17 Little Known Social Media Tools You Should Be Using (and Why)

Following our previous post with 5 popular social media tools for marketing, KISSmetrics gives us even more and good detail on 17 useful social media tools for marketing.  Check out previous 5 and the 17 in this article.

Excerpt:  Everywhere you look there is social media. It’s in our homes, businesses, places of worship and schools. And everywhere you look people are using it and talking about it. And it seems that every week there is a new social site launched.

To make matters worse, for every social site launched, there seems to be two or more services created to measure, track and monitor that service. What’s a marketing professional to do?

To help you cut through the clutter I thought I’d share with you 17 must-use social media tools that have helped my clients and their businesses. You’ll also get my reasons for why you should be using these tools, too.

Read full article via 17 Little Known Social Media Tools You Should Be Using (and Why).  From KISSmetrics

Five Valuable Tools to Facilitate Your Social Media Strategies

Check out the most popular tools to help you organize the growing social media campaigns.

Excerpt:  Utilizing social media in your online endeavors should be an essential component of your overall strategy. Search engines are being modified to reflect the popularity of powerful sites like Facebook, Twitter and other big-name players. Maintaining a social presence and building a reliable reputation are vital to effective online marketing and networking. Now, as Google+ and Pinterest join the mix, it can become overwhelming to keep track of the multitude of social sites to update regularly. Here are some of the most popular tools to make your job easier.

Read full article via Five Valuable Tools to Facilitate Your Social Media Strategies.  From Blogtrepreneur

Learning Styles – Learning Skills

Another tool for leadership and management.  Hone your learning skills to effectively handle the information challenges presented daily.

Excerpt:  Once you know where your preferences lie on each of these dimensions, you can begin to stretch beyond those preferences and develop a more balanced approach to learning. Not only will you improve your learning effectiveness, you will open yourself up to many different ways of perceiving the world. Balance is key. You don’t want to get too far on any one side of the learning dimensions. When you do that you limit your ability to take in new information and make sense of it quickly, accurately, and effectively.

Read full article via Learning Styles – Learning skills from MindTools.com#np.

Four New Tools for Brain Workouts – HBR

I loved this article.  For all leadership and management.  Have you accepted the false premise “you are as you are now and that is the end of it?”  Read this article!

Excerpt:  How do you sharpen your thinking?

We’ve written already about how you can use auto-analytics to measure and improve the tasks you take on every day at work, but there’s another class of auto-analytics that help you improve at a more fundamental level. These tools strengthen the underlying brain and behavioral structures that support smarter thinking, decisions, and routines in any professional field.

Here are four new tools that I’ve spotted in my research. I use the term “DIY” because each option can be tested, and learning outcomes quantified, without the need for an outside instructor or expert.

Quantified Mind is a personal online cognitive testing platform based on psychometrics, the measurement of cognitive performance in areas like reaction time, executive function, and verbal learning.

Read full article via Four New Tools for Brain Workouts – H. James Wilson – Harvard Business Review.

The Five Cs of Opportunity Identification – HBR

Good read on sources to target innovation in your company.

Excerpt:  Simply asking “what job is the customer trying to get done?” can be a powerful way to enable innovation, because it forces you to go beyond superficial demographic markers that correlate with purchase and use to zero in on frustrations and desires that motivate purchase and use.

Seductive simplicity hides a rich, robust set of opportunity identification tools. Through our experience utilizing the “jobs-to-be-done” concept in a range of settings, my colleagues and I have developed five tips for would-be innovators: the five Cs of opportunity identification (modeled after marketing’s famous four Ps — price, product, place, and promotion).

Read full article via The Five Cs of Opportunity Identification – Scott Anthony – Harvard Business Review.

An Adaptive Approach to Managing Innovation

Recommended read leadership and management.   Ideas of Axelrod and Cohen as basis of tools.

Excerpt:  It is this author’s view that the gap in management practice, where it exists, results from a mismatch between traditional management methods (command and control) and the unique nature of innovation as a system having non-linear behavior.

This approach makes it possible to build on the ideas of Axelrod and Cohen (2000) regarding complex adaptive systems in general, applying their framework specifically to managing innovation. This permits us to describe the role of managers and specify actions they can take to advance the process. The Axelrod/Cohen framework is evolutionary and has been developed so that improvements can be generated even though every element of a system may not be fully understood and the outcome may not be predictable (a good fit with innovation).

Read introduction and download pdf here via Enterprise innovation articles.  Innovation Tools

A Table of Design Methodologies: Instructional, Thinking, Agile, System, or X Problems?

The tools to help you with your daily challenges  —   for all leadership and management.

Excerpt:  The table below shows five popular design methodologies (Instructional System Design, Design Thinking, Agile Design, System Thinking, and X Problem). It includes definitions, visual models, primary focus and goals, values, main steps, and further readings. I don’t claim these are the absolute parts that make up each design approach as the definitions, goals, primary focuses, and steps may vary greatly from source to source. However, the tables notes the key points that seem to separate them from each other.

Going from left to right, the models generally are designed for solving semi-structured problems to increasingly ill-defined problems, however, the type of problem and the skills of the designer will generally depict which model might work best for a particular situation. In addition, choosing a primary methodology does not mean you cannot borrow or change processes with another model as you are in control of the design, rather than the methodology being in control—design is both art and science.

Read full article and table via Design.  From BigDogLittleDog

5 Free Marketing Tools from Google You Need to Know About

Were you aware of these tools from Google?  If not check them out via link.

Excerpt:  With more than 1 billion search queries submitted to Google every day, Google houses a lot of data. Luckily for marketers, Google offers some great tools that provide access to this data. And they are free!

Check out these five helpful tools:

Read full article via 5 Free Marketing Tools from Google You Need to Know About | The Daily Egg.

Impact Analysis – Decision-Making Skills Training

A great tool from MindTools.   Use this one to determine change effects on your teams and business BEFORE you make the change.  For all leadership and management

Excerpt:  Impact Analysis is a technique designed to unearth the “unexpected” negative effects of a change on an organization.

It provides a structured approach for looking at a proposed change, so that you can identify as many of the negative impacts or consequences of the change as possible. Firstly, this makes it an important tool for evaluating whether you want to run a project. Secondly, and once the decision to go ahead has been made, it helps you prepare for and manage any serious issues that may arise.

All too often organizations do not undertake Impact Analysis. This is one reason that so many projects end in failure, as unforeseen consequences wreak havoc

Read full article via Impact Analysis – Decision-Making Skills Training from MindTools.com.

How to Mind Map in Three Small Steps

This article is related to previous article on mind-mapping.  In the previous article, mind mapping is by free apps.  This article gives you the steps to set up mind-mapping with pencil and paper, and in fact, this author recommends pencil and paper.   A bit lengthy but very valuable information, and I would recommend you walk through each step as this is the easiest way to grasp the concept.    Tools for all leadership and management  Good how-to

Excerpt:  There is a better way: creating a mind map.

A mind map is a simple hierarchical radial diagram. In other words, you organize your thoughts around a central idea.

Read full article via How to Mind Map in Three Small Steps.  From LifeHack.Org

11 Free Mind Mapping Applications & Web Services

Hey guys, these are “tools”  and in the next article read one of the ways “mind mapping” can help you.  For all leadership and managment

Excerpt:  Mind mapping is a way of taking notes, capturing ideas, exploring concepts and breaking down information into a more readily understood format. It’s a place where visual representations and written representations of things merge to create something that is more natural to the mind; it works with and represents the way we think, where as paragraph-based text is not representative of the thought process at all.

There are a million and one uses for mind mapping. You can use it to study for a big exam. You can use it brainstorm new article ideas, or flesh out what needs to be covered in the business plan for a new venture. You can organize a big move of house; heck, I’ve seen people use the mind map format for their daily to-do lists (each to their own, eh?).

There are huge advantages to creating your mind maps with paper and pen. In fact, though I’ve tried many different mind mapping programs over the years, pen and paper remains my favorite way of creating them. Some would say that it is a part of the process. That said, there are distinct advantages in using software and sometimes you need to decide what the best tool for the job is on a case by case basis. For when that time comes, here are 11 free mind mapping applications and web services.

Read full article and links via 11 Free Mind Mapping Applications & Web Services.  From LifeHack.ORg

Investor Protection through Audit Oversight — The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance

Small business news-to-watch, of-interest and need-to-know.    The article seems to be primarily a discussion of what is as well as how one might set up controls or measurements to provide the protections.

Excerpt:  Anyone involved in the financial reporting process deals daily with the hard realities of complexity and rapid change — whether you are a preparer of financial statements, a board or audit committee member, an investor, an independent or internal auditor, a counselor, or a regulator.

Commercial activity is increasingly global. Some financial instruments and transactions are bafflingly complex with values that can only be estimated. Standard setters in the United States and abroad are moving away from historical cost accounting toward fair value accounting, requiring difficult estimates. There is a plethora of new rules and requirements growing out of the Dodd-Frank and JOBS acts in the United States, and all of this is happening in what since 2008 has been the most difficult global economic environment since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Much as we struggle with these rapid changes and their complexity, regulators also struggle to see around the curve, to be prepared for what is coming tomorrow, and to have tools in their toolbox that will be appropriate for those challenges.

Read full article via Investor Protection through Audit Oversight — The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation.

Rolestorming – Brainstorming Techniques

This is a cool tool for your team group “think and create “sessions.  Brainstorming that eliminates the vulnerabilities for team members.    For all leadership and management

Excerpt:  About the Tool

Rick Griggs developed the Rolestorming method in the early 1980s. Dr Arthur VanGundy then described it in his 2004 book, “101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem-Solving.”

Griggs developed the technique to help people overcome their inhibitions during group brainstorming sessions. The theory is that if you pretend to be someone else, you’ll feel more comfortable putting ideas forward. This is because taking on another role distances you from owning an idea, which helps you speak up.

You can also come up with additional ideas when you look at a problem from someone else’s perspective.

What’s more, Rolestorming is fun, and it’s great for helping team members feel more comfortable sharing ideas with each other. It also builds confidence, because shy or less assertive people feel empowered to speak up.

Read full article via Rolestorming – Brainstorming Techniques from MindTools.com.

Perceptual Positions – Communication Skills Training

An imperative skill for all leadership and management.  Check out the “tool” to help you.

Excerpt:  The Perceptual Positions exercise is taken from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Its goal is to show you, in a structured way, how to see other people’s points of view. It’s a straightforward exercise that you can do in just a few minutes.

Read full article via Perceptual Positions – Communication Skills Training from MindTools.com.

Deloitte | Econometric Analysis | Scenario-Based Planning

Download the paper that helps you with important what-if scenarios for your small business.

Excerpt:  Suppose your boss, the Chief Financial Officer or Chief Strategy Officer, asked you how your company’s revenue would be impacted by a changing economic climate in coming years. How would you quantify the potential impact of specific events or variables?

Scenario-based planning is a tool designed to assist the development of strategies for operating in any of several contrasting business and economic environments that could lie ahead.

Download the attachment above to learn how to use statistical techniques of econometric modeling and multiple regression to project financial performance within scenario-based planning.

Download paper here via Deloitte | Econometric analysis | Scenario-based planning | CFO Center | Strategic analytics.