Essential Marketing – A.I. and Customer Service

Give Your Time an MOT

Do you run your day or does the day run you? Scan through this simple list of symptoms and see which apply to you; Do you find yourself easily distracted? Do you take longer to complete relatively simple tasks? At the end of the working day do you feel deflated as its mostly been unproductive? […]

Social Media Management for Professional Firms – Part 2

Here is the 2nd part of my review of social media management for professional service businesses, derived from typical questions posed over the past few months. Q.      How do you inject personality into a firm’s twitter account to encourage engagement? A. Many large corporate organisations adopt a mechanism of allowing their social media team to leave […]

Is Twitter in Trouble?

It’s amazing how quickly bad news or rumours travel.  Something in the human psyche gives a turbo boost to negative stories.  We have a strange compulsion to share and be the harbinger of doom, aided by the multiple social media platforms at our fingertips. Ironically it’s one of the most prominent of these platforms, Twitter, […]

Friends, Randoms, Connected-men, The Truth Behind Online Relationships

A couple of years ago I wrote an article highlighting the fascinating work of anthropologist and psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar, supporting my view on hype surrounding the importance of the numbers of social media connections.  Dunbar’s research into the social interaction of apes combined with known historical factors of human behaviour led to a pretty definitive […]

Time For a New Website?

There seems to be a flush of businesses updating websites driven by the ever increasing reality of digital dominance in marketing matters and fear that competitors are stealing a march. Before pressing the panic button and engaging that “oh so charming” design company to makeover your online face, pause for a moment, breathe and think […]

The Power of Influence – Knowing Your Social Media Score

Prior to all things going digital and smartphones embedding themselves in our lives, we had a simpler more straightforward life.  In the past your number of friends could be counted in birthday or Christmas cards or the entries in the address book you kept in the draw of the table in the hall, the one […]

Working Smart – 6 Top App Suggestions

One of the oft touted benefits of technology; new and shiny gadgets, software or apps, is their ability to make our lives easier, save time and be more efficient. Not all make the grade, in fact many can create quite the opposite effect and leave you staring at a screen for far longer than you’d […]

Is Marketing Dead?

Headlines of a similar nature have been peppering business news feeds for a couple of years now.  It’s a dramatic supposition. A management function that has breathed its last, passed on, is no more, has ceased to be, expired and gone to meet its maker, stiff and bereft of life, it rests in peace.  Apologies […]

Marketing – Is it really all about the 3 C’s – Content, Content, Content?

Pick up a copy of a business magazine, webinar, SEO whitepaper, workshop agenda or open one of those hundreds of marketing tip e-mails [not all such e-mails are the same of course 🙂 ] and the chances are you’ll not go far before the word “content” is mentioned. If you want your website to be […]

Business Development – Why You Need to be Thinking LinkedIn

There are no shortage of “top tip” type posts extolling the virtues of marketing you or your business on social media platforms.  Many offer useful practical advice and are indeed helpful whilst others appear to offer nothing other than the basic, obvious and on occasion not all together accurate nuggets. In this latest post I’m […]

9 Tips to Help Manage Your Biggest Assets

It’s surprising how many times we can make assumptions of others in the workplace and often underestimate the workload and stresses those in senior roles deal with. As a junior and middle manager I too fell into the trap of thinking the “boss” was not always engaged with the important stuff and didn’t understand what […]

We all want to be Norm – 10 Tips to Build Stronger Customer Relationships

Back in the early 1980’s a US sit com hit our screens and almost immediately became a hit. Centred on a small bar in Boston the show introduced us to a series of characters who were the regulars and staff of “Cheers”. The theme song was catchy and used the phrase “Where everyone knows your […]

Growth Accelerator – A Practical Approach to Improved Performance

We all need a virtual or actual boost in our businesses now and again.  It’s too easy to become complacent, comfortable or afraid of making any changes that might make things “different”. What many successful businesses do is harness a culture of continual evolution never settling for the status quo.  This can be massively helped […]

Excellent Customer Service – Have You Got it Covered?

Having just returned from a trip to California I’m inspired to write about customer service.  Not that we encountered the very best at every turn, yes it was mostly very good but my TripAdvisor reviews did include the odd horror. Yes, even the great land of “awesomeness” and “super excitement” didn’t get it right all […]