The Third Stage

One Word theme for 2012 - ENABLE

With a tip of the hat to Mari Smith the Social Media guru I am going to theme our years from now on.

And the theme for 2012 is ENABLE.

In 2011 we put a great deal of effort into changing our product mix to fit with a desire to help people and businesses grow in a more human way. We did this through our training programme The Growth Circle, building easy to use/navigate/maintain websites for our clients and through the introduction of our Appreciation Marketing programmes. At the same time we shed some of our older products and thinking.

This year we will be focusing on the word ENABLE:

• Enabling our customers to grow through our programmes
• Enabling more people to interact with us by improving our systems
• Enabling more business to be done with and through our collaboration partners
• Enabling the creation of more assets for our investors, partners and clients.

Check back and see how we are doing, tell me what your one-word strategy will be this year, and thank you for reading this.

Happy New Year

Phil Terrett

 

 

Sprat to catch a mackerel - does this work for online services?

So here is the scenario. You are looking for an online product to support your business. You scout around and find one, it is used by some big names in your industry but you want to try it out before committing to the bigger costs of an 'Enterprise' version. Imagine your delight when you find that there is a free, hosted version that you can use until you get to a certain size before switching to the paid version.

Sprat to catch a Mackerel right?

Everyone happy right? You get to try the product, they get to reel you in? Usually no unfortunately.

A case in point. We were sold on OpenX, an online adserver that we wanted to use with a client. Their free version claimed many users, and a nice lady spent 30 minutes on the phone with us explaining the product. She did tell us that it was unsupported by OpenX but that there was a vibrant online community that supported it through the forums. This meant that any minor implementation issues could be answered by the community.

So we plumbed the product in. Great user interface. Easy to configure. All the bells and whistles.

Problem. It does not work as it should. Ads are delivered sporadically or not at all. Single Page call doesn't work. There are blanks, delays, things missing.

So over on the vibrant forums we realise something - no-one from OpenX takes part in the forums except for the occasional monosyllabic (responses blocked) announcements that something is fixed. The forums are full of desparate companies repeating questions on the same topics - why doesn't it work? Why won't you respond?

Over on Twitter the clamour for action grows and is largely ignored. One customer says "It has been three days since any ads were served to my site". Emails to their help email address get no response. An email to the nice lady who talked with us gets this response: "This is the problem we have with our free products since they come with no support or guarantees."

Our guess is that 'No support' actually means 'We don't care and won't help'.

So is there a point to this rant? Yes, actually.

If you are going to offer a free product to entice people to to use you and then move on to your paid product then:

a) It has to work and well

b) You need to support the fundamentals of the product - i.e. to keep it working

c) Your customer service and responsiveness needs to be of at least the same quality as that of your paid products.

Otherwise, guess what? Correct. People will rip out your system, never progress to the paid product, and will not be fans in the futute.

p.s. Using Twitter for Customer Service only works if you pay attention.

Legs beneath the water: Trey Pennington

It is a sad morning.

I just heard from my good friend Allan Blair Beaton that one of the speakers that I met at Allan's recent What's Next 2011 conference, the social media guru Trey Pennington took his life yesterday.

Trey flew into the UK to present at the Cardiff event and I got to say hello to him. He was a warm, charming and intelligent man who wowed the audience with his keynote address. He was generous and had brought across from South Carolina a bag load of bandanas for the audience. He was thinking of others.

I don't know the circumstances of yesterday, but the twitterverse points to underlying depression - I guess time will tell, but what a sadness that he could not find help.

How many of us are like ducks, serene and confident above the waterline, but with legs paddling like crazy out of view to keep us afloat?

My thoughts go out to Trey's family today......

Thanks to Allan and Paul and Jacs for the picture.

Book review #23 365 Thank Yous

Book reviews from The Third Stage is our blog series devised to recommend marketing and networking books that could help with your business.

365 Thank Yous

John Kralik

ISBN 978-1-4013-2405-6

 
This book is a story of personal journey made by a middle-aged American lawyer who made a fundamental decision to change his rotten life by spending a year sending out 365 thank you notes. It is intensely personal and often excruciatingly so.

What we find important about this book, is that it is part of a trend towards older values; the simple politeness of saying thank you, being grateful for what we do have rather than bemoaning what we don't have, showing appreciation to those around us.

John Kalik's personal style of thank you note will not suit everybody. The pain that he felt and healed will be uncomfortable for some. However, take on board the underlying honesty and warmth of this story, and the amazing decision he took to do this, and you will learn a lot from this book.

Saying thank you is a first step towards developing your own ability to treat others with appreciation and by doing so to improve their lives and yours. Have a read we're sure you will enjoy this.

The Oldpreneur says: "Have we lost the art and the benefits of saying thank you?"

I ask this because I always try to thank people, when they have done me a favour or have been an advocate for my business. I guess it was part of my upbringing, with my parents insisting that thank you notes always be sent for Christmas or birthday presents - as I do now with my children. Yet when I thank someone much younger than myself they always seem surprised, especially if it is a handwritten note.

My route to appreciation started with an idea to become more memorable after meeting people at networking events. Instead of the ubiquitous sales e-mail to follow up a short meeting, I started sending handwritten postcards to the people I met. These cards noted something about the conversation we had had and I soon found that people remembered me more for this approach. In fact people come up to me often and say “You’re postcard guy I remember you”.

A Los Angeles judge recently spent a year sending out 365 thank you notes. This turned his life around and he became a judge, and in his words, a better person. He also got a book out of it!

After practising appreciation for a couple of years my company has just launched an appreciation marketing service to help companies and time constrained one-man bands show their appreciation to their contacts. This is really exciting to us and immediate clients include solicitors, estate agents, and a department store.

It occurs to me that every older businessperson has an advantage over (most) younger competitors in the field of appreciation, having been brought to show gratitude. This is obviously a generalisation, but I believe there is truth in it.

Does it work for your business? Recently a colleague from a previous corporate role asked if we would be able to help a client of his. We could, and won a contract with them. Our first action was to send handwritten thank you postcard to the colleague. His response was to e-mail asking has some of my business cards to appoint more similar clients towards us. When they first cheque comes in he will be in line from more substantial thank you in the form of a hamper.

Mother Teresa said “There is more hunger in the world for love and appreciation than for bread”.

So, thank you for reading this and let me know if I can help you…

(Reproduced from the July 2011 column by The Oldpreneur for Wales and West Media)

 

Introducing The Oldpreneur

Phil Terrett, our CEO has been moonlighting! Since he turned 50 last year (looks 40, feels 30, behaves like he is 10) he has been writing a column for Wales and West Media called The Oldpreneur.

After some thought we decided to let him publish it on the company blog, so watch out for a regular opinionated piece from The Oldpreneur!

Why improving your emotional intelligence is a good thing

Gareth Harris of Positive Doing has been involved in personal development for over 10 years. He is a Master Practitioner of NLP and a New Code NLP Practitioner and is accredited to deliver Emotional Intelligence through JCAs ie online report. Here he discusses improving your emotional intelligence:

We all need to communicate with other people and the quality of this communication can make a huge difference to the results we get. 

When you improve your emotional intelligence (Ei) you get to develop the key areas needed to make the most of any communications you have in the future.

The great news about you Ei is that it can be developed.  

Ei looks at two very specific areas:

Intrapersonal Intelligence = being intelligent enough to pick up what is going on inside of you (Self awareness) and doing what we need to do about it (Self management).

Interpersonal Intelligence = being intelligent enough to pick up what is going on in other people and between people (Other awareness) and doing what we need to do about that (Relationship management).

At a deeper level Ei is influenced by our attitudes, in particular our attitude towards ourselves (Self regard) and our attitude towards other people (Regard for others).

 

The relationship between the two areas are shown above. The core attitudes of Self regard and Regard for others is considered the bedrock of your Ei and is very often one of the first areas to be developed.

Self Regard - Far too many people are wondering around with a way too low regard for themselves. Which, if linked to a too high regard for others means the communications are very lop sided and tend to be of the “you’re OK I’m not OK” type of conversation. Improving your self regard is a corner stone to better Ei.

Awareness of self and of others  - The degree to which you are in touch with you body,your feelings and your intuitions and the degree to which you are in touch with the feeling states of others. Both of these skills when developed will make a huge difference to the way you communicate with others.

These are just a couple of 16 different emotional intelligence areas that can be developed. 

So, by improving your emotional intelligence your communications with yourself and others will improve. And this has to be a good thing.

Gareth Harris

gareth@positivedoing.com

Twitter.com/positivedoing

 

 

New Blog Series - The Growth Circle

As we move smoothly in to 2011, we are starting a new series on our blog dedicated to the fine folks involved with our business support initiative The Growth Circle.

The Growth Circle is a collaboration of experts (we define expert not a some smart alec who thinks they know everything, but rather as someone who makes a living in the subject area they have chosen) who we call the Business Ninjas. These Ninjas have voices that should be heard.

As we help businesses grow, they too have voices and great knowledge. The Growth Circle blog series will introduce expert topics from both groups.

So essentially dear readers you will soon be able to access a steady stream of Guest Blog Articles from our partners and clients to help you. Please comment freely - your feedback is appreciated and useful to us.

Coming shortly and first up will be the subject of Emotional Intelligence.

In the meantime, you may care to find out more about The Growth Circle's upcoming Bristol Media Summit on February 3rd 2011:

Book Review #22 The Pickle-Smith Trunk-Warmer

Book reviews from The Third Stage is our blog series devised to recommend marketing and networking books that could help with your business.

Ok well not strictly true this time around, however The Pickle-Smith Trunk-Warmer is an illustration of the writing capabilities of a great friend of ours, James Daniel of Earthmonkey, a fine copywriter and SEO guy. TPSTW showcases some of James' talent, and if you are a student of marketing also take a look at the campaign behind the book on Twitter / Facebook and at the website www.picklesmith.co.uk.

But down to serious stuff. TPSTW is a ripping yarn for pre-12 children telling (hopefully only the first installment of) the story of Indigo 'Indy' Pickle-Smith. Indy is a serial inventor of such impressive gadgets as the Pickle-Smith Alien-Translator TM, and the Pickle-Smith Kung-Fu-Matic Robot TM. This story focuses on his fight to get recognition for the Pickle-Smith Trunk-Warmer, a design to prevent elephants from getting trunk frost when skiing. Despite attention from the vile Hugo, cannibals in Africa and a cat on a hang-glider Indy......but that would be giving the story away wouldn't it :-).

TPSTW is beautifully written and the cartoon illustrations are great. We can unashamedly say  "Go here and buy it" if you have a youngster in your family - it is great fun and they will enjoy it thoroughly.

Cool Stuff #53 Fiverr

Cool Stuff is The Third Stage's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

So you have reached the point where your social media strategy is ready and you are looking for content for your website or Facebook page or to send to your followers on Twitter. Take a look at fiverr.com. For $5 (yes really that is all), you could get a video testimonial in Spanish, a new avatar, your name written in the sand, a plan to help you cope with a zombie invasion (personalised to you), or our favourite, your url written into the blank box in the middle of a tattoo on a model's back.

We seriously think that Fiverr is cool and useful, and full of practical things that can help your business. It is also addictive and an awful lot of fun. Be prepared to lose at least an hour of your life browsing and giggling the first time you visit. Here's one Phil, our leader got done - it cost him $5 (£3.28 at the time).

The Third Stage derives no financial benefit from featuring Roundpic in this series. If Fiverr is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.