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Archives for September 2013

Innovation Governance Requires Technology Smarts

bridge-the-gapTwo key components of innovation governance are:

  • the technology that drives innovation
  • and Boards and C-levels who are responsible for strategy and governing the decisions regarding innovation and technology.

Technology is always changing. The problem is a Board technology knowledge gap and this leads to ineffective technology strategy.  

Heller Search Associates say:

 According to the Kellogg School, 75% of executives aren’t confident in the value of their technology investments, 70% of IT projects deliver disappointing results and 35% of projects fail outright. These numbers are staggering and make it clear to me that boards are missing the mark when it comes to providing technology oversight.

In a past post I reviewed the importance of the Board and C-Levels to effective innovation governance. But, how is the Board and senior managers to lead innovation governance if they don’t have technology skills? Simply put, they will not be able to do it well. They don’t need to be geeks but there is a need for some awareness of technology trends and how these might influence the performance of the enterprise.

Deloitte Consultants in their Tech-Intelligent Board (PDF) report say:

Few Boards devote attention to IT (Information Technology). Many would like to do more. The question is how?

There are company Boards that have answers to this question. I will list a brief summary (from a variety of sources such as McKinsey and Deloitte consultants, Harvard Business Review, CIO magazine and others) and will expand on these in future posts.
IGtechskills

  • Annual technology reviews, good but need to be more frequent
  • Hire new Board members with technology backgrounds
  • Set up a Technology Advisory group
  • Set up a Board Technology Portal that is easy to use and sends reminders to revisit
  • Have the CIO brief the Board at least once every three months
  • Use reverse mentoring to have new technology savvy employees to brief Clevel executives (my favorite)

More to follow.

 

Tomorrows World: Best Practice for Corporate Apps

tomorrows-worldTomorrow’s World was the BBC’s flagship science programme for decades, and – as I remember it – always predicted an exciting future. One of the 1979 editions included a prototype for a cordless telephone… others included an item on the office of the future, and on the first home computer terminal.

Here we are in that future, and yes, we have mobile phones and ‘home computers’. (No robots in my office yet though).

And the rate of change seems to be accelerating. Not only do we have mobile phones, we are increasingly using them to do what ‘home computers’ were designed for – and more. We didn’t have access to the internet on our phones in the 1970’s, you know… but now almost 40% of time spent online is spent using a mobile device and 17% of global web traffic comes from mobile devices.

Naturally, this has – or should have – an effect on your digital strategy. Given the prevalence of the personal computer over the last few years, corporate comms professionals have naturally been using the corporate website, together with email and other outreach options. But given the rate of change, in particular that towards mobile, what approach should you take now?

Communicate Magazine will be hosting an afternoon conference – Best Practice: Corporate Apps – to discuss just this. There’s a great line-up of speakers discussing case studies, thoughts on strategy, and views on the future, together with the chance to network, and a debate.

It will be on October 10, in the Barbican Centre, London. Do come if you can (find out more). It should be both interesting and useful; I’m particularly looking forward to the session on The New Best Practice. Naturally, there’s a hashtag – #BPCA13 – so if you really can’t make it, you can follow online.

I bet the tweetstream around the Tomorrow’s World episodes would have been interesting…

Statistics and Predictions for the Future of Marketing Strategy

big data marketingHow will marketing strategy change in the next five years? That’s the question Gigya tries to answer in its new white paper, “5 Ways Marketing Will Change in the Next 5 Years.” Three words dominate Gigya’s predictions—data, permission, and personalization.

There are real statistics that show how the focus of marketing in recent years has already shifted to these three strategic imperatives, and that shift will dominate the next five years. Gigya shares the following statistics to back up its predictions:

  • The big data market will grow at an annual rate of 31.7% through 2016, which is seven times higher than the overall growth rate for information and communications technology. (via International Data Corp.)
  • An estimated 2.2 million terabytes of new data are created each day (via Autonomy)
  • 90% of big data is unstructured, “human information” from Twitter updates, Facebook posts, website clicks, and so on.
  • Data collection volume increased in 2012 from an average of 10 collection events per page to 50. That’s a 400% increase. (via Krux)
  • 40% of users decide not to log into a website or app using their social network accounts due to concerns about how their personal information will be used.

With those statistics in mind, here are the five predictions Gigya offers in its white paper for the next five years in marketing strategy:

  1. Massive data collection across multiple touch points becomes standard.
  2. Marketers get a firmer grip on the data they manage.
  3. Social media grows into big data.
  4. Permission marketing becomes the norm.
  5. Programmatic marketing ends the age of generalizations.

For marketing experts and practitioners, these predictions probably don’t come as much of a surprise. Big data, mobile, and personalization have been the big buzz topics for more than the past 12 months and will only continue to grow in importance. I think the most interesting part of the white paper is within the section about the need for marketers to get a “firmer grip” on the data they manage.

The white paper suggests the need for “modern dynamic databases equipped to handle large, varied datasets,” which data scientists and data analysts need to “mine, synthesize, and convert into actionable insights.” Those are two very different parts of the big data puzzle, and each deserves attention. The tools are meaningless if you don’t have the expertise to turn a massive amount of data into something useful. Similarly, the brightest minds can’t do much if they can’t collect and crunch the data in the ways they require to extract the actionable information.

What do you think about Gigya’s predictions for marketing strategy in the next five years? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Ilker

The Financial Theory of Corporations Versus Social Responsibility

tibetan-yak
When it comes to social responsibility, corporations are in a tough spot. Traditional financial theory holds that corporations exist in order to maximize profits for shareholders. To the extent they divert corporate resources to fund social or environmental causes unrelated to their business, it represents a transfer of wealth from shareholders to a different constituency.  Further, it is a transfer of wealth over which shareholders – the owners of the company –  have little or no say. This is troublesome because corporations do not exist to redistribute wealth.  To the extent that any institution exists to redistribute wealth, that role goes to governments.

This does not mean that corporations should not be concerned with the environment or the social context in which they operate. Rather, it means that corporations should be paying careful attention to those issues where they can have an impact and where the cost of ignoring them will have a detrimental effect on the company’s future prospects, image or share price.  Spending money to make a difference in environmental and social issues that are part of how they operate is an acceptable corporate expenditure.  Spending money to fund the chairman’s pet charity to save the Tibetan yak is usually not, unless you are in the business of mountain expeditions.

How does all of this fit into investor relations?  In my twenty-five years of talking to investors, it has been rare that major institutional investors raise these types of issues.  Institutional investors focus on your company’s future prospects, back-tested against your current performance.   Unless your company’s future prospects are being impacted by environmental or social issues, most investors don’t seem to care.  There are a few socially responsible investment firms, but I’ve never really seen them have much more than a gadfly effect.

So does this mean corporations should just ignore the issue?  You probably can, but I would hope not.  Your company is probably doing things that you can point to as responsible corporate citizenship. Most companies are constantly testing ways to save money by eliminating waste and inefficiencies.  The best of these ideas often result in both costs savings and benefits for the environment.  For example, every social activist’s favorite target, Wal-Mart, has done many such things. Here’s an illustration from the book The Wal-Mart Effect, by Charles Fishman: in the 1990s, Wal-Mart came to the conclusion that there was no need for deodorants to come in a separate box.  The cardboard box added cost, took up shelf space and required trees to be cut down to make the cardboard.  Yet the box didn’t add anything to the customer experience and surrounded what was already a perfectly good container.  So Wal-Mart worked with manufacturers to get rid of the boxes.  As a result, the product cost less to produce, some of which was passed along to consumers, and the environment benefited because the demand to cut down trees for cardboard was reduced.  (One can only hope that they are working on the same thing with respect to blister packs.)

Good companies undertake these types of projects all the time. A good investor relations practice is to make a list of all the projects your company does to eliminate waste and inefficiencies or to make the work environment safer.  The next time you’re questioned about your company’s commitment to the environment or social causes, pull out your list and discuss it along with the comment “Look, we can’t be all things to all people – our resources, just like everyone else’s, are limited. But we do choose to try and change things for the better where we can have an impact.”  Better yet, be proactive and talk about these things as part of your regular communications.

I am not enough of a Pollyanna to think that this will mollify activist investors with a militant agenda, but you’re not going to make them happy anyway.  The objective here is to have a well-reasoned response that shows you are influencing things to benefit your customers and the environment in which you operate.  And, like Wal-Mart, you probably shouldn’t expect to receive too much credit for what you do.  After all, as Kermit the frog said, “It’s not easy being green”.

 

AT&T Embraces Emotional Branding in Ad Campaign

at&t wireless iphoneWho said a telecommunications brand can’t pique consumers’ emotions? AT&T proved that it could successfully tap into consumers’ emotions decades ago with its “Reach out and touch someone” campaigns. While the brand has lost some of its emotional connection to consumers in recent years, the marketing team has been trying to turn that around over the past 12 months with an ad campaign that is laser-focused on emotional branding.

John McDermott of Advertising Age reports that the AT&T “It’s Not Complicated” campaign, which features first graders discussing AT&T’s mobile service with an adult, has been very successful in emotionally connecting consumers to the AT&T brand. Both consumers and AT&T employees (the brand’s most powerful advocates) are reacting positively to the campaign.

You can watch one of the commercials in the campaign below.


This is good news for AT&T, a brand known for wireless coverage in the United States that is significantly inferior to the market leader, Verizon Wireless. McDermott reports that AT&T isn’t focusing on its competitors in its marketing strategy but rather the company is planning to extend its wireless offerings in the future. The question at this point is whether building an emotional connection through an ad campaign will work in the long-term if AT&T can’t back up the feelings its ads evoke with products that deliver on consumer demands.

Google succeeded in its attempt to build an emotional connection between consumers and its brand with its 2011 Google Chrome ad campaign and again with its 2012 Google Zeitgest video. However, Google was able to meet consumers’ expectations for its brand, so the emotional connection was a significant enhancement to the brand’s existing value.

Years ago, I worked for AT&T, and at the time, I was proud to be an AT&T employee. It was my first marketing job out of college, and I still have an AT&T paperclip holder sitting on my desk as I type this article. I have hope for the AT&T brand. Step one — set consumer expectations and consistently meet those expectations. An emotional connection will develop organically, which can be fostered through emotional advertising. Only time will tell what the rumored AT&T wireless brand extensions will be and whether or not they’ll be enough to make consumers believe in the AT&T brand again.

What do you think? Leave a comment and share your thoughts below.

Image: Robert S. Donovan

Offering work experience? 9 key tips

I asked Alice, a sixth-form student spending a week with us for work experience, to look at the websites of companies offering work experience to people like her. This is what she found…

 

work-experienceLots of sixth-formers (and younger!) look for work experience while thinking about what they might like to do in the future. Here are 9 suggestions based on my review of corporate websites.

 1. Make it easy to find

It is really hard to find work experience over the internet so it is important that once you get to a website it is easy to navigate your way around the site – for example, with a layout that splits the information into sections so it’s easy to find what information applies to you.

The BBC’s website was the easiest to navigate and you could find work experience straight from the home page.

  • It had links to different parts of the website including application forms, and explanations of what each part of the company does.
  • The bright colours, images and design they used were really good, keeping it looking professional and appealing without looking childish.

The BBC website was perfect for its target audience and I thought had one of the best designs and layouts.

2. Make us feel welcome

It is important to sound friendly and pleasant on the web page because that makes the atmosphere of the company sound welcoming rather than daunting. This is important because we need to be comfortable enough in the work surroundings to ask questions, which is how to learn and is what the experience is about.

Numerous websites were good at sounding friendly and yet still professional, such as Penguin and the BBC.

 3. Talk directly to us

One of the best features or language techniques I saw was when the company talked directly to you rather than indirectly. The benefit of talking directly is that:

  • this makes the website feel a lot more personal and friendly, which makes the company sound a lot more appealing
  • It also makes you feel like the company is taking you seriously and treating you like an adult rather than talking down to you.

One of the best companies for doing this was Tata Steel.
Tata Steel work experience

4. Tell us what skills we need

GSK and Tata Steel give a list of skills or requirements needed. This is useful because:

  • It helps people who are looking for a specific type of work, telling them what they need to achieve and do to be able to apply.
  • It also gives people who are genuinely interested in that certain field a better chance of being taken on.

It also benefits the company as it means that they will only be getting people applying who really want to come and work with them and who might be suitable.

 5. Tell us what we need to know

The information content is really important and I found that it varies a lot between companies. The main things that I would want to know are:

  • What skill would I need?
  • What skills would I gain?
  • What would I be doing on my work experience?
  • How would I apply?
  • What did other people think of it?
  • And how would it help me with my future?

Cap Gemini have a limited amount of information on their website but a separate PDF file containing all you need to know about them and work experience with them. This is a really good way of providing information.
BBC work experience

6. Show us what it is like

Something that I really liked on the BBC website was all the photos and videos of people who have previously been on work experience there.

  • This shows people that are interested what actually happens on the work experience.
  • Videos mean you get to hear what other people think that have been in your situation rather than the company just telling you about it.

This helps people who want to go on work experience and it will help the companies to get more people to apply.

7. Make it easy to apply

I found that most of the websites wanted you to apply online, however there were some that wanted you to ring up to apply;

  • applying online is very easy and it gives you the chance to think about what you are writing in advance, which gives you the opportunity to maximise the possibility of being taken on
  • If you apply over the phone it gives the company the chance to see how well you respond to questions and how well you think on your feet.

However phone conversations can be tricky and daunting especially if you have never met the person before so I would say that from the student’s point of view, the best method and the most beneficial method of applying would be online.

8. Use social media

random house facebook pageChannel 4 has a Facebook page for people who have been on work experience with them. I feel that it would be beneficial if more companies had open Facebook pages for young people and work experience as

  • more and more young people have Facebook now and it would really interest us if companies posted photos, videos and opinions so we could see how other people have found work experience
  • And it would help us learn what the company does, how they do it and what actually goes on when you go for work experience with them.

I did find a page on Facebook for Random House. It is positive, kept up to date regularly with what is going on and also they take the time to reply to posts, which in my opinion makes them look committed to providing good work experience.

9. Make it easy to read

It is also important that the information is presented in the right way. I found that the websites that I learnt the most from were the ones that had the key points written in bullet form and each set of information under new headings.

I liked this layout because

  • It meant I could pick out what information I wanted and what was relevant to me
  • It looked appealing and made me more inclined to read it as it wasn’t just a big block of writing
  • It also meant that I could remember the information more easily as it was broken up and not a solid mass of writing.

 

Even if students don’t apply for work experience with you, or if they aren’t accepted, their experience of the company’s web site and social media pages will affect their view of the company in the future.

Thanks Alice!