BuiltEnvironment

Changing my mindset

A few years ago, I joined Facebook. I created personal and company pages to connect with family and friends AND to promote my business. But I couldn't make the two pages do what I wanted; there were so many worthless items appearing that other people had written.

For example, one night, a contact in Dallas made four posts just before 11pm about the fact that he was tired and was wondering whether he should go to bed. These four posts showed up on my business page, accompanied by 15+ comments from HIS friends urging him to go to bed if he was that tired.

And I couldn't figure out how to delete individual items, so I ended up deleting people as fast as I was adding them. I finally decided that Facebook had insufficient value for me to put up with the frustration it caused me, so I deleted both pages.

I never did anything with Twitter. I didn't think I had much to say that would interest many other people, and I didn't think I had the time to follow a bunch of other people and/or companies. I didn't see that any value could be packed into 140 characters.

On the other hand, I have been an active LinkedIn user for many years. I keep my profile updated and spend time every week looking at questions and answering those where I have more to say than just "me too!" I congratulate people on promotions, keep up with folks who change jobs, and offer help where I can. And I look at new people who have joined to find those I already know, or with whom I have many connections, to expand my own list of connections.

Opportunities have come my way through LinkedIn, and I have reconnected there with people when emails to them bounced back because they had changed jobs. I have made some solid business connections and friends with whom I regularly interact online and on the phone.

I often ask other marketing professionals about their A/E or related firms' use of Facebook and Twitter. They all said they couldn't tie specific new sales or clients to either outlet. They said they were using those tools "because everyone else is," and we would laugh.

I thought that using a service because everyone else is, even though one couldn't identify real benefits from using the service, was a bit like 25+ years ago, when we all still used Yellow Pages advertising. It told our competitors that we were still in business but didn't often result in new clients or business.

I've changed my mind -- and my mindset!

After all, marketing is about tomorrow -- who we will work with/for tomorrow, what we will work on tomorrow, what we will bill time to tomorrow. Therefore, marketing leaders have to be concerned with what technology we will use tomorrow. We need to get, and stay, ahead of the curve on relevant technologies.

So I'm embarking on a course of self-education about all the technologies I've pooh-pooh'ed and ignored. I owe it to myself, my clients, and anyone in my industry who thinks I have anything of value to say. By the time I'm done, I expect to be using Facebook, Twitter and other tools I discover along my journey.

That's my resolution for 2012 - a few weeks late perhaps, but it doesn't matter when I catch up as long as I DO catch up!

Missed opportunities

Over the last 20 years, I've received a lot of phone calls from A/E industry recruiters. The calls were sometimes about low- to mid-level marketing positions, but most often were about engineering or architectural positions in which I had neither qualifications nor interest. Once that was established, the recruiter almost always asked me I knew of anyone else who might be interested.

My stock answer was something to the effect that I saw no reason why I should do their job while they collected the commission. (I thought that I was being very smart!)

Now, I'm reading a book called "Never Eat Alone," by Keith Ferrazzi. On pp.132 and 133, Ferrazzi says, "Headhunters are professional matchmakers... I return every call from them, helping to tap my network to find people for their jobs. I know they'll help me with access to some of their clients when I need their help. After all, they are in the networking business."

Now, 20 years later and, I hope, 20 years smarter, I know that my standard answer to those recruiters was not smart, but merely "smartass!"

Now, after a long and (mostly) successful career as an A/E/C/environmental industry marketing professional,  I know that successful networking starts with giving, with helping others, and that you can only ask for favors after you have created the relationship -- you have to give before you can get.

So I have to wonder how differently my three job searches over the last 12 years might have turned out if I hadn't been such a smartass... if I had developed solid, respectful relationships with a few successful recruiters... if I had understood 20 years ago that "what's in it for me?" is not always the best attitude with which to build a relationship.

Would I be just where I am now? Would I be working at my dream job at my dream firm? Would my company, The Siben Consult, LLC, have have a staff of five or six people and need to turn away work for lack of bodies to execute projects?

There's no way to know.

But I do wonder.

 

 

 

                                    "Remember the Alamoo!"

                                    (downtown Austin art-cow collection)

Efficient and ineffective

There are a great many people who think that the words "effective" and "efficient" are interchangeable -- that they mean the same thing. But this is not the case.

I have on occasion explained to a person or group that being effective means doing the right thing, while being efficient means doing the thing right (i.e. in the correct manner). Often, the person to whom I offered this explanation will look at me like I've grown another head!

Anyway, I've just started reading "Never Eat Alone" by Keith Ferrazzi (with Tahl Raz). On page 44, Ferrazzi observes that "Too often, we get caught up efficiently doing ineffective things..." Many of us spend hours painstakingly following a complicated process, getting every step right, without ever considering that we might have chosen the wrong process to follow or the wrong outcome to pursue.

Obviously, we should want to make sure we are doing the right thing before worrying about how to do it right.

And here's a somewhat philosophical question to ponder: if you chose the wrong thing to do, does it really matter how well you did it?

Of course, growing a second head might enable me to be both more effective AND more efficient, that that's another post altogether!

It is, however, always nice to have one's thoughts validated by others.