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luni, 25 februarie 2013

Working Together to Reignite America's Economic Engine

Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, February 25, 2013

Working Together to Reignite America's Economic Engine

In a meeting with governors from across the country today at the White House, President Obama stressed the need for bipartisan cooperation, and pressed the leaders in attendance to work together with their partners in Washington to put the focus back on the next generation, rather than the next election.

President Barack Obama delivers remarks and participates in a Q&A during a meeting with the National Governors Association (NGA) in the State Dining Room of the White House, Feb. 25, 2013 (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

How to Deal with Challenging Clients

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 05:25 PM PST

Posted by CraigBradford

If you’re a consultant, you may not realise it, but a large (and difficult) part of your job is to manage people’s attitudes and behaviours. This task is made even more difficult because it is usually most apparent when clients are unhappy or disagree with you. Even the best consultants will have to deal with challenging clients at some point in their career. I want to share some of the things I’ve learnt from my experience so far as a consultant.

I firmly believe that when it comes to keeping clients happy, prevention is better than a cure. Most of the tips I’ve shared look at how to prevent clients from ever becoming a problem, but I also cover some tips to help resolve the problem as quickly as possible if things do go wrong.

1. Communication solves all problems

At Distilled, we have a saying that communication solves all problems. Over the years, I’ve found this to be true. If the problem can’t be solved by communication, it can almost always have been prevented by it. I don’t mean to recommend phoning your client "once a month" as standard, because good communication is a frequent a mix of formal and informal subjects. Don’t just call your clients regarding work; call them on a Monday to see how their weekend was and on a Friday to wish them a good weekend. These little bits of extra effort can make a big difference in the lifetime of a client relationship. As a general rule, I like to speak to my clients at least twice per week and meet face-to-face at least once-per month if possible.

If you have clients abroad, speaking frequently might not always possible, but even so, you should still make the effort -- especially if they are a long standing client. For example, I’ve just spent the last two weeks in Cape Town visiting one of my clients. Obviously South Africa is a long way to go, but we’ve been working together for quite some time, and the value we both got from finally meeting face-to-face was invaluable. Lots of the consultants at Distilled have success stories that are sometimes directly related to a turning point in a client relationship as a result of taking them for a beer and getting out of the office to an environment where you can both relax and talk off the record. In general, the more communication, the better. It may feel strange at first, but you can always find an excuse to call a client.

2. Have a genuine care for the success of the business

Communication is closely related to my next point, because care generally comes as a result of regular communication and getting close to a client. If you speak to someone two or three times a week, you get to really know them -- not just from a client point of view but what they like, what motivates or demotivates them, and even what they’re up to at the weekend. Hopefully the result of that is that you really want them to do well, and that the success of the business means more that just a job to you. You’ll enjoy your job a lot more if you genuinely care about the success of the business as much as the client does. Anyone that’s been in SEO for a while will know that it’s often not a 9-5 job; quite often, it’s evenings and weekends. Unless you really care, you’ll start to resent working with that client. Reaching this point in a client relationship is invaluable. Let me explain a bit further.

There are always going to be ups and downs with clients, and in general clients, will react in two ways to bad news. They either get angry, shout and scream (usually via email), or say it’s entirely your fault. The second reaction is to pick up the phone and talk about how it can be resolved. If your client knows that you genuinely care about the business, you’re more likely to get the second reaction. It means they are more likely to skip the shouting and pointing fingers part and start trying to find solutions to the problem. They know they don’t need to tell you how bad it is because you’ll also feel the same. Getting to this stage of honesty with a client is rare, but it’s a great place to be. This is what turns retainers into lifetime clients and testimonials.

3. If I do this, will you be happy?

You may recognise the following scenario: you get to the end of the month, you’re happy with the work you’ve delivered, you send the monthly report, and the client is disappointed. While this is a bit annoying, it’s easy to stop it from happening again. At the start of every month, create a plan of what you expect to get finished that month, show it to the client, and ask them, “If I deliver all of the things on this list by the end of the month, will you be happy?” If the answer is no, you have a bigger problem. If the answer is yes, then as long as you deliver what you said you would by the time you said, then it's less likely they'll be disappointed. As a side note, the things you say you will deliver should never be results. Only promise things like documents and meetings, and never promise results or outcomes as they are outside of our control and you’re likely setting yourself up for disaster.

4. Document everything

One of the most basic things you should do as a consultant is keep a record of all conversations. After every meeting or phone call, follow up with an email to the client and summarise the main points of the meeting. This is a pretty thankless task 99% of the time, but it can be your most important piece of evidence should the clients record of events ever be different to yours.

5. Never go above your contact

Another common problem you may run into as a consultant is struggling to get things done on the client side. This could be rolling out changes to the site, getting more budget, or just getting some budget in the first place. Whatever it is you are struggling to get done, never try to go above your point of contact to their superior. Not only does this come across as bad manners, it makes your main point of contact look bad to their management. Don’t forget, one of your roles as a consultant is to make your point of contact look good, not the opposite.

6. Provide useful and tailored monthly reports

Let’s be honest -- writing monthly reports isn’t fun, and it’s made even worse by the fact that after you spend time writing them, they often don’t get read. However, they’re very important as part of the prevention phase. It’s even more important the closer you are to your client. Even if you speak to your client regularly, you still need to send a summary of what you’ve done every month, as well as the results. Put simply, if you don’t send reports, your clients will forget what value you added that month. For example, I’ve been in the scenario in the past where a client sent me an angry email and questioned the results from that month; I pulled up analytics to show that things were actually going very well. His response was, “Wow, that’s amazing, I had no idea we were doing so well. Unless you constantly remind me that we’re doing well, I’ll continue to moan at you.”

That’s pretty much a direct quote (you know who you are).

He was right; I fell into the trap of thinking that because I spoke to them most days, I didn’t need to send a report. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Use reports to show what you did, what the results were, and get sign off on the next month's activity. Writing reports also helps to keep you accountable for your own work. By writing at the start of the month what you plan to do and showing it to the client, you’re more likely to get that work completed if you know that you’re going to review it at the end of the month with the client.

7. First mover advantage

Imagine the situation: you go into the office on Monday, only to find your client has dropped for all keywords. What do you do? Tell everyone that if anyone calls, you’re not in? Flee the country? No -- you need to step up and call the client before they call you. If you don’t call and try to fix it before the client notices, you’ll end up with an angry client for two reasons: first, because of the drop, and second, they pay you to notice when things go wrong and they noticed (in their eyes) before you did. Always use the first mover advantage and call the client to let them know. It’s not going to be easy, and they might shout and scream, but they’ll appreciate that you noticed it straight away. Tell them the situation and that you already have the team working to find out the cause and find a solution.

The second part of the post focuses on finding a cure when things do go wrong, despite your best attempts to prevent that happening. For the purpose of this post, let’s assume you’ve received an email from an unhappy client, and they’re threatening to leave; let’s also pretend it’s an unjustified complaint, meaning you genuinely think you have provided value and there’s just a misunderstanding. Here are a few tips that have worked for me in the past in resolving the problem:

1. You can’t win an argument

I’ve taken this from How To Win Friends And Influence People, but I’ve found it to be true through life in general, so it stuck with me when I read the book. It's always my first tip in resolving a conflict with a client. Don’t argue, because you’ll never win and even if you do prove the client wrong, you’ll lose the contract as a result. As Dale Carnegie puts it in the book:

“Why prove to a man he is wrong? Is that going to make him like you? Why not let him save face? He didn’t ask you for your opinion. He didn’t want it. Why argue with him? Always avoid the acute angle.”

Does that mean you need to let clients say whatever they like and walk all over you? Of course not, but you do need to help them see your point of view, not force them to see it otherwise you’ll just get resistance. I typically start with accepting it’s my fault in some way or another. This doesn’t need to mean it’s actually your fault; I usually word it as my fault for not explaining something clearly, or presenting information in an ambiguous way that was easy to misunderstand. Doing so helps to put the client at ease. Clients like to feel that they call the shots, and it makes them more willing to listen to your next point, which hopefully is the answer.

2. Delivery method

In the majority of cases, clients will deliver bad news and complains via email. Regardless of how nasty or challenging a client may seem, people generally don’t like conflict via the phone, and even less in person. Use this to your advantage. It’s too easy to fire off a counter aggressive email rather than pick up the phone; resist the urge to reply by email and try to arrange a meeting instead. I like to respond with something immediately to acknowledge that I’ve received their email but make it clear that there’s been a misunderstanding and that email probably isn’t the best medium to explain. In order of preference, try to respond by:

A face-to-face meeting
Skype, G+ hangout, or something that you can see the person’s face on
A phone call
An email

If you are able to arrange a meeting or a phone call, you’ll dramatically increase your chances of coming out with a success story than trying to resolve via email. If you do manage to get a meeting or a phone call, ensure you have your ducks in a row and responses to all the questions the client is likely to have. To help with this, something I’ve found useful is to actually write out an email like you would have responded, but don’t actually send the email. I’ve found this useful in working out exactly what I want to say and to be sure I have all the answers to their questions in a way that makes sense.

3. Disarming honesty

If you’ve messed up, admit it. Nothing says "I’m an idiot" and gets clients angry like coming back with excuses and trying to pretend that it’s not that bad. If you made a mistake, or even if the results just aren’t as good as you were expecting, admit it, your client will appreciate that you’re in this thing together it adds to the genuine care in the business as well if you’re first to go to the client and say you’re disappointed with the results. Otherwise, you’ll have a client that thinks he’s going mad because you see value that they don’t.

4. Know when to say goodbye

Finally, if none of the above is helpful, know when it’s time to say goodbye. Not all client engagements will work out the way you want them to, but it’s important to breakup on good terms. Even if you’re not the right solution for them at the moment, you could be at some point in the future, so take care not to burn your bridges. You never know where your client could end up working in the future.

I hope you’ve found my tips useful. All relationships are diverse, but I’d be interested to hear about any tips you have for dealing with challenging clients. Thanks to Caitlin Krumdieck for letting me pick her brain about previous Distilled clients and adding to the ideas above. Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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Seth's Blog : Will you choose to do it live?

Will you choose to do it live?

The answer isn't obvious, and it's certainly not for every career or every brand. I spend a lot of time wrestling with this very question.

Let's start with live music, the most familiar example of 'live':

The live performance isn't guaranteed: it might not work, the performance might be sub-par
It costs more, often a lot more, to attend
It only happens when the creator decides to make it available
The audience is part of the process, in many ways co-creating the work
Amplified live music always lower fidelity than the album

Pre-recorded music is perhaps 500 times more popular than live music, for these and other reasons. Five hundred!

The Grateful Dead made live music. Steely Dan didn't. The Beatles started very much with live but ended up exclusively with polished, packaged perfection.

Of course, live music is more likely to create something that we talk about, years later. Because it's scarce and risky.

The questions that are asked and the decisions you make to produce a fabulous live interaction have very little to do with the quality concerns and allocations you'll make to produce something that scales and lasts. Confusing the two just frustrates all involved.

When you buy an HP printer, you're buying a product, an industrialized artifact. Visit the Apple Store, and suddenly there's a live element—one bad genius can ruin your entire experience. Zappos figured out how to turn online shoe-buying into a live performance by encouraging people to call and interact. Twitter is live, an online PDF is not. Every day this blog flies without a net, typos and all.

Consultants do most of their best work live (asking questions, innovating answers) while novelists virtually never do their work live.

For the creator, live carries more than a whiff of danger. For the perfectionist, the luxury of editing and polishing is magical. And for the consumer, the reliability and sheen of the pre-tested product provides a solace that she just can't get from the dangerous, risky business of consuming it live.

Some non-profits spend their time seeking out the tested, perfect scalable solution--not live. Others do their work in the moment, in the field, live.

The fork in the road is right here. Taking your work live is energizing, invigorating and insanely risky. You give up the legacy of the backlist, the scalability of inventory and the assurance of editing. It's an entirely different way of being in the world. Scale and impact can certainly come from creating your best work and sharing it in a reliable way. On the other hand, if you're going to be live, then yes, do it live.

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duminică, 24 februarie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

EU Doesn't Like Its Forecasts, So It Removes Them From Its Site
Quadrocopter Pole Acrobatics
Italians Head to Voting Booths, Election Ends 9:00AM EST Monday; Surge for Grillo and "The Apathy Factor" Will Doom Bersani Coalition

EU Doesn't Like Its Forecasts, So It Removes Them From Its Site

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 08:24 PM PST

With thanks to Yogi Berra, making predictions is hard, especially about the future. And with constantly revised forecasts for the EU, the European Commission decides the safe safe thing to do is Eliminate Forecasts for 2015.

Via Google Translate from El Economista ...

This morning you could see the data for 2012, 2103, 2014 and 2015, but now can only see the figures from 2011 to 2014 and there is no trace of the catastrophic 2015 numbers (see the screenshots attached below).

Although there is no official communication in one way or another, hypothetically could be a real blunder produced after being released by mistake, or any type of computer failure, a former forecasts for 2012 under the 2015 column.'s say, that would have mistakenly announced as 2015 forecast estimates released earlier this year to last year.

Forecasts of Discord

Those European Commission forecasts envisage a general improvement in economic scenario for 2014. However, estimates for 2015, this morning hidden behind an interactive graphic , pointed for a few hours, before being erased-a brutal relapse. In fact, Germany would grow 2% in 2014 to only 0.8% in 2015, would UK from 1.9% to 0.3%, France 1.2% and Spain 0.2% from 0.8% to -1.4%.

Sooner or Later

El Economista has some interesting snapshots of the removed estimates. To be completely fair, the original posting may have been a simple mistake.

Regardless, I suggest the EU forecast for 2014 is too optimistic.

Will the EU 2014 estimates be revised lower as well? If not soon, then expect revisions later, with France leading the way lower.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Quadrocopter Pole Acrobatics

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 07:02 PM PST

Here is an interesting video that came my way via reader "Nino". It's a look at some rather amazing technology that is developing right now, and I suspect very few are aware of it.

Link if video does not play: Quadrocopter Pole Acrobatics

The video shows a quadrocopter capable of dynamically balancing an inverted pendulum (a stick weighted at the bottom), but also flipping the stick to another quadrocopter that determines the optimal position to catch it without losing balance.

Technology marches on whether anyone is aware or not. People do become aware as markets for technology develop.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Italians Head to Voting Booths, Election Ends 9:00AM EST Monday; Surge for Grillo and "The Apathy Factor" Will Doom Bersani Coalition

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 10:58 AM PST

Voting booths are open in Italy though 3:00PM Monday (9:00AM EST). Exit polls will trickle in soon after but early exit polls could be misleading. If the result is close we may not know for over a day.

The Wall Street Journal offers this Italian Election Guide.

Italian voters can cast ballots Sunday and until 0900 ET Monday, after which exit polls will provide quick but approximate insight into the probable result of the election.

The center-left coalition led by Democratic Left leader Pier Luigi Bersani was five percentage points ahead of Silvio Berlusconi's center-right coalition according to the average of polls before a blackout on such surveys kicked in two weeks ago, giving it clear front-runner status.

Exit polls in 2006 and 2008 underestimated votes cast for Mr. Berlusconi, but unless Italy's 51 million eligible voters shifted dramatically in recent days, Mr. Bersani should – even with fewer than a third of the ballots cast – win a plurality, meaning his coalition will be awarded a majority of seats in the 630-seat lower legislative chamber.

Shift Has Taken Place

The Journal says "unless Italy's 51 million eligible voters shifted dramatically in recent days, Mr. Bersani should win a plurality."

I suggest such a shift has taken place. The open question regards turnout and apathy, not a shift, per se.

Loser's Penalty

In the Chamber (the lower House of parliament) the party with the largest plurality in the national vote gets a majority (54%) of the seats. In the Senate (the upper chamber of parliament) each of Italy's 17 regions operate independently. The winner of each region gets a majority (55%) of the region's seats.

There are 315 seats in the Senate. Lombardy, Italy's largest region gets 49 seats and the winner will take 27 seats (55%). The other parties will split the remaining 22. Second place may only get 10.

The Journal sums it up this way.

"If Mr. Bersani wins all 17 regions, his coalition will have 178 seats and a commanding upper-house majority. However, if he loses Lombardy, the most populuous region, he will have only 162 seats. If he wins Lombardy but loses Veneto – a near certainty given polling trends – and also loses Sicily – to Mr. Grillo rather than Mr. Berlusconi – the center-left will have 159 Senate seats, a razor-thin majority."

Not So Fast

I am not convinced Bersani wins the Chamber, let alone the Senate. Some 22-25% of Italians were undecided in the election polls before blackout two weeks ago. Since then, I suggest (based on crowd turnout and social media comments) that there has been a surge for Beppe Grillio and Silvio Berlusconi.

The last election polls before the blackout look like this:

Bersani center-left 34.5%
Berlusconi center-right 29%
Beppe Grillo's Five-Star Movement 19%
Monti Civic Choice 12%.

Given the number of undecided voters, Bersani can easily drop 3% or more (and I suspect more). If Berlusconi and/or Grillo gets a huge percent of the undecided votes, Bersani can easily drop to second or even third place.

Senate Coalition Unlikely

Monti is a lost cause and I doubt he gets more than 10%, making a Senate coalition unlikely if not impossible.

I commented on the possibility of a win by Berlusconi or Grillo in Germany Warns Against "Silvio the Savior" (And That May Backfire); Fake Horse Race Odds Get Around Blackouts.

Reader "AC" who is from Italy but now lives in France writes ...

Hi Mish

After a hung parliament, the next most likely outcome may very well be the Five Star Movement (M5S) getting an absolute majority. Rage against the political class is extremely high in Italy, everything that looks "new" is getting votes. Grillo was able to catch the sentiment shift with extremely populist proposals even though his economic program is quite incoherent if not blatantly preposterous.

Grillo support comes from the youngest part of the population.

Undecided voters may not vote at all (in Italy you do not have to register to have right to vote, you are registered by default) or they will probably shift massively to Grillo. The outcome will depend on whether the undecideds stay home.

How Grillo's parliament members will react as newly elected officials is a real unknown. Grillo himself will not be in the Parliament, and his party will be quite young. None of them have much political experience, even not in smaller city councils.

What they will do? How they will react? Nobody knows. That's the most "fascinating" thing of M5S, completely new people of a completely new party managed in a completely new way. Grillo and his candidates never did a single minute of TV interview during the whole campaign. They decided to ignore completely TV (but TV has not completely ignored them). This also is completely new, probably new in the modern world.

I do not think Berlusconi will be able to win this time. He has definitely lost a part of his voters, those that expected from him to keep his past promises.

The hung parliament is the most likely outcome, as I said months ago, and I do not even think that Bersani and Monti together will have majority.

Last but not least: Monti has declared yesterday that Merkel was not comfortable with Bersani as Prime Minister, but Merkel officially denied the minute after. Really a strange declaration from a man like Monti that made of international credibility its main "value proposition".

Regards

AC

The Apathy Factor

I expect a surge of voter enthusiasm for Grillo that will take votes away from Bersani and Berlusconi. Somewhat paradoxically, I also expect a surge in apathy where voters stay home.

The apathy I refer to is not on the Grillo or Berlusconi side, but apathy for Bersani and Monti. Certainly the campaign by Monti is anemic. Thus, unless there is a late surge of energy for Bersani (and I highly doubt there is), Bersani is going to come up short.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Seth's Blog : Understanding internet genius

Understanding internet genius

The media has changed, forever, and of course that means that what it takes to be labeled a genius has changed as well.

Here's a page I built about Joni Mitchell and three people who have made an impact in the post-LP interactive, connection economy.

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Seth's Blog : Real-time news is neither

Real-time news is neither

The closer you get to the event itself, the more it costs to find out what's going on. A week or a month or a year after the fact, the truth (or as close as we can get) is nearly free. Finding out that same truth mere seconds after it happens is costly indeed.

Want to know what the crime rate in Scarsdale was like on January 1? You can look that up instantly. Want to know what it was three seconds ago? A lot more difficult.

Mike Bloomberg became the richest man in New York by selling traders just fifteen seconds head start on the data they needed. Fifteen seconds costs thousands of dollars a month per trader. But in most cases, what we get online is not actually in real-time and it's not news, either.

Getting ever closer to the first moment is expensive in other ways. It might cost you in boredom, because watching an entire event just to see the good parts takes time, particularly if there's no guarantee that there will even be good parts.

It might cost you in filtering, because the less you're willing to wait, the more likely it is that you'll see news that's incorrect, out of context or not nearly as valuable as it appears.

When journalists, analysts and pundits are all racing to bring you the 'news' first, you get less actual news and more reflexive noise. Go watch an hour of cable news from a year ago... what were they yelling about that we actually care about today?

And, it turns out, the five minute head start you got from watching that news live has no real value to make up for all the costs that go with it.

On the other hand, if you can figure out how to bring actual, interesting, useful breaking 'news' to those that will pay for it, you can provide quite a profitable and beloved service.

In the last ten years we've redefined breaking news from "happened yesterday" to "happened less than fifteen seconds ago." The next order of magnitude will be prohibitively expensive and (most of the time) not particularly useful. Better, I think, to hustle in the other direction and figure out how to benefit from well-understood truth instead of fast and fresh rumor.

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luni, 25 februarie 2013

Working Together to Reignite America's Economic Engine

How to Deal with Challenging Clients

How to Deal with Challenging Clients

1. Communication solves all problems

2. Have a genuine care for the success of the business

3. If I do this, will you be happy?

4. Document everything

5. Never go above your contact

6. Provide useful and tailored monthly reports

7. First mover advantage

1. You can’t win an argument

2. Delivery method

3. Disarming honesty

4. Know when to say goodbye

Seth's Blog : Will you choose to do it live?

Will you choose to do it live?

More Recent Articles

duminică, 24 februarie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Seth's Blog : Understanding internet genius

Understanding internet genius

More Recent Articles

Seth's Blog : Real-time news is neither

Real-time news is neither

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

luni, 25 februarie 2013

1. Communication solves all problems

2. Have a genuine care for the success of the business

3. If I do this, will you be happy?

4. Document everything

5. Never go above your contact

6. Provide useful and tailored monthly reports

7. First mover advantage

1. You can’t win an argument

2. Delivery method

3. Disarming honesty

4. Know when to say goodbye

More Recent Articles

duminică, 24 februarie 2013

More Recent Articles

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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