After GETTING OUT - GET BACK INTO THE GROOVE

Divorce can leave you reeling, but when you start to pick up the pieces of your life and decide to move back into dating, it can feel a bit strange. If you were married for a long time, you may even feel too intimidated to try dating again. Have no worries, you can jump back into dating and actually enjoy finding out about yourself and meeting other people in the process. The following list offers ideas on how to get prepared for dating, how to go about reconnecting and finding dates, and what to do when you actually start dating.


Re-establish Your Identity
Being a part of a couple for a while will certainly take some of your individuality away. Take advantage of this time after your divorce to find that individuality again. Learn new hobbies, find old friends, and treat yourself with respect. This list tells you how to do that and more.

• Let go of the past. You will not be able to move forward until you resolve your feelings about the break-up of your marriage and the divorce. Once you work through these feelings, you’ll find yourself in a much better place to go on with your life.
• Rekindle old interests. Did you have a passion for photography before you got married? Pick up that camera again. You may find that you can rediscover yourself through those interests you pushed aside during the marriage.
• Find new interests. Maybe you’ve always wanted to learn how to paint or go kayaking. Taking up new interests now will help you rediscover qualities about yourself you may have forgotten. It will also get you out and meeting new people.
• Learn to enjoy your own company. After living with someone for a while, it can be difficult to enjoy doing things alone. Find ways to have fun on your own.
• Take care of yourself. If you’ve gained a few extra pounds, find a way to get some exercise. Eat healthily and take time to pamper yourself. If you feel good about the way you look and feel, others will too.
• Lose the negative self-image. If you feel poorly about yourself, you are likely to attract people who will treat you badly. Make a list of your good qualities and remind yourself often of them. Work on building yourself up.
• Develop new friendships. You don’t have to ignore your old friends, but often it is helpful to have a new network of friends who didn’t know you and your ex as a couple. New friendships and support systems can help ease your transition after divorce.
• Reconnect with old friends. Track down old friends with whom you’ve lost touch over the years. Whether you find you’ve still got lots in common or you’ve both moved on, it will likely enrich your life anyway.
• Volunteer. No matter if you have a lot of free time or almost none, there is some place you can volunteer your time. Devoting some time working for others is a great way to discover new things about yourself.
• Start a new career. If you’ve been working in a job you hate or if you were staying at home with the children, after a divorce is a good time to start down a new path. Start taking steps to get you going toward that career you’ve always wanted. Perhaps you can go back to School, better yourself and enjoy LIFE. 
• Facebook. Find your friends on Facebook, then share photos, play games like Scrabulous, and keep up with what’s happening in their lives. Facebook allows you to adjust privacy controls so that you can choose who sees your profile information.
• MySpace. Like Facebook, MySpace allows you to connect with friends and stay current with their lives. MySpace offers music on the profiles and you can personalize your page to your liking.
• Twitter. If you just want to keep your friends updated and know what they are up to, Twitter allows you to type in a short update that goes out to your friends. If you like getting messages on your phone, have the updates go directly there.  
• Don’t talk about the divorce. Especially if you just finalized the divorce or it was particularly messy, the temptation to talk about the details will be strong. Resist the temptation and focus on the person across the table from you instead.
• Show interest. You have accepted or asked someone on a date, so spend that time finding out about them. Try not to compare them to your ex, but find out what makes them unique and fun to know.
• Don’t go too fast. The unexpected loneliness of divorce or the desire to fill a gap left empty by your ex may drive you to want to remarry right away. Instead, slow down and enjoy the chance you have to enjoy meeting others or reconnecting with your interests.
• Relax. Leave your insecurities about being out of the dating scene at home. Have fun, enjoy your date, and you will find that your date will appreciate you for just being yourself.
• Be accepting. Know that your date has also lived a full life that may not be exactly what you expect. Be accepting of the fact that your date may have commitments to children, debt from divorce, or any other number of factors that you might not have anticipated.
• But don’t settle. Just because you are feeling lonely, don’t settle for less than what you deserve. A woman who always breaks your dates to be with her friends or a man who treats you with no respect are just not worth your time.
• Be aware of old patterns. If you have a history of dating (or marrying) a certain type of person, learn how to break the cycle. Especially if your past choices have lead you to dangerous situations such as drug abuse or violence, seek help to learn how to get away from your old patterns.
• Whether to have sex. Whether or not to have sex with your date or how quickly to engage in sex may have a very different feel after being married. You may want to jump right in there again or need to take things slowly. Listen to yourself and do what you need. Better still, stay away from it. Might just change a lot. 
• Practice dating. Let yourself go out with people who might not be the perfect match. This allows you to get back into the swing of things with a lot less pressure to make the date go perfectly.
• First relationship. Many experts believe that the first real relationship after your divorce is an important one for the healing process. Statistics indicate that this first relationship is very unlikely to last, but it provides you a chance to make the transition into your new life.

These will get you Back in to the GROOVE. MOVE on and enjoy your LIFE. It's too short to WASTE it away. 

My Thoughts: Trends in Sustainable Social Media

A recent article i read: Top Ten Trends in Sustainable Business, focuses on the best trends in “green business,” I’m struck by how many of the points are applicable to sustainable social media. Here are my personal top trends in sustainable social media:

1. A deeper understanding of what sustainable social media means. Sustainable social media is not about creating a Facebook page so people can find you, or tweeting your blog posts automatically, it’s about long term engagement. Sustainable social media means creating conversations, really listening to your stakeholders’ needs, bringing stakeholders into your company for their input, and creating long-term strategies for deeper two-way engagement. If you have a deeper understanding of what sustainable social media means, you’ll see the return in customer loyalty, volunteerism, deeper engagement, and a host of other actions.

2. Your employees are your secret weapon. True – they know and love your organization. Let your employees tweet, use Facebook, answer questions on Yahoo! Answers, post questions on Linkedin Groups, and more … on the organization’s behalf. They are the customer and client touch points. More and more companies are creating social media policies. You could create a social media policy for the workplace, ideally clear and simple, and as open as possible. Here are a number of collected social media policies.

3. Speaking with rather than to your customers. The beauty of social media is that it allows real conversation. That’s called Web 2.0. Your stakeholders are using social media because they are asking to be part of the conversation. Bring ‘em in! Dr. Phil asks his Facebook fans questions. I used to watch a lot of Dr. Phil's shows. Donor Tools asked its customers where they should volunteer via their blog. Where can you get the great ideas your stakeholders have to share?

4. Storytelling and social media dance the perfect tango. You have a back story. Your products, your services, and your organization have a back story too. People don’t want statistics and data, they want people, stories, and personal connections to the company. Use social media to give it to them.  What’s your story? How can you use social media to convey the story? How can you gather even more stories from the people who are engaged with your organization? Stories sustain interest, and your social media efforts.

5. Transparency is the badge of social media trust. Social media begs transparency. Don’t hide anything because there are hundreds of people who would love to know the dirt and don’t mind digging for it. If you know your organization is hiding something, or not being as forthright as it should, it will come out … Eventually … somewhere on social media. And then it will be a big mess. I read a famous story about Habitat UK. And here’s another true story: I know of a company (that i read about on the SUN online UK) that set up five twitter accounts so that the related accounts would retweet the company’s account. The same company also created a fake Facebook account to “friend” people and eventually encourage them to become a fan of the company’s Facebook Page. Fraudulent? Yep. Uncool? Totally. I’m waiting for someone to “out” them.The more transparent your organization is, the more trustworthy your social media will be. And sustainable social media is all about building and maintaining trust.

6. There really is such a thing as ROI. People will argue that you can’t determine return on investment from social media. Or return on influence. Or return on insight. I disagree. You can clearly see the effects that social media has on sales, membership, website visits, conversion rates from social media channels, online campaigns, and more. To create ROI, it’s critical to determine ahead of time what your organization’s goals are for social media. If it’s more online mentions, measure that. If it’s donations, or memberships, then track the activity through social media channels. Sustainable social media means measuring the return.

7. Create a strategy. Then follow it, and adjust it.Your approach to social media should be strategic. Without an overall strategy, you’re just throwing pasta at the wall and hoping some of it will stick...yeah go right ahead and try on your office wall or @ home with your Kids. The trend is away from individual channel approaches, towards a comprehensive strategy (as it should be). To do that, review your organizational and program goals, internal capacity, time, and level of commitment to social media. Create a social media strategy that supports your goals, and gets your organization where it wants to be. Define the channels you want to use, how you will use them, and how using each channel will help your organization meet its defined goals. Implement your strategy and adjust as needed. Sustainable social media means having a recipe and following it so that you are using social media effectively to support the company’s goals. And adjusting as needed.

8. Website integration. Social media shouldn’t stand on its own. Sustainable social media strategy means that your entire web presence (including social media profiles and activities) ARE your website. It’s not just your URL now. I’m pleased to see more integration between websites and social in the last year. Examples are Facebook’s new “Like button” that you can put on your website, the social sharing features (tweetmeme, addthis, etc), integration of YouTube within websites and the blog on the home page. Until recently, the blog was always relegated to its own page, or a separate site. To create sustainable social media, you have to integrate the social into the website, while the website should also send readers out to your social spaces. It’s all one site.

9. Fear of Failure: to succeed, you can’t be afraid to fail. Platforms change all the time, the audience becomes more savvy and jaded, and it’s a brave new world every day in social media. One day you think you understand a platform such as Facebook, and the next day Facebook changes the world. However, I’m starting to sense a fear of failure that may fossilize into a mindset as social media becomes more common. I hope not.Trying is succeeding. Trying something new, solidly based upon strategic planning, is sustainable social media. Failure teaches important lessons to you, and to us all. It’s a big social media lab right now, and we’re always on the lookout for new combination that work. Don’t be afraid to try.

10. Stakeholders are upset if you’re NOT listening. If you aren’t at least listening for mentions of your organization, key products/services/brands, then you’re missing out on the conversation. Customers are most often going to use twitter to complain and praise … and ask for attention. Set up web alerts of all types. It’s best to listen and respond. The expectation now is that you are listening. If you are not responding, little problems quickly become big ones. Listen and respond.

I think these are the big ones. What other trends are you seeing in Sustainable Social Media?

Samuel Moses Opoku-Agyemang (a.k.a. - Kwabena Poku): Started as a Business Development Manager of H.I.M. Solutions Ghana (HealthInformation Management Solutions Ghana). He has at least Five (5) years business development and events consulting experience. His areas of expertise include Digital Media Marketing, Brand Communication (Digital Media), Event Promotion, Event Production and Management Consultancy, Customer Services and Marketing Research. Samuel currently consults for various events and works full time with MGC Activ/Chilloutghana.com (A Co-Founder). He is responsible for Day-to-day operations, business development and all marketing activities. In addition, he has experience in building up networking solutions for Administrative systems for organizations, which lack such facilities.  

@MGC Activ's Chilloutghana.com, we develop and managed Sustainable Social Media for the Following 

Silverbird Ghana 

Miss Ghana 2010 

VF 020 Live 

Zain's Movietastic 

Zain's Football Mania 

Zain's 888 Service 

RockStar4000 Ghana 

chilloutghana.com 

Adom Praiz @ 10 with Cece Winans 

Y 107.9 FM

e.TV Ghana 

Happy FM Ghana 

Millers Oils Ghana

mSimps Ghana 

Miss Malaika Ghana 

The Perfume Lounge 

Sinking Sands Movie 

CheckMate Movie 

MTV Africa Music Awards With ZAIN (Road to MAMAs)

Solar Charger Ghana 

& Many MORE!!!!

4 Reasons Your Website Sucks... A paper by MGC Activ GHANA

I know, you've been working really hard on your website. You've made sure that every pixel is perfect, every menu margin magnificent, and every title titanic.  Unfortunately, it's entirely too easy to make a beautiful website that, well, sucks.

Here are four ways things can go horribly, terribly wrong:

1. Your website isn't findable. Some of the biggest companies in the world have websites that aren't well optimized and they still get found.  Unfortunately for the rest of us, that isn't an option. This is especially a problem for gorgeous sites that are all flash and only have one page for Google or Bing to index, but many new websites don't optimize page titles or URLs--key places for telling search engines what your pages are about.
2. Your website only displays the news about the cool stuff your company has done. Ummmm... that's nice, but if I'm a prospect, I don't care about how cool you think you are--I care about how you're going to solve my problems.  If your website only has navigation about who you are & what you do and a news feed, it sucks.
3. Your website is so slick and cool that people have no idea where to click. It's no secret that people have short attention spans when they surf the web, so making your page so "cool" that you've hidden all obvious navigation is a really good way to increase your bounce rate.  If you only have two buttons, they had better be the best two buttons and serve your prospects' needs exactly, or they're not going to engage.  Even better, though, would be to give your prospects enough options that you can address their varying needs, depending on where they are in the research or buying process.
4. Your website automatically plays sound. Maybe you have an auto-playing video or some funky background music, but it plays instantly. From a pet peeve perspective, this should really be #1, but it's less of a marketing problem and more of an annoyance.  Your prospects probably don't suddenly want a blasting presentation to come out of their computer speakers while they're sitting in quiet cube farms.  They'll quickly close the browser tab rather than becoming engaged, filling out lead forms, and eventually buying your product or service.

At MGC Activ Ghana, we will help you to "unsuckify" your website, by making sure it has the following:

1. Enough well-optimized pages that people can find you
2. How you're going to solve your prospects' problems
3. Clear navigation & calls-to-action
4. And for the love of everything, no automatically playing noise or video!

Taking these actions will go a very long way towards making sure your prospects stay on your site, interact with your company, and become customers!

MGC Activ GHANA 

CORE VALUES

Our core values are creativity, innovation and strategic thinking. We believe in the power of teams and promote consistent client interaction. Our team is made up of organisational development/strengthening, financial accounting, risk management and website development experts who have worked with various organisations including, centre's of learning, think tanks, auditing firms, insurance companies, financial institutions and human capital development consultancies. 

CORE SERVICES

Business Support Services

Feasibility Studies

Concept Brief

Edit, Review and Validation of Business/Concept Plans 

Business Plans (Operational Guides, Financial Plans and Risk Management Plans)

Training Toolkits, Policy and Procedure Manuals and Information Packs

SUBSIDIARY SERVICES

• Event Planning Consultancy 
• Event Production Consultancy 
• Event Promotion and PR
• Image and Corporate Outlook Services
• Logo Designs
• Online, Print Advertisement and Billboard Designs
• Website Design and Development

Subsidiaries 

• www.chilloutghana.com
• www.eatoutghana.com

@ MGC Activ - We have developed and Managed Website projects for Organisations such as 

• Toyota Ghana
• Sikkens Ghana 
• Ministry of Tourism 
• Paloma Hotels 
• Venture Capital Trust Fund 
• Ghana Bar Association 
• Media Whizz Kids

 etc etc etc 

 

For More info:

Call +233-26-4180300 or email info@chilloutghana.com 

 

Zain slashes call rates

• Zain reduces call rates from 12 Gp to 8Gp a minute to all networks
• No registration and no conditions

Accra, 13 September – Zain Communications Ltd, Ghana’s most affordable mobile operator has drastically reduced their call rates to all networks by a staggering 33%.  Both post and pre paid customers will wake up this morning and start making huge savings on calls on the Zain network without having to register for the service.  In addition to this, all customers will get their first eight Zain to Zain SMS’ for free.

Philip Sowah, the Country Manager for Zain Ghana commented ‘The needs of our customer is key to us at Zain and we work to develop exciting and affordable products and services.  These new rates focus on no frills affordability, we have no conditions attached to our new rates, if you use the network you will enjoy our low tariffs.’

Furthermore, the new call rate does not affect any of the ongoing promotions Zain is currently offering, which means that customers can make further savings.  The Zain 3 cool deals gives customers free night calls, preferential rates to friends and family and the payback deal where customers get bonus credit for calls received.  The Akwaaba promotion allows customers who have been inactive on the network for three months to reactivate their lines with free credit of GHC 5.  New Zain customers will also enjoy bonus credit for joining the network.  Customers can register their Zain SIM cards in a Zain shop or at one of the 14,000 registration outlets in the country.