Social Media Explained – opportunities in web marketing

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This image((1)) came to me via a photographer friend of my wife. This is clever in a charming way to think of social media though I definitely part company with the description of Google +.

I found this graphic from Social Strand Media that does a better job of describing a wider range of social media.

Social Media Explained from social strand media

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once you get beyond the simplicity of the presentation and get over the simplifications, or, in some cases, errors in characterization of social media, these reveal an interesting opportunity to shape a strategy that is particular to your business. Keep in mind that the social media sites mentioned here are really just the tip of a vast universe of niche specialty social media sites. If you are a winery, there are social media sites where oenophiles hang out. Does your business involve native species of perennial flowers in the upper midwest? There are social websites for virtually every slice of interests. If you can’t find one that suits you, start one yourself. Open source social website software like BuddyPress is simple to set up. Web marketing is not necessarily big budget, just long on thinking and involvement.

So, the web marketing challenge here is to identify your customer base(s) and get involved with them. Keep in mind you need to drop the old pushy sales and marketing approaches and get engaged to share your knowledge and enthusiasms. Web marketing is engagement and sharing not pushing messages. Sales will follow.

Optimized with InboundWriterFootnotes:
  1. Turns out that this image has “gone viral” on the Web. Nevertheless, its source is in fact a Web marketing firm, Three Ships Media. The story of how and why they created this social media chart is here [↩]

Drucker on Concentration, Performance, Results – The Effective Executive – 6

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“It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem – which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.”

In earlier posts in this series on Peter Drucker’s book The Effective Executive: the definitive guide to getting the right things done, we reviewed his list of basic practices:

Effective managers:

  1. “….know where their time goes.” 
  2. “….focus on outward contribution”
  3. “….build on strengths….” 
  4. “….concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.”
  5. “…. make effective decisions.”

Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive

This posting is devoted to the fourth practice, concentrate where it counts.((1)) 

If there is any one “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.((2)) Continue reading →

Optimized with InboundWriterFootnotes:
  1. All quotes in this posting come from pages 100-112 in Peter Drucker The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. Revised. Collins Business, 2006. [↩]
  2. Note that decades before the controversies over so-called “multi-tasking” Drucker notes the singular importance that people can only effectively do one task at a time. I have written about this earlier in “Multitasking, Too Much Information, Interruptions, and High Performance”  [↩]

Labor Costs, The Beer Game, Apple, and Supply Chains

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Recently, via Zite,  I came across a posting, “The Beer Game -or- Why Apple Can’t Build iPads in the US” by David Wu (@marksweep) that used the famous supply chain simulation game, The Beer Game, to allegedly explain why Apple has it manufacturing operations in China.

The lessons of the Beer Game are pretty evident. Delay in the supply chain causes amplified downstream problems. The problem wasn’t that we were kids running beer supply, the problem was the structure of the chain itself. Small changes at the front end lead to massive mistakes down the line.

And,

Because of the bullwhip effect illustrated by the game, Apple needs to have factories in China because the supply chain is there. We learned in the Beer Game that minute changes have massive ripple effects along the supply chain.

The U.S. has lost that industrial base and it’s extremely difficult to get it back. It’s not about unions, jobs Americans don’t want – it’s about delay.

These are not the lessons of the Beer Game. Continue reading →

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Build on Strength – Drucker’s The Effective Executive – 5

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In earlier posts in this series on Peter Drucker’s book The Effective Executive: the definitive guide to getting the right things done, we reviewed his list of basic practices:

Effective managers:

  • “….know where their time goes.” 
  • “….focus on outward contribution”
  • “….build on strengths….” 
  • “….concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.”
  • “…. make effective decisions.”

Peter Drucker's The Effective ExecutiveThis posting is devoted to the third practice, build on strengths.((1))

The effective executive makes strength productive. He knows that one cannot build on weakness. To achieve results, one has to use all of the available strengths – the strengths of associates, the strengths of the superior, and one’s own strengths. These strengths are the true opportunities. To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization. It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant. Its task is to use the strength of each man as a building block for joint performance.((2))

Enable Strengths and Make Weaknesses Inconsequential Continue reading →

Optimized with InboundWriterFootnotes:
  1. All quotes in this posting come from pages 71-99 in Peter Drucker The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. Revised. Collins Business, 2006. [↩]
  2. Note again the dated language from 45 years ago [↩]

Performance, Contribution, Results, Commitment – Drucker’s The Effective Executive – 4

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“To Focus on Contribution is to Focus on Effectiveness”

Peter Drucker's The Effective ExecutiveThis is the fourth in a series discussing the 1968 book by Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive: the definitive guide to getting the right things done. In this part we will focus on the third chapter, “What Can I Contribute?”

“The effective executive focuses on contribution. He looks up from his work and outward towards goals. He asks, “What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and results of the institution I serve?” His stress is on responsibility.”((1)) …..

“The man who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, in in the most literal sense of the phrase, “top management”. He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole.”

What Is Contribution?

Contribution refers to three areas critical to organizational success: Continue reading →

Optimized with InboundWriterFootnotes:
  1. all quotes in this posting come from pages 52 – 70 in Peter Drucker The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. Revised. Collins Business, 2006. [↩]

Time Management for Effective Managers – Drucker’s The Effective Executive – 3

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Time – a most valuable resource but always fleeting

In the previous posting in this series we closed with Drucker’s five essential practices for managers.

Effective managers:

  1. know where their time goes.
  2. focus on outward contribution.
  3. build on strengths….
  4. concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.
  5. make effective decisions.

Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive

This posting focuses on the first of these, time.

Time is a central resource, yet unlike other resources it cannot be inventoried, purchased, or controlled in any way. It is always the scarcest resource. Thus the use of our time and the organization’s time is critical to achieving results.

Effectiveness Depends on Continuous, Uninterrupted Blocks of Time

“Time in large, continuous, and uninterrupted units is needed….”((1)) A manager who can only find brief moments for reflective thought is bound to think about only what is at hand, what they already know, and what they have already done.

Drucker argues that there is a three step process that is the foundation of effectiveness in managing time. First is recording the use of time, second is managing time,((2)) and third is the consolidation of discretionary time. These are the steps to coming to grips with how one’s time is being used now.

Reducing Time Wasters Continue reading →

Optimized with InboundWriterFootnotes:
  1. all quotes are from Chapter Two – Know Thy Time in Drucker’s The Effective Executive [↩]
  2. the use of the word “managing” here refers to the setting of priorities and making choices about the use of time. There is no sense to thinking that time is managed in the way every other resource in the organization can be managed. [↩]

To-Do List – what makes some successful task managers

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to-do-listEveryone has a to-do list. Even if you keep it in your head, everyone has one. I use a simple app on my iPhone that syncs with the same app on my iPad and on my desktop to manage my to-do list. This is a recent replacement for a technology I used for 30 years, 3×5 note cards (preferably un-ruled) that stuck out of my shirt pocket.

Regardless of the to-do list technology employed, I am sure that your to-do list is almost always longer than can be fulfilled and increasingly filled with “overdue” tasks. Mine is chronically creeping in that direction.

A recent article on Brain Pickings (BrainPickins.org) “A Brief History of the To-Do List and the Psychology of Its Success” by Maria Popova reviewed some recent research ((1)) ) that touches on two useful points. Continue reading →

Optimized with InboundWriterFootnotes:
  1. mostly focused on a chapter about to-do lists, the third chapter, titled “A Brief History of the To-Do List, From God to Drew Carey,” in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister [↩]

Who Says Content Is Not Still King on the Web?

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“Content is King!”

This phrase, now seemingly completely worn out in the ever newer world of Web 2.0 going on Web X.0, is really still true. Now, in the world of increasingly flashy Web production values, it is time to resurrect this slogan and put it into action in your business. This is especially important for small business people who cannot afford the “finer things” on the Web. Time to take a look again at your value to your customer niche and bring back content, real, genuine, authentic in all its quirkiness, your content.

Jessica Beinecke - OMG!Here is an example of a young woman, Jessica Beinecke,  teaching idiomatic English to learners of English in China. She is now reaching millions of people. And, she is doing this with no other production equipment than a laptop computer and some lights.

Why is she so successful? Watch.

‘OMG!’ Exports American Slang to China – from The News Hour – Friday 02/10/2012

and here is her lesson for Valentine’s Day.

Bad Things Do Happen – Are You Prepared?

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Do You Have Insurance?

How many times have I asked clients, “Do you have insurance on your business assets? Do you have liability insurance? Key person insurance?” For many small business people these questions are a combination of absurd and uncomfortable. Frequently I am brushed off with, “I can’t afford that.”

Can You Afford This? Continue reading →

Management Skills for the Effective Manager – Drucker’s The Effective Executive – 2

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Peter Drucker's The Effective ExecutiveIn Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive, he outlines eight management practices in the introduction that are the core skills of the effective manager:

  • They asked, “What needs to be done?”
  • They asked, “What is right for the enterprise?”
  • They developed action plans.
  • They took responsibility for decisions
  • They took responsibility for communicating
  • They focused on opportunities rather than problems.
  • They ran productive meetings.
  • They thought and said “we” rather than “I”.

But, before really getting to work on these he takes on some very interesting foundational issues. First, “… the executive is, first of all, expected to get the right things done. And this is simply that he is expected to be effective.”((1))  

What is effectiveness? Continue reading →

Optimized with InboundWriterFootnotes:
  1. All quotations in this posting are from pp. 1-24. Here is an early example of how the style, and many of the examples, in The Effective Executive are quite dated. The pronoun “she” never appears in the book. When he wrote the book in 1967, women in management were extraordinarily rare and their was only a nascent awareness that women could and should play a full role in our economic and social institutions [↩]