Tag Archives: business

March 5, 2012 · 10:27 am

But enough about me…

We’ve all been to the party where someone is firmly ensconced in a corner or at the bar telling tales about their favorite subject:  themselves.  Sometimes, especially if we’ve never heard them before, these stories can be funny and interesting.  I don’t know how you feel but I always get a little weary of them after a while.  If you hang around long enough, inevitably the person senses a fresh audience and repeats the same old tales, always with themselves in a leading role.  Then again, given the ages of some of my friends (and your author), it’s quite possible to write the repetition off to having forgot that they’ve told the tale already!  Maybe by telling the same stories these folks give themselves the appearance of establishing intimacy while really doing nothing of the sort.  We’ll leave that to the psychologists.

I bring this up this morning because of a piece I read on how brands are using Facebook and how their behavior reminds me of the tale-tellers at the cocktail party.  The report was in eMarketer, and the gist is this:

In December 2011, consulting firm A.T. Kearney analyzed the conversations happening on Facebook between 50 of the world’s top brands and their fans, comparing their interactions to those in December 2010.

The study found that in 2011, 94% of the 50 top brands’ Facebook pages directed users to a one-way communication page, such as a tab or a closed Facebook wall that didn’t allow consumers to initiate a conversation. This was up from 91% of the top 50 brands’ pages in 2010. Additionally, 56% of those brands did not respond to a single customer comment on their Facebook page in 2011; the same percentage of nonresponses as in 2010.

I suspect that part of this is due to those brands not wanting to deal with issues such as moderation (how to look for and deal with offensive comments and language), or full-time support of social marketing efforts.  Too bad.  Like the person who speaks only about themselves, these companies might think they’re engaging with their audience while the reality is they’re turning them off.  I’m sure you’ve been on company pages that are nothing more than an endless stream of promotions.  I’ve taken more than a few of those out of my news feed and I gather from the research I’m not alone.

If we’re going to use the tools of modern marketing the way we used the older, non-interactive tools, we’re missing the point and wasting the advantages these newer forms of marketing can bring.  That’s what I think – what do you think?

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March 2, 2012 · 10:57 am

Making The Doh!

Friday at last, and we’ll do our usual Foodie thing this week with a focus on doh.  That’s not a typo – it’s doh in the Homer Simpson manner:  I want to review a few of the most common mistakes we make in the kitchen.  The inspiration was a recent piece in Cooking Light.  They cited 25 common errors – I’m going to lay out a few this week and maybe we’ll get to some others next week.  Of course, the lessons they teach won’t be restricted to the kitchen either…

Homer Simpson

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The first one is something that I’ll cop to myself : you don’t taste as you go.  Old seasonings, a particularly pungent batch of herbs, how much natural sugar is in the food can all affect the taste of the dish and no recipe can account for all of these things.  You have to taste as you go and adjust.  Of course managers often make that same mistake in their offices – they don’t taste.  What I mean is that to get where they are, managers have followed some sort of recipe and generally have written (in their own minds, if not on paper)  other recipes for how they want things to run.  That’s great, but one has to taste too.  I’ve known bosses who lock themselves away in their offices and don’t wander about among their staff speaking, listening – tasting!

Another mistake:  you don’t read the entire recipe before you start cooking.  This is how you get 6 steps into a dish and realize you’re missing an ingredient or haven’t heated the oven or don’t have the right size pan.  Figuring out a dish takes an hour longer than you have won’t make whomever you’re feeding very happy.  In business, we make that mistake as well.  We agree to deals without getting into the fine points of a contract or we begin projects without really thinking through every step.  That sometimes results in work grinding to a halt as we hit issues that arise but were very predictable had we thought things through in-depth – had we read the whole recipe.

Finally today, we don’t know our oven’s quirks and idiosyncrasies.  Every oven has hot and cool spots.  Baking or roasting without taking those zones into account can result in uneven cooking or over/under done results.  The same is true of your staff.  If we treat each team member’s work habits as the same we get projects done piecemeal or qualitatively unevenly.  Some folks need careful instruction; others need only to be told the basics.  We need to make sure we know how often to check on the progress and adjust based on how things are moving along.

Funny how a kitchen is like an office, even when you’re not a cook!  Better that we stick to making dough and not making DOH!

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March 1, 2012 · 10:23 am

Straight Talk

There generally aren’t a lot of laughs available while reading the Sports Business Journal. On occasion there’s head-shaking; other times there’s amazement. Laughter? Not so much. Yesterday, however, I got a great laugh out of Terry Lefton’s column. Terry writes about sports marketing and is always a good read. His column entitled Time for some straight talk on marketing jargon – isn’t it? struck a topic that’s near and dear to me and makes a great point whether you’re in the sports business or not.

Every business has a vocabulary.  Doctors ask for forceps, not the “scissor-thingee”.  A short-order cook would respond to “two ruined with breath” and deliver 2 scrambled eggs with onions.  Obviously the language of the web – servers, routers, HTML, CSS, etc. is not widely understood outside of the digital world but makes communication possible within it.

That said, Terry does a great job of pointing out often the language that is used to provide clarity can also be used to obfuscate.  Whether it’s listening to a vendor pitch a product or to someone explaining why their strategy is a great idea, I’m always concerned when a lot of the language is the inbred vernacular that has neither real meaning nor for which there is a need.  I guess they’re just trying to establish their bona fides by using it, although I can rattle off legal language but it doesn’t make me a lawyer.

You must learn the language of business – that of your specific field as well as business in general.  However, learning how and when to use it is just as important as the vocabulary itself.  Otherwise, we end up with a situation like the one below, that Terry lays out far better than I can:

Even though the thicket of vernacular has become a pandemic problem, that doesn’t mean we’re ready to punt. After all, this could be a new benchmark. Still, optimization could be mission critical, since we’re a bit above our pay grade here.  Holistically speaking, if we can monetize this, it could be the best cross-platform paradigm since disintermediation.  Actually, it’s unclear that we have a clear line of sight on this, but ping me; we’ll calendar some time, ideate some scenarios, and hopefully move the needle. And we’ve gotten this far without even mentioning the obvious need for consumer-facing synergies.  So let’s add some bandwidth and let time be the variable; that’s the only way to ensure that this goes three-deep. At the end of the day, it is what it is.

So now that I’ve run that up the flagpole, are you saluting?

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