- Image by Scott Ingram Photography via Flickr
Ok, this idea isn’t just for those of you that are unemployed. It could be for those of you that are sick of where you are right now in your career.
Most of you are looking for your next position in another huge company. I know because many of you have asked me for help finding you that position. I’m glad you did ask too because nothing is better than helping a friend, especially when they are feeling pretty low. I’m keeping my eyes and ears open for all of you.
But why not take this time in your life to try something scary? What have you got to lose?
Go out on your own. Or call a few colleagues that are in the same boat as you and start your own partnership.
You don’t know anything other than your specialty? Perfect. Work at specializing the hell out of that specialty and outsource the rest. Everything can be outsourced today – data collection, tabs, coding, translations, even report writing, if that’s not your thing.
So maybe you need one (yes, just one) person to oversee the outsourcing while you’re impressing the hell out of your clients.
Now just think of your part. What can you do differently from what you were doing before?
You can think beyond the next 90 days because you don’t need to worry about the stock price.
You can follow your own processes that fit you and your clients and not the ones that have been homogenized for 1,000 other employees and hundreds of other clients.
You can do way more for a lot less because your overhead is close to zero.
You can focus on a small niche and be very successful – you don’t need to get 60% of Microsoft’s business. 0.6% will probably make you very happy.
If you really want to work for a huge company, that’s not bad and I’ll still help you as much as I can. I still work for a big company and I’m happy.
But think things through. What have you got to lose?
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Tags: Outsourcing, Small Business
Forrester has recently released a report titled “The Social Technographics of Business Buyers.” Here are some highlights of the results:
click to enlarge
91% of these technology decision-makers are Spectators.
Your buyers are reading blogs, watching user generated video, and participating in other social media. 69% of them said they were using this media for business purposes.
55% of these decision-makers are Joiners
Your buyers are members of facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks. They are on Twitter too. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the only people on such networks are college kids and stay at home moms.
43% are Creators and 58% are Critics.
Your buyers are making their own blogs. They are uploading videos and articles. If they are not creating their own, they are sharing and commenting on others. How many of those articles are about you? How many are about your competitors?
Are you too late?
Marketers continue to do a better job using social media to reach out to consumers. Similarly, researchers are starting to find ways to use this media to learn about consumers. But not much is going on in B2B.
If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not using social technologies in your marketing, you’re late. But most of your competitors are probably late too. Take advantage of this. Go find out where your buyers are hanging out online and join them. Talk to them. Learn from them. Share with them.
The full report is available for purchase here.
- Image by Vermin Inc via Flickr
During Social Media Week 2009, Abrams Research surveyed over 200 social media leaders from across North America. Here are some interesting – but not terribly surprising – results.
- A whopping 40% of respondents picked Twitter as the number one social media service for businesses. LinkedIn came in a distant second (21.3%), followed by YouTube (18.8%), with Facebook an even more distant fourth at 15.3%.
- When asked which social media service they’d be most likely to pay for, 32.2% chose Facebook – followed by 29.7% choosing business networking site LinkedIn. The contrast of Facebook’s bells-and-whistles features (photos, status updates, newsfeed, tagging) with the bare-bones networking functionality of LinkedIn suggests that many people find social networking most valuable for making professional connections. Twitter – the top pick for business use – came in third, with 21.8%.
- A paltry 1.5% said they would pay for MySpace – in a category where Facebook was the runaway winner – and only 2% said they’d recommend it for business. It came dead last in both categories – where it used to be the runaway leader.
You can see the full results of the survey here. In the meantime, here are my personal responses to the questions:
1. Which social media service would you be most likely to pay for?
LinkedIn. Facebook would be a close second but I believe that a very large percentage of Facebook users would move elswhere if it became a pay service. LinkedIn would maintain a much higher percentage of users.
2. What social media service would you advise a business pay for?
Twitter. The intmacy that can be gainedwith users (customers) is unmatched.
3. Which social media service will be the first to die?
Bebo.com. Actually, it’s impassible to pick the death of any such sites. I can’t believe anyone still uses MySpace, yet they still have millions of active users. Bebo however just seems to want to be a little bit of everyone (facebook, YouTube) but they aren’t as good and don’t have any differentiators. But they will likely still be around several years from now.
4. Which corporation has done the best job of using social media?
Burger King. Even though facebook quashed it, their plan to give away free Whoppers in exchange for the sacrifice of friends was pure genious.
5. What’s the best way to monetize social media?
“Freemium” use, i.e. a free basic model followed by a fee for advanced options (i.e. storage, analytics). The “free level” maximizes the size of the universe and also gets the die-hards hooked, wanting more that they are willing to pay for.
6. What’s the biggest challenge facing social networking services?
Developing something that is new (niche, application, technology) and keep things fresher than the eventual copycats.
7. What social networking feature is the most critical for everyday users?
Tie – Status / Newsfeed. I guess technically, status updates are part of the newsfeed.
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I’m starting to feel a little more confident these days that more people are getting it. From Seth Godin’s blog:
Five tips for better online surveys
- Every question you ask is expensive. (Expensive in terms of loyalty and goodwill). Don’t ask a question unless you truly care about the answer. This means that a vague question with vague answers (extremely satisfied…acceptable…extremely dissatisfied and no scale to compare them to) is a total waste of time. What action will you take based on that? It’s smarter to ask, “how much would you say lunch was worth?”
- Every question you ask changes the way your users think. If you ask, “which did you hate more…” then you’ve planted a seed.
- Make it easy for the user to bail. If you have 20 questions (that’s a lot!) make it easy to quit after five and have those answers still count. If you waste my time and then don’t count my answers, see #2.
- Make the questions entertaining and not so serious, at least some of them. Boring surveys deserve the boring results they generate.
- Don’t be afraid to shake up the format. Instead of saying, “Here are ten things, rank them all on a scale of one to five…” why not let people compare things? “We had two speakers, Bob and Ray. Who was better?”
Bottom line: before you let the survey guys run a survey of your loyal customer base, make them pay you with resources you can use to reinvigorate those users you just bothered.
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Tags: Seth Godin
I’ll write more soon about how much I love friendfeed.
For now, just go check out the Market Research room I created. It currently agregates news and information about MR from 17 different sources (new suggestions welcome). The room includes blogs, news sources, and even twitter feeds.
You don’t even need to join friendfeed to enter the room.
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Tags: FriendFeed, Market research
Do you hold off on any sort of pee breaks during the 6-hour spectacle of the Super Bowl because you want to see all the new ads? Then you and your bladder will thank me.
Adweek is showing previews of many of the new ads that will air on Sunday. Jump over there now to see.
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- Image via Wikipedia
Not long ago, CNN.com was the first site I’d visit every morning to get my fix of national and international news. I then started migrating to Google News. I figured that if one news source was good, then many news sources must be better. Google aggregates stories from over 4,500 news organizations.
Now I never visit Google News. Or CNN. Or any traditional news organization.
Now I get most of my news from the people I follow on Twitter. Or friendfeed. Or from a ranking site like popurls. Or Alltop. Or Techmeme. Or Twitturly.
These sources aren’t investigating or reporting the news. But they are telling me what I should be paying attention to and where to get more details.
Are my new sources of news better or worse than my old ones? Should editors with journalism degrees tell me what the day’s headlines should be? Or is that decision better left to a much larger group of civilians?
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Tags: news
Twitter is not a broadcast medium. So, there is no need to make an effort to gather as many followers as possible.
If you try to broadcast your marketing message via Twitter, a few things happen:
- Only a small percentage of your followers will see an individual message.
- Some of those will be turned off and stop following you.
- To account for the above, you could broadcast more marketing messages and increase the frequency.
- You’ll reach some more followers and some of them will again be turned off.
- You will be seen as a 24/7 commercial. Followers will see less benefit in following you and stop.
Twitter is best used as a conversation agent. As in any conversation, it’s better to listen than to speak. You learn more that way.
Use Twitter to gather information. To do this, you will need to focus on following, not gaining followers.
Use Twitter to share useful information. “Buy my product” is not useful.
If you do this, followers will come on their own (I REALLY wanted to use a “build it and they will come” quote here, but deemed it too cliche) and your ego can be satiated.
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Tags: marketing, Social media, Twitter
- Image via Wikipedia
Cheers to Humphrey Taylor of Harris Interactive for defending online research in his letter to The Economist:
SIR – Your article about the accuracy of opinion polling in America’s election stated that “online surveys are notoriously biased” (“Poll, baby, poll!”, October 25th). Their track record says otherwise. In the almost 80 elections in the United States and Britain where we can carry out a comparison, the final forecasts of online opinion polls have on average been somewhat more accurate than telephone polls. What’s more, they include most of the “cellphone only” population.
You also wrote that “most experts” consider as “sloppy” the weighting of surveys to compensate for biases in the sample. As the raw samples in all opinion polls contain biases, whether the data are collected in person, by mail, on the phone or online, it would be very sloppy not to weight them. Who are these experts?
Humphrey Taylor
Chairman
The Harris Poll
New York
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Steve Rubel says that text is still the King of the interweb. His reasons:
- It’s scannable
- Search engines like text
- Cubicle-dwellers can surf quietly
- Mobile video sucks
- Cut and paste
Scoble says video is godly.
You take 1,000 words to explain to me what the next game from EA looks like. I’ll do it in a minute or two of video. The video will beat your blog every time. Every time!
It’s a silly argument as they are both right.
Video wins out when video is needed. But it is not always needed. Would Rubel have made a stronger case for his argument if he was on video (as absurd as that sounds)?
When both formats are done well, video is often superior for the obvious reasons.
But video is not often done well.
And text is not often done well.
There is more of a commitment on the part of the reader/viewer when watching a video. If I know there is one good article out of 100 blog posts, I can scan them quickly and find what I’m looking for in a couple minutes. If I start scanning for one good video out of 100, then I’m giving up after the fifth bad one.
So no one wins this one. It’s not even a tie. It’s a no contest.
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