Business Improvement and Social media

One of the hardest things for any entrepreneur to figure out (after how to make money) is building a healthy, focused, powerful company culture.

It's easier said than done, especially in today's world of outsourcing, teams that live across the country from each other, virtual assistants, etc.

However, I've seen, time and again, that when a company knows how to make money AND gets their culture right, they're pretty much guaranteed to succeed. One without the other doesn't last long.

To drill down into the magic of doing this, I invited my good friend Gunnar Lovelace onto The School of Greatness.

Gunnar is the founder of the super-successful online warehouse of health foods at wholesale prices, Thrive Market.

At few moments since the end of World War II has downward pressure on prices been so great. Some of it stems from cyclical factors—such as sluggish economic growth in the Western economies and Japan—that have reined in consumer spending. There are newer sources as well: the vastly increased purchasing power of retailers, such as Wal-Mart, which can therefore pressure suppliers; the Internet, which adds to the transparency of markets by making it easier to compare prices; and the role of China and other burgeoning industrial powers whose low labor costs have driven down prices for manufactured goods. The one-two punch of cyclical and newer factors has eroded corporate pricing power and forced frustrated managers to look in every direction for ways to hold the line.

In such an environment, managers might think it mad to talk about raising prices. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

The first impression someone has of you can make or break the rest of the relationship.

In fact, studies have shown that people begin to judge others 1/10 of a second after meeting them. This reaction is usually not a conscious choice. It's a trait left over in our DNA from our prehistoric days when judging someone new was a life-or-death decision.

Not only are first impressions important in your personal life, they're even more important in your career. Many deals I've closed have come down to the sheer fact that people felt more comfortable with my team and me than they did with my competition.

Because first impressions play an important role in a new business relationship, I've studied top entrepreneurs and researched how people make judgments on first interactions. Below is a list of five things to do when meeting a potential client for the first time.

.

We all know that anxious feeling you get when you feel like you can’t cross things off your to-do list fast enough.

While many of us have days where we feel overloaded, too much stress can cause burnout. Burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion that occurs when we feel overwhelmed by too many demands, have too few resources and too little recovery times.

Today, recruiters are taking to social media profiles to check out their candidates potential before offering them the job. For those fresh out of university or just those who have just not been keeping track of their activity, cleaning up your social profiles is a definitely a priority. If you want to make a good impression upon your potential future employer, then you must check your pages thoroughly as social recruitment appears to be on the rise. According to a study by Jobvite, 73% of recruiters have hired a candidate through social media and 93% of hiring managers will review social profiles before offering a job.

Most people do not think much about certainty, but it governs most of what they do. “Certainty is the catalyst that turns attitudes into action,” says Zakary Tormala, a psychologist and associate professor of marketing in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His research, with Derek D. Rucker of Northwestern University, among others, has applications for executives, pollsters, and anyone who has an interest in spurring people to action. Managers who understand certainty can better groom leaders in their organizations.

You’ve probably heard conventional advice about networking: Practice your elevator pitch, try approaching people standing alone (they’ll be happy someone is talking to them), memorize icebreaker questions (“How did you hear about this group?” “What’s the most difficult part of your job?”)

Those are fine pieces of advice for certain kinds of events and certain kinds of people (ahem, extroverts). But what if the thought of going to such an event in the first place fills you with anxiety?

Then you might just be an introvert.

With more than 259 million users, LinkedIn is the most popular social network for professionals as well as one of the top social networks overall. Are you using it to its fullest potential?

While new social networks are sprouting up constantly, LinkedIn is a powerful platform that often gets underutilized or put on the back burner.

But the truth is, LinkedIn can be extremely powerful -- especially when you're aware of all the little hidden tricks that don't get nearly enough exposure as they deserve. To help you master LinkedIn, below is our ultimate list of 35 awesome tricks you may have been overlooking.

As a budding entrepreneur, you will come across thousands of sites while you search for the information that you need to start and run a successful business. While some of these websites are one-shot deals, a number of them will become favorites that you visit over and over. Here are 25 websites every entrepreneur should bookmark. These are sites that will prove incredibly useful to you as you change the world. These sites will provide priceless tools, strategies and inspiration for you ranging from marketing, information for starting up and building soulful businesses.

If there’s one thing that we can all agree on it’s that the world of work is changing…quickly. The way we have been working over the past few years is NOT how are we are going to be working in the coming years. Perhaps one of the most important underlying factors driving this change is the coming shift around who drives how work gets done. Traditionally executives would set the rules and pass those down to managers who in turn would pass those down to employees. But as Dan Pink aptly put it, “talented people need organizations less than organizations need talented people.” In other words employees are now starting to drive the decisions and conversations around how work gets done, when it gets done, who it gets done with, what technologies are being used to get it done, etc. The next few years are going to bring about dramatic changes. But why now? What are the key trends that are driving this new future of work? There are five of them - take a look.

Last February, Tory Burch got a gift from her staff to mark the 10th anniversary of her first store: a coffee-table book chronicling the company’s first decade. Every detail was perfectly on-brand, from the volume’s cloth cover (in a blue hue called “Tory Navy” that appears in every collection) to the numerous photos of family and friends. Though it contained few words, the book illustrated perfectly the cornerstone of Burch’s success: “It’s all about storytelling,” she said one morning as we sat at the kitchen table in her apartment, where the brand began. “It’s years of stories.”

When you need to get a message to a colleague, what’s your preferred mode of communication? Do you dash off an email, pick up the phone, or maybe send an instant message via the company’s intranet? A lot has changed since the era of interoffice memos, and how you choose to communicate could well be a generational choice. According to a new study from Peter W. Cardon at the University of Southern California and Bryan Marshall at Georgia College, age differences increasingly result in sharp divergences in how employees connect and correspond with one another.

Email still reigns supreme in the workplace, the authors found, but social media networks are poised to take over.

Einstein's famous theory of relativity (E=MC2) celebrates its 110th anniversary this year. This elegant formula helped us understand how the world works and has impacted scientists and philosophers alike.

The business world has its own formulas for success. Hard work dedication = results. Power = money influence. Big > Small. Fast > Slow. Fancy degree time = corner office.

The thing is, the world has changed. The old rules of business no longer carry the day as we cope with fist-fighting competition, mind-numbing speed, and exponential complexity. Add in macro trends such as global markets, digitization, cloud computing, millennial workforce shifts, mobile technology, and geopolitical turmoil, and you're wrestling a whole new beast. One that can't be conquered with some long-expired formula.

The 100 people on 2015's Most Creative People in Business list have achieved impressive breakthroughs across a wide swath of industries: finding a possible cure for Ebola, using drone technology to help save endangered animals, modeling jet engines with 3-D printers.

None of these breakthroughs came from resting easy on outdated ideas or settling into familiar ruts. And yet, even this illustrious group admits to getting stuck and actively seeking grist for the mill. So we put the following question to the group: Where or from whom do you seek out inspiration? What do you do when you're in a rut? And most importantly, how do you keep new ideas flowing? Here's what some of them had to say—if you try them out yourself, one each day of the work week, you'll have almost a month of options to help spark some creative new ideas of your own.

When executives talk about social media in business, they typically talk about it in terms of specific platforms. They ask: does our company need to have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Snapchat? Should we adopt Yammer, Jive, Sharepoint, IBM Connects, or the upcoming Facebook at Work as an enterprise collaboration tool?

The idea for this piece was rattling around in the back of my brain when I came across an interesting blog post on the Association for Talent Development’s site: “Why I Hate Mission Statements—But Love Missions.” The writer, Brad Federman, lays out many legitimate complaints about typical declarations: They have been wordsmithed into frothy blather, are too long to be remembered, and have little use beyond adorning the lobby wall. But Federman also argues, correctly, that a compelling mission has the power to shape a workplace and inform strategic and operational decisions. So what accounts for the disconnect? More importantly, how can it be bridged?

Businesses and individuals are pitched all-year-long by folks who just have one goal: close the sale, no matter what. To do that, they walk in, ask stupid questions, while trying to sell themselves. They make a sales presentation and extensively use the world “we” to talk about their company, products and so on. It’s often about them, and rarely about us. What happens next is predictable: we – the clients – politely say “we’ll be in touch”, run away, and never come back.

While innovation continues to be a top-three priority for three-quarters of the companies in BCG’s 2014 global innovation survey, fewer executives are confident in their organizations’ innovation skills. Innovation is hard. Breakthrough innovation is harder. What sets breakthrough innovators apart? And who are the most innovative companies of 2014? The following articles tell the story.

Malcolm X was quoted as saying; “The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” If you are reading this article, you are likely a step ahead of the competition by staying sharp in news and trends in the online marketing field. By starting to think about the future of online marketing, you can plan out a successful 2015 year for your business while staying a step ahead of the competition.

The 15 step guideline for the perfect 2015 digital marketing strategy will provide you with a digital marketing blueprint for the upcoming year.

An increasing number of organizations, either public or private, are utilizing virtual training to develop employee skill sets and keep them up-to-date with the organization’s policies and procedures. However, in many respects, creating a successful virtual training strategy is an art, and various elements should be present in order to implement an informative and engaging experience for the employees. But what are these elements, and which techniques should be utilized when developing a virtual training strategy that offers the best return on your investment?

To gain better insight into what makes people share content online, Fractl studied the emotions associated with viral marketing campaigns, plotting the ones that are most commonly associated with viral content on Robert Plutchik’s comprehensive Wheel of Emotions:

CuriosityAmazementInterestAstonishmentUncertainty

Then, we looked more closely to see how certain demographics respond to different types of content.