Sunday, May 27, 2012

Corporate Due Diligence, Introductions, Negotiations and Exit Strategies

We offer the following services, targeted mainly at the International Commodities and Trade Sectors... set fees apply to all services

Corporate Due Diligence Services ....

This service comes in two distinct levels where we can investigate all possible aspects of the company you wish to work with, Corporate registration, Public officers, and links to Banking and Finance.

A complete due diligence can further investigate using a full buyer investigation with reference to our wide and diverse contacts within the International Trade and Commodities Industry.

Introduction to a Major

We can provide an introduction to a major industry company .. we cannot of course guarantee that you will have a successful deal, as this is subject to individual negotiations between the two parties, however if you wish us to use our contacts and our industry expertise we can all offer a negotiation Service

Contract Negotiations

We can negotiate a contract between a verified supplier and a buyer for a set fee ...

Exit Strategies

With our extensive verified buyer contacts within the industry we can provide you with a exit strategy for your product ...

Please contact us ... service@intmf.com  for more information or assistance concerning the service we offer.

See our Blog for general and specific comment ...it is situated at http://intmf.wordpress.com


Moving our Blog to Wordpress

We have decided to move our blog to WordPress ...
From today (26th May 2012) you can find the blog situated here

Friday, November 4, 2011

How to build Online Influence without seeming to

I have watched with interest how organisations that operate in the Social Media sector .. and I have some observations about how to define your strategy

Lets start with the function of Social Media
….

Social Media is not a direct influence or sales path …. it is a tool to build a contact .. to build a relationship and ultimately to add to an experience of your brand from which you can then leverage, while you continue to add value to the overall experience.

Social Media is the Internets replacement in this insular world for your sphere of influence … you community, your friends, and those organisations that you are interested in engaging with.
Social Media has been hyped up to the point where people are living their life in this cyber space instead of the real world … please take note … Social Media is not your life, and the most important people in your life, are not on Twitter ! Well they shouldn’t be … professionally speaking I believe many mature bricks and mortar organisations would be more successful especially on Facebook if they de-activated their account – their strategy is all one sided, and is all about providing the information that they believe is important – which is not how you build a relationship .. One thing, numbers of Facebook does not means that they are actually listening to you … but on Twitter … I believe they are more engaged and therefore interested and note, the un-follow button on Twitter is a heart beat away.

In the early days, very early days on Twitter, on another account I did an experiment with that exact scenario .. and then changed the nature of the feed .. the response was immediate … that feed lost a large number of followers .. and note people remember … that … if you don’t value them .. well enough said

Now lets look at how to build influence


It is built by engagement and valuing the people you connect with, but you MUST speak with your own voice and from your own values …. if you do not offer up something of yourself then what makes you different than the thousands of voices of the Internet .. that say .. buy this .. do this .. see here … your strategy must be to enhance the experience of your followers … their world is made somehow brighter by following you on Twitter or any other Social Media channel, in other words you provide something they want in their life.

I have seen worthy organisations who are so focused on getting their message across, without seeing the other side of the picture …. you need to involve people in your world on a more personal basis or should I say your persona …. which on the Internet is not the same thing .. well it shouldn’t be. Also if you are speaking as the voice of a organisation, you need to follow strict protocols of how you engage … what you say .. and how you say it … bring your personal views of what they did, or how they have treated you is counter-productive and will lose you followers.

There are specific processes and strategies to interest, to engage, involve the customer / follower, to retain them and use that connection as a leverage to a wider audience … but so many are missing the mark here …. to start look at your own interests and those sites you follow and ask yourself, why am I interested in this information, and how do they retain my interest and how do they interest me enough, that I want to re-tweeted my message to my followers … this is a critical point … to a large extent I choose the people I follow and likewise unless I believe they overall experience of my feed will be enhanced and will add something to my message … I will not engage … so I this is how I value them by not devaluing our relationship -  and therefore I will only re-tweet a message and content that I can relate to … and I believe my “friends” for want of a better world will find of value …. basically because I do.

At the end of the day … you need to remember on thing .. this is Social Media … it is not a one way passive “relationship” as in Mass Media, it is or at least it should be a engaged interactive relationship, that value and engage with your people … to build a joint experience, and note joint means together …. do not make the mistake of seeing your followers as a means to an end .. as the equivalent of email fodder … value them, respect them and you will succeed … don’t .. well we know what happens if you don’t.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Introduction to Issues surrounding Engagement Consulting

I was recently speaking on chat to a friend of some problems I had with trying to impress on 
the company, the seriousness of their disconnect with their end clients who were, after all, you know real people… (like them?) it sort of went like this..

We are all much more creative than we give ourselves credit. Sorry for my disconnection with you … I have been trying every which was I can to relate and communicate to non-creative (C level Operations & Executive personnel ) to get them to comprehend what I consider as real business concerns … they consider as irrelevant emotive concepts like customer experience, engagement, feelings, and other more tangible concepts such as sustainable growth (that they understand) and future growth strategies that require innovative and out of the box thinking .. any real growth without innovation is a fantasy .. future real growth will come from disruptive products and services that fracture and re-define the markets

I am certainly passionate about those areas …. where the corporate world think they are operating in a vacuum …. the psychological aspects of individual C Level career success restricts focus, narrows perspective & may break engagement & understanding of customers – I think it more than breaks the connection with the customers … except for those very rare people who have their feet on the ground – not too many of those …
Its amazing the mess that this one issue is causing the likes of News Corp, HP, Netflix, Yahoo and the obvious one is the looming changes facing Mass Media … you know Film, Mass Media (TV)+ Cable + Newspaper + Magazines .. Amazon must be loving this ..

I am been quiet on the blog, because I have been trying to process the so many changes since the uncloaking of the morally reprehensible behaviours of News Corp and a separate free lesson on how to damage your brand and lose over a million of subscribers courtesy of NETFLIX, Yahoo and the bickering … and the fork in the road that HP find themselves — put there through their own bad strategic planning … and lets not forget Delta who are without doubt the singularly worst client and customer culture I have ever observed in a company ….. and finally what the death of a truly inspiring creator, Steve Jobs will mean for Business in general but for Apple in particular, so I will come back here … give me a while to compose my thoughts and we will get at it.

PerhapsI can point to a letter sent by a recent passenger of Delta by my friend Sandra Maxey … here is the link … @sandymaxey Letter to Delta Airlines CEO – http://bit.ly/qcPxoK

But a couple more points while  we are here, I am wondering if we are all in the mess because of the MBA Program … it may make business understandable, but business is not a thing, each company is a life, made up of their own dreams and aspirations, full of individual people whom it might be nice to think are actually going in the same direction as the company, (most aren’t because of flawed Corporate cultures) and the most important aspect, their customers, who are all real people, who want to be valued and engaged … and refused to be categorized and sorted just so it makes it easier for the company to dissociate themselves from this truth .. companies are people … so are customers, people even own it … (maybe not directly) people manage it, operate in it, and who they sell their product or service to … you need to value them or basically become irrelevant .. you will cease to exist.

One last observation, the large aspect of the MBA attitude is one of expedience .. which is kind of abhorrent to me .. however that aside, recently I heard that Harvard and Wharton Schools were adding ethics classes to the MBA .. what a total wast of time, ethics, principles and integrity is not something you can teach, it is something that has to be part of your values, the actual make-up of your personality – if not, when you are put under pressure they (ethics) will not be your go to code of conduct.

So I would say again, to change the way the world thinks we need to teach our children what is really of value – and guess what its not money .. more later

Friday, September 16, 2011

Reader Engagement

It does not matter how the content gets to you, by what ‘road” or in what form, whether in a library book, a hard copy magazine or newspaper, the web and its various forms of streaming … it has something in common … you have to have interest in the content, it has to engage with you .. and make you want you to focus and read on.

This has always been the case. How often have you picked up a book, looked over a few pages, and discarded it. Why ? because it did not engage with you, watched a movie, switched channels, went to sleep or worse still, walked out of a theatre .. or reading a web page and thought , no .. and moved on … read a Twitter stream and nothing, you either clicked good bye or went looking for content that you can relate to, regardless of how the content is delivered to you, how you view it or engage with it, it has to value you and engage with you as a person.

Think about this and we will come back to you … in the next blog entry with more .. of what I hope is interesting content