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Here’s another fabulous series of studies on the truth behind metaphors reported by Mind Hacks (one of my favourite blogs).

This time the studies all relate to the issue of weight. If people talk about something important we use the term “discussing weighty matters”. If someone is seen as being irrelevant they are described as being a lightweight or having no substance. So is there any truth that weight = being seen as important or good?

These studies looked at the impact having people fill in the same questionnaire holding a heavier clipboard would have.  In one study people valued foreign currencies as greater when they held the heavier clipboard.  Other studies showed that people holding heavier clipboards tended to be more confident in their opinions on controversial issues and were more likely to agree with strong arguments for the issue.

So what does this mean for business? Well I would certainly be testing different weight clipboards when you have customers complete new customer forms, questionnaires, surveys or feedback forms.  You may get clearer and more definite responses to your business as a result. Just remember that super-heavy clipboards may also create a workplace health and safety issue – so you may want to leave the lead-lined ones in the drawer.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

Employee manuals are something that most businesses who have more than one employee need to have. The trouble is often they sit on a shelf (next to the Strategic Plan) and gather dust. The only time the cobwebs are removed from them is when there is a disaster and you need to work out what to do.

Employee Manuals need to be living breathing documents, full of enough useful information that you and your team refer to them whenever they need to do something out of the ordinary (like hire someone new, run a performance review or work out how to deal with the employee who has BO). Of course they also need to deal with crisis situations such as dismissing someone, dealing with sexual harassment or what to do when an employee goes off the rails.

Good employee manuals also need to keep pace with emerging technology with policies covering blogging, social media use including Twitter and instant messaging.

Finally, they need to be regularly reviewed in light of new industrial relations legislation to ensure that your business still complies.

After 20 odd years as a Human Resource Manager with companies ranging from less than a hundred employees to a few thousand, I put together all the best policies that I had written, implemented and used in each of the organisations into our Instant HR Policies & Procedures Manual for Australian businesses.

I designed it to be a super simple to use template HR manual – just insert your company name, check out the fit of the policies for your business (for example – not every business offers staff discount so you may not need that particular policy), do a quick check with your legal team to make sure your particular business structure is taken into account and then you are on your way. You don’t need a huge HR team to make it work.

Over the past few years, our employee manual has been successfully used by hundreds of Australian businesses from small start-up IT companies through to large mining organisations. From Opera companies to plumbers – the essentials of good HR are still the same. We even have discovered our manual appearing in some of the Pacific Islands, the UK and the USA. Even though the legal contexts vary, good HR transcends geographic boundaries.

Yesterday, after many months review, we released our latest version 3.1 which takes into account all of the changes from the Fair Work Act. And late last night, everyone who had purchased the manual in the past 2 and a bit years was sent a new free download link to the new edition – just to make sure they were current with their policies (we like surprising people with that little bit extra!)

So … if you have been meaning to create an employee manual for your team, perhaps you may want to check out our Instant HR Policies & Procedure Manual. It will make your life a whole lot easier!

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – HR Writer

Many people believe that you have to be the best in your field to be successful.This sets you up for major stress and a lot of disappointment.  It also makes for situations where business goals are written down as  “to be the best in the world (insert business here)” – which serves as a demotivator to employees and generates a “ho hum” response from clients.

The good news is you don’t have to be the best to succeed – otherwise all of those kids who were Dux’s of High School would have taken over the world by now.

If you think seriously about it there is ever only going to be one “best in the field” at any given time. If we let that stop us there would only be one painter in the world, one footballer and one stockbroker. All the rest would say “ah well – I am not going to be the best so I may as well do something else”.

We know that isn’t true. There are thousands of successful painters, hundreds of A-league footballers all making a mint, and thousands of professional stockbrokers. There’s room enough for all of them to make a successful living.

So cut yourself some slack. All you need to be is one of the best in your field, or at least be known as one of the best in your field. You don’t have to be perfect – you just need to be known to be better than most of your competition.

Someone once told me that you have to be a better marketer of what you do, than a doer of what you do. I am not so sure that I fully agree with that sentiment. I personally believe marketing and professionalism go hand in hand. There’s no point in being the inventor of the world’s best mouse trap if no one knows about it.

You need to balance both sides of the equation for success. You just don’t need to be the world’s best at doing it. There … doesn’t that feel better?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

I have been working with a wonderful niche wholesale business over the past month. Their website is well optimised and they appear on page 1 of Google for all of their main keywords  at the end of the first month the site has been up.  To make it even better they have shown a strong profit from their first month of operating. Pretty impressive by any standards – even more so as this is a small business run from private home.

But what has impressed me most about this particular business is their willingness to work out their numbers – and in particular the cost to acquire each new customer.  They track each and every new customer to work out where they came from, and they have done this tracking seamlessly as part of their process rather than as an add-on or afterthought. For this reason they have some solid data to work with.

They then have a simple Excel spreadsheet that lists all of their marketing campaigns for the month in both print media and online adwords. From here it is simple maths – how much did it cost to acquire each new customer, and how much on average did customers acquired by each medium spend in their first month.

What they have found is customers acquired from online sources only cost them $1.03 each and they spend on average $50 in the first month (we are just starting to see this group moving into repeat orders – a whole new set of numbers for the spreadsheet).  Customers from the print ads cost my client $21 each and only spent on average $26 in the first month.

Think about it – if you could gamble $1.03 and consistently come up with $50 – would you gamble the money? What about gambling $21 and coming back with $26? Which gamble would you take more often?

The thing here is to realise that you can track your numbers – and use them to inform where you spend your marketing budget. If you advertise “to get your name out there” you are doing yourself and your business a disservice. Warm fuzzy name marketing is great for big business – but doesn’t pay the bills of small business where each dollar counts. You want tangible results from each campaign.

Yes, we only have one month’s data to go on, but we have statistically significant numbers given the traffic through the site (I knew those years of Behavioural Statistics back in my Psychology degree days would one day come in handy).

This is a small business – and yet they know with a fair degree of accuracy which marketing gets results for them. So before you run your next marketing campaign ask yourself – do the numbers add up? If you don’t know – find a way to track the results and determine whether the investment is worth it for future expenditure.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

One of my favourite new words is Lekking (thanks Cosmos Magazine for sharing this one). It first came from the Swedish att leka meaning “to play” and originally was used to describe male behaviour when females are around in the animal kingdom.  It can be as simple as peacock displays or as complex as male cichlid fish that build underwater cities in the sand to grab the eye of a passing female cichlids.

But lekking is not just limited to animals. The University of NSW in Sydney showed that human males also form leks – with power-dressing and verbal insults as a way of showing off.

The funniest study was one published in Human Nature that showed men also lek with their mobile phones – they display them in public places (even if they don’t intend to use them). The more men in a group, the more mobile phones were pulled out for display. Women tend to keep them in their handbags and only use them when needed, blokes on the other hand put them on display and then constantly fiddle with them even when not in use (read a full version of the article reported in the NY Times here).

As I read about this study in an airport during peak early morning business meeting transit time I of course looked around … and lo and behold – males with their mobiles out on display as far as the eye could see. Take a look for yourself  in the next group of blokes if you don’t believe me – check out how many of them display their mobiles – it is lekking in action.

So two things stood out for me – first lekking is just a darn good word and we need to use it more. And second – how little gadgets can quickly become adopted to satisfy our core animal instincts. Wonder if the mobile phone companies will consciously adapt their newest lines to make them more obvious?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

In recent weeks my family have been exploring nursing home options for my mother – and I have to say that universally the aged care sector are the worst adopters of the web. This is a multi-billion dollar industry and yet they still haven’t grasped that most baby-boomer children of aging parents use the net to research options before we pick up the phone to call a particular service.

So what have we found?

• A large percentage of nursing homes (both high and low care) don’t have any form of web presence. The most you will find is a phone number and address in one of a thousand junk web directories.
• If there is a website – it will be a standard brochure style site, with approximately 1-3 pages on it.  The larger more corporate sites are more designed for investors into the company rather than clients – so there are a lot of “what a great business we run let’s pat ourselves on the back” type of pages.
• The pages will show at least one photo of the front of the building, and a few istock photos of happy looking seniors.
• There will be no photos of rooms, common areas or facilities.
• Information is restricted to “we believe in aging with dignity and we work hard to make it happen”. If you are really lucky you may get a paragraph that says something about we have regular visits by podiatrists, pharmacists and hairdressers – but again no specific details.
• You may find a few very very vague paragraphs about fees, along the lines of “yes we charge daily fees and a bond may be payable”.

What were we looking for?

• Information about the centre – it’s philosophy & operating policies
• Details of accreditation
• Testimonials from current clients and families of clients
• Fee schedules with explanations and links to the Government rules on each component
• Details of what to bring to the home on admission
• Information on waiting lists
• Photos of the rooms, facilities and meals
• Information on support services and enrichment activities (a copy of the current weekly schedule would be great)
• Tips to help settle the person into the facility
• Enrolment forms
• Regular news updates on what is happening in the centre
• Google map link so we can find the centre. A link to Google Street would also be great so we can see what is around the centre (such as that bikers pub next door or the 6 lane freeway at the back fence).

You have to remember that it is not just the family that are stressed by this process. We also are coping with the concerns of “what is going to happen to me” of our frail elderly parents currently within hospital. The more information and photos we can share with them, the easier they will feel. They will start to get a sense of future and hope, rather than just losing control. They already are dealing with the a huge loss in the realisation that they can no longer cope on their own, without the added stress of not knowing the next steps and possibilities.

Aged Care Facilities could learn a lot from many of the daycare websites that include these features as standard. The same emotional issues are faced by the families seeking care – a mixture of guilt and hope from the family;  wanting to know the person will be safe, cared for and loved; being time poor and needing to find the facts quickly.

I understand that the industry is over-subscribed with many centres holding long waiting lists. This means that they don’t have any imperative to change their approach. However, the smart centres and businesses that do take action to improve their web presence will gain a dominant market advantage for when the many new centres that are currently being planned and being built hit the market.

Until that time – if you are like us, all you can do is to drive to each centre with your list of questions and watch the staff try and sell the facility while you try and glean the information you need for both you and your elderly parent.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

Yesterday I took some time out to read this month’s edition of Nett magazine – and was fascinated by the story about Big Brown Box who have had phenomenal growth in the online world in a very short time.

Reading it, I was reminded that if you want to grow your business there is one equation you need to be aware of – business growth costs time and/or money. You either invest your time or the time of your team to learn how to do a particular thing and then implement it, or you spend money and get it done for you.

Big Brown Box went with the spend money approach. As they so rightly put it, they had a parent company with very deep pockets that funded 12 months of research, planning and fine tuning before the company went “live” on the net.

But even if you don’t have  the level of backing that Big Brown Box had, their strategy is very easy to adapt no matter the size of your business or the money you have to invest. Here’s a snapshot of what they did in that 12 month period:

1. Conduct extensive research on what consumers wanted from an online store – the “essential requirements and minimum standards … before they would buy online”. They used the findings to shape their online strategy. Many businesses miss the research phase – but businesses win or fail based on their initial research.
2. Know what makes them unique – they looked at best practice around the world for online stores and created a service that was unique to the Australian market (free delivery across Australia). Yes, this USP can be matched by other online brands in the future, but they have market leading advantage.
3. Get the basic functionality right – think like a customer and not like a Geek. Customers look for things on your site in different ways to people who intimately know your business. Make it easy for customers to navigate around your site and find what they are looking for.
4. Education not just information - If you are online, one of the key roles you have is providing education and not just information. How can you educate customers about your product or service?
5. Encourage interaction – “the best recommendation is from happy buyers” – Actively seek honest feedback on your site. Big Brown Box requests a product review after each purchase and follows up those who don’t submit a review.
6. Balance SEO (search engine optimisation) with paid traffic - most businesses need both in order to be successful. In both strategies – focus on the smallest niche at individual product level for best results.
7. Aggresively target quality links back to your site to boost your rankings.
8. Build strong alliances with influential people on the net – Big Brown Box targets influential bloggers as a way to get their brand out there.
9. Track & respond to online discussion of your brand – both good and bad comments need to be addressed. Take negative feedback on board and acknowledge any mistakes.
10. Have an exceptional customer service team that are empowered to take action to resolve complaints. Your online business is only as good as the humans behind it.

Each of these 10 things can be implemented in your business, no matter your marketing budget. You may need to invest time to achieve the same results, but each is very “doable”.

What can you do in your business today after learning from the success strategies of the Big Brown Box?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Just a few random technology thoughts from this morning …

1. Even when there is an unsubscribe button at the bottom of each email broadcast, some people still insist on sending an email asking to be unsubscribed rather than just clicking on the unsubscribe button.  I believe there are two main reasons a) not everyone is as comfortable with technology as others  & b) many people are afraid of clicking links in case of either downloading a virus or joining a whole new spammers list.  Make sure your broadcast/autoresponder system allows for these people to communicate with you via email so you can personally take action for them.
2. Twitter spam is becoming an increasing problem. The funniest ones are people who RT something you have said, or who Tweet “Awesome tweeters” (and then list a pile of names) and when you go to thank them you find they are not even following you.  These are generally auto-bots who tweet random garbage as a way of trying to get people to follow them – what a great way to fail at marketing! Twitter is all about two way communication – not one way force feeding.
3. I just finished doing some keyword analysis for a client. One word attracted 4438 searches per day. The same word with the letter “s” at the end only attracted 487 searches a day. Little things matter when it comes to search engines.
4. I’ve fallen in love with Spam Assassin on my email in-box in my cpanel. It has reduced the amount of spam hitting my desktop from about 250 spam emails per day to only a handful. Yes, I still scan the cpanel email box each day to make sure nothing has been caught that shouldn’t have been, but the reduced download and time saving is worth the once a day checking.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance writer