Looking for simple and effective ways to increase lead generation? Then, check out these 6 lead gen tips. Generating leads has never been so easy. What do you do to bring in a continuous flow of qualified leads to your business on a daily basis? Mapping out a lead generation strategy, learning how to nurture […]
Many years ago, I was an executive in a Fortune 100 company and my team received some devastating news. I mean it was the WORST POSSIBLE SCENARIO.
My employees were scattered around the globe. I gathered them together for a conference call, delivered the news, and told them they had 24 hours to be angry and then we were getting back down to work. We would overcome.
This has been my approach to business throughout my career. You have to embrace the chaos. There is always going to be chaos. How you handle it … this is your defining moment.
This coronavirus crap is pissing me off. Almost all of my business is canceling, including the college classes I teach. So. Shit.
But my 24 hours of being angry are over. It’s time to embrace this chaos. It’s time for YOU to embrace the chaos, too. It’s clobberin’ time.
I am forecasting that for the next few months, I’m going to have lot of time on my hands. Here are 25 ways I’m fighting back and using this chaos as an opportunity:
Re-frame my website, especially my speaking pages.
Have more personal conversations (actual phone calls) with close business connections.
Get healthy and get back in shape. This winter was brutal.
Create a new speech. My best speech. It will knock your socks off.
Get more involved in my local community businesses and church.
Spend more time mentoring young professionals and encourage them through this rough time.
Improve the content in my college classes.
Use social media every day to give people hope.
Write some amazing new blog posts with this free time.
Improve the entertainment value of my Marketing Companion podcast.
Do more watercolor paintings. Yes. I am painting now.
Start a vegetable garden that actually grows something this year.
Read a book every week.
Be more proactive in promoting the work of others.
Brainstorm ways to further monetize my content.
Take a few day trips to the mountains. That calms me down.
Dive into my website analytics. I never have time for that.
Hold a free webinar that teaches and inspires people.
Spend a lot more time with the young inner-city kids I mentor. They need me right now.
Create a video series on my personal branding book KNOWN. This has been on the backburner for years and people have been begging me for it.
If the consulting business dries up, visit companies and do consulting for free. It will pay off in the long run.
Find ways to help people who are suffering through the business downturn.
Learn something new. Not 100 percent sure what that will be yet. Probably AI-related.
Write my new book. Oh my. Wait until you see this one. I mean seriously.
So that’s the plan. Or the start of one.
Now I want to acknowledge that this is a terrible time. People are being quarantined, floating aimlessly on cruise ships, and dying. So we all need to take this seriously and be safe.
But maybe it will help your outlook if you make a list, too. If things are heading south for you too, find some things to look forward to, create new opportunities that are in your control.
Let’s embrace the chaos together.
Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.
With the concerns about a global health pandemic, the necessity of shifting more events and meetings to be virtual is on everyone’s mind. There’s only one problem: most of us have spent too much time in virtual meetings that are a waste of time.
I should know, I’ve probably spoken or participated in well over a hundred over the past years – both as a virtual keynote speaker and a remote workshop leader.
Some of them have sucked.
But I don’t believe that virtual meetings or presentations need to be bad. The real problem is that no one seems to know how to run them well.
Thanks to concerns about the coronavirus, we seem to be headed into a season where more events will happen virtually. So we should all have an interest in making them better. To start, let’s consider five of the most common reasons that virtual meetings go awry …
Problem #1 – Increased distractions.
Presenting the same thing you might have done in person in the same way doesn’t work in a virtual session. There are too many distractions and other things people may be doing at the same time.
Problem #2 – Lack of audience.
The entire idea of a laugh track for television sitcoms was created because the lack of an audience made creators worry that people wouldn’t know when to laugh. In a live meeting, we can look to the people around us for a cue as to how we might react. A virtual setting lacks this and so we feel isolated in our reactions and it’s harder to engage.
Problem #3 – Intrusive malfunctioning tech.
If you have ever started a conference call with ten minutes of participants asking if you can hear them, you’ve already experienced this. The fact is, much of the technology used for virtual sessions creates a lot of friction. People have to download something, microphones don’t work and Internet connections fail.
Problem #4 – No accountability.
When you are sitting in a live meeting or you show up late, there is a reputational and social cost to being tardy or being on your phone or checking out. Everyone else can see what you’re doing. In a virtual session, there isn’t any social pressure to keep you engaged or to prevent you from multitasking.
Problem #5 – One-way interaction.
Too often in virtual meetings one side has a camera on and is delivering content while the other is silently and invisibly listening. This creates an unbalanced meeting because one side has no insight into how the other side is reacting.
So, how do we fix these issues?
It’s easy to think that these are all thing that will always be the case with virtual meetings. After all, it’s not reasonable to “lock the doors” of a virtual session or force everyone to be on video to hold them accountable, right? And you certainly can’t wish away technical issues just by hoping they don’t happen.
Yet despite the difficulties these problems create, there are some techniques I have seen and used myself to help make virtual meetings and presentations a LOT better than they might otherwise be. Here are a few suggestions:
Solution #1 – Make virtual tech an advantage.
If you know everyone who is participating in your meeting will be on their computer during the session, a lot of possibilities open up. You can have them all visit a landing page directly to enter information. You can host and integrate a live poll. You can even tailor your content based on immediate responses you get. Virtual meetings can enable faster real time engagement if you can bake the interaction into the session.
Solution #2 – Use multiple mediums/styles.
While people may be able to sit through an hour long meeting or a 45 minute keynote, the rules are different for virtual sessions. In a world where people are used to 90 second YouTube videos, keeping their attention is more demanding. Sometimes, I will integrate videos more frequently into virtual sessions, or use interactive exercises asking participants to draw a picture or answer a question. These allow for a mental break and help audiences stay engaged for longer because you are mixing up the content.
Solution #3 – Reduce the friction.
Often the technology platform for a session is selected based on what is the approved platform for a particular organization or what presenters are most comfortable using. Both are not great ways to choose technology. Instead, consider what tech would be easiest and fastest for your audience to get working. Who has the best live support to help people with issues? What tool doesn’t require downloading? Considering the friction of the tech tools for your audience first can help prevent tech issues later.
Solution #4 – Expect distractions and reiterate often.
In a virtual environment, repetition becomes much more important in order for ideas to stick. When you are presenting virtually with slides, for example, you may need to insert more summary slides or add more “bottom line” style reminders to reiterate your main points. Just because your audience may have been distracted or multitasking doesn’t mean they are bad people or didn’t really want to hear your message. Being more patient and proactive by changing your presentation style slightly can make a big difference in what your audience retains afterwards.
Solution #5 – Focus on the follow up.
Perhaps even more than in-person meetings, the follow up from a virtual session becomes much more important. If you have recorded the session and promised to share it, make that happen quickly. If there are downloadable materials make them easy to find and get. The moment right after a virtual session is a critical one for engagement and a time when your audience may be most receptive to anything you can share. So plan the follow up and do it quickly.
Is the future about virtual events?
I have never been someone who believed that virtual events could replace in person events. There is something magical about getting the right people in the room to make connections and a serendipity that happens face to face which is impossible to recreate virtually (yet!). I hope that live events never get replaced.
I do, however, believe that a virtual presentation can be highly effective and in many cases preferable – for example if you have a widely distributed group that can’t be in the same place at once, or a global health scare that makes travel riskier. Hopefully this list helps you transform your next virtual meeting or presentation into one that doesn’t suck and really does engage your audience.
We all need to find more ways to make our virtual meetings better. For the near future, it’s at least pretty clear we can expect to have more of them.
I’ve been a speaker at all eight Social Media Marketing World events and it is always an annual highlight for me. It’s like coming home to family — so many wonderful friends to see! If you’ve never attended, you should give it a try and discover the fun.
In the early days of SMMW, I spoke on Twitter and blogging, then I evolved into content and strategy. In 2016 I was asked to be the closing keynote speaker and I did it again in 2019. What a thrill to speak in front of 5,000 frenzied social media friends!
I think a key to my success at this event is that I always push boundaries with fresh, exciting content. My philosophy is that a great speech delivers insights, not just information. Information … you can get that in a blog post. But you’ll have a unique experience coming to one of my talks!
I pushed the boundaries again this year by doing something different. I spoke from my heart about the biggest problem facing social media marketers today — winning the war for attention.
I see that social media marketers simply try to keep up by copying others or following directions from their favorite gurus. This simply cannot work. Winning a war for attention means we can’t be conformists.
So let’s dig into the heart of the speech …
Winning the War for Attention
I started my speech with a funny story from the early days of television to illustrate a pattern that happens in every content channel.
When TV started in the 1950s, the programs were filled with local talent — singers, cooks, and anybody who could fill some time on the air. Almost anybody could get on the air and almost any business could buy advertising time.
Over the years, the channel “filled up,” and the content became more expensive and sophisticated. Local advertisers dropped out and network (and then cable) TV took over.
Today, what does it take to get your attention on TV? Game of Thrones. At $10 million per episode for a show like that, the content has never been better but if you’re trying to compete on the basis of content, bring your checkbook!
As I told this story, I asked my audience to think of the similarity of what is happening in their own favorite social media space. The same pattern will happen over time. The space fills up with content and it becomes more expensive and difficult to compete, an idea I first introduced in 2014 with an idea called Content Shock.
Now, what do we do about it?
I proposed that answering five questions can lead you to a strategy that helps you win the war for attention. Here they are.
1. Only we …
I asked the audience a simple question. Can you finish this sentence: “Only we …”?
This is a very important question because if you can’t finish that sentence, you don’t have a marketing strategy and if you don’t have a marketing strategy, you can’t have a social media strategy. You’re being set up to fail.
It may take you weeks or even months to figure this out. But you simply must find these special points of differentiation. If you’re stuck, go out and ask your customers what they think. You’ll almost always find the answer there.
2. Company culture
In my Marketing Rebellion book, I go deep into this idea of how company culture really determines how successful you’ll be with your social media marketing.
The company culture both enables your narrative and constrains your ability to win the war for attention. If you have a culture that is open, nurturing and fun … that will be your social media presence. If you’re uptight and controlling, you probably won’t get very far in winning the war for attention.
This can be frustrating because no amount of energy and talent can overcome a dismal company culture. Sometimes, an effective social media strategy has to start with executive education.
I made the point that sometimes social media success must start with executive education.
3. Are you a conversational brand?
I said that the business case for all social media is this: “Come Waste Time With Me.”
Nobody has to be on social media. So to succeed, you have to earn a place that makes people want to waste time with you. Why would they want to do that?
Not all products and industries have an equal chance to win the war for attention.
If you work for a university, a sports team, a pop star, or a professional athlete, you will naturally have a high level of attention and organic reach.
If you work for a bank, the electric company, or a company that makes appliances … well, these just are not going to make it to dinnertime conversations. You’re not that conversational and it will be much, much harder for you to win the war for attention.
You have to make yourself conversational. This does not necessarily have to be difficult or expensive, but you do have to stand out in some unique way.
I provided an example of a hand tool company in Lithuania that went viral over its videos that explored how the tools were hand-crafted.
4. How can you maneuver?
I explained to the audience that this was the most important part of the talk. My concern is that everybody leaves a conference like Social Media Marketing World and follows whatever the gurus tell them to do. I see this year after year.
If it is the year of Snapchat, everybody piles on to Snapchat.
If it is the year of video on LinkedIn, then that is what everybody does.
Marketers flock to whatever is popular until they ruin it.
And that’s no strategy. Winning the war for attention depends on non-conformity, not conformity.
I used an example of TikTok, which was a big piece of the conversation at SMMW20. There seems to be a frenzy to get every business on to TikTok. Research shows that indeed, there is a growing older audience there. But let’s take a closer look:
Did you know that about 94 percent of the content created on TikTok is by teenagers? This implies we have a lot of older people stalking TikTok (as they first did with Snapchat before dropping out). So do you really need to be building an audience of 12-year-olds for your business? Maybe.
I’m not against TikTok, I’m just saying, “THINK” and don’t spend budget on activities because some guru told you to do it (This part of my talk received applause!)
To be effective today, you cannot be guru-led and fall in line with a crowd. You have to zig when everybody else is zagging.
To illustrate this, I provided examples from three very saturated industries — real estate, food, and entrepreneurial content — and showed that a little simple creativity helped businesses stand out and create great success.
5. Human-centered content
In this part of my speech, I noted that every great social media success story has a human anchor providing some unique value. (I cover this in detail here: A simple theory of social media success).
I showed how many companies are missing out on opportunities to show real human smiles, personalities, and passion because they act like grape lollipops, which say they are grape but are not really grape at all!
This was the funniest part of my speech and I got the biggest laugh I think I have ever received as I covered a few big social media fails!
The point is, the most human company wins — it just does. I believe that with every fiber in my body. And you won’t be winning the war for attention with some fake and inauthentic presence.
Putting it into action
These are the types of guidelines I use with my clients, and they work. They’re not that hard. But they do take a bold willingness to not follow the crowd.
I ended my talk encouraging the crowd to:
Be a non-conformist.
Maneuver.
Be more human.
It seems simple, doesn’t it? How are you being a non-conformist in your industry?
Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.
As writers, we know reading is a fundamental part of our practice. We’re encouraged to expose ourselves to new writers, texts, words, and ideas. But do you ever find yourself reading something and wondering, “What am I looking for? How can I learn from this writer?”
Writing practice is at the heart of everything we do here at The Write Practice. Every week, we share new fifteen-minute fiction writing exercises to help you practice and grow as a writer.
But what if you could build your own fiction writing exercises? What if you could find something you love in a story someone else has written, and then practice how to recreate that yourself? What if you could take the lead in your own growth as a writer and learn from your favorite stories and authors?
You can! Here are three steps to help you analyze any text to learn its secrets and apply its lessons.
First, Choose a Book to Study
Developing writers often love to read, but they don’t know how to move beyond the reader experience of a text to analyze how a writer is creating an effect.
Not every text begs analysis, of course. When I’m after a quick pleasure read at the beach or a fast-paced thriller to help me escape the mundane, I don’t want to slow down to unpack a writer’s method.
But when I am trying to get better as a writer, I need to choose some texts that can teach me. Depending on your goals, you might choose a writer you admire, a reader-favorite in a genre, or a classic novel. I think it helps if you’ve read the text through at least once, so you aren’t trying to grasp the basic premise of the scene or section.
3 Steps to Learn From a Book
Once you’ve chosen a text, try these three steps to help you learn a text’s secrets and apply them to your own writing with fiction writing exercises.
1. Describe what you see
First, narrow your focus. If you want to get better at dialogue, choose a dialogue-heavy scene. If you want to improve your ability to write suspense, choose a chapter or scene that had you captivated until the end.
Read the scene or chapter slowly, pencil in hand. You can record your notes in the margins or in a notebook. Read a paragraph, section, or page and then stop and describe what you see related to your area of focus.
For example, in a fast-paced scene, do you notice how the dialogue is clipped? Are the sentences short?
See if you can describe the various parts of the scene. What are the characters doing before and after they speak? When does the scene begin? Where does it end?
2. Ask why and how questions
Once you have a good list describing what you noticed, ask why and how.
If you noticed the dialogue sentences are clipped and short, even fragments in places, ask yourself why, My guess is that those short sentences speed the pace to keep the reader engaged. But maybe they reflect how the character speaks differently under pressure, revealing insecurity.
There are no wrong answers—only defensible ones. Try to come up with multiple reasons for how a writer is creating the effect or why they are crafting a scene this way.
Also, here’s a shortcut for this step: ask yourself what the story’s genre is.
Genre dictates a number of choices for writers. A thriller will almost always have someone racing against a literal or metaphorical clock. A mystery will have a dead body or puzzle, usually in the first quarter of the book.
Notice the patterns you see related to the genre and ask yourself how they propel the story forward.
3. Apply the lesson
Now that you have a good list of description and some great questions or observations about how and why a scene is developed, it’s your turn. Choose one of the sections you analyzed. It might be a paragraph, a page, or a scene.
Practice recreating the effect in your own style and voice. You can create a character composite or swap in a character from your work in progress. If your analysis revealed short, clipped dialogue, write short sentences. If your analysis showed a clever technique for character description, try it out using your own details.
There’s no wrong way to do it. All developing writers mimic the greats as they find their own voices. Don’t be afraid to learn from authors you love, using their work as a model.
Practice Is Key
It’s one thing to read books you love. It’s another thing entirely to write books you love, books that can hold their own on the shelf next to your favorite authors.
But if you study your favorite books and create fiction writing exercises to practice the techniques they use to capture your imagination, you can recreate those experiences for yourself. Better yet, you can build on them to create something new and innovative, something readers can’t put down.
Pull a book off your shelf, study it, and create a way to practice what that author’s done. How will their skill weave its way into your writing?
Have you used a similar process to learn from other authors? What helps you learn from the books you read? Share your ideas in the comments.
Then, describe what you see as you read or view it. Ask and answer those how and why questions:
What makes it work?
Why does the author choose these details?
How did she speed up or slow down the pace here?
If there’s any time left on your timer, try writing something in a similar style or using the same techniques.
It may feel clunky or uncomfortable at first, but play with it and have fun. Share the story you chose and the observations you made (and your own application of the technique, if you have time to write!) in the comments below.
Be sure to leave feedback for your fellow writers! In fact, why not try practicing one of the techniques they share?
With the concerns about a global health pandemic, the necessity of shifting more events and meetings to be virtual is on everyone’s mind. There’s only one problem: most of us have spent too much time in virtual meetings that are a waste of time.
I should know, I’ve probably spoken or participated in well over a hundred over the past years – both as a virtual keynote speaker and a remote workshop leader.
Some of them have sucked.
But I don’t believe that virtual meetings or presentations need to be bad. The real problem is that no one seems to know how to run them well.
Thanks to concerns about the coronavirus, we seem to be headed into a season where more events will happen virtually. So we should all have an interest in making them better. To start, let’s consider five of the most common reasons that virtual meetings go awry …
Problem #1 – Increased distractions.
Presenting the same thing you might have done in person in the same way doesn’t work in a virtual session. There are too many distractions and other things people may be doing at the same time.
Problem #2 – Lack of audience.
The entire idea of a laugh track for television sitcoms was created because the lack of an audience made creators worry that people wouldn’t know when to laugh. In a live meeting, we can look to the people around us for a cue as to how we might react. A virtual setting lacks this and so we feel isolated in our reactions and it’s harder to engage.
Problem #3 – Intrusive malfunctioning tech.
If you have ever started a conference call with ten minutes of participants asking if you can hear them, you’ve already experienced this. The fact is, much of the technology used for virtual sessions creates a lot of friction. People have to download something, microphones don’t work and Internet connections fail.
Problem #4 – No accountability.
When you are sitting in a live meeting or you show up late, there is a reputational and social cost to being tardy or being on your phone or checking out. Everyone else can see what you’re doing. In a virtual session, there isn’t any social pressure to keep you engaged or to prevent you from multitasking.
Problem #5 – One-way interaction.
Too often in virtual meetings one side has a camera on and is delivering content while the other is silently and invisibly listening. This creates an unbalanced meeting because one side has no insight into how the other side is reacting.
So, how do we fix these issues?
It’s easy to think that these are all thing that will always be the case with virtual meetings. After all, it’s not reasonable to “lock the doors” of a virtual session or force everyone to be on video to hold them accountable, right? And you certainly can’t wish away technical issues just by hoping they don’t happen.
Yet despite the difficulties these problems create, there are some techniques I have seen and used myself to help make virtual meetings and presentations a LOT better than they might otherwise be. Here are a few suggestions:
Solution #1 – Make virtual tech an advantage.
If you know everyone who is participating in your meeting will be on their computer during the session, a lot of possibilities open up. You can have them all visit a landing page directly to enter information. You can host and integrate a live poll. You can even tailor your content based on immediate responses you get. Virtual meetings can enable faster real time engagement if you can bake the interaction into the session.
Solution #2 – Use multiple mediums/styles.
While people may be able to sit through an hour long meeting or a 45 minute keynote, the rules are different for virtual sessions. In a world where people are used to 90 second YouTube videos, keeping their attention is more demanding. Sometimes, I will integrate videos more frequently into virtual sessions, or use interactive exercises asking participants to draw a picture or answer a question. These allow for a mental break and help audiences stay engaged for longer because you are mixing up the content.
Solution #3 – Reduce the friction.
Often the technology platform for a session is selected based on what is the approved platform for a particular organization or what presenters are most comfortable using. Both are not great ways to choose technology. Instead, consider what tech would be easiest and fastest for your audience to get working. Who has the best live support to help people with issues? What tool doesn’t require downloading? Considering the friction of the tech tools for your audience first can help prevent tech issues later.
Solution #4 – Expect distractions and reiterate often.
In a virtual environment, repetition becomes much more important in order for ideas to stick. When you are presenting virtually with slides, for example, you may need to insert more summary slides or add more “bottom line” style reminders to reiterate your main points. Just because your audience may have been distracted or multitasking doesn’t mean they are bad people or didn’t really want to hear your message. Being more patient and proactive by changing your presentation style slightly can make a big difference in what your audience retains afterwards.
Solution #5 – Focus on the follow up.
Perhaps even more than in-person meetings, the follow up from a virtual session becomes much more important. If you have recorded the session and promised to share it, make that happen quickly. If there are downloadable materials make them easy to find and get. The moment right after a virtual session is a critical one for engagement and a time when your audience may be most receptive to anything you can share. So plan the follow up and do it quickly.
Is the future about virtual events?
I have never been someone who believed that virtual events could replace in person events. There is something magical about getting the right people in the room to make connections and a serendipity that happens face to face which is impossible to recreate virtually (yet!). I hope that live events never get replaced.
I do, however, believe that a virtual presentation can be highly effective and in many cases preferable – for example if you have a widely distributed group that can’t be in the same place at once, or a global health scare that makes travel riskier. Hopefully this list helps you transform your next virtual meeting or presentation into one that doesn’t suck and really does engage your audience.
We all need to find more ways to make our virtual meetings better. For the near future, it’s at least pretty clear we can expect to have more of them.
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. You have that one, right?)
. This has been on the backburner for years and people have been begging me for it.
Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling 
book, I go deep into this idea of how company culture really determines how successful you’ll be with your social media marketing.
Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling 
