Apr 26, 2012 | Collaboration, Social Media
Emotional intelligence, EI has a whole lot of psychological mumbo jumbo surrounding it, a search will turn up almost a million articles. So, I’ll simplify all that by saying it is the capability a person has to empathise and then engage with another individual and/or group.
It is the thinking that underpins effective use of social media. We can all figure out how the algorithms work, and the how the interactions play out, but it is EI that creates the engagement.
I get a lot of stuff in my inbox , some, obviously, gets deleted immediately, some I share very selectively across my contacts, some I share with specific people, and some get spread via Twitter, Linkedin, et al. Why? Because what I share, plays a role in how others see me, and I want to be seen differently by different people, and groups of people.
It also varies by platform.
For example, there are a lot of hits on celebrity foibles when reported in online news sources, but they do not get shared much. However, we tend to share the pictures and stories of the tsunami in Japan, or the interesting article we find on a blog.
We humans are social animals, we spend a lot of effort to shape the way others see us, as that will contribute to our acceptability in differing groups and situations, and what and how we communicate is more important in this connected age than ever before.
Apr 24, 2012 | Branding, Collaboration, Communication, Marketing
Trust is a greatly over-used word in management conversations, and has therefore lost much of its meaning, becoming a cliché for “lets hope”.
People trust brands when they deliver consistently over time, but trust is like a bucket with a hole in the bottom, you need to keep pouring water in to keep up with the inevitable losses for a whole range of reasons. Stop adding to the bucket for a moment, and you lose ground that is very hard to make up.
In discussing collaborative structures of various types, “Trust” is grossly overused, and should be replaced by an alternative description, “Reputational Capital” which implies more of the appreciation/depreciation continuum better understood by managers.
Collaborations work only in the presence of people who individually work to ensure that by their efforts others will benefit, and the whole system remains healthy. This is consistent irrespective of the size and nature of the collaboration, from major corporate initiatives, to self managed teams on the factory floor, the local tennis club, and web based sharing platforms like Zipcar. The Reputation of all participants is paramount to collaborative success.
Amazon, Zappos and Ebay rewrote the book on reputational capital with their review systems, and the principals used are now in wide use across many web platforms to provide buyers and sellers with certainty.
How long will it be before there is a web-wide statement of our activity, that accounts for all our activity, irrespective of the platform, an accounting of our Reputational Capital, a “klout” type score that measures not activity, but the satisfaction delivered to the people on the receiving end of all the transactions an individual originates.
Mar 26, 2012 | Collaboration, Innovation, Small business
Blogs, facebook, web sites, and e-books have all bypassed the mass model of publishing, enabling huge numbers of people a creative outlet not available before 2000, but there is still the need for seed-funding. Raising the modest amounts of money to try and commercialise creativity has become a whole lot easier with the birth of Kickstarter, a crowdsourced funding platform for creativity.
Kickstarter is an interesting model. It calls for pledges for a project, a target and a time frame. When the target is reached, the credit card pledges are activated, if the target is not reached, they lapse. In this way, it creates micro finance for creative projects. The social media collaboration between the site, and facebook enables a “fan-base” to be developed, creating a market at the time the pledges are taken.
A challenge to this type of funding being extended to commercial operations is the hold current legislation gives ASIC, intended as a protection against snake-oil salesmen. The same challenge exists in the US where last week congress passed legislation to enable crowdsourcing of funding up to $1 million/year from a small unaccredited investors, and $50 million for established private companies before having to register a prospectus with the SEC.
Both are very good ideas, that should be translated to Australia where SME’s have great difficulty raising money, and the hurdle of having a prospectus approved by ASIC is very high indeed. The potential for growth enabled by access to funding by SME’s has to be substantial, providing a kick to the economy.
Mar 15, 2012 | Category, Collaboration, Management, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Produce marketers are not all that different to most FMCG marketers, except that the power of the retailer in produce categories is magnified by the total lack of proprietary branding, effectively insulating the consumer from the producer, making brand building and innovation a greater challenge. This lack of branding power and engagement with the consumer puts them at the mercy of retailers.
In an effort to put some parameters round the problems, the Mildura Development Corporation funded a study that sought to articulate the challenges and choices faced by producers in the Sunraysia region, particularly by drawing the comparisons with the competitive environment in the UK.
The headline elements in the conclusions are:
- The power of the retailer
- Scale of producer operations
- The role of the business model employed
- The increasingly critical nature of data, its collection, analysis and leverage potential
- Marketing choices made.
These factors are all connected in cause and effect relationships with each other, and with the customers, and consumers of produce, but most forget, or get confused about the differences in the approach, which can be summarised as:
Sell to your customers
Market to your consumers.
Perhaps the report can add to your thinking, contact me for a copy, or discussion.
There is a downloadable copy of the report in the “Sharing” pages of this site, let me know what you think of it.
Dec 20, 2011 | Collaboration, Leadership, Management
Meritocracy is about the best ideas, whereas democracy is about consensus, usually an average outcome.
In a democracy, those who manage to smooth the waters, and gain the average usually get ahead, but in a true meritocracy, those with the best ideas get listened to, and eventually get ahead.
Collaboration is often confused for democracy, everyone gets an equal turn, but in a collaboration that will win, only the best ideas survive the demanding, often aggressive review and decision making process that are core to success. It is this review that crashes most collaborations, because most people see them as democracies, not meritocracies brought together to identify and harvest the best ideas.
Sobering thought when you consider the challenges we face, economically and socially, to think that at best, we can have an average outcome.
Dec 15, 2011 | Collaboration, Management, OE, Social Media
Ronald Coase was first to recognise and articulate the economic relationship between individuals and the co-coordinating structures necessary to organise the work of individuals, coining the term “Transaction costs” in his 1937 essay “The nature of the firm”
Coase in his original paper set up the theoretical framework for the huge cost reductions now possible, enabled by the tools of the web 2.0, which are gathering momentum at a huge rate.
What he did not spend too much time thinking about, because it was not relevant at the time, were the costs imposed by a redundant status quo. Cultures of organisations often require that costs to be absorbed simply because the operating environment has not evolved sufficiently to allow the collaboration tools now available to be used to their potential, leaving co-ordinating overheads to do the work now possible with a mouse, and a bit of nouse.
The possible competitive advantage to organisations, particularly ones with widespread operations is huge, as most of the competition will have trouble making the leap.
Let them pay the cost of yesterday, you have the opportunity to grab the future in recognising the power of the new collaboration tools.
