Obamas To Worship At Metropolitan AME Church On Martin Luther King and Inauguration Day

WASHINGTON ? President Barack Obama worshipped and celebrated the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday at the historic Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Obama and first lady Michelle Obama attended services with their daughters Malia and Sasha at the downtown Washington church.

Introducing Mrs. Obama, the Rev. Marie P. Braxton said, "I'd like to say that she is the first lady of the world." The pastor invited congregants to sing "Happy Birthday," to the first lady, who celebrated her 49th on Thursday, and Mrs. Obama stood and waved.

With the first family were Obama's sister, Maya Soetoro-ng, and Mrs. Obama's mother and brother, Marian and Craig Robinson.

The sermon by the Rev. Ronald E. Braxton, the church's senior pastor, was about trusting in God. "Never take God out of the equation. Whatever you undertake in life, make sure God has the leading role," Braxton said. "With God, all things are possible."

The Old Testament reading during the service came from the book of Exodus, Chapter 14, in which the Israelites cross the Red Sea as Moses leads them out of Egypt.

The church, which is celebrating its 175th anniversary, was draped in the reds, greens and golds found in African Kente cloth. The program said Sunday's service was a dual celebration of Obama's second inaugural and of the anniversary of King's birthday.

Word must have spread that the first family was coming: Pews were full, and the back cover of the program was printed with an official photo of the Obamas. Church-goers rose to their feet, and those in the balcony leaned over to catch a glimpse, as the Obamas entered from a back room as the gospel choir continued to sing. The Obamas sat in the second row, and Secret Service agents sat in the third row.

Metropolitan AME Church also hosted prayer services before the 1993 and 1997 inaugurations of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/20/obamas-mlk-day-worship-metropolitan_n_2515730.html

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Business Guide Certification ? Launch A Prosperous ... - Ahri Alert

The global market is taking a toll of all people. The services plus advice they offer use experience and understanding. For instance, if you established your website that has a web designer who had been not attuned on the conundrums of optimization for google, or the most current theories of website landing page design, these factors could have a negative relation to your overall online marketing plans. Business advisors is a good idea irrespective where your corporation is positioned; whether you are barely removing, or you?re an experienced company that possesses bumped into a few obstacles. You can buy a sit-down session along with a consultant if you have been confident about handling your own private business. Furthermore they know the competition thoroughly. Make sure to help thoroughly assess your options to see the right one. And how on earth do you choose the one yes its true for your industry? Procurement is practically handled on a regular basis. On the alternative hand, providing a service is without question the fastest way for you to earn money its no wonder that there has been an upturn in small company consulting ventures. empresas consultoras.

Majority of little enterprise owners have become into the corporate environment for to start with. If you own answered ?yes? to queries, then you requires businesses providing enterprise consulting. First and leading, a consultant actually reaches know and understand your home business. This will make sure that company can take a position firm and there?s a place looking for that type associated with business. For managing that finance for starting an alternative business or expanding an active business, you require the professionally prepared industry plan. If a company does not produce, customers are lost when customers are dropped, money is dropped. Common situations in which a consultant will end up being useful is if your company is growing or in the transition period. The courses are generally taught by greatly experienced business consultants with a number of consulting encounters. Are you small businesses operator with a good endeavor? These attributes are essential when searching for consultants to outsource to. consultoria a empresas.

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Source: http://ahri-alert.org/business-guide-certification-launch-a-prosperous-business-consulting-profession/

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Social media dispute resolution stumps some companies

(Reuters) - If HBO cuts out on you in the middle of the latest "Girls" episode, and you have Charter Communications Inc as your cable provider, don't try tweeting your dismay to their customer service department. Nobody will hear your lament.

Charter, the fourth largest cable provider in the U.S. with 5.2 million customers across 25 states, closed up its social-media based customer service team in December. "Umatter2Charter," as it was known, had been taking customer complaints over Twitter and Facebook and trying to resolve them, but the company says it is now done with working out customer service issues in social media forums.

The move, which might seem to conflict with the growth of social media, highlights the difficulty some businesses are having with free-flowing, round-the-clock social media, its public nature and the expectation of immediate responses.

With Facebook users numbering about a billion and Twitter drawing 200 million, it might be hard to believe that any retail enterprise would drop out of the fray, but Charter isn't the only major company to announce such a move. Also in December, the largest single grocery store in New England - the Wegmans in Northborough, Massachusetts - shuttered its Facebook page despite having some 8,000 fans.

"It's a tough sport," says J.D. Peterson, vice president of product marketing for San Francisco-based Zendesk, which helps companies manage customer service. "The real-time nature of it - at times the volume that can come from it - it's very new and different for businesses."

While Peterson's company recommends going where the customers are - and a big chunk are clearly on social media - Peterson says not all businesses share the same philosophy or have the ability to engage those consumers in these open forums. But any company that has a significant online presence doesn't really have a choice, he says, working with consumers through social media is expected of them.

Advocates for the use social media say the challenge actually presents an opportunity for businesses - showing they are responsive to complaints and care about their customers can bring in revenue.

"I have seen this time and time again, and the end result is that the interaction often turns an irate customer into an advocate for the brand. And that is worth it's weight in gold," says Mike Rowan, chief marketing office for Atlanta-based Swarm, which manages social media for companies.

That's certainly the way retailer Lands' End, a division of Sears Holdings Corp, sees it.

"When we started using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter in early 2009, it gave us a new opportunity to do what we've done for 50 years, which is connect with our customers," says Michele Casper, Lands' End's senior director of public relations. "Whether it is through social media, our call centers or online, we offer the same level of customer service through each channel."

DIVERTING COURSE

Charter says it is not walking away completely from social media - just the idea of providing customer service via Twitter. The company says it has ample other avenues for consumers to get help - including telephone, customer service counters and live chat on its web page.

"We communicate with thousands of customers each day on the phone and in person, and that's where we'll focus our efforts," says Charter spokeswoman Anita Lamont. "While social media is a method some consumers choose to seek help, Charter offers phone and web-based contact solutions where all customers can access resources to provide assistance."

The abandonment of the Facebook page at the Massachusetts Wegmans store, which caused a great fuss among the store's "fans," was, in large part, due to the inability to respond quickly enough to consumers. Store personnel couldn't break off enough time from their other roles to constantly monitor the page, Wegmans spokeswoman Jo Natale says, allowing comments to sit unanswered - a no-no in the world of social media.

"Our top priority has always been, and will continue to be, providing incredible service to customers who shop in our stores," she says. "And it isn't as though there aren't other avenues for folks to connect with us if they have a question or concern."

As much as customers expressed surprise and dissatisfaction at the decision, Natale says, it came down to a decision that if the store couldn't serve the Facebook page at a level it felt was expected that it shouldn't do it at all.

"They quickly discovered, once the store opened and got very, very busy, that it wasn't so easy to stay on top of comments or to find the time to post," Natale says. "In a retail operation like ours, there isn't anyone sitting at a PC or checking a mobile device throughout the day. It's a fast-paced business that requires our people to be on the floor serving customers."

(The author is a Reuters contributor. The opinions expressed are his own)

(Follow us @ReutersMoney or at http://www.reuters.com/finance/personal-finance; Editing by Beth Pinsker and Tim Dobbyn)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/social-media-dispute-resolution-stumps-companies-174141886--sector.html

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Authorities: McCready's boyfriend shot himself

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Source: http://todayentertainment.today.com/_news/2013/01/15/16523283-mindy-mccreadys-boyfriend-shot-himself-say-authorities?lite

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The politics behind business performance in Africa | Chris Blattman

?we use firm-level data for 89 countries to examine formal firm performance. Without controls, manufacturing African firms do not perform much worse than firms in other regions. But they do have structural problems, exhibiting much lower export intensity and investment rates.

Once we control for geography and the political and business environment, formal African firms robustly lead in sales growth, total factor productivity levels and productivity growth. Africa?s conditional advantage is higher in low-tech than in high-tech manufacturing, and exists in manufacturing but not in services.

While geography, infrastructure, and access to finance play an important role in explaining Africa?s disadvantage in firm performance, the key factor is party monopoly. The longer a single political party remains in power, the lower are firm productivity levels, growth rates, and sales growth for manufacturing.

In contrast, the business environment and firm characteristics (except for foreign investment) do not matter as much. We also find evidence that the effects of the political and business environment are heterogeneous across sectors and firms of various levels of technology.

A new NBER paper from Harrison, Lin and Xu. Sadly I do not see an ungated copy. Anyone who sees one please put in comments.

I?ve only been able to skim the paper, but the question, approach and the answer all strike me as incredibly important for lots of reasons. One is that it gets us started on addressing some of the puzzles of development raised by Banerjee and Duflo in their under-read Growth Through the Lens of Development Economics?or this Pande and Udry piece on institutions and development (both of which I mentioned last week). In particular, it starts to get far more specific about government and?institutional?failure than the existing?research?(which is pretty crude when it comes to political failures).

I don?t think we should take this as evidence that party monopoly is actually what causes the problem (I think the authors would agree with this), but it does start to get us closer to what political failures need more investigation.

Source: http://chrisblattman.com/2013/01/14/the-politics-behind-business-performance-in-africa/

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$2B: The amount insurance claims from the May 2011 Joplin Tornado are likely to...

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Source: http://www.facebook.com/insurancejournal/posts/10151431789149258

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How the HubSpot CMO Screens for Top Marketing Talent

How the HubSpot CMO Screens for Top Marketing Talent

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One particularly great source of content ideas is talking to your sales team or getting involved in some sales meetings yourself so you can find out what types of questions your prospects are asking. Odds are, these prospects are typing those same questions into Google. And the smart inbound marketers will then write articles to answer those questions, which not only attracts more prospects to their website, but also gives their sales team a piece of thought leadership content to share with the people they talk to.

And now, let me get to my point. This article topic came directly from questions we get when talking to companies about using our software and adopting a more inbound approach to marketing. So if you're curious about the qualities to look out for in an inbound marketing manager, and how to evaluate and interview your candidates, this post will give you my two cents as a CMO. Feel free to take some tips from my approach and adopt them for your own hiring process. And if you find yourself sitting on the other side of the inbound marketing interview table, read this article on how to get hired as an inbound marketer.

What I Look for in an Inbound Marketing Manager

The perfect inbound marketing manager has a variety of different skills. At HubSpot, we like to use the acronym "DARC," which stands for digital, analytical, reach, and content:

• Digital means they live their lives online and are familiar and comfortable with blogging, social media, and the web in general.
• Analytical means they like to measure what they do, and they make decisions based on data.
• Reach means they have a knack for growing their network by creating a gravitational attraction to what they do -- and people want to follow their work.
• Content means they are naturally a content creator, and they're not afraid of it. (You?d be surprised how many people are scared of writing a blog article.)

You can learn more about these skills in our Hiring in the DARC Ages ebook, which is a free excerpt from the Inbound Marketing book.

Domain expertise can also be important. If you market to aerospace engineers, you want to hire an inbound marketer who can have something interesting to say to aerospace engineers. Don't overlook this. It can be harder to learn a highly technical industry than it can be to learn the fundamentals of inbound marketing. Because of this, you might be better off hiring the best blogger for your industry, even if they claim not to know anything about marketing. Alternatively, you could hire an inbound marketer who will interview your domain experts (e.g. executives, evangelists, product managers) and then create and publish content based on that research. But even in that case, you still need to make sure the marketer can at least grasp the basic concepts of your industry and become fluent enough to be a solid interviewer and journalist for your industry.

In addition to these specific traits, I personally like to look for a balance of of both creative and quantitative tendencies in the people I hire for inbound marketing. Not only do you want to hire an inbound marketer who has the creativity to come up with new ideas for content and think of new ways to use tools to get results, but you also want someone who knows how to measure what they do and is motivated by moving the metrics. If they love creating content purely for the creativity of it, they are motivated for the wrong reason (if you want them to be a great marketer, that is). The key thing to consider here is that the truly great inbound marketer knows what goals and metrics you want to move, and then figures out how to combine available tools in new and interesting ways to drive the business results you want. Often, they are the first to try something new; always, they measure their results and see if what they did moved the metrics.

An example of this combination of skills at work would be publishing a press release composed entirely of tweets to announce an acquisition of a social media company. When we did that at HubSpot, we generated over 1,200 tweets of the hashtag included in that press release, as well as a whole lot of media coverage, even though the acquisition was small (fewer than 7 people) and not extremely newsworthy. Another example is someone adding social sharing links inside a PDF ebook when it had never been tried before, and then tracking the amount of sharing as a result ... and then optimizing those links over time to help your ebooks spread more. Because one of our inbound marketers tested this out on our team, today we get thousands of downloads of our HubSpot ebooks just from social sharing alone.

How I Review an Application for an Inbound Marketing Manager

Before the interview, do some thorough ?online stalking? of your candidate. Truthfully, I don?t look at potential job candidates' resumes much except to grab that person's name so I can type it into Google. As I'm searching for them, I look to see what their general web presence is like. How easy is it to find them? Do they have a blog? If they do, I will usually run it through Marketing Grader to see what their stats are. How often do they publish content? Is the content any good? I also take a look at their social profiles to see if they're active on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Pinterest, etc. They don't need to be active in all of these places, but they should have a quality presence in at least one of them. If they're not still in school, I will also check out their current company, run that website through Marketing Grader, and see if their current marketing is any good. You'd be surprised how many people claim to have a lot of inbound marketing success on their resume, but in reality, have horrible Marketing Grader stats.

When I'm doing these initial audits, some of my personal pet peeves I look our for are (1) people who have an email address with hotmail.com, aol.com, or an ISP like Verizon or Comcast, and (2) people who don't have a personalized URL for their LinkedIn profile. While these things might not get a candidate eliminated for sure, they do indicate a lack of proficiency with inbound marketing. Similarly, I prefer when a candidate's resume is in a PDF file (not a Word doc), when the candidate includes a link to his or her LinkedIn profile in the email text, and when the text of their cover letter is in the text of the email -- not in an attachment. Those things indicate to me that the applicant is proficient in how people use the web and that they thought about making their credentials easily accessible to me. Finally, while a paper resume sent via snail mail to my office will get through the clutter (I do open non-junk mail), it's not ideal because I can?t forward the piece of paper or share it with others easily.

How I Interview Inbound Marketing Managers

First off, I like to interview people in person -- or, if geography does not allow for that, on Skype. I don't do many phone screens. I personally feel like the phone screen is a holdover from the pre-internet days when its purpose was to get some additional detail beyond the information on a person's one-page resume. Today, I can learn all that and more by doing some online snooping.

During the interview, I like to ask more ?case-style? questions. I learned about this technique in business school, because it's how all the consulting firms interview. This question type got its name from how business schools use case studies as a teaching method. Case-style questions give the candidate an opportunity to show how they think about and work on problems, rather than just telling me the same prepared stories about the bullet points on their resume.

An example of a case-style question would be to draw a marketing funnel on a whiteboard, adding in some numbers for visitors, leads, opportunities, and customers. Then, ask the candidate to pretend those are the real numbers for your business, and ask them what they would do if they were the CMO. I like this question, because it makes the candidate do some analysis out loud, and then you can quickly get into talking about both marketing strategy and tactics. Or, if you're interviewing a potential blogger, you can show them the stats for your blog overall and for an average article, and ask them what they would do if they managed your blog. The key with these questions is to keep the overall questions broad, but then get into specific details by asking a number of follow-up questions ...

?Okay, you say we should blog more often ... how often? How do you know when it's too often? How would you create that additional content? What would you measure to know if your strategy worked or not? Let?s say you doubled the blog's publishing frequency. What would happen to the stats next month?? ( ... and so on and so forth)

Using these case-style questions allows you to not only evaluate whether the candidate has the DARC attributes, but also if they're a good balance of creative and quantitative in how they approach problems. Sure, you could ask them questions like, ?Are you analytical? Can you give me an example?? but I personally feel like it is too easy to fake your way through questions like that. For more information about how to evaluate potential inbound marketing hires, check out our post about "How to Recruit and Evaluate Marketing Interns," and stay tuned for an upcoming article where I'll share some of my favorite marketing interview questions.

Image Credit: Nguyen Vu Hung (vuhung)

Source: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33999/How-the-HubSpot-CMO-Screens-for-Top-Marketing-Talent.aspx

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