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Consolidation Is The New Distribution

May 14, 2009 By

New social media tools seem to be launching every day. There are different tools that do different things. There are also different tools that do the same thing. It’s difficult to keep an overview of what’s new and what’s useful. The downside of spreading activities over multiple platforms is that you risk losing control of your content. Moreover, people won’t know where to find you and your content.

However, the importance is focus. By focusing your content on a handful of platforms that meet your content distribution criteria, you take (back) control of your content. Understand how each platform contributes to your social media goals and objectives and select the appropriate ones. The power of social media is that your users will spread your content to other platforms for you.

Focus on the most valuable tools. Take control of your content. Let social media do your work.

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Opaque Transparency

March 31, 2009 By

Online customer reviews are one of the developments that have raised the popularity of social media. Many retailers offer customers the option to write and read reviews about the products they sell. Customer reviews form a great complement to professional reviews. Whereas professional reviews can tell us how good a product is to use, customer reviews can tell us how good a product is to own—and—how good the retailer is.

There is risk involved though. One recent case involved Belkin’s representative of Amazon.com. Mr Bayard not only offered to pay customers $0.65 per positive review of Belkin, he also wrote positive reviews himself using pseudonyms.

Social media can make a lot of a company’s marketing more transparent, but cases like these make it a false sense of transparency. I hope that companies take an ethical point of view when dealing with customer reviews, but there will be exceptions unfortunately.

There might be more than meets the eye. Be critical.

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You Get What You Pay For

November 18, 2007 By

When selecting a product or a service, price tends to play an important role. Except price sometimes plays an important role for largely the wrong reasons. Price is equated with cost and not with value. Lower prices mean lower costs, but (long-term) benefits, such as value (in quality and/or speed) and a good relationship, might be overseen.

I came across an interesting case recently where a client more or less demanded a service agency to invoice less—despite delivering all the services as described. Not only is this morally unfair, it’s disrespectful.

You get what you pay for. You pay for what you get. Don’t destroy a potentially solid long-term relationship by making the wrong one-time decision. Go for the best that your organization can get, the price will justify itself.

As David Schwartz alluded to in his book “The Magic of Thinking Big” (Amazon link): Go first class, you can’t afford not to.

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Breaking Down Barriers

March 25, 2007 By

In life, you will encounter barriers of communication. Often, it’s easier to just walk away from the barrier and look for a different solution.

But is that what you want? You walked into that barrier because somewhere behind it, there’s something of value. Often, you’d rather walk around the barrier or climb over it. More frequently, you’d like the person on the other side to walk around it or climb over it. Sometimes, you’d meet halfway or worse, at opposing ends. Effort and time are spent but the barrier still remains as an agonizing obstacle. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just remove the barrier?

Be patient. Break down the barrier. Together.

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Mediocrity

November 12, 2006 By

I don’t like compromises. Compromise is the opposite of synergy. It’s based on making a choice between multiple elements because they couldn’t work together.

Compromises are often introduced to make multiple parties happy. But guess what? Synergy can achieve the same thing. Synergy drives a solution closer to optimal while compromise drives it further away from optimal. In the long run, compromises kill the potential of a concept.

If excellence lies at multiple extremes, don’t kill either by taking the middle road.

Focus on reaching synergy rather than compromises.

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