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?