Lately, my Cards have been down at half time and then just demoralize their opponent in the second half. I am curious as to what goes on in that locker room to make the light come on for the players. Does being down inspire a team or an individual to reach their maximum potential?

Jonah Berger, assistant professor of marketing and Devin Pope, an assistant professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed game outcomes based on the half time score. They researched N.C.A.A. teams across all divisions and found that teams down by 4 at halftime lose about 60 percent of games. Teams down by 8 lose about 80 percent of the time. They analyzed more than 6,000 N.C.A.A. basketball games played in the past four seasons. Surprisingly, the data show that trailing by a little can actually be a good thing.

According to Berger and Pope, on average the team with the lead should win more than half of those games. The data however shows the opposite. The team trailing by a point actually wins more often.  According to the research, being slightly behind increases a team’s chance of winning by 5 percent to 7 percent.

I suspect that a good reason for the second half turnarounds is the result of great coaches, motivational techniques and good team chemistry.

If you are like most people, you are probably feeling like a team that is down at half against a very tough opponent, the economy. Therefore, it is incumbent upon all of us to become that great coach. We need to be that motivational coach to others and ourselves everyday.

When it comes to sales, recruitment or maintaining existing clients, never underestimate the power of motivation. As coaches we need to motivate our teams to do that one little extra thing that will make us better than the competition.

Often time’s leaders think that money is the motivator for those that we mentor. In fact, the desire for more money tends to score much lower. Motivation is best delivered when we understand the human need to belong to a group. The three motivators that consistently rank at the top of employee list are:

• Advancement
• Type of work
• A company that they are proud to work for

So, if your team finds itself a little ahead at half, perhaps you should remind them what is going on in the other locker room – they are planning a big second half surge. I hope you enjoy the rest of the N.C.A.A. tournament. Go Cards!

This wasn’t my first poor customer service experience from Northwest or Delta or whatever it may evolve into next year. Cutbacks in services, staff reductions and just boneheaded management styles have left us awash in miserable to non -existent customer service.

I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the customer service team – hard workers who historically are one of the lowest paid. An article in the Boston Globe reminded me that some CEO’s get it.

Take Paul Levy for example. He is the guy who runs Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The moment had come when pink slips were inevitable. So he took time out and just watched some of the 8,000 people who work for Beth Israel.

As Kevin Cullen, a Globe Columnist noted, “He stood at the nurses’ stations, watching the transporters, the people who push the patients around in wheelchairs. He saw them talk to the patients, put them at ease, make them laugh. He saw that the people who push the wheelchairs were practicing medicine.

He noticed the same when he poked his head into the rooms and watched as the people who deliver the food and empty the trashcans chatted up the patients and their families.”

Paul Levy did something incredible. He did something right for his employees. He did something great for his hospital and the bottom line. Levy stood in front of an auditorium filled with anxious employees and said, “I want to run an idea by you that I think is important, and I’d like to get your reaction to it,” Levy began. “I’d like to do what we can to protect the lower-wage earners – the transporters, the housekeepers, the food service people. A lot of these people work really hard, and I don’t want to put an additional burden on them.

“Now, if we protect these workers, it means the rest of us will have to make a bigger sacrifice,” he continued. “It means that others will have to give up more of their salary or benefits.”

He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when the auditorium erupted in applause. Thunderous, heartfelt, sustained applause.

The consensus was that the workers don’t want anyone to get laid off and are willing to give up pay and benefits to make sure no one does. A nurse said her floor voted unanimously to forgo a 3 percent raise. A guy in finance who got laid off from his last job at a hospital in Rhode Island suggested working one less day a week. Another nurse said she was willing to give up some vacation and sick time. A respiratory therapist suggested eliminating bonuses.

Levy did the right thing to help people in hard times. He also did the right thing in delivering great customer service. It is very often the front line that makes the biggest impression on customers. They are the ones who hear the problems first hand. And when given the tools and training they can be the ones to prevent a problem from becoming a lost customer.

Cullen writes this about Paul Levy, “he is trying something revolutionary, radical, maybe even impossible: He is trying to convince the people who work for him that the E in CEO can sometimes stand for empathy.”

Brand differentiation is exactly what gives people permission to buy your services or goods with confidence. Aristotle said we are what we do. It’s no different for business.

Southwest Airlines is selling freedom and Walt Disney imagination.

According to Roy Spencer Jr., author of the recently published book It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For, the success of these businesses is rooted in their clearly articulated purpose.

Does your business have a unique purpose or service? Or as Spencer asks, “would your customers mind if you ceased to exist?” What ever that uniqueness is, it better be clearly articulated in your new business presentations.

In the short term what can we do to fill the sales funnel and create a personal point of differentiation? I offer this simple suggestion that helps you, your customers and gives something to those organizations that need you the most. Volunteer.

Volunteering with organizations puts you in touch with a new network of influencers. Volunteering is the original form of social media. It has been around long before LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or any other social networking activities.

What volunteering does for you and your business is it creates a unique point of differentiation. It positions you in a totally different light. It is marketing 101. People buy from people, people they know. How many employees are in your organization, 2? 200? 2000? Imagine the networking potential if you started a workplace volunteer program. An article in the Minneapolis Business Journal on how to get a volunteer program started in your business is a great first step. Then fold your newfound network of contacts into your CRM program.

Aristotle was right. We are what we do. If we actively work to make our community better, it makes us better. It enriches us, our employees, our brands and quite likely our bottom line.

I wrote shortly after Obama’s election that he had garnered a 66% share of the 18-29 demographic or about 16 million people. Brand loyalty is created as a result of cognitive elaboration (thinking about it) by an individual. Since 16 million young voters assigned a positive attribute to Obama and ultimately the Democratic Party, chances are good the large majority will live a life loyal to the democratic brand. It is a fundamental principle of positioning.

The challenge before us as communication practitioners is not only gaining market share but also retaining those that are loyal to our brand. Higher education needs to retain the students enrolled. Nonprofit must retain core individuals who are active with time or money. Business must retain clients and key employees.

Higher Education
A top down approach to staff and faculty mentoring of students creates a family environment and identifies potential problems before they arise. International or minority students are an extremely high at risk demographic. Faculty and upper classman who reach out to the new students, prior to arrival, are sure to create a bond. It is this sense of inclusiveness that will tie the student to the university well beyond their four years.

Non-Profit
Shifting money from salaries to other priorities sends managers into a never-ending downward spiral of dealing with frequent turnover. An alternative approach is paying more to gain stability, maturity, and the skill sets to sustain long-term initiatives. Retaining those grass roots organizers and donors will be enhanced as the time manager spent on training and retraining staff can now be devoted to personally strengthening key relationships.

Business
Engaging your new clients is very much like higher education. Your account executive should be communicating with the client between projects and not just during the projects. Personal client engagement by senior executives creates an environment of partnership instead of a vendor status.

Employee retention may not be an issue today, however there is a way to thwart key staff turnover when the economy heats up again. Authentic engagement, mentoring and training by senior management today will pay dividends in the future.

None of us can afford to lose a generation of students, customers or employees. How we manage our human relations with stakeholders will ensure that we don’t fall into a chasm of disconnect and disinterested.

Many companies overlook the importance of internal brand communication. How much more effective would an organization be if the employee and their families fully understood the brand promise, sales strategy and customer service standards?

Today’s employees are the product of an evolutionary change in the sophistication of media and production values. While the old company newsletter still stands as a stalwart of communication in many organizations, intranets and internal blogging are now valuable real-time tools.

Eli Lilly and Company uses digital signage in the form of TV screens (LillyTV) that feature company news in the places their employees linger. While waiting for coffee, the elevator or an ATM, employees turn to LillyTV for the latest headlines, pictures and videos of company news and local or international events.

Not only is LillyTV an instant way to distribute company news, it reaches employees who don’t sit in front of a computer. “In manufacturing, people don’t have their own computer, they don’t sit at a desk often, so they don’t see the company website, e-mails or newsletters,” says Chris Bias, senior internal communications associate at Lilly. “But [now] they can get the information too, because it’s in their break room.”

Eli Lilly is using a cellular TV system from MediaTile, which has been around since 2002. Its website claims to offer “Digital Signs in a Box” that are easy to install and connect to a cellular network.

Internal communication needs to reach beyond just the desk or the break room. Repetition of the message should be delivered at home and to the family. Expanding your brand message to the circle of influence, or as Seth Godin calls it the Tribe. When done successfully, the entire family communicates your brand attributes in their social circle, thus expanding your sphere of influence.

Ideas to create a family of brand ambassadors include:

• Communication sent to the employee’s home that engages the entire family
• Text messaging or posting on an employee’s Facebook page to acknowledge a job well done or an anniversary date
• Posting a YouTube message to the employee and their family, again acknowledging the role they played in the company’s success
• Encouraging employees to bring family members to the office so as to engage further with your brand
• Sponsorship of employee softball teams, charitable events or other social activities sends a clear message that your brand is human

Western civilization craves information. Communicating the company brand promise, new initiative or sales goal, keeps everyone engaged and involved. Keeping the employee’s family engaged creates a supportive home environment. How you communicate is as important as what you communicate. And like the four way stop sign, when understood, it keeps everyone moving forward.

This does not have to mean that “people write their own newspaper”, says Jeremy Zawodny, a prominent blogger and software engineer at Yahoo!, an Internet portal. “It could be as simple as rating the restaurants they went to or the movie they saw,” or as sophisticated as shooting a home video. (Delaney, Hastings, Rainie, & Orville, 2006).

In terms of higher education recruitment, blogging is the new media. It is participatory and it is a new tool that marketers will need to integrate into the marketing mix. With nearly 60% of teenagers creating content and participating in that media, it is easy for a university or a business to create relevant content and function as an active participant in the lives of potential students. The first step in recruitment is relationship building and relevance.

Delaney, Hastings, Rainie, & Orville, conducted an interview with Terry Semel of Yahoo!. He spoke in depth about portals and blogs serving as the new media and communication tool of choice for college age people. For his first few decades in the media industry-at CBS, then Walt Disney, then Warner Brothers, where he was chairman and co-chief executive-Terry Semel felt pretty clear about what media companies were. Then, in 2001, he left Hollywood and went to Silicon Valley as the new boss of Yahoo!, the world’s largest Internet portal. A self-avowed technophobe who barely knew how to use e-mail, Mr. Semel suddenly found himself in “meetings with a bunch of 23-year-olds”. He already had the ambition to turn Yahoo! into the archetypal “21st-century media company”, but suddenly he was no longer so clear about what that meant.

Mr. Semel has spent the past five years educating himself, including the counsel of trusted advisers such as his daughters, aged 24, 19 and 13. “The first does a lot on the internet, the second does everything on the internet, and the third “lives online” and has so many beeping devices that Semel, who has a New York accent and the kind of humor that goes with it, occasionally wonders “whether she is trafficking”. Between them, they have helped him to work a few things out.

The Internet “is a much larger change than the coming of television” in the 20th century, says Semel. In the past, “someone decided that the news goes on at 11 o’clock at night; people like my wife never even saw the news, because she never stayed up that late. We all grew up when somebody else was the programmer; now the user is the programmer.” That is change number one. To Semel, it means that Yahoo! must do more than provide technology. “We decided to open Yahoo! up, so that anybody using their personalized start page MyYahoo!  and can instantly go wherever they want to go,” even if that leads to the web pages of rivals. That credibility, he thinks, will keep users coming back for a “deeper engagement”. As people spend more time on Yahoo!’s pages-news, blogs, e-mail, chat groups, photo and music sites and so on-whether as their final destination or as stops on a journey, Yahoo! can put more and better advertising in front of them.

Change number two, says Semel, is that-unlike in television, say-”you don’t need hits”. Many small audiences are as good for advertisers as few large audiences, and indeed may be better. This has huge implications for content, turning it into one long continuum-from professional to amateur, from blockbuster to subculture niche.

Chris Anderson of Wired magazine calls this stretched statistical distribution “the long tail”. Anderson argues that old-media economics, which are biased toward the hits at the “head” of this distribution, are being replaced by new-media economics, which allow creation and consumption along the entirety of a much longer content tail.

Exchanges become necessary because people need help navigating around this huge continuum of content. In the present century, says Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future (2006), “you get large by allowing the many and small to gather on your lawn. This is the media equivalent of what eBay, a Silicon Valley neighbor to Google and Yahoo!, has done for the trading of secondhand goods among individuals. It is what Wikipedia has achieved as an encyclopedia. It is also very similar to what, say, the New York Stock Exchange does.”

A university or institution needs to become the great lawn to accommodate the giant Frisbee of ideas and conversations to be thrown about by current and potential students.

He shared with me a story about how his wife had tripped in dimly lit hallway of a local restaurant. Her fall resulted in broken bones and a period of unconsciousness. (Since her husband is a reader of Mind Share, I’ll take this moment to wish her a speedy recovery.)

The restaurant manager sprung into action, calling an ambulance and assisting in everyway he knew how. He gave the husband his business card and said the restaurant will take care of everything. If the story had ended here I would be writing to tell you how this restaurant manager epitomized customer service and ultimately the delivery of the brand promise.

Unfortunately, and perhaps unknowingly, the restaurant brand took a decided turn for the worse. After the trip to the emergency room, doctor visits and follow-up care, a representative of the restaurant’s corporate office/insurance company contacted the executive. The first words out of the representative’s mouth were, and I paraphrase here, “Sir you must have misunderstood the manager. He did not say that we would take care of everything.”

With one phone conversation the brand perception of this restaurant changed. This brand damaging event did not need to happen. Failure to provide brand education to everyone in your organization and your contract suppliers can wreak havoc on your reputation.

Training every employee in the proper way to treat a customer is essential. Training your vendors to deliver your brand promise is a completely different challenge. When we partner with a third party supplier it is critical that we have the brand promise discussion as a component of the overall deliverables. Here are few a thoughts that can help reduce the odds of getting that angry call from a loyal customer.

• Make sure project managers, supervisors and all front line people understand the brand promise.

• Empower your team to make decisions quickly and remedy mistakes before they escalate.

• Coach staff on how to be empathetic to a customer’s pain.

• Timely and regular communication, internally and externally, can actually turn a negative situation into a positive experience for your customer.

• Senior involvement tells your customer that they are important.

• Secret shopping your vendors is a great way to audit the delivery of your expected products and services.

We all spend a great deal of time, thought and resources to ensure that our brand is communicated. Sometimes we forget customer touch points extend far beyond the sales, marketing and project managers. The last thing we need is for one of our customers to trip over failed communication because we kept a department or vendor in the dark about our brand promise.

I suspect that there will be quite a few empty spaces for the promoters of industry tradeshows in 2009. Growing booth cost, rising registration fees, travel expense, show promotions – it all adds up.

In November 2008, convention attendance in Las Vegas was down 16.4 percent to 3,276,040 attendees, compared with 3,484,710 in the same period the previous year, according to the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority.

Apple decided to pull CEO Steve Jobs from Macworlds keynote speech — and announced that 2009 would be its last year at the show. Other industry giants, such as Adobe, Belkin, CreativeLabs and Seagate, had already pulled out.

It’s unclear what will happen to the conference following Apple’s departure. The show’s presenter, IDG World Expo, says the 2010 event is on. But, it also plans to hold a “town meeting” where it will solicit ideas for the future.

I recently had lunch to discuss the subject of tradeshows with Thomas Joyce, Vice President Customer and Industry Affairs for Hershey’s. Tradeshows are a big part of Hershey’s budget. Customer relations and lead generation aside, he suggested that marketing, packaging and R&D might be the biggest beneficiary of tradeshows. “The people in these departments don’t always get the opportunity to see the competition and customers close-up,” said Joyce.

According to Joyce, a trend that is gaining ground is the concept of the shared event sponsorship with non-competing manufacturers. Select customers, senior leadership and one-on-one conversations without all the competing distractions are the key benefits.

There are signs that Apple is entering a new era not unlike the concept that Hershey’s is exploring. It seems pretty clear that Apple chafed at the idea of having to introduce some of its best new products a few weeks after the close of the holiday selling season. Most consumer electronics companies like to make their big product introductions toward the end of the year, rather than the beginning, but the timing of Macworld forced Apple into a different schedule.

Apple now hosts several of its own events every year, such as the June Worldwide Developers Conference and the September music event.

Stephen Nold, President, Advon Technologies notes in his blog at Tradeshow Week, “Yet whether the era of the big trade is over is an interesting question. Social media has driven marketers to more carefully research and define relevant markets with great expectations shaped around targeted messages reaching interested communities. If large tradeshows burden the sales cycle with inefficient lead generation operations, then maybe there is a new shift in tradeshows.”

Call it a shift or an evolution; business needs to conduct a serious tradeshow audit. Tradeshows are essentially a place where a given community meets to exchange ideas, socialize and develop contacts. How are online communities any different? My alternative to traditional tradeshows include:

• Appoint a social/business networking leader within your company to be the architect of a community building strategy.  LinkedIn has 33 million members and Facebook has just surpassed 150 million active users.

• Get serious about your position as the thought leader in 2009. Hosting webinars for your industry is an effective way of reaching the community of buyers. You’ll never have to worry about qualifying the prospects, because only interested prospects will attend!

• Does your target market need on-going certification? Help prospects gain their continuing education credits by hosting regional conferences. You help them. You learn more about their business. You own a captive audience.

Changing familiar marketing tactics like tradeshows takes courage, perseverance and an understanding that marketing is an evolutionary process. That means fully utilizing technology to reach prospects that are already engaging in different types of communities.

I guess I’m learning, I must be warmer now
I’ll soon be turning, round the corner now
Outside the dawn is breaking
But inside in the dark I’m aching to be free

The Show Must Go On – Queen