The Future Of Business – History Is Repeating Itself
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
- The Future Of Business – Change Is Coming, And Lots Of It. (owengreaves.com)
- The Future Of Business – Social Is A Feature Not A Platform (owengreaves.com)
- The Future Of Business – The Future Of Shopping With PayPal (owengreaves.com)
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)
