Communication in Business

Communication – What business depends on

Communication is the heart of business.

Your business is your big idea – your vision - made tangible as products and services, processes and people interacting with other people called customers.

: Generic Business Model

Your success depends on how clear and powerful your vision is – and how well you communicate it.

You need to create the right story and the systems and products to back up the promise you make to your customers.

You have to communicate with and motivate two distinct groups of people.

People you want to buy from you – this is called marketing.
People who you need to do the work to make the first group happy – this is called leadership.

But its the same story. Congruency leads to trust and trust leads to smooth running operations.

Getting this right means listening. It’s no accident that you have 2 ears and one mouth. That’s the proportion you need to use.

So this site will tell you about some of the tools that we have found useful in learning to communicate in our own businesses – and which could well transform the way you run yours.

The expanded version of Growing Jobs now published

Last year we did some work for SEEDA looking at what it would take to build a world class workforce for the horticultural industry.

This meant talking to 30 or so growers, finding some good case studies of simple but effective practices and distilling out some basic principles of good practice suitable for smaller businesses. At the end of last year I published the report and case studies as a paperback.

Now I’ve added the evidence base – a review of current thinking on high performance work practices and what aspects of it are useful to small businesses generally based on the research and our own experience of running IT, training and horticultural businesses over a 30 year period. This produces a useful guide to companies in the process of growing that are having to start being a bit more deliberate in the way they manage their staff.

You can read some of the book here.

Social Media for Real Businesses

I’ve used Completely Novel to create some new books. The first one to be properly published complete with ISBN number is Social Media for Real Businesses.

This book developed out of a combination of our own experiences in developing and promoting businesses and the research projects I’ve carried out over the years for people who have a real interest in how small businesses actually make use of this stuff. People like the Government, IT and telecomms companies.

Most of us have to create some scenery for the play of our networking. Digital media give us a real chance to do that.

Much of what passes for advice is about the self reflecting games of the twittering classes. This book aims to bring it down to earth. This book aims to put this into the context of how you can use this is in a day to day practical sense. How it’s been used by real people to sell real products and services to real customers.

If you’d like to take a peek at the book your can review it here

I hope you like it.

What makes us trust web-sites?

I’m currently doing a research project into what makes people trust websites. Here’s a questionnaire that asks you to look at 2 pairs of sites and give your opinions on what you like and what you don’t like. Probably will take around half an hour.

The first 200 people to complete it will get a £10 amazon vouchers.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool.

Growing Jobs report now out in Paperback

One of the projects we carried out last year was a horticultural workforce project that looked at what is needed to build a first class, sustainable workforce to take the industry forward. It was funded by SEEDA (South East Regional Development Agency) and basically involved interviewing growers from all the main sectors of the roduction horticulture industry – fruit, protected cropping, field vegetables and ornamentals and looking for some examples of good practice so as to produce a set of case studies and a “Duffers Guide” to good HR practice.

Most of this of course boils down to better communication, treating people properly and implementing basic HR practice. However there are some really innovative processes and training programmes around and the report – which is available as a PDF download can be accessed via our sister site www.growingjobs.org together with some video case studies.

The report with its supporting case studies is also available to read online or to buy as a paperback thanks to the wonders of social media marketing and a great new site called Completely Novel.

You can now buy the Growing Jobs report and the case studies as a paperback – 57 pages for £5.99

You can use this link to buy it.

The completely novel site also allows you to read it online before you buy it.

If you do got this route, please let me know how you get on

Alan

Social Media for real businesses – 3

Here. at last, is the final part of the mini course.

It follows up the story telling and toolkit parts and looks in detail at how you get to identify and get close to the key 50 people that can make all the difference to the success of your business.

We look at how you can use social networking sites like Ecademy, Linked-in and Facebook to find and get into contact with these people and explore the use of tool like Klout and Peerindex to establish how well you are telling your story and being taken notice of.

Finally we explain what it takes to get to grips with twitter.

This completes the half hour talk which should give you a good grounding in current thinking about use fo social media.

Building your online library

Social Media for Real Businesses

Most of us get business by face to face sales and networking activity. However in today’s connected world it’s important to create a body of work which shows off what you can do and which can be readily find by people who want to go on line to check you out.

I have been working the last couple of months on a project to help yet another group use social media to promote themselves.

So we built a resource for educators and researchers to learn about how to do just that. One tool I’ve used on the project has been Camtasia – it lets you take an existing powerpoint presentation, put a talking head into the corner and produce the whole thing as flash movie that can go onto youtube and be embedded into whatever Html page you like.

Here’s one I prepared earlier which reviews 8 tools for self promotion that covers what I wanted to tell you about this month. We talk about various tools – some of which you will know and some that you probably won’t. The tools are useful for creating the body of work that you want people to see when they check you out after (or before!) meeting you. Here’s the list

1. WordPress
2. Slideshare
3. YouTube
4. Ecademy
5. Amazon – author pages
6. Completely Novel
7. Blidgets – from WidgetBox
8. Paper.Li

The video explains what they create and goes into how to use them and what they will do for you.

Of course outbound broadcasting is only part of the story – you also have to engage with your audience by getting into a conversation. We’ll talk about that in the next post – but for those of you who can’t wait you can find the movie at my you-tube channel. DrAlanRaeBusiness

Using Social Media in the real world

We’ve been experimenting with various ways of getting your message across over the last few months.

One that’s quite powerful is Camtasia. It allows you to put voice overs onto power point slide presentations to produce good quality flash movies that can be embedded into blogs or other web pages. You do this by creating the video, posting it onto YouTube (or Viddler or vimeo) and then simply cut and paste the code into the page.

Here’s an example. It’s the first of three on thow to use social media for real business and it covers getting your story straight.

In following blogs we’ll look at how you can use some new tools to build a powerful collateral library and then how to deploy them using twitter, linked-in and facebook to provide the kind of story that you would want prospective business partners to find when they check you out via Google before or after they meet you. Again we’ll use the Camtasia created movie to tell the story. One thing that’s nice is you can also produce an MP3 sound only version.

So here’s part one – becoming a story teller.

Look out for part two next week.

Why you should take facebook seriously

A fundamental characteristic of the internet (like life generally) is that nothing stays the same for long.

While most folks have been focusing on twitter, Google and linked-in to build their online story, Facebook has been quietly stealing their lunch.

According to Robin Goad’s brilliant blog “Hitwise Intelligence” Here in the UK, it’s now second only to Google in terms of visits and vastly swamps anything else in terms of pages viewed. In September it received 16.4% of all page views in the UK. That’s of ALL of them. It also accounted for 7.27% of all visits in the last period – only being pipped at the post by Google with 8.99%

It now has 55% of the visits for social networks – with YouTube the next player at 16% and it accounts for nearly 10% of ongoing traffic to sites making it the second most important source of traffic after Google. This figure rises to 12% for online retail sites.

So if you haven’t got a facebook strategy or at least a fan page yet – maybe you should be thinking about it.

Bit of a wake up call really. Here’s a nice picture of Facebook sneaking up on Google to finish up with.

Facebook creeping up on Google

Another great business communication tool

Thanks to a tip off from my old chum Tom Evans I recently checked out a new self publishing site called CompletelyNovel.com

As part of my last couple of projects I’ve created a couple of workbooks and it’s always been a long term project of mine to tickle up some of my earlier e-books, get them into paperback and sell them on Amazon / give them away as promotional material. Given that you can get 100-off 56 page books done for a little over £2 each, if you want to produce good quality collateral that’s a pretty good deal.

So I’ve signed up for the free version. So far I’ve produced the growing jobs workbook as a perfect bound paperback – proof copies en route – and have turned my existing 21 business stories into online book. You can read it here. Free to me and free to you. If you want to buy a hardback copy I’ll shortly be creating a link. It looks like this

The great thing is – if I sell them for £5.99 – I will make £3.73 in royalties. And if I upgrade to a paid plan I can get ISBN numbers and sell them on Amazon. – not bad for £8 (or £15) a month. The top version would pay for itself in cheap ISBN numbers if you published 5 books a year.

I would check it out if you are looking to follow the “jack up your credibility by giving away good content” school of marketing.

Leadership is about telling the truth

One of the challenges of running a business is to be clear about what you’re doing to anyone you meet.

Sometimes its hard to come up with a concise answer – because you have to get so much stuff to balance and there are always new opportunities coming along. Be too opportunistic and your brand starts to lose focus. It’s amazing how easily people get confused.

All our research tells us that in a networking situation, people respond to, advocate and transmit information about people who

They Like
Are absolutely clear about what they do

The same is true in the workplace – if your team are in no doubt about the company’s purpose and it is something that they relate to then they will feel energised and the creativity that you need them to have to solve the problems of the daily grind will be released.

I’ve just finished writing a white paper for the Growing Jobs project which is concerned with how to build a sustainable workforce for the horticultural industry.

In it there’s a description of so-called high performance workforce practices. There are 3 bundles of these that are to do with

HR practice
Rewards
Involvement

The involvement strand practices are all about getting people involved in the business by making it clear what we’re about, what they have to do and where the edges of the envelope are within which they have to operate.

They include

Creating cross functional and self managing teams
Formalised continuous improvement
Making business plan and KPI targets and actual performance available to all staff

Most business people are naturally fairly economical with the truth where their staff are concerned. However you only get real performance if people trust you – and you have to earn that with a large amount of paying forward about where you’re going and what needs to be overcome.

Authenticity – in both marketing and leadership is your friend.

Staff association

Internal staff surveys

Self managed work teams

Cross-function teams

Circulating information on organisational performance and strategy

Providing everyone with business plan and targets

Staff suggestion schemes

Quality circles / TQM

Kaizen – formalised continuous improvement

Communication in Business

Communication – What business depends on

Communication is the heart of business.

The expanded version of Growing Jobs now published

Social Media for Real Businesses

What makes us trust web-sites?

Growing Jobs report now out in Paperback

Social Media for real businesses – 3

Using Social Media in the real world

Why you should take facebook seriously

Another great business communication tool

Leadership is about telling the truth

Useful pages

Site contents

Admin

Pages

Categories

Communication is the heart of business.

Social Media for Real Businesses

Useful pages

Site contents

Topics

Admin

Pages

Categories