Jure Klepic2013-05-25T23:46:31-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=jure-klepicCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Jure KlepicGood old fashioned elbow grease.Organizing Your Organizational Culturetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32206972013-05-06T13:14:48-04:002013-05-06T13:14:53-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/Academy of Management Journal, "Responding to Organizational Identity Threats: Exploring the Role of Organizational Culture," authors Davide Ravasi and Majken Schultz found that organizational culture is a set of shared mental assumptions which guide actions by defining appropriate behavior.
Our workplace cultures of today evolved out of the tribal cultures of yesterday. As humans we feel a strong urge to attach ourselves as part of a tribe and that pull continues into today's workplace. A culture includes values, visions, norms, jargon, systems, beliefs and work habits. These cultural mores and standards affect the way members of the organization interact with each other, customers, prospects and stakeholders.
In a 2010 presentation to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Kenneth Desson and Joseph Clouthier answered the question, "Organizational Culture - Why Does It Matter?" When individuals feel they are valued members of a team, the company can adapt to change, increase its competitiveness, and survive the harshest of economic swings. In a business with an unhealthy organizational culture, there is no overreaching standard of excellence so employees often act as individuals trying to achieve their own goals instead of those of the organization. An unhealthy organizational culture can result in the failure of the entire company, as seen in the culture of greed that overran Enron or the culture of indifference that has led to so many mining disasters.
To achieve competitiveness, productivity, efficiency and growth, managers need to work towards establishing a healthy organizational culture. But how can they influence the members of today's workforce to join together and move in a positive direction? Best-selling author and corporate strategist Stan Slap offers some solutions in his latest book, Bury My Heart at Conference Room B: The Unbeatable Impact of Truly Committed Managers.
Slap's management and training company is renowned for achieving maximum commitment in manager, employee and customer cultures -- the three groups that decide the success of any business. When these groups form as cultures in a company, they are far more self-protective, far more intelligent and far more resistant to standard methods of corporate influence. Not only have they revolutionized over 200 companies, Slap's team developed a plan that allowed Oracle to sell their strategic intent to 167 countries, and was also voted one of the ten most important things to happen to Warner Music Group for helping to grow their most profitable division by over 300 percent over three years.
Rackspace credited their move from 75th to 34th on the Fortune Best Places to Work report to the fact that "Rackspace culture connects Rackers with the mission in a way that is meaningful for them and aligned with their values." Beth Comstock, chief executive officer at NBC Digital Media (formerly chief marketing officer at General Electric) said, "I wish we'd had Stan Slap at GE during our branding efforts."
In the book Slap focuses on the importance of commitment and emotion to building an effective organizational culture. Managers are not only shown how to sharpen their management skills in order to influence others to achieve results, they also learn how to make their own jobs more fulfilling. Slap even shows readers how to sell it to themselves, their people and their company. If you're thinking about reorganizing your organization to be more effective, this is the book to read first.]]>Fieldoo Scores Big in Social Media for Sportstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31580022013-04-25T17:48:34-04:002013-04-25T17:48:41-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/
Actually, somebody has - Fieldoo. We are just not aware of it because it deals solely with soccer (football to the rest of the world) and that sport still doesn't get much attention in our country. But this sport is so popular everywhere else that they were clamoring to find a better way to match up players, coaches, agents and clubs. Fieldoo aims to fill this void by combining the strengths of the World Wide Web with a thirst for player contacts.
Patterning itself as the "LinkedIn of football," Fieldoo is working to connect sports people from all over the world, and it is quickly building its appeal. Currently there are over 5000 members. Counters on the landing page reveal that 1624 agents and 147 user countries are already involved in this rapidly growing social network. Agents have the ability to get a business page, find a perfect player, get hired and earn money. Players can put together their soccer resume, find career opportunities, and share their soccer stories. Both have the capability to market, search and connect.
Jure Doler, Fieldoo's CMO, believes that the platform has such an impact because there are so many transfers in the game of soccer. Research conducted by FIFA (the ruling body for World Cup Soccer) showed that transfers in 2011 occurred every 45 minutes. Some 70% involved signings of free agents. The amount of information and contact needed to make those agreements was overwhelming, so Fieldoo set out to simplify the process by digitizing and enhancing the dealings between football players and agents. This new capability is changing the way they connect.
Players can now network and present their skills to agents from around the world. Agents can quickly filter through players to find those with the exact skills they need. This worldwide capability allowed an agent working out of a Spanish agency to find a player from Slovenia and sign him to a soccer club in Thailand.
Fieldoo intends to become a reference in the world of sports representation and promotion, so imagine what could happen if this capability is applied to the process of selecting football players in America. Talented youngsters from smaller schools might be able to represent themselves to the best colleges. Lesser agents would have access to a wider variety of players, and teams would have better information on which to base their player selection. Everyone would be on a more level playing field because it would break the grip of the current power structure and bring a new openness to the game.
Social media has always represented itself as the ultimate equalizer in the online world. Anyone with access to a computer can make connections, build a community and present their capabilities. LinkedIn has taken advantage of this networking capability to make finding a job easier in the business world. Perhaps Fieldoo represents the next evolution by applying social principles of community to the sports world.]]>Social Media Influence Is Much More Than This Forbes List Showstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31100922013-04-23T15:04:35-04:002013-04-23T15:04:47-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/The Top 20 Women Social Media Influencers. Those results were then incorporated into his follow-up blog, Who Are The Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers, 2013? Although Forbes claims no ownership of this list, when something so unsound and unimaginative is published under the Forbes imprimatur of useful business knowledge it raises concern about the battle between the need to publish content and the desire to maintain editorial legitimacy.
The integrity of the Forbes contributors has at times been called into question based on their remuneration and efforts to drive traffic to their own money-making ventures. But the criteria which Shaughnessy establishes for his list is enough to raise questions about his own credentials. Instead of finding out what really matters or developing his own standards, Shaughnessy uses PeekAnalytics as his primary guide for determining influence. With their tired standard of measuring Twitter followers, PeekAnalytics adds nothing to the conversation of influence measurement. Similar to every other list that has been made based solely on Twitter followers, there is no attention paid to the metrics of comments on their blogs, content quality and other social networks.
Instead of useful metrics, PeekAnalytics has a measurement it calls "Pull" which is supposed to show how much greater one individual's audience is than that of the average social media user. His top influencers supposedly have pull that is two to three thousand times greater than the ordinary individual. In truth though, this notion of pull is as weak as a Klout score because it relates nothing about substance, vision, and power to motivate action. It doesn't even rate originality. If someone tweets, "Hey did you hear the latest Kardashian joke?" and it gets 10,000 retweets, is that really more influential than somebody who tweets something innovative or profound and only gets 1,000?
He also says that his criteria included the notion that:
"The experts had to be writing about social media and not just marketing, though that criterion was loosely applied -- writing about social media and content marketing, for example, qualified people. We also looked for people who create content on a regular basis -- not just people who are distributing other people's content via Twitter."
The list itself negates his criteria because some people don't blog about either of these topics, and do only share or reproduce other's ideas as their own. In the old days, this would have been called plagiarism; now it is simply providing content.
There is nothing which states if there was any effort to track the credentials of those listed or are we simply to believe those who say they are experts in their field? While there is nothing wrong with flipping burgers, I fail to see how someone who was doing so less than three years ago can suddenly become a brand or social media expert ... Some people that did make this Forbes list don't even work in the social space. They may blog a bit as a sideline, but the reality is that the ability to create a Facebook page or gather a million followers doesn't mean you have any real experience.
What Do You Have to Do to Get on a Forbes List?
As with any list, it is possible to actually get things right sometimes and there are at least a few people like Christopher Pen, Marsha Collier, Ann Handley and few others on the list that can truly be called influencers. But the very core of the list is wrong because it is built on faulty assumptions of what influence is. How many of these people did something remarkable on the social web? Although the main definition of influence includes the ability to motivate an action, a simple retweet does not meet the standard of influence. Is the truth more likely that this is self-promotional and designed to drive traffic to the same old set of bloggers who are paid for blogging?
Forbes list shows no obvious understanding of what it really means to be an influencer or thought leader on today's social web. People who deserve to be here are too busy working to change the conversation, and are not worrying about their Klout score or number of Twitter followers. They don't trumpet their scores as if they were all that mattered. Instead they focus on what really does matter.
How can any list which purports to be about the brightest and the best in the field omit Seth Godin and his work on tribes and community, or Brian Solis, one of the most preeminent thinkers of the day who is driving the future of social media and communications? Marjorie Clayman is leading conversation behind how to use social media in B2B and she is also very well known for supporting and making a voice for social good.
Finally, who is more of an influencer in education and the power of the positive than Angela Maiers, whose name will probably never appear on one of these lists? These people are all professionals who are moving the needle in this social space. They have education and experience and are not just proclaiming themselves as experts.
What Influence Is, For Those Who Don't Know
It seems that today everyone thinks they can write and preach about influence, even though they have no clue as to what influence is. In order to rank people on the ability to influence we need to understand influence, not just define it. When people just try to define influence they come away with something as useless as what is used in this post.
The real definition of influence is quite simple -- influence is the power to sway. But understanding influence is far more than just knowing this definition. Understanding influence in contemporary online world means understanding contemporary notions of identity and identity construction. Identity, ideas of person and self are cultural constructs; they are ideas and values that are part of our culture.
So the real question here should not be who will make the next Forbes list, but how can the author of an article about influence omit the names of so many of the brightest and best thought leaders in the field? This is especially shocking when you consider that all of the people who did land on his list were, or still are, inspired by some of these very same people? Those who have been omitted are at the forefront of the social universe and indeed are the reason that we can talk about the things shaping marketing in social space today. There are very few people like Brian Solis who is out there every day blogging and bringing creative ideas to the table, but he and these others aren't even recognized or rewarded as the leaders they really are.
Shame on you, Forbes.]]>Feathering Our Community With Nestivitytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30527662013-04-16T14:41:15-04:002013-04-16T14:41:33-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/
Now the Internet-age has helped us establish world-wide communities with people who have a similar thought process to ours. We like engaging in conversation with these people and sharing our ideas. As we find a product or service we enjoy we share it with others and influence them to use it because we believe it will be of benefit to them or make their lives easier, too.
There have been some bumps along the way to this universal feeling of community, though. While we have done a good job of building our personal communities, business marketers have not been quite so effective. In December 2012 Constant Contact conducted a survey of 1100 participants in its Small Biz Council regarding their use of social media. While the survey found that 82 percent of the respondents feel that Facebook is effective for their business, only 29 percent say LinkedIn is effective, 25 percent for Twitter and 15 percent for the most visual medium of all, YouTube.
In spite of this increasing effectiveness, over half believe their social media marketing skills still need help. Because of this they don't post as often as they need to or know how to build a feeling of community. Only 13 percent post to Twitter on a daily basis, let alone engage in conversation with prospects and customers.
Mark Schmulen, general manager, social media, Constant Contact commented that, "While the majority of small businesses are 'experimenting' with social, those who have found success have learned that social media marketing requires a commitment to engaging their audience on a consistent basis." Unfortunately, that commitment isn't there. In fact, another study by The Acquity Group of Interbrand's 2012 Best Retail Brands found that a full 73 percent of customer tweets were ignored. In fact, companies were least likely to respond to or engage with customers via Twitter than any other social media channel evaluated.
Business Can Benefit by Flying Over to Nestivity
Nestivity, the first and only community engagement platform for Twitter, promises to provide a better way to manage followers. Currently in beta testing, the goal is to enable users to respond faster to complaints and questions, and keep followers engaged.
Nestivity turns a Twitter handle into a "Nest" for all of a user's followers to visit. Tweets then become a focal point for engaging in discussions. The site allows users to organize and engage followers, amplify reach and archive a history. Nesters can either start a conversation or encourage the community to start one of its own. A dashboard monitors conversations and allows participants to focus on conversations and manage them. Instead of scrolling through tweets that randomly skip around from one point to another, a business marketer can now respond quickly to complaints, compliments or questions.
With this new twist on social media, business marketers will have a much better chance of building a community and talking to customers instead of at them. It also allows influencers to stand out so marketers can build stronger relationships with them. Finally, a social media tool that helps build communities instead of isolating us all.]]>The Age of Collaborative Marketing Has Arrivedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30104012013-04-04T18:03:48-04:002013-04-04T18:03:53-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/
That strategy began faltering in the not-so-distant past as the rise of social media saw a return to more personal forms of communication. Marketers first realized they could use tools like Sysomos and Radian6 to eavesdrop and listen in on consumer conversations. As Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media platforms grew they embarked on the process of social management by trying to build a following.
YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr and an ever-increasing variety of outlets soon returned control to the consumers. Over 80% of online content is now user-generated and it can be difficult for the marketer to get an "ad in edgewise." That's why we are entering the third phase of social marketing, which is collaborative. Marketers now need to develop deep relationships with their core consumers so they can easily inform and ideate with them and motivate people to advocate for their brand. This represents a fundamental paradigm shift from marketing at consumers to marketing with consumers.
Invite Consumers Into The Marketing Process
One company leading the way for the collaborative marketing revolution is Crowdtap. The New York-based firm is growing rapidly with its philosophy of helping clients unlock real value by partnering with consumers throughout the marketing process. CEO and founder Brandon Evans reports that sales for 2013 have already exceeded all of 2012, when they grew 500%. Crowdtap was recently named as one of the Forbes' 100 Most Promising Companies and is now working with over 40 Fortune 500 brands.
As an industry innovator, Crowdtap just published a thought-provoking white paper, The Collaborative Marketing Future: How Co-creation and Advocacy Will Drive Winning Companies. The paper creates a convincing case for the "Three As of Collaborative Marketing" - attract, assist, affiliate.
Crowdtap's paper includes five trends and five steps to building a collaborative brand, but the key takeaway is that consumers will provide brands with an endless amount of ideas, insights and content when given the opportunity. They are then willing to become staunch advocates for the product. Crowdtap client, Post Foods, uses the collaborative approach to great effect with its market research team. Emily Stern, Integrated Insights and Strategy, states that "Through collaborative marketing we are able to form a connection with passionate consumers who really want to get involved in how their favorite brands evolve. By doing so, we hope to grow consumer satisfaction and, ultimately, strengthen brand loyalty. We're fortunate to have a strong partnership with Crowdtap that enables us to do exactly that while generating real-time, actionable insights."
Iskra Dobreva, Social Media Strategist at Verizon, adds that, "Developing deep relationships with consumer advocates has become an increasingly important way for us to build loyalty and gain new customers. Over the past six months we have used the Crowdtap platform to help us scale these relationships and their impact."
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was once famously quoted as saying that "A more open and connected world will help create...more authentic businesses and better products and services." That vision is already being realized, and its name is collaborative marketing.]]>Can Business Use Social Media to Succeed?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29943222013-04-02T17:22:37-04:002013-04-02T17:22:46-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/
Usually the leaders in observing changing consumer habits, businesses are lagging far behind in trying to figure out how to utilize these transformed behaviors to their advantage. Just think about some of the companies in business today. How many were here yesterday and how many will still be here tomorrow? What is the crucial difference that will make one business succeed beyond anyone's wildest imagination and another formerly successful business crash and burn?
JC Penney was once at the top of the retail world, but now watches the losses pile up as customers flock away from their newly-reconfigured stores and marketing strategy. Best Buy made great gains as the purveyor of modern technology, but is now closing many of those same retail locations. For some, it is a basic misunderstanding of changing consumer needs, but for others it is a fundamental refusal to engage consumers on their terms in the social media universe.
It's Time for Business to Get Social
It's obvious that businesses will have to undertake a major transformation in consumer interaction, but how can this be accomplished when so many CMOs have not taken the social media world to heart? Thankfully, digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Brian Solis, has released a new book which will illuminate the way. What's the Future of Business: Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences (WTF) is a thoughtful, straightforward explanation of why and how businesses can become more personal and create consumer experiences instead of just marketing, selling and servicing them.
The follow-up piece to his seminal work, The End of Business As Usual: Rewire the Way You Work to Succeed in the Consumer Revolution, Solis uses his insights on the effects of emerging media to take the WTF reader through a journey of discovery and enlightenment. He helps the reader understand the dynamics of the changing consumer landscape and provides solid input on what companies can do to adapt and lead.
A principal analyst at the Altimeter Group, Solis knows the difference between online influence and online popularity, and understands that connected consumers expect and demand more from the companies they deal with and the products they buy. When dissatisfied, these empowered consumers are more than willing to share a negative experience, but it is much more difficult to create a positive experience that will be shared amongst their circles of influence. He uses his three principles of influence -- reach, resonance and relevance -- to show corporate leaders and marketers how to create and insure an amazing consumer experience.
Solis asserts that "The future of business is about creating experiences, products, programs and processes that evoke splendor and rekindle meaningful and sincere interaction and growth. At the center of this evolution -- or (r)evolution -- is the experience." By learning to create experiences, businesses will be released from the current unproductive norm of simply responding to experiences.
Although Solis is known the world over as a thought leader in new media, he is best recognized for his capacity to make seemingly simple, yet potentially trend-shattering observations. When he says that the future of business comes down to relevance and the ability to understand how technology affects decision-making, we had better sit up and pay attention.]]>Will Bang With Friends Bring Klout to Its Climax?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29006712013-03-20T15:13:33-04:002013-05-20T05:12:02-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/post author Mark Wilson (who also somewhat surprisingly started Philanthroper.com as a simple way to give back every day) asks whether Bang With Friends (BWF) is the beginning of a sexual revolution on Facebook. Although describing it as disruptive, Wilson says that this app conveniently highlights prospective Facebook friends of the opposite sex and allows you to simply click if you would like to, ahem, bang them. If you match with a friend who has indicated a similar interest in you, you're notified by email and on your way to real fun.
Despite Wilson's question about whether this is the beginning of the online sexual revolution, it may also be the end of the real world social media revolution. Beyond being merely disruptive, this app is unnecessary, ridiculous and upsetting to some point. What has happened to the idea of meeting someone, building a relationship, and getting to know more about that person as an individual rather than making judgments based on superficial criteria? Flying in the face of all this logical reasoning however is the illogical fact that Bang With Friends is quickly making lots of friends of its own and moving its way up the social space ladder.
When social media began we all had such great visions of its many positive applications for marketing, communications and philanthropy, but it is desolving too soon into only being able to fulfill the most base of human activities. What needs and uses can or should we reserve for the social space? We are all aware that social media has spread through the online world faster than an STD in a brothel, and know that certain portions of the population seem to find it useful for finding unsuspecting victims. We probably should have guessed that this would be the next logical step for the college crowd, but we really need to take action now to reclaim social media as a way to build relationships before all of this goes too far.
Will Banging Bring Klout to Its Knees?
In a follow-up post, Wilson says that Bang With Friends is now aiming to become Facebook's "Klout for Banging." Because of the astounding initial response he reports that the app has laid claim to as many as 100,000 hookups and is now looking to build on its earlier success. The app will be expanded to facilitate LGBT matching and is currently trying to quantify online sex appeal. With their new "leaderboard" of your most bangable friends, BWF has now fallen into the same erroneous assumption as Klout that their high scores are measuring something worthwhile.
By equating clicks with bangability BWF comes up with possible matches like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart in much the same way that Klout equates popularity with influence in order to anoint Justin Bieber as an influencer. The truth is that if Klout were to start measuring analytics the same way that BWF does, it would be the only real action that they are measuring. Klout has done such a poor job of defining influence that silly innocuous apps like Bang With Friends actually do carry the possibility of bringing it to a real climax, or end.
Marketers need to take control of the social media world before Klout and BWF drag us so far down that we cannot recover. Klout can't even come to the influence conversation because of its lazy definition of influence. The more you Tweet, the higher your score in their book. But, if you take time away for a vacation, your Klout score plummets and you are no longer considered an influencer.
Let's go back to developing a usable, realistic definition of what it means to be an influencer so we can devise helpful analytics that may actually be useful in spotting the online influencers. We need to bring the marketers, cultural analysts, innovators, and anthropologists to the conversation before these poor excuses for a marketing tool become the norm. Something like BWF might seem silly or of limited appeal to the college crowd, but it could pose a real danger to those of us who are trying to understand and develop the social world for positive purposes. Measuring influence is a deep and nuanced process, not to be left to the simplest of definitions. It must start with the ability to effect change and influence behavior, not with the opportunity to make it easier to hook up with someone you like on Facebook.]]>Tweeting for Businesstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28670402013-03-18T15:53:06-04:002013-05-18T05:12:01-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/study about Twitter cast some interesting light on this social phenomenon. It found that events which are sometimes heralded as "trending on Twitter" are in truth simple irrational exuberance or people expressing negativity, and not necessarily reflective of public opinion as a whole. The Center stated that only a sliver of the American adult population is actually using Twitter. Despite the apparent drawbacks, can American companies use this social media opportunity to effectively market and promote their business?
Clayman Marketing Communications, a full service, business-to-business advertising and marketing communications firm in Akron, Ohio, pointed to some possible opportunities in a white paper entitled, "Tweeting for Business: A Social Media Starter's Kit." Company VP of Client Services, Margie Clayman, has successfully used the medium to help their company grow. Although Twitter's uses for a business-to-consumer platform can be easily seen, when asked if this form of social media can work for business-to-business, Clayman said that it depends on the product and sales cycle.
Tweeting in a b-to-b environment can help build brand awareness and engagement, but tracking to sales can be difficult. A business strategy for Twitter might include driving attendance to trade shows, becoming a voice for the industry, connecting with industry influencers, and establishing top-of-mind awareness. It is also a great opportunity to capture the attention of younger professionals entering the job market.
Clayman advises that the first step in developing a social media strategy for business is research to gain insights into what the competition is doing, what customers want, and what the objectives should be for a social media program. One person should be dedicated as the voice of the company and a budget set regarding the amount of time to be invested. When it comes to setting goals and tracking ROI, it is also helpful to read Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization by Olivier Blanchard.
Businesses should think of Twitter as another component of the marketing strategy tool box. It is part of the new form of personal communication, not the mass communication to which marketers may be accustomed. Since there must be a commitment to consistency, it is helpful to develop a strategy in advance for a stream of regular Tweets for the business to send to its followers. Because a Tweet is such a limited length of communication, marketers should follow the "jab" theory of communication -- hit them with one short point, hit them with another short point, hit again with a different take on the first point, and so on -- just enough to make followers stop and take notice of what is being said.
Tweets should be representative of the company's business philosophy, but not self-promotional. They should be relevant about something followers need to know, educational about something they don't know, or informational about an event or service. A company can share blog posts or drive followers to new information on its website. Twitter can also be useful for engaging followers in a conversation and building relationships. Be interactive so they will comment back and start a dialogue. Since the next step is to do something with these leads from a sales perspective, the sales team should be involved in the planning and development process.
Twitter may be the new kid to the marketing block, but with thoughtful planning and implementation, it can help businesses communicate to their target audience in a consistent and cost-effective way.]]>Is America's Innovation Imagination Trivial?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28085232013-03-05T14:24:02-05:002013-05-05T05:12:01-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/Wall Street Journal published an article by Robert J. Gordon, a professor at Northwestern University, who presented his opinion that the future of economic growth in the U.S. is bleak, even though we have achieved a 2% growth rate between 1891 and 2007. Nobel laureate Edmund S. Phelps took Gordon's thought process even further in the New York Times when he commented that less innovation has widened inequality in the United States.
These dire predictions may have caught the attention of the White House as President Obama commented in January that, "The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation." He laid out a challenge for the U.S. to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the world. Of course the government's solution is to throw more money at the problem in the form of corporate partnerships for research and development.
But corporate America isn't much better at the innovation game. When faced with the challenge of a stagnant economy, a stale product, or fickle consumers, the solution is often to gather top executives in a room for an intense brainstorming session. The problem with this approach, according to Albert Einstein, is that "we cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
Fortunately, there is somebody who really is bringing a new approach to innovation. Debra Kaye is an international innovation expert specializing in cultural strategy and innovation for consumer businesses. She is the innovator behind many brand success stories for Dove Chocolate, Mars Petcare, American Express, L'Oreal, Groupe Danone and Colgate, who encourages corporations to look at their products differently, to crystallize their branding and marketing strategies in bolder ways to truly resonate with consumers.
Now Kaye has taken these insights and uses them to help us unlock our inner innovator in her new book, Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation. Based on the Oriental legend of the red thread, Kaye builds on a foundation which states that innovations are made up of threads or relationships that weave together into a fabric of interconnectivity which spawns new insights. She believes that insight is no accident and that everyone is capable of designing and developing thoughts into smart and practical innovations for everyday living.
Instead of the tired brainstorming approach Kaye maintains that anything--even doing laundry--will help you dream up new ideas better than sitting in a meeting. She asserts that the conventional wisdom that innovation can be institutionalized in a formal group is wrong. Our brains don't make connections in a rigid atmosphere because there is too much pressure and too much influence from others in the group. Unique ideas blossom best when your brain is relaxed and engaged in something other than the task at hand. Steamy showers, ambling walks -anything other than rigid brainstorming sessions.
Kaye's contrarian approach doesn't stop at brainstorming. She doesn't believe in innovating based on trends either, which is a prevailing industry practice. She sees those as ephemeral. Rather she takes a much broader anthropological approach to finding hidden connections deep in our culture for businesses to discover new ways to generate ideas. Her five simple, yet deeply profound, red threads include universal truths, which make approach to both problem and opportunity of innovation completely new and fresh.
Debra Kaye believes that we all have the power to design and develop thoughts into things. I tested some of her ideas and was surprised at how empowering they really were. They work.
Do you agree that America is losing its ability to innovate or do you think that we can use new skills to out-innovate the world? Leave a comment below and share what you think it takes to grow an idea into an innovation that makes everyone say, "Why didn't I think of that?"]]>VascoDe Sees Phones Emerging As a Powerful Force in Social Mediatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27688082013-02-27T15:46:07-05:002013-04-29T05:12:01-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/
In its report, "The World in 2050," PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) estimates that the Chinese economy will overtake the U.S. by 2025, but that is not the most surprising part. PWC also estimates that the Indian economy will leap from its current place as eleventh largest to the third largest world economy by 2050, only slightly behind the U.S. Other areas and countries that could become world economic leaders include Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico, several countries in the Middle East, as well as Turkey and Malaysia. Representing a population of 4 to 5 billion people, many in the prized 18-24 year old demographic, these emerging markets could dramatically alter the world's financial landscape.
Technology could play a major role in propelling these economies forward, except that some of the very same factors that work in their favor also work against them. Imagine 4 to 5 billion more people with access to Facebook and Twitter and you'll see that the world of social media influence could quickly be turned on its head. That raises the logical question of how to provide access to emerging markets where there is no telephone or electrical infrastructure in place to tap into the worldwide web. Data costs are outrageously high, most people can't afford the expense of smartphones or only have access to basic mobile phones, sufficient electrical power is not available, and internet cafes currently offer the only way to access the internet.
What if all that could be changed? One emerging company, VascoDe Technologies, an Israeli Cloud service, is betting their own future as well as the future of these countries, on their process of simplifying and fitting social media into the different needs and infrastructure limitations presented in emerging markets. Founded in 2004, VascoDe established operations in 2009 to enable mobile operators in these emerging economies to generate revenue from services which work on all mobile devices. Their patent-pending Client-less Mobile Interaction (CMI) system enables users of simple phones to enjoy advanced applications, such as Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and mobile Skype, without installing any additional software. Users simply dial a short access code and engage in real-time sessions that rely on VascoDe's cloud server.
Innovation is Key at VascoDe
According to Dorron Mottes, VascoDe's founder and CEO, innovation is a key value for the company's on-going growth. "We take innovation methodologically," said Mottes. "We cut across fields such as business, technology and operations and burn innovation into our company's DNA." As a serial entrepreneur, Mottes has over 18 years of experience in executive level management positions, managing and leading new initiatives from inception to implementation and significant sales.
Mottes says that helping emerging markets tap into the global conversation feels something like a "back to the future" or "straight-on to the past" approach. "As we're raising and facing very deep questions about the digital social life established economies are accustomed to, we are at the same time trying to figure out how to simplify and fit its essence to the different needs and capabilities of the emerging markets."
To help find solutions to these seemingly-insurmountable obstacles VascoDe has developed a set of tools which support and enhance what they see as essential for continued innovation. These tools include rapid prototyping and evaluation, as well as instituting methodologies for gathering and analyzing feedback. The product line evolves based on direct feedback from the field, both statistical and personal.
As part of the evolution of its overall vision, VascoDe sought to identify key values of socializing emerging markets. They wanted to analyze and appreciate cultural differences while still responding to cultural similarities seen in the human need to communicate and interact, speak out, find employment, show off, and pair up. Providing answers to these social needs required VascoDe to reshape and even fine-tune such well-established communication mechanisms as Facebook and Gmail to fit the target needs.
The challenges to fulfilling this vision included reachability, technical, social and business. But collaboration within a team of seasoned entrepreneurs, managers and experts allowed an ego-free creative process where room for new ideas could be created along with the predefined plans. VascoDe also leveraged its own social family network of partners, investors, and special experts as part of the innovation process through brainstorming sessions via mail, telephone or in-person meetings.
In answer to the "million dollar question" of whether innovation in an organization should be centrally managed or distributed, VascoDe decided to have it both ways. It is centered by a dedicated person, but all employees are encouraged to contribute. There are daily discussions and sharing of knowledge, a funneling process for new ideas, and a prototyping system for analysis of ideas with potential. Ten percent of the company's R&D efforts are allocated to innovation in products, technologies and solutions.
Mottes concluded with a sample story of the impact VascoDe's innovation can have. "We contacted one of the people we met in the field test," he related. "This person told us that our service changed his life because he could now apply to jobs with email and check it for responses on a daily basis. Although checking email has almost become a burden to the western economies, for those in the emerging markets it is a life-changer."
This all proves that you don't necessarily have to look to the so-called market leaders to see the future. We have already seen how social media has changed the face of communication in the U.S. market, but companies like VascoDe are already innovating how they can change the face of communication in the world market.]]>Impressions Aren't Impressivetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27292192013-02-21T16:29:53-05:002013-04-23T05:12:01-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/
Even with measurement systems more consequential than gross impressions, there are still several problems with their real values. A newspaper might say it has a potential readership of "x" amount, but how many of those people are seeing the specific page or actually looked at a specific ad? The same is true for electronic media that promise a certain size audience. Super Bowl advertisers paid millions of dollars for thirty seconds of airtime, but how much of the promised audience was actually in the room and paying attention when their ads ran?
Since the online world does not currently have any standards when it comes to determining effectiveness, calculating impressions with today's online media is even more dubious. Anyone can promise millions of impressions and advertisers apparently willingly stand in line to spend their money. Beware! Big impression counts don't mean high audience reach. In dozens of campaign tests spanning many websites, Nielsen consistently found that while the web can deliver many millions of impressions, only a small amount reach the desired target audience.
Add to this mishmash that an online media impression may be counted for an ad that is not fully in view. Yes, those partial view seats at the theater that are not full price, well, on the Internet you may just pay full cost per impression, even though that served ad is not fully in view. Online advertisers are trying to get a handle on viewable ad impressions with the "Making Measurement Make Sense" (3MS) initiative, but the pilot uncovered challenges regarding the number of impressions that could not be measured for viewability.
When the discussion is more focused to social media, the lack of value for online impressions becomes even more pronounced. One just need look at how our well-known social media experts are calculating impressions. Current wisdom has a blissfully simple, yet totally useless, formula: the number of followers multiplied by number of tweets. So, for example, if someone with 10,000 followers sends out one tweet, the assumption is that there are 10,000 online impressions. Even supposed measurement tools like Hashtracking.com and TweetReach don't take two very important points into consideration:
the number of active users (followers) at the time a Tweet is sent; and
a misconstrued definition of reach, stating that the total number of your followers is equal to the reach of your message. This is wrong as there is no way to ascertain that all of one's followers have viewed or would have interest in the current topic.
How Should Brands Really Measure Social Media Effectiveness?
In late 2011, Seth Godin posted a blog called "Moving Beyond Impressions," in which he talked about how commonplace it had become for online advertisers to brag about getting millions of impressions. Instead of impressions, Godin recommended focusing on perception and interaction, but apparently nobody was listening. Given that interaction is a primary goal of social media, measurement tools need to be created that take into account the power of social media influencers to affect behavior.
There has also been some fanfare about Nielsen's relationship with Facebook. The two companies announced an alliance to "help marketers better use the Internet." Not surprisingly, their product, Nielsen BrandLift, promises to provide a tool for measuring the effectiveness of advertising, but only on Facebook. In a seeming contradiction, last October, Facebook itself said that reach, frequency, and impressions matter more than clicks, but again only as they relate to paid advertising.
All of this dysfunction and uncertainty in measurement should ultimately serve as a wake-up call to brand marketers that the concept of measuring online impressions really means nothing at all, especially when it comes to social media. What brands should really focus on measuring are relationships, engagements, actions taken, increased revenue, and so on. These are signs that the social in social media is being used properly.
A brand should not be concerned about the number of "likes" it gets on Facebook as much as the number of its Facebook followers that are willing to provide a recommendation to a friend. A tweet to a thousand followers that take action is more valuable than a tweet to a million followers who take no action. And a social media influencer who can't motivate his or her followers to change their behavior regarding a brand is of no value to that brand at all.
Don't be confused by the apparent ability to suddenly measure online impressions. Dig deeper and find out what they are really promising to measure before investing any marketing dollars.]]>How Educators Can Empower Students and Themselves Through Technologytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25863622013-01-31T14:00:02-05:002013-04-02T05:12:01-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/
On the other hand they are faced with the harsh reality of teaching in today's economic environment. Federal, state and local government budgets are under continued stress to hold the line on costs and taxes. With school boards focusing on possible cutbacks, mergers and closings, teachers are complaining that they have no resources available to help develop students' skills.
Fortunately technology can come to the rescue for many of these beleaguered and frustrated teachers. Since so much of the future will be based on technology, it only makes sense for technology to play a critical role in training tomorrow's workforce. Microsoft has taken up the cause of providing educational resources by making a substantial commitment to its Partners in Learning (PiL) program.
PiL supports teachers in their ongoing efforts to provide students with the personal development and technical skills needed to thrive and succeed. Teachers have access to a multitude of resources for imparting the crucial skills, such as critical thinking, collaboration, creativity and problem-solving, their learners need to achieve both business and personal growth.
Helping Students Realize Their Full Potential
Through the Partners in Learning program Microsoft says that it has helped train more than 11 million teachers and reached over 200 million students. Educators in this worldwide community can access free resources such as Learning Suite, which includes free software add-ons to popular Microsoft products, Office 365 for education training materials, a Critical Thinking Teaching Guide, Local Language Tools, the Microsoft Digital Literacy Curriculum, and much more. Teachers can collaborate with a community of like-minded educators from around the world and enhance their own personal development. It's also great place for teachers who aren't so tech-savvy to go and get advice, tutorials and learn from other people's lesson plans.
Andrew Ko, General Manager, U.S. Partners in Learning, says that, "We believe that education is the most effective way to develop the skills needed for better economic opportunities and outcomes, but we can't educate tomorrow's leaders with tools and practices from the past. We must continue to invest in the development of enhanced learning environments that lead to better outcomes. Effective teachers are the number one predictor of student success. We want to help equip every teacher with the tools and resources they need to ensure they are the most effective they can be."
Students themselves are already geared into using technology to boost their future. From their comfort with using smartphones to manage their daily lives to the use of social media as their sole means of connection and communication, students are intuitively prepared to integrate technology into their everyday workplace environment as they grow older. They are teaching themselves how to use their social media influence to affect behavior and create change in others. When these basic skills are encouraged and nourished by a caring teacher who is backed up with innovative resources, who knows what our students will be able to achieve?
Our students do matter. They have the ability to achieve their own growth and to shape the course of our world, and need to be provided with the personal development resources they require to achieve their own promise. We must use technology to empower them and the teachers who are molding their young minds. Teachers will play a crucial role in shaping the minds of the next generation and helping them realize their full potential.]]>Organic Brands From Australia Making Inroads in the U.S. Markettag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24741432013-01-14T15:51:45-05:002013-03-16T05:12:02-04:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/"Crocodile" Dundee, the Australians are quietly pursuing marketing strategies to place their organic products in the hands of eager U.S. consumers.
Organic products are made without using synthetic chemicals or genetically modified components. According to the state government of Victoria, "The Australian organic food industry is booming; it is currently worth around $200-$250 million per year domestically and a further $50-$80 million per year in exports with an expected annual growth of up to 60 percent."
Now the Australians are expanding beyond the organic food and beverage market to include everything organic -- skin care, hair care, baby products, pet food, clothing, and a full line of products for organic homes and gardens. These exporters hope to capture a share of the huge, consumer-driven U.S. market, which surpassed $31 billion in 2011, an increase of 9.5 percent, according to the Organic Trade Association's 2012 Organic Industry Survey. While the majority of these sales were in the food area, the non-food sector reached $2.2 billion, an increase of 11 percent. According to Business New Daily, "The survey predicted continued growth rates of nine percent and higher in 2012 and 2013."
According to Mandi Lebbos, CEO and founder of Love PR, an Australian PR firm with an office in Los Angeles, brands that develop and create a range of products focused on organic formulas and ingredients are rapidly being embraced by more consumers because there is more focus on educating the mass market on the possible effects and recurrence of harmful ingredients and chemicals found in many cosmetics and personal care products. Consumers are now becoming more aware of what they are putting on their skin and the long term benefits of transitioning to more natural and organic based products. Mandi cites Crystal Rock Deodorant as one example of a U.S. brand that has taken the natural path by developing a product made from natural mineral salts in place of irritants and unnecessary chemicals.
How Australian Organic Brands Plan to Penetrate the U.S. Market
According to Lebbos, the U.S. is a dream destination for Australian brands with goals of expanding to a larger consumer market. By comparison, the U.S. has a larger population and maintains international metropolitan hubs, home to the largest market of celebrities, fashion and beauty activity. Australian brands like Vani-T and NVEY ECO -- both launching in the U.S. in 2013 -- have built a following of dedicated Australian consumers because of their dedication and commitment to providing skin nurturing products that educate people about the benefits of using organic and natural based products and ingredients. A strong PR, communications and social media program will be used to convey these attributes to health-conscious American consumers.
"Public relations is extremely important for Australian brands looking to achieve success in the international market because the focus on educating the mass market is not something they are traditionally accustomed to," said Lebbos. "From native Australian ingredients to new and innovative ways of creating something as basic as a lip gloss, it's important for these Australian brands to assemble an effective team of PR and social media strategists to provide information that will educate the American public about these new brands."
Identifying social media influencers that can help spread their message to American consumers who are concerned about what goes into the products they use will help the Australian marketers achieve their lofty sales goals.]]>Better Gifting Through Listeningtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23270362012-12-19T03:12:12-05:002013-02-17T05:12:01-05:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/
I "borrowed" (or maybe pilfered) a copy of Santa's quotation checklist (don't tell!). All you have to do is find something your potential guest recipient says frequently and then match to quote bellow.
Once you know what category you're shopping in, you can check What's Topping Santa's gift List for gift ideas. You may also check out Top 10 Unique Christmas Gifts Ideas in slideshow bellow. That's all there is to it. It could be that simple for those in the marketing world as well. If today's marketers would take the time to learn Santa's secrets for being social, listening and engaging, it would be much easier for them to present consumers with the gift of products and services that can actually meet their needs on a daily basis. No more gift guessing; just sit back with a bright twinkle in your eye as they exclaim, "How did you know?" And to all a good marketing night - Ho, Ho, Ho!
]]>It's Time for Businesses to Get Socializedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22769932012-12-13T14:54:28-05:002013-02-12T05:12:01-05:00Jure Klepichttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/
The sheer volume of users in the social media universe makes it hard to ignore. Each day hoards of consumers and businesses turn to Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets for their communications fix. The venerable IBM, which ushered in the original computer age, now agrees that social is changing the way people connect and the way organizations succeed. Their website includes results from a 2010 McKinsey Global Survey which found that 9 out of 10 companies reported some element of measurable benefits from social business.
Becoming a social business involves engaging, sharing and collaborating with all of a company's stakeholders including employees, customers, prospects, management and investors. The goal is to efficiently utilize social processes to become more adaptive to changing times and more responsive to input. Instead of transmitting information in a controlled one-to-one manner, social allows for almost immediate communication to massive audiences.
In fact the question should no longer be why do we need to become more social, but why aren't we all becoming more social? Very few companies are taking an active role in becoming a social business, with most of them adopting a wait and see approach. This reluctance to jump in may come right from the corporate suite where CEOs at major corporations are participating in social media channels at significantly lower rates than the general public, according to a new study sponsored by Domo and CEO.com. Making matters worse are the results from an IBM survey entitled "From Stretched to Strengthened" which found that an astonishing 71 percent of CMOs feel unprepared for today's market challenges!
These companies are still going by the old marketing playbook and have not yet reached a tipping point where they feel they absolutely need to change to remain competitive. Some of them do have younger marketers coming up through the ranks who are more prepared to handle today's communication challenges, but these laggards need to be aware that other companies are already way out in front of them.
Some companies that are beginning to dip their feet into the social waters are using the same tired tools to develop their strategies. They are still trying to push information at consumers instead of working to engage and draw them in, or they are confusing popularity with influence in their efforts to find online outlets to help spread their message.
What these companies need is a new playbook for the social world. Fortunately one has just been released, Socialized! How the Most Successful Businesses Harness the Power of Social by Mark Fidelman. Mark believes that being social is not a one-time campaign but a year-round ingrained corporate strategy to keep in touch through social at all times. His game plan helps leaders gain the competitive advantage by combining social technologies with internal culture shifts. Insisting that being social is not merely a social presence but a willingness to engage and communicate, Fidelman provides tools to help marketers understand consumers and show them how to build communities in this brave new digital world. More of a textbook than just a book, Socialized! teaches marketers how to abandon the mass media mentality and embrace the social business model.]]>
