Collaboration as a Competitive Tool

With the use of social media and other e-Tools on the rise, the word "collaboration" has taken on new meaning and significance. More than ever, collaboration means leveraging the strengths and ideas of others, including those outside an organization.

Why Collaborate

If you are not using collaboration as a competitive tool, then your competitors are. By embracing collaboration you are better prepared to compete in a complex and changing environment. According to a CNBC series on collaboration, "In order to ensure success going forward, organizations will need to adopt the next generation of technology, plan for future innovation and collaboration, reinvent to stay current and use new R&D to stay a step ahead."

Collaboration and Crowdsourcing
You can begin fostering a culture of collaboration in your organization by involving others in meetings and brainstorming sessions. For example, if your organization is seeking business development ideas you can solicit ideas from everyone in your department or organization. Since everyone wants to make a meaningful impact on their company, including others will allow them to become valued contributors. Additionally, including others is a rewarding experience that can lead to successful outcomes.

Some organizations such as Microsoft have taken collaboration a step further by involving their customers in new product development. This strategy is known as "crowdsourcing," a method by which a job traditionally performed by an employee is outsourced to a group of people usually in the form of an open call. In his book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, author Jeff Howe explains that crowdsourcing offers diversity by allowing crowds to solve complex problems.

The diversity of today's multi-generational workforce also offers organizations the opportunity to tap into a rich source of talent to solve problems and generate creative ideas. Clay Shirky author of Here Comes Everybody, believes humans are innately good at working in groups and that anything that amplifies group effort can bring about change.

Effective Collaboration
For collaboration to be effective, small groups of fifteen to even several hundred individuals can be created to maintain the flow of knowledge across the organization, break down traditional organizational barriers, and reduce the amount of time it takes for individuals to get answers to questions. In his book, Silo Busting, Dr. Ranjay Gulati, Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, “draws attention for the first time to the importance of both internal and external integration.” Dr. Gulati states that, according to research, up to fifty percent of collaborative efforts end prematurely because objectives are not met. To achieve successful outcomes start with a mission, a clear plan of action, aligned goals, and clarity around roles.

Collaboration has many benefits that can ultimately lead to success! With clear goals and proper planning you will achieve win/win outcomes.

Share your thoughts: How does your organization practice collaboration?

Practice this process with your team: Collaboration: Harnessing the Ideas of Many

Sources:

CNBC Television

Gulati, R., http://www.ranjaygulati.com/

Howe, J., Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business

Shirky, C., Here Comes Everybody

• Music is the most popular category with 31% of all analyzed videos, followed by Entertainment (15%) and People & Blogs (11%).
• There is no clear correlation between the rating of the video on YouTube and how often it is viewed. Videos with a rating more than 4 out of 5 usually have fewer views than those with medium rating score between 2 to 3.
• Average length of a YouTube video is 4 minutes and 12 seconds.
• The average number of views for the YouTube videos we analyzed is 99,160.
• Blogs with low and medium authority frequently link to Music and Entertainment videos.
• Authoritative bloggers are more likely to include links to News and Politics videos.
• North American bloggers link to a lot more News and Politics videos with a specific interest in health care, global warming and U.S. political issues.
• 20-to-35 year old bloggers are most active in embedding and linking to videos within their posts with 57% of total videos coming from this demographic group.

So what better way to understand social media than by looking at the fundamental principles of influence as taught by Dr. Robert Cialdini, professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University? In his seminal book, Influence, Cialdini covers six “weapons of influence”  that are hardwired into our social and cognitive minds.  In other words, we can’t help but behave in accordance with these laws of social interaction.

 Does this sound like something useful to keep in mind during your social media engagements?  Well, let’s take a look six powerful persuasion techniques:

1. Reciprocation

In Cialdini’s words, the rule for reciprocation “says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us. If a woman does us a favor, we should do her one in return; if a man sends us a birthday present, we should remember his birthday with a gift of our own; if a couple invites us to a party, we should be sure to invite them to one of ours.”

And so it is in social media: we’re more likely to retweet someone who has already retweeted us.  We link to people who have linked to us.  And we tend to give a business far more trust after it has provided us with a lot of free value.

Used manipulatively, this turns into autofollow bots that help you amass thousands of followers in a breathtakingly short time—none of whom may actually care what you have to say.  Doh!

Used more positively and constructively, if you focus on initiating reciprocity by providing no-strings-attached value to those in your network, you’ll ultimately wield far more influence.  Not because the gift economy is a new fad in marketing, but because following the law of reciprocity is how we’re wired as humans.

2. Commitment and Consistency

“Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment.  Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision,” said Cialdini.

Chances are, you follow too many people on Twitter.  And you’re signed up for more RSS feeds and newsletters than you can really read.  Objectively, purging your list of followers and unsubscribing would eliminate distractions and increase your social media signal-to-noise ratio.

But most people never make that purge and hardly ever unsubscribe.  Part of it goes back to reciprocation, but a larger part stems from consistency: you’re loath to admit that following and subscribing to those people and newsletters was a mistake.

On the positive side, how much more likely are you to comment on a blog that you’ve already commented on before?  Especially if you’re now “signed in” to comment on the blog during future visits—and if your Gravatar or Disqus headshot shows up next to the comments?

According to the principle of consistency, you’ll want to remind people of their previous positive commitments through perks, public displays, an elimination of friction for increasing their commitment, etc.  It works for Amazon prime, Amazon’s 1-click ordering, and Amazon’s reviewer system, and it will work for fostering blog comments and a blog community, too.

3. Social Proof

One method we use to determine correct behavior is to find out what other people think is correct. We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.

Just watch this video to see this in action!

Whether we admit it or not, most of us are impressed when someone has a ton of blog subscribers, Twitter followers, YouTube views, multiple blog reviews for their upcoming book, and so on.

Yes, people can game the system (autofollows and such), which can jade our intellectual response, but our core and initial emotional reactions stay the same.

On the positive side, creating a lot of value for others can help companies and individuals gain social proof via reciprocation: writing engaging content for guest posts, offering to interview authors and subject matter experts, and so forth.  Not only do these activities provide social proof in themselves, but they can help you gain a support network capable of “salting” your blog comments, your retweets, etc.

And when it comes to social proof, tribes matter.  It’s not just about what the mass of people are doing on social media that constitutes proof, it’s what other like-minded people and peers are doing.  So according to the principle of “social proof,” you should concentrate your social media efforts on finding and building social proof within your tribe.

4. Liking

“We most prefer to say yes to people we know and like,” says Cialdini. Extensions of this principle are:

1. Physical attractiveness creates a halo effect and typically invokes the principle of liking;
2. We like people who are similar to us;
3. We like people who compliment us;
4. We like things that are familiar to us;
5. Cooperation toward joint efforts inspires increased liking;
6. An innocent association with either bad or good things will influence how people feel about us.

How does this work for social media?  Well, to start with the virtual equivalent of physical attractiveness, we give extra credence to attractively designed blogs, messages contained in videos with higher production quality, and corporations’ landing pages displaying a better sense of social media savvy in their overall design and layout.

Similarly, individuals involved in coordinating joint ventures for the common good are associated with—and therefore “haloed” by—those efforts, while at the same time invoking cooperation toward a joint effort, which further increases “liking.”  Think of Seth Godin’s efforts at compiling free and thoughtful ebooks and then using the compilation to raise funds for a non-profit.  Bryan Eisenberg’s Trick or Tweet efforts from a year ago also come to mind.

As for complimenting others, what else is a retweet, a trackback, or a positive blog comment than a social compliment?  And yes, those are all activities you should participate in authentically, sincerely, and liberally if you wish to leverage the principle of liking to your advantage.

5. Authority

Cialdini talks about “The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of authority…”  In his book, he examines how authority can be conferred by (and also manufactured by) titles, clothes, and trappings.

In social media, authority is less about titles and clothes than about virtual trappings.  In his (fantastic) report, “Authority Rules,” Brian Clark talks about how perceived expertise can frequently differ from real expertise.  Meaning that the guy known for blogging about and offering intelligent commentary on a subject will likely have far more perceived expertise (and therefore influence as an authority) than a genuine but unknown non-blogging expert.

But perhaps the most direct measure of authority is the number of people who will buy or download a recommended resource based on little more than an authority’s endorsement.  How many people would buy a copywriting book simply because Brian Clark said it’s a must-read?  How many people will download a free PDF on nothing more than Seth Godin’s evaluation that it contains important insights?

But one thing social media has seemed to spark is a dawning understanding that authority is (or should be, at least) limited to a legitimate field of knowledge.  So when a relatively famous figure like Robert Scoble states on his website Scobleizer that search engine optimization isn’t important for small businesses, he’s “taken to task” on it rather severely.

6. Scarcity

Apart from reciprocity, this is perhaps the most used tool in social media.  When bloggers open up a class or inner circle membership or subscription service, it is never for an unlimited number of customers or for an always open/unlimited time.  Smart bloggers either create or fully leverage already existing scarcity by limiting seats available, length of time to buy, etc.

Laura Roeder has rather famously made scarcity a centerpiece of a signature technique,  wherein bloggers hold competitions with free services as a prize.  When contestants don’t win, they then value the prize more highly precisely because of the newly perceived scarcity.  This makes them more likely to accept a consolation prize of getting the services at a slight discount.

Parting Recommendations

While the six principles of persuasion started out as “weapons of influence” that were used against us by “compliance professionals,” I—along with Cialdini—would encourage you to practice the positive side of wielding influence. To sum up many of the recommendations from the post, here are some very positive ways to leverage the principles of influence to increase your social media success:

• Focus on creating value and initiating the reciprocity principle by gifting your social media contacts with high-value content, insights, reports, etc.
• Sincerely flatter your subscribers, friends, and commenters by responding to them and nurturing your growing community.  Actively reach out to people you admire using social media and pay them the compliment of commenting on their blogs, following their tweets, linking to their content, etc.
• Commit to consistent engagement on the social media platforms you chose to use, to the point of staying away from new social media platforms that you don’t have the resources to actively participate in.
• Use social proof as credibility cues where appropriate.  Show off your number of subscribers next to the Subscribe button.  Possibly use colleagues to “salt” your comments on important posts, build up your network by guest posting, commenting, and retweeting.
• Coordinate within your community on larger efforts for the greater good.  You’ll probably be psyched at what you create or accomplish, you’ll do good and feel good about it, and you’ll likely become associated with the effort.
• Put the extra effort in on achieving professional and inspiring design.  Dress for success on your blog, website, and social media landing pages.
• When creating a contest or trying to spark immediate action, use the scarcity principle to positive effect.  But be honest about it—no changing “last day for” dates, no miraculously replenishing supplies, etc

 Via socialmediaexaminer.com

Every online business owner knows what it takes to run a successful business: not only popularity but increased revenue through high-quality traffic and conversions. Optimizing the customer’s experience of your website is critical to the survival of any website owner’s business. If your business website is generating low income due to declining traffic, perform routine tests of your page’s elements as an immediate measure. By implementing any changes to your website’s elements called for by your tests, you can arrest your decline in sales.

A lot of business owners are surprised by how many of their visitors abandon their shopping carts before checking out. Google Analytics reveals that there are specific percentages wherein customers drop their shopping cart off. However the reasons could not be determined immediately.
 

Performing routine tests of your website is the first step in optimizing the visitor’s landing page experience. This approach is incremental and should be tested thoroughly before fully rolling it out.

Repetition and Persuasion

Displaying persuasive copy and special offers repeatedly on your landing page is crucial. Take advantage of the opportunity your customers are giving you by browsing your products and services; persuade them with appealing offers and carefully worded sales pitches. You may not be able to control their emotions or thoughts, but you can control your sales words. Repetition burrows an impression deep in the visitor’s mind. Just avoid sounding like a used-car salesperson.

Aim for the heart: tell customers about your product’s benefits by enumerating its main features. You could also list what your product doesn’t have, such as no artificial flavors, additives, or harsh chemicals. Repeating these benefits will convince readers of the benefits in store for them.

Begging for Information

While collecting information and website visitor profiles is important, keep in mind that overdoing it can backfire. Customers are turned off by having to fill a load of survey forms before checking out. Asking for too much information for a simple purchase could lead to a cancelled transaction.

Forms can also make a website look cluttered. Try hiding forms behind drop-down buttons using DHTML or AJAX, allowing visitors to fill them out without having to reload the page or open another tab.

Reassure the Customer

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes, and you will find that revealing personal information such as email addresses and telephone numbers is a major concern. Earn their confidence by reassuring them. Email marketers often append their letters with something like, “We hate SPAMMING as much as you do, and we won’t sell your information to anyone else,” along with a link to their privacy policy.

The Trust and HackSafe seals are important to have beside your forms, as are the names of credit cards that customers can use to make payments. Still, nothing beats the traditional money-back guarantee and return policy that customers can use if they are not satisfied with a product or service.

Alternative Methods of Payment

For every Internet user still clinging to a dial-up connection and Internet Explorer v6, there is someone still not comfortable using their credit card online, despite the vast improvement in online security and horde of trusted online payment websites.

Address this concern by offering alternative ways to order and make purchases, including by phone and fax. Make sure your website is friendly to the diverse ways in which customers prefer to conduct business. Sometimes merely displaying a phone number for ordering and making inquiries instills trust in the visitor, even if they never use it.

Build Value

Create an atmosphere in which customers view your product as being valuable and are comfortable making a purchase. TV infomercials for home shopping use this method to boost sales. Just as you become convinced of a product’s benefit, along comes the host to announce that, “Call now and we will double your order!” This tactic builds value for your product.

It also helps to justify the cost of the product for sale. Whether the product is $5 or $5,000, the customer needs to like the item and feel like they have landed a good deal. One way to do this is by adding up the product or service’s features and comparing the actual price to the “value” that the customer is getting.

Various elements of a website can affect customer behavior. Identifying each element and “split testing” them one by one is well worth the effort. Test often and repeatedly. Mark your progress, weed out dead elements, and aim to surpass your best conversion records.

via smedio.com

 If you are trying to learn how to get traffic to your blog, then you will benefit from the tips in this series, which are designed to show you the necessary steps for how to get traffic to your blog. When you have the right tips, tricks and resources in your arsenal, then that is when you can truly be successful in gaining traffic to your blog. There are twenty tips in all that you need to keep in mind when it comes to learning how to increase blog traffic. In the first post of this series we touched on the first seven, followed by an additional six in the next post, and here are the final seven tips.

1 – Create a blog roll on the side bar or at the bottom of your blog site so that you can publicize links for your favorite blog sites online. Let the bloggers know you put them in your blog roll and you may just get a little bit of reciprocation in return.

2 – Post links to relevant blogs and blog posts in your posts when you are creating blog content. Creating links and references to other blog entries and blog websites will actually increase traffic to your blog just as well as to the blogs you’re linking. This is especially useful when track backs are used because it lets the blog owner and their readers know that you mentioned them.

3 – Learn how to write blog entries that are short without compromising value and that are interesting, even in a small space. This will allow you to improve your ability to blog more frequently for an increase in blog traffic. Don’t be afraid to continue offering comprehensive studies and lists as well, occasionally.

4 – Put effort into the promotion of your most popular blog postings when you are blogging. Write a post that details your top 10 or 10 most popular blogs of the best. Refer to your best blogs in newer entries when the subjects are relevant, or reference old posts while updating the information they contained.

5 – Create a newsletter that operates separately from your blog, and invite your blog readers to become subscribers. Now you have a new way of advertising your blog, as you can link back to your blog in every newsletter that you send.

6 – Utilize offline methods for promoting your blog just as often as online methods. Make sure that your auto signature, your business card and any other marketing or print materials that you have are adorned with your blog address so that people can find you online more easily.

7 – Pay close attention to your blogging traffic reports. Learn from the statistics that you receive and use that information to update the keywords that you use accordingly. The more that you are able to fine tune your writing to your blog traffic reports, the better the results will be.

Social media being used for educational purposes. It’s not a new concept, but it is continuously being used for new applications. among the most recent is the use of social media for educating consumers about money management. it’s not just individual financial planners that have turned to social media for this reason, but the companies themselves. Amidst legal issues and user privacy concern lies a hope that the financial industry as a whole can regain the trust of the American consumer base, turning to social media for marketing and brand-building goals.

Doing so could be a tight-rope walk, but TIAA-CREF and Putnam Investments are among those financial industries that are targeting their core demographics through the use of social media, according to this report. Aggregating educational content and tools, extending online classes and games and socially-driven challenges, these institutions are hoping that the combination of useful content within a virtual environment can help them to gain long-lasting relationships with customers.

Content is the key to this particular method of acquiring and retaining customers, as many corporations have learned that building a Fan Page on Facebook isn’t enough. The juxtaposition of content and presence is a rather lofty goal that many brands have been trying to archive for the past year or so. Improved options for integrated social network and mobile apps have made it easier for third parties to offer a higher level of convenience to their customers, with the growing adoption of this applied technology increasing the trust factor around such marketing and brand-building campaigns.

This trust factor is very important when it comes to the use of social media by financial institutions. The legalities of having an interactive web presence as a financial institution or a financial adviser are very specific in what type of information can be shared online. For the most part, those partaking in social media towards the education of new and existing customers are sticking to the educational realm, providing information that does not cross over into the advice arena.

Utilizing games and challenges that encourage a user to enlist the participation of their friends is another tactic that these financial institutions are using, which can actually increase engagement and produce longer site visits. That’s all well and fine for the companies providing the games and challenges, but I’m rather curious to learn of the success rates of such attempts at luring in customers.

Making education fun and social is something I think could be useful in several areas, far beyond the financial realm. The ability to passively consume content at your own pace, combined with the options to learn in an enlivened environment, could really pay off for certain establishments. Some banks have been trying different variations of this for a few years now, with some even creating virtual environments within the likes of Second Life in order to create a space for teens and adults to learn their lessons is a safer manner.

Providing the information many consumers are already looking for is another good move on the part of TIAA-CREF and Putnam, with Putnam being particularly aggressive in this regard. The benefit for the consumer is the option to access information they would have likely stumbled across had they been online researching for themselves anyway. The danger, of course, is that a company such as Putnam could be rather biased in its curated offerings to customers and new clients.

Nevertheless, it’s smart for a brand to position itself smartly within social media, giving consumers a mini place of research refuge (even if its slanted). The use of social media in this way will help to drive the web in a more semantic direction, hopefully offering a way for search engines to give users answers to their questions instead of just links to third party web sites.

This article credited by EverythingPR

The lesson here is that before deciding if social media is going to work for you, and telling any company that you are working with that you want your site/blog/whatever tied into it, do some research. Here are a few things to do first:

• Define your customer – industry, age, geographic area, etc.
• Find out where your customers “live.” Are they online? Do they go to tradeshows or read magazines? Do they subscribe to eNewsletters? Do they use Twitter?
• Look at the demographics of the potential social networks you might get involved in. At a minimum, look at Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Do those demographics meet those of your potential clients?
• Find out if there are niche social networks that your clients frequent, including Google and Yahoo groups.

Once you know if you should even get into social media, and which sites to spend time on, it’s strategy time.

Time vs. Money

Running a small business means that I have to be careful how to spend my money. That means if I can do something that takes time rather than money I’ll do it. And that’s why I love social media. Who needs sleep? Not me. I have a coffee IV running 24×7. But seriously, if you don’t have the time or inclination to find out the above list of items before creating a social media strategy, which I would offer should be part of every business strategy, then be prepared to pay for it. The choice is yours: spend time or spend money.

Source via The Non Marketer