My friend Trevor Lui (@LuiSays) said it best...time is money. But you are not likely to part with either without knowing the value, or the promise of value, that you will receive in return. When was the last time you really gave some thought to defining value?
Value is a finicky friend to time and money; value is as much about perception as it is a measurable commodity. The same value means different things to different people, cultures and time zones. So how can you deliver value when it's a moving target?
If we presume that you would trade time or money for a product, then value could be defined as the service you provide. It goes without saying that your products must be on par with or have benefits that comparable products in your category have. And I think it's fair to say we've all been promised "the best service" to death by every organization from fast food to politics. So is value a myth? Is value an empty promise?
The answer is everything is a commodity and loyalty is a myth. In our A.D.D. society of smart phones and tablets, we don't need to be loyal to any product or brand as we can jump from value promise to value promise with the tap of a finger.
To compete on value you must evolve from providing great service to being more fascinating than your competitors. A new product has an inherent fascination factor but it is the organizations themselves that are inherently fascinating that we strive to emulate. Take Apple for example, they will release a new iPad3 this year; the product will have a fascinating elements, but they will sell tens of millions because Apple continuously evolves itself to be more fascinating than its products.
Until next time,
Stevethestevereport@gmail.com
PS: Not sure how to become or stay fascinating? Then pick up or download Sally Hogshead's book Fascinate; it provides a framework to get you there.
Monday, 30 January 2012
Thursday, 12 January 2012
LinkedIn Polls: A Useful Tool? (blog)
So I tried out the new LinkedIn polling feature (see Chicken vs. Egg poll) and have some likes and dislikes...
I like...
Until next time,
Steve
thestevereport@gmail.com
I like...
- the fact that group members, when they receive an email update, can vote on the poll right from thier email. This is great because the user doesn't have to click several times to vote.
- as an administrator it's really easy to set up and monitor. if your event or company has a LinkedIn group, its a great way to get a poll out fast and garner quick returns.
- I set up my Chicken vs. Egg poll to run for 1 week. This was for no particular reason, just seemed like a good idea. As the person running the poll, I can't seem to close it or end it...nor are there any additional analytic tools beyond the results. This is OK if you are asking a simple question, but not so useful for more in depth questions.
- The poll can not contain any live links, photos, pop-ups or other "aids" to explain an optional answer. For example, your voter may need to read a definition of a technical term to answer the poll correctly.
Until next time,
Steve
thestevereport@gmail.com
Wednesday, 14 December 2011
Dear Pentiumhouse,
I never thought this could happen to me. First of all, I’m a residential contractor, and with an occupation such as this, you always spend a lot of time meeting people…
One night I was working late on my computer and out-of the-blue, I got an email from LinkedIn. It was from a woman who was referred to me by a mutual friend. She desperately needed my help on her house. The pictures she included showed off her enormous living room, a blonde perky kitchen and voluptuous bathroom…that had been neglected for years. After some quick correspondence via LinkedIn, we agreed I would come by the house the next morning; I couldn’t wait to get my hands on her house.
She met me at the door as I came up her driveway, standing there all alone on her ivory shag rug. I jumped from my truck, grabbed my tools and was slipping out of my boots before I knew it. We immediately went to the bedroom and I surveyed the trouble. We moved lustfully from room to room and I repositioned her house from every angle. She was shrieking from excitement!
I was there all morning, taking measurements and carefully caressing her house. Finally, I gave her my best offer; a complete overhaul was required to keep the inside of her house hot…and the outside wet. She didn’t hesitate and signed at once, while licking her luscious lips.
The Moral of the Letter
More and more, professionals and consumers use Social Media as their first point of reference and research before reaching out via email or phone. And with the power of being connected online, they can ask someone in their network about your service/product very quickly. You should assume they have already asked and received the feedback before reaching out to you. You don’t need to be a social media junkie, but you do need to keep your profile information current and spend an hour a week making and maintaining your connections; it will generate business for you and you will find yourself saying to a friend “I never thought this could happen to me.”
Until Next Time,
Steve
thestevereport@gmail.com
One night I was working late on my computer and out-of the-blue, I got an email from LinkedIn. It was from a woman who was referred to me by a mutual friend. She desperately needed my help on her house. The pictures she included showed off her enormous living room, a blonde perky kitchen and voluptuous bathroom…that had been neglected for years. After some quick correspondence via LinkedIn, we agreed I would come by the house the next morning; I couldn’t wait to get my hands on her house.
She met me at the door as I came up her driveway, standing there all alone on her ivory shag rug. I jumped from my truck, grabbed my tools and was slipping out of my boots before I knew it. We immediately went to the bedroom and I surveyed the trouble. We moved lustfully from room to room and I repositioned her house from every angle. She was shrieking from excitement!
I was there all morning, taking measurements and carefully caressing her house. Finally, I gave her my best offer; a complete overhaul was required to keep the inside of her house hot…and the outside wet. She didn’t hesitate and signed at once, while licking her luscious lips.
The Moral of the Letter
More and more, professionals and consumers use Social Media as their first point of reference and research before reaching out via email or phone. And with the power of being connected online, they can ask someone in their network about your service/product very quickly. You should assume they have already asked and received the feedback before reaching out to you. You don’t need to be a social media junkie, but you do need to keep your profile information current and spend an hour a week making and maintaining your connections; it will generate business for you and you will find yourself saying to a friend “I never thought this could happen to me.”
Until Next Time,
Steve
thestevereport@gmail.com
Tuesday, 22 November 2011
The Economic Genius of Charlie Chaplin
I'm tired of being asked to "figure out" online video...justifying the costs or how to monetize it. Online video is already part of your DNA and all you need to do is recognize this fact.
For my 10th birthday party my Mum went to the local library and rented a movie projector (yes with actual film reels) and several Charlie Chaplin movies. My friends and I were allowed to watch the movies, rewind them as much as we wanted to re-watch the funniest parts, and change from movie to movie whenever we felt like it.
By comparison, the six year old in my life surfs YouTube for his favorite Disney and Thomas the Tank Engine videos...pausing, rewinding and jumping from video-to-video on demand using either my laptop or iPad.
Online video is no different than the silent films of Charlie Chaplin. The medium has not changed…just the content, technology and tools to view them with. Think of video as an evolving medium. Black-and-white silent films to colour movies with sound...television...and now online video. Would anybody care to argue the point that television, pre-Internet, was an experiment or should be ignored and not invested in? Or maybe that Hollywood
Watching educational or entertainment video content is as natural to humans as breathing. Here's the secret...there is nothing to figure out except to ensure your online strategy includes video...or you may just miss the "television" of the next 30 years.
Until next time,
Steve
Tuesday, 15 November 2011
Awesome Example: An Awful Emcee
Sometimes we overlook how important an emcee is to your event. After attending a swanky gala event last Saturday night, I was reminded of this via a shocking experience.
Let me set the scene, there were about 200 people who attended this fundraising awards gala. Tickets were a premium, there was a silent auction, gourmet meal, wonderful decor and professional a/v. The awards were sponsored and three people were being recognized for their lifetime contributions to their industry.
The emcee is a household name and flew in for the event. It became appallingly apparent nobody had briefed her nor had she read the script before getting on stage. Other than the name of the event she didn't know how to pronounce the sponsoring organizations, the winner’s names nor their respective organizations. To be blunt she butchered the live event execution and at one point called to "roll the next video" 30 minutes too early. The video was to present the next lifetime achievement award...kind of critical to the program.
In all the hustle and bustle of getting an event out the door, we can't forget the most basic of details. The lesson learned? Your emcee can crash your event roll-out just as easily as your venue, a/v or food. However when your emcee crashes and burns at the podium…there is little you can do to recover. Spend the time to fully brief your emcee, especially if they are not from your industry.
Want to know the best punch line of the event? The final award recipient intentionally butchered the emcee's name several times calling her Shannon Tiegs...getting only half her name right.
Until next time,
Steve
Wednesday, 2 November 2011
A Tale of Two Worlds
I admit it; I’ve entered a new world and am enjoying it very much. Although, six weeks into my new world, I’ve leveraged relationships and applied skills learned in my old world.
Allow me to back track, earlier in 2011 you may recall that Business Information Group (BIG), a division of Glacier Media purchased several magazines from Rogers Publishing – one of which was Meetings & Incentive Travel and their IncentiveWorks show. In that deal, over 15 magazines were sold; two of them being Hardware Merchandising and Canadian Contractor. In September, a career opportunity presented itself to join BIG and lead the teams on Hardware and Contractor. Frankly, it was the kind of tremendous opportunity you just don’t say no to.
In a nutshell, Hardware Merchandising serves the home improvement retail industry – our readers are owners and decision makers at Rona, Home Hardware, Home Depot etc. Canadian Contractor serves the residential construction industry – our readers are renovation and custom home builders like Mike Holmes and Jim Caruk. This is a brand new world; a stretch from the meetings and incentive travel industry…sort of.
Hardware Merchandising has an awards program…and produces a gala event to present the awards that is co-located with another industry conference. The event was approximately five weeks after my start date and we had no sponsors and no attendees registered. The winners had been selected and thanks to our co-location had a date and a venue.
You’ve heard it time and time again; relationships are the secret key to any successful event. My story is one of many, which proves this theory (again). In just four weeks we had secured seven sponsors; all of them our industry’s national and regional associations from Newfoundland to British Columbia to Nunavut. We had registered 90 attendees, on par with past years attendance. We had produced seven 4 minute high-definition videos and developed the awards gala program including staging, audio visual, signage, menu and timing with the hotel. There were even custom chocolate logos made to enhance the dessert course, florals for décor and the event photographer was ready to roll.
I am very fortunate to have existing, strong relationships with the audio visual provider, the organization that owns the conference, the florist, venue and photographer. Without these relationships the process would not have gone so smoothly and, I dare say, the event would not have been the success it was without their tremendous support.
As many of you know…I’m a self confessed social media junkie. But this tale reinforces that face-to-face relationships will never be replaced with online ones.
Until next time,
Steve
Now known as…
Stephen (Steve) Dempsey, Publisher
Hardware Merchandising | Canadian Contractor
sdempsey@bizinfogroup.ca / P: 416 510 6780
Allow me to back track, earlier in 2011 you may recall that Business Information Group (BIG), a division of Glacier Media purchased several magazines from Rogers Publishing – one of which was Meetings & Incentive Travel and their IncentiveWorks show. In that deal, over 15 magazines were sold; two of them being Hardware Merchandising and Canadian Contractor. In September, a career opportunity presented itself to join BIG and lead the teams on Hardware and Contractor. Frankly, it was the kind of tremendous opportunity you just don’t say no to.
In a nutshell, Hardware Merchandising serves the home improvement retail industry – our readers are owners and decision makers at Rona, Home Hardware, Home Depot etc. Canadian Contractor serves the residential construction industry – our readers are renovation and custom home builders like Mike Holmes and Jim Caruk. This is a brand new world; a stretch from the meetings and incentive travel industry…sort of.
Hardware Merchandising has an awards program…and produces a gala event to present the awards that is co-located with another industry conference. The event was approximately five weeks after my start date and we had no sponsors and no attendees registered. The winners had been selected and thanks to our co-location had a date and a venue.
You’ve heard it time and time again; relationships are the secret key to any successful event. My story is one of many, which proves this theory (again). In just four weeks we had secured seven sponsors; all of them our industry’s national and regional associations from Newfoundland to British Columbia to Nunavut. We had registered 90 attendees, on par with past years attendance. We had produced seven 4 minute high-definition videos and developed the awards gala program including staging, audio visual, signage, menu and timing with the hotel. There were even custom chocolate logos made to enhance the dessert course, florals for décor and the event photographer was ready to roll.
I am very fortunate to have existing, strong relationships with the audio visual provider, the organization that owns the conference, the florist, venue and photographer. Without these relationships the process would not have gone so smoothly and, I dare say, the event would not have been the success it was without their tremendous support.
As many of you know…I’m a self confessed social media junkie. But this tale reinforces that face-to-face relationships will never be replaced with online ones.
Until next time,
Steve
Now known as…
Stephen (Steve) Dempsey, Publisher
Hardware Merchandising | Canadian Contractor
sdempsey@bizinfogroup.ca / P: 416 510 6780
Sunday, 21 August 2011
The Results of Steve's Social Experiment
The Question
Social Experiment: It's 10:20pm in Toronto on Thursday night...when did you read this?
The Results
This very non-scientific experiment was intended to test a few theories about online groups I have been reading about. Given the comments and pattern of comments, I was pleasantly surprised. Here are my top four results...there are plenty more we could deduce...feel free to add/comment!
Key Assumption: For every comment I am assuming there are ~10 additional people who passively followed along during the experiment. This ratio is based on common feedback best practices.
The Parameters: The Steve Report group had approximately 323 members last Thursday and this question elicited 17 comments in total. Thus, if you follow my assumption, 170 members viewed this discussion or approximately 53%, a number I'm very pleased with.
#1 - Email Still Works
3% of members saw this discussion in their LinkedIn news feed - your home page "wall" - thanks to Tammy Carey at Frischkorn. The balance of the group, or 97%, saw the discussion via email when LinkedIn deployed group discussion updates. Regardless of time zone, most members took relatively immediate action as a result of receiving the email: opening it, clicking on the link and taking some action (in this case posting a comment).
I have read dozens of expert opinions that email, as a form of marketing, is already going the way of the dinosaur. These results (at least for our group) demonstrate that email is still very effective. And thanks to my good friend Duncan Payne at DX3, he proved that sending multiple emails with the same message are important as Duncan missed the first email around Friday lunchtime (in Toronto) and reacted to the second email on Saturday (24 hours later).
To further show that email marketing is still very effective, the analytics that power Blogger (the platform that I use to house The Steve Report and are Google owned) also verify that the group gets the most traffic after a LinkedIn group email deployment.
#2 - Content...King?
Anyone who knows me has heard my speech that content is king. What's interesting about this experiment is the discussion had no real content or strong opinion that would elicit a comment. The question provided no value to the audience. So why did 53% respond? My answer is two-fold,
(A) Guarded Socialization - the seemingly unassuming question was not personal or professional in nature and answering it allowed members to participate in the conversation without any real commitment of themselves.
(B) Opportunity - in the absence of a content direction, members will add their own content. Thanks to Sandy Biback if Imagination+, we had an embedded conversation about the Big Bang TV show.
#3 - Conversation
One of the pillars of any community, online or face-to-face, is conversation. If your community can engage in conversation - regardless of how mundane - then you truly have a community. I would challenge you that if your business event(s) are not generating conversations, then your business event(s) will become the proverbial Dodo birds of your industry.
Mad Scientist Footnote...These results may be skewed as the first email wave hit mid-day on a Friday in August...a time when many folks are already thinking about the weekend and possibly more likely to be enticed by an online discussion!
#4 - Commitment
The real reason I think 53% of members followed this discussion is a direct result of commitment; in this case my commitment to the group. I would hypothesize that members answered the question with blind faith knowing that I am committed to the group...and I would not waste any one's time by starting a discussion (or conversation) that I am not prepared to follow up and see through to the end.
In today's economy, without commitment, your value to any partnership/conversation is very low or zero. If you are going to have a Twitter feed, a YouTube channel, a blog, or any form of "engagement" with your audience around your event, you need to be totally committed to it 365/24/7.
Thank you for everyone who posted a comment or passively followed along, I truly appreciate it. I hope you've enjoyed our little Social Experiment and that there are some insights you can apply to your organization.
Until next time!
Steve
thestevereport@gmail.com
Social Experiment: It's 10:20pm in Toronto on Thursday night...when did you read this?
The Results
This very non-scientific experiment was intended to test a few theories about online groups I have been reading about. Given the comments and pattern of comments, I was pleasantly surprised. Here are my top four results...there are plenty more we could deduce...feel free to add/comment!
Key Assumption: For every comment I am assuming there are ~10 additional people who passively followed along during the experiment. This ratio is based on common feedback best practices.
The Parameters: The Steve Report group had approximately 323 members last Thursday and this question elicited 17 comments in total. Thus, if you follow my assumption, 170 members viewed this discussion or approximately 53%, a number I'm very pleased with.
#1 - Email Still Works
3% of members saw this discussion in their LinkedIn news feed - your home page "wall" - thanks to Tammy Carey at Frischkorn. The balance of the group, or 97%, saw the discussion via email when LinkedIn deployed group discussion updates. Regardless of time zone, most members took relatively immediate action as a result of receiving the email: opening it, clicking on the link and taking some action (in this case posting a comment).
I have read dozens of expert opinions that email, as a form of marketing, is already going the way of the dinosaur. These results (at least for our group) demonstrate that email is still very effective. And thanks to my good friend Duncan Payne at DX3, he proved that sending multiple emails with the same message are important as Duncan missed the first email around Friday lunchtime (in Toronto) and reacted to the second email on Saturday (24 hours later).
To further show that email marketing is still very effective, the analytics that power Blogger (the platform that I use to house The Steve Report and are Google owned) also verify that the group gets the most traffic after a LinkedIn group email deployment.
#2 - Content...King?
Anyone who knows me has heard my speech that content is king. What's interesting about this experiment is the discussion had no real content or strong opinion that would elicit a comment. The question provided no value to the audience. So why did 53% respond? My answer is two-fold,
(A) Guarded Socialization - the seemingly unassuming question was not personal or professional in nature and answering it allowed members to participate in the conversation without any real commitment of themselves.
(B) Opportunity - in the absence of a content direction, members will add their own content. Thanks to Sandy Biback if Imagination+, we had an embedded conversation about the Big Bang TV show.
#3 - Conversation
One of the pillars of any community, online or face-to-face, is conversation. If your community can engage in conversation - regardless of how mundane - then you truly have a community. I would challenge you that if your business event(s) are not generating conversations, then your business event(s) will become the proverbial Dodo birds of your industry.
Mad Scientist Footnote...These results may be skewed as the first email wave hit mid-day on a Friday in August...a time when many folks are already thinking about the weekend and possibly more likely to be enticed by an online discussion!
#4 - Commitment
The real reason I think 53% of members followed this discussion is a direct result of commitment; in this case my commitment to the group. I would hypothesize that members answered the question with blind faith knowing that I am committed to the group...and I would not waste any one's time by starting a discussion (or conversation) that I am not prepared to follow up and see through to the end.
In today's economy, without commitment, your value to any partnership/conversation is very low or zero. If you are going to have a Twitter feed, a YouTube channel, a blog, or any form of "engagement" with your audience around your event, you need to be totally committed to it 365/24/7.
Thank you for everyone who posted a comment or passively followed along, I truly appreciate it. I hope you've enjoyed our little Social Experiment and that there are some insights you can apply to your organization.
Until next time!
Steve
thestevereport@gmail.com
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