How was your stay?

Studying marketing, one of the first things you will learn is that “word of mouth” is the most valuable marketing you can ever get for your business. This sounds pretty straight forward; do a good job and your customers will tell everyone how great your products are. Unfortunately the world is no longer quite that simple.

Word of mouth on steroids

What used to be one customer talking to another, is now; Internet forums, microblogs, social blogging, social networks, wiki’s, podcasts, social bookmarking, content sharing and thousands of other ways to communicate online. Juggling all these communication channels, the news about your fantastic product or service could easily get lost.

Facilitate sharing!

One of the cheapest and most effective marketing campaigns I have seen recently was at the Andaz Hotel i New York . When I checked out after a fantastic stay, they simply gave me a Tripadvisor business card. Instead of taking the passive approach, they facilitated sharing. I’m not sure if Andaz hotel, Wall Street is one of the top 10 hotels in New York, but according to TripAdvisor it is! .. and that happends to be where most of us do our research before booking a hotel.

The best things in life are free

Like the TripAdvisor review card, there’s a lot of other smart solutions that can facilitate “word of mouth” and online sharing. But don’t expect the creative people from your media agency to come running to tell you about them. They won’t, simply because they don’t make any money from it. The best things in life are free. The same goes with marketing.

Lighthouse 8, Business Engineering

 

 

 

 

Business Engineering

What is business engineering?

Compared to only a few years back, most of today’s businesses have access to an extreme amount of business data. Utilizing free technology like Google Analytics, online survey software like SurveyMonkey and misc trend software, just about “any” company can receive business intelligence that only a few years back was reserved for the fortunate few. This revolution in information technology has crowned the term “big data”. The access to the data is no longer an issue, the challenge is how to efficiently utilize the data. The difference between traditional business management and business engineering, is how you incorporate technology and data in you business decissions. The majority of research on traditional business management was published before the technology revolution (and the Internet). Where academics earlier had to make decisions based on assumtions about the market, we now make decisions based on input from the market. Business engineering is the scientific approach to business management. It incorporates all the different areas and functions of the business, and aims to build management information systems that improves the performance of the company.

Why you should listen

The challenge with business analytics is that it grows proportionally more complex with the amount of data. This means that the advantage of being a big corporation has suddenly turned into a disadvantage. Intelligence simply can’t be processed and distributed to the different business functions fast enough making the huge organisations slower to respond to the wants and needs of the market. This creates an opportunity for the small and medium businesses that we haven’t seen since the industrial revolution. if you are leading a start-up this is fantastic news. If you are managing your company the same way you did 5 years ago, the alarm bells should be accompanied by the red flashing light in your office right now.

Lighthouse 8, Business Engineering

 

 

 

Where good ideas come from

Steven Johnson shows us how radical innovation is accessible to everyone who know how to cultivate it. Where Good Ideas Come From is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how to come up with tomorrow’s great ideas.

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