I think this is a good follow up to my last post about leadership and setting expectations as well. So here it is. Picking your north star is really about setting a mid/long-term direction for your company or group. It must meet four basic characteristics:

1. You must be able to see it from just about anywhere
2. It must stay in the same place
3. It must be far enough away that you’re not going to get all the way there anytime soon
4. It must be aspirational

An Example From Manufacturing

The first example comes from the book I mentioned above and is based on the story of Paul O’Neill who picked “worker safety” as the north star for Alcoa when he joined the company. Here’s a short excerpt from a Business Week book review:

When Alcoa (AA) introduced Paul O’Neill as its Chief Executive Officer in 1987, investors thought the new boss was pulling a prank on them. Standing on a stage, O’Neill did not speak about increasing market share or earnings forecasts. Instead, he pointed out the nearest emergency exits. “In the unlikely event of a fire or other emergency,” he said, “you should calmly walk out, go down the stairs to the lobby, and leave the building.” O’Neill’s sole focus that day was on how to make a habit of worker safety.

What O’Neill knew was that in the process of eliminating injuries in his factories -which incidentally make aluminium in a process that is not exactly low risk- he would drive many other positive changes. In fact he improved  plant efficiency, employee morale, union relations, and the bottom line. This is because his north star had a surrounding constellation of  business goals that would also be met if he headed towards it.

An Example From Development

For the past year and a half I’ve been using an application called Asana to manage my team. It’s a simple task management tool comparable to MindJet Tasks, Pivotal Tracker, Trello and others. Though I don’t know if this is an “official” north star, I’ve heard and read that Asana is focused on “speed” …. and I see it represented in their service. When I say “speed” I mean it in a couple of contexts.

In the first case the user experience in Asana is very fast which means that you can enter tasks into the system faster than any other solution I’ve seen. The’ve also made the user experience visually light but information rich which means it’s quick to parse a large amount of information on the screen whether you’re in a browser or their mobile app.

The other context has to do with development. Before starting development on the service the team at Asana created a development framework called Luna which was designed to make product development faster (among other things). And, if you look at the rate of development compared to the size of the team working on Asana it’s pretty impressive how much they’ve built in a short time.

When you orient around a north star it has the potential to impact all aspect of your business from the front-end to the back-end. Again, lots of associated benefits cascade down from a single north star.

Finding Inspiration

Finding your north star may not be easy but it has huge potential for your team because it simplifies the process of validating choices on a daily basis. It also serves as a single guiding principle that every one can align to, communicate about, and celebrate. I think of a north star as being surrounded by a constellation of supporting stars that compliment it. I realize that I’m pushing the metaphor here, but the gravity that holds constellations together tends to look a lot like a unique differentiator.

Asana’s focus on speed has allowed them to make inroads with consumers (Asana has avoided industry specialization). On the other hand, Pivotal Tracker’s focus on Agile has lead to significant traction in the development arena. And, MindJet’s solution with a unique integration to their planning tool is well suited to business management. In short, there is no shortage of north stars to choose from and in addition to all the other benefits I’ve outlined above you’ll get a differentiated product or service.

Can you think of other companies that are aligning around a north star? What are they? is it working? Any skeptics out there?

The post Pick Your North Star appeared first on Smart Method Blog.

1. Enterprise data systems tend be less “real-time” oriented than social, will this have to change as social data proves more and more valuable to the enterprise?
2. Can you give us insight into the half-life of social data?
3. Social data -like many data types- is full of vanity metrics, can you shed light on what the truly valuable social data is?
4. How do you see social data being used as part of enterprise marketing systems such as advertising platforms and email platforms?
5. Some of the first questions that come up around social data involve privacy policies. Can you share your perspective on where privacy is headed and what it will mean for enterprises?
6. How do you reconcile user identities across platforms?
7. Can you each provide an example of where enterprise data and social data were used to drive business value?
8. When we sit at this panel next year what will we be talking about?
9. Arguably Oracle’s most successful product is it’s database technology. Can you speak to how this technology is meeting the new demands we’ve discussed?
10. What strategies should companies consider to move beyond fan pages to get to that rich profile at the individual level?

The post Social Data, Discussed @ The Oracle Social Summit appeared first on Smart Method Blog.

Leaders Don’t Motivate People

I think that many leaders think that motivating and inspiring their teams is their most important job. I disagree, my experience tells me that people are inherently motivated if you can create a secure and stable working environment with fair compensation and engaging opportunities. Certainly there will be opportunities to motivate but these are no more frequent than the opportunity to celebrate what has been accomplished.

Here’s a great video on the topic of what motivates and drives workers:

Leaders Are Teachers

In the last couple of years I’ve discovered that the number one reason that my team does not produce the results I am looking for is a lack of direction on my part. In short, I have not been descriptive enough about what my desired outcome was. To be clear, I do not want to have to be prescriptive about how to do something because I want my team to be entrepreneurial and I want to create space for innovation. And on top of that, I want to create space for dialogue about the desired outcome. But to get all that I find that you need to start with a very clear description of the outcome you’re looking for.

I found that working with virtual assistants has been an extreme example of this approach. VA’s are not very entrepreneurial in my opinion, but they are VERY good at following precise direction. If something is unclear they simply stop and wait for feedback. After this happens once or twice you quickly learn to think through all the steps and make sure everything is clear. While this works it adds overhead up front and reduces some of the value of outsourcing. In some cases this is unavoidable, but what’s better is to make the goal VERY clear and to let them determine how to satisfy it. Leadership is about transitioning your team from this first approach to the second.

For those interested in learning more about how to be a great teacher, I’d recommend a book that I’m reading called Teach Like A Champion.

Leaders Set Expectations

Where most people think leaders “motivate” I’d propose that they think of “set expectations” instead. This is where the art of leadership comes in from my perspective. If expectations are too high your team will lose it’s drive. If you set the bar too low they’ll lose respect for your guidance and your business will ultimately suffer. That said, in my experience teams -and people for that matter- are typically capable of doing more than they think they can. One technique for working at the upper-end of the sustainable range is to balance expectations within a larger framework.

Imagine that you’ve got two dinner plates with one about two inches larger than the other. If you take the same amount of food and serve it to someone on each of these plates you’ll find that how “full” they feel when done is dependent to some degree on the size of the plate. Eating all the food on an overflowing small plate makes them feel more “full” than eating all the food on a large plate. Same thing with work. As a leader you have an opportunity to frame your expectations in the context of larger business goals. This not only puts a specific expectation in context, it also invests the worker in a goal that is bigger than themselves. In short, they understand the larger vision and feel connected to it.

Lead by Example

I don’t know if leaders are born with relevant tendencies but I do know that we can learn to be better leaders. At some point leaders chose to “lead” a group of people and from that point onward they’ve started to become more qualified to lead. When you lead you get exposed to different experiences and choices. Assuming that you’re capable of learning from the experiences than you’re on your way to becoming a better leader. Sometimes I think that this is all the distinguishes leaders. So, if you’re thinking about how to take on more leadership this is your invitation to make it happen.

The post Leadership Is Often About Setting Expectations appeared first on Smart Method Blog.

The topic of targeting with social data is a constant refrain in my world these days, and I just learned about a use case that’s worth sharing. What makes it stand out is the fact that it’s focused on historical social data. Actually, this was the second time that historical social data came up in the last few months so here’s the story. This summer Disney launched a film which co-starred  Whiteney Houston who departed in early 2012. But they saw a unique opportunity to target promotion of the film to the community of people who celebrated Whitney’s life on Twitter in the days following her death.

Rewind the social data back to the days after her death and you’ve got a HUGE audience of people raising their hands saying they LOVE Whitney. Those people are still using social today and if they don’t know about the Disney film they’re about to.

Ok, here’s another use case just for those retailers in my audience. If you haven’t heard of MyBuys they’re a good example of a company looking for annual trends -of course, Oracle supports this kind of thing too- that help with ad and retail optimization. In short, when the holidays approach they start dusting off their cookies, building segments, and targeting personalized content based on how you shopped during the holidays last year. Pretty cool and yet another way to squeeze a bit more bang out of your buck.

This all begs the question, what value will your brand find if it starts rewinding your social data? Is it time to bring back the most engaging posts of 2011? Is it time to suggest a follow up interview with that journalist wrote a positive editorial about your technology last year? Granted, your content strategy team should be all over this already …. but they’re not. They’re all focused too focused on the real-time, right now, and what’s happening next playbook to look in the rear view mirror. Especially considering that no one’s really given them -or told them to use- a rear view mirror for social. And, in reality, this extends beyond social and is just a general reminder that those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. Following this, retailers should be studying which pages/layouts/products/designs did best last year with their web analytics tool of choice. My suggestion, install your rear view mirror now. It’s a competitive advantage.

Or, maybe I’m just being a little nostalgic as we close out the year Here’s one of my favorite posts from about a year ago … still as pertinent today as back then.

The post Targeting Meets Time Travel appeared first on Smart Method Blog.

I’ve found that it’s useful to print up our personas and hang them on the wall so that you can walk over and review them as you debate some business or design decision. If you do this, I recommend putting up a page that explains what personas are. At Involver it was fun to watch my colleagues and guests to the office read and react to them. Here’s what our explanation poster looked like:

And here is what one of our personas looked like. We developed a handful of these to round out the folks that we designed for or worked with. Remember, these are fictitious characters and are NOT based on specific individuals.

One thing that you may notice about these personas is that they are designed for marketing and sales use. Of course, you can adjust the format to meet your specific needs. Here I call out which collateral is most relevant to each persona along with selling points. If you’ve got other great reference examples please post links in the comments.

The post Sample Personas from Involver appeared first on Smart Method Blog.

My career has primarily been spent at small and medium sized businesses -and for the last several years at start ups- but today I find myself at one of the largest companies in the world. In this post, I’ll share just a few initial observations on the move, though this seems like topic I’ll revisit. As I haven’t written about this before you may not be aware that Involver, a social tech startup where where I ran the marketing group, was acquired by Oracle back in September. in short, I just went form a tiny startup to a tech giant.

To Join Or Not To Join, It’s All About The People
There are entrepreneurs out there who think of giant companies as places where their ideas go to die. As you might imagine they don’t tend stay long after the acquisition process. Of course, acquiring companies have some compensation levers to encourage folks to stick around if they think they can thrive in the new environment. As for me, I can’t say that I wasn’t a little wary of Oracle but the thing that made that feeling evaporate quickly was the people in my group. At the end of the day, the people that your are going to work with have more influence on this decision than the size of the company.

Part of the OTN team at our recent offsite. This was “crazy shirt” day.

It’s A Different Kind Of Maze
I’ve been struggling to come up with a sensible metaphor to describer small vs big companies …. and I’m not sure this one really does it justice, but here it is. If you think of working at a company as navigating a maze than at small companies and start ups it seems like you’re often being judged on how quickly you can move through the course. You have to get very creative and work with very limited resources but you can typically find your way around challenges. Whereas at big companies a big part of what matters is how effectively you can break down the walls and establish throughways. This is more about finding ways of tapping into resources that will demolish barriers.

My New Role
My new role at Oracle includes a range of responsibilities but my primary focus will be on managing the Oracle Technical Network which is the largest developer community in the world. I am, of course, excited to implement a lot of the technology that I’ve helped build and market over the last several years. If you’re interested in learning more about OTN visit us at: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork. One other aspect of this role that excites me is the fact that marketers will have to become more and more technical to be competitive, for this reason I’m already thinking about how to build interaction points between the technical community at Oracle and the larger community. If you have ideas, I’d love to hear them.

The post Becoming An Intrapreneur At Oracle appeared first on Smart Method Blog.

In short, if Apple can train kids to buy songs for a dollar why can’t Facebook train kids to drop a buck to reach their friends? As a backdrop there has been research recently that points to the fact that you may only be reaching about 10% of your friends when you post.

Research conducted by Group M Next (a unit devoted to sourcing new technologies) into pages operated by 25 brands finds that the share of Facebook users seeing organic posts from a brand they “like” was down 38% in the five weeks after Sept. 20, from 15.56% (consistent with the average 16% Facebook has often reported) to 9.62%.

 While “liking” a brand is not quite the same as a friending someone in your network, I suspect that the stats are comparable. So Facebook is giving kids a paid channel to reach their friends while slowly reducing organic reach. Nice. Were you wondering why folks weren’t engaging with your posts quite as much as they used to? Well promoted posts could be for you … I mean, if you really want your friends to know how cool you are or what you had for dinner.

And there’s an added bonus if you care about your Klout score. I happen to think that what Klout -and Kred for that matter- are up to is very interesting. It’ll be interesting to see how they stay a step ahead of folks who are rolling their own “influence scoring” but that’s an aside. Today, Klout does not factor in that some posts are promoted. Thus, it’s theoretically possible to impact your Klout score with promoted posts. Which means that it’s possible to buy influence.

Now if you’re even a slight bit cynical this won’t be a surprise or even be inconsistent. People buy influence all the time. We did just have an election, remember? With Klout, your posts still have to generate comments and likes and such (my content does that). So, promoted posts get me more comments and likes and such. I suspect that Klout and others will address this as their application evolve. Let’s face it, promoted posts should count though perhaps not quite as much?

Subscribe To Me 

Facebook, of course, has a solution for those of us who don’t want to promote posts but who do want to see our friends’ updates. It’s called “subscribing” and it works. Thus, those savvy personal brand builders will encourage their friends to “subscribe” to them on Facebook. Hint hint.

An Experiment

If I weren’t so damn busy, I’d test out my promoted posts theory just for kicks because I’m really curious to see if it works. My colleague Marius Ciortea told me that he might give it a shot. If he does I’ll circle back to share the results. And, if you’ve done it please comment.

UPDATE

Here’s some data on my promoted post for this article:

The post How To Blow Up Your Klout With Promoted Posts appeared first on Smart Method Blog.

In the meantime, here’s a talk that I recently gave about how social is working it’s way into the enterprise.

The post Getting Back to Blogging appeared first on Smart Method Blog.

What remains consistent irregardless of user type is that a pricing table must be designed effectively for conversions, and ideally promote upselling to more expensive and beneficial product plans over time. This implies a need for transparency in your pricing table, as well as that your web application have a clear value proposition to prospective users. 

This post will outline a framework for thinking about pricing tables for both consumer and enterprise level users, highlighting strategies and tactics that have been employed by cutting edge businesses to great success. This framework should serve as a good starting point for developing your own pricing table, as well as giving you some useful tools to continue optimizing your pricing tables over the long-term.

Strategy: Consumer vs. Enterprise Level Users

While the ultimate goal of any pricing table is to promote conversions, this goal is approached differently for consumer and enterprise level users. Consumer level pricing tables should be as simple and intuitive as possible. Strategically, you want to reduce friction in the decision making process to promote customer acquisition. On the other hand, some complexity and the use of generalities can be an effective strategy when developing enterprise level pricing tables because this can drive consumers into a consultative sale process. Enterprise level clients deal with larger costs and require more holistic solutions. As a result, enterprise level pricing tables are rarely self-serve, instead they drive potential customers to your sales team.

Pricing Tactics

When pricing tables are presented online, businesses use a number of tips and tricks to help facilitate customer acquisition. Deducing the relative benefits of two pricing plans is impossible if compared on price alone. As a result, the actual prices on pricing tables should be downplayed. Instead, emphasize the benefits and features available at each level of your pricing table.  For consumer level users, emphasizing price plan benefits instead of the price itself will give these users the transparency to select the pricing plan that they actually need. The benefits of each plan in turn validate the price, instead of having price uniformly drive the decision making process. This holds true for enterprise level users as well, with actual prices even being withheld until prospective users take the initiative to contact you.

Another pricing tactic that is widely used is to add a higher pricing plan as a decoy. Customer level users will often perceive the most expensive plan as excessive given their current needs. Adding a higher pricing plan as a decoy refocuses the user, making your other plans seem like less of a burden on their wallet. For enterprise level users, a decoy pricing plan serves as an incentive to upgrade their plan over time, indicating that your web application’s benefits are scalable enough to meet their needs over the long-term.

Table Design Tactics

A number of tactics can be employed when designing the layout of your pricing table as well. How you choose to arrange and compare your pricing plans can subtly influence buying behaviour to great effect. In many instances, businesses highlight the most popular pricing plan, which usually is a plan that is not too cheap and not too expensive. This tactic is particularly useful when targeting consumer level users, as they find comfort in the power of numbers and will be less inclined to feel that they are picking a plan with benefits they don’t actually need. This tactic is less effective for enterprise level users, as businesses don’t necessarily like to benchmark themselves against their competition, instead they may prefer finding a holistic solution to their problems with the added help of a salesperson.

When designing a pricing table, downplaying your free offering (whether it be a free plan or a free trial) is encouraged. For consumer and enterprise level clients alike, downplaying your free plan will naturally prompt more users to seriously consider a paid plan. Free offerings can also be an effective incentive for users to upgrade their plan if these benefits are available for free at higher price points. While free product offerings are often a necessary point of parity with your competitors, when designing pricing tables the emphasis on the FREE stuff will ultimately distract from your primary goal of acquiring new paying customers. (If you’re interested in learning how might use “FREE” effectively check out my earlier post).

A final tactic to employ when designing a pricing table is to include a FAQ at the bottom of the page. For consumer level users, this FAQ should be fairly comprehensive, as any confusion might result in users simply moving on to one of your competitors. For enterprise level clients, this is more of a best practice, and should serve less as a FAQ and more as a conduit by which users are funneled to your sales team.

Copy Design Tactics

A number of tactics can be employed when choosing the text and designing the copy of your pricing table. For example, for pricing plans with multiple pricing vectors (volume pricing , variable/step costs etc.), using phrases like starting at instead of displaying all prices refocuses users attention on the benefits of each plan and not the price itself. For enterprise level users particularly, they may have inevitably high future costs as they grow, and showing them this may result in resistance towards picking a plan at all.

Another copy related tactic is to highlight differences in benefits between each plan using strikethrough, not excluding the benefits from the table altogether. It’s important to show not only what users get, but what they don’t with each pricing plan. This allows both consumer and enterprise level users to have a more complete understanding of what benefits you really offer.

A similar copy tactic is to quantify the benefits of each pricing plan in numbers and terms like unlimited. More expensive pricing plans with benefits that are unlimited in their functionality can be quite an incentive for customers because it will seem less likely that they will need to upgrade their plan in the future. Enterprise level users will respond to this tactic very favorably, as terms like unlimited will indicate that your web application is scalable enough to meet needs that they might not have yet.

Pragmatic Advice Testing and Development

When employing the above strategies and tactics when designing your pricing table for either consumers or enterprise level clients, it’s very important to develop and test your table iteratively. For example, it is highly recommended to use A/B testing (or multivariate testing for more complex tables). A/B testing is a method of marketing testing where one attempts to improve in this case conversion rates by comparing the success of a control sample A to a variety of single-variable test samples B. By testing the variables of your pricing table in an A/B fashion, over time your table will become more effective.

The fact that pricing tables must be continually developed cannot be stressed enough. Some of the most renowned and successful pricing tables look very different from when they were originally conceived. For example, award winning project management software company Basecamp has iteratively developed their pricing table to great success.

For a huge gallery of pricing tables, please visit this resource. http://ui-patterns.com/collections/pricing-tables/entry/4155

The post Pricing Tables – Strategies & Tactics appeared first on Smart Method Blog.

In the meantime, here’s a link to an iMedia article about social marketing that I worked on with the Involver team.

Making Social Media More Accessible to Brands

The Web will one-day eclipse television as the dominant medium for advertising, but we’re not there yet. The spirit of generosity that inspired Tim Berners-Lee to share his creation with the Whole Wide World made the Web quite a different place than the world of television. The model of free goods, services and content suggested by authors such as Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, and so intrinsic to the Web, has changed the way our economy operates. In this environment, it can be a challenge for brands to promote paid services.

Read more on iMedia.

The post Getting Back To Social appeared first on Smart Method Blog.