Dance With Strangers

Do you finish your day and realize you didn’t really accomplish anything?

Oh sure, you DID stuff, a lot of stuff. But nothing was truly accomplished. Ask yourself how you spent your time throughout the day. Were you going back and forth from task to task, biting of small bits of each task, only to swallow it quickly and move onto something else?

Or did you sit down, shut out everything else and eat up the entire task, while actually taking time to taste?

You will only be successful when you multi-task, not multiple-task.

People love to talk about customer service stories. Good, bad and ugly. We all share them with each other as if they are our own personal scars. Head on over to Twitter, Facebook, Yelp or any other online network and you’ll read what people think about the customer service they just received. We all know that more people talk about horrid customer service. Sure I have a large amount of those stories (I’m looking at the continuously poor service of ING). Fortunately though people do take the time to provide some kudos when the service is divine. Today, I share one of those stories.

Marketing tools can often be confounding. They are overly expensive and over designed. They get deployed before they have a team to support the tool. They work, sometimes. But we try them all in hopes that they deliver what we need and provide us with more insight into the work we are doing. One of the tools I use each day is Act-On software and you can read how it provides real-time B2B marketing analysis, email management, demand gen automation and more, but it is not the tool I care to discuss today. Today I want to talk about Andrea and Dan, two people who work at Act-On and provided me with a wonderful example of proactive customer service.

One morning last week I got an email that Andrea and Dan, helping us with another issue, came upon something we had done wrong in implementing our forms. This was not a major deal, but it was causing problems in certain browsers (yes, that means IE). Now here is what could happen after they discover this issue:

1. Ignore the issue, AKA “Bad Customer Service”
2. Alert us to the issue, AKA “Customer Service”
3. Tell us how to fix the issue, AKA “Good Customer Service”
4. Fix the issue then tell us about it, AKA “Amazing Customer Service”

The fourth form of customer service is what I call proactive customer service and it goes way above and beyond what you expect of any company. But it is also that type of customer service that creates a loyalty to a company, a product, a person, a brand. That morning Andrea and Dan of Act-On took the fourth approach on customer service and it made a huge difference for my day. Rather than trying to figure out the problem and wasting a few hours I was off and running. Proactive customer service is the ability to put your customer’s needs completely ahead of your own, but then going even one more step further and providing a true solution.

Thanks Andrea. Thanks Dan. Thanks Act-On.

Take a moment and share your story of proactive customer service.

Fortunately I work for a company that is witnessing amazing growth. And with tremendous growth comes a lot of interviewing. Last week alone I interviewed ten separate folks for four different positions. During each interview I like to examine how I performed; the questions asked, the information given, how much data I truly feel I got out of the person. Proper interviewing is certainly more art than science and over the years I’ve learned a great deal from those around me on how to get what you need when interviewing a person for a position.

Mix It Up

One of the most simple steps you can take is to mix up the people who will be conducting the interview. This is particularly important when interviewing marketing personnel, but it can also bring a fresh perspective to any role you are trying to fill. Many of the folks who came in to interview last week met with a variety of people outside of the marketing department, including our CTO. Obviously everyone in the company has a stake in who gets hired, no matter the position, but I often get the best opinions on a candidate from those outside of the marketing realm. These people know what is needed, but they can also remove any potential bias they may have about marketing talents and really cut to the core of the candidate as an overall talent. Just last week my CTO provided me with some terrific interview questions based on his conversations with a candidate. Make sure you include people outside of your own department in the interview process, it will open up your eyes to the strengths and weaknesses of a candidate.

Go Back For More

Traditionally people usually have one or two rounds of interviews and then make a decision. That seems a bit brash for someone that you’ll be spending 50-60 hours with a week, don’t you think? Would you get engaged after the second date? Don’t be afraid of having an extended interview process that could be 3-5 rounds. They don’t have to be all marathon-day sessions with multiple people, but it is good to get in front of a person several times to get a sense of when they are being a “job candidate” and when they are being themselves. Set up an initial phone screen, follow it up with an interview session with the marketing team, bring them back in for the interviews with folks outside of your team and then maybe close it up with a one-on-one session. Over time you will get a good handle on the different “flavors” of the candidate, their ability to schedule time into their calendar, attention to detail on how they remember items over a period of time and more opportunities to get to know this person you are about to spend so much time with over the coming months.

Spice Up The Locale

OK, I’m taking the “work relationship” metaphor too far, but what I mean is that you should interview the person at least once outside of your own offices. Personally I like to use the coffee shop across the street, especially for the first interview. There are many reasons for this including:

• Introduction–Did they do their homework and connect with me on LinkedIn, hence they know what my ugly mug looks like?
• Manners–How do they treat the folks working at the coffee shop?
• Personality–Out of the office, but still in a business-like setting, can they relax a bit and let out their personality?

I posed this question on Twitter and Jim Storer had an interesting suggestion, get the candidate on the golf course and you’ll learn a bunch of things:

Certainly a bit more intense than the coffee shop, but I think Jim would agree that one of the reasons the golf course works is because it is outside of the office space. Our friend Natayna Anderson had a good point of course, not everyone plays golf, but again I do think one could find a setting that would truly place a candidate out of their element and provide you with a much deeper understanding of their skill set.

Be Consistent

Asking the same exact question every single time is not only boring, but will also not give you a fair representation of different people. However, it is important to have some benchmark questions to ask each candidate, even if you tailor them to their personality or the flow of the conversation. The reason is obvious, you need to have easy ways to compare and contrast candidates. This becomes even more important when comparing two very strong candidates, providing you with a potentially tie-breaking formula.

Put Them To The Test

Some people are just really, really good at interviewing. You know who I’m talking about. Perhaps you are one of those people. But guess what those people can’t do, handle a challenging test. Don’t feel like you can’t tax your candidate with homework. A few suggestions, again from the marketing world:

• Rewrite the company boilerplate using all the information at your disposal.
• Provide a 90-day demand generation plan.
• Write a post for the company blog.
• Detail the five things you believe our competitors do better than us.

The ultimate lesson in interviewing is to be hard on the candidate, because their job is going to be hard.

Mix it up with the people interviewing, because they will have to have relationships with multitudes of co-workers.

Take them out of their element, it will provide a small light into their personality.

And don’t be afraid to ask for more, because the person who goes above and beyond is the person you’ll want to keep.

More than three years ago I had the gall of writing a post that suggested that blogs were simply a medium and that the important part would always be the content, which is the way it has always been. My point, which I had to make several more times after being attacked and called an idiot by one of the people mentioned in the original post, was that social media was nothing more than a transport. Granted it is a faster and more dynamic form of transportation and allows us to communicate in a much more interactive manner, but people should continue to focus on creating good content and less about pontificating about how social media has revolutionized our lives. The conclusion was that over time social media would lose the fad element and fold itself into other practices.

Spending the past week at MarketingProfs B2B Forum it was evident that the transformation is already happening, albeit slowly. This show focused on marketing best practices with a sprinkling of social media and left behind the short-lived legacy of social media focused shows. The latter had promoted personality and ego, which is not sustainable. The former is all about substance and education, which brings people back for more. During MarketingProfs I sat in six sessions and in all but one of them social media was an after thought or simply a part of a larger process. Even during the Boston Social Media Breakfast there was much more focus on practical communication and marketing methods than talk of “using Twitter for lead generation”.

This shift makes obvious sense and it will take a few more years for social media to exit the hype cycle, but doesn’t is seem like we’ve been here before? Remember eMarketing? Email marketing? Direct marketing? Eventually they move from being a short-lived yet enthusiastic fad and into a function of a greater practice. In this instance, marketing.  Social media, although extraordinarily useful outside of marketing, has now rightfully started to move from fad into fade.

Thou Protest Too Much

Now don’t fret, this is a really great sign for those of us who believe that social media is a good marketing technique (hand raised emphatically). During the MarketingProfs conference I listened to people give me terrific pointers on better trade show marketing, building communities online and offline, creating brand advocacy and building better content. Not once did I have to suffer through another “social media case study” or a set of slides pontificating the “confusion prism“. We have begun the move towards making social media a more respected function of business, rather than a set of caricatures trying a little too hard to defend the practice.

Te people I talked with during the panels, in the hallway and at the functions had also been making the shift — or perhaps they had never bought into the fad. They provided me with amazing ideas and refreshed my thinking, but also surprised me with their titles. Hardly anyone introduced themselves as a social media consultant, expert, guru or some other nonsense. Instead I was talking with directors and vice presidents of marketing, heads of agencies and business development, small companies and large. Twice I even spoke with people who had removed social media from their titles during the past three months. They were searching for answers, not rhetoric. They were teaching, not preaching.

It’s about time.

A lesson we all learn early in life is to not give in to peer pressure, it only leads to bad things happening. Typically this is a lesson steeped in fears around alcohol, drugs or reckless driving during the formative teenage years. Yet it applies throughout life, including when that teenager grows up and enters the world of business. Even in the relative safety of corporate America peer pressure can be a constant theme, leading to cutting corners, ethic violations and simply bad decision making. Peer pressure certainly prompts action, but using negative influences and causing adverse repercussions.

Peer motivation, on the other hand, provides the necessary inspiration from those surrounding you, but in a positive environment. This happens all the time in business, often through the creation of challenges amongst teammates to hit goals of self-inflicted peer motivation for folks driven to out perform others. Overall, peer motivation is something that we can harness in appropriate dosages to push ourselves and our teams to achieve great things, oh and it really works for parenting, but that is for another blog.

Peer Motivation and Athletics

When it comes to sports and athletics peer motivation is a critical part of the success recipe. Players often find themselves in situations where their peers raise their game to another level, not simply through the play of the game, but the influence of their workouts, diet or studying game tape. In fact, peers within sports are not necessarily on your own team, it could be your greatest opponent. Last night I was reminded of how powerful peer motivation can be watching “Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals“. Growing up in the 80s, in Boston, it was a great honor to watch Larry Bird and Magic Johnson take each other to new levels, and along with it an entire professional sports league. This peer motivation happens all the time in sports, although not always to the level of a Bird & Magic, and it also happens for individuals who are…well…um…not professional athletes.

During the last part of 2009 I was training to run a half-marathon in Austin and for this ex-offensive lineman running isn’t exactly a natural physical state.

But throughout the training process peer motivation kept me going, and the “peers” didn’t even realize the effect they were having on getting me through my goal. One of those people, Tim Walker, has been chronicling much of his work out regimen and discipline on his blog and on Twitter. Seemingly, each time I thought about skipping or skimping on a run Tim would Tweet or post about a workout technique. Undeniably this would make me run longer and faster, helping push me to finish that half-marathon in February. Peer motivation.

Peer Motivation and Social Media

Social media is full of peer pressure, that has been well documented, but peer motivation is also a fantastic side benefit of social media. One great example is ChallengeApp, a new social network that allows you to challenge your friends or network to any type of challenge. Not surprisingly, Tim pointed out ChallengeApp to me and immediately we were in a challenge for the month of April. Our challenge is to get through 20 substantial workouts in April (join us?). We are only a few days into the month, but already I can tell this is going to drive me since we remind each other over Twitter and ChallengeApp about our workouts and don’t think it isn’t killing me that Tim has one more workout than I do already!

Peer motivation using social media or any other means is not just for athletics, in fact ChallengeApp (or really any collaborative platform) is a great tool for a team of bloggers looking for more production, fundraisers looking for more donations, company departments looking to out produce another department, the options are endless. Understanding how much power your words have on others may inspire you to be more proactive about peer motivation, and on the flip side you should search for people who will motivate you.

How are you going to motivate your peers today? Who motivates you each and every day and might not know it?

Last year at SXSW a few of us had a little fun with a game we call B.S. Bingo. You take a bingo card and you add the most popular “lingo” that you might hear during an event like SXSW, specifically the Interactive portion. Below is the 2010 version, enjoy and remember it is all in fun. Big thanks to so many of you on Twitter/Buzz who helped populate this year’s SXSWi bingo card:

Download the SXSWi Bingo Card.

Linkedin in is a powerful tool for B2B sales enablement, engagement and prospecting. This is a presentation given to our global sales force at BreakingPoint on how to use the capabilities of LinkedIn to move from being an online resume to online resource.

From time to time I’m asked about social media guidelines for a company. Typically the person is putting something together and an executive has quite smartly stated that the employees need some guidelines. Now the original statement they made may have even said the dreaded “r” word, but either way the goal here is pretty straight forward. Or at least it should be. Your ultimate goal in creating social media guidelines is:

To produce a thorough but easily readable document that provides all employees a practical guide on how to interact within the context of social networks realizing that they are employed by said company.

Let’s break those down a bit further.

Thorough

• The social media guidelines should include as much of what people SHOULD be talking about as what they SHOULD NOT be talking about.
• The guidelines should take into account all facets of social media ranging from blogging and Twitter to posting online photos, audio clips and geo-location services.
• The guidelines should have some language approved by your legal department, but it should also be vetted through HR, sales, marketing, PR, exec leadership and others. This is a document for the entire company.

Easily Readable

• This may read as “short” to you, but that is not necessarily the case. It could also mean it is designed well or broken into well thought out chunks.
• Social media guidelines should be easily accessible to all employees.
• You do not have to publish your social media guidelines for the whole world to see. It is not frowned upon, but don’t think you have to reveal everything to everyone.
• Think about providing your guidelines in other formats such as video, audio or cheat-sheets to tack to cubicle walls.

Practical Guide

How to Interact

• Be respectful
• Be honest
• Be helpful

Social media guidelines are not rocket science, but they should provide people with a clear guide on how to participate in social media.

Thanks to Jim Storer for the inspiration needed for this post.

It’s event season for most B2B companies, particularly in the technology world. In the next six weeks I’ll be going to a bunch of shows for BreakingPoint, mainly to demo our cyber simulation capabilities to folks. As you prep for your upcoming schedule of events how are you telling your community that you will be out and about? Couple of suggestions:

• Blog about the events you are attending, why and what you will be doing at the event.
• Set up Twitter searches for the show names or hashtags, connect with people talking about the event.
• Post events to LinkedIn (groups and their actual event feature).
• Send out an email to segments who may be attending certain shows with an offer (we have a super cool t-shirt).

If you don’t tell people you are going to be someplace, don’t be surprised if they fail to show up.

The other day I got an email from Pam O’Neal (my Vice President of Marketing, for those of you new to our adventures here) telling me to check out an article in Washington Technology on using social media to connect to the top contractors, agencies and influential companies in the government space. Not only was Pam pointing out the article as a resource for us at BreakingPoint, but also how the author used LinkedIn at the end of his article.

Mark Amtower, the author, is a B2G marketing consultant and his resolution for 2010 was to be connected to at least one person, preferably three, at each of the top companies listed by Washington Technology by the end of March. Aggressive, most certainly. But Mark is a smart man obviously because he understands how to harness the interconnectedness of social media. Just head to the end of the article and presto, a hyperlink to Mark’s LinkedIn profile.

Nothing amazing at this point though, right? The magic actually didn’t happen until I connected with Mark on LinkedIn, that is when the addition of resourceful content, as usual, made it’s mark.

Within minutes of connecting with Mark there was a personalized response to me in my inbox. How do I know it was personal and not a really great form response? Pam had connected with Mark about an hour before and the emails were completely different. Nice touch. But here comes the move that I found to be brilliant; two invites to join groups that Mark had set up on LinkedIn, both extremely focused and full of resources.

Mark had gone from a random contact to a source of information in minutes and someone I was really looking forward to talking with and probably talking with about his services. Ultimately that was his goal through his resolution and he is making it happen by using some of the social media principles we have discussed here on the blog. But let’s rehash:

1. Be Accessible–Include links to where people can find you.
2. Integrate Social Media–Make sure you are integrating social into your byline articles, events, emails, etc.
3. Be Personable–There is a strong connection built quickly with personal communication.
4. Provide Resources, Not Promotions–Mark didn’t push me to a website that touted his skills, he introduced me to groups that can help me with my job.

Content is king and social media is the way to spread the word. Let’s all use Mark’s example as a social media best practice, whether for B2C, B2B or B2G.

Oh, and you can connect with me on LinkedIn too.