Business people and people that enjoy intellectual media.
When?
Just put it in your queue above Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey.
Why?
It might change the way you think about building to success.
Best Quote
Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.
Review
Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers was good enough that I have now read it twice, which is unusual for me because I have such a large reading list.
In his book, Gladwell examines many aspects that work together to create the outliers that become truly great. What does it take to be Michael Phelps, Bill Gates, or another high performer?
Putting in 10,000 hours on that task.
Being born at just the right time.
Being in the right group of people.
Being in a field that does not lock you out.
And more of course.
Last Word
Mostly, I find this book fascinating. I believe that Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin is a book better suited to applying to your daily life. Nonetheless, Outliers is a great book that I believe it well worth the read.
I’ve left jobs I loved and jobs I hated. Leaving both types sucks, but leaving a job I love makes me feel sick. I remember coming to the decision that it was time to leave a great job for a new opportunity and really feeling pained. It got even worse when I told my boss.
The questions and self doubt:
Am I making the right decision?
Did I just burn my bridges?
What happens if I’m wrong?
It’s terrible. It really is.
Being on the other side is really weird too though. I’ve had people that work for me quit and nearly quit for heaps of reasons:
A better opportunity came up.
They weren’t happy about something with their current job.
Something in their life changed and they couldn’t keep their job anymore.
via Ke7dbx
Sometimes, you can keep people from leaving.
But, why do it? In the case that your employee found a better opportunity, it’s good for both parties to wish them well and end your working relationship on a good note. Sure, it’s flattering to them if you try to keep them, but if they decide to stay and then realize that they made a mistake, you’ve got a problem.
If your employee isn’t happy about something with their job and they gotten to the point they’re willing to quit, this shows at least one of two things and possibly both.
Whatever it is is so bad that you won’t be able to satisfactorily change it.
Your employee waited so long to bring it to your attention (or at least bring the dire nature of it) that this might show you that you don’t have a relationship where they’re willing or able to speak openly with you.
In either case, it doesn’t matter whether it’s compensation, management style, cultural fit, growth opportunities, or anything else. Your employee has chosen to leave in order to get away from something rather than to get closer to something, and trying to keep them is no guarantee that things will change no matter how hard you try.
In the third case, there are few instances when you can keep an employee that chooses to leave their job due to a life change, and the only legitimate one that I’ve ever encountered is an employee relocating for their spouse. That one was easy, “We’d love to keep you if you’re okay with working remotely.” “Yeah, that’d be great.” “Awesome. Consider it done.”
In all other cases I’ve encountered though, how can you keep a mother that wants to be homes with her children, a son that wants to take care of a sick family member, and so on from doing so without feeling bad and potentially engendering some ill will? You can’t.
via kevin dooley
My preference is to avoid the conversation altogether.
If you think your employee is considering leaving, talk to them about it. This is the time to find out if you need to let someone go or make changes to keep them. It’s too late when they’re the one to approach you.
If you’re the one leaving, talk to your boss early. Telling them about problems that you have with them, the company, or your position on the same day you say that you’re quitting is really crappy. You don’t give them any opportunity to change. If you’ve made the decision to go, make it clear to them that, while you would love to stay, your decision is for the best, and you’d like to be clear. You’re leaving.
Not being open and honest early can burn bridges and cause a lot of bad decisions down the road. Once your or your employee have made a decision to leave though, the decision has been made. There’s almost no talking to be done. Just make the parting as easy as possible.
Anyone interested in how society and movements grow, change, and decline.
When?
You’re probably gonna to miss out on some of the significance of this if you’re under 20 or so. That’s not to say that there aren’t some 15 year olds out there that wouldn’t completely get this book of course. I just believe that an older mind would probably appreciate this more on average.
Why?
The Tipping Point is fascinating.
Best Quote
A study at the University of Utah found that if you ask someone why he is friendly with someone else, he’ll say it is because he and his friend share similar attitudes. But if you actually quiz the two of them on their attitudes, you’ll find out that what they actually share is similar activities. We’re friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble. We don’t seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do.
Review
Coming from a marketing background, this book is very interesting because it gives you some idea of how you might be able to take advantage of, or even create, a movement or a viral success. Malcolm Gladwell gives several examples of how ideas, diseases, crime, and more have spread through society and then abruptly stopped. He attributes these to the work of three different types of people:
Connectors – These are the people that know everyone and are naturally able to bring others together.
Mavens – These people have their fingers on the pulse of their fields. When you need to buy a new car, the car maven knows everything that anyone would ever need to know. When you want to know what’s been going on in the world recently, the current events maven can fill you in better than anyone.
Salesmen – These folks are the most persuasive people you could meet. They can sell ideas, products, and more.
When you combine these people with the right ideas in the right circumstances and with the right surrounding events, the only thing they need in order to ensure success is stickiness. The ideas, products, or whatever else their selling has to stick with people. It has to be such a different or compelling idea that it grabs people’s attention. If it has that, the right combination of Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen can make it successul.
Last Word
The tipping point is the moment of critical mass when something crosses the threshold from indie trend to mainstream movement. You should read The Tipping Point if only for the fact that you need to be able to recognize societal changes that might affect you or your business…if not also being able to use them to your advantage.
After the Google Panda update and especially following the Google Penguin update, webmasters began pooping themselves over low quality links pointed at their sites. Many webmasters have purchased links from Fiverr, participated in link wheels, or otherwise come by craptastic links, so even without using a tool like Open Site Explorer to see who was linking to them, most of those webmasters knew they had low quality inbound links.
Then, people started catching on to Negative SEO, and we suddenly seemingly had confirmation that low quality links pointing to your site could actually harm you.
via andyarthur
Putting Negative SEO in perspective
Negative SEO is a tactic that supposedly works, but Google has more or less completely denied that it does despite the algorithm updates and SERP changes that seem to suggest that is not true.
If we both run marketing blogs and you’re beating me in the rankings, I can buy a whole bunch of crappy links pointing to your site, use Xrumer and other tools to build low quality links, and otherwise make it look like you might have been trying to game the search engines. Under Google’s recent algorithm changes, this could earn you a penalty or all out exclusion from search results, which would hopefully bump my website up.
Bad, right?
Right.
This all has caused a lot of people to scream for a link disavowal tool.
Basically, webmasters want a way to give Google a list of links and say, “You see those links over there? Yeah, they’re not mine, so please don’t penalize me for them.”
The problem with this is that:
Google seems to hate giving into webmaster requests, so will be slow to comply.
Google in all its infinite wisdom and data mining glory will use paranoid webmasters against the rest of us by taking the link disavowal requests as signs of what websites real people (not computers) think are low quality.
So, look at what happens. Google does a decent job of figuring out what websites are good and bad, but plenty of bad results sneak in now and then, don’t they? Google can just release a link disavowal tool, make webmasters feel like they’re caving and doing them a favor, and then match up the sites requested for disavowal with their algorithmically generated crap site list, and badda bing badda bang badda boom, they’ve suddenly got a new, hopefully higher quality list of crap sites.
via photoloni
I’d be concerned.
Well, I have a few concerns:
Ignorant and paranoid webmasters will get milked by charlatans that offer a link clean up service.
Those same webmasters will be a little overzealous and will ask Google to disavow too many links that are actually good.
An onslaught of bad request will cause sites that you and I get links from to be penalized or banned, which will cause our rankings to drop even though we didn’t request a disavowal.
When Google does eventually announce a link disavowal tool, I bet that it will work to everyone’s advantage if they just stay as far away from it as possible and, if someone absolutely feels the need to use it, that it would be best for everyone if they are as conservative as possible.
Very few webmasters really have the time or knowledge to analyze their link profile, and that lack of knowledge could become a major pain for the rest of us.
You’re a savvy business owner, so you’re using social media. Unfortunately, you can’t say for certain whether or not it’s really worth your time. If you’re asking yourself what you should be doing and what you should be getting out of social media, the following three musts are for you.
Use Social Media to Find New Ideas
Business owners are some of the best idea people in the world. They find a need in their community and figure out how to address it, but the most aware business owners recognize that they can learn a lot and get a lot of new ideas from others. Whether just monitoring, dipping in a toe, or spending hours in social media, you can pick up a lot of new ideas in social media.
Use Twitter searches, Topsy, Social Mention, and other services to search for your company, your competitors, your industry, and mentions of your local area. Find people that are having relevant conversations and jump in to see what you can learn from them. And, don’t forget to keep track of what people say so that you can see what new ideas get mentions most.
Involve Your Whole Staff
HubSpot, Dell, Cisco, and Zappos are perfect examples of companies that involve their whole staff in social media, which not only takes the burden of the leadership, marketing, and PR departments, but also makes handling customer service and spreading awareness of the company easier because they have more than just one person supporting multiple channels. Imagine that you run a shoe store and have one employee that is really passionate about photography and another that loves music. Ask your photographer is she would like to contribute to your Instagram, Facebook, and other accounts that can host images. Ask you musician if he would like to share his love of music or if he wants to help create videos for the business that you can then share on YouTube and other channels. This helps to share the burden, since social media is time consuming, and ensures that both people with passion for social media and people with diverse interests get the opportunity to connect you to different parts of your potential audience.
Give Sneak Previews of Upcoming Products and Services
Offering sneak previews of your new products or services online to your potential customers is one of the best ways to build demand even before a launch. The customers can provide vital feedback that can be extremely helpful in ensuring a smooth and better launch. You can post photos of your new products or services on your social media sites and ask for comments from customers.
Anyone that is interested in ever improving themselves in anything and anyone that might ever want to be a parent.
When?
Now.
Why?
This book left the strongest impression on me of almost any book I have read in the last few years.
Best Quote
Research confirms that merely putting in the years isn’t much help to someone who wants to be a great performer.
Review
Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated is the perfect companion for Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. They discuss very similar topics, while Colvin’s book goes much more deeply into the hard work aspect of becoming great. Colvin’s thesis is that the truly great get there not just by putting in the time, but by putting in the time deliberately. Great violinists don’t practice just the things that are fun. They practice the things that need practiced most whether they are fun or not, and they do this over and over until they become masters. The same goes for athletes, business people, and more.
I was so impressed by Talent is Overrated partially because it is extremely well researched and written, but even more so because it made me wonder how great I could be at something if I was more deliberate or maybe even how great my children could be if I helped them to be more deliberate. Think about it. If success is a determiner of happiness and success could be achieved with dedicated and deliberate practice, wouldn’t you go out of your way to do that for yourself and your family?
Last Word
I wholeheartedly recommend Talent is Overrated to anyone that thinks they might be even remotely interested. Even for non-business people, I really believe that you will find this fascinating simply when looking at it through the lens of your personal life and your family’s.
Companies like SEOmoz and HubSpot make marketing look easy. Not only do a number of their employees blog and participate in relevant conversations on other blogs, Quora, and a number of other sites, but they also have very responsive social media outlets on Facebook and Twitter. Seeing that and then reading things like this from my friend Marcus make some of us think, “We need to do that. I could do that. Let’s do it.”
After all, if you can make everyone in your company a marketer, that will not only reduce marketing’s workload, but also give you so much more content and perspectives to work with, right? Right? Wrong.
Good marketing requires planning and coordination.
The thing that you don’t think about when you read social media books and blogs about new marketing is that the central leadership role of the CMO, CCO, VPM, or even just community manager is more important than ever. Without standards and guidelines and then a quality filter (ie. your head of marketing), blog posts go out that have bad formatting, terrible writing, and are off message; emails get sent that don’t align with your strategy; and updates get posted to Twitter and Facebook that ultimately make you look bad.
I won’t link to any examples because there’s no need to shame anyone, but have you ever seen something from a company in social media, email, on a blog, etc and thought, “That’s a little weird coming from them”? There’s a good chance that company tried to make someone a marketer, when they really weren’t, and didn’t put the proper planning and coordination in place to ensure that their content aligned with the business’ goals.
via Occupy Global
Sadly, the marketing problem is often the CEO.
I’ve seen too many organizations where the CEO charged in with passion, which is great, and promptly messed everything up, which is not great.
Making everyone a marketer doesn’t mean there should no longer be internal controls, guidelines, filters, or a gatekeeper. Just because your CEO calls the shots doesn’t mean that your lowly community manager doesn’t know better how your blog subscribers will react to his writing, so when you do try to make everyone a marketer, your CEO might have to slow down and be forced to take a No or simply just guidance from the real marketers.
Get yourself a schedule, a gatekeeper, some training, and the power to tell people No.
It’s so easy to avoid this problem too. As long as your CEO recognizes the need for quality and consistency, she should be willing to stick to a plan. Once you have the CEO on board, you can make everyone a marketer and still ensure that you don’t have those embarrassing things happen.
This is one of the best marketing books I have ever read.
Best Quote
Marketing by interrupting people isn’t cost-effective anymore. You can’t afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing messages, in large groups, and hope that some will send you money.
Instead, the future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumber networks and then tet out the way and let them talk.
Review
I first read Permission Marketing 2 years ago and was blown away. Recently, I revisited it in audiobook form and was still very impressed. Even though it was written in 1999, it is still one of the best books for marketers looking to build their foundation in permission marketing.
Since this book was published, forward thinking marketing has grown into inbound marketing, content marketing, and more – the value of all of which will be debated for years. Regardless though, Seth Godin helped to push marketing leaps and bounds ahead of where it had been as soon as Permission Marketing came out.
Last Word
A permission mindset is not the only thing I look for when hiring a marketer, but it is a huge qualifier. Paid media, PR, branding, and other aspects of marketing all have their place at the table, but if a young marketer does not have at least a basic grasp of permission, it tells me that either their education was poor or they’re more interested in short term, zero-sum games than long terms benefits.
I’ve been blogging since early 2007 and have made money and gotten recognition from it, but not in the way that most aspirants think of it. The fact of the matter is that making money directly from blogging is nearly impossible. I’ve run AdSense, participated in affiliate campaigns, been paid for my writing, and more, and the money I can attribute to directly to my blogging is easily less than $200 per year on average.
At the same time, my income has quadrupled, I’ve spoken at conferences and events like the DMA and Social Slam, and I’ve secured a position as a knowledgable and dependable marketer and analyst. Those results easily outweigh the direct financial benefits of blogging, but I would never have realized them if all I had been focused on was making money from blogging.
via Maria Reyes-McDavis
How can you make money blogging?
As trite as it sounds, don’t focus on the money. The thing is that you can afford to not focus on the money is you don’t delude yourself into thinking that your blog is your business. It’s not. It is a vehicle for you and your business.
Do great work. Create a great product. Make your customers so happy that they blog about you.
Then and only then, when your business is so good that you can afford to spend time on blogging, write about what you know best. If you’re a web startup CEO, don’t blog about marketing and social media unless that’s where you really add value. Stick to leadership, company building, or leadership. If you’re a market analyst, stick to that. How do you add value by blogging about tools, or engagement, or management?
via cowbite
Yeah, I don’t know either.
Stick to what you know, and don’t focus on the money.
The best bloggers create crap content now and then, and they’re writing about their areas of expertise, so how can you or I compete if we don’t stick to what we know best?
Simple answer – we can’t, and it gets even worse if trying to market yourself or your company or, worse, make money from blogging comes at the expense of actually doing great work.
By this time, the question of whether or not you should be using social media to grow your online business has been answered definitively, and it was a yes. The question that remains in most people’s mind though is How. How do you actually use social media to grow your online business?
Customer Communication Platform
Some people don’t like the phone. Others don’t like email. Others don’t like face-to-face communication, and on, and on, and on. Social media introduces a whole new set of channels through which you have the opportunity to communicate with your customers, and while some people do not like using social media, 950 million people using Facebook, hundreds of millions using Twitter, and millions more using other channels confirm that there is a large potential audience there for you.
The thing to look for when using social media to grow your online business is not how easy can you make it or how many possible places can you spread your message to, but rather what does each audience in each different channel want to communicate about. Tailor your content and your communication style to each audience and each channel in order to make your message as relevant and meaningful as possible.
Monitor the Competition
Social media is one of the best platforms to help in monitoring competitors without going out into the field to carry out a market research analysis of them. Your competitors will tell their customers what they are doing and, in turn, those customers will possibly say something about your competitors over social media. Such information is important as it will help you know what you competitors are up to and how other people are reacting to any new developments they have. From there, you can then adjust your business accordingly to keep abreast with the competition.
Use tools like Topsy, Social Mention, Twitter searches, IFTTT, and others to monitor what your competition is saying, what people are saying about them, and what people are saying about you.
Increase Search Engine Ranking
Prior to social media being widely accepted, search engines primarily used factors like inbound links and textual analysis in order to determine which pages should rank highest in search results. The problem with this is that very few people manage websites, so if you’re counting how many links a website has pointing at it as a sign of how popular it is, you’re missing all of the votes of people that don’t run websites.
Now that so many people use social media, social signals like tweets and Facebook likes act as votes of popularity and value. The more social signals search can see your website has, the better it will rank in search results.
Build Credibility
The key to building credibility in social media is to first build a trusting relationship with your customers. Once rapport is established, then your customers can feel comfortable including you in the constant information and feedback stream that is a Facebook, Twitter, or other social media feed. There are several ways that will help you be able to build your reputation and credibility for your customers to totally trust in you. These include:
Making sure that people are aware that you know what you are doing and that you are an expert in your area. In so doing, they can trust that you are aware of their specific needs. This means, if you’re a designer, talk about design. Sure, the odd football comment or random joke can pop in there now and then to show your personality, but if you’re a designer with a Facebook page and you want to use it to grow your business, talk about things related to your business that people will care about.
The information that you give to your customers should add value for them in some way. This information should be aimed at promoting shared interest. This means don’t talk about yourself all the time and don’t share something unless it’s really valuable to your audience. Something that isn’t valuable is just an annoyance, and every time you annoy someone, you make it easier for them to stop paying attention to you.
You should be dynamic enough to give each customer what they want by tailoring your products and services to be able to meet their specific needs. This means you should do your best to tailor your content to each channel and audience. Pay attention to whether your Twitter followers respond to the same language, content, and posting times as your Facebook fans or your Pinterest followers. There’s a good chance they like different things, so customize your content, as well as the products and services you talk about, to them.
