DETROIT - This Corona Virus is everywhere you look, at least on the news, and it is all any of the reporters want to talk about. This rhetoric is now on all media channels and it is in just about every media headline. Right now there are 1.2 Billion dollar web pages that address the subject and tweets are flying on social media.
It is becoming quite clear that the traditional ways of doing business are going to be changing. There will be no more excessive touching and your communication skills, as well as your negotiation ability, will have to be brief and to the point. If you don't know how to sell then you're going to have a hell of a time. This is going to be the new direction for every business.
MY PATH TO LEARN HOW TO COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY
I'm going to relate a story to you from back in the late '90s. I dated a woman who was a drug addict when I lived out on the East Coast. There is no pretty way to say it so I'll just tell you what happened. This woman was very sick and relied on her pretty looks to get stuff she wanted off of me. But I noticed a red flag when I would get her on the phone. She had zero communication skills of any sort on the phone and was pretty powerless. It was like dating two different people and eventually, I weaseled my way out of it. What it taught me was that your physical body language can be a seductive and powerful asset while your phone communication skills could be a disaster. This is what led me to learn more about Neuro-Linguistic Programing, (NLP). This is the study of human behavior and being able to both read and communicate through body language, posture as well as speaking using vocal tone. It is a study that uses the whole body including eye movements to communicate and is essential if you want to be able to read people.
This skill was not easy to get down and it took a lot of practice. There was a period of my life when I had no advertising agent and I had to rely on my own two feet. I started to study body posture and how to use vocal inflection to lure people into a conversation and then feel them out to see if they would be a good fit. I ended up turning down a lot of jobs that could have ended up badly. In short, I avoided drama and only took the kind of clients that I wanted to work with. Cherry-picking the best people to work with turned out to be a winning strategy. This could work for you too but you have to learn how to read people so they are a good fit for you.
I ended up seeking NLP people in my area and even did some work with people over the phone. I learned how to catch people's eye movements to seek out sincerity. Eventually, I transferred these skills over to my family life and my dating life until I found the right woman for me. These are essential life skills and you can use them interchangeably from business to your personal life. Reading people effectively will help you screen out the ones who would make your life difficult or lead you off down the wrong path.
Since taking 40 weeks of Neuro-Linguistic Programming I was able to read people to the point where I could spot sincerity, half-truths and flat out bullshit. The other thing I began to do was take a good look at my social media and clean house.
STARTING OVER IN THE COVID-19 AND SOCIAL MEDIA AGE
Let me start out by saying that you are reading an independent website run by yours truly. This is my company and I call all of the shots in it. There is no compromise from me to social media companies. I have found social media to be seriously restricting. There are security measures put in place to block your progress and from having you communicate to anybody without paying a heavy price. This is a money-sucking treadmill that is set up to take money out of your wallet consistently. This can add up very quickly and you might have nothing to show for it.
I learned very quickly that Social Media, Facebook, and Instagram in particular, could be very limited and very restrictive. They would often ban my account for very bizarre reasons like posting a Led Zeppelin album cover in one of my posts. I was locked out for seven days but I had offended a Muslim who didn't even live in America. Facebook was pulling really dirty moves and putting international spies on my personal account to monitor my activities. There is a simple test you can do to see who is secretly monitoring your account. I was disappointed to learn that I had my own peanut gallery from Chad, South Africa, Nigeria, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and other offshore countries. I had similar problems with Instagram and found their feedback to be extremely limiting. In short, you have to color in the lines and not express your true inner thoughts or risk getting your account banned. Both of these platforms push for a politically charged leftist agenda. There is also a politically correct agenda that leaves you without a voice. They want you to be a cardboard cutout who follows the main mass media narrative and that doesn't cut it with me.
We had trouble trying to get along with our hosting company too. They are an interesting bunch and tend to make life more difficult than it need be. They wanted us to put all of our eggs into a Wordpress format and fumble along with their ugly web pages. The last time we played the game none of our pages would even pop up in Google let alone get indexed and this went on for months. We finally had to give some refunds out to one of our clients. The situation was unacceptable. Our hosting platform changed their C Panel requirements and made all of our Wordpress pages obsolete overnight. We had to start completely over again and this was heartbreaking and insane. But we did it and this time we decided to create hand-cut pages by scratch and not use any WYSIWYG wizards and plug-ins and so on. We did the whole damn thing over again and then and only then did our pages start to appear on the front pages of Google again. The interesting thing about this is that we were able to get our pages ranked on page 1 in the same day.
You will have to have many stories about your business to make them appear on the first page in some cases. But you can also get them into a directory that will rank your business on the first page of Google. We offer those solutions and are now rolling them out. In addition to this, I would consider mobile pages and Alexa search based media pages to get more attention. Up until just recently, the vocal search capability was very limited and a grey science. Now there are new technologies being developed that will assist companies with audio vocal search right from your mobile phones.
To wrap it up you will need to get in front of your customer's faces. You will need to put your marketing messages on the web and then send them to your audience. You will need to identify that audience so you are not just shooting arrows in the dark and use some form of paid advertising. As of this writing, we are hearing very good returns on Twitter's paid search program and hearing that it is cost-effective. You will have to have an active capture mechanism to catch leads with either an email link, an active phone button or a lead capture form. Your material has to be ready for this new audience who you cannot touch, or see, or even talk to. Many businesses have vacated until the panic is over and some have already quit for good. The whole landscape is changing as we know it and if you want to stay in business it is going to be necessary to get ready.
SAFETY BEGINS WITH YOU
BUSINESS AND COVID-19!!
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