How to Handle April Fools’ Day…and a Few Good Pranks!
I’ve gleefully noted here before that humor at work can really help you boost productivity, reduce stress, create a wonderful company culture and bring people together. But too much of a good thing can have negative consequences. As we look ahead at our calendars and see April Fools’ Day closing in on us quickly, we realize that it could be an occasion where some folks cross the line. You don’t want that. There are as many different attitudes and requirements regarding an “April Fools’ Day Policy” as there are workplaces. For example, I don’t want the crew staffing the ER pulling pranks on each other when they’re rolling me in on a gurney. Other settings where you’re working closely with clients would be in appropriate as well. However, with a group of coworkers who have been together for years and are good friends at work and at play, you have quite a lot of leeway. To sum it up, there is an infinite variety of tolerances between the two extremes I’ve cited here. Your responsibility As a supervisor, you need to be sure that no one gets targeted by any office hijinks. If there is any history of friction between employees, you should deliver some subtle words of caution – or ban pranks altogether – before April 1 rolls around. Some office gags don’t target individuals and can be good fun. If you’re fast with a screwdriver, you can change the hinges on the door of your lunchroom refrigerator so the hinges and the handle are on the same side. In this state it become impossible to open using the handle. You can just sit back and watch people try. Warning: If you have an employee who is as strong as an ox, your refrigerator door handle could be completely pulled off. If you want to have some innocent fun with computers, you can paste various pieces of Javascript code into browsers to get some interesting results. Note that some browsers, like Safari won’t allow this unless you change a preference and Chrome will strip out a word you’ll need to replace, I’ll explain what I mean in my instructions. Pull these pranks when your target is away from his or her computer. Flying graphics. Be sure there are photos on the displayed webpage. Grab the code snippet below by inserting your cursor and doing a “select all.” Then paste the code below into a browser address box, then hit return/enter. Note that Chrome usually deletes the word “javascript” and the colon. You’ll have to cursor back and type those in by hand – with no space after the colon – before you hit return: javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName("img"); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+"px"; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+"px"}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0); Faux website hack. The next Javascript allows you to edit or change the text on a website page in a browser window just like you would in a Word document. It doesn’t change the website at all, just what is on the single computer screen where you enter the code. Play around with it to see how it works and come up with a funny (and harmless) prank. You could “prank” yourself with this one and then point it out to...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Meerkat, Marketing and Much More.
Meerketing (sorry) and sales The Meerkat app seems to be a social media tool that has the potential to rise above many others. Here are three ways brands can use it and over here are another five unexpected ways it will help marketers. Steve Olenski gives us five magic marketing (free) takeaways that will benefit virtually any small business. Combining your social media contacts with your email marketing strategy can be like unloading a double-barreled shotgun. Here are six approaches. Unless, of course, you’re worried that email is dead. Are your Tweets meeting the needs of your followers? Here are six tools to analyze your Tweeps. The video content platforms offer excellent analytics. Here are four metrics you should be watching in your video marketing. If you missed the #SXSW interactive conference you need to review these 10 mini-trends that had people talking. Companies that use marketing automation to nurture leads see a 451 percent increase in qualified leads and 53 percent higher conversion rates on average. Are you using these marketing automation tools? And if you’re new to the topic: This introduction to planning and automating your social media and PR posts will get you going in the right direction, no matter which platforms you’re using. Here are two critical sides of successful content marketing today: using visuals and understanding the role of keywords. Small business owners need to keep a certain amount of flexibility in their marketing plans. Jim Joseph lists four areas that you should respond to as they evolve. Driving ROI through a partner channel is no easy feat. Brian Tervo, resident and Chief Executive of North American Operations for TIE Kinetix, offers four tips for improvement. Yes, Virginia, there are growth hacks and here are nine classics that I offer as inspiration. And if nine aren’t enough, here are 15 for your startup. If you’re considering a mobile analytics app to boost retention and engagement, you’ll get a good overview of what you need here. How do you know – I mean really know – if the content you’re creating is good? Uberflip marketing VP Hana Abaza shares her thoughts. Venture Beat surveyed 3,000 marketing technologists to see which conversion tools and companies did the best job. Get a glimpse of their results. Slow and steady, well at least clear and steady messages to your customers are the keys to keeping them. Location marketing technology is getting so precise that we need to use it wisely to promote our brands, but without becoming George Orwell’s Big Brother. Management, leadership and productivity Only 30 percent of family-owned businesses survive second-generation ownership. This Harvard Business Review looks at leadership secrets from successful family businesses. Communication is everything in business. It’s time to start doing it the right way instead of the wrong way. Here are six good ways to be heard and understood. Spring. When a young small business owner’s fancy turns to searching for tax write-offs. Here are five some people miss. If you see potential as a government contractor, read how you can become a federal small business contractor of choice. It’s exciting to discover how quickly the mobile payments industry is evolving, especially when you have Apple Pay and Samsung Pay squaring off against each other. And here’s another example of this evolution: Square Cash is introducing “Cashtags”...
read more6 Tips For a Pain-Free Tax Season
With the exception of CPAs who make a huge chunk of their income during tax season, most of us wish this time of year would never come around. Yet, it does, so we can reduce our pain and frustration by going into our tax preparation and filing with our eyes wide open and as prepared as possible. These six tips will help a lot. Expect the best but prepare for the worst. The worst outcome is that later in the year you find yourself in the middle of an audit. Use this healthy fear to motivate you as you organize your documentation. Sometimes at the end of our filing we chuck everything into a file folder or shoe box and stick it in the closet hoping to never see it again. Be more thoughtful. As you tuck things away, be sure they are labeled and organized in ways that will make them easy to find in a “worst case scenario.” Be ready for the health insurance question. IRS regulations have turned your tax preparer into an Obamacare enforcer. You have to answer some questions about your health insurance and if you let it lapse for any period of time last year you can expect to be penalized. Also, this added burden on your tax person could make your bill go up. Download as much as possible. If you need to look at checkbooks and other bank records for income and expense information, probe your bank’s website for download links. I’m finding that every year they seem to improve your ability to retrieve transaction information via a spreadsheet file download. Banks used to be pretty stingy about the number of months you could go back. They are improving these services. Scan your digital calendar or appointment software. There is nothing worse than finding you have left out a deduction after you think your work is done. Look through the entries in your electronic calendar for 2014 and make sure you’re accounting for all your mileage and other travel related expenses. Download a checklist. There are so many categories of deductions that you really need a gentle reminder each year to be sure you aren’t missing something. Your tax preparer may have given you a checklist, but if not, there are others available on the Internet. Here’s one from the TurboTax people, but it doesn’t cover all the specific categories of deductions that apply to your business. However, otherwise it’s very good. Put tax preparation on your schedule. Getting organized in order to file taxes is like pulling off a Band-Aid – the quicker you get it done, the less painful it is. Get down to business as soon as you can and then you can move on to other, more productive, projects. I know that many of you have this well organized and totally under control. That’s fantastic. Keep up the good work. If that’s not your situation yet, get the software and systems in place that dramatically reduce this yearly...
read moreWant Loyal Customers? Be Sure You See the Big Picture
Here are three terms that get kicked around a lot today: Customer service. Customer engagement. Customer experience. From your perspective, are they all the same, are they distinctive from one another, or are they terms that aren’t exactly the same but do tend to overlap? Let me suggest that while they relate to one another, you need to appreciate how they differ to make each one “actionable” as you manage your business. For some businesses, customer service is merely – and wrongly – defined as a department or a responsibility that falls on certain employees. When I walk into the local big box home improvement center, I see a customer service department immediately to the left. Then as I make my way past the shopping carts, a greeter engages me and asks if I need help finding something. The aisles are well signed, so I don’t need help at this point – good signage, by the way, is a component of my “customer experience” while shopping at this store. Getting help when you need it I’ve needed to purchase locks in the past and if I buy several, they will re-key them so they can all be opened by the same key – but where’s the hardware person? If I can’t quickly find the person who knows how to do this, the engagement isn’t happening as it should, customer service is being degraded and my overall experience is on a slippery slope to a very bad place. One more point to make on customer experience: It started when I pulled into the parking lot – for example maybe there are shopping carts all over the place – and it continues through the entire shopping-buying-using process. Customer engagement this time around may have started when I received a newspaper insert listing sale items, among which were my new locks. The attributes of customer service, engagement and experience will change dramatically between retail, business-to-business, online and brick-and-mortar businesses. You should understand them well enough to be able to take your business and plug it into some kind of narrative like I’ve provided here. At that point you will be able to list actions you can take to improve each one. Just the FAQs no longer enough The options for improving in all of these areas are rapidly increasing today. For example, just a few years ago an FAQ page seemed like a fantastic help to an online shopper or website user. Today, discussion forums and “knowledge” databases that cover a much wider variety of topics go far beyond the simple question-and-answer format provided by an FAQ page. Having highly trained and engaging sales people or well produced video instructions that inform your customers in the best way to use a product or service will reduce or eliminate calls to a customer service center requesting help or a product return number. What’s in your genes? Understanding that your company’s customer experience DNA starts at the top is critical. I recently stopped by a favorite New York restaurant in the middle of one of our cold spells there were two tables and I was the only person waiting. One was smaller by the door, the other was a booth located further inside. A little under the weather myself, I requested the booth. The...
read moreHow to Say Yes to the (Viral) Dress in Your Business
A friend of mine was at an NHL game the other day when a woman in the group behind him took out her smart phone and started to discuss the day’s major online controversy: Was the dress blue and black, or was it white and gold? Although the teams on the ice were battling each other like it was the final game in the Stanley Cup series, there was more intensity among this group of spectators who found themselves sharply divided between blue-black adherents and white-gold partisans. It was the first my friend had heard about #thedress. The next day he looked it up on the web. If you were following this phenomenon at all, you may have noticed that people started showing up on television wearing the dress in question. Pushing something on the web to official viral status is difficult, especially when it has such a strong commercial angle like the dress. Pet videos are one thing, but something that will drive people to push a “buy now” icon is entirely different. But while creating viral media is difficult, it doesn’t mean you should stop trying. The payoff can be huge. Let’s break down the underlying commercial principles of viral media into their basic components and see how you can use them in your business. Brand or product recognition. The idea is to get your company or product in front of as many eyeballs as possible. I encourage you to use any clever means you can through the social media to get this done. Many of the most productive are the epiphanies created when one of your users features you in a post that goes viral. You can’t plan on that, but you can do things to increase your odds by creating opportunities. I know about a small local music shop that has a very cool logo design and it’s been selling that design on t-shirts for more than 40 years. One day there was a huge protest event in the Middle East and the next day people came into his shop excited that they had seen someone wearing his t-shirt in the news coverage. Lesson: Create a great design for your company and get it out into the public. It’s been working for a certain tractor company forever. It will work for you too. Enlist volunteers. There are many ways you can have your customers promote your products and the more strategies you use, the better odds you have that something will eventually go viral. Organize contests that encourage your users to post photos or videos to the social media. Create hashtags to accompany events, products, opinions or anything you can dream up. Encourage your customer to post online reviews. If you have products, send them to bloggers and others who review in the media and invite their opinions. Local viral. You don’t have to become an international viral sensation to increase sales. Many, and perhaps most, small businesses will do great if they can just get some more local “buzz” going. To be successful at this, you need to understand how opinion is created in your community. Consider things like local sponsorships of teams and events. Find ways to get your business featured in the local newspaper. If you do a blog, get more out...
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