I’m not a doctor but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. That being said I did work for a large cell phone carrier and visited a testing lab where all the engineers used hands free sets with phones they were testing. Understandable since they get in demo phones for testing and until they do, they have no idea what the radiation levels are being emitted.
Now I’m not going to argue if cell phones are safe or not. There are plenty of new articles out there like this one from The Street, but I did find this useful CNET site that does describe the cell phone radiation levels and what they mean as well has list currently manufactured cell phones and their radiation levels.
In a nutshell, I think I will use my bluetooth until all this is sorted out.
This weekend a local wine store opened in town and my wife and I decided to spend time on main street and check it out. It was a nice store in a historic building with a good selection of wine.
I notice a buddy of mine who is an area wine rep was helping the new store owner by doing some tastings in the back of the store. Great guy and very knowledgable. Never got to talk to him as he was helping another couple.
We browsed the store for probably 15 minutes to see if he would free up. As we perused the wine there were some unique selections that we studied. We might have even bought a few of these unique bottles but nobody helped us. I am assuming the other two other folks were the owner and employee or partner. Not once did they greet us, welcome us to the shop, or asked if we had questions. Nor did they seem busy as they just hung out at the cash register talking to each other.
Now this might be a bit obvious but if a person comes in your shop they are likely there to buy. If you do not help said customer out or out right ignore your potential customers, how do you plan to sell the wine? If I wanted to be ignored and not talk about wine I could have gone to the local super market.
When your a specialty shop your advantage of the mass market such as a super market is expertise in the product. People go to these specialty stores to learn more about the product and enjoy the experience.
As a business owner you should always ask yourself:
- Are you ignoring your customers? What can I do to increase interaction?
- What is your competitive difference the market place?
- How can you exploit that to your advantage?
I was reading Whitney Hoffman’s article on the Difference Between Listening and Hearing and it got me to thinking about all the conversations I have had last week, last year and all my life where the conversation was frustrated by neither one of us listening. I would say X and they would hear Y and then I react to Y and they start talking about Z. Very frustrating.
I have played a lot of poker and chess in my lifetime. I like to think several moves ahead and reading people is important to know how they react to such moves. My father is a classic conversationalist. He can steer a conversation and take you down a path without you knowing it. As a teenager it was a bit unnerving because the topics would change to a subject I would rather not talk about and find myself in the middle of the conversation without knowing how I got there.
Conversations come in many forms today with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Filtering information has become specialized features of these sites and value-add software such as TweetDeck. Tools make online conversations much easier and person to person it has become harder. Especially when some folks solely rely on their email accounts. You can tell a person something but if it isn’t in a email form then the conversation didn’t exist for them. And what about a more flamboyant conversation online? Well, Google Wave is about to wash upon us like a tsunami. I think this problem is just going to get worse where personal communication becomes harder and harder. Where the computer and email has just about put the death knell on writing letters to a friend and cursive writing, we now have instant conversations via email, Twitter and Facebook.
But what about in person? I am in the middle of reading Just Listen by Mark Goulston M.D. (no I do not get any referral fees from Amazon, I live in North Carolina) and he talks about the difficult conversations were people are not listening. I find it an excellent book for anyone that finds themselves in difficult non-listening conversations be it your teenagers or your boss. I won’t go through the techniques here since I am only half-way through the book and Mark does need to make a living so buy his book!
That brings me to Whitney’s article of a video of Malcolm Gladwell talking about plagiarism and I had to laugh. About a month ago I found a presentation with Seth Godin at a change conference where Seth talked got an advance book of The Tipping Point by Gladwell and it inspired him to write a book on the subject and give it away for free. Of course he sent Gladwell a copy of the book and asked permission to publish it since it was on the same subject Gladwell was writing about. Gladwell not only approved but wrote the forward to the book! I recommend you check out Seth’s presentation. It is a great talk on is approach to publishing and marketing that is quite unique and I think can be applied to many businesses and not just publishing.
