Guiding Star Communications and Consulting Inc. marries proprietary digital tools with consulting services to enable organizations to discover and support their people strengths, and accelerate organizational greatness!
We offer solutions for customer experience and staff experience, marketing, adult learning, brainstorming and ideation, business strategic planning, and event management.
Create multimedia-rich e-books that work offline! Use in iOS and Android apps!
Map and explore the customer journey. Then master it!
The do-it-yourself online platform for private event management!
Want to follow-up inline on your first survey? Now you can.
Safely explore the challenging scenarios of work. Socially and online!
Guiding Star Communications and Consulting, collaborating with Snyder Inc., has evolved a whole new level of learning. We're calling it Level Five Learning. It's ready to push beyond outcomes to competencies!
Starlight is the blog of Todd Kasenberg, Principal of Guiding Star Communications and Consulting, and any invited guests. This blog covers a range of topics that include e-learning, customer experience, journey mapping, loyalty, marketing strategy, market research, and organizational culture. In other words - it's got a lot of gems for many different readers, but readers might have to be patient to find what works for them. Enjoy!
Not all situations involving human performance require "training". In this article, learn more about the three types of learners, and how coaching - a technique that requires an expert "guide at the side" - is best suited for learners who actually have knowledge and even skill, but who persist in sub-optimal performance behaviours.
Grow your followership on Twitter. Leverage these 9 great tips that we've studied and tried to enrich your Twitter presence, and you'll build a better world (or at least, a better Twitterverse).
Andragogy. An enigmatic term, rarely but correctly used in the context of learning undertaken by adults. We provide the skinny on andragogy in an elegant infographic, and point out why the term pedagogy isn't the right one when we talk about adults and learning.
It would be so easy to sell, if only everyone had the same needs and perspectives and behaved uniformly. Well, that doesn’t sound like a recipe for fun! Realistically, your customers and non-customers have needs and desires that prompt a search, leverage online resources to understand the possibilities to satisfy their itches, and then interact in various ways before buying (or not buying). We can help you understand the dynamics of buy and not buy through our expert processes in understanding customer needs and customer journey mapping.
Challenging economic times often prompt organizations to cut back on their training programs – it’s an obvious target, some might even say “fluff”. But be honest for a moment – aren’t the costs of training actually easily swamped by the costs of not training? When your people need a little push or a little learning, or when you need to be sure that training programs are changing behaviours in the weeks and months after the “event”, we can help.
Marketing plans – it’s funny, but it sure seems like there is a different approach per consultant! Our team believes that a marketing plan lives and breathes and includes information about positioning, differentiation, critical success factors, and a range of tactics, covering advisory, word of mouth, opinion leadership, social, digital, print and other factors. Incredibly, we’ve boiled down the essentials to brevity with our Two Page Marketing Plan™.
In our opinion, there are only two sources of true competitive advantage (or differentiation) – innovation and relationships. (Yes, it might take a few moments for you to ponder that in its simplicity). So in a time when so much is “me too”, when we face significant commoditization, where innovation is proving difficult, shouldn’t you nail the relationships? From investigational methods to excellence with customers training workshops, we can help.
Your culture is your brand. It is worth consciously considering it, and consciously sculpting it. Toxic cultures – with undue competitiveness, arrogance, an “it’s good enough for me” value or a “tomorrow will do” ethos – will break through to your customers, to those critical relationships you need to survive and thrive. We can help with sensitively-assessed organizational culture assessments, and help teams create aspirational values – and take it beyond this to implementation.
In a mobile world, with devices in every hand pretty much during all waking hours, the potential for learning delivery is greatly increased. But it even goes beyond that – from formal to informal learning, to trapping, for the benefit of the organization, the reading that employees / stakeholders do while studying something new, for getting just-in-time answers to real problems, and more. It is our passion to help you create formal e-learning programs that engage across platforms, and it is our drive to help you unleash informal learning for the benefit of your organization.
Storytelling Methods Can Enhance Learner Experience in Online Learning
This article reminds us that as story-loving creatures, humans can really groove on e-learning that uses storytelling. It seems that we've past the appreciation of Previous/Next Learning technologies, and just want our online courses to be more sophisticated, more savvy, and, well, more storied. Common rapid e-learning tools can make it happen; leveraging the online case study platform Case Swarm (www.caseswarm.com) can also enable storytelling as part of learning.
