Amazon Wish Lists - what took me so long?

Have you ever been reading an interesting article and it turns out the author has written a book which sounds equally interesting, but you just don't have time to read their book right away? What happens?

For some of us we open a document, or make a note and try not to lose the note and generally never get around to reading the book because we can't remember it when we get around to purchasing our next book.

Well not anymore. Now what happens is that I finish the article on my Kindle (see previous post regarding downloading articles to a Kindle), connect to the Amazon Store from my Kindle, search for the book, scann the user reviews and depending on how it looks put it on my Wish List.

It only takes a couple of minutes. This way I never forget the interesting book and new author.

While this may not be news for some of you, for others this may be a complete revelation. I never took advantage of the Wish List option on Amazon because I thought it wasn't worthwhile. It is, you should take advantage of this opportunity to always have a great list of worthwhile reading.

Now if there way only a way to be easily link these author's blogs and websites to this blog from my Kindle...

When CEOs speak: How execs’ quotes doom your pitches

What makes some press releases more effective than others? Mostly it is in the focus of the message. Here is an excellent article regarding something that all of us who are responsible for any type of outreach need to always keep in mind when crafting our messages.

It is so easy to begin any type of advertising or outreach with how great your product or company is. It is much harder to begin with statements about why your customers and prospects would want to use your product or company but they are much more effective. Take a good look at the direct mail, e-mail and the copy of advertisements you see and receive. Or better yet, reread your own press releases and advertisements. How many of them start out directed how great you are, and how many of them begin with why your prospects would / should be interested in you and your product? You will begin to see the difference.

Ever since somehow getting onto the Ragan PR Daily e-mail list I have been reading their articles and have been consistently impressed. If you are interested in PR this is a must read site, don't miss the "must read" section of articles.

Great article on future of Social Networking

Here is a very interesting article on the future of Social Networking. Lots to think about in this article.

Lessons Learned Q4 - 2009

Over the years I institutionalized Lessons Learned meetings with the various teams I have been leading, most recently Marketing and Product Management. I firmly believe in the value of making certain we understand the reasons for what happened for good and bad. These meetings are invariably valuable and have no doubt been one of the many reasons these teams consistently improved. It was great to hear people say in the middle of projects "well, that is going on my Lessons Learned list". While we certainly made mistakes and wrong decisions, we rarely made the same mistake twice.

Likewise, by getting into the habit of reviewing and updating my resume every quarter (thank you Manager-Tools, see the post on My Favorite Podcasts) that process is close to a personal Lessons Learned session. So if formal Lessons Learned meetings are worthwhile for teams, wouldn't they also be worthwhile for individuals? This post is a personal Lessons Learned review. This was an interesting quarter and there is a lot which should never be forgotten.

However, prior to starting that topic, the quarterly resume update comment should probably be expanded. The team at Manager-Tools recommended a quarterly resume update on one of their podcasts a while ago. Like much of their advice I followed it and as usual was happy I did. It is important to have an updated resume because you never know when you will need it. Forcing yourself to update your resume with specific quantifiable information, because resumes need to highlight results and results are quantifiable, you get into the habit focusing and measuring your results all the time. Certainly we should all be doing this but a quarterly update has helped me focus on making certain that what I am working on is measurable not just to the company, but to me and my career.

Back to Lessons Learned. The normal process for our team meetings is that everyone provides at least 3 - 5 items which worked well and 3 - 5 items we don't want to repeat. We put everything together count up the items which were mentioned multiple times, group everything together, send it out to everyone, review it at the next meeting and again when a similar project is started as part of the kick off meeting.

This list will be slightly different, this is a simple list of items I don't want to forget:

• I will always get promises in writing
• We all know this, but really, are all the promises which you are counting on in writing?
• My career takes active management - what did I do today to actively manage my career?
• Always know my value statement
• This is not a job description this is how I provide value to my employer. This should be in writing. Review as part of my quarterly resume review.
• It was very valuable to create a personal SWOT analysis - I will review this and update regularly along with my resume, quarterly.
• Always know what I want to improve and make a point of working on that
• Continue to make this specific i.e. time management, team management, better hiring, more effective presentations, better listening, etc.
• There are always ways to improve effectiveness and efficiency. Work on these relentlessly.
• Always be expanding my personal network of friends - continue to expand my network of friends.
• Make a point to reach out to people and connect regularly. Having more friends and being interested in others makes for a much happier and fulfilling life. Congratulate friends on their success and reach out to comfort those in need. Be nice to people, say hello to everyone, smile. I can meet a lot of interesting people that way.
• Always be open to new opportunities
• I may have (had) the best job in the world but don't kid yourself, it is not secure, don't ever think that again.
• Have a written set of goals which cover all aspects of my life that I review regularly
• Momentum takes a long time to build but can be stopped very quickly.
• Don't make big moves without making certain I understand the underlying issues.
• It may look good on paper but reality can be different. Remember the saying "the map is not the terrain".
• Leadership - have a vision, make it big, communicate it clearly.
• Develop multiple lines of communication and relationships within any organization.
• That is the only way to really understand what is happening. Always listen more than I talk. Always triangulate.
• Don't wait until the end of the quarter to build a list of Lessons Learned. Create a document and update it as needed. Clean it up and post it quarterly. I have the feeling that I have already forgotten some important lessons.
• Compensation drives actions and activity.

I would love to hear what you learned this last quarter.

Is Social Media worth the effort for most businesses?

I was talking with a friend regarding the value of social media the other day. His question was basically - is social media worth the effort for most businesses? My answer is yes, absolutely social media is worth the effort and cost. Even at the most basic level businesses need to be aware of social media and even if not trying to activity engage their public, completely ignoring social media and the online world is is dangerous.

The minimum actions every business should take:

1. Setup automated Alerts in Google to keep an eye on what is being said about your company, your brand and you. Even if you are not being proactive about building your brand online you need to be aware of any mentions in the online world. You may not stop something negative from going viral but you need as much time as possible to quickly craft a response.
2. Keep an eye on Review sites. One of the most popular is Yelp. These are sites where customers (and others) comment and rate everything about your business. If someone leaves a poor review sometimes you have the ability to respond. Be careful and take a deep breath before responding, don’t make things worse with a poor response. Apologize, invite the person back and see if they just experienced an “off” day. Offer to make it up to them.
3. Look up your business on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Make certain that what is displayed about your business is accurate.

Better yet, proactive actions to take:

1. Work to get your customer’s e-mail addresses with offers of discounts and advance or special sales. But don’t just spam them relentlessly, be careful about how you use your mailing list.
2. Setup Twitter and Facebook fan pages and make certain all your customers know about these. Provide updates on new products, new services, new employees, industry news, sales, discounts, specials or even publicize positive reviews or mentions on other sites.

Extra credit

1. Use videos of customers in your store offering testimonials about your products and services, post these on You Tube and link them to your facebook page or website. Twitter about them. The Flip camera is inexpensive and it has an easy to use interface to help you upload videos to these sites.
2. If a customer tells you how satisfied they are ask them to write a positive review on Yelp or to Twitter about it and you can re-Tweet it to your followers

Basic measuring of results

One of the benefits of online publicity, public relations and advertising (and let’s be clear, using social media to publicize your business is a component of public relations and advertising) is the ability to easily track results. The goal of all this effort is to increase sales. Like any marketing effort, measuring results is critical to determine effectiveness. The result of successful use of social media is generally to drive traffic to your website. Converting website traffic to sales is another topic. This means, however, that you need to be tracking the number of visitors to your site. The easiest way to do that is through placing Google Analytics code on your website and keeping a regular eye on number of hits, length of stay and general navigation. If your social media efforts do not begin to increase traffic then you need to change what you are doing with the social media.

 

Summary
While the use of social media is hard to quantify for many businesses, social media provides a cost effective outlet to help most businesses stay in front of clients and potential clients and it is hard to ignore the low cost and high potential. Do whatever you can to quantify results and start with tracking your website traffic. Then move onto conversion of traffic to leads and sales. Ignore social media at your own risk.

The unrealised potential of ERP and CRM

Have you or your company implemented either an ERP or a CRM system? Are you getting all the expected value from that system?

If so you are in the minority. Is that surprising? This is a very interesting article on the issues companies are having with the implementation of both ERP and CRM systems.

Although people like me who are responsible for the design, sales and implementation of CRM systems work diligently to help our clients extract all the value possible from our systems, the implementation issues seem somewhat out of our control and are dependent on the client. These numbers certainly look accurate to me.

While these systems are not easy to implement, it is possible to use phased approaches to implementation and make certain to get value at each step and make certain that the users are able to understand and use the system to get more effective at their jobs. However, many times we see installations which incorporate so much technology and have such lofty goals that the entire implementation takes too long and the business changes during the implementation which requie specification changes, team changes and soon a loss of focus.

To resolve this problem. See and understand the big picture. Target your objectives, solve immediate problems and require ROI at every step.

Measuring Marketing Efforts

If you are interested in measuring results of marketing and PR efforts check out this fascinating article “A Powerful New Set of Public Relations Measurement Standards - This time they're based on business outcomes. By Katie Delahaye Paine

Why is this an interesting article? Because so many organizations don't or can't measure the ROI of marketing efforts!

Upon taking over the Marketing department at our company there were many surprises but perhaps the largest surprise was an astounding lack of measurement. Sure we had a hard working group of professionals, but there was virtually nothing being done to quantify results of all the hard work.

However, the more people I talked to, the more I read and studied marketing the more obvious it was that we as a company were not alone in not measuring results.

Although this article is specifically about PR, the basic concepts are certainly applicable to all types of marketing efforts. Especially these days when so much marketing is social marketing. Social marketing feels a lot like PR so the framework proposed in this article is applicable to a much larger canvas.

This article outlines measuring results on business outcomes in the following four areas:

1. Financial
2. Reputation
3. Employee
4. Public Policy
and offer measurement guidelines for outcomes related to each category.

In our company's case, in order to begin measuring anything we had to start from the beginning including defining what we should measure. We started with a multi-month effort to clean up our internal database which included removing outdated information, de-duplicating records, updating choices and creating new processes to make certain that new data being entered was clean and contained the information needed to measure results.

We trained sales team members to correctly input data they collected and built reports which were reviewed daily to identify when data was not entered correctly. We held people accountable for quality of data issues. Important point – do whatever it takes to enforce clean data going in, it is worth the effort.

As all this was happening we began reviewing our website make certain that we had the analysis tools active on every page (we used Google Analytics) and were tracking web traffic accurately.

We reviewed and updated our lead forms, to make certain we were capturing the correct information and correctly mapping that information into our database.

We chose to focus on lead generation and conversion. Were we effectively generating enough leads for our sales team and which of the leads were being converted to sales? Not rocket science but something we could all understand and communicate. Of course “creating enough leads” turned into “creating enough high quality leads” because now conversion ratios were being watched.

As always, attitudes change, efficiency and focus improves because something is being measured. People wanted to be associated with a winning campaign or idea which also meant that our ability to measure and monitor constantly improved. Everyone wanted to make certain the numbers were good. When campaigns didn’t work, we made certain to no repeat the same mistakes which saved money. We did small quick tests – which is easy with e-mail campaigns to make certain that larger efforts would return the best results.

Unfortunately, the company was sold and the team partially disbanded, Marketing was taken over by the acquiring company. However, most of the team members were retained, just repositioned mostly because they could articulate their value and results. For those who were not retained, their resumes look much better because they are able to accurately portray the result of their efforts.

We would never have been considered effective if we hadn’t been measuring results. This article and the measuring framework described, if adopted, will help a lot of people and organizations.