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Applications of Neural Networks

Neural networks are widely used in various fields, and their applications are expanding. Here, we'll look at some typical uses of neural networks and explain their usefulness and effectiveness through real-life examples.

Examples of Neural Network Applications in Various Fields

Image Recognition

Medical Image Analysis: Neural networks are used to diagnose diseases in medical images. For example, using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to analyze MRI or X-ray images can help detect cancer and other diseases early. CNNs are effective at learning spatial structures in images, resulting in high accuracy in medical image analysis.

Autonomous Driving: Autonomous vehicles use CNNs to recognize road signs, pedestrians, other vehicles, and more. This helps determine safe driving routes and prevent collisions. For instance, Tesla's autonomous driving system analyzes road situations in real-time and controls the vehicle's movement.

Speech Recognition

Virtual Assistants: Speech recognition technology plays a crucial role in virtual assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa. Using neural networks, it converts user speech into text and executes commands based on it. This technology significantly enhances user convenience, allowing various tasks to be performed through voice commands.

Medical Records: When doctors record patient conditions verbally, neural networks can convert it into text and store it in electronic medical record systems. This enhances the efficiency of medical staff and helps accurately document patient conditions."

Natural Language Processing, NLP

Chatbots: Chatbots are commonly used in customer service, processing natural conversations through neural networks. For instance, they provide appropriate answers to user questions and retrieve necessary information. Widely used in sectors like banking and e-commerce, they enable 24-hour customer support.

Translation: NLP-based neural networks perform translations between various languages. Google Translate, for example, uses neural networks to understand the meaning of sentences and accurately translate them into other languages. This facilitates smooth international communication and helps break down language barriers.

Real-life Cases

AlphaGo

Google DeepMind's AlphaGo is an artificial intelligence that plays the game of Go, combining neural networks and reinforcement learning algorithms to defeat top human Go players. AlphaGo's success demonstrated the exceptional performance of neural networks in complex strategy games. By learning from millions of Go game records, AlphaGo improved its ability to play Go on its own.

Facebook Face Recognition

Facebook uses neural networks to recognize and tag faces in user photos, enhancing user experience and providing automatic photo organization features. Facebook's DeepFace algorithm achieves a face recognition accuracy of 97%, nearly equivalent to human recognition capabilities.

Google Translate

Google Translate has significantly improved translation quality by introducing a neural network-based translation system. This system understands context and provides more natural translations. Neural network-based translation models consider the flow and context of sentences, translating at the sentence level rather than word by word.

Conclusion and Future Challenges

Neural networks demonstrate outstanding performance in various application areas, making our lives more convenient. However, there are still challenges that need to be addressed. Future research will focus on further improving the performance of neural networks and exploring new application areas. The potential of neural networks is vast, and innovative technologies utilizing them will continue to emerge.

I hope this book aids in your understanding and utilization of neural networks, and I wish you great success in your future research and learning endeavors.

Continue reading at https://strategicleap.blogspot.com/

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Kinds of Metrics in social media

The very first category is basic metrics. These metrics can be gathered easily either from the social networking channel itself or with a separate service or system. Basic metrics include fans (how many people are following a person on a specific account), wedding (how many people in your community tend to be interacting with your content), as well as sentiment (how people feel to your content-positive, negative, or neutral). Consider evaluating these fundamental metrics first to determine the general scope of the community dimension you have (e. g., followers), how prominent you are in spreading content and how much publicity it actually gets (e. g., reach), and how individuals respond to your content on social networking (e. g., engagement as well as sentiment as per social media channel strategy template).

The second category is definitely advanced metrics, which immerse into the actions and psychographics (the attitudes, behaviors, in addition to opinions of audience members) of specific users (e. g., influencers-people who have the capability to persuade others to take some action and advocates-loyal and expended audiences who are supportive of an brand or community). These kind of specific metrics tell a new social media professional a lot in relation to user behaviors, but also with regards to the unique characteristics of a area. Advocacy, audience engagement, in addition to influencers are just a few metrics that can be collected and tested for identifying your several audience segments. These metrics are somewhat more challenging to help categorize and collect, so that you may need to get specific applications to analyze these metrics (e. g., Klear for influencers) or invest in a tool that could analyze and report these kind of metrics along with the basic metrics (e. g., Meltwater).

Your third category is channel metrics, which are unique to distinct channels. While many channels show certain basic metrics, the configurations also make considerably more specific metrics useful. For instance , story completion is important to get Snapchat and Instagram to see, whereas retweets and absolute favorites may be aligned with Twits. Facebook has reactions due to the updates and comments.

A final category is behavioral metrics, the most complicated yet beneficial metrics to collect on web 2 . 0. In behavioral metrics, most of us explore downloads and leads (did the content we article on social media result in a membership or action? ). They are the metrics many mature managers and leaders interested in as a result of investment in social networking. Conversion rate (how numerous clicks and actions led to sales divided by the amount of clicks and actions taken), amplification rate (how a lot the content has been shared as well as viewed by others-specifically taking a look at shared actions like retweets [RTs] or even shares on Twitter, reviews, and share actions), as well as influencer impact (how numerous high-profile professionals and trading accounts shared and engaged using the content) are just a few metrics that allow us to evaluate whether people took action depending on what they saw on social networking (a Facebook ad, a good influencer campaign, a demand subscriptions to a YouTube station, etc . ).

A comprehensive social networking monitoring and listening strategy includes at least several metrics from each category, however the choices depend on the overall goals set for the social media endeavours and which metrics greatest align with the goals from the social media campaign.

Implementing the Monitoring and Listening Strategy

Now that you understand the differences among monitoring and listening, you are in a better position to determine the precise approach and resources you will have to accomplish your goals:

Responsibilities with regard to monitoring and listening. Identifying who will be in charge of the role is instrumental within determining whether you will have the required resources to accomplish these duties. Identifying key personnel (community manager, account manager, social media advisor, etc . ) who will wear charge of reporting and fascinating with the team or model on this issue is also critical. This is another area which might be integrated into the list of commitments for the team internally (or externally depending on the circumstances). Ensure that those who are responsible for the playing and monitoring capabilities know the objectives and entire scope of the social media techniques from a business and transmission standpoint.

Monitoring and playing training. Like social media tools, expectations for social media records analytics and measurement usually are evolving rapidly. Training with analytic tools (Hootsuite, Microsoft company, HubSpot, Meltwater, Facebook Training, Stukent, etc . ) is often very useful. Social media professionals ought to maintain up with the latest measurement applications for monitoring and playing.

Outlining what you can in addition to must listen to and display. Outlining the key areas of concentration before implementing a supervising and listening plan is necessary. This will set forth a strong basic foundation for staying organized in addition to current.

Tying in supervising and listening practices to help current business, communication, in addition to brand objectives. Note 2 will demonstrate whether each one department has accomplished it has the set objectives. In addition , experience can be integrated into current options (e. g., SWOT study integration) as well as used to predicted trends and opportunities.

Employing analytics and research to tell content that resonates together with audiences. Importance of using info to inform the types of messages, articles, and writing style basically for your brand online. Content creation does not happen on a impulse all of the time, but rather it is a methodical process of evaluating the previous information, videos, images, and improvements that generated engagement and also reach by resonating together with key members of the neighborhood. Connecting the data to provide within the law insights for other downline and leadership can make the main between executing and not carrying out the content and, in some cases, to not get the project or career. In other words, measuring and coverage content data helps push future brainstorming sessions, aide for execution, and revenue for social channels.

Setting up a consistent brand monitoring in addition to listening ecosystem. A research approach should specify the standards for who reports often the findings to whom, what is claimed, what the deadlines will be, the way data will be analyzed in addition to formatted, and how the resulting accounts will be shared with clients as well as senior management.

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Innovation in Promotion and Store Flyers

In this section the new promotional tools adopted by brands and retailers are introduced. They are enabled by digital technology. Then, store flyers are discussed as traditional promotional tools that are undergoing major changes due to the shift from print to online and to the rise of flyer aggregator platforms.

Brands and retailers are experimenting with innovation in promotion, thanks to new digital channels, and customer insight gained from individual customer information and new intermediaries (Ziliani and Ieva 2014). Consequently, shoppers are offered a plethora of promotional opportunities, accessible at various phases of the shopping cycle, deployed by a growing number of players across several channels (Shankar et al. 2011). Brand coupons, for example, are available on brand and retailer websites, coupon websites, mobile location-based coupon services and group deals sites (e.g. Groupon). In 2013, 80% of US internet users downloaded coupons from brand, retail or intermediary websites and over 60% of consumers looked online for a coupon/deal/offer before making a purchase (eMarketer 2013).

At the same time, brands compete for customer loyalty by offering loyalty schemes and clubs, loyalty apps, subscription-based schemes and branded currency wallets (e.g. Starbucks). “Price” and “loyalty” promotion, once separate domains, are merging into hybrid strategies that make use of “the best of both worlds” to attract shoppers and make them stay.

Alongside retailers and manufacturers many “deal intermediaries” have emerged. They range from the long established providers of targeted coupons-at-till based on shoppers’ history such as Catalina Marketing (www.​catalina.​com) to coupon websites, mobile location-based coupon services, group deals sites (e.g. Groupon) and group deals aggregators (e.g. Yipit.​com). A very interesting case is that of virtual wallets such as Google Wallet and Apple’s Passbook where coupons, loyalty points, customer data and methods of payment coexist (see Ziliani and Ieva 2014 for a detailed description of the new promotional tools).

Digital platforms are a powerful source of innovation in price promotion, enabling new promotion types such as group deals and flash sales. At the same time, digital technology is transforming traditional tools, such as coupons and flyers, by shifting them online and enabling their customization. In the next section we focus on the digital evolution of promotional flyers.

Traditional Flyers

The promotional flyer, taking its original name from the times when wartime aircrafts dropped leaflets onto enemy cities for propaganda purposes, is a printed means of regular (e.g. weekly/monthly) one-way communication between retailers and customers, distributed both in store and out of store and employed to communicate deals and retailer image (Pieters et al. 2007).

The flyer commands a substantial part of a retailer’s budget in many countries (Parguel et al. 2009; De Camillis 2012; Gazquez-Abad and Sanchez-Perez 2009). In 2002, flyers accounted for 50% of the average retail marketing budget in Italy, while in France they accounted for 60% and 65% in the US (De Camillis 2012). Flyers are an important retail promotion tool because they influence shoppers both at home and in store and are source of marketing contributions from manufacturers who rely heavily on them to reach consumers directly (Srinivasan et al. 1995; Volle 1997; Arnold et al. 2001; Mimouni-Chaabane et al. 2010).

Due to the relevance of investment in flyers, the reduced effectiveness of promotions, the growing tide of new promotional opportunities and the emergence of new players, managers are concerned with the improvement of store flyer efficiency and effectiveness. The following critical aspects of flyers as retail marketing tools emerge from previous research (Ziliani and Ieva 2015): Time to MarketIt takes up to 2 months from concept to delivery, and no last minute changes can be made.

Environmental ImpactThe twelve billion flyers printed and distributed in Italy every year account for 500,000 tons of carbon emissions (De Camillis 2012); it can be expected that more and more cities will rule against flyer distribution.

Poor MeasurabilityAt present, retailers track overall promotional sales lift of in-flyer items but have no means to relate this to customers’ actual exposure to the flyer itself. Neither do they assess the impact of flyer page length, in-flyer brand mix, and other features.

Buyer Driven ProcessWithin the retail organisation, the process of flyer production involves buyers and category managers more than marketing people, who usually collabourate on design elements and overall flyer theme only, and have little saying as far as the choice of products is concerned.

Retailers are concerned with the above problems, and they are aware that today’s promotional scenario (Fig. 1) offers consumers numerous alternatives to print flyers (Ziliani and Ieva 2015).

So far, academic research on flyers has investigated: impact of flyer design on store traffic and on store sales (Gijsbrechts et al. 2003; Mimouni-Chaabane et al. 2010), flyer design optimisation (Pieters et al. 2007), profile of flyer-prone consumer (Martínez and Montaner 2006), and flyer as information source (Zhang 2006). Little or no attention has been paid by academic research to the flyer management process and its organisational dimensions. Ziliani and Ieva (2015) identify the decision centres involved in planning this essential part of retail promotion, and the information sources used for flyer creation and management. They found that flyers have evolved drastically in recent years thanks to the availability of customer insight for the flyer planning process and to digitalization.

To improve the flyer design and management process, some retailers have been applying customer insight derived from loyalty card data, as shown by the following applications (Ziliani and Ieva 2015):

Optimisation of Flyer Geographical DistributionBy knowing where customers live, flyer distribution can be better planned.

Analysis of Flyer Performance in Different Customer Segments of Interests, and Customer Segmentation Based on “Flyer Proneness”Insight results in substituting the flyer (for customers who score low in terms of flyer influenced purchases or other measure of flyer impact) with new communication channels such as serving customised promotions on till receipts, kiosks, website, apps and others.

Shopping Basket AnalysisThis can be applied to understanding flyer impact, e.g. by computing the percentage of loyal families who repurchase the promoted good after having tried it due to a flyer. Shopping basket “gap” analysis can suggest categories and SKUs (stock keeping units) to promote on flyers in order to stimulate customers to fill such gaps.

Extracting insight from customer databases to improve print flyer effectiveness and efficiency, however, is evidently not an easy nor fast option. It is not surprising, therefore, that many retailers are turning to digital channels in search of a shortcut.

leadership development goals examples

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Using Shotgun Innovation

The innovation that was important to us was products that will sell. Most companies hire out innovation. Hasbro and Mattel come to mind. They have a network of outside “inventors”; they basically use a “shotgun” approach: throwing shit (spaghetti) against the wall to see if any sticks (see also Ingredients and Inventory). I used ideation meetings to produce corporate products from inside the corporation in a disciplined manner; we never took an idea from an inventor. Phil Jackson40 at Hasbro told me every time I saw him that no other company could do what Radica was doing  he was right. He was shocked when we had the mega-hit with Draw Poker and followed it up with Bass Fishin’ (and later with 20 Questions, an early artificial intelligence game). Because of being the first company to do back to back hits, Hasbro contracted us to put the Hasbro line-up of intellectual properties (Yathzee, Monopoly, Candyland, etc.) into electronic form.

The ideation meetings were really started to get the team to work together so that everyone knew how and where the products were developed and could “buy in” to them. They also saw (when put under the gun) how tough it was when they were put on the spot to create. In other words, we had team cohesiveness because everyone was involved in the process and gained respect for all those who contributed to create (No vacuum, everyone got to see how we worked). It is important so that the team can work together and remove internal friction. Innovation has to be transparent and disciplined. It is critical that the culture is maintained and everyone is on the same page.

Size

I’m not sure growing a company just to grow is good. I think the quality of product and the quality of life are something to go after. Size doesn’t always matter.

Size and Fun

The fun of a business tends to be inversely linear to the size of the company. The bigger you get, the less fun you have and more headache, and the culture starts to fall apart. The perfect number may be 200. After 200, it really crosses a threshold. When you get past 200, then you have to have another level of management come in and then you get into the vice-president stuff.

The Smallest Component

The more power you get, the less you can use because as soon as you use the power incorrectly, you lose it all. The power lies in the organization, not within you.

It’s like the wall. There are the bricks and the mortar. And in the mortar, there are gypsum, water, sand, and the smallest component of all: lime. Lime provides the glue. So, I’m in the wall, as the CEO, I’m the smallest component. I’m not a brick, I’m not the mortar, I’m not the water, I’m not the sand. I’m that little trace of adhesive that holds the wall together. So, a CEO needs to understand he is the smallest component. He is not the strength of the wall. The strength of the wall is those people sticking together and the CEO’s responsibility is to provide the adhesive so they can stick. But CEO can’t do the work.

Spilt Milk Syndrome, Double Bind

This is a valuable lesson I learned at a young age and I still use it all the time. At 8 years of age on my grandfather’s farm, I was given the early morning task of carrying buckets of milk uphill from the barn to the house. My grandfather would continue milking while I carried buckets.

He would admonish me to be quicker as he needed the empty buckets to continue; he would yell at me to “run faster!” While I was making the 200-yard run to the farm house, my grandmother would watch me from the kitchen window. When I arrived and would empty the buckets into the creamer machine, she would tell me to “slow down, you are spilling the milk.” So, I had my grandfather complaining to run faster and my grandmother complaining to run slower: a classic double-bind. I was confused, as anyone is in a double- bind. I had to find a way to satisfy both. But how? I had to find a way to stay fast and not spill milk. I focused on looking at the edge of the milk in the bucket as I ran, sort of balancing the bucket. I still spilled some milk, but could justify it to my grandmother. I sort of satisfied both grandparents.

The lesson: As the thought leader, when you run fast be aware of how much you are spilling and control the loss as best as possible. In my business practice now I evaluate the speed I must go to be competitive and try to minimize the loss. Being aware of the cost of the loss vs. the benefit of the speed is something that can be managed—always be aware of what your speed is costing you. In some cases, it is worth the loss to get to market in time. Just always be aware.

Spread of Information

Information is power, so the more information you bring into yourself and you think you have power, the more you stifle the organization and none of us have power.

I saw this in its harshest form in the Chinese patriarchal culture, where they thought if they kept information they kept power; it took five years to break this in Radica there and get everyone to spread the information to those who needed it. Pushing company information away brings power back; holding information causes miscommunication. Lots of gray hairs from this one!

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Knowing Decision Trees

A decision tree is a flow chart for choosing a course of action or drawing a conclusion. They're often used for supervised learning binary classification problems. You can find plenty of graphics programs online for creating decision trees. And is ti specifically helpful for your social media strategy.

With a decision tree, you specify a number of predictors that determine a given outcome. For example, suppose you wanted to create a decision tree to predict whether or not someone will go to the beach.

You could set up three predictors: one called "sky" that indicates if the weather is overcast, rainy, or sunny; a second called “humidity” that indicates whether a day is humid; and a third called "wind" that indicates whether the wind is strong or weak. Then you create one outcome, such as Joe goes to the beach. Because Joe either goes to the beach or not, this is a binary classification problem.

The next step would be to create training data based on Joe's choices in the past. You could create a four-column table with the columns labeled Sky, Humidity, Wind, and Joe Goes to the Beach. You'd enter data in all four columns — predictors in the first three columns and outcomes in the Joe Goes to the Beach column. You can probably see a correlation in the data just by glancing at it; if the day is sunny low humidity with little wind, yes, Joe goes to the beach. If the day is humid and it's raining, regardless of the wind, no, Joe doesn't go to the beach.

You don't need a decision tree to spot the patterns (especially in a small problem domain), but for the sake of this example, let's go ahead and create one. To create your decision tree, you might start with Sky, which branches off into three possible conditions: sunny, rainy or overcast. Each of these then branches off into two conditions: high humidity or low humidity. And each of these then branches off into weak or strong wind. Making a decision is then a simple matter of following the branches of the tree. If the day is sunny, you follow that branch to the next decision point — whether it's a weekday or weekend. If it's a weekend, then you follow that branch to the next decision point — whether the wind is strong or weak. And at the end of each path is your outcome — yes or no.

To reduce the complexity of the tree, you can prune some of the branches. For example, if Joe goes to the beach only when the sky is overcast or sunny, you don't need to branch off from rainy to weekend/weekday or strong/weak wind, because Joe already made his decision at this point — no, he won't go to the beach when it's raining.

When you create a decision tree, you want to have a clear path to a yes or no outcome. If you have trouble getting there, your tree may have too much entropy — it's too messy and takes too long to get to a yes or no answer. You can also prune the tree if you see a predictor that doesn't help; for example, if Joe goes to the beach regardless of whether it's windy, then you want to eliminate or replace that predictor.

K-Nearest Neighbor The K-nearest neighbor algorithm classifies data based on similarities, making it very useful for multi-class classification. With K-nearest neighbor, you're essentially charting points on a graph that represent known things with certain characteristics. Then, you plot a point on the same graph for some new unknown thing and categorize that thing based on the category of its nearest neighbors. The K represents the number of nearest neighbors. K = 1 means only 1 nearest neighbor. K = 2 means two nearest neighbors. The higher the K value, the broader the category or class.

Think of it this way: When I was younger I used to work for an animal shelter in downtown Chicago. One of the most difficult jobs was trying to classify the breed of each new dog. There are hundreds of different dog breeds, and dogs aren't particular about their partners, so most dogs were a mix of several breeds.

Every time we got a new dog we would compare it to known breeds. We would consider several characteristics, including the shape of the head, the color, the size and shape of the ears, the body shape and size, how the dog held its tail, and so on. To classify the dog as a certain breed, we were using the equivalent of K-nearest neighbor. We wanted to figure out which breed or two breeds the dog was most similar to.

We usually couldn't figure out whether one of a dog's parents was a Boston terrier or a French poodle; we were simply trying to find the closest possible match. We were trying to minimize the distance between the unknown dog and the known breeds. The lesser the difference, the closer the match, the nearest the neighbor.

Minimizing the distance is a key function of K-nearest neighbor. The closer the match, the more accurate will be the machine's predictions. The most common way to find the nearest neighbor is through the use of Euclidean distance, which is essentially the shortest distance between two points.

Imagine having millions of dogs to classify based on their breed. To start, you might choose two key characteristics that serve as predictors, say weight and hair length. Suppose you chart your data on a graph with an x and a y axis. You chart hair length along the y-axis and weight along the x-axis. You create a training data set based on 1,000 dogs whose breeds you know and chart them based on their weight and hair length. A new dog comes in. You measure its hair length and weigh it, and plot a point on your chart for the new dog. While the point isn't likely to be right on top of one of the existing points, it's close to several neighboring points.

Let's say for this dataset we use K = 5. This means that you draw a circle around the points you plotted for your unknown dog and its five closest neighbors.

Now look at the five closest neighbors. You can see that three of them are shepherds and two of them are huskies. So you can be somewhat confident to classify your unknown dog as a husky-shepherd mix. If the task is to give one class for the test object, then we may have to count the votes obtained for each class these nearest neighbors and choose the class with the largest number of votes. In the above example, the dog may be classified as a shepherd.

K-nearest neighbor is a very common and powerful machine learning algorithm because it can do much more than identify a dog's breeds. In fact it's commonly used in finance to find the best stocks and even predict future performance. The downside is that this takes a lot of computation power, so if you're using KNN on large data sets, the machine may take a while to deliver its output.

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Branding as a social discourse

If you've ever tried to provide a definition of communication to any point outside of the academic world, it is very likely that it was difficult. On the one hand, it is a difficult task because it involves. For example, communication can be examined and understood from the perspective of a concentrated source, where such things as the reliability of the source, knowledge, diction and social influences become important. Communication, however, can also be studied and understood from the point of view focused on the receiver, where things like perception, interpretation, motivation and skills are important. Communication can also be studied by focusing the perspective of a process in which elements such as language, the media and non-verbal codes become important. On the other hand, it is a difficult task, since the study of communication surpasses many other fields and disciplines. For example, Rogers says that Wilbur Schramm, journalist training, was the founder and ""father"" of the formal investigation communication.1 noted, however, Schramm graduates of history, political science, civilization and American literature and English. As Rogers says, scholars and other well-known base of communication were not very different; Political scientist Harold Lasswell was Paul Lazarsfeld was a sociologist, a psychologist Kurt Lewin was one, and he was a mathematician Claude Shannon. Maybe Schramm said it best when he said that ""... the difficulty of summarizing such areas as human communication is that there is no land, which is in itself."" This means that communication is at the same time, a field that takes the variables studied, political, social and psychological embedded in interactions and processes DIALOGIC.

The aim of this post is to analyze the area of ​​communication research that goes beyond the world of political, social and psychological, and received much attention in the literature of these fields for at least the last six decades: the social construction. Take a portable perspective centered, and the source of the process focused vision focused, identity using two social networking sites on the Internet (Facebook and LinkedIn) building will be examined, trying to discover the processes in place when social actors ""converted"" if they themselves, and discover the individual character, who is doing it. Gonzales and Hancock says that ""... instead of dealing with only the Internet as an outlet for social interaction, the Internet should be considered as a space for self-realization."" 4 this post will focus the social processes involved in this social commitment.

The study of identity

Perhaps there is no better place to start than with text Goffman, Presentation of Self in everyday life, how much powerful and eloquent about the role of communication in the construction of social discussion. According to Goffman, social actors have both the agency and which have jurisdiction over the front others.5 For example, clothing and decorations are the key variables that differentiate people on the basis of occupation, social status, and even religion. As another example, one of the verbosity vulgaris and jointly define and are defined by a sense of self. This means that the individual characteristics such as friendly, intelligent and boring are based on communicative as shown, or the buildings themselves. Both of these examples show that the vehicle is at least partly under the control of one. On the basis of the first paragraph of this section, the discussion comes from a point source center of the view.

According to Goffman, however, is also not to be avoided hotspot receiver vision, nor devalued.6 The discussion about identity can be similar to the theater, like going to the theater event, says Goffman. "".. when everyone has a role that implicitly require observers to seriously impression promoted ahead of them."" 7 In other words, those with whom they interact must come to terms with their sense of personality. It is no different with the suspension of disbelief Coleridge says, arguing that the stories told, literary or otherwise, members of the public should temporarily suspend the concept of reality, so the story it has to represent something other than fiction and fantasy. 8 This social process requires others allow you to become as much as we want, taking into account the concept of action Eadie (what we do for others) and interactions (what we do with the other), which are incorporated into practice discursivas. 9 at the end of the study of identity is a lot about the connection and account history that accompanies its social construction. social actors put on different surfaces at different times, at different audiences, telling stories, using a different language, as a result of (probably) different effects.

Shortly after the text Goffman has become required reading for researchers and students of identity, Berger and Luckmann in the social construction of reality was published.10Their thesis was by Goffman, in which he claimed that, in reality, there is the impact on the outside. Rather, they are created by it. In certain parts of his book, Berger and Luckmann argue that ""on the one hand, a man's body ... [and] On the other hand, has the body of a man."" 11 Although this can be interpreted in many different ways, the basic argument is that there is a difference in meaning between what they are and what they have. For example, genetics, Berger and Luckmann explain that sex is something you have, and emotions are often things you need: to have, here, it is synonymous with the idea of ​​self Goffman's social structure. This means that even if it may be a biological man, has the ability to communicate emotions alter type, such as empathy, sympathy and envy, confirms concerns about the kind Cerulo link. Therefore, in this example, it can be regarded as biologically determined, but what is perhaps be thought of as a social construction.

It is obvious that the paradigm of social constructivism, which Irving Goffman, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann emanate, is alive and well, which explains the relationship between human experience, socializing and creating identity. However, as you are in the social world, which has little (if at all) countries, and the vast majority of social gatherings is not the FTF through dialogue, but through the intermediary form, which is the identity he created and shared? They are more narcissistic social actors, such as Bergman, Fearrington, Davenport says Bergman, or simply let the new technologies to demonstrate how narcissism? 13 are own social actors reveal more about themselves, claimed Joinson, or just new technologies, such as self-disclosure practices simplified? 14 return back to the romantic vision of himself, which says Gergen is probably an antique or potentially exceed the postmodern? 15 Before answering these questions, you must first understand how the massive use of electronic media has transformed the way we think about the structure and the effects of it.

This is an excerpt from: https://social-media-strategy-template.blogspot.com/

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How to develop a luxury brand

As a brand starts locally and grows, you need to do it right from the start. This process requires both a strong and a strong creative entrepreneur. Developer needs to develop a unique style, but should also have someone around who can be trusted to take care of business development and channel creativity in areas that translate into sales without limiting the creativity of the designer. Association Sergio Galeotti and Giorgio Armani and Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé are object lessons in the kind of teamwork that is required to succeed. Strong and trusting relationships with complementary styles and instincts, it is very important for the development of the brand ready-to-wear.

line of women ready to wear, giving a strong identity of many successful brand. It provides the press around the world and create awareness of retailers and consumers. Brand development of total look, ready to use acts as an anchor; It is very difficult to sell brand belts, pants or shoes without a strong image on the clothes or dresses.

Develop a brand, you need to have a presence in many large cities around the world, and the ladies ready-to-wear is expensive, because it allows you to create a network of retail stores with the brand, These stores usually sell more accessories and bags ready-to-wear, but the line ready-to-wear, which makes attractive window and creates an environment fashion magazine. It's a bit chicken and egg proposition: To sell accessories and bags requires a strong name and a strong line of ready-to-wear. To develop and promote a strong line of ready-to-wear requires a volume obtained through the sale of bags and accessories.

How to make money

The paradox is that many women in business are useless fashion. As discussed below, the development of the collection of ladies ready to wear collection requires a new prototypes, products, special paths and roads that are cost-effective only when the volume is. It is also the case in the male line of ready-to-wear, which are often difficult to distinguish from each other. store operations are highly dependent on their level of sales. In other words, you can not make money by opening a store brand is not known and it is not fashionable and attractive.

In fact, as we shall see, it is the best way to finance the implementation and development of the collection of ready-to-wear for women is the development of license agreements in other product categories. What is there to say that many brands are losing money in this industry. EuroStaff conducted a study of the profitability of twenty French brand ready-to-wear in 1994. Of these, only seven showed significant benefits yields barely three, eleven and lost money. And Chanel, with net profit H67 million from the sale of ready-to-wear for H570 million, was more profitable than the rest of the industry combined.

The creative process

Here we come to the most important style element: the creator. The role of management in this area is to organize a work plan, which specifies the requirements for the next season: how many clothes pants? How many dressed in skirts? How many cocktail dresses? sales price targets to aim detail and cost of material used is also specified. The designer must create and then run these strict guidelines to ensure that the final product will be sold at an affordable price in the shops. plans similar accessories and other products is also required, all of which must be consistent with the rest and easily recognizable brand. Dior relationship must be distinguished from the compound of Yves Saint Laurent, every product bearing the stamp of a certain quality and bring added value to the entire group of products. This can be achieved through coordination and clear lines of the design guide.

Although the administration should not be directly involved in the creative process, it is necessary to establish standards and processes of planning and review, in order to harmonize the different product lines, as well as analyze what has or has not been sold. Administration may be responsible for ensuring the quality of raw material (fabric, technical fabrics, buttons, linings, and so on) and production. Creativity of people such as Karl Lagerfeld and Giorgio Armani should not be controlled. It's just a question of establishing guidelines, targets and opinions, so that the creative process can be used to improve brand position in the market.

World presence

The balance of the assets for the fashion brand includes elements of imaging, such as shops in large cities independent brands and activities of consumption, such as licensing agreements for products. Distribution of fashion apparel products vary according to the specific needs of individual markets. In the United States and Japan, for example, luxury fashion brand are distributed primarily through department stores. Customers to visit stores in Milan and Paris fashion shows and store brand according to its budget to buy open. Remote control is the most important development of the brand. However, if a brand wants to create a force or a particular sensitivity alone, but must also build its flagship store in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Osaka and other cities influential.

In other European countries makes use of the importer or distributor to take over the sales development in the territory. This requires an exhibition hall and a living room with a collection whose products end up in multibrand stores and local shops that do not directly buy. In countries such as Hong Kong or Singapore, the company is managed in part by the various fashion retailers such as Joyce in Hong Kong or Singapore Glamourette. These retailers are strong in identifying potential new brands and buy them before anyone else in this country.

Because it is difficult to make money?

The ready-to-wear, it comes to the sale and sold. In fact, when the volume is not present, the cost of production outfit is extremely high.

If we take women's dress H950 sales price, the wholesale price will be about H395 (or 2.4) ratio marked. The cost of production and digital advertising costs can be multiplied by two or three, if the item has to be done in small quantities. In such cases, it becomes too expensive to use a laser cutter and how the various parts are in the tissue may not be the cheapest of larger quantities. The process of creating sperm can then become fully automatic, with no guarantee that the quality is much better at the end. The economic outlook also depends on whether the products are sold at full price, or if some should be sold at bargain prices, with discounts of 30 to 70 percent. When production runs are small and most of the products sold exclusively at bargain prices, profitability is certainly no longer on the horizon, taking into account that a good season only 50 percent of the collection of relatively unknown brand usually sold at full price. This is where licensing deals are on the scene, as they provide the money needed in the first days of heavy investment in ready to wear and to ensure it is a success.

The most common organizational structure

Many luxury brands of fashion, there is the position of director of marketing. The reason for this is that the role of marketing manager is to find out from consumers what brand should be, which may be in direct conflict with the designer, whose task is to establish what the consumer should have. However, a person whose experience is very necessary to have is rare to be able to provide separate guidelines that force the designer to look at what is happening in the stores. This position is commonly known in British Patent and how to look fashion merchandiser.

Another role in the luxury fashion is communication and / or public relations. This person usually refers to the Director General and acts as a channel between GM and designer. rarely have the luxury factory structure (usually a fee on purchase or managers responsible product supply chain). So the most important works in the field of business stores: store manager, of course, but also managers, managers of zone countries, retail, retail management regional and global head of retail marketing. As already mentioned, the number of employees is limited and is in direct contact with both the designer and the end user.

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WHERE DOES THE WEB GO NEXT?

This post is an excerpt, that is influenced from this post: apple iPhone buyers guide

The future of the internet is at a crossroads, with the direction set by regulators who are finally giving due weight to the importance of privacy. The most obvious sign? That US politicians alike are ready to slap down Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, summoning CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg to answer questions over the missteps made by the world’s dominant social network.

“It’s a really big moment, a cultural awakening about what’s happening with our data,” said Laura Tribe, executive director at OpenMedia. “My biggest hope is… that we can have a conversation as a society about how we want this to go. It’s about trying to build something that’s better.” We can’t say if Facebook will exist in its current form in five years perhaps it will be cast aside like Myspace before it. But we do have a sense of what regulations are likely to be faced by internet giants, along with the lobbyists and influencer's who will be trying to influencer's governments.

Those lobbyists will include Facebook, which is always keen to help fund election campaigns, but don’t ignore the noisy constituents tired of their rights being trampled. “No-one really knows what’s going to happen next, but it’s up to us to shape what it’s going to look like  because it’s clear that something needs to change,” said Tribe.

Here’s how regulators could alter how businesses behave online and what that means for the future of tech.

SCENARIO 1 STOP SELLING DATA

Facebook has an extra piece of data on us our credit cards. After hearing ad nauseam that the problem isn’t Cambridge Analytica but Facebook’s business model, regulators ban the trade in data. To protect their bottom lines, Facebook, Twitter and Google all start charging. The result? Plenty of us opt out, making social media a niche hobby.

Tribe isn’t convinced this scenario is very likely, noting that Zuckerberg has said there will always be a free version of Facebook but if it did, expect user numbers to fall off. “Right now, Facebook’s fundamental model is based on people sharing their data,” she said. “If Twitter started charging $2 per month for an account, what would that do? Would that change the amount of trolls and bots that are on there? Would that change the amount of people just on there watching? Is it really worth my money to invest in trolling?” Besides, we shouldn’t have to pay for privacy, she adds. Matt Stoller, fellow at the Open Markets Institute, argues it’s not us that will pay, but Facebook. “One of the really important changes that’s going to happen is you’re going to see a redirection of ad revenue from Facebook and Google back into the rest of the ad finance space,” he said. “These guys are monopolists, and they have been capturing revenue that is not rightfully theirs… that’s why Facebook has $40 million of revenue and 50% margins, because stealing is a great business model.” And antitrust regulators pushing revenue back to traditional ad companies is potentially very good news for struggling newspapers and the like.

SCENARIO 2 COPY GDPR

Facebook wants to roll out a new facial recognition feature but before hoovering up user data to do so, it asks permission. Users ignore the pop-up and, instead of capturing every detail of our faces and accidentally leaking the data to governments, Facebook isn’t allowed to turn our lives into a surveillance hell hole. A future that isn’t dystopian now that’s novel.

Just as American regulators are struggling with what to do about privacy online, their European counterparts are readying for their own protective measures to come into play the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is nothing if not timely. One easy way for American politicians to catch up to the Facebook scandal would be to copy over the GDPR rules. This wouldn’t be very onerous for the companies in question, as Facebook and Google need to meet the laws for us Europeans anyway, but it would have the benefit of kickstarting privacy protections across the pond.

“I think it would be a great start, as we’ve seen legislation in the US about ISPs being able to sell your data here, we’re going in the wrong direction,” Tribe said. “Having something like GDPR or any strong privacy rules implemented with enforcement would be a great start.” However, it would only be the start: Facebook is still allowed to operate in Europe, after all, so it’s still making money out of our data. Stoller says it’s worth waiting to see how successful GDPR is in Europe before dragging it into the US. “It’s hard to get right the first time,” he said. “But I’m glad they’re doing it, and if I had to pick, implement it [in the US] or not, I’d probably say implement it.” That would mean the US would have to admit that Europe and its bureaucracy did something right, so don’t hold your breath.

SCENARIO 3 BREAK UP THE MONOPOLY

Facebook is still around, but it’s only a social network. The advertising business, Instagram and WhatsApp have all been spun out into independent companies. Google’s reorganisation into Alphabet turns out to be prescient: Google is broken up into Search, Gmail and Ads, while its “moonshots” are dumped into a loss-making company, ending its expensive “balloon internet” and other creative projects.

Senator Lindsey Graham suggested to Zuckerberg at the hearing that Facebook is a monopoly: “If I’m upset with Facebook, what’s the equivalent product that I can go sign up for?” They go to rivals such as Twitter and Snapchat, but frequently also to Instagram and WhatsApp which are owned by Facebook. Is it time to break up Zuckerberg’s behemoth? “First of all, you can just separate out Instagram and WhatsApp and the Facebook network, that’s the easy part,” said Stoller. “It wouldn’t take care of all the problems, but it would immediately reduce Facebook’s leverage over ad buyers, because now you’d have three places to buy ads instead of just one.”

Stoller also suggests banning any more acquisitions, saying there’s only so much consolidation they should be allowed. “You could do it by size threshold, so if you’re over a hundred million dollars in market cap, you can’t buy anyone,” he said. “But you could also just take a much more ethical view towards those mergers and acquisitions and then companies like Facebook which has signii cant track records of violating consent… you could just say: ‘you broke your agreement, so no more acquisitions for you’.”

SCENARIO 4 TECH INTERVENTIONS

Facebook no longer holds our data: it’s stored on a blockchain that it has no direct access to (just roll with it, okay?). Messages are all encrypted by default and all social media is interoperable, making it possible to interact with friends and family without having to join every platform. The blockchain is the tech buzzword du jour, so it’s no wonder plenty are spitting it in social media’s direction. Could it help? “This isn’t about one tech and one platform, it’s about the structures we’ve put in place and our philosophy,” said Tribe. “Will technology like blockchain save us? No, the tools we’re using are based on surveillance culture, so unless it’s an actual pushback to surveillance culture… unless we actually shift the culture itself I think it’s going to be really hard to have any tech panacea.” That said, she points to the success of messaging encryption, which is enabled by default on platforms such as Facebookowned WhatsApp but not its own Messenger. Make it easy, make it the default, and people will use it, Tribe believes.

Stoller suggests interoperability is the answer, “forcing Facebook to open its network so that you could communicate with your friends and family who are on Facebook… even if you weren’t on Facebook.” The idea is similar to how Trillian opened up the desktop messenger market, he noted. “If they did that then all of a sudden you’d have a lot of competition in that market, kind of opening up the social grid.”

SCENARIO 5 NATIONALISE THE TECH GIANTS

Facebook and Google are declared necessary assets to the US government and nationalised. Travellers crossing the border into the US are no longer required to hand over their social media logins, as the government already has them. We’re all on Facebook, whether we want to be or not, with digital citizen cards linked to our profiles, and we’re all suddenly friends with Trump.

“To me it just puts shivers up my spine that we would take all of this information... and hand it over to the government,” said Tribe. “The idea they could take it over and buy it is really scary.” She added: “We want a space that is not the government. As much as we’re scared of Facebook and what it’s doing with our information, Facebook can’t put me in jail or deny me at a border crossing. Information is power, and Facebook has a lot of power, but not as much as the government.”

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Perfecting Your Pitch

This post is an excerpt, that is influenced from this post: https://thoughtleadershipzen.blogspot.com/2017/01/penetration-pricing-strategy.html

When it comes to fundraising, the devil truly is in the details in this case, the investor meeting and your pitch.

Your early sales are not just going to involve selling your product. When you’re trying to convince investors to give you money, you’ve got to know how to sell your big vision in a way that’s clear, concise, and consistent.

A panel of three Y Combinator partners shared advice based on their own startup experiences about how to pitch your company and have a successful investor meeting.

Know Your Pitch

Michael Seibel is a Y Combinator partner who previously co-founded and served as CEO of Justin.tv and Socialcam.

In his time at these startups, he learned a lot about pitching, and the most important thing to remember is to always keep it short. He said that you really only need a 30-second pitch and a 2-minute pitch.

The 30-Second Pitch

This how you talk about your company to people who are interested, even if not financially. You’re not asking anything of them, but instead you’re just explaining what it is your company does in three simple sentences.

1. What does your company do?

Seibel said, “You have to be able to [say this] in a way that is simple and straightforward … You have to assume [the other person] knows nothing. Literally nothing about anything.”

A good way to do this if you’re a tech company is to pretend like you’re talking to your mom or grandpa. If they can’t understand in one sentence what your company does, you need to simplify more.

Seibel gave the example of Airbnb, saying that their sentence couldn’t be “We’re Airbnb and we’re a marketplace for space.” That means nothing. But, this does: “We’re Airbnb and we allow you to rent out the extra room in your house.”

2. How big is your market?

Find out what general industry you’re in and how much it’s worth. It’s no mystery that people understand opportunity in terms of money, especially investors.

3. How much traction do you have?

This is where you talk about your growth rate and give some stats. Seibel said an example of this might be, “We launched in January and we’re growing 30 percent month over month. We have this number of sales. This amount of revenue. This number of users.”

Even if you’re just getting started, it’s important to emphasize how fast you’re going. Whether you’ve been working for a few months or a year, this sentence needs to convince potential investors of your momentum.

The 2-Minute Pitch

You’ve probably heard of the 10-minute pitch, but Seibel said that’s a waste of time and that you can get it all done in two minutes, even when talking to investors.

“One thing I like to tell founders is the more you talk, the more you have an opportunity to say something that people don’t like. Talk less and it will probably be better.” So for your 2-minute pitch, start with the 30-second pitch, and then expand into these additional points, allowing a sentence for each.

1. What is your unique insight?

What are you bringing to the table that your competition isn’t? What is your “secret sauce”?

Whatever you call it, this is the part where you want to tell the investor something you know that they don’t know about your industry and your business. Their ideal expression should be kind of an ah-ha face.

This one can be two sentences, if necessary.

2. How do you make money?

Seibel said that founders can be weird about this point, especially if the answer is advertising. But it’s best not to beat around the bush or sugarcoat because then it just seems like you have no idea how you’re going to make money.

He said not to run away from this sentence. Speak simply and directly about how you plan to make money and then move on.

3. Who’s on your team?

To investors, your co-founders’ best achievements are going to be the ones that made other investors money, seeing as they want to make money too. Even if you don’t have any of that on your founding team’s résumé, do not resort to listing PhDs.

The investor wants to know how many founders you have — Seibel said preferably between two and four. They also want to know how many are technical and how many are business-oriented.

Finally, be sure to mention how long you’ve known each other and how you met.

4. The Big Ask

Up until now, you’ve gone easy on the jargon, keeping things super simple and clear. But this is the part where that jargon comes in handy because it’s important to talk about money in a way that’s clear you understand it.

Seibel said that some of the things you should know are if you’re raising on a safe or a convertible note, how much money you’re raising, and what is the minimum check size.

And if you don’t understand these terms, make Google your new best friend.

When to Fundraise

Timing is key when talking to investors. Seibel said that you want to do it at a time when you’re strong.

How do you know for sure that you’re strong? He said, “If investors are asking to give you money, you’re strong.” If they aren’t, you should be working more to get the word out about your brand.

Another way to show your strength is to build in a way that you don’t need their money to grow. The more self-sustaining your model is, the more you can show self-reliance and initiative, making investors even more certain that you’ll handle their money efficiently.

Seibel said to give them the impression that this thing is moving with or without them. He also said that, if you do need money really early on, plan on needing less money and show traction and speed where you lack in age (of your company).

The Investor Meeting

So you’ve gotten an investor interested and they want to know more. From setting up the meeting to saying all the right things, the more flawless each step is the more likely they’ll want to invest.

Get Introduced

As with talking to the press, it’s always best if you get introduced to potential investors through shared contacts. This helps your inquiry get to the top of the stack as it’s already endorsed by someone they trust.

Keep in mind, though, that the credibility of the middle man (or woman) is super important. For example, if that person is an investor who’s already passed on your company, Seibel said it’s best not to use them as a connection.

Make a Date

When it comes to scheduling the meetings, it’s no time to drag things along. “It’s a sprint. Not a marathon,” Seibel said.

If possible, you want to schedule all of your investor meetings in the same week. If this sounds overwhelming, don’t worry; Seibel has a nifty strategy.

To get all of your meetings on the same week, he likes to use a script like this: “Hey, we would love to set up a meeting but we’re building like crazy for the next two weeks. So can we set it in that third week?”

This is far enough in the future that they have room in their schedule and you’re able to get everyone in on the same week with enough time to prepare before then. It also gives the impression that you’re not completely desperate for their money.

“It’s signaling all of the right things,” explained Seibel.

It’s also best to have one person handling all of the investor scheduling as it can be really time consuming.

Dos and Don’ts

Qasar Younis and Dalton Caldwell, both Y Combinator partners, finished off the lecture by sitting for a mock investor meeting and going over some final dos and don’ts of pitching your company and asking for money.

Do

Let the person know exactly what you do. (See 30-second pitch above.)

Teach the investor something, giving them some unique insight about your industry and your business.

Move the conversation forward with confidence and clarity, which comes from knowing your facts.

Ask for money. After all, that’s what you’re there for.

Don’t

Make the meeting feel like a one-sided interview or an interrogation. It should feel more like a collaboration/conversation.

Meet with bad investors. Do research on who you’re meeting with and find out if they’re a good fit for your company.

Let the conversation end when the meeting is over. Make sure you send follow-up correspondence.

Fund until you’re blue in the face. Fundraising is not the goal or a measure of success. It’s what you do with the money that’s important. So stop when you have what you need.

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Consistent targeted actions

An excerpt from the thought leadership zen blog

Contacting more investors will get you more meetings, but it won’t necessarily get you more money or better deals. DocSend and Tom Eisenmann (2015) did a study of 200 funded startups that raised $360 million in total. According to the results, if you do everything right, you’ll likely have to contact 20 to 30 investors to get funded. The good news is that you don’t need to contact hundreds. (Realistically, if you talked to 100 investors and none of them decides to fund you, there is definitely a serious problem in your business idea, your team, the whole industry, or even you!) In any case, it doesn’t make sense to continue arranging new meetings with potential investors until you solve the core problems with your startup. Then you can focus your efforts on the quality of your connection to the investors.

Sometimes it’s just plain luck to get a good offer for funding your startup just by being at the right place at the right time. I don’t refute that, but do you want to count on plain luck? The better you prepare yourself, the better your odds will be. The more targeted actions you take and the more effort you put into them, the more chance you’ll have to strike a good fundraising deal.

Focus on building a profitable and scalable business

This is the main reason you will get funded or not. You must do everything you can to build a profitable and scalable business. Define a business that is open-ended and continuously improving. If you are building your startup on a one-time sales concept (selling to the customer once), it probably won’t be a very scalable business. It would be much more attractive if your customers keep making repeat purchases and referring you to their friends. But don’t try to solve every customer problem at the same time. Build a strategy for continuous innovation, while offering follow-on, complementary solutions to grow your revenues.

Investors like business ideas that are based on solid market research from outside experts, especially if these experts forecast a billion dollar opportunity. This type of startup is much more likely to be scalable and investment worthy. You don’t necessarily have to hire expensive outside consultants if you are able to follow the guidelines we’ve discussed in the previous stages.

Collokia, is a machine learning-based, collaboration platform with commercial offices in the USA and development offices in Uruguay and Hungary. They initially raised $500,000 in seed money and one year later has secured an additional $1.3 million in seed funding, led by software giant Globant and Fundo Pitanga, a Brazilian venture capital firm. It wasn’t that difficult, mainly because of the contacts and reputation of the team. But Pablo Brenner, founder of Collokia, acknowledged that raising funds for global innovation from outside the USA is very difficult, as most local and regional VCs prefer investing in well-proven business models, and not in innovative technologies. So the spectrum of potential investors became very narrow even for such a well-established startup as Collokia. Therefore, you must be ready for the same challenges: prepare proofs of your business concept and focus on building a profitable and scalable business from the very beginning.

Leverage and automate your business to the maximum

Every startup should know that there are certain things they have to do that don’t scale. But once you have figured out your processes, try to leverage and automate your business as much as possible. This will help your business scale faster (maybe even without additional money) and save you time, which you can use for building relationships and meeting investors. Following are main areas where you should constantly look for automation and leverage possibilities:

Production and delivery automation. A startup that is labor intensive is not very scalable. Start looking at technology and outsourcing to automate your production and outsourcing before you begin to scale the business. If you still need additional employees to scale the production, building online training videos and clearly documenting processes is the least what you can do.

Marketing automation. Focus on automating your sales funnel/pipeline and use leverages to reach more potential customers. Direct marketing is highly useful at the initial stage when you need to get feedback from customers, but generally, it’s not scalable (except e-mail marketing automation, which we’ll discuss later during traditional Marketing shortcomings).

Revenue stream automation leads to consideration about licensing and franchising. All of your resources, including time and energy, are limited, thus you probably won’t be able to take on all the markets in the world (if you think you can, you might be overestimating your capabilities or your business model targets to a rather low volume market which won’t be very interesting for angel investors and VCs). Many markets already have major players. It’s up to you whether you want to compete with them or to make them you partners which, actually, can be much more effective for scaling than trying to out-compete them. Consider all possible partnerships forms including exclusive distribution, licensing, and franchising.

Startups who have found ways to grow the business by automating and leveraging production, marketing, and revenue streams will be far more attractive to any investor.

Become visible and regularly update your online presence

Try to become more visible on larger and smaller online platforms for startups like Angel List, F6S, Startup Valley, InnMind etc. Create your profile, submit projects, product photos, and upload videos. Some of them are large and well know while others are for niche prop projects and target a specific sector or geographical market. It doesn’t require much time to create your profile and to post few updates when they are available. These platforms just on their own won’t necessarily bring you investors, but once you get in contact with your targeted investors, don’t miss an opportunity to show that you are a serious startup and your professional profile is available almost everywhere. There are two totally different scenarios after you send your one-pager or pitch deck to potential investors. In one case, they might get slightly interested and decide to look and see what other information is available about you online or they might feel that your startup is being listed on too many platforms or not enough platforms.

If you want to create a good profile, look at the startups being featured on AngelList. Don’t copy them, but get an idea on how to improve yours. Also, a good idea is to check startups in your sector who succeeded in fundraising and were featured in media. If you know something about Google remarketing, you might consider keeping your full pitch deck and additional information for investors on your own website. You can put a link to this website in your profile on all platforms. You can create a remarketing (sometimes called retargeting) campaign addressing just visitors to your website. In this way, you would have a chance to remind potential investors about your startup when they visit your website, map this through your web analytics. Set up it once and it won’t need any extra maintenance work.

Find out where your target investors are active, what they read, what they watch, and what they post. And especially, find out what events they attend and make sure you are there! Don’t go overboard on sales, but be polite and subtle. Highlight your startup and your progress, reveal the opportunity for investors, and put out your call to action. The goal here is not to strike a fundraising deal right then and there, but to increase the awareness of your startups and start building a relationship with potential partners.

Create a list of 30 to 50 targeted investors

A good idea is to start by making a list at least 30 investors you would be happy to work with as well as a list of at least 30 investors to whom your pitch should be highly interesting. Find the match between those two lists and come up with a list of between 30 and 50 investors you’ll try to reach. List them in the priority according to your own preference. Just keep in mind that time is limited, thus you should focus your efforts and don’t spread yourself too thin. As we have already discussed, if none of them will agree to invest, something may be wrong with what you’re pitching or how you are developing your startup. Take their feedback seriously and make needed changes (at least in the pitch) before contacting other investors.

Set the right mindset for fundraising

The main mindset for successful fundraising is to be willing to put yourself out there to meet anyone in the first place. Even though you don’t need to talk to hundreds of investors, it’s still a numbers game. Usually, it is advisable to have at least several meetings with different investors before making a final decision on the partnership.

Decide which of the founders will be responsible for fundraising and meeting investors, while others make sure the business performs well during the fundraising process. Being a good storyteller helps people to remember you and initiate discussions. So it might be wise to see who among your founders is the best story teller. Start building personal relationships with potential investors, partners, and people who might connect you to them today, even if you are not fundraising yet.

Perseverance and patience are two of the best personal traits needed for fundraising. Rejections will happen and the hurt might feel personal. Just anticipate rejection in advance and don’t be upset when it happens. Just keep going!

The best time to raise money is when you don’t need it because you are able to walk away if the deal is not good enough for you. Having your startup development and fundraising milestones defined will help you know when to walk away. If you face a situation when an investor asks for more than 25% of your equity, you should be very careful. If you give up too much of your equity and control over the decision making too early, future investors might have strong doubts about your capabilities to successfully develop the business. Don’t get involved with the wrong people either, even if their financial proposal looks great. Sometimes it’s better to refuse an offer rather than to take the money and obligate yourself to work with people whom you don’t like or whose values are too different from yours.

Reach out your target investors daily

Once you have created a list of 30 to 50 target investors and ranked them according to your preference, you should start to focus on the top 5 angel investors or VCs you’d love to work with. Don’t be in too big a hurry to contact them with cold email or regular online form submissions. These approaches have some chance of success, but not much.

The best way to approach an investor is to identify a specific partner, principal, or employee in the investor’s company. Find them in your network and get to know them: check their Linkedin profile, read their blog and tweets, and see if they were featured in media. A good idea would be to get an introduction from another founder who has been funded by them or another third party who has had recent and frequent contact with the target investor. It’s not always as difficult as it may seem. For instance, you could make the first connection by recording a personal video where you address them individually (say their name and explain why you are seeking their attention rather than another investor). Furthermore, in the same video, you could reveal how you took your previous funding round and hit all the milestones agreed with your earlier investors. Then you can explain how the amount of the current round will help you reach the next stage of your startup, when you plan to raise additional funds, and what they could expect in terms of the valuation of your company, thus, the benefit of becoming an investor for the current stage.

Once you start receiving calls for meetings, try to schedule meetings with a few investors on the same day. Such meeting organization will help to create artificial urgency and make you look more important (as opposed to just another startup) in the eyes of investors. Don’t be arrogant with them (actually don‘t be arrogant with anyone). During your meetings with investors, try to have a discussion with them instead of pitching them. This is not a pitching competition. You are looking for partners and if you are sitting at the same table, it means you have at least some interests in common.