06 Habits of True Strategic Thinkers

01.  Anticipate 

Most of the focus at most companies is on what’s directly ahead. The leaders lack “peripheral vision.” This can leave your company vulnerable to rivals who detect and act on ambiguous signals. To anticipate well, you must:

• Look for game-changing information at the periphery of your industry
• Search beyond the current boundaries of your business
• Build wide external networks to help you scan the horizon better

 

02.  Think Critically

“Conventional wisdom” opens you to fewer raised eyebrows and second guessing. But if you swallow every management fad, herdlike belief, and safe opinion at face value, your company loses all competitive advantage. Critical thinkers question everything. To master this skill you must force yourself to:

• Reframe problems to get to the bottom of things, in terms of root causes
• Challenge current beliefs and mindsets, including your own
• Uncover hypocrisy, manipulation, and bias in organizational decisions

 

03.  Interpret 

Ambiguity is unsettling. Faced with it, the temptation is to reach for a fast (and potentially wrongheaded) solution.  A good strategic leader holds steady, synthesizing information from many sources before developing a viewpoint. To get good at this, you have to:

• Seek patterns in multiple sources of data
• Encourage others to do the same
• Question prevailing assumptions and test multiple hypotheses simultaneously

 

04.  Decide

Many leaders fall prey to “analysis paralysis.” You have to develop processes and enforce them, so that you arrive at a “good enough” position. To do that well, you have to:

• Carefully frame the decision to get to the crux of the matter
• Balance speed, rigor, quality and agility. Leave perfection to higher powers
• Take a stand even with incomplete information and amid diverse views

 

05.  Align

Total consensus is rare. A strategic leader must foster open dialogue, build trust and engage key stakeholders, especially when views diverge.  To pull that off, you need to:

• Understand what drives other people's agendas, including what remains hidden
• Bring tough issues to the surface, even when it's uncomfortable
• Assess risk tolerance and follow through to build the necessary support

 

06.  Learn

As your company grows, honest feedback is harder and harder to come by.  You have to do what you can to keep it coming. This is crucial because success and failure--especially failure--are valuable sources of organizational learning.  Here's what you need to do:

• Encourage and exemplify honest, rigorous debriefs to extract lessons
• Shift course quickly if you realize you're off track
• Celebrate both success and (well-intentioned) failures that provide insight

THE STRATEGIC DECISION  |  Paul J. H. Schoemaker

For more information regarding strategic thinking and its application to your web properties.  Contact me at db@davidbadajoz.com or visit www.davidbadajoz.com.

Short Message Service

Facebook and Twitter are great channels that marketers can use to reach new audiences and participate in two-way interactions with consumers. Unfortunately, both social networks are also undeniably scattershot as marketing tools. Segmenting and personalizing your communications effectively using either one is difficult, and even your most dedicated fans and followers will likely not read many of your messages.

The chronological layout of Twitter timelines, coupled with the sheer volume of tweets many users receive, makes it almost inevitable that your followers will miss some of your tweets. And Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm can prevent your posts from appearing in your fans' News Feeds if you're not creating content that's consistently interesting to them.

Those facts make a good case for the need to write compelling social media content. They also underscore the value of converting your social media followers into SMS- and email-marketing subscribers. As people who have a genuine, expressed interest in your products and services, your fans and followers are the perfect targets for those efforts.

By recruiting your social fans and followers to your email and SMS lists, you can forge deeper relationships with them by offering more personalized and targeted content than you ever could via social media alone.

You can also increase the likelihood that your communications will be read—particularly in the case of SMS, since 83% of all text messages are read within an hour of being received.

For more information regarding branding your business.  Contact me at db@davidbadajoz.com or visit www.davidbadajoz.com.

Building your Brand with Google+

 

Navigating a new social platform can be challenging, especially for larger brands that have a global presence, multiple brands and millions of fans. Last week Google announced its relationships with a handful of third-party social media management software companies that will provide tools for brands to manage their presences on Google+, including the ability to manage Circles, publish to Google+ and access analytics. These tools will help streamline publishing to multiple Google+ pages and effectively manage Circles in a scalable manner, while enabling access to analytics across a brand’s Google+ presence.

For more information regarding branding your business on Google+ for business contact me at db@davidbadajoz.com or visit www.davidbadajoz.com.

Optimizng PDF's for SEO

 

The debate rages on about whether or not your marketing content such as ebooks and webinars should be gated behind lead-capture forms. However, there is plenty of content such as case studies, FAQs, fact sheets, and brochures that aren't very suitable for lead generation and can benefit from being ungated and readily available in organic search.

This type of content is frequently published in PDF form, and as an important part of your inbound marketing strategy, it should get the same SEO treatment as everything else you publish. The next time you're ready to release new PDFs out into the world, follow these 5 steps to quickly optimize them before you publish to ensure crawlers can find and index them for searchers.

01. Create your PDF in a text-based program.

When you use Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat, crawlers can read and index the content.

02. Follow SEO best practices when writing your content.

Optimize your content as you would any other content for your site. Use relevant keywords in your content, H1 and H2 tags in the copy, and make sure your images include alt tags.

03. Crawlers can read links in a PDF, too.

Build in links to relevant pages on your website so readers can get back to your site from the PDF. This is particularly important if your PDF is shared via email or social networks, as those readers may not have been to your site before.

04. Save the file as a PDF with a relevant file name.

For example, my PDF on vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes would be called Vegetarian-Thanksgiving-Recipes.pdf. This will also help users identify the content of the PDF if they share it with others or save it for later use.


05. Find popular pages on your site.

Once you click OK, publish your PDF to pages on your site that are frequently crawled so it's easier for search engines to find and index the PDF.


Pretty easy, right? Optimizing PDFs is a quick, simple step you can take to make content like case studies, fact sheets, brochures, product overviews, and other valuable content assets more search engine-friendly.

HubSpot

For more information regarding SEO campaigns contact me at db@davidbadajoz.com or visit www.davidbadajoz.com.

Daft Punk Coca Cola Box Set

After the Daft Punk inspired Club Coke 2011 bottles launched earlier this year, here is the official Daft Punk x Coca Cola collaboration bottles.
The classic Coke glass bottle comes with gold and silver Coca-Cola logo application and matching Daft Punk bottle crown sitting on top.
The silver one is actually 925 silver and the gold one features 18k yellow gold. Hand finished the bottles are sitting in a box designed by Daft Punk.

 

The signed box set is limited to only 20 sets worldwide. You can enter to win a box set, which is signed by the artists, at www.daftcoke.com.

 

The Story Behind Ferrari's Famed Prancing Horse Logo

Ferrari has one of the most recognizable logos in the world, a mark that today would precede from endless market research and hundreds of iterations dreamed up by some savvy corporate-branding agency. The genesis of Ferrari’s leaping black stallion, though, was distinctly more spontaneous, as this fascinating video from the Italian carmaker reveals:

According to Ferrari, Papà Enzo took the logo from an image of a red horse painted on the fuselage of Count Francesco Baracca, an ace pilot in the Italian air force and a World War I hero. Apparently, Enzo only ever spoke of the logo’s provenance once. And this is what he had to say:

"In ‘23, I met Count Enrico Baracca, the hero’s father and then his mother, Countess Paolina, who said to me one day, ‘Ferrari, put my son’s prancing horse on your cars. It will bring you good luck.’ The horse was, and still is, black. And I added the canary-yellow background, which is the color of Modena (Enzo’s birthplace)."


What the film leaves out - and what Wikipedia filled in - is that Francesco Baracca died in action, possibly after his airplane got shot by ground troops and crashed in a fiery mess. The reason Ferrari's horse is black, not red, is because it was meant to be a symbol of mourning for the fallen pilot. It’s a touching detail, but one that the big PR machine of modern-day Ferrari chose to omit. Guess they don’t want anyone to hear Ferrari and think “death by burning vehicle.”


For more information regarding professional identity campaigns contact me at db@davidbadajoz.com or visit www.davidbadajoz.com.

Ferrari's World Design Contest 2011

First Prize:
'Eternità' by Kim Cheong Ju, Ahn Dre and Lee Sahngseok from the Hongik University, Seoul


Ferrari World Design Contest is a competition - launched by the marque from Maranello in collaboration with Autodesk, the project's technical partner and official sponsor – for schools and universities from the automotive and design sectors in Italy and abroad to create the Ferrari of the future.

The participants are asked to create a pure hypercar with technology and materials from the latest generation, a car with an extreme architecture, while functional under every aspect. The contest runs until July 2011. The jury, under the presidency of Luca di Montezemolo, will award an internship at Ferrari's Centro Stile, lead by Flavio Manzoni, to the first and second placed participants as well as monetary prizes.

Second Prize:
'Xezri' by Samir Sadikhov from IED Turin, Italy

Third Prize:
'Cavallo Bianco' by Henry Cloke and Qi Haitao, from the Royal College of Art, UK

'Ferrari Achilleo' by Jose Casas, from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, USA

'F80' by Jae Han Song, from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, USA

Autodesk

Autodesk, Inc., is a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Customers across the manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, and media and entertainment industries - including the last 16 Academy Award winners for Best Visual Effects - use Autodesk software to design, visualize and simulate their ideas. Since its introduction of AutoCAD software in 1982, Autodesk continues to develop the broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art software for global markets. For additional information about Autodesk, visit www.autodesk.com

Autodesk Education Initiatives

Autodesk wants students of all ages to imagine, design and create a better world. By partnering with academic leaders and institutions, Autodesk is helping educators to build skills and engagement, both in and out of the classroom, in order to prepare for successful careers in architecture, engineering, and digital arts. Autodesk offers the technology and learning resources that inspire the next generation of professionals, while providing institutions with educational pricing, training, curricula and community resources. For more information about Autodesk education programs and solutions, visit www.autodesk.com/education.