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Communication: 3 Tips to Make Your SME Buzz With Productivity

Posted: 26 Sep 2012 12:00 AM PDT

Sandy Pentland of MIT and his team discovered that great teams are built on communication. This seems to be common sense so how does the business owner create the environment that fosters good communication leading to high productivity?

The Communication Buzz Factor

Some small businesses just seem to buzz. When you interact with them, people seem to genuinely like their workplace and what they are doing. Innovation seems to flow.

They effortlessly attract customers and they are often found on those lists of "Best Places To Work." There is something the organisation does as a whole that glues them together as a team.

Communication lines are networks

According to research done by Alex "Sandy" Pentland of MIT's Human Dynamics Lab, there are teams that simply function with excellence. He explained his post, "The New Science of Building Great Teams," that he and his team asked people to wear badges and analysed the data such as tone of voice, body language, whom they talked to and frequency of communication.

They discovered that how each team communicated was the key to their success.
They found that teams that communicated beyond the formal channels (e.g. bosses sending the messages or meetings) were more effective. Since communication can be shared in any direction, it is more likely for ideas to be explored and put into action.
For this communication to work, there has to be a "charismatic connector." As the business owner acts as one of the nodes in a network, other people become nodes as well.

Tips for developing the Buzz Factor

# 1. Spend time speaking with everyone in your organisation.

Whether you have a small or medium-size business, making time to speak with everyone so you model the importance of internal networking. This prevents silo thinking and may even nurture friendships across disciplines.

# 2. Use staff breakfasts, lunches or tea breaks as opportunities to just chat.

A client of mine has lunch brought in once a week and everyone gathers in the conference room. This has been a great place to hear what is going on in people's lives and has informed his response when he is providing accountability. Eventually when projects get mentioned, there is a spontaneous exchange of ideas and advice.

# 3. Stay out of the way so your team and/or staff can bounce ideas off of each other.

Sometimes the boss inhibits creativity and conversation and you have enough to do without being part of every conversation in the office. Allowing gathering points (i.e. water coolers, break rooms, the copier, certain desks, etc.) or use of an intranet are useful tools for these informal conversations.

Create your own Buzz Factor

The Buzz Factor is more than a rich environment for creativity and innovation. It's even more than trying to use the latest management craze. Making sure that people have time to communicate formally and informally fosters a sense of community and belonging.

You, the business owner, can be the charismatic connector with something very simple...a conversation. This is something humans do well. The Buzz Factor is simply networking - chatting, meeting, collaborating - leading to better productivity.

What tips would you add so small business owners develop the Buzz Factor? How could the Buzz Factor be used in a struggling business?

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The post Communication: 3 Tips to Make Your SME Buzz With Productivity appeared first on Tweak Your Biz.

The Ultimate Guide To Defeating EdgeRank For Facebook Page Owners

Posted: 25 Sep 2012 07:10 AM PDT

Edgerank is the Facebook algorithm that determines which stories appear in each user's news-feed. Regardless of how many fans a page has, research indicates that pages on average only reach about 17% of their Facebook fans, e.g. A page with 20K fans will reach 3,400 fans.

In this post, I'll explain how EdgeRank works, how to create a more effective Facebook posting strategy, which updates work best, how to reach more fans and ultimately - how to optimise Facebook's marketing potential for your business and brand.

How is Facebook's EdgeRank calculated?

The three factors that affect the Edgerank algorithm are:

Affinity
Edge Weight
And Time Decay

What is Affinity?

Affinity is based on closeness on Facebook. How "friendly" you are and how much you "interact"?

Liking, viewing, commenting and sharing send a proactive signal of closeness
Activities that require higher levels of user engagement get a higher score. Leaving a comment takes more effort than clicking the "Like" button.
The more you interact with a person or a page, the higher their affinity score
But affinity only works one way: you can't increase your affinity score in another user's feed by constantly clicking on their "Like" buttons.

What is Edge Weight?

Edge Weight determines which types of content are more important. The three types of content which are understood to have the highest weighting are:

Videos,
Photos,
and Links

Each person's Edge Weight is different on Facebook, i.e. someone who likes photographs is more likely to have them in their feed than someone who doesn't.

What is Time Decay?

The final factor that determines EdgeRank is recency also known as time decay.

The older an update, the less likely it is to appear.

How to create a Great Facebook Posting Strategy?

Understand Edgerank and you will see that it creates:

An "engagement" challenge and opportunity - for managers of Facebook pages.

Businesses want to promote their products and get more customers. What's the point of being on there unless you are getting an ROI?
Success on Facebook depends on driving engagement, i.e. reaching more people means getting more likes, more comments, more shares and more fans.
Promotion and engagement don't often easily go together. It is difficult for most businesses to create updates that are both engaging and promote - at the same time!

What should your Facebook Posting Strategy look like?

Create a posting strategy that includes 2 types of Facebook Status Updates but one that is weighted in favour of engagement.

The correct ratio will be different from business to business but a good place to start is either 3:1 or 2:1
Edge weight means that where possible, all updates should include video, picture and/or links.
Plan to post regularly - time decay requires that an effective posting strategy is also a consistent one.