Tag: lessons

As we close our offices today until the second week of January, I realise that it's time to reflect on our wonderful journey and what we have all learned this year.

We have had the most amazing experiences, namely through our people and clients, who constantly amaze me with their insights, perserverence and determination to kick goals. 

We are in professional services and as such our job is to ensure that our clients always receive a "professional service" at the standard that they expect.

At Marketing Eye, we spend time training our team to be better at managing client expectations and delivering best-in-class marketing services on an ongoing basis.

Our model is simple; We provide an outsourced marketing department for small to medium sized businesses.

Our clients are predominantly entrepreneurs who once had an idea, developed it and then became successful in their pursuit to realize their dreams.

Here are 5 things I learned this week:

There is one thing that employees can learn from a Navy Seal that will be life changing - and that is to make your bed every morning to perfection. By completing this task, according to Navy Admiral William H. McRaven, who gave a talk to 8000 graduating students from the University of Texas last month, you would have completed the first task of the day.

I watched the video of his speech that clocked up 1.7 million views in 2 weeks on YouTube a few weeks ago and was inspired.

Of his 10 Life Lessons From A Navy Seal, here are 4 that resonated most with me:

1. If you want to change the world, start off by making your own bed. This makes perfect sense to me as once you have completed this task, it is easier to complete others. It also signifies that its the little things that we all have to do in our lives that at times we may see as pointless, that are instrumental in helping us achieve our goals.

2. If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle. You cannot do it by yourself no matter how good you think you are. Working as a team can help you accomplish things more quickly and effectively, keeping employees accountable to each other and increasing motivation to achieve the end goal.

3. If you want to change the world, don't be afraid of circuses. This means that you should not be afraid of failing and the repercussion of that. There will be times where you fail and as McRaven says, it will be painful, discouraging and will test you to your core. The ability to get through this and know that not only have you come through to the other end, but there will be more circuses in the future, will make you stronger and more determined to succeed.

4. If you want to change the world, don't ever, ever ring the bell. Giving up means you won't have to have any more circuses and it will give you immediate relief from the pain or challenges you may be facing, but if you do this, you will have the same situation pop up over and over again in life and you will do the same thing - ring the bell. It is impossible to succeed if you keep ringing the bell.

Start-ups by their very nature are exactly that; just a start. The journey to building a successful business is often equal parts energizing and anxiety-inducing. The creator of Little Sale Birdy Laszlo Szabo shares his experience of operating a successful start-up and reveals the hard truths that he learned in his first year (that they won’t teach you at marketing or business school).

Just recently, US Airlines were left embarrassed when an employee responded to a customer with a cryptic tweet – an image of a woman and a very strategically placed toy airplane.  Understandably, this social media marketing error horrified the world and the image went viral.  In addition, the airline’s bizarre apology was retweeted over 12,000 times.

The PR failure from this ill-advised US Airlines post served as a reminder of the power of social media and how it can cause devastating damage to a company’s brand.

Here are the six lessons to learn from this PR plane crash, and other social media disasters: