Joel Comm's Blog, page 19

Facebook Isn’t The Most Important Place To Do Social Networking

Your company is the best place to start networking. If you were to take all of the advice offered by every social media expert and look for a common thread, it would probably be the importance of networking. That’s what social media marketing is all about. Whether you’re building connections with the owners of other pages to generate views and influence, or deepening the loyalty of individual customers through live video and comments, social media is the ultimate tool for making business personal. It’s called “social” media for a reason. So it’s no surprise that Carlos Gil, a social media marketing speaker, also rates the importance of networking. But while social media speakers also tend to work as consultants for a range of different businesses, Gil is unusual in having a full-time corporate day job. He runs the social media strategy for BMC. It’s a multi-billion dollar company that employs more than 6,000 people and supplies IT services for about 82 percent of the Fortune 500. So as a social media professional, Gil understands content strategy and Facebook advertising and Snapchat. But as a company man, he’s also discovered the importance of networking not just online but also within the company. “You can’t do things by yourself,” he says. “All the stuff that we social media practitioners tell other people to do online, you have to do when you work at a corporation but even more so because you’re constantly under the gun. You have deadlines. Other people depend on you to make them look good. There are lots of moving parts.” It’s an important point, and one that’s often overlooked. Social media gives us the ability to reach huge numbers of people anywhere they might be, but there are also people all around us, and they matter too. When you work in a large corporation, they matter a great deal. In fact, they all matter. It’s not just a question of making friends with the IT guy so that when your email doesn’t work, it gets fixed fast. Everyone from the people who keep your office clean to the CEO is a potential connection that can bring you benefits. And in the same way that on social media you buy connections with good content, so within a corporation, you buy connections with co-operation. You lend a hand. You listen to people’s problems. You go out of your way to help someone when they need it. You make introductions and you take part in corporate activities. All of those team-building exercises, after-work drinks and the company ping pong league aren’t there just to enrich life at work. They’re perks with a purpose. They put you in touch with people who need your help and whose help you need. They bring people together. It’s hard to imagine now a business that doesn’t use social media. But the first big test of a staff member’s networking skills isn’t online. It’s their ability to talk over the partitions and build connections within the company. Listen to the complete interview featuring Carlos Gil on the FUN podcast on itunes or here Stitcher

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Why You Don’t Need To Find Your Why

You’re more than one thing. There’s one piece of advice that entrepreneurs hear again and again. You need to find your “why.” You need to figure out your purpose, and focus on that one thing that matters more than anything else. Your key advantage. Your unique skill. Your goal. It sounds right, but people aren’t that simple. We’re all a mixture of multiple ideas and preferences and abilities. As we build our businesses, we want more than one thing: to succeed of course, but also to succeed in a particular way. We want to build successful businesses but we also want to raise happy families and give back to the community. We understand that we need to be serious and business-minded but we also know that if all we are is serious and business-minded, life is dull and lacks its spark. We’re not just entrepreneurs. We’re human beings with all of the complexity that humans contain. That’s not a bug. It’s a feature. Making use of that complexity makes us stronger and it brings benefits in everything we do. Brian Carter, for example, is a highly successful speaker and marketing consultant. He’s also a stand-up comedian who took two years of screenwriting courses to improve his creativity. It’s easy to see how comedy skills might make him a more interesting keynote speaker — and his speeches are always funny –but his business skills also enhance his comedy. After each show, Brian would listen to a recording of his act and rate his jokes. He would measure how long the audience laughed and how loudly they laughed, and lay out his jokes in an Excel spreadsheet. He would use the sheet to calculate how many laughs per minute his act generated. “I would create a level of efficiency from my set,” he says. By merging two very different interests, Brian is able to improve both of them. But you don’t even have to merge those different interests. Keeping them apart can make each highly effective too. After delivering a successful keynote filled with jokes and humor for a national company, the business asked Brian to create a webinar for its employees about Facebook marketing. That webinar was completely serious and explained how to use data to tell apart buyers, non-buyers and fans in ads and email marketing. It wasn’t humorous but it was packed with practical techniques and useful insights. “They were blown away because they thought this guy was just funny,” Brian recalls. You could argue that even Brian Carter has a single goal. Ask him for his fifteen-second elevator speech, and he’ll sum up himself up by saying that he likes to get results, and in practice he gets those results by poring over data sheets and Facebook stats. But he’ll then use the remaining twelve seconds before the elevator doors open to explain that you shouldn’t teach dogs to shake hands because they don’t understand what they’re agreeing to. It’s important to know why you’re building your business. It’s vital to focus, and it’s crucial to know your strengths and your skills. But it’s when you combine those strengths and skills and interests and all the paths that your curiosity takes you down that the magic really starts to happen. What is your Why is a single question about a single word. But it can — and should — have multiple answers. Click here to listen to a full interview with Brian Carter on the FUN podcast.

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Here’s A Little Known Way To Finance Your Business Without Debt Or Collateral

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of 401(k) Business Financing for IZEA. All opinions are 100% mine. There’s one message that I hope comes through in all my talks and all my books. It’s that anyone can do it. Anyone can kick their J.O.B., start their own business and work for themselves. Anyone who wants to be their own boss can take control of their own life. Anyone who has an idea and a dream and the get-up-and-go to make it happen, can take that first step and look forward to a life of fun doing something that they love. But I know that’s easier to say than to believe. No new business idea is ever financed by desire alone. You’re going to need money. Marketing has budgets, contractors have bills and it takes time before you turn your first profit. Time is money too. The first challenge of any new business owner is finding Small Business Financing to get things rolling. Banks and Use Your Retirement Funds to Start Your Business ForegoTraditionally, entrepreneurs have gone cap (and credit record) in hand to banks, and agreed to pay their giant interest rates at the risk of losing their home. More recently, crowdfunding has allowed thousands of businesses to raise funds for their products and test consumer demand before spending their own cash. But there is another method that’s been around since the seventies, and few people know about it. 401(k) Business Financing lets you use your retirement fund to finance a new business. There are no tax penalties, so you don’t get hit with a bill from Uncle Sam when you pull the money out, and you can just pour it straight into your new venture. Guidant Financial has helped more than 14,000 entrepreneurs to use their 401(k) and other retirement and pension funds to become entrepreneurs (more than any other provider in the industry), and they point out that it’s an opportunity to invest in yourself. Instead of trusting your pension company to put your money in the right stocks so that there’s something there when you hit your sixties, you’ll be able to bet on your own dreams and on your own drive to succeed. There’s no collateral, so you won’t be at risk of losing your home. The beautiful thing about Debt Free Financing is that you won’t have interest payments to make and your new business will be able to grow faster. You’re borrowing from yourself so your credit score doesn’t matter. And Guidant Financial say that they can wrap the whole process up in about three weeks. This time next month you could be your own boss with the money you need to build a successful small business. Requirements of Using 401(k) Business Financing Before you leap in, there are a couple of things to consider. First, you will need to have at least $50,000 in your retirement fund. If you’ve been working and saving for your retirement, you should be in a good position. If not, you’ll need to save a little longer. And secondly, understand you’ll be taking a risk. You might not be betting your home but you will be betting at least some of your pension pot. There’s always a risk in starting a new business. There’s always a price for something valuable, and nothing is more valuable than a life spent doing something you love. Don’t take that risk as an excuse to do nothing. Take it as an opportunity to build a business plan that looks reliable and realistic. Then take a look at 401(k) Business Financing as a way to make it happen.

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3 Reasons Business Is Like a Rollercoaster

What to watch for on your next trip to an amusement park. Tell people that you’re starting your own business and they’ll tell you what to expect. “It will be like a rollercoaster,” someone will (inevitably) say. What they mean is that you can expect lots of ups and downs. There will be times when you have to endure a long, hard journey but at the end of it, your head will be in the clouds and you’ll feel that you’re on top the world. Then things will start moving again. You’ll start slipping. Before you know it, you’re back at the bottom and facing that long, slow climb to the top again. Sometimes you’ll move quickly and sometimes you’ll move slowly. Sometimes you’ll have the impression that you’re going round in circles. Often, you’ll want to scream. But it will always be thrilling and exciting and addictive and something you’ll want to just keep doing. Once you’ve built your first successful business, like your first rollercoaster ride, you’ll just want to have another go. There’s more to it than that, though. Felicia Slattery is a best-selling author and communications consultant who spends her spare time at amusement parks. She has enjoyed riding the big rides since she was a kid in the Chicagoland suburbs. “We went for an eighth grade field trip to Great America and there was a boy that I liked who wanted to go on The Demon,” she said. “I was so scared but I was like ‘Okay!’ because I liked the boy. He talked me into going on and I loved it.” Now grown up and living in Knoxville, Tennessee, it’s no surprise that Felicia is a regular visitor, with her husband and daughter, to Dollywood, an amusement park in the Great Smoky Mountains. Her experiences at that park, though, contain even more lessons that can apply to any business. First, like Disney’s amusement parks, Dollywood is themed. Line up to go on The Mystery Mine, a roller coaster with a 95 degree drop and a turnover loop, and you’ll feel like you’re on your way to being a miner. Take your seat and you’ll be taken through what feels like a haunted, nineteenth century mining operation. That’s branding. The product is the ride itself but the branding helps the rollercoaster distinguish itself from other similar rides in the country, and it affects the experience. Even when you have a product strong enough to sell on its own merits, careful branding still gives customers a deeper experience — and the business more sales. Felicia’s husband, though, is six foot four and is a muscular 250 pounds. While Felicia and her daughter loop the loop in an abandoned mine, he’ll take a seat on a ride that allows his long legs to dangle. There’s an important lesson there too. Even when you have a niche, it’s important to remember that not all customers are the same. You still have to make sure that you can cater to as many of your customers as possible, even those with legs too long to fit into a rollercoaster seat. Airlines, with their local monopolies, might be able to force customers to just squeeze in but other businesses need to find ways to make as many of their customers comfortable as possible. And finally, the reason that Felicia and her family go back to the park so regularly is that it delivers a consistent, emotional experience. She finds that the park doesn’t disappoint and it’s always fun. That consistency of service is vital too. Learn all those lessons from rollercoasters, and you should find that your business-building has a lot more ups than downs. Enjoy more of Felicia’s story from her appearance on the FUN podcast.  

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Think You Know What TV Looks Like? Mario Armstrong Emmy-Winning Talk Show Host Might Change That

CREDIT: Courtesy The Never Settle Show, Mario Armstrong Live video is changing the face of television Sometimes change comes slowly. You hardly notice it. And sometimes it lands like a tornado and if you aren’t watching carefully, one day you look out the window and find that everything has moved. Live video is landing like a tornado. Brands are already trying to figure out how they can make the most of it. Some are putting their CEOs in front of the cameras. Others are taking people behind the scenes. The really smart ones are realizing that they can now create original content that has the appeal of a live television show but with real-time mass audience participation. It’s a huge opportunity. And now people in television are starting to see that opportunity. We recently saw the launch of the Internet’s first live, interactive talk show, delivered online and with real live input from viewers. THE NEVER SETTLE SHOW goes out online and can also be seen on Roku, Apple TV and Amazon. It’s the brain-child of Mario Armstrong, a fast-talking Emmy Award-winning talk show host who’s been a regular contributor on the TODAY show, CNN, NPR, Dr. Oz, and a whole host of other shows. He’s now applying that experience to his own content. But instead of creating another cable TV show, he’s working with Al Roker’s live streaming corporation to create a new kind of “social TV,” a real meeting between social media and television. That difference starts in the production meetings where the show’s subjects are decided and the guests are fixed. Instead of the producers holding their meetings behind closed doors then delivering the results to an audience and hoping they like it, Mario and his team broadcast the meetings on Facebook Live. Viewers are invited to send in their comments, ask questions and make suggestions. They can vote on directions for the show. The audience has already decided that the show won’t have celebrities talking about their new books or their new TV shows. They want to see real people who left their nine-to-fives discussing their experience and explaining how they managed to achieve their dreams. The audience gets a real say in the direction and the themes of the show. During the broadcast itself, Mario has a team of social media people who watch the comments and direct questions to a screen in front of Mario. He can then pass them onto the guest, making sure that the audience gets the information it wants. Viewers can communicate directly on Skype.And it’s all done in a real studio, in front of a real studio audience, with multiple cameras and all of the production values that you’d expect from a professional television show. This is an entirely new use of live video. It’s also a revolution in entertainment. Until now, we’ve relied on other people to tell us what they thought we wanted to know. We’ve expected them to be able to guess our tastes and we’ve relied on them to give us the information and entertainment we want. Now we have a chance to make the shows ourselves. From the planning to the broadcast itself, live video is giving us a real say. It’s the first wind of change. Pretty soon we’ll be turning on the television and finding that everything has moved. Listen to Mario discuss this ambitious project in the interview below.

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Why You Need to Watch This Heartwarming ‘Incident’ From United Airlines

One wrong doesn’t cancel out thousands of rights. The recent events with United Airlines pretty much sum up what’s wrong with the world today. It became the perfect storm of miscommunication, bad judgment, and lack of humanity. Everyone was right and wrong at the same time — well, the security guard was pretty much wrong all the way around but everyone else had a point. First, let’s look at the mistakes on the part of United Airlines. As a business, they want to fill seats and maximize their returns. However, they also have an image to maintain so that people want to pick them. Their first mistake could be their overbooking model and policy of pulling people off of flights to replace them with other people. What this policy did was release a Hunger Games mentality in those told to leave the flight. No one wants to lose their seat, especially when they were on time and ready to take off. To select those passengers who don’t fly as often for ejection also seems fraught with bad judgment on how to win customers for life. Not only will United Airlines lose the customers they had on that flight, but the world witnessed how it all played out. However, companies make mistakes too. Perhaps United will now revisit its policies to see if can develop some that treat people like people, not cattle. As for the staff that worked those flights, who have become the butt of jokes since the incident, it’s not their fault. They don’t make the policies for the company, so there is no reason for other passengers to take out their anger at United on them — they are simply trying to do their job. Instead, it would be a great idea to embrace United’s employees and offer kind words. It’s what we should do for our fellow human beings. Just a couple days after the debacle, an incident took place on my United flight. I documented the experience and the reactions told the whole story. Then there is the passenger, a doctor, who was simply trying to get back to his practice and who couldn’t believe he was picked out of a crowd. Maybe he had already had a bad day and was feeling frustrated. Consumers don’t want to be bullied by the very companies they decided to purchase a product or service from. The doctor clearly could have selected another airline and it’s a pretty safe bet that he will definitely do that going forward, especially since he has announced that he will be suing the airline. What was also sad was that, soon after the incident, the media began running stories on the doctor’s sordid past and all the mistakes and bad judgments he made in his life to date. It was somehow a way to validate what the security guard did, like, “Hey, look, this guy was already a bad guy so he deserved this treatment.” In reality, there is no need for the media to vilify the passenger, and what he did in the past is no one’s business. We all make mistakes, and it’s not up to the media or United Airlines to dig for dirt to add to this situation. It’s not up to us to judge anyone in this situation. What we can do is realize people react for any number of reasons and that those reactions aren’t always the best decisions. We need to go a little easier on each other or we will forget what it means to be human. We can also speak up and tell these companies that we don’t approve of their policies in a way that doesn’t involve punishing those that work for them and have no say in the matter. I’m all about bringing compassion back to everything we do. It starts with each of us thinking before we act and employing the Golden Rule.

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How to you spell FUN?

There is nothing wrong with hard work, but what’s the point if your work prevents you from enjoying your life. Welcome to FUN, the Podcast that encourages you to Carpe all those Diems and live a life that rewards you personally and professionally. I introduce you to leaders from the business, entertainment and social world that have turned their passion into play. Download one of the apps below and subscribe to “The FUN with Joel Comm” podcast!           

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What To Do After You’ve Helped The Customer

The only business idea better than solving a customer’s problem. All successful businesses start the same way. Whether it’s an ice cream store or a cloud storage company, all good companies have the same foundation: they solve a problem for customers. Can’t find a good sundae in town? A new ice cream store will have you loading up on frozen desserts. Want an easy way to store and access your files? That new cloud service will do the auto-syncing and downloading for you. But that problem-solving is only the start. The question for really successful businesses is how high you can build on that foundation. WalkMe was founded five years ago in Tel Aviv to solve everyone’s problem. Dan Adika, the company’s CEO, wanted to replace the video tutorials that no one watches and the help pages that no one ever reads with website walkthroughs that show users exactly what they need to do. “We started as a guidance tool,” he says. “We showed users how to complete any task they were doing online as they were doing it. It’s like a GPS for websites.” Used on sites as well-known as Eventbrite and Crunchbase, WalkMe provides a layer between the user and the site. The process starts with a search (“How do I create an event?” for example.) But instead of offering a page of search results, users then see a balloon floating over the next button they need to press. When they follow that command, they’re taken to the next step and shown exactly what to do. The system even scrolls down the page for the user and can respond to conditions. Entering particular keywords into a text field, for example, could trigger a new direction for the walkthrough depending on what the user is trying to achieve. Creating the walkthroughs is simple too. Adika says the company set the goal of enabling any manager to create a walkthrough in five minutes without help. “I want my mom to be able to go into Salesforce and do it,” he says. Companies only need to click through the process themselves. WalkMe records the steps and allows them to enter their explanations into the balloons. After acquiring Abbi in January, they can even do it for mobile devices. Now based in San Francisco, the company has raised almost $100 million in funding and employs some 470 people. But while it’s easy to see the value of a website walkthrough, WalkMe’s real value lies in the help it offers to its clients. Mastercard uses it on Salesforce to help its own employees make more sales, and by tracking how customers follow the path laid out by the walkthrough, the company is able to offer detailed customer analytics. What started as a simple upgrade to Help pages has grown into an employee management and data analytics tool. “If you talk to a customer here and a customer here they will tell it’s a completely different product,” says Dan Adika. “One will say it’s an enabler for sales. The other will say it’s support for event organizers.” In addition to Mastercard, the system is used by companies as large as IBM, Unilever and Sony. The company’s most recent valuation put it at $400 million. Solving a customer’s problem is always a great way for a business to begin. It’s when you solve a problem the customer didn’t know he had that success really starts to happen.

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Firing Your Entire Staff Might Just Be Your Best Move Yet

To help others, help yourself first. Watch the safety video on a plane and you’ll notice that the instructor always says to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. The video will even show a parent pulling on their mask before they turn to their child. It’s the one instruction that has you scratching your head and thinking, “Huh, I’m not doing that.” Of course you’d want to make sure your child is okay first. But there’s a reason the safety instructions tell people, even parents, to look after themselves before they look after the people around them. Once they’re comfortable and able to breathe properly, they’ll be able to help others more effectively. That’s the same dilemma that business owners often face. As companies grow, entrepreneurs can find themselves losing the joy that they first had when they opened their business. The work becomes more stressful, less exciting and less fun even as they become increasingly responsible for the lives of their employees. Not only are they now doing work they don’t love, they have to keep doing it for sake of their staff. It’s a lose-lose situation for any entrepreneur who wants to be in control of their own life. Bryan Kramer, for example, runs his own digital agency, Purematter. Along with his wife and co-founder, Courtney, Kramer enjoyed his job as CEO. The company grew to employ twenty people. Soon, though, the difficulty of finding, pleasing and holding onto clients, and the stress of making payroll for a large number of people, started to take its toll. The company had started with a sense of fun and excitement but that fun was disappearing. “The question is how long does this last,” warns Bryan. “You have to hang on to that feeling or you end up giving away so many pieces that you’re no longer having fun. I think that happens more times than not with people who are trying really hard in business. It happened to me.” Bryan’s solution was to do what he loved the most: he took a trip. He and Courtney traveled to Amsterdam then took a boat trip through the rivers of Germany, taking pictures, meeting people from around the world and exploring European food. When they came back, refreshed, they consolidated the company. The staff was let go and the twenty-person agency became a two-person consultancy. The result was a return to that original sense of fun, both for the couple’s work and for their relationship. “We are having a much better time,” says Bryan. “The stress is less. We’re feeding two not twenty. We’re taking work we love and feel passionate about. And the conversations between us are better now that there’s less stress.” That new-found fun has also allowed Bryan to move his business in a direction that is both more satisfying for him and more beneficial for others. He wrote a book explaining that business is neither B2B nor B2C but always human to human, and he’s now dedicating himself to teaching other business owners the techniques and the skills that he learned running an agency. “I’m really excited about educating people, teaching them a few things that can help them to skip a few steps,” he says. “I want to give them a faster way to accomplish something meaningful in their lives.” Running your own business should be fun, and it’s only when you’re having fun in business that you’re in the best position to help others. Reaching for that oxygen mask first might feel strange but it could be just what everyone around you needs. You can listen to the entire interview with Bryan Kramer on FUN with Joel Comm  on itunes here.

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How To Protect Your Privacy When You’re Working In A Cafe

Walk into any café today and you’ll find as many laptops as unicorn frappuccinos. Starbucks and Costa Coffee might just as well market themselves as alternatives to WeWork. It’s pretty generous of those chains to create cheap offices for workers in the gig economy… with pretty good coffee on tap too. And that’s great. One of the benefits of working for yourself and doing your own thing, is that you can work anywhere. You can take your laptop and your Beats headphones and instead of working in the spare bedroom you can build your business from the corner of your local Java bar. You can even hold client meetings there. But spend any amount of time in those cafes and you’ll start to notice something. Not everyone is connected to the café’s wifi. A few people (and you can spot one or two of them in every busy café) will have connected to their phone’s hotspot instead of to the café’s own Internet. I see it often in airport lounges. Their reason won’t be that their Internet is faster, though it might be. They’ll be thinking of security. Log into some open connection in a café, and your computer is vulnerable to hacking. According to some experts, anyone sitting within a hundred feet of you — so that’s anyone in the café — can listen to everything you do on the Web. I’ve always thought that’s a bit paranoid. If you’re not a Pentagon general planning the invasion of North Korea, what are the chances that someone will want to know where you’re browsing? But a little paranoia isn’t always a bad thing. If you’ve got confidential data on your computer, or you’re browsing your finances, taking care of your privacy is a pretty good habit. What I find really strange though is that those people running through their mobile data allowance will usually be sitting in front of an open screen. No one in the café or the airport lounge will be able to view their browser history but everyone who heads to the counter to pick up their coffee (or runs to the bathroom to offload their coffee) can see exactly which sites they’re browsing and what they’re writing about it. And they will. There’s nothing more interesting than the sight of someone else’s computer screen. And it’s not like those café denizens don’t know. In one survey by the Ponemon Institute, 87 percent of mobile workers said they’ve caught someone looking at their screen in a public space. Three out of four were concerned about it, but less than half actually did something about it. That’s crazy because the solutions are simple. There are two of them. The first is to always sit in the corner of the café and tilt the screen so that no one else can see it. That’s great… if there’s a corner available. (Go find the corner next to an airport gate.) The other solution is to buy a Privacy Filter. 3M make them and they make sure that the screen is only viewable by someone sitting right in front of it. If you’re traveling or working in a café, they’re now pretty essential. Just don’t expect them to hide the fact that you’re drinking a unicorn frappuccino. This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of 3M. The opinions and text are all mine.

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