Conversation

JUNE’S BEST – LinkedIn, Trust, and Making The Most of Your Content

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July - Celebrate!

July – Celebrate!

July is upon us, and we here in the States are getting ready for our annual tribute to patriotism, fireworks and barbecues!
June was a bumper crop month for quality content across the digital marketing industry, and I’m only too happy to share the top articles I’ve read:

LinkedIn Ninja Tricks!

LinkedIn Ninja Tricks!

 

 
Facebook seems to get the attention from online sources (granted, cracking the 2 billion users mark is noteworthy…), but many of the businesses I speak with are still kind of scratching their head when it comes to LinkedIn. This top list of tips and tricks from Melonie Dodaro will get you to that next level of skill in using this great professional channel.

Sincerity

Sincerity

 

 
Sincerity and Trust have been the key components for strong customer and business relationships since forever. Building them online isn’t impossible, but it is different. This article introduces some areas of consideration about communication and how you do this. The line between communication and action is pretty clear.

Credibility

Credibility

 

 
Beyond getting found, your website needs to build and maintain your professional credibility. If you’re wondering how a website can do that, then you will find this article Laura Forer of MarketingProfs very, very valuable.

My Community

My Community

 

 
When I speak about online relationships, I refer to the mental model I call VACC (Visitors / Audience / Customers / Community). In this insightful article, Irfan Ahmad digs into how a business can approach this with Facebook Groups, an underutilized resource for most businesses. If you take this on, you’re ALREADY in the lead, since chances are your competition ISN’T doing it!

Social Media Posts

Social Media Posts

 
 
So, that post from last Tuesday blew the doors off in Shares and Comments! WOO-HOO!!!!! Now, how can you leverage what was obviously a Great Piece of Content again and take advantage of it’s quality and virality? Here are 5 ways to look at….

 

Reuse That Content!

Reuse That Content!

As a follow-on to the previous article, how do you take that premier article you’ve written and reuse (or “slice & dice”…) it in such a way that you can make the most of it. Here are nine ways you could repurpose it and reach oven more of an interested audience. Remember, everyone has a preferred way of communicating, and by doing this you are making practical use of that fact!

Business Critical: Listen-To-Understand

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Listening-to-understand

Listening-to-understand

I wrote an earlier article called Listening is Visual that was about a trip during my last corporate job to Florida to meet with some technical community leaders there. I had planned to do “the usual”: I had created a PowerPoint presentation that represented the bullet points I would talk to and would help guide the discussion.  However, there was no projector and no real place to project, anyway. So much for the presentation and what seemed like control of the meeting.

What originally looked like a standard meeting became much more valuable! The real listening, the responses, the dialogue that took place was really wonderful and very valuable. I came away with a great understanding of their passions and concerns.

Since that time I have made “listen-to-understand“ my goal in every meeting.

…I cannot emphasize this enough…

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Rudeness Wrecks Everything

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Rudeness

Rudeness

According to an article recently published in the New York Times, rudeness, even just “slight incivility”, has a negative impact upon those exposed to it. The article concerns a study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics by several co-authors from the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University and the Bnai Zion Medical Center.

The objectives of the study were:
  • “Rudeness is routinely experienced by medical teams. We sought to explore the impact of rudeness on medical teams’ performance and test interventions that might mitigate its negative consequences.”
The conclusions were:
  • “Rudeness has robust, deleterious effects on the performance of medical teams. Moreover, exposure to rudeness debilitated the very collaborative mechanisms recognized as essential for patient care and safety. Interventions focusing on teaching medical professionals to implicitly avoid cognitive distraction such as CBM may offer a means to mitigate the adverse consequences of behaviors that, unfortunately, cannot be prevented.”

I also read an article by Valeria Maltoni entitled “Alain de Botton’s Ten Virtues of the Modern Age.” Alain de Botton is, among other things, a prolific author and founder of the School of Life. (I highly recommend following these links and finding out more…). The reason this article resonated so much with me as I thought about the rudeness study is the potential solution the Virtues present to the problem of rudeness in our societies.

Unfortunately, our society has begun to prize rudeness over civility. While the most rabid examples can easily be found or recalled from the past election season here in the US, it’s been around for a very long time. We justify it by saying that we’re just “being real”. I have witnessed numerous scenes in corporate meetings and relationships where the cutting remark or put-down was used to discredit someone’s idea, derail a conversation, or redirect a discussion that wasn’t going someone’s way. One of several articles I published reviewed how this can severely impact innovation and communication, making success or even progress highly unlikely.

The study cited earlier showed that the rude remark has a global negative effect on physical performance, cognitive performance, communications and teamwork for a significant time after the comment is made. While this has potentially life-ending effects in health care, was does this imply for business?

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How Hard Is It To Actually Listen Online?

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Listening

Listening

Listening to the various voices online looks very different from listening to someone sitting across from you. You don’t get visual cues, body language, tone or very much context. Valeria Maltoni has written that “Listening is the most valuable skill nobody teaches.”

I’ve written in the past about the difference between “listen-to-respond” and “listen-to-understand”. Much else has been written and discussed about the importance of active listening, listening without judging, and the like. We concede its importance, but where is it taught? How is it learned? If learned in some way, do we use it, or do we fall back into “listen-to-respond” or, worse, blocking what others have to say because it doesn’t align with what we already know or believe? Do we actually believe that we can’t be wrong or include new information that will clarify or change what we know?

Are we REALLY THAT ARROGANT?

In business, you can play the role of a Subject Matter Expert (SME) online, which is quite helpful for your customers and audience. Doing so builds your reputation and gains recognition for you as someone “with the answers.” Of course, you have to keep working on that all the time, especially if you work in an area that is constantly in flux (which is most professions….). But, as long as you honestly work to deliver true and helpful answers, you’re good.

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Do You Win or Do We Win?

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Winning

Winning

Winning.

It is an obsession across cultures, sports, politics, businesses, you name it. If I win, you lose. There is no common goal or understanding. There is only I WIN.

There are, of course, different definitions of winning for different situations, players, and time. By time, I mean that no “win” is permanent.
  • The Romans won until the Goths won.
  • The Royalty of France won until the Revolution….and then there was Napoleon….he won until he didn’t.
  • The Russian Czars won until the Revolution, and that Revolution won until it collapsed.
  • Alta Vista (a search engine, for those of you who remember…) won….until Google.

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Best of November: TOP POSTS – No Turkeys Here!

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Can you believe it? Thanksgiving is past and we are all on the short countdown to Christmas!? Well, while you were trying to finish off the Halloween candy AND putting together the grocery list for Thanksgiving, there have been a LOT of article published that deserve your attention…..I’ve gone through them and cherry-picked the most relevant ones for you!

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Fall Reading List

Fall Reading List

One of my favorite sites to read, Conversation Agent by Valeria Maltoni, posted the seasonal reading list. I know your reading list is already pretty long, as is mine, but her recommendations always lead to revisit and lengthen mine. I’m sure this list will do the same for you!

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OPEN UP: Do You Short Circuit A Valuable Conversation?

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Angry Meme

Wrong Kind of Meme

Like many Americans, I have begun paying a lot closer attention to “the news” online in the run-up to the election this week. I have chosen to visit The Guardian (US. Edition) as a primary news site, since they are globally known as a credible news source and run articles ASIDE FROM ELECTION NEWS, which is a bit of a breather from US – based news organizations. Even their view of our election offers some deeper articles about the tides that effect both sides and all constituencies here, which is refreshing and gets me to think….always a good thing!

They published an article this past week entitled “Meme warfare: how the power of mass replication has poisoned the US election.”  In this article Douglas Haddow writes a bit about the evolution of memes on the Internet and how they have evolved. He notes that they can be fun, stupid and/or infuriating. What they are NOT is helpful in developing debate or conversation. Here is his definition of memes (so we can all know what exactly we’re thinking about here…):

“Memes – from the Greek for “that which is imitated” – were once defined as being self-replicating units of culture. This included anything that could be learned, remembered and spread from one brain to another, such as the concept of god all the way to the popular Budweiser “ Wazzup” catchphrase.
 
Through the Internet  the idea moved from the conceptual sphere into the viscous reality of data and pixels, transforming it into something more traceable: a segment of media that is copied rapidly. This includes images, text, video, a combination of all three and sometimes real-world actions.”

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How Do You Focus To Listen?

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Listen-To-Understand

Listen-To-Understand

There is a budding resurgence taking place concerning the importance of Conversation in life and business. Not that a lot of the words aren’t just hanging out there, dissipating in the wind. A lot of businesses grab the “shiny thing” when it comes to the latest discussions and thinking around whatever can keep us growing, or at least “safe.” I still experience an enormous amount of Telling and Broadcasting instead of Conversation and Engagement, both online and off-line. Even conversation has numerous forks in the concept, the largest two seem to be “listening-to-reply” and “listening-to-understand.”
A few years ago I wrote an article about the abundance of LIKING-type behavior online in comparison to the actual conversation taking place. Businesses were still trying to figure out this new paradigm where the customers actually controlled the brand perceptions, and NOT the BRAND controlling them. Along with the immature capabilities for measuring real engagement and the misunderstanding surrounding the actual meaning and value of a LIKE or a FOLLOW or a “+1” meant that the definitions of success were too fuzzy, and likely incorrect.
Things are different now.

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There are some CHANGES you should know about….

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Changes

CHANGE – And Now For Something Different

Change signifies life and the movement through time we all take part in. The dual focus I have taken within this blog has been about things I have a long-time and deep abiding interest in AND the phenomenon we loosely and broadly call “social media” and the business and more human aspects of it.

As of this past few weeks my more business-focused writing will take place on the blog that is part of my new Social Sapiens site. Some of those will be cross-posted here (and vice versa…) as they have aspects of my passion for being human online or how what happens online impacts us in real life. I intend to continue to write for this blog in broader areas that include many of the things I’ve written about before, but that business owners and entrepreneurs may or may not find as directly pertinent to their bottom lines (although my hope is that the work published here will be valuable and thought-provoking to whomever takes the time to read and consider it…).

Please join me on my other blog soon, and keep your eye here for more articles too!

 

AUGUST SAMPLER: 5 Informative and Imaginative Posts For You!

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The end of summer is upon us. These diverse articles will tickle your imagination and start you thinking about what your autumn online activities might be!

10 Social Media Myths

10 Social Media Myths

 Many times I must slip into “Mythbusters” Mode when speaking to groups about what’s real, what’s imaginary, and what’s merely perceived when it comes to social media. These 10 myths are not comprehensive, but they do cover many of the common misperceptions. If you have more questions, let me know!

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