So Here’s Your Challenge

If you have spent any time on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok (and now, sadly, LinkedIn), you may have been the victim of over-sharing. You are subjected to pointless, and often narcissistic postings, often from people and organizations that should know better. While the impact on you is wasted time, the posters often don’t consider the brand impact of their actions: Every posting, comment, picture, or video, tugs the brand in one direction or another.  

With all of the wheel-spinning and effort spent on social media, wouldn’t it be nice to actually use it to grow sales? Not improve awareness, develop the brand, help with marketing, or “continue the conversation”. But actually sell.  

Project managers the world over build Gantt charts, PERT charts, Work Breakdown Structures.  They focus on delivering on-time, on-budget. No matter your role, is there something that can be learned from the profession of project management?

How do you determine the ROI on your marketing and sales investments? Unfortunately, most marketers focus on the conversion rate - say 5%.  But this is a fundamental error: what about the other 95 per cent that haven't converted? What can be done about them?  

Gutless and spineless…and afraid of the marketplace of ideas.  These are not exactly the attributes that most organizations (or people) aspire to. Yet most have a Social Media strategy that conveys precisely that. 

You invest in events, send out emails, educate, and send invoices.  But how well do you really know your target audience?   Beyond the basic demographics, perhaps not as well as you might think...

Have you ever spent time staring at your blank screen, wondering what your next blog post should be about, then staring at the clock, stressing about the looming deadline.  While it’s tempting to think of this problem as writer’s block, it is really a question of process gone wrong.  (Or rather, gone missing.)  

What is the one lesson that appears in every newspaper article, every magazine article, and for that matter, every bestselling book?  Journalists and editors realize that they have to work exceptionally hard to get people to actually read what they write. And unless you actually do so, their work has no value – so they have become experts on “hooking” you in.  Here’s how they do it.  

My recent trip to India has once again sensitized me to an assumption that writers and speakers too often make:  that everyone understands what you mean to say. This is absolutely not the case.  Test yourself – what do the following three words mean?  Flyover, Subway, and Removalist.  

Governments use regulation to influence how we each make decisions, either through tax policy or laws. Business uses money to change our behavior, either through commission plans, bonuses, or advertising. But how do we, as individuals, change the attitudes and behavior of those around us?