Last year, my Altimeter Group colleague Charlene Li and I published a series of research reports on the state and evolution of social business. In our research, we discovered that the most advanced businesses shared seven success factors in developing, launching, and measuring social business strategies. Our friends at Jossey-Bass asked us to turn it into an ebook and that we did! The Seven Success Factors of Social Business Strategy During the launch, we were interviewed by the Amazon team…
Guiding the Customer Journey
Guest post by John Jantsch is a marketing consultant, speaker and author and the founder of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network. His latest book, Duct Tape Selling – Think Like a Marketer, Sell Like a Superstar is available online and in bookstores May 15. Just a few years short years ago marketers were still heavily focused on broadcasting their message to create demand for their products and services. Today, a kinder, gentler form of marketing called inbound marketing relies…
Investing in Social Networks to Earn Influence and Reciprocity
On this special episode of Revolution, we meet Porter Gale, former VP of Marketing of Virgin America, advisor to exciting startups and business ventures, avid speaker, and also the author of the best-selling book, Your Network is Your Net Worth. Porter is someone whom I personally admire and have also had the good fortune to work with over the years. With Porter, no matter what she’s working on, everything begins and ends with people. She shares her recipe for success…
Facebook Evolves from Social Network to Social Ecosystem
Every so often, Facebook hosts its f8, a conference in San Francisco aimed at developers, media, and partners. This year, in front of an audience of 2,500+, Facebook introduced its vision for the next year and beyond. With Mark Zuckerberg kicking things off, Facebook introduced a dozen or so new products organized into three including Facebook’s update to Login, which gives people more control over the information they share with apps, Anonymous login, which offers a way for people to…
Stop Talking About Technology and Start Designing Experiences
As Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore wrote in the Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage, the future of business is less about products and more about creating experiences. That’s right. You’re no longer in the product business. Products are a by-product of experiences you set out to create. Products are also social objects that spark desirable relationships between you and customers and also among customers. The future of business is experiences. One year after launching What’s…
Beaconizing the Brand Experience
Guest post by Gib Bassett (@gibbassett), Global Program Director, Consumer Goods, Teradata There’s no question that the shopping journey has been disrupted by consumer behavior in online, social media and mobile channels. What’s less certain, especially within the branded consumer products industry, is the best way to serve this now commonplace “connected consumer.” The pursuit of this answer, and the quest to learn more about connected consumers, is commonly referred to as “digital transformation.” Consumer products manufacturers in food, beverage,…
Report: Digital Transformation and the New Customer Experience
We’re under attack! Social, mobile, real-time, cloud, big data…it’s coming at us all at once! Rather than miss out, many brands are jumping from trend to trend as a way of staying relevant in an increasingly digital market. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Foursquare, Instagram, Pinterest…we’re covered. We have and had a strategy for a while now. Mobile. Yep, we’ve got an app for that…plus we’ve got adaptive and responsive web design that makes old sites new again! Snapchat…our brilliant strategy vanishes…
A Return to Simplicity, Empathy and Imperfection in Communication: Human to Human #H2H
Guest post by Bryan Kramer, author of the new ebook, “There is no B2B or B2C: Human to Human” and CEO of PureMatter Marketing has become so complex, in segmenting audiences into “B2B” (business to business) and “B2C” (business to consumer). Being here in Silicon Valley, surrounded by titans of technology like Google, Facebook, Cisco, Twitter, LinkedIn and eBay to name a few, I’ve observed a downhill slope of complexity in marketing communication. This, plus the rise of social, digital…
The Quality Prism: The secret to co-creating brands through social media
Guest post by Greg Narain (@gregarious) co-founder of Chute, a company that helps brands discover or collect relevant photos from social networks and incorporate the visuals into their websites and apps Brands finds themselves at a challenging crossroads in their evolution. For decades, companies have utilized a command and control model as it pertains to their brands. Billions of dollars have been spent to carefully craft specific messages and deliver them via campaigns. However, as consumers continue to create and…
Empowering Employees with Social Media Improves Customer Relationships and Grows Revenue
Employee empowerment is about creating brand advocates to scale customer relationships and effectively compete in new digital markets. Organizations can no longer rely on inbound and outbound sales reps, people willing to jump through hoops and obstacles via call centers, or traditional marketing to boost awareness and demand. Customers demand engagement, in real time, and that takes human beings, training, and support. In January 2014, the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the country’s oldest remaining metropolitan newspapers, opened a technology…
