jason breed « #SocialMedia

Posts Tagged ‘jason breed’

Do Influencers Or Customers Buy Your Products?

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Image Credit: www.bagmadness.com

Social Media continues to wreak havoc on corporate marketers and will continue to do so for a long time. The days of creating a message and buying a few strategic placements are long gone. Today there are more cable channels than anyone can watch and the web web is so fragmented that it’s unrealistic to think that a well placed ad can garner even mild interest. Along with fragmentation, there is an overwhelming amount of data that needs to be considered by marketers to do even the simplest tasks. When things get out-of-control, we tend to go back to what we know and just put a different spin on it.

Remember spokespeople? That one iconic image that would transcend buyers and connect with the masses. James Earl Jones had “the Voice”; the Beatles had “the Sound” and James Dean had “the Look”. Connect any of these to your Brand and hold on tight. Customers would forgive bad service or a little higher prices in exchange for pop-culture style influence.

Digital connectivity in general and Social Media specifically have changed those rules. The idea of attracting an influencer remains however, in social media at least, the execution of that is entirely mis-aligned.
There are really no iconic style influencers in social, it’s simply too new. Most social influencers are early adopters who have gained social media status by being an outlier and who are now seen as having expertise. These “experts” tend to exhibit influence based upon that expertise. Take Mommy Bloggers, Social Media Mavens or any other industry. These people were not even on the influence radar before social media. Now marketers revere them due to their 30k followers. The reality is they were early to adopt new technology and were seen as having unique perspective. As those early adopters gain more status, their views and perspectives tend to become more mainstream and less from the fringe. As their message becomes more mainstream, their expertise dwindles along with their status. It’s usually about this time that marketers identify these individuals who have built status, as influencers. Quick Question – Do these people who have accumulated status by being early adopters truly advocates of you products or just perceived as influencers by some staffer? Matt Riding created a great dialogue recently around developing an influencer program rather than an advocate program. The point is that influencer programs are pretty easy to execute, quick and easy to show improvements on certain KPIs (key performance indicators). Advocacy programs though are much more difficult to execute, they take a longer time to grow and it’s more difficult to show progress on KPIs. Spending time on advocates do prove very worthwhile. these are your customers, they spend money regularly with you and you now have the ability to get to know these people better than you could have ever expected…you just have to want to. Marketers still try to develop social influencer programs but are there really influencers that will get people to purchase your products?

The next time you plan marketing activities and can choose the quick win Influencer program or the “better-for-the-business” advocacy program make sure you understand the difference to your company and your career. If anyone understands the difference it is Matt Riding. Matt is better know in the social sphere of Twitter as @techguerilla and will be leading our discussion this week. Matt brings a wealth of experience with unique mix of technical, marketing and social know-how. The topic and questions this week will be:

Topic: Do Influencers Or Customers Buy Your Products?

Q1. Can a ‘influencer’ with 500 followers be as influential as someone with 500,000?
Q2. If context is so critical to understanding influence, do tools such as Klout have value? To whom?
Q3. How can we migrate from ‘influencer’ programs to ‘advocate’ programs?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, May 17 at noon ET. Follow #sm111 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live. The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

Tags: advocates, influencers, jason breed, Klout, marc meyer, Matt Riding, social media, social status
Posted in Branding | 1 Comment »

Changing the Approach to Customer Satisfaction with Social Media

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

The face of customer service and customer satisfaction has changed in recent years. It used to be that customer service was managed as an in-store experience, then telephone, then the web and now customers have experiences across thousands of touch points or more. Social media has changed the way the customers want to interact and certainly the pace by which they expect to be interacted with. The numbers are there, hundreds of millions of active blogs, over 175 million registered users on Twitter, Facebook gets over 600 million visits /month and media outlets like Huffington Post reach over 30 million people / month. All of these sites offer the ability to easily post anything to entire networks of loosely coupled “friends” in a way that creates a permanent digital record that is easily accessed by any search engine.

If customer satisfaction is a result of the combined experiences that a customer has over time, then every touch point presents an opportunity to improve or diminish overall satisfaction. The challenge is the daunting amout of new possible outlets that customers use for those experiences that companies have to contend with. As noted above, the numbers of people using social media and the amount of new social media channels being rapidly adopted are simply impossible to keep up with.

Up to now, dozens of vendors in the space have customer satisfaction indexes, net promoter scores, customer service measurements, etc to help companies keep track of their progress with customer satisfaction. They all use different techniques to measure and capture sentiment including “secret shoppers”, exit surveys, online questionnaires, complaint websites and even better business bureau scores that are reactive in nature. In today’s ever connected world, companies cannot afford to measure their effectiveness quarterly or even monthly. The social web never stops working and customer service departments need real-time or near real-time measurements to stay on top of emerging issues.

So what is a good customer satisfaction score? Today companies throw parties if they reach the 90′s out of 100. However, having just one un-satisfied customer can be REALLY bad like here and here. With the rising level of engagement using social, is it even reasonable to strive for 100% satisfaction? To answer that question, you would have to assume that every customer is equal. With new ways for customers to publish content, there are also new ways of measuring the quality of a customer as well. Should you treat customers with a high Klout score differently than customers with a lower one? Does an unpopular tweet by a customer with 30k followers make them more right than an unpopular tweet posted by someone with 50 followers?

The social web has certainly changed the way that customers expect to be treated and, consequently, the way that companies now have to start to manage customer satisfaction efforts. How this ultimately plays out is still unknown as companies are still at the very first stages of trying to solve this vexing challenge. To help us better understand the issues and help us start to discover possible solutions is our host this week Meg Fowler. Meg manages public relations/social strategy for @Sametz and is a treasure trove of great information. She will moderate our topic today and questions:

Topic: Changing the Approach to Customer Satisfaction with Social Media

Q1: What is a good customer satisfaction score today — and why have/haven’t our goals changed?

Q2: Is the customer always right in social media?

Q3: How can companies shift to respond to the new reality of customer satisfaction?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, May 3 at noon ET. Follow #sm109 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live. The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

Tags: customer satisfaction, Customer Service, jason breed, marc meyer, Meg Fowler, social media
Posted in Customer Service | 2 Comments »

Is Twitter Massively Overrated?

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

Now here’s an interesting question. Is Twitter massively overrated? If you immediately answered this question with either a yes or a no, you might be under-informed. Just as the question itself is general in nature, a generalized ”Yes” or “No” is equally too broad. Twitter is the media darling right now and gets all the hype whether it’s deserved or not. All the major news channels promote their Twitter handles, celebrities use Twitter and many executives announce their plans to move on via Twitter. At the same time, companies large and small have set up Twitter accounts and millions of normal people have also set up Twitter accounts…and never gone back. It really depends what you are trying to accomplish with it both personally and professionally.

Let’s split out some representative ideas on where Twitter is overrated and where it is useful.

Where is Twitter over-rated:

Individuals trying to connect with their friends. Really hard to organize friends when you have to type @JonSmith, @SuzieSmith, etc everytime to send out messages. In addition, by the time you type all 7 friends in, there is no room for a message
Companies trying to use Twitter as a channel for Press Releases when they are written as normal press releases. Unless you write for Twitter with catchy headlines and engaging messaging, most companies get very little attention this way.
Individuals or companies who come to Twitter without a purpose. Twitter is a vast wasteland of brief content bits and URLs (both long and short). It’s hard to find anything in particular unless you know what you are looking for.

Where is Twitter under-rated:

Anyone looking for information by Topic. Twitter has proven itself time and time again in its ability to organize and inform people around a topic whether the fall of an entire country, crash landing of a plane or the latest on pop stars.
Individuals looking to quickly connect with a person. Assuming that person or company has a Twitter account, it is much easier to connect directly with someone via Twitter and more immediate than other channels like email. Have a problem with a product, airline or home service (cable) just send out a tweet and you may experience much faster and better service than simply calling the toll-free line.
The ability to re-imagine your business. Ramon De Leon and Best Buy’s Twelpforce both figured out a way to better their business by re-imagining it via Twitter.

These are just a couple of quick examples but they speak directly to the topic of this discussion. In order to understand if you should be on Twitter, whether you are an individual or a company, you first need to understand what you are trying to accomplish. If Twitter seems like it might be viable, then you have to understand if your audience is here and then how the effort it takes to be effective on Twitter creates enough value to warrant it. What are some other areas where Twitter is over or under rated? To help us answer this question, we went to Jay Baer, President of Convince & Convert. OK, Jay actually brought us this topic which he wrote about yesterday that was one of his most engaged posts he’s ever done. We wanted to continue this great dialogue to our weekly chat to make sure that we are not just following the Twitter hype machine but actually getting some value out of it. Our topic and questions for this week’s chat are:

Topic: Is Twitter Massively Overrated?

Q1: Just 8% of the USA uses Twitter. Why is it such a big deal?

Q2: In what circumstances is Twitter NOT a viable tactic for companies?

Q3: How should companies decide where to participate in social media?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, April 19th at noon ET. Follow #sm107 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live. The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

Tags: jason breed, jay baer, marc meyer, overrated, strategy, twitter, value
Posted in twitter | 1 Comment »

Frenemies: Can PR & Advertising Work Together On Social?

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

Social Media in many contexts is a bucket term that people use to define the digital unknown. When marketers, IT and marketing communications come together it becomes difficult to split out social media jobs where they don’t overlap. Since the digital world became social there has been a land grab of sorts to figure out who owns what when it comes to social media. On one hand, content heavy side of blogging, tweeting, thought leadership would fall under public relations. On the other hand, social is an easy bolt on to much of the work that traditional agencies provide their clients. Agencies typically inlcude more of a technology component simply because they are more set up to do so.

Companies are caught in the middle. Both pitches sound good. Without more grounding both could be “right”. So what is the right approach? Can you split the duties between the two? We asked these questions to public relations maven, Elizabeth Sosnow who is the Managing Director at BLISSPR. Elizabeth has a unique spin on this topic that will make for healthy discussion. We welcome Elizabeth to our 100th week of hosting our weekly chat focused on the Business of Social Media. Our topic this week and questions are below:

Frenemies: Can PR & Advertising Work together on social?

Q1: Is it realistic to think that Advertising and PR can collaborate on social and what roles should they “own” in a joint pitch?

Q2: Does PR over-rate its capabilities in SM or does it under-rate advertising’s SM potential?

Q3: How many of your current social media campaigns fall into the “promoter” vs. “brand builder” buckets?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, March 1 at noon ET. Follow #sm100 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live. The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

Tags: advertising, Elizabeth Sosnow, jason breed, marc meyer, Public Relations, social media
Posted in Public Relations | 1 Comment »

Government & Social Media: The Global & Local Impacts

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

Civil and political unrest has erupted in parts of the Middle East. Entire countries like Libya, Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen and Egypt are dealing with protestors who are rising up in an attempt to affect change. After seeing success in Egypt, other countries are encouraged with their chances of change and following much of the same course as those in Tunisia and Egypt started.

Along with other issues, Egypt’s youth has experienced significant unemployment for a long time. This younger demographic led much of the uprising and used social media outlets to organize their revolt. So as the string telephone goes, many who are less familiar with situations are wondering how social media caused these riots. Social media, of course, did not cause the civil unrest, frustrated citizens and ineffective govenments caused the riots. Social media simply fueled them.

In search of free political and/or free economic systems, citizens are using the ubiquitous channels that are social media (primarily Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, YouTube) to organize and communicate with each other and the rest of the world. So effective are these tools that some governments are shutting down or severely throttling web access while other governments are encouraging its continued use. Some Governments are so threatened by the power this new style of communication presents they are even prosecuting users for using it.

It seems very appropriate to discuss how Governments are treating social media here on this event. To do so, we are employing the expert services of Alexander B. Howard, the Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media. Alexander’s take on the world’s governments use of social media will certainly enlighten whether you are interested in Gov2.0 or enterprise2.0 as citizen’s expectations will certainly be changed forever. The topic and questions we will use are below:

Government & Social Media: The Global & Local Impacts

How effective is own government using social media in the Middle East? (and how other governments are blocking, censoring or filtering it)
How citizens are using social media at home?
What privacy, security and identity issues are raised by those trends

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, February 22 at noon ET. Follow #sm99 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live. The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

Tags: Alexander Howard, gov20, government, jason breed, marc meyer, political, social media, unrest
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Unleashing Consumer Insights with Social Media

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

Monitoring and Listening are quickly becoming commodity type words, and that’s wrong. In my travels and discussions with all types of Fortune 100 marketers, many are using the terms to explain what they are doing in social media, yet most cannot give me any meaningful value from the actions. The same goes with the resulting data. These same marketers will show me the pretty reports from their very sophisticated systems, yet hardly any are doing anything with the data to evolve actionable insights. It’s not the systems fault, or the marketers, really. We are at a point where an evolution is needed in how we think about this stage of the social media process.

When you listen generically, you will hear a lot of noise. If you know where to point your microphone though, you could here prospects who are asking for your product recommendations, customers who are seeking answers about their latest purchase or better understand the latest product buzz from your competitors. One might also be able to identify people who are passionate about your product/company, people with ideas that you could incorporate, employees and their opinion on their work environments.

To better account for this, I prefer to move away from talking about the tactical actions of listening/monitoring and focus more on the outcomes: Learning. Let’s set up a learning post or focus your reports on what you have learned today. Putting on that lens, clients start to think very different in how they act and how they report on those actions that ultimately leads to a new found value in running these listening / learning posts.

Now that you are learning new things every day, how do you unleash the data being collected into actionable insights. The first step was discussed above. Listening for noise will get you just that. Hearing what’s being said is a discipline that cannot be overlooked. Next, knowing what to do with the information is critical. Do you send ideas to the product team, issues to service and branding to marketing? Or are you relying on one person to manage every conversation just because it’s digital? This would be the equivalent to having customer service, returns, cashiers and product specialists all be the check out person in your retail store.

Learning about your customers is critical to being able to engage with them. Who better to discuss this than the President & CEO of Communispace, Diane Hessan. Communispace has been helping their clients understand the intricacies of doing business in a digital and social world for many years now. The have helped dozens of large companies innovate in new and exciting ways and they understand how to create value throughout their digital and traditional landscapes. With this experience, Diane will lead this week’s #socialmedia discussion. The topic and questions are listed below:

Unleashing Consumer Insights with Social Media

There is so much information on the web today. What’s the difference between info & insight?
What are the best strategies for engaging consumers & getting them to open up their lives online?
Other than the standard Dell/Starbucks stories, what companies do you think are great at listening online?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, February 8 at noon ET. Follow #sm97 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live. The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

Tags: Diane Hessan, insights, jason breed, Listening, listening post, marc meyer, monitoring, social media
Posted in Innovation, Listening | 1 Comment »

The Rise of the Brand Experience

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

If you look at the top global brands of 2010, you will find traditional brands at the top of the list. With so many emerging brands across the globe, what does a brand have to do to become a top global brand?

1. Brand Messaging continues to be a strong driver for marketers. Where a Brand is the personality that identifies a product, service or company (name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or combination of them) and how it relates to key constituencies: Customers, Staff, Partners, Investors etc. The messaging is what I refer to as the communications that is distributed around the aspects of branding like:

Corporate slogan
Products and services
Product names
Product features
Positionings
Marketing mixes (including pricing, distribution, media and advertising execution)

All of this messaging culminates in developing the Brand Promise. Effectively what the brand stands for or has stood for in the past.

2. Brand Experience is the what the brand actually delivers. It’s the culmination of all the touchpoints a customer, partner or employee may have with your brand including your website, social media touchpoints, point-of-sale, post sales service, mobile, and actual use.

The point of this post is to point out the impact that social can and has had that impacts a brand and it’s conversion. I point out conversion as the driver here because, in my experience, a great product that does not sell simply does not last long. The same goes for brands. Where a brand has always been defined by it’s product, social media allows you to redefine what your brand can actually stand for. It allows you to be entertainers, educators, and more for your followers.

A recent BusinessWeek article discusses GM’s old guard and their approach to building cars in the modeling room without any customer feedback. The article goes on to praise Dan Ackerson’s (new CEO of GM) customer centric approach to building cars. The difference of Brand Promise in the past (pre-bailout) and the recent move towards Brand Experience (post-IPO) in the future. Interesting.

Digital’s impact on brand expression and experience is significant. Leading companies are still trying to figure out what this new world looks like now that a Brand can expand it’s breadth of what it stands for and now that customers are armed with a whole new set of expectations and capabilities. To help us sort this out is Michelle Tripp, a Creative Director / VP of Account Strategy at Idea Worldwide. She will lead our conversation this week around the rise of the brand experience. The topic and questions follow:

Topic: The Rise of the Brand Experience

1. Who should be front and center in conversation: The brand name or the brand’s communicator?

2. Are consumers more likely to buy because of the brand promise or the brand experience?

3. How can brands create experiences in a social world?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, February 1 at noon ET. Follow #sm96 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live. The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

Tags: brand experience, brand message, brand promise, Branding, jason breed, marc, meyer, Michelle Tripp
Posted in Branding | Comments Off

How To Plan a Global Social Media Initiative

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

Putting together a social media plan in general, is not all that difficult for many companies. This is not because setting up a social media plan is necessarily easy to do well, just that most companies have low expectations and therefore low levels of execution and most importantly integration. The other part of this is there are really no right or wrong ways to build a social media plan. Ultimately, if it delivers enough value back to the organization to off-set the costs of time and capital, then the company can/should claim success, right? One difference is in the company’s tolerance for incremental success vs. transformative leadership. Often, social media is a way to achieve both, depending on the ability of the enterprise to adapt and execute in new and different ways than are comfortable or proven in the past.

Whatever your reasons for deploying a social media plan, just makes sure it maps back to your corporate objectives. A plan and executables without demonstrable value back to key objectives will not be well received, funded or supported for very long.

What is not discussed often enough is the difference of having a social media plan for a local geography vs. a social plan across the globe. First there are simply more small to medium sized businesses who only need local or country specific penetration, next, social is just now becoming “socially acceptable” as a key differentiator in the c-suite. This new focus and attention is sure to stretch even the most senior social planners at global companies. While trailblazers like Dell’s Vice President of Social Media and Community Manish Mehta are paving the way for global practitioners, there are still very few and far between. Why is it so hard? Developing a plan and developing a plan at scale at two completely different animals. A few key reasons are:

Sheer volume of potential conversations
Vendors with a lack of multi-language support
Having enough quality personnel
Too many point systems and platforms
Differing behaviours of social usage (online, mobile, short messaging, etc)
Lack of proven governance models (managing risk, escalation procedures, training)

There are not a lot of good examples in the market on how to tackle a global social media plan and pull it off. As companies attempt this, it requires some know-how, a lot of creativity, perspiration and follow through. There are not a lot of people who know that as well as Ken Burbary. Ken is the Vice President Group Director, Strategy & Analysis at Digitas and will lead the discussion on this topic for #sm95. The topic and questions are as follows:

Topic: How to plan a global social media initiative

Q1 – How is social media consumer behavior evolving globally?

Q2 – What model should companies use to manage social media initiatives globally? (centralized, decentralized, hybrid)?

Q3 – How can companies understand consumer social media usage across different markets & countries?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, January 25 at noon ET. Follow #sm95 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live. The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

Tags: enterprise, global, jason breed, Ken Burbary, marc meyer, Planning, social media, strategy
Posted in corporate | 2 Comments »

Facing Conflict On Social Networks

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

Conflict is a fact of everyday life. Whether between family members, workers, or strangers in the coffee line, conflict is all around us. Some people thrive on it, others shy far away from it and at work it can be a significant drain on productivity if it is not dealt with. Besides productivity, conflict can result in increased levels of stress, missed work and, in extreme cases, even escalate into violence. There are departments within companies that are set up to manage conflict, companies focused on solving the problem and employees who are better at managing it than others.

This type of conflict (in the work place), if addressed, is manageable. If not addressed it can ruin your culture, destroy productivity andultimately drive down shareholder value. There is a newer type of conflict emerging though. You cannot see the people in this conflict or hear tone or voice inflection to see if they are kidding. This conflict is often anonymous and most of the time relatively meaningless. This conflict is digital.

Just like ignoring conflict in the offline workplace is imperative, managing conflict in the online workplace is just as imperative. It comes in many flavors though. Conflict can come from people who do not agree with your products, geography, employees, sustainability efforts or anything else and they can present themselves anywhere online at anytime. Some of it is deserved (like this) and some of it is not, (like this).

If you have a digital strategy or not, the chances are, you have conflict online. Whether you know about it or not is a different issue. Be certain that your customers, employees, stakeholders and partners know about it though. As a company, you have to plan for managing online conflict and train workers across the organization how to handle. Clear points of escalation should be in place as well as severity levels for types of conflict. Response frameworks, filters and notifications and other tools should be in place as well. Setting this up proactively before you have an issue is a better way to mitigate risk than setting up under the duress of a reactive situation.

You cannot plan for everything, but having certain precautions in place is always advised. The risk to value ratio is much to significant to ingnore for any business large or small. This week’s moderator is going to help us understand what’s at stake and how to handle when conflict in the digital or social space occurs. The moderator is Meg Fowler from communications firm Sametz Blackstone Associates. Meg brings a heap of experience and a knack for delivering value to this weeks chat. The topic and questions follow:

Topic: Facing conflict on social networks

Q1: What are the key steps a business can/should take in dealing with conflict online (issues w/ cust. serv., reputation, PR, etc.)?
Q2: How do you face conflict when you’re managing a community? Can communities exist without it? Should they?
Q3: What is your personal approach for dealing with conflict online?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, January 18 at noon ET. Follow #sm94 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live. The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40

Tags: conflict, conflict online, conflict resolution, jason breed, marc meyer, Meg Fowler
Posted in corporate, Human Resources | 2 Comments »

Posts Tagged ‘jason breed’

Is Twitter Massively Overrated?

The Rise of the Brand Experience

Facing Conflict On Social Networks

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