The challenges of knowledge sharing is becoming more difficult as more information becomes available. According to the Daily Mail, the average person is exposed to enough data to fill 174 newspapers every day. This staggering amount of content highlights how critical it is for companies to have clear channels for interoffice communication. Employees must know how to sort through data and effectively share it with their associates.
Companies are ensuring that their staff members have the proper skills to find and distribute important information. Tools like social media and databases have become key components for knowledge sharing in 2013. The data must be fully understood before businesses can capitalize on it.
Reliable research
The internet has become a valuable tool for information and knowledge sharing, but unfortunately, it web also makes it extremely difficult for employees to find verified data from reliable sources. What seems like a great statistic that’s indicative of a specific market trend may actually be a complete fabrication written by an anonymous blogger. Managers are worried that their employees will rely on false data and unintentionally hurt the business.
The problem has become so severe that Google has stepped in to help. According to The New York Times, the search engine recently began offering courses to show people how to find reliable data. Over 155,000 students joined the first class, and attendance is expected to grow during future installments.
Programs like Google’s classes help bolster knowledge-sharing within an enterprise. Managers should offer research training to their staff members to ensure that data is verified before it’s shared.
Webinars are vital
Webinars and online training are becoming key contributors to knowledge development and sharing. Many companies are using them to ensure that their employees have access to verified information. In-person meetings are being gradually replaced by digital alternatives. The mobile workforce requires constant connectivity, so managers encourage their workers to host and participate in webinars.
An online seminar can be a staff meeting, a product demonstration or any topic related to the industry the participants are in. With webinars, employees ensure that they are speaking with a reliable source, whether it is a client, an associate or a trusted third-party.
Social Media Today points out that many webinar applications allow hosts and attendees to record presentations. These files can be valuable for knowledge sharing. Employees can share the meetings with their associates so that the entire company has access to the information.
Benefits of knowledge sharing
Forbes writes that are three primary benefits of knowledge sharing in the corporate arena: decision-making, learning and innovation. Reliable data allows companies to make the best possible decisions and adapt to market forces. This allows an enterprise to position itself as an industry leader.
They also point out that knowledge sharing fosters an educational atmosphere that makes learning part of the everyday routine. Workers grow as they discover new information and can improve their on-the-job performance.
Finally, data allows companies to monitor trends so that they can improve. Instead of falling behind competitors, a business can innovate its products or internal operations.
Scott Murray is the Social Learning Evangelist for TrainUp.com, the web’s largest career marketplace. He is also a contributor to the Training Insights Blog, a series of blogs dedicated to career and professional development.
The Google Bomb is back! Searching for [miserable failure] in Google now returns George W. Bush’s knowledge graph in the search results.
The Google Bomb first became popular back in 2004 when Google and some other search engines ranked George W. Bush as the number one result for a search on [miserable failure]. In 2007, Google killed the Google bomb from showing up.
But why did it rank in the first place? Google ranks pages based on anchor text of links, among other factors, and many sites bombed Google by linking to George Bush’s webpage with the anchor text [miserable failure]. In 2007, Google decided to prevent Google Bombs from happening.
Now, with the launch of the knowledge graph, George Bush’s related knowledge graph snippet on the right shows up.
I wonder if Google will come up with a method of preventing this from happening or if they will find it relevant for the query.
In short, Matt outlined three topics in this five-minute video.
(1) SEOs confuse algorithm updates with data refreshes.
(2) Panda & Penguin algorithms are not about making Google more money in the short term.
(3) SEOs spend too much energy and time focused on link building and only thinking about search engines.
Algorithm Updates Versus Data Refreshes:
Matt explained that one of the biggest misconceptions he sees in the industry is that SEOs often confuse data refreshes and algorithmic updates. This is a topic we covered before at least once, but in short, here is the difference. An algorithm update is when Google changes the algorithm on how the search results are ranked, indexed or filtered. A data refresh is when Google updates the data where the algorithm runs. For example, we had a Penguin updaterecently; and, that last update was an algorithm update. There was a change to how the algorithm worked. Prior to that, Penguin 3 and 2 were mostly just data refreshes.
Panda & Penguin Updates Are Not About Revenue Gains For Google:
There are many people in the industry that feel Google releases algorithm updates, such as thePanda and Penguin updates with short-term goals of increasing their revenues. Matt said that is absolutely false and the algorithm and organic search results are completely separated from revenue goals.
Matt added that in one of the older earnings report, Panda was listed as a reason why Google’s revenues may not be as high in future quarters. Simply because Panda may have short-term negative impact on Google’s revenues. Why? Because Panda’s goal was to eliminate low-quality content sites that monetized mostly over AdSense revenue.
Then, Matt goes into explaining how Google looks at long-term goals, making the searcher happy, so they come back and search more. Google has methods for letting users take their data and leave. Google is rarely interested in short-term revenue goals, Matt added a few times.
Clearly, this is the PR side of Matt talking; but in my opinion, he 100% believes it.
SEOs Focus Too Much On Link Building & Search Engines:
Matt’s final point in the video is discussing what SEOs spend too much energy focusing on. They include link building and search engines, as opposed to their users. Matt said they can spend more time on social media and other areas to help build awareness of their sites.
He then discusses how the history of great sites, those sites generally focus on design and user experience first. This way the user is happy and recommends it to others. Matt added that Craigslist is a great site; but, their user experience is not great. So, there are many startups that come in and beat them on user experience to take over in some niches.
One of the most common mistakes in any international or local internet marketing campaign is that the campaign does not make sense to most potential customers. Within a few seconds of glancing at your PPC ad or landing page, customers should know exactly who you are, what you do, and what you do not do. Below are a few tips for how to make your Google PPC campaign thrive, from picking the right Google Ad Words to creating the best landing page.
How to pick the right Google Ad Words
First and foremost, make sure that your Google Ad Words are relevant to your business or product. Often, being more specific is better. For example, instead of choosing the word “coffee” for your business that ships green coffeebeans that individuals can roast at home, choose the keyword phrase “green coffee beans.” Chances are, few people looking to find other things associated with coffee—coffee shops, coffee flavored ice cream, coffee pots, coffee gift baskets—are interested in purchasing green coffee beans to roast at home. Reach out to the right customer for your business.
Have a landing page that is easy to understand
After having an ad that clearly states what you offer, make sure that your landing page is easy to understand. Within a few seconds, potential customers should be able to know who you are and what you offer. One problem with many landing pages is that site visitors cannot readily figure out what site they are visiting. You need to ensure that your landing page shows the following, regardless of whether your focus is local internet marketing or international sales:
In a few sentences, say who you are and what you do
This information should be easy to see on your landing page and easy to understand
Creative web design is great. Similarly, having a landing page that looks expensive is important. However, your landing page will only hurt you if you cannot clearly articulate who you are and what you do on it. Remember that potential customers do not owe you anything. It is your responsibility to make sure your message gets across, not their civic duty to try to decode your landing page. Come up with a solid identity and clearly state it in a few simple sentences. If you still question your company’s identity, it’s time to go back to your business plan and figure it out.
Optimizing any Google Ad Words campaign
Always focus on being clear and concise throughout the entire campaign. You don’t want to attract all customers; you want to attract the right kind of customer by clearly articulating what you have to offer. In addition, working with local marketing experts can help guide you through the system to make your internet marketing campaign count. By connecting with the right customers through popular online advertising techniques, you can build a brand for your business to thrive.
Chris Marentis is the founder and CEO of Surefire Social. He has a marked history of branding expertise in the e-commerce and internet marketing industires. For more information, visit http://www.surefiresocial.com/.
When someone is kind of anyway you’re trying to park , And instead of responding with my usual snarkiness, I should have a great ride. You responded with a heavy Norwegian accent, Tanks.
My grandparents were from there. I could’ve an assholes to them, instead I was kind and realize the strength of that Makes it always imperative to be kind of
PERSON 2 – Steve, you OK? The sentences you posted are not making much sense – did you use a new mobile device or is something going on?
Steve Ulrich Apologies to all. One should never try to use speech recognition, while driving!
Steve Ulrich It should have read: when someone was kind of in the way when I was trying to park, Instead of responding with my usual snarkiness, I said “have a good ride”…
PERSON 2 – Hahaha, the equivalent of the “spelling corrector” on the iPhone’s SMS
PUBLISHERS NOTE: I was able to find this, that explains how to simply post videos and images. It seems to work pretty well and is self-prompting. It still does’t have the flexibility, of the old SlideShare application, like autostart. I can’t figure out why they are taking this approach after spending $116M on SlideShare, but it’s not my dime….
PUBLISHERS UPDATE – 5.31.13 – Ive just been informed, and sadly confirmed, that the features below are indeed NOT available to all accounts. Although it seemed to be no problem to drop the applications across the whole platform, for some reason LinkedIn is only allowing some accounts to upload files. It has nothing to do with premium status, but I can upload and some of my clients cannot – yet?
BY EMILY PRICE
LinkedIn added the ability to showcase users’ talents in a whole new way Wednesday: pictures and video. Now LinkedIn users can add visual content to their profile pages, giving more depth to the written content already displayed on the site.For instance, a photographer might choose to include several of her best photos, or a copywriter might upload a video of that ad he wrote for last year’s Super Bowl. Architects can upload the blueprints for a building they designed, and musicians can upload videos of past performances.
Visual content can be added to your summary, work experience and education sections on the site, and can come from your computer’s hard drive or from the web.
On the flip side of the equation, people who are browsing profiles on the site can now like or comment on media uploaded to others’ profiles. A sharing option — for sharing content you find interesting with others — is also in the works.
New media-rich profiles are available now for LinkedIn members in English-speaking countries.
To add media to your own profile on LinkedIn click the “Edit” button on your profile page and follow the prompts in the summary, education and experience sections.
What sorts of content will you be adding to your LinkedIn Profile?
I thought all the crashes and “try later” warnings were bad. Just like the “your contact list is currently not available.”
Then we had to deal with the totally random attacks on keyword stuffing by the LinkedIn Trust & Safety team. If you look up any keyword on LinkedIn, I guarantee you that the first 4 or 5 pages of results will be keyword stuffed in the projects section. So you do the same thing, or you can’t compete. I explained this and the fact that they could write a pretty simple algorithm to detect this, not anything like Google, but they never made an effort.
Now, just as I am getting used to my profile supposedly among the top 1% viewed in 2012, we get a total new look: They have changed all the tabs, removed all the applications, stopped supporting blogs altogether, and cannot tell anyone when they will have the “new application” that will allow you to put up your experiences now supposedly in your summary section -all without any kind of announcement or warning.
WTF? I make my living (in part) as a LinkedIn coach. I have spent the better part of a complete day scrambling to read what little documentation they have, and emailing back and forth to other supposed LinkedIn Guru’s (like anyone can figure out what they are likely to do next) to figure out how to work around this latest “improvement.”
Could this have anything to do with their attempts to monetize LinkedIn? To this point it hasn’t really made any sense to upgrade. Keep your eyes and ears open for some sort of suggestion that there are plug-ins and gizmos available to Premium users, like video upload etc.
I’ll keep you posted as I sort this out (another day or two I didn’t have to re-invent the wheel) as it is excruciatingly apparent that they won’t.
Google’s fourth Penguin update — what the company is callingPenguin 2.0 — hit last night, and less than 24 hours later we’re already getting a first chance to look at what sites might be considered “losers” in terms of search visibility.
The SEO software company, SearchMetrics, has just shared its initial look at what sites have been affected the most by the latest Penguin update. As always, SearchMetrics is using its “SEO Visibility” benchmark, which looks at the visibility of a company’s web pages as they appear (or don’t appear) across a wide range of keywords in Google’s search results.
Here’s their initial list of the 25 biggest Penguin 2.0 losers:
There are eight porn sites on the list of 25, and four game-related sites. Of those game sites, three are listed in the top 10. (You have to merge the porn sites listed at the bottom with the sites above them to get the actual order of impact.)
There are also several well-known brands, like Dish.com, the Salvation Army, ETS, and CheapOair. REEDS jewelers has been around since 1946 and has stores in 18 states. DailyDot.com, also on the list, is a respected online news site.
The column on the far right shows how much “SEO Visibility” each website has lost — at least for the keywords that SearchMetrics tracks. This doesn’t necessarily mean that these websites are all seeing dramatic traffic losses, because they might still have high visibility for keywords that aren’t being tracked. That said, in the couple years that we’ve been reporting on the Penguin and Panda updates, lists from SearchMetrics and a couple other SEO software companies have generally been considered mostly accurate.
In his blog post, SearchMetrics founder Marcus Tober says the impact from this latest Penguin update is smaller than he expected.
It’s not the update I was expecting. I thought that this Google Penguin update would have had a bigger impact similar to Panda 1. But that didn’t happen. My first analysis shows that many thin sites, sites with thin links and especially untrusted links face the problem. In addition, some small business sites were hit because they haven’t taken SEO serious enough.
He also told us via email that the impact was much stronger in Germany than in the U.S., and SearchMetrics details some of the Penguin-hit websites in Germany in a separate blog post(German language).
Companies in the business of dealing with people know how important customer complaints management is – after all, there are very few companies that do not interact with customers on some level; even if there is no direct interaction.
The rules have changed a lot over the past few years, and they are changing even more just about each and every month. What worked in the early part of the 2000s will not work in 2013 – consumers have a far greater soapbox now for one thing, and the way that we communicate in general has also changed greatly.
What exactly are the ‘new rules’ that need to be considered for our current era, and what should companies be doing to adhere to best practices on complaints management? Here are some important things to keep in mind…
Customers are no longer limited to posted letters, limited email and telephone calls. Now, they have all of those channels, as well as personal blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, consumer feedback websites, forums AND word of mouth. Worse still, feedback posted online that mentions your company will show up in internet search results when people are searching for your business online.
Customers are more likely to report on a bad experience than a good one. What this means is that even though the past 150 customers who have purchased your wildly popular gizmo via your snazzy online store are thrilled, not all of them will be shouting your praise to the world. The one or two customers who were not too happy about that gizmo (or your store, or even your delivery process) are another story. Those are the ones who will tell everyone they can just how terrible your company, products and store are – often, on multiple channels for good measure.
Customers can not only become happy again, they can even become your number one fans. This is however, provided that you deal with their complaints properly. Complaints should not be seen as a bad thing for starters – this is a chance to improve your services and goods for the better. For another thing, the way that problems are addressed makes a lot more difference than the actual issue in many cases. In order to effectively address the complaint, you first need to catch it early, escalate it properly and route it to the right person though.
As you can see, the rules continue to change pretty much all the time. What doesn’t change however is the fact that response time and reaction are both vital when it comes to making a bad situation into a good one.
Automating the complaints process with a good software tool is one way to improve your overall systems. You may also want to think about other tools such as competency testing for employees who deal directly with customers. Product reviews and preventative measures such as customer surveys, and also making sure that customers can easily air their views should be top of mind too.
At the end of the day you see, it is far easier to handle a small upset soon after it happens, than risk dealing with the public relations disasters that can (and do) happen overnight when customer complaints are left unchecked. Quite an easy choice really when you think about it that way.
Christopher Stainow is actively involved in the streamlining of business quality processes and procedures through the use of quality management tools & document control software. Learn more at lennoxhill.co.uk.
Financial Specialist Shares Ways to Help Your Child While Protecting Your Retirement
From $20,000 to $65,000 a year – that’s the tuition cost for one year of college, says John McDonough, a money expert who helps retirees and parents plan for their families’ futures.
“For the 2012–2013 academic year, the average cost for an in-state public college is $22,261. A moderate budget for a private college averaged $43,289,” says McDonough, CEO of Studemont Group College Funding Solutions, www.studemontgroup.com. “But for elite schools, we’re talking about three times the cost of your local state school. Either way, your kid’s higher education can easily shoot into six figures after four years.”
Along with worrying about rising tuition prices, parents also fear for their own futures if their retirement savings are drained by children’s college costs, McDonough says. Only 14 percent, for example, are very confident they’ll have the money to live comfortably in retirement, he says, citing a 2012 survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
“Families feel they’re faced with conflicting goals, but there are numerous ways to pay for college while investing in your future retirement,” says McDonough, who offers insights for parents to keep in mind while planning for their child’s education:
• The ROI of a college education: At a time when so many American families are financially strapped, college is an especially stressful topic because parents know higher learning will help their kids succeed. College graduates earn 84 percent than those with only a high school diploma, according to Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. Here is how earning breaks down over one’s life time, based on education: a doctoral degree-holder will earn $3.3 million over a lifetime; $2.3 million is estimated for a college graduate; those with only a high school diploma can expect $1.3 million.
• Move retirement assets to qualify for grants: Most parents know about the 529 savings account, but that’s not necessarily the best or only option. Reallocating your retirement assets, such as 401(k)s, can better position a child to qualify for grants and scholarships. This legal and ethical maneuvering may be the single most important factor when considering how to pay for college.
• Know your student’s strengths and weaknesses: Consider independent and objective analysis of your future college student. Assessment might include a personality profile and a detailed search for a future career. Also think about a more nuts-and-bolts approach, including scholarship eligibility, SAT and ACT prep courses, review of admissions essays and an in-depth analysis of chances for enrollment in a student’s top four choices of colleges.
• Make a checklist of financial aid forms: In order to maximize a fair price of higher education, remember there is plenty of data to review. McDonough recommends a checklist with a timeline and notable deadlines. Be ready to troubleshoot the “alphabet soup” of data forms: FAFSA – Free Application For Federal Student Aid; CSS profile – College Scholarship Service; SAR – Student Aid Report; and more. Think about this process as a second job, or find professional help you can trust.
About John McDonough
John McDonough is the managing member at Studemont Group, which is primarily focused on helping retirees gain peace of mind with unique market rescue and recovery programs. He is also founder, president and CEO of Studemont Group College Funding Solutions. His experience in the financial services industry includes managing partner at Granite Harbor Advisors in Houston and divisional vice president of AXA Equitable/AXA Advisors, the third largest insurance company in the world. McDonough is a member of the prestigious Forum 400, a qualifier at the Court of the Table qualifier for Million Dollar Round Table, an active member in National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors and Society of Financial Service Professionals, as well as American Association of Life Underwriters. He has completed the course work to sit for the Certified Financial Planner® professional designation exam from Rice University.
Employees with bad attitudes can spoil a business and alienate customers. This principle remains true whether the business in question is a fast food restaurant, high-end retail store, or even a business-to-business company. People skills and social etiquette are instrumental to a successful business – paradoxically, people will sometimes choose a smiling fa […]
Image Source There’s really no way of completely avoiding germs – they’re everywhere, year-round. Alas, this means your employees are just as likely to fall ill in balmy summer months as they are in the bleak midwinter. Fortunately, conscientious employers out there can do their bit to help by implementing strategies to boost employee health […]
Even though people use stress and burnout as synonyms, these words refer to different aspects: stress implies a physical state where your body is overly taxed, whereas a burnout defines a state of depression that is mostly caused by an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness. Nonetheless, stress is known to be one of the leading causes […]
Cost cutting has hit each and every business in the last decade. The businesses target on maximizing profits by getting rid of extra overhead expenses and outsourcing the processes if required. It has been observed that the first step towards cost cutting is laying off extra, under-used or non-performing human resources. Downsizing has been a […]
The challenges of knowledge sharing is becoming more difficult as more information becomes available. According to the Daily Mail, the average person is exposed to enough data to fill 174 newspapers every day. This staggering amount of content highlights how critical it is for companies to have clear channels for interoffice communication. Employees must kno […]
The challenges of knowledge sharing is becoming more difficult as more information becomes available. According to the Daily Mail, the average person is exposed to enough data to fill 174 newspapers every day. This staggering amount of content highlights how critical it is for companies to have clear channels for interoffice communication. Employees must know how to sort through data and effectively share it with their associates.
Companies in the 
