The first was hosted by IQuad (www.iquad.co.za) and focussed on Strategic Innovation. The second was hosted by Huddlemind (look them up on Facebook) and focussed on the future of marketing in our strangely connected Web 2.0 world.
The upshot of the situation is that the message put forward by both was strangely similar: In order to stay relevant in business today, you need to be flexible, adaptable and be willing to re-invent your message as and when the business environment requires it.
The approach between the two workshops was completely different.
Strategic Innovation: The method of setting a strategy around a table and then re-hashing the same thing next year is considered to be old-school. And yet it happens regularly, including the development of marketing plans and planning for new products. Strategic Innovation suggests that your strategy must be approached creatively without losing the focus on the bottom line. It’s the focus on flexibility and the willingness to try new approaches. It’s moving away from spending 80% of your R&D focus on a few products that have to recover the development costs and make a significant profit over the next four to six years. Again this latter thinking is old-school. The idea is that all facts of the business must be open to innovation.
Marketing in the Web 2.0 world: Did you know that a few years ago, three prime time TV adverts would get you 80% coverage. Today the same coverage would require one hundred and twenty adverts across many channels. Why? People today are wired in a different way; they don’t cluster around the TV anymore for entertainment and information. Both can now be obtained via the internet, at home, at the office, in a coffee shop, at the airport or on your phone.
The focus is to get enough information when you need it, packaged in a way that you can access it, accurate and reputable. Information by word-of-mouth or from newspapers is still the most trustworthy. So to get your message across you need to be able to satisfy these needs without sacrificing your core values embedded in that message. And you need to get people talking about it; either in conversation or electronically, in blogs, by text messaging, on social networking sites ....
So what does this have to do with my first business blog? Absolutely everything! I have been extremely fortunate to have Liz de Speville as my mentor in developing my business. Liz helps people develop their personal and business image and message and is a life coach to boost. Liz helped me develop my message both for my business and the business website (www.biophys.ltd.uk). Since the initial phase of developing my message Liz has been continuously pushing me to improve that message and present it in different ways rather than a staid website. It took these two workshops to give me a window to the world that she was seeing (by the way we live 11.000km apart) and to realize that I have to re-invent and re-present my message. And this blog is the first step towards that.
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