We have some important news coming very soon. If you or if someone you know is job hunting or working on their interview technique.

Then you MUST – we repeat MUST keep your eye on this blog in the next few days.

We will reveal further details tomorrow but – suffice to say that we are almost GIVING AWAY our job interview skills course.

But you will have to be quick – More details tomorrow.

PLEASE  – If you know of anyone who is job hunting at these difficult times, feel free to send them this link. If you have twitter or stumble – that would be appreciated too.

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Blog post originally from Sharp End Training

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A lot of business’s & marketers have switched onto using facebook for marketing & promotion. After all, alexa shows facebook to be the 3rd ranked website in the world after google and yahoo and according to it’s own stats, there are 65 million regular users. That’s a big market place.

But most marketers miss a vital trick. In these days of mass automation and bulk processing, it’s easy to forget that behind each profile is a real person – not just a prospect.

Treating people’s profiles on facebook like printouts from any other automation or bulk processing tool is a good way to send your online reputation going the wrong way.

Why?
If you were selling something in the street, you wouldn’t systematically go through them asking them one at a time “Do you want to buy this?” and if they hesitated or said no – you moved onto the next one.

No you wouldn’t
That’s not very efficient or a good use of your time or resources.
The facebook danger (and admit it – we have all done it…) is going along to someone’s profile or a group and posting something like

“Hello I am [your name] and this is what I sell [link]” and then left.

You have never visited that page again. What you have done is just polluted the internet. It’s like graffiti spraying someone’s facebook profile.

There is a better way
It’s called actually getting to know people. You remember – you did it on your first day at school…

You find out what they like and don’t like (you do find out what your customers don’t like… don’t you?)

You ask them how they are; take an interest in what they do. (You might not be interested in swimming with sharks but they might be…)
And after a while, something magical happens – they begin to like you and even better, they may even trust you – so when they have a problem or they actually get bit by a shark they are likely to ask people they trust for advice. THEN it might be sale time.

Of course this is a longer lead time but something else magical happens – they tell their entire shark swimming mates who then seek advice from you. Now isn’t that better than selling one at a time ?

Thought you would agree?
So, my advice is – if you are building your online business using your own name, brand or image – then you CANNOT afford to be seen as an internet polluter. Whatever you are selling.

You MUST be seen as someone people can trust.

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Following a conversation with a colleague recently, it is probably worth making blog readers aware that all our courses are available to resell.

What do I mean by resell?

Well, courses are produced in the Sharp End Training colours of dark blue. An example is below. This is the style of the course when you buy standard courses from us. It is also the layout of courses that our affiliates send traffic to.

Of course, software is very clever these days and if you are a training provider, we can easily re badge the training in your choice of colours for you to resell or use to support your existing training. The same course screen has been converted below.

Where we have inserted “anylogo” in the top left hand corner, it is possible to insert…any logo.

(Ignore the fact that only one screen is showing – this is just for demonstration)

(Subject to fair, legal and honest), you can then resell, give away etc access to this course as if it were your own.

To get started and to discuss your requirements, please contact us on 01909 772729

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Mark over on the ‘Integration Training’ blog posted an interesting post about ‘Technique Head’ recently.

Mark writes about trainers and consultants who learn the theories and explanations then spout them out, almost as written, regardless of their own understanding of it, or the understanding of the people they are training.

These “theorists” use the theory not as a means to an end but as an end in itself.
I know some consultants and trainers, for whom the talking about and theorising about, is more important than the actual doing.

They are the sort of people who will write endlessly about nutritional values, cooking in various parts of the world, health and safety considerations and then struggle to make beans on toast and get a cup of tea ready all at the same time.

There is the saying “Those that can, do and those that can’t, teach”
To an extent this could be true, bad teachers/trainers are those who know what to do, yet how to do it is lost on them and their students. Good teachers are those who have, done and know instinctively the best way to get their experiences and knowledge across.
It would be a sad world indeed if all teachers were former failures.

So why aren’t these ‘theory’ trainers and consultants just shown the door on the grounds that they are boring and in effect only tell us what we can find out for ourselves as easily as they did?

We live in an age of “perceived expertise” – where anyone can read a few books, set up a website and then call themselves pretty much whatever they want.

Most of the population (this goes for business as well as consumer) is generally so insecure that they will buy any “quick fix” going.

I agree with Mark’s overall thinking that training must work – at more than a superficial level – so the training does not have to be continually repeated, making staff more efficient, speeding  procedures etc. and overall, especially in these cost conscious times, saving money.

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In most business organisations, email has become the standard way of sending information backwards and forwards. If a manager needs to send something to the team, they just send an email. Sales figures, customer service reports, whatever.

So far so good – but using email as a management tool has a number of weaknesses that aren’t readily obvious.

Most people have no clue how to save a document from an email. (The default location in windows is something called a temp file. When you try to explain this to people, their eyes will just glaze over).

As a result of this, most will just leave the attachment attached to the document and clog up the PC’s hard drive, network server space or both. Plus they have to go rummaging through old emails to find something. (IT is supposed to make it easy to find things not rely on humans to remember..but that’s another blog post)

New starters are supposed to do what? A new install of standard email software like outlook isn’t very much use and newcomers will have to listen to a second or third hand account of why things are as they are in the workplace.

Again, wasteful and not using the technology.

So what is the answer?

Well, taking a leaf out of Google’s own playbook, why not give every member staff has a personal internal blog.

What goes on a personal blog?

As well as the standard personal stuff, users can post minutes or meetings & away days they may attend. How to’s are all stored in one place and personal & team targets can be posted.

Of course, all this is indexable & searchable by tags and you can even set it up so that when a new post is made, an email alert is posted out to everyone.

Now, doesn’t this seem like a much better way to make the technology work for you rather than the other way round?

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