8 Ways Social Media Benefits Events

Incorporating social media (via Twitter, blogging, video, community sites, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) is a growing phenomenon for live and virtual events. Last week included a swing through Chicago for strategy development on two conferences where I produced social media in 2009. I'll be heavily involved in growing the social media presence for both events (the national Business Marketing Association and the American Marketing Association Market Research Conferences) again in 2010.

According to attendees and event industry observers, we introduced more innovative social media experiences than even many tech-oriented events. This impact at the front end of producing event-based social media comes from the fact the activity merges several areas of expertise for Brainzooming, including:

• Strategy development
• Customer experience design
• Social media
• Event production

Based on first-hand experience, beyond creating a buzz or "newness" for an event, strategically incorporating event-based social media delivers a variety of real benefits:

• We created additional layers of content beyond capturing speaker talking points. We produced additional commentary, links to relevant information, and video interviews, among other educational assets.
• We extended the conference impact to audiences outside the event through conference websites and the liberal use of hashtags.
• It's possible to motivate favorable behaviors through incorporating promotional offers to drive trade show traffic.
• It provides another way for attendees to become actively engaged in an event.
• We gained an understanding of audience reactions to presenters on a real-time basis.
• It's a way to solicit and address on-site customer service issues.
• Our efforts provided additional educational value by introducing a large percentage of attendees to social media applications.
• The social media team's presence prompted new interaction opportunities among those engaged in tweeting at each event.

What experiences have you discovered with event-based social media? We've found that realizing the full range of benefits requires a well-planned strategy and "producing" an event's social media effort, not simply leaving it solely to organic development. (Check out the deck we put together for the AMA Marketing Research Conference to get a sense of the range of interactivity we built into the event.)

Through both producing major events and taking a lead on organic social media in a number of smaller events, we've developed many fundamental approaches and look forward to sharing the benefits of these learnings in events this year. And if you're doing event planning, let us know if you're interested in finding out more about how social media can deliver new value for your event. - Mike Brown

How to Succeed Where Strategy Is a Bad Thing

In many circles, "strategy" has become a bad word, right up there with "creativity," "innovation," and even "thinking." There clearly are business people who see strategy as mucking up getting things done. For them, strategy is perceived as simply adding time, cost, and complexity. It’s viewed as an impediment to running a business successfully. And by “successfully,” I mean “by the seat of their pants.”

To try getting a toehold for introducing a strategic perspective in these environments, we talk about strategy at Brainzooming as "addressing what matters with insight and innovation.”

It's tough for executives to argue against the "what matters" part, especially when making a case for something tactical as REALLY important. It forces them to put up or shut up if an idea is more of a pet project than a fundamental business issue.

Granted, "insight" is a little easier to sell-in than innovation; people don't want to be "dumb" about the work they're doing even when they're willing to accept a "status quo" mindset.

The clear implication the past few years is the simpler and more straightforward the definitions, process, and deliverables of strategy creation and implementation are, the more likely something successful will happen. – Mike Brown

Getting Ready for 2010: Planning in a Recession - Guest Post by Barrett Sydnor

Today's guest post addressing preparing for 2010 comes from Barrett Sydnor, one of the first guest authors ever on Brainzooming back in early 2008. I've worked with Barrett on various strategic planning projects over the past 15 years, including quite a bit of quantitative industry analysis and supply/demand forecasting.

Today, he's addressing the right marketing stance to have during and coming out of a recession:

Fortune Favors the Bold.

The Roman playwright Terence wrote that in the 2nd century BC, though Virgil often gets credit because a similar line later appears in the Aeneid. Terence was probably talking about the military strategy of some emperor, but it turns out that the sentiment applies to businesses—small and large—as they face figuring out how to plan for 2010.

A natural tendency when looking at bad or uncertain times is to hunker down, keep spending to a minimum, and stay with what you have done in the past. Natural, but maybe not smart.

A Hurwitz & Associates report found that 65% of small businesses that expected increased revenues during 2009 had raised or planned to increase marketing spending. Increased revenues were expected by only 30% of those who were keeping marketing spend flat, and almost half (41%) of those who were cutting marketing spend were expecting a decrease in revenue.

This correlates with a study done at Penn State after the 2000 recession. The authors say that using what they call “proactive marketing” can allow firms to improve both capital market and business performance during a recession. They cite increased marketing spending by P&G, Kellogg, Intel, and Wal-Mart during recessions—and depressions—as a way to grab or consolidate dominant market shares.

For sports fans, one way to restate “Fortune Favors the Bold,” is “The Best Defense is a Good Offense.” You might ask, "How did that work out for Bill Belichick and the Patriots against the Colts?" While the execution lacked, he had the science—and the odds on his side (discussion here, here, and here).

In planning, as in coaching football, getting the odds on your side is really is what you are trying to do. Being more aggressive with your 2010 plan may be the way to tilt those odds in your favor. - Barrett Sydnor

Getting Ready for 2010: 3 Real Life Planning Successes

I'm a proponent of spreading strategic thinking broadly in a company and not readily handing off strategy development to outside parties exclusively. Yet I've been a part of many examples where an outside perspective helped move strategy development ahead much more quickly.

Here are several examples you may be facing where it's good to get outside expertise:

Turning Talk Into a Plan

A small subsidiary's three-person management team was told to get a plan in place to show corporate management the company's direction. They had no planning process and only ten business days to deliver a comprehensive strategic plan. We brought in the Brainzooming process to develop an innovative strategic plan in one day. The output couldn't be simply a bunch of ideas nor could it be only a rote plan with little strategic insight.

Structuring a day-long session using question-based exercises allowed the team to answer questions about the business, participate in exercises to stretch strategic perspectives on competition and opportunities, and come back the next morning to make people and timing decisions on a tight plan to share with the operating president.

As non-planners, they wouldn't have been able to put together a coherent business plan in ten days, but they did understand their business and the general direction they needed to head. We combined their deep knowledge with exercises and facilitation allowing us to challenge and create a strategic flow from their answers. We delivered the best of both worlds - a structured plan reflecting their intent for the business with sound strategic logic and more innovation than they'd have ever brought to it alone. This experience demonstrated the clear benefit of the emerging Brainzooming process.

Stimulating a Management Team that Knows It All

We rolled into town to help a really experienced senior management team tackle annual planning. Because of their tenure and smarts, they knew the company inside- out. This knowledge rendered them ill-suited to solving a long-term growth challenge: as every idea was uttered, they "knew" why it wouldn't work for the brand.

During the course of a day-long planning session, I created a new exercise on the fly based on a brand in a very different industry sharing the same fundamental characteristics of our client. I asked the group to suggest how this other company could address the same challenge they were facing. All of a sudden ideas started flowing non-stop. We were able to take the concepts and strategically apply them to their business.

Left on its own to think strategically, the management team would never have reached an alternative look at its business. An outside perspective, unburdened by excessive detail was critical to identifying an analogous situation, providing an entree for innovative strategic thinking and implementation.

Doing the Thinking for a Distracted Management Team

We had a pre-scheduled planning follow-up with a management team who, since our initial session, had been charged with exploring a major brand contraction. Unable to convince them their new assignment should be the focus for our session, we instead spent time addressing the status quo scenario. Unfortunately, the status quo wasn't likely or compelling enough to command much of their attention and strategic creativity.

Frustrated by the lack of intensity while addressing the status quo, we wrapped the effort early. We told them we'd work on the status quo scenario, delivering 200 prioritized, fleshed out ideas and concepts within 3 days. Using several creativity techniques during the flight home, we generated really strong creative concepts for the status quo or, with some modification, for the alternative scenario also.

This was a great example of the importance of a balanced group in doing the best strategic thinking. The client's management team had business experience and functional knowledge, but was sapped of any creative energy it ever had. Bringing in outside talent for a creative spark was needed to turn lackluster thinking into vibrant, implementable ideas. - Mike Brown

Getting Ready for 2010: Tools to Improve Your Success

With 2010 looming and the importance of approaching the year with creative business and competitive options, here are links to a variety of tools to help if you're under the gun to get a successful plan completed.

A Foundation on Strategic Thinking

• An Overview on What Strategic Means, Who to Involve in Strategy Development, and a Few Strategic Tools

Creating a Strategic Focus

• Steps to Re-evaluate and Focus on Important Elements in Your Business


• Better Understanding What's Strategic in Your Business

Contingency Planning

• Thoughts on Dealing with Uncertainty


• Steps to Deal with Planning Amid Uncertainty


• Quickly Developing Options When Your Current Plan Isn't Working


• Having to "Wing" Your Strategy Because of Uncertainty

Updating Your Current Plan

• Re-checking Your Marketing Plan for Completeness


• Reviewing and Modifying Your Strategic Direction


• Updating a Marketing Plan Under Tight Resources

Implementing Specific Strategic Thrusts

• Generating New Ideas When You Need Them


• When A More Aggressive Competitive Strategy Is Needed


• You're Fighting an Uphill Battle and Need a Contrarian Strategy


• Developing a Low-Investment Marketing Strategy


• You Have a Turnaround to Fix

Wrapping Up with a Smile on Your Face

• The Ultimate in Flexible Strategy

Additionally, Trendwatching.com has released its briefing on "10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010" covering impacts arising from (among other things):

• Urbanization
• Fragmentation in what constitutes luxury
• Increasingly complex online presences
• A push for mass IRL interactions emanating from online networks

There are certainly other Brainzooming articles touching on these planning topics, but ideally this short list will get you jump started for current planning efforts you have to complete. - Mike Brown

Getting Ready for 2010: A Strategy Foundation - Guest Post by Keith Prather

Keith Prather is Managing Director of Armada Corporate Intelligence, a corporate business intelligence firm that functions as outsourced members of corporate strategy groups and consults with companies of all sizes on strategy and implementation. Armada is sponsoring this week of posts on getting ready for 2010 planning.

I've known Keith for nearly a decade and have worked with him closely on a variety of strategic and market planning efforts. Today, I'm excited he's sharing his professional perspectives on getting a better understanding of your external environment during this period of dramatic global change in business and consumer markets:


A critical component of a successful strategic plan is a well-established strategy foundation – a compilation of information and intelligence covering your industry, global markets, customers, and the environment. Particularly relevant this year is the need to produce an accurate economic forecast with meaning and relevance for the business. And given the uncertainty surrounding the global economy, this can be a daunting task.

Following the most basic tenets, forecasters need to identify the supply and demand drivers for an industry, and capture meaningful data describing the condition and outlook for them. Sometimes though the most impactful elements on a business are not what we think. Going to the expense side of the income statement and understanding the biggest cost items in your business will help determine the real key elements of supply – those you rely on.

For instance, one client believed steel (which was one of the company's top expenses) was the primary input for its business, with countless hours spent monitoring, forecasting, and negotiating steel prices. Energy costs, on the other hand, were not considered to have a material impact, and were lumped into utility and overhead costs. In 2008, however, consumption of oil-based resources drove prices up significantly. As a result, oil costs had to be factored much more directly into forecasting models to improve their accuracy. By not anticipating this significant change to the company's business mix, however, it was caught flat footed.

On the demand side, the challenge is more complex. While providing future economic insights for clients, several fundamental items seem to be driving things developments. First, everything ultimately circles back to consumers. You and I, spending money, drives more than 70% of the nation’s $13 trillion in GDP. Watching consumer spending, consumer confidence, housing, and several other metrics tracking consumer activity are useful in helping gauge future activity. One great aggregator site for basic economic information is the US Census Bureau’s Economic Indicator page.

There are some other great free aggregator sites providing solid current economic news and explanations of some of the items driving current activity. One of my favorites is the RTTNews Daily Market Analysis. We also pay a lot of attention to the Financial Times, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, and Global Insight for forecasting information.

For manufacturing, the Institute for Supply Management publishes one of the most accurate gauges of manufacturing activity, the Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI), on a monthly basis. You can read about the PMI in simple, easy to follow prose at the ISM website.

Calculating risk is also an important component to a well-done strategy foundation. With a wave of new legislation floating around in Congress, it is important for companies to use scenario planning in considering impacts of various regulatory actions on the company. From health care to energy legislation, companies will be hit with direct and indirect risks as a result. Using a system such as the Lockwood Analytical Method for Prediction (LAMP) can help in gauging which scenarios provide the greatest risk – and the greatest likelihood of occurring.

It can’t be said enough, a solid strategy foundation is the underpinning to a successful strategic plan. Woodrow Wilson once said: "We should not only use all the brains we have, but all the brains we can borrow." If you can’t build the strategy foundation in-house, it’s worth getting help to make sure that the business landscape is being accurately portrayed. Otherwise, you might be building a ship when what you really need is a bicycle. - Keith Prather

Getting Ready for 2010

My, how times change!

In the old days, I'd get twitchy if our planning group's attention hadn't turned to readying for the next year's planning by April with completion targeted for early September. Amid a changing business environment, however, those dates got progressively later until the prospect of nearly coincident planning left us unphased.

At the Frost & Sullivan event I participated in during the first week in November, attendees were asked who was still working on 2010 plans. Based on the large percentage of hands raised, it looked like many companies have pushed back planning efforts much later.

As a result, Brainzooming is focused on 2010 planning, providing tips and ideas to prepare your plan for what your marketplace holds next year. Here's what's coming this week:

• Tuesday - My Brainzooming Instigation buddy Keith Prather from Armada Corporate Intelligence will highlight approaches and tools to survey your external environment. Armada is sponsoring this week's Brainzooming features on 2010 planning, so beyond upcoming posts on the topic, check out the services Armada offers to help you get through this challenging business period.
  
• Wednesday - Mid-week, we'll feature links to more than 15 Brainzooming articles to support your planning efforts.
  
• Thursday - There are various planning environments you may face. On Thursday, we'll share stories of how Brainzooming has teamed with Armada Corporate Intelligence, using the Brainzooming approach, to successfully address frequent planning challenges.
  
• Friday - Previous guest author Barrett Sydnor of Sydnor and Associates will cover making investment decisions in this business environment.

If you're feeling really under the gun for getting your 2010 plan done on time with the level of rigor to help your business be more successful in 2010, get in touch with Armada today for help with an Idea Generation Session, a Plan Audit, or a Fast-Track plan building session. - Mike Brown

The Best Laid Plans Result from Creative Thinking - Guest Post by Sage Bray

I first connected with Sage Bray when she was nice enough to do a tweet pointing her Twitter followers to Brainzooming as a great blog for creative inspiration. Her Twitter name (@aSageInRealLife) and profile were both tremendously intriguing. Sage is involved in a very cool blend of freelance writing, art, and consulting with small businesses and solopreneurs. Her published work has appeared with Inc. Magazine, The Poor Chef, Examiner.com, and a myriad of other online periodicals. She blogs about making a living from creative endeavors on aSageInRealLife.com.

In today's guest blog, Sage shares her perspectives on the benefits of placing creative thinking at the heart of planning:


Creativity isn’t really about random inspiration although it does seem that way sometimes. What it is really about is exploring options. Instead of falling into the “It’s done that way because that’s always how it’s been done” mode of thinking, you step outside the box, break new ground, push the limits, or get radical. Those are acts of true creativity - an essential, but often overlooked, component for a growing, vibrant business.

Even if you ask for innovative thinking from your employees or yourself, it can still be a fairly rare occurrence. That’s because it’s too easy to jump at the first viable idea that comes along. I have a rule: I must come up with an absolute minimum of three solutions to any business problem—although I try for at least 10. This means lots of wacky, crazy ideas which are fun and do result in some really interesting ideas. But it’s having choices that forces me to compare the pros and cons and really analyze what is possible.

For instance, if you want to get the word out about, say, your new casino style gaming site, you may think it’s innovative to start a campaign on Facebook, get fans, and start networking on gaming forums. And you could, and probably should. But what else could you do? There is traditional print advertising, which is becoming the rare thing to do these days. Under certain circumstances though, that could be the best choice to direct your funds, especially if you have a very targeted market. How about getting someone to dress up as Elvis and pass out coupons for free trials at local festivals? Or offer free life-long subscriptions to a couple big entertainment bloggers? Are these viable solutions for your marketing? You may laugh at the idea of some guy dressed up as Elvis promoting your business, but I know several businesses that do exactly that and they have seen significant measurable increases from this kind of promotion. No solution is too crazy - not if it works.

However, being creative and innovative does not mean just doing it differently. It means doing it well, in the best way possible, using the ingenuity you draw from others and from your experiences. Keep up your reservoir of ideas by reading plenty of blogs and newsletters, attending trade shows and local meet-up groups, and brainstorming with colleagues.

Don’t limit your exposure to things related to your specific industry either. You can glean fantastic ideas from both related and unrelated industries by simply asking yourself how their innovative ideas can relate to what you do.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel (although that sometimes happens) to keep your business growing and flexible. But you do have to be prepared to do things differently and look for creative solutions to even the most common problems. Keep in mind, the objective is to do whatever you do well. Sometimes the answer you need will be something completely ordinary and what you’ve been doing all along. The thing is, you won’t know if it’s the best solution without thinking creatively about it. - Sage Bray

Add the Main Ingredient - Guest Post by Kai Rostcheck

Today's guest post is from Kai Rostcheck, an Idea Guy who problem solves and discovers opportunities for small businesses that believe in the triple bottom line of economic benefit, social impact, and environmental sustainability. Kai has an "Idea of the Day" that you can sign up for at his website: http://www.kairostchek.com.

In this post, he shares his perspective on the criticality of developing a business, revenue, and profit model that works:


A company I know in Boston is close to closing its doors. This is disappointing, because it’s a truly unique venture that captures the remarkable stories hidden inside of every day people; things you’d usually miss if there weren’t someone clever enough to go looking and tell you what’s really there.

We’re trying to find a revenue model that will allow them to shift gears and have come up with some great short-term ideas. But their long-term viability is still a question mark. Unfortunately, this occurs all the time. People with great convictions start businesses and invest lots of time and money before figuring out how to make a profit.

I heard the same kind of story from another consultant friend recently. After that, I met a young entrepreneur at a Web Innovator’s conference who is struggling to find funding, and still needs to figure out her revenue model.

It’s happening all over the place.

Personally, I work for more than the bottom line and encourage all companies to consider social impact and environmental responsibility as part of their core strategies. But the reality is that we can’t stay in business for long if we’re not profitable. It’s not ok just to build it in the hope that customers will come, unless you are just playing around with a concept and don’t feel attached to a successful outcome.

You wouldn’t make roast beef without the roast. You don’t make pancakes without eggs. You can’t wash your car without water (well, I suppose you can at a waterless carwash. There’s always an exception). If you are an entrepreneur, you can’t succeed without a viable and flexible revenue strategy. No marketing program can make up for this fundamental truth.

One of the instructors at Boston University’s graduate entrepreneurship course requires his students to submit business plans with two alternative business models, to prepare them for the reality their core focus could fail or get pushed back. This is the equivalent of a well-stocked kitchen that allows you to improvise and adapt in case you run out of something.

We are entering the age of lean, when young, flexible companies are driving innovation. That’s a good thing. If you count yourself among that crowd, just be sure to stock the cabinets with your main ingredients before you start cooking up your next business idea. Those ingredients must include a solid financial plan and a great network.

In my area, there are lots of support groups offering free consultations. The folks from DartBoston are a good example. I know of others that focus on social entrepreneurship, pre-VC stage strategy, etc. I bet there are some in your area too. My advice is to look around and see who’s willing to give you advice before you get in too deep. Good luck! - Kai Rostcheck

Radio, Radio - Part 1

Before and after the recent National Association of Women Business Owners session on DIY Strategic Thinking, I had the great opportunity to appear on radio programs on Kansas City’s KCTE Hot Talk 1510 AM. Strategic Thinking and Hot Talk – what a combination! Since both programs are available for listening online, you can be the judge.

In late May, I appeared with good friend Jay Liebenguth on his Thursday afternoon show, Live with Jay. Jay has been a great supporter, and beyond putting the radio show online, he wrote an incredibly kind post on his blog.

We covered a variety of strategic thinking topics, many of which have been highlighted here. Take a listen to the show, and for your quick reference, here are links to topics we covered.

• Steps You Can Take to Be More Strategic
• What’s Strategic Thinking?
• Challenges in Doing Strategic Thinking?
• Planning for Doing Planning – What’s in a Marketing Plan?
• Adapting Plans
• Who Should Be Involved in Planning?
• Bringing Others into Planning
• How Much Structure Should Go Into Strategic Planning?
• Ways to Prioritize Ideas
• What’s the Link Between Humor & Innovation?
• How Do You Get People Engaged in Strategic Thinking?
• Can Strategy Really Be Simply Stated?

After the NAWBO program, I met Kelly Scanlon, publisher of “Kansas City Small Business Monthly,” appearing on her June 20 Friday morning program. This Thursday there will be a link to that show and the innovation topics we covered.

A Week of Struggling for Simplicity - A Simple Strategy Check

Here’s a quick check for generating a simple, solid strategy. Is your strategy?

• Understandable – Will employees be able to read it and comprehend your direction, even if someone isn’t there to explain it?
  
• Implementable – Will something be able to be done with the strategy to create positive business results?
  
• Aligning – Will following the strategy create a natural inclination for employees to work in a cooperative fashion toward a common goal?

Solid (and simple) strategies should generate three “Yes” answers to these questions. So how does your strategy stack up? Ideally it displays the appropriate level of simplicity.

The Dilemma of Objectivity

I'm so excited to have Barrett Sydnor, president of Sydnor & Associates, as today's guest author. We go back nearly 15 years, and I've always enjoyed his business writing tremendously. Today he addresses objectivity within strategic planning; he'll also be back next month with a post on "invented second."


David Ogilvy, the father of modern advertising, quotes the father of modern consulting, Marvin Bower, as defining marketing as “objectivity.” If so, then objectivity is one of the most important qualities that any good strategic marketing planning process must have. But it is tough to do for two reasons.

One is that most people simply aren’t built that way. A few years ago I led a planning session for a company where I wanted people to think from the outside in (no big insight I know, but bear with me). To encourage that, they were not allowed to use first person references when speaking about the company - no “we” or “our.” It had to be third person, as an outsider would refer to it. To enforce it, we charged a quarter each time they referred to the company in first person. By the end of the session we had collected a very considerable sum for charity. One participant gave up about one-third of the way through, tossed a ten dollar bill in the pot, and said “I hope this gets me through the end of the day.”

These were smart people, good strategic thinkers, but they could not totally divorce themselves from thinking of the situation at hand in a first-person way.

The second reason that objectivity is tough is because often the objective person is seen as being negative or cynical. They are accused of not being a team player. And it is true that sometimes the approach and language of objectivity sounds negative and cynical when it is intended as skeptical or cautionary.

So how do you build objectivity into the planning process? One way is to encourage something I would call “passionate objectivity.” This is a quality or skill set that the best news reporters are heavily endowed with.

Those reporters approach stories with enthusiasm and an open mind, but they look for facts -verifiable facts - to back up or refute the opinions and subjectivity they encounter along the way.
An exercise that you can do to ensure that a planning recommendation is based in objectivity is to treat it the way a reporter would (should) treat a news story.

• Write down the questions they would ask. Include the basic neutral, fact-collecting ones and the pointed ones that try to dig deeper.
• Determine who they would go to as sources on the story, both inside the organization and outside sources—competitors, independent industry experts, academicians. Figure out what customers they would talk to.
• What would they ask each of these sources and what would the answers be?

If you can answer those questions with good reliability and it still points favorably to your recommendation, you’ve had a good test of your processes objectivity. If you don’t know what the answers would be or the answers don’t square with the recommendation, maybe it’s time to go back and put some more passionate objectivity into the process. - Barrett Sydnor

How Close Are We Forecasting Here?

Forecasts and size estimates shown with multiple decimal points are scary because they invariably imply a phony level of precision. When you’re estimating something, understand up front how precise the answer has to be, and present the result accordingly.

Doing a near-term estimate for a production forecast is one thing. But if the question relates to a market’s size to gauge relative market share or reasonable long-term growth expectations, it’s probably appropriate for your answer to be a range, and maybe a pretty wide one (2x or 3x differences between the low and high end may even be reasonable).

Also, rather than investing all your efforts in one estimate, approach it with multiple methodologies or sets of inputs to create credible boundaries for your estimated range. That’s “precision” that’s more valuable than any level of phony decimal places.

Surf's Up!

Here are three links that can benefit you in varying (and sometimes fun) ways when preparing marketing plans.

Guerrilla Marketing Plans

I haven’t “blogged” other conference presentations yet, although I typically write pages of notes and idea starters. One of the most valuable note packets was from a 2003 Transportation Marketing Communications Association presentation by Jay Conrad Levinson, the father of guerrilla marketing. He covered essential elements of a marketing plan and the number of times you need to get a message in front of potential customers to move them to be repeat buyers. Interestingly enough, surfing the web recently, I found this Spark Insight page with notes taken from the same speech Levinson was giving then. Not sure if he’s still covering this material, but it’s a great quick reference on guerrilla marketing.

Marketing Plan Simplicity

This link to Entrepreneur magazine content popped up on AOL recently. It’s a great reminder on the importance of simple prose, reasonable length, and a direct style when preparing a business plan. While its target audience is people writing business plans for their own start-ups, it’s certainly applicable for any marketing or business plan you’re putting together even within a big company.

Deceptive Simplicity - "Indexed"

I love a Venn diagram just as much as the next person. Okay, I love a Venn diagram more than most people. This book and website by Jessica Hagy capture her commentary on a wide range of topics through Venn diagrams, x-y charts, and other graphs. She produces an amazing amount of content on her blog and generates a lot of comments debating what the charts mean. Her ability to translate complex issues into a few lines and words on an index card is inspirational (and maddening – if you struggle mightily to express ideas simply!).

"Hit 'em Where They Ain't Week" - We've Seen the Enemy & They Don't Look Anything Like Us

Since baseball is getting into full swing, this week's posts are dedicated to one of my favorite all-time players, Wee Willie Keeler. You'll learn more about him Wednesday, but the reason he's a favorite is because of his famous strategic quote: when asked about his hitting approach, he replied, "I hit 'em where they ain't."

That approach works in so many ways strategically, we'll use it as the inspiration for the posts all week. Today's turns the quote around, concentrating on not getting hit where you ain't looking.

I spoke a couple of years ago on the same program as the then-COO from Sprint. During his presentation, he highlighted the incredible number of photographs being taken and sent via cell phones on a monthly basis.

It would have been interesting to sit inside Kodak in the years leading up to the emergence & explosion of this capability to see if cell phones were ever considered as competitive threats. I suspect they weren’t, especially since a Kodak exec I saw presenting at a Frost & Sullivan conference in early 2007 couldn’t get beyond his focus on printing things. There wasn’t much recognition of alternative means of communicating and transmitting images and the impact on Kodak.

The scary implication for any business is that not all future (or even current) competitors will “look” like you. Cell phones don’t look like cameras, and the images that they produce aren’t too conducive to printing. Yet, for capturing & sharing images, they’re a lot more functional than a traditional camera (or even an electronic one).

How can you begin to assess and project the nature of future competitive threats. Beyond cursory exploratory research, here are several questions to consider:

• What benefits does your company deliver? If you didn’t deliver them, who else currently would / could deliver them?
• What if your company never existed – how would customers satisfy their needs?
• What if your industry never existed – what alternatives might develop to satisfy needs?
• Who are the niche players in your markets today that could grow in prominence? How might they be defining your business for you right now?

We used the first benefits-oriented set of questions a couple of weeks ago at the Kansas City Business Marketing Association in looking at how Apple had disrupted other markets, yet could be disrupted itself. The exercise interestingly yielded Microsoft, Garmin, YouTube, and Louis Vuitton as all potential competitors to deliver the same benefits Apple does. That's quite a wide-ranging list!

This type of work is challenging and highly speculative. But it pays to consider, anticipate, and prepare for as many competitive possibilities as you can picture.

Change Your Character – Attracting Thinkers as an Event Planner Would PLUS A Special Bonus

Another question at last week’s conference was on getting reluctant people to participate in strategic thinking efforts if they don’t want to spend the time or are skeptical about its value. Barring a management directive, you can’t force participation. Instead, consider two other approaches.

First is the Wednesday “Change Your Character” exercise. Professional event planners face similar challenges. They’re under the gun to produce great events and make sure that people want to show up for them. They accomplish this with their event by:

• Having multiple events of different sizes at different times to attract different groups
• Planning the event’s timing so it doesn’t conflict with other priorities
• Tying the event to an already scheduled activity
• Holding the event someplace new – in a more convenient or a unique location
• Broadening the invitation list with new participants and guests who usually wouldn’t be invited
• Confirming well-known guests personally and communicating their participation to others
• Creating a compelling invitation – ensuring invitees know all event details and the benefits of attending
• Inviting people in sufficient time for them to commit
• Making it easy to RSVP in the affirmative
• Calling invitees to confirm attendance and reminding them about the event a week before
• Creating attractive networking and relationship building opportunities for attendees
• Giving certain invitees specific roles to perform at the event

As usual, come up with 3 new ideas for each event planner technique to get people to come to a strategic thinking session. (Click here for more background on the Change Your Character exercise.)

Here’s the bonus on this challenge - Five approaches that we’ve used to secure participation from people reluctant to invest time on strategy:

• Collect strategic input with online exercises – Allow people to participate without a meeting. Use this for SWOT exercises, gauging opinions, and soliciting perceptions on future industry dynamics.
• Secure a little bit of time with a clear objective – If you can get 45 minutes of a group’s time, select an exercise and a prioritization approach that will fit the time. Make sure you’re clearly moving toward your objective within the session.
• Do strategic thinking for non-participants – Find out what non-participating stakeholders want to accomplish and do the strategic thinking for them. Package the outcome in a recommendation or executive summary, pitching the results to demonstrate strategic thinking’s benefits.
• Work with who you can get – If you have a small but diverse group interested in strategic thinking, hold a session with them. Ensure that you clearly deliver results and create a buzz about it afterward.
• Reference sell – If someone senior has seen beneficial results from strategy efforts, ask them to contact your reluctant thinkers, recommending they find time because it’s worth it.

Use these five approaches and the event planner techniques to get your foot in the door for more strategic thinking within your business. And to gain a better perspective on the advantage of thinking about even small business presentations as events, check out tomorrow’s post.

Checklists – Helping Visualize the Uncertain When Plans Fall Through

There's a great article by Dan and Chip Heath in this month's Fast Company about the value of simple, straight forward checklists to improve performance. It’s a reminder of the value of checklists as strategic tools to help ensure that you're thinking through both routine and new situations in structured ways. Problems on a recent trip underscored that point along with the realization that effective checklists don't always have to be written.

During a “major winter weather event” (KC television weather jargon for “snow”), I was monitoring the weather by looking out the window and watching The Weather Channel. I was unaware that our airport had been closed for hours until my traveling companion called to ask when I was going to the airport and what my alternatives were.

It was suddenly essential to develop a checklist to evaluate viable options so that our trip didn't fall apart. The resulting checklist works in many instances where a plan looks as if it's in jeopardy of not succeeding:

• Identify critical plan priorities that can't be compromised. (We had to arrive Sunday night; all else could be adjusted on the road.)
• Increase flexibility / options right away to be able to still achieve the priorities. (That meant downsizing my checked bag to a carry-on in 5 minutes and getting to the airport ASAP to have the opportunity to make more flight options.)
• Secure access to the necessary information flow. (We determined that on the ground info was our best source – first at the counter, then at the gate.)
• Develop likely scenarios and their implications. (Since it was an airport-wide delay, we had to get as early a flight as possible, while being prepared to catch the latest connecting flight possible.)
• Secure the resources to operate in the most likely scenarios. (Our important resources were charged phones, water and food to take along, and each other - splitting up & teaming as necessary to get to the front of the customer service line ASAP.)

The end result? We made it on an earlier scheduled flight that left an hour after our original plane was supposed to depart. Our 2-hour Chicago layover was consumed by the delay; we walked off the plane in Chicago and went right to our original connecting flight. We had food because we’d planned ahead, so it wasn’t a big deal to miss eating at Midway. We arrived only 15 minutes late vs. the prospect of arriving 5 hours late. And the checklist made all the difference!

Strategy in Action - Suzy and Jack Welch & Fast Company Links

Two recent articles do a great job of addressing the real world benefits of having a strategic foundation in business.

In a recent Business Week column, Suzy and Jack Welch provide a brief rationale for the value of mission statements and then cover several steps toward developing a meaningful one that actually drives business decisions.

A longer piece in Fast Company issue 121 by Charles Fishman called “To the Moon in a Minivan” reports on NASA’s approach to develop, along with Lockheed Martin, the replacement spacecraft for the space shuttle. What makes it particularly interesting is the treatment of the strategic elements within NASA’s plan, providing a behind the scenes look at how a major enterprise applies strategic concepts to move an effort ahead.

We learn NASA’s "vision" statement (“To the moon, Mars, and beyond”) and how its effort is bounded by direct critical success factors such as keeping the spacecraft’s weight under 50,250 pounds, focusing on simplicity & utility, and exploiting pre-existing technology (even going as far back as the Apollo program) before inventing new solutions. Importantly, the program has a simple and very visual statement to align its development efforts. According to Ship Hatfield, the NASA project manager for the capsule, the Orion spacecraft is “more like a mini-van. It’s more of a vehicle to go to the grocery store in.” With a picture like this for a project team, making strategic decisions becomes much easier.

2008 Challenge - "Figuring Out What Matters"

The new year is a time for reflecting on what’s really important. If I may turn that concept on its side a little, since articulating a new definition for “strategic thinking” (addressing things that matter with insight & innovation), I’ve been trying to get down on paper a list of questions whose answers would help shed light on “what matters.”

Here’s Our Collective Challenge – What are great questions to best identify what really matters in a particular business situation? This is a starting list of questions:

• What does our brand stand for?
• What do we most want to accomplish in the business?
• How would we describe our best, most valuable customers?
• Who don’t we do business with?
• Who do we win the most business from and why?
• Who do we lose the most business to and why?
• What are the biggest cost drivers in the business?
• What things would be most devastating (or most embarrassing) if our customers knew about them?
• What’s the biggest unknown in our business?

Feel free to start using questions from the list above. Feel even freer still to comment on other questions you’ve used successfully to identify “what matters.”

Bolstering Strategic Thinking - A Recap

The initial posts on this blog were on closing the strategic thinking gap that develops in many businesses (i.e., a desire to invest significant time on strategic issues, but little time spent in reality). Here are links to the five posts in order:

Why strategic thinking doesn't happen
Something's missing in strategic thinking
Somebody's missing from the strategic thinking effort
Tools to improve strategic thinking's efficiency & effectiveness
Outcomes are missing from strategic thinking & wrap-up

The posts provide an overview of specific approaches that can be taken to improve the quality & output of strategic thinking efforts in business.