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Can you quantify the effect of “Word of Mouth”? Maybe you can.

Alain Thys over at Marketing Profs has come up with a workable formula that may help quantify the value of word of mouth effects on markets. A short but interesting read that may have wide implications for nearly everyone.

OK, OK, I can hear already hear the chorus of voices out there saying, “Who cares? After all, I’m not in marketing.” Well, my answer to you is two little words:

You are!

“Word of Mouth”, in my opinion, affects practically everything. Are you a job seeker? What about if you have an innovative idea? Looking for venture capital? Want your New Year’s Eve party to be the best ever? All of the above, and more, can benefit from a good “buzz”.

Getting people talking is a good thing, but don’t forget, it needs be the right kind of buzz. Take what steps you can now to manage the buzz about whatever YOU want to accomplish (you might want to review some of my previous posts on managing your internet presence).

The fact is, virtually ANY endeavor requires support from other people. In many cases, the more support, the more likely it is realized. No matter how good it is, without a huge amount of the right kind of buzz, NO endeavor succeeds. Manufacturers, marketers and people in the business world know this well. Remember the Sony BETA? New Coke vs. Classic?

Face it: you want something to happen? Start a buzz!

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Will Blog for Project Management

OK, so maybe I’m late to this particular party, but I just recently ran across this 2005 posting from Tim Duckett: 10 Ways to Use Blogs for Managing Projects. (It’s a short read. Go ahead; I’ll wait.)

The 10 ways:

1. Communicating with project stakeholders
2. Replacing paper
3. Building issue logs
4. Capturing information snippets
5. Publicizing project progress
6. Reducing email overload
7. Capturing requirements
8. Circulating screenshots
9. Keeping team members up to date
10. Providing an automatic audit trail

I wonder: How many of these reasons would resonate with large organizations? How do you sell the idea to management?

What I think is the key thought is actually contained in the opening sentence, quoted above. Focus on desired outcomes (or, keep your eye on the trophy); namely, improved information flow, easily accessible shared knowledge, and up-to-the-minute updates. By clearly articulating what you want to accomplish, it becomes less about the tools and more about the goal: improved efficiency in execution.

One Hundred This and That

Jerry Madden, Associate Director of the Flight Projects Directorate at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, collected a list of principles known as “100 Rules for NASA Project Managers”. Certainly a great “handbook”, and pretty much timeless as well. After his retirement in 1995, he followed it up with “100 Lessons Learned for Project Managers”. (Strangely enough, there are actually 128.)

But what I’d really like to see is his list of “unwritten” rules, one of which is, “Show up early for all meetings; they may be serving doughnuts.”

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

How do you go about initiating change in your organization? Not so easy, is it? A ChangeThis article by David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz, “The Neuroscience of Leadership”, suggests that the physical operation of the brain itself may have a lot to do with it.

To me, the challenge of change in any organization (particularly for broad, organization-wide changes) is to encourage it in such a way that acceptance becomes rapidly widespread. Otherwise it becomes bogged down, sidetracked, or otherwise ineffectual. Once that happens, the next attempt at change becomes even harder to initiate.

David and Jeffrey suggest the best way may not necessarily be to tell people what’s best for them, but to present ideas in such a way as to allow each person to experience their own insights into how best to behave. Then, when leaders remind others about their useful insights, a positive feedback is formed, and the new behavior becomes more entrenched.

Steps to building acceptance can be summed thus:

1. Focus employees’ attention on their own insights, by facilitating discussions and activities that involve being entrepreneurial
2. Regularly provide “gentle reminders” so the entrepreneurial maps become the dominant pathways (in the brain) along which information, ideas, and energy flow
3. Catch the team when they get sidetracked and gently bring them back

I have no problem with the steps outlined above, but translating that into the real world is not so cut-and-dried. Suppose you have an organizational change you want to introduce (internal blogging, for instance). How do you go about getting the organization to envision it? Where do you begin?

More to come on this in the future…

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!