DCO Weekend Reader - 1/2/09
The web is a vast repository of opinions, commentary and occasionally, wisdom. Here’s a selection of the best articles I read over the past week.
If you would like to recommend an article, blog or book, please leave a comment with your suggestion. Weekend Reader is a regular feature here at DCO, and you can read past Weekend Readers here.
Many times I embed rich media into the Weekend Readers that may not show up in E-mails or RSS readers. For that reason, I generally recommend you click through to my blog to read Weekend Reader posts.
Welcome back and Happy New Year everyone. Here’s wishing all of you a most excellent 2009!
The holidays are, among other things, a time when many of us reflect on what’s important to us and try to connect more deeply to neglected priorities. Taking a full two week vacation this holiday for what I believe to be the first time ever, I had plenty of time to do both.
The symbolism of Christmas and New Year’s offer us the opportunity to give thanks for the blessings of our past, and prepare for new beginnings. While our blessings may change from year to year, and new beginnings can be intimidating, this time of year helps us all put into perspective what is truly important for each of us, and how fortunate we all are. Life can be messy, confusing and complicated to be sure. My guess each of us had our fair share of disappointments, even tragedy, in 2008. But as I’m fond of saying: “you find what you look for,” and there are so many happy, fulfilling, excellent aspects of our lives to focus on. In the end, it may come down to simple balance, and an accepting wisdom that slowly comes with age.
Personally, I’m excited about the new year and in so many ways it does represent a new beginning for me; a fresh canvas upon which to create. It could be the heady glow from two weeks vacation, a new year, and way too much pork and sauerkraut, but with some recent decisions and a fair amount of self-examination under my belt, I feel more direction and purpose than I have felt in a while. I look forward to sharing it with you throughout 2009.
Getting back on track - we do have some must-reads this week. The “advice to young entrepreneurs” under Entrepreneurship is an extremely well-written and content-rich article. “Dealing with no” under thought provokers will take you a minute or less to read, but may inspire you to totally change your company’s sales process. Lastly, please take the time to click the very last link of this post, the “bonus” link. If the link isn’t showing up, then click through to this post on my blog and you will be able to watch it. You will need your speakers turned on for this one and as a word of warning, I wouldn’t be drinking any liquids as you watch.
I’m looking forward to continuing our conversations in 2009.
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DCO Weekend Reader - 12/12/08
The web is a vast repository of opinions, commentary and occasionally, wisdom. Here’s a selection of the best articles I read over the past week.
If you would like to recommend an article, blog or book, please leave a comment with your suggestion. Weekend Reader is a regular feature here at DCO, and you can read past Weekend Readers here.
Many times I embed rich media into the Weekend Readers that may not show up in E-mails or RSS readers. For that reason, I generally recommend you click through to my blog to read Weekend Reader posts.
Only 12 shopping days left!
As the year winds down and the holidays gear up, time gets more and more precious. Between the year-end crunch at work, shopping for friends and family and holiday parties there seems to be little time for ourselves and those important to us. So this week, I’m keeping the Weekend Reader fairly light and sticking to basic, quick reads. Don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of good ideas in this week’s Reader. However, I’d rather you spend the majority of your spare time this weekend curled up on the coach with your significant other sipping a glass of wine (or hot cocoa) than reading leadership tips.
My personal must-read for this week is the “eight things you should add to your weekly task list”, under personal excellence. I do intend to actually add them to my electronic task list (my lifesaver) as recurring tasks, so I can give them some thought every week. I would also encourage everyone to read the “don’t waste a crisis” article under thought-provokers.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for stopping by.
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Turning Buzzwords into Reality
As I reported on previously, last week I had the opportunity to moderate a panel entitled “Using Web 2.0 to Drive Top-Line Growth.” The panel did a great job, with several important themes coming out of the panel discussion and the networking afterwards.
We distribute feedback forms at every meeting and while the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, there were a couple obvious detractors. One comment in particular, caught my eye:
This Web 2.0 stuff is just too touchy-feely for me. It reminds me a lot of all the hype around the Internet pre-2000 and we all know what happened there…
Great comment, and one that was the genesis of this post. In truth, I had been thinking something along these lines for a while now. Not that Web 2.0 is a boom headed for a bust, but rather what is the fuss really all about? Skipping ahead to the answer (or at least my answer), it’s a forest for the trees paradox: too many people focus on the trees not the forest. It’s not about the tools, it’s about what they can do. And I contend that if you can get past the “touch-feely” nature of the tools, all Web 2.0 is doing is bringing back the good ‘ole days of doing business.
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Web 2.0 meets Web 1.0
I moderated a fantastic panel last night for the local SIM Chapter I’m a member of. As a Board member in charge of Programming, I’m always very nervous come meeting night. After four years of scheduling presenters, the one lesson I’ve learned is no amount of planning is sufficient to even guess how the program will be received. Having a panel presentation also adds to the degree of difficulty. Given some past bad experiences with moderators, I decided to moderate the panel myself.
I’m happy to say the panel was a tremendous success. The topic was “Using Web 2.0 to Drive Top-line Growth.” I leveraged my personal network for some great recommendations of panelists and ended up with Laura Bennett, President and Co-Founder of Embrace Pet Insurance; Kristy van Auken, SVP of Marketing and Communications for Akron Canton Airport; and David Toth, President and Co-Founder of Worksmart eMarketing, a consulting firm helping their clients understand and leverage social media and Web 2.0 mindsets.
For anyone looking for tips on putting together a successful panel, one of the keys to success last night was balance. Sure, all our presenters were knowledgeable about the subject matter. But what I heard after the event from our members was that there was great balance between the presenters. From strategy to metrics to specific campaigns, there was a minimum of overlap between the speakers. Everyone brought a different perspective which added greatly to the panel.
Leveraging Web 2.0 to drive growth is a hot topic these days. What was interesting about last night was the audience questions as an indicator of where certain industries are and what is holding them up from embracing these new channels to market. With our panel representing Web 2.0, a large portion of the audience was still Web 1.0 focused. Our group has a diverse mix of companies, but generally they reflect our regional economy fairly well: B2B manufacturing and financial primarily, with some education and service companies. While education and services have tended to embrace these new tools, manufacturing and finance still have lots of questions.
The discussions, and questions, were wide-ranging. A few main points rose to the top that I thought you might be interested in.
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The point of that last post
Most of my posts get written at night and then are scheduled to go live the following morning. So it went with my last post on using social networks to build relationships in response to the economic downturn. I had just finished the post and was getting ready to call it a night. I’m not a Blackberry addict, but I do usually check my messages one last time before going to bed both as preparation for the following day and just in case there is something I need to reply to.
One of the messages I had was a fairly ordinary E-mail invite to a webinar. What caught my eye was that while it was E-mailed directly to me, the greeting was “Dear Craig”. I’m going to avoid naming the company, but even more ironic was the subject of the webinar: “How to create a winning collaboration strategy.” Yet even more ironic was this short comment stating the core value-add of the webinar:
Learn how to get dramatic business results from collaboration with a people-centered strategy.
Umm, your “people-centered strategy” apparently doesn’t know that my name is Dave, not Craig.
It gets better.
Checking my E-Mail in the morning, I saw a follow-up message from the same sender. Taking a quick glance, I saw it started off with “I am re-sending the email below because many people alerted me…” Great - they corrected the problem. Arriving at work I read the rest of the E-Mail which said the problem was that many people reported that the E-mail was corrupted and unreadable, not that their names were wrong. This update E-mail was still addressed to Craig.
So what’s my point?
My point is not to write a negative post; it’ not really even to have a quick chuckle at the irony of the situation. And it’s not a cautionary tale about making sure to double-, even triple-check mailers for accuracy before they go out.
My point is that today’s social tools can cut both ways. Sure, you can get “dramatic business results from collaboration…” You can also shoot yourself in the foot pretty easily too. I still think a lot of companies are straddling the fence when it comes to new marketing strategies, and mixing “target marketing” tactics with “social networking” themes. Nothing wrong with that, we all move forward in our own way and at our own pace.
What I don’t get the sense companies are doing though is realizing the game has changed and the stakes, in some sense, are higher. At least expectations are higher. I’m not knocking this company for making a mistake - we’ve all made mistakes throughout our career. But when their E-mail goes on to say:
If you’re not familiar with Company X, we deliver enterprise social networking combined with collaboration. Businesses use Company X to reduce by 1/3 the time their staff spends every day searching for information and people, and to speed up cycle times in virtually all functions across the organization.
and you got my name wrong on the E-Mail, you’ve got instant credibility issues.
So don’t read this post and think I’m saying you can never make a mistake. The point I’m trying to make is that if you’re trying to play in the social networking / collaboration space, then just as the opportunity is higher, I think the expectations for authentic messages and relationships is also higher. One “whoops” can detract from a whole lot of good work.
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Dots: Connected - Thanks Chris
I’ve always felt I’m a good “connect the dots” kind of person, whether those dots are people, concepts, initiatives, strategies, etc. In a sense a big part of my job now is helping entrepreneurs connect dots: their business concept to markets, their markets to market pain, market pain to opportunity and opportunity to investment.
I’ve written before about some Social Networking basics. In this post on leveraging social networks, I talk a bit at the end about the power of social networks, that “viral” nature that you hear so much about and how a well run campaign has the power to add exponential, potentially explosive results to your company.
File that away as Dot A.
Obviously, it doesn’t a blog post to know that we are in the midst of a huge economic crisis. We can debate the roots of the crisis ad nauseum, but the results are that companies are going out of business, people are getting laid off, and sales are down. Pretty much across the board.
File that away as Dot B.
Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect Dot A (potentially explosive lead-generating technology) to Dot B (we really need some new business). Maybe you’ve tried some new media campaigns in you company, maybe you’re just considering it. But I think (I would like to think, at least) that most smart companies are thinking through how to take advantage of these new channels.
There are different levels of genius when it comes to connecting dots, and the Chris I refer to in the title is Chris Brogan, blogger and consultant specializing in helping companies use social networks to build relationships and add value. Chris’ takes the connection between our two dots above to a whole ‘nother level in his post Target Marketing. It is a quick read and if you have any involvement in your company’s value chain involved in retaining customers I highly suggest it to you.
Chris does a fantastic job of not only painting a bleak picture for us of why our current attraction and retention methods aren’t working, but more importantly I think helping us see through the fog of hype and point out a concrete way social networking and new media strategies can help us through these difficult times. My paraphrase of Chris’ argument would go something like this:
- The Internet (and following it’s lead most print and TV news outlets) have turned us into “snackers”. We don’t read anymore, we skim.
- Even if we take the time to read some things, we don’t care. The overload of spam, mailers, E-Mail newsletters, website banners, etc. etc. has numbed us to traditional “target marketing”.
- Chris solution? Not as you might imagine. Sure he thinks the answer lies in Social Networking, but the solution to your dilemma is to Build. Relationships. Now.
The message is to cut back on the traditional approach (target marketing). It isn’t working. Save the money and redeploy some of it on well crafted social networking campaigns designed to build relationships.
Normally, I’m naturally suspicious of people touting solutions that just happen to match their soapbox. This is one case where I think the message is spot on. Something to think about.
BTW - if you have the time to read the comments on Chris’ post, there are some good ones in there. In particular, I liked a couple comments comparing social networking’s focus on building authentic relationships with good customer service of “days gone past”. I’ve been remarking to many business associates of late that I think the dearth of quality customer service is a huge market opportunity for companies that can take advantage of it.
There’s another great comment about 2/3 of the way down that reminds us of a great tool we all used to use every day to build relationships. You almost certainly have one on your desk. It’s probably square, made out of plastic, and has twelve keys on it with letters and numbers. It’s your phone and nothing beats an old-fashioned, voice to voice phone call for reinvigorating a relationship.
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Do you annoy your customers?
I love that sign you see every once in a while in a diner or dry-cleaners:
“If you loved our service tell your friends, if not tell us.”
That’s a great sentiment and was probably hung on the wall to send the message that management is truly interested in quality service and being responsive to customer complaints.
The problem is, we all tend to do the opposite. If the service/food/employees were great we tell the cashier on the way out. If any aspect of the experience was lousy, we tell all our friends to stay away.
Then comes this Harvard Business Publishing Management tip of the day: Does Your Product Annoy Your Customers? The article talks about how computer vendor’s increasing tendency to install unwanted software on their products (bloatware) has lead to a new market for Best Buy to offer a $30 service to remove it all.
The article, as written, is not so much a cautionary tale about services that annoy, even enrage your customers. It ends up on a much more interesting note, which is the opportunities created by those annoyances. Even more interesting, the author implies that the market simply can’t resist piling on to money-making ideas, so there will always be a steady stream of annoyances to take advantage of.
Relating this to our own personal branding and pursuit of excellence, I see two themes here:
- Always be vigilant that you are not annoying your customers. This means looking through their eyes, not your own. It doesn’t matter if you see it as a value-add or an additional revenue stream, it matters whether it adds value to them.
- Opportunities always abound to fill the gap between what the market is asking for and what they are being provided. Even simpler is providing a less frustrating experience. Since this means focusing on delivering only what the customer is asking for, you may have the opportunity to deliver better perceived value at a lower cost. Voila - excellence!
This all reminds me of a simple equation I had written on the whiteboard in my office for the longest time:
Satisfaction = Perception - Expectations
