Posts tagged business relationships
The best advice I ever received for my business, and my blog
Jan 22nd
I was recently asked by an interviewer, “Who has had the greatest influence on your personal growth?” Pretty good question! But the answer was easy. In fact, there was one lesson I learned from one man that has had a profound impact on my approach to life, my business, and my blog. I’ll share that important lesson with you today.
Sensei and sensibility
When I lived in Los Angeles, I desperately wanted to attend the MBA program at Claremont Graduate University for one reason – Peter Drucker taught there (in fact, the school was named for him). If you have never heard of Peter Drucker, discovering his books and articles might be the most important thing you can do for your career.
I applied for entry to the college, but was told I was too young to be accepted to this prestigious program. I would not quit that easily, however, and went through an appeal process, arguing that they needed my youth (27 at the time) to add to the diversity of the program! I made an unlikely stand on the grounds of EEO, which was quite a stretch, but incredibly, I was admitted! Perhaps my tenacity amused them.
Peter Drucker was one of the handful of people I have known who could distill vast complexity into simple wisdom. The scope of his knowledge was breathtaking. He would sit on the edge of his desk and lecture for three hours straight without a break, and without notes. He generally lectured about one of his books. My favorite was Innovation and Entrepreneurship
A new approach to leadership
Professor Drucker taught via the Harvard case study method. We would be assigned to read a long, detailed, real-life business case and then dissect it in class to discover the true nature of how business worked.
The students in this class were high-flyers — the brightest business executives in the Los Angeles region — and they were always trying to “solve” the business case. Nothing made Professor Drucker angrier than that! “What makes you think you are smarter than the people in the case?” he would ask, “Smarter than people who have worked in this industry for decades? How can you be that arrogant?
“Your job as a business leader is not to provide the right answers. It is to provide the right questions.”
Over and over he would pound this truth into our heads until it became part of our DNA. And he was so right … so profoundly right. There is not a week that goes by that I don;t think of some lesson from Professor Drucker, but this was the most important of all.
Think of the power of leading people to the most effective solution, not by pontificating and telling them what to do, but by distilling the issue down to the essential question and letting them discover the answer themselves.
Adopting a strategy of professional humility is anathema to our modern Western culture. We may associate humility with weakness, when in fact it is strength.
The essence of blogging?
Like most young people starting out in business, I felt a need to know all the answers, especially when I was promoted to a leadership position. But from Professor Drucker I learned that being vulnerable, involving others in the process, coming up with a better solution together, sharing the weight of decisions – those are all benefits of humility. Being deeply human, instead of trying to wear the Superman cape, is powerful and liberating.
This is also a key to effective blogging I think. Most bloggers adopt a mantle of invincibility and that is certainly the easy path to take: “I publish, therefor I’m correct.”
But being a humble blogger leads to meaningful social media engagement and ultimately, crowd-sourced wisdom. I almost never have the answers. But I think my blog posts do present the essential questions: Does every business need a social media strategy? What is the value of social media engagement? How do we measure success?
And then YOU provide the answers through your comments. A much better system, don’t you think? How could I possibly sustain this blog for the last four years by only giving you answers? Nobody is that smart.
I hope this resonates with you in some small way. How does this idea land on you? Could being a humble leader become a key to making you a better leader, a better parent, a better blogger?
Photograph courtesy Claremont Graduate University
Link to Innovation and Entrepreneurship is an affiliate link.
Four ways to become a spellbinding online personality
Sep 12th
By Mars Dorian, Contributing {grow} Columnist
I always try to find deeper ways to connect with my audience and customers. The web can separate your site from your audience by oceans, and to bridge that distance, you have to fight hard to make that connection.
I drew the following cartoons to express what I believe are some of the most effective ways to connect with your audience and build an online presence that is SPELLBINDING!
1) Become the signal. Get rid of the noise
Some people have earned permanent residency in the echo chamber.
After all, it’s a cozy place. Easy to maintain. No extra care required. But I challenge you to ditch that space when you TRULY want to make a difference with your business and marketing. You see, I read Seth Godin, like probably a lot of you. Feverishly. But the danger with admiring your role models is copying them without having their experience. And that’s what is happening — marketers copying Godin left and right.
They talk about standing out, building tribes, and being a linchpin.
You know it’s not coming from them. You know they have NO experience to foster that claim.
Seth Godin says “tribe,” “remarkable,” “linchpin” and they rehash it like it’s the cure to mortality.
It’s noise.
Leverage your OWN experience — if you want spread the idea of being remarkable, standing out and going all the way to the edge with your marketing, then actually do it. Let your actions get the message across because then it will be authentic, and people will learn from your real experience, instead of tweeting some repeated impressive-sounding but ultimately shallow phrase. Instead of adding noise to the echo chamber, become the SIGNAL.
2) Uncover the mask.
I recently met an online client in the offline world (still remember how to do that?), and I was FLABBERGASTED to say the least. That quirky, nuclear-powered, vibrant person I met was NOT the stiff and stilted persona that I have known from the online realm.
She later confessed to me that she disguised herself online to appear more professional, putting on a mask every day. You know the spiel — mission statement with incomprehensible gibberish “I set up system to maximize your online visibility and managementyadadada…”, a stockphoto profile pic and glossy-blue brand design because it feels corporate and professional. Arghghghhgh.
Like Tara Gentile says, we live in a “You” economy nowadays, and that means you have to bring your original style, beliefs, obsessions, and quirks, combined with your brand promise to form a holistic perception.
In other words, hold your “freak” flag high and proudly. And that’s how you’ll attract like-minded customers who will love to make business with you.
Ditch that mask.
3) Don’t just explain. Tell stories.
It’s hard to write about this because the whole aspect of “storytelling” in the online marketing space has more hype than hyperspace.
But the truth is, storytelling is and ALWAYS will be effective. We have been storying since we were smelly monkeys scribbling pictures of beasts on the cave walls. Stories helped us survive, because we could share life-saving experiences without actually going through them ourselves. We are still wired to prefer stories over any other content form, and that’s why you should use it excessively.
A press release blog post puts us to sleep but tell us a story and we’re engaged like a piñata filled with fireworks.
Look at your brand, your company, your blog, yourself and tell us your stories.
4) Mesmerize me.
Ahhh … I’ve held on to the most difficult thing for last. Is marketing today anything more than having a good looking website with grrrreat content?
Isn’t everybody going after the SAME THING? How are you going to cut through the noise and grab your visitors by the throat? Why do you come back to the {grow} blog again and again? Here’s why. Mark Schaefer provides mesmerizing content.
How can YOU achieve that? I think it comes from a place of absolute congruence between your personality, your platform, your message, and a certain creative spark.
Another mesmerizing guy is Gary Vaynerchuk. His soul belongs to video. The guy seems like he was born with a video camera in his cradle, and that’s why people watch him, even if they couldn’t care less about wine. If he tried his hand at blog writing, he wouldn’t be nearly as captivating, because it’s not his domain.
Mitch Joel provides mesmerizing podcasts because he’s a masterful interviewer.
I communicate through cartoons.
It’s all about which style you connect the MOST with, and then conveying that in your message in an entertaining and interesting way.
I know, it’s kind of meta. But don’t you find it mesmerizing 
?
Mars Dorian describes himself as a creative marketeer with a moon-melting passion for human potential and technology. You can follow his adventures at www.marsdorian.com/
Original illustrations by the author.
Social media and the end of empathy
Jul 7th
Why am I using a picture of a large mouth bass on a blog post about social media and business? Seems a little fishy doesn’t it? Well I didn’t use this for the halibut. There is a very relevant story with a lot of marketing mussel. A story on a grand scale, you might say.
When I was a young sales guy I learned a very important lesson about customer relationships and empathy from a fishing trip.
My company was struggling through a massive quality issue that was threatening my customer to the point that it was shutting down their production lines … and THEIR customers’ production lines. In business terms, this was an apocalyptic problem and it eventually resulted in the largest quality claim in the history of my company.
Nerves were beyond frayed. I remember spending one Labor Day weekend sorting through reams of lot numbers in search of alternatives that might work. We couldn’t find any and I was forced to make an excruciating call. I had to tell a plant manager that every lot of our material in his plant, every lot in transit, and every lot in our inventory was defective. We were going to shut his plant down, maybe for weeks.
Months before, this customer and I had become good friends on a company-sponsored fishing event. Yes, businesses used to do that kind of thing. Believe me, when you spend eight hours in a bass boat with one guy, you get to know him pretty well! We had shared a lot of our life stories and created a great memory on this trip.
As I made the phone call and delivered the news, I held my breath. There was shocked silence at the other end of the phone. Finally, my customer said, “Schaefer, the next time we’re in a fishing boat together I’m going to toss you out!”
He was able to use our shared experience and friendship to break the tension and tell me in an empathetic and humorous way that he knew it wasn’t my fault and that we would get through this crisis together.
The days of conducting business based on these deep relationships is largely over I think — relationships that were built on a golf course, a boat, long dinner conversations — not text messages, online help functions, and customer service tweets.
Ten years ago, if you had a business crisis, you could probably count on those deep relationships to help pull you through, at least to a certain extent. Today, and especially after the recession, people just don’t have time for relationship-building. I can’t imagine inviting a customer to a weekend of golfing any more. Everybody is doing what used to be three jobs. Who has the time for building business friendships?
I wonder about the long-term implications for business when relationships are negotiated through spreadsheets and emails. I have an image in my mind of that United Airlines commercial where a businessman laments losing a customer because they never saw them. He proceeded to hand out airline tickets for customer locations.
Maybe there will be backlash and a re-focusing on deep relationships at some point. There was recently a story about tech start-ups scrambling for office space near Twitter because of the live networking opportunities. Kind of ironic. Seeking deeper offline relationships with people dedicated to spreading low-impact online relationships.
Breaking Blogging’s Biggest Taboo
Jun 26th
I’ve probably read 10,000 blog posts and there is one topic that I rarely see expressed. So today, I’m going for it.
As a blogger, it’s cool to be annoyed, excited, introspective, outraged, depressed, happy, mad, sad, and glad. But it is never, ever cool to be proud.
I think the reason is simple. Social media at its core is narcissistic. Even though the benefit is connecting with other people, you generally write, post, and tweet about what is going on with you. I mean, it’s the subject you know better than anything, right?
Whether you’re online or offline, it’s generally unacceptable to go around shaking your tail feathers with every accomplishment, but on social media that taboo is amplified because we KNOW it’s narcissistic so we want to show up like we’re as dramatically un-narcissistic as possible.
But as I sit here on a Sunday morning, something very amazing has happened and if I really am honest and write about what’s going on with me at this moment on my social media journey, I can’t avoid using the P-word — Pride. So let’s plow some new ground and write a blog post that admits: “I’m allowing myself one moment, one blog post, to be proud of myself.”
The past few years have been a wild ride. It seems like the career momentum is building week by week and sometimes day by day. The social web enables me to paint on a global palette and I’m enjoying every minute of it.
I’ve had many reasons to feel blessed and grateful to you, my {grow} friends who have been with me every step as my blog creeped into the AdAge Top 50, my book The Tao of Twitter charged into the top 5 communications books on Amazon, and my teaching and consulting activities matured into more interesting and high-profile engagements.
I cannot claim singular responsibility for any of this. There is no such thing as a successful solo artist on the social web. We all conduct our own riotous symphony of friends and followers who help, support and cajole us every day.
Through all this I have done a good job keeping things in perspective and keeping an even keel, but something happened today that eclipses all those professional developments and prompted this expression of pride. I was quoted in The New York Times.
This made a profound emotional impact on me because the New York Times has been such a special part of my life. As a journalism student, I studied the New York Times as the pinnacle of my profession. As an adult, luxuriating in the Sunday Times — filled with art, books and travel — is a weekly oasis. And as an intellectually-curious adult I marvel at the depth of reporting, the artistry of the writing and the power of its importance as a journal of record. When they went to a paid subscription model , I swear I was the first one in line with my credit card.
And now here I am. I’m in there. For good. I feel so very humbled, joyful … and proud.
There, I said it. I’m proud.
By the way, there is an extremely good lesson here about the power of blogging. The NYT reporter, Stephanie Rosenbloom, didn’t find me through connections or because of my reputation. She found me through a blog post about social influence.
In my post Ten Reasons to Blog Even if Nobody Reads It, I mention this possibility of vast exposure as a unique aspect of blogs. To have an opportunity for massive reach, you can’t depend on Twitter or Facebook updates — you MUST have a blog. Blogs are important!
Any way, thanks for obliging me a moment of sunshine, rainbows, unicorns, and celebration. My wife just reminded me to take out the trash so it’s back to the real world. As always, the inexorable tide of daily life has wiped out this moment and it’s back to business. And that’s a good thing.
In the comment section, I invite you to break the blogging taboo with me and tell everyone something that happened to you this year that YOU’RE proud of! It’s an important part of who we are, isn’t it? Let’s celebrate it!
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You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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