Tag Archives: Social

How Do You Increase the Value of Social Network Interactions? Five Thoughts

Situation: People participate in social networking sites for several reasons – to network, to promote their businesses, products or services, and to gain insight through crowd sourcing. For these audiences, how do you increase the value of social network interactions?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Encourage participants to move from a short-term to a medium-term focus. Short term focus is about lead generation, immediate results and buy right now. Think of the man in the flashy sports coat selling his products on late night television. This may generate a sale but with low engagement and commitment. Alternatively, if you focus on engagement you start to build growth which is more sustainable. Growth which will persist with more momentum.
  • Clarify your objectives. Are you interested in sales or influence today or this quarter? How much effort do you want to put into it and what payback do you seek?
  • Be patient. Take the time to develop quality content. This time is an investment which pays back both in the medium and long-term.
  • Don’t treat people as though they can be manipulated into buying from you. There is a karmic cost to this approach. Look instead at the potential benefit that you can provide that will attract people to your content. Think in terms of reciprocity – give first and let others decide how they will respond.
  • Try an experiment. Propose a simple question: “What do you want?” Ask the question three times, each time with a different thought in mind – first annoyance, then confusion, and finally empathy. Rather than speak the questions, send them via instant message one after the other. The words of the message were exactly the same each time, “What do you want?” Without tone of voice, expression or body language, the receivers could instantly tell me what I was thinking in each case. The same works in social networking. People can read where you are coming from based on how you position your content. If you want to increase the value of what you have to say or offer, offer it openly and invite your audience to respond.

Thanks to Kenneth Vogt for his contribution to this discussion.

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How Do You Build an International Presence? Seven Guidelines

Situation: Companies are looking at market expansion opportunities. International expansion is one alternative. In the past this was done largely by sending expatriates to foreign locales. More recently there has been a trend toward hiring locally. How do you find the right talent locally? How do you build an international presence?

Advice:

  • Everything starts with the basics – a good job description.
  • Finding people is easier these days with social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Xing, The Meet Group, FlexJobs, TikTok, Reddit and Quora. However, finding the right people remains a challenge.
  • Invest time and effort to research your target market. Which country is a market or has the most likely prospective clients? What is your competitive advantage in that locale?
  • For a hiring company without an existing presence in the local market it is also a challenge to convince good local candidates that yours is the right company to join. It is important to understand the local business culture and values, and also to offer career-paths to qualified candidates.
  • Don’t assume the need for multiple offices as you start. You can start with a highly mobile person working from home who knows the local language(s), customs, and who already has contacts in your target market.
  • It is often assumed that it takes one year or more for an expatriate to be efficient locally, and that hiring locally often accelerates first years’ startup-time. However, the local person has to understand and “fit” into the corporate/head office culture.
  • Working with an international executive search firm to find qualified local talent with the right fit to your business and needs can greatly improve your odds of success.

Thanks to E.J. Dieterle, President & CEO, YES Partners, Inc. for his contribution to this article.

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How Do You Build Meaningful Social Media Participation? Seven Thought Starters

Situation: A company has built a good online community. Between their site and newsletter, they are contacting tens of thousands of executives weekly. The CEO constantly seeks new ways to encourage active participation in the discussions. What have others done to effectively build regular participation in discussions? How do you build meaningful social media participation?

Advice:

  • Know your audience and focus on topics that engage people. For example, one company does a semi-annual compensation survey. This generates great response when the results are published.
  • Another company has found that they learn more from mistakes than they do from success. People love to talk about business blunders, particularly if the discussions include well-intentioned humor.
  • Reach out to individuals with interesting backgrounds, experience and situations. Encourage them to post, or feature them in a discussion.
  • Another company sends out weekly emails with titles and synopses of articles posted in the last week. This enables newsletter recipients to quickly scan topics and click on those of interest.
  • A common challenge is filtering posts which are trivial, self-promoting and lack relevance to the focus of the site.
  • The bottom line is that there is no magic bullet. Social networking sites are rapidly evolving so it is important to continually seek creative additions. This takes time, work and investment.
  • Consider your own experience. What has drawn you to a social networking site? What have this site done to effectively build regular participation in meaningful discussions?

Thanks to Ken Ross of ExpertCEO, Inc. for his contribution to this article.

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How Do You Boost the Performance of a Life Sciences Company? Six Suggestions

Situation: The CEO wants to improve the performance of her life sciences company. She has questions about the business plan and roles within the company. She is also looking for better ways to connect with current and potential customers. How do you boost the performance of a life sciences company?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Assess both your own role and the company to ensure that there is good alignment between the business plan and the roles within the company.
  • Be strategic after assessing the company’s needs and situation. Too often companies jump to tactical considerations because they are action oriented. To be effective, tactics must align with the broader company strategy.
  • Build a foundation based on value and compliment this with effective models to communicate and leverage this value base.
  • Think outside the box. Consider options to use or increase the effectiveness of social networking. This has growing dramatically in importance as a way to reach and communicate with key current and potential constituencies.
  • Perception is important. Be aware of what others think of the company and work creatively to present the company in a light that will support objectives.
  • The visual cortex represents 75% of sensory awareness. Leverage this on web sites and in marketing campaigns.

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How Do You Build Teamwork Across Account Teams? Four Observations

Situation: A CEO is concerned that there is a lack of teamwork across the company’s account teams. Often, they compete with each other rather than sharing knowledge and information. While some competition is good, too much can stifle growth. How do you build teamwork across account teams?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • It looks like the company needs to change its account management culture. There is a need to review the entire operation and rethink how the account teams interact with each other.
    • Schedule meetings with the full account staff – attendance required – describe the concern and encourage teams to share ideas and resources.
    • The commission structure drives performance. Tie financial incentives to collaboration. Reward the teams on collaborative efforts disproportionately to individual team effort – Y% commission for individual team effort vs. 1.5 x Y% commission for collaborative effort.
    • Increase monitoring of revenue and client acquisition – for the full group as opposed to individual account teams.
  • To keep a manageable level of competition among teams, group them into “leagues.” The leagues compete against each other for production and financial rewards. Encourage them to develop social interaction to build the league spirit.
    • A twist on this is temporary “leagues.” Shift team and league groupings from time to time to share best practices and resources. Measure the results. Track and reward the best league performance over time.
    • Be sensitive to the possibility that individuals may respond differently to league vs. individual team incentives. Those who respond more positively to the league concept can become the collectors and disseminators of best practices among the teams. This creates a status incentive to complement the financial incentives.
  • Consider the peer-programming model from the software industry. In this model, two people are occasionally teamed with one as lead and one as back-up. Let them learn from each other for a period and then return to normal operation. The same can be done with teams.
  • Does the company really have a problem? If the corporate competition leaves at 5:00PM but the company’s staff are working weekends to produce, maybe things are OK!

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How Do You Engage People in a New Offering? Eight Points

Situation: A founder has created a new social media offering. The concept is to attract individuals with complimentary interests and have them engage each other for mutual benefit as a better source of information and connections. Implied trust is an important component of these connections. How do you engage people in a new offering?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • People are willing to experiment with a new social media offering – in this case because they like to help others. It makes them feel good and they like the role of helping others.
  • People are always seeking good talent. If this does a better job helping them to find good talent, they will try it out.
  • Hiring managers prefer to pass on a resume of someone known to them because a bad referral could reflect badly on them. Strengthen this aspect of the offering through information gathered from participants.
  • A small pool is a negative. Broaden the pool to include those who are looking to step up their careers. Think of this as people-to-people direct hiring and use a social approach with broad appeal. This will increase the number of people willing to play.
  • Be the place where people can come to help others. Add additional tags – help to build confidence and get inspiration. Getting a job happens as a consequence.
  • The element of trust and relationship is important to many – 40% of early users of the current network express this. Assure that the value proposition is also attractive to the 60% who are not concerned about this.
  • The network will build on the energy from the emotional play.
  • Expand the options for how people can help. Investigate allowing trusted referral relationships within the system. Allow people to refer trusted people in their own networks. This can include people who “I would trust to refer good people.”

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How Do You Deal with Cut-throat Competition? Seven Thoughts

Situation:  A company serves a market with a lot of new small entrants. Clients purchase from these other companies as well as the CEO’s company. They are continuing to call and network with their client base to retain clients and build new customers. What else should they be doing? How do you deal with cut-throat competition?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Make a list of those clients who are no longer purchasing from you or referring new clients. Go talk to them. Ask why they are no longer purchasing from you or referring new clients. This may open new options. You may find something new or unexpected that you can offer.
  • Work with an outside service to follow up with on clients lost and won. The key question for them to ask clients is why. Learn from the responses what is most important about the clients’ purchase and referral decisions.
  • Consider a new service. A health/happiness outcome would be a nice value-add: a quarterly report back to referral sources on how happy the clients that they referred are. The last question on the survey should be – Would you work with our firm again? Why or why not?
  • Consider using an outside source to gather the data for these surveys. To get more valuable responses, don’t just ask about your company, but also several of your top competitors; this will produce a richer set of responses.
  • There are two ways to compete: either you are low cost or have established a unique value proposition. Whatever this is, sustainability of your critical point of differentiation is essential.
  • Health care legislation is now in flux. Whatever the outcome, it will have an impact on your market. Become an expert resource on the implications of various outcomes.
  • Look at social media resources – feed valuable information to your audience via blog.

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What’s the Next Version of Our Business Solution? Four Ideas

Situation: A company that provides personnel services wants to adjust their business model to make it more appealing to employers. They are unique in that they focus on social issues, rather than purely on business services. From the perspective of a hiring Manager, what would you want to see? What’s the next version of our business solution?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The idea of a social issues-based brand is unique. To some employers this may have appeal.
  • Your obvious differentiator is the tie between existing communities and social networking. Emphasize this.
  • As an employer, the focus is on finding quality employees for the right price. This will always take precedence over other factors for most businesses. In fact, over-emphasis on social issue-based hiring could subject an employer to discrimination issues. It also will not appeal to everyone. How can you address quality employee for the right price through your service? Here are some things to consider:
    • The employers’ challenge is finding good candidates. How do you solve this problem?
    • Employers have specific needs to fill. Help them by identifying and screening candidates so that it makes their job easier.
    • The question for the employer is whether your helper audience can crowd source the screening function. Screening is the challenge of the employer. Solve this and I as an employer want to talk to you!
    • Within your model, instead of asking for monetary contributions from your helper audience ask them to donate time to screen candidates. Not being a recruiter is a plus.
  • Pitch your new ideas to your company insiders – see what they say.

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How Do You Develop a Sales Organization? Four Points

Situation: A small company’s business is increasing and they need to build a sales organization. To date all sales have been conducted by the founder CEO and a single employee salesperson. Should they build inside or outside sales first? Are there trigger points at which one or both should be increased? How do you develop a sales organization?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Right now you have first mover advantage in your market space. You have a unique offering and no existing competition. The immediate objective is to maximize early market share. Borrow if necessary to ramp sales. There is no trigger point.
  • Hire an outside salesperson now. You want an individual who is knowledgeable about your market and who has a large set of contacts. Make at least 50% of this individual’s compensation variable (commissions) to start and escalate the percentage of variable compensation as sales grow. Hire at current market rates.
  • Supplement your existing marketing with an investment in social media marketing and SEO (search engine optimization). Don’t try to do this yourself on the cheap – hire a pro. Invest in Pay-Per-Click to push your visibility.
  • To sell this plan to your existing salesperson and the rest of the team, it’s time for a Come to Jesus talk.
    • Make a strong business case for your program.
    • The trade-off is either invest now to rapidly build sales or become insignificant.
    • Once you’ve made your pitch and received consent, let the plan work before you ask for more.

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Is It Time to Hire a Marketing Manager? Five Considerations

Situation: A small company has always used guerilla marketing as its marketing modus operandi – trade shows, etc. Their VP Sales recently left. They feel a need for a marketing plan and hired a company to assist them in understanding how they are perceived by their customers.  Should they continue to outsource, or is it preferable to bring marketing expertise in-house? Is it time to hire a marketing manager?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • How well do you understand your customer profiles? It is important to characterize, segment and understand your customers before you can understand your marketing.
    • What is the company size of your typical customer? Small companies don’t spend a lot on big trade shows, other than perhaps sending a couple of people as attendees. Event marketing may be a more effective way to reach small customers.
    • The company that you hired should be answering these questions for you.
  • Marketing is about creating an environment in which people are aware of you and find you versus your having to go out and find them. Social media have fundamentally changed the marketing challenge, emphasizing pull versus push marketing – commercials, ads, billboards, etc.
  • An important role of marketing is perception management so that when a lead or need arises, your company is a natural answer.
  • Whether or not you hire a person, you need a marketing plan. Once you have a plan, you need a marketing budget.
  • The company is now at 35+ employees. Fischer’s growth curve research indicates that at this size you need a professional in the marketing position – someone with experience who knows the ropes. This person could be inside or outside.

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