NEMOA Idea Blog

Loved this post from Seth Godin as we put the finishing touches on our spring conference in Boston, 3/2-3/4. "Setting the stage" makes a huge difference...

It might be a garage or a sunlit atrium, but the place you choose to do what you do has an impact on you.

More people get engaged in Paris in the springtime than on the 7 train in Queens. They just do. Something in the air, I guess.

Pay attention to where you have your brainstorming meetings. Don't have them in the same conference room where you chew people out over missed quarterly earnings.

Pay attention to the noise and the smell and the crowd in the place where you're trying to overcome being stuck. And as Paco Underhill has written, make the aisles of your store wide enough that shoppers can browse without getting their butts brushed by other shoppers.

Most of all, I think we can train ourselves to associate certain places with certain outcomes. There's a reason they built those cathedrals. Pick your place, on purpose.

fear.less

Here's a fun thought to ponder from the fear.less blog. Perhaps I like this because I used to run catalog production at L.L.Bean where chaos was a constant force around me...!

Cooler heads tend to prevail because they are not very cool at all - they are aflame with focus, thought and determination.

 

Fear is disorienting, and panic can scatter brain you whether in a few seconds of natural disaster or a drawn-out week of personal strife. We are so much more than our animal instincts yet that is what we are often reduced to when we are put in a stressful situation.

 

Those who rise to the occasion in a crisis make the active choice to not freak out. Collecting information and using reason deconstructs fear and helps turn paralyzing terror into a captivating puzzle. Curiosity and problem solving can be an effective substitute for courage.

 

Breathe deep and gather facts.

Why we work

Love this post today from Seth Godin's blog.

Why do we work?

1. For the money
2. To be challenged
3. For the pleasure/calling of doing the work
4. For the impact it makes on the world
5. For the reputation you build in the community
6. To solve interesting problems
7. To be part of a group and to experience the mission
8. To be appreciated

Why do we always focus on the first? Why do we advertise jobs or promotions as being generic on items 2 through 8 and differentiated only by #1?

In fact, unless you're a drug kingpin or a Wall Street trader, my guess is that the other factors are at work every time you think about your work.

More ideas from NEMOA's Fall Conference

Several of NEMOA's Fall speakers talked about "must-dos" on your website. Here are a few ideas they presented in more detail at the September conference.

• You MUST have product reviews on your website. If you get bad reviews, fix the product!
• Learn how to make inexpensive videos for your website at www.howcast.com. Don't worry about being perfect - fun videos are a hit via YouTube.
• Improve customer search results by automating your search function so that as a customer types a word, words drop down giving the customer a choice to choose from.

More to come!

NEMOA's Fall Conference wrapped up last week. Our speakers had so many cool ideas... Here are three of my favorites from a large business-to-business and business-to-consumer multichannel merchant:

1. If you are sending a customer a coupon, give her a choice of $ off, or a free gift. Why try to guess which one she prefers?

2. Ask your vendors to choose cross-sell items for your website rather than assign your own staff to this task.

3. There is an "attachment ceiling" to try and get a customer to add more items to their shopping cart. For each item a customer purchases, offer three possible add-ons. If you offer more, the customer has too many to choose from - and will choose none.

Love this recent post from Seth Godin...

Seth Godin - Generosity

If you make a difference, you also make a connection. You interact with people who want to be interacted with and you make change that people respect and yearn for. Seek to make a difference. It's your art, it's what you do. You touch people and change them for the better. The more you give, the more you get.  

There are tens of thousands of businesses making many millions a year in profits that still haven't ever heard of Twitter, blogs, or Facebook. Are they all wrong? Have they missed out, or is the joke really us? They do business through personal relationships by delivering customer service and it's working for them... They are not writing about it, they are doing it.  

Vision is the lifeblood of any organization. It is what keeps us moving forward and provides meaning to the challenges and setback that make up real life. In a down economy, things get very tactical. We are just trying to survive. What worked yesterday does not necessarily work today. What works today may not necessarily work tomorrow.   This is where great leadership makes all of the difference. Leadership is more than influence. It is about reminding people of what it is we are trying to build - and why it matters. It is about painting a picture of a better future. It comes down to pointing the way and saying, "C'mon. We can do this!"   When times are tough, vision is the first casualty. Before conditions can improve, it is the first thing we must recover.  

Commit to a lifetime relationship that spans events, companies, and geographic boundaries. Care for the concerns of others as if they are your own. Aim to connect those who will benefit and enrich each other's lives in equal measure. Communicate candidly. Tell people what they should hear rather than what they want to hear.   If you are truly enriching someone's life, they will typically miss you in their past. They think their lives would have been better if they had met you earlier.  People at events are hungry for authenticity.

We try to live by this creed at NEMOA! Hope to see you at our Sept Conference in Newport, RI, 9/15-9/16/2011.

Idea #7 - Editing your work

Loved this post today from Seth Godin's Blog:

It's laughably easy to find someone to critique a sentence, to find a missing apostrophe or worry about your noun-verb agreement.

Sometimes, you're lucky enough to find someone who can tell you that a paragraph is dull, or out of place.

But finding people to rearrange the chapters, to criticize the very arc of what you're building, to give you substantive feedback on your strategy--that's insanely valuable and rare.

Perhaps one criticism in a hundred is actually a useful and generous contribution in your quest to reorganize things for the better.

[And for those in need of subtitles, this isn't a post about your next novel. It's about your business, your career and your life.]

Four people tell you that there was a typo on the third slide in your presentation. A generous and useful editor (hard to call them a consultant), though, points out that you shouldn't be doing presentations at all, and your time would be better spent meeting in small groups with your best clients.

Idea #6 - Mashable

One of our NEMOA speakers told be about Mashable.com which bills itself as "The Social Media Guide". Our speaker tells me this is one of the top blogs to read. I wasn't sure what to expect - Social Media covers a wide gambit! But I love the information here - especially the Twitter Guidebook and Facebook Guidebook. The trending tab and social media tab take you to all sorts of interesting news in Social Media and new and emerging technology. The site layout is easy to navigate with clear headlines and click-throughs to learn more. Very helpful!

Idea #5 - What's next in Communication Tools?

Wow. When this technology rolls out, and I have no doubt it will, everything about how we sell and how we advertise product changes... Check out this incredible link from TED.com about an upcoming technology from the Media Labs...

Idea #4 - More cool ideas from the NEMOA Conference...

Vineyard Vines is working hard to create a "hugging environment" for their retail, catalog, and internet customers. They tell personal stories about the models in their product copy and encourage customers to send in their own stories about Vineyard Vines products - along with photos. The founders of Vineyard Vines, brothers Shep and Ian Murray, told us that the two most important people in their organization are the person the customer talks to when they place an order, and the last person in the company to touch a product before it reaches the customer.

Vineyard Vines focuses on the experience the customer has ordering from Vineyard Vines as well as on the product that is ordered. Good idea!