Article by: Joanna L Krotz - Source - Microsoft at Work RSS Feed
Social media marketing is a fast-growing innovation, tapping into the rising influence of user-generated communities such as blogs, wikis, networking, and bookmarking sites.
By joining these active communities, you can build relationships and promote your products and/or expertise.
Generally, online social networks attract members who bond over shared interests and opinions. That creates a clubby and trusted group of virtually connected friends or associates. So when a member or blogger recommends your product, commends your service, or endorses your comments, it results in powerful "word of mouse" referrals.
Alternatively, if you make the effort, you can develop your own following on social media sites as an opinion-maker, authority, adviser, industry analyst, or wry observer.
As a result of getting noticed in all the right places, you can generate leads and convert those leads into sales.
Tip: However tempting it may be, don't assume a fake identity to talk up your company (unless you’re being an obvious jokester). It's bound to boomerang.
User-generated communities aren’t just for kids anymore
Don't think this strategy only suits niche markets. Social sites are exploding across the Web.
The most popular categories tend to be communities where you create and share information, such as MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Bebo, Squidoo, and Tagged. Or it can be those where you bookmark useful or fun sites for other users, such as Digg, del.icio.us, or StumbleUpon. Visit this age for a broad list of social networking and media sites.
Visitors to social media sites jumped a staggering 774 percent between 2006 and 2007, according to a 2007 comScore study. And the Pew Internet Study reports that some 50 million Americans are reading blogs. What's more, adult interaction in social media is significantly on the rise.
Choosing your online megaphone
For small-business owners, the social media horizon is broad indeed.
Like much of search engine marketing, social media marketing doesn’t cost much in dollars. But it does require time and effort to:
investigate sites;
create and monitor content;
track traffic and referrals;
refine efforts to improve results, and
keep at it until you have an impact.
Here are some proven ways to start stirring the pot. You'll learn more as you go.
1. Contribute to a community whose members mirror your customers. By checking into the comments, forums, and profiles of a community, you can determine member interests, locations, and a rough sense of demographics. Once you've identified a community that matches your preferred customer, there are a number of ways to get noticed.
For example, Irina Patterson runs an event-planning business from her home in Miami. She often posts on the local craigslist and, she says, gets great results. "It is a community that responds almost instantly. You can pose a question, share a resource, ask for a barter deal or ask for advice. You can target specific geographic areas, which is important for a service business like mine."
Patterson makes sure her posts link back to her company Web site.
2. Become a commentator on a well-trafficked blog in your industry or field. Don't ignore the blogosphere. According to Technorati, the blog search engine, nearly 97 million blogs were being published as of mid-2007.
Get familiar with a few blogs compatible with your business. A good start is a search on Technorati as well as visits to your industry or professional associations and trade journals to see what they serve up.
Make sure you're up-to-speed on the blog's tone, issues, and attitudes before you chime in. When you start generating reactions, you'll know you're hitting nerves.
3. Create a viral video campaign. Online videos are now cheap and easy to create and upload, notes search engine marketing consultant Susan Gilbert at JoomlaJump.com.
Produce a video of two to three minutes that dramatizes or explains your online site or your market niche and yourself. Then upload the video to MSN, YouTube, or other video communities to drive traffic to your Web site, Gilbert says.
If you link the videos to community pages on social bookmarking sites, you create a little network that search engines will find. Next thing you know, you're getting referred traffic and, potentially, more customers.
4. Join a professional networking site (or two). These can be hit or miss, depending on what you market and how you work the community. For professional services such as PR and consulting, it can generate leads. Check out examples such as LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Facebook, and Biltmore Who's Who. Then branch out to others.
5. Launch a blog. This is the most obvious idea, and, no question, online templates now make it easy to create a blog. Run a search and you'll find options. What's hard is to gain traction and keep posting lively content (with a link to your company site, of course). See these tips for starting a blog.
6. Become a dedicated gamer. Game for this? Depending on your wares and customer profile, engaging in the multi-user online gaming community can be a rewarding way to draw traffic and viral referrals, says Marian Sabety, at Wyndstorm, a social network technology marketer.
One of the largest is World of Warcraft, but new ones pop up frequently.
Unless you are already pulling lots of traffic, first gain experience with some of the above tactics before starting a blog. Once you have the hang of it, you'll know more about leveraging the power of a personal blog.
Finally, remember to add value rather than to merely advertise your product. To make social media marketing work, you must enjoy being part of the community.
About the author Joanna L. Krotz is the founder of Muse2Muse Productions, a custom content company for business and consumer magazines, newsletters, and digital imprints. Krotz has launched marketing Web sites and e-news portals, as well as created magazines and online marketing for a variety of companies. She is co-author of "The Microsoft Small Business Kit," a 500-page guide to launching and running a business.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
How to Retrain Your Brain
Going lobal
By Dr Kevin Orrman-Rossiter and Dr Sharon Orrman-Rossiter
There is a well known phenomenon that suggests you can't teach an old dog new tricks. That may be true for dogs, but the latest in neuroscience research has been showing that people can continue to learn and change their brains at seemingly any age. This is great news for business or those trying to map out a career trajectory.
In a nutshell, it tells us that it is never too late to learn. What we now need to determine is how we can best achieve the brain changes that would make a difference to guiding the grey matter towards peak capacity and performance and apply them to our own business environment.
The best news is that to make the most of this for yourself you don't need to start remembering words like ventral prefrontal cortex or caudate nucleus. Instead, it is a matter of following some basic concepts and practices.
Much of this has come from a new idea called neuroplasticity. 'Neuroplasticity is simply the rewiring of the brain,' says UCLA research professor of psychiatry Jeffrey Schwartz. Except that 'now we are talking about a fully mature brain changing; a basic fact that took scientists some time to accept,' Schwartz says in his ground-breaking book The Mind and the Brain.
Until only five years ago, the prevailing scientific understanding was that we were born with a certain number of brain cells and these decreased with age. It is true that we lose neurons every day (up to 30,000 a day by some estimates). However, work published by researchers in the past five years has shown that we can grow new neurons within the brain regions normally associated with learning.
One of the key findings from Schwartz's and others' work is that the degree of attention we pay has a marked impact on and influences our success in engaging in tasks. This mindful awareness, or mindfulness, as this type of attention is called, can systematically bring about changes to our own brain function.
The original studies were conducted with patients who had what were thought to be incurable brain disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Now studies have been extended to people who simply want to improve the functioning of their brains or preserve their cognitive abilities as they age.
This 'mindfully active' process is important to trigger new brain circuitry. By paying attention in this manner it is then possible to exploit the brain's tendency to pick up on repetitive behaviour and make this behaviour automatic. That is, to form new habits. This is different from the manner in which we normally attack a problem or change a behaviour.
We live in a very analytical society where we pull apart or deconstruct a problem. In doing so we are paying attention to the very parts of our brain that we want to change.
Instead, the research shows, we need to focus our attention on what we want to do instead. It is a matter of concentrating our attention on what we want to do rather than what we do not want to do. This means that if we try to modify a habit, we will start using the 'old', previously created neural wiring. Making a change to this entrenched 'wiring' is far more difficult than creating new 'wiring.'
Here's how it works. When you undertake an activity or think thoughts, then a whole distributed collection of neurons in your brain fire in particular patterns. These patterns may be located in similar brain areas but are individual in pattern for each person. The more you repeat the activity or thought the more the neurons are likely to fire in the same pattern. This has been expressed as 'the neurons that fire together, wire together'.
So, through this process our habits, skills and personalities continue to be created with time. Changing these patterns in your brain requires effort. This can be illustrated by imagining that your brain is like a lump of jelly (a wonderfully evocative metaphor that Edward de Bono spoke of in his book The Mechanism of Mind).
These activities and thoughts are like drops of water that create paths in the jelly. Some will become quite deep. And a drop of water that falls near a pathway will run into one of the existing channels. Only by mindfully starting a new channel, a new thought or action, do we effectively move on to create new ways of doing something.
The key point here is that when you are endeavouring to change, don't try to modify the old habit. Instead, mindfully develop a new habit. You are then working with, rather than against, your brain physiology.
We can introduce these concepts into our own business environment in some simple and powerful ways. Think about how you can set up your work environment so as to corral your attention through your own actions and become more productive. This can be achieved by arranging your day and your surroundings in a way that encourages focus and accomplishment.
Furthermore, if you want to, or are needing to modify a behaviour or thought pattern, then changing the start of that pattern is important. By you changing a single action at the start you can initiate a whole new set of complex behaviours or 'chunks of action repertoires'. These chunks help form coordinated sequential motor actions and develop streams of thought and motivation.
Motivation has been shown to be important in all this work. 'Experiments have shown that when animals are motivated to learn, the brain responds plastically,' says Michael Merzenich in Norman Doidge's book The Brain That Changes Itself. So it is important to recognise what will motivate you (and your staff). You can't make the assumption that everyone's motivations are the same.
It is also important to recognise again the degree of focus required to learn as adults. Quite often, instead of learning, we will be replaying mastered skills. It 'costs' us effort to learn, particularly if we are at middle professional levels. 'To keep the mind alive requires learning something truly new with intense focus,' says Michael Merzenich.
It is no wonder then that it is difficult to change someone else's mind, given the individual differences in brain physiology and that changing our own habits and thoughts requires mindful attention. Given the incredibly large possible combinations of neuronal wiring in each person's brain, it is not surprising that we have such unique ways of looking at and performing functions.
Therefore, for those who are managing, leading and working with knowledge-based workers, it is important to guide rather than tell others how to think. To create successful change, it's a case of assisting others to make their own thought connections.
Research has illustrated that distractions, including multi-tasking, are the enemy of this attention-focused learning. This key finding has a bearing on many of our current business practices. It has shown that multi-tasking is not something the brain engages in well.
Critically, research shows that interruptions, no matter how short, can cause the brain to take up to 15 minutes to collect its thoughts and go back to where it was before the interruption. This is because the brain works in sequence and has to switch tasks consciously.
These findings provide a great reason for blocking out time, that is free of email, phone and Blackberry interruptions when attending to important business thinking and tasks. If you want to, for example, put on a load of washing and chat to a friend about the weather, the lack of complexity allows your brain to switch easily. In contrast, the more complex nature of business thinking is not so easily or efficiently handled in such a manner.
And, the benefits of a good night's sleep is also showing up in the research. Neuroscience is starting to uncover the links and benefits between exercise, sleep and your cognitive abilities. It has been found by Professor Nicola Lautenschlager of the University of Melbourne that moderate exercise can improve cognitive function.
But, the important conclusions from neuroscience research are that our brains have the ability to change if we give them the opportunity. Brain function differs from one person to the next and our brains change during the course of our individual lives. It is never too late to teach ourselves new tricks throughout our lives.
What business can learn from neuroscience
don't assume you can't change, you can change your behaviour and thoughts at almost any age
it is easier and more effective to create a new habit than modify an existing one
'rewiring' of neurons requires mindful attention and focus
understanding why you want to change provides the motivation to change
exercise can enhance neuronal growth
adequate sleep assists memory consolidation and problem solving
brain individuality means that you shouldn't assume that others will change in the same manner as you do; instead guide rather than tell others how to think
Rewiring your brain
Take note of the following areas where either individually or collectively you are experiencing:
the inability to get the desired results
a high staff turnover
a lack of staff engagement
a disconnect between jobs and rewards
individuals who are bored
staff feeling their strengths are not being used
a culture of distraction
How to refocus in order to rewire:
To create a new habit (in contrast to trying to modify an old one) mindfully focus on developing the new habit in the following way:
be clear and specific about what action you want to take
understand and be clear about why you want to develop this new behaviour or habit
take action and focus with intent and concentration for a solid 15 minutes
swiftly recognise if and where you get off track or start down the 'old habit pathway'
refocus with action for a further 15 minutes with intent and concentration
for success repeat each day for three to four weeks
Dr Kevin Orrman-Rossiter is an executive coach, social researcher and futurist. He has a PhD in physics as well as management and marketing qualifications. He was awarded a prestigious Australian research award, the Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship and has worked in international manufacturing and the financial services industries.
Dr Sharon Orrman-Rossiter is an expert in coaching for performance. She is past chairman of Monash University's Centre for Biomedical Engineering. She has a PhD in medicine and has been involved in cutting-edge research in the UK and Australia. With her husband Dr Kevin Orrman-Rossiter, she founded Clarity Now where their brainpower is used to coach individuals and groups on how to get the most from their minds in executive leadership and career planning.
By Dr Kevin Orrman-Rossiter and Dr Sharon Orrman-Rossiter
There is a well known phenomenon that suggests you can't teach an old dog new tricks. That may be true for dogs, but the latest in neuroscience research has been showing that people can continue to learn and change their brains at seemingly any age. This is great news for business or those trying to map out a career trajectory.
In a nutshell, it tells us that it is never too late to learn. What we now need to determine is how we can best achieve the brain changes that would make a difference to guiding the grey matter towards peak capacity and performance and apply them to our own business environment.
The best news is that to make the most of this for yourself you don't need to start remembering words like ventral prefrontal cortex or caudate nucleus. Instead, it is a matter of following some basic concepts and practices.
Much of this has come from a new idea called neuroplasticity. 'Neuroplasticity is simply the rewiring of the brain,' says UCLA research professor of psychiatry Jeffrey Schwartz. Except that 'now we are talking about a fully mature brain changing; a basic fact that took scientists some time to accept,' Schwartz says in his ground-breaking book The Mind and the Brain.
Until only five years ago, the prevailing scientific understanding was that we were born with a certain number of brain cells and these decreased with age. It is true that we lose neurons every day (up to 30,000 a day by some estimates). However, work published by researchers in the past five years has shown that we can grow new neurons within the brain regions normally associated with learning.
One of the key findings from Schwartz's and others' work is that the degree of attention we pay has a marked impact on and influences our success in engaging in tasks. This mindful awareness, or mindfulness, as this type of attention is called, can systematically bring about changes to our own brain function.
The original studies were conducted with patients who had what were thought to be incurable brain disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Now studies have been extended to people who simply want to improve the functioning of their brains or preserve their cognitive abilities as they age.
This 'mindfully active' process is important to trigger new brain circuitry. By paying attention in this manner it is then possible to exploit the brain's tendency to pick up on repetitive behaviour and make this behaviour automatic. That is, to form new habits. This is different from the manner in which we normally attack a problem or change a behaviour.
We live in a very analytical society where we pull apart or deconstruct a problem. In doing so we are paying attention to the very parts of our brain that we want to change.
Instead, the research shows, we need to focus our attention on what we want to do instead. It is a matter of concentrating our attention on what we want to do rather than what we do not want to do. This means that if we try to modify a habit, we will start using the 'old', previously created neural wiring. Making a change to this entrenched 'wiring' is far more difficult than creating new 'wiring.'
Here's how it works. When you undertake an activity or think thoughts, then a whole distributed collection of neurons in your brain fire in particular patterns. These patterns may be located in similar brain areas but are individual in pattern for each person. The more you repeat the activity or thought the more the neurons are likely to fire in the same pattern. This has been expressed as 'the neurons that fire together, wire together'.
So, through this process our habits, skills and personalities continue to be created with time. Changing these patterns in your brain requires effort. This can be illustrated by imagining that your brain is like a lump of jelly (a wonderfully evocative metaphor that Edward de Bono spoke of in his book The Mechanism of Mind).
These activities and thoughts are like drops of water that create paths in the jelly. Some will become quite deep. And a drop of water that falls near a pathway will run into one of the existing channels. Only by mindfully starting a new channel, a new thought or action, do we effectively move on to create new ways of doing something.
The key point here is that when you are endeavouring to change, don't try to modify the old habit. Instead, mindfully develop a new habit. You are then working with, rather than against, your brain physiology.
We can introduce these concepts into our own business environment in some simple and powerful ways. Think about how you can set up your work environment so as to corral your attention through your own actions and become more productive. This can be achieved by arranging your day and your surroundings in a way that encourages focus and accomplishment.
Furthermore, if you want to, or are needing to modify a behaviour or thought pattern, then changing the start of that pattern is important. By you changing a single action at the start you can initiate a whole new set of complex behaviours or 'chunks of action repertoires'. These chunks help form coordinated sequential motor actions and develop streams of thought and motivation.
Motivation has been shown to be important in all this work. 'Experiments have shown that when animals are motivated to learn, the brain responds plastically,' says Michael Merzenich in Norman Doidge's book The Brain That Changes Itself. So it is important to recognise what will motivate you (and your staff). You can't make the assumption that everyone's motivations are the same.
It is also important to recognise again the degree of focus required to learn as adults. Quite often, instead of learning, we will be replaying mastered skills. It 'costs' us effort to learn, particularly if we are at middle professional levels. 'To keep the mind alive requires learning something truly new with intense focus,' says Michael Merzenich.
It is no wonder then that it is difficult to change someone else's mind, given the individual differences in brain physiology and that changing our own habits and thoughts requires mindful attention. Given the incredibly large possible combinations of neuronal wiring in each person's brain, it is not surprising that we have such unique ways of looking at and performing functions.
Therefore, for those who are managing, leading and working with knowledge-based workers, it is important to guide rather than tell others how to think. To create successful change, it's a case of assisting others to make their own thought connections.
Research has illustrated that distractions, including multi-tasking, are the enemy of this attention-focused learning. This key finding has a bearing on many of our current business practices. It has shown that multi-tasking is not something the brain engages in well.
Critically, research shows that interruptions, no matter how short, can cause the brain to take up to 15 minutes to collect its thoughts and go back to where it was before the interruption. This is because the brain works in sequence and has to switch tasks consciously.
These findings provide a great reason for blocking out time, that is free of email, phone and Blackberry interruptions when attending to important business thinking and tasks. If you want to, for example, put on a load of washing and chat to a friend about the weather, the lack of complexity allows your brain to switch easily. In contrast, the more complex nature of business thinking is not so easily or efficiently handled in such a manner.
And, the benefits of a good night's sleep is also showing up in the research. Neuroscience is starting to uncover the links and benefits between exercise, sleep and your cognitive abilities. It has been found by Professor Nicola Lautenschlager of the University of Melbourne that moderate exercise can improve cognitive function.
But, the important conclusions from neuroscience research are that our brains have the ability to change if we give them the opportunity. Brain function differs from one person to the next and our brains change during the course of our individual lives. It is never too late to teach ourselves new tricks throughout our lives.
What business can learn from neuroscience
don't assume you can't change, you can change your behaviour and thoughts at almost any age
it is easier and more effective to create a new habit than modify an existing one
'rewiring' of neurons requires mindful attention and focus
understanding why you want to change provides the motivation to change
exercise can enhance neuronal growth
adequate sleep assists memory consolidation and problem solving
brain individuality means that you shouldn't assume that others will change in the same manner as you do; instead guide rather than tell others how to think
Rewiring your brain
Take note of the following areas where either individually or collectively you are experiencing:
the inability to get the desired results
a high staff turnover
a lack of staff engagement
a disconnect between jobs and rewards
individuals who are bored
staff feeling their strengths are not being used
a culture of distraction
How to refocus in order to rewire:
To create a new habit (in contrast to trying to modify an old one) mindfully focus on developing the new habit in the following way:
be clear and specific about what action you want to take
understand and be clear about why you want to develop this new behaviour or habit
take action and focus with intent and concentration for a solid 15 minutes
swiftly recognise if and where you get off track or start down the 'old habit pathway'
refocus with action for a further 15 minutes with intent and concentration
for success repeat each day for three to four weeks
Dr Kevin Orrman-Rossiter is an executive coach, social researcher and futurist. He has a PhD in physics as well as management and marketing qualifications. He was awarded a prestigious Australian research award, the Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship and has worked in international manufacturing and the financial services industries.
Dr Sharon Orrman-Rossiter is an expert in coaching for performance. She is past chairman of Monash University's Centre for Biomedical Engineering. She has a PhD in medicine and has been involved in cutting-edge research in the UK and Australia. With her husband Dr Kevin Orrman-Rossiter, she founded Clarity Now where their brainpower is used to coach individuals and groups on how to get the most from their minds in executive leadership and career planning.
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