How do you acquire information?
In an article on the Harvard Business Review blog, Bill Taylor poses the question, “Are You Learning as Fast as the World is Changing?“. Mr. Taylor Co-Founded Fast Company Magazine and wrote a Wall Street Journal best seller, Practically Radical. He of all people understands why information is at the centre of any companies core business strategy. The smart companies who want to grow in the future will have very efficient information curation methods.
Learning faster than the competition will be a competitive advantage in the future, if it hasn’t been all along. The first step in developing your marketing strategy is to have a clear information strategy. Together we develop better methods to ensure you understand as much as you can about your competition, the future of your industry and how to make smarter marketing decisions.
I help you learn a more efficient way to consume information.
The faster you learn, the faster you adapt to this ever changing world.
33 Questions to Frame Your Research (Downloadable PDF)
Working together we determine how to get to your customers who are the ‘innovators’ in your market, they’re the ones who spread ideas, start trends and who are integral to the success of your marketing strategy.
The Early Majority and Late Majority listen to the trend setters and follow their lead. We must create a word-of-mouth strategy that gets the innovators and early adopters talking. Who are the innovators and early adopters (the sneezers)? They are the influencers in your communities and social circles and with the adoption of social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Youtube, Pinterest, Instagram) influencers are very important gate keepers for organizations.
Today, word-of-mouth spreads almost instantly, ten years ago it didn’t. What does that mean for your business?
Just think about how much more marketing and advertising will get forced upon us in the coming years. To make more and more of our decisions in the future, we will listen to the people we trust, our friends and family. Your only hope is for your product or service to be remarkable. The definition of remarkable: something so amazingly brilliant and different that people want to talk about it. If your company is truly remarkable, we will have no problem establishing your strategy to create the positive word-of-mouth you need to move through the idea diffusion curve.
Where do you find your information?
Do you go to several different news sources regularly? Most of us do. An easier way to manage all the different places to find information is to set up an RSS reader. I use Netvibes here’s how to set yours up.
Setting up your RSS Reader (NetVibes) – “How-To-Set-Up-Your RSS Reader”
Other Places to Find Great Information
Stumble Upon – http://www.stumbleupon.com/
One of the most underrated social platforms is Stumble Upon. You sign up for Stumble Upon, select interests you are interested in and begin Stumbling. When you come across a page you really like, you can give the page a thumbs up. Conversely, if you do not like a page that comes up you can give it a thumbs down. Over time after you’ve told Stumble Upon countless pages you like and dislike it gets much better at producing the websites that you are actually interested in. It’s much easier to experience it than to explain it.
See the article “The Incredible Power of Stumble Upon”
Alltop – http://alltop.com/
Alltop is just a news aggregation site. It has many different topics to chose from and then provides sometimes hundreds of different resources on your chosen topic. Great for researching sources, different opinions, and to find lots of variety of content providers.
Ted.com – http://www.ted.com/
The best place on the Internet to find educational videos. From 9 to 20 minutes, the best speakers in the world are found on Ted.com.
Delicious – http://www.delicious.com/
A bookmarking site, similar to the bookmarks you keep on your browser but one major difference. Delicious allows you to “tag” websites and pages with specific describing words which allow the page to be searched later. Over time you build a database of important pages you’ve saved on Delicious that you can find again anytime by searching the tags the page was saved with.
Why use Delicious?
Over time you’ll build up a search-able database of the best articles, blogs, photo’s, video and websites on the Internet.
Want to know where you actually rank in Google? Try Depersonalized Search
When you search in Google you will always get personalized results based on your past search history and location. But if you add “&pws=0” to the end of your search term. (also ensure you put a “+” between all keywords)
As an example, I will use “social media” as a search term. Normal Google search URL for that keyword would look like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=social+media.
Now to “de-personalize” this, all you need to do is add &pws=0 at the end of it – no spaces. Now my search URL would look like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=social+media&pws=0
There’s always those people at a party that will claim to be first Google result. Because you’ve been to your site before and you live in the same location, OF COURSE your site will be the first result, but that doesn’t make it the first result for everyone. Try depersonalized search to determine the true rank of your website in Google Search Results.
Click to see the next step in your strategy:
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