Social Media - Integrating the Tools

As a business you probably want to spread your marketing messages far and wide, using whatever tools that are available. Letting one social media tool feed another potentially makes this more efficient. For example:

• Twitter tweets can automatically appear on your company website, such as to be part of the News section
• Using RSS feeds to drive content into other services
• Photos and videos added to Flickr for your followers there can be added automatically to Twitter and/or your Facebook account
• For professionals, Twitter tweets can feed into LinkedIn, so they appear in the “Network Activity”  seen by people who are connected to you
• YouTube likes and comments can automatically become Twitter tweets
• FourSquare check-ins can be fed into Twitter

Generally these links are permanent, until you sever the link. But some, such as FourSquare to Twitter, you confirm during each check-in.

Whilst these links can be very useful, you also have to be mindful whether they are appropriate. On feeding Twitter into LinkedIn, is the frequency and topics on which you tweet appropriate to your LinkedIn profile? Is the use of hashtags on Twitter appropriate for LinkedIn?

You may find that it is worth having two or more Twitter accounts. There could be a “business” one that feeds the website and/or LinkedIn, plus another for tweets that are more personal and you wouldn’t want to appear in such places.

With a bit of careful thought, these interfaces can be leveraged to your advantage.
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Traffic Light Charts for Excel

We’ve looked before at add-ins for gauges and sparklines, but haven’t looked at “Traffic Light Charts”. These apply colour highlights to trends, as in the example left.

Here improvement is shown in green, and deterioration in red. The thicker red line is especially poor performance, and will jump out at anyone reviewing this simple dashboard. This and other styles are achieved using Excel add-ins.

If you like what you see, the add-ins can be purchased at reasonable prices from the foot of the page.

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Cost, Revenue and Cash Flow Drivers

Many moons ago I was Head of Finance at Celltech, the biotechnology company. Some R&D costs were project or department-specific, but others were allocated by the number of people in each section.

Then the first manufacturing process started. Initially the same cost basis was used, but this began to produce bizarre decisions, such as expensively automating a process cheaper to do manually, simply because that didn’t attract such a high overhead allocation. Another approach was needed.

We invented the concept of “cost drivers” to produce more suitable estimates. Costs that only related to R&D only ever got charged to R&D. I was amused to attend a course some years after, only to find these concepts were now called “Activity-Based Costing”.

The point was that if management looked at the results of actual vs budget and asked the simple question “Why are they different” there would be a valid reason, not some fudge due to accounting treatment. We could get to the bottom of any issue, and be able to do something about it.


What is Driving Costs, Revenues and Cash Flow?

But what we didn’t do was identify more directly what was driving costs. Now we would think one stage further and devise a way to monitor anything critical to the health of the company.

So not just what is driving main costs, but also driving revenues and cash flow. So factors like footfall, quote conversion rates and debtor days. Possibly staff turnover if costly or disruptive. Plus drivers in other areas. These Key Performance Indicators can then be reported and managed at the divisional or departmental level.

Out of these would come maybe half a dozen KPIs that would stand out in importance to the business as a whole, and which could be directly controlled. Follow and action these regularly and the financial results would take care of themselves to a significant extent. However as the term KPIs is so often applied to the results such as revenue and profit, I prefer to split KPIs into two distinct types:

• Key Performance Drivers (KPDs)
• Key Results Metrics (KRMs)

Have you consciously made that distinction in your business? And determined what will be important for 2011? It could make 2011 a far more successful year!

Do contact me or ring 01628 632914 if you would like to discuss further.

Thoughts from Business Cloud Summit 2010

Earlier today I attended the Business Cloud Summit in Hammersmith. Incorporating an exhibition and panel interview sessions, it provided a very positive view of the cloud as an option for organisations of all sizes.

But some aspects did strike me:

Two Types of Providers

There are two types of providers – those that look at their service from a customer perspective, and those that don’t.

Aspects like making it easy to leave to make it easier to join, through data export or no minimum commitment. Or by producing a “customer charter” - though beware the title matches the content!

Cloud or Outsourcing

The largest cloud-based system in the world, for HR, sounded very little different from any other form of outsourcing agreement. There are weekly meetings between provider and customer, and I suspect dedicated servers not the multi-tenanted systems usually provided. It also wasn't clear whether access was via the public interent or some private connection, as is common with other types of hosted HR and payroll apps.

That’s a very different situation from a typical cloud user, who may have little if any influence on the way the service runs.

Commercial Business Models

The majority of exhibitors were companies formed specifically to develop and market a SaaS cloud app. The main exception was Microsoft which has recently decided to embrace the cloud before someone else does it for them.

Other on-premise vendors who have cloud offerings were not there promoting them, reflecting their approach in other situations. The cloud business model is not especially attractive to on-premise vendors, and I fear is a major barrier to development and promotion of cloud offerings. Is the cloud too cheap?

Risks and Rewards

One of the industry representatives said the cloud “brings new risks and rewards”. Some of the new pitfalls and risks we’ve discussed in earlier articles.

Clearly cloud providers are no different from any other IT vendors in telling you all the benefits, but little if any of the issues. Choosing a cloud provider is certainly as much a minefield as on-premise. It’s best to be well advised.

If you’d like to discuss any aspect of this please contact me – details to the left.

News Update - Monday 29/11/10

Here's the pick of the last week's news stories that are likely to impact your business:

Cloud First policy: In the week the Cloud Industry Forum in the UK launches its "Code of Practice" for cloud providers, the US federal government has announced it will soon adopt a "cloud-first" policy, meaning federal agencies will be required to used cloud services "whenever a secure, reliable, cost-effective cloud option exists."

The EC announces at the same time that a cloud without clear and strong data protection is not the sort of cloud we need. 

100 uses for RFID: Radio-Frequency ID tags can transform business processes and open up new business opportunities

Libel Laws on the Internet: A reminder about how punitive these laws can be. Your staff certainly need to be careful what they say online.

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