The age of conversation is here: are you ready?

In what began as a mild dare, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan challenged bloggers around the world to contribute one page — 400 words — on the topic of “conversation.” The resulting book, The Age of Conversation 2, brings together over 100 of the world’s leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators in a ground-breaking collection of essays about the value of dialogue in the world of marketing and idea-building. Contributors hail from 29 U.S. states and 14 other nations.

I’m proud to be among the contributors to The Age of Conversation 2, which comes out on October 28. My essay, “Emptying Your Teacup in the Age of Conversation,” uses an old Zen koan, or story, to discuss the new marketing as an act of dialogue, instead of an act of controlling a one-way message. Collaborating on a book about conversation was a natural extension of my work as a dialogue-builder and my work helping mediators market themselves more effectively.

Not only does the book promise to be a compelling read about marketing and dialogue, but it also promises [Read more]

Micro-blogging goes mainstream says Wall Street Journal

Last summer I wrote Twitter 101 for Mediators, offering ideas for getting started with the micro-blogging platform and reasons Twitter could be an effective marketing tool for mediators.

If you’ve been considering Twitter, or have just started using it, check out this week’s Wall Street Journal article, Twitter Goes Mainstream. An excerpt: [Read more]

Is mediation annoying to prospective clients?

I read a great little article in the Harvard Business Review recently. In Psst! Your Product Annoys Your Customers author Rita McGrath discusses ways to improve customers’ experience by taking away something they find negative about your product or service.

McGrath argues that anything customers find “irritating, inconvenient, painful, or even worse, scary and disgusting” can doom your prospects as a service provider.

Of course, my mind went straight to mediation and arbitration because “painful” or “scary” could be apt descriptors in some prospective clients’ minds. But my mind also went there because of the potential parallel between mandatory ADR and the pre-loaded computer software example in McGrath’s article: [Read more]

Mediators can do well by doing good, even in a recession

Charles Green, author of the excellent (I just finished it) Trust-Based Selling: Using Customer Focus and Collaboration to Build Long-Term Relationships, recently blogged some ideas for trustworthy and future-thinking ways small businesses can act during difficult economic times.

In Top Ten Ways for Your Business to Deal with a Recession, Green offers up strategies that capitalize on this kind of thinking:

• Don’t fall prey to short-termism
• Do well by doing good
• Meet transactional opportunism with relationship strategies
• Be there for others now, and they will be there for you later
• We remember those who helped us when times were tough
• Now’s the time to prove you’re trustworthy–worthy of trust.

While not every item on his Top Ten list makes sense for mediators in small or solo practices, many of them do. I particularly like #3, #7, #8 and #9.

Have a great idea for staying on course during a recession? I invite you to share it in the comments.

How to keep hackers out of your email

About a month ago, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account was hacked by a college student. We benefit from her misfortune by learning how he did it and making sure someone can’t do the same with our email accounts.

According to news sources, he needed only three pieces of information to gain access:

1. Palin’s birthdate,
2. Palin’s zip code, and
3. The answer to Palin’s self-selected security question on Yahoo – where she met her husband.

A simple Google search gave him the first two pieces of information and he guessed the last one pretty easily.

So what’s a mediator to do? Here are four ideas and links to more: [Read more]

Southeastern Mediators’ Summit: A practice-building conference not to be missed

Have mediators limited their thinking too narrowly? Can mediation realize its potential for social change and economic viability? Is it possible to transform business disillusionment into making a decent living as a mediator?

These are some of the important questions that Lipscomb University’s Institute for Conflict Management is going to help answer on December 1-3 in the first annual Southeastern Mediators’ Summit.

With an inaugural theme of “In the Shadow and Out of the Box,” the two-and-a-half-day Summit in Nashville, TN will help mediators learn how to apply what you know as a mediator in new ways and in new markets. Workshops and general sessions include “Thriving Community Mediation Models,” “Managing Faith-Based Disputes,” “Mediation’s Future in Health Care,” “Advanced Commercial Mediation,” and “Sustainable Environmental Mediation.”

I think so highly of what the Summit wants to achieve that [Read more]

Client relationship management: Some software options

It’s been almost 18 months since I wrote a review of mediation client and case management software and even longer since I created my list of 10 must-have tech tools for the wired mediator. That’s too long when we’re talking tech.

So I was happy to find Jolt Magazine’s recent CRM Heaven or CRM Hell? Seven Options Reviewed from the Trenches. CRM, or client relationship management, requires really effective software to do it right, and Jolt’s article gives a nice run-down of the options.

Me? I still use Highrise, and happily so. Someone asked me at the ACR conference why I use that one instead of one of the super-powerful options like Act! or SalesForce. What I want may not be what you want, so the question’s a good one. Here’s what I look for: [Read more]

Mediation in the mainstream: the problem of observability

When Daniel Bowling and David Hoffman’s Bringing Peace into the Room first came out in 2003, I adopted it for one of my mediation courses at Woodbury College.

Prepping for class one evening, I read aloud to my husband an excerpt from a chapter by Peter Adler. When I finished, he gave me a long, sad look. “No wonder mediators have such a tough time convincing the public to embrace mediation. Even those who benefit from it think you didn’t do a damn thing.”

This is the excerpt I read him: [Read more]