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All about Blockchain Consortia

Merriam-Webster online gives this definition of a consortium: “An agreement, combination, or group (as of companies) formed to undertake an enterprise beyond the resources of any one member.” One part that we are looking at here is “group of companies.” Many times, these groups of companies will comprise participants that are competitors in the same market. And the second aspect that we are looking at is “beyond the resources of any one member.”

Because the current business world primarily doesn’t operate like this today, this state of coopetition can be challenging to establish. However, it is worth pursuing because companies can look to get returns that would not be possible independently. In that pursuit, companies looking to use blockchain technology come together in some form of a consortium to build the solution together. As Deloitte’s 2019 Global Blockchain Survey found, there are various reasons why companies might look to join a consortium.

As companies start looking into and experimenting with blockchain, they get to the point of trying to figure out how to best work with other players in an organized fashion. Optum technologies started by learning about blockchain technology. They evaluated blockchain’s impact on their business, decided the use case to pursue, and started looking to build relationships with other insurers interested in working together. The idea was to find a few national insurers who want to participate in the experiment and benefit by trying to solve the use case with blockchain.

Participating in various blockchain health care conferences allowed the Optum team to build these relationships with other insurers like Humana, Multiplan, Aetna, etc. These were the efforts that paved the way for consortium conversations. At a high level, the consortium’s founding partners signed a memorandum of understanding to start using the use case to improve provider data accuracy. Each entity had to negotiate up the leadership chain, and the Synaptic Health Alliance was born as a consortium.

Types of Consortia

That’s the route Synaptic Health Alliance took. However, different forms of consortia take shape as companies try to figure out how to best cooperate with competitors. One framework to view the developing consortia trends in the blockchain space is to look at the leadership available to bring the ecosystem together. A consortium steward provides the lead in defining the working relationship of business network partners to help drive the blockchain solution from concept through development and industry adoption. There are two emerging patterns to structure these consortia. First is a founder-led consortium where the consortium steward is one of the companies in the industry ecosystem. The second is where an independent entity provides leadership as the consortium steward.

Founder-led Consortium

A founder-led consortium typically involves an industry thought leader providing an early lead in the adoption of blockchain technology. Often the founder acts as the steward of the business network and is responsible for providing technological and organizational leadership and bringing its business partners along in adopting a blockchain use case. Sometimes a dominant industry player fills this role. At other times, a group of companies comes together to agree and solve a shared business problem. Still, one of the group’s peers would end up taking the lead as the steward of the network. One of them, however, does provide leadership to the group in structuring the alliance.

Irrespective of the consortium steward’s profile, all participants work together to build out the solution, prove it, and invite others in the industry to join in. In this case, the maturation of the product and the consortium would likely progress in parallel. Technical maturity, among other things, includes the progression of developing the solution, establishing standards protocols, defining integrations, etc. Organizational maturity consists of the group’s progress in defining the operating model, governance, etc., and growing the network by making it attractive for other partners to join the consortium.

This consortia structure typically starts with a smaller number of participants, which helps better manage the politics of competitors needing to adjust to the new paradigm of working together toward a common goal. A steward of the blockchain network has to tackle technology, economics, and politics as different facets of the consortium. Having a smaller number of starting members helps not to complicate the politics. If the speed of decision-making is an important factor for the consortium’s success, having a consortium steward helps move things forward at a relatively faster clip. If other consortium partners have a similar idea of the solution, it helps with quicker decision-making.

Although a smaller number of consortium members helps with faster decision-making, there is still a need to have large enough numbers to form a minimum viable ecosystem. After all, network effects influence the consortium’s chances of success. You can’t start a really good blockchain use case that provides value with smaller industry players. It is unlikely to have enough weight. It’s a delicate balance—keeping the numbers small to keep it manageable but large enough to have the outcome be material and attract other industry participants.

On the flip side, though, this structure might cause friction for newer members of the consortium. They might fear that initial members will benefit more and rules are skewed against them. This can give newcomers a reason to hesitate and thus provide friction for adoption and get in the way of growing the consortium.

An example of this consortium is in the retail industry centered around food safety. Walmart has been heavily involved in this initiative. Walmart is one of the world’s largest retailers and one of the first to pilot blockchain technology. Frank Yiannas, the vice president of food safety at Walmart, has come to appreciate the transformative possibilities of blockchain technology. As he explains, “I happen to be a big believer that blockchain is a new and emerging technology that has extreme relevance for food. But I have to tell you, when I first started at this, I was a major blockchain skeptic. But after working with it, and more importantly, piloting it, I’ve become a blockchain believer for sure.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) data have documented the impact of contamination in food supply chains. The CDC estimates that one in six Americans get sick from contaminated foods or beverages each year, and three thousand die as a result. The USDA estimates that foodborne illnesses cost more than $15.6 billion each year.

With technological advances, the food supply chain has grown a lot. Still, it comes with the challenge of keeping food safe throughout the system. Food contamination episodes have a widespread impact on companies in the ecosystem, starting from the producer to the retailers. It also negatively impacts consumer confidence. Consumers may eventually stop buying certain food products for fear of health hazards. Even if one lot has problems, retailers have to remove entire shipments from the shelves because it takes a long time to trace and identify the problem’s origin. They want to err on the side of safety.

Origin tracing is difficult and time-consuming because of various reasons. No one has complete visibility into data on the movement of goods across the entire supply chain. Typically each player in the supply chain only has knowledge of their transaction up the chain with their supplier and down the chain with their customer. A complete picture needs to be put together, one piece at a time. Stitching it together isn’t easy either because much of the record maintenance is not standardized. There is also widespread use of paper documents, which means that tracing has to be done manually and takes much longer than it would if digital records were being used. Because the records have been maintained manually—on paper—there is also a higher chance of data mistakes due to user error. The errors need to be reconciled to get an accurate picture. Many foods see commingling from multiple sources coming in from different countries, and traceability is further complicated.

With the early adoption of blockchain, Walmart has seen some early gains. Walmart is focused on food safety, using blockchain technology to help them better manage their supply chains. They decided to tackle two use cases to run pilots—pork in China and mangoes in the US. These pilots have helped Walmart reduce the time it takes to track the origin of items and allows the retailed to have better availability of associated data through the supply chain to improve food safety and reduce waste. In their blockchain pilot on the pork supply chain in China, they could reduce the time needed to track down the meat source from twenty-six hours down to a few seconds. For the pilot on mangoes, as confirmed by Frank Yiannas, “We tried to trace mangoes, sliced mangoes back to the source. The current process took us about seven days, you know, pretty much the industry benchmark. Maybe a little bit faster than at times that happens in some of these health investigations. After blockchain, we could do it in 2.2 seconds.”

Food safety is an area ripe for the use of blockchain technology. Players in the food safety ecosystem have an incentive to work together to solve the problem using blockchain technology. By its very nature, the ecosystem lends itself well to what blockchain can bring to the table. Because food safety is not a competitive issue, participants in the whole ecosystem have an incentive to cooperate. When a food safety issue happens—nobody wins. Suppose there is an E. coli outbreak with consumption of fresh spinach in the interest of consumer safety. In that case, all the spinach that is difficult to trace gets pulled from the shelves. This inability to quickly trace the source also hurts those whose supply chain did not carry the tainted products. This motivates the industry participants to work together and make the solution work. Over and above that, the overall system is too big for any single player to solve it by themselves, making sense to co-operate with the competitors.

To provide traceability throughout the complete supply chain, this kind of effort needs leadership from a key player. That company coordinates other stakeholders and shows them what blockchain technology can offer to solve their collective challenges. The consortium has grown to include Dole, Driscoll’s, Kroger, Tyson Foods, and more. The consortium steward has to define the value for all participants in the ecosystem for its efforts to be successful. Otherwise, wider adoption by breeders, processing plants, cold storage facilities, distribution centers, and retail stores will be difficult to pull off.

Neutral Third-Party-Led Consortium

A startup company or an independent software vendor (ISV) develops a blockchain-based solution to solve a shared problem within the industry in a neutral third-party-led consortium. This independent company brokers the consortium’s workings and manages the operational and governance structure to attract participants in the ecosystem to join the network. This neutral third party provides the lead in building the solution, starting from the product’s initial conception, and working toward development, and finally, implementation and support.

In this scenario, because there is no one company leading the effort, there is less fear amongst other partners about working in the shadow of a big brother imposing on them. That makes for easier recruitment of newer members to grow the network. Because it is a neutral environment, it is also relatively more straightforward for competitors to start working together. This neutral environment helps reduce any drag on adoption.

As we see in other business situations, when you have many decision-makers at the table who have an equal say in matters of decision making, the going can be slow. Different opinions and points of view need to be reconciled to achieve consensus. That can be challenging and time-consuming. In such a situation, this model can help move things along faster.

As Dan Salmons, CEO of Coadjute, explained to me, “It seemed to us that the answer was to create a company that could present a solution rather than wait for one to be agreed on.” Coadjute is on a mission to digitally connect the UK’s property market by bringing together various disparate players in the industry: estate agents, conveyancers, surveyors, brokers, lending banks, etc. The end goal is to improve the customer’s home buying experience.

“I had a problem here that I didn’t know the solution to. I was out hunting; how on Earth would you give a comprehensive end-to-end experience to customers in a very fragmented property market?” explained Dan. The home buying process is pretty complex because a buyer needs to engage with multiple businesses. Just think of all the steps you have to take when you buy a home. First, you find a real estate agent and start looking for a home.

Meanwhile, you also need to figure out how big a home you can afford. How large of a loan will the bank give you? You work with a bank for the preapproval. And then, at some point in time, you need a home inspector to help you understand what you are walking into. You work with a mortgage broker to find the right loan for you. An appraiser will come in to help before the loan is closed. You probably don’t know what exactly every entity providing a service to you does throughout this long process, but there are associated fees.

Each of the entities you interact with during the buying process is part of a vertical sub-industry, i.e., real estate agents, banks, home inspectors, mortgage brokers, assessors, etc. “Each one of these verticals—state agency has been digitized in some great platforms. . . . Conveyancing has been digitized, the legal piece with some great platforms if you want to do that. Brokering has been digitized. Mortgage lending is being digitized. Surveying is being digitized. But collectively, when you go on this process, you have to knit all that together,” explains John Reynolds, founder of Coadjute.

The individual pieces work well, but the end-to-end value chain is fragmented. It’s tough for a consumer to get through it all. A buyer has to stitch it all together as they go through this process across different verticals. This situation leads to a longer buying time, which can go up to four or five months, with increased cost going up to 4 percent of the property values. John goes on to explain, “If I want to buy your house, and your name is on the land register as owning the house, really all we’re trying to do is change that to my name and put some money in your account. But to do that, we’ve got like these six companies and all these things we will navigate through.” Buying a home is a watershed moment in people’s lives. But the home buying process often brings along stress and frustration.

For Coadjute, it all started as a research project. Looking at different UK government agencies, you can’t expect them to close down their systems and move to a single government platform. Could they create a distributed ledger that would keep their databases in sync? When the UK Land Registry department floated a bid, they went for it. A POC was built to test the shared ledger concept for the complete home buying process—from someone starting to list their house until someone moves in. They created nodes for each of the different players in the value chain. When they put out an invitation for companies to test it out, they received an overwhelming response.

Fifty nodes were set up across twenty-two countries to create dummy properties and complete transactions around them. The POC proved that such a solution would go a long way in reducing the repetition, cost, and friction involved in the whole home buying process.

But the move from POC to production is enormous because it is about adoption. The POC showed that the solution will work technologically, but will industry participants be willing to adopt it? So, the next question was how to move into production successfully. The team realized that the industry participants already have systems they use, and it would be difficult for them to move off those systems and onto a new platform. The research around this challenge gave birth to the idea that Coadjute will be this network of platforms. So, they went and talked to leading platform providers in different verticals to work closely with them.

With that group, they moved into a non-production MVP. They connected the Coadjute platform to test environments of these other industry-leading platforms and make them available as a mobile solution. With this platform’s help, a buyer can track their home buying journey and get a mortgage and move home in one simple online journey. By bringing together leading actors at each stage of the value chain, they can now create this end-to-end experience for the consumer.

To some extent, governance is not tricky for Coadjute. They are not targeting disintermediation or disrupting the industry, nor are they threatening the existing players. They are helping facilitate the end-to-end process for the current industry players. Some players in the property market have been very keen to see the Coadjute solution built. Others are interested but a little bit more ambivalent. There is a varying degree of commitment. There is also considerable variation in the types of companies involved. You have small software companies and also very large banks. This fragmented market with many small players leads to distrust that a big player might try and take it over. With all of this variability, following the third-party model seems to be a good fit.

As Dan explained, “We are seen as a trusted, independent, sort of objective third party by all the players in the market. Coadjute means collaborate, and you’ll hear us say that we don’t intend to disrupt the market. We want to support it. We’ve gone out of our way to try and be a good friend and supporter of all the companies involved.”

Consortia are turning out to be the vehicle for collaboration utilized to tackle use cases that are beyond the means of one single company. Many ecosystems are adopting this approach to come together and learn about blockchain technology and build industry-wide solutions. Consortia enable the participants to take advantage of blockchain technology and solve common problems while maintaining the needed boundaries as competitors.

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Platform-Based Metrics, Tools and Solutions, and KPIS

We have talked over a number of universal, government social media strategy template, platform-independent metrics, but other metrics usually are uniquely defined and intended for specific platforms. Once again, we can easily evaluate the basic, advanced, approach, and behavioral metrics aimed with each current podium. Like the platforms themselves, often the metrics available on each adjust frequently. Thus, it is important to understand basic underlying principles in the metrics used and to mature a flexible mindset.

Along with amassing the metrics from everyone platform, we also ought to explore third-party tools that you can get to help collect, analyze, in addition to report the insights accumulated on each platform. Some tools (e. g., Twitter) have already been open with their application computer programming interface (API) with thirdparty tool developers, but other folks have not.

When evaluating personal platform and third-party equipment, ask yourself the following questions: Just what metrics is the platform previously using? Is it using only simple metrics, or exploring innovative metrics as well?

What is the repayment model? Are the tools free of charge? Does the platform have a month to month fee? What different strategies does it offer? What capabilities does it offer? Keep in mind that info equal money, and these applications can be somewhat expensive with regards to the scope and the amount of records you want to collect. What records is the tool able to obtain and report on? Many tools focus on single tools, while others are broader and will include a variety of platforms. Some tools provide historical data and various metrics based on location, podium, and key word analysis. Determined by what you are willing to invest in in addition to use, it is important to note just where each tool lands inside your social media budget and review. How does the platform measure each and every metric, and how does it estimate the results in its reports? If the platform is not willing to reveal how it comes up with it is influence, engagement, and other scores, this should raise a red rag. Does the platform offer exercising and educational opportunities? Examining the particular clients of each platform, the particular support it gives to consumers, and whether or not it is ready to supply training and educational assets are other factors to consider. It’s the one thing to use a tool, but including all aspects of social media, applications evolve, and it is important to observe the longevity of a podium based on this element. The time has the platform been proven in the field? There are a number connected with monitoring and listening expert services, and you should note how long they've been part of the community, how many information they have, what clients many people serve, and in which activities they have participated. How much will do a service cost? Most social media marketing analytics tools are cost-effective, but some are designed for enterprise clientele, which means they are pretty pricey. When evaluating the cost of this tool, be sure to identify their capabilities, the type of data they are able to acquire, and what you will be able to do with your data.

What is the Bridge Between Tracking and Listening?

While there is actually a difference between listening to social media marketing conversations and measuring your data, the bridge that attaches these two areas is approach. Creating a framework that is able to acquire insights from conversations in social media (research) and convert them into applicable actions steps (practice) is what approach can bring to the table.

Binding Everything Together With Analysis

We must determine the overall impact and also significance of our data studies and insights for our daily business and communication routines. These insights can help determine what will be working and not working for a company or business online through different social media protocols. First and foremost, just before identifying your key metrics for analysis, you have to arrange them with the set targets for your social media channels as well as campaign. Your goal might be to raise brand awareness, engage in considerably more conversations online, or can help level of negative ratings this happen online. The metrics that you focus on have to be interconnected with the objectives you have established. Essentially, objectives are what you look for to accomplish, and metrics in addition to analysis represent what you are currently able to accomplish. Ideally, you should take into account these objectives follow the major specific, measurable, achievable, natural, and time-specific (SMART) set of guidelines.

There are a lot of metrics from which to choose. Determine the following questions to help choose ones to use (Dawley, 2017):

How does this metric hook up with my objectives?

Is this metric really applicable to what I have to accomplish?

What category performs this metric represent?

How will that metric inform me in relation to my social channels in addition to online presence?

Do I contain the right tools (and knowledge) to collect and analyze that metric?

A frequent concern that arises in web 2 . 0 is whether or not many information need to be done (aka math). The answer is... of course. Fortunately, typically the formulas are straightforward. Many are consistent across platforms, nevertheless other services and instruments calculate metrics based on their unique algorithms. When evaluating along with analyzing your data, double-check the information you have and reports just to cause them to saying what you think they can be saying. Some tools tend to be focused on service-level metrics (e. g., vanity metrics) without having diving into the detailed behavior metrics we may want to increase our social media reports, situation studies, and campaigns with regard to clients and brands.

One of the primary metrics to report is actually social media return on investment (ROI). Roi is a common metric used to assess whether the investment (money) a brandname or company put into the campaign accomplished the create goals and objectives. Hootsuite talks about social ROI as “the sum of all social media measures that create value” (Dawley, 2017). Essentially, social media ROI might be calculated by multiplying the gain or total investment by simply 100 (Dawley, 2017). Public ROI is not only a metric that needs to be included to determine the all round success of the campaign you will be launching, but it also helps identify

Overall stance within the sector among your key people Where you need to invest along with drive your resources for you to in the future Both gaps along with opportunities for future marketing campaign initiatives The impact social media is wearing your bottom line as well as popularity and community relationships

Do’s and Don’Ts in Social networking Research and Analysis

Maintain the following best practices in mind in relation to social media monitoring and tuning in. First, there should be a designated man or woman or team for keeping track of and listening to the chats on social media. With suitable training (Google Analytics, Hootsuite, HubSpot, etc . ), scanning specialists will be prepared to not only support identify the key metrics along with KPIs to track, but also to be aware of how to apply these studies to actionable steps along with relate this information and how its connected to strategy to senior operations.

Second, in order to do the best job, social media professionals must get the right tools, especially social websites management tools. Social media operations tools come in different sizes, target areas, metrics and files collection capabilities, and prices. The harder data, filtering and historic capabilities, and reporting steps you want to have, the more costly your tools are going to be. Hootsuite, Buffer, Talkwalker, Sprout Interpersonal, Spredfast, HubSpot, Sprinklr, Radian6, Nuvi, Zoomph, and MavSocial are just a few providers to examine. Each system has cool features, prices, and capabilities, and also the social media professional in charge of checking and listening has to get all of these items into consideration. Showcasing a request for proposal (RFP) to each provider and viewing which one has the best program for a company’s social media administration capabilities and needs may be the greatest approach.

Third, social media checking and listening is just the starting. It all comes down to how social networking professionals apply these insights in order to strategies. Just collecting information in spreadsheets without performing on the results will collect electronic dust. Look at the insights and find out if any specific proper or creative applications could be implemented. This could result in making more content focusing on specific themes or trends, and even posting content at peak times on specific channels.

4th, monitoring and listening have to be connected to evaluating the actions and actions you want your own personal audiences to take. If you want to obtain certain goals for your corporation or business (e. grams., engagement and word-of-mouth), you will need to engage and talk with your own personal audiences. Establish a set insurance policy and engagement protocol, however, that specifies how your own personal team members should properly indulge to best reflect your manufacturer voice and community. Therefore team members do not go off piece of software and cause a crisis to the team and for the brand. It is rather tempting to express emotion or maybe try to be snarky, for example , currently trendy and people respond to the idea. This could cause serious troubles and drive metrics along with trends about your brand throughout unwanted directions. Or the social websites manager could fail to consider every one of the different interpretations that a meaning might have, resulting in miscommunication.

Good example occurred with the Pepsi company in April 2017 inside Kendall Jenner campaign. The particular campaign featured Jenner providing an Pepsi to a policeman while she was part of any protest, which sparked plenty of outrage from Pepsi’s followers. In response, Pepsi apologized to be able to Jenner, but not to Pepsi’s audiences. Failing to consider the particular conversations and sentiment portrayed by audiences when creating its statement resulted in a greater crisis for Pepsi.

Driving content you feel is beneficial is one thing, but see where the night takes us when you listen to how your current audience members respond and also send them a relevant reply. Whether it is a thank-you, a great emoji, or a question to aid drive the conversation considerably more, this helps spark a dialogue with your audience, which results in involvement. Wendy’s, Taco Bell, as well as the Rock have found that if they will not only share content but engage with their audiences with social media, the result is even more targeted visitors and reach than once they just pushed content solely.

Last but not least, do not let vanity metrics (e. g., number of comments) be clouded by junk emailers. A lot of bots are selected to like (e. r., like farms), share, as well as comment on content (e. r., bots on Instagram). Even though increasing their numbers could possibly be appealing, social media professionals have got to look deeper and see in the event that an account is real not really. Filtering out fake health care data can be time consuming, but it is very necessary to see what’s definitely going on. Some social media managing platforms and services accomplish this automatically, but it is up to our professional to avoid inflating as well as misleading others with statistics.

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Digital Flyers used by retailers

Digital flyers are the online version of the print flyer, available on the retailer website or mobile app, which have been identified by business press as a recent addition to retailers’ digital assets (Ray 2011). Making the flyer available online, however, means different things for different retailers. Some digital flyers recall the early days of the web, when websites were “brochureware”, i.e. pdf versions of print ads. Some retailers, on the other hand, have seized the opportunity to enhance flyers by “augmenting” them with digital features such as:

Search engine internal to flyer, to enable in-flyer search of product offers by brand, category, and even percentage-off product price;

Electronic coupons associated with each featured product that the customer can download or save electronically (i.e. to an online shopping list);

Save item to shopping list, for printing, sharing, e-mailing;

Product details that can be accessed by clicking on the product image: nutritional values, traceability, ratings by other shoppers;

Recipes featuring the flyer products accessible as videos, QR codes and links;

Send flyer via e-mail;

Share flyer or single offer via text message or social plugins;

Make flyer printable and downloadable, whole or single page;

Flyer app: an app that allows for flyer push receiving, browsing and other flyer interactions and services (forward, share, save item to shopping list);

“Shop through flyer”: by connecting to e-commerce functionalities consumers can click on the image of products featured in the online flyer and access the retailer’s (or manufacturer’s or third party’s) e-commerce website where the item can immediately be purchased.

Retailers who can leverage their customer information database for insight can go much further in the exploitation of the opportunities offered by digital channels. For example, the US Stop and Shop supermarket chain has combined loyalty data with a program from Datalogix that enables the retailer to find its customers while they are surfing the web and deliver the flyer online to them in real time by displaying a targeted ad that links to the retailer’s online flyer (Alaymo 2011). In-store visits and sales can be directly attributed to the online campaign through the shopper card data. The retailer reported strong return on the campaigns.

A new type of information intermediary, the flyer aggregator, provides an opportunity for retailers who want to develop a digital presence for their flyers and extend their reach, as discussed below.

Flyer Aggregators

Flyer intermediaries have been on the market for over a decade, and have expanded rapidly in recent years. Some are in essence price comparison services, as they basically help customers find the cheapest store for their shopping list by calculating price indexes for store comparison. Others play the “discovery” key as they aim to enhance flyer browsing convenience and enjoyment. One leading player, Shopfully, owner of several flyer browsing services in different countries, defines its business as: “the last mile media, the first source of geolocalized information on promotions, new products, shops, opening times and contacts of the main retailers and brands in all shopping categories, from grocery and drugstores to discount, clothing, electronics, office supplies, sporting goods, hardware and home and many others.” (www.​shopfully.​com).

Retailers cooperate with flyer aggregators because of consumer interest in finding flyers online, and because at the same time only a fraction of a retailer’s customer base log on to their websites to read flyers. Customers enlisted in loyalty card databases can be reached directly. Other customer segments such as cherry pickers, “shared customers” and prospects are more difficult to reach and pull to the retailer’s website to read the flyer. An effective way to do this seems to be by leveraging the new online flyer intermediaries. Consumers enjoy the convenience of browsing only flyers relevant to their search, i.e. those featuring the desired category/product/brand, on offer for the period of their choice, and in the preferred geographical area. Consumers who register with the aggregator get notified immediately of the release of new relevant flyers: an advantage in the common case of limited available quantities of promoted products.

Flyer aggregators compute new metrics for flyers such as:

Bounce-back rate (% of customers leaving the flyer after seeing the first page)

Time spent with flyer

Time spent in zoom mode

Views by device: % of views through smartphone, tablet, desktop PC

Number of page views per page

Percentage of viewers who zoomed on featured items per page: as it is assumed that viewers zoom on a product when it is of interest, the number of zoom actions or number/percentage of viewers who zoomed on each page provides information on how attractive each page is, hence supporting the improvement of the flyer construction process Heatmap of zooms per page: with each page featuring many products, it is relevant to understand where viewers’ attention fixates on each page. As zooms are considered a proxy for attention and, consequently, interest, a “heatmap” representation—similar to eye tracking research heatmaps—generates insight into which item/items or area/areas of the page command greater attention

Retailers can use these metrics to address the above mentioned problem of poor measurability of flyers.

Insight provided by aggregators can support informed decisions on the optimal number of flyer pages, number of items per page and more. As flyer aggregator services are available on a variety of platforms, such as smartphones and tablets, metrics can be computed for browsing activities taking place both at home, in the store or on the go, shedding light on the flyer role at different stages of the consumer path to purchase and on device preferences among customers.

By polling the subscribers’ database, the aggregator knows how many customers visited a store after browsing the flyer online, how many switched store, whether they also browse print flyers. By asking subscribers for additional personal information (or partnering with retailers to merge customer database information with the aggregator’s own data on customers’ use of the platform) the aggregator gains valuable insight for targeting, such as demographics and shopping behaviour. The Italian leading platform Doveconviene.it discovered that users of digital flyers live in smaller towns where print flyers are less intensely distributed due to higher costs, and where distance to store is greater, making it a worthwhile customer choice to determine the destination store based on the information of available offers. Doveconviene.it also confirmed the US finding (Nielsen 2011) that users of flyer intermediaries are retailer’s “non-loyal” customers—a different audience.

from the retailer’s own digital assets visitors. Metrics and insight could also support a retailer’s negotiation of advertising contribution with brand manufacturers based on “quality” of flyer space, number of views (“reach” of the flyer), number of zooms (“interest in the product”) and more.

At present, the promotional strategy scenario is one where traditional flyers are widely used in many markets and a growing number of retailers are popularizing the new digital flyer. Intuitively, traditional flyers will not require integration with the company’s other channels whereas the advanced features of digital flyers described above are only available for retailers who adopt an omnichannel approach. The scenario described so far encourages more research into the effectiveness of digital versus print flyers. Findings from literature concerning the print versus online effectiveness comparison provide only weak support for an overall superiority of print. It is unclear to what extent print may be considered more effective than online. To our knowledge, no studies have been conducted, neither in the advertising nor in retailing, estimating the effect of print versus online on customer responses in terms of actual behaviour.

smart goals for leadership development examples

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The digital detox

I would love a digital detox,” says Jayson Brinkler, a photographer in his forties with an exhibition in Paris.

Given he has a shade under 70,000 followers on Instagram, Brinkler is a surprising advocate for being less connected, as well as being a passionate advocate of film photography. “Film is a dying art,” he tells me. “Kodak went into liquidation, Agfa went, Polaroid went, all the big institutions that we know in photography that kept the industry going have disappeared.” In its place, disposable digital images, samey Instagram feeds and a constant demand to upload more. “It is exhausting,” said Brinkler.

Six photographers are freezing and on a bi-monthly photowalk organised by Abdul Hye, a dental nurse in his mid-30s. The catch? There’s not a single SD card or CMOS sensor in the cameras draped from each photographer’s neck. Except Brinkler, that is. “I was half expecting to be lynched today,” he tells me, for only bringing his iPhone, albeit with a handsome Zeiss lens strapped to its rear camera.

Our photographers aren’t alone either. A survey released in February 2018 listed the top five things people missed that had been replaced or killed entirely by technology: while creating mix tapes topped the list, photography was writ large. Putting photos in albums, hanging printed photos, and the thrill of opening a pack of newly-developed photographs made up three of the remaining four slots.

But in the face of the technological onslaught, groups around the world are resisting the march of time.

Film photographers are the thin end of the wedge: there are those who swear not only by the design and tactile appeal of their leather-bound planners but also by their efficiency benefits, and those who would rather push pieces around a board than dispatch Nazis in Call of Duty.

There are hints of a trend: in 2017 Facebook revealed it had lost 700,000 daily users, while the amount of time spent on the site dropped by 50 million hours per day. And, with a 2017 study reporting that heavy users of social media reported worse mental health, the loss of analogue pursuits could be to everyone’s detriment.

BULLDOZED BY TECH

Alex Batterbee tells me he feels “bulldozed” by the constant demands of digital. He breaks off to concentrate on the Indonesian coast, where one of his warships has been abruptly sunk by the Chinese navy. Alex is one of the organisers of a community who meet in pubs across to indulge in the apparently simple, old-school joys of board games.

Alex and five others are around a table on the mezzanine floor of a hotel where they and around 50 other gamers have met to peruse a huge selection of board games that allow them to colonise Mars (Terraforming), pit the forces of good against evil in the middle ages (Avalon) or, in the case of Alex and his group, set a nation on course for world domination (Imperial 2030). The game is so bewilderingly complex that I watch it for an hour and manage to leave knowing less than when I arrived. “This board is kind of dry,” admits Andy Wingrave, looking up from a byzantine set of rules. “But it’s just really fun to play because of the interactions with everybody.”

The idea that analogue pursuits are the preserve of Luddites and the left-behind are quickly dispelled by the “boardies”. In between outbreaks of internecine warfare and complex tax negotiations, it turns out virtually all of the group are enthusiastic technologists. “Video games are a massive part of my life,” says Wingrave. “I started actually coming here to get out of the house.”

Maria Gillies adds: “I’ve always played video games, ever since I was a kid. I used to play more video games than actually going out with human beings.” The difference between board games and online games? “You don’t talk about how your day was,” she says. “Here, even though sometimes we’re playing with strangers, you get to talk about how you are, and how your life’s been. It’s that social interaction.”

Social media gets a colder reception. “I’m a developer,” Wingrave tells me. “I work with technology all day, but I don’t use Facebook and I don’t use Instagram.” Gillies tells me she’s another social media refusenik and Anne Learoyd takes a break from managing the United States’ military to admit to being on Facebook but nothing else.

GETTING IN THE WAY OF LIFE

“I think that a lot of digital technology interrupts your life,” Charlotte Longworth tells me. Longworth runs a group whose 1,500 members meet up to shoot images on film, while Longworth herself runs workshops helping beginners process their own rolls. “I think there’s a thing now where people feel a bit overwhelmed with technology,” she says. “[They’re] overwhelmed with being sat in front of a computer all day there’s something getting back to them in i lm that feels real and physical.”

For those coming from digital photography high-quality, forgiving on sloppy technique and near-instant the appeal of film can be oblique. “People like having the discipline,” says Longworth. “What you’d think would be its weakness is actually one of the strongest things about it.”

The gaggle of photographers agrees. The group’s organiser, Abdul Hye, argues film forces photographers to be more thoughtful. “When you shoot film you’re kind of editing as you’re going along,” he says. Film photography isn’t only for amateurs looking for hip-looking kit. “You learn your craft,” pro Jayson Brinkler tells me. “Anyone can turn up with a digital camera and be trigger happy and shoot lots of images. [But] if you slow your process down, you’re thinking about the light, you’re thinking about the composition, you think about your subject matter. Everything slows down.”

He recounts a portrait shoot in which the subject unexpectedly asked him to shoot a colleague as well. Shooting on a single roll of medium-format Hasselblad film, he found himself with six frames per subject. “That’s all I had to work with, and one of those frames that I came away with is now in the archive of the National Portrait Gallery, so if you think about what you’re doing, it slows your process down and you make sure you come away with the goods.”

There are practical benefits, too. One of the photographers, Marcus Walker, is using a Bronica camera that he picked up for $300 on eBay. “My medium format equipment is equivalent to 100 megapixels [in a digital camera],” says Brinkler. “If I was to buy a 100-megapixel camera, I’m looking at $50,000 to $70,000.”

Excerpt from: https://upscaleexistence.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-ultimate-iphone-buyers-guide.html

[ndveggies]

How to Hire the Best Team

According to Sam Altman, your ideal co-founder is James Bond. But if you’re not that lucky, you should know what qualities to look for in startup teammates.

Altman, the president of Y Combinator, doesn’t mean your startup should be filled with trigger-happy philanderers who spend their free time getting wasted.

But, like James Bond, a great co-founder is unflappable, tough, and knows what to do in every situation. He or she needs to act quickly and be decisive, creative, and ready for anything.

As the leader of a team, you need to have some Bond in yourself, too but don’t worry, the tuxedo is optional along with.

https://thoughtleadershipzen.blogspot.com/2017/01/penetration-pricing-strategy.html

Co-Founder Relationships Are Critical

Altman said that co-founder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.

“You have to watch out for tension brewing among co-founders and you have to address it immediately,” he said.

“The number one cause of early death for startups is co-founder blowups. But for some reason, a lot of people treat choosing their co-founder with even less importance than hiring. Don’t do this!” Instead, make sure you’re looking for someone whose skills complement your own and who can fill in the gaps that you can’t. Also, look for someone with those Bond qualities.

Having a Lot of Employees Doesn’t Mean You’re Cool

Of course, after you find a co-founder, you’ll probably want to start hiring employees. But Altman cautioned founders to resist the urge to hire people right away.

A startup that has many employees may seem cool, but careful hiring in the early stages is key for the longevity of your startup. Only hire when the workload is too much for your existing team.

Unfortunately, the cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high. In fact, Altman said one bad hire can kill a young startup.

Building an effective team takes time and thought. And without a really good team, it will be harder to execute on your ideas and grow your startup. So don’t rush the process.

Learning from Airbnb Five months. That’s how long Y Combinator alum Airbnb spent interviewing their first employee. And they only hired two employees their first year.

Before hiring anyone, the founders wrote down a list of the values that they wanted every Airbnb employee to have. The most important value? Candidates had to “bleed” Airbnb. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t get hired.

For example, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky used to ask people if they would take the job even if they had only one year left to live. That question alone was enough to weed out the people who didn’t really possess the values Airbnb was looking for.

Your employees play a huge part in defining your company. That’s why you need to hire people who believe in your startup as much as you do.

Hiring Amazing People

Altman said, “The best source for hiring by far is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know.”

Experience is not always a reliable factor. Experience matters when you’re hiring someone to manage a large part of your organization. But for your early hires, consider their aptitude and their belief in your mission instead.

The Importance of Projects

Startups don’t operate like traditional businesses, so why hire like one?

Altman recommended having the candidate work on a project in lieu of an interview. But if you’ve decided on conducting traditional interviews, then you should at least ask about projects that people have worked on in the past.

Reference Check

Altman also proposed contacting their references and asking questions like:

Is this person in the top 5% of people you’ve ever worked with?

What specifically did they do?

Would you hire them again?

Why aren’t you trying to hire them again?

Attributes of an Ideal Candidate

Here are some of the key qualities to look for in a potential hire:

Good communication skills

Risk-taking attitude

Maniacally determined

According to Altman, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tries to hire people that he’s comfortable hanging out with in a social situation. Zuckerberg also looks for someone he’d be comfortable reporting to if the roles were reversed.

It’s important that you enjoy working with your employees. Your team doesn’t need matching BFF necklaces, but nothing is worse than resenting someone with whom you spend 40-60 hours a week.

When it comes to attracting and maintaining talent, it doesn’t hurt to offer generous equity.

It’s better to give your employees more equity than your investors, because employees will only add more value over time. According to Altman, Y Combinator companies that have done this well are often the most successful.

Retaining Your Employees

Of course, your work is not done after you hire your employees; now you need to retain them. And that can actually involve more work than the hiring process.

With retention, the goal is to ensure that your employees are happy and feel valued. That means that first-time CEOs need to learn management skills.

According to Altman, a speaker at a Y Combinator event told other startup founders how he learned from his failings as a CEO. Even though he’s successful now, he had a hard time holding on to his employees early on in his startup.

Someone asked him what his biggest struggle was and he said: “Turns out you shouldn’t tell your employees they’re fucking up every day unless you want them all to leave because they will.”

Qualities of a Great CEO

As a CEO, you have to be aware that, by default, you’re going to be a bad manager.

You need to overcompensate for that with these tips, which come down to giving employees autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Famed business author Dan Pink said those are great motivators to get people to do great work.

Let your team take credit for all the good stuff. You need to take responsibility for the bad stuff.

Don’t micromanage. Let people have small areas of responsibility. This will actually push them to work harder.

Firing People When It’s Not Working

Altman said there are three things to ask yourself about a potential hire. If the answer to all three is “yes,” then chances are you won’t regret your hire.

Are they smart?

Do they get things done?

Do I want to spend a lot of time around them?

Unfortunately, though, for one reason (or many) things won’t work out sometimes. Despite taking all the care in the world during the hiring process, sometimes you need to fire people.

If you’re hesitant about firing someone, it helps to evaluate his performance. Most people will mess up a few times. But if a person always does the opposite of what you would have done in a given situation, then you need to let him go.

If it’s not working out with one of your employees but you don’t want to fire him, then maybe you just need to move him into a new position. It helps to hire smart people who are great at learning new things. Those kinds of people will fit pretty much anywhere you put them.

Execution Makes All the Difference

Execution is one of those founder tasks that you can’t outsource. Ideas are worth nothing without execution.

If you look at a company that executes well, chances are its CEO is a master executor. So if you want a culture where people work hard, pay attention to detail, and manage the customers, you have to represent those qualities as a leader.

Whatever the founders do becomes the culture.

A CEO’s job is often categorized as having four components – see the vision, raise money, evangelize the mission to people you’re trying to recruit, and hire and manage the team. But Altman said that there’s a fifth component: setting the execution bar.

He said, “Execution gets divided into two key questions. One: Can you figure out what to do? And two: Can you get it done?”

Keys to Mastering Execution

1. What you’re spending your time and your money on reveals what you, as a founder, think is important. Identifying the two or three things you need to focus on each day will help you to execute better.

2. Say “no” to almost everything. You need to focus your attention on the right things.

3. Be intense. Running a startup will consume your life, leaving little chance for true work-life balance. You need to outwork your competitors and that means countless long nights, at least in the beginning.

The enemy of execution is indecisiveness.

“Indecisiveness is a startup killer. Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never make a decision.” The power of decisive action is something Altman knows about first-hand.

His company was about to lose out on a deal with an important client, so he called the potential customer and told them that his product was better and tried to set up a meeting with them. They told Altman that they were signing the deal with his competitor and nothing could change their minds.

Instead of accepting defeat, Altman and his team got on a plane and arrived at the potential client’s office at 6 a.m. They ended up ripping up the contract with the other company and Altman’s startup closed the deal with them a week later.

Had they not gotten on a plane and shown up in person, they would’ve missed out on a valuable customer.

Growth and Momentum Fuel Startups

Startups must never lose focus on growth and momentum. That’s why intensity is a requirement for any successful startup. Unlike traditional companies, startups are working to move fast while also being obsessed with quality.

“Momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups,” said Altman.

“You want a company to be winning all the time. If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control. A team that hasn’t won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing. So always keep momentum.”

For most software startups, this means they need to keep growing. For hardware startups, this means that they can’t let their ship dates slip.

In 2008, Facebook’s growth was slowing down and so was their morale. Zuckerberg responded to this burgeoning crisis by creating a growth group to work on small projects.

This group lived up to its name and got Facebook back on track. Morale improved and now the growth group is the most innovative part of the Facebook family.

How to Keep Momentum

Maintain momentum by establishing an operating rhythm at the company early on. This means shipping products and launching new features on a regular basis and reviewing metrics every week with the entire company.

This is where your Board of Directors can come in handy. They often get companies to care about metrics and milestones.

[ndveggies]

The Hypothesis Progression Framework and the Customer-Driven Cadence

In the summer of 2000, General Motors, an American car manufacturer, introduced the Pontiac Aztek, a radically new “crossover” vehicle — part sedan, part minivan, and part sports utility vehicle. It was marketed as the do-it-all vehicle for 30-somethings. It was the car for people who enjoyed the outdoors, people with an “active lifestyle” and “none to one child.”

On paper, the Aztek appeared to be fully featured. It had a myriad of upgrades that included options for bike racks, a tent with an inflatable mattress, and an onboard air compressor. GM even included an option for an insulated cooler, to store beverages and cold items, between the passenger and driver seat. Their ideal customer was someone who would use the Aztek for everything from picking up groceries to camping out in the wilderness.

The Aztek had a polarizing visual aesthetic; many either loved or hated it (most hated it). Critics found its features, like the optional tent and cooler, awkward and downright gimmicky. GM insisted these were revolutionary ideas and suggested that they were ahead of their time. They believed that, once customers took the Aztek for a test drive, they would quickly realize just what they were missing.

After a $30 million marketing push, it appeared that the critics were right. The Aztek failed to make even a modest dent in the overall market. The year that the Aztek was released, the American auto industry had sold 17.4 million vehicles. The Aztek represented only 11,000 of those vehicles (a number that some believed was still generously padded).

To customers, the Aztek seemed to get in its own way. It was pushing an agenda by trying to convince customers how they should use their vehicles, rather than responding to how they wanted to use them.

It’s easy to point at this example in hindsight and ask, “How could GM spend so much time, money, and resources only to produce a car no one wanted?” Some suggested it was because the car was “designed by committee” or that it was a good idea with poor execution. Insiders blamed the “penny-pinchers” for insisting on cost-saving measures that ultimately produced a hampered product that wasn’t at all consistent with the original vision.

The lead designer of the Aztek, Tom Peters, went on to create many successful designs, like the C6 Chevy Corvette and 2014 Camaro Z/28, and eventually won a lifetime achievement award. He suggested that the poor design of the Aztek had started with the team asking themselves, “What would happen if we put a Camaro and an S10 truck in a blender?”

The reality is that it was all of these reasons. Even though it appeared, at the time, that GM was “being innovative,” they had forgotten the most crucial element: the customer. They had fallen in love with a concept and tried to find a customer who would want it.

They were running focus groups and also doing their own market research. They probably even created personas or some variant of the “ideal customer” that was perfect for the Aztek. GM believed they were being customer-focused. Yet they weren’t paying attention to the right signals. They had respondents in focus groups saying, “Can they possibly be serious with this thing? I wouldn’t take it as a gift!”

While we can commend GM for trying to push the boundaries of the auto industry, we must admit that by not validating their assumptions and listening to their customers, they had created a solution in search of a problem.

We make assumptions about everything. It’s a way for us to make meaning of what we understand based on our prior beliefs. However, our assumptions aren’t always grounded in fact. They may come from “tribal knowledge,” experience, or conventional wisdom. These sources start with a kernel of truth, which makes them feel real, but too often we mistake assumptions for facts.

This is not to say that assumptions are a bad thing. They can be incredibly useful in tapping into our intuition. It’s when our assumptions go unchecked that we open ourselves to vulnerabilities in our design.

Unchecked assumptions can have a powerfully negative effect on our products, because they cause us to:

Miss new opportunities or emerging market trends

Make costly engineering mistakes by creating products that nobody will use

Create technical debt by supporting features that customers aren’t using

Respond to problems too late

What’s most dangerous about unchecked assumptions is that they become conventional wisdom and are carried so long that they create a false sense of security. Then a competitor swoops in with a better understanding of the customer and quickly takes over the entire market.

Henry Petroski, a professor at Duke University and expert in failure analysis, once said, “All conventional wisdom has an element of truth to it, but good design requires more than an element of truth — it requires an ensemble of correct assumptions and valid calculations.”

Therefore, it introduces a high level of risk if teams move forward with underlying assumptions that haven’t been formulated, tested, and validated.

What Is the Hypothesis Progression Framework?

The Hypothesis Progression Framework (HPF) allows you to test your assumptions at any stage of the development process. At its heart, the HPF breaks up the development of products into four stages: Customer, Problem, Concept, and Feature.

Using the HPF, your team will:

Formulate your assumptions into testable hypotheses

Validate or invalidate your hypotheses by running experiments

Make sense of what you’ve learned so that you can plan your next move

As the name suggests, the HPF is founded on the principle that if you state your assumptions as hypotheses and try to validate them, you will remain objective and focused on what the customer is telling you rather than supporting unconfirmed assumptions.

For now, understand that each stage in the HPF works together to address these fundamental questions

Who are your customers?

When we sit down with teams, we will often hear something to the effect of, “Oh, we know who our customers are. That’s not our problem.” Then we’ll ask questions like:

What environments do your customers live/work in?

Why do they choose your product over that of your competitors?

What are they trying to achieve with your products?

What unique attributes make your customers different from one another?

You may (or may not) be surprised how many teams have difficulty answering these types of questions.

Customer engagement is not customer development. It’s one thing to engage customers by having an ongoing dialog using social media networks, support forums, and the like. That’s great. However, it’s another thing entirely to systematically learn from your customers and generate actionable insights.

Your customers are not in a fixed position. Their values and tastes change over time. Therefore, you must be willing to journey with them and continually refine your products to remain one step ahead of where they plan to go.

What problems do they have?

At times, we get so enamored and focused on our solution that we need to step back and ask ourselves, “How many people are really experiencing this problem?” or “How much of a frustration is this problem for our customers?” If GM had been willing to ask their customers, “How valuable is it to have your car convert into a tent?” they would have learned that the tent was not solving a necessary problem for most of their customers. We must appreciate that, to create successful products, it’s more than solving a problem — it’s a matter of solving the right problem. The problems can also be identified through social media strategy template.

Will this concept solve their problem and do they find it valuable?

There are many ways to solve a problem, but how can you be confident you’re solving it the right way? Are you sure that customers value the way you’re trying to solve the problem, or are you introducing new problems you hadn’t considered? During the Concept stage, you’re trying to ensure that you’re solving the customer’s problem in a way they find valuable. You want to leverage your customers’ feedback and continually validate that your ideas are on the right track. You’ll establish the benefits of your concept (as well as its limitations) and increase your confidence that you’re building something customers want. Can they successfully use this feature and are they satisfied with it?

We’ve all been excited for a product release only to be disappointed later because it didn’t deliver on its promises. Throughout the design and development process, you must ensure that your concept works as expected and is successful in helping customers solve their problems. While the Concept stage is to ensure you are building the right thing, the Feature stage ensures you are building it the right way.

By using the HPF as a guide, your team will remain customer-focused as it progresses through customer and product development. Together, these stages represent your entire solution. It’s important to note that the HPF doesn’t necessarily need be worked from left to right; it can be started at any stage. Depending on where you are in your product’s development, you may decide to start at the Concept stage or Problem stage. However, you may start at a later stage in the HPF only to discover that you need to answer fundamental questions in the earlier stages. We’ve had teams come to us, ready to conduct usability testing on a feature, only to realize they didn’t truly understand the customer or problem. That’s what makes the HPF so profound: it allows teams to easily understand the stages that need to be validated to ship a successful product.

As we’ve discussed, your customers’ needs evolve over time, and you must be willing to revisit your assumptions about your solution to ensure that it’s meeting the right customer, solving the right problems, creating value, and making your customers successful.

The Customer-Driven Cadence

To remain Lean and customer-focused, teams must operate in a pattern of continuous learning and collaboration. The HPF has been designed to be used in parallel with your product development sprints or schedules. In short, you should be using the HPF while you’re building and refining your products.

We’ve found tremendous success with this approach and have refined it to align more closely with our framework and activities. The Customer-Driven Cadence has three fundamental actions that you’ll employ during each stage of the HPF: Formulating, Experimenting, and Sensemaking. Let’s look at each of these individually:

Formulating (a.k.a. Build)

Throughout the entire customer-driven process, from customer to product development, you’ll be formulating your assumptions, ideas, and hypotheses. This is an important practice because you will need to track the team’s learning along the way. Ries refers to these key decision points as moments where a team needs to “pivot” (change direction) or “persevere” (continue the course). By continually formulating your assumptions and stating them as hypotheses, your team will create a structure that allows you to easily track your assumptions about the customer, their problems, and your ideas of how to respond to those problems. Finally, you’ll need to formulate a Discussion Guide. The Discussion Guide is the set of questions you’ll ask customers in order to prove/disprove your assumptions.

Experimenting (a.k.a. Measure)

Each stage of the HPF has activities where you need to test whether your assumptions were correct. By continually running experiments against your hypotheses, you’ll have the data you need to decide whether to pivot or persevere with your product’s direction. While there are many methods you can employ to test your hypotheses, we heavily emphasizes talking directly with customers.

Sensemaking (a.k.a. Learn)

The customer-driven approach relies on your ability to continually collect and make sense out of customer data. So often, teams fall into a cycle of “build, measure, build, measure, build, measure” and miss the overall learning or broad understanding of their customer.

This is an excerpt form the digital media strategy blog