A. Hopkins Insurance & Financial Services

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  • How to write an engaging caption on social media for your business

    How to write an engaging caption on social media for your business

    “Discomfort is always a necessary part of the process of enlightenment”

    -Pearl Cleage

    There are many reasons to spend time writing quality social media posts for your business. Whether you choose to wield your own words, or borrow someone else’s, as in the above quote, a great caption can take your audience to great places, get them thinking, spark an interesting conversation around one of your products, or engage your audience in a way that says something about your brand, and who stands behind it. Your audience wants to believe and know you are thinking about something other than your bottom line.

    One post or caption with accompanying video or photo can be all it takes for someone to engage, buy, call you, return for more, or pass on a good word.

    Even though it’s not a lot of content, a short phrase or sentence, a good caption or post takes some thought.

    To start, ask questions such as:

    Am I giving my audience a reason to engage?
    Am I inspiring them to think outside their own comfort zone, their own life bubble or sphere of influence?
    Am I informing them about something that I think will help them in their life or their business?
    Am I revealing something honest and real about my company/brand values that others can resonate with?

    To begin writing:

    Start with an intention. What are you wanting to accomplish with the caption—is this an introduction to your brand? Do you want to tell people what you do? Do you want them to start their own conversation on what you have presented? Do you want them to share?

    If you ask a question, make it open ended. When was the last time you walked away from the spa and felt like a new person? What would your revenue look if your equipment maintenance could be finished a day earlier than promised? What is the best thing about a Friday in November? Spur people’s curiosity with a question they can’t help but think about, or scroll on.

    Get to the point. If it’s too long, you risk losing and boring your audience. We all know this. Pay attention to what grabs your attention in your own social media activity and behaviours and work towards maximum engagement. If it’s a sponsored post, don’t forget to add a call to action.

    Raise the stakes. If the audience doesn’t engage, what will they miss out on? A chance at a one-time promotion or sale, a chance to realize something about their own life or self-growth?
    
    Support your caption with an accompanying image or video. As we all know, visuals are essential. They are what draw people in, prompt them to pause, watch, if only for a few short seconds.

    360PSG also recommends keeping it short. They recommend, “Don’t make them click to see more…someone casually browsing Instagram is likely to keep scrolling when a lengthy caption takes them out of their flow.”

    Something else that can go a long way is giving the caption a “clean” visual. 360PSG recommends burying the hashtags in the comments rather than in the caption.

    Social media is a creative medium. Don’t bore your audience or turn them away with something too conservative. One thing to consider before you begin writing a caption—when you feel the impulse to screen shot something so you don’t lose it in the stream of your social media feed, pay attention to those moments. What caught your attention and inspired you?

    Author: ChamberPlan.ca

  • Three Ways You Can Boost Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace

    Three Ways You Can Boost Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace

    Right now, people everywhere are taking a close look at how unconscious bias, privilege, and structural racism continue to manifest in the so-called woke world. This includes the workplace, and these conversations underscore the importance of regularly reevaluating and re-energizing equality, diversity and inclusion (ED&I) initiatives to ensure real change is still happening.

    Adding the following three criteria to your ED&I strategy will go a long way to disrupting the organizational structures that continue to stand in the way of meaningful change in the workplace.

    Empower leaders responsible for ED&I so they can enact systemic change

    Most ED&I tool kits include some form of unconscious bias training where individuals reflect on their own intrinsic biases and learn how to adjust behaviours to mitigate the ways these preconceptions play out in the workplace. What these activities don’t specifically address, however, are the systemic issues inherent in most organizational cultures at a structural level that allow bias to continue to operate in the workplace.

    And while it is still important for each of us to be aware of personal bias and to learn how this impacts our behaviour, ED&I initiatives also need to evaluate systemic issues that are deeply ingrained in organizational structure, and interrupt those systems to create a more genuinely inclusive work environment. Change of this magnitude needs to be initiated, implemented, and evaluated by someone in the organization with authority and autonomy to overhaul current systems.

    James D. White, former CEO of Jamba Juice, discusses in a digital article for HBR how important it is to empower those responsible for ED&I so that sweeping change is actually possible. “[T]he standard DE&I playbook has been to hire a chief diversity officer (CDO) with a budget for consultants and enrichment programs. But you can’t build capacity if the problem is not with the diverse talent but with the culture that determines their future… doing anything once cannot change a corporate culture that reinforces itself day after day.” As CEO, White was able to implement broad change at a high level, including championing a more diverse Board of Directors — something a consultant or CDO likely could not have done.

    Change how high-profile projects are assigned

    Despite the time and resources invested in ED&I over the years, data shows that we still have a long way to go when it comes to diversity, particularly in leadership. Up to 70% of senior leadership roles (VP, Senior VP, and C-Suite) positions are held by white men, and over the past 12 years, the percentage of white male CEOs has only fallen 4% from 93.4% in 2005 to 89.4% in 2017.

    White and his co-author, Joan C. Williams, suggest that changing how “glamour work” is distributed can help boost diversity in all levels of management.

    According to White and Williams, “glamour work” refers to the high-profile assignments and projects that get people noticed and ultimately position them for promotions. By purposely choosing employees who were previously overlooked for glamour work, White appointed Action Learning Teams (ALTs) who had on-the-ground expertise and skills that made them ideally suited for solving relevant issues related to key business goals.

    Selecting individuals based on frontline experience and grouping them in teams to leverage the right mix of talent and skills to solve the issue at hand “meant that the teams were far more diverse than the company’s workforce as a whole.” It’s also important to set teams up for success by giving them release time from their regular jobs so that they can work on these projects and execute them well.

    Interrupt structural racism at every level including HR and middle management

    As White and Williams point out, “effective policies enable inclusion, but middle-level managers [and HR] hold the key to delivering it.” It is crucial that every level of your organization is highly attuned to issues of bias and, more importantly, is empowered and encouraged to enact concrete changes to interrupt them.

    At Jamba Juice, White implemented a new incentive system that assessed store manager compensation based on a variety of criteria including engagement, climate, and organizational health scores. In terms of debiasing HR, White and Williams suggest creating an action learning team that includes the CEO or equivalent, and setting a mandate and timeline to restructure the hiring process by developing objective hiring criteria to promote diversity and inclusion.

    Having an ED&I statement on your website or an annual bias awareness workshop simply isn’t enough. To see real change in the next 10 years will require a complete overhaul of all organizational systems — from hiring to promotion and everything in between — with a focus on eliminating privilege and inequity in the workplace.

    https://hbr.org/2020/07/update-your-dei-playbook

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2020/12/29/your-unconscious-bias-trainings-keep-failing-because-youre-not-addressing-systemic-bias/#6d0b24c11e9d

    Author: ChamberPlan.ca

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  • A new approach to work after a life-altering event

    A new approach to work after a life-altering event

    Your life looks more different right now than it ever has.

    Depending on the nature of your work, you are either run ragged trying to keep your business afloat, or you’ve had some time to slow down, take a step back and see life, your life, from a different perspective.

    Our patterns of behavior are ingrained in each one of us; what we do for work is often at the core of our identity. We wear 10-hour work days like a badge of honour; it signifies good work ethic—that we are getting somewhere. We are conditioned to drive to our place of work, sign up our kids for every available sport and artistic endeavor, all the while, stay fit, eat healthy, take care of ourselves and find quality time with loved ones.

    We’ve had some time to step off this crazy track (some of us are now watching the rats run by). We’ve been on a road that is near impossible to see because we are always traveling too fast upon it.

    It feels like a good time to open the mind to different perspectives and shared wisdoms, and ask the question, “Have I been working smart, or the only way I know how?”

    In a recent interview with Tim Ferriss, Michael Lewis asks, “Am I only here to pay my bills? Or are we here to get more out of life?”

    Lewis tells the story of his young self working for Salomon Brothers. After he wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal about investment bankers being overpaid, he got into big trouble with his boss. But, he was also one of the highest revenue generators at the firm at the time, and therefore, un-fireable.

    Listening to people who are inclined to speak their truth gets one asking, “What is my truth?” While Lewis is more than ambitious, and admits he’s competitive, he says he doesn’t accept money as an accurate measure of ambition or success. “I’m not trying to get a lot of [one] thing. If I’m trying to maximize anything, it’s a feeling. [I want to say] ‘that is a great piece of work.’” It’s a great interview and worth a listen. 

    Working hard versus working smart is something we’ve all heard before. Medium contributor, Amanda Warton Jenkins reveals in her post “Don’t Work Harder, or Smarter; commit to these 3 things and watch your life improve” that after her reading of Brendon Burchard’s book High Performance Habits, that “the highest performers don’t grind and hustle like me.” She admits, [her] “ladder was usually against the wrong building.” Meaning, she realized that her “why” for achieving half the things she was working hard to achieve were for the wrong reasons. She states, “Many of my goals were only there because achieving them was about how I looked to others. Achieving them made me look successful, normal, important. But none of them had anything to do with who I really wanted to be.”

    COVID isolation has been a good time to reflect for some business owners and entrepreneurs. It’s a great time to answer some unaddressed and hard questions, like:

    Do I want to grow my business for the right reasons? Does your growth strategy make sense for your business? Or are you positioned for growth because it’s what you think you should do?

    What have I noticed about my business during the pandemic that I have never noticed before now? Is less overhead serving me well? A smaller team?

    How have my customer’s expectations changed? How can I keep this new mindset going?

    Can my business gain insight into new ways of operating? A new process?

    Zat Rana, an online writer who describes himself as “playing at the intersection of philosophy, science and art”, takes the words of philosophers and turns them into modern day messages, applicable to our daily lives. In a more recent article, he says of Nietzsche’s philosophy to not think of knowledge as being separate from power.  He explains, “Think of your body as an expression of truth. More than the warrior or the philosopher, this is why Nietzsche was especially drawn to the archetype of the artist – he/she who creates what they are.”

    There seems like no better time than now to recreate who we are, reinvent aspects of our businesses and question our approach to work.

    Author: ChamberPlan.ca

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  • Innovative ways businesses keep going during COVID-19

    Innovative ways businesses keep going during COVID-19

    As the saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Montreal distiller Paul Cirka decided to take his own spin on this old adage when life – or more accurately, his supplier – gave him corn. Instead of turning corn into gin, he made hand sanitizer.

    Cirka Distilleries is one of many businesses finding innovative ways to keep the doors open during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not an easy task. As the federal and provincial governments take measures to combat the virus, more than a million Canadians lost their jobs in March and by mid-April more than five million people had applied for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit.

    Over the last month, many businesses have been declared non-essential. Many have closed their doors, hopefully temporarily, as they ride out the pandemic. Others have turned to alternative ways to carry on. Restaurants are doing takeout and delivery, for example, and fitness facilities and yoga studios are putting classes online.

    Some businesses have become even more innovative. Fortunately for companies like Cirka Distilleries, COVID-weary Canadians need a drink more than ever and businesses that make and sell alcohol continue to operate. Cirka saw a need even greater than gin and vodka, however, and using a recipe approved by the World Health Organization, the business has joined distilleries around the world to produce much-needed hand sanitizer. Since March, Cirka’s employees have been working around the clock to develop the antiseptic, which requires a much higher form of alcohol than the usual 40 proof Cirka uses to make its vodka and gin.

    Other businesses are also straying from “business as usual”. Bauer Hockey, one of North America’s top producers of hockey equipment, has changed its focus to make another product currently in high demand: masks. Bauer is using hockey visor materials to manufacture full medical face shields, which are meant to protect the wearer from being infected by respiratory droplets that carry the virus. Organizations can request a minimum of 100 face shields directly through Bauer’s website.

    Bauer’s venture into medical face masks is a welcome contribution in a time when frontline workers are in dire need of personal protective equipment…and when employees of businesses deemed non-essential would otherwise be unemployed. The switch from hockey gear to hospital gear is keeping 20 people working in Quebec and another 12 working in New York.

    Peregrine Retail Design Manufacturing’s in Burnaby normally creates elegant front counter designs for high end clients including Lululemon, CIBC and Starbucks. But when many of its clients were forced to temporarily shut their (undoubtedly fancy) doors, work came to a halt and Peregrine had to lay off 30 per cent of its 85 person staff. Seeing a need in the retail sector determined to still be essential – grocery stores, pet stores and (as we determined earlier) liquor stores, Peregrine quickly turned its sights to manufacturing a product slightly less high end but ultimately more critical in keeping retail workers safe – plexiglass shields.

    There’s no word yet on when life will get back to normal. But while the future remains uncertain for many small businesses in this most unprecedented time, one thing we can likely count on is that more business owners will embrace innovation, and find new ways to stay afloat, meet a need and keep their workers working.

    Author: ChamberPlan.ca

    Read the original version of this article.