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Multinational business magazine The Economist has been working with Microsoft Enterprises business solution, Microsoft Cloud, to create a micro site called Empowering Business.

The site contains some very interesting bite-sized video snippets of business advice from industry experts. In this article I’m going to explore some of the advice that is offered on the site.

Marketing

In under 30 seconds, the CMO of technology news site Mashable, Stacy Martinet, explains how businesses can control their own publicity channels. Historically, businesses have been dependant upon buying advertising, or relying upon the media to cover their brand. Now however they can control – to a much to a much greater extent – what messages they send out, when they send them and how; through the use of blogging, social media and other forms of new media. This has fundamentally changed the way we (consumers) perceive organisations, and also how they market themselves to us.

On the Empowering Business site, Stacy Martinet also explains what she believes is the biggest mistake made by marketing professionals. She believes that thinking about marketing campaigns in an old fashioned way – running a project for a set period to achieve specific results – is a mistake. She suggests that businesses today should focus on constantly and consistently building and improving their brand(s) on a 24 cycle, rather than focusing on producing a specific return every 3 or 6 months.

Technology

Liz Crawford, CTO of beauty subscription service Birchbox believes that having a good understanding of your market and then being able to use technology to your advantage, to make your organisation more efficient, more effective and more innovative, is the key to being a successful Technology Officer.

The Economist in Partnership with Microsoft Cloud – Empowering Business

Leadership

Senior Lecturer at MIT School of Management, Claus Otto Scharmer, suggests that self-leadership is a skill that every leader needs. He states that before you can lead others, you need to be aware of how to lead yourself. If you can assess yourself to enable to you understand what you do and how you could improve, then you can transfer this knowledge into how you can make other people better too.

Human Resources

HR Consultant Jessica Miller-Merrell, from Xceptional HR, explains how company culture is a bottom-up phenomenon. She suggests that many high level mangers believe that they can dictate company culture from the top-down. Jessica states that because the employees are the culture, managers must get employee buy-in for an organisation to change how it operates.