If doing business with a sense of fun works for Richard Branson, that’s good enough for me
In recent weeks my partner Suzie Cheel and I have been very preoccupied with re-focusing our consulting business. Today, prompted by a four year old blog post about Sir Richard Branson’s business values, we reminded ourselves about the necessity of having a very clear, understandable, easy-to-communicate values framework for the business. And that led to a very productive discussion about our marketing.
Although we have had the consulting business in place for over twenty years, and our formal company structure for some sixteen of those, what we have been setting up with our all-new, all singing and dancing Social Media Powered Marketing is in many ways a new business, with some of the usual challenges attendant on such ventures.
It’s involved getting out of our comfort zones and some 4 am starts to take advantage of coaching sessions from the USA. And balancing other commitments, including family ones, some travel, my ongoing coaching commitments and so on.
We have been attending to a lot of practical details of how the business will work, getting clarity about our target market, developing marketing plans and initiatives, ensuring the supply of some outsourced services, developing product. All good, all necessary. But not much, at least explicitly, about the values framework.
Then today, in a management magazine I was scanning over breakfast, I read some comments by a top executive which reminded me of how essential it is for any business with long term prospects to define and articulate its values. I made a mental note to get around to that. “Too busy” right now, of course. Which if I heard a coaching client say I would no doubt ask, so when would be a good time to identify and document your company values?
Physician, heal thyself!
It’s not that we are working in a values-free zone, or that we don’t have shared values guiding the way we do business. Just that we had not had that specific conversation to identify our values in sufficient clarity to guide and monitor the way the business operates.
No doubt because I had been thinking briefly about these issues, my eye was caught a bit later in the morning, while fixing some photos that had somehow gone missing from older blog posts here, by a post I had written back in 2005 about the values espoused by Sir Richard Branson for his Virgin brand enterprises. One version of those values lists the following:
- Value for money
- Quality
- Reliability
- Innovation
- Sense of fun
The first four make eminent good sense to me but I like particularly having “sense of fun” inscribed as a key company value. I suspect that, in a sea of companies offering internet marketing services, it could be easy to think we have to be and be seen to be Very Serious.
Because business is serious, right?
Well, if Richard Branson and Virgin can be so successful (and not just in monetary terms), we can hardly be said to be irresponsible about our business if we choose to be known as people who are committed to having fun, as well as to providing value for money, quality, reliability and innovation, and whatever other “serious” values we might choose to incorporate.
Incidentally, taking time out just now to have that conversation about our values and to agree definitely that Sense of Fun was going in the list, we went on to have a further, very productive conversation about our branding – which frankly until this morning had been a bit fuzzy and is now clear enough for us to have a story we are keen to tell. But you know how it is, we had spent some money on branding and would now have to change and probably spend some more money.
We took the long view, better to get it right now, even if there is a bit of extra expense, than to stick stubbornly to something just because we have paid some design costs. Specifically, we are switching from “Webarts Online Marketing” to “Social Media Powered Marketing” – if you check out the site in the next day or so, just imagine that the name has been changed 
.
All in all, a fast trajectory of marketing clarification and decision-making between breakfast and lunch, triggered by the initially disconcerting and disruptive effect on my thinking from seeing “sense of fun” listed as a business value. But a process which rapidly pulled some loose threads together and which we believe gave us a better framework with which to proceed.
So what would your business look like if you incorporated a sense of fun as a key value? Or have you already done that? Or does the idea appal you?
I’d love to hear about any other companies you know of – including your own – that have incorporated a sense of fun in their values framework. No doubt there are some obvious ones, such as clown services for children’s parties. But what “serious” businesses are there, besides Virgin, which include a sense of fun in their values, explicitly or implicitly in the way they deliver service?
[Image credit: "Branson posing with the band", courtesy riz94107 on Flickr, Creative Commons]
Gravatars – What, Why and How to Get One
A quick guide to the gravatar
Note: this post includes quite specific details about how to get a usable picture – may be -101 obvious to some, but we all have to start somewhere and I remember when it was all a mystery to me!
What is a Gravatar?
“Gravatar”? Strange word: and unless the dictionary on the shelf in your office or at home is very new, you almost certainly won’t find it there – maybe not even in an online dictionary. Apparently the word is made up from Globally Recognized Avatar, using “avatar” not in the Hindu sense of an incarnation of a higher being, but in the – literally more mundane – computer usage of a graphical representation of a user.
So Why would you want a gravatar?
Personal interests aside, it’s simply about branding.
I realize some people don’t want to have their personal photos online or use their personal photos as part of their branding. My own view is that your branding will be more effective when potential customers or colleagues can see a picture of you. Just as I believe that your comment on a blog post or forum thread will be more effectively communicated if people can see a picture of you. Matthew Stibbe has an excellent post on using a good photo to build your personal brand.
Of course, your gravatar does not have to be of you. It could be, for example, a company logo. There is a whole side conversation that could be had here about corporate and personal branding, but for the moment and admittedly at the risk of over-simplifying the underlying issues, think about what you are wanting to communicate: if you want or need people to see you as someone they can – in the marketing phrase du jour – know, like and trust, ask yourself whether that trifecta is more likely to get up with a (good, professional) picture of you or one of the company badge?
How do you go about getting a gravatar?
Easy peasy. Three steps.
1. You go to the Gravatar site and click on the Get Your Gravatar Today button. They then send you an email so you can confirm your application and have access to your new account.
2. You find or create a picture 80 x 80. If you are worried about how to edit a picture to get that size, Irfanview is a free, downloadable program with great editing tools. You will need a picture which is square. To get that you may have to crop a picture you have: Irfanview is great for cropping.
If you need to get instructions for cropping, search on <Crop> in the Irfanview Help screen.
You select the part of the picture you want and make it square. You do that by adjusting the frame until the width and height coordinates match (or nearly match within a pixel or so) as you will see in the blue section at the top of the Irfanview window: in the illustration here I have adjusted to 259×259, because I want to see how it looks before I reduce it to 80×80).
After you have cropped the picture, save it as something like imagename259.jpg (to avoid confusing it with the original or the avatar picture you are about to make).
Once you have saved the cropped version and if you are happy with that, it’s time to make the smaller, 80×80 version. With the cropped (square) image open, click on Image -> Resize/Resample and you will see a box as displayed here.
Uncheck the box that says <Preserve aspect ratio>, then type 80 in the width box and 80 in the height box (see screenshot below). Then save as something like imagename80x80.jpg so you will know that’s the one.
3. You go into your Gravatar account and upload your lovely new 80×80 picture.
You’re done. And as Mike Bergin explains in his helpful post, Get Your Gravator On, which I drew on for this post:
For the motivation to research and write this post thanks to the post on the subject at Blogging for Boomers.
I look forward to seeing more pictures of smiling (or serious) faces on the comments here.
If you have any challenges with setting up your gravatar, please leave a comment here and I will do what I can to help you sort it out – or another reader may well get in first and help.
For WordPress bloggers who would rather not have their site plastered with just the standard Gravatar logo, the default where a commenter has not activated their own gravatar, there is a very interesting option with WP-Identicon. Haven’t explored it or tried it – just noticed as I’m wrapping up this post.