Claire Morley-Jones of HR 180 tells us about how she runs her successful HR business from home. To f...
Claire Morley-Jones of HR 180 tells us about how she runs her successful HR business from home. To find out more about running your business from home, visit http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/layer?topicId=1073960216&site=220&r.s=sl
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Added: 967 days ago
Views: 272
Had a good idea for your own business and not done anything about it yet? Ever wondered whether your...
Had a good idea for your own business and not done anything about it yet? Ever wondered whether your entrepreneurial spirit could lead to your career success? Claire Young entrepreneur and finalist on The Apprentice - reveals hints and advice for those with an entrepreneurial spirit looking to set up their own business.
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Added: 637 days ago
Views: 91
Want the latest in expert business advice delivered straight to your desktop every week? yourBusines...
Want the latest in expert business advice delivered straight to your desktop every week? yourBusinessChannel is releasing a new series -- Business Legends - which packed with top tips and expert business advice gathered during interviews with some of the world's most successful business people.
Make sure you see these shows for excellent business advice from a line up of the world's top business people including:
Bob Young, Founder and CEO - Lulu.com
David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR
Kevin Roberts, Global Chief Executive of Saatchi & Saatchi
Penny Power, Founder, Ecademy
Mark Middlemas, Managing Partner Integration, Universal McCann
Stefan Tornquist, Research Director, Marketing Sherpa
Tom Smith, Research Manager, EMEA, Universal McCann
Top business advice from business legends - broadcast weekly to your desktop!
See more business news television shows featuring these experts, as they give their top expert business advice at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com
Find out more about the very latest show releases, as well as other yourBusinessChannel news by visiting our blog at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com/blog.aspx
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Added: 967 days ago
Views: 240
In this business tv show, join international business experts Ian Coleman, Partner, Head of emerging...
In this business tv show, join international business experts Ian Coleman, Partner, Head of emerging markets, PricewaterhouseCoopers UK, Tony Dickel, CEO, MRI China, and Chris Runckel, President, Runckel and Associates, as they talk about upcoming issues they see for businesses operating in emerging economies.
Ian Coleman: I think that what we have seen is a growing change to one of acceptance that it isn’t novel, its business as usual. A growing change towards the integration of emerging market managers into the managerial structures of multi international companies because the importance of doing business in those countries.
Tony Dickel: You’ve got the 1billion US dollars a week of foreign investment, you’ve got the 3000 companies a month, you’ve got the 10% economic growth, all an environment of an emerging population of only children, there isn’t a hope in hell that demographically China can create enough middle management and senior management over the next 20 years and so to support what’s going to be going on in China in the context of economic and corporate growth and the need for mid-senior level talent, not a chance, especially as many of the better Chinese people are also being exported overseas. So apart from that everything’s great. It’s going to be easy.
Chris Runckel: One of the things we feel very passionate about really is the problem that we see in all of these developing countries with the failure to invest into the education system. All of these countries what you see is that investment in education is insufficient for the requirements that are being set by the growing economy and so you start developing problems where you cant get the quality of engineers, of accountants and of a wide range of people that you require for these new type of economies..
Ian Coleman: When we think of joint venturing and so on it’s often in the context of a developed market company joint venturing to enter an emerging market to serve them and provide goods and services there but ...
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Added: 967 days ago
Views: 236
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More expert business advice from Paul George from the Business Families Team at PricewaterhouseCoope...
More expert business advice from Paul George from the Business Families Team at PricewaterhouseCoopers, as he gives examples of the kinds of problems family business face, and effective ways to deal with them:
“There are obviously some different roles here and that can cause some different situations, difficult situations. I mean I think one leader of a fabulous UK business said to me the other day is the one thing you always have to remember is he’s married to the mother of his managing director and difficult decisions always have to be made. I think one family business leader told me he found it a big break through in his family relationships when he’d worked out that raising performance issues over the family Christmas dinner was probably not a good way to behave.
Yeah this stuff is difficult, this stuff is difficult and it has to be managed I think those who do it well are very rigorous about separating the different roles they play, about doing business especially the hard parts of business and difficult discussions in the right environment, in the office at the right time but this is not easy stuff and more generally if you look at some of the retorts about benefits of the family businesses some of the big problems in family business can come where family dynamics do go wrong, where there a problems within the family and it also easy for that to spill over, down into the business. Typically these are relatively non-political organisations, providing that the family is getting on well, can become enormously political if there is a problem within the family.
I think one of the key things is to have some clarity and structure around what the deal is. What the deal is within the family about the relationship with the business so at the sort of simplest level I think best practices for family owning businesses to have clarity about, you’re a shareholder, what are your rights in terms of getting involved in the business, can you turn up and view and if so when, can you work in the business, ...
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Added: 966 days ago
Views: 236
Top business sales advice from David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing...
Top business sales advice from David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, reveals why you need to stop being so egocentric because nobody cares about your products or services. See more business news television shows featuring these experts, as they give their top expert business advice at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com.
David Meerman Scott: This weeks idea is a little bit surprising to a lot of people and it is this - Nobody cares about your products or services. Interesting that I say that and you may be thinking what is this guy talking about, nobody cares about your products and services? They don't!
You know what they care about? They care about their problems. They care about finding solutions to their problems. And to create really great marketing. The thing to do is to forget about talking about your products and services in your marketing, particularly your online marketing.
And think about it in your own world, when you're out looking for something in terms of something to buy or something interesting to consume online, or some cool YouTube video, or whatever it might be, are you interested in direct advertising? Are you interested in those companies that just hype their product you know fifty percent off today only, free shipping all this week. You know these are product orientated hype kinds of marketing.
Here's the thing you need to think about Who are your buyer persona's and what do your buyer persona's have in terms of problems that you can solve? Here's and example for you. Imagine that you are an owner of a company that makes fresh pasta. And think about for a second the problems that you solve for people. So instead of talking about your own damn products, your pasta, what you do is you think about how you can reach for example young mothers who are looking for a healthy and quick meal that they can make really easily to serve to their family.
Or another buyer persona, perhaps you are trying to reach a group of people who are single and what they are looking for is different. They are looking for a very small amount of pasta to make as it is only for one person.
Or think about another buyer persona - a restaurant who are looking at hundreds of pounds at a time and imagine how different your marketing becomes when you are talking about not the damn pasta, but you're talking about the problem you face, in this case mundane pasta can solve. And if you are creating web content around those problems your marketing is literally transformed - I kid you not! And you have experienced this too. When you go to a site and you have that feeling oh my gosh, these guys know me, these guys understand who I am, these guys understand what I am facing and I think they are a company that can help me.
But when you go to a companies site and all they do is talk about their products and services - do you feel the same way? I certainly don't!
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Added: 959 days ago
Views: 239
China and India are two of the largest and fastest growing economies in the world, but what are the ...
China and India are two of the largest and fastest growing economies in the world, but what are the differences and how would you choose which is right for you? We talked with emerging markets specialists Stephen Philips, Chief Executive of the China-Britain Business Council, Ian Coleman, Partner and Head of Emerging Markets at PricewaterhouseCoopers UK, and Chris Runckel President of Runckel and Associates.
Chris Runckel: There really is no one China, you have china thats along the Eastern sea board which now is a very, actually a more a more advanced developing area for doing business. It has very good infrastructure, road systems, very good communications system in the major cities. You have modern buildings, a lot of the accoutrements that any business would be looking for.
Then you have the western area of the country which tends to be much poorer, much less developed, infrastructure is starting to go in there. The government is making a push to install infrastructure through the western region and its coming up but really the cost of internal shipping inside China and some of the other costs that are added in a project still makes western China not as attractive are as it might be.
Stephen Philips: For most businesses theyre going to be focussing on the more urban areas, but those urban areas arent just Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, there are many cities across China that have more than a million people which is unlike the UK clearly. CBBC itself has got offices in 11 cities across China, most of those cities most British people will not even have heard of. Chongqing in the west of China for instance, its an urban area, has got 30 million people, half the size of the UK and yes its probably somewhere that the vast majority of people have never heard of.
Chris Runckel: For the west you have India which is a very, very good location for lower cost projects which have more labour content in them. Fairly good protection of intellectual property, some significant ...
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Added: 966 days ago
Views: 175
More expert business advice from Google’s European Enterprise Director Roberto Solimene, as he exp...
More expert business advice from Google’s European Enterprise Director Roberto Solimene, as he explains how Google Apps works for businesses by eliminating unnecessary expenditure, problematic hardware and software, and effectively banks information to help companies succeed:
“Again every kind of business is suitable for the use of Google Apps. Originally we thought that it would have been something more beneficial to small or medium sized organisation because they don’t have the funds, they don’t have the resources, and they don’t have the infrastructure to use a hosted service inside their organisation.
But we are seeing them more and more that very large organisations are calling us just too just explore how they can use Apps inside their organisation whether it is for a division or whether it is for a specific kind of employee or for the organisation. But we are seeing that everybody now is interested in at least discovering what is on offer on this so called web to zero offering.
The most exciting thing is that I save a lot of money; this is only the first of the things. I don’t need any more very complex infrastructure, I don’t need to buy a license for all my employees, I don’t need to buy spam services, I don’t need to buy servers, I don’t need to buy filters for viruses for example or servers for all that software. I don’t need to buy infrastructure for filing and archiving old documents and the mail that a company receives and so on. Just think about the saving that you have in all this infrastructure when you can give everything host to someone that has hundreds of thousands of servers spread around the world.
Some people are definitely worried about having all their information online but we are going towards a phase where doing that is going to be the most natural thing to do. Just like when we used to put our money inside a mattress thinking it was safer. But now we take for granted the best place to put our money is actually the bank.
If we can build a parallel ...
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Added: 966 days ago
Views: 230
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In this business tv show, international business experts Stephen Philips, Chief Executive, China-Bri...
In this business tv show, international business experts Stephen Philips, Chief Executive, China-Britain Business Council, Ian Coleman, Partner, Head of emerging markets, PricewaterhouseCoopers UK, and Chris Runckel, President, Runckel and Associates, talk about looking beyond the balance between risk and reward, because there's a great deal more to choosing the best destination.
Ian Coleman: People often ask me what is the next hot destination and the next hot emerging market and I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that. Why? Largely because of something I said earlier about the need to balance risk and reward. It’s relatively easy to look at that on one dimension and say which of those high risk countries, where’s the highest physical risk, a lot of people look at that. It’s equally as easy to look at population demographics, look at expected inflation rates, to look at the economic growth potential of different companies but its bringing those two things together that I think is very important.
Stephen Phillips: Clearly a lot of early international investment in China went to the eastern coastal board with the ever keen eye on cost production. Some of that is moving to countries like Vietnam and other countries in Asia but some of that is also migrating in china to the Hinterland to the west of China or to the North east of China so it’s a much more complicated dynamic than just investments having gone into China and then moving into further countries and there continues to be a great deal of new investment going into China as well but many businesses obviously have to look at the bottom line and they will go to places, a) where they can get the lowest cost production and b) where they can find the right skills.
Chris Runckel: Right now Vietnam is one of the lowest cost areas out there but that cost will erode over time and then I see India probably even in the future Bangladesh coming up for locations for low cost factories and Vietnam just like china will have to start making ...
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Added: 967 days ago
Views: 246
In this business tv show, Google’s European Enterprise Director Roberto Solimene explains the thin...
In this business tv show, Google’s European Enterprise Director Roberto Solimene explains the thinking that drives Google Enterprise, how they are working to organise the world’s information to make it more accessible and useful, and how these ideas could change the very way we work:
“So Google enterprise really was created like about three and a half years ago in the US. It started as I said before as a response to our customers or to the markets requesting to have a similar experience inside their companies as they had it on the internet. The first product was the Google search appliance and then in December 2004 we started the business here in Europe as well and it has been a fantastic growth.
We now have offices all over main Europe. We have sales, we have presales people, we have marketing people. We of course work together with the main Google organisation but it has been one of the fastest growing divisions inside the company.
The reason why there has been so much growth is because we have been simplifying tasks which were originally complex. So imagine using an iPod or using a TomTom, they are a very complex system in the background but very simple for the user. We want to bring the same experience to the users of our search appliance.
So imagine you are an employee and you go to the office and your searching your corporate intranet just as easily as when you are searching Google.com for example.
As a lot of people know our founders motto is to organise the world information and make it accessible and useful. We found out that more than 70 percent of the world’s information is actually behind a firewall. So imagine your corporate intranet, imagine your docs management system, imagine your databases, this is where most of the world’s information is.
We thought it was a great thing to do to bring our products to the corporate world as well as to the consumer world.”
See more business news television shows from Roberto Solimene at Google, as he gives his top expert business ...
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Added: 966 days ago
Views: 237
In this business tv show, Paul George from the Business Families Team at PricewaterhouseCoopers expl...
In this business tv show, Paul George from the Business Families Team at PricewaterhouseCoopers explains why it could be in your best interest to buy out the rest of the family:
“The other thing that can be a problem with a family business that thrives over many generations is if you’re not careful you end up with a very unmanageable share holder register.
You know in a modern family it’s often the case that the entrepreneur will split the shares pretty equally among his children. If they do the same then in some families within generations you’re talking about dozens of shareholders and you can end up in a very difficult and unmanageable situation where its still a private company but its got a pretty widely spread shareholder base who aren’t closely associated with what’s going on and often the company carries on operating in much the same way they did in the first generation, with a very low dividend, really running very conservatively for the benefit of the business, not the shareholders and that’s a recipe for all sorts of problems if its not sorted out.
The companies that survive longest in terms of generations, if you go back through you’ll often find there’s been a succession of single children. The two big problems in family succession are having no children and having many children and there’s a process that many of those survived have gone through every 2 or 3 generations of, if you like pruning the family tree, buying out those parts of the shareholder register that aren’t really heavily committed to the company anymore.
Borrowing in the company and doing that in that way and history says that’s a successful part of the process of keeping a family process healthy in the long term.”
See more business news television shows from Paul George, as he gives his top expert business advice at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com
Find out more about the very latest show releases, as well as other yourBusinessChannel news by visiting our blog at ...
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Added: 966 days ago
Views: 202
More expert business advice from inside the offices of Google, as European Enterprise Director Rober...
More expert business advice from inside the offices of Google, as European Enterprise Director Roberto Solimene, reveals the tech tools they use, as well as the thinking that’s behind it and how they are able to work much smarter:
“We use exactly the same products and this was one of the points of Larry and Sergey and Eric before we even launched the Google Apps they wanted to be sure that they were using as a company exactly the same kind of products.
I think that is fundamental that is the trust that we put inside our products. We use exactly the same kind of information and we have seen a boost of productivity just by using this information. So wherever I am, I can have access to my mailbox without using any VPN because it’s all secured anyway. I can actually create and see the calendar of all my colleagues. I can actually have access to the active directory of all the company. I can actually have access to all the documents that I have created or that I have been invited to collaborate.
With time you will see all new products coming next to docs, spreadsheets, calendar and mail. So just think about groups and think about your personal page, think about a lot of other things that will be there. What is most exciting is that not only will we be able to present this to my customers but I will also be able to use it myself. So it is very important.
The consumerisation of IT is really here and we are driving that towards that phenomenon, where the employee and the user of the application inside a company are really first of all a consumer and he is driving the adoption of more simple to use applications. So I am able to have inside the organisation easy to use applications that I have over the internet at home.
Think again consumer products like the iPod, you know the Xbox or the TomTom for example. Just with your finger tips you can actually go immediately to the information you are looking for and you can do that now inside the organisation inside your company, so inside the place that you ...
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Added: 967 days ago
Views: 279
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More expert business advice from Paul George from the Business Families Team at PricewaterhouseCoope...
More expert business advice from Paul George from the Business Families Team at PricewaterhouseCoopers, who explains what it is that makes family businesses such strong performers:
"I think what do family businesses do well? Family businesses are fantastically good at building really strong cultures. Really strong cultures that employees and stakeholders buy into big time.
Its so much easier to believe that a family that's been running a business for 3 or 4 generations and really, really believe in their product and believe in their business its so much easier to buy into that than it is maybe in a public company that is owned by a different bunch of funds this week to next week and the great public companies really, really make use of that and the families that own them in many ways often have moved away from large parts of the fulltime executive management of the company but the ones that do it well recognise them as having a unique position of being if you like ambassadors of the value of the business both internally and outside the company and that's a very powerful advantage.
Where a family manages to articulate the values of the business clearly that's powerful and it's very, very easy for all concerned to buy into that.
The other thing that's probably worth talking about is just performance and the data's difficult on relative performance but given that quite a lot of companies that are family owned are public companies, and quite a few surveys have been done on how do they actually do? How does this stuff actually work? Its difficult data and its difficult to read it clearly but they're certainly not underperforming and the majority or surveys seem to show that family ownership is actually pretty much a positive in terms of the performance of a company and there are funds out there that actually pick their investments in terms of favouring family companies because they reckon it's a criteria for performance.
Why would that be? Well essentially these companies are operating on a much longer time horizon than companies which are perhaps driven by the surplus and reporting requirements of a widely spread private company, public company rather and the family ownership gives them the luxury to actually look out on eight,10 or 20 at a time horizon and a lot of them take good advantage of that."
See more business news television shows from Paul George, as he gives his top expert business advice at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com
Find out more about the very latest show releases, as well as other yourBusinessChannel news by visiting our blog at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com/blog.aspx
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Added: 966 days ago
Views: 150
Expert business advice from Bob Young, CEO and Founder of Lulu.com, as he paints a graphic, easily v...
Expert business advice from Bob Young, CEO and Founder of Lulu.com, as he paints a graphic, easily visualised picture of the opportunity that exists online today – and it is huge!
“As well as the internet being sort of remarkably revolutionary in this concept that it connects everyone together, what it does for entrepreneurs, for businessmen everywhere is that it creates this massive opportunity.
So it is hard space to get your head around because it doesn’t relate to the real world. In the real world if you work really hard today you could go out and say you had a service you could probably talk to one hundred, maybe two hundred.
Maybe even if you were truly the energizer bunny you could talk to three or four hundred people about your product. On the internet you could talk to a million people today alone about your product. So the scale of the opportunity makes the investment worthwhile.
So whether you figure out how to use EBay to advance your service, whether you use Lulu to publish your video or your book or your music or whether you use Google to resell to put up ads on your website so that you promote your product or your service. You give away your product or your service but you make the money by surrounding it with ads which is nothing more than the old magazine or television model when you think about it. We always got television shows for free and it was an ad supported content.
Well that’s what the internet is with Google ads, which is why Google is doing so well. My point simply being is the internet is simply full of opportunity and it is still a very immature world. We are looking at this internet market place less than ten years after its invention, well maybe a little more than ten years.
Imagine radio invented in what the 1930’s, in 1950, radio has come a long way since 1950. Television it’s like looking at television, I mean television was basically invented when I was born in 54 and you are sort of comparing television in 1964 to the internet today. As in the ...
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Added: 966 days ago
Views: 215
In this business tv show, emerging market specialists Stephen Philips, Chief Executive, China-Britai...
In this business tv show, emerging market specialists Stephen Philips, Chief Executive, China-Britain Business Council, Ian Coleman, Partner, Head of emerging markets, PricewaterhouseCoopers UK, Frederique Schillern, COO Asia Pacific, Equity Trust, and Chris Runckel, President, Runckel and Associates, discuss the IP challenges that every company must consider before doing business in an emerging economy.
Frederique Schillern: You could say that intellectual property in China is a big concern; it should be for anybody who is really transferring intellectual property in China.
Chris Runckel: China in all honesty is a disaster in respect of protection of intellectual property. Even today intellectual property is not being protected in a worldwide sense. You know other places have their problems as well; India has their problem with intellectual property as well but of all the countries in Asia, China is the worst.
Ian Coleman: What we are increasingly seeing people do is look to work through licensing arrangements that are more collaborative where there is an attempt to actually almost bring the enemy into the camp if that’s a analogy that one may use. I’m not sure that it’s a great analogy actually but none the less that concept of actually getting into a circumstance where there is a mutual understanding of the profit motive and working that through.
Chris Runckel: There are ways in which you can design your manufacturing to limit your exposure of that intellectual property and many companies have done a very good job of that. What they will do is they will manufacture certain components in China to lower cost and actually put together sub assemblies in China but they do the final manufacturing or final putting everything together in another location. Other time there are ways in which you can actually basically protect your intellectual property by only releasing certain portions of it to exposure in China and this is how may major corporations are actually doing their manufacturing so that ...
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Added: 966 days ago
Views: 177
In this business tv show, Marketing Sherpa Research Director Stefan Tornquist reveals why he thinks ...
In this business tv show, Marketing Sherpa Research Director Stefan Tornquist reveals why he thinks many websites are being built the wrong way round, and why that’s losing them sales:
“Websites aren’t experienced holistically anymore, because of search we go directly into components of those websites. If we’re searching for a camera we’re not going to go to the Amazon homepage we’re immediately going to go to a category page and if you’re searching for a bit of news you may or may not go to the homepage of the Telegraph you’re more likely to go directly into the site and so when I’m talking about simplifying a website its really very important to simplify the interior pages what marketers call the landing pages because that’s where people land whether they’re arriving from an email, or a search, or an ad and so its that design on the page that’s so important.
On the homepage in fact it may not be the worst thing in the world to display your brand and have a bit of fun. A homepage needs to be all things to all people, there are a lot of different demands on that kind of page.
What you really need to focus on are those pages where something happens, somebody buys a product or registers to an email and certainly in ecommerce there’s no reason for me to go to everyone’s sites, Amazon and I will too because really they’ve done more testing and more work around how people engage with their pages than anyone else.
Now it doesn’t mean that your pages need to be as full as an Amazon page because they’ve done a little bit of training so everyone who’s used Amazon over the years has sort of been trained to what’s there but if you start boiling it down its really pretty simple to find things on the Amazon website and then to buy them.
For all of that content they’ve designed it in such a way that if really you don’t want to look at those user reviews, you’re not interested in the other products that they’re recommending they’re very easy to move past those ...
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Added: 966 days ago
Views: 220
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Top social marketing advice from David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketi...
Top social marketing advice from David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, talks about a golden way to improve your messaging and get doing better than it is today. See more business news television shows featuring these experts, as they give their top expert business advice at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com.
David Meerman Scott: So here’s the thing, the most important thing for web marketing, truly the most important thing is to focus on your buyer personas, not on your products and services, not on your company. Here’s what I mean by that:
Have you looked at a hotel website recently? I travel all the time, I give keynote speeches all over the world, I’m in a hotel almost every week, and what I do is I always check the hotel website. And every hotel website is virtually the same. What do they do? They talk about their product and they talk about their service. And they have information about their product and their fluffy pillows and their tasty shrimp, and the swimming pool out back and the fact that they’re near the city centre. That’s a product oriented form of marketing.
But think about it differently if you are creating marketing specifically for your buyer personas. And what you need to do is you need to understand who your buyer personas are. Actually go out and interview people who are representative of your buyer persona. Find out what their problems are and then build your web content directly for them.
So for example with a hotel, there’s the independent business traveller who makes a decision of what hotel to stay in. Perhaps they’re interested with getting the lowest price or free parking, or perhaps they want to have high speed internet available in their room. Then you’ve got a corporate travel department, which is another buyer persona for hotels. Perhaps somebody is near a company headquarters and they are looking to have maybe 100 room nights for their visitors coming to that hotel. ...
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Added: 959 days ago
Views: 269
More expert business advice from social networking guru Penny Power, Founder of Ecademy. In this bus...
More expert business advice from social networking guru Penny Power, Founder of Ecademy. In this business tv show she gives straight forward advice and tips on how to make more friends online:
“When anybody asks me ‘how do I start to connect with people?’ just think about the real world if you went into a moved into a pub, into a village and you went to the bar you wouldn’t go in there and hand out your business care to everyone and start broadcasting what you were doing. What you would actually do is you'd sit quietly by the bar and you might buy the person next to you a drink and start talking to them but think about what you would do.
You would ask them questions, you would show a huge interest in them, that's how to start in a social network click on some profiles and write to them and say fantastic to hear that you enjoy swimming and you live near a lake and in Italy, how beautiful that must be. Put out the hand of friendship to them.
The friendship is what you want to create inside a social network, a business network successful when you create the friendships first its relationship first, business second and so always look for opportunities to show an interest in the other person.
Testimonials are really important, if somebody’s written a great blog, go onto their profile and write a great testimonial and say ‘I just want to say what a great blog you wrote and put a link into that blog’, that's doing that person a real favour - but remember you're leaving your link on that persons profile as well so people that write testimonials about me will obviously, my profile is busy, look for the profiles where people are busy and anybody who writes a testimonial on that persons profile providing they have some value to give in that, its not just a ‘Hi, nice to meet you’ because that's not what a testimonial is about, but actually something that endorses that answer, and says the value they felt that they gave you.
Do that, that's putting out a hand, that's a really nice gesture. So ...
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Added: 966 days ago
Views: 164
Hear expert business advice from Tom Smith, Research Manager, EMEA, at Universal McCann, as he revea...
Hear expert business advice from Tom Smith, Research Manager, EMEA, at Universal McCann, as he reveals how one should approach the development a strategy that will encourage usage within social networks:
"There are so many ways you can work with social networks but increasingly it's not just about advertising it's about having a presence in the place is where consumers interact and doing that in a way that feels credible and relevant.
So whether you can create a page of inner social network and be there but actually giving people a reason to be involved sort of as creating content that you share on your page and get users to interact with or you create applications that users can load on to their social network pages creates a genuine usage for them and makes their page more interesting or makes their life easier online.
There are some good examples like Intel created a page on MySpace that was a collaborative music project. So people could who were pitching for a place in a band could create a super group out of the best entrants. So it's kind of rather than just being an advert on a social network it's actually kind of acting how you want to be seen and kind of creating stuff and getting people involved. So acting how you want to be perceived rather than just talking about it.
I think business should really jump on this idea and involve their users and open themselves up to getting more people involved and have done very well.
We looked at Facebook, and they have actively got their users to collaborate with them to translate the website into hundreds of local languages around the world, you know that was done by charge by the users.
Another good example is a video rental company in the US called Netflix which were trying to improve their recommendation system that recommends new films that you should borrow and they opened it up to the general public and developers and put a million dollar prize on it and said come and create a better recommendation system for us.
So it was about collaborating with the wider community and being open with them. They shared all their data and they are going to get a better system out of it by being open and being active and being involved with the wider world."
See more business news television shows from Tom Smith, as he gives his top expert business advice at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com
Find out more about the very latest show releases, as well as other yourBusinessChannel news by visiting our blog at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com/blog.aspx
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Hear expert business advice from Tom Smith, Research Manager, EMEA, at Universal McCann. The expert ...
Hear expert business advice from Tom Smith, Research Manager, EMEA, at Universal McCann. The expert behind the renowned Wave 3 report, Tom reveals his thoughts on social media's biggest trends:
"We have seen a big move towards video and multimedia content. I mean video sharing sites just keep on taking off wave and wave. We know that is down to increasing access via broadband. The technology and the cost of creating things on videos is falling year on year. So all of these, you know everything is becoming more multimedia is becoming more advanced.
The content that consumers are creating is probably more watchful than it used to be and attracts a wider audience. Things are evolving like blogging is becoming easier and more accessible and available on a bigger number of platforms. So you can blog online, of course you can blog on a social network page, you can blog via your mobile, you can do what's called micro blogging where you just blog in one sentence or less.
So you know everything is evolving and there are more access points for people to create and share content than there ever has been.
I mean the numbers that we have looked at and we have surveyed hundreds of millions of people worldwide are passively consuming this. So hundreds of millions of people are reading blogs, watching videos and video sharing sites, looking at other people's photos from around the world.
You know it is a mass phenomenon. If you are online you are doing it so as internet penetration rises you know the impacts of social media will be felt amongst all parts of the population worldwide.
It's relevant because it is where consumers are increasingly spending their time when they are online and we know we have seen in this research that people are spending more and more time in less environments because social networks now allow you to do everything you want online. So allow you to keep in contact with friends, allow you to share photos, they allow you to look at other kinds of content from external websites.
So people are spending less time on sites outside of this. So you kind of have to take the message to where people are going to be, which is inside social media rather than build a brand website and expect them to come. It's about taking your content to them and taking your message to them where they spend their time which is increasingly social media."
See more business news television shows from Tom Smith, as he gives his top expert business advice at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com
Find out more about the very latest show releases, as well as other yourBusinessChannel news by visiting our blog at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com/blog.aspx
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