Now more than ever, companies need to focus on innovative workflow solutions for learning. This is a great way to reduce wasted time employees spend looking for information. Interventions at the point of need on the job can dramatically improve the performance of your business.

Staff need to understand the process, the problem and to have access to micro-learning content to improve competency on the job.

The forgetting curve demonstrates that after formal e-learning or staff training a decline of memory retention in time occurs. If employees don’t apply the knowledge – they forget it.

The 70:20:10 model for learning means that 70% of the learning is on the job, 20% is coaching and 10% is the formal learning.  Businesses need to build and implement fast learning solutions for adaptive learning and performance support.

Innovative systems such as Sound Branch can decrease learning time by 50%.

Sound Branch is a next-generation social learning tool based on the power of the voice. It helps businesses to retain and transfer knowledge which can be lost due to staff churn and the fast pace of change in a new age of business.

Businesses need to train, transfer and sustain knowledge through circulation systems such as Sound Branch or other tools which can be used by learners at critical points in the workflow as points of reference.

The most important issue is the application of knowledge.  Employees want on demand information guides with minimal support.  Sound Branch can orchestrate this. Learners want to know the steps, the detail and then practice what they have learnt. Social learning tools allow staff and managers to understand what’s been the most downloaded and what’s been most liked. This can help create accurate business intelligence reports to further help companies adapt and change their businesses to increase workflow. 

All voice notes captured within Sound Branch are converted into searchable text. The main advantage of this is that keywords searches can be conducted on particular issues to help workers revise in their times of need.

If you’re going to build a sales team, you’ll need some sales specialists. And most salespeople fall into different brackets. Largely, the four types of salespeople you’ve got are: inside salespeople versus outside salespeople and business development versus account management.

The reality is that it doesn’t matter what type of salesperson you are,  you have a number of phone calls to make during the working day. Sometimes these calls can be scheduled conference calls or sometimes calls out of the blue.

Out of the blue calls often lead to voicemail because the person in question – the decision maker – is either at lunch or in another meeting. Our top sales professionals know you should leave quality voicemails for the customer or indeed the prospect.

Those voice notes often sound like a sales pitch and quite often it is a salesperson following up with a prospect to see where they might be within the sales cycle.

But what if the voicemail was different? Instead of one person pitching to an individual, how about many people having that ability? Instead of it just being the salesperson how about other types of experts to strengthen the quality of the voicemail. All the people that could be on the voicemail might be product experts or technical experts in pre-sales. Other people that could be included might be technical support, product trainers or even perhaps the finance department. Having many people on the voicemail is very much different to the traditional voicemail that you and I are used to. So why should we change?

Sales is about driving up the average order value, generating more meetings, or indeed increasing the conversion rate. Increasing the quality of the voicemail and turning it into education podcasts should help drive all three of these key performance indicators.

And a final thought. What if voicemails were responded to by the buyer themselves? What if these massive online conversations between buyers and sellers were shared with the key decision-makers? How would this affect the sale cycle and the speed to close the deal?

You can learn more about Sound Branch a new innovative voice social media application by visiting the website below. Sound Branch is the world’s first nano podcasting platform. Use the platform to record audio in just ten seconds.

www.soundbranch.com

Engagement of employees is a very individual thing, and various different factors can come into play which influence it. Age, gender, race, technological uptake, intelligence and motivation can all play a key part.

It is no wonder then, that there is a worldwide issue within the workplace of disengagement.

So how can companies address this? One concept is that of a ‘social mindset’. This is a strategic move by companies to improve and build upon employee engagement over a sustained period of time.

A ‘social mindset’ is a relatively new term. It relates to a higher social skillset than we might have possessed above that of a few years ago, and embraces the social change that has hit our society. It allows companies to reflect on their business from a real person perspective, looking at individuals and their input, as opposed to the overall results. It enables companies to develop individuals to become more than ‘just a number’ and to therefore drive their business results accordingly.

Really, it’s about respect and making the most of skills. It’s a mindset which embraces the views of all members of staff. It leans towards an inclusive culture, and allows the companies and the individuals to grow and engage. It allows individuals to grow and develop at their own pace and within their own comfort zones. It looks to engage them completely in their day to day activities by taking action, as opposed to imposing rules and regulations to drive engagement, which may seem to actually have the opposite effect.

It should be said at this point, that in no way is this a quick process. It’s a cultural change within a company, but the results speak for themselves, and can result in a longevity of staff, and a universal understanding of company goals and strategy, which in turn drives team spirit and camaraderie.

Here are just some ways that a social mindset can improve employee engagement:

Clarification and collaboration

It’s sometimes challenging for colleagues and employers to understand where each other’s strengths and weaknesses lie. A social mindset allows this to be an organic process. Through a social mindset, employees develop their roles and their purpose within the company through collaboration. For example, the company takes on a project – within a social mindset there would be no pre-determined roles, although there would be a certain number of tasks that needed to be completed. Collaborators within the company would have the freedom to volunteer for tasks which specifically matched their interest / skillset, without being constrained to their specific job title or job description. By working in this way, companies can develop and nurture passions within staff, and allow them to enjoy their roles in a much more holistic way. Employers are also given the opportunity to see where true leaders lie, and by giving staff autonomy, can develop the leaders of the future.

Streamline communication

With today’s technology, a social mindset can thrive. Apps such as the newly launched http://soundbran.ch, a voice messaging app, offer the perfect platform for a social mindset’s implementation within a company in a clear and simple way which are not dissimilar to social platforms with which they may already be engaged.

The engagement with Apps such as Soundbranch is in itself an organic process, and allows employers to see how the workforce engage with each other. It also allows remote workers to be part of a team in a much more inclusive way than has historically been possible.

The Social Mindset allows not only communication within teams both publicly and privately, but also allows for real-time feedback on projects, and removes the risk of missed calls / emails / meetings having an impact on company success. In doing so, it builds trust, and ensures ongoing staff engagement.

Teach each other

A social mindset allows colleagues and collaborators to learn from each other, and therefore grow, sharing experience and learning in a social way. Gone are the days of day long training sessions to share expertise and promote best practice – this is far better done through example and illustration, things which a social mindset allow to thrive. A social mindset encourages sharing of the processes of specific tasks as opposed to their results, which allows all staff to learn and develop at their own pace by absorbing skills and asking questions. It also encourages feedback and allows the introduction of fresh thinking, removing the challenges associated with repetitive tasks, and ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’, which can stunt the growth of both companies and individuals.

One way in which the teaching can take place is to assign specific groups, which are led by a perceived ‘expert’ – the expert shares learning and experiences of a specific topic / skill, and allows those interested to engage in a social setting with a less formal atmosphere than might otherwise have been created by training. Leading by example boosts the confidence of the assigned experts, and creates further collaboration by reinforcing their strengths, and allowing others to take accountability for their weaknesses whilst addressing them accordingly.

Develop the individual

Whilst work takes up a significant amount of an individual’s time, it’s in an employer’s interest to harness their skills and passions outside of work as well. If staff are enabled to combine their work with their hobby, then their work becomes all the more enjoyable. They are confident of the company’s engagement in their life outside work, and the social mindset allows them to engage their colleagues in their outside pursuits. A voice notes app for example, can allow teams to form and initiatives to develop quickly and easily.

Many companies already implement this by organising team sporting challenges which may be sponsored by the company / other sources. Not only does this give staff a sense of team and personal pride, it also reinforces the Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR) of the company, and gives them good news stories to spread to the outside world. These stories not only boost staff morale, but also reinforce the standing of the company as an excellent place to both work, and do business with.

Sound Branch is described as a free app that combines the best of voice as a powerful messaging tool.

A Transformative Communication Tool

School administration can be very fast paced and detail oriented with many decisions, big and small, made throughout the course of a day. With one principal and two assistant principals, the amount of information that we have to consume can be quite overwhelming. We’ve found Sound Branch invaluable in helping us to stay connected and communicate more effectively during the school day. As soon as there’s a decision that another administrator needs to know about, we no longer need to schedule a meeting, craft an email, or even send a text. Sound Branch provides an opportunity to leave a detailed message that can be retrieved by the rest of the team when time permits.

It also allows us to engage in a more reflective practice with time to consider a response instead of providing immediate feedback. Whereas in the past, we had to carve out time for all three administrators to be in the same place at the same time, we’ve found that sharing, discussing, and even debating ideas via Sound Branch has cut our meeting time down from 6 hours to 2 hours a week, allowing us more time to collaborate with teachers and communicate with students.

A Relationship-Building Tool

As administrators in a school with over 1000 students and 100 staff members, we recognized that, in order to continue meeting the day-to-day needs of our students and staff, we had to establish and enhance relationships with key stakeholders throughout the school and our cluster. This year the administrative team has met with fellow school administrators (any time that we can get them alone for a minute) to introduce them to Sound Branch. Too often we see our administrative colleagues for short amounts of time (at school meetings, staff development, and/or in passing) and rarely get to check in on how they are doing. Sound Branch has allowed us to reach out for a quick hello, to ask questions, share information and news, and update colleagues on changes of plan — and (on rare occasions) share our frustration. What has been most satisfying is that, no matter where we are physically, we are only a vox away from being connected.

Less Meetings and Shorter Meetings

Have you ever attended a meeting where everyone who was supposed to be there wasn’t? If so, then you know that inevitably the information will have to be repeated. It’s a very real challenge getting administrators from the various schools and offices to meet in one place. Sound Branch has allowed us to be strategic not only in when we schedule meetings, but in who needs to be “present” for what. We have established a series of chats with colleagues that allow us to disseminate important information as soon as it’s ready to be shared. We don’t need to rely as heavily on face-to-face meetings for sharing and reviewing information. Whether we’re branching with our Deputy Head to discuss the new math program or with our Assistant Head for Curriculum and Instruction about professional development ideas, communication and collaboration have been greatly enhanced.

Previously, if we needed to share information or seek an answer, our recourse was limited to an email (one of dozens and dozens that we all receive daily) or phone call (that would almost always go to voicemail). Now we send a voice note, and our director has an archived message that is readily available at the push of a button. We found that the majority of seeds we send have a turnaround response time of less than 20 minutes. Our teachers very much appreciate the prompt reply to their curriculum-related questions, and we appreciate not always being caught up in lengthy phone conversations with our colleagues.

Next Steps

In moving forward as a school community, a next step for us is to expand on our use of Sound Branch with the staff. We are excited to see that a few of our teachers have jumped on board. Now the goal is to support them in collaborating as teams to further strengthen their professional relationships and their relationships with their class families, and to maximise their professional growth together.

The Traditional Approach

A traditional interview process involves an applicant applying directly to a job via a job board or an agency.

These candidates are then filtered first by review of the CV and then by telephone interview before face to face interviews are arranged.

What if you combined the CV and the telephone interview?

How much quicker would it be to filter candidates and what efficiencies could be achieved?

This is where voice messaging app such as Sound Branch comes in. Candidates create a Sound Branch profile by downloading the voice notes app for iOS or Android.

Users can then register for their profile with 1 click sign in via Google, Facebook or Twitter and start recording an audio profile.

Audio profiles include a person’s education, skills, work experience and other interests. Instead of a soulless CV with no personality, the audio profile humanises the CV and brings it to life.

For The Candidate

The candidate has an opportunity to pitch to recruiters and companies who they would not ordinarily be about to reach. For the HR and talent management team, this is a more compelling way of filtering out candidates on fit, attitude and relevancy of experience.

For The Recruiter

One of the biggest challenges for a traditional recruiter is that the best time to call candidates is not during the working day which can lead to anti-sociable working hours.

Using Sound Branch for recruitment and job hunting is a new and different way of re-imagining the recruitment process.

You can tell a lot about someone from their LinkedIn profile picture but you can learn a lot more by listening to their voice. Voice messaging for recruiters means less anti-social timings for telephone interviews and an overall better experience for the candidate.

Private groups have now been launched in Sound Branch which alleviate concerns around privacy settings (after all, most people don’t do public speaking!) and benefit all users. Due to popular demand, we are also creating functionality for one-to-one messaging, as a number of private groups were being created solely for this purpose.

In the New Year, branches will also be able to search the audio clips, not just through the title tags, but through the audio messages themselves. Sound Branch has teamed up with Google Voice API to translate speech sound bites into text, which will then be searchable for all users.

Thanks to Amazon Echo, one of the coolest new features you can use in Sound Branch is Alexa, which is similar to Siri on an iPhone. Alexa allows users to complete a series of voice-activated commands, and can do anything from play 1 of 40 million songs from Amazon music, to telling you what the traffic to work is going to be like. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Amazon Echo – it is a voice-activated tube which can be placed anywhere in your home. The Alexa app connects to the Amazon Echo via your smartphone, and can be customised to learn new ‘skills’, which are similar to apps on a smartphone. Skills such as Sky News, Spotify, and more can be added, and we are currently developing Sound Branch Skills for Amazon Alexa, which will allow you to control and access Branch via your Amazon Echo device. We have similar plans in the works for the Google Home competing device.

We’ll also be making further usability improvements to Sound Branch by including the ‘listened to’ feature, which will allow you to see what sound bites you have listened to, and the ones you haven’t got around to listening to yet. We are revamping the way in which seeds and branches work, so the usability is improved.

Finally, we are creating a business console so that organisations can provision professional Sound Branch applications to employees. This will allow businesses to take advantage of all the same brand functionality, but within their own domain and with all the necessary security and privacy levels managed. Therefore if a member of staff were to leave the organisation, the administrators could revoke access to Sound Branch.

All in all the next version of Sound Branch will be secure and easy-to-use. We have listened to our users on Sound Branch and are taking on their feedback!

All digital marketing departments have a suite of products to help them do their job. Whether it’s Tweepi to mass follow and unfollow people on Twitter; Google analytics to measure the return on investment of particular marketing channels and goals performance; HootSuite for managing social media; Hubspot for inbound marketing or Buffer for scheduling tweets on Twitter.

Not to mention the collection of social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all of which have organic free tools and paid for advertised options.

Being a digital marketing manager, for alignment I’m working closely with the salesforce who are closest to our customers. I’m engaged with the product team to ensure I know what’s coming next in the programme and working closely with the salesforce who are closest to our customers. I’m engaged with the product team to ensure I know what’s coming next in the product roadmap. What tools am I missing?

A poor workman always blames his tools. However, we also know that an electric screwdriver is a lot quicker than its traditional manual predecessor. Yes, you can beat somebody at tennis with a wooden tennis racket but it’s much more comfortable to use carbon fibre. You might see where am I going with this.

What I think you’re missing is the hybrid of the customer phone call interactions cross between the massive market appeal and digital disruption which is social media.

Sound Branch does just that. It combines the trustworthiness of the voice and it’s a motion with the power of social media to create a different engagement tool for customers and brands.

I could recommend a restaurant to you on Twitter or Facebook using text. Or I could use my voice notes on Sound Branch.

Word of mouth marketing is the marketeers dream. Why? Because it is the cheapest form of mass marketing. Sound Branch as a digital marketing tool allows you to catalyse word of mouth marketing for your brand and what is more powerful than this?

Alternatively can download the app on the Apple App Store with the Android App coming soon.

We have all been talking only to be interrupted and lost our train of thought. Everyone does it from time to time  because we feel we have understood the point a person is making and respond before they have a chance to finish their sentence.

Ever been in a meeting and it is dominated by one person? The point of any meeting is to have the right people in the room and the collective contributions can solve any issue that, what can I contribute are presented. The domineering person doesn’t learn a lot when they talk for half an hour and does not listen. There must be a better way.

So what if we killed off the unnecessary interruptions and everyone had only 10 seconds to get to the point. This is what Sound Branch does. The advantages are profound. Gone is the dominating single voice who thinks they know it all. The single voice transforms into the wisdom of the crowd.

Imagine a conference call everyone can have their say in 7 second sound bites. People respond using audio clips and nobody needs to make meeting minutes as this is all stored online.

We all forget what we said 1 month ago or 2 months ago. This is natural for the human brain and we have short term and long term memory. Sound Branch means that your voice notes live on forever! Years from now you will be able to look back at a point in time and reflect. Sound Branch gives you authenticity of real voices of real people in real time.

Sound Branch is a new social media platform that uses audio as the primary way to make connections. The app allows users to record, post and listen to 10 second audio clips that branch out into conversations and beyond.

The platform encourages engagement and lively quick-fire conversation where ideas can be shared, stories can be told and everyone’s opinion can be heard.

With a simple, intuitive interface that enables users to build and find conversations on a limitless range of topics, Sound Branch, and it’s 10 second audio format, is a new and exciting way to share your voice notes with the world.
Sound Branch – the voice of the world in 10 seconds

Sound Branch – Say it in 10 seconds.

Below we present infographic which show what Soundbranch is and how its works.