The three websites

Late this afternoon I put out the following message on Twitter, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom: “Have created 3 stunning websites in 2 days. Used to use vastly expensive web design co who took 6 months to achieve fraction of the same result.”

The tweet immediately excited massive interest. Several people wanted to know what software I had used. A professional web designer from South Africa responded “Impossible … send URL’s please,” which of course I did.

One person said “Wow, three websites in 2 days = impressive!” He then asked me how I achieved such fast website building and how much I’d charge to create a CMS website for him. My response to him, and to anyone else with the same question, is that whilst I can build websites rapidly and very competently, it is not what I do, nor is it a service I am ever likely to offer.

The best I can do is explain what I did and how it came about. So here goes …

In the past I used vastly expensive web designers …

In the past I believed that web design, to be any good, should be left in the hands of the professionals. When a valued client needed a new website a couple of years ago, I immediately suggested a web design company with an excellent reputation, who had developed and refined their own content management system over many years. I had known the owner of the company for nearly a decade, and also knew several of their satisfied clients. So I recommended that they do the design.

The company was briefed in October 2007. They came up with a proposal at the end of November. The proposal was finally approved and the company started work on a “functional specification.” This went backwards and forwards a few times until it was approved in February 2008. It took four months to get this far.

I commissioned a first class copywriter to come up with the copy, based on a 20-page master document we had already created. The copywriter turned the job around in a few days, and the copy was ready to go by the end of February. No problems there. He did an excellent job.

Based on a briefing from the graphic designer who had designed my client’s visual branding, the web designers came up with a mockup of the proposed home page early in March. It went backwards and forwards numerous times before we were happy with it. In mid-May the design was finally approved. It had taken 7 months to reach this stage.

From there the web designers set about building the website. This involved building the main menu structure, which then couldn’t easily be changed, and a series of page templates based on the approved design. They also had to integrate a blog, the means to show random testimonials, random team profiles and a few other small refinements. This took another 6 weeks.

Finally, early in July 2008 we took delivery of the unpopulated website. It had taken 9 months to get this far.

We then added images and copy to all the pages, which took about a day. A few days were spent testing and tweaking the site, and getting the bugs worked out. The finished result was presented to the client and approved. And in mid July it went live.

But all was not well. Fifteen months and many £ thousands after starting the project, the blogs still didn’t work, the content management system was clunky with a dreadful user interface and turned out to be a real pain in the backside … and the client was not happy.

Then I discovered Wordpress … and everything suddenly changed

While all this was going on, someone recommended that I look at Wordpress. I had looked at it casually some 2-3 years earlier, but wasn’t overly impressed at the time. It was suggested that I should look at Wordpress + Bluehost + Woo Themes.

I looked into all three, and was very impressed this time. Set up an account with Bluehost. It was hassle free and only took a few seconds. Transferred my domain across, again a painless process. Within a minute or two I had installed Wordpress using tools provided in the Bluehost control panel, and was ready to go.

The back end of the Wordpress Content Management System turned out to be VASTLY superior to that used in the very expensive website described above. Yet anyone can install Wordpress, and it costs nothing.

I added some pages. It was both easy and intuitive. Arranged them in the order I wanted. Set up my preferences. Downloaded some useful plugins. Found some attractive design themes, many of them available free of charge. Uploaded the ones I liked to the site. Experimented with them. Settled on one I liked and started to build the site.

Even as a novice it took me less than a day in total, excluding ongoing tweaks to the copy. My only outlay was for a few stock images from iStockPhoto, but they weren’t expensive at about $3 apiece (now $5). Within a day I had an excellent website up and running using a very robust platform that was also used by millions of others. And it cost me next to nothing.

Over time I discovered other attractive themes and useful plug-ins that could add extra functionality to the site. I eventually decided to switch to a premium theme. But at $20 a year, it was hardly expensive … and if you’re reading this now at marketingwzdom.com, you’re viewing the final result right now.

I started my blog. Within its first month it ranked in the top 2% in the world. The site is professionally designed, looks good and gets frequent compliments. In its first 7 months it attracted some 150,000 visitors from 90 countries, and ranks within the top 5% of sites in the world. And that’s without even trying.

The Wordpress content management system is also extremely robust. And intuitive. I couldn’t say either of those things about the so-called professionally designed website described earlier, even though the developer is considered to be one of the best out there. My Wordpress installation made that system obsolete overnight.

Which brings me to the subject of my tweet …

Three new sites in just two days

Having seen how easy Wordpress was to use, my partner was often frustrated by the complete ineptitude of some of the web designers she’d had to deal with on behalf of her clients. Trivial matters were often blown up into big issues, and simplest tasks were made to seem impossible to perform.

So when her sister needed a new website for her business, my partner offered to create one for her. As recently as a year ago she would never have dreamed that she would ever be able to put a website together, let alone a decent one. A client for whom she produces newsletters also needed a new website, so she offered to put that one together too.

She initially spent a few days putting the sites together using some free Wordpress themes, and getting up to speed on Wordpress in general. I felt they needed to look more professional and wasn’t keen on the typography, but found that it was’t too easy to customise them.

Around that time I heard about the Canvas theme from Woo Themes. I checked it out and was very impressed by its capabilities as described on their site http://www.woothemes.com. I suggested to my partner that she should use the Canvas theme, which can easily be customised in dozens of ways.

A few days later we needed a new site to promote an upcoming joint venture with one of my clients. By now I knew exactly what was entailed in putting together a Wordpress site, and knew what Canvas was designed to do. I knew I could get the unpopulated site up and running in a matter of hours using Wordpress and Canvas.

I then discovered that Woo Themes offers something called the Woo Themes Playground, where you can set up a free account and experiment with any of their themes as if it were installed on your own site. I signed up and in an hour or two had pulled together a really nice customised site using Canvas. And yes it turned out to be every bit as good as claimed.

First website — Sunday

I bought the Canvas theme. It was $70. Within a few minutes my partner’s sister’s site had been switched to Canvas. I spent an hour or two setting up the navigation, pages, posts and styling for the theme, deciding which pages should have three columns; two columns or be full width. In Canvas this is a doddle to set up. It is also extremely easy to set up custom navigation. The theme is a joy to use.

Using Photoshop I came up with a nice full width header image. I’ve been using Photoshop since 1990, soon after it was originally launched, so it only took a few minutes to do this, even though I only use the program occasionally and am now somewhat rusty with it. Loaded the resulting image onto the site. It looked great. Tweaked the colour scheme so that it complimented the header image. Then arranged to meet my partner’s sister to get her feedback and tweak it while we met. That was two days ago.

She liked the design immediately. We spent a couple of hours tweaking it here and there over a coffee. She was delighted. Within hours we had accomplished a whole lot more than the professional web designers had achieved in 9 months, at a cost of £ many thousands. It’s now just a matter of adding the copy and images, which doesn’t take long, and the site will be ready to go live.

Second website — Monday

The following morning, i.e. yesterday, I had arranged to meet a colleague and my joint venture partner to decide what we needed to include on the joint venture website. I decided to create the site there and then in the meeting. This would have been inconceivable a couple of years ago.

We met at a hotel and used their Wifi to connect to the web. I set up a new account with Bluehost. Within a minute Wordpress was installed and ready to go. Uploaded the Canvas theme, and we were in business. By now I knew my way around the theme’s customisation options, so it took no time to get up to speed on the finer details.

We decided on the fly which pages would be needed. We created them there and then. We also set up some special blog post categories to use within the navigation, and created several dummy blog posts for each of the special categories to check that the navigation worked as intended. It did. A few minutes later we had created the navigation menu structure using a combination of pages and categories — very easy to do with Canvas.

In fact I learned that Woo Themes’ custom navigation menu set up has impressed Wordpress to such an extent that they have delayed the release of Wordpress 3.0 to incorporate this functionality into the final release. I can confirm that it revolutionises the construction of navigation menus. You decide what pages or categories you want to use, then just drag and drop them into the sequence you want, edit display names as appropriate and click save. Job done.

We then tweaked the menu descriptions and words a few times. Within a few minutes we were all delighted with the result. Then it was a matter of finalising the look and feel of the site before we went our separate ways again.

I looked through various images I already owned to see if one could be repurposed as a full width header. Found one that was perfect. Cropped it to size. Uploaded it. It looked great. We decided to blend it with a cityscape image to communicate the right message at a glance.

Looked for a suitable cityscape image from a stock image library. Found the right one almost immediately. Bought it there and then. Fired up Photoshop. In a minute or two the two images were blended together (one of my colleagues said he’d had to pay £ thousands in the past to achieve a similar effect) and I added some text to the banner.

Uploaded the banner image to the site. It looked great. Tweaked the colour scheme on the site to complement the header image. Again it really only took a few minutes, and we had a result we were all delighted with.

I gave my colleagues access to the back-end content management system. One of them spent a couple of hours today copying and pasting the appropriate text. It took five minutes to link the site to a third party payment processor. The copy now just needs tweaking, refining and editing. And we need to select and add a few images to lift the pages before the site goes live.

Once again, we accomplished in well under half a day what the web designers took 9 months to deliver … and every part of what we created in that short time works exactly as it should, unlike the vastly expensive web site I described at the beginning of this piece.

Third site — Monday Evening

The third site? When I got back from yesterday’s meeting my partner asked me to help her with her second site. I started after dinner yesterday evening, and the job was completed before I had to go to bed. I spent an hour or two this morning working out how to incorporate an image slide show on the home page. Figured it out with a bit of delving. And hey presto the job was done. And she was delighted.

The end result? 3 great looking websites in less than 2 days. They still need to be populated with copy and images before going live. But that’s not a big job. The point is that using Wordpress and Canvas we have accomplished three times as much in two days as the professional web designers managed to accomplish with just one site in 9 months, and at vast cost.

Can anyone create a decent site in half a day?

Can anyone turn out really decent sites this easily? Yes, but with a couple of caveats. Whether the end result looks professional enough to impress is down to your eye for design; flair for colour selection and ability to arrange the elements in a visually appealing manner. An attractive and intuitive user interface also makes or breaks the design for me. Not everyone has those skills and abilities, including plenty of professional web designers. And not everyone has the tools to hand that I had, like Photoshop and Easycrop, or the knowledge of how to use them to produce a particular result. And not everyone will start the task with the workable plan in their head, that I had, from the moment they start using the tools.

I should also point out that when I say “create a site” I’m referring to building a fully functional but unpopulated site. Copy and images would still have to be added. But this is no harder than using a word processor. And if the content has already been planned and written, it doesn’t entail much more than copying, pasting, and uploading the relevant images from your computer to the site. The most time-consuming task, in my experience, is finding the right images to use.

If you’re completely unfamiliar with Wordpress, Photoshop and image libraries it might take you a week to achieve the result I was able to produce in half a day. But that’s still way better than the months, vast cost and endless frustration entailed in using some of the traditional web designers out there who still (unwittingly?) use obsolete methods to achieve inferior results at vastly inflated costs. And once the first site is up and running, it won’t take you long to set up a second one based on what you learn from the first one.

People who already know Wordpress, Woo Themes’ Canvas, and many of the other good premium Wordpress themes won’t be particularly surprised by any of this. But lots of other people will, I’m sure, be shaken to the core. Based on the responses to my tweet earlier, and the considerable interest it generated, this really does change everything!

If you’ve had experience with Wordpress and can recommend certain themes or plugins, please share your experiences by leaving your comments below.

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Writing a book is a fabulous way of establishing your expertise. If all your competitors give out a business card when they visit or communicate with their marketplace, and you give out the book you’ve written, which of the two competitors do is your prospect more likely to choose?

Are they more likely to choose the one that doesn’t look as if they’re an expert or the one who does? Writing a book gives you an edge and a distinction. It positions you head and shoulders above your competitors. And it’s fun to do. But where do you start? One of the options is to publish your own book.

Here in this guest post our good friend Dee Blick describes how she wrote and self-published her first book. Dee is an award winning marketer; Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing; and speaker and weekly columnist for the Financial Mail. She is also author of the best selling self-published book: Powerful Marketing On A Shoestring Budget For Small Businesses:

I remember as a little girl being asked what I wanted to do when I grew up. My response? I wanted to write a book. I loved writing, still do and the thought of a person reading my work and being inspired to take action and improve their business is what drives me to this day.

And so, 40 years later and here I am with my first published book and number two waiting in the wings. If your dream is to write a book and you’ve never quite made it I hope that my story inspires you to turn that dream into a reality.

How did I start?

I made the decision to self publish my first book and I’m doing the same with my second book. Don’t think of self publishing as a poor cousin. It’s come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years and with digital print on demand it’s environmentally friendly and cost-effective. An increasing number of literary agents are now advising authors to self publish, simply because to land a publishing deal, you either have to be very lucky with a strong link to a publisher or, you have to fall into that dubious category of celebrity, cashing in on either your fleeting or long-standing fame. Why tout your manuscript around publishers suffering the ignominy of rejection when you can self publish? What’s more with Amazon now levelling out the playing field between self published and traditionally published authors, it’s open to all of us. (By way of illustration, I recently came back from holiday to find that Amazon had e-mailed thousands of people recommending five business books, with mine being at number one and incidentally the only self published book out of the five)

I appointed a specialist self publishing publisher. I wanted to focus on writing my book, not on having to organise the entire publishing process. In the event, it cost £1,000 which I recouped at my book launch. Because my book is about marketing the costs were classed as a business expense. The great thing about self publishing is that your royalties tend to be higher than if you go down the traditional publishing route. Because I sell many books direct at signings and events as well as through Amazon, I have managed to make a healthy profit on my book and it has paid for itself many times over.

So, having made the momentous decision to self publish the biggest challenge lay as you would expect, in the actual writing. I have been very fortunate in that I have won many national media awards for my marketing articles in the last 26 years. I naïvely assumed that writing a book would be as straightforward as writing an article for a magazine and so initially did not allow sufficient time. I had to pull out all the stops to get my book to the publishers on time. However much time you think you will need to write your book, double it.

I found that having an editor; a person with the balls to actually pull me up on grammar and punctuation and to question my integrity on content was vital. My book went from being very good to great simply because my editor was not afraid to challenge me. With the best will in the world, you will have days when the writing simply flows and it’s a joy. On other days, it’s like pulling teeth!

I also learned that with the right positive mindset I could move mountains. I discovered strength within me that I didn’t know existed. I wrote my book whilst also running a very demanding full-time marketing business and having to handle chronic repetitive strain injury in my arms and shoulders. Don’t talk yourself into not writing your book simply because you don’t think you have the time. If you’re driven and tenacious you will find it. I used to visualise myself signing hundreds of books at my book launch and reaching the bestselling ranks on Amazon. These thoughts motivated me on days when the idea of mooching round the shops was more attractive than tackling a challenging chapter. At a practical level I motivated myself by organising my book launch and giving my publishers a fixed date for my final manuscript. Set goals and visualise your success.

It has been a rollercoaster of a ride. I’ve spent more hours than I care to mention self promoting my book but it has been worth it. Four months of initial hard slog, sending my book for critic reviews and finding any PR opportunity to hang my message on. I have been interviewed by the Financial Times, Royal Mail, The Mail on Sunday and countless business magazines and had some amazing critic reviews. I now write a weekly marketing column for the Financial Mail and no end of positive opportunities are now being laid at my door simply because I’ve written a book that has become a modest bestseller. But nothing, absolutely nothing compares with the feeling I get when receiving an e-mail from a reader who has bought my book and they’re writing to tell me how I have benefited their business. That really is, to quote the advert, priceless.

So where are you now with your book?

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Viral growth in social media outpaces large numbers of faux followers said Seth Godin in one of his best ever blog posts today. The following piece was published by Jamie Turner, Editor-in-Chief of 60secondmarketer.com, and is reproduced here with his kind permission:

Seth Godin wrote a terrific blog post today. He discussed the propensity for many brands to focus on getting more followers instead of focusing on providing “viral-worthy” promotions or “forward-to-a-friend-worthy” blog posts.

This chart from Seth Godin points out that brands who focus on quantity of followers are missing the point. It’s about the quality of the idea and the engagement of your followers.

This is something the 60 Second Marketer team has been talking about for a long time. Our point is that your brand’s social media success revolves around the quality of your audience, not the quantity of your audience.

We’ve all seen the Tweeple who have 10,000+ followers. In the early stages of the social media game, our collective response was probably, “Wow! This person has 10,000+ followers. They must be really good or really smart or both.”

But after a while, we’ve collectively realized that unless you’re Seth Godin, Chris Brogan or some other well-known person (or brand), if you have more than 10,000 followers, you’re probably spending too much time getting new followers and not enough time providing great content.

Most of us know that there are a number of ways to artificially grow your Twitter and/or Facebook followers. But these techniques are the 21st century version of SPAM. They’re useless, counter-productive and a complete waste of time.

Seth Godin has been preaching about this ever since Permission Marketing came out many, many years ago. The secret is to get real followers who are genuinely interested in what you have to say.

When you have a moment, read Seth’s blog on this topic.

Or, if you’re a member of the Short Attention Span Club, you can read these highlights:

• Many brands believe that the quantity of followers is more important than the quality of followers
• In one social media experiment that Seth conducted, 200,000 followers led to a very dismal 25 click-throughs
• The number of click-throughs is directly proportional to the quality of your promotional ideas
• If you start with 10,000 “fans” and have an idea that nets .8 new people per generation, eventually, your idea dies out (yellow line)
• If you start with 100 people (99% less!) and the idea is twice as good (1.5 net pass along), it doesn’t take long before you overtake the other plan (green line)
• If you start with 100 people and the idea is just slightly better (1.7 net pass along), it can really take off (purple line)

Seth’s bottom line on all this is slightly different than mine, but they’re both relevant:

1. Seth’s Bottom Line: The better the idea, the more viral. The more viral, the greater the success.
2. Jamie’s Bottom Line: The better the follower, the more engaged they are with your brand. The more engaged they are, the more likely they are to pass along your content.

They both highlight an important lesson about social media — that wracking up a bunch of “faux” followers only results in this decade’s version of SPAM. It’s useless. A better alternative is to build genuine followers more deliberately. In the end, you’ll have an engaged audience who will be more than happy to pass your social media promotion along to others.

Make sense? What are your thoughts? What’s your point-of-view on all this?

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How do you combine personal and professional online without pissing people off?

This guest post has been contributed by Monica O’Brien, author of the book Social Pollination: Escape the Hype of Social Media and Join the Companies Winning At It. Social Pollination provides a strategic blueprint that helps businesses leverage social media for crazy growth! For a limited time, purchase Social Pollination and get a free membership to Monica’s private coaching forum.

This is what Monica has to say:

Back in high school, one of my teachers told the class that he never had a glass of wine when he went out to dinner with his wife. It wasn’t because he didn’t drink, he said, but rather because if he were pulled over on the way home, a DUI would tarnish his reputation in the community and ruin his chances of becoming principal someday. I remember thinking, the guy never stops being a disciplinarian – an example for others. He never lets loose.

And I knew that day that I never wanted a profession where I couldn’t have a regular life after work.

10 years later, the entire world is doing exactly what my former teacher (now high school principal) did to manage his career. Nowadays, everyone has a personal brand – a way to demonstrate value to others quickly and succinctly. And everyone’s personal brand seems to combine professional pursuits with interests and hobbies, blending the traditional worker and his relationships into a 24/7 experience put on display for all to see.

And yet, there seems to be an ongoing war between the people who use social media for personal relationships and the people who use social media for business. The personal side looks at the others and says, “Man, stop selling your stuff to us, we just want to chat with each other and be cool,” and the business side replies, “Dudes, why are you investing so much effort – working so hard at this social media thing – if you can’t eventually feed yourself from it?”

I use my accounts for both personal and professional – but I know from the feedback I get that I have a “personal branding issue.” My clients complain that I tweet too much about things they don’t care about with people they don’t know. My friends who knew me before I was consulting complain that I’m not fun, that all I ever do is talk about what I’m reading and learning, and that I never share my personal stories on my blog anymore – the reason they initially subscribed.

Personal branding is a conundrum for most people – we don’t want to be boring or sales-ish or an expert and we don’t want to be wild or gossipy or strange, and the two words are unmashable, like trying to force two magnets with opposite charges to touch. There is no win, no way to talk to people in our personal and professional lives the same way.

But it has to be done, because there is also no way to separate our personal lives from our professional ones. So here are my thoughts on how to handle the issue:

Accept that social media is a marketplace.

Everyone has something to sell, even the cool kids. Maybe it’s a website – maybe they are trying to get a promotion at work. Maybe they are just trying to cure self-esteem issues with @replies and comments, or maybe they have a product that they want you to purchase. The sooner we all accept this, the better.

Use Twitter and Facebook and your blog to both sell stuff and to talk to friends.

People think they don’t want to be friends with anyone who is a salesperson. But nobody want to buy something from a robot, so part of personal branding is learning how to sell to your friends without damaging the friendship. I write about online marketing mostly, but not always – I sometimes write about eating chocolate before a work out, or Obama winning the Nobel Peace prize. I want to be friends with you, but I also want to tell you what I’m up to professionally.

Refrain from ranting on social media, even if you would in real life to your friends.

I don’t think the world is a better place when people say what they want, rather than what’s nice. I refrain from ranting not because I’m afraid of confrontation, but because some of my clients can find it – and I want them to trust me, not think I’m an insane person with a bad attitude who can’t control her emotions.

Realize it’s expensive to be flippant.

Like this writer I know, who writes about sex a lot. But she represents a company, and sometimes when she writes about sex one of the potential partner companies calls to pull out of a deal. Negative ROI, baby.

To end, I leave you with a great quote I found today:

“You might think that going for years without ‘pitching’ anything would endear you to your audience. But in fact, it tends to just make them cranky when you finally get around to asking for the sale.” ~ Sonia Simone

How do you combine personal and professional online?

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If you think that marketing is just about spreading your message, you need to think again, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom.  Marketing should actually be at the epicentre of your business, whether you realise it or not.

For nearly 10 years, once or sometimes twice a month I ran 3-day, 30-hour workshops opening people’s eyes to an array of low-risk/high-return marketing strategies. I discovered that the definition of marketing varied enormously between people. So the workshop always started with some definitions of marketing, which I am pleased to share with you now.

To a lot of people, marketing is about running an ad tomorrow so you can have sales the next day. If it were that simple you’d be a multi-millionaire and there would be nothing more to learn. But there’s so much more to it than that.

A good general definition of marketing, quite simply, is “The process of educating people to the advantages and benefits you offer them and compelling them to choose your products or services over those of your competitors.”

Jefferey Gittomer, a renowned sales guru, defines marketing as “getting your telephone to ring with qualified buyers.”

Kenrick Cleveland, one of the world’s top authorities on influence and persuasion, defines marketing as “Selling to people you’re not in front of.” I very much agree with this definition.

In 1973 Peter Drucker suggested that the aim of marketing was “To make selling superfluous… to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

Julian Richer, one of Britain’s most inspiring businessmen, defines marketing from a retail perspective, as you’d expect. He says it is “Every aspect of telling people about your business: advertising, the way you present your premises, the design of your stationery, and the way you look after your customers — because they tell other people, and customer service is the most effective form of marketing there is.”

John McKitterick of General Electric said that: “The principal task of marketing … is not so much to be skillful in making the customer do what suits the interest of the business, as to be skillful in conceiving and then making the business do what suits the interests of the customer.” And that is so, so true.

All six of those definitions are good.

That could all be said another way: “If you could see the world through John Smith’s eyes you can sell to John Smith what John Smith buys.”

In other words if you want prospects or clients to beat a path to your door you should look at everything from their perspective.

Going deeper …

Moving on from those excellent definitions, which consider marketing mainly from a ‘spreading your message’ perspective, a deeper definition of marketing is “The profitable identification, attraction, getting and keeping of good customers.”

If you think about it, this involves almost every function in your business. Identifying and attracting customers (including members, patients, students or parishioners) is traditionally considered to be the role of marketing. Getting customers is usually considered to be the role of sales. Both of these are pre-sale functions. And then there is keeping customers, which is normally considered to be a post-sale function.

Identifying customers includes such things as: deciding who you are and what you do; What EXACTLY your product or service is designed to achieve for your customer; what specific problems or needs you can solve or satisfy; choosing your best market segments, i.e. clearly defining the exact customers who can most benefit from what you do better than anyone else; identifying your high probability customers … and more. This requires rigorous market research and analysis.

Attracting customers includes all manner of things from how you differentiate your product, service or business; to the way you use advertising and social media; what’s on your website and how it is presented; how you package your products and services; whether your premises inspire confidence; where you concentrate your marketing efforts … and what you say in your marketing messages.

Getting customers includes such things as your distribution; your pricing; your product quality; the helpfulness of your staff; the way you set expectations; and your ability to convert your prospects into first time customers, i.e. selling.

Keeping customers includes such post-sale activities as delivery; fulfilment; the way you meet or exceed your customers’ expectations; billing; money collection; customer service; building relationships with your customers; maintaining constant communication; paying attention to the critical non-essentials; and delivering extraordinary value.

Getting and keeping customers are the only sustaining force in any business. Every single job in your business directly or indirectly relates to getting and keeping customers. That includes your receptionists, people who chase payment, delivery drivers, shop floor workers and admin staff right the way through to the managers and directors of your company and any associates or third parties working on your behalf to whom you might outsource certain functions. Every single role in your business falls within the deeper marketing definition.

Marketing therefore goes far beyond targeting, advertising, pricing, and promoting your product and service. It is also responsible for creating the products and services that satisfy the needs of your marketplace; quality control; accounts recievable; looking after your customers; and converting first time buyers into loyal clients. Whether you previously realised it or not, marketing is therefore at the epicentre of your business.

It follows that everyone in your business must have a customer-first attitude. They should be hired because they have that attitude. You should part company with them if they don’t. Every one of them should develop their customer awareness by meeting and/or interacting with customers as part of what they do. If the leaders in your business aren’t spending 40-60 percent of their time reading about, thinking about, or interacting with your customers they’re doing the equivalent of sailing a ship at night without a compass, chart or lights.

Every single person in your business should be aware how their role relates to getting and keeping customers. Every one of them must do something every day to get and keep customers. They must be directed and trained to appreciate why their jobs are important to getting and keeping customers, and know how to do those things well.

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Are you trying to figure out how to deal with influx of data arriving at your doorstep via social media tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and others?

So is Christopher Carfi, CEO & Co-Founder of Cerado,who submitted this blog post for members of Jamie Turner’s 60 Second Marketer community. It is now republished here, with Jamie’s kind permission.

Maybe it’s time to head for the hills, get off the grid, and smash the iPhone to bits.  Maybe it’s time to declare “email bankruptcy” and just delete those 1,000 unread messages, issue a public mea culpa and start over.  With an ever-increasing chorus of “overload,” it seems this social media stuff is irretrievably broken, right?

Here’s one quote from an article by Pam Pastor that sums up many people’s feelings:

“When I checked my Gmail inbox, I was shocked. I had about five pages’ worth of Facebook notifications. Swimming in so many e-mails from the social networking site, I missed a few important messages. My lame response to agitated e-mail writers? ‘Umm, I’m sorry, it was buried in Facebook crap.’” – Pam Pastor, “Dazed and Confused (on Facebook)”

Although social media may be the new, hot thing, this kind of overload isn’t a new problem.  “Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time” wrote Alvin Toffler in his groundbreaking book Future Shock nearly 40 years(!) ago, and it’s still true.  In addition to email, voicemail and meetings, we’re now awash in social networking data.  We’re freaking out about how to deal with it at an individual level.  And now we want to bring this stuff into our businesses.  Are we nuts?

No, we’re not nuts. We simply don’t yet have the facilities to deal with this new flood.

How to deal with social media today

Right now, I think we’re at the primitive stone tools stage of dealing with social network data.  We’ve been given access to four kinds of things that were either obscured or simply not available in the past.  These things are:

• Profiles – Summaries of online identities
• Connections – Links between ourselves and others, or links between others in our “network”
• Content – The words, photos and video we are all publishing online
• Activities – The things we’re doing in these networks, brought to the surface for all to see

In the historical, “media-driven” world, the only one of those four we needed to deal with was the “content” pillar.  We developed strategies to deal with content-overload by reading “trusted” sources and, even in those sources, only reading the items that were relevant to us.  (For example, if you pick up a Sunday edition of the New York Times, do you read every word in it?  Or do you just read the sections and articles that you deem “relevant?”)

In dealing with the newly-surfaced items of profiles, connections and activities, we need to take a similar type of filtering approach.  One doesn’t need to react to everything.

How we’ll deal tomorrow

While we struggle to come up with new types of filters, personal-productivity processes like GTD (“Getting Things Done”) and other tricks and techniques to manage the social media deluge, we often overlook some very powerful tools that are already at our disposal, tools that are with us every day.

Our eyes and our brains.

A recent article in Current Biology magazine presents research that suggests the human retina can transmit visual input at about 10 million bits per second, about the speed of a wired Ethernet connection. But we don’t feel we have “visual overload” every time we open our eyes.  (Similarly, on the auditory side, we filter the cocktail party conversations, only picking out the voices that are most relevant in our current conversation while still keeping tabs on the conversations happening on the periphery.)  Our brains know how to do this instinctively.

A few individuals like Dave Gray and Dan Roam are starting to move business in this direction, and have shown that tapping more effectively into our visual centers simply makes good sense.  And makes good business.

Tying it together

So what does this mean?  Right now, visual thought leaders like Gray and Roam have shown how to use visuals to improve explanation of business concepts.  The next steps will be to apply these techniques to better interpretation of the profiles, connections, content and activities in our networks to understand how customers, vendors and their shared communities interact.  Watch for it.

Literally.

– Christopher Carfi, CEO & Co-Founder of Cerado

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There are a number of things to keep in mind when you start a blog. This excellent post by Jamie Turner was featured  on his excellent blog 60secondmarketer.com and is now republished here, with Jamie’s kind permission …

Are you thinking about starting a blog? If so, there are several things you should keep in mind. Here are the top 10 tips you should keep in mind before you launch a blog.

1. Be Specific About Your Goals: Oh, sure, everyone knows that you should have an objective for your blog before you launch it. But most people aren’t specific in their goal-setting. Do you want it to attract customers? Do you want it to add personality to your brand? Or do you simply want a channel to communicate your take on the latest headlines? Be specific.
2. Think Backwards: Jerry Brown was a great advertising man who decided the best way to sell a product was to get inside the mind of the customer. He called it Thinking Backwards. When you’re Thinking Backwards about your blog, ask yourself “What’s in it for my reader?” Nobody comes back to a blog unless they get tools, tips or techniques that improve their lives in one way or another.
3. Write Headlines that People Will Google: If you want traffic to your site, then write headlines that are Google-able. People don’t Google “Engines,” they Google “How to fix a 1954 V-8 Chrysler engine” or “V-8 Chrysler engine.” Write your headlines the way people Google. That’ll ensure better traffic and readership.
4. Vary the Length of Your Blogs: A lot of people wonder how long a blog post should be. The correct answer is as long as you want it to be. That said, your readers will appreciate it (and come back for more) if your posts vary in length. Remember, variety is the spice of life.
5. Use Guest Bloggers: Eventually, all bloggers need a break now and then. You can keep your ideas and your writing fresh by taking time off and stepping away from your blog. Make a policy of having regular guest bloggers. That way, you can maintain the quality of your work without sacrificing quantity.
6. Blog 3 to 5 Times a Week: Some people won’t agree with this, but we’ve found that unless you blog 3 to 5 times a week, Google, Yahoo and MSN won’t rank your blog as high.
7. Know Your Blogging Platforms: The most common blogging platforms are Wordpress, Drupal, Typepad and Google’s Blogger. They’re all good. We use Wordpress and love it. Drupal has a more graphical interface. Typepad has been around a long time. And Blogger is good if you’re a beginner.
8. Enhance Your Blog with Plugins: Plugins are mini-software programs that make your blog more user-friendly. No matter what platform you use, be sure to check out the Plugins. Your visitors will have a better experience that way.
9. Stay on Topic: It’s easy to get distracted on your blog or to write about off-topic subjects. But your readers aren’t interested in off-topic subjects. They’re interested in whatever it is you specialize in. So stay on-topic as much as possible.
10. Ask Questions: To encourage reader-engagement, you should ask questions at the end of your posts. Don’t ask just for the sake of asking. Ask because your readers probably have a lot of good ideas and comments you haven’t thought of.

Does that make sense? Is there anything we’ve left off? If you were giving advice to a new blogger, what would you tell them?

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The combination of blogs and social media have transformed publishing and communication beyond recognition in the past 2-3 years. This excellent post by Rajesh Setty, an entrepreneur, author and speaker based in Silicon Valley, was originally featured by Jamie Turner on his excellent blog 60secondmarketer.com. It was republished there with Mr Setty’s permission.

The post is called “9 Ways People Respond to Your Online Content” and is now republished here, with Jamie’s kind permission …

Blogs and Twitter have almost eliminated any barrier to publishing. You have an idea and in a few minutes your thoughts can be online. Think about it – with every person thinking about more than 50,000 thoughts a day, producing online content can be simple.

Maybe. But simply churning out meaningless content does not guarantee that others will read what you write. Make this mistake and people will read what you write and write you off.

What’s the alternative?

Use your creativity to generate content that will inspire and transform the lives of the audience in a positive way. Remember that it costs time (and indirectly – money) for your audience to read what you write. And, they expect a good return for that investment.

You will know whether you are succeeding in influencing your audience in a positive way because the audience will tell you. No, maybe not directly but by the way they respond to your content.

So, here are the nine ways your audience will respond to your online content:

1. Spam: If your content does not provide a reasonable ROII (return-on-investment for an interaction) for the reader or is self-serving or simply useless, the reader will mark it as spam. Posting something that may be assessed, as “spam” is the fastest way to losing credibility.
2. Skip: The reader makes an assessment that he or she won’t lose much by reading it. In this case, the reader has not written you off yet but if you consistently create content that is worth “skipping,” the reader might write you off.
3. Scan: The reader thinks there are only a few parts that are of relevance and wants to get right to the core of the content and skip the rest.
4. Stop: The reader is touched by the article and stops to think about the article, it’s relevance and what it means to him or her personally and professionally.
5. Save: The content is so good that the reader might want to re-visit this multiple times.
6. Shift: The article is transformational. The reader is so deeply affected (in a positive way) by the article that it shifts some of their values and beliefs. In other words, this piece of writing will transform the reader and make him or her grow.
7. Send: The content is not only useful to the reader but also to one or more people in the reader’s network. The reader simply emails the article or a link to it to people that he or she cares.
8. Spread: The reader finds the article fascinating enough to spread it to anyone and everyone via a blog, twitter or the social networks that he or she belongs.
9. Subscribe: This is the ultimate expression of engagement and a vote of confidence that you will continue to provide great content. When the reader wants to continue listening to your thoughts, he or she will subscribe.

Finally, here are a few things to consider before you post your next online content:

1. Understand Your Audience

Unless you are writing something for your private consumption, your audience should be the center of the focus and not you. The more you know about your audience, the better you can connect with them. Think about:

• Who is your audience?
• Why are they reading what you are writing?
• What are their concerns in general and what are their concerns NOW?

2. Check Your Objective

Some questions to think about:

• What is the purpose of your article?
• What assessment do you want the reader to create by reading your article?

3. Unleash Your Creativity

You know the audience and you know the purpose of the article. Now the next step is to unleash your creativity and create something that will generate the kind of response that you are looking for.

Some questions to think about:

• What would be unique (content, point-of-view etc.) in this article that will make the audience do what I want them to do?
• How can you make this article “extremely relevant” to the current times?
• What can you include that will increase the “longevity” of the article?

4. Learn from Feedback

You already know the nine ways that people respond to your online content. When people act the way they do, they are providing you valuable feedback. Keeping your emotions aside, learn from the feedback and incorporate this learning into your next article.

Background: An earlier version of this article was titled Skip, Scan, Stop, Save and/or Spread. Thanks to several people especially Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki and Kathy Hendershot-Hurd who helped me enhance the initial concept through their comments.

About the Author: Rajesh Setty is an entrepreneur, author and speaker based in Silicon Valley. Rajesh maintains a blog at Life Beyond Code. You can also find him on Twitter at @UpbeatNow.

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The ability to influence and persuade others is a critical skill if you’re in business. Dr Robert Cialdini, who wrote this article with Steve Martin for the December 2006 edition of the always excellent Training Journal, has spent over 35 years researching the science behind how people are persuaded; written books about them; and is regarded as one of the world’s top authorities on the subject.

This article explains how the influence process works. It is reproduced here with the publisher of Training Journal’s kind permission.

N.B. Although this article was written specifically to help training professionals, its content can be adapted for any business, and it should be read in that way.

Robert Cialdini Ph.D & Steve Martin explain how L&D professionals can persuade key decision-makers of the importance of training

One of the primary roles of learning and development professionals is to research, develop, deliver and evaluate various forms of skills and knowledge training programmes in the organisations for which they work. While these roles can often be challenging, what can often be even more challenging is persuading stakeholders and decision-makers of the value of training and development. This is equally true of internal training professionals as it is of external providers.

If the ability to influence and persuade others is such a critical business skill for training and development professionals, what do we know about how the influence process works? All of us will almost certainly know people who have that apparently inborn ability to influence others. Those lucky few, who appear able to very skilfully and elegantly engage others, sway the opinions of those that are undecided and persuade their colleagues and co-workers to see their point of view. What can be frustrating about these born persuaders, though, is that they are often unable to explain how they have come to possess such an important and essential business skill. They may consider their ability to influence and persuade others to be a skill they have been born with, while we stand back in admiration and witness them practising their art, often frustrated at the fact that they can get others to say yes to their requests when we can’t, even when sometimes we are asking for the same thing!

The problem with viewing influence as a skill with which we are born is that it makes it difficult for those who have it to explain and pass down their skills to others. Artists generally are better at doing than explaining. But if we consider influence as a science, something else happens: something much more empowering and efficient.

For more than 35 years now, my social scientist colleagues and I have been researching the science behind how people are persuaded. In fact, there is now some five decades-worth of recorded scientific study into social influence and persuasion, and the results are clear: there is a science behind how we are persuaded. There are universal laws that guide how we are influenced, and these scientific laws can be learned in much the same way we can learn other scientific principles. No longer do we have to trust to hope that the approach we take will be effective. No more do we have to adopt a trial and error approach when we want to convince another. By understanding the scientific principles of influence which appeal to just a handful of deep-rooted human needs, we can be assured that our requests, our proposals, our presentations and training can be significantly more persuasive and influential.

Modern Life and Information Overload

In order to better understand how learning and development professionals can become more effective influencers, it is important to firstly consider a phenomenon that pervades every corner of our society – we call it information overload. We live in a world today where we are quite literally inundated with information, facts and data. Often this information is presented to us as an attempt to change our behaviour, to influence and persuade us in some way. Whether it is advertisements for new motor cars, emails, brochures from a conference organiser informing us of an HR seminar we should attend or colleagues seeking our support on projects, every one of us is increasingly overwhelmed with information and requests for our attention.

When faced with this plethora of information how do we decide what to do with it?

Wouldn’t it be marvellous if we were like computers, able to absorb all the relevant information we receive, rationally process it and arrive at informed decisions about the best course of action? However, people are anything but computers. They are people who, every day of their lives, are inundated with an ever-increasing amount of information and data.

It is currently estimated that the average UK citizen is exposed to up to 1,700 advertising messages every day, and that number is increasing.

One might expect that, faced with access to this sea of information, we make more rational and better-informed decisions. But the surprising fact is that we often do not. Ironically, there is simply too much information for us to deal with and, therefore, in order to deal with this information overload, we use decision shortcuts or rules of thumb to help us to make choices.

This phenomenon affects us in learning and development. It is simply not enough just to have the best training workshop or proposal anymore. It is the proposals that are presented in the most persuasive way that will often win the day. In the same way that consumers will often use decision shortcuts to make decisions, those of us looking to have influence within our organisations can utilise these same shortcuts to make our communications more persuasive and influential. Understanding these shortcuts and using them in an effective and ethical way can provide tools to create more compelling messages and more effective attempts at persuasion, and can build mutually-rewarding and long-lasting relationships with colleagues and customers. There is another advantage, too: understanding these shortcuts will make us more individually persuasive, with potential benefits in both our professional and personal lives.

In this article, we seek to present these decision shortcuts – the six universal principles of influence – by explaining each of them and then, in turn, providing some insights into how L&D professionals can use them in a responsible and ethical way to become more influential while building mutually-rewarding, long-term relationships with those with whom they interact.

There is now some five decades-worth of recorded scientific study into social influence and persuasion, and the results are clear: there is a science behind how we are persuaded

Principle 1 – Reciprocity: The good old give and take

Application for L&D professionals
Give to other first what you want to receive back

The principle of reciprocity says: ‘We are obliged to give back to others the forms of behaviour that we have received from them.’ It is a principle that pervades all societies and cultures. We intuitively know how this works in our personal lives: if a friend invites us to their house for dinner or remembers our birthday with a card, we are obliged to return the favour. We know only too well that we should say yes to those we owe but what we may not know, and what social scientific research has found, is that reciprocation also works effectively outside of our everyday contacts and networks. This means that we can use this principle of persuasion to develop networks and access to decision makers and sponsors who we need to influence.

Scientific research goes on to tell us that the gifts we give are more likely to be effective when they are viewed as meaningful, tailored to an individual and unexpected. Ultimately, though, gift-giving is one of the cruder applications of this principle of persuasion. A more sophisticated approach which would confer genuine advantages to L&D professionals, who are attempting to improve relationships and co-operative working in the office, would be to display the behaviours they desire in others first. The same holds true for sharing information and resources: if you lend a hand to a colleague or manager of another team when they need help, you will significantly increase your chances of getting support from them when you need it. Research shows that your odds of future support improve even further if, after your colleague or client has thanked you for your help, you say something like: ‘I’m glad to help you as I know you’re the sort of person who would help me if I ever need support.’

Principle 2 – Scarcity: We want more of what we can have less of

Application for L&D professionals
Highlight unique features of your proposals and point out what others stand to lose

Judging by the results of many years of research, few would disagree with the principle of scarcity, which suggests that people typically associate greater value with things that are rare, dwindling in availability, or difficult to acquire. Notwithstanding the scientific research, there are many everyday examples that also support this claim. In recent years, many parents have gone to great lengths to purchase the most popular Christmas toy that happens to be out of stock in all the stores. In the UK, the petrol shortage in the summer of 2000 resulted in some extraordinary behaviour as people scrambled to acquire limited fuel and, in October 2003, the notion of losing something caused many thousands of people to stop their cars and block a major motorway just to see the final take-off of the Concorde, a sight, we would point out, that had been a familiar one every single day for the last 30 years or so. What makes the Concorde such an apt example of the power of this principle is the fact that, immediately after British Airways announced in February 2003 that it would be stopping Concorde flights, the sale of seats when through the roof. Ironic, then, that the reason that BA cited for stopping the flights was that it was no longer economically viable with reports that, on certain flights, there were more cabin crew than paying customers.

So powerful is the concept of loss that researchers from the University of California found that householders were 350 per cent more likely to carry out energy efficient measures in their home when they were told how much money they would continue to lose if they didn’t, rather than how much money they would gain if they did.

The same phenomenon can be used by training professionals to make their proposals and presentations more persuasive. According to a study in the Journal of Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, potential losses figure far more heavily in managers’ decision-making than gains. L&D professionals who respectfully and honestly point out what managers or clients stand to lose if they fail to consider their proposals, or the unique attributes that they could miss out on, will find themselves benefiting from a very powerful way of presenting information.

It is currently estimated that the average UK citizen is exposed to up to 1,700 advertising messages every day, and that number is increasing

Principle 3 – Authority: People defer to experts

Application for L&D professionals
Present your expertise; don’t assume that it is self-evident

Few of us fail to recognise the power of expert endorsement. After all, it is a neat and efficient way to decide on the right course of action. Why, in our overloaded lives, should we go to the trouble of finding out all the information ourselves when there are experts who have already done it for us and on whose wisdom and knowledge we can rely? When we are ill, we seek the advice of our doctor; when deciding what toothpaste to purchase, we may pick a brand that has been recommended by the British Dental Association. Training professionals can increase their authority by seeking accreditation to a recognised professional body or institute. Since it makes good sense to defer to authorities, it also makes sense for L&D professionals to establish their expertise when communicating with groups, whether these groups are decision makers or participants in workshops.

So what makes someone an authority? Research shows that the most persuasive authority is a credible one, and credible authorities possess both expertise and trust-worthiness. One way that L&D professionals can be seen as having expertise is to have that expertise introduced by someone else, especially someone who is also seen as an authority in their own right.

But how often do we fail to get around to arranging this or, worse still, introduce ourselves and our expertise? We would be well advised to avoid this trap and to seek the power of an introduction. Even when we are unable to secure a personal introduction, sending a letter or email in advance of a meeting or workshop, which includes information about your expertise, training, qualifications and experience, is a very powerful and persuasive thing to do and infinitely more effective that doing it yourself at the start of a session, when you are more likely to come across as big-headed or full of yourself.

Surprisingly, L&D professionals will often assume that others recognise and appreciate their experience when, in fact, the opposite is the case. One suggestion would be to develop a two-line biography of yourself, setting out your key achievements, experience and qualifications, to give to someone prior to being introduced to a group. We think you will be pleasantly surprised when you see the reaction of your audience.

Principle 4 – Consistency: We align ourselves to previously puhlic-declared commitments

Application for L&D professionals
Make commitments actionable, public and voluntary

Have you ever in your professional life come across individuals who appear to support you or give the impression that they are willing to commit to your ideas or proposals, only at a later date to back down or retreat from what you thought was a genuine commitment?

Our principle of consistency suggests that people feel strong pressure to be consistent within their own words and actions. Making a commitment ties a person’s sense of self to a particular course of action. However, just gaining a commitment is often not enough. In order to cement a commitment and persuade the individual to act on it, there are three things that also need to be present. These are that the person owns the commitment, he has an action associated with the commitment and that he is willing to make that commitment jteMi.

Negotiating initial voluntary commitments and making them effortful and action-based as well as public is a powerful way to change and influence behaviours. In one study, people spent significantly less time in the shower following a work-out in the gym when they were first asked if they supported and would sign up to a ‘use water responsibly’ campaign. Training professionals can use similar strategies to encourage people to make commitments to practise new skills the and apply them to their job roles. Asking people to imagine how they will apply a new skill or piece of information and getting them to write such an action down and share it with a colleague can be a very effective change process.

Principle 5 – Social Proof: People follow the lead of many, similar others

Application for L&D professionals
Use peer power and testimonials wherever possible

Suppose that, this year, you decide to take an evening class, perhaps to learn a new language or skill that you have promised yourself. How do you choose the best way to achieve your goal? Do you join a local college or night school, take up an interactive internet course or perhaps investigate that audio language programme that you heard a friend at work talk about? Most likely, you’ll look outside of yourself and to others around you for at least part of the answer. The principle of social proof says that, when we are uncertain and we are attempting to make the right decisions, we will often look to the behaviour of others around us for direction about what choices to make. This is compounded when those around us are similar to us in terms of age, education, social standing and experience.

Social psychologists refer to what people commonly do in a given situation as a descriptive norm. Descriptive norms typically provide people with useful information about which courses of action to take if you hear your colleagues at work raving about a restaurant, chances are you might be influenced to try out the restaurant too. Looking to see what other people are doing is a quick and easy tool for making decisions in uncertain circumstances. Indeed, social proof has the greatest persuasive power when the ‘right’ choice in a given situation is somewhat ambiguous. For example, organisations trying to decide on a new training and development initiative could be persuaded to take the plunge if they are first offered information about the success achieved by other organisations of a similar size and in a similar industry.

Training professionals can become significantly more influential and persuasive, not by using their own powers of persuasion, but by using the testimonials and recommendations of others that are similar to their targets.

Principle 6 – Liking: People like those who like them

Application for L&D professionals
Look for and present genuine similarities and praise

Put simply, the principle of liking says that people prefer to say yes to, and comply with, the requests of those they like.

So what characteristics influence people’s liking for others? Social scientists point towards three specific elements of liking: similarity, praise and co-operation. We’ll take them in turn.

Firstly, people tend to like others who are similar to them. For example, a training specialist wishing to persuade people to adopt a new approach to a work assignment might point out certain areas of similarity that they share with their audience (like them, they used to use a similar approach but, upon investigation, they have found a new, more time-efficient method that they probably wouldn’t want to lose out on).

Secondly, people will tend to like, and therefore be more persuaded by, those who pay them compliments and give them praise. There is strong evidence to suggest that people are extremely receptive to the requests of others immediately after they have received a compliment. In fact, recent research points to the fact that people are more likely to respond positively to a request immediately after the person making the request has paid them a compliment.

Thirdly, we like people who co-operate with us towards mutual goals. Attempts to influence others that involve joint working or partnerships are often more successful than those that do not.

Conclusion: The power of persuasion

Application for L&D professionals
With power comes responsibility — always be honest and ethical

We have sought to provide not only interesting and scientifically- validated evidence of how L&D professionals can increase the chance of people being persuaded by their recommendations and presentations, but also some practical applications for the use of these principles (see figure 1 below).

There are some additional points we would like to make regarding the use of the principles we have described. Firstly, although these principles are conceptually distinct, you are likely to be most effective at fostering influence and persuasion when using several of these principles at once. For example, consider how one might influence a new manager in an organisation. Perhaps one could first point out how a number of other managers, who happen to be of a similar age and in similar circumstances, have benefited from working with you. One may then go on to compliment the manager and offer some new personalised information or data that helps him in his new role. By doing this, the L&D professional creates a powerful communication that, in this example, utilises three of the social influence principles we have presented, namely social proof, liking and reciprocity.

Research shows that the most persuasive authority is a credible one, and credible authorities possess both expertise and trustworthiness

Secondly, it should be clear that, although people use these mental shortcuts when making decisions, it doesn’t mean that people consciously use them. It is not the case, for example, that someone will say to himself: ‘Well, I’ve done this for so long now my sense of commitment dictates that I continue!’ Nonetheless, whether or not the operation of the principles of persuasion is consciously recognised, the existing evidence indicates that they will still be influential.

Thirdly, because information is sometimes highly relevant to their goals, people may consequently be motivated (although not always able) to process deeply the content of these messages. Indeed, the effectiveness of a message will depend upon a combination of the substance of the message and the way that message is delivered. Thus, the principles we have discussed are not an alternative to providing people with substantive information but more a vehicle for ensuring those important messages are communicated in a persuasive way.

And finally, and most importantly, we should realise that the reason people use these shortcuts is because. in most circumstances, they tend to steer them in the right direction. It is not the case that people are being stupid or making mistakes when they use these mental heuristics to guide their choices. They are often merely overwhelmed with information and know subconsciously that these shortcuts have served them well in the past. It is for this reason that we would only encourage the honest and ethical use of these powerful principles of persuasion. In modern business we are all, after all, looking to foster long term and prosperous working relationships.

Professor Robert Cialdini is Regents Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University and has been awarded the 2006 Peitho prize for his contributions to the world of social influence. Steve Martin is the Director of Influence At Work (UK) and a business colleague of Professor Claldini.

Figure 1: Influence — A Quick Guide for learning and development professionals

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Barack Obama is undoubtedly one of the greatest influencers of modern times. His accomplishment in going from a relative unknown to the most talked about person on the planet in less than 18 months provides a lot of valuable lessons to anyone marketing a product, a service … or a person.

The excellent article that follows appeared in the May 2009 edition of Training Journal, and is reproduced here with the publisher’s kind permission:

Larry Reynolds reveals the seven critical skills that make the new US president so influential

If you want to get yourself elected as president of the United States, you’d better have some pretty well-honed influencing skills. In fact, the US presidential election process is probably one of the biggest tests of influencing skills in the modern world. Not only do you have to persuade people to give you loads of money to run a gruelling 18-month campaign to get selected as your party’s candidate, but you then have to start all over again to win the election for the actual presidency. And if you are starting as a relative unknown – as Barack Obama was when he first stood for the Democratic nomination – your influencing skills had better be exceptional. As anyone who’s listened to his major speeches will agree, in Obama’s case they are. But what exactly does he do to be so influential?

In this article I’ll examine seven critical skills that make Obama a great influencer. They are trust, presence, credibility, herd instinct, avoiding loss, building commitment and storytelling.

Trust

Influencing skill number one is trust. We are much more likely to be influenced by someone we trust. How did Obama build a reputation for trust when he had no track record with the people he was trying to influence? First, he conducted his campaign with ruthless integrity.

A common practice in US elections is to give cash to local community activists and preachers to encourage them to get the vote out on polling day. ‘Walking-about money’, as it is often called, is sometimes justified as covering legitimate expenses for, say, transport costs in poorer areas; in reality it can sometimes be little more than a thinly-disguised bribe.

Obama flatly refused to pay walking-about money – not because he couldn’t afford to (he ran the most successful fundraising campaign in US presidential history) but because he knew it was wrong.

Whenever he made a mistake on the campaign, he admitted it and apologised. An ill-judged comment mid-campaign about some Americans “getting bitter and clinging to guns and religion” caused uproar. He immediately apologised – both for the offence caused and also for the fact that this controversy was distracting people from the real campaign issues.

Since politicians are generally not thought to be particularly trustworthy characters, Obama also enhanced trust by deliberately distancing himself from conventional politics. He made a point of saying that his campaign “was not hatched in the halls of Washington. It began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston”. This reference, with its echoes of the closing words of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, not only helped to disassociate him from politicians (untrustworthy) but associated him with Martin Luther King (trustworthy).

Presence

Influencing skill number two is presence. Partly this comes from physical attributes – Obama is tall and the taller candidate has won the US presidential election in a statistically significant 66 per cent of the time. He also often speaks in a slow, deep voice and people with slow, deep voices tend to get listened to in a way that those with fast, high pitched voices don’t.

But presence isn’t just about your physical attributes – it’s about your ability to be absolutely present in the moment. Throughout gruelling campaigns for the Democratic nomination and for the presidency itself, Obama never looked rushed or flustered. Whenever he talked to someone, he always gave them their full attention. Whether he was addressing a crowd of thousands, or chatting to a small group of supporters, he always took the time to make his audience feel that they really mattered.

Credibility

Influencing skill number three is credibility. We generally perceive someone to be credible because of their experience and expertise. Unlike many presidential candidates, Obama had had no real experience in government – less even than Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who at had least served as governor of Alaska.

How did Obama come across as credible despite this lack of experience? He used two main approaches. Firstly – unlike Palin – he was ruthlessly, obsessively and pedantically prepared for any question put to him during the campaign. Unlike his opponent John McCain, who seemed at one point unsure about just how many houses he owned, Obama mastered all the details.

More importantly, and more cleverly, Obama reframed the debate about his experience. What mattered, he said, was not experience but judgement. Throughout the long presidential campaign, Obama always had a trump card to play when it came to judgement: back in 2002 both Hillary Clinton and John McCain supported the war in Iraq; Obama didn’t, and his consistent opposition has greatly enhanced his credibility.

Herd instinct

Influencing skill number four is herd instinct. Like animals in a herd, we are highly influenced by others around us. Most people are influenced more strongly by their friends, family and peers than by a TV advertisement or a politician. Obama understood this brilliantly; although he was obviously highly skilful at influencing people directly, his campaign was even more brilliant at making it very easy for his supporters to persuade their family, friends and peers to become supporters too.

One way in which he did this was to harness new technology. To take just one example, if you were an Obama supporter, you could download a free piece of software to your iPhone that would give you latest campaign information to use when persuading your friends to vote for Obama. It would even suggest which of your friends you should call next, depending on which state was being contested next.

Obama really understood how to make herd instinct work for his campaign, in a way that John McCain and most business leaders don’t.

Avoiding loss

Influencing skill number five is where it starts to get really counter intuitive. Let’s say you want convince a group of colleagues at work to do something. Would it be more effective to say “do this and good things will happen”, or “don’t do this and bad things will happen”? Most people tend to go for the more ‘positive’ approach. They’re wrong. Three times out of four, the second approach – the avoiding loss tactic – will be more effective. That’s because most people are more motivated to hang on to things they might lose, than to gain things they haven’t yet got.

In a classic social psychology experiment conducted at the University of Victoria, in Canada, students were given a coffee mug. After a bit, they were asked if they’d swap it for a big bar of Swiss chocolate. Only 11 per cent agreed to relinquish the mug. In a parallel experiment, students were first given the chocolate and then asked to trade it in for the mug. This time only 10 per cent agreed to the swap.

Once we’ve got something, we’re highly motivated to hang on to it (which maybe explains all those clothes in your wardrobe you never wear but are reluctant to take down to the charity shop).

Since most people are more motivated by the prospect of loss than gain, it makes sense for politicians to use lots of negative campaigning during an election. It’s much more of a vote winner to say “vote for my opponent and things will be terrible” than “vote for me and things will be great”.

This presented a bit of a problem for Obama – getting away from traditional mudslinging politics was one of the things he wanted to do, both as a way of building trust by distancing himself from conventional politicians and also, I believe, because he just didn’t think it was the right thing to do. So here’s what he did. He lavished considerable personal praise on his opponent John McCain, while at the same time reinforcing the message that a vote for McCain was a vote for the policies of George Bush. Call it negative campaigning in a subtle way.

Building commitment

Influencing skill number six is to build commitment. If you succeed in getting someone to make a small commitment, it is much more likely that they will then make the bigger commitment. That’s why, at the end of a business meeting, it’s much more effective to get participants to sum up, in their own words, what they are going to do as a result of the meeting, rather than the meeting leader doing the summary for them. Making that small commitment – telling my peers what I am going to do – makes it much more likely that I will make the bigger commitment of actually doing it.

Obama’s campaign was unusual in many ways, and one of them was his focus on raising money from very small donations – $5 here, $10 there. Most career politicians don’t bother with small donations – why put in all that effort to raise a paltry sum when just one meeting with, say, a Russian oligarch can net you tens of thousands? But career politicians miss the power of building commitment.

When you persuade someone to make the relatively easy gesture of donating $5 to your campaign, you make it hugely more likely that they will actually vote for you on polling day. Making a small commitment causes a mental shift that makes bigger commitments more likely.

Story telling

Influencing skill number seven – and this is where Obama really excelled – is to tell stories. Throughout his campaign, he repeatedly told one big story – the story of the American dream: in America, anyone, from however humble a background, can go on to achieve great things through determination and hard work. He and his family exemplify this story.

Obama began his address to the 2004 Democratic convention – the event that made it possible for him to run for the presidency – by saying:

“Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father – my grandfather – was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

“But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.”

Arguably, Obama was elected in part because he happened to be the right candidate at the right time. But he only communicated that he was the right candidate by telling the right story at the right time.

His genius as a teller of stories is not only in the stories he chooses to tell, but the way in which he tells them.

Consider this extract from later in that same speech:

“You know, a while back I met a young man named Shamus in a V.F.W. Hall in East Moline, Illinois. He was a good-looking kid – six two, six three, clear eyed, with an easy smile. He told me he’d joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week. And as I listened to him explain why he’d enlisted, the absolute faith he had in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service, I thought this young man was all that any of us might ever hope for in a child.

“But then I asked myself, ‘are we serving Shamus as well as he is serving us?’ I thought of the 900 men and women – sons and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors – who won’t be returning to their own hometowns. I thought of the families I’ve met who were struggling to get by without a loved one’s full income, or whose loved ones had returned with a limb missing or nerves shattered, but still lacked long-term health benefits because they were reservists.

“When we send our young men and women into harm’s way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they’re going, to care for their families while they’re gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.”

Let me draw your attention to a few things that make this story so powerful. He makes the link between a specific individual – Shamus – and the broader political point that sending people to war involves certain moral commitments.

He really engages the emotions – “loved ones with a limb missing or nerves shattered”.

He increases his credibility with the details in the story – the number of casualties, and the fact that, because Shamus is a reservist, he is not entitled to the benefits of a regular soldier.

Although there is enough detail to make the story come alive – Shamus is tall, good looking, with an easy smile – some detail is left very vague. This vagueness allows listeners to fill in the details and imagine Shamus is like them, or like their family members.

There’s a lot in these 250 words. If you want to see and hear Obama delivering them, you can do so on the excellent American Rhetoric website at www.americanrhetoric.com.

How much did Barack Obama consciously work at these seven influence skills, and how much did he just do instinctively? I don’t know – maybe he doesn’t either. But what I do know is that you can be more influential by applying them in your organisational context.

Larry Reynolds leads 21st Century Leader, a consultancy specialising in authentic leadership, influence and change. He can be contacted on +44 (0)1535 645519, at larry@21stcenturyleader.co.uk or via www.21stcenturyleader.co.uk.

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