Show some creativity AND Patience. Spamming is just lazy. (So are auto-DMs on twitter. Just because you can automate doesn't mean you should.)
One of the congratulations messages that came in to me was a solicitation to advertise for $15K. Not only unsolicited -- off target. And I know this person IRL.
The feeds on LinkedIn look more and more like Facebook. People if you can't separate business from personal this might explain your work/life balance issues. It also might explain why you can't get work done in a timely matter. Time Management at its core is about focus.
Recently, LinkedIn sent me a notice about only connecting to people I know. That's funny because if that was the case we would all have less than 400 connections. Also, that notice flies in the face of most users AND how LinkedIn makes money!
And what happened to discussion on LI? The groups are dead.
I examined at least 35 posts on three groups (UC Insights and Channel Partners and Telecom Professionals). Engagement is Rare!
Engagement is demonstrated mostly by Likes, rarely a comment on these groups. However, all of the posts are just headlines from articles or blog posts. It is all just click-bait. And that is annoying to everyone.
On the UC group, CommsTrader, AT&T and other corporate communicators just blast stuff here (and elsewhere) hoping for clicks and likes. CommsTrader actually tweets to the group. (His tweets post to the LI group.) It is awful.
Overall it has become nothing more than an online Rolodex (contact management tool). I think recruiters - who were the customer target for Reid Hoffman - started abusing it, but then Marketers got involved and those lazy bums ruined it for everyone.
SIDE NOTE: LinkedIn explained in memes.
]]>There are 2.5 billion smartphones on the planet now, according to Ben Evans.
"China now has 656 million internet users. Brazil trails only the US in total Facebook, Twitter and YouTube users, and the country has more mobile devices than human inhabitants." [TCrunch]
Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are 3x the scale of WinTel. Not just giants in tech, but giants in the economy as well. More so than IBM or WinTel. [mobile is eating the world]
Machine learning and AI are getting exponentially better each year.
Facebook has between 15-20% of mobile time. And smartphone apps are 60% of all time spent online in USA.
With Amazon Alexa and Google Home (and other voice activated search), what does that do to your SEO or PPC campaigns?! POOF!
There are "nearly 3.8 billion internet users worldwide, almost 2.8 billion are active on social media." The most popular social networks "as of January 2017, based on global traffic figures for unique monthly visitors, shows: Facebook (with 1.1 billion), YouTube (with 1 billion), Twitter (with 310 million), LinkedIn (with 255 million), Pinterest (with 250 million) and Google+ (with 120 million)." [channel partners]
"Cisco and DHL, the world's largest logistics provider, estimated last year that $1.9 trillion dollars of economic value could be created by the use of IoT devices and asset tracking solutions in the global supply chain and logistics sector." [business insider]
NOAA has a new satellite "GOES-16 has four times the image resolution of the existing Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) fleet." See images here.
SIDE NOTE:
That said, people who blame increased connectivity for widening ideological divides misunderstand what's going on. The world is not getting worse, nor are our divisions deepening. We've always had these problems - it's just that connectivity is bringing them to light. Racism, xenophobia, bigotry and sexism have always been there, it's just that we can see them more clearly now. This unprecedented, radical form of transparency feels scary and dark, because it forces us to look long and hard into the corners. But that's also why connectivity is so important. Billions of people are starting to speak out, and that means we are no longer able to claim ignorance, and filter out the terrible things that have happened on the watch of good people in the past. Welcome to the world as it really is, and not the way the gatekeepers used to tell us it was. It's about time. [Future Crunch 30]]]>
Four things he has been saying really strikes me lately:
"Too many people are playing checkers when the game is chess." I think about all the me-too channel strategy going on that is NOT producing the results for the money and effort spent. In fact, it looks like people are just going through the motions.
Think about all the musical chairs that have occurred this year. What do you think all that personnel switching means?
"People are chasing cash not Happiness." In telecom, the chase is on for cash, instead of outcomes. It is all about short term goals.
"The bigger your Ambition, the more Patience and Work you need to deploy it." So many people want quick results with minimal effort. Sales is a different game today. So very different. (Go back to quote #1: It isn't checkers anymore!)
It takes 120 days to build out a fiber circuit to a new building. It takes AT&T 60 days to upgrade an existing pipe. Yet you don't even want to give your Program that long! How long do you think it will take to plan, recruit, on-board, build trust and get a sale? If you said 90 days, I just triple jumped your king.
Hustle is required. The one lesson I am learning is that we know what we have to do to be successful, but we don't want to work that hard to get there.
]]>I know we have blurred the lines between work and life, but come on. I often wonder if that isn't a symptom of why we are so unproductive. We are always connected, constant thoughts of work results in no rest, no real down time and for a few burn out. For most, periods of unproductivity.
When you have a structured work day of 8 hours, does it make work easier to accomplish? Knowing you have to get stuff done in allotted time? Yet when you factor in the doing more with less and more and more to do (especially for sales and marketing people), that is stress that adds to unproductive.
I look at LinkedIN and wonder if people have forgotten what work is. Correlate that to sales, especially relationship building types of sales, and we wonder why sales are off. We wonder why it is hard to hit sales numbers. No one knows when to work -- or what work looks like - or what business relationships look like.
According to a survey by Microsoft, 46 percent of workers say their productivity has improved thanks to social media and social media tools.
"Research from the University of California, Irvine, shows productivity rises in the late morning around 11 a.m. and peaks between 2 and 3 p.m." [fortune]
A study by Cornerstone found that work overload was cited as a factor that decreased productivity by 68 percent of employees surveyed, who felt that the hours required to complete their work on a daily basis outnumbered the hours in their workday. [source]
A study by Cornerstone OnDemand found that 43 percent of employees surveyed feel that unscheduled interruptions by coworkers are the biggest obstacle when it comes to productivity.
Research conducted by Stanford University cites that multitasking may ultimately be decreasing our general intelligence. Multitasking gives the illusion of higher productivity, but it is hard to cut down 6 trees by swinging the axe at each only once per hour.
"A survey from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that most Americans actually work normal hours and get regular sleep, despite their reputation for being overtired and overworked. [QZ]
So we want to look busy and be busy, complain about being busy, but we aren't actually productive. Some of it is distractions. Some of it is Fear.
"A study lead by the University of California, Irvine, and presented at the South by Southwest panel on workplace distraction, found employees were actually happiest when performing these rote tasks. Why is busywork secretly so enjoyable? It's because completing busywork gives you a feeling of accomplishment without the corresponding stress which comes along with more challenging tasks." [fortune]
We admire busy because we confuse it with being accomplished. We don't grasp the difference between Urgent and Important.
In some cases, we know what we have to, what we should do, but we don't do it. We don't want to work that hard for success. We don't want to break our comfort zone. We don't want to risk it.
These are just observations, but I think we confuse being happy with a social media infused FOMO view of success. We dream about being a multi-millionaire - through lottery or a unicorn start-up idea - with all the toys and imagine there is no down-side and that with money all our problems go away and we are magically happy. (Does Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton look happy?) That is a dream, but that isn't our goal, which is closer to paying the bills, going on vacation, spending time with family & friends, enjoying the journey of life. That is the opposite of the millionaire dream life. Happy requires purpose and meaningful work. The problem there is meaningfulwork, Creative work, takes up time, effort and risk. OOPS!
Hugh writes, "The thing that turns a job into passion, that turns work into play, is a sense of mission."
It's like the current push to be an entrepreneur. It is everywhere, but most people do not have the skills or drive to do it. Startups fail for a variety of reasons. We have glamorized the failures - Pets.com, Friendster, Boo.com, Webvan and more. But all anyone talks about is raising money, not building a viable business - or building a company to last.
We have forgotten to focus on the goals. And to enjoy the journey as well.
Managing more sales is part time management and part reflection.
]]>This year I think every major carrier had an outage that lasted more than two hours. Some lasted all day. Some were regional. Some were nationwide.
Facebook, twitter, Gmail, Yahoo! mail, Outlook/Hotmail, Twitch, Slack, Playstation, Xbox Live - we live online. The new normal is not even 4 nines. Four 9's - 99.99% Uptime - is 1 hour of downtime per year. However, 99.9% means 8.76 hours of down time per year. We are in a 3-9's world.
It is too expensive to build a resilient network. And the carriers have learned that customers want cheap. With cable, they learned that Best Effort was "good enough". Who taught them that? Customers did. They buy unprotected circuits. They don't pay extra for protection or failover. BC/DR is for utilities. Even businesses in the Gulf region that survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005 can't be bothered with DR/BC. Not all. But most.
We only buy insurance when it is absolutely required by law.
Carriers also learned that a service level agreement (SLA) looked good to the buyer. It was a check box on the RFP. Yet the carriers know that paying out for an outage (just ask Frontier in FL, TX and Cali) isn't all that expensive. The most a customer can get back is a month's billing amount. The usual credit is 1/30 of the monthly bill. At $300 that is $10.
SD-WAN will help some businesses with back-up / failover, if they are willing to put a 4G or other broadband circuit in place as insurance. If they are willing to pay for the SD-WAN.
The funny thing is that no one thinks about Redundancy until there is an outage. Then they are peeved, yelling, calling it to be put on hold for hours. To be put on hold so they can vent and call back later to fight for a credit. Yippee!!
With all our data and applications in the cloud, Internet is as vital as oxygen or electricity. Down time means that no one is doing much of anything except Solitaire. How expensive is that?
Right now, Florida is staring into a category 4 hurricane named Matthew. Water, bread, gas, wood, batteries and other supplies are scarce. No one prepares. No one thinks ahead. Panic mode is just so unproductive.
Think about the cost of a 3 hour outage. No one does but it is our job as the Trusted Advisor to point at days like today and say: See?! Let's put a plan in place for this.
Disaster Recovery as a Service is a big deal especially for data center businesses. Right now, companies along the East Coast of the US are wishing they had planned better and bought some DR insurance.
Stay safe out there. Plan better starting tomorrow.
]]>First up, Blue Coat is selling itself to Symantec for $4.65 Billion. The cyber-security software company was going to go public via an IPO, but chose the private sale route, which seemed a safer bet for the PE firm, Bain Capital, that bought Blue Coat in 2015 for $2.4B and financed acquisitions to bolster the product portfolio to annual revenues of $598 Million. Blue Coat lost $289 million in those same 12 months. Good deal for Symantec, who sold its Veritas data storage unit to the Carlyle Group for $7.4 billion earlier this year.
BitTitan, the cloud services enablement specialist, has announced that it has closed a $15 million round of Series A financing led by TVC Capital, according to Channel Vision mag.
Speaking of IPO, twilio filed for one. VoIP Logic has an interesting take on it here.
Two Rhode Island based IT firms merge. "Carousel Industries, a leader in communication and network technologies, professional and managed services and cloud solutions, today announced its intent to acquire Atrion, Inc., a leading IT services firm specializing in security, productivity and collaboration, unified communications, networking, applications and integrations and data center solutions." This kind of PR is annoying to me because no one - even with 1300 employees - can be a "leader" in every aspect of IT and comms. And most mergers don't even come close to 1+ 1 = 3. Rarely do you get 1+1=2. It is usually 1+1=1.
Now for the big news: Microsoft is buying LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in cash. I have no idea why everyone is calling this a real-time comms project. The adoption of Slack changed everything. You can see it in how other projects have pivoted or added features, like containers, groupware, video and voice calling.
To me this seems more like a continuation of efforts to be a portal for employees that Sharepoint started. As Microsoft works on Sharepoint revisions (to look more like Slack?), they have to be thinking of ways to compete with Facebook and the myriad social networks that are taking up eyeballs, video and chatting away from telcos and enterprise communication systems.
Slack's loudest benefit is the reduction in email, which means less time people spend in Outlook. Cisco Spark will have people doing everything from a single GUI (in theory). That means Office365 is just one of the integrated services.
Do you need MS Office suite if your resume is on LinkedIn, docs are shared on a collab platform, databases are in the cloud, and contacts are on your phone?
No one wants Windows 10 and its all seeing activity tracking. Add that to LinkedIn and MS will know an awful lot about a lot of people. Almost as much as Google and Facebook know.
Microsoft has tried this before with acquisitions of Lync, Yammer and Skype. It takes them years to get the integration right (if at all). Remember, they bought Skype in 2011 for $8.2B and didn't really get the integration until 2014.
Maybe this is their new mobile strategy... LinkedIn, a clunky platform for resumes and social networking that as of late has many users frustrated and disappointed. Will we see Lync integration in LinkedIn soon? Click to email, call, chat, video anyone in your network? Oh, won't that be fun from a noise stand point.
They just dumped Nokia and took a huge write off on that mess. Have they made any money yet on Skype?
According to the MS CEO, it is all about the professional network meeting the professional network: "Think about it: How people find jobs, build skills, sell, market and get work done and ultimately find success requires a connected professional world. It requires a vibrant network that brings together a professional's information in LinkedIn's public network with the information in Office 365 and Dynamics."
Even this LinkedIn fan boy isn't sure what Microsoft is doing with Azure, Xbox, Win10 because he is on Chrome. The way I see it, LinkedIn in two years becomes integrated into Outlook, Office365, Win10, Sharepoint and Dynamics. Some of that will look like Salesforce and data.com (although Salesforce got a deal on Jigsaw in 2010.) The social graph adds a piece that MS doesn't currently have.
It will be interesting to see how Lynda.com is utilized by the combined entity. Will that become a tile on Win10 and Xbox? Probably. The deal slides are on Scrbd.
For segments of the marketplace this Microsoft centric move will make sense. Others will turn to Google for Work or Facebook for Work - or an IBM suite if they ever resurrect Lotus Notes & Domino into a true competitor for enterprise. Spark may take some of this. Add Apache Open Office to Spark and what do you need MS for?
What will also happen is that another online Rolodex will make some headway in this space, the same way that Snapchat took from the other social apps.
A bunch of investors are going to look at this and push more transactions. Facebook and Google hardly ever play follower, but they might shop for an online resume platform like JibberJobber - or a jobs board like Indeed or Monster to put some pressure on Microsoft and LinkedIn. If nothing else, that type of data can only add to the social graph that both of them have. This creates an opportunity for someone because there is a window of about two years before this integrates. We live in a first mover marketplace.
$26 Billion in cash, like money is nothing. Will this be a bigger debacle than Nokia?
]]>People have a shortage of time, because we have to do way more per day to keep above water. Social media is an admitted time suck (see Hubspot story; or the nextweb post; or this article about social ruining your life; and wired's social is a waste of time.) So why would a business social network make it more noisy; more of a time suck?
Discussion is missing in many of the groups. I belong to the maximum allowed - 50 - and very few have posts that are anything but links. For a SOCIAL network, the social is gone. Now LinkedIn is just a broadcast medium, but is ANYONE LISTENING?
The Pulse is that anyone can publish anything. And much of it is just press releases or other pitches. You couldn't curate the Pulse? Or like Reddit have articles voted up or down?
If you are going to copy another social network, why Facebook? Because of the numbers? Those numbers indicate that LI stinks in most categories. And these numbers show that engagement and reach are down.
Here are some ideas:
Not every Liked update should show up. Have a share button. Because people like everything, which floods my feed with stupid sh!t. Important Note: That results in me not liking the person liking all that stupid stuff.
I have had to go back to an egg timer for social media with 10 to 15 minute intervals to jump in and jump out. See more time management tips here.
FROM LINKEDIN: Some videos may automatically start to play with the sound muted when you scroll down your LinkedIn newsfeed. To disable auto-play for all videos:
Move your cursor over your profile photo on the top right corner of your LinkedIn homepage and click Privacy & Settings from the dropdown. Under Basics, scroll to Auto-play videos and click Change. Click the toggle to change the setting to No. Click Close.
]]>Slack has video and voice. Snapchat does too. WhatsApp - also owned by Facebook - does too. Office365 does. Apple has Facetime. There isn't anywhere that you can go to get away from voice or video calls.
This means more avenues for ads, robocalls, annoyance and loss of productivity. All of this was supposed to make it easier. (I hope it all comes with a DND (do not disturb) button that is easily found.)
A bunch of UCaaS players are rushing to catch up to Slack by adding threaded group messages, containers and the like to UC&C Presence and IM apps. Here's the problem: I have too many ways for people to contact me!
If I thought I was tethered before (because of a smartphone), now it is far worse.
And the inbox is now inboxes!!! Not just Outlook and Gmail, but Messenger, Slack, twitter, SMS/text. Where did that address or request go? What inbox is carrying that thread?
I not only have too many interruption points, I have too many inboxes. This stuff isn't getting simpler. It is getting more complicated.
Can you imagine discovery during a trial? I need his snapchat, facebook, twitter, gmail, outlook, messenger, office365, skype history, inbox and calls. How long would it take to gather all of that?
Gary Kim writes that telecom is a commodity like sugar. The Next Gen Network isn't a carrier network; it is the Internet. Everything rides over that now. Not the best solution for a reliable, secure network.
With Hosted PBX revenue at around $9 Billion globally (via Gary Kim), then it isn't growing but contracting.
Free P2P voice is taking over where cell phone minutes had ruined the landline business. Texts, email, chat and social media are replacing voice calls. [Even in dating, a form of sales, there is no way to call anyone through a dating app despite technology that could provide for it.
Chat is replacing text. Minutes are declining. Where will the revenue come from?
As they spend CAPEX to build fiber to the premise and to the tower, dropping $40K on a fiber build is not uncommon, how do they get the revenue back? The ROI is long. The ARPU is flat. The only thing changing are the fees. They keep adding more and increasing them. The fee should just be called Margin or Profit.
No idea where this is going, but it isn't getting simpler. The way to interrupt someone is too pervasive. When employees are already working longer hours, distraction avenues have increased. Would be nice if it got simpler.
]]>Sprint gave its employees layoffs for the holidays. Despite the cash from Softbank, Sprint is losing ground to T-Mobile and has little hope of catching up to Ma and Pa Bell (ATT and VZW). It isn't about price as much as it IS about a quality network. Access to exclusive phones doesn't hurt either.
In positive news for this cellco, Sprint teams with Conversocial to become the first US telecommunications brand to introduce Messenger as part of their social care strategy.
Lots of throttling claims from YouTube, DISH and others to both wireline and cellular network operators. It figures.
It leads to an interesting question: Should ISPs filter the Internet for their customers?
Broadband use is down from 70% to 67% in homes in the US according to Pew. They probably can't afford it.
Lightower Fiber Networks has acquired network assets from HarborLite Networks, based in Baltimore, Md., which includes fiber in downtown Baltimore. Always good to buy fiber density in an NFL city.
Microsoft acquired Talko. Dan York talks about what that means here. Basic problem with every new talk or text app: You need network effect for it to work. Hyper-crowded market right now. And no one has a Snapchat problem.
Altice is trying to buy both Suddenlink and Cablevision. New York State authorities aren't buying their story about network upgrades. For once, consumer good IS being looked at. The authorities have to know that once they say YES, there is no way for them to enforce acquisition conditions. And every major acquisition that has come with conditions has had the buyer skirt them.
ShoreTel is buying Corvisa out of the UK and Netherlands for $8.5M.
IBM and BellSouth had a short history of working together. Now IBM is taking over AT&T's Managed Hosting Services. If you can't be good at it, outsource it!
Happy Holidays!
]]>The CMO Council report, From Creativity to Content, is about the role of visual media in story-telling. A lot of the reason for visual media - (photos, video, illustrations, infographics and animated gifs - goes beyond "a picture is worth a thousand words". It has to do with Getting Attention. In our current info flooded world, getting attention is harder and harder. It takes a visual to stop people from scrolling.
Stop and think about the latest social platforms - instagram, Pinterest and even Facebook - are just photo sharing websites. Tumblr is nothing more than an animated gif showcase.
Infographics are the new comic book. It is how we sum up studies and talking points. It is the step beyond the graph. It is the graph and more in one illustration.
They say that the amount of information that comes out in one year is more than in 5000 years of human history. Well with 7 billion people on the planet, that is a lot of potential content creators. Here is a good look at the data explosion in a story with pictures.
As a marketer, you have to really know your story and your target audience; then you have to figure out how to get their attention. More and more, according to the study, it will be with visual media. Budget appropriately.
Side note: No art in schools, but visual arts will be how brands bond with consumers soon. Oops!
]]>5. Is your cloud provider HIPAA compliant? An 11 point checklist via GCN.
4. May 2015: 11 Major Social Media Changes This Month. Facebook algorithm, Pinterest buttons, Linkedin phone number search, twitter DMs and more.
3. How busy is the Internet? Here is a graphic of an Internet Minute.
2. Sales is difficult enough, but these 5 bad sales habits will sink your chances.
1. Mary Meeker is called a futurist. She works for VC firm Kleiner Perkins. Each year she presents her Internet Trends. [196 slides so you won't go through all of them but she shows the size of the internet today plus the apps marketplace. Worth a look.]
]]>"I don't care about Facebook, Pinterest, tumblr, twitter. I care about social media because it sells shit! ... this is where I think the cash is going, where the customers are going! This is where the customers' attentions are going." This is where you have to be in order to tell your story!
The game in business is retention, how many customers you keep (20 min). Lifetime value of a customer is the best metric.
I don't travel internationally (domestic travel is enough of a pain in the ass to deal with. Don't get me started.) But the TruPhone World plan is a cool idea: 1 SIM card for 66 countries for voice, text and data. Boom!
I won't say it redefines mobile comm, but it is a marvel to think of all the coordination that this company had to do to get all of the MVNO deals in place to make this work in 66 countries with 100 MVNO contracts. I have been working with just US MVNO contracts and I want to punch the cellcos, so I can't imagine doing it globally. It's a lot of effort and coordination.
There isn't MMS btw, because only 40 of 850 cellcos offer MMS.
TruPhone is using WebRTC to create a permission system with your social networks based on a social graph. If you are meeting Joe Smith and you have his office number but not his mobile and you are connected on Facebook, this permission system will allow you to call his mobile (or text). TruFind is a cool concept. (And at 2 AM I am not sure I explained it well, but it is about availability, authorization and social graph.)
Just because you are reselling someone else's network - as a CLEC or an MVNO - doesn't mean that you can't re-think the space you are in and add real value to the customers. (I said value not save them some $$).
]]>The note said:
Hello Friend!
@radinfo We noticed that you're a fan of the Tampa Bay Lightning and Bright House Networks. Thank you! We got together and figured you would appreciate this fan package to cheer during the playoffs! We'd love to know that this arrived safely, so please feel free to tweet us. Thank you for choosing us! #GoBolts!
@BrightHouseCare & @TBLightning
In my RSS feed, many (many) bloggers have given up. They haven't written anything in over a year. They tried it (or so they say), but it wasn't worth the effort - or so they say.
In this article, Mitch Joel talks about how social media CAN be engaging and useful, but much of the content sucks! Consumers "want moments of connectivity, delight and communication." Think about some of the best marketing assets - whether that is the old AT&T long distance commercials (Reach Out and Touch Someone) or Coca-cola Christmas commercials or a great social media contest or the way M&M owned the Super Bowl last year with its SM team. Each of those is an isolated marketing asset at work - a tactic if you will. Along the way, each brand tried numerous other tactics that probably sucked (or were less memorable at least).
What I see most is that companies don't have a strategy for a trade show. It's like a marketing outlier. Last year, TelePacific used a couple of trade shows to spotlight their new branding message of C-C-C (Connectivity, Cloud, Continuity). AireSpring has used its booth to further its marketing campaign, notably the Just SIP It. But most telecom and IT companies don't.
They don't drive traffic to their booth. They don't tie the booth into real life (you know, after the trade show).
If you do a number of trade shows, couldn't you treat it as 18 holes of golf? Or 9 innings of baseball?
All these tactics - social media, email, trade shows, newsletters, contests, trade journals, blogs - should be integrated into one brand message. Each tactic should be telling the same story, just in a different way.
When you go to a trade show? What would make that trade show a success for you? What's the ROI metric? Is it realistic? Or do you really have no idea? i hear people tell me that they have to booth at certain shows just because they have to have a presence. Really? And that's enough for you? Turn it around - and have a presence a different way or give them a big reason to notice.
PPP - product, people, press - are what trade shows should be about for a big bang effect. Product launch, talent showcase (hey meet our new CTO!) and press releases (which today should be about case studies or something granular).
Again are you tying this altogether?
Mitch Joel writes, "No matter how great the content is, it needs a meaningful distribution strategy behind it to convert into something truly valuable." That goes for the product or company too.
]]>