Well, here we are… it’s January again, and for many of us, that means a brand new year with brand new worries. Will the economy turn around? Will you still have a job this time next year? What about health care? The list is never ending.

Kevin Gyoerkoe, co-director of the Anxiety and Agoraphobia Treatment Center in Chicago and Northbrook, Illinois, and Pamela Wiegartz, assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, have written a book called 10 Simple Solutions to Worry that, for all of us worriers, is worth taking a look at. This is not a light and airy approach to worry; you’ll find practical, almost clinical, ways for you to address the worry in your life. The 10 solutions are:

1. Understand worry
2. Make a commitment
3. Learn to relax
4. Change your thinking
5. React differently
6. Accept uncertainty
7. Manage your time
8. Communicate assertively
9. Confront your worries
10. Know your medications

The book goes into detail about each of the ten solutions, and gives you specific steps to follow to implement each solution. For example, the steps for accepting uncertainty include:
• Identify whether your worries are productive or un-productive. Productive worries will be realistic, current and controllable, while unproductive worries will be unrealistic, future-oriented and out of your control.
• Re-evaluate and challenge the positive beliefs you have about worry. For example, does worry help you find solutions to your problems? Maybe you believe it protects you from negative outcomes or shows that you’re conscientious. Are you better at solving problems because of your worry? Do you concentrate better because of your worry? By challenging your beliefs in this way, you’ll find it easier to let go of worry and, ultimately, your need for certainty.
• Pick a productive worry and then spend time developing solutions. The worry should be plausible, current and solvable. Once you’ve developed some solutions, simply implement the best one.

They conclude that, once you’ve made progress in managing your worry, the next challenge you face is maintaining your gains. I guess worry is like any other resolution (the classic losing weight comes to mind…). Sustaining your progress requires attention, too. Worry can be insidious, and unless you face it head on, you don’t stand a chance of controlling it for life. According to Gyoerkoe and Wiegartz, you can manage worry very much like you manage (or should manage!) weight gain: pay attention when the pounds creep on and make an immediate U-turn. Effectively managing worry means nipping it in the bud. They maintain that four steps: continually practicing these strategies, early detection when worry returns, identifying unproductive worry, and using the solutions that worked best for you to manage unproductive worry, are the key to maintaining your progress and staying worry-free for life.

I’ll let you know how it works out!

As the world prepares to say goodbye to the “King of Pop” (and hopefully to the wall-to-wall media coverage of his death…), we can take a lesson in branding from his songs. This is a great post from Paul Williams of Idea Sandbox.

ABCs of Branding: 8 Branding Lessons Through Michael Jackson Song Titles

Follow these key steps and you’ll find branding A-B-C. As easy as 1-2-3. As simple as do-re-mi.

We Are The World
→ Be Conscientious - Strive for excellence. Maintain strong beliefs.

By Michael Jackson & Lionel Richie, USA for Africa - 1985

Got To Be There
→ Have Empathy for Your Customers - Cultivate loyalty beyond reason. Personalize the experience for your customers. Support your evangelists to increase your loyal following.

“Got To Be There” from Got To Be There - 1972

Rock With You
→ Be Genuine - Be approachable, be authentic, and be real. Do this as employees, a company, and a brand.

“Rock With You” from Off The Wall - 1979

The Love You Save
→ Have and Live Your Values - Stand for something, not for everything. Have a reason for being. Let financial success be a by-product of doing the right thing.

“The Love You Save” by the Jackson 5 from ABC - 1970

Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough
→ Be Remarkable - Don’t settle for good. Zag! Pop! Pow! Be A Purple Cow. Be Remark-able.

“Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” from Off The Wall - 1979

Man In The Mirror
→ Maintain Vision - Want to make the world a better place. Help your customers live their dreams. Build to last, not to flip.

“Man In The Mirror” from Michael Jackson Bad - 1987

Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’
→ Strive To Develop Innovative Ideas - Don’t fall behind. Adapt to changing circumstances. Keep creating ideas that innovate.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” from Thriller - 1982

Off The Wall
→ Have Fun - So tonight… gotta leave that nine to five upon the shelf… And just enjoy yourself!
Groove! Let the madness in the music get to you. Life ain’t so bad at all… If you live it off the wall.

“Off The Wall” from Off the Wall - 1979

Visit Idea Sandbox.

Living in Cincinnati, home to Proctor & Gamble, it’s understandable that we would be inundated with companies talking about branding. It’s ubiquitous, and frankly, annoying. It’s a term that’s tossed around pretty freely, but no two uses actually mean the same thing. And then we have the “personal brand,” where people morph into brands. Seriously? That’s a bit much. And I just found this great post that tells me I’m not the only one who thinks so.

The Term Personal Brand Makes Me Want To Kick Myself In The Face.

I’m sorry. It does.

While looking through my RSS reader today I saw two articles back-to-back talking about developing a “personal brand”. I can’t explain how angry that phrase makes me. A short list of reasons why I loathe “personal branding”

* It strips away our humanity and turns us into a fictional concept
* It describes something so inherently self-important and egotistical that borders on delusional
* I want to be a brand about as much as I want to be a building
* It’s a stupid buzzword created to make something obvious seem more complicated and real

Do we really need to come up with a new buzzwordish term for everything we do as human beings?

Read full post here.

I’ve heard many people in the corporate world question the value of social media. And even many who are currently using it are concerned that employees are abusing the privilege. Why aren’t more companies getting it? This blog post, by Ann Handley of Marketing Profs Daily Fix, helps shed some light on the topic.

Sometimes I walk away from a conference with as many questions as answers. Such was the case at last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit in SF. Great speakers, great content, great ideas– an idea-fest for social media types like me. But after the two day session ended, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why is this so hard? Why aren’t more companies getting it?

The answer is both simple and amazingly complex: It’s woven into the very fabric of the the way we think about marketing.

My company has worked with many companies the last three years on social media programs, from Fortune 100 giants to small shops, giving us ample experience to see how good intentions come up short in making the transition to the new marketing world. The mistakes usually fall into one or more of the following areas, the seven deadly blind spots of traditional marketers:

1) Not thinking like social media marketers: Social media is all about sharing, opening up, being transparent, providing real value to our customers. It’s about long-term relationships, not short-term campaigns. This doesn’t come naturally when you’re raised in corporate environments that emphasize management control techniques. We must give up control, take some risks and get out there. Social media consultant Chris Brogan says we need to “turn marketing into business conversations.”

2) Not connecting social media programs with the larger corporate strategy and other programs: Social media programs are too often set up as separate silo programs rather than an integral part of the company’s marketing and communications efforts. The best leaders weave these programs into programs across the company—including their product development, communications, marketing and customer service, and more.

3) Not really listening to customers: Social media is about listening to our customers. Conduct an audit. What are their needs? What are they missing? How are they using your product/service? Do an audit of your customers, understand what types of material, communications and engagement they would want from you. Create customer profiles. Then figure out how to reach them. Ex: start a community on Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter and invite customers or join an existing one. Use these to ask your customers questions and pick their brains about your products, challenges, concerns.

4) Not listening to the market: How can you target your products/services if you don’t know your market? Think about your goals—what are you trying to monitor/achieve? What are your resources (small team, an intern, you?) You can set up a listening and monitoring program quickly, starting with Twitter, a powerful real-time search engine. Bigger companies will need to have a systematic way of monitoring comments around their brands but smaller companies can use free tools like Google Alerts, Backtype and FriendFeed to monitor discussions—and of course, search engines customized for Twitter.

5) Not trusting the employees: The old days where the company controlled employees’ content is long over—they’re conversing online whether companies condone it or not. Establish company guidelines but provide employees the tools and freedom to express themselves—and then step back. Let the conversation flow. Sure there’s some risk but the biggest risk is trying to bottle up your most powerful resource, your employees.

6) Not creating “social” content: Good content drives traffic, links, goodwill and much more. The problem is much of our content is in corporate-speak and brochure-ware that we slap on the web. Your content needs to be fresh, interesting, engaging, relevant to your audience–and “share-able” on social media sites.

Forget your message a few minutes and focus on your customers. Define your audience before you begin and understand what content they find interesting. Marketer Jason Falls suggests you ask yourself: “Where do they work, play, shop? What do they like for fun? What makes them want to buy things? What interests them?” Think like a publisher, not a marketer.

7) Not creating cool videos: See the trend? Videos need to be about the customers’ needs, interests, not your latest product overview. (If it is product oriented, design the video to show how it really helps the customer do their job.)

Read full article>

Just about everyone knows that Seth Godin is brilliant. It’s always interesting to read what he has to say about the current state of affairs, and where he thinks they’re going. The following is a good one about Twitter.

Friction saves the medium

Email is dying because it’s free. If you can send an email for free to 100 of your closest friends, instantly, you probably won’t abuse the privilege. But someone else will because they might define ‘friend’ differently than you or I.

100 times 100 is ten thousand. Spam.

So now, people don’t reply when you send them a resume, because it costs too much to do that ten thousand times.

Twitter is next. The paradox is obvious: to grow, you need to remove friction from the medium. If it’s not easy and free to use, people won’t. But then it gets big and it becomes profitable, so people use it too much.

The churn rate at twitter is reported as more than 50%. That’s because of lack of friction as well. Easy to get in, easy to get out.

Stamps are underrated. Friction rewards intent and creates scarcity.

Visit Seth’s blog.

One of the so-called rules of social media is that you should adopt a personal voice. After all the medium is all about helping companies look less monolithic and to engage on a one-to-one basis, right? Well, not necessarily, according to Ann All’s article in IT Business Edge. Content is content, and as long as you are producing unique, interesting subject matter, you may still find an engaged audience lapping it up. Ann points out that the IT Business Edge profile on Twitter and Facebook fan page are little more than warmed-up RSS feeds. This is fine for their audience: it’s more about putting links to useful articles on the networks where their audience congregates. Read full post here.

There’s a reason why we like to read content that is organized in a neat list - it makes it easier on us to track things this way. Lists are not prescriptive, nor they are the universe of what you could do, they are just a starting point.

Lists help us catalyze our thought and process the information. Plus, it’s no mystery that our brain likes to process things in batches. Lists are great for helping us think about issues in progression and, when needed, they help us memorize things.

You don’t have to believe me; NPR has a great list post about 10 reasons why we love making lists. So here’s a list of five marketing ideas you can use today:

(1) Create a robust content road map - start capturing information about all you know in your field, or business, or niche. File it from basic to advanced. Then utilize a robust buying cycle guide for your customers to decide what you present, when.

The guiding principle here should be progression from building awareness, to helping them discover you, to validating their choice. For example, for awareness and discovery use some form of micro blogging, and heavy employ of public relations activities. Brochures and collateral for validation, as long as you make them about your customer. Read full story.

Social media has changed advertising. Advertising has, since its inception, held a dubious position within society. For example, when we watch TV or view a web page we consider it “what pays for the stuff we like”. However, there are those of us that buy magazines just for the ads and the Sunday paper is filled with shopping specials. But, by and large, it is what is passed by for more interesting content. I have written a number of blog posts on this topic. I have over the past several years written several blog posts about advertising’s diminishing effectiveness with consumers.

Advertising is diminishing in effectiveness largely due to explosive growth of Social Media and Social Networking. Never before have consumers had such control over brands. And consumers do this without constraint. Social Networks allow for free and unhampered communication and connection. How can advertising compete with all that fun stuff flying about? Read full story here.

I found this great podcast about advertising via social media on NPR’s On the Media site. However, for some reason that I should probably know, it won’t let me link to it. So instead, I’ll just give you the navigation to go there yourself… it’s well worth it to listen to this very timely, 5-minute podcast yourselves. Enjoy!

http://www.onthemedia.org/
On the left navigation, under Topics, click on Internet
Scroll down until you see ‘Define Ad’. The broadcast is dated April 17th.

It’s painful to think of all of the time and money that goes into creating a brand, just to have it disappear. Circuit City and Aloha Airlines are just two that come to mind. The website 24/7 Wall Street is predicting that several more will go the way of Circuit City in the next year or so. Read full story.