Bob Apollo

Twitter is a runaway success, with more than half-a-billion registered users, and a community that spans both business and consumer interests. But what makes a “great tweet”? The May 2012 edition of the Harvard Business Review highlighted some fascinating research into user perceptions from a survey covering over 1,400 users people who were particularly technology-focused and news-centric - so more likely to represent a B2B audience than the average Twitter profile.

Some of the results are particularly relevant to those of us who want to use Twitter as part of an integrated business communication strategy. The study pointed out that despite the fact that Twitter users choose whom to follow, only 36% of tweets were regarded as “worth reading”. So what were the best and worst types of tweets?

Avoid cluttering...

Are you trying to address too big a market - or solve too many problems?

I don’t know about you, but I’m always uneasy when a CEO describes his or her strategy and somewhere along the way you hear a variation on the “after all, how hard can it be to grab a small share of a big market” argument? Well, the answer is always “a lot harder than you think”.

The only thing aiming for an overlarge target market does for you is to dilute your efforts to the point where even those modest ambitions are unlikely to ever be achieved. Actually, that’s wrong - that strategy brings with it a whole raft of other undesirable baggage, including:

• Confusing the market as to who you are and what you stand for
• Confusing your sales people as to who your most valuable customers are
• Confusing your marketers as to how they can most efficiently generate demand
• Wasting an inordinate amount of time, energy and misplaced enthusiasm
...

I wonder if I’m alone when I look around at the circumstances that have led to the continuing crisis in our economy (is anyone prepared to bet that it won’t get worse before it gets better?) and consider whether the foundations can be found not just in the reckless get-rich-quick attitudes of a handful of irresponsible bankers but in a more general failure of our collective moral compass?

I’ve been reading Gary Hamel’s “What Matters Now”. You may be familiar with his previous works, which include “Competing for the Future” and “The Future of Management”, but his latest work strikes a particularly resonant chord, and offers a timely reassessment of our priorities as business people.

According to some of the latest reports from Sirius Decisions, CSO Insights and other leading B2B research organisations, the best-in-class sales and marketing organisations are as much as 5 times more effective than the average in converting inquiries into sales - as well as maintaining significantly faster average annual revenue growth.

How do they achieve this? A large part of the answer lies in how they choose to measure their performance - and how they apply what they learn to achieve continuous improvement. I’m going to be sharing the key principles in a free BrightTALK webinar on “Applying Smarter Metrics to your Sales and Marketing Funnel” on 22^nd May at 2pm UK. You can register for the webinar here - but I’d like...