What are some of your favorite podcasts to listen to in the morning?

An interesting question and some amazing answers here,

I second every podcast mentioned here some of the stuff mentioned I am addicted to.

so here is my list I hope I don't duplicate any of the resources already mentioned,

Inside Personal Growth

This is how they describe themselves
“Inside Personal Growth provides listeners with high quality interviews featuring leading authors in the field of personal development.”

Podcast Episode Archives - The One You Feed

I came across this podcast from Maria Popova’s brain pickings , I find the podcast both beneficial and fruitful.

the idea of the podcast comes from an ancient story that an old man was teaching his grandson and told him that inside all of us two wolfs a good one and a bad one and they are in a constant battle, so the kid asked grandad which one wins? the grandfather said the one you feed.

Writers' Bloc Podcast

Even if you are not a writer I think you can appreciate the create of writing specifically of those who create some of best selling TV series and programs.

The show describes itself as
“Writers’ Bloc is a podcast about comedy writing hosted by J.R. Havlan, an 8-time Emmy Award-winning writer for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. “

Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Interesting in-depth conversation with some of the most talented creative minds, the podcast explore, investigate, create and enlighten about the subject of creativity and innovation.

Books and Authors

I will directly quote the description here “Featuring Open Book and A Good Read. In Open Book, Mariella Frostrup talks to leading authors about their work. A Good Read features Harriett Gilbert discussing a range of favourite titles with guests.”

92Y
92nd Street Y (92Y) is an arts, educational, cultural and community center serving people of all ages, races, faiths and backgrounds. The most recent episode was with Actress Natalie Portman

The Entrepreneurs - Radio

A tour around the startup world, Looking at the global SME’s and business world, very interesting thoughts and interviews.

Interviewing Authors with Tim Knox, Author, Talk Radio Host, Serial Entrepreneur, Small Business Expert - Interviews with bestselling authors.

Interviewing Authors is one of the Web’s premiere blog and podcast destinations that focuses on the process of creating, writing, editing, publishing, marketing, and selling an author’s work.

I am working on a list of 100 must listen to podcast.I will share it here upon completion.

feel free to reach me on Twitter : @fouad_khafaga

Brand Biology (Define your species).

Brand Biology

“Brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

Marty Neumeier

Brand biology is a metaphorical term that I will be using during this series of articles, to refer to different types of elements, factors, cognitive phenomena, and components, that gives a brand life and help the brand survive in the different environment of the market.

Your brand biology is your customer’s categorization, your brand’s DNA is your audience perception, and your clients market is your future environment.  The target market defines your species and their thoughts shape your organisms.

There is more than one element to the idea of brand biology and customer categorization, in this article I will review two elements, the first is related to customer perception and the second is cognitive behavior.

Customer’s perception is manipulated and persuaded by factors like brand color, name, personal experience and campaigns.

In a paper that was published by California State Polytechnic University, titled the Effect of theForeign Brand on Consumer Perception.  The paper empirically examines the influence of brand names (foreign versus national) on consumer perception.

The results support the hypothesis that the national brand elicits more positive consumer perception than the foreign brands. In this study, consumer perception is operationalized by four constructs: attitude toward the brand, purchase intention, advertisement feeling, and attitude toward the advertisement.

This is important in terms of brand biology; just the awareness of your species as mentioned in this study affects your survival. In future articles we will look at your brand survival tactics, brand environment, brand biotic and abiotic.

The second element that affects the categorization of the brand is cognitive behavior, as humans we tend to create mental short cuts, especially in the age of the digital worlds the choices of any product or service could be overwhelming.

Within social psychology, cognitive miser is an umbrella theory of social cognition that brings together previous research on heuristics and attribution biases.

 The theory suggests that humans, valuing their mental processing resources, find different ways to save time and effort when negotiating the social world. The term cognitive miser was first introduced by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor in 1984.

 We tend to crate mental short cuts to ease the process of digesting, transforming and exploring data of any kind. The brain activity of categorizing data lies at the heart of cognitive economy. We treat things as being of a kind so we don’t waste neural processing cycles in details that are irrelevant to the core o the process itself.

When we go to the beach we don’t remember every grain of sand, when we look at the forest we don’t name every tree that we see.

And there is a very good evolutionary reason or this, it’s to prevent our brains from getting overwhelmed with data, making sure we don’t have too many brain tabs open at the same time or too many labeled products on the same shelf because too many choices are paralyzing in most cases.

The process of categorizing data in three main ways

the first one is the Gross or partial appearance which means if they look the same they are the same.
The second form of categorizing is functionality; appearance in this case is not the major concern if it can be used for writing it belongs to the writing tools section and sometimes we might call it a pen.
 Finally the third way of categorizing is conceptual and a perfect example of that is the tool box “If it fixes things it’s in the box”

In order for your brand biology to be compatible in such a harsh environment, in order or your kind to survive, the brand must master the skills necessary to stand out among your species.

First Study the industry before entering the market, understand the audience reactions to the existing, past and future products and services in your industry.  That will provide some needed input and insight into the customer’s perception.

Second define your species if your brand is serving an appearance, a function or a specific concept. Make sure you highlight those features build your campaigns based on how unique and authentic your brand is.

The elements of brand biology are many. Customer’s perception and audience cognitive behavior are two essential components of determining the DNA of your brand biology. 

The Effective Social Media Executive (part 1)

The Effective Social Media Executive (part 1)

This is a part of a series of articles about social media executives influenced by the father of modern management book “the effective executive”.

The book actually struck me as being extremely relevant in both principal and practice so I will pick those concepts and try to implement them into the social media field to produce the effective social media executive.

In his book Peter Drucker dedicates a whole chapter to contribution, which is the contribution of the executive to the company or the organization.

This is a profound question to any social media executive, what is your contribution to the field or to the market, if you’re just posting, updating, changing profile pictures that could be great active and could drive both traffic and engagement yet it is not effective.  It’s just posting.

How to determine then what should be the focus of ones contribution?  As per Peter there are four factors

The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four

Basic requirements of effective human relations:

• Communications.

• Teamwork.

• Self-development.

• Development of others.
To break down these four focuses in social media terms we need to look at each of them closely

•   Communication :

Communications have been in the center of managerial attention for years. In modern society however there has been great concern with social media communications. Now it is the social media executive responsibility to ask questions like
 what are the contributions for which will be known for?
What should we expect of you as your audience, friends and followers?
What is the best utilization of your knowledge and your ability?”

Which channels are you using and why?

•    Team work :

The focus on contribution leads to communications sideways and thereby makes teamwork possible. The effective work is actually done in and by teams of people of diverse knowledge and skills. These people have to work together voluntarily and according to the logic of the situation and the demands of the task, rather than according to a formal jurisdictional structure. The question here should be “Who has to use my output for it to become effective?”.

I am still amazed by facebook pages and twitter accounts that still talk only about themselves, their offers, their employees, and their company culture.

Social media as a medium gave us an opportunity to work together as a team of knowledge workers.
Define your output; define your audience and who can benefit from that. Then find you master group or your community creating a dynamic thought process resulting in an output that is both beneficial and effective.

      

•     Individual self-development:

In large measure depends on the focus on contributions. The man who asks of himself, “What is the most important contribution I can make to the performance of this organization?”Asks in effect, “What self-development do I need? What knowledge and skill do I have to acquire to make the contribution should be making? What strengths do I have to put to work? What standards do I have to set myself?”

•   Development of others:
  
  The executive who focuses on contribution also stimulates others to develop themselves. He sets standards which are not personal but grounded in the requirements of the task. At the same time, they are demands for excellence. For they are demands for high aspiration, for ambitious goals, and for work of great impact. People in general, and knowledge workers grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted.

So in order to recap in social media terms these 4 main focus points can be easily implemented in our social media strategy and our social media lives.

A-     Communicate : Be social don’t act Social

B-      Teams work: Find your tribe , create a mastermind group

C-      Self development: it’s a dynamic social world and you should be too.

D-     Development of others: adapted to the platforms and set bar for the achievement for yourself and others.

Thanks for reading I hope that you found this adaptation of the book interesting would love to hear your thoughts feel free to
tweet me @fouad_khafaga
or
googl+ :khafagafouad@gmail.com 

Just what kind of a leader are you? (Expectations & knowledge skills)

I have developed a healthy addiction to MOOC’s they have a great impact on my understanding of marketing, markets , Human thought and Leadership.

In a MOOC offered by edx.org Titled “Leaders of learning” they introduced an interesting four models of leadership that I am about to share with you.

Hierarchical Individual Expectation:

Being a successful leader in a Hierarchical Individual learning environment means bringing the external requirements of a governing institution (Frequently state or federal government) into the work and practices of the organization.           

Knowledge & Skills:

•Manages successful superior subordinate relationships.

•Focuses the organization and its learners on clear performance targets

•Marshals the human and material resources of the organization in the service of those performance targets.

•Builds and sustains stable relationships with learners and their families based on high expectations.

Hierarchical Collective Expectations:

Being a successful leader in a Hierarchical Collective learning environment means leading according to the requirements of an external authorizing environment, while also encouraging and enforcing the norms, values, principles, and practices specific to the learning community.         

 

Knowledge & Skill Requirements:

A Hierarchical Collective learning environment typically values a leader who:

•Articulates and models the key values of the organization.

•Incorporates external requirements into the specific values and practices of the community.

•Builds and sustains stable relationships with learners and their families based on norms specific to this learning community.

Distributed  Individual Expectations:

Being a  successful  leader  in  a  Distributed  Individual  learning  environment  means  articulating  an  appealing  vision of  learning That  is  shaped  by  the  needs,  preferences,  and dispositions  of individual learners.

Knowledge & Skill Requirements:

A  Distributed Individual learning environment typically values a leader who:

•Responds to learner  needs  and  interests,  and  consider  how  they  will  change  over  time.

•Is unafraid to embark on new, entrepreneurial ventures.

•Builds and inspires a team of collaborators with diverse knowledge & skillsets.

•Mobilizes  human  and  material  resources  to  respond  to  learner  needs.

•Closely  monitors  learners’  engagement,  interest,  and  connections  to  the  learning  environment.

Distributed Collective Expectations:

Being a successful leader in a Distributed Collective learning environment means identifying and supporting the common values, beliefs, and goals that bind the learning community together. Often it means openness to sharing ownership of an educational vision with the community.    

Leadership Knowledge & Skills:

A Distributed Collective learning environment typical values a leader who:

•Inspires individuals and organizations with common interests to operate in networked relationships

•Recognizes shared community values and articulates them within the community and the larger world

•Identifies community members ‘resources, and motivates members to share them

•Brings resources from the external world into the community while maintaining community norms and standard.

Source: http://bit.ly/2085N5N