Archives for June 2014
Creating an Engaging Social Media Contest
Social media tools make it easy for just about anyone to create a social media contest but not all contests are successful. The more engaging your contest, the better. After all, users will want to share the contest with their networks — which means more exposure for your brand. Use the tips below to create an engaging contest on social media.
- Choose the right platform for your contest. Does your contest involve sharing photos? Instagram or Facebook are good choices. Do you want to keep the contest on one site or extend it to multiple sites? If this is your first contest, it’s smart to start with just one social network as management will be that much easier.
- Determine contest requirements. What do you want people to do in order to join the contest? For example, you might require entrants to like your page, leave a comment, upload a photo, vote, or create content. Ideally, entrance requirements should be relatively easy for your
users to do. Otherwise, some will opt not to participate because it seems too hard.
- Determine the prize. Why should users enter your contest? In some cases, bragging rights is incentive enough. In others, you may need to dangle an enticing prize in order to drum up excitement. In any case, your prize should appeal to your target audience and be relevant to your business. For example, if you sell dog food, consider offering a month’s worth of free dog food as a prize. This ensures that only those who have a genuine interest in your business and its products enter the contest.
- Plan your social media contest. This includes developing the contest’s rules, sketching out how it will look, developing a calendar, and identifying how you will market it.
- Use a social media contest management tool to create, manage, and promote your contest. Why start from scratch when software exists specifically for managing social media contests? For example, a third-party tool could make it easy to create professional-looking social media campaigns, promotions, and contests — and help ensure that your contest complies with Facebook’s promotional guidelines.
- Promote your contest. Finally, you’ll need to spread the word about your contest. Don’t wait until it’s live to start promoting it. For example, you can write a blog post before it launches, talk about the upcoming contest on Facebook, post photos of the prize before the contest launches, and more. On the contest’s launch day, consider paying for a promoted post to ensure that the majority of your followers actually see the post. Add contest details to your other online properties and consider issuing a press release. While you’re at it, send out an email or newsletter to your customers as well as post flyers at your physical location. Spread the word and ask your followers to do the same.
- Interact with entrants. Your active participation will encourage users to continue commenting, sharing, and liking your contest. Engagement breeds more engagement, so make sure you’re available to answer questions and encourage participation.
The more engaging your contest is, the more likely contestants will be to share the contest with others.
Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.
How to Become More Resilient in the Business World
As you've no doubt heard many times before, failure is inevitable in the business world. The truly great leaders are the ones who are able to pick themselves back up and become better because of their failures. But how do you cultivate this type of resilience in yourself? Is it something you're born with, or is it something that you can learn?
I strongly believe that it's the latter. In my opinion, there are plenty of ways that you can learn to the kind of inner strength necessary to move past failures and become stronger as a result. Here are a few strategies that will help you to accomplish this:
- Remember all of your failures. There are many people who suggest that you have a “bad memory” when it comes to your failures, but I disagree; instead, try to remember every single moment of your failures. This is the best way to analyze where you went wrong and to learn
important lessons for the future. If you choose to forget about these failures, you miss out on many important and helpful teaching moments. “Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence.” ~Colin Powell. I'm not suggesting anyone fail on purpose, but I am suggesting that those who have experienced failure, more times than not, are those who rise to great success. Mostly because they learn to manage success as if still in times of failure.
- Repetition breeds success. The most important steps on the road to success are the steps that most people don't see. Success comes from the daily routines you put yourself through to improve yourself and hone your skills so that you can achieve greatness. For a basketball player, it's the hours spent at the free throw line after practice. For a golfer, it's the early hours spent at the driving range or around the practice green. For a business person it can be just about anything; leadership training, organization, etc. Having a commitment to excellence means being committed to practice and all of the steps needed to find greatness. “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” ~Dale Carnegie
- Manage your fear. Every great leader has fears or anxieties that will act as roadblocks to his or her success. There's a good chance that you'll never be able to completely get over these roadblocks, but you can learn to manage them. Rather than running from your problems, face them head on and deal with them directly. Otherwise, your fears and anxieties begin to take control over you. “What you can become depends on what you can overcome” ~ Anthony Douglas Williams
- Be at peace. This is the result of the previous strategies. The more that you practice, control your fear, maintain your focus and improve your confidence, the more you will be at peace as a leader. This inner peace makes it much easier for you to be resilient in difficult situations.
If you are going to find success as a business owner, you must find it within yourself to be resilient even in the face of failure. Contact us today at Viral Solutions for more assistance with this. We are here for you as you work to make your business the best it can be.
Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.
Do You Need a Time Management Action Plan
Do you feel like your workday is out of control before it even begins? If you spend your days keeping up instead of getting ahead, bad time management could be the culprit. Too often our consultants find business owners overwhelmed by excessive detail work. Adhering to a few time management principles helps to avoid these situations.
Consider a time management “overhaul” if you can identify with one or more of the following statements:
- I spend much of my time responding to crises or “putting out fires.”
- I don't have time to plan ahead and set priorities.
- When I leave work on time, I feel anxious about what has been left undone.
- I find myself thinking about work even when I'm off the clock.
- I frequently get caught up in busy work.
- I don't have time to participate in professional growth activities outside of work.
- I don't have enough time for family and friends.
- I devote most of my time to the same few problems or people.
- I feel like I'm just keeping my head above water.
While there are no specific time management techniques that work for everyone all the time, there are a few simple practices that can help put a light at the end of the tunnel.
Stay organized. Take time at the end of each day to organize yourself for the next day or week. Whether you use a high-tech computerized PDA (Personal Data Assistant) or a low-tech to do list on a pad of paper, organize your tasks in a fashion that works best for you.
Get full information. Find out what is needed and when it is expected.
Prioritize. Organize your workload into critical deadlines and routine maintenance tasks. Consider the 80-20 Rule, coined by the late 19th century Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. According to Pareto, 80% of the reward comes from 20% of the effort. The key is to identify the valuable 20%.
Delegate. Learn to let go. Distribute to others those tasks that don't require your specific expertise or input.
Don't procrastinate. If the task needs to be done, then it is best to start accomplishing it quickly for several reasons. One, it won't go away. Two, you never know what else you may need to do tomorrow. Three, if you wait until the deadline is near you could find that accomplishing the task may require more time than you have left!
Divide and conquer. If you are overwhelmed by the size or complexity of a project, divide it into several more manageable tasks and tackle them one by one.
Don't expect perfection. It may be noble to strive for perfection in all that we do, but sometimes paying too much attention to detail is just another form of procrastination. Know when “good enough” really is good enough.
Eliminate time wasters. Set aside specific times each day to check e-mail and voicemail. Respond to each according to its level of urgency.
Plan for your peak. Consider whether you are a morning person or a night owl, then plan the most difficult tasks for the time of day when you are at your best.
How Do Great Leaders Lose their Momentum?
Chances are that when you've been in business for long enough, you've seen at least a couple great leaders suddenly lose all of their momentum, and their once-promising project takes some gigantic leaps backward. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to consistently stay motivated enough to continue achieving their goals and making headway with their business.
But what's the cause of this? What is it that suddenly makes great leaders lose their momentum and their edge?
Here are a few ideas:
- Complacency. Success can be a dangerous thing; the moment that we think we've achieved all of our goals and decide that we've become “good enough” is the exact moment that we become complacent and risk losing all the momentum we've built. Leaders who become complacent for too long can find it difficult to muster up the motivation to start moving forward once again. Avoid complacency at all costs.
- Not taking risks. Once business owners and leaders have achieved certain levels of success, they start playing it safe as they're too anxious about taking the kinds of occasional risks that made them successful in the first place. It's very easy to get bored with your business if all you're doing is meeting objectives rather than constantly striving for improvement. Live a little! Take calculated risks here and there to keep your business moving forward, rather than settling for any kind of plateau. As Vince Lombardi once famously said, “Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.”
- Burnout. We live in a society where we glorify “busyness,” but it's important to take a step back and breathe every now and then. Part of being a great leader is realizing that you can't be the one doing everything with your business. The more your business grows, the more important it becomes to delegate and take breaks when you can. If you fail to do this, then you run a much greater risk of burning yourself out.
Have you struggled with motivation as a leader of your business? Perhaps one of these factors has played a role in that. Contact us today at Viral Solutions to learn more about how we can help you keep moving forward and reaching greater and greater heights.
Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.
How to Stay Focused on Work During the Summer
Summer is finally here; the sun is shining, the air is warm, the birds are chirping and the beach is calling. But unfortunately, there's still plenty of work to be done.
It can be really hard to stay focused on work when the weather is so gorgeous, but it has to be done. How can you hold yourself accountable for completing your work when you'd rather be outside enjoying all that the summer has to offer?
Here are a few tips:
- Get more work done mid week. During the summer, a lot of people will be taking off on Fridays or Mondays for weddings, camping trips or any other events they have planned. If you can try to avoid scheduling due dates or important meetings for Fridays or Mondays, you can get more done between Tuesday and Thursday while still allowing people to get work done on Mondays and Fridays if they're around.
- Get in the spirit of the summer. Let's face it; everyone at the office is longing to get outside and enjoy the weather. So what if you took a day to have a company barbecue or some outdoor games? It'll satisfy
people's craving for some summer fun and allow them to recharge and get back to work without being as distracted by the prospect of what they're missing. You could also choose to extend hours on a couple weekdays to give people off early on Fridays.
- Change up your routine. Most jobs are defined by some sort of routine, but that routine can get tedious during the summer when you're doing the same thing as you do the rest of the year, except that you're missing nicer weather outside. Try to find new ways to challenge your employees or give them new tasks or training to focus on.
- Focus on deadlines rather than hours. With people taking vacations and days off during the summer, it can be hard to keep people on conventional work schedules. Try being more flexible with people's hours during the summer so long as they get projects completed by a particular deadline. If people know that they have the ability to take off, they'll stay more focused on completing their project and not getting off track.
- Get those windows open! This isn't so much a business tip, but it can still make a big difference; if your business has windows, open them up and let the sunshine and fresh air come streaming in. It can be very depressing for employees to have to sit in a sterile, stale work environment when there's so much life right outside the window.
Do you suffer from motivation during the summer months? It's completely normal! Just remember that everyone is in the same boat, but there are ways that you can keep focused on work even on the nicest summer days.
Christine Kelly | Queen Bee | Viral Solutions LLC
Prior to joining Viral Solutions, Christine held executive leadership roles at some of the largest small business consulting firms in the USA. Her experience includes leading direct reports of over 130 remote sales agents who generated $38mm in annual revenue. She obtained her Marketing degree from British Columbia Institute of Technology. Bring her C-Suite experience to your small business. Although our company is virtual, and we can work with you wherever you are located, she is located in Denver, Colorado and owns a second home in Vancouver, BC Canada.