Hello everyone! It looks like the blogging encouragement has worked, since this week's question is about how to manage all the comments showing up on a blog. I'll let the blogger speak for herself...
"Dear Ask Remabulous, I had a question about blogger etiquette I thought you could
help with. I’ve started getting more and more comments on my blog which
makes my heart sing but I don’t know if I should respond to each and
every one of them, especially when most of them are not questions but simply “Ah,
I relate” type comments.
Do you have any guidelines for this?
Thanks,
Cupcake"
Great question, Cupcake, and it's one that every blogger wrestles with once her site gets any attention. Here are my thoughts and strategies below...
It does seem that visual thinking and learning is every bit as important as literacy these days. As Ken Robinson said in the video I featured a little while back, we have no way of knowing what the future will look like even five years from now.
We encounter more visual material today than ever. As far back as 2006, sources were estimating that the ads we encountered on a daily basis numbered in the thousands, especially for television watchers. But internet usage can more than make up for that, if you're in front of the computer all day- I know this!
So what does all this mean? Visual literacy is essential in today's world. Information is being conveyed to us through visual communication just as much as through written. Video is becoming the medium of choice, as YouTube becomes a sort of how-to serach engine. Given the choice, we'd all rather be shown than told, right?
As Daniel Pink explains in A Whole New Mind, we have long been on a left-brain/logical thinking bias. We believed at one point- over 100 years ago, granted, that the right brain had very little to do with our effective functioning. But now we see that it has everything to do with success nowadays. The right and visual brain sees the whole picture, synthesizes meaning from facial expressions, and understands things far more quickly than a supercomputer by pulling out the whole picture from all information available, especially emotional content.
Hmm. Starts to sound more like the world we are operating in now, doesn't it? As logical sequential routinized work gets moved overseas as these sorts of tasks can be simply trained and left to run along indefinitely, we are left to look at what kind of work is meaningful for us.
It is the visual, emotionally connected work that we need to engage in. Video allows us to communicate in a visual and personal fashion. If your business message is up on a brochure style website that doesn't allow for users to connect, engage, and that doesn't stimulate them visually and emotionally, everyone is missing out.
Who are you today? Who is your business? How can it be more high concept and high touch, and how can you put that concept out in a more meaningful way.
If these are new ideas, I highly recommend both Daniel Pink's book as well as the short video at the top of the post with Tom Wujec, where he talks about why images are an effective mode of processing information.
Where can you be more visual? Share your thoughts with us below...
When you started your business, didn't you think about how its existence would
impact the world? Most of us who are entrepreneurs are hoping to create social change. (That's why most of us tear up when we watch
the entrepreneur video that was all over the internet recently- if you haven't seen it yet, get the tissues first!)
However, as we get into business licenses, taxes, bank accounts, assessing our
bottom line and getting out to network, we can easily lose sight of this initial desire.
Do you feel burnt out sometimes when you sit at your desk all day, banging
out e-mail, news releases, administrative tasks and all the elements that go into running your business?
Of course you do. It's only natural.
So what's the solution? Think about what your initial dream was about your business
and how you wanted to change the world through your work, find a cause or charity that is on the same page and join it.
How does this help your business?
Well, for one thing, it gets you
out of the house, which is a very important start. Connecting with
other people who share your values is essential to stay motivated and
inspired.
AND, connecting with people who aren't businesspeople in the same way
you are is a great way to think from a fresh perspective. I
love networking with other entrepreneurs, and since we tend to think
the same way, I need people who share my core values but who think
differently
just as much.
Also...
it's often easier to solve a problem if it isn't about you. If you are
helping a cause get a bigger mailing list, you will probably churn out
creative ideas. It's easier to be helpful for someone else. You can
then turn
around and apply these strategies in your own work. Also- those you
meet with will have great things to suggest, too.
And last but not least, it's so important to think about the world outside
of ourselves. When you work from home it is easy to stew in your own stuff and let that take over your whole head. Our businesses have the
potential for greatness, but we also need to remember that there are other people in the world, too. By
reaching out and making the world a
better place through a cause, we are more able to be grateful for what
we have and work from that place, instead of the all too familiar
stress and
panic.
Let us know what causes you and your business support in the comments below. Let's inspire each other!
Today I cover a topic that most people don't associate with business: fashion and personal style. We often forget that, as entrepreneurs, we are our brand. I have been taking a wonderful class on PR with Lisa Elia of The Clear Publicist, and she reminds us that every point of contact we make with the public is part of our PR as business owners.
So it seemed appropriate that I answer the following questions this week, as I teamed up with an expert yesterday, Catherine Cassidy of LifeStyled, who was just the right person to spruce up my look and help me answer this question:
"Dear Ask Remabulous,
I feel like a frump! Working from home, I often hop out of bed in the morning and head right to my computer. If I don't have meetings, I'm often still in my pajamas until late in the day. I know I am doing good work, but sometimes I wonder if I wouldn't feel a bit more legitimate if I dressed for work, even though it's just as my desk in my apartment.
Do you have this problem? What do people generally do to make sure they are putting out a professional image both when working at home, and when out meeting contacts in the world?
Thank you for any advice you can offer, Pajama addicted entrepreneur"
Thanks for your question, PJ addict! Let's dive right in, and remember, if any of you have questions you'd like answered on the site, you can e-mail them to: askremabulous@remabulous.com
Who's Got Your Back by Keith Ferrazzi was one of the books that didn't make the cut for travel to Spain, but that was only because I had to make a "No Hardbacks" rule in order to cut down on the number of books I was bringing.
I was knee deep in this baby before I left for a reason: it has great advice, especially for people who work alone.
We all know we need contact with others to spur new ideas. When sitting at home in pajamas at three in the afternoon in front of the computer and having forgotten to eat lunch for the third day in a row, most of us at-home entrepreneurs have an a-ha moment:
"It might be useful for me to have someone to talk to and keep me on track," we think. "Hmmm."
Ferrazzi steps in with his book to help you find the best possible people to connect with at these moments. Here's how and why, according to the book...
My time in Spain was a great reminder: that I love travel, that I love seeing new scenery and art, that I love a good siesta with a book, and that I love to look at a beautiful view.
I was reminded of a bio-feedback monitor I got to play with a few months ago on a weekend away with friends. We
each
got to watch the beeping light of our heartbeat as we learned to relax
and turn the red light indicating stress to blue and then green,
indicating
relaxation. I wonder how much of the ease of arriving at green had to do
with the view my friends and I had of the ocean through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall of
the
living room. I was reminded of this as I spent time looking at other beautiful views in Spain like at Montserrat monastery, pictured above.
Beauty
keeps us sane, but the wonderful thing about it is that it is so
subjective.
I am often delighted, when driving around LA, with the shapes of the power lines
and their towers. I can barely stop myself from pulling over and
sketching
them. They look like robots or statues. Normally, I blow right
past this sort of mundane element of a long highway drive, but as I am
on a
check-in call on Mondays where we talk about the art we are working on,
I try to look with different eyes these days.
This week's tip is simply this: what if you were to imagine that you had on a pair of
goggles that allowed you to see everything as beautiful?
Would that change your day? Your approach? Your life?
Give the world around you a chance to be beautiful today. It will show up for
you.
And big hair. For anyone who missed Vanessa Summer's awesome video about her bad hair day, check it out and see that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree between teacher and student. At least Vanessa was in the process of improving her hair in her video!
Anyway... the Gaudi architecture is still pretty exciting, so enjoy.
While traveling in Spain, I noticed something. All the movies I decided to watch on the flight (Bless Air France for giving you about 40 choices even in coach and letting you watch as many as you want on your own private screen) were kind of heavy relationship dramas or romantic comedies, while my brother was laughing with delight at Madagascar 2 next to me. Hmm.
I am thinking that perhaps it is time to incorporate humor into my entertainment queue.
We all need a good laugh. Remember school lunches when laughing was the main portion of the conversation? I think that during this economic trend, we have all been so focused on work and adapting to the new world we now live in that we have forgotten to laugh.
Laughter is the most wonderful stress relief. That isn't a new idea- much like being reminded to take a deep breath, we all know we should but rarely remember to do it.
So, as I haven't interviewed anyone for this week's podcast, I offer instead the Ricky Gervais show which my brother was kind enough to play for me while we were traveling. It's a bit naughty and ridiculous, but I still have learned things from it and it has made me think.
And it reminded me that humor is one of the best ways to make your business stand out from the pack. If you can find a way to bring a laugh into your message, you will be even more enticing to your audience than you can imagine.
A laugh is a gift to the world right now. Let's have more of them. Enjoy Ricky and try to branch out that way yourself...
And... if you know of other funny podcasts, please do share them in the comments. I would so love to have more to listen to and I am sure others would as well.
I am back from Spain and back to work! I had a lovely trip and am sure to be sprinkling things I discovered along the way through lots of posts.
The first example is from the painting above: a mannerist work that we found in the art museum in Seville, in southern Spain.
When first looking at it, I simply saw the strange hand positions that were popular during this art movement. People had gotten tired of plain old renaissance works, so strange hand positions had become the rage all over Europe. Who knew this was the antidote?
But what I realized when looking closer... if you stop thinking about this as a painting and remove that context, it really does look like these guys are facing off and throwing down gang signs:
Right?
Craziness. Read on to learn why you need to know what context you are in when you talk about your business, or your likely to start a rumble just like these guys in robes would do today...
