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What Your Profile Really Says About You

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What does your profile say about you?

If you’re not giving enough thought to your online profiles, you may be sending mixed messages to potential employers. Consider what your profile may be saying:

  • No picture — Not having a photo says, “I am not confident enough to show my face.” If you don’t have a photo you’re proud of, find a friend with a camera and start shooting. Look straight at the camera and smile for the best impression.
  • Logo or something else as picture — Again, I worry about the person’s confidence when there’s a logo or avatar instead of a picture; or I worry that they have no personality.
  • No recommendations — A profile with no recommendations screams, “No-one else believes I am as good as I say.” Reach out to a few friends or colleagues for recommendations to remedy this ASAP, and be sure the skills you’ve listed mirror your real-life skills.
  • Incomplete profile — To me, this just smacks of laziness. It says, “I have nothing to say or am too lazy to put it here.” Whenever you have the opportunity to include more information to make a good impression, you should do so.
  • Not up to date — If you haven’t updated your profile since 2009 but are actively looking for a job, that’s a disconnect. I would wonder if perhaps your heart wasn’t in it or if you truly had a keen eye for detail.
  • No contact details — This is like saying, “Call me!” but not giving out your number. If you are overly concerned about privacy, create a new email address and Google Voice phone number specifically for job hunting, but make certain whatever you do that your potential interviewers don’t have to work to contact you.

Putting your profile to work

Once you’ve put your best foot forward, so to speak, and filled out your profile completely and correctly, you can take it to the next level. Some other tips to consider:

  • Ask for an introduction. Instead of a totally blind date, it helps to have an introduction. Work your contacts and discover who in your network might be able to make an introduction or recommendation at your dream job.
  • Cultivate connections. Connections who work within a company to which you’re applying can also give excellent insights into the company culture and tidbits that can come in handy during the interview phase.
  • Appeal to your ideal match. Use the descriptions of your previous positions to tell the story job recruiters are interested in hearing. If you know that your ideal position is with a company that values independence and self-direction, for example, highlight your past accomplishments in those areas.
  • Get specific. Just like potential mates get tired of reading about “long walks on the beach” and people “looking for someone with a good sense of humor,” recruiters start to glaze over clichés as well. Be as specific as possible with your profile to make yourself stand out in the crowd.
  • But don’t be tempted to exaggerate. In this Internet age, your resume can be double checked in the fraction of a second it takes Google to return a result, and any exaggeration can be seen as outright dishonesty.
  • Follow up (but don’t come across as desperate). It’s always appropriate to follow up after a first meeting, but don’t be a pest, and don’t come across as desperate; it’s a turn off.

Photo: Shutterstock

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About : Bernard Marr is a globally recognized expert in strategy, performance management, analytics, KPIs and big data. He helps companies manage, measure and improve performance.

 

The Educators Road Map For The Next Generation of Work

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This road map for the next generation of work is for the up and coming generation to make sure they start on the right foot.

What happens when the tools & technologies we use every day become mainstream parts of the business world?
What happens when we stop leading separate “consumer” & “professional” lives when it comes to technology stacks?

The result is a dramatic change in the products we use at work and as a result an upending of the canon of management practices that define how work is done.

New tools are appearing that radically alter the traditional definitions of productivity and work. Businesses failing to embrace these changes will find their employees simply working around IT at levels we have not seen even during the earliest days of the PC. Too many enterprises are either flat-out resisting these shifts or hoping for a “transition”—disruption is taking place, not only to every business, but within every business.

The Educators Work Culture

Continuous productivity is an era that fosters a seamless integration between consumer and business platforms. Continuous productivity manifests itself as an environment where the evolving tools and culture make it possible to innovate more and faster than ever, with significantly improved execution. Together our industry is shaping a new way to learn, work, and live with the power of software and mobile computing—an era of continuous productivity.

Continuous productivity is possible

Continuous productivity shifts our efforts from the start/stop world of episodic work and work products to one that builds on the technologies that start to answer what happens when:

  • A generation of new employees has access to the collective knowledge of an entire profession, experts, or enterprise.
  • Collaboration takes place across organisation and company boundaries with everyone connected by a social fibre rather than the organisations hierarchy.
  • Data, knowledge, analysis, and opinion are equally available to every member of a team in formats that are digital, sharable, and structured.
  • People have the ability to time slice, context switch, and proactively deal with situations as they arise, shifting from a start/stop environment to one that is continuous.

Join The Educators Pioneering projects

The vast majority of organisations are struggling right now with how to face these challenges. Beside the ones who try to ignore this shift, majority of the organisations are trying to use this new technology to run their old system. You are welcome to join The Eductors as an individual and develop your teaching environment or join any of our current and futur group projects.

How Different is the way we work:

The availability of the information and communications tools has allowed us to move from a hierarchical access model of the past to a much more collaborative and sharing-first approach. Every member have access to the raw “feeds” that could be material to their role. Teams become the focus of collaborative work, empowered by the data to inform their decisions. The increasing use of “crowds” and product usage telemetry able to guide improved our services, based not on sampling and forecasting but on what amounts to a census of real-world usage.

The following table contrasts the way we work (continuous productivity) and the current norms.

Traditional way
 Continuous Productivity
Process Exploration
Hierarchy, top down or middle out Network, bottom up
Internal committees Internal and external teams, crowds
Strategy-centric Execution-centric
Presenting packaged and produced ideas, documents Sharing ideas and perspectives continuously, service
Data based on snapshots at intervals, viewed statically Data always real-time, viewed dynamically
Process-centric Rhythm-centric
Exact answers Approximation and iteration
More users More usage

The cultural changes encouraged and enabled by continuous productivity include:

  • Innovate more and faster. The bottom line is that by compressing the time between meaningful interactions between members of a team, we will go from problem to solution faster. Whether solving a problem with an existing product or service or thinking up a new one, the continuous nature of communication speeds up the velocity and quality of work.
  • Flatten hierarchy. Equal access to tools and information, a continuous multi-way dialog, and the ease and bringing together relevant parties regardless of place in the organisation flattens the hierarchy, this is the key.
  • Improve execution. Execution improves because members of teams have access to the interactions and data in real-time. Gone are the days of “game of telephone” where information needed to “cascade” through an organization only to be reinterpreted or even filtered by each level of an organization.
  • Respond to changes using telemetry / data. With the advent of continuous real-world usage telemetry, the debate and dialog move from the problems to the solution. You don’t spend energy arguing over the problem, but debating the merits of various solutions.
  • Strengthen organization and partnerships. Organisations that communicate openly and transparently leave much less room for politics and hidden agendas. The transparency afforded by tools might introduce some rough and tumble in the early days as new “norms” are created but over time the ability to collaborate will only improve given the shared context and information base everyone works from.
  • Focus on the destination, not the journey. The real-time sharing of information forces organizations to operate in real-time. Problems are in the here and now and demand solutions in the present. The benefit of this “pressure” is that a focus on the internal systems, the steps along the way, or intermediate results is, out of necessity, de-emphasised.

Follow the following article for further reading.

 

  1. Road Map For The Next Generation of Work – Paradigm shift (1)
  2. Road Map For The Next Generation of Work – Theory & Technology (2)
  3. Road Map For The Next Generation of Work – Examples and Checklist (3)

 

 

Effective Visuals

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Along with having great course content, you should also have an outstanding use of effective visuals throughout the entire course.

Sometimes finding the right images can be more difficult than originally anticipated. Your images must add value to the course, whether it is a graph or chart explaining the information, or just an example photo that the student can relate to.

Keep in mind that specific eLearning platforms can have different ways to feature visuals throughout your course. These are 10 Do’s and Don’ts for choosing eLearning visuals, beginning with the quality.Do find quality images. Avoid using blurry or pixelated images within your courses. Rather than looking unprofessional or distracting your students, either use quality images or none at all.

Don’t use visuals without a purpose. It is important that all of your images have a purpose and add value to your course. Don’t use images just for decoration or to fill in space. Images without a specific meaning may be distracting to your students, rather than helpful.

Do choose valuable images. Your images must add value to the course, whether it is a graph or chart explaining the information, or just an example photo that the student can relate to. Be sure the images resonate with your students.

Don’t use overly complex visuals. If you have a complex graphic that is crucial to your course, consider placing it on it’s own slide with the description separately. This will allow for a larger image and the students are likely to see more (or all) of the details. When possible, avoid complex graphics and go for a simpler version, while still getting the point across.

Do use a variety of visuals. Be sure your course has a variety of graphics and images throughout. These include charts, handouts, photos, or even bullet points or lists. Different medias and visuals help the student organize their information better.

Don’t overload your courses with images. Adding too many visual elements can quickly become cluttered and overwhelming for the student. With less visuals, the student can better focus on the content.

Do use words and pictures together. Consider placing text and images together, expressing the same message in two different ways. Students can likely learn faster and remember key terms when associated to an image.

Don’t add text to busy images. Placing text with an already complicated graphic will only further the complexity. Place the text on a different screen in this case.

Do use a consistent image style. Consistency helps students focus on the material rather than worrying about the design changing throughout the course.

Don’t copy images from Google. Many images seen via Google are copyrighted and therefore, you will be violating copyright if you use them in your course.

With these 10 visual Do’s and Don’ts, you can create your online course in no time via an eLearning platform. Be sure to utilize your eLearning platform to add visuals throughout the entire course, not just in the presentations.

Are you looking for quality images to use in your online learning courses? These are 10 free stock photo resources and 10 free eLearning graphics tools.

Harness the New Tools for Training

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Transform Training

Over the next five years, how you train and educate your staff won’t just change; it’ll transform.

What’s the difference?

  • Changing means continuing to do essentially the same thing, only introducing some variation in degree.
  • Transformation means doing something utterly and radically different.

For example, moving our music from cassette tape to CD changed how you listen to music. But going from a CD to having all your music in digital format on your smart phone and with you at all times transformed how you listen to music.

Exponential changes driven by processing power, storage, and bandwidth are now reaching a stage that allows us to transform business processes including how we educate and train our workforce. This transformation will certainly accelerate. The only question is whether your organization will take advantage of it.

So what does the future of corporate training look like? To get a clear picture, you first have to know a few facts:

  • The majority of phones professionals are using worldwide are smart phones. In other words, your employees’ phones are actually multimedia computers with internet access. That alone has huge ramifications for training them.
  • Tablets and smartphones are outselling PCs globally and employees have access to them wherever they go including home. So smart mobile devices like phones and tablets are rapidly becoming the new platforms for training and education. That doesn’t mean employees are no longer using laptops, it means we are using them in different ways and much less.
  • These smart devices will get exponentially smarter every year, giving us new capabilities. It used to be to access a super computer you had to be a university or major corporation. Today, even a small company can access (from their phone) a super computer in the cloud and run advanced simulations.

Knowing these things, it’s time to rethink how to train your employees from here on out.

Here’s how to do it

New Tools for Training:

  • Implement Just-in-Time Training
    For most people, the best way to learn something is by doing it. That’s what just-in-time training enables people to do. Rather than sit in a classroom or one-on-one with someone and learn, people can learn in real-time. Remember, most employees have a multimedia computer with them at all times (their phone or tablet). With just-in-time training, they can access any element of what they need to know at the moment of need. If they have a question or need assistance, they simply touch an icon on their device’s screen and are connected to a live trainer who can help. If the trainer needs to see something to give assistance, the employee can aim the device’s built-in camera to the problem so the trainer can see it. This alone would cut training costs tremendously.Does this mean we eliminate classroom or other formal training sessions? No. There will still be formal training, but less of it because now we can have distributed training in real-time that’s just-in-time. So this isn’t about getting rid of something; it’s about using a new tool for training and education.
  • Create Interactive Training Materials
    We also now have the ability to create interactive training manuals and textbooks. In the past, e-books have been static, basically an electronic PDF of the book. Now they are becoming dynamic e-books where you have embedded audio, video, and links to other resources. And thanks to visual communications, you can even have a way for employees to tap a special button in the training manual and be connected to someone who can give more advanced training on a specific subject.Additionally, employees can tap into a series of videos that allows them to personalize the training for their specific needs. Since the training manual is no longer static, employees can personalize the manual by plugging into a menu of more advanced training options embedded within.
  • Today, training is measured in one-hour blocks of time. One hour needs to become ten-minute blocks of highly focused time.
    I recently heard some one say they watched “an entire TED talk” as if it was a long amount of time. Our attention spans are short and the list of things each of us must accomplish seems to be getting longer. Measuring the units of training in one-hour blocks of time is already obsolete.By taking advantage of the virtual, mobile, social, and visual revolutions that are already taking place, we should measure employees training units in ten-minute blocks that include a short focused lesson with an application tool.
  • Tap Into the Gameification of Training and Education
    Gaming isn’t just for kids. Interactive gaming is a tool that can transform training and education. I’ve identified five core elements of gameification that when applied together can dramatically accelerate learning. They are:
  1. Self-diagnostic. Interactive, competitive, and immersed training modules can know each person’s skill or knowledge level and progress accordingly. It can know where someone left off and give next steps from that point when the person logs back in. This is the best way to allow for individual training and learning.
  2. Interactivity. Regardless of someone’s inherent learning style, learning is much more effective when you’re interacting with the material, not passively sitting there. When you learn by gaming, you’re interacting with the information and concepts and actually doing things. It’s no longer passive training.
  3. Immersion. In the recent past to the present, video games use interspatial 3D, where you go into worlds. So instead of images popping out at you, you go inside to them. That’s how games on the Xbox 360 and others have been working for years, by using a regular television set or flat panel display. This sort of technology gives an immersed effect, which engages people more.
  4. Competition. Humans are naturally competitive beings. When you’re sitting in class or doing one-on-one learning, there’s little competitive value. No one advances until the session is over. However, when you’re competing, as in a game, there’s an adrenaline rush that keeps you engaged and focused on the task at hand. In an effort to “win,” people master concepts faster.
  5. Focus. When you’re playing a game, you’re forced to focus. You have to do A in order for B to occur. If you don’t do A, then you won’t get far in the game. Focus is the result of interactivity, competition, immersion, and self-diagnosis. When you can focus, you can learn virtually anything…fast.

Embrace the New Era of Training

The ideas mentioned here are already possible. Use them to redefine how your company trains its employees. Since businesses spend large sums of money on training and education, anything that can accelerate or enhance learning will save both time and money.

And always remember, if it can be done it will be done; if you don’t do it someone else will.

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online-teaching

Course Designers Package

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In 2013 we introduced a free comprehensive guide on how to take your course online to help both the digitisation and structuring of knowledge for our readers. The Educators’ initiative for 2014 is to promote the preservation of knowledge (in diverse digital formats) and structuring of the knowledge as a teaching tool. In 2014 we are extending our existing service with more direct collaboration with this extensive package:

Training programmes (Course Designers Package):

  • Teachers Starter Pack
  • Moodle Course Design Pack
  • Help with Curriculum Design
  • Course Validation & Certification
  • Help with Internet Marking
  • Virtual Class Room

Our workshops and online programs are built round the simple principles of providing high quality, practical and pragmatic solutions that enable you to deliver a significant improvements in terms of quality, efficiency and performance to your current activity. 

If you have an in-depth knowledge and understanding on your specialised subject and are ready to learn new technology, then we are interested to hear from you.

A passion to help others together with exemplary facilitation and presentation skills is essential. We will be your partner and provide both technical and marketing help.

Make a request now it takes less than a minute!

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Whats on offer?

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Thank you for your interest.

While we are dealing with your enquiry, you can start with our Free Guide on how to take your course online.

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Join our team as:

  • Certified member - Take any of the online courses and become certified member. (Subject to passing the exam)
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Mobile Apps Will Transform All Business Processes

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Mobile Apps will transform all business processes. Over the next two years most companies will be using mobile apps (developed in house or bought off the shelf) to help them with such things as supply chain management, logistics, purchasing, maintenance, training, services, or sales support. Let’s face it, two years is a short amount of time considering there’s such a low percent of mobile apps for business functions today.

So, what does all this mean for your business?

It means that mobile apps designed by businesses for their internal use and competitive advantage will explode over the next two years. Therefore, all business leaders need to ask themselves: “Two years from now, do I want to be one of the companies that is not developing mobile apps to transform business processes?” Once you see the hard trends driving this software revolution, it would be hard to answer “no.”

Remember, a hard trend will happen; a soft trend might happen. The hard trend is that businesses will be developing mobile apps customized for their company for various functions. The soft trend is whether your company will be one of them.

Here’s something else to consider: The number of smart phones and tablets in all sizes of companies has obviously exploded in the last couple of years, and this hard trend is picking up speed. At the same time, the cost of being able to deploy business intelligence in every function is dropping off a cliff just as the capability of our smart devices, of our wireless and wired networks, and of both private and public clouds grows.

So with costs decreasing and capabilities increasing, the time to act is now. The question is, “How?”

The key is to assess whether you have the in-house capabilities to develop mobile apps. Some companies do, and some companies don’t. It depends on the size of the business and your IT department. However, a lot of young people do have the capabilities needed. Therefore, I would suggest that you hire or “rent a kid.” In other words, if you don’t already employ some talented young people who have both the interest and knowledge to develop mobile apps, it’s time to bring some in. They have a lot of present and future value to offer, but they do not know your needs and business requirements.

So you need to have the core competency of developing your own mobile apps for business processes that can give businesses a competitive advantage. The companies that transform their business processes using mobility will achieve new levels of success. The time for business process transformation is now.

Article by:Daniel Burrus Daniel Burrus is considered one of the World’s Leading Futurists on Global Trends and Innovation, a top LinkedIn Global INfluencer, and is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research

IT Trends Effecting Online Training

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Here is the list of IT trends effecting online training and education. Most of you involved in elearning have embraced the first six points of this article. I suggest you pay more attention to the items 7 to 12. The following is the summary of the article by DANIEL BURRUS.

No matter what industry you’re in, your company can’t survive without technology. From smart phones and tablets to mobile apps and cloud-based technology, there’s a plethora of technological advancements to not only keep track of, but also to profit from.

To stay competitive, every organisation needs to anticipate the most significant technology trends that are shaping their business and changing their customer, and then develop innovative ways to use them to their advantage, both inside and outside of their organisation. Remember, if it can be done, it will be done. If you don’t use these technologies to create a competitive advantage, someone else will.

Over the next five short years the following game-changing technologies will transform how we sell, market, communicate, collaborate, educate, train, innovate, and much more.

1. Big Data Gets Bigger and Becomes a Service.

Big Data is a term to describe the technologies and techniques used to capture and utilize the exponentially increasing streams of datawith the goal ofbringing enterprise-wide visibility and insights to make rapid critical decisions. Companies are learning the hard way that Big Bad Data can get you into trouble fast, so there is a new push to focus on the quality of the data as it is being captured.

  • High Speed Analytics using advanced cloud services will increasingly be used as a complement to existing information management systems and programs to tame the massive data explosion. This new level of data integration and analytics will require many new skills and cross-functional buy-in in order to break down the many data and organizational silos that still exist. The rapid increase in data makes this a fast-growing hard trend that cannot be ignored.
  • Big Data as-a-Service (BDaaS) will emerge this year as cloud providers offer midsize and smaller organizations access to much larger streams of relevant data they could not tap into otherwise.

2. Cloud Computing Gets Personal and Advanced Cloud Services will be increasingly embraced by business of all sizes, as this represents a major shift in how organizations obtain and maintain software, hardware, and computing capacity. As consumers, we first experienced public clouds (think about when you use Google Docs or Apple’s iCloud). Then we saw more private clouds giving companies the security and limited access they needed, as well as hybrid clouds that provided both, giving customers and consumers access to specific areas of a company’s cloud. Companies of all sizes are using the cloud to cut costs in IT, human resources, and sales management functions. As individuals increasingly use personal mobile clouds, we will see a shift to services and less of a focus on the devices we use to access our services. This shift will also help us address the three limiting factors of mobility: battery life, memory, and processors.

3. On Demand Services will increasingly be offered to companies needing to rapidly deploy new services. Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) is increasingly joining Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), creating what some have called “IT as a service.” The rapid growth of Collaboration-as-a-Service (CaaS), Security-as-a-Service (SaaS), Networking as-a-Service (NaaS), and many more are all giving birth to Everything as-a-Service (XaaS). As a result, IT departments in all industries will be increasingly freed to focus on enabling business process transformation, which will allow organizations to maximize their return on their technology investments.

4. Virtualisation of Storage, Desktops, Applications, and Networking will see continued acceptance and growth by both large and small businesses as virtualisation security improves. In addition to storage, we will continue to see the virtualisation of processing power, allowing mobile devices to access supercomputer capabilities and apply it to processes such as purchasing and logistics, to name a few.

5. Consumerisation of IT increases, as consumers become the driving source for innovation and technology, which is fueled by rapid advances in processing power, storage, and bandwidth. Smart companies have recognized that this is a hard trend that will continue and have stopped fighting consumerization. Instead, they are turning it into a competitive advantage by consumerizing their applications, such as recommending safe and secure third party hardware and apps. Encouraging employees to share productivity enhancing consumer technology will become a wise strategy.

6. Wear Your Own Device (WYOD) will take off this year as wearable technology goes mainstream with big players launching smart watches, smart glasses, and more, creating new problems as well as opportunities for organizations of all sizes. Over the past few years, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) caught many IT departments by surprise; it’s now time to get in front of this this predictable hard trend and turn it into an advantage.

Are you ready to take your course online follow our free step by step advise on this site, and for those interested to design their course on Moodle platform we offer a free online course.

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7. Gameification of Training and Education will acceleratea fast-moving hard trend ofusing advanced simulations and skill-based learning systems that are self-diagnostic, interactive, game-like, and competitive, all focused on giving the user an immersive experience thanks to a photo-realistic 3D interface. Some will develop software using these gaming techniques to work on existing hardware systems such as both old and new versions of Xbox and PlayStation. A social component that includes sharing will drive success.

8. Online Learning and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) have been embraced by highly recognized and traditional educational institutions, putting them in a position to challenge all educational systems by making Location and Tuition far less of a barrier to receiving the information, training, and knowledge people need to know in order to succeed in a rapidly changing world. This hard trend, combined with Gameification systems, will change the face of global education.

9. eBooks, eNewspapers, eMagazines and Interactive Multimedia eTextbooks are finallypassing the tipping pointdue to the abundance of smart phones and tablets that provide a full color experience, and publishers providing apps that give a better-than-paper experience by including cut, copy, paste, print, and multimedia capabilities. Interactive eTextbooks will finally take off thanks to easy-to-use software such as Apple’s iBook Author and other competing tools, freeing new publishers to create compelling and engaging content, and freeing students from a static, expensive, and literally heavy experience.

10. Social Business Applications take on a new level of urgency as organizations shift from an Information Age “informing”model to a Communication Age “communicating and engaging” model. Social Software for business will reach a new level of adoption with applications to enhance relationships, collaboration, networking, social validation, and more. Social Searchand Social Analytics will increasingly be used by marketers and researchers, not to mention Wall Street, to tap into millions of daily tweets and Facebook conversations, providing real-time analysis of many key consumer metrics.

11. Smart Phones & Tablets Get Smarter with the rapid advances in processing power, storage, and bandwidth. Smart phones have already become our primary personal computer, and the Mobile Web hasbecomea must-have capability. An Enterprise Mobility Strategy Becomes Mandatory for all size organizations as we see mobile data, mobile media, mobile sales, mobile marketing, mobile commerce, mobile finance, mobile payments, mobile health, and many more explode. The vast majority of mobile phones sold globally will have a browser, making the smart phone our primary computer that is with us 24/7 and signaling a profound shift in global computing. This new level of mobility and connectivity by many millions around the world will allow any size business to transform how they market, sell, communicate, collaborate, educate, train, and innovate using mobility.

12. Mobile Apps for Business Processes such as purchasing, supply chain, logistics, distribution, service, sales, maintenance, and more will grow rapidly. There will be an increasing focus on Business App Stores within companies giving users access to personalized information they need on their mobile devices anytime and anywhere.

Posted by: Daniel BurrusDaniel Burrus

From Click To Conversion

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From click to conversion, where not all clicks are created equal.

The world loves free — especially free — data, insight, helpful tips, etc. Thus, when you’re creating and sharing helpful content, people click on it.

Many content marketers mistake this click for need when often, it’s simply an indicator of interest.

For example, let’s say you post a lot of content around B2B digital sales & marketing strategy and consistently see good click-thru numbers on those links. Specifically, you may see a lot of clicks from inside certain LinkedIn Groups that focus on B2B sales & marketing.

Because of this, you assume those groups want and need advice about developing B2B sales & marketing strategies — something you do. So you devote more time to those groups beyond just posting your content.

You monitor the Daily Update emails, you participate in various discussions and begin to connect with other members.

Meanwhile, you’re not seeing as many clicks from another platform — let’s say Facebook — so you dial down the time you spend there to focus more attention to those click happy LinkedIn Groups that seem to love your content.

But you have a big problem.

You don’t really know if the social media activity is converting to new leads, downloads or subscriptions, or if you’re just helping to educate a lot of people that will never do business with you.

Turning links into leads: The missing link here is conversion tracking.

It’s not enough to use Google Analytics to determine that your social and content efforts are driving traffic to your website, you need to define the high quality from low quality traffic. The only way to do that is to initiate an action and tracking it.

For every social media post you make, you need to understand how many clicks and conversions (downloading a white paper, subscribing to a newsletter, or buying a product) were generated.

To create and share content that turns invisible prospects into visible leads, you can start by:

  • Ask your visitors to take an specific action (you can give them a reward for their action, eg: ask them to give their email to receive the full article)
  • Directing your visitor to the next stage (eventually leading them to the purchasing page)
  • Ask them to leave a comment.

When someone clicks on your content, they’re indicating an interest or curiosity. They’re window-shopping. And in the world of business prospecting, they’re invisible.

But when they take that next step … when they trade you a piece of personally identifiable information, such as an email address to subscribe to a blog, they become a visible prospect.

I suggest you start with the google free conversation tracking facilities and you can then consider number of softwares available in the market.

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Import Google Analytics Goals into Conversion Tracking

When it comes to analysing customer activity on your website, Google offers two features to help you: Google Analytics Goals and Transactions, and AdWords Conversion Tracking. You can use both at the same time, or just one.

Compare Google Analytics Goals and AdWords Conversion Tracking

Google Analytics Goals

  • Ideal if you’re interested in the entire flow of customers through your site, not just conversions.
  • Can include conversions from non-AdWords sources, so it’s good for tracking all customer traffic on your website.

AdWords Conversion Tracking

  • Ideal if you’re interested only in conversions.
  • Tracks conversions only from AdWords sources.

Benefits of importing Google Analytics goals

Importing your Google Analytics goals into AdWords Conversion Tracking offers a few benefits. They include:

  • Access your Google Analytics conversions and data related to your AdWords clicks.
  • See Google Analytics conversion data in AdWords.
  • Give Conversion Optimizer access to data that helps optimize bids, potentially increasing conversions and lowering costs.

Keep in mind

You might not need to import Google Analytics transactions if you already use AdWords Conversion Tracking on a particular page. (Enabling both could cause conversions to be double-counted.)

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This article is based on extract from the article by: the Tom Martin, he is the founder of Converse Digital , author of The Invisible Sale. Get more from Tom on Google+, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

Effective social media strategy

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How to build an effective social media strategy

Based on the article by: Tom Martin

The folly of click data

The world loves free — especially free — data, insight, helpful tips, etc. Thus, when you’re creating and sharing helpful content, people click on it.

Many content marketers mistake this click for need when often, it’s simply an indicator of interest.

For example, let’s say you post a lot of content around B2B digital sales & marketing strategy and consistently see good click-thru numbers on those links. Specifically, you may see a lot of clicks from inside certain LinkedIn Groups that focus on B2B sales & marketing.

Because of this, you assume those groups want and need advice about developing B2B sales & marketing strategies — something you do. So you devote more time to those groups beyond just posting your content.

You monitor the Daily Update emails, you participate in various discussions and begin to connect with other members.

Meanwhile, you’re not seeing as many clicks from another platform — let’s say Facebook — so you dial down the time you spend there to focus more attention to those click happy LinkedIn Groups that seem to love your content.

But you have a big problem.

You don’t really know if the social media activity is converting to new leads, downloads or subscriptions, or if you’re just helping educate a lot of people that will never do business with you.

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Turning links into leads

The missing link here is conversion tracking.

It’s not enough to use Google Analytics to determine that your social and content efforts are driving traffic to your website, you need to define the high quality from low quality traffic. The only way to do that is by tracking conversions.

For every social media post you make, you need to understand how many clicks and conversions (downloading a white paper, subscribing to a newsletter, or buying a product) were generated.

To do this, I suggest you invest in a social media management and tracking platform that will produce customized short links for each social post you create … and track traffic from those links all the way through conversion.

There are a number of enterprise level solutions that will do this but for now, let me show you a simple real-world example of how I use this conversion data to better target my social media marketing efforts.

How conversions inform your strategy

The single most valuable benefit to comparing performance by click and conversion is time and effort management.

The insightful reports can be quite eye opening and really help you focus your limited time and attention to drive the best results for your business.

For instance, look at this campaign snapshot for my new book, The Invisible Sale.

Because most people are not going to purchase a book that is still nine months from publishing (this campaign was in April) we designed the campaign to drive awareness of the book and newsletter subscriber sign-ups. The figure below is showing the click and conversion (people who clicked through and then signed up for my Painless Prospecting newsletter).

If I was only looking at click data, I might feel that I need to place more effort on Twitter and less on Facebook and LinkedIn as Twitter drove significantly more clicks. But take a look at the conversion column.

It tells a very different story. Each of those platforms drove four conversions. However, LinkedIn drove those conversions at a much higher rate. Thus, if I’m looking for the most profitable platform to place my limited resources (time and effort) than LinkedIn would seem a better option.

Think of it this way …

When someone clicks on your content, they’re indicating an interest or curiosity. They’re window-shopping. And in the world of business prospecting, they’re invisible.

But when they take that next step … when they trade you a piece of personally identifiable information, such as an email address to subscribe to a blog, they become a visible prospect.

And that should be the goal of your social media efforts: To create and share content that turns invisible prospects into visible leads.

The benefits of conversion tracking

Conversion tracking isn’t just a better, more accurate way of reporting social media ROI. It’s a better way of developing a social media plan of attack. The single biggest challenge marketers have today is regarding time … or maybe better stated, thelack of time.

If you’re merely tracking clicks, you very well may be spending a lot of time producing and sharing content with window shoppers instead of developing truly valuable relationships with true prospects.

About the Author: Tom Martin is a 20+ year veteran of the marketing and advertising industry with a penchant for stiff drinks, good debates and digital gadgets. He is the founder of Converse Digital , author of The Invisible Sale.

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Metacognitive And Learning

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Strategies For Instructional Design

Do you know how to learn? Many people don’t. Specifically, they don’t know how to look inward to examine how they learn and to judge what is effective.

That’s where metacognitive strategies come in. They are techniques that help people become more successful learners. Shouldn’t this be a crucial goal of instructional design?

Improved metacognition can facilitate both formal and informal learning. It can improve the performance of new tasks on the job and help teams problem solve more effectively.

Here are some things instructional designers should know about metacognition.

What is metacognition?

  1. Metacognition is often referred to as “thinking about thinking.” But that’s just a quick definition. Metacognition is a regulatory system that helps a person understand and control his or her own cognitive performance.
  2. Metacognition allows people to take charge of their own learning. It involves awareness of how they learn, an evaluation of their learning needs, generating strategies to meet these needs and then implementing the strategies. (Hacker, 2009)
  3. Learners often show an increase in self-confidence when they build metacognitive skills. Self-efficacy improves motivation as well as learning success.
  4. Metacognitive skills are generally learned during a later stage of development. Metacognitive strategies can often (but not always) be stated by the individual who is using them.
  5. For all age groups, metacognitive knowledge is crucial for efficient independent learning because it fosters forethought and self-reflection.

The Two Processes of Metacognition

Fortunately, many theorists organize the skills of metacognition into two components. This makes it easier to understand and remember.

  1. According to theory, metacognition consists of two complementary processes: 1) the knowledge of cognition and 2) the regulation of cognition.
  2. Knowledge of cognition has three components: knowledge of the factors that influence one’s own performance; knowing different types of strategies to use for learning; knowing what strategy to use for a specific learning situation.
  3. Regulation of cognition involves: setting goals and planning; monitoring and controlling learning; and evaluating one’s own regulation (assessing results and strategies used).

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Metacognition and Expertise

  1. Many experts cannot explain the skills they use to elicit expert performance. (Perhaps this is due to the automatic functioning of the expert.)
  2. Metacognitive strategies often separate an expert from a novice. For example, experts are able to plan effectively on a global level at the start of a task—a novice won’t see the big picture.
  3. Some adults with expertise in one domain can transfer their metacognitive skills to learn more rapidly in another domain.
  4. On the other hand, some adults do not spontaneously transfer metacognitive skills to new settings and thus, will need help doing so.

Examples of Metacognition Skills You May Use

Successful learners typically use metacognitive strategies whenever they learn. But they may fail to use the best strategy for each type of learning situation. Here are some metacognitive strategies that will sound familiar to you:

  1. Knowing the limits of your own memory for a particular task and creating a means of external support.
  2. Self-monitoring your learning strategy, such as concept mapping, and then adapting the strategy if it isn’t effective.
  3. Noticing whether you comprehend something you just read and then modifying your approach if you did not comprehend it.
  4. Choosing to skim subheadings of unimportant information to get to the information you need.
  5. Repeatedly rehearsing a skill in order to gain proficiency.
  6. Periodically doing self-tests to see how well you learned something.

Metacognitive and learning Strategies

Metacognitive strategies facilitate learning how to learn. You can incorporate these, as appropriate, into eLearning courses, social learning experiences, pre- and post-training activities and other formal or informal learning experiences.

  1. Ask Questions. During formal courses and in post-training activities, ask questions that allow learners to reflect on their own learning processes and strategies. In collaborative learning, ask them to reflect on the role they play when problem solving in teams.
  2. Foster Self-reflection. Emphasize the importance of personal reflection during and after learning experiences. Encourage learners to critically analyze their own assumptions and how this may have influenced their learning.
  3. Encourage Self-questioning. Foster independent learning by asking learners to generate their own questions and answer them to enhance comprehension. The questions can be related to meeting their personal goals
  4. Teach Strategies Directly. Teach appropriate metacognitive strategies as a part of a training course.
  5. Promote Autonomous Learning. When learners have some domain knowledge, encourage participation in challenging learning experiences. They will then be forced to construct their own metacognitive strategies.
  6. Provide Access to Mentors. Many people learn best by interacting with peers who are slightly more advanced. Promote experiences where novices can observe the proficient use of a skill and then gain access to the metacognitive strategies of their mentors.
  7. Solve Problems with a Team: Cooperative problem solving can enhance metacognitive strategies by discussing possible approaches with team members and learning from each other.
  8. Think Aloud. Teach learners how to think aloud and report their thoughts while performing a difficult task. A knowledgeable partner can then point out errors in thinking or the individual can use this approach for increased self-awareness during learning.
  9. Self-explanation. Self-explanation in writing or speaking can help learners improve their comprehension of a difficult subject.
  10. Provide Opportunities for Making Errors. When learners are given the opportunity to make errors while in training, such as during simulations, it stimulates reflection on the causes of their errors.

In summary, metacognition is a set of skills that enable learners to become aware of how they learn and to evaluate and adapt these skills to become increasingly effective at learning. In a world that demands lifelong learning, providing people with new and improved metacognitive strategies is a gift that can last forever.

Developing an Influencer Plan

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Developing an Influencer Plan

In today’s marketplace, the biggest challenge you have is standing out in the crowd, becoming recognized as an authority, and obtaining your dream job. Tested, proven marketing strategies can help you solve these challenges, whether you think you of yourself as a marketer or not.

Build Your Digital Footprint

Getting started

First you have to identify your target audience (those how may be interested in your product or service). Next study the competitive landscape and your target audience needs, those who may be interested to receive your instructional posts or blogs.

To keep the cost down you need to your own writing, proofreading, uploading into WordPress, and finding copyright free images for individual posts.

Start Building your LinkedIn network, Facebook Fan page (not a personal page), Google+ and get your Twitter going (subject to your audience you may use other social networks)

The influencer list

Influencer can be defined as a blogger, competitor, or media organization that is creating content of interest to our target audience. Initially, can develop this list by tracking keywords (like “content marketing”) in Google Alerts, authors in industry trade publications, those who were talking about the topic on Twitter, LinkedIn and other bloggers that you just find interesting.

  • LinkedIn- Join the relevant groups and discussion.
  • Article Submission Sites - Join the relevant article posting sites.
  • FaceBook Fan page - Start building your face books fan page.

Getting the attention of influencers

As influencers, these people are fairly important. They generally have real jobs, and are extremely active on social networks, spending their time sharing content and blogging. Getting on their radar is not easy. So, to get their attention, you can give away content gifts.

Ways to achieve this:

Social media 4-1-1

Originally coined by Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping, Social Media 4-1-1 is a sharing system that enables a company to get greater visibility with social influencers.

Here’s how it works.

For every six pieces of content shared via social media (think Twitter for example):

  • Four are pieces of content from your influencer target that are also relevant to your audience. This means that 67% of the time you are sharing content that is not yours, and calling attention to content from your influencer group.
  • One piece can be your original, educational piece of content.
  • One piece can be your sales piece, like a coupon, product notice, press release or some other piece of content that no one will pay attention to.

While the numbers don’t have to be exact, it’s the philosophy that makes this work. When you share influencer content, they notice. And you share, without asking for anything in return … so that when you do need something someday, the influencers are more likely to say yes.

Big content gifts

From your “top content marketing blogs” list, you can decide which one can get a better visibility with influencers by actually ranking the influencers and sharing it out with the masses.

You can rank the top bloggers, websites, books, etc…looking at areas like consistency, style, helpfulness, originality, and social sharing. Then each quarter, you can publicise the list, showcase the top 10, send out a press release, and try to make a big deal out of it. You will find that most of this influencer group share the list with their audiences, and may place your widget (with their personal rank) on their home page, linking back to our site. So not only are we building long-term relationships with these influencers, you are getting credible links and traffic as well.

The importance of a community blog

As you may not have the resources (time and money) to develop large body of content you can find others to join you. To attract these social influencers you should put a compelling case forward (you can be promoting their blogs or book, etc). Most of these influencers (if approached properly) will be more than happy to help you out.

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Influencer program results

You will see positive traffic patterns almost immediately simply because of the amount of social sharing from the network.

That, in turn, leads to more social sharing and some amazing SEO results.

While you may or may not launch a blog that has outside contribution, committing to maintaining a social influencer list is a critical component to your social sharing program.

Next step is to add webinars and video marketing to your content.

This report was written based on an Article by: Joe Pulizzi is founder of Content Marketing Institute