Month: December 2014

Social Intelligence Is A Competitive Advantage

Just came across a Tableau white paper and one of the top 10 business intelligence trends they talk about is how Social Intelligence is increasingly becoming a distinct competitive advantage.

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“In 2014 we saw organizations begin to analyze social data in earnest. In 2015, the leading edge will start to take advantage of their capabilities. Tracking conversations at scale via social will let companies find out when a topic is starting to trend and what their customers are talking about. Social analytics will open the door to responsive product optimization.”

Per Wikipedia, “Social intelligence is the capacity to effectively negotiate complex social relationships and environments…[ it is social intelligence, rather than quantitative intelligence, that defines humans… social intelligence is an aggregated measure of self- and social-awareness, evolved social beliefs and attitudes, and a capacity and appetite to manage complex social change.”

So what is the social intelligence of your business? Are you managers and decision-makers looking at data to help them understand the social intelligence of your business? How do you measure social intelligence and start calibrating data?

These questions are exactly the kinds of things DMAI can help you with.

Right Now I’m Thinking About Engagement

http://blog.sfgate.com/storystudio/sponsoredarticles/adv/?prx_t=x6ABAAfoBApB8LA

This article is full of interesting viewpoints and could easily lead to a half dozen blog posts.

However, right now I am really thinking about employee engagement.

Engagement is a tricky emotion. When someone is truly engaged in their work its special. Most of the time most of us are mostly engaged, but not really feeling it all the time. And sometimes our engagement is on a mostly negative level.

So how does a company keep the majority (if not all) of its employees engaged most of (if not all of) the time? Well, based on my own experience, nothing makes me feel more engaged then more work than I can handle, but not so much that it’s impossible. The sense of always having something to do, coupled with a consistent sense of accomplishment is what drives me towards engagement.

During my 15 years with Wells Fargo, I had some years where I was fully engaged and a few where I was not.
By far, my most accomplished years where there ones where I felt vital to the success of the business. So how to replicate that with everyone around me today?

I’ve got a team of over 60 people, most working independently from home. Only a handful have been with me for just over a year, the rest all less than a year. Our jobs are very much an ebb and flow kind of work, where we seem to have periods of too much and periods of not enough work to do to keep everyone engaged. So that’s what I think about a lot.

Starting in January, we are going to kick off a few new side projects to give team members more opportunities to feel productive during the slow times and we are going to institute a more structured incentive plan to reward hard work in the fast times.

Let’s see how that goes towards upping the engagement level. Given I’m one who rarely feels completely satisfied and is always looking for ways to adapt, enhance and improve… I optimistically wonder where this will take us.

2014 was all about building the foundation. 2015 will be all about putting up the house so that it comfortably fits us all.

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Integrated business intelligence tracking with Cyfe

Stumbled across this Analytics Dashboard Builder Today. Looks pretty cool.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/239702

Cyfe is a business-intelligence tracking platform that lets users create custom dashboards with widgets. After you’ve got Cyfe set up, you can monitor your social media, marketing, sales, analytics, support, infrastructure and more. It pulls data from your business records and from popular services such as Google and Salesforce to provide you with relevant data in easy-to-read and easy-to-download formats.

This service allows even the smallest startups to gain insight and use data in a way that was once reserved for enterprises with investments in staff and servers built to crunch numbers. Simply put, it enables leaders that leverage numerous online tools for daily tasks to customize perspectives vital to accomplishing specific goals, rather than tediously extracting data from multiple sources and trying to make sense of it all.

Unlimited dashboard configurations and widgets are available at only $19 per month. Powerful real-time and visual business intelligence is no longer the exclusive privilege of large enterprises.

I’m gonna play around with it and hopefully it will be something I can get my team up and running with and then I can include it in my trainings! 20141203193138-5-tech-tool-help-compete-with-big-guys

Instruction for Social Media Marketing Tracker

Today I’m gonna give away some free advice on how to set up a social media tracker. If you are using social media to promote your business, then you really need to be using something like this to help you maintain a consistent schedule of pushing out content.

This was prepared by our Business Development and Training expert, Jenifer Caliwag, so she gets most of the props for this blog post.

Here at DMAI, we use our SMMT (Social Media Marketing Tracker) to help us to monitor or track how much traffic and attention we gain through our website and Social Media and help us understand and analyze the right content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it across their social networks.
You can also use applications like HootSuite to do this, but for the sake of our own analytics training and skill building, we do it manually to build a data set.

Our tracker has 15 columns: Date, Time, Posted By, Network, Categories, Sub- Categories, Target, Calls to Action, Posts, comments (replies), Likes (favorites), Share (retweets), Clicks, Reached and Total Engagement, these are the categories will help us to incorporate all of the information we need on our social media updates and posts.

As we track our social media efforts we will meet 5 important goals:

1. Keep the content updated and current
2. Track, test and measure the posts we put in social media
3. Know and understand exactly what content attracts attention
4. Increase engagement among our key influencers
5. Transform statistics in to profit

So, that’s the kind of thing we do and something we can easily help you set up and/or administer.

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Social Media Marketing > Who Are Your Influencers?

There is a new buzzword making its way around the internet… influencer marketing. The concept has been around awhile, but I’m seeing it pop up a lot with small business and network marketing in particular.

Wikipedia defines Influencer marketing as a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.

In a lot of ways, DMAI is more into influencer marketing then traditional marketing. It’s a given that our niche, analytics outsourcing and training, and our client mode, work being done in the Philippines for US and Philippines based business, is not something you will see on billboards and primetime TV commercials.

The majority of new clients and business opportunities have come to us because of a referral or someone we have targeted directly because they are an influencer.

Influencers can be clients, business partners, industry connections or just about anyone who can speak about you and your business in a positive and knowledgeable way. They also have to be credible. And it helps if they like to talk about things they like.

So who are your influencers and are they being correctly targeted with your social media marketing?

Big questions with important answers.

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Sharing My Analytics Solution

Seasons Greetings To All My Connections,

With the global analytics talent shortage causing many of us nightmares when it comes to recruiting, training and retaining talent, I can offer a solution.

My company, DMAI, specializes in setting up analytics centric teams in the Philippines to add additional resources for clients in the U.S.

If you are interested in learning more about our high quality and cost effective solutions, please check out my blog: http://www.dmaiph.wordpress.com

Thanks for your time and may you have a Happy Holiday season.

Dan Meyer
President & Founder of DMAI
danmeyer@dmaiph.com
925-595-4079

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Achieving Better Results Through Analytics: What’s Your Analytics Strategy?

Just put together a pitch deck for a potential in-house corporate training.

Here’s some of the highlights…

You need an analytics strategy.

Making data-driven decisions is key to success in any business.

Having the right data at the right time makes all the difference.

Data-driven decision-making, as well as improved productivity and better overall outcomes begins with analytics.

Some of the benefits from a good analytics solution include:

  • Provide timely and targeted coaching/training to agents.
  • Ensures that the right materials are assigned.
  • Optimizes process of following agent improvements, leading to skill development and job mastery.
  • Eliminates the need for e-mailing countless excel spreadsheets
  • Schedules coaching/ training at an appropriate time.
  • Optimizes the follow up process to review impact of training and identifies when agent performance requires management attentions.
  • Give’s Management a High Level Overview of important KPIs.

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Business Strategy with Analytics – Aligning a business strategy to drive an organization forward requires a robust analytics solution. Businesses who have good analytics tend to be much more profitable and efficient then ones that do not. DMAIPH has helped dozens of companies in both the U.S. and the Philippines with adding more data analysis in their business strategy.

That’s why we have joined up with our key business partner PMCM Events Management to showcase our solutions at #TechToniPH in July 2017. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to find out what we can do to help you align your business strategy with analytics.

 

Introduce Analytics Into Your Networking Marketing Strategy

When it comes to sales, one of the most important lessons I learned while with Wells Fargo is that you should only sell something to someone if they both want it and need it. There was this one story that sticks out in my mind, its form a sales trainer whose class I attended 20 years ago.

He said, “You can only sell a red car to a person who wants to buy a red car.” The point being that you can’t see blue cars to people who want red cars, because if you do they will end up not being happy with what they bought and therefore not happy with you. In fact in order to sell a product, you need to only offer it to the people who want and need it. Trying to sell the wrong product to the wrong person is a huge time waster and network killer.

Having this mindset, I’ve continually been baffled by the sales tactics I see with so many network marketers I know. I mean I hate coffee, never had a taste for it. But having that key piece of insight hasn’t stopped almost a dozen of my friends from trying to get me to be part of their coffee sales MLM.

If you sell coffee, then the first thing you do is go down your list of friends and eliminate anyone who doesn’t drink coffee. Now I know, there is always a chance they might be a source of new leads, but honestly trying to get someone to sell something they don’t use themselves if really just another waste of time.

SO if you take an analytical approach, you would eliminate the long shots. Not just non-coffee drinkers, but also one who cant afford to buy the coffee. It doesn’t do much good to hard sell someone who cant afford your product.

You would be better off seeking out new network connections by joining groups and forums where your target market is. If you are trying to sell red cars, look where red car owners end up online. Where do the go to talk about their red cars and share photos of their red cars. Or maybe you sell vitamin supplements… then you should be marketing to health care professional, people who exercise regularly or are health conscious. Selling vitamins to someone who doesn’t care about their health is another uphill battle.

So the key starting point for using more analytics in your sales strategy starts with building a demographic profile to define your target market and exclude people who will more likely than not be a waste of your precious time.

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Networking Tips > How To Get People To Like You

How to Get People to Like You: 7 Ways From an FBI Behavior Expert

Sharing the above link to an interesting Time Magazine article I just read.

As I continue my networking efforts to add another client to DMAI as well as teach some of my employees how to become better networkers, this was a really timely read.

Here are some the top keys to success mentioned:

1. Seek others opinions. We people realize that you are interested in your opinion, then they will always have a positive impression of you. Even if you disagree with their opinion, letting them talk about what is important to them is a key way to win over people.

2. Putting Aside Your Ego. Biting your tongue wen people who do things to upset you, letting someone else grab the spotlight, taking a back seat and letting someone else lead… all ways of putting your ego aside and making others feel comfortable with you.

3. Listen. This is a sure fire way to get people to like you. Let them talk. Let them ramble about what’s on their mind. Listening is really hard, because we naturally ready a response to anything and everything we hear.

4. Ask People What Challenges Them. This one is a bit surprising, but when you get people to tell you what causes them stress and you are able to listen and maybe offer a few solutions, they will find you company not just pleasant, but important.

5. Tell Them You Just Have A Minute. When someone wants to talk with you, let them know your time is important, but so are they. By saying you have just a minute or so free, the both value you time and appreciate your giving away some of it to them.

My experience is that when you need to turn on the charm, and work the room. To as Dale Carnegie so finely put it, to win friends and influence people, you need to do more than shake hands and smile. You need to be both engaging and enchanting!

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