How a Proactive Social Media Strategy Helps Business

Consumers are now spending more time on social media networks than any other form of the web. It is amazing how fast social media sites and new ideas are spreading on line. What is your business doing to take advantage of a proactive social media strategy?

Facebook has a monthly audience of nearly a billion visitors. That’s a B as in billion. Other top sites, like Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn, attract hundreds of millions. By now, nobody doubts the power of social platforms, although few marketers have been able to exploit them as fully as they desire.

As Harvard’s Mikołaj Piskorski makes clear in his new book, A Social Strategy, businesses have a long way to go before they truly begin to unlock the potential of the social web. Most marketers, in fact, use social media much as they would ordinary media—to broadcast messages. We are still not working as hard as we can on engagement and building relationships.

And the real potential lies in building relationships and utilizing social platforms to create solutions for customers’ social problems. While consumers are understandably skittish about corporations interjecting themselves their personal conversations, they appreciate the opportunity to meet and build relationships with others. And that, it turns out, this is an enormous opportunity.

That’s why it’s important to make the distinction between a digital strategy that involves social platforms and a true social strategy. For a social strategy to succeed, simply joining the conversation is not enough. You must lead it.

Here are some good ways you can capitalize on social media and improve your customer engagement and relationship building. Put these seven social elements to use in your business’s social media strategy:

Market Research

Nothing new here, as this was always important to a business. What is new is the access to millions of consumer communications, which represents a gold mine of data, available at the low cost of your ability to mine it.

Public Relations

Social networks represent a direct channel into consumers. You need to craft new, compelling messages for them, without selling.

Brand Marketing

Increase the value of your brand through this communications channel. Reinforce old relationships, build new ones, and stretch the real lifetime of both with the value utilities you can provide.

Customer Support

Many ways to add value to the products and services you provide, while increasing your image.

New Product / Service / Business Model Development

Leverage the public pool of ‘collective brain’ to define and test new market opportunities.

Consumer Education

Create valuable discussion boards and other means to respond to ‘asks the expert’ type of information. Ask your customers for information / education they would like to see.

Promotions

Reach more customers with added communications channels. Integrate all of your channels to improve on the information and messages you provide.

Social media gives us a great opportunity to listen in on what people are saying (with lots of emphasis on listening). It has been long known that word of mouth is incredibly powerful, and I’d say it is the best marketing technique in one’s arsenal.

Social listening tools are still somewhat primitive, but they are improving quickly and are already being deployed to help monitor conventional marketing efforts in real time.

Rishad Tobaccowala, on his blog, gives a nice overview of social listening. Among his insights is that you shouldn’t keep your efforts sequestered in an isolated social unit any more than you would wall off other types of research. Rather, you need to make sure to integrate social listening into your overall marketing and customer service efforts.

He also makes the apt observation that heavy influencers are not necessarily heavy users (in fact, they don’t need to consume your product at all). So social media may be the only real shot you have to interact with some of those who can affect how your brand is perceived.

Another nice thing about social listening is how easy it is to integrate it into the rest of your marketing intelligence. It can help shape and augment focus groups, monitor mass media campaigns and combine with other real time resources such as Google Insights.

The bottom line

Social media is a ‘pull’ and not a ‘push’ medium. It is two way conversations … where response time is very important.

By creating a social media mindset and culture within your business, you will be amazed at how your customer base and relationships can grow.

Being social with a great positive engagement isn’t a new way of marketing; it’s a way of doing business. Follow these simple tips and you will be leading the way.

How many of these strategies have you tried in your business? Please share a story or two about some of your social media campaigns.

How to Create Curiosity to Improve Marketing

Here’s a rather interesting promotion from California Pizza Kitchen to improve marketing. At the end of my dinner, I was given the bill and a CPK “Don’t Open It” Thank You Card. That certainly did create curiosity, yes?

It’s a coupon with an interesting twist: you bring this card with you the next time you come to CPK. You’ve already won something, from a free appetizer up to $50 dollars (or more). But you won’t know what you’ve won until your next visit.

The instructions are pretty clear: whatever you do, do not open the card or your prize is null and void! A manager has to open the card for you when you return.

You are guaranteed to get something worthwhile—and this is a critical part of arousing curiosity. Coupons are too explicit: “Here is your 20% off.” Scratch-offs and lottery tickets are most likely to reveal that you’ve won nothing. With the CPK coupon, the fine print teases you with a list of the possible prizes.

Now I’m curious: which prize have I won? This is a mystery that needs solving with another visit.

Social Media Commerce Using Social Games

Why Social Games Are Marketing’s Next Frontier. I read an interesting book recently, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World written by Jane McGonagall. Here are a few of the useful takeaways on using social games.

Growth in gaming

“[Al]though a typical gamer plays for just an hour or two a day, there are now more than five million ‘extreme’ gamers in the U.S. who play an average of 45 hours a week. To put this in perspective, the number of hours that gamers world-wide have spent playing “World of Warcraft” alone adds up to 5.93 million years.”

Impacts of gaming

“In a good game, we feel blissfully productive. We have clear goals and a sense of heroic purpose. More important, we’re constantly able to see and feel the impact of our efforts on the virtual world around us. . . . One recent study found, for example, that players of ‘Guitar Hero’ are more likely to pick up a real guitar and learn how to play it.”

Learning persistence

“Research shows that gamers spend on average 80% of their time failing in game worlds, but instead of giving up, they stick with the difficult challenge and use the feedback of the game to get better.”

Building relationships

“Studies show that we like and trust someone better after we play a game with them—even if they beat us. And we’re more likely to help someone in real life after we’ve helped them in an online game. It’s no wonder that 40% of all user time on Facebook is spent playing social games.”

These takeaways support our position on the importance of games and gaming as the next important customer engagement technique. Consider these points in evaluating why games are so valuable:

Games can be combined … with rewards which permits fueling loyalty

Advertising, like other marketing elements … is moving from eyeballs to engagement

Social games … fit all platforms

Games have shown ability … to draw large communities

Brands can become … a component of game experience

Games aren’t limited … to just the virtual world

Lots of reasons to add games to your social media commerce and marketing campaigns, don’t you think?

Please share a social media commerce gaming experience with us.

Read more:

8 Popular Social Media Initiatives for Customer Engagement

Social Commerce Business … What Ben and Jerry’s Knows That You Should Know

12 Ways to Build Social Commerce Business through Great Customer Service

Actions That Are Limiting Your Business Innovation

On December 9th, 1968, a research project funded by the US Department of Defense launched a revolution. The focus was not a Cold War adversary or even a resource rich banana republic, but rather to “augment human intellect” and the man driving it was not a general, but a mild mannered engineer named Douglas Engelbart. The key was business innovation.

His presentation that day would be so consequential that it is now called The Mother of All Demos. Two of those in attendance, Bob Taylor and Alan Kay would go on to develop Engelbart’s ideas into the Alto, the first truly personal computer. Later, Steve Jobs would take many elements of the Alto to create the Macintosh.

So who deserves credit? Engelbart for coming up with the idea? Taylor and Kay for engineering solutions around it? Jobs for creating a marketable product that made an impact on the world? Strong arguments can be made for each, as well as for many others not mentioned here. The truth is that there are many paths to innovation. Here are some of them.

Innovation Is Never A Single Event

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but it wasn’t until 15 years later, in 1943, that the miracle drug came into widespread use. Alan Turing came up with the idea of auniversal computer in 1936, but it wasn’t until 1946 that one was actually built and not until the 1990’s that computers began to impact productivity statistics.

We tend to think of innovation as arising from a single brilliant flash of insight, but the truth is that it is a drawn out process involving the discovery of an insight, the engineering a solution and then the transformation of an industry or field. That’s almost never achieved by one person or even within one organization.

Innovation Is Combination

The reason that Fleming was unable to bring Penicillin to market was that, as a biologist, he lacked many of the requisite skills. It wasn’t until a decade later that two chemists, Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain, picked up the problem and were able to synthesize penicillin. Even then, it took people with additional expertise in fermentation and manufacturing to turn it into the miracle cure we know today.

This isn’t the exception, but the norm. Darwin’s theory of natural selection borrowed ideas from Thomas Malthus, an economist and Charles Lyell, a geologist. Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA was not achieved by simply plowing away at the lab, but by incorporating discoveries in biology, chemistry and x-ray diffraction to inform their model building.

Great innovation almost never occurs within one field of expertise, but is almost invariably the product of synthesis across domains.

First, Ask The Right Questions

Too often, we treat innovation as a monolith, as if every problem was the same, but that’s clearly not the case. In laboratories and factory floors, universities and coffee shops, or even over a beer after work, people are sussing out better ways to do things. There is no monopoly on creative thought.

But that leads us to a problem: How should we go about innovation? Should we hand it over to the guys with white lab coats? An external partner? A specialist in the field? Crowdsource it? What we need is a clear framework for making decisions.

As I wrote in Harvard Business Review, the best way to start is by asking the right questions: (1) How well is the problem defined? and (2) How well is the domain defined? Once you’ve asked those framing questions, you can start defining a sensible way to approach the problem using the innovation matrix.

Clearly, no one method can suffice. Look at any great innovator, whether it is Apple, Tesla or Google, and you’ll find a portfolio of strategies. So the first step toward solving a difficult problem is asking the questions you need to define your approach. To paraphrase Voltaire, if you need to solve a problem, first define your terms.

There Is No Optimal Size For Innovation

When most people think about innovation, they think about startups. And certainly, new firms like Uber, Airbnb and Space X can transform markets. But others such as IBM, Procter and Gamble and 3M have managed to stay on top for decades, even as competitors rise up to challenge them and then, when markets shift, disappear just as quickly into oblivion.

While it’s true that small, agile firms can move fast, larger enterprises have the luxury of going slow. They have loyal customers and an abundance of resources. They can see past the next hot trend and invest for the long term. There’s a big difference between hitting on the next big thing and developing it consistently, generation after generation.

Leverage Open Innovation To Expand Your Capabilities

When Microsoft launched Kinect for the Xbox in 2010, it quickly became the hottest consumer device ever, selling 8 million units in just the first two months. Almost immediately, hackers began altering its capabilities to do things that Microsoft never intended. Yet instead of asking them to stop, it embraced the hackers, quickly releasing a software development kit to help them along.

Like Microsoft, many firms today are embracing open innovation to expand capabilities. Cisco outfoxed Lucent not by developing technology itself, but by smartly acquiring startups. Procter & Gamble has found great success with its Connect and Develop program and platforms like Innocentive allow firms to expose thorny problems to a more diverse skill set.

As was the case with Alexander Fleming and penicillin, most firms will find that solving their most important problems will require skills and expertise they don’t have. That means that, at some point, they will need to utilize partners and platforms to go beyond their own internal capabilities of technology and talent.

My Best Morning Habits and Routines

Over my many years in business, I have always made it a priority to closely observe others for what I might learn. One of the more valuable topics I paid particular attention to was their morning habits.

To give you some quick context, they’ve worked at companies like Box, Kaiser, VMware, Optimizely, Cisco, Deutsche Bank or they’ve started their own companies.

They’re also mostly funny, caring, smart and thoughtful. So I would consider them to be well-balanced.

Here are my top morning habits:

Keep moving forward

A quote from Walt Disney: “Around here…we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things.” He was able to get through difficult times by always having something in the future to look forward to, even if it was just a small thing like a new comic book or a football game.

“This mentality includes staying in a forward-thinking state of mind. I try hard not to waste energy feeling badly about myself aid, because when I do I get stuck in a paradox where there is no room for happiness or any other emotion.”

Be OK with what you can’t do, because there is so much you CAN do.

Walt said he is very much aware of the things he can’t do, like ride a roller coaster, but instead of focusing on that he instead focuses on the things he can do, and the things he is passionate about. He said you can put some things that were impossible or out of reach before in the “can-do category” by making adjustments. To illustrate this point with an example he plays a clip of himself with the marching band, the story he opened with, which further illuminates his theme or his core message.

15 minutes of no screen time

Besides turning off an alarm that might be on your phone, resist the urge to check your email or social media. It sets you up for a day of being enslaved to technology, and your morning time should be reserved just for you. This might mean disabling notifications on your home screen so you’re not tempted by that Facebook update or mounting emails.

One simple question

In a commencement address he gave at Stanford back in 2005, Steve Jobs revealed the motivational tactic that he used to start each and every day.

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”

And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Goals and Review

You want to make sure you set your goals and outcomes for the day as part of your morning ritual. You can do this in your task management system, or in a journal entry, or however you like. There is the assumption that you have longer-term goals written out already (go ahead and write them if you don’t).

To do this, you want to reference:

Your goals.
Your schedule for the day.
Your task management system.

It may also be worth creating a small outline for what your day is going to look like.

They’re crushing it on commutes

While everyone else is taking a nap on the train or twiddling their thumbs, they’re crushing it on their laptop and changing the world, one letter at a time. They also don’t make excuses. For example: “Nelson, how could I do this? I have to drive to work, I can’t create something while I’m driving!” Sure, that’s true, but you could be learning with audiobooks.

They create motivation by asking “Why?”

Ask yourself the hard questions like “Why am I doing this?” or “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” By the way, that last quote was from Steve Jobs.

Demonstrate positive attitude

Build and maintain a positive mental attitude. Do things to let it be seen and felt by others. It’s often easier to give into cynicism, but those who choose to be positive set themselves up for success and have better reputations.

Maintain patience

The proper timing of your words and acts will give you a big advantage over people who are impatient.

For example: Don’t click send on the email right away — breathe and reread it. The classic example would be getting irate and sending something with hostility.

Much of real happiness is a matter of being aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing it — and enraged people aren’t typically conscious of their actions.

Don’t procrastinate

Procrastination communicates to people that you’re hesitant to take action. This demonstrates the worst form of fear.

Reflect at end of every day

Most of the time, heading out of the office is the time for rehearsing everything that went wrong that day. I recommend also reflecting on what went well. That way you’re not denying that some things went poorly, but you’re getting a richer picture of what happened.

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 him on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

40 Positive Secrets for Motivating and Inspiring Change

The past can’t be changed, but the time for change is now. That’s why this list is here—for inspiring change. Which of these positive lessons resonates with you? Which do you see yourself sharing with your own kids, if any? What would you add? Share them and make a difference in life. In anyone’s life, for that matter.

No matter what anyone says, being you is enough.
Look at the most successful people in history. You are capable of all that and more.
Always think about how your words and actions will affect others.
When you shake someone’s hand, make it firm but friendly.
It doesn’t matter how good-looking or successful someone is, or how much money they make—no one in this world is above you. Or beneath you.
Forgiving someone doesn’t mean you’re obliged to let their negative behaviour continue in your life.
Learn the best ways to say the words “no” and “enough.”
Do things that scare you once in awhile.
Never be afraid to ask for help. You can’t do it all.
Read something positive every day.
Don’t be hard on yourself. It’s never too late to do better.
Exercise every single day for at least an hour. Even a walk contributes to your health and well-being.
Choose the pain of having discipline over the pain of feeling regret.
Follow through.
Learn how to cook really well and do it often. You’ll be happier and healthier.
Work on loving and accepting yourself every day.
Respect anyone who had the guts to look fear in the face and smile back.
Learn how to listen. Most people just wait for their turn to talk.
Get out of bed when it’s absolutely the last thing you feel like doing.
Figure out a few things that you do really well, and strive to master them.
Fall in love with learning.
Find peace in every part of your life. Then share the peace.
Don’t underestimate your power to change yourself.
Don’t overestimate your power to change others.
Be willing to change for yourself, not someone else.
Honour everyone who ever taught you something valuable.
Practice the 3Ps—be prompt, be prepared, and be professional.
Don’t compare yourself to others. They aren’t comparing themselves to you. (When in doubt, refer back to Number 1.)
Notice something in a random person that makes you smile to yourself and say, “That’s really inspiring.”
Remember what John Lennon said: Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.
Train your mind to only believe in what’s possible.
Be your own best friend.
Celebrate your own accomplishments with humility, and the accomplishments of others with extravagance.
Walk away from a relationship with anyone or anything that doesn’t make you feel good.
You don’t owe anyone any explanations. It’s your path.
Ask yourself often, “How am I better today than I was yesterday?”
Always be willing to learn something every single day.
Be brave. The hard times never last.
You choose how you think and feel in any situation. This is one of the hardest lessons you’ll ever learn, and when you do it will transform your life.
You are not alone, ever.

What will you add?

How to Withstand a Brand Crisis

Late last year a crippled Carnival Cruise ship was brought into port with thousands of disgruntled customers. Their vacations were ruined, they were stuck at sea and the media was having a field day covered their plight and the potential downside of the entire category of cruising. If you were Carnival, what would you do to prevent the brand crisis from getting worse?

If you are lucky, you haven’t been faced with this real question looming in front of you for your small business, but at any moment you might be. You could have a rogue employee who does something foolish, or a product that doesn’t work the way it is supposed to, or a completely unreasonable customer who decides to take to blogs and start publicly bashing your company. In this 24/7 always connected world, the next crisis can be right around the corner.

Trying to prevent it from happening is obviously the best choice, but what if it does happen?

Here are a few steps that crisis communications pros use when faced with this exact situation to help deal with a crisis, rebuild a brand reputation, and save a company.

Express concern The worst thing you can do when you start dealing with any crisis is to give the impression that you are not bothered by the crisis itself. In the case of Carnival, they ruined people’s vacations and the public needs to see them feel bad about it. Feeling bad won’t fix anything on its own, but it does demonstrate that you and your company have a heart and that you care.
Share the facts, not your defense As the crisis plays out, chances are you will still be gathering the facts. If there are lawyers involved, this can be particularly tricky – but when you have concrete facts, it is always a best practice to share them. This doesn’t mean using them to assign blame to a subcontractor or pointing fingers. It is possible that the crisis wasn’t your fault, but in the beginning that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you demonstrate you are trying to be honest and authentic as you and your team work to solve the issue.
Outline a believable solution The important thing in this phase is to not declare victory over a crisis prematurely. When you know that you have really solved the issue, give the public a real description of how you fixed it and how that fix will make it impossible for the same issue to happen again.
Detail the real issue alongside the solution Once you have done the first three steps, you can get to the point where you really share who was at fault. This is not the moment for you to point fingers, but rather to elevate the issue if it is warranted. If it was an employee that screwed up, this point is where you share the new policies that you have in place to fix that in the future. If it was a subcontractor problem, you talk about how you will be revising your entire supply chain to manage this type of issue.
Emerge as a leader The final step is what can turn a crisis into something that you just sit through and hope to survive through into a critical moment where you could transform your business. After you have emerged from the crisis, the question to ask is how you can lead your industry and help make sure that this crisis doesn’t happen to any other company. This may involve creating a partnership or working with a third party group, or even starting one. The goal of this phase is to go above and beyond just fixing a problem, and demonstrate that what you learned from the entire experience was that this issue is critical to solve for the entire industry – and you are going to be the one to try and do it.

What do you think?

Why Some Businesses Insist their Customers Are Usually Wrong

One of the more iconic phrases in customer service is “give them a pickle”, drawn from a story by Bob Farrell regarding an unhappy customer who couldn’t get extra pickles for his hamburger. Are customers usually wrong?

The customer actually wrote a letter detailing the frustration he felt in his inability to get said pickles. The phrase stuck thanks to the important lesson Bob learned that day — a little extra effort in service is often all it takes to make for a great experience. The benefits of fulfilling small requests give truth to another popular idiom: that “the customer is (almost) always right.”

But what about feedback and requests that go beyond personal interactions with your company, and deal directly with your product? Should you listen to customers then? Do they understand their problem well enough to propose feasible solutions?

When it comes to a product’s vision, many will tell you: customers are often poor judges of their own needs. You’ll find yourself having to say “No” most of the time, and it’s for a good reason — in regards to building the best solutions, the customer is mostly wrong.

It’s Your Job to Solve the Problem

When listening to feedback, the temptation to follow the customer’s lead is always looming. After all, they know their problem, so they are probably the best person to plot out the solution, right?

Customers might help identify the destination, but you can’t usually listen to them on how to get there.

Where the customer tends to be consistently “right” is in that ability to point out problems.

In regards to Henry Ford’s supposed observation that people would have asked for “faster horses,” we see where the customer was actually right—identifying the need for quicker transportation.

But you needn’t be disrupting the horse and buggy industry to view feedback the same way. When someone takes time out of their day to contact you, pay attention: their thoughts could shed light on what other customers might be struggling with.

Where paths diverge is in developing with the best, most innovative solution. How do you build the solution of tomorrow around feedback that only consists of the ideas of today?

Customer feedback is great for telling you what you did wrong. It’s terrible at telling you what you should do next.”—Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote

The customer is thus “mostly wrong” because 99% of the time they will suggest faster horses.

This can be misleading: in hindsight, “faster horses” obviously wasn’t the answer, but imagine being bombarded with thousands of similar requests. It is tough to say “No” in the face of such demand, but you have to remember that popularity doesn’t dictate optimal utility.

Once your product has achieved product/market fit (it’s likely well on it’s way when you start getting thousands of feature requests), it’s best to stop chasing problems. There will always be things that other people want your product to do.

Rather than attempting to solve all of them, which will effectively make it impossible to solve any of them, instead focus on any problem that allows the customer to achieve a must-have experience.

This might mean you turn away potentially good customers in the short term, all for the purpose of attracting great customers.

Many would agree that excessive people-pleasing after product/market fit can ruin an initially good product. You have to recognize that most suggestions from customers won’t fit your vision. You have to be able to say “No.”

This makes turning customers down a key skill in keeping support standards high, while focusing on building the product people need.

And yet, saying “No” isn’t always easy. Product people build products because they love solving problems for customers (marketing folks like myself, who focus on customer success, feel the same way).

It’s tough turning people down. We can all use a refresher on how to say “No,” and why it is not the worst thing in the world for a customer to hear.

How to Tell a Customer No

Learning how to say no isn’t just a necessary skill for support, it’s a necessary skill for life. It may take some practice, but here are a few things to keep in mind.

Realize that “yes” can be selfish. It’s important to acknowledge that there are many folks building products who struggle with the guilt of saying no. The thing to realize is that a misguided “yes” is essentially a selfish gesture towards the rest of your customers.

Bending over backward with new features or building something that is outside of your product’s vision in order to keep a single big customer will lead to a less than stellar product for the majority. “No” can be the most selfless thing you say all day.

“No” sounds better with understanding. Whenever an outcome isn’t in someone’s favor, it’s hard to make it a truly positive situation. But leaving the conversation without providing a reason is like applying for a job and not receiving any feedback: you’d rather just hear the why, even if you didn’t get the position.

Acknowledging the effort the customer put into the request and why you see how it might be useful (if true) is often just the right amount of empathy needed before you explain why it just isn’t a fit for where your team is taking the product.

Give recommendations when appropriate. It’s not uncommon for customers—especially larger customers—to get into an “all-in-one” mindset. Some companies do well building software this way, but they are the exception.

If a customer requests a feature that would bloat your product but would make for a great stand alone product, give a recommendation. We happily recommend fine folks like SproutSocial for providing quick and accurate responses to customer feedback on social media.

Set clear expectations. It is always best to err on the side of caution whenever you get feedback that you might implement. Having a customer follow up every 2 weeks after you’ve lead him or her on is awful for both of you.

If an idea has merit but isn’t on your immediate roadmap, don’t even come close to using the word “soon.” Assure the customer that you’re looking into said feature but that, “At best, it’s quite far out while we work on _____.”

Treat every “No” like the first one of the day. Saying no to so many feature requests can start to affect your empathy toward the customer.

To counteract this, be sure to remind yourself that the customer doesn’t know this is your twelfth no for a certain feature—they are likely getting in touch with you for the first time. It’s your job to make them feel like their contribution, even if it doesn’t get implemented, isn’t just a burden to you: “Really appreciate you taking the time to share these thoughts, Karen!”

Don’t lose your curiosity. Repetition also creates a risk of “seen that before” syndrome. This often results in you giving less and less attention to requests that seem repetitive.

It’s sometimes good, however, to dig into a feature request you’ve turned down before. Why did this person specifically ask for it? Although the default response to a customer question is often “action,” responding with your own questions from time to time can reveal some new insights about a certain feature that you’ve never had before.

Use “No” to Keep Your Competitive Edge

To be clear, let us not forget that product excellence is often defined by meticulous evaluation and execution on evolving customer requirements. Knowing what customers need is what keeps a great product great, hence the ongoing utility of feedback.

You just have to remember that a company’s competitive edge often comes from avoiding the “sameness trap,” or by solving problems in ways that other companies and customers themselves never considered. Searching for the best outcome often requires many no’s, before you can finally say yes.

What do YOU think?v

Simplifying Your Marketing Content

Let’s not mess around with it. Here is how simplifying your marketing content pays off.

We all get stuck sometimes. We think we know what to write. But when we open a Word doc, the words don’t flow.

We try to blame it on writer’s block.

But the hard truth is this …

We’re still confused about what we want to communicate. We wrestle with complexity. We don’t know the essence of our unwieldy idea.

Sound familiar?

A few simple principles can help you distill the essence of your message, and communicate with power and clarity.

Want to know how?

1. Start with the right question

Ever feel like an idea is too multi-faceted with threads of thoughts moving in all directions?

And you can’t figure out how to weave all these ideas together into one coherent piece of content?

Step back and isolate one simple question.

In their book The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird suggest:

Consider a subject you wish to understand, and clear the clutter until you have isolated one essential ingredient. Each complicated issue has several possible core ideas. You are not seeking “the” essential idea; you are seeking just one—consider a subject and pare it down to one theme.

Let’s say you want to write a post about how to build a thriving business online. This question is complex and unwieldy.

Firstly, what type of online business are we talking about? Promoting a freelance writing business online is different from building a Software-as-a-Service business.

Secondly, when you want to know about building an online business, do you want to learn more about business processes or marketing tactics or about picking the right idea?

So, instead of trying to answer all ideas in one go, start with one simple question. Write about how to generate business ideas, how to do a quick feasibility study, or how to pick one business idea.

To simplify your ideas, simplify your question first.

2. Reduce clutter

The principle of cutting away the clutter to clarify an idea sounds straightforward.

But what is clutter?

When is nuance helpful and when does nuance become clutter?

Imagine a remote control with only an on/off button. It’s simple, but not very useful, is it? To add more functionality, you need more buttons, so complexity increases.

But how many buttons does a remote control need?

The answer depends on the user’s wishes and what product he wants to control.

In his book The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda describes this as the balance between “How simple can you make it?” and “How simple does it have to be?”

A similar tension exists in writing. How simple can you make your message? When have you cleared so much clutter that your content becomes meaningless?

To understand when nuance becomes clutter, think about your reader. What information is essential so he can understand your ideas and follow your advice?

3. Rewrite and rewrite again

Achieving simplicity requires taking a step back and then looking at your content again with fresh eyes. What’s the aim of your content? And how can you simplify your writing to achieve that aim?

Simplicity is hard to achieve.

Shane Parrish suggests that even Charles Darwin found it hard to express himself clearly and concisely. Darwin wrote down his ideas quickly, and then went back to them again and again.

Rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite again.

When you give your ideas time to blossom, you give yourself an opportunity to make your writing clearer. So write your content over several days.

And don’t stop writing after you’ve answered one question. Revisit topics to deepen your understanding. Find an even simpler question or branch out to follow different threads of thought.

You can understand anything better than you currently do.
~ Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird

4. Organize

One blog post has the perfect length to answer one simple question.

But what if your readers ask complex questions? And what if you want to help them make sense of complexity?

This is where organization comes in.

Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
~ John Maeda

Let’s think about a book. Each chapter of a book answers one simple question. Together, these chapters answer a bigger question, like this:

You can apply a similar principle to your blog.

First, create a series of blog posts answering the simple questions. Then, create a page or blog post as a collection of these questions—show how you break down a complex question into smaller questions. Such content is often called cornerstone content.

My blog post about how to improve your writing skills is an example of cornerstone content. First, it breaks down the question of improving writing skills into:

Which writing techniques do you need to learn?
What writing habits can we nurture?
How can we write with substance?
Where do we find inspiration to keep improving our writing?

Next, it breaks each of these questions down into simpler questions. For instance, the question about writing techniques includes:

What’s a good sentence?
How do you choose words?
How do you make your writing flow smoothly?
How do you use metaphors?
How do you write mini-stories?

Once you’ve answered the simple questions, answering a big question becomes easier. A matter of organization.

5. Draw pictures

When I wrestle with an unwieldy topic, I start scribbling.

Even writing down a few words and drawing arrows can help clarify my thoughts.

Stop thinking of drawing as an artistic process. Drawing is a thinking process.
~ Dan Roam

How to communicate with power and clarity

Learning to write well means learning to think well.

And that means re-learning how to ask questions.

Remember when you were a kid, and kept asking questions?

Look at the world again with fresh eyes. Be a child again. Learn to be comfortable with not knowing answers, and you’ll discover new lessons and fresh ideas.

Follow your curiosity.

That’s how you learn more and enrich your life.

How Schools Can Improve their Product of Learning

What do you believe is the major product of schools? My opinion is to achieve the ability and desire of students to learn new things. That is the product of learning!

The change we are in the middle of isn’t minor and it isn’t optional.

–Clay Shirky

As Clay describes the digital internet age, it is far from minor and not optional. Right on the mark isn’t it? This description is particularly relevant for the need for continuous learning.

The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years. EVERY TWO YEARS. The top 10 jobs that were in demand in 2013 didn’t exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that don’t yet exist. All this in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet. Scary, isn’t it?

For students starting a 4 year technical or college degree, one half of what they will learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study. We are clearly living in exponential times, aren’t we?

What is your choice for the top learning issue of the day?

Continuous learning is our choice. Taught in schools? I have not found many that are changing their learning and education strategy based on this environment. In fact, most seem to be hunkering down even more into the past. I was very surprised by this finding.

In earlier times, perhaps several generations or so ago, our great grand parents and their parents faced an entirely different problem of learning. In their environment, both generations shared the same problems and basically the same solutions. Learning in this environment was a lot simpler. It was simply a matter of transferring information (facts) from the older generation to the newer one.

Enter the industrial age where the world had begun to change very rapidly and grow in complexity. Old solutions, old facts, were no longer enough. Learning needed to change to keep up, switching from learning old information to discovering and understanding new information and solutions. Clearly a paradigm shift had begun. No longer dumping facts into a learner’s memory was going to be adequate.

In the information and internet ages, learning problems have gotten much worse. As we said earlier, the amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years … doubling. We are clearly living in exponential times.

So how do we improve our ability for continuous learning in such a fast changing and complex environment? We have defined 10 ways we believe are essential in achieving this goal. Let’s discuss each of these:

Learn by doing

Most of what we know, we didn’t learn in school. We learned it in the real world,actually doing, not reading or listening about doing. Confucius once said:

I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand.

He appreciated that being a creator was the best way to learn. Make your learning be active learning and be creators as often as possible. And learn as many new things as possible. That means making your work environment be an environment of change. Rotate into new things to learn often. We believe this the most critical of the ways for schools to improve your learning.

Walt Whitman: Remember this above all. There is no royal road to learning.

Observe and reflect

By observing life’s experiences around us and careful reflection of what we observe, we can gather facts and information to learn new solutions and methods. Give students more opportunity to increase their ability to ‘connect the dots’ around them.

Present novelty

Our brains pay more attention to things in the environment that are new to our experience. So, seek out as many new experiences to try as you can handle and help students become an explorer. Continuously expand their boundaries of new experiences …include some far out things in different fields. Continuously practice connecting the dots of experiences.

Don’t fear failure

Students need to be learners that ask hard questions and explore what might work and what won’t. As a learner, we need to accept failure so we can use the often times messy trial and error. Make failures and mistakes as learning sources (and the mistakes and failures need not be yours).

Develop curiosity

Continually to get students to think about what they don’t know, don’t be afraid of confusing student learning and evoking tough questions. You can develop curiosity. This curiosity can be used to tailor robust methods of blended learning. Curiosity must come first. Questions can be fantastic windows to great learning, but not the other way around. Build students skill of curiosity … it is a necessity for good learning.

Practice imagination

Albert Einstein once said: Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere.

He understood the complexities of the world today required imagination for the discovery of new ideas and solutions. Imagination requires lots of practice; it doesn’t just happen on its own. So start working on this skill to add it to improving student learning.

Related post: Albert Einstein Facts and Wisdom

Employ emotion

We as learners respond to things around ourselves that elicit emotion. Put emotional stories to work to create a stimulus-response learning process. Listen for inspirational and emotional stories and use them as experiential learning in the classroom.

Embrace change and contrast

Students learn new things best when they are in contrast to other information in the environment or to things that are in contrast to previous experiences. To improve learning, work on the experience of change … have students study trends and study changes going on around them. Get them to step out into the unknown as often as they can.

Understand the meaning

In learning, students tend to respond best when they determine things are that are most meaningful. Find the meanings that provide that which motivates us to dig deeper.

Connect and collaborate

Connecting with others in the internet world is a great way to share ideas and solicit feedback, new views, and ideas. Have students find some online interesting connections who share like goals, and have them try a collaboration project or two. Collaboration is an excellent way to expand learning in a sharing environment.

In 1976, a British statistician named George Box wrote the famous line, “All models are wrong, some are useful.”

His point was that we should focus more on whether something can be applied to everyday life in a useful manner rather than debating endlessly if an answer is correct in all cases. As historian Yuval Noah Harari puts it, “Scientists generally agree that no theory is 100 percent correct. Thus, the real test of knowledge is not truth, but utility. Science gives us power. The more useful that power, the better the science.”

Social Listening

15 minutes of no screen time

One simple question

Goals and Review