Categories
Starting Up

Experiential Marketing for Your Business

Looking for a startup or business in the video entertainment venue? Well, Dance Heads is one such company to be looked at, which offers compact and mobile video attraction that can be used at weddings, parties, bat and bar mitzvahs, corporate events, exhibitions, trade shows, fairs and festivals or can be placed permanently in amusement parks, shopping centres, cinemas and many other public places. Every event organizer wishes to cause the most pleasant emotions in the guests circles and leave unforgettable memories.

Call it Experiential Marketing. You may draw huge attraction from crowds and make successful events by renting Dance Heads video equipment to be placed in your organised party events. Dance Heads’ video studios advertise themselves, attract crowds of spectators and bring lots of fun to any event. Grow your events business this way and you could retain your satisfied customers and even draw in new potential customers.

By doing this business you can not only search clients by your own but also set up mutually beneficial collaboration with different companies and people dealing with entertainment sphere (wedding and event-agencies, photo operators, masters of ceremonies and anchormen). You will help such companies and people to provide customers with more entertainments and they in turn will help you to find more orders.

Here is a fine example of Dance Heads in operation, see with your own eyes how interesting it is: http://www.dh-business.com

Dance Heads business doesn’t require any huge organizational costs, doesn’t require large a number of employees, assures you of a fast return on investment. Dance Heads is enjoyed by a diversified customer base   – from young children to older customers in their 50?s.or 70; It brings a real sense of joy and also generates great income.

For more details, visit Dance Heads

Categories
Technology

Pros and Cons of Managed Services

Businesses are increasingly migrating away from providing their own infrastructure for IT-related tasks, toward a model wherein necessary services are managed in the cloud by other companies. Before relying on JD Edwards managed services, it is essential to know the advantages and tradeoffs of having a third party manage key infrastructure.

The technology needs of businesses continue to increase. Once it was sufficient to host a website and perhaps to provide a few organizational mailboxes. Eventually, web applications came to replace tools such as calendars, contact lists and other physical components of running a business. Today’s smart companies manage information electronically by default, producing hard copies only when necessary.

This has vastly increased the burden of maintaining the infrastructure that any business must have to compete. Businesses can respond to this in one of two ways. They can either host all necessary services themselves, hiring essential staff and purchasing additional equipment, or they can contract a managed services provider to do it for them. Managed services bring along a number of benefits and disadvantages.

Managed Services Pros

Easing Maintenance Infrastructure
First, managed services encapsulate a number of solid choices and best practices. Choosing a suite of applications to meet a given need is challenging, but any business that hires a managed hosting company, such as IQMS’ ERP software or other planning software, can be certain that the proposed solution will be well-integrated to meet a given set of needs. Said services will also be kept updated, are managed securely, and often come with a service level agreement which commits to high availability.

Cost Benefits
Managed services generally cost less. Just as buying in bulk saves money, so too does hosting in bulk. Buying new servers and bandwidth while also hiring new staff to host a single set of services costs more than does hiring another company. By hosting multiple instances of a similar stack, efficiency is increased and costs are reduced.

Easy Deployment
Managed services are also fast to deploy. It is often possible to set up infrastructure in minutes or hours, rather than the days that would be necessary to set up and network physical servers, as well as to hire essential maintenance and support staff. Managed services can also scale to meet new demand, thus eliminating the need to acquire new hardware and personnel as demand increases.

Managed Services Cons

Reliability Concerns
There are also disadvantages to managed services. When hiring another partner to host critical business infrastructure, one hopes that their business will endure. If it fails, any businesses relying upon them might be left scrambling for a way to replace email, web hosting, calendars and other critical pieces of infrastructure without which any business cannot run.

Less Flexibility
Managed hosting offers less flexibility. While the choice of which applications to use for a given need might be a daunting one, it does allow meeting specific requirements to exacting standards. Managed services take some of this choice away, resulting in combinations that may not be as ideal for a given use case.

Finally, managed service providers generally store information outside of a business’s own infrastructure. In many industries this is a perfectly acceptable choice, but regulated sectors such as health care may require that service providers adhere to additional standards such as HIPAA and HITECH. Such compliance increases complexity and costs.

Whether to use managed services is a complex issue. For some businesses, they represent a great way to cut costs while quickly coming up to speed. For others, the risks and added complexity might override any benefits. As such, there is no right answer for everyone, and businesses and organizations must individually weigh these factors to make the right decision for their unique circumstances.

Categories
Networking

6 Ways Online Press Release Distribution Can Help You With Your LinkedIn Marketing Efforts

Article Contributed by Kristina Jaramillo

1) The press release generated publicity can provide you with instant credibility with your LinkedIn profile visitors.

For example my client Sara LaForest’s headline reads like this: “Top Management Consultant Featured in Business Week, Fast Company & WomenEntrepreneur.com – Connect and Find Out Why”. This shows readers immediately why they should trust her and why they should trust what she has to say.

Here are some of the other ways you can highlight your publicity on your LinkedIn profile:

Create a quoted media positions
Showcase your media mentions within your summary
Add the publications section to your LinkedIn profile
Create a media kit on your LinkedIn profile using Box.net

2) Showcasing your press release generated publicity will prove to journalists that you are media worthy.

On LinkedIn you should be looking to connect with journalists, editors, online radio show hosts and other media professionals.  Now for those media professionals to accept your invitation, you have to prove you are credible and newsworthy.  When your press release is published by a top publication, you have completed half the battle because you have given yourself expert status. Now, you just have to build a relationship with the media professionals you connect with and show them that your information is relevant to their audience.

3) Use press releases to promote your LinkedIn group and community.

We recently created and distributed a press release that promoted Skip Weisman’s Workplace Communication Strategies group – and it was published on CNBC.com. This helped him:

Increase his LinkedIn group membership by making more people aware of his group.

Give him a reason to re-announce his group again to his email list as well as any LinkedIn connection that were not already members of his group. Any time you have a success, you should be letting your connections know.

Give new connections a reason to join his LinkedIn group when we sent out group invites.

4) Your press release placements can position you as a thought leader in your LinkedIn group – and those other groups you belong to.

I like to create discussions around a topic and link the discussion to a press release or article I’ve written that gives more information on the topic and is featured on a top website. This automatically gives me a third party endorsement which offers more credibility than if the information was just placed on my own website or blog.

5) Use your press release placement as a springboard for discussions.

For example, I distributed a press release titled “More Journalist on LinkedIn Than Any Other Social Network, Study Shows”. I then created this discussion within LinkedIn group:  “How are you using LinkedIn to get you more publicity?

In the LinkedIn discussion summary I put “In the press release below, I reveal that 82% of journalist are on LinkedIn and that is more than any other social network.  So now I am asking you, how are using LinkedIn to build and maintain relationships with media professionals to get you more publicity?”

I then linked the discussion to my press release on Yahoo News.

This helped me:

Get more exposure for my press release

Create a discussion among publicity professionals as they provided their insights. I then responded to their feedback with other ideas and explained to them how I can help them with their LinkedIn publicity efforts

Start a discussion among small business owners and other business professionals who wanted to learn how to get more publicity by using LinkedIn

6) Getting published or featured all over the Web on top websites and blogs will give you access to more people who will want to connect with you on LinkedIn.

You will have people coming to you seeking your advice.  They will see your press release and then look you up on LinkedIn wanting to connect with you.  For example, as I was writing this article, I received an invitation to connect that said, “Hi Kristina, I just read your tips in Canadian Advisor’s Edge Magazine – I’d like to connect with you and learn more.”

Your Next Steps

Now that I have shown you how online press release distribution can help you with your LinkedIn marketing efforts, it’s time you take action and start writing your press releases. If you need help, check our my Instant Press Release Templates at http://www.40InstantPressReleaseTemplates.com

About the Author:

LinkedIn marketing expert Kristina Jaramillo helps small businesses and organizations get more publicity, prospects and profits using effective LinkedIn. Now, at http://www.HowtoGetMorePublicitywithLinkedIn.com, you can gain full access to her FREE 14-Day LinkedIn Publicity E-course that shows you how to create an expert LinkedIn profile the media will love, how to build relationships with the media plus sneaky ways to get more PR using LinkedIn.

Categories
People & Relationships

3 Simple Strategies to Improve Your Bottom Line by Tapping Your Most Valuable Asset, Your People

Article by Skip Weisman

Two startling facts regarding issues absolutely impacting the bottom line of manufacturing companies in today’s challenging economy:

1. The Gallup organization, an international research company with a division that focuses on employee engagement and motivation, estimates $300 billion is wasted every year in lost productivity at U.S. companies due to un-motivated, dis-engaged employees.

2. Another research firm, Sirota Survey Intelligence, reported in 2005 that in 85% of Fortune 1000 companies, employee motivation and morale “declined significantly” within the first six months of employment and continued to go down after that.

Those statistics are startling with regard to the potential impact on bottom line results of companies today. But, it is also not surprising.

Research I recently conducted of over 3,000 subscribers to the Workplace Communication Expert blog (www.WorkplaceCommunicationExpert.com) showed 44% of business leaders are unhappy with employee performance.

When you look around your workplace and evaluate the productivity, motivation and morale of your people, how much might your organization be contributing to that $300 billion?

And, in evaluating the cost of hiring, on-boarding and training new employees, if not being done effectively, could this be another place where company profits are stealthily slipping off the financial statement?

Here are three specific strategies manufacturers can apply to develop, maintain or recapture employee motivation, morale and engagement so that your employees are truly assets bringing high value to the work environment:

1) Define your “Championship Game”
From the first day of training camp everyone that is part of an athletic team at any level from little league through the professional ranks knows the ultimate objective and vision for their team (organization) is to reach the Championship Game (for baseball it’s the World Series, football The Super Bowl, soccer it’s the World Cup, etc).

It is the inspiring vision to win the championship that keeps everyone focused, doing the right things for the right reasons so they can contribute to the team’s success, while also being able to reap the well-defined, and not so-well defined, individual and collective rewards and opportunities that come with their contribution.

The same type of culture can be created inside any business. It takes strong, visionary leadership and consistent communication to make it successful.

2) Jointly create an agreed upon set of core organizational communication and behavioral values

Many organizations have their “values” hanging on posters in the hallways while managers and leaders both engage in, and enable others, in behaviors inconsistent with those values.

With no one holding anyone accountable to the values on the walls, performance and behaviors deteriorate and subsequently default to what is witnessed and experienced in the halls.

This, too, is a strategy that is both easy to create, plus easy to maintain when two processes are applied:

  1. Bring your team(s) together to jointly create the organizational communication and behavioral values and commit to a “team agreement” that everyone, literally, signs on to.
  2. Leaders, managers and teammates agree to address violations of the values and team agreement immediately (or, at the earliest possible opportunity after a documented and witnessed behavior).

NOTE: One client that recently concluded this process reported employees were self-regulating themselves and their teammates six months after installation of the above strategy.

3) Create a communication “Forum” that includes a “feedback loop”
Communication is always among the top three issues or problems identified by employees in organizations. The challenge with this generic, vanilla statement is that there are too many aspects of communication to fix the problems.

It must be more clearly defined.

In a recent client project three different teams in one focus group identified communication as an organizational problem. Yet, each defined it differently from a completely different context.

One simple way to resolve this issue is to create a formal forum for communication that includes a two-way feedback loop.

This sounds much more complicated than it really is. It simply means that regular, structured meetings are facilitated to bring issues, problems, ideas and suggestions to the fore for company leaders to address and respond to.

There are four key steps for doing this successfully:
1) Schedule meetings at regular and consistent times
2) Invite a cross section of participants representing the various departments, divisions, etc.
3) Collect ideas, chunk them into related categories and prioritize
4) Create a system through which company leaders can respond to every item in a reasonably timely manner.

Often company leaders are leery of developing this type of communication process for fear of the meetings devolving into gripe sessions. These fears are valid and can be eliminated by doing these three things:
1) Setting clear guidelines at the outset,
2) Ensure that all ideas and suggestions are articulated in a positive, constructive manner, and
3) Following through with prompt feedback on all ideas so that those contributing feel as if their contributions were taken under consideration and were valued (it is perfectly okay to say “no” to an idea as long as it comes with a credible reason).

Manufacturers that have implemented some, or all, of the three above suggestions have been able to generate dramatic results, such as:
. $900,000 in waste eliminated within 12 months of implementation
. 300% increase in pre-tax profits over a five-year period
. 100% increase in pre-tax profits within four months of implementation
. 65% permanent improvement in workflow processes and 22% waste reduction within 12 months.

With results like that no business leader in Western civilization can argue that they can’t invest the time, energy and resources to learn how to implement the three simple strategies outlined above.

Give it a try.

About the Author

Skip Weisman is The Leadership and Workplace Communication Expert based in Poughkeepsie, NY. Since 2001 he has partnered with business leaders and their teams to transform communication in workplaces in a way that offers dramatic increases in productivity, profit margins and the bottom line. His latest white paper report on which this article is based is 3 Simple Secrets to Increasing Your Bottom Line: How Maximizing Motivation, Trust and Commitment in Your Workplace Makes a Difference in Today’s Challenging Economy! The report is available free at www.TheEmployeeEngagementExpert.com. Skip can be reached at 845-463-3838 or by e-mail at Skip@WorkplaceCommunicationExpert.com

Categories
Planning & Management

3 Reasons Under-Performing Employees In Your Company Are Not At Fault

Article Contributed by Skip Weisman

In today’s economy business leaders can’t afford to accept under-performing personnel in their companies. Yet, in a recent survey 44% of them reported being unhappy with the performance results of their employees.

In order to solve a problem such as this, employers need to first identify the cause and then create viable options for applicable solutions. There can be many reasons why employees under-perform and some leaders may point to poor attitudes, low motivation and individuals’ inability to work with others, or accept and adapt to change.

Although those reasons may be absolutely valid on the surface, there are always underlying issues that have led to the causes identified by the business leader.

There are only two aspects to evaluate with under-performing employees. It’s either due to an individual’s:

  • ability, or
  • their attitude.

In either instance, the employee is not at fault.

There are three primary mistakes business leaders make that prevent employees from being engaged in their workplace and contributing at higher levels:

  1. The organization has not given the employee a reason to be engaged and motivated, or to contribute more than minimum effort.
  2. The organization has created an environment that is actually de-motivating and dis-engaging.
  3. The employer failed to hire the right person for the job or to ensure the person hired is working in a role that fits their talents, skills and interests.

Business Leader Mistake #1 – Not Giving Employees a Reason to be Engaged, Motivated & Contribute

Many business leaders mistakenly believe that providing someone the privilege of a steady income and certain quality of life via a paycheck should be enough to create a motivated employee.

Yet, studies continue to show that salary and benefits, although important for providing base levels of motivation, is not enough to generate higher levels of engagement.

Many managers and leaders say they are frustrated with the feeling they have to continually find ways to light a fire under their people to get them to do what needs to be done. Instead they should be investing energy in connecting to their employees on a personal level to instead find ways to light a fire within them.

One extremely effective way to do this is to apply the Employee Motivation Equation.

The Employee Motivation Equation begins with creating an inspiring vision for the company that employees at all levels will be excited to contribute to. Daniel Pink, in his 2010 book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us identified “Purpose” as one of the key motivating components for a 21st Century workforce.

Business Leader Mistake #2 – Creating a De-Motivating Environment

In any new relationship there is always a honeymoon period where all the parties involved have good feelings about the possibilities moving forward. It’s the same when a new hire joins a company.

Unfortunately, a survey of about 1.2 million employees at mostly Fortune 1000 companies in the early part of this century conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence, and revealed in 2005 that in 85% of companies, employee morale sharply declines after an employee’s first six months on the job, and continues to fade in ensuring years.

In a significant number of companies, as this Sirota research shows, something is occurring in these work environments that causes an enthusiastic and engaged employee to change their attitude.

Many factors can be attributed to this drop off, some of which include:

  • Poorly communicated job descriptions and responsibilities causing uncertain performance expectations for the individual,
  • Inequity in managers addressing inappropriate behaviors and poor performance of co-workers,
  • Managers that play favorites and communicate disrespectfully in the workplace,
  • Lack of positive feedback for contributions made

Business Leader Mistake #3 – Making a Wrong Hiring Choice

In the haste to fill positions, often those making the hiring decisions fail to invest enough time in making sure the new hire is a good fit for the position. A “good fit’ includes assessing skills, talent and job experience perspective, plus checking into the potential new hire’s personality, including beliefs, attitudes and motivations.

Additionally, sometimes due to unforeseen circumstances employees are asked to fill roles not originally intended, and for which their skills and talents are not the best fit.

In these situations, despite the employees best efforts they are unable to meet desired performance expectations, and both the employee and the employer become disenchanted with the relationship. Yet, the onus must be on the employer to get it right when inviting someone into his or her work culture.

Before proclaiming employees are unmotivated, and/or unwilling, to perform to expectations and bring positive attitudes to the work environment start evaluating these three workforce mistakes from an organizational leadership and communication perspective to see if there is room for improvement.

About the Author:

Skip Weisman is The Leadership & Workplace Communication Expert. He’s the author of the white paper report titled, “The 7 Deadliest Sins of Leadership & Workplace Communication: How Leaders and Their Employees Unknowingly Undermine Morale, Motivation and Trust in Work Environments.” The white paper is available as a free download for a limited time at www.HowToImproveLeadershipCommunication.com . If you’d like to learn how you can improve your work environment by improving communication contact him directly with any questions, or for a complimentary Strategy Session at 845-463-3838 or e-mail to Skip@WorkplaceCommunicationExpert.com