Week Two - The Animal Week

Another great week at the Ryan Academy, week two already & it seems to be flying in. I have christened this week "animal week".

With Melrona we were given the Belbin self-perception inventory &  also the test of a  leader interpretation; now which of us are Tigers, Chameleons, Turtles, Eagles or even Salmons.

In our reading of "The Managing Innovation Design & Creativity" chapter one talks about the Hare brain & the Tortoise mind.

In Marketing in a Digital Era, Naoimh spoke about Mail Chimp.

What I want to go through first is teams & teamwork. The Volvo Round the World Yacht finished in Galway last year, it was an enormous event & a great achievement of the organising committee that landed such a prestigious high profile event. I personally don't have any interest in yachts, I was however blown away by the sheer size of the occasion. My purpose for driving down was to listen to a previous winning captain of the race that was giving a lecture on team work.  To be honest I was not overly keen on driving up and down to Galway in one day to listen to a lecture on team work. How wrong I was, he was a captivating speaker, his experiences were surreal, the conditions they had to endure in respect of both the weather & life on the boat were amazing. In order to gain more speed on the boat they minimise on everything. As part of his wonderful speech he spoke on how he selected his crew. He picked  a very diverse crew, each of them were brilliant in very different ways. He explained that he needed them all of to do different things as  they all had their specialities, each very valuable in the crew in order to make it work. He told a hilarious story that in bad weather when the mast broke a few of them were putting a temporary mast together cursing in several different languages while hanging on for dear life. One building, one tying ropes etc.

My point to you my fellow bippers is that we have all been given several assignments & we are in several teams. We should all look at what we have in our teams and analyse what we have. If we have two people in the team that are good with figures or IT, look at their secondary talents. Are the secondary talents creative, are they good in presentation preparations. It is  teamwork that will pull us all across the line in our results. If someone has a good idea that you don't like, don't rubbish it unless you have a better idea. This will only alienate the person that came up with the idea & lead to a negative effect on the team. I personally subscribe to the notion that you get more with sugar than salt. Remember this is a team game & to quote Geraldine "enjoy the peer to peer learning". If anyone needs assistance in doing their Powerpoint presentation, I can stay back with my laptop & help where needed. I would be only too delighted to help.

Back to Mail Chimp, this is a tremendous programme. (http://mailchimp.com) This allows you to send very presentable emails / offers to existing or potential customers.It also has wonderful templates that will help you on your way in sending professional looking emails. You can monitor how many were opened, did they go to your web site etc. They keep all your campaigns on record, you can see what worked & what did not work. You are also able to copy the last one & amend it for a new campaign. You can have multiple mailing lists & be selective on who you send what to, this is a great tool for direct marketing. It is a super programme, that is very cheap. If you  have less that two thousand subscribers you can send twelve thousand emails out free of charge per month.There is another fantastic feature on this programme that will monitor your "opt out" returns. If a client on your mailing list clicks on the opt out link at the bottom of your email (all advertising emails must have an opt out link) it will exclude their email address from future campaigns.

I think as an experiment for our bip team, we should open an account in mailchimp. We will use our own email addresses as the customer base. We should send out offers, some of us open the offer, some follow through to a landing page on a web site & one or two opt out. I  can set up a generic logon so we can all have a go. If you are interested in participating please either give me your email addresses during the week or email me.

Now in keeping with the animal theme I am off to read about Dinosaurs in Chapter two of  The Managing Innovation Design & Creativity



Regards,
BIP / SO'D