Posts Tagged ‘business strategy’

10 Reasons to use Facebook for Business

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Social networking websites like Friendster, Myspace, Tagged, etc, and especially Facebook, have significant implications for business owners, marketers, and entrepreneurs. To keep your business current, you should at least be familiar with the latest conversational marketing techniques and viral technologies, including Facebook and its powerful features.

facebook

10 reasons to use Facebook for Business:

1.    Meet friends. Now Facebook is not just for school kids. Members are typically older and more mature than on other sites, and there are more professional users.

2.    Get business contacts. With more than 200 million users, not only are your friends  on Facebook, so are your prospects, your customers, your JV partners… and, of course, your competitors. So don’t miss out.

3.    Instant gate opener. Facebook members are open to connecting. You can easily begin a dialog with highly successful-even famous-people who were previously otherwise unreachable.

4.    Build relationships. By engaging in conversations with your prospects and customers, you can better adapt your marketing and business services to meet their needs.

5.    Increase visibility. By consistently showing up, posting relevant information, and being a thought leader, you can increase visibility and credibility as an expert in your area.

6.    Build your personal brand. Now, the lines between business and personal have become blurred. You can reveal as much or as little about yourself as you wish, allowing you to personalize your brand.

7.    Target your niche. Users volunteer vast amounts of information about themselves that you can readily access. These kinds of demographics, psychographics, and technographics would previously have cost fortunes to access.

8.    Get quick top Google placement. Create a Page for your business and ”push” information to your “fans.” Pages (for business) and Profiles (for personal) are indexed for optimal search engine positioning. Facebook has a page rank of #7 according to Alexa.

9.    Create targeted Ads. With Facebook Social Ads, you can test out extremely targeted advertising for minimal cost. For example, only targets those in Malaysia, or only target teenage females betwwen 15-20, etc.

10.    Free marketing. Facebook is totally free to use (except for the Ads) and with regular activity you’ll end up with more traffic, more subscribers, and more paying clients too.

Facebook is easy to use and FREE!.. Use it!..

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Posted in Business, Technologies | No Comments »

Interested In Internet Marketing?

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

Internet marketing is a very broad subject. If you understand how broad offline marketing and sales is, it is the same for online or internet marketing. Therefore, in order for your online marketing campaign to be successful, there must be a group of marketers that truly focus on doing it. It is complex and the methods are variety. Fortunately there are few distinguished techniques for you to start. While the others, they can be implemented later accordingly.

1) WEBSITE - Why having a properly designed website is very important to optimize your online marketing?

The purpose of marketing is to create leads.  Once you have leads, then it is up to the sales team to close the deal. Among the leads, there are people whom you can close them right on the spot. For others, there must be some leads nurturing effort before they are convinced to engage on your products or services.

The campaign that you make to get people to visit your website is called marketing. It can be via both ways; online and offline or just one at a time. Once the visitors are at the home page, your website is taking the role of a salesman. Therefore, it is not wrong to say that your products’ website is your online sales men. That factor alone is a very good reason for you to invest for a well designed website.

Now, you’ve understood the function of your website. Let’s get to understand in brief about what are the visitors’ expectations and behaviours about any website:

  • People come to web sites to satisfy goals, to do tasks, to get answers to questions.
  • They come for information, for the content that they think (or hope) is there
  • Answers a question or helps them complete a task
  • Information is easy to find and easy to understand
  • They expect the content to be accurate, up to date, and credible
  • They don’t read much, especially before they get to the page that has the information they want.
  • Even on information pages, they skim and scan before they start to read.
  • They want to read only enough to meet their needs.

Let’s discuss about the vital points to consider….opps! I’m sorry. I have to catch an appointment now. We’ll continue later, ok? :)

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Posted in Business, General, Products, Technologies, Web Design | No Comments »

Building Core Competencies

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

There are 2 tools to help the firm to identify and build its core competencies.

  • 1st Tool: consists of 4 specific criteria of sustainable competitive advantage that firms can use to determine those capabilities that are core competencies.
  • 2nd Tool: is the value chain analysis. Firms use this tools to select the value-creating competencies that should be maintained, upgraded, or developed and those that should be outsourced.

In this article, we will only discuss about the first tool only.

4 Criteria of Sustainable Competitive Advantage 

1. ValuableValuable capabilities allow the firm to exploit opportunities or neutralize threats in its external environment. By effectively using capabilities to exploit opportunities, a firm creates value for customers.

2. RareRare capabilities are capabilitiesthat few, if any, competitors possess. A key question to be answered when evaluating this criterion is, “How many rival firms possess these valuable capabilities?” Capabilities possess by many rivals are unlikely to be sources of competitive advantage for any one of them. Instead, valuable but common (i.e., not rare) resources and capabilities are sources of competitive parity. Competitive advantage results only when firms develop and exploit valuable capabilities that differ from those shared with competitors.  

3. Costly to Imitate Costly-to-imitate capabilities are capabilities that other firms cannot easily develop. Capabilities that are costly to imitate are created because of one reason or a combination of three reasons:

a) Unique historical conditions. As firms evolve, they pick up skills, abilitise and resources that are unique to them, reflecting their particular path through history. A firm with unique and valuable organizational culture that emerged in the early stages of the company’s history may have an imperfectly imitable advantage over firms founded in another historical period - one which less valuable or less competitively useful values and beliefs strongly influenced the developmentof the firm’s culture. An organizational culture is a source of advantage when employees are held together tightly by their belief in it. 

b) Causally ambigous. This occurs when the link between the firm’s capabilities and its competitive advantage is causally ambigous. In these instances, competitors can’t clearly understand how a firm uses its capabilities as the foundation for competitive advantage. As a result, firms are uncertain about the capabilities they should develop to duplicate the benefits of a competitor’s value-creating strategy. 

c) Social complexity. Social complexity means that at least some, and frequently many, of the firm’s capabilities are the product of complex social phenomena. Interpersonal relationships, trust, friendship among managers and between managers and employees, and a firm’s reputation with suppliers and customers are example of social complex capabilities. 

4. NonsubstitutableNonsubstitutable capabilitites are capabilities that do not have strategic equivalents. This final criterion for a capability to be source of competitive advantage is that there must be no strategically equivalent resources that are either not rare or imitable. Two valuable firm resources (or two bundles of firm resources) are strategically equivalent when they each can be separately exploited to implement the same strategies. In general, the strategic value of capabilities increases as they become more difficult to substitute.The more invisible capabilities are, the more difficult it is for firms to find substitutes and the greater the challenge is to competitors trying to imitate a firm’s value-creating strategy. Firmspecific knowledge and trust base working relationships between managers and non-managerial personnel are capabilities that are difficult to identify and for which finding a substitute is challenging. However, causal ambiguity may make it difficult for the firm to learn and may stifle progress, because the firm may not know how to improve processes that are not easily codified and thus are ambiguous. 

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Posted in Business, Entrepreneurship, management | No Comments »