I was recently presented with the decision to choose a fulfilling career path. On one hand we had an IT role, which was [...]]]> Have you ever been presented with a proposition that you think in hindsight would have gotten you where you wanted to be? Has it ever turned into a mind vs heart confrontation?

I was recently presented with the decision to choose a fulfilling career path. On one hand we had an IT role, which was close to my heart because that’s what I had always done and on the other a business process management role. It was perhaps the most difficult career decision I had to take and went back and forth between the two weighing up the pros and cons of each. This is when the “elders” were called in, those who had been there and done that. Based on their sound advice and the ultimate goal in sight, which is to be an entrepreneur and C-Suite executive, the decision was made to lose the safety shell. But this wasn’t done without first building a “safety net” to safeguard oneself from the pitfalls of stepping into the unknown.

The point I’m trying to drive here, or rather the points are

1. You and I and everyone else on this planet have a tendency to get comfortable with what we already know (partly the reason why you could literally memorize the names of all the explorers there have ever been). This is our comfort zone and there is nothing wrong with this BUT read on …
2. You may have a plan, but plans aren’t set in stone, be prepared to erase and re-write
3. You could either focus on the very next move or the long term goal when trying to re-assess your plan, one of them will be more fulfilling than the other and I believe you know which one
4. You could do one thing and do it very well your entire life and be seen as an expert but business owners and entrepreneurs are usually Jacks, i.e. jack of all trades, again, your call based on where you want to head
5. Never forget the adage “Luck favours the bold”, so tighten your guts and get out there

Have you ever had to lose your safety shell or step out of your comfort zone? What was your experience like?

Do you want a better clientèle? Do you want to dominate a market? Go Niche. Read on to learn why.

I had the opportunity to meet with Craig Wyrill yesterday (via @LaneBurdett). He’s a supercharged solicitor who’ll either have a solution for you up-front or will [...]]]>  

Go Niche

Do you want a better clientèle? Do you want to dominate a market? Go Niche. Read on to learn why.

I had the opportunity to meet with Craig Wyrill yesterday (via @LaneBurdett). He’s a supercharged solicitor who’ll either have a solution for you up-front or will know someone who will be able to help you out. How? Networking. Not just online but in real life. By the way, don’t try adding him on linkedin unless you’ve met him. In two lines he gave me the gist of his business. Work with professionals who care about their time and money and help them build, hold and protect their wealth. How often have you heard a mission statement so simple and niche? There are no marketing tricks here, it’s pure one-on-one networking. If you want customers, find them, understand them and “accidentally” bump into them. It’s because his business operates in a niche the people whom he meets will either become his customers or will refer someone who’ll become a customer. Find people with similar intents and you’ll be looking at the kind of clientèle you want straight away. The reason this works is perhaps because people who value their own time and money also value the service provider’s time. Time is quite literally money when you’re providing consultation and if you’re offering true value to your customers, charge accordingly. Craig said it himself, “I’m not cheap”.

Have you had a similar experience? Will you be using this methodology? Let’s discuss.

If you answered yes to the question, take a hard look at yourself in the mirror, don’t bat an eyelid and ask yourself the same question again, “Are you competing with intelligence?”. Doubtful?

Business intelligence tools have been around for a while and have undergone quick successive changes in order to suit the [...]]]>

If you answered yes to the question, take a hard look at yourself in the mirror, don’t bat an eyelid and ask yourself the same question again, “Are you competing with intelligence?”. Doubtful?

Business intelligence tools have been around for a while and have undergone quick successive changes in order to suit the corporate user. To the point that industry leaders such as SAP and Oracle now allow for ad-hoc repositories sitting in, you guessed it, Microsoft Excel. I’ll refrain from ridiculing Excel this time. However, in my observation, the use of these tools, which could have been leveraged to make “informed” decisions has been reduced to an automated report production factory where linear data goes in and linear information comes out. As a manager you’d perhaps end up looking at 5 different reports, which are no more than “data formatted to look pretty” before you can even get a hint of what’s been going on. Does movement in your industry’s market directly affect your supply? Can the noise in purchase order frequency be attributed to the bullwhip effect? Do you even know if your company has the data necessary to make informed decisions? Answers to the former 2 questions would most likely come down to the manager’s hunch in most organizations, which in itself is a hypothesis and not confirmed fact. In volatile markets having visibility of what’s going on and how one aspect of the business affects the other becomes paramount. This when the INTELLIGENCE needs to be given some thought.

• Measure the right things within the organization and base the target on some sense of reality
• Make (relevant) information available to all within an organization and give analysts enough degree of freedom to source information internally and externally
• Make sure your analysts are data literate and KNOW their tools like the back of their hand
• Analysts need to undergo continuous training in order to make sure their skills are razor sharp
• Managers need to be aware that information is a means to validate the hypotheses and not proof to fit their hunches. If you don’t like what you see, MANAGE IT!
• IT department need to realize and understand that information silos will continue to exist if they’re not agile enough and don’t provide tools versatile enough to bend the data
• Must-have information is what helps you keep the organization profitable while ensuring that the customers’ needs are met at all times. Good-to-have information is a waste of time and effort.
• INSIGHTS are the bottom-line of information production
• INSIGHTS are harder to report on than crunching numbers
• INSIGHTS need cross-functional co-operation

Once you’ve got all that covered, you’ll be competing with intelligence.

Not so long ago I wrote about the need for “Connecting the social media networks” to obtain quality consumer profiles for better targeting of marketing efforts. While inter-connecting them might only remain a dream, according to  

information visualization

Not so long ago I wrote about the need for “Connecting the social media networks” to obtain quality consumer profiles for better targeting of marketing efforts. While inter-connecting them might only remain a dream, according to this article on Mashable (by Chriss Boorman, CMO at Informatica), mining the information out of them might be a better prospect. However, for organizations that spend very little time defining the information they need to see and even lesser time presenting in a way that it can be understood within 30 seconds handling the wealth of information would pose a serious challenge. Enter information visualization.

Information visualization is the interdisciplinary study of “the visual representation of large-scale collections of non-numerical information, such as files and lines of code in software systems, library and bibliographic databases, networks of relations on the internet, and so forth”.

Although the definition limits it’s extent to non-numerical data, it can be extended to encompass numerical data as well in my opinion. Using tables, excel charts and eye-sore heatmaps can convey the information no doubt but if you had to hold a meeting to explain to someone what you’ve just presented, the whole point of visualizing the information has been defeated. This is a real challenge in organizations these days, where regularly updated pieces of information are put together in Powerpoint presentations (don’t even get me started on this) without much regard to whether the point that had to be conveyed has been accomplished through the “chart” just presented. This is as much of a skill issue as it is an aesthetics appreciation issue. For business users who’ve only ever seen Excel as a reporting environment would have little clue as to what could be done to present the information effectively and for efficient decision making. This thought has already been shared from a medical industry perspective on TED by Thomas Goetz. See below:

A bit of digging around revealed how the folks at informationisbeautiful.net actioned this:

Traditional medical information

Redesigned medical niformation

Notice how easy it becomes to interpret the information? If you’d like to get started on your information transformation path start here! If you’re still asking the question as to why you must put the effort into doing this, read on.

1. Information effectiveness: Visualizations help in driving the point you’re trying to make across to the reader in a focussed manner.
2. Information efficiency: If you had to sit and go through 30 line and bar charts in a report and were asked to assimilate the information and make a decision call on it, would you be able to? NO! Others wouldn’t be either. Break it down, simplify it, get creative with how the information is expressed. A great example I found that demonstrates this point is this infographic about “reducing your chances of dying from a plane crash”. You should be able to get through it pretty quickly even if you have no clue about the travel / airlines industry.
3. Perceptions matter: Well presented information will almost always be found to be more credible compared to poorly put together information.
4. Can’t read all numbers: The human brain and eye can only focus on about 2 rows and 3 cells so basically a 6 cell region at any given time. So if you’re going to present the performance for 10 brands across 5 regions, good luck waiting for the information recipient to make a call on what’s going on. Clearly, tables aren’t the best way to express information.

Web 2.0 brought about an interesting change in the way “collective intelligence is harnessed” and distributed. Blogs and micro-blogs, reviews, social media, Q&A’s – collectively allowed the common-man to have a voice. This phenomenon, followed by a classic hockey-stick growth in the amount of information available on the [...]]]>

Web 2.0 brought about an interesting change in the way “collective intelligence is harnessed” and distributed. Blogs and micro-blogs, reviews, social media, Q&A’s – collectively allowed the common-man to have a voice. This phenomenon, followed by a classic hockey-stick growth in the amount of information available on the internet has led to a point where a whole new micro-economy is dedicated to managing the content. Perhaps Nietzsche was right when he penned:

Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.

Now while I won’t suggest that it has ruined the thinking, atleast not just yet, it sure has ruined the writing. The evidence lies in the tons of comments floating about youtube and twitter. This is akin to the democratic society we live in, everyone gets a voice but only a few matter. Anyhow, I won’t digress anymore.

So what does it cost to engage the customers / users? How has user generated content created a micro-economy?

Think about it, about 3 years ago, the internet giants were still doing well with cluster servers and traditional data-centers. The growing cost of energy and the move to be environmentally sustainable has sparked a race towards more energy efficient data-centres. Correct me if I’m wrong in my line of thought; if one traditional non-green data-centre costs about $10,000,000 in energy costs for a year, would running two data-centres at half the cost really affect the bottom line? To quote costs, back in late 2008, facebook’s power consumption alone cost them about $1,000,000 (yes, that’s a MILLION) a month. Deloitte’s Media & Entertainment predictions for 2009 quoted storage costs of up to $100 Million a year for video and photo storage companies. Are we about to reach a point where the internet itself or the services based on it will become the single most expensive trough for power consumption? Perhaps not. This is where the micro-economy is brewing, more research into renewable and sustainable energy sources, more construction of green data-centres and most of all with the advent of cloud computing, scalable on-demand resource utilization (basically if you don’t need it don’t pay for it).

Is user generated content really worth it?

Have you ever noticed now the date and time are always localized to the organization offering the freebie / information marketing gig? Here’s what happens to the [...]]]> Do you send out opt-in emails to customers to inform them of your latest webinar / seminar? Do you receive email from companies offering “free” industry related seminars?

Have you ever noticed now the date and time are always localized to the organization offering the freebie / information marketing gig? Here’s what happens to the recipients; the perceived effort required to decode the message is higher because the timezone needs to be converted to a local one. Personally speaking, this does affect the conversion rate because you’ve already lost the customer at the action point. They haven’t even gotten to your marketing gig where you could sell them something. Here the math to prove it:

• 10000 customer emailed about the seminar
• Assuming conversion @ 1.5% because you didn’t localize the timezone you’ve  now only got 150 parties interested (confirmed, nothing will stop them)
• Now assume a sales conversion of another 2% and you’ve only sold to 3 people
• You could have achieved a 2% attendee conversion for the campaign if you localized the timezone infromation
• You could have sold it to ONE MORE person

*figures are hypothetical but grounded in reality

I’m not sure what asking for one more piece of information i.e. location would do to your opt-in email subscription conversion rate. Perhaps you could deploy facebook connect and hope that the profile location information is filled out. This should get you one step closer to a more intimate email marketing campaign. I have not tested this idea just yet. Perhaps one of you who’s already got an email marketing plan could test this on a small scale and share the results with us.

What are your thoughts on this? Would love to hear your views.

UPDATE

It seems as though the folks over at HubSpot have got this figured out and without compromising the sign-up process too. It can be seen in the exhibit below.

Localized event invite