10 Tips on How to Research Your Competition. Five Ways to Hold the Right Kind of Attention - John Hagel III and John Seely Brown - John Hagel III and John Seely Brown. By John Hagel III and John Seely Brown | 8:26 AM April 5, 2011 No matter how talented or accomplished you are, you cannot always count on attracting and retaining the attention of others.
Too many options compete for everyone’s attention, and they multiply with each passing day. It will be more and more challenging to rise above the noise and hold onto the attention of those who matter to you. How to Use Game Mechanics to Reward Your Customers. There's a green card.
Then there's silver, gold, and platinum. And then there's the Centurion—the black American Express card. Which do you want in your wallet? A handful of luxury brands have for decades used promises of status to encourage customers to spend more through loyalty to their brands. Today, brands of all stripes are experimenting with the psychology of status and power in rewarding customers. Consider Foursquare, a company built entirely on a game-design model. The new rewards ecosystem is a marketer's dream. "Historically, customer engagement was something big brands did a lot better due to full scale loyalty programs," says Gabe Zichermann, a blogger who authored Game-Based Marketing and who hosts of the Gamification Summit. That's changing. Rewarding Customers Through Gamification: Why Game Mechanics? 10 Things I Learned From Failure. How to Narrow Your Target Market. Huge, profitable companies like Walmart and Amazon didn't start as the all-encompassing retailers we know today.
How to Monetize Social Media. Many business executives have not found sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Myspace, and Linkedin useful in making money.
Building genuine online relationships that are also good for the bottom line is not so easy. There is a lot of trial and error. But while monetizing social media is difficult it is not impossible. There are companies that are getting the word out about their brands using social media and are turning a profit. Take The New York Jets. The Jets also communicate regularly on Twitter. How to Write an Executive Summary - Business Plan Executive Summary. While the business plan’s executive summary is the first thing the readers of your business plan see, it should be the last part of the business plan you write.
The purpose of the executive summary of the business plan is to provide your readers with an overview of the business plan. Think of it as an introduction to your business. Therefore, your business plan’s executive summary will include summaries of: The executive summary will end with a summary statement, a “last kick at the can” sentence or two designed to persuade the readers of your business plan that your business is a winner.
Does Your Business Have Curb Appeal? When my wife and I saw the ad for a small, lemon-yellow cottage, we immediately knew we wanted that house.
It was in Toronto's Beaches community. Newly married and without kids, we envisioned going for long walks on the beach and then retreating to our cottage abode. We called our real estate agent and arranged a showing. We walked through the front door into a sun-drenched living room. As we climbed the stairs to the second floor, I turned to my wife with a giddy smile—we both knew we were going to buy the house. How to Make Your Small Business Seem Bigger (Using Tech) Ramon Ray, journalist and editor at Smallbiztechnology.com, sums it up perfectly: "Small businesses can do BIG things using low-cost technology and readily available expertise.
" It doesn't matter if you're running a business out of your home, the local Starbucks (free Internet), or an abandoned warehouse, if you have the right tools to reel in a large consumer base, it's not necessarily important how small your business is because it's doing big things. With all of the technology tools out there, small businesses are now in a better position to compete. "With the rise of social media and ubiquity of online software the time is NOW for small businesses to reach a big business audience," Ray says. Simon notes that with today's technology, smaller businesses now have the capability of being just as powerful as larger companies.
"In fact," he says, "you can argue they're more powerful because they've got less stuff clogging the technological artery. Creating a Company Vision. Hardly a day passes without someone asking me for business advice.
It might be a student or a struggling entrepreneur or an up-and-comer at a larger company. I'm sure most successful entrepreneurs experience the same thing. As often as not, people want that "one top tip," that single piece of advice that can put a person on the path to success. Lo, if only things were so simple. On the other hand, there is one thing I wish I had understood more clearly from the get-go: the power of visioning.
When we opened Zingerman's Delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1982, I had never even heard the term visioning. How to Write a Business Plan Outline.