November 20, 2008 By 1 Comment

More Over There Than Over Here

i have been putting a HUGE amount of energy in over at Secret Women’s Business Network getting things up and running and putting my passion to video (no, not amateur pr0n!).

At the same time I have been reading in those down times when I need to rest. Just having finished Jill Bolte Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight I am still turning over the ideas she presents in that book.

Firstly, I was very very pleased to see that her ordeal has led her to reach the same conclusions that I have about emotions, actions and choice. It took a stroke for her, and for me it took Al-Anon and being married to an alchoholic.

How you feel after 90 seconds of feeling an emotion, is your choice. The first 90 seconds are the physiological responses programmed into us in the most primitive part of our minds. After 90 seconds that has passed and if you are still feeling that feeling it is because you are choosing to.

This is the bit invariably when people will say “but I don’t choose to be like that, I just AM like that” and close their minds. In the past I tried so hard to help people realise that you can change, I know you can change because I have done it. I have seen my father do it. All it takes is a conscious choice and a lot of practice….and I mean a lot.

Jill Bolte Taylor learned how to do it because the part of her brain that would go into the negative aspects of emotions after the initial event, was damaged and so she  could not engage in the old thinking cycle that she once had (now she resurrected that part of her mind, but keeps it in check by choosing to think of other things when she wants to break the thinking cycle).

Now when people read this I know some will have turned off already. They fear change, but I loved Jill’s assertion that change and chaos is the first step in creativity. If you shy away from it, you will be denying yourself the opportunity to be better than you are now. To be happier than you are now.

I wish I could contact people who have gone through this process, so we can get together and talk about the amazing things that have happened since deciding to take control of how we think. I am inspired to write to Jill and applaud her in her efforts to both further the study into brains and mental illness, and her wish that we all see that we so have the majority of control in our lives. In driving the machine that is our brain, we can choose to put the brake on or to speed up, not it. We can choose to be as happy as we want, in any situation, at any time (apart from those 90 second periods when we regress to our most primitive selves).

Secondly I am becoming more and more fascinated with the brain itself. My hobby is turning into almost an obsession. I crave to really understand how the combination of chemicals and electrical impulses make us…us. My Multiple Sclerosis has done spots of damage in places in my brain. I am working hard to move those functions elsewhere, just as Jill did.

Never give up on anyone that has brain injury, when you read Jill’s book you will see how lucid she was at times during the stroke but was unable to communicate. The 40 points in the appendix on how to treat someone who has had a stroke or damage are telling, that pity on condescension has no place in treatment, only respect and compassion.

Look I could rave on and on about this because it really is the secret to happiness. Open your mind to the possibility that you just might be able to feel good at will. Read this book and others on how science is slowly seeing how the brain works. Make a decision to make a small change today….. see how it goes.

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November 16, 2008 By 2 Comments

Passive Aggressive: How Often Do You Forgive Your Heroes?

Just deleted 460 words because all i wanted to ask was…

When your hero does something contrary to what you believe they should do…how often do you forgive them?

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November 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Selling On The Internet – You Are Doing It Wrong

Several pieces of information have intersected and fell in place with an audible “click” for me this past fortnight as I launched the Secret Women’s Business Network blog.

One hint came from the tiny tome The Contrarian Effect (Why It Pays Big to Take Typical Sales Advice and Do The Opposite) by Michael Port and Elizabeth Marshall. Michael made the point that sales tactics and processes of yesteryear, while they may “appear” to work, they are short sighted, burn potential and repeat customers, and were designed with the seller in mind not the buyer.

How many of the large internet marketing launches did you feel was really to help you the customer compared to “I know this is all just trying to get as much money as quickly as possible”? The big boys in the business sniff at anyone saying that the current method of launching does not speak to them on a personal level. The big guys are missing the point entirely and should be careful they don’t lag behind.

If you are hearing feedback that your most savvy customers are not enjoying something on a personal level, you better listen. You are doing something wrong. You may gain short term customers, but you will lose those customers that are going to be most valuable to you, the long term, socially connected ones that will sell FOR you. With all the buzz currently about Seth Godin’s Tribes, I hope this message gets through, build your tribe, on a PERSONAL level. Be yourself and lead people like yourself.

The next piece of information came from a quick scan of this report (well it is 43 pages and I am out of printer paper!) that looked at 1000 socially connected consumers ( a massive group and getting larger every day). An absolute MUST read I believe.

The first tip in the social networking part of the report is to “Share the Spotlight”. Alas many of today’s marketers only share that spotlight with their product, or within their own network. It is not hard to see who masterminds with who (or who paid to be in a mastermind group with who) because that is ALL these people promote. They do not favourite the little people that “may” be a customer one day, they do not respond to random reachouts by social network users who are keen to speak to them. they have a closed loop happening and it is obvious to those outside of it.

The third part came from a Frank Kern give-away video that talked about the “Core Influence”. The same stuff I learned a few years ago while going through my NLP training, but when Frank delievers it to his audience it is a new concept to them because they are all still thinking of their customers as walking wallets. Frank takes them through the exercise of visualising their customers as a human being with a real life so they can connect better with that “person”.

Why is that such a radical idea? Why has connected with your customer on a “personal” level been the very last thing a sales person has wanted to do. Is it because they do not really believe in the tactics they are using and product they are selling? I certainly think so!

The new world demands authenticity. If there is even a hint of some form of duplicity your customers are going to find someone else to buy from, and there are a LOT of other sellers they are now aware of. Gone are the days of the single sales area of the Fuller Brush man; the internet means your customers can buy anywhere, any time, and they want that to be a friendly, fun purchase. They also want to buy from someone they LIKE, because the new consumer is VERY AWARE of where cash goes and what it does. Everyone prefers to help friends over strangers.

The oldest sales tactic of all, also has to go. I believe the “sales letter’, that wall of text that the seller convinces themselves works, is in it’s twilight. Why? Very soon the written word will not be “personal” enough on the internet unless it can be seen to have come spontaneously through social networking. This new measure of how we weight personal communication is already in place in the spoken word. A discussion amongst friends at the pub holds more weight with you than something you read in a magazine, even if it was written by an “expert”. The human algorithm says give more weight to the word of a friend over the word of a stranger (unless your friend is an idiot). It’s automatic!

I am watching with interest and curiously at the changes that are happening as the so-called sales gurus of the internet are evolving (and remember the whole internet marketing thing as an entity to itself is only about a decade old). As it dawns that there are better ways to do things, that the friendly shop keeper on the corner had it right, and the relationship between him and his customers was mutually respectful and long term, rather than the soul-less mall wham-bam of cash grabbing.

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November 1, 2008 By 1 Comment

Like for Like

Recently there was a minor spat on the internet. Yes I know – fighting on the internet, who would have thought?

Still this fight was a bit of a strange one.

A blogger, commenting on another blogger’s post, made her own post about her opinion of a certain situation. That would all seem straight forward. Commenters agreed, disagreed and generally chewed a delicious piece of gristle that revolves around one of those “no-one can really win” situations.

All went quiet and then about a month later that same blogger was sent an “open” email from the subject of the previous post. She elected to post it on her blog.

Now this is where things get a little weird.

The email was full of testimonials form the staff of the organisation that was under discussion about what a great guy their boss was and how he we was not a chauvinist pig at all.

*sound of scratching record*

What? What did chauvinist have to do with anything?

Still most people took it at face value when the boss of the organisation commented in the blog comments he was at the brunt of a lot of abuse for being sexist . Conversation was feisty and I couldn’t help but wonder what was really the motivation for that email (and why it was publicly posted).

See, I checked Google for what I thought I had missed. These days your  (and business) profile depends on your social profile and what people are saying about you in blogs, Twitter and other publicly accessible places.

So I searched for name + chavinist and all I came up with was a tweet comment from a woman saying she would have liked to have seen more female names on a list. The response from the boss was I am many things but not a chauvinist. Hmm so the only public mention of the boss linked to the word chauvinist was made by the boss himself.

So sure there could have been a barrage of emails coming in, or carrier pigeons, or some other method that was being organised somewhere that was not visible on the internet.God Google didn’t know about it and no-one who was commenting on the that blog post was aware either.

There was no request from this boss for the email to be taken down, that they wished it to be kept a private matter, and that it was never meant to be published. So a “private” issue was being taken public by enlisting a blogger to post an email that was basically a marketing letter for a profile.

So what was going on here?

Yesterday i was listening to the cricket on the radio and discussion turned to one of the flamboyant umpires and how he had completely put a bowler off his game by being overly noticeable. The commentators speculated that the actions of this umpire were not for the good of the game, but to keep the umpire’s name in the public view. That rather than talking about the cricket game that was happening, the papers, tv and commentators were all talking about this umpire.

Hmmm interesting.

We could also chat about the “oh look over there!” method of turning public scrutiny from one issue that WILL be damaging to one that is controversial but less damaging.

The company this boss fronts is having a pretty dismal PR problem at the moment. They have promised goods that haven’t arrived, billed people after they requested they cancel their order, and have not really explained to people that in joining up for a continuity program it is up for the individual to stop the paypal automatic payments. (the confusion there is kind of understandable as getting people to unsubscribe is not in your primary interest…but I digress)

There is a saying that goes something like “don’t choose an intelligent source for an event when there is any possibility human stupidity can be the cause’, and while that may sound a little harsh, it may well be the case here. This email may not be part of some marketing effort, there may not be a direct link between the email being posted and the owner of the blog being used as a patsy (or worse in collusion all along). It might have really genuinely “seemed like a good idea at the time.

Lessons to be learned are, if you want to raise your profile in a positive way, don’t link your name to a negative concept.

Trying to distract people from a negative issue by creating controversy elsewhere is just plain dumb. The internet expects transparency, the internet cannot abide duplicity, and old style smoke and mirrors won’t work as well as it used to on unread, inexperienced users.

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