Retaining and Growing Loyal Customers in a Down Economy

Let’s face it, the projects getting funded faster than any others in marketing, operations, and service are focused on more fixing big complex problems than they are on getting to know customers more individually.  Trying to bring order to chaos right now is important; yet more critical is taking the time to define customer-by-customer strategies for enriching, adding value to, and ultimately getting your customers to their goals. 

Being a major contributor to getting your customers to their goals right now is more important than any low-price leader strategy or doing bundling of services.  What customers need more than anything else right now is results.

Time to Start Leading Your Customers’ Results Revolution

It’s not easy for a director, VP or even a CEO to not panic and start spending on the areas of their companies that dissatisfy customers. From the case studies completed for courses taught in International Marketing and International Business however, this is exactly the wring thing to do.  In the panic of troubled strategies, company leaders lose track of why their customers trusted them in the first place.

If there is a strong, resonating lesson to be learned from the case studies completed of General Electric, IBM, Proctor & Gamble and Schindler it is this: transforming marketing, selling and service strategies to over-deliver results and guidance to customers in difficult times is a matter of the company doing the serving surviving.  Here are the lessons learned:

• Create webinars, seminars, and conferences aimed at giving your customers insights into their industry.  Taking this step, even if it is small and a webinar which can be inexpensively done is critical.  It signals that a strategy of helping your customers get to their goals is what’s on your agenda. Bring in an industry expert if you can afford it and give your customers insights into how they can be more efficient. Think of this as an investment in staying more relevant and valued by your customers.

• Sales need a new mission, and it involves creating account-by-account retention plans that concentrate on their unmet needs. Instead of just sending your sales reps in to buy lunches and schmooze just to keep your company’s name in front of clients, take the time and make productive use of it instead.  Start by mapping out where clients’ goals are relative to additional services, knowledge, and expertise your company can provide. If incremental services revenue gets generated, that’s excellent.  The point of this is to develop retention work-out plans on an account-by-account basis so your company stays in the role of serving your clients.  Making contributions, even if they are over and above what is paid for, is what needs to happen on these account-by-account retention plans. 

• Develop service, product and development strategies that align with account-by-account retention plan needs.  Taking this approach groups the top priorities by account so that when a single strategy, say for example creating programs for enabling them to take better advantage of your products to generate new business, so it can be done once and delivered many times over your customer base.  Taking this a step further, consider how important of a time it is right now to get the knowledge in your company organized so it can be delivered to customers needing to get more from your products.   

• Staying on target with retention plans is even more important than being tactically efficient right now. In the case studies we’ve gone through in my classes this is the hard part, the area where company cultures really get tested on their commitment to be focused on retention and not fire-fighting.  What needs to happen in this step is to concentrate on retention plans, aggregating together plan requirements and executing on them fast. 

• Customer-defined outcomes are all that really matter in retention plans, so stay clear of overcomitting. This is one of the lessons learned from P&G and their turn-around several years ago.  Retention plans involving their channel worked because they focused not on the internally-derived project plans but on the timeline that made the most sense for their customers, despite the challenge this put P&G through.  It was worth it however.  P&G held onto their channels in the midst of a major re-organization and also had the ability to launch products globally at the same time with greater accuracy than ever before. 

• Transaction-driven sales reps must embrace the role of teaching over selling for customer retention to work.  This is the really hard part of any customer retention strategy.  Good sales reps are wired to exceed quotas and spend every waking second thinking about how to accomplish this. Retention plans need to be rolled out so that sales reps see the long-term value of holding onto these customers.  Only then will the hard work and little immediate gratification of commission earned work.  Also, there needs to be a VP Sales-level ownership and support of the program to make such a big cultural shift in a sales organization.

Bottom line: Retaining customers isn’t about pricing, bundling or gimmicks.  It’s about getting your company so engrained into their unmet needs through the use of retention plans and the excellent execution that your company becomes essential to their success. As rewarding as companies at times find firefighting because of the “quick fix” satisfaction it provides, does nothing to actually hold onto customers.  Investing time in tailoring specific retention plans that deliver results does.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus @ Perfect CEM

Technorati Tags: Economy,Marketing,Marketing in Economy,Recession,Retaining Customers

The Celebration of Guru Purab

On Occasion of Guru Nanak Jayanit most part of India would be celebrate the birthday of Guru Nanak Dev Ji. Hence I would take this opportunity to tell people about what this festival means for the people of India.

The religion of Sikhism preaches that there is one God but that he is formless. That is why the Sikhs do not worship idols. The festivities in the Sikh religion revolve around the anniversaries of the 10 Sikh Gurus. These Gurus were responsible for shaping the beliefs of the Sikhs. Their birthdays, known as Gurpurabs, are occasions for celebration and prayer among the Sikhs.

Guru Nanak Dev Ji (the First Nanak, the founder of Sikhism) was born on 20th October, 1469 in Rai-Bhoi-di Talwandi in the present Shekhupura District of Pakistan, now Nanakana Sahib. The Birthday of Guru Nanak Sahib falls on Kartik Puranmashi i.e. full moon day of the month Kartik. In the Gregorian Calendar, the birthday of Guru Nanak usually comes in the month of November, but its date varies from year to year, based on the traditional dates of the Indian Calendar.

The Festival

The celebration is generally similar for all Gurpurabs; only the hymns are different. The birthday celebration usually lasts three days. Generally two days before the birthday, Akhand Path (a forty-eight-hour non-stop reading of the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikhs) is held in the Gurdwaras.

The day prior to the birthday, a procession is organised which is led by the Panj Pyaras (Five Beloved Ones). They head the procession carrying the Sikh flag, known as the Nishan Sahib and the Palki (Palanquin) of Sri Guru Granth Sahib. They are followed by teams of singers singing hymns, brass bands playing different tunes, 'Gatka' teams (Martial Arts) display their swordmanship, and devotees sing the chorus. The procession pours into the streets of the town which are covered with buntings and decorated gates for this special occasion. The leaders also spread the message of Guru Nanak.

On the day of the Gurpurab, the day begins early in the morning with the singing of Asa-di-Var (morning hymns) and hymns from the Sikh scriptures followed by Katha (exposition of the scripture) together with lectures and recitation of poems in the praise of the Guru. Following that is the Langar or special community lunch, which is arranged at the Gurudwaras by volunteers. The idea behind the free communal lunch is that people should be offered food in the spirit of seva (service) and bhakti (devotion).

Guru Nanak Jayanti is celebrated by the Sikh community all over the world and is one of the most important festivals in the Sikh calendar. The celebrations are especially colourful in Punjab and Haryana.

The article is an excerpt from Wikipedia

Four Factors Absolutely Essential for Success

In Business or Life, by Tom Nies, Expert Access

There are four factors, or ingredients, that are absolutely essential for success in any and every pursuit. These four factors, which may be considered like the four points on a compass for success, are:

1. Desire to succeed
2. Knowledge that provides the foundational ability to succeed
3. Behavior - habitual and disciplined behavior that produces success
4. Love of the pursuit that stimulates and supports the desire for success

Desire

Those who teach the sciences of marketing and sales have long emphasized the acronym AIDA. This acronym stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. It is these four aspects that must be developed if one is to successfully market or sell any idea or product.

Of course, the key idea is desire because it is desire that motivates, or moves, the potential buyer's action to choose and to commit, which wins the sales success. Desire is also the stimulating force that triggers the pursuit of success in any endeavor. As Vince Lombardi, the legendary American football coach, relentlessly insisted,

"You've got to pay the price."

Great companies that succeed will do "Whatever It Takes" to help their customers succeed in their pursuits. These two ideas are, of course, the same; that is, that there is sacrifice or effort needed, indeed demanded, in order to succeed. We must be willing to make the commitments needed to gain the prize sought.

In more recent times, these ideas have been sloganized as "keep your eyes on the prize." But for one to make the necessary sacrifices and efforts, first there must be the desire. And the greater the success desired, the greater must be the resolve. "I want something; therefore, I need to do various things." I want; I need.

All great champions in sports and other competitive pursuits quite regularly and openly say "I want to win." And these great champions are willing to do "Whatever It Takes" (within ethical limits) to accomplish their goal. And, as they achieve successes, these successes not only provide the gratification sought, but at the same time, they stimulate and increase the desire to seek still higher successes, while increasing the confidence needed to seek to achieve yet greater goals.

Knowledge

Just what is knowledge?

Photo courtesy of JV Kua

Simply, knowledge is a body of knowing about a specific focus or discipline. The greater the body of knowing, the more knowledge one is said to possess. This possession of knowing is a key idea. The pursuit of any possession requires an effort, more specifically a human effort. A human effort is one that demands a willful act of free choice.

This free human choice in pursuit of knowledge also infers ignorance. To so focus oneself on one endeavor of interest in order to gain increasing knowledge, one must of necessity ignore, or remain ignorant in, other areas of potential knowledge. So, as knowledge is developed in a certain area of specialized interest, one becomes increasingly more dependent on other specialists who can support or provide for the lacking or ignorance of the knowledgeable specialist in other ignored areas of need. This, of course, implies not only the need for TEAMWORK, but also the realization of one's own limitations and dependencies.

Knowledge Isn't Power

Francis Bacon was a widely respected intellectual contemporary with Shakespeare. Bacon's dictum, "Nosse es Posse," spoken in the Latin infinitive, is precisely translated as "To know is to be able." Unfortunately, this is usually translated incorrectly as "Knowledge is Power." Knowledge really is not power; it only provides the ability to perform, to do, to accomplish, or to have the potential power necessary to achieve or succeed at some task or mission.

Simply said, "Nosse es Posse" means that one is knowledgeable. This word contains three elements: knowing (know), a body of knowing (knowledge), and an ability (able). But we all have known many who may seem to be knowledgeable enough, yet never seem to accomplish very much. We tend to call these people "underachievers."

Of course, teams of people, organizations, and nations too, can be, and too often are, also underachievers. Still, knowledge is necessary to success.

Sun Tzu, recognizing this, taught thousands of years ago that,

"It is foolish to expect success from untalented people."

It is also unwise to expect success from an unknowledgeable person, or team. To be successful, emphasize the pursuit, acquisition, performing and sharing of knowledge.

Knowledge must become activated in order to actualize any potential reality or pursuit. This idea leads directly to the third factor.

Habituated and Disciplined Behavior

Perhaps the reason that so many New Year's resolutions are so quickly broken is that there was never any true resolve in the resolution. The "act" portion of the above words is emphasized to draw attention to the very real demand for human action. All human action demands a combination of the intellect and the will. We must first know what we seek to do, and then we must freely act to achieve this end. Strong actions demand great resolve.

The more consistently we act in a certain way, the more habituated becomes this behavior. But habits, or habituated behavior, can be either helpful or harmful. One who always acts truthfully becomes known as a truthful person; one who even occasionally lies becomes known as a liar. We become as we behave. So, while we possess knowledge, we become accomplished through our actions.

Socrates stated this as follows:

"Act the way you want to be and soon you'll be the way you act."

Again, we become as we behave.

So, to become accomplished, we must behave in a disciplined manner, which becomes habituated. A disciple is one who has learned from a teacher and then consistently and faithfully acts according to these teachings or learned knowledge. Of course, teaching and learning are not the same things. The teacher tries to help another to learn, but the learning is something that takes place within the learner who is gaining knowledge. But learning is not a passive process.

Get Active

At Cincom, we hold "Learning Labs" that seek to both transmit ideas and understandings, but also require labor by the learner. The word Laboratory combines both the ideas of Labor, or active participation, and Oratory, or verbal presentation. Effective and efficient learning requires both teachers and active learners.

cAtive learning is greatly aided and facilitated by practice, discussions, workshops and active interactions of various types. Practice also includes rehearsals and repetitions. These efforts help to clarify and confirm understandings and skills in a safe and non-threatening and less risky environment than does the "real" performance, encounter or competition.

Compete

(Photo courtesy of Konderminator)

It's the same with all other skills.

Our capabilities and mental powers are tested most when they are placed under stress. And like the chain that always breaks at its weakest link, whenever we are weak, we will tend to fail when under stress. Those who fail to prepare are preparing to fail. But while practice may not make perfect, it does make permanent. So, as we practice, it's important to do so under the guidance of or assistance from learned coaches or teachers who can aid and assist accomplishments.

These learning ideas all revolve about the need for discipline. We must study carefully and continuously what we are seeking to accomplish, or become proficient and accomplished in. And it helps greatly to study under knowledgeable teachers who demand disciplined performance. To add to Sun Tzu's dictum, one might say, "It is foolish to expect success from untalented, unlearned or undisciplined people."

Love of the Pursuit

Over the years, I have been blessed with the opportunity to meet and personally discuss their careers with quite a few highly successful persons. One of the key ideas I always pursue is to ask what is it that this person feels was the most important factor in their success. Inevitably, the answer is phrased in the following way:

"One must find something that one truly loves, and then commit oneself totally to that pursuit."

So often and so convincingly has this been said that I believe that one could lay down as a first principle that a deep and abiding love of one's pursuits is the shortest and surest way to attain the end sought, and to gain the knowledge and develop the skills and behaviors necessary for the successes targeted.

(Photo courtesy of Lala Lisa)

Just as one who truly and deeply loves another person always seeks the best interests and happiness of the other, so too does one who truly loves one's profession, or vocation, always seek to honor and fulfill those pursuits to the greatest degree possible. Quite rightly has love been so often likened to a burning fire.

As the fire consumes the fuel, it burns brighter and more strongly. And so, larger fuel can be added to a fire as it grows stronger.

There is no limit to the size or appetite of a fire. Similarly, the more one knows and loves one's pursuits, the greater becomes the appetite for more knowledge, greater challenges and more significant ways to serve one's pursuits. Knowledge, love and service—these three ideas are intimately interrelated. The more one knows another, the more one can and usually does love another. And the more one loves another, the more one seeks to serve and to sacrifice oneself for that other.

It's the same for a pursuit, a career or a vocation.

One simply cannot and will not give oneself totally to anything that one does not truly love. But when one does so love, then one seeks to unite with, or to surrender oneself to, that other person or pursuit.

For example, the professional golfer does not also try to concurrently pursue a career as a tennis player. Rather, the professional wants to give himself or herself totally and completely to that profession. Without the intense focus that total commitment demands, one cannot excel at one's career, profession or pursuits. This intense focus, or total abandonment, and commitment demands a deep and brightly burning fire of love. Those who work only for money may become satiated when enough money is gained. But those who truly love never become satiated. As long as the love grows, the desire to know more and to serve better grows as well.

In the End

In the end, it's not really money that motivates us.

The Olympics, which are built upon the idea of amateur competition, are a par excellence example of the love for the sport being the driving force that knows no bounds. In fact, the word amateur is derived from the Latin word amare, which means "to love." And the more one loves one's work, the more fun it becomes.

Think about that.

We love our profession, it's fun, truly great fun, and besides that we get paid for doing something that we love and enjoy doing.

What more could one ask?

Tiger Woods says "I love golf" as frequently and fervently as he says "I want to win."

These two twin desires are in fact simply different aspects of the same thing—a love for one's pursuits. It's the same with all great achievers. They love, truly love, what they do; and so they want to do what they love as well as possible. The Olympic Gold Medal, or the trophy won, is not the prize; rather, it is the symbol of the prize. That prize is surpassing excellence achieved. And note too that Tiger Woods does not say, "I want to win for the money involved." Even though large amounts of money usually accompany great successes, the money involved is not the primary motivator of truly great achievers.

Conclusion

Top earnings, prestige, celebrity status, the respect and admiration of others—all of these, and more, are by-products or fringe benefits for those who achieve eminence in their careers.

But it is the four factors of

• Desire
• Knowledge
• Behavior and
• Love

that are the drivers and energies that produce the excellent results that are so universally admired and respected.

The Power of Web – White House 2.0

Get ready for White House 2.0. That's what many are expecting when President-Elect Barack Obama becomes President Obama in January and puts the power of his unprecedented Internet operation to work in the Oval Office.Obama relied heavily on the Web for his victory over John McCain -- from organizing volunteers to fundraising to communicating -- and expectations are high he will turn to the Internet again to further his White House agenda.

"A lot of people are speculating," said Julie Germany, director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics Democracy & the Internet. "Will an Obama administration use its vast back-end system, its database, all of the online communities it developed, to actually mobilize advocacy?"

"It could, for example, email or text message or call people who live in certain districts to get them to lobby their senators and Congressmen on issues that the Obama administration cares about," she said. Micah Sifry, co-founder of techpresident.com, a blog about politics and the Web, thinks it will -- or at least try. "By giving people a sense that they really do have a stake and a say they will be much more motivated to do things in support of his legislative agenda because they'll feel like it's their agenda too," Sifry said. "He is going to learn, either by succeeding or failing at this, that the more he partners with his supporters the more power he will have," he said

"The more he simply tries to push a message at them and make them do something the less power he will have," Sifry added. Obama's first moves after winning the election would indicate that he plans to not only mobilize his faithful but also listen to them.

In an email sent to millions of supporters on election night, Obama thanked those who gave their "time, talent, and passion to this campaign." But, he added, there was still "a lot of work to do" and he would "be in touch soon about what comes next." Change.gov, the official website launched by the Obama transition team on Thursday, invites users to "share your story and your ideas, and be part of bringing positive lasting change to this country."

Under the headline of "Open Government," change.gov urges users to "Share Your Vision" via email and asks them for their email address and zip code, essential elements in building an online data-base. Craig Newmark, founder of online classifieds site craigslist.com, served as a technology adviser to Obama and is an advocate for a more open and responsive government.

"In New York and San Francisco there are so-called '311' programs," he said. "The idea is that it's customer service for local government and if you need a pothole fixed you contact 311. "Well let's start expanding 311 systems to all of government," he said. "There's also the whole transparency thing," Newmark added. "The Internet is all about transparency. The first phase is the election campaign then, afterwards, getting some real grass-roots democracy in there." David Almacy, who served as Internet and e-communications director for President George W. Bush, said the Internet is "a very powerful tool in communicating the president's agenda."

Internet is basically a 24-hour seven-day-a-week spokesperson," Almacy said. "While we're sleeping at night it's still available for those who are searching on energy legislation or the war on terror or the war in Iraq." Almacy, who overhauled whitehouse.gov during his two years in the White House, making it a much more dynamic website, warned though that the Obama administration may find there are limits to how much it can do. For example, "you're not allowed to place cookies on people's machines," he said of the electronic spies which gather information about users. "We had to work within the bounds that we were able to play with."

There might be some people who would be less likely to trust the government as much as they trust their political campaigns," Almacy added. Sifry said Obama "seems to have the right instinct but the proof is going to be in the pudding, as they say, in the details of how this plays out." Germany agreed. "There's a huge difference between being a candidate and actually being in the administration, and a lot changes from the day you win an election and the day you're inaugurated," she said.

Courtesy – Times of India

Finding New Markets by Tracking Channel Partner’s Customer Satisfaction Scores

It’s time to question the assumption that the largest channel partners and resellers deliver the highest levels of service.  The argument goes that these resellers have the resources, processes, systems and experience to deliver excellent service to every customer, every time. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Under attack from their cross-channel competitors and having to routinely sacrifice margins, bundle in services, discontinue unprofitable lines while attempting to stay up to speed with new product introductions and the technologies behind them, the largest resellers often deliver the worst customer satisfaction.  They have too many distractions to find new markets as efficiently as smaller and more focused resellers do.

Channel Loading Now In Progress – What about Satisfaction?

Well into the 4th quarter, these largest resellers are getting loaded up with inventory, motivated by Market Development Funds (MDF), CO-OP Programs, even cash sales incentives taken directly to gross margin, they are doing what they do best: move product. 

Nailing sales quotas is critical right now. Yet so is retaining your brand name and reputation as well, and your customer loyalty above all.  It’s time to start evaluating your channel partners for more than just their ability to move tonnage when it comes to products and more on their long-term ability to deliver solutions that stay relevant.  It’s time to see which resellers can also lead you into new markets too. 

Time to Start Managing Channels by Value
The mid-tier and smaller channel partners and resellers need to be looked at from their contribution to value-added services they add today and have the potential to in the future.  Entirely new market segments, many of them vertical, are being found today based on concentrating on nurturing and measuring channel partners on value, not sales alone.  The 20 year dominance of Printronix for example in bar coding and now RFID is attributed to this strategy.
Concentrating on the value partners are delivering can give you insights into entirely new markets – insights not possible with just a sales volume standpoint.

Getting There from Here

It seems counterintuitive to say that focusing on nothing less that sales results given the economy and all the bad economic news is foolish.  Bet remember that the best performing companies look at these slow times to aggressively invest time and effort to get stronger, more knowledgeable, more agile to capitalize on the bounce-back of the global economy.  The catalyst of this idea comes from the blog post Crisis Advice from GE's Immelt: Stay Committed to Growth. In this blog post is a great quote:

“Keep your company safe but keep building the future.”

Building for the future means getting to the truth of what your resellers are really contributing.  Sure, the largest and best financed resellers can help you slam-dunk your quarterly and yearly quotas. But what about your long-term relationships with customers?  Your brand reputation? Your ability to find entirely new solutions based on the lessons these resellers can give to you? The fostering and nurturing of customer loyalty?  

You’ll never know if your largest resellers are contributing to or detracting from your brand and customer loyalty until you start measuring customer satisfaction.  Consider these potential ideas to gain greater insights into customer satisfaction across your entire reseller base.

• Getting Your Channels Twitterpated. Get on Twitter and post customer satisfaction surveys often, solicit feedback, and track customer satisfaction by reseller and post it on your Intranet sites.  It will surprise you; often the largest resellers have the worst customer satisfaction scores.

• Facebook Applications for Tracking Reseller Satisfaction. Go after your customers using Facebook as well, and get them to opt in and provide the best and worst experiences they have had with your products and channels.

• Look To Your Resellers Who Excel At Customer Satisfaction for new market ideas.  There is an abundance of examples that show how small yet highly focused resellers can give you entirely new ideas of how to find new markets and dominate them.  The slow yet deliberate path of Printronix to dominate the bar coding and then the printing of RFID tags was a 20 year overnight success story.  It all started with resellers who found this market opportunity.

Bottom line: Get ready for the turnaround by measuring how effective your channel partners are in nurturing customer satisfaction, because in discovering that you will find new market opportunities as well. 

Courtesy – Louis Columbus at Perfect CEM

Are we at the brink of a new cross channel digital monitoring?

With the experience of working in the digital marketing space and dealing with various analytics reports over the years, an astounding fact still keeps me wondering - how can we be more effective in analyzing the marketing campaigns in the digital space & across various digital channels? Digital space does provide marketers with an enormous opportunity to dig much deeper into the marketing campaigns with the ability to analyze the “traffic”. Analytics and its ability to analyze is one attribute that always attracts me towards the digital marketing vis-à-vis traditional or print media. Mckinsey recent survey suggest that in fact, 55 percent of the companies are cutting their expenditures on traditional media in order to increase funding for their online efforts, compared with only 43 percent of the respondents whose companies don’t measure the impact.

Of course digital media has made enable marketer to build effective and efficient mean to reach its target audience. The same Mckinsey report highlights the most exciting innovations are taking place in three areas:

• In media planning, marketers have been developing analytics that allow them to compare the effectiveness of on- and offline efforts.
• They are also developing a better appreciation of how online marketing messages convert shoppers into buyers, both online and in stores, and using these insights to make specific digital-advertising techniques more effective.
• Third, to target advertising messages with greater precision, a few leaders are learning to measure the ties among people in social networks—something we call the optimization of social media.

The current economic condition and squeezed marketing budget has also been instrumental in leading marketers into this space. Of course by no mean I plan to discount the value of digital marketing space by the economic situation but highlight the importance of building a “window” to effectively monitor & especially cross channel.

The rapid increase of marketer’s dependence on the digital space and enormous growth of online advertising hides a serious challenge: the digital world has developed faster than the tools needed to measure it. Hence would like to recommend a more integrated reporting mechanism or even a “unified” view of traffic. We have been working over the years in the CRM space to build a unified view of our customer, which is wonderful. However with the increase in spending ,and above all the dependence on the digital marketing; are we at a brink of a new stage of evolution in the digital media and its analytics ~ An integrated or unified view of our traffic across channels?

We have various mechanisms to monitor our website, advertisement, registration, incoming/outgoing traffic, regions, and so on. With the explosion of Web 2.0 platforms such as blogs, discussion forums, peer-to-peer networks, and various other types of social media, all of which continue to proliferate across the internet at lightning speed. Now we (marketer) even have to monitor this space. A tool that has really attracted me in the Social Media Monitoring space is Sentiment Metrics . SentimentMetrics locates and stores all the content about your brand, from millions of blogs, popular discussion boards, news and press release sites, and then cleans and analyses the data, presenting it in clear easy to read tables and graphs. Hence for companies struggling with monitoring the social media, this tool is a recommended try.

Coming back, this forces me to think that marketer spend on digital media is increasing every minute however it surprises me when the same marketers does not understand the value of analytics. Still they are happy to see Click through, webhits and so on. But does that provides enough information where you can take or implement decision based upon some serious quantifiable analysis. Unfortunately based upon my recent research and interactions with marketer, the answer is still no or not clear.

We really need to think quick and hard to how we can firstly build an effective mechanism to track and analysis the traffic, because apparently that is the fundamental to any customer, sales, and so on. Secondly we truly require a technological integrated approach to a unified view of our traffic and measure the RCQ (for reach, cost, and quality) of the same. Being hypothetical but optimistic to see the ability of analytics to track the traffic, cross channel and in an integrated manner, not matter is the ads runs on google, yahoo, facebook and so on.

Some think to ponder this weekend. Have a happy weekend.

**The article takes pointers from Mckinsey article ­– “How poor metrics undermine digital marketing” by Jacques Bughin, Amy Guggenheim Shenkan, and Marc Singer.

Twitter and personal branding:

This is an interesting article by David Scott about the phenomena called as Twitter. I echo his opinion about some good practices while twitting. His article…

I've been enjoying Twitter and (so far) have managed not to become obsessed. I'll tweet a few times a day and check out others now and then throughout the week.

As you probably know, people use Twitter to keep their "followers" (people who subscribe to their Twitter feed) updated on their life. For instance, you might tweet about the conference you're attending, the project you're engrossed in, or you might ask your network a question. Users can choose to follow the Twitter updates of anyone they want to hear from: family members, colleagues, or perhaps the author of the last book they read.

Twitter has been a valuable personal branding tool for me. I've connected with people who read my stuff, met new contacts, pointed people to my books, and promoted speaking engagements. All for free and in just a few minutes a day.

Many people ask me about Twitter and it's use in personal branding and marketing. But they immediately dive into stuff like "how often should I tweet", "what should I tweet about", "is it cool to DM people" (send direct messages), and other details of using Twitter. Well, that's all fine, but the vast majority of people miss the most basic (and important) personal branding aspect of all.

Interesting?? read more