March 3, 2010 By 2 Comments

Umm… Uhh…

There’s a simple solution to the non-words “umm” and “uhh” in public speaking*:  it is virtually impossible to “umm” and “uhh” when you are making eye contact with a specific person.

Umms and uhhs happen when you look at your notes, the wall, the ceiling, the floor, or a crowd = collective, not crowd = individual therein. They never happen while you are looking directly at another person’s eyes. Try it for yourself. Observe how people make eye contact when they speak, or don’t, at the next meeting you attend.

If you’re on the phone, look at a picture of a real person. (Caveat: make sure the person in the picture is someone who elicits appropriate vocabulary for the call. You don’t want to accidentally slip into baby talk during a marketing presentation.) In a pinch, speaking to a drink bottle or a coffee cup, pretending it has eyes, will do, but a picture of a real person is better.

*Some people in the online business community don’t realize that recording a teleclass or webinar to create an audio file for subsequent sale is effectively the same thing as public speaking. While a live audience may forgive Umms and Uhhs and the doubleplay “umm and,” people who listen to the content while driving find the filler words slamming into their brain like bricks. Look at a picture of a business colleague. SPEAK to that picture. The number of filler words in your audio file will decrease dramatically. (See the post, Creating High-quality Audio Files, for additional tweaks that will make your files sound more polished and professional.)

You can substitute your dog for a person; dogs cooperate more than cats. Fish are useless.

The first time you try to make eye contact with a real person when and every time you speak, your eyes will hurt by the end of the day. Then, you’ll start noticing how few people make eye contact all the time.

Spread the word. Make eye contact when you do it.

We discovered this solution in Powerful, Persuasive Speaking, a two-day class presented by Alan Hoffler of Mills Wyck Communications. If being more persuasive would help you be more effective in your work or vocation, we cannot recommend this class enough.  In my session, one professional (NSA) and one pretty good amateur speaker both observed marked improvement in delivery skills.  People with no prior training in public speaking made amazing improvements.

Filed Under: How to 680, Leadership 303
February 24, 2010 By 1 Comment

Twitter for brick and mortar businesses

I’m not, at this moment, a Tweeter.

I listen to and read about discussions of how it’s possible to use twitter to grow your online reputation; that it’s vital for companies to have the instant reputation management that Twitter facilitates, and that “Twitter is where the conversation is happening.”

OK. I am not sure what all of this means, or that I need to participate.

However, one sentence in one conference call floated out of the ether onto my notepad:

What most people don’t realize is that Twitter for off-line, non-personality-based businesses is an entirely different animal.

Naomi Dunford, in an Ittybiz Speakeasy call, late in December 2009.

I post this simply to have the statement in an accessible place to which I can send clients who are also baffled by Twitter.

Filed Under: Twitter
November 20, 2009 By 1 Comment

There’s always a goat

I came home from teaching a course about the tools that office workers need to be productive to an open calendar and three or four blog posts waiting to get out of my head onto the screen. As I settled in to work, I noticed that my big dog was barking his “something needs my attention” bark; a bark that didn’t stop and didn’t shift as it would if he were following someone moving on the street. I went out to see what had his attention.

One of my neighbor’s goats had died.

Farm, or even backyard-farm, life is often not pretty. One thing I know for sure is that once there’s a problem, it won’t get any better on its own. We had a similar situation earlier that year.  When you find a dead possum on your porch in July, you will have to take action long before you can wait until the problem solves itself.

I called the goat’s owner. We talked about what to do with the body, and fortunately, I thought of the tigers. The Carolina Tiger Rescue facility was happy to take her, but they couldn’t come and pick her up.   I loaded her into the bed of my truck and delivered her. By the time I came home, the afternoon was gone and the evening’s schedule called.

It is in the nature of goats to disrupt schedules and plans, but it is also in the nature of schedules and plans to be disrupted. Your life may never cross paths with a real live goat, or even a dead one. Count yourself lucky. But every life has its own goat-equivalent. Most of the time, schedules are disrupted with the addition of “something else, more, additional.” We don’t even think of it as “disruptive” when we discover a chunk of the plan doesn’t have to be completed, although it’s as much of a change as finding out we have a new responsibility.

There’s always a goat, even if sometimes, the goat is a possum, or a kitten.

When I don’t want to think about goats, I use a phrase provided by a friend who works at the Animal Shelter:  “Kittens do not take zero minutes.”

Filed Under: Project management 658.4
October 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

USB Chargers & Gold Paint Pens

Once more, I carefully set one of my devices to charge overnight, only to find it dead as a doornail in the morning. Why? because the mini-USB connector fits both ways, AND, because the logo for the “wall” end of the charger is on THE BOTTOM of the connector.

Why would anyone do this? Once day, I’ll ask the nice people at Blue Ant. For today, I’ll get out my gold paint pen and mark the top side of the connector.

For the record, all of my other connectors are marked this way. I saw the logo on the blue tooth charger and (silly me!) thought that the logo alone would serve to mark the top. Ha! I will never remember that in this case alone, the logo marks the bottom.

Younger readers with good eyesight may well be able to distinguish the tree-like symbol that means “top” on a USB connection, from the “arrow” on the bottom, in all kinds of light. People who buy reading glasses by the dozen will understand why it might help to mark the top. White paint would work as well as gold, I suppose, but gold marks feel a bit more luxurious, for the same price. You can buy the pens at art supply stores.

Filed Under: How to 680
September 17, 2009 By 1 Comment

ICE Entries and, Your address book is a database

ICE = In Case of Emergency.  First responders are learning to find the cell phone of an unconscious person and look for an ICE = In Case of Emergency entry.  The numbers in that entry are to people who would be useful or should be notified that the cell phone owner needs help.  Help the EMT help you by creating the entry, and by making sure your friends and family members create ICE entries for their own phones.

Along the same lines, consider that most phone address books can hold more than phone numbers, especially for “smart” phones that sync to a PC and have a “notes” field for each contact entry.

I wish I could remember how the subject came up.  Someone asked when I had my most recent tetanus shot.  I pulled out my cell phone and went to “T” in the address book.  I had the answer.  My friend was astounded. (A friend recently needed an emergency tetanus shot, and went to the emergency room on a Saturday night. The total bill was $426, with only $27 of that being for the injection itself and the remainder for ancillary ER services.)

My dogs each have entries in my phone, with their microchip information and date of last rabies shot.

For that matter, the date of my own rabies series is filed under “R,” but that’s a long and different story.  (Make CERTAIN the administering nurse codes the injection as “treatment for exposure,” not “prophylaxis.”)

I know a woman who keeps her son’s preference in beer in his entry’s Notes field.  When he visits, she knows what to buy.  (I suppose, if one had enough sons with different preferences, it might be easier to create a “beer” entry, but that’s not the case in this particular family.)

I have the rental rates and minimum head counts for my favorite meeting space in the Notes field of its entry.

I’m usually pretty well prepared for planned medical visits, and I can assemble the relevant records a day or two before.  However, “tetanus” (in particular; there are others that have a similar unexpected quality) is one medical outcome that is often unexpected, the result of an unplanned trip to the ER or urgent care clinic.  I will almost always have my phone with me on that kind of visit.  Common sense note:  the notes I make are somewhat cryptic, and I don’t keep my entire medical history on a device that can be pickpocketed out of my purse.  However, I’d rather a thief find out my tetanus history than get a shot I don’t really need because it hasn’t been very long since the last one.

Filed Under: Backups 005.8, How to 680, Process 153
July 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Social Networking in 15 Minutes a Day

  1. If you have to, set a timer.
  2. Create folders for the emails you’ll receive from Facebook and LinkedIn, and then create rules that automatically direct any incoming mail into these folders. Open these folders no more than once a day.

Facebook (Personal)

  1. For the first four or six weeks, Facebook can be worse than kudzu. Most people get past this phase. Some do not.
  2. Use lists to organize your friends. Go to Friends / All Friends / Create new list. Friends and Family. Business. High School. Co-workers. College. Neighbors. Clients. (Friends can appear in more than one list, so the high school friends who are active in your life today can appear in “friends and family” as well as “high school.”) You will quickly find that some FB users have TMFT (too much free time). Put these users in a list of their own, so their numerous posts don’t “crowd out” the important but less frequent posts from other people you want to follow.
  3. Once a day, look over the postings from people on the lists you care the most about. Some lists won’t change very often.
  4. If someone has posted something that resonates with you, add a comment.
  5. Notice that you can turn OFF any particularly inane “games” or “applications” that fall into the category of TMFT. You can also turn off posts from individual users, but putting them in their own list serves the same purpose.
  6. You can use privacy settings to limit who sees which of your posts, or you can decide to post comments you’re happy for your entire community to see. Your personality will determine which option works better for you.

Facebook (business)

If you own or represent a business or non-profit entity, consider creating a profile page for that business. You can use the business page to post information directly relevant to the business. Facebook members can become “fans” of that page and receive updates about the business separate from any updates you may want to make about your own life or work.

Linkedin

  1. Create your profile. Customize your public profile URL.
  2. Connect to people you know.
  3. Join groups that appeal to you, that your connections belong to, that strike your fancy. Be sure to set the email notification to “weekly” (the default is daily).
  4. Consider whether any of the applications suit your life and your online image. Voracious readers may want to consider adding the “Reading List” application.
  5. Update your “working on” status regularly, or never. Once a week is a good target.
  6. At the very least, read the weekly LinkedIn update email that contains a synopsis of what your contacts have been doing in Linkedin. Within a few weeks, you’ll learn which of the group emails are worth reading in detail, and which can be skimmed or deleted.
  7. If you have any extra time, consider answering questions in your area of expertise.
  8. One very useful time to use LI is before attending an event where it’s possible to know who else will be attending, such as events managed through Meetup or EventBrite. Review the attendees list and look up a few of the profiles in LI. When you attend the meeting, you’ll know something about some of the people who will be present.

About Twitter

  1. If you’re reading this article because you’re new to social networking and concerned about the amount of time it can take, and if your business operates in a reasonably stable world (i.e., NOT financially dependent on up-to-the-minute breaking news), you can focus on Linkedin and Facebook first.
  2. You might want to open a Twitter account now if you have a particular user name you want to claim.
Filed Under: Networking 658.8, Social media 658.87
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