While I currently concentrate my own blogging on TheSocialMediaProfessor.com, I also maintain GlobalMarketingProfessor.com as a hub with links to multiple specialized sites on various aspects of International Marketing. When I teach MBAs, I sometimes give them as an assignment to blog and currently, my Executive MBA class in Marketing Management blogs on GlobalMarketingProfessor.com. Check it out, I'm sure you'd enjoy it!
My Vote for The Business Podcast of the Year: Smart Passive Income
2015 is turning out to be yet another “Year of the Podcast” and while I am myself still procrastinating the launch of my own podcast (any week now…), I very much enjoy listening to the podcasts of others during my daily walks with our Goldendoodle Simona (pictured below!).
In addition to following podcasts on social media and digital marketing, I have also been “glued” to the Serial podcast (good luck with your appeal Adnan Syed!) and picked up the Swedish hit interview series “Värvet” now also available in an English-speaking version Varvet Intl.
What I have not done enough of to date, however, is to help spread the word about the podcasts that I recommend others tune into and today marks a particularly timely occasion to start doing more of that. The situation is that one of my favorite podcasters, Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income, is yet again up for a Business Podcast of the Year award. (Beyond the To-Do List by Eric Fisher is another great one amongst the finalists by the way!)
So, why do I think that Pat Flynn is most deserving of this award? For starters, he is generous and transparent with his audience about sharing both his successses (many!) and failures as he conducts a rather impressive series of experiments with his own online entrepreneurial ventures. He even calls himself the “crash test dummy of online business.”
In addition, he features an intriguing list of guests on his show that includes not only the “big names” but also people you've never heard of. Using this approach, Pat effectively illustrates how a varied set of small businesses, solopreneurs, and part-time entrepreneurs can achieve impressive results both cost-effectively and in relatively short order. Through his disarming charm and curious attitude, Pat manages to get guests to open up more than on the average podcast to the benefit of listeners such as me that stands to learn from their experiences.
Tips and tactics shared on Smart Passive Income revolve around how you can best leverage tools, time, and resources for maximum impact and value to the communities you serve. He shares his favorite tools, explains how he uses his time and experiments with his morning routine, and increasingly Pat also includes discussions about how you can scale up a small business through the use of outsourcing without losing the human touch. In this last respect, Pat has been inspired by his best buddy Chris Ducker, the Virtual CEO and author of the eye-opening and best-selling book Virtual Freedom.
There is no doubt that sales and marketing is undergoing a radical transformation fueled by increasingly powerful new technologies and platforms available at low cost and I think it is critical to stay up to date with what those opportunities are regardless of whether you are strive for a corporate life or enter into online entrepreneurship to some extent.
At least, I know that many of my students are looking at all the emerging technologies with a mixed sense of bewilderment and overwhelm and I don't hesitate to recommend they listen to Smart Passive Income for clarity and to get with the game. For corporate managers and executives, I also think it makes sense to learn what a new generation of online startups are up to as they and the companies they work for otherwise risk becoming obsolete unless they too become more responsive to the needs of clients and adopt some of the same tools, principles and strategies as those discussed on Smart Passive Income.
So, if you are not convinced yet that Smart Passive Income is a podcast deserving of your vote as Podcast of the Year, please give it a chance and listen to some episodes first and I think that you'll come around 🙂 Thanks Pat for all the good work that you do that also undoubtedly also helps me stay up-to-date and relevant as a Social Media Professor. I am also looking forward to seeing you and Chris Ducker and learning more about this exciting time of online business and entrepreneurship that we are living in at the 1-Day Business Breakthrough event in San Diego on April 24!
Remarkably Cold
Today after finishing teaching my classes at Chapman University, I took a glance at the front page of Wall Street Journal and immediately spotted the to me very familiar city name “Lulea” (or Luleå in Swedish, 45 minutes north of my hometown of Piteå) atop one of the articles. The story was about Ice Music, a concert series held in an igloo in which musicians perform on instruments made out of ice, so-called “Icestruments”! A perfect example of a story that is remarkable, i.e., something that lends itself to be remarked about and thus easily spread on social media. Listen to this beatiful sample with a song called “Zombie Tango”:
So my native Swedish Lapland, Sweden's northernmost destination, has managed to create another international story. Why am I not surprised? No, not anymore after the ICEHOTEL became world news, or after Facebook's establishment of a data center in Luleå!
This past summer, I was pleased to bring yet another group of Chapman University MBA students to this exciting region as part of the Business in Scandinavia travel course. My students got to learn that there are many creative entrepreneurs up there in northern Sweden that are working hard to supplement the traditional base industries of mining, forestry, steel and paper mills with services and tourism-based industries.
In order to get some international attention and some buzz on social media, they also have some very capable marketing minds up there such as Tomas Riklund, Niklas Berg of In the Cold (the agency behind the ICEHOTEL website), and Ronny Olovsson at Vinter AB. And in Skellefteå, my travel course group got to spend two days with a congregation of world-class creative minds at the international event Creative Summit. Looking forward to reading about the next remarkable story from up there!
The Marketing Concept Sliding Down the Long Tail of Marketing
In the history of marketing, Peter Drucker's Marketing Concept of 1955 is a milestone. The statement that “the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer” served as an eye-opener to many executives and helped transform many businesses as a result. Consistent with this perspective, Theodore Levitt published the classic Harvard Business Review article Marketing Myopia in 1960 in which he claimed that businesses should define themselves more in terms of the needs that they were satisfying rather than by the product that they currently made.
This has impacted the naming of companies and the general wisdom is to not name a company after its current product as the means by which you meet customer needs can change over time. Indeed, it is difficult to find more than a few (e.g., Nescafé, MasterCard, and MTV) out of the 100 Best Global Brands of 2014 with a name that directly hints at specific products.
Also, if you have already painted yourself into a product corner that you are feeling is becoming too constrictive, look at ways by which you can become more vague or flexible going forward. Hence, International Business Machines became IBM, Kentucky Fried Chicken started going by KFC, Citibank switched into Citi, and Apple Computer Inc turned into Apple Inc.
Yet, even as I recognize the benefits for many companies if they follow such advice, sometimes I wonder if product-centric names aren't making somewhat of a comeback? I see that companies with a name that specifically matches what someone searches for on Google, can be very successful selling their wares online.
For small businesses to show up high on Google, they often have to resort to so-called long-tail strategies, the idea pioneered by TED founder Chris Anderson. What I also have seen is the phenomenon of companies buying up not just one but multiple domain names. In fact, I visited a firm here in Orange County recently and learned that they operated four different websites under very different names but all four basically led people to the same company and address.
Some businesses are taking this one step further and launch perhaps hundreds of different websites each of which is customized to a precisely defined target market and the searches they are likely to make. The more specific you become, such as through the use of 3 or 4-word keywords, the more likely it also becomes that you will be found by people searching for that more specific term. I recognize that many such websites that are set up are not company names per se but rather they represent product pages but still, building up a product-specific web property could also become limiting after a while.
Regardless, my sense is that emerging long-tail tactics in digital marketing indeed can work to your advantage but a key factor is the degree to which you make fixed investments in the form of time and money spent on each of your many different websites. If that amount is low, you could readily change your mix of product pages and transition to new product categories as needs change. Many products are indeed meant to be temporary and corresponding microsites that are set up do not require substantial resource investments.
The potential downside of using product-centric names is still that you are not building a brand for the long haul if the whole product category risks becoming obsolete or if you would like to include other products in your offering over time. So, what do you think? Would you prefer to build a website using product-specific phrases like Air France or would you rather call yourself McDonald's?
Social Media and Quality Management
Inspired by Ted Rubin's post Social Media is the New Quality Control, I began to reminisce about my past as a Quality Engineering major at Linköping University in Sweden. Perhaps that past of mine is not so unrelated to my current focus on social media marketing after all?
I can definitely see that Ted has a valid point in that attempts by brands to divert attention away from product flaws can backfire as those glitches will resurface sooner or later anyway. Passionate users like the brand advocates Ted focuses on are also likely to be amongst the first ones to discover any issues with a product.
The connection to quality that Ted makes is that you can use your advocates as a Social QC (Quality Control) and you will basically get the brand reputation that your product deserves. A faulty product will not get good word-of-mouth but a “flawless product” will get some serious buzz by your brand advocates. Picking up the relay baton from Ted, I suggest that you also can make some additional links between social media and quality management and here I elaborate on some of those.
You can use social media to identify brand advocates that you can invite to play more active roles than in the past at much earlier phases in the new product development process. Social media platforms can be used to communicate with those advocates during the process as they convey their feedback. This is consistent with emerging practices of crowdsourcing and open innovation where you open up holes in the product development funnel for outsiders to take a peek at what is going on inside and dig in and do some work when called for. The potential benefits of such initiatives are that you can both expedite development processes with external help and increase the accuracy in terms of securing a tight product-market fit. In short, you can increase the attractiveness of the end result at the same time as you can eliminate or fix problematic issues before they are set in stone. Addressing challenges early both in the production and the design processes is definitely a core principle of quality management.
Services is also an area of quality management that has come to the forefront in recent decades and here social media is already playing a major role at many companies as they monitor and respond to concerns and opportunities discovered on various social channels. The reason why service quality has become such a critical factor from a competitive standpoint is that this can be the area in which companies can still differentiate themselves while many physical goods manufacturers have found themselves embroiled in fierce competitive battles as their physical products have become more or less commoditized.
To the extent that service delivery requires the active participation of service representatives, a high-quality service experience also represents an important opportunity to develop stronger relationships. If nothing else, that aspect I am sure that Ted “Mr Return-on-Relationships” Rubin will appreciate! I hope that I can discuss this further with Ted in a few weeks in San Diego and I hope that you will be joining us there as well at The Social Media Marketing World! A fantastic event with the opening networking party again taking place on the USS Midway aircraft carrier. For those unable to go this time, I recommend that you consider going there!
Disclosure: Some of the links on this website are so-called “affiliate links” but please note that I only recommend products or services that I either use to satisfaction personally or am confident will add value to my readers based on endorsements by people I trust.
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