Lessons Learned from the Leadership School of Hard Knocks

Have you ever given this Helen Keller quote any thought? Think about it for a moment. How does it play into lessons learned? Hold the thought for a few minutes and give me your answer after reading this article about the lessons learned from the school of hard knocks.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.

Helen Keller

Ever wondered how the best leaders handle being at the top so effortlessly? The truth is, these highly successful people do stumble, worry, and doubt themselves, just like the rest of us. But they are very good at mastering the way they are perceived.

Many a day I like to reflect back on my three careers, my experiences as a leader and manager, and my lessons learned. Here are some of my better lessons that I have shared most often.

Understanding expectations

It’s so easy to launch yourself into an effort, to get straight to business when working with a new boss, and think that we’re being productive. Happened a lot during my corporate career. Taking the time to clarify expectations upfront, however – whether that be in terms of the work itself , what’s the scope, and so on; or in terms of the working relationship … how you can work most effectively together – can avoid a whole lot of time wasting.

The same applies as a consultant as I am today. You can dive straight in and try to solve everything you think needs fixing, but that may or may not be what the client wanted. Clarifying those expectations at the beginning of the relationship, identifying three main areas where you’re going to focus your time and really deliver results, will allow you to deliver the most value while making sure that the client is getting what they want.

Get information

In my last career, I am a marketer and in many aspects, I know a lot about online and social media marketing. But I do follow a lot of other online marketers; I am subscribed to their blogs and email lists. Why do I do that? Because I can still learn from them: I can see what they do and how I react to it. I also get a ton of information and can easily select which of this information I want to read or watch and what to ignore. All in all being subscribed to my competitors makes me a better marketer.

As an online marketer I am never done learning and by simply listening to people I would otherwise regard as my competitors I get even better at what I am doing. Not listening to them would mean I would be missing out. I can get a ton of information for free from people that I highly respect.

If your competitors produce great content from your niche and share industry insights or knowledge, appreciate their work and learn from them. If they provide value, you can profit from it just as much as your potential customers.

Communications and collaboration

At IBM or Lockheed Martin, and at any large company, there is a whole system of words and expressions and those dreaded acronyms that you need to understand in order to be able to communicate. Once you have the lingo, this will give you shortcuts to getting your point across and will ultimately get things done more quickly and in a way that everyone agrees with.

While this language code can be useful, you also need to remember the poor souls who aren’t quite up to speed. This can include new hires, of course, and external agencies, but you’ll be surprised how sometimes even the more experienced managers won’t have a clear idea of what you’re actually talking about. Agree on common definitions upfront and you’ll be more effective in delivering something that everyone is happy with.

Power of effective communications

I was amazing at writing at school. So it was a bit of a shock when I started my first job at IBM and found that essay writing was not the same thing as business writing.

On top of that, an international environment where most people were not native speakers meant that simple and unambiguous communication was crucial. Effective business writing had a specific objective, used clear and concise language, active tense rather than passive; it wasn’t about sounding clever or being poetic.

Learning to write an effective business document – a recommendation, a report, or just an email for that matter – will allow you to get your message across quickly and effectively, to influence people with a more persuasive argument, and to impress people with your convincing business results.

The ability to distil complicated matters into a clear and well thought-out message is a useful skill in all areas of life, above and beyond the corporate world.

Making tradeoffs

Ah, choices. This is a biggie..

So what does this mean? Well, you can apply this at a couple of different levels. First, looking at your project list: you need to identify which projects will have the biggest impact and then focus your time on those projects – it’s far too easy to get bogged down in little tasks and trivial details.

Second, at the macro level, a strategy is choice: we’ll focus on this market OR this market, we’ll invest here OR there, we’ll prioritize this OR that. Giving a laundry list of every possibility, or saying that “it’s all important”, is the path to failure.

Work-life balance

I’ve written about this before and I’ll say it again: the concept of work-life balance is a completely false dichotomy; and I think it was IBM that taught me this. During my first years at IBM I was a poster child of “work hard, play hard” – me and everyone else.

We were all straight out of university, young and single, hardworking and ambitious. We worked late and partied later. In the good old days, IBM even encouraged this with extravagant Golden Circles events in exotic places.

The point is that you can’t hate your job, counting the minutes until you get to go home at 6pm, the days until the weekend, and the weeks until the next vacation. That’s no life at all.

Instead, I’m a big fan of work-life integration, where we enjoy our professional endeavors and spending time with our colleagues just as we have fun while working hard on our personal interests in our time “off”. I’ve never felt happier or more fulfilled than I do now, working harder than ever on my own businesses and projects and having a blast while doing it.

How to Build a Strong Brand

Knowing how to build a strong brand is one of the first steps toward starting a successful business. With around 305 million startups launching yearly, a strong branding strategy helps one stand out from the competition.

However, without sufficient knowledge, branding your business can be a long and complicated process.

To help out, here are key tips on branding your brand.

Put Customer Interests First

Customers like great products and they like serious benefits. For them, things that benefit them personally are easy to justify. The Nike Moon shoes did this, but only because the customer was beginning to understand jogging and its benefits for their health. Bill’s secret goal wasn’t to sell shoes, he was simply promoting something that he believed in. This may not sound like a marketing strategy, but it certainly should.

If you’re unsure what your audience is really looking for, try putting yourself in their shoes for a moment and think beyond the scope of your product or service. Instead of thinking about your product’s features or competitive advantages, think about what goal your customer is trying to achieve. Then, be there with the information, products, and services they need to make it happen. This means you need to do your research first.

Base Your Strategy On A Felt Need

Initially for Nike’s audience, the felt need wasn’t for better running shoes, but for a better way to get in shape. Certainly, running was already popular among kids and athletes in the 1970’s, but it wasn’t the widespread social activity that we see today. The growing white-collar workforce helped pave the way for social activities that included the promotion of cardiovascular health. Once the trend was ingrained, the need shifted and the “jogging shoes” themselves became the felt need.

Believe In Your Product

It’s unlikely that Bowerman’s original goal was to become a millionaire as he penned the pages of his first jogging pamphlet. That wasn’t why he did what he did. His only goal was to promote a sport and an idea that he believed in. As marketers, shouldn’t we believe in the product and the ideas we are selling? For Bowerman, it sure made marketing a lot easier. He was “marketing” without even realizing what he was up to.

Sell Easily Identifiable Benefits Instead Of Your Product

While jogging is pretty easy to understand, the waffle tread isn’t (at least not until you understand why Bowerman made it in the first place). His goal was to make the world’s most light–weight running shoe. He believed that this factor alone could dramatically improve the speed of a distance runner. His product worked and quickly gained the industry respect that it deserved.

Embrace New Technologies

While Nike’s early marketing strategy centered on print publications, they later went on to dominate other mediums, like television in the 80s and 90s, through modern social media platforms today.

Adapt To The Needs Of Your Audience

Nike hasn’t historically adopted new communication platforms for their marketing just because they’re chasing new, flashy objects. Far from it. Rather, they’ve been quick to conquer new mediums because they’re where their customers are. For example, take a look at their Instagram profile. They know their core demographic includes heavy Instagram users and so it makes sense for their brand to maintain a presence there. However, they also make sure that everything they post provides value. Rather than interrupting the flow of their follower’s feeds with flagrant sales pitches, they share motivational messaging. Other posts subtly tie into the brand’s history and their sponsored influencers while directing users to interest–specific Nike sub-accounts on Instagram. In this case, they could have simply said something to the effect of, “Check out our women’s footwear and apparel profile, and our general running product profile.” Instead, they went the extra mile and created something memorable and entertaining while staying relevant to what their audience wants to see.

Stay True To Your Sense Of Purpose

They say the more things change, the more they stay the same. For Nike, that has certainly remained true. Throughout their current content marketing initiatives, Nike makes sure their brand message hasn’t gotten lost over time or across channels. They focus their emphasis on creating content that promotes the benefits of their products, rather than the features. Helping their customers be better at what they love to do is still the focus of their branding and message. By moving their content marketing to the platforms where their customers are, it shows that they are keeping their audience’s needs in mind while staying true to themselves. Nike’s marketing strategy has succeeded in sustaining a global brand while many of their competitors have come and gone from the spotlight.

My Favorite Google Chrome Extensions for Social Media Marketers

What has changed in the world of Chrome extensions? A great deal. New extensions are continually emerging that can drastically change the day-to-day habits of social media marketers. Plus, a few classic extensions have undergone impressive upgrades.

Check out this list of the best Google Chrome extensions for social media marketers, and start saving some valuable time and effort at work.

Momentum

Sitting down at work and firing up your computer only to be faced with an overflowing inbox isn’t the best way to start your day. This extension offers a beautiful way to get in the right headspace before getting bogged down with scheduling posts, replying to followers, monitoring hashtags, creating new content, and everything else a busy social media manager is responsible for on a daily basis.

The Momentum extension replaces your “new tab” homepage with a gorgeous new photo every day along with a personalized greeting. Momentum also allows you to set one main goal for the day and keep track of a longer to-do list, helping you stay focused throughout the day. You’ll see the local weather in the top right corner, a list of links you frequently visit to the left, and a motivational quote at the bottom of the page.

Stay Focused

Just because social media managers get paid to be on the sites that other people use to waste time doesn’t mean they don’t suffer from bouts of intense procrastination elsewhere on the web. Thankfully, technology can be a source of discipline as much as it is a source of distraction.

StayFocusd is an extension that limits the amount of time you can spend on certain websites (a.k.a. the ones that you visit instead of doing work). Once you’ve used up your allotted time, you can’t visit the site again for the rest of the day. You can get pretty granular with what you choose to block as well, whether it’s an entire site, a specific page, or even certain types of content like videos, games, or images.

Evernote Web Clipper

Social media managers typically have to switch between their creative and strategic hats throughout the day, often needing to wear them at the same time. Jumping back and forth between these two dynamics during a busy day can cause even the most organized person to feel a little frayed. Enter: Evernote.

The Evernote Web Clipper extension allows you to clip any article or web page and save it in one place. Alongside the notes and to-do lists that you can create in Evernote itself, this extension allows you to pull in key text from any website or article you find while doing research online. This is also a great way for you to collect content to share on social without having to keep 20 tabs open all day.

Grammarly

Publishing a post with a spelling mistake is a nightmare for social media managers—and rightly so. While the occasional error happens to everyone from time to time, consistent mistakes can damage your brand’s credibility. Grammarly can help catch them all, including the mistakes that manage to evade the usual red squiggly line: an incorrect verb tense, a missing article before a plural noun, or the misuse of a comma.

The Grammarly extension can catch over 250 types of errors, many of which aren’t typically caught by spellcheckers. Along with catching your mistakes, Grammarly can actually help you write better overall, by offering synonym suggestions in line with the context of what you’re writing.

Figure it Out

The biggest challenge when working globally often has nothing to do with language barriers or cultural nuances—it’s figuring out what time it is in a different region without doing the math on your fingers under your desk. The Figure it Out extension allows you to add up to 10 time zones to your “new tab” screen, which should help make scheduling posts or setting up meetings with different regions super easy. Figure it Out also displays regional national holidays, so you can avoid posting your best social content on a day when no one will be paying attention.

How to Influence Customer Conversion with Psychological Triggers

We’ve all wished we could have more conversions at one point or another. But getting people who visit your site or your premises to actually buy from you is really tough. Most of the advice out there you could quite easily call “stylistic.” It’s all about how you present yourself and how to put your best foot forward. These could include psychological triggers.

It’s vaguely psychological in the sense that it accepts that enticing people to buy your product is important. But it’s naive in its approach. It doesn’t seek to exploit the psychological triggers that cause people to buy from you.

Here, we’re going to investigate the various psychological forces that trigger the buying decision. How you can influence them? Let’s take a look.

Trigger 1: Pleasure

Human beings might have very different personalities, but they’re all wired on a basic level in a very similar way. This is particularly the case when it comes to pleasure and pain. People like pleasure and they avoid pain.

This basic fact is important for companies. Companies that provide their customers with pleasure are in a better position to do business than those that don’t. Why? Because companies that provide pleasure will become associated with pleasure in the consumer’s mind.

The theory seems straightforward, but how to make it actionable? Today, many of the world’s top companies are using the A to Z process. The idea here is to take customers from their first interaction – point A – and get them as close to point Z as possible, before asking for money.

You see this sort of thing all the time from top tech startups. Almost all tech startups won’t charge for their software upfront. Instead, they’ll offer customers a free trial that lasts perhaps a couple of weeks.

In that time, customers will use the product and learn all the many ways that it can help them. And, ultimately, they’ll begin to associate pleasure with that product. When that happens, tech companies will look to close the sale. It’s an effective strategy and one that exploits a key human drive.

Trigger 2: Novelty

The media has known for a while that people strongly respond to both precedence and novelty. In the consumer world, the same is true. Take novelty, for instance. Neuroscience has shown that our brains react to novelty in a very interesting way.

When we see something new, our brains immediately release dopamine, making us feel good. We then start to associate new stuff with feeling good and become, in a sense, hooked.

Take the iPhone, for instance. Everybody knows that the difference between the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 6 is small. And yet people were quite happy to throw away their iPhone 5 and blow money on the new version, just because it was new.

So what can marketers do with this information? The key here is to continuously tweak your product. Add a couple of new features, change the styling, or even do a simple rebrand. These can all be effective in driving new sales and giving customers what they want.

If you do go down the novelty route, however, you’ve got to be careful. Customers will call your bluff if you don’t add meaningful new features or change your business model.

Trigger 3: Ease

The famous psychologist Daniel Kahneman said that the law of least effort applies to cognitive as well as physical effort. He says that if people have a number of options to achieve the same goal, they will choose the easiest.

His argument, therefore, is that people like stuff that is easy and dislike stuff that is hard. Evolution, he says, has made us lazy. It was a survival benefit for us to expend as little energy as possible because we never quite knew when our next meal would arrive.

Because laziness is so deeply built into our psychology, it’s something that is paramount for businesses. Firms need to make the customer experiences as painless and as easy as they possibly can.

Take making payments, for instance. Customers want to be able to make payments as quickly and as easily as possible. But often businesses don’t offer solutions that cater to their needs. Nobody wants to spend ages filling out a direct debit order form every time they make a big purchase.

Recently, however, we’ve seen the rise of consumer financing companies. These companies make it easier for businesses to offer customers financing options. Crucially, they’re quicker and smarter than the finance options of the past. And many of them can be handled by a single POS terminal.

You can also see the drive to make things as easy as possible in the rise of businesses like We Buy Any House. These companies exist solely because people don’t want to go through the hassle of selling on the regular market. They just want the process to be as easy as possible.

What’s the key message to convey to your customers? It’s that your business is the easiest and simplest way for your clients to get hold of the service that they want.

Trigger 4: A common enemy

Steve Jobs wasn’t the best manager or the best engineer. But what he could do better than anybody else in the world was sell. He understood that they way to sell to people was to create an alliance with them to solve a problem.

Creating a common enemy helps to unite businesses and consumers in a fundamental way. It makes it seem as if they are on the same team and have to work together to face down a common foe.

In the 1980s, Apple saw that Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard were running away with the desktop market. Jobs immediately saw an opportunity to cast Apple and its consumers as the underdog, and the PC firms as the corporate giants.

It didn’t matter that Apple itself was a big company. All that mattered was that Apple was uniting its customers under one banner against the PC.

The advice for small businesses is to find a common enemy. Remember, you don’t have to unite with people against a particular company. Having “colds and flu” as an enemy or “boring education” can be just as effective.

Improve Your Content with these 5 Visual Tools

Want to improve your social media images? Looking for easy-to-use visual tools for creating high-quality visual content?

Visual content is an absolute must for generating engagement on social media, whether it’s in the form of videos, graphics, or emojis.

In this article, you’ll discover five tools for creating professional-looking visuals for social media.

Create GIFs

GIFs are powerful tools for showcasing your brand, products, and company culture on social media. MakeaGIF lets you create GIFs from your own images, YouTube videos, webcam, and other video files.

To build a GIF from images, select the images you want to use such as pictures of your latest company event, office activities, or something else.

Upload your images to MakeaGIF.

Then arrange the images in the order in which you want them to appear.

Arrange your images in the order you want in MakeaGIF.

Now, just name your GIF, pick the speed and category, and click Create a GIF.

Add a name and choose speed and category options in MakeaGIF.

Keep in mind your GIFs don’t have to be work-related. The best ones use humor, so get creative and brainstorm a GIF for TGIF, for example. Creating your own GIFs lets you add a more personal and unique face to your brand.

Add Emojis to Graphics

Emojis have become ubiquitous in online conversations as a way to add personality to content. The team behind EmojiOneis always on top of the newest emoji updates so you never have to wait long to use the hippest visuals available. The app makes it easy to use emojis on social media and lets you incorporate them in custom graphics.

EmojiOne is available as a desktop browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Once you install the extension, click the unicorn icon on the toolbar to access your emoji library.

You can also download the art files for the complete emoji library to use them in your other communications such as posters, infographics, or SlideShare decks.

EmojiOne is completely free to use. If you’re using their art files commercially, they ask that you give them attribution in the form of a link.

Produce Animated Videos

Moovly lets you create animated videos and presentations and then export and share them on social media.

After you register, click Create New Moov.

Next, enter a title, description, and category for your video. Then click Create.

Now decide what video style you want to create, such as an animated video, presentation, or display ad. You can either use one of Moovly’s templates or create a moov from scratch.

Now you’re in the Moovly editor window where the magic happens! From here, you can add objects from the Moovly Library and access the text, color, animation, sound, and voice tools. The tool also lets you upload your own content in the form of pictures, graphics, and sounds.

Add visual and audio elements in the Moovly editor window.

When you’re finished creating your video, decide what platform or device to optimize the video for such as YouTube 480p, iPhone 5, iPad, Presentation, or custom dimensions. Then save your video and return to your dashboard.

Click the Moovly Animation Settings menu to view video platform optimization options.

Downloading your video is easy. First, choose the file format and video quality you want. (It costs up to $8 to export in HD.)

Select a download format for your Moovly video.

Then decide if you want the Moovly watermark on your video; it’s $3 to remove it.

Finally, choose whether you want to remove the “Made with Moovly” outro. (This will set you back another $2.) You can export your video and then upload and share it.

You can remove the Moovly outro from your video for a fee.

You won’t find many tools that let you create professional-grade animated videos and presentations for under $15. Moovly offers an easy-to-use interface and with a bit of tinkering, you’ll soon be creating high-quality videos like this for your social media channels.

Build Infographics

Infographics are a must for your social media marketing. With Piktochart, you don’t have to be a graphic designer to create attractive infographics.

A limited version of the tool is available for free and offers 10 infographic templates to choose from. For a monthly fee, you get access to hundreds of templates and icons, as well as integration with SlideShare, PDF, and more.

After you choose a template or start your own design, begin adding your content. Everything is customizable so you can tweak and edit the graphics, background, text, and more. You can also upload your own files.

Tweak your infographic design in the Piktochart editing window.

The Tools section lets you add charts, maps, and videos to your infographic.

You can add a chart or map to your design in the Piktochart Tools section.

When you’re happy with your design, download your infographic. Your choices are limited with the free version, but if you’re just starting out, you’ll be able to share an impressive-looking infographic with your social media followers.

Choose from these options to download your Piktochart image.

Turn Visuals Into Movies

Magisto eliminates the time and hassle of video editing and will create beautiful videos for you automatically from your photos and videos. It’s available on a variety of platforms, including desktop, Android, and iOS.

To get started, click Create Movie and choose the videos and images you want to include. The free version limits you to 10 videos or photos and a maximum length of 15 minutes.

Add photos and videos to create a movie in Magisto.

Next, choose from Magisto’s collection of themes and editing styles to apply to your movie. Your choice will determine the effects within your movie and the editing speed and filters. There’s also an option to let Magisto choose a style for you.

Choose an editing style for your Magisto video.

Next comes the music. Make a selection from Magisto’s excellent music library or you can upload your own song. The song and video will sync perfectly with the cuts and effects following the speed of the song.

Select a soundtrack from the Magisto music library.

Finally, give your movie a title and the app will do the rest.

Magisto does a great job of creating professional-looking video based on your selections, but if you want further editing options, you’ll need to upgrade to the Business plan for $9.99 a month.

Small Business Challenges for the Foreseeable Future

This article offers strategies for the future survival and growth of small businesses. It explores the evolving nature of small businesses and documents how many are creating successes that are richly creative and widely beneficial. This article summarizes major challenges for the foreseeable future impacting small businesses. While the trends that follow are not exhaustive, they are major drivers of business change. Small businesses should be aware of these broad trends, should think about how they may positively or negatively affect the future of their business, and should adjust their planning for the future accordingly.

Personalization

This important trend bodes well for small independents that can leverage their inherent advantages of flexibility and customer intimacy to create a more personalized experience for their customers. While technology permits sophisticated database marketing and promotions, small independents are still the best poised to get to know their customers individually as they are often a personal part of their lives. Knowledge of customers’ birthdays, favorite colors, time of day they like to shop, and other information is not just pleasantry anymore. It can be an essential driver of sales. While big companies employ slogans like “reach out and touch someone,” it is more likely the small business can actually shake their hand.

Value Proposition

American consumers are becoming more interested in getting more value for their money. Price is not the only factor in a value determination. Speed, convenience, service and knowledge all play an increasingly important role. Both large and small businesses continue to redefine their value propositions with better prices, selection, service, and products. A value proposition refers to the unique characteristics that distinguish your business from competition. It defines the intrinsic worth of your business’s offering to customers. A strong value proposition communicates a clear message to your marketplace about why potential customers should buy from you. It defines what your customers will get for their money.

Increased Competition

Competition continues to increase in number and intensity. We are over-stored with an explosion of products displayed in an ever-increasing amount of square feet per capita in the U.S. Big businesses continue to get bigger, employing market share growth strategies and communicating value propositions that are designed to either dominate a product category or customer segment. Increased size leads to increased efficiencies that in turn fuel additional growth. Small companies are left to scramble for the remaining market share. Further, the market has become global with the Internet blurring the lines of traditional market areas. Because of the Internet and the increasing clout of large national chains, small businesses must not compete on price. The real strengths of successful small businesses revolve around specialization, differentiation and finding profitable, defendable, and sustainable niches. Success for many derive from the decision to move beyond just the selling of product to creating customer experience, moving from a transaction orientation to establishing on-going relationships. This decision shifts focus from what moves product to what moves people.

Changing Demographics

Three powerful demographic trends will cause profound change

The Aging of America – It is predicted that the number of Americans ages 55 and older will almost double between now and 2030. This aging of America will present many opportunities for small independents that may choose to target this growing segment.

The growth of the Hispanic population – The U.S. Hispanic population became the largest minority in the United States in 2002 and will continue in this position through 2050. This growing market continues to be underserved by many small businesses.

Generation Y – Born between 1981 and 1995, this new generation numbered 57 million. It is the largest consumer group in the history of the U.S. and represents a dominant future market. Many of the most popular traditional brands are having a tough time appealing to this group who seem immune to traditional marketing messages.

Community Activism

There is a growing national trend of community resistance to unrestrained small business development in order to protect local community personality, feel, and values. This trend speaks to the perceived benefits of small independents. Nevertheless, the consumer will find his or her way to where they want to shop – big box, specialty store, or national chain. Trying to stop new development often becomes a major distraction when they should be spending time thinking about their own business and improving their downtown or neighborhood shopping areas.

Health Care Costs

The healthcare insurance crisis affects the small business especially hard due to the runaway costs of providing benefits to employees. It creates a real competitive disadvantage. The availability of health insurance is often a determining factor in choice of employment. Until this problem is fixed, small businesses need to explore every available alternative, from exploring the availability of state or trade association health plans to implementing new solutions like the recently available high deductible health savings accounts. If small retailers want to attract and retain the kind of employees that will give them competitive advantages, health care benefits must be considered.

Changing Consumer Attitudes and Behavior

The traditional customer definitions and delineations have been blurred by the sheer volume of marketing activity across the entire socioeconomic spectrum. People are more fluid in their shopping behavior. They move in and out and around and through value businesses, middle market stores and luxury goods purveyors on a weekly basis. Everybody is everybody’s customer now. It is up to the business to know their customers well enough to make the connection and offer that will entice them to buy. Time has become number one on the list of what Americans cherish most. The desire for convenience will continue to drive changes in store concepts, formats, retail mixes and locations. People are time-starved and small independents need to factor the need for speed and convenience in their individual value propositions. Given the explosion of choice, consumers are less loyal, less tolerant, and more willing to explore and experiment in search of satisfaction. Consumers are growing more cynical and skeptical. Small businesses need to develop trust through clear and consistent demonstrations of their differentiated value propositions. They need to make the shopping experience easy for the customer by eliminating confusing or inefficient elements that frustrate customers and complicate their choices.

Urban Sprawl and Real Estate Development

A recent trend in new development is to create community spaces of mixed-use that exhibit a strong sense of place. Many of these developments called “the new urbanism,” incorporate features more in keeping with feelings of towns and neighborhoods vs. traditional large retail centers. They are designed to promote social interaction and leisure time activities. These mixed-use, smaller scale, more friendly environments that hearken back to the tradition of Main Street, providing a social hub where people, live, shop, work, and play. Small business fits this model more logically and more naturally than many larger format competitors.

How a Proactive Social Media Strategy Helps Business

Consumers are now spending more time on social media networks than any other form of the web. It is amazing how fast social media sites and new ideas are spreading on line. What is your business doing to take advantage of a proactive social media strategy?

Facebook has a monthly audience of nearly a billion visitors. That’s a B as in billion. Other top sites, like Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn, attract hundreds of millions. By now, nobody doubts the power of social platforms, although few marketers have been able to exploit them as fully as they desire.

As Harvard’s Mikołaj Piskorski makes clear in his new book, A Social Strategy, businesses have a long way to go before they truly begin to unlock the potential of the social web. Most marketers, in fact, use social media much as they would ordinary media—to broadcast messages. We are still not working as hard as we can on engagement and building relationships.

And the real potential lies in building relationships and utilizing social platforms to create solutions for customers’ social problems. While consumers are understandably skittish about corporations interjecting themselves their personal conversations, they appreciate the opportunity to meet and build relationships with others. And that, it turns out, this is an enormous opportunity.

That’s why it’s important to make the distinction between a digital strategy that involves social platforms and a true social strategy. For a social strategy to succeed, simply joining the conversation is not enough. You must lead it.

Here are some good ways you can capitalize on social media and improve your customer engagement and relationship building. Put these seven social elements to use in your business’s social media strategy:

Market Research

Nothing new here, as this was always important to a business. What is new is the access to millions of consumer communications, which represents a gold mine of data, available at the low cost of your ability to mine it.

Public Relations

Social networks represent a direct channel into consumers. You need to craft new, compelling messages for them, without selling.

Brand Marketing

Increase the value of your brand through this communications channel. Reinforce old relationships, build new ones, and stretch the real lifetime of both with the value utilities you can provide.

Customer Support

Many ways to add value to the products and services you provide, while increasing your image.

New Product / Service / Business Model Development

Leverage the public pool of ‘collective brain’ to define and test new market opportunities.

Consumer Education

Create valuable discussion boards and other means to respond to ‘asks the expert’ type of information. Ask your customers for information / education they would like to see.

Promotions

Reach more customers with added communications channels. Integrate all of your channels to improve on the information and messages you provide.

Social media gives us a great opportunity to listen in on what people are saying (with lots of emphasis on listening). It has been long known that word of mouth is incredibly powerful, and I’d say it is the best marketing technique in one’s arsenal.

Social listening tools are still somewhat primitive, but they are improving quickly and are already being deployed to help monitor conventional marketing efforts in real time.

Rishad Tobaccowala, on his blog, gives a nice overview of social listening. Among his insights is that you shouldn’t keep your efforts sequestered in an isolated social unit any more than you would wall off other types of research. Rather, you need to make sure to integrate social listening into your overall marketing and customer service efforts.

He also makes the apt observation that heavy influencers are not necessarily heavy users (in fact, they don’t need to consume your product at all). So social media may be the only real shot you have to interact with some of those who can affect how your brand is perceived.

Another nice thing about social listening is how easy it is to integrate it into the rest of your marketing intelligence. It can help shape and augment focus groups, monitor mass media campaigns and combine with other real time resources such as Google Insights.

The bottom line

Social media is a ‘pull’ and not a ‘push’ medium. It is two way conversations … where response time is very important.

By creating a social media mindset and culture within your business, you will be amazed at how your customer base and relationships can grow.

Being social with a great positive engagement isn’t a new way of marketing; it’s a way of doing business. Follow these simple tips and you will be leading the way.

How many of these strategies have you tried in your business? Please share a story or two about some of your social media campaigns.

How to Create Curiosity to Improve Marketing

Here’s a rather interesting promotion from California Pizza Kitchen to improve marketing. At the end of my dinner, I was given the bill and a CPK “Don’t Open It” Thank You Card. That certainly did create curiosity, yes?

It’s a coupon with an interesting twist: you bring this card with you the next time you come to CPK. You’ve already won something, from a free appetizer up to $50 dollars (or more). But you won’t know what you’ve won until your next visit.

The instructions are pretty clear: whatever you do, do not open the card or your prize is null and void! A manager has to open the card for you when you return.

You are guaranteed to get something worthwhile—and this is a critical part of arousing curiosity. Coupons are too explicit: “Here is your 20% off.” Scratch-offs and lottery tickets are most likely to reveal that you’ve won nothing. With the CPK coupon, the fine print teases you with a list of the possible prizes.

Now I’m curious: which prize have I won? This is a mystery that needs solving with another visit.

Social Media Commerce Using Social Games

Why Social Games Are Marketing’s Next Frontier. I read an interesting book recently, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World written by Jane McGonagall. Here are a few of the useful takeaways on using social games.

Growth in gaming

“[Al]though a typical gamer plays for just an hour or two a day, there are now more than five million ‘extreme’ gamers in the U.S. who play an average of 45 hours a week. To put this in perspective, the number of hours that gamers world-wide have spent playing “World of Warcraft” alone adds up to 5.93 million years.”

Impacts of gaming

“In a good game, we feel blissfully productive. We have clear goals and a sense of heroic purpose. More important, we’re constantly able to see and feel the impact of our efforts on the virtual world around us. . . . One recent study found, for example, that players of ‘Guitar Hero’ are more likely to pick up a real guitar and learn how to play it.”

Learning persistence

“Research shows that gamers spend on average 80% of their time failing in game worlds, but instead of giving up, they stick with the difficult challenge and use the feedback of the game to get better.”

Building relationships

“Studies show that we like and trust someone better after we play a game with them—even if they beat us. And we’re more likely to help someone in real life after we’ve helped them in an online game. It’s no wonder that 40% of all user time on Facebook is spent playing social games.”

These takeaways support our position on the importance of games and gaming as the next important customer engagement technique. Consider these points in evaluating why games are so valuable:

Games can be combined … with rewards which permits fueling loyalty

Advertising, like other marketing elements … is moving from eyeballs to engagement

Social games … fit all platforms

Games have shown ability … to draw large communities

Brands can become … a component of game experience

Games aren’t limited … to just the virtual world

Lots of reasons to add games to your social media commerce and marketing campaigns, don’t you think?

Please share a social media commerce gaming experience with us.

Read more:

8 Popular Social Media Initiatives for Customer Engagement

Social Commerce Business … What Ben and Jerry’s Knows That You Should Know

12 Ways to Build Social Commerce Business through Great Customer Service

Actions That Are Limiting Your Business Innovation

On December 9th, 1968, a research project funded by the US Department of Defense launched a revolution. The focus was not a Cold War adversary or even a resource rich banana republic, but rather to “augment human intellect” and the man driving it was not a general, but a mild mannered engineer named Douglas Engelbart. The key was business innovation.

His presentation that day would be so consequential that it is now called The Mother of All Demos. Two of those in attendance, Bob Taylor and Alan Kay would go on to develop Engelbart’s ideas into the Alto, the first truly personal computer. Later, Steve Jobs would take many elements of the Alto to create the Macintosh.

So who deserves credit? Engelbart for coming up with the idea? Taylor and Kay for engineering solutions around it? Jobs for creating a marketable product that made an impact on the world? Strong arguments can be made for each, as well as for many others not mentioned here. The truth is that there are many paths to innovation. Here are some of them.

Innovation Is Never A Single Event

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but it wasn’t until 15 years later, in 1943, that the miracle drug came into widespread use. Alan Turing came up with the idea of auniversal computer in 1936, but it wasn’t until 1946 that one was actually built and not until the 1990’s that computers began to impact productivity statistics.

We tend to think of innovation as arising from a single brilliant flash of insight, but the truth is that it is a drawn out process involving the discovery of an insight, the engineering a solution and then the transformation of an industry or field. That’s almost never achieved by one person or even within one organization.

Innovation Is Combination

The reason that Fleming was unable to bring Penicillin to market was that, as a biologist, he lacked many of the requisite skills. It wasn’t until a decade later that two chemists, Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain, picked up the problem and were able to synthesize penicillin. Even then, it took people with additional expertise in fermentation and manufacturing to turn it into the miracle cure we know today.

This isn’t the exception, but the norm. Darwin’s theory of natural selection borrowed ideas from Thomas Malthus, an economist and Charles Lyell, a geologist. Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA was not achieved by simply plowing away at the lab, but by incorporating discoveries in biology, chemistry and x-ray diffraction to inform their model building.

Great innovation almost never occurs within one field of expertise, but is almost invariably the product of synthesis across domains.

First, Ask The Right Questions

Too often, we treat innovation as a monolith, as if every problem was the same, but that’s clearly not the case. In laboratories and factory floors, universities and coffee shops, or even over a beer after work, people are sussing out better ways to do things. There is no monopoly on creative thought.

But that leads us to a problem: How should we go about innovation? Should we hand it over to the guys with white lab coats? An external partner? A specialist in the field? Crowdsource it? What we need is a clear framework for making decisions.

As I wrote in Harvard Business Review, the best way to start is by asking the right questions: (1) How well is the problem defined? and (2) How well is the domain defined? Once you’ve asked those framing questions, you can start defining a sensible way to approach the problem using the innovation matrix.

Clearly, no one method can suffice. Look at any great innovator, whether it is Apple, Tesla or Google, and you’ll find a portfolio of strategies. So the first step toward solving a difficult problem is asking the questions you need to define your approach. To paraphrase Voltaire, if you need to solve a problem, first define your terms.

There Is No Optimal Size For Innovation

When most people think about innovation, they think about startups. And certainly, new firms like Uber, Airbnb and Space X can transform markets. But others such as IBM, Procter and Gamble and 3M have managed to stay on top for decades, even as competitors rise up to challenge them and then, when markets shift, disappear just as quickly into oblivion.

While it’s true that small, agile firms can move fast, larger enterprises have the luxury of going slow. They have loyal customers and an abundance of resources. They can see past the next hot trend and invest for the long term. There’s a big difference between hitting on the next big thing and developing it consistently, generation after generation.

Leverage Open Innovation To Expand Your Capabilities

When Microsoft launched Kinect for the Xbox in 2010, it quickly became the hottest consumer device ever, selling 8 million units in just the first two months. Almost immediately, hackers began altering its capabilities to do things that Microsoft never intended. Yet instead of asking them to stop, it embraced the hackers, quickly releasing a software development kit to help them along.

Like Microsoft, many firms today are embracing open innovation to expand capabilities. Cisco outfoxed Lucent not by developing technology itself, but by smartly acquiring startups. Procter & Gamble has found great success with its Connect and Develop program and platforms like Innocentive allow firms to expose thorny problems to a more diverse skill set.

As was the case with Alexander Fleming and penicillin, most firms will find that solving their most important problems will require skills and expertise they don’t have. That means that, at some point, they will need to utilize partners and platforms to go beyond their own internal capabilities of technology and talent.

Social Listening