But the reality of “free&# is that it does cost the user, the buyer and the supplier sooner than later. While the sites and tools appear to be “free&# using them wrong can cost you dearly. The data you produce creates cost that far out way any of the benefits of “free things&# you use or think you obtained. We’ve also seen it in most business negotiation where the buyer is always trying to get a deal from the supplier (reduced cost or “free&# additions of value). But the cost is more than what you “pay”. Does Money Follow Free? MORE >>

Often businesses overlook one  of the most time-consuming processes: contract management. Some businesses fail to correctly account for the amount of time that their staff dedicates to each of the phases of the contract process. As an exercise, share this list with your contract management staff and ask them how many hours per week they dedicate to each one of these stages of the contract process: New Contract Requests. In order to be successful, businesses need to be able to focus on their core strength:  the key factor that sets a business apart from all others. Renewals. MORE >>

The answer, of course, is “Process” – there’s isn’t any – neither in measurement or analytics – everyone seems to be making it up as they go (and one person has a different definition of the same deliverable as everyone else – there is just about no consensus, on anything).  But, if you think about it, why would you get a report or audit when there was no common definition of what those things are, how long they take, what’s in them, and what they could and should cost?  Why is that? No wonder. Any one agree?   MORE >>

We like our culture the way it is and don’t see anything wrong with it, and we’ve always done things this way so we’re not really keen to change any of our processes or people. Change is a sexy idea, until it costs. Change Is Sexy, Until it Costs. “I’d like to better use social to build my business. But I don’t want to spend anything because we don’t have a budget, and we can’t cut anything else. Can you help?” Until we actually need to do the work in our own organizations. Make personnel adjustments. The brilliant news? MORE >>

It costs, because you have hired good people who do good work that takes time, and it costs. Yes, posting a video, making a status update on Facebook or Twitter might not cost a lot initially. It will cost between 2-5 minutes to splash some random content to a page, but that’s not really what you want to do. Social Truth: Social tools may be cheap, but social costs because it requires people who know how and what it takes to do the work and carry it out well. Advertising is Cheap, Resources and Production Costs Aren’t. Social media is not cheap. MORE >>