Posts Tagged ‘Business’
Am I Crying Wolf?
After spending a couple hours downtown in my community today I was just vibrating with the thought, ” These poor business owners”. What do us Social Media Geeks see that traditional business owners don’t? I felt like standing on a box and screamming STOP IT! Stop what your doing and look up…pull your head out of that dark warm part of your anatomy and pay attention! It’s like a tidal wave is coming and these traditional business owners are looking the other way as if it wasn’t there. Is there something wrong with me, am I speaking to a brick wall, am I just crying wolf?
I couldn’t wait to get back to my office and write to you, it’s like venting I think but I’m wondering what it will take before everyone starts to actually pay attention. I look at how many people in Canada actually have Twitter accounts and I’m hard pressed to find many, with only 34 million people in the country you would think there are more than a few paying attention. I’m in Western Canada, ok Bristish Columbia, I live in a suburb east of Vancouver called Abbotsford. There’s not much out here if you are an executive like me, you have to commute to the bigger cities to find work, but that’s a problem too! Resume’s…do they even work anymore? Even these online job banks rarely work…why…because traditional thinkers don’t look there, they do look for referrals though.
Even the local Chamber of Commerce is looking the other way, they want traditional businesses (bricks & mortar) to buy memberships and insurance packages. My only chance is to try and influence through my online show, Owen Greaves LIVE! maybe. Maybe, just maybe, I can reach them and maybe you can help me. If you are a person who believe’s passionately our way of doing business is changing and care enough to get the message out, then contact me and I’ll invite you to share on my show. That’s the only way to get in front of them and get them to listen…on the Internet and that’s where I’m setting up shop, not downtown in a building. Thanks for reading and listening I guess, we will talk about this on Monday’s alot at 2PM EST / 11AM Pacific on Owen Greaves LIVE! Join me won’t you?
I.T. Strategic Planning – Two Key Ingredients
Two Key Ingredients To A Successful I.T. Strategic Plan
Before entering into an I.T. Strategic Planning session there are two key areas of your business you need to be well versed, it will make or break your plan. Prepare your team and arm them with the right information, they will develop a sound strategy that may only require minor corrections 3 – 5 years down the road. Every plan needs to be updated and adjusted as to ensure it is inline with the business needs.
I’m not going to go into great detail here but you will get the picture, there are many steps in developing a sound strategy and it’s up to you, The Leader, to ensure you equip your team with as much information as possible. Without the right tools & information the exercise will take twice as long and you will most likely never provide solutions for your organization, hence you may not be kept on for a second shot at it.
KEY #1
As a Leader in your organization you know what it means to be well informed and it’s no different for this team, in order for the strategic team to be successful you must be able to articulate the companies business plan in simple terms. Your team needs to understand the company objectives and how they originally planned to achieve them, otherwise there is no target, no way to know which direction to go, this business plan is a compass. If you do not know or someone on your I.T. Strategic Planning Team is not privy to this information, stop and get it, this information will set the tone of your plan. Get a strong understanding of this business plan at high level at the minimum, as it is must have information.
KEY #2
You must know ALL your organizations business processes. What are the processes that take place in one business day to get the job done for each department in your company. This is important to know because you’ll want an inventory of all processes so they can be reviewed to determine which ones can and can not be automated. This key is also critical in order to find the right ERP solution for your organization should that be identified as a project in your I.T. Plan for the next 3 – 5 years. Some call this the pulse of the business, it is the oil, the workflow that determines profitability or the lack of, you need to get a good handle on this item to ensure you are identifying, addressing and eliminating broken parts of your system or systems.
As you can see the above are preliminary but are essential if you want to be of value to your organizations future success. You also need to have a good understanding of these two keys for step one in designing your I.T. Strategic Plan, step one is the Vision / Mission of your I.T. Department. Without that understanding it will hamper your efforts to find your voice, to articulate your vision to those who are looking to you to solve and provide the best service possible to the whole organization.
Feel free to leave your comments and input, if you wish to hire Owen to help you develop an I.T. Strategic Plan simpy e-mail me at:
Until next time 🙂
Whatever Happened To Face-To-Face?
Whatever happened to meeting face-to-face, is this no longer the best way to build relationships, to build trust and the best way to move products and services. I find myself spending more and more time online than I do out in the market place interacting and networking, is something broken here or is the world truly being driven more and more indoors? I have also found that it’s far too easy to misread typed words because there’s no body language or tone of voice, talk about being misunderstood! My world is getting smaller and smaller by the moment, and me being the highly relational type needs to interact with others. So how do we accept or fight this paradigm of living online to get anything done or to get what you want?
Now I’ve been a computer geek for a very long time and I embrace new technologies, even the ones that make me wonder if we should be developing them. Computers are getting smaller, TV’s are thinner, computers run so much of our electronics now we couldn’t go back to a time without them if we wanted to. You know how you can tell if you can’t live without your hand held devices or computer…do you lie in bed at night thinking about how to make so much money so you can tell your boss which bus to get back on? I know you do, because there are so many so called experts out there telling you how to do it, in your e-mail, on your phone it’s everywhere! We are bombarded by so much information now we can’t distinguish the difference between real life and fantasy, (I think daytime soaps started this) Virtual Reality is making huge strides and that’s when we’ll have a real dilemma. But I digress.
Social Media Networks have us, Ala Matrix, Twitter is as real time as you can get and you can make more friends in five minutes than you could face-to-face. Facebook gets you connected to high school buddies much like the old website called Classmates did back in the day. Like golf courses where more business is done in a day than the whole week, Social Media Networks are becoming just like those golf courses, will we want to make that shift or will we hang on to old ways?
So what’s my point, the reality is we are changing at a pace we can’t keep up with technologically, the gap between the haves and have not’s is becoming wider every minute of the day. The truth is we are becoming less connected physically, we are dependent on technology and in the very near future we will be giving control over to technology. We will come to trust the very thing we enjoy blaming for all the crashes and freezes that force us to reboot in the windows world. The shift to Linux is real, most hand held devices run it, not windows….zero’s and one’s are the base from which all things called technology are birthed. So if you think we will be able to go back to the horse and buggy days you are in for a big surprise, technology won’t let us.
Universities are using video conferencing methods and there are more learning management systems out there than ever before making it easier to acquire accreditation online. Newspapers WILL be a thing of the past, everyone is a news reporter now which means the controls for quality are no longer held by the big blues. Which increases the percentage of error but also means we will see and hear even more about events and happenings that are less important than our current global economic meltdown.
With Nanotechnology – The New Technology, we will see the likes of nanobots doing our work for us, they will learn from their environments and eventually think for themselves. Many a person far smarter than I will argue this point but I’m not convinced we will stay in control of these technologies.The question begs to be asked, who will oversee and say what is acceptable and what is not. In my eBook The New Technology – The End of Mankind? – The Beginning; I scratch the surface on why technology hasn’t saved us time and where the new technology is headed. In the future we will communicate in such a way where you & I will integrate with technology, we will become wireless devices and no longer have to meet face-to-face! If you are interested in getting my eBook please send me an e-mail: owen@owengreaves.com
I have to come to terms with the fact that I eventually will have to learn to live without, I mean human interaction. This electronic world is slowly killing human contact don’t you think? Technology killing human contact, that’s another story to be told.
I would like to hear from you on this, do you agree or disagree, do you think we are doomed and will be sentenced to our rooms to interact on the Internet. Or, will we mantain control?
What's Your Social Media Plan?
Like a Business Plan or an I.T. Strategic Plan you should know why you are using Social Media Networks. Most businesses are oblivious to this marketing phenomenon and really don’t understand it’s value. The challenge is that when someone asks what it is, they talk like it’s a bunch of friends getting together for coffee and chatting it up. It’s more than a water cooler. In my opinion, FaceBook has cornered the market on catching up with old school buddies but it really hasn’t figured out how to be more than a playground for old friends on recess. Just my point of view, you may feel different about it.
If you think you have to have a large business to enter into the Social Media arena, your dead wrong, all you need to do is build a plan, then you will experience it’s true value. Despite what you may think, it’s not about advertising, positioning and jockeying for the #1 spot on Twitter Grader, that isn’t the goal. Google does this already but doesn’t tell you their secrets on how they control who gets ranked the highest. If you don’t plan the use of this new marketing environment you will waste time and wonder what happened, you’ll wonder if it wasn’t a distraction from you current goals and objectives. You will eventually use those tools as one way to measure your standing but you will be planting a banyan tree so don’t expect an immediate return on your investment.
So what’s am I talking about?
Let’s assume you have a business plan and you actually sat down and built an I.T. Strategic Plan, which one does the Social Media Strategy fit into? Truthfully? It doesn’t fit into either, it should be in your Marketing Strategy, unless you’ve decided to build your own Social Network, build a team to run it and build the infrastructure to support it, only then should it go into your business plan as a way to promote and develop brand. I’ll also assume you have a good understanding of the fore mentioned plans, if not, go study them before you start down this trail.
Building a large following is not as hard as it may seem, it does requires time & effort, it also requires a carefully crafted message to ensure you obtain reach that will generate activity and eventually revenue. So, your vision should be more about how you will use it rather than making it an entity all it’s own, where will it fit in the marketing strategy and what resources will it require, how big will it be and who on your team knows anything about it? Do you need to hire a consultant to help you incorporate Social Media into your marketing efforts? The questions are many and there many of us that can guide you to a sound plan in using the likes of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the great many others.
First Steps:
1.) Review your Business Plan
2.) Review your I.T. Plan if you have one
3.) Build a team to work with a consultant
4.) Hire an outside consultant to walk you through the need for Social Media Marketing
Wading into the Social Media Environment doesn’t have to be difficult, get help and build your plan. Until next time, be good, if you can’t be good, be yourself 🙂
Twitter The Social Media Network Gone Wild!
Social Media Networks are popping up everywhere and no one can stop them! Today it’s clear Twitter is taking the world by storm and is one of the most effective ways to generate traffic to a website, not to mention it’s FREE! Twitter is projected to surpass Facebook and many others as the Social Network of choice. I’ve been using Twitter everyday since December 26th,2008 and I can tell you some of the sharpest minds on the Internet are there and they will follow you if you offer value to the community. Value is measured in many ways on Twitter, like Blogs content is king, find good information, helpful information, develop a reputation as a sound resource, plus, be a great person and you’ll create a large following.
Like many of these Social Media Networks, information is what most are looking for, how to articles and where to find that nugget that can help you be a better you or improve your companies branding. Twitter is the most instant messaging platform with mass appeal, the branding tool of choice and considered a secret weapon by many who use it.
The most common Social Networks to date look like Facebook, Digg, My Space and LinkedIn just to name a few, but none respond faster than Twitter! I’ve helped a number of entrepreneurs and small businesses get started with Twitter and have shown them the value of leveraging the other networks with Twitter. Why not make them all work for you? The phenomenon of Social Media Networks is just starting to realize it’s power by adding value to the market place, whether it in B2B or simple membership environments. It’s getting harder and harder to hide and easier to brand your product(s) and yourself with the power of Twitter.To learn how Social Media Networks can increase awareness, brand a product, increase traffic and develop a revenue stream, send a message to socialmedia@owengreaves.com with your request.
Come join the Social Media Marketing Gone Wild phenomenon. Join Twitter and follow me.
How are you using Twitter, leave a comment and share your experiences.