4 key ways to manage your word-of-mouth image

Author of “The Conversation Company” discusses ways the news media industry can grow business by effectively managing customer experience, conversation, content, and collaboration.

Word-of-mouth is the most effective communication form in the world. 

Information coming from people or sources we trust has the highest influence on our perception of brands, people, and companies. The paradox is that we all acknowledge the power of conversations, but we are not managing it. Because of that, we create a bunch of unused conversation potential.

If you look at the print business, there are two types of conversations that can be helpful. First, there are conversations about advertising. They increase reach for your clients. Second, there is word-of-mouth about the content you deliver. Both can help to grow business.

Four elements help manage word-of-mouth: delivering a great customer experience, managing the conversations, delivering conversation-worthy content, and collaborating on a structural level with your audience.

1. Customer experience: The basis of positive conversations about your company is very simple: offer strong products and decent customer service. These two drive conversations.

If you do them well, conversations will boost business. If you perform even a little below expectations, conversations will decrease business. This is the foundation of a “conversation company.”

Then there is the challenge of integrating online and offline customer experience. Far too few companies supplement their traditional offline customer service channels with the new online possibilities offered by social media.

At the end of 2010, just 6.5% of companies offered online services to their customers. The “conversation company” believes in a total philosophy toward customer experience. The role of social media within this philosophy is to allow a company to react in real time to people’s problems and complaints. 

Companies like KLM and Best Buy (with Twelpforce) demonstrate perfectly how this fits into the overall picture. Other companies, such as Dell, build mission control centres. These centres are covered 24/7 by staff who answer online questions from customers and prospects. 

No conversation is left without a response; everyone is helped. 

I am waiting for the majority of journalists to open up to the crowd. The moment journalists join in and answer critical questions from readers, their emotional bond will increase, leading to positive conversations.

2. Conversation: The “conversation company” manages online conversations in three stages: observing, facilitating, and participating. 

It starts simply by listening to consumer conversations, adding a few relevant comments where necessary. At the same time, the company prepares its content in such a way that it can be shared easily with other interested parties. Clever companies combine these online conversations with their offline activities. 

3. Content: Companies should no longer be concerned with the planning of one-off advertising campaigns, but rather with the global planning and management of their content. 

Your company must learn to think like the publisher of a newspaper. And when you are in the print business, that can’t be that hard, can it? The newspaper with the most interesting content is the newspaper that is read the most. 

Good content is the ideal way to increase your reach.

4. Collaboration: To optimise conversation potential, companies should collaborate structurally with their customers. This increases the average level of consumer commitment.

It is possible to be fairly creative with this. 4food, a successful hamburger outlet in Manhattan, draws up a new menu every day with the help of its own customers. Using tablets left on the tables, diners can put together their own recipes for the “perfect” hamburger. 

Every new concept is displayed for other customers and best-selling burgers are promoted via Twitter and Facebook. For each burger sold, the recipe-maker receives US$0.25. 

In a similar vein, Procter & Gamble has developed vocalpoint, a community in which 350,000 mothers help develop new product ideas for the P&G brand. These mothers are also the first users of the new products during the development phase, so they can provide feedback regarding possible problems/weaknesses before the product is finally launched. 

Perhaps the print industry should consider working with co-creation of the news. This could be very interesting for regional news, for instance. Use citizen journalism as an opportunity, not as a threat.

by Steven Van Belleghem 

INCLUDING HR PRACTICES IN CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

HUMAN CAPITAL is the basic unit of any organization and it is critical to an organization’s success so the HR focus must be more strategic in the new knowledge-based economy (K-economy) era. This knowledge based economy includes corporate governance and corporate governance is about ensuring ethics in corporate management so that business can be run with a social up gradation of the society and it also ensures transparency to the internal(i.e. employees and employers) and external society(i.e. customers and shareholders). But still corporate governance does not includes HR practices in it and if some HR practices are included in corporate governance it can help organizations to run smoothly .HR practices included in corporate governance will help in creating a value in the corporate to achieve excellence in their business and not competing with others and thus making their organization more successful.

                    In simpler terms, corporate governance is formal system of accountability of senior management to corporate stakeholders. Corporate governance includes company accountability to shareholders and other stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, customers and local community.

Corporate governance is concerned primarily with holding balance between economic and social goals and between individual and community goals.

Corporate governance is:

1. A relationship among stakeholders used to determine and control the strategic direction and performance of organizations.

2. Concerned with identifying ways to ensure that decisions are made effectively.

3. used in corporations to establish order between firm’s owners and its top level managers.

Some HR practices that can be included in corporate governance are:

       1. HR SHARED SERVICES   The HR Shared Services initiative is one part of the corporate services review that will transform the way Human Resources, Financial and Materiel administrative services are provided across the Public Service in order to:

Enhance enterprise decision-making;

Improve internal service delivery; and

Reduce operating costs

THUS  HR SHARED SERVICES WILL HELP IN MAINTAINING THE RECORDS OF EMPLOYEES AND ALL FINANCIAL TRANCPERANCY WHICH IS REQUIRED IN CORPORATE GOVERNANCE.

 

Entrepreneurship and Higher Education

Stimulating innovative and growth-oriented entrepreneurship is a key economic and societal challenge to which universities and colleges have much to contribute. This paper examines the role that higher education institutions are currently playing through teaching entrepreneurship and transferring knowledge and innovation to enterprises and discusses how they should develop this role in the future. The key issues, approaches and trends are analyzed in order to have a better understanding of the role of entrepreneurship in the higher education.

Entrepreneurship education seeks to provide students with the knowledge, skills and motivation to encourage entrepreneurial success in a variety of settings. Variations of entrepreneurship education are offered at all levels of schooling from K-12 schools through graduate university programs.

It should come as no surprise that many people in higher education eschew the notion of entrepreneurship. For some, the very word conjures up the specter of a for-profit motive, about which they are suspicious and disapproving. While there remains skepticism about what the Kauffman Foundation Panel on Entrepreneurship Curriculum in Higher Education defined in his very reputed report as the “transformation of an innovation into a sustainable enterprise that generates value…” Entrepreneurship and market-driven innovation, however, have become more prevalent in higher education over the past decade and a half.

Apparently, entrepreneurship engagement is a rapidly expanding and evolving aspect of higher education that requires proper support and development. Authors stress the need to expand existing entrepreneurship efforts and introduce more creative and effective approaches. It will provide inspiration for those in higher education seeking to expand and improve their entrepreneurship teaching and knowledge-transfer activities.

Key words: entrepreneurship, knowledge-transfer activities, enterprising behaviors

Communication Skills in Organizational Performance

Communication is a valuable skill and in many ways is an art form. If you possess strong linguistic skills, this will go far in effectively helping you communicate in both your personal and professional lives. Being able to successfully communicate in the workplace is a prime qualification many employers actively look for when hiring new staff.

Lack of effective communication may lead to misunderstandings, lack of information, decrease in employees’ performance, decrease in company’s turnover, as a result ineffective or poor communication is frustrating for employees, and becomes a source of a conflict. Managers' inability to clearly express their thoughts, ideas and demands leads to employees' inability to perform work well, according to the company’s demands. Such a situation may take place when an employee is not truly aware of what is requested of them. This decreases the satisfaction an employee gets from the job.

Providing concrete tools to help managers and HR professionals create an organization culture that encourages accountability through leadership training conferences for increasing organizational communication skills for every employee.

Your organization's upward communication includes the interaction of employee with their managers. Your employees need a direction. Make sure your managers meet their employees at least once a month to listen to their concerns. It need not be a formal interaction; it can be a casual chit-chat about how things are going. These management and staff meetings are the best way to gather feedback. Most important then is to act on the feedback.

To ensure effective communication in a successful business, every employee must participate in basic organizational communication skills starting with developing listening skills, speaking skills and designing an effective questioning and feedback sharing mechanism. Whether its internal or external communications, you need a communications plan to ensure that your employees work as a single team to achieve goals.

Key words: leadership training conferences, organizational communication skills