Sep 4, 2012 | Marketing, Sales, Small business
A modest sized marketing services agency I do occasional work for has an awards wall, where industry peer bestowed awards appear, a feature of most service agencies I have seen. However, theirs has two wrinkles
- Beneath each award is a further rating, done in collaboration with the relevant client that records the effectiveness of the ad/campaign, whatever it was, in the only awards arena that really matters, the marketplace.
- Campaigns that fail to win industry awards, which is most of them, are also subjected to their internal assessment of effectiveness, and they give it an internal award, and a spot on the wall.
As part of the effectiveness assessment underneath each award is a record of the assumptions, that drove the communication strategy, and their own internal award, the rating of which goes from “ratshit” to “not again” to “OK” to “dreamtime”. It also records what they collectively did right and wrong to deliver the result, and what they learnt that can be applied next time.
The wall provides a talking point, is a reminder each day of the reason they are in business, and how they are performing. Making performance transparent in this manner can be confronting, but time and time again, as I review best management practice, I see such transparency as a key success factor.
Oh, and another small wrinkle that sets them apart. They apply a pre-agreed sliding fee scale based on the agreed performance against objectives they set with their clients, so they always have skin in the game.
Clients love it!
Sep 3, 2012 | Leadership, Personal Rant, Small business
I observe lots of activity in all sorts of enterprises, public and private, see KPI’s set and met, initiatives announced with fanfare (and in the case of the NSW Government re-announced)but little of any value seems to be happening.
Familiar?
Enter the Rocking Horse syndrome.
Lots of activity, failure to make any useful progress, but sometimes it keep the kids happy, for a while anyway.
Aug 25, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Social media is a jungle, full of vegetation that limits the view, poisionous flowers that look beautiful at first glance, small areas of bright sunlight that somehow finds its way through the foliage, nasty surprises of many types, and gems that can change your life.
Those who know the jungle can pick the nasties from the goodies with little more than a glance, when the reluctant wanderer can barely see any difference, and they seem to be able to find their way effortlessly through the undergrowth whilst we flounder.
That is the nature of our environment, get used to it.
There are many blogs out there that offer information, insight, and advice, use them. Jay Baer’s convince and convert, Mike Stelzner’s Social Media Examiner, and Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation, Jeff Bullas, being four of the best. All offer advice, insight and opinion via a range of means, and will throw a bit of light into the dark corners.
A client asked me recently why he should bother spending the time and money (it is not cheap, it just costs differently to the stuff on the P&L) on social media, and my answer was simple: “that is where your customers are!”
Jul 16, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Sales, Small business, Social Media
A vast array of marketing & sales activity is aimed at persuading, far less are aimed at engaging. This may appear to be a largely semantic difference, but consider the difference when you see someone undertaking an activity they are paid to do, compared to somebody undertaking the same activity because they love to do it.
Yet it is engagement that leads to persuasion, not the other way around, so why bother trying to persuade, which is usually a recitation of the features of your product or service, concentrate on engagement and have the product sell itself.
Jun 15, 2012 | Management, Operations, Small business, Strategy
This is a term coined by Peter Drucker when talking about contract management, particularly in relation to older contractors who bring a wealth of experience and hard won wisdom to the table.
Using contractors, particularly high level ones brings a number of huge benefits:
- Turns a fixed cost of an employee into a variable, project specific cost.
- Easier to impose specific performance measures, as the responsibility of the contractor is to the task, and less to the cultural environment.
- They bring immediate resources to projects otherwise difficult to staff
- Offers the flexibility for enterprises to bring in specific skills from time to time, that they do not need all the time.
- Generalists, and those with a wide experience, are better at seeing how logically unrelated pieces may fit together, they are less concerned with ambiguity, than specialists, and less likely to “anchor” an analysis in their specialty, and narrow perspective.
Our economy is undergoing structural change, management productivity is under scrutiny, so it makes sense for businesses, from start-ups to huge multinationals, to take advantage of the big pool of highly experienced, mobile, and motivated older contractors.
Jun 7, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Anyone who can read can read a Keats sonnet, but not everyone can “see” the lyrical quality, and feel the passionate introspection most have at their core. Those who can are truly literate in English poetry.
Data Literacy, a term I like, similarly implies not just an analytical capability, but also an intuitive capacity to understand the nuances and hidden gems in data, rather than just the capability to be informed by apparent outcomes.
Have you ever seen people making stupid decisions while pointing out that the data justified them?
I see it all the time. It seems to me that there should be a knowledge building chain here, rather than just a data analytical one:
- Gather data,
- Analyse data,
- Apply healthy skepticism to the outcomes,
- Gather more, preferably counter intuitive data,
- Pursue the trends, outliers, inconsistent data, apply informed analytics rather than statistics,
- Synthesis of the complex, often paradoxical information,
- Informed intuition, and data literacy evolves.
Not all numbers are equal, some are more reliable and informative than others, simply because they are the result of tested assumptions, and more and better informed questioning. The development of literacy takes time, effort, and resources, but is worth it.
