You Should Mix Your Personal and Professional Lives

It's an important and frequent question: should I put personal information on my professional networks? Should I put professional information on my personal networks?

Yes.

I like blurring the lines between the personal and professional halves of my life. For one thing, it's part of my brand. I'm a humor writer and fiction writer in my off-time, and I don't mind sharing that with my professional network. So I'll occasionally post something funny to Twitter and LinkedIn. And I'm a small business owner, author, and speaker, so I'll share work-related items on Twitter and Facebook. In fact, Twitter is the place where I will absolutely blur the lines. Followers on Twitter get Erik the Dad as well as Erik the Business Owner.

There are a very few instances you don't want to do this: you're a spy, or in the witness protection program. Or you work for an idiot of a boss who thinks that you should never, ever reveal to the outside world that you have an identity outside of work, let alone a family, home, and hobbies. (Stop working for this guy.)

But other than that, mix away! Mix your personal and professional lives. Brag to your professional network about the fish you caught over the weekend at the lake. Tell your personal friends about the speech in England you've been invited to give.

We are, supposedly, well-adjusted people who lead full and rich lives. We seek to find that balance between work and personal. There is no one in this world, except maybe your idiot boss, who lives and breathes their work life to the exclusion of everything else.

So why do people try to hide the fact that they have a personal life from their professional network, or never discuss their work lives with their personal friends?

While I'm not advocating completely mixing of the two halves of your life, I am suggesting that you let some information about each trickle over to the other.

Things NOT to Share

There are a few things you cannot and should not share with your other network.

• Don't share proprietary company news with your personal network. (Don't share it with your professional network either.)
• Don't violate HIPAA or other privacy rules.
• Don't share 'intimate' details with your professional network. (Don't share it with your personal network either, especially if they're icky.)
• Don't gossip about people at work on your personal networks. You might have accidentally friended them a long time ago on Facebook. Or might have some mutual friends you didn't know about.
• Don't share your political ideology to your professional network. While it may be fine for talk around the office, it may not be appropriate to your professional contacts online.
• Don't share the same overly-sappy, happy, puppies-and-rainbows inspirational quotes on LinkedIn that you do on Facebook. Also, keep them off Twitter (there's nothing actually wrong with doing it, I just hate them).
• If you tend to be more of the vicious shark in the business world, try not to let that part of your personality spill over into your personal world.
• Similarly, if you happen to be a right-brained, artsy-fartsy type at home, that may not fly at work, especially if you work for a bank or an accounting firm.

Things TO Share

Everything else.

Author:

Erik Deckers is the owner of Professional Blog Service, and the co-author of Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself. His new book, No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing. He is also a humor writer and satirist, which hopefully you figured out before you got this far into this blog post.

BI Software Solutions ' Dispel CEO Confusion About Big Data

With all this talk of Big Data, companies implementing it for their business intelligence software have an advantage. However, skepticism isn't all that far behind. Fortunately, one can get a basic idea of what CEOs might be thinking when they're considering the advantages of big data. Forbes magazine published last month about 5 big data questions that CEOs must ask but now you can also use these questions to prepare an appropriate response:

'CEOs are starting to wonder if big data is for real and if it can deliver a significant competitive edge to their businesses. It's critical to qualify the risks and rewards upfront, because big data can get expensive fast.'

From the questions in the article, you can already formulate a response or at least know what to expect when pursuing a CEO as a possible lead for business intelligence.

1. Keep the benefits simple.

Simple doesn't necessarily mean insignificant. It means that despite all the big numbers and advanced, technical details, you should only demonstrate how it can actually help. Show direct links between your big data features and the advantages of the information it can provide. Make it easy to understand. Remember, CEOs are only human and there are limits to how much information they can take. And from the first question, one can also conclude that there's only so much they will find relevant to what they want for their business. (In this case, they need to know if all that information can give them an idea on what decisions to make.)

2. Be upfront with the costs.

'The cost of building and integrating the big data stack, including staff, can easily run into the millions for a large enterprise.'

If you can, try to keep this from happening. Some might find it petty but a CEO has every right to know how much money a big data project is going to cost their business. Once you've set an appointment and are meeting with your intended decision maker, be honest with the cost even if they didn't ask for it immediately. It's better to stun them with a price that's a lot higher than they expected instead of dishonestly claiming it is lower when the end result is still as expensive.

3. Show how to measure the results.

In relation to #1, you need to demonstrate how this will translate into results. Remember, don't bombard them with too many details. You still have to keep things simple enough for them to understand. Inform them of what they will need in order to analyze the information and illustrate how it impacts the business.

4. Give an accurate measure of how long results take to come in.

Again, honesty is the best policy. You can fine-tune your software to process as fast as possible but that should only give you more reason to give an accurate measure of its speed. Knowing that speed will not just affect their decision to acquire. It will affect the way they time its use in the even that they do accept your software solution.

These answers can apply anywhere in the sales process (from the early marketing stage to when you're finally attempting to close the deal). It's just a matter of making it compact. Simplify these answers for your lead generator but slowly expand upon them should a prospect take more interest. To summarize, you have to make the process easy to understand from a CEOs perspective and keep honesty in mind at all times.

Customer Service Manager Tip of the Day: Create Effective Incentives for Your Team

As a customer service manager, you undoubtedly deal with employees who lack motivation, or who just need that extra kick to get them in gear. You have metrics you have to hit, but you're running out of ways to keep your team focused on the goal.

Sometimes, all people need are some extra incentives and rewards'both tangible and otherwise.

Incentives Certainly Aren't A New Idea'But Do They Work?

Most likely, your company already has a set of reward and recognition systems in place. A recent article that profiled a WorldatWork survey states that 86 percent of companies use recognition tools as part of their corporate strategy. In the customer support world, in particular, customer service managers use incentives to attract star agents and build teams. When administered correctly, incentives help foster employee loyalty and company pride. However, it's worth examining'are incentives effective?

Interestingly, many companies aren't sure. Another study found that 37% of employees don't know how satisfied their employees are with the company recognition program, and 15% claimed that their employees don't find the rewards program beneficial.

So, before you go to order a box load of engraved pens, don't add them to your virtual shopping cart until you answer the following questions:

1. What rewards are applicable in a customer service environment?
2. How will you measure the effectiveness of the incentives?

Incentives, Rewards, Goals, etc.

You want to be an effective customer service manager, and you want your employees to both respect you and be motivated to work for you. So what kinds of rewards work in the fast-paced, high-pressure environment of call centers?

Interestingly, in employee surveys we've seen, people aren't motivated solely by money. Believe it or not, but many contact center employees find the idea of new skills and knowledge a great incentive'if they know that it will lead to a promotion or job enhancement. Below is a list of rewards that we've seen customer service managers have success with:

• Additional customer service training'when it leads to the potential for advancement
• Better work environment and working conditions
• Job security
• Bonuses/commissions
• Employer contributions to work plans
• Options for flexible schedules

But the Most Effective Incentives Customer Service Managers Use '

The most motivating rewards are strategic in nature. By strategic, we mean that when customer service managers are devising an incentive program, they first think through the following points:

The incentives are tied to a specific goal. Typically, incentives are tied to a goal dealing with productivity, metrics, or quality. First, outline the goal you want your agents to reach, and make sure it's an obtainable goal. For example, if your current CSAT rate is at 78, and you want it to be at 90 in three months'that's probably not realistic.

Let your agents choose their incentives. You know who knows what incentives are motivating? The people receiving them. It's appropriate for customer service managers to involve agents in figuring out which rewards will be enticing.

Make the process part of the goal. Instead of just saying, 'Here's the goal ' go!' make the process of achieving the goal rewarding. This doesn't mean that every moment will be a theme park ride (sometimes you have to wait in line, after all), but you can create energy around the challenge of working toward the goal. It's helpful to give agents progress reports as they make their way along.

In Conclusion, Measure Your Efforts

Hey! Great! Another metric for you to track! Don't panic'this one is much easier, then, say, average handle time. It is important to make sure that your incentives are working, even if you've had input from your team on designing the reward program. You can devise a simple employee satisfaction survey and also monitor productivity statistics and turnover ratios to gauge the efficacy of your rewards program.

Interested in learning more tips on how to improve as a customer service manager? Browse our resource library for hundreds of useful articles and tips.

The Key Startup Advice That Helped Shape myYearbook (now MeetMe)

Good advice is hard to come by. When you are in a leadership position, people tend to ask you for advice rather than offer their own. Therefore, it is important for entrepreneurs to seek out advice from all sources, whether it roots from other companies, good books, caring parents or British politicians! Here are three pieces of advice that shaped myYearbook (now known as MeetMe), and my life:

1. Don't be afraid to make (and measure) mistakes. Winston Churchill said, 'Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.' While it is extremely disheartening to have something fail ' something you have been working on for months and months ' what you learn is invaluable. Not every feature launch is a success, and not every update has game-changing results. If you are too worried about making mistakes, then you don't give yourself room to innovate. Many decisions, especially as they pertain to new technology, need to be made very quickly, before enough information is known ' making mistakes much more likely. If you're not making mistakes, then you're not making decisions. However, not learning from your mistakes will lead to failure. The only way to learn from the mistakes is to have good measures of impact. At myYearbook, we have a metrics-driven culture and can quickly assess how a new product or feature is performing. It's a cliché, but as the saying goes, 'The only failure is not to try.' Take the risk, but be sure to track it.
2. Be about one thing. Google believes that 'It's best to do one thing really, really well.' When we started myYearbook, we had a broad mission. We wanted to be where you go to have fun and connect with any type of friend ' new or old. But it didn't feel right. As time went on, our message became more crisp and we realized the value in Google's wisdom firsthand. Over the first few years, we narrowed our focus and became about being less, not more. Instead of trying to continue to compete with Facebook as another social networking platform, we completely broke off into a different category ' the meeting network. As a meeting network, we do one thing ' connect you with people who you want to know, not people you already know. This allowed us to focus our product and create features specifically around meeting new people, giving us considerable growth in the U.S. without spreading ourselves too thin.
3. Take a break. When I am working on something for a while and at a standstill, my mom always tells me to go to bed and try again in the morning with a clear and fresh head. It's wise advice that I try to follow and nearly always leads to a better idea, a clearer picture or a better perspective. When I am stressed out or deep in thought, I know that I can go for a run or get some fresh air, and even if I don't solve the problem right away, I'm always glad I took the break. It's also important to know when to end your work day. When I graduated college, I decided to live 20 minutes away from the office instead of in the same town so that I would be able to maintain a sense of unwinding by 'going home.' Even if you're doing something you love, you still need to rest from it once in a while to clear your head. The breaks don't have to be long; it's whatever best suits you at the time. I think it would be hard to stay sane without those little breaks.

Catherine Cook is the co-founder of myYearbook, now known as MeetMe, a social network for meeting new people. She is responsible for creating some of the most important features and applications on MeetMe and has been instrumental in driving the company's growth on web and mobile. myYearbook merged with the Quepasa Corporation in November 2011 and in June 2012 rebranded to MeetMe, Inc. With the rebrand, MeetMe launched a 4th of July aerial campaign at beaches across the country.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC recently published #FixYoungAmerica: How to Rebuild Our Economy and Put Young Americans Back to Work (for Good), a book of 30+ proven solutions to help end youth unemployment.

photo by: awezmaz

Legal Marketing: Why Law Firms Need to Move from Push to Pull

'We are the Number 1 legal practice'' We've lost count of the times that we've seen this statement 'grace' the pages of a professional service website. Yes, that might well be the case but in the digital age such a proclamation carries little weight unless it is backed up by examples, client testimonials and content that proves your credibility. If the services a law firm offers are really so outstanding, then surely there are ways to showcase that online.

While this sounds like a no-brainer, you still see some law firm websites looking more like an online brochure than a digital hub ' promotional, exclusively self-referential, relying on broadcast messages and reminiscent of the web relics that were around in the mid-1990s.

The reason for legal companies' reluctant adoption of digital, some will argue, is that generally speaking, professional services get a lot of their business through referrals and word-of-mouth recommendations, and so, creating content and engaging with people online is not on their priority list. But as Bob Dylan sings in his eponymous song, 'The Times They Are a-Changin''.

78% of consumers research services online before making a commitment to buy, with law firms we've worked with finding it increasingly difficult to attract clients through interruptive advertising and traditional 'push' marketing techniques. Your audience and prospective clients are online helping themselves to the most relevant information that they are seeking. Are you doing anything to attract and engage them?

If the answer is 'no', it is time to make the move from a promotional to a client-focused online strategy.

Why inbound marketing is a natural fit for law firms

There are some compelling factors (both internal and external) that hammer home the need to adopt an inbound internet marketing solution.

The external, contextual reasons have to do with the major shift in consumer behaviour and habits, which is taking place with the advent of social media. Internet users have transformed from passive recipients to active producers (and co-producers) of content. They not only want to find information; they want to engage with it, and so, they now demand strong and powerful user experiences. Old-fashioned 'push' marketing tactics are losing their effectiveness and giving way to methods that reflect the new consumer behaviour.

The internal inbound capabilities may not be that obvious ' despite traditionally being late adopters of technological innovation, legal firms have some of the best content resource at their disposal. What better match for inbound marketing, which is about attracting and engaging people through valuable, quality content? Since online users look for credible, thought-leading content, the existing powerful in-house resource ' subject-matter experts specialising in different sections of the law ' can be leveraged to the company's business advantage.

This eliminates one of B2B companies' greatest woes ' the lack of in-house content development capabilities. Lawyers know their respective field inside-out; they are usually excellent writers and would make the most natural thought leaders if they put metaphorical pen to paper and committed to a sustained social media presence. This would not only establish the individual lawyers as thought leaders in their specific field but would also add credibility and boost the exposure of their law firm.

Inbound internet marketing is a tried-and-true comprehensive strategy that matches the dynamic nature of consumer habits in the digital space. Putting valuable, industry leading content at its core, inbound marketing changes the focus from 'push' to 'pull' ' a much-needed move for forward-thinking legal firms looking to meet the challenges of the digital age.

Learn more about inbound marketing for legal pracices by downloading our complimentary White Paper.

Image credit: audiophilia via Flickr/Creative Commons

3 Steps To A Customer-Driven Marketing Plan

Is your marketing strategy driven by what you have to sell or the market needs you best fulfill?

If there's one theme that weaves through most of my content, it's that successful marketing together it's a relentless focus on the customer. And the biggest marketing mistake you can make is to just focus on what you have to sell.

I often use one of my favorite inspirational quotes on marketing from Peter Drucker: 'the aim of marketing is to know the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.'

But how do you get to know your customers? You cannot speak to all of them. But there are a few simple ways to use research and a customer-first mindset to drive effective marketing strategy'

The 'Attention Economy'

We are living in a time when the main scarcity is our target audience's time and attention. No matter who you are selling to, your customers still have product and service needs. And they have information, education and entertainment needs as well.

But according to Nielsen, our customers see more than 2,000 marketing messages every single day. The battle for customer attention has moved from a battle of the message, the medium or the technology to one of customer insights.

Thomas Davenport and J.C. Beck define attention economics as: 'As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information. Attention economics applies insights from other areas of economic theory to enable content consumers, producers, and intermediaries to better mediate and manage the flow of information in light of the scarcity of consumer attention.' (Wikipedia)

Step 1: Speak to a Customer

The best way to gain insights into your target customers is to ask them. Or at least ask a sample of them. Pick some of your best customers, your most-recognized ones or simply the ones who are most open to providing you with feedback.

This is also a really cost-efficient and highly-effective way to develop content on a low budget:

• Ask them about ALL the challenges they faced that led them to seek a solution
• Ask them how they found you
• Ask them what content they looked for and where at each stage of the buying journey
• Ask them why they chose you

You can use these answers to develop testimonial videos, blog posts, webcasts, whitepapers and more marketing content for each stage of the buying journey. And then look to distribute the content in all of the places they told you where they went looking.

Step 2: Formal Research

Having been a sales and marketing professional for both a traditional and a syndicated market research firm, I can promise you that I am not a research purist. But the fact is that formal research is dreadfully under-funded in most organizations.

Like the more informal or qualitative research mentioned above, formal customer insight research should seek to understand the key challenges and issues facing your target customers. It should identify all the challenges they are facing and the relative priorities of each. And it should identify the relative priority of channels where they seek information and the content formats they are looking for at each stage of buyer journey.

Step 3: Keyword Research

Everyone uses a search engine at some point in the buying process. And understanding the keywords they use is not just a good idea for marketing, it is a fundamental need of the business to understand the keywords your customers are using when they search for information.

Keyword research allows you to get inside the minds of your buyers to know what they are thinking at the exact moment when they have a content need. So my suggestion is for every business to build a search-driven marketing plan. Some Resources to help:

• Google Insights: allows you to see keyword trends over time.
• Google keyword tool: helps you see the volume of different keywords and also makes suggestions for other keywords to consider.

What stops your business from moving to a customer-driven marketing plan?

One Reason People Aren't Buying On Your Website

If your website visitors aren't calling, opting in, or buying anything, it may be because of this fixable problem.

Write to one in person' keep them in mind

'The people coming to my website aren't doing anything. They come, they browse, then they leave' without contacting me, opting in, or buying anything. Why?'

This is a very common question' and problem.

How can you solve this dilemma?

Overcoming The 'Just Browsing' Syndrome

First, by understanding that website searchers are there hoping to find something that will help them:

1. Solve a problem they have (your product or service is that possible solution).

2. Provide information they need

Does your site offer what they are looking for? If not, they won't stay.

Ok, let's assume your website is relevant to what they are searching for. Why won't they respond?

John Jantsch suggests several possible reasons. Let me suggest one super important reason: Value v. Price.

Perceived Value Of What You Offer

Imagine for a moment that you are on the internet to find something. Let's say you are trying to figure out what to do about your current hot water situation.

You family is regularly complaining about not having enough hot water.

'You used up all the hot water!'
' You ALWAYS use up all the hot water'
'I get to shower first this time' last time there wasn't any hot water when it was my turn!'

You can imagine the bickering.

So you are motivated to find out what water heating solutions are out there.

One option you run across is to upgrade your current water heater to a tankless water heater. It promises never to run out of hot water.

Perfect!

But, as you evaluate your options, you determine that the cost to upgrade is pretty high.

In other words, the value of this solution does not exceed the price for the solution.

Shifting The Balance

What can the website owner do to overcome this?

You can magnify the value side of the equation' or minimize the price side of the equation.

1. Periodically run a sale to see if it helps push people over the top to make a decision.  This reduces the price and by default increases the value proposition.

2. Show them how the new water heater will pay for itself in 7 years from the energy savings.  This magnifies the value side, and makes the price side seem less significant.

3. Show them how much the water heater costs to run per day, and compare this to a quieter, more harmonious house.  Who wouldn't be willing to pay an extra 22 cents a day for peace?   Here you are elevating the value of this solution (happy family) and reducing the perceived cost.

What can you do to increase your value proposition (real or perceived) compared to price?

If people perceive the value of your product/service, they will happily pay the corresponding price. Are you boosting perceived value? TWEET THIS

What I want you to do with this truth

1. Think through how to apply it to your business website.

2. Pass this article on to someone you know who will benefit from it.

3. Subscribe to this blog for automatic delivery to your inbox of new insights for your business.

4. Get additional ideas on how to get more response from your website visitors by downloading our free website persuasion checklist.