Jun 23, 2011 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Operational benchmarking was one of the “flavours of the month” for a long time in the nineties, until people realised that finding out what the best in class were doing, then expending resources to copy them, just ensured you never caught up, and at best, were one of a number who were doing OK.
Search Engine Optimisation strikes me a bit the same way.
Making sure you put often used terms into your posts, sites, and tweets is supposed to get you noticed, come up the top of the Google page, but at best, you will share the spot with all the others slavishly following the boring mantra of spicing up all communications with what rapidly become ‘net clichés.
The marketing challenge in the e-world is the same as in the physical one, to be noticed, you must be doing something that is sufficiently different so that at least some of the potential audience is drawn to the spot, then you have a chance to impress with the quality of your thinking, writing, photographs, product, or whatever else it is you are there to do.
Be different, daring, creative, and stand out from the crowd.
Jun 21, 2011 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Communication, Customers, Personal Rant
Negotiation is a process of finding a solution to a question that is acceptable to all parties. It should go without saying that the first step is to actually communicate, setting out to find areas of compromise, and places of potential value not immediately obvious that occur in many disputes.
The alternative is standing back and throwing rocks, which can only be a winning strategy when you hold all the cards, but then it is not a negotiation, but a statement. However, when the power in a dispute is spread around, declining a seat at the table almost inevitably means you end up on the menu.
The unilateral banning of the live cattle trade to Indonesia was such a rock throwing exercise. Thank heavens the dills in Canberra appear to have woken up in time, and are at least communicating with stakeholders, hopefully with the intention of finding a solution, rather than just doing a post cock-up arse cover.
Jun 20, 2011 | Communication, Marketing, Operations
Experience is hard won, experienced people have an intuition built up over time that is not always obvious, and is certainly not a “by the list” analysis of all the factors, weighing up the relative importance of each, and reaching a conclusion. Somehow it is a cognitive process that happens really quickly.
Some years ago my daughter had an accident in a gym, and very badly broke her arm, to the point of being almost severed. Whilst it was treated as an emergency, and substantial resources immediately swung into action, 24 hours later it was an experienced nursing sister, someone with many years orthopedic trauma experience who noticed a couple of very minor inconsistencies, and demanded a specialist review. That saved my daughters arm from gangrene setting is as a result of Carriage Syndrome. When I asked her how she recognised it, when nobody else had, all she could say was that she “just did”. Experience. She knew enough through experience, had seen enough cases in the past with all the nuances that occur, to recognise cognitively what was going on, rather than just knowing what to do to apparently address the all the apparent problems of a severe compound fracture.
Psychologist Gary Klein has made a lifetime study of decision making, describing the impact of experience on decision making, and how it works in situations of stress, ambiguity, and time critical situations.
Considering the value of this experience should shake some of the corporations around who hire 30 year olds rather than 50 year olds, (and 60 year olds) because of a perceived “vim and vigor” benefit, but what about the instinct and intuition built of long experience? Experience covers all aspects of life, the positive impact of experience influenced decision making is just more obvious in some situations than others. Experience enables those who have it to instinctively see what is going on, rather than just responding to the more obvious what to do.
Jun 14, 2011 | Collaboration, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
“Immediacy” is perhaps the watch-word to describe the way in which our society works. Communication is so instant that we expect reaction to the communication to be just as quick, and this expectation of virtually instantaneous reaction can be a death trap for those not adequately prepared for it.
Just think what would have happened last week had the MLA properly prepared for the predictable backlash from the 4 Corners program. Rather than a muted response, David Palmer (MD) and other stakeholders in the industry should have been out there, TV, blogs, twitter, U-Tube, et al, with stories, pictures, and commentary that articulated the facts on a personal level, with emotion, and honesty.
There is an alternative view to the sensationally emotional 4 Corners story. There is a modest number of very good abattoirs that process a substantial majority of the animals sent to Indonesia, many of the smaller works, whilst not perfect, are working towards better standards, the local employment around the feedlots and works in Indonesia adds substantially to the local economy, the success of the investment MLA has made over many years to lift standards, the care Australian farmers and logistics suppliers take, and so on. Had this story been well told, we may not have had the level of knee-jerk we have had, and the attention would have been focused on how to improve the minority of the trade in Indonesia that is substandard, rather than a total ban which throws years of work, an important industry in Indonesia and Australia, and the relationship with the biggest neighbor we have against the wall.
Even better, knowing it was coming, use all the electronic tools of the immediacy generation to get the message out there in front of the 4 Corners program going to air to further mitigate the dumb, emotional knee-jerk we are now seeing in the community. Whilst a bit was done, it is bland, unemotional, scripted stuff with no emotional connection, and clearly sets out to arse-cover, rather than tell the story in a memorable way. It failed at both.
What was delivered to our couches last week was pictures of the worst of the worst, highly effective, emotional shock tactics that achieved their objective. The lesson for the rest of us is to prepare for the worst, while hoping for the best, because when the worst happens, your response has to be convincing and immediate.
Jun 7, 2011 | Communication, Social Media
Try this on U-tube, a recitation of stats that should leave no doubt that social media is mainstream, not a toy for the digital generation.
OK, we all know you cannot believe everything you see on the web, so halve all the numbers, quarter them, and it still does not make much difference to the only logical conclusion. Social media is not a fad, it is mainstream, it is a revolution, and it is gaining momentum as we speak.
Jun 1, 2011 | Customers, Marketing
Considering in a recent workshop the parameters of service innovation being delivered by the enterprise concerned, we boiled down the variables to just two.
- What is it that the customers is trying to achieve that using our product will deliver better than any alternative?
- How easy (or hard) is it to do business with us, and how can we improve the experience?
It really seems too simple, but sometimes the simple delivers the best outcome, complicating it just gets in the way of clear thought.
When we answered these two simple questions, the follow up activities were obvious, as were the costs, necessary changes, and implementation timetables.
