Who is this Guy Chris Greaves? -2

Two months ago in Who is this Guy Chris Greaves? I issued some crude statistics on what a CEO would see if he received a mailing from me and decided to check me out by using the Google search engine.

I have re-issued the search with these results:

Quantities may vary if you repeat the search, depending on the date, and on the size of your monitor screen.

The results can be summarized as follows

Name Only	& Toronto	& Mississauga
4 out 7 or 57%	10 out of 10 or 100%	Top 6 out of 10 or 60%

The only change is in the Mississauga rankings (I live in Toronto, but right on the border of Mississauga), so this is an improvement, but not by much.

The good news is that “Arguments with the 407-ETR” has dropped off the radar; that sort of thing isn’t likely to impress a CEO at first glance.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been working diligently at tweeting my blogs, products and services, but I know I need to get more out there.

It’s a process, not an act!

Talk to Me !

A Stamp Date Stamp

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

I’m feeling quite pleased with myself.

In Staying Ahead of the Avalanche 4 and related posts I’ve described my efforts at touching contacts, mainly with postal mail.

Inevitably I run out of my customized postage stamps, (Running out of Picture Postage Stamps), or get enthusiastic and run of an abundance of letters, and then I’m faced with a small hill of addressed envelopes waiting to go out.

Of course I want to keep my mailings roughly in sequence, and one day last week found me sorting a wad of envelopes in name sequence, then cross-checking them, record-by-record, against my data base.

What a waste of my time!

This morning I hit on the idea of augmenting my envelope macro to drop the print-date right where it will be hidden by the postage stamp.

Once they arrive!

Talk to Me!

5 Pet Peeves

The San Francisco Chronicle in a post titled “LinkedIn’s top pet peeves at the office” lists them as follows:

1: People who don’t take ownership of their actions. This was picked by 78 percent of the respondents.

2: “Negative Nellys” who constantly complain.

3: People who don’t clean up after themselves when using the fridge, the microwave or other common areas.

4: Boring meetings that start late or go way too long.

5: People who “consistently seem to miss your email (you can only use the “it hit my Spam” excuse so many times).”

What about people like us who don’t trudge into an office at nine each morning?

1: I can take ownership of my actions and show responsibility by admitting fault and mistakes as soon as I see them. That let’s my clients know that I’m honest and won’t let surprise cost-overruns leap out at them. Fixing mistakes as soon as they happen is the fastest way to get rid of that dirty smell.

2: This is easy for me. “The answer is always YES!”, and each time I’ve answered “No”, I’ve regretted it. The journey should be fun with someone else who is prepared to give-it-a-whirl.

3: I don’t share a common kitchen area, but I can clean up areas of the project used by me. That includes printing a hard-copy of a document and proof-reading it in a different room a day later to catch even more typographical errors.

4: Each email or phone conversation has a goal. I ought to be aware of that goal before I pick up the phone, or start typing. Staying focused on the issue lets me deal with clients quickly and frees them up to get back to their own job.

5: Making sure I respond to all emails the same day is mandatory, even if the response is just an acknowledgement that I’ve received the email. “I’ll need a couple of days to put this together” let’s my client budget their time and schedules. Plus it gives me a chance to send two emails instead of one!

Talk to Me!

Getting the Word Out - 2

(Please see also Getting the Word Out )

More thoughts as they arise:

• Thought 1:

No matter what I’m publishing, it’s going public because *I* think it is of value to the world out there. I should, at the very least, Tweet everything I publish. It is up to my Twitter followers to decide whether what I create is of value or interest to them; it’s not for me to decide their likes and dislikes.

• Thought 2:

Some blog items, Clear Thinking is a good example, are immediate candidates to be appended to my “From The Blogs” section in the embryonic next-month’s issue of the eLetter. By appending them as I publish them, I reduce time spent looking for articles at the next publishing date. My function is reduced to that of deleting unwanted items.

• Thought 3:

Tweets automatically get posted to LinkedIn and from there, I think, my LinkedIn groups or connections get notified; I’m not sure how that works, but I do see that LinkedIn notices all my tweets.

• Thought 4:

Most blogs, and Clear Thinking is one of the set, don’t warrant an entry in an updated LinkedIn summary. That area is better suited for new products or service of a major nature.

• Thought 5:

Having begun the process of documenting the procedures for publishing, I find that I discard 50% of my bookmarked news items! They’ve been sitting there for so long that I can no longer recall why I thought that they were important. Dealing with them through my speedy process at the time they arise will mean a better harvest for me.

• Thought 6:

My Twitter audience is business-oriented, and while most of us will glance at twitter during the weekend, the majority seem to be desk-bound, like me. It makes sense to use a service such as Twuffer to schedule tweets on the weekend to appear the following Monday or Tuesday during business hours.

• Thought 7:

My preference is to compose my web items in Microsoft Word and compile them to web pages, then copy from the web pages to the blogs. This gives me a chance to examine, inspect the material, test links and so on before making the issue public. For example, a candidate for Macros In Minutes gets posted to http://www.chrisgreaves.com/MacrosInMinutes/index.htm before being posted to http://macrosinminutes.blogspot.com/ .

• Thought 8:

A working document has been made: Getting the Word Out - 3

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Getting the Word Out

(Please see also Getting the Word Out – 2 )

I’ve just published my monthly eLetter. Not a big deal; takes me about 45 minutes, because it’s largely a matter of collecting stuff that I’ve published or created over the past month.

And therein lies a problem: I write a lot and develop a lot and answer a lot of questions, but I tend to do them without any sort of framework.

So I’ve decided to formalize myself!

My goal is to “Get people to know about me, to recognize me”.

My objectives can be summarized here as “For each publishable event or trigger, emit it via Twitter, LinkedIn or my monthly eLetter”.

My Output Channels are Numerous

1. My small Emailing-list of fellow-entrepreneurs
2. My home page blog www.ChrisGreaves.com
3. My Clear Thinking blog
4. My Macros in Minutes blog
5. My Torontopreneur blog
6. My Squared Time blog
7. My vermicomposting blog
8. My Toronto Transit Omission blog
9. The itWorldCanada blog
10. My YouTube videos
11. My downloads page
12. Technical white papers in PDF format
13. My SUFE blog
14. My What’s Your Problem? blog
15. Articles mailed as flyers to my contacts list
16. The few high-level technical forums I frequent.

That’s a lot of channels, in various states of repair. There are more that have slipped my mind; clearly this is out of control.

My Sources (or Triggers) are Numerous

Web pages, especially newspaper articles and press releases.

Ideas that seem to arise spontaneously in my brain.

• My services.
• My products.
• Queries that arrive by phone or email

For Each Source or Trigger Event

There should be published something, somewhere, about me, what I did for someone.

I need a process sheet for each channel that provides me with mechanical steps I can take to publish my claim to fame, without distracting me from my other work. That is, a source or trigger, once resolved, should drop onto a conveyor belt and come out the other end as a published item.

Example 1:

I bookmarked a newspaper item “Einstein Challenged” about a recent experiment that suggested particles exceeded the speed of light; I have an opinion on this. I can write up a commentary on my ClearThinking blog, then Tweet it. I might append it to a weekly LinkedIn summary. I might issue it as an article to the eLetter or as a flyer to the C-crowd; it is a good example of my thinking process. It is certainly a candidate for a link within my eLetter.

Example 2:

I wrote another cute macro that highlights duplicated words within each sentence of a document; a style checker, you might say. I add the macro to my MiniU template. I make a video of it in operation and publish it to YouTube. I write a Macros In Minutes blog item. Then I tweet it, and possibly add it to me weekly LinkedIn summary.

Example 3:

Many of my web-page groups, List Numbering is an example, can be loaded directly to a PDF format. A link to that PDF file can be set on the web pages, and can also be listed in my Downloads page, with the benefit of allowing me multiple tweets or updates via LinkedIn.

Example 4:

I wrote a proof-of-concept tool “Follow” to do some heavy-lifting in Social Networking. It is not an application really; it is driven by an embedded string, without the database management back end, but it is a significant achievement. I have made a video on my videos page, uploaded the video to YouTube, blogged it in Torontopreneur (although it won’t appear for another week) and will Tweet it. But first I will add it to LinkedIn as an accomplishment. After Tweeting it I emitted a short email to 20 of my entrepreneurial peers.

A Learning Process

This will be a learning process over the next few months.

Today is the best time to start, because I have almost an entire month before my next eLetter issue is due out, and while retroactively fitting out my channels is going to be a beastly amount of work, I can start going forwards today with a better plan or structure to make the most of what I do.

Talk to Me !

Management Measures Supplies

It’s that time of year when people hand out “day-timers”, promotional material that comes with a message.

Here’s a typical example, provided for me from a neighbour, at my request.

Inside we have one face per month.

The booklet itself occupies very little space, but we can load the inside with every cyclic expense in the coming year, the better to budget and plan our expenses.

Example 1:

Note the date of replacement of each printer cartridge.

Example 2:

Note the quantity of postage stamps at each purchase

Example 3:

Note subscriptions to networking groups, ISPs, domain registration and the like.

Now you have no excuse for ignorance of upcoming expenses as they fall due.

And yes, the booklet lives on your desk, close to your keyboard and phone!

Talk to Me !

Management Measures Cartridges

Sure, you complain about the high cost of Laser-Printer Cartridges.

But justify, to me, the facts on which you base you complaint.

You’ll tell me that a cartridge costs $70 at the store (Quantities may vary!), and I’ll believe that you pay $70 per cartridge; no need to produce the receipt.

But then I’ll ask you how many sheets you get per cartridge, and you’ll stare blankly for three seconds, then invent a number; you’re lying, aren’t you!

So then I’ll ask you how often you replace your cartridges, and again, I’ll receive the blank look and the wild guess. And we know that a wild guess isn’t a confirmed fact, so it’s a lie, isn’t it?

Here’s what you do:

Whenever you replace a cartridge, stick a little adhesive label on it with the place and cost of purchase, and the date you popped the cartridge in the printer.

The next time I replace a yellow cartridge, I’ll know exactly how many days it has lasted.

Exercise

Assuming I don’t have a paper-counter on my printer, how would I measure how many sheets of paper I get per Yellow cartridge? Per Magenta cartridge?

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Sad Saga

The Prospector often enough paints a rosy picture of life in the heady world of High Finance on Bay Street.

And then it paints a sad story, from time to time.

I have Prospector set up to tell me when any of my contact corporations is in the news.

So last month I read of some fraud in some company:

I don’t know the facts, just what is printed in the press release.

Fourteen Million dollars is not chump change, not even on Bay Street.

My guess too is that the company is ethically bound to announce this problem rather than hide it under the rug.

Then this month I read:

I had not yet met the CFO; given a few more months I might have taken him to lunch.

Was he the one who perpetrated the fraud?

I don’t know.

Is he the one who has to resign and take the blame?

I don’t know.

All I know is that, with a weary sigh, I remove his record from my contact list.

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The Next Day

Property manager bilked $20M in condo fraud, victims claim

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Anatomy of a Proposal

This is an appropriate time to write this up on two counts:

(a) I am re-reading “ Documentation and the Nursing Process ” by Lois White; I taught from this slim book about ten years ago and love it for its stress on Goals, Objectives, Deliverables, Measurement and Documentation.

(b) I have entered preliminary discussions with a chap who wants me to develop a system, but I am leery of projects proposed by individuals. All too often they want a full-fledged system for peanuts, and I can’t do that.

So here goes:

1: I want some cash NOW!

2: I don’t want to get jerked around

3: I want to offer only what I can guarantee as a short-term deliverable.

4: I want to proceed in small measured steps

5: I want to minimize the amount of work I do up front by me

6: I want to minimize the up front dollar investment by him

7: I want to minimize the risk for both of us.

My terms will be cash in advance; I don’t know this fellow, and I don’t know how adaptable he is.

Next: My Plan

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The U.S. Economy

I hadn’t realized how bad the economy was until I stepped into Arnot Mall, Horseheads New York last Friday morning.

Here we are, just before eleven o’clock and the mall is close to deserted.

And it is just as deserted in the other direction.

Many stores are empty, not closed.

A closed store has the lights off but the displays are evident. Closed stores have a black-cloth screen placed behind the window.

We don’t get to see an empty shell.

In the photo above, the five large window bays are given over to a display of trophies, but it’s not a trophy store; it’s just a display to fill in a long and empty storefront.

I estimated about 25% of the stores were vacant.

We moved into The BonTon (but JC Penney and Macy’s was little different.

It is eleven o’clock, one week before school restarts.

Where are all the mothers and teenage kids being dragged in for new clothes for school?

There’s no-one in sight, not a shopper, not a clerk.

One hour later, in conversation with a clerk in Macy’s, I learned that a new mall had been built and that "Many stores moved into the new mall”.

That might explain the closure of store fronts in this mall.

But it doesn’t explain the absence of foot-traffic both in and out of the large department stores.

Talk to Me !