The Pedestal Group

At a networking event last week I met a lovely woman who was excited to hear I train on social media. When I asked why, she said every time she goes to a trade meeting, she’s told she’s missing out by not using (fill in the blank).  First it was LinkedIn, then it was Facebook, then it was Twitter. What’s next?

I have to tell you, I hate hearing this.  Embracing social media for social media’s sake is just not what it is about. You have to understand who your customers are and where they are looking for information.  Then be there. It sounds too simple but that’s how it is.  I know there are stories in every industry about someone making it big through Twitter, or Facebook, or whatever. But I will guarantee for every one of those incredible success stories there are many many times more stories of people who didn’t get anything.  Because their clients weren’t there. They were somewhere else.

So when I’m working with a client, we determine who our best targets are going to be. Not by dollars or some number, but by who they really are. We include gender, family status, children, age, work, hobbies, and anything else we can find out.  It is truly being able to walk around in the customer’s head that gives us the knowledge of where they are looking and what they want to find.

So please – don’t bow down to peer pressure and get into something you don’t care about.  Instead, make sure it is where your customers are before you waste your time!

About 85% of the tech support calls I take start with a reboot. In fact, in IT Crowd, a British comedy, they answer the phone, “Hello IT – did you reboot?”. I know it sounds cliche, but it is true. Why is that, you ask? Simple. When a computer runs, it passes code through the processor, memory, etc. over and over and over. In a system like that things can get hung up and left behind just like for a person. A reboot clears the memory and refreshes the computer. So when you then go to troubleshoot, you are starting from a clean slate.

In the Harvard Business Review this month, they talk about companies allowing people to take naps and forced time off. Having caught an employee napping on the job once I must confess I’m not in favor of it, but I have certainly made people take time off to refresh and bring clarity to their thinking. Kind of a “reboot” for a person. You give yourself a chance to empty out anything that’s stuck or left over and come back refreshed and ready to dive in again.

So, when was the last time you rebooted?

www.printfriendly.com

I’ll admit it – I’m one of those people that reads better on paper.  I know – I know! I need to learn to read on the screen but for longer stuff, there’s nothing better than sitting with a cup of tea on the sofa rather that at my computer.  Enter printfriendly.com!  If you have ever printed a blog post and gotten seven pages of comments you didn’t want to read in the first place or worse, a website that wasn’t optimized for printing so all you got was the side bar, this site is for you!  Simply copy the URL to the big box on the site and click Print Friendly. The site then shows you a page that is ready for print, or you can actually remove even more text before printing so you only print what you wanted to read.  How cool is that?  So while you should still think about it before you print, now you can print without as much waste. Hooray!