Recent Bookmarks and Annotations
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reportonbusiness.com: The sports fix on 2009-01-22
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Marketing and Social Media That Matters..the B2B perspective: groundswell on 2009-01-14
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shocker.jpg (image) on 2008-12-15
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Warren Buffett Sees "Fairly Significant" Chance U.S. Going Into Recession - Warren Buffett Watch - CNBC.com on 2008-12-03
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A lot of the ingredients are there for it. I will guarantee you, you are young, in your lifetime you will see 6 or 7 recessions, probably. That is just part of capitalism. And I don't know, I don't know exactly when they will happen. I don't know how deep they will be, but they will happen and sometimes they will be exacerbated in various ways by mistakes people have made in investment markets or maybe in the housing market or something of the sort.
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In terms of pure economics, you know, our children will live better than we live, our grandchildren will live better than our children. There is economic progress. Mankind has not used up its potential yet and we find ways to become more and more productive, turn out more and more goods and services that people want. So I'm a bull long-term on mankind's possibilities
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Preparation: Recession, Depression, or Panic? « Publius’ Forum on 2008-12-03
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While pessimism is not my nature, I see a dark cloud on the horizon. First, a major Depression followed by massive inflation. Informed Americans should make plans for some very difficult years ahead.
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@Work: More Recessionproof Industries on 2008-12-03
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Customer Affinity Is New B2B Marketing Measure - 01/23/2008 on 2008-12-03
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Council: Customer Affinity Is New B2B Marketing Measure
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Backed by a major new study, the CMO Council is urging B2B companies to create marketing performance models based on "customer affinity," a concept that the Council concludes is far more meaningful than "soft metrics" such as brand awareness/satisfaction or response rates to marketing campaigns.
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The study, "Profitability from Customer Affinity," was conducted in the B2B technology sector, but has far-reaching ramifications for many markets.
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engagement and interactivity with customers is far more meaningful and valuable than just blasting out one campaign after another
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the council believes that traditional brand measurements actually reinforce ineffective marketing practices and "severely limit the role and vision of the CMO."
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In contrast, companies' ability to develop strong interaction/
engagement with customers has "enormous impact" on their returns, and may actually be the most essential competitive advantage and determinant of their overall business performance in the years ahead, stresses Neale-May.
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Marketers, it stresses, "need to play a significant role in defining, orchestrating and activating all of the factors impacting customer affinity."
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B2B technology was chosen as the focus of the initial affinity study because of its size and importance (annual expenditures of $488.5 billion in the U.S. and $1.5 trillion worldwide) and its unique, complex set of customer relationship challenges
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Customer Affinity Index (CAI)
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In the tech market, the Council conducted extensive qualitative and quantitative research over a six-month period with senior-level IT buyers/specifiers; channel solution providers; marketers with IT manufacturers/vendors; and customer relationship, service and call-center executives.
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For starters, contrary to traditional marketer perceptions, branding isn't all that important to customers. Customers' top five factors in evaluating and selecting a tech vendor are level of competency, caliber of service and support, level of commitment, compatibility with existing infrastructure and quality of thinking-again, reaffirming the alignment theme. Brand perception/promise ranked in the bottom five responses.
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Customers say that the most important factor is strategic alignment of the vendor's organization with the customer. Meanwhile, alignment is "neither a top priority nor a real competency" among vendors/channel partners, concluded the researchers.
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No shock, then, that only 21% of vendor marketers themselves, and just 3% of channel partners, view vendors as being "extremely well-aligned" with the end-use customer.
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56% of vendors perceive themselves as being "extremely customer-centric," but only 12% of customers agree.
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85% of vendors believe they're getting better at responding to customer needs, but 45% of customers disagree (and 41% don't view channel partners as getting better at responding).
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52% of customers described their relationships with vendors as "dependent and captive," "struggling for common ground" or "combative and adversarial," and 45% described their relationships with channel partners in the same terms.
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Customers' top three factors are help desk and customer support center feedback channels, field technician and sales engineer visits, and input sessions around new-product road maps. Vendors' top three are executive visits and interactions, the help desk/customer support channels, and beta visits and interactions.
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How to Change the World: How to Use Twitter as a Twool on 2008-12-03
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If the concept of using Twitter in a commercial manner interests you, keep reading.
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You must buy into the theory that products and services reach critical mass because mere mortals spread the word for you.
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Influentials don’t have as much special access, special knowledge, and distribution as you might think because of the growth of websites, blogs, and, of course, Twitter.
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But mark my words: (a) Nobodies are the new somebodies, and (b) it’s better to have army of committed nobodies and than a few drive-by somebodies.
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One more point: if enough nobodies like what you do, the somebodies will have no choice but to write about you.
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The goal is to get to masses of people because you don’t know who can and will help you.
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Ignore people who tell you that it’s the quality of your followers not the quantity. They’re trying to make friends, not use Twitter as a tool.
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the more followers, the more people talking about what you do, the more you can reach the tipping point.
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However, if you go with your name, you need to not tweet only about your company—indeed, you have the moral obligation to tweet informative posts that have nothing to do with your company. You can see what I do
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I monitor this search [guykawasaki OR “Guy Kawasaki” OR Alltop] to follow what people are saying about me and Alltop.
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Searches like [how to Alltop] where you substitute your company or product name for “Alltop” are also useful to find tweets about using your product or service.
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When you find such tweets, take these actions:
People are pissed: help them out
People are confused: help them out
People who have questions: help them out
People are happy: ask them to spread the word
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Don’t be shy about asking people on Twitter to spread the word for you.
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We counted, and these 450 people had a total of 140,000 followers. This meant that whenever we announced a new topic, the 140,000 followers of 450 people received notification.
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This is a very important lesson: people must believe that what you’re marketing is great for their followers, and they must trust you.
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Here’s a guideline for creating something great.
Here’s how to build trust.
Here’s a complete explanation of evangelism.
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To fix these issues, we created the Alltop news and announcements
email list
. Through this list, we announce every new topic, and we let the recipients decide if they want to tweet it (or email it) to others. Also, they can obviousy edit and create their own tweet or message.
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One day I met with Rashmi Sinha, the CEO of
Slideshare. We got to talking about how she increased her traffic, and she told me that a “Post to Twitter” link was the most effective mechanism.
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I pick Twitter because it doesn’t involve a popularity contest to get on any front page—instead, all your followers will get the tweet.
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This is something that I don’t do, but I would if I ran an ecommerce company.
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check out what Amazon does by clicking
here and what Whole Foods does by clicking
here. Also, check out the stream of Twitter deals
here
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And rest assured that “Twitter spam” is an oxymoron because following you is completely opt-in.
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With some effort, you may come to view Twitter as I do: the best new marketing twool of this century. Tweet long and prosper.
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Social Networking is "good for business" on 2008-12-02
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Learning to love recessions - The McKinsey Quarterly - recession - Strategy - Strategic Thinking on 2008-12-02
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Some companies emerge from a recession stronger and more highly valued than they were before the economy soured. By making strategic choices that sometimes defy conventional wisdom, they increase their stock market valuations relative to those of their former peers and thus gain more power to shape their industries.
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To see how recessions can be used to advantage, we studied nearly 1,000 mainly industrial US companies over an 18-year period (1982–99) that included the US recession of 1990 to 1991.
1 We identified companies that either remained industry leaders (those that stayed in the top quartile of performance in their industries) or became successful challengers (those that moved up into the top quartile).
2 We then investigated the attributes of successful companies, both during the recession and in healthier economic times.
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Successful challengers, we found, maintained a greater appetite for acquisitions during the recession than did their less successful former peers. In periods of growth, these challengers were M&A laggards—they made 63 percent fewer deals
3 than their former peers did. But during the recession, while competitors brought their deal-making activity nearly to a halt, successful challengers dropped relatively few of their transaction plans, erasing the gap with the rest of their industries.
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Successful challengers seem to have pursued transactions that offered greater opportunity to shape industries
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Moreover, successful challengers, unlike their more conservative former peers, were not afraid to spend their cash reserves in a recession. In 1990, they lowered their reserves to a level 41 percent below
4 that of their former peers, though before the recession, their excess cash level had been just 6 percent lower (Exhibit 1)
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Meanwhile, leaders that remained successful during the recession pursued a larger number of much smaller deals than did their less successful former peers. But the most dramatic, and least expected, response of the leaders to the recession was their approach to operating expenses (Exhibit 2)
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While most companies tightened their belts, successful leaders, trading lower short-term profitability for long-term gain, refocused rather than cut spending. Indeed, these successful leaders, perhaps reasoning that a soft market required greater effort or provided greater opportunity, actually spent significantly more on selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs
5 than did companies that lost their market leadership.
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Yet in expansionary periods, successful leaders spent significantly less on SG&A than did their former peers. Furthermore, successful leaders, seeking to extend their position through innovation, more than doubled their already higher-than-average level of spending on R&D
6 during the recession relative to their former peers.
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Expenditures on advertising followed a similar pattern, with successful leaders spending more money (as a percentage of sales) than did their former peers during the recession and smaller amounts of money in periods of growth. Despite selective spending increases during the 1990–91 downturn, successful leaders, which maintain an employee-to-sales ratio 27 percent lower than that of their industries, were still far more efficient than their former peers.
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Thus, when other companies simply battened down the hatches, seeing only risk during the recession, the more successful competitors found opportunity and pressed their advantages. As companies today look to the end of the present downturn, they should consider that managing risk doesn't mean avoiding it altogether.
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