Monthly Archives: June 2012
The Internet in 2015 (Infographic)
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The State of Customer Service in a Consumer Driven Market
Via Nerdgraph
See full infographic http://www.nerdgraph.com/the-10-best-customer-service-infographics-for-2012/
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Filed under Small Business
9 Posts Today, 6.29.12 Small Business News to Use
HOME page posts include learning how-to communications with left brainers; human resources management metrics; customer relationship management tools; risk management check-up; marketing and website how-to — plus more as usual.
I was able to do a bit more today on our blog structure. Changes are: you will find the menu tabs, GUEST POSTS and INFOGRAPHICS, are now drop down menus for you to choose “Current” or “Archived” pages in each menu tab. The ABOUT & PRESS RELEASE menu tab (previously About Author & Blog) is also now a drop down menu tab for you to choose “Author & Blog” or “Press Release” pages.
Unchanged and as always, great content for you to enjoy!
Everyone everywhere have a great weekend! If you celebrate July 4th where you are, don’t forget next week is a split work week with the 4th falling in the middle of the week. Good or bad? Off 2 days, on 2 days, off 1 day, on 2 days, then off 2 days next weekend. Well, it is what it is, yes!
Beverly
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Filed under Business Blog & Miscellaneous, Small Business
10 Ways To Help Left Brainers Tap Into Creativity
This is just about the majority in business. Read the how-to be successful in presenting, leading and managing. Good “stuff”. Communications and leadership
Excerpt: If your job requires you to lead meetings, brainstorming sessions, or problem solving gatherings of any kind, chances are good that most of the people you come in contact with are left-brain dominant: analytical, logical, linear folks with a passion for results and a huge fear that the meeting you are about to lead will end with a rousing chorus of kumbaya.
Not exactly the kind of mindset conducive to breakthrough thinking.
Do not lose heart, oh facilitators of the creative process. Even if you find yourself in a room full of 10,000 left brainers, there are tons of ways to work with this mindset in service to bringing out the very best of the group’s collective genius:
Read full article via Innovation Excellence | 10 Ways To Help Left Brainers Tap Into Creativity.
Filed under Leadership, Operations & Innovation, Management
Tools: Measure The Value of Talent
Check out the tools. Great resource of need-to-know stats in your business. These costs are too often hidden, or at the very least, the extent of which they compound are hidden. Human resources management
Excerpt: Be among the first to beta test two new tools developed by AICPA and CIMA: the Cost of Losing Talent© (COLT©) and the Cost of Replacing Talent© (CORT©). You will also be contributing benchmark data to the framework of these invaluable tools before their official launch.
Gather, then enter your top line financial and operational data and produce instant outputs. It’s completely anonymous. Before you get started, review our short data collection guide to learn what data you will require and how you might collect it ….
These tools have been developed to address an urgent need to measure the cost to companies of losing and replacing talent. Total costs are surprisingly large, come straight off the bottom line, and yet remain largely unknown.
Download tool here via Measure the value of talent. From CGMA Magazine
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Filed under Human Resources & Payroll, Management
The Attribute Map, Part Two — Wharton@Work July 2012
Good tool, try it. CRM and marketing.
Excerpt:
Nano Tool:
An Attribute Map is a highly effective tool for assessing your customers’ real needs and desires. It simplifies the complexity of your customers’ reactions to your product or service and your position with respect to competitors. Attribute maps let you clearly see where additional resources could have the greatest impact and give you objective information about the likely consequences of a move.
Read full article via The Attribute Map, Part Two — Wharton@Work July 2012.
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Filed under Marketing, Branding, Sales, Advertising, eCommerce & Social Media
How Mature is Your Risk Management? – HBR
Where is your risk management strategy or is it at all? The article based on E&Y research makes great points. Do you consider risk management is not the key areas of company growth and revenue – business goals? Read on. I think your strategy may be altered.
Exerpt: In recent research conducted by Ernst & Young, the top finding was that organizations with greater risk management maturity—that is to say, those that do focus on strategic risks and have integrated their various risk management activities—outperform their peers financially. They clearly generate higher growth in revenue, EBITDA, and EBITDA/EV. The finding is a correlation but points to a theory of causation: we believe these companies are far more adept at identifying and mitigating the risks that could undermine their achievement of business goals. At the same time, they are effectively containing financial reporting and compliance risks.
Read full article via How Mature is Your Risk Management? – Michael Herrinton – Harvard Business Review.
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Filed under Leadership, Operations & Innovation
9 User Experience Pitfalls That Repel Website Visitors
More great advice, tips and how-to from KISSmetrics. CONTROL the things you can control as the ultimate first step in ensuring your website successes. Marketing and website design
Excerpt: As a business owner, what can be worse than having a visitor leave your site due to an annoyance that you can control? You may lose sales due to numerous factors that are out of your control. But what about the ones that you can control? Wouldn’t it be great to have a nice, clean website so that you can focus on optimizing the things that matter?
In this blog post I’m going to share some things that send users away from your website – all of which you have the power to reverse!
Read full article via 9 User Experience Pitfalls That Repel Website Visitors. From KISSmetrics
8 Attributes of Content That Inspire Action
Another great read this morning. Lots of tips, advice and examples in this article. Don’t allow your focus on content be diverted to flashes of success at the loss of your goals. Marketing and social media.
Excerpt: It’s tempting to chase viral success and create content that only produces traffic spikes and social shares. If you’re only creating content with this in mind, you may find yourself producing content that is completely unrelated to your business, not reaching the right audience, and not getting your visitors to perform the actions you hope.
Read full article via 8 Attributes of Content That Inspire Action | SEOmoz.
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Filed under Marketing, Branding, Sales, Advertising, eCommerce & Social Media
How to Be a More Coherent Marketer
Recommended read for all marketing managment. The article defines and explains the how-to.
Excerpt: Leading marketers have learned to distinguish three separate classes of capabilities. Right-to-play capabilities are the basic functional capabilities, such as campaign management, media buying, and budgeting, that any marketing organization should have. Right-to-compete capabilities are those marketing capabilities that any company must have to compete effectively within its industry. These would include, for example, a customer relationship management platform in the financial-services sector, format optimization in retailing, and brand management in consumer packaged goods. The third category includes the overarching capabilities that leading companies cultivate at the right-to-win level. These capabilities, which are generally cross-functional and complex, reinforce one another as part of a single capabilities system. They link directly to the company’s fundamental strategy (its “way to play” in the market), and are relevant to most or all of its products and services. It is this coherent alignment between all the critical capabilities, the market, and the portfolio that differentiates a company from competitors.
Read full article via How to Be a More Coherent Marketer. From Strategy + Business via Booz & Co.
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Filed under Marketing, Branding, Sales, Advertising, eCommerce & Social Media
How to Identify and Control Blog Comment Spam on WordPress
Another good article from KISSmetrics with his usual detailed and comprehensive style. SPAM is something with which we all deal. WordPress’s help with their prescreening engine is good, but after the bulk of spam is trashed by WordPress, you are still left with the daily task of moderating the remainder. I try to also moderate this remainder to include care of those commenters whose first language is not English. Our content is currently serving 103 countries. After all is said and done, you finally accept nothing is a perfect resolution of this issue.
Excerpt: If you own a blog, chances are you have encountered a little – or a lot – of spam. The more popular your blog becomes, the more spam it is likely to get. And there is nothing more frustrating than having to spend a lot of time moderating your comments to determine which ones are spam and which ones are legit.
In today’s post, we’re going to look at:
How to identify spam.
If third-party comment systems control spam.
Settings and plugins you can use in the base WordPress comment system to help moderate spam.
Read full article via How to Identify and Control Blog Comment Spam on WordPress. From KISSmetrics
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Filed under Business Blog & Miscellaneous
15 Posts Today, 6.28.12 Small Business News to Use
HOME page today includes several brand, marketing, advertising and sales posts with tips and how-to; a downloadable legal guide for hiring interns; MIT offers free teaching case studies (great resource); leadership and CEO help; website design and tools; plus more topics as usual.
INFOGRAPHIC page has a new infographic for you, Workplace Incentives.
As you have probably noticed, we are working on the blog structure. And, I am sure you have guessed, website design is not really my world! If I am making any website expert out there cringe …….. sorry!
Content is great, enjoy all content!
Beverly
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Filed under Business Blog & Miscellaneous, Small Business
5 Ways To Commit CEO Career Suicide
If you are the CEO and there is only one person in the company, you are probably safe for a little while, maybe. However, this article points out the traits and habits that is little or not at all tolerated in today’s businesses. Heads-up. Even if you are the only person in the company now, these 5 things will eventually catch up to you as well.
Excerpt: Let me be very clear; I’m not suggesting that you become a micro manager or that you stop delegating, I’m simply suggesting that you do the job the way it is supposed to be done. Great leaders champion from the front – they are not disengaged invisible executives. As the CEO you are the visionary, influencer, champion, defender, evangelist, and above all else, you must have a bias to action. You can be none of these things as a recluse.
Engaged leaders are very visible and very active leaders — they question, listen, assess and act
Read full article via 5 Ways To Commit CEO Career Suicide | CEO.com.
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Filed under Leadership, Operations & Innovation
How Social Music Marketing Can Help Your Brand
Here is a concept to make your brand memorable and marketing more fun for the consumer.
Excerpt: So where are brands investing? The default used to be to sign a big deal with the hottest established artists, think Beyonce and Jay-Z, leveraging their star power to attract consumers. Today, more and more brands are turning to emerging artists so they can deliver something that speaks to the individuality of their consumers. Attaching an artist to branded content is a sure way to guarantee consumers enjoy and remember their experience, and therefore, the brand.
Read full article via How Social Music Marketing Can Help Your Brand. From Mashable
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Filed under Marketing, Branding, Sales, Advertising, eCommerce & Social Media
20 Brands Using Social Media in Really Innovative Ways
This is a great takeaway article for small business. See video examples and access links for more video.
Excerpt: Using social media effectively is good for your brand, no matter how big you are. There wouldn’t have been US$3.08-billion spent just on advertising on social networking sites in 2011 otherwise. A recent study by research company Millward-Brown also showed that there was a direct correlation between how successful a company is and how well it uses social media. Research from eMarketer meanwhile suggests that brands can profit dramatically from a well-executed social campaign. But if you want to stand out, you have to do something really special. The 20 pieces listed below are all special and all stand out. They also all won awards at Cannes Lions, one of the world’s biggest international advertising festivals. Every year around 9 000 registered delegates from 90 countries visit the Festival, which receives more than 28 000 entries across various spheres of advertising
Read full article, see videos and access list links via 20 brands using social media in really innovative ways | memeburn.
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Filed under Leadership, Operations & Innovation, Marketing, Branding, Sales, Advertising, eCommerce & Social Media, Small Business
