(Professional) Twitter Tips

If you are like me, you understand the basic concept of Twitter, a posting site that allows users to essentially post a short message on any subject from “where they are” to “who they are with” or “what they are doing at that very moment”. It can seem that Twitter is nothing more than individuals recording and posting their every move, from “Drinking a cup of coffee” to “ugh –going to work” and it might therefore be hard to imagine more professional applications. I was pleasantly surprised when I came across this article highlighting just that, business uses for this amazingly popular website which should not be underestimated in either its amazing reach or its potential capabilities.

I hope you enjoy and can find some useful items to “Tweet”.
David Lammert

5 Twitter tips for your company
Abridged: www.cnnmoney.com, By Kim Thai

For anyone who’s wondered what ‘tweeting’ can do for business, here are the keys to using Twitter.
Thousands of companies have hopped onto the Twitter bandwagon, trying to find a way to bring in business (and hopefully, revenue) one tweet at a time. But it isn’t as easy to Twitter — especially for companies — as one might think.

For those who don’t know: Twitter’s a micro-blogging site that allows users to communicate with each other in 140 characters or less. Think of each “tweet” as a text or instant message — not really directed at anyone but visible to everyone. And those who want to follow particular people’s tweets can simply subscribe to their feed for real-time updates.

But don’t mistake it for a fluke: In the last year, Twitter traffic has multiplied almost 15 times over, with more than 37.3 million unique global visitors in May, according to comScore. And as tweeting becomes hotter, companies feel more pressure to join the social-networking tool in order to stay competitive. But many are struggling to understand Twitter culture and, as a result, their tweets can come off as desperate or inadvertently turn away potential customers.

So to help you avoid any Twitter faux pas and maximize your tweeting potential, here are five rules for using this social networking tool that’ll keep your company ahead of the competition.

1. It’s a two-way conversation
Know those annoying people who always talk about themselves and don’t listen to others? Well, don’t let that persona take over your Twitter feed. Remember to listen. Too many businesses are just blasting out press releases over and over again — or worse, have an automated tweeting system and wind up ignoring communication from their followers.

That’s the worst mistake you can make on Twitter, says Julio Ojeda-Zapata, social media expert and author of Twitter Means Business: How microblogging can help or hurt your company. “It’s like these companies are standing out on a mountaintop with a megaphone broadcasting how wonderful they are, but Twitter is an intercom, not a megaphone.”

To avoid this common mistake, use Twitter regularly, and consider assigning a specific person to tweet on a daily basis. This way, companies can follow users who mention their business, engage users through direct messages, and actually build relationships with followers, rather than inundate them with information.

2. Your Twitter and company voice should sound the same
Twitter may be a casual medium, but that doesn’t mean your company has to be casual about it. Businesses should do what makes the most sense for their brands, experts say.

The key? Make sure that your Twitter voice reflects your company culture, says Joel Comm, CEO of InfoMedia. For example, Zappos — a fast-growing, lighthearted online company that sells shoes and other merchandise — recently tweeted a quote from Pooh’s Little Instruction Book. Whereas for Discover Twitter came in most handy for posts on consumer spending and financial resources for customers.

Twitter is all about transparency, so it’s important to be authentic when you tweet so that your company’s personality — whatever it is — comes through clearly. Comm likens the Twitter experience to a water-cooler conversation: Being relatable and fun is crucial, but staying true to your company’s core values matters most.

3. Tweet to attract and retain customers
Twitter can boost customer service to a new level, as Comcast found when it established a Twitter account specifically to handle Internet complaints and other technical service problems. In a recent correspondence with a customer on Twitter, Comcast tweeted the same questions a representative would ask on a technical support hotline and received answers via Twitter. But instead of leaving the customer on hold for hours, Comcast was able to identify the problem immediately and send out a technician.

Consumers are impressed — and often surprised — by a company that openly and directly addresses customer-service problems. Twitter allows businesses, big and small, to take that extra step whether it’s about complaints or simple product queries. For example, Take Zettler Hardware, the oldest hardware store in Columbus, Ohio, which fields questions on common plumbing problems on Twitter, often responding to photos uploaded on Twitter and replies with recommendations for replacement parts and repair strategies.

This kind of instant and robust customer service builds loyalty that’s hard to come by through traditional methods, says Rodney Rumford, co-founder of TweetPhoto. “The biggest sin,” he says, “is being silent.”

4. Twitter’s just the first step
While Twitter should be part of any savvy company’s daily marketing, it’s only the beginning of a successful social-networking strategy. “Twitter is a way to get your foot in the door,” Rumford says. “It’s the start to building a relationship.”

For business-to-business companies, Twitter’s a great way to network. Author Ojeda-Zapata gave the example of Mark Palony, a marketing manager at the software company SoftBrands, who was looking to collaborate with German software giant SAP. Palony searched Twitter for SAP mentions and began following an SAP worker near his area. He initiated some sports small talk through tweets and — with continual contact — moved on to actual meetings. Palony now calls it his “single best use of Twitter.”

Tweeting, Ojeda-Zapata says, is like having drinks online. It can easily lead to drinks in real life, formal business meetings — and eventually, company growth.

5. Have fun and be creative
The very nature of Twitter — from its 140-character limit to its fervent followers — attracts users with a short-attention span, so the best tweets keep users coming back. Interactivity can be a great way to do that: Auntie Anne’s and Dairy Queen ask customers about their favorite pretzel dips or Blizzard flavors through tweets, while at Home Depot, confused shoppers can tweet for help as they search the aisles for particular products.

Twitter’s GPS function can also point businesses in the right direction. Cupcake Stop, a New York cupcake truck company, tweets its location to customers as it moves throughout Manhattan, and Union Pacific lets fans track a historic steam engine road-trip across America.

The experts agree there’s no right way to use Twitter, but with these strategies, you won’t tweet the wrong way. Time to start the conversation.

Ace the Interview

It’s been some time since we had a blog that involved interviewing, and since it’s such an important topic, I wanted to briefly revisit the subject from a slightly different angle.

Hopefully you enjoy this lighthearted reminder of things to be aware of and items to stay away from while trying to secure the job you desire. In a labor market where the employer can choose from more potential applicants than he or she can imagine, small mistakes will not be overlooked – not when there are 20 more applicants waiting in the lobby with equal (if not better) qualifications.

Enjoy and Good Luck!
David Lammert

Ace the Interview
Abridged: www.harvardbusiness.org, By: David Silverman

Through a combination of skill, perseverance, and luck, you've landed the interview. In short order, you'll be alone in front of a gauntlet of interviewers with no recourse to the backspace key to fix any verbal gaffes. Now what?

Number one, understand that you are applying for a job someone needs doing and they're trying to figure out if you're the person. And to do that, the interviewer will rely on their perceptions and beliefs about interviewing.

For example, I like to know that an employee has a desire to get promoted and move ahead. My reasoning is that an employee who mentions promotion in the interview will work harder on the job.
But other interviewers may have had a bad experience with an employee focusing on advancement to the exclusion of finishing the job they were hired to do. If you're not sensitive to that manager's fears, and continue talking about how you're getting your MBA at night, you won't get that job.
So with that thought in your pocket — that you need to listen and react to the person in the room with you, not slavishly follow any list of rules — I present to you my list of rules for interviewing:

1. Dress appropriately. If you're going to Amalgamated Ginormous Finance, Inc., a business suit is appropriate. If you're a man, wear a tie. Even in California.

2. Shut up. Did I tell you about the time someone came and told me his life story for 45 minutes and then allowed me 10 minutes to explain the job? I think you know how that story ends.

3. Listen. The most useful skill in sales is listening — and in an interview, you're selling yourself. If you say, "I think the best computers in the world are PCs and people who use Macs have more style than substance" after the interviewer mentions his iPhone, you could be left with your opinion and no paycheck.

4. Ask questions. You can avoid the problem above by responding to the question, "Do you think we should scrap all the PCs here and buy Macs?" by saying, "That depends on lots of factors. What would your requirements be?"

5. Show interest. This could also be called "sucking up." When an interviewee doesn't ask me anything about myself, she's not just saying "I've got pride in my accomplishments and don't need to pander to you." She's also showing me that she isn't good at showing interest in other people. This means she’s going to have a hard time politically in the company. And since that's going to reflect badly on me...no job for her.

6. Do your research. Some people find being Googled creepy. But if you do it carefully, you can show the hiring manager that you took the time to learn something about them. Feel free to quote what they said in CIO Magazine about the challenges of technology in the office. Just don't mention the size of their swimming pool as viewed through Google Earth.7. Answer the question you wish they'd asked. Robert McNamara said the about dealing with the press, but it's also very good advice for interviewees. How many times have you left the interview thinking, "I never got a chance to tell them about my Nobel Prize in possum research?" Don't wait for the question. Answer "What did you do at your last job?" with "Actually, it was my work on possums two jobs ago that you might find most relevant." (Well, maybe for you it wasn't specifically a Nobel or about possums, but you get the idea.)

Quiz

The below has been sent to me several times from different sources, so I apologize that I cannot attribute it to any one source. I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope you do as well. If nothing else, I think it will provide a few minutes of enjoyment and thought in the course of a busy day.

Enjoy!
David Lammert

THE QUIZ BELOW WAS DEVELOPED BY A PSYCHOLOGIST FOR HUMAN RESOURCE OR BUSINESS MANAGERS TO USE AS A TEST TO DETERMINE A NEW EMPLOYEE’S ETHICS & MORALS DURING THE INTERVIEW PROCESS.

You are driving down the road in your car on a wild, stormy night, when you pass by a bus stop and you see three people waiting for the bus:
1) An elderly lady who looks as if she is about to die.
2) An old friend who once saved your life.
3) The perfect partner you have been dreaming about.

Which one would you choose to offer a ride to, knowing that there can only be one passenger fit into your vehicle?

You could pick up the ELDERLY LADY, because she is going to die, and thus you should save her first. Or, you could take the OLD FRIEND because he once saved your life, and this would be the perfect chance to pay him back. However, you may never be able to find your PERFECT MATE again.

The right answer that human resources and business managers want to hear is as follows: “I would give the car keys to my old friend and let him take the lady to the hospital. I would stay behind and wait for the bus with the partner of my dreams”.

The Importance of Retention

I have always said that as important as selecting the right person for a job is making sure that they are retained once they are on board. Sometimes, after months of effort in the search process, perhaps the cost of a recruiter, applications, interviews, and background checks, once the employee is on board, the level of effort seems to come to a standstill. The effect of the time, energy and expenditures on a company for a loss of personnel can add up, and in today’s economy, where every penny counts, it is an area that should be paid attention to. I am of course not talking about the employee who is not doing their job or is a poor reflection on the organization that they work for, but rather the good, and solid employee that does their work, doesn’t make waves and for the most part goes unnoticed that is lured away by the promise of greater reward (financial or emotional).

The attached article describes the effect that poor retention can have on a company.

Enjoy!
David Lammert

Retention Still Goes Mostly Unmeasured
Abridged: www.staffing.org, By: David Earle

Poor retention is expensive and that expense is most often unrecognized and understated. Few companies measure either the causes or effects in a systematic way. A best practices program here needs at least six elements: on-boarding interviews, comprehensive employee satisfaction interviews, general worker environment surveys, exit interviews, a calculation of turnover costs and a demonstrated link to the strategic and tactical business discussions of senior management and the corporate board.

On-Boarding Interviews
The first of two measurements that help assess the quality of the candidates recruited and the efficiency of the on-boarding process. Are we bringing 1000 people (@ $1800 each) through the funnel only to lose 15% of them (a waste of $270,000) within 90 days?

Employee Satisfaction Surveys
Call this what you will – follow ups, evaluations, reviews, assessments or surveys – these tell you how employees feel about their workplace. For new employees this is especially critical because 86% of them decide whether or not to stay with the firm within their first six months. As a general rule, the longer people stay with a company the less apt they are to leave, but there are some important caveats: 1) the more senior they are, the more expertise, experience and institutional wisdom they take with them if they do leave; and 2) regardless of what they say in surveys, our research shows that half the currently employed workforce is looking at job opportunities on the Internet and almost everyone will consider a new job if the benefits are great enough. As we have reported elsewhere, the social contracts binding employer and employee are a shadow of what they used to be. Very few employees any more, no matter how tenured, are locked in for life.

Worker Environment Surveys
Less personal than satisfaction surveys, these measure structural and process issues that need reassessment or improvement. Regardless of how much it affects them personally, people like being able to point out a problem and see it fixed. They dislike not having that input and seeing the status quo drag on indefinitely. These surveys can also be used to inform future actions such as changes in benefit plans or pending corporate mergers and acquisitions.

Exit Interviews
If you can’t save an unexpected and inconvenient run of voluntary terminations, at least you can, and need to, find out why the people left. A certain number will be unavoidable but what’s that number? Are you losing people for avoidable reasons, reasons that can be fixed? A systematic debriefing program will provide that information. A general, fill-in-the-blanks survey will not help very much. People on their way out the door have little investment in their answers and will seldom say what’s really on their minds, which is precisely what you need to hear. Do as many actual interviews as you can afford and have pros handle these. If you don’t have pros on staff, contract the work out.

Employee Turnover Costs
If it doesn’t increase or decrease the bottom line, senior management isn’t going to pay much attention. So make the case that’s there to be made. Most companies, if they measure turnover costs at all (and the chart shows it’s not all that many), only measure the direct costs to recruit a new employee (marketing, vetting, interviewing, transportation, relocation, etc). But that’s not where the big money is for most positions; instead, it’s in lost productivity and opportunity costs. These can be calculated. There are a number of benchmarks for vacancy costs. One we published in 2007 put the average for employees in the $40,000-$60,000 range at 150% of salary. If you want management to pay attention to your focus on turnover, put the proper cost on it.

Management Compensation Tied to Turnover
Nothing quite focuses the mind of a manager like a target linked to his performance review, advancement prospects and compensation. A goal that isn’t linked is just “nice to do,” while one that is linked becomes a “must do.” Best practice retention programs almost all establish that link. If managing a firm’s human capital is truly important, the firm’s core management initiatives must support it.

Links to Tactical and Strategic Corporate Plans
Best Practice turnover initiatives have executive support. They have that support because they link to the priorities of the company as a whole. They are not good to have because HR says so, but because the company understands that it can’t get where it wants to go unless it factors turnover/retention into meeting its objectives.

Final Note
Some amount of employee turnover is inevitable. There are three kinds: turnover you desire and precipitate (layoffs, underperformance); turnover you can’t avoid (death, retirement, changes in family status); and turnover you wish you could prevent (competitor poaching, compensation, advancement, boredom, burn out, management conflicts). Best in class companies do a much better job with the third kind than their peers. FORTUNE magazine’s annual list of Best Companies to Work For cites these standouts as well as some of the specific programs they use.
It is clear that these companies, for their overall variety in addition to their different approaches and different programs, share a common perspective: that hiring good people, engaging them, developing them and retaining them is good, bottom-line business. Any extra resources it takes to accomplish this are well spent.

Turnover is one of the valuable markers of workforce health. Like high blood pressure, high cholesterol or insomnia it is an indicator. Ignoring it has consequences, negative ones. Heeding it has demonstrable benefits.

Hanging Tough

How are you and your company responding to the recession? As we learned in grade school, you have to learn from your past in order to form your future – and how companies responded during the Great Depression gives us cause to pause and consider if we are responding appropriately in today’s economy.

I hope you enjoy the following.
David Lammert

Hanging Tough
Abridged: The New Yorker, By: James Surowiecki

In the late nineteen-twenties, two companies—Kellogg and Post—dominated the market for packaged cereal. It was still a relatively new market: ready-to-eat cereal had been around for decades, but Americans didn’t see it as a real alternative to oatmeal or cream of wheat until the twenties. So, when the Depression hit, no one knew what would happen to consumer demand. Post did the predictable thing: it reined in expenses and cut back on advertising. But Kellogg doubled its ad budget, moved aggressively into radio advertising, and heavily pushed its new cereal, Rice Krispies. (Snap, Crackle, and Pop first appeared in the thirties.) By 1933, even as the economy cratered, Kellogg’s profits had risen almost thirty per cent and it had become what it remains today: the industry’s dominant player.

You’d think that everyone would want to emulate Kellogg’s success, but, when hard times hit, most companies end up behaving more like Post. They hunker down, cut spending, and wait for good times to return. They make fewer acquisitions, even though prices are cheaper. They cut advertising budgets. And often they invest less in research and development. They do all this to preserve what they have. But there’s a trade-off: numerous studies have shown that companies that keep spending on acquisition, advertising, and R. & D. during recessions do significantly better than those which make big cuts. In 1927, the economist Roland Vaile found that firms that kept ad spending stable or increased it during the recession of 1921-22 saw their sales hold up significantly better than those which didn’t. A study of advertising during the 1981-82 recession found that sales at firms that increased advertising or held steady grew precipitously in the next three years, compared with only slight increases at firms that had slashed their budgets. And a McKinsey study of the 1990-91 recession found that companies that remained market leaders or became serious challengers during the downturn had increased their acquisition, R. & D., and ad budgets, while companies at the bottom of the pile had reduced them.

One way to read these studies is simply that recessions make the strong stronger and the weak weaker, since the strong can afford to keep investing while the weak have to devote all their energies to staying afloat. But although deep pockets help in a downturn, recessions nonetheless create more opportunity for challengers, not less. When everyone is advertising, for instance, it’s hard to separate yourself from the pack; when ads are scarcer, the returns on investment seem to rise. That may be why during the 1990-91 recession, according to a Bain & Company study, twice as many companies leaped from the bottom of their industries to the top as did so in the years before and after.

Chrysler’s fortunes in the Great Depression are a classic instance of this. Chrysler had been the third player in the U.S. auto industry, behind G.M. and Ford. But early in the downturn it gave a big push to a new brand—Plymouth—targeted at the low end of the market, and by 1933 it had surpassed Ford to become North America’s second-biggest automaker. On a smaller scale, Hyundai has made huge gains in market share this year, thanks to a hefty advertising budget and a guarantee to take back cars from owners who have lost their jobs. Those gains may turn out to be temporary, but in fact the benefits from recession investment are often surprisingly long-lived, with companies maintaining their gains in market share and sales well into economic recovery.

Why, then, are companies so quick to cut back when trouble hits? The answer has something to do with a famous distinction that the economist Frank Knight made between risk and uncertainty. Risk describes a situation where you have a sense of the range and likelihood of possible outcomes. Uncertainty describes a situation where it’s not even clear what might happen, let alone how likely the possible outcomes are. Uncertainty is always a part of business, but in a recession it dominates everything else: no one’s sure how long the downturn will last, how shoppers will react, whether we’ll go back to the way things were before or see permanent changes in consumer behavior. So it’s natural to focus on what you can control: minimizing losses and improving short-term results. And cutting spending is a good way of doing this; a major study, by the Strategic Planning Institute, of corporate behavior during the past thirty years found that reducing ad spending during recessions did improve companies’ return on capital. It also meant, though, that they grew less quickly in the years following recessions than more free-spending competitors did. But for many companies recessions are a time when short-term considerations trump long-term potential.

This is not irrational. It’s true that the uncertainty of recessions creates an opportunity for serious profits, and the historical record is full of companies that made successful gambles in hard times: Kraft introduced Miracle Whip in 1933 and saw it become America’s best-selling dressing in six months; Texas Instruments brought out the transistor radio in the 1954 recession; Apple launched the iPod in 2001. Then again, the record is also full of forgotten companies that gambled and failed. The academics Peter Dickson and Joseph Giglierano have argued that companies have to worry about two kinds of failure: “sinking the boat” (wrecking the company by making a bad bet) or “missing the boat” (letting a great opportunity pass). Today, most companies are far more worried about sinking the boat than about missing it. That’s why the opportunity to do what Kellogg did exists. That’s also why it’s so nerve-racking to try it.