business – THE SOCIAL CMO Blog

Employers: Treat Every Employee Like A Mary Kay Rep

October 22, 2020January 9, 2021 by Ted Rubin

Empowering your employees will result in success for your brand…

Every retail employee is an individual with their own unique skills, outlook, and ability to solve problems. With the right training, an employee can learn to be a true ambassador for your brand, an asset to your company’s image, and a key reason that loyal customers keep coming back to your business. However, many brands put their public-facing employees into a box, with a selection of scripted responses and not many tools for genuinely addressing the problems of their customers. For them, promoting the brand is an afterthought and customer service is a means to an end.

Not every brand operates that way, of course, and the smart ones empower their employees to be more than robots. Treating your retail employees more like Mary Kay reps, rather than cogs in the machine, is crucial for establishing a better customer experience.

Beware The Risks of Arrogance and Pride in Business

July 19, 2019July 19, 2019 by Ted Rubin

Buzzing off those results you secured for your company? Feeling confident? Maybe even a little self-important? Time to check yourself people.

Ever work with someone who always had all the answers, even if they weren’t paying any attention to the questions? Have you ever been that person? It’s human nature for success to breed confidence; however, allowing that confidence to veer into arrogance is a dangerous thing in business and marketing. It’s hard to build a team-first culture when key members of the team think they are above the rules and above the rest of the group. And when a whole team becomes arrogant, success gives way to complacency. Beware of these risks at every level of your business.

When confidence turns sour

It’s hard to overstate how important confidence is to success, and how easy it is for confidence to become arrogance. It can grow from little things. Maybe you contributed a big idea to the project but felt that you didn’t get enough credit. Or maybe you got too much credit. Perhaps you see the positive trajectory of the team you’re a part of and overstate your part in it. It’s OK to be proud of your work and to foster pride in teamwork, but when that morphs into feelings of superiority, your whole team can start assuming that past results guarantee future success.

“A confident, level-headed leader knows that arrogance is bad for business, and that times of success are when they need to temper confidence.

No matter where it originates, arrogance is bad for business. A confident, level-headed leader knows this, and knows that times of success are when they need to temper confidence. You want team members to feel they’ve contributed, but not that they are more valuable than the rest of the team. As a leader or a team member, you also need to check yourself constantly, to make sure you’re not sowing the seeds of over-confidence in your business and marketing.

It’s important to stay vigilant because arrogance can destroy a successful business or team from the inside. When one team member feels they’re more important than the rest and their attitude goes unchecked, suddenly the rest of the team may not be so willing to engage and share their own ideas. An arrogant team member is willing to sacrifice the good of the whole to continue to feel important.

It starts with you

Of course, this isn’t just a risk for teams. It’s also something that we all must address on a personal level. When you come up with a great idea, put in the work to bring it to reality, and see your idea lead to success for your business, of course you should be feeling confident! However, stay humble and don’t let complacency creep in or the damage can escalate. You feel the confidence of success, so maybe next time around you put in a little less effort and expect to get the same results. Then, what happens when that lesser effort doesn’t lead to the results you hoped? Well, it’s got to be someone else’s fault, right? Arrogance might tell you to look outside of yourself and place blame, when the real problem is much closer to home.

Practice self-reflection

The cure for arrogance is a willingness to look at your actions through a lens of humility. Honest self-evaluation can be hard, but it’s incredibly valuable. In good times and bad, it starts with asking: How can I do a better job? No matter how well you and your team are doing, there is always room for improvement. Just as importantly, no matter how well something has worked in the past, there’s no guarantee that it will continue to be the best thing for your business moving forward. The old saying that “pride goeth before the fall” is true! People who take a step back and reflect periodically, often find more ways to improve their performance than their self-important colleagues.

Beware the dangers of pride and arrogance in business. You never want to feel like you have ‘arrived’ – no matter how well things are going, how hard you worked to contribute to that success, and how much your team values your input. Confidence is a powerful, positive thing, but only when it’s tempered by a healthy dose of humility.

#FollowThePath… #NoLetUp!

Originally posted at TedRubin.com

Don’t Tell Me You Don’t “Do” Business Cards

October 29, 2014December 20, 2014 by Ted Rubin

Don’t tell me you don’t “do” business cards. I suggest… you “do” them. It’s about connection and relationships. ‪#‎RonR‬. I posted this to Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn and the following conversation transpired. I add more depth to my statement in the comments below. Thought it worthwhile to give it all a home here.

The Importance of Hitting Our Inner Reset Button

October 25, 2014December 20, 2014 by Ted Rubin

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Our brains process five times the information they did 20 years ago. Here’s how you can help your brain adapt to information overload, and remain creative and productive.

Here’s a question for you: How many of the following scenarios can you identify with?

I feel guilty when I’m not working.
I often pull all-nighters on projects but don’t get as far as I should on them.
I feel the need to prop up my idea-flow with caffeine.
I check my email even on my days off and during vacation.
Doing what I’m doing used to be fun—now it’s difficult to stay energized.
I’m less organized than I used to be and find myself procrastinating more.
I often wake up in the middle of the night with anxiety.
I pick up colds and flu very easily.

If it seems you’re busier than ever, yet struggle with productivity—and one or more of the above scenarios sounds awfully familiar—you’re not alone. Today we’re more plugged in than ever before in history, and we’re paying a price—mental, emotional and physical burnout.

Balancing Act

We have more difficulty staying focused. We have trouble disengaging from work. We experience more stress-related health problems. In an INSEAD research paper,“Doing Nothing and Nothing to Do: The Hidden Value of Empty Time and Boredom,”author Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries writes: “The ability to balance activity and solitude, noise and quietness, is an excellent means to tap our inner creative resources. The secret of truly successful, creative people may well be that they learned very early in life how not to be busy.”

Does this mean you should chuck work and “Zen” your way to success? Of course not. But there’s a critical balance that seems to be missing from our lives, especially if we have a tendency to be workaholics.

Information Overload

Every day, we take in about 174 newspapers’ worth of information (five times as much as we did 20 years ago), and watch an average of five hours of TV. That’s a lot to process, and our brains have a hard time taking it all in. On top of that, thanks to our plugged-in lifestyle, we take less true vacation time and work more hours—neither of which helps us be more productive.

I read an interesting article in The New York Times Sunday Review recently called“Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain.” The article was written by Daniel J. Levitin, author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, which explains that the human brain has evolved into two separate “attention” systems that help us sift through information and sort it into two areas: the task-positive and task-negative networks.

The task-positive network is active when you’re focused on a specific task and engaged in it without distraction. The task-negative network, on the other hand, is active when your mind is wandering or daydreaming. That’s where inspiration and creativity come from. Then there’s a third component, an attention filter, which acts like a switch between the task-positive and task-negative networks. The filter helps orient us and tells us what to pay attention and what to ignore in any given moment.

Over the years, we’ve developed shorter attention spans because we’re constantly being bombarded by incoming information, which, in effect, activates that switch. So if you’re constantly getting notifications for email, Facebook, Twitter, etc., you’re constantly see-sawing back and forth too often between what’s critical and what’s not.

Deliberate Immersion

Levitin suggests we need to lay off that switch by segmenting our daily activities into time slots and immersing ourselves in a single task for a sustained period, like 30 to 50 minutes without distractions. The same goes for immersing ourselves in task-negative activities like exercise, walking in the woods or listening to music, which all help trigger the mind-wandering, daydreaming mode that leads to creativity and resets our brain to provide perspective on what we’re doing.

Chances are, you’ll have to train yourself to do this; however, regular bouts of downtime where you’re not constantly plugged into task-positive activities is not only good for the brain, it’s good for your body, too. The same can be said for taking real vacations (not working during your holidays). I know that taking frequent breaks and putting myself in the moment when I’m on a holiday really helps me focus and also creates a more positive frame of mind when I’m back at work.

The human brain is a marvel of creation. When we treat it right and stop abusing it, wonderful things can happen. If we all hit our “reset” button more deliberately and more often, just think of what we could accomplish together.

Photo: Getty Images

Originally posted OCTOBER 3, 2014 American Express OPEN Forum

The Only Way to Build a Brand on Social Media is Through Trust

October 19, 2014December 20, 2014 by Ted Rubin

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Whether you’re building your personal brand, your business brand or both, one thing remains true: You need content to help you build trust and followers.

Should Social Media Outsourcing be Illegal? ~guest post via @BLichtenwalner

February 8, 2014December 20, 2014 by Ted Rubin

Many companies completely outsource social media management. These companies may have good reasons for this decision. Yet, when outsourced, social media communications misrepresent reality. In fact, is it possible that completely outsourcing your social media accounts should be outlawed? Below are a couple issues to consider:

Duane Reade Strategy Creates 1 Million+ Engaged Twitter Followers

October 11, 2013December 20, 2014 by Ted Rubin

~via Wired City… New York City drug store giant Duane Reade is connecting with more customers via social media.

Its Twitter fan base surpassed 1 million followers, a major milestone for the Walgreen-operated drug store chain among the drug, food and mass-arena segment. Duane Reade has raised its presence on Twitter more than 6,000 percent in the past year.

“CUSTOMER-IZE” your Brand Culture

August 28, 2013December 20, 2014 by Ted Rubin

And dramatically increase you Return on Relationship… #RonR.

The Voice of the Customer… Are You Listening?

August 24, 2013December 20, 2014 by Ted Rubin

With all the noise online today, people are tuning out things like advertisements and promotions from brands. When considering a product or service, what’s more important to them are the thoughts and opinions of their friends—especially in social media. Reviews have become the first go-to resource for most people searching for something online these days, so brands need to pay attention to this trend.

For instance, when you’re looking at books to read on Amazon, don’t you check out the reviews to see what others thought about the book before you hit the “Add to Cart” button? It’s human nature to seek out the opinions of others who have tried something—from the books we read to the music we listen to—and especially big-ticket purchases.