People

Say What?! Do You Know The Odd Truth About Reviews?

/ Jeff Hora / 1 Comment

How often do you get honest feedback about how you’re doing? I mean, honest….it doesn’t NEED to be brutal, just a truthful, balanced opinion from someone, based on their experience. A large number of businesses are scared of feedback and reviews on their various social media pages. This is despite the fact that this is an important form of social transmission and enhances the word of mouth referrals they value so much in the off-line world. These can make or break a business.

Social proof is a fuzzy concept to some, but basically it is an accumulation of the clues in our environment we use to make decisions when we don’t know the truth (a H/T [Hat Tip] to Mark Schaefer for this clear definition!) Reviews are one avenue for prospects to check you out if they’ve never heard of you before and are considering buying what you offer. Nielsen reports that 84% of people say that online reviews influence their buying decision.

There are two components to successfully working with customer reviews.

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How To Solve the Biggest Problem with Diversity

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There was an item on the local news the other night that I found fascinating. A number of students at the university campus were holding a rally advocating for a Diversity Center as a gathering place that would acknowledge the diversity of the campus and provide a place and programs that would focus on that aspect of their identity.  Given the cash-strapped condition of higher education, my immediate thought was “re-inaugurate the Student Union as the Student Diversity Center and you’re done!”

As I let this information further settle, I began to wonder about the surface focus that our culture has taken in the intervening years between the concepts of Student Union and Student Diversity, what that says about our culture, and the dangers and opportunities this presents, both for our culture, and then, turning the thought on its side, for business.  Yeah, I have an exciting thought life….

Want to Be Heard? Listen…and Hear…

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Detail

Detail (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Do you remember the little plastic animals, usually dogs, that people used to place in the back windows of their cars?  These plastic pooches would nod their heads as the car moved, giving the impression that they were looking around. Sadly, I see this plastic behavior sometimes taking place in meetings I attend. Someone is presenting an idea, a report, training or just carrying on conversation, and some of the people around are making appropriate nods and noises, but their follow-up conversation and engagement belies their inattentiveness.  Even if they ARE listening, they don’t hear what is being said.
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Want To Be Heard? Speak Softly…

/ Jeff Hora / 1 Comment
Lakhovsky: The Convesation; oil on panel (Бесе...

Lakhovsky: The Convesation; oil on panel (Беседа), 51.1 x 61.3 cm (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Who doesn’t want to be heard?  I’ve got things to share and so do you.  Passions, beliefs, information, opinions, jokes…the list is pretty long.

Central to who we are as people and as a community is how well we communicate. Clarity, empathy, and a foundation of understanding of and agreement with terms (I usually refer to this as semantics) help to make communication successful. In my experience, there are a number of behaviors that contribute to “getting heard” in our ongoing communications. Speaking softly is something that seems counter-intuitive, since the natural thing we do if we don’t feel like we’re being heard is SHOUT. However, if you really wish to get focused attention, it is a very useful technique.

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Work-Life Blend: The Holiday Edition

/ Jeff Hora / 2 Comments

It doesn’t matter really. If you’re a solopreneur, a director of a corporate business unit, a team member at an international enterprise or any other kind of role designation, you run into this.

Work and business don’t stop. In a lot of cases, they speed up at this time of year. Yet, you KNOW that you have holiday-related events and such involving family, friends, co-workers and neighbors that are unique and important. As if pressures weren’t high enough, they just got higher. How do you prioritize it all?

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Reliability and Finding the Right Expert for Your Business

/ Jeff Hora / 1 Comment

During a fruitful first meeting with a new colleague and collaborator this week, she mentioned something that really disturbed me.  She has a very healthy graphic design and publishing business and works with a broad array of customers.  She focuses on what she does very well and gives referrals, like any good business, to other businesses that she works with and trusts. However, in a couple of instances she has had to give referrals to customers for solopreneurs she didn’t know as well, particularly in the digital and social media marketing areas.

Sadly, both she and her customers “got bitten.” Although I haven’t gotten the complete story, apparently the solo businesses gladly took the referrals, promised the moon, seriously under-delivered and then disappeared. My colleague looked bad and her customers had a less than wonderful experience, as well as losing money and time.

Wow.  Just Wow….

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Trust, Relationships and #H2H

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Recently a friend of mine made a long-ish post on Facebook. It was an apology and a mea culpa. Although I had missed the earlier post she referred to, she stated that she was caught off-guard by other people’s reaction to it. She said that, in retrospect, she agreed with one friend of hers that had actually reached out to her about it: it was an offensive and prejudicial post. She apologized for the first post, a very real and human thing to do.

What she was hurt by was the fact that a number of her ‘friends’ had ‘un-friended’ her (in Facebook vernacular…) without asking her about the post, commenting on it, or even just responding in some way. She couldn’t understand why people who knew her would react in such a knee-jerk manner without asking her why she felt this way or further questioning the post.

I feel her experience points to a couple of challenges with building relationships online as well as some bad habits we’ve cultivated along the way. Continue reading →

Now What?!

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Every business hits this wall at some time.

Whether your just starting out, ALMOST to profitability, have a “going concern” or are well-established, sooner or later something either organic (like growth of your customer base) or externally realized (your top salesperson and top delivery person get married and move out of the state), “Now What?!” happens to you.

How do you respond?

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Co-working and #H2H

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Citizen Space, a coworking space in San Franci...

Citizen Space, a coworking space in San Francisco, CA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to the U.S. Census, more than half (51.6 percent) of all businesses that responded to the 2007 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) were operated primarily from someone’s home in 2007. Just over 72 percent are sole proprietorships.

What does this mean?
It means there are a lot of us sitting in a room by ourselves a lot of the time.  When the need to focus is keen, this can be really helpful. However, we are human beings, and none of us operates all that well in a workplace vacuum.

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A Prairie Dog Place

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English: A black-tailed prairie dog at the Nat...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have always found pictures of prairie dogs popping up from their burrows to be hilarious. There’s something about the idea of this small animal getting a better view of its surroundings that just makes me smile. This made me think of some experiences I’ve had lately with smaller local businesses.

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