Last night I was sure that I lost my card to get into our building. I was bemoaning the red tape I would encounter today to get a new one when it turned up at the bottom of my briefcase. (It’s usually in my pocket.) So this morning all I could think about was that card and the firm grip I had on it. Alas, I emerged from the D.C. Metro and realized I had left my phone home.
The moral: Focusing on just one thing may cause you to lose sight of some others. Here are five tips in five areas of your business. Email me if one rings true; might not be best to call or text me today.
1. Build trust with an audience. Ben Heald, CEO of Sift Digital—who will be speaking at SIIA’s Digital Content & Media Summit next month in London—wants you to be more open when you speak to colleagues and audiences. He recounts a talk he gave to local start-up entrepreneurs where he spoke about the issues and mistakes that his company had dealt with. “I could easily have given them a glossier version of events, in which we smoothly got to 130 staff and £8m revenue, but the learning experience wouldn’t have been nearly so strong,” he wrote in his blog. “The audience seemed to be interested—loads of questions and comments, good chats afterwards, LinkedIn requests, personal emails and even an invitation to repeat the talk in Manchester. …once again it was a reminder that if you want to build trust with an audience you need to put your real self out there.”
2. Think global. From Elana Fine, managing director of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business: “Understand every business is a global business. I repeat. Understand every business is a global business and every entrepreneur is a global entrepreneur. For those of you who use the business model canvas as a planning tool—think of your canvas and look at which box represents a global opportunity. Is it a customer segment, a manufacturing partner or a distribution channel?”
3. Market to inspire participation. Ariana Huffington on what Jeff Bezos should do with The Washington Post (from an article in the Washington City Paper): “The first thing…is start to bring the incredible level of consumer engagement that he created at Amazon to the paper. I’ve always said the future of journalism is going to be a hybrid future—one that combines the best tools of traditional media…with the best tools of the digital world, like speed and engagement. Journalism is moving from a mode of presentation to participation.”
4. Improve meetings. Speaking of Bezos, Daniel Pink writes in his book, To Sell Is Human, that the Amazon founder often includes an empty chair at the table in important planning meetings. It represents the customer: “Seeing it encourages meeting attendees to take the perspective of the invisible but essential person. What’s going through her mind? What desires and concerns? What would she think of the ideas we are putting forward?” While you’re looking at that empty chair,” writes Jill Geisler of Poynter, “remember to make sure you think of every possible customer that could occupy it—not just those who look and sound like the colleagues in the room with you.
5. Truly commit to digital first. Writing on the Poynter site, Cory Bergman, GM of NBC’s Breaking News, chronicled Facebook’s mobile turnaround. ”Even at a thriving Silicon Valley startup full of employees in their twenties and thirties, [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg battled a desktop-centric culture. He backed up his ‘mobile first’ declaration with his own behavior. He removed his desktop monitor from his desk. Whenever someone pitched him an idea, he would ask, ‘What does that look like on mobile?’ He urged staff to ditch their iPhones for Android phones to more closely mirror the population of Facebook mobile users.” Note: 85% of Breaking News’ visits now originate from a mobile device.
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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline