March 4, 2011

Just like CIOs, IT Vendors must earn their “seat at the table”

CIOs are in the service business. They are responsible for a major portion of operations in an enterprise – infrastructure, systems, and processes. Staff and customers depend on these things in order to get their work done, to move product, to deliver services, to generate revenue.

Getting to the table

CIOs don’t get a “seat at the table” of strategic discussions if they can’t deliver on service basics. And more and more, “good enough” isn’t, well, good enough. CIOs constantly strive to deliver rock solid basics and stretch beyond to delivering additional value, anticipating needs before they arise, and innovating all the way from back room functions to client facing solutions.

IT vendors are in the same boat, yet many seem to miss this essential point. Service matters. A lot. Especially when your customer (the CIO) is in the service business. And especially when he or she is held accountable for your performance.

Service matters

It’s a long sales cycle for many IT investments. Incumbent vendors have a unique opportunity to prove to the CIO that they can get the basics right, to earn a seat at the table with the CIO when future investment decisions are being made. Products and services must work as promised, with no hidden costs or unexpected constraints. The vendor’s organization needs to be reliable, responsive, and agile. Those are the minimum requirements. Vendors who get this right start to earn the trust of the CIO and start to get included in more strategic discussions.

Value

CIOs are business people first, technologists second. Buzzwords, bells and whistles isn’t enough to cut it anymore. Value is the name of the game, and an increasingly important part of the value proposition is service.

Photo credit: johnlamb

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February 16, 2011

How to generate $50,000 in revenue with your ebook

  1. Build an audience of 450,000 subscribers to your blog
  2. Write 12 bestselling books
  3. Have the guts to push yourself, always
  4. Start a new, paradigm-breaking publishing company
  5. Write a manifesto
  6. Create an inverse relationship between price and your number of ‘best customers’

Seth Godin is a fun guy to watch. He is full of insightful, thought-provoking ideas. And  he practices what he preaches. Check out what he’s doing with his latest endeavor, The Domino Project.

Here’s the link on this ebook, you can browse around from there to check out the rest:

http://www.thedominoproject.com/2011/02/poke.html

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February 9, 2011

Strategy is all about starting at the end, even for job postings

A good strategy establishes a clear vision of the end result desired and reveals the most critical decisions about how you’re going to get there. You can then fill that in with a plan of attack that covers more practical and tactical matters.

Why is this worthwhile? Because focusing on your end game goals is efficient. A little more thought up front goes a long way over the course of your project.

Or when your hiring someone.

Hiring someone is a big decision with long-term implications for your business, your team, and probably for a whole string of projects. So, why not look at the ‘hiring project’ more strategically?

Take for instance, this job posting from User Interface Engineering. I don’t know anything about this company or it’s CEO Jared Spool who posted this description, but I love the way it’s structured.

Jared makes a rather typically bland statement about the title of the position he’s looking to hire. And then, blammo – “fast forward one year…” He jumps ahead in time to tell you about how you’ve done with this position after your first year. It’s filled with a bunch of positives statements about all that you’ve accomplished, the way you did it successfully, and the direct impact it’s had on the business. There’s the vision – can you fulfill it?

Ok, then “back to today…” Check us out, give us your best half-page write up, and if you’ve got a chance, we’ll be back to you in 24 hours.

What a great attitude and approach to getting someone on board.

Photo credit: smohundro

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November 12, 2010

A clever social media campaign

Social media made simple – here’s a great example.

Reese Ben-Yaacov (@ReeseBY) owns Assistant Connect, an online virtual assistant business, and  she’s running a neat campaign from a single web page.

It’s a simple contest to win 4 hours of virtual assistant services – a one hour brainstorming session to figure out what services might benefit you most, and three hours of work.

You enter the contest by writing “one paragraph on your biggest challenge in your business in relation to time management and administrative functions and post it on your blog or Facebook with a link back to” her site.

People who enter the contest help spread the idea of utilizing a virtual assistant. And they point readers of their blogs right back to the site. This introduces more people to the contest, which helps it spread even further. Not only that, these links can help greatly with search engine optimization. Search engines like Google put sites higher on the results list as the number of “inbound links” increases.

A pretty clever campaign.

I don’t know how effective this will be for Reese, but I love the idea of a simple, integrated approach with sharing and linking built right in. This model could surely be leveraged by anyone with a services offering. The only tweaks I’d suggest are setting this sort of thing up on your own domain name (to juice up SEO on something you own), adding an About page to give a little more context about the business, and using a platform that supports trackback links so that everyone can find each other’s posts.

Photo credit: Nina Matthews

Filed Under: Social media Tagged With: , , 2 Comments
September 3, 2010

Why has top blogger Chris Brogan suddenly gone old school?

Have you seen his recent posts? Each has an awesome vintage photo as an anchor.

I’ve always loved reading (and writing) blog posts that are accompanied by a relevant photo. Just look around this blog; virtually every post I’ve made has a photo or image to anchor it.

The photos help catch your attention, set the mood, and/or make a point. It’s precisely because I really like reading blog posts with great images that I became inspired to do the same. I’ve always found it worth the time and energy to find the right photo for each post. It’s more than the “icing on the cake” – the images become an integral part of the message.

You don’t have to be a great photographer to do this. In fact, you don’t have to be a photographer at all. There’s a great abundance of images being shared by thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of people by way of Creative Commons licensing and awesome photo sharing sites like Flickr.

This new angle Chris Brogan is using, at least for a series of posts, is very interesting because the photos are really fantastic old photos yet they serve to support the point he’s making in each post. Chris blogs about cutting edge thinking in social media, but it’s always based on timeless human interaction themes, and these old photos really help tie that overarching theme in nicely. Well done.

Oh, and if you want to check out some really great vintage photos like the one I used in this post, go to Vintage Collective’s photo stream on Flickr:

Vintage portrait photography

Vintage storefronts

On the road

A working man’s blues

Here are a couple of Chris Brogan’s recent posts featuring great vintage photography:

How to convert traffic to a sale

How to grow traffic to your blog

Photo credits: all photos on this post vintagecollective

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September 2, 2010

Experimenting with LinkedIn Answers

Lately I’ve been experimenting with LinkedIn Answers, a section of LinkedIn for asking and answering business questions (no selling, advertising, recruiting or job searching allowed). So far, I’ve answered 22 questions on a variety of topics. Nine of those answers have been tagged as “good” by the person who asked the question, and two more have been labelled as the “best answer” among the responses. So, I’m batting .500 overall with a couple of home runs.

Right there is a little bit of the magic of LinkedIn Answers. People provide thanks and confirmation that you’ve helped them through the rating system. Many also write a personal note of thanks or follow up the conversation via email. It feels good to know you’ve helped someone, and that encourages more participation in the system (at least it does for me).

It’s fun and productive to help people. It’s also interesting to learn about the challenges facing other organizations around the world. Through this process I’ve chatted with folks from all over the US, Canada, India, Singapore, the U.K., British Columbia, and Japan about topics ranging from Non-profit management to Internet marketing to tips on using LinkedIn.

I’m still feeling my way around this part of LinkedIn, but I can tell you that it is very active. It’s also very interesting how the system seems to prioritize the questions you see based on your network. Those more closely linked to you seem to float to the top. It also learns what sort of questions you like to answer and encourages you to go deeper in those areas.

This sort of personalization feels very natural. And once you’re in that flow, you end up helping a lot of people and keeping a finger on the pulse of the challenges people face in your area of expertise. A couple of nice by-products are the many opportunities to expand your network and show off your expertise a bit, which helps enrich your profile (more on that in another post).

LinkedIn Answers is well worth exploring. Go check it out.

Photo credit: coletivomambembe

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