Startup mindset

A couple of days ago, I was asked at a gathering of startups for how long I do work for my current company. I said that for around two months, I heard the following observation: 'Quite a lot of time for the startup style'. 

On a sidenote: I am living in Berlin, Germany, a country where you need a lot of effort and inner strength if you want to achieve professional success. In the last three years, I've heard a lot of stories from people that arrived in Germany (capitalist version) in their late 30s and it took them around 30 years to be considered: fluent German speakers, mature enough and relevant enough for being a successful story. Most of them did not change their job in the last two decades, as the stability of the workplace is part of the profile of a stable career.

However, it seems that the startups - not all of them created by German entrepreneurs - are here to claim a different narrative. It is not the time spent at the same desk that matters, but your achievements, and if you are smart enough to get the best professional and financial exposure in your late 20s, you can retire honorably and tour the world in your early 40s. A job interview do not start with an investigation about what your aims for the next 5 years are, but rather with a question about where do you see yourself in the next 30 days.

I am not one of those highly enthusted persons that will pledge the cause of the startups and I am decent enough to consider the financial risks of changing the job every 3 months. But, on the other hand, I felt very often that it is a big distance between the corporate mentalities here and the reality and such disparities will discourage innovation and creativity and on the medium and long term will endanger development. The startup booms could be understood somehow as the solution that the young generation of entrepreneurs living in Germany found for catching up with the latest trends in technology and creative thinking while enjoying the stability of the German economy. 

On the long term, I am optimistic and wish I am one of those startup minds too. 

Basic networking rules

As I was very busy lately doing a lot of research and networking, I tried to sum up with a couple of basic rules that one may follow for reaching high efficiency in terms of expanding the number of business contacts and opportunities of further branding. 

There are a couple of my personal insights:

- Do not forget to have enough business cards in your wallet. If the list of participants is open, try to have at least enough cards for each member of the audience. In general, you should have an average of around 20 business cards. If you are out of it, send your details to those that gave their business cards.

- Food and drinks are always part of the networking events, but be sure that you are not too hungry for spending all your time running from a plate to another. It is not extremely polite to talk business with your mouth full. And anyway, try to keep yourself as sober as possible.

- Be fast! Do not spend a lot of time with the same person. Remember that you are there to network and thus, try to get as many contacts as possible. Try to plan beforehand what are your objectives and what do you intend to achieve - how many contacts, what people may be of interest for a next meeting etc. 

- Be short but efficient. If you are not a good speaker, do a short rehearsal before the event. You should not lecture, but to have enough humour for introducing your company and services. Try to find point of connection with the other members and to make the conversation pleasant yet useful. 

- Continue with the networking. Get the advantage of the first impression - the sooner the better - and get the connection at a next level: find your contacts on Xing or LinkedIn or Twitter. Establish as soon as possible a next meeting in order to discuss in detail about your plans. 

What is your recipe of successful networking? Feel free to share your experiences!

Using algorithms for public relations

Anyone with a basic training in the domain of PR knows that the possibilities to predict a big crisis are limited and thus, investing in prevention is the best solution. However, in an era when hundreds of apps are created daily, there should be a cure for unexpected crisis. A startup from Singapore found the solution and here we are: the PR crisis - or honestly speaking, most of them - could be prevented. 

Sounds terribly optimistic, isn't it? Like engineering almost.

The wonders of the Dropbox

If you are a big company working with many freelancers, many of them located very far away, it is normal to try finding a way to quantify the amount of work spent for you. The culture of work is challenged dramatically by the latest work trends but, as usual, the mind patterns did not change over night. 

As I am working as a freelancer for over five years, I was faced more than once with the suspicions of my otherwise nice bosses regarding the way in which I do spent my time. Especially in the case of people not familiar with what exactly does it mean to be a freelancer and somehow envious of your freedom of spending an impressive amount of time home zapping websites and drinking your coffee all day long and having free hot homemade lunch. What for a freelancer this is the golden mine of freedom: the possibility of organizing your time up to your needs, without spending hours commuting and killing time in the company of nice or not so nice colleagues.

Anyway, regardless of how much you will write and say about how wonderful is to be a freelancer, you will always be the target of various suspicions. But in the world of 2.0., there are a lot of tools that will help your reluctant employer to quantify your work. 

Take, for instance, the Dropbox. It is a system that allows employers to share docs, organize and edit information. Either you are in Sydney or Buenos Aires, you will add there your work objectives, your plans and even your financial documents. There are versions available for phone and if you can install it in a matter of minutes on your desktop.

There are three available variants: Free - you can use 2GB, Pro - $9.99/month and a capacity that goes till 500 GB and Business - highly recommended for teams, with a lot of safety features, permanent phone support and unlimited deletion recovery. 

If you want to find out more about it and to get updated with news, you must follow their blog, updated regularly.

Now, your virtual boss will be more happy and you can impress him/her with your speed and the amount of reports produced daily. (Each document uploaded has a date and the mention of the last update).

Good luck Dropboxing!

Tell your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free

I am a passionate reader of books about time management, but even more passionate to practice various recipes - personal or borrowed - of how to efficiently use my time. In the middle of writing a new book - about communications and customers service a project I have in mind for at least 5 months, but wasn't a pro manager of my writing time - I decided to have a look in my Kindle for useful resources.

Amy Lynn Andrews' book: Tell your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free helped me to better organize the coming weeks of writing when I need to juggle with the housework obligations, a very challenging new job where I need to be very active and an impressive amount of social obligations. Add to this some other equally important spiritual requirements and you have an impressive mosaique of a hectic life. 

My lessons learned from the book:

- planning, planning and planning

- The confirmation of my old feeling I live with since early childhood: 'Any significant change in our lives will require patience and sacrifice'.

- When you have your priorities set, you can enjoy the freedom of organizing the daily and weekly blocks of time in a flexible way. For instance, if today the domestic chores can be finished in 10 minutes, you dedicate the rest of the time assigned for such activities for writing or volunteering. 

- We are always in control of our own time, and we should make the right choices for a balanced time schedule. But in order to achieve this, we should establish what our roles are - wife, mother, businesswoman, consultant, teacher, writer etc. - what are our main objectives in each case and what are our daily tasks. 

- Write down your objectives and set up the Excel/Google doc with your set-up activities: both the negotiable and non-negotiable ones. 

The conclusion: you have a dream? Work for it punctiliously, hard, with a bit of sacrifice but at the end of your journey, most likely it will turn into reality. 

The latest trends in communications

Anyone interested in the latest trends in terms of mobile and social media communications would have been happy to join the sophisticated audience from the BITKOM Congress, organized between 26 and 27 November in Berlin, on Karl-Marx Allee. 

Big billboards on Karl-Marx-Allee

Even though Germany faces a lot of problems with accepting the new technologies - for instance, the e-wallets are not openly accepted - the engine of the European economy cannot stay behind and thus, little by little, with the help of a smart and well organized lobby, the change of mentality is on the way. The main advantage of not being the first to follow the trends could be that one may still have the last word in improving the previous techniques and strategies that were followed almost blindly at the beginning. 

For the moment, Germany is trying to develop the research tools for constant social innovation. There are a lot of changes ahead and it will be not easy to endeavor what the final results will look like. The speed of the transmission of information equals the speed of light a scenario that makes almost impossible the categorization of the data. 

The press conference

One of the most used word I've heard during my hours spent at the BITKOM Congress was: sharing (not necessarily only on Facebook). Sharing while taking care of the privacy considerations; sharing if you want to grow both as an individual and as company (JP Rangaswami); sharing because you do not have any other choice; sharing in a smart way, by using the social media tools and the mobile technologies in order to reach your potential and current audience and customers. Even though not all companies and sectors do need an impressive amount of data (banking, financial and the government sectors are the most exposed to it) almost all domains of activity will need to change at a certain extent their information culture. New skills are needed at all levels of decision. 

As Germany is the country of Siemens and other forefront companies in the world of technology and communications, the references to mobile communication was often used as the best tool to address the overall reservations for an open data policy. The challenges and opportunities for innovation are impressive and we are just at the beginning of the journey (Annette Zimmermann, from Gartner Research). 

When you are in Berlin, do what Berliners do and from the agenda couldn't miss a presentation about the 'legendary' local start-up culture (Joel Kaczmarek, from Gruenderszene), with a funny introduction in the daily life of a startuper. I hope that many of the serious, black-suited participants realized that irony should be included as a main quality of a startuper in Berlin and therefore, they will be kind and nice with anyone asking them their generous financial support. 

The Congress was located at the legendary Kosmos, the DDR's once best kino

Overall, the Trend Kongress offered a good picture of the state-of-arts of the German communications.  A lot of meticulous work ahead till the next Congress.

Online PR for German companies

Good news for you, online media addicts. The next months will mean more work but with many spectacular results for your clients - and your bank account!

Very often, I expressed my unhappiness with the low outreach of German companies via online media tools. The situation is not one of the best in Europe, but it seems that it will not stay for too long. According to an interesting study Zukunft der Unternehmenskommunikation in the coming months we may assist to a lot of interesting changes.

For instance, according to the study, social media communication will increase its presence into the branding and communication strategies of German companies with over 82%. Nowadays, the average use is of 48% of the daily PR activities. Content marketing is also expecting to increase with around 75%. Currently, the media and the public are influenced mostly by e-mail newsletters and the information distributed via press portals. Regarding this latest tool, I must recognized that I was not too keen to use it and preferred instead to communicate directly with the media. However, each time I used one of those free or charge press portals, I got unexpected results. Probably, a matter of checking the identity and the prestige of the company sending the media, as the membership to a press portal supposes the confirmation of some identity details of the sender. 

The research published by PR Gateway mentions that the social media tools - together with media monitoring services and online press release services - contribute to the increase of efficiency of the PR work, with a minimal investment of time. I could not agree less. 

The study is based on a researched made during August and September 2012, among 313 German companies covering domains such as IT, consulting and pharma industry. 

With such good news for the next 12 months, I can't wait to check permanently how I will help my German and non-German customers to increase their presence in the online realm.