ThinkingSparks

Free webinar on Social Media Trends by Guy Kawasaki and Mari Smith

Just a quickie post to let you know about the FREE webinar this coming Wednesday. Guy Kawasaki and Mari Smith cover the 7 hottest trends in social media today.

If you cannot make the webinar, sign up anyway and watch in when it suits you.

Sign up here.

Hostmanship (and a book give-away)

I am smitten with the concept of Hostmanship! Services marketing has always really fascinated me to no end because the employees in the business have such a great impact on how a business and brand is perceived and experienced. Very often in marketing the focus is on advertising or promotion, which to me is an important part of marketing,but not the whole picture.

What I like about Hostmanship is that when explained as the "Art of making people feel welcome" you instantly get it. Everyone has at least some inkling of what making people feel welcome, is all about. Even if you may not be very good at it yourself.

The second thing I like about the concept of Hostmanship is that if you apply it to other businesses than those in the hospitality industry, it still holds up. You can apply it if you run a hospital, a gym, a nail studio, a networking group, consultancy, sell cup cakes, or an art gallery. It doesn't really matter what you do, you want to make your guests a.k.a. you customers feel welcome.

The third thing I like about Hostmanship is that it fits so well with anything I know about services marketing. It resonates with me and I think the authors say it so much better than dry theory.

Jan Gunnarsson wrote the book with Olle Blom and there is a world of experience behind the concept of Hostmanship. Check out Jan Gunnarsson speech at TedX Maastricht. If you are not into video, check out their company's PDF About Hostmanship.

We received three copies from Jan Gunnarsson to give away. Enter the sweepstakes before Sunday March 11th, 8 AM (Amsterdam time that is). The whole world can play.

Jan Gunnarsson - "Hostmanship: the art of making people feel welcome" from Hostmanship on Vimeo.

Shaking of my Dutchness

Having just moved to the south of Spain I knew I would run into some cultural differences that would make me wonder out loud. Throw an international community into the Andalucian mix and living here is probably an anthropologist’s wet dream.

Someone told me to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Nerja. A band would be playing and there would be fireworks. For a Dutch girl from Amsterdam this sounded like fun and preparing for our worst, we booked a hotel room in town.

Of course, I am still not completely used to the different opening hours of shops and such here in Spain. I know them, but they are not an integrated part of my biorhythm and mindset yet. Usually, by the time I am ready to shop, shops have closed. By the time I am ready to take a short nap, they open again. In Holland on a New Year’s Eve shops will definitely close early, so I was happily surprised to see that a lot of stores were still open around 6 PM. I was also surprised to see that some restaurants were closed. I wrote it off to me not understanding the nuances of opening hours on this particular day of the year.

The band was doing some sound checking and the bar was already set up at the square at the Balcon de Europa. One large square bar and just one beer tap I noticed. They must drink other types of booze here on New Year’s Eve I thought as we continued walking around the streets of Nerja, showing the town to a visiting friend.

Around eight at night, we were ready to sit down and have a drink and maybe even a small bite to eat. To our surprise, a tapa bar on the square was about to close so we looked for another place. As we were about to sit down the waiter told us that he would be closing in 15 minutes. Both the anthropologist and the businessperson in me were dying to know why. Did he have to close because of some exotic city ordinance, or if the closing was of his own volition. It turned out the closing was voluntary. They were closing so the staff could have the New Year’s Eve meal with their family.

I am not sure if it was me being me, or if it is the instilled Dutch Golden Age merchant nature that makes the Dutch, Dutch. I was absolutely flabbergasted that these bars and restaurants were closing. A couple of thousand people on your doorstep and you close your business? It didn’t make any commercial sense to me.

It started to make some more sense when I saw so many people in and around the square carry bags with bottles and their own drinks. It made me wonder if the bars were closed because they knew they would not make any money of all these foreigners with funny paper hats. Or if it was the other way around, people bringing their own drinks because they knew lots of places would be closed.

The question still boggles my mind. Are the Spanish missing commercial opportunities or do they have their priorities – the right work-life balance – straight? As I am trying to shake off my Dutchness, I am going for the latter. It is why I moved here.

Passion

 

Excited about the new year. This year's theme is DARE.

Developed 4 seminars for business owners. First ad is one of Axarquia's magazines tomorrow. Poke the box!

Setting up shop in Spain

So we moved to Spain. Sold the house in Amsterdam. Rented one in Andalucia. The sunshine and the view of the hills and the Mediterranean in the distance sure beat the rain and 40 neighbors looking into your backyard.

We explored our surroundings. Observed and listened. There is still a lot to learn and find out but I am poking the Spanish box. Let's see what happens...

 

Social media is not an option

Over the last half year or so I immersed myself in social media. Read a lot of stuff. Tried to weed out the self proclaimed gurus from the people who really know what they are talking about. And of course I dabbled in social media myself. I learned a lot and I would like to say that my learning curve has been very steep. Going up that is.

I needed to read up because when working for TNT Post as an interim manager on employer branding and job marketing we didn't use social media at all. Sounds like blasphemy, but thousands of people needed to be hired, while it looked like thousands of employees would lose their job. Strikes and labor unions were part of daily life back then and social media had been abused by disgruntled employees before so it was a no go back then. However, in the mean time the Communication Department strategized on how to deal with social media. They came up with some excellent guidelines that I blogged about last December.

So I was held back. Or so it felt. When awake from this "social media" less period of my life - I didn't even have time to write my blog back then - I realized that lots of organizations, professionals (even friends in the same line of work as I) don't use any form of social media. It reminded me of a friend who 13 years ago was working in food FMCG and proclaimed that the internet was of no use for his business. He was the commercial director and he was wrong. It still boggles my mind that people who work in branding, marketing or communication aren't on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. You don't have to be fanatic about it, but how do you know how it works or what it can do, if you do not use it? And if you don't use it how can you give the best advice possible to colleagues or clients?

Or course there are people who say that social media isn't for everyone or every organization. I beg to differ. I think social media has an impact on the organization and its brand(s).

It is very simple really. If branding is all about the image in the heads of the consumer, you have to listen to what they are saying about you. And they using social media to say it. So social media is not an option. You don't get to chose if you're in or out. It is mandatory. Your (potential) customers are out there talking about you and you should listen. It is the least you can do.

If your organizations is like most organizations it has employees. They use social media too and may say good or bad things about your organization. With service providers employees have always been creating moments of truth. Every interaction with customers is a moment of truth. The emergence of social media confronts other types of organizations with this phenomenon as well. Listening, and clear and simple guidelines would be a minimum involvement in social media for an organization with employees.

Businesses exist because they sell stuff. Person to person sales has taken on a whole new dimension with social media. Cold calling has been replaced by smart calling. That is, if you use social media to your advantage. And why wouldn''t you? I have never met anyone who likes cold calling. Nor have I ever met anywone who likes to be "cold called".

It is a challenge to figure out how to best use these media to your advantage. But you really have no choice in "if" you should use them. It influences your organization and your brand whether you use it or not.

To explore this topic I started the group The Social Brand on LinkedIn. Why don't you join me there?

 

Workshop on Positioning; March 24

This coming thursday I will be one of the speakers at the Women Event, an event for female entrepreneurs in The Netherlands. Check out the other speakers too: Annemarie van Gaal en Coco de Meyere (Dutch link only).

I will be doing a workshop on positioning in which we will do a quick scan of the positioning of the entrepreneurs' organization. There will be some homework to do and I will give each and every participant written individual feedback.

So if you are in The Netherlands and want to know if you have laid the foundations of your organization correctly come and join me.

Who do you feel comfortable with when asking for help?

My sabbatical is over and I want to start working again. Not as an interim manager anymore, but as a consultant, sparring-partner, issue coach, or whatever role it takes to help you solve your organization's problems when it comes to strategic fit, positioning, branding, services marketing and communication strategy.

So I wrote the business plan. The website in Dutch is done. The website in English is being finished this week. Check it out and let me know what you think.

It is also the time to ask people in my network for help. I know a lot of people, but I realized that I only feel comfortable enough to ask for help, with a limited number of people. Is that silly me or is that normal? Or should I not consider those people I do not feel comfortable with, part of my network.

Please give me your opinion. Or give a helping hand if you are comfortable with it.

Using Twitter: 100 days likes and dislikes

Although I have had a Twitter account for quite some time, I only really started using it about 3 months ago. As it is good usance to review after 100 days I thought I'd share my thoughts on using Twitter. Not that the world is waiting for another self-proclaimed social networking guru, but I just want to share and check my thoughts with others.

I found that I see Twitter as an extension of my working environment. It is how I act in the workplace in real life. I share knowledge and go looking for new insights. If I don't understand something I'll ask. If I do not agree I'll question and be my usual critical self (it is a gift you know). I also found I do not want to be all work and no play. So I utter things I would around the water cooler or coffee vending machine. Or have the small conversations I would have with people I meet on the go, at the trainstation or in the elevator. I like those short dialogs with people. I like the feeling that just for a short time I found a kindred spirit, or gained a new insight by an unexpected view of a virtual stranger. I like meeting new people and I like feeling connected.

But just as in real life there are things I do not like or get about people on Twitter. I do not get following zillions of people. The other day I started following someone who I thought to be interesting. He has more than 300.000 followers and to give him credit, he was also following a 300.000+ people back. But I wonder how you engage with so many people. There is no way to follow so many people and have time to do anything else worthwhile in your day to day life. I ended up unfollowing the person.

Also it seems to me that a lot of people use Twitter in an oldfashioned "one-to-many communication" kind of way. They use Twitter to broadcast and send out their messages. If they are real pros about it they automate, repeat and schedule their messages. There is in principal nothing wrong with all of these things but at times I feel like I am listening to the ongoing repetitive SOS signal on the island in Lost. To me it doesn't feel very sincere and the lifecycle of these messages are very short. Eventually I end up unfollowing those kind of people because they only advertise. They aren't sharing, they aren't opening up for dialogue, they never initiate dialogue.

I mostly use Twitter to learn and share about professional topics. I tend to follow people who do the same thing. Sometimes however people do not live up to my expectations. My bad, as they are my expectations. Having said that though I just don't get the "I woke up", "I had a coffee", "I arrived at the office" kinda updates. Who cares? It boggles my mind that those people actually have followers. I must admit that in one particular case I waited around for some big revelations, but they never came. So after 10 strikes, I unfollowed.

Sometimes I find messages undecipherable. It happens with messages that have lots of @'s, #'s and http's in them. I am not sure if it is just me but I find that my brain simply rejects them. My brain will command my eyes not to read them. Someone will probably do or is doing a study into the effectiveness of the 140 character message, but I am betting that all those at-signs, hashtags and URL's in one tweet add to the ineffectiveness of messages.

All in all I really like Twitter as a tool to meet, share and engage. I try to add a bit of myself to the mix in the process. I liked doing the #FF FollowFriday recommendations. But with the brain shutdown at the sight of too many  @'s and wanting to be sincere in my recommendations I started limiting the number of #FF's. So now I #FF 4 people every friday and motivate why I think other people should follow them too. It sparks dialogue, which I enjoy.

Want to share your thoughts on Twitter?