Participating Is Never Enough

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Going to a party and waiting near the door to be noticed or approached isn’t being a “partygoer.”

Going to a networking meeting and simply handing out a stack of cards without connecting with anyone isn’t networking.

So how can anyone equate SEO to social media marketing, or typical social media marketing to authentic engagement?

You can participate socially, or at mixers, or in social media, without sharing anything of value. But what’s the point, when it’s so easy to move beyond participation to engagement? Simply turn the “flashlight” of your attention from yourself and what you need, to those around you.

When you get thirty seconds for self-introduction, use twenty of them to celebrate or recognize someone else in the room. Follow your grandmother’s advice and listen twice as much as you talk. Share an intriguing idea or funny story and make yourself memorable.

Online or offline, separate from the crowd to get meaningful results. A leader doesn’t try to disappear into their crowd of followers, he or she stands out and brings more value than anyone else. Be special and you’ll make the people you meet feel special too. Nearly instant celebrity!

As crowded as things get in the world (virtual or real-life), participating simply means standing still. Soon you’ll be surrounded. But the faceless, uncaring people who surround you will take you where they are going, not where you want to go. Stop wasting your passion, your gifts, your uniqueness. Stop settling for participation and move down the path to leadership and real success.

The World’s Happiest Leader: A Personal Tribute to Tom Beebe

“Imagine that the key to happiness is following your own intuition instead of other people’s opinions and advice.” Alex Ostrowski

Great leaders never stop following their intuition. They maintain a child-like faith in their insights. The rest of us mostly flit from one opinion du jour or breathless bit of “wisdom” to the next, like butterflies fading in the grass.

The greatest leaders create a culture in which employees or followers have faith in their own intuition. Because happiness happens, too.

As a child I was very fortunate to have a Sunday School teacher named Tom Beebe, and will always remember climbing happily onto his lap for a story. At the time he was VP of Personnel at Delta Airlines; he was eventually its President, and Delta became famous as a truly great company to work at (featured on page 253 of In Search of Excellence).

Mr. Beebe built “The Delta Family Feeling” on his amazing intuition about what people need and respond to. He was too smart to leave the fate of his company to impulsive or copycat decisions. For example, every stewardess was chosen from thousands of applicants, interviewed twice and screened by the company psychologist.

But all the procedures didn’t blanket his intuition, they validated it. Every employee gained a new confidence in the intuition that Delta recognized and celebrated. That confidence stayed front and center on the job, and every customer felt special to be served.

Delta made its employees so happy to work there, they once chipped in to buy their company a new airplane.

Today it’s much easier for great leaders to recreate at least part of that excitement. Like Tom Beebe, you’ll acknowledge your intuition and instill it in your employees or team members. All in a matter of hours. With the right tool and a world full of self-educated people, anyone can become a great leader like Tom Beebe.

Other people’s opinions and advice are fine, as far as they go. Just don’t confuse them with what brings real happiness. Use your intuition.

Are people the means to an end, or the end itself?

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I give great marketing advice to my clients. It always gets them to see their business and value in a whole new light; from 20,000 feet and ground level too. And then I help them create great content.

Marketing myself is harder, partly because every conversation is such an energizing experience. It’s a “rush” to discover what people do, then think out loud about how I can help them succeed.

To this day, my great-grandmother Mimi’s dictum drives everything I do: “Make yourself useful.”

Getting that much pleasure from every conversation makes each one a goal fulfilled.

At the same time, I care deeply about my current business project and would love to see many people use it. It will only work if people use it. So in that sense, every person is the means to an end.

Have to get that straightened out.

How about you? Is gaining many online “friends” a worthy goal in itself, or are you trying to get their money, respect, retweets? It’s easy to leave that decision unmade, but you’ll be more successful if you straighten that out for yourself.

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Your last marketing campaign?

(But your marketers aren’t this appealing I’ll bet)

http://acidcow.com/video/6418-pandas_on_a_slide.html

$ — Social Media’s “Lost Symbol”

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Does SEO really generate serious money for the average small business? Here’s a surprising fact: even its own gurus aren’t sure.

At first blush this proposition seems like a no-brainer. Selling means “keeping the funnel full.”  So the bigger your “funnel” and the more eyes you attract, the more money you should make, right? And does anybody not want to be like Google?

Google has huge resources and a growing family of great products. We don’t. If hundreds (or even thousands) of online followers join your list of strangers, have you really filled your sales funnel, or just installed a heating duct in your marketing plan?

There’s a big difference between a funnel and a heating duct. Using a funnel, you qualify your leads and focus your efforts on the best prospects. SEO’s heating duct approach just brings in lots of hot air.

SEO experts say you’ll make money by improving your search engine ranking, and therefore traffic. But even they admit that even major social media sites are money losers and that SEO’s success is uncertain. One of them wrote in a LinkedIn discussion group,

“Rank does not necessarily lead to traffic and traffic doesn’t necessarily lead to conversion. Conversion is the real business goal that we should be delivering in my view.”

Another one asked, “Is social media ROI unmeasurable?” How can he keep taking your hard-earned money if he doesn’t know?

And those same experts dismiss branding and engagement as mere distractions, “intangible excuse[s] we use to avoid the fact that we have nothing to measure.” Sorry, Charlie; there’s actually plenty to measure when you connect with real people. It’s just nothing that moves your money to the experts’ bank accounts.

So you decide. Is your business goal having big numbers that look good on a chart, or smaller numbers that generate real conversion numbers–and lasting relationships. Quantity or quality?

The Marketing Mantra doesn’t try to generate huge numbers or first-page rankings. It will, however, generate measurable results for your branding and engagement efforts. It also documents what led your audience from “stranger” to “supporter” status in their own words.

You can pay experts a lot of money for big readership. Or invest a few dollars and build market leadership. It’s time to authentically engage with identifiable people who’ll keep supporting you because you offer them so much real value.

To learn more, please visit http://www.yourmarketingmantra.com.

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Build a Corporate Culture The Social Media Way: Orchestrate It

In a great follow-up to my last article about institutionalizing corporate culture, business owner Frank Hurtte asked,

“When I founded the company, I had a vision of what we would be. I have shared this vision with our staff. Can you toss in a few suggestions to move it from vision to culture?”

To answer this pivotal question about marketing a vision to their “inside customers”–their employees–so it becomes a great culture, let’s take a quick look at how businesses market to their “outside customers” in the social age.

(Keep in mind that the days of manipulating people to give you business are dead and buried. You can no longer “sell” to the quality people you’d want as long-term customers. Build a community around all of your customers, so buying your product or service helps them improve their lifestyle or prospects every time)

The best businesses no longer try to find customers for their products or services–including new services such as monetized blogs. No more “push” or “pull” marketing. They develop products or services that meet the needs of authentically engaged customers. These customers become members of a dynamic yet always demanding “tribe” they will keep supporting, as long as the vendor or service provider offers enough real or perceived value.

It works the same in business. Think of your staff or employees as musicians in a symphony orchestra. They need to be accomplished musicians to get their jobs, and be willing to participate in a new culture that’s unique to that orchestra.

The conductor’s primary role is not to “push” or “pull” them into following his lead. The best conductors genuinely appreciate the sometimes hidden talents and passions of each orchestra member, and creates a culture in which musicians will constantly interact and learn. If the conductor is a Leonard Bernstein, he creates a culture for his orchestra in which their willingness to grow and help each other grow is constantly being recognized. The orchestra’s success is built on preparation and teamwork, so each public performance becomes a celebration rather than an act of closure.

If the orchestra’s culture has been nurtured one member/musician at a time, each of them spends as much time supporting his or her fellow musicians as they do following the conductor. That frees the conductor to focus on the vision of each musical piece. They can lead the “celebration” that happens before a live audience or in a recording studio.

Now let’s get back to Frank’s question, and clearly differentiate modern business cultures from the industrial-age culture building that we saw in Wal-Mart’s cheer circle. Your vision of the company is comparable to what a conductor sees in the symphonic score, Frank. Find an effective way to build a culture in your company and attract the most skilled new employee/customers; just as a great orchestra can get its pick of the best musicians.

Make the process of growing and nurturing your unique culture a requirement and reward of working for you. Then you can stop trying to find employees who accept your processes and operational requirements. As CEO your job-one will become meeting the needs of your authentically engaged employees and staff members. Given the chance to be recognized for the right reasons, helping their fellow employee members will become as natural to them as helping fellow musicians is to members of the New York Philharmonic.

There’s one major difference between modern companies and a fine orchestra: unlike first-tier professional musicians, many employees won’t already be adequately trained professionals. But if you apply the right tools such as the four-step Marketing Mantra process, you can quickly help them acquire the skills they need as they bond in a new community, and become fully and productively engaged in your now shared vision.

Moving your company from vision to culture

What does any living culture embody? 1) significant value for every stakeholder, 2) a process to encourage authentic engagement, and 3) stakeholders’ feelings of personal ownership over that process. These qualities are shared by every culture, in every age and environment.

Every business has a culture. The bad news is that the existing version typically drains rather than sustains the business’ potential: it lacks one or more of these essential qualities.

The good news: social media communication fosters the same three characteristics as the best “offline” cultures.

In other words, everyone on your staff who uses the Internet is already primed to move from vision to culture. Your job is to begin emphasizing those characteristics–along with a commitment to effective communications–as part of your vision.

Then every stakeholder will start changing from an observer to an active supporter of your company’s new culture. They will help nurture its continued growth too, because they were there at the creation!

Build a Corporate Culture the Old Fashioned Way: Institutionalize It

I lived in Japan for eight years in the ’60s and ’70s, when it was hard to miss crowds of coworkers beginning their day with calisthenics and brief motivational speeches by managers. At the beginning of every workday any open space might come alive with neat rows of jumping jacks and jills. Even in offices, people did it behind their desks.

And this wasn’t just for workdays. One summer I spent a week camping near the ocean in Niigata Prefecture. Every morning Japan’s top-rated radio program blared calisthenics from loudspeakers, like a vacation reveille. Hundreds of campers up and down the beach dutifully hopped from their sleeping bags to do squats and stretches in unison.

Early morning calisthenics apparently became a national pastime during World War II, when the military government decided that every citizen should be ready to repel the expected Allied invasion. Since their only weapons would be sharpened bamboo poles, the citizen soldiers would obviously have to stay in good physical condition.

This invigorating ritual also came in handy after the war, when assembly-line workers streamed into factories to help create Japan’s industrial “miracle.”

It was never hard to get most Japanese to participate. Since the feudalistic days Japan has been a nation of poor rice farmers; crops failed without highly focused cooperative effort during planting and harvest seasons.

The Japanese model spread across East Asia and attracted the attention of some important visitors. At a Korean tennis-ball factory in the 1970s, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton was inspired to institute a similar kind of team-building activity, and it became part of the retail behemoth’s corporate culture.

Even today, as each shift starts all Wal-Mart employees everywhere must follow a manager’s lead as he or she does a few calisthenics and group shouts of “Good morning, [colleague]!” — clap, clap, stomp, stomp — “Whoo-whoo!” To make the exercise more relevant, part of the group cheer includes a hearty chanted prediction of the store’s success.

Wal-Mart believes this helps employees more efficiently move over 5.5 billion cases of merchandise a year. But this practice also blurs the line separating corporate process (for greater efficiency) and company culture (which should revolve largely around inefficient people).

Raising their hands in a pledge to work safely reminds employees to help reduce company costs. But is it viable culture for smaller businesses in the social media age, when every company is increasingly focused on HR and employees are increasingly fractious? Stay tuned.

Are SEO Junkies Just Desperate For Attention?

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There are benefits to growing older. You don’t have to show your ID all the time, and . . . uh . . . you’re not so obsessed with getting the attention of strangers.

Okay, so there aren’t many benefits. But that second one is a biggie.

Nothing shouts “immature” like being noisy in public places: rattling windows with the high volume in your souped-up car radio. Showing passersby how drunk and disorderly you can be. Complaining loudly for no good reason at a checkout line, or in an airplane.

It’s normal for young people to confuse attention with respect; they’ll learn the difference as they grow up. But when mature adults start to equate “eyes” with “the prize” (success) we’re just kidding ourselves.

Could our passionate quest for getting an obscene number of hits be simply a sign of our second childhood–or laziness?

In the end, what exactly do those thousands of followers get you? If just two of them decide you have something of value and give you a little business, you haven’t accomplished much of anything. To be blunt, your ROI sucks.

You would have been better off going to a free networking breakfast and picking up two solid leads. At least then you’d have gotten a decent meal.

Everybody knows that Google and certain experts have made millions–or more–with good SEO tools. But unlike the millions of wannabes out here, they offer something of real value to every visitor. They’re leaders because they’ve brought the most value to the table, not because they’ve brought the most visitors to their site.

Eyes aren’t really the prize. Stop filling the coffers of SEO technicians because of dreams of sugarplums dancing in your head. Make your online brand quality, not quantity.

It’s time to stop trying to rattle more windows, and start getting authentically engaged.

Personalize your company with success

How can we persuade CEOs to create for their all-important knowledge workers:

* An authentic reason to believe–in themselves and their company
* All the tools they know they’ll need to succeed
* A culture that organically nurtures self-education
* An ideal environment to effectively deploy everything they have to offer
* A new sense of trust and hope in the company, and their colleagues
* Many new ways to add value to their team and workplace
* Significant savings in cost and resources, one verifiable percent at a time, and
* A sense of engagement that rivals the best social media interactions?

Anyone who can help wake up a CEO “asleep at the wheel” will gain attention and prestige. But the person who has a practical way to achieve these objectives at every level of an organization will have the field all to him- or herself.

As someone once said, “Don’t be so busy counting your chickens you overlook the ducks standing nearby.”