Vise and Mark Malseed
Leading By Design by Ingvar Kamprad and Bertil Torekull
The Pixar Touch by David Price
The HP Way by David Packard
The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt

Personal Effectiveness
Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
Living a Life that Matters by Harold Kushner
Raising the Bar by Tim Rosaforte
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
It’s Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong
The Dip by Seth Godin
Big Russ and Me by Tim Russert
Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman
From Promise to Power by David Mendell
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
The Other Side of Me by Sidney Sheldon
Secrets for Success and Happiness by Og Mandino
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
I Dare You by William Danforth
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
First Things First by Stephen Covey
The Essence of Success by Earl Nightingale
The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale
Law of Success by Napoleon Hill
Success through a Positive Mental Attitude by Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
A Treasury of Albert Schweitzer edited by Thomas Kiernan

Investing
The Snowball by Alice Schroeder
Warren Buffett Speaks by Janet Lowe

Sales
The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino

Inspiration
The Greatest Miracle in the World by Og Mandino
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

Consulting
Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weiss
Getting Started in Consulting by Alan Weiss

Physical Fitness
The Best Life Diet by Bob Greene

Problem Solving
The New Rational Manager by Ben Tregoe and Charles Kepner

Presentations/Writing
Pop! Stand Out in Any Crowd by Sam Horn
Presenting with Pizzazz by Sharon Bowman
Ask Not by Thurston Clarke
The Dream by Drew Hansen

Global Trends
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman
The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan

Management Lessons from Auto Racing
One Helluva Ride by Liz Clarke
At the Altar of Speed by Leigh Montville
The Enzo Ferrari Story by Enzo Ferrari
Winners are Driven by Bobby Unser
Racing to Win by Joe Gibbs
McLaren Formula 1 Racing Team by Alan Henry
Racing Back to the Front by Jeff Gordon
Michael Schumacher by Christopher Hilton

Management Lessons from the American Revolution
A Leap in the Dark by John Ferling
1776 by David McCullough
The Summer of 1787 by David Stewart
American Creation by Joseph Ellis
Thomas Paine by Craig Nelson
Thomas Jefferson by R.B. Bernstein
Common Sense by Thomas Paine

About Dan Coughlin
Dan Coughlin works with large and mid-size companies to improve their business momentum. He is a business keynote speaker, management consultant, and author of ACCELERATE: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Business Momentum. He speaks on leadership, branding, sales, and innovation. His next book, The Management 500: A High-Octane Formula for Business Success is due to be published in May 2009.

Sacrifice Is A Sustainable Strategy

By Dan Coughlin

My parents majored in sacrifice and minored in thrift. Every day for the first thirty years of my life I heard the word “sacrifice” as in, “We sacrificed a lot so you could be better off.” And they weren’t kidding. My mom wore the same winter coat for at least ten years. Going out to eat was a rare treat saved only for birthdays. A fancy dinner included my dad going up to McDonald’s and getting a dozen cheeseburgers and then going to the grocery store and buying a half gallon of vanilla ice cream. Then my parents, my five siblings and me sat around our kitchen table and ate it. At least 85% of all the clothes I wore in the first twenty-two years of my life were bought at garage sales.

Two Problems with Sacrifice
There were two problems with this approach.
Problem #1: Sacrifice was used like a jackhammer.

I heard the word sacrifice so many times that when I finally went on my own I was determined to go out to eat. I was determined to buy books and not go to the library. I was determined to enjoy today and not scrimp by every minute of my life. And there were these wonderful new inventions called credit cards.

Problem #2: My parents were right.

Despite all my frustrations with hearing that word over and over and over again, my parents were right and they are still right. The upside of sacrificing far outweighs the downside. A very high percentage of businesses and individuals in the U.S. have acted a lot like me for the past twenty five years. We all need to learn from my parents and make sacrifice a sustainable business strategy.

Stop Thinking About the Next Quarter, Start Thinking About the Next Decade
Beginning in the 1980s when the stock market began to grow exponentially, individuals and businesses began to obsess over quarterly returns. This obsession with short-term results caused executives and managers to think about what could be done today to make a good showing in ninety days. Think about how absurd this is. Over the course of ninety days, you might have seventy days of actual work. Imagine your results for last quarter weren’t very good so now you feel the pressure to produce great results this quarter. What will you do? You could slash your prices or come up with a hot promotion to get sales moving. You could dramatically cut costs to make the numbers look good. You could fire people or sell off assets. You could cheat and make up numbers to make the quarter look good. Or you could do something dramatically different: focus on improving the value your customers receive and remain patient over the long term.

Pixar Animation Studios didn’t overtake Disney Animation Studios overnight. They did it by remaining remarkably patient and steadily improving the quality of their films. Google didn’t become the best search engine in the world overnight. They steadily and patiently improved the quality of what they had to offer. Apple didn’t become the Most Admired Company in the World as named by Fortune magazine overnight. They steadily created more value for customers.

Stop focusing on making this quarter look good and start focusing on making the next decade truly remarkable. Ironically, as you focus on generating ten years of greatness you will steadily make the performance of each quarter better and better.

Use Credit Very, Very Carefully
Cash is annoying. First you have to have it, and second you have to have it with you. Credit cards are so much easier. You can just whip those puppies out and pay for everything from fast food to fur coats. The same is true in a business. Having a credit line makes everything so much easier. If you have a good product idea or marketing campaign, you can just plow ahead. You don’t have to think through whether or not you can really afford it. You can implement immediately because you know your good idea is going to generate a great return on investment. Except sometimes it doesn’t. Actually sometimes it generates a zero percent return on investment. That’s right. Some new products and some marketing campaigns deliver no revenue. None. Zippo. However, you do still have that little problem of the bill to pay.

My mom would search for extra pennies in the house at the end of each month to pay the bills, but she would never buy anything on credit, mainly because she was scared she wouldn’t be able to pay it off. However, being scared of credit turned out to be a very smart thing because it forced her to think through her purchases. It turns out that credit cards are a good thing, just like car loans and house mortgages and business credit lines are good things, as long as you pay them off on time.

The big problem with credit occurs when a person stops thinking through his or her purchases. Suddenly frivolous purchases seem mandatory. And paying them off today is annoying since tomorrow will always be a better day. Think long and hard before you make a purchase today that can be paid for tomorrow. Identify your margin of safety. Can you really afford it? Is there a reason why you’re not paying cash today?

Is that a Meeting or a Roman Festival?
I love a good business meeting. As a speaker, facilitator, or observer, I really get a kick out of a productive meeting where ideas are being generated, discussed, and selected for implementation. Having said that, I’m really confused by many meetings that I attend. If the attendees are going to be in the meeting room for 95% of their stay, why bother taking them to a fancy resort with expensive rooms and even more expensive food? Either go to a moderate hotel or give the attendees time to enjoy the surroundings. Some people argue that the surroundings are necessary to convey the message that the business is doing well. To which I have a very technical response: baloney! I’m writing this article on a desk my mom found at a garage sale twenty-five years ago for $20. Does my desk, which works just fine, make this article better or worse?

Get in Shape
This one is going to cut a little close to the bone. Folks, we’re out of shape. I know, I know, you might be in good shape, but the vast majority of Americans are not in good shape, including me. This concept of sacrificing goes beyond just financial waste. We eat like every meal is our last meal for the next thirty days. We need to get lean and hungry again. We need to eat right and exercise more. Isn’t it a strange dynamic that we fill our days with activities so we can’t exercise, but then we’re tired so we need to eat more to keep our energy up?

Imagine no money owed on past bills, savings in the bank, a trim waistline, and great personal energy.
Now imagine more bills than you think you will ever be able to pay off, no savings in the bank, a huge waistline, and very low personal energy.

Q: What’s the difference between these two scenarios?
A: Sacrifice.

Let me try that again.
Imagine a business with no money owed to anyone, employees who find purposefulness in their work, and great energy in the business for the long run.
Now imagine a business with stacks of unpaid bills, employees worried about keeping their jobs, and very low morale for the long run.

Q: What’s the difference between these two businesses?
A: Sacrifice.

Ok, I’ll add in one more word: patience. When you have to have results today and you have to try every idea today no matter the cost, then you have no patience. When you don’t have patience, you won’t be able to sacrifice. And if you don’t sacrifice today in order to improve tomorrow, then you will continually be in the second scenario.

Why Sacrificing People is a Really Bad Move
Firing people is suddenly the in-thing to do. Each month we read about hundreds of thousands of jobs being eliminated. This is an extraordinarily good move to cut costs in the short term and an extraordinarily bad move to improve profits in the long term. There are only a few resources that generate profits. Having money in reserve can improve a company’s ability to invest and generate more money. Of course, that theory hasn’t exactly worked out very well recently. Owning real estate is a good investment for the long term, although it hasn’t worked out very well recently either. And the other great value-generator is people.

But it’s not enough just to have employees; you actually have to tap into their minds to gain the ideas for profit generation. I suggest you gather employees together in groups of five to seven people and ask the following questions:
Without letting go of any of our employees, what ideas do you have on the following questions:

1.    What can we do to cut costs without decreasing value to our customers?
2.    What can we do to increase value to our customers without increasing our costs?

Let me encourage you one more time. Before you let go of any of your employees, gather them together in small groups and engage them in meaningful conversations. Just as executives and managers are too quick to spend frivolously in good times, I think they are too quick to fire employees in tough times. I’ve never met the executive or manager who had all the answers on any topic. The best ideas always come from group discussion followed by a single individual making the final decision. Gather your employees together and engage them in a meaningful discussion about how to cut costs without cutting value to your customers and how to increase value to your customers without increasing costs. And do this every quarter in every year regardless of whether the economy is doing great or doing badly.

Make Old-Fashioned a New Way of Life
As I’m writing this I feel old. It sounds so old to me to talk about sacrificing and being patient. Those were the words I heard from my mom and dad when I was growing up. It doesn’t feel hip or cool or young to talk about sacrificing and being patient. However, winning does sound cool. If you want to build a great career and be part of building a great business, then make old-fashioned a new way of live.

During really tough economic times like we’re living in right now, the word sacrifice gets used a lot. It’s easy to talk about sacrificing when you have no choice. Everybody has to sacrifice when the stock market falls by 45%, jobs are being eliminated, and cash flow is drying up. It’s also easy to lose weight when your doctor says, “Lose forty-five pounds or you will die.” The harder part is to sacrifice when times are great and to eat wisely and exercise when you’re in great shape.

To build truly great businesses and to get in truly great physical shape for the long term, we need to make old-fashioned a new way of life. We need to sustain our sacrifices for decades, not quarters. In doing so, I think we will all find that sacrifice creates freedom. When you choose not to buy something or eat something that you want right now, you enhance the belief that you are in control of your decisions, not someone else. That’s freedom. When you have to buy or eat something as soon as it appears, then you are not in control of your decisions. That’s lack of freedom.

My parents didn’t sacrifice for six months and then spend $10,000 on a lark. They were consistently frugal over a period of several decades. Decide on the value you want to deliver to your customers, and then consistently, patiently, and steadily sacrifice other options in order to build a great business for the long term. Be consistently frugal and you will be ready for the strategically rainy day. That’s the day when investing your carefully saved money can generate an extraordinary advantage for the business. But that advantage won’t happen if you’ve spent every dime you could borrow.

Sacrifice, be patient, and maintain that approach over and over and over. It’s actually an exciting and freeing experience.

About Dan Coughlin
Dan Coughlin works with executives and managers to improve their business momentum. He is a business keynote speaker, management consultant, and author of ACCELERATE: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Business Momentum. Dan’s clients include Coca-Cola, Abbott, Toyota, Boeing, Marriott, McDonald’s, AT&T, American Bar Association, YPO, Vistage International, Roush Fenway Racing, and the St. Louis Cardinals. He speaks on leadership, branding, sales, and innovation. His next book, The Management 500: A High-Octane Formula for Business Success is due to be published in May 2009 by AMACOM.

5 Questions To Improve Email Response Rates

By Paul Broni | Inbox Interactive

Before you write the copy for your next email marketing effort, ask yourself these five questions and write down your answers:

Question 1: What problem does your target audience have?
You only need a few sentences here. Your prospect needs to know that you really understand her. Remember, we’re not writing copy yet, so you don’t need to be creative here. Rather, we’re developing a framework that we will turn into great copy.

Question 2: What have been the obstacles to the problem’s solution?
Again, this answer can be short, with just a few factual sentences. You need to identify what the historical roadblocks were to the problem’s solution in the past. Think about what’s been keeping the problem from getting solved.

Question 3: What is possible because of your product or service?
You’re getting ready to set the stage for what your prospect’s life will be like after buying your product or service – your solution. The answer to this question should paint a picture so the prospect can see himself enjoying the benefits.

Question 4: How is your product or service different?
Write a few sentences on your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Your USP is what sets you apart from your competition in a favorable way. Your USP is what gives your business the advantage from which your clients and customers benefit.

Question 5: What do you want the prospect to do?
This is the call to action. Think about what you want the recipient to do. Sign up for something? Call you? Register for an event? Make a purchase?

With this framework in hand, you are on the way to crafting copy that will elevate your email marketing results.

-Source: Paul Broni has been a partner at Inbox Interactive since 1998.