A WebVisable survey finds video advertising to be an increasingly important component for small businesses. – Small businesses achieved more in search in the fourth quarter of 2010 by
increasing their keyword portfolios and diversifying ad spending across the
major search engines, according to a report released by WebVisible, a company
that tracks small business search advertising trends. According to th…
A new joint survey from Appcelerator and IDC shows that the emergence of tablet computers has caused developers to refocus their development strategies. – Appcelerator, maker of tools for building mobile, desktop and tablet applications, and IDC have announced results of a joint survey showing that the onslaught of tablet systems has caused some developers to refocus their development efforts.
Indeed, the joint Appcelerator-IDC survey of more than 2…
In this edition of Baseline: Line of Business, Joe Maglitta, Vice President and Editorial Director at Ziff Davis Enterprise, catches up with U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Keith Taylor at the MIT Sloan CFO Summit in Boston, MA. Taylor serves as the Assistant Commandant for Resources and Chief Financial Officer for the Coast Guard. In this capacity, he is responsible for financial management and resource activities including planning, programming, budgeting, and execution of the services appropriations. During this video interview, Taylor discusses how important it is to make use of every dollar in his budget, and how he is working to reform processes and integrate systems within his branch of the service. Taylor and Maglitta also discuss how creating and using a “spaghetti chart” can help simplify complexity between systems within an organization.
– Video Content.
A frequent question from people in all career phases is what a person can do to better sell a new idea, whether to a customer or inside an organization. As much as it would be nice to have a standard formula that always works, success really depends on the particulars of your situation.
There are, however, a number of common strategies you can consider. Your best course of action is to be adept at using a variety of approaches to make your ideas more powerful and compelling. These nine strategies are a strong start to include in your idea-selling toolkit:
1. Get the Facts in Place behind Your Idea
Make sure you build fact-based, logical support as the underpinning for your idea. If the facts aren’t readily available, look for new or nontraditional information sources. Assemble the information you need to develop a fact-based case for why your idea will deliver results the organization needs.
2. Link Emotions to the Facts Supporting Your Idea
Think about the world’s great stories. Very few are made up solely of facts. They all are strongly rooted in characters and emotions. Develop the most compelling storyline which makes sense with your idea and creates emotional connections to it among potential supporters.
3. Depict Your Idea
Based on whatever is appropriate, create an early mock up of what you’re trying to accomplish. It could be a picture, a storyboard, a video, or an actual prototype, among other things. Help others buy-in to your idea by making it easy to interact with an early version of the end result you’re attempting to deliver.
4. Create a Clear Implementation Roadmap
If there aren’t obvious steps for how an idea can become reality, it may be dead on arrival in an organization. Break down the “how-to’s” behind your idea so key stakeholders can clearly see the effort and investment necessary to bring an idea to fruition.
5. Make Your Idea Easier to Support
Do the groundwork to make choosing your idea easy for decision makers by removing as many obstacles as possible. Think about whether it makes sense to break your idea up into easier to digest (i.e., support, fund, implement) pieces. Maybe you can better sell your idea by going the Goldilocks route, with “too much” and “too little” versions surrounding the option you want. Push for the BIG idea, but be happy to settle for the “just right” option in between.
6. Quietly Build Your Support One-by-One
Rather than waiting for a big meeting to introduce your idea and see how things go, build your support person-by-person ahead of time. Talk to individuals in advance, share where you’re headed, and solicit both input and support. If someone is supportive individually but becomes antagonistic or noncommittal in a later “big meeting,” you can always tactfully refresh their memory about an earlier favorable position.
7. Be Ready for the Right Moment
Some ideas will be ahead of their time when you’re working on them. Keep going. Perform all the preparation, get your assumptions and ideas challenged by others, and make refinements. Then read the organizational or market tea leaves as best you can so you’re ready to introduce the idea when it’s really the right time.
8. Secure Visible Third-Party Validation for Your Idea
It always helps to have an influential spokesperson backing your idea. Inside an organization, your third-party validation may not be from a TV star; it’s likely to come from senior leaders willing to expend their political capital to support good things for the organization. Identify who the key influencers are and start building their interest and support for your idea.
9. Pick a Different Salesperson
It could be someone else can run with your idea more effectively than you. If you think that’s the case, consider recruiting THAT person to be the salesperson. Or maybe even give the idea away to someone who can nurture and develop it better than you can. If you’re really interested in bettering the organization first and foremost, seeing the idea pushed forward and implemented by someone else should be more important than retaining ownership of a great idea which never sees the light of day.
Summary
These strategies are a starting point. Adapt, combine, or pull them apart so they’ll work most effectively in your organization to take full advantage of successful new ideas.
Mike Brown leads The Brainzooming Group, helping organizations succeed more rapidly by expanding their strategic options and efficiently implementing innovative plans. He authors the Brainzoomingâ„¢ blog, shares innovation ideas on Twitter, and wrote the ebook “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation.†He’s also a frequent keynote presenter.
Online CRM software improves and helps in lots of business processes. That is the reason why a lot of companies select to utilize this software.
At a Berlin security conference, Microsoft executive Scott Charney suggests a "Collective Defensive" strategy for the Internet modeled after public health policies. – Scott Charney, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of trustworthy computing, is advocating that governments enact legislation that would isolate computers from the public Internet if they aren’t adequately protected by the latest security technology.
Speaking at the International Security Solu…
A Veeam Software survey finds data protection in virtual data center environments lags among cost-conscious companies. – Veeam Software, a provider of VMware data protection, disaster
recovery and VMware management solutions for virtual data center
environments, released preliminary findings from its first annual
report on the impact of virtualization on data protection strategies.
Although virtualization is impro…
In all companies a key role in the development of the business and its positiveness is directly related to industry marketing strategies and methods relationship with customers.
Innovations for a conservative industry
“WE CAN bury her, burn her, or dump her.” The lucrative business of running funeral homes is rarely as blunt as that portrayed by Monty Python, a British satirical television show, and certainly not a front for cannibalism. But burial rites in most of the modern world remain an expensive relic of 19th-century habit. The last big innovation was cremation, which is now under fire for its environmental costs. A study conducted in 2007 for Centennial Park, a cemetery in Australia, found cremations produce the equivalent of 160kg of CO2 per body. A cemetery burial emits a mere 39kg. But maintenance (mowing lawns and the like) makes the ultimate carbon footprint of burial bigger than cremation.
Both tend to make extravagant use of coffins made from valuable hardwoods such as oak and mahogany. In America the coffin may then go into a cumbersome and expensive burial vault. Unpleasant chemicals abound. A paper published in the Journal of Environmental Health in 2008, entitled “Drinking Grandma”, warned about the public-health risks of formaldehyde leaking from cemeteries into groundwater. Cremations are dirty too. Dental fillings mean that they account for as much as a fifth of Britain’s mercury emissions: regulations require crematoria to cut mercury emissions by half by 2012. …
Based on Forrester Research report on online retailing, cost-conscious businesses should seriously consider investing in a mobile retailing strategy in order to stay competitive and grow market share. – Consumers increasing appetite for mobile applications is driving
online retailers to speed up their mobile marketing initiatives,
according to a Forrester Research study produced in partnership
with Shop.org, the National Retail Federations digital division.
Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of…
A new look at the landscape of climate politics calls for subtler and more thoughtful approaches
WHAT does climate policy have to learn from Capability Brown, whose landscape designs provided the settings for over a hundred of England’s stately homes and palaces in the 18th century? According to a new discussion paper by a group of academics and policy activists, the answer is a form of stage management. Brown eschewed long straight drives that took the visitor directly from the edge of a property to the house at its heart, feeling the destination was diminished and made dull by being always straight ahead. He preferred that people travel along winding “lines of grace” and “lines of beauty”, in the aesthetic idiom of the time. He arranged the curves and contours of the landscape, with its woods and glades and lakes, in such a way as to frame and then hide the object of the journey in various delightful ways before the final, impressive arrival. “Lose the object and draw nigh obliquely,” he is said to have said.
This is the lesson that a number of academics, mostly from the social sciences and humanities, and other interested parties, drew from a meeting they held in February to discuss the perceived failures of the approach to climate change that the world has been following for the past two decades. (They were helped by the fact that their meeting place, Hartwell House near Aylesbury, benefits from fine grounds landscaped in Brown’s style.) Taking the climate itself as the object of policy, and making a beeline for a climate endpoint that you have been told is desirable—a world less than two degrees warmer than the one Brown enjoyed in the 18th century is the widely accepted target—is an approach which has failed to have much practical impact to date. In a discussion paper drafted since the meeting and released on May 11th, the Hartwell group argues that that lack of impact is unavoidable. Slogging doggedly to a distant end that seems never to get any closer is not going to work: to make progress one needs to follow a more roundabout route, one which is a pleasure—or at least politically appealing—at every point on the journey. …
T-Mobile is said to be unsure whether to support a WiMax or LTE-based 4G network. According to a report, T-Mobile has been in talks with both Sprint-favored Clearwire about WiMax and Harbinger Capital about its planned LTE network.
– WiMax or LTE? Which technology to choose for its eventual 4G network support is a question T-Mobile is said to be considering, according to a report from the Financial Times.
The carrier has reportedly been in talks with two companies about their competing technologies. Clearwire, which supplie…
Businesses in all types of industries today are investing in data loss protection technology at increasingly higher rates because of the increase in corporate insider threats. As more employees utilize Web applications for real-time communications, data leak prevention has become even more complex. Here, Knowledge Center contributor Bob Hinden discusses the trends driving this new generation of insider threats and shows how businesses can implement data loss protection into their Web 2.0 security strategies.
– Social networking sites and Web 2.0 applications have become pervasive in the enterprise. As Web-based tools bridge gaps between communities and wipe away physical borders, they enable people and businesses to communicate in real time. While instant messaging, Web conferencing, and peer to peer file…
RSA Conference 2010 is kicking off March 1 in San Francisco, bringing with it a focus on the latest threats as well as security strategies spanning application development, social networks and the cloud.
– From data protection to
cloud computing to application development, this years
RSA Conference is
keeping an eye toward practical strategies for dealing with todays
cyber-threats.
The conference, which will
run from March 1 to March 5 at the Moscone
Center in San Francisco, has expanded t…
Anti-doping strategies targeting individual footballers which cost some $30 million (Dh110m) a year are ineffective, Fifa’s chief medical officer Jiri Dvorak said yesterday. Dvorak told a Fifa medical conference in South Africa that roughly 10 cases of 33,000 tests done annually, at a cost of
The amount of data that enterprises have to store has been expanding, and 2010 promises no reversal of that trend. For IT managers, the challenge of dealing with so much data is not going away. With that in mind, eWEEK spoke to a number of analysts about what database administrators and the companies they work for should be thinking about in 2010. Here is what eWEEK found.
– …
News Analysis: Microsoft had a relatively successful year. But 2009 is nearly history and Microsoft must look ahead to 2010. Google and Apple will remain its biggest competitive challenges. However, Microsoft would be wise to avoid unhealthy obsessions about the competition. Here is a look at 10 strategies Microsoft should follow in the new year.
– Now that 2009 is coming to a close,
it’s time for Microsoft to look ahead to 2010. The software giant will
be met with several challenges during the year. It will need to face
off against Google, an increasingly disconcerting competitor that seems
to have its sights set on Redmond.
It also nee…
Two fallen internet titans are trying to regain their footing
“THEY never come back” may be an ironclad law of boxing, but AOL and Yahoo! are trying to prove that it does not apply to lumbering online giants. On December 9th Time Warner span off AOL, undoing a famously ill-conceived merger. A couple of days earlier Yahoo! and Microsoft finalised an agreement to merge their web-search and much of their advertising businesses, freeing Yahoo! to hone a new strategy. Peculiarly, both firms’ comeback plans hinge on giving away content to attract traffic and thus advertising—an online strategy that has disappointed many media companies.
AOL and Yahoo! came of age a decade ago in different corners of the internet: one as the biggest provider of dial-up access, the other as the leading web directory. Both soon turned into “portals” providing both content and communications tools, such as web-mail and instant messaging. More recently, both have drifted while the internet evolved around them. A series of weak bosses failed to do away with fiefs, professionalise management and keep the brands fresh, even as competition—from broadband in the case of AOL, and from rivals such as Google and Facebook for Yahoo!—ate into revenues. …
As 2009 comes to an end in a few weeks, eWEEKs Eric Lundquist is contemplating the 10 technology strategies that IT managers and administrators can use to help cut costs and improve their companys business outlook for 2010. Some of the technologies and strategies that Lundquist sees making a big impact next year include cloud computing and virtualization, social networking, and whether or not to upgrade to Microsoft Windows 7.
– The end of the year approaches, and you have spent way too much time on
Facebook and Twitter and worrying about little things like keeping your
company in business in 2009. However, despite a once-gloomy economy now
showing some sun around the edges and an interest in social media bordering on…
