Near Miss Or A Total Catastrophe

You just escaped an event that could have resulted in a major financial loss or a serious injury. But you escaped it. You are now out of it and your finances are in place and your health is intact. You take a deep breath and move on with your life. Or do you?

Rollback a bit and take a pause. What just happened there? In simple words, you just got lucky. What are the chances that it won’t happen again? A more pertinent question may be, why were you in that situation to begin with? Were there signals out there hinting of a looming disaster? Did you ignore them and just moved on until you were almost hit by it? Now that you got lucky, what do you do? Move on or fix what brought you so close to a disaster? The answer is obvious.

In a book, Managing the Unexpected by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, they argue that resilient organizations treat near misses as failures and make sure that they are never faced with that situation again.

If we as individuals, start to treat near misses as failures and take actions to prevent a repeat, we’ll be better at managing our work, relationships and responsibilities we are entrusted with.

What Do You Do When You Hit A Wall?

When you hit a wall, what do you do? Do you take the easy way out or do you stick in there and dig?

There’s a lot that you can do by playing on the surface. But that won’t make a difference. You’ll have to roll your sleeves and dig in deep. You’ll have to get out of your comfort zone and explore new ideas and strategies. If you are not sweating and not feeling the pain, the walls are not going to shrink.

So, when you hit a wall, don’t squirm around, dig in!

3 Steps To Dig Out From Your Social Media Rut

Are you managing your company’s social media marketing? How are you performing? Are you making an impact or are you stuck?

Most professionals would like to think that they dig and find new ways when they hit a wall. However, in reality, many squirm around the problem and hope that somehow their efforts would yield results. It doesn’t work that way. When you are stuck, you have to dig.

How do you dig out of it? Let’s deal with this situation head on.

Situation
Your social media content is not creating the buzz and not engaging with your followers.

I have seen many businesses treat their social media channels as a gateway to share cute and hopefully enthralling news from around the world. They will throw in great stories of samaritans, animals acting funny on cameras and of course, how to beat the Monday blues and get excited about weekends!

We do this because who wouldn’t like those warm and fuzzy stories. But in this pursuit, we lose the focus of why fans are following our business on Facebook and Twitter. If they want those fuzzy stories, there are organizations that champion and promote such stories. They can always get it from them. More importantly, you are simply curating content that’s gone viral and very likely they have been viewed by everyone all over the web umpteen times. Where’s your creativity, what’s your contribution?

Solution
To conquer this challenge, you must first answer the big question.

1. The Big Question

What’s the motivation behind creating this social media channel? Do you want to help your clients learn more about your product? Do you want to engage with prospects? A mix of both? Do you want to establish yourself as the thought leader in your business space? Do you want to cater to a certain group of professionals by providing them with helpful tips? What’s the goal? You have to be absolutely clear about it. Keep the goal focussed. Having too many goals will only derail the impact.

Nike created their Facebook page with the goal to motivate people, athletes. They are not selling products, they are not providing customer support, simply encouraging followers to be active and out there.

Once you know your goal, start thinking about your audience.
2. Know your audience
Who are they? Knowing your audience will help you promote your Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin posts. What really helps is creating a persona of your followers. Who’s your typical follower, sketch the persona of that person and keep it in front of you when you write the content. Try to understand their pain points and align that with your goal.

3. Build a Strategy
Once you know your goal and the audience, now’s the time to strategize. Many marketers would start with the strategy straight away, Don’t. You’ll only be shooting in the dark and throwing everything around to see what sticks.

If you are looking to upsell to your clients, focus on upcoming products, give them discount coupons. Engage them through promotions and referrals. If you are trying to convince prospects, focus on case studies, testimonials, thought leadership articles. You have to strategize based on your goal and audience. Also, being aware of your brand identity and the kind of product or service that you offer and the budget that you have will all play into your strategy.

But if you are stuck, and want to dig out, you’ll have to roll your sleeves and strategize.

Start Early, Fail Quickly

 

Hershey Chocolate

Last summer, I was at Hershey’s Chocolate Factory in Hershey, PA, with my kids. While on the tour bus, the tour guide spoke about Hershey’s founder, Milton S. Hershey. How he took on an apprenticeship at the age of 16  and how he started his first company at 19 and how he failed many times before he could get it right and find success. But, when he did find success, after many failed attempts, he was all of 29!

There are many such grand stories of young people finding success early on. But when you trace the history, you find they started very young and failed many times before finding success. So, go ahead, start early and fail quickly.

Dear Manager, Break Down Those Cubicles!

In a workplace, learning happens when you collaborate. It happens when you interact with your colleagues and contemporaries. And it also happens when you hear  your colleague talking to a prospect or a client on the phone. In other words, it happens when you hear each other, when you sit next to each other.

cubicles vs open space
cubicles vs open space

Unless your role and the nature of job demands privacy, there’s no reason why we should seclude employees from each other and put them behind highrise cubicles or worse, in offices, far from hearing distance of each other.

Dear Manager, break down those cubicles and you’ll see a startling transformation in learning and productivity that comes from healthy feedback and competition.

Photo (c): AgencySpy and Kisses & Chaos

Don’t Lose a Customer

Many SaS based software companies lose their clients after the clients’ needs are fulfilled. They paid for your service; month to month or annually and then cancel accounts when done.

Is it possible to restrict their software usage to bare minimum and extend them the service in this minimum mode for free or almost free so they don’t have to cancel their subscriptions? If the answer is yes, you may have just cut down your customer attrition many folds.

What’s Brewing In Your Mind?

Your best idea is ahead of you. However, you can only get to it after a failed 100 ideas… so, go ahead and execute that idea that’s brewing in your mind. If it doesn’t succeed, it will at least get you closer to success.

Starbucks to Acquire Barnes and Noble?

What if Starbucks were to acquire Barnes and Noble?

First of all we wouldn’t be seeing notices like these. 

Starbucks-Barnes-and-Nobles
Starbucks-Barnes-and-Nobles

Second of all Barnes and Noble with a market cap of $ 788.91 Million is an easy acquisition for Starbucks with a market cap of $42.24 Billion.

And for Barnes and Noble with their stocks fluctuating between $13 and $16 for a long time is only slipping further. Nook sales are down and Amazon has beaten them in both; e-readers and print books.

Starbucks’s stocks have been rising steadily since 2009.

But these are not the reasons why I am recommending that Starbucks should acquire Barnes and Noble.

I am actually saying that Starbucks need a game changing act soon and acquiring Barnes and Noble is one such act.

Here are my reasons:

  1. Starbucks has serious competition in its core business. Caribou coffee can give Starbucks a run for its money any day. I personally prefer Caribou Coffee when I have the option between the two. Caribou Coffee has a better store layout and a more homey touch than Starbucks that resembles more like an old library. In other words, Caribou Coffee is more in tune with Gen Y.
  2. Amazon went from a book seller to a world’s leading tech company, why can’t a connoisseur coffee seller foray into technology? What better opportunity than to invest the money in Barnes and Noble e-readers to boost its appeal and sales. I can attest that Nook is a classy device, lost in the sea of competition that is willing to make no money out of them yet.
  3. Coffee and books are made for each other. Why can’t we add breakfast and pastries to that list. After all you would have so much real estate to play with. e-readers are the future. You’ll have more space than you actually need to host all the books of the world.
  4. Offer a Starbucks coupon with every book you sell. Come on Mr. Schultz, we know those coffees really don’t cost that much!
  5. And not to forget that an act of keeping Barnes and Noble open will make Starbucks an instant heart throb of millions of Americans, including yours truly.
  6.  Gen Z adore this section (see image below), you need them to come to you before they discover Caribou Coffee. Invest in the future.
Barnes and Nobles Store Closing
Barnes and Noble Store Closing