Book Review: Hip and Sage
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In the early days of the Digital Age, a very successful friend dropped by my office to learn the basics of email. She's one of the smartest and most successful women I know, but she didn't know some things about technology that she thought would help her. Rather than fret about it, she went looking for help.
If you're a Baby Boomer, especially an older one, you may feel like my friend did then. There are blogs and Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and MySpace. There are abbreviations like RSS and VOIP. There's a long list of things that younger people who work with you relate to the way a fish relates to water, but that you don't understand.
You can find a friend who's a bit more savvy and get help learning about new technology. Or you can buy a copy of Hip and Sage and spend time with it. Better yet, you can do both.
Before we go on, here are two things. If you're not a Baby Boomer, don't read any farther. You probably don't need this book. But if you are a Baby Boomer and the new technologies, especially social media leave you frustrated or puzzled or feeling ignorant and out of it, this is the book for you.
Lisa Haneberg is one of the best writers going at explaining helpfully things that many people imagine are just slightly beyond their grasp. How about focusing your efforts? Then her Focus Like a Laser Beam is a great choice. Need a breakthrough in your life? What could be more helpful than a book titled Two Weeks to a Breakthrough?
And what if you are a Boomer who's wondering what social media are and whether you should put in the effort to climb the learning curve? Then Hip and Sage is for you.
Actually, the book should have been titled Sage and Hip because that's the order that Lisa tackles the issues. The Sage part is about processing what you've learned over the decades to help you understand what you have to share.
And the Hip part? That's about how to share it, using all manner of new technology. It's not about how you can be the person everyone half your age wants to be like. You don't need that anyway.
But it might help you to know what a blog is and how to use one in your business. And it might help you to know how you can use an RSS feed to get lots of helpful information presented to you in one place. And what about Wikis and VOIP and MP3?
This book will give you a short introduction to all these things, but it will do more. It will help you define success for yourself and figure out what part these new tools can play in helping you achieve it.
The biggest benefit is that you'll come away knowing enough about new technology to recognize some key terms and become more confident about what you're passing up and what you want to investigate.
Bottom line: if you're a Boomer and puzzled about how new technology might fit into your life and your business, Hip and Sage is the book you've been waiting for.
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
Hi Wally,
Thanks for reviewing this book. As a non baby boomer (I think I am considered Gen Y), I am interested in these new forms of social media for personal reasons (all of my friends are using these technologies to communicate on a daily basis). However, on a professional level, this media has been less valuable.
I work in the construction industry, which in general is not very progressive on the technology and marketing front.
My compnay is a commercial roofing company. I had my friend help us launch a website about a year and a half ago (with Google Adwords advertising) thinking that people would find us online. Since then we have gotten exactly zero leads from our website and our very amateur yellow pages add has continued to bring us business week after week.
I learned some valuable lessons from this. One is to understand your marketing channel. Owners of commercial buildings tend to be older than average and have always gone to the yellow pages with their building repair issues.
I still believe that the web provides some unique opportunities for our construction company (like delivering custom sales presentations to customers who we have located through more traditional channels), but if you are broadcasting on a channel that your customers are not listening too, then your message will fall on deaf ears.
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Thanks for those comments, Brian. Let me share two comments.
First, there are Boomers who are comfortable with the newest of the new technologies and make them part of everyday life. And there are some who are not comfortable with anything.
As you describe, there are also differences by industry. There are roofing companies out there using web sites and other media to build business, so we know that can work. Two possible things could be problems for you: getting people to the site and getting them to contact you.
For construction companies, having a good site and some simple search-engine friendly techniques may be more effective than paid advertising. When I analyze this for clients, I look at a few basic things.
Does each page have a specific title tag with a keyword toward the front? Are your keywords in your h1 tags, keyword and description metatags and page copy? Since you're probably a local business, are local place names an important part of your keyword strategy? That's the kind of thing that makes a site search engine friendly without costing a ton.
Then, once folks get to your site, I want to look at things that make the site customer-friendly. Is the site informative? Is the language easy to read? Are there lots of internal links? Is searching easy? Is it easy to contact you?
For a good example, check out the site for Tip Top Flooring in Toronto. Check out the tags and the way the copy is written and the way links are handled. Keywords and phrases include Toronto and GTA (Greater Toronto Area) because their customers will use them when they search. Note that there's a lot of information for potential customers. It's easy to ask a question or get an estimate.
Before giving up on your site, I'd pay someone take a look at it and make recommendations on improvement.
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Wally - always looking for good reading recommedations for my 50 something coaching clients. Being out of touch with new technology dates the older job seekers especially if they are being interviewed by a manager younger than they are.
Great to have a title I can share with them.
Dorothy
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That's a perfect use for this book, Dorothy. I wish I'd mentioned that in the post.
Your clients might also benefit from one of Lisa's other books, Two Weeks to a Breakthrough.
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