“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe you too can become great.”
~
Mark Twain
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Week 50 - Make Changes Stick
Any change you make needs to be supported by a system to ensure actions continued to be carried out in the new way. By now you should be comfortable with systems, policies and procedures so this is the point where you must systematize the revisiting of the policy and procedure making process. That’s right, before you laugh, we do really need a system for updating your system!
Set aside one day each month to review your policies and procedures. During this day you should spend one hour on each different area of your business. Do this every month with unwavering commitment and your business will improve as never before. Can you honestly remember when you last took the time out in this way to make positive improvements?
Some things you can look at each month are:
Set aside one day each month to review your policies and procedures. During this day you should spend one hour on each different area of your business. Do this every month with unwavering commitment and your business will improve as never before. Can you honestly remember when you last took the time out in this way to make positive improvements?
Some things you can look at each month are:
- What problems arose for us during the month and how can we modify our policies and procedures to avoid a repeat of these?
- Did any of our policies and procedures cause trouble during the past month – how can we adjust them to avoid a repeat?
- How do the employees feel about the policies and procedures? Which would they like to see modified and why?
- Responsibilities – are all bases covered? Do we need to assign new responsibilities to employees to cover new areas of business?
- Does anyone think we could make more money or make our jobs easier by changing the way we run things?
It is essential that you involve your key employees (perhaps all of them) in this workshop discussion. Through a combination of effective systems and development of new income streams, your business will be far less vulnerable to the ebb and flow that is business today. So what about you personally - can you handle the ebb and flow? You see the same principles apply to you as an individual. You need to prepare your mind, constantly feeding it with rich information and positive re-enforcement.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Marketing Musings: Scowls on Rodeo Drive
This week The Wall St Journal ran a story about customer service on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles. In Week 42 I wrote that you really must ensure that all aspects of your business are firing. It’s not enough to have a nice shop fitout, or helpful front desk staff. All areas of your business must be lifted to the same level. What’s interesting about the WSJ article is that despite the multi-million dollar shop fit outs, the global branding budgets and the huge expense of staff, you can still “Fall at the Last Hurdle”. Here is an excerpt:-------------------------------------------
…I decided to gauge just how inviting Rodeo Drive's stores are with the help of Mr. Hill, who is president of Sensory Logic, a company based in Minneapolis that helps businesses from Target to Toyota connect emotionally with patrons. Mr. Hill employs "facial coding," a technique of reading and using facial expressions to elicit the most profitable emotional response in a customer. The premise is that feelings occur more quickly than thoughts and play a more effective role in purchasing decisions, so businesses need to appeal to our emotions. This is territory plumbed eons ago by Madison Avenue's ad men, but it's been harder to put into practice in many retail stores.
If it's the emotional rather than the rational part of our brains that makes many of our buying decisions, that's particularly true when it comes to luxury. (Certainly, it was my emotional brain that bought a St. John Knits suit recently, which my rational brain is now trying to justify.)
Yet just training sales clerks to say, "May I help you?" may not be terribly effective, given Mr. Hill's argument that only 7% of communication relies on verbal exchange. The rest is store décor, the facial expressions of sales associates, and things our eyes and ears pick up subliminally. Thus, on Rodeo Drive, Chicago's Michigan Avenue or London's Bond Street, one of the key factors deciding whether you walk out with a new Prada handbag may be the muscles at the corner of a sales clerk's mouth.
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It’s great stuff and worth while reviewing your business from the ground up.
It’s great stuff and worth while reviewing your business from the ground up.
Friday, November 02, 2007
Marketing Musings: Shape-Shifting via Facebook
My usual stance on ANY advertising that does not result in a lead that has a chance to be converted into a sale is, don’t do it – especially if you are a small business with limited resources. In general this has resulted in me viewing “institutional advertising” or general branding messages (without a call to action) as simply a waste of money. This month in Fast Company magazine a new Facebook VP really got me thinking about whether or not this type of advertising is truly dead in the water.
Read the paragraphs below - it makes complete sense that there will always be a place for the emotional pull of a generic branding ad in forming opinions in the first place. Not all companies are lucky enough to benefit from extreme word of mouth marketing and for them, spending somewhere remains a necessity. I love the phrase "shape-shifting".
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...The primary accelerant is a Facebook feature called News Feed, which automatically shares information across friend networks and groups. As a result, "News Feed optimization," the art and science of writing a compelling News Feed announcement, has become an industry itself. "News Feed is as important to Facebook as AdWords or AdSense is to Google," says entrepreneur and blogger Dave McClure, who is teaching the Stanford course.
Harnessing the power of News Feed, the new apps, and the booming user base to make money for Facebook itself is the task of a new hire, VP of product marketing and operations Chamath Palihapitiya. Zuckerberg brought him aboard this summer to help figure out how to exploit what Facebookers call the "social graph"--those thousands of threads that make up users' connections to other people--and to create Facebook's coming targeted advertising program. Palihapitiya, 31, is tall and whippet thin, with elegant manners and a ready smile. A former electrical engineer, born in Sri Lanka and raised in Canada, he ran AOL's instant-message group, then jumped to the venture fund Mayfield. He is part Sand Hill Roadster and part freethinker; he appeared in an art film last winter making pointed comments about Silicon Valley's "old boy's club."
It is only day 67 for Palihapitiya at his new job when we sit down to talk, but he already sounds like a true believer. While cagey about details, he isn't shy about the potential he sees for targeted ads to fill Facebook's coffers. He madly sketches on a notepad, drawing a fine distinction between demand fulfillment (I want a cheap ticket to Hawaii. Now!), which the Internet has become quite good at, and demand generation, the shape-shifting set of marketing messages that conspire to get a consumer to want something. That, he says, is where he sees serious money on the table. "Facebook users are more engaged with each other," he says. "Aren't you more likely to be interested in what your friends are doing?" Google, which focuses by and large on demand fulfillment, is a $160 billion company. "For every dollar that goes into fulfillment, there are hundreds that are spent on generation," he says, particularly by the big brands. So what could Facebook be worth? Five times Google? Ten times? "Could be," he smiles.
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Read the paragraphs below - it makes complete sense that there will always be a place for the emotional pull of a generic branding ad in forming opinions in the first place. Not all companies are lucky enough to benefit from extreme word of mouth marketing and for them, spending somewhere remains a necessity. I love the phrase "shape-shifting".
----------------------------------
...The primary accelerant is a Facebook feature called News Feed, which automatically shares information across friend networks and groups. As a result, "News Feed optimization," the art and science of writing a compelling News Feed announcement, has become an industry itself. "News Feed is as important to Facebook as AdWords or AdSense is to Google," says entrepreneur and blogger Dave McClure, who is teaching the Stanford course.
Harnessing the power of News Feed, the new apps, and the booming user base to make money for Facebook itself is the task of a new hire, VP of product marketing and operations Chamath Palihapitiya. Zuckerberg brought him aboard this summer to help figure out how to exploit what Facebookers call the "social graph"--those thousands of threads that make up users' connections to other people--and to create Facebook's coming targeted advertising program. Palihapitiya, 31, is tall and whippet thin, with elegant manners and a ready smile. A former electrical engineer, born in Sri Lanka and raised in Canada, he ran AOL's instant-message group, then jumped to the venture fund Mayfield. He is part Sand Hill Roadster and part freethinker; he appeared in an art film last winter making pointed comments about Silicon Valley's "old boy's club."
It is only day 67 for Palihapitiya at his new job when we sit down to talk, but he already sounds like a true believer. While cagey about details, he isn't shy about the potential he sees for targeted ads to fill Facebook's coffers. He madly sketches on a notepad, drawing a fine distinction between demand fulfillment (I want a cheap ticket to Hawaii. Now!), which the Internet has become quite good at, and demand generation, the shape-shifting set of marketing messages that conspire to get a consumer to want something. That, he says, is where he sees serious money on the table. "Facebook users are more engaged with each other," he says. "Aren't you more likely to be interested in what your friends are doing?" Google, which focuses by and large on demand fulfillment, is a $160 billion company. "For every dollar that goes into fulfillment, there are hundreds that are spent on generation," he says, particularly by the big brands. So what could Facebook be worth? Five times Google? Ten times? "Could be," he smiles.
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