Solid Thinking

Tripartite Skills

The success of a consultancy depends on three skills:

1. Smart = identify opportunity, recommendations; The dream
2. Passion/Aggression = push through, suggest, seek approval; The Drive
3. Discipline = action; The Reality

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First Rate announces exclusive New Zealand and Australian partnership with SearchIgnite.

New Zealand Online Marketing scene just about to get a bit busier.

How do we apply ethics to business, especially in making sure the staff can function as best as they can?

Let’s start with three different outlooks:

• Consequentialism: derives the rightness or wrongness of an act from the consequences. “The ends justify the means”. How you do things is not as important as why you do it.
• Deontology: derives the rightness or wrongness of an act from the character of the act itself rather than the outcomes of the action. You are right or wrong based on how you do things.
• Virtue Ethics: focuses on the character of the agent/person rather than on the nature or consequences of the individual actions themselves.

What do these all mean? Consider the act of telling a lie. Each of the concepts above would have a different interpretation on the rightness or wrongness of telling a lie:

• Consequentialism: telling a lie is wrong, but sometimes it is required for a greater good. For example, to protect a person from torture by saying “No, I have not seen him”.
• Deontology: telling a lie is wrong and is a sin from a religious point of view, regardless of the reason.
• Virtue Ethics: emphasises less on the rightness or wrongness of the lie, but looks more into the character of the person. The outcome may be different between a priest and a murderer.

How would these affect your business leadership?

Take for example your staff selection. Different types of people may suit different staff position. Let’s imagine a decision maker (CEO; or judge, marketing strategists, etc):

• Consequentialist: Would emphasis on results. A frivolous person may simply set long term goals and hope they are achieved. A wise person may break the goals down to milestones and monitor the milestones. Staff will most likely be relatively free to do their jobs. If there are no parametric rules (e.g., boundaries), system abuses may happen. Staff of creative/strong-leadership/effective-slacker background may highlight themselves with achievements. Industrious/highly-technical/heads-down type of staff may be slightly lost in directions at times due to the relaxed control. Key to success: milestones and periodic evaluations.
   
• Deontologist: Would emphasis on how things are done based on his value of right/wrong. The person may choose to closely monitor activity progress, and insist on things done in his/her way. At times, focusing too much on how things are supposed to be done may result in forgeting why things are done. Also, rigid framework may limit creativity and becomes a barrier to business evolution/growth. Staff of creative/strong-leadership/effective-slacker background may struggle with this type of leadership and relationship may be marred with conflicts. Industrious/highly-technical/heads-down type of staff will be very productive according to the leader’s master plan. Key to success: never forget the purpose of every action, have an external team to recommend creativity and evolution, careful staff selection.
   
• Virtue Ethicist: Would emphasis on staff characters. The person would spend a large effort in making sure the staff are as trustworthy as possible. Usually very trusting nature to the staff, and some which may become an ‘inner-circle’. In the extremes, a “my guy can’t be wrong” view may develop and become a fertile breeding ground for cliques and favouritisms, something that is very counterproductive to teamwork. Key to success: advisory roles filled with honest/trustworthy and impartial people to balance the very-subjective nature of virtue ethicist, continuous introspection to ensure the virtues are upheld uncorrupted.
   

Spotted today in the NZ Herald: Kiwi Data Warehousing Soars.

What does  mean to us?

If anything, recession taught us something by looking at the trends faced by the advertising industry. Most pronounced in the offline advertising, companies are rushing to cut their marketing budget by a large amount. They chose to hunker down in the bunker waiting for the artillery barrage of credit crunch to pass away before poking their heads again.

Interestingly, some went exactly the other way around into panic buying mode. They base the sales on percentage concept, where if the conversion rate goes down then in order to maintain the sales volume the base audience number must go up. This “panic sales defense” move lead to massive increases in marketing spend that returns no sales increases.

Why exactly these things happened?

The primary cause is that a lot of businesses, especially in the “calm New Zealand where time forgets”, neglect the importance of information. In particular, a lot of them do not bother to try to know their customers. For most conservative businesses, any sales is as good as the other. For instance, a lot of businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars on their websites without bothering to spend a few hundred dollars to get good analytics software such as Google Analytics.

But knowing your customers is paramount to your marketing efficiency. Google Analytics, for example, can be configured to attribute your sales to where the customers are coming from. With this you can recognise which source is valuable and which is not so that when it comes the time to cut down some marketing budget you can be sure you are cutting the right one.

Other useful analysis include customer behavior, such as what do they buy, what are the most favourite products (= promotion opportunities), what are they searching for that made them leave your shop (= product gaps), etc. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook also allow you to engage your customers to gain their trust, and most importantly, feedbacks. Not only that, they also form a free 3rd party data warehousing, where you can conduct data mining to see what people are talking about in relation to your, or your competitors’, products.

With free tools such as these and storage data space becoming cheaper every day, data warehousing and data mining should become a common business practice. It should even be a crime to run a business without thinking about who your customers are.

If you can snipe your enemy from a distance, why blindfold yourself and charge with a short rate inefficient scatter gun?

Facebook Demographics 2009 Age Distribution from Google Ad Planner data - notice the red rectangle.

Notice the red rectangle

Facebook Demographics 2009 from Checkfacebook.com, showing purportedly 60% of Facebook global population from 8 different countries - notice how 18-24 age group is mostly higher than the other age groups.

By Checkfacebook.com

Facebook 2009 US Demographics shown by Facebook Ad demographic targeting tool roughly confirms the data given by Checkfacebook.com, lending strong credibility to it.

Facebook 2009 Demographic for United States

Good food for though. Google Ad Planner data is highly inaccurate? Anyone has any information on how Google Ad Planner data is compiled?

“Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand? “

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How much money is YouTube earning? How much money is YouTube losing?

Is YouTube a viable revenue generator?

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Colin James in the Stuff.co.nz today:

The jury has spoken. But does it speak for anywhere other than Mt Albert? And does it speak on anything but Mt Albert’s particularities?

His writeup highlights the possibility that National’s Melissa Lee dramatic loss in the Mount Albert byelection last weekend (13 June 2009) is a possibilit that the public is starting to reject National after the 2008 election win. It went on to cite the Timaru example in 1970s.

However, questions remain to be asked. The item that is missed out of the  analysis is the voter turnout rate. How many of the expected votes actually eventuate? Is there a general apathy in the region? Is Mount Albert now really a unison of, Labour vote, or could there be a large disappointment on National candidate leading to a lot of abandoned votes (which did not quite go over to Labour)? Is it really Labour, or is it simply “nothing”?

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Plain simple. Microsoft and Yahoo seems to have struck a deal which may benefit each other.

References:

1. Throughout 2008’s on-again, off-again talks between Yahoo and Microsoft, many financial analysts declared the belief that some sort of deal–either Microsoft acquiring Yahoo outright or later just its search business–was a matter of when, not if. - 28 April 2009
2. Yahoo and Microsoft, which held a marathon series of fruitless merger and partnership negotiations last year, have restarted discussions, this time over a possible advertising agreement, a person briefed on those discussions said Friday. - 10 April 2009
3. THE uneasy alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft, which will see Yahoo Search Marketing selling sponsored web links on Microsoft’s new search engine, called Bing, is looking rocky. - 30 May 2009
4. Asked if the talks between Yahoo and Microsoft about an Internet search deal continue, Bartz replied “a little bit.” - 1 June 2009

Clearly, Microsoft and Yahoo has agreed to disagree (on the acquisition/takeover), but also agree that they have a ‘common enemy’ named Google.

As such, situational relationships commonly result in sleeping together. And before you know it they had a baby.

Yahoo! Search Marketing ads on Microsoft Bing.com - click image to enlarge

This simply means that Yahoo gets better presented to the searchers, as clearly Bing tries to sway some of the Googlelovers which Yahoo search failed to; Microsoft gets real meaty materials for the search results (and most probably a part of the ad revenue).

Implications for the marketers: watch this space! If Bing does take off (and early reviews indicate this is quite a possibility) then it is time to get more serious on Yahoo! Search Marketing.

The real question is, as apparently is the risk with all childbirth, will the relationship become victim of postnatal depression?

Microsoft is set to launch Bing tomorrow. Touted as “potential Google killer” by some media, Bing has received a mix of reviews (CNet, Wired).

But will it change the SEO landscape?

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