The Five Most Important Questions

Just finished reading Peter Drucker's The Five Most Important Questions.

It reminds me of an old story…
A business executive returns to college to meet up with his favourite professor who is approaching retirement age.
The exec arrives a little early and sits in on the last part of the professor’s lecture.
Later over coffee, the executive says to the professor, “After all these years, you’re still presenting the same old lectures…”
And the professor replies, “Ah, yes. The basic questions for anyone in business remain the same, it’s just that the answers have changed.”

Drucker’s book is interesting because he died some years back, yet it contains some fresh content… No, it’s not about the Twilight Zone!

Drucker asks the same questions he did many years ago and this time we have some fresh answers by experts such as Jim Collins and Philip Kotler.

This is a really interesting idea for an author or publisher.

A bit like an interview book with a twist. Ask the experts how they would deal with certain business issues. Keep it simple, say, down to five questions. Record the answers and voila! A book. Even better, do it again with different experts next year…

In case you're wondering, the five most important questions you can ask about your organization are:

Drum roll please...

1. What is our mission?
2. Who is our customer?
3. What does the customer value?
4. What are our results?
5. What is our plan?

This could easily be used to create a one-page business plan...

Fixing my Social Media Mistakes

Following up my previous post... My blog posted okay to (1) Blogger, (2) Linked In (3) Thought Leaders Central, but not to Facebook. 3 out of 4 was a good start.
If anyone can tell me how to post it to Facebook I'd appreciate it.

To manage my other social media conversations I scored a copy of Event Box - courtesy of the Macheist special bundle offer.

Macheist = Some great tools and even better games... The World of Goo is fantastic! Love the graphics and the concept...

Event Box lets you log into my blog posts, other blog post feeds, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Flickr and more.
That's a good thing... I recommend it!

However, Twittering... Mmm... I feel like the little birdy icon has twittered on me! I've received about 450 Twitts today. Some of them are dribble, some are of no interest, some are useful, some valuable, some are even from people I know.

Next quest... and next question... How do I manage my Twitts?
Love to hear your clues, suggestions and answers.

My Big Social Media Mistake

I’ve been making a big mistake around Social Media.

I’ve been posting a few blog entries. I’ve been doing Facebook. Started on Twitter. Added slideshows and book reviews on LinkedIn. Even said “I like it” on StumbleUpon.

I’ve been playing the social media game but doing it all completely wrong. I realised what I was doing wrong at a breakfast seminar this week. Rob Hartnett of Business Performance International was presenting. And, so was Jasmine Batra of Arrow Internet Marketing.

What was I doing wrong? I was treating all these social media things as separate things to do. No wonder I couldn’t keep up. My To Do List read like a social media nightmare. Update Facebook, add Twitter, post a blog, link to this, add to that…

That’s not building a Web 2.0 campaign, that’s building a brick wall. One brick, then the next one…

The web is about connection. Everything’s linked and joined together. It’s all digital code and that means it’s all synchronized as well. That means you can update many things at once if you just work smart.

So I clicked over to Slideshare where my slideshows are and updated Facebook and Twitter with two clicks. How easy was that?

My lesson: look for connections and short cuts. Automate!

Now let’s see… can I post this blog to Blogger, update Facebook, Linked In and Twitter all at once? I’ll let you know how I get on.

That’s my big Social Media mistake. What’s yours?

How to Get Traffic to your Blog

Here's our fourth slideshow RAP of We Blog: How to Create Your Own Media Channel.
It's derived from Michael A Bank's Blogging Heroes.

This RAP looks at "Blog Traffic". With so many blogs out there, who's going to read yours? And, how are they going to find you? We look at four traffic strategies for your Blog:

1. Producing Great Content
   
2. Getting Links
   
3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
   
4. Online Participation
   

Have a click through, it only take 4 minutes, and let us know what you think of the new format.

Book Rapper We Blog 4 Blog Traffic

View more presentations from Geoff Mcdonald.