Category: TODAY’S ISSUES

10 Simple Tips to Promote Your Customer Thinking

We can truly understand and employ good customer retention only in contrast to other insights. Here are some tips to promote your customer thinking.
Not really. But understanding what influences customers to buy your products and services is certainly not straightforward. You need to put customer influence to work to fully appreciate why customers make the decisions they do. Explore, experiment, and do lots of testing to learn the most.
Promote your customer thinking
Promote your customer thinking.
Check out our thoughts on customer focus.
How much time do you and your business dedicate to gathering customer insights and converting them into the best influencers? Not enough is the answer we hear most often. One way you can find useful insights is to examine research in social psychology.
A differentiated customer influencer is critical to business success. Companies that consistently provide the best ones are most often the most successful.
But there is a tremendous and ever-growing completion for these influencers, isn’t there? Often it seems almost a bridge too far. So we need to know the best ones that have been shown successfully.
See our article on the Deadly Mistakes that Destroy Employee Engagement
Here are 10 we have found to most appreciated by customers of our clients:
 

Client retention examples  … time

Most people today suffer from too little time. Always and it is an increasingly important factor. Time is the one thing that even the richest customer doesn’t have enough of. So customers’ perceptions about your company’s customer experience are largely influenced by saving them time. Often the meaning correlates with convenience. This means you have to reduce the time it takes for them to:
Find you
Engage with you
Communicate their problem
For you to resolve that problem.
How well are you doing with these customer influencers?
Related post: Customer Loyalty …10 Ways to Gain, Build, and Retain It
 

Promote your customer thinking depends on employee expertise

Customers need to believe that your company’s employees are good at what they do. They must perceive that your staff is well-informed about products, services, policies, issues, and any other relevant subject matter.
So, to project their best knowledge to your customers, you have to make sure that they are fully empowered with information that’s accurate, complete, and up-to-date. And the ability and time to provide sound advice for the best influence.

Business Information: How to Completely Change Your Success Priorities

 

customer influence
Customer influence?

Promote your customer thinking … personalization

Customers don’t want to be treated like a number. They want to feel valued and understood. Their belief? That the money they spend with your company entitles them to such treatment.
The differentiation of the influence your company delivers will, therefore, be at least in part contingent on your ability to personalize your interactions with customers across all channels.
That means knowing their name, their previously expressed preferences, or the particulars of their current situation. Lots of small ways to create customer influence with personalization.

Business Information: How to Completely Change Your Success Priorities

Care

Customers like knowing that you care. Great service is the top reason customers keep giving their business to companies and the top reason they recommend those companies to others.
On the flipside, 80 percent of customers say that they have stopped doing business with a company because of a bad service experience.
More often than not, they will never do business with such a company ever again. For these reasons and others, it is critical to ensure that your company delivers influence with great service care. The care that results in great experiences that are remembered and talked about.
You can’t over prepare your customer influence if you want customers to select or stay with your company.
Remember, customers, create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.

Customer experience influencers … listening

Success with social media and customer influence requires more listening and less talking. Read between the lines of your target audience’s responses to your influencers and join discussions to learn what’s important to them.
Only then can you create better influencers and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter in their lives.

 

collaborate
Like to collaborate?

  

Collaborate

As a business, you need to find customers who like to partner to help you with ideas and spread your messages.
The neat thing about collaborating is that by working with different groups of people, you potentially will introduce your story to a whole new audience of people who are not familiar with your work.

 

 

 Timeliness as customer influencers

Nothing beats customer response timeliness in terms of the value of customer influencers. Timely responses to customers score big with your existing and potential customers.
Stay on top of your market and continually refine your ability to report on what is going on now.

 

 Original thinking

Most consumers are searching for new ideas not rehash. They value original thinking highly. Offer it for great customer influence. Create well-conceived original themes and content.
Ask original thought-provoking questions that trump quantity any day.
It’s better to have 1,000 online connections who read and share with you and then talk about you with their own thoughts are better than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

 

Good customer retention … learn as you go

Don’t think you can execute ‘drive-by’ customer influencers that will succeed with your customers.
Plan and refine what you learn continuously. Use analytics and reliable tracking tools to know what is working best and follow these paths.

 Related post: Employee Engagement Activities …13 Mistakes that Destroy Engagement

 

 Employ customer influencers … accessibility

Don’t publish your customer influencers and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently take action and participate in the resulting conversations.
Online customers won’t hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.
 

Takeaways

 

This is your time to create and take action on customer insights from successful influencers. With good continuity and persistence, relevant insights will be helpful in developing lasting relationships with your customers.
Lead with initiative and own the moment. Dive in today and notice how much your business improvements grow.
Remember this simple fact. Stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in. Let your content marketing success be your difference maker.
From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and — perhaps most importantly — your bottom line.

 

create_website_design

 

 

Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?
 
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
 
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
  
More reading on customer engagement from our library:
Complaint Management … Tips for Small Business Success
Complaint Handling … 14 Effective Business Relationship Recommendations
Influence Consumer Behavior by These 9 Personalization Strategies
Client Engagement … 4 Actions To Improve Engagement
 
Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

Improve Employee Motivation: How to Completely Change Techniques

Is your goal to improve employee motivation and engagement? And do it in the way that makes them want to do it? A quality of a top notch leader isn’t it? Well remember this: good leaders are reliable and yet not predictable. And they should be consistent without being predictable. Not rocket science is it? But without these leadership traits, you will be losing the ability to motivate your team.
improve employee motivation
How to improve employee motivation.
What skill matters most if you are a leader of a small business? Or perhaps for any business leader? We believe it is the ability to motivate and engage. For a small business, to develop the best motivational leader qualities is more critical to the daily operations than larger businesses. Why? Because there is much less leadership to be involved. And fewer employees so you need everyone fully engaged and motivated.

Can you change? Of course, you can. Everybody changes every day. But how versatile, agile, and quickly can you adapt yourself and your organization to stay relevant in today’s society?

Organizations are always evolving. What’s different now, is that we set new speed records of change on a daily basis. Technology gives us unprecedented possibilities. And this sea of opportunities is pushing the traditional bureaucratic, controlled and hierarchical organization into an identity crisis.

Your personality and attitude make a world of impact on those around you, don’t they?  Making motivational improvements for you and your team should not be rocket science … it is usually the simple things that make you most effective.
So … you need to pay attention to the development of your own motivational leadership abilities if you are a leader of a small business. Here are some things that you need to do to motivate and engage your staff:

Improve employee motivation … providing challenging work

Wondering what the most important part of being social is? It is listening, hands down in our opinion. And listening means hearing. So if you don’t start with great listening, you will immediately turn off many of staff.
I learned this one quite early in my leadership and management career. Remember your first step in team motivation is making listening the backbone of your conversation. And then give everyone meaningful work tasks and cross train.

Storytelling in communications

Have you noticed how much employee motivation has changed in the last decade? Most people have. So when you use just traditional communication techniques, employees imagine you are stuck in time. Not a good thing.
One new communication technique we think is most important is storytelling. Think about the stories that you were told as children. They are etched into our subconscious. Use pictures and videos to communicate your stories in creative new ways. Ways that will be remembered and talked about.
be consistent
Always be consistent.

Be consistent

Do you know your employees well and their likes and dislikes? If so, this in your guide to consistent personal conversational topics.
Always be consistent in the subjects you know your employees are interested in. Select the new variants but stick with their interests.

Show your personality

Everyone has a personality or at least 98% of the populace. Your business reflects the personalities of its leaders either by choice or by accident. You know which is best, don’t you?
Every successful leader has a specific tone of voice. One that relates to the personality of the business. And yes, of course, a business and its leadership have a distinctive personality. Decide what personality you want and let your tone reflect it in your leadership style … consistently. Employees love the personal touch.

Be flexible

It is often difficult to be flexible with all the decisions required in the marketplace. So if you want to be more flexible and still be consistent, you must pay attention to even the small details in dealing with employee decisions.
Make your employee interaction stand out with simple messages and involve employees in as many decisions as you can.

Listen and hear

A Chinese proverb once said if you don’t like to smile don’t open a shop. The same goes for being a person who doesn’t like to deal with people. Nothing is more damaging to a business.
Listen, hear, and observe closely. Find the unspoken messages. Make listening and observing your core competences. You don’t gain insights by talking. Ideas can come from anywhere, so it’s important to keep your ears open to new ideas and insight.
Leaders need to be good listeners for everyone, from customers to employees to business colleagues. They need to listen to what other people say and not just hear it. Listening also helps a leader get multiple perspectives. When making a decision, a good leader always listens to a number of different people. They know they own the final decision but always make sure they get input from multiple people.

Always learning

always learning
You are always learning.
Now more than ever, things are changing at blazing speed. Employees notice businesses that are stuck in time, refusing to learn.
There is only two ways to keep up. They are continuous learning and applying what you learn. Spend time understanding changing trends and patterns. Apply them as often as you can. And most importantly, solicit the help of your employees.

Communicate clear expectations

Don’t like networking either on or off-line? Not sure why you are in business, are you? This is true for employees and customers
Don’t be fooled by the deceptive simplicity of being social on-line. Building an effective network takes a lot of time, energy, and resources. Schedule time to make it happen and devote the energy required. Get your employees involved.

Always, always put employees first

Employees should always come first, they are your business. No matter what the job is, leaders always want to look for the best people and then take care of them. They are the lifeblood of the business. They then will take great care of customers.
When you’re leading a business or an organization, you’re leading people. Many leaders work to have relationships with their employees. Taking them out for coffee and getting to know them better is common, an important element in being a leader. Here are two additional perspectives from exceptional business leaders:
You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.
– Walt Disney
 
You have to treat your employees like customers.
–          Herb Kelleher
 

Being socialable

Be social … walk around and connect on multiple levels.  Connected leaders quickly become multiplier leaders. Multiplier leaders know that at the apex of the intelligence hierarchy is not the lone genius, but rather the leader who knows the importance of bringing out the smarts and capabilities in everyone around them.

Inspire and energize

Share your passion. Show compassion and share positive energy always.
A quality of great leaders is being able to clearly articulate ideas and get people excited and inspired about them. It’s not selling people on an idea, it’s inspiring them.
Getting a person to work with a leader when they’re not obligated is more than just inspiring them. It’s about ensuring people have fun and are energized with passion. Many charities get people to volunteer for them by inspiring and energizing a noble cause. They say that if you donate, you’ll be spending your time working toward something greater than yourself. This inspires people to take a few hours to work for a charity promoting a cause they believe in.

Coaching and mentoring

Mentor and develop self-esteem and a positive attitude. We have written on employees’ positive attitude on several occasions. Employee attitude is so critical that it can’t be overemphasized. It often trickles down from leaders, but it needs to happen more by design. Your business can never be what it can be if you don’t focus on employee happiness.
If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll have dozens of people criticize you. Customers, current and former employees (whether you know it or not), and family and friends may give you constructive criticism. It can be stressful to hear or read, and it can be easy to pass on criticism to employees. But it doesn’t help that much. As a leader, you should ensure employees have high self-esteem in their job.
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Creative great customer experience design.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your enablers for success for yourself and your employee team?
 
Need some help in finding ways to motivate and engage your employee team?  Such as creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers? Or perhaps finding ways to work with other businesses?
 
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your business learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
  
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
9 Things to Know About Creative Visual Design Content
8 Presenter Mistakes That Are Rarely Made Twice
Know These Great Secrets of Collaboration and Co-Creation
How Good Is Your Learning from Failure?
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
 
 

 

What Historical Personality Reminds You of Elon Musk

Much has been written about Elon Musk in the last year, and a lot of it makes us rethink the man. Makes us rethink what we knew or thought we knew. And lots that remind you of Elon Musk.
reminds you of Elon Musk
Reminds you of Elon Musk, yes?
Elon Musk has always been a thinker, a creator, and an eccentric.  As a child, he daydreamed in an almost trance-like manner and coded his video games.
He always found resourceful ways to make money, and after he graduated from college, he opted for entrepreneurship rather than wait for an internet company to take notice of him.
Still the same old Elon, right? And more eccentric all the time, just like another historical personality.
Numerous passions inspire Musk, and today he manages companies and projects that specialize in electric and self-driving cars, private space exploration and Mars colonization, solar energy and artificial intelligence. More about these momentarily. But first a little background on entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship in America recently hit a 40 year low, with far less business creation and new jobs coming from startups than in the past. Productivity numbers show a similar trend, with levels today far below what they were in previous decades. Clearly, these trends are troubling signs that need to be reversed.
To many, this is surprising because we seem to see innovation all around us, from smarter smartphones to speakers that talk to us and respond to our commands. However, the truth is that information and communication technology makes up only 6% of advanced economies. Silicon Valley isn’t going to build the future alone..

On average, it takes about 30 years to go from initial discovery to significant market impact and we are about a decade into the next great transformation. That puts us almost exactly where those Xerox executives were in 1977. They had no idea of what personal computers would unleash and if we’re honest, we need to admit that we are in the same boat.

What we can do is recognize that there is a great transformation underway that will unlock possibilities and opportunities that are impossible to see clearly right now. However, it is more critical to explore than to predict and that’s what we need to do today. We don’t need to understand the future to be open to it.

But there are lots of parallels of an entrepreneur personality that reminds you about Elon Musk. Can you guess who it is?

Who Is Elon Musk?

Elon Reeve Musk (born June 28, 1971) is a South African-born American entrepreneur and businessman who founded X.com in 1999 (which later became PayPal), SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla Motors in 2003.
Musk became a multimillionaire in his late 20s when he sold his start-up company, Zip2, to a division of Compaq Computers. Lots of similarities in personal wealth between the two.
Musk made headlines in May 2012, when SpaceX launched a rocket that would send the first commercial vehicle to the International Space Station.

Education

At age 17, in 1989, Elon Musk moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University and avoid mandatory service in the South African military. He left in 1992 to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed for a second bachelor’s degree in physics.
After leaving Penn, Elon Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a Ph.D. in energy physics. However, his move was timed perfectly with the Internet boom, and he dropped out of Stanford after just two days to become a part of it, launching his first company, Zip2 Corporation.
An online city guide, Zip2 was soon providing content for the new websites of both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In 1999, a division of Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options.
Elon Musk biography
Elon Musk biography.
Lots of irons in the fire, so to speak. Lots of similarities also.
Here are some of his well-known businesses:

 

Zip2

In 1995, Musk and his brother, Kimbal, started Zip2, a web software company, with money raised from a small group of angel investors. The company developed and marketed an Internet “city guide” for the newspaper publishing industry.
 While at Zip2, Musk wanted to become CEO; however, none of the board members would allow it.  Compaq acquired Zip2 for US$307 million in cash and US$34 million in stock options in February 1999. Musk received US$22 million for his 7 percent share from the sale.
Not too similar here between the two.
 

X.com and PayPal

In March 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, online financial services, and e-mail payment company, with US$10 million from the sale of Zip2. One year later, the company merged with Confinity, which had a money transfer service called PayPal. The merged company focused on the PayPal service and was renamed PayPal in 2001.
Musk was ousted in October 2000 from his role as CEO (although he remained on the board) due to disagreements with other company leadership, notably over his desire to move PayPal’s Unix-based infrastructure to Microsoft Windows.
 In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received US$165 million.] Before its sale, Musk, who was the company’s largest shareholder, owned 11.7% of PayPal’s shares.
Both of these business leaders need to be in control.

SpaceX

Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel.
With US$100 million of his early fortune, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, in May 2002. Musk is a chief executive officer (CEO) and chief technology officer (CTO) of the Hawthorne, California-based company.
SpaceX develops and manufactures space launch vehicles with a focus on advancing the state of rocket technology. The company’s first two launch vehicles are the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets (a nod to Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon), and its first spacecraft is the Dragon (a nod to Puff the Magic Dragon).
 In seven years, SpaceX designed the family of Falcon launch vehicles and the Dragon multi-purpose spacecraft. In September 2008, SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket became the first privately funded liquid-fueled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit.
 On May 25, 2012, the SpaceX Dragon vehicle berthed with the ISS, making history as the first commercial company to launch and berth a vehicle to the International Space Station
In late 2017, SpaceX unveiled the design for its next-generation launch vehicle and spacecraft system—BFR—that would support all SpaceX launch service provider capabilities with a single set of very large vehicles: Earth-orbit, Lunar-orbit, interplanetary missions, and even intercontinental passenger transport on Earth, and totally replace the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Dragon vehicles in the 2020s.
Tremendous similarities between the two technologies of these two businessmen.

Tesla

Elon Musk companies
Elon Musk companies.
Elon Musk is the co-founder, CEO and product architect at Tesla Motors, a company dedicated to producing affordable, mass-market electric cars as well as battery products and solar roofs.
Musk oversees all product development, engineering, and design of the company’s products. Just like you-know-who.
Five years after its formation, in 2008, the company unveiled the Roadster, a sports car capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds, as well traveling nearly 250 miles between charges of its lithium-ion battery.
With a stake in the company taken by Daimler and a strategic partnership with Toyota, Tesla Motors launched its initial public offering in June 2010, raising $226 million.
Additional successes include the Model S, the company’s first electric sedan. Capable of covering 265 miles between charges, the Model S was honored as the 2013 Car of the Year by Motor Trend magazine.
Can you think of the two transportation industries that represent these two individuals? This could be the give-away clue.
Below are 12 surprising facts about Musk that paints a picture of the eccentric multi-disciplinary engineer.

 

Reminds you of Elon Musk … a loner early

When Musk was a child, he would often gaze into the distance while his parents were speaking to him, which led them to believe that he might be hard of hearing. Doctors removed his adenoids, but it made no difference.
Both of these individuals were loners.

 

Often bullied

Growing up in South Africa, Musk’s classmates bullied him and beat him up badly. At age 41, he had surgery to fix a deviated septum.

Early creator

It was called Blaster, and Musk, then 12, received $500 when its source code was published in the South African magazine PC and Office Technology. In 2015, a Google software engineer revised the code to function in HTML5 and made it playable.
The objective of the game is to destroy an alien ship filled with weapons of mass destruction. While it’s a rudimentary game, don’t forget that it was created by a preteen nearly 33 years ago.
“[It was] a trivial game … but better than Flappy Bird,” Musk told WaitButWhy.

Paid for college as an entrepreneur

While studying at the University of Pennsylvania, the natural entrepreneur would throw house parties and charge a cover fee of $5 to help him pay his rent.
He and his roommate were the only residents of a 10-bedroom frat house, and they would cover the windows with black trash bags and the walls with bright paint.

Did not finish

In 1995, Musk enrolled in graduate school at Stanford University to study physics. Within two days he decided that the internet had far greater promise to change society and left to found Zip2, a company that provided maps and directories to online newspapers.

Father of five

Musk has five sons with his ex-wife Justine Wilson. Twins Griffin and Xavier were born in 2004, and triplets Damian, Saxon, and Kai were born in 2006.
The couple also had a son named Nevada, born in 2002 and named after the location of Burning Man, the music and arts festival where he was conceived, though he died of sudden infant death syndrome at ten weeks of age.

 

Reminds you of Elon Musk … risk taker

Amid the Great Recession and expensive divorce from his first wife, Wilson, who blogged about her demands on LiveJournal, Musk was living off loans from his wealthy friends.
Musk put his last $35 million into Tesla and maintained his stake in the company, despite his lack of cash. Tesla went public, and today it’s valued at more than $33.4 billion, while Musk himself is worth $12.7 billion, according to Forbes.
It reminds you of Elon Musk … both individuals were big risk takers.

Continuous Learner

Musk is knowledgeable about many disciplines, and many people wonder how he can educate himself so effectively. During a Reddit AMA in 2015, a user asked about his process.
Musk replied, “I do kinda feel like my head is full! My context switching penalty is high, and my process isolation is not what it used to be. Frankly, though, I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying.

Lots of ideas

Civilization has developed planes, trains, automobiles, and boats, but Musk envisions his conceptual Hyperloop high-speed transit tube as a fifth mode.
He says it is theoretically the fastest way to travel the California coast. It would never crash, it would be immune to weather, and it would get passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in under 30 minutes.

Owns many Bel Air mansions

One Bel Air mansion wasn’t enough for the Tesla co-founder. Musk now owns five mansions in the lavish southern-California neighborhood, worth a total of more than $70 million.
Of course, they are eco-friendly — an aerial image of Musk’s main home shows massive solar panels on one side of the property.

AI is the biggest existential threat

Musk is incredibly leery of AI. He fears that AI could become more powerful than people and perhaps cause human extinction if it grows too smart.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Musk explained that it’s technically not a robot that would become too powerful, but a computer algorithm.
“The important thing is that if we do get some runaway algorithm, then the human AI collective can stop the runaway algorithm. But if there’s large, centralized AI that decides, then there’s no stopping it.”
Musk isn’t the only one to fear the power of AI. Other tech leaders and scientists are on the same page as the SpaceX founder, including Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates.

Addicted to caffeine

For a period in his life, Musk reportedly drank eight cans of Diet Coke in addition to several cups of coffee each day.
It was his means of staying awake and focused during 100-hour work weeks during the process of building and launching his companies; he told Inc. in 2007.

The bottom line

The answer, of course, is Howard Hughes. He was a technologist in aviation with many inventions. He was a successful businessman in the airline business. And he was more or less self-made.
Is Elon Musk headed down the same slippery path as Howard Hughes?
What do you think?
Digital Spark Marketing
Digital Spark Marketing’s Firestorm Blog
Need some help in finding ways to grow your customers?  Such as creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers? Or perhaps finding ways to work with other businesses?
 
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.
 
It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
 
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
 
 When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
 
Check out these additional articles on business and its performance from our library:
Retail Design …11 Ways Businesses Are Responding to the Future
7 Surprising Things to Know About the Zillow Business Model
10 Lessons for Successful Entrepreneurs You Need to Know
 
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.

Adaptability Culture: Deadly Mistakes Preventing Adaptation

Your success with building a change and adaptability culture in your business depends not only on coming up with great ideas and making them happen. An adaptability change establishes the culture with employees.
adaptabilty culture
An adaptability culture.
No business attribute is more important today as that of adaptability, as many, many businesses are on the brink of irrelevance … unless they change as fast as change itself. You need to have and try many creative business ideas as often as possible … take to heart what Peter Drucker had to say in the quote shown above. That is why this needs to be a part of the culture of your business.
Before we start here is a short video on how to measure adaptability.
Within five years, if you’re in the same business you are in now, you’re going to be out of business.
-Peter Drucker
It’s also important to recognize that culture comes from the people—it is the people. Think about the individuals within your organization—what are their personalities like? Who are they outside of work? What tickles their fancy? All of these things lend to the culture of your organization, and ultimately your products
We live in a business world accelerating at a dizzying speed and teeming with ruthless competition. As most of the tangible advantages of the past have become commoditized, creativity has become the currency of success.
A 2010 study of 1,500 CEOs indicated that leaders rank creativity as No. 1 leadership attribute needed for prosperity. It’s the one thing that can’t be outsourced; the one thing that’s the lifeblood of sustainable competitive advantage.
Unfortunately, most companies fail to unleash their most valuable resources: human creativity, imagination, and original thinking. They lack a systematic approach to building a culture of innovation and then wonder why they keep getting beaten to the punch.
Creative change and adaptability could become the main strengths of your company and the pillars of its long-term growth and success.
Here are some useful tips on how to help move toward a change and adaptability culture in your business:

Encourage curious, imaginative minds

We are big believers in change and adaptation. They contribute heavily to creative minds. We’re first curious about something, and it’s that curiosity that drives us to create new ideas. Try to think of inventors who created something without first being curious or imaginative. Difficult isn’t it?

Create a spirit of collaboration

Your employees should feel like members of one big family. They are the biggest assets of your business.
Creativity doesn’t often happen in a vacuum. As the author Steve Johnson says, chance favors the connected minds. When people are together, talking, laughing, thinking, exploring — they’re going to throw out ideas. These ideas trigger something in someone else’s mind, and it snowballs. Before long, this group of folks has developed a creative change that wouldn’t have been possible without the collective collaboration.
Don’t fall prey to the myth that only some people are adaptable and you’re not one of the chosen few. We are all adaptable; it’s just a matter of figuring out in what way. So find things you’re curious about and that are interesting to you, use your imagination a little, stay motivated and work at it, and surround yourself with others who are doing the same.

 

adaptability culture examples
Can you foster adaptability?

Foster adaptability culture examples

Creativity drives change and adaptability and can be taught. There are many courses that teach people different creative techniques. Give your employees the opportunity to acquire skills that will help them become more productive and proficient in what they are doing.

Encourage new ideas to flourish

People should be encouraged and inspired to openly and freely share ideas for change. There should be no censorship in the creative process and ideas for change. Welcome everyone to contribute with their ideas for improving, from the couriers and drivers to the top managers.

 

Maximize diversity

mission culture
Can you maximize diversity?
Ziba, a top innovation-consulting firm in Portland, has an “Ambassador Program,” which allows employees to spend three months working in other disciplines, known as “tribes.”  During that time, the ambassador team member participates as part of those teams. This helps to create an understanding of another world. That diversity of thought and perspective, in turn, fuels connection and adaptability.  It also translates to better business results.
Diversity in all its shapes, colors, and flavors helps build a culture of change. The diversity of people and thought; diversity of work experiences, religions, nationalities, hobbies, political beliefs, races, sexual preference, age, musical tastes, and even favorite sports teams. The more diversity, the better.

Adaptability culture: encourage autonomy

We all prefer control over our environments.  According to a 2008 study by Harvard University, there is a direct correlation between people who can call their shots and the value of their change and adaptability. An employee who has to run every tiny detail by her boss for approval will quickly become numb to the environment of change.
Granting autonomy involves extending trust. By definition, your team may make decisions you would have made differently.  The key is to provide a clear message of what results you are looking for or what problem you want the team to solve.  From there, you need to extend trust and let them do their best work.

Start small

ITW is a diversified manufacturing company that produces a wide array of products from industrial packaging to power systems and electronics to food equipment to construction products. It is a highly profitable company nearly 100 years old. This big, old company, which is nestled in a traditional industry, thinks small.
The leaders at ITW believe that being nimble, hungry, and entrepreneurial are the ingredients for business success. As a result, any time a business unit reaches $200 million in revenue, the division “mutates” into two $100 million units. Like an amoeba, the unit subdivides, so it stays hungry and nimble.  The company would rather have ten independently run an innovative $100 million units than a single, bureaucratic, and clunky $1 billion unit. Guess what? It’s a great environment for change and adaptation.
Companies that can stay more curious and nimble have a better ability to change and adapt more easily. They have a stronger sense of urgency and are not afraid to embrace change.  They put their curiosity, imagination, and creativity to work.

Motivate by sharing

Most of the time, you’ve got to want to be adaptable to be adaptable. You’ve got to work at the change to be able to change.
But every once in a while someone will walk into my office, look around at the walls and ask how I came up with some of the ideas. Or we’ll be in a meeting, and something will click for me as I’m scribbling in my little black notebook.
What most people don’t know is that I actually work on it. Yes and I practice. I think people think you’ve either got it or you don’t, but I think everyone adapts in their way.
So I started doing things to challenge myself to change. Sometimes they were business-related. Other times they weren’t. And now I have an arsenal of things that I do on a regular basis to stretch my mind. It’s trying to make creative thinking and practice a consistent habit.
 

Passion starts with leaders

Believe in what you preach. Give yourself 100% to the cause. Be honest if you want to be accepted. Lead by providing the example. Do not just lead – inspire!
With a team full of passion, you can accomplish just about anything. Without it, your employees become mere clock-punching automatons.

 

Celebrate even small successes

Social norms in any culture are established by what is celebrated and what is punished. Consider more narrowly how they function within an institution. Nearly every business’s mission statement includes words about “innovation,” yet risk-taking and change are often punished instead of rewarded.  Rewards come in many forms, and often the monetary ones are the least important.
Celebrating change and adaptation is not only about handing out bonus checks for great ideas—although that is a good start.  It should also be celebrated with praise (both public and private), career opportunities, and perks.  In short, if you want your team to be creative, you need to establish an environment that celebrating their successes.

Foster risk-taking

Zappos as a company is known as much for its culture as for its innovative business model. The company has built a business that is growing rapidly by allowing individuals the freedom to take creative risks without that overwhelming sense of fear or judgment. They tell their employees to say what you think, even if it is controversial. Make tough decisions without agonizing excessively. Take smart risks.  Question actions inconsistent with our values.
Another interesting example: A software company in Boston gives each team member two “corporate get-out-of-jail-free” cards each year. The cards allow the holder to take risks and suffer no repercussions for mistakes associated with them. At annual reviews, leaders question their team members if the cards are not used. It is a great way to encourage risk-taking and experimentation.  Think this company comes up with amazing ideas? Absolutely.

Adaptability culture: foster a changing climate

Always look for alternatives, improvements, and non-standard ways of solving problems. Many of the ideas that your team will come up with will be unfit, some of them will be excellent, and a few will be brilliant. Sometimes one brilliant idea is all it takes to make a huge business success.

Readily accept mistakes and failure

There is no success without failure. Ask any successful person, and they will confirm that they have failed in life but that their failures made them stronger and even more determined to go on. It is perfectly OK to fail as long as we learn from our own mistakes. Your employees should not fear failure because it will kill their desire to create new and unusual ideas.
In many companies, people are so afraid of making mistakes that they don’t pursue their dreams. The simply follow the rules and keep their heads down, which drives nothing but mediocrity.
James Dyson, the inventor of the Dyson Vacuum cleaner, “failed” at more than 5,100 prototypes before getting it just right. In fact, nearly every breakthrough innovation in history came after countless setbacks, mistakes, and “failures.” The great innovators and achievers weren’t necessarily smarter or inherently more talented. They simply released their fear of failure and kept trying. They didn’t let setbacks or misfires extinguish their curiosity, imagination, and ability to change.
Failing means taking risks and increasing the rate of experimentation… and exploring. Some bets will pay off; some will fail. The key is to fail quickly. The speed of business has increased dramatically and every minute counts. The best businesses try lots of ideas and let the losers go quickly and with no remorse.

The  bottom line

As you can see, some of these ideas do not take much time and money to implement. Start from small and transform your company step by step. Creating a change and adaptation culture is a process that takes time, but as the first creative ideas become a reality, and the first results show up, both you and your employees will appreciate the positive effects.
customer relationships
Build customer relationships.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.
 
It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with adaptability, change, innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
 
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff ’s teamwork, collaboration, and learning? Creative ideas in running or facilitating teamwork or continuous learning workshop?
 
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
 
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
  
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
The Nine Most Valuable Secrets of Writing Effective Copy
How Good Is your Learning from Failure?
10 Extraordinary Ways of Learning to Learn
Continuous Learning Holds the Keys to Your Future Success
 
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on Spotting Intelligent People

People watching is a favorite hobby of mine. One of my many objectives is spotting  intelligent people.
spotting intelligent people
Spotting intelligent people.
This has been a ‘hobby’ of mine for several decades now. Let me share the many common signs of intelligence I have observed.
Here is a short video describing the common characteristics of intelligent people.

 

Talk only to share information

To them, small talk is simply that. Small. Meaningless even. It’s a waste of time. They proactively listen to others and digest what was said before explaining their counter-argument. They bounce ideas and hypotheses off of others rather than discuss random pop psychology or the latest news on a celebrity couple. In short, they shamelessly focus on what’s important.
More to spot: Creative Marketing Ideas: How Does JetBlue Become so Creative?

 

Brutally honest with what they don’t know

I think a common trap that many people fall under is trying to pretend we understand something that we don’t know while nodding our heads meaninglessly. We do this because we don’t want to appear uninformed and unknowing. (I’m still working to improve on this myself) I think intelligent people get straight to the point.
They say: “I don’t understand this, can you explain it to me like I’m 5?”
They could care less about what others perceive their understanding or intelligence to be. What they do care about is catching up and learning so that they can understand in the first place.
They know that without a solid understanding of the basics, there’s no hope for them to grasp the more complex material.
Good source: Online Resources … 19 to Learn the Best Practical Skills
 
intelligent person characteristics
Here are intelligent person characteristics.

Spotting intelligent people … they consider different perspectives

 Truly intelligent people can inhabit a different perspective, especially a perspective they disagree with. Abraham Lincoln would sometimes argue with a friend from one perspective, and then they would switch and argue from the opposite perspective.

Nothing to prove

 They never feel the need to prove to other people how smart they are. They don’t brag about it. Casual acquaintances probably don’t even know. I think this is because they are so secure about their intelligence that it’s a non-issue to them.
My father went to Harvard and had a stunning memory. He never used his IQ as a way to make other people feel inferior. People who want to let everyone know how smart they are—yeah, I doubt they are.

 

Spotting intelligent people … they have patience

 Leonardo Da Vinci called it “sfumato” or “smoke.” The idea is that not everything is clear, and the desire to have an answer now can lead someone into error. Intelligent people have patience with difficult, dense, or even ambiguous or vague subjects. Patience is defined as “the ability to endure, ” and in this case, a sign of intelligence is enduring not having a clear, definite answer.

 

Know how to explain their craft

 This especially applies to people who are professionals or experts in their field. This is because they’ve been through it all. They know what it’s like to come across the topic for the first time.
To progressively learn more about it as a student. To having dedicated hours studying and researching and becoming an expert. They know what the stages of learning are, and can explain their craft to anyone in those respective stages. Albert Einstein is well-known for saying the following quote:
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
 

Spotting intelligent people … they are good listeners

 They read and go to talks. A sure sign of intelligence is reading and listening. The average CEO reads 50 books a year. Warren Buffett spends most of his time reading. He’s fond of saying “the more you learn, the more you earn.”
 

Continuous learners

 They read a lot and are constantly still learning. My father always took us to historical places or natural wonders during our summer vacations. Battlefields. Museums. Grand Canyon. Stuff like that. Our pleas to go to Disneyland went unheard.
My father wanted to learn things on his days off—and his days on too. He not only read both fiction and nonfiction, but he also watched many documentaries.

 

Seeking new perspectives

 Intelligent people aren’t afraid or ashamed to tell you when they don’t know something. I’ve had more than one doctor try and fake his way through a conversation when I knew more about a medical condition than he did. When I found a doctor, who said, “I don’t know. I’ll research that.”—I kept that doctor.
More: Important Life Lessons … I Learned These Too Late in Life

 

Are consistently curious

signs of an intelligent person
Signs of an intelligent person.
 They ask questions. I guess they realize that the way you learn things is often to ask.
Spotting an intelligent person might not be that hard. They seem to have common traits among them. We can use these traits to identify them.
  1. Intelligent people think before they speak: When you ask an intelligent person a question, instead of shooting the answer quickly, they take their time and answer the question.
  2. They are not afraid of being wrong: Truly smart people are not afraid of being wrong. When they seem to find a hard question, they tend to accept the defeat instead of fighting with their ego.
  3. When they get into a conversation, they are informational: Smart people only take part in the conversation when they have something important to say or something that is meaningful.
  4. They tend to stay up till late at night: Recent studies claim that eveningness is an evolutionary advancement that marks out ‘more intelligent individuals, while those with lower IQs tend to restrict their activities primarily to daytime.
  5. They are quite empathetic: Empathy is a core element of emotional intelligence. They tend to understand people’s feelings better.

Intelligent people talk less

While speaking, they try to explain as much as they can in as few words as possible. They know exactly what point they are trying to make and do not wander a lot from it. Their statements are short and precise.

Intelligent people don’t answer first

 This might sound a little weird but, more often than not, whenever a question is thrown, intelligent people wait for others to try and answer. If no one else has a solution, only then they get up to provide the solution.

Intelligent people use their ears

Intelligent people are very good listeners. They will listen keenly to anything and everything you tell them.

Intelligent people understand things faster

When you are with a bunch of people, start telling a joke. Intelligent people tend to understand the joke earlier than others, and they will often start smiling or laughing even before the joke is completed.

Intelligent people never boast of their intelligence

 You will never find them being rude to you if you contradict their words. They will never claim that they are always right because they are intelligent. Instead, they will listen carefully to your explanation. They are never afraid to accept that they made a mistake.

Others look up to intelligent people while speaking

 Subconsciously, everybody looks at the smartest person while speaking to make sure whether they are right or wrong. This doesn’t happen in the first meeting itself. But, if you meet the same group a lot of times, people develop this habit.

The bottom line

All these are easy traits to observe and hence you may feel that it is easy to identify intelligent people. But again, they are smart people. They don’t reveal themselves easily. You have to be observant if you have to spot an intelligent person.
WINNING ADVERTISEmeNT DESIGN
Want to build a winning advertisement design?
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s leadership, teamwork, and collaboration? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a team or leadership workshop?
 
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy innovating your social media strategyg?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
  
More leadership material from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Build an Effective Team by Being a Talent Hound
Success Enablers of Highly Creative Leaders
Secrets to Becoming a Remarkably Mindful Leader
Leadership Characteristics That Improve Influence
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
 

Critical Success Factors: 5 Most Strategic Ways To Accelerate Them

What would be your answer if you were asked to name the five greatest critical success factors for your business?  Would it be the most creative marketing … the best knowledge of your market … your customer experience?
critical success factors
Critical success factors.
The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all but goes on making his own business better all the time.
Henry Ford
Of course, those answers are important. But our top 5 factors deal with your team, your customer, and your adaptability.
Studies show that over 90% of startups fail. Even for those rare few that make it big, life doesn’t get much easier. In fact, only slightly more than 10% of the firms on the original Fortune 500 list are still in business today. Making an enterprise successful and keeping it that way is a staggeringly hard thing to do.
So it’s not hard to see why there has been so much effort devoted to narrowing down a company’s performance to a single factor.  Some say that focusing on the customer is key. Others believe that building a great culture is the real path to success. Still, others preach the gospel of developing capable leaders.
Doing what you love: Help in Doing What You Love: 20 Enablers for Success at Last
Here are the top five most important critical success factors to a winning business that we use most often with our clients:

Critical success factors marketing … customer understanding

The one who best understands the customer, his needs and priorities. Customer and market insights are critical to your success, and their understanding should be a continuous process. It starts with knowing who your target customers are.
I love brands that pay attention to detail as much as I do because it takes a relatively small seed and sparks it to life. I could buy shoes from a local store or anywhere online, but I want to shop Zappos and become part of their story because they show they care and focus on me.
It’s evocative and personal. It creates a desire within me that most brands don’t.
They often show me things by combining behind-the-scene insight with real-world examples. This stimulates me to share.
We all need shoes, and there are many options out there, but Zappos is the kind of brand that develops a cult status through its style and culture. This isn’t achieved overnight and without care, though it takes a lot of work.
customer relationship building
Customer relationship building counts most.

Customer relationship building

The one who can best build relationships with both new and existing customers. The better the customer relationships, the better the confidence your client has in you and the greater the trust. Both are essential to building customer advocates.
The Disney brand is a huge favorite because I love their products so much. Magical, fantasy entertainment. Being bringers of joy, affirmers of the good in each of us, to be — in subtle ways — teachers. To speak, as Walt once put it:
 
 Not to children but the child in each of us.
 Success drivers: Life Success Lessons: 10 You Need to Learn Early in Your Career
Disney’s brand does this through focusing on customer relationships and by giving guests a few hours in another world where their cares can be momentarily put aside and by creating memories that will remain with them forever. I love living in their world of imagination.
 

Critical success factors … motivated team

The one with the best motivated and talented team is usually the one that comes out on top. People are the business.
 Your team is your business quite literally, and no matter how good you are, your business is no better than the people who represent it. Hire for personality and motivation and grow the talent.
Starbucks is a favorite of mine for their aggressive innovation style and the way their team engages customers. Starbucks brings us a space to enjoy the products they sell, rather than a just a product.
Related: Starbucks Marketing Strategy … Making Social Media a Difference Maker
Some would say that it fills a psychological need that other companies have not had to do in quite the same way. The emotion is all about uplifting moments and daily ritual. Stimulating all our senses.
Key factors that lead to successful business
Key factors that lead to successful business.

List of critical success factors … honed skills

Look for the ones who keep the knowledge and skills of his team highly refreshed and honed.
First and foremost, the best have great coaches and mentors for their people with continuous hands-on training. Ensure everyone has an assigned and trained backup.
Zappos brand is the top of my list for their awesome culture and skills from the top to bottom of their company. They don’t sell shoes. They deliver that extra dose of love we all need from time to time. There is no secret here. Zappos became Zappos because of the fanatical skills in customer support it offered. That is the company’s brand.
Related: What the Zappos Company Culture Teaches About Branding Your Business
As Tony Hsieh, the Zappos CEO puts it,
Back in 2003, we thought of ourselves as a shoe company that offered great service. Today, we think of the Zappos brand as about great service, and we just happen to sell shoes.

 Business adaptability

Look and be the ones who carefully observe the changes in the environment and best adapts to those changes and trends.
 
Watch your competitors, both locally and on a national scale, and learn from them. Experiment with new ideas fearlessly.
I prefer brands that are most innovative and very eager to try lots new and different ideas. And not afraid of a failure or two. KLM Airlines certainly deserves to be this camp. Real social media marketing innovators. They frequently come up when marketers are discussing the best in social media marketing.
They have been successfully executing their social media marketing plan for over four years, and their strategies have played a key role in their marketing and customer engagement.
Related: How KLM Airline Marketing Uses Social Media for Winning Campaigns
If you’re not familiar with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, known by its initials KLM, it is the flag carrier airline of the Netherlands. With headquarters is in Amsterdam, KLM operates scheduled passenger and cargo services to more than 90 destinations worldwide. It is the oldest airline in the world, still operating under its original name (Founded in 1919).
Their brand identity is built around a culture of innovativeness. Over the past four years, KLM has launched some social campaigns – some big, some small. They had a few failures along with great successes, but they keep exploring and testing what consumers like the best.
latest book
 
Do you have the winning equation for the success of your business?
 
Do you have an element of the equation you’d like to add? Which one of these five would you substitute?
What are some of your experiences with the success factors of your business?
Please share an experience with this community.
 
Need some help in finding ways to grow your customers?  Such as creative ideas to promote the differentiation with potential clients? Or perhaps finding ways to work with other businesses?
 
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.
 
It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
 
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
 
 
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
 
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
 
Check out these additional articles on business and its performance from our library:
The Business Intelligence Process Part 3 Competitive Analysis
Competitive Growth Strategy … the Story of In-N-Out Burger
10 Entrepreneur Lessons You Need to Know
Collaboration and Partnerships Are Key to Business Growth
 
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.

 

 

 

What Grisham Teaches about Stories He Uses in his Books

Do you like to read great stories in the form of novels? I do.
grisham teaches about stories
John Grisham teaches us.
I have about 6-8 favorite authors that I read every book they write. John Grisham is one of those favorite authors of mine. Know what John Grisham teaches about stories?
More to learn: Use 8 Breathtaking Commercials That Employ Emotional Appeal
Everything you are exposed to makes a connection. It is how you put them together that makes things interesting.
Do you use stories to convey your marketing messages?  Are you interested in building a strong story for your marketing messages? If so, you will want to check out these tips we have derived from many of John Grisham’s books.

“What’s that word again that you used for stealing content,” my newspaper editor friend asked me?  “Curation,” I said, “and it’s not stealing content.”

It seems to me that at the heart of the controversy is a fundamental shift in the value of information.  It used to be scarce, but now we’re drowning in it.  That’s creating a fundamental shift in the economics of media.  Therefore, the answer lies not only in product innovation, but business model innovation, which is even harder.

 This is a 2 part series. Here is Part 1: The Truth about Stories … Part 1 Tips for Better Story
Stories are a very integral part of being persuasive. If you want to persuade your customers and create a memorable experience at the same time, you must master building dynamite stories.
Related:  Remarkable Stories Connect Emotionally.
The reason that stories are so appealing is that you can transport customers inside the story and give your message more meaning.
Do you agree that building compelling stories is the top business skill of the next five years, or will it take a bit more convincing to persuade you? Are you doing all you can now to hone your ability to build excellent story skills and acquire new ones?
Here are 12 ways to create a better story we have learned from John Grisham:

Grisham teaches about stories … parts to a story

Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel. If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction.
Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development. John Grisham does a great job of building his topics and characters in both of the beginning and middle sections of his novels.
Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.

Attention Grabbing: How to Own Your Live Audiences

Grisham teaches about stories … build on your experience

To tell great stories, examine your life for times, places, and perspectives nobody else had. Where do you find material for storytelling?  Draw from your experiences and look inside yourself. Rely on what you know and draw from it.
Capture a thought, a truth from your experience, and specific values from deep down in your core.
Grisham is from Mississippi and went to law school at the University of Virginia. He uses his knowledge of these areas in many of his books. When you read about his experiences, it is as if you were there.
Good stories are largely an act of curation. The greats detect stories as they move through life and then pull them together in ways that make us stop and think. In a manner that inspires.
John Grisham books
John Grisham books.

Create a strong theme

A strong theme is always running through a well-told story, The theme is often not stated directly in the story, but it is the essence or the core idea at the root of the story.
A clear sense of your theme or controlling idea keeps you from trying to throw too many ideas into one story.

Grisham teaches about stories … create a challenge and conflict

Good stories are about problem or conflict. Without these elements, stories aren’t very interesting. In its most basic form, a story is about someone who wants something, and either gets it or does not.
That character’s desire brings out the conflict that moves a story forward. The appearance of the conflict is the beginning; the resolution is its ending.
The compelling part of a story is how people deal with conflict–-so start with the people and the conflict. In Grisham’s books, it is hard to separate the challenges from the characters. That is what you want to create in your stories.

 

Start working on your ending as soon as possible

Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
In Grisham’s earliest novels he struggled with his endings. Later you can tell the story revolved around the end. To accomplish this, he had to work out his ending early in the process.

Grisham teaches about stories … construct anticipation

Raise questions. Provide the “bait.” The anecdote should raise an issue right from the beginning. Implied in any matter that you raise, however, is that you are going to answer it. Consistently raise questions and answer them.
The shape of the story is that you are throwing out issues and explaining them along the way.
what John Grisham teaches
John Grisham writing routine.

Give characters personality and opinions

Give your characters a unique personality and views on various topics. What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them.
Challenge them. How do they deal? I have rarely read a Grisham book that I could not picture the characters, their personalities, and appreciate their opinions. This adds significantly to the stories.
Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.

Grisham teaches about stories … tap into your audience’s emotions

Whenever I am fortunate enough to read one of Grisham books, I am struck by their power to pull listeners in, much like a gravitational force that’s impossible to resist.
The best way to draw your audience in is to make them care … emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically.  But how do you make the audience care? This is the most fundamental question of all. There is no single answer.
One important answer is having empathy for your audience and trying to craft your story and design your content always with the public in mind.
Stories in all their many forms are never just about transferring information alone. We are emotional beings, like it or not, and to make the audience care enough to listen to you, you have to evoke in them some emotion.

Grisham teaches about stories … build mystery and surprise

A well-told story is one where you can stop at any point and have the reader wonder “….and then what happened?” Each time a piece of the mystery is solved, another one appears, and that’s what keeps us listening until we reach the ending.
If you find yourself struggling at times, step back and find some mystery.

Use language to show and not tell

Show and don’t depend just on telling. Intensify the story with vivid language and intonation. Tap into people’s emotions with language.
Use metaphors, idioms, and parables that have emotional associations.
“Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.” – Ernest Hemingway

Show creativity

Be creative. Create a storyboard; draw it out. A good story always has ups and downs, so “arc” the story. Pull people along, and introduce tension, just like in a fairy tale.
There is rarely anything in a Grisham novel that is standard fare; it is always creatively unique.

 

Grisham teaches about stories … employ curiosity at end

Great stories pull readers past the obvious (but wrong) to show them the profound. You don’t have to beat people over the head with your message, nor do you need always to make your message painfully obvious.
This is not about being vague or unclear, but it is about letting the audience work on their own a little to figure things out … creating some curiosity.
That’s one of your jobs as one who creates a story. We’re born problem solvers. We’re compelled to deduce and to deduct because that’s what we do in real life.
It’s this well-organized absence of information that draws us in.

The bottom line

Remember … stories are an excellent means of sharing and interpreting experiences, and great experiences have this innate ability to change the way in which we view our world.
Stories, when properly practiced, pull people into a dialogue. It’s about engagement and interaction. The audience is just as active a participant as the storyteller.
In contrast, many companies and brands still relentlessly push messages to their employees and into the marketplace without meaningful context or relevancy.
Next time you are building a marketing campaign, use a great story made from these tips.
Stories can be incorporated effectively in this way by utilizing them in your content marketing efforts, especially if you use case studies and interviews to tell your tales and present your messages for you.
Are you incorporating stories into your copy? Are you utilizing them in your marketing?
 So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you.
 Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
 
It’s up to you to keep improving your ability to learning to learn. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning from all around in your environment.
 
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Ogilvy on Advertising … Best Lessons Learned from his Secrets
Volkswagen Ad … The Secrets to Its Effectiveness?
Effective Advertising … 14 Best Examples of Ad Design
Successful Advertisement Design … 12 Best Examples of Study
Insurance Advertising War … 8 Examples to Learn From
  
Mike Schoultz likes to write about the topics that lead to small business success. He also likes to share his many business experiences. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Trend Marketing … Minimalist Guide to Explode Trend Spotting Results

How do some people seem to know about the next big thing way ahead of everyone else? Because they know how to recognize early signs of change. That leads them to key trend spotting techniques and trend marketing.

trend marketing
What is trend marketing?

What is a trend?

A trend is a general tendency or direction in which something’s going to move, develop or change.
It’s defined by a shift in mentality or behavior that then influences a large group of people.
Pay attention though. This is not to be confused with ‘fashions’ or ‘fads’ which increase dramatically followed by an almost immediate decline.
Trends last much longer and have a much greater impact on society.
A new behavior. A new attitude or opinion. A new expectation. Any of these can form the basis of a trend.
Underneath our definition lies a model that juxtaposes multiple dimensions. Dimensions include external change against human nature.
Basic needs such us status, creativity, self-improvement don’t change. The way we address these needs is through new products and services. These  changes form the basis of a new trend. Can you give an example of a fundamental trend that doesn’t change?
But it’s not enough to simply understand a trend. You want to know where and how trends will emerge. More importantly,opportunities they will present to you.

 

Why trend spotting?

It’s important to be on the lookout for the newest trends. They will allow you to plan more effectively for the future and introduce more successful initiatives to your business.
By focusing on what will happen next, you can make more informed decisions in less time. This will save a lot of energy and money in the long run.

 

Trend marketing … fundamental trend elements

There are three fundamental elements that drive all trends:
  • Basic Needs
  • Drivers of Change
  • Innovations
The secret ingredient of trends, however, isn’t any of one of these elements. Rather, it’s the tension created as the three elements interact with one another.
This tension can best be identified by understanding customer expectations. And understanding for gaps between what customers want – both now and in the future – and what they are currently being offered.
Understanding this enables you to hit the sweet spot of trend-driven innovation with your new offering. It also allows you to beat customers’ expectations and resolve this tension.
For example, think about how Airbnb changed our expectation from travel towards a more authentic experience.  Also consider how Uber changed the way we expect to move through the city.  Or how Tesla changed the way consumers thought an electric car could also be sexy to drive?

Listen and observe

Today, there’s too much broadcasting and not enough receiving. Everyone is focused on pumping out information.
But turning off our signal and receiving and digesting, that’s a skill that has disappeared.
How do I do it? I like to immerse myself in a topic by reading about it.
I schedule an hour in the morning, and again before bed to this to reading.
I schedule it. I also carefully observe things going on around me. It is amazing how much you can learn. Pay close attention and take notes.

Distinguish between short-lived and long-term

Strive to identify big changes. Changes that create lasting problems that lots of customers will be happy to pay to solve.
The idea is to wind up with a business model in which revenues are much larger than costs for a long period. Not a model that limps by on slender profit margins before competitors take even that away.
To filter out fads, talk to the potential buyers of the solution to the problem.
The more frustrated they are, the more likely they are to pay for a solution. In extreme cases, potential customers may be willing to fund the development of solutions.
Also, talk to experts. While they may not be able to write checks, they can provide insights and point to possible solutions.
Solutions that customers could not even imagine.

Trend marketing careers … follow trustworthy thought leaders

When selecting your sources for news and information, find reputable resources you can trust. These are people who are experts in their field. And brands whose information you find to be reliable and valuable.
I follow some marketing bloggers who have been in the business for years.
Most of them I’ve found through other people I follow or trust. When their blogs are too gimmicky or inauthentic, I stop reading.
Be selective and filter out the noise.

 

 

Look beyond your boundaries

You have to look around and ask: ‘What are the general trends going on, even though they haven’t affected me or my business yet?’
For example, many noted that people weren’t yet ready to buy music by the download. Few also noted that the way they found new music was shifting.
They could see how companies could become major players launching new music, such as Apple through its commercials, or Starbucks with its stores.
What was the trend? It was where people weren’t necessarily interested in discovering music by walking into a record shop or watching MTV anymore.

connect the dots
Connect the dots.

Trend marketing brands … connect the dots

Once you’ve collated information and the latest news from your chosen area, you can start to group articles together. Then assess them and find connections between the elements.
Tools for collating and bookmarking your findings:
  • Evernote – A great tool that lets you assign photos, docs, scans, notes, for future reference.
  • Pinterest – A great content sharing service that allows members to “pin” images, videos and other objects to their pinboard for future reference.
  • Delicious – An online social bookmarks manager that lets you save, organize and discover interesting links on the web.
  • Freemind – great free tool for creating mind maps
  • Old fashioned pen & paper, sticky notes & white boards!

  

Key trend spotting techniques … test assumptions

Once you have connected the dots between your findings and found re-occurring themes and connections, you can then assess the potential trends. See how they are doing in the current landscape, and make potential predictions for the trends in the future using the following:
Google Keywords: By using Google keywords you can see the average number of searches that your potential trend is typed into Google each month. Compare them to other trends and keywords.
Google Trends: Google Trends is really good for seeing the fluctuation of trends. It also permits how well they’ve done in the past and how well they’re doing now. They also permit predictions of how well they’ll do in the future.
Then ask yourself the following:
  • What are the needs that the trend satisfies (is it a trend or fad)?
  • How many people won’t be able to or be interested in taking advantage of the trend?
  • What will affect the speed of the trend?
  • Where is the trend now – who’s currently using it on the innovation curve?
Once you have a solid idea that’s a  trend and that it will survive, find out the following:
  • What demographics are you targeting (get to know them and ask them questions)
  • What is the investment required and how profitable is the idea?
  • What’s the longevity of the concept?
The basic tools of the trend tracker are seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.
In other words, every sense that can be used to get information about the world should be employed in looking for upcoming changes.
Start by reading and watching everything you can. That should include general interest news outlets, trade publications, blogs, government reports and casual conversations.
Be especially alert for problems people are talking about.

Create a competitive advantage

To get the biggest benefit, be the first mover. It is rare for any single entrepreneur to be the only one who sees an opportunity. Most will hesitate and not move at all.
Many others will not move swiftly enough. Lasting competitive advantage usually goes to the first entrant to stake a market out and capture customer loyalty.
Those who come later usually have to settle for slimmer profits and more competition.
Being first is not enough, of course. Business history is littered with well-financed startups directed by well-regarded leaders. Leaders who committed too much, too early and in the wrong place.
So test before committing. Again, look for revenues that overwhelm costs and customers who are overjoyed.
For every trend that supports a future startup star, any number go ignored. Many leave potential customers searching for solutions and opportunities for established companies to fill their needs.
But it only takes timely identification of one trend to get a startup in flight, and these techniques can point you to the one you need.
There is no silver bullet when it comes to spotting trends. Trends reveal themselves over time from a variety of places.
Spotting a growing pattern means you must have your eye on multiple sources long enough to notice changes.
This takes some intentionality, but it doesn’t have to tie up all of your time.

Take care on choosing sources

key trend spotting techniques
Key trend spotting techniques.
Just as it took multiple sources—bloggers, Facebook, word of mouth—to realize that the time is ripe. It will yield a visit to Colombia. Spotting a trend in other industries is much the same.
As you put together a list of blogs, news sites, social media channels, and other sources, here are some tips to help you hone in and filter extraneous content:

Look outside your industry

In addition to watching what’s going on in your niche, it often pays to expand your horizons.
Our world is so interconnected; true trends pop up everywhere.
Keeping an eye on developments in other fields can sometimes be key in predicting changes closer to home.

 

 

The bottom line

Many successful businesses were started by entrepreneurs with an ability to see a trend before everyone else. They were able to take their insight and capitalize on it in a new and creative way.
Businesses from Uber and Lyft to Airbnb and HomeAway are just some of the most recent examples of entrepreneurs benefiting from emerging trends.
But just because it’s been done before doesn’t mean it is easy to see trends first and find ways to capitalize on them.
Smart entrepreneurs are always looking for an edge.
They want to know how they can identify trends and how they can use that skill to build and grow a business. Fortunately, there are steps you can take develop this skill yourself.
 
Customer engagement
Customer engagement improvements are worth the effort.
Need some help in building better customer insights from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer base?
 
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job of growing customer insights and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new insights that you have learned.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
 
Check out these additional articles on customer insights from our library:
Lessons from the Yale Customer Insights Conference
Small Business Customer Insights 101
Remarkable Marketing Using These 17 Customer Insight Techniques
A How-to Guide for Small Business Social Media Marketing
 
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.

 

Resistance to Change: Recognize these 10 Frequent Causes?

And are you happy with where you are heading? How about dealing with resistance to change?

resistance to change
        Pay attention to resistance to change.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

Lao Tzu

 

With the rate of technological growth and changes introduced by the information age, change is now the normal state of business isn’t it? Change does not come easy, however.

 

Related: An Actionable Approach to Target Market Segmentation

 

Much resistance to change is often blamed on individual traits. Many times, this is true. More often, however, we over-estimate how much change we as individuals can accept. We also often do not appreciate how difficult it is to lead and implement change effectively.

 

People, just like everything else, are constantly subject to change. When we stop changing, our growing and learning comes to a grinding halt. Therefore we need to maintain a clear vision of change options available to us, and understand which ones offer the best growth opportunities. And then go with them.

 

Whenever you consider resistance to change options, try to understand the motivators of the resistance. Use what you learn to guide your choices in how to respond to the resistance you face. Expecting that there will be resistance to change and being prepared to manage it, is a proactive step you’ll definitely want to undertake.

 

At the end of the day all sources of resistance to change need to be acknowledged and your emotions validated.

 

It’s far better to anticipate objections than to spend your time putting out fires. It is important in knowing how to overcome resistance to change is a vital part of any development and growth.

 

It helps to keep in mind these typical reasons for resistance to change:

 

Resistance to change examples … lack of abilities

This is a fear few of us will readily admit. But sometimes, changes going on around us necessitate changes in skills, and some of us will feel that they won’t be able to make the transition very well. Recognizing this fear is critical to solving it.

 

Types of resistance to change
Types of resistance to change.

Don’t appreciate need for change

If you or your staff does not understand the need for change you can expect resistance. Especially from those who strongly believe the current way of doing things works well…and has done so for a long time.

 

 

Reasons for resistance to change … uncertainty and fear

One of the most common reasons for resistance is fear of the unknown. People will only take active steps toward the unknown if they genuinely believe – and perhaps more importantly, feel – that the risks of standing still are greater than those of moving forward in a new direction

 

The less you know about the change and its impact, the more fearful it can become. Leading change also requires not springing surprises on the organization. The organization needs to be prepared for the change. In the absence of continuing two-way communication with leadership, grapevine rumors fill the void and sabotage the change effort.

 

 Holding onto past

If you ask people in an organization to do things in a new way, as rational as that new way may seem to you, you will be setting yourself up. Up against all that hard wiring, all those emotional connections to those who taught you and the audience the old way.

 

poor listening
Poor listening habits?

Poor listening and communication 

Changes within an organization start with key decision makers. It is up to them to pass along the details to team members and ensure all questions and complaints are handled before changes go into effect. Unfortunately, as news of a change spreads through the hierarchy, details are sometimes skewed and members end up receiving inaccurate, second-hand information. Poor communication can therefore cause resistance to change.

 

It’s self-evident isn’t it? When it comes to change management there’s no such thing as too much communication

 

Resistance to change … minimal trust

When people don’t believe that they, or the company, can competently manage the change there is likely to be resistance. Meaningful change does not occur in a climate of mistrust. Trust, involves faith in the intentions and behavior of others. Mutual mistrust will doom an otherwise well-conceived change initiative to failure.

 

 No understanding

If people are allowed to be part of the change there is less resistance. People like to know what’s going on, especially if their jobs may be affected. Informed employees tend to have higher levels of job satisfaction than uninformed employees

 

Impacts of change

Resistance can also stem from perceptions of the change that people hold. For example, people who feel they’ll be worse off at the end of the change are unlikely to give it their full support. Similarly, if people believe the change favors another group/department/person there may be (unspoken) anger and resentment.

 

Moving out of comfort zone

When we talk about comfort zones we’re really referring to routines. We love them. They make us secure. So there’s bound to be resistance whenever change requires us to do things differently.

 

Too much change

Don’t mistake compliance for acceptance. People who are overwhelmed by continuous change resign themselves to it and go along with the flow. You have them in body, but you do not have their hearts. Motivation is low in such situations. So pay attention to the amount and timing of the changes that are introduced.

 

 

WINNING ADVERTISEmeNT DESIGN
Want to build a winning advertisement design?

 

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
 
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
9 Things to Know About Creative Visual Design Content
8 Presenter Mistakes That Are Rarely Made Twice
Know These Great Secrets of Collaboration and Co-Creation
How Good Is Your Learning from Failure?
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.

 

 

Trend Spotting Tools I Employ to Skyrocket Performance Results

How do some people seem to know about the next big thing way ahead of everyone else? Because they know how to recognize early signs of change. They also know which trend spotting tools to use.
trend spotting tools
Trend spotting tools.

What is a trend, and why should you be spotting them?

A trend is a general tendency or direction in which something’s going to move, develop, or change. It’s defined by a shift in mentality or behavior that then influences a significant number of people.
It’s important to be on the lookout for the newest trends on https://zenserp.com/trends-data-api/ so you can plan more effectively for the future and introduce more successful initiatives to your business. By focusing on what will happen next, you can make more informed decisions in less time, saving a lot of energy and money in the long run.

Anticipate change

I frequently remind coaching clients that the only constant is change. Believe it. Assume that change is coming and look for it. Change can be either social — as in the rise of socially responsible business — or technological, as exemplified by the growth of mobile commerce.
Sometimes change can be both. Social media is a great example of that.
Don’t forget the cyclical, up-and-down, back-and-forth nature of business while you are looking. Change doesn’t have to be permanent to provide a viable opportunity for business creation and growth.
For example, when the real estate crisis hit in 2008, construction activity shrank, and many people were forced to make do with what they had. But trend-spotting entrepreneurs were able to adjust their plans depending on the market.
In another example, savvy interior designers marketed their services to those who wanted something new but couldn’t find or afford a new home.

See it coming

The basic tools of the trend tracker are seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. In other words, every sense that can be used to get information about the world should be employed in looking for upcoming changes. Start by reading and watching everything you can.
That should include general interest news outlets, trade publications, blogs, government reports and casual conversations overheard in elevators. Be especially alert for problems people are talking about.

Trend spotting tools… your sources

Just as it took multiple sources—bloggers, Facebook, word of mouth—to realize that the time is ripe to visit Colombia, spotting a trend in other industries is much the same.
As you put together a list of blogs, news sites, social media channels, and other sources, here are some tips to help you hone in and filter extraneous content:

Follow trustworthy thought leaders

When selecting your sources for news and information, find reputable resources you can trust. These are people who are experts in their field, brands whose information you find to be reliable and valuable.
I follow some marketing bloggers who have been in the business for years. Most of them I’ve found through other people I follow or trust. When their blogs are too gimmicky or inauthentic, I stop reading. Be selective and filter out the noise.

Look outside your industry

In addition to watching what’s going on in your niche, it often pays to expand your horizons. Our world is so interconnected; true trends pop up everywhere. Keeping an eye on developments in other fields can sometimes be key in predicting changes closer to home.
Once you’ve started a list of potential sources and brands you want to follow, it’s time to optimize your trend-spotting with a few tools. Consider using trend-tracking tools to help you zero-in on trends that are worth investigating further.
You won’t be the only entrepreneur looking for business ideas on these platforms, but you can use them to dig deeper to validate hunches.
what is trend spotting
What is trend spotting?

Trend spotting tools … Google News and Alerts

This first point is two tools. Google News allows you to create a stream of news stories for a specific keyword, person, or brand while Google Alerts will notify you every time that keyword is mentioned on the web.
 

Google News

To harness the Google News tool, follow these simple steps:
  • Go tohttp://news.google.com
  • Click the black down arrow on the right side of the search bar to pull up Advanced Search options
  • Enter a search term you want to track
  • If relevant, include where in the article you want to search for the term, a date range, and any specific periodical sources or locations.
  • Your search will pull up recent news stories related to the search term
  • For further filtering options, click the “Search tools” button to adjust your news source (Blogs or All News), time frame, and whether relevance or date should sort the results.
You can keep track of these alerts in your feed. To do this, copy and paste the URL from your search to add it as another content source. That way, whenever a new article with your search terms is published, you’ll see it in your Feedly reading list.
For detailed instructions on how to set up Google News sources directly in Feedly Pro, check out this tutorial.
 

Google Alerts

To use Google Alerts, do the following:
  • Go tohttp://www.google.com/alerts
  • Enter a search term
  • Click on the “Show options” dropdown
  • Specify any restrictions you want on type of sources, language, region, and some
With Google Alerts, you can opt to get immediate notifications. Alternatively, you can add the stream of alerts to an RSS reader, like Feedly, and check in on your own time.
To do this, where it says “Deliver to,” select “RSS feed.” Then click the “Create alert” button. Next, click on the RSS feed icon to view the feed URL for your Google Alert. Copy this URL (it will start with http://www.google.com/alerts/feeds…) and paste it into your search bar in Feedly. Press enter, and you’ll be able to add the feed to your reading list.

 

Twitter lists

For minute-by-minute trends, Twitter may be the best source of breaking news. Although Twitter can be a noisy world, with Twitter Lists, you have the power to filter the input down to what matters to you.
Create lists for Twitter accounts of people or brands who share your interests, or who are thought leaders and influencers in your field. That way you can stay on top of their updates without the feed getting cluttered by irrelevant tweets.
To create a Twitter list, follow these steps:
  • Click on your profile image in the header (once you’re logged in to Twitter)
  • Click on “Lists” from the dropdown that appears (alternatively, you can type in http://twitter.com/yourusername/lists to get to the same page)
  • Here you should see any lists you’ve already created or subscribed to
  • Click the “Create new list” button
  • Type in a name, description of the list, and select whether it should be public or private
  • To add Twitter accounts to the list, go to each user’s profile page
  • On the user’s profile page, click the gear icon and select “Add or remove from ”
  • From the pop-up box, check the box for the list you want their tweets to show up in
  • Repeat the last three steps for each Twitter account you want on your list
 

Feedly

For your own, hand-picked blogs and websites, you can use Feedly to quickly and easily curate a reading list. Here are a few tips for getting your Feedly primed for trendspotting:
  • Use the search bar on the top right or the Add Content button to find and subscribe to new feeds by pasting in an URL.
  • Use theChrome extension or a Feedly bookmarklet to add feeds to your reading list from any web page.
  • Type a topic (example: social media) into the Feedly search bar to look up suggested sites from other Feedly users
  • With Feedly Pro, you can use the Power Search, including hashtags (example: #socialmedia) to help you find specific stories related to that topic.
  • Notice the popularity rating of the articles coming through your feed to see which ideas are getting more traction
  • To discover new sources, you may not have known about; you can check out theShared Collections from other users who have recommended similar content

Google Trends

So, you have a website selling footwear, and you need to discover the best time to market boots. So, you’ll need to know when in the year the demand for boots starts to go up. Here’s what Google Trends says:
As you could probably have guessed there are great peaks in the winter and troughs in the summer for boot sales, but what it does indicate is that people start their searches earlier than you would think: July and August. So that’s when your marketing efforts should start as well.
You can also see that June is a rubbish time to be selling either boots or shoes, so perhaps you should focus your efforts on selling sandals.
Google Trends also suggests related terms (Wordtracker’s Keywords tool also does this, of course).
And you can search by image, product mentions on the web. Or you can choose to narrow it down by country, restrict it to a specific period or search by category.
You can, for example, find out how popular searches for DVDs are in the category ‘Technology’ rather than in ‘Arts & Entertainment’ if you’re interested more in recordable DVDs than movie DVDs.

Yahoo Search Clues

Next, let’s look at how useful Yahoo Search Clues is at trend comparison:
We can see from this graph that Coolpix (the compact digital) is overall very slightly more popular than the Digital SLR D300 but their graphs over a year are largely similar. The split between male and female searching for the terms is broadly similar with a slight preference by male searchers.
The smaller camera appeals to an older demographic than the more complicated DSLR. And the biggest market for these cameras is the United States.
From this information it’s possible to decide which groups to target in advertising or marketing campaigns – with Coolpix we would have to decide between:
Targeting a new, younger demographic to bring in a new type of customer
Or concentrating marketing efforts on older customers to whom the product already appeals.

YouTube Trends Dashboard

The YouTube Trends Dashboard is a great tool for tracking the popularity of, unsurprisingly, video content:
If you wanted to narrow down the search results to those most popular with or most shared by 13-17-year-olds in the UK, this is where you would do it.
And if you wanted to compare what the young ‘uns are viewing with those videos popular with the more mature, perhaps even in a different country, you can do that, too.

BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed organizes the most shared pieces of content on social media. Sign up for their main daily RSS feed or select a section you want to subscribe to, for example, Viral, Sports or Movies.
Getting a handle on the type of content being shared will help give you some ideas as to the kind of content you should have on your site.

Topsy analytics

The social search engine Topsy features a Twitter analytics tool which you can to use to compare up to three subjects where you can look at up to a month’s worth of trending links. Topsy only includes ‘significant’ tweet mentions, i.e., mentions that have been retweeted or include a link.
The data comes from Twitter, and Topsy only includes ‘significant’ tweet mentions, i.e., mentions that have been retweeted or include a link.
It’s obvious which is getting talked about the most.

Twitter trends

Twitter Trends is the list of often hashtagged (#) terms you’ll see on the left-hand side of your Twitter account. You can track trends by location (there’s a choice of 150+ locations), or there’s an option to have ‘tailored trends’ – these are trends that are focused on your location and who you’re following. My tailored trends today are telling me that Nokia’s HERE maps have been launched on iTunes:

WeFollow and FollowerWonk

Find out what the influencers in your particular industry are talking about by finding out who those influencers are. In WeFollow add a tag, and it will suggest who are the top influencers in that niche. Mind, it’s user-generated. They gather their statistics from people who have submitted their Twitter name to them.
FollowerWonk also makes it easy to find influencers:
Click the ‘Search Twitter bios’ tab, and ‘more options’ then complete the details that you’d like to include in your search. You can sort by influence rating and some followers among other options.

Think with Google

trend spotting marketing
Trend spotting marketing.
A very useful newsletter to sign up for is Think with Google
Since Google are the ones with all the data, the marketing insights they pass on are surely worth a look. A current example on the site is a report on how and where users interact with their smartphones:

Google Instant

Last but not least is yet another Google tool, Google Instant: i.e., the drop-down menu that you see when you carry out a search on Google
Typing in “travel 2013”, for example, throws up some very interesting ideas on how you could be marketing your hotels, what to write about on your blog or which holidays to feature on your travel site. And it may even suggest terms that you hadn’t thought of before (for more long tail suggestions, try Wordtracker.

The bottom line

To be effective in this new era, we as marketers need to see our jobs differently. No more just focusing on metrics like clicks, video views or social media shares. We must successfully integrate our function with other business functions to create entire brand experiences that serve the customer all the way through their experiences throughout the business.
We can do better. Much better. But first, we need to stop seeing ourselves as crafters of clever brand messages and become creators of positive brand experiences.
word_of_mouth
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Pinterest Marketing … Rich Pin Tips for Discovery Shopping
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How to Get Small Business Press Coverage
 
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.