Business Insight Zone

Here are the top five posts, ranked by page views, published on this blog in May.

1. Twitter follow-backs: the 5-step lightning approach.
2. The three-part litmus test, for social media and everything else.
3. Using social media for competitive intelligence.
4. Your brain hates Twitter.
5. There IS such a thing as a dumb question.

(I note a distinct social-media lean . . .)

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Image by woodley wonderworks, used under a Creative Commons license.

Run a Google search on “social media ROI” and you’ll get 1,140,000 results.

It makes sense: companies understand that the social media have taken off as a cultural phenomenon, but they don’t know whether it’s worthwhile for them even to participate on social media platforms, much less pursue them actively as channels for business. So managers do what they’re trained to do — what they should do — and ask “How will we know when we win?”

Unfortunately, this inquiry often gets oversimplified as “What’s the ROI?” — which prompted this heretical thought from me during the Inbound Marketing Summit:

ROI is a fine thing.

It’s fine because it gets at a fundamental, laws-of-Newton relation of business: How much will we spend? And how much will that bring us? Good.

ROI works best, though, when we’re using it on known entities. Examples:

• If we start hiring today to add 20 more salespeople, how much business can we expect them to book in the next six months? This works great because we already have salespeople, we know how long it takes to find new ones, we know how long it takes to get new ones ramped up, and we should be able to venture a solid guess at how much business they’ll close in the early going.
• If we build a state-of-the-art factory, how long will it take for it to pay for itself? As complicated as this question is — and consider what Intel faces when it must decide whether to build a multi-billion-dollar fab — there are great tools in place, down to the last decimal of tax treatment of amortization, to help make a decision on it.
• If we increase our spending on Marketing Program X, how much sales lift can we expect to see? Even in the often-murky arena of marketing, there are areas that we understand very well in a quantitative sense. A good e-mail marketer can tell you in seconds how much sales lift to expect from a 2% increase in click-through rates, for instance.

There are always many unknowns in the world of business, even with the best projections and in areas that we understand well, but in cases like these we can at least go forward on our ROI calculations with a good degree of confidence.

Unknowns abound in social media.

Social media, however, in still so new that there are many more unknowns than we’re used to dealing with for lots of other areas of business. I like to compare it to the U.S. automobile industry in 1900, when there were scores of companies making forays into car-making. At that time, automotive technology was up in the air, Henry Ford hadn’t yet revolutionized how manufacturers were organized, and the makers hadn’t even settled on which fuels to use. Beyond all that, there weren’t many good highways joining major cities. Everything was in flux.

Don’t get me wrong: the fact that the same state prevails today in social media doesn’t mean we just throw up our hands and start spending without thinking. But plenty of what we try will be experimental, even if only because the examples we have to study come from companies of different size, in different industries, with different strategies and parameters. So we have to be in test-and-learn mode, understanding that we’re going to have to take some calculated gambles and then, in the words of Paul Gillin, “fold your losers, double down on your winners.”

The good news is, much of what you can do in social media today is cheap. That low “I” means that if you can hit even modest “R” numbers, your ROI gamble will pay off.

Social media is not just marketing.

For reasons that aren’t hard to understand, many companies’ social-media programs have started from within marketing and p.r. units. But social media is a hydra-headed beastie, with both internal and external faces.

Without diving  into specifics, social media is already finding good fits, for different companies, in:

• marketing
• sales
• operations
• customer support
• training
• product development
• market research
• recruiting
• . . .

Consider the parallel to e-mail. There might be only one person in a company with “e-mail” as part of a job title: an e-mail marketing campaign manager. Yet every person in the company uses e-mail to get their jobs done. That’s what we’ll also see — what we are beginning to see — with social media.

In the face of this, how will you calculate — or even guess — at the return on investment?

So, to summarize:

• By all means, keep asking, “How will we know when we win?” Social media deserves as much discipline as any other area of business.
• In those areas where you can measure ROI connected to specific social-media efforts, by all means do so. ROI is a useful tool — a fundamental tool — when it’s used right.
• Understand that, sooner or later, social media will probably become as pervasive for your business as e-mail, phones, or face-to-face communication. That’s neither good nor bad — but it’s a good idea to be ready for that day before it’s staring you in the face.

Your thoughts?

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Photo by Daisy Romwall, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

. . . as I slump to the end of a tiring — but inspiring — week.

1. Quoth Bill James:

People take information and build knowledge. When you give them new information they will create new knowledge, absolutely and without question.

I take this seriously, not particularly in its baseball context, but because Hoover’s has worked hard for many years to bring high-quality, relevant information to businesspeople. All the time I’m thinking more about how we can do this better, not just in the sense of supplying information better and faster, but in the sense of helping you turn it into new knowledge that fuels your business.

That’s just a sketch of a much bigger idea — more to come.

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2. You may know that in many cases I’m a foe of business meetings, but I had a great one today. After I came out if it, I tweeted this, half in jest:

A good meeting is one you come out of with a hit list in hand.

After discussing it with a friend — who rightly stumped for the benefit of having a clear meeting agenda — I followed up with this:

Sharp clarity going in, severe clarity coming out should be the goal of a meeting.

If a meeting doesn’t exhilirate you, or scare you a little, or give you relief by answering some of your burning questions . . . what good is it?

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3. Something to think about if you find you’re having a hard time thinking:

The ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings, and to those of others is a naturally evolved feature of the human brain. Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life. . . . Our brains can generate only a limited amount of this precious resource every day.

How can you improve your own attention? Or your customers’? Or your employees’? It might make a big difference to your business.

Related:

• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.

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Photo by fauxto_digit, used under a Creative Commons license.

It’s been a great two days at the Dallas edition of the Inbound Marketing Summit. Here are some bullet points on things that have caught my attention.

• The audience presents an interesting split. As I type this, I’m sitting next to Greg Cangialosi, CEO of Blue Sky Factory. His firm does amazing things integrating e-mail and social media in ways that boost e-mail marketing performance. So, in sum, he knows a little about using social media for business. By contrast, during my panel session yesterday, an audience member asked me “What’s RSS?” So there are a lot of opportunities for novices to learn from veterans, and for veterans to understand what the level of knowledge is among newcomers to social media.
• My friend Aaron Strout of Powered made many good points in his talk, but two stood out: (1) Some companies are actually making more money by using social media intelligently. Radical thought, huh? (2) If you’re trying to sell better social-media use within your organization, be ready to convince your CEO and CFO of the business case for it. In other words, show them the money.
• Chris Kieff of Ripple6 gave a well-received talk (and later picked up the tab for my dinner — thanks, Chris!). One key point: “Beware the creepiness factor.” He and I talked about this more at dinner; I gave him the example of a Blackberry app that broadcast my GPS location even though I had (tried to) turn off that function.
• Whole Foods has been a gold-standard example of the corporate use of Twitter for a while. Now they’re upping the ante by building their Twitter presence in geographic locales, e.g. with their account for Whole Foods in Houston.
• In their panel, Blake Cahill of Visible Technologies and Amber Naslund of Radian6 made great recommendations for convincing senior executives of the value of social-media monitoring. Blake suggested that you show an exec how monitoring works on some non-business passion of theirs (cooking, motorcycles, whatever), then show them the parallel to business. Amber suggested that you could reinforce this by showing the monitoring results for a competitor.
• A good lesson from Greg Matthews of Humana, who has the challenge of getting people interested in a health-insurance provider: he says that instead of taking healthy stuff and trying to make it fun — which doesn’t work — “We’re trying to take fun stuff and make it healthy.”

There’s a lot more I could say — this conference has given me plenty of ideas for follow-up posts. But for now, I’m still learning as much as I can while the IMS sessions are still running.

Jakob Nielsen raises a very good point in this BusinessWeek piece about businesspeople’s use of Twitter:

If you care about productivity, don’t check your Twitter feed while you’re trying to get work done. Disruptions are deadly for productivity because it takes several minutes to reorient the brain every time you go off track looking at something else.

It’s a point I’ve hammered on before, one that grows out of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research into “Flow”: we don’t — we cannot — sink down into a piece of work until we’ve spent at least 15 or 20 uninterrupted minutes on it. This is when we get “in the zone,” lose all track of time, and lose any self-consciousness about the work we’re doing. We just work.

Much as I love Twitter, using it heavily makes you prone to exactly the types of interruptions that are likeliest to diminish your ability to do your best, deepest, most “Flow”-driven work.

But . . . right after the snippet quoted above, Nielsen said:

Stick to checking updates once per day — for example, during lunch. All the tweets will still be there.

Not so — at least not for many power users of Twitter. Many of the heavy users who extract lots of value from Twitter do so by dipping into it throughout the day, and it doesn’t work for them to check it once per day. By dipping in frequently, they can sample the current flow of tweets and engage in active-but-transient conversations that won’t be current later on.

So, good use of time or bad use of time? Or, to put it a different way: do you let the brain win, or do you let Twitter win?

I don’t have the answer, but I have two questions that I’d like YOU to answer:

1. How would you decide whether frequent use of Twitter throughout the day was a worthwhile use of your brain, in business terms?
2. How many areas of your everyday work besides Twitter violate the concept of “Flow” along the lines of what Nielsen describes? (Hint: e-mail.)

I look forward to your answers in the comments. Hit me with your best shot!

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Related posts:

• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.
• Book review: CrazyBusy, by Edward Hallowell.
• How Flow is like a good cup of coffee.
• Fewer meetings should lead to more “Flow.”

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Photo by Laszlo Ilyes, used under a Creative Commons license.

My agenda for today includes a few hours of driving on the stretch of I-35 that connects Austin to Dallas, where I’ll spend the next two days at the Inbound Marketing Summit. (If you’re there, please find me and say hello.)

I’ve been doing more traveling for work lately, experimenting as I go with different approaches to maintaining (or even increasing?) my productivity. But now I want to tap your brains with some informal poll questions so that we all can benefit from our collective experience as business travelers.

So, my hearty road warriors . . .

• How do you stay productive when you’re traveling?
• What pieces of technology do you rely on when you’re traveling?
• What are your key sources of information on the road?
• What types of work can you not do on the road — and what types can you do better on the road?
• How do you evaluate whether a particular piece of business travel is worth it?
• What’s your best advice for someone taking on a lot of business travel?

Please, friends, educate me (and each other!) in the comments thread.

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Photo by skez, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Lately I’ve been handling a lot more follower notifications for the Hoover’s Twitter account and for my personal account. This is both good news and bad news.

• Good news: Hey, all these new people are following us!
• Bad news: Ick, what’s with all the spammers and other gross types?

I’ve never used auto-follow — and in fact strongly oppose its use — and I’ve never thought it made sense to follow back every single tweeter who follows you. That means reviewing new Twitter followers manually and deciding whether to follow them back one by one, which can be time-consuming if you let it.

At the request of a Twitter acquaintance, I laid out my simple, five-step approach to handling Twitter follow-back decisions quickly and in bulk. Here we go!

Step 1. Set up an inbox filter to shunt all Twitter follow messages into one folder.

Both Outlook, which I use for the @hoovers account, and Gmail, which I use for my personal account, make it easy to set up filters. You want to fix it so that you only see or think about Twitter followers at defined intervals. Otherwise, the trickle of notifications can clutter up your inbox and drive you crazy.

Step 2. Check your Twitter folder only once per day. This does two things for you:

• It allows you to take advantage of batch processing, which is one of the key tactics you ought to be using across all of your work for getting more done.
• It makes it simple to put a one-day lag in your follow-back decisions. This is useful because some bad tweeters, in a misguided effort to swell their follower numbers, will follow many new accounts each day, hoping to get automatic follow-backs. They then unfollow the accounts that don’t follow back quickly. Waiting even one day will let you see clearly which of the people who followed you have already unfollowed.

Step 3. When you do check the folder, you can delete any notices for accounts you obviously don’t want to follow back. It could be, for example, because the account has never tweeted:

It could be because the name on the account is nasty (“&^%$ Videos is following you”) or otherwise offputting (“GetRichNoEffort is following you”).

Step 4. Each follower e-mail from Twitter includes a link to that follower’s Twitter biography page. Just right-click on that link to open each page in a new browser tab.

Note that this doesn’t work well if you’re going straight from Outlook, since it’s going to want to open a new window for each link. For this reason, I access Outlook via Internet Explorer — or, even better, Google Chrome — for this task only. (Takes ten seconds, saves lots of time in the long run.)

Step5: Cycle through the browser tabs, making your individual follow-back decisions as you go. Since you’re on the person’s Twitter page, it’s easy to see their biography (or lack of one), their ratios of following / followers / updates, and the content and timing of their most recent 20 tweets. Simple!

Finis.

Twitter users: What am I leaving out? How do YOU handle follow-backs?

Regular blog readers (or followers of our Twitter feed) will recall that I attended the Inbound Marketing Summit in San Francisco a few weeks ago. Thanks to the Summit’s co-organizer, Justin Levy, I can now bring you the video of the panel in which I took part — “Innovative Marketing Programs Using New Media” — which also featured these fine folks:

• Bernie Borges, CEO of Find and Convert
• David Reske, CEO of Nowspeed
• Jamie Dickin, EVP of Sales at Brickfish

Here’s the video — 45 minutes-plus:

By the way, I liked my co-panelists and got to talk with a couple of them after the session, but I want to single out Paul Gillin for doing a great job moderating this panel. I’ve pulled that duty more than a few times, and I know it’s tough to listen closely and interact with panelists while also keeping up a good flow for the session as a whole. I thought Paul nailed it.

Oh, and I should note that this week I’ll be a panelist at the Dallas edition of the Inbound Marketing Summit. If you’re attending, please be sure to find me and say “Hi.” If you’re not, stay tuned to this blog and to our Twitter feed for updates from the conference.

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Related:

• Justin Levy’s post on this session.

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It may be a case of spring fever.

Ever have one of those weeks when you work like crazy but finish very little?

*raises hand*

So, here are varied items of interest to launch you into the (U.S.) long weekend.

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>> Three IPOs in the span of a week? Pinch me! – And not just three IPOs, which makes for a tidal wave of activity relative to what we’ve seen lately, but three successful IPOs. DigitalGlobe, SolarWinds, and OpenTable all made a good showing in their market debuts between May 14 and May 21, which may encourage other would-be public companies to come forward (or, at least, encourage those with NamesLikeThis).

From the end of last summer until this spring, the IPO market has been mired in an awful slump — worse than anything in many years. But maybe we’re seeing the right baby steps as the market gets its feet back under it.

Related:

• A (relative) flurry of activity in the IPO market.
• Silicon Valley, the IPO drought, and the culture of innovation.

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>> Looking for work? Want to make a difference in the world? — Change.org has launched an initiative it calls Jobs for Change. Danny Moldovan, who heads the program, told me that “Our goal is to recruit more people into careers in service, and we’re currently working to build the largest database available of jobs in the nonprofit, government, and social enterprise sectors.”

The project is backed by several nonprofit groups and employs its own career advisers to offer advice to job-seekers. It also lists jobs in various categories. I know lots of job-seekers who are having to get creative with their career planning — who knows but what some of them will end up in the not-for-profit sector, earning a living  while trying to make the world a better place?

Related:

• JoblessJoe: when the going gets tough, the tough MAKE something.

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>> Some of the biggest turnarounds happen the fastest. — That’s the punchline of an article at Slate’s “Big Money” site that centers on Sergio Marchionne’s turnaround of Fiat. To be honest, the article could have benefited from a lot more detail on the turnarounds at Fiat, H-P, and Boeing, but the moral of the story still hits home:

Just as bad management can erase billions of dollars of value (think of the $36 billion that Daimler paid for Chrysler), good management can create it, and often more quickly than you’d expect. One difference between the best CEOs and the worst is that the good ones work at a faster pace. Murdering a major company can take many years of painstaking ineptitude. Successfully turning it around takes much more skill but sometimes less time.

Go back and look at other great turnarounds, e.g. Gerstner’s at IBM, or Jobs’s return to Apple. They don’t happen overnight — but they don’t take ten years, either.

How long are YOU taking to turn things around for yourself or your company?

Related:

• Mark Hurd’s 3-minute management clinic.
• The turnaround CEO — what to look for.

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>> Ursula Burns will succeed Anne Mulcahy as CEO of Xerox. — Three great things about this: (1) a woman is succeeding a woman running an old-school, business-to-business enterprise (I’m sure Tom Peters approves!). (2) Burns is the first African American woman to head a Fortune 500 company. (3) The succession comes as absolutely no surprise, since Burns has been groomed for this role for years.

Thinking of turnarounds, there was a time, not so many years ago, when Xerox needed one desperately. It got it, thanks to Mulcahy and Burns, and it looks to be in good hands going forward.

Related:

• CEO succession — successes and failures.

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>> When the going gets tough, the really tough grow market share. — Cisco has talked openly about its ambitions to “move with a speed nobody has ever attempted” into dozens of new areas. This piece from The Register talks about the networking giant’s grand design, which is founded in its existing expertise in moving huge amounts of data traffic across wired and wireless networks.

Mostly, I just love Cisco’s chutzpah. It could sit on its laurels, quietly dominating one or more areas of networking. Instead, it’s taking advantage of (a) the market downturn, (b) its own technical prowess, and (c) a monstrous pile of cash to elbow aside competitors in areas likely to grow rapidly for years to come.

Pulling it off will take some doing — but if any company is likely to do it, it’s Cisco.

Related:

• Disorganization Negates Talent.

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Photo by Brendon, used under a Creative Commons license.

Further to last week’s post about Malcolm Gladwell’s treatment of sports underdogs, I came across this in Gladwell’s online discussion with Bill Simmons of ESPN:

The consistent failure of underdogs in professional sports to even try something new suggests, to me, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the incentive structure of the leagues.

Turn it back to business: you’re an underdog in something, or your company is, or someone at your company is. Yet the underdog in question doesn’t try something new.

So, what’s wrong with your incentive structure?

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UPDATE, a little later on Monday: I forgot this tidbit from February

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on CEO incentives.

. . . A C.E.O.’s incentive is not to learn, because he’s not paid on real value. He’s paid on cosmetic value. . . .

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Photo by Nic McPhee, used under a CC-Share Alike license.