The C-Suite Digital Handbook

Five Reasons Why This is The Best of Times: You Can Do More With Less – Part 2

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In the last blog post, I explored how you can build revenues by engaging employees in marketing and communicating directly with your customers using social media. This blog post explores how you can maintain research and innovation at this time to take your business to the next level.

Fourth, you can build and develop insights on your business that will keep you on top of your game. Consulting studies, research, conferences and trade shows are budgets currently on the chopping block.  Yet, there are still many opportunities to leverage the digital world to stay on top of things for little to no money.  For example:

• Find free presentations online frim trade shows and conferences.  You can sometimes download them in MP3 format from the conference or event website.  There are also other sources, e.g. Slideshare, where you can find copies of the presentations or video aggregators like You Tube or blip.tv, which contain taped versions of the talks or interviews with the speakers.  I was unable to go the 140 Characters Conference, the Twitter conference in New York this June, but the conference has made the video recording of the conference presentations on its website.
• Get insights from professionals in your idustry by using the Gerson Lehrman Group, a network of more than 200,000 experts worldwide.  Scheduling conversations with experts is quick and easy.  You can often get insights that you wouldn’t from engaging expensive consultants.  I am a member of the GLG Council and very much enjoy the opportunity to speak with professionals seeking to understand the changes in the media landscape.
• Leverage LinkedIn to form an industry group, put out a question of interest or conduct a poll amongst the connections of your employees.  Facebook also enables you to form groups of common interest.
• Use Twitter interfaces like Tweetdeck or Seesmic to track conversations about your business, competitors or industry in real time.  You will often get interesting insights or links that will provide you with important competitive information.  LinkedIn also offers a tool called Company Buzz, which lets you find relevant trends and comments about your company on Twitter.
• Establish a Google Reader account where you can collect RSS feeds of industry newsletters, bloggers in your business and research services.
• Follow what is happening at a conference in real time through Twitter.  Often times conferences establish hashtags in advance which conference attendees use when tweeting, enabling those on Twitter to follow the conference in process.
• Identify technically savvy and eager professionals in your organization to manage the collection of this information.  Reward people for uncovering research or ideas that can help take your company to the next level.

Fifth, you can innovate your company through engaging your employees and your customers. In downturns, budgets and plans for new initiatives get scrapped.  However, in 2009 there are many cost effective ways to keep innovation going that weren’t available during the 2001 – 2003 recession.  Scott D. Anthony points out “tools like prediction markets, collaboration software, design tools, virtual focus groups and markets of low-cost specialists can dramatically expedite the innovation process” in his new book:  The Silver Lining:  An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times.

Some of the ways to engage employees in innovation include:

• Provide an open forum for employees to contribute ideas.  Offer incentives for employees that contribute winning ideas.
• Leverage web-based software collaboration tools like Basecamp and Campfire provided by 37Signals.
• Facilitate group brainstorming using web-based tools like MindMeister and Gliffy.

Opportunities for engaging your customers include:

• Work with companies like SalesForce.com, leading provider of web-based CRM solutions,  to develop programs where customers can contribute their new product ideas to you on your website.  Enable consumers to comment and vote on ideas.  Reward the winning ideas.  Promote this functionality using social media.
• Sponsor a contest where customers and/or professionals in your industry are rewarded for coming up with a new product or process.
• Develop a product prototype using Google Sketchup a 3D software tool that combines a tool-set with an intelligent drawing system.  Launch a website where key customers can come in and make comments or add ideas to your prototype.
• Read comments about your products or services on sites like BizRate, ePinions, Yelp, Angie’s List, Amazon, and other places where customers will make their opinions known.  New business ideas can be generated from these contributions.

In sum, in 2009 there have never been more opportunities to do more with less, making this the best of times. It may feel uncomfortable, it may take some time figuring some of these things out.  Yet, the short and long term benefits can be significant.

This blog is dedicated to profiling ways that your business can do more with less and grow your top and bottom-lines.  If you know of businesses that are successfully leveraging digital tools and platforms to build their business at this time, I would love to learn about them.