Topics can sometimes grow organically as you write about them and do a little research. The topic here was to throw out a challenge to develop the best 125px x 125px ad since I had developed one today that I thought was pretty good. I still would be interested to hear whether you can do better than the ad on the right here. However there’s more to all this than meets the eye.
The Search world is all a-twitter with the news that the Google Spam team has downgraded the search rankings for the Google Chrome group because their actions resulted in bloggers being paid to write posts that included links to Google Chrome web pages. That is in violation of the Google Quality Guidelines.
This is a guest post by Sam Peters.
The biggest rage in the world of social media is Tumblr. People equipped with smartphones are taking to the streets, collecting images, and posting them to the specialized blogging service – all while gaining massive amounts of followers.
Many may find this title, Social Media Forces Customer-Centric Marketing, somewhat puzzling. To understand what is meant, we should look at a few definitions.
Marketing like many other branches of business often introduces jargon that may confuse readers. The latest of these is the term inbound marketing. In demystifying this term, we will show you a concept that is even more useful. That is marketing from the outside in
Today social media tools dominate the landscape of business marketing. Why is that? Because online social media tools are usually easy to use, free, and can yield quick returns on relatively little personal investment.
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If you think that is a very un-Godin-like title, you’re in for a surprise. You may have been thinking about Seth Godin’s post on Small Is The New Big.
Small is the new big only when the person running the small thinks big. Don’t wait. Get small. Think big.
Outside in is perhaps the best pair of words to express that you are looking at something from a different perspective. It is a very short way of suggesting that the view is coming from a different direction. The words are being used currently in a number of different and interesting ways.
Scalable was a word introduced in the Information Technology world but it raises some interesting questions in applying it in other contexts.
In IT it is a popular buzzword that refers to how well a hardware or software system can adapt to increased demands. For example, a scalable network system would be one that can start with just a few nodes but can easily expand to thousands of nodes. Scalability can be a very important feature because it means that you can invest in a system with confidence you won’t outgrow it.
Now we see it applied more generally to a company that many customers would rate very highly for customer service. Toyota Failure Proves Quality Isn’t Scalable.
A small operation can bootstrap itself into a medium or even a reasonably large company, via either organic growth or acquisition, and still maintain the quality which was the basis of its initial success.
At some point, though, whether you’re talking an automaker or a technology firm, size breeds insularity, which in turn fosters risk aversion. I haven’t even mentioned the corner-cutting mentality which occurs when making numbers becomes a (the only?) priority.
The author, Alexander Wolfe, points out that in the more open world created by the Internet, the quality stakes are very much higher.
Toyota might not have so fortunate a fate, and thus a swifter fall, because we now live in Internet time, where seismic shifts occur in timeframes too tiny for rational thought to stop that Twitter/Facebook/Cable TV train from running the business off the metaphorical track.
I believe the author identifies exactly why this problem occurs.
It’s true that the scalability doesn’t seem to be a limiting factor for manufacturing, per se. It’s not the manufacturing which is at fault in the Toyota crisis. It’s a management failure brought on by an inherent inability of human beings to scale up, beyond a certain point, the social interactions which grease the wheels of a smoothly running society. (And, in a very real sense, a company is a society writ smaller.)
The real reasons for the Toyota problems have yet to be pinned down, however a clear message is that Toyota was not willing to accept that customer satisfaction is determined by the customer. Undoubtedly the final bill for Toyota will be very much greater than if they had accepted that if a single customer is dissatisfied, you have to make it right. Of course there is a very small proportion of the population that are never satisfied. However unless you do as much for them as most people would accept is right and fair, then you may well be storing up problems for yourself.
Insularity is not an acceptable or justifiable company trait. There must be full two-way communication that both parties find acceptable. Setting that up and providing adequate resources for that is not somehting that is easily scaleable. However the hoped-for economies by providing less than satisfying customer service are completely outweighed by the market penalties when customers feel ignored.
On a personal note, I have been a most satisfied customer of Toyota for many years and will gladly pass on the word to friends and acquaintances. However my voice and the voices of other satisfied customers are lost in the huge noise created by those who it would appear have reasons to claim that Toyota just did not listen.
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Although you might assume we are about to discuss that new Ford Focus automobile, that is the resultant of what we really want to talk about.
The word focus is what Peter Drucker felt so strongly about that he emphasized it three times: focus, focus, focus. Although it is clearly essential advice for small and mid-sized companies, it is equally applicable in mega corporations too.
According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, that is what Ford’s Renaissance Man is now pushing.
Alan Mulally, an engineer from Boeing, arrived three-and-a-half years ago when Ford seemed on death’s door. It suffered a $12.6 billion loss in 2006, when industry-wide car sales were strong. But in 2009, Ford became the only U.S. car company to avoid bankruptcy, and posted a $2.7 billion profit. After plunging below $2 a share a year ago the company’s stock is now bumping $12.
“Improve Focus, Simplify Operations,” is for Mr. Mulally a sacred mantra. Soon after his arrival Ford began shedding brands – Jaguar, Land Rover and Aston Martin among them – that the company couldn’t afford to support. Volvo will be next to go. Meanwhile, the core Ford brand got an investment infusion to replace aging cars and revive a model lineup that had been heavily tilted toward gas-guzzling trucks.
In the process, Ford cut its number of global platforms, or chassis, to eight from more than 20, and the number of nameplates to 25 from 97. Each platform and model involves hundreds of millions of dollars of engineering costs, which translated to billions of losses when Ford couldn’t sell enough of each model.
Product-development chief Derrick Kuzak is methodically implementing the “One Ford” strategy of developing cars in a single region (say Europe, or North America) and selling them globally, instead of developing slightly different cars in each region at enormous extra cost. The first of these, the subcompact Fiesta, was engineered in Europe and will arrive in the United States this summer. In 2011, we will see a new version of a slightly larger car, the compact Focus, also engineered in Europe and designed as a global car from the start.
It’s all another triumph for that KISS principle. As Albert Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
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