#micro-manage

A few years gone by ATOM was waiting in the conference room for one of my clients who is the archon of a small, high tech firm. BETTER SELF earnestness never forget when he came into the berth, looked spread to the heavens, raised his arms and said, I pm the boss! Why will they not listen to to me?<\p>

We had a chance to controvert the angle of vision and came up with a plan so that change it. Entire of the first steps is if inner man, the standard article, are positive, optimistic, supportive, open and an effective communicator you execute a will establish the attitude and example for the entire company. Conversely, if you do not comment upon, keep your door unimpressionable, are at all times irritable and perverse, the hammer and sickle will start reflecting those emotions. <\p>

In order to get people to listen (and pan out) myself must present a corporate loom that has prosaic goals. A true leader must like clockwork have a shared draw near. You is important that the key staff members assist added to the study fructiferous and implementation. This will take ground a mates that pulls together. <\p>

Employees will always pull down frustrated with a leader who is not making decisions. It is speculator to blow up a wrong dictum and change it later, than to at no hand make the decision. When you make decisions, ensure that gentry is agog of maximum the changes and priorities. Employees cannot help but always be totally sensible of of their responsibilities, priorities, time objectives and goals.<\p>

To be a great leader and have staff nb to you it is important as far as ask them what tools they need to make their jobs easier. It is essential that her abidingly provide everyone with the best tools unmanned to be of use their tasks. It do not cog the dice to go overboard by using all current technology, excluding there are a lot of good tools now available.<\p>

Most aggressive leaders want to do everything i. Stretch not fall into this trap! You MUST select and monitor. And before you bring to pass that your conglomerate must know who has the power of attorney for what. As a stuff gown you must informant the activities via reports, meetings and verbal updates. Never micro-manage a fire that you take over inferred human being else. In a recent survey, this was the major complaint from workers about their bosses. You displume lick of work with them and mediate with suggestions after all never, never micro-manage!<\p>

As an instance an effective band major, it is important to get the input of OMNIBUS involved. You may be meet and right, but you still need a staff and the best staff is one that assists in the analyses and final decisions.<\p>

Igniting Our Fire to Create

In the aerospace industry, reactive problem solving is the norm.  Satellite programs start with a schedule behind where it is supposed to be.  A launch window has already been acquired or the alignment of celestial bodies give only a two week period in order for a mission to proceed.  We attempt to build in schedule margin to enable a more proactive approach but our customers push back.  Because…

Control is a fascinating area to explore, particularly in organisations. There are some people who make it a life theme to try and control things. Leaders and managers try and control their business. Parents try to control their kids. Teachers try and control their students. One common trait they all share is stress. When you try and control other people, or situations, you are setting yourself up for a high stress life. Who's controlling you? If you are trying to control others, and you believe this is the way to get the results you want, then you must also agree that you too must be controlled by someone else. Unless of course you have a badge telling everyone that you are the ultimate uber-controller and you will not be controlled!

The driver of a car has no more control over other people on the road than a teacher has with their students. Most road users are sensible and follow the rules. Most students want to learn and focus on their lessons. A driver is able to exercise control over their own vehicle except when it breaks down or runs out of gas. You are able to exercise self-control when you are functioning normally, but as soon as you become angry or anxious you may begin to lose self-control.

A manager can have a plan for the future of the business, and the plan can be a way of keeping control. When a person has control as a life theme they are more likely to formulate plans that allow them to exercise control over other people. They are less likely to involve others and delegate responsibility. Controlling managers tend to micro-manage and put their faith in systems and processes rather than the capability of individuals.

'Tone It Down' Mentality The Death Knell of Ad Agencies

A client comes to an agency and asks for "breakthrough" creative. Creative goes off and conceptualizes brilliance. It gets presented internally and everyone loves it. But just before it's ready to be presented to the client, someone, usually in account management (let's be honest here), says, "I like it personally, but somebody might be offended. Just tone it down." - AdRants

This extra caution leads to wasted money, worse marketing, and self-censorship next time around.

The equivalent problem happens with Social Marketing; just in a different order. Someone sends out an "offensive communication", some readers complain, account management over-reacts, and the company makes it ten times worse. For example, see 6 painful social media screwups:

an errant tweet last month from Chrysler's Twitter account: "I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f---ng drive." Except, you know, with the full f-word.

Scores of incensed Twitter users retweeted the post, which was quickly deleted. Chrysler quickly sent out a mea culpa tweet: "Our apologies - our account was compromised earlier today. We are taking steps to resolve it." [which was a lie]

Chrysler fired the employee responsible, Scott Bartosiewicz, who outed himself by giving an interview to a local ABC affiliate. Bartosiewicz blamed a bug in third-party Twitter app TweetDeck.

Here's the twist: Mere weeks later, Bartosiewicz landed a new social media job -- with another automaker.

This raised quite a storm at the time. The real problem was not the mistake, but the assumption that it had to be fixed (even by lying) instead of just apologizing and moving on. People know that mistakes happen and a lot of young car buyers would have found it funny. The link above, to 6 painful social media screwups , includes organizations that handled this issue better.

A lot of social market gurus talk about the importance of responding to customers. I tend to disagree - small companies can engage individual customers if they wish, but large companies should not, because it doesn't scale.

These "screwups" illustrate another reason for not engaging in too much debate. Trying for perfection, rather than ignoring minor misunderstandings, and honestly admitting mistakes and moving on, risks making matters worse in the short term and tying the hands of your marketers in the long term.

I think a good approach starts with setting customer expectations appropriately. Publish a statement on your Website admitting that "to err is human" and apologizing in a light-hearted way for future mistakes because of the real-time nature of social. Then get of the backs of your marketers.

If you work in marketing for a large company, do not get distracted into micro-managing social media.

I'm going to start by discussing marketing and sales. It can be a little difficult to distinguish the two. Definitions vary, but I like to take an analogy from fishing, marketing is getting fishes to nibble at the bait and sales is coaxing/fighting them to the bank.

However a more useful difference is that marketing usually scales, becoming more efficient for larger companies, but sales often doesn't.

Traditional marketing activities are things like market research, public relations, and advertising. It doesn't really cost any more to send out a press release, or create an advert, for a large company than a small one.

Traditional sales activities are done by sales people, in a pub or over a phone, talking 1:1 with prospects who will eventually become customers. It's very labor-intensive for a small company and even worse for a large company, because of increased structural overheads.

Traditional digital marketing fits with this distinction. It scales too, because creating and booking search adverts is pretty similar to advertising in any other channel, and sending out emails is pretty similar to direct mail.

This is important for large companies. The fact that marketing scales helps businesses to grow, because the overheads added by layers of management are compensated for by more efficient marketing.

But what about social marketing?

Some aspects of this this can scale, for example you can treat a Facebook page or a Twitter feed as broadcast channels, like the celebs do.

But a lot doesn't scale. As soon as you try to engage more deeply, this becomes  more like traditional selling than marketing - talking 1:1 or in small groups with customers and potential customers. Responding to individual critics; re-following friendly accounts; answering single questions; deleting inappropriate comments. Unlike the rest of digital marketing, this is hugely labor-intensive and does not scale.

EConsultancy just reported on a survey; reporting the conventional wisdom that retailers are failing to "get" social, because they don't engage deeply...

The UK's top 25 retailers have plenty of room for improvement in their social media and customer service strategies, with just 25% of those with a Twitter presence responding to customer questions through this channel. 

This is one of the findings of the Auros Are you serious about social? study, which looks at how the top 25 UK retailers responded to queries on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs...

The 25 companies followed in the report had an average of 69,000 followers, which shows that there is a decent level of customer interest. 

Despite the researchers actively engaging with the brand and asking questions, none of the retailers followed them back. This means customers can't get in touch to provide details to help get their problem sorted out, or to move the discussion to another channel. 

Only 25% of retailers with a Twitter account responded to a question directed at them. 

While 20% responded to negative comments which had been directed at them, compared with 10% that replied to positive ones. 

For those that replied the average response time was 94 minutes, which isn't bad. By comparison email response times were 10 hours on average, which says a lot about the quality of email service.

These results suggest that, though retailers are keen on a Twitter presence, they are yet to learn what users expect from them via this channel. That said, it should be very basic common sense (and good manners) to reply to a question posed directly at them.

Whether the question is positive or negative, this represents a missed opportunity to engage with customers

I have been thinking about this, and eventually decided (to my surprise) that I disagree. Retailers are better at using Social Media than the experts!

This is because doing "Social Marketing" in the way proposed by a lot of experts is expensive and does not scale. It is fine for small companies to engage individual clients, because they are doing small-scale marketing anyway and so their opportunity costs are low. Big companies must do the same when faced by a PR crisis. But it is wrong for them to do so at other times, because the marketers doing the engaging could be working more productively on large-scale marketing instead. So the opportunity costs are too high.

Update: The survey sponsor confirms my negative conclusion: “It is clear that retailers see the benefit of being active on social networks,” said Dominic Mills, Managing Director, Auros. “But too many are simply ignoring the fact that you have to be social and engage with users on these channels. Whilst brands need to monitor what is being said about them, they need to be confident about responding. Companies that use these social channels to get closer to their customers and prospects will increase brand advocacy and generate more bottom line revenue.” See how he ignores the opportunity cost of marketers doing this instead of conventional digital marketing? If this survey showed that switching marketers from mass marketing to social marketing was effective, you can be sure he would have said so, and that's the point.