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The only thing worse than being able to say, "my boss won't let me," is having to acknowledge, "my boss will let me."
Over the last fifty years, the amount of headroom offered to white collar workers has dramatically increased. Piece work and time clocks have been replaced with self-policing and keep-your-own-calendar in many organizations. It's entirely possible to do very little, very often, particularly in a big company.
When we say, "my boss won't let me," what we're often saying is, "my boss wants great results, but she's not willing to let me take initiative without responsibility."
I'd be shocked if any smart boss took a different approach. Who's going to give you authority without responsibility?
Just about everyone I meet has far more ability to move up and to make an impact than it's easy or comfortable to admit. Once you do admit it, of course, you have to do something about it.
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Improving Reporting Efficiency and Relevance Posted: 27 Apr 2011 01:38 PM PDT Posted by Sam Crocker This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Hey Mozzers! A quick introduction for those of you who don't know me: my name is Sam Crocker. I work for a global media agency called OMD and am based in London. In addition to our work on (primarily) enterprise SEO clients we also occasionally find time to work on our search and social blog. I am an avid consumer of content in the SEO field and when I'm not doing client work I am constantly working on testing out new ideas, (working on) improving internal processes and reading/sharing SEO and tech stories on Twitter. I am also extremely happy to be writing another post for SEOmoz after a bit of a hiatus. Introduction As some of you may well recall, my old boss and good friend Tom Critchlow featured on White Board Friday back on April 14th talking about How to Make SEO Happen. There should be no doubt about the fact that this is an important factor to all SEO practitioners and consultants because at the end of the day it may be nice to give advice and hide behind issues around how "it's the dev's fault" or other classics that we've all been forced to use (let's be honest, sometimes it is the dev's fault). However, the obvious fact is that we are hired based upon our reputation or our price point, but we are retained based upon our ability to deliver results. The bottom line is this: clients have hired you both to deliver results and communicate those results with them in a manner that they can understand. Reporting is only valuable if the client reads the report (largely dependent on them understanding what they are looking at) and that it is profitable. You could measure the profits of this report in a number of ways - I've even known some to attribute time reporting to "new business" as it is essential to retaining clients. This is not, in my view, the right way to do things. [Note from Tom: I'd like to quickly clarify my position here and note the difference between reporting and reports. My original whiteboard friday uses the word reports but is really talking about strategy & recommendation reports. I believe length strategy reports are not good, but I think monthly reporting is definitely a good thing. After all, as I mention in my WBF communication is the key to solve all problems and reporting is part of that. This is totally my fault for not being clear in my whiteboard friday and I'll likely write a follow-up post soon to clarify. My comment here also explains my thinking a bit more clearly. Sam shares awesome tips here on making reporting actionable and clear but I don't want people thinking I'm against all reporting :). Now, on with the post!]
Step 1: What Are Your Shared Goals
Executives of large businesses don't have time to focus on every individual ranking (nor often do they care) and they certainly don't have time to read about every single link that has been built. More importantly - as Justin very adeptly pointed out on the Raven blog - reporting on link building can make your reports suck. Note- the "status sheet" is in my view one of the most important ways to document who is responsible for what and what the timeline is. This can be incredibly powerful if you are ever dealing with a slightly less motivated client to document the fact that you both have agreed obligations as part of the project and will ensure that you are not always taking orders from the client or grief for "overdue" tasks. It goes both ways and will keep everyone honest.
This report will be more time consuming to pull together but still should not be overcomplicated. The vast majority of these items should be supplied as a means to build trust and provide documentation for their investment (e.g. links built) but do not warrant in-depth analysis. I would advise against supplying the full list of keywords and ranking within the report (e.g. visibility metrics) as they can be confusing and over-complicate the situation. This can always be provided as an appendix.
*KEY POINT - this should not be a written report. Get together with all relevant parties and talk through some slides - it will take less time if you set an agenda and stick to it. Feel free to provide handouts, but do not write out your entire strategy and try to justify every single task. Firstly, it almost always looks more defensive in person and secondly, it's way too easy for your competitor to use if you ever lose an account. The benefits to this in a number of other respects is obvious, however it is a powerful bargaining tool. If you are open with your hourly rate and willing to share the previous month(s) breakdown of hours spent on work a strong argument can be made about how much time as follows. If your rate for your time is £100/hr (and you should know your rate) it is as simple as this:
2.) Automate as much as possible This one also seems fairly obvious but it's something that we've all been guilty of at one point or another. We can't all be Excel wizards and building a template can be costly. This is where you can save a lot of time by making use of an expert to build a template for you. If the template is intuitive enough you pretty much copy and paste data/segments from the Google Analytics API and the rest is auto-generated. 3.) Report less frequently Another obvious opportunity. As I've touched on in a number of instances above there is no reason to report on all the metrics listed in the BLR and Quarterly Report every single month. It is important to be accountable for your work but having too many charts and too much analysis month-on-month will almost certainly lead to your clients no longer reading your reports- in which case everyone loses. 4.) Just report ROI Ranking reports and "new traffic" are great and sometimes necessary for reporting. However, what have we really been hired for? This all comes back to the notion that our audience wants to know what we've been up to, but if you are getting results (the very results that you all agree you have targeted) the rest can be supplied as documentation and potentially never need discussion at all. 5.) Present your report (PPT or Prezi) Another no brainer for me really. How do you feel when you receive an email or document that is 50 pages long? I feel frustrated and overwhelmed. The solution is to set up a monthly phone call (or face-to-face where possible) and present your charts/figures to the client. Send over all of the data a day before the call and make sure they have a serious look through it before you speak on the phone. Biggest Timesavers: In the long run, absolutely nothing has saved me more time on reporting than speaking with the client at the beginning of a project and getting a feel for what they expect or want out of a report. Questions to ask: 7.) Dashboard, Dashboard, Dashboard Pro
I hope you've found this post helpful and would love to hear your thoughts on reporting in the comments. Any other time-saving measures you've taken and care to share with the class would be much appreciated or if you're a bit shy feel free to share them with me on Twitter. |
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Congratulations!!!
Linchpin is the bestselling and (judging from my inbox) biggest impact book I've ever written. Given the extraordinary feedback I've gotten from readers, it encouraged me to figure out ways to spread the idea to more people.
To that end, the paperback comes out today. It's four dollars cheaper, which in the scheme of things isn't a lot, but paperbacks have proven to make a huge difference in widespread adoption (Eat, Pray, Love sold more than 1000% as many copies after they made the shift). I think a new format sends a message about sharability.
For impact, I still prefer the hardcover, but I really like that this new edition means that the Kindle edition will finally be fairly priced by my publisher--less than half the price it used to be.
To celebrate the paperback launch, I took the audio from a speech I did on the road trip last year and decided to make it into a video, adding the latest in snazzy motion graphics.
Things got out of hand. Way out of hand.
Paul, the creator of the graphics, ended up spending four months of his life on the animation, creating perhaps the most elaborate video of its kind. I gave him free rein to do what he liked, and he took it... 700 hours of creation, 1,000 pieces of art... the rendering alone took 27 hours. This project took on a life of its own, and it took blood, sweat, tears and money to finish it. What to do next?
My original thought was to create a DVD of the presentation and offer it for sale for $300. Shipping worldwide included. Each copy comes with live performance rights, so you can present it to groups (but not online).
That's fine for corporations, coaches and organizations, but I wanted to share it with more people. One way is to create a complex system that would require you to submit a receipt for buying the paperback and getting some sort of passkey, etc.
I decided that this was too complex and not trusting enough.
Hence the honor system. The Road Trip video has been broken into four pieces for manageability and we inserted a tiny blurb for the paperback in each one. You can watch the entire video right now, at no extra cost, online. All you have to do is truthfully type in a password (The password is: iboughtthebook) when you watch each part of the video. Here's the link to the first part.
Have fun. And thanks for your attention, your leadership and for doing the work.
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It's impossible to have a coin with only one side. You can't have heads without tails.
Innovation is like that. Initiative is like that. Art is like that.
You can't have success unless you're prepared to have failure.
As soon as you say, "failure is not an option," you've just said, "innovation is not an option."
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