Who among us has sailed through work environments without being part of or witnessing some sort of conflict, whether it is bullies, wet blankets, micromanagers, or troublemakers? Win at Work!/The Everybody Wins Approach to Conflict Resolution by Tucson-based author Diane L. Katz delivers an eight step “Working Circle” concept to problem-solving at work.

It’s a flexible, non-linear approach to solving issues in the workplace.  The process gets you to think, rather than follow a prescribed formula to conflicts, and that is the power of the concept. One of the key themes that Katz emphasizes in the book is that you should not go into conflict resolution with a pre-determined idea of what the other person will say, but rather with an idea of what your game plan should be and what is personally negotiable and non-negotiable.

This is a powerful way of approaching conflicts, because you focus on a different area than on trying to prepare for a debate or trying to anticipate their reaction. In order to understand one’s personal style, Katz includes a simple questionnaire that helps categorize people into one of five different styles:  attacking, confronting, problem solving, compromising, and withdrawing.

If you already have self-knowledge, you might not need to read the book. But how many of us truly understand how to approach various work conflicts? The author describes several examples of how her clients faced common problems at work, and how they use the Working Circle to analyze and solve the problem successfully, keeping in mind that success might not mean we get the result we are hoping for, but we still gain valuable insights and experience.

As Katz notes, breaking down a complex and disturbing problem often gives one a feeling of empowerment.   Part of the process is looking to your past to find examples of where you have encountered similar issues and how you dealt with them.  Have you encountered a bully before?   Have you been caught in the middle of fights and disagreements?  

The Working Circle is designed to take into account what are called the masculine and feminine approaches to conflict resolution. Rather than being gender specific, which Diane is careful to note in almost every chapter of the book,  these are just general terms to describe aggressive and avoidance approaches to conflict. The optimal solution is more collaborative.

The bottom line is that solving conflicts often takes a certain amount of courage, and the payoff is significant to personal satisfaction.    The goal of the process is to transform the individuals involved. The message of the book is don’t be intimidated by anyone or any situation. 

The Working Circle process can be applied to personal conflicts in our lives as well, and I suspect that the author’s next book will be “Win at Home!” 

Diane Katz  lives in Tucson and has a master’s degree in organizational psychology, and a PhD in conflict resolution. Win at Work! is published by Wiley and available in bookstores nationwide.  For more information, visit www.TheWorkingCircle.com.

Thanks to PR firm O’Connor Communications for bringing this book to my attention.

A good "A to Z," nuts and bolts book about blogging

If you get frustrated by how-to books that assume too much knowledge upfront, you will probably like Tris Hussey’s “Create Your Own Blog: Six Easy Projects to Start Blogging like a Pro.”

It’s a simple guide that walks you through every step of the way, from getting started to how to build an audience. It covers everything from personal and business blogs to podcasting, video, and lifestreaming blogs.   It’s one of the few books I’ve seen that helps you determine which blog platform to choose (the author is partial to Wordpress, as I am). 

Every now and then publicity agents for these new books contact me to see if I would like to review the book, and if it’s a topic I’m interested in, I usually agree. If I don’t like the book, I don’t blog about it. Here are a few nuggets from the book, which is 273 pp and priced at $21.99:

• Write for yourself. Tris notes, “I didn’t start writing to be famous or get a book deal. I wrote because I had opinions I wanted to share and nowhere else to do it.”
• Blogging is about passion and storytelling
• You can use Google analytics and Woopra to gather and tabulate your blog stats
• To find your blog “voice,” just write like you’re chatting to a friend or a favorite professor or teacher
• If you are trying to build traffic, you need to post at least three times a week
• To help increase the comments on your blog, comment on other people’s blogs

The best advice at all — don’t put something online that you don’t want to see printed on the front page of the paper.

The author is a charter member of the Professional Bloggers Association and is a social media consultant. He was one of Canada’s first professional bloggers, and has been blogging since 2004. He was also named one of Vancouver’s top 20 social media people.   More info can be found at www.sixbloggingprojects.com

If you haven’t read “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” by David Meerman Scott, you’re missing out on a top guide on how public relations has changed and “how to use social media, blogs, news releases, online video and viral marketing” to reach your buyers directly.  You can find the book at his website www.webinknow.com or from Amazon and other online bookstores.

I re-read the book this past weekend (the revised 2010 edition), and there’s one section that I didn’t feel represented PR professionals properly – or, at least, not the PR professionals I know, most of whom are in Arizona.    In chapter 7, “The New Rules of News Releases,” he writes that “many PR professionals have a fear of the unknown. They don’t understand how to communicate directly with consumers and want to live in the past, when there was no choice but to use the media as a mouthpiece….I also think there’s a widely held view about the purity of the press release as a tool for the press.  PR professionals don’t want to know that hundreds of millions of people have the power to read their releases directly.  It’s easier to imagine  a closed audience of a dozen reporters.”

The book is brilliant and has helped completely change the way we look at public relations. I don’t think he has quite captured the issue here, however. Granted, he travels a lot more than I do and talks to way more PR people, so he’s probably a better authority. I’m just going on what I know about myself and the people in my networks. I don’t see fear of the unknown, and I don’t see an inability to communicate directly with consumers. What I do see are professionals who take pride in their career, and who don’t like the sloppiness and lack of fact checking that often happens when anyone and everyone can issue a news release. There really isn’t an editorial function anymore for what’s put out online. Most PR people I know are excited about social media and while they recognize there’s more due diligence involved in reaching so many more segmented audiences, they appreciate the convenience and reach of social media tools.

A recent incident involving NBC Anchor Brian Williams is perhaps one example that struck me about the lack of verification that most untrained people would conduct. Apparently a rumor circulated that Chief Justice John Roberts was going to leave office, according to a report on RadarOnline.  The rumor actually started in a first year law class at Georgetown University as part of a lecture about the necessity of verifying the credibility of legal informants. Fortunately, Brian Williams double checked the story before breaking it.

Now that the floodgates are open, we can’t hold back anything on the Internet, so while the benefit is that many more stories can get out there and conversations can be initiated between companies and their customers directly, true PR professionals fear not the unknown, but the deterioration of the integrity of information.

This isn’t to say that all PR professionals hold themselves to a high standard, but it is part of the ethics code for the profession. Wire services like Businesswire are quick to proofread releases and keep an extra layer of precaution before a release goes “live,” but so many more companies and individuals are using free press release sites that have no editorial function. The result can be a lot of promotional crap out there – crap that doesn’t instigate conversations, but is just annoying. This is what I fear – not that anyone can read a release, but that anyone can write one.   It brings down the whole profession.

Here’s a good overview for anyone in business who wants to learn more about how to use a blog to create a relevant audience and drive more business.  As the authors point out, there are three parts to blogging:   1) the specific technical instructions to set up your blog and add information to it, 2) what you need to know to get eyeballs looking at it, and 3) how to leverage your blog with other marketing efforts.

Even though I have been blogging for Valley PR Blog for 2 years, I found this book helpful and more practical than some other blogging books I’ve read.    There are plenty of factoids in the book to persuade even the most reluctant blogger, such as the news that online media is the only area of media currently growing.   Blogging helps people communicate with large numbers of people quickly and publicly.  Blogs have grown from 5 million in 2005 to 133 million in 2008.  If one of your competitors is continually blogging about your industry and you aren’t, search engines will find your competitor’s blog and place it, not yours, high on the list of search results when someone searches for one or more terms in your industry.  By learning how to engage the public through open online channels, you can truly connect with your customers.   A business blog not only gets the messaging out to customers, but enables you to bring your audience’s comments in, making your blog the home base for these online conversations.   [This is the benefit of blogging that I think many business executives fail to understand - the ability to centralize where the conversations about your company are taking place].

There are 9 chapters which cover everything from why blogging is important to how to get more readers (77% of bloggers attract readers by commenting on other blogs, according to Technorati), how to choose your particular blogging platform, how to engage with your readers, what to write about, how to deal with negative feedback, multimedia blogging, and creative commons licensing.   The case studies are helpful and not too long – just quick bites of information to help support the text.  There is also an appendix of important blogging sites.  

If you are looking for more tips on urls, tagging, keywords, YouTube channels, photo-sharing services, polls, contests, and other blogging components, you’ll find it in this guide.

The authors are Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt.   Eric is CEO of Butow Communications Group, a web design and online marketing firm in Jackson, California.   He has written several computing books, including “How to Succeed in Business Using LinkedIn.”   Rebecca is the co-founder of sixty4media, which specializes in WordPress design and development as well as social media consulting in Vancouver, BC.   She has been blogging since 2004 on miss604.com, and in 2008 was listed within the top 10 “Most Influential in Canadian Social Media.”

Note:   From time to time I’m offered complimentary review books from Pearson/Que/Sams.  If I like the book concept, I’ll review it. 

My big regret in hindsight was not being bright enough, or energetic enough, to drive down to hear author, blogger, and wine expert Gary Vaynerchuk speak in person when he was here in Tempe this past October at the Changing Hands bookstore.

I asked for, and received, his new book “Crush It!” for Christmas.   I’ve read several books that have summarized the social media wave and future trends, including PR 2.0 by Brian Solis, Now is Gone, by Geoff Livingston, and “The Social Media Bible” by Lon Safko, et. al.  All good books, but in my mind, Gary is the one who really “crushes it.” 

I like his book best because of 1) the personable way in which he delivers the message, 2) because it makes me feel like less of an anomaly in this world   (Sometimes I think I’d get more people to believe me if I were male, not female), and because 3) it follows my own book formula of writing something that can be read in a 2-hour plane ride.

If you find yourself in the middle of two camps, like me, you’ll love this book.   I’m divided between (mostly) younger friends in Camp A who “get” social media, engage in it, and are open to new ideas.    In contrast, many of my contemporaries and (mostly) older friends and business acquaintances in Camp B don’t get it.   So I feel validated when I’m with the Camp A-minded people, and impatient when I’m with the Camp B crowd.  

I get most annoyed when the Camp B personality asks me, “So how do people make money from a blog?”  Or, alternatively, when they claim they think twitter is nonsense because they “don’t want to read what someone had for lunch.”  Is their DNA that literal, that non-intuitive, that non-visionary?

As Gary V points out, his “Wine Library TV was never about selling wine on the Internet.  It was about building brand equity.”  And, more pointedly, as he talks about the trend of people moving their lives more and more onto social networking sites: “…it makes total sense that if this is where the eyeballs are going, this is where business has to go.  Money goes where people go…[advertisers] used to spend their money on traditional media – radio, television, newspapers and magazines.  Those platforms are losing eyeballs to the online world by the second…if the survivors in the traditional media don’t adjust to this new competitor, thirty years from now our kids will examine them in museums with the same curiosity they now reserve for dinosaur bones and fossils.”

You don’t need to go out of Arizona to find great books.   Here’s a list of some of the local authors I’ve read and like, in no particular order:

1. Dine Out Phoenix – Where to Eat from Chic to Unique – by Pamela Swartz
2. Life as a Mother-in-Law – Roles, Challenges Solutions – by Olivia Slaughter, Ph.D. and Jean Kubelun, Ph.D.
3. The Art of the Fresh Start – How to Make and Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions for a Lifetime – by Glenna Salsbury
4. Arizona Gun Owners Guide – by Alan Korwin
5. The Braces Cookbook – by Pamela Waterman
6. Women Who RV – and Their Kindred Spirits – by Marion Orem
7. Laid Off?  Don’t Stress!  How to Get from Mad to Glad – by Kitty Wiemelt
8. Twilight - by Stephenie Meyer
9. Steering by Starlight – by Martha Beck
10. Escape from Cubicle Nation – by Pamela Slim

I believe these are all available on Amazon, so one-stop shopping and your holiday gift-giving is done.

I just finished a really good book about twitter that would make an excellent gift for any friends you have who are sitting on the fence about whether to jump in or not. Hey, it’s never too early to think about Christmas! 

What I like best about “All a Twitter” by Tee Morris is his conversational style. He’s not trying to be a lofty author, speaking from on high.   He’s just sharing what he has learned since he first started tweeting in spring 2007.  He covers a lot of ground, and in fact the book is 280 pages long, and includes a section that explains tools for twitter as well as twitter speak.

He tells you how to register, starting with the basics. He tells you how to pick a good photo. There is a significant section on how to get tweets on your mobile phone. The book addresses all levels of experience on twitter, and goes into both personal and professional uses. If you have friends who wonder about twitter search, hash tags, tweet stats, tweet ups, Mr. Tweet, this is a great overview for them.

He also gives his personal perspective on aspects of twitter. For instance, like me, he hates automated tweets. I don’t follow people who “schedule” repeat tweets every few hours.  He strongly feels that tweeting quotes isn’t participation (this is where I don’t agree – I follow a couple of people on twitter who posts cool quotes each day, and I find them inspiring).   He hates tweetshrink, a tool I hadn’t heard about but which scans and condenses your tweet. The result often looks like hieroglyphics.   He points out that twitter “isn’t group therapy,” where you try to work out some of your personal problems online. He also notes that what you say openly can backfire, and cautions people to think twice before they hit that tweet send.

My favorite section is in chapter 9, “The Outsider’s Perspective.” 

Returning to what I mentioned earlier in this chapter about explaining twitter to someone outside of the community, you remember those strange looks? Sometimes you get those from people who tried twitter and just don’t “get it.” That doesn’t mean they’re missing out or not as sharp as you. It just means that… they don’t get it. If you try to make them get it, that makes a bad situation only worse.

He’s right. Either people are motivated to find out what all the fuss is about, or they’re not. Not my problem. But if you have friends who are sitting on the fence and want to learn more, and just need a little prodding, or if you want to learn a little bit more about twitter than you currently know, this is a very readable book.

And kudos to the publishing company’s publicist, Lisa Jacobson Brown.  She sent me a really nice pitch letter/heads up about the book, and it was a rare pleasure to receive such a targeted e-mail.

The book is $19.99 and published by Que Publishing.  You can find the author at www.teemorris.com and @TeeMonster on twitter.

p.s. Warning – Tee says he gets asked all the time if the book is written in more than 140 characters.  He addresses it in the introduction: “I’ve heard the joke. I’ve heard it often. The fact that this book is as thick as it is and has 13 chapters should be the hint that there is a bit more to twitter than you might expect. Please don’t make that joke. It’s just not working for me anymore.”