As with many other aspects of crisis management, businesses are hesitant to invest in social media strategies because the returns are often difficult to quantify. Get caught up in a Web-based crisis, though, and you’ll be thanking your lucky stars for the protection. In a post on the SmartBlog social media blog, Rob Birgfield summed up tips given by several panelists at last year’s BlogWorld Expo, including this one regarding the value of being engaged in social media:
Return on Investment? How about Return on Avoiding Pain? While many companies are looking to measure return on investment by looking at improved sales, greater operational efficiencies, etc., we often ignore social media’s crisis management benefits until it’s too late. Dallas Lawrence reminded attendees to invest in social media for what he calls a “return on avoiding pain.” To stop a crisis in its tracks, you have to have a presence and an ear to the ground. Lawrence cited United Airlines as an example. In 2008, when an archived story announcing the airline was filing for bankruptcy got picked up by Bloomberg – the story took off, made its way around the blogosphere and sent the stock tumbling. In the traditional sense, United did nothing wrong. But if they were appropriately monitoring — and consequently addressing the misinformation, the airline could have averted what turned out to be a true disaster.
Having a presence in the social mediaverse is like insurance for your reputation. Unlike insurance, though, social media is useful during good times as well, be it for marketing, communication, or monitoring stakeholders and the competition, making it well worth the investment.
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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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You’ve gotten out there and created a Facebook page for your business, but now you face the challenge of convincing current and potential customers to pay attention. One way to accomplish this is by creating a special landing page featuring a call-to-action asking visitors who are not currently marked as fans to indicate that they “Like” you, allowing your updates to be sent directly to their personal Facebook walls.
How do you do it?
Creating and configuring a call-to-action and landing page is fairly easy, and even novice users should be able to have one up and running quickly thanks to a step by step guide from the marketing professionals at HubSpot.
First, create a call-to-action graphic. They are available free at a number of places around the Internet, and Hubspot has a free generator as well.
Include a basic introduction and make the “Like” button easy to spot, then save it on your personal web space so that you can link to it later.
Next, you must enable the “Static FBML” app on Facebook. This creates a box on your Facebook page in which you can render HTML or FBML.
Plug your image’s Web address into the FBML (Facebook Markup Language) code provided by HubSpot.
Paste the full FBML code into the proper box inside the “Static FBML” app, name your page and save the changes.
Finally, set your new landing page as the default view for visitors by clicking on the “Wall” tab and selecting “Settings,” then “View Settings.” Under the list “Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else,” select the name of your landing page and it’s done.
Other uses
In addition to gathering followers, landing pages can be used to promote special deals, call attention to new products, or draw visitors in with an attractive and engaging splash page.
Fast, free, simple, and effective. Why don’t you have one?
Ms. Chapman’s new book, How to Make Money Online With Social Media: A Step-by-Step Guide for Entrepreneurs will be available very soon. With offices in Nashville Tennessee, but working virtually with international clients, Lisa M. Chapman serves her clients as a business and marketing coach, business planning consultant and social media consultant. As a Founder of iBrand Masters, a social media consulting firm, Lisa Chapman helps clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa @ LisaChapman.com
There’s a well know saying: “It’s not what you know …but who you know?”
Well in today’s changing world, replace it with this: “It’s not only what you know, it’s not only who you know, but, as important, it‘s who knows you.”
In order to be known you can’t just stand there and wait for things to happen. Don’t assume people will notice the wonderful quality of your work or that of your department. Rather, build your reputation as a can-do professional or leader. Successful people don’t hide their achievements. They broadcast them at the right time and the right place.
Build Your Reputation and Career
Do you dread the idea of touting your skills and your work; think self-promotion smacks of showing off; and believe that it’s playing politics? If you do, then you‘re missing out on a key skills of managing one’s career. Here are some tips to get you started.
At the end of each week, document your accomplishments. This will ensure that you have an accurate record of the value you provide. It will also make it easier to talk about your achievements without feeling that you’re exaggerating.
Be seen and known in your organization. For example: Take on a high-profile assignments, volunteer to be on a multi-departmental task force, attend community events sponsored by your company, write an article for the internal newsletter or blog, etc.
Grow and maintain your network. Stay in touch with clients, supplier, partners and industry leaders because they also need to know of your accomplishments. They can be a great source for information, contacts and referrals.
Career Success Tip:
In a fast paced, changing workplace, it’s who sees you and knows your work that matters. Promote yourself, not be your title, but by the outcomes or results of what you do. Don’t assume people will notice the wonderful quality of your work or that of your department. How well do you toot your own horn?
Readers, what’s your experience with promoting yourself? Has it helped your career?
The topic of employee engagement seems to be one that is quite popular in recent years especially with all the changes that have occurred in the landscape of the workplace. It has been sited that a culture of high engagement is necessary to help overcome the fear of the fleeting workforce with the improvement of the economy and the increase in hiring in some organizations. In the January issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine, Tom Roth discusses five key elements to creating a culture of engagement. One of those elements is creating a culture of inclusion. In explanation of this, Roth makes a statement that employees don’t necessarily hate change, but actually hate having change imposed upon them. Think about that for a moment. In a previous post, I discussed the need to include employee control in your performance management strategy. Roth is right; employees hate having things imposed upon them. They hate that their supervisors have complete control in the performance management process as well. So, what can you do?
Often times, the issue comes down to miscommunication and mixed messages. You have given supervisors a great deal of responsibility for the performance of their work teams. You blame them when a member of their team fails to meet performance expectations. So it seems perfectly logical that they would assume the position of power and control in a performance management discussion. Additionally, you required that they get all those forms completed on time and if your company completes reviews for everyone at the same time, then you are basically asking them to add an entirely new job for themselves in the few weeks prior to the deadline. The result is a rushed review form and most likely an even more rushed review conversation. And since this may be the only document you require of them on performance for an entire year, this may just be the only performance discussion this employee gets at all.
If you want to give employees more control in their performance management process, then your managers and supervisor can’t hold the conversation for the performance review once a year or only when there is a problem. The conversation needs to be two way throughout the year. In fact, I say find a way to abolish the performance review all together. Focus your supervisors on all the time two-way feedback and you may be surprised with the result. Doing what you’ve always done get what you always get. Do you need to change it?
Sheri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 16 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development. She is available to help you with your Human Resources and Training needs on a contract basis. For more information send an email to smazurek0615@gmail.com or visit www.sherimazurek.com. Follow me on twitter @Sherimaz.
(This post is Part 1 of a 2 Part Response to a Submitted Question)
When I think of a playground, I picture swings, a set of see-saws, a jungle gym and various other pieces of equipment; and, I see multiple opportunities to raise money.
There are many ways to raise money, but I can only address the method that is the most effective at raising significant dollars — people asking other people to write checks.
Naming Opportunities are where donors get to have their names (or those of others being memorialized and/or honored) posted on a space or affixed to a piece of equipment/furniture.
In the case of a playground, the entire facility and each piece of equipment could be named after individual donors. Understand, there is no relationship between the cost of (the elements of) the project and what is “charged” for the honor of naming….
The “charge” for a naming opportunity is based on what the market will bear. If it will cost $250,000 to build a playground, but you have a donor who is willing to write a check for $300,000 to see his/her name over the entrance to the facility, then $300,000 is what it will “cost” for that naming opportunity. Realistically, that doesn’t happen too often.
What does happen, what must happen, is the work that goes into determining what the “cost” of each naming opportunity will be.
The process begins at two ends and works towards the middle. One of the two first steps is to make a list of everything in the playground that could possibly be named: each see-saw in the set (and the entire set), each swing (and the swing set), the shock-absorbing ground cover, anything you can think of. [The total “cost” of all the naming opportunities” typically exceeds the total cost of the finished project, and rarely are all the naming opportunities actually sold.]
The other “first step,” and the rest of the process, will be addressed in Part 2 of this posting.
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Have a comment or a question about starting, evaluating or expanding your fundraising program? With over 30 years of counseling in major gifts, capital campaigns, bequest programs and the planning studies to precede these three, I’ll be pleased to answer your questions. Contact me at AskHank@Major-Capital-Giving.com
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Have you seen The Fundraising Series of ebooks ??
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= If you would like to comment/expand on the above, or would just like to offer your thoughts on the subject of this posting, we encourage you to “Leave a Reply” at the bottom of this page, click on the feedback link at the top of the page, or send an email to the author of this posting.
Imagine that you could dump all the words of a million books from the past 500 years into a giant database, and look to see how various words have waxed and waned in usage over the centuries. You could look and see when archaic words like thou and yon disappeared from popular usage. You could identify the year the word internet first appeared, and when people started saying garbage instead of rubbish.
Oh… You can do that now?! Yes, the Google Monolith has indeed scanned more than a million books into a searchable soup, and we can now play with this facility using something called the Google Books Ngram Viewer. Let’s put the thing to work and examine our favorite topic: Strategic Planning. In the graph below, we can see the degree of usage of the words planning (in red) and strategy (in blue) since 1860.
Google’s Ngram Viewer shows that planning is falling from favor as strategy rises.
Doesn’t that picture tell a story!? As you see, planning took off just after the turn of the 20th century. In the world of business theory, a notion called “scientific management” was proffered by one of the first management consultants, Frederick Winslow Taylor. This approach, now referred to as “Taylorism,” sought to apply a scientific discipline to management practice. During this same era, the field of Psychology was dominated by an equally mechanistic view of mankind, called Behaviorism. In 1913, John B. Watson published what is known as “the Bahaviorist Manifesto,” and said that “the behaviorist… recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.” There was no need to consider a concept such as “consciousness,” said the behaviorists, as human behavior could be understood as a sequence of cause and effect, of stimulus and response. With enough control over the variables in our environment, it was thought, we could predict the future… and we could plan for success!
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A funny thing seems to have happened, as you see in the graph, at about 1976. Planning peaked and began to fall in favor, while strategy began a triumphant rise. My hypothesis? That’s when one of our most original management thinkers, Henry Mintzberg, started writing and publishing his observations on what does and does not work in the real world of business and organization. Mintzberg shows that strategy cannot be planned because planning is about analysis and strategy is about synthesis. This is why, he asserts, the process has failed so often and so dramatically.
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Strategic planning is an oxymoron. Strategic thinking does not lead to a plan, it leads to a strategy. Rather, planning must follow strategy. If you don’t want to call it operational planning, call it “Planning that Follows Strategy.”
Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning
Mintzberg argues that organizational strategy is often “emergent.” That is, answers to strategic questions do not arrive like the result at the bottom of a math equation. Rather, strategy emerges and changes as the strategist observes the world and reflects upon the dynamics of the competitive environment. Of course, there is debate among experts as to what exactly constitutes strategic thinking. Michael Porter, perhaps the most widely cited expert on organizational strategy, says that “strategic thinking rarely occurs spontaneously.” As if to prove his point, Porter provides a dry, methodological approach to the quest for competitive advantage and organizational strategy. Porter provides a set of strategic analysis tools that are serious and rational enough to make any Taylorist or Behaviorist proud. And granted, I have often found Porter’s framework and methodology useful in understanding the competitive dynamics of an industry.
But a quick study of the History of Strategy provides a blinding flash of the obvious: Successful strategy-making is most often an “emergent” process. Employing the emergent approach, the strategist maintains an open mind as to the future direction of the organization, and seizes the moment when opportunity matches organizational capability. In the end, strategy-making must be thought of as a creative process, as rich in spontaneity and magic as any other art. To apply these notions to our own decision-making , remember that strategic thinking is a yin and yang of left and right brain thinking. To engage in strategic thought, think and reflect on the big picture – the diverse players and forces in your environment. Think about the future. Use your left brain’s capacity to generate rational questions and answers. Use your right brain for intuition and wisdom.
Wholeheartedness: Strive for being whole in work/life through body, mind and spirit
The best way for me to explain what I mean by the above definition is to share with you this Wholeheartedness Assessment that I developed a few years that will help you assess your current and future effectiveness for living a harmonious work/life in these three key areas:
Body – physical and social
Mind – intellectual and financial
Spirit – emotional and spiritual
The assessment provides you the opportunity to record what you already do in each of these areas, provide suggestions on what you could do, and determine an action plan for what you will commit to doing.
Janae Bower is an inspirational speaker, award-winning author and training consultant. She founded Finding IT, a company that specializes in personal and professional development getting to the heart of what matters most. She started Project GratOtude, a movement to increase gratitude in people’s lives.
Since every business has competitors, every business plan needs competitive analysis — also known as competitive intelligence.
Direct competitors provide more or less similar products or services, such as coffee shops. Indirect or generic competitors provide different things, but customers will often choose between them. For example, nearby restaurants may offer different eating options, but compete for customers. Shall we do Chinese or Mexican tonight? Incidentally, another form of competition is for customers to opt out entirely. Shall we eat pizza at home tonight?
Here’s how to do competitive analysis:
Identify Major Competitors
Find out from potential customers how they currently get their needs met. What products or services do they already consume that your offerings might be better, cheaper, more convenient? Figure out the 3-5 “best” competitive choices for your target customers, and study them intensively.
Visit in person or online, shop anonymously, read up about them in the trade and popular press, talk to industry experts. Try to get a solid but objective handle on each firm’s strengths and weaknesses, particularly relative to your customers’ preferences. Determine the key success factors for this industry.
Prepare Competitive Profiles
Next, write a brief profile of each major competitor, summarizing information such as products, markets, facilities, pricing, marketing strategies, and finances. Carefully assess how each competitor might or might not pose a competitive challenge to your firm, and what you would do to overcome that threat.
Create Competitive Matrix
Finally, prepare a table or spreadsheet to summarize your findings. On the left side of the table, list the most important success factors — such as product reliability, customer service, capital investment, distribution channels, pricing, and so on. In the next column, weight each success factor so that the total adds up to 1.0. Then, in the remaining columns, list each of the major competitors. Working across the table, rank from one to five each competitor on each of the success factors, then insert a column to weight your rankings, which is obtained by multiplying the ranking by the weighting. At the bottom, add up the weighted values to create an overall assessment of which competitors represent the most serious challenges to your company.
Use this competitive analysis to help you decide how to position your business to compete (or cooperate) most effectively with your primary competitors. It’s not that hard if you follow these steps, or you can bring in a consultant to do this as part of your business planning process. More information at: https://staging.management.org/mrktng/cmpetitr/cmpetitr.htm
With Twitter followers numbering 1.2 million, Alyssa Milano sent a tweet in support of a new book; “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks & How They Shape Our Lives”.
The book, available at this Amazon page, broadcast to 1.2 million people who likely follow Alyssa closely, would probably have experienced a spike in sales, right?
So, Did the Tweet Convert to Buyers?
No. None! One point two million people – and not even ONE measly sale as a result?
Wassup? As the story goes (told by John Kremer, Book Marketing Guru), the authors of the book, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler then turned to Tim O’Reilly to send it out to his 1.5 million followers. The result: ONE sale.
Influence and Impact
John Kremer, intrigued by this book marketing phenomenon, goes into elegant detail about how social networks actually influence – or not; and how we’re in the very early stages of learning how social networks and social media tools impact behavior.
Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Harvard, contends that “If we’re really going to advance this field, we need to figure out how to identify not just influential people, but also influenceable people;” and “we need to distinguish between influential, or real ties online, and uninfluential, or weak, ties online.”
Monitoring, Segmenting and Tracking is Just a Start
Like never before, the internet enables marketers to monitor, segment and track data – and its subsequent actionable behavior. But there’s more to it than just statistics. According to Christakis, “if we’re going to exploit online ties … measures of meaningful interactions will be needed.” We need to determine “…which online interactions represent real relationships, where an influence might possibly be exerted.”
Which means to me that there’s an important subjective human behavior element involved, too.
Kremer suggests that this is where the niche concept means much more than the sheer number of followers. Marketers must tap into communities of like-minded individuals – influential people – (not numbers) who share because they care.
(Many thanks to John Kremer – one of my book marketing heroes. Nice guy, too!)
Ms. Chapman’s new book, How to Make Money Online With Social Media: A Step-by-Step Guide for Entrepreneurs will be available very soon. With offices in Nashville Tennessee, but working virtually with international clients, Lisa M. Chapman serves her clients as a business and marketing coach, business planning consultant and social media consultant. As a Founder of iBrand Masters, a social media consulting firm, Lisa Chapman helps clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa @ LisaChapman.com
I have previously disserted on the actual need for a project manager to be able to make the right decision at the right time. I strongly believe that success is based on this simple principle.
Our first reaction would be to imply the existence of a strong relationship between experience and good decision making. The question is: What kind of experience? Domain experience or project management experience? While activities, resources, milestones, levelling, etc. are tools for the senior project manager, they are often targets for his/her less experienced counterpart.
In the past several years, I have worked with all sorts of IT project managers (junior, casual, senior, expert, guru). As I watched their everyday struggle to survive project situations by making the right decision, I tried to compare their thought processes. From these observations I would propose the following tenet: Senior project manager decisions are affected by potential project difficulties while more junior project manager decisions are based on the project plan structure and its deficiencies. I will follow with a corollary: project management maturity is not based on longevity, but rather on breadth of experience.
The project manager’s ability to abstract information from the project planned and actual data is a crucial determinant in his decision making effectiveness. This ability is linked to the project manager’s breadth of knowledge and experience in the domain the project is run. There are differences in how junior and senior project managers are affected by different aspects of their projects. The difficulty in finding and recognizing potential problems in the available data is what I observed the most in junior project managers. They tend to focus on project management rather than managing their projects. Seniors are better at getting at the core of the situation and less influenced by side aspects of the project like project management principles. Thus, I believe the information gathering and analysis process is a critical element in the performance of a project manager.
In order to increase the performance of junior project managers, you need to provide tools or processes that ensure project data is reliable. For example, a careful attention to using simple and relevant scheduling best practices should be a nice way to achieve this. This would increase the junior (or senior) project manager confidence and help making more accurate and timely project decisions using his/her domain knowledge.
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