I remember reading Harry’s article on “Gender Gap in Pay, Recognition and Rewards” with great interest. His article pointed out inspirational women who have set examples of leadership in today’s very competitive marketplace. I found it odd that I hadn’t heard of some of these women, but then again I’ve always been more likely to be inspired by the real-life people that walk through my life—from my high school locker partner who wanted to drive race cars and did … to the employee of a client who bulldozed through the bureaucracy and made things happen.

No person, either famous or in my life, inspires me more than my grandmother, who just turned 100 years old. More than once, she has demonstrated determination and a strong work ethic just in the last five years. Needless to say, her life has been filled with moments of resilience, and it wasn’t until I set out to do a small slide show for her birthday celebration that I saw this in action.

Developing a slide show for an active woman celebrating more than 100 years was more time-consuming than planned but well worth the time. With help from family who looked through photo albums, we scanned about 100 photos and articles. Fortunately, some of the more recent photos were already in digital form.

If you’re interested in creating a slide show as a family project, here is the process:

First, I scanned the photos at 300 dpi for the family so that everyone would have a high-resolution graphic that could be printed if necessary.

Second, I set the resolution to 72 dpi for the slide show.

Third, I imported the photos into the free Microsoft Movie Maker, added transitions between photos, and added music.

Fourth, I created a CD label with the free Avery DesignPro software. I gave every family member a CD with the slide show and the higher-resolution photos.

Last, I created a DVD cover with the free Memorex exPressIt software to hold the CD.

The added benefit of the slide show was that the photos themselves inspired my grandmother to give detailed descriptions of each photo, including describing the color of her dresses in those old black and white photos. What a memory!

In the end, it was a positive project for everyone to see how different the world was in the early 1900s when photos were in black and white, computers didn’t exist, and you couldn’t travel around with your phone in your pocket.

And I thank the subject of the slide show, my grandmother, a woman who still demonstrates her determination on a daily basis. What an inspiration!

About Melanie L. Drake

Melanie L. Drake focuses on the publishing and marketing sides of the AchieveMax® company. AchieveMax® professional, motivational speakers provide custom-designed keynote presentations, seminars, and consulting services on change management, creativity, customer service, leadership, project management, time management, teamwork, and more. For more information on AchieveMax® custom-designed seminars and keynote presentations, please call 800-886-2629 or fill out our contact form.

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We’ve all had good customer service, and we’ve all had bad customer service. But those moments of exceptional customer service are few and far between.

Since it’s Halloween, I’m reminded of an incident a few years back. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

I was at dinner at a local restaurant toward the end of October and was greeted by my waitress, who was dressed in a beautiful Snow White costume with well-done make-up and manicured nails. No Snow White at Disney World or Disneyland could have competed with her. Everyone she served loved her costume and was thrilled to be served by Snow White. I thought it was a great idea that management asked their employees to dress up for Halloween because everyone so obviously responded positively to it.

Toward the end of the meal, instead of having Snow White return to our table, a new waitress, dressed in normal, drab waitress apparel, appeared. When asked where Snow White was, we were told that she had been sent home.

Gasp!

To this day, I wish I had said something to this by-the-book manager. Sure, Snow White didn’t show up to work in her approved uniform. Yes, she didn’t ask if she could wear a costume for Halloween. But were her customers satisfied and happy? You bet!

There’s a Japanese proverb—Deru kugi wa utareru—which means the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, and obviously that’s what happened in this case. Snow White made waves, and her manager didn’t like it.

However, how can you truly provide exceptional customer satisfaction if you don’t empower your people to make decisions and allow them to think out of the box to solve customer problems? I’ve seen a number of instances recently when so-called empowered employees were reprimanded for not doing what the manager wanted but the internal and external customers were happy with the outcome. 

In the end, Snow White provided excellent customer service, while the manager apparently didn’t notice how delighted his customers were; the manager was at fault himself for bad customer satisfaction, which I’m sure was not his intent. 

If I had been the manager, I would have made wearing the Halloween costumes for the wait staff an annual event. Word of mouth would have increased his business, customer retention would have been high, and his customers would have been happy. 

As Theodore Roosevelt said:

“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do!”

About Melanie L. Drake

Melanie L. Drake focuses on the publishing and marketing sides of the AchieveMax® company. AchieveMax® professional, motivational speakers provide custom-designed keynote presentations, seminars, and consulting services on change management, creativity, customer service, leadership, project management, time management, teamwork, and more. For more information on AchieveMax® custom-designed seminars and keynote presentations, please call 800-886-2629 or fill out our contact form.

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In a previous article in this series, I discussed plugins for WordPress, which are tools to extend the functionality of WordPress, that will help you as a webmaster of a WordPress blog. This article will discuss a number of plugins to help your readers enjoy your blog and web site.

1. FeedBurner FeedSmith

The FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin makes it easy to redirect 100% of traffic for your feeds to a FeedBurner feed you have created. FeedBurner can then track all of your feed subscriber traffic and apply a variety of features you choose to improve and enhance your original WordPress feed. Some of the FeedBurner functionality includes the reader’s ability to easily e-mail articles, subscribe to the feed, and add the articles to Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Newsvine, or Netscape (Propeller). Feedburner also allows your readers to subscribe to your feed via e-mail instead of through an RSS reader.

2. Gregarious

Gregarious, a social bookmarking plugin, allows users to submit and comment on web sites. The Gregarious plugin allows for seamless integration between your WordPress blog and social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and more. It also allows your readers to e-mail your articles to a friend. If you are not using Feedburner, Gregarious is a good alternative to give your readers easy access to social bookmarking sites and e-mail functionality.

3. Include Me In That

I searched for months for a plugin like Include Me In That. Since our site is now a decade old and information is plentiful, I wanted to help our readers find similar articles of interest and to unite content from our blog on WordPress and our web site newsletter, which the blog basically replaced. This plugin allows you to include external HTML files in any post. You just add some code into the post in the position you want the file to appear. You can see this plugin in action at the end of many articles in the blog. I am also using it for the author information at the end of each article so that if I need to change something in the biographical information, I only need to do it once to change it on all pages of the blog. I did experience a few issue with Feedburner when implementing the plugin and found that simple text files or html files with minimal html coding work the best. It did take a few days to set up all the files and add the code to the pages, so if you don’t have much time, I’d suggest the following plugin.

4. If You Liked That

Before I found Include Me In That, I was using If You Liked That. At the end of each post, this plugin inserts links to a user-selectable number of other posts in the same category as the main post. This is a simple tool for you to add to help your readers find related content. Although I use Include Me In That now instead of If You Liked That, I’d recommend this plugin for its ease of use. 

5. SimpleTags

The SimpleTags plugin allows you to create a list of Technorati tags at the bottom of your post by providing a comma separated list of tags between the [tags] tags. These tags help your readers find additional blog articles on the same topic as your article. If you are using Windows Live Writer, you can set your tags for various web sites such as del.icio.us, Flickr, IceRocket, Live Journal, and Technorati instead of using this plugin.

“Beginner Business Blog: Top Reader Plugins for Your WordPress Business Blog” is part three in a series of blog articles designed to help you start your own business blog.

About Melanie L. Drake

Melanie L. Drake focuses on the publishing and marketing sides of the AchieveMax® company. AchieveMax® professional, motivational speakers provide custom-designed keynote presentations, seminars, and consulting services on change management, creativity, customer service, leadership, project management, time management, teamwork, and more. For more information on AchieveMax® custom-designed seminars and keynote presentations, please call 800-886-2629 or fill out our contact form.

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After installing WordPress to your server, you’re probably ready to start blogging away.  However, before you write your first article, you’ll want to look at some WordPress plugins, which are tools to extend the functionality of WordPress. Plugins allow you to customize your site based on your specific needs.

The following six plugins will help you as a webmaster to keep your site running smoothly. The next article in this series will discuss a number of plugins to help your readers enjoy your site.

1. Akismet

When I originally set up the blog, I chose to make everyone register to post a comment, thinking that alone would stop spam comments. Unfortunately, the spam comments came in immediately, and it was becoming increasingly time consuming to read through 100 spam comments a day.

I ended up adding the plugin for Akismet, which checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. Since Akismet is installed with WordPress, all you need to do is enable it and get a wordpress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under the “Comments” tab in your control panel. Akismet has found more than 30,000 blog comment spam since it was installed about six months ago. That’s an average of 5,000 spam comments a month or 167 comments a day.

2. Math Comment Spam Protection

Although Akismet separates real comments from spam comments, it still allows all comments through for you to view and then delete. As a result, I added the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin, and it has cut down on the amount of spam comments I receive to just a few a week. This plugin asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question, which helps prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot. You can see this plugin in action down by the comment field of this article.

3. Simple Trackback Validation

The Simple Trackback Validation plugin eliminates spam trackbacks by first checking if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to and second by retrieving the web page located at the URL used in the trackback and checking if the page contains a link to your blog. Since adding this plugin and the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin, my spam level has dropped to only a few messages a day. This plugin works with Akismet so you can still look through the trackbacks before deleting them.

4. Widgets

When I first started using WordPress, it was frustrating to have to edit the code by hand in order to get the sidebar set up the way I wanted it. After I had everything set up the way I wanted it, I found the Widgets plugin, which allows you to move things (widgets) around, in and out of your sidebar. A widget is something that you might want on your sidebar, such as a category list, recent posts, recent comments, a calendar, links or search. No coding is involved, and you can drag each section to put it in the order you’d like. There is the additional functionality that you can create your own text widget with html. I was hesitant to try it since I had already spent quite a bit of time hand coding the sidebar file, but after trying it, I would strongly recommend it. (As of version 2.2 of WordPress, Widgets are automatically loaded with your WordPress installation.)

5. SEO Title Tag

The SEO Title Tag allows you to define a custom title tag for your home page, and you can put the blog title after the article title or not at all.  For example, Harry’s article on leadership lessons originally had the title: AchieveMax® Blog » Leadership Lessons We MUST Pass On.  It’s now customized to have the title and and blog name, in that order, for the title: Leadership Lessons We MUST Pass On » AchieveMax® Motivational Speakers Blog. You can also replace your blog name with a shorter blog nickname. Moreover, this plugin allows you to create a customized title tag for any post, static page, or category page.

6. Another WordPress Meta Plugin

Call me crazy, but I like to have complete sentences with a description of the page when I do a search. I was happy to find Another WordPress Meta Plugin, a plugin for inserting the META tags keywords and description into your posts, pages and index page. For example, with the article I wrote on wedding project management, the description is in a sentence and goes to the heart of story: Here are five tips for wedding project management. Without the META tags, the description would be: Because of this description, we often see searches for “wedding project management” in our web statistics. Having recently planned a wedding, … Of course, whether you have a META description or not, the description shown in the search results will depend on the search keyword.

“Beginner Business Blog: Top Webmaster Plugins for Your WordPress Business Blog” is part two in a series of blog articles designed to help you start your own business blog.

About Melanie L. Drake

Melanie L. Drake focuses on the publishing and marketing sides of the AchieveMax® company. AchieveMax® professional, motivational speakers provide custom-designed keynote presentations, seminars, and consulting services on change management, creativity, customer service, leadership, project management, time management, teamwork, and more. For more information on AchieveMax® custom-designed seminars and keynote presentations, please call 800-886-2629 or fill out our contact form.

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When we first talked about starting a blog for the AchieveMax® web site, I had a few concerns, the primary one being that I would have to learn a new program, which—after some research—turned out to be WordPress. Having now worked with a blog in WordPress for almost a year, I admit there are a number of things I wish someone had told me about WordPress and blogging when I started.

For those of you considering starting a WordPress blog for your business (on your own server, not through WordPress.com), here are the top five tips I wish I had known before starting a WordPress blog.

1.  Windows Live Writer

The WordPress editor is lacking to say the least. I think it is worse than the first word-processing program I used more than 20 years ago. For St. Patrick’s day, Harry wanted his article to be in green text. With the WordPress editor, there is no button to change the color of the text. Instead, you have to track down the code for green text in some other program. Windows Live Writer, on the other hand, allows you to change colors of text, create tables, insert tags, insert maps and do a bevy of other things. You can then save the draft locally, post the draft to WordPress, or publish the article. It’s a little cranky with registered trademarks and em-dashes when transmitting a post into WordPress, but other than that I have no complaints so far.

2. Feedburner

Although I knew about Feedburner a few months before I ever set up an account, I initially didn’t see the need for Feedburner since I already had an RSS feed as part of WordPress. However, Feedburner makes it easy to redirect 100% of traffic for your feeds to a FeedBurner feed you have created. FeedBurner can then track all of your feed subscriber traffic and usage and apply a variety of features you choose to improve and enhance your original WordPress feed. I particularly like the feature that allows people to subscribe to the RSS feed via e-mail as well as the statistics for outgoing links and incoming links. I also use the headline animator (see below) in my e-mails. Since there are so many optional features, it takes a while to dig through your choices; I am still setting up some of the features.

3. Daily Back-ups

Ever since Norton Antivirus decimated my Netscape mail a number of years ago, I’ve learned to back up my important files often, most on a daily basis. One day not too long ago, our blog disappeared. There was no way to sign in to the administrative panel, and nothing showed up on the main blog page. My web host has a link for downloading the SQL database, and believe me, without the back up, I could have lost months of work. I still have no clue what happened, but restoring the database with the back up was the only thing to fix the problem. Even with the back-up, I lost a few comments and the final version of two posts. There is also a WordPress Database Backup plug-in for those without this back-up feature on their web host.

4. FileZilla

Originally, I installed WordPress through Fantastico, which automatically installs a variety of scripts, through my web host. WordPress regularly updates its software with new additions and security updates that should be uploaded to your server. Updating WordPress via Fantastico was fine until a glitch with Fantastico caused all the em-dashes and registered trademarks to convert to gobbledygook.  I have since discovered FileZilla, which is a fast FTP and SFTP client for Windows with a lot of features. I simply download the newest WordPress version, sign into my account, and upload my file. Of course, always create a back up of your SQL database and site before installing a new version of WordPress.

5. Technorati Incoming Links

Technorati searches, surfaces, and organizes blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.” It currently tracks 98 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. By joining Technorati, you can claim your blog, which then allows you to see your incoming links in your WordPress dashboard. This feature is a good resource to know who is linking to you.

While I was writing the section on Technorati, I ran across an article, Newbie Blogging – Crucial Choices and Trackbacks. This blog article is a great source for learning about trackbacks and includes links to other sources for new blog owners.

“Beginner Business Blog: Top Five Tips for Starting Your WordPress Business Blog” is part one in a series of blog articles designed to help you start your own business blog.

About Melanie L. Drake

Melanie L. Drake focuses on the publishing and marketing sides of the AchieveMax® company. AchieveMax® professional, motivational speakers provide custom-designed keynote presentations, seminars, and consulting services on change management, creativity, customer service, leadership, project management, time management, teamwork, and more. For more information on AchieveMax® custom-designed seminars and keynote presentations, please call 800-886-2629 or fill out our contact form.

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Recently, I bought a new appliance at Lowe’s, primarily because it was featuring a number of rebates that drastically reduced the price compared to its competitors. The customer service was also excellent. After receiving my gift card in the mail, I was dismayed to discover that I had been shorted $25. I spent a few days upset about this shortage, thinking that I had been duped.

A week later, I e-mailed the Lowe’s rebate center through the Lowe’s web site. The return e-mail was not from Lowe’s but from Young America, which provides promotion fulfillment for companies on the web, including rebates, premiums and sweepstakes.

The e-mail from Young America said I had already received my rebate. Unfortunately, Young America was referring to a second rebate that I had indeed received. I responded with another e-mail, explaining once again which rebate I was referring to. (Don’t you hate it when they don’t really read your e-mail that does have all the details?)

Nothing …

I waited a few more weeks and then decided to contact Lowe’s customer service directly. I received an immediate response that my message was being sent to the manager of the rebate center. A few days later, I finally received another e-mail saying that my $25 gift card was on its way.

Despite the excellent customer service at the Lowe’s store itself, I ended up feeling cheated by Lowe’s until I realized the glitch was with the partnership with Young America. If I hadn’t pursued the missing $25 gift card amount, I might have stopped shopping at Lowe’s. It’s the little things that make a difference. (Home Depot, by the way, is closer.)

The Young America web site says that “Customer fulfillment is what happens when marketing programs are executed so well and so consistently, with so much value added at every opportunity, that the entire customer experience is elevated and the relationship with your brand is deepened.” Considering that Young America did not respond to my second e-mail, my experience was dismissed not “elevated,” and Lowe’s brand was diminished not “deepened.”

If you partner with other vendors or outsource your services, are your partners living up to your customers’ expectations? I’ve reviewed our past experiences with vendors we use, and I have to admit there is at least one that I sincerely question our using in the future because the product was not up to our standard for our customers and cost us time to fix. Is it time to review your vendors or outsourced services before your customers make negative assumptions about your business? 

About Melanie L. Drake

Melanie L. Drake focuses on the publishing and marketing sides of the AchieveMax® company. AchieveMax® professional, motivational speakers provide custom-designed keynote presentations, seminars, and consulting services on change management, creativity, customer service, leadership, project management, time management, teamwork, and more. For more information on AchieveMax® custom-designed seminars and keynote presentations, please call 800-886-2629 or fill out our contact form.

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