Feb 6, 2011 | Branding, Marketing, Social Media
Advertising has a new coat, “adverfanning” as in advertising to attract “fans” for your social site, who are then the target of directed or “Permission Marketing“, a term coined by Seth Godin over a decade ago.
Adverfanning has been growing exponentially with the growth of social media, it is the foundation of the business model, but the cost/impact has been increasing as click through rates decrease. According to a report by analytics firm Webtrends, it now costs $1.07/fan, as reported in this WSJ article, which is getting close to TV cost/impact in some time slots.
The business of advertising has not changed, but the tools have. The old ones, TV, radio and magazines have fragmented enormously with choice, and new ones have emerged from the social media, but the objectives are unchanged.
Gain attention
Generate engagement
Motivate trial
Build repeat sales
Encourage brand evangelism.
Feb 3, 2011 | Leadership, Management
When was the last time you saw people around the water cooler laughing like a bunch of kids, in work-time?
Did you think that perhaps they were being frivolous, wasting the organisations time?
If you did, you would not be alone, as we seem to take ourselves too seriously, and our organisations tend to frown on what is seen as frivolity.
However, when you think about it, laughter is a sign of strong, positive personal relationships, something most organisations work for, so laughter should be seen as a symptom of success, not frivolity.
In a new book, Tom Rath who leads Gallups workplace consulting practice argues in his new book “Vital Friends” that a person with a “best friend” at work is 7 times more likely to be engaged in work than the average.
The book is a the result of a pile of research, but when you stop and think about it, the notion of productivity being associated with being happy makes absolute sense.
Feb 2, 2011 | Communication, Customers, Management, Marketing, Sales
Opportunity cost is a concept well understood, and often used in a theoretical sense, but not often is it translated into something easily understood.
In a store just before Christmas, I was tossing up between two brands of domestic coffee machine, that appeared pretty similar in all but price, the better known brand being substantially more expensive. The sales assistant sensing my indecision, and perhaps thinking I might do more ‘research” and he would lose a sale solved the dilemma by asking, “would you rather have” X” brand, or “Y” brand and 20kg of coffee beans?”
That turned the theoretical “opportunity cost” although I had not considered it in these terms at the time, into something tangible that had a value relevant to the purchase, and made all the difference…… I took the “Y” brand machine and with the saving, bought some exotic coffee beans.
Feb 2, 2011 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media
Yes, another alphabetically numerated generation for us to get our heads around, the F of “Facebook” generation.
These kids, born in the mid eighties, have grown up connected. To them, Facebook is more than a tool, it is a part of their social fabric, fundamental to the way they see the world, act, communicate and engage with their environment.
Their “behavorial DNA” is different to their parents, often even to their older siblings, and they way that plays out as these F generation people make it into the executive suite will be fascinating, challenging, and inevitably speed up the pace of change, already too hectic for many.
Jan 31, 2011 | Branding, Lean, Operations
I’ve written a bit over time about the value of a unifying business purpose, the way it can unify and motivate the stakeholders of an enterprise, often beyond the boundaries of just employees.
It is all easy to say, but apparently very hard to do, as the number of mission statements, and articulation of business purpose that are around that are no more than a bunch of cliches written on a whiteboard in some strategy session simply because it is on the agenda of things to get through.
Tom Fishburne again nails the notion of business purpose as a cliché in this cartoon, one picture tells the story of most efforts.
The video embedded in the copy around the cartoon is worth a look, it articulates via the story of Raleigh jeans the value of a real purpose as opposed to a confected one. The video also addresses the notion of manufacturing being brought closer to the geographic source of the business purpose, another hobby horse, as I see the beginnings of supply chains contracting around local capabilities, rather than being outsourced for apparent short term cost benefits, without understanding the long term implications.
