Social media has a funny magnifying effect. If your brand is strong, it will only be enhanced through social media. However, if your brand has a bad reputation, you’ll find that social media is capable of delivering more worms than you thought fit into the can.

Be critical and cautious when considering a social approach to your business. Social media is not the be-all end-all of your marketing.

Align your social media efforts with the strength of your brand.

The conversation requires proper preparation. Set clear objectives on what you’d like achieve with the conversation. Document the required and invested resources. Measure the outcomes. Evaluate your outcomes versus your objectives and determine your return.

If the return is positive, then that’s great. Continue to engage in the conversation, look where you can improve your return and execute those ideas. If the return is negative, reevaluate your approach by changing variables like tone, content and frequency. Don’t be afraid to pull the plug if results aren’t positive but aim for improvement first.

Plan the conversation you intend to have. Turn conversation into conversion.

Circuit City basically dominated the stock market—beating average performance by 22 times at its height—for a 15+ year period. However, one of the key traits of a “great” company is that it’s able to withstand setbacks, whether personnel-wise, economic or other. This hasn’t been the case with Circuit City as it closed its doors last week after filing for bankruptcy in late 2008. This obviously baffled me and I’ve tried to find answers to how this happened. In the end, it boiled down to losing the competitive advantage:

• Their branding model didn’t work anymore. The goal of Circuit City was to become the best at service, selection, savings and satisfaction. However, other market players had mastered one or multiple of these categories in a better way than Circuit City: Best Buy (service and selection), WalMart (savings) and Amazon.com (satisfaction). As a result, Circuit City failed to gain a competitive edge.
• Circuit City had a tradition of paying their employees well and training them to deliver the best possible service, but cost cutting procedures led to stripping sales commissions from sales staff and eventually to layoffs of these well-paid and knowledgeable employees. This also hurt their competitive advantage.
• The economic recession wasn’t a key driver but it does magnify the effects and was strong enough to push Circuit City over the edge.

In essence, Circuit City destroyed its business by destroying the underlying foundation on which it was built and failing to reinvent itself.

Long-term strategies—or strategies in general if you will—have always focused on achievements, objectives that needed to be reached by a certain point in the future. A more real-time focus on business would dictate objectives to be around a shorter time cycle and could be detrimental to long-term strategic planning.

However, I disagree. While the real-time stream does stress more real-time action, action must be focused on protecting the future. This does call for an adjusted approach to business. Achievements should focus more on shorter-term objectives but should contribute to a longer-term goal. Policies need to be created to deal with real-time interferences and processes need to be ironed out to improve responsiveness. The strategy should become more of a philosophy, a way of doing business with certain goals or ideal future situations as targets. Tactics and operations should become more agile and should focus more on short-term measurable results that can be continuously tweaked.

Prepare yourself to deal with the real-time stream but don’t lose sight of the future.

He also mentioned “protecting the future”. Every major business decision and business activity was made based on the protecting the future. Many companies capitalize on opportunities in the here and now, generate massive amounts of buzz for a certain (short) period of time, or are focused on quick wins. The question remains, however, whether these initiatives contribute to setting a company up for long-term success.

Using the “protect the future” mantra helps you analyze opportunities and make conscious decisions.

Are your initiatives focused on protecting the future?

Products/services come to an end for a multitude of reasons. Most common ones include:

• Consumers don’t buy them anymore leading to losses
• Margins have been cut due to competition
• Companies divesting in a certain product/service
• Substitute products/services have entered the market

Whatever the reason for the end of a product’s lifecycle is, have you thought ahead? Do you have in mind what to do once that moment comes?

Some questions to bear in mind are when considering future options are:

• What would you want to do? Put motivation behind the direction you’d like to take.
• What would your customers want you to do? Think about your target audience, your value proposition and your business model.
• What can you do? Choose a direction that emphasizes your strengths and competences.

Think ahead. Stay ahead.

However, there are also instances where the product/service is killed after the pilot wasn’t successful.

Re-evaluate. Re-adjust. Re-think. Re-design. What went wrong to warrant a pilot failure? Was the concept thus flawed that an unsuccessful pilot could be predicted? Did the pilot produce new information about the product/service that was overlooked? Success can be unpredictable but shouldn’t be discarded after a setback. The pilot isn’t an end in itself. It’s merely another means to an end.

Let the end guide you.

However, user-friendliness is not the same as usability. Design encompasses so much more than aesthetics. Design sits at the core of everything: aesthetics, user-friendliness, usability, functionality, scalability, flexibility and level of standardization just to name a few criteria.

Of course there are factors that relate to the target audience and the market / industry, but good design is generally universal.

As a second measure of quality, try explaining the design over the phone to someone, preferably someone who’s from another country / lives under different cultural circumstances / has a different mother language, to test your design.