Lisa Harris Marketing

Next week I am running a guest session with the MSc Strategic Entrepreneurship students at the University of Southampton on the subjects of entrepreneurial marketing and personal branding. Here are the slides:

The key theme of this session is the growing importance of entrepreneurial skills in developing the profile of an individual or a small business in order to ‘stand out from the crowd’. Increasingly, these skills can be showcased online through blogging and social networking.

One of our objectives for 2010 is to integrate the development of online communication and networking skills more effectively into our programmes, through the vehicle of personal development portfolios (PDP) which we are trialling this year. We will be reporting on our progress at the Association for Learning Technology’s Conference (ALT-C) in September.

I hope everyone enjoyed the last couple of weeks with Alan

We have posted a brief video in the Ning community responding to queries about the presentations next week.

My slides for Thursday’s final class session are here:

Here are the slides, with links to readings and video, for Week 2:

Starting on Thursday, I’m running this unit for Southampton MSc students for the first time, together with Alan Rae. The slides for the first week are here:

There is also a Ning community where student groupwork and tutor feedback will be posted. This unit currently forms part of the MSc in Marketing Management and (from next year) the new MSc in Digital Marketing.

Alan and I tried out some new stuff for the University of Southampton Marketing DNA ‘taster course’ series the other night. You can view the slides here:

Mark Cahill has written an interesting post claiming that some of the ‘sacred cows’ of building blog readership are becoming less relevant:

1. The value of trackbacks has been destroyed by spammers
2. Technorati has now been overtaken by Google Blog Search as the key source of linking information.

He suggests that this new world requires a new strategy: a focus on depth of reader engagement rather than counting the volume of passing eyeballs, and the encouragement of links, links and more links.

Here is a summary of Mark’s excellent action list:

Content – create compelling content and more open calls to discussion.

Linking - provide more links to people writing on the same issues.

Value - find ways to provide better value to the reader.

Understand the readership – think more about what the market really desires than simply writing for yourself.

To develop community, use community - spend more time reading and commenting on other blogs in your sphere of influence, using your url in your signature.

Increase post volume – increase the number of interesting tidbits on which you comment.  Not every post needs to be a definitive guide on a subject.

Social networking – don’t forget to direct blog posts into Facebook and Twitter, but without inundating your network with overly specialist material J

More community – get more involved in communities where you will be in front of people whom your blog is written for.  Social networking should lead to more face to face marketing opportunities, not less!

Dive deep into Google – use the free analytics tools to find out what is going on, and then make changes as required.

No doubt this list will look very different again a year from now, but that makes it all so much more fun!

Recent articles in Business Week (‘How Cloud Computing is Changing the World’ by Rachael King), and the Financial Times (‘Back to Bust?’ by Richard Waters) chime with the experiences of the ‘Gifted Amateurs’ attending our Punch Above Your Weight workshops. These entrepreneurs are growing their businesses with limited time, expertise and available budget by drawing upon new web-based technologies such as the Google Docs, blogs and emerging social networks. They are circumventing the need for increasingly complex IT systems as their businesses grow by continuing to rely upon cost-effective Web 2.0 tools and their own networking skills.

Business Week notes how tapping into web-based applications represents a significant change in the way that businesses obtain software and computing power. It draws upon the example of a $11 billion electronics manufacturing company called Sanmina-SCI which is using Google Apps for email, document sharing and diary planning. Merrill Lynch suggests that such ‘cloud computing’ will expand into a global market of $95 billion over the next 5 years.

The Financial Times describes the example of 2^nd Wind Exercise Equipment which has saved over $200,000 by switching its email system from Microsoft Exchange to Google’s Gmail. In a worsening economic climate, cost savings like these are not to be sneezed at for those companies prepared to take a chance with Cloud Computing. The risks, of course, concern the reliability and security of cloud-based systems. As Broadstuff shows there have been a number of high profile ‘out-ages’ already this year by providers such as Amazon S3, Google Docs, MobileMe and Twitter.

The above examples show that proactive companies are dipping their toes cautiously into the Cloud – using it mainly for non-essential applications at the moment, but with a view to extending their commitments if their experience is positive. For the new business ventures of our Gifted Amateurs, the trade off between the cost savings of Cloud Computing and the occasional reliability glitch is definitely worth it.