Leading Your Culture Plan

Think back to your best bosses or beloved mentors. Did they remind you of all the doom and gloom? Was it their quest to constantly point out and highlight your flaws and shortcomings? Or did they steer you to focus on your strengths and talents?

Businesses, as with each of us, have plans in place to succeed. No one makes a habit of navigating their work into the proverbial rocks. Yet it happens.

It’s not that we make a plan; it’s that we may not even have the challenges facing in the direction. Whatever gets our attention gets our energy. We often see companies that are risk averse or investors who don't want to lose more money.

Mean What We Do

Imagine you’re at an amusement park enjoying a summer afternoon eating junk food, playing games and enjoying some rides with friends. Suddenly you hear a man yelling. As you get closer, you see he is actually screaming at his two young children. As you get closer still, you can make out what he’s saying; “Get on that ride and have fun!” What do you imagine is the kids reaction?

Having a plan that is flexible is essential. But often we can do what we think we need to do and remain stuck. As leaders, we can push our people to work harder without really knowing that we’re even working in the right direction. Activity and progress can get lost in our pursuit to improve. If our plan is flawed, changing the tactics may not help.

Are your best laid plans and your goals aligned?
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Kneale Mann | Leadership and Culture strategist, writer, speaker, executive coach engaging leaders, collaborative teams, and strong business results.

formspring

Challenging Your Best Laid Plans

If you have read any formal information about marketing, you know about the four P’s.
If you have been exposed to anything with regards to growing business, you have undoubtedly heard the phrase strategy before tactics. And if you have been in the workforce as either a stakeholder or someone who has direct reports, you may be familiar with the difference between a boss and a leader.

So with all the formal and informal training, seemingly endless information and learning why aren’t we living in a world of unlimited success and riches? Politicians are grappling with debt load, companies are making blind cuts in a quest to improve the bottom line and we can’t go anywhere without reading about the global economic crisis. Is it any wonder we have a collective pang in our stomachs most of the time?

Energy and Attention

Now think back to your best bosses or beloved mentors. Did they remind you of all the doom and gloom? Was it their quest to constantly point out and highlight your flaws and shortcomings? Or did they steer you to focus on your strengths and talents?

Businesses, as with each of us, have plans in place to succeed. No one makes a habit of navigating their work into the proverbial rocks. Yet we do it all day long. Our best laid plans may, in fact, be our biggest downfall. It’s not that we make a plan; it’s that we may not even have the challenges facing in the direction. Whatever gets our attention gets our energy. So if we build a plan to get out of a negative spot, our focus isn’t on positive footing but rather eroding foundation.

Mean What We Do

Imagine you’re at an amusement park enjoying a summer afternoon eating junk food, playing games and enjoying some rides. Suddenly you hear a man yelling. As you get closer, you see he is actually screaming at his two young children. As you get closer still, you can make out what he’s saying; “Get on that ride and have fun!” What do you imagine is the kids reaction?

Having a plan that is flexible is essential. But often we can do what we think we need to do and remain stuck. As leaders, we can push our people to work harder without really knowing that we’re even working in the right direction. Activity and progress can get lost in our pursuit to improve. If our plan is flawed, changing the tactics may not help.

Are your best laid plans aligned with what you want to accomplish?

Kneale Mann

image credit: architecture411

Viral Creation and Manufacturing Brands

Myth or Reality?

Many will argue they can create you a brand. It begins with a strong product or service followed by expertly designed look, feel, execution and emotional connection. Your intended customer will embrace such a wondrous entity and share the positive experience with all whom they know. And that simply not true.

Brands cannot be created. That is up to those who have the experience. If you are Canadian, you know the story well. If not, it’s one worth reading about all things branding and viral.

The Legend of Tim’s

If you are from or have ever been to Canada, you know of a phenomenon like few others on earth. It is a cultural and business marvel. And it is named after a legendary hockey player who was one its co-founders. The Tim Horton’s coffee company is one of the most successful franchise models and continues to grow into the U.S. under the expanded name Tim Horton’s Cafe and Bake Shop.

What the company does best is stick to what they do well. It amazes most experts that they can introduce new products all the time and all the while sell hundreds of thousands of gallons of coffee each year. What is equally amazing is that most of their customers have perfectly good coffee makers at home, but prefer to line up with their fellow java junkies for a cup of Tim’s. The future of building relationships and product awareness is through brand experiences customers can share with each other.

People Want More

Tim Horton’s doesn’t serve the most exotic coffee on the planet; it’s certainly not the fanciest joint on the block. However, while others try to dress up their customer experience with high back padded arm chairs and CDs featuring acoustic compilations, sometimes the right model is to get your customers in and out of your store with exactly what they want and expect from you. For that, they will line up.

Will Yours?

Kneale Mann

image credit: the fit gourmet | original: oct 2008

Your Personal Media Experience

One-to-One Rapport

It doesn’t matter if you work in television, radio, advertising, communications, marketing, digital or mobile; your top job is developing audience. You can use words like influence and connection, conversation and relationship but having more people consume your offering gives you a better chance on driving success through whatever metric you decide to employ.

Return on your investment may be measured by revenue or awareness but unless you are independently wealthy, you need to eventually realize results of some kind. So in the quest for advancement, most are hesitant to take chances and things get stuck.

Creating Your Experience

As you know, the word media is plural for medium yet there is plenty of evidence that some feel it is a catch-all phrase. But for the most part we consume media alone through gadgets and channels. And with technological advancements, our experience is more in our individual control every day. Our user experience can be uniquely ours.

You don’t read your Facebook newsfeed with ten other people. You aren’t sending tweets from the control room of a studio. And you are probably not devising your next blog post while mapping out storylines and an editorial calendar with your team. Creating and consumer media is a personal process. There are exceptions but we mostly read, watch, listen, write and interact alone. Our quest to reach and share with others makes the experience social.

Imagine. Create. Share.

Think about your average week. Mine consists of time online, calls, email, writing, maybe a webinar, group calls, business development, client work, proposals, team discussions, driving to appointments and research. Your week may be different but you are conducting most of that work alone through various media.

So when companies talk about gaining more market share or building a brand - which can only be done between customers - they often use averages and demographics, charts and trends and that is valuable information but more times than not our clientele consume our offering alone.

How can you enhance customer need on a personal level?

Kneale Mann

image credit: thecoolgadgets

Starbucks and the Economic Meltdown

As recently as 4-5 years ago, many of us who do business presentations used Starbucks as an aspirational brand. It was the trading up transaction. You would do without something to get that $5 latte and millions of people go into their 17,000 stores every day and do just that. Then the economy took a kicking and suddenly Starbucks was viewed – by some – as too expensive or a frivolous luxury we couldn’t afford.

So instead of assuming what people were doing or thinking, the company thought it would be wise to actually find out. Matthew Guiste is the Director of Global Social Media at Starbucks. In this video presentation, he talks about how they engage millions of fans through Twitter, FourSquare, YouTube, Facebook and various other channels.

Your business may not be as big as Starbucks but this could give you ideas for engaging with your customers.



Kneale Mann

video credit: leaderlab

Finding Your Digital Audience

Don't Wait For it to Find You

The world is travelling at the speed of light and we are trying to hang on just a moment longer to live in the now which has already passed. We are attempting to digest a mind numbing amount of content.  The Harvard Business Review published a piece dealing with the age old interview question: “Where will you be in five years?”

How About Five Minutes?

Depending on the circles you travel, you can feel completely out of sync with your clientele while it seems your competitors are cashing in. I’m asked all the time if YouIntegrate can help. The first step is to find out what you want to do with these digital channels and how you feel it can help you find your audience.

It is easy to create a profile. It is much more difficult to populate it with content that serves both your customers and your business. And it's even more challenging to have the patience for the time it takes to grow the community. After that you need to tend to its health and longevity. Campaign mentality will not create long-term growth.

You can spend a lot of time and money on messaging and media choices to see very little result. Or you can strike gold and then try and replicated it which is rare. The social web is a warm inviting temptress that can woo us into thinking we’re getting somewhere in short order. But there are no quick wins.

Easy Peasey

It is simple to go online, find a place to land and start barking. It is much more difficult to develop strong B2B or B2C relationships through the social web. This stuff takes time. If you look at how you built your business so far, it is the same process.

Mitch Joel wrote this week about the Mutterings of Twitter. He explained that we can easily pull out our smartphone at the check-in counter the moment our flight is delayed and send out an angry tweet or Facebook status update. The real-time web has given us the ability to publish material for free in an instant. The key is for companies to be with their customers all along so responses to service issues can be addressed. If they aren't there, they can't set the record straight.

Our Need to Connect

The only prediction we can make is that this will only get more challenging. We are not making less mobile devices, we are not shrinking the online world and the ability to grow a personal network is not diminishing.

But what you can do as a manager or owner is find your voice no matter the platform. Yes I can help. Then you can discover the power of sharing it no matter where your audience resides.

Have you found your voice? Have you found your audience?

Kneale Mann

image credit: istock

The Share Economy

If you spend any time making, creating or consuming media, you hear the word ‘share’ more and more every day. We are mobile, we are engaging, connecting and exchanging ideas. What happens when we look at the share business model?

Think Netflix or ZipCar. Think social networking.

Lisa Gansky is the author of “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing” and talks here about the future of business that's about sharing all kinds of stuff, either via smart and tech-enabled rental or, more boldly, peer-to-peer.

This is from her recent talk at TED@MotorCity.



Kneale Mann

visual credit: TED

Social Media: A Twelve-Step Program

Change Takes Time.

Our humanness can work against us. We make mistakes, none of is perfect yet we expect it of others.

We get a new thing and expect it to be perfect every time.

Amber Naslund wrote a great piece recently about how we are quick to complain while our desire grows for business to embrace the social web.

We ask that companies become more inclusive, interactive and social yet we are fast on the send button the moment there is a slip up. If the gadget we first heard about a week ago does not perform to our highest standards of excellence, we say it’s a failure.

And we do that to ourselves.

This has become even more prevalent in the social channels many of us spend time navigating. We look around and see confidence and we don’t know if we can live up to that scrutiny.

If you have gone through, going through or know someone going through a twelve-step program, you know it requires time, work and dedication.

Here are twelve steps to enhance our online experience...

• Ask a lot of questions.
• Recognize that our information is ours to protect and grow.
• Know that our voice is just as important as anyone else’s voice.
• Grasp that others' opinions are just their opinions.
• Have patience.
• Understand there is no one way of doing it.
• Accept we are all just trying to figure it out.
• Acknowledge that we have to work at it every day.
• Trust our instincts.
• Agree that our expertise is just as vital as anyone's expertise.
• Recognize it takes time for others to get to know us.
• Comprehend we are not too late to join the conversation or start a new one.

What would you add to the list?

knealemann
Let's create experiences not campaigns.

image credit: no12cirencester

Finding Your Voice

Paralyzed With Fear

It was the day before my first on-air shift. Years of work had culminated in my chance to speak on the radio.

I had no experience. This was for skilled professionals.

All the people I admired made it seem effortless. I was terrified.

So I sought advice from a mentor.

Find your own voice and have fun.

Fun? I was petrified. I was excited for the opportunity but this was too real.

There were thousands of listeners hanging on my every word (or so I thought) and they would know I was a fake. They would be able to hear the nervousness in my voice and be laughing hysterically at this talentless idiot.

Who is this guy? How did he get on the radio?

Time gives us perspective and knowledge.

Twenty years and thousands of on-air shifts later, I was coaching others on how to find their voice. From that first horrifying moment of panic to the last time I was on-air, I always felt a twinge of nerves. This was still important.

My radio career continues to help when clients and colleagues lament their lack of experience in the online world. Everyone will know they’re a fake. They are over their heads. They don’t know what they’re doing and everyone knows it. They don’t know where to start. They don’t know what to say.

The customer can now find her own voice.

We all have the ability to build our own radio station then try to find an audience. We can build profiles and discussion platforms that give us a chance to broadcast whatever content we want. Understanding that the audience doesn't just appear and our content may not be desirable to others is the first step of acceptance.

The Three P's...

Patience | There are no lottery tickets, there are no short cuts, this will not happen immediately. This is not a campaign. Look at those you feel are doing it well and you will soon discover they are constantly revising and refining.

Practice | Whether you run long distances, drive a million dollar race car or perform surgery, you are won't master your craft the first time you try it. And thousands of procedures later, you will still be trying to get better.

Pay Attention | If your goal is to find an audience or paying customer base, you need to heed their feedback. If you make it about you, you may be your only listener. And the audience will not show up simply because you are looking for your own voice. Patience and practice will help.

While the classic rock station plays Zeppelin, the alternative station features the new Weezer album and the hit station does another story on Lindsay Lohan, you need to find your own voice.

And have fun!

knealemann
Create experiences not campaigns.

image credit: istock

The Physics of Marketing

Where science and behavior converge.

Far too often you can read diatribes and monologues about branding this and positioning that and little of it has a stitch to do with satisfying the customer.

When asked about their tastes and behavior, most people lie and those lies become the basis for decisions. One bad week, one bad post, one bad comment can dismantle decades of managing a brand.

We live in a self-publishing world where anyone with a connection and a keyboard can share their thoughts, ideas and opinions.

Dan Cobley is director of marketing in the UK for a little company you may have heard about called Google. Through the persistence of a teacher who taught him that physics is cool, Dan went on to get a degree from Oxford.

Here Cobley explains how his passions for marketing and physics are much more related than you may think. [video]



knealemann
Create experiences not campaigns.

image credit: ted

Creating Your Social Brand

What Others Say About You

The fascinating issue about social media is that no matter who you meet you can get an opinion.

There are those who say they want to get more involved but are intimated or don’t know how to move forward. There are others who have some knowledge but have made the personal decision to become an expert and tell others how to navigate the space.

Who can forget the ever growing ‘you should do it that way’ group which is annoying beyond words. And there are vultures at every party so we have to watch out for the spam, scam and scrammers.

What do you do if you want to improve your social brand? How should you act? What should you post? Where should you go?

Let’s examine the word “social” which seems to be a catch-all these days. I am a social guy, I don’t have trouble in most social situations but others have called me too outgoing or talkative. Yup, that’s me. Oh well, deal with it or don't.

I can navigate discussions in a wide range of subjects because I love to learn about others and that is my social side.

Perhaps you are more reserved and you are intimidated by a guy like me? Perhaps you enjoy smaller groups of friends and a quiet dinner over being lobbed in to a speed networking event like the one I attended this week?

Brand is a term that is misused constantly.

Like viral, you cannot create a brand. That happens between customers. Like reputation, it's what others say when it's not in the room.

I can’t tell you how to feel about a certain experience – that’s your job. Some claim to be “brand experts” or run a “brand agency” which is not the whole story. As marketers, we can set the table and create an atmosphere but that’s it.

No one knows how Old Spice has become the most talked about company on the social web this minute. The team behind the campaign hoped it would happen, but no one can claim they predicted the reaction.

So back to you, back to your social brand, how do you create it?

Maybe the best place to start is to be yourself.
Do you think that will work?

knealemann
Helping you integrate all you do with all you do.

image credit: onbloggingwell