Archive for December 2011
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
I want to thank any and all who have come to my blog, and most especially to those he keep returning to see what I will share next, I hope you are learning something and continue to keep thinking forward. So this day I wish you and your world a Merry Christmas, and may 2012 be a better year than 2011 may have been, Happy New Year and good fortune to you.
Many Blessings,
Owen Greaves
A Review Of John Morgan’s Book “Brand Against The Machine”
I have read this book twice now, the first time was a quick once over, the second time, I grabbed a highlighter and messed this book up. I read lot, I mean read sales books, marketing books, how to books, even the bible, but this book I couldn’t put down. It grabbed me right from chapter 1, I was sitting in one of my favorite offices this morning, that being the Roasted Grape, and I punched out probably 30 nuggets (Tweets) from the 1st 5 chapters! So I guess you might say, you should go buy John Morgan’s book, infact…do it right now!
The premise of this book is right on the cover, ” How to Build Your Brand, Cut Through the Marketing Noise, and Stand Out from the Competition”. I know what you are thinking, it’s another marketing book, in some ways you might get that, but I have found it to be more than that, it’s a very direct set of principles that are actually easy to understand.
The book reads easy, it’s very straight forward, and I like the directness, John is very clear when he says it. This book is filled with more wisdom than you would expect, he clearly sees something most of us know but rarely execute. There are a great many take aways for me, but I’m not going spew them all out here, you need to find them for yourself. I will share one of my favorite chapters, it’s number 6, The Right Position, it’s a very short chapter too.
The first sentence from this chapter:
“The number one goal of your marketing should be to establish and position yourself as an authority in your industry or field. Authority leads to easier sales, and more opportunities.”
This says it all for me:
“The most important element of branding is positioning.”
That say a mouthful doesn’t it?
There is so much to share and frankly it would be a copyright infringement if I were to quote the book, I highly recommend John’s book, you won’t be disappointed. Thank you John for writing this book, I have enjoyed reading it over and over a few times.
Start your fight against the machine today, John shows you exactly how to do it. Enjoy!
Related articles
- Brand Against the Machine (chrisbrogan.com)
- Brand Against The Machine – John Morgan’s New Book Redefines Branding (rizzotees.com)
The Value Of A Fan, Like Or Follow
For whatever reason we seem to need to assign a dollar value for anything and everything, maybe there isn’t one, but we just have to have one. I’m not going to layout the proper conditions or equation in this post, I’ll let you do you own research, but let’s spend some time getting it right.
Yesterday I talked about Barking At Shadows, where we put far too much stock in the number of fans, likes and followers. Those indicators make you feel good but are really a false sense of security, it just means someone came knocking, they probably didn’t do anything else. So we start asking the question, what’s the value of a follower, a fan and a like…what’s the ROI?
The question of Social Media ROI comes up all the time, and immediately everyone points to the number of followers, likes and fans, but that would be the wrong thing to do right? In my last post I said I would introduce you to someone far smarter than I, he knows this stuff, he lives it. You will love his directness, he calls it as he sees it, so be prepared to learn Social Media ROI with passion. My good friend and author, Olivier Blanchard understands Social Media ROI metrics, he has clear and definite thoughts on how to plug Social Media into your business as well. I am a little biased but I highly recommend you read his book called Social Media ROI, you will be amazed at what you don’t know. I was in an exchange with Olivier and friends on FaceBook the other day in reference to this Mashable story posted on Olivier’s FaceBook wall called, “4 Ways to Convert Facebook Fans Into Super Fans”.
Olivier said with the above link:
Actually, no. Don’t. Attract fans with ads? Create advocates with… contests? Seriously? Who writes this crap? I wonder what the folks at Brains on Fire think about this garbage.
Owen said:
The problem with the “FAN” & the “LIKE” or the “FOLLOWER”, there is no real accurate way of measuring its value, it’s similar to KLOUT trying to accurately measure ones influence. Individually they don’t matter, but the SUM of these inaccurate metrics is more important. The SUM leads to a perceived value, not a real value that can be manipulated. The “SUPER FAN” is one more attempt to bring value to a single digit, WOM is hard enough to measure, the total number of those WOM messages matters more than the single blabber mouth being a SUPER FAN. But what do I know, I’m Canadian.
Olivier responded with:
You know how they do it, right? The CPF (cost per fan) gets magically transformed into fan value:
Because the fan cost $4 to acquire, that fan’s value is now estimated at $4. So the media buyer’s ROI equation, based on media equivalency models, becomes a factor of average acquisition cost – actual acquisition cost. It works like this:
“The average (cost) value of a fan is $4. Our CPF is $2. We acquired 100,000 fans, for a total fan value of $400,000. Your acquisition cost was $200,000. We provided an ROI of 200% with this campaign.
Whether the agency’s fees were included in that $200,000 depends on the agency. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. That’s the scam.
I responded with:
Its all scam, whomever scams best…. wins.
The conversation ended there, but almost everyone tries to game the Social Media Fan, Like and or follower, its barking at shadows.
The ultimate place to be is for you (your business) to bring extreme value, powerful solutions, backed by qualified data, and that might actually include the shadows, but it’s the lessor of all the metrics to be watching.
There is much to learn, and much more to unlearn when it comes to the future of business, but you should start with Olivier’s book, then his blog, then my blog. I am more about a new of changing, Olivier wants you to be honest and realistic about what you measure, and he’ll get in your face if you or I start spewing a bad message. We’ve talked about this value before, over and over again, it keeps coming back to the table. All it means is, many still don’t understand what it is and where it should go.
The Fan, the Like & the follower do have a value, but let’s put that value in perspective, and most importantly, let’s put that value in the right place in the equation.
Related articles
- Barking At Shadows (owengreaves.com)
- Which are the most important social media metrics? (Hint: they’re nothing to do with social media) (brendancooper.com)
- Be careful what you ask for, you might just measure it (briansolis.com)
Barking At Shadows
I must confess, my youngest son is responsible for the title of this blog post. We were sitting at the dinner table this nite and we were talking about our neighbours dog, deaf but not blind…soon though. Our dog (Zeena pictured on the left) on the other hand, has bionic hearing, she can hear the paper being dropped at the front door from anywhere in the house. She races to the door barking madly, when I open the door, nothing…. all she sees is her shadow. I said, this is just like social networks, and my son said, ya…you’re barking at shadows like those followers are real people. He said something there that inspired me to write this random thought process.
Also, this constant running and barking caused me to reflect on conversations on Twitter & FaceBook lately, in regards to LIKES, FANS & FOLLOWERS. I will call these three things shadows, shadows are very misleading, hard to determine, to see where they come from even, but mostly, we are lead to believe they are something far bigger than they really are.
We tend to put far too much stock in the number of followers, fans and likes. We even attach a value to these indicators, wrongly I might add, but we do it to justify our time getting them. So we can have a case for our actions. Don’t get me wrong, they are important, in that they tell you one thing for certain, someone came knocking at your businesses door. Those numbers don’t tell you much more than that, ideally we would like to believe there’s more data to be had when someone decides to follow you, be a fan, or when the like button is pushed. I would like to believe there was actually a plan in place when this data collecting started, but I’m skeptical.
If you didn’t have a plan, a strategy, or a desire outcome well thought-out before you put your business online, then your numbers merely mean you had a visitor. You might call them potential buyers, but nothing has been bought just yet, not until you can turn that fan, that like, or that follower into something more tangible. There is a very real way to this in Social Networks, but I’m not the one who will teach you this day, another far brighter than I will do it. Stay tuned, and I will reveal him to you in tomorrows post.
So, these numbers you are so proud of are no different than the shadows my dog finds, your bragging and pumping yourself up because you have large numbers is a false sense of security, you are hanging your businesses future on the number of likes, fans and followers, don’t do this, you’re just barking at shadows.
Related articles
- Is This One Of Your Goals For 2012? (owengreaves.com)
- Social Media is not Going to Save Your Business (briansolis.com)
The Future Of Business – Change Is Coming, And Lots Of It.
For as long as I can remember, nothing ever stays the same, and yet we fight tooth and nail to keep things in their rightful place so we know where to find it. Most of us even call ourselves change agents, that really only applies to everyone else right? We don’t mind walking others through change as long as it doesn’t impact our own little worlds. The truth is, when it comes to our businesses, we had better embrace change.
You would have to be in complete denial or not have a pulse to see that it’s not business as usual, just look around you, people are behaving differently more today than any other time in history. Hell, younger generations own a phone but don’t know how to speak on it, they only communicate via some flavour of text messaging. What happened, my sister used to live on the phone when she was a teenager, now it’s a mobile device in hand and we’ll text all day long.
If there’s one thing you should be learning here at owengreaves.com, it’s change. The world of business is not what we are comfortable with, we have to move with it or be ignored, especially in the digital realm. One of the first things to consider here is this, the same problem will always confront you, and that is how to get attention. We have been struggling with that one problem for some time, back in the day we thought Radio, TV, and Newspaper were the best ways to get that done, not anymore.
Enter in the Internet and it’s soon to be 5 Billion eyeballs, the playing field has changed (there’s that word), now reaching the world is much cheaper, and anyone can talk to anyone at any given time. But here’s the bigger problem, even though we can spread the word faster and cheaper, how do we actually get the masses attention? Well, now you have to change the way you look at your business, you have to change the way you think, because you no longer have control over it. That’s right, the consumer of tomorrow will not tolerate being manipulated into a sale, in fact, if they sense it, they’re gone. Today you have to be transparent, you can’t lie, mislead or trick and get away with it, that’s a problem for most big businesses because they have considered consumers as not that smart to figure things out. Today you have to give away something before consumers actually notice you. I’m generalizing of course, but you get the point, because you ARE smart people.
You’re probably wondering why I’m even talking about this, well, for some reason business owners are struggling with the change that needs to take place. Big business has to give up control, they have to learn how to trust the people formerly known as consumers. You’ve read that here many times before, but what’s the problem? Big business doesn’t know what to do, still, even after 5 years of heavy Social Media integration.
Let’s be honest here, Social Media has passed the I’m a new fad phase, Social is changing, it’s a natural process now in many circles, except small to medium businesses. Most of the smaller operations still want to do things the old way, they don’t understand the changes happening around them. Why? For the most part they aren’t paying attention, and attention is everything! What happens when over 60% of commerce is done on a handheld devices, when everything goes mobile, what will small to medium sized business do then? Play catchup, it will be too late. They can’t hide behind a lack of knowledge, there’s so much of it out here, so there’s a deeper reason, there has to be.
The funny thing about business owners and entrepreneurs is, they only have one vision for that business, they tend to only see how they can sell their product or service based on what they know and were taught. That’s usually old industrial age process and thinking, it’s not right or wrong, we must think differently today to see a bigger picture. Smart, well intentioned people struggle the most. Looking beyond the transaction, think more on the lines of interaction, it’s relationship building, it’s building trust, and that takes an investment and time. Mostly, it takes change. You will have to give more of your business away, put it consumers hands before the transaction will take place.
We are about to enter a world so mobile and social, we’ll think it was invented 15 years from now, a quantum leap is about to take place in the next 3 – 5 years, and I hope to reach as many business owners as possible before it happens. Social is no longer a platform, it’s a feature. We won’t even think Social Media anymore, it will be a natural DNA of everything we do, it will be everything mobile.
So build for mobile and let social be the tide or current if you will, those who get attention will have built their businesses future on smartphones, and above all, give consumers access and a seamless way to buy.
Use Nine Inch Nails business model, CWF + RTB = $$$$ it’s the 90 /10 rule.
I’m a little long winded today I know, but I can’t help it, I run into far too many business owners fighting the change, change happens every second of our lives, don’t fight it, embrace it. Change is coming, and lots of it. Are you prepared, if not, I’m available to help.
Related articles
- The Future Of Business – Social Is A Feature Not A Platform (owengreaves.com)
- The Future Of Business Workshop – In Abbotsford (openandfreebusinessmodel.com)
- Introducing EndofBusiness.com (briansolis.com)
- The Future Of Business – Everyone Will Be An Affiliate Of Something (owengreaves.com)
- The Future Of Business – Be Useful (owengreaves.com)
