Group items tagged

Interesting assessment by Tracy Sestili on the value of social media fans/followers, April 20, 2014. LinkedIn sent it to me. Explains that unless they do something that amplifies your brand or purchases from you, they have no value and it may be a negative outflow of effort to build a fan base without return.

Blog post by Sylvia Browder at the Story Exchange--where women mean business. "Challenge 2: Undefined Niche To Niche or Not to Niche…that is the question. What is a niche? A niche business is one that targets a very specific group of people with specific shared interest. A business with an undefined niche is like a ship sailing in shallow water. By creating a niche business allows you to market to your ideal clients. For example, if you were a behavioral psychologist targeting teens, you would market your services in places where parents are likely to find out about you; such as advertising in parent magazines, providing resources to local middle and high schools or joining organizations geared towards parents. Solution: By understanding who and where your ideal customers are; it is easy to craft a marketing plan to target them. Here are three easy ways to target your potential clients: * Improve your website's SEO with specific key words * Generate exposure locally and virtually with professional speaking, seminars or publishing a book or articles. * Craft a clear message that speak at the heart of your customer " Challenge 4: No Social Media Plan Random tweets and meandering Facebook posts will result in a lot of time devoted to zero results. Before making another useless post, sit down with pen and paper and make a list of what you want to achieve from social media. To which social media do you belong? What are some social media marketing strategies that you have noticed from other companies? What do you have that will offer value? You may find that your company is spread a little too thin across the social media spectrum. Quality truly is superior to quantity in this respect. Solution: Create a social media marketing plan and stay the long haul. Establishing a strong presence can be a very time consuming process. It is unwise to expect your list of fans, followers or subscribers to grow overnight.

Interesting webinar--writing retreats--$89, June 2014

Survey by Seth Kahan of 135 executives of trade associations and professional societies among others. Listed innovation priorities for future: educational offerings mentioned 101 times (135 survey participants), member experience--78, meetings--65, ...technology--56 Interesting innovations identified by survey participants on page 17 starting with this one: identifying a unique way of delivering women's leadership programming. Many organizations do it, most for their internal staff development, but don't do it well. We want to drop anchor in a crowded ocean and dive deep below the surface for our reach. Another one: creating an institute to advance the profession: research, human capital and practice management. Yet another: practice Portal www.asha.org/practice-portal/

Interesting scale of factors for measuring community performance in relation to other communities

Slide 22 on Edutopia Experiment Workshop very interesting for planning and learning from experiments--What; Audience; Hypothesis; Data to prove or disprove; What are the steps to implement, collect data, analyze data, and reflect on it by ??? What did you learn? What will change to be more effective or efficient in your work? What is the design of your next experiment?

Interesting article on why content is not the important thing in a blog anymore, but how you market and promote it is, as well as the strategy you have mapped out to continuously engage those who have signed in as members or customers.

Digest of ideas by Gwen Teatro, You Are Not the Boss of Me, reprinted 9/7/14, originally written in 2010. Very interesting look at the Fifty Discipline by Peter Senge. "There was a time when everyone was jumping onto The Learning Organization bandwagon. This usually happened when times were good, when organizations felt a little more ebullient...Budgets were cut....wisdom and decisions would only come from the few and learning for the many was a luxury no one could afford." Learning Organization components 1. Vision--shared--may start with one person, it must be embraced and shared by all. Can be simple, i.e., Zappo's Delivering Happiness 2. Team learning--in an age where shared leadership is or will become critical, the need to understand the dynamics and functional operation of teams is pretty great--how team members communicate with each other, how they manage conflict, and how they examine their successes...and their failures 3. Personal Mastery--taking the time to study and understand our reality and our purpose 4. Mental models--dangers of clinging to and operating from narrow perspectives--assumptions and biases in our thinking 5. Systems thinking--paying attention to the connections between and among a variety of elements that make up the whole.

From 2011 but still interesting, Sree Sreenivasan, DNAinfo

interesting article by Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie, November 4, 2014 on how to help groups make better decisions. Eight suggestions are made: 1. Silence the leader 2. Prime critical thinking 3. Reward group success 5. Assign roles 6. Appoint a devil's advocate 7. Establish contrarian teams 8. Delphi Method

Interesting article by Megan Hughes, March 23, 2015 on how inventers are racing to meet the needs of baby boomers with personal behavior tracking/assessment devices (Fitbit and others) to help boomers enjoy good health for as long as possible. Boomers are afraid of losing their independence according to market assessments that drive new tech development for this age group.

An interesting infographic on female millennials and their views of diversity, role model gap, work-life strategy, global careers, new era of talent, career confident, feedback culture, financially empowered.

interesting report on female millennials including their views of diversity, upward mobility, international opportunities, etc.

interesting breakdown of attractive landing page for website, most of which we don't do

interesting survey results on benefits valued by members of scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly communities. Top two benefits were peer reviewed journal and continuing education for members and nonmembers.

interesting job of the future--professional triber--someone who puts together project teams on demand

Mary Meeker's annual report on trends. Slides 109-112 on millennials work behavior and expectations and what they value are very interesting--training and development, flexible work hours, cash bonuses. Buy personal technology and use it in the workplace. Millennials much more likely to be on demand workers (4$%) than gen x, baby boomers, or mature workers. Slide 126 is on freelancer categories. Slide 127 is on how quickly freelancers can get work from internet. Slide 128 shows internet enabling commerce such as ebay Etsy, airbnb, upwork, uber, thumbtack, soundcloud, and stripe.

interesting video of Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor Helen Riess speaking about empathy and its importance to our society. To have EMPATHY means to employ: E--eye contact or gaze to see each other M--Muscles that make up facial expressions P--Posture--are you with your arms folded tight against your body or slumping because you don't want to be there? A--Affect-analyzing the expressed emotions of the other person T--tone of voice. Tone of voice and facial muscles are controlled by same place in brain--allow emotions to leak out H--Hearing whole person--context Y--Your response

Far down the page is a Tips for Success section for learning in a structured, supported online situation. Might be interesting to see how some of this translates into tips for inde(interde)pendent self-directed learners.

interesting list of tools, none of which I have heard of, although their functions make sense to me