Did you finalise your New Year resolutions? Got your targets and action plans in place for a stellar year in 2010? Are you lining things up to give yourself the best chance possible of achieving everything you want this year?

Great! You’re amongst a small percentage of people committed to making things happen. People who are willing to be held accountable for their actions, and accept full responsibility for their achievement.

Setting high targets and challenging ourselves is a worthy pursuit. Congratulate yourself as you tick them off your ‘to-do’ list and enjoy the sense of satisfaction that will surely come from achieving your goals.

And as you enjoy the journey, remember that in our rush to acquire more, achieve more and experience more, we sometimes forget that what we have, and do, is less important than who we are and how we contribute.

The words of Michael Josephson, of the Josephson Institute of Ethics, are very timely at the start of a new year and new decade. We are, after all, human ‘beings’, not human ‘doings’ or human ‘havings’.  What will matter?

Read the rest of this entry »

New Year resolutions happen every year, but predictions generally only occur at the turn of a decade. Knowing what might happen before it actually occurs would certainly be handy.

If we could predict what might happen it would certainly give us a competitive edge.  We could be ‘one-step-ahead-of-the-game’, give us an opportunity to maximise every opportunity and put all our efforts into those things likely to generate the greatest reward – whatever we might want that to be.

Moving from the ‘noughties’ to the teen years of the 21st Century  gives us a opportunity, not only to look back on what happend between 2000 and 2009 – think iTunes, the social media explosion and wireless internet – but also to look ahead and predict what might happen during 2010 and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

Think social media doesn’t matter to you, your business or your reputation? Think again!  Socialnomics’ ‘Social Media Revolution’ clip on YouTube is doing an excellent job of showing how important social media is, and will continue to be, to all of us – both as consumers and product and service providers.

There are currently more than 200 million blogs with 54 percent bloggers posting content or tweeting daily.  Around 34 percent of these bloggers are posting opinions about products and brands online. What might they be saying about you?

It’s worth giving it some thought as around 78 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations, but only 14 percent trust advertisements.  I wonder why?!

Now, you might think ‘all this web stuff’s not for me’ and you may be right. But celebrities Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres currently have more followers on Twitter than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama. Read the rest of this entry »

Two stories caught my eye this week regarding companies making claims they apparently haven’t been able to keep.

The first is Telecom who’s reached a settlement with the Commerce Commission following its admission it misled around 130,000 broadband customers regarding pricing plans. Apparently it overcharged customers more than $9.5 million between 1999 and 2006 when dial-up customers switched to broadband.

Although Telecom has refunded almost all these customers, since 2003 it has apparently received warnings, settlements or convictions relating to the Fair Trading Act at least eight times. Read the rest of this entry »

2009 was the year the rules changed. The ‘who cares?’ attitude that seemed to dominate so many of our businesses, and personal interactions, up until then finally faced a reality check. Suddenly, large numbers of us started to care.

We cared about whether our life-savings and investments would still be around for us to draw on so we could enjoy a comfortable and happy retirement. We cared that our order books were shrinking and our debtors were taking longer to pay, or not paying at all. We cared that the jobs we were in, and the businesses we ran, would continue to generate income so we could keep paying the bills and live the life we’d become accustomed to. Read the rest of this entry »

Tiger Woods’ admitted ‘indiscretions’ have tee’d off more than a few people recently, including his wife, Elin, his corporate sponsors, and bigwigs in the golfing world.

Sponsors Accenture, Gillette, Tag Heuer and AT&T are publicly distancing themselves from sports’ first billionaire and no doubt ruing the fact that their names are likely to be associated with the scandal for years to come. (Perhaps the so-called ‘Curse of Gillette’ works both ways?)

Woods’ family and his sponsors have a right to feel aggrieved, and seriously let down, by his actions. It’s a breach of trust on a spectacular scale. Read the rest of this entry »

Philosopher Joseph Hall said “A reputation, once broken, may possibly be repaired, but the world will always keep its eyes on the spot where the crack was”.

It’s a particularly relevant quote given the damage that’s been done to New Zealand author Witi Ihimaera’s reputation following his admission of plagiarism.

Quite why such a distinguished author as Ihimaera, who’s acknowledged as one of New Zealand’s undoubted literary elite, and a professor of literature at Auckland University, would plagiarise another author’s work is baffling. I say ‘undoubted’ but of course, Ihimaera’s admission of plagiarism raises massive doubts about his motives and character. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no wonder politicians regularly feature in the bottom 5 of the ‘Most Trusted’ occupations list produced by Reader’s Digest each year.

This week the papers have been dominated again by the international travel MPs and their partners have taken, largely at taxpayer expense – in some cases without even attending the meeting’s they went overseas for! Read the rest of this entry »

Research indicates it’s 6-7 times more expensive to gain one new client or customer than it is to retain one. And yet many businesses spend thousands of hours, and dollars, trying to acquire new customers, and relatively little time and effort nurturing and retaining their existing ones.

Valuing and retaining your current clients and customers is essential. Not only will you benefit from their continued custom, you are also more likely to benefit from any new clients or customers they recommend. Read the rest of this entry »

Why is it that ghost-writing of a book is deemed acceptable but ghost-blogging or ghost-twittering isn’t?

Maybe it’s to do with the fact that many people might accept that some level of skill is required to actually write a book, whereas composing a 150 word blog post or 140 character tweet can be done ‘off the cuff’, so to speak.

Whether this is true or not, many of us prefer not to be deliberately deceived. Being ‘time-poor’ is no excuse.

Far better to be up-front and open about who exactly is tweeting or blogging under a specific identity than try and hide behind ghost-bloggers or tweeters.

Head of marketing at the University of Otago, Associate Professor Ken Deans, noted in a recent New Zealand Herald article that he believed ghost-tweeting was unethical.

“It’s about trust and mistrust. If someone else is writing for the CEO, that’s unacceptable.”

One Tweeter who’s clear about their identity, and who’s tweeting on their behalf, is New Zealand Prime Minister John Key (johnkeypm). Tweets placed by staff are prefaced by ‘via staff:’

Does this make the information any less readable? No. It simply means the reader knows who’s placed it and ensures Key is not caught out by curly questions that might arise as a result.

So if you’re tempted to blog or tweet using a ghost-writer, be mindful that not being open and honest in your communications could back-fire big time, and instead of building trust and creating valuable conversations you could find yourself distrusted and branded a fake.