An important business skill is being able to distinguish between trends that are mostly hype and those that genuinely represent a change in how companies operate. Knowing your industry, talking to other leaders, and simply understanding human nature are all useful in making this distinction.
It’s also important to understand the trends themselves since this will give you insight into whether they actually solve a problem or if they are mostly just attractive distractions. Some trends need to be carefully considered because they have both pros and cons and may be right for some organizations but not others.
Visual Analytics
Visual analytics is one of the hottest new trends from data science, but it’s got solid business applications. If you’ve ever looked at a pie chart or even color-coded columns on an Excel spreadsheet, you’ve engaged with visual analytics. However, as a concept, visual analytics is not just about looking for new ways to represent data in visual form. Instead, it encompasses the entire process of more fully understanding the data. It also comes in more forms than ever before, including animation or 3D modeling.
The idea behind visual analytics is to find the best way possible to share information. You can get a better grasp on what it might mean to your company by reviewing a guide on the topic that includes information about options for an analytics platform that can assist you in using data more effectively for decision making.
Remote Working
Everyone is talking about remote work these days, and there are a lot of reasons to embrace it at your company. It allows you to recruit talent without geographical restrictions, and it lets you save money on office overhead. However, everything isn’t rosy with remote work. Not every employee is in love with the idea of permanently working from home. Furthermore, it’s an arrangement that can be damaging to teamwork and other types of collaboration.
Think carefully about whether remote work is best for your organization, and if you do decide to implement it, do so with some thought about how to preserve cohesion within your company and build a sense of loyalty among your staff.
Social Media Marketing
As is often the case with trends, the concept of social media marketing arrived on a wave of optimism that is gradually being tempered with more caution about how effective it really is when you dig down to cold hard numbers. It was tempting to believe in the benefits of social media for your business and the power of social media to sell services and products because it is, or can be, mostly free.
The truth is that for some organizations it has been hugely effective. Furthermore, even if you can’t trace direct sales to your social media profile, it can do a lot to build customer loyalty. Yet there are drawbacks as well. A serious stumble on social media can be very damaging to a company. The best way to approach social media as a marketing tool is with caution, a good knowledge base about the platform and reasonable expectations.