Who is Using Twitter?

Written by Jeff Bullas – jeffbullas.com

Twitter is the mysterious online cousin to the mobile text message and has always been branded with strange names.

Twitter users have often been associated with terms such as Twits, Tweeps and Twerps and have hidden their tweetingidiosyncrasies from friends and family. Like an alcoholic hides their bottles.

The 140 character limit has been cast as not necessary in a world of “Big Data”, where saying a lot is valued more than saying less.

I have often been asked to explain what Twitter means at dinner parties and one of my favorite phrases has been

“It is like a SMS on Steroids”

Its brevity is its charm and strength.

Is the Younger Generation Using Twitter?

In 2010 I was lecturing at the International College of Management to a class of 18 to 24 year old students.

I asked who was on Twitter and only one had the courage to own up in front of their peers.

Fast forward 18 months and a different class but with the same demographics, I asked the same question, instead of one hand I saw five.

It appears that Twitter is gaining acceptance amongst the millennial generation.

Is my “very” scientific research supported?

According to the Pew Research Center’s Study it is and here are some of the facts and figures.

Is Twitter Growing? Continuar leyendo «Who is Using Twitter?»

The Science of Social Timing Part 3: Timing and Blogging

http://blog.kissmetrics.com

Timing is everything, and maintaining a blog is no exception to the rule. Learning when your audience is tuning in, and therefore when to post, is mandatory for any successful blogger. In the third and final part of this series we’re going to explore how timing can affect your blog readership.

Data courtesy of Dan Zarrella (@danzarrella), searchengineland.com (@sengineland) and HubSpot. Content available as a webinar by Dan Zarrella here. Note: all of the data below is presented in Eastern Time (EST) unless otherwise noted. Continuar leyendo «The Science of Social Timing Part 3: Timing and Blogging»

Get better data from user studies: 16 interviewing tips

One of my favorite parts of my job is interviewing a huge variety of people about their habits, needs, attitudes, and reactions to designs. I like the challenge of quickly getting strangers to talk freely and frankly about themselves, and to try figuring out new designs and products in front of me. User research shouldn’t be like the boring market surveys they read from clipboards in the mall. Great research interviews should be like listening to Terry Gross on Fresh Air — engaging and insightful. That’s what I aim for. Here are some tips and techniques that have helped me get the most out of user interviews.

Photo by pasukaru76

Michael Margolis
UX Research Partner, Google Ventures
http://www.designstaff.org

1. Get into character >>> Continuar leyendo «Get better data from user studies: 16 interviewing tips»

Senior Marketers Seen Lagging in ROI Analysis of New Digital Tools

Only 14% of senior marketers whose companies use social network marketing say they are tying their efforts to financial metrics such as market share, revenue, profits, or lifetime customer value, while only 17% of those whose companies are using mobile advertising say they are doing so,according to [download page] a survey released in March 2012 by Columbia University’s Center on Global Brand Leadership and the New York American Marketing Association (NYAMA). This compares to 41% whose companies measure the financial impact of their email marketing, and 47% whose companies do so for their traditional direct mail marketing.

This is despite adoption of new digital tools such as social network accounts (85%) and mobile ads (51%) having risen to a point where they rival the adoption rates of more established channels such as sponsorship and events (90%), print advertising (85%), direct mail (74%), and TV and radio ads (59%).

 http://www.marketingcharts.com

This is despite adoption of new digital tools such as social network accounts (85%) and mobile ads (51%) having risen to a point where they rival the adoption rates of more established channels such as sponsorship and events (90%), print advertising (85%), direct mail (74%), and TV and radio ads (59%). Continuar leyendo «Senior Marketers Seen Lagging in ROI Analysis of New Digital Tools»

Components of High-Quality Blog Posts

Creating a Powerful Introduction

In order to engage readers from the start, you have to begin with an attractive abstract that succinctly encapsulates the subject of the blog post. This introduction should be short and concise — try keeping it within 3-5 sentences. After reading your introductory paragraph, readers should immediately know what they will be in for.

Think of your introduction as a sales pitch. Let the potential reader know why he or she should read the rest of the post by stimulating their curiosity and outlining the value they will obtain should they read the post.

This introduction can also be useful for developing things such as post excerpts, metadata, descriptions for submitting to social news portals and so forth.
Using Research and Secondary Sources

A blog post should always have sound and accurate information. It’s best to support ideas and arguments with secondary resources, quotes, and research studies. Linking to relevant sources reinforces the things you say in your own blog posts and gives the reader greater context about the items you’re discussing.

by Pamela Dominguez | http://sixrevisions.com/content-strategy/components-of-high-quality-blog-posts/

Today, almost everyone wants to share his or her thoughts on the web. And with so many easy ways of blogging brought to us by services like Posterous and Tumblr, why not do it, right?

Nevertheless, we shouldn’t go around ranting uncontrollably about random stuff on the web. If we really want to share something interesting with the community of our choice, we should, at the minimum, project professionalism and trustworthiness and emphasize accuracy and quality of the writings we put on the internet.

Whether you’re maintaining a personal blog, starting up a design blog, or managing and updating your company’s official blog, the fundamental tips and strategies discussed in this article will ensure that all of your posts will be professional, high-quality, and awesome to read.

Why Should We Care About the Quality of Blog Posts? Continuar leyendo «Components of High-Quality Blog Posts»

The Power of Customers’ Mindset

re your customers in a concrete or abstract mindset as they think about purchasing your product? The answer can affect how much they buy.

Every day consumers make purchase decisions by choosing among large sets of related products available for sale in the aisles of stores. What factors might systematically affect how consumers make decisions among an array of products? Our research explores one aspect of that question.

As most marketers realize, not all shoppers are created equal. Within the same store, one may be searching for a specific product to meet an immediate need, while others may simply be browsing. Just as they can have different goals when they enter a store, individual consumers may approach purchase decisions with different mindsets that can affect how they shop. In social psychology, a mindset is defined as a set of cognitive processes and judgmental criteria that, once activated, can carry over to unrelated tasks and decisions. In other words, if you get a consumer thinking a certain way, that way of thinking — that mindset — can influence his or her subsequent shopping behavior.

In particular, social psychologists have identified two distinct mindsets that are relevant to how consumers make decisions when choosing among large sets of related products: abstract and concrete. An abstract mindset encourages people to think in a more broad and general way. Consumers in an abstract mindset who face an array of related products will focus more on the shared product attributes associated with an overarching purpose — for example, the general category of hair care or car maintenance. Conversely, a concrete mindset draws attention to lower-level details and attributes associated with execution or usage; consumers in a concrete mindset will thus focus on factors that differentiate between products.

(…)

By Kelly Goldsmith, Jing Xu and Ravi Dhar
Full article [PDF]
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/articles/2010/fall/52112/the-power-of-customers-mindset/

Are your customers in a concrete or abstract mindset as they think about purchasing your product? The answer can affect how much they buy.

As most marketers realize, not all shoppers are created equal. Within the same store, one may be searching for a specific product to meet an immediate need, while others may simply be browsing. Just as they can have different goals when they enter a store, individual consumers may approach purchase decisions with different mindsets that can affect how they shop. In social psychology, a mindset is defined as a set of cognitive processes and judgmental criteria that, once activated, can carry over to unrelated tasks and decisions. In other words, if you get a consumer thinking a certain way, that way of thinking — that mindset — can influence his or her subsequent shopping behavior.

Key to being happy may not be in genes but in your choices

Working shorter hours did not necessarily lead to happiness, but working a lot more or less than they wanted made people very unhappy.

“It appears that prioritising success and material goals is actually harmful to life satisfaction,” Professor Headey wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Partner choice played a big role. Women were less happy if their partner did not prioritise family goals than if they had no partner, and people with a neurotic partner were far less happy over time. They never got used to their partner’s negative emotions, either – even after 20 years of marriage there was no decline in the effects on their happiness.

Doing exercise and being a healthy weight were beneficial, and obesity was strongly linked to unhappiness, particularly for women.

Professor Headey did not know why many people continued to prioritise goals which did not seem to make them happy. «I think people don’t often sit down and think about what really makes them happy, and then try to do more of that.”

Amy Corderoy | http://www.smh.com.au

Happiness … It’s a choice.

The sad sacks and Eeyores of the world are not doomed to gloom forever, according to new research that shows happiness is not dictated by genes.

Instead it found your choice of partner and life goals drastically affect your satisfaction with life – overturning the popular theory that happiness is largely decided by personality traits moulded early in life and genetic factors.

Up until now much research had seemed to show even extreme events such as becoming disabled or winning the lottery had little effect on people’s happiness, and studies of twins strongly linked happiness to genetics.

But in reality, over the course of their life about 40 per cent of people experienced large changes in their levels of happiness, said the study leader, Bruce Headey, an associate professor at the Melbourne Institute at Melbourne University.

The study, the first to track happiness over a long period, followed 60,000 Germans for up to 25 years. Continuar leyendo «Key to being happy may not be in genes but in your choices»

Online Product Research

About the Survey

This report is based on the findings of a daily tracking survey on Americans’ use of the Internet. The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International between August 9 and September 13, 2010, among a sample of 3,001 adults, age 18 and older. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. For results based Internet users (n=2,065), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

by Jim Jansen | http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Online-Product-Research.aspx

Read Full Report

Explore Survey Questions

Overview

The commercial use of the internet by American adults has grown since the mid-2000s, with 58% of Americans now reporting that they perform online research concerning the products and services that they are considering purchasing. That is an increase from 49% who said they conducted product or service research online in 2004.

Morever, the number of those who do research about products on any given day has jumped from 15% of adults in September 2007 to 21% in September 2010. From February 2004, the number of adults conducting research on any given day has more than doubled, up from 9%.

Additionally, 24% of American adults say they have posted comments or reviews online about the product or services they buy, indicating a willingness to share their opinions about products and the buying experience with others.“Many Americans begin their purchasing experience by doing online research to compare prices, quality, and the reviews of other shoppers,” said Jim Jansen, Senior Fellow at the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and author of a new report about online product research. “Even if they end up making their purchase in a store, they start their fact-finding and decision-making on the internet.” Continuar leyendo «Online Product Research»

Real Men Do Apologize

This thesis was confirmed by two studies. In the first, 33 male and 33 female college students filled out an online questionnaire each evening for 12 nights. They described up to three instances that day in which “you apologized to someone or did something to someone else that might have deserved an apology.” They also described up to three incidents in which “someone else apologized to you, or did something to you that might have deserved an apology.”

As expected, the women reported offering more apologies than the men. However, they also reported committing more offenses. After taking this different threshold of perceived offensive behavior into account, “we found that the gender difference in frequency of apologies disappeared,” Schumann and Ross write. “Female and male transgressors apologized for an equal proportion of their offenses (approximately 81 percent).”

Newly published research finds men are as willing as women to apologize. But they’re less likely to believe a particular incident warrants contrition.

By Tom Jacobs | //miller-mccune.com

In the continuing battle of the sexes, score one for men. New research finds men are as willing as women to apologize, contrary to popular belief. However, researchers also report men are less likely to believe a particular incident warrants contrition. (Gremlin / istockphoto.com)

Men, according to conventional wisdom, are stubbornly unwilling to apologize. Countless pop psychology books have referenced this reluctance, explaining that our egos are too fragile to admit we’re wrong, or we’re oblivious to important nuances of social interaction.

Sorry to disrupt that lovely feeling of superiority, ladies, but newly published research suggests such smug explanations miss the mark. Writing in the journal Psychological Science, University of Waterloo psychologists Karina Schumann and Michael Ross report that men are, indeed, less likely to say “I’m sorry.” But they’re also less likely to take offense and expect an apology from someone else.

Their conclusion is that “men apologize less frequently than women because they have a higher threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior.” Whether on the giving or receiving end, males are less likely to feel an unpleasant incident is serious enough to warrant a statement of remorse. Continuar leyendo «Real Men Do Apologize»

Conversational Well-Being: Quality Over Quantity

Matthias Mehl, Shannon Holleran and Shelby Clark of the University of Arizona and Simine Vazire of the Washington University in St. Louis evaluated well-being related to the superficiality of conversation, although they acknowledged from the start how difficult it might be to measure these squishy concepts. As they point out in their paper, “Eavesdropping on Happiness: Well-being Is Related to Having Less Small Talk and More Substantive Conversations,” that appeared in Psychological Science, “Although the macrolevel and long-term implications of happiness have been studied extensively, little is known about the daily social behavior of happy people, primarily because of the difficulty of objectively measuring everyday behavior.”

To address this hole in psychological research and the subjective methodological concerns, the team attached unobtrusive audio recorders to 79 participants that periodically turn on (30 seconds of recorded sound every 12.5 minutes) for four days. Looking at 300 30-second samples for each participant, the researchers first noted whether the person was alone or talking and then categorized each recording according to levels of small talk versus substantive conversation, with conversations of substance being defined as involved conversations consisting of meaningful or personally profound material.

Backing up previous findings, the researchers demonstrate that higher well-being is associated with less time spent alone and more social interactions. The happiest participants were alone 25 percent less of the time and spent about 70 percent more time talking. More importantly, the happiest participants had about one-third as much small talk and twice as many genuine conversations.

But before we start sharing our deepest thoughts with the mailman, the team acknowledges correlation doesn’t prove causation. Perhaps they got it backward, and happy people facilitate authentic conversation instead of real conversation yielding happy people.

So people should probably hesitate before readily wearing their hearts on their sleeves, although the evidence clearly indicates that they definitely shouldn’t just be running their mouths for the sake of conversation either.

The team concludes “our findings suggest that people find their lives more worth living when examined — at least when examined together.”

But what if someone doesn’t have anything personal or profound to share? Then real conversation might be the necessary stimulant to galvanize a previously unexamined life.

Psychologists link happiness with less small talk and more substantive conversation.

By Brad Wittwer

Less small talk and more substantive conversation causes increased happiness. (Terry J Alcorn, Inc.)

Four out of Five Experts Agree — With Me!

The research team, led by Dan Kahan of Yale Law School, studied “a broadly representative sample” of 1,500 Americans in 2009. Through a series of questions, their cultural beliefs were measured on what can be called a left-right scale (although the researchers do not use the terms “liberal” and “conservative” in their paper). Those strongly holding egalitarian and communitarian outlooks were on one end of the spectrum, while those with hierarchical and individualistic views were on the other.

Participants were then presented with a series of statements and asked whether in their view most experts concurred with them. Three of the statements represented the consensus of scientific opinion: “Global temperatures are increasing,” “Human activity is causing global warming,” and “Radioactive wastes from nuclear power can be safely disposed of in deep underground storage facilities.”

Finally, the participants were introduced to a fictional expert on one of those subjects, who either agreed or disagreed with their position. After reviewing the researcher’s credentials and reading a bit of their writing, each participant rated the degree to which they found the expert knowledgeable and trustworthy.

New research finds we trust experts who agree with our own opinions, suggesting that subjective feelings override scientific information.

By Tom Jacobs
http://www.miller-mccune.com/

A clear consensus of opinion emerges within the scientific community on an important issue, such as climate change. But the public, and its elected leaders, remains unconvinced and unreceptive to well-founded warnings.

With this phenomenon growing frustratingly familiar, researchers can be forgiven if they begin to feel like Rodney Dangerfields in lab coats. From their perspective, they don’t get no respect.

Newly published research suggests that’s not entirely true: Americans do believe and trust researchers. But we focus our attention on those experts whose ideas conform with our preconceived notions. The others tend to get discounted or ignored.

“Scientific opinion fails to quiet societal disputes on such issues (as climate change) not because members of the public are unwilling to defer to experts, but because culturally diverse persons tend to form opposing perceptions of what experts believe,” a team of scholars writes in the Journal of Risk Research. “Individuals systematically overestimate the degree of scientific support for positions they are culturally predisposed to accept.” Continuar leyendo «Four out of Five Experts Agree — With Me!»

Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

I’ve been playing tennis for nearly five decades. I love the game and I hit the ball well, but I’m far from the player I wish I were.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot the past couple of weeks, because I’ve taken the opportunity, for the first time in many years, to play tennis nearly every day. My game has gotten progressively stronger. I’ve had a number of rapturous moments during which I’ve played like the player I long to be.

And almost certainly could be, even though I’m 58 years old. Until recently, I never believed that was possible. For most of my adult life, I’ve accepted the incredibly durable myth that some people are born with special talents and gifts, and that the potential to truly excel in any given pursuit is largely determined by our genetic inheritance.

During the past year, I’ve read no fewer than five books — and a raft of scientific research — which powerfully challenge that assumption (see below for a list). I’ve also written one, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, which lays out a guide, grounded in the science of high performance, to systematically building your capacity physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

Harvard Business Publishing
by Tony Schwartz | http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/08/six_keys_to.html

I’ve been playing tennis for nearly five decades. I love the game and I hit the ball well, but I’m far from the player I wish I were.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot the past couple of weeks, because I’ve taken the opportunity, for the first time in many years, to play tennis nearly every day. My game has gotten progressively stronger. I’ve had a number of rapturous moments during which I’ve played like the player I long to be.

During the past year, I’ve read no fewer than five books — and a raft of scientific research — which powerfully challenge that assumption (see below for a list). I’ve also written one, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, which lays out a guide, grounded in the science of high performance, to systematically building your capacity physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Continuar leyendo «Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything»

The Science of Laughter

The laughter virus

As anyone who has ever laughed at the sight of someone doubled over can attest, laughter is contagious. Since our laughter is under minimal conscious control, it is spontaneous and relatively uncensored. Contagious laughter is a compelling display of Homo sapiens, a social mammal. It strips away our veneer of culture and challenges the hypothesis that we are in full control of our behavior. From these synchronized vocal outbursts come insights into the neurological roots of human social behavior and speech.

Consider the extraordinary 1962 outbreak of contagious laughter in a girls’ boarding school in Tanzania. The first symptoms appeared on January 30, when three girls got the giggles and couldn’t stop laughing. The symptoms quickly spread to 95 students, forcing the school to close on March 18. The girls sent home from the school were vectors for the further spread of the epidemic. Related outbreaks occurred in other schools in Central Africa and spread like wildfire, ceasing two-and-a-half years later and afflicting nearly 1,000 people.

Before dismissing the African outbreak as an anomaly, consider our own technologically triggered mini-epidemics produced ,by television laugh tracks. Laugh tracks have accompanied most television sitcoms since September 9, 1950. At 7:00 that evening, «The Hank McCune Show» used the first laugh track to compensate for being filmed without a live audience. The rest is history. Canned laughter may sound artificial, but it makes TV viewers laugh as if they were part o live theater audience.

Far from mere reactions to jokes, hoots and hollers are serious business:
They’re innate — and important — social tools.

By Robert Provine | //psychologytoday.com

Whether overheard in a crowded restaurant, punctuating the enthusiastic chatter of friends, or as the noisy guffaws on a TV laugh track, laughter is a fundamental part of everyday life. It is so common that we forget how strange — and important — it is. Indeed, laughter is a «speaking in tongues» in which we’re moved not by religious fervor but by an unconscious response to social and linguistic cues. Stripped of its variation and nuance, laughter is a regular series of short vowel-like syllables usually transcribed as «ha-ha,» «ho-ho» or «hee-hee.» These syllables are part of the universal human vocabulary, produced and recognized by people of all cultures.

Given the universality of the sound, our ignorance about the purpose and meaning of laughter is remarkable. We somehow laugh at just the right times, without consciously knowing why we do it. Most people think of laughter as a simple response to comedy, or a cathartic mood-lifter. Instead, after 10 years of research on this little-studied topic, I concluded that laughter is primarily a social vocalization that binds people together. It is a hidden language that we all speak. It is not a learned group reaction but an instinctive behavior programmed by our genes. Laughter bonds us through humor and play.

Continuar leyendo «The Science of Laughter»

10 Insights: A First Look at The New Intelligent Enterprise Survey

How do you win with data? SMR surveyed global executives about turning the data deluge and analytics into competitive advantage. Here’s an early snapshot of how managers are answering the most important question organizations face.

Last May, at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium main-stage discussion on “Emerging Stronger from the Downturn,” one panelist listened with a growing private smile as his fellow speakers described example after example of how technology-driven information and analytics applications were transforming their companies. The stories were of data and analysis being used to understand customers, parse trends, distribute decision making, manage risk; they foretold of organizations being reinvented and management practice being rethought. They told of change, basically. A lot of it. Driven by ever-emerging technology and the new things it could do.

That was the point at which the panelist, a multinational industrial COO, turned to the audience and unofficially summarized, “So, the lesson: If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

He’s right. Change is here. Failure to adapt means irrelevance. Time and progress march on, but at a Moore’s law pace instead of a clock’s. [Más…]

However, the focus on exactly what’s changing can be misplaced. For all the swiftness with which technology is shifting — getting smarter, more powerful, more cognitively “human” — it’s sometimes true that the attention we pay to the next new technology is a distraction. It distracts us from the changes that organizations could make with no more new technology at all — the changes organizations could achieve just by capitalizing on how current technology can enable them to capture, analyze and act on information. (Though the “just” in that sentence may be ill-advised.)

MIT Sloan School’s Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, talked about that kind of change in an interview with SMR:

“Although most of what I’ve been talking about has focused on changes in the technology, I think the biggest changes are going to be in the way the companies use the technology. If some catastrophe happened and technology just froze for the next couple of decades, I believe the pace of organizational change would continue just as rapidly, because we have so much catching up to do. Specifically, I think this cultural mentality of using data more effectively, running experiments and responding to the environment and replicating it is something that is going to happen regardless of what additional advances we see in the underlying technology. A decade from now, I expect companies to be far more responsive, far more innovative, far more analytics-minded.”

Brynjolfsson gave experimentation special emphasis, but his observation fits other information-enabled practices found under the big tent of analytics. The technology is here. The data are available. How will companies use them to win?

To answer that question, SMR has teamed with the IBM Institute for Business Value to build a new innovation hub and research program called “The New Intelligent Enterprise.”

Through the SMR and IBM IBV collaboration, The New Intelligent Enterprise aims to help managers understand how they can capitalize on the ways that information and analytics are changing the competitive landscape. What threats and opportunities will companies face? What new business models, organizational approaches, competitive strategies, work processes and leadership methods will emerge? How will the best organizations reinvent themselves to use technology and analytics to achieve novel competitive advantage? How will they learn not only to be smarter, but to act smarter?

In the months ahead, this inquiry into the makeup of The New Intelligent Enterprise will consist of survey research, in-depth interviews with thought leaders and top corporate executives worldwide and the most relevant academic research and case study work in the field. This article presents (very) early returns on that research — especially on the first annual New Intelligent Enterprise Survey, a global survey of nearly 3,000 executives who told us about their top management goals, their uses (and misuses) of information and analytics as they attacked those goals and the management practices in play in their organizations. In both this article and “10 Data Points,” we call out some of what we’re learning. The articles have been coauthored by core members of The New Intelligent Enterprise team: Steve LaValle, IBM Global Strategy Leader for Business Analytics and Optimization; Nina Kruschwitz, SMR Special Projects Editor; Rebecca Shockley, IBM IBV Global Lead for Business Analytics and Optimization; and Fred Balboni, IBM Global Leader for Business Analytics and Optimization.

Please note: What’s here is only preliminary — a true “first look” at the themes, benchmarks and questions that are surfacing. Next on the schedule: conclusive analysis of the survey and stage-one interview findings will be published in a New Intelligent Enterprise Special Report on October 25. Selected interviews will be published online through early winter. And in late December, the Winter issue of SMR will include further exploration of the key ideas in October’s Special Report.

For now, though, consider the following notes — and the survey statistics in “10 Data Points” — as a collective reminder to reexamine your own practices and plans. As the gentleman said, If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.

Here are 10 observations and questions about analytics-driven management that have popped out of research and interviews so far, and which we’ll be exploring more deeply in the major reports ahead.

By Michael S. Hopkins, Steve LaValle and Fred Balboni
http://sloanreview.mit.edu

He’s right. Change is here. Failure to adapt means irrelevance. Time and progress march on, but at a Moore’s law pace instead of a clock’s. Continuar leyendo «10 Insights: A First Look at The New Intelligent Enterprise Survey»

Thought Leadership Success Factor No. 5: Fueling Service Innovation, Not Just Marketing

Thought leadership programs serve one master in most professional services and other B2B firms: Marketing. Marketing generates content (commissioning studies, writing white papers, and so on). Marketing packages and distributes that content (producing academic-looking publications, seminars and webinars, educational PR campaigns, email newsletters, etc.). Marketing then turns over the resulting client inquiries to account executives. Thought leadership is a Marketing activity.

But that robs thought leadership programs of their greater potential value – as sources of service innovation, not just marketing content. When companies use thought leadership to fuel new services or rejuvenate existing ones, they not only codify expertise on how to solve some business problem; they turn it into capability that many (not just a handful) of their professionals can use with clients. They do this by taking a powerful concept described in a white paper or research study and turn it into a rigorous methodology. They then develop effective curriculum around that methodology and put their professionals through training programs so they can master it.

When that happens, thought leadership content fuels new services or new approaches to existing services – not just creates client interest in them through marketing. We have seen a number of professional firms that created strong client interest in a concept after conducting and marketing some innovative research – only to find that just a few people in their firm could actually deliver the service implied by their compelling concept. (It’s a page from the “Let’s Throw Something Against the Wall and See What Sticks” book on marketing and service development. The idea is not to develop a robust service until a firm has numerous clients who are willing to pay for it.)

Bob Buday’s blog
//bloomgroup.com/blogs/bob-buday

Thought leadership programs serve one master in most professional services and other B2B firms: Marketing. Marketing generates content (commissioning studies, writing white papers, and so on). Marketing packages and distributes that content (producing academic-looking publications, seminars and webinars, educational PR campaigns, email newsletters, etc.). Marketing then turns over the resulting client inquiries to account executives. Thought leadership is a Marketing activity.

When you think about what would happen to other industries that followed this practice, you begin to see that it’s insane. Imagine a pharmaceutical company that conducted drug research for marketing purposes only, telling the market it’s come up with a breakthrough compound but deciding not to manufacture it. That’s just about the state of thought leadership programs in most of the B2B firms we know. What they publish is often not something that most of their professionals practice.

I’m not sure why this is the case. But I know it is the case. Perhaps it’s because service innovation in professional services is in its infancy. Few firms have created formal and highly productive processes for developing superior services. In most professional firms I know, services are hand-crafted by individual artisans – practicing consultants, lawyers or accountants who often in their spare time document some approach to solving a recurring client problem.
Continuar leyendo «Thought Leadership Success Factor No. 5: Fueling Service Innovation, Not Just Marketing»