Alan See: Posted on Friday, April 10, 2015 12:38 PM
You created a presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter placing your
small business on the social media party grid.
Free word-of-mouth marketing was supposed to take over and the cash
register start ringing. It hasn’t played
out that way, so what happen?
A
Foundation for Growth Social media platforms can provide the foundation for growth. Social platforms can help you and your organization
be found, find, and engage your target audience. · Be Found:To
be found during the “search” process when a customer or prospect has a need or
desire for a product or service that your organization is capable of
delivering. |
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Alan See: Posted on Wednesday, April 01, 2015 2:16 PM
If you are a technology vendor or CIO don’t panic. Chief Marketing Officers still love you. We continue to think about and are concerned
with technology and data. But I’m
starting to spend more time with HR this year.
Yes, I’m concerned with whether or not marketing has the “right people
on the bus.” That’s a challenge that never
ends, particularly when the business environment is constantly changing. What I’m bringing attention to, and becoming
more concerned with, is the individuals we don’t have room for on the bus. |
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Alan See: Posted on Tuesday, March 31, 2015 8:20 AM
Imagine that you’re attending a major conference. It’s time to head over to the networking
kick-off session. You’ve got your
business cards in your pocket and your elevator speech is locked and
loaded. You’ve brushed up on current events
and read the speakers backgrounds so you are ready to keep the conversation
light and engaging.
And then it happens; you run into a social buzzkill. He’s looking at your name tag now…
“Welcome Alan, thanks for shaking my
hand! Now, if it’s not too much trouble
could you get out your smart phone and Like my Facebook page? |
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Alan See: Posted on Sunday, March 29, 2015 11:17 AM
A choke point is a strategic channel which could be closed
or blocked to stop sea traffic. At the Strait of Gibraltar,
where Spain reaches for Morocco, only eight miles separate Africa from Europe. It’s a
strategic location that links the North Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean
Sea. When the world’s
economy depended on merchant ships, control of Gibraltar
meant control over the flow of products and profits to merchants throughout a
large portion of the world.
Have your social networking messages sailed into a choke
point? |
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Alan See: Posted on Friday, March 20, 2015 3:02 PM
The other night I told my wife that I
might actually be a growth hacker. She
just looked at me and said, “You spend way too much time online.”
Sean
Ellis, who
is known for helping Dropbox grow in its early days, coined the
term " growth hacker"
in 2010. In a blog post,
he defined a growth hacker as "a person whose true north is growth.
Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable
growth." In April 2012 the idea of
growth hacking really took off when a blogger named Andrew Chen
wrote a piece called “ |
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Alan See: Posted on Thursday, March 12, 2015 9:46 AM
Word-of-Mouth Marketing (WOMM) today is both online and through
face-to-face interaction. At times we
think of WOMM in terms of marketing buzz,
the interaction of users of a product or service that amplifies the brand and
in some cases goes viral.
In reality, regular old everyday “buzz” is not as glamorous as
we marketers like to imagine. Recommendations
from friends and family don’t often come with viral like excitement, but from a
place of more practical experience.
This perspective was driven home for me during a lecture with
some senior business students during their capstone marketing course. |
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Posted on Friday, March 06, 2015 11:42 AM
Does your company encourage questioning in any substantive way? If
so, does your company provide any training programs focused on guidelines and
best practices for questioning? In
truth, many companies, whether consciously or not, have established cultures
that tend to discourage inquiry in the form of someone’s asking “Why are we
doing this?” The impulse is to keep
plowing ahead, doing what we’ve done, and rarely stepping back to question
whether we’re on the right path.
According to Socrates, “Wisdom is limited to an awareness of your
own ignorance. |
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Alan See: Posted on Tuesday, February 24, 2015 2:20 PM
The advertisement above is Sir
Ernest Shackleton's recruitment notice for his 1915 Antarctic expedition. His entire crew of 27 men did return. But their adventure is one of the greatest
survival stories in the annals of exploration.
Shackleton, his shipEndurancecrushed by ice in Antarctic’s Weddell Sea, led his crew to safety through a
series of impossible journeys over land and sea. What began as a journey of exploration became
a 20-month battle to stay alive, demanding ingenuity, courage, and leadership. |
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Alan See: Posted on Thursday, February 12, 2015 9:02 AM
A trim
balding man in khakis with a button down shirt, the CMO looks the part he has
played for so many years – the affable, hardworking executive who gets the job
done. It’s the 2015 sales kickoff
meeting and he is setting in the front row with the rest of the executive team
getting ready to address the troops. He
could still remember a time when these meetings required full business attire, there
was no PowerPoint, and there were no smart phones or facilitated hashtagged social
conversations with the audience. |
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Alan See: Posted on Monday, February 09, 2015 2:02 PM
I grew up in Grinnell,
Iowa, a small town in the rural Midwest. It’s not exactly the place you would
expect to find one of the most prolific scoring basketball teams in the nation.
The “ Grinnell System,” Grinnell College’s
run-and-gun offense is considered unorthodox, even chaotic, but it is fun to
watch. Grinnell
teamshave led all playing levels in scoring for 19 of the past 21 seasons, while
ranking first in the country in 3-point shooting for 17 of the past 21 years. According to Head Coach David Arseneault’s
book titled “ |
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