Drowning in Data?

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How frequently does data overload affect you?

courtesy searchengineland.com

courtesy searchengineland.com

Christopher Frank and Paul Magnone, authors of Drinking from the Fire Hose, want you to take a short quiz. Answer each question with either “frequently” or “infrequently.” Give yourself one point for each time you answer “frequently.” If you score a 5 or higher, you probably want to come back tomorrow to look at some excerpts of their solution to drowning in data.

  • How often do you sit through a meeting that’s more about reporting the numbers than about learning from them?
  • How often do you leave a meeting with more questions than answers?
  • How often do your colleagues spend more time presenting the data than they do discussing the implications?
  • How often do you feel that preexisting beliefs affect the way data is interpreted?
  • Once the results are reported, how often does the conversation end up going down the dame old path instead of developing any new insights?
  • How often do you see data cited to confirm a point of view instead of to spark fresh insight?
  • How often do you learn nothing actionable from a data set?
  • How often do you feel you have to make a decisions before you’ve been able to review all the data at hand?
  • How often do you feel that you could make better decision for the organization if you just had a little more time?

Tomorrow: How to find truly essential nuggets of information and use them with confidence.

Out of Site, Out of Mind

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It only takes a few seconds for a guest to your website to decide to leave – or stay.

Guest Services in your church is more than just a friendly face greeting everyone who comes onto your property – because increasingly, your Guests have “visited” your website before coming to your church facility. Mark MacDonald, a close friend and founder and Creative Director of Pinpoint Creative Group, recently had this to say: 

 85% of people visit a website before visiting a church. If your church doesn’t “feel” like your web; most of them will never return.

You can read the full article here, but note the close relationship between the digital and the physical: your digital “doorway” must match your physical doorway – at least in “feel.”

While you’re pondering that nugget, add this to the mix:  Evidence points to information from trusted sources getting a better hold on our brains than the noise from everything else.

Martin Lindstrom, consumer advocate consultant and best-selling author, recently elaborated on this topic in a Fast Company online column:

Let’s say that not that long ago you came across a fascinating article. But when you later try to verify some of the facts, you just can’t pinpoint exactly where you first read it. What you do recall is that the source was reliable and you trusted the message. This is a situation I find myself in quite regularly. So much so, that I’ve pondered the conundrum and come up with a theory: we store information according to how trustworthy we deem the source of the message to be.

I make no claims to being a marketing expert (see Mark if you need one) or to being a student of what consumers – including church consumers – are looking for (read more of Lindstrom’s work here).

But when I connect all of the above, it boggles my mind. If you are a leader in ChurchWorld, it ought to do the same to you.

Here’s the summary:

  • An overwhelming majority of Guests coming to your church have visited your website first
  • Your digital doorway must match the physical doorway or your Guests will feel a major disconnect
  • Brands (and that includes your church) that are trusted have a better chance of staying top-of-mind

What are you going to do about it?

 

 

Speed Reading Week, Day 5

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Creative Thinkering, Michael Michalko

Have you ever asked yourself “Why didn’t I think of that?”

 If so, this book is for you. Bestselling creativity expert Michael Michalko shows that in every field of endeavor – from business and science to government, the arts, and even day-to-day life – our natural creativity is limited by the prejudices of logic and the structure of accepted categories and concepts. Through step-by-step exercises, illustrated strategies, and inspiring real-world examples, Creative Thinkering will show you how to synthesize dissimilar subjects, think paradoxically, and enlist the help of your subconscious mind. You will liberate your thinking and literally expand your imagination.

Creative Thinkering is filled with innovative exercises to strengthen your intuition. With every chapter you will learn something new – often from a situation or setting that you encounter every day. The book also contains fascinating stories and examples of how people use the power of creative thinkering. One of my favorites is about Walt Disney:

Using his imagination, Walt Disney uncritically explored fantastical ideas. Afterward, he would engineer these fantasies into feasible ideas and then evaluate them. He would shift his perspective three times by playing three separate and distinct roles in relation to them: those of the dreamer, the realist, and the critic.

On the first day, he would play the dreamer and dream up fantasies and wishful visions. He would let his imagination soar without worrying about how to implement his conceptions. The next day, he would bring his fantasies down to earth by playing the realist. As a realist, he would look for ways to work his conceptions into something practical. On the third day, he would play the part of the critic and poke holes in his ideas, asking, “Is this feasible?”

Got an idea or project coming up? Put the power of creative thinkering to work and you will be amazed at the results.

 

Speed Reading Week, Day 4

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The Amazement Revolution, Shep Hyken

Customer service isn’t a department – it’s a philosophy that includes every person and aspect of the best and brightest organizations.

Shep Hyken delivers seven powerful strategies that any organization can implement to create greater customer and employee loyalty:

  • Membership: What if you treated the people you serve like members instead of customers?
  • Serious FUN: What if your team felt a sense of fulfillment and enjoyment that made them loyal to you and your customers?
  • Partnership: What if you customers thought of you as a partner rather than just another organization?
  • Hiring: What if you could implement innovative hiring processes to support your customer-service mission?
  • The After-Experience: What if you could create a memorable, positive experience after someone did business with you?
  • Community: What if you could create a community of evangelists – loyal customers who brag about you to their friends and associates?
  • Walking the Walk: What if every person in your company didn’t just deliver, but also lived and breathed your vision for amazing customer service?

Throughout the book, Hyken shares more than one hundred insightful examples from fifty role-model organizations that prove these strategies can and should be implemented immediately – by any organization, large or small.

I first heard Shep Hyken speak on a video talking about an extraordinary cab experience he had on a trip to Dallas. I was hooked – and I think you will be, too.

The Amazement Revolution is not just stories and examples – at the end of the book, Hyken has condensed the seven strategies down into “brainstorm worksheets” that your organization can use to put ideas into action.

How will you amaze your customers today?

Speed Reading Week, Day 3

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The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW, by Joseph Michelli

Zappos – the name has come to stand for a new standard of customer experience, and amazing online shopping experience, and the most impressive transformational business success story of our time. Simply put, Zappos is revolutionizing business and changing lives.

 CEO Tony Hsieh documented the Zappos story in his excellent book Delivering Happiness. I encourage you to read it to get Hsieh’s personal insights on the evolution of Zappos.

Michelli’s book The Zappos Experience takes you through – and beyond – the playful, off-beat company culture Zappos has become famous for. Michelli reveals what occurs behind the scenes at Zappos, showing how employees at all levels operate on a day-to-day basis while providing the “big picture” leadership methods.

Michelli breaks the approach down into five key elements:

Serve a Perfect Fit – create bedrock company values

Make it Effortlessly Swift – deliver a customer experience with ease

Step into the Personal – connect with customers authentically

S T R E T C H – grow people and products

Play to Win – play hard, work harder

When you enhance the customer experience, increase employee engagement, and create an energetic culture, you can’t help but succeed. Zappos has woven these five key components into a seamless strategy that’s the envy of business leaders.

The Zappos Experience is much too detailed to adequately treat in this short post.  Applications for ChurchWorld abound. Here’s one example for you to think about:

Zappos’ customer service is legendary for how it handles the huge volume of merchandise shipments. Members of the Customer Loyalty Team take a huge amount of pride in their customer interactions.

Could you apply the same principles in the Guest Services Team at your church?

  • What are the small and epic acts that make up your service story?
  • What do people remember about the way contact with your organization made them feel?
  • What are the stories circulating about your organization’s guest services practices?
  • How are you capturing and retelling large and small WOWS delivered by your team?

It works for Zappos; it can work at your church, too.

Speed Reading Week, Day 2

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The Power of foursquare, Carmine Gallo

Author Carmine Gallo has discovered seven big ideas that will help you CHECK IN to the power of foursquare to unlock your brand’s potential:

Connect Your Brand – Align your foursquare strategy with your brand’s value proposition and your brand story.

Harness New Fans – Use foursquare to attract new customers who otherwise might not know about your business or who don’t keep it top of mind.

Engage Your Followers – Add insights and information to keep your brand in front of your customers and fans wherever they are.

Create Rewards – Leverage foursquare’s powerful and free tools to learn more about your best customers and to create rewards for their loyalty.

Knock Out the Competition – Outsmart your competitors by being a leader in this new space and develop creative campaign. Don’t wait for case studies – be the case study.

Incentivize Your Customers – Give your customers a reason to check in, again and again.

Never Stop Entertaining – Foursquare is a playful platform. Always have fun.

If someone asked you what foursquare is, you would be entirely correct to use any of the following answers:

  • It’s a social, local, and mobile networking tool
  • It’s a location-based social network
  • It’s a geolocation app
  • It’s a game
  • It’s a communications tool
  • It’s a new social-media marketing platform

That’s the business world of foursquare – what about ChurchWorld?

Speed Reading Week, Day 1

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Here’s the deal: a book a day, with a few nuggets pulled out for your consideration. Ready?

The End of Business as Usual, Brian Solis

Some of today’s biggest trends – the mobile web, social media, gamification, real-time – have forced us to rewire the way we think about and run our organizations. Consumers are creating a new digital culture, and as they connect with one another, a vast and efficient information network is taking shape and is beginning to steer experiences, decisions, and markets.

The End of Business as Usual will change the way you view the world of business, from sales and marketing to customer service and product development to leadership and culture. Its critical insights include:

  • Shared experiences are redefining brands in digital consumer landscapes, and astute brands can now also create and steer these experiences
  • Consumer influence is growing, and businesses can use this to their advantage
  • Connect with a rising audience (and with audiences of audiences) through new touch points between consumers, brands, and new influencers
  • Create a culture to earn trust, influence, and significance among connected customers

Solis has written a powerful book, deep with implications. Here’s a couple of samples:

The nextwork sends and receives information at blinding speeds, creating an efficient human switchboard and network that in theory and in practice, outperforms telephone, terrestrial, cell, emergency, and web networks for the speed and precision at which relevant experiences are shared and re-shared. News no longer breaks – it tweets. (pp 54-55)

An Audience with an Audience of Audiences

This picture serves as both a time capsule immortalizing this important transition and evidence of the emergence of new information nextworks, a series of audiences with extended audiences. Every single one of these students is a representation of the connected customer. They are each connected to others in the room and around the world, figuratively and literally. They are nodes in the human network, playing an instrumental role in the dissemination of information and also the experiences that unite us online and in real life. Your job is to now influence what they share. (p 61)

Questions for ChurchWorld

  • How has the explosion of social media impacted your ministry – personally or corporately?
  • How are your “consumers” influencing your organization differently today than 3 years ago?
  • How are you harnessing the power and influence of social media technologies to connect with your audience?
  • Is the rate of change greater today than it was a year ago? How comfortable are you with that?
  • On a sliding scale, do you view your organization as rigid, social, connected, adaptive, or predictive?

This is your time to lead, not follow; your time to make a difference.

Beyond Customer Service

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Do you give up, clean up, or follow up?

The following comments were originally adapted from Zig Ziglar on Selling and Jeffrey Gitomer’s The Sales Bible for a business development audience. In terms of what churches need to do to think about the “customer” they are trying to reach, I think they are very appropriate for church leaders to consider. Remember, guests to your church are measuring the experience they receive from you not to other churches, but to other customer-oriented businesses. The days of “customer service” as the standard of excellence are long gone.

Today, everybody talks about the importance of “customer satisfaction.” In this competitive market the only way to get ahead (and sometimes the only way to survive) is to go beyond customer service to customer satisfaction. The best way to prevent a prospect or client from becoming unhappy is to provide excellent service before the problems are allowed to arise. The Norwegian word for “sell” is selje, which literally means “to serve.” Isn’t that a great sales strategy? Here are some ways you can “serve” your prospect or client:

  • Satisfactory customer service is no longer acceptable
  • Customer service begins at 100%
  • The customer’s perception is reality
  • A mistake is a chance to improve the company
  • Problems can create beneficial rearrangements
  • Make the customer feel important
  • Learn how to ask questions
  • The most important art – the art of listening

Customer satisfaction in the never-ending pursuit of excellence to keep clients so satisfied that they tell others of the way they were treated by your organization.

Is your church raising the bar on “customer satisfaction”? Or is it just the same old, same old?

 

Who is in Your Inner Circle?

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Presidential history calls them the “kitchen cabinet” (Andrew Jackson) or the “brain trust” (Franklin Roosevelt). It’s a group of friends and advisors who serve leaders in an unofficial but very influential capacity.

Every leader ought to build an inner circle that adds value to him or her and to the leadership of the organization they serve. John Maxwell suggests the following mix:

  • Creative people
  • Loyal people
  • People who share your vision
  • Wise and intelligent people
  • People with complementary gifts
  • People with influence
  • People of faith
  • People of integrity

Do those closest to you exemplify these qualities?

Whiteboard For Skeptics

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According to author Dan Roam (The Back of the Napkin, Unfolding the Napkin, and Blah, Blah, Blah), there are three kinds of visual thinkers: people who can’t wait to start drawing (the Black Pen people); those who are happy to add to someone else’s work (the Yellow Pen people); and those who question it all – right up to the moment they pick up the Red Pen and redraw it all.

Hand me the pen! Black pen people show no hesitation in putting the first marks on an empty page. They come across as immediate believers in the power of pictures as a problem-solving tool, and have little concern about their drawing skills – regardless of how primitive their illustrations may turn out to be. They jump at the chance to approach the whiteboard and draw images to describe what they’re thinking. They enjoy visual metaphors and analogies for their ideas, and show great confidence in drawing simple images, both to summarize their ideas and then help work through those ideas.

I can’t draw, but… Yellow Pen people (or highlighters) are often very good at identifying the most important or interesting aspects of what someone else has drawn. These are the people who are happy to watch someone else working at the whiteboard – and after a few minutes will begin to make insightful comments – but who need to be gently prodded to stand and approach the board in order to add to it. Once at the board and with pen tentatively in hand, they always begin by saying “I can’t draw, but…” and then proceed to create conceptual masterworks. These people tend to be more verbal, usually incorporate more words and labels into their sketches, and are more likely to make comparisons to ideas that require supporting verbal descriptions.

I’m not visual Red Pen people are those least comfortable with the use of pictures in a problem-solving context – at least at first. They tend to be quiet while others are sketching away, and when they can be coaxed to comment, most often initially suggest a minor corrections of something already there. Quite often, the Red Pens have the most detailed grasp of the problem at hand – they just need to be coaxed into sharing it. When many images and ideas have been captured on the whiteboard, the Red Pen people will finally take a deep breath, reluctantly pick up the pen, and move to the board – where they redraw everything, often coming up with the clearest picture of them all.
Roam’s conclusion of these different types of people?

Regardless of visual thinking confidence or pen-color preference, everybody already has good visual thinking skills, and everybody can easily improve those skills. Visual thinking is an extraordinarily powerful way to solve problems, and though it may appear to be something new, the fact is that we already know how to do it.

What color is your pen?