jason breed « #SocialMedia

Posts Tagged ‘jason breed’

Social Media for Business: How Do You Cope With Online Distraction?

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

We come across topics that are very thought provoking, enough that we cannot do it justice by trying to cover it. Sometimes it’s better to go direct from the source. Below is recent post from our moderator this week, taken from here http://blogs.hbr.org/samuel/2011/01/social-media-in-2011-who-will.html. We will discuss this POV on our #socialmedia chat this week.

EXCERPT: “Here are the 6 most important choices for you to make this year — the choices that will determine both the quality of your life online and of your relationships offline:

What am I choosing to do on the Web? Imagine turning your computer off every time you turn away from it, and then using the next boot-up cycle to think about what you want to accomplish when you get back online. I’m not advocating that kind of wear and tear on your on/off switch, but I know that our lives online would be infinitely more satisfying if we each took 30 seconds to stop and think about what we want to experience or achieve each time we go back to the Internet.

The pace of our online lives intensifies the need for absolutely clarity about our personal and professional goals: the Internet hurls so many tasks, distractions and genuine opportunities our way that it’s easy to get blown off course. But if you’re clear about what you want the web to do for you — the kinds of relationships you want to build, the conversations you want to have, the ideas you want to express — your time online can actually support and sharpen your vision for a fulfilling life. Make 2011 the year in which the web becomes a means of pursuing your personal and professional priorities, rather than an end in itself.

Who am I choosing to be online? Anyone who has played a video game or hung out in Second Life has encountered the temptation to reinvent oneself as a seven-foot tall werewolf or a voluptuous cheerleader. But you don’t need a salacious fantasy to craft an online persona that is subtly or even dramatically different from your offline self. Your offline self is lumbered with a job, a set of expectations from friends, family and colleagues, and maybe some body image neuroses. Your online self can be anyone you’ve dreamed of being, or someone you already secretly are. And since the persona you create for yourself online inevitably bleeds over to your life offline, creating the best version of yourself online will invariably help you become the person you want to be, online and off. Start bringing that online person to life now.

What problems am I choosing to fix with the help of the Internet? The village that needs a new water pump. The prospect of climate change. The aunt who needs a new beau. The creative vacuum left by the implosion of your garage band. Whether it’s a problem for you, your community or the world, the Internet can help you fix it. Tithing 10% of your time online — from micro-volunteering to online activism to writing a heartfelt note to a lonely friend — is a structured way to ensure that the Internet becomes part of the solution instead of part of the problem. This can be the year in which you get serious about the Internet as the single most promising problem-solver in a world that faces many fast-growing problems.

Am I choosing to be a brand or a person online? Much attention has been paid to “personal brand management” or “reputation management” online. You can choose to live your online life as a brand, and commit yourself to a strategic online presence that is based on maximizing the ROI of your every online utterance. Or you can choose to be a person, committed to online authenticity not because it’s a best practice for social media marketing, but because it’s an extension of your offline integrity. You get to choose whether you live in an online world that’s made up of the interaction among brands or one that’s made up of interaction among people. The way you (and the rest of us) engage online in 2011 will set the pattern for our future.

How am I choosing to use boredom? Recent research reveals that our brains need a certain amount of downtime, that is, boredom, in order to be productive. Those moments when our minds wander are the moments that give us breakthrough thinking, insight and innovation. Reaching for the Blackberry when you’re stuck in a line-up, or processing e-mail during tedious meetings: these activities displace the former vacancies from which aha! moments once emerged. This is the year to commit to a minimum RDA of boredom, to foster habits that keep you from filling every moment with productive or engaging activity.

How am I choosing to live online? Your time online is full of frustrations, from web sites that crash to people who write flames instead of comments. You can let these frustrations turn you off of social media. But remember that in 2011, as in every previous year, the amount of time you spend online will increase. The Internet is woven into the fabric of your daily life. In a very real way, you live there. It’s up to you, to each of us, to make the choices that will make it a good place to live.

Where are you going to ask for help online? We’re all struggling with the choices that the web now asks us to make on a daily basis: choices that were unimaginable even a decade ago. Identifying the challenges where you need some support, and the specific networks or communities where you are going to look for it, is crucial to moving forward in your life online.

What are the online challenges you’re facing? Leave a comment so that we can start tackling them right here.”

Alexandra Samuel is the Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University and the co-founder of Social Signal. Our topic this week and questions for the chat will be:

Topic: How do you cope with online distraction?

Q1: How can you determine if something you are doing online is productive or merely distraction?

Q2: What strategies and tactics can business people use to focus their attention online?

Q3: When do you deliberately use social media as a distraction?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, January 11 at noon ET. Follow #sm93 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: Alexandra Samuel, distraction, jason breed, marc meyer, productivity, social media
Posted in corporate, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Social Media and Commerce for Business

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

The holiday shopping season is behind us now and everyone can catch their breath. A lot of companies tried out some new approaches to their traditional e-commerce strategies by adding in touches of social. It is still too early to tell what worked and what did not for sure but it is time to start talking about real strategies for social commerce in 2011.

Based on your business there are a number of approaches to take with regard to social commerce. Looking online, there are a lot of ways to drive new sales. These would include setting up proper descriptions on review sites like Angies List, Yelp, Google Places, etc. It might also include considering product ratings, comparisons and customer reviews on your own site.

Regarding walk-in or foot traffic, how does social come into play here. Certainly there is the daily deals phenomenon that Groupon started and now hosts dozens of competitors including Wal-Mart. Is Groupon the best avenue for your business? Other offline successes have come through checkins and scavenger type of hunts that bring in gaming type of incentives.

What is the best approach for applying social to your 2011 e-commerce strategy? What’s working and what’s not? We brought in the big dogs for this discussion. One of Forrester’s leading analysts covering social media, Augie Ray will moderate today’s chat. Augie brings an entire industry worth of research to help us discerne the right values and help spots some of the early trends. Our topic and questions this week are:

Topic: Social Media and Commerce for Business

Q1: How is social affecting online consumer purchases?

Q2: How is social affecting off-line/in-store purchases?

Q3: What are top 10 things to consider when setting up social commerce?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, January 4 at noon ET. Follow #sm92 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: Augie Ray, daily deals, eCommerce, Groupon, jason breed, marc meyer, social commerce, social media, strategy
Posted in Commerce | Comments Off

Radical Transparency of Privacy In Social Media

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear it? Does anyone care? If you sign up for a website email list and the site uses your information for other purposes, do you care? What are the downside consequences of you sharing something socially? Digital privacy is a hot topic right now as it should be. On one hand, you have consumers who got a taste of the FREE internet meaning content is free, applications are free, utilities are free. On the other hand, you have corporate advertisers who are paying for your access via advertising.

Ever wonder how YouTube could possibly host, store and stream all of that video content to everyone, anytime and not charge a dime for it? Ever wonder how Flickr and Facebook can store you entire life’s worth of photos for free? It’s not because they like you all that well, it’s because your aggregated data is very valuable. The digital “gold” of the Internet if you will.

I always wonder if people really care about their data privacy. Consider college students who post their secret, crazed college days online. There is definitely a demographic shift of intentionally posting private data. Younger generations are much more open to posting their life happenings onto the web whereas adults who have not grown up with technology are much more stringent on the content they post. The digital data privacy debate certainly has a colorful list of players (my version only):

Uptights – typically older and do not trust that which they cannot hold (the Internet)
Loosey Gooseys- Have no regard for any repercussions for what they post, say or otherwise do online. They feel they are exempt.
Professionals – Have a few accounts (mostly on business sites) that they frequent and a handful of social sites they signed up for but have never gone back to.
Greenies – first time on the Internet and think everything is “official” because it’s on the Internet whether content, sign-ups or spam links
Too Cool For Schoolies – who have been on the web since it started and think they can spot a scam or fake cookie a mile away. These are the ones that marketers really love to collect their data on.
Violated – Every one of the above who find out their data is being used who act like they actually care about it now.

The fact is that your data is collected online both intentionally and intrinsically. Intentionally when you sign up for an email reminder, sign up for a new game or social network ,etc. Intrinsically every time you log on and visit a site someone is following your cookies and making assumptions based on where you visit and what you search for….you just don’t know it. If you want to get a sense of what is collected, just visit the Consumer tab of www.bluekai.com. But don’t blame it on the Internet and all the mean companies on the web. We are the ones who shunned the newspapers when they tried to set up walled gardens and charge for content. We are the ones who refused to pay for personal quickbooks offerings therefore making way for www.mint.com. I liked the way one CMO put it, the federal campaign to require a digital Opt-out list is a scare tactic. What they should really be marketing is a “I want to sign up to pay for my digital content” campaign due to the fact that if everyone opts to not allow digital tracing, then advertisers will have to require a paid subscription for anything they do online.

Now imagine that no matter how smart you think you are, you intrinsic data has been tracked for decades however no-one had the computing power to do anything with it before. That’s right, every time you watch a television show through your cable box, the cable company knows what you watch, when you watch it and how much of it. For instance, they can provide an accurate list of supporters to candidates by knowing if a customer frequents CNN over FOX News, they know when you move and they know if you pay your bill on time or not, etc. Ever wonder how those coupons on the back of your grocery store receipt always have the items you like, they compare what you just purchased against other items that people who purchase similar items usually buy also.

The fact is that marketers are in a never ending quest to become more relevant to you whether online or offline. If business is going to infringe deeper into your privacy then who need to keep them in check. Is it government or industry trade groups? The business landscape is littered with those who have tried to self-regulate (Internet and Housing Bubbles) although there are shining examples as well. I believe that it will ultimately come from some mix of the two where the government will continue to protect citizens from economic privacy harm like identity theft and Industry watch dog groups will hold companies morally responsible. Which brings up another point, Is a company’s obligation to consumer privacy a regulated one or a moral one. If I ever found out that www.amazon.com was using my private data maliciously I would go to www.ebay.com, www.etsy.com or www.jomashop.com no matter if the FTC was there or not.

This big topic will certainly require a pro, therefore who else to cover it than the Social Media Explorer himself Jason Falls. This is Jason’s 2nd time hosting and if this chat is anything like that last one he did, we will have to charge a cover fee (speaking of free content ) to pay for all the extra server strain he brings. Jason is a coveted strategist, speaker and all around good person and we are happy to have him hosting once again. The topic and questions are:

Topic: Radical Transparency of Privacy In Social Media

Q1: What is a business’s obligation with consumer’s digital right to privacy?

Q2: Who should regulate digital privacy – gov’t or industry groups?

Q3: What are the moral implications for businesses and digital rights to privacy?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, December 21 at noon ET. Follow #sm91 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: data collection, digital privacy, jason breed, Jason Falls, marc meyer, Privacy, privacy harm, regulations, targeting
Posted in Privacy | 1 Comment »

Using Video and YouTube To Reach and Influence Audiences

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

All companies have a content team and most have what they would refer to as a content strategy. Typically that strategy includes text and images for the website, some brochure ware and then there is a by-line for Social Media. Mostly that by-line is there to re-purpose other content (blog) or simply to promote (Twitter). While it is still a very small percentage, many are beginning to find value in the use of video in their social media efforts.

While some content is OK for text, there are many opportunities to greatly expand the value of content through the use of video. While there are thousands of applications, here are a few:

Product Demonstrations
Express Passion – Leaders can draw out their passion better with video than with text
Showcase Talent
Provide a Day in the Life Of – especially for recruiting
Funny or Entertainment Videos – with the hope of them going viral
Training

The residual value of the videos are significant as well. Videos can be an untapped source for organic search engine optimization and can also create more backlinks to your site and they can be shared easily with others to create a large network effect. Whether using video for traditional marketing purposes, training, recruiting or as a way to increase product use, video is a great way to engender trust, show passion and grow your culture. On the other side, consumers are also using video to make their point. Companies cannot afford to not have this skill available to them.

Technology is increasingly taking away many of the barriers that once existed with the ability to create and distribute videos. Mobile devices enable a much different product or shopping experience especially when tied to QR codes, Apps or mobile websites. Flip cameras and the like create an easy way to capture, edit and distribute videos in a way that simply was not possible even 5-6 years ago. New web enabled technologies will create new ways of engaging with videos as well whether through the desktop of even now on your television.

To explore the many ways that video can add a new element of sophisication to your corporate efforts we decided to devote an entire chat to it. This week’s chat will be hosted the respected Andrew Mueller. Andrew’s perspectives on video and it’s impact through social media are impressive and he will lead us to better understand how to make an impact in our orgainizations by using video. Join us in the discussion this Tuesday 12/14 at noon eastern time. The topic and questions are:

Topic: Using Video and YouTube to reach and influence audiences.

Q1: What types of video work to reach and affect audiences?

Q2: Is YouTube being used effectively by brands? Examples.

Q3: How do Google TV, Apple TV and others change the game?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, December 14 at noon ET. Follow #sm90 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: Andrew Mueller, apple TV, content strategies, jason breed, marc meyer, social media, video, YouTube
Posted in Content, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Social Influence: Meaningful?

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

We know that being popular does not equate to being influential. On the other side, being influential does not equal popularity either (consider Florida’s new Governor elect Rick Scott is now very influential, yet he is the first such governor since 1916 to win without the popular vote (<50%)). So is this conversation is circular, another chicken and egg discussion? There are a couple of ways to approach this topic.

the much covered approach of popularity vs influence and
the more scientific approach of the forms of social influence.

The difference of these two topics, especially across the enterprise, is that one conversation can add value and the other typically does not. So to not bypass a good SEO opportunity, let’s cover both of them.

Influence vs Popularity: you can talk ad nausea about this topic but consider that having a lot of Friends, Likes or Followers online does not mean that you are either popular or influential. It simply means that you paid a service to use bots to increase your presence. for companies looking to find industry influencers, they typically rely on tools that mechanize a formula that compares the amount of post with the amount of people who see the posts against the number of people who act (like, share, retweet) on the post. The point I’ll make here is that scheduling your message to be published at a time when everyone is online and looking for your message does not mean that your message will be popular or influential…only optimized.

Forms of Social Influence – when you begin to apply science to influence there is a chance you will be able to repeat success. First, when we use the term Social Influence, let’s make sure that we are not talking about how influential people are on social networks. That’s the soft discussion. We will use the term social influence to mean the study of influence in the context of a group (or social influence) overlaps quite a bit with the research on attitudes and persuasion. Social influence is also closely related to the study of group dynamics, as most of the principles of influence are strongest when they take place in social groups. As an enterprise, if you are able to understand the science of how people affect the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of others (influence) you could begin to shape your engagements much differently that pushing a press release to a group of industry bloggers and calling it a day. According to Wikipedia, the 3 main forms of social influence come from conformity, compliance and obedience.

Conformity – a tendency to conform in order to receive social acceptance – is generally defined as the tendency to act or think like other members of a group. Group size,unanimity, cohesion, status, and prior commitment all help to determine the level of conformity in an individual. While conformity is generally disdained in American culture, there are many cultures in the Middle East and Asia that rely on conformity for social influence.
Compliance – refers to any change in behavior that is due to a request or suggestion from another person. Word of mouth marketing relies heavily on compliance behaviors with foot-in-the-door or bait-and-switch techniques.
Obedience – This is a change in behavior that is the result of a direct order or command from another person. Special interest groups find this method popular. When there is a chemical spill, toxins in a river, a new national healthcare plan…it is easy for people to follow a distractor based on socially accepted beliefs regardless of truths.

The default for companies trying to figure out who is influencing their “voice” in the market is a tricky one. The only approach right now is the crop of online tools that have emerged from Klout, Edelman and Hubspot that formulate from forms of popularity that assume influence. For some companies right now showing movement for the sake of motion is better than nothing. What this does is provides a false sense of security though as there are no algorithms that measure passion. Passion can drive tremendous influence if you think about the Bills that pass through congress with a child’s name attached to them. They are driven by wildly passionate parents who do not want the same thing to happen to any other children. These parents would never show up as influencers in the traditional sense though.

Where I like the discussion around the science of influence is it opens up broader discussions for enterprises who are looking to become influencers and not just rely on those who seem influential. After looking at the forms of social influence, companies can uncover new meaning behind their approach in an effort to continuously make them better. Think about recommendations. If you understood that your site visitors were simply looking for conformity as a way to influence a purchase decision, you would employ product ratings and feedback. To take it further, compliance is more than a simple “share this” button, it’s the Groupon model. I’ve made a decision to purchase this product but I need you to also buy it in order to get the discount.

Sorting out social influence as a science will lead to a much better result than simply looking at people who have large followings or simply talk the loudest in the room. To help us sort out our discussion this week is Shelly Kramer. Shelly Kramer is the Founder and Chief Imagination Officer of V3 Integrated Marketing and Kramer & Co who has been written up in Forbes, American Express and the Wall Street Journal to name a few. Our topic and questions this week will be:

Topic: Social Influence: Meaningful?

Q1: How do you find influencers?

Q2: Can you create influencers?

Q3: Is Social Influence a meaningful goal for companies?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, December 7 at noon ET. Follow #sm89 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: authority, influence, jason breed, marc meyer, science, shelly kramer, social media
Posted in Branding, Content, corporate, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Apply Your Social Media Experience In Government

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

The rush is on! Go to any government conference or read many of the case studies that have been developed and you will see the industry (of the Government) congratulating agencies basically for “trying” social media. Much like the private sector, government agencies have been diving into social simply by signing up for accounts. According to a study just released by L2: over 80% of the Government agencies they studied had a presence on each of Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Even with all of those accounts, that same study rated 75% of those same agencies as having a below average or average at best digital IQ and if you try to find any meaningful case studies out of all that activity, you will be looking a long time for very little.

So it’s safe to say that activity does not equal progress when it comes to social media adoption and usefuleness whether you are in the public or private sector. But before we call all Agencies on the rug, it is important to to recognize some glimmers of brilliance from the study:

NASA – is the clear leader of Agencies with innovations in social that include tweetups, the Buzzroom experiment, incorporating social into their websites that drive demonstrable traffic and innovation challenges that drive results.
Data.gov & Challenge.gov – both are cross-agency sites designed to aggreagate public sector needs with private sector innovation in an open and relatively transparent way.
Armed Forces – have taken to social media for recruiting purposes and have been doing a very good job at it. Sites like the National Guard have teamed with private sector sites to crowdsource “cool factor” with their Show Us Your Guns campaign.

These glimmers of hope seem to be just that. Right when it seems an agency is embracing social (TSA Blogs), they slide down the slippery slope into oblivion. When you start to look at reasons for the lack of effectiveness, one recent survey from the National Assn. of Counties who surveyed their member counties reported that almost 80% said they had no social media policy in place. While it is not the only reason, it certainly would contribute to a lack of effectiveness in using social media within government.

It seems that what is missing is simple execution. Like anything new, the technology often gets adopted before the governance is in place which leads to a wide open door to a room full of risk, unlawful activity and plain mis-judgements that stem from an approach that is less about trial and more about error. The good news from this is these challenges have already been addressed. Many private sector companies were leaping into the social world led be interns and a rogue IT person and have learned many leassons about privacy, governance, systems integration, managing digital networks and more. So the real question becomes how to transfer the tribal knowledge that is being accumulated in the private sector and use it to short-cut public sector initiatives.

It was exactly one year ago that we did our first event on how the digital world was impacting the Government. Being one year later, we thought it would be interesting to see how far this conversation has come. Who else is bring this conversation into the spotlight other than John Moore. John brings an innovator’s mindset with the battlescars to prove his experience. He has many accolades including founding and running The Lab for all things Gov2.0. For this week’s event, the topic and questions are:

Topic: Apply Your Social Media Experience In Government

Q1: What is “Open Gov” or “Gov2.0”?

Q2: How can business work with Local/State Gov in social?

Q3: What do social businesses need to know to work with Government?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, November 30 at noon ET. Follow #sm88 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: agency, experience, gov20, government, jason breed, John Moore, marc meyer, social media
Posted in social media | 1 Comment »

Transform Your Marketing Department into a Publishing Department

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

One thing is clear, the function of marketing is rapidly transforming. There are many things driving this change like technology, data / analytics and 100′s of new channels to market through. Those are all very tactical and when something is new, everyone goes to the tactical solutions first. Let’s get a blog up, install new analytics engine and buy some space in as many websites as we can. That does not address the larger opportunity nor does it address the fundamental changes that need to happen. The same skill sets of old are not the same skill sets that are needed today. There’s training, new hiring rules, new organizational charts and new management techniques. Technology and new digital advertising buys do not address the fundamental changes that are truly needed to transform your marketing department.

Another fundamental change is how you perceive yourself. Companies have long been defined by their products. That was it! The new digital landscape and the consumer shift from mass needs to custom fit have created opportunities for those companies who can think differently. Companies have an unprecedented opportunity to re-define themselves beyond their products. For the first time, companies are becoming entertainers (youtube video channels), educators (blogs, wikis), and friends (social networking). They are re-imagining the roles they are able to play with the broader market (who would have ever thought blenders would be cool?)

To re-define your company, you must first re-define your marketing department. Marketers have been built to reach audiences and influence purchase decisions. In order to play in the digital space, content becomes the core of the activities. Marketers need to re-organize their staff to meet the heavy content demands of this new approach. One way to do it is to take a page from publishers. Publishers have always relied on developing and distributing quality content. Their approach to market is to connect with their audience rather than coerce them. Marketers can learn a lot from what publishers have already figured out and the marketers who jump on this early will gain a significant advantage of the majority of companies who will continue to do things the way they have always done them.

To help marketers begin to work through this, we invited Joe Pulizzi , founder of Junta42 to moderate this week’s chat. Joe is internationally known evangalist of content marketing and has been a long time advocate of how the effective use of content can re-define marketers. To help us through this topic, Joe will use the following questions:

Topic: Transform Your Marketing Department into a Publishing Department

Q1: How does media and publishing relate to marketing and branding?

Q2: What’s the difference between what a real publisher or media company does versus a brand?

Q3: What’s the setup look like in a non-media company brand?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, November 23 at noon ET. Follow #sm87 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live

Tags: brand, Content, jason breed, Joe Pulizzi, marc meyer, marketing, publishing, transform
Posted in Content | Comments Off

Enterprise Social Media: Working For Your Online Advocates

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Like hormone crazed teenagers day dreaming in class, Brands are very similar. We fantasize about creating advocates, yet when we we get them, we’re not quite sure what to do with them.

Everyone has an opinion on brand advocates, how to get them, how to activate them, etc (all good stuff by the way). Most of the discussion is about getting advocates to do things though. Get them to write another product review, blog about us and retweet our promo. If I was your brand advocate, I would need a vacation for sure.

So give them one. I don’t mean airplane tickets, hotels and coconut drinks on the beach. Just a simple vacation from doing all your work for you. Figure out what to do for them. What could you do for a “friend” of the company that you just do because you like them, not because you expect anything from them?

Most companies build extensive sytems to manage brand messaging, create brand loyalty through rewards and messaging but you have to do something before you get the benefit. What if I just got a promotion and started traveling. I take four trips in four weeks and my typical pattern is four trips over the course of a year. There should be triggers going off everywhere that are simply meant to create a great experience from my brand. I may not be at the “Gold” level but if there is a suite that’s available for my stay, give it to me. The good will business that comes from it is unmatched. Advocates are created over time with brands that have a strong reputation with me.

A Brand’s reputation is shaped as a cumulative feeling across EVERY personal experience I have with that Brand whether receiving my bill, using the product, calling customer service or seeing an advertisement on TV.

If that’s true, a Brand manager simply needs to create more experiences faster than the customer will create for themselves on their own time. Instead of sending over a coupon, send a box of your new product to their door to try out. Leave a bottle of wine on their pillow when they were expecting the bottle of water that everyone else gets. Instead of focusing on what you can get your advocates to do for you, try spending some time coming up with ideas of things you can do for your advocates…just because.

Brands spend a lot of creative talent on getting consumers to “Like” them yet once they do, companies are not set up to continue to manage the relationship. With that, our event for this week being moderated for the first time by, what I would consider, an advocate of #socialmedia. We met Chris Kieff as a regular contributor on our events and now he is moderating his own. With a great perspective and tons of experience, we are excited to have Chris lead this next event. The topic and questions will be:

Topic: Enterprise Social Media: Working For Your Online Advocates

Q1: What is the best way to find advocates in social media?

Q2: Now that we’ve identified advocates, how do you build relationships with them?

Q3: How do you enable them to carry your message virally?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, November 16 at noon ET. Follow #sm86 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

Tags: activate, advocates, Brands, Chris Kieff, customers, influencers, jason breed, marc meyer
Posted in Branding, Listening, social media | Comments Off

The Social Customer…and What Brands Need To Know

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

You think marketer’s lives are rough, try being the customer. So much is being thrown at the customer these days, its hard to keep up.

B2B Customers: You used to have a few vendors that competed for your dollars, the agencies were simply creatives and technology vendors simply did technology. Without all the improvements in technology, manufacturing had many barriers to entry which reduced your choices. You never heard about how vendors were treating your employees (good or bad) and you never cared how they were performing with other peers in related industries. Marketing was marketing and technology was, well, technology and never did the two meet. Decisions were made independently without concern to the ecosystems that are in place today.

B2C Customers: You were able to make purchase decisions simply based on how the product tasted, handled, or felt. You did not worry about their greenhouse effects, the videos their employees were making behind the scenes or how much the same product cost at other stores within a 7 block radius. Your friends may have mentioned cool products but you did not have to worry about your friends seeing every purchase you make (remember that Dixie Chicks album you really want) nor did you have to remember if you had ”like’d” the Brand in one of your networks. You did not care what they were making next because if you did not want it, you would simply just not purchase it. Forget writing letters to your friends to warn them that the “new & improved” product really wasn’t.

Fast forward to today. Customers are more equipped through technology and network science to make purchase decisions than every before. Interestingly enough though, the buying cycle is getting longer, not shorter. Customer’s purchase paths have changed. No longer do they call you to see if something is in stock or what your hours of operation are. No longer do you get a chance to speak to prospects, they simply search online, visit the first few sites that come up, comparison shop through online and physical stores, review product ratings and comments. If prospects can’t relate to the things they find in that process, those potential customer simply go away without you ever knowing they were actual prospects.

While purchase patterns have changed, so have expectations. The expectation is that I, as a customer, can ask a question online to a company and get a response back either from other customer zealots or from the company itself. The other expectations are that you are being a good corporate citizen (because I’ll find out if you are not) and that my vote counts. I want to influence the direction of the next product, not as a shareholder, but as a product user and Lord help if my product breaks down before I think is reasonbly expected.

We know that customers are changing for both B2B and B2C and yes, even for B2B2C. The challenge is that customers have not yet fully transitioned from customer-of-old to customer-of-new so they are still in motion. They don’t know what they want in a Brand yet however the expectation is still there. So how do you handle this? We’ve brought in one of the best thought leaders in this space from one of the most renowned agencies in the forefront of this battle. Please welcome Chris Carfi from Edelman. Chris wrote the customer manifesto and has built his career helping companies managing the ongoing customer transition. The topic and Questions for this week are:

Topic: The Social Customer…and What Brands Need To Know

Q1: How has the social customer changed since 2004?

Q2: How does mobile affect the social customer?

Q3: Where does the “brand” actually meet with the social customer online?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, November 2 at noon ET. Follow #sm84 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live

Tags: Chris Carfi, expectations, jason breed, marc meyer, purchase patterns, social customer, social media
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