If you have any friends who are in business - either with a main
store-front or in a home-based business, share this article with them.
And if you have any friends who do not belong to the
Valley East
Facebook Group, send them an invitation to join.
The following article is proof that what we are
doing in this group is the leading edge of a transition that our society
is experiencing when it comes to community engagement. And the business
world is recognizing this quickly.
Print publications are being replaced by online
publications with interactive graphics and video which can provide so
much more value and ease of distribution. Consequently, the print
advertising support that kept businesses alive will dry up—after all,
you can't click on a magazine.
Retailers will also realize that most of the sale
flyers they stuff in newspapers and mailboxes are going straight to the
recycle bin. These paper products will turn to email, digital, and
mobile delivery almost exclusively.
Businesses are beginning to realize that customers
and prospects are a community—or an audience—and they are reached and
engaged with by their common interests, passions, or needs. The best way
to accomplish this is with high-quality content delivered on an opt-in
basis that builds a true two-way consumer-business relationship.
Facebook is a return to the person-to-person relationship that is so
important for local businesses to day.
As I write this post, there are 1762 people who are
part of this transition with the Valley East Facebook Group. There are
6000 direct contacts through three other associated Facebook Groups.
When you consider that each of those contacts has upwards of 200 friends
or more on average, that means that we have a potential engagement with
1.2 million people from around the world. All from just one person
putting up one post. We live in an amazing time.
10 business tactics that will die in 5 years
The
following is copied from the article that was published at the above
link.
Imagine it's a lovely day in the spring of 2019.
Flowers are blooming, my beloved Mets are still rebuilding, and the
Rolling Stones will be making the rounds for one last tour/money grab.
As for the marketing industry, the once-familiar
business tactics will start to die off—or will already be dead.
Here are the top 10 business tactics and norms that
we can expect to fall by the wayside in the next five years.
Siloed marketing
departments
Don't worry readers, I don't mean to say that
marketing will cease to exist, but the era of companies having separate
departments for brand strategy, digital, social media, or content
production will be over. It's all just marketing, which is totally
focused on one thing: revenue generation.
Consequently, the CMO will become the
second-most-important person in an organization—after the CEO—because
he/she is responsible for overseeing and perfecting the customer
experience to maximize the revenue generated from those efforts.
This also means there will no longer be an
independent sales head. That person will now work with—and for—the CMO.
This leads right into the next point.
Salespeople
The time of the relationship-focused, back-slapping
salesperson is coming to a close. We are moving into a user-driven sales
environment where all the information a customer might ever need about a
product is readily available on the Web.
Unless your salespeople bring real industry,
insight, and consulting expertise to the buying experience, they don't
provide any value. The best (and last standing) salespeople will be
those with real knowledge that customers need to help them make informed
and intelligent buying decisions. The order-taker reps will have long
been replaced with a website.
Wide-net sales
tactics
Sensing a theme? Say farewell to arcane and
interruptive sales tactics—cold calling, email blasts, direct mailing,
etc.
The days when sending blind emails (or faxes) to
prospects you don't know touting the benefits of your solution or
product are over. Increasingly rare, it will become nearly impossible to
have someone pick up a call or return a message from someone they don't
know, let alone enter the buying process.
Selling is helping, so unless your communication to
a user immediately proves valuable and relevant, it will be more of a
nuisance than anything.
Personal branding
Very few people will still have an old-school paper
resume. Instead we will have a curated (and, in some cases,
not-so-curated) digital footprint—consisting of a LinkedIn profile,
blog, social profiles, images, and other items that surface in a Google
search.
These will be the go-to resources for companies
looking to hire new talent and people looking to vet nascent personal
relationships. This revolution in "getting to know someone" is a
double-edged sword because the Internet is forever, which makes
reputation management essential across all your platforms.
Imagine the future presidential election candidates
that will be from the generation that grew up with Facebook. A potential
disaster for all involved is highly plausible.
Because we increasingly live our private lives in
the public sphere—thanks to social media—it's important to remember that
if you wouldn't want your mom to see it, you should keep it far from the
Internet.
The cubicle and the 9-to-5
By 2019, Baby Boomers will be planning retirement,
Gen X will be in mid-career, and the culture is decidedly millennial.
The traditional 9-to-5 world is ending, because
employees are always connected and the lines between the workday and our
personal lives are blurred. This has its good and bad points. Want to
leave at 4 p.m. for yoga? Go for it, but when the boss emails at 9 p.m.,
she'll be expecting a response immediately.
This will also affect how offices look, because no
one wants to sit in boxes anymore. Open design is now the norm along
with telecommuting, job sharing, and sabbaticals. And no one will ever
wear a tie again—well, maybe every now and then.
The printer
Very few annual reports, directories, or any
internal or external documents will continue to be printed.
Online publications with interactive graphics and
video can provide so much more value and ease of distribution. The same
goes for B2B trade publications, as they will all move to online
formats. Consequently, the print advertising support that kept them
afloat will dry up—after all, you can't click on a magazine.
Retailers will also realize that most of the sale
flyers they stuff in newspapers and mailboxes are going straight to the
recycle bin. These paper products will turn to email, digital, and
mobile delivery almost exclusively.
In-house technology
It is unlikely that companies will continue to
supply workers with mobile devices and computers. Everyone will bring
their own, and the IT department will have to adjust and adapt.
Similarly, the CIO will now work more closely with the CMO, not the CFO.
Internal systems will move to the cloud, and the
majority of technology expenditure will be in customer-facing assets. As
computing technology improves and the culture of technology changes to a
more open and crowd-sourced environment, internal tech teams will have
to stay flexible amid the constant state of change.
Customer
engagement
The "Mad Men" style demographic targeting will be a
thing of the past—meaning no more "our target is 60 percent female, ages
24 to 45, with a HHI of $75,000-plus." Who thinks of themselves in that
way?
Same goes for B2B. Forget about going after job
titles. In fact, we will lose the word "target" altogether.
Customers and prospects are a community—or an
audience—and they are reached and engaged with by their common
interests, passions, or needs. The best way to accomplish this is with
high-quality content delivered on an opt-in basis that builds a true
two-way consumer-business relationship. B2B and B2C become P2P—person to
person.
Travel
Teleconferencing technology will become better and
more efficiently used. Everything from Google+ and Skype to
enterprise-level systems that make you feel like you are in the same
room will proliferate in the commercial space.
Audio- and video-enabled robots already exist with
screens that can display the face of the remote party and be maneuvered
around the office in and out of meetings as needed. Innovations like
these will curtail the need to fly across the country for face time or
for only one or two meetings.
Of course, face-to-face interaction will always be
crucial in business relationships, but it can be reserved for a few
essential instances.
Gordon Plutsky is the CMO at
King Fish Media. Follow him on Twitter
@GordonPlutsky. A version of this article first appeared on
iMediaConnection.
