Social Media Marketing

We just attended a half-day business booster mini-workshop, run by a friend, Terry Carney, on ‘Social Media Marketing’. The session was really informative around what’s out there, what works and what doesn’t, how to join up all your business related social media, to ensure it’s consistent, to the point, relevant and useful.

The session also high-lighted some really good do’s and don’ts, pitfalls and possibilities that can drive benefit and business to companies.

Terry, who ran the programme, also manages a Business Booster LinkedIn group which you can find at http://www.linkedin.com/groups/BUSINESS-BOOSTER-GROUP

Product Innovation Stimuli

We recently facilitated a product innovation workshop for a corporate client looking to break out of existing product paradigms.

We put a lot of effort into making sure we had both related and un-related stimuli on hand to help people see things in different ways and explore new and fresh ideas. This included a large table of related products, some of the clients and many from competitors, several mood boards of ‘what the future might hold and look like’ and a really good, varied selection of magazines and periodicals, a few related to the clients field but most not!

We also showed a couple of thought provoking video clips from You Tube which incorporated lots of stats, numbers and provocative statements about the future, this gave us additional food for thought!

With all this stimuli we were really able to stretch and pull the clients existing paradigms around products and generated some really great ideas to work up into full product propositions.

Combining Virtual preparation with Multi-Cultural Facilitation

We recently worked with a global corporate client to design and facilitate a 2 day global strategy workshop with 8 different multi-cultural regions, Russia, Ukraine, Europe, USA, South America, Asia, Africa and Australia.

Nearly all the pre-workshop contact, consultation, design and preparation was carried out remotely and virtually making good use of e-Mail, Word, PowerPoint and especially Skype! The workshop design went backwards and forwards several times and a ‘few’ Skype calls later we had our 2 days mapped out and the client was happy. Virtual working is definitely enabled and enhanced through the ability to see one another.

During the workshop, all geographic regions were represented; the challenges as we progressed through our agenda were not unexpected: language, communication styles (soft and hard, direct and subtle), misunderstanding meaning and perceived cultural hierarchy (in part influenced by the level of maturity of local markets) all had to be embraced.

To overcome these challenges some basic but critical techniques we employed were:

• collectively building meaningful workshop guidelines and actively using them;


• making sure we managed perceived and actual hierarchy in the room by making certain


• everyone was included, listened to and heard and NOT interrupted;


• giving opportunity for table discussion in native/first language;


• speaking clearly and slowly and asked others to do the same;


• asking others to help and support those who’s English was not as confident;


• summarising and paraphrasing more regularly


• 
  
  seeking to use lots of praise and thankyou’s!

It was a really rewarding engagement. We’ve definitely seen an increase in the need for cross-cultural work in the last 4-5 years and we’ve found these basic ‘top tips’ help the group make good progress.