Ideas

Social Networks for Business: Starting Strategy and Tactics

By Bill Freedman

I’ve recently been asked by a client about defining their “social strategy.” For the client this meant “how can I leverage blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social networks for business?” My answer shocked: “the more important question is how will you deliver social channel activity?”

Social Networks for Business Landscape

Social Networks for Business via BuddyMedia, Inc.

The debate, in other words, was over the semantics of social network participation: is it strategic or tactical. The client was asserting that social is a strategic endeavor than needs planning. I was advocating that it is a tactic that needs consistent execution, and to analyze if it was necessary to apply this strategy to a product using a sample size calculator is the best choice to learn this.

As with most semantics arguments, both sides are right. Social network participation benefits from a strategic foundation: funding, staffing, tools, policies and processes, for example to manage the payments on a company getting the paystubs online could be the best choice. And social networking is defined by action: posts, tweets, comments, etc. The strategic foundation is a benefit, not a requirement, as anyone who has set up and account and messaged “Hello world” knows.

Neither of us dealt with the real issue: outcomes. How will social networks drive awareness, generate leads, provide service and build an online community? What are the measures of success? How does the marketing budget and promotion mix change with a focus on social?

Social Networks for Business

The solution was simple: start now and evolve participation over time. We chose a company blog as the primary content delivery channel to be supported by Twitter and LinkedIn posts, commenting and monitoring. YouTube and Facebook are left for another day.

The deliverables will evolve a marketing strategy with indexsy.com. A blog post. Tweets. A blog calendar. Requests for follows. Retweets. Updates to LinkedIn. Blog comments. Lather, rinse, repeat ( and measure).

Content is targeted to be 60% educational, 30% entertainment and 10% shameless sales pitches to start.

Strategy complete. Now the client’s social networks for business journey begins…

How would you do it differently…leave a comment. Thanks!

Truisms That Inspire and Amuse

By Bill Freedman

When writing gets difficult for me, I turn to HL Mencken. The “Sage of Baltimore” was a free thinker and prolific writer in the early 20th century. His writing inspires me, improves my own writing and, I believe, helps me amuse my audience.

HL Mencken

HL Mencken

As time moves forward, Mencken becomes a little more obscure and misunderstood. But he remains eminently quotable. For example:

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

He’s inspired me to collect and share many a truism, bon mot, aphorism and even a few jokes. With that, here are a few anonymous entries from the archives:

  • Bad breath is better than no breath at all.
  • Old age may not have much to recommend it, but generally speaking, it is preferable to the alternative.
  • When you are not sure what to say or how to answer, the only two good choices are to either 1. tell the truth or 2. be quiet.
  • If you want something to be different, you need to do something differently.
  • If you always tell the truth you will never need to remember what lie you told to who.
  • Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.
  • Fall down seven times. Get up eight.
  • Truth is illusory. Rumors are real.
  • “Transparent” is the new buzzword for “buy my product now!”
  • The best way to avoid a fight is to make sure the outcome is obvious before the first punch is thrown.
  • Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes because there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.
  • Character is what you are. Reputation is what people think you are.
  • A man who says marriage is a 50-50 proposition doesn’t understand two things: 1. Women. 2. Fractions.
  • The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant.
  • The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.

And I close with one more from the “truisms that inspire” archive from Mr. Mencken himself:

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.

CIO Priorities for 2013 from 2,053 Industry Leaders

By Bill Freedman

Every year a Gartner survey summarizes global CIO priorities, and every year I take a very close look at the findings.

The most recent survey was conducted in the fourth quarter in 2012 and included 2,053 CIOs. These individuals span 41 countries and 36 industries. I like this annual survey because it is a well designed study into the priorities driving US$3.7 trillion of spending on information technology and personnel.

CIO Priorities: the Findings

Top 10 Business Priorities

Ranking

Top 10 Technology Priorities

Ranking
Increasing enterprise growth

1

 Analytics and business intelligence

1

Delivering operational results

2

Mobile technologies

2
Reducing enterprise costs

3

Cloud computing (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS)

3
Attracting and retaining new customers

4

Collaboration technologies (workflow)

4

Improving IT applications and infrastructure

5

Legacy modernization

5

Creating new products and services (innovation)

6

IT management

6

Improving efficiency

7

CRM

7

Attracting and retaining the workforce

8

Virtualization

8

Implementing analytics and big data

9

Security

9

Expanding into new markets and geographies

10

ERP Applications

10

One of my favorite parts of this survey is that the technology executives are asked about business priorities first. They may be propeller heads at their core, but they understand their primary task is to find ways to align technology with business initiatives and drive strategic results. As a result, top line growth, business expansion, cost control and personnel issues are clearly present in the business priorities. The only item that I’m surprised isn’t explicit ed stated in the business priorities is accelerating product cycles and decision-making.

The technology list is dominated by newer technology that has enough of a track record of delivering disruptive results. The heightened priority suggests that these investments are moving from lab experiments to broad deployment. Cloud and mobile are the talk of Silicon Valley; it’s also found, in my estimation, in 6 of the 10 priorities. Multiyear initiatives where the necessity has out-paced results are also on the list: Analytics, Security, Virtualization and ERP.

Large budget items like desktop hardware, software and support, which in many cases are the largest portions of annual budgets are not strategic topics in this years survey. Likewise, vendor relationships and outsourcing aren’t a priority this year as they’ve been in the past.

Takeaways

  • Its going to be a good year for technology in general as top line growth leads the list of priorities
  • Its not just that CIOs are spending on cloud and mobile, their organizations are benefiting from these technologies
  • Enabling agility from the bottom-up is a big opportunity. From mobile and cloud, to analytics and virtualization, and ERP and CRM, technologies that provide productivity leverage across the organization will be easiest to justify
  • Infrastructure investments won’t be slighted. Organizations will strive to move quickly, but with a strong foundation. Security, scalability and maintainability will be built into to major initiatives. This is a correction to previous years where organization were burned by having to spend on remediation and refactoring to fix mistakes of moving too fast.

What do you think? Comments welcome.

What Does a Sales Funnel Look Like?

By Bill Freedman

A sales funnel is an essential management tools for visualizing the status of sales and marketing operations.

Sales Funnel

The funnel is an apt visual metaphor for virtually every sales process. Many inquiries will enter the top of the funnel. Along the way, some prospective customers abandon your solution while others engage more deeply. In the end, a precious few exit the funnel as paying customers.

But because buyer behavior and sales processes vary greatly across industries, companies and product lines, generic funnel diagrams are of limited use. Think about it: are you satisfied by a picture showing that 1,000 inquiries eventually convert into $199 of revenue? Of course not. The funnel needs to begin with assumptions about your business. From there it needs to be validated, optimized and improved against the reality of buyer behavior and the competitive marketplace. It longs to be a beacon of competitive advantage for your business. It needs to be both predictive and believable.

Eventually, you’ll be able to use your funnel as a model for sales and marketing investments such as sales staffing, lead generation and product roadmaps. It can also become an early warning system for changes in the competitive marketplace, buyer behavior or operational effectiveness.

So what does a sales funnel look like? It looks like your business.

Ideas in the Social Media Era: I’ll Get It Right the 5th Time

By Bill Freedman

I love this chart. Not only is it funny, it gets to the core of how the social media era is disrupting creativity.

The chart puts its focus on article length (and perhaps the quantity of postings and/or impressions). The chart is silent on quality.

Great ideas have always been distilled to their essence through pity catchphrases. With social media, any idea, even before it’s refined (let alone great) is distilled for social network impact. The network for disseminating ideas is becoming more powerful than ideas themselves.

This is a new challenge for the creator and innovator. When is an idea ready to be published? What are readers’ expectations for quality and accuracy of new ideas? Does it help or hurt your reputation to publish many unrefined ideas? Is your idea sharing risk tolerance dependent on the size and nature of your social network? Are facts and accuracy destined to become endangered species during the social media era?

I don’t know, but I’m going to publish this now and refine it later. My sense of optimism suggests that we’ll muddle through.