Dot Tom

Recently I had a great conversation with Lisa a senior e-commerce marketer.  Lisa observed that she hadn’t seen enough evidence that social media was relevant to her organization.  She raised some very legitimate concerns including the negative business impacts of customer criticisms; identifying resources to manage it once launched and how to tie sales back to e-commerce.
As our conversation continued I reminder her that her own site had launched product reviews last year – We all tend to forget the less sexy types of social media.  Lisa went on to share about a very interesting relationship with an important thought-leader in her industry that regularly mentions Lisa’s web site in his public speaking engagements and on his blog.  Later I visiting this guy’s blog and found dozens of links and references to Lisa’s web site.  Lisa wasn’t paying for this exposure except by making herself available to answer questions and sharing promotions as they occurred.  Of course that’s social media too, and very measurable.

Lisa mentioned that one of her competitors launched a “community” but she wasn’t terribly impressed.  In her view the community lacked innovation and leadership and failed to drive concrete business objectives.  Having a look at the competitor I found that while there were a lot of features, an active community with interesting content it seemed disjointed with more monologues then dialogue.  There didn’t seem to be that much direct interaction between the host and it’s visitors and while there were plenty of text links and banners leading to the corresponding e-commerce site none of the links were tagged for analytics reporting.  It’s little wonder Lisa was not impressed.

Lisa was also anonymously participating in industry related blogs and engaging in some other Twitter activities with industry leaders.  In spite of the unofficial nature of Lisa’s strategy, her organization seems to be benefiting, if only modestly from her social media activities.  What’s more Lisa doesn’t have to jump into the responsibility of managing a community or hire more staff to continue to make important and beneficial strides in her social media activity.  As Lisa  engages cautiously she just needs to continue to avoid three common mistakes…

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Professional Continuous Improvement Cycle

Today it’s imperative that you are continuously learning.  In rapidly evolving industries like internet marketing it’s critical that you not only stay abreast of strategic and tactical developments in the industry, you also need to address your own professional developmental needs to insure that you not only maintain but increase your value to your employer, remaining sharp and marketable.  But how do you prioritize and focus your efforts?
There are 3 priorities for your professional development that I would recommend regardless of your career path.

1. Identifying current professional development needs
   • For the role you hold today
2. Identifying future professional development needs
   • For your next career move
3. Keeping current
   • Industry trends, tactics and best practices
   • Business and competitive philosophy and strategy
   • Industry relevant economic research and trends
   • Industry relevant consumer research and behavioral trends

It is very common for people to move into different functional areas as their careers develop.  Even if you remain in the same department for your entire career there is nothing more valuable then someone who knows their job, can demonstrate transferable skills, offer cross-functional insight and is knowledgeable about topics that have direct impact on the broader business.  That’s a person I want to promote.

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