thinking/critical

Of all the companies that use the Internet for business intelligence, those who have a talent for finding the meaning and patterns behind the noise will benefit the most.

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Distilling customer relationship publishing into one simple blog post
 
 

I read dozens of business books and articles every month, and I look for common threads between them. Not surprisingly, I find more common thought than innovative or divergent thought in business theory. In general that’s good, because it means that ideas are being tested for practical [...]

People are getting all wrapped up in social media, thinking social media is the point. Social media is just a delivery device – a delivery device that any junior high school student can master. Marketing is the point, and content is the requirement.

Websites, social media, blogging, and other forms of interactive marketing have greatly enhanced the marketing potential of most organizations. But beware the temptation to believe that these are all you need, or that any of them are actually “free!”

In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan – the modern media world’s most prescient cultural forecaster – said “we are always living way ahead of our thinking.” This article examines how that truth influences most business failure to successfully market products to customers.

Without the support of wild growth based on expansion, we must return to offering things of inherent, comparative value. Relationships are once again essential to business success. Relationships within the business, and relationships with the customers, vendors, and communities the business depends on. But has our understanding of relationship become superficial?

If you find yourself assembling virtual teams of home-based contract workers, you will need to develop new skills and sensitivities to motivate, manage, and assess them.

One topic that seems to create a lot of concern – with both customers requiring consulting and blog readers – is the topic of using systems to facilitate communication. There are three camps. Camp 1 is the group who is convinced that systems create bureaucracy, slow down the process, and undermine creativity. Camp 2 is [...]

The relationships we have at work are significant. Like our families of birth, we generally have little control over who the members of the family are. Our work relationships have the power to bring us joy or cause us anguish. They can lead to the greatest creative breakthroughs or significant physical and mental breakdowns. Or they may be nowhere near those highs or lows, just droning on in the background of our work life, not driving us crazy but not making our lives any richer either. The bottom line for business is that an organization filled with happy humans is more likely to be profitable than a similar business filled with the unhappy sort. In his book The Relationship Cure, Gottman says “A bid can be a question, a gesture, a look, a touch – any single expression that says “I want to feel connected to you.” A response to a bid is just that – a positive or negative answer to somebody’s request for emotional connection.” According to Gottman, there are three types of response to bids: turning toward responses, turning away responses, and turning against responses. One example from the book (pp 36-37) works as follows:

Remember the book – and the saying – the medium is the message? Marshall McLuhan, author of the saying and of the 1964 book of the same name, theorized that every message is not only influenced, but defined, by the medium by which the message is delivered. McLuhan died in 1980, before any of these new digital marketing mediums were possible, let alone conceived of. Yet his work is as relevant today as it was back when he was worried about the ultimate social impact of the television. McLuhan argued that at the intelligent, rational levels of perception, human beings take a message and consider its content carefully. However, at the empirical – experiential – level of consciousness, the medium itself is the message.