MetricsMan presents opinions, insights, and best practices of public relations and social media research and measurement. It discusses the evolution of measurement, return on investment, the Barcelona Principles, social media measurement models, marketing mix modeling, the battle against advertising value equivalents, and establishing accountability of the public relations profession.
Through this book, public relations professionals will be able to set clear measurement goals and objectives, identify right from wrong in the metrics they use, and understand how to apply valid measurement models and frameworks in their practices. This book also provides valuable information for public relations educators and students to learn about the best practices of research and measurement in the industry.
Congratulations to Rita Owens who won the 2018 ABC/APCC Excellence in Communication Consulting for her book, Communication for Consultants. She presented her project at the Association for Business Communication Annual Meeting in Detroit, October 2019.
From the moment of their first client engagement, consultants in all fields face communication opportunities and challenges. No matter what their focus may be, professional services, accounting, technology, operations, human resources, manufacturing or marketing, consultants drive change. That change, from its initial definition through its development and deployment, must be precisely communicated to a variety of audiences and through a variety of mediums.
Most business communication books do a good job leading professional writers and presenters through the basics of audience, organization, formatting, and mechanics. But, few focus on a specific business role, like that of a consultant, and give specific guidance for communicating during all stages of a project. From the pre-engagement process to the actual engagement to the post-engagement follow-up, consultants are challenged by the variety of audiences whose roles continually shift throughout a project.
This book guides a current or would-be consultant through the various phases of a typical engagement and gives practical advice and direction on written and oral communication throughout a typical project. Current and future consultants in all fields will gain specific knowledge about writing and presenting to a variety of audiences including clients, team members, managers and partners. The book also gives advice to new and seasoned consultants about state-of-the-art use of technology in communication and business communication etiquette.
This book provides the quintessential information needed to understand the financial side of the retirement planning coin. Readers will begin by learning about the various plan types available to the employers to offer to their employees. The topics related to compliance testing are thoroughly discussed as well as strategies used to legally shift benefits in favor of the highly compensated employees.
However, some employers do not sponsor a plan. In this instance, retirement savers will need to understand the options available in the world of individual retirement accounts. This book is not intended to provide investment advice, but rather to guide how different retirement savings vehicles function and how they can be effectively deployed.
Many financial professionals find that their clients will ask questions about all aspects of their financial life. For this reason, this book also discusses non-investment-related topics, such as housing options, social security planning, Medicare planning, and a few other basic insurance-based issues faced by all retirees.
Executive leaders need a framework with which to evaluate current and to create new corporate ethical management systems in their organizations. This book offers such a framework, called the Moldable Modelc, a system of consistent components that give leaders a framework and a guide to build an organization-specific corporate ethical management system (CEMS). This book teaches how to design ethical workplaces utilizing the role modeling, context, and accountability components.
In a step-by-step process, the author guides the reader through the research-based components with definitions, theory, explanations, and the practical application of those components through suggested organizational activities. Readers can expect to develop ethical tools and a complete corporate ethical management system for implementation into their specific organizations. In just a few hours, a busy executive can have the knowledge and tools to design an ethical workplace that creates satisfied and committed employees who increase organizational productivity and competitive advantage.
Leaders in the 21st-century must learn to solve problems and motivate followers with a combination of creativity, leadership, and effective change. In The New Leader: Harnessing the Power of Creativity to Produce Change, readers will develop an understanding of the relationship between creativity, leadership, and change. They will analyze the creative process, learn how to develop a creative culture, and understand effective leadership styles that promote creativity and change. They will explore training to enhance creativity and leadership, and develop practical ways to create an environment that encourages positive growth. The book offers simple techniques to enhance creativity and leadership immediately, while also pointing to long-term changes that will bring even more success. Stories, reflection questions, and theories are intertwined to help the reader develop sound strategies to lead with enhanced creativity.
The book will help an overwhelmed leader learn engaging tools to lead change, while encouraging disengaged leaders to try new methods to revive their leadership and accomplish a motivating vision. In the end, leaders will become more effective, engaging, and transformational by adopting the ideas in the book. They will serve as a model for creativity, create spaces that enhance creative growth, and encourage cultures where employees are free to create positive changes for their organizations.
This book begins an adventure wherein the author outlines for us the particular shape our minds impose on that journey; he takes as his analytic, the human sensorium: the panoply of sensory channels (sight, hearing, touch, etc.) we use to grasp our world. His primary insight is that our sensorium does not, beyond immediate social groups, present smooth, mirror-like vistas of our socially networked world.
Contrariwise, he shows that this uniquely human array of channels presents a mosaic of disparate inputs with subtle fissures and sutures between and among them. That more sophisticated view of our sensory apparatus allows him to describe with great practicality, the fissured, segmented architectures we inject into our enterprises and, above all, our markets.
These insights particularly illuminate the revolution reshaping our understanding of the basic couplet of value exchange driving markets: Buying and selling.
In this revolution a more telling focus on services as catalysts of value exchange is supplanting the traditional terms: goods and product, as the architecture of that very human sensorium broached above modulates value exchange across the chain of institutional need in markets.
Armed with this novel set of insights, we come away with a far better sense of what is happening “overhead,” as we work out our missions and careers amid our socially constructed edifices: enterprises, institutions, and their battlegrounds, our markets.
A fearsome aspect of management is the performance appraisal. It has become a byword for unfairness and irritation among employees. Some management writers are even proposing in doing away with it. We agree that the current method of appraisal is unsustainable and counterproductive. In this book, we discuss Performance Leadership – the idea of leading employee performance, which should be the focus of management. Just doing appraisal or evaluation is not enough. Managers must incorporate the entire model of performance management and use it to lead within their workgroup, department, or organization. We walk managers through the steps of Performance Leadership, discussing the benefits and pitfalls of each step. The idea of making performance management work as a leadership style is new and simple, but it takes dedication to complete the task. This book is valuable for supervisors, managers, human resource staff, and others – anyone who needs to manage performance!
Projects generally require skills and effort from multiple disciplines to develop project deliverables. Projects are executed in teams, as project tasks require multiple skills, judgment, and experience. Project teams roles should be assigned based on strengths of individuals.
Project team process is a mediating mechanism linking variables such as members, team, and organizational characteristics that include structure, culture, supporting systems, performance and incentive systems, employee morality, and top management support.
Team performance or teamwork is impacted by the structure of a team. Team structural characteristics include the number of team members, the status hierarchy, roles and responsibilities, and accepted norms for behaviors of individuals within the team. Further, understanding characteristics of virtual teams and their key attributes for improving global project performance are of critical importance.
Social and behavioral skills that each person brings are important influencing factors in interactions with other team members and in forming a cohesive and productive team. Also, organization and national cultures influence their behaviors.
Project Teams is an attempt to address all these topics in detail and offer a practical approach to managing projects successfully in the current business environment by including concepts, processes, techniques, and tools to manage and enhance performance of project teams and projects. This book would be meaningful for project management professionals and project managers in any organization and can be a useful resource for academic institutions in teaching management and project management disciplines.
Why read another book on selling? Simple. Today’s client is more informed, more sophisticated, and has more access to information. Selling professionals today need to be keener to fulfill the needs of the client by offering value, and most important, trust.
In the increasing age and rage of globalization and the Internet, competition rises. Selling professionals today need to determine better ways to reach the economic decision maker and better articulate their value. Selling: The New Norm is such a book. This book will provide the tools and templates required to meet today’s sales challenges.
Check out Forbes Magazine, July issue, which refers to Bolton’s book — “…some positive guidance summarized in a new book…”
By providing excellent service, organizations build strong relationships with customers, generate barriers to competition, utilize resources more efficiently, and increase profitability. This book provides concepts and tools to help managers:
‧ Uncover new sources of revenue from innovations and improvements in the customer experience, including leveraging business analytics and metrics;
‧ Design service processes, operations and channels to create customer experiences that build relationships, as well as design responses to service failures; and
‧ Manage people, physical evidence, branding and communications to effectively cocreate experiences with customers. The Customer Experience is the sensory, cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral dimensions of all activities that connect the customer and the organization over time across touch points and channels. It encompasses all activities involving the customer where the organization is the focal object, including prepurchase activities (such as exposure to a website ad), and purchase, consumption, and engagement behaviors (blogging, sharing photos).
This book analyzes the challenges of creating excellent customer experiences, including the management of technology and new media. It describes how customers coproduce and cocreate their experiences, and how these activities influence business revenues and costs. The book takes a deep dive into the psychology of customers, revealing the conceptual building blocks of customer experiences and how they build relationships over time. These ideas provide a business perspective on how to manage relationships with customers to generate cash flows and profitability, including the role of pricing.
