For some time I have been putting up infographics I have come across that I have found of value or interest.
I will continue to do so but now in a different format. Iwill collate many together in this one thread.
Please feel free to contribute those graphics you find and are of value / use to you… or maybe just got you thinking
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Posted by Mike Morrison
One hundred years of anything is quite an accomplishment in itself. But when you stop to think about organizations that championed business ethics and marketplace trust since day one, the Better Business Bureau stands alone.
I love the line…”Before you invest… investigate” still true today
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Posted by Mike Morrison
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Posted by Mike Morrison
Well I seem to have been on a mentoring splash over the last few days, here is some useful information on the value of mentoring.
Everyone CAN win in a mentoring relationship, providing the match between mentor and mentee is considered, and that both parties respect each other.
See how mentors make a difference.
Source: degreesearch.org
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Posted by Mike Morrison
Do you wordpress?
It seems that this platform is becoming more popular than ever.
I always recommend people looking to build a simple business site to use WP, as it is easily portable, can be enhanced by coders other than the original one that developed it, and what’s more, when it comes to re-branding or refreshing the look, it can be done without having to change the content – oh yes and changing all content is easy too!
It appears that with a WP site you are not alone!
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Posted by Mike Morrison
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Posted by Mike Morrison
Content marketing was a top priority for businesses in 2011, and it is going to remain so in 2012.
That’s according to a study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, a marketing education and research company. In the past year, marketers distributed more business-to-business content on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter than ever, according to CMI.
Content marketing encompasses new techniques and methods of sharing information. Spreading unique, helpful bits within the industry or with consumers creates brand awareness, new customers and client loyalty. Businesses should be sharing information from company research and client data. Data can be displayed in web infographics, articles outlining business tips, videos and slideshows.
via Ecademy: user blogs http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=176504
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Posted by Mike Morrison
Data from the Q4 2011 Vistage CEO Confidence Index quashes any remaining doubts that today’s executives are ready to embrace social media.
The survey of 1,641 U.S. CEOs found that 60 percent of CEOs today are actively using social media to grow their businesses.
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Posted by Mike Morrison
In any business we need our people to both work hard, and yet we need them to remain fresh so that the performance is sustainable – that means each employee having a healthy work-life balance.
Evidence from recent research suggests that there are more women in “balance” than men. The good news is that over the last 5 years the data suggests that we are getting better at achieving balance.
8 Comments | management | Tagged: HR, leadership, work-life balance | Permalink
Posted by Mike Morrison
While looking for some resources for a workshop I came across this wonderful graphic by FastForward Consulting Group:
This includes the 6 abilities:
To see the 6 abilities in all their glory, click on the image above.
The central image here is closely aligned to our Knowledge, Understanding Action model.
What the authors call Explicit knowledge is akin to our “Knowledge”
Tacit knowledge – “understanding”
and practical wisdom is similar to our “action”
7 Comments | management | Tagged: 6 abilities, action, knowledge, understanding, wise leader | Permalink
Posted by Mike Morrison
This is how I set my personal goals and make them as WACKY as possible. The WACKY’er the better!
Goals are the fundamental tool for personal and organisational development. After all, how can you know you have achieved something or even improved your situation at all if you have no target or benchmark to work from?
The most common business goal setting tool is known as SMART goals. The use of acronyms is very common in the business world and SMART goals are generally taken to be goals that are Specific, Measurable & Motivating, Aligned, Reachable and Time driven.
This is all well and good in the business world of performance management where by and large people want a stretch but not too much of a stretch. The risks of failure are sometimes high so the taking of chances is not encouraged by many managers. I personally view this as a huge deficiency in many organisations. Permission to try and to fail (and therefore learn) is not usually given.
Many people, through their experience at work, are therefore familiar and comfortable with the SMART goals approach. If they form any personal goals at all, they are likely to design SMART goals. If the same timidity and safety approach is applied to personal goals they are likely to be weak and not that motivating for the individual. Are these goals likely to be achieved? If they are achieved, are they going to rock your or anyone else’s world? My answer to both questions is NO!!
If you are going to pursue goals in your life then you had better make them huge, awesome, life-changing, jaw-dropping, pulse quickening goals that are worth your effort and time. Aim for the stars – even if you come up short you will still have had a hell of a ride and be higher than most everyone else. You will have learnt valuable lessons and be more than motivated to try again. In my opinion it is far better to regret the things you’ve done than live a life regretting the ones you didn’t try.
This is how I do it – using the acronym WACKY. I think that if a catchy acronym is used it will stick in your mind and you’ll find you can access it easily. Hopefully you’ll then use it all the time and spread the message to others.
I want people to think my personal goals are totally WACKY – that’s great – then they will likely be the goals that others may not have thought of or are too scared to try for themselves. I want to stretch myself – that’s the only way to grow and develop as a person and be able to help others more effectively. That’s always been my driving force. Partial failure of one of my WACKY goals will often be better than most people’s mediocre SMART goals – I’ll learn loads of good stuff and be that much closer to where I want to be. I also take my time to form them and that way I get the real honest from the heart stuff – it really works for me.
These WACKY goals are generally my over-arching long-range life goals so they will certainly contain lots of mini-goal stages – that’s fine – many small steps will add up to a huge journey. I try and make the small steps as WACKY as possible – it all makes life interesting.
Wonderful – it is meant to be a great goal so if my goal doesn’t fill me with wonder, what’s the point? It has to be something that makes my imagination work hard. I want it to play on my mind and draw me on down that road less travelled.
Animating – again, if it doesn’t get me fired up and raring to go and get started – I’ll find another goal that will. I want my pulse to quicken when I think about it. I want to be animated when I talk to my nearest and dearest about it and I want them to be amazed by it.
Colossal – I make it big, big and bigger yet. If it doesn’t make me stop and think “hold the phone, that’s big even by my standards – people will think I’m mad” then I rethink it and just make it bigger. I make it a huge hairy-assed goal that if achieved will make me think “Yeah, that was a good one”. If people saw my goal in the street they would cross the road to avoid it – it will be a kick-butt monster of a goal.
Killer – I try to make it undeniably unique and special; when achieved it will be well worth the sacrifice and effort. I’m a trend setter not a follower – I set great goals that I and others have not yet achieved.
Your – I own it with my heart and soul. It’s personal. I will pour my energy into it – failure is not an option. Roller skating up Everest is just not my goal – my goals have to be my goals. I have learnt over the years to pick goals that really do chime with my core values as an individual human being.
That’s it. This technique has taken me years to discover, formulate and learn and I am still trying to get it perfect. It is a life-long challenge. No one said it would be easy but I urge you – don’t be SMART be WACKY.
Try and design some of your own WACKY goals for your life – you will be surprised where they take you.
26 Comments | guest, management | Tagged: SMART goals, smart objectives, wacky, wacky goals, wacky objectives | Permalink
Posted by Mike Morrison
Retaining talented people is an important role of both line management and human resources. There are without doubt 100s of excuses people give when leaving a company, especially in “exit interviews”.
Exit interviews are great for the business and HR, but lets get real – most employees do not want to risk their reference on saying the boss was an idiot, or that it was a controlling environment and that the style of management actually stopped people from performing… now do they?
No – so the reality is – if you want real honest reasons for leaving – give an open regference first – then ask for “reasons for leaving!
In the mean time I have found this useful infographic on the reasons why people leave. Post your thoughts as comments below.
by visually via 
57 Comments | management | Tagged: human resources, Management, retention, talent, talent management | Permalink
Posted by Mike Morrison
RSS can look so boring, but can it be made more interesting?
I have been asked how I put the “ticker” in my footer on emails and on some article sites I post to.
It looks like:
Each time an article is added to the blog so the graphic is updated.
To get this just go to
http://www.rss-image.com
Add your RSS feed
you will be presented with an image address like:
http://www.rss-image.com/img/404614dbc1681494efe7bf98ab3804fa.gif
Simply create some simple HTML code around this image address:
<a href=”http://rapidbi.com/blog“> – where the address is your blog
Then add “><img src=” – followed by your image address
and close off with:
” /></a><br />
<a href=”http://rapidbi.com/blog”><img src=”http://www.rss-image.com/img/404614dbc1681494efe7bf98ab3804fa.gif” /></a><br />
This can then be added to many blogs, article sites and of course your email footer….And the best news is it stays up to date.
Simples 
7 Comments | management, Social Media | Tagged: blog, footer, rss, ticker, visual rss | Permalink
Posted by Mike Morrison
Often we have heard the phrase “tick the box” as a way of saying “well we have done enough to say we have done the task” – but have we really?
Many of us know that some jobs do only need a “tick in the box”, but sometimes we miss the point.
Last week while preparing for a business trip I was down my local high street (it’s just a few weeks to Christmas) and I noticed in our local shopping centre was a Santa’s grotto. Nothing unusual here except that, well I don’t know it just looked tatty. In previous years it has been a large and reasonably impressive looking grotto, more like a log cabin, not an open space with a Santa on a throne. In fact it was so bad I took a photo of it, intending to blog about this.
This week I have been in Dubai, A Muslim region, not a Christian one.
On a trip I went into a small local mall – not one of the big tourist ones, but a shopping mall used by people living locally. Looking at the shoppers there is a good mix of Muslim, Christian and other faiths here… but the grotto!
Now this centre is a small one, almost the same size as my local shopping mall back home. But what a difference.
In comparison, the UK grotto is “ticking the box” – the one in Dubai is “meeting & exceeding” the needs and wants of shoppers.
Which of these two images inspires children – well I know which one does for me. This is the difference between delivering on our promise and ticking the box.
Which would you take a small child to?
Just how often do we tick the box rather than understanding that image means a lot?
6 Comments | Date, management | Tagged: customer service, quality | Permalink
Posted by Mike Morrison
So just how to get 1000s of followers on Twitter.. quickly?Well maybe you can’t – at least not in the way you are expecting or many spammers will have you believe is possible.
One of the ways that smaller (and big) business can attract customers is through social media. Twitter for a variety of reasons has become very popular.
In the past when we wanted to market we needed mailing lists of thousands or tens of thousands. The reason for this was simple, as people and researchers discovered the response or conversion rate was often around the 1% mark. So doing the maths it was easy to calculate the size of the data base one needed to achieve the planned business goal.
Those involved in marketing have taken each new technology as it has come along and used it in their existing models.
What many have overlooked however is that twitter and other social platforms have their own “norms” and methods.
You see when you have a “list” many marketers will say that once they have trusted you to have their details they as potential customers are a warmer prospect – so they are more likely to buy from you – so for sake of argument let’s say that the percentage that responds changes from 1% to almost 10%. Now if that list contains only people that have bought from you before, or have significant experience of you to trust you – that response rate is higher.
Leaving the response rates alone for a moment (I will come back to that), have a think about referrals. For we know that both referrals and testimonials help in persuading potential customers into trusting us to make a purchase. Getting referrals however has often been difficult for many businesses.
Now imagine a way of having existing customers talk about your product or you as a provider on a daily basis – each time they tell many people they know. Also imaging that in time the conversion rate on that list becomes many times higher than the 10%.
Well welcome to twitter. If all you are thinking about is the number of followers you have- then I am afraid you have missed the point – and you may as well stop. Simply put, if you have 100 good quality followers, and each of them have 100 good quality followers then one great message has the opportunity of getting to 100,000 people – every day! Ok so realistically that wont happen, but then most people on twitter statistically have several hundred.
Many also say that it takes too much time – well the typical number of tweets from a user is just 10 a day.
The point here is to engage with your followers, not like other marketing channels where it is just about broadcasting.
Many are starting to use Klout scores – if you think this is important – then it is easier to have a higher score with a smaller audience than a large audience. Better to have 500-1000 people that you talk to, they talk to you, and they retweet your message – for this is a form of referral!
Some points to note:
- 67% of users are more likely to buy products from brands they follow on Twitter. This compares favourably to the 51% who buy products from brands they follow on Facebook (HubSpot, Edison Research)
- Companies that use Twitter gain twice the number of leads each month than their non-Tweeting counterparts (HubSpot, Edison Research).
- Twitter users are more educated than the general population. Just 12% of users report a high school education or less (HubSpot Internet Marketing, Edison Research).
- Twitter users have higher incomes than the population at large with nearly half of Twitterers earning $50,000 USD or more annually. This compares to 33% of the general population (HubSpot, Edison Research).
- Many Twitter users are considered early adopters with 19% among the first to purchase new products upon launch compared to 10% of the general population (HubSpot, Edison Research).
So while I started this article on how to get thousands of followers – you can, just with a few hundred – for the “followers” count is sheer vanity. There will be thousands of people that read your tweets that are not following you – and that is what you want. Build a reputation for great content, and good followers will find you, especially if you:
1. Tweet every day – just 5-10 times
2. Give useable/ valued information – not just promotions
3. Talk & engage with your followers – i.e. reply to them – help them, answer questions
4. Talk about things that are not about your company or product (show you are human)
5. Retweet other peoples messages
6. Give people links to sites other than your own
Twitter is not a quick win. It can take an account 9-12 months to be trusted. But when established the responses to things you put out can be very quick. If you are new to twitter and want quick responses then try another technology – if you are serious about engagement and growing your business then slow and steady wins the day
**sources:
http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/#followersvstweet
http://www.socialtechnologyreview.com/articles/40-fascinating-twitter-facts
How to get 1000s of followers on Twitter…
19 Comments | management | Tagged: engagement, followers, social business, social media, twitter | Permalink
Posted by Mike Morrison
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