We are drowning in information.

The Library of Congress is huge (see picture above).  Did you know it took over 200 years to accumulate all the written material to fill the Library of Congress?

The information material created in just the last 10 years on the internet dwarfs that amount…there’s a lot of material coming out all the time and we’re not setup to be able to process or handle that much information.

I had the opportunity to go to an interesting event this afternoon – Douglas Merrill, the author of Getting Organized in the Google Era and the former CIO of Google presented a summary of his book and his thoughts on what it takes to get organized in the world we live in today.

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   photo by tao_zhyn

Habit number seven from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly effective people is “Sharpen the Saw”.  He uses a story of a woodcutter who is struggling after several days of sawing wood – he’s lost effectiveness because his saw is no longer sharp.  From Covey’s perspective, there are different aspects to this – physical, mental, spiritual and social.  If you want to remain at peak effectiveness, you need to sharpen up in all of those areas.

I’m fortunate to be part of a great group called the Professional Business Coaches Alliance (www.pbca.biz ).  It’s a group of business coaches from all over North America who all have their own companies but share common values and approaches to helping business owners succeed.

Our annual meeting was this past weekend in New Orleans and I reflected on the flight home how this was a really well timed chance for me to ‘Sharpen the Saw’ across a lot of different areas.  We spent a lot of time learning and discussing new ideas, best practices and how to be more successful in our businesses (and how to make our clients more successful).  We also spent time connecting and reconnecting with colleagues who share a lot of common ground (and I had some great meals in New Orleans!).

When was the last time you sharpened your saw in a meaningful way?

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The world has changed a lot – you used to be able to send out letters…direct mail and bring in new business with great success.

But costs have gone up, effectiveness of direct mail has gone down and there are lots of other marketing choices out there.

One of those choices is email marketing – it’s low cost, it’s easy enough that anyone can do  it and if it’s done right it’s been proven to more effective in terms of ROI (Return on Investment) than anything else out there.

The kicker is that is needs to be done the right way!

Let’s start out by looking at an example:

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    photo by Monica’s Dad

It’s probably time to start thinking about alternatives – not power alternatives (although that’s a worthwhile discussion as well), I’m talking about alternative Social Media platforms other than Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Facebook is now over 400 Million users and over 80 Million of them are playing Farmville (which may be a sign of the apocalypse…I’m not sure) and – Twitter is generating 50 Million tweets per day.  It’s pretty clear that the big platforms are well into the mainstream and potentially too crowded to be useful to anyone trying to connect with more of a niche market than the entire world.

On top of that, history tells us that the world will keep changing and even if you missed the initial jump into these platforms a couple of years ago – you’ll have a chance to get in on the cutting edge of whatever’s next.

So what are some of the other choices of Social Media platforms out there?

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   photo by Dave F

Do you know what you’re subconsciously telling people about your business?  Are you sending messages that don’t match up with the impression that you’d like to send (assuming that you know what that is)?

The thing is that you and your employees are constantly sending out messages whether you mean to or not.  Have you ever been to a retail store where one of the clerks was rude to you or someone else close enough for you to overhear?  What about a restaurant where they don’t clean off the tables before they seat you?  Or maybe it’s something small like forgetting to respond to an email from a prospect.  Any one of those is likely to cost you a customer.

What messages are you sending about your business?

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