Remarkable Reading #36: How to Make Money with Social Media: An Insider's Guide on Using New and Emerging Media to Grow Your Business By Jamie Turner & Reshma Shah and GLOBAL VISION: How Companies Can Overcome the Pitfalls of Globalization by Robert Salomon
The aim of this section Remarkable Reading is pay a tribute to the books that taught, share trends & insights into where our world in the 21st century is heading in a technology enabled world, and ask the right questions.
Bolded and italics quotes and references do not belong to myself and belong directly to the author. The focus is to share valuable insights and teachings from the book to win business for the authors.
How to Make Money with Social Media: An Insider's Guide on Using New and Emerging Media to Grow Your Business By Jamie Turner & Reshma Shah is yet another practical book filled with fun-facts and super strategies into why Social Media is so vital & critical to your business. Whether it's to connect with new prospects or reignite liaisions with old prospects, the basics of a company blog combined with one of the many social networks such as Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIN, can prove to be a powerful business tool, and one that every business needs to understand the importance of.
Page 165 - “When a company forms a global alliance with a local partner in the host country, that local partner can help the foreign company manage company specific institutional risks, given its familiarity with the local political, economic, and cultural environments”.
Two topics & themes we’ll be touching on are:
- What to watch out for in an age of globalization & outsourcing in the 21st Century
How to Make Money with Social Media: An Insider's Guide on Using New and Emerging Media to Grow Your Business By Jamie Turner & Reshma Shah is yet another practical book filled with fun-facts and super strategies into why Social Media is so vital & critical to your business. Whether it's to connect with new prospects or reignite liaisions with old prospects, the basics of a company blog combined with one of the many social networks such as Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIN, can prove to be a powerful business tool, and one that every business needs to understand the importance of.
Jamie Turner (who also wrote GO MOBILE: Location-Based Marketing, Apps, Mobile Optimized Ad Campaigns, 2D Codes and Other Mobile Strategies to Grow Your Business as reviewed here has a concise and clear understanding of Social Media. He understands the basics of it's importance as an author, as well as staying ahead of the mobe evolution. Jamie Turner & Reshma Shah both prove to be a strong team, and the end output is a simple & surprising book. How to Make Money with Social Media: An Insider's Guide on Using New and Emerging Media to Grow Your Business provides sufficient examples of how to specifically apply Social Media as an authentic channel to win business for your brand and company, and isn't a spurious integration, but a personalized and customized marketing channel for authentic B2B growth.
Suggestions & hints on what Social Media is, what social networks are most well attuned to your social media conversations, how social media will impact the growth of your business, and how you can measure the metrics of social media once your strategy is implemented is really where How to Make Money with Social Media: An Insider's Guide on Using New and Emerging Media to Grow Your Business shines, and Jamie Turner and Reshma Shah's writing prowess is admirable.
Both authors enlighten and educate us into remembering that despite being over a decade since Social Media has emerged as a proven scientific marketing technique, not all companies have embraced the power of something as simple as a company blog yet.
As an avid and passionate blogger for the last 20 years (consistently), I thoroughly recommend blogging combined with +1 social network as your bare minimum social media technique and channel to begin with. The key will always be on content that is informative, educative, instructive, improving and exciting.
Some key take-out's include:
Page 11 - “Even though the first television broadcast took place in 1928, TV wasn’t widely adopted until the mid- 1950’s”
Page 14 - “For most of the twentieth century, traditional marketing was pretty simple: Figure out your USP, get the creative people at your agency to come up with a good TV commercial, and run the heck out of it during prime time”
Page 23 - “All this leads us to one of our key points: you can waste a lot of time and money in social media if you don't know what you’re doing”
Page 33 - “Businesses that use social media as a megaphone are missing the point. You know the kind we’re talking about. They're the businesses (or consultants) that can’t stop talking about themselves and what makes their products or services special”
Page 45 - “Companies now realize that their blogs are channels that can create a link between a customer or prospect and a business. And when they build that link, they’re creating loyalty for their brand and their product or service”
Page 45 - “Companies now realize that their blogs are channels that can create a link between a customer or prospect and a business. And when they build that link, they’re creating loyalty for their brand and their product or service”
Page 67 - “A great way to get more customers using social media is not just to engage but to educate says Hubspot chief technology officer and founder Dharmesh Shah. “We believe in this passionately at HubSpot, and it has worked miracles for us. We’ve learned that the more people you make smarter by educating them, the more leads and customers you get”
Page 115 - “The right way to use social media is to create conversation with your prospects and customers. Conversations go back and forth, not just one-way. So if you use WordPress to create a blog about your company, you’ll need to encourage people to engage with you by leaving comments, tweeting about your posts, writing articles on their own blogs about your posts, and doing other things that create the circular momentum and the snowball effect that we discussed in previous chapters”
Page 247 - “A lead is an inbound prospect who is interested in your product or service (or your competitor's products or service). If you can capture a lead and nurture it through the sales funnel, you can convert that prospect into a customer. And that means revenue for your company”
Page 251 - “But the manpower, involved in running a social media campaign can be significant. So can the costs for producing the content for your social media campaign”
This alongside GO MOBILE: Location-Based Marketing, Apps, Mobile Optimized Ad Campaigns, 2D Codes and Other Mobile Strategies to Grow Your Business are two very simple yet effective strategy books in reminding us not to forget the basics of social media integration into your marketing mix, and realizing that content is the only fuel that works for this engine as well as collaboration, connectivity, creativity, curation & creation. Jamie Turner & Reshma Shah do a wonderful job at educating us, and it's the sort of book you reflect on in terms of social media marketing foundations in the formative years.
Moving on to GLOBAL VISION: How Companies Can Overcome the Pitfalls of Globalization by Robert Salomon.
Globalization has had a significant impact on the world economy. The way in which we do business, how we do business changed crucially, and so did the impact it had on company culture.
Whilst Globalization can be a remarkably powerful & effective way to set your company up for success with launches into multiple markets, utilizing it improperly, or thinking that “one size fits all” in terms of launching a new product can be detrimental to a company’s success in the twenty first century. Launching a product can cost a company billions, if not trillions of dollars, and it is easy to assume that if a product is successful in one country, it can work in all countries. This is a fallacy that Robert Salomon argues against. He urges companies to understand individual and specific markets for what they are before launching a product in a particular market.
I blogged here about how and why the opportunity of working with fast emerging global Asian superpowers can be opportune and very exciting, but also pose problems and issues if not studied very thoroughly. THE STARBUCKS EXPERIENCE: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary Into Extraordinary by Joseph Michelli is a phenomenal examples of how a global company can be launched and accepted into an emerging Asian market with success, and Robert Salomon’s GLOBAL VISION: How Companies Can Overcome the Pitfalls of Globalization is a remarkable reminder of what to watch out for. Success IS achievable when launching into multiple but careful successive planning is needed first & foremost to understand the cultural, political and economic landscape. Whilst the lure and excitement of selling to over 3 billion new consumers is exciting, the wrong type of product into a market can be a dangerous and costly exercise if not studied properly. I love how Robert Salomon also points out that sometimes it is the countries in our local vicinity, or countries that we share similarly attuned cultural values with where we might be prone to have more success.
China and India, for example, on one hand, have a collective population of over 3 billion people that makes it a very prosperous and exciting market for any country wanting to expand their sales, but on the other hand, without realizing what these countries and markets are attuned to, what their cultural norms are, what their value system is, you will struggle to sell to 3 billion people let alone other markets in Southeast Asia or Europe (even if you think it is something simple as chocolate). The wisdom of realising the value in customization & personalization of the finer nuances between each country, and treating each country as an individual and specific country is what will ensue the success of your product launch into emerging or multiple markets.
Robert Salomon’s GLOBAL VISION: How Companies Can Overcome the Pitfalls of Globalization assists us in understanding the cultural, political and economic factors that can impact your company when you outsource or when you decide to expand your company into an international or emerging market. A globalizing world is full of tempting opportunities, however the wrong globalization strategy can severely hinder your company’s prospects if not studied & researched rigorously and heavily, specially in terms of what markets you’re investing into.
Robert Salomon has sharp business acumen and acuity, and his writing style is exciting, detailed, informative whilst being fun and contemporary at the same time. His writing style is complete, exhaustive, all-inclusive, & detailed, and his ability to decipher and help us in understanding such a complex topic is relevant, weighty & worthwhile. An absolute must-read for any company investigating cross-border collaborations, as well as understanding the power and potential of institutional distance.
A few key take-out’s I found spectacular include:
Chapter 1, Page 1 - “Globalization has fostered an increasingly interconnected world, with nearly $30 trillion in foods and services traded and more than $1 trillion in corporate investment in 2013 alone. Advances in information technology and transportation have helped facilitate globalization - connecting developed and developing worlds, lifting some 400 million people out of poverty along the way”
Page 10 - “While advances in information technology are indeed increasing at a rapid rate, and those advances have certainly facilitated the coordination, connectedness, and efficiency of communications across borders, it does not follow that all peoples and countries will converge so as to become nearly indistinct. Despite what business pundits who exhort globalization would have to believe, important differences between countries remain, and information technology simply does not fully bridge the political, economic and cultural divides between countries”
Page 11 - “People are not the same the world over. Countries vary on a host of dimensions, and the ways in which they differ have important implications for how companies ought to globalize and how globalizing businesses will perform”
Page 18 - “Expanding globally allows companies to reach far-flung customers and generate foreign sales. And these days, it seems all the rage to penetrate fast-growing emerging markets like those in China and India, to reach a vast consumer base.”
Page 35 - “There are many factors that influence the likelihood of success in global markets, but a critical first step in successfully navigating the global landscape is to understand the unique factors that make globalization so complex and challenging”
Page 38 - “A second obstacle stems from cultural differences. Chinese consumers do not share many of the tastes and preferences of consumers from the West, which makes it difficult for Western companies to appeal to local consumers there. Moreover in business, the Chinese rely more on interpersonal connections and relationships to get things done than their Western counterparts”
Page 45 - “A company like IKEA, which has largely performed admirably in global markets, demonstrates an interesting phenomenon . IKEA first expanded globally in the 1960s and 1970s to European countries such as Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany, all of which are institutionally similar to Sweden. It was easier for IKEA to transfer its intangible assets to those markets and establish itself there”
Page 50 - “The American companies Airbnb and Uber are excellent examples of firms using new business models whose success depends critically on the political environment - even within a company’s home country. Airbnb and Uber both use web-based technology platforms to create online marketplaces that connect buyers and sellers”
Page 112 - “A culture that has been centuries in the making does not quickly dissolve, whereas political and economic institutions can change relatively quickly - sometimes rather suddenly.”
Page 165 - “When a company forms a global alliance with a local partner in the host country, that local partner can help the foreign company manage company specific institutional risks, given its familiarity with the local political, economic, and cultural environments”.
I thoroughly enjoyed Robert Salomon's GLOBAL VISION: How Companies Can Overcome the Pitfalls of Globalization, and for those who are ardent fans of THE WORLD IS FLAT by Thomas L. Friedman will really enjoy this.
You can purchase a copy of GLOBAL VISION: How Companies Can Overcome the Pitfalls of Globalization here, follow Robert Salomon on Twitter here, and visit his website here.
You can purchase a copy of How to Make Money with Social Media: An Insider's Guide on Using New and Emerging Media to Grow Your Business here, follow Reshma Shah on Twitter here, follow Jamie Turner on Twitter here, visit his website 60 Second Marketer here, and add him on LinkedIN here.
Comments
Post a Comment