Technology Marketing Specialist

Research Quantifies the Success of Internal Communications

Gallup Research of 300,000 businesses indicates that 75 to 80 percent of your people are achieving much less and feeling far less enthusiastic about their work than they could be.

If all your employees were “fully engaged,” Gallup says, your customers would be 70 percent more loyal, your turnover would drop by 70 percent, and your profits would jump 40 percent.

Think Before You Decide To Cut Costs

Rita McGrath from Harvard Business Review suggests better ways to cut costs. As she rightly indicates that all measures to cut costs might not be the best and the right ways to do so. Here are the things we think may help you contemplate your next moves towards cutting costs:

1. Beware of the hidden dependencies among different parts of your operations when you are evaluating areas to cut.
2. Analyse your spends & identify loopholes. Search and eliminate redundant activities and over-payments. This way you will experience an immediate boost to net income without any need for reduction in services or quality.
3. Avoid unnecessary complexities in how you does business. Several processes like payments & invoicing have huge amounts of duplicate, complex and ultimately unnecessary work. This has crept into those processes over the years and you should re-look at the processes.
4. Sometimes, the best way to cut costs is to “fire” the most high-maintenance and expensive customers that force you to take on complexity or service activities that are expensive beyond the value of what the customer can deliver to you.
5. Strategise first, cut costs after. Cutting costs across the board seldom leads to effective results. In the process, your best people leave & a slow degradation of basic system occours. Instead, have a clear purpose to rally people’s imagination, so that the core strategic activities are done very well while those things that are less central are eliminated altogether.
6. Be careful before turning down someone’s offer to reduce costs of a certain at the expense of an investment. For eg. your IT department could do certain things that really improves productivity in accounts your department. Make sure you have a systematic way of figuring out where your investments are really paying off.

7 Ways To Use Social Media To Improve Marketing

As Chris Brogan rightly says “Social media isn’t always the right tool for the job.” and we agree. There are many businesses in India trying to integrate the social media platform in some way or the other to reach out to their customers.

We have chosen below the 7 most preferred ways that if tailored correctly will impact positively for Indian businesses looking to try out social media marketing.

1. Build blogs and teach conversational marketing and business relationship building techniques.
2. Check out Twitter as a way to show a company’s personality.
3. Couple your email newsletter content with additional website content on a blog for improved commenting.
4. Map out an integrated project that incorporates a blog, use of commercial social networks, and a face-to-face event to build leads and drive awareness of a product.
5. Start a community group on Facebook or Ning or MySpace or LinkedIn around the space where your customer does business. Example: what Jeremiah Owyang did for Hitachi Data Systems.
6. Investigate whether your product sells better by recommendation versus education, and use either wikis and widgets to help recommend, or videos and podcasts for education.
7. Work with practitioners and media makers to see how they can use their skills to solve your problems. Don’t be afraid to set up pilot programs, instead of diving in head first.

For a comprehensive list of how marketers can use Social media for marketing check out Chris Brogan’s blog post here.

Fortunately, You are inefficient!

Shocked to read these words?

I want to highlight the startling fact that most office workers operate at a low level of efficiency.

If you are intrigued click here and find out how you can save atleast one hour per day at work.

Indian Politicians Moving Online

Internet campaigns and news sites are mushrooming across the Internet prior to the Indian General Elections 2009.

Whether it is an attempt to superficially duplicate Barack Obama’s successful online campaign (The full report on Obama’s Successful Social Media success can be accessed here) or if it really signals a change in the mindset of our Indian politicos who now want to connect with the young, literate and Internet-savvy generation, we do not know yet.

Read the full list of launches focussed on the upcoming Lok Sabha elections here.