Embed respect for the customer’s time into your processes and practices.

For example:

• In a sit-down restaurant, minor errors in an order are mildly annoying, but can usually be dealt with fairly quickly.  When it’s drive-through or take-out, and the customer won’t discover the problem until they get home, it’s critical to double-check the order before handing it to them.
• In a restaurant, some items are time-sensitive. If someone asks for extra cream, they’re not drinking their coffee until they get it. If they want honey for their pancakes instead of syrup, they’re not going to eat them until they get it. Make it a practice to take care of any extras before the food for which it’s needed is served.
• Here’s an example of someone doing it right:  Men’s Wearhouse has tailors on-site at all of their stores.  If all you need is a pants hem (which is always needed on dress slacks), they take care of it while you wait, and you only pay for any given alteration once. That saved me one time when I had to wear my MW tux and had gotten a little bit big for them. The tailor opened up a few minutes before the store opened, let out the waist a couple of inches while I waited, and didn’t charge me for it.
• Another example:  Discount Tire will check and rotate your tires (purchased from them, of course) for free, while you wait, pretty much no matter how busy they are. For even more time savings, you can make an appointment online.

Do you know of another company that’s doing this well? Share in the comments below.

Now some of this stuff is just normal wear and tear, or a fluke, but the leak really got me thinking…

Consider the fact that one sloppy soldering job connecting two pieces of pipe 12 years ago is now causing thousands of dollars worth of damage.  One case of someone not checking carefully enough on something that was going to be permantently buried under concrete.

What are the equivalents of that in your life and work?

Sure, a single typo probably isn’t going to cause thousands of dollars of damage, and even this isn’t the life-and-death matter of, say, working on the space shuttle or packing a parachute. But what is the worst-case scenario that could play out if you cut corners and do less than your very best work?  Even if the risk is very low, sometimes the consequences are so high that you simply have to take the time to do the job right.

So while I’m generally all for keeping a positive outlook and expecting the best, sometimes you really have to ask, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Have you had an experience in your business or personal life where one small mistake had huge consequences? Please share it in the comments.

“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.”

Benjamin Franklin

Whether you’re Joe Blow, freelancer, or owner of The Joe Blow Company, or simply Joe Blow, CEO of Something Else, LLC, your ability to do business is inextricably bound to your personal name. Even if you have focused on building the business brand over your own personal brand, web-savvy (and who isn’t these days?) potential customers, business partners and employees are going to do their homework, which includes finding out what they can about you personally.  And in today’s world, Benjamin Franklin’s words are perhaps even truer than when he wrote them two centuries ago.

Consider this:  every individual who has a social media account now has an online presence. That’s about 75% of Americans and only slightly lower worldwide. So unless your name is something like Zbgniew Dbrvsky, you’re competing with everyone in the world who shares your name.

On the flip side, unless you’re moderately famous (and no, slightly isn’t enough) or have been proactively building and protecting your name online, all it takes is one Ripoff Report or bad Yelp review that calls you out by name, and your name is virtual mud. If they’re really pissed, they can throw a Fiverr SEO gig at it, and it will take you months, or even years to slog your way out of it.

With that in mind, here are the top 10 action steps you can take to protect your personal name online. Some of the first ones may seem obvious, but they’re here for completeness. Keep reading and you may be surprised.

1. Google yourself. Sure, you’ve probably done it before anyway. This time, make a note of the results — namely, what are the top 20 positive or neutral results out there that are about you. You can note the negative ones, too, but we’re mainly interested at this point in finding out what you have to work with.

2. Update your bio. You want the information that’s out there about you to be current and consistent. If you’ve been online for a while, odds are that there are many different versions of your bio floating around out there. Create a short (under 160 characters), medium (one long paragraph) and long (3+ paragraphs) version.  You may also want to have a version in first-person and another in third-person.

3. Join BrandYourself.com. This is an absolutely essential tool for personal branding, and yes, there’s a free version. It will a) provide an additional URL that’s likely to rank high for your name, b) help you promote your other positive URLs with a high-quality, relevant link, and c) track your progress. While there are other steps that may have more impact, the tracking capability is why you want to do this one sooner rather than later. The free version will let you track and promote three links. If you’re serious about this, it’s well worth the $100/yr. premium plan. Submit your highest-ranking links from step 1.

3. Audit and update your current social media profiles. Make a list of all your existing accounts in a spreadsheet.  Make sure everything is up-to-date and that any links are going where you want them to go.  Also, if any of your accounts don’t have your personal name as part of your username, you may want to consider changing that. It’s not a huge factor, but the Twitter profile for @JoeBlowCEO is going to rank better for “Joe Blow” than @ThatCEODude.

4. Claim additional social media accounts. It really doesn’t matter if you’re never going to use them — go ahead and claim your name (or your variation on it) on as many social platforms as you possibly can. Use your updated bio and set up whatever links you can to your main sites and social channels. KnowEm will do it for you, for a fee. If you want to do it on your own, use NameChk to check availability. If you want to be completely thorough, you can use Wikipedia’s lists of social networking sites, Q&A sites (Quora is a biggie), and social bookmarking sites. Best recommendation: hire a freelancer on Odesk for $2/hr. or less to do it for you.

5. Set up social media aggregation & promotion tools. Now that you have all your social media channels up-to-date, let’s promote them. Must-have tools include Empire Avenue, RebelMouse, XeeMe, About.me and Flavors.me. The key to these is that they are fairly automated — every time you put out a piece of content, it gets linked everywhere. Set it and forget it.

6. Set up Google authorship. If you want Google to know what content is actually created by you, you can now simply tell it on your Google+ profile. This has been around for a couple of years, and heavily utilized by those “in the know”. Now, Google has finally made it much easier for everyone to set this up with their step-by-step guide. Link to all of your new and newly updated social profiles.

7. Become quotable. Have you ever come up with a particularly pithy or memorable way of expressing a thought? If not, it’s time to start, and if so, it’s time to share it. Whenever you think of a nice, concise way of expressing something, put it out on your blog, social media, and quotation sites. While many of them require quotes to be “well sourced”, there are some popular ones that accept user submissions, such as SearchQuotes and QuotesDaddy. If you’re a published author, you can also submit your quotes on GoodReads and if your quote appears in an article just about anywhere, you can try submitting it at ThinkExist.

8. Be a content machine. You have now created the infrastructure to maximize your online exposure. Now you need to give it fuel. There’s no hard and fast rule about how often you should post, or what mix you should have of original content vs. curated content vs. simply sharing content from others. But whatever works for you, do it consistently across multiple platforms.

9. Publish content “off-site”.  Supposedly, guest blogging for SEO purposes is dead. While that may be true for SEOs trying to do it on a large scale for the sake of backlinks, it’s certainly not true when it comes to building your personal reputation. You don’t have to do a lot of it, but having your articles published on high-traffic sites will do wonders for your online reputation. It may rank for your name on its own, but it can also gives quality backlinks to some of your top sites. It’s also a great credibility builder in your bio.

10. Give interviews. Because of the concern about guest blogging and SEO, many blogs are steering away from guest posts. But they love interviews! It doesn’t matter whether it’s audio, video, or just written. And — even better than with guest blogging — your name is going to be in the title of the post, not just the tagline, and the search engines love that.

11. Fund a movie. For anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, you can become a film producer. “So what,” you ask. IMDB. You’ll automatically get a profile page on IMDB, and that data gets syndicated to hundreds of other sites. Look for films that match your interest and budget on Kickstarter, Indiegogo and other crowdfunding sites. Be sure that it specifies that you’ll get IMDB credit, else the only benefit will be feeling good about supporting an up-and-coming filmmaker.

12. Make a plan to keep all of this information up-to-date. Start by going back and updating your BrandYourself and Google+ profiles with all these new profiles you’ve created.  Plan on checking everything at least a couple of times a year to make sure nothing’s broken. Make sure you have all of the information in one place so that if you have a major update to your bio or links, you know where to go and what to do.

Finally, keep in mind that all of these things are just outward signs — your reputation starts with your character.  Treat people right, speak well of others, create value wherever you go, and you won’t have to work nearly as hard at building and protecting your reputation.

Scott Allen is one of the true pioneers of social media, helping individuals and businesses turn virtual relationships into real business since 2002. He’s coauthor of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online and The Emergence of The Relationship Economy, and a contributor to over a dozen books on entrepreneurship, marketing, social media and other business topics. He is currently Director of Client Solutions for Momentum Factor, a digital marketing agency exclusively serving the direct selling industry. For fun, he enjoys spending time with family, making music, coaching entrepreneurs, pug snuggling, and bending Google to his will.

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Company: MomoFactor.com

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I’ve been seeing a lot of talk recently about sentiment analysis as a tool for tracking online reputation. I’ve been a bit skeptical, but there is a certain appeal to the idea of being able to distinguish between positive and negative messages so they can be handled appropriately, as well as getting an overall idea of the brand’s reputation. So I’ve been doing some testing, and I’ve found that my skepticism was well-founded. Simply put, these tools just aren’t very accurate at determining negative sentiment, for a variety of reasons. Mainly, though, it’s that they’re still basically looking at the words used, and not fully understanding the context. For some examples, I used Sentiment140.com to do a Twitter sentiment analysis on Herbalife. Herbalife is not a client – I chose them because they’ve been in the news a lot lately. The report analyzed 88 tweets, and found 60 positive, 15 negative and 13 neutral, for a total rating of 80% positive vs. 20% negative.

But the reality is quite different. Going through it, I found:

• 12 positives misclassified as neutral
• 11 positives misclassified as negative
• 1 negative misclassified as neutral
• 1 neutral misclassified as negative

So the real results are actually 94% positive vs. the reported 80% positive. Let’s look at some examples:

I really wanna start herbalife ..

— Heidy (@heidymoreno_) July 8, 2013

Reported as neutral, but clearly positive — the tool just doesn’t recognize that in this context, “start” is a positive term.

Thnks to Herbalife Shake and AloeVera drink to relive my mind&body stress and also my gastric and vommiting pain..:)

— Zuhairah (@Zuhaairaah) July 8, 2013

Stress, gastric pain and vomiting. Negative? No, because Herbalife “relived” (maybe the typo affected it, but I doubt it) it.

I don't know if I can take my herbalife shake into the doctors office. This is a problem #dontwannagetintrouble

— Leah Dawson (@LeahShelll) July 8, 2013

Reported as negative, but clearly not. This one simply requires human interpretation.

@Herbalife no refined carbs. Not even an ounce!

— Leon Kioko (@leonkaindikioko) July 8, 2013

“No” and “not even” signal negative, but in this context, they’re a good thing.

Maybe at some point in the future, these tools will be accurate enough to be useful, but at this point, the overall analysis is way too far off to be meaningful, and even the matter of sifting them for processing is questionable.  If you’re only trying to look at the negative messages, it might be somewhat useful, because they do seem to err on the side of interpreting sentiment as negative, but why would you want to do that?  You really should be responding to positive messages as well as negative anyway. And if a human being still has to make the interpretation, how is the sentiment analysis tool helping?

If you’ve had a different experience with sentiment analysis, or think you know of a tool that’s more accurate, please leave a comment below and let me know.

That’s what Heresy decided to do with this book, Digital Doesn’t Matter: Reinventing The Advertising Industry. Shot into action by the slow dying of the advertising industry they so dearly loved, authors John Lambie and Josh Sklar spent 6 months interviewing over 100 of the top CEOs, executives, directors and journalists in the advertising and marketing industry, including people from Google, Ogilvy & Mathers, Nike, Dell, Y&R, and more.

This book looks to be a go-to resource for any person remotely interested in marketing, advertising, or PR that wants to know how to make it as we try to smoothly and effectively transition these fields into the digital era. Covering a broad, but very specific set of topics such as:

• Marketing Strategy
• Account Management
• Strategic Planning
• Data Analysis
• Social Media
• New Business Development
• Talent Development
• Recruitment
• And far more

All of that though, is only half of the reason I’m excited about this book. At another angle, this book, while available in PDF, Kindle, and hardcover form, seeks to hit a whole new level of dynamic interaction with the reader through a mobile app. Imagine if while you were reading your favorite book, let’s say Harry Potter for now (I hear it’s pretty popular), that you could comment and talk to other readers while reading your favorite sections, skip to only the parts that talk about dragons (or Cerberus, ogres, unicorns, etc.), share your own stories, provide immediate feedback to the author for her next book, give ideas, and read stories from either her or other readers that continually give insights into the world.

That’s the kind of groundbreaking concept this book looks to achieve. People will be allowed to comment, annotate, submit stories, provide feedback, and offer ideas. The app will be forever changing and updated, with the authors providing case studies, research, extra education, as well as a community to discuss what’s happening, connect people with mentors, vent anonymously, and critique the latest ads. Innovative and ambitious, to say the least.

Now, the real kicker with this? It’s not one of those things you get psyched about, look at, then wait around for 2 years while the groundwork occurs. Heresy is looking at obtaining funding by early March, and then having all of this delivered by June of this year. If this is something you want to get involved in, you can view their Kickstarter page and their Facebook page.

I hear those who donate early and keep posted on Facebook may get some special opportunities for a sneak peek at the book. I’m certainly in for a few bucks just to help see this be realized.

Originally published Jan. 10, 2013

Jump to latest update

Orrin Woodward [bio – blog] is a leadership expert.  He’s co-author, with Chris Brady [bio – blog], of Launching a Leadership Revolution, which was a bestseller on just about every list around: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, USA Today and Money.  In addition to authoring over a dozen books, they’re successful entrepreneurs with two 8-figure businesses, LIFE and TEAM, and they’re both Black Diamond distributors in Monavie. Orrin’s also a client and a friend.

But some people don’t like him, or what he does, or what he stands for.

To some extent, that comes with the territory.  Some people simply don’t like network marketing, period. Or the personal development industry. Some people have had bad experiences, for whatever reason.  When you take a stand, when you put yourself out there like he does, you’re going to be a target.

Legitimate criticism is fine. People sharing their personal experiences, even if negative, is fine. Baseless accusations and innuendo aren’t.

For the past few years, Orrin and Chris have been working their way up this list of the “Top 30 Global Leadership Gurus”. If you visit the site now, though, you won’t even see a list of top leadership gurus (it’s under construction). What you will see is this [Ed. – It’s under the “Global Guru Criteria” tab, which, being a javascript link on the page, I can’t link to directly] :

And,  when we added an IP address checker to our system this year, two Guru candidates listed in the top 15, Orrin Woodward and Chris Brady, who have had substantial votes since 2010, were disqualified and removed from the list because more than 98% of their votes came for only three IP addresses, meaning that only three people voted for them over and over again. This accounted for almost 2000 of their votes.

 The casual reader might look at this and be shocked. But I smell a rat, because I know Orrin and Chris, and this just isn’t consistent with what I know about them. Let’s apply a little bit of critical thinking:

1. They simply have no need to game it.  They have the real influence.  Launching a Leadership Revolution has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Orrin is the #2 leadership development expert on Twitter, according to WeFollow [Ed. – See all Orrin’s scores here. He and Chris are both ranked for leadership, as well.] (not riggable, because it’s based on actual behavior, not just follower count) [Ed. – See comments for more about WeFollow].  LIFE events routinely have 10,000+ people at them. Their membership is highly motivated and organized. Their social media imprint could gather 2,000 unique IP votes in an hour, let alone a year.
2. If they had wanted to game it, you wouldn’t know it. Frankly, they don’t have the know-how internally to rig it.  I do, but a) I wouldn’t, and b) even if I did, there wouldn’t be any evidence. (And seriously, who makes a voting site and doesn’t prevent duplication by IP address?)

And I’ve talked to Orrin about it. They simply didn’t do it. They’ve also checked around within their organization, and it looks like they have hundreds of people who can verify voting for them, not 40 (2% of 2,000), as the site implies.

My first challenge to Evgeniy Chetvertakov, the current owner of Leadershipgurus.net, is this: present your evidence.  What time frame are you talking about?  Orrin stopped linking to the site at all when it went down last fall (did it change ownership?). What are the IP addresses? How do you know they’re from someone in Orrin’s organization, and not one of his critics trying to make him look bad? Given some of the tactics we’ve seen, that’s actually more plausible.

My second challenge is really a question: why make these accusations without even contacting Orrin or Chris? What happened to “innocent until proven guilty”? Or even just common courtesy? Why put yourself in the position of making defamatory statements without a proper investigation? And how can you run a leadership site without practicing one of the basic principles of leadership: get both sides of the story.

UPDATE 2/22/13: Following a letter from Orrin’s office to the site owner asking for the evidence, none has been provided. What type of alleged leadership site would make an allegation without providing evidence? Draw your own conclusions.

Let’s stick to the facts. And the fact of the matter is, Orrin’s and Chris’s credentials are indisputable. Ranking on this one site was just an acknowledgment of those accomplishments…not something they needed as validation.  The fact that they referenced it in the past was simply good marketing. And I know their social media footprint — I will personally stake my professional reputation that they can easily generate 2,000 votes or other actions on any independent site in a matter of a couple of days.

Use your brain. Look at the facts. These accusations just don’t add up.

UPDATE 7/15/13: After receiving no response from Mr. Chetvertakov following repeated attempts, Orrin’s office tried to track him down via other means…turned out to be not so easy:

An extensive private investigation has determined that the address given by Chetvertakov upon registration of the Leadership Gurus website is not (and apparently has never been) occupied by Chetvertakov, who has identified himself as a citizen of the United Kingdom.  The address listed on the Leadership Gurus website, which is registered to Chetvertakov, and the Global Gurus’ Facebook page is completely fictitious and does not exist.

That’s from the lawsuit Orrin and Chris ended up having to file to clear up these false accusations, starting with a motion to service Mr. Chetvertakov (if that’s even a real person or real name) by email, because all of the other contact information for him appears to be inaccurate.

We’ll see how the lawsuit runs its course — the truth will come out, but for now, it’s clear that the new owner of the Leadership Gurus site has gone to a lot of effort to conceal their real identity and location.

UPDATE 5/23/14: A double victory for the truth: Leadership Gurus site publishes retraction and apology; Inc. Magazine names Orrin Woodward and Chris Brady to Top 50 Leadership and Management Experts:

I’d use the phrase “In a stunning turn of events…”, except that for those of us who knew the truth all along, it’s no surprise — exactly what we expected would eventually happen.

First, the Global Top 30 Leadership Gurus site printed this retraction and apology:

In January 2013 Leadership Gurus posted a note that we had disqualified Orrin Woodward and Chris Brady because most of their votes were from 3 sources. After one year of reviewing substantial legitimate votes for Mr Woodward and Mr Brady which are enough to keep them in the top 30 list, we now believe that previous votes we based our original statement on, may have been due to other circumstances including but not limited to, a few overzealous fans, multiple people using a central IP address like a university, or foul play from competitors to discredit them. Regardless, we believe we have made a mistake and would like to apologize to Mr Woodward and Mr Brady for the earlier statements. The note was unsubstantiated and has been removed from the Global Gurus Website and should not be referred to or relied upon by any other person, entity, website, blog or social media outlet of any kind.

Self-explanatory. I hope the critics who referred to this will take note and act accordingly.

Secondly, Inc.com has published a list of Top 50 Leadership and Management Experts, which includes Orrin Woodward at #20 and Chris Brady at #39.

Now, being the intellectually honest critical thinker that I am, I’ll just go ahead and point out something I’m sure the critics will take aim at: the list was actually created by leadership author/speaker/blogger Jurgen Appelo, not by Inc. columnist Jeff Haden, and yes, Jurgen Appelo happens to be on the list (at #40). Doesn’t matter (and thinking it does is a logical fallacy) — the entire methodology is spelled out in detail.

The fact of the matter is, there’s no one “right” way to pick the top “X” of anything, especially something as subjective as leadership experts. But what we have here is the next best thing — a methodology that is transparent after-the-fact, but not known about in advance, so couldn’t be deliberately gamed, even if someone wanted to. It’s based on multiple reasonable criteria. And based on those criteria, Orrin Woodward and Chris Brady are among the top management and leadership experts in the world, in good company with people like Clayton Christensen, Brian Tracy, Michael Hyatt, Peter Drucker, and Marcus Buckingham.

Congrats to Orrin and Chris on the well-deserved recognition.