by Melanie DePaoli

   This article was originally published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter

Developing your culture is a lot like putting together a puzzle without knowing what the final image will look like. Just because you have all the pieces, doesn’t mean you know what the final outcome will be. The key is putting the pieces together—it takes time, patience and a willingness to make mistakes.

There are tips and tricks to putting a puzzle together such as, starting with the edges and dividing the remaining pieces up by color or pattern.  Starting with the edges allows you to create the boundaries or the framework. By defining the boundaries upfront, you have a starting point and a point of reference to go back to when the rest of the pieces do not make sense.  Every remaining piece will now go within that boundary—or so you think.

Completing the boundaries is quite an accomplishment, but it is not the goal. Stopping here or only focusing on the boundaries is what gets a lot of companies into trouble. Just because there is a physical boundary between the internal workings of your company and the marketplace, does not mean that the two never interact or that one is protected from the other. In fact it is the exact opposite; because there is a boundary the two areas directly influence each other.

The boundary subconsciously signifies there are secrets on the other side. No one likes to feel left out, that is why gossip spreads so quickly. Your employees want to know how your customers think and feel about your product, company or service so they are able to create better marketing, improve the offerings, increase sales, and create loyalty— the list goes on and on. The market wants to know the dirt about your company—do you really make a good product or offer the best service: how do you treat your employees, after all it may be a good place to work: is there some inside information that will get them a better deal—again the list goes on and on.

While this boundary looks pretty straight forward there is another element to consider, your employees. They go home every night and become a part of the market. “Great” you think, as you are running through all of the free information they can obtain for you. “Great” you think, as you run through all of the ways they will implement the new free information. “Great” you think, as your pride builds up because your employees are working around the clock to build and improve your company and its brand.

A friend of mine once said, “They pay me to come back the next day; they have to give me a reason to allow my work to influence my personal life.” What your employees say or how they represent your company in their personal time is going to be a reflection of how they experience working for your company. An employee’s perception of your company carries far more weight than any marketing campaign you will ever run—because they know the dirt.

So think of the ‘edges’ of your company as a flexible and transparent boundary.  Every action or reaction your company takes, both internally and externally affects what is on the other side. These transparent boarders are a great checks-and-balances point, but remember that it goes both ways: a change inside is always reflected outside and outside impacts are always reflected inside.

Mel DePaoli is the president and founder of Omicle located in Seattle, WA. She helps companies create a contagious culture by connecting the way the business is operated with how the business is marketed. Please visit Omicle for more information about how Omicle can become your Catalyst for Discovery. She is also interviewing companies for her upcoming book series, Brand or Culture: Which Comes First. Please visit Brand or Culture.com to get involved in the Brand or Culture Debate today! You may follow her on Twitter @MelDePaoli or become a fan of Omicle on Facebook.

by Melanie DePaoli

   This article was originally published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter

Every company’s target market is comprised of “busy people.” Busy people are very valuable, but they are busy for a reason – they have their own life, their own challenges and every company wants to connect with them. Have you considered how these busy people perceive the way you are trying to communicate with them? The fact is, you need to accept up front that busy people will only give you their attention if they see value in it. The mere fact that you have targeted them is not a good enough reason.

People are overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of different communications every day – email, text messaging, online ads, phone calls, television commercials, point of purchase displays, and the list goes on and on. They do not have the capacity to treat every communication experience as equally important, nor do they want to! Just because you think your product, service or message is important and that this busy person needs to hear what you are saying does not mean they will feel that way.

Busy people pride themselves on being unique – not fitting into this category or that. But instead creating the categories they want to be a part of. They look for products and services offered by companies they are able to trust to feed this desire. By learning to be the company that busy people trust to consistently help them feel this way, you have the potential to become the company that sets the standards instead of one of the ones striving to achieve the standards set by others.

Trust is what keeps a business alive and allows it to run smoothly. With trust, businesses thrive. Without it, businesses suffer and corruption takes over. It takes time to build trust with a busy person. There is a good chance your communications will be blown off just because it is their unconscious habit. Another possibility is that you may be using the wrong medium for the message you are trying to convey, but that is a whole other article.

Busy people would rather experience life than listen to what you have to say. They want to enjoy the things they do and the people in their life, so timing plays an important role in how and when you communicate with them. People typically do not like being lied to or treated like they are just another transaction so authenticity is the best approach.

The Authenticity Approach is the best way to connect with busy people and to run your business. Good or bad, the truth always comes out. Being authentic will allow busy people to relate to your company which builds trust. When they trust you, they want work with you.

Mel DePaoli is the president and founder of Omicle located in Seattle, WA. She helps companies create a contagious culture by connecting the way the business is operated with how the business is marketed. Please visit Omicle for more information about how Omicle can become your Catalyst for Discovery. She is also interviewing companies for her upcoming book series, Brand or Culture: Which Comes First. Please visit Brand or Culture.com to get involved in the Brand or Culture Debate today! You may follow her on Twitter @MelDePaoli or become a fan of Omicle on Facebook.

by Mel DePaoli

   This article was originally published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter

Businesses are always told ‘to do their research’ and ‘to make sure they really know their market.’ They often tell you that they do know their market and then proceed to describe them, (usually) in such general terms that might as well be anyone, someone, or even anybody—just as long as they breathe and have money. Sound familiar? No need to worry. We all do this at some point or another. The key is to recognize we are doing it (before it becomes a problem) and that it is okay to ask for help or say we do not know.

I have spent a good portion of the last year and a half doing research to find out if connecting a company’s culture with their branding was viable and determining the market and appeal. Overall, I think I have found some amazing results. I say found because what I thought going in was not entirely what I discovered to be true. I have been able to identify a unique niche that no one has and now I have the knowledge to fulfill it as well.

Because of the challenge of explaining an intangible, I have had a lot of opportunity to practice and get it wrong. It is still not perfect, but I describe it MUCH better today than I did a year ago! I also took to the opportunity to do some casual market research, once I was able to identify what I needed to clarify! That is the key; market research for research sake will tell you nothing. Research with a purpose will produce interesting results – often not what you expect.

I noticed that people kept associating what I did with a business coach, a marketing consultant or an executive coach. (For this, the terms coach and consultant are used interchangeably.) To me, the three are distinctly different and do not describe the services I offer. I will agree there is some overlap with all of them and the services I offer but, I do not describe the services I offer as any of those.

So, I designed a quick survey whose goal was to find out how people perceived the services offered by business, marketing and executive coaches (keeping in mind that coach and consultant are assumed to mean the same thing). While I did accomplish this goal, if I were to distribute the survey over again, I would add a few clarifying questions to make the results more accurate and more specific. I was so focused on finding out about the perception of the services offered that I forgot to ask who was taking the survey. Where they coaches or consultants themselves that were telling me about the services they offered? Or, were they people that had hired a coach? Having that information would have helped me target my market better and explain to other consultants how we could work together instead of view the other as competition. (Which I do not believe in, but that is a topic for another article.)

I found the results to be very interesting. Some of the results proved what I suspected, while others I found to be a surprise. In short, the survey proved that those are generic terms that really do not mean much of anything. While I am sure I will upset a few with that statement, it is not about what YOU say about your business, it is about how OTHERS perceive you. By using a generic term, you are confusing your prospects and doing yourself a disservice.

All of this information is interesting, but what does it mean?

For companies that offer these consulting services, I recommend they reevaluate how they talk about and promote their business. Yes, the general terms are easy for a quick conversation but they can devalue the services you offer making you a commodity. You cannot charge a premium price for a product or service that the client can get anywhere. Also, by being a commodity it means you have to do more work, more advertising and more marketing to show prospects why they should choose you over the consultant sitting next to you.

For my business, it confirms that I am not a business, marketing, or executive coach in a literal sense even though my services overlap some of the general perceptions. It also confirms that I do need to continue to refine the explanation of my services to prevent being pigeon-holed. Perhaps the most value I received from the survey was it gave me a better understanding of the top of mind reasons people reach out for help. It also showed that in a pinch, I can say I am an executive consultant. This is where the difference of a coach and consultant come into play. My services are more closely aligned with a consultant than a coach.

So, what do you do?

Please feel free to see the results for yourself at: Survey Results  

Mel DePaoli is the president and founder of Omicle located in Seattle, WA. She is also interviewing companies for her upcoming book series Brand or Culture: Which Comes First. Please visit www.omicle.com for more information about how Omicle can become your Catalyst for Discovery and www.brandorculture.com to get involved in the Brand or Culture Debate! Ms. DePaoli can be reached at mel@omicle.com.

by Mel DePaoli

   This article was originally published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter

Doomsday talk needs to stop right HERE, right NOW. You have a choice of how you are going to look at these times. When you look back in history, it is times like these which inspired the most innovative inventions that launched the next boom. It is times like these that take mediocre companies and make them stellar. How do they do it?

They take advantage of the times to improve all of those areas that they have been meaning to improve, they tighten up loose ends, encourage their employees break the normal bounds and most importantly, they take risks. When times are good and business is booming, companies are always complaining how this or that needs fixed or we need a new way to do something but they do not have the time to make those changes.

With a little more down time than you would probably like, now is the perfect time to give your employees “Innovation Freedom.” Take the time with your team to brainstorm what is the most exotic idea they can come up with—no holds bar! Anything is fair game! Simply make list after list of these ideas, making sure to write them all down. Covering the room in ideas should be your goal. Even if the idea is just a joke, it will spur creativity later.

After your team takes a long break, dinner and drinks or overnight, get back together and go through the list with the focus of “Which of these ideas, in a perfect world could we implement into our business?” Again keep in mind that we are still focusing on the ideas, not the solutions. People will naturally start to gravitate toward implementing these ideas, but it is critical to refrain from that right now. The purpose of this step is to talk further about each idea and how it can revolutionize the industry, the business and your employees.

By now you have probably narrowed the list down to at least half if not further. Here is where you go through the list again with a small dose of reality. Get your team focused on three questions for each idea: Is it relevant to our industry? Honestly, is it new? and the most important question, Are we jazzed about it? Using those three questions will narrow the list down to a handful of innovative ideas. The one(s) you choose to implement are up to you, but I recommend that you implement the ones that your employees are the most excited about. By standing behind your employees and empowering them to actually make a difference in themselves, the business and the industry; you will have a winning recipe for success.

Mel DePaoli is the president and founder of Omicle located in Seattle, WA. She is also interviewing companies for her upcoming book series Brand or Culture: Which Comes First. Please visit www.omicle.com for more information about how Omicle can become your Catalyst for Discovery and www.brandorculture.com to get involved in the Brand or Culture Debate! Ms. DePaoli can be reached at mel@omicle.com.

by Mel DePaoli

   This article was originally published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter

Twitter is quite the enigma. Everyone has an opinion, but no one really knows what you are supposed to do with it. The New York Times said it best with It’s What You Make It. I am not going to go through all of the features of Twitter because you can find that elsewhere. Instead, I am going to talk about using Twitter for business.

Like so many, I am relatively new to the world of Twitter. Before signing up though I wanted to know “if anyone has received business from Twitter.” I posted that question on various sites to see what others experience has been. The general consensus was that no one has received business (directly) from Twitter. So if you are looking to get more business from a new source, you will have to look elsewhere.

That being said, if you are looking for a tool to get the word out about your company, your product or your service, Twitter is IT! Twitter is a great way to talk about what is important in your area of specialty. It also makes you think, because you have to use smaller phrases and words that will entice your follows to read what you write and hopefully re-tweet your tweet.

So what are things that will interest your followers and help you get results? Notice the fine print—get you results! Whether you advertise, use social media or network the goal for any of that is to drive business results. So what are you looking to get out of Twitter? That will drive how you tweet. Do you want to increase visibility, have someone read that blog you spend all that time posting to, or drive people to your website because your conversion rate once they are there will take care of the rest? How about practice conveying value to prospects or the idea you had for an article but forget where you were going with it? Twitter is great for all of those things.

Like anything else out there, Twitter has a learning curve. There are a ton of acronyms, it makes you aware of the length of your URLs and you cannot assume that your followers will read every message you tweet. Because of this, your messages have to be true to your brand, but simple enough that they make sense individually.

You will hear some tell you that Twitter is addicting, others do not have a problem. Hmmm sounds like any other addiction. The great thing about Twitter is that it allows you to target your audience when they are available. If your audience is online from 5-7pm then that is when you post your tweets because that is when they will see them. @DanZarrella did his own study and noticed that most tweets are viewed in the morning from 9-11. Though this is interesting, he did not mention what time zone and the chart he shows doesn’t account for this either. He does show interesting stats on words that encourage re-tweeting though.

Another thing to take into account is mixing business and personal. If your objective is to use Twitter as a business tool, then leave off the comments about how you are working in bed, eating a jelly donut, or just got over a cold—we don’t care and you really are not that important. So get over yourself!

Ahh I forgot to mention the challenge in being able to tweet 24/7. Like you, I have other things I need to do. Therefore, tweeting live is not always an option. A great tool to assist you with your tweeting is TweetLater.com. You create an account with them and can schedule ahead of time your tweets. How wonderful is that? TweetLater gives me the benefits of tweeting, but still allows me to get the real work done that I need to.

So take the good with the bad and make the most of the service. There is a lot of talk about changes that Twitter may be making in the future. We will see. For me they sound good, so I am looking forward to them.

Mel DePaoli is the president and founder of Omicle located in Seattle, WA. She is also interviewing companies for her upcoming book series Brand or Culture: Which Comes First. Please visit www.omicle.com for more information about how Omicle can become your Catalyst for Discovery and www.brandorculture.com to get involved in the Brand or Culture Debate! Ms. DePaoli can be reached at mel@omicle.com.

by Melanie DePaoli

    This article was published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter

You see me one time. This is someone’s license plate in the community that I am living. Since it is on a Corvette, at first I just thought it was funny. The more I saw it, the more it got me thinking—it’s true! We make decisions all the time based on this simple philosophy.

Prospective clients normally make their decision about a company with the very first person they meet or speak to and within the first minute. WOW that is a lot of pressure! It sounds like interviewing for a job . . . wait it is!

Think about when you hire a new employee. You are very selective, want the most for the best price and try to decide if you will like the person’s personality—if they will fit. Is this someone you can work with? Is this someone who your current team will work well with? Will this person be able to help us grow? Will this person be able to grow with the company? A lot of companies believe that most skills can be taught while personality cannot.

This is why it is so important to have a strong culture and to define what it is that your company stands for. By taking the time to define this, you create a work environment with standards for how decisions are made, a set of expectations for how customers will be treated and employees will interact, and you establish boundaries of what is right and wrong.

By defining your culture you also create what your internal perception and a desired external perception of your company. The internal perception is how the employees perceive each other and how they perceive the company. Do they work for a company that they cannot stand or is it a company that they feel supported by and takes care of them?

When people hear [insert your company name], what do you want them to think? What do they need to think in order for you to turn the prospect into a client? This is your external perception or your brand. Money can only buy so much; eventually true colors always reveal themselves. This being said, why risk walking a path that will end up costing you more in the end. Take the time and do it right from the start: define your culture so your culture becomes your brand and your employees and clients are saying the same message because they WANT to.

Mel DePaoli is the president and founder of Omicle located in Seattle, WA. She is also interviewing companies for her upcoming book series Brand or Culture: Which Comes First. Please visit www.omicle.com for more information about how Omicle can become your Catalyst for Discovery and www.brandorculture.com to get involved in the Brand or Culture Debate! Ms. DePaoli can be reached at mel@omicle.com.

by Mel DePaoli

  This article was originally published in The Productivity Institute Newsletter

If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies. . . . It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.  Albert Einstein

Once again, Einstein was ahead of his time!  But, in this case, he was only half right.

There are many companies out there that have hired an incredible designer that was able to initially cover up the shoddiness of the business as Einstein might lament. On the flip side there are many GOOD companies that for whatever reason will not or do not invest in quality design, and this is as sad a situation as Einstein described.

How does good design affect your business, be it for a website, marketing materials or any other aspect that the public views? What is the value of design? Can you control the effect of quality design? And, does good design impact my bottom-line? Since these questions are all intertwined, there is no clear yes or no answer to any of them.

The world is as it is. Unfortunately, no matter what our parents tried to teach us, we do judge a book by its cover, even when we may not mean to. That being said, when your business has nicely designed materials, this is a direct representation of HOW you do business. Think about it, if you do not care enough about your own ‘stuff,’ how are your customers to know you will provide top quality and treat them with respect?

“But we want that mom-n-pop feel.” That is great; there is value in this as well. But leave that to a designer to accomplish because just using clip art and having someone without experience putting your materials together does not give the perception of ‘mom-n-pop,’ it gives the perception of cheap! Does this mean that the more expensive the designer or firm the better your materials? The answer is a firm: “No”.  Price can be misleading just as with any other profession.

The secret is that you need to know who your company is and what it stands for BEFORE you talk to the market or put your materials together. Why? Because when a prospect views your materials (this can be anything from a magnet to your website and everything in-between) a perception is created in their mind about the experience they will have when doing business with you. If they like the perception, they will want to do business with you. Of course, once you create the perception, you need to deliver!

This is where most companies miss the boat. They think that advertising and marketing are separate from how they do business. I am here to tell you that they are not—they are one in the same! Your marketing and advertising efforts are laying the ground work for the experience that your customers will have. People like what they expect.

It truly is amazing how the smallest thing can have the biggest impact on your bottom-line and can create an industry standard. By creating an industry standard, your competition will not survive unless they (at least) match your level of service and how the market perceives you. This is a great way to minimize your competition. An excellent example of this is the McDonald’s Happy Meal. It is a child size portion of food, in a fun box with a cheap toy. It not only shows that McDonald’s considers children an important part of their market, but the design is perfect to capture their attention. No fast food or family restaurant will last long without offering their own version of this. It is simple but VERY powerful.

When design + marketing and advertising + how you do business come together harmoniously authenticity is achieved and there will be a positive impact on your bottom-line—guaranteed!

Mel DePaoli is the president and founder of Omicle located in Seattle, WA. She is also interviewing companies for her upcoming book series Brand or Culture: Which Comes First. Please visit www.omicle.com for more information about how Omicle can become your Catalyst for Discovery and www.brandorculture.com to get involved in the Brand or Culture Debate! Ms. DePaoli can be reached at mel@omicle.com.