Rating Retail Stores

Retail stores are the key touchpoint for  customers.  As the holiday season comes up, customers are going to be looking for your store.  But, first, they have to find the store.  To that, they'll either turn to Google, or visit your site and try to use the store locator.  In most markets, they'll have a choice of which store to visit.  You want them to have the most information and information they trust.  Consumers trust the opinions of their peers more than paid advertising - 70% vs 40%!  Google displays store reviews inline with their search results, along with your competitors stores!  Does your store locator site help the customer find the information they need?

To help drive customer decisions and traffic to stores,  you need to engage the community sentiment and provide the openness and transparency by displaying store reviews in your Store Locator application.  By providing customer review information, your stores can help to increase loyalty, increase traffic and identify opportunities for improvement.

To encourage new customers to buy from you, you need people through your doors.  Retail stores no longer provide the lifelong relationship of our grandparent’s era. So how do you get prospect into a physical store? Social is still the answer. User-generated content from real consumers is a way to attract the online shopper to your brand of product offerings [Bazzarvoice, 2014].  71% of people read online reviews before making a purchase decision - simply put, you need to enable our customers and prospects to get the information they want on our site.

The Management Game

Recently, I was invited to play the Management Game, imported from our new corporate owners, Softbank.  What is the Management game?  In 1976, Sony CDI developed a kind of business game called the Management Game. The game simulates running a business, with each participant as a manager. Softbank adopted the game from Sony, and updated it with modern technology.

A group of five to seven people gather to play, each with their own 'factory' and a limited set of resources to drive their factory.  You begin as in most games, by drawing a card.  The card drives your action that turn - make a decision to buy, sell, research, hire or expand, or is a 'risk' card, draining off resources and time.

Originally, the game required all transactions to be manually tracked, forcing the participants to develop a high degree of accounting skills and understanding of the information behind a business.  The Softbank update uses iPads to handle the transactions and accounting, allowing the gamers to focus more on strategy and game theory.  In the 1980s, US executives would pay $500 a head for a multi-day seminar where one single game would be completed, representing a 5 year run for their factory.  Today, we completed all 5 years in about 5 hours, including training and reviewing results.

While difficult to learn in the first round with a compressed schedule, the Management game is a fantastic tool for reviewing the 'big picture' of business, from supply to capacity to the value of research and development.  We all enjoyed getting a chance to lift our eyes from our day to day siloed workflow and take a moment to try to understand all of the parts of running a business.

Strategy is key in the Management game - risks are part of succeeding.  Heavily leveraging your business early in pays off well; you have higher access to capital early in the game, and the interest rates are low, creating little penalty for carrying high debt loads.  Two strategies successfully used in our session were high R&D investment, reducing the cost of your goods on the market, and high sales force investment, allowing you to sell more goods than the other players, due to some oddities in the rules.

The rules don't always reflect real world conditions in markets and business, but they do allow you to see  how game strategy works in running a business.  Win or lose, there are certain rules and values you play by in a business, and maximizing your advantage by the rules will maximize your profit in the business.

A further overview of the game is presented at DigInfo.tv, a Tokyo based news video site:

- Will England, October 2014

Scouting for Scouts

Last week was filled with public speaking engagements. I was scheduled to speak at 3 school night for scouting events. This is where we get up in front of brand new parents and brand new kids who've never heard of scouting or might have a little bit of Scouting background. We explained to them about the Cub Scout program, encourage them to sign their children up for Cub Scouting and even more, encourage them to sign up as a leaders to help their kids excel in the program.

I never really felt that I was "on"  at any of the presentations. I did my best. I explained scouting.  I explained my passion. But I never really felt on. We still had a hundred percent of the parents present sign their kids up for scouting. 15 new scouts were recruited through my efforts. It was a stressful week and I'm not quite sure why I didn't deliver what I feel is my best.

For some reason, I felt restrained or constrained and didn't really rock out. Well anyway this was my first year doing school night for scouting presentation. Perhaps next year I'll do a little bit better.

I've always wanted the chance to do public speaking presentation and public sales like this. I like it, it makes me feel good, although it does take a ton of energy. Having an introvert get up in front of 20, 30, 40 people is really something different. But I like that Rockstar feeling. Maybe I'm a closet rockstar, just like I'm a  closet Type A personality. :-)

Giving back - Boy Scouts and Social Media

All these years of working in Social Media, I've been trying to learn more about the best practices, best way to run a social site,  how to engage the audience and really communicate.   Well,  now I've got a chance to pay back - I've been selected to help build the social presence for the Trailhead District of the Heart of America Council of the Boy Scouts of America.  I'll be an editor and helping drive their social presence starting with the Facebook page for Heart of America Trailhead District.

We've got some challenges, starting with having both a page and a personal profile.  That should be easy enough to fix.  After that will be developing a content strategy and driving engagement with the page.

We'll need events and activities, photos and videos from what we're doing. It's an interesting challenge,  not only from an engagement point of view, but from a management position.  I don't know the brand or legal restrictions,  and as a volunteer, I'm limited to evenings, weekends and the occasional lunch meetings to build relationships within the Council to educate and expand the vision of social media.

Should be a great time!

Plantronics BT-300M and the Mac!

The work laptop has been giving me fits today, so on a whim I thought I'd move the BT-300M bluetooth dongle over to my vintage 2006 Mac Book Pro.  I've got Lync 2011 installed there for teleconferences and such.

Well, much to my surprise, the BT-300M was fully recognized on the Mac, and provides full call control from the Plantronics Voyager Pro headset!  Mute, call end, call answer, everything.  Very nice news - another way to avoid using the clunky work laptop.

A personal note on SEO

A personal note on search engine optimization of your web pages. I've spent quite a few hours making sure that our Cub Scout Pack is well represented in the major search engines. If you search for Overland Park Cub Scout , our pack comes up number one in the search results in all the major engines. Tonight, it paid off. We had a new scout and parents come to our meeting who found us by searching for Cub Scouts on Google. We are able to help them join a Cub Scout Pack and build our Cub Scout Pack membership simply because I took the time follow the basic rules of search engine optimization with our Cub Scout web page. As you can tell, I'm a bit proud of this accomplishment and I'm very pleased that this band will have a chance to have their son in a great Cub Scout Pack in the future.

Today? Search challenges and Paying Attention

Today I paid attention at work.  Searched for a few things.  And found more SEO problems than I really wanted to. Pages with no machine readable content. Out of date pages so highly optimized they're still coming up in the first page of search results. I found a bunch of problems like this. I am just a Business Analyst. Its not my day job to pay attention to production issues. The first thing to do is find the stakeholders for all of these pages. Most of these changes are pretty simple. About 90 seconds maybe 2 or 3 minutes to really make the change in some of the pages. But since I'm not operations, I have to take it to the business owners to ensure that the changes I want to make are the same as their 'vision'.

So tomorrow, we meet with stakeholders and process people and more to start fixing some of these SEO issues we find on the production site.

It seems that by paying attention I've only made more work for myself and everyone else on the digital team. But the upside to paying attention will ensure the customer has a better experience and can actually find what they are looking for when they search for our new key words.

When it comes right down to it, paying attention benefits a customer. And that's what it's all about right? Taking care of what our customer needs.

What have I been doing? New Plans from Sprint!

Been off the blog all summer - heads down with Scouting and Sprint!  We've been quietly developing what I feel are some of the most outstanding plans in wireless.  We're back in the game, competing to be the best third place phone company out there!

T-Mobile has been buying gross adds (new customers) by giving away the house on their plans - $100 for 5 lines, 10 GB shared data among the lines. Pretty sweet deal, no contract, etc.

Well, now we're upping the ante.  We kicked off the Family Share Plan with a splash this week, where $100 will get you up to 10 lines, 20GB shared data, 2GB per line exclusive data. Oh yeah, and unlimited talk and text.  And that's just the start.  Our creative teams, IT teams, planning, analysts, and everyone on the Digital team has been laser focused on getting this rolled out and launched.  Fascinating and fun work when we're all driving to a great customer focused goal.

Want to find out more?  New customers to Sprint get the best deal - but existing Sprint customers can still migrate their plans (up to 4 lines) and get unlimited talk and text and 20 GB (or more) data.

Plan Grid comparing Sprint to the rest.  #DoubleIsBetter

Find out more from Sprint:

• Switch to Sprint for the best deal in data
• Sprint Family Share Plan FAQ's for Existing Customers

(ObDisclaimer - I work for Sprint, I do not speak for them, nor was I compensated for this post.  Just excited about the new plans!)

Plantronics Voyager Legend Blue Light Flashes 3 times - and it's Dead!

If you have one of the Plantronics Voyager Legend bluetooth and UC headset, you know how excellent it can be.  And more than likely, you've had one up and die - won't power on, won't charge, just shows the blue light flash 3 times when you plug it in.

I've had two die like that and Plantronics has been good enough to RMA them for me - great and all, but I count on my UC Bluetooth headset for work all day every day.

Today, it happened again - but this time I found a post in the Plantronics forum with detailed steps to ressurect your blue-light flashing dead Voyager Legend!

I called technical support just now! He said I need to reset it and it worked. Like this:

1. Turn off your headset.
2. Press and hold both Call and Mute buttons at the same time.
3. While pressing these buttons down, turn on your headset.
4. You should see the LED on the headset flash blue and red alternately.
5. Turn off your headset.
6. Turn it on again. You should hear the female voice giving the headset status.

Took 30 seconds or so for the red and blue lights to stop flashing and then it worked again for me!  Wanted to share this excellent tip on fixing your Plantronics Voyager Legend UC headset!

-we

What I was reading this morning . . . Kanban

We were using this back in the 90’s to build airplanes; it’s now been pushed into the realm of Agile software development.  Kanban means literally ‘billboard’.  In manufacturing, each part has a Kanban card and the work stations pull parts into the work process.  Output has a card and is queued up for the next work station.  When cards run low, you order more parts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development)

Summary:
1) Visualize what you do – make it public –  use Kanban cards, boards etc.
2) Limit what you’re working on at one time.  Less process switching creates less ‘thrashing’
3) Manage workflow through the system.  Lower WIP levels allows bottlenecks to be found.
4) Explicit and concrete policies.  You can’t improve if you don’t have clear documentation.
5) Continuous feedback throughout the process.
6) Collaborative improvement based on data and scientific testing. Small, continuous improvement, not top-down sweeping change.

For development, you let the executing teams pull cards from the work backlog, work on them without interruption, then move the card to the next lane - from design, development, testing and more.  As you see cards stacking up you can identify backlogs; visualization helps make it happen.  Very compatible with Agile development and can be used even in oldschool waterfall development.

More detailed background:
http://www.infoq.com/articles/hiranabe-lean-agile-kanban 

Further reading – SCRUM vs Kanban :
http://www.agileconnection.com/article/what-best-scrum-or-kanban 

Examples of Kanban boards in Development:
http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-kanban-boards

Even more reading:
http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=104

Fascinating stuff, really…

Noise Graffiti

Noise Graffiti , a set on Flickr.

No one knows much about the 'Noise' graffiti tag; or at least they're not talking much about it on the 'net. But the ones found here in Overland Park closely match the West Coast tags by 'Da Noise' artist. Wonder if we have some new residents here in OP?

Sennheiser HD202 Headphone Review

Originally submitted at bswusa.com

Yes, it's BSW's Money Saving 5-Pack Headphone Deal! For over 10 years, BSW has made this exclusive package available to wonderful heads of all shapes and sizes. This is without a doubt the best value, best headphone for the money. And you don't get just one...you get FIVE for $89. Wooohooo!!!! The ...

Sennheiser HD202PKG

fantastic value and outstanding SQ

By wingland from Overland Park, KS on 12/30/2013

4out of 5

Pros: Good Bass, Durable, Good Value, Comfortable, Great Sound
Cons: Cord too long
Best Uses: Music, With My Computer, Home Audio
Describe Yourself: Audiophile
Primary Use: Listening to iPod
Was this a gift?: No

Normally use Grado SR-60 for critical listening and recreational listening. No more. Far more accurate, better sound quality in the bass. Very very accurate - up with the best studio and audiophile monitors. Slightly rolled off top end, just a touch less air than a multi-thousand dollar set of cans, but for the price you will not find a better set of head phones.

Very good on-the-ear fit and comfort, nice padding at the top of the band to facilitate long-term listening.

Will also be using them for audio for video mixdown and editing.

(legalese)

Why Telecoms Don't Fight the NSA

" In February 2001, Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio says he was approached by NSA agents about establishing direct access to Qwest's call records without a FISA warrant. Nacchio declined, thinking the program was illegal. Subsequent leaks showed Qwest as the only phone company that declined to participate in the program. The retaliation was immediate: Nacchio says Qwest lost government contracts in the following months (although some contest this), and the business started to collapse. Just a few years later, Nacchio was brought up on insider trading charges, a prosecution he maintains was political payback. "
 -- The Verge

Quest is now a brand mark of CenturyLink and the billions of dollars of assets were sold at firesale prices.  CenturyLink is voluntarily participating in wholesale monitoring of phone and data traffic. 

Use of Silencers in Crimes

Western Criminology Review found that "in the 50 cases of silencers found in drug raids, none of the defendants used a silencer to shoot at police"

http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v08n2/44.clark/clark.pdf

Social Sharing - getting it shared

Earlier we saw how to set up your page to get it ready to be shared across social networks. Now, how exactly do you share it across all those different social networks?

You have a couple of choices. First, you could visit the top 5 or 6 social sites you want to share on and dig into their sharing API to find out the exact parameters to use to generate their cute little button. Or you could leverage a service that does all that API gazing for you and keeps up with the constant change of sites and API's. I'm assuming you want to take the easier route, so we'll look at the most popular of the sharing aggregation sites, AddThis.

AddThis.com lets you set up a free account and grab sharing buttons for nearly every social network in the world - from Facebook and Twitter to Orkut and things I can't even pronounce, let alone read. They use their internal algorithms to determine what the most popular sharing sites are, and show those first in the list of buttons. They also keep track as visitors share using AddThis across the web and set individual personalized preferences. If your mom shares a lot by e-mail using AddThis, then the e-mail icon will show most often.

Once you've created an account on AddThis.com just click 'get the code' for sharing buttons. They offer lots of options, but lets focus on the most basic, sharing on a website. From the 'Get Sharing Buttons' page, you can select several different visual styles, from 16px to 32px buttons, vertical or horizontal, or just a little sharing bar. Pick what fits your page the best. Notice how the code on the right changes slightly - that's how the display is customized to show different options. Once you have the layout you want, just select the sourcecode in the textarea, copy and paste it into your website in the location you want. Sprint uses this on the Phone Details page, just under the main column key features.

Location is important - if you bury the sharing buttons in the header or footer, you'll get less content shared. You should have the sharing buttons as near to the content the customer is reading as possible. This helps them to remember to share your special content and say 'thank you' to you for providing such awesome content! Sharing cool stuff also gives them credit in their social economy; the more and better stuff they share, the more prestige they get from their networks. But more on that in a future post . . .

Now, back to that code. It's pretty simple HTML:

<!-- AddThis Button BEGIN --> <div class="addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style "> <a class="addthis_button_preferred_1"></a> <a class="addthis_button_preferred_2"></a> <a class="addthis_button_preferred_3"></a> <a class="addthis_button_preferred_4"></a> <a class="addthis_button_compact"></a> <a class="addthis_counter addthis_bubble_style"></a> </div> <script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=xa-52376d2e5d4cb5e5"></script> <!-- AddThis Button END -->

You're making a new box on your page with a few links. Those simple links get rendered into pretty round-corner web 2.0 buttons by the javascript call. The 'class' tag tells the javascript how to render them. You'll note the first four links are 'preferred 1,2,3 and 4'. That's the personalization I was talking about earlier. AddThis uses the visitors preferred sharing sites or methods to populate those links. The last two tags set up the 'Plus' button and the counter for how many shares you've had. Once you get more familiar with AddThis you can add, remove, change the order and a whole lot more in this simple block of HTML code. For now, publish your page and see how it looks with the new sharing buttons!


Wait a couple of days, then log into AddThis.com and see analytical reports on how your sharing is going and what kind of social lift your content is getting from your new buttons!

Planning SEO for the Holiday - with humanity

Search Engine Watch online offers a set of solid tips that may be of value to those new to the Internet and marketing.

 First off, people search for holiday bargains, deals and gifts. And secondly, if you want to get in front of those holiday shoppers, you should have specific pages for them to find in the search engine.

 You're going to need a plan around the holiday calendar - early October for Haloween promotions, early November for Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, the last day you can offer free shipping for holiday delivery, post holiday cleanup sales and more.


Now, you know when you're going to offer what - but how to get it in front of the shopper? Use the right keywords. Drill into Google Keywords - Google Trends and Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool are invaluable sourcing for brainstorming keyword lists and uncovering potential new target terms for holiday 2013 optimization. Find terms that will help educate shoppers about your offers and promotions. Be darn sure that the keywords you're including on your page are reflected in the page content. If you're offering 'secret santa' gifts in your keywords, you should have relevant, targeted content about secret santa gifts you offer. The big search engines will penalize you if you're spammy in your keywords, using words unrelated to your page content. Your customers will also punish you, dropping you from their consideration and mindshare if they click through and find no related content.


Beyond your keywords, you should make sure your page titles, Open Graph titles and body text all reflect the search terms you're keying in on for the holiday season. Don't be a dweeb though; this is overkill and reflects poorly on the site. Keyword loading may get search hits, but between the typos (foe?) and the spammy title, you're not going to be generating any long term or quality customers.


Search engines take some time to crawl and index your pages; pre-publishing landing pages with some good textual descriptions and hints about what's coming is handy to give the crawlers something to latch onto. Use social sharing too, so your visitors can share the sweet upcoming deal with their networks.

Most importantly though; remember not to burn your goodwill and customer sentiment on oneshot marketing efforts. Seth Godin phrases it best: "In the connection economy, though, the thoughtful, patient, mature and modern approach wins out. Because connection is built on trust and generosity, not on snark and short-term wins." It takes years to build a reputation and high search engine rank. And a couple thoughtless decisions to ruin it.

Social Sharing - setting up your page

OG social sharing:
a mimeographed self-help file

Social Sharing has been going on for a long time - first, people would send around typewritten, mimeographed jokes, lists, or other neat stuff. Next came the digital world of forwarded chain emails. Then the web, where you could copy and past the URL to a site and either link to it on your home page, or send it by email. Now, social sharing has become embedded into your everyday life. Everyone has seen this:
A block of icons we all now know as 'share this page to Facebook, Twitter, email or Google Plus'. Click the button and by magic it's posted on your newsfeed or wall! But how does it work? Unlike magnets, there's no real magic there, just some basic page coding tools.

First, you need to be sure your page is ready to be read by a machine. That means you need a good title in your 'title' tag, proper HTML that mostly validates and maybe a few images on the page that can represent what you are talking about. If you want to get fancy, you can add a couple more tags to more accurately describe your page to Facebook and Google Plus. Those tags are called 'Open Graph Tags'. At the least, you can put a Title, Description and Image for your page up in the head of your page.   of your page. That's as easy as typing the 'title' tag correctly - just key in:

There are five key properties you'll enter in a 'meta' tag:

• og:type
• og:url
• og:title
• og:image and 
• og:description

Usually, you are sharing a website page, so that's the type. The url is the absolute URL to this page; useful if you use dynamic navigation or other stuff. It can be ignored though for static websites. Title is pretty self explanatory. The image is the thumbnail shown on the left of the link in the Facebook timeline or Google Plus post. If you leave out the 'description' tag, you end up with the facebook crawler picking some snippet of text from the top third of your webpage. In a lot of modern dynamic websites, that's not really what you want to display to your visitors when they see a link to your site on Facebook or Google Plus.

This is the foundation to having a good, sharable page across all modern social networks, and it sets your page up for being part of the new, wider social graph that Facebook and Google are pulling together to define the new web.

Top Ten List of Questions for a Business Analyst

A long time ago, I was asked what my 'rubric' or list of questions were for my new job as a Business Analyst. I didn't have a clear answer. "It Depends" wasn't really a good answer.

Well, I've finally found someone smarter than me that has that list of questions. Just check out:

http://www.batimes.com/articles/carls-top-ten-list-of-questioning-techniques-for-new-and-not-so-new-business-analysts.html

Excellent groundwork questions that can be used and adapted to any situation as we build and define projects and programs, starting with "Be Prepared" and continuing through leading your customer through iterative designs for how they want the solution to work. Delivering quality work depends on getting the solution well defined at the beginning. 'Misses' in requirements lead to rework, defects and less than optimal customer solutions.

Anything you'd add to the list that isn't domain specific?

United Way?

Spent the better part of the morning writing up a script for a couple dozen team members to use in making personal contacts across the organization asking for donations tot he United Way.  Yup, it's that time again - the United Way is the big charity that my company has supported for years.

I donate every year; they directly support several local initiatives including the Boy Scouts of America and the Heart of America council, that I am pretty passionate about.

But I've never figured out the motivator for the higher level team to drive such passion around the United Way campaign.  They don't get paid cash for their work with United Way; the exposure and networking doesn't seem that important. Is it just the 'in' thing to do in Oak Row for the executives?

One of the interesting things I had to do in composing the script was build a set of answers to overcome objections.  Really, I've only heard two - charities are scams (United Way only keeps about 10%) and 'I already donate to xyx'.

Do you donate to United Way?  Why?  Why not? What do you think?

Buff and Polish

New owners over to the Far East, and so I've been going through what I should do to ensure I 'best contribute to shareholder value' - in other words, how do I keep my job?

Figure a couple things will help:

• Show up more often.  We get a lot of location freedom to work from anywhere.  But oldschool face to face never hurts people to remember what you do and why you are there.
• Clean up a bit.  Get the hair cut monthly.  Hit the thrift store for some wool blend stuff and cash in the gift cards for a couple more button down shirts.
• Self promote.  I've started an internal public blog about tools, technologies and stuff inside the company; I'll copy-post those out here too.  May help build internal and external reputation as someone with a clue.
• And of course, the basics - deliver results, drive operational efficiency, act with integrity, the whole 'Seven Imperatives' thing.