Search results matching tag 'business'

Will there be a day when the Marketing and HR departments in big organisations become one?

2458347 — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:07:39 GMT

We're used to seeing job titles like Head of Marketing, Head of HR, Personnel director, Marketing Director, Head of Brand, HR director etc

Will we see it become common in major organisations for job titles and board positions like Director of People and Marketing or Global Head of HR and Marketing, or Director of Brand and People?

What about Global Brand Tribe Director ? or Director of Organisational belief?

New Brand Tribalism has emerged. www.newbrandtribalism.com

The Face of your Company

2438628 — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:06:00 GMT

People buy people, so it is important to reveal the human side of your enterprise, as very often the first image people see is the profile photo on your website, blog or social networking site. You need to communicate effectively with your chosen audience, ensuring you are sending the right message about your organisation. Be sure to personalise the connection you make, it helps your customer see you as a person instead of an abstract web site.

In the past companies have not been keen to invest heavily in photography for their corporation as they see it as an unnecessary expense compared to the overall promotion of the company, but consider this: Your company sites will be the first thing your potential customers will see, they are the windows to your company.

Here are a few points you may want to consider about your current business photography:

Has the image been taken in a relaxed, comfortable surrounding?
Is the light flattering?
Is the background distracting?
Is the image up to date?
Can you clearly see the individual?
Does it give the right impression and match your brand image?
Is it a quick snap shot taken by a colleague?
Does the individual look approachable and trustworthy?
Is the image engaging?
Would you connect to this person on a social networking site?
Most importantly would you do business with this person?

If the answer to any of these is “no” then perhaps you need to speak to a professional business portrait photographer. Investment in your business photography can set you apart from your competitors. There is still a lack of investment in images and graphics online stay one step ahead and put a human face to your company.

Post by Penny Joyner (PA Photocall)

How to win business pitches......

2621936 — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:00:15 GMT

For most of us, the opportunity to communicate, to impress and to really sell oneself and services doesn’t come along every day. So when an opportunity does knock it’s difficult to understand why there is such a lack of thought and effort put into so many presentations. An engaging PowerPoint presentation can be the winning factor in delivering a business pitch.

In economically challenging times, ask yourself, can you really afford to stand up in front of a captive audience and then waste that audience’s time? We’ve all been there, sitting in a boardroom, a conference or sometimes even at an event watching painfully while one lost soul proceeds to point aimlessly at a PowerPoint presentation. Mind-numbing stuff, they read off the first slide and then every slide after that, there is little imagery – if any, and one has to wonder, do they even realise that they have an audience? Opportunity lost.

PowerPoint can be an amazing tool if you know how to use it, or it can be the death of you and your audience if you don’t. But if you’re one of those trying to blame the software then come on people, wake up and smell the coffee and get some help.

Any more thoughts?

Article 10 is the UK's leading presentation company undertaking the full range of creative presentation services. Whether you require business presentation design, a simple PowerPoint presentation template or a full production with video and animation for maximum impact, our presentation help will get your message across in the most effective way possible.

Visit www.article10.com

Collaborative Individualism Emerges At Reboot Britain

2292853 — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:32:00 GMT

This week's NESTA sponsored Reboot Britain conference brought together a mix of government, business, banks, technology, media people from the UK, and visitors from the USA that saw left leaning Labour/Liberal Democrat political views engage and collaborate with conservative Tory representatives. The crowd's reaction saw the many of those who are normally distrustful of government, financial institutions and conservative politics try to mingle more with what they historically view as the "other side" of the spectrum.

Opening remarks from conservative Jeremy Hunt MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport, had him lovingly embrace the Internet, new technology and the governments increasing integration of it into public services. He praised the transformative nature of new technology's impact in delivering high quality factual content to the world from ordinary citizens, with Wikipedia, and talked about a new effort to publish and provide archives of government documents online for access to all. Hunt said that politics has been stuck in a rut toward progress, with its stance to first fight online, then ignore it, and only now begin to embrace it. People have flipped politics on its head by rushing online to express views and grassroots organizse around issues in powerful ways that have not beeen witnessed before, making for the emergence of a new movement composed of "collaborative individualism."

"Huge change is possible with the Internet and the Internet also makes possible some very unpleasant things," he said. "The Internet is a powerful way to connect voters and as a politician I have to engage more intelligently with my constituents."

Hunt's speech received mixed reaction and a bix of cheeky tweet banter from a crowd of professionals who live on the bleeding edge of the technological world, think liberally and radically, and often wonder why the conservatives, and the government, with its recent release of the Digital Britain report, have taken so long to embrace new technology that the left and leaders like Al Gore have been pushing the agenda toward for years. Now, it seems, the people have collectively forced politics to adapt or be left behind.

Visiting Reboot Britain was a digital celebrity group of Americans called the Travelling Geeks, who mingled with the guests and presented panel sessions throughout the day, including Craig Newmark, the nerd who many people feel changed the world with Craigslist.org.

"The Internet makes public service people feel they can come out of the darkness, and feel liberated and my hidden agenda is helping people in government affect change, and talk, and accelerate collaboration across the Atlantic," he said. On the good side, most people want to be a positive influence, and on the evil side, noisy, idiotic spammers and trolls with extremist views pollute the channels of communication and need moderation to combat this ugly side.

To combat the ugly side of the Internet, people need a friendly "nudge" to do good, and regulations toward social media use among public service employees needs to be relaxed so that they can feel safe freely expressing views and using the tools to improve things, citing the example of Newmark's favourite project FixMyStreet.

I caught up with Newmark after his talk, and you can listen to his commentary here on this Audioboo.

Pock marking the day was an insulting and demeaning panel presentation asking "Is the Web Female?" that attracted a majority of female attendants, only to sucker-punch them with horrible commentary from two of the American panelists who behaved like the scary, exclusionary popular girls in a Beverly Hills 90210 high school class. While lifestreamer Megan Asha and technology journalist Sarah Lacy may be respected digital influencers in US circles they did themselves, nor the women in the audience, any favours by describing how women behave online as being "catty, gossipy" and wanting to shop a lot. The comments provoked anger among the audience:

"Disappointed is the web female session seemingly stymied by pointless focus on imaginary gender characteristics. A waste." tweeted @josiefraser

"A few minutes of listening to 'is the web female' debate and you lose the will to live." tweeted @hollandshurst.

"Finally giving up on 'Is the Web Female', which is relying on a narrow, depressing & slightly weird definition of "female" tweeted @justinpickard

Panelist Joanne Jacobs balanced out the nasty catty female debate by smashing stereotype demographics and openly confessing that she often gender-switches online to allow herself more freedom with masculine-style expression. MT Rainey brought home the concept that the web is neither male or female but simply a place where humanity gathers.

The day's closing address saw Howard Reingold outline ways to improve digital inclusion with digital literacy, and more activism.

"Boring blogs and Twitter accounts show that participating just isn't good enough, being an active citizen is a start but from passive consumption you have to move toward participation," he said. Reingold called for the end of crap content, miss-information, spam, porn spam and helping more people develop their own "crap detectors."

Master of ceremonies for the day was Policy Unplugged's Steve Moore who remarked at closing that he was thrilled to watch #rebootbritain trending above the dominant topic King of Pop Michael Jackson's death on Twitter.

Feeling gossipy, catty and like shopping so guess I should get online and surf the Web today,

-Lisa

New Business Conferences Are NOT Conferences

2292853 — Wed, 20 May 2009 11:42:00 GMT

More and more popular among business gatherings is effort by organizers to create a new approach to the traditional format of bringing an industry together. Instead of trade show display booths filling a venue, and a roster of lectures from industry leaders being the standard highlights, the new business generation is seeking out events that offer more interaction, collaboration and fun.

Last week in London at The Hub in Kings Cross, social entrepreneurs attended Shine 09, billed as an "unconference" that offered up one-to-one mentoring, creative brainstorming, a social collaboration game, and a party where the British Urban Collective performed. Over the unconference's two day run, participants joined in on workshops that aimed to cultivate new ideas, and help steer these concepts to execution. *Note, definitely better to refer to everyone as a participant than just a passive attendant, as everyone got invovled!

“The difference here is that last year’s event was a very urban-guerrilla, anarchist feel to it and this year it is business, with a focused switch from pre- to post- recession and a real display of determination of people who want to make real world change happen,” said Cliff Prior, Chief Executive of UnLtd.

Shine joins a number of creative conferences coming up, both in the UK and USA, that are styled after predecessor's BarCamp , Foo Camp, and SXSW, all which take inspiration from the unconference concept. While there is still a market for, and a majority expectation, for the traditional business conference, which is a billion-pound industry, new thinkers are mixing things up and attracting a diverse combination of brand-name sponsors, high-profile participants, and entrepreneurial micro-businesses that seem to all benefit from exchanging energy and ideas with each other.

“Our aim with Shine is to never have talented people sit in a room and just clap, we need to give interaction, space and structure to fill out the event with ideas and see inspiration turn to perspiration,” Prior said.

Upcoming untraditional conferences include:

bTWEEN (11-12 June 2009, Liverpool), an interactive digital media forum.

2gether09, a London summer conference run in festival style, that aims to explore and celebrate how technology can be used to promote social progress.

Over The Air, a September London mobile development gathering spaced over two days of fun, learning, hacking and socializing with participants camping over night.

Fees for the events are affordable and range from £30-£100, often free for students.

I've also written about Shine09 on DigitalJournal.com, please see my post here.

Shine on,

-Lisa

PS: Have you attended a non-traditional conference recently, what did you think? Are you going to a creative conference? Which one? Comments about creative conferencing welcome.

Task no 1. For business: Reinvent Advertising & Marketing!

1792681 — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:29:30 GMT

Hopefully lessons will been learnt from the financial crisis, do not try to rebuild business on the principle that Marketing & Advertising are always right!
The words "60% of all advertising, globally is wasted" were splashed yesterday across the marketing papers. This kind of unanimity in the trade press is not coincidental. And if the likes of Unilever persist in praising “Social Media” similar losses will still be shown in the years to come!
To have any hope of repairing the damage left behind by the highly dishonest and incompetent banks, big business must first convince the majority of the population that they are really capable of fixing the problems. Not only are we trapped in the worst recession in living memory. But behind all this lurks a horror even more shocking; the entire marketing/advertising-economic model of free enterprise, rugged individualism, creative advertising and marketing is broken beyond all hope of repair.
Marketing/Advertising on which the Western world built its seeming success seems to have completely broken down. How else can one describes a situation in which all of the country's main financial institutions and many of its biggest industrial companies are effectively bankrupt and on government life-support?
The crisis triggered by September's Credit Crisis appears to have discredited many of the assumptions on which our prosperity and democracy was founded. In 1989 the world, from China and Russia to South Africa, India and Brazil, concluded that there was no serious alternative to market forces as a means of organizing productive activity. In 2009 the whole world seems to have reached the opposite conclusion — that free markets and financial incentives together with marketing & advertising, lead even the richest and most sophisticated societies to disaster.
The question we must ask today is not whether Marketing & Advertising is too big or too small, but whether it works at all.
Undoubtedly the crisis could well be the cause of an idea whose time has come, for the new model of Marketing & Advertising that we must now invent. More generally, financial regulation and macroeconomic management will surely now recognize that naive theories about "efficient" advertising/ marketing and the highly dubious claim they spawned "advertising works" were a major cause of the entire financial disaster. It will still be capitalism, but Marketing/Advertising will not try to rebuild business on the principle that "marketing and advertising are always right".
Already it appears that the Advertising industry, ably supported by Marketing, is already placing their faith on so called “Social Media”. The Internet is NOT a medium conducive to effective, accountable, advertising.
This hysteria about Social Media again reflects the problems faced by Old Advertising & Old Media, a total lack of understanding as to the real meaning of the word “Communication”.
As to Unilever we have already offered Simon Clifts a free copy of our book “Television Killed Advertising” for there he will discover ways of saving a fortune in Marketing monies as well as to how he could advertising on the Internet and elsewhere most effectively! And by the way Simon the offer still stands!
Our TAG program with $10m of research behind it is the way forward, TAG creates a “Social Media for Business” where your customers willingly become the very center of your business with stunning ROI! Interested? Contact me on paul.ashby@yahoo.com

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How, in this world of 24/7 multitasking, do you zag and do some single-tasking?

209478 — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:43:00 GMT

Think like the person behind this great example of single-minded whiteboard focus!

This idea of ‘doing one thing well’ is explored thoroughly in Jim Collins’ bestseller, ‘Good to Great’.

It’s summed up by the fable of the fox and the hedgehog;

"The fox is clever and smart and is constantly trying new things and new ways to get the hedgehog; distracted by new ideas and going off into a multitude of directions.

He isn't successful.

The hedgehog does just one thing but he does it really well – he knows how to curl up into a ball and have his pointy spikes sticking out.

Well, I'm a fox. I move in different directions, distracted by new ideas and new potential product offerings and new ideas in target prospects.

I'm working harder than I have to."

So how can you be the hedgehog?

Find ONE THING that you do REALLY well and just stick to that!

Ref http://influxinsights.com/blog/article/2176/multi-tasking-is-dead--long-live-single-tasking.html

http://www.bizinformer.com/50226711/are_you_a_fox_or_a_hedgehog.php

A Lifesaver for Creative Business Motivation

2292853 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:31:00 GMT

Normal 0 Is your typical day spent like this?

· Struggling to find time and mental space for creative work

· Priorities swamped by day-to-day tasks

· Constant interruptions breaking their creative focus

· Overflowing e-mail inboxes

· Demanding clients expecting instant responses

· Important commitments being lost or forgotten

· Information overload and digital distractions

· Having to deliver more with fewer resources

· Being ‘busy’ instead of creative and effective

If so, your creativity is likely blocked and you may find help to these daily challenges from creative coach and poet Mark McGuinness, who pens the blog Wishful Thinking. Many of Mark’s suggestions for working in creative fields can be found on his blog, or in his ebooks.

His popular Time Management for Creative People has been downloaded more than 45,000 times -- you can get it for free here.

Upcoming ebook from the author is a DIY guide called How to Motivate Creative People, based on his thoughts in this blog post.

He’s also got a seminar in the works based on Time Management for Creative People and is a co-founder of Lateral Action.

Feeling creatively motivated for work,

-Lisa

Space planning in agencies

2371748 — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:47:00 GMT

We're space planning for a brand agency and considering ditching the traditional department seating structure (i.e. no areas for client service, creative and strategy) and mixing everyone up. Is this TOO idealistic or will it actually work? How will it impact the management of teams? Has anyone worked in this environment and what are your thoughts?