Top 10 Ways Social Media Management Benefits Small Business

You’ve heard the claims, seen swarms of stories about the marketing potential made possible via social media marketing and perhaps have even gone so far as to set-up a social media presence…but somehow you are still sitting on the sidelines. If you are still confused about how and why a social media management firm can benefit your small business then keep reading. Today we are going to go beyond the basics and talk about the other reasons social media management makes sense.

1. Social Media is big…really big…and getting BIGGER! Don’t make the mistake of thinking that social media marketing has already reached its saturation point…it hasn’t. Yes, roughly 79% of adults in the United States already use at least one form of social media with a worldwide estimate of nearly 1.5 billion…but the growth explosion is far from over. In fact, many experts predict it has only just begin. Instead of adding more consumers, future growth is expected to come from duration or total time spent interacting via social media sites. In short, your clients are probably already using social media and will do so at a greater and greater rate in the future. A social media management firm keeps you connected with clients.

Socialising Customer Relationships

Why is it that social marketing campaigns and marketing automation are completely disjointed yet have the same objectives? We’re all trying to reach the same goal –engage with prospects and influence, and ideally accelerate the buying process.  Historically, social marketing and marketing automation have been treated as completely separate disciplines operating like the proverbial two ships passing in the night, with most social marketing tools sitting in silos disconnected from mainstream marketing processes. This needs to change.

5 Hidden Skills for Big Data Scientists

1. Be Clear:  Is Your Problem Really A Big Data Problem?

There are many big data problems out there requiring huge compute scale, innovations in computation paradigms, vast storage space and so on. But just because your data takes up lots of disc space does not mean that you have a big data problem. Firstly, your data may be encoded in an inefficient format. XML, for example, can be incredible verbose (all those close tags and human readable text). Secondly, if your data changes over time it may change very slowly indicating that monitoring the difference between data sets is more important that importing complete data sets. Thirdly, you may be processing your information on a legacy architecture designed for low power CPUs or cores. Architecture should be data driven, meaning that you need to deeply understand the informational aspects of your data and not just the size of the data as it comes to you on disc.

The Employee’s Guide to Social Media Crisis Management

What happens if the company or organization you work for finds itself in a social media crisis, but hasn’t invested in a social media crisis plan?
What do you do when the stress of the situation starts to escalate and you’re still left unclear of your role within the crisis? When you feel unhelpful, confused and frustrated? When you haven’t been trained in the proper ways to respond to such a situation or are even clear in what your team expects of you?
If you’re an employee of a company and happen to find yourself in a similar situation, here are some starting points of what you can do in order to help the company for which you work begin to regain control of the situation:

Using RPM to Manage and Optimize the Entire ‘Customer Lifecycle’

Revenue Performance Management (RPM) is much more than improving the effectiveness and efficiency of sales and marketing. In fact, RPM is today enabling organizations – from major health systems and global consumer product companies to web 3.0 start-ups – to transform their revenue processes and realize significant increases in performance and results.
But, I would argue that RPM is even bigger than that. We are increasingly seeing marketing automation and RPM on the front lines of creating new ways of thinking about, and ultimately creating, business excellence. RPM is helping companies to drive business-building change in a world that is changing faster than many of us would ever have thought possible just a few short years ago.

Management Skills Pyramid

To be successful, there are many skills a manager needs to master. I adapted Kammy Hatnes' pyramid structure to show the increasingly difficult management skills you must master at each level and to also display how these management skills build on each other to help you achieve success in your management career. The result is the Management Skills Pyramid shown here.

Digital Management of Business Travel Expenses

Globalization has helped organizations expand their business to regions far and wide. This meant that with the expansion the area of jurisdiction for the management also widens making travel across regions and globetrotting between distantly located offices becomes a must for the key professionals. Besides these the corporate offices also needs to track and manage the expenses incurred at these distant locations.

My Time Management Technique That Works

Since I make a living online, most people want to know what my work schedule is like, and if I end up working more hours than people do at a regular 9-5 job. The answer is no.
I actually do a lot less physical work and still make a good income all because I leverage the web and my time.
The process I am going to share with you below is my daily schedule. I also want to point out that I have a policy where I only work online Monday-Friday. I turn off my computer Saturday and Sunday. So the following is a schedule that I do M-F.

Strong Growth Starts With Great Leadership

Across the globe, senior corporate executives (including boards of directors) are pretty obsessed with one thing: growth. It’s the business imperative that consistently trumps every other goal.
In recent years this growth imperative has been amplified because of the post-recession economic challenges with which we’ve all had to grapple. Companies are doing everything they can to re-ignite their revenue-building capacities, like implementing marketing automation for example. They are also using strategies including tapping overseas markets, driving innovation, investing in new talent, and exploring M&A opportunities.

Seven Guideposts to Achieving the Impossible

It won’t take you long to recall the last time at work somebody resisted changing something. From the mundane and unimportant like changing the stationary, the look of the bulletin board, the type of coffee in the coffee machine or the traditional venue for the office holiday party to much more serious like changing the organization’s name, dropping a product line, merging to survive or closing regional offices.

How many times has someone said to you, “Oh, you can’t do that. In this organization that’s just impossible.” Workplace inertia is so common it is parodied everywhere, from popular TV shows to comic strips.

Managing your Google AdWords costs

Pay-per-click advertising like Google AdWords puts cost control into your hands. However, managing your Adword costs and maximising return on investment involves testing, analysis and regular adjustments, as business writer Rachel Miller explains
Pay-per-click advertising puts the advertiser in control of their budgets. You can set budget limits — per day and per click through (every time someone clicks on your ad) — so there’s no need for costs to spiral out of control. However, with that control comes a challenge — it’s up to you to monitor and refine your Adwords strategy to maximise your return on investment.

How To Apply Strategic Management in Business

With the increasing amount of competition in your field, it is necessary for your company to consider creating a business strategy that will help you get to the top of your turf. Strategic management is the art of creating and implementing the objectives your company wants to achieve. It is the process in which you specify your company's mission, vision and objectives. You develop different programs to achieve this. You also evaluate how much of your resources are you going to allocate to make your programs or projects possible. Before you proceed in applying strategic management in your company, you must remember that this is a process. The following lines will give an introductory explanation to the steps contained in this process.

Business Acumen and Strategy for Managers

OVERVIEW

Create and implement a winning business strategy plan

Many successful, critical thinking decision making executives have difficulty bridging the gap between functional expertise and general management skills. All too often, the specialized skills that made them invaluable in their former role become far less useful in a general management role, while the need for general business skills and decision making tools increases.

4 Ways to Outdo Your Competitors

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
Do you ever feel like there’s a competitor around every corner? Budding entrepreneurs often hesitate to follow their business dreams because they believe their target market is already so saturated that there simply is no more room to absorb any new entrants.
However, savvy small business owners can make it in a crowded field, even one filled with a couple of 800-pound gorillas. The key to your business’ success doesn’t hinge on finding a completely empty field, but how you define your company and its place in the market.

Here are four easy ways to set yourself apart from the din of voices in your industry. Do you have any tips for making it in a crowded market?

Successful Budgeting Involves People

Successful budgeting goes beyond numbers. It depends on people management.
Managing the budget numbers can be simple, but managing a budget takes people, not spreadsheets. While budget numbers are simple, budget management isn’t. To make a budget work, you need to add real management:

5 Reasons You Need Finance Talent on Your Start-up Team

Here’s how things go for the typical software startup: An engineer comes up with a product that he or she thinks is pretty cool. The engineer spends six months building a prototype, possibly in a garage. But to bring the product to market that engineer needs financing, and that’s a whole other challenge. 
So the entrepreneur writes a business plan and hopes hard to get a VC or an angel investor interested. There are a number of problems with this approach, one being that people who are good at creating new products are rarely also good at creating new business plans. 

Stress management

«Πρέπει να αντεπεξέλθω!», «πρέπει να επιτύχω!», «πρέπει να καταβάλλω επιπρόσθετη προσπάθεια!», «όλα εξαρτώνται από αυτή τη στιγμή!». Σίγουρα οι προηγούμενες φράσεις, δεν φέρνουν όμορφες εικόνες στο μυαλό μας...
Για τους περισσότερους από εμάς, το stress αποτελεί το νούμερο ένα πρόβλημα κατά την εργασία. Και όμως, θα μπορούσε να μειωθεί, εάν λάβουμε σοβαρά υπόψη μας τα ακόλουθα δέκα μηνύματα:
1. Δεν χρειάζεται να είμαστε πάντα τέλειοι. Η «τελειομανία» είναι ασθένεια (και όχι προτέρημα όπως νομίζουν πολλοί) και αντιμετωπίζεται ιατρικά. Δεν χρειάζεται κάθε ώρα της ημέρας, να αποδίδουμε τα μέγιστα. Δεν μπορούμε να είμαστε συνεχώς σωστοί. Για τους υπόλοιπους, έχουμε κατακτήσει με το σπαθί μας, το δικαίωμα, κάποιες φορές, να κάνουμε ακόμα και λάθη. Το αποδέχονται και μας το συγχωρούν, καθώς το ίδιο κάνουμε και εμείς για εκείνους. Αυτό που μένει, είναι να καταλάβουμε εμείς, το νόημα των παραπάνω.

The Best Social Media Management Tools, Systems & Platforms

Social media management tools, platforms and systems are extremely important for a company that wants to attract more online visitors. There is a large selection of platforms, systems and tools, thus sometimes is really difficult to choose the one that’s proper for your business. In order to find the best social media management tools, you have to take into consideration various factors.
SMMS-compulsory communication platforms
Social media management tools or systems, simply known as SMMS, represent the communication platforms that allow users to communicate, interact, engage, respond and take action. Such platforms are forums, Twitter, Facebook or blogs. These extraordinary dashboards are highly customized and provide information in real time. Moreover, they enable you to have multiple accounts. With these useful platforms, more users can share a workspace and they need only one click to reply in several places.

Managers Need to Up Their Game with Social Media

Using social media to accomplish a meaningful purpose involves more than providing new technology and praying for success. Successful mass collaboration places new requirements on an organization, particularly its managers. While many organizations are technically ready for social media, they should question the readiness of managers to embrace new ways of working collaboratively to achieve social success.
Why? Because social media and mass collaboration fundamentally challenge the relationship between responsibility, resources, and management. Normally, managers accept responsibility provided it comes with control of the resources required to deliver on that responsibility. The connection between responsibility and resources sits at the heart of management authority, control, accountability, and organizational design. Look at an organization chart and you will see the distribution of resources and responsibilities — the currency by which managers measure themselves and compare themselves to their peers.

Are You Truly A Strategic Sales Manager?

Executives often describe their sales managers as strategic, but they don't really see them that way. In this episode of the Sales Management Minute, find out if you are truly a strategic sales manager.

If there is one expression that executives toss around without considering the true definition, it’s the word "strategic.” More often than not, when a sales manager is described as "strategic,” it is because this person is adept at bringing in deals. While that is an important skill, the use of "strategic” in this case is for a sales person not a sales manager.