Reboot your Business. Reboot yourself!

A Review of CTRL ALT Delete by Mitch Joel

As we work from day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month it’s easy to miss the extent of the changes that digital media and technology have made to our businesses and careers.

I will be discussing how to manage these changes, both at a business level and a personal level in our upcoming webinar on July 10th with Mitch Joel, the author of CTRL ALT Delete and Six Pixels of Separation, who is President of Twist Image - one of the largest independent Digital Marketing agencies in North America, but sold to WPP earlier this year.

It's a free webcast and if you register now you can watch live or playback.

In this post I preview some of the thinking in his latest book which we will discuss in the webinar. I will also be giving some examples of tools we have developed at Smart Insights and feature in our latest guide to Digital Transformation.

In CTRL ALT Delete Mitch Joel gives us a sharp wake up call to show that “Business-As-Usual” is a risky strategic approach for businesses AND can be a risk for personal career development too. He makes this point forcefully when he explains:

"The challenge is that most businesses don’t know how to adapt, and most of the people who are working for these companies don’t know how to change their old ways.

Technology hasn’t just transformed how we connect socially. Technology has sent business through a rapid state of genetic mutation and we’re still in the middle of this evolution. I call this moment time the following: Purgatory. We’re not in hell… but this certainly isn’t heaven either.

While Digital Transformation has been a prominent issue amongst consultants working with large businesses throughout 2013 and into 2014, this often focuses just on business transformation. I like the way Mitch Joel’s book also looks at the personal dimension of how these technology changes can affect and individual’s career too. The book is in two parts, to show how he stresses the need for individuals to change, the first is Reboot: Business, the second, Reboot: You.

Throughout his book, Mitch Joel covers  many specific calls-to-action which will can help businesses transform. Here are the ones that resonated with me:

• 1. Truly understand your consumers and their landscape. Understand how people relevant to your products and services are using active media today and whether your brand is truly active or strictly passive meaning that you are simply broadcasting messages on social media. The picture is changing continuously, so this shouldn’t be an occasional activity. We have described some techniques to understand this in our post on marketplace mapping and our persona toolkit.
• 2. Put effort into mining and applying insight. Close to our hearts too, Mitch Joel says that his experience is that regardless of size, many businesses are struggling with data and consumer intelligence. He advises to start small and build relevant dashboards, invest in social media monitoring tools to become more active and responsive.
• 3. Brands need to develop closer direct-to-consumer relationships. Hands-off, at-a-distance relationships aren’t relationships… So companies need to actively use their presence across paid-owned-earned media to get closer to, to interact with their customers.
• 4. Deliver value first. This follows-on from the previous point. When we wrote the first edition of Emarketing Excellence in 2001, I was keen to stress the need for companies to develop an “Internet value Proposition” which would add value to their brands by offering consumers new ways to inform, entertain and sell. It’s an idea that many brands have adopted now, with budget invested to highlight these new forms of value. Jay Baer has even written an entire book, “Youtility” showing examples of this in practice
• 5. Focus on true fans. A practical tip here, Mitch advises “turning to the fanatical”, to find and nurture your true fans to encourage advocacy.
• 6.Ride on the backs of giants. This highlights the importance of Digital Agility. To be able to monitor what people are excited about TODAY. Since interests change so fast. He gives examples of how businesses have taken advantage of early enthusiasm for Pinterest or Instagram for instance.
• 7. Remove friction. Re-engineer processes and customer contact to make buying easier from customers. He gives the example of how the Nationwide Insurance company in Canada uses a mobile app to simplify the process.
• 8. The Ultimate Question? Do you know the ultimate question? It’s the would "“you recommend us to friends or family” question popularised by Fred Reichheld and increasingly featured in Net Promoter Score programmes. Joel suggests this is a way to review the effectiveness of whether you are re-inventing successfully.

So looking back at Joel’s purgatory analogy I mentioned at the start of this review, he advises us to grasp the opportunity. He says:

"Purgatory is a moment of transition, but one that we can’t necessarily define by time... Do we sit idly by and wait for it to pass? That would be a massive mistake...

Moments of purgatory are moments of power as well. Appreciate it. Instead of shaking your head and wondering what happened, stop and realise that you can now have amazing direct relationships with your consumers: indeed the opportunity is right in front of you to provide them with true tools of utility foster long-lasting connections".