Nov 4, 2012 | Communication, Social Media
Mitch Joel writes one of the more thoughtful blogs dealing with the changes in our digital environment, he seems to be able to articulate what others amongst us just feel as a vague itch.
In this post, from 2011, he considers the implications of us now all being publishers, what responsibilities do we undertake, and how can we do better? After all, 140 characters does not constitute an article of any real value.
Similar questions, and a number more, were asked by Mark Colvin, Colvinius on twitter, during his Andrew Olle lecture on Friday evening.
Essentially, the publishing environment has undergone a huge disruption, and there is more coming. How we deal with the changes, personally, socially, and economically impacts on every one of us, so it is worth some thought.
Colvin is a great Australian journo, wedded to the facts, yet able to mix the facts with a humanity that is all too rare, as he explains and reports. Thanks to the wonders of our new digital world, his thoughts can be shared, and re-shared, and we will all grow just a bit as a result.
Thanks Mark.
Nov 2, 2012 | Change, Collaboration, Social Media
I have a new email address, one that allows me access to an enterprise social network, run off the “Yammer” platform that has been deployed by an occasional client.
This is an innovation that will turn the time people spend on their social networks into hugely productive time for employers.
The client concerned has a far flung empire, not big, but very spread, delivering a specialised service. Last week they urgently needed someone with an unusual skill to address a crisis in a client factory, a skill that up to now may have taken weeks to identify, if it was around. Instead, the engineering manager stuck the request on their yammer network, and it took minutes for a young engineer in Perth to respond, he had skill required, developed with a previous employer.
The opportunity to use internal social media, Yammer, Chatter, the Salesforce.com equivalent, and others, is opening a door to collaborative work such that we have brely dreamed about before. Forget the complicated, time consuming, and mostly wasted project update meetings every second day, replace it with a daily SM update, create forums to address problems and spread news and ideas.
This is not just socialising business, this is a revolution in cross functional/geographic collaborative management.
That’ll scare some folks!
Oct 31, 2012 | Social Media
Mike Stelzner’s “Social Media Examiner” on line magazine, rather than blog, is about the best of a good bunch of sites that offer insight to the blogging process.
These 21 tips, assembled from a group of pretty smart operators are gold.
Thanks Mike!
Oct 29, 2012 | Change, Management, Marketing, Social Media
One of the many paradoxes of our on-line social life is that to engage, we give up a part of our personal life, we become available to anyone else who cares to look for us, within the boundaries of increasingly better privacy hurdles in social media tools.
In the past, our personal lives were almost all we had, simply because of the inconvenience, inefficiency, indeed, impossibility, of telling everybody, anything much about ourselves.
The earlier incarnations of social media removed those barriers, and suddenly we realised that we had created a monster, a perfect environment for stalkers. All sorts of unsavory and undesirable people, and those we had no desire to know suddenly had access to our details, and so we started designing out the access, but it is a binary process, a filter is “on”, or it is “off”, no “maybe”.
So, how do we design it out? We design back in some of the elements of the inefficiency we had until a decade ago, put in hurdles that need to be crossed before you get to the personal stuff. Clay Shirky, one of the great minds thinking about this stuff does it again in this Zeitgeist presentation from 2008. I only just found it, but the message is as relevant now as 4 years ago, perhaps more so.
Oct 26, 2012 | Communication, Marketing, Personal Rant, Social Media
Millions of “writers” are now publishing blogs, and as a result there are many sources of “how to” write a better blog, and get it seen.
However, it seems to me that most of the advice is rehashing pretty basic stuff, and focusses way too much attention on the medium of publishing, the web, rather than offering advice on the writing. If there is any merit in the idea that a well written blog will outperform a poorly written one, perhaps we should ignore most of the new-age advice, and go to the experts on writing.
Having an ability to write, to express an idea memorably, with clarity, and in a manner that creates understanding and an action from the reader is not a result of the net, it is just as hard as it always was, it is just that now the good stuff has far more visible competition for attention from the crap.
David Ogilvy is an acknowledged expert, the original Mad-man, who wrote some of the best advertising of all time, also wrote this internal memo advising his employees how to write.
The advice holds for those trying to write blogs, tweets, and advertising copy today, as much as it did of O&M employees in 1982.
Oct 8, 2012 | Customers, Sales, Social Media
Sales is a tough job, you win or you lose, with no middle option. Understanding those you lost is the key to improving future performance.
Over 30 years of engageing with sales people, managing sales forces, and doing sales training, it seems to me there are just 5 reasons that seem to be recurrent in a failed B2B sale.
- Failure to understand that a potential customer in not interested in what your product can do, or has done, just what it may do for them. Trying to sell the features of a product, rather than the benefit it delivers, tailored to the circumstances of the buyer is sales death.
- The power of incumbency is huge, vastly underrated in most cases. When getting a sale means someone else is missing out, the risks to an organisation, and the reputation of the one who makes the change can be significant, so failure to remove the risk usually leads to failure. The old adage “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” still holds.
- Failure to communicate and convince the decision-maker. I have seen huge efforts go into making sales, and as the effort drifts, it becomes apparent that the one who makes the decision, the Yes/No person, is not engaged, and often not even known.
- Lack of up front resources, or content that serves as an alternative to the traditional sales effort. In this day of the net being used as a primary information source, it is often the case the specifications of a purchase have been determined, and a purchase decision made, before a potential supplier is aware of the process. The processes of qualifying a lead, supplying information that contributes to a specification, building relationships, and determining price and delivery requirements, previously the function of sales has moved on line, the only variable left is the “who will supply” question.
- Price. This is almost always the reason that gets cited as the one that broke the deal, but usually it is just a convenient excuse when any of the other four above have kicked in, and the explanations just get too complicated. It is the “Dear John” of the purchasing officer.
