This blog features the writings of Daniel Watson B.Bus.(B.A.), AIMM, MAICD, Managing Director of Rhodan Management Consultants Pty. Ltd.(Est.1994). It will focus primarily on providing food for thought for SME business owners wanting to grow their businesses, but will also impart the unique insights into business and life that Daniel Watson has developed over more than 3 decades as a company director, general manager, management consultant, sales manager, and business development manager.
About Me
- Daniel Watson
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Born in the mid 1950's and raised in a very small country town situated in Northern Victoria. Resident of Melbourne since 1980 and happy to stay living in one of the world's most liveable cities. You can view my professional profile at http://www.linkedin/in/danielwatson
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Is Social Media Sucking your Business Dry?
Being blissfully unaware of the entire social media landscape before embracing LinkedIn about two years ago, and then branching out over the last six months or so to embrace facebook, twitter, blogger, instant messaging, web-based e-mail and the like, I had no idea of the amount of time, that active participants in this so-called social media age, must commit to remain active and relative to their audiences.
As a management consultant, I am now concerned for all business owners who have employees with direct and unfettered internet access, and who do not employ an IT manager, or have a very good understanding themselves, of the social media landscape.
My concern stems from the fact that even with an IT manager or a good understanding of social media, it is far from an easy task to determine the extent to which company time and resources are being misappropriated through the private social media activities undertaken by employees.
Without one, or both of these elements, at your disposal to stem systematic abuse, your business profitability, is at the mercy of your employees.
Apart from the time such private activities can suck out of any business day, there is also the cost of bandwidth effectively stolen from your business and used to download music, movies, video clips etc to ipods, mobile telephones, flash drives and the like, for private use (the fact that such devices can also be used to download and steal business data, is a separate issue all together).
Those of you with wireless capabilities enabled in your business premises may, to your cost, find that employees and their friends are accessing your internet connection for downloads after hours, via smart phones or laptops operated from cars parked within range of your business broadband signal.
The critical danger will be where you have one, or more employees, who develop an addiction to social media activities. There are already terms such as Facebook addict, Twitter addict, and Social Media Whore, being bandied about on the internet, with some users applying these labels to themselves.
Don’t just think that it won’t affect any of your employees, and remember that it is not only the young, that are heavily into social media. You need to develop a real awareness of the dangers both financial, and potentially legal, of providing unfettered internet access to your employees.
Remember that if you feed an addiction, it will only get worse.
As with gambling, alcohol, and illicit drug addicts, it is ultimately a downhill spiral, with the employer bearing the brunt of the collateral damage, and ultimately paying a high price, before eventually needing to dismiss the errant employee.
Don’t think social media is a passing fad. If you have lived in blissful ignorance like myself until recently, you are about to be hit by a fundamental change in the way in which the world communicates and transacts.
I am old enough to have commenced work before mainframe computing impacted on the workplace, and well before personal computers were thought of, and certainly many years before that other supposed passing fad, the internet, was available to the masses.
I have no doubt that unauthorised social media activities by employees are going to become a large and problematic issue for small business owners, especially those not equipped to fully understand, much less handle, the risks inherent in this growing problem.
Do you know just how much time your employees spend on unauthorised social media activities during working hours?
Would you have any idea if any of your employees are social media addicts?
Do you understand that this is an issue that you can ignore, but only at your own peril?
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Blogging is Tough Going for Business Owners
Writing and posting a regular business blog is seen by many as an efficient and cost effective way to promote your business expertise and your business brand. It is also now seen as an integral element of a necessary social media strategy, one that businesses that continue to ignore embracing, do so at their own peril.
Whilst it may be correct to say that doing it yourself is an efficient and cost effective means of blogging, this statement relates to an ideal world, and the reality will be far from this for most business owners, who will generally be far from efficient and effective at this multi-faceted task.
Unless you possess a fantastic skill set, have a great handle on the language and its nuances, can find the time and the clear headspace to do the writing task properly, and you can then be disciplined enough to publish and promote your blog on a consistent and regular cycle, I would suggest you save yourself a lot of pain, and look at your alternatives.
As a first time blogger, with no previous experience at all of blogging, twittering, and face booking (if that is the right term), it has been a tough ongoing assignment for me to establish a blogging platform, choose topics to blog about, write and edit same, publish and promote each blog, and monitor the statistics to see who was reading them, where the readers are located, and how they accessed each blog.
Having said that, this article is the twenty-fifth consecutive, weekly business blog, that I have authored and posted to the "Unique Insights" Blog Site, and it will be the last for this year. Along this short journey, the Blog Site was awarded a Top 100 Business Blog Award, and it is now consistently read by business owners in over 35 countries, each week.
My experience over this last six months, tells me that the discipline required, the brain power necessary, the creativity that needed to be found, the understanding of audience needs that must be developed, as well as the ability to continually maintain a high level of enthusiasm, will mount a serious challenge to most business owners wanting to do it all themselves.
As a management consultant, I felt it was necessary for me to experience exactly what a business owning client would go through, if I was to recommend to them, that they promote themselves and their business, via a blog that they needed to write and publish themselves. This was the driver that sustained me through my first six months of blogging, and without this driver, it would have been difficult to maintain the momentum.
Following my own personal experience, my recommendation to any business owner thinking of doing it themselves, would be to outsource the majority of the heavy lifting that is involved, and just play the key roles of idea generator and final editor.
However, before embarking down this path, I would strongly suggest all business owners need to be absolutely clear on what outcomes they expect to achieve from blogging, at what cost, and by when, so that they can adequately brief anyone they engage, and have a way of measuring return on investment, so that they can stop the activity if it is not delivering to expectations.
Will I continue blogging, yes I will, as I have now gone through the pain of acquiring the required skills and have caught the bug. However, commencing with this article, and for all future articles, I will be posting via e-mail through Posterous (which I have just discovered and recommend anyone just starting out blogging should investigate) to my own domain, rather than via Blogger at the Blogspot domain.
Will your business have a social media strategy in place for 2010?
Will a blog site be part of your social media strategy if you adopt one?
Will you outsource the heavy lifting and stay focussed on areas where your strengths lie?
As this is my last article for 2009, I would like to wish all of my subscribers and casual readers, a happy festive season and a happy, healthy and prosperous year in 2010.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Stay Focused on the Main Game
As hard as it is to do, it is imperative for the ongoing success of your business, for you to remain totally focused on the main game, and not get distracted or sidelined by unsolicited demands for your time, or through allocating far too much of your limited available time, to attempting to know and understand everything you believe you need to know and understand, in order to stay in front of your competitors.
One problem commonly experienced by business owners is that they have never really decided what their main game is, and as a consequence, they devote far too much of their time and energies to activities for which they never see an adequate financial return, one commensurate with the time and energy devoted to those activities.
If you fall into this category, it is beholden upon yourself for the sake of your business and your own peace of mind, to review your current business activities, make a clear decision as to what in future will be the main game of the business, and then focus as much energy as you can on preparing a strategic plan for the future of the business, and then to developing a clearly focussed business plan that will facilitate the eventual success of the chosen business strategy.
Should you already be perfectly clear on the main game of your business, but the business is not living up to its potential, then it is highly likely that a lack of focus on this main game due to the constant demands on your time from others as well as the need for you to be the resource and information gatherer for your business, is a key reason for the under-performance of the business.
The following are a few suggestions that you might consider implementing in your business to ensure that, at all times, your major focus is on your main game, and not on participation in all of the sideshows to that main game.
• Implement a policy of only conducting face to face meetings by appointment, and limit these appointments to only people who can clearly be seen to have a real and positive contribution to make, in assisting you to win at your main game.
• Hire a “bulldog” as a gatekeeper to ensure that those attempting to circumvent the appointment process, only ever attempt this tactic once, and without success.
• Let everyone you deal with know the actual nature of your main game, and ensure that they are clear on where you would welcome their input, but equally clear that outside these boundaries their input will not be entertained.
• Learn to accept that you cannot possibly, regardless of the industry you operate in, personally ever acquire all the knowledge needed to run a successful business, and be prepared to import expertise, as and only when actually needed, and then only for specific well defined tasks.
• Realise that the vast majority of information that circulates and is always at your fingertips if you want to seek it, or is constantly being pushed and marketed to you incessantly even if you are not seeking it, is in the main stuff you already know, just repackaged, relabelled, pushed through new mediums or by new gurus, and really adds little value to your business.
• Use a media monitoring service to deliver to you a weekly tailored package of information published about topics specific to the information needs of your business, and allocate no more than an hour or two each week to digesting the information provided.
• Have someone else open your incoming mail and make sure they clearly understand that the only thing you want to see in your in tray is real business mail, and only then, if that mail is clearly and directly related to the activities of your main game.
In making sure that your deliberate focus is on your main game, and you are not wasting time and effort participating in sideshows, you will not only make a far better personal contribution to the success of your business, but you will also send a clear message to others, as to where they should be paying the most attention.
Are you as focused as you should be on your main game?
Do you have strategies in place to help you stay focused on your main game?
Is everyone associated with your business aware of what the main game is and where they need to put their focus?