Let it Go! What Businesses Can Learn from Frozen!

My life consists of Disney, Pixar, and Animated movies on repeat these days. 

I cannot tell you how many times I have watched some of my favorites over and over and over again. Wreckit Ralph, The Little Mermaid, Incredibles, and Despicable Me are on autopilot in my home. So how do I keep a work life balance, I think that most days I just give that up. Perhaps that is only an illusion, anyway... Besides, I find I hone my marketing strategy skills by learning from these precious gems, these amazing sources of truth, character, and imagination. My son's most recent obsession is Frozen. He thinks that Elsa is his wife, and insists that only he can sing her parts. I love that. I love the power it has over him. I love the message that it sends us, our family, and me.

I have become really talented at identifying key points that we can all take from these animated professors. And today, Frozen has given me perhaps, some of my most favorite. Here are three great lessons that businesses, and marketing strategists can take and apply from Frozen.  I hope they have the same affect on you as they have on me!

1. Don't go it alone: Success in life and in relationships is all about the relationships you build and enjoy while journeying the unknown. Those relationships enrich any field, any situation, any circumstance you might find yourself in. As in life, or in marketing, leaning, leveraging, and relying on relationships for your success is paramount. Without them you will not be happy, complete, or successful. All GOOD and well implemented strategies have to engage, encourage, and embrace them. Build relationships with people who seek relationships. Relationships are a skill, and it's easier to develop that skill with others who seek to develop that skill as well.

2. Face your Fears: Change is scary. Success is scary. Pain is scary. We cannot get to the next level, the next phase, the next pinnacle in our business, or personal life without risk. Risk can sometimes leave us in a vulnerable spot. Sometimes we might even fail, but risk can also give us that experience, expertise, and understanding that we might not have gained otherwise. Face your Fears, step out on faith, trust your relationships, and build your legacy based on hope and trust, not fear. Risks always produce more opportunity than being paralyzed with fear ever will.

3. Let it Go: Sometimes are experiences tie us down. Sometimes what we gain from them feeds are fears, keeps us from starting over and trying again. All good strategies fail sometimes. All efforts aren't always realized. There is not a fool proof plan that works with any and every audience, but a strategy that evolves, changes, withstands hard times, and moves forward will always win. Let go of the things that didn't work, but don't quit trying. Don't quit being. Don't quit working. Don't quit. 

I love that my little guys learns these ideas from a Disney movie. But more than that, I love that these things transcend our home. They are tried and true life lessons, and we can apply them to our day to day, our life strategies, and our relationship strategies. We can apply them to the course we take in general and always find worth. That's what I call a lesson worth learning...

Just Keep Swimming...

Sometimes Social Steering seems like an uphill battle with very little results, and other times Social seems like a language you have always spoken, wherever you find yourself, Don't give up. Five reasons to keep swimming according to Nemo (and my 4 year old Lucas).

1. You won't reach your goals if you quit
Learning a new way of communicating can be challenging and uncomfortable. Some things will certainly look and feel unnatural until you become familiar with practice. Take for instance the hashtag #: it can be both #powerful and #redundant. When used appropriately and strategically, it can emphasize your point and help you hone in on specific queues and triggers. However you use it, make sure you use it.

2. How can you measure any success if you never get into the water. 
Most professionals will tell you that you cannot learn to swim unless you get in. Social is no different. Because this is a conversation first, remember that conversations are fluid. If you make mistakes, humble yourself, and keep talking. Getting in the water gives you the tools and understanding of the environment. It poses the challenges and risks first hand and it gives you the skills and confidence to overcome them, or at least face them. Social is talk! Get in the conversation and maneuver through.


3. Risks open us up to new realities, richer and deeper insight. My son and I have a  favorite part of Finding Nemo. It is the part when Dori tells the sea turtles what great obstacles Marlin has conquered. That story travels so far that it reaches Nemo in the fishtank. This is marketing. When you fight through to achieve an outcome, the message itself is what gives your customer confidence. Everyone wants to work with a hero, and overcomer, a success. Whatever motivates you to push through, keep your eyes on the prize. You have nothing to lose.

4. The Payoff shows itself in the relationships that bring us both personal satisfaction and business.
When we finally get to our goal, the reward is well worth it. It's the difference in working a job and working a passion. A passion is always fulfilling at the end. Make sure you take the road that leads you to your passions, and make that road the only one you travel. Your work will thank you, and your clients will as well.

5. A mind is a terrible thing to waste!  Learning keeps you alert, awake, and ready to Go. Learn something new everyday. Learn how to inspect, examine, and apply what you learn. But most of all, learn how to discern when something you have learned is not for you! Critical thinking is something that we can learn and use to grow our business. It can save us, our work, and our clients from wasted time and resources! Be on the lookout for opportunities to invest in new solutions, but be aware of solutions that are just murky waters.

Strategy is all about developing a pattern that is holistic and implementing it consistently over time. Do you need help with this? I know someone...

-GoldCoastLady

Listening is the Key to Communicating What They Want

It occurred to me that with listening being as important as it is to success, we might need to stop and investigate how to listen properly and effectively.  This is always a good thing to ponder over and consider, so that we can identify if our listening skills are in tip-top shape.  So here are my top five tips for listening better!  Hope they are intuitive for you, or easy to instantly apply adopt for your good fortune!

How to Listen

#1~ Be teachable!  A good listener enters into every conversation with a personal motive to discover!  What can you learn about this person, situation, or circumstance?  What is the goal, motivation, focus, areas of penetration or need?  How can you help develop the argument or the solution! Both are important in problem solving!

#2~ Be accountable!  Make sure that you repeat back what you have discovered so that you can then take responsibility for the role you will or will not play in it.  A person who feels you understand their uniqueness, needs, and problems will likely trust you to solve them!  Make sure you interject with validating phrases, such as, "So you are saying that", "Just so I can be clear that I am understanding", "Let me verify that I understand this right", "I am not sure I see your total vantage point, can you further explain", or "Just so I can be the most help to you in solving your problem, it seems as though you are saying".  Be careful not to paraphrase exactly, as it can come across and disingenuous, and you definitely don't want them to discover you are practicing your listening skills on them.

 #3~ Listening is 70% eye contact! If you are on the phone this is hard!  Make deliberate efforts to have important talks face to face! Skype can help with this if you are a technical consultant! If not, make sure you dialogue enough, so that the relationship has time to manifest. This requires an effort to let them talk, and to give them the freedom to digress.  Authenticity happens in the details.

#4~ Listening is hands-free!  Put down the gadgets, phones, ipads, computers, or any other little distraction that will steal your audiences' confidence in your interest, and your attention!  If you are like me, and you struggle with paying attention, then you need to make extra measures to do this!

#5~ Listening is active!  It grows, develops, shows, and remembers!  A tool for this is helpful.  I use #NIMBLECRM to record relevant details about my audience, so that I can revisit, resuse, and re-encounter our comfortable place over and over again.  You can do this, too, and it is necessary to be fully engaged and effective!

The final part to listening is conveying that you have done so! Here are five queues you give to your audience that you heard them and understood what they said!

How to Convey

#1~ You are important enough for me to think about!  If you cannot see the big picture after the first conversation, let them know that they are important enough for your to study and research the best possible situation for them.  Since they feel you have confidently responded earlier that you understand their needs, most people will greatly appreciate a well thought out plan, and not a quick answer. Stay away from quick answers! They hurt your reputation and your relationship.

#2~ Take some time to teach! If you feel that the problem is only developed partially, and my have additionally areas that will be affected, take the time to explain additional considerations, ideas, thoughts, and possible limitations that might pose a problem to the solution.

#3~ Take the time to come up with examples they relay your thoughts! Have some ideas on hand that can be expressed in tangible ways.  Sometimes words can get muddled, but people understand real life situations or examples. Have a few to spare.

#4~ Don't give away too much info. It's scary, and un-necessary.  Be careful that they don't find you intimidating and run for the hills.

#5~ When in doubt, hold your fire!  The less you say about a concept or a thought you haven't fully considered, the wiser you appear.  The wiser you appear, the wiser you are.  Don't speak before your think.

Be honest with your listener that this is your standard of business, and what they can set for you as an expectation.  It drives the ball home, and hopefully the project, too!

To Drip or Not to Drip... That is the Question

In my previous post about the power of perpetual touch we talked about what is a drip marketing technique and why it is an important part of cultivating relationships for business.  To expand on the idea that perpetual touch is important, I wanted to cultivate and explain the difference between a good drip, and a bad drip.  As I explained in that article, it is not enough to simply touch someone, they have to desire your attention.  So what are some good ways to drip, and some not so good methods you ask? Here are my top five:

Top 5 good drip marketing tips:

1. Always ask them first!  This is especially important with email marketing, and does not relate as much to Social Media touching and direct mail!  Permission is key, email is private and personal to many of your recipients. The very first bad way to ruin your impression is to send them something they don't want!
2. Be authentic! If you think about business all the time, it is OK to post about business, however, you will tire your audience! They want to know that you are well rounded! Keep your posts centered around who you are. Get a little personal by sharing your values and your humor! They will connect with it.
3. Show up for every meal you are invited to! If you know what they want and need, give it to them and show up on time. There is nothing worst than getting someone to give you access to their trust, and under delivering what they expect you to know and offer them. 
4. Send cards! People love them and they go a long way, especially if they are hand written!
5. Be spontaneous!  As much as you can try to stick with a blueprint of how you want to touch your audience based on information you have gathered about them, but don't hold tight and fast to this.  Spontaneous and unprompted reach can be very compelling. Follow your promptings! If you think of them, send them a note!  This always translates into a language they receive!

Top 5 bad drip marketing tips:

1. Don't: Send them everything you got! If they don't care about this service, product, or event, don't bully them with information about it.
2. Don't: Forget their interests, important occasions, and technical aptitude! If they give you a birthday, remember it! If they don't tweet, don't invite them to connect on twitter! If they want to learn about email marketing, don't teach them about widgets!  You know longer look like a person who wants to help, but like a person who wants to sell!
3. Don't: Send them a letter you send to everyone else. Be careful of form letters! They look very impersonal and usually get trashed.
4. Don't: Show up for every meal! Don't overstate & over saturate them with your presence! People like seeing you, but if they see you too much, they will certainly get bored with your content. Listen better than you talk. You will be received much better.
5. Don't: Get too personal! People care about your kid and the cute things they do, but they easily get tired of your opinions on all hot topics!  Have opinions, just respect the opinions of others more! Stay close to places where we all see eye to eye, relate, and understand with common ground.

Drip Marketing is not rocket science, but it is an art!  Be creative, courageous, and meaningful so all will value what you have to say, and how it affects them... beyond business, into every day life.

Drip Marketing... The Power of Perpetual Touch

I think that in most areas of life, we underestimate the power of touch.  With Valentine's Day on the horizon, it has never been more on the forefront of my mind.  Little things we do; physical, spiritual, intellectual. Our initiation makes a mark; it leaves and impression.  How much of an impression, we never know.  But we do know, don't we.

Drip Marketing is applying this principal to business. It is allowing the importance of touch, wanted and sometimes unwanted, to leave an impression.  Your strategy can be the difference in the impression you make.  It can make you or break you.  Some people say that it doesn't matter what people remember, as long as they remember.  I don't believe this to be true.  I think silence is golden, if the noise you make turns someone away.  This is where cultivating a strategy will serve you well. 

What is a Drip Marketing Strategy you ask?  It is simple.  It is the process of touching your audience by different methods for the purpose of building a solid and favorable impression.  It is the planning and organizing of the ways and means by which you touch them.  It is the understanding and recognition of their desired methods of touch, by means of studying and learning your pursuant.  It is the method by which you consistently seek relationship, friendship, engagement. 

Just like in all relationships, faithfulness, loyalty and perseverance is valued and savored in real authentic friendship.  Business is the cultivation of friendship for the benefit of commerce.  Apply principals of friendship to business and you will manifest loyalty every time.
Drip Marketing is a requirement for success.  If you are not doing it, you are surviving by luck.  Luck will only take you so far.  Strategic Relationship Cultivation will take you the rest of the way... Trust it...

Lessons from THE LORAX

I have never been much of a writer... but I love watching movies with the three year old... I love to listen to him hum the tune of each show he has watched 200 times.  There is no better sound to me...

This weekend we watched THE LORAX and as I watched my little guy enthralled by every moment in this movie, I found myself very intrigued by the lesson we can learn in life and business that I took from this movie... As I said, I am not much of a blogger, so I thought I would make this short and sweet:

1. Preserve the SACRED by not using more than you need for personal gain!  Don't cut down the trees translates across many platforms.  Things that are sacred in our environment can extend to things that are sacred in life: TIME is of great value when at home or at work.  We should be careful not to overindulge others who mean to misuse it or discount it.  We should carefully value our time, and the time that belongs to another.  We should show them that in everything we do.  VALUES are another example we can attribute to  SACRED.  Ask yourself what you regard as SACRED in your life and business.  Can you identify those things?

2. Love is a motivator!  We will do all kinds of crazy and wonderful things for love.  That should be an important motivator in life and at work. The Golden Rule can move us to make major moves toward another in various ways.  Even though some of the things we do will not serve us well over time, most of the time LOVE Wins. Pursue all the things you desire that are motivated by love.

3. Let it Grow!  NO matter what it turns into, to grow is better than to die.  Death symbolizes the end of something, sometimes good and sometimes bad.  But to Grow something is the essence of a seed that has taken root. In life and in business the fruit of these seeds should be analyzed by the first two lessons listed: Does this fruit look like love, and does this fruit have attributes of the sacred.  That's how we can foster good fruit, deciphering between the weeds that seek to steal the sacred and remove the love. You cannot, however, examine the fruit without them taking root.  Don't be afraid to let them do that.  There is truth and power in learning from weeds.

I love the LORAX. I love the time that I get to cherish with the three year old, but I also love how these things transcend into all areas of life.  Does your business preserve the SACRED, and is it motivated by LOVE.  These will determine how it GROWS... I want to encourage you to think on these things... Use them to Turn your relationships into Gold...