by David Bullock on March 23, 2010
Have you ever seen an opportunity in the marketplace and wondered what would have happened if you had taken the chance to actually go with a hunch and do something? What did you do then and what are you going to do in the future when opportunity presents itself?
In May 2008, I was presented with an idea with an uncertain future. But I seized the opportunity and a whole new world has opened up for me. As I write this post today, I am pleased to be able to share with you what I had been up to and the adventure it has been.
Key Take Away : One project that is well selected and executed in a timely fashion can change your life.
You own it. No one can take it away from you. And the lessons that you learn along the way are priceless.
The Project That Started With A Conversation
Over the past year I have been working on several projects some good some bad. But all of them taught me something. As I have been watching the market, I have noticed that there is this idea that you only need one skill, one magic product or one super-secret technique to create a wonderful empire.
With Barack 2.0, we have spent over 12 months expanding the blog into a book, which then grew to a full-blown business and speaking career. There was no one product or skill that we used to accomplish this. It took a bunch of pieces to complete the puzzle.
We incorporated:
- Offer Creation
- Salesmanship
- Traffic Generation
- Content Deployment
- Listbuilding
- Repackaging
- Leverage Management
- Taguchi Thinking
- Video
- Audio
- Blogging
- Copy Writing
- Online and Offline Networking
- Public Speaking
- Social Media
- SEO
- Pay-Per-Click
- Strategy
- Tactics
- Seminar and Webinar Presentation
- Building Credibility
- Social Proof
- Public Relations (Credibility Public Building)
- E-commerce
- Distribution
- etc…
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by David Bullock on February 17, 2010
As we completed the Barack 2.0 project, we had the opportunity to speak with the professors at Wharton School of Business about the data exhaust that is created due to new media platforms and practices.
These are the questions that came out of that discussion:
- What data is required to produce a profit in business?
- What data is worth inspecting?
- You have the data… now what?
- Does it go into a nice report and sit on the shelf?
- Is all of this data collection and measurement meaningless?
It can be meaningless if the data is not useful and pragmatically applicable.
Let’s look at a few concepts that filter out a lot of the noise:
Perfect Information Definition #1: Information that completely eliminates uncertainty in a situation (as opposed to imperfect information, which only reduces uncertainty). (www.businessdictionary.com)
Perfect Information Definition #2: Information that is accurate, precise and actionable. (Technomics – H. Lee Martin)
Accurate and precise means that the data is picked up from a reliable source and is repeatable. But what caught my attention was the idea that the information has to be actionable.
What does that really mean? It means you have to be able to do something with the information besides just present it and think about it.
Information, to be truly valuable and meaningful, has to be actionable.
So if you are running your business by the numbers, the steps are as follows:
- Know what data to gather
- Get the right data
- Interpret the data
- Use the data to improve your business
This is especially true with social media, as so much data *seems to be coming out of the social media space.
*Just having a large volume of data does not mean that the data is valuable or meaningful.
Do you think that all of this expensive data and reporting is worth it if you push it against the idea of it being “actionable?”
