Managing the Gray – Positive Advice That Everyone Can Use to Succeed

Actually I think that’s called leadership, which we are sorely lacking these days. As somebody who does leadership coaching and teaches entrepreneurship to college students I continually stress the importance of these principles and believing in oneself to take risks. Social media, being the new kid on the marketing block, is scary to the follower community, because it’s new and challenging and in these uncertain economic times they default to taking the easy way out so as not to risk their jobs. In reality however a strong leader will come up with and run with fresh ideas in order to sustain and grow their organization during a tumultuous period. Given all the budget cutbacks social media is a powerful and economical medium to invest in.

The saying I hate using the most, after I hear “I’m too afraid of people bashing us”, is “they don’t want to lose that home and Volvo wagon in the suburbs, because they’re content”. Unfortunately unless you’re willing to risk it all it’s difficult to be an effective leader. A perfect example that you touched on in your video the other day was the US Auto Industry. They’ll never fix their 30 year old problem by asking for a bail-out, because all it is going to really do is protect everyone’s lifestyle that they are content with, from the top on down. We need leaders C.C. Thank you for bringing this up today as it has been fresh on my mind all week.

CC, Great MTG as usual. I have some thoughts. First off, I loved the fishing analogy. Don’t forget the hook! When you were talking about measuring your goals and having specific benchmarks I was wondering what are the best tools to use when doing this? You talked about Google hits, Buzz, etc… What are the best ways to measure that stuff?

Next, was thinking about what you said about community and building a community that converts to your mission. What I would like to add is to search for existing communities that have already formed but don’t have that thread that binds them together.

For instance, there may be many independent video creators out there doing stuff for fun, but they have no way to interact. What are the problems they face? What are their challenges? I see a lot of people recently complaining about the fact that they don’t know how to upload their videos so they work on all devices. M-dialog has a great up-loader that lets you compress into multiple formats. Community can be formed around people that have these specific issues, they can talk and communicate about them and ultimately M-dialog would be the beneficiary.

I guess what I am saying here is that pointing back to your brand directly can sometimes look like spam. Solving peoples problems and giving like minded people a place to connect is offering a service that will ultimately improve the brand.

Finally, what clients need to know is that the Long Tail Effect of content is more important than the short term boom. I wrote an article six months ago on “Beginning Woodturning” I get hundreds of hits a week and thousands of hits a month on that one post. Don’t be afraid to see what your community is latching on too and optimize it and as you say, “Feed the Fire” These people are actively seeking and participating in that micro-segment of your community, give them more to chew on.

Again, thank you for the great content and tell the family I said to have an amazing thanksgiving.

Keith

CC

I have been listening to MTG now for about 3 months and I always appreciate your insight… This particular podcast hit home with me quick a bit. Defining your strategy, planning, executing, taking corrective action in order to meet your goals is how businesses survive!!! I agree with Marc above that it is called leadership and we are lacking in that area all over the place. However I think it more then just leadership and having a great idea. The key point in my mind that you mentioned was the planning in order to meet the goal. As you stated the plan is even stronger when you include your team. Getting the team involved (or community) is the substance that you can give them to chew on as Keith stated above.

As a long time project manager and now coach/mentor to entrepreneurs and small business owners my point to people in general is the way you execute your business strategy is through initiatives also know as projects. Without having some kind of measure of performance (goal) that aligns with your organizational strategy in mind how do you know where you are going or when you get there. Once you know you measure of performance you can lay out a plan. It is vital to include some risk management planning as well, as you mentioned things will not goes as planned so you need to be ready to take corrective action. Building a risk management plan will allow you to make coarse correction more easily. And of coarse make sure you actually measure at the end of your project to see if you met your goal, if you didn’t you still can learn from all your efforts and apply what you learned on your next project, right!

Thanks for all great podcasts and keep up the free flowing thoughts, I always find them enjoyable.

‘Q’ – aka, Nathaniel

This is really spot on. I think a lot of people will overlook it because it seems simple and elegant. However the real solutions often are. People want quick fixes. These aren’t quick fixes, but ways to run your brand and business by.