Follow me where I go what I do and who I know
Make it part of you to be a part of me
Follow me up and down all the way and all around
Take my hand and say you’ll follow me

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows you to let people (your Followers) know what you’re doing at the moment. Activities reported range from the inane (”Heh. Just belched louder than Barney“) and mundane (”Enjoying a pumpkin muffin and a Tall at Starbucks on 43rd”) to the insanely creative Tweets for cultivating business.

Twitter as a marketing and client-attraction tool is all the rage. Say you’re in the marketing business for the food and beverage industry and a bunch of your followers rely on you for keeping up with trends. Your Tweet may sound something like this: “Enjoying a Perfect Oatmeal at Starbucks. Adage.com says it’s their new slam-dunk product for women and Millennials. Wow.”

Still scratching your head? Here’s a neat little video that describes Twitter.

How healthy is your organisation’s culture? Take this free organisational culture survey, presented by the Australian Future Search Network. You’ll get a score that provides a snapshot of where your organisation is headed, either away from greatness or toward it.

Also, the Australian Future Search Network has great ideas on community development and organisational change including a free paper on 9 principles to effect change. The ideas on organisational change have equal application for small and large organisations and businesses.

If I could give every single business writer, guru or executive one thing to read every morning before work, it’d be this essay by George Orwell: Politics and the English Language.

Not only is this essay short, brilliant, thought-provoking and memorable, it calls bullshit on most of what passes today as speech and written language in management circles. And if you are too lazy to read the article, all you need to remember is this: never use a fancy word when a simple one will do. If your idea is good, no hype is necessary. Explain it clearly and people will get it, if there truly is something notable to get. If your idea is bad: keep working before you share it with others. And if you don’t have time for that, you might as well be honest. Because when you throw jargon around, most of us know you’re probably lying about something anyway.

In honor of George, whose birthday was last month, here is a handy list of words I hear often in management circles that should be banned. Flat out, these words are never used for good reason.

Words that should be banned:

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http://www.wdfm.com/publish/e-commerce_blogs/

Sign up for the free Web Digest for Marketers while you’re at it. Great stuff!

Love the Gray Wolf logo!

According to business success strategist Philip Humbert, it’s none of those. Read on.

Strictly Business: The Purpose of Business

I hear lots of discussion about purpose and mission statements for business. Some tell me the purpose of any business is to make a profit. Others focus on the quality of the product or on teamwork and morale. Obviously, all of that is wonderful and to some extent necessary. But it misses the point.

The purpose of every business is to serve a satisfied customer. Period.

In the end, satisfied customers create the profits. Satisfied customers create repeat business, which is vastly more profitable than finding a new customer for every transaction. Satisfied customers allow for pride, satisfaction and the constant improvement of our goods and services. Only satisfied customers will ultimately keep the doors open and allow the business to “work.”

Sure, a great marketing plan is desirable. Of course, making a profit is necessary over time.

But in the end, only satisfied customers make everything else possible.

So, what are your customers really looking for? What benefit or convenience, what quality or experience is most vital to them? Ask them! Let your customers tell you what makes your business special. Let them tell you how and why you stand out from your competition. Let them tell you why they buy from you and keep coming back.

Too often, business leaders spend too much time examining details when a simple lunch or phone call to your best customers could tell you precisely how to grow the business. In the end, systems and business plans, tools and equipment are good, but only to the degree that your customers are smiling. Everything else is detail.

Copyright 2008, All rights reserved. Philip Humbert.

Contact him at www.philiphumbert.com or Coach@philiphumbert.com. Sign up for his free TIPS e-newsletter.

An effective Web site follows design, content and usability principles that focus on the site’s visitors. You want to make information easy to find and easy to understand. You want to make it easy for visitors to take action, whether that action is to contact you, engage in a conversation, buy a product online, or simply to smile.

To remain an effective means of communication, most Web sites require proper care and feeding. And not just any old tinkering around. The key is to base the TLC primarily on what your site visitors need.

It doesn’t matter if you’re bored with the colors or other visual design elements. It doesn’t matter what Technology Tom says you gotta have. It doesn’t matter what Artsy-Fartsy Fara thinks would look fabulous. If it doesn’t enhance or support your communication with your target audience, forget it.

Gerry McGovern addresses this issue in his New Thinking article, Resist Redesign:

Redesign is classic organization-centric thinking. It rarely has much to do with making things better for the customer.

Your website isn’t working. What should you do? Well, how about finding out why it isn’t working and fix that. But let me tell you this, the problem with your website has rarely anything to do with its graphical design.

Your website is working. But it’s four years old. What should you do? Leave it alone. Or focus on making it work even better. But let me tell you this, making it work better has rarely anything to do with its graphical design.

Organizations love projects. You get a budget and a launch date. You can get busy and look like you’re working really hard. Some web teams love website redesign projects. It’s fun. They get to go to lots of meetings and talk about graphics and colors, and to extol about how bored they are with the old design.

But usually it’s not the web team that wants the redesign. Rather, it’s some marketing manager. Or some senior executive in communications who has had a golf course conversation about the Web. Or some newly appointed manager desperate to reinvent the wheel.

Great websites are not redesigned. They are continuously improved. The website that gets some new budget every couple of years for a redesign is the website that is being managed like a brochure. In other words, it’s not being managed.

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The PayPal shopping cart is easy to use as well, but its features are sparse. Very sparse. I wanted an e-commerce solution that has features such as product management and newsletters. I installed Zen Cart, but it was overkill for my needs. Just when I thought I’d have to settle for the PayPal shopping cart, I discovered E-junkie.

You can sell physical products and digital downloads, set up an affiliate program, send updates and newsletters to any buyer group, and much more.

And how cool is their logo? I kinda like having the blinking thing there, watching over me as I work.

I also enjoy learning foreign languages. I studied Spanish in high school, and I lived in Spain for several months while in college. (I ran with the bulls in Ceuta, and I have gouge marks to prove it.) I’ve taken a couple of French and Italian courses, and I learned a smattering of Thai and Mien while teaching English in a Laotian refugee camp in Thailand.

Why am I talking about this?

Well, I just read an interesting article by Jerry Bader, “Web Content: It’s All About the Why.” For some odd reason (too much caffeine this morning?), my brain translated the word “why” into Spanish and French. I wanted to know how to say it in Thai, so I started googling around for an online translator.

You know how it goes. One thing leads to another, and before you know it, you land on a really cool site such as the International Dialects of English Archive referenced above.

I still haven’t answered the question. Why, oh why, am I talking about accents, dialects, foreign languages, and getting gouged in Spain?

See if you can guess.

[guessing]

…

[guessing]

…

…

[guessing]

…

Here’s why:

Simply to tell a story. Why? Read Jerry’s article.

Almost everyone has heard about social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, blogging tools and platforms such as WordPress and Blogger, video sharing site YouTube, virtual worlds such as Second Life, and, of course, good old email programs. All of that is what is called social media.

I like the way Cory Treffiletti in today’s post on OnlineSpin breaks social media into four main categories:

• Social Networks
• Social Applications
• Citizen Journalism
• Virtual Worlds

As many are fond of saying, it ain’t rocket science unless it’s rocket science. You can understand just about anything once you learn the lingo.