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Get Ready To Shake The World
Feb 4th
Have you noticed that there is a whole new personality and a new way of being to successful entrepreneurship? Just compare the successful entrepreneurs from one hundred years ago and those of today – there is a subtle difference about how Andrew Carnegie built his business and how Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google.
This new theme of being successful is what James Marshall Reilly (@reillytweet) explores in his book Shake the World: It’s Not About Finding a Job, It’s About Creating a Life. In the opening pages of the book, we find Reilly sitting at the Ben Franklin room at the State Department waiting Hillary Rodham Clinton to speak. As he looks around and banters with other people there he begins to wonder, “How did I end up here?” How does a guy from a no-name school who worked with and represented rock bands end up sitting at the State Department with Nobel Prize winners and Haitian diplomats?
Instead of simply letting the thought go, Reilly takes on a project of actually conducting empirical research and speaking with the young game changers of this generation to find out how they define success, how they got to where they are and can their paths be a template for others.
Shake the World Asks if You Are Willing
When I received the review copy of this book from a publicist and started reading it I was unimpressed. I thought to myself, “Here’s another book that’s trying to create some kind of success roadmap. And another book that’s trying to elevate “young upstart entrepreneurs” and their unique way of being to something few of us are ever going to do. Well, at least this guy has done some kind of research instead of just sharing war stories. I’m going to give it a shot.”
You don’t have to wonder if you can create the same success that these people did – Reilly tells you that you CAN. The question really becomes, are you will to take the same risks, make the same commitments and sacrifices as these people did? And what about those of us who aren’t nineteen anymore and have other responsibilities? How much of the blueprint for success can we follow?
Responding to Ordinary Circumstances in an Extraordinary Way
What I’m seeing inside this book is that responding to ordinary circumstances in an extraordinary way is a signature characteristic of the people Reilly interviewed. That doesn’t strike me as anything new – we can say the same thing for successful entrepreneurs of the past.
What seems to set these folks apart is that they seem to be unencumbered by the negative self-talk, complaining and excuses that so many of us default to when things don’t go our way.
Take Elizabeth McKee, for example. You’ll find her story on page 40. Elizabeth was a student at Texas A&M. When her friend had to quit school because she had a baby, Elizabeth asked herself why there wasn’t a child care facility on campus. The more research she did, the more committed she became to her cause. She went straight to the president and followed all the channels. At the age of 20, she had raised over $320,000 to build the center, hired, fired and supervised contractors and managed to stay in school. Don’t think that Elizabeth was “special” or privileged. She came from a small farm in Texas and was the first woman in her family to attend college. Her plans were to return and run the family farm. But after the child facility experience her interests changed.
What you’ll learn from each of these stories is that it isn’t the circumstance or the person that made the difference in their success, it was the actions they took in response to their circumstances.
What you’ll gain from each of the stories covered in Shake the World is a new way of perceiving your world and a new way of taking control of your life circumstances instead of them controlling you.
It’s Not Too Late For You to Read Shake the World
I know. You’re probably reading this and thinking that this book isn’t for you because you’re not twenty anymore. Not true.
Granted this book is an ideal read for a young person in high school, college or just starting out. Young people will learn that the state of the economy isn’t what drives opportunity – rather it’s the state of your mindset that matters.
Those of us with a few gray hairs will get what the title delivers – our world shaken up a bit. I’m sure that the author intended the title to mean that these people shook the world. What I got out of reading this book is that it’s never too late to shift your mindset about how the world works.
I was inspired by how these people looked at the world and I realized that with a little practice, I can change my mindset as well.
Read Shake the World and see what lessons you can put into practice for your own life and your business.
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Matt Trifiro of Desk.com: Meeting Customer Service Expectations in a Social World
Feb 3rd
The Rolling Stones proudly sang, “Time is on my side, yes it is.” These days, time seems to be an adversary that everyone is fighting, especially when it comes to social media and small business. Unlike large corporations, small businesses do not have the ability to hire teams of individuals to monitor and respond to customer service issues on social media sites. So what’s a small business to do? Matt Trifiro joins Brent Leary to offer a solution.
* * * * *
Small Business Trends: Can you tell us a little about your background?
Matt Trifiro: I have been a startup marketing person my entire life. I have been a co-founder and founder of a number of start-ups, and I joined cloud service provider, Assistly, at the end of 2010 to run their marketing team. Within nine months of my joining, they were acquired by Salesforce.com. Now we are a business unit of Salesforce.com and we are called Desk.com. I am the Sr. Vice President for Marketing at Desk.com.
Small Business Trends: Let’s talk a little bit about the speed and expectation around getting great customers experiences.
Matt Trifiro: Mobile has completely revolutionized our relationship to the Internet and similarly our relationship to companies. When I had a good or bad customer service experience, chances are, the device that is nearest me is going to be my mobile phone. The easiest thing to do was to Tweet, and I’ve done that.
With personal publishing systems like Twitter and the ability to contact thousands of people, if you are going to deliver great customer service you have to be connected to all of these high velocity channels 24/7.
Small Business Trends: How effective do you think small businesses are today being able to roll that out to their customer base?
Matt Trifiro: I think completely ineffective. The larger companies spin out a Facebook team, they spin out a Twitter team, they put two or three people on it, and they build it into their work flow and policies and eventually they build tools. Small business cannot afford to do that. It is hard enough to just learn what tool to use with Twitter. So I think that most small businesses are behind the curve in keeping up with their customers.
As a user it is really fairly simple. I just tweet. But as a small business, what would you do with that tweet? How do you assign it to somebody within your company to resolve the problem? How do you ensure that it does not fall through the cracks? When you don’t have a dedicated person on it, it is your job to answer every tweet. Small businesses cannot afford to do that so you really need to look to tools and automation solutions to help you address what is needed.
Small Business Trends: How does a small business prepare themselves to be able to handle the kind of service experience that customers really do expect today?
Matt Trifiro: You have to recognize your customers have different expectations. If you want to be competitive in this new world you have to go where they are. You will have to be there at hours when you are not normally expected to be, using technologies that you may not have ever used in the past.
The second thing you need to do is identify the tools that empower your organization to utilize those channels effectively without completely bringing you to your knees. If you cannot afford to hire a social media person, and an email person, and a customer service individual, you need to leverage technology in all aspects of your business.
Small Business Trends: How does it impact the overall organization in terms of service impacting sales or service impacting marketing?
Matt Trifiro: It is all becoming sales and marketing. If I was selling coffee at Starbucks, the most important thing to me is not that you bought a single cup of coffee, but that you come in every day and you order that triple latte with extra foam that is five bucks. Five dollars every day is a maximum amount of money over the course of the year.
When you look at a customers lifetime value perspective, customer service is almost more important than sales. It is where your revenue is coming from. A lot of customer service questions that happen in public social media are really sales questions and if your customer service team is empowered to respond to customers over social media, that becomes a sale. I think that it effects the entire organization.
Small Business Trends: What are some of the new things Desk.com offers?
Matt Trifiro: We have completely rebuilt our product to service the needs of small and medium size businesses. We have a new agent interface that is super easy to use and very easy to set up. You can attach Desk.com to a Twitter account and be servicing your customers over Twitter with literally five clicks.
You can attach a Facebook page in a similar number of clicks. You can attach an email account. All of the different channels that your customers demand service from are now organized in one place on our new agent interface. All of the interactions with the customers are stored at one place so that if multiple employees interact with the customer, they can see the entire history.
In addition, we have an entirely new mobile agent. A buyer who does some customer support but is on the road all the time now is able to interact with customers to provide support using any HTML5, Android or IOS mobile phone very simply and easily. That is new in Desk.com as well.
Small Business Trends: Where can people go to learn more about Desk. com and how it can help small businesses get up to speed with delivering the customer experience that they are really looking for today?
Matt Trifiro: Go to www.Desk.com. Every account gets their first full time agent for free. There should be no barrier, even to the smallest of companies to try it out.
This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.
Matt Trifiro of Desk.com: Meeting Customer Service Expectations in a Social World
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
When the world changes…
Jan 18th
It’s painful, expensive, time-consuming, stressful and ultimately pointless to work overtime to preserve your dying business model.
All the lobbying, the lawsuits, the ad campaigns and most of all, the hand-wringing, aren’t going to change anything at all. In fact, instead of postponing the outcome you fear, they probably accelerate it.
The history of media and technology is an endless series of failed rearguard actions as industry leaders attempt to solidify their positions on a bed of quicksand.
Again and again the winners are individuals and organizations that spot opportunities in the next thing, as opposed to those that would demonize, marginalize or illegalize (is that a word?) it. Breaking systems that benefit your customers is dumb. Taking money from lobbyists to break those systems is dumber still.
View full post on Seth’s Blog
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Dec 11th
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Dec 4th
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Have You Entered the World of Social Commerce?
Dec 3rd
The importance of social media to your small business is nothing new, of course. But the tips we’ll cover in this post take the effort to a whole new level. Are you doing all you can with your social media efforts? If not, here’s a way to do more.
Social Sales & Marketing
Have you entered the world of social commerce? Possibly the most important trend in social media today is that you no longer need to use this tool just for marketing. Here’s a look at how to convert all those fans to customers with an approach that is becoming popular with businesses large and small. DIY Marketers
Facebook engagement ads can build your business? If you plan to advertise on Facebook, what better way than to use that advertising to increase your own fan base? Creating an army of fans and potential customers for your brand has never been easier. Here’s how. The Rise to the Top
Social Influence & Effects
If you follow no other Twitter accounts, follow these. Small Business Trends is proud to be on the list, but we share that honor some other very worthwhile tweeps. Please take the time and check out these awesome resources. You won’t regret it. Buzz Small Business Magazine
Social media and your employees. Social media can empower customers and small businesses alike, but what limits are you permitted to put on the social media activity of your employees? This important report looks at what employees can and can’t say about your business online. WSJ
Another kind of social business. With the focus on social media for business these days, another social business idea sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. As his article suggests, even in a tough economy, social ventures may make good business sense. NY Times
Social Media Tips
Social media: tool or trouble? We’ve probably all read the positives about what social media marketing can do for our business, but what about the flip side? Yes, social media has a darker side leading to distraction and loss of productivity. Fortunately, there is a way to avoid the potential risks. Annemarie Cross
Is social media really working for you? You’ve engaged in social media marketing to benefit your business. But are you really getting all the benefits possible from your efforts? Use this checklist to decide whether there are things that might make your efforts more effective. Fox Business
Targeting & Branding
The rise of the niche community. While Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn may still be the big kids on the block, the rise of the niche social network specially targeted to a specific interest group can be another important tool for marketing your small business. BBC
Using blogs to boost your brand. In this video, branding and business coach Isabelle Mercier shares a tip about using other peoples’ blogs to promote your brand. Blogs are the original social media, and getting others talking about your product or service can be a great social media benefit when marketing your business. LeapTV
Final Thoughts
It’s all about relationships. In the end most online social marketing serves the same purpose as social interaction in the face-to-face world. It’s maintaining those relationships with customers that’s really important. Here are some steps toward successful online relationships. PitneyBowes
Have You Entered the World of Social Commerce?
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Self truth (and the best violinist in the world)
Nov 17th
The other day, after a talk to some graduate students at the Julliard School, one asked, “In The Dip, you talk about the advantage of mastery vs. being a mediocre jack of all trades. So does it make sense for me to continue focusing on mastering the violin?”
Without fear of error, I think it’s easy to say that this woman will never become the best violinist in the world. That’s because it’s essentially impossible to be the one and only best violinist in the world. There might be 5,000 or 10,000 people who are so technically good at it as to be indistinguishable to all but a handful of orchestra listeners. This is true for many competitive fields–we might want to fool ourselves into thinking that we have become the one and only best at a technical skill, but it’s extremely unlikely.
The quest for technical best is a form of hiding. You can hide from the marketplace because you’re still practicing your technique. And you can hide from the hard work of real art and real connection because you decide that success lies in being the best technically, at getting a 99 instead of a 98 on an exam.
What we can become the best at is being an idiosyncratic exception to the standard. Joshua Bell is often mentioned (when violinists are mentioned at all) not because he is technically better than every other violinst, but because of his charisma and willingness to cross categories. He’s the best in the world at being Josh Bell, not the best in the world at playing the violin.
The same trap happens to people who are coding in Java, designing furniture or training to be a corporate coach. It’s a seductive form of self motivation, the notion that we can push and push and stay inside the lines and through sheer will, become technically perfect and thus in demand. Alas, it’s not going to happen for most of us.
[The flipside of this are the practioners who bolster themselves up by claiming that they are, in fact, the most technically adept in the world. In my experience, they're fibbing to themselves when they'd be better off taking the time and effort to practice their craft. Just saying it doesn't make it so.]
Until we’re honest withourselves about what we’re going to master, there’s no chance we’ll accomplish it.
View full post on Seth’s Blog
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Nov 11th
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Oct 29th
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The Jedi Masters of Today’s Business World
Oct 21st
“You stay in the game, play it right and don’t give up.”
I find so much inspiration from people who are going through great personal or professional challenges and difficulties with grace, poise and perseverance.
They are today’s Jedi Masters to me. They put one foot in front of the other, stay in the day, stay in the game and don’t go too far out. The times are choppy and stormy, but not impossible to navigate. It just requires different skill sets and a flexible mindset.
There are three areas that have been impacted by great external change that has forced us to go through great internal change. Slowly people are shifting, getting into motion and accepting reality.
1. Being in Business
Consumerism is consistently changing and being shaped by demographic shifts, culture trends and technology. Boomers are still consumers but their prime time has passed. Generation X is 11 percent smaller than Boomers and they are bogged down with raising families and debt. Generation Y is looming and aging up but they don’t have the the jobs yet to give them more income clout. Regardless of these dynamics, people continue to buy, spend and create trends. Businesses need to be fluid, innovative and fun today.
2. Careers and Jobs
Unemployment of 9.1 percent and 14 million people out of work may not seem like all that much, but it is having a much greater impact because even the people who are working are making less and spending less. The idea of having a career has changed dramatically. Having a career now means having a job, regardless of what your expertise is or what you studied in college. Work of any kind where you can use your key skills, learn new ones and make a difference is better than no work.
3. Family and Community
We live in a multicultural, extended family world today. What families and community looks like now is diverse, open and nontraditional. People are finding new ways to connect to each other. Traditional families, single parents, no kids, extended families, and families of friends are all unique and working.
People who go with the flow, find ways to get through and make the best of each day with what they are given are today’s Jedi Masters to me.
Here are 10 commonalities I see in the mindset and approach they take to their lives and businesses:
1) They see the silver lining and focus on the lesson.
2) They are proactive and take thoughtful actions.
3) They surround themselves with a support system that they use and tap into.
4) They serve others and get outside themselves.
5) They allow themselves to embrace and go through the uncomfortable emotions.
6) They see how their experience can benefit others.
7) They take actions they may not yet believe in.
They have faith and spirituality.
9) They focus on what they can control.
10)They exude an intangible energy that impacts others and attracts people to them.
Thank you to all of the Jedi Masters of life and business who continue to inspire me daily.
Image from AlexeyRumyantsev/Shutterstock
The Jedi Masters of Today’s Business World
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
