As every person who burns candles at both ends knows, these tactics eventually become debilitating habits leading to exhaustion, stress-induced illness, and mental fatigue. These habits can increase your risk exposure (overlooked details, poor communication, sloppy procedure) if not kept in check. While the economy has affected almost every business in terms of sales, workforce strength, and operations, there are some simple ways organizations can mitigate common “do more with less” pressures.

Agree on what’s important
Don’t let competing priorities, turf wars, or personal agendas impede efficiency or progress.  Rally groups around an iterative framework focused on organizational (not departmental) goals. Scrum is a form of agile development often used in software development, but its principles can be applied to any type of project/program management. Scrum emphasizes communication, collaboration, and the flexibility to adapt to emerging business realities. Any company can easily adapt Scrum to suit their own industry or channel, creating a transparent benchmark and reporting system.

Accessible, easy-to-use collaboration software like Basecamp can support a shared framework like Scrum. Basecamp allows you to set up individual projects, assign specific users, share files, establish tasks and tie them to milestones. Best of all, no one gets accidentally omitted from a message (like with conventional email) thanks to the user group assignments. Basecamp acts like a central repository, providing the continuous “input” support needed for users to act quickly and responsibly.

Make information available to others
Benefits of Scrum include increased transparency, personal accountability, and higher levels of commitment created by the redrawing of functional ownership lines. Continue weaving these themes throughout your organization by adopting a few online tools and ensuring all employees know how to access and use them.

Use a keyword research tool to determine the phrases bearing the strongest, most relevant results for the topics pertaining to your business. Then set up Google Alerts to track and report online mentions of those important keywords.  Results can be published to an RSS feed, which others can subscribe to via an RSS reader, their smartphone, or likely the company intranet. Yahoo! Pipes is a highly configurable alternative to Google Alerts.

Set up a Delicious account specifically for bookmarking information relevant to your broad business dealings. Macro categories (tags) could include those listed below, supplemented by more micro-level tags to aid with faster, more refined search results.

• Primary Competition
• Secondary/Emerging Competition
• Media Mentions (for your brand)
• Industry Trends
• Research (or Reports)
• Markets (or Channels)

Re-Think Processes
Today’s work environment, created by economic, technological, and cultural shifts surpassing events of the prior two years, requires business leaders to reexamine time-honored methods and communication funnels. Tighter budgets, talent gaps, and organizational inefficiencies are wreaking havoc with relevant, well-defined product and speed-to-market, often with an unfortunate downstream effect on customer engagement.

A fresh mindset, executive-level support, and operational transparency all help create a positive new environment capable of encouraging individual contributions for the good of the group.

About The BtoBblogger: Heather Rast is an integrated marketer, driver of insights, and passionate business change agent. She looks for the intersection of relevance, differentiation, and needs fulfillment to help craft holistic strategies that deliver organizational value and nurture consumer affinity. Follow her on Twitter or read her blog at www.insightsandingenuity.com.

Tom Pick, on The WebMarketCentral blog, just yesterday did offer an interesting perspective when he asked the question, “Will content marketing kill trade publications?” While interesting, it does emphasize what I am not seeing or hearing – and that’s how one should incorporate print advertising into the 2010 marketing mix.

That just seems odd- for this time of year to not be hearing the marketing mix discussion including print. Doesn’t it? I’m clearly all in for social media…but as Gary Vanderchuk describes in this video – Social is business, not a tactic, but a mindset that permeates throughout the entreprise. With that as our definition, as planning is taking place for 2010, can it really be possible that companies are completely eliminating print? Can that be a wise decision?

Take the recent Pew Internet Survey where we learned these average user ages: Twitter 31, Facebook 33, and LinkedIn 39. Current retirement age is 65 [I'd argue 70 after this recession]. In that 32 year range (33 – 65), what end of it do the decision makers in your industry fall? I’m betting more likely than not closer to retirement age than Facebook 33.

Sure it is important to get in front of these influencers on Facebook, but my point here is that the entire workforce has yet to become digital natives (shameless plug: tune in for the #B2Bbookclub Wed at Noon for the Trust Agent definition). So quite a large percentage of the targeted decision making, purchasing power demographic, may in fact still be reaching for that print publication as soon as it arrives.

Now don’t get me wrong…I believe Ballmer when he stated, “All content consumed will be digital, we can [only] debate if that may be in one, two, five or 10 years.” But my money says for certain it won’t be in 2010, leaving you with decisions to make for your 2010 marketing mix.

Right, I mean don’t forget that old school idea…put your website address in your print ad…buyer sees it, she turns to her computer and goes directly to your website. No Google page ranking to contend with, no other contextual ads for her to get distracted by, just straight from the magazine to your doorstep. (Your website being ready to convert them is a discussion for another post.)

Now this is not a one size fits all suggestion either. A recent CRNtech issue I had my hands on was just 24 pages, that’s thin. So the industry you are in clearly has a significant impact on whether or not print advertising should be included in your marketing mix for 2010. My hope is that these are the decisions you are struggling with.

As I’m suggesting that print remains a viable vehicle for your 2010 marketing plan. The medium itself has suffered more as a result of the recession and budgets being slashed versus it not being a viable method to reach and influence buyers. A truly integrated marketing program – one that surrounds your buyer in all channels (including print) — enhances your brand presence in their mind. The more places your brand can be the greater opportunity you have to influence them.

I simply think it is to soon to call the grim reaper for print advertising, print’s not dead. What do you think?