November, 2008

Branding Basics / Customer Service — No Comments
24
Nov 08

Little Things That Make a Difference

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Photo Credits: aplumb

Businesses often overlook simple ways to build competitive advantage, little things that are easy to implement and don’t cost much that are nevertheless very important to the end user.

One example is snacks on planes. The cost of a small snack is probably not more than $5 per passenger, yet airline bosses have decided that they are “not in the food business”.

This, however, gives customers ammunition to badmouth the airline. I’m sure you’ve heard at least once somebody complaining about how airline X didn’t even give them a bag of peanuts during their 3 hour flight.

Wouldn’t it be better to have happy customers bragging about how airline X gave them two bags of peanuts and didn’t even charge them for a glass of wine? How much is that goodwill worth? Can’t the airline pay for it by just spending a little less on advertising?

And what about auto makers who spend hundreds of millions of dollars designing a new state of the art engine, but decide not to spend $2 in a better piece of plastic so that the driver can comfortably rest his cup of coffee?

Or, what about doctors who risk getting sued, not due to malpractice and negligence, but because they didn’t treat their patients right? Sometimes spending five minutes treating somebody with respect can create more goodwill than a million dollar education…

People tend to focus on (and talk about) the things they understand.

Most people don’t care about the principle of Bernoulli that explains why an airplane flies, but they know that when they get hungry on a plane they want food. They may not understand how a continuous variable transmission works, but they can “get” cup holders. They may not have a clue of how brain surgery works, but they sure can tell when a doctor cares.

What are those little things that you can do in your business to make the customer experience better?

Personal Branding — 7 Comments
19
Nov 08

Personal Branding Works Like Insurance

When I was growing up in Peru back in the day, there was a very popular radio commercial that I would hear every day on my way to school. It was from an insurance company, and it went something like this: “It is better to have insurance and not need it, than to need insurance and not have it”. It must have really worked, because they aired it for years.

I can’t help to remember that commercial when I see how some people approach personal branding and networking. When they suddenly find themselves looking for a job, a project or a customer, they rush to update their résumé, put together a half-baked LinkedIn profile and call everybody they know, even if they haven’t kept in touch in years.

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Photo Credits: MarkHillary

That’s not the way things work. Just like insurance, the best time to prepare for bad times is during good times (and times can go from good to bad very quickly). The Dow went from 13,000 to close to 8,000 in a matter of days and 240,000 people lost their jobs in October alone. Many of these were good, high paying jobs held by highly educated and well qualified individuals.

The right approach is to manage your personal brand as if you were an independent contractor. You work for a company called Me, Inc. independently of who pays your salary. If you’re still gainfully employed or still have work in the pipeline, by all means work hard and bring your “A” game to the office every day. Just don’t make the mistake of putting all your eggs in that basket.

Personal branding is like insurance. Don’t develop a pre-existing condition by neglecting your personal brand.

Here are a few links to get you started:

Online Branding — No Comments
16
Nov 08

Creating and Managing Your Social Media Avatars

Some time ago I mentioned that favicons and avatars (or profile pictures) are important branding elements on the web. This time I’ll talk about how to create and manage your avatars.

As we participate in different social media sites, we notice that each one requires a different size of profile picture. This means that we must either manually crop our picture, or let the site resize it (which may result in cropping your picture in the wrong place or decreasing its quality or aspect ratio).

To create profile pictures for different media sites, I use a service called mypictr.com.

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The process is simple:

  1. Upload the picture you want to use.
  2. Select a social media site from the drop down menu. A frame with the correct size will pop up on top of your picture.
  3. Play with the cursor at the left hand side to reduce your picture’s size, and click and drag the frame until you’re satisfied with your picture.
  4. Click on Pictr It button and wait a few seconds.
  5. Once your profile picture comes up, right click on it and save it on your hard drive (you can create a folder called Profile Pictures or something like that, and name your picture using the name of the social media site somewhere in the file name).
  6. Select a different social media site repeat the procedure.

Here are a few tips to take into account before creating your profile pictures:

  • If you are participating in social media as an individual, try to use a picture of yourself. If you participate as a company, you can use your company logo.
  • A good way to get your picture noticed is to set your face diagonally in the picture frame.
  • Don’t change your profile picture too often, which can be confusing to your followers.
  • Try to use the same picture in different social media sites. Most people frequent more than one service, and using the same picture in all of them will make it easier for your followers to spot you.

Branding Basics / Personal Branding — 8 Comments
13
Nov 08

My Definition of Personal Branding

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Photo Credits: pshutterbug

Personal branding expert Dan Schawbel asked his Twitter followers for their definition of Personal Branding. Here is my take, in 140 characters or less:

The art of articulating and communicating your skills, personality and values so that others seek you to help them solve a problem.

While these are very few words, each of them is there for a reason, so let’s dissect the phrase and understand what each word means in the context of personal branding:

  • Personal Branding is an art: it takes practice, creativity and patience to do it right. There is really no checklist or sure recipe for success, and building your brand is a long term, ongoing process.
  • Personal Branding involves your skills, personality and values: while skills are important, it’s not only what you know that counts. After all, business requires you to interact with people, so personality is also important. However, there’s a third, crucial element: your values. Without being true to your values you will never achieve a strong personal brand. You need passion, and for that you have to do something you believe in.
  • You must be able to articulate and communicate what your brand is all about: you may have a potentially strong brand, but if you’re not able to define it and share it in a simple way that resonates with your audience, your brand will never reach its true potential.
  • A strong personal brand makes others seek you instead of you seeking them. A sound personal branding strategy will help you build your reputation and your network so that interesting opportunities come to you.
  • For a personal branding strategy to be successful, you must be able to solve a problem. You must provide real value and exceed your customers’ expectations.

So there you have it, my take on what personal branding means in a few simple words.

What is your definition of personal branding?

Blogging — 3 Comments
9
Nov 08

How to Make Your Blog Posts Easy to Read

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Photo Credits: WalkingGeek

Blogs, wikis and social networks are being credited for a renewed interest in writing among college students. Having an audience and a medium for self expression are encouraging members of our younger generations to find their voice and share it with the world.

At the same time, the popularity of texting and micro-blogging platforms like twitter , which limit the number or characters you can use to send a message, are teaching us to be more concise and to make our point quickly.

As more people create content, our attention span keeps getting smaller. There is just too much to read, listen to or view these days, that is why when it comes to blog writing it pays to follow a few simple rules to make our content easier to read.

Here are a few of them:

  • Write less: Try to use 50% of the words you would normally use. Once you finish writing, go back and try to further reduce your word count. Repeat the process until your paragraphs are short and tight, and your message is clear.
  • Try to make your paragraphs short; three or four lines work best.
  • Use headlines to break the discussion into several paragraphs. Breaking the discussion into small, manageable chunks, each dealing with a sub-topic of your discussion, makes it easier for readers to scan your content.
  • Use other elements that facilitate scannability, like bolding key words and phrases, and using bullet points to organize your content.
  • Link to complementary information instead of trying to include too much information in the body of your article. Linking to sources of information is not only good ettiquete but it helps to put your writing in the right context, both for your readers and search engines.
  • Use an easy-to-read font size. Normally, 10pt or 12pt are good choices. Use fonts like Arial, Verdana or Georgia; they are optimized for computer screens and easy to read.
  • Use plenty of contrast: black text on white background works best, followed by white text on black background.
  • If your article is long, consider listing the three or four major takaways at the beginning (news items in cnn.com show a good example of this technique), or include a ‘Summary’ paragraph at the end.
  • Learn how to craft informative and/or catchy headlines. In aggregator sites like Alltop, on Twitter posts, or in search engine results pages, your headline is usually the only thing your readers will see. If your headline fails to garner attention, your article will never be read.

Blogging / Book Reviews — 1 Comment
8
Nov 08

Book Review: Problogger

Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett draw upon their wealth of experience with blogs and give us this comprehensive blogging primer.

While the book is mostly focused on making money from blogs, it starts from the beginning: by explaining what is a blog and how to set one up. This takes about three chapters (if you have already started a blog, you can just skim through those sections).

Intermediate bloggers will enjoy the book more from chapter 4 on, when Darren and Chris talk about how and what to write (helpful to overcome the all-too-common “writer’s block”) and how to make money from your blog (both directly, like with advertising, and indirectly, as with partnerships, speaking engagements, etc).

The last few chapters deal with a topic that was completely new to me: buying and selling blogs. Darren and Chris do a very good job at spelling out the caveats you must take into account when buying and selling blogs, to avoid scams and costly mistakes.

The comprehensive nature of this book makes it difficult for the authors to go into much detail about any particular topic. The good news is that Darren’s blog (problogger.net) is chock full of how-to articles that may give you the specific information that you won’t find in the book.

Overall, I found this book to be a very good blogging primer, one that I will keep in my bookshelf for future and constant reference.

Blogging — 1 Comment
6
Nov 08

Posterous Makes Blogging as Easy as Sending an Email

I’ve always been impressed by brands and products that build their competitive advantage around the concept of “Easy”. That’s why I decided to check out Posterous.

Posterous is a new blogging platform launched a few months ago by two young entrepreneurs under this very simple premise: to make blogging as easy as sending an email.

Since all you need to do to post is send an email to post@posterous.com, Posterous comes in handy when you just want to blog a picture with a quick blurb of text directly from your mobile phone.

Posterous takes ease of use so seriously that you don’t even need to sign up. When you send your first email post, your account is automatically created for you. Furthermore, your Posterous posts can be automatically routed to your main blog or Twitter page.

I have created a Posterous blog to try it out, and have linked it to my Twitter account. It will be interesting to see if Posterous can remain consistent to its implied brand promise of “the easiest way to blog” as they add new features in the weeks to come.