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 29, 2012 | Change, Communication, Innovation, Social Media
It is all a matter of perspective.
Digital marketing implies an application of the existing disciplines of marketing, just tweaked a bit to accommodate the presence in the environment of digital options, facebook, linkedin, Pin it, and the rest.
Marketing in a digital world implies a pivot, the old rules no longer apply, because the world has changed.
Comscore has released their latest research, summarised and commented on in Mike Stelzner’s great Social Media Examiner blog. The impact of on line shopping, our seeming addiction to social sites and the opportunities to find new ways to engage with consumers as they conduct their digital lives, is delivering a host of new businesses, business models, and service opportunities not on the radar just a couple of years ago. Just look at the sudden emergence of cloud computing, the question is not where in the organisation responsibility for operating the cloud interactions should reside, but how can we best leverage the opportunities thrown up by this piece of the digital revolution.
Digital is no longer an option if medium term commercial survival is an objective, weather it be marketing, managing manufacturing, customer relationships and inventory, or just doodling, it is the other side of the inflexion point.
Not every body is there yet, but it will not be long, so don’t be late.
Mar 22, 2012 | Communication
In a recent negotiation, a good faith, and non confrontational negotiation conducted in English between one of my clients and a prospective investor from East Asia who spoke virtually fluent but non colloquial English, we suffered from a misunderstanding emerging from differing cultural interpretations of the same words.
We discovered, again, that communication is only completed when the intention of the speaker is clear and unambiguous to the receiver of the words. It is very easy to assume an understanding of the meaning of a word or phrase, simply because they register.
Mar 13, 2012 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
This is a pretty common call amongst the junior marketing staff of my clients, most of them are familiar with facebook, they use it in their personal lives to fill a whole range of functions.
When asked “Why must we be on Facebook”? there is usually an awkward silence, and the standard response is likely to be something like “just because!”
Facebook, Twitter, and all the others are just tools, they are able to deliver an outcome, but it is the outcome that matters, not the tool, used to get there.
You measure the performance of a car on a journey in many ways, petrol mileage, comfort, handling, and so on, but the reason you get in the car is to get somewhere. Social media is no different, measures of the media themselves are just measures of efficiency, not measures of the outcome.
To make it worthwhile, to create engagement, to build a relationship, there must be something for the traveler at the end of the journey.
Mar 5, 2012 | Communication, Leadership
If you cannot state your mission in a very few words, perhaps less than 10, able to be expressed in 30 seconds, the time it takes for a ride in an elevator to the 30th floor, where the big boys live, try again.
I see many mission and purpose statements that are full of jargon and weasel words, that really convey little but the perceived need to make everybody happy, to conform to the latest fad management book, but by the time it gets to the factory floor, where it really matters, it means nothing.
To be effective, a mission statement should be a reflection of what all those in the business feel, what needs to be built, the answer to the question, “what are we doing here?”
So it is easy to wordsmith a statement, but it takes persistence, leadership, and determination to make any use of it.
Feb 29, 2012 | Communication, Leadership, Marketing
We are pretty well immune to those who make promises, as we have heard it all before, and having been burnt, and burnt, we tend not to believe the hype this time.
Doesn’t matter if it is a colleague assuring us they will meet a deadline, a supplier “guaranteeing” performance of his offering, or a pollie telling us the train line will be built by the end of 2020, we have heard it all before.
The antidote is to stop saying and start doing, and let the performance speak for itself.
