A REAL Business REALITY CHECK

Sharing an interesting article by my friend Steve Kayser on his blog.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Bo Diddley

WRONG.

Bo didn’t know diddly on this one. I found a book you could judge by its cover: “Reality Check,” by bestselling author and entrepreneur, Guy Kawasaki.

The back cover of this book should be required reading for authors, writers, marketers, PR professionals, and anyone that wants to understand how to draw people into your story with well-written, eloquent simplicity.

I picked “Reality Check” up, flipped to the back and was completely drawn in.

BEFORE I READ IT

How in the world can you cover 11 topics on the back page―and do it well? Topics like pitching, venture-capital aptitude, speeches, evangelizing, business plans, board meetings, PR, innovation, e-mail, customer service, and schmoozing.  Impossible!  But Guy does it impossibly well.

AFTER I READ IT

Then I read it. I soon realized why Seth Godin said, “Buy two copies of this book. One to rip pages out of, mark up, copy, and tack on the wall, and one to give away to your clueless colleague. Oh, better make that three copies. Four?”

Guy Kawasaki has long been a favorite of mine but not because of all the public accolades or business success he’s had. Not because I think he’s one of the best at using Twitter for business or because he has over 100,000 followers.  Just two reasons really. The first reason is his writing style. It’s easy-to-read, helpful, irreverent, completely devoid of corporate gobbledygook, sometimes hilariously funny, always positive, and it’s actually easy to put into action the things he suggests.  The second reason? He’s incredibly accessible and responsive. If you contact him — he will contact you back Via Twitter or e-mail.

So, since Guy is accessible and responsive, I decided to contact him to talk about “Reality Check.” He agreed.

Interesting Right….Read More Here

Indian Sensex up by over 400 points

The BSE (Bombay Stock Exchange) Sensex rallied 3.65 percent today and propelled gains to more than 17 percent in April, its best monthly performance in 10 years, as a wave of improved investor confidence swept across the world. Nifty surged 15% from the closing of March series.

The 30-share BSE Sensex shut shop at 11,403.25, with a gain of 401.50 points or 3.65% over previous close, and ended this truncated with a gain of 0.65%. The 50-share NSE Nifty surged 3.32% or 111.60 points, to settle at 3,473.95 and lost 0.2% this week.Leading heavyweights like Reliance Industries, ONGC, Bharti, Infosys, ICICI Bank, NTPC, BHEL, SBI, TCS, Wipro, HUL and HDFC gained 2.5-9%.

Mirroring the changed outlook for Indian equities, foreign institutional investors (FIIs) have enhanced their grip by raising stakes in 157 companies in the January-March quarter. Economic Times reports also suggest that foreign funds led the buying, pumping in more than $1.4 billion in April 1-27, their biggest inflow since October 2007.

Global markets also bounced back in today's trade. At the time of closing of Indian equities, European markets were trading higher. The FTSE went up 45 points, to 4,141. The CAC was trading at 3,094, up 43 points and the DAX rose 48 points, to 4,655.

Among the US futures, the Dow Jones futures were trading at 8,043, up 76 points and the Nasdaq futures went up 12.25 points, to 1,372.75.

The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) as well as the National Stock Exchange (NSE) will remain closed on 30 April and 1 May for the Lok Sabha elections and Maharashtra Day, respectively.

Calling All Innovators

Submit your application for Forum Nokia’s Calling All Innovators contest and win

Forum Nokia is challenging mobile and web application developers worldwide to submit best-in-class applications for use on Nokia devices in the 2009 Calling All Innovators contest. Winning applications will be featured in Nokia’s new Ovi Store, which has the potential to reach 50 million Nokia devices globally when it launches in May.
The top submission in each category will receive cash and prizes that include:

• Premium placement of the winning application in Nokia's Ovi Store, where consumers will find the best mobile applications and content for their Nokia devices;
• Paid travel to demo the winning application at a Nokia-specified event; and
• The winning applications will be reviewed by Nokia for possible preload on future Nokia devices.

Total cash and prizes for winning applications are worth more than $250,000!

Developers can submit applications in three contest categories:

• Internet Innovation – Transform consumer-focused ideas into real applications on Nokia devices using standards-based web technologies.
• Flash –Build compelling applications that expand the capabilities of Flash Lite on Nokia devices.
• Emerging Markets and Mobile Necessities – Create innovative applications that cut across mobile technology platforms. All applications will be considered, including those developed using Java, Python, or open source.

In the Flash category, there is an additional prize of $10,000 USD, for one application that also received money from the Open Screen Project Fund this year.
Details about the types of applications that can be submitted, along with the judging criteria, are available on the contest website.

Contest entries will be accepted until midnight (EST) on 30 June 2009.

Finalists will be announced on 17 August 2009, and the winners will be announced at Nokia World in early September.

Submit your application for Forum Nokia’s Calling All Innovators now »

What Does a Great Story Look Like?

A Great article by David Henderson on his blog - http://www.davidhenderson.com/

This week I have been writing about the power and value of organizational storytelling for the purpose of achieving sustained image and reputation leadership. But, what does a great story look like?

As someone who began my career in network television news, and then moved to a second career in public relations, storytelling comes second-nature … something I take for granted and wish I were better at doing. So I must stop, and dig down to explain the essential pillars of organizational storytelling.

Storytelling is about life. It is about sharing the human experience, something that is a common thread that tends to touch and connect with something inside each of us … that makes us laugh, or perhaps cry, or maybe just contemplate. We listen to a great story, and we often will retell it to a family member, friend or colleague.

As I find often during consulting, storytelling can easily be used to communicate vision, concepts, ideas and build consensus for an organization or company.

If you are the storyteller, you must love your story. You must believe in what you are sharing, passionately. You must bring it to life so that the story is right there, living between you and the audience.

A curious image, like a photo, can help … so long as it is closely tied to the story. Here’s a great example of corporate storytelling, using a photo. It was shot by my good friend, Ed Lallo, an Austin-based professional photographer who started his career in the newspaper business … so he knows how to tell a story with his camera.

There are as many different kinds of stories as colors in the rainbow. Just visit the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. If you are interested in learning the spectrum of storytelling that might be applied to your organization, that’s the place to hear amazing storytellers and techniques. Yet, each story is about people. Not about concrete roads, buildings, companies, software, products, manufacturing plants or stuff … but about people, most often an individual who has experienced something in life. The story could be about the storyteller.

My old friend and colleague, Michael Deaver, was a masterful storyteller. He said that good storytelling must contain emotional, logical and analytical elements, working together, to capture attention. I agree. The emotional piece touches our hearts; the logical piece just makes sense; and, the analytical part is supported by facts and figures. We can tell a great story that might lack either the logical or analytical pieces but … it’s got to connect with the audience emotionally in order to really work.

Storytelling must also be timely and relevant to what’s happening in the world around us. Otherwise, while it could be a good story, it lacks perspective and context.

• Storytelling has a beginning: “Let me tell you a story …”
• A middle that contains an event or experience, and …
• An ending that wraps up the story with, perhaps, a lesson learned or a surprise twist.

While many people in public relations agree about the value of organizational storytelling, few practice it. There’s got to be a significant paradigm shift, from being overly obsessed with marketing, sales and promotion, and embracing a new style that is more sharing, more conversational, more open, more credible and transparent.

Let’s get something off the table - most press releases (at least 99.9997 percent of them) are not stories. They are sales promotion pieces, and that’s one reason why news releases are so ineffective in today’s world, whether to get the media’s interest or to capture the attention of anyone else. If, on the other hand, news releases were, God forbid, written as legitimate stories, I predict they could be wildly successful. But, they are not.

Techniques for organizational storytelling, and many more elements of contemporary communications leadership are detailed in my new book, “The Media Savvy Leader: Visibility, Influence, and Results in a Competitive World.”

How to Fight Back the Recession?

Just watching the companies fighting their way through the challenges of this economic downturn one can appreciate what it means to go after intelligence aggressively.

There is a small healthcare products manufacturing company in Los Angeles, for example, that has decided to throw down the gauntlet of transforming its supply chain, sourcing and marketing systems to be more focused on rapid response times to customers. They decided that in the midst of an economic downturn, getting aggressive about how they used business intelligence could make a huge difference in their ability to survive and grow.

As it turns out, their strategy of aggressive intelligence is paying off with increased orders from e-commerce sites the business development teams had been working with for years. One of the senior managers of this firm is in my graduate-level course in International Business. Paradoxically, the recession forces his retailing customers to go multi-channel much faster than they had anticipated.

The result: an entirely new channel for his company as well.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

President Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States. "Citizenship in a Republic," Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

Coming Out Swinging ... With Knowledge

It's time for more companies to get up and dust themselves off from this recession and start fighting back – with knowledge. The easy strategies of using continuously dropping prices, sacrificing margins or even bundling products to the point of unprofitability are, to be blunt, weak. How much better to fight the good fight of bringing the knowledge in our companies to the forefront of our customers' unmet needs and knocking out their problems for them? That's the plan at this manufacturer and it is working.

Instead of complaining about how about how bad this recession is, there are those courageous companies who instead look at their customers' knowledge and process problems as their own. They attack these problems with an intensity they would in their own company. They use intelligence aggressively to serve their customers. That's the key take-away from the small manufacturer I've gotten to know in L.A. from one of my students.

Key Lessons Learned

After visiting my students' company and hearing how pervasive the mission they are on is getting engrained into their culture, a few key take-aways emerged:

• Everyone sees themselves as fighting for their customers' victories, not just their own.

This pervaded the assembly areas, and certainly included sales and service. Every person I talked to, from the manufacturing supervisors to the sales managers, directors and VPs saw the recession as a fight they would help their customers win. It wasn't about them; it was about helping their customers get through this too. The term "we got their back" came up several times.

• Using data mining to find patterns in special orders to create new build-to-order product configuration.

This manufacturer is taking their histories of special orders and looking for patterns in the data to create entirely new combinations of special order products. While these special orders were costly to produce at the time, they do provide a glimpse of what is selling. The result has been product line extensions quickly created with an increased probability of success.

• Looking for new ways to help their customers be successful in multi-channel management strategies including increasing emphasis in e-commerce.

This was a big one as the company acts as a light manufacturer for trading partners in China and Taiwan and has better availability on specific healthcare products than their competitors globally. As a result of the decision to get aggressive about how they manage data, they can now provide price and availability across all healthcare products on a 24/7 basis in three languages, and two Chinese dialects. This has been one of the key areas where they are helping their distribution partners open websites in specific Chinese provinces and throughout the Pacific Rim. The result is their sales are growing in the midst of this recession.

• Product catalogs customizable within hours for any given reseller's needs in three languages and two Chinese dialects.

  The online product catalogs are organized in an enterprise content management system so they can create specific subset catalogs and push them to a partner's website within less than 72 hours if needed. This is a major competitive advantage and further shows how aggressively this company is using intelligence.

Conclusion

What's so unique about this company is that while the recession is certainly a major concern, there is no dwelling on it. There is instead a mindset of using the recession as a reason to fight harder than ever for customers and get aggressive in their use of intelligence.

Courtesy - Louis Columbus, at Expert Access

Top Social Networking Sites in February 2009

Social networks attract users. Among the fastest growing sites in February 2009 compared to the same month a year ago: AOL Community and Twitter, according to comScore. Unique visitors to Friendster.com and Propeller.com are declining compared to a year ago. Data are based on an opt-in panel of users representative of the U.S. population.

Top Social Networking Sites by Unique Visitors, February 2009

Top Social Networking Sites by Unique Visitors, February 2009
Property	February 2008 (000)	February 2009 (000)	Change (%)
Total Internet audience	185,017	192,187	4
Social networking audience	N/A	122,290	N/A
MySpace.com	67,957	70,303	3
Facebook	32,436	57,375	77
Classmates Online	13,051	16,247	24
MyLife.com	N/A	15,345	N/A
Buzznet	5,230	8,661	66
Yahoo Buzz	2,957	7,955	169
AOL Community	76	7,261	9,513
LinkedIn	3,316	6,948	110
AIM Profiles	7,960	6,928	-13
Digg	5,546	6,917	25
Bebo	N/A	5,789	N/A
Tagged	1,704	5,396	217
DeviantART	3,710	4,770	29
Twitter	340	4,033	1,085
hi5 Networks	2,728	3,670	35
CaringBridge	1,713	2,483	45
BlackPlanet.com	2,030	2,381	17
Gaia Online	1,685	2,325	38
AddThis	407	2,020	396
SodaHead.com	777	1,801	132
Multiply	1,139	1,754	54
Friendster	2,496	1,689	-32
Xomba	967	1,591	65
Propeller	2,489	1,464	-41
MSN Groups	2,941	1,327	-55
Note: Audience is defined as all persons at U.S. home, work, college, and university locations.
Source: comScore, 2009

Courtesy - Clickz

On A Lighter Note - Phenomenal Human Mind

I CAN READ IT! CAN YOU

phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.

The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

if you can raed tihs forwrad it.

Stop Marketing, Start Branding

When most think of the term BRANDING they often associate it with the term Marketing or in some cases a cattle ranch. When they think of the term brand, generally an image or a symbol such as a logo, or a tagline come to mind. In fact, none of these associations are truly accurate. Your corporate identity (logo) or tagline, or jingle, or color scheme is only a representation of your brand, not your brand in and of itself. Your BRAND is actually what your customers PERCEIVE of you when they see your logo, hear your tagline or jingle. This is one of the most confused issues in business today. Knowing the difference can translate to rapid growth.

Marketing vs. Branding

Marketing is the act of communicating or disseminating the message of your brand. It is all about the creative vehicles you use to leverage the message to your market (e.g., advertisements or trade shows.) Branding is the process of creating and living the message of your brand. If your message isn't clearly defined with a consistent process in place that reflects and affirms it, then your marketing dollars are wasted and squander valuable budgets in the process. Our advice? Stop marketing, at least for now. And, start branding. Your challenge: Make a conscious effort to get crystal clear on the message you want to convey to your customers.

Think about ALL the facets that make up the doing of your business; from your values and behaviors, to your brand promise, to HOW you deliver your products and services, to how you promote a specific culture and "way of being" for your employees - your key assets! All of these are integral to building your successful brand. Making sure these facets show up in a conscious way, congruent with your Brand Promise, to build and sustain your brand will ensure the three key attributes of a strong brand: Relevance, Consistency and Distinctiveness.

Why focus on Relevance?

Brand RELEVANCE is matching and satisfying YOUR internal and external messages and values congruent to YOUR brand promise—attracting relevant customers to your brand.

How do your values show up in a RELEVANT way when delivering on the promise you commit to both internally and externally to your customers. Do your customers care about the same things you care about?

How relevant is Wal-Mart™ to its customers? Their tagline: Always, Low Prices, Always! What about Best Buy™? Relevance is explicit in their name? They provide the best price or the best value for the deal. Their name is relevant to the internal/external behavior and promise they deliver with each product and customer transaction.

Your authenticity must be consistently congruent with your core values, not everyone else's. So take some time to profile your perfect customer.

Consistency = Trust

Brand CONSISTENCY is showing up the same way every time, walking the talk and being true to your brand promise. Why is Consistency so important to sustaining your successful brand? What it boils down to is one simple word: Trust. Honesty is expected. Trust is engaging and intimate. It needs to be earned. Honesty is required to be in business today—Trust is something else altogether. It is one of the most important values of a brand and it requires real effort from corporations.

How you show up consistently in the various facets of your business—from how you answer the phone, to what customers see, hear, taste, touch, smell and intuit must be congruent with your promise.

Oprah is the 'Queen' of consistency. Thirty million people totally trust her. One initiative through Oprah?s Angel Network generated $12.1 million in donations for children in South Africa. No one would donate that kind of money if they did not trust Oprah and expect that she would consistently follow through on her promise.

Even You can Create Distinctiveness!

What is the one word you 'own' in the minds eye of your market that distinguishes your brand from others?

Brand DISTINCTIVENESS means you stand out uniquely and unequivocally different than your competition both internally and externally while being congruent with your Brand Promise.

What makes Fed Ex so distinctive in their industry is their unrelenting commitment to deliver. Google has transformed the experience of browsing on the internet, and Amazon and eBay with their unique approaches to e-business.

Stop Marketing and Start Branding!

• Make sure your brand's message is crystal clear and authentic to your core values (have you defined your core values?)

• Make sure every employee understands and lives your Brand Promise.

• Capitalize on creating a RELEVANT, CONSISTENT and DISTINCTIVE experience for your customers.

Creating and living the brand message cannot be overemphasized. Branding is a powerful lever for any business when it is approached in a conscious, strategic and holistic way to show up relevantly, consistently and distinctively in every way.

Courtesy - Suzanne Tulien, Principal, The Brand Ascension Group

Quit Giving It Away!

Manufacturers are leaving money on the table by not paying attention to bringing more accurate and timely pricing into their quotes.

In discussions with dozens of manufacturers, a simple truth emerges: quoting systems, even the most manual, are the lifeblood of any sales pipeline. Pricing has become both the competitive weapon of choice and in many industries however, the last differentiator in several consolidating markets.

With such a critical role in defining profitability, pricing is getting much attention this year, from the CEO level down.

Amazingly even CIOs who have at times fought re-defining selling systems in favor of spending IT money and time on consolidating ERP systems, databases, or portals, are being driven to make selling systems a priority by CEOs, Sales VPs, and General Managers who all see margin being sacrificed due to pricing inaccuracies and disconnects on quotes. The combination of accurate pricing and quoting is emerging as a priority in 2006, and it's because so many manufacturers realize that thousands if not millions of dollars are being left on the table due to pricing inaccuracies.

The First Step: Re-defining Quotes with Pricing in Mind

When sales are up and times are good, it's easy to ignore the occasional pricing mistake on a quote, or solve it through a quick phone call or even a follow-up visit. When times get tough pricing gets micromanaged because margin on every deal needs to deliver in order for a manufacturer to stay profitable. In reality manufacturers experiencing rapid growth yet complacent enough to let pricing be managed some of the time, checked for accuracy maybe once a month, and rationalizing all this with "we'll make it up on volume or that big OEM deal" doesn't cut it anymore.

Their competitors can sense this on deals where prospects share pricing data and pounce when they find you, their competitor, maybe out of sync with the going price by even 5 to 7%. Competitors are watching, your prospects and customers are watching, and if you're publicly held in the United States, even the SEC is watching through Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. All these factors and more are making pricing the competitive weapon of choice in selling and also the most important but least managed part of a quote.

The Second Step: Knowing A Good Deal When You Sell It

For those fortunate manufacturers who have growing businesses, there's a tendency to use rules of thumb, or what many call the assumption base of their companies to make quick decisions on what price to put on quotes as well. This is different than pricing accuracy, which is the point of the first step, as this step deals with analyzing the mix of customized products, services, and margin to determine if the deal the quote is meant to bring in will in fact be profitable or not. When it comes to this point, manufacturers need to quit relying exclusively on the intuition of their sales managers and executives and truly know if the deal they are trying to get through a quote is truly profitable or not. Only by integrating quoting and pricing along with the necessary tools to figure out margin can a manufacturer hope to charge prices that will deliver the highest margin possible.

The Third Step: Unleashing Pricing on New Products

Manufacturers spoken with regarding the payoff of bringing pricing into quoting remark that their biggest payoffs come from being able to quickly launch new products and pricing together, even into their dealer and distributor channels. Once the connection between pricing and quoting systems have been made, one truck manufacturer has been able to both define custom configurations of its products and pricing for each component within five weeks, a remarkable accomplishment when one considers these trucks are highly specialized and have thousands of parts and components. The lag time for one storage products vendor in pricing updates for their quoting and online sales systems was solved through brute force on the part of marketing directors spending all weekend long every three months loading up pricing tables and ensuring they were loaded and working right.

New product introductions are very tough to align with pricing, especially in to-order customized products sold through channels where each channel partner has a different pricing table. Yet if you are looking for a reason to get your quoting systems aligned with pricing, product strategies and turn them into a selling competitive advantage, the next product introduction is reason enough to look for improving how these systems work in your company. Quotes are literally just the beginning, and the integration of pricing and product customization, when managed to a series of goals is what helps to transform how companies are profitably selling today.

The Bottom Line: When sales drop off many companies put their prices into free-fall, sacrificing millions in margins. When sales are up, margins aren't looked at closely and as a result even greater opportunities for profits are lost. What's needed isn't the start of a price war or premium pricing. What's needed is the synchronizing of quoting, pricing and product strategies, making selling the competitive strategy and not just price.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus at Expert Access

How to Earn and Lock Down Customer Loyalty with Analytics

A First Time Fix is Addictive

The surest path during a recession is to invest in and even overcompensate in making those strategies, processes and systems that directly interact with and enable conversations with customers as efficient and streamlined as possible. Given the choice between spending a dollar on increasing customer loyalty by making your company easier to do business with versus not doing anything, it’s clearly better to err on the side of locking down loyalty using analytics.

Analytics are often used in customer service and service management departments for resource planning and forecasting, managing the service management system to optimal levels, also for defining schedule and route optimization, in addition to Fleet Management. All of these strategies for using analytics lead to exceptional internal efficiencies. But let’s face it. This economy has sent a very loud and clear signal … it’s a very critical time to keep the customers you have and gain new ones through exceptional, over-the-top service. Using analytics to lock down customer loyalty is possible, profitable and a strategy forward-looking company in a broad range of industries are pursuing today.

Key Points

Consider the following key points about how analytics can be used to make service more customer-centered and capable of fulfilling the goal of locking down loyalty:

First time fix percentage needs to continually go up, even faster right now. Do you know what your first time fix performance is? Get a hold of that figure and track it down and then begin to create a time series of it. Chart it over time, work with your service department to figure out how to drive this figure up. Consider it a leading indicator of customer loyalty.

Customers find first-time fixes addictive.

Service Level Agreements (SLA) need to be exceeded during this recession, and analytics can tell you if you can or not. Instead of just “getting by” on the measures of performance you commit to customers on, go after the ones specifically in your SLAs and do an exceptional job on them. When it comes time for contract and service renewals, your service strategies aimed at delivering exceptional performance can form the foundation of keeping the customer.

Attack manual processes that cost you money and automate them over the Web instead … now. Consider the fact that your customers live in a 24/7 world, why force them into a 9 to 5 world that is further constrained by when your RMA Specialists are at their desk. Automate the RMA process online. QVC, HSN and other mass merchandisers who must make multichannel management work to survive are doing this today. On the tech side specifically in the B2B arena, HP and IBM are masters of this as are dozens of component suppliers.

Get your service act together and create a dashboard to measure performance. Realize that service is the path to locking down customer loyalty in this recession. Get a dashboard together and start measuring how you are doing on a set of key measures of service performance. Resolve to do whatever it takes to drive up these measures of performance, because they are measures of your ability to keep customers loyal.

Bottom Line:

Want to lock in the loyalty of your customers during this recession? Use analytics to measure how you save them time and respect their unmet needs by trying to anticipate their needs with more targeted and efficient services strategies. When in doubt exceed their expectations on SLAs and measure � and celebrate that. That’s where the future of any company’s viability is.

Courtesy - Louis Columbus at Cincom SmartMarket

When Philosophy meets Geography in the “Age of Engage”.

We are entering into the age of engage. I using the phrase from the book – “The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today's Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture” by Denise Shiffman. Though being honest, I have not got an opportunity to read this piece of work however the editorial review at Amazon articulates that this book is an excellent primer on using the Web effectively to develop marketing strategies, Shiffman (marketing and management consultant) offers an introduction to Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 and expands on the role of the Internet as an effective tool for businesses to truly interact with their target audiences. The author uses case studies and examples (e.g., Starbucks, Apple, Best Buy) to explore the Internet's role beyond the corporate Web site.

Being dealing with Analytics and Digital marketing myself for mor than a decade the topic always amazes me the same as I was amazed on the day one. I am sure that even Denise who has articulated this work would agree that there still is a lot to discover, learn, capture and document.

Note: to readers of this blog by no means I am trying to discount the work of Denise. Another honest piece that I can mention here is that I have been asking everyone coming or going to USA to get me a copy of this. I made a quite a decent attempt to get it from my Singapore and Philippines trip lately, but no luck. This would surly give you some indication about my eagerness to read this piece of work. Additionally I would recommend people reading “Praise for The Age of Engage” section that would simply amplifies the piece of work by Denise.

Coming back to the philosophy that seems to be somewhat related to the geography, in this case. Philosophy according to Wikipedia is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language. Denise beautifully articulates (referring to the same review) that marketing has undergone a cataclysmic shift. Blogs, comment sites, and social networks have given your audience unprecedented power in their relationship with you and your products. Hence this cosmic way of involvement or engagement by all the stakeholders of the product lifecycle has transformed the way we sell or market our product. So if I may twist the definition of Philosophy for my own comfort then I can say that Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning existence, mind and knowledge.

What we marketers explore, is the ways to communicate the existence of our product or services in the mind of our customers; so when he/she requires a product or service that matches our offering he/she should have the knowledge about our product or service. Hence the probability of sale in the case could be high or little higher. Now to make it little more interesting and going back to the age of engage, what we learnt through Denise articulation is marketing has undergone a cataclysmic shift, and why is that? It is mainly due to competition, need to earn higher mind share, voyage to discover new, effective and let’s not forget in the age of the big “R” or recession, efficient methods to reach your customer(s). Hence efficiently and effectively reach to the customer when he is looking for you or your product.

Now what is Geography? Again, as Wikipedia explains Geography (from Greek γεωγραφία - geografia) as the study of the Earth and its lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena. So how it is relevant here or how it is relevant with Philosophy in the age of engage. In this forward-thinking guide to marketing in the Live Web age, Shiffman explains why and how CEOs must throw out the 'Four P s of Marketing' and replace them with a new paradigm of marketing in which email, viral buzz, search mechanisms, social aspects, widgets, avatars, authenticity, and story play major roles.

Yet again taking the liberty of redefining or giving new dimension to Geography in the age of engage – what we as marketers need to know from the Geographical aspect of our customer is? The land – where they belong or live; feature – how they are different then the other lot - culturally, socially, etc; inhabitant – where they go or interact socially; and finally Phenomena – what are the trend of buying, why they buy, when they buy and so on.

Eventually, what does the above means? Well from my worldview ;) I am making an attempt to amplify the need of explicitly understanding your customer and the voyage to reach him/her. We have entered into the age of engaging with our customer. No matter we like or dislike. With blurring boundaries in every aspect, from geography to culture to social, and so on, we (marketers) are forced to developing strategies for not for only a region, culture, or religion; rather build a strategy for the entire third planet from the Sun. Of course tactically have its local variance. A social networking site like Facebook or Orkut could be a good example. Yes, we can debate about the reasoning of one being more popular in Americas and one being in Asia.

But the fundamental essence of the offered product remains the same. As marketer it is detrimental not to understand the quintessence of the changing world, and the changing customer in the same world. Let me ask what would you do when you want to search something you don’t know about…..Hmmmmmm…..After so much of scientific research; I have come to the conclusion that most of us would Google it. That small example amplifies the importance of digital medium. Hence, “philosophically” stating, we can assume that with shift in the customer search paradigm, a lot more has shifted. So what we need to understand that there is a substantial elementary shift to one’s habit of acquiring knowledge. May be in this case from print to digital media.

But then what is Geography – Geography will also remain the same, what is this aspect we need to understand is where the customers are coming from, what is the trend, what is their behavior, and so on. So where would you get this information. I am sure philosophically stating you can Google it. And yet again with my “scientific research” I came to a conclusion of Web-Analytics. This is the feature that I am working for last 10 years, for the pure essence of its fun and passion. Why passion? Because on numerous occasion the analytics has proven me wrong, even with my decade of experience on working with various cultures, countries, societies, age groups, etc.

In Conclusion – In this age of engage[1] we not only need to know about our customer, their needs, their wants, etc. but also essentially predict it. Well I can assure you it is possible.

Hence marketer all across the globe needs to investigate into means of social media to get closer to your customers. It amazes me when I advocate about the use of social media, people ask me what a CEO or GM of a company do on a social media site. My answers is to please research, people are forming groups allover from Linkedin, Ning, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Hi5, and list will go on. Kids in schools, CEO’s running the multi-million dollar business, all are out there. People from all walks of life are twitting on twitter, writing scraps on facebook, creating the second life.

However is finding them alone is enough - the answer is a blunt NO. We need to analyze them, their needs, their space, their moods, their trends. We need to build information that converts into knowledge, knowledge that in turns, give us the power and the ability to predict, and hence make decision. The decision of where to invest, how to invest, how to capture the data, how to anticipate their needs or want, and so on.

I am sure Denise must have done an adequate research into how to engage with the customer however through this article I wanted to higher the importance of New Age Media Marketing bundled with Analytics that would help you to analyze your customers well. Working with data and analytics has given me an element of surprise, nearly every day. The surprises of what we never thought or what we thought being entirely different than what our customers are thinking or doing.

Just think about it !

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[1] I hope I am not forced to pay the royalty for using the word.