Posts Tagged ‘Business’
The Future Of Business – Meet Emilie Wapnick
Let me Introduce you to Emilie Wapnick, she is a prime example of what I have been sharing with you here on this blog, what the younger generation thinks, and how they are building the business of the future. Now Emilie is in her mid 20’s and is leading the way for young entrepreneurs, pay attention to what she say’s and how she say’s it.
I contacted Emilie and ask if I could introduce her to you and share something from her site, but mostly I want you listen to her and get to know her before I send you off to visit her site. I think you will be surprised by what she has to say, and you will be even more surprised when you hear about her background and education.
There are many young entrepreneurs out there who believe they can have a lifestyle instead of a work style, that they can experience more than one passion. And they don’t buy the big lie, that you can only do one thing in your life for a profession or vocation. I’m 53 and I believe it! The journey of life is way more interesting than locking into one career, one job, or one trade in my humble opinion. But we were taught by our parents, our schools, and by society, that we had to get a good education, then get that one good job; then everything will be ok. It’s just not true, because it doesn’t work for many, it does however work for some.
It’s not really about being an entrepreneur, but that’s the term we use to rationalize our gypsy like emotions, we want to follow our passions, we have and can have more than one. Society rejects this model because it lacks what many would call security and control, the truth is, it does provide those things, it’s just different, not wrong.
This is what the future of business landscape looks like, the rules are changing, and how we think about those rules and future matter more than ever. Today we are busting out, we are fighting back the conditioning the Industrial Age has forced us to endure. The Industrial Age is Dead, now lets embrace ambiguity, let’s grab those passions, start your journey, and don’t forget to enjoy the adventure.
Enough from me, let’s get to Emilie.
Here is a snippet from Emilie’s About page:
Hi I’m Emilie,
I’m just a confused 26-year-old from Montreal, Canada, who has decided to never commit to one career path– ever.
I want to travel and live in cute European cities. I want to write and produce a TV show or web series about 20-somethings who move to Berlin to be artists. I want to start a non-profit online art collective. I want to start businesses that are run on principles of permission marketing. I want to surround myself with smart, creative, passionate people. I want to inspire others to break free of the beliefs that limit them.
I believe we all have these false mythologies we have created in our heads about who we think we are. We should be challenging these beliefs and replacing them with more positive ones that reflect the person we choose to be.
Already you’re getting some insight of who she is and what she thinks about her future, but let’s hear it from in this video. This video is taken from her blog, she explains what her site is about.
Are you like Emilie? I am, what you are seeing is a glimpse into the future, what the business owner of the future feels, what they want, but what they don’t want, is what older generations are trying to force them into. As you can see, the future of business is not a skill set or technology, it’s about how we think. What big business is trying to hang onto, these fine young cannibals are pushing back, pushing the paywalls down, and they will rewrite the rules of business, all we older folks have to do is believe in them. What we really have to do is, get out of the way and let them show use a better way. Thanks Emilie for letting us see the future of business.
OK, go visit Emilie’s Blog, you will feel a fresh breeze on your face, not too mention she’s a cool cat. Just follow the link:
A Social Media Opportunity Missed
A few weeks ago I attended a session on Social Media, I was flabbergasted, no wait, I was shocked by the lack of knowledge in the business community, that most don’t understand how social networks will impact their business. A local bank put the event on, the event was just to drum up business of course, but they dropped the ball. They should have tried to connect with me during, if not immediately after the event, through a social network of some kind, after all the speakers were talking about social media and how to use it. I left the event empty handed, nothing in hand, no one approached me, I approached the speakers but they were eager to leave right after they finished. First real contact came two weeks later, I got an email. Now to be fair, I was invited by someone associated with the organization, I didn’t hear about the event at all, I heard nothing, he even sat with me (a good move), we have since met a few times to get to know each other better. The email’s primary purpose was to provide me with contact information, here’s a snippet:
<snipped to protect the quilty>
“Your XYZ small business advisor will work with you to identify realistic growth targets — and recommend the right financial products and solutions to help you get there. If you have any questions about managing your business, please call any time. I have attached a list of our Senior Account Manager, Business & Personal advisors with contact details.”
They thought they were helping business owners by having someone speak on social media, all it did was freak people out, why, because there was a huge gap as to why they should be paying attention to social networks. The speakers were awesome with how to use social media networks, some steps to take, some tactics and strategy, but they didn’t educate the crowd as to why they needed to do what they were selling. The WHY is more important than tactics and strategy, it’s not enough to say everyone is doing it, show your audience why, show them it’s working, give good examples. Take the time to show what’s going on around them, show them the future of business, and then try to help you create ideas to help adopt that future. Social networks are just one small part of an open economy. Explain in simple terms what the business of the future looks like, tell how its social and mobile, how a business need to become a platform, how we are seeing the tribalization of business, and what does all this mean to their business. Show the audience what is happening, then give them hope. And just what is happening, a paradigm shift.
I preach the future of business, an open economy, adopting the open & free business model, it means you think differently, it means you realize something has to change, and the need to change it quickly. We are moving into a world where 60% of all commerce is online, another 3 billion people are coming to the Internet in the 3 years, are you ready? Do you know what to do?
The bank collected names and contact information from everyone as they came in, so they had the details to communicate immediately. Posting a warm welcome on FaceBook with a picture of the crowd, a few shout outs on Twitter thanking people for coming, would have gone a long way to making the bank more human. Now in their defence, most of this community do not use Twitter, they all said they used FaceBook in a poll taken by the speakers.
I would have recommended they leverage FaceBook then, wherever the people are, that’s where your business should be! They could have held a contest on FaceBook and Twitter building up to the event, made the announcement on the social networks as to who won during the event. As you can see they could have made it a huge opportunity to connect with people and be more human, which in turn builds more trust. But that’s not what happened, they did what they always do, make the customer work too hard to make communication happen, and the communication that did happen was to make the customer work even more. The bank should have reached out and made it easy for those who attended to get information and have the option to let them sit down with them to talk about product and services. What they did, they sent a mailer telling the audience to contact them, backwards in the new day of business. You make it an opt-in and opt-out, you go to the people, not make the people come to you. If they come to you, it’s most likely going to be by digital means, they aren’t leaving their home to sit in your office. The bank should have invested more in social media, they should have set an example, it was a social media event for crying out loud. Enough said on that, as you can see they could have had a better plan in my humble opinion.
How could this Bank make it easier for the audience, what would you have done?
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The End Of Control By Gerd Leonhard
I’m up late every night trying to find new ways to teach you the ins and outs of where business going, the future of business. It’s my hope you are actually learning something here. You’re probably seeing it’s not business as usual, that things have been changing rapidly, and it’s painful too. I hope I’m making you think long and hard about what to do next in this new open economy. As I’ve mentioned many times, the future of business is not a skill set, it’s not mechanical, it’s not even about technology, it is however, about how you and I think.
Throughout this blog I have covered a variety of topics, I even share local events in my community, I do that for couple of reasons, to keep it interesting (I hope), and that I am a real living person practicing what I preach. The difference between you and I is, I see things you don’t, and I share that foresight with the intent of helping you take your first steps toward this new world of commerce. The Future of Business is a broad topic really, there are so many paths to go down but there isn’t enough time in a day to cover it all. So I tell you about what I find in my research, in my collaboration with other futurists, and then hopefully you can see the same patterns and trends being presented before us.
You probably find it difficult to implement strategies and tactics to an uncertain future, to something you can’t see clearly. That’s why I write about it, the best way to figure it out is to learn, find sources that can help you understand the paradigm shift we are going through. I pay attention to other futurists, 265 of them, I collaborate with some, and I do countless hours of research of my own, and I don’t get paid to do it! I’ll talk about that another time.
One of those 265 futurists I refer to is Gerd Leonhard, he lives Basil, Switzerland. He heads up The Futures Agency, The Futures Agency is structured as a virtual organization with global reach, deep knowledge and domain expertise, and extensive experience as strategic advisers. He is a digital mentor of mine, I respect his work, and he makes it interesting.
Now you may have noticed there’s push back from the corporate world, most Industrial Age businesses, they are throwing up paywalls everywhere, trying to control you, trying to prevent you from having information freely. Gerd talks about the end of control regularly, he even wrote a book on the topic a few years ago, so I’m not even going to try preaching it, I’ll let you read his book. You can get it here: End Of Control By Gerd Leonhard
Olivier Blanchard’s New Book – Social Media ROI
It finally arrived, Olivier Blanchard’s book called Social Media ROI, Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. I am truly humbled and honored, I was not expecting to find my name in the book, thank you with all the appreciation I can muster.
I have never met Olivier, but I have had an online relationship with him for over 3 years, and I can tell you he knows what he is talking about. He is firm in his stand and he has always taken the time to try and explain why he takes the stand he does, a man on a mission, a man with Integrity, which you will read in his book.
Now, for some reason the world has missed a simple observation, Social Media (conversations)is not new, its just gone digital. What has been overlooked, is how to accurately translate these conversations into revenue, how these conversations become conversions, how they actually bring about a result worth measuring. No Olivier is not the only one to see that conversations can have a Return On Investment (ROI), he is however, the only one to date that can articulate it with clarity and passion. And now with this book, he is working with you side-by-side.
What caught my eye upon cracking the cover, is how Olivier walks you from beginning to end, from what a Social Media Program IS, what you need to think about, to what it should look like,and what you should get from such a program. It’s the first Social Media University TextBook in my humble opinion.
Right from the beginning you’ll read how to create a social company, all the way to analysis and reporting of your social media program.
This book is easy to read and yet it is serious heavy lifting at times, but if you take the time and follow Olivier’s thinking, the confusion simply goes away. If you do the work, you will have a solid foundation of how to not only leverage Social Media networks, you’ll know how to participate in them, how to plug Social Media into your business, how to listen, how to monitor. and as he says, ” Listening Before Talking”. You learn more from this book than sitting at your computer trying to figure it out. Olivier is your Social Media ROI Mentor, all for the price of a book.
One of my favorite chapters is, The Eleven Key Best Practices for Social Media Program Management.
I highly recommend reading this book many times, not just once, it is packed with so much, one reading would merely set you up to fail. You have in your hands a text book if you study it, you will increase your odds of success in all social networks. A MUST have on your book shelf. This book will protect you from those who consider themselves Social Media GURU’s, the so called Social Media Expert.
This book will play a huge role in my work, how I see the future of business, how this fits an open and free business model, and how an ROI can be achieved. I look forward to implementing many of the steps in this book, and you will too, it’s the best investment you’ll make for the future of your business.
Make sure you connect with Olivier on his blog and follow him on Twitter: @thebrandbuilder
The Future Of Business – To The Cloud And Beyond!
We have to face the fact that the Cloud is where we will store our publicness, our legacy is going to live on forever, not through people, but through Kilobytes cached on servers all over the world. The Cloud is a fact of life, it is only going to grow up and be another reservoir of data, a deep well of information, unlike anything we’ve know to date. You think Wikipedia is awesome, wait till the Cloud matures. The Cloud is not connected computers in a closed network, they are outside, and can connect to any computing device.
Microsoft offers 25GB on Windows LIVE SkyDrive, Online Storage, Google allows you to run your entire business on their servers and with their services. I shared that this was going to happen in 2001 at a conference, I spoke to 500 I.T. Leaders, and they all said I was crazy, it will never happen. Businesses won’t stand for it, people won’t use it! As you can see they didn’t have the foresight an I.T. leader should have, they were closed minded executives, imagine that.
Everything is moving to the cloud for many, many reasons. Business is becoming more social and mobile, and the requires the cloud for that kind of environment to work properly. Location-based services are a perfect fit for the cloud, so going mobile means going to the cloud.
In a previous post I talked about the shift, we’re going from pages to streams, from PCs to the Cloud, Today to NOW, from Me to We, and Items to Data. Where everything will generate a stream everywhere. The cloud is full of storage, full of streams, and filled with the new oil, DATA!
The best way to take advantage of the cloud is to make everything in your business mobile, the cloud lets you access your data and the rest of the worlds data on the fly. Every business will become a platform to use, not unlike Google or Microsoft, people always come back to places they find useful. You can even build your own cloud, well sort of, you can connect an external drive to your router that is accessible from anywhere in the world. That in essence is a cloud, your external drive is where you store everything, so no matter where you are, you can reach your data, but the other options are better.
Almost all major technology corps are offering some form of cloud computing, even though the question of security is still on the table. Security is always going to be a problem, as long as there is humans on this planet, security will be paramount. Having said that, many are clamoring to put their data on the cloud, it just makes good sense for those who work from home / travel most of the time.
The jury is still out on who offers the best solution and I’m not sure it will matter if there is some kind of standard in this environment. Considering the security issue, will you put your data out there, Google has most if not all that you do on the NET anyway. The Cloud opens up new business models based on access, more so than today.
On a different perspective, when clicking the Like Button or Follow, to get access, the dollar value assigned to Likes & Follows will create a whole new metric to measure, one more thing to track, will all cloud environments or storage devices require engagement or just a Like or a Follow.
How will your business use the cloud?