HOPE is perhaps the single most lucrative thing to sell.
There are so many people in need of direction, while so few actually want to do the work required to achieve the end goal. Thus many scammers sell the end result up front while glossing over the hard work required to get there.
In my last blog post I hinted I will be putting together another entry where I would reflect on something that has been in my mind for a good number of months, if not years altogether. Something that, to me, comes pretty close home as the main problem, issue, bottleneck, challenge (whatever other term you would want to use) on the full adoption of Social Computing within the enterprise by knowledge workers.
Funny enough, it hasn’t got to do anything with a good number of the various different challenges that plenty of people have been talking about all around for a long while now. Yes, this is a blog post where I would not talk about cultural barriers, nor the various technology challenges (Social software tools being too complex to use, as the main one, for instance, as well as the plethora of them available coming as a close second one), nor the difficulties in letting command-and-control let go by organisations as well as some of the management layers, nor the reluctance to change and so on and so forth.
To make changes in your business and stay on track — so you are doing the right thing to reach your goals — rather than just being busy, you need an action plan. Creating an action plan doesn’t need to be a long drawn out process. You can create one in five days (or less!) and then be kicking it in gear creating success for your business. Here’s how.
My checklist for optimizing the lead generation process so far has included six steps: the mindset of not pushing; repairing the rift between sales and marketing; creating the ideal customer profile (and the un-ideal customer profile as well); agreeing upon a universal lead definition that fits your company’s goals and culture; importance of a well maintained database; and, in step 6, I outlined a multi-modal approach and discussed its importance in the lead gen process. Today I’d like to discuss the aspects of an effective lead management process.
A couple of days ago, Steven Baker of Business Week published “Beware Social Media Snake Oil,” warning that “hordes of marketing ‘experts’ are promoting the value of wikis, social networks, and blogs.”
Since I run one of the nation’s largest social media agencies (and help some of the world’s largest brands with social media marketing), people asked me what I thought of it. It’s not an answer I can condense to a tweet. So here goes:
I slagged eMarketer last week for misleading reporting on Twitter usage, so in the spirit of fair play, I’ll show them some love for an interview they did with Kevin Ertell, Vice President of Retail Strategy for ForeSee Results.
In the interview, Kevin nailed the top thing that every single business should have on the top of their to do list:
“We’re seeing at many, many retailers that the amount of people that say they came to make a purchase today is 20% or higher. Yet, those people’s conversion rates are nowhere near 20%. So, there’s a massive gap there, and a lot of that gap can be attributed to usability issues. ” Continue Reading…
Most of the guides, how to articles, and general industry advice we have read on social media marketing contain some “myths” :
Just a quick note this morning on the idea of random numbers and productivity losses around the use of social networking, but other sacred cows like Fantasy Football we shrug at. Companies do not generally tend to block access to Fantasy Football sites, but the productivity loss playing the Fantasy Football game can amount to as much as you lose in a whole year with social networking. Then there is the American Side of the argument that Social Networking costs 2.25 billion in productivity costs, which is still much less than Fantasy Football.
And now for some numbers to support that claim, according to Findarticles.com the following numbers apply as of November 2008.
Do you ever pause and think about the avatar you use online as the visual representation of you: your persona or alter ego? What it says to others about you and the organization you work for or represent?
Avatars are creeping into business environments and will have far reaching implications for enterprises, from policy to dress code, behaviour and computing platform requirements, according to a report from industry analysts Gartner.
I was reading an article on The top 10 CIO concerns and I was struck by the first four: