29:
Self-improvement is big business, worth $11.6 billion last year, and expected to grow 6.2% per year from 2009 – 2012. If a small percentage of the people (like me) who consume self-help products were successful at whatever it is they wanted help with, the world would be a much more peaceful and harmonious place. But as the world has not changed much in those areas, it stands to reason that the majority of the stuff sold does not work. What a surprise!
In my quest to connect the dots between the spiritual understanding that all things and actions manifest evidence of their effectiveness and benefit, I purchased a new self-help book titled 59 Seconds: Think A Little. Change A Lot. by Richard Wiseman. I highly recommend it simply because it highlights what doesn’t work, and what does based on validated research. What that means is that the book contains really clear and concise things you can do in 59 seconds or less to be more decisive, imaginative, engaged, and happy.
That’s my take. Anyway, what’s one more book gonna hurt?
Popularity: 1% [?]
26:
Facing tough economic times and changing customer behaviors, businesses are forced to do better or fail. There are two keys to success – hiring great people and providing a simply exceptional experience.
Finding friendly, engaging, and intuitive people who will leave customers with favorable impressions is challenging at best. You cannot teach friendliness and intuition. And intuition (defined as the ability to make sound decisions with incomplete information) is a gift some people possess and others simply do not. So its imperative that businesses hone their ability to spot this “soft skill” during the interview process.
Delivering a superior experience, or the ability to consistently provide exceptional service, is a key competitive advantage and effective differentiator. Time magazine recently reported, “The No. 1 marketing strategy for businesses and organizations now and in the future will be directly related to the quality of that organization’s customer service.” 68 % of customers leave because of an attitude of indifference displayed toward the customer, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey.
Service is a critical success factor. It establishes and helps to build relationships and referrals. When customers and prospects are deciding weather to patronize your business they are judging you by three things:
- Are you trustworthy?
- Do you care about me?
- Are you committed to my satisfaction?
And you have a really simple and surefire way of knowing the truth of this claim: just ask yourself if these are the things you care about when you’re buying.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a growing practice with many new technologies that enable businesses to effectively implement strategic relationship development programs. What gets lost are basic underlying values that ensure substantive connections and successful relationship building. Below are some guidelines to successful customer relationship building:
- You do not sell to consumers. You sell to people. Develop and maintain a view of your customers as individual people with individual needs and wants.
- Setup your service interactions to ensure you treat every customer the way you would want to be treated.
- Develop ways to identify and address the unique and specific wants of your customers.
- Listen to your customers. Invite them to tell you what they think. Make it easy for them to do so. And pay attention to what they say.
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Popularity: 1% [?]
14:
While the term “social media” has quickly become a fixture and is often used, it is not always understood. Here is a brief breakdown.
The keyword is “social.” It refers to a place where people interact online, usually organized by groups around common interests. What makes social media “social” is that anyone can post and respond to content. There are presently three main social media categories or types of sites: 1) News; 2) Networks; and 3) User Generated Content.
Social Media Categories:
- Social News: People post and vote or rate news or other content they consider important. StumbleUpon and Digg are popular social news sites.
- Social Networks: People organize into groups along interest lines and communicate with each other with pictures, memos, status updates, email and other applications. Facebook and MySpace are social networks.
- User-Generated Content (UGC): Sites where users can post content and make accessible to the public. Typical UGC formats include comments, ratings, reviews, and other feedback mechanisms. YouTube and Flickr are popular user generated content sites.
So here are highlights on where some social media types overlap the three categories:
- Blogs have features that touch all three of social media categories. Blog content is user generated, may have news value, and is typically viewed by a network of followers. Blogs overlap the social news and UGC categories.
- Twitter is a collection of networks, covering different and varied topics and interests, where users follow each other’s brief updates (or “Tweets”). Twitter overlaps the social news and social network categories.
- RSS, (Really Simple Syndication) allows a person to subscribe to receive new or updated content they are interested in, automatically whenever it is added or updated by the author. Content is made available to subscribers using RSS by creating what is called an “RSS Feed.” RSS overlaps the social network and UGC categories.
Popularity: 1% [?]
01:
May peace be upon us…
May we love ourselves richly…
with bold thoughts,
thoughtful and measured steps,
fearless actions,
and faithful vision.
May we love our children…
with principled direction,
compassionate interaction,
loving responsiveness,
and unconditional acceptance.
May our labors enrich the world…
with passionate initiative,
respectful and attentive collaboration,
and open and receptive issue resolution.
May love fill our souls…
that we may know boundless passion,
that we may swim the open waters of companionship,
that we may walk life’s beaches
hand-in-hand with love.
Happy new year!
Popularity: 2% [?]
28:
As a leading technology solutions consultant and provider to businesses for the past 11 years I have been ahead of the curve in recommending open-source solutions. Enterprises face growing challenges to arming staff with leading edge technology that is easy-to-use promoting rapid adoption, customizable, scalable and delivers immediate cost benefits. Consistently I have found open-source solutions meet these often challenging requirements. The hardest part of getting these solutions implemented has been overcoming the risks associated with deploying new and unproven systems and services.
The concerns are valid, and addressing them always requires detailed and thoughtful implementation strategies. But a new day has come and open-source has arrived. There are now mature open-source solutions for leading enterprise technology and communications requirements including file management, communications, email, CRM, web sites, content and asset management, systems integration and more.
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Popularity: 2% [?]
27:
We have reached a tipping point where our values fail promote human and societal benefits that or goods and services are supposed to serve. This has led to the current state of affairs where marketing occurs in an environment void of integrity. We sell relentlessly and too often without regard for rules of conduct.
Integrity is defined as “adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty.” As part of the marketing process integrity is also a vital core agreement that establishes a foundation for establishing trust, achieving effective communication, and communicating value. Integrity is and has been substantially subverted in competition with the relentless pursuit of profits, by far the leading market value. It is spoken of. It is placed at the forefront of ethical and operational standards. Rules are established to punish unethical behavior. Yet unethical acts occur consistently, and the prevailing values are used to justify those actions. In our present state of affairs as a marketing community, ethics are nothing more than words, text and ideals that are rarely upheld.
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Popularity: 2% [?]
23:
There are two choices men have in any one lifetime. Create things. Or live among and in service to those things that are created. This is a wonderfully simple order that supports life in its unending function – to create. The universe as it exists does nothing but create. Creation is life. And everything that is created dies. In fact it starts dying the instant it comes into existence. This profound fact of existence, that death is a part of life, illustrates a key reality – that there are only two sure things in existence: 1) Death, and 2) Change. Simply stated, everything will die and things as we know them in any instant will change.
We live in a world that continually changes, a world where thoughts, things, and experiences are all continually changing. Our world is not static, and God is not dead and did not leave the world unattended. We live in a living world, with a living omniscient creative intelligent force.
With these two stark realities in tow, we can begin to piece together why our lives seem so unfulfilled and why so many are left out of the immense prosperity enjoyed by the privileged few. The reason for our suffering, both individually and collectively? Fear. Fear and our acceptance of it as a driving force in our thoughts and reasoning. Many great texts and scholars have pointed to fear as a venerable debilitating and compromising force. But what is fear? Fear is defined as both “Extreme reverence or awe, as toward a supreme power.” and “a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined.”
I define fear as our minds response when it cannot do what it does, think and solve problems. This condition is rampant in our lives in light of the previously mentioned realities of death and change. So, since we wake up each day not really knowing if we’ll even make it out of bed, our minds go to work creating conditions it can do its work on. We concentrate our thoughts on, and invent things we can control. We create plans and schedules. We invent beliefs and make agreements to be bound by them. We teach these beliefs as foundation understandings to our children. We spend the overwhelming majority of our precious time and thoughts on organizing and managing our lives functioning in the realm of those beliefs we invent that provide a sense of being in control. And all the while life happens around us with no respect for our choices. While we are locked in the narrow scope of our beliefs, understandings and agreements; some of us are operating beyond the confines of these understandings and daring to dream new things. To create and fashion new designs into new things. And whenever we dare to look into the unknown, using our thoughts as the blueprint for our future reality, our world is changed and we go to work making use of these new realities and manifestations. We revise the rules, our beliefs, so we can cope with our new world.
Fear plays a key role in shaping what we do. And what we do shapes our future. So ultimately we are responsible for finding the balance between embracing and casting aside our fears. We decide our fate, our future with our choices. We are God. Here are some thoughts on how to cope with the unknown in our lives. Seek to understand what is meant by core concepts like eternal life and forgiveness. They provide a foundation for overcoming our fears.
Now is all there is. Eternal life is the endlessly unfolding moment in which we exist. It is each one of us, as we are, in each instant. And forgiveness is granted to us eternally, for in any moment we have the opportunity to choose what we will think and do. Those choices we make in each moment dictate the future. This knowing is the foundation for freedom. This knowing is the evidence that fear of the unknown future is unwarranted. For the future is unknown precisely so we can create it. We have this power, each one of us. And we use it every day without giving it the attention and reverence it warrants. It is the thoughtless use of this great power that creates undesired outcomes and causes suffering.
Seize your power. It is an immense task to challenge all our core beliefs and assume power over our thoughts which dictate our reality. But it is an awesome journey that highlights how truly interdependent we are. We literally need one another to have a shared vision, a shared view if we are to achieve any desired outcome. That is why we can accomplish so much in groups, where we merge our thoughts and desires into a common vision. So the key is to coalesce and create collective visions based on our natural aspirations for peace and prosperity. This is the “brotherhood of man” that is so commonly referred to in theological texts of all faiths.
Ernest Holmes wrote “Find me one person who is for something and against nothing, who is redeemed enough not to condemn others out of the burden of his soul, and I will find another savior, another Jesus, and an exalted human being.
Find me one person who no longer has any fear of the universe, or of God, or of man, or of anything else, and you will have brought to me someone in whose presence we may sit and fear shall vanish as clouds before the sunlight.
Find me someone who has redeemed his own soul, and he shall become my redeemer.
Find me someone who has given all that he has in love, without morbidity, and I will have found the lover of my soul. Is not this true? Why? Because he will have revealed to me the nature of God and proved to me the possibility of all human souls.”
There is an oath we would do well to live by. It reads as follows:
Be fearless in the face of your enemies.
Be brave and upright that God’s love may emanate through you.
Protect the helpless. For they have not faced their fears, and your grace shines the light of awareness upon them.
Do nothing against another.
I am grateful for another day with all of you in it.
Popularity: 3% [?]
07:
My longtime friends Eunika Rogers and Kevin Sipp married on Saturday in a B-E-A-utiful ceremony at the historic Hammonds House museum in Southwest Atlanta.
Eunika and Kevin are two people who have managed to live rich lives. They are driven with intense passion for life and have managed to remain true to the pursuit of their dreams. For that matter, the fact is they dream – and let their dreams be the foundation of their life plans and actions. Too many of us, in my humble opinion, never live this way.
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Popularity: 19% [?]
29:
Our words are important. I like this story as an inspirational reference.
“I got two A’s” the small boy said.
His voice was filled with glee.
His father very bluntly asked,
“Why didn’t you get three?”
“Mom, I’ve got the dishes done,”
The girl called from the door.
Her mother very calmly said,
“Didi you sweep the floor?”
“I mowed the grass,” the tall boy said,
“…and put the mower away.”
His father asked him with a shrug,
“Did you clean off the clay?”
The children in the house next door
seemed happy and content.
The same thing happened over there,
but this is how it went.
“I got two A’s” the small boy said.
His voice was filled with glee.
His father proudly said,
“That’s great! I’m glad you belong to me.”
“Mom, I’ve got the dishes done,”
The girl called from the door.
Her mother smiled and said,
“Each day I love you more.”
“I mowed the grass,” the tall boy said,
“…and put the mower away.”
His father answered with much joy,
“You’ve made my happy day.”
Children grow confident from praise
for things they’re asked to do.
To help them lead a happy life
so much depends on you.
And by the way, a note for you
this works for grownups too.
Popularity: 4% [?]
04:
If the economic downturn has hit big businesses hard then it has hit small businesses harder. In these challenging times it is critical to market according to your unique business requirements. In other words do what works for you – market your way.
Too many of the strategies and trends asserted and supported in marketing media are effective and relevant only for large enterprises. As an example the Forbes 2009 Ad Effectiveness Survey found that Forty-eight percent of marketers said that search engine optimization (SEO) was the best method for generating conversions online. E-mail and e-newsletters was next with forty-six percent. For smaller marketers the leaders get flipped with e-mail being most effective. Published information and recommendations are generally skewed to favor strategy for large enterprises because they pay for most of the research and publications.
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Popularity: 23% [?]
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