How to build trust as a foundation for innovation

Image credit: Pixabay

By Michael Manning

As a manager, you know all too well that every organization endures periods of change. Maybe it’s due to a long-needed digital transformation. Perhaps it’s the result of a series of innovation projects or an aggressive move by a competitor. Maybe you had to replace a departing superstar or cut your team because of budgetary constraints.

The reason for the change doesn’t matter one iota if a crucial element is missing: trust. Without trust, avenues of communication experience gridlock. Collaboration ends up stifled and stilted. Everyone feels on edge and misaligned. A lot of this falls on the manager’s shoulders.

A team that lacks trust is a bad setup for innovation. It’s also risky, because no company can adapt without the confidence of its people. Consider the jarring findings from a December 2017 study by Ultimate Software: 93% of employees said trust in their direct support is crucial to staying satisfied at work, and a majority said they’d turn down a large pay increase to stay with a great boss.

Here’s the disconnect: 80% of managers think they are transparent with their employees, while only 55% of employees agree. And, 71% of managers say they know how to motivate their teams, while just 44% of employees agree.

Trust on both ends of this dynamic is lacking.

Warding off the troubles of distrustful teams

Have you ever been on a team whose members don’t trust one another? It isn’t really a team at all, just a group of people working on similar efforts. Plus, most of its members spend too much time protecting their work, not to mention wasting energy battling over rights and responsibilities.

It’s a shame. Without the bonding that comes from colleague confidence, no team or department can be innovative, creative, or productive.

Ironically, many leaders and managers forget this fact when they agree to implement digital transformation endeavors. Instead of making sure their people have faith in one another’s abilities and motives, managers move full steam ahead with programs and strategies. Then, they watch in surprise as talented members leave, infighting begins and trust dissolves.

As one piece of Forrester research showed, battles over digital ownership negatively affected 43% of reporting businesses. That’s a significant number of organizations trying to compete in their industries with limited trust.

On the flip side, companies that clearly define their team players’ roles and talk about innovation transparently from Day One have a better chance of constructing cohesive teams — and ultimately winning the digital revolution race.

When team members can clearly see their purpose in any effort, they naturally worry less about one-upping each other and concentrate on hitting overall goals. As they see and celebrate real-time progress, they foster a culture of innovative thinking that’s not limited by change-related fear. Without the presence of suspicion, loyalty grows and objectives come to fruition.

Establishing levels of trust prior to transformation

Considering a digital quantum leap of one or more corporate processes? Be certain your team members are ready to work together seamlessly by taking a few necessary steps:

1. Share your game plan

What do you hope to accomplish with your upcoming change? Hold nothing back and tell the full story to team members. Don’t feel you have to sugarcoat difficulties. Instead, talk about them honestly and discuss how you expect to overcome them. Being realistic, positive, and honest from the jump will help your team feel less anxious about working together to tackle the unknown.

2. Give your teams a wide berth

If you want your teams to take full ownership of their tasks, don’t hold them back with unnecessary red tape. Allow them to make decisions on their own — with parameters that you have precisely outlined upfront — so they can adapt as needed. The more agile they are, the faster they’ll achieve their expected goals.

3. Make listening to everyone’s ideas a must-do

Promote thought diversity along every step of your digital transformation, encouraging your players to toss out ideas originating in their personal experiences and knowledge. As employees open up, they will naturally grow closer. They’ll also start offering solutions that wouldn’t be considered in a less diverse forum, and their faith in you as a manager will flourish.

4. Get buy-in from less-enthusiastic workers

Have some team players who aren’t thrilled to embrace their roles? Get their buy-in as soon as you can. Be empathetic to their concerns while remaining firm about going forward with the digital transformation. After your conversation, they should feel heard but should also recognize that their contributions are expected. The last thing your team deserves is a naysayer who strives to resist, not commit.

Digital transformation can be a game changer for any corporation, but it doesn’t happen without strategic planning. Innovation won’t just find you. Instead, go out and discover it yourself by empowering and educating a trust-infused team.

Article source: https://www.smartbrief.com/original/2019/02/how-build-trust-foundation-innovation

How David’s Bridal is revamping the online experience to drive people into stores

Image Source: Digiday

By Hilary Milnes

Fast fashion has lit a fire under David’s Bridal, incentivizing the 60-year-old retailer to modernize its approach to customer acquisition.At the center of its new digital strategy: The company’s 330-strong store network. To compete with digitally native companies newer to bridal, like Asos, Reformation and Topshop, David’s Bridal is improving its online messaging to drive customers to make appointments for an in-store visit, where the conversion rate is 50 percent higher.

To do so, the company worked with the agency January Digital to restructure its customer data system into a single-view platform, building an online marketing strategy geared around driving customers into stores. According to Diana Takach, head of digital at David’s Bridal, the new approach had three goals: to get more customers to make appointments online, to increase revenue and to get more customers to sign up for email newsletters.

“We’re a traditional retailer — we’re talking about customer information being collected on paper, in binders,” said Diana Takach, David’s Bridal’s head of digital. “But fast fashion is happening now in bridal, and it’s throwing people for a loop. It sounds like we’re late to the game, but it’s the industry. It’s been flipped on its head.”

David’s Bridal gathers a lot of customer information throughout the purchase journey, including wedding date, number of bridesmaids, dress style preference, communication preference and information on the mother of the bride. Before revamping its strategy, David’s Bridal’s customer data was scattered across store locations and online. By shifting the data in one place, it fleshed out a sequential marketing strategy, through paid posts on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat.

According to Takach, this increase in paid social was possible thanks to a reallocation of the performance marketing budget, by moving around underperforming spend. It also rearranged its annual media spend. The company used to heavily promote itself on radio and TV between January and April, piling 90 percent of its media budget into those four months, when the most brides we’re in planning mode. Now, the company has shifted its budget away from TV and radio, and distributed its reach evenly throughout the year.

With the goal of getting customers to make in-store appointments, David’s Bridal saw a 76 percent increase in appointments made this year over last, and a 20 percent increase in revenue driven by its e-commerce site. It also reported that 93 percent of customers who made appointments in-store made a purchase. (The company did not share specific figures).

The retailer considers the new strategy to be a better long-term investment than one-off customer acquisition with prompts like promotions.

“Digital is really crowded, so the question was: how do we drive results, especially when retail is so challenged offline?” said Takach.

Tierney Wilson, January Digital’s managing director, said that getting a clearer picture of customer data across channels led to David’s Bridal finding new ways to…Continue Reading

 

Article source: https://digiday.com/retail/davids-bridal-revamping-online-experience-drive-people-stores/

 

How To Future-Proof Your Business

qimono / Pixabay

Most business industries evolve over time and customer buyer habits change. As a result, how your business adapts to these changes will directly affect how successful you will be in the future.

There are many famous companies in the past that failed to adapt to buying behaviour of customers and as a result, they have been consigned to history. Kodak for example were once probably the most trusted brand in the photography industry. The company failed to adapt to the digital photography revolution, which was one of the fundamental reasons for their downfall.

In this post, I will outline some measures that you can take to help future-proof your business for ongoing success.

1) Adapt Your Products / Services

It is important that you get regular feedback on your products that you sell or the services that you provide. What you offer needs to evolve to match customer needs.

Disruptive businesses can potentially change buyer behaviours. Netflix and on-demand television services have disrupted more industries than just the movie rentals and general television sector. Off-license liquor stores and take-away restaurants have had to…Continue reading…

Article source: https://www.business2community.com/small-business/how-to-future-proof-your-business-02119529

Rise of mobile artificial intelligence

Image source: Business Mirror – In Photo: From the top: Huawei P20, P20 Lite and P20 Pro

By Ed Uy | Business Mirror

“Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.”—Ian McDonald, River of Gods

WHILE smartphone companies continue to highlight features, such as bezel-less screens, DSLR-like camera capabilities, higher screen resolutions and longer battery life, all of which are much easier to understand for the regular consumer, the more interesting developments are happening deep within the phone’s internals. Not just in terms of processing power or graphical capabilities, but artificial intelligence or AI.

According to research from Counterpoint’s Components Tracker Service, 1 in 3 smartphones, or roughly more than half a billion, shipped in 2020 will natively embed machine learning and AI capabilities at the chipset level.

Apple’s Bionic system on chip (SOC) will drive native AI adoption in smartphones, making the iPhone maker a leader in the AI-capable chip market through 2020. Huawei comes in second in the market with AI-capable smartphones when it launched its HiSilicon Kirin 970 SOC.

The initial driver for the rapid adoption of AI in smartphones is the use of facial-recognition technology by Apple in the iPhone X.

With advanced SOC-level AI capabilities, smartphones will be able to perform a variety of tasks, such as processing natural languages, including real-time translation; helping users take better photos by intelligently identifying objects and adjusting camera settings accordingly—things which, by the way, the Huawei Mate 10 smartphone series can already do.

Experts say this is just the start as machine learning will eventually make smartphones understand user behavior in an unprecedented manner. By analyzing user behavior patterns, devices will be able to make decisions and perform tasks that will reduce physical interaction time between the user and the device.

HUAWEI’S A.I. STORY

WITH the release of their most recent flagship products, Huawei hailed the advent of a never-before-seen AI development strategy: from chip planning to phone manufacturing carrying the AI platform. The Huawei Mate 10 with Kirin 970 chip was hailed as the “first mobile phone AI chip.”

Device Side AI, or On-Device AI, is one of the most talked-about topics in AI in recent years; it refers to a concept that the collection and calculation of data and decision-making are all performed on the end device. Compared with cloud AI, On-Device AI is featured by enhanced stability, less time delay and a commitment to protect user privacy at the same time.

However, its computing power is still not in the same league as cloud computing, but with the popularization of AI, On-Device AI is garnering greater acclaim in the market. On-Device AI requires corresponding chip/board on the hardware end device.

“The project of Kirin 970 was established two years ago,” said Eric Zhou, marketing director for Huawei’s Wireless End Device Chip Business Department, who has been in the chip industry for 12 years. He said the most important factor in defining a chip was prognosis.

Huawei’s team detected a major bottleneck in…Continue reading…

Article source: https://businessmirror.com.ph/rise-of-mobile-artificial-intelligence/

Why Businesses Will Struggle to Adapt to 2018’s Social Marketing Challenges

Image Credit: PonyWang/iStock

By James Jorner

In its ongoing efforts to redefine popular beauty standards as part of its decade-long Real Beauty campaigns, Dove learned the hard way about the thin line that exists between positive social message and controversy. For a company that has so successfully promoted positive body image in the past, it must have come as a shock that an idea so well thought out (or so it thought) ended up being so misinterpreted.

But that’s just one of many examples that what looks good on paper might not look as good on Twitter.

While the marketing mistakes we saw in 2017 might have taught us a thing or two about social marketing, 2018 might bring with it a fresh list of public relations mishaps, legal issues and other unanticipated challenges.

By looking at trends, we can predict and prepare for what’s to come in 2018.

People will expect authenticity

As brand messaging, giving to charity and claims of “green” become popular ways to attract customers, consumers are putting their guard up and being very selective about what they believe.

“Consumers are no longer being impressed by new old tactics that used to be woven together into cause marketing,” Electra Cruises CEO Randy Clayton said. “Going forward, businesses will need to be more believable.”

The answer to this is authenticity. To be able to connect with consumers at a personal level, social marketers––and marketers in general––will need to cultivate an authentic voice that customers can easily identify with. The messages sent out must reach customers, be genuine and at the same time enhance brand principles—something that’s not been very popular in 2017.

So, what can you do to make your voice more believable?

“The time is ripe for transitory content,” RockHer CEO Jim Vernon said. “Social marketing will need to pick up the momentum set on transitory content such as Instagram Stories and Facebook Live videos in 2017. This type of content has a better shot at making your brand credible, as opposed to other types of content, which look and feel rehearsed and perfected.”

Brands will be required to be even more transparent

Back in 2015, Machinima had to settle charges imposed on it by the Federal Trade Commission for failing to adequately disclose paid endorsements to YouTube influencers for the promotion of Microsoft’s Xbox One.

This is a case of influencer marketing done right (Machinima had promised its client 19 million views) but against the law.

With the rising application of influencer marketing, sponsored content and other related techniques taking center stage in social marketing, brands are under a lot of scrutiny. This has called for more transparency on their part in the way that they leverage these methods to get their products out there.

Speaking of the Machinima settlement, Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, explained, “When people see a product touted online, they have a right to know whether they’re looking at an authentic opinion or a paid marketing pitch.”

Lawsuit Settlement Funding CEO Chris Janish said, “The legal aspect of advertising has long been a non-issue, but now, companies will need to carefully consider this area before they can even begin to sell their message.”

With such developments, influencer marketing might become irrelevant, or at least not as effective in 2018 as it has been in the previous years. Customers will find it hard to believe a message if they can clearly see that an influencer has been paid to push it.

Managing messaging across channels will be more challenging

Traditionally, the idea of optimizing content for different channels was to take the same piece of content and make small changes to fit it into the target channel. However, as it is, every piece of content has to be created for a particular channel, from the start.

The content-creation process is changing drastically, and social marketers will need to adapt to these changes. They will need to constantly look back at past content and see what has worked before, including the social data and target audience information.

“Each platform provides unique opportunities for you to tell the story of your brand,” Scorum CEO Vladislav Artemyev said. “To succeed in each, social marketers have to clearly define the type of content to create for their audience in each of the channels. They have to know the key pillars of each platform; what content matches the target audience, and which types to do away with; and the audience engagement levels on each platform.”

While 2017 gave us lots of Kendall Jenner Pepsi ads, it also gave us Heineken’s Worlds Apart ads. So, nothing is predetermined. Some marketers will still rise above the challenges and use the trends to their advantage. But the time to act is now.

Article source: http://www.adweek.com/digital/james-jorner-effective-inbound-marketing-guest-post-2018-social-marketing-challenges/

YouTube to Invest $5 Million This Year in Creators Who Promote ‘Empathy and Understanding’

CREDIT: CAN NGUYEN/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Variety Magazine | By Todd Spangler 

YouTube is looking for some upbeat PR — pushing the idea that the Google-owned global video platform can be a force for social good, after suffering an advertiser backlash in 2017 over objectionable content that was being monetized.

In 2018, YouTube said it will invest $5 million in its Creators for Change program, including production and marketing support. The program, which launched in September 2016, is aimed at boosting the profile of YouTubers whose videos “counter hate and promote tolerance.”

Since launching Creators for Change, YouTube has teamed with 39 creators from around the world who have released dozens of videos encouraging empathy and understanding. This year, YouTube plans to engage more creators in the program as well as develop new tools and guidance for empowering the broader community.

“Video is a powerful medium to open minds to new perspectives and shared experiences,” Juniper Downs, YouTube’s head of public policy, wrote in a blog post. “Creators prove that to us every single day. And we think Creators for Change in 2018 will reach and inspire even bigger audiences.”

Over the next several months, according to Downs, YouTube will announce the recipients of the production grants through the renewed investment. More info on the program is available at youtube.com/yt/creators-for-change.

On Wednesday, YouTube is hosting the Creators for Change Summit in London with several hundred creators in attendance.

Those include Dina Tokio (pictured above), a British beauty vlogger who uses her interview series “#YourAverageMuslim” to challenge perceptions about Muslim women; L-Fresh the Lion, an Australian rapper of Sikh descent, who created a two-part track to challenge racism; and Rosianna Rojas who in partnership with the United Nations Refugee Agency traveled to a remote area of Colombia to document stories about refugees.

Last year, hundreds of advertisers froze spending on YouTube after spots were discovered running in front of objectionable content. That included terrorism and hate videos, as well as videos with young children targeted by pedophiles.

YouTube has taken a series of steps to curb violent and disturbing videos — and to reduce the chance that any ads will run against outré content. Most recently, last week YouTube announced a stricter set of criteria for creators who are eligible to participate in its revenue-sharing program and said it will start manually reviewing all videos in its Google Preferred premium ad program.

Article source: http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/youtube-5-million-creators-for-change-anti-hate-empathy-videos-1202675018/

Mars earbuds are equipped with space-age translation tech

Image source: digitaltrends.com

Over the past year or so, earbuds with translation tech have been popping up everywhere, signaling the evolution of an industry. Headphones are now capable of being more than just a means to deliver music — if the tech is good enough, they can act as a bridge between disparate cultures, bringing people together to foster mutual understandings.

The new Bluetooth-enabled Mars wireless earbuds, a collaborative project from Line Corporation and Naver Corporation (a leading internet provider in Korea and Line’s parent company), aim to do just that. Boasting real-time ear-to-ear translation of 10 different languages, Mars is unique in that it is designed for each person to wear one earbud (as opposed to needing two pairs). The earbuds were named a CES 2018 Best of Innovation Honoree at CES Unveiled New York on Thursday, November 9.

Scheduled for release in early 2018, Mars support Line’s Clova artificial intelligence, a virtual assistant which takes cues from Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. Aside from translation, Clova can help users stream music from several sources, check the weather forecast, and control Internet of Things (IoT) devices, all via voice commands. Line touts Clova as the first A.I. platform developed specifically with Asian markets in mind; Clova integration will be available at launch in Korea and roll out to other markets over time, though we don’t have any sort of timetable.

Microphones inside the Mars — Line doesn’t specify but we assume they’re bone-conduction mics — feature automatic ambient noise blocking, ensuring that users can take phone calls comfortably, even in loud, busy environments. For translation purposes, supported languages (for now) include: English, Korean, Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, French, Vietnamese, Thai, and Indonesian. We don’t yet know how much the Mars will cost or where they will be available.

In addition to Mars, Line launched a smart speaker in Japan in 2017 called the Clova Wave. Line also announced a series of kid-targeted speakers called the Champ, featuring anthropomorphized Line characters Brown (a bear) and Sally (a baby chicken), but we haven’t heard anything about them since. Line is perhaps best known for its messenger app and social media platform, which is popular in South Korea.

Article source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/mars-earbuds/

Business Intelligence: Leading the Way to New Digital Opportunities

Business Intelligence: Leading the Way to New Digital Opportunities
By Kym Gordon Moore

How can you make the right and most efficient decision when identifying better solutions to improve on and apply to the overall performance of your organization? Business Intelligence tools make managing, gathering and analyzing important raw data or nebulous data less difficult and quicker. Data mining, collecting, and processing analytics, queries, and reporting are all elements related to the discipline of business intelligence (BI). These tools can help you keep track of organizational and individual activities, assist end-users in getting the right data, recall business decisions or track the progress of projects more efficiently than previously applied data.

Ever changing marketing trends and targeting customers through their behavior and traffic patterns is the driving force for integrating business intelligence tools that provide greater insights than the way we previously used manual marketing forecasts. Actionable information that business managers and corporate executives can access in order to make informed business decisions can affect the organization’s overall performance and growth.

Yet how do you determine what is the best software to apply to your organizational needs? If you’re searching for a buyer’s guide for software services based on their merits, you can find some transparent and reputable review sites to help you uncover the best software tools for cloud computing, forecasting, benchmarking, mobile, predictive analytics, big data, and visualization.

Dashboard software creates data visualizations (graphs, charts, metrics) that monitor client interactions, revenue, reports, and scorecards. Although dashboard software monitors client reactions, customer relationship management (CRM) and BI Tools are not to be confused. CRM is a database that stores customer sales history and interactions, which you could segment for greater productivity and profitability. Business intelligence tools combine software for customer acquisition and retention. Together, the two can impact real-world numbers through testing and experimenting.

Business Intelligence technologies and analytic tools give more accurate reports while saving time and money. With the capability to analyze historical data and forecast a holistic view of their market, organizations need to understand analytics in order to make their company compete efficiently while understanding big data in real-time to deliver an optimal customer experience.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?Business-Intelligence:-Leading-the-Way-to-New-Digital-Opportunities&id=9754971

Pittsburgh Zoo reaches out to millennials with new app

Image Credit: Steve Mellon/Post-Gazette

ASHLEY MURRAY

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

 12:03 AM       JUL 10, 2017

 

Snap a selfie in the Islands exhibit at the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium, and you may end up with big sunglasses on your face and a pineapple drink in your hand — at least that’s what might appear on your smartphone screen if you’re using the zoo’s new app.

The app, which was developed by the Station Square-based Schell Games and launched this spring, features a dozen Snapchat-style photo filters that the zoo communications team hopes patrons will share on social media.

A lion’s mane appears around a photo subject’s head when using the app near the lions’ den, and patrons can appear as though they’re scuba diving in the aquarium.

“We’re reimagining what this experience can be for that more screen-minded individual,” said Laura Gething, communications manager of the Pittsburgh Zoo, a nonprofit with the mission of conservation.

Ninety-two percent of 18- to 29-year-olds own a smartphone, according to a Pew Research Center study this year.

The app is just one way the zoo aims to reach the millennial and post-millennial generations.

According to Pew, millennials are those born between 1981 and 1997 — now the largest living generation. Other analyses define the post-millennial generation, or Generation Z, as those born after 1995.

“Kids automatically are intrigued by zoos, but how do we make our facility a great place for other than just that standard audience?” Ms. Gething said.

Experts find that…Continue Reading

Article source: http://www.post-gazette.com/business/tech-news/2017/07/10/Pittsburgh-Zoo-reaches-out-to-screen-minded-Millennials-with-new-app/stories/201707070184

A Digital Shift in the New Era of Customer Experience

A Digital Shift in the New Era of Customer Experience
By Kym Gordon Moore

How do you define, and cultivate the behavior of your customer without overwhelming them? Organizations tend to obsess over ways to innovate and remain competitive as a leader in their respective industry. All too often, this obsession puts more emphasis on the operational and revenue strategy versus the welfare of their end-user, the customer. Customers are savvier, more creative and have consistently proven how the old marketing focus and platform is now obsolete.

The customer experience goes beyond the simplicity of good service. It involves engagement, trust, education, solutions, how well you treat your workforce, social responsibility, and customer evangelism. It’s about connecting to the emotion of the customer and treating them as a human and not a chatbot. How do you identify opportunities that focus on your customer, build core business data from them and better understand their behavior without disrupting their experience? The core of today’s business ecosystem puts the customer first. By initially engaging with the customer, you can get a better handle on identifying their problem through researching opportunities for finding solutions to satisfy their needs.

Here are 3 primary and important reasons why it is imperative to rethink the digital shift and plan of action in this new era of the customer experience.

1. Technology is driving change. Business is social and digitized. The language customers speak is different and faster.

2. Current customer journeys no longer comply with traditional marketing funnels. Traditional customer journey stages have become obsolete. Customers do not flow in a linear fashion with new journey models, nor do they experience each stage of the process in the same fashion.

3. Build relationships, trust and earn loyalty. Focusing on building relationships and earning loyalty through delivering exceptional experiences throughout the customer journey is key for marketers. Marketing and sales teams can effectively grow tribes of customers who will advocate on their behalf and help organically grow their business to strengthen their brand.

Over 3 decades ago we strongly connected to customers through a brick and mortar location. We were in the driver’s seat guiding them on decisions based on our suggestions of what we felt they needed. They trusted our expertise whether they needed what they purchased or not. Such transactions oftentimes resulted in buyer’s remorse, which worked against repeat business.

In our customer-led market, we appeal to a larger base of consumers. You must build your business around your customers instead of the other way around. Building relationships, harnessing your resources to create a consumer-friendly culture, earning customer trust and loyalty by taking touch points and interactions seriously, will not pigeonhole ideas but will encourage the customer to feel comfortable getting on board your current digital marketing vehicle.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?A-Digital-Shift-in-the-New-Era-of-Customer-Experience&id=9736608