Why Communications and Training are Essential for Community Banks

July 30, 2009

Communications and training are essential for any company.  Based on my experience as SVP Marketing Director of the Bowery Savings Bank, I have direct knowledge of how important it is for community bankers.  If you’re interested, you can read two blogs I wrote for the Community Bank Consulting Blog  “Why Community Bankers have never had it so good and 10 things they can do to make it even better ” and “Why banks can’t afford not to train their employees .”  Your comments are welcomed.

Jeff Simpkins, CEO of Community Bank Consulting, also hosts a free weekly webinar Free Webinar Wednesdays that features guests who talk about a variety of topics of interest to all businesses.  Recent topics included Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Plain English” and “Using Facebook for Promotion — Both Personally and Professionally.”  Click on the link to register for the webinars.

My colleague Amy Dean, president of Key Word Communication , and I will be presenting  “Inside Out Public Relations” on Wednesday, August 19th.  Stay tuned for  more details.

Ideal Clients: What Every Business Wants

July 29, 2009

My colleague Jeff Simpkins recently wrote a post, Ideal Clients , that was quite touching in its definition of an ideal client.  Jeff is CEO of Community Bank Consulting and Book Yourself Solid and here is what he said: Read more

Internal Communications Strategies for Web-Savvy Employees

March 29, 2009

CEOs don’t always walk the talk when they claim that employees are the company’s most important asset.  If that were the case, employees wouldn’t be using social communities on the web to find what’s going on in the company.  So here are several strategies to focus employees on the company’s goals through the company’s own communications network. Read more

Juicing Up the Annual Report

March 11, 2009

Spring is coming and so is the avalanche of annual reports that public companies send to their shareholders.  And, as usual, most of them will be as dull as dishwater.  Think about it.  When was the last time someone told you he had curled up in bed with a good annual report to read?  Not likely, unless sleep was the primary motivation. Annual reports can be real dullards. Read more

• Try Different — Seth Godin

  The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

  But you can always try different.

  Years ago, I was creating trivia questions for a product we built for Prodigy. We had a 99% accuracy rate in doing the questions. Which was great, except there were 1800 questions in a batch, which meant 18 wrong each time, which was totally and completely unacceptable. These were honest mistakes, made by smart people working as hard as they could.

  No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't do better than 99%. So we switched our system completely and did it in a totally different way. Same number of people, same number of hours, 100% accuracy.

  If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.

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