Does the government really need another ‘celebrity’ telling it how to spend our tax money?

Sir Philip Green has been announced as the latest ‘celebrity’ entrepreneur to join the government’s stable of advisers, but ministers are now calling for his own tax affairs to be investigated.

I recently posted a blog (Who will you trust) about factors which should influence your decision to hire a specific coach. Similar to the coaching profession, anyone can decide to call themselves a trainer or leadership expert. An external trainer will set you back anything from £300 to £2500 a day. You may ask, what’s the difference between a trainer which charges £300 and £2500; actually not a lot. It’s all about how much you value their worth and how good they are at identifying the value of their proposed solution to you.

So, how do you go about finding a identifying a reputable external training consultant to work with your business?

1. Price is not a guarantee of success or experience

I would like to go on a journey with you.  My goal: to make sense of the web in a way you may not have considered before. The web is more than a random collection of websites. It has a structure and a meaning to it that, if you understand it, you can use to the advantage of your business. I would like to expose that inner structure and show you how to structure your website, and indeed your entire business.

We are no longer in a position, whether we run small local businesses or businesses that aspire to sell products and services worldwide, to merely view the web as a marketing tool, or an ecommerce site or a distribution channel. We must start thinking of it as the primary organizing principle of our business. It is more important than the “real” world it mirrors. And in the coming year or two it will become obvious to everyone that a new order of business is emerging. These will be businesses, small or large, that are large in their impact on the web. 

My husband will tell you otherwise, but it’s not normal for me to have a big rant over something. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do for a living. I genuinely get a real kick out of helping an individual or organisation develop. My only problem with what I do, is that it is pretty much unregulated – what that means is that any Tom, Dick or Harry can set themselves up as a Coach or Training Consultancy.

Advocates of Twitter will say it’s essential for business. Other people will say it’s a time waster... So which is it? Read on for my guide, based on my two month’s experiences of being a tweeter, of how to achieve more with your tweets.

1. Get to know people and enjoy the conversation

Treat your time on twitter as if you were at a big networking event. This is your opportunity to get to know people, create goodwill with your followers and raise your profile. You will develop business by maintaining a presence on twitter – but like most things, this takes time, effort and patience. Don’t expect to be immediately clinching deals with your twitter followers. It still takes approximately seven conversations to move a cold prospect to a warm prospect – regardless of whether you are holding on-line or off-line conversations.

2. Create (shortened) links

Ecommerce is no longer hot news, and with nearly 10% of retail sales happening across the web, most of us are pretty familiar with the subject. It was only a few years ago that opening up online was a great way to make your fortune, as with the right idea you faced little competition in a growing market. Nowadays it’s more difficult.

When talking about developing customer service and relationships many believe that training and recruitment are key. However, over at Zappos.com, an internet retailer that was bought last year by Amazon for £1.2 billion, it starts before that. It starts with the company’s culture.

Founded in 1999 and focused, initially, on selling shoes they have grown incredibly fast over the last 10 years and in 2008 boasted $1 billion in sales. Phenomenal growth. But all of this, according to their CEO Tony Hseih, is built on their company culture and core values. Check out their core values and video from the CEO above.

Zappos Core Values and Culture

Zappos’ value are listed on their website as:

Recently, I needed to leave a networking group which I was a member of. I was adamant that I wasn’t going to cop out and tell the owner of the group my reason for leaving was, ‘too much client work’, and leave the real problems (which would help him to know) unsaid.
 
I’ll be honest, I avoided the conversation for a couple of weeks, and then I got THAT phone call. The one I couldn’t avoid, and the question I couldn’t avoid. ‘You said you had some feedback which would help me with my groups?’

I took a deep breath, prepared myself for the difficult conversation… no lightning bolt hit me, there was no animosity and we had a constructive and pleasant conversation. I was very surprised as I was likening this conversation to a visit to the dentist – you know you have to go, but it’s not going to be pleasant. (More on this conversation in a later blog post)

Those of you who have been tweeting today will be well aware of Twifficiency, a new service that has swept across the Twitterverse at a rate of knots. The simple service claims to calculate "your Twitter efficiency based upon your Twitter activity" and is the sort of thing social media geeks love finding out.

It started to appear on the social networking plarform this morning and very quickly Twitter streams were filled with users' Twifficiency rates:

Not only is a blog a great way of connecting personally with your target market, it is one of the best ways to optimise your search engine ranking. It appears that Google puts a greater weight on content in a blog than in a 'static' website.

The point of a blog is to help people see past the commercial literature and help connect with you as a person. Then, the next stage is to build up trust & credibility with your target audience - showing them you understand them, and know what you are talking about.

So how do you go about setting up and writing a blog?

Here are our tips:

Before you start writing, there are three things you have to think about first:

1) why you are going to start a blog

2) The technical aspects of a blog - where and how to host

3) what you are actually going to write in your blog

why you are going to start a blog

If your primary goal is to share your opinions and ideas with the general public, you would want to use a different blogging tool than a user who was creating product blogs as a commercial sales effort.