Rnordman

Did you know you can make people absolutely loathe you with your social media promotions? Think about the makeup of social media for a moment. Let’s use Facebook as an example. Why did you sign up for your own personal Facebook account? Likely, you wanted to get in touch with old friends, share pictures with family, perhaps read a joke or two and keep abreast of what people are up to.

You certainly didn’t sign up so you could be inundated with advertising or promotions from companies. Even if you adore a company or business and you do decide to like their page, you still won’t appreciate blatant self-promotion. That is the mistake that many social media companies make on social media.

The Numbers Tell the Tale

According to ExactTarget’s 2012 Channel Preferences Study, even when consumers sign up for communication from a company, only 4% want promotions sent via Facebook (even less for Twitter at 1%). In fact, by a whopping 77%, we prefer that promotional information be sent via email, but only with permission of course.

With that in mind, it is obvious that businesses must be very focused in how they utilize social media. The last thing you want to do is irritate your core audience to the point that they don’t even want to purchase your product or service.

The way that social media is set up for companies almost forces companies to act more like a person than a corporation. And, the truth is that, the more you can act like a “person” on social media, the research indicates that the more reach you’ll have with potential customers.

Let’s take a look at how some companies have used this concept successfully.

BufferApp.com

BufferApp.com started something new to engage readers called #BufferChat. This is a weekly chat on a variety of topics where the executives and others in the know at Buffer get to talking on Twitter. In fact, Buffer has 221,000 followers and growing steadily.

You’ll also notice that Buffer engages with readers. If they hashtag Buffer, they can be assured Buffer will respond. This is the kind of interaction that people crave on social media and one of the keys to Buffer’s success.

Huffington Post

Huffington Post is another expert in utilizing social media to market their brand. They’ve learned that offering interesting images and unique content gives their social readers something to share with others on social media platforms.

In the example here, Huffington post uses both a large, interesting photograph and a headline that is engaging to the reader. People want to know how people used graffiti to be kind. Many people will read the article and share it.

Huffington Post has 3,234,321 likes on Facebook. The article referenced here has been shared 37 times in less than 20 minutes and another 214 people liked the post.

E&A Credit Union

The final example is referenced in an article on Vertical Response. Apparently, E&A Credit Union hired James and Matthew and Company to create a public relations social media campaign. What the PR company came up with is beyond brilliant.

First, they posted a couple of lines on Facebook along with an image of a zombie-proof home.

“We all know that the Zombie Apocalypse is coming soon. What you need is a 1.99% APR home equity line of credit to upgrade your defenses.”

Who could resist something with this much humor and creativity? If there is one thing people who are on the social media sites enjoy, it is something unique that plays to pop culture. At the time this ad was released, The Walking Dead was at the height of its popularity. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect for this particular social media campaign.

How to Promote Successfully

ExactTarget’s Audience Growth Survey offers some interesting insight that can help businesses utilize social media to promote more effectively.

• Since people are more likely to respond to promotions sent via e-mail, social media can be utilized to collect emails for list growth. Although there may only be a 45% signup rate on social media, the cost for converting Facebook leads into subscribers tends to be very low compared to other methods, such as inbound sales calls or in-store promotions.
• Another idea is to promote special content on social media that people will find interesting, but require email registration to access that free content.
• The Audience Growth Survey also looked at how many companies use bloggers and influencers to help promote their brand. About 33% of companies use this tactic and it has a 56% effectiveness rate.

Rethinking Your Social Media Strategy

Keeping in mind that people get on social media to make a connection, here are some additional things you can do that will put your social media marketing strategy ahead of others who are simply self-promoting on these sites. There are some different theories that will help you as you work on how to engage your social audience.

5-3-2

This rule is credited to TA McCann and is based on every 10 Facebook posts, 10 Tweets, etc. The theory simply states that:

• Five posts should be content from others that your audience will find of interest. This can be images, funny quotes, interesting articles, etc.
• Three posts should be unique content from the company, but not anything that sells your product. Instead, these might be interesting insights, facts readers will find interesting or just a personal greeting.
• Two posts can be personal and should not be related to work or business. For example, “Our secretary Marla just had twin girls. Congratulations, Marla. Welcome to the world Mary and Kary.” A picture would help set the tone.

Notice how the posts are not selling a product. That just isn’t the best use of social media for your business in most cases, although the occasional promotional offer is okay. The focus here should be on the word “occasional”.

30/60/10

Rallyverse suggests taking a 30/60/10 approach to social media marketing.

• 30% should be content created by you and owned by you. This can include links to posts on your blog, photos, videos and slides. 30% keeps you from just talking about yourself all the time. Remember, that this content should not be blatantly self promotional in nature.
• 60% should be content you gather from other sources. This can include articles from others, quotes, news stories and so on. However, and this is vital, you must include your own viewpoint on this borrowed content. What do you think about that news story that broke today? Keep in mind that it is best to steer clear of topics that might be controversial. You want to gain followers, not alienate them.
• 10% should be promotional in nature. These are your Call to Action posts. Examples would include: “Sign up for a free trail”, “Subscribe to our newsletter”, or “20% off today only”.

20-to-1 Rule

Michael Hyatt suggests the 20-to-1 rule as a good approach for social media content. Michael Hyatt points out:

“Twitter and Facebook are relational tools not transactional tools.”

With that in mind, he suggests that 20 posts should be related to others and only one post to your business.

So Many Theories, But Everything Comes Down to One Idea

There are many theories about how often you should post, what times of day you should post, how much you should focus on Call to Action statements and how often you should share posts from others. However, what it all boils down to is that you should be more focused on what your audience is interested in and how you can relate to them than how you can promote yourself and your business.

If you approach social media as a person, make friends and interact with others, then your social media promotions will go much better than if you just throw a bunch of product information at your followers and friends.

How do the elite consulting firms and Big 4 accountancies use social networks? The answer may surprise you.

Here at PeopleLinx, we help several top strategy consulting and Big 4 accounting firms with their employees’ presence on social. They’re wonderful clients–smart, strategic, and forward-looking.

So why do they need help with social business? For many reasons, they should be the first ones to embrace social business:

• These are the most networked organizations in the universe. Their partners are the most powerful people you’ve never heard of. Their power resides in their ability to make phone calls that influence the actions of nearly every major corporation and government agency the world over. These folks are plugged in.
• They’re known for innovative business practices. Many of the most influential business concepts of the past three decades (wisdom of teams, good-to-great, war for talent, business process outsourcing) began their lives as best practices within the top firms.
• They’re producing some of the most thoughtful and engaged social business strategists in the business world. McKinsey’s Dave Edelman and McKinsey Global Institute, EY’s Chris Boudreaux, Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, and other consultants have contributed mightily to our understanding of how social transforms business.

So you might think the elite consulting and accounting firms have jumped into social business with both feet.

That’s not really the case.

Advising C-level executives of major global corporations is a sensitive business. The top firms are both excited by the prospect of cultivating relationships on social networks, but they’re also nervous. Confidentiality is a huge concern. So is reputation, and the risk of online musings being interpreted as one-size-fits-all management advice. Not to mention the logistical challenges of creating consistent practices across offices, languages, and timezones in an industry famous for its high employee churn.

The marketing director of one of the top firms summed it up well to me on the phone last week: “We know this is something we need to do, but we’re struggling with how to do it.”

The “Killer App” for Partners

The killer app for elite firms isn’t social publishing, social selling, social recruiting, or even social networking. It’s the LinkedIn profile.

That’s right, the LinkedIn profile.

The reason is deeply rooted in the way the top firms cultivate clients. For the top firms, the personal reputations of the partners are everything. Consulting and accounting partners aren’t just the firm’s executives; they’re also rainmakers. They’re expected to bring in large accounts through their personal relationships. Oh, and they’re also the product: the client is paying for time with the partners (and the teams that support them).

The reputation of the individual partner is supremely important.

The top firms’ websites have long included bios describing each partner’s accomplishments in gloriously understated technicolor. But those firms are realizing that their partners’ LinkedIn profiles get much more traffic than those proprietary bios. So the LinkedIn profile is gradually becoming the centerpiece of their partners’ online branding.

It’s not a quick win. Partners are almost always senior in both role and years, frequently on the road, and not overly fond of their laptops. They’re busy and impatient; some might even call them ADHD. Getting them to sit down, log in, and update their profiles isn’t easy. Some firms are resorting to full-time trainers to sit (literally) with partners and take them through their profiles.

Social and the Cone of Silence

Consultants are careful, bordering on paranoid, about who they connect with, follow, and friend.

It’s not that they’re asocial. On the contrary, the best consultants are highly networked. But they’re not doing it online.

The reason is confidentiality.

The top consultancies pride themselves on maintaining client confidentiality–part strategic imperative, part marketing. Many consultants work on sensitive projects (mergers, acquisitions, pricing, reorganizations, corporate turnarounds). The very fact that they are working with a particular client can send shock waves inside the company, to the competition, and even to the capital markets.

The top firms also leverage confidentiality as a reverse-psychology marketing tactic. By emphasizing the secrecy of their client relationships, they create a hidden aura of mystique and hidden power. When I was a McKinsey consultant, the Firm’s managing director told a prominent business publication that his primary job was to keep the firm’s name out of the headlines. (He was later convicted of insider trading, which was all over the headlines. But that’s a story for another day…)

The practical implication of all this is that the top consultants won’t disclose their clients. They are trained to avoid behavior that would allow an observer to infer who they’re advising. That rules out a lot of social networking activity. Checking in as mayor of the Hershey Hotel on Foursquare, tweeting “Wheels Up from the Bentonville Airport!”, or posting pictures of the Johnson & Johnson Employee Store on Instagram can be career-limiting moves for a consultant.

That applies in spades to social gestures like connecting on LinkedIn, following on Twitter, and friending on Facebook. Top consultants won’t friend, follow, or connect to clients unless the work is a matter of public record or the relationship is purely personal. Even then, a consultant is likely to avoid even the appearance of divulging a client relationship.

Keep in mind, these folks still use BlackBerries. They take privacy seriously.

Thought Leadership and Social Publishing

One area where the elite firms aren’t at all paranoid is and accounting firms are not shy about publicizing their thought leadership. For the top firms, it’s their primary form of marketing.

The top firms don’t generally care for traditional marketing. Many of them won’t even utter the word “marketing” and talk instead about “reputation building” and “thought leadership”.

The prestige firms were doing content marketing long before it had a name, and they’re still masters of the art. Shining examples include McKinsey Quarterly, PwC’s annual CEO compensation survey, and Millward Brown’s annual study of Top 100 brands. They attract new prospects through the power of their ideas, insights, and proprietary data. So they invest heavily to publish proprietary research, reports, surveys, and strategic perspectives. These publications are a marketing (oops, I mean reputation-building) investments. They’re usually made public or distributed to selective clients at no charge. Their strategic purpose is to enhance the firm’s reputation for thought leadership and to generate new opportunities from clients interested in the research.

The top firms use Twitter and LinkedIn to drive readers to their content. It’s a growing part of their distribution strategy, but on balance still much smaller than the good ole’ fashioned email blast.

Here again, it’s largely a structural problem. Most content marketing is fairly decentralized. It happens at the level of the practice area (banking, pharmaceuticals, corporate finance, M&A, etc.). The practice team responsible for content marketing within each practice is relatively small, and often doesn’t grasp the relationship between social engagement and relationship development.

So by and large the elite firms are just beginning to scratch the surface on social. You won’t find a lot of stimulating discussion or real-time insights being exchanged.

To find consultants having open conversations about strategic topics, you have to go off-label and look at the unofficial alumni groups on LinkedIn. By and large they’re populated by alumni of the major firms. Freed from the confidentiality constraints of active client service, they’re more inclined to speak their minds.

That’s where you’ll find out what consultants really think.

Take a look at our one-pager: Showcase Your Firm’s Most Valuable Assets

Prosumer is a portmanteau of professional and consumer.

I first came across it writing a blog post on the secret to mobile startup success.

There are many startups that begin as consumer focused businesses before unveiling an enterprise product.

It strikes me this often leads to a successful B2B product, so I thought I’d look at Uber (and briefly Airbnb) and discuss what B2B companies can take from a prosumer model.

Piggy-back on consumer habits

Uber Garage is the innovation lab of Uber, the private hire car app.

The Garage came up with UberRUSH in April 2014, a courier service based on the same principles of private hire.

One of the obvious plus points for UberRUSH as it faces competition in New York is the number of users already familiar with the Uber interface.

The RUSH services sits on another tab in the app, making it instantly familiar to a large swathe of users.

The lesson for B2B companies is that a service should treat business prospects as consumers, not as prospects to add to a marketing funnel.

Mirror consumer facing interfaces, make the UX as familiar as possible, and allow me to do everything quickly without making a phone call.

Treat business customers with consumer levels of respect

Traditionally, B2B has been less transparent than B2C. Whether it be pricing or promises. That’s perhaps to be expected when talking about service propositions.

But increasingly corporate and consumer are merging thanks to increases in subscription based services on the consumer side and the decline of on-premise on the business side.

What this means in B2B is that talking to customers in a frank manner is advantageous.

Here’s a tiny and simple example from UberRUSH. Pricing is transparent, too, as opposed to many couriers that agree on a rate.

Understand consumer trends in the workplace

A more relaxed or flexible corporate environment is also shown in travel. Airbnb is looking to push into the business and hospitality markets.

Forbes reported that Concur, a corporate tool for expense and travel management, has seen an uptick in vacation rentals now surfacing on expense reports.

Whether it be buying Apple TVs for meeting rooms, or a grocery run from a supermarket, there are likely businesses using your consumer services without you knowing it.

Shout about the good things you do

Branding is something that B2C companies are traditionally better at than B2B, as so much of B2C depends on first impressions and relationships are more fleeting.

Shouting about the good things your company does can be done as part of this positioning. It’s not a cheap tactic, it’s merely an extension of that consumer facing mentality.

Look at the below. UberRUSH does a great thing for charity. It should make this apparent and does. Yes, there may not be a direct business benefit to the business customer (aside from meeting CSR goals) but appealing to the person in procurement and their values is a happy side effect of merely talking about this kind of activity. It’s what companies like Unilever, with its Project Sunlight, do all the time.

The Harvard Business Review once put the value of lifetime customers into dollars: A loyal pizza eater’s lifetime revenue can be $8,000, while a Cadillac owner’s is closer to $332,000.

But what about lifetime employee value? To me the answer is simple: priceless.

Keeping good employees for a lifetime is not a realistic goal for many organizations these days, though it should be. The trick is maintaining their loyalty through a number of practices, and not just a good paycheck, free coffee and an occasional pat on the back. Empowerment is the key to employee dedication – give them the wheel and the freedom to be an acknowledged part of the company’s success.

Getting to that point may take some practice. My company, LoyaltyOne, has been testing several initiatives to engage our 1,600 employees, with varying degrees of success. But two of these efforts make pretty good case studies that I’d like to share.

The first, which we call Pass It On, is an interactive program designed to encourage employees to reward their peers.  We worked with the company Achievers to create a platform so that each associate is given a bank of points that they can bestow to deserving co-workers. Associates can also recognize their peers without awarding points, by simply thanking them or posting an “applause” on the Pass It On employee website.

To keep track of activity, the company has set up leaderboards, kind of like scoreboards that share how often a “player” is acting as a recognizer or being recognized. This activity itself is tracked so recognizers are themselves rewarded for being good team players.

The results? As of June, 97% of our associates were active in the program, and 40% of the recognitions come with no points, indicating that LoyaltyOne has helped foster a culture of recognizing as well as rewarding.

The second initiative took place in December 2013, when LoyaltyOne launched the Move & Earn program to stimulate physical activity. With this initiative, the company gave all employees FitBit devices and encouraged them to set their own activity goals and monitor steps taken each day. To date, 59% of our employees are participating in the program, compared with an average of less than 50% for worksite wellness programs, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Even better, employees who participate in the program have increased the number of steps they take on a daily basis by 27%.

Programs like these are a step in the right direction when it comes to employee loyalty. And let’s face it, a company will not have engaged, happy customers without engaged, happy employees. I’ll back it up with our own engagement score: 88% of LoyaltyOne associates said they are proud to work for the company.

As any marketer should know, you can’t put a dollar sign on figures like that.

Since the introduction of the printing press during the Renaissance Era, the economic impact of technological innovation has increased the global GDP value by more than 10 times – but how is innovation affecting our current Information Age?

If we compare the world’s fastest supercomputer in 1975 to an iPhone 4 with equal performance, the price difference is huge – from $5 million to $400 in just over 30 years. Since then, many companies have made it a priority to invest in research and development to help foster innovation, as 4 out of 5 CEOs rank tech innovations as having the largest impact on their business.

Fast forward to the Internet of Things, and we have disruptive technologies such as the cloud, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing and advanced robotics – most of which have only been in development for a decade or so.

We’ve come a long way in such a short time, but what’s next in technological innovation? Take a look at the Infographic below, created by Pulp-PR, that highlights the history of tech innovation and a few upcoming consumer technologies to keep your eye on throughout this year and next.

FA Insights is a daily newsletter from Business Insider that delivers the top news and commentary for financial advisors.

A 4% Withdrawal Rate Could Disrupt Your Retirement Planning (Morningstar)

Michael Falk from Focus Consulting explained the reasoning behind using a 3% or 4% withdrawal rate with Morningstar. Falk said 4% rate is not necessarily wrong, but can increase risks based on your planned expenses.

"So what I advocate is maybe start little bit more simply, maybe start with looking at how the total spending plan splits into both the budget for fixed expenses and in the balance of the spending plan for all those discretionary things that you love to do," Falk said. "Then once you get to a point of covering your fixed expenses, and if you go into retirement with little debt--the house is paid off and maybe you go down to one car that is paid for--you make that so much more manageable. Now you can roll with the markets punches so much more easily. It also means that there is no preset amount of equities that you should or shouldn't own. It also means there is not a preset amount of liquidation 3%, 4% that you should take every month."

Two Portfolio Tweaks To Prepare For A Stronger Economy (BlackRock)

In the midst of signals that the economy is on the upturn, BlackRock's Russ Koesterich recommends making a couple changes to your portfolio. This is to account for the change in the investment climate following recent optimism. One tweak is to add cyclical stocks that are especially sensitive to economic growth, in energy, financials and some tech. Another is to avoid short term bonds. 

"The outlook for bonds largely depends on the length of their maturity. Last week’s data, combined with other recent employment indicators and some signs of higher inflation, may lead the Federal Reserve (Fed) to begin raising short-term interest rates. To the extent this occurs earlier than investors expect, shorter-term bonds –those with maturities between two and five years – are likely to be the most vulnerable, and could see their value fall," Koesterich wrote.

Advisory Firms That Use More Technology Earn Higher Profits (InvestmentNews)

A technology study from InvestmentNews showed that advisory firms who use more technology actually earn a higher profit. However, that doesn't mean these firms spent more on technology. Both "Innovator" firms and other firms spent about three percent of revenues toward technology expenses.

"Investments in technology allow the advisers and business development professionals at Innovators to have more shared and centralized intelligence, more efficient access to firm technology — which is enabled by remote, cloud-based and mobile technologies — and ultimately a greater capacity to grow their firms' revenues without increasing headcount," InvestmentNews research said. "This suggests that not only have the firms that are most deeply committed to technology already experienced superior financial performance as a result, they are likely continue to benefit and build their businesses at steadier rates than other advisory firms in the near future as well."

Why You Should Use A Rules-Based Approach To Investing (Wall Street Journal)

Cokie Berenyi, CEO of Alphavest, recommends using a rules-based approach to investing, and tells investors to avoid an emotional or passive approach. "The basis for this rule-based approach is ranking the performance of the six most commonly used asset classes: domestic and international stocks, bonds/fixed income, currency, cash, and commodities," she writes. One rule is to overweight the top two classes for clients, the other is to avoid or short the sixth asset class. 

"They liked the fact that this strategy isn't about hanging their hat on my ability to shift assets from one asset class to another or in and out of the market. I'm purely using data," Berenyi said. "The rules-based approach also advocates for advisers to avoid the "noise" from wholesalers. There's so much static out there in the media and the marketplace. My rules help me tune out wholesalers who stop by my office pushing the investment du jour. If it doesn't filter through the rule book, just don't look at it."

The Pros And Cons Of Using Target-Date Funds For Your Retirement (Barron's)

Target-date funds are a mix of stocks and bonds, combined in a mutual fund that becomes more conservative as you get closer to retirement. Andrew Bary from Barron's said these funds, which are taking over the 401(k) market, are beneficial because they basically manage themselves for a low fee. However, Bary said that equity allocation from these funds can go as high as 90%.

"Especially with inflation right now, if you're in a money market fund or even a stable value fund, you're going to not keep up with inflation, or barely keep up with inflation. This offers you a fighting chance to have a reasonable amount of money for retirement," he said. "Within five years, it could be the predominant investment for most people and their 401(k) plans."

Join the conversation about this story »

GUEST POST

---

This is a response to VentureBeat feature article 4 ways mobile music is becoming the PB&J of the marketing world written by Feed.fm’s Jeff Yasuda.

Every company is trying to build audience, engagement, and retention — all in a never-ending battle to build revenues. Marketers often pray for organic traffic, but many are forced to pay for audience at the top of their conversion funnels. CPI (cost-per-install) continues to increase making it harder to find the magic number for when a customer can be acquired for a price lower than their long-term value.

One of the best new ways to do this that nobody knows about yet? Music. No, really. I’m serious. More specifically, we call it MaaS or Music-as-a-Service, which has proven to be extremely good at boosting engagement — and retention — among customers.

The history of audio marketing goes back decades

In brick-and-mortar settings, music has been used for decades to entice users into parting with their hard-earned dollars. Restaurants, retail stores, and casinos to name a few have been doing this for years though various services such as Muzak and DMX which later became consolidated under the Mood Media umbrella.

Muzak in particular, which was initially known for its painful instrumental renditions of various classic songs like the Girl from Ipanema that would incessantly play in elevators and dentist offices, later became a successful company that amassed over a billion dollars annually in revenue.

Why? Well, it’s because brick-and-mortar businesses like restaurants and clothing stores understand the power that music has on consumer spending. For instance, even certain genres will have different effects on listeners.

Researchers at the University of Leicester in the U.K. found that of the various genres played in restaurants, classical music made diners stay longer at their tables but also had them buying more expensive items. Also, a different study done in a wine store found that when it played French music, more people bought French wines, and likewise for German music. What’s even more interesting is that when consumers were asked why the bought a certain wine, they had no idea.

The multi-industry successes of Music-as-a-Service

In our own analysis, we took data from numerous music installations which included games, websites, and apps. In an A/B test environment we found that when music was used, consumers spent on average 433 percent longer using a product than when music was not listened to. In addition, we found that users that listened to music came back to the product 88 percent more on average than those who did not listen to music.

Gaming in particular has been a compelling case for the use of music. We conducted an A/B test on a blackjack game built by an internal game studio at GameSalad. We first drove traffic to the game by advertising on Facebook. After clicking on the ad, the user was dropped on a landing page with a big button that read “Play.” Once the user clicked the button, 50 percent of the traffic was sent to a blackjack game that had music playing in the background and 50 percent had no music. The game was identical in both cases and also had standard casino sounds like cards being flipped and chips being collected. The background music that was used for the music variant was a mix of classic rock ranging from AC/DC to Led Zeppelin.

The results were staggering with nearly a 350 percent increase in session time and over 170 percent increase in retention. Moreover, it was fascinating to note that over 17 percent of the participants who played the game with music shared on Facebook that they were playing the game and listening to a certain artist.

The table below shows a few key performance indicators that we observed on several thousand unique visitors.

Sins of the past & overcoming misconceptions

While the previously mentioned results were eye-opening, we had several growing pains at the outset.

When Feed.fm launched in the fall of 2013, some of the initial customer discussions focused on how much they hated hearing music on websites. Comments like “When I hear music on a website, I immediately turn it off. That would actually kill engagement, wouldn’t it?” were frequent.

We almost immediately needed to explain that the player is an “opt-in” experience and would not auto-play music –- potentially a career damaging or at minimum an embarrassing moment if surfing a website in one’s cubicle farm. But after providing enough data and going through specific use cases, customers would end up doing a trial and they’d “get it.” This is part of why its taken music so long to emerge as a powerful marketing platform — and one that didn’t take away from the creativity of the music itself.

The other question we would often get was “I didn’t know you could do this… how is this legal?”

We operate under the compulsory statutory license for internet radio. In layman’s terms, this means that listeners would not be able to reasonably predict what song is coming next. (Or perhaps a different analogy might be that: the service works more like Pandora, not Spotify.) While I can’t speak for other MaaS operations, our team has gone to great lengths to integrate a compliance engine into our API that manages how many songs from a particular artist or album can be played in a certain time period as well as the number of skips in a user session. We also calculate and report the number of plays to the appropriate copyright agency to insure the artists are properly compensated.

So yes, MaaS is both good for businesses and perfectly legal. And rather than escalating CPI expenditures for attaining new customers (which doesn’t always mean long-term customers), music can boost engagement and loyalty for both new and old customers.

***

Using music to improve the customer experience has been done for decades but using music online to build engagement and retention is a relatively new phenomenon. The audio frontier for marketing initiatives is still a being explored, but it is exciting to see many well-known brands that are beginning to experiment by using music to improve the customer experience and get users to spend money.

Jeff Yasuda is the CEO and Co-Founder of Feed.fm, which provides Music-as-a-Service through its API helping brands, games, and app developers improve session times and retention through major and indie label music.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about missed SEO and link-building opportunities for corporate websites, to aid in content marketing efforts.

Leveraging your employees has been touted as the biggest missed opportunity in social media, but could the same be said about SEO vis-à-vis link building and content creation?

Put another way, shouldn’t businesses be using their employees’ personal and professional networks as an opportunity to build links and help promote their business?

For instance, when I write content on my personal blog, I could link that to my company’s website. And every time I need to explain a concept online (in a blog comment or on Quora, for example) that has already been expertly explained on my company’s blog, I should link out to that great content. This strategy builds my reputation and helps my company with its online presence through linked, relevant content.

Inbound links are the bread and butter of SEO and provide two avenues that help grow your content marketing efforts:

1. They are easily the most important factor that search engines use to determine which website should be ranked.
2. A well-placed link is an excellent source of qualified web traffic on its own, even without the added SEO value.

The social media marketing world already has a set of systems and web applications to assist with the process of utilizing employee resources. Let’s explore how that works, and how it might pertain to SEO.

How social media does it

Before we explore how we can use our employees’ resources for SEO, let’s examine how it works with social media. If you aren’t a celebrity, big brand, or someone with pre-established authority, it may be difficult to accrue a following on the various social networks. Without an audience, a business is unable to effectively communicate its marketing message and get the results it desires.

You could spend major $$$ on social advertising to assist you with this, but there are also other, less expensive and more effective ways — and they’re already on the payroll.

The premise of services like GaggleAMP, Triberr, and EveryoneSocial is to utilize employee resources (or in the case of Triberr, your “tribe”) as a source of cumulative audience and influence. For example, GaggleAMP incentivizes and enables employees to share content across their social channels on behalf of their employer. The business then reaps the benefits of employees’ social audience, increasing the business’ own reach.

If you consider your business as a whole, comprising a sum of its employees who can be united with a common purpose, you have a real force to leverage. Each employee has his or her own sphere of influence and audience, on or off of social media, which can be combined to benefit your company. But can this idea be expanded to work for SEO? Let’s explore.

Okay, how might this be applied to SEO and link building?

One of the most difficult parts of link building is scaling the process. Pooling your personnel, instead of relying on a portion of a small marketing team, is advantageous, helping to do a greater quantity of work without relying on scaling the tactics. And since link building is more effective if treated as relationship building, utilizing all your employees (each having their own set of relationships) is particularly helpful.

Unfortunately, I believe getting employees engaged in social media is a much easier task than with SEO or link building. After all, most employees already have social accounts that they are proficient in using, while most people working outside of internet marketing may not fully understand what link building is, how it’s done well, or how it benefits anyone.

Employees do have a way to participate, though. They have ideas, networks, and personal blogs that, with minimal effort, can be used as a tool to help the company build links. Corporate employee training on this practice, as well as a well-defined incentive program (including gamification) would be required to begin.

How this might help with SEO and content marketing

Employees can also help with SEO beyond link building, through content creation and ideation:

• Your employees can contribute by creating content for your corporate blog.
• Your design team can produce an infographic for the company website — the kind of content that people love.
• Employees can also contribute to smaller, micro-content pieces. This could be in the form of answering an industry question by having each of them suggest one or two tactics. These few sentences get strung together into something larger, as shown in the AARP post below. This way, the time investment for your employees is significantly less but the content’s impact greater than the sum of the parts.

• Similarly, they may want to contribute advice to a website section such as a FAQ, providing small bits of text that can be valuable to consumers.

Pro tip: MyBlogU is a new service that helps with the creation of this type of content, allowing for collaborative sourcing of interview-type posts and more. Easy content is always welcomed in the world of content marketing and SEO.

Your company’s employees are experts in their field and they have ideas to share. Providing a platform to share these ideas brings your company to the forefront of discourse on the topic, improves rankings based on applicable content, and honors employees for their talent.

SEO-training your team

Depending on the industry you work in, the level of training required for this system to work will likely vary. But in order to undertake a successful SEO-by-employee strategy, it’s important that the contributors all understand SEO and link-building basics, as well as those tactics that are considered to be spammy.

Let’s assume your company’s employees are not familiar with link building or its effect on the corporate website and content marketing efforts. In this scenario, a formal, structured training program may be necessary to teach about web traffic and SEO basics, as well as what link building is and how it is used within the industry. Think like a lay person here when devising a training program! What seems obvious to content marketers and SEOs may not be as clear to others.

Following a general introduction, the trainer would need to explain the rules of what is allowed, what might trigger a penalty from the search engines, and what could be considered outright spam. As any digital marketer knows, this is murky ground that we all struggle to understand; so in order to avoid jeopardizing your corporate site at the hands of less-knowledgeable employees, create a very structured document outlining dozens of examples of what would be an effective tactic and what is not permissible.

Some prohibited tactics to review include:

• Buying links
• Blog comment spam
• Link exchanges
• Bulk commenting on unrelated blog posts
• Bulk submitting of links to social bookmarking sites

Pro tip: As an added resource, I’d feel comfortable recommending that companies base their entire link-building training process around Paddy Moogan’s link building bible. It’s one of the best written and most extensive publications on the topic. It also clearly outlines what is acceptable and what isn’t.

Link building tactics to involve your team on

Here are some common link-building tactics I recommend for strengthening your SEO through the efforts of your team:

• Link to employee bios: Publish employee bios on your company website. It’s easy content to create and can help you obtain more visits to your website. Then, each time an employee is interviewed, has conference materials published online, or posts content on relevant issues to outside blogs, there is an opportunity to link back to their corporate bio, thus building relevant links for your corporate website. This makes particular sense for those in the C-suite or at director-level positions.
• Take advantage of guest blogging opportunities: Guest blogging should be primarily about building authority for your employees, not about links. But if you treat guest blogging as a means of authority building (i.e., a part of your content marketing arsenal), you can gain the benefit without having to worry about penalization from the search engines. This tactic makes particular sense for employees who are interested in expanding their personal brand, like to write, or are subject-matter experts. Expanding an employee’s personal brand is an incentive in itself. Your company can even help acquire guest posting opportunities.
• Make use of your employees’ social media presence: If you get your employees to help share company content through their social media accounts, with a system like GaggleAMP, or even just through general encouragement, you’ll extend the reach of your website content exponentially, which can help increase your search ranking. Remember to only encourage sharing with social media accounts that maintain professional personas.
• Connect personal blogs and websites: In some cases, employees might control their own websites but may not be aware of how linking to their employer can help the company grow (or that this is a practice the company encourages). Of course not every employee would be willing to do this, since many people wish to separate their personal and business lives.  Therefore, it would be important to incentivize a tactic such as this, perhaps more than others. A prize for the most referring traffic is one possible incentive (more on this in the next section).
• Build partnerships to address broken links: This could be performed in a casual manner, by any employee. If they are browsing the web and they discover a 404 page on an external website, and your company happens to have a similar resource, they can reach out and suggest swapping the broken link for your company’s, thereby marketing your content.
• Get links from your customers: When your sales team is collecting information from potential customers, have them inquire about the possibility of linking your company’s website to theirs. This provides you with the information about which of your customers would have the capability of linking to you in the future. You might even establish a separate email list, and send emails encouraging linking to your business if they have found certain information useful.
• General public relations: Let your public relations team or agency know that links are of interest to you, and ask them to share any back-links they’ve brought in through their efforts (e.g., from good press coverage).
• Looking for brand mentions without a link: This is another one which can be done casually by just about anyone; if your employees find any unlinked mentions of your company, they can reach out and attempt reclamation. Just make sure that you are not duplicating efforts on this one, so the publishers don’t become inundated with requests from your company.

Make it a game; have incentives

At the heart of getting employees to contribute to your content marketing and link-building efforts in any of these ways should be a well-designed incentive system.

You can assign points to each link built, all with different weights. It doesn’t necessarily make sense to assign weight according to a link-value metric like toolbar PageRank or Domain Authority (as might initially make sense to establish as a KPI), but it can be a factor. Not everyone is going to have equal skills or assets that they contribute. Therefore, it makes greater sense to assign weights according to the difficulty of the task and the quality of the link (e.g., perhaps based on referral traffic, as a secondary measure). After all, these employees are likely non-marketers.

As far as incentives go, each point they’ve earned might help increase an employee’s year-end bonus, or be equal to an entry to a raffle for a nice prize. You could find a way to recognize a link-builder-of-the-month, or display some sort of leaderboard — both non-monetary systems of establishing merits and providing a way to monitor success across the company.

A system for tracking built links is also imperative so that work doesn’t overlap and so proper credit is awarded. You can establish a collaborative spreadsheet or have successes sent to a centralized email address that gets managed by the marketing team.

However you decide to manage your incentives, the goal should be the same: to encourage employees to create SEO content and be able to identify which methods are bringing success — and which employees are using them.

Tertiary benefits: Your employees

Although the marketing and website benefits for involving employees in your SEO efforts are clear, there are also soft benefits you can achieve through these efforts, such as helping to build your employees’ skill sets and industry influence.

Here are a number of other ways your company and its employees can benefit from team participation in a strategic SEO content program:

• Building links takes certain skills, and it’s useful to know who has them. HR can identify employees who are proficient with web technology, for example. Perhaps the receptionist has some skills that have gone unrealized and would benefit the company (and boost job satisfaction) to an even greater extent.
• It helps your business identify people who might be well-suited for sales and PR roles: There are some clear parallels between skills required to build links and sales and PR talents.
• It helps you identify your most passionate, motivated employees. Link-building secretary or mailroom clerk today, skilled marketing professional tomorrow.
• It creates company thought leaders: Your employees can make a name for themselves on the internet by producing content and expanding their personal brand — which, in turn, can be leveraged to reflect positively on your organization.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about the pros and cons of getting employees involved in SEO and link building to increase your content marketing success. Have you implemented such a program? Please share your ideas below.

Want more insight on ways to involve your team in your content marketing and SEO efforts? Register now to attend Content Marketing World 2014, September 8–11 in Cleveland, Ohio.  

Are Your Words Killing Your Brand? written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

It’s guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest post is from Karon Thackston – Enjoy!

While there are hundreds of definitions of the word “brand,” my favorites come from the World English Dictionary. As a noun: “a particular product or a characteristic that serves to identify a particular product.” And as a verb: “to give a product a distinctive identity.”

Most of us keep our brands in mind as we develop product packaging or choose color schemes for websites. However, all too often, we arbitrarily pick words when writing marketing copy and content without so much as a thought about branding. Generic word choices fail to evoke an emotional connection and attachment to our brands that, in turn, can actually harm recognition and growth.

Good Examples of Brand-Oriented Words

Let’s watch a couple of videos and I’ll show you what I mean. Have a pen or keyboard handy and jot down the words that catch your attention or make an impression on you.

Video #1 – Gillette Body Razor

Did your list contain these words/phrases?

• Terrain
• Rugged
• Control
• Off-road razor
• Take you where you want to go
• Confidently

What do they all have in common? They are words commonly classified as masculine/manly. They give a visual impression of a man’s body that this target audience will want to be associated with. Sure, Gillette could have written video copy that said something like, “Trying to shave your body is way different than shaving your face, dude. You’ve got all those curves and you can cut yourself if you aren’t careful. Our new body razor pivots and makes it easier to shave across uneven surfaces.”

That would be accurate, but it wouldn’t live up to the brand. That type of copy also wouldn’t get anywhere near the same reaction as calling a guy’s body “rugged terrain” that requires an “off-road razor” for shaving. The copy is specific to the brand as well as the precise target segment for this product.

Video #2 – USAA Insurance

Right away, from the first words spoken, I picked up on the phrases:

• Mine was earned
• Handed down
• Generation to generation
• Superior level of protection

 

To wrap it up, the voiceover copy used “begin your legacy…”

What do those phrases say to you? For me, I get the message that USAA insurance isn’t just bought, it has to be warranted. Because USAA only provides insurance to military families and their dependents, you have to be part of a somewhat exclusive club. That immediately adds value to any brand because it separates the company from the mass marketplace.

In addition, the terms “handed down,” “generation to generation” and “legacy” show that this product has value and is worthy of being considered an inheritance of sorts. That boosts the perception of this brand instantly.

Is this practice just for video copywriting? Absolutely not! It’s for writing website copy, social media posts, blog articles or any other type of content you produce. Your brand, and the words that represent it, should stretch fully across the entire landscape of your marketing efforts.

Do This Before You Kill Your Brand

Performing this quick exercise will help you discover the best words to support and promote your brand. Once you have a good idea of the communication style you want to use, you can boost all your marketing copy and content with more power to persuade, engage and remember.

1. Determine How You Want Your Brand to Be Known

Create a list of words/phrases that should come to the minds of your target audience when they hear the mention of your brand.

2. Get a Copywriting Thesaurus

Books like “Words that Sell” by Richard Bayan are excellent for giving you different, enticing words to use, so your copy doesn’t sound ordinary.

3. Ask Yourself Questions

How do your target customers perceive themselves? Are they stereotypical manly men? Are they power women who kick corporate butt? Whatever it is, add to your list words/phrases that relate to their world in the areas of work, play, relationships, goals, self-perceptions, etc.

As you discover more about your customers, expand your list of words so you have a never-ending source of nouns and verbs that capture attention and remembrance for your brand.

Karon Thackston is President of Marketing Words helping businesses convert better, rank higher and sell more. Having worked with companies including Gorton’s Seafood, American Boating Association and others, Karon builds success through copywriting, SEO copywriting and conversion techniques for businesses of all sizes. Download Karon’s “Copywriting Makeovers” ebook for real-world case studies that can equip you to boost the performance of your website.

Author: Adam Marchick

Convincing consumers to download your mobile app is difficult — but losing their engagement with that app is easy. Research from Flurry shows that after downloading any given app, 25% of people will use it only once, and over half of all users will stop using the app after three months.

If a mobile app is part of your marketing mix, it’s critical to establish a strong path to conversion — one that users will adopt within the first few weeks. Users who do not engage with your app quickly are likely to uninstall and forget you forever.

Here are five ways to turn your app installers into power users and purchasers.

1. Build Trust to Onboard Effectively

New mobile users need to understand the value of your app — why is it a must-have?  Make a great first impression with an informative splash page (an extra screen that pops up the first time a user opens your app). Use this prime real estate to guide the customer through your app’s top features, and to demonstrate the value of opting into push notifications.

Pro tip: On iOS, you are only allowed to officially ask for push permissions once. Don’t waste your only shot by asking for push permissions in a splash page. Instead, start with an informal ask, and only prompt them to the official permission page if they answer “YES.”

New users should also be motivated to create an account within your app. A Kahuna cohort analysis determined that users who have accounts are more likely to stay engaged, and have a higher lifetime value. Accounts also streamline the check-out process and greatly increases their likelihood to make a purchase. To encourage registration, use push or in-app messaging to remind your users of the benefits.

Pro tip: Send an informative notification that highlights the advantages of registering. For example: “Did you know that members have access to exclusive mobile deals? Create an account today!” Include a link to a ‘Sign Up / In with Facebook’ page within your app.

2. Provide Value to Encourage Engagement

Cultivate user engagement and retention by sending marketing messages with relevant, valuable content. Personalized recommendations, based on ‘last brand viewed’ or ‘most recent purchase’, provide value to your users and warm them to your mobile app experience. The key is to target specific segments of users and to incorporate personalization.

Generic push notifications are the junk mail of the mobile world, and do more harm than good. You never want your users to think, “I bet 10,000 other people got this exact same message.”

Pro tip: Use demographics combined with behavior to segment your audience. For example, you might send this  push message to females who are between the ages of 18 and 24, live in California, and have recently viewed the ‘shorts’ category on your website or on your mobile app: “Hey <first name>! It’s shorts season in <user home city>, check out these styles from <last designer viewed>!”

3. Inspire Urgency to Drive Mobile Conversion

Once your users are engaged with your brand on mobile, it is time to start encouraging them to make a purchase. Research shows that 48% of users worldwide list mobile as a key media for impacting purchasing decisions (according to Mobile Marketing Watch). Develop a robust cart abandonment strategy that incorporates real-time customer behavior across channels (i.e. if a customer adds an item to their cart on desktop, mobile web, or through your app), and leverages push and in-app messaging to encourage immediate conversion. Make sure to customize your marketing message for each user by referencing the specific item waiting for them in the cart.

Pro tip: Test out several different versions of push message copy to see which one generates the most purchases. Low inventory alerts like this are especially effective: “Low inventory on <last item added to cart>!  Get yours today before they’re gone!” Just make sure any incentive message you send is true – mobile customers can sniff out a cheap marketing ploy a mile away.

4. Offer Social Proof to Cultivate Brand Loyalty

Encourage your customers to share on social – this is a great way to transform your customers into brand advocates, and to generate network effect organic user growth. Consider a VIP campaign or special promotion message to encourage your top mobile customers to spread the word to their friends.

Pro tip: Send a push message to your top purchasers: “Super excited about your new <last item purchased>? Let your friends know on Facebook and get 10% off your next purchase!” Not only does this expose your brand to new business, but it encourages repeat purchases from those top customers.

With a strong understanding of your users’ preferences and browsing patterns, it is easy to encourage them to purchase additional items when browsing. In-app messages are a great ways to communicate with your customers when your brand is already on their mind. But use in-app messaging wisely and sparingly — every in-app message you display takes away from your actual application. An in-app message is a pop-up message, and we have all seen these abused on the web.

Pro tip:  Use in-app messaging to incentivize those active within your app to make an additional purchase. For example: “Hey <first name>, thought you might like these new arrivals from <last designer viewed> as well.”

5. Find the Right Rhythm to Retain Users

As you continue to engage with your mobile customers, prevent over-messaging by tailoring your push strategy to accommodate each user’s unique time of day preference and message frequency tolerance.

Pro tip: Track the number of app uninstalls as compared to the mobile revenue resulting from each message you send — so you can be sure your push messages are not annoying your users and you are comfortable with the complete ROI picture.

Key Takeaways

Making sure your app delights and engages your users is a high-stakes game. Today’s mobile shoppers are solidifying their app preferences, and your mobile communications must be strategic and personalized to win their allegiance. The reward is well worth it: making the cut brings with it a level of word-of-mouth marketing that will cause your organic app installs to skyrocket. Identify and optimize your customer’s path to engagement and purchasing, and ensure your app comes out on top in mobile commerce — the future of online shopping.

---

5 Ways to Increase Revenue and Engagement with Mobile Apps was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella just sent out a 3,187 word memo to employees about his vision for the future of the company.

Microsoft's fiscal year just started, so Nadella is using it as a launching point to refocus the company: "We'll use the month of July to have a dialogue about this bold ambition and our core focus."

In the memo, he lays out the core vision for the company, "At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more."

From: Satya Nadella

To: All Employees
Date: July 10, 2014 at 6:00 a.m. PT
Subject: Starting FY15 - Bold Ambition & Our Core

Team,

As we start FY15, I want to thank you for all of your contributions this past year. I'm proud of what we collectively achieved even as we drove significant changes in our business and organization. It's energizing to feel the momentum and enthusiasm building.

The day I took on my new role I said that our industry does not respect tradition – it only respects innovation. I also said that in order to accelerate our innovation, we must rediscover our soul – our unique core. We must all understand and embrace what only Microsoft can contribute to the world and how we can once again change the world. I consider the job before us to be bolder and more ambitious than anything we have ever done.

We'll use the month of July to have a dialogue about this bold ambition and our core focus. Today I want to synthesize the strategic direction and massive opportunity I've been discussing for the past few months and the fundamental cultural changes required to deliver on it. On July 22, we'll announce our earnings results for the past quarter and I'll say more then on what we are doing in FY15 to focus on our core. Over the course of July, the Senior Leadership Team and I will share more on the engineering and organization changes we believe are needed. Then, at MGX and //oneweek, we'll come together to build on all of this, learn from each other and put our ideas into action. 

Our Worldview

We live in a mobile-first and cloud-first world. Computing is ubiquitous and experiences span devices and exhibit ambient intelligence. Billions of sensors, screens and devices – in conference rooms, living rooms, cities, cars, phones, PCs – are forming a vast network and streams of data that simply disappear into the background of our lives. This computing power will digitize nearly everything around us and will derive insights from all of the data being generated by interactions among people and between people and machines. We are moving from a world where computing power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless, and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.

In this new world, there will soon be more than 3 billion people with Internet-connected devices – from a farmer in a remote part of the world with a smartphone, to a professional power user with multiple devices powered by cloud service-based apps spanning work and life.

The combination of many devices and cloud services used for generating and consuming data creates a unique opportunity for us. Our customers and society expect us to maximize the value of technology while also preserving the values that are timeless. We will create more natural human-computing interfaces that empower all individuals. We will develop and deploy secure platforms and infrastructure that enable all industries. And we will strike the right balance between using data to create intelligent, personal experiences, while maintaining security and privacy. By doing all of this, we will have the broadest impact.

Our passion is to enable people to thrive in this mobile-first and cloud-first world. 

Our Core

Microsoft was founded on the belief that technology creates opportunities for people and organizations to express and achieve their dreams by putting a PC on every desk and in every home.

More recently, we have described ourselves as a "devices and services" company. While the devices and services description was helpful in starting our transformation, we now need to hone in on our unique strategy.

At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.

We think about productivity for people, teams and the business processes of entire organizations as one interconnected digital substrate. We also think about interconnected platforms for individuals, IT and developers. This comprehensive view enables us to solve the more complex, nuanced and real-world day-to-day challenges in an increasingly digital world. It also opens the door to massive growth opportunity – technology spend as a total percentage of GDP will grow with the digitization of nearly everything in life and work.

We have a rich heritage and a unique capability around building productivity experiences and platforms. We help people get stuff done. Stuff like term papers, recipes and budgets. Stuff like chatting with friends and family across the world. Stuff like painting, writing poetry and expressing ideas. Stuff like running a Formula 1 racing team or keeping an entire city running. Stuff like building a game with a spark of your imagination and remixing it with the world. And stuff like helping build a vaccine for HIV, and giving a voice to the voiceless.

This is an incredible foundation from which to grow.

Microsoft has a unique ability to harmonize the world's devices, apps, docs, data and social networks in digital work and life experiences so that people are at the center and are empowered to do more and achieve more with what is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity – time!

Productivity for us goes well beyond documents, spreadsheets and slides. We will reinvent productivity for people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data and social networks. We will build the solutions that address the productivity needs of groups and entire organizations as well as individuals by putting them at the center of their computing experiences. We will shift the meaning of productivity beyond solely producing something to include empowering people with new insights. We will build tools to be more predictive, personal and helpful. We will enable organizations to move from automated business processes to intelligent business processes. Every experience Microsoft builds will understand the rich context of an individual at work and in life to help them organize and accomplish things with ease.

Productive people and organizations are the primary drivers of individual fulfilment and economic growth and we need to do everything to make the experiences and platforms that enable this ubiquitous. We will think of every user as a potential "dual user" – people who will use technology for their work or school and also deeply use it in their personal digital life. They strive to get stuff done with technology, demanding new cloud-powered applications, extensively using time and calendar management, advanced expression, collaboration, meeting, search and research services, all with better security and privacy control. Microsoft will push into all corners of the globe to empower every individual as a dual user – starting with the soon to be 3 billion people with Internet-connected devices. And we will do so with a platform mindset. Developers and partners will thrive by creatively extending Microsoft experiences for every individual and business on the planet.

Across Microsoft, we will obsess over reinventing productivity and platforms. We will relentlessly focus on and build great digital work and life experiences with specific focus on dual use. Our cloud OS infrastructure, device OS and first-party hardware will all build around this core focus and enable broad ecosystems. Microsoft will light up digital work and life experiences in the most personal, intelligent, open and empowering ways.

Digital Work and Life Experiences: We will deliver digital work and life experiences that are reinvented for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. First and foremost, these experiences will shine for productivity. As a result, people will meet and collaborate more easily and effectively. They will express ideas in new ways. They will experience the magic of ambient intelligence with Delve and Cortana. They will ask questions naturally and have them answered with insight from Power Q&A. They will conquer language barriers and change the world with Skype translator. Apps will be designed as dual use with the intelligence to partition data between work and life and with the respect for each person's privacy choices. All of these apps will be explicitly engineered so anybody can find, try and then buy them in friction-free ways. They will be built for other ecosystems so as people move from device to device, so will their content and the richness of their services – it's one way we keep people, not devices, at the center. This transformation is well underway as we moved Office from the desktop to a service withOffice 365 and our solutions from individual productivity to group productivity tools – both to the delight of our customers. We'll push forward and evolve the world-class productivity, collaboration and business process tools people know and love today, including Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Bing and Dynamics.

Increasingly, all of these experiences will become more connected to each other, more contextual and more personal. For example, today the Cortana app on my Windows Phone merges data from highway sensors and my own calendar and simply reminds me to leave work to make it to my daughter's recital on time. In the future, it will be even more intelligent as a personal assistant who takes notes, books meetings and understands if my question about the weather is to determine my clothes for the day or is intended to start a complex task like booking a family vacation. Microsoft experiences will be unique as they will reason over information from work and life and keep a user in control of their privacy.

Cloud OS: Our cloud OS represents the largest opportunity given we are working from a position of strength. With Azure, we are one of very few cloud vendors that runs at hyper-scale. The combination of Azure and Windows Server makes us the only company with a public, private and hybrid cloud platform that can power modern business. We will transform the return on IT investment by enabling enterprises to combine their existing datacenters and our public cloud into one cohesive infrastructure backplane. We will enable our customers to use our Cloud OS to accelerate their businesses and power all of their data and application needs.

Beyond back-end cloud infrastructure, our cloud will also enable richer employee experiences. For example, with our new Enterprise Mobility Suite, we now enable IT organizations to manage and secure the Windows, iOS and Android devices that their employees use, while keeping their companies secure. We are also making it easy for organizations to securely adopt SaaS applications (both our own and third-party apps) and seamlessly integrate them with their existing security and management infrastructure. We will continue to innovate with higher level services like identity and directory services, rich data storage and analytics services, machine learning services,media services, web and mobile backend services, developer productivity services, and many more.

Our cloud OS will also run all of Microsoft's digital work and life experiences, and we will continue to grow our datacenter footprint globally. Every Microsoft digital work and life experience will also provide third-party extensibility and enable a rich developer ecosystem around our cloud OS. This will enable customers and partners to further customize and extend our solutions, achieving even more value.

Device OS and Hardware: Our Windows device OS and first-party hardware will set the bar for productivity experiences. Windows will deliver the most rich and consistent user experience for digital work and life scenarios on screens of all sizes – from phones, tablets and laptops to TVs and giant 82 inch PPI boards. We will invest so that Windows is the most secure, manageable and capable OS for the needs of a modern workforce and IT. Windows will create a broad developer opportunity by enabling Universal Windows Applications to run across all device targets. Windows will evolve to include new input/output methods like speech, pen and gesture and ultimately power more personal computing experiences.

Our first-party devices will light up digital work and life. Surface Pro 3 is a great example – it is the world's best productivity tablet. In addition, we will build first-party hardware to stimulate more demand for the entire Windows ecosystem. That means at times we'll develop new categories like we did with Surface. It also means we will responsibly make the market for Windows Phone, which is our goal with the Nokia devices and services acquisition.

Our first-party devices will light up digital work and life.

I also want to share some additional thoughts on Xbox and its importance to Microsoft. As a large company, I think it's critical to define the core, but it's important to make smart choices on other businesses in which we can have fundamental impact and success. The single biggest digital life category, measured in both time and money spent, in a mobile-first world is gaming. We are fortunate to have Xbox in our family to go after this opportunity with unique and bold innovation. Microsoft will continue to vigorously innovate and delight gamers with Xbox. Xbox is one of the most-revered consumer brands, with a growing online community and service, and a raving fan base. We also benefit from many technologies flowing from our gaming efforts into our productivity efforts – core graphics and NUI in Windows, speech recognition in Skype, camera technology in Kinect for Windows, Azure cloud enhancements for GPU simulation and many more. Bottom line, we will continue to innovate and grow our fan base with Xbox while also creating additive business value for Microsoft.

While today many people define mobile by devices, Microsoft defines it by experiences. We're really in the infant stages of the mobile-first world. In the next few years we will see many more new categories evolve and experiences emerge that span a variety of devices of all screen sizes. Microsoft will be on the forefront of this innovation with a particular focus on dual users and their needs across work and life.

Microsoft will continue to vigorously innovate and delight gamers with Xbox.

Our Culture

Our ambitions are bold and so must be our desire to change and evolve our culture.

I truly believe that we spend far too much time at work for it not to drive personal meaning and satisfaction. Together we have the opportunity to create technology that impacts the planet.

Nothing is off the table in how we think about shifting our culture to deliver on this core strategy. Organizations will change. Mergers and acquisitions will occur. Job responsibilities will evolve. New partnerships will be formed. Tired traditions will be questioned. Our priorities will be adjusted. New skills will be built. New ideas will be heard. New hires will be made. Processes will be simplified. And if you want to thrive at Microsoft and make a world impact, you and your team must add numerous more changes to this list that you will be enthusiastic about driving.

I am committed to making Microsoft the best place for smart, curious, ambitious people to do their best work.

First, we will obsess over our customers.

Obsessing over our customers is everybody's job. I'm looking to the engineering teams to build the experiences our customers love. I'm looking to the sales and marketing organizations to showcase our unique value propositions and drive customer usage first and foremost.

In order to deliver the experiences our customers need for the mobile-first and cloud-first world, we will modernize our engineering processes to be customer-obsessed, data-driven, speed-oriented and quality-focused. We will be more effective in predicting and understanding what our customers need and more nimble in adjusting to information we get from the market. We will streamline the engineering process and reduce the amount of time and energy it takes to get things done. You can expect to have fewer processes but more focused and measurable outcomes. You will see fewer people get involved in decisions and more emphasis on accountability. Further, you will see investments in two new or combined functions: Data and Applied Science and Software Engineering. Each engineering group will have Data and Applied Science resources that will focus on measurable outcomes for our products and predictive analysis of market trends, which will allow us to innovate more effectively. Software Engineering will evolve so that information can travel more quickly, with fewer breakpoints between the envisioning of a product or service and a quality delivery to customers. In making these changes we are getting closer to the customer and pushing more accountability throughout the organization.

Second, we know the changes above will bring on the need for new training, learning and experimentation. Over the next six months you will see new investments in our workforce, such as enhanced training and development and more opportunities to test new ideas and incubate new projects. I have also heard from many of you that changing jobs is challenging. We will change the process and mindset so you can more seamlessly move around the company to roles where you can have the most impact and personal growth. All of this, too, comes with accountability and the need to deliver great work for customers, but it is clear that investing in future learning and growth has great benefit for everyone.

I am committed to making Microsoft the best place for smart, curious, ambitious people to do their best work.

Finally, every team across Microsoft must find ways to simplify and move faster, more efficiently. We will increase the fluidity of information and ideas by taking actions to flatten the organization and develop leaner business processes. Culture change means we will do things differently. Often people think that means everyone other than them. In reality, it means all of us taking a new approach and working together to make Microsoft better. To this end, I've asked each member of the Senior Leadership Team to evaluate opportunities to advance their innovation processes and simplify their operations and how they work. We will share more on this throughout July.

A few months ago on a call with investors I quoted Nietzsche and said that we must have "courage in the face of reality." Even more important, we must have courage in the face of opportunity.

We have clarity in purpose to empower every individual and organization to do more and achieve more. We have the right capabilities to reinvent productivity and platforms for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. Now, we must build the right culture to take advantage of our huge opportunity. And culture change starts with one individual at a time.

Rainer Maria Rilke's words say it best: "The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens."

We must each have the courage to transform as individuals. We must ask ourselves, what idea can I bring to life? What insight can I illuminate? What individual life could I change? What customer can I delight? What new skill could I learn? What team could I help build? What orthodoxy should I question?

With the courage to transform individually, we will collectively transform this company and seize the great opportunity ahead.

Join the conversation about this story »

Let’s be real. No one likes to be sold. Today’s buyers are no different in that regard but there is one difference; they’re more rebellious than ever before. That’s because the Internet has sped the dissemination of information at an unimaginable rate and the information has emboldened buyers with a new level of purchasing control.

The availability of paper and the invention of movable type spread the dissemination of ideas from the 15th century and on helping to spawn the European Renaissance. And today, because of the invention of the Internet, we’re experiencing a Renaissance of a different kind—a Buyer Renaissance.

Buyer’s are reacting to—perhaps are even the cause of—four distinct cultural changes in the B2B world.

These four changes correspond to some degree, to those of the “real” Renaissance.

1. A rebellion against the reliance of salespeople for information.
2. A Movement toward realism (art is in the eye of the buyer)
3. An increased reliance on observation and empirical data.
4. A mindfulness of non-product related factors on decision-making

Rebellion is manifested within buyers in the following ways:

• They don’t want to meet with you
• They don’t return your phone calls
• They don’t read your emails
• They don’t give you their real contact details on web-forms
• They (act like they) don’t want or value your help
• They form opinions and purchase criterion on their own, in advance of talking with salespeople
• They do (a lot) of research in advance of entertaining an initial or follow-on conversation
• They can’t, won’t, or don’t make lone decisions.
• They are interested one day and not the next. Then are interested again soon after that.

I’ll be hosting a Webinar on July 16 to dive deep into this subject. Along with John Hulwick, Director of Sales for Clearslide, we’ll identify the three main reasons why buyers rebel, we’ll describe each of the four underlying cultural shifts mentioned above, and we’ll outline twelve specific ideas that you can employ immediately to succeed with rebellious buyers.

Rebellious Buyers: How to Sell to People Who Don’t Want to be Sold

Selling has never been an easy profession. While in many respects selling has gotten easier (we have more tools available than ever), the challenges are increasing at a faster clip. Vying for attention, earning the chance to build trust, demonstrating value, and navigating the labyrinth of decision-making, remains a monumental challenge.

How about you? Do you think buyers have gotten more rebellious? What do you think sellers can do in the face of this challenging environment? Post your comments here and join us for the webinar for an interesting discussion.

Ready to put your business on autopilot?

That’s right, selling doesn’t necessarily require constant aggressive marketing. You don’t have to sell to sell. Setting up a strategy for passive sales is an increasingly important aspect of marketing, and it doesn’t annoy customers like more aggressive tactics do.

Stride recently released a neat infographic about the topic, actually. It covers most of the bases (you can find them below), but I can point out the important bits for you, because I’m super nice and generous.

Here are some important notes on how to cater your products’ marketing so they sell themselves:

Strong Colors

• 85% of buyers say color is the primary reason they bought a specific product (Tweet this)
• 93% of buyers say that visual appearance is very important to them when buying a product (Tweet this)
• Black represents power, used for high end products
• Orange can be aggressive, and creates a call-to-action
• Red is energetic, and gives urgency to a product
• Color increases brand awareness by 80% (Tweet this)

We at eZanga find color really interesting. See more here and here.

Appealing Website Design

• 42% of shoppers’ opinions of a website depend on the site’s design (Tweet this)
• 52% of buyers will not return to a poorly designed website (Tweet this)
• 64% of visitors won’t buy anything if the website is too slow (Tweet this)
• 10% won’t complete payment if the payment process is too long (Tweet this)

“The Good Cause Effect”

• 50% of customers will pay more for a product if the company is philanthropic (Tweet this)
• 60% of people say that buying products from socially responsible companies is important to them (Tweet this)
• 91% of people are more likely to switch brands to one with a good cause (Tweet this)

Word Play

• More than 50% of people will enter a store that has a SALE sign (Tweet this)
• 60% of people are more likely to buy something if the word “guaranteed” is associated with it (Tweet this)
• 90% of people say that positive reviews influence their decision to buy (Tweet this)
• 25% of people are more likely to buy if they receive follow-up information (Tweet this)

---

Facebook co-founder and hoodie-enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg has revealed his extremely optimistic prediction for how the Internet will reshape the lives of the Earth’s poorest people in a cheery Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Though it didn’t get nearly as much pickup as Zuckerberg’s previous op-ed on immigration reform for the Washington Post, it is nonetheless informative about how one of the world’s most powerful technologists views his own work.

More influential than the printing press

“There have been moments in history where the invention of new technology has completely rewired the way our society lives and works,” wrote Zuckerberg. “The printing press, radio, television, mobile phones, and the Internet are among these. In the coming decades, we will see the greatest revolution yet, as billions of people connect to the Internet for the first time.”

The printing press is easily one of the most significant inventions of the last 500 years. The explosion in mass literacy gave birth to the French Enlightenment and, eventually, democracy. Prior to the printing press, self-governance was only possible in very small societies; really, it only existed in the rolling hills of ancient Athens, where roughly 5,000 citizens would gather to hear orations.

The switch from oral tradition to written language was the basis for the scientific revolution, as it was never before possible to record and replicate information with the same speed.

Radio had a relatively more muted impact on society; it helped centralize the American government and national culture, since everyone could hear the exact same information simultaneously.

Zuckerberg appears to believe that the Internet will have a more profound impact on society than the printing press — in essence, the scientific revolution and the birth of democracy. It’s quite possible that connected devices will indeed rapidly advance society in ways that are qualitatively different than self-governance and the scientific method.

Google, for instance, is leveraging the vast wealth of the web to power a generation of artificial intelligence. Moreover, the creation of virtual reality could create a world that is, for the first time, free of geographic alliances (and all of their associated rivalries).

Whatever the cause, Zuckerberg predicts (very) big things from the web.

Dramatic reductions in poverty

“A recent study by Deloitte found that expanding Internet access in developing countries would create 140 million jobs and lift 160 million people out of poverty, and that this newfound opportunity would even meaningfully reduce child-mortality rates,” said Zuckerberg. “Across sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, the Internet will help drive human progress.”

There are a number of tech titans who believe that information asymmetry is the cause of poverty. The poor have all sorts of valuable skills and ideas, but can’t connect to investors or buyers, because no one with power can readily access them. Last month, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky predicted that similar web platforms in the U.S. would alleviate poverty by giving everyone access to part-time paying gigs.

For instance, nonprofit micro-work firm Samasource farms out mostly low-skill digital tasks to some of the poorest places on earth. This reporter has used freelancing platform oDesk to hire people in Asia for research.

Zuckerberg evidently imagines some rather large outflows of cash from developed nations to the developing world, creating financial parity thanks to the Internet.

A connected world

“Perhaps the most important change might be a new global sense of community,” said Zuckerberg. “Today we can only hear the voices and witness the imaginations of one-third of the world’s people. We are all being robbed of the creativity and potential of the two-thirds of the world not yet online. Tomorrow, if we succeed, the Internet will truly represent everyone.”

The idea of so-called “global citizenship” has been around for at least 95 years, around the creation of the League of Nations in 1919. President Obama ushered in a renewed interest in the philosophy, believing that all nations either succeed or fall together. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s tech advisor, Alec Ross, was especially big on this philosophy, helping to promote Internet access and entrepreneurship throughout the globe.

The Internet does make countries more interdependent, as everyday citizens are able to communicate and trade without the nuisance of a government mediator.

One would think that identifying as a “global citizen,” rather than a citizen of the U.S., would have increased with a younger generation that is used to chatting and playing World of Warcraft from those all around the world. But, according to World Values Survey data, young people are not significantly more likely to identify with a global sense of community as older generations.

So, it appears that a global sense of community still needs something a bit more from the Internet, if the Internet can have that effect at all on our beliefs.

Still, these very optimistic predictions help explain why Zuckerberg commits so much of his own money to advancing Internet access in the developing world through programs like Internet.org. He thinks the knowledge economy has a grand mission. It also means he thinks Internet companies deserve a lot of respect and resources, too.

By Tibor Shanto - tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Sales people are always looking for the secret to sales success, more revenue and glory. One path is to look beyond sales and see how they can drive commerce. At first glance one may be inclined to dismiss this as just semantics, but in as much as attitudes drive actions, and actions lead to results, the distinction is so much more.

“Commerce is the whole system of an economy that constitutes an environment for business. The system includes legal, economic, political, social, cultural and technological systems that are in operation in any country. Thus, commerce is a system or an environment that affects the business prospects of an economy or a nation-state. It can also be defined as a component of business which includes all activities, functions and institutions involved in transferring goods from producers to consumers.”

Substitute “nation-state” in the above to vertical or market segment, and you can see why successful sales people focus on commerce over sales. For us to sell more, we require customers who need to and can buy more; and new prospects who see merit in buying from us. As sellers, there are steps we can execute that will help and benefit both groups in the same way, and other steps that will pertain to one of the above.

While all good sales people want to help their customers/buyers, and work diligently to do that, for the most part it is usually centered around our offering. Not taking anything away from many “solution focused” organizations, the fact remains that when I ask sales people or even many managers:

How can you directly support their goals?

The majority respond in a way that reflects what their product does in a very-specific way related to the nature of the product, for example: hardware specs, or the “User Experience” they deliver.

But few go into the clients’ world. Even many case studies focus on how their product helped the client achieve things, a more secure environment, faster speeds, etc. But little if anything about how and why the buyer interacts with their world. It is as though the buyer has nothing other than the product or process in question to worry about.

A seller focused on commerce, understands that his success is tied to the buyer’s success, and that happens beyond the product, on a bigger playing field. How do they help the buyer increase market share, extend return on assets, expand time, mitigate risk, manage reputations, exceed customer expectations, reduce to cost of doing business – not buying your product, or how to add value to the buyer’s customers.

The good news is that with a nudge in the right direction, and managerial support, most sellers can be given the broader vision of Commerce. Focus on commerce, and sales follow.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto 

They all revolved around sales development and ended with one realization. SDR teams are paramount to achieving success in a dynamic market. They drive an efficient sales process and make for a predictable revenue model and scalable sales team.

But there are still skeptics. After all, it’s hard to restructure your entire sales team without some resistance to change.

Here are the top five objections…along with the reasoning of why this shouldn’t stop you from implementing sales development.

1. We Don’t Have The Resources

There’s currently no budget to hire a new team focused specifically on sales development.

The answer is specialization, regardless of scale.

Here’s how you can launch a sales development team without many resources. Even if you only have one rep, they could prospect Monday and Wednesday and act as a closer on Tuesday, Thursday, or Friday.

With two reps on board, one idea would be for one rep prospect while the other closes deals. It will instill the mindset of specialization, which is the real value behind sales development.

2. We Don’t Have The Lead Volume

It’s not just about inbound leads. It’s about the combination of inbound and outbound maximizes your businesses’ appointments and demos.

Lead volume has nothing to do with whether or not you can implement sales development, unless it’s in the most extreme cases (i.e. huge deals at an extremely low volume). If you’re selling multimillion dollar Boeing jets, you might not need a sales development team to prospect new business, because the options are so limited.

If you are selling software, sales development can increase demos and drive up your revenue numbers.

3. We Don’t Want Our Prospect’s First Conversation To Be With The Least Experienced Reps

This is the single most common objection to specialization.

Think about it this way…

Even if you have the best Account Executives, their skills revolve around bottom of the funnel objections that deal directly with providing a solution to their problem. They are not adept at handling the top of the funnel objections that come from cold calls and emails.

Our best clients’ SDRs are even better than their AEs at overcoming initial objections ranging from “We’re happy with our current strategy,” to “We don’t have time to talk right now.”

SDRs deal with challenges like these every single day, and are able to dive deeper and bring value to their business goals. They can spend a higher percentage of their time practicing and role playing the best ways to handle these unique situations.

4. We Don’t Want The Prospect To Be Passed Off The Minute We Gain Traction With Them

Passing the baton should improve a prospect’s relationship, not hurt it.

Once a prospect has a good conversation with an SDR, the rep might say something like, “Let me upgrade you to one of our experts, who can teach you some specifics about the product.”

It frames the suggestion in the light of not only giving the prospect something new, but introducing them to someone who knows more about the product and can be of value.

Hone your language, use the best tools, and your lead handoff will be flawless.

5. We Let Marketing Take Care Of Lead Nurturing

A sales development team maximizes one-to-one conversations, while a marketing team masters one-to-many conversations.

This makes marketing automation a fantastic tool for blasts and drip campaigns, but not the right one for sales development.

Sales development reps need to respond to leads as soon as they are generated, answer questions quickly, and schedule demos immediately. It’s the most agile way to handle your prospects.

-

There’s value in specialization. While it doesn’t fit with the traditional sales model, sales development is the key to efficiency within your sales team.

Follow SalesLoft on twitter for the most up-to-date sales development info, or visit SalesLoft.com for detailed information about prospecting.

When used correctly, forms can be one of the most important tools in your lead generation strategy; for many organizations, forms are the #1 way to capture leads on websites. The main purpose of a form is to get permission to interact and continue to engage with a potential customer, gain insightful information on that prospect, and let you prioritize and score a lead’s attributes (such as title) and actions (such as downloading a solution-focused white paper).

Proper form creation can have a huge impact on conversion rates, and will ultimately help you get more qualified leads in the hands of your sales team. In terms of design and layout, there are many factors to consider, but using a number of the following best practices will help you create user-friendly forms for lead generation that motivate individuals to hit the submit button – and after all, getting a submission is the first goal for any form.

 

Let the reader know what’s in it for them

• Provide a clear and concise explanation for why the reader is filling out the form.
• Explain what they get in return for completing the form, and use a heading and sub-heading to help describe the benefits of filling it out.

Strong call to action

• Whether you’re linking to a form from an email, web page, landing page, or social media, you want to make sure readers know what the value proposition is and what they get by completing the form.
• Make sure that you’re clear about what you’re asking for throughout the form. If someone is confused at any point while completing the form, there’s a high likelihood that they won’t complete the form, or will enter bogus information.

Placement

• If your form is on your website, keep it high enough so that it can be seen without having to scroll down.
• If you’re linking to a form in an email, the call to action should focus on the form and the benefits of completing it.
• Draw attention to forms with buttons containing direct messages. All buttons should be large and colorful enough to get the attention of visitors.

Shorter forms are usually better

• We’ve conducted numerous A/B tests to determine if a long or short form will convert better. In all cases, the short version has won. However, make sure it’s still long enough to collect the information you need – a form that asks only for a name and email will not be as useful as one that also asks for a phone number and company name. Leads might also avoid filling out a suspiciously short form for fear of being spammed.
• That said, the people who fill out longer forms may be more motivated, so while you may get fewer leads, they may be better quality.
• Use your marketing automation system to save contact data each time a lead fills out a form. The next time the same lead fills out a form, the data they have already provided should pre-fill. This prevents the user from having to manually enter data that they may have already provided in the past, and makes you look smart, like you know who they are. (Which you do.)
• If possible, use progressive profiling to gradually obtain more data on each lead who fills out one of your forms. For example, the first time someone visits a form, you may only ask for three pieces of information (name, email and phone). Upon the next visit, you then populate a form that asks for company and title. This helps to ensure that the form remains short, but still allows you to gradually gain increasingly relevant information on the individual submitting the form.
• People are often turned away by lengthy forms that ask for more information than the submitter is willing to give; progressive profiling will get you to your goal of more complete information without taxing the buyer’s patience or arousing mistrust.
• Here are a few qualities that might help you spot a bad form in need of some fixes:

o No heading or sub heading

o No branding

o No value proposition to persuade people to submit the form

o Too long, without using side-by-side text to limit the need to scroll.

Which form would you rather fill out?

Include your privacy policy

• A simple link to your organization’s privacy policy and a promise that none of the lead’s personally identifiable information (PII) will be passed to third-party websites will help build trust with those completing the form. (Of course, do follow through on this guarantee – nobody likes spam!)

Test, test, test

• Preview your form in multiple browser windows to make sure it works across the board. Don’t skip previewing the form on mobile devices; 47% of emails are opened on mobile devices now, and people reading email on their phones and tablets will be more likely to fill out a form that is mobile-compatible.
• Test-submit the form to find any process flaws, and make sure the flow is as designed.
• A/B test to identify which of your forms has the best conversion rate. Test many different variables, such as form length, combination and order of questions, wording, and graphic design. Test just one

Follow up

• Make sure you follow up as quickly as possible (usually within 24 hours) if you are using the form for lead generation purposes. Leads go cold quickly.
• Most important: make sure form submitters do indeed get what they were promised by submitting the form. This is a chance to begin building a trusted relationship. Don’t blow it.

Do you need/want a Captcha?

Probably not. The acronym CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. Such programs create and grade little tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. They’re mostly used in these situations:

• Preventing spambots/adbots from signing up on forums or taking part in online polls
• Protecting rich multi-media downloads from automated access by bots (which is not a security risk, but a bandwidth drain)

We don’t recommend them unless you fulfill certain conditions; it’s just one more field to fill out, one more chance the submitter will lose patience and click away.

As a business professional you probably have a collection of old business cards sitting on your desk that you will get to “sometime”. You also have an active LinkedIn profile with 500+ connections and growing and you belong to many active professional Facebook, Google Plus groups but none of these platforms are translating into ROI.

Why? Is it Because…

• You lack of time because you are running a small business and there is only so much you can do in a 24-hour day
• You have other priorities like getting the work done or fulfilling your orders
• You don’t have a budget to hire someone to help you

All are very valid reasons for not “nurturing” these leads. The end result is the loss of business and sales. Here are a few suggestions that have helped our business move away from survival mode to build mode.

Haste Makes Waste… Schedule Some Time

Let’s tackle the time issue first. This is what most of us have a problem with: TIME! We tend to get bogged down with the details of running a business and not sitting back and examining the loss of potential earnings. It is natural for a small business to react by “putting out a fire” before thinking about making a sales call.

Everybody has time when they need it. You already have made time to get your orders fulfilled and ready to deliver.

Nurturing those leads could translate into new business! 

You Are Your Best Salesperson

As the owner of a small business with a very limited budget, you cannot afford to cast those business cards or social media connections into the forgotten round file. Schedule weekly time to review and organize by prioritizing your leads into hot, lukewarm and cold. Best times for us have been Monday mornings when we are fresh from the weekend.

Connect Via Social Media

Connect with the hottest leads first. If you have your prospect’s business card, then call and set an appointment or invite him/her to connect via social media platforms. If you are already connected, reach out with a friendly message first before you send them a proposal. You want to make sure they are interested and they don’t feel intruded upon.

Engage in Relevant Groups and Communities

Often times when sharing an article or joining in a conversation you meet many people or possible business prospects. Keep the conversation going to build trust and then ask politely to engage further, be it by friending on Facebook or connecting on LinkedIn. I always prefer to listen first; you can learn a lot by listening to what your prospects are saying.

Addressing the “What About All the Other Work” Question

This one is tough. Not only do you need to spend some money, you now have to “trust” someone else to do your job and hand off responsibility. And will your existing clients be pleased? Again, it’s back to time management and of course monitoring your vendors. As we discussed earlier, you need to find time to follow up on leads. One suggestion is to consider hiring a subcontractor for a few hours a week and oversee the work.

Addressing the “It’s Too Expensive” Concerns

Start by adding up all those leads and the potential percent of business you could get if you reached out and turned some leads into clients. It is well worth the money you will spend on an assistant. If you aren’t willing to invest in your company, why should clients work with a firm that is not willing or able to grow to meet their needs.

Conclusion

If you truly want to grow your business, you need to be proactive in cultivating leads and investing the time and dollars into turning them into customers. There are no magic bullets. It is roll up your sleeves, position your company and its services with the focus on results. Spend time working on your business, not in it!

You should expect, what you inspect, and it seems that measurement of Marketing still has a great impact on effectiveness. In this week's blog, Hugh draws from our most recent alignment study, published jointly with Marketo to explain what happens when change what you measure Marketing on. Shifting your focus from leads to appointments, then proposals and finally sales has a big impact on closure rates, how much revenue comes from Marketing, and even customer retention. We'll also show you how to get the whole report, for free, at the end of this video.

read more

Happy 4th!

It’s great to celebrate; kick back for a weekend and reflect on the year half complete.  Enjoy your upcoming long weekend!

But….

Don’t delude yourself.  If you own, or have P&L responsibility for a B2B business, 2014 is largely in the bag – for better or for worse.  Here’s why.

July & August – That’s vacation season.  You know full well (and your sales reps will consistently remind you) that capital budgets and major business initiatives aren’t seriously considered, much less implemented during the bulk of the third quarter.  And although Labor Day arrives early this year (September 1) there’s at least two weeks of ‘ramp up’ as folks return from vacations.  So you’ve got a couple Q3 weeks to work with.

October & November – That’s B2B trade show season.  Companies aren’t going to make major decisions or investments with a trade show just around the corner.  They’ll wait, send a small team to the show to compare known options and scout new ones.  Then the team will return, take time to prepare a report, and then discuss it with colleagues. And of course November is effectively a three week month (how much really gets done in the three days of Thanksgiving week?)

December – Good news here.  There are a couple decent weeks before everything shifts to year end, closing, planning, etc…and of course holidays and other work limitations.

So according to common wisdom you’ve got a couple weeks in September and a couple in December.  Is that enough to hit your targets?

Buying process

If that doesn’t ‘feel’ or ‘sound’ right that’s because it shouldn’t.   It’s absurd (but widely believed!)  First, it’s a function of a self limiting traditional mindset (like no company grows during a slow economic cycle.)

But more importantly it’s a function of an outdated sales model.

It used to be that when direct sales people had to connect in person for a series of meetings and conversations, traditional scheduling conflicts did impact the pace of business.  That was back when direct sales people controlled information and the sales process.

Today, however, since >90% of B2B purchases initiate with an internet search and since research shows that the buying process is typically 70% complete before buyers are willing to speak to sales reps, many folks are embarking upon their buying journey on weekends, evenings, during vacation (and maybe even from their smart phone while their boorish cousin rambles on at the Thanksgiving gathering!)

So the real problem isn’t vacations, capital budget cycles and holidays – rather the real problem is that you don’t know who’s buying, or who should be buying, what you’re selling.  Nor does your model accommodate the virtual, protracted and convoluted buying process typical in todays markets.  Your direct sales model is disconnected from how your prospects are buying.

Syncing buying and selling cycles

The solution, therefore, isn’t to lament the challenges and buy into the excuses.  Instead the solution is to develop a B2B sales approach which leverages the power of inbound marketing to sell virtually through the first 70% of the sales process.  You achieve this by establishing thought leadership around the business challenges your buyers face all year (and stew about at least 350 days/year,) and which you may understand better than they do.  You create a body of educational content in various forms, optimized for your key buyer/prospect profiles, which resonates with them and works on your behalf – independent of external factors.

And your huge fall trade show investments?  Is your B2B marketing treating those as 3 day events or extended campaign opportunities with pre and post components?

Stepping up your game

Here’s the point.  If you’re in the B2B manufacturing space, particularly selling complex products or services, to a large extent your ability to impact 2014 is fleeting.  But you’ve got a huge opportunity to impact 2015 by building a B2B sales and marketing model that will:

• help prospects find you whom you’d never have found on your own
• create a huge early stage sales footprint without increasing your sales staff
• filter prime opportunities from low quality
• prospect and sell 24 X 7 X 365
• establish an entirely higher level of market position and authority
• substantially grow marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads and revenue
• build out of 2014, grow in 2015 and rock 2016

But there’s a lag time from when you start until you really begin to harvest the fruits.

Maybe now’s the time to start?

image – startingourfamily

You may or may not understand exactly what social selling is. In fact, it may sound like something that doesn’t warrant your attention. However, you would be wrong. It can help you to bring your business to the next level by selling like crazy. LinkedIn is the perfect forum through which to do it.

The reputation of the sales concept

Unfortunately, when a lot of people think about selling and salespeople, negative thoughts may come to mind. This may be the case with you too. In fact, when you think about social selling on social media channels, including on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc, you may associate it with spam. Social selling means leveraging your brand by populating with the most appropriate, effective people with the right insights and the right relationships. However, it is very important for you to understand that if you go about social selling the right way, you may be able to increase your business’s revenue significantly. LinkedIn will enable you to successfully do that. Of course, that is the ultimate goal. Of course, there are other positive side effects that will occur before you actually get to the point of increasing your Return on Investment (ROI).

Social selling through LinkedIn will increase your website traffic, which, in turn, will generate more leads. More leads will eventually lead to greater ROI. It is important to keep in mind that social selling is different from other types of selling to some extent, although there are basic skills (and a basic foundation) that they share. There are basic selling techniques that you should implement in order to increase your selling capabilities. Beyond that, there are other, more advanced elements that you should incorporate into your selling approach.

• Creating the foundation: Of course, the foundation must exist (and be solid) before you can do anything else with any hope of succeeding. Your foundation must be well thought out, professional, and effective online.

• Choosing the most effective prospects: It isn’t enough to have prospects. You need to have the right prospects. Your prospects need to be a perfect fit for what you are offering. Your objective goes beyond merely selling something once to that person (eventually). What you want to do is to build a strong, enduring relationship with that person. He or she will become loyal to you and your brand if you do it the right way.

• Establishing yourself as a subject matter expert (SME): After you have established your credibility and trust with the other person, you will be able to establish yourself as a subject matter expert and when a person needs what you are offering, you will be the first person they turn to.

• Engaging your potential customers: Part of the foundation of any meaningful relationship is the interaction. It is critical to your success that you engage your prospective customers. You have the potential to have amazing, stimulating, extremely valuable discussions that can lead to all sorts of wonderful places. Let it take you where it will.

• Continually fortifying your established relationships: As you build your relationships, it is extremely important for you to focus on continuing to bring value to the relationship. It will probably be mutual and you and the other person will both get a lot out of the relationship.

• Developing the relationship to the point where you interact online and in person: This will add a great deal of value to the relationship that you share. Interacting online is very valuable, adding that other layer to the relationship will really make the interactions that you share with the other person much more meaningful.

How to get the most out of social selling

There are some easy things that you should do before you start to get into social selling through LinkedIn. They don’t require a great deal of effort but they will make a big difference to your results and they are well worth it because of that.

• Make sure that you use a professional photo and that your profile is complete (on every social media channel that you use).
• Make sure that your profile is appropriate for what you are doing (WIIFM).
• Make sure that you have a substantial number of recommendations to share with other people.
• Ensure that your content is top quality and that it expresses your ability to solve the other person’s problems.
• Engage with your prospective customers consistently and regularly.
• Share interesting and valuable content that you feel would be beneficial to the other person.
• Work your LinkedIn groups to the best of your ability. Leveraging those groups will definitely pay off.
• Make use of your first-level connections to connect with connections on other levels.
• Do your best to interact effectively and leave comments and questions for other people.
• Interact with other people without any agenda in mind besides the desire to solve the other person’s problems.

Conclusion

If you use the correct social selling approach through LinkedIn, you will be able to bring your business to the next level (or even the level above that). There is no telling how far you can take it. Interestingly enough, all relationships have the same basic foundation and the core of that foundation is the human/emotional element. You will succeed in your social selling efforts through LinkedIn if you can develop context, collaboration, and amazing content. If you remember to always relate to the other person on an emotional level, you will always succeed.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a complimentary assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

It takes a lot of planning to have a safe, fun, and successful camping adventure. You need to decide where to go, form a travel route, and know how accomplish the desired activities you’ve planned from morning to night. As much as it’s good to get disconnected from the digital world when you go camping, the following smartphone apps make a good case for taking your device with you. They can help with each phase of your adventure — except for avoiding mosquito bites. Study Up: Learn to Camp [Cross-platform] Though the Learn to Camp app is targeted at people who will be camping...

Read the full article: 7 Awesome Camping Android And iOS Apps To Plan Your Next Adventure

Ever try measuring the straight-line distance between two points on Google Maps? You had to hold some object or appendage up to the little scale, then eyeball-measure the distance on your screen. What a mess. No more—a new update puts the task a right-click away. Also, you can doodle with it.

Read more...

Google announced a number of new updates coming to the Chromecast at I/O recently . One of the best is already rolling out: full device streaming.

Read more...

Buying a home is one of the biggest financial commitments most of us will ever make.

According to the Census Bureau, the median price of a home in the United States in 2010 was $221,800. Bearing in mind that, ideally, you would have a 20% down payment, that means you'll need to sock away $44,360.

Relatively few of us have that kind of money idling in our savings, but most of us could manage to unearth a smaller sum from beneath the proverbial couch cushions. Say ... $10.

If you were to save just $10 a day for that $44,360 down payment, how long would it take?

To figure it out, we used an online compound interest calculator to simulate two savings methods:

1. The high-yield savings account

The first is a high-yield savings account like the one offered by Ally (you can find it through Bankrate), with an interest rate of .87%, compounding daily.

With this account, it would take you between 11 and 12 years to save a down payment. At 11 years, you'd have $42,137; after 12, you'd have $46,170.

2. The investment account

Now, here's a twist: If you're putting the money you plan to spend on a home in an investment account rather than a savings account, your money could potentially grow much faster. Although, since it is invested, it's not a sure thing. If you were to invest your money in a portfolio with a conservative 4% annual return, it would take you about 10 years to save a down payment. At the 10-year mark, you'd have $44,756.

(For the record, if you were to have a more impressive 6% return on your investments, it would take a little over nine years to save a down payment. At nine years, you'd have $43,278; after 10 years, you'd have $49,650.) 

If you're saving for a house in a different price range, you can check out some of our favorite compound interest calculators at The Calculator Site and Bankrate.

SEE ALSO: 7 Easy Hacks That Could Save Major Cash

Join the conversation about this story »

The Program on Negotiation (PON), an active Harvard-MIT-Tufts consortium, draws lessons from the world’s best negotiators. This year, PON honored Ambassador Tommy Koh of Singapore as its 2014 “Great Negotiator.”  PON has annually granted this award to a range of remarkable men and women such as former Secretary of State James Baker, Lazard CEO Bruce Wasserstein, and U.S. Special Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky.

Tommy Koh became the youngest ambassador ever appointed to the United Nations and later served as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United States. During his remarkable career, described in detail here, Koh played central roles in some of the most complex international negotiations ever held. For example, he:

• Led negotiations over China’s recognition of Singapore while preserving Singapore’s important relationship with Taiwan;
• Served as President of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea in which thousands of delegate-negotiators hammered out a “constitution for the oceans” that was ultimately ratified and/or signed by 197 countries;
• Chaired negotiations at the Rio “Earth Summit”—likely the high point of international environmental cooperation, with the final session attended by no fewer than 130 heads of state/government—that produced global agreements on forests, biodiversity, desertification, and climate change, etc.; and
• Acted as Chief Negotiator for Singapore in talks leading to the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement.

While most of us will not undertake negotiations of this complexity, Koh’s approach offers powerful lessons for all negotiations. Koh himself emphasizes often-neglected “fundamentals,” such as:

1. Master your brief. There is simply no substitute for doing your homework on the issues, the people, and the context in which you’ll be negotiating.

2. Build a talented, happy, and cohesive team. Negotiation is not usually an individual sport.

3. Build a common fact base.  In many disputes, disagreement arises less from a clash of interests and more from disparate understandings of the situation. Develop the facts of the case jointly with your counterparts.

4. Think outside your own box. Along with analytical intelligence, which is absolutely essential for negotiating, exercise both emotional and cultural intelligence. Koh observes, “The beginning of wisdom is to understand that we all live in our own cultural box. We should therefore make an attempt to understand the content of the cultural box of our negotiating counterparts. This will help us to avoid violating cultural taboos such as serving pork to American Jews or food that is not halal to our Malaysian or Arab friends. At a deeper level, it will help us to understand how our American, Chinese, and Malaysian friends think and how they negotiate. Armed with this understanding, we will able we will be able to customize our negotiating strategy and tactics to suit each negotiating partner.” Koh stresses the importance of negotiating both with your head and your heart; connect emotionally with your counterparts and make airtight arguments.  This is often done best over informal meals; in Malay, this is called “makan diplomacy.”

5. “Think win-win.” Koh emphasizes that sustainability calls for the deal to be fair and balanced.

These five points have value in almost any negotiation. But, for those carrying out more complex negotiations — let alone those with thousands of negotiators like the Law of the Sea or the Earth Summit — Koh offers this additional advice:

1. Educate. In high-stakes, multiparty dealmaking, technical sophistication and understanding of the issues can vary widely, leading to serious conflicts.  For example, a critical and contentious issue in the Law of the Sea talks involved the economic and technical aspects of an emerging industry that would mine deep seabed “nodules” made of copper, cobalt, nickel, and manganese. To help shape a shared understanding, Koh recruited an MIT team that had independently built an analytical and financial model of a seabed mining operation to give a series of influential seminars and analyze proposals for feasibility.

2. Minimize, then expand your circle. To make progress in large-scale negotiations, look for an opportune moment to “miniaturize” the process by finding a small subgroup of negotiators — not necessarily from the largest or most important countries — who are widely respected for their technical knowledge and are seen to hold the values of the group that they will informally represent. As this miniaturized negotiation begins to make real progress, carefully expand it to bring others along.  For example, on a key issue under negotiation by 172 countries, Koh finally miniaturized the larger stalled process to include only Fiji, Pakistan, Argentina, and the United States, with their small-scale agreement ultimately expanding into a full consensus.

3. Wage your campaign on several fronts. Think in terms of multi-front “negotiation campaigns” rather than specific deals. While you need to have an ultimate deal in mind, in reality you must orchestrate a series of smaller deals that set it up.  For example, when negotiating the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement, Koh had a U.S. counterpart — Ralph Ives from the Special Trade Representative’s office — with whom he interacted extensively. Yet, in parallel, Koh also coordinated multiple deals on each at least five fronts: 1) other Executive Branch agencies, 2) the U.S. Congress, 3) key companies and trade organizations from the U.S. business community, 4) the Singaporean government, as well as, 5) potential opponents of a free trade deal representing organized labor, human rights, and the environment.  As a result, the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade agreement was successfully signed in 2004.

From studying great negotiators like Tommy Koh, we can learn (or re-learn) the fundamentals as well as inventive approaches to truly challenging negotiations.

To learn much more from Koh, watch the 2014 Great Negotiator sessions held at Harvard Law School here and here. 

Does Customer Experience require information technology? Allow me to rephrase this question, is it necessary to purchase-configure-operate an arsenal of information technologies to improve the Customer Experience? Which is my way of asking, if it is necessary to turn Customer Experience as a business philosophy and/or value proposition into CRM: an information technology?

It occurs to me that it is mistake to collapse information technology and Customer Experience together – to make the kind of mistake that was made with CRM. I say that your organisation can impact-improve the Customer Experience in many ways that do not require information technology. Where is my proof? Let’s start with my recent experience.

Why Didn’t I Buy From Two Well Known Retail Brands?

I needed more trousers; my preference, some would call it addiction, is for Chinos. So my nephew drove me to a shopping centre outside of town. On his advice, I went to the first shop, found what I was looking for. And in the process I came across summer shorts. So with a handful of trousers and shorts I headed to the fitting rooms. Long queue. No movement for three minutes. No staff around to help out. I put the goods back on the racks and left.

Onwards to the second retail brand, which just happened to be next to the first store. Within five minutes or less, I found myself exiting this story empty handed. Why? One, they just didn’t stock trousers that fit me. Just about every trouser that caught my attention was regular length and regular is too short for me as I am tall and have long legs. Second, no staff members around to ask for help in finding longer length trousers. Third, the prices showed up as being too high; I remembered what I had paid for the Chinos I was wearing.

Why Did I Buy From The Gap Store?

Having had enough, I headed directly for the Gap store. Why? Because this is where I had purchased, some years ago, the Chinos I was wearing and happy with. The store showed up as friendlier-easier as it was much smaller in size, I could clearly see two sales assistants, and they looked happy. I spent over £150 pounds and walked out of the store with several Chino trousers and shorts. Why did I end up buying from Gap?

• They stocked the products that I was looking for – Chino trousers and a range of summer shorts;
• I found the particular style I was looking for – Classic;
• Each range of trousers came in a range of sizes including the size (34, 34) I was looking for;
• I found it easy-quick to try on the trousers (and shorts) as there was no queue for the fitting rooms; and
• The ‘checkout’ experience of paying for these items was quick-easy and delivered by a friendly sales assistant.

And there was a moment of delight. What delight? Upon checkout I found that I had been charged 30% less than I had expected to pay. Why so? Because Gap had a sales promotion that day and I had not noticed it as it had not been well signposted.

I draw your attention to this: no information technology was needed other than the POS till. Gap ended up the winner simply because it did the basics of clothes retailing right: store design (size-layout-signposting), the right product, ability to trial the product, good customer service, and pricing that is in tune with product quality and customer expectations.

I also notice, that I have a stronger bond to Gap and Gap did not have to engage in any customer loyalty or outbound marketing programme to generate that bond. How has this strengthening of the bond come about? By stocking the kind of products that I am looking for, by asking the kind of price I am willing to pay, and by making it easy-pleasant to buy from them: not just once, but every time I have bought from them.

If Gap does want to do something other than get the basics right then here is my advice. Gap should consider storing my preferences in terms of the products that I have bought from them. And allow me to order those products from them. Why do I say that? Whilst I like their latest Chino trousers (the ones I brought from them recently) I prefer the ones that I bought several years ago. The fact that those trousers are no longer available makes them that much more attractive to me. I wonder how many others are like me. If there are enough of us then there might be a market for listening to and catering to our needs. Back in the days when I was a consultant with Peppers & Rogers, we would put this idea into the mass customisation bucket. This is where information technology would be useful, even essential, for improving the Customer Experience.

I wish you a great week, thanks for listening – your listening calls forth my speaking. And if you have thoughts that which you wish to share then please engage in a conversation with me by commenting.