Tag Archives: Strategic management

December 15, 2014 · 1:53 pm

It Ain’t Me Babe

You might think from the title of today’s screed that I’m going to get into another Dylan rant. Nope. I’m just borrowing a song title from him because it was the first thing that popped into my head when I read something.

twitter fail image

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I realize that research can be boring but here is the factoid that blew my mind: 40% of Facebook accounts and 20% of Twitter accounts claiming to represent a Fortune 100 brand are unauthorized. That comes out of a research report from the good folks at Nexgate. They analyzed the 32,000 social media accounts associated with the Fortune 100 between July 2013 and June 2014 to compile their State of Social Media Infrastructure, Part 2 report. The findings are disturbing, at least to me, and should be a warning to anyone in business who manages a social media account.

It found that the average firm had 320 accounts on various platforms, but that many were false. How exactly any company, even these very big ones, can keep up with 320 accounts is beyond me although I suppose you could convince me of the need for very granular Twitter accounts, for example, with which to do customer service. 2.29 accounts per firm indicated that they had probably been hijacked, while social spam on accounts grew a staggering 658% since mid-2013.  Links to porn, malicious software, and worse are rampant.  I suspect that using the excuse that “it wasn’t us; it was an evil person using our good name” isn’t going to cut it.

Obviously the first thing any smart business should do is to  create an inventory of legitimate accounts.  From that you find the other accounts and ask that they be taken down.  It’s also important not to just “set and forget” what’s going on within the real accounts.  People do manage to hack their way in and spammers have figured out ways to hijack threads.  In other words part of “listening” is hearing yourself as part of the conversation and taking action when your own voice seems inauthentic.

Make sense?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, digital media

Tagged as , , ,

December 5, 2014 · 2:07 pm

Sneaky Is Stupid

Foodie Friday, if you’re not too stuffed from all of the past week’s consumption.  I came across an article in The Guardian which pulled back the covers on how some restaurants improve their margins by cutting corners in sneaky ways.  What prompted them to write the piece was the travails of The Olive Garden we featured here on the screed a few Fridays ago.  Not surprisingly, the myopic practices going on there is just the tip of a much larger set of things restaurants do. 

A few examples: restaurants will often serve glasses with a half-inch to an inch of foam on top because leaving that much foam can save them around 20 beers per keg.  They will use heavier, high-grade silverware for steaks to give the perception of a higher grade of meat.  They will cut back portion sizes and buy smaller plates.  If they cut an ounce out of a burger they’ll buy smaller buns (something I think they learned from the package goods folks).  Naturally, prices don’t change.

The list goes on but it raises the obvious business point.  As I wrote in September, many companies lose their core identity in the chase for revenues which is bad.  Hurting the products that got you to this point is worse.  Smarter companies do one of several things.  If you’re Apple, you maintain higher prices and don’t mistake cost for value.  If you’re Honda or Toyota or Nissan, you create separate brands (Acura, Lexus, Infiniti) that allow you to charge for a better product while permitting you to change the “standard” brand however you’d like.  No smart brand is sneaky.

What dumb companies do is to cut corners. Successful companies are always looking for creative ways to protect the bottom line without giving the impression that quality is going down with it.  Imagine what happens when your current customer base picks up on the smaller burgers or questionable shrimp.  Legitimate changes – repositioning menu items to increase sales or example – don’t affect quality.  Anything that does may increase your per table margin but you’ll be seating far fewer tables over time – even if you’re not in the restaurant business.

Make sense?

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Huh?

Tagged as , , , , ,

November 26, 2014 · 11:43 am

Timing Is Everything

Today is prep day for tomorrow’s feast.  Since I’m busy doing many other things (including praying the pending snow storm misses us), I’m reposting my Thanksgiving screed from 2008.  Not much has changed in the intervening 6 years about my approach to the task at hand.  It’s also a decent observation on the value of planning and attention to detail.  Happy Thanksgiving!

I had an assistant once who developed the concept of “the Ritter factor” when estimating time.  The basic concept was that if I said something would take a certain amount of time, that amount needed to be multiplied by 4.5 to determine the actual time required.  While not admitting to the accuracy or even existence of this factor, I can state that Thanksgiving‘s biggest challenge is time. “Time?” you’re thinking, “that’s the biggest challenge?  HA!  This idiot has really lost it!”  I’m sure you could put together a list of this week’s challenges which would contain items such as where to stash all the coats, how to fit 25 people around a table made for 12, and how to step over Uncle Elmer to get to the bathroom without waking him up.  However, as the conductor of the Thanksgiving orchestra around old Rancho Deluxe here, let me assure you that the primary challenge of the day is delivering all 39 items on the menu to the table at the same time, appropriately hot or cold as required.

The key to the entire day is a timed checklist.  Seriously.  I take enormous amount of crap from everyone who sees mine each year until they realize that the meal is being served at exactly the time requested by the Mrs. which happens to coincide nicely with halftime of the football game.  This list is created by using back timing – something TV and radio producers do all the time.  Beginning at the desired end time and factoring in the availability of necessary facilities (ovens, stove burners, etc.), you work backwards and piece together the time required for each dish until you have a road map.  Anything I can knock off ahead of time (baking, prepping all the dressings, parboiling vegetables) is done up to 24 hours in advance.  It even gets down to resting time for the turkeys before carving and the time it takes for the oil to heat up in the fryer.  In fact, we’ve started frying a turkey in part because it frees up an oven late in the process.  This sounds like a silly bit of overkill to get the meal ready, but it prevents you from leaving the soup in the refrigerator or forgetting you were serving carrots and finding a 20lb bag the next morning.

I’d be happy to share my list with you but it really would only help you a bit.  The cooking facilities here are pretty damn good although we spent the money on them instead of indoor toilets (kidding).  You have to tie your back-timed list to the menu, the facilities you have available to you, and your cooking skills.  Even though my former assistant (who comes most years for the Thanksgiving meal) thinks I’m chronologically challenged, I’ve got 25 full bellies Thursday evening that think otherwise.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Helpful Hints

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,