Business Insight Zone

See this picture? Sherman Tan was nice enough to under a share it on Flickr under a Creative Commons attribution license, which means that you and I can use it so long as we give Sherman credit. (Good etiquette implies linking back to the Flickr page for the photo.)

Here’s what I’m thinking: this economy has put a lot of people in the “break glass in case of emergency mindset.” I’d love to see how other business bloggers (or bloggers in general) would riff on Sherman’s photo in posts of their own.

So, join me, won’t you? Take the photo above (you can copy it in a larger size from Flickr, crop it as you please, etc.) and write a “Break Glass” post. Please include a link back to this post, or let me know on Twitter, and I’ll be sure to see your post.

I’m eager to see what you come up with!

You’re making mistakes. Everybody does. You’ll make mistakes tomorrow, too. It’s okay.

But look at the mistakes you made yesterday, last week. Are they suspiciously familiar? Maybe because you made them again today? Maybe because you’ve made them a thousand times over?

Mistakes are forgivable. (They’d better be, or I’m in big trouble.) But repeated mistakes should teach you a lesson, not in the cliched sense of “that will teach you a lesson,” but in the real sense that you learn to change your behavior to avoid the mistake in the future.

Behavior change, by the way, is notoriously hard.

But it’s the only way to get better.

Are you (or your company) changing your behaviors so the same old mistakes don’t recur?

~~

Photo by Nesster.

Last week I appealed for your vote in the SXSW Panel Picker. (If you haven’t seen my proposal yet, it’s here.) Now I’d like to call your attention to 15 proposals for panels that include people I know from the worlds of social media, marketing, education, and graphic arts. I’ve voted in favor of all of these — not (just) because these people are my friends, but because I know the thought and energy they will bring to these sessions. Here they are:

• Sunni Brown — No They Didn’t: How to Avoid Visual Pollution
• Keith Burtis, Jason Falls, Amber Naslund, & Justin Levy — Prove it! Exploring Social Media ROI for Business
• Alex Jones — Social Sentinels: Managing Antisocial Behavior In Online Communities
• Peter Kim — Sponsored Conversations: Good Strategy or Spam?
• Austin Kleon — Visual Note-Taking 101
• Jennifer Leggio — Inherent Dangers of Real-Time Social Networking
• Adele McAlear — Posts Mortem: Death and Digital Legacy
• Kate Niederhoffer — Spinning the Social Web
• Sheila Scarborough — Drawing the Line Between Free and Paid
• Sheila Scarborough — Can They Buy Your Voice? Blog Disclosure Ethics
• Jim Storer, Scott Monty, & Shawn Morton — Building Social Strategies at Fortune 100 Companies
• Jeremy Tanner (panelist) — Don’t Move! Build a Startup Community Where You Live
• Daysha Taylor — Digital Content Syndication: Post Once, Distribute Everywhere
• Gradon Tripp, Meg Fowler, & Matthew Knell — Social Change for Zero Dollars a Day Using Social Networks
• Lauren Vargas & Beth Harte — Harvard Was Wrong: Profs’ Perspectives on Blackboards/Backchannels

I encourage you to cast your vote in favor of these panels — but hurry, since voting closes September 4th!

The title of this post asks, “can you judge a book by its cover?” You can when the “cover” is the front page of someone’s Twitter account and you’re judging whether to follow them. That page contains an avatar image (usually the person’s photo), a short biography (no more than 160 characters long), a link to the person’s home page (or company, blog, LinkedIn profile, etc.), and — crucially — the most recent 20 tweets that the person has sent. You can click through to see more tweets in batches of 20, but if you follow many people on Twitter, doing that often takes more time than it’s worth.

And there’s the rub: if you want more people to follow you on Twitter, you have very little time to make a good first impression on them . . . but many ways that you could string landmines of the “Don’t Follow Me” variety across their path.

Recently four heavy Twitter users — Meg Fowler, Jim Storer, Aaron Strout, and Tim Walker — got to talking (on Twitter, of course) about the poisoned words, phrases, and other cues that automatically signal “Don’t Follow” for them. The end result was that the four decided to bang out a joint blog post that talked about best practices in not following based on not liking the proverbial “cover” put forth by fellow tweeters. Here’s what we came up with:

Here’s your new business card:

This was sparked by a Twitter discussion about meaningful and meaningless job titles. (”Consultant” and “community manager” were two that came up.) And you’ll know better than I do what the real and bogus titles are in your own field.

But keep this firmly in mind: Nobody ever bought anything if they didn’t think it would suit some need for them. That need might be the meaning of life, or it might be “Pacify my kids while we stand in line at the grocery store.”

The first three of these cards go to my friends Amber Naslund, Meg Fowler, and Tracy Lee Carroll.

Are you showing your customers and prospects how you make their problems go away?

What prize would you like with your Hoover’s subscription?

We think the value of Hoover’s speaks for itself, but we also understand that sometimes it’s easier to bite the bullet on a purchase when there’s a sweetener thrown in. In the past, we’ve sometimes offered iPods or the like as an incentive, but the bloom is off the rose on the iPod front, and anyway we want to know what YOU would covet.

So, within reason (no yachts!) . . .

What would be your favorite incentive or prize to go along with a Hoover’s subscription?

The floor is open for suggestions. Please leave yours in the comment thread below.

~

Photo by Lynn Merrick.

The Carpet Salesman by Tanel Teemusk

Maybe your job isn’t selling. Formally.

But you are a seller. If you’re in business, you might need to talk up the benefits of your product at any time. Maybe you sit next to a guy on your flight back from St. Louis; he’s friendly, you chat, . . . and it turns out he’s the perfect prospect for your company. Not just a good prospect, but the prospect who could make your year. You’d better believe you’re a seller.

You don’t need to oversell. You don’t need to get down into the spec sheets and the pricing grids and the purchase orders, right there in Row F of Flight 468. But you’d better be ready to listen to his needs and explain how your offering might suit them.

We’re not talking about a 30-second elevator pitch (though if you can’t give one for your product, that’s the place to start your process of education). You’re doing the informal version of a full-bore consultative sale. He’ll forgive you for not knowing the answer to every question; he understands you’re in IT or operations or finance, not sales.

Why does this come up? Because this week I realized I don’t know nearly enough about Access Hoover’s. (That’s the product that lets you use Hoover’s inside, say, Microsoft Dynamics CRM.) Do I know some? Sure. But not enough, for example, to do justice to the hard work our developers have done on this major upgrade. Not enough to have a fruitful conversation with Mr. Right in Row F. So I’m taking myself to school.

Is it time for you to go to hand-selling school? In this economy, how could it not be?

~

An interesting tidbit I uncovered today when I was trawling through the Filings pages on IPO Central: the current quarter is better than any of the previous four quarters in terms of

• number of IPO filings,
• total value of proposed IPOs, and
• average value of proposed IPOs.

Here’s the whole story, in handy chart form:

This doesn’t mean that happy days are here again for the IPO market (especially if you equate “happy days” with any period like the dot-com bubble of ten years ago), and even a robust IPO market can’t save us from continued economic weakness or uncertainty.

It does mean, though, that the folks running these companies — and the market-savvy financiers working for their IPO underwriters — like their chances for making sensible IPOs over the coming months better than they did at any time in the past year.

~

Related posts:

• Total value of 2009 IPO filings, month by month.
• A bumper crop of IPOs?
• A (relative) flurry of activity in the IPO market.
• Silicon Valley, the IPO drought, and the culture of innovation.

~

You’re given 45 minutes to present — say, to speak at a lunch meeting. Take no more than 20. (You’ll probably expand to 25 anyway, if you’re like most speakers.) Then say

“Now, where have I gone astray?”

or

“What do you think?”

or

“There’s more I could say on this, and I’ll be happy to answer questions, but what I really want to know is what’s on your mind.”

(Not “your minds” — it’s not about the group. Say “your mind” with conviction, and any member of the audience will take it personally.)

The world is full of speakers, even funny ones and ones with smart things to say, who end up a presentation with something like, “Well, I wanted to take some questions, but I had so much material that I see we’ve run out of time.” These folks — unless they’re so legendary that the audience would sit there for hours (think Katherine Hepburn, or John Wooden, or the Dalai Lama) — make the mistake that the members of the audience are there for the speaker rather than for themselves.

So cut it in half, and give what’s left to the audience. Give it wholeheartedly.

Note that this isn’t a shortcut when it comes to preparation. You’d better work extra hard to make sure you put an hour’s worth of value into your half-hour of time, and you’d better be ready to talk about whatever comes up during the discussion, even if that means saying, “I don’t know” and then moderating an impromptu roving panel among members of the audience who know more about a given facet of the topic than you do.

Have you ever tried this? Are you willing to?

~

Photo by Bruce Tuten.

We’re running a survey with a whopping two questions to get a better idea of how we can meet your needs. Please take 30 seconds to follow this link and give us your feedback.

Thanks!

~

Photo by Rob Shenk, used under a CC-Share Alike license.