When You Need an App

An app is a program downloaded to a smart phone or tablet computer. There are zillions of apps.  Most people's mobile devices are cluttered with them.

Because of that, apps produce a lot of noise: that is to say that the clutter from all of those apps makes it more difficult to use the device.

Over time, people instinctively try to cut down on the noise and manage the number of apps they own. They prune, categorize, and delete the apps they don't need.

If you create an app, you're competing against a ton of other apps for a very small space on the smartphone.

Many small businesses that I meet are all over this craze and want to create an app. Ooo we've got to have an app, they say! So when I ask what it'll do and what value it'd bring to the user experience, they look at me puzzled. "It will tell them about our services and give them a fast way to contact us," they say, and I shoot back, "Oh ... like your website?"

Then I try to get them to think about how quickly such an app would be deleted because it's noisy. It doesn't add any real value or differentiation, so why would anyone keep it?

And that's the trick with apps. Good apps should enable the user to do something:

• it should be a tool;
• it should be a way to collect and review information;
• it should extend your customer service to the palm of their hand;
• it should be a way to reduce friction (calling or emailing your offices to get something done);
• it should be a way to share experiences with your products to potential customers in their social community.

Apps should empower a user. If an app doesn't do this, it's valueless, and will likely be perceived as clutter and deleted from the mobile device.

Meanwhile, companies should make their websites mobile-aware so that they change perspective to fit a smaller screen with less resolution. If a website isn't mobile-aware, it'll present itself as a site better viewed on a desktop machine, making it very difficult to read and access information. Companies should make their website mobile-aware so that they're easier to read, consume, and use, thus making it easier to work with the company.

But a website isn't an app. And even more horrendously, an app's purpose shouldn't be to just drag the user to a website. If you want to get into the app business, think about how the app extends the consumer experience and empowers their relationship with you. Otherwise, stick to the website, and make that as easy as possible to use on mobile devices.

R

10 Things Social Media Should Do For You

So I'm asked this one all of the time: what will social media do for my business? How will I know if it's working?

Here are ten things that - at a bare minimum - social media should do for your company. If they're not doing these things, maybe it's time to re-evaluate your strategy.

And maybe you don't have a strategy at all? Picking just a couple of these would be a good place to begin to help refine your use of "social" so that there's measurable goals and objectives and outcomes.

1. Develop a Lead Channel, Direct Marketing List, and Cultivate Referrals.

I frequently write in my books and blog that direct email marketing is becoming more challenging. As of 2010, 89 percent of all email is spam and the technology to blacklist and filter spam is becoming quite efficient, and, consumer's preferences towards email are changing. Social media is a way to develop and cultivate consumer contact for lead-generation and a means to encourage others to pass business along to you.

2. Enable Connection.

Social should enable connection. I like to say that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the juice that brings the web traffic to a website, but what makes them "stick"? It's relationship. Social enables connection. Social should make it easy to connect to cultivate relationships. It makes it easy for a potential consumer to LIKE and follow brands; to subscribe to thought-leaders; to connect with other like-minded professionals. Your company's use of social media should enable connection - in both the front office (between sales staff and customer) and the back office (in terms of professional relationships).

3. Enable Speed and Rapidity.

Social media is pretty convenient. If you can tweet to a brand and say, "I had a problem with XYZ - can you fix it?", and then they're able to address it, and maybe send you a confirmation or update, that's pretty fast and convenient. If a customer or potential client can ask somebody a question on Facebook and get an a response, that's pretty fast and convenient. Think about how social media could be used to make it easy, fast, and convenient for your customers to contact you using social media.

4. Enable Listening and Feedback (and Corrective Action).

People are telling you things about your company all of the time. In social media, the consumer expects that you're listening. You should be. What's your listening strategy? How are you listening to commentary and correcting the problems brought to light by the customer? How do you make it right?.

5. Enable Sharing.

Social should be used to enable others to share ideas into their own social network fluidly and without special licensing, sign-ups, or access restrictions. Your company should make it as easy as possible to share intellectual property, ideas, marketing materials, white papers, video ... any content so that others can share and promote those ideas for you online. Sharing is an intrinsic part of social media. How're you enabling sharing and making it easier for others to share what you do?

6. Enable Accessibility.

Social media should make it easier to get in touch with you and your team. It should make your owner/CEO reachable by click to an audience of spectators. Sites like Quora can pull ideas out of the heads of your leadership and lay it out there for others to read and respond to. Imagine being able to see something online and forward the link to the officer of a company, and get their feedback on the issue. It's about making you and your team closer, more accessible, to clients and investors and shareholders than ever before.

7. Create a Persona Around Your Brand.

I often discourage using Twitter. It's just not an effective tool for building relationships, but it is an effective bullhorn that can pull subscribers into a destination to get more content and become exposed to more ideas. Twitter is a cult-of-personality tool: people follow people because they're interested in what they have to say. You can take a President, for example, as a representative of the brand/company, and create a cult of personality around them, thus personifying the brand. On Facebook, the nature of posts plugged into a wall can create a whole following around the style and substance of the posts, thus fostering the persona and values behind the brand. Social should try to make a person out of your company or brand so that it's more reachable and identifiable.

8. Develop an Audience and Community.

In social media, everybody is their own media company, even businesses and corporations. If every subscriber is offering their consent to be contacted and marketed to, it's an audience willing to receive your message and interested in your product and service. How can you leverage a bunch of always connected customers waiting to hear from you? Why, let us count the ways ...

9. Foster Trust.

Every communication and act on social media reinforces relationship and demonstrates to the customer why you can be trusted. Maybe your message conveys a testimonial, your expertise, your experience, a tactic you used to solve a problem, and so on. It's constantly demonstrating value. Think about that: how is social building more trust with your audience?

10. Allow for Transparency.

Finally, social media is about the deconstruction of institutional power in favor of smaller, more individual power. It's about listening, getting closer to your customer, and building trust. It's about being more accessible. It's about being innovative, fast, and convenient. All of these things make for a more transparent company: a company whose practices are accessible by and visible to the general public.  How does social make your company and its practices more crystal-clear?

There are a lot of things social media can do for your company and this list isn't nearly exhaustive, but it is a starting place. Just a couple of these objectives could become the catalyst for doing some real, meaningful, and astounding with social in your company. Where you go from here is up to you, but whatever you do, work on making social media provide value to every person who offers you their time and attention.

R

5 Ideas in 5 Minutes to Save Your Business 30-Percent

Hey, small business owner! (Yeah, that's you) ... I want to help you work less, achieve more, and satisfy your customers more often.

.

Now, all I'm asking for is five minutes of your time, and there are five things that I want you to just think about over the course of the next five minutes. And if you actually acted upon these ideas, I'm pretty confident in suggesting you'd save a third of your daily operations expenses. That's five ideas in five minutes to save your business 30-percent.

.

Ready?

.

1. Intake.

• Clock how long it takes an average customer to place an order with your company. Does the process take three minutes? Five? Ten? Twenty?
• Identify the average volume of orders you receive on a given day.
• Time how long it takes for the customer to contact you to the point the work order's actually in the fulfillment cycle. What is that time?
• Count the number of people that touch, read, authorize, or acknowledge the receipt of the order.

2. Transparency.

• How does the customer find out about the status of their order? Is it a phone call? How often per each order? How does that customer follow-up or get more information on their order?
• How does your internal sales team/employees follow-up on the status of an order? How frequently do they do such checks, and how much time does it take them? Fundamentally, how many people does it take to screw-in your light-bulbs?
• How difficult is it to see the progress of the order from your information system? Does the system contain 100-percent of everything you need to know as a manager, or just 30-percent? Do you find yourself walking-around trying to find the answer to questions about jobs that isn't answered by the information system?
• Are order statuses confirmed by shouting through the hall or by looking something up? Do you have to be in front of a computer at the office to look it up, or, can you look it up where-ever you might be?

3. Quality.

• Do you measure your defect and scrap ratios? What are those ratios?
• How much of your service is corrective labor? How much of your business' time is thrown at corrective action or fixes to satisfy the customer?
• How frequently do get shipping, distribution, and transportation wrong?
• What's the percentage of your products and services that score exceedingly high on customer satisfaction? Aside from understanding what you're doing wrong, do you know what you're doing right?

4. Output.

• What's the total turn-around time and expense from order placement to delivery? Can you categorize both time an cost per product line or service? And thus, which products and services are the most and least efficient? The most and least profitable?
• What's the ratio of orders that deliver on-time with the desired features promised to the customer? How frequently are you breaking your promises?
• What's the number orders delayed, rescheduled, paused, waiting, or back-ordered? How do execution delays affect your cash flow position?

5. Listening and Learning.

• How are suggestions from internal staff and your customers turned into policy and procedural changes at your workplace?
• Do you know most of these numbers and communicate them regularly to your staff?
• Does your company have a culture of learning from its mistakes and improving upon them, or, hiding mistakes and repeating them?
• How do you satisfy customers that you were slow in responding to, delivered a poor quality product, or disappointed upon delivery? Do you have a program for making customers happier?

Conclusion

• Each one of these things should be dashboard KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) that reflect the pulse of your business; that would reflect your management of the business. If you can't answer these questions, are you managing by facts or are you managing by assumption?
• If your computer system is incapable of yielding some of this data or is yielding inaccurate information, why are you relying upon it?
• If your computer system isn't automating a majority of these processes and enabling better transparency, faster and more accurate and more reliable business processes, and enabling your team to satisfy customers ... why own a computer system?
• If you or your staff aren't constantly learning from mistakes and missed opportunities, then you're likely repeating the same problems and creating a culture around mediocrity. Without metrics and practices like these, how is anybody in your organization held accountable - the least of which would be you.
• Some of these best practices could literally re-shape the relationship you have with customers and staff; if you're not building internal and external relationships to foster trust and community, you're constantly driving a wedge between efficiency and client retention.

.

If you implemented controls over these metrics, shared them with your staff, asked for their suggestions, instilled accountability, got an information system that provided useful information, and started listening to your customers, I guarantee you: 30-percent savings of operational expenses - bang! All because you started managing your business by objective facts rather than by convenient assumption.

.

R