Over the last three weeks, I have had as many conversation with senior executives about how they can cope with the constant barrage of incoming information, mainly via email.
In various lengths of windedness, I tell them rather smugly that my inbox is empty 95% of the time. Not because no one ever sends me anything (although that may well be true) or that I just delete it, but because since January 2008 I’ve followed David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system.
Now I don’t know why it works for me. Maybe it appeals to the left side of my brain, maybe I just like process, or maybe it just works. But I highly recommend it to any senior executive whose inboxes control them rather than the other way around. If they can get it working (and you do need to work at it for a couple of months) I can guarantee they will feel more productive, less stressed and more in control.
In fact, I think there’s such a big internal market for this I’m considering offering one-on-one coaching to H&K’s elite.
A few different projects have got my mind focused on influence this week. The first is planning the research design for the centrepiece of my book on social media in B2B (can we measure the influence that social media platforms have on the different staging of the B2B buying cycle?). The second is connected with our cooperation next month with Twitter at the Cannes Lions.
In both contexts I am reaching the conclusion that influence cannot be measured, and thus is a futile metric for exploration. Sure, you can ask people how much influence something has or has had, but do they really know? And what is influence anyway? In my mind it is a power that makes someone do something, not a property that any individual possesses. Invariably when an individual does have influence, it is only over a specific thing. Even the most influential people in the world (politicians, one could argue) have no influence over whether I will buy a Sony or a Panasonic television this weekend.
In a public environment, you might (just) be able to attempt to measure influence by looking at people’s networks, the re-communication of their utterances, but to me this is just reach. Someone who says something that reaches 100,000 people is no more influential than someone who reaches just 100, if all of the latter act on that communication but none of the former do.
In short, influence needs to be measured in context and at the receiving end not the transmitting end. That is not something you can do by looking at their blog posts, tweets or Facebook profile.
So do we continue to try and measure things that cannot be measured, or do we measure things that can be measured and can give us as marketers comparisons that we understand.
I think it’s the latter.
Not content with burning myself out last Christmas finishing my first book, Enterprise 2.0, I have just signed a contract to write my second. And this time on an even shorter timescale!
For this next title, I’ll be focusing on consumer marketing’s ugly step-child, business-to-business marketing - and specifically the application of social media principles to what has in many cases becoming a rather formulaic aspect of the communications mix. Yet when you consider that roughly one-third of searches on Google are business-to-business in nature and more than 50% of Google’s and 39% of Yahoo’s advertisers are business-to-business companies, then the importance of the Internet in the purchasing cycle cannot be overstated.
It follows then that it is no longer an option for business-to-business marketers to dismiss social media as a consumer craze, and my aim with this book is to raise the profile of successful business-to-business use of social media and help companies discover, select, integrate, exploit and measure these techniques as part of an integrated marketing strategy.
Wish me luck! And if you have any great stories of business-to-business social media marketing you would like to share, please feel free to comment.
Spam is obviously a fact of life these days, but I can’t help but notice a subtle increase in the amount of unsolicited email hitting my work inbox.
And it’s not just the quantity that is grabbing my attention, but the content too.
You see, this isn’t the usual Viagra or Rolex material but people - I’m guessing salespeople - desparately trying to hit their lead generation quota.
Now I have every sympathy for anyone trying to make a decent living in such uncertain times, but sending unsolicited and untargeted email actually has two effects on me.
Firstly, it’s annoying. Business-to-business marketers think they can get away with email marketing tactics that have been pretty much outlawed for self-respecting business-to-consumer equivalents. Even in this market (the UK) there are some gaping loopholes that allow emails marketing products and services to other businesses a free ride. If we don’t have a relationship that I initiated, then you shouldn’t be sending my email. Period.
Secondly, it’s irrelevant. By casting your net wider I pretty much guarantee that your response ratio will drop. I have no plans to review my developer headcount (none suits fine, right now) or upgrade my IP telephony. Just because your product might save me money doesn’t mean I’m going to be hitting that reply button.
Business-to-business marketing needs to learn a few lessons from its consumer marketing brethren, and realise that its market is in control when times get tough. And that means spending less time selling, and more time listening.
30 Mar 2009 at 11:05
Niall Cook
Enterprise 2.0 blog
No Comments
It’s taken a while, but getting both timing and pricing right has been unbelievably difficult. However, for all those without corporate expense accounts that baulked at the price of the hardcover version, I’m relieved to announce that a downloadable PDF version of Enterprise 2.0 is now available from lulu.com for just £9.99/$14.03/€11.15.
This is a complete electronic replica of the printed book in PDF format. None of that anti-social DRM involved – in this hyper-social age I hope I can trust people to respect my copyright.
To buy, you can go directly to: http://bit.ly/enterprise20
For more information, go here: http://bit.ly/enterprise20info
This is a topic I am just starting to explore, so bear with me. I have a couple of hypotheses to play with:
- The distribution of languages used for content - especially in social media - does not correlate with the distribution of languages of internet users (see chart below).
- The prevalance of non-English languages online is much higher than most English speakers think.
Discuss.
14 Oct 2008 at 17:56
Niall Cook
Enterprise 2.0 blog
No Comments
.!.
During my Canadian tour last week, I’m proud to say that I used slides just once at the breakfast for Hill & Knowlton clients. The rest of the sessions were all off the cuff.
In response to numerous requests, I put my slide deck on Slideshare.net. Here they are:
I’m afraid they lose a little without my talking over them. If you’d like me to come explain them to your company, please contact me.
14 Oct 2008 at 17:43
Niall Cook
Enterprise 2.0 blog
No Comments
At the Enterprise 2.0 breakfast I held for Hill & Knowlton clients in Toronto last week, someone ask me about tools for capturing ideas from sales people with voting and commenting capabilities. Nothing sprang to mind, but I promised I would do some research.
Seems like a bit of an untapped market to be honest*, but one that hits all the buttons is Nosco (www.nosco.dk) from a Danish firm.
Not only does it allow voting and commenting, but it also allows participants to buy and sell shares in the best ideas and run competitions. For sales teams, I think these kinds of features could be ideal. The software can be hosted securely externally (so up and running quickly) or installed on a customer’s own servers.
* Since posting this, Noam Danon left a comment pointing me to QMarkets, another potential candidate. Any more out there I’m missing?
** Add Consensus Point to your list as well. President David Perry informs me that they “actually started developing prediction markets 15 years ago but things *really* started heating up with The Wisdom of Crowds came out.”
01 Oct 2008 at 09:50
Niall Cook
Enterprise 2.0 blog
No Comments
In the words of my hosts, I’ve “finally realized where the action is” and will be taking the Enterprise 2.0 roadshow to Canada next week.
In what promises to be a whirlwind tour I’ll be speaking to Hill & Knowlton clients and staff in Toronto on Tuesday 7th, followed by beers at Third Tuesday that same evening. On Wednesday I fly to Ottawa and do the same thing all over again, with Third Tuesday in Ottawa on a Wednesday (these Canucks are crazy guys, aren’t they).
It’s a while since I was last in Canada, but seeing that both the literature review and foreword authors for Enterprise 2.0 are both based there, it seems like a fitting place to begin the tour.
The rest of the year currently sees the roadshow moving on to Paris and Finland in November, and Sweden in December.
Promises to be a busy end to 2008.
