Blogs Blogs

What’s the future of education? How will students learn differently? What will the schools of the future look like? 

A good article appeared in The Economist recently that talks about the need to use technology to deliver personalised content using omni channels. For the educators, it thus becomes important to embrace technology to deliver courses and generate value at scale, without the actual need for physical classrooms. 
Welcome to the future of education.
https://goo.gl/9U8rkN

With Digital Marketing becoming a buzz word, it is also very key to rein the overuse , overkill and abuse by marketers of these techniques without paying attention to the quality of content. Here's a nice article from Hubspot - https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketers-this-is-why-we-cant-have-nice-things  - that deals with content marketing, messaging platform and  video marketing.

From a product company perspective our work on the messaging app (chat app) becomes very important, as messaging apps are leading to higher conversion rates.

Please read the article for a complete understanding.

From complex ERP systems to Facebook, applications make meaning out of input. The form — in its many manifestations — provides a gateway for user submission.

Thefirst article illustrates 13 different ways to present forms, and explores the future of data input.

The second article presents hybrid interfaces as the future of coversational UI.

Link 1 | Link 2

An excellent primer on the various marketing statistics. Useful for Sales / pre-sales pitches , for the product team (on what we can measure) and project team (in terms of what we can implement and measure).

It gives overview on what terminilogy we can use, and the current industry trend and stats on each of the parameters. More at https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics

Search Engine Optimization Statistics

Understand how consumers are searching for and finding information about brands online.

• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
• Ecommerce 
• Local SEO
• Mobile Search
• Organic Search
• Voice Search

Content Marketing Statistics

Learn what projects and platforms content marketers are prioritizing. 

• Blogging
• Content Strategy
• Podcasts

Social Media Statistics

See how marketers are expanding their reach with social media. 

• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Snapchat
• Social Media Management
• Social Media Usage
• Twitter 
• Visual Content

Video Marketing Statistics

See why brands are adding video marketing to their strategy. 

• Product Video
• Social Video
• Video Analytics
• Youtube

Email Marketing Statistics

Learn how marketers are using email marketing to maximize ROI. 

• Clickthrough Rate
• Email Copy
• Email Segmentation
• Email usage
• Mobile email

Lead Generation Statistics

Discover how marketers are reaching lead generation goals. 

• Demand Generation
• Marketing Analytics
• Marketing Automation

Advertising Statistics

Understand how consumers view paid media. 

• Adblocking
• Display Advertising
• Mobile  Advertising
• Video  Advertising
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Marketing Technology Statistics

Discover how new technologies are changing consumer behavior. 

• Messaging Apps
• Mobile
• Aritifcial Intelligence (AI)

Sales Statistics

Learn how salespeople can increase their efficiency with inbound selling. 

• CRM
• Selling
• Service Level Agreement
• Social Selling

https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics

Good Article by Jeremy Basset on Collaboration and Innovation.

Collaborative growth is derived from partnerships. ‘Partnership’ doesn’t mean ‘ownership’, neither does it mean ‘procurement’, it means partnership. At it’s core, partnerships give rise to mutual growth and value creation. Both parties make a contribution, and both realise value. The concept of collaborative growth builds on the notion of ‘leveraged growth’, which was conceived over a decade ago and brings it into a post-Uber/Airbnb era.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/welcome-new-growth-era-jeremy-basset

Hi Giridhar,

On June 7, 2017, we are updating LinkedIn’s Terms of Service - our Privacy Policy and User Agreement. These updates to our terms will let us introduce new features, while continuing to give you control over how your information is used.

While I encourage you to read the full terms and my blog post about the changes, below is a quick glance at what’s new. Our goal is to increase the value you get out of LinkedIn, but you can also opt-out of these new features, if you’d like.

• Increased visibility of your LinkedIn Profile - Service partners will show your profile to their users, similar to the way your profile shows up in search engines, so you can be more easily found for opportunities.
• Easier to share your achievements with your network - We’ll suggest positive and public professional accomplishments, like new patents or publications, to add to your profile so others can see.

In addition, here’s two more new features you can choose to opt-in to:

• Productivity bots to improve communication with your network - New automated systems will use information in your messages to suggest responses, meetings, ice breakers, or insights to help you have important conversations more easily.
• Easily meet up with other members - You’ll have the ability to see members nearby who have also opted-in, so it’s easier to meet up when you’re at a conference or out for lunch.

If you’ve not already heard, we are now a part of Microsoft, but our services are still provided under a separate Terms of Service. We hope you find value in the updates we’ve made. If for any reason you don’t agree to the new terms and would rather close your account than opt out of specific new features, you can do so.

Thanks for being a member,

Sara Harrington,

Vice President of Legal at LinkedIn

The CEO of DBS says it’s not enough to apply digital “lipstick.”

DBS is one of the leading financial-services groups in Asia. Headquartered and listed in Singapore, the company has a growing presence across the region and aspires to be what it calls “the Asian Bank of choice for the new Asia.” One of the most important prongs of that ambition is the bank’s digital strategy—notably its determination to embrace technology, reimagine the customer journey, and make the bank’s culture more entrepreneurial. McKinsey senior partner Joydeep Sengupta recently sat down with Piyush Gupta, the CEO of DBS since 2009, to discuss the challenges and opportunities Gupta has encountered along the way and the future shape of banking, including the threat from platform companies.

We invested initially in two small, central teams of 12 to 15 people, which over time I merged. One of the teams was focused on customer experience, the second on innovation. In both cases, the objective was to catalyze a sense of how to innovate—what had to be done about customer journeys in the way of training, exciting people, getting this on the agenda. In hindsight, this focus on customer experience and innovation turned out to be good. When you give people the freedom to go and try a few things with a rubric that says, “As long as it helps the customer, it is worth doing,” it opens people’s minds and it opens up a lot of possibilities.

The Quarterly: How did you get your board and senior management aligned around the new approach?

Piyush Gupta: That’s a really important question, as most CEOs have to find a balance between short-term results and investing in the long term, which may mean compromising short-term financials. In our case, the board got behind this agenda very swiftly, in part because in 2012 we had an inorganic opportunity that failed. The board concluded that inorganic acquisitions would be very hard to come by. In 2014, after the board had signed off on the planning process, it gave us an incremental $200 million, in their words, “to go blow it up.” They said that if you can blow it up, then we might be able to make something worthwhile for the future.

Gartner's top 10 trends will drive the future of the intelligent digital mesh.

Enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders must prepare for the impacts of these disruptive trends on people, businesses and IT departments, and determine how they can provide competitive advantage.

Of the Top 10 Strategic Trends, the following applies to us.

Trend No. 1: Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Machine Learning

Trend No. 2: Intelligent Apps - Virtual Customer Apps (VCAs)

Trend No. 6: Blockchains and Distributed Ledgers (multi-party purchases or sharing - a far-off use-case)

Trend No. 7: Conversational Systems 

Trend No. 8: Mesh App and Service Architecture

Trend No. 9: Digital Technology Platforms - all of the above rolling into "Customer Experience Platform" (we are in this category)

Please read the complete article or atleast the above mentioned trends. Feel free to approach for any inputs. The article is also stroed as a PDF in the Doc Lib.

Enable Considered Purchases Through Digital Commerce

Two reasons the rewards outweigh the risks of digital commerce and customer engagement

• You may not have a choice.

• If you won’t do it, your competitors will. 

Build three core competencies to enable digital commerce for considered purchases

• A customer-led buying process. 

  • The good part about buying a car online was the flexibility of the dealer I ultimately bought from, which differentiated them from other dealers. They were willing to negotiate pricing, confirm inventory availability and schedule a test drive via email. Use digital to enable self-service. Encourage sales to respect customer preferences.

• A digital product catalog and rich product content. 

  • The bad part of the online buying process was the hand-off from manufacturers’ sites comprised of rich content and immersive experiences to dealer sites that showed available inventory but  lacked 360-degree video, high quality images or detailed product information. Use content marketing to enrich commerce.

• A common system for tracking buyer interactions. 

  • The ugly part of the buying experience was the ONSLAUGHT of emails, mobile messages and phone calls trigerred by my online vehicle search. Post-sale, I got the same survey request three times. Use CRM, marketing automation or campaign management tools to orchestrate multichannel interactions.

Crafting The Right Digital Strategy For Your Business

A DBS BusinessClass event at Google's Singapore headquarters shed light on what businesses need to do to get their digital marketing on track.

Four "moments" in the digital life of a consumer where their preferences are shaped and decisions are made. These are:

* I-want-to-know moments – 66% of smartphone users turn to their phones to look up something they saw in a TV commercial

* I-want-to-go moments – 82% of smartphone users use a search engine when looking for a local business

* I-want-to-do moments – 91% of smartphone users turn to their phones for ideas while doing a task

* I-want-to-buy moments – 82% of smartphone users consult their phones while in a store deciding what to buy

To capitalise on these moments, brands need to "Be There" when these moments occur, "Be Useful" by being relevant to the consumer at that point in time and "Be Quick" by having a mobile experience that is fast and without friction.

Nine out of 10 fintech startups who talk to Neal Cross, Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) at DBS, fail their sales pitches within five minutes. And that is because there is one underlying problem that all of them share: They are selling their products in the wrong order.

Snip 1

To accomplish that, SMEs need to establish the right order of their sales process. This is especially pertinent for B2B sales, especially solutions for large corporations. “Don’t sell your product — that’s the worst thing you can sell,” said Cross.

“Sell yourself — that’s the single most important thing. People buy from people. I need to know you are someone I can work with. I need to know I can trust you.”

Snip 2

Identify the decision makers

In business, time is money. Time wasted equals to cash thrown to the wind. So salespeople or founders need to research and understand who are they going to meet before entering the meeting room.

“Find out their personal motivations. Find out how they get their bonus. Understand their KPIs. Talk about what they are trying to achieve, then position the product in a way that will help achieve their outcome.”

Snip 3

To pitch to corporate customers, it is crucial to know how the sales rhythm works. Essentially, they are three stages to it.

First, there is the presentation of the product’s features. Then, if the customer shows interest, they will naturally enquire about the price. Finally, if they are seriously considering a purchase, they will want to know the risks involved.

“You can’t say the same thing throughout your sales pitch. It’s always about risk at the end. You need to smooth things with the customers … They may want to know [for example] if the product is scalable. If you are very smart, you can also increase the price at the end,” said Cross.

Click here for the entire article.

20 YouTube Tricks, Hacks & Features You'll Want to Know About

Item #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 - all to be used for InfoPier TNR

1) You can create a link that starts a YouTube video at a certain time.

2) You can easily see the written transcripts of people's videos.

3) You can help your video get found in search by editing or uploading a transcript.

4) You can use YouTube to easily get free transcriptions of your videos and audio files.

5) You can create, share, and collaborate on video playlists.

6) You can save videos to watch later.

7) You can create your own custom YouTube URL.

8) You can add clickable links to your videos.

9) You can also add an end screen or cards to promote content.

10) YouTube has a big library of high-quality, royalty-free sound effects and music you can browse and download.

11) You can easily create photo slideshows and set them to music.

12) Play YouTube videos in the background on mobile devices.

13) You can live stream videos to YouTube.

14) You can upload and watch 360-degree videos (live and pre-recorded).

15) YouTube ads target you based on an algorithm similar to Google and Facebook.

16) You can remove ads from YouTube videos (and watch videos offline) for 10 bucks a month.

17) You can use Google Trends to explore and compare popular YouTube search terms over time.

18) There's a "safer" version of YouTube available for your kids.

19) You can now clear your YouTube History.

20) You can learn about YouTube's copyrights terms from a cast of ridiculous puppets.

Wistia is professional video hosting with analytics and video marketing tools

• Host it like it’s hot - Guaranteed smooth playback on any device, with no ads. Fully responsive, with fast adaptive streaming and support for 4K and 360 video.
• Boost your video marketing - Get the best in video SEO, interactivity, and integrations. Prove ROI with the world’s most detailed video analytics.
• Power your product - With flexible APIs and thorough documentation, we do the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to. If your product relies on video, Wistia’s got your back(end).
• Control your content - Secure your videos for private sharing with password protection, gating, and domain restriction. Control and track who’s watching what.
• Secure your videos - Take complete control by restricting where videos can be played and how they look on search and social
• Generate new leads -  Tie Wistia to your favorite email tools to capture leads in your videos and send them to your lists 
• Improve your SEO - Wistia videos use JSON-LD to ensure your videos rank for pages on your website, not YouTube.com
• Understand your data - Create better content by understanding how viewers interact and engage with your videos

Have a loo at https://wistia.com/product

Easily share videos in Gmail, Squarespace, Medium, and more with our free Wistia for Chrome extension. Install it today! ??

On how to use Wistia - https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-use-wistia

We can do "Video Campaign" within "Campaign Manager" by adding it as widget - just like "email campaign" by using it is a tool to collect email-id within video, video tracking, video based drip campaigns, etc, apart from 360 Video playback, etc 

The Public Apology Letter: 6 Brands That Nailed It

By Amanda Zantal-Wiener, March 9, 2017, 8:00 AM

There are some people who just refuse to sincerely apologize. My favorite example of this phenomenon is taken from a U.S. television franchise called "The Real Housewives," in which the cast members have become notorious for doling out feigned apologies. Instead of simply apologizing for hurting someone's feelings, for example, it's more common for them to say something like, "I'm sorry if your feelings were hurt."

That, my friends, is not how you say, "Sorry."

Click here for more details.

So, Next Time You Mess Up......you know what to do.

Granted, admitting when you’re wrong is still anything but a simple task. And figuring out how you’re going to make it right isn’t a process that can take place overnight. But one thing you can do immediately is to admit your mistake. Ask for feedback. Be transparent. And remember -- “I’m sorry” can go a long way.

Team, this is something that we can start doing right away - with our clients, prospects and everyone with whom we work with. 

LEVEL3 is a collaborative workspace that brings Unilever, startups, and entrepreneurs together to deliver meaningful business impact. An innovation ecosystem that encourages experimentation to pioneer new business solution and create lasting partnerships.

https://medium.com/level3-speaks/unilever-foundry-launches-innovation-community-level3-76c81813edec

and Tish Wong  is the author - https://medium.com/@tishwong  Tish wants to live in a world filled with eccentric creativity and odd out-of-the-box innovation, laden with edible books made from white chocolate.

and she knows Ayush very well !!

Team, as we execute various iterations of the different projects, we will / shall come across different clarificatons points raised by our customers. These help us in getting our understanding aligned. The efforts spent on this is crucial and important as it helps us to clarify our own understanding and it is knowledge. One such information is the way our base entities concerning customer/accounts/leads/opportunities, ets is created, linked and stored. It is not comprehensive but better than not having it documented. Please have a read, as it shall be updated on an ongoing basis. 

Executive Summary
A document that captures the discussions and responses to queries from Satya on concepts centering around different entities (members, accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, enterprises, etc) viz structures, linkages / entity relationships and administrative aspects.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y2QszRLE8W20RtptPanawiR-3FLMPNaXEznDoZg08xs/edit

Accompany, the developer of an app designed to serve as a user's chief of staff. The product integrates with the user’s email, contacts, calendars and social & professional feeds and combs publicly available sources to provide information about people and companies. 

https://www.accompany.com

https://app.accompany.com/

Usermind, a developer of software designed to help companies automate their customer interactions with the goal of improving revenue, retention and profitability. 

https://usermind.com/

https://usermind.com/product

https://usermind.com/solutions

Team,

Pse go through the URL here and the shared the FB Post and LinkedIn Post after liking it. 

Updated : Mar 6th 2017

#1. MCI unveils digital economy strategy for people, firms and Government

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/mci-unveils-digital-economy-strategy-for-people-firms-and/3571876.html

"The Infocommunications Media Development Authority (IMDA) and Cyber Security Agency (CSA) will work with agencies such as SPRING on the SMEs Go Digital programme announced at Budget 2017, said Dr Yaacob.........Concluded Dr Yaacob: “The digital economy is coming. It will create growth, jobs and higher wages for Singaporeans, but will also require us to adapt and be open to many changes… Our businesses and people... must be willing to take advantage of these opportunities, making the effort to re-learn, up-skill and keep pace with technology.""

#2. Government to partner two leading employment agencies to help unemployed professionals

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/government-to-partner-two-leading-employment-agencies-to-help/3571486.html

SINGAPORE: The Government will partner two private-sector employment agencies to help unemployed professionals get back to work, announced Manpower Minister Lim Swee Say in Parliament on Monday (Mar 6).

Speaking during his ministry’s Committee of Supply debate, Mr Lim said these two agencies, who have been working with government agencies in the UK and Australia, were chosen because of their business focus on active, rather than passive job seekers.

---- snip -----

WAGE MISMATCH: SUPPORT FOR MATURE PMETs

Mr Lim also provided details on the enhancements of the Career Support Programme, to help three groups of PMETs who have been unemployed for a longer duration. Employers who hire unemployed mature PMETs who have been actively job searching for a year or more would receive a higher wage support for a longer period of time - 18 months compared to the current 12 months.

For this group, the government would help pay half of the worker’s wages for the first 6 months, 30 per cent for the subsequent 6 months, and 20 per cent for the last 6 months.

For PMETs aged 40 to 49 years who have either been made redundant or unemployed for six months, the government would now double their wage support. This could be up to S$25,000 in wage support given to employers who hire them.

Finally, employers of PMETs below 40 years of age would receive 20 per cent for the first six months, and 10 per cent for the next. In the end, Mr Lim said the success of the enhanced Adapt and Grow initiative is not how much money the government puts in to help both jobseekers and employers. “(It depends on) how much our jobseekers are prepared to adapt and grow, and how much our employers are prepared to be fair and inclusive,” he said.

Lean, agile startups and mammoth corporations might sound like unlikely partners, but working together could actually make perfect business sense for both parties.

A good read on why startups and corporations should collaborate: https://goo.gl/ZYboKX