Author Archives: Ashley Freeman

About Ashley Freeman

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  1. How Social Media Can Increase the ROI of Your Conference

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    Conferences are a big investment.

    To ensure a return on that investment, maximising audience engagement and the reach of your event are crucial.  They’re the difference between a worthwhile conference, and a flop.

    Regular and targeted content and social media activity can help to create a buzz around your conference, drive greater engagement and extend the life of your event way beyond the final curtain.

    Social media can deliver the return on investment you need, if you use it correctly.

     

    The Build Up

     

    There is no better start to a conference than one where the room is already alive with a buzz and gentle hum of excitement and anticipation.

    Through social media, you can get your participants talking about the event weeks, or even months, before the event by sharing content through social media channels relevant to your target audience.

    Post regular teasers about agendas, speakers and workshops to create mystery, anticipation and intrigue. Use your event hash-tag regularly in posts. Build up the event, so that by the time it comes around, the audience can’t wait to get started.

     

     

    Audience engagement starts well before the participants walk through the door.

     

    The Main Event

     

    So, you have generated a wide and active interest in what you are doing through social media avenues. Make sure you accommodate that interest by recording everything.

    Report live from the event through tweets, blog posts and video clips, and immortalise the event forever on the social web. Invite followers to watch and participate using an event hashtag. Keep them up to date with what’s happening throughout the day. You’ll find that many people who weren’t at the conference will be next time!

     

    The Follow Up

     

    It’s in the follow up to the event that social media really comes into its own. This is where you’ll see the true ROI on your conference.

    Social media allows you to continue to expose your team to the vital information from the conference on an ongoing basis. No matter how engaging or inspiring the conference was, your team are likely to forget things. The last thing you want is for your investment to go to waste. Involve them in social media conversation about the event, and encourage them to integrate what they learnt into their work.

    It’s really important that you hold onto anyone that engaged with content posted through social channels, or shared your updates. They could all be future customers after all!

    Create polished and engaging post-event content – summaries, highlights, photo galleries – and re-edit anything that has long-term value for your organisation. Think about future prospects. From the interested followers that you generated through your event’s social media campaign, who could deliver further ROI in the future? Who is a potential customer or investor?

    Continue to follow up on the key relationships you established through social media, and your event could continue to pay for years to come.

     

    If you need any advice on how to deliver a greater ROI for your conference, please give us a call.

  2. Business Imperatives – Trust, Honesty and Integrity

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    Trust is everything. Despite what some business manuals may tell you about the hard sell, honesty and integrity are much more powerful for establishing and maintaining a customer base than using persuasion, smoke and mirrors.

    Long-term business relationships between your organisation and your customers must be built on a culture of trust.

    Here are our top five tips for developing a foundation of trust with your customers:

     1. Be Yourself

     Rather than acting or sounding like businessperson in a meeting, just be yourself. Potential customers are much more likely to invest in what you are telling them if it comes from a personable, human place. If a customer believes they are the victim of a hard sell, they tend to clam up.

     2. Consistency

    Consistent and persistent behaviour over time is a sure-fire way to build customer trust.

    While you might think that being edgy and unpredictable gives you a competitive edge and makes your company look cool, customers prefer to know what they are getting. By adopting a consistent approach, your customers are much more likely to trust you. They know what you are about and trust that your services and products will remain at the same (high) standard every time.

     3. Conversation

     Don’t think of every business meeting as a sales pitch. Cultivate a real dialogue – it is more approachable and personable, and will encourage customers to relax, and to trust your honesty.

    A great relationship with your customers relies on connection. Sit down. Have a conversation. Even tell them a story. Break down the barriers and earn their trust before you get down to the business of the day.

     4.    Stick To Your Guns

    Above all, integrity is important to develop trust and a good reputation with your customers. There is a reason long established institutions still command large portions of the market, even if their prices cannot compete with the latest online companies. They have credibility and customer trust built up over many years. They have a proven record.

    Be willing to stand up for what you believe in and, if something is non-negotiable, say so. Make decisions based on what you know is right and a good customer will respect your integrity.

    Be honest with yourself and with your customer. While they may not always like what they hear, they will respect that you always give it to them straight. In the long term, that is more valuable than telling customers what you think they want to hear.

    It doesn’t end there.

    5. Maintenance

    If you are to enjoy the benefits of any long-term, well-established customer relationships, you must maintain their trust. To do this, you must establish a reputation of honesty, loyalty and integrity and build it into the fabric of your company image and culture.

    A trustworthy reputation and customer loyalty have a measurable impact on any ‘bottom line’.  Make it a part of your DNA.

    If you need any advice on how to cultivate a culture of customer trust, give us a call.

  3. The Importance Of Investing In Employee Development

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    “Leaders must develop the capabilities of employees, nurture their careers, and manage the performance of individuals and teams.”

    ‘Make Talent a Strategic Priority,’ The MacKinsey Quarterly

    You hired your latest team member for their talent and potential, right? Well how do you expect to maximize that talent and potential without developing and nurturing it?

    Learning isn’t a one off. It doesn’t stop once you have satisfactorily initiated a new employee and familiarized them with the requirements of their role. Learning and development must be an ongoing thing if you are to maximize potential and employee engagement.

    Unfortunately, many leaders are falling short of providing the teaching and encouragement needed to develop their best team members. Time management issues and financial constraints often prevent us from executing effective employees development strategies.

    It is doubly important now as the economy recovers from a major recession, and the upcoming workforce are consistently written off as ‘lazy’ and ‘unprepared’ for the modern world of work.

    Studies have proven that organisations that invest in ongoing development programs are rewarded with improved overall performance, greater employee engagement, a higher percentage of internal promotions and a better chance of retaining talented team members.

    We all know we should be doing it, but how should you go about it?

    Start by acting as a role model. If your team sees that you, as a leader, are still learning and developing, and that you have vulnerabilities, they will be more inclined to embrace development themselves. Create a culture whereby learning is celebrated as a valuable outcome of a project.

    Team members should be able to link their daily activities to a bigger picture. This means recognizing how their efforts help meet organizational goals, but also how they bring themselves closer to their own, personal goals. Give your employees a sense of where they can go within the organisation. Provide them with an idea of how developing their potential might help their ambitions and career path.

    And remember…problems aren’t just problems. They are opportunities for learning and developing. Allow team members to make mistakes without feeling like they may cost them their job or slow their climb up the career ladder. Help them to see problems as an opportunity to develop, not as a threat.

    If you identify an area of weakness in an employee, think about how that weakness could be remedied. Try pairing the team member in question with another known for their strengths in that area. Maybe encourage them to enroll on an online course, or fund them through a day course.

    Are you asking your employees – “What have you learned today?”

    Are you investing time and company resources in developing your best talent?

    No? You should be.

    If you’d like any further advice on how to develop talented employees, please give us a call!

     

  4. What Does A Change Champion Look Like?

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    So you have a clear vision of the positive change you want to see in your organisation. The question is: How do I implement that change?

    More often than not, its not enough that you know what change you want to see. Preaching it from the alter will probably fall on deaf ears too.

    You need to get down amongst the congregation. You need to populate your team with champions of change, or “positive deviants” as the Harvard Business Review puts it. Members of the team who are already engaged, who are already doing things in a radically better way, who can spread the word, embed and sustain change within your organisation. Your good disciples. If you will.

    What is a Change Champion?

    Okay. Enough of the divine references! Let’s talk about what a change champion actually looks like.

    Change Champions are carefully selected and trained to manage the inevitable uncertainty that is bound to arise within your team when faced with a program of change.

    They are charged with reducing the pressure on management, identifying and dealing with issues quickly, gathering feedback on communications, identifying the main resistors and detractors amongst the team and carefully managing that resistance. These ‘moles,’ if you like, are members of the community of the team who are “just like us” and so can overcome resistance and disillusionment more easily than the higher ranks of management.

    It is up to you whether you make your team aware of the change champions among them, or encourage them to covertly nurture change from an equal and anonymous position within the team. The danger of elevating change champions is that the team come to depend on them, to look to them as another avenue of leadership. To create a change champion that is truly effective, you must make sure that they stay ‘one of us.’

    If you are committed as a leader to a big change effort within your organisation, an effective, engaged network of change champions can be the ones to carry that effort through to fruition. You cannot hope to truly effect positive change from a soapbox. To truly infect your team with the positive spirit of change, and your clear vision for that change, you need a network of ambassadors, covert agents, champions…of change.

    Any comments?

    We would love to hear your thoughts so get in touch by emailing Neil at nwest@involve.co.uk or calling 020 7720 0105.

  5. Bridging The Gap Between An Idea And Reality

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     “Ideas are dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless.”

    Mary Kay Ash

    Converting an idea into reality can sometimes seem like a gigantic leap of faith into the potentially disastrous unknown. Saying that, great ideas are only made useless without the passion, lateral thinking and ‘let’s just go for it’ needed to implement them.

    So the question is – how do you bridge the gap between that great idea and the completed product?

    The main components of the bridge between an idea and reality are often time, money or resources. Ideas will regularly fall on these basic logistical requirements. But sometimes, the only thing that is stopping ideas from becoming a reality is courage. The courage to face the unknown, have faith in your idea and take a chance on it.

     

    Sound familiar?

     

    Glenn Llopis sees it as a fundamental problem with the modern workplace, where we are wired to only execute on what we are told to do. Unfortunately, this will only ever deliver immediate, short-term results.

    His research shows that employees are much more able to deliver on assigned tasks than on tasks that require free-thinking and an entrepreneurial attitude.

    To unleash the true potential of a team member, they need to be equipped with the confidence and resources to be able to think creatively, and see their ideas through to fruition.

    Those people that can implement ideas take the initiative, and believe in themselves and the idea enough to be able to meet unexpected obstacles head-on, and to accept accountability and responsibility for the project.

    They are able to help others understand their vision. Which means they have to be absolutely clear what that vision is and how to communicate it.  How will it deliver ROI? How will it benefit the organisation but more importantly how everyone can play their role in achieving it? While it is important to embrace the opinions and expertise of others, they go with their gut, and stay true to their founding vision.

    If you are a forward thinking organisation that wants to encourage creativity and an entrepreneurial attitude, then make sure that your team are empowered with the courage, freedom and resources to see their ideas through to reality. There is real value in someone that can turn an abstract idea into a complete product. Is your team made up of those priceless people that can implement ideas?

    Maybe it is, but you don’t realise it?

  6. The Power Of Mind…Maps

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    Could your organisation benefit from the ULTIMATE thinking tool?

    It’s been well known since Scientific American magazine published Ralph Haber’s research in 1970, that images are more evocative than words in triggering creative thinking and memory. Haber found that humans had a recognition accuracy of images between 85 and 95 percent.

    The mind map, therefore, best imitates the way our brains work, by incorporating its most significant ways of thinking into its own structure.

     

    “The mind map is the external mirror of your own radiant or natural thinking, which provides the universal key to unlock the dynamic potential of the brain”

    mindmapping.com

     

    Cool, huh? Imagine for a minute the power of being able to hold a mirror up to the creative cerebral potential of your team… imagine being able to maximize that potential? You could take on the world!

    The proven power of mind maps in team productivity, engagement and visual involvement make it an essential element of your meetings and conferences.

     

    What Is A Mind Map?

     

    Mimicking the creative process, the mind map begins with a single focus, the origin of your spider diagram. Like a tree, its branches radiate from the main trunk as that idea grows and develops. Branches carry separate key ideas into their own sub-sections, until, hopefully, the creative potential is exhausted. It literally ‘maps out’ your ideas.

     

    Unleash The Power

     

    By capturing all sessions using a mind map, your team will not only feel involved and engaged in the thinking process, but the conversations will continue with fully visualised points of reference.

    In this modern, technological age, software and apps are now the main engines of mind mapping. The power therefore extends to quick and easy sharing of idea maps, and even greater productivity. A survey by Chuck Frey, for example, found that users of mind mapping software experienced up to a 25% increase in productivity.

    Mind mapping might just be THE most effective means of communicating ideas and brainstorming problems. Not only does it enhance visual involvement and increase productivity, it also provides a visual, stimulating record of all creative exchanges and collaborations within your organisation, keeping them fresh in mind and memory.

    We think that’s a pretty powerful thing. Don’t you?

  7. Creating a Fertile Environment For Innovation

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    “Innovation as usual…” 

    Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

    Innovation is the difference.

    Innovation is the single common denominator of all the top companies in the world. It is an essential component of a competitive and productive organisation, and of a highly energized, motivated and engaged workforce. Innovation has become a business imperative.

    And yet, frustratingly for many leaders and managers, it is not something you can project manage. It is not something you can quantify. It is not something that can be forced or directed.

    Innovation is not another policy directive that can be emailed around your team on a Monday morning – ‘This week, we are pushing a new company policy of “innovation.” We want you all to be more innovative. Your performance will be evaluated at the end of the week.’

    Innovation comes from the seeds of creative ideas. It is your job as a leader not to force innovation, but to shape your working environment so that it becomes a fertile ground for those seeds to grow naturally.

    It is your job to facilitate innovation, not insist upon it.

     

    Tending the fields of innovation…

     

    There is much debate about what kind of environment best stimulates innovation.

    We think of a fertile, innovative environment as one in which your team are encouraged to collaborate, get involved and bring new ideas to the table.

    It is about allowing the freedom and creativity that ideas need to grow into profitable actions. You need to ensure that your organisation is flexible enough that you are able to make changes and act on impulse before anyone else. A fertile environment also encourages collaboration as an essential part of innovation.

    Innovation must happen by invitation. Show your team that they don’t have to ask permission to think creatively, and to implement their ideas. Make innovation a structural part of everybody’s job. Don’t, for goodness sake, appoint an innovation team!

    Finally, it is important that you reward innovation. When your team takes the initiative to try bold new things that will ultimately enhance the organisation, they should be rewarded. Be innovative about how your reward them. Keep it interesting and fun!

    Given the right conditions, a little tending and encouragement, innovation will thrive as part of the usual, everyday workings of your organisation. You won’t even have to think about it. It will just happen.

    If you’d like any advice on how to cultivate an innovative environment within your organisation, give us a call!

  8. Exhibiting at CIPD

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    We took the opportunity to exhibit at the CIPD exhibition last week in Manchester – the UK’s largest gathering of HR professionals.

    Thousands of people descended upon the Manchester Central Convention Centre to explore and understand what their fellow professionals are up to. From our perspective, this was an opportunity for us to reach out to this large HR community and start making them aware of INVOLVE and what we do – our name is recognised more in the Comms and Engagement area rather than HR.

    Not only was it fun, but hugely productive and rewarding. It was interesting to see that we were one of the few businesses to be majoring on employee engagement. Many consultancies add it to their list of services but few seem to really specialise in it. Health and well-being seemed to be a hot topic, as well as coaching (exec) and resource management.

    To sweeten things up, we made a decision to transform our exhibition stand into a traditional looking sweet shop. Laid out on the counter were jars of sweets that represented how we help our clients. Refreshers represented Values Refreshing, cola-bottles symbolised increasing Cola-boration etc etc… It seemed to work too, as the CIPD made us Runners Up in their competition for best exhibition stand. Out of 300+ exhibitors, not bad for a little “sweet shop” tucked away in the corner!

    If we met you there and you’re reading this, please drop us a line and stay in touch. If not, we’ll see you next year…

  9. Wanted – Project Manager (Webcasting & Digital)

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    Here at INVOLVE, we are currently on the lookout for an exceptional project manager to join our rapidly growing agency.

    This is an exciting opportunity for an ambitious person with remarkable project management skills and outstanding client service to make their mark in the industry. Working at INVOLVE, an award winning employee engagement agency, you will mainly be responsible for delivering projects from start to finish in our rapidly growing webcasting and digital teams. There will also be opportunities to offer your unique skills and expertise to other parts of the agency and support a wide range of projects including live and hybrid events.

    Amongst other things, some of the key aspects of this role would be; taking an initial brief from the client, working with internal teams to develop a suitable solution, managing internal teams to develop and deliver all elements of the project, general project planning and administration including scheduling, budgeting and creating technical specifications, managing suppliers, venues and studios, managing key clients and stakeholders, briefing and training clients and presenters and managing the event onsite – which can often be abroad.

    This opportunity is perfect for someone who wants to be an integral part of a dynamic multi-skilled team and is looking to blend exceptional project management, brilliant client facing skills and great technical knowledge in a leading agency.

     

    We are a values driven agency, looking for someone who:

    • Has worked for 3+ years in a client facing events role, ideally focused on webcasting/digital
    • Has a good understanding of streaming media and online events
    • Has a good understanding of live events and audience engagement
    • Has experience of quoting and managing budgets and delivering to tight timescales
    • Has a good understanding of digital media and technical AV production
    • Is able to effectively manage their own time and priorities
    • Is able to work autonomously or as part of a wider team
    • Has a proven track record of delivering exceptional client experiences
    • Has great communication skills both verbal and written

     

    If you feel that you’re right for this role and would like to discuss it further, please contact Andrew Bannister at abannister@involve.co.uk.

  10. How NOT to Manage a Meeting

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    For many of us, meetings are a drag: an unfortunate necessity of the working day.

    It doesn’t have to be like this.

    Meetings are about making decisions. This should happen quickly, cost effectively and with full involvement.

    Unfortunately, most organisations get meetings completely wrong. A badly executed business meeting is not only a waste of time and money, it’s also bad for morale and detrimental to team involvement.

     

    A Bad Meeting

     

    We’ve all been in meetings that have no agenda, no clear objectives and regularly drift off topic. Do you remember that 4-hour meeting on “efficiency?”

    In a poorly managed meeting people eat loudly, play on their mobile phones, text or take phone calls. Others constantly think out loud or distract and divert from the point of the meeting. Most simply pretend to listen.

    A meeting like this is a serious threat to productivity.

    It’s partly the fault of established business convention. Meetings around a conference table are an unnecessary and unproductive structure built to solve what could often be achieved in a quick chat.

    It is irrelevant and out-of-date. It just doesn’t make sense in businesses today. When it is so easy to share information quickly and efficiently, meetings should only be scheduled when there is something worthwhile that needs to be discussed ‘in person’.

     

    What NOT to Do

     

    Never use a meeting to share information. With all the avenues at our disposal in this digital age, there is no excuse for it. Use the meeting for decision-making. Make sure everyone has the information they need before the meeting.

    Avoid long, sterile, regimented business meetings around a conference table. As much – if not more – can be achieved in a 10-minute standing meeting on the company floor.

    There is no need to schedule a half hour meeting for what could be achieved in ten minutes. If you have that amount of time, you will fill it, but what you fill it with won’t necessarily be of any use at all. Establish a time frame based solely on how long you will need for the topic that needs to be addressed. Take that meeting somewhere interesting, inspiring and engaging.

     

    How to Get Them Right

     

    The best way to know if you are getting your meetings completely wrong is to know how to get them completely right.

     

    – Make sure everyone arrives on time and end the meeting at the time scheduled.

    – Avoid derailing the meeting with tangents and off-topic discussions.

    – If you identify a problem in the meeting, you are also there to come up with a solution.

     

    Most importantly;

     

    – Find the best way to include the whole team in the meeting, and eliminate anything that might distract or take away from its objective. Mobile phones in the box please!

     

    Establish clearly the objective of the meeting and stick to it. Discuss it, solve it, and end it.

    Want to find out more about improving the productivity of your meetings across your organisation? Why not give us a call?

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