Three Great New Websites

Recently, one of my colleagues came across 3 great new websites. New to us at least. They are:

 

* Opensiteexplorer.org This provides pretty much everything you want to know about your website and your competitors in terms of google ranking, authority and linking. It's easy to use and it's the sort of thing you just want to keep playing with when you should be at the tea table and your food's going cold.

 

* Beatthebrochure.com - it claims to give you the lowest holiday prices guaranteed - and my first experiments with it returned impressive results.

 

* Mysupermarket.co.uk compares the prices for you of thousands of items across six of the main supermarkets. I guess it's best if you have a one off big purchase to make and want to know who is doing it cheapest. The test I did on a litre of Smirnoff vodka told me that I'd save a fuller £10 by going to Tesco over Sainsburys.

 

How did we ever manage to survive before the Internet?

At the moment, we are currently busy with our upcoming event. It is the Annual Review of Employment Law 2012 (La Mon).

Invest NI Seminar

One of my colleagues attended an Invest NI seminar on 26th of June 2012 and picked up the following key points.



In relation to organizations:

1. When you don't know what you don't know an opportunity is lost. Therefore, benchmarking in organizations is critical.

2. Those organizations that export generally are better managed.

3. The higher the level of perceived competetion in an organization, the greater efficiency in that company.

4. Great organizations give people early experience of leadership.

5. Great organizations build leadership in as many places as possible.

At the moment we’re all working hard on our big event coming up soon. This is the Essentials of Employment Law

David Meade's Insights

A colleague of mine attended a course two weeks ago hosted by David Meade. She got 5 helpful important points from the conference:

1.       Power of positive thinking – being told you are terrible at something will make you worse at the task, being told you are good (even when you are not) will make you perform better as you believe you are good at the task (research carried out by team of ballet dancers who were asked to play basketball. They were then randomly selected and told some were good and some were terrible at playing – even if they were really good. The ones who were told they were great outperformed the ones who had been told they were terrible).
2.       Awareness – when given a task be aware of the other things going on around you. It is amazing how you can miss the most obvious thing because you are so busy focussing on the task in hand. 
3.       Know when to take a risk – David Meade relayed the story of how he took the chance and left his University job to start a career doing Mentalist TV work. On his first appearance on the Stephen Nolan radio show, he was expected to be “car crash radio”. His determination and desire to succeed proved otherwise.


As always we're busy devising more employment law seminars

Employee Management

Our CEO has been researching staff engagement recently and has come up with the following conclusions:

1. One of the most effective strategy to impact engagement across an organization: Start at the top

• It will be an uphill battle for everyone if your most senior teams are not true believers of the power engagement.

2. Define and refine your culture to engage: Keep your “culture to engage” in the front of employees’ and managers’ minds.

•  Make “culture,” “engagement,” and similar subjects frequent items for discussion.

3. Spot an Engaged Employee, engaged employees are:Authentic

• Employees who are themselves are more effective in the workplace.

4. One of the most important rules of Employee Engagement: Rules are meant to be broken.

•  Sometimes, you may find that it is necessary to break a rule to easily proved extraordinary service or just to make things work as they should.

5. Engage remote teams: Use web cams

•  An inexpensive web cam can be tied to your Instant Messenger. It is a great way to humanize people who are just names on a "cc" list.

We're currently re-working how we market our employment law email service

Change Management Issues

At the moment the company is researching change management issues and have discovered a lot of mistakes that caused failure. We noted five common mistakes:

Mistake #1: Not enough leadership - several leaders focus too much on management and too little on leadership.

Mistake #2: Lack of communication - change management communications need to be targeted to each segment of the workforce. It should be delivered in a two-way fashion that allows people to make sense of the change subjectively.

Mistake #3: Ignoring current corporate culture - when people in an organization realize and recognize that their current organizational culture needs to transform to support the organization’s success and progress, Mistake 3change can occur.

Mistake #4: Not envolving the employees - leaders must actively involve the people most affected by the change in its implementation. This will help ensure employees at all levels of the organization embrace the proposed changes.

Mistake #5: Lack of skills and resources - change does not happen through goals and exhortation alone. Like any business operation, It also calls for the right skills and resources, Organizations often simply fail to commit the necessary time, people, and resources to making change work. Paradoxically, successful behavior change often demands the very skills the change Is trying to create.


We're currently busy marketing our training centre for Northern Ireland

Young Leaders Conference

The same colleague of mine attended another course last week. It was about young leaders and gleaned 5 key learning points:

The Young Leaders Conference was also one of the coursed I attended to two weeks ago. It was all worth it and I learned the following important points:

1.       Make a decision and stick to it – even if you know it will mean people may dislike you for it. If it needs to be done, stick to the decision and carry it through.

2.       Taking risks – a good leader should not be afraid to take risks – whether they be good or bad.

3.       Vision was again reiterated at this course, the importance of sharing the vision.

4.       Power of psychology/ persuasion. Think about how you put a suggestion forward. Say for example you have 5 ideas and there is one in particular you would like the person to choose. Place it at number 3 in the list. Research shows that the choice at number 3 is most likely to be chosen as by then the person feels they know what you are talking about and are drawn to number 3. If you have 4 ideas, still put it at number 3 and if you have 3 ideas, make up a first or fourth and place it again at number 3. (David Meade)

5.       Don’t hide away from the bad stuff – don’t bury your head in the sand and pretend it will go away when there are problems, deal with them head on even if you know the outcome could mean change.

We're currently busy marketing our Inhouse Training for Northern Ireland

Common Purpose - Passion and Resonance

Passion and Resonance was the second topic discussion in the course, "Common Purpose" which one of my colleagues attended to last week. She got some helpful learning points from the discussion:

• "Without passion, you don't have energy; without energy, you have nothing. Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" ~ Donald Trump

          Communicating a business’ passion:

-          How is it we want staff to communicate?

-          Think about the content, be creative.

-          Engage in conversation with our customers through our website/ Twitter/ Facebook

-          Be strong, honest, true and accurate

• "Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it’s something you’re tremendously passionate about" ~ Steve Pavlina

• "Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" ~Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

We're currently busy marketing our interview rooms for Northern Ireland

Common Purpose - Broadening Your Vision

One of my colleagues underwent a lot of courses last week and one of them was entitled "Common Purpose – Broadening Your Vision". She learned 5 important points from this course:

1.       Baroness May Blood also demonstrated how humour and humility can take you far in life.

2.       Heard from Baroness May Blood, truly inspirational woman who clearly had a vision for what she wanted to achieve and showed the energy and determination to match it.

3.       Heard from Peter Dixon from Phoenix Gas, provided a very interesting insight into how a business needs a vision in order to achieve results. Results cannot be expected without the vision behind them.

4.       The day itself raised questions on our own visions – do we have a personal vision? and do we know what the true vision of the organisation we work for is?

5.       Paul Rooney from PWC gave an interested session on Leadership and who he looked to for leadership and vision both in his career and personal life.

As always we're busy devising more Irish employment law seminars

Good to Great

One of my colleagues told me about a great book he read, it's called, "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. He took five key learning points from it:

1.     Stick to what you’re good at – The Hedgehog Concept. Good-to-great companies are those that consistently stick to doing what they do best and avoid getting distracted into new fields of business that are away from their core competencies.

2.     Good is the enemy of great. This is one of the reasons why so little becomes great, but ultimately good companies can become great companies if they push themselves and don’t settle for great.

3.     Pursue the big 3 traits. Good-to-great companies move ahead of their competitors by pursuing only those projects that have three traits;

        a.     What they can be ‘best in the world’ at

        b.    What drives profitability for their business model

        c.     What their people are deeply passionate about

4.     Do not get side-tracked on non-core ideas. Instead, good-to-great companies set their goals and strategies based on understanding what lies within their Hedgehog Concept and ignoring everything that does not.

5.     Creating a good-to-great company takes time and is an iterative process rather than a blinding flash of inspiration. To guide this process, many use a ‘Business Council’ approach to gain the depth of understanding required to come up with a unique differentiating Hedgehog Concept.

We're currently busy marketing our seminar rooms for Northern Ireland

Diversity Management Workshop

A colleague of mine attended a Diversity Management workshop delivered by Tanya Kennedy two weeks ago at Legal-Island's training centre and took from it the following five key learning points :

• Jane Elliot’s “A Class divided” is a superb video that shows just how easily people can fall into prejudice and the ugly consequences. See here
• Zappos has some great core values worth examining including :

1. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Deliver WOW Through Service
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

• Pret a Manager have simple core values  : passionate about food; passionate about people; passionate about success
• No-one is born prejudiced. It’s a learnt process. We can unlearn it.
• Are we all age obsessed? I think we are…

As always we're busy devising more Irish employment law seminars

Social Media Marketing

Legal-Island has been studying social media marketing closely this week and have gleaned 5 important key points to remember:

1.  It's Social - Marketing as a conversation is a two-way dialogue. New 'mindsets' are required to be successful in social media  
2. It's a Revolution - A fundamental and revolutionary change in online behaviour, expectations and in the online customer experience 
3. Power Shift - Social media empowers the customers and the network
4. Declining Effectiveness - the traditional approaches to sales and marketing are not as effective as before
5. The End of Business as Usual -  We need new 'mindsets', new business approaches and new performance measures. It's not all about being a broadcast medium. It's about listening to and engaging with customers, partners and community.


We're currently re-working how we marketing our employment law email service

IoD Annual Convention 2012

Three weeks ago, one of my colleagues attended the IoD Annual Convention here in London. It was really helpful and she was able to gather a number of key points: 

1.        How to make the most out of your LinkedIn Profile (from Ariel Eckstein presentation, MD of EMEA, LinkedIn. Complete your profile – importantly add a photo – it makes it more personal to those connecting with you. Only connect to those who you will actually do business with. Treat your Linkedin connections like your phone book. Would you phone the people on your LinkedIn connection?

2.       Passion drives success. It’s not all about the talent you have for something, it’s the passion and the drive you have which will ultimately lead to your success (BackleyBlack – Steve Backley and Roger Black)

3.       “Success is a decision not a gift” (BackleyBlack)

4.      From Kevin Roberts, it’s not all about Return On Investment but Return On Involvement. Get the staff fully involved and the return will be much much greater.

5.       From speaker Kevin Roberts, CEO Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide: “inspire rather than inform”, specifically on the company website. Customers want to be inspired by what they see, not bored by informative text. Think about what your webpage looks like and revise to inspire customers.

As always we're busy devising more employment law seminars.

Active Listening

I listened to an audio cd this morning by Peter Thompson called ‘The best kept secrets of the world’s great communicators’ – the following is a summary of one chapter on ‘Active Listening.’ These are the points that I noted from the session:

Listen actively when there is high emotion or the possibility of misunderstanding, when the person is important to you, or when you need the information they have. The better you listen and respond to others, the better they will listen and respond to you. The more attention you pay when someone else is talking, the more attention they will pay when you are talking. The following are ways to listen actively:

1.       Maintain eye contact. It shows others that you are paying attention.
2.       Think of listening based on the ratio of having two ears and one mouth. Use them in that ratio. Listen twice as much as you speak.
3.       Make notes. This will reinforce your memory. It is advisable to ask permission first in some situations. That permission is seldom refused. If you wish to take a tape recording, it is vital to ask permission.
4.       Allow people to finish their own sentences no matter how enthusiastically you want to jump into the conversation. Doing so will indicate respect for what the person is saying.
5.       Get all the information that is available within a conversation so you will not jump to any false conclusions. Wait for the end of the sentence or end of the conversation to be sure this conversation is unique from any other that may sound similar to you.
6.       Respond so the other person knows you are listening. Your response may be “Yes” or “I see” or merely nodding your head. Any of these will do.
7.       Be accepting rather than judgmental so you can truly hear the message being given. Different accents, catch phrases, speeds of speech, and cultural generalizations can get in the way of hearing the actual message.
8.       Ask questions when you do not understand something that was said. This goes a long way to building strong communication.
9.       Ask core questions. That is typically a series of “why” questions that go deeper into a particular subject to gain the greatest understanding of a situation. Start with broad information and continue seeking more specific responses.
10.   Pause before replying. Pausing will add power to what you say. It indicates you are giving a considered response, that you thought about it, that it is not just some answer you offer every time this question comes up.
11.   Use the Rapid Repeat Method to improve your listening skills and concentration abilities. Do this by simply repeating, silently in your mind, what is being said a fraction of a second later. This holds your concentration and improves your recall of what was said.


It's hard going sometimes in the employment law field. We still feel we're organising the best employment law seminars around.

Art of Pricing

Legal-Island has been trying to research about how to find the hidden profits to grow a business. We came across a book called, "The Art Of Pricing" by Rafi Mohammed.

Here are some of the ideas we've obtained:

• Find ways to add perceived value in ways your competitors cannot match. 3 most commonly used ways to add value are:

1. Offer enhanced service
2. Provide peace of mind
3. Arrange financing

• Value, in the mind of your customer, is always determined by 5 different factors:

1. Income
2. Competitors
3. Substitutes
4. Demand
5. Environment

• Only 2 of the 5 factors are directly controlled by your company. The other 3 factors are determined by market forces you can’t directly control. Your product’s value will ebb and flow as these external factors change. Note also that these 5 factors are determined subjectively by each individual customer. Different people will always have differing personal judgments about the value of things. This is why the comparative value of the same product will differ markedly from one person to the next. If you set a single price point for your product or service, there will always be untapped profits you are failing to harvest.

• Pricing Strategy

1. Market conditions
2. Versioning
3. Segment-based
4. Differential Pricing

At the moment we’re all working hard on our big event coming up soon. This is the Employment Law 2012 Conference.