Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.- e. e. cummings
Free cups of coffee for voters. (Starbucks.) Free overnight shipping for randomly selected customers. (Zappos.) Free hotel stays (Microtel Inns & Suites).
These are all ways businesses have “surprised and delighted” customers by going well beyond the call of duty with a creative, novel act of generosity that says, “You are having an experience.”
Create a moment that knocks a customer out of their routine, and you instantly build a stronger relationship. You’re also almost guaranteeing that they’re going to pass that story on: “Guess what happened to me today?” Boom! Word of mouth.
“Surprise and delight” isn't a new idea, but I wanted to remind people that creative gifts aren't just a strategy for corporations. I got to thinking about it this week when a friend shared with me the story of a meeting he'd just had with a potential vendor; afterwards, she not only paid for his parking but gave the attendant a kind message to pass on to him as well.
Point is, you don’t have to have a multimillion dollar company to go above and beyond with creative gifts or acts of kindness that tell clients – or even employees, colleagues, friends, or loved ones – that you’re paying attention. In fact, the best way to surprise and delight is to do exactly that: PAY ATTENTION. Seek out small details that you can surprise people with later.
That said, here’s a few of my own techniques that I’ve used to jog people from the “business as usual” frame of mind that gets in the way of making true connections. [Click 'more' to read them!] Read more →
"Genuine confidence is what launches you out of bed in the morning, and through your day with a spring in your step." – Jim Collins
People constantly ask me, “What do I have to offer?” I especially hear this from young people who are looking to approach more senior players. But among both young and old, there are so many people who’ve yet to discover their unique selling proposition (USP) – that “secret sauce” that can open doors to new contacts. We all have one, sometimes many. It’s up to each of us to identify and develop it.
Your USP might be an expertise, a hobby, or even an interest or passion for a particular cause. Here’s one suggestion to build your reputation around that USP: Start a club or organization.
All clubs are based on common interests. Members are united by a similar job, philosophy, hobby, neighborhood, or simply because they are the same race, religion, or generation. They are bound by a common proposition that is unique to them. They have, in other words, a reason to hang out together.
You can take your own distinctive UPS and then take the extra step that most people don’t. Start an organization. And invite those you want to meet to join you. Gaining members will be easy. Like most clubs, it starts with your group of friends, who then select their own friends. Over time, those people will bring in even more new and intriguing people.
For you to get to know the people who can make you successful, they've got to want to get to know you. And to make that happen, you’ve got to USE YOUR CURRENCY -- your unique capacity to help somebody else fulfill their mission or vision of themselves in some way. Defining that currency is the second step in creating a solid Relationship Action Plan.
If you, like many people, don’t instantly know what your currency is and want help finding it, the best way to get started is to dig deep and find out what they need to be more successful. But you also need to take a good look at yourself to ask: How can I help? What do I have to offer?
Take a crack at these questions to get yourself started:
1. What things do you say about yourself and your interests that excite or intrigue people you meet?
2. When did you help make someone else a success at something?
3. Of the times you were able to give, which worked the best and which felt the best?
4. How can you purposely incorporate those currencies into your sales and networking plans?
Bonus challenge: Keep in mind that currency encompasses the small stuff, too. So today, find time to do at least one of these three:
1. Give a colleague a genuine compliment.
2. Friend someone you've lost contact with on LinkedIn or Facebook.
3. Thank someone publicly.
Tell me how it goes!
For more info about the Relationship Masters Academy, visit the FG site.
When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news. - Charles Anderson Dana
You must manage your own media. Yes, a PR firm can help you generate those contacts, but early in your career you won’t need them and you probably won’t be able to afford them.
Who better than you to tell your story with credibility and passion? Start making calls to the reporters who cover your industry. Have lunch with them. Create and send press releases. Remember, media folks need you as much as you need them. They may not need your exact story at the exact time you want, but with a little stick-to-itiveness, they’ll come around.
Here are 10 tips to help you break a big story – yours!
1. Know the Media Landscape
Nothing infuriates reporters and editors more, I’m told, than to get a pitch from someone who clearly has no idea what their publication is about or who their audience is. So spend time reading their articles, figuring out what they cover, and what kinds of stories their publications like to run. Read more →
As a follow up to last week’s post on making yourself indispensible to employers, here are some great tips from Frances Cole Jones, whose book The Wow Factor is all about finding ways to surprise and delight clients, colleagues, and customers at every turn.
3 Ways to Create Career-Catapulting Competitive Edge
By Frances Cole Jones
If you’ve been laid off - or want to ensure you won’t be;
If you just graduated and can’t land your first job;
If you want to position yourself for promotion;
You need The Wow Factor - that special something that sets you apart from the crowd.
To get you started, here's one new habit, one piece of vital information, and one thing you can do today to wow tomorrow.
One Habit to Practice: Actively Create Camaraderie While it may seem a bit pedantic, it’s often helpful to think through three potential topics for small talk prior to your arrival at a meeting, a lunch, or a job interview. In my experience it’s best to choose from a fairly broad range of possibilities: say, local sports, current movies, and—depending on the crowd—nearby restaurants or attractions that you have researched. What this does is smooth over transitional moments such as waiting for the last meeting participant to arrive, for the waiter to bring your menus, or for the elevator when you’re ready to leave—all of which can be awkward if silent, or potentially deal-breaking if the topic you choose at random lands badly with your listeners.
One Piece of Information to Know: The Art of Interrupting Most of us have a few tactics for what to do when we’re interrupted. We’re less confident, however, when it comes to interrupting others—though this can be necessary if you’re running a meeting that’s gone off track, or are overseeing a team that’s gotten into a wrangle. Given this, here are a few pointers:
The difficulty begins when many of us interject, “May I interrupt you?” The trouble with this particular choice is that it doesn’t carry the necessary heft to stop the person in their tracks. Consequently, I’d ask you to begin by saying, “I’m going to interrupt you.” – a choice which ensures your control of the remainder of the conversation.
After that, you might go on to say, “This sounds like an important idea, but I don’t know that everyone here needs to be in on the discussion—can you and I set another time to discuss it?” Or, “I don’t know that that level of detail is quite required here, but maybe you can follow up with Jane tomorrow?” (Throughout, your physicality and tone are going to matter a lot: my request is that you sound both firm and encouraging.)
One Action Step to Take: Bypass Bureaucracy We all know the frustration of listening to a pre-recorded voice telling us to “Press or say one for sales; press or say two for technical support…” Similarly, we’ve all had the experience of being told, “No, I’m afraid he’s not available this week. May I take another message?”
Here how to bypass this bureaucracy: If you are dealing with an automated system, regardless of the situation, the best choice to make if you want to speak to a human being is to press the button that mentions sales as I guarantee they will have staffed the section that’s in charge of taking your money. Once you have a person on the phone, introduce yourself and ask him or her their name. Then explain the situation you’re trying to resolve and ask how they would suggest you move forward. When they say you need to call another number, request both that they perform the transfer and that they stay on the line until there is an actual third person on the phone.
If you are trying to resolve a situation via the web, and have sent emails to their suggested customer service mailbox to no avail, check around on the site for the contact information for their public relations or press office. At this point, I don’t recommend sending them an email, as that’s too easy to ignore, but giving them a call. Again, I guarantee this is one area of the company that will be staffed with living, breathing people, as maintaining their public image is likely a priority. Once you have someone on the phone, the same procedures apply: introduce yourself, get his or her name, explain your situation and ask how best to proceed.
So whether you’re starting out, starting over – or starting to think you’re ready for a bigger piece of the pie-- I guarantee implementing these three tools will help ensure your wow factor.
Media manager and trainer Frances Cole Jones is the author of The Wow Factor - check her out!
Last week’s “Three Steps to Kick Social Anxiety” broke traffic records here. No doubt about it: Meeting new people puts us out of our comfort zone! You guys had a lot to say about public speaking. In fact, there were so many good tips in the comments, many from professional coaches, that I’ve used them to create this new post. (Most of the responses are edited down, rather than verbatim.) Thanks all for the great input!
1. Practice, practice and practice. Most nerves develop when we think we won’t come across as credible to our audience. The more you practice, the more comfortable you will be with your program, the less nervous you will be. Janet Boulter
2. Home field advantage: Examine your current affiliations and see if there is a group that you are very comfortable in and start speaking there first. Josh Phanco
3. Control for quality: Focus more on content and less on delivery. Chad Brue
4. Do your wee ones a favor: Parents can help their kids grow up with comfort in public speaking by looking for and creating opportunities. Church, scouting, various clubs, drama, debate all can give these opportunities. Or you can create them in your own family and in gatherings with friends and relatives, where children are given experiences to contribute, to share a thought, give a little speech, act in a skit, etc. (An opportunity for practice for you as well!) Jeff Lindsay
5. Put your audience first. It's not about you, it's about them - so quit your worrying and focus on how your speech is going to improve their lives, even just a little. (NOTE: The community spoke! I originally included a reader's recommendation of the beta blocker Propranolol in this list, but have removed it after taking to heart the concern of many KF.com readers.)
6. Ipod to the rescue: Listen to a few kick ass songs to get you into your groove. If your body isn’t moving and you’re not singing… then find better songs. Matt
7. Remember the Force: See yourself as connected to everyone and everything. Martial Arts teaches students that all is one. That means when you address that “scary sea of faces” you should see them as exactly the same as you, because guess what – they are! David Portney
8. Mental buddy-up: Imagine yourself some time in the future, hugging the people in the crowd, as though they were long lost family. Or imagine them after the talk, approaching you and telling you how positively the message affected them.
9. Share the love: Just before walking to the podium, look into the eyes of as many people in the room as you can. Project every ounce of your being into the thought that they are going to love your message. (And make sure your content delivers on that promise!)
10. Use a positive mantra. Rather than thinking negative thoughts like “don’t screw up” or “what if I forget what I want to say?”repeat a positive mantra as a means of boosting confidence and focusing on the audience. Find a mantra that is personally meaningful and believable. It could be a song title (Aretha Franklin’s “RESPECT” comes to mind), a line from a poem or anything that makes you feel powerful and confident. And it has to be strong enough to drown out the negative, “Joy-Sucker” voice in your head that undermines their confidence and makes you less able to convey their knowledge and experience to the audience. My personal mantra is “You go, girl!” (accompanied by a mental fist in the air). Gilda Bonanno
Take a minute to develop your personal pre-speech mantra - and share it here!
Who else has been following the Murphy-Goode Winery contest? Today they’re announcing the winner of their six-month “Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent” dream job. The campaign is a terrific example of how social media marketing can generate tremendous buzz, brand loyalty, and publicity – and even some controversy. Were you a fan of the campaign - or the wine?
Wrinkles aside, I like the campaign so much I’m considering something similar for my next hire.
Social media consultants and firms, send proposals to my managing editor, sgrace-at-ferrazzigreenlight-dot-com: How can we adapt Murphy-Goode’s contest to find a new community manager/brand ambassador for Keith Ferrazzi and the power of Relationships?
The book tour has given me a great opportunity to learn how to use Twitter, and I must say – I like it. It offers a whole new way to communicate and integrates pretty well with my frenetic pace. (More on that in another post... the 24/7 constant stream can also be exhausting!)
Here's a list of some of the top lessons and tips I've picked up over the couple months of heavy use. My community manager Ryan has been the one to help get me set up on all the best apps, and that's SO IMPORTANT to making Twittering, especially on the tour when I'm rarely at a computer, possible.
1. First of all, what I've noticed about content: The 140 character restriction DOES MATTER! It significantly changes the style and content of everyone’s communication. It also means that twitter is great for soliciting questions, but only OK for getting answers. Many people can’t express their thoughts in 140 characters, so answers lack any teeth. Facebook is PHENOMENAL for getting answers to questions.
2. Hashtags have been most useful during events, to create adhoc groups and spontaneous meetups. Using a hashtag over an extended period of time doesn’t seem to work so well since people have to constantly remember to tag their Tweets. However, during an event, the hashtag is on everyone’s mind and allows people to have a conversation with the other participants in the event.
3. Use Ubertwitter for Blackberry – it’s better than Twitterberry
4. Do NOT send all your tweets out over FB - there's no better way to irritate your FB crowd quickly. If you install the Selective Twitter app in Facebook, you can simply put #fb at the end of a Tweet and it automatically updates your Facebook account. Great way to have precise control over your updates without any hassle.
5. Seesmic Desktop is the best desktop client for Twitter, according to Ryan.
6. Twitter is a great way to ping people on the fly and (bonus!) you get to give them props for the whole world to see using @replies - a small act of generosity and one that really builds the conversation.
7. Insightful comments and relevant links as well as questions are the most likely to get retweeted
8. To be truly engaged, tweet an average of once per hour (10-16 tweets) everyday to stay on people’s radar; use @replies make it a conversation.
9. The quality of your tweets is paramount, assuming you're tweeting the minimum recommended quantity. Actually, it's always paramount.
10. Use twitter to solicit questions from people. (i.e. – “I’m interviewing David Allen in a few minutes. What questions should I ask him?”) This works so well because questions are typically short and sweet. It’s not hard for people to write good questions in 140 characters.
I'd love for more tips from all of you - I guess my most ultimate insight is that Twitter is a learning process for everyone, all the time!
I'm working on switching my Facebook activity over to a fan page, where there's no cap on the number of friends. Thanks to the tour, I would have busted through the 5K limit on a regular page. Please connect with me on the new page!
So when I was at FB for another meeting yesterday, I got their advice on the most successful fan pages -- they mentioned Michael Phelps as a model for success. Here was their advice - and it's equally applicable to regular FB pages too. Think of your friend circle as an audience to be entertained. That'll keep you from getting the FB version of a cane pulling you offstage - them filtering you out of their newsfeed.
1. Build the conversation first; sell second or third.
In other words, be yourself and build your personal brand and collateral by being generous with content and openness before asking for anything. "Be yourself" and interact with you audience for a good while to build your rep before asking for or advertising anything.
2. Make sure the page strongly conveys your individual voice.
This is pretty self-explanatory, but make sure the page screams YOU. Spend time there being yourself.
3. Post compelling content.
Metrics show that fans like photo and video best. (And btw, tbe best and easier metric for how you're doing with content is in the number of comments you get.) The images should be complimented by interesting, uniquely-you status updates.
On Day 28 of Keith's WGYB Road Show, Carlos del Rio from www.agillian.com discusses his top 3 rules as a social media marketer. You can read a summary of his points on social media excellence after the jump.
Free cups of coffee for voters. (Starbucks.) Free overnight shipping for randomly selected customers. (Zappos.) Free hotel stays (Microtel Inns & Suites).
"Genuine confidence is what launches you out of bed in the morning, and through your day with a spring in your step." – Jim Collins
Today's Challenge: How Can I Help?
If you’ve been laid off - or want to ensure you won’t be;
Last week’s “
Who else has been following the 
The book tour has given me a great opportunity to learn how to use 
