BQ's watch of news for BrainsFeed

Noteworthy news

The facilitation boost for teamwork

A very interesting post was published recently in a blog dealing with the point of confluence of marketing and neuroscience. It shows that bringing an outsider in any team endeavor actually improves the performance of the team effort. The post focuses particularly on decisions made in team contexts and on problem solving. This is very much in line with the kind of experience I have with workshops organized for customers on specific issues they want to deal with. In most cases we end-up achieving significant progress in an amazingly short time and with work that feel effortless although it's actually very demanding. The following are the top factors of success in my opinion:

1. focus on a specific issue: each workshop has a very specific focus area and my job as facilitator is to make sure everybody remains focused on the issue at hand or jointly agree to tackle another issue, but the point is to guarantee everybody is on the same page and all decisions about the topic to handle are made explicitly not by the usual "agenda drift" many meetings have


2. supporting process: during a workshop there is always a "backbone" in the form of a process that we follow and that process comprises specific sequences of work involving techniques borrowed from The Fifth Discipline, IDEO's method cards, NLP or Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats


3. external facilitation: as an outsider I have considerable freedom to ask stupid questions and approach the issues under discussion from original angles something perhaps an insider might not dare do or think doing as it's not easy to escape from established ways of doing inside an organization

So the effect of external facilitation seems to be visible in scientifically controlled experiments, something I find really interesting. The article clearly states that you don't need to bring in expensive consultants to get the "outsider effect" and that's rather good news because it's a great argument for enlightened entrepreneurs and managers who want to mix people from different functional areas. Now I believe there is much more to it than "just" importing an outsider in a team process if we want maximum impact. The effect is most likely much greater if the outsider has developed an expertise in this type of services.

Power of time-off

Some interesting inspiration at a time when it's so "normal" to always be reachable and connected and active and "oh-my-Gosh" so busy...

Slides from the conference at Technoport

A mini-conference about the basics of how to use search marketing to develop the business was organized today at Technoport with eTeamsys and BusinessQuests presenting.

Mike Mitchell, eTeamsys' CEO, spoke about the challenges and the major trends affecting search marketing, with a highlight on e-reputation. When speaking about e-reputation he showed how search results about Clearstream are currently affected by a high-profile trial that took place in France recently and by video content making a number of negative claims about the Luxembourg-based player in securities clearing & settlement. By contrast, Mike showed how search results about Euroclear were consistent with a more desirable image for such a player. That was pretty interesting and I certainly recommend you look at the slides with evidence of the difference between the search results of these two players. Now you might ask what the impact may be since these are B2B players and their business is unlikely to be affected by that kind of results as industry insiders will filter out the noise. Well, it may well affect the ability of the organization to recruit talent (remember how people became uncomfortable saying they were working for Philip Morris a few years ago or how people working for virtually bankrupt investment banks were being very discreet about that last year?). And since there is a war for talent and these organizations do need good IT people, there may be an impact. At any rate I'm not sure you want your brand to be tarnished even if that can boost your PageRank, right?

I spoke for BusinessQuests to highlight:

• the imperative of aligning online strategy to overall business strategy


• the scarcity of human attention, 


• how to consider people when publishing content online, especially when you want your ads to get clicked and to lead to actual commercial results


• the need to think in terms of audience, experience and influence when defining your approach to search and more largely your online presence


• what can be done in the field of analytics in terms of audience profiling, content performance and ultimately business performance 

The two sets of slides are to be found below.

eTeamsys on search marketing

BQ on objectives driven online presence

Slides from the conference at Technoport

A mini-conference about the basics of how to use search marketing to develop the business was organized today at Technoport with eTeamsys and BusinessQuests presenting.

Mike Mitchell, eTeamsys' CEO, spoke about the challenges and the major trends affecting search marketing, with a highlight on e-reputation. When speaking about e-reputation he showed how search results about Clearstream are currently affected by a high-profile trial that took place in France recently and by video content making a number of negative claims about the Luxembourg-based player in securities clearing & settlement. By contrast, Mike showed how search results about Euroclear were consistent with a more desirable image for such a player. That was pretty interesting and I certainly recommend you look at the slides with evidence of the difference between the search results of these two players. Now you might ask what the impact may be since these are B2B players and their business is unlikely to be affected by that kind of results as industry insiders will filter out the noise. Well, it may well affect the ability of the organization to recruit talent (remember how people became uncomfortable saying they were working for Philip Morris a few years ago or how people working for virtually bankrupt investment banks were being very discreet about that last year?). And since there is a war for talent and these organizations do need good IT people, there may be an impact. At any rate I'm not sure you want your brand to be tarnished even if that can boost your PageRank, right?

I spoke for BusinessQuests to highlight:

• the imperative of aligning online strategy to overall business strategy


• the scarcity of human attention, 


• how to consider people when publishing content online, especially when you want your ads to get clicked and to lead to actual commercial results


• the need to think in terms of audience, experience and influence when defining your approach to search and more largely your online presence


• what can be done in the field of analytics in terms of audience profiling, content performance and ultimately business performance 

The two sets of slides are to be found below.

eTeamsys presentation on search marketing

BusinessQuests presentation on online marketing for real people

Top global brands: big swings and US dominance

The list of top global brands was published a few days ago by Interbrand and BusinessWeek. The top 10 brands are largely the same as last year, but the list of brands that have made the biggest gains is interesting: Google (+25% in brand value), Amazon (+22%),  Zara (+14%), Nestlé (+13%) and Apple (+12%) make up the top-5 of the year's winners. Brands that have lost value are (unsurprisingly) those of financial institutions with UBS (-50%), Citi (-49%) and Amex (-32%) leading the pack.

A break-down by country shows the US brands account for nearly two thirds of top global brands, while the top 3 countries of origin (US, Japan, Germany) are home to over 80% of top global brands (see chart - click to enlarge).

The total value of global brands based in the US reaches an amazing 744.2 billion US dollars, while Japan's are worth about 91.8 billion dollars, only slightly above Germany's 91.2 bn$.