What’s New & Exciting For 2012?

By Owen Greaves | January 9, 2012

This year, 2012, is a year where we all have great anticipation of special things to happen, hoping life treats us better than it did the year before. I’m no different than you, I’m struggling with much the same issues you are, just differently.

This morning I was asking myself a simple but yet complicated question, I’m going to be 55 this year, and I’m looking ahead at the next 20 years. Should I have them. What do I want to do with what may be the last 20 years I get to live? I mean what meaningful work do I want to pursue and deliver, or execute, better yet ship. How was I going to help you for the next 20 years, should you let me.

You already know how much I love to help people, you already know that I’m passionate about the business community, you should also know that I am concerned for mankind when it comes to technology. But those things don’t mean much, especially when the metal meets the meat.

One of my passions is to bring light to business start-ups in my area, I’m also looking outside of my community area. I haven’t done a good job of this just yet. Public speaking and workshops are cool and fun, but they don’t generate revenue for my clients the way good old fashion PR & Marketing do.

What I mean by that is this, I can show you what’s coming, I can tell you what you might do about it, but no one knows about you, not in the way the Future Of Business will require. You’ve read it, you’ve heard me say it, there are 2.1 Billion people on the Internet and there are another 3 Billion plus coming. How will you be found, how will you be heard, and most importantly, how will you generate revenue?

With that in mind, I’m going to be doing something extra around my workshops and public speaking, and my webhosting business, I’m going to help promote your business, or business idea for you. It’s simple really, I’m going to be doing Podcast interviews of businesses doing something interesting, something great, these interviews will be done via Skype and then released on my Blog with links to your business.

I’m looking for business start-ups to interview, if you know of one, maybe it’s yours, send an email to interview@owengreaves.com and lets talk about your business. I want to know some basic information, like what you are doing, how you are doing it, how long has your business been doing business, what’s your vision for your business, how is your business making the world a better place, and most importantly….what’s your businesses story?

Every business wants and needs exposure, qualified exposure, and it is my desire to help you by interviewing you and publishing those interviews all over the Internet.

If you know of an interesting start-up, or you are starting a business of your own, let me know, and let’s talk about a possible interview. So what’s new & exciting? I would love to hear from you.

Good luck in 2012, and thanks for being a part of what I do here at Owengreaves.com

Many Blessings,
Owen Greaves

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in Business, Future of Business, Human Business, owengreaves.com, Podcasting and tagged , , , , , , , ,

The Future Of Business – History Is Repeating Itself

By Owen Greaves | January 3, 2012

When I was a little boy at the age of 5, I lived on the Queen Charlotte Islands. We moved from Vancouver, British Columbia to the Northern Tundra, it was a sad day for my Mother & I, oh ya, my brother too. It was at best an adventure, it wasn’t a lifestyle improvement. I can remember riding with my Dad in his truck from Queen Charlotte City to Masset on many occasions, what was weird about it was, you couldn’t make that drive without hitting a deer with the truck. You couldn’t own enough freezers to store all the meat, so Dad would have to report most of these incidents to the game warden. This happened everyday! The interesting thing about it was, everyone in town knew it had happened. Queen Charlotte City is not a big town, so news traveled fast.

I told you that story to tell you this one. The greatest impact living in an isolated part of the world was not how bad it was, but how these small communities all over the island pulled together. I mean it was beautiful country, there was so much natural in everything that happened, but the real treat, the healthiest thing for our community, was how business conducted.

Remember when you could order items from the Hudson Bay, Eaton’s and Sears catalogue? It was fun, it was easy, it was drop shipped to your door, except if you lived on the Queen Charlotte Islands. Oh you could make your orders through each of these company catalogues, if you didn’t, Christmas didn’t happen! Worse yet, you couldn’t get new clothes, well not unless you went down to the trading post and picked up something someone else owned at one time.

Business was much more difficult back then, or at least getting what you needed to survive, let alone having any luxury items. The most memorable thing for me living there, was when you would make your orders, wait at a minimum of one week for the ship to come in, that’s right, a freighter would come filled with belongings, food, clothes, all kinds of things, even equipment. The whole town would gather down on the main dock and wait, BBQ’s were out, music was playing, everyone in town gathered like a family reunion. Imagine waiting a week to get your food, maybe two weeks because of bad weather. I can remember some tense times when word got out the ship was delayed. But it was a great memory, a happy memory, the towns people helped each other, we all knew each other, and we made sure our neighbour was looked after.

Today, 50 some years later, we appear to be heading right back to a time such as then, without the ship of course. Social Media has brought us back to a place where we have to care for one another, connect with each other, build a relationship with each other. We had to build trust then, and we have to build it again today. Back in a time when big business did not have the same control as it had between now and then, we the people have control once again. We are gathering together to meet, to help each other, to collaborate, and make sure our neighbour is looked after. History is repeating itself, mostly in how we used to do business. Today we hold Tweet Up’s, big social events, and speaking events, all for the purpose of coming together as a community, or communities. We are going back to ordering from catalogues that are now web applications, Apps, Smart phones, websites like Amazon, and it gets drop shipped by the big ship UPS or FEDX, or whomever you prefer. These companies we order from are now asking us what we want, how we want it, and how fast can we get it to you. We are going back to small town rules, where you can’t hide, you can’t lie, and you can’t get away with shinanagan’s and stay in business.

The Future Of Business is all about people, it’s taking us back to a time like the depression, back to a time when we did all that we could for one another. History is repeating itself, are you part of making the world a better place, are you part of this history taking place? I challenge you, be the change, you be the voice, you be the reason the world is a better place, you help make history repeat itself.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in Business, Future of Business, Human Business and tagged , , , , , , ,

The Value Of A Fan, Like Or Follow

By Owen Greaves | December 15, 2011

oliviersbookFor 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
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in Books, Business, Future of Business, Social Media Metrics and tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Future Of Business – Change Is Coming, And Lots Of It.

By Owen Greaves | December 2, 2011 |

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
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in Business, Future of Business, Open & Free Business Model, owengreaves.com, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , ,

The Future Of Business – What Could The Hardcore Hockey Fan Tell You?

By Owen Greaves | November 24, 2011

Abbotsford Heat

I know the question is odd when talking about the future of business, but I ask you to play along. Let’s see where I take you : )

If you were hired by your local hockey team (In my case, the Abbotsford Heat) to market the club in the digital realm, what might be there first question out of your mouth? No it’s not how much do I make. If the resources were in place, funding and say personnel, what would you ask?

Lets consider that all the questions are not dumb questions, no matter how obvious they might be, what would you ask?

I would most likely ask what the current cost is for customer acquisition, there is a cost with online marketing, so what is it?

Knowing that number would tell you at least two things, what they have been doing and, what they aren’t doing, that is provided you understand some simple marketing metrics and the overall understanding of what the strategy be.

You might even ask where the marketing dollars have been spent, like Google Ad Words and so on. Make a list. But there are two more important issues or questions I would be asking. Because frankly, I don’t care where the money is spent unless I know the answer to one primary question, and if I don’t get that answer, we are going to get it through some due diligence.

My first question is more about what the hardcore hockey fan wants, do the fans want free tickets to games, food or beer, or would they want dedicated, intimate free time with their favorite Player / Coach/ or even Executive?

It’s an Access over Ownership question, if we don’t know the answer, we better find out, and fast, because everything else that follows will be based on that data. I’m certain the average fan will pay the ticket price, but how much would they pay to have one-on-one time with their favorite hockey player? Maybe over a nice meal, I mean dedicated time, an intimate time to just be. What would you pay for that? A better question to ask yourself would be, would we be willing to give that access away for FREE?

You see, it’s easy to sell tickets, it’s even easier to sell club merchandise, but give the hardcore hockey fan access, and you have something really exciting.

The digital strategy will be built around what the hardcore fan really wants, and I’m willing to bet access is the secret sauce to your marketing efforts. The future of business as I have researched it, over the next 3 – 5 years will be Access over Ownership. Fill that need, and your hockey club will have a whole new set of marketing tactics to play with, a new view of the community, and a great way to Connect With Fans. Add that with a Reason To Buy, and you have a thing called revenue. (CWF + RTB = $$$$)

There are many, many more questions to ask, and this is a very low level, very loose post, but I’m flying at 50,000 feet and blue skying it.

If you knew access was the key, what other great ideas come to mind? Share them here in the comments, it would be great fun.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in Abbotsford, Advertising, Business, Future of Business, Google, Marketing and tagged , , , , , , , ,