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Inside Finance will continue to produce great TV shows about entrepreneurial business and business innovation skills.
Inside finance will continue to follow the impacts of disruptive innovation and the discussions around it. We have more great shows from Graeme Codrington.
Inside Finance TV will continue to follow the impact of the digital generation entering the world of work.
Inside Finance will continue to discuss the digital generation.
Social media policy should extend outside the marketing department, as Bob Barker explains in this TV show.
So companies are just waking up to the fact that they need to leverage their employees.
There’s a terminology that says marketing is far too important to be left to the marketing department, and that is the terminology that’s becoming true now with social media.
So if you just do push only marketing you’re not you know, you’re back to your 2% response or less, or if you’ve just got that mind-set that is, it works but it’s not terribly efficient and people don’t trust that marketing anymore.
So what companies are beginning to realise is that the that sales people and individuals in the company represent a really good way of getting their content out there, the important content that people need to engage with, particularly in the business to business area.
And so people are beginning to realise that if their sales people and their key executives aren’t good online they need to do something about that because if they haven’t got. For example, if they’ve got ten people on LinkedIn and they’ve got no picture of them.
They may be brilliant, but anyone of a younger generation is gonna look them up and think well, I don’t want anything to do with them. They obviously don’t understand this new world.
So there’s the companies beginning to realise that. LinkedIn has gained huge momentum the last few years as a defacto platform for people connecting in business.
So companies are beginning to realise the power of LinkedIn, companies are beginning to realise the power of content and getting people to share that content through social channels.
And it’s very important that individuals are used to share that content. It’s much more easy these days.
You’ve got these share buttons on the bottom of all the content. But even people knowing that they can just click on that content and it will share it, people generally don’t know that.
So there is a big opportunity to educate people who haven’t had that education because nobody told you how to use a PC, nobody told you how to use social media to get that education and help the firm do its marketing.
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Inside Finance will continue to follow ideas about the digital economy and will have more videos from Julie Meyer.
Digital retail is the future, and retailers have to embrace it says Henderson's Alice Breheny in this Inside Finance TV interview.
Oh, I mean the ramifications, it’s terrible really, I mean I think, you know, if you don’t embrace it then you know, you’re on a slippery slope really into decline, whether you’re a retailer or a property owner.
I think you can defend yourself against it and keep your head above water.
But those that are going to thrive are those that really embrace it and seek every opportunity to exploit it.
But you know, we certainly see locations becoming unviable eventually, you know, there’ll be very little reason for people to visit them.
Retailers that, if they don’t up their game, you know, the competition out there is really fierce at the moment and certain asset types that just won’t be relevant in the future.
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Inside Finance will continue to look at digital retail and the affects of digital technology on other industries.
The digital economy creates a lot of unstructured data. In this TV show Nigel Huddleston discusses the challenge of making it relevant to your business.
There’s a real hot topic around big data and it means lots of different things to different people.
But I think the key is, is finding an intelligent way to make this massive confusing information relevant to what you’re looking at.
I think in the hospitality sector again, one of the key things is, is bringing in data from third parties and your own data in a meaningful way
So integrating things like your loyalty programmes with search behaviour, you know, who’s looking for what hotels in which cities and at what times and from what devices, and being able to track that with your own data.
And bring all of these bits of information together so that you can both serve the user but also carry out transactions and push information to the user in a meaningful way.
It’s very confusing. There’s lots of companies out there trying to help with this at the moment.
It’s early stages but it’s very, very important to the industry.
Inside Finance TV is following discussions about the digital economy - Look out for more from Nigel Huddleston
One of the things with data is what we use with it, both as Google, but also as a provider or a supplier of holidays, content hotels.
That one of the key things with data is to make sure that it’s permission based, so that you’re using information the way that the user allows you to use.
And that means that the onus is on you to make sure that if you’re using that data then it’s useful to the consumer so that you’re using it in a way that’s going to be helpful to them.
So if you’re checking into a hotel or about to arrive at a hotel and maybe they’re kind of following you from the airport and can see through mobile that you’re on their way. As long as you give permission.
They know that you’re ready to check-in, that they know what room type that you prefer, they know what you like in your room in terms of flowers or drinks in the bar, all of those things are potentially useful, but only with the user’s permission.
But again, early stages there, there’s lots of exciting things going on in using user information.
I think it’s very early stages in this big data field. I would say we’re probably two out of ten in terms of where we can go with this.
And who knows where it’s going to go, you know, it’s almost as if it’s the early stages of the dot com era again in terms of the power of big data.
Inside Finance TV will have more expert discussion on the connected economy - Look out for more from Nigel Huddleston.
Connected marketing relies on well developed personal brands to share company content. Our latest video from Bob Barker explores the issue:
A lot of companies out there have been using traditional marketing mechanisms.
They’ve been using digital marketing, and what we see is that more and more marketing has got to rely on the individuals in the company to help get the messages out because it’s those individuals that are often the sales people and it’s the individuals who themselves have got networks.
So what we do a lot of is helping people to understand what their personal brand is all about and to make sure, for example, on LinkedIn that they’ve got a decent profile because Google’s going to find you on LinkedIn if somebody’s looking for you quicker than any other platform, so you need to look the part.
You need to be dressed well, and so on and so forth. And then there’s the whole thing about network maintenance, or understanding and managing your network.
So we’ve all built up contacts on our Outlook or whatever it is, and we’re beginning to build up more and more contact on LinkedIn as it becomes more the de facto business platform for business people connecting.
So we have to put time in and understand how we build and nurture our networks using something like that.
And then the other thing is that now we’ve got a brand and we understand our network, we’ve then got all this content that the company’s produced that might be relevant to what we’re talking about but nobody’s sharing it.
So a lot of companies are building all this content and people aren’t sharing it, like these videos.
We see in large companies, when you look at the shares, nothing’s going on, and so we help companies to understand.
We help the individuals in those companies to understand it’s their responsibility to help get this content out there because on the internet when people are researching companies and they’re looking for what people, you know, what companies are all about, they’re doing a lot of their research without the company knowing.
So unless that company’s got content out there and people are interfacing and being out there, and having their brand out there, they’re not going to be visible when companies are looking for who they want to do business with and who they might trust.
Inside Finance TV will continue to explore connected marketing and the surrounding issues- look out for more TV shows from Bob Barker.Ralph Jenson talks about various economies through which we’ve transitioned, it’s a very general, very broad framework but it’s really good to help us understand our current context, ‘cause leadership is always context-specific. So, very quickly, he talks about the hunter-gatherer era, it was an economy in which there was competitive advantage that was forged through a sense of focus.
The interesting thing in the story is that technology is the disruption, so technology changes the rules of the game. In this particular case the technology that did that, the plough, the ability to harness animals, so we moved into the agrarian society. From there we moved into the industrial era. So each of these are economies in which we look at what created a competitive advantage.
The industrial era is interesting because competitive advantage in this particular set of circumstances was created through business efficiencies, that’s where the science of management was birthed. Frederick Taylor and others – if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. So the legacy of that era remains today.
I still meet companies and leaders who think that their competitive advantage will be forged through greater business efficiency. Business efficiency is a hygiene factor now. So, we moved from then to what was called the information-based economy, where it was how we utilised data and from there we moved into the connection economy.
There are more videos discussing the digital connection economy on Inside Finance.
All my friends and family are on Facebook. But pretty much anybody and any audience who wants to connect with me can.
I once hit the 5,000 friend limit and then went through and did a massive purge and dropped it down to three and it’s now drifting up over four again.
So when you hit that 5,000 limit you maybe have to think differently.
But for me, Facebook is a place where people can get to know me, me as a person. And I think some CEOs, some business leaders are starting to see the benefit in doing this as well, in just making yourself accessible.
I’m passionate about cricket and most other sports, but cricket in particular.
I am passionate about my family. I enjoy travel, although I hate travelling, if you can see the distinction between those two things.
And for me, I just thought, well Facebook is the opportunity for me to just let that all hang out.
In the same step as I’m travelling, as I’m with my family, as I’m watching sport, as I’m engaging with my clients, I’m getting a sense of what’s changing in the world.
Inside Finance will continue to look at the uses of Facebook for CEOs and we will have more videos from Graeme Codrington.
There is just as much digitalisation in marketing as all other industries. Campaigns are being tested on the consumer before they are put into action. Andrew McAfee discusses:
I really have trouble finding parts of the business world, industries, companies, jobs, tasks, that are immune from this computerisation, from the digitalisation going on, the closest I come are more features of the parts of the company that are closer to innovation and creativity and taste and aesthetics, but even there let’s not be too careful.
Mad Men is an incredibly popular television show in the United States and I believe in the UK as well and this Don Draper school of how you come up with the next ad campaign is a thing of the past. Because what Don Draper does is he understands the mind of the consumer and the mind of the market, he’s going to listen a little bit but he’s going to go away and have his insight, and then he’s going to come back and by virtue of his brilliant pitch to the management of the company, he’s going to convince that customer what to go spend their next advertising dollars on.
This is ludicrous, this is not the right way to go about it. There are a bunch of problems there, first of all how does he know the mind of the consumer, how do we know he’s correct and why are we basing our decisions on the persuasiveness of one testing pitch in one meeting, this doesn’t make any sense.
So when we look at the worlds of advertising and marketing in these more creative functions, we see technology coming in very quickly, we see ideas being tested, we see the experimentation happening and we see this move away from just blindly trusting the gurus, the pundits, the Don Drapers of the world, and maybe we do rely on them to come up with a new idea, but then instead of taking their word that it is the perfect idea and the best idea, let’s go subject that to some rigorous testing and experimentation and figure out how good an idea it is, before we have to commit heavily to it.
For more videos about digitalisation in marketing and the rest of the digital economy go to Inside Finance.
The disclosure rules have been in for quite some time. And it’s my understanding, although I’m not a lawyer, it’s my understanding that they were brought in so that the days of ambushing your opponent on the steps of the court after months and months, sometimes years of preparation for a trial and say, you know, “Ha ha, you didn’t know about this document.”
Which really undermines their whole case, e-disclosure was brought in and disclosure as well was brought in to stop that from happening so that both parties understand fully the strengths and weaknesses and certainly in terms of the documents before they get to the long process of preparing for a trial.
It may well be, for example, if the other party knew of the existence of certain documents that a settlement would have been the preferred route as opposed to spending an awful lot of time on expensive advice and procedures to get to the point where they, in effect they give in as they would have done a year ago.
When parties are involved in litigation, each party has an obligation to disclose the documents of relevance to the case. And whether those documents are good for their side or bad, and so with each firm of any size now, having huge amounts of information it’s important to be able to easily digest that information and sift it for relevance to a particular matter.
It’s gone an incredible distance.
There are two types of reviews really, one is a traditional linear review where the lawyers and the clients will look at the documents and read the documents themselves and use their own eyes and understanding to make a categorisation of a particular email etc.
And they will sift those down by using keywords and date range parameters and so forth.
The big steps now are that computers are making those decisions for them, sometimes more successfully than others.
For e-disclosure but predominantly emails, the reason for that is it’s now obviously by far the preferred method of communication for the written media.
And attached to emails are documents, so you might have contracts, spreadsheets, image files maybe.
But usually those are just the two types of information, emails forms the largest and then you have a review of what we call loose documents.
So these will be documents that themselves aren’t attached to an email or in any sort of structure of that nature.
The big thing that people are talking about now is technology assisted review, where the PCs … sorry, the disclosure systems are able to make a judgement on a categorisation of a document based on the categorisations that have been made before. How it works is this. You will have a population of say, for argument’s sake, 100,000 documents, and a lawyer will review the first 1,000 and then the system will say, based on your choices of those first 1,000 documents, I think if you were to carry on, the remaining 99,000, you would categorise in this way
And so then the lawyer will look at those and say, “Well it was right in this document, it was wrong in that document and I would have made that document this.” So by now you’ve looked at 2,000 documents and the system says, “Okay, well, you know, thanks for helping me out, based on that I now predict that you would make the choices for the remainder, the 98,000.” And so you finally get to a stage where having reviewed only a few thousand documents, you can have confidence that whilst it won’t be perfect, if 98% of the choices that the computer’s made, you agree with, you may well be able to say to the other side, “We’ll stick with those categorisations that it’s done.” It’s being talked about a lot.
It’s still very new but it’s potentially a way to save thousands and thousands of pounds in the review phase.
Well, the problem with this technology is one of trust, because in order to … for both parties to agree they both have to understand how the system’s come about to make those choices. And they … ideally what will happen is both parties will be using the same system. And they will both agree to use technology assisted review and therefore both sides will have confidence that the system is working fine [0:14:52.3]. It’s not that usual for both parties to have the same type of system. So your technology assisted review might be different to mine and I’m going to think that it’s actually inferior to mine. And therefore I don’t want you to rely on your results but I’m happy to rely on mine, getting the two sides to agree is the trick.
In terms of big data I would say entrepreneurs are really smart now if you are, especially in the digital space of using the data, and I think that has offered so many new opportunities of analysing who your customers are.
How... tracking what customer preferences are, getting a better understanding of... which will help to tailor the product or service that you're offering.
So I think again you need to be smart about it, the danger with it, it's overwhelming.
You have far too much information so I think you need to put the process in to place within the business to utilise it and take it to your full advantage.
I think it has offered a lot of opportunities. I mean when we look back, 1998 Google was only set up.
I mean LinkedIn, Twitter is only recent phenomenon we have. Personally I think there's great opportunities in terms of reaching your customers, reaching clients whether it's B to B, B to C.
But I always think there's also... the world's become more visible so maybe things you got away with in the past is no longer possible.
So I think my view is using social media is a great way of promoting your business but also keep aware of social media also comes with potential pitfalls if you don't use it in the right way.