Latest articles published on Workforce Transformation

Workforce Transformation
Author unkown

Workforce transformation is about adapting the workforce for business success in this era of continuous disruptions and digital challenges. Achieve end-to-end workforce lifecycle that make work better for humans and humans better at work.

Workforce Transformation Strategy pivot around three themes: Energize the organization, Invest in the people and Manage and sustain the change.

Here are some of the latest articles I´ve published on the organizational success behind managing employee´s end-to-end work experience, your company´s most valuable asset.

¿Qué es el trabajo asíncrono? Published on Sage Advice

8 consejos de RRHH para dirigir equipos remotos de forma eficaz. Published on Sage Advice

¿Cuándo se debe evaluar el rendimiento de los empleados? Revisamos algunos casos. Published on Sage Advice

Trabajo híbrido: Estas son las empresas que lo han implantado con éxito. Published on Sage Advice

Trabajo híbrido: el arte de combinar el teletrabajo y la oficina. Published on Sage Advice

Analítica de Recursos Humanos o People Analytics: 10 beneficios del uso de Big Data en Recursos Humanos. Published on Sage Advice

Resources for Business in Social Media Platforms

Social Media

Social media marketing looks simple. My product is fantastic, indeed; a tweet will suffice to go viral and I will be soon in the next edition cover of BusinessWeek.

However, the reality will come to hit you right in your believes and your one post probably won’t go viral.

But a good strategy and a consistent, iterative improvement process may in fact drive traffic, generate leads, and even sell through social media. You might not be in the “30 under 30´s” of Wired, but you can build a successful company off the back of your social efforts.

So I’ve compiled a set of actionable Resources for Business in Social Media Platforms available to help you in your way.


Instagram for Business Blog

This is the place to get started and updated with all the content and news for your business IG account. You will find here all the advertising and sell, including the documentation for your developers team to connect and use the data.

Visit the Instagram for business Blog, here.


Youtube Playbook for Creative Advertising

YouTube is the second largest search engine according to Forbes. With this essential guide you will easily get to know:

  • the YouTube ecosystem and some of the strategies behind its creative content,
  • learn to use the tools that will take your creative to the next level and optimize your campaigns,
  • how to reach your audience, hold their attention and earn their love,
  • and discover the full suite of strategies and analytics tools that will help you grow your YouTube audience.

Visit the Playbook for YouTube, here.


Twitter for Business

The #1 platform for discovery and real time conversations offers a powerful, impactful, and unique advertising platform. Don´t miss the resources that Twitter had collected for Business to help them increase the base and engagement of their followers.

A month of Tweets Template from Twitter for Business site.

Visit the Twitter for Business page, here.


Linkedin for Small Business

The professional network comes with great features to make your business grow, from tools to build relationships, find talent or prospect new leads.

A fantastic Business Owner´s Guide for Linkedin is available, here.

Visit the Linkedin for Small Business site for all resources and features, here.


The Keyword – Google Ads Blog

All Hail Google Adwords! Under the headline “Make every marketing dollar count” the ubiquitous and omniscient Google brings to all the mortals the tricks, tips and latest updates of the Google Ads platform. The content is organized chronologically and not categorized at all so it´s difficult access the content. Ranks poorly in this article SEO.

Visit “The Keyword” Blog, here.


My Marketing Stack (Updated Q4-2020)

A marketing technology stack is a suite of technologies that marketers leverage to conduct and improve their marketing activities. The purpose of all MarTech is to simplify processes, measure the impact of marketing activities and drive more efficient spending.

Because marketers won´t find the perfect all-in-one solution, the best approach is to find a combo with the best solutions available to address specific marketing problems, or a marketing stack.

Marketing technology is now one of the largest portions of a company’s total marketing budget (26% on average according to Gartner).

The fact that the market has been populated recently with thousand of choices is probably causing the stress in some CMO´s, worried sick to stay ahead of it competitors or more often to understand what is going on.

The ability to back up the marketing team’s actions with data is often enough evidence to defend internally a growing budget for the department.

To help them here is my top marketing technology vendors for each category:

  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  • Product Intelligence and Feedback
  • Customer Onboarding
  • Automation
  • Interoperability
  • Localization
  • Analytics
  • SEO
  • Customer Lyfecycle Communications
  • Content Marketing
  • Website Conversion
  • Collaboration
  • Digital Assets

Customer Relationship Management

I am not usually in the mood to talk about CRM solutions and this is no special occasion. Mostly used to support the sales force in B2B business, the CRM is no sweet treat for any marketer. The input and therefore the value of the data often comes from the salesperson feedback. If the sales team is not disciplined enough, your CRM won´t be useful at all. Also probably because the magnitude (in money, time and pain) of the projects involving deploying or migrating a CRM, I will only give you here the 2019 selection of Gartner about that. Good Luck.


Product Intelligence and Feedback

Amplitude.com enables the teams asking the questions, building the experiences, and deciding what’s next with the data and analytics they need. The platform will allow your team to better convert, engage, and retain customers. Gain a deeper understanding of how customers experience your digital products, ship product improvements faster, measure impact, and visualize user journeys and personalize product experiences to drive engagement, conversion, and loyalty. Free Version Available.

Riddle Allows your team to gather feedback from your users with 15 quiz, poll, and survey interactive formats. Qualify and segment leads based on quiz responses. Email quiz results to each quiz taker. Offers multiple integrations and templates. Free 14-days trial.

Formstack is an intuitive online form builder that allows your team to create powerful forms, automate workflows, streamline your document generation, payment collection, gather customer data, and automate your day-to-day tasks. Free 14-days trial.

Satismeter allows your team to discover customer pains in key touch-points and track how you improve over time: gather feedback from new customers during onboarding, measure satisfaction with parts of your service, gauge your overall customer experience, learn what is unique about your service and judge if you’re ready to scale. Free Version Available.

Brandwatch is a powerful market intelligence solutions that provides historical and real-time consumer data, to protect your brand and never miss a negative post, monitor conversation about your brand online and discover what your customers think, benchmark your performance and brand awareness against all of your competitors, survey billions across the globe, instantly with fast, real-time and reliable results, build a data-driven culture and understand consumers at every touchpoint or find your next opportunity by predicting consumer needs and spotting trends. . While writting this realized that Brandwatch is the owner of Buzzsumo (See Content Marketing, below).


Customer Onboarding

WalkMe is a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) with multiple layers of data collection and analysis of the user journey, in-app step-by-step guidance and help users to complete complex business processes. Gives your team the control to change content, design, placement, and functionality of each step of the on-screen guidance.


Automation

Phantombuster.com allows your team to automate web data collection, build amazing workflows and chain actions for the most used social media platforms. It comes with predefined templates and a very good knowledge base and tutorials. Free Version Available.

Marketo by Adobe allows your team to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows. Marketing automation enables many modern marketing practices, including lead generation, segmentation, lead nurturing and scoring, relationship marketing, cross-sell and upsell, retention, return on investment (ROI) measurement, and account-based marketing. Marketo is better suited to B2B marketers who already have an established MarTech stack and expect to be able to customize their platform.

Hubspot offers a full stack of software for marketing, sales, and customer service, with a free CRM at its core. It´s a modular solution that can also be bundled together. The digital marketing module comes with some nice features of worklow automation, lead conversion, content management, social media streams and analytics. Free Version Available.


Interoperability

Segment.com collects user events from your web & mobile apps and provides a complete data toolkit to marketing, product and engineering teams. For a marketer user, Segment unify customer’s touch points across platforms and channels, enabling personalized, consistent, and real-time customer experiences. Free Version Available.


Localization

DeepL.com By far the best online translation service I´ve found. The translator is free and it has a version for developers that connects your application to DeepL PRO REST API to automate the translation process. Free Version Available.

Smartling.com is a Translation Management System reduces the time and cost spent on translation and localization to deliver culturally relevant brand experiences. They have developed integrations to connect to CMS, code repository, and marketing automation tools.


Analytics

Google Marketing Platform It’s hard to beat Google Analytics in terms of flexibility and value. Google Marketing Platform brings together DoubleClick Digital Marketing and the Google Analytics 360 Suite to help your team plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place. Free Version Available.

Kissmetrics.io is a Customer Engagement Automation solution both for SaaS and eCommerce businesses. Is a powerful web analytics tool that delivers key insights and user interaction. They have compared their solution against Google Analytics highlighting that the data is tied to a person (not a visitor), see the full customer journey across devices, discover drop-off points…

Crazy Egg lets your team see exactly what visitors are doing on your website. Your team can use Crazy Egg Analytics to understand the customer journey with Snapshots,  Heatmaps and Recordings. It also comes with A/B Testing Tools. Free 30-day trial.

Metricool offers a simple dashboard to review metrics, plan content publishing and manage online ad campaigns. Free Version Available.


SEO

Moz Pro centers around improving your rankings and search engine visibility. This will allow your team to crawl, measure and audit any website, highlight technical issues and inform content strategy. Free 30-day trial.

SEMrush finds long tail keywords and phrase matches. You also can monitor your competitors’ inbound links and other market relevant information, SEO, Content, Market Research, Advertising, SMM & SERM. Free Version Available.


Customer Lyfecycle Communications

Customer.io helps your mobile or desktop application to configure event based segmentation and marketing and send personalized emails. Requires and REST.API integration with the code of your app but the results are fantastic and simple to set up different campaigns based on the behaviour your customers are showing.


Content Marketing

BuzzSumo Content Marketing cost less and generate 3x more leads than traditional marketing. With BuzzSumo your team can use advanced content insights to generate ideas, create high-performing content, monitor performance and identify influencers. Free 7-days trial.

TubeBuddy is a browser extension and mobile app that integrates directly into YouTube to help you run your channel with ease. Provides keyword research, best practices walktrough to rank higher, A/B Testing and Analytics. YourTube is the second largest search engine (Forbes).

Anchor.fm is an all-in-one platform where you can create, distribute, and monetize your podcasts from any device. Anchor submits your RSS feed automatically to all major listening platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify… Free Version Available.

Other interesting options are Populr.me, Ion and Uberflip.


Website Conversion

Unbounce.com While websites are great for information and exploration, they’re duds at turning traffic into revenue. Landing pages allows the marketer to have a focused content instead of a site full of distractions. The term “conversion rate” is generally used to signify the % of visitors that turn into customers. The average conversion rate is lower than 3% globally. Unbounce provides Landing Pages, Pop-Ups and Sticky Bars to present relevant offers and convert visitors into buyers. It comes with a ton of templates to design and publish witout the need of a dedicated developer. No free version. Free 14-days trial.


Collab

Trello uses boards, lists, and cards to enable teams to organize and prioritize projects. The butler funtionality allows you to automate some actions in your workflow. Free Version Available.

Microsoft Teams it is just simply fantastic. The apple of Satya´s eye is getting a lot of attention during the COV-19 Pandemic. It comes with a lot of collaboration features and add-ins with other market applications. Free Version Available.


Digital Assets

Canva is very useful solutuin with drag-and-drop features and professional layouts to design graphics for all your content and formats: Invitations, Headers, Profile Pictures, Posts images… You can also apply filters, use fonts and a big stock of pictures for your designs. Free Version Available.

Freepik.com is a huge collection of digital resources (Images, PSD, EPS, Vectors, Tutorials, Templates, Icons…) many of them free to use under attribution licences.

Adobe Stock is a stock photo service offered by Adobe that is fully integrated into Creative Cloud platform. It provides a seamless workflow for designers, since you can browse, test edit and use professional stock photos in your designs directly in any editing app.

Check my post about The Rise of Digital Assets, here.


Systems Dynamics – First approach

What is it?

System dynamics (SD) is a technique for strategic and policy simulation modeling based on feedback systems theory. It was invented in the late 1950s by Jay Forrester, a pioneer in engineering and computer design. Since then, SD has developed as its own field, distinct from the larger fields of operations research and management science to which it is related.

SD unites social and behavioral science with the nitty-gritty details of planning and accounting, and requires the careful design and construction of original models with many interacting variables.  Although SD modeling is technically demanding, the logic and results of a good SD model are neither esoteric nor hard for decision makers to understand.  And although SD models are sophisticated, they are also compact enough to run instantly on a laptop computer, permitting a whole series of alternative assumptions and scenarios to be tested quickly and thoroughly in interactive strategy development sessions.

Definition from the Systems Dynamics Society. https://www.systemdynamics.org/for-strategy

This first pencil and paper inventory control system [ a simulation Jay Forrester was working on in a project for General Electric] was the beginning of system dynamics.

Jay W. Forrester
Link to the McKinsey Article, here.

About Jay W. Forrester. Professor Emeritus of Management System Dynamics

Jay W. Forrester founded the growing field of system dynamics. His research includes the System Dynamics National Model, which generates the major observed modes of economic behavior; a new type of dynamics-based management education; and system dynamics as a unifying theme in pre-college education.

A pioneer in early digital computer development, Forrester invented random-access magnetic-core memory during the first wave of modern computers.

Forrester has received numerous awards for his books, nine honorary degrees from universities around the world, and the National Medal of Technology, awarded by the President of the United States.

MIT. Link to the Profile, here.

Resources

John Sterman. Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management. Professor, System Dynamics and Engineering Systems. Director, MIT System Dynamics Group

Suggested Readings

Jay W. Forrester, Industrial Dynamics, Productivity Press, Portland, Oreg., 1961.

Jay W. Forrester, Urban Dynamics, Productivity Press, Portland, Oreg., 1969. Jay W. Forrester, World Dynamics, Productivity Press, Portland, Oreg., 1971, second edition 1973.

Jay W. Forrester, Collected Papers of Jay W. Forrester, Productivity Press, Portland, Oreg., 1975.

Jay W. Forrester, “System dynamics as an organizing framework for pre-college education,” System Dynamics Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1993, pp. 183-94. (Also available as Memo D-4277-1, System Dynamics Group, Sloan School, MIT, Cambridge MA 02139.)

Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Landers, and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, New York, 1972.

George P. Richardson, Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, Pa., 1991.

Mindmap to understand chinese tech players and their american counterparts

I found this useful image for those unaware of the Chinese Tech giants nowadays and their similar North American counterparts.

It used to be the case that Chinese tech companies built a foundation in the domestic market by copying the business models of successful US companies and localising them to make them more relevant for local consumers. However, everything has changed. Now, companies in China’s tech sector are driving fundamental innovation that is being increasingly adopted around the world.

The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)

“The Mother of All Demos is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart’s December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace. The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor.” Amazing.

The Turing Test – Original Paper

The following is an excerpt from Oppy, Graham and David Dowe, “The Turing Test”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/turing-test/>.

“Turing (1950) describes the following kind of game:

Suppose that we have a person, a machine, and an interrogator. The interrogator is in a room separated from the other person and the machine.

The object of the game is for the interrogator to determine which of the other two is the person, and which is the machine. The interrogator knows the other person and the machine by the labels ‘X’ and ‘Y’—but, at least at the beginning of the game, does not know which of the other person and the machine is ‘X’—and at the end of the game says either ‘X is the person and Y is the machine’ or ‘X is the machine and Y is the person’.

The interrogator is allowed to put questions to the person and the machine of the following kind: “Will X please tell me whether X plays chess?” Whichever of the machine and the other person is X must answer questions that are addressed to X.

The object of the machine is to try to cause the interrogator to mistakenly conclude that the machine is the other person; the object of the other person is to try to help the interrogator to correctly identify the machine. About this game, Turing (1950) says: “

I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. … I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

Alan Turing, 1950.

An extensive explanation about The Turing Test may be found, here.