Tag Archives: business

How Facebook Can Solve The Duplicate Venue Problem

I’ve been thoroughly confused by location-based services that allow the users to create venues. Many times, this practices leaves the LBS with a ton of duplicate venues. Facebook just announced they have partnered with Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah to bring the location experience to the world’s largest social network. The Places feature on Facebook will allow businesses to claim their Place and merge it with an existing Facebook Page. Okay. Cool. But what happens when there are duplicate venues that already exists not just within a single platform, but across platforms? (Facebook answered a lot of questions in its FAQ section on Places, but this one remains unanswered.)

Here’s what Facebook has the potential to do. It can solve the duplicate venues problem once and for all.

At point A., if Facebook allows business owners and managers to merge multiple LBS locations with a single Facebook page, it can solve one of the biggest problems in the location industry. That would allow the location-based platforms to better track and merge duplicate venues.

But another issue occurs at point B. What happens if not every location has a Facebook Page? Do they have to make one? Some corporations don’t allow franchisees to manage individual Facebook Pages for their branch. What happens to those locations on Facebook? Is the corporate site allowed to merge multiple Facebook Places into a single Page?

To be honest, I’m a little overwhelmed by the Facebook press conference tonight. I may have missed the answers to these questions, but then again, Zuck did say, “There’s a lot we aren’t doing…yet.” The possibilities are there. Will Facebook and the LBS networks follow them up with actions? And if so, when?

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August 18, 2010 0 Comments Short URL , , , , Marketing, Social Media

Building a Miracle Team

The 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team

The only class I’m taking this semester that really engages my interests is my Organizational Behavior course. We’re assigned to student teams for a semester-long project to study a local company or organization and how it functions.

A team, according to our course definition is “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”

We just read a white paper by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, authors of The Wisdom of Teams. In it, they argue that teams should be selected on skill and skill potential and not on personality. I pride myself on being a Myers-Briggs personality type ISTJ because I like making decisions based on hard facts and objective viewpoints. But I disagree with Katzenbach and Smith. I think personality plays a huge role in how well a team functions an performs.

High-performing teams focus on personality. Individual personalities on a team have to fit delicately together like a jigsaw puzzle. Herb Brooks had the right idea when he coached the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team to a miracle gold medal. The winter Olympics are this week so I think the time is right to take a look at his team.

Brooks (played here by Kurt Russell in Disney’s 2004 film Miracle) made his players take personality tests before assigning them positions in his lineup. He defied the failed pattern of Olympic embarrassment by proclaiming that all-star teams fail because they rely solely on the skill of the individual. He wasn’t looking for the best players; he was looking for the right ones. Sure, he saw the “complementary skills” and “skill potential” Katzenbach and Smith mention, but he cared way more about individual personal dynamics than the two authors recommend.

Who’s right? Herb Brooks’ team won a gold medal. Just saying.

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February 19, 2010 2 Comments Short URL , Uncategorized

Too Big NOT to Fail: Lessons in Internal Communication from “Undercover Boss”

I’ve never been a fan of large organizations, companies and (especially) governments because I frequently see decision makers screw up when they are so far removed from the lower levels of management.

These fault-filled bureaucracies often frustrate employees by making them feel that “the man upstairs doesn’t know what’s going on down here!” Indeed boardrooms, financial statements and policy meetings are extremely different than assembly lines and low-level cubicles, so unless “the man” comes downstairs to have a look around every now and then, how would he know what’s going on?

I’m a student at Boston University, and I’ve been surrounded by uproar this school year from both students and faculty at the budget cuts the university made restricting students’ printing on-campus. The University forced restrictions on the number of pages students are allowed to print free of charge and the number of printing labs for students. These changes have left many members of the BU community wondering if the decision makers upstairs really know what’s going on down here.

Internal communications snafus are everywhere. So when I saw previews for CBS’s post-Super Bowl premiere “Undercover Boss,” I thought, “This is great.” But I also realized how this show just proves how much of a problem internal communication gaps are! Can you imagine working for a company and not knowing what your CEO looks like? I would like to think that if I were working in a large organization, I would recognize the CEO if he/she came to me pretending to be a new worker bee.

Then I think that if this guy…

walked into one of my classes pretending to be a professor, I wouldn’t think anything of it. When he didn’t understand students’ weekly schedules, I would shrug it off and chalk it up to him being another academically-minded teacher. This is Boston University’s President Robert Brown, and I have never seen this man before in my life.

I don’t want to make him out to be the bad guy. I’m sure he wasn’t the only one making the printing decisions. His university is just another victim of current management trends.

I hope “Undercover Boss” draws some attention from executives. The first episode featured Larry O’Donnell, COO of Waste Management cleaning toilets, driving garbage trucks, and learning “a heck of a lot” in the process. When his undercover stint was over, he said “I didn’t realize the impact [I had]. [These policies] came right from my office…I had no idea.” He vowed to fix the problems he witnessed. Maybe the “faces” of these large organizations will become more recognizable someday soon.

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February 8, 2010 1 Comment Short URL , , Communication

Social Media Marketing


My business class team had to do presentations on emerging issues in business. We chose Social Media Marketing. Above is the presentation and below is the summary I wrote. Thanks and much credit to the rest of my team!

Social Media Marketing is the act of bypassing traditional communication channels to establish direct and meaningful relationships with current and potential customers. Over the past two years, there has been nothing short of a gold rush among businesses to establish a presence on social networking sites due to a high return on investment. Research from Forrester predicts that social media marketing, currently a $716 million industry, will grow to become a $3.1 billion industry over the next five years at the expense of offline advertising.

The driving theories behind social media marketing are much the same as for traditional marketing. They are slightly altered to fit the online nature of social networks. Because all media is now social media, meaning they can be shared, downloaded, uploaded and spread virally, these new methods are very effective in the online world.

Social media marketing is a pull method. It uses content disseminated through social networking channels so customers will be drawn in as opposed to interrupted. Content can include blog posts, videos, online contests, webinars, surveys, studies, cartoons, or anything that customers will find rewarding and valuable.

Customer relationship management becomes a much more possible and pronounced aspect of marketing online. An infinite number of feedback loops are now possible so that customers can easily tell a company what they think or feel about a product or idea without being wrangled up for a focus group. Additionally, personal selling shifts from the responsibility of employed salespeople to the enthusiasm of fans. One goal of social media marketing is to, through content and relationships, turn strangers into friends, friends into customers and customers into salespeople.

In our research, we found that many businesses were being dragged into social media after experiencing a crisis or communication breakdown between the marketing department and customers. With 71% of Americans who have Internet access using social networks, this new type of marketing is going to be a necessary part of every marketing plan in the very near future. Businesses will forever strive to put a human face on their corporate name.

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July 27, 2009 0 Comments Short URL , , , Marketing, Social Media

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