2014s Three Guiding Words

3 Guiding words

This year as part of my overall planning, I’ve taken Chris Brogan‘s challenge/suggestion to heart and have adopted three guiding words for 2014 to use not only in my business, but in my personal development as well. Below you’ll find the 2013 and 2014 posts that Chris did in regard to his words, the process and what he’s found it means to him. I personally like the idea of having words (mental images) that I can return to when weighing decisions about how I’ll spend my time and energy. My hope, is the addition of the guiding words will stimulate more creativity and help get me back on track, anytime I stray away from the path I’m looking to take/share this year.

Why adopt this challenge? It’s a good question. I was looking for a way to revitalize my planning process and the subsequent journey. In his 2013 post Brogan noted “I’ve found the concept of three words allows me to think in more dimensions about what I want to do with my life and it lets me apply lots of tangible goals…” and this resonated with me. In both of his posts (see below), he gives clear directions as to how to create yours, the words he’s used in the past and how when he experimented with 4 words once, what the result was.

The process in discovering my words was easier than I had imagined. I had a good idea of what I wanted to accomplish in 2014 in the three areas of professional, personal and financial health. Lately, I’ve been reading and studying the activities of Simon Sinek and Brene Brown and the first word was very top of mind. As Brogan noted, “The words are meant to be a “shorthand” or memory trigger to your larger vision, goals and plans”.

2014 Three Guiding Words:

So without further adieu, here are my three guiding words:

Inspire:

My goal is to inspire others to achieve their personal and professional goals in 2014 and beyond. For myself, it’s also a reminder to continually seek out different perspectives and ideas on ways to lead an inspired life. I’ve been fortunate to have had so many divergent influences and interests over the years that I don’t fit nicely into any one category. It’s a small problem in trying to develop a niche, but a real benefit in searching for innovated solutions to problems. Brian Fanzo wrote this post on Twitter, and I couldn’t agree more. I hope to inspire others to do so as well.

 

Cultivate:

I’m looking forward to cultivating stronger personal and professional relationships, with old friends and new alike in 2014.  The power of social for me has been the ability to connect with so many interesting and talented people throughout the world. The next step for me is to meet some or as many as reasonably possible this coming year. I’m looking to forge strong working relationships with others that share my passion for delivering exceptional service and who are looking to inspire their communities to achieve success and happiness. The power of social has reconnected me to folks from my past. Each have gone on to do wonderful and creative things from the last time I got to spend time with them. An example is Brett Heard. An inspiration for certain. Brett has forged a great career at Fresh Baked Entertainment. When Brett released his first, of what I’m sure will be more motion pictures, “Stag”, I got to see an early cut of the film with a focus group. The invitation to attend was a great honour, but the best part was being able to see Brett, shake his hand and congratulate him on his hard work and success over the years. It’s been a real treat watching his wonderful career and skills grow. In addition, I’ve got to see how he is a great family man as well. I really am looking forward to experiencing that feeling with others, I feel I know, but haven’t met yet this year and sharing those experiences with Joan and Spencer.

Courage:

Having the courage to step out of my comfort zone to achieve happiness, health and to ensure I continue to cultivate and inspire. This one will take more work, as in the past I’ve allowed myself to be sidetracked by projects that were not necessarily a good fit for my values or goals. Over the years I’ve gotten very possessive of my time, especially in carving out that time for family. I’ll need the courage to say no to projects that don’t fit, but still have the humanity to guide them to someone who may be a much better fit. I’ll need courage to avoid falling into easy patterns and to make commitments to stick to habit changes I want to push beyond settling for the status quo.

So far, with these three guiding words, I’ve committed to my four “study” books for the year, a commitment to pursue podcasting, commitment to complete a couple of online courses and certifications, improve the service levels for clients, develop a proprietary online training course for a niche industry in transition and schedule opportunities to meet more people in person.

I’m lookingforward to seeing the impact of these guiding intentions on this years journey.

 What are your words or techniques that help keep you on track to achieving your goals?

 

Resources:

Chris Brogan’s “My Three Words for 2013” post

Chris Brogan’s “My Three Words for 2014” post

Customer Service is Marketing

English: A business ideally is continually see...
English: A business ideally is continually seeking feedback from customers: are the products helpful? are their needs being met? Constructive criticism helps marketers adjust offerings to meet customer needs. Source of diagram: here (see public domain declaration at top). Questions: write me at my Wikipedia talk page (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Marketing, Social Selling, Social Business,
Strive for excellence

I’ve long-held the belief that marketing is an enterprise wide responsibility. At its core, effective marketing programs connect the customer experience across the organization from manufacturing and service best practices to customer preferences and the capabilities of your competitors. With the continued advances in technology, it’s become easier to collaborate within your organization to achieve stellar results. The downside to the advance of technology is that your customers can easily assess your capabilities, can see if your actions aligned with your messaging, and most importantly whether or not you live your corporate values.

All to frequently, organizations believe that the role of marketing is  purely to promote the organization’s products or services. In fact, the discipline is much greater than promotion. The substance of marketing is centered around the customer, always! There has been performance programs built since the early ’90’s focused on how an organization can meet or exceed a customers needs.

I know it sounds like an episode from Rod Sterling’s “Twilight Zone”; but, imagine an organization that empowers its line workers to halt production of the entire line when the machinery falls out of alignment, threatening the quality of goods (reducing returns). The accounts receivable clerk responsible for understanding customer issues and sticking with the customer through the entire organization until the issue is resolved satisfactorily (reducing days outstanding and building stronger customer relationships). The customer service department that is charged with ensuring the customer isn’t just satisfied with the fix, but is committed to making the customer happy (leading to your ultimate marketing tool – word of mouth referrals).  Sounds a little outlandish doesn’t it? Based on your customer service experiences would you believe it to be true? I can assure you from my experience that when you put your customer first, good things can and will happen.

As a marketer and an entrepreneur, I’ve been in large organizations with national and international reach, worked with “Mom and Pop’s”, owned my own businesses , and I’ve seen first hand the difference having, or not having, a solid customer service program can have on the bottom line performance of the organization. For solopreneur’s or micro-businesses, you may believe that this is beyond your capabilities. Please take the time to do your research and learn more, because you can do this. In fact, doing so might provide you with the competitive advantage you’ve been yearning for. I’d also recommend that if you haven’t read the work of Micheal Gerber, that you consider get a copy. It was and continues to be fundamental to my successes (read the E-Myth series if you’ve not*).

Lately, it’s the work of talented friends and closely followed virtual mentors that has brought the issue of integrating marketing efforts with those in sales and other customer facing departments to the forefront for me. This weekend, Terry O’Reilly (@terryoinfluence), released his latest installment of “Under the Influence” on CBC Radio One, and the focus was on customer service. The episode has real life examples of organizations that have gone above and beyond to make their customer not only satisfied, but happy. As O’Reilly states “A happy customer, is a loyal customer”. Could you imagine, taking a return on an item that you stock, but didn’t sell, or ordering a pizza for your customer at 2am, when you’re an online fashion store? Well, these organizations not only did it, they encouraged it. I’d recommend that you give the episode a listen, in fact, when you have time, give them all a listen (I believe you’ll enjoy them).

To illustrate how effective customer service is so fundamental to your business success, here are a couple of sample tweets pulled from my feed this morning.

Some quick examples of tweets from today alone. If you’re not doing it already, it’s time to take your marketing/customer service to the next level and learn to deliver an exceptional customer experience. We know that it takes up to seven or more contacts to get a new customer to consider buying from us and only a few to get an existing customer to buy again. As O’Reilly so aptly reminds us “Customer Service doesn’t cost money, it makes money”.

How are you treating your customers?

* no affiliate link

Related articles

Social Business Coffee Break! Adoption BP #5 Social leadership! #socbiz

It’s been an interesting week already. Yesterday, I was able to participate in in the Waterloo Region Social Media Summit, hosted by the Small Business Center. The day was full of great information from the generous and talented speakers (to see the stream use #socbizwr). What was telling that in the course of these 24 hours, I’ve listen to Joe Thornley, CEO of Thornley Fallis (@Thornley) keynote at the summit talk about the need for senior leadership in social, returned home and caught this compelling discussion/debate with @tedrubin and @jasonkeath in IBM’s webcast debate the ROI of social media and the need for senior level engagement and leadership (watch here). http://youtu.be/29i4L0mui2U

Today, as I scanned my reader, I came across this great presentation from Sandy Carter, VP Social Business Evangelist at IBM sharing information from IBM’s CEO survey. What’s nice about this short presentation is the key takeaways and the excellent examples of CEO’s that have embrace social to engage with their customers and how they are empowering their employees to do the same. Both are worth your time.

– Gordon

Related articles
View Mobile Site