Monday, February 2, 2015

Taylor Swift's Latest Trademark Filings Reveal a Shrewd Business Strategy


Taylor Swift may not have been the first musician to utter the words “This sick beat,” but if the shrewd superstar has her way, she could be the last.
Last October, days prior to the launch of her blockbuster album 1989, it turns out Swift stealthily filed trademarks for some of her catchier lyrical stylings, including “Nice to meet you. Where you been?,” “Could show you incredible things” and “Cause we never go out of style.”
The trademarks, which have not yet been granted, would apply to a dizzying array of product categories, from cosmetics to key chains to tote bags to temporary tattoos.
While other celebrities have attempted to copyright catchphrases in the past, such as Paris Hilton’s legal wrangling with Hallmark over “That’s hot,” the Guardian reports that this is the first time an artist has attempted to trademark her own lyrics.
The filing likely points to a pre-emptive strike against third parties who would seek to profit off of Swift’s songs as opposed to a forthcoming line of 1989-themed products, according to The Guardian. However, Swift does currently vend a ‘This Sick Beat’ long-sleeved T-shirt on her online store.
Known for her cheer-along choruses, unparalleled album sales and impermeable image, a closer look into Swift’s empire reveals a fiercely calculated business mind poised to crush any obstacles -- includinghackersnaysayers and Kanye West -- on the path to global domination.
Last November, in a similarly self-protective move that shook the music industry, Swift pulled her catalogue from Spotify, saying she felt that the streaming service devalued her work’s worth. At the time, Swift reiterated a rambling op-ed she’d penned for The Wall Street Journal in which she proclaimed herself “one of the few living souls in the music industry who still believes that the music industry is not dying…it's just coming alive."
Geoff  Weiss

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

8 Interesting Facts To Know About Super Bowl 2015


Super Bowl 2015 is scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 1, with the Seattle Seahawks taking on the New England Patriots. As the defending champs take on the most dominant NFL team of the last 15 years, the matchup is one of the most unique in the 49-year history of the game.
It’s no surprise that the two teams will meet at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. They both finished the 2014 regular season with the best record in their respective conferences.
The accomplishments of both teams have been largely overshadowed by the “Deflategate” controversy, which the NFL is still investigating. However, the incident shouldn't affect the game itself, which could turn out to be one of the more memorable in recent Super Bowl history given both clubs' strong play in recent seasons.
Below are eight interesting facts to know about Super Bowl 2015.
Could be most-watched TV show ever
Last year’s game was the most-watched TV show in U.S history with an average of 111.5 million viewers. It broke the previous records set in 2012 and 2010.
Seahawks make back-to-back trips
Seattle is the first team to play in consecutive Super Bowls since New England did it in 2005 and 2006. The Patriots were victorious in both games.
Tom Brady sets Super Bowl record
Brady will become the first quarterback to ever start in six Super Bowls. He had been tied with John Elway, who played in the game five times.
Most-experienced Super Bowl coaching matchup
Bill Belichick will coach his sixth Super Bowl, while Pete Carroll has reached the game for a second time, setting a record with eight combined appearances between head coaches. When the Patriots played the New York Giants in 2012, Belichick and Tom Coughlin combined for seven appearances.
Game returns out west
The contest hasn’t been played outside of the eastern or central time zone since 2008, when it was last held in Glendale. Super Bowl 50 will be played in San Francisco’s Levi’s Stadium.
Expensive tickets
Tickets are being priced higher than ever before on the secondary market, with the average asking priceat TiqIq surpassing $6,000. The site had never even tracked previous Super Bowl tickets going for more than an average of $5,000 per seat.
Pricy commercials
After a 30-second ad cost $4 million in 2014, that number is expected to rise to $4.5 million this year.
Multiple viewing options
For the fourth straight year, fans can watch the Super Bowl online. Viewers can stream 11 hours of Super Bowl content, without the requirement of a cable subscription.
Anthony Riccobono

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

10 Ways to Improve the Quality of Your Business Life


There's no greater success sucker in life than negativity. Work inevitably brings challenging experiences, whether it's having to spend time around negative people or being in a bad situation. 
Negativity can limit your potential to becoming something great in your career and keep you from living a purposeful, hopeful and fulfilling business life.
If you stay miserable in your work life, you'll have greater amounts of stress, increased health problems and less opportunity to grow your business: You won't be able to see past the negativity to the opportunity.
To become more positive, make a conscious decision to change your thinking and accept that work brings difficulty and negative moments. Your choice should be to live effectively within the challenging times. 

1. Accept the challenge.

No amount of positive thinking can take a challenge away but there are positive ways to look at it. Don't let anxious emotions swallow you.
You need to not rid yourself of these emotions or become overly attached to them. Painful times in business come and go as part of the natural flow of things. Trust that each challenge in business is there to help you grow. Do your best to live effectively when challenged.

2. Be self-reliant.

When people act in a self-centered fashion, they can become negative toward themselves and others.
Perceiving your business life as being all about you makes it tempting to believe that you deserve more than what you have. An attitude of entitlement sets you up for unrealistic expectations -- that others in the work world should cater to your needs and wants.
This type of attitude makes you difficult to work with. For a more successful and fulfilling work life, be able to depend upon yourself to get your needs met.

3. See opportunity.

When you view your business life as only what you don't have, you cannot appreciate what you've achieved thus far.
Learn to see and appreciate all that you have achieved and be grateful. There's nothing more draining than being around someone who is constantly complaining about their business. Train yourself to see everything as an opportunity.
Make the mental shift from negativity to gratefulness. This attitude gets noticed. It will make you more attractive to work with. And from this, more possibilities open up. 

4. Shed the seriousity.

Laugh more, especially at yourself. Life gets busy, schedules are full. Your business life can become task oriented or routine driven. If you stop laughing and act mechanically, you're living life under a black cloud. Yet you're responsible for your personal and professional relationships.
Work isn't always about performing tasks. Take moments to change your routine, enjoy breaks and go on vacations.

5. Help others.

If you live your business life as if you're the center of the universe, you will struggle. If the whole point of your company is to only think about yourself, you won't achieve long-term success.
Helping and supporting others to become happier and more successful versions of themselves is a pathway to your own increased fulfillment and success.

6. Have a purpose. 

Setting goals and striving for something bigger in your business life can help you lead a more abundant life.
Everyone is here to work and to be in action. Happiness is a byproduct of achieving. 
Without action, there's no room for anything but depression and negativity. By staying busy, moving toward business objectives, being creative and innovative, you will wake up with a purpose that keeps you motivated in your quest to achieve bigger-picture goals.

7. Choose your attitude.

Change always starts from within. In business, you can be your best ally or worst enemy. Work is never going to be without challenge. Even when you feel that nothing is going the way you want, you can choose to search for the silver lining.
Learn to change the language you speak to yourself with. You're perhaps hardest on yourself when things in business don’t go well. A stream of negative, self-defeating inner talk corrodes your focus on goals and dreams. Be nice to yourself and keep pressing forward.

8. Adopt positive company.

Emotions are contagious and so you become more like the people you spend your time with. If your co-worker circles are full of emotional vampires, histrionics or self-centered people, you will unconsciously resemble them.
It's difficult to stay motivated at work when people around you are not supportive and don't demonstrate goal-oriented behaviors. When you surround yourself with positive, motivated people, you'll ride the escalator to success. 

9. Work hard. 

Turn stress into positive action and motivation. All stress can be worked through. Don't let it paralyze your movement. When you focus on moving through workplace stress, it dissipates more quickly.

10. Shed the victim mentality.

You cannot grow in your business if you see yourselves as a victim. Each person is responsible for his or her thoughts, attitude and work ethics.
Take full responsibility for your views and yourself amid the good and the bad. If you consistently believe bad things happen to you, you are handicapping yourself in the drive for success. 
To increase your feelings of success, make positive choices in favor of yourself. Love yourself. Take positive actions in your business and manage your thoughts.
Thoughts become words and words lead to actions, and actions become habits. Pay attention to gratitude, prosperity, abundance, love, hard work, goals, exercise, eating healthfully and obtaining sufficient sleep. Let these become your habits.
Sherrie Campbell

Monday, January 26, 2015

Don't Squash Your Big Goals for the Year by Squandering Time


What’s your annually renewed vow? Eat better, exercise more, lose weight? Spend more time with the kids? Keep a weekly date night with the spouse?
Have you set a goal that's work related -- perhaps to keep a neater office and files? Are you trying to land that big client you’ve been going after for months?
Honestly, I don’t care what it is, but you do. You care so much you’re feeling bad right now that you didn’t make it happen last year.  
There’s a reason if you keep failing at realizing your resolutions, and I don’t think it’s because you’re weak-willed, lazy or insincere. I don’t even think it’s because you’re too busy, although you probably feel that you have too much to do and not enough time to keep your vow. 
Half the problem is that you keep letting your time be stolen from you by interruptions, especially at work. When people sit down and account for their time, they discover that they lose three to five hours a day to unwanted and unproductive interruptions from people I call time bandits, according to my research. Among them are probably your nearest (employees, colleagues, clients and customers) and dearest (yourself).
So you won’t have time to keep your resolutions unless you learn to deter your time bandits during your workday. Here are some timely tips to get started:
Understand the challenge. For a few days, calculate how much time you lose to interruptions. You will then have incredible motivation to change.
Train people who interrupt you. Learn how to explain to those who might interrupt your work that you want to take care of their request but make it in their best interest to let you "time lock." Have them allow you to block out some uninterrupted time. Assure these people that you will take care of them -- later. Offer to support them when they need the same thing: uninterrupted time.
Protect yourself from losing focus. People are often their own worst time bandits. Learn techniques to help you concentrate, so that you don’t waste your own time when you're trying to concentrate.
The other half of the problem is planning and prioritizing the time you've regained from reducing interruptions. If you don’t plan to succeed, you are in essence planning to fail. If every week this year your weekly plan does not show adequate time allocated sacredly to your resolution, then you are inviting failure. 
The reason you must resolve to work on your resolution is because you've made a habit of not doing so. People “run out of time” to exercise because they let something else intrude, which then spills over into the night.
They don’t eat right because they can’t find time to pack a healthy lunch, let alone find the moments to eat it. They cancel the weekly date with the spouse because they need to finish that big project for a client.
People refer to "next semester" for signing up for a Spanish class and ask, What’s the big hurry about making a will?
So here are brief tips for allocating time to meet your needs:
Determine the critical tasks. Obviously you consider your new resolution among your most critical tasks (along with keeping your business afloat and attaining health and happiness). That goal was critical enough for you to make a solemn vow, which means you must prioritize it, not let it take a backseat.
Handle the many minor tasks efficiently. If a project is not critical, it should be designated to the minor many slot. Such tasks are often repetitive or homogeneous tasks, tailor-made for batch processing. Doing like work in batches creates momentum and efficiency. 
Distinguish between hard and easy tasks.This is a subjective assessment. Determine what's hard for you to accomplish as opposed to what’s easy. Slot in hard tasks when you have energy or creativity for them. Hold the easy ones for when your energy or creativity is lower.
Plan for a week, not just tomorrow. Seeing the whole week at once makes it clearer the tasks that are critical or minor and what can be batch processed. This ensures that you have allocated sufficient time to achieving your resolutions. Writing things down spurs thinking, creativity and task execution.
As you go through this year, if you find yourself backsliding on resolutions, check these tips again and find renewed resolve.  
Edward G. Brown

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Are You a Manager or a Leader?


Over the past 15 years of building my real estate business, I've come to learn there's a huge difference between managers and leaders. Too often these words are used interchangeably. I've seen managers who are, in fact, leaders and so-called business leaders who are really nothing more than managers. 
The nuances in meaning are slight, but the business results produced by the two are drastically different. If you search online for the definition of a manager, Google defines it as "a person responsible for controlling or administering all or part of a company or similar organization."
A leader is simply someone who leads.
A manager controls. A leader leads.
It has been my experience that the companies that make a dent in the universe are the ones that are led not controlled by people. 
Are you a manager or a leader? Here are four simple ways to find out:

1. Being open to new ideas.

I will admit that there have been times in my career when I have actually caught myself saying, "That's the way it's always been done" to someone. When I do, I know I am trying to control not lead.
When employees or customers challenge the status quo of the way your organization does things, this is an opportune time to let them lead.
Your employees and customers have great ideas, ones that can make your company better. Instead of always saying or thinking, "We do it this way because that's the way we've always done it," challenge yourself to stop controlling the situation and let someone else have a stab at making the company better.

2. Viewing the competiton to learn from it.

"Our competitors are awful," a manager might say. If you're  thinking or saying that the competitors are awful, you're a manager. Managers like to control things and one thing they can't control in business is the competition.
A leader, on the other hand sees that competition can make a company stronger.  Leaders pay attention to what the competition is doing right and what rivals are doing wrong, so that they can learn new and better ways to build their own business. 
Leaders realize that the competition is not awful. It's just different. When explaining their company's value proposition, leaders can eloquently detail how the competition's value proposition differs from their own, without saying anything negative about the other company. 

3. Embracing the input of staff.

Managers don't ask others for their opinion because by doing so, control is lost. Leaders love using technology like the online-polling tool Survey Monkey so they can poll team members for ideas and advice about everything.
I learned this the hard way. I used to control and manage everything in my business from the planning of events to the training and marketing. When you start to see low attendance at your events and training or find that few are embracing your new ideas, it's time to start asking for help.
I survey members of my team about everything, including what training to offer, how the marketing should look and when and where to host events. By doing this, I get a consensus about what's important to them.
When people are engaged in the decision-making process, they are more likely to embrace whatever organizational endeavors the leader is working on. Even if you have some staffers who don't agree with the final decision, they appreciate having been asked their opinion, which means they're more likely to embrace the initiative even if they don't agree with it.

4. Not needing the final word.

Managers like control and one of the ways they retain it is by analyzing most decision-making processes with an assumption that they are right most of the time. 
Leaders approach things from a different viewpoint, one in which the assumption is that they don't have all the answers and the best way to find the best answers is through collaboration with others on the team.
Stacey Alcorn

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Use Emotional Intelligence to Make More Money


Recently I had an incident with a service provider who simply did not want to create a report in the format I requested.
I had been challenged trying to explain what I wanted from this person, even going so far as to write what to change and add on a sample report, but to no avail. I couldn’t get the data I wanted. Then I tried creating a Google Drive document with the sums I wanted to see in certain columns and the figures that comprised those sums in separate columns.
Trust me: I wasn't asking him to build a Mars rover from scratch. I just wanted data that already existed reorganized in a different way so that I (chief salesperson, boss and paycheck signer) could use it to create my forecasts more effectively. It was simple enough or so I thought.
I was wildly agitated as this person tried to tell me that the level of detail I wanted wasn’t necessary or didn't need to be recorded, tabulated, cut and pasted the way I requested. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was about creating this report, although the frustration I felt was eerily familiar. But I was still stumped.
Then I woke up this morning and it all made sense: geometry!
Was I asking this guy to do geometry? No, but I was asking him to arrange something in a way he was unfamiliar with and he protested because he was a numbers guy and thought, This just isn’t how you relay this data. 
My go-to brain guru, Howard Gardner, taught in his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences that people don't possess one specific kind of intelligence but rather individuals have multiple strengths and each person carries a unique blend of them.
A lot of the smarty pants you encountered in geometry class are probably logical-mathematical types who, as Gardner purported, do well with abstractions, reasoning, numbers and critical thinking and have the capacity to “understand the underlying principles of some kind of causal system,” which logical reasoning is closely linked to.
Well, I can barely figure out what that quote means, so clearly I am not the logical-mathematical type. But this, ahem, stubborn, vendor was. I, in fact, lean heavily toward the interpersonal type of intelligence that Gardner branded as working well with others, being sensitive to their moods and motivations and getting them to cooperate in a group.
Clearly I was failing at my own game, though, because exactly no one was cooperating. I just couldn't get this guy to see what I wanted him to create or understand that the only way I could effectively make sense of the data was to have it organized in a certain manner, one that made sense to my creative brain.  
Is it really so annoying to create a report in the format a client desires if you're paid well? Why not just make the customer happy?
This notion should be at the root of businesses: How can business owners give customers what they want and how they want it? Most entrepreneurs build their businesses backward.
But giving clients what they think they need is best delivered by using emotional intelligence.  
Here’s my formula for using emotional intelligence to make more money and save everyone a lot of angst:
1. Identify a target audience that’s big enough to serve, yet niche enough so you’re not everything to everyone and ideally a group that's very frustrated with the options currently available.
2. Get inside their heads and identify exactly what's keeping them up at night.
3. Present a solution that blows away the competition. Find a bold alternative that works.
4. Meet your customers where they are. Just give them what they want, when they want it. Period. It’s the crux of selling in the new luxury market and applies to every market as long as you can charge appropriately.
5. Get over yourself. Who cares if you think proofs or spreadsheets should be formatted in a certain way. Move over superstar, successful people in business don’t focus on their way: They focus on their customer’s way.
Remember, passion is great: Most entrepreneurs build their businesses around something they're passionate about doing, which is crucial to company longevity and success. But they cannot lose sight of who signs the paychecks: the customer.
The secret formula is to start a business that you’re passionate about and provide solutions in the most efficient manner and the format your customers crave so they can still be passionate about their businesses, make money, and in return, give you more work. Hello, superfat piggy bank!
And it didn’t even take a logical-mathematical type to give you the secret. 
Marley Majcher

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

How to Stay Calm in a Job Interview


We all know that job interviews are stressful. Hiring managers and recruiters can understand a little bit anxiety and some stress but being too stressful can prevent showing your true nature and professionalism. As a result, you may end up not getting the offer. Also, some hiring managers and recruiters think that if you are too nervous in a job interview, then, you cannot handle the pressure when you are doing your job. Therefore, you need to learn to control yourself during an interview.
Below you can find tips for staying calm during a job interview. Don’t forget that if you stay calm, you can show your confidence and reflect your true self to the others and increase your chance of getting the offer.

Go There Prepared 

Do your homework before the interview and research the job responsibilities, the company and its culture. Go there knowing why you want the job so much and what you are bringing to the table. Make a mock interview with a friend or with yourself in a mirror and cover the possible interview topics. Also, make a list of questions to ask to the interviewer. You can get help from my previous post “Best Questions to Ask During Interviews” from here.

Plan Ahead

Print out copies of your resume a few days before. Don’t wait until the day of the interview. Prepare your clothes and make sure they are ironed. Get at least eight hours of sleep the night before. Plan your travel route to the interview location and try to arrive there 15-20 minutes early. Never be late to the interview.

Listen

Be an active listener and answer what is being asked of you. Don’t answer the question just to answer it or talk about something totally different from what is being asked. Don’t cut the interviewer off while s/he is talking. Remember that an interview is a two-way conversation and it is not an inquiry. Therefore, give yourself a break and take the time to listen to the interviewer.

Think Positively

Think positively and don’t try to second-guess what the interviewer is thinking about you. Thinking positively will help you relax. As a result, you can focus on your skills and accomplishments easier. Show your strengths and reflect on the key points about yourself to state why you are a great fit to the job.
Ceren Cubukcu