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  • Management Tips: The 4 worst words to hear

    “Whatever you say, boss.”

    Okay, they don’t have to be those exact words, but you know that, as a manager, you have problems as soon as you start to hear anything like that.

    Which of your conversations are crucial?

    I read a great book not long ago on the topic of crucial conversations. One of the big things that stuck with me was the idea of Fight or Flight.

    When we have personal conflicts that we are not willing to discuss or deal with, the most frequent responses are Fight and Flight. In Fight, we try to justify, tell the other person why they’re wrong, and otherwise make a disagreement worse by being aggressive, uncooperative, or attacking. In Flight, we don’t deal with the problem. Instead, we ignore it or just give in.

    If you can’t think of a time when you’ve experienced Flight, just recall anytime that you didn’t agree with someone’s choice, and when things went badly, you said, “Hey, I didn’t make that decision.” If you just let the person make the decision without talking with them about your thoughts. You were in Flight mode. If you tried to talk to them, but ended up arguing instead of really communicating, you were in Fight mode.

    Building a cohesive team
    via dnak

    Building a cohesive team

    For years, you’ve been told about the importance of building a strong team with a unique culture and people that share a vision. The thing that baffles me is the headstrong managers that think this means just getting everyone to go along with their vision. It’s like some of us tell ourselves, “If everyone says yes, I’ve done my job.”

    In most cases, no. No, you haven’t.

    Getting people to agree with you has little to do with them saying yes and a lot to do with them feeling yes. Think about it. How many times have you disagreed with someone and eventually said, “Alright, whatever you want. Do it your way”? That is flight, and that kills teams.

    Your people are not unthinking objects.

    I read once that people with autism have a difficult time viewing others as more than objects in their environment – no different from a pen or a door. If the other person does not explicitly say what they are thinking or what they want, the man (or woman) with autism can’t interpret what is left unsaid, and stay with me here, this is where managers go wrong. The worst managers in this respect are high energy and high passion. They do a bad job reading their people because they are so busy and so fast moving that they don’t take the time to notice what their employees are really saying when they say, “Whatever you say, boss.”

    So, while high energy and passion work well on the individual level, they can often be team killers.

    Often, consensus is not necessary, but when you say you value it and that it’s important to your team moving forward, don’t be stupid and just stop at yes. You have to know that your team actually believes in the direction you move them. Otherwise, you end up with a lot of yesses and little, to no, actual support. Going down that path leads you to a team of disheartened, unthinking, uncaring employees lead by a clueless leader with a false sense of Team.

    Answer to your problems
    via UMBRELLA SHOT

    The answer

    Every time you communicate with your people from today onward get to a shared yes, and don’t force agreement. Teams don’t succeed as a result of one person, but they do fail as a result of one person – You, the boss. So, if you can’t get to a shared yes when it’s necessary, step back and begin a conversation. Don’t force your views. Don’t justify. Don’t argue, and don’t deal with any of that from your people.

    Require and expect genuine, thoughtful conversation, and accept that while you won’t always get it, you are also not always right – whether your people say, “Whatever you say, boss,” or not.

  • How to effectively optimize your email newsletter for a higher conversion rate

    Regardless of the studies you read, somewhere north of 90% of all internet users check email. Roughly the same percentage use search engines, so you can’t afford to ignore either. The thing is that there is a major difference between email and search engine optimization.

    Search engine optimization is great for building awareness and acquiring new customers while email is best at retaining and upgrading existing customers.

    Your marketing plans should include search, social, PPC, and other awareness building channels to get new sales and email sign ups, but once you have those sales and sign ups, optimizing your email campaigns can result in increased revenue per customer and in greater overall profitability. Just as an example, one email campaign that I helped to optimize just last year resulted in enough revenue to pay for an entire year’s worth of a full digital marketing program.

    Know Your Audience

    Know your audience
    Sometimes, the only thing you’ll get with an email sign up is an email address. When this is the case, send a “Getting to Know You” email, where you offer something like a 10% discount for the person to fill out a survey in which you conveniently ask for more information like their location, gender, interests, and more. Alternatively, you can use a service like Qwerly or Rapleaf to get information on almost any email address. This information should be appended to your master database and used in your marketing.

    By knowing more about your audience, you can send special offers only to those that haven’t bought in a while, use calls-to-action that appeal more to men or women or people in certain parts of the country, design different versions of your email to go to people that love sports or gaming or anything else. The more that you can increase the relevance of your email to the recipient, the greater chance you will have of them responding.

    Provide Incentives

    Provide incentives
    You need to provide your email newsletter subscribers something that they can’t otherwise obtain. There are many other businesses providing similar products and services such as yours, and you therefore have to give your subscribers a reason as to why they should sign up with you. Give good and relevant content, yes, but then?

    Create an incentive by offering a sign-up bonus, weekly or monthly bonuses, discounts or bonuses on every purchase your subscribers make, giving them access to very relevant information about your business and affiliates, among other freebies. Reward your customers with a coupon if they like your posts on your social media pages, or enter them into a jackpot when they refer their friends to your website.

    WARNING – Do not overuse incentives though. You don’t want to become like American car dealers that can’t sell anything unless it’s severely discounted, and you don’t want to be one of those services that always sends a 10% off coupon after I abandon my cart. Use incentives only to move you toward your goal and only when they are highly relevant to the recipient.

    Promote

    Promote
    Social media pages for your business allow you to cross-promote. Promote your Twitter and Facebook pages in your email newsletters, and promote your email newsletters on your Twitter and Facebook pages. When you share content only within one channel, you give your constituents a reason to jump channels. For example, let’s say you’re a florist. If you share a video on how to keep flowers alive for longer within your email list and then you tweet that I can get that video if I sign up, there’s a good chance that I will sign up.

    Conversely, you can put in your email newsletter that people that like your Facebook page sometimes get access to deals no one else sees. If I receive your emails, what do you think I’m going to do when you tell me that?

    Use Creativity

    Use creativity
    No customer will read through a boring newsletter all the way to the end. Make your newsletter captivating, full of fun, and entertaining so that your customers can not only read through it all, but are also left eagerly awaiting your next newsletter. Your headlines have the ability to capture the attention of your readers, so keep them short, sweet, complete and specific.

    However much you write unique and interesting content though, no one will read it if the headline is boring and flat. You can test the creativity of your newsletter by reading it and honestly gauging if you would read through it all if you were a customer. Another way to test subject lines, headlines, and other parts of your marketing is to use PPC to see which headlines get clicked on more, split test your email sends to see which subject lines get opened more, or even email a few of your subscribers and say, “If we wrote about X or Y, which would be more interesting to you?”

    Implement a Mobile Version

    Implement a mobile version
    Many people read their emails on their mobile devices, and you can benefit from this also. Organize your email newsletters into formats that can be easily read on both computer monitors and mobile devices. Avoid jam-packing too much information into each email newsletter that will affect navigation and readability. There are several free plug-ins and themes that can be used to format your newsletters to suit your mobile device customers. Make your e-newsletters mobile friendly and more subscribers are likely to read them.

    When I design emails, I generally try to keep them to 480 pixels in width. This ensures that they fit easily on iPhones and most Android devices, and it’s typically not so narrow that it looks odd in Outlook, Hotmal, Gmail, and other email providers.

  • The lie of the social media conversation

    Over 10 years ago, The Cluetrain Manifesto gave us the phrase “markets are conversations,” and with the advent of social media, we stretched that to imply that both individuals and brands should be conversing, but despite well-worn examples of some brands conversing with their customers, I’m not convinced there really is a social media conversation for brands.

    Brands don’t want to converse with their clients. They want to sell more stuff. For every @ComcastCares, Zappos, or Microsoft help channel, how companies completely ignore online engagement opportunities? I, myself, have written about Comcast, Logitech, Men’s Wearhouse, and Sandals customer service only to have not one of them even acknowledge the posts, and in the case of Men’s Wearhouse, I was praising them, which would have been a softball for any of their customer service representatives monitoring blogs.

    Social media is complicated
    via wizgd

    Individuals engaging in social media feels normal. It’s a lot like talking to friends, or at least people you have something in common with. Brands engaging in social media feels odd, but we want it to be right. If brands can talk to you through social media, they should. Shouldn’t they?

    Valuing social media is really hard.

    The problem is that we expect brands to respond to tweets, Facebook Page complaints, blog posts, and more, but they don’t want to, and they have to justify spending time on paying attention to you in social media, which is hard to value properly, rather than a plethora of competing channels that are significantly easier to value:

    • On-site.
    • Telephone.
    • Email.
    • Website.
    • Advertising.
    • Broadcast.
    • And more.

    I worked specifically on social media measurement for 2 years of my career and have spent a large portion of the following 3 years continuing to work in this space, and while social media is measurable, it is difficult because we don’t always have comparable cross-channel metrics and sometimes have to set company-specific conversions or valuations. For example, in every social media channel, you can value activity partially by the users driven from those channels into your website, phone system, or other more traditional channels. If X spend $X in salaries, tools, or vendors on Twitter and Y number of twitterers visit your website and buy products or service worth $Z, you have an easy ROI calculation.

    BUT that’s not everything. How much is customer service on Twitter worth? Well, if you spend $A answering questions that help B number of twitterers that do not call in and use up employee time answering their questions individually, just look at how much money you spent answering those questions on Twitter and how much you saved by not answering them individually.

    Now, how about the branding, awareness, goodwill, and all of those other fuzzy things?

    Cat got your tongue
    via BarelyFitz

    Cat got your tongue?

    Thought so.

    You get buzz metrics from social media, but that doesn’t make branding, awareness, or goodwill any more measurable. Rather, it just means that we get tough-to-measure metrics paired with still-somewhat-foreign media, and that equals out to a reluctance to budget marketing dollars toward these channels.

    And, so it comes back to markets.

    Whether you like it or not, brands value markets they can measure first, markets they understand second, and only then markets they’re told are supposed to be valuable third, and social media in most cases falls into that third category.

    So, next time Frigidaire, or Dairy Queen, or your local dry cleaner does not pay attention to your social media praise or hatred, don’t be shocked. You have been sold the lie of the social media conversation, and they make decisions based on dollars.

  • Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

    Who?

    Anyone that has the remotest interest in business, management, entrepreneurship, self-improvement, Apple, Steve Jobs, etc.

    When?

    Reasonably soon.

    Why?

    It was a very good book.

    Best Quote

    I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on.

    Review

    My dad and I listened to this book on a cross country drive. My dad is a smart and curious guy, but he’s not a business man per se (despite being an entrepreneur) nor is he particularly interested in business. That being said, he found Steve Jobs to be very interesting as did I.

    Isaacson has written a compelling, complete, and sometimes biting biography of one of recent history’s most influence businessmen. While many people wear their What Would Steve Do bracelets and seemingly bow at the Jobs alter, I have yet to meet a person that has read this book that says they would want to work with him, and that is one of the strongest aspects of Isaacson’s story. He seems to have been so true to the reality of Jobs and his life that readers really get a sense of what kind of person he was.

    Last Word

    On one hand, there is a lot to learn about business from this book, but on the other, Steve Jobs is purely a curiosity read. It’s so entertaining and engaging, and you might just come away from it with a few ideas for your business, so go out and get your copy soon.

  • The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss

    Who?

    Read The 4-Hour Workweek if you are interested in productivity, efficiency, or entrepreneur.

    When?

    Don’t rush.

    Why?

    It’s a good book, but not everyone loves it.

    Best Quote

    For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.

    Review

    When I first read this book in 2010, I was very impressed. Some of The 4-Hour Workweek comes across like a get rich quick sales pitch from a young guy with far too much bravado. Once you get past that though, it’s easy to see that Tim Ferriss’ book is packed full of strategies and tactics that really can help you do a better job in your current position, make yourself more efficient, and help you to progress faster in a lot of different situations.

    The most important aspect of the book is actually its structure:

    1. Define – Define your objectives. What is important to you?
    2. Eliminate – Eliminate distractions and inefficiencies.
    3. Automate – Automate your cash flow byt building something that requires as little of you as possible.
    4. Liberate – Liberate yourself from everything that you don’t want to be. Don’t want to work 9-5? Don’t. Don’t want to work in an office? Don’t. This is the step where you really start reaching your goals.

    Last Word

    Although I prefer audiobooks, I highly recommend that you get the paper or ebook version of the expanded and updated 4-Hour Workweek because this book is much easier to digest when you’re actually reading it, and the expanded and updated version has actual case studies from Tim Ferriss’ readers demonstrating the viability of his approach in many other circumstances.

  • Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout

    Who?

    Anyone that has never taken a marketing class should read this book.

    When?

    As soon as you begin doing any marketing or product development work.

    Why?

    Positioning is a great Marketing 101 explanation of branding, extending, and even developing a product.

    Best Quote

    Today’s marketplace is no longer responsive to the strategies that worked in the past. There are just too many products, too many companies, and too much marketing noise.

    Review

    If you studied marketing and/or work in it, you can probably skip this book, but if you do read it, you’ll probably enjoy it. I found the stories and examples rather simple, but the person that said I must read it, and isn’t a marketer by the way, thought it was amazing. The thing that marketers will enjoy in this book is all of the solid stories about how large brands tackled their problems.

    Some main points that really stick out:

    1. Your brand isn’t what you say it is. It’s what your customers say it is.
    2. People are inundated with information and attempts at communication. Forcing your way into someone’s life will almost always not work.
    3. Change minds by simplifying your message.
    4. If you can’t win in your category, create a new one. For a more recent example than the book gives, this is what Tim Ferriss did when he made up “lifestyle design.”
    5. 80% of learning and sensing is done visually, so make your product visually attractive. I don’t know if this had a name when Positioning was written, but I recommend researching sensation transference.

    Last Word

    Even though you might find yourself thinking, “Yeah, I know this already,” Positioning is a great reference book to have on your bookshelf. I will recommend it to young marketers I work with in the future, and I recommend it to you.

  • How and Why to Set Up rel=”canonical” on a WordPress Blog

    When you create multiple pages with the same, or highly similar, content, search engines algorithmically pick up on the similarities and either exclude all but one of those pages from search results or show all, but only 1 each time a relevant search is performed.

    So, you’re asking, “What’s the problem with that?” Let’s say that you have a website that sells rugs, and in an effort to show up in the search results for everyone, you decide to duplicate one of your pages and just change a few words, so you have a whole list of pages with titles and topics like this:

    • Buy a rug today
    • Buy a rug cheap
    • Buy a rug online
    • etc, etc, etc

    If the content on each page is essentially the same, search engines pick up on that quickly and decide to show me, the searcher, whichever one they think is relevant. Let’s say your page is the best rug page ever, so I decide to link to it from my blog. Then, my neighbor does a search and finds one of the other pages from the list and links to it from his blog. Now, you have 2 incoming links, but to two different pages, so when the next person searches, the search engine does not have a strong link signal to determine which page is better, but your competitors might only have one page that is awesome and happens to have 10 incoming links. All else being equal, your competitor’s page will outrank you in the search results and will likely get more traffic.

    One way to combat this is to use the rel=”canonical” tag in your page header. Rel=”canonical” tells search engines that the canonical, or main, version of the page exists a the link the canonical points at, so when one of the pages on your list gets linked to and search engines follow the link, they can see from your page header that the real version exists somewhere else.

    The result of this is that all inbound links to the non-canonical pages count for the canonical version, so when you’re going up against a competitor in the search results, you don’t have one page with 5 links and another with 3 links and another with 8 links going against one competitor page with 10 links. Instead, you have one canonical page with 16 inbound links outranking the competitor page.

    How Do You Set-Up a Canonical URL?

    A canonical link tag can be added to the header of the HTML page. Just be sure to remember the following:

    • Be sure that URLs are normal or standard.
    • Modify your Content Management System to show only the URLs you want.
    • Once you have chosen your ideal canonical page, ensure that your internal links are consistent so all will lead back to the same site.

    On the header of the other pages with less priority or less preference, simply add a tag to show the URL you want Google to index it.

    Just add rel=”canonical” link to the head portion on the non-canonical variation of each HTML page and indicate the page of your preference.

    If you’re using WordPress, install an SEO plugin, such as WordPress SEO, to ensure that the canonical tag is always present.

    Want a little more information?

  • Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

    Who?

    Anyone interested in entrepreneurship, leadership, or management.

    When?

    No rush.

    Why?

    It’s an interesting book from a successful, serial entrepreneur.

    Best Quote

    Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships), and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself).

    Tied with

    Without conscious and deliberate effort, inertia always wins.

    Review

    Tony Hsieh writes in Delivering Happiness that he wanted to complete it without a ghost writer, which is admirable in a way, but ultimately, it shows as the book wonders, has odd tangents, and does not keep a consistent tone or message. Despite those problems though, Delivering Happiness is a valuable read and one that I recommend to many people.

    Tony is a serial entrepreneur – having seemingly stumbled into a dot com advertising success early in his career, made an attempt at running an investment fund, and then moved into the leadership position with Zappos after his fund invested in them. There is a lot to learn from him, and he carries a strong message of culture, training, customer service, and passion that has been told in one form or another of the follow-your-dreams talk nearly everyone of us got several times during our youth, but of course, someone that has actually lived that and been successful always renews our belief that following your dreams really is all that it takes.

    Last Word

    Without a doubt, Delivering Happiness is worth reading. There are a lot of valuable lessons, and Tony comes across as a great guy. That being said, I wouldn’t put this book at the top of any reading list as I think it could have benefited from a more experienced writer.

  • The Snowball by Alice Schroeder

    Who?

    Anyone interested in Warren Buffett, investing, the stock market, finance, and probably entrepreneurship.

    When?

    Put it in your queue.

    Why?

    Being one of the richest and most financially successful men the world, he’s someone you probably want to learn about. Also, it’s a very well written and interesting book.

    Best Quote

    If you are investing in your education and you are learning, you should do that as early as you possibly can, because then it will have time to compound over the longest period. And that the things you do learn and invest in should be knowledge that is cumulative, so that the knowledge builds on itself. So instead of learning something that might become obsolete tomorrow, like some particular type of software [that no one even uses two years later], choose things that will make you smarter in 10 or 20 years.

    Review

    From the first few minutes of The Snowball, Alice Schroeder had me hooked. She created a very well-written and intriguing biography of a highly successful and interesting man. Honestly, before I read this book (or listened to it actually), I knew very little about Warren Buffett. Now, not only do I know quite a lot, I also am interested in a number of aspects of investing, management, and entrepreneurship that I had not been before.

    The Snowball is one of the most absorbing reads I have had in the last few years. Alice Schroeder takes her readers from Buffett’s childhood and filing his first tax return to owning a tenant farm in high school all the way through college, his work life, and every personal detail you could imagine. Along the way, you get some very interesting stories about people like Akio Morita (or Sony), Bill Gates, and more, and of course, there are fascinating dives into Buffett’s curious habits as well as personal stories such as him seemingly having two wives at once.

    Last Word

    While I would not rush out to get this book, The Snowball is a must read. Whether you’re interested in business, Warren Buffett himself, or simply a good biography, you will find Alice Schroeder’s book well worth your time.

  • The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

    Who?

    Every entrepreneur, marketer, and product manager.

    When?

    Now.

    Why?

    The Long Tail is one of those books that puts changes to world markets in perfect perspective.

    Best Quote

    The three main observations:
    1. the tail of available variety is far longer than we realize
    2. it’s now within the reach economically
    3. all those niches, when aggregated, can make up a significant market – seemed indisputable, especially backed up with heretofore unseen data.

    Review

    Some people have greatly criticized this book by saying that Chris Anderson took one step too far by trying to force the Long Tail model onto market that do not conform to it. I disagree with their critiques.

    Having been exposed to this idea as a result of statistics courses in college and then my work in SEO, I did not find this idea all that shocking. That being said, The Long Tail was a very impressive book. It is extremely well written, and if you’re not familiar with the topic, it is the book to read in order to help understand changes in media and marketplaces of all types and why it is that your one big bet is unlikely to succeed, but your 1,000 little bets all just might.

    Last Word

    Whether you agree with the critiques of The Long Tail or not, Chris Anderson’s book is a must read that will give entrepreneurs, marketers, and product managers significant insight into market fragmentation, indie success, and the growth of niche upon niche upon niche.

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