Social Media for Brick & Mortar Businesses

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Start Small.

It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million views, 13 years for TV, four for the Internet. Facebook got there in nine months. The iPod got there in a couple days. People under 30 don’t use email; it’s for old people. Only 18% of TV ads generate profit. How do brick and mortar businesses keep up? Social media isn’t optional anymore. Here’s seven quick ideas to help you.

We’re out of the Technology and Information Ages and into the Participation Age. The hallmark of this age is “sharing”, which is why social media is so big. It allows us to share on a multitude of levels. It is a lot less expensive than advertising and when done well, is much more effective. How do we get our arms around it?

Don’t panic. Social media is just another communications medium, like radio, TV, fax and email. Except it is much more interactive and participative; like the phone, except at your leisure (you don’t have to answer right away).

Here are a few quick principles I use dealing with social media:

1) Pick just one or two entry points that can be highly integrated, that can push traffic to each other, and go deep. In 2007 I picked blogging and Twitter. I would highly recommend that you blog (some are questioning that these days, I think it is still by far the best social media), and then interact with people on Twitter about their interests first, and your blog second and only occasionally. Or you can pair up Facebook and Google+ (some people use it to blog now). Or Pinterest and Google+, etc. Whatever you do, start small so you can actually participate and learn, not spam. You can broaden out later if you find you have the bandwidth, but stay focused until you are sure.

2) Become the expert in something. Again, BLOG IF YOU CAN!! It’s by far the best way to use social media to become an expert. Write comments on other people’s blogs, and offer your material to others to repurpose it.

3) Be INTERESTED, not INTERESTING (be interesting as a result of being interested). Example – join existing conversations on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. Support others in their comments and blogs, answer q’s, and eventually they will want to know what you have to say and will visit your blog or community group.

4) Join a community, don’t just crash it to sell something. See #3 above. After you have established yourself as someone who can contribute to others’ communities, maybe start your own Google+ hangout or other forum on Facebook, etc. Learn first, then invite your existing friends to join you.

5) Build relationships, don’t sell things. Build a network, don’t do networking! SERVE, DON’T SELL. Do NOT use social media to attempt to get a zillion new friends! All the research shows you should target your social media at your existing raving fans. SERVE them, and they will bring you new readers and new customers.

6) Read “Rework” by Fried and Hannson. Read Seth Godin’s blog & 37Signals.com’s blog and find others that you respect. See how they provide something of value. Don’t mimic their content, just follow their lead – serve others with interesting content.

7) Search for local relationships and develop them online as well as off. Connect, then offer offline opportunities. About 85-90% of all conversations about a product start off line and then move online. And again, starting with local relationships allows you to use social media to support your existing friends, who will then bring you more viewers and customers. If you go after herds of new people with your content, your friends will smell that and walk away.

Don’t see yourself doing this? There is a growing number of credible people who can help you by ghost-blogging, and by managing your social media. I would never let anyone else manage my personal Twitter account, and I do all my own blogging. If you are going to hire others, make sure the public knows it’s not you – be authentic. Your company can be known as the blogger, even if you aren’t.

There are a bunch of other things you can do, but if you start with these, you’ll stumble into most of the other things that would be helpful as well. Happy blogging!

Manage Stuff. Lead People.

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The end of management.

Management is good. Managers are bad. There is no room for them in a Participation Age business. People don’t need to be managed; they need to be led. The difference is not semantic, it is gigantic.

The Industrialists did their dead level best to re-make people into simple extensions of machines. When people are extensions of machines, they are “stuff” to be managed. But if they are fully human, they require leadership, not management.

In our business, we only manage stuff; processes, systems, delivery of goods and services, accounting, marketing, sales, etc. These are all “things” to be managed. Everyone in the business manages stuff of some sort or another. But none of us needs someone with the title of “manager” to hover over us to ensure the stuff will get managed.

Manage Stuff
Stuff definitely needs to be managed. Unlike people, stuff is inherently stupid and lazy. It needs to be told what to do; it doesn’t have a brain of its own or any motivation to assemble itself. The packaging material and the product just sit on the counter until someone picks both of them up and puts them in the box. Someone who is smarter and more motivated than the stuff needs to manage that process, but the smart and motivated person doing the packing does not need managing – they need to be led.

Accounting numbers are also stupid and lazy. They just sit on spreadsheets until a smart and motivated person comes along to update, organize and report on them. That process needs to be managed, but not the person doing the accounting – they need to be led.

Every process, system, product, and service in a business is inherently stupid and lazy and needs to be managed. Unfortunately, managers don’t see much difference between the people, and the stuff or processes in the business. To a manager, people are extensions of machines or processes, and both of them need the hovering involvement of a third party to force them to work. That other person, called “manager”, doesn’t actually pack the box.

The manager assumes the person is as inert as the packing materials, and must be “managed” to ensure they will actually pick up the packing materials and put them in the box. The manager exists to ensure the person doesn’t just sit there like the packing materials. It’s a waste of two good lives; the life of the manager who does nothing, and the packer, who is treated like a nine-year old incapable of being responsible.

Lead People
A leader will do it quite differently. They will not hover over or manage the adult Stakeholders. They will impart vision and guidance, including why we do what we do, metrics for success and metrics for exceeding the objective. A leader will train and provide the necessary infrastructure, and they will create a process that requires the packing person or the process itself to proactively report to the leader regularly how things are going.

Then the leader will do something extraordinary that the manager would rarely do – they will GO AWAY AND BE PRODUCTIVE, TOO. Instead of hovering over the children in the day care center, they will go somewhere and do something themselves that adds to the bottom line. Or they might just be one of the packers or one of the accountants, and join right in being productive; leading and motivating by example, not by threat, persuasion, cajoling or hovering.

A manager justifies their existence by making other people productive more than by being productive themselves. Managers “feel” productive – they have tons of monitoring on their plate. But a leader will lead by example, get in the trenches and be one of the productive people.

Leaders can afford to do this because they hire Stakeholders, not employees, and don’t need to live in a day care center where they are watched like nine year olds. Most of the work of the manager disappears or gets dispersed among all the adult Stakeholders.

Everyone is a Leader
Stakeholders are adult leaders, too, and understand that if they have all the training and equipment they need, and clearly understand the objective required, they will gladly take the bull by the horns and “own” their tasks, job, process and result. Why? Because they also know they own part of the compensation (profit-sharing) that will come from that level of ownership. Taking on the former tasks of the manager is one more way for them to Make Meaning, not just money.

Adults Without Managers – An Old Idea
The idea of managing stuff but leading people is not a new concept. A store owner prior to the Industrial Age hired someone else to stock shelves, trained them and gave them the tools they needed to do it. Then that leader went back to being productive themselves. If the stocker wasn’t productive, they were let go and the leader got someone who could self-manage. After training the new person, the leader went back to being productive again. Managers hang on to employees who need to be managed because it justifies their existence. A leader fires them and finds a Stakeholder.

In a great modern business, as before the Industrial Age, everyone produces something, whether it is maintenance, accounting, packing, new product development, or vision and leadership. No one stagnates around watching other people do the work. Stakeholders are all leaders, and all of the manage stuff.

Fire All The Managers – All of Them (Including Yourself)
You can replace five or ten managers with one leader, easily. It’s a great money saver and you’ll find out real fast who are the chidren (employees) who need to be moved along, and who are your adult Stakeholders who will take over the very few things the manager was doing that were of any value.

Keep Only The Stakeholders
Are you managing employees/children? If you are, my guess is you’re really tired of it. Stop it. Tell the nine-year olds it’s time to grow up and be adult Stakeholders. Show them the stuff that needs to be managed, then tell them everyone is responsible to lead in their area of expertise. Then go get a job and be productive yourself. If you have employees who don’t want to grow up and at least lead themselves, find someone who will. There are plenty of Stakeholders out there.

Managers – A Business Disease of the Industrial Age
Managing people (not stuff) is a disease of the Industrial Age. It’s a recently invented construct and is a dead end process that maintains people at the nine year old level. And it dehumanizes them as if they were an extension of a stupid and lazy machine.

Leaders – What People Have Always Needed
Leading has been around since the dawn of man. It was not invented, and is the time proven method for motivating people. Everyone in your business should do it in their area of expertise. It’s rewarding and humanizing.

Get out of the Industrial Age into the Participation Age. Manage stuff. Lead people.

Business Buzzword Bingo

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And Why You Shouldn’t Play

Big words are a turnoff for most customers and make our offer sound like a Dilbert cartoon. So why do we use them when short words would do just fine? Who are we trying to impress?

Does monosyllabic really need five sounds? We’re in love with all things “Big”, and just assume big words make us sound more polished. But really they make us sound more like Dilbert’s boss. The worst culprits are vision statements, mission statements and “give-me-money” plans. But I see buzzwords in a lot of fancy attempts to sell things, too.

Dilbert and Woody Allen
Too much biz stuff sounds like it really was written by Scott Adams for a Dilbert cartoon. It’s meant to make us sound thoughtful, but instead it’s funny because it’s either tortured, fake, complex, a stretch, dumb, or just plain baffling. When we string one fancy word after the other, we sound more like a Woody Allen tirade than an expert in our field. It really just cheapens our image and makes us look uptight.

The Rule of Short Words
When writing a vision, mission, plan or sales copy, here’s a writing rule;

Be wary of any word with three or more sounds, chiefly those that contain any of the following letters: u, v, w, x, y, and z.

It’s not that you can’t use them, just be wary; test them and make sure you aren’t playing buzzword bingo and trying to sound smart. If there is a matching word with two or less sounds that works as well, use it.

Sound Like An Expert or Be One – You Choose
Here’s some classic terms used to play buzzword bingo, and simple words to use instead. All are three or more sounds and contain u, v, w, x, y, or z. Some of the worst are words ending in “ize”. The big words make you sound like an expert. The short ones might convince people you really are.

Actualize – Complete
Synergy – Teamwork
Synergistic – Really? Just don’t use it.
Dysfunctional – Broken
Intellectual – Smart
Operationalize – Make it work
Solutioning – Fixing
Empowering – Getting out of the way
Competency – Skill
Validate – Confirm
Conceptualize – Think, Picture, Form a Thought
Reorganization – Change
Monetize – Make money
Incentivize – Reward
Deliverable – Result
Proprietary – Mine, Ours
Recontextualize – move

Distract Them If We Can
In some cases, the buzzword is code for something else and the big word is used to distract you.

Multidisciplinary – Scattered
Adaptive – Uncertain, or confused
Synergistic – Looking for a friend
Analyze – We’re afraid to decide
Analysis – Beating a Dead Horse

By the way, except for the buzzwords themselves, this post was written using only words with two or fewer sounds. It’s not hard to keep things simple, but it’s really easy to make them complex.

Keep It Simple
Keep it simple and you’ll likely sound a lot more secure and a lot more like you know what you’re doing.

The Three S’s Of The Industrial Age

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Safety, Security, and Stability

My mother, who was born in 1921, grew up in the Great Depression and entered the workforce in 1943 after nurse’s training, taught me to pursue three things in life, the three S’s of the Industrial Age:

1) Safety – live in the suburbs, don’t live downtown with the icky people.

2) Security – have a big wad of cash in the bank.

3) Stability – every day should look the same, no surprises. Get a job with a giant corporation; they are the best prepared to give you a life with no surprises.

The Ozzie and Harriet Dream
Just about every mother of that generation was teaching their kids the same things. So it’s no surprise that at the height of the Industrial Age after World War II, the suburbs exploded with cookie cutter Cap Cods, white picket fences, men who all left for work in unison with their white shirts, ties, suits and briefcases at 7:30am and got home at 6pm, working for Giant Corporation, Inc., and living as predictable a life as possible. That cohort is called The Silent Generation.

Their manic pursuit of safety, security and stability made them the best extensions of machines in the history of the Industrial Age. It also dehumanized them to the point of silencing their voices, their creativity, and their legacy (remember, no Presidents and no Supreme Court justices came from this generation; the only generation without a number of them.) But where are these three S’s on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? They are at or nearer the bottom.

The Bottom Looks Pretty Good When It’s Above You
Why did my mother teach me to chase these things that were at or near the bottom of what we as humans need in life? Because having gone through the Great Depression and World War II, she was looking up at the bottom. She didn’t have any of the three, and a life with all three would have been Nirvana for her.

Straight the Fourth S
But Millennials who only grew up in the shadow of the Industrial Age do not understand the language of Safety, Security and Stability. They are one of the first generations in history, at least in the west, to be born with all three of those things provided for them at birth. They aren’t looking up at the bottom, and are instead reaching for the fourth S of the Participation Age, Significance. Making money is no longer enough. Being an extension of a machine to do so is not attractive, and the idea that every day should look the same and that life should be predictable and without surprises is not challenging to them. They want more.

It’s Simple, and Maybe Hard
And as the cultural influence of the Industrial Age and the Factory System fades behind us, we are all waking up to the need to re-humanize the workplace, reintegrate it back into our lives, and build lives to Make Meaning, not just money. To do so we must eliminate the arcane business practices that we dragged out of the Industrial Age into the Participation Age that turned men into machines and silenced our drive for significance. Addressing the business diseases of the Industrial Age is not complex; it’s simple. But for those who have built businesses and lives around the inherited constructs of a bygone era, it will be both simple and hard.

The Will To Chase Significance
If we recognize that we have inherited some of the business diseases of the Industrial Age, all we need is the will to change. But it needs to be a strong and determined will, because our past is a strong magnet and will pull us back in if we lack vigilance.

We should be grateful that the Industrial Age provided us with the first three S’s, Safety, Security, and Stability, on which to build the fourth S, Significance. But we must also recognize that the practices that brought us those three will not bring us the fourth. We have a choice to make. Stay with what we know and slowly atrophy as the world moves on without us, or join the Participation Age and start sharing together in building companies that Make Meaning, not just money.

Which do you choose?