The White Pages and their Yellow buddies are, for the majority of consumers, a nuisance. They are bulky, out of date immediately, and increasingly don’t have the information one wants (as more people use cell phones as their primary connection). They’re also a waste of money and resources — there someone has to deliver the things, they need to be printed, shipped, stored, etc.
And yet they are delivered to me whether I want them or not.
Then I learned that most telcos still give out the books becuase they have to. Local jurisdictions require them as part of their operating agreements.
I get that we can’t penalize non-Internet users and shut them out — but can’t it be something they opt-in to, rather than something I need to opt out of?
Switching To Opt-In Marketing
That got me thinking about other organizations’ marketing efforts.
For example, I have an email list that I have built up over many years. (I’m supposed to send one out today, in fact.) Looking at my stats, I am certain there are people who have long been on that list who simply tolerate receiving it — they haven’t opened and email in years. What if I were to run a “census” and ask people to affirmatively say they want to remain on the list? It might be painful to watch the number on my list drop, but those that remain really, really want to hear from me.
Think about how much you send out (whether by mail or by email) that people did not ask for. What if you switched over to entirely opt-in strategies?
I wrote recently about how organizations can use people’s social media feetprints to find talent. There’s also been lots written about how careful people need to be with what they post in the social media sphere lest they inadvertently make themselves unemployable.
Footprints by Flickr user kimba
But I think if you’re looking for a job and you’re not using social media proactively, you’re crazy.
What you can do with it:
Create a portfolio. I’ve written about this before. Resumes rarely convey your real highlights. They can’t; they’re too stylized. Your social media footprint can do that. On your blog, on your “about” page, you should have a linked, bulleted list of your key accomplishments.
Prove your reputation. It’s easy to say that you’re important in your field, or that others regard your work highly. But how do you prove it? A list of three references may or may not get called. But if you have been sharing and generally been a good social media citizen, the good will you’ve generated will be on display for all to see. Connect with others in your field, and share tips and ideas with them. Use the usual suspects — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.
Find places to interview. Duh, obvious use. But it’s a biggie. Ask around, keep your eyes open, be in a lot of conversations. You’ll be able to see who’s looking for talent. And you’ll see who knows about such things.
Research a prospective organization. Before you make an approach, you can check an organization out a bit. LinkedIn is great for this, because you can filter by employer. Who’s worked there? Do you know them? Guy Kawasaki has a great tutorial on using LinkedIn to screen potential employers (to avoid nightmare bosses).
Watch the prospective organization. Let’s say you’ve gotten that first interview, or even an informational interview. If your statistics systems are set up right (that is, you should be using statcounter or sitemeter on your blog so you can see where people are coming from when they visit your site), you can gauge their interest. Are they checking you out? Doing a good job of monitoring can also help you decide whether the fit with a given organization would be a good one.
Control follow up. Of course, the follow up letter is a time honored way of making sure the impression you left your interviewers with is actually the one you want them to have. (“As we discussed when we were together, I am a rock star in these four ways…”). If you use email, it’s also a way to leave hooks. Include relevant links to things you’ve written. Watch to see if they click on them. You can tell how interested they are and also calibrate your own responses by watching your stats.
Stay on the radar. Hopefully, you have gained a sense (by asking in your interview or through research) of what, if any, social networks the hiring managers are a part of. It’ll be either Facebook or LinkedIn — in each they may be a part of a subgroup. Don’t be weird and in-you-face about it . . . but be active in ways they may see. Connect these efforts with your stat-watching. Share links, using url-shorteners that allow you to see traffic stats.
The overall approach is to be active, be visible, and monitor. Don’t just send in the resume, get the interview, and leave it at that.
From the moment you decide to consider working at a firm, you are in a relationship with them, so be proactive about it. It may not get you the job, but it’ll put you higher up on the list.
Any new trend generates jargon. It’s necessary in order for people to talk about the ideas embedded in the trend. Pretty soon, the people who follow the trend use so much jargon it loses its meaning. We’re about at that point with this thing people are calling “social media.” Amber Naslund suggests a good thought experiment in which we need to describe social media without using certain buzzwords or catch phrases (e.g., “You need to join the conversation.”)
Photo of The Conversation by Edouard Vuillard is by Flickr user cliff1066
People in organizations need a clear understanding of the value — to them — of pursuing social media. Unfortunately, many of the people who are most excited about and evangelists for social media put everything in a kind of gee-whiz, the world’s changing mode. To anyone older than thirty-five, this holds painful echoes of the way people talked about the “new” economy in the late 1990′s.
The argument amounts to this: “You need to be in the social media space because it is new, and many people, including me, see it as cool.” Why? asks the organization leader.
At that point, many will trot out statements that make no sense but that are meant to sound smart. They will say that a brand is “a conversation,” or that people want to be in a “relationship.” Both are silly things to say. I do not want to be in a “relationship” with my bank; I want easy access to my money and I want it all there when I go to get it. Similarly, I may have a conversation about a brand, but as a consumer I understand that a brand is simply a way of conveying in shorthand what qualities I might expect from a given product, service, experience, or cause.
The thing that is missing in so much of this is the key element of why an organization might give a fig about social media. So here it is: the decision. As an organization, I want to influence people’s decisions so that they decide to do what I want them to (examples: buy my product, attend my school, go to my theme park, support my cause, trust my brand, view me as a thought leader).
So, I would make the case for social media in those terms:
People make decisions based in large part on recommendations from peers or trusted figures. Increasingly, these recommendations are passed along through social media tools.
The key characteristic of social media that makes it different from other media is that the contributions, comments and other responses of users are seen as intrinsically important.
To influence people’s decisions, we need to monitor and play a role in these user responses.
For these purposes, important social media tools include: blog posts, comments on blog posts, user forums, email lists, reviews by consumers on shopping sites, and online communities like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Each of these is a channel in which user responses and activities are key. They are all areas where an organization can seek to gain a presence.
But if these attempts don’t have a fundamental connection to the decision I want people to make about my brand or my organization, it’s just wasted time and energy.
Especially among nonprofits and community organizations, meetings are a plague. They seem to be called at the drop of a hat, they run over time, and all too often the chief result of one meeting is another meeting.
By Flickr User tiarescott
But if you focus on the purpose of the meeting, and follow some simple guidelines, meetings can become useful.
Here are nine tips to consider:
Be prepared to lead. It’s been said that a committee is a beast with many stomachs and no brain. You need to provide the brain — leadership. In today’s workplace, there’s a lot of talk about “collaboration” and sometimes that is a smokescreen for not stepping up when it’s time to lead. Be prepared to follow the agenda, keep to the time, and shut people off who ramble when it’s not time to do so.
Use smaller chunks of time. In most organizations, there’s a “default” length of time that most things take. In most nonprofits it’s an hour, though one I have worked with assumes that any meeting will take 90 minutes. You can shrink that time and it won’t hurt anything. When you call the meeting, give a start and an ending time — and make the ending time be earlier than the norm might be. Is your default length an hour? Try scheduling a 45 minute meeting.
Have an agenda. You must, you must, you must prepare an agenda. Think about the purpose of the meeting: are you making a decision, getting information, sharing updates, brainstorming? Put the agenda together accordingly. Put fewer items in than you think you can cover. Don’t make it long just because you think the items look lonely on the page.
Share material ahead of time. If the meeting is to review material, it must be shared ahead of time, with enough leeway for people to read and think about it. That means at least a full day before, in most cases. It does no one any good to receive materials for a morning meeting the night before. If the meeting starts and it is clear that the materials have not been shared in enough time, end the meeting (if it is the main subject) or skip that item (if it is one of many on the agenda). Next time, people will share their materials, I guarantee it.
Start on time. Every meeting that doesn’t start on time is a guarantee that the next one will start later. Often, due to anxiety or other factors, people will want to “wait five more minutes.” Instead, just start. When they do saunter in, don’t back up just for them. People will get the idea and show up on time.
Follow the agenda. Your job as leader of the meeting is to follow the agenda and pay attention to time. If the conversation moves off of the agenda and it seems fruitful, step in and make sure people are aware of this. “We are shifting to a new topic. That probably means one of the remaining topics won’t be covered. I just want to make sure we know that. OK?”
Recap decisions made. If there is no outcome to the meeting, it was more than likely wasted time. Even if the meeting’s purpose was open-ended, like brainstorming — capture what was decided or discussed. Make sure everyone understands the decisions made or the key items talked about. Allow time at the end to do this.
End on time. One reason people hate meetings is that they run on and on . . . and over. Adhere to the end time you advertised. End early if you can (people will want to come to your meetings).
Follow up. After the meeting, as soon as possible, share notes on the key items discussed, key decisions, or key questions (depending on the meeting). If you take good notes, you can do this in your sleep. (Or designate someone to do so.)
Some optional things to try to really compress your meetings and make them more efficient:
Hold the meeting standing up. (You’ll be more efficient.)
Limit the meeting to fifteen minutes. (You’ll get to the point!)
Institute an anyone-can-leave-if-the-meeting-is-useless policy. (It forces meeting planners to hold a useful meeting if they know everyone can just walk out.)
Hold the meeting by chat. (People can multitask easier and won’t resent the time spent as much.)
What are your top meeting tips? Share in the comments!
On Monday evening, Domino’s officials became aware of a truly disgusting video circulating on YouTube, evidently made by a pair of employees, that showed one of them making sandwiches for delivery and putting pieces of cheese up his nose and spitting on them. The video was causing an uproar, and observers had pieced together clues as to which franchise was the locale for the snippet. A Consumerist.com reader tracked it back to a Conover, N.C. location.
Domino’s didn’t know what to do at first, and spent Tuesday cleaning up what they could and hoping it would go away. The pair of Domino’s employees involved in the video promised that they never delivered the sandwiches and it was a joke. They were fired and Domino’s is pressing charges.
But it didn’t go away, and Domino’s created a Twitter account to keep people updated, and Patrick Doyle, President of Domino’s USA, cut this video in response:
Lessons:
As it has always been, one or two lame employees can make big trouble for a brand. This is not new.
BUT, the speed with which things can metastasize has exponentially increased. This played out over three days or so, and Domino’s got criticism for acting too slowly.
The way a company handles such a crisis can make or break it. Is it sincere? Is it transparent? Is it thorough? After an initial hiccup, Domino’s was all those. (Watch the video.)
While some see this episode as a cautionary tale about moving too slowly in the Internet world, I see it a little differently. Yes, Tuesday was tough, but it was not a death blow. The event had to play out, and Domino’s made the right response.
This is something that any organization can learn from — you don’t have to be a Domino’s. Community-based nonprofits as well as national organizations can take a lesson from this. The lesson is this: the leader of the organization is a central character. Note that I did not say “figure,” but character. The executive director or CEO is an integral part of the story of an organization.
Back to Domino’s: What makes this the right response (in addition to all the things you would expect like the firing, pressing charges, etc.) is the direct, heartfelt, and angry response from Doyle. This is why the leader matters in an organization. This guy is shaken to his core by the episode, he’s not someone just doing their job. You can just about feel it in the video.
It is Doyle’s emotion — his character revealing itself — that saves the day. Until he starts getting wound up, it seems like it could just be a cheesy corporate statement: he’s not looking at the camera, reading from something off-screen. It feels shifty.
But then about 30 seconds in, he hits his stride. He gets mad. He starts to stress words differently. He looks at the camera. (Frederic Lardinois thinks the whole video is lame but, as you can see, I disagree. I think the emotion wins out in the end, almost in spite of the corporate restrictions.)
The critical component in rebuilding public’s trust in this case is the direct connection they get from social media. Twitter and YouTube (along with traditional avenues) play the major role.It’s an axiom in the political consulting world that an attack should always be answered in the same medium in which it is made. They send out mail? You send out mail. They put up TV? You put up TV.
They put up YouTube? You put up YouTube.
You won’t see Doyle’s whole response on network tv – it’s too long. But people WILL see it on YouTube. They will see his emotionalism, and the palpable disgust that these two people sullied the reputation of the 125,000 other Domino’s workers who are trying to do their best.
I argue that, like Tylenol after its cyanide scare decades ago, Domino’s will emerge stronger after this because of the direct, heartfelt performance if its president.
Good job, Mr. Doyle. Your example is one that any organizational leader ought to take to heart.
I was reminded of the howls from some pundits after a McCain-Obama debate in which the subject of “strategy” came up. The refrain from the left was: “This guy doesn’t even know the difference between ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics.’”
The truth is, people have been arguing about the difference between strategy and tactics for centuries and there is no concrete consensus on the difference. Most people have an overall sense that strategy relates to “bigger” things and tactics more to “small” things. Many others think strategy is somehow better than tactics when it comes to planning.
And, more often, one will hear someone in the workplace telling someone else to think or act “strategically” — when what they really mean is “be smarter.”
Like the term “leadership,” it is a shorthand for a larger idea — but for most people this idea is ill-defined.
I learned strategic planning from one of the people who helped develop our modern understanding of it. While strategic planning has changed many times since it was first elaborated in the late 60′s, this definition from my mentor always sticks with me:
“Strategy is a decisive allocation of resources.”
In other words, a strategy is something that, if you pursue it, other avenues are foreclosed. Many different tactics, on the other hand, could be used in the pursuit of a particular strategy.
In most cases, I’ve found that the answer to this question depends on the size of the theater. What is a tactic when looked at from one level can be a strategy at another level.
As an example, a company might have a strategy to use social media as its primary marketing communications tool. It would use various tactics to achieve that: blog comments, Facebook pages, Twitter, and so forth.
However, depending on the size of the theater you are looking at, a tactic can become a strategy. Just thinking about the fictitious company’s “social media” strategy, imagine the marketing department that is charged with implementing this. The fact that the overall thrust is social media will now be a given, just a parameter. The strategic decisions at this level really will center on which tool to use and how strongly to bet on it.
Seth Godin wrote recently about the plight of agents. Literary agents, travel agents, stock brokers, real estate agents — all either extinct or becoming so. Why? Anonymity:
The problem with being a helpful, efficient but largely anonymous middleman is pretty obvious. Someone can come along who is cheaper, faster and more efficient. And that someone might be the customer aided by a computer. . . .
Middlemen add value when they bring taste or judgment or trust to bear on a transaction that isn’t transparent. . . . Key point: anonymous agents are interchangeable and virtually worthless. Agents that don’t do anything but help one side find the other side in a human approximation of Google aren’t so helpful any more.
Does that mean the business of being an agent is dead? No! It means it’s time to make sure you’re not anonymous. Add value that can’t be added otherwise — and that is where discernment comes in. Agents can provide a powerful filtering (or editing) function.
But, in order to provide this function, agents need to say “no,” perhaps as often or more than they say “yes.” This means they need to brand their own identity as someone who is a helpful nexus of good content, be that content a steady stream of well-priced homes, a stable of awesome authors, or a collection of well-performing startups.
This may mean there is room for fewer agents in the world, but it also means that the ones who are left can play a more important role.
There is a lot of angst within the journalism (and journalism-curious) community lately, as there have been a controversial suggestion that the best way to reinvent journalism would be to make it a nonprofit, charitable endeavor.
One organization, the Voice of San Diego, gives a glimpse of what hard-hitting journalism can look like under a nonprofit model. A recent LA Times profile of VSD is fascinating.
But what really grabbed me was this paragraph:
Because it doesn’t have to print newspapers, Voice of San Diego puts the majority of its $825,000 annual budget into salaries for its 11 journalists, who make from $35,000 to roughly $70,000 and focus on government, education, law enforcement, real estate and science.
For a news organization, $825K is a small budget. But from where I sit, as the purveyor of a completely volunteer local news site, with a budget under $100 in direct costs per year — it seems Gargantuan. My main reactions are twofold:
I want to try to “grow up”
I think good journalism can be done for cheaper
I am not sure what it would look like, and I have a hunch I may be wrong, but . . . we’ll see.
Some of my friends know that, hidden in my dim, dark past, I used to do something involving electric bicycles. I’m here to tell you that, yes, it’s true and it was a colorful period of my life.
While I was working for then-California Controller Gray Davis, I met up with a charismatic man who had the vision thing in spades. His name was Malcolm Bricklin.
Malcolm was an automotive entrepreneur. He was the first American to get a perpetual license to import a Japanese vehicle — the Subaru. He parlayed that as a young man into quite an empire, and then sold out. His later efforts were not as successful, though they all had their silver linings and interesting moments. When Fiat quit importing the Spider, Malcolm stepped in and imported it with the “Bertone” badge. He created the Bricklin gull-wing door car (which enthusiasts still swear by and, I am given to understand, on which the DeLorean is based). He had an idea for cheap cars for the masses and created the Yugo — which, say what you want about it, but it was cheap.
In fact, that was Malcolm’s main vision: inexpensive cars, accessible for everyone.
He also had another vision. He thought electric vehicles were the wave of the future. Of course, he was right — just about fifteen years ahead of his time.
When I met Malcolm, he was trying to get an appointment with my boss, Gray, to talk about a new idea he had that would need some political support. There was a giant, shuttered General Motors factory in Van Nuys (the Valley area of Los Angeles). Malcolm wanted to use that as a factory to convert gasoline-powered cars into electric. The idea was this: You give Malcolm’s company your car and, say, $10,000 — and they give you back your same car but electric-powered.
While I think that is a cool idea, it never took off. But I was mesmerized, and so I left politics and went to work for Malcolm.
After trying to get electric cars off the ground for a time, Malcolm (and his business partner, a former GM Delco chairman and Hughes executive, coincidentally named Malcolm Currie) determined that the choke point in the whole enterprise was the battery industry. This fact is still being rediscovered today. There just is not enough capacity worldwide to make the number of high-tech batteries that would be needed for electric vehicles to be mass-manufacturable. Part if the reason that there was (and is) not enough capacity is that the battery companies did not see enough of a market. What if they built the factories and no one bought the batteries?
So Malcolm shifted gears. He needed to show the battery companies that if they built them, people would buy.
Thus was born the EV Warrior electric bicycle. Malcolm created the Electric Bicycle Company and developed an infrastructure through car dealers to sell the bikes.
The bikes had a casing on the back where a rack would be, that contained a motor and a battery. Press a lever on the handlebar, and the motor would kick in, propelling the bike up to about 15 miles per hour. (The image is from our promotional materials.)
It was an idea that had a great deal of merit, but the product was not up to the task and probably did not have a market. The bikes were very top heavy, the drive mechanism was finicky, and we never got quality control quite right.
We were also saddled with a bunch of weird regulations. Turns out if you slap even a low-powered motor on a bike it becomes a “vehicle.” That brings with it a host of issues. We had to create VIN numbers, meet Department of Transportation regulations, which included having headlights that were as powerful as car headlights, and riders had to wear motorcycle helmets and typically get special motorcycle licenses in order to ride the things. We’re talking bikes with little motors, here, and all this rigmarole just about killed the idea before it started.
But that was my job. The helmet and license thing. Me and a colleague, transportation consultant Ryan Snyder, went around to state capitals trying to get the laws changed in order to allow people to actually ride these things. Ryan had more success than I did with his states, but together we were able to get the law changed in California and I went on to get the law changed in Oregon and Washington states. W00t! The basic idea was simple: we created a new “class” of vehicle called the “electric assisted bicycle.” This new class of vehicle could be ridden without a special license, only on streets (not sidewalks), and anyone under 16 had to wear a helmet — but a bike helmet, not a motorcycle helmet.
The company eventually folded before we really got going, but this was an exciting, if brief, period in my life. The characters I met were fascinating. Malcolm himself was a walking, charismatic bolt of lightning. But there were others: an erotic sculptor who designed the motor casing; the inventor of the “extended warranty” who did — well, I am not sure what, but car dealers thought he was a magician for inventing that thing; a former ad man and Bible scholar who was Malcolm’s right hand.
Once EBC closed I continued to do the same state capital work for some other electric bicycle firms (yes, there were others, making the Charger and the Zap) but that was not successful. The heyday had come and gone.
I am sure some of my readers are wondering: Did he register as a lobbyist in these states? To be honest, I cannot remember the details. I believe I did. Or at least I tried. But at some point, I also recall we got an opinion that, since I was working only on one issue, I did not have to.
Here and there, though, you can see police forces using electric bicycles — mostly the Charger and Zap. The EV Warrior? Not so much — too heavy. More often, they are a curiosity hidden in various people’s garages. Will they ever emerge?
We’ll have to wait and see.
P.S. What happened to the Electric Bicycle Company? It was eventually purchased by Lee Iacocca. He renamed the company EV Global. That company no longer exists either.
I grew up in Detroit when times were tough and it wasn’t pretty. But looking at how the heads of the Big Three are responding to the crisis that faces them makes me think that there may be too many auto companies in my hometown.
While the new reorganization plans the Big Three unveiled yesterday have aspects to recommend them (for example, GM axing Saab and Saturn) the amount of prodding it took to get to this level of change makes you wonder how serious the companies are about following through.
What’s galling though, is how the car execs seem roundly out of touch with reality.
Ford’s Mulally says he’ll actually use his own product to get to the DC hearings where the automakers must show lawmakers better restructuring plans — and then others say “Me too! Me too!” But this only comes after they got heat for taking private jets to go beg for taxpayer money.
Meanwhile, GM has gone cost-saving happy. They’ve turned off voicemail for employees and have stopped putting batteries in their wall clocks. A spokeseman says “It’s all good business practices, but now it’s extreme business practices to the point where we’re not wasting anything.” Huh? (I’ll have to turn off my voicemail and tell my clients it’s the new sig-sigma.)
And GM’s president actually claims that there is no “plan B” beyond a government bailout, which strains credulity.
The auto manufacturers are desperate — but are they desperate enough to truly change?
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The bikes had a casing on the back where a rack would be, that contained a motor and a battery. Press a lever on the handlebar, and the motor would kick in, propelling the bike up to about 15 miles per hour. (The image is from our promotional materials.)
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