Being Smarter

We are pleased to announce our second guest blogger signing to the Being Smarter blog – from a CEO who’s company is all about helping businesses to become smarter. Aaron McCormack is the CEO BT Conferencing and will be joining us regularly with his thoughts on being smarter in business.
______________________________________

So who gives a @$£%@ about the Tweeting and Blogging and Facebook updates of anyone, when we all have jobs to get done? I was much quicker to adopt social networking tools in my personal life. Although many Facebook friends are now professional contacts and it is hard to tell the difference nowadays.

Even Twitter (the “domain of twits” I used to say) has recently become an entertaining place for me (@aaronirish) following the updates from all the various riders in the Tour de France (#tdf)

But do these tools have any role to play in helping us, or anyone else, get our work done?

There is a view that companies enabling social networks for internal use will simply end up helping their people spend more hours gossiping and sharing pictures online, rather than helping people get things delivered.

I tend to agree.

Many of my colleagues disagree. They think that corporate social networking tools (those we know, and some that are yet to be invented) will be the way that people do business going forward. People point to the way that these tools help folks build stronger relationships, find the right resources, enhance knowledge management and gain wider perspectives. Books like the Wisdom of Crowds tell us that if we can find a way of sourcing everyone’s input in a group, then the group makes better decisions.

Because you are here reading this blog, you are more likely to believe that social networking tools are useful. But would you bet your own money on it?

Let us know what you think…

Aaron McCormack is CEO of BT conferencing http://www.conferencing.bt.com/ a division of BT Group plc, one of the world’s leading providers of telecommunications services. For over 20 years, BT Conferencing has specialised in the delivery of robust, reliable and innovative conferencing solutions – backed up by high quality service and support.

Wagwire is an interesting service that’s been around for a year or so now and is clearly gathering momentum. Everyone uses text comments on blogs, however, howabout allowing people to leave an audio message on your online presence or even on your social networking profile.

Their plugin enables your visitors to leave you audio messages with a click of a button.

Setup an account in a few minutes and following registration, download the code to produce a button for your website. Upload it onto your blog on site and then sit back and wait for the voicemails to flood in.

It looks cool and certainly offers viewers something different, without having to bash away on the keyboard to leave a comment.

Wagwire in action

There’s a free trial service – or a subscription service starting from €1/month – so it’s not exactly going to break the bank!

Check it out here.

It’s always a good feeling when the industry trade press feature one of your innovations. Lesley Everett’s Walking Tall personal branding course has been featured today in PersonnelToday.com.

One of our esteemed partners and a true expert in her field, Lesley Everett commented…

“In the current climate, providing people the ability to access highly effective, but low cost training solutions has never been more important. Our personal branding modules launched on the 8.45 Club will show subscribers how to develop their personal brand in order to develop executive presence, confidence and marketability.

Lesley is one of a number of partners The 8.45 Club works with to develop courses for business audiences. If you are a true subject matter expert with a story to tell and an audience who wants to hear it – why not consider using this virtual presenter format as a way of reaching untapped audiences as well as generating an additional source of income… while you sleep.

Use the contact us link at the top of the page to request a call.

I was fortunate enough to spend a year with an excellent B2B marketing agency, called The Marketing Practice. These are folks who are on top of their game in the IT B2B marketing space. In fact, there’s no better agency for that niche in my opinion. Why? Because they get it. They spend their time immersed in the IT sector and so talk the right language. They recruit people from the IT sector and they research the customers buying in the IT sector.

If your fortunate enough to be invited to one of their S&M forums (that’s sales and marketing to you) then you’ll get insight from IT customers in bucket loads. If you aren’t so fortunate – it doesn’t matter, because they summarise the event after it’s happened.

On Lindsay Willott’s Continuous Customer Capture blog, you’ll find the presentations given, as well as links to the research behind the event.

Spend 5 mins looking through it – you will learn something I promise!

I have to admit, I’ve always been sceptical about using Facebook in a business context however I have to say I’m fast changing my mind. With 250m regular users – the law of averages says someone must be using it for things other than tracking down old school friends…

There’s a number of resources that have been written over the last month and rather than reinvent the wheel, I thought it would be useful to summarise the best ones I’ve found here…

The Webworker Daily folks always come up with sound advice. Here they list 32 ways to use Facebook for Business.

The InsideFacebook site is dedicated to providing information to developers and marketers of the Facebook platform with a post from last year which is still current talking about the opportunities for business on the platform.

Krishna De lists 7 ways to get started on Facebook for new businesses which is also an interesting take with plenty of comments too.

Hubspot has a Free downloadable 22 page E-book – containing comprehensive advice on setting up profiles, promoting a business page, a definition of groups vs. pages, advertising on Facebook and analysing traffic.

There are also a number of good books on the subject…

Facebook Marketing for Dummies

The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products,

Facebook Marketing: Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Business

Hopefully these set you off in the right direction. If you find any more good resources – why not list them below…

Internet marketing consultants continue to spring up all over the place as the online marketplace continues to hot up and shows no real signs of stopping. My question is whether you can train yourself to become your business’s resident Internet marketing expert… and become famous within your organisation for mastering this black art?

As I’ve found over the last few months, it is impossible to be expert in every field. It is also impossible to subscribe to and read everything that comes across your desk. You could easily become a full time pupil and get absolutely no work done.

You need to be selective. Pick a particular field, ringfence some time on a regular basis and focus on one or two sources of information and concentrate on those.

So why not aim to reduce or remove your spend on Internet marketing consultants and go DIY. There’s an excellent Linkedin thread below with a whole load of advice from 15 different people on where they’ve gone for advice and training.

Give it a whirl…!

In addition – we’re only 13 days away from the next round of the thirty day challenge. Demystify the internet and the world of possibility that is social media and immerse yourself for free…

If you uncover any gems – why not share them below?

One of my favourite authors, David Meerman Scott set this debate up in his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR a couple of years ago – and it continues.

The internet marketing ‘guru’s’ – you know, the guys who earn the big bucks with the giant mailing lists make a living out of capturing email addresses, however there is a growing school of thought that in ‘normal’ businesses – particularly in the B2B space that it’s a bad thing to insist on capturing addresses.

There’s a great post today from Michele Linn backing up David’s theory with three ‘aha’ moments – a thing we like here at Being Smarter.

Check out her post and see what you think.

Google has just updated its ever popular image search to guide users towards using legal imagery – that is imagery which has the consent of the copyright holder. Whilst some people may describe it as a murky area – ‘stealing’ other people’s imagery – it is actually quite clear cut.

The Creative Commons Licensing scheme has been around for a number of years and provides a simple labelling scheme for users to see if and how a particular image can be reused. Often, it’s simple case of providing an acknowledgement – in other cases, imagery or video are simply not allowed to be reused.

Google can now help in your quest to find the right images… take a look at their new service here.