Tag: social media

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HR Tech

Eureka! Unlock the Power of “Remote Intuition” in Zoom/Teams/Google Meet

Written by (tk) krishna thothadri on Digilah (Tech Thought Leadership)

Intuition – The X factor critical to generating ideas collaboratively but not something one expects over a Teams workshop involving a dozen people across five time zones, multiple languages and ethnicities. Unlocking the power of collective intuition had been my forte in the hundreds of workshops I had conducted during the pre-COVID decade. I was a firm believer that the revolutionary efficiency of Zoom/ Teams could never deliver the magical inefficiency of unstructured intuition and ideation. Physical workshops were the Hogwarts of collective intuition, and “Remote Meetings” were the Death Eaters! I had completely stopped doing such workshops.

As COVID dragged on, Teams, Zoom and Google Meet tried to address the issue with rooms, Whiteboard and Jamboard. I experimented with these shiny new toys but quickly realized that remote meetings had become camera-off, mute-on time capsules when people multi-tasked; learning new ways to jam about ideas was an extra behaviour change no one wanted to do.

One year into COVID, I found inspiration from an unlikely source. My middle-school son was attending remote classes and he was sharing ideas with his classmates! His teachers had found a way to keep self-learning and collaborative intuition alive. There were no new shiny toys, just basic stuff- Google Search( text, images, Youtube), Google Slides, PowerPoint, the laptop’s camera, and the Chat inside Google Meet.

I had my Eureka moment- stick with the familiar, just tweak it to make it a little unfamiliar.

  1. Define the challenge and expectations with the decision-maker, not the minions co-ordinating the workshop
  2. Zero meeting time for information sharing; send everything as pre-reads a week in advance
  3. Energy is the key to intuition so break up the workshops into several 2-hour sessions
  4. Child-like output format: create a simple, visually evocative frame that can hold 7-15 words to headline the idea (e.g.billboard, front of pack, etc.)
  5. Create trigger questions and populate the frame with idea starters to fire participants’ intuition
  6. Encourage people to submit their ideas a few hours ahead of the session. Curate the ideas into themes
  7. In the session, invite creators to explain their ideas. Allow them to use a few supporting slides by sharing their screens
  8. Use the trigger questions and ideas to generate more ideas
  9. Do not use the session to operationalise the ideas; stop at overall ‘explore/discard’
  10. Let the core team work through the operational implications and send it out as pre-read for the plenary session with the decision-maker and stakeholders.
  11. Close the exercise with a final 60min decision-making session
  12. Cameras on! Ensure 100% attention throughout the session.

Can this make ” Remote Intuition” scalable, fun and effective? The answer is Yes!

Want to find out how? Let’s chat over a coffee, WhatsApp me at +6593891694

Categories
Digi Tech

6Cs to Success on Instagram: Are you game?

Written by Anjuli Gopalakrishna on Digilah (Tech Thought Leadership)

Instagram started as a photo sharing app in 2010 and has made its way in the past 12 years into an app that offers multiple content formats: Instagram Stories, Lives, long form videos, Reels, Interaction features and much more. The people who use Instagram daily have grown to around 2 billion in numbers. And 500+ million people use Instagram Stories daily. More than 200+ million businesses are on Instagram. A diversified user base makes it an ideal platform for your brand or business to reach out to your target audience and influence them.

So how exactly can you build your tribe on Instagram and get them to know, like and trust you and eventually to buy from you?

I poured over many successful Instagram accounts, went through 100s of YouTube videos from the internet gurus, tried all the black hat hacks touted out there on the Instagram to grow your following. I studied the exact system the ace Instagrammers followed to try and understand what really works on this platform.

After months of deep dive, I cracked the code and came up with my own 6 C framework to success on this amazing platform. This is a step-by-step framework that will enable you to attract your dream audience, grow your genuine following and influence on Instagram and convert them into paying customers without the overwhelm and anxiety or the need to be glued to mobile phone 24/7. Read on if you want o learn more.

The first C: Clarity

This is the fundamental step. You need to know you ‘why’ to be on Instagram before ‘what’ and ‘how’ to be successful. Why do you need to be on Instagram? Who do you want to serve? What problem can you solve for them? What reasons can you give them to follow you? What’s your niche? Who is your ideal customer avatar?  What keeps them up at night? These deep and fundamental questions are essential to answer to build the strategic foundation for your Instagram success.

From optimizing your Instagram bio / profile to planning your feed content and story highlights, this clarity will pave the way for building blocks of your content messaging and formats.

The 2nd C: Content

Out of the clarity of purpose flows the best content that resonates with your target audience.  There are possibly only three reasons that people consume content on any platform. It educates, it entertains, or it inspires.  Your job is to figure out what might be of use to your target audience. Remember everybody wants to listen to the ‘WIIFM” radio (What’s in it for me). Place your focus on what they need and serve them with that content that fulfills that need. And given the digital world we live in today, it is easy to figure out what your target audience needs, if you care to listen. A simple Google Suggest can be used to glean into the minds of your people. Keyword planner tool, Answer the Public or many such tools are available for you to do your content research and create your content plan.

The 3rd C: Consistency

To build the ‘KLT” factor or the ‘know, like and trust’ factor with your tribe, you need to show up for them consistently. There is no other way to build a community around your brand or business. Mere exposure effect will ensure that you stay top of the mind of your tribe. I see many businesses lose heart when they don’t see instant results from their content lose their motivation to post and share useful content consistently. The steam dies off. But here’s the point you are missing. It is those who may not have interacted with your content, but the silent lurkers who simply watch and consume your content without giving out any signals that end up becoming your customers when their time of need arrives. So don’t be disheartened and be guided by vanity metrics of ‘likes’ and ‘follows’, instead focus on consistently providing value to your tribe and sure enough they will convert.

A strategy of content pillars and category-based system works best to make the job of consistent content pipeline flowing. Think of 10-12 categories that you can place your content in, catering to different needs at different stages of your target audience in their buying journey. There are many content-scheduling tools available out there that can help you to stay consistent with your content. My favorite is Social Bee.io which enables you to manage and automate your content posting for all your profiles in one place and is super value for money for the paid version.

The 4th C: Community

When you start showing up consistently with value adding content, you are bound to start attracting your tribe to your Instagram profile and slowly building a community.  One thing to remember when building your community is that social media platforms are meant for being ‘social’. It is not a place where you just sell or talk about yourself all the time. That would be such a big put off. Instead engage with others, leave genuine comments on other’s content, join the conversations, leave meaningful value adding bits to the conversations and the community will reward you with engagement. Instagram has so many features for you to build a high engagement with your tribe through stickers like polls, ask me a question, emoji slider bars in the Stories. Make use of them all to truly engage and learn from your tribe.

The 5th C: Connection

Once you have active engaged community on your Instagram profile, it is time for you to build deeper connections with your people. Take the effort to connect with them through conversations in the DMs. Instagram Stories allows you to directly start conversations with your story engagers in the DMs. Again, remember to keep the conversation flow natural. Be interested in them and try to understand their needs first before rushing to pitch your product or service or making a sales offer. Just talk to them. Warm them up, nurture them by offering a freebie or something of value so that you can take the conversation to the next level through other channels such as email or even DMs.

It is a slow process. Like dating. You don’t ask the person to marry you on the first date. It takes time and effort to get to know each other, build trust, before you can go for the big ask, the proposal to marry. Take it slow and easy and keep the conversation flow natural.

There are many innovative features available in Instagram DMs to take advantage of. Voice notes, video messages, video calls, saved replies, gifs and even automation for you to engage with your tribe in Instagram DMs. Sky is the limit if you can make use of all the features with your imagination and creativity.

The 6th C: Conversion

Converting your prospects into paying customers is the final and the most rewarding steps in the framework literally speaking. Afterall, you want all your efforts to finally end up making some money for you. This is the step you need to be well prepared for with a well set up sales conversion funnel that makes it easy and friction free for your warm leads to convert and make the purchase. Your landing pages for your products and services must be able to act as your salesperson to answer all their questions or objections. Be ready with your offers and bonuses to get them to open their wallets and credit cards for you.

Now there you have it! The 6 Cs to Success Step by Step framework for you to follow on Instagram. I would like to invite you to join my free online course Instagram Influence Foundations at this link. Once you are happy with my style of teaching and are ready to take your Instagram strategy to the next level, you can take a deep dive with the deep dive online course Instagram Influence Mastery 2022 and beyond with 60+ video lessons. You can take this course anytime anywhere at your own pace. Once you buy it, you get a lifetime access, and all the updated content comes to you for free.

That’s true, we need to keep adding content as the Instagram platform keeps changing and evolving. 

Categories
Digi Tech

I’m Linda

Written by Linda Wells on Digilah (Tech Thought Leadership)

I am not a tech geek. I am not an academic professor at your local university. I’m just me! and all I want to do is show people what they are eating/drink/consuming and the harm it does and nudge them to pivot to healthy food and drinks, plus increasing their physical activity.

Before the global pandemic happened, I had a small business that did just that – face to face workshops and speaking gigs at conferences, workshops and meetings – all within a few kilometres of where I lived (well, maybe up to 500kms).

Now … My clients are global, some of them 16,500kms away. Why? Because of technology and the digital revolution, we are currently in.

Whilst I ran live workshops on my topic of healthy food, drinks and exercise and I always dreamed of creating online content, making some online courses on a digital platform. The truth is, I didn’t think I was smart enough to do that!!

I am smart in my thought leadership sector (for example I know what artificial numbers 950 and 951 mean and what harm they do to our body … check the closest drink you have on your desk while reading this and see if it includes those), but tech guru: NO. I know how to achieve the goal of 10,000 steps a day, but how to understand the digital world: NO.

When the pandemic hit, I had just moved to another State with no friends, no business contacts, not a member of any business forums or groups and had no work opportunities at all. So, guess what I did?

I decided to put my content online. I searched digital platforms, chose a few to test and ended up subscribing to Thinkific and put my courses online. I made video content. I learnt how to edit the content, how to add to YouTube, how to create the captions etc. I created resources and pdfs for students to download as well.

I used to use all the MS(Microsoft) things, MS Word, MS PowerPoint, MS Excel and had used these for many, many years (I’m not telling you how many as I don’t want to disclosure how old I actually am – haha).

Now I use Google Drive, Google Docs, I use Zoom (doesn’t everyone), I use MS Teams, I create content in Canva, I’ve do email video messages via Loom, I use Mailchimp for my newsletters – I have learnt so much from my digital and technology journey since 2020 – all the while teaching people how to understand what is in discretionary, ultra-processed food and drinks.

I’m Linda from e-RAW.

e-RAW is a digital learning company that helps people transform their lives from consuming ultra-processed food/drinks and risks to their health to the best version of themselves they have ever been. Bonus: they get to pass it on to their family and friends – at home and in the workplace.

In fact, the word ‘discretionary’ wasn’t in my narrative, until I asked a group of smarter people than me on an online Retail Food Environment course from Monash University with me, what word I should use instead of ‘crap food’ to be a little bit kinder. This was on a digital Zoom weekly course roundup and guest speaker gig. So, I learned from my fellow students the word ‘discretionary’ on a tech video helping us with our online course we were studying from our home offices or workplace offices. See how important tech has been, even when it is just in the background!

Categories
Digi Tech

OWN YOUR BRAND ON SOCIAL MEDIA TO SUCCEED

Written by Lourd Vijay – Digilah (Thought Leadership)

Founder of LVDS (Lourd Vijay’s Dance Studio)

Hear here if you are not upto reading!

https://open.spotify.com/embed/show/6ukAttNgIccm87g1oHMcWe?utm_source=generator

Social media has very drastically altered the world of business. Every entrepreneur or company has to constantly reinvent themselves to stay afloat; making it a challenge to comprehend the present trends, the ever-changing algorithms, the indecipherable analytics and the sudden upspring of agencies and social media marketers.

For small enterprises like ours that offer niche services like teaching dance, choreographies and performances, and predominantly catering to the hobby-classes market, social media has worked to be both a boon and a bane.

When it comes to delivering great content, dance as an activity and an art form fits perfectly to drive the kind of content that grabs enough attention, likes and follows, but then the big question is “does it bring a brand like ours a measured, tangible outcome?”

We, in the past have had an array of professionals, agencies, freelancers and interns with a social media background who have helped us with our presence but unfortunately the returns and benefits have been dismal. The ad spends have had no valuable outcome as the leads were largely irrelevant and were from a geographical region that wasn’t where we operated within. However, the influx of user-friendly and life-saving tools such as Canva for great creatives, IMovies or Inshot for video edits & Wix for intelligent websites, has lowered our dependence on social media professionals while also empowering us with a better sense of aesthetic. Functional tools such as these are the need of the hour.

My experience has made it very evident that organic growth is the only way forward in an industry like ours. Which means we need to churn out great content every single day. Our quest, hence, is to answer this sole question – “What is great content?”

Over time we have built a better hit-ratio for the kind of content we post. The turnaround time to interact with our followers has also improved drastically and our costs have reduced leading to faster and better ROI(Return on Investment).  This has obviously come at the cost of some preliminary investment in terms of time and resources. The effort seems to have paid off for now, which we hope continues until Metaverse decides to throw us off with new algorithm alterations.

Therefore, my learning’s from building my business through social media has been:

  • Look beyond vanity metrics, clearly stating your KPIs
  • Use reports and analytics to see what is working and what is not on a regular basis
  • Most important own your brand, personality and tone

Being optimistic, we hope to overcome the setbacks Covid has caused and evolve into a national brand and an enterprise that operates across varied geographies. The graduation to being a national brand would enable us to hire the brightest minds from the social media industry who can drive up value from the word ‘go’.

Until then, Canva is the tool for survival.