Handout for Diversity Summit 2011 in Sugar Land/Houston

Diversity Summit Handout for Early Career Moves

I've prepared a handout for Diversity Summit 2011 (in Sugar Land/ Houston, TX on May 20, 2011 at the Sugar Land Marriott). They asked me to speak on their career panel to answer several questions:

§ Take Control of Your Future – How to Develop Your Own Career Plan

§ How to pick your Sponsor, Advisor, Mentor, Coach and when to move on to a new one

§ What is the difference between an Advisor, Mentor or Coach

§ How to get noticed?

§ What is really expected and not expected for you to go to the next level

§ How to broaden your experience?

§ Should you get a MBA degree?

§ How do you strategically change jobs to advance your career?

§ Take Control of Your Future – How to Develop Your Own Career Plan§ How to pick your Sponsor, Advisor, Mentor, Coach and when to move on to a new one§ What is the difference between an Advisor, Mentor or Coach§ How to get noticed?§ What is really expected and not expected for you to go to the next level§ How to broaden your experience?§ Should you get a MBA degree?§ How do you strategically change jobs to advance your career?

 In that vein, I have prepared a handout to get everyone on the same page in the panel. It will be a whirlwind hour and I don't want anyone to miss anything. Please check it out and give me some feedback so we can improve it and help us all be better.

Check out the snazzy handout!

Market Analysis

Michael Porter had it right. His Five Forces Model continues to impact our work today. While it is easy to dive into the nuts and bolts of how a business competes against rivals, courts customers, faces new products and comepetitors, a high level approach is usually a better strategy.

Defining a company strategy is integral to solving a client's problem. Recently, we completed a preliminary analysis of a client's current competitiveness. In this post, I will focus on one of the forces: Bargaining Power of Customers.

The Bargaining Power of Customers is especially strong in professional service firms (like Elevation Consulting Group, doctors, lawyers, restaurants/restauranteurs) simply because the product one offers is purely intangible many times. Customers have the ability to demand and negotiate many times over the price of a service because its quality cannot easily be compared with a specific product. So, the company explained, that they were in a quandary. Their business seemed differentiated from many other service providers but still lacked differentiation for customers. What were they to do to avoid commoditization, leakage/breakage among its other services, and loss of competiiveness in the market?

There are several tools we applied to this client's needs. We aascertained their current efforts to understand their customers, the service offerings of its competitors and also assess what it currently offered. In order to reduce the bargaining power of customers we came up with an innovative strategy (summarized in neat points for those who like to skim):

• Edit their post-service follow up survey to include questions to determine overall satisfaction, ask for feedback on increasing satisfaction, and determine their usage of social media channels.
• Next, we created an continual improvement process (CIP) which gave us the ability to identify opportunities and other stastically significant data to help our client understand where it stood based on the services it provided.
• Also in the CIP, we set up case management tool that allowed our client to see the feedback it received, and respond to it within 2 weeks. This is crucial for any service firm. The phrase, "You Asked For It" comes to mind. The connotation with that phrase is that one must respond once he/she receives this information, or the relationship may be put in jeopardy and you could be seen as aloof.
• Finally, in the CIP, we sought to create a business case using other data from web traffic, targeted customer demographic data on internet usage statistics, along with this new question on social media usage among its customers. The business case we created shed light on who and how their targeted audience was using social media. This, in turn, allowed us to create a social media strategy for the client that capitalized on this customer profile.

Understanding current information of the client is important for analysis. Leveraging market and industry information gathering into the data analysis for a client using his/her data becomes a key way to help others understand information. Turning information into analysis and then into recommendations is essential in today's information overloaded world. There are several outlets for this information moving forward:

• Applying this new analyses for Search Engine Optimization of client's website
• Continue to move forward in data analysis to understand new trends and movements in this industry
• Set up a revenue tracking system for this survey
• Help the client reach new customers through further analysis and identification of opportunities in the market.

So, Michael Porter was indeed right. His framework has many facets. This post, we gave an example on how we helped them to understand their clients for this part of the project. 4 more forces to go....

How to Find and Choose a SEO Consultant

We were in Chicago this weekend talking to other Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and online marketing consultants about the difficulties of companies to determine good SEO consultants. Much of what we do is called by vernacular terms as "internet voodoo" and "words that work magic." While these terms are true, that does not help companies who are deciding:

1. Whether an SEO consultant is worth the cost
2. How to find a reputable and trustworthy SEO Consultant who will deliver results
3. How to compare different firms. 

These are important questions that many companies do not have enough knowledge or experience in the matter. We will set off a series that will identify key areas that will help companies- startups, small businesses, mid-cap businesses, large conglomerates- answer these three issues. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to comment here or leave us a message in the form to the right. --> ---> ---->

P.S. For those of you who are impatient and want the answer now, we have your answer to those three issues in a nutshell. YES, we are worth it, a good firm will deliver results above and beyond expectations, and it is definitely possible to measure the quality of firms.

Which URL Shortener Should I Use?

Do you Twitter a lot? Do you forward a lot of email where a link could get truncated due to length? Unless you said yes to the preceding two questions, you probably don't need to shorten a URL.

Shortening a URL has consequences for SEO simply because they do not organically show up through the clickstreams. However, if you must resort to a URL due to Twitter where character length is of the utmost importance, there are better and worse services.

bit.ly, tr.im, and cli.gs seemed to be the best options due to their use in twitter clients and the usage of 301 redirects and tracking.

Search Engine Land posted a great blog post on this topic.

Effective Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is becoming a more complicated and comprehensive intelligence that requires keen and experienced professionals to understand in order to add value to any website. We provide such experience and have a proven track record of assisting clients to raise their SEO by leaps and bounds. Contact us today for a consultation.

More central to SEO Optimization consulting, a well designed web page with optimized site architecture, content, inbound linking, link building, and other optimization strategies.