Mediation Marketing and Career Guide: Making Mediation Your Day Job

Color can be a strong element of your ADR business brand when used strategically because people associate meaning with colors, says Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch in his introduction to a recent podcast on the use of color in branding.

In Color As Branding Element, John interviews color expert Kate Smith, editor of color advice site Sensational Color, about the meanings associated with certain colors, how to use color effectively in print and online collateral, and companies that use color well.

If you’re re-working your ADR business image or in the first stages of creating it, this is a podcast worth your time. Listen directly from Color As Branding Element or get it on iTunes.

For a bit more on the use of color in your ADR business branding efforts, here are a couple of past posts on the topic:

• Color, Consumer Decisions and Business Branding
• How to Choose Your Website’s Colors

© 2010 by Tammy Lenski. Work originally published at MakingMediationYourDayJob.com.

What would happen if you were to stop blogging primarily about yourself and your services, and instead blog about topics that meet the interests of your target market – even if those topics weren’t conflict resolution?

I stumbled across a terrific example of this approach recently, when Eric Raymond of Oakley Signs & Graphics contacted me about referencing one of my articles on their blog, Free Help for Real Estate Agents.

Oakley’s blog isn’t about real estate signs, though that’s what they make and sell. Their blog is about helping their market, realtors, do their job better. In our email exchange, Eric told me why they chose this approach:

Last year, we decided that spending money on advertising didn’t build any equity in relationships. If all customer/client relationships lived and died in the transaction, it placed an unreasonable burden on the purchasing experience, which even in its best form is still somewhat adversarial.

If we allocated advertising dollars towards creating a free resource for agents to become better at their job, we would not only build more valuable relationships, but we would also be engaged in the only thing that can create demand for real estate signs: helping agents become better at their job. You don’t need signs if you’re not selling homes.

Now that’s simply smart marketing – relationship oriented and resource based. Judging by the traffic their article brought to my own blog, they have a healthy, vibrant readership.

© 2010 by Tammy Lenski. Work originally published at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

Internet marketing company Hubspot has an excellent video, accompanied by slides, called How to Monitor Your Social Media Presence in 10 Minutes a Day.

The video is an hour and chock full of simple, straightforward things you can do right now to better track the results of your online and social media marketing efforts. Even if you do only two or three of the activities they suggest you’ll get new insights into your efforts.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

The following article was just published in the spring newsletter of ACR’s New England Chapter, NE-ACR. I’m delighted to have shared newsletter space with fellow authors Diane Levin (Web-Savvy Advice for ADR Professionals), Blair Trippe, David Gardner, Al Canali, Mindy Milberg, and Jim McGuire. Special thanks to Louisa Williams, editor, for all the hard work she puts into producing each issue.

Using Social Media in ADR Marketing: Top 10 Tips

“You should blog.”

“Get on Facebook – yesterday.”

“If you’re not on Twitter, you’re missing out on a big marketing opportunity.”

“I have 703 connections on LinkedIn. You?”

If only successful conflict resolution businesses proliferated as quickly as places to hang out online and other people’s opinions about how you should spend your marketing time.

Because putting time into marketing you must. If you’re like most conflict resolution professionals building practices today, you will not find business success until you master your craft, whether it’s mediation, conflict coaching, collaborative law, arbitration or one of many other processes for addressing conflict; identify the conflict-related services your market doesn’t just need but wants; and conduct effective regular marketing online and off.

That last challenge is difficult for many conflict resolution professionals who don’t think of marketing as part of their practice, don’t know how to tap online platforms for marketing, consider social media a colossal waste of time, are simply overwhelmed by all the options out there, or all of the above.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogging, podcasting, and the like are all social media, an umbrella term used to describe the online intersection of information creation, human interaction and networking, and the diffusion of ideas.

They’re also the latest bandwagons. But bandwagons, seductive as they are, can be dangerous wastes of precious time. Going along for the ride can lead you to destinations you never wanted to visit and away from the ones that would make the journey worth your while. So don’t just jump on the bandwagon. Learn how to steer and make these tools work for you.

This article offers best practices for leveraging social media and figuring out how to get the biggest return on the investment of your time. While it won’t help you decide whether to blog, podcast, or tweet to build your practice, it will help you understand what’s involved in doing this right and, in the process, help you assess the value of using social media as part of your marketing mix.

The 10 tips that follow have a common thread: They’re all informed by three related habits of mind. Adopt these mindsets when you’re using social media, and they’ll guide you well every time.

Mindset 1: Relationship. It’s not called social media by accident. At its foundation, social media is more about relationship development than anything else. Relationship marketing, conversation marketing, dialogue marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing are today’s buzzwords, and they all assume that effective marketers know to put relationship first. Remember that you’re in a relationship business, so use online platforms to demonstrate your best communication and social skills. When participating online, think, “build connection.”

Mindset 2: Conversation. Today’s effective marketers don’t build relationships so they can talk at other people. They build them to start and participate in two-way conversations online, just as you would in any in-person relationship. When participating online, think “conversation” instead of “bullhorn.”

Mindset 3: Authenticity. Twitter has more than 20 million users in the United States alone and grew by 50% monthly in 2009. Facebook boasts 400 million active users. There are more than 130 million blogs and approximately 1 million blog posts daily around the globe. All this means lots of noise and too few signals. When participating online, be a signal in all that noise – figure out what sets you apart, what differentiates yourself from your competition, and use it. Vanilla just isn’t a good flavor online.

Top 10 Tips

1. Get clarity on your goals. Too many people start participating in social media as an experiment. That’s not a bad way to start, but what’s crucial to leveraging social networking effectively is defining and refining your goals. When you get clear on exactly what’re you’re hoping to accomplish and how you can achieve your goals, you’ll know how much time you should devote to social media, whom you should follow, and what you should be talking about online.
2. Find your tribe. Marketing genius Seth Godin, author of best-selling books such as “Purple Cow,” defines a tribe as “a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” Social media isn’t about gathering as many followers, readers, and listeners as you can – it’s about finding and connecting with the right people, those who are interested in what you offer, your big idea, or what you represent. Focus on tribe, not numbers.
3. Don’t be that guy. We all know someone like him, that guy who can’t stop talking about himself and holds the floor as if he’s in a one-man show. We all know how we respond to these egomaniacs, so leave the pulpit at home. When you make friends on Twitter, don’t make your first message to them a promotion for your business. When you link up on LinkedIn, find out about your new friend before telling them how much you can help them. It’s fine to mention what you offer and share your writings, videocasts, or audio recordings. But overt self-promotion shouldn’t be the bulk of what you’re doing. Remember the three mindsets.
4. Make a commitment. It’s estimated that 50% of blogs go inactive within 90 days, meaning the creator stops adding new content. You can find many online marketing salespeople who promise massive results quickly, but they’re lying. The old-world maxim is true in the online world, too: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Blogging, tweeting, linking up, and chatting on Facebook are approaches that require regular care and feeding, just like your offline relationships. Opting in and dropping out is no better than never doing it at all.
5. Give before you get. Your momma was right. When you log in to your favorite social networking site or start typing your latest blog post, don’t work from the question “How can I convince people to buy my services?” Think instead, “How can I be helpful and remarkable to them today?” For instance, answer questions posted on Twitter by people in your target market – even if it’s not a conflict-related question (“Anyone have spare tickets for tonight’s Sox game?” Maybe you don’t, but perhaps you do know a good source you’re willing to share). Your goal is to be helpful, be seen as a resource, and stay present in your market’s mind.
6. Loosen up…but don’t get sloppy. People want to hang out with people who are interesting. That’s true at cocktail parties, and it’s true online. One-note Sally, who can talk only about conflict and resolution and negotiation and peacemaking and mediating and conflict coaching… gets tiring. When participating online, be the well-rounded person you are in the rest of your life. Connect with people who care about the same hobbies and causes you care about (Remember Mindset #3: Authenticity). That said, keep in mind that you don’t want to confuse your market. If you love to play blood-splattering video games, for example, perhaps that’s a hobby not to discuss in the same forums in which you’re marketing your conflict resolution services.
7. Join other people’s conversations. Think of social media as an online water cooler – sometimes you start the conversation, sometimes you join others’ conversations. On social networking sites, this means logging in and spending a little time reading what others in your social circle are talking about before responding to the discussions that interest you most. On blogs and other content sites, it means leaving comments in the comment boxes at the foot of the articles (if you receive bloggers’ posts via email, click through to the blogsite to leave your comment). Remember Mindset #2: Conversation.
8. Remember that social networking is local, too. Local and social search are part of the web’s future. People local to you will search for and follow you because it makes the web feel more neighborly. Friends rely on what other friends recommend because they trust their judgment and consider it more honest. Gone are the days when your local market probably wasn’t hanging out online (reread the stats in Mindset #3, and you’ll see your neighbor’s somewhere online now, too). For example, meetups, in-person gatherings organized by people in online social circles, are commonplace now, with many websites devoted to making them happen (see, for instance, Meetup.com). Find a meetup in your area and join in – or start one of your own.
9. Use automation sparingly. Most social media tools now include mechanisms for automatically adding certain kinds of content. For instance, on Twitter, you can arrange for anyone who follows you (chooses to be notified of all content you add) to receive a brief automated message from you. You can also set up your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts so that your social circles on those sites are notified automatically of your latest blog posts. Easy, yes, but not necessarily effective. Social circles don’t want to talk to your computer; they want to talk to you. If you use automation, be sure it’s only a small part of your participation.
10. Be willing to evolve. Today it’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, FriendFeed, Foursquare, and dozens of others. In five years, maybe sooner, most of them will be replaced by something else as technology and people’s interests evolve. When participating online, don’t wed yourself to a tool – wed yourself to being in relationship, building connection, and serving as a helpful resource. Those never go out of style, online or off.

© 2010 by Tammy Lenski and NE-ACR.

What will it take for ADR to reach a real tipping point in broad adoption by the public? While tempting to place the answer to this question squarely on the shoulders of national and regional professional associations, the more effective answer instead places the responsibility on the collective shoulders of all individual mediators.

There are five critical characteristics that affect the rate at which a new idea gets adopted broadly in the marketplace. Know the five — and how to address them in your marketing efforts — and you have a powerful key not only for your own success, but also for helping professional conflict management and resolution gain traction broadly. More work for any good mediator means, ultimately, more work for all mediators.

Alan AtKisson, environmental sustainability expert, the powerhouse behind the Sustainable Seattle project, and writer on the “diffusion of innovation,” says this about spreading innovation:

Researchers have discovered that the adoption of an innovation in any given population follows a fairly predictable pattern. An innovation starts with an innovator, often a single individual with a new idea. (”New” here means unknown to the culture, even if the idea is very old.) After its conception, an innovation spreads slowly at first — usually through the work of change agents, who actively promote it — then picks up speed as more and more people adopt it. Eventually it reaches a saturation level, where virtually everyone who is going to adopt the innovation has done so.

AtKisson identifies five critical characteristics for increasing the rate at which a “new” idea — like professional mediation — gets adopted by the mainstream. I’ve described each and how it’s relevant to your mediation marketing.

Characteristic 1: Relative Advantage

An innovation will spread more quickly if it’s perceived as better than the status quo – that is, its advantage relative to the status quo is quite clear in the potential adopter’s mind.

For mediation to gain market traction, the market needs to see it as better in some way than these other common options:

• Doing nothing or handling it yourself. This remains the most widely adopted option in conflict situations in virtually every market.
• Intervention by someone with authority. In commercial and business settings, this might include human resources or senior leadership.
• Litigation. While mediation marketing commonly makes the case for mediation by contrasting it to litigation and the accompanying financial and emotional tolls, only a very small number of business disputes escalate to litigation. The status quo isn’t litigation for most conflict and disputes, including those in the business arena.

Until mediators collectively do a better job of contrasting mediation’s relative advantage over the above “big three” options, adoption rate will rise slowly.

Characteristic 2: Compatibility

To spread, an innovation needs to fit well with people’s existing values, past experiences and present needs.

If you want to increase your ADR marketing success, you need to figure out what your target market values, what problem-solving approaches they already know and use, and explicitly connect your value offer to those.

For instance, if your market values direct dialogue for resolving disputes and preserving the business relationship, they’re apt to be more attracted to a style of mediation that doesn’t rely solely on caucus to negotiate a resolution. If your market distrusts neutrality, then they may be more attracted to working with a negotiation coach who’ll figuratively “step to their side” and advise them, than a professional mediator.

Characteristic 3: Complexity

The easier it is for people to understand and use the innovation, the faster the adoption rate.

This is a particular challenge for mediators. The public still doesn’t really know what mediation is because the term is often used interchangeably with negotiation and arbitration in the media, and because mediation conducted by one mediator can look quite different than mediation conducted by another. The public doesn’t yet know how to find the kind of mediator who will be a good fit for their particular situation and values, and too often assume that one size fits all, sometimes leading to disillusionment with all of mediation. And court-associated mediation carries some of the same procedural and systemic complexity that litigation carries – hardly a way to make mediation simpler to adopt than litigation.

Mediators who de-complexify the process of getting to the mediation table will help diffuse mediation faster. This translates into re-thinking the procedural maze associated with some court-associated ADR. And for mediation outside of the legal arena, it translates into minimizing the hoops mediators require parties to jump through to get to the table.

Characteristic 4: Trialability

If people can try out an innovation in some form, without first having to commit to it all at once, the adoption rate will increase.

Trialability is not an unfamiliar idea if you’ve ever walked by the product sample lady in the supermarket.

The challenge for mediation, of course, is that its confidential nature makes sampling difficult. Videos of roleplays (even unscripted ones), while informative, don’t achieve trialability in the true sense because the viewer knows what they’re watching isn’t fully real. They’re not really sampling; they’re watching someone else sampling.

The answer to this challenge may well be in the time-tested process of networking. Networking, online and in person, allows your market to sample who you are instead of what you do. The most effective networking builds trust and gives your market the opportunity to experience how you think, what you’re like, and how credible you are. It’s a shorter leap to buy your services for a market that already knows and trusts you as a person and as a professional in your field.

Characteristic 5: Observability

If people use an innovation and the good results are visible by others, the innovation will spread more rapidly.

Observability is tricky stuff for people whose product is invisible. Self-promotion by talking about your successes at networking events, on blogs, and via social networking sites doesn’t rise to the level of observability. Credible observability comes from others talking about your work and the good results they achieved because of you.

Add to this challenge the real possibility that consumers of mediation may not really observe that the mediator is helping the dispute or conflict get sorted out. In Daniel Bowling and David Hoffman’s Bringing Peace Into the Room: How the Personal Qualities of the Mediator Impact the Process of Conflict Resolution, Peter Adler describes this small research project:

Several years ago, Kem Lowry of the University of Hawaii Department of Urban and Regional Planning did an analysis of some thirty successfully mediated cases that had been in a program I directed…First Lowry asked the mediators in our cases to explain what they did to bring about success. Then he asked the parties in those same cases what they actually observed the mediators doing. The mediators – myself included – gave elaborate explanations of strategies, timing, and tactics. We identified how we went about conducting our conflict analyses and circumscribing issues to be worked on. We deciphered the breakdowns, breakthroughs, and the windows of opportunity both lost and found. The participants in our cases had a very different view. What they recalled us doing was opening the room, making coffee, and getting everyone introduced.

So how to build credible observability for both the ADR field and for individual mediators? Some ways include:

• Testimonials. Not just any testimonial, but ones in which the writer or speaker explicitly describes what you did that helped.
• Tapping people with courage. Some folks who’ve used mediation won’t discuss it with others, even when they’re happy with the results. It’s the dirty-laundry thing. But the blogging, cell phone generation may have fewer inhibitions. You need to find the people with courage to talk – again, very specifically – about what you did that helped.
• Tapping people affected positively when the parties work things out. If successful observability is about making the good results visible to others, you may have more success getting people who weren’t directly involved in the mediation to talk about the successes. People like HR directors, managers, CEOs, and legal counsel.

To integrate these ideas into your mediation marketing, answer each of these questions for your own practice and use your answers to design your approach:

1. What is the conflict status quo for my particular market and how can I demonstrate to them that my services are a vastly preferable alternative?
2. How do my services speak explicitly to the values, past experiences and present needs of my market, and how will I convey that to my market?
3. How can I make the adoption and use of my services as straightforward and simple as possible and how can I best alert my market about that?
4. What will I do to give members of my market the opportunity to sample me and/or my services?
5. How can I make the good results I’ve had with my clients observable by my prospective clients?

This article was originally printed in the ACR Commercial Section Newsletter, December 2009.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

If you’re out in public and have an emergency, “Somebody help me!” is a whole lot less effective than saying, “You in the blue jacket, dial 911!”

There’s an old psychology experiment (if someone can recall the source, please remind me, as I can’t find it) demonstrating that specific requests trump general ones. I was reminded of this experiment when I saw an article by the word-of-mouth marketing geniuses at GasPedal. In In “How to Get Your Fans to Take Action,” they say,

A large fan base is nice, but it’s when you get them to take action that it really pays off. Here’s how:

1> Be specific
2> Make it easy
3> Acknowledge them

1> Be specific
Get fans moving by giving them something specific to act on. Rather than asking for general support, ask for specific things like reviews, volunteers, testimonials, feedback on a new product, donation amounts — whatever. By keeping your requests specific, your fans will know exactly how you need help.

2> Make it easy
People are busy — and while they would love to help you, they don’t always have the time to join in complicated campaigns on your behalf. Make things simpler by removing unnecessary steps, giving them links to where they need to go, and outlining specific instructions on whatever you’re asking. The easier you can make the process, the more likely fans are to participate.

3> Acknowledge them
When a fan shows their support for you, make a big deal about it. Thank them, acknowledge them in front of other fans, and highlight the results of their efforts. Sooner or later, you’re going to be asking your fans to take action again — make it easier next time by showing everyone how much fan support means to your business.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

Last month a large envelope arrived unexpectedly in the mail. Inside were two double-sided 8½ x 11 laminated sheets in colors immediately evocative of construction zones. One is titled The Contractor’s Guide to Successful Construction Projects and the other The Property Owner’s Guide to Successful Construction Projects.

My immediate reaction was, “Now this is simply smart marketing.”

The guides’ author is Stuart Baker, a Cape Cod-based mediator and builder who helps property owners, construction professionals and architects sort out the kinds of quagmires any of us who’ve ever built a house or done a major renovation know well. Stuart combines almost 30 years of construction experience as founder and owner of Creative Contractors Corp. with ten years as a mediator / negotiator, and several years as an addictions counselor, community organizer and local community project coordinator. His site, Conscious Cooperation, is a well-designed, straightforward resource and his new guides are now featured prominently on it.

The two short guides offer wisdom for setting up a constructive (ha!) working relationship associated with a building project, how to communicate effectively, and what to do if conflict brews. For example, the Property Owner’s Guide cautions,

7. EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED: Address work changes and surprises.

• Work changes should be written out and if at all possible estimated beforehand.
• A good rule of thumb is that the actual cost of a work change order will be held within 20% of the estimate unless unforeseeable things emerge.
• The contractor should agree to make every effort to notify the owners of unexpected situations, particularly in remodeling. It is impossible to always foresee everything, and there may be additional costs. Trust is important here.
• Address dealing with dust protection and cleanup.

I liked Stuart’s smart marketing idea so much I asked him to tell me a little bit about his intentions with the guides and how they’ve been received.

I have found that the intention to cooperate and be committed to mutual success is really powerful and can open very unexpected doors of harmony, effectiveness and enjoyment related to any project. This is part of what I urge people to put good attention to. I ask them how do they feel when they know someone is holding them in this fashion, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to do that reciprocally.

With the two guides my intention is to reach “both sides” of the construction relationship equation, both property owners and contractors, hopefully before they even have a contract. The Guides can actually be used, too, to help both “sides” screen each other.

My overall intention is to help people set a great beginning and framework for successful continuation and completion of any project. As you and I know, the human relations are so important, and in this realm I think
they are often given so little attention. Then people wonder what went wrong! I want people to bring out underlying themes, hopes, fears, concerns, excitement. I want to bring out the agendas and have clarity, forthrightness and hopefully honesty between people.

He tells me the guides have been very well received. No surprise there. You can get your own copy of the guides from Stuart’s site.

Thanks, Stuart, for your willingness to let me share your great marketing idea.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

In his famous How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie wrote,

“I often went fishing up in Maine during the summer. Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn’t bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish and said: ‘Wouldn’t you like to have that?’

“Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people?”

Love that story. Hat tip to my friend Cindy for reminding me of that one, long forgotten to me.

Announcing “quick calls”

You may be interested in my new Quick Calls weekly office hours, announced last week over at my Conflict Zen blog. You’re welcome to make use of them as well.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

Prospective clients are checking up on you. They’re Googling your name and your business name. They’re scanning only the first one or two pages of results. If you’ve got a website, they’re visiting it and looking around. If you don’t, they’re relying on what others are writing or saying about you.

These are the questions they’re asking themselves as they rummage about on the ‘net:

• Does she know her stuff?
• Can I trust him to get it done right?
• Why should I hire her instead of the mediator down the street?
• How can he help my clients and/or me?
• What would working with her be like?
• Does he offer something that I believe is a compelling solution to my problem?

For many mediators, these are the answers you’re providing online and off:

• Images of suits at boardroom tables, the scales of justice, handshakes, doves.
• FAQs about mediation, with the same answers as many other mediator websites.
• A photo of yourself in front of your legal library’s bookshelves, perhaps with your attorney colleagues around you.
• A boardroom like all others.
• An introductory session like all others.
• Print materials that are professional but generally boring and indistinguishable from the ADR provider next door.

Collectively, these answers are ineffective in a world where “cookie cutter” just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Why Differentiation Matters

If you’re already established and bringing in all the clients you want, you’re not reading this article. You already had a toehold before competition got tough or you had such an entre into your market that you could be mediating from the moon and people would still seek you out. I’m not writing this for you.

I’m writing it for the other 95% of mediators out there.

To stand out to your prospective clients, you need to be remarkable, not average. You need to convey your fit with their specific needs, not be interchangeable with other commercial providers. You need to convey that your practice is vibrant and in demand, not boring or tired.

What does it take to stand out, to be remarkable, to be unique in what you do and/or how you do it?

Here are five actions you can take in the next 60 days to build a differentiated platform for your practice. Some are concrete actions, and some are reflective work. You’ll need to do both, because each feeds the other.

You’ll notice none of them involve building or re-building your website. That comes later because the outcomes of the exercises will guide website design, function and content.

1. Stop Running From Your Current Job

To market effectively, you need to be running toward your dream, not just away from your nightmare. Running from your present situation supplies only the desire to get away – to almost anything that will give you some relief. That’s not a great foundation for marketing, which benefits greatly from genuine passion.

When mediators tell me they want to build a private practice or prove the mettle of a mediation division within a firm, I always ask: Why ADR? With painful frequency the answer is some version of, I’m disillusioned/unhappy/tired of what I’m doing now.

I live for the days mediators say to me, I’m so excited about the potential that ADR offers that I can’t stand waiting another day for my market to see that too.

Action 1: Figure whether you’re running primarily away or toward. Be nakedly honest with yourself. If you’re running away, all is not lost. Your task is to get very clear on what you would love to run toward – paint a picture in detail, figuratively or literally. Maybe it is commercial ADR. Maybe it’s piloting commercial jets.

2. Take Off the Mask

Differentiation is, in no small part, about risk. The risk to be who you really are and show that face to your market. It’s the risk to set yourself apart in a remarkable way, instead of blending in with the crowd. And in the mediation world, it sure is a growing crowd.

When it comes time to write marketing copy, build or re-build your website, and put yourself in front of your market, you want no cognitive dissonance between who you really are and who they see, or between who they see and what your marketing says about you. You want consonance and differentiation, in tandem.

Action 2: Who are you, really? If you could relax and let your good quirks shine through, what would people see? If you took off the professional mask you think you have to wear and let your market see you in your glory, what would they see? When you’re most happy, who are you and how do you act?

3. Pick Up the Paintbrush

This is about getting very clear on your market. Your market is not everyone, even though everyone has disputes. Repeat after me: My market is not everyone. When you market to everyone, the old saying goes, you market to no one.

Your market is looking for glimpses of themselves in your marketing. They’ll look ‘til they find the person who’ll give it to them, or they’ll walk away and find another way to resolve their dispute.

Be the commercial mediator for the construction trade. Or NASCAR fans who own mid-sized businesses. Or tech startups in Silicon Valley. You can add more markets later if you wish, but understand this: Narrowing your market usually means more business, not less, because your reputation as the go-to person in that market creates word-of-mouth momentum.

Action 3: Paint a picture of the people in your market, using words or images. What do they do? Where do they live and/or work? What do they spend money on? How do they dress? Where do they hang out? What do they do in their spare time? What kinds of values do they hold deeply? What causes do they support? Do you like them as humans (please say yes or pick a different market – it’ll show)?

4. Write a Classified Ad

You’ve heard of the elevator pitch. This is like that but you get fewer words. Your market is busy, overwhelmed by information, and wants you to cut to the chase.

If you were to write a classified ad for your market, telling them who you’re seeking and conveying a few important tidbits about the real you, what would you write? Here’s an example to get you started:

Conflict makeover artist seeks high-achieving mediators who want to transform their reactions to conflict. Whiners need not apply; this is strictly for internal-locus-of-control ADR providers who want to boost their own and their clients’ success. Are you a conflict junkie or conflict doormat? Tammy will teach you how to transform your reactions in conflict and be the mediator you know you can be.

Action 4: You have 75 words max. Write the ad. It’s not about using it; it’s about the clarity you’ll get from the act of writing and limiting your verbiage.

5. Take Your Market to Lunch

Market research matters, and I suspect very few ADR providers actually do it. Market research helps you answer necessary questions like:

1. How many people are there in my chosen market?
2. Who is my competition and how do I stand apart from them?
3. How do they solve problems now?
4. Would my market buy what I’m selling? If not, why not, and how would that change the services I offer?

The Internet, the Yellow Pages, your local library, and your local Small Business Development Center (sponsored by the SBA) can help with the first two questions. But there’s no substitute for talking to people in your market if you want to answer the last two.

Those last are two of the most important answers you need. And the questions most of you will skip. Too much trouble? Afraid of the answers and the implications for your dream? Too vague about your target market to know how to find them? Too uncomfortable approaching them?

All legitimate fears and discomforts. But here’s the rub: If you don’t do your research, you’re building a business based on a hunch. That’s a pretty expensive hunch, and one that hasn’t paid handsomely for most mediators.

Action 5: Invite five people in your target market to lunch together. If you know your market really well, you’ll know the kind of place they’ll enjoy eating. The trade is this: They get a fabulous, fun, extended lunch with no obligations beyond that, and you get to be a sponge with lots of questions. Be sure you get answers to numbers 3 and 4 above. After the first lunch, rinse and repeat.

The Return on Your Investment

When I look at mediators who make it in the current business and ADR environment and those who don’t, the differentiation is clear.

• Those with clarity about their market shine.
• Those with clarity about what differentiates them are remarkable – and their markets notice, too.
• Those who set aside their fears and reach out to their market for the unvarnished truth learn what will work and not work. Then they translate that information into practice.
• Those who set a solid foundation by working through the hard questions have the best marketing materials, websites, and advertising.

If you take all five of the actions I’m recommending, you’ll spend eight hours over 60 days. That’s one hour per week. If you’re running toward your passion instead of away from your disillusionment, you can find that one hour and it will pay satisfying dividends.

This article was originally printed in the ACR Commercial Section Newsletter, September 2009.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

When a prospective client invites me to speak to their group about my work and how I may be of assistance, one of the first logistical questions I’m asked is whether or not I want an LCD projector.

There are times I do use PowerPoint, but I’m judicious about it and always keep Garr Reynolds’ wisdom in my mind. And the following tongue-in-cheek wisdom, too. It’s an oldie but goodie. Enjoy the chuckle!

[Can't view the embedded video in your email? Click here to view it online.]

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

Today was a first for me: Keynoting an ADR association conference via Skype. If you were in the Association of Missouri Mediators audience, thanks for inviting me and for being part of something new and interesting!

I promised the audience some follow-up links based on our conversation about marketing mediation, and thought I’d share them with everyone.

Articles related to my keynote comments

• Marketing mediation from your strengths
• How a narrow target audience broadens chances for success
• Mediation in the mainstream: 5 successful strategies for spreading innovation
• Your ADR marketing strategy: Avoiding the opt and dropped trap
• All aflitter about twitter: Answers to your social media questions

Getting the most out of MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com

• Subscribe to receive future articles automatically (no charge)
• Find past articles that are most relevant to you

I also promised you all a link to my self-paced, online course for mediators and other ADR professionals: Making Mediation Your Day Job course. As I mentioned, I’m closing new enrollments (for now) after this weekend, so if you’re interested, this is the time to take action.

Thanks for having me with you today and my very best to you,

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

Do you wonder what it takes to create and implement the ideal marketing strategy for your ADR business, whether you’re a mediator, conflict coach, trainer, arbitrator or other professional?

Do you wonder how to reach your ideal market and really engage their interest in what you’re offering?

These are two of the most frequent questions other mediators ask me. I’ve answered in my book, Making Mediation Your Day Job. I’ve offered additional strategies here on the blog. And I’ve answered in teleseminars and short workshops around the country.

But there are two problems: It’s not all in a single place so you can follow all I want to share, step by step. And I’m not available to give you one-on-one feedback and answer your questions after you get started.

Well, I’ve just corrected those problems. “Just” being a relative word, since I’ve been working on this for the last three months.

And today, I’m opening my new Making Mediation Your Day Job Course, the only course of its kind, to fellow ADR providers all over the world.

It’s online, so you can access it anywhere you can get an Internet connection.

It’s self-paced, so you can complete it at whatever speed fits into your life.

It’s step-by-step, so you don’t have to guess anymore what things you need to do first.

It’s light years less expensive than my one-on-one biz coaching, so you can rest assured it’s affordable even in tough economic times.

It’s a lifetime membership, so you get not just what’s there now, but also everything I add in the future. Without getting billed over and over and over as the months go by.

And I’ll be there with you, all along the way, answering your questions, joining you for conversation in the discussion forum and in monthly member-only telephone calls. I’m creating a community of learning for mediators and I’m bursting with anticipation of the kinds of fantastic conversations we’ll have there about building business, mastering the craft and contributing to the growth of the ADR field.

But there is one thing you should know right now. When the limited number of spaces I’ve set aside are full, I’ll close the course to new members for an indefinite period. I want to keep the course manageable so those of you who take advantage of it to jumpstart your ADR practices can get the best of me. I’ve taught online for almost a decade and know how many is too many to do right by you.

So head on over to the Making Mediation Your Day Job Course and check out all the material we’re going to cover and how to be part of the inaugural group!

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

Have you ever wondered…

• What it takes to make mediation a real demand in the marketplace?
• How to stop spinning your wheels and start making a living as a mediator, conflict coach or other ADR professional?
• Which marketing activities are worth your time and money and which ones are like throwing away your precious time and money?
• How to know what your market really wants and would gladly pay money to get?
• Where to start building a simple, successful marketing strategy that fits with who you are?
• How to make yourself stand out in the crowd of other professionals without being sales-y and slick?
• How to leverage the power of the ‘net and create a vibrant web presence without a single geek gene in your body?

In just a little over a week, I’ll be launching something pretty special that I’ve been working on for months. I’ll show you how to do these things…and much, much more.

If you’ve read my book and wanted even more, I’m going to give it to you. If you’ve wanted to work with me one-on-one but couldn’t swing the time or finances, I’m going to make it easier for you. If you’re one of the many folks who’ve emailed me in recent months, looking for ADR business and career advice, I’m going to put all my answers in one place. If you’ve asked me how to get a proper website in place and who to trust, I’m going to tell you exactly how.

September 20. My folks were married on September 20. Seems like an auspicious date to me.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

My publisher has let me know that Making Mediation Your Day Job is selling well enough that they want to issue a second edition and market it more broadly. Yippee!

They’ll also put out a Kindle edition, something several of you have requested.

So today I’ve been working through the publisher’s proofs for the next edition and I found myself pausing here:

Many mediators work from the assumption and belief that the parties know best what will work for them and can sort out their dispute if we, the mediators, can help clear the debris out of their way. If you’re a mediator who works from this orientation, then you help people explore, uncover, consider, and reflect. You come to them as a guide instead of as an expert who knows what they should do and how they should do it. That’s the spirit with which I will work with you over the course of this book. Just as when I mediate, I will attempt to clear away debris, reframe the problems you’re trying to solve with your marketing, raise questions for your consideration, and help guide you in your own thinking.

I paused because I’ve heard from a lot of you that the book has helped clear out debris. And yet I know from others of you I work with as a business coach that there’s still stuff that gets in the way that isn’t addressed in the book. So, a quick question, if you wouldn’t mind taking 1 minute of your time. It’s anonymous, so I’ll get only your answer:

[This poll is now closed. Thanks for your contribution!]

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

Geoff Sharp is closing his blog, mediator blah…blah.

I’m sad for us, but happy for him, because his choice is about spending more time on other projects and with those he loves. I’ve never met Geoff in person but consider him a friend, and he’s one of the originals in the little ADR blog squad made up by those of us who blogged before it was hip.

I bet he’d appreciate some well-wishes via the comments on his last, good-bye post: blah…blah…bows out.

Geoff, please stop in and say hello now and then. The ADR blogosphere will be less without you.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

Since Making Mediation Your Day Job came out, a lot of you have asked for a place to discuss the book, discuss mediation careers, and talk about creating thriving ADR businesses. I heard you, loud and clear.

So, I’ve just created a new Facebook group, Making Mediation Your Day Job. Join me there to do things like:

• Ask your practice-building, mediation business and mediation career questions.
• Discuss the book and flesh out sections you’d like more information about.
• Leave a testimonial about the book (thanks in advance!).
• Meet, network, and talk with other ADR professionals who want to jumpstart the use of ADR around the world.

Come on over for a visit to my new Facebook group, leave a comment, ask a question, answer the question I just posted there.

Know of other great Facebook ADR groups? Share them in the comments!

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

“A summer of statistics and fun!”

Now. I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of humans would not agree that “fun” and “statistics” should be used in the same sentence. Let alone with an exclamation point at the end.

Yet, that’s exactly what the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (affectionately known as ICPSR by its devotees) did in a brochure for its summer program in advanced quantitative research methods.

That’s because ICPSR has absolute clarity about its target market. It’s not you and me (and I even taught research methods when I was prof in a mediation master’s program). ICPSR knows its target market is social science professors and advanced Ph.D. students. It’s people like my political scientist husband, who does believe that courses with titles like Logit and Probit Analysis and Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Generalized Linear Models are fun.

ICPSR, knowing its market very clearly, spoke directly to that market. And when my husband got that brochure, he sat down and read it in detail from cover to cover.

ICPSR didn’t care that you and I would toss that brochure in recycling pretty damn fast. It cared about the people it knew would read it and sign up. Just like my husband, who’s going back for his fourth or fifth gig in Ann Arbor. He’ll come home with another t-shirt that only stats geeks would get, like the one in his drawer that reads, “I’ve spent my whole life worrying about heteroscadasticity.”

That’s your goal, too, in your mediation marketing – to know your target market so clearly and so well you can create information that’s compelling enough they can’t wait to digest it.

ABA Government and Public Sector Lawyers Division Newsletter

On another note, my thanks to Katherine Mikkelson, author of Teams in Government Law Offices: How to Build a Better Team, published in the Summer 2009 issue of the above newsletter. Katherine tapped me as a resource for the article and was kind enough to quote me as well.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

Blogs, Twitter, Facebook…and one troubling trend. It generally looks something along these lines:

Bye for a while, Tweeps! We’re going to Venice for two weeks for much-needed R&R.

Argh! Just stop that sort of thing right now!

Right around the time I’m reading that from you or someone else I follow, I figure the local and not-so-local thieves are, too. The local ones who’ll take advantage of your absence by “taking care” of your home for you.

And the distant ones who’ll use the opportunity to hack your site or your accounts when you’re not looking, as they did to my logo designer David Airey a while back.

Please stop announcing your away-from-home plans on the world wide web. It is the worldwide web, after all.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

Re-organizing my digital resource files for mediators reminded me it’s time to make sure newer Making Mediation Your Day Job readers know about them. Here are some marketing resources, many of them digital audio, for your listening and reading pleasure – my compliments:

How to Market a Mediation Practice
An hour-long interview of me by Cole Silver for his raindancing expert audio series

Building Buzz with Blogs
A five-part teleseminar Diane Levin and I recorded a couple of years ago to help mediators learn how to get started with blogging (this one is available to you only if you own my book)

Target Markets for Mediators
Five very brief audio lessons to help you identify your ideal target market

ADR in the 21st Century
Copy of a handout Diane Levin and I prepared for a New England ACR workshop we lead, filled with resources we use in our own practices

Tools I Use
My updated page showing the dozen or so tech tools I most frequently use to run my business

Enjoy,

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

One theory behind interest-based bargaining is that parties to a conflict are more likely to agree to a solution that meets one or more of their most important interests. If you’re one of the millions who’ve read William Ury’s work, you know this well, and you know his defintion of interests: The intangible motivations that lead people to take positions – needs, desires, concerns, fears, and aspirations.

I used to remind my mediation grad students that if parties keep saying no to proposed solutions, the solutions either don’t meet an important interest or they don’t see that the solutions do. So it’s pretty pointless (and stepping over the mediator line in a lot of professionals’ books) to convince or manipulate them into agreement in these circumstances and so much more effective to look for solutions that do meet their interests or work to understand where they see the disconnect between the solution and their important interests.

Any of you who’ve read my book know I make the case for using interests to guide our marketing work in much the same way as they guide the work of many mediators. So, the concept above works for your market, too: People are more likely to agree to a service that helps them meet one or more of their most important interests.

In The 5 Things People Really Buy Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch makes the case,

“…No matter if you sell heating and cooling services, legal services, hand painted greeting cards, or consulting, at the end of the day, your customers all buy some variation of the same five things.

So you better make sure you show them how you and your products and solutions are going to:

1. Make them more money
2. Save them more time
3. Allow them to avoid the frustration of doing stuff they don’t like (like wasting time and money)
4. Help them save or not lose money today and in future
5. Help them feel better about themselves

Copy these five points and refer to them often as you develop your marketing and sales pitches.”

So, mediators, the work we do speaks very directly to interests 3, 4 and 5 and you could probably make the case for interest 2 as well. I see a lot of mediation marketing that addresses #4 (ok, in all honesty, I see it ad nauseam).

I think mediators are missing the boat by failing to address #3 and #5 in how we talk about what we do. What do you think?

A quick announcement

Those of you who also read my Conflict Zen blog already know I’ve started a new writing project, The Year 20 Reboot. I’m celebrating year 20 of my marriage this year and my husband and I have a launched a bit of a joint marital experiment for the next 12 months. Something mediators might have an interest in. If I’ve intrigued you, read more about it here.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

One mediator is known for his wacky ties. Another is a former judge known far and wide for being so obnoxious parties settle in order to get away from him. A third is known for her impatience.

All of these are mediators Dr. Randy Lowry describes to illustrate market differentiation in Mediate.com’s DVD, Get Busy, Get Paid: How to Develop a Financially Successful Mediation Practice. And while the ways these mediators are differentiated probably aren’t the ways you’d choose to differentiate yourself, they’re excellent examples of the distinctions markets see.

I had a chance to view this video last week and recommend it for a whole host of reasons. It covers important topics like target markets, market niches and market differentiation in a straightforward, thoughtful way. It challenges you to put the work into understanding what you have to offer. And Lowry sets the stage well for successful practice-building with his practice development pyramid. From the bottom of the pyramid up he describes the phases most mediators go through:

• Phase 1: Become a trained mediator – the foundation for everything else on the pyramid
• Phase 2: Practice through volunteering – building your skills and your credibility
• Phase 3: Part-time practice – you’re getting paid, but not able to support yourself yet
• Phase 4: Part-time practice – starting to get case momentum, realize it’s time to decide whether or not to commit to making mediation your day job
• Phase 5: Full-time practice – able to make a reasonable living as a mediator
• Phase 6: A premier practice – booked months out, people will wait to get on your schedule, you can be selective about the cases you will accept

I particularly appreciate that Lowry emphasizes the importance of good skill and professional credibility as critical for success, good marketing skill or not. At one point in the video he shares this quip from a judge in Atlanta: “You can give a sparrow a certificate saying he’s a peacock. But the peacock knows the difference.”

And I was thrilled to see Lowry describe the value of using interests (over positions) in selling, much as I do in my book. When I watched him describing this, I thought to myself, this man is a kindred spirit.

Randy Lowry has an engaging, humble and entertaining style that ensures the video stays watchable and interesting throughout. I met Randy at the Southeastern Mediators Summit last December and he has a demeanor on video that mirrors his natural warmth and easygoing professionalism off camera. He balances lecture with exercises, and peppers his talk with numerous memorable stories that drive the points home.

The Get Busy, Get Paid DVD and digital course manual is well worth the reasonable $49 US, particularly if you like to absorb information and then figure out how to apply it to your own circumstances. Just one small word of caution, though, if you own a Mac: I tried two different versions of the DVD in three different relatively new MacBooks and they wouldn’t play. Once I got my hands on my husband’s brand new Windows machine, a Dell XPS, I was able to view the video without any problem.

A special thanks to Jim Melamed, who kindly provided me with a copy of the DVD so I could review it here.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

When I was writing my book, I ran across a really apropos quote about the act of writing: “Everyone says they want to write a book, but what they really mean is that they want to have written a book.”

So I can’t help but ask: Are you a mediator who wants to build a successful ADR business? Or one who wants to have built one?

I think the mediators in the first group are the ones who can be truly successful. The ones in the latter group are those who go to ADR conferences and whine about how hard it is out there – and don’t really want to prove themselves wrong.

By the way, if you know the original source of that quote, I’d love to know it and credit them.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

Thanks to Nancy Hudgins, I had the opportunity to speak with members of the Association for Dispute Resolution of Northern California a few days ago. If you were in the group, thanks for your active participation and terrific questions!

Nancy kindly told the group about my article in the current issue of ACResolution: No Need to Be a Geek: Leveraging Today’s Internet to Market Your ADR Practice. If you’re an ACR member or know someone who is, I hope you’ll read the entire issue, which is focused on marketing.

I promised links to past articles that echo our discussion. Here they are:

• Mediation target markets and market niches: not the same
• How a narrow target audience broadens chances for success
• Marketing mediation from your strengths
• 2 critical questions your mediation marketing must answer
• Mediation in the mainstream: 5 successful strategies for spreading innovation
• Your ADR marketing strategy: Avoiding the opt and dropped trap

Best to you,

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.

The Zen concept of Beginner’s Mind describes a state in which a person can work with many possibilities and avoid getting stuck on any single path or approach.

As described by Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “the most important thing is not to be dualistic … This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few [emphasis added].”

Mediators grock the concept of Beginner’s Mind, because it’s the state of mind elegant mediators know how to bring to the table. It’s a relevant state of mind for mediation marketing, too.

When you consider the services you offer through the lens of Beginner’s Mind, you orient yourself not to your present expertise or to the market-limiting box you may have placed yourself in, the box labeled “mediator” or “arbitrator.” With Beginner’s Mind you enable yourself to consider skills instead of the packages in which you bundle them, to consider ways potential clients could benefit from the set of skills you currently bundle as “mediation.”

If you were to take off your expert’s hat (I know, there’s self-comfort in your expertise), what would you do to adopt a Beginner’s Mind? In what ways could you unbundle your skills to serve clients in new ways?

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.

Do you know the four primary parts of a successful elevator pitch?

Harvard Business School has a straightforward, simple little online tool that explains each and then analyzes your completed pitch. You can find the elevator pitch builder here.

It looks just like a little fun, but really, it’s worth putting in the revision time to get it right.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.

Eighteen months ago, I was putting the finishing touches on my book, Making Mediation Your Day Job, and posting here some of the ideas in it for feedback. One of those ideas was the value of tapping your strengths when marketing.

Today I received an email from Jackie, who told me, “I can’t stand marketing and I think it’s going to mean the death knell for my fledgling ADR practice. My local business networking group told me I’ve got to learn cold calling, schmoozing and all sorts of other activities that make my blood run cold. Can you help me figure out how to turn marketing into something I can at least find palatable, if not love?

Yes, indeed. Here’s a short excerpt on the subject from my book, followed by links to several earlier articles in which I gave practical, detailed tips about how to begin marketing mediation from your strengths. And, of course, I work with ADR groups via workshops and one-on-one with individual mediators to discover and craft marketing strategies built on your strengths.

Work from your strengths

If you’re like most people, you probably “play to your strengths” much of the time. After all, your strengths carry you while you shore up your growing edges. For many mediators, the actions typically associated with traditional marketing feel more like they play to your weaknesses, or at least to your misgivings and self doubts.

Let’s consider this through a conflict lens. Engaging conflict is hard because, at least in some ways, it calls upon you to confront your fears. Conflict may “press your buttons” because you experience a real or perceived threat to some part of your identity…a threat to your view of yourself as competent, autonomous, worthy of being included, and so on.

You may find marketing a challenge for similar reasons: Offering your talents for the world to buy or ignore puts your identity on the line. Mediocre (or worse) results from your marketing efforts imply judgments by others of your competence or value.

Kat, a new professional in the field, put it this way: “I’m already resistant to doing the kinds of things that most marketing books tell me I need to do. So, when I do them and then don’t see results, two things happen. I dislike doing those tasks even more next time. And my dislike of the tasks shines through, probably to the very people I’m trying to reach. It’s like a double slap in the face.”

No more slapping yourself in the face! Building a marketing strategy based on your strengths yields four immediate, compelling and irresistible results:

• You’ll do it better.
• You’ll enjoy it more.
• You’ll more likely follow through because it’s enjoyable.
• And you’ll attract others to you because you’re working from your passion.

Marketing from your strengths doesn’t completely release you from all tasks that fail to capitalize on what you do best. But it does mean that the bulk of your marketing tasks should be based on your strengths in order to build momentum from which to launch your less-desirable tasks.

What are your strengths, ADR-related and not? And what could happen if you replaced marketing tasks you dislike with a way of marketing that feels authentic and enjoyable?

More on marketing from your strengths

• How to Enjoy Marketing: Market from Your Strengths
• Marketing from Your Strengths: Finding Overlap Between Interest and Skill
• How to Market from Your Strengths: Choose Activities You Enjoy
• How to Market from Your Strengths: Choose Markets that Share Your Passion

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.

It matters less to me that you precisely agree with the definitions I’ve crafted than you having clarity in your own mind about how the cluster of marketing and sales activities differ from one another.

The danger of muddy thinking about marketing activities is the missed opportunity to build and promote your mediation practice or ADR career in a thoughtful, cohesive way.

Target market = Who you want to serve.

Market niche = How you want to serve them.

Marketing = The collective mix of business activities for reaching, listening to and building relationship with your market.

Sales = Activities designed to close a purchasing agreement for a product or service.

Advertising = The use, usually paid and repeated, of a persuasive message to generate sales.

Branding = The act of creating an association between a person, product or business and what they want to stand for in their market’s mind.

Public relations = Management of information flow between a business and its market, with the intention of creating goodwill.

Publicity = Dissemination of promotional material to generate interest in a person, product or business, usually using free media outlets.

Which of these do you do most? Least? Is that the right balance for building your dream?

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.

How frequently should you blog? It’s one of the most common questions I’m asked by ADR professionals who have added or want to add blogging into the mix of mediation marketing activities.

I’ll admit to not being particularly drawn to rules for rules’ sake. I like to make my own. Not because I’m a maverick (ahem) personality, but because I like to take tools that are created for one use and stretch their application in ways that are useful to me and those I serve. A rule created for one context may just not make much sense in another.

An outdated rule: You must blog several times a week

This rule of thumb hails from the days when blogs were online journals maintained by teenagers. Daily and multiple-posts-a-day blogging made sense in that context. News and political bloggers championed the same high-frequency blogging because of the nature of their content, and others championed the rule in the name of generating traffic to a site.

And as blogging grew in popularity, new bloggers tended to accept the old rule of thumb as a rule outright, as though rejecting it somehow violated the brotherhood. Bah!

We business bloggers are a different breed and we have different needs – as do our readers, most likely. And generating high traffic is a misguided goal for ADR professionals. Far better to generate small amounts of exactly the right traffic – those who closely match the kind of client you seek.

How frequently should you blog?

You get to set your own blogging frequency rule. Consider the following trio as guides to help you make a good call for your blog’s success:

1. Your target market’s needs and wants. If your target market prefers or expects multiple short posts weekly, that signals your frequency differently than if your target market’s reading habits lean toward one or two longer articles per month. You may have a lot to say, but if it leads to fatigue on your readers’ part, your writing will have less effectiveness. As with so much of what I say here, knowing your target market clearly helps you make good business and marketing decisions. The question to ask yourself is, Who specifically am I writing for and what frequency will build that audience’s reading loyalty?
2. Your writing quality and commitment. Some recommend that new bloggers post regularly and frequently, as a way to kickstart your ROI and get into the habit of blogging. Yet, the blogger’s bane is a fast and furious start, followed by a quick fade when it gets too hard to keep up the pace or the results aren’t immediately clear. And too-frequent blogging can diminish quality. The question to ask yourself is, What frequency will help me stay committed over time and ensure high-quality content for my readers?
3. The role blogging plays in your mix of marketing activities. I’m a big fan of getting very clear on the marketing activities best suited to yield good results, and dedicating marketing time from most to least. If blogging, then, is anticipated to be a minor part of your ADR marketing mix, your time commitment might be similarly chosen. And, of course, vice versa. The question to ask yourself is, How big a role do I want business blogging to play in my marketing my mediation practice?

For more on this topic, try these:

• Why Blog Post Frequency Doesn’t Matter Anymore
• What Is the Ideal Post Frequency for a Blog?

Happy blogging,

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.