How do know what people think? Well, you’ll need to ask them. Businesses can devise plans and make better decisions with data in hand. Gathering knowledge is not as difficult as one might imagine, especially with several online applications makes market research process relatively easy.
An online survey can help customer relationship representatives gauge customer satisfaction, solicit information from existing or prospective customers, or help human resources professionals learn what matters to employees.
Social media monitoring is the act of using a tool to listen to what is being communicated across the internet. The media is monitored; not just from traditional publishers, but on social sites such as blogs, wikis, news sites, micro-blogs such as Twitter, social networking sites, video and photo sharing websites, forums, message boards, and user-generated content. In general, social media monitoring tools can determine the volume and sentiment of online conversation about a brand or topic. This can provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands or products.
As 2016 comes to a close, here are the top social media monitoring services, ranked by their number of customers amongst Siftery’s list of 250,000 top companies.
We live in fast-paced times. Jobs are being created and destroyed at an unprecedented rate. In order to understand these changes, there’s a whole new area of research and focus emerging, broadly known as the ‘Future of Work.’ It’s an essential topic to know about if you care about your relevance as a manager in 2017 and beyond.
Discussions around the future of work currently focus around four main areas:
Over the course of my career, I’ve been fortunate to have worked with organizations both large and small. No matter what the size the business, I’ve seen that way that culture can enable creativity — or stifle and eventually destroy it altogether.
Destroying Creativity
Many of the traditional organizations I’ve worked with had hierarchies that were focused on group or department roles, with formal and rigid chain of commands. They are highly prone to bureaucracy and role protectionism.
Building software for startups is a huge challenge. Not because writing the software itself is that hard, but most startups have managed to create the least optimal places to do work. In my 10+ years of experience as a software engineer at startups, I cannot trust employers to provide me with an adequate work environment, and this holds me back from doing the best possible work for them. I am an ambitious, driven individual, and I want nothing more than to provide the places I work with my best possible output. I will give whatever company I am working at 100%. Most of the places I have worked have done a great job at preventing me from doing this. That’s why from here on out, I am taking a stand and drawing a line in the sand. Henceforth I will only work in a “remote” arrangement.
Open offices
Most startups nowadays are obsessed with the open office environment, and it’s nearly impossible to find companies that do not implement this type of layout. They’ll claim it’s because they want an “open and transparent culture” (myth busted*), but if you know anything about the subject, you’ll know this is the worst possible setup for actual work, and doesn’t improve communication or culture. You don’t have to look far to find plenty of research on the subject- and quite frankly, there is simply no debate here. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that open office layouts foster a more collaborative environment. Of course, office managers, CEO’s and founders selectively ignore the mountain of evidence which disproves this hypothesis. This is one of the real tragedies of the startup world. It’s hard to estimate how many startups are being held back by the obsession and group think around the open office environment. There is also the cost to the mental health of the employees who are subjected to these mad houses every day. As the startup scene continues to ingest, chew up, and spit out/burn out young talent, there is very little by way of wisdom in the scene to help push back on issues like this. In the words of DHH: “The open office plan is a tyrant of interruption, a deep loss of privacy, and the death of productivity”
Over the years, my really good teams have by and large been pretty strange. Not in a bad way, but in a way where every person on the team was an individual, and yet worked together as a single unit.
Each team had a unique culture, and the last thing I wanted to do was bring in a new person that would throw that dynamic out the window.
You’ve sent the emails, made the pitch, and landed the meeting. Big meeting, big stakes. So when you send a calendar invitation to hold another person’s valuable time, don’t be a noob — especially if you want the right people to show up at your meeting, at the right time.
In a perfect world:
You create the invitation in a calendar program…
which emails the invitation to the people you invite…
who accept the invitation…
at which point you are notified that the meeting is all set.
If the meeting’s time, place, or details change, that change is reflected on everyone’s calendar.
Reporters absolutely love real thought leaders: smart people who offer surprising and useful insights. But true leadership is quite hard to find. If you make it easy for the media to catch your execs being brilliant, your business may well benefit.
When company representatives give an interview to the press, it usually is in one of two modes: advocate or expert. Advocate, the traditional sales voice, is where the business executive argues all of the advantages of the product or service that the company sells. Expert is where the person is quoted as an expert, wherein the comments are ostensibly neutral.
The most persuasive kind of publicity is media coverage. Free media is more valuable than almost any kind of marketing, except word of mouth, because it lets you tell the world the value of your offerings, and it comes with the validation of a third party (the publication). Nowhere is press coverage more crucial than for a budget-constrained start-up or small business.
And yet, mystifyingly, startups seem to go out of their way to make it as difficult as possible for journalists to contact them.
There was a time in my career where I had 12 direct reports — 12 people whose careers I was responsible for, 12 people whom I needed to be available to for questions, guidance and assistance.
