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5 Ways brands can play to win on TikTok

8 October, 2021

Contributed by Evan Horowitz, an EO Los Angeles member and a recent guest on EO Wonder podcast. Evan is the CEO and co-founder of Movers+Shakers, a creative agency with a mission to “spread joy by connecting brands to culture.” We asked Evan how brands can leverage the TikTok platform. Here’s what he shared:

There’s no denying that TikTok is one of the fastest-growing and most widely used apps today. In fact, TikTok was the most downloaded and highest grossing non-game app globally in the first half of 2021. What’s exciting for brands is that there isn’t a single right way to approach TikTok, and as TikTok expands its capabilities and offerings, brands enjoy even more options to help them grow online.

Here are five primary ways brands can play on TikTok today.

1. Create your own brand channel

Creating a brand channel is a great way to establish your presence on TikTok. We recognize that creating content for TikTok may seem intimidating at first, since the raw and unpolished nature of the platform is vastly different from the curated and highly polished content brands typically create.

One way to “get into the flow” of TikTok (and grow your brand channel quickly) is to get involved in trends. Every week, new trends blaze through TikTok—music, skits, jokes, dances. The value of joining in is twofold. First, TikTok’s algorithm boosts the exposure of videos participating in what’s trending, giving you a boost in viewership. And second, your brand benefits from the “cool factor” from the trend, showing that you’re tuned in.

Brands that are serious about TikTok post content daily, while others choose to test the water with fewer posts. While most posts may not get a ton of traction, the occasional post can go viral. The more content you post, the greater the chances for it to go viral.

Skeptical about the branding power of TikTok? Read 3 Reasons to Reconsider the Branding Power of TikTok, From a Gen-X Skeptic on EO’s Inc.com platform.

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Categories: Best Practices BUSINESS GROWTH PR/MARKETING

Tags: #eyeslipsface eo los angeles EO Wonder Evan Horowitz Movers+Shakers TikTok

Maurice Thomas

How my 15-year side hustle became my lifelong dream

6 October, 2021

Maurice ThomasContributed by Maurice Thomas, an EO South Florida member who is one of the Champions of the new EO OneWorld initiative, a membership platform affiliated with EO’s New York chapter which believes that a diverse EO is a stronger EO. EO OneWorld will add value to EO by attracting more EO members from the Black, Hispanic/Latino(a)(x), Asian and LGBTQIA+ entrepreneurial communities. Maurice is also the founder and president of Thomas Services, Inc. a solutions-based, logistics and supply chain service company.

Are entrepreneurs born or made? As I examine my path to entrepreneurship, I suspect it’s a little of both, or at least it is in my case. Here’s the story of how I came to run my own company.

Back in the early 1990s, I was a married father of two very young children working as an investment banker in a small, boutique firm. Our firm’s owner and CEO was a very experienced businessman—a true entrepreneur in every sense of the word. Having previously worked in some of the largest companies in the world and earned an MBA from a prestigious university, I had no idea what I signed up for, but it didn’t take me long to realize that working there was the best professional decision of my life. We were small and very entrepreneurial in our approach. I was required to learn very quickly, and I was given increased responsibilities no sooner than I showed the capacity to handle them. 

My first entrepreneurial opportunity

One day in early 1993, I was having lunch with one of our clients, who also was a true entrepreneur. He began to describe his latest business acquisition and—suddenly!— the conversation morphed into a discussion around the opportunity for me to start a business designed to service HIS new business. A few months later, I was the owner of a modest, three-employee operation. And so, my entrepreneurial journey began.

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Categories: Entrepreneurial Journey general Inspirational members

Tags: eo new york EO OneWorld EO Soul EO South Florida LGBTQIA+ Maurice Thomas

5 Tips to revamp your performance review process

1 October, 2021

Contributed by Chiara Toselli, head of marketing and sales for Pavestep, a performance management solution that helps businesses effectively manage their talent.

We’re approaching that dreaded time of year: performance review season.

For many companies, it’s the one time a year that employee performance is examined and evaluated.

The problem?

People on both sides of the desk loathe annual performance reviews. For managers, the process feels like a giant waste of time, and is often seen as a check-the-box exercise. For employees, the majority view performance reviews as unfair and plagued with biases.

Most of us understand why people feel this way—annual reviews are grossly inaccurate. If people can’t remember what they had for lunch last Monday, how can a manager remember how someone has performed for an entire year? Short answer, they can’t!

To clarify, I don’t think annual performance reviews should be eliminated. In fact, they can be an appropriate time to address compensation, have formal career development planning conversations, or discuss ratings. However, if performance reviews are the sole measure of how your organization evaluates and develops talent, then it’s time to switch to a more modern approach and focus on feedback that improves performance and motivates employees.

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Categories: Best Practices Coaching Company Culture PEOPLE/STAFF Productivity

Tags: Chiara Toselli continuous feedback core values Pavestep performance review

Why some leaders deny reality with return-to-office strategies amid Delta surge

29 September, 2021

Contributed by Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management and an EO 360° podcast guest. We asked Dr. Tsipursky to explain how normalcy bias and other cognitive biases impact entrepreneurs in determining return-to-office scenarios. Here’s what he shared:

As the efficiency rate of vaccines against the Delta variant slides to 39%, company leaders who implement a normal office return are denying reality. The threat is now indisputable: Delta variant infections and deaths have reached an alarming rate in just a few months. No wonder the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that everyone—including those who are fully vaccinated—wear masks and has begun to recommend booster shots for at-risk groups.

Still, many companies, from large ones to start-ups, and even the US federal government, are pressing on with the return to the office, despite employee resistance. Of those who worked remotely during the peak of the pandemic, over a third have already returned. Most of the remainder are required to do so by mid-autumn. In addition, as schools resume in-person learning, Delta variant cases and hospitalizations are increasing at alarming levels.

Employees’ stance on work arrangements

Results of in-depth surveys on employee preferences around return-to-office plans clearly showed a reluctance for a normal office return even before the Delta surge. Approximately half say they will quit if their preferred work arrangements are not approved. A quarter to a third of employees favored full-time remote work, while more than half preferred a hybrid schedule of a day or two in the office.

Numerous employees have already quit in response to the compulsive plans of their employers to get them back to the office. The Delta surge will lead to more resignations among employees who don’t wish to risk their health with breakthrough infections.

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Categories: Best Practices Crisis HEALTH STRATEGY

Tags: behavioral science cognitive bias delta plus variant Delta variant Disaster Avoidance Experts Gleb Tsipursky Great Resignation mu variant return-to-work transition

4 Tips to overcome the fear of growing your brand online

24 September, 2021

Contributed by Kady O’Connell, founder of Kady Creative, which helps passionate businesses succeed with strategic branding, powerful websites, and click-worthy content. Kady was a recent Dare to Startup podcast guest where she discussed the various processes that go into running a successful startup, including how to handle e-mails, quarterly planning, team communication and more.

As an entrepreneur running a business, you must overcome the fear of growing your brand online. Over the past decade of working with clients to build their brands online, can you guess what’s the number one struggle I see?

  • It’s not about poor time management
  • It’s not about having the right team support
  • It’s not even about having the right skills and knowledge for content creation

The biggest obstacle I’ve identified in clients is the intense fear people have of putting themselves out there. Most times, they are entirely paralyzed into a state of inertia. They have no idea what to say, how to say it, or where even to start.

Can you relate?

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Categories: Best Practices BUSINESS GROWTH PR/MARKETING STRATEGY WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS

Tags: Dare to Startup podcast Kady Creative Kady O'Connell mere exposure effect

Going hybrid? 3 Strategic real estate tips

22 September, 2021

Contributed by Andrew Flint, a co-founder of Occupier, a transaction and portfolio management software helping commercial tenants and brokers manage their real estate footprint. Occupier’s software helps teams make smarter, more informed lease decisions by centralizing the way they work. In turn, teams ensure alignment between their real estate decisions and business successes.

The pandemic-related remote work experiment has been an eye-opener for both employees and employers. However, they don’t necessarily see eye to eye on what it means for the future of on-site operations as teams get back to work.

A 2021 McKinsey survey shows that about half of workers now want to work from home at least three days a week. On the other end of the spectrum, around three-quarters of top-level executives want personnel to be in the office at least three days each workweek. This tug of war between competing needs has had two very different results.

The first (and perhaps least expected) result is the Great Resignation, in which employees are taking their talents to companies that’ll give them more scheduling flexibility. When it comes to going back to work after COVID-19, they’re willing to make a major switch in order to find the balance they want in their personal and professional lives.

The second outcome is a way to get the best of both worlds for all parties: offering hybrid working environment solutions. In fact, the hybrid work model is gaining traction. Yet moving all employees to hybrid isn’t just about keeping everyone’s calendars and expectations up to date. Hybrid work models affect every facet of how work gets done, right down to having a major impact on real estate.

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Categories: Best Practices PEOPLE/STAFF STRATEGY

Tags: Andrew Flint Hybrid Office Strategy Occupier Pew Research Center

How to elevate product design by leveraging neuroscience

17 September, 2021

Contributed by J. Cornelius, an EO Atlanta member. J. is the founder and president of Nine Labs, which helps companies imagine, design and build world-class web and mobile products.

Great design is not a luxury. It’s a necessity.  

That bears repeating: Great design—a product that looks good and works well—is essential for success. Product design in the software industry has matured enough that you simply will not succeed with an ugly, ill-conceived digital product. A beautiful and well-functioning app is just table stakes. And I’ll explain why.

Over the last year, I’ve had multiple conversations and discovered these groundbreaking talking points anyone in product design must be aware of.

Beyond basic software expectations, the reason product success often hinges on design has a lot to do with the basic principles of neuroscience. When customers choose between two competing products with similar capabilities, the better-looking and more intuitive one always wins. 

Understanding the underlying neuroscience of human decision-making will empower your team to make more appealing digital products, a distinct advantage over your competition.

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Categories: Best Practices Technology

Tags: Design ROI eo atlanta J. Cornelius Nine Labs

How to thwart collaboration overload by working smarter

13 September, 2021

Contributed by Rob Cross, professor of global leadership at Babson College, cofounder and research director of the Connected Commons business consortium, and author of Beyond Collaboration Overload: How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore Your Well-Being.

What is dysfunctional collaboration?

The most common collaborative dysfunction is a product of too much collaboration driven either by an overly inclusive organizational culture, formal designs with too many reporting relationships, or excessively large spans of control formal structures that have either de-layered too much or gone to many dimensions in a matrix-based structure (eg, three accountability lines). These operating models can drive the collaborative footprint of roles to a level that is unsustainable. And this has gotten worse with the pandemic. 

Pre-pandemic, people were, on average, spending 85 percent or more of their time in collaborative activities—time spent on the phone, in meetings, on email and utilizing instant messaging. That number went up by 5 to 8 hours a week through the pandemic. No one is paying attention, though—leaders generally are just foisting more and more demands on overloaded people. This makes following some of the practices I discuss in the book to streamline collaboration critical for both performance and well-being.

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Categories: Best Practices Company Culture Guest contributors PEOPLE/STAFF

Tags: Babson College collaboration overload dysfunctional collaboration essential collaboration Rob Cross

A heartfelt ‘thank you’ to the teacher who impacted my entrepreneurial journey

8 September, 2021

Richard Levychin is an EO New York member and chairperson of EO OneWorld, a membership platform affiliated with EO’s New York chapter which believes that a diverse EO is a stronger EO. EO OneWorld will add value to EO by attracting more EO members from the Black, Hispanic/Latino(a)(x), Asian and LGBTQIA+ entrepreneurial communities. Richard is also a partner in Galleros Robinson Certified Public Accountants and Advisors, where he heads the firm’s Commercial Audit and Assurance practice. Richard is grateful to the mentors who inspired him to succeed, and wrote a touching tribute to a college professor who had a lasting impact on him. The following article originally appeared in Business Insider and is reprinted here with an addendum, as noted toward the end.

When I received a letter from my alma mater, Baruch College, awarding me with the Baruch College Alumni Association Leadership Award for Business, which was to be presented as part of their annual meeting, I was deeply humbled.

I did a flashback in time to when I was the 18-year-old immigrant kid from Jamaica, living in Springfield Gardens, Queens in New York who, in his sophomore year at Baruch, was enrolled in two back-to-back advanced accounting classes taught by Diane Gold, a 25-year-old Jewish woman with a BA, an MBA, a CPA, and a PhD.

She was close to 300 pounds. So the Black kids in the class, in our infinite smart-ass wisdom, nicknamed her “Slim.” Not much older than us, she was part hard-ass teacher and part smart-ass teacher.

Class was a combination of intense accounting content and jokes flying across the room between her and mostly the Black students. The other students simply didn’t have the courage or the material to participate in the jokes. The thing about Slim was that as long as you did your homework, did the classwork, and got good grades, you could make as many smart-ass comments as you liked.

She took a special interest in me and was unimpressed with my 90-plus test scores, choosing instead to focus on the 10% I got wrong. (“Richard, 90% in college gets you an “A.” 90% at work gets you fired”). She would do a deep dive with me on the 10% I got wrong, usually ending our conversations with “What were you thinking here? Come on. You are smarter than this.”

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Categories: Coaching Entrepreneurial Journey Inspirational Legacy Member Spotlight

Tags: Baruch College Diane Gold EO OneWorld Galleros Robinson Richard Levychin

10 Valuable Instagram hacks and features

3 September, 2021

Contributed by Harikrishna Kundariya, CEO at eSparkbiz Technologies, a SaaS development company that provides world-class solutions to help clients grow digitally.

Instagram, with its massive audience, is still growing day by day. People feel incredibly engaged by and spend so much time on this social media platform because of its unique and ultracool features that allow users to share stories with the world in a creative way.

Is your company maximizing its Instagram presence to grow and scale? There are features available on Instagram that are yet undiscovered by most users.

Here are 10 Instagram hacks and features you probably haven’t used yet.

1. Shortcuts for common responses

Responding with the same reply to everyone becomes annoying and time-consuming. A better strategy is to save pre-written responses so that you can quickly respond without wasting a second.

How it’s done:  Go to your IG profile and click on the three-line icon. Then go to settings, tap “creators,” and then click “saved replies.” Add your common response and save it along with a shortcut to identify the message when you need it. You can use pre-existing replies by typing the shortcut into the direct messages (DM) of any user.

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Categories: Best Practices BUSINESS GROWTH Guest contributors Media PR/MARKETING

Tags: eSparkbiz Harikrishna Kundariya Instagram hack Instagram presence social media hack

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