… or is it ?

I bumped into a former colleague in town today and in response to his question about what I was up to I said not a lot as I had exited a mandate where there was a conflict of interest. He commented: “I admire your honesty but its not exactly lucrative is it ?”. No but…. three buts…. as someone once said “My reputation is all I have and I must not damage it” and as the maxim goes “Honesty pays” – this client will come back to me and indeed has just hired me for a totally different mandate – Why ? because I was so honest. And the third but… I find that when one door closes another one opens and reveals a path that is very often a far better one to travel.

I would say honesty can be potentially lucrative….

If you don’t get a ton of mail, just typing in the words you’re looking for usually does the trick. I can just type lisa in the search box and get all of the messages from my friend Lisa, southwest to bring up my ticket confirmations, or “bank statement” to help get my finances in order.

But the real power of Gmail search lies in search operators — words that help modify your queries. Search operators work pretty much the same way within Gmail as they do for Google. So, if I want the email Lisa sent me with her flight information so I know when to pick her up at the airport, I type from:lisa SFO. Likewise:

A link from my co-worker Michael: from:michael http
A photo from my mom: from:mom has:attachment
That last chat I had with one of the Gmail product managers: keith is:chat
All messages from ebay that aren’t outbid notices: ebay -outbid (the hyphen tells Gmail to return all of the messages that don’t contain the word that follows it)
The messages in my inbox sent directly to me that I haven’t read yet: to:me is:unread in:inbox

You can limit the scope of your search to a particular subject (subject:) or label (label:) as well. And you can get pretty fancy. Recently, I was trying to remember the date of my friend’s April birthday. I always send her a birthday email, so I searched to:maya (birthday OR bday) after:2007/4/1 before:2007/5/1. It’s the 19th.

Extracted from: How to find any email with Gmail search, posted by Arielle Reinstein, Product Marketing Manager, Tuesday, May 06, 2008 8:28 AM

TRACKING BUZZ ACROSS SOCIAL NETWORKS, FORUMS AND TRENDY WEBSITES

Meta Search Engines are under-the-radar rivals of Google Blog Search and Technorati. Sometimes they have gems the bigger guys don’t. A few:

Clusty enables searches for news, images, wikipedia articles and blogs.
Serph tracks buzz in real-time. Search for a product, company name or person. It will include results from blogs, news aggregators, social bookmarking sites (such as Magnolia and del.icio.us), image sharing sites like Flickr, and video sharing sites.
Zuula searches multiple sites at the same time. Run a web query; results from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa, Mahalo and other search sites will be separately tabbed for easy perusal.
Nielsen BrandPulse. This enables you to tap into forums, boards, Usenet newsgroups and blogs that may be discussing your company, brand or product.

Google Trends. What’s more popular: The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal? Google Trends lets you pit them against each other and graph the results. A broader product, Google Zeitgeist, tracks what users are querying most on the Google search engine.

Facebook Lexicon counts mentions of words and phrases on Facebook users’ profiles. Like Google trends, keywords can be pitted against each other (just separate them with a comma). For an example, see Clinton vs. Obama.

TweetScan enables users to search for product or company mentions in real-time across Twitter.com, a website that is popular with early adopters and tech lovers. Also see Twitterverse, which gives you a sense of commonly-tweeted topics of the day; Intwition, which tracks links shared on Twitter; and TweetClouds, which builds tag clouds based on your query. More tools for sifting through Twitter data, or tracking brand buzz on Twitter, are in this article.

BoardTracker lets marketers search for mentions in discussion boards. The homepage also features a dynamic tag cloud, so you can find out what products, brands and topics people are discussing most today.

Google Groups and Yahoo Groups let marketers sift through discussions occurring on, namely, Google or Yahoo Groups.

Much of the information in this MarketingVOX How-To was gleaned from The Art of Strategic Listening by Robert Berkman, who specializes in culling market intelligence from social media resources.

Google Blog Search enables searchers to sift through blog postings. Like typical search results, blog posts are ranked by relevance to your query. Like a regular web search, you may use Boolean commands. Advanced Blog Search lets you limit results to words in the blog title, posts at a certain URL, author name, dates written and language.

The order of results can also be changed by date and time — so you can see the newest postings first.

Caution: Google only indexes blog content from blog RSS feeds. That means Google Blog Search excludes blogs that do not generate a feed. What’s more, some blogs only syndicate the title and first paragraph of their posts, further limiting your results.

Other tips: consider mining non-English data when exploring Google Blog Search. As of April 2007, 37 percent of all blog posts were written in Japanese. If you’re willing to consider an outside vendor to manually track and translate non-English data on your behalf, Ogilvy PR and Edelman are two useful options.

Technorati Advanced Search. Since its launch in 2003, Technorati has focused on indexing blogs and other social media. Like Google, it has a proprietary ranking system: the perceived “authority” of a site is provided beside each result.

Advanced Search enables you to query for “all blogs” containing your search, “blogs about” your search or posts from a certain URL.

Technorati also enables Tag Search, which checks your query against the “tags” bloggers assign to their posts. Flickr photos and YouTube videos are also “tagged” by authors. Technorati searchers may terrace queries by blogs, photos, or videos.

If you query by tag, Technorati will also provide related tags that may be useful to you.

Do not overlook the Technorati Blog Directory. Instead of searching blog posts by the keywords they contain or by their tags, the blog directory lets you sift through blog descriptions, written by creators or authors.

Caution: Like Google Blog Search, Technorati only indexes some blogs, not all. And while searching by tag or directory description is useful, you are relying heavily on the ability of bloggers to honestly and accurately describe their own content.

Much of the information in this MarketingVOX How-To was gleaned from The Art of Strategic Listening by Robert Berkman, who specializes in culling market intelligence from social media resources.

Boolean logic is a system of showing relationships between sets by using the words “AND,” “OR,” and “NOT.” Boolean logic is recognized by many electronic searching tools as a way of defining a search string. So, Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT can refine your searches on Google (or any other search engine) by combining or limiting terms.

Here are some examples of boolean search strings:

mushing AND racing
caribou OR reindeer
fisheries NOT Alaska

Sets get smaller the more ” AND” is used, and larger the more “OR” is used. Although you might think “AND” would add more hits to a set, what it has actually added is limitations. The term “OR” adds possible options.

A company had a boiler that was working intermittently. They tried everything they could do but nothing worked. Finally they called in a consulting engineer, who they knew to be expensive but the best in the business.

He arrived and set to work studying the boiler, checking connections, temperatures, and overall operations. He then stepped back, stroked his chin and after a few minutes, made a mark on the side of the boiler. He then picked up a sledge hammer and took a full swing and hit the mark. The boiler gasped and sputtered, then started to work perfectly.

The consulting engineer then gave his bill to the client. The boss was shocked and said “I’m not paying $1000 for hitting a boiler with a sledge hammer.” I need to see a detailed invoice.

The consultant’s bill:
Hitting the boiler: $25
Knowing where to hit the boiler: $975

Takeaway: When setting billing rates, explain to your client that much of what you are being compensated for is diagnosis. The 10-20-30 years of experience you bring drives to a solution that the client or consultant can then implement. Consultants get a bad reputation when they try to diagnose without enough experience and then try to prescribe solution without enough skill.

SOURCE: IMC USA Daily Tips for Consultants #794: Explaining Your Fees May 19th, 2008

Back in May 2008 the USA Daily Tips for Consultants #798 discussed ‘going native’, – ie. knowing when you been on site at a client’s for too long. Here is the list of warning signs:

– You are asked by the client staff how to work the coffee machine

– You remember to bring your “contractor” ID badge but forget your wallet

– You are not displaced from your temporary office but new employees are sharing cubicles

– You know personal life details of the client’s night cleaning staff and security guards

– You discuss what needs to be repaired with the copier repair person (whom you also know on a first name basis)

– You are on the faculty for the new employee orientation program

– You use so many acronyms you no longer know whether they are yours or the client’s

– You are asked to serve on the the company picnic planning committee

– You are asked by the client to join the staff

– You begin to use the terms “us” and “we” when referring to the client organization

Takeaway: A hallmark of the professional management consultant is their independence and objectivity.

… and its relevance to management consulting.

The Hippocratic Oath is an oath traditionally taken by physicians pertaining to the ethical practice of medicine. It is widely believed that the oath was written by Hippocrates, the father of medicine, in the 4th century BC.Two lines that can be equally pertinent for management consultants are: I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and practice my art, respected by all men and in all times; but if I swerve from it or violate it, may the reverse be my lot.

In other words, know what you don’t know or don’t do very well and make sure that you have a list of specialists in these fields that you can either refer a client to or to whom you can sub-contract part of a mandate. For example, although I am a chartered accountant I always have a local accountant prepare Income Statements and Balance Sheets when I am putting together a feasibility study or business plan. In this way I play to my strengths and I do not start doing things that I am not qualified to do.

This does not detract from your reputation – on the contrary it enhances it as clients know that they can trust your judgement and that you have professional integrity.

Yes, we all know the elevator speech should be brief, that it should be how you help someone or a company solve a problem but it is also important that the person understands what you do.

So try this… explain to a high school student or your favourite aunt what service you provide. THEN, ask them to explain back to you what you do. Be open to clarifying questions.

Once you can explain your service in a way that doesn’t require specialised knowledge, you will have the basis for a great 2 minute introduction to your services.