Dusty Miller

Enumerates distance learning alternatives that can be used by company trainors. Audio teletraining; Audiographic teletraining; Computer conferencing.

Trim Travel Budgets With Distance Learning

This is part two of a series of articles in which Cassie will share tips on how students and young professionals can develop the skills needed to succeed in the workplace.According to Encarta Dictionary, by definition, a mentor is an experienced adviser and supporter, someone usually older and more experienced who advises and guides a younger, less experienced person; a mentor is also a trainer—but I must partially disagree, respectfully. In her December 2012 T+D article, “Preparing Today’s Youths for Tomorrow’s Workplace,“ Ann Pace wrote, “Collaboration between business and higher education is essential to effective talent development that also targets current workforce needs.”  I propose that as the article strongly implies, the younger generation has something to offer the seasoned veterans of the workplace. Last weekend I volunteered my Saturday to be an alumni advocate for a project that I chaired while I was still in school. While there, I started talking to the man serving as the security guard on duty.  He expressed a need to learn typing skills and a few other various computer-based and communication skills that would have been taught some time after he probably graduated from high school.  I offered to help him in exchange for bass fishing lessons.  Then it dawned on me:  We were going to mentor each other—offer our expertise in some skill that we possess free of charge.  Indeed, anyone that has something to offer (advice, training in a skill, or otherwise) can be a mentor  if they choose to be. I realize that mentorship can be approached from two perspectives: the mentor or the mentee.  For this post, I’m going to assume that the mentee is a student, and the mentor is a business professional.  Don’t worry, I have something for both. First, to the student (or mentee): How does someone find people that are willing to mentor them?  After deciding what they want to learn or be mentored in, they have to, as a friend of mine says, put on their big girl pants, and ask for help. Representatives of companies that come to speak at colleges and universities—especially at extracurricular events—are a great place to start.  If they’re speaking at an event for a group that the person is a member of, they obviously share similar interests and have some kind of expertise in that field. This means that the really hard part of finding like-minded people is done!  At that point all that’s left for the mentees to do is to get up, take the few steps, and in front of peers (gasp!) admit that there’s a skill gap and that they need a mentor.  It might be surprising, but I have never had a single person tell me “no” when I asked them for the opportunity to network and pick their brain on their topic of expertise.  The more obvious choice is to connect with professors while still in school.  I have had the privilege to work with her on several projects through my education, extracurricular activities, and even post-graduation work.  Professors are natural mentors; and even if they do not have time to mentor personally, they will often direct the mentee in question to a person who would be more appropriate.  Professors do care about their students, regardless of how they grade exams or projects, and they only want to see their students succeed.I still consider one of my old professors, Gail, to be one of my greatest mentors.  She’s helping me when she doesn’t even know it—I am actually writing this blog as a result of asking permission to share Ann Pace’s article with her class. I remember sitting in her professional branding class not so terribly long ago, and sweating because I had to do a mock team interview (double gasp!).  In this case, as in so many others, I overcame nerves, and took the opportunity to connect with a woman who was a member of HR for the company I now work for.   As an added bonus, I was asked to come back the following year and be an interviewer for the very same class assignment.  So, just about anyone a student comes into contact with in school is willing to guide them, and possibly even take them under wing as a mentee. Most are just waiting to be asked. Now, for professionals in the working world (or mentor): We all know that networking is incredibly important to our careers. And I’m sure everyone has those one or two people that they have consistently relied on for advice – I know I do!  I think it’s as important now as ever, to remember we were once those transitioning students that were unsure of what their future held. We need to make the offer to mentor those kids.We never know who we might meet at an event hosted by a community organization or at a college or university.   Take every opportunity to go out and meet the next generation of workers – and find out what they’re made of.  I think it’s so important to evaluate the way students behave in an educational setting, and also to start measuring the gaps between where they’re at now and where we need them to be when they’re our employees and peers.  Mentoring a young person is a great way to start filling in those gaps. I will be the first to admit that I am a young professional – key word being “young.” Fortunately, my position as corporate trainer and my volunteer work give me the privilege of wearing a mentor hat.  That being said, any other person can be a mentor in their workplace or community.  Becoming a mentor is as simple as finding a skill gap and offering to help, then sticking with it.  Whether the person being mentored is older or younger makes no difference.

Mentoring – A Key Piece of Higher Ed and Career Development

Winter 2014 - The Public Manager

Cyberspace is where most people get their news and where the majority of real-time communication takes place. How can public agencies adjust to this transition and best reach their audiences? In this social media age, the public sector cannot afford to not be in the digital space. Many agencies have slowly, reluctantly, if not begrudgingly, jumped onto the social media bandwagon, yet there still remains a glaring disconnect between digital era technologies and communications in the public sector.There is a need to fill that vacuum. After all, the majority of digital natives—the phrase used to describe those who have an innate knowledge of digital technology because of the era in which they were born—effectively leverage these technologies to communicate at hyperspeed. Why hasn't the public sector caught on?At first, digital platforms seemed daunting for the public sector. Rife with privacy and branding or messaging concerns that could send any agency HR professional over the edge, social media and digital communication presented major problems for government organizations. The answer? Just ignore it, and hopefully it will go away.Fast forward a few years, and the cyber wave is an unimpeachably dominant presence in the world. It is how most people get their news, where the majority of real-time communication takes place, and how billions of dollars of marketing budgets are spent every quarter.So, how can public agencies adjust to this transition? Stodgy, time-consuming bureaucracy must embrace the Millennial way of reaching its audience. But don't think this process has to be expensive, difficult, or challenging for digital immigrants (those belonging to previous generations, who did not grow up using digital technology).Public-sector marketing professionals must be honest with their organizations about the changing landscape of communications. And that's on top of their duty to be mindful of their public mission. So, what goes into an effective digital marketing strategy?Government agencies need laser-specific audience targeting, social listening, and content management to remain relevant in a high-speed world. Often, agencies spend the majority of their resources creating content.Between researching, polling, and synthesizing, content is rarely the limiting agent to an organization's digital visibility. That's because these agencies are used to spending resources on data; they've been doing it this way since their inception.However, the paradigmatic shift comes, in promotion of this content. Every content producer has dreams of his work going viral, yet very few ever achieve this goal, and an even smaller percentage comes from the public sector.A complete digital marketing strategy leverages material across three major areas of visibility: paid, owned, and earned media. In each area of visibility, audience targeting is critical to success. The concept of audience targeting is as simple as it sounds, though much more difficult to apply in reality because of the challenges created by current advertising models.Targeting Your AudienceRetargeting, or the practice of using social media or web-based advertisements to target users who have researched your brand or agency, is the method du jour. However, retargeting is fraught with complications.For one, increased security options in Google's new https rollout will affect retargeting's ability to identify people who have looked up particular phrases or companies. For another, retargeting often has an irritating effect on the online audience for several reasons. The feeling that a nefarious bot is "following" the user around is just one example that affects brand trust.As with any evolution on the Internet, advertising must follow suit. Enter the concept of "pre-targeting," which enables agencies to intelligently spend their small marketing dollars on an audience that actually cares about them. For example, why blow the advertising budget on Facebook when the majority of your agency's audience interacts on Twitter?The use of blanket spending on "social ads" is wasteful and ineffective. Pre-targeting identifies where your target audience exists and spends its energy, and avoids useless expenditures on forums that do not engage with your offering.But advertising is only part of the puzzle. A solid digital marketing strategy is multichannel and diverse in its content.Creating Content That ResonatesTime and money are always scarce resources, and content creation and promotion requires both. Another key part of audience targeting lies in creating content that is of value to your audience. Determining what exactly resonates with your audience requires social listening, content curation, and informed keyword optimization.Content comes in all forms. "Content marketing" is a trendy buzzword that advertisers use to imply added value to their various marketing software or tracking tools. However, a more appropriate term to describe effective leveraging of content would be "content promotion."We've already discussed why content production is rarely the bottleneck to effective digital visibility. Instead, getting your message to the right people at the right time proves to be the most challenging task for marketers, because it requires a complex data set to identify the proper audience.At Audienti, I worked with one particular government organization, a household name and recognized internationally for its integrity in programming and development, to target its audience. The agency's main concerns were budget and brand trust. It was embarking on a fairly public digital initiative in an industry rarely associated with creativity and innovation.Three major parts of Audienti's software toolkit that proved valuable in this project were site optimization, keywords, and competitor tracking. "One of the most important aspects of maintaining or redesigning your website is focusing on search engine optimization (SEO)," according to the web communications specialist at this organization. While SEO isn't necessarily hard, it can be cumbersome and is certainly important to maintain because it increases your organization's visibility to its target audience.Fortunately, there are many websites that create SEO reports for you and point out any mistakes you might be making. Unfortunately, a lot of these tools are expensive—especially if you are a smaller market station.A site-optimization tool identifies issues you may have with your site, including problems with links or images and meta data. The tool tells you whether the issue is just a minor problem or a major one, so you know what to focus on first.For example, a site-optimization tool may identify slowness as an issue. Fixing these problems before they are widely experienced by the end user helps to combat the government stigma of slowness and inefficiency, and ultimately develops greater brand trust.Tracking competitors may not seem like a common practice in the public sector, but it's an important one to remain relevant in the highly competitive digital marketplace. You can compare features such as domain and page authority with competing or similar sites, and learn about improvements you might make. This also highlights the importance of keeping up-to-date with both your web infrastructure as well as your web copy.Spreading the MessageGovernment agencies must spread their messages over multiple platforms and through different channels to ensure brand recognition, which is a first step to awareness, trust, and eventually, advocacy.Audience targeting is the leaner, more effective answer to directionless ad spends and content production that sees no social lift. Through effective marketing strategies, your online audience is subtly, and perhaps permanently, affected by your content and messaging.The question of whether you must take your marketing campaigns online is no longer relevant. Instead, marketing professionals in the public space must ask themselves, "How can I get my message heard in a space cluttered with digital noise?" The answer isn't as difficult as it may seem.

Dusty Miller

About