This practice clearly wastes a tremendous quantity of resources. To be fair, there are many issues complicating these areas that make flaring extremely challenging to avoid. But looking at the situation from a purely business point of view, the practice of flaring squanders a vast amount of highly valuable hydrocarbon gas.

Expansion-stage companies can occasionally be caught wasting valuable resources too.

A poorly done blog provides a prime example of this: It is characterized by sporadic posts, lackluster content, and a lack of engagement. Conversely, a well-done blog has the potential to bring significant value to a company much like the hydrocarbon gas. It can supply the platform for your company to become an industry thought leader, educate unaware visitors about your product or service, or, ideally, generate targeted leads for your company to go after. But when a company only half commits to squeezing the most value they can out of their blog, they might as well be flaring their time. Something that had the potential to be a valuable resource simply evaporates into the cloud.

Just possessing a blog no longer gives an expansion-stage company a competitive advantage.

The blog needs to be overflowing with compelling content, full of actionable recommendations, and impressive enough to share with colleagues. Expansion-stage companies cannot afford to burn up time by half-heartedly executing a project, especially when that activity contains so much potential to produce abundant returns when utilized to its fullest potential.

Throughout its work process, an expansion-stage company needs to be cognizant of what it is doing with its resources and mindful of whether they can be put to more efficient and advantageous use. To that end, here are three recommendations to serve as a starting point for an expansion-stage company to avoid “flaring” their valuable resources, presented in order of difficulty:

Easy:

Write a better blog! This involves taking the time to explore and develop ideas, incorporate helpful resources, and facilitate a strong discussion.

Medium:

Spend thirty minutes to one hour assessing each project after finishing it. Consider whether too much time has been focused on a single idea or if the project could have simply been done quicker.

Hard:

Read through Scott Maxwell’s Economic Model Series for a thorough explanation of how to pinpoint exactly how resources are benefiting your company, and where key improvements can be made (as well as other advantageous insights).

Image provided by: birgerking

Highlights from Google’s I/O 2012 event include announcements about the Nexus 7 Tablet, Project Glass, and Compute Engine. But despite the sky diving and three ring circus Google put on, one item stuck out in particular: 50% of Google+ users sign into their account every day.

Admittedly, I have not looked too deeply into the level of Google+ accounts that log in daily. For all I know, there could be a large chunk of Google+ users belonging to a niche audience who remain very consistent in their use of Google+. But anecdotally, Google+ has failed. The enthusiasm and expectation social media lovers had for the product faded away long ago as Facebook’s timeline entered the mix. The fact that Sergey Brin is the only person constantly showing up in my feed illustrates the point perfectly.

But Sergey Brin and his fellow Googlers invested huge amounts of capital (human and otherwise) into developing and promoting the social platform. It is undeniable that Google+ launched as Mountain View’s pride and joy, and they hoped it would achieve significant and continuing success. Although I cannot say with certainty that Google refuses to concede their product has not realized the achievements they had hoped, there is nevertheless an important lesson that expansion-stage companies can learn under that assumption: Refusing to admit when a project does not realize the intended level of success can do considerable damage to a company by wasting precious resources on continuing to support it.

Expansion-stage companies often use up a big portion of time and energy in activities such as developing a product feature they anticipate their potential customers will widely utilize, or putting together an innovative marketing campaign. But when these projects do not attain the desired level of success, the paramount piece of information to understand is that the time, energy, and money spent on the project are all sunk costs; refusing to concede that those resources could have been used more efficiently does not improve the situation. A company of Google’s size might be able to afford continuing a project that does not immediately provide excellent results. But an expansion-stage company does not have that luxury.

Of course, the company can take a step back and analyze the situation for any quick pivots that may allow them to still get some noticeable returns on what they have invested thus far. In fact, that may be the smartest approach to take as it is likely that at least some of the finished work will prove to be worthwhile. But being purposefully blind to an unsuccessful endeavor because it sapped a lot of resources does not lead to any improvement for your company; it simply hinders your company from finding a path to take the next productive steps forward.

image provided by: Flickr

Glen Urban has worked on marketing research projects through MIT with the likes of Intel, GM, Google, CNET, and AT&T; the MIT Sloan School of Management also recently awarded him the Buck Weaver Award for Marketing, given to recognize important contributions to the advancement of theory and practice in marketing. Bluntly put, many consider him a marketing authority. And his primary research focus for the past decade has been trust marketing.

Trust marketing (thankfully not deceptive in appearance) consists of customer advocacy techniques that can assist consumers in making informed purchase decisions based on comprehensive marketplace options and fair advice. More interestingly, Urban puts forward that trust engenders business benefits in four areas:

Reduced Customer Acquisition Costs

There are two benefits here: lower costs to acquire new customers and a lower number of dissatisfied customers abandoning a product.

Higher Profit Margins

Customers who trust the company they are doing business with are willing to pay more for their product! They are willing to cover the extra costs under the assumption that the product is of the highest quality and they will be able to avoid problems down the road.

Growth

When a company does a product right, their customers will look to them for additional offerings, creating an instant market for potential expansion.

Long-Term Competitive Advantage

This is a multi-faceted benefit. In the long term, customers are more likely to trust companies through tumultuous times, they provide better feedback for insightful innovation, and in general the company’s reputation will experience improved brand perception.

Urban also includes 8 methods of fostering trust between a company and its customers, with very detailed descriptions for each available here:

1. Strive for Transparency
2. Build Outstanding Products and Services
3. Realign to be on the Customer’s Side
4. Help the Customers to help Themselves
5. Put the Customers to Work
6. Compare Your Products to Your Competitor’s Products
7. Create a Trust-Based Supply Chain
8. Make Trust Transcend all Functions of the Firm

So what is the one tactic missing from Urban’s list? Influencer marketing. Much has been written about influencer marketing (such as this article), so I will instead detail out how it ties into trust marketing a little better.

Most customers consult at least one or two resources to provide insight into the benefits and downsides of a product when considering a new purchase. Although not always, one of these sources is typically some sort of industry trendsetter or thought leader. These are the individuals that influencer marketing targets. By really convincing these influencers of the quality of a product and the benefit of its use, companies are able to gain a major advocate for their product. They will not only sway customers to more heavily consider a product when evaluating their options, but will also contribute to the brand’s reputation as well by having such a strong endorsement supporting it. It is through their advocacy that companies can start to win over droves of customers and reap the rewards of trust marketing.

image provided by: adamr / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

As the speed and quality of user experience has drastically improved in the past couple of years, more and more research has been published about user expectations of websites. The Aberdeen Group found that a 1-second delay in page-load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions (a more full report on the data can be found here). These numbers represent serious missed opportunities, and preventing such significant losses can be a phenomenal success for a company.

This is where the APM market becomes relevant. In the recent past, the term application performance monitoring has broadened considerably: it now encompasses end user experience monitoring, application data analytics, and the monitoring of data centers in addition to the traditional .NET and Java EE monitoring. APM has been touched by the overarching tech trends as well, now offering products and services that monitor and utilize big data, mobile, and cloud environments. To better delineate what falls under the umbrella of application performance monitoring, Gartner divides the APM market into five sections:

• End user experience monitoring — keeping track of data that speaks to the end user’s interaction with the application, such as the execution correctness and quality
• Application architecture discovery, modeling, and display — monitoring the software and hardware parts that are involved in a particular application action as well as the different possibilities to make that action possible
• Transaction profiling — mapping out the path that an action takes; the possible paths are taken from the dimension above
• Deep dive monitoring — taking a more in-depth look at the particular components involved in an action as determined by dimension two
• Application data analytics — synthesizing and analyzing the data taken from the previous steps to provide useful and pertinent information

Although these divisions are distinct, they all work cohesively to identify and fix application issues, ultimately bettering the customer’s interaction with a website.

When first hearing the term application performance monitoring, many likely assume that the market is limited to watching over the real nitty-gritty, hardcore hardware and software interactions that make up an IT infrastructure. In fact there are many companies who do this and are seeing amazing growth — AppDynamics and Bluestripe Software are two examples. But there is also the quickly expanding sub-market of end-user experience as presented above.

This dimension concentrates on making the customer experience as seamless as possible. As evidence like that presented by the Aberdeen Group comes to light, the necessity to utilize end-user experience monitoring becomes even more prominent.

There are several pioneering startups emerging to offer services in the end-user experience monitoring sub-market. One of the fastest growing ones is New Relic, who offers a product that combines several of the Gartner dimensions into one SaaS solution. But perhaps the most compelling reason to engage this service, or several other options in the market, is how disruptive the pricing is. Where the old school APM offerings required several thousand dollars a year as an investment, the new breed of APM vendors presents a comparable and undoubtedly important service for a mere fraction of the cost.

All in all, users are expecting higher quality, faster interactions with websites. And companies in the application monitoring performance sector are delivering, offering high quality, disruptively priced services that can assist in preventing the loss of a considerable number of customers due to a slow-performing website or application.

image provided by: biggraham / Flickr

In the neverending search for dynamic content for websites, Camtasia provides the ability to create polished, engaging video presentations that serve as a great addition to any home page. The program offers dozens of different callout and highlight features, intuitive editing and video/audio alignment capabilities, and several different production options. However, with such a powerful and multi-faceted tool, there is a lot of opportunity to misuse or simply not know about features.

Although playing around with all of Camtasia’s different abilities may be helpful for some, here are 8 tips that provide the path of least resistance in terms of time and frustration to create a high quality video production:

1. Record audio first.

It is much easier to record the video aspect of your project while taking cues from the already finished audio in contrast to recording the video by guessing how long it should be, recording the audio, and then editing the video to match up with the audio. Even if your visual callouts are not at first in sync with the corresponding audio, it is much easier to adjust the timing of the audio and video on the timeline then have to add or take away a still frame from the video.

2. Use consistent and high definition video settings for recording, editing, and production.

It is very important to ensure that the video dimensions for recording, editing, and production are all standardized during the course of your project. There is nothing worse than recording the entirety of your video to find the quality of output is blurry, pixilated, or grainy. This is easily prevented by setting high recording and editing dimensions from the beginning; to pick the settings for YouTube HD quality output, check out this tutorial. All in all, it is better to error on the safe side by starting with higher video dimensions.

3. Limit background noise.

Camtasia does allow you to edit out background noise, but doing so distorts the naturalness of the audio. Therefore try to minimize background noise in your environment such as whirring air conditioners or heaters, traffic outside, or people talking about what they had for lunch in the room next door. There’s nothing more frustrating than having a great audio clip that is blemished by some obnoxious car honk.

4. Add additional time for a still frame.

To extend a frame that is too short for a corresponding audio clip, click Edit>Extend Frame then enter the amount of extra time needed. This feature is not advertised much by Camtasia, but it is far cleaner than copying and pasting or extending clips.

5. Have separate PowerPoint slides.

Save a different PowerPoint file for each slide that is going to be in the production. Recording all the slides together then editing them in Camtasia can leave tiny (but noticeable) video clips of the next slide at the end of each of them. This is not a challenging problem to fix, but you can definitely save a lot of time by not having to delete the last tenth of a second off of each PowerPoint clip.

6. Pay attention to transitions.

Transitions are not intended to be noticeable; their sole purpose for existing is to do just the opposite. For this reason, be sure that your transitions are not too long or cheesy. It makes the final video look far less professional and can be an unwelcome distraction.

7. Unlink audio and video.

The potential annoyances arising from keeping your audio and video linked far outweigh the benefit that this feature could provide. Keeping them linked prevents you from isolating any one audio or video clip by itself; many times this can lead to cutting out tiny clips that go unnoticed until the video is finally produced. It might be helpful to have them linked when you are rearranging the order of clips, but beyond that this just is not a helpful feature to have turned on.

8. Edit individual pieces as you do them.

Once you are finished recording an individual audio or video clip, edit it! Not only will it make the entire project feel more manageable, but you can fix problems that might mess up other audio or video clips later in the timeline as they arise.

Making use of these tips will undoubtedly save you wasted time and irritation while making your video through Camtasia. For an example of a video made using these tips by a first time video maker, with some interesting information on website visitor segmentation as well, look at this video.