My New Year’s “Business” Resolutions

I am quick to admit it- I am not very good at making New Year’s Resolutions, let alone keeping them beyond the first week of January.

Over the past several years, I’ve taken the last week of the year to reflect on how my previous year went and set new goals for the next year- both personally and professionally.  I found much greater success with that!

Then, during the course of the year, I would review my goals, monitor my progress, chart my successes and celebrate my good fortune.  On a typical year, I would hit about 80% of my goals.  I attributed my success to the fact that I am a knowledgeable (translation: ‘good’) goal setter.

And then “2009 Happened”!!!…

By the end of the first quarter, I was so out of whack with my goals that I gave up and quit measuring and monitoring my progress.  (This was a ‘first’ for the eternal optimist.)  The year quickly soured from a goal setting perspective.  I had to work at maintaining a positive attitude and focus on the things that I could control and ‘ride the wave’ of a very turbulent economic year.  The charting, measuring, and celebrating of hitting the goals never took place because I knew the outcome was not going to look pretty.

But I love the end of each year.  It is time to reflect and celebrate on the goodness of life, and dream again of a bright horizon of endless possibilities drawing near.

This year I am going to try something different.  I am only going to set goals for the next 90 days and evaluate my progress on a monthly basis and give myself permission to adjust my goals accordingly.  I am also focusing more of my goals on relationship-building since that is something that I can control versus program deliverables (i.e. revenue) which is still rather squishy at the moment.

I am curious what others are going to do from a business or professional stand-point.  What ideas do you have?  If there is enough interest, we can share ideas and progress together throughout the new year and perhaps discover some new innovative ways to make New Year’s Resolutions in this uncertain economic season we are experiencing.

GoRapids.com Small Business: The Impact of Social Networking

Zach Vruwink spoke at a Heart of Wisconsin Workshop on Social Networking earlier this week and some of the data he shared apprehended me.  We were in conversation about social networking sites like LinkedIn; Facebook; Twitter and referenced some web statistics that were mind-numbing:

• Facebook has over 350 million active users.
• It is the third most visited website.
• It has 600,000 new users daily.
• It ‘s fastest growing demographic is people over the age of 35.

While I struggle and contemplate how “viral and connected” I want to be with my outside world from a business and personal perspective, there is a massive movement toward greater social connectivity on a 24/7/365 basis.

An example of how this is playing out around us in our community… I was in conversation last night with a couple of parents with junior high and high school students.  We were talking about the way the parents and their children heard about the recent snow day at school.  The parents gathered their information from either the local television or radio announcements.  The children often received their information via texting one another and on some accounts were aware of the school closings before their parents were.

So what is this saying to us in a small business context?  I believe the answer is that we need to pay more attention to Social Networking.  It will require us to get more engaged in that arena out of necessity, even if it does not resonate within us personally as a ‘need’.

A decade ago, we would not think twice about should we have a business land-line, yellow page ads, regular print advertising campaigns through our familiar streams of communication like the newspaper or direct mail.  But that landscape continues to change rapidly, and will continue to evolve moving into the next decade.

Let’s not fossilize with a social networking medium for our business that is antiquated.  Let’s make a New Year’s commitment to utilize all the streams of communication that are currently available to us to encourage folks to continue doing business transactions within our great community as much as possible.  It is our responsibility to stay socially relevant and  connected to our client-base.  We will all benefit greatly from effective Social Networking on multiple levels.