By Bob Bailly
My recent posts have looked at how our evolutionary past has shaped our modern business behaviour. Recently I looked at the desire to live and work in a tribal setting – a feeling so powerful that many of our business practices are based upon a tribe’s primitive functioning. I also looked at the notion that tribes demand strong leaders, and these leaders must inspire their followers (through fear, heredity or action). Followers must also understand and accept their roles for the tribe to be successful.
I pointed out that there were other conditions necessary for us to want to belong. Here are three I noted, with some comments about implications for modern business.
- Tribes have a strong culture and are prone to develop and use cultural symbols.
- Tribes develop stories, sometimes magical and sometimes mythical, that define their values.
- Tribes have enemies, and the stronger the enemy the stronger the loyalty to the tribe.
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We kicked off the second year of our new blog with a strong month of posts that covered a wide range of topics including leadership, content marketing, SEO, Pinterest for B2B businesses, trademarks, free tools for social media and PR, and succession planning.
On that final point, we said a sad farewell to a valued colleague last month. For our Linda Forrest, it was time for a new challenge in a new city. After a successful seven years with us, Linda has taken on the role of Digital Media Communities Manager at the Canadian Digital Media Network based in Kitchener/Waterloo. We welcome you to reach out to her on LinkedIn or Twitter to stay in touch.
Without further ado, here are our posts, in case you missed them, from February.
February 8: Giving your team ownership by Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
February 15: Burning the candle at both ends as the clock ticks down by Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
February 21: What an IP Coordinator should know: Something about trademarks by David French
And on a related note…
In addition to our series, our associates and guest bloggers were also busy writing on a great range of topics. Here are our other posts from February, as ranked by the enthusiasm of our readers:
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Associate Peter Hanschke is an Ottawa-based product management specialist. His post is part of our continuing series about the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market. We welcome your comments.
By Peter Hanschke
The ability to demo your product to a prospect is a key activity in the sales process. Prospects struggle to make the connection between what is shown in a slide deck and the issues that they need to address or the problems they need to solve. Furthermore, they also need to be assured that the product you are describing is simply not slide ware. A properly constructed demo that shows how the prospect can address their issues takes time and effort to create. But many companies leave the design and creation of the demo to the last possible moment. The result is the standby method– open the product, show individual features and hope that one or more of the features resonates with the prospect.
The problem is that the prospect is looking for a solution to a problem that they currently have – not a set of features.
Prospects are interested in buying your product or service only if it addresses a need or problem that they have. In today’s tight economy, products that address issues will be considered more favorably than those that are simply a collection of features. The intent of a demo is to show the capabilities of your product in such a way that resonates with the prospect. The prospect needs to truly understand how your product addresses their core issues. Upon completion of the demo, the prospect should have a clear vision of exactly how your product helps them.
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By Alexandra Reid
In my last post, I shared and reviewed my favourite (free) social media monitoring tools that I use regularly to carry out social media marketing strategies on behalf of clients. Today, I reveal the management and measurement tools I use to organize and keep track of the zillions of conversations I monitor daily across multiple channels.
To summarize, these tools are free and therefore great for small businesses and new ventures. However, they are useless if they are not aligned with a sound social media marketing strategy. They are also far from perfect so we must always cross-examine data with information provided by other tools and sometimes even check information manually to ensure everything is accurate.
I decided to combine my favourite management and measurement tools because many of them do both functions. Technically, some of these can be used for monitoring social media as well. At the end of the day, it’s not so much the tools that matter, but how you use them. These are the ones that I’ve found excel, particularly in the management and measurement departments.
Without further ado, here are my favourite social media management and measurement tools:
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This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from April 2010. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran
I can’t remember when or from whom I first heard the line, “Marketers should think like the fish, not like the fisher.” But I have always enjoyed it as a pithy summary of our marketing credo that says you must put yourself in your customers’ shoes when plotting your marketing strategy. It doesn’t matter how fancy your new spinning rod might be, or how pretty the fly is that you just put on the end of your fly rod, if the fish aren’t hungry for what you’re offering, they’re not going to bite. You need to know what the fish are looking for and then craft your marketing message accordingly.
Driving along the other day, I saw the truck in this picture and I drove around a couple of city blocks so I could come back and take the picture. I tweeted this the other day but I thought I’d also share it here because it is such a simple-yet-brilliant example of this precept. Enjoy.
By Bob Bailly
