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Keys to a good location based marketing campaign | Location-based Marketing Tool

2011-06-11T16:30:00.001-04:00

Keys to a good location based marketing campaign | Location-based Marketing Tool

Aaron Strout, head of location based marketing for WCG put together a great checklist on how to run a good location based marketing program, appropriately titled:

10 Keys to a Good Location Based Marketing Campaign

This list is a primer for the soon to be released book “Location Based Marketing for Dummies“, one we are definitely waiting to get a copy of and recommend that you get as well.

My Take: For nearly every small business; local restaurant, retailer or service provider, location based marketing is going to be both new and not so new. New, in the sense that there is now a whole new set of technologies to work with and Not So New, because location based marketing is what they have always done. Local businesses survive based on foot traffic both old customers and new customers have got to come into your place of business in order for you to make your numbers month in and month out.

BlogWorld NY 2011 Keynote: Mega LBS or Mega BS (blogworld.com)
SMBs Turn to Social Media Before Search Marketing (offeredlocal.com)
Top 5 Foursquare Mistakes Committed by Small Businesses (mashable.com)
Is your restaurant as socially influential as the big guys? (offeredlocal.com)

Daily Deals and Location Based Marketing | Location-based Marketing Tool

2011-06-11T16:25:00.001-04:00

Daily Deals and Location Based Marketing | Location-based Marketing Tool

Writing in Techcocktail – Kris Petersen, CEO and Founder of DealsGoRound pointed out 3 trends that he saw in the daily deal market.

In typical flash sale fashion, the 2011 Daily Deal Summit was here for 24 hours and then it was gone. The sold out event took place in New York City on Wednesday, April 6th and was attended by a standing room-only crowd of deal and service providers, as well as… via 3 Trends In Daily Deal Offerings.

Reading his post you will find that experience deals, those deals that combine two uncommon items together and deals at the speed of mobile, the ability to change or create deals as an when needed are going to be two very important elements as the daily deal space grows and becomes an ever bigger part of the location based marketing and social media marketing landscape.

Here a deal, there a deal, everywhere a deal deal (offeredlocal.com)
Aaron Strout’s – 10 Keys to a Good Location Based Marketing Campaign (offeredlocal.com)
Location-Based Services: Foursquare vs. Facebook Places (offeredlocal.com)
Facebook vs. Groupon and LivingSocial – You Win! (bradsdeals.com)
As Daily Deals Go National, Will They Get Less Generous? (mint.com)
A Small Business Marketer’s Guide to Group Deal Sites (hubspot.com)

Foursquare and Twitter power up location based marketing | Location-based Marketing Tool

2011-06-11T16:17:00.001-04:00

Foursquare and Twitter power up location based marketing | Location-based Marketing Tool

Cool news, tweeps: you remember how Twitter launched the awesome #newTwitter, with the detail panes so you got a lot more context around all the links in your tweetstream? Well, now foursquare check-ins get the royal tweetment. When you tweet your check-in, the tweet’s details will now include the photo,…

via Yo dawg, we heard you liked foursquare, so we put some foursquare in your Twitter.

My Take: It is clear that your options in location based marketing and social media marketing are all becoming more and more connected and you don’t want to be caught on the outside when it comes to taking advantage of these two strategies.

Google Rolls Out Checkin Deals for Latitude Nationwide | Location-based Marketing Tool

2011-04-10T11:35:00.003-04:00

Google Latitude, the search giant’s location-sharing mobile app, is launching checkin offers nationwide, giving users the ability to unlock discounts with a handful of launch partners.

Google Rolls Out Checkin Deals for Latitude Nationwide | Location-based Marketing Tool

Much like Foursquare and Facebook, Latitude now reveals different offers if a user checks in to locations hosting a Latitude deal. However, Google adds…

via Google Rolls Out Checkin Deals for Latitude Nationwide.

The old joke about a boat anchor

2010-12-25T17:23:00.003-05:00

On a recent family road trip I was reminded of an old joke about things that become a "boat anchor". It essentially referred to some item that was so old or so useless that it's only use was as a boat anchor.

While on a recent road trip my son commented that his iPod Touch was running low on juice, I said that he could charge it up when he got to grandma's. There was a moment of consternation and then a longer period of silence as we continued to drive along.

On the way to grandma's we stopped off to get the car washed and I looked back to find my son still playing his iPod Touch and I laughed when I saw that he had taken my netbook (backup computer) out of its pouch and was using it as a backup battery to his iPod Touch!

It really made me realize how quickly we have moved from a PC world to a hand held world, whether that be a smart-phone or an iPod. My once cherished Netbook is now nothing more than a boat anchor or in the case of my son's purposes a source of energy that makes it possible to keep using his iPod on a long road trip!

Thanks,

Ed

Here's the problem with subscribing to blogs, tweets, and social networks

2010-09-23T23:30:00.004-04:00

So I've been thinking about information and knowledge a lot lately. I remember the first time I discovered an RSS feed and I thought that this was really cool. I figured I could just have it scour the web looking for things that I was interested in and have it presented back to me in an easy to digest format, man that is cool.

Well, for while I was actually correct, it was cool and it was a very quick way to keep on top of what was happening. Flash forward, imagine, my excitement when I started realizing the benefits of joining social networks and then subscribing to specific blog posts and bloggers whom I was interested in and then of course the ability to subscribe to tweets, the joy was un-imaginable, the knowledge I could gain was virtually unlimited, talk about a fire hose!

I would say for close to two years I was able to get a virtually unlimited amount of information on almost any subject for which I had an interest. To some extent this has been pretty good. I've actually been able to gain a vast amount of different knowledge about subjects that I had very little knowledge of at the time. This is been especially good when working in small and medium businesses addressing issues of growth, where you have to multi-task and develop new skills at a rampant pace.

Over time, however, I realize that I was becoming overwhelmed with information, that I was unable to turn into knowledge. It was taking more and more time everyday just to casually review the information on subjects which I actually had a specific interest (most of which are now stored in Evernote, for future reference). I noticed that most of this time increasingly was devoted towards filtering out things that I already knew as opposed to actually looking at things that were in fact new bits of information.

As an example, when SEO became an important function of the marketing process I needed to understand how it worked. In particular, I needed to understand the most basic aspects of SEO and determine how it would affect the business, how to implement SEO correctly and how to monitor it.

So, like many I subscribed to bloggers who wrote about SEO, people who tweeted about SEO and news feeds related to SEO. The challenge was, as my general knowledge increased I had no way of telling my subscription services that hey, I already know a bunch of this stuff, what I'm really interested in this things that I don't know about SEO. I know longer wanted to read articles that started out with "5 things that every CMO needs to know about SEO". Heck, I knew 50 things about SEO by that time, what I wanted to know was the 2 "really new" things that I didn't already know.

What I really need now is the ability to follow certain subjects such as SEO, innovation, and start-up/growth business, but a much higher level of understanding. I know a lot about these subjects already, so spending my days sorting through titles or first sentence previews of information streams is really just a waste of time, what I need is the ability to tell my subscription services that I'm no longer at a basic level of understanding I need more advanced information on the subjects.

When I first began thinking about this problem, I thought that the easy solution would be to subscribe to the people who were writing at a more advanced level, so a blogger that wrote about advanced SEO as opposed to a blogger that wrote about entry-level SEO. The challenge with this is that many bloggers who are writing about a certain subject have to cover the entire gamut from early endeavors to mid range activity to more advanced activity, in order to make the writing interesting for any user (newbie, mid-range or expert) who might happen to find out about them by searching the web. So, I don't think it's practical to say just subscribe people who write at a higher level or just subscribe to the terms that may be used in higher-level discussions etc.

In the end my information subscriptions need to know how much information I've already covered they need to know how to sort out the basic from the mid range to the more advanced and only show me the information based on where I am in the understanding of a particular subject.

A man has got to have dreams.

We have effectively killed off the "X" Steps to "Anything" idea in marketing

2010-07-07T14:49:00.005-04:00

Not long ago, maybe a year or so, there were a raft of blog posts written about, well, how to attract people to read your blog posts, and one of the main suggestions was to write posts about things that contained some number of steps:

3 Steps to CRM success
7 Steps to winning venture capital
30 top lessons from ......... whatever ... I am already tired of thinking about it

In little more than a year it now seems that virtually everything that I read contains the phrase "X" Steps to "Something", heck I even did it on this post (hypocritical?). This of course shows the power of social networks for disseminating ideas as well as the power for ideas to became virtually useless in record time. In effect new ideas in marketing spread so fast that they lose all of their uniqueness in capturing people's attention.

So, what now, well here are 3 steps to ...... crap I almost did it again.

If you have a message break it down into parts, instead of talking about the steps try making a story out of it. As an example I wrote a blog post titled 3 signs your strategic plan is going to fail - if I wrote that post today I might say that "Once upon a time I worked at a company where we created a great plan and put it down in words, but Monday morning when we all got back to work I didn't know what the first step was and then I realized that I didn't know what anyone else was doing and that in the end the plan failed, so here is what I would do differently".

To me it's just more interesting to read it as a story or as a personal example than as a series of steps, after all I am not trying to assemble a chair from Ikea. I am trying to learn something and be captivated beyond a set of bullet points.

Now I know stories were all the rage a few years back and we probably killed that too but maybe it's time to bring them back? I guess I am just all stepped out for the moment.

Thanks,

Ed

Here what I'm saying, June 20-27, 2010

2010-06-27T16:42:00.004-04:00

Grabbed my posts from Twitter this week to see if I was under the influence of anything in particular. Noted that most of my good ideas weren't posted because they are secret :)

Hanging in Gloucester, MA at the "Greasey Pole" event, an annual classic

RT @alex: This is how I would fix modern schooling: http://jefmenguin.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/selfesteem.gif

Now that's funny! - Look honey I got the new #iPhone http://ht.ly/23x32 10:15 AM Jun 26th

More on Rework by 37 Signals and the challenges of #Freemium business models http://ht.ly/23unB

Great clips! The Smith Report » Kindle Clippings – Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson http://ht.ly/23u51

old style much better! - RT @HootSuite: Fan of old style RTs? Click the Owl > Settings > Preferences > Uncheck "Use Twitter Web retweets"

Always a good refresher - Guy Kawasaki’s 5-Point Guide to Personal Branding | Personal Branding Blog - Dan Schawbel http://ht.ly/22wsV

Sliver Businesses, I Iike that analogy - Chopping Up The Twitterverse | Get Venture http://ht.ly/22rFZ

12 Reasons people 55 and older gave for being on Facebook and why they like it - http://ht.ly/219oO

Great post! - The Stages of Innovation Acceptance http://ht.ly/20ZkT

Picked up the URL offeredlocal.com figured what the heck, everyone's on the local bandwagon these days, might think of something : )

Person on the T is stuffing their face with a burger while talking on the phone, funny how some people were raised :)

Pricing and Freemium models in Minimum Viable Product, Release Early, Release Often and Lean Startup

2010-06-25T20:51:00.006-04:00

Ian Smith has put together another good set of ideas from one of the companies that I have followed for a number of years, 37 Signals.

The Smith Report » Kindle Clippings – Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson

The one topic that I love to see debated and one that Ian highlights is - when do you need to be clear about your profit model:

#2 Clipping: Anyone who takes a “we’ll figure out how to profit in the future “ attitude to business is being ridiculous that’s like building a rocket ship but starting off by let’s pretend gravity doesn’t exist. A business without a path to profit isn’t a business it’s a hobby.

So I’m dead against freemium models, because for every Twitter there are a million failures. It’s true that a well financed VC backed business can ignore profits for a while to grab market share but they will have worked out a profit path in the not too distant future.

I think the debate gets a bit cloudy when married with the ideas of "release early and release often" popularized by Guy Kawasaki, "Minimum Viable Product" by Eric Ries and "lean Startup" in general. What I think startups struggle with is "when should I charge" not so much "should I charge" for my product.

I think most people start businesses with the intent that they will earn money, yes, it is probably urban legend that it is not necessary but I still think that most companies that actually get off the ground do in fact have a vision of how people will pay them for their product or services.

My advice centers around the following, at least in the startup phase:

Create a Minimum Viable Product to see if you can even build something that remotely meets your own expectations

Release Early and Release Often until you have enough feedback that lets you know the idea is not a pipe dream

Be a Lean Startup using the simplest method of payment until you get some momentum i.e. 2 pricing plans and email and social media for customer service until you are profitable

In principle I agree with Ian on the dangers of Freemium except in the case of something that is trying to be a platform. There would be no micro-blogging like Twitter if in fact it was not free. Now of course if you are offering products that help people harness the power of Twitter such as managing advertising for businesses then yes, freemium is not going to be the way to go, so make sure you know if you are the platform for delivery or a tool to work the platform as they may aid your decision on freemium versus paid and when and how to start the charging prooces.

Thanks,

Ed

What's your strategy? Game Mechanics to navigate your company's products and services

2010-05-09T14:06:00.007-04:00

Game Mechanics at Work and Play — Competing on Execution

Meri Gruber from Competing on Execution makes a very good observation about game mechanics with her trip to a kids science fair, one that actually reminded me of what people are doing in location based products like Foursquare.

In thinking through it a bit more it may be as simple as providing a subtle bit of organization, which is the key driver. As noted Meri had two experiences, one in which she attended an event that had a list of all exhibitors (art fair) and another (science fair) that had a similar list in the form of a passport where you collected badges once you had seen the exhibitor.

In the end the passport badge format of the science fair provided a much better experience because she didn't miss any exhibitors and there was a sense of accomplishment at the end, no reward mind you, but just the knowledge that she came to an event and saw all that it had to offer. In the end Meri wrote about the science fair, which in and of itself says a lot.

From a strategic marketing standpoint there are some good takeaways here:

Are you making it easy for customers to navigate all of your offerings - checklist, tracking process, making a game out of it?

Are you providing a reward or recognition for being a great customer - Meri was a great customer of the science fair?

Could you tie into the game mechanics of a partner for both of the above?

I would also add that this is more than just a traditional loyalty club question, it really goes beyond, it's about a higher level of engagement, in essence a game!

Thanks,

Ed Loessi

What's your Strategy? - Google Streamlines, Targets Search: Its Biggest Change in Years

2010-05-07T21:34:00.009-04:00

Google Streamlines, Targets Search: Its Biggest Change in Years | Fast Company

In his Fast Company review Dan Nosowitz did a good job of highlighting the key points of Google's newly update search interface. In my opinion, one of the key points that may actually pass over the heads of many people was:

"Novice users may finally try out the different types of Google search, now that they're sitting right next to the general results and are targeted more specifically."

So, why is this so important? Well, let's look at the realities of search at the moment:

The millions of average searchers today generally go to web and for the most part Google, since it is now a verb, and they type in some words and then they see what comes up on the first page or in the top 1-5 Adwords positions and they click on something that catches their eye.

Marketers of course covet these positions and spend millions/billions of dollars a year in SEO and PPC programs to be on that first page and get the clicks from people who have largely been blissfully unaware of the other types of web content that were up above their eye line (at the top of the web page) or mixed in with the rest of the content further down the search pages.

So, what has changed with Google's major update?

Well for many web searchers they are going to suddenly find out that for their keyword searches there are actually videos, blog posts, Twitter (and other micro-blog) updates and discussions that pertain to what they are searching for, essentially many pages not just one, in essence a whole new world of content just a few clicks away.

However, the real change is going to be for marketers. There is now no longer just one page to try and be in the first 10 listings of, there are at least 5 pages that first page relevance is going to be required because Google has essentially added a first level filter right on the left hand margin where people can actually see it.

This means that as a marketer you will need to be producing video content, blog content, Twitter conversations etc. because millions of people can now easily filter you right out of the equation.

Give it a try, if your company currently appears on the first page of a Google search, enter in those keywords and bring up that page. Now, click on the filters along the left and see what happens to your position (or should I say lack of position) and now you will have a good feel for what will be happening now that it is both apparent that there is other content in the world besides your SEO optimized web site.

I've tried this with a few client sites and for those companies who have primarily relied on having had a web site for a long time or having gotten lots of links to their home page, it's ugly. All of a sudden your competitor who has 50 YouTube videos or 3000 Twitter followers is all over page one of the video or updates filter and they are no where to be found.

Best advice, you better get cracking and start producing content where you have been lacking because that nice SEO authority that you enjoy now will quickly be disappearing and your competitors will be madly producing content to gain that first page advantage.

Thanks,

Ed

How to Predict Whether a Startup Will Succeed or Fail: Testing the

2010-05-07T15:51:00.004-04:00

How to Predict Whether a Startup Will Succeed or Fail: Testing the “Disruptive Innovation” Model

This is a very interesting article, I still think the main question is what teams can be successful implementing the paths that are suggested. Using Thurston's model for predicting the right path is fairly straightforward and should be used by people as a barometer to determine are they reading the market opportunity correctly. The big trick is to both read the market and get people that can actually do something about it.

Thanks,

Ed

Posted using ShareThis

Can start-ups really change the World?

2009-09-19T10:11:00.003-04:00

In start-up land it seems that the "advice de jour" is that you must be "changing the world" or you are likely to bore the heck out of people or catch the wrath of the many bloggers that inhabit start-up land.

This past week the blog World was ripe with posts and comments from Techcrunch50 with a fairly heavy leaning or lamenting that the current round of participants were not "trying to change the world" You are supposed to be changing the world.

This idea of changing the world has long been echoed by venture capitalists, who along with the standard "we invest in teams, profitable business models" often say you must be changing the world. Guy Kawasaki, a well known advisor and speaker has even named his Blog - How to Change the World.

So can start-ups really change the World and what is the World?

If you are a desk jockey working for the man, then your world is that constrained space you are dying to get out of so you might start that first business to escape one World and create a new World for you and your family, which for a lot of people is a pretty important World

If your World is a particular passion like social service than you might create a business that makes a huge difference to those that you are passionate towards. Take for example Kiva, these founders had a passion for helping people rise from poverty and they significantly advanced the process for micro-lending, which has made a huge difference in the World of those people. Kiva has lent millions of dollars, which is really only a fraction of the billions that have gone into fighting poverty globally, but does that mean they have not met the game changing threshold because they are not the number 1 or 2 lender on the Planet fighting poverty?, of course not.

If your World is the Planet Earth than you might create Facebook but of even with 300 million users it's not really the whole World it's just a subsection of the 6 billion people on this planet who happen to socialize in a certain way, so is it really changing the World?, well given that it is the number one social network for people who socialize that way, then I guess so at least for them.

The challenge with using the term "World" is that it is generally used to mean all encompassing and huge and that is, as with many things, a bit of a distortion. I think what people really should be saying is "don't be incremental" best articulated by Tim O'Reilly So, here is my advice:

Don't leave that desk jockey job in an IT services company and start another IT services company that is cheaper or more responsive because you have less overhead and you are excited to work for yourself on the weekends

Don't copy Kiva's micro-lending model and make a few improvements to the Web interface

Don't just make Facebook applications so that you can gain access to their vast user base

Think about what you can do to make some really significant change to a particular World however big or small that World is and don't confuse your World with someone else's World.

And finally, always remember, as a start-up your World changing business may not be big enough to intrigue a venture capitalist or escape the wrath or boredom of the esteemed judges, advisers and angel investors that like to hang around the start-up world and that is fine.

Just make sure that you understand the World that you are in and your place in it and act accordingly.

Ed Loessi

Buying enterprise software where the innovation is happening

2009-02-06T17:16:00.009-05:00

In a recent article on ZDNet titled Survey: More SaaS development in 2009 it was noted that "More than half of all developers around the globe will work on Software as a Service (SaaS) apps this year", which means that if you are a buyer of software and you are not actively looking in the SaaS market for new solutions to your software needs you are likely to be buying less innovative solutions, which is not a good strategy.

It's really a pretty simple premise; innovation for a business comes from one of two things; the first being your ability to come up with a unique idea and target a chosen market and second the ability in most cases to harness the resources; the people and software/technology tools to get it done.

So, ideas, well that is up to the leaders in the company and the market will soon let you know what they think about your idea. The best people to implement the ideas will be sought after and brought into the company and that is a huge focus and no one is interested in the un-innovative person but often times technology is thought of differently, people like to use terms like 'safe' or 'proven' which we all know is secret code for 'not innovative'.

Many times you see companies that pride themselves on having the best ideas and going after new markets. These same companies spend huge amounts time trying to find the best people, the people with the best ideas, the newest methods, so why would they then sabotage all of that innovation by implementing old-school technology?

It's simple there are a lot of old-school technology providers that still have to milk the huge investments they have made in building their solutions and guess who they are going to be milking?

Now, some might say that new technology is unproven but guess who is making that new technology? odds are it is the best and brightest that used to work at the big 'safe' vendor, the person who said 'hey there is a better way' but to whom their big vendor employer said 'hold on we are not done getting a return on our investment'.

So from 2009 forward the writing is on the wall, half of all innovation in software is now taking place in the SaaS arena, if you want to be leading the innovation in your market now is the time to bring in SaaS solutions and engage those best and brightest who are creating the newest and most innovative solutions.

Ed Loessi

A comedian who understands the iterate or die business model

2009-01-26T11:53:00.021-05:00

Harvard Business Publishing had a great article called Innovate Like Chris Rock most people are aware of Chris Rock as a comedian but when you see him talk about how he creates comedy on a 'global scale' you get a sense for how smart he really is and what is really involved in creating anything on a global scale.

So here is what he does:

He writes up some ideas on a yellow pad
He goes to a small local club and tries it on 30-40 people
He throws out the things that just don't work and iterates until there is a good 45 minute set
He progressively exposes the comedy set to larger audiences, providing value along the way
Finally (and what most people confuse as being the start) he shows up on HBO as the calm, cool, relaxed provider of world-class comedy

What he does not do:

Sit in a room by himself or with one or two others and create and deliver entire sessions
Work to get it perfect before he lets the world see his creation
Take initial negative feedback and toss out all of his ideas and start from scratch again

In the end even though Chris is a world class performer he still works it through a process but not a process that stifles the innovation!

In our business we battle this sort of thing all the time as do our customers; those being people who are trying to propel their organizations away from antiquated thinking by embracing newer and better technology strategies and revenue models as well as those who are creating new software as a service products and services to offer to enterprise and government entities.

What they battle on a regular basis is the mentality of "we gotta get this right", "don't do something until you can show all of the ramifications", "that's not how we make money today" and the long litany of similar and no less spine chilling words used to protect the silos and fiefdoms that can exist in the world of enterprise and government product and service providers.

What happens is that people throw out sage advice like 'proper planning and input from everyone will ensure success' or 'make sure to check with so and so', when in fact so and so is the Chief of No and more No.

Now to be fair organizations that operate like that probably did not start out that way but as they got bigger and 'smarter' (the MBA way) they stopped iterating and replaced iteration with planning and project plans and approvals and internal experts as the best way to innovate and get things done when in fact, it yields some of the least innovative outcomes that are humanly possible.

What I am increasingly finding is that it is virtually impossible to find anything in business that would not benefit from an 'Iterative Process" and that virtually every success story works its way back to companies and yes comedians that work that way.

When I talk about an iterative process and their are many versions of the idea I mean a process that:

Makes it easy to get started
Makes it possible to get to a first version of a new product or service in 30-60 days
Is understood to be a continually evolving process that demands improvement based on actual customer feedback not just the internal noise of an organization
Has as its number one goal to achieve something new; new revenue, new markets, new thought leadership

To be sure this is a specific view, one that works for our company and our customers but it can be iterated by others, so take a stab at that and iterate the definition for yourself.

Rest assured if you are working in organizations that are unable to implement an iterative process or if you are providing a service that is not created using a iterative process you are likely to fail in the short-term (as a new company) or wallow in mediocrity as an 2nd or 3rd tier player in the industry that you are in.

So take it from Chris Rock, iterate or die!

Thanks,

Ed Loessi

Matching business and IT priorities is child's play

2009-01-21T20:45:00.017-05:00

In our company we are often working with business people to create software solutions before their internal IT department has been called on (sometimes because of the fear of doing so) but inevitably if the idea is strategic someone from IT will need to at least pass an eye over what is happening to see how many rules we are breaking.

The big challenge is that often the business manager struggles in relating what they/we are trying to do with the "strategic IT plan" (the thing it must do in order to get the idea through the gate) and the whole discussion can go completely off the rails really quickly.

So, I was reading a brief on a newly released Gartner EXP Report. In the report they had this interesting table (below) and it got me thinking of a common assignment that my elementary school children do where they have 2 columns of words and they try and match them such as the word 'City' in one column and 'Boston' in another.

The idea is to match up the two words because they belong together. Now looking at this table I thought "Hey this would be great, let me create an easy way for a business person and an IT person to tie their priorities together, so that they could easily see how and when they are in fact actually pretty close to talking about the same thing".

Here is an easy example:

The COO really wants to improve business processes this coming year.

The CIO says "That's great we have been looking at upgrading the ERP system and there is plenty of scope for improving business processes in that area"

The CIO says "I've got scope this year to advance our business intelligence capabilities".

The COO says "That's great we know that business intelligence will really improve our ability to attract and retain new customers".

To a certain extent this is really simple and maybe that's just the point. As children we learn to connect ideas and words together via a simple relation but as we get older we get more rigid in our definition, always looking to get the exact meaning established so much so that we fail to see when we are actually talking about the same things and trying to achieve the same goals.

Give it a shot see if you can get your priorities matched!

From Gartner EXP Worldwide Survey

Top 10 Business Priorities	Rank	Top 10 Technology Priorities	Rank
Business process improvement	1	Business intelligence	1
Reducing enterprise costs	2	Enterprise applications (ERP, CRM and others)	2
Improving enterprise workforce effectiveness	3	Servers and storage technologies (virtualization)	3
Attracting and retaining new customers	4	Legacy application modernization	4
Increasing the use of information/analytics	5	Collaboration technologies	5
Creating new products or services (innovation)	6	Networking, voice and data communications	6
Targeting customers and markets more effectively	7	Technical infrastructure	7
Managing change initiatives	8	Security technologies	8
Expanding current customer relationships	9	Service-oriented applications and architecture	9
Expanding into new markets and geographies	10	Document management	10

Value Management Strategy

2009-01-19T12:46:00.007-05:00

Just before the holidays I wrote a Blog post on the Faulkner Technologies corporate Blog about Value Management Strategy. Over the last few weeks I have talked about this idea within our company and with a number of our customers and potential customers. The short version is below and I feel like if you can embrace the idea you can make a tremendous impact in any area of a company.

The General Idea:

‘Value Management Strategy’ is defining the key value points in your business and, through a continuous assessment process, getting yourself and your teams to focus on the most valuable customers, opportunities, contracts and services.

The main components of Value Management involve two simple ideas - 'Initial Strategic Value' and 'Ongoing Strategic Value', and they can re-define how you measure your business.

What this really means is that any thing that you do has to have an initial strategic value point it cannot be done simply to show effort, it makes no sense to build a sales pipeline just to show that you have added to the numbers of prospects, it makes no sense to develop new products or introduce new business processes simply to create change, you must be able to define and then measure the initial strategic value of doing things within a business.

This is also true in an ongoing sense. If you have an initial strategic value idea then you must have any ongoing strategic value idea. As we often find out even the best laid plans change and you must be able to look at the things that you do or the customers and products that make up your business to determine if the game is changing.

To make a quick point, value management strategy does not involve trolling your systems for financial or numerical data to try and paint a picture. This is not a question of business intelligence; it is a process of asking questions of the people who are as close to the activities as
possible within the company.

It's as simple as having the sales person answer questions about a new opportunity or customer or having the account and contract managers answer questions about the general performance of a customer or an ongoing contract. By measuring value in the form of basic questions and answers you serve to create a mental dialog within the business and this mental dialog makes it easy for people within the company to keep themselves on track.

To read the expanded version you can go and DOWNLOAD a short white paper with more examples on this idea.

Thanks,

Ed

NthView

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Value Management Strategy