Released late in 2009, it’s already a best seller. Its author is a well-known psychiatrist, consultant, business coach. He also wrote Get Out of Your Own Way and Get Out of Your Own Way at Work. He writes a leadership column for FastCompany and is a syndicated columnist, including columns for The Huffington Postand Psychology Today. Three times named one of America’s top psychiatrists by the Consumers’ Research Council of America, he is frequently quoted or featured in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Newsweek and others. You may catch him on CNN, NPR, Fox News, or on BBC-TV.
You probably felt that way about information overload BEFORE you added social media to your daily routine. Now you, me and everyone else are drowning in a swirling sea of data, appeals, ads, options, opt-ins, opt-outs and so many pop-up screens we’re all pooped-out. The problem is, as business owners and leaders, we still have to communicate and connect.
On my radio show, Social Media Professor, I spoke with someone who can help: Sam Horn. Sam is someone who knows how to make product names, taglines and headlines POP! She assures us we “don’t have to have an MBA or a multimillion-dollar budget to create one-of-a-kind ideas, products, and messages. All you need is the POP! Process: a fun, fascinating, and strategic approach for making your message purposeful, original, and pithy—to generate instant intrigue and word-of-mouth buzz.”
Just ran across John Moore’s manifesto from 2007. He takes up the challenge published by Howard Shultz, the founder of Starbucks. Leading up to 2007, Shultz seriously considered where the company was headed, and didn’t like what he saw. He challenged the company to get back to being a coffee store.
Me at Starbucks in southern Georgia in 2008
John Moore became a recognized marketing genius as he went from being a barista to THE marketing guy at Starbucks. When he read the Shultz Challenge, he put together a manifesto: What Must Starbucks Do? In it, he outlines a beautiful case for how the pursuit profit and the approval of Wall Street are diluting the Starbucks brand.
“Differentiate or Die!” Great title for a book. Sound objective in practice, too. Here’s the big question: what’s your referent? What exactly do you want to be different from and where are you looking for your benchmark?
On purpose, I ask small business owners this specific question, “How are you different?” I say, on purpose, because I purposely keep the question short, leaving it wide open for their own interpretation. You probably already know how every single answer begins. (Want me to give you a minute to think about it? Okay…ready?)
Twitter’s hot. It’s been around long enough for a whole host of tools to crop up to support your experience of Twitter. Would you please take a few moments to complete a survey about the tools you’re using? I’ll do a follow up post giving you the results, along with links to all of the tools.
“What do I tweet about?”pops up often during the Q&A session of my presentations. Social media consultant Keith Burtis gives good counsel in response, “no one cares about your products…tap into their passions.”
What would you talk about here? The product or the person? What would HE want to talk about?
The first step in creating something valuable for your audience is to think and feel what your audience is feeling. Tom Asacker in A Little Less Conversation, p. 61
Empathy: getting really close to folks so you can almost see it from their eyes and feel it as they do
There’s never been a better time for small businesses and independents to leverage technology and excel! Asacker says you’ll need to “go deep” in your relationship with your marketplace. Deep enough, in fact, to
With services like BlogTalkRadio.com every business, no matter its size, can have its own radio talk show!
Here’s what’s on-deck for the Social Media Professor radio show program. The show airs most Tuesdays from 11:30am to 12:00pm Eastern Time, USA. You can listen and call into the show through Blog Talk Radio or call in to 01-646-716-4404.
How ’bout some energetic, slightly irreverent, but oh-so-right young blood into the social media scene? Tune into the Social Media Professor show on BlogTalkRadio.com February 2, 2010 at 11:30am ET USA to hear Michelle Chmielewski. She’ll be sending a couple bottles of enthusiasm and fresh perspective at the max your bandwidth can handle.
By day she’s the community manager for international online brand monitoring powerhouse Synthesio. The rest of the time, she’s just pure inspiration.
If you have questions for Michelle, feel free to leave them in the comments below.
To hear and be a part of the show, tune in at 11:30am ET USA to the Social Media Professor. You can also call into the show at 01-646-716-4404
Due to the interest and viral-ility of today’s post on the social media revolution, it seems folks would probably enjoy Did You Know 4.0. Even though this video has made the rounds already, it’s still worth viewing again and again. It’s especially helpful to send to prospects (and even your skeptical boss; you know, the one who prints out his email, writes the response, and gives it to an assistant to process).
Trying to convince your boss to unblock Facebook and Twitter at work? Wishing he would see the value of this thing called social media? Here’s a video that’d light Joe Friday up: it’s just the facts.
DIY Tip:The original format of this video was too big for my Thesis WordPress column. I could either let it run into the second column, or resize the video. Here’s a handy tool to help you calculate the proper aspect ratio in case you need to resize a video. You’ll need to go into the HTML view of WordPress and change the video dimensions and the player dimensions.
Theodore Levitt stoked the Marketing Imagination by asking, “What business are you in?” He classicly kept the fire going by suggesting companies had “marketing myopia”—a too narrow vision on who they were. Peter Drucker came first, though, by asking in his 1946 blockbuster The Effective Executive, “what business are you in and what business ought you be in?” Both modern American grandfathers of business insight felt the telos of business (the end toward which all things are directed) would inform and direct every other decision.
Seems that Tom Asacker would agree. The telos Asacker envisions will no doubt be unsettling to many:
What is the goal of business? As one classically trained in American business, I can confidently quote to you the textbook answer:
The goal of business is to increase shareholder wealth.
While one might think “shareholder wealth” would be open to interpretation, I’ll put your mind at rest by letting you know the almost universal understanding of the term is MONEY.
This being the third installment of a review of Tom Asacker’s profound book A Little Less Conversation, and in keeping with my initial claim that Tom’s a fellow contrarian, I’ll start by making the bodacious claim that the goal of business is most certainly NOT to increase shareholder wealth!
For a 169 page, small format book, Tom Asacker’s A Little Less Conversation packs powerful profundity. In my last post I recounted the five major trends Tom foresees. Today I was planning on tackling his next profound topic: happiness. Since I just read Immanuel Kant’s treatise on happiness, my head is spinning too much to assimilate those two thinkers. However, I’ll take a shot at giving you enough to get your head spinning, too.
