photo credit; gainsp2003 on flickr creative commons

CharlestonCurrents.com featured an article from me in their issue on Thursday, 29 April, 2010. I’ve re-printed it here or you can go to the issue to read it.

In the world of nature everything is about opportunity.

This truth was apparent the other day when we heard a thump on the roof of our office. As I looked out of the window a red tailed hawk rolled off the roof with a mourning dove in his talons. They rolled around in the underbrush and then the hawk took flight to the cover of a low growing live oak. There he perched to feast on his meal of opportunity; the mourning dove.

Many reading this will think the hawk cruel for devouring the dove and some might wish for the demise of the hawk. From where I sit, I think this is a lesson in seizing opportunity.

As a small business owner, how hungry are you?

If you are hungry, how do you find your next project? Do you do as the hawk and fly across your territory watching for the slightest twitch or negligence? The truth is that the dove only became hawk food because he was not placing his attention where it needed to be: on being aware of what was happening around him. It’s the same in business. If someone “eats our lunch” in business, it’s because we may have been negligent one too many times.

Be aware

Whether we are in an economic recession, depression or boom, being too satiated keeps us from being aware. Throughout nature, critters have a way to know when opportunity arrives. Spiders sense the filaments of their web twitching; fish feel the vibrations of the water moving as flies land on its surface. Animals have a territory that they diligently monitor, making it their business to know what happens in their territory. We many not need to act on all the intelligence we gain, but it is our responsibility to know. And we must be prepared to respond to our intuition and the cues we gather from our intelligence.

Here are a few tips to keep the business hawks out of our dovecote:

1. Be vigilant to all opportunities.
2. Follow up on all leads.
3. Respond in a timely manner to inquiries.
4. Even when you don’t think you need to, circulate.
5. Remain powerful; not only physically, but mentally. Knowing you are capable is half the way to gaining the opportunity.
6. Don’t judge until you have all the information needed to make a decision.

On Tuesday the competitors in the short program men’s figure skating awed me with their power and determination. When the American Jeremy Abbot messed up his program, I felt his emotional pain.

Abbot said,

“I’m going to have to do a lot of digging in the next two days because I’m not going to give up, and I’m not going to leave it here,” he said. “I’m not going to leave my Games on that experience.”

What a lesson for us all! It’s easy to be jubilant in victory. It’s harder to be determined in the face of failure.

If we are in business long enough each of us will fail.  So on reconsideration perhaps I do understand why these Olympic athletes do what they do. In order to win we must risk.  This anonymous poem has held meaning for me for years.  Maybe Abbott knows it too.

The Risks

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool;

To weep is to risk appearing sentimental;

To reach out for another is to risk involvement.

To expose feeling is to risk exposing your true self.

To place your ideas and your dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss.

To love is to risk not being loved in return.

To live is to risk dying.

To hope is to risk despair.

To try is to risk failure.

But risks must be taken,

The greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.

The person who risks nothing, does nothing,has nothing and is nothing;

They may avoid suffering and sorrow,but they cannot learn, feel change, grow, love, live.

Chained by their certitude, they are a slave,they have forfeited freedom;

Only the person who risks is free.

Hopefully the later is your goal. So here you are, committed or not to the blog and you are short of ideas. These ten ideas will help you write interesting blog posts even when your creative muse has gone on vacation.

1. Look to the news of the day; are there any major news items that impact some aspect of your businesses core competencies? If so, write about how and why. Google News has a robust search feature which allows you to hone in on your most significant keywords.
2. Look to your interactions with your clients. Did you have any “teachable moments” or interactions in the past few days that you feel are common and which, when shared, can provide learning opportunities? If yes, write about those moments; be sure to keep the names of those you mention and identifying comments discrete. You don’t want to embarrass your clients or yourself.
3. Write about some of the “basics” of your business. It is always good to refresh yourself on core competencies and share fresh insights as to why these basics are so important.
4. Write about management issues affecting your business. Each business has issues that are common to them all and often generalize to others in the industry.
5. Look to trends in your industry and analyze how one of them may affect clients in your industry.
6. If your blog is client facing, write about new developments that are sure to produce results for them. Tell why.
7. Invite another industry / sector expert to be a guest blogger. They can write about their insights into key issues in your industry.
8. Share a client success story (with permission of course.) Tell why they succeeded and if you were a part of that success, help readers see how and why the client succeeded.
9. Share a major learning experience; an Ah-ha moment. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be bullet proof…just healed. So say how and why you got insight that helped you redirect.
10. Share information about your colleagues or employees or even new staff member news, awards and competencies. I would even suggest having one of your employees write a guest post. Invite them to share some of their personality and talents they bring to working with you.

As the dust settles on this year we see the frantic scramble to get into social media normalizing. More businesses understand the new conversation channels or are at least trying to incorporate them in their mix. We understand that television and print media while changing will not go away. We understand that there is a conversation and that the customer truly owns the brand.

What do you see in your crystal ball for 2010?

We recognize that the U.S. is composed of a diverse population, with 38% of us being over 44 years of age; 37.4% of us being 18-44 years of age and the remainder under 17 years of age.

As marketing and business communications professionals, this means we comprehend each audience segment has preferred information channels. As we promote our services and products, we understand that a 21 year old will get their news from Google reader and that at 58 year old from most probably from either TV or print media. That there are some of us who, while in the older segments, use new technology, embracing mobile media as much as the younger generations. We also understand that not only younger generations care about social responsibility; that social responsibility is a required part of being in business. That when it comes to media relations, the media are just as stressed as other business segments and are trying to do as much with fewer resources. That our job is to work in tandem with them by supplying truly interesting information and sources to help them do their jobs.

2010 promises to be rich with opportunity for small businesses to act like big corporations when it comes to reaching customers through all the channels with a straight to consumer approach that is more about what the customer wants in their lives.

In summary:

• Marketing Communications
  • More segmentation of message—We’ll use Twitter, Facebook, the local newspaper as well as television, and increasingly, mobile technology.
  • Social media acceptance as one of the major message delivery vehicles
  • Social responsibility as a requirement of doing business
  • Blurring of the difference between advertising and public relations
• For PR
  • Video pitching
  • Social media acceptance as one of the major message delivery vehicles to media contacts and the consumer
  • Increasing message delivery direct to the consumer
  • We’ll turn more to multi media releases, using the power of video sharing, and pod casts to enrich press releases
  • Public relations professionals as major advisors for not only publicity but for advertising and marketing messages.

Share your prognostications with us. We look forward to learning from everyone how they see the new year shaping up for them.

The positive points of having a blog for your business are capably enumerated in this post from Conversation Agent. Especially insightful are these points:

Blogs allow you to:

• provide topical and relevant information and resources regularly, to become an appointment
• receive feedback from your readers and engage them in discussions that are relevant to them
• distribute your content more widely thanks to Google and the larger business community online

Valeria Maltoni’s helpful suggestions of how to organize one’s thoughts and ideas work.

As she notes, printed and mailed newsletters have their place as do e-newsletters, but a blog allows for two way conversation. As we’ve noted in previous posts (Ask your users what they think), we want to listen and engage more than talk to.

Blogging is a rewarding way to engage your customers and provides immediate and updated news to them.

The video above goes into the cute category, but I sent it to six friends and one can’t help but wonder how many they will send their own version of this to. Classic viral.

The other that is having major impact today is the global effort to promote Help a Reporter Out, a free service started by Peter Shankman to connect journalists and sources. The service has taken off with marketing staffers, journalists from diverse media, pr pros, and small business owners who want to do a better job of getting PR. Shankman asked everyone to set their status on their social networking sites to,

“Get Sourced. Get Quoted. Get Famous: www.helpareporter.com – Putting Journalists and Sources together, one quote at a time.”

and it’s working. As of 10:30 a.m. today, Summize for Twitter had 9 pages of tweets of those who’d tweeted with that message.

Social networking is not new. It’s been going on forever, some in the past called it, “gabbing over the fence,” “the water cooler” or “gossip.” I call it good sense.

As reported in a 2003 Post and Courier article, Principal Moore is a professional who works hard at her job, creates success and is recognized for that success. Her almost miraculous turn-around of Sanders-Clyde Elementary School prompted the CCSD to do what many in other businesses frequently do; give a high achiever more to do for less money. The business maxim seems to be that if you have one successful person, give them more to be successful at. Never mind sustaining success and making sure that one doesn’t kill the goose that laid the “golden egg of success.”

CCSD asked Principal Moore to take on the turn-around of another failing school, Fraser Elementary. In the Post and Courier on Saturday, May 10th, Principal Moore was lauded in a High Profile article. Now, don’t get me wrong, we should laud her to the high heavens, but we should also encourage her to preserve herself. Principal Moore reported in the recent article, that she rarely sleeps more than four hours a night.

Enough sleep we’ve been recently told is one of the most underrated preservers of good health. We know that adequate sleep allows the body to heal itself. It supports a vital immune system that resists disease. It helps prevent diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. We also know that good sleep can be undermined by stress which Principal Moore admits dogs her thoughts. Principal Moore said in the May 10th article that she cries with worry about making sure both schools achieve. Stress? this woman’s stress level is off the chart!

Stress can sometimes be counteracted by loving relationships, however, Reporter Diette Correge writes in her May 10th article of Principal Moore, “She talks about being single and not having kids or a significant other, and she says she gave her beloved Shih Tzu dog to her mother last year because she didn’t have enough time to take care of her.”

Today the Post and Courier contains an editorial that says that we should “Learn from Principal Moore”. Well, yes we should. About perseverance, about using all our abilities to do a job. About doing our very best. But we should also learn our limits. The unspoken message in this editorial, and the story from May 10th is that we should take on more than we can do to the detriment of our health and without the correct compensation. I am not damning Principal Moore. She is working to achieve success the best way that she knows how in our culture that touts workaholism as the goal for all high achieving professionals. She’s doing what we define for professionals as success. She’s working harder.

Hard work is essential to success, but so is being alive. We must get over our Puritanical notions that hard work is the only path to success. We must learn to seek balance. Rest, exercise, laughter, partnership– in the company of hard work. We must realize that stress is the number one cause of disease. So, I say to Principal Moore, delegate, train others to do what you are doing, work hard yes, but balance, protect your health, think of your future. If you want to be around to see the success that I am sure you will achieve at Fraser Elementary, seek balance.