Using Twitter or Facebook through you smart-phone may give the employee the look of being the conscientious worker looking up information during the course of a meeting, yet the reality is different they cannot stand to be away from Twitter, not even for one second.

According to Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University’s Booth Business School “Desires for (social) media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist. With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time.”

This can become a major problem for an employer as the ultimate result is that work does not get done when it should be. There is definitely a cost from the employer’s perspective; it comes in terms of lost productivity and an inability to deliver on time.

There are two different perspectives to consider here:

They are both symptoms of the same problem – too much focus on Twitter or Facebook and not enough focus on completing their work assignments. We have all seen it; the person you are having a conversation with checks his Twitter updates while you’re speaking, they think you won’t notice, trouble is you do. If they cannot live without tweeting everything around them then your employees may be in serious trouble. For the manager this can become a big problem.

The positive side is that social networks have made people more interactive, built communities and groups with shared interests and allows people to stay more “connected” than ever before. Yet at the same time this also at the heart of the problem, which is in the balance between being connected or being too connected – the latter can be just one step away from addiction. It has been postulated that addicts face higher incidence of depression and lower physical and general self-esteem levels and this is one of the issues any business owner or manager needs to be aware of.

South Korea, for example, considers Internet addiction (of which Social Media addiction must be considered a part) as one of its most serious public health issues. Are they right to? That is an interesting question. Certainly spending 20 plus hours per week gaming or gambling could be seen as an addiction as could spending that time on social media.

From an employers perspective it is as important to recognise the problem as it is to find a solution. One start may be that during meetings no mobile or cellular phones should be allowed and neither should computers. The problem here is that many effective workers do capture meeting notes and actions through the computer. I would love to hear your comments about other solutions.

The key issues in regards to managing the use of Social Media in the workplace can be:

These will be covered further in other articles.

To discover who your competition is in a web business, be sure that you’re always actually using the right keywords you find and search for others businesses using them. By understanding your competition, you can begin to understand what separate your business from the pack. Then by tweaking your web site, its message and your on-line marketing campaign it is possible to avoid directly competing for rankings.

You may need to offer your customers free products or special prices for referring others to your website, but obviously you must provide to validate a limited-time offer. People are more likely to trust a business which their friends or co-workers recommend, and the increased sales will more than compensate for the cost of the free products. Even in the cyber-world word of mouth referrals are vitally important this is one of the reasons people are involved in building networks on Social media sites, like Facebook. Ultimately the information people obtain from their cyber-friends can be the deciding factor when choosing between two competing products.

If you want to achieve a great following, try using Twitter to generate a buzz. This tool is fantastic, as it allows you to upgrade your presence in the industry and communicate important promotions and products that you may initiate. One key aspect is that Twitter is also free, eliminating excess costs on marketing plans. One of the key aspects of business is to stay as professional as possible at all times in order to separate your company from competitors.

Be honest about the product. Your readers are not stupid. If you know of a product that has a flaw in it, but would still like to promote that product, tell your audience. Make sure you explain the difficulty you had, and why you still enjoy the product. Your customers will appreciate your honesty, as not to many corporations are prepared to do this.

If your e-newsletters aren’t driving the traffic you want, take the time to learn how to develop an engaging blog. Look at the successful blogs for your competing brands then try to cherry pick some of the better ideas that you see in them and leverage them for your business. You can then develop those ideas into your own voice. This is a winning strategy.

Given that the majority of corporate web sites are not for famous brand-names, like Coca Cola, they start seriously challenged in that few prospects have heard of the product or the company before their first encounter. Yet it is important that the company builds a rapport with prospects as they come into contact with the organisation for the very first time.

From a publicity perspective, in the on-line world we need to engage writers that will act as publicity agents for the product, brand or service. These writers have a large choice of places where they can publish content, including:

► Blogs
► Content Farms
► Social Media
► Link Builders
► On-line review sites

Each are valid places to leverage for publicity purposes. Each builds links and in respect of SEO and at the end of the day links mean visibility. It is important to get the message to a wide audience, but in a way that endears the corporation and its products or services to both prospects and clients alike.

It was once said in show business that there is no such thing as bad publicity, it is all about being in the public eye. To some extent the same is true with links. It is good manners to include outbound links in every item that is posted on-line, as was done here with our famous brand name when you mention another product, but you can also improve the visibility of your own material by the use of internal links. But above all the purpose of linking is to raise the visibility of your own web-site. Indeed there are two aspects at play here:

► The link; and
► The content

Having links simply provides the possibility of raising visibility in the search engines. Yet people still read and care about what is written in the various articles on the web. These articles are akin to on-line reviews and people do read reviews, both good and bad. Some people feel that is they flood the market with a large number of seemingly independent reviews all saying the same thing then this will add power to their product, yet the truth is that Google and other search engines are more likely to simply ignore this content. From the viewpoint of the search engine each article reviewing your product has to appear as if it were independently written and in this regard Google is the king of the search engines, claiming more than 90% of the search market, so you had better pay attention to its needs.

Links to your web-site can come from anywhere, so when you are looking at building publicity for your website you will need to be working with a web publicity partner that understands the importance of building links to your website and will do so in a way that is professional.

For the majority of businesses they do not have the power of a famous name to propel traffic to their website and they have therefore to leverage other tactics to build popularity. All businesses have to build relationships in order to build sales revenue; the same is true when it comes to managing your brand’s social media presence, it is a key part of relationship building, yet it is not in the sole domain of the sales force. The value of your brand having an independent presence on certain social networks cannot be understated; yet in order to drive the right value it is often important to build a partnership with an Internet publicity firm, such as P3 Social Media, which the author Peter Giblett works with, in order to maximise your presence.

Which social media tools to use is a vital question and will largely depend on the industry your business is in. Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook etc do take different approaches and it is not necessarily that a global presence on all networks is right for your industry.

Managing your brand’s social media presence takes ongoing effort. It is not like creating an advertising campaign, where once launched you can expect to reap the rewards of extra sales. Leveraging the power of Social Media takes a persistent and consistent presence. Social media tools can be a constant source of customer service enquiries, those ‘how to’ questions which need to be answered to the customer’s satisfaction yet it can also be used to discover how customers wish to see your product be developed. Customers are always prepared to critique and offer suggestions, which may benefit product development teams. An holistic approach should be taken in respect of your corporate social media presence.

Monitoring is important! Responses do not have to be made the split second after an another person’s post is published, but they do need to be timely and reasoned.

The first element here is about setting up a monitoring or listening station. How you do this can be as simple as a keyword search in Twitter or it can employ more complex monitoring software. Your Internet publicity partner should be able to guide you to cost effectively monitoring the buzz about your brand or product and advise on how to respond in each circumstance.

The right response is crucial in all circumstances. Generally people do not want is smooth marketing talk. If they have a problem then it is better to have a product specialist respond with information on how to make the product work again; this is about being seen as providing the solution. Most responses can be made by the right expert within the business responding, yet knowing how busy people are it is often best to have someone independent monitor interactions and ensure that the right person responds in a timely fashion.

Much of this interaction is about being involved in an on-going conversation that is happening on-line. It is developing in all sorts of directions, only very few of which any corporation need concern themselves with. It is important to be focused and targeted in all communications. Ultimately each brand needs to exude its personality to the outside world through its social networking interactions.

There are many similarities in how any business will use social platforms, yet there are many businesses that fail to understand how to interact on these social environments. All too many think of it as an instant opportunity for free advertising, yet this is possibly the last thing you should think about doing to improve the on-line visibility of your business. Sure you can give information about deals and discounts on a regular basis the way one of our local shopping malls does. Having a Social Media following is a critical part of having a successful on-line presence.

Social media environments are a place to discuss and inform, not to advertise. The distinction may seem like a fine line, but it is very real. It is acceptable for a shopping mall to tell its contacts about bargains being offered by stores through FourSquare but it is not appropriate for individual stores to be advertising their wares through Social Media. So what is a store permitted to contribute?

For a store selling leather goods they should give information about leather quality and what to look for in a good leather jacket. This information assists the customer in any choices they are thinking of making.

So how does a store provide information to its customers? Well a blog can certainly assist. So what information should be provided? Blogs should be informative and helpful in nature, whatever your line of business. If your marketplace is casual styled then the blog should follow suit. With a financial services type organisation then articles are likely to need to be more serious in nature. Therefore you should make your brand’s blog relevant to your audience.

In using Twitter the marketing executive from one of our local wineries suggested that there should be a ratio of eight general informative messages to one advertising styled message. General informative messages for this winery include discussions about what makes a good Pinot Noir or the floral design for a memorable corporate dinner. With such a contribution they relate generally to the area of expertise of the business or brand.

This ratio of informative messages to advertising communications of 8 to 1 is generally appropriate. I advise my clients that a ratio of 10 to 1 is what they should aim for and that it is better to give information than to advertise at any time, but ten to one is a convenient number to remember. and of course this excludes any ‘ReTweeting’ of information or replying to messages.

Becoming a social business is about being a business that cares about its clients even before they become customers. It is one of being seen as the people to trust in the marketplace and that relates to the quality of information being provided in the on-line world. Having a blog is a part of this effort, but not the whole of it – this must be combined with a Social Media presence. For a shopping mall then a location sensitive platform, like FourSquare, may be the best approach to publicise this, whereas other businesses are not so location sensitive and should therefor consider using platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, depending on the type of people that you need to connect with.

In this context the adoption of analytical applications includes general reporting requirements (e.g. monthly sales reporting) as well as specialist applications (for example Activity Based Costing). This requires a projection of future need, but is still essential to determining the necessity of a pre-built Data Warehouse. Some applications will be tied to a packaged solution, whilst other options will have general availability.

Indeed when you are defining a ‘greenfield’ business intelligence implementation with a corporation that has few skills in the area it can be difficult to think about advanced analytics. The problem here is that some individuals will hail from other corporations that are analytically rich and these individuals want to launch into advanced analytical applications, when the traditional groundwork has not been laid out (e.g. a long history for analytics and a knowledgeable analytical team in the business).

Having recently worked with a growing mid-sized corporation who had recently appointed a new CFO to assist in their growth, she of-course came to the corporation bursting with ideas that had assisted her former employer to success, yet in the new environment there was no analytical capability and to make matters worse there were two accounting systems. She had a challenge on her hands, none the least being how she could implement the cost analysis modules she required.

The solution assessment  requires ratings for all analytical applications. It is essential to indicate all applications that are intended to be used in the future, even if this picture is currently uncertain. for example:

◊ Monthly financial reporting

◊ Ad-hoc queries

◊Customer Profitability

◊ Product Profitability

◊ Activity Based Costing

◊ Balanced Scorecard

◊ Inventory Analysis

◊ Business modelling

Identifying basic applications is as important the more advanced. It is essential to focus on those elements that are mission critical right now as well as its complexity to achieve. Complexity here is based on a number of factors including the immediate availability of this data. Where data components are not available today then the complexity goes up as the corporation has to consider how to obtain this data.

As an observation the reader will need to analyse the range of applications that are provided in association with any pre-built Data Warehouse in order to assess its suitability. Be aware also that many applications are based on data marts, these are focused data sets that should take data from the existing data warehouse database and restructure it to suit the analytical application being implemented. This mart should never be confused with the role of the data warehouse.

Next: “Which Solution is Best?”

Previous:

Part 1: Financing the Business Intelligence Project (Buy or Build?)

Part 2: BI Project Decisions: Ready Made Database Options

Part 3: The Corporate Architecture and Complexity of Data Links

Part 4: Financing the BI Project: Uniqueness Factors (or USP)

This is part of a series on communications and links to other articles on this site…

There are several types of communication that are important to the average business today:

◊ Direct one-to-one, a dialogue

◊ One-to-many, broadcasting

◊ Many-to-many, such as in a meeting

On a “One to One” basis we communicate directly or through another medium. There are differences in how we communicate but there is generally a dialogue that occurs in any conversation. Our approach may be different say for a letter (if anyone writes these anymore) or an email than in a conversation, but it is a dialogue nonetheless. In a conversation we will deal with one point at a time, whereas in a letter we tend to put in all of the related detail before sending it.

Email differs from a normal letter in that it is not purely a one-to-one messaging tool, it allows us to send that same message to multiple people. We developed the ability to broadcast early in human history as well – remember the smoke-signals used by Native Americans were almost certainly used in other ancient societies; even 16 century England had a fire warning system used to send messages rapidly across the country in order to prepare for an expected attack of the Spanish Armada, allowing them to muster forces at a time when sending a message by traditional means was agonisingly slow.

“One to Many” messages are used in a multitude of ways, like a newspaper article, telegraph, radio, television. The ‘presenter’ prepares their statement and makes it via the appropriate medium. In the modern world we are putting a lot of this information on-line in the form of blogs or websites, but the majority still follows the process of one person posting for all to see.

“Many to Many” communications don’t really exist through any of the traditional communications media. A meeting may give everyone an opportunity for everyone to speak, but it is in reality held through a series on one to many communications. Us humans are simply not able to handle multiple simultaneous conversations; so we have developed a protocol that enables us to achieve the effect of a many-to-many conversation.

Computers on the other hand are able do multiple things at the same time more effectively and they can communicate with other computer at a speed allows messages to travel the globe in an instant.

The changing world of business communications is largely about empowering collaboration between people who are interested in a particular outcome. In business relationships matter and have always been vital for success, in fact it plays on another basic part of human nature. The need for a crew to work together for the success of the voyage is as vital in a trawler facing a ferocious storm as it is in your business.

Each person involved brings with them something unique that helps the team succeed. Yet today we are able  to contribute in so many ways and continue contributing. With the use of Social Media it is even possible to have our customers make a contribution to our product development which can be a vital part of our success. Collaboration is a very personal thing. Each and every person has a sphere of collaboration, which is about them, their team, the department they work for, the company, customers, suppliers, third-parties, industry experts, etc. Even their friends perhaps have a role to play.

Ultimately the changing world of business communications is about improving out ability to collaborate. It is about bringing the right people together, cost effectively, to solve a specific problem, then moving on.

1. Sign Up and Settle In to your chosen network
2. Set up your profile and start to define your Social Media image
3. Read around – know what others are doing
4. Connect with some people you know
5. Start posting something
6. Connect with some people who have a large following (super-connectors)
7. Answer a question or comment on someone’s post
8. Add some more connections (find some people in your own specialist area)
9. Have a little fun
10. Ask a question and interact with everyone who responds
11. Follow some of the web links people provide – understand their thinking, likes/dislikes
12. Seek out active people (key users/evangelists) in your field
13. Communicate with active people (answer their questions, comment on their updates)
14. Find comments about your product/brand/company & categorise them
15. Identify the right way to respond to those comments
16. Do some Customer Service (and respond to the comments)
17. Post an update with a link to a web article you like.
18. Manage more questions and answers
19. Combine some on-line and off-line activities
20. Post something challenging for you and of value to connections
21. Have some fun – try some of the features you have never used before.
22. Identify another Social Media site which may is consistent with your goals
(2nd presence)
23. Drive connections to blog posts
24. Build subscriptions on you blog site – this ensures readers come back
25. Concentrate on the elements of your time-line for your second presence
26. Answer questions, debate and introduce blog posts
27. Automate some of your activities
28. Spend a little time each day looking at how to build connections
29. Update your profile, learn from others
30. Connect with people you do not know
31. Have a little more fun

In connecting with people the first port of call is your own contact list – try to find some people that you already know, you will be surprised how many people are already here. It is important to obey the site rules. On some sites a presence must be personal, on others a business or brand persona is permitted. Obey these rules. In connecting to people who have a large following you should be looking for people in your domain of interest – don’t follow stars for the sake of it.

When posting updates it is preferable you link them to a website. There are plenty of strategies about what to post and frequency. Initially it is important just to make a statement to let people know you are present. Sometimes you may need to repeat a post, not word for word, but general ideas. Linking posts to blog pages is a way of adding more information than would be possible in a social media message.

Answering questions, or commenting on someone else’s contribution is important as it is about demonstrating you own knowledge and expertise. If your presence if brand based then the questions/comments must be relevant to the general marketplace of the brand. It is always important to build a dialogue with those who respond to your questions, this builds trust.

The customer service aspects are as important a part of building on on-line presence as any marketing message. At first you must understand people’s motive for commenting on your brand, not everything will be a complaint. Initial analysis is important as it will determine the response given. It may seem daunting at first, but appropriate responses will come naturally over time and they must not appear to be a marketing message. It is important to be honest – if there is a problem admit it and tell them when it is expected to be fixed. Ultimately you should aim to respond quickly (within a couple of hours), but at first it is necessary to understand the best way to respond, so take your time. This is ultimately about intelligent intervention.

Automation is an aspect that can be important – Every blog post I write is automatically posted to a number of social media sites – this informs my followers that I have something new for them – this makes my publication mechanism more effective. Saying one message in multiple places can take up quite a bit of time.

There are two main things that need to be covered when defining a recovery plan:

• Protect documents and data,
• Create a check-list of “what-ifs” and write out what your businesses’ response would be,

Documents and data are critical to the success of the business. It is often said that people are the most valuable asset to a business, but its data comes in a very close second. A single premises business has a potential for further risk as all the non-human assets are stored in a single location. Think of the risk of a fire. Computers (or Servers) must be regularly backed-up with the copies being retained off-site.
It is important to know what your insurance policy covers, but it is also important that key documents are kept off-site. Many insurance policies only cover the essentials e.g. the stock in a store fire, but it is essential to have all IT equipment included. For the small business it can be the red-tape around a policy that can ensure a smaller business does not re-open. Off-site back-ups of computer files and important documents at least ensures that aspect of the business can re-start.