Tips for Better Virtual Meetings

With more than two-thirds of business executives engaging in virtual work, virtual meetings are a standard feature of the business landscape. But of course that doesn't mean its easy to navigate through. 

I came across this great article from Harvard Business School on some great tips for better virtual meetings.

1) Be Very Interactive

One reason virtual meetings do not flow as naturally as in-person meetings is that establishing camaraderie at a distance is difficult. Yet it can be achieved if the meeting particpants make an effort to engage with their colleagues from afar.

2) Use Technology To Enhance Collaboration

Technology that enhances two-way communication and active collaboration can make virtual meetings almost like being there - one team at a Fortune 100 company experienced a stunning 90% drop in decision-making time in virtual meetings after it put technology to work. Useful high-tech tools include virtual rooms for attendees, white board functionality for note taking, voting tools for anonymous feedback, cameras so colleagues can see one another, collaborative online presentation capability, informal chat rooms for side discussions and the ability to raise your hand virtually and ask questions.

3) Reserve Meetings For Two-Way Communication

Have you ever attended meeting where all you did was listen? If one-way meetings are bad in person, they're deadly over the phone, especially when participants are scattered across the globe and it's the middle of the night for some.

4) Level Ths Playing Field

It is common in virtual meetings for some employees to particpate while sitting together in a conference room, while others are alone in their offices or other locations. Employees in the conference room have the benefit of side conversations with their colleagues and shared coffee breaks. The individuals not in the room may feel excluded and wonder whether their input is equally valued.

5) Establish A No E-Mail Or Instant Messaging Policy

This is obvious, but it's worth emphasizing: just as it's rude to have side conversations during a face-to-face meeting, it's rude to converse an email or instant messaging during virtual meetings. To encourage compliance, try what one team did: it decided that anyone who broke this rule would be assigned the next item. The prooved a highly effective deterrent!

Pros & Cons of Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a very populat form of driving traffic to a website, especially to a brand new one.

Google Adwords is the leader of PPC engine and I guess followed by Yahoo Search and MSN. No matter which one you choose to start with the process are similar - you decide which keywords you want to target, write an ad and are charged every time someone clicks it.

Anyways, lets analyse the pros and cons of PPC as a traffic source.

Pros

• PPC traffic can be turned on and off instantaneously. Once you have done your keyword research, you can be up and running in less than 15 minutes.
• It is very targeted, since you can decide the time of day and the location from which your ads should be seen.
• Its the ideal method of testing how your website converts. You can run as many tests as you want, with the goal of improving your conversion rate. PPC can help you refine your website before using other traffic sources.
• While in banner advertising you pay by impressions (an impression is when someone sees your ad), in PPC you pay only when someone clicks. This means you are paying only for the actual traffic Google is sending you. 
• Adwords is also a good way to quickly test if there is a market for a new product not yet developed. The marketer can perhaps perform a survey on the landing page to learn if theres interest on a new item/and/or technology possibly entering the marketplace.

 Cons

•  Google Adwords is a very popular way of driving traffic. The more people use the system, the more it will cost to achieve the top position. Depending on how many advertisers are in your market, it is uncommon to go over $1 a click for the top spot.
• You can't rely solely on PPC. It is easier for a competitor with deeper pockets to outid you. 
• Since Adwords seem so easy at first, many advertisers do not invest the time necessary to track the ROI of their investment. They just turn their campaign on. Only by tracking your campaigns, you know which keywords don't convert and can exclude them from your campaign.

Can you make money managing social media?

Our advertising agency have asked us many times before if we would want them to manage our social media stuff for us.

Of course I would think that everybody should do their own social media because of the "authencity" value. But I am also a realist. If people want to out-source their social media and there is a buck to made, it will actually happen somewhere. I also believe that there is some value to a consultant or agency helping people along for the some period of time.

I am not going to name brands but I have seen some big brands with some amazing and sophisticated social media marketing programs. These companies are beggining to make correlations between "share of voice" and true marketshare, using listening platforms to track micro-trends and taking location-based marketing to a whole new level.

Of course these companies have the resources to hire the biggest agencies and best minds in the world to help them navigate social media labyrinths and determine a strategy.

For medium-sized companies. I guess unless you are an elite brand, most companies are desperately confused about what to do about social media. But most of these companies at least have the vision and budget to hire an agency to get them started on social media marketing.

For small businesses - I really believe that social media can provide an advantage to most small businesses, but that doesn't mean it actually does unless they are working on it! Now why isn't it happening?:

• They are overwhelmed by the concept and dont know where to start
• They started Facebook page and nobody "liked" them so they quit
• They understand the concept but don't have the time or resources to do anything consistent and meaningful
• Their marketing budget is tied up on traditional marketing and they don't have anything left for something new
• When you bring it up, they stare you down and tell you they dont need Facebook or Twitter.

The new category of social media gurus are trying to teach best practices and perhaps do some hands-on social media management. My take is the most of these efforts eventually fail because you are communicating for somebody else, which is probably not sustainable, and the labour cost to actually do this stuff is so high and the results so undefinable in the short term that businesses lose interest.

I am also coming across more small agnecies offering social media packages - e.g. one facebook update, tweet a day and one blog a week. I am not quite a fan of this approach because it intstitutionalises lazy marketing. But it is happening. A lot. 

I think the only viable long-term solution for most small businesses is to get some coaching and learn step by step plan to eventually create a culture, an organisation and an actionable strategy appropriate for the company resources and budget. This seems to be the approach that will work best. 

Social Media ROI: Myths, Truths, Measurement

Since we are embarking into the social media scene at work, I have been researching on how we measure social media. Question: Is the way you calculate social media ROI the right method? And are you meeting your business objectives and goals? If you answered YES to these questions, YAY!!!

But even that, are you 100% sure you are doing it the right way?

Like my boss, many are still skeptical about marketing via social media and some claim its not really measurable as it's difficult to get the benchmarks and without the metrics it seems diffiult to claim that a strategy really worked. I feel that way, but it might be because I don't have all the numbers to plug in yet.

But for online marketers like me, its a high priority because they:

• need to improve effectiveness
• need to improve integration with other marketing
• feel pressure to report quantified outcomes

But before we discuss the best way to measure our social media marketing, we need to set business metrics which are basically goals and KPIs of our marketing strategies. If its just because "our agency advised us to do it" or "our competitor is doing it too" then, please think about the reasons more deeply.

Examples of some typical social media business goals:

• Gather competitive intelligence
• Engage with customers and prospects online
• Maximise reach of content and messaging in social channels
• Support existing sales and marketing campaigns
• Support recruiting and retention efforts
• Build a customer community to provide support and advocacy

Now to get to ROI, these metrics have to be turned into business benefits -a combination of tracked data and outcome  data, which are not directly connected to social media. e.g. total sales, number of test drive requests, registrations, etc.

I think its quite important to consistently measure ROI of a lot of things..as long as it concerns the growth of our company, in the end we want to knoe whether our investment will pay off or not. Of course its true to listen more to the customers and start engaging with them (by talking with them but first listening  to them). I think this is an investment as well..

Social Media Marketing: We need to measure it! (or do we not?)

Social Media Marketing has received centre stage in today's marketer's planning plateau. E.g. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, etc. 

Marketers are curious about this "new" channel to market especially given that many studies depict a sense of postivisim in it. However, the reality is social marketing is something of a black box, marketers inject programs into the black box and cross their fingers at the output.

Perhaps the standard quantitative notions of approach to analysing data (bounce rate, CTR, regression, path analysis, etc) may be cast aside for qualitative methods? Afterall social being social requires the need for verbal and face checks, no? or perhaps we should just get companies to state their objectives and we just track certain metrics. Do we really need to measure it? I think that is the question. Or should we just let social media play its role and just cross our fingers and hopefully the spread of its positive will correlate positively with profitability and hope that we can control the spread if its negative.

Well what are your thoughts? There are many different ways to see how many people see what you create, but is there a way to get a true sense of how well your Social Media Marketing is doing? For all the measurement metrics and stat softwares out there the only number we should be looking at when determining the success of our Social Media campaigns is the same thing we look at any campaign. Its the only thing we judge each of our social media campaigns on.

I came up with pros and cons of some of the top measurment methods:

1. Number of followers and Likes -Does it really mean anything? Obviously its great to have an audience, but usually 35% of followers are competitiors, people you know in the industry, etc who are really not there interested in your product/services. So who are you really helping? Bottom line, an audience is great and any form of media is valuable. Its also far less expensive than an ad in the newspaper or TV .
2. Engagement. Some will say that the number of follwers are useless if you don't have a high engagement score. I guess the real problem is that the majority of Social Media users don't really interact to brands on those sites. They sit and watch.  
3. Revenue - Let's be honest. Companies/Brands get into Social Media to get new clients, increase revenue and not really into making new friends. Social Media marketing is just a piece to the great Marketing pie and cannot sustain a business on its own. Like all of us know, u require awareness to purchase and hopefully turn that purchaser into an evangelist for your brand.  

By looking at the question re. "measuring" if by measuring it means counting friends and followers it really doesn't add much so to me that sort of measurement can be skipped.
 

Virtualizing a File Server

We are in the middle of a project to replace a new file server and were suggested to virtualise our file server. As you can imagine, this is a large project for us. We have a lot to consider and plan out before moving forward. All in all, it has been an eye-opening endeavour.

One of the biggest challenges is deciding on how the new implementation would look. Our next decision is regarding the server itself. I like the idea of easy portability and hardware independence.

Our current physical server is without warranty and one of the two power supplies has fried. The security in the server is not exactly coherent or structured. We are also out of space and apparently not backing up entirely.

We were curious when asked to consider implementing a virtualised server environment. If I am not wrong, a virtual file server is a system consisting of one of more virtualised devices that store computer files such as documents, sound files, images, audio and video files. The server can be accessed by workstations or application servers through the Fileserver network.

File virtualisation can be limited by scalability, which can involve the number of file systems, files, servers or I/O input/output) performance. The file virtualisation platform must also be interoperable with the current infrastructure so that it can work with existing storage systems and switches.

Brand Reputation and Search Engine – Correlated?

I was reading Advertising Age this afternoon and read an article titled "Search Shifts Means Visibility Must be Earned, Not Paid". Does this infer that brand reputation and search engine optimisation are correlated? If so, this has many ramifications.

I believe marketers should devote more attention to SEO rather than SEM, as the title in Advertising Age suggets. Consumers look to the internet for information and education to help them make a more informed decision. 

In the fase paced interconnected world that we live in today, consumers are going to talk about your company regardless if you have entered the online space. So even your offline campaigns, customer service, product quality with be talked about online. And of course these conversations can make or break your brand reputation.

As part of SEM, one of the variable of getting higher rankings, content needs to be refreshed and of course rich in information can be a very powerful variable in pushing up brand name in Search Engines.

Consumers want to know more about the company/brand and read about reviews and feedbacks from current customers. But hey isn't that a way social marketing? People are searching, people are also perhaps in engaging in long-tail searches on your company and brand. So having good or bad press on search engines may be a deal winner or breaker for you - depends on how it swings.

Somehow this is no longer PUSH marketing but PULL marketing at play. Not new I might say, in the past we have always trusted our friends more than advertisements anyway.

So concluding, I personally feel that brand reputation and search engine are correlated - be it good or bad reputation. Search marketing now is not just about generating leads, it is also a strategy in itself that goes beyong selling a product.

What are your thoughts?

Social Media for Businesses – A Reality Check

For years now I have been trying to introduce the idea of social media to my boss who practices very traditional marketing strategies. I think I am geting closer but there's still a lot of convincing to do.

Here are just some pointers on some social media techniques I put in place:

1. Use tools (e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc) to better engage your customers, and these are just tools. Social Media marketing is a strategy in itself.
2. Nothing will replace a face to face meeting – not even Social Media marketing.
3. Markets are getting smarter – you listen to the customers – and there is also alot of unhappy customers out there. You can get an anti-your company blog. But hey which company doesnt want to listen to those unhappy customers. On the contrary these companies give you a chance to better improve yourself.
4. Use Social Media to understand the customer and give it to them better. They use Social Media tools to listen to the conversation about the company in real time.
5. Companies should embrace the opportunities Social Media entails – think beyond the unhappy customers, on the contrary convert those unhappy ones to happy one and they will be your evangelists.
6. Listening is one thing, participating is another. Its very important to listen first and understand first and then response especially in this fast paced world we live in now.
7. Large companies especially cant afford to sit on the sideline, have to get in now before you get left behind especially now that a growing number of customers are spending a fair portion of their time online.
8. Social Media gives you untapped opportunities and allows you to listen in to conversations about your brand and as a result allow to you understand where you stand, how you can improve and as such deliver better value.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Here are just some of the Social Media Marketing Monitoring tools that I use. Some are retty good and some not but nevertheess still works. 

• Google Alerts
• TweetBeep
• Watchthatpage
• Trendrr
• Trackur.com
• Google Trends
• Blogpulse

Please feel free to add to the list for those I’ve missed out. Thanks!

Authentic Marketing in Social Media – Paying People to Seed Comments – Trust

In media such as prints, TV ads, consumers will understand and recognise that these are all paid advertisement and they are perfectly fine with that. After all, this fact is known from the outset.

However what if this is not known from the outside? A trend that I see, from conversations with friends, clients and agencies is the notion of seeding conversations in Social Media. For example, firms employ (and pay of course) individuals to post comments on blogs, forums and such as to create a favourable image for the product and hope that it will generate more traffic and of course generate leads.

Is this right? I don’t know – Well for me, I hate to read comments that are not genuine especially if I found out later that this was a paid post or comment – some one who is employed by the company in question. I would lose credibility in the site or for that matter the product – trust is built in incremental steps but once lost, it falls exponentially – isn’t trust (and candidness) the bedrock of social media? Trust is one of the antecedents (drivers) of Word of Mouth (WOM).

From a marketer’s stand point, sure WOM is something they wish to achieve i.e. a result, by seeding comments, would one lose that trust if found out?

But I can understand from the agencies’s point of view is that it generates discussion in the comments section. Afterall social media is interaction and its success stems from conversations.

What are your views, I’m keen to hear them out.

Social Media humanizes your brand?

I think so! But do you think firms are more concerned about "negative comments"?

You bet! Of course that really depends on how the interaction is conversed online. Social media gives business the opportunity never befper to access consumers honest and candid feedback

You bet! of course that depends on how you interaction and converse online. Social media gives firms the opportunity never before to access consumer’s candid feedback and of course business are given the opportunity to respond and relate back to the consumers.

The "problem" I see though is that a significant number of companies still treat social media as a channel for sales. Firms should think beyong that and use social media as a means to better interact with their customers and garner feedback.

Though I have heard is that firms seem to be only concern about one major point - what if someone gave us a really bad feedback? Can we delete bad comments?, etc, etc. Fixating on negativity.

If you think about it, businesses should really be asking how they are going to engage with their consumer? Social Media did not invent critisicm. Businesses have always dealth with complaints via phone calls, email, face to face. So how different is this? 

The Ultimate Guide for Top Internet Marketing Products Exposed

The World Wide Web is filled with a lot of things. But as an Internet Marketer, you should be more particular about your competitors. Everybody wants to have a piece of the action. Everyone wants a share of the market. Obviously if you are not competitive enough you won't be earning much.

Like everything in life in order for it to have your online business succeed you have to invest in it. The basics would be a good domain name, web hosting and a marketing strategy. If you choose well in these aspects, your business could reach great heights.

Not all Domains and Hosting Providers are the same. It is necessary that you get the most reliable web host in order to provide continuous service to your customers. When choosing a web hosting service and domain, be sure to go for a server that can handle your security and expected traffic in the long run.

A good Online Marketing Strategy, on the other hand, could take your business to the top of search engine results for optimum target visits. Being on the top position would drive unique visits to your site, which could translate into sales in the immediate future. 

Your choice of Online Advertising Strategy would put your website in key places of the internet for maximum profits. Advertising is a way to reach out to potential customers. If your ads are on the right spot, you'll get an assurance of reaching your sales quota for the day. 

There are many online marketing products and packages available today to help you in promoting your online business. The problem now is in choosing which one would work for you best. But how would you know that if everybody else says that their marketing product or strategy would work like magic on your business? There's only one sure way to go about it - by consulting authentic customer reviews. 

With a portal that can provide first-hand, accurate information about a certain marketing product that's currently circulating over the internet, you would be able to come up with the best choice for your business. This portal is powered by consumers themselves. Customers, users, or subscribers of a certain online marketing, advertising, or hosting package are then encouraged to add their reviews, recommendations, and feedback - both positive and negative - about their experiences in any of the marketing packages and strategies they have availed of. These would then serve as a guide for everyone, including professionals and novice internet marketers. If there is a new online marketing product recently released, consult customer reviews first before buying it for your own use. This way, you would know if the product could really help you or not.