by Caroline Leach | Jan 23, 2016 | Social Media, Work/Life
Are you looking for more fun in your life? Would you like to connect with friends and family? Do you want to research the fastest growing social network?
Those are the reasons I joined Snapchat today. I want to learn how I can use it in my personal life. And I’m interested to see how businesses are using it to build their brands.
It’s a feeling not unlike the one I had upon joining Twitter. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. I didn’t fully know why I was there. I couldn’t yet articulate what I wanted to accomplish.
And that’s okay. Part of learning why you’re in a social network and how you can use it for personal and/or professional objectives is to experiment and play with it.
That reminds me of Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick‘s opening to their book The Art of Social Media.
“We are in the trenches of social media, not in a “war room” back at headquarters,” they wrote. “We acquired our knowledge through experimentation and diligence, not pontification, sophistry and conference attendance.”
That’s what I’m doing with Snapchat. I’m learning as I go. I’m making mistakes along the way.
And while I’m not quite ready to share “how to be social” in this network in the way I did with LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, that day will come.
Today I set up my profile and found a few friends. To maintain at least a few boundaries, I didn’t click on younger family members or professional colleagues.
To my surprise, a handful of my Facebook friends were on Snapchat, so I connected with them. And I convinced my spouse to join, so we could learn together.
In the meantime, there was an unexpected benefit to joining Snapchat.
Not surprisingly, my daughter doesn’t want to interact with me in social media.
But when I told her I joined Snapchat, we had fun looking through her Stories and Snaps together. She showed me how captions and geofilters work.
Best of all, she finally followed me in Instagram. And I was able to follow her back for the first time.
Now I just need the next big social network to come along, so she’ll be my friend in Snapchat.
by Caroline Leach | Jan 9, 2016 | Marketing & Analytics
What are great blogs for marketers?
And why read blogs anyway? Because they’re a quick, timely and entertaining way to learn about the latest trends in marketing and get interesting viewpoints on how the field is rapidly evolving.
Researching top marketing blogs reaffirmed 2 things. First is my devotion to 3 blogs marketing-related blogs. Second is 3 more I’m adding to the blogs folder on my iTools (the collective name for my personal iPhone, iPad and MacBook).
3 long-time favorites –
Seth Godin. Also known as “Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.” Ever since Linchpin, I’ve been a fan. His post, Don’t snow globe me, bro, not only helped my former Corp Comms team focus on what’s most important. One of my team members was so inspired she had a snow globe made for me.
Chris Brogan. Also known as “media, marketing, lead generation and customer acquisition strategies for business.” Ever since Social Media 101, I’ve been a fan. And I’m endlessly inspired by Chris’ perseverance – with blogging and with life.
Harvard Business Review. Also knowns as “ideas and advice for leaders.” Ever since I found back issues in a colleagues’s office, I’ve been a fan. So many terrific thought leaders – Umair Haque, Peter Bregman, Heidi Halvorson, Alexandra Samuels, Tom Davenport, Dorie Clark, Tony Schwartz, Karie Willyerd and more. Now I’m following posts on marketing, market research, analytics, branding and data.
3 new favorites –
Ryan Holiday. Also known as “meditations on strategy and life.” Ever since I visited Ryan’s blog, I’ve been a fan. Of all the marketing blogs I searched – and there were dozens – this captured my attention. I clicked through post after post, and link after link of this author, marketer and entrepreneur.
Ann Handley. Also known as a “content marketing keynote speaker and best-selling author.” Ever since Everybody Writes, I’ve been a fan. Her expertise is digital content marketing. She’s the chief content officer at MarketingProfs, with marketing resources for marketing professionals.
FiveThirtyEight. Also known as “using statistical analysis – hard numbers – to tell compelling stories about elections, politics, sports, science, economics and life.” No, it’s not a marketing blog. But since my new role is in market research, reading this blog launched by statistician Nate Silver is another immersion strategy to accelerate my learning project.
What are your favorite marketing blogs?
by Caroline Leach | Jan 3, 2016 | Marketing & Analytics
What are good questions to ask about new research?
That was the question I had as I revisited Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding + Using Analytics.
Written by Tom Davenport and Jinho Kim, this is a book I read a few years ago when I led our company’s employee engagement survey strategy.
Working closely with our partner, Towers Watson, I was learning a lot. Yet I wanted to better understand the underlying analytics.
As I moved into a new role and have embarked on a learning project, I’ve revisited the book.
It includes a great list of questions that leaders should ask about analytics projects. They’re summarized from marketing and strategy professor Liam Fahey‘s article in Strategy and Leadership.
Here they are:
Overall questions:
- What business issue or need is the analytics work intended to inform? (This reminds me of the McKinsey & Company question, what problem are we solving for?)
- What are the core insights relevant to understanding the business issue and its context?
- How can I leverage these insights in the work I do?
- How do the insights affect decisions confronting us now?
- How do the insights help shape emerging and future decisions?
Questions for preliminary findings:
- What is surprising about this finding?
- Can further analysis be done to strengthen or refute the finding?
- Should others be involved to challenge this emerging finding?
- Is there a significant insight emerging here?
- If the thinking holds up, how should it affect my thinking on this or other topics or issues?
Questions for new insights:
- What is new to each insight?
- What was the old understanding?
- How significant is the difference?
- What is the reasoning or “argument” that connects the data set to the insight?
Questions after insights have been delivered:
- Who was/is involved in shaping the new understanding?
- How might they have influenced the outcome?
- What might be the principal difference across individuals or units?
In our ever busier and faster world, I also ask myself what the one key takeaway and implication is from the research. How would I summarize the insights in a sentence or a tweet?
In addition, I ask myself if I truly understand the work. If not, it’s time for more questions.
After seeing the movie The Big Short this weekend about the 2008-09 financial crisis, I wish more people had asked a lot more questions.
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