Social media

Twitter and the curse of non-interested followers

Social media tools are specifically designed to build conversations. Think about it like talking with your neighbor across the back fence, only you’re talking across Internet. Shared ideas and interests are paramount to building personal credibility and friendships. Twitter and other online tools can accelerate credibility building, but they can destroy it just as quickly.

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Innovation

Disruption: Finding the edges through force

Disruption forces us out of our comfort zone and to the edges of our businesses where we discover new opportunities to serve untapped markets. In some cases, we create markets where none exist. We find things we never dreamed about or thought possible before someone “drops the bomb,” forces us out, and makes us look back on what has happened. Like it or not, we need disruption to facilitate change and force us to the next level–whatever that may hold for us.

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Change

Change begins with you

So often we’re afraid to make the important decisions necessary to take us to the next level of success. We say we’re “risk adverse,” when in reality we’re probably just afraid we’ll make the wrong decision and fail. So what. Failure is nothing more than change–not good or bad in most cases, just a different outcome than we might have wanted.

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Marketing

The last thing you hear

When we made a small change to the last prompt recently, we noticed a 100% increase in the number of misdirected callers who hit the last prompt–the one before, “If you need to hear these options again, press the number or pound sign.”

Most told us they just punched the last prompt they heard, but 99% of those misdirected callers should have chosen the first prompt they heard. I suppose one way of looking at this is that they customer was interested enough to listen to all the prompts before deciding. I think what truly happens is customers are waiting for

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The destination might be the same, but the journey is not.

In recent months, I have encountered a number of people who are new to their jobs. They’ve come from outside the organization for which they now work and they were hired in part because of the good work they had done with their former companies. No doubt, they were told when they were hired something like, “What we’re doing isn’t working, we need you to fix it.” The new organization has handed each the keys to the car and is relying on past navigational experiences of this new “driver” to get the firm to a new destination.

Unfortunately for the driver,

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Business

It’s all in the tone of your voice

Growing up, I learned quickly how to determine when my dad wanted my attention. He could add a certain tonal quality to his voice, let’s say, to the delivery of a sentence that let me know I needed to focus on what he was saying. He never raised his voice, but I often heard him “yelling” when he used “the tone.” On the other hand, my mom’s voice often had a constant level of exasperation that allowed me to lose every word she shared to the white noise that surrounded us.

I thought about “the tone” as I watched President-elect Barack

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Trust is still the currency

Although the perceptions, behaviors, interactions are somewhat different between the generations, the act of sharing information and building relationships (face-to-face or online) is tied to one single factor: Trust. Trust is what makes the relationships work. Trust is the only thing that can make or break that relationship. It does not matter if it’s a personal, friendly relationship, or one build on expectations of your company or your brand.

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Organizational change

Looking through the wrong end of the telescope

Many organizations have become so rooted in their past that they have put their entire future at risk to preserve their own traditions and corporate cultures. They persist in developing marketing and product plans based on what is now an outdated idea of what was prevailing thinking at some tiny point in their history. There is no faster way to kill a brand than to think about future opportunities looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

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