It’s Getting Really Hard to be a Jerk These Days

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in Transparency

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It’s really funny and I think it`s really great and a sign that society is moving in the right direction but it is getting harder and harder to be a jerk these days.  It used to be pretty easy to get away with because you were able to treat some people badly and suck up to the people that are important in your path to getting ahead in life.  Today, the world is smaller and communication has never been better.  Through blogs, micro blogging and social networks, everyone is connected from the lowest level worker to the highest executive or CEO.

In the past, companies would ignore individual customers and focus on the much larger target market.  If they ran over one customer along the way, it didn`t matter because there were always plenty of others waiting in line to deal with the company.  Today a single bad experience with a customer can really hurt a company.  Everyone has a voice and an internet connection these days.  Anyone can write a review about a company that they dealt with on hundreds of review sites and anyone can create a blog or Facebook group in response to how they were treated by the company (positive or negative although negative experience are much better fueled).

Some companies such as Comcast, DELL and Amazon.com, realize this and are turning their haters into fans and their fans into loyal evangelists.  Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV is very careful about what he says to every single person he deals with and if he accidentally says something to upset someone, even completely unintentionally, he spends hours of his time apologizing to every single person involved.

In the online world, if you (or your company) are a genuinely good guy, you have very little to worry about and if something negative does come up, you can easily protect yourself by being transparent.  If you are a jerk, you will end up trying to hide everything until it blows up in your face.  At that point, you have very little hope of winning your audience.   The public will like and respect the “good guys” for their transparency and they will really dislike the “jerks” for not being transparent.  Worst of all, they will start speculating about every aspect about the jerks because it will always seem like they are hiding something.

Over the last couple of years and even over the last few months, there have been tons of politicians, athletes, executives and others exposed in the news and on blogs for being “Jerks”.  Everyone has an opinion and now we can share our opinions with the world.  These opinions get indexed by search engines and lead to comments and more opinions which are also indexed in search engines which save the opinions forever.  It is getting much harder to hide “Jerky” behaviour from the world.

Although it has never been a good idea to burn bridges, people have always been able to burn a bridge or two over time.  The burnt bridges may have in some cases, prevented them from a couple of opportunities but nothing compared what a burnt bridge can do today or what it will do to you in 5 or 10 years.  Google records, indexes, maps out and allows comments on every burnt bridge with pictures and all.

The saying goes “good guys finish last”.  The good guys always got the short straw and were pushed around by the jerks.  Now, the tables are turning and the good guys are going to start winning.  So please do yourself a favour and embrace the change, be helpful, treat everyone well and most importantly stop being a jerk!

They’re All Going to Laugh at You!

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in Blogging |Social Companies

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They're all Going to Laugh at You

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As part of the transition from the 1900′s to the 2000′s and more specifically the last few years, we all have to get over a major obstacle in order to move forward.  The major obstacle as made famous by Adam Sandler is the fear that “they’re all going to laugh at you!“.  As individuals, many have been held back because they were afraid of consequences, they were afraid of what people would think and they were afraid that people would laugh at them.  It may not be those specific fears but pretty much, they were afraid that what they produce would not be accepted as well as they would hope.  Growing up, we have all heard the saying “better to remain quite and looked a fool than opening your mouth and removing all doubt”.  We are trained to keep quite until we are certain that everyone else will agree with us.

On a corporate level, every department fears what other departments will think, what their superiors will think and even more what the public will think.  This thinking leads to being less productive, less innovative and more boring.  Before doing anything at a large company, a department will have a meeting, then propose it to other departments or superiors and then test it out on a small sample of the public before even thinking of moving forward.  During this time, they can be losing out on potential profit and allowing their competitors to get ahead.
Obviously there are times when you need to test things out to make sure that they are on target and won’t damage the company image but that doesn’t mean that internally they have to shlep on forever.  By keeping things to yourself and hiding forward thinking from your company or target market, you are doing yourself a huge disservice.

Companies and organization now have the tools to connect with their audience and to communicate on a daily basis in real time.  They can blog, connect on Facebook, Twitter,  Youtube and many more social networks.  Your audience is waiting for your thought leadership.  They are waiting to hear about your organization, what you are thinking about and what you can do for them.  There has never before been a time that you can give your audience more than you can right now.  If that’s the case, what are you waiting for?  Nobody will laugh at you for jumping in.  The only time they will laugh is if you don’t take advantage of this amazing opportunity to connect with them.

What are you waiting for?  Jump in and leave a comment.
*photo thanks to Linny http://www.flickr.com/photos/linnybinnypix/

The Beauty of RSS Feeds and Readers

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in Search Online

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(For the “How To”, scroll to the bottom of the post.)

You don’t really see the benefit of RSS feeds and a reader if you are working with very few sites.  If all you need is to check cnn.com for your news and yahoo finance for your investments, you might look at an rss reader as a hassle or a way of complicating your daily routine.  If that’s all you are using them for then I agree.   But what if you end up visiting the same 10 sites every day which is very common and becoming more common each day.  At that point, you might start seeing the beauty of the rss feed and reader and start using them regularly.

What an rss feed essentially does is it pulls news and articles from all over the web and brings them into a nice, easy to read format.  By just visiting your reader, you will get the same information that you would have from opening each individual site but with a reader, you don’t have to keep checking if each site updated every day (or every hour or even minute).  Even breaking news travels to your reader fast enough to be on top of it.  All you have to do is open your reader and if the sites updated, the new articles are in your reader.  Simple as that!  You can relax knowing that all the information you would be looking for will come right to you as it happens.

Alerts: Google and Other

RSS feeds are not exclusive to Blogs and news sites, you can create your own feeds based on many criteria including google alerts, blog alerts, keyword alerts and searches from most search engines including twitter.  By setting up the right alerts, you can pretty much listen to what the entire world is saying about any particular topic (including your business) in real time.

Every company, organization and in most cases, even individuals should have alerts set up for themselves, their businesses, organizations, products and industry.  It will put your finger on the pulse of the trends and what the future may hold.

Where the rss system works exceptionally well is in a misunderstanding or crisis such as a scandal involving your business or organization.  During a crisis, you become overwhelmed with everything that needs to get done, responding to the situation and building a strategy to get through it.  You don’t have time to sit and search the web over and over again to find  everything that is being said about you.  With an rss reader, you can create as many alerts for websites, keywords, terms and people as you like and have them come right to you as they happen.  All you have to do is keep the reader open in a browser and refresh every once in a while (if auto refresh is too slow for you).   In many cases, you can subscribe to comment feeds as well and hear what the average people are saying that don’t have their own platform.

To put all of this into practice, use some of the resources below:  I suggest using Google Reader for all.

1) What is an RSS Feed? Some Quick FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions): Learn the basics.

2)      Google Alerts: http://www.google.com/alerts. First, sign in to your Google account or create one if you don’t have one yet.  Then enter your search term such as your company name, an individual at the company or any other related term that you would like to keep track of (enter it as if you were searching Google).  Choose what types of information you would like collected such as news, blog posts, videos, etc.  I would suggest “Comprehensive” so that you get it all but it would really depend on what you are looking for.  Then in the deliver menu, click “feed” to have the results delivered to your feed as they happen.  Rinse and repeat for all of the terms that you want to be updated about.  You can create up to 1000 Google alerts so don’t be shy.

3)      IceRocket.com: http://www.icerocket.com/. Enter your search term into the search bar and results will appear.  In the left sidebar, towards the bottom, there will be a “subscribe” link to subscribe to the feed.  Right click the link and choose to “copy link address”.  Then log into Google Reader and click on the “add a subscription” button at the top of the left sidebar.  Paste the link that you just copied on the IceRocket.com search.  The feed is now in your reader and will be updated as new posts are created.  Once again, rinse and repeat.

4)      Twitter Search: http://search.twitter.com/. Enter your search term in the search bar.  At the top right of the results page is a link to the “Feed for this query”.  To add the feed to your reader, follow the same steps as for IceRocket.com above.  You should be getting the hang of this already but once again, repeat for all keywords and terms.

The above resources should give you a very good start to using RSS feeds and reader to listen better to what the world is saying about things you care about, and save a heck of a lot of time in the process.

Do you have any other hints, tips or resources? Let me know in the comments.  Also, if this helped you, let me know.