However, by using Linkedin aggressively—instead of passively—I was introduced to a few ways that using Linkedin could actually improve your bottom line.

1. Thank Your Connections
Connect. Connect. Connect. The size of your network is dependent on your connectivity. Send a simple thank you after individuals accept your connections. This is a great time to introduce yourself and extend a non-intrusive offer to help in any way you can (i.e. look at their website for functionality, give an insurance quote, etc.). Even if an connection does not instantly lead to business, it increases the amount of people you know which could lead to business in the future.

2. Group Action
Don’t be afraid to interact with fellow users. Engage in a variety of groups. This can also help you grow your network based on common interests and business objectives. Engage in group discussions. Post news that demonstrates your expertise, and establishes you as an industry leader. Contribute to conversations, being sure to add value.

Starting a group is another great way to establish yourself and your company as a thought leader. Creating a narrowly defined group will help you attract the right kinds of prospects. Allow the group to be an open group—the more members the better. Engage, engage, re-engage. Be sure you are closely monitoring your group and keeping its content relevant and useful.

3. Use it as a Follow Up
Be sure to send a Linkedin connection invitation to customers/colleagues/prospects after every meeting. This reinforces your name and skillset. You can even use this as a time to ask for an introduction to a decision member on their contact list.

Does your Linkedin profile need a makeover? Click here for an infographic from last year that is still relevant and helpful.

Happy prospecting!

Recently, we have observed companies grabbling with the innovation challenge and have witnessed their shortcomings in conceiving of and vigorously pursuing breakaway innovation. A key bottleneck: the lack of outstanding ideas that can fill the gap of blockbuster new products. Their most common substitute: a lot of small bets that are generally destined for mediocrity or failure.

Wouter Koetzier said it best, “The best ideas rarely appear out of thin air. The only way to come up with the best innovative ideas – consistently and repeatedly – is to make innovation an essential part of how you do business, of your strategy.” Indeed, according to an Accenture report in 2011, just one in every 1,000 innovative ideas actually proves successful. Innovation requires higher quality ideas, which is why we have developed Sparxoo’s Breakaway Innovation process which emphasizes The Vital Idea Ecosystem.

The above illustration outlines the innovation process. The remainder of this post introduces the first step (Mission). We will follow-up with details, tips and suggestions on the full breakaway innovation process on our digital and brand innovation blog.

Mission. The mission is akin to setting business goals and objectives. We choose to use the term “Mission” because this implies there is more purpose to innovation. During the Mission stage of innovation, top management identifies market/target groups for innovation, criteria for success, and a core team to accomplish goals. Top management should have a vested interest in a successful project outcome. To set business goals and strategic guidelines for innovation, start with strategic questions such as:

• What’s the business problem?
• How is the business or market changing?
• What is the potential opportunity?
• What will it take to achieve success?

The pursuit of breakaway innovations requires breakthrough-specific capabilities and significant strategic commitment . Breakaway Innovation is transformational, resulting in the emergence of a new state that is a radical reconceptualization of the mission, culture, and leadership for the organization, and can result in new-to-the-world products & services. We suggest a kickoff workshop in which all team members discuss common success factors in innovation (requirements of the innovation process) such as:

• Core project team is assigned with strict deadlines
• Fits organization’s overall goals
• Differentiation (stands out in the market)
• Getting customers to say “Wow” (very appealing to customers)
• Financial opportunity (revenue and profit)
• It is considered operationally feasible
• Gathers its own internal support

Once the mission is set, we move into The Vital Idea Ecosystem, which is so named because new product success and failure is often decided before the new product project even enters the product development phase. Accordingly, we recommend emphasizing Inspiration, Ideation, and Prototyping.

Inspiration, step 2, is the foundation upon which ideation can flourish. The goal of the Inspiration step is to develop in-depth insight into what is moving your (potential) customers – their hidden needs – and what is driving markets inspires you to take the next step, to develop the foresight required to identify your future growth markets and products. Research has shown that a strong market orientation and superior skills in marketing research are associated with successful product innovation programs. That’s why we suggest prioritizing the customer for inspiration.

We also note that as technology allows manufacturers to deliver as much and often more functionality than the typical consumer can use, the bases of competition will change. Rather than compete on yet more features and functions we will see manufacturers compete even more on style, on design and on emotional connection, with approaches used in the luxury and fashion markets being increasingly adopted in more traditional sectors. (Read more)

From Inspiration, we move to Ideation (or Step 3), at the heart of innovation, which is why we’ll be dedicating a full follow-on blog post to this topic. For now, we’ll convince you to increase your attention to this step: a major benchmarking study undertaken by one of the authors reveals that only 19% of businesses have a proficient ideation front-end to feed their development funnel. (Read more)

If your team prioritizes innovation, we applaud you for recognizing the importance of innovation in gaining competitive advantage. For best results, prioritize ideation and embrace non-traditional methods to come up with ideas. The extra weeks and months of ideation (see 6 innovation exercises) can be the difference between pursuing a winner and a loser. More tips and insights to come in a follow–up post. Good luck as you ambitiously pursue breakaway innovation.

By Andy Havard, Marketing Executive

Internet video appears to be taking over the World Wide Web these days. It’s being used by online markets through online ads, On Demand TV placements, social media promotions, and it’s being watched time and again on video sharing sites.  So, why are marketers implementing Internet video into their online campaigns? The following article addresses the four key reasons why Internet video is becoming such a prominent staple in the marketing arsenal of brands, businesses and bloggers.

Internet Video Is Popular
Internet video is one of the most popular forms of media on the web. In fact over 2 billion YouTube videos are watched every single day–that’s a staggeringly large viewership. Internet videos are actively sought after by online users, unlike the reels of TV ads so many of us channel hop to avoid. The reason for this is that Internet videos can be entertaining, informative and educational, which online users welcome into their daily Internet browsing activity. As a result Internet video can achieve brand awareness and generate website traffic without becoming sales platforms. The ability Internet video has to become a great marketing tool, yet avoid all standard ad format stigma, makes it incredibly viable as an online resource.

Internet Video Could Reach a Limitless Audience
One of the most impactful and powerful attributes of Internet video, is its ability to transcend an extraordinary amount of limitations. By nature an Internet video can be watched and received all across the world, surpassing the limits of regional and national marketing campaigns. Not only does it have the potential to reach a worldwide, universal audience, but its popular nature also allows it to go beyond target audience restrictions, too. For instance, if you share your Internet video on a social media website, you can of course showcase it to your Friends, Followers and Fans, but they can also share it to their social media audiences too, which were originally out of reach of your social media demographic. With Internet video being able to squeeze through such boundaries, its content can realistically be viewed by an almost limitless online audience.

Internet Video Can Increase Search Engine Rankings
Internet marketers using Internet video may be well aware of its popularity on the web, but may not have realised the potential it has to boost the search engine rankings of brands, businesses and blogs. Google’s introduction of universal searches in 2007 has meant that over the past four years YouTube videos, Vimeo videos and the majority of all Internet videos can be found on Page 1 of Google. The power such a search engine ranking could give to improving conversion rates, improving website traffic and generating higher levels of brand awareness online is astounding. Being able to infiltrate the search engine rankings in this way, provides a quick shortcut for highly competitive keywords and phrases, which could benefit anyone.

Internet Video Is Budget Flexible
Any marketing strategy is potentially viable and impressive, but marketing approaches can swiftly become lacklustre when they cost a fortune to implement. Perhaps what you could call the ‘beauty’ of Internet video is its ability to be extremely budget flexible. Internet videos can take so many forms whether it’s ‘how-to’ videos, viral ads, training videos, video blogs or huge corporate blockbusters, and it is possibly the only marketing approach where cost doesn’t affect impact. A simple webcam video made at home can be just as effective as a five-day Hollywood film shoot in the Maldives. Due to technological advances, the majority of videos today can be created and commissioned very cheaply, making them within the grasps of brands, businesses and blogs of all niches and sizes.

Summary
By understanding the benefits of marketing using Internet video campaigns, and utilising the power it has to further and progress marketing goals and targets, can really help to make a huge impact to the online presence of brands, businesses and blogs. Internet video’s ability to boost conversion rates, increase website traffic, generate a higher search engine ranking, and spread brand awareness to a staggeringly large online audience, is the very reason why marketers are implementing internet video in their online campaigns.

• Greater transparency: Along with the new algorithm, Klout also introduced enhanced metrics that give you significant insight into how your score is derived—and therefore greater insight into how to improve your Klout.
• More emphasis on interaction and engagement: The new Klout algorithm factors in not only how often people are engaging, but also the types of engagement that occur.
• Increased focus on quality over quantity: Klout’s updated algorithm takes into account the percentage of your content that sparks interaction. It should bump people toward sharing fresh, useful content that truly brings value to their followers.
• Enhanced ability to incorporate new platforms: Klout began as a tool for measuring only influence on Twitter, but now incorporates Facebook Blogger, Google +, and a few others. As trends change, Klout will now be more nimble in allowing users to incorporate other social media sites in the calculation of their Klout scores.

According to Klout, most users won't see much shift in their scores.

Five Ways to Improve Your Klout Score

If you’re one of the many users who experienced a drop in Klout, have no fear! Check out these tips for improving your score.

1. Include other social accounts. If you haven’t already, be sure to add other social sites to your Klout account. That means Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn and potentially even your blog can help give your score a boost.
2. Think twice; post once. Before posting to your social networks, consider the real value of the post and the kinds of engagement it’s likely to inspire. It may even be time to consider cutting down your posting frequency.
3. Differentiate content. Your Twitter followers and your LinkedIn connections are looking for different relationships with you and your brand. Offer content specifically tailored for each audience.
4. Shift your focus: Rather than concentrating on the score, focus on what really matters to your followers…and deliver it daily. The Klout score should be secondary to your efforts, not the single factor driving your brand’s social media campaign.
5. Engage strategically: Your influence is now measured against that of those you interact with. That means it’s time to make smart choices about online connections and find ways to enhance relationships with top influencers.

How has your Klout score been affected by the new algorithm? And will it change the way your brand uses social media?

“Customer experience is the new advertising department.” –Max Kalehoff, Clickable

“It’s better to think of social media tools as amplifying customer opinion rather than improving it.” –Joshua Porter, HubSpot

“Fans, true fans, are hard to find and precious.  Just a few can change everything. What they demand, though, is generosity and bravery.” –Seth Godin, Tribes
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” –Peter F. Drucker, political economist

“We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people.” –Pierre Omidyar, eBay creator

“Marketing by interrupting people isn’t cost-effective anymore. You can’t afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing messages, in large groups, and hope that some will send you money. Instead, the future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk.” –Seth Godin, Unleashing the Idea Virus

“This is the model for the 21st-century advertising agency. Sitting upstream of the silos, agile, flexible, one touchpoint for the client, with the ability to understand and connect with the consumer, and ideas that rise above media schedules and engage with people in a that has true mutual benefit and value”. –Philip Beeching and John Wood

“With the creation of Web 2.0, we are seeing the emergence of a new type of digital consumer, who is no longer simply a passive ‘site-seer’ on a fixed consumer journey but an independent explorer craving freedom, adventure and companionship. The challenge for businesses and advertisers is to engage with the active digitraveller as well as the passive digitourist.” –Sarah Morning, Agency Republic

“Risk – calculated risk – is key to success online. There’s no need for complicated metrics to prove this point. Logic tells us that with so much content clamouring for attention, offering something new, authentic and genuinely interesting is the only way to get people to pay attention.” –Arthur Ceria, CreativeFeed

“Today’s marketing success comes from self-publishing Web content that people want to share. It’s not about gimmicks. It’s not about paying an agency to interrupt others.” –David Meerman Scott, The New Rules of Marketing and PR

“To accompany the four Ps of classical marketing, marketers would do well to instil the digital four Cs, around conversation, collaboration, culture and compensation.” – Zaid Al-Zaidy, TWBA\London

Reach your target.
1. Who is your target audience? What audience needs are you addressing?
2. Who are your competitors? What are they offering?
3. How are you standing out to your target audience in a competitive market?

Interact with your audience.
1. What action do you want your user to take once they get to your web site?
2. How are you navigating the user to take this action?

Communicate the right way.
1. What are your top 3 business objectives with the web site?
2. What are the top messages that you must communicate (key features and benefits as well as potential objections from your audience)?
3. How are you communicating functional benefits? How are you making an emotional connection for the long-run?
4. How are you customizing communication points by segmenting out your audiences?

Match design with brand message.
1. What is the overall style and personality that your web site should convey?
2. How does your web site use design to simplify communications (i.e. a picture is worth 1,000 words)?
3. How does your web site use design to make an emotional connection?
4. How does your web site use design to simplify information communication and create a good user experience?

Stay digitally current.
1. How does your web site integrate digital assets such as video and social media?
2. Do you have a need for multiple web sites/customized landing pages for specific use cases (i.e. newsletter landing page)?
3. Have you incorporated supplemental materials such as product PDFs?
4. Is your site optimized for search?

Prepare to repair.
1. Is your web site easy to maintain and update to keep content fresh?
2. Are you constantly testing your site to make sure design features run smoothly?
3. Does your site leverage scalable platforms (i.e. Drupal, WordPress)?

Once you conduct your own web site evaluation, contact Sparxoo Agency for a free consultation on how to elevate your web site presence and better your brand. Sparxoo Agency is a branding, digital marketing, and consumer innovation agency that focuses on web design and development to expand online presence. Take a few moments to learn more about our agency:
www.sparxoo.com

Be Mentally Positive — When you feel ambitious, it’s as if you can take on the world; it’s like a positive high. You are mentally awake and ready to take on the world. One of the first steps of keeping motivated is to have a positive outlook. Take a look at Steve Jobs’ keynote speeches. He is constantly in awe of what he and his team at Apple have accomplished. The following video comically takes a look at his positive language:

Identify Bright Spots — Now that we understand ambition is partly rooted in positive thinking, identify those times you were in a positive mood. Was it getting out of the house? Was it trying something new? Was it spitballing with a friend or colleague? Was it taking some time for yourself? Whatever gets you in a positive mood can be a catalyst for motivation.

What is Your Prize? — Entrepreneurs are often faced by incremental failures that can be discouraging. These discouraging moments feel like signals saying it is not going to work. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, was laughed at when he tried to convince college students Facebook was the next big thing. Why would I want to talk to my friends online when I can just walk down the hall, they mocked. Yet, Zuckerberg’s idea turned out to be a hell of a gold egg. His vision of what Facebook could be likely kept him on track.

Get Inspired — Tales of entrepreneurs that have made it work and all of the challenges they were forced to overcome can be inspiring. Think about what Steve Jobs must have gone through when Apple’s board gave him the boot. Imagine being deposed and then making an incredible return, which overshadowed his previous successes. You are not the first or last entrepreneur to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges. To help you through them, reading the success stories, such as Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki or The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, can be fuel to give you an extra boost.

Remind Yourself of Your Success — It took you two months of hard work to get published in the Wall Street Journal. Or, you have already developed a prototype of your product and sparked the interest of several investors. When focusing so much on the present and future goals, it’s easy to loose sight of our prior accomplishments. Reminding yourself of how far you’ve come can help you reboot and push forward.

Image by bruno neves from Stock.Xchng

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Additional Resources:
Online degree programs are available through Guide to Online Schools for entrepreneurs looking to give their new ideas a boost.

Whether created organically or purchased, whether incremental improvements or transformational, innovation is vital in today’s rapidly evolving, competitive global economy. At Sparxoo, our team of brand & innovation strategists has led many brand innovation workshops and expert worksessions with Fortune 500 companies. Our formula: start with creativity to spark new ideas and add in strategy to structure and focus ideas across identified goals. Great ideas can come from anywhere, so tap into your leaders, your Gen Y talent, your customers, and industry experts. Connect the ideas together and draw out an innovation roadmap for the medium-term and long-term. Below, we share 6 innovation exercises to help energize your thinking.

MARKET INNOVATION

1. Subway Train. This exercise is a big picture competitive mapping to help you visualize the interactions among market players. Stretch your thinking about how far-reaching your platforms are, and the relationships between industry players.Pretend you are a civil engineer designing the future map for your industry with a focus on mapping out the current and potential future competitors. Like the NY Subway, create a series of 4 to 6 subway lines. Name each subway line and create specific stops on the line. Each stop represents a brand in your industry or potentially in an adjacent industry. On the map, note subway hubs where several lines intersect. Which is your brand’s location on the subway map? Where is the ideal location for your brand tomorrow?
2. Royal Kingdom. This exercise helps you identify partners and competitors, and anticipate the moves of key market players. Get prepared for the battles that lie ahead.You are the king of a village and are expanding your kingdom. Draw a map of your surrounding terrain, noting all nearby villages. For each village, note whether the occupants are friendly (i.e. potential partners / acquisition targets) or foes (major competitors). Note the key assets contained by each village. What are the benefits and barriers to occupying each space? What are potential battles that lie ahead and how will you align your troops for success? Consider that you only have a few key moves in the next 3 to 5 years. Which villages should you focus your attention on, and Why?

PRODUCT INNOVATION

1. Causal Connection. This exercise helps connect product benefits with customer needs. This one-to-one mapping can help to make sure your innovation is on-target from the user perspective.Create 2 columns: 1) in the first column, create a list of product features and 2) in the second column, note the action you hope to accomplish for the customer. Now, prioritize the actions that you want your user to take and aggregate product ideas together that will help satisfy the customer need.
2. Shop-Along. This exercise gets you out of the office to where your customers are: in the store. The way your customers shop in reality may be very different than the way you drew it up. Visit the stores where your consumer shops.Shop along with the consumer, tracking their movements and the types of products they’re shopping for. When they evaluate products, what are the cues they are looking for? What is the suite of products associated with selected products (i.e. when they buy a Hershey’s bar, they might also buy marshmallows and graham crackers). As an added bonus, you can use special glasses that record eye movement to see what’s grabbing the customer’s attention, what’s in their considerations set, and what they end up purchasing. Take the learnings to your product development team to consider product features and attributes.

BRAND INNOVATION

1. Music Mojo. This exercise helps you think through the personality of your industry, your competitors, and your organization.When you think about your industry, what mood comes to mind? Choose 5 to 8 songs from across genres and listen to them. What does each convey? What would you think about an organization / brand that reflected the song? Now map the songs to your competitors and to your brand today. Which song is inspirational for your brand tomorrow?
2. Magazine Cover Story. This exercise helps your organization imagine what you want to become famous for. The goal is to truly stand out, so make it happen.Select the magazine for which you’d like your brand featured on the cover. Determine the topic of the cover story, then create a headline and a visual. Discuss the impact of this cover story and the steps to achieving the magazine cover.

Amazon envisions the future of the e-commerce world to be in the cloud based on product launches in the past five years. In 2001, Amazon enabled its users to buy and sell used and new products and four years later began selling private label goods (under the name, Pinzon). Amazon has focused less on physical goods and more on the cloud in the second half of the decade.

In 2006, Amazon began selling data storage, called Amazon Simple Storage Service, and a year later launched its digital music service. In that same year, Amazon launched its ground-breaking e-reader the Kindle. And in July 2010, e-book sales overshadowed Amazon’s hardcover books. In fact, Amazon claims it sold 143 e-books for every 100 hardcover books. The success of the Kindle (which can only be rumored to be successful as Amazon has never released sales figures of the device) has arguably led to the current war of the tablets — with competitors like Apple, Google, Dell, HP and others.

With its e-book sales increasing (a resource with tips for eBook authors), Amazon is poised to tackle the emerging online video rental market. Online video is certainly a rising trend amongst internet users. In the month of December 2009, 178 million people watched 33.2 billion videos, with the average viewer watching 187 videos per month in the U.S, according to comScore. To capture this growing audience, Amazon recently announced it would soon begin $.99 online video rentals and launched video streaming, similar to Netflix. But Amazon isn’t the only company picking up on the trend.

Steve Jobs recently released the new iTV video rental device, Google has beta tested its YouTube rentals and the rapid growth of Netflix over the last couple of years is going to be challenging for Amazon to compete against. Netflix had 15 million subscribers as of June 30, an increase from 10.5 million a year ago, with 61 percent of them having watched a movie or television show via the internet on computers and web-connected TVs. And Netflix’s CEO admitted over the next decade he anticipates the company to focus primarily on internet streaming, reports the LA Times.

“Amazon.com has used aggressive price discounts to carve out a dominant position in print and electronic books,” writes the Wall Street Journal. But the company is faced with formidable competitors in the online video space. Beyond the industry leader, Netflix, Amazon is challenged by Apple — which aims to replicate its $.99 music downloads in the video rental market with its new iTV. Amazon’s goal is to match the $.99 rentals, but if Apple’s iTV takes off, Amazon could lose grasp of the market.

Will Amazon tackle the online video rental market as it did with e-books? If Amazon can parallel its e-book success in the online video space, the online retailer will be that much closer to achieving its goal of becoming the center of the e-commerce universe.

Image by Gabriella Fabbri from Stock.Xchng

Revenue Assumptions
Identify your revenue streams first (i.e. advertising, product sales, subscriptions) and the key elements for each.  This can be as straightforward as price times quantity sold equals revenue.  In a subscription business think about price points of your products and your target number of customers.  If you have an advertising based business, consider metrics such as number of advertisers, impressions, and CPM. To help inform your assumptions so that they are more than just guesses, you should look at the overall market and comparable businesses.  How long did it take your competitor to reach $1 million in sales?  What price are they charging?  Even better yet, do a beta test of your product to see sales response on a limited basis.  If you have little confidence in your assumptions, create assumptions for multiple scenarios by developing your best guess, an optimistic case and a pessimistic case.

Expense Assumptions
Expense assumptions are often much more straightforward than revenue assumptions.  Start with cost-of-goods sold, then consider sales, marketing & distribution expense.  It’s important to think about how your expenses relate to your revenue.  For example, if you are going to ramp up your sales, do you need a significant marketing budget?  Then factor in your technology, people, office, and other expenses.  Expenses tend to go up over time, so factor in annual raises and adjustments for inflation of 3 to 5% annually.   Be sure to be comprehensive and include expenses such as payroll taxes, healthcare expenses, and a small miscellaneous cushion.

The Actual Model
Setting up the model is the complicated part, unless you are an Excel whiz.  The key output of your financial modeling is income statement projections for the next 3 to 5 years.  Try to link up as much as possible through formulas that reference your assumptions (ideally assumptions can be on a separate worksheet in the same Excel file).  Generally, you can use simple formulas such as multiplying price and quantity.  Occassionally, you’ll need to use more advanced functions such as the IF function and others.  I color code my entries such that all hard-entered inputs are in blue, and all formulas are in black. Then I know never to update any numbers in black because they are just calculations that adjust in real-time.  Beyond an assumptions worksheet and income statement worksheet, you might also consider separate worksheets for listing out your headcount, cash flow, balance sheet, and a depreciation schedule.

Making Sense of the Output
The fun part is to see revenue growth, operating income, and required investment based on the final model.  Be sure to troubleshoot and make sure that your results make sense.  Assuming that your formulas are all linking up properly, consider how your business looks to an investor.  How much do they need to invest and what is the expected return?  Are you able to surpass revenue milestones of $1 million and/or $10 million?  Do you show a healthy revenue growth of 15+ %?  Do your operating margins make sense in years 3 – 5 (i.e. are they reaching the 20 to 30% range)?  Are you able to reach profitability by the 2nd or 3rd year of projections?  How much investment is required to fund your business for the next 18 months?  Be sure that your expectations are reasonable.  I’ve seen some projections that are unrealistically optimistic and show margins twice those of Google.  You might need to find additional market data to inform your assumptions and make adjustments so that your financial projections model is both reasonable and compelling to prospective investors.

View A Financial Model Presentation for Startups