Oct 21, 2011 | Change, Communication, Leadership
Creating a sense of commitment to an outcome is the job of anyone who seeks to lead.
Perhaps the most powerful way of achieving this is to build an understanding in an audience of what the current looks like, and articulating the shape of the future.
This should be far more than a presenter just asking themselves rhetorical questions, done well it creates a rhythm to a presentation, that can be compelling.
Probably the most compelling example, certainly the best known is Dr Kings speech in 1963, most immediately recognise the power of that articulation, relating to the couple of minutes at the end where he articulated his dream, having spent the first 12 minutes or so of the 16 minute speech laying out the present. This speech was so compelling it assembled the momentum for enormous change in the social fabric of the western world, consider what could be done in youir organisation with the use of that simple technique.
Trick is to ensure you live the dream, or it is just words.
Oct 19, 2011 | Customers, Marketing
Peter Drucker often condensed seemingly complicated concepts into pithy quotes of the blindingly obvious.
One I came across the other day is “There is only one profit centre that counts – customers”
It seems this statement of the obvious is often lost in the razzle dazzle of bullshit and self serving, non value adding nonsense that inhabits many organisations.
Next time you are faced with a pile of the aforementioned internal stuff, ask yourself a few simple questions:
“what would a valued customer think about all this?
“Would my customer see this as an activity that they are prepared to pay for?
“How does this impact on my customers experience with the product and organisation?
Pretty simple questions, but answering them and acting accordingly will radically increase the productivity of your marketing expenditure.
Oct 17, 2011 | Management, Marketing, Small business
If imitation is the best form of flattery, domestic FMCG suppliers, the few left, should be very flattered indeed.
Any lingering doubts about the pressure being applied to them by the two retail gorillas should be blown away by this video from ad agency Mumbrella, which demonstrates the fine line between flattery and IP stealing.
This has happened in front of our eyes to one of our core manufacturing industries, and when the piper calls to be paid, it will prove to be very expensive indeed. There is so little packaged food manufacturing now being done in Australia that the industry is in real strife, I suspect scale is rapidly falling past the point of viability, and those left are under great pressure.
Perhaps the new ACCC chairman Rod Simms will follow up on his words that seem to indicate a different attitude to the retail duopoly than his predecessors.
Oct 11, 2011 | Marketing, Social Media
Following on from yesterday’s post, on quantifying the value of social media, a couple of further thoughts.
Like any activity, it is crucial to undertake activity utilising social media in the context of achieving an objective, a commercial activity of any type is doomed to irrelevance without an objective against which to measure success, and learn how to improve.
Similarly, an effective plan requires that there be a logical, sequential series of activities that all play a role in the achievement of the objective articulated.
So, a three step process for achieving Social Media effectiveness:
- Acquisition. Where do yu expect the visitors to the activity to come from?
- Behavior. What do you want them to do while visiting?
- Outcome. What is the commercial outcome that you are looking for?
This this third leg, outcome, is the key one, and can be many things, but currently are usually centered around simple measures such as time on site, page visits, and purchase. However, these simple measures whilst useful ignore the power of the social media, its capacity to amplify a message, so a set of measures around the degree to which the message is “amplified” should be considered. The number of “likes”, comments, retweets, and similar measures of activity that “amplifies” a post are the real measure of social media effectiveness. This post by Avinash Kaushik, Google’s analytics guru offers some great thinking.
Oct 10, 2011 | Marketing, Social Media
Finding ways to quantify the impact of investment on-line has become a real challenge for management. A dollar spent on line is a dollar not available to be spent elsewhere, so the need for a quantitative base from which to compare apples and apples is substantial, and it keeps the beanies happy.
Google Analytics is a set of free tools that can be used to ferret out the information needed to optimise any site. Currently with 130+ standard reports, and lots of opportunity to customise your own reports, the tools are of enormous value to anyone running a site. Forget all the expensive optimisation consultants, just pay a web savvy student a bit to dig around and come up with opportunities to get more out of your web ecosystem, the site, bloggs, Twitter, Digg, Tumbir, Linkedin, and so on.
Here are some lessons put out by the experts.;
- This series of videos by Appsumo offers lots of tips in a very easy to understand manner.
- Social Media Examiner, perhaps the best site for gathering information on social media has this interview with Google’s Avinash Kaushik on the use of Google analytics in quantifying activity on the web, and is a must watch for beginners to pros.
- Avinish’s blog provides a beginners guide to web analytics, 10 easy things to do to assess the effectiveness of a website, but that is only the beginning of the insight that can be gained from his blog, another must read.
- And just in case you want more….
Point is, the tools for measurement are now there, Google has an enterprise quality set for free, so there is absolutely no excuse for not using them.
Oct 4, 2011 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
Dave Winer, one of the earliest bloggers, prolific web publisher, and a key developer of the RSS technology so many of us use daily, has made many pithy statements worth remembering, but I was reminded of one over the weekend as the silly GASP customer complaint “thingie” went viral.
Dave opined “if you don’t want me to slag off at your product, don’t have a shit product”. A retailer sells goods, but the service is a part of the offering to customers, so irrespective of weather or not a purchase is made, it is in the retailers interests to have them leave with a smile on their face.
The dresses at Gasp may be worn by so called stars, but the failure by the self proclaimed sales superstar to recognise that individuals can now extract a substantial revenge for poor service via social media should ensure his superstardom is exercised elsewhere, perhaps serving petrol at the local Woolies where he cannot do much damage to his employers brand.
