I’m writing this post while visiting Antwerp, Belgium as part of the Social Business Sessions I’m hosting along with The Fusion Marketing Experience. While here, I had an opportunity to spend time with several Belgian journalists. One of the notable conversations was with Erik Verdonck of Pub, a local magazine focused on the advertising industry. The three themes we touched upon are not only timely, but representative of the challenges that face marketers and strategists around the globe. 1. A…
You say you want a revolution? Well, Revolution Season 3 is coming soon
Over 30 episodes and two seasons, Revolution TV is coming back stronger and more engaging than ever. This season, we’re only inviting guests who are proving that they can disrupt what it is that they set out to change. This show is dedicated to learning from their challenges and how they found success. In an era of Digital Darwinism, no business is too big to fail or too small to succeed. This is a time of revolutionaries People who see…
Culture Shock: Culture’s Impact on Social Marketing and Business
Guest post by Ekaterina Walter, a social media strategist at Intel. She was recently elected to serve on the Board of Directors of Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Follow her on Twitter Culture is one of the largest components of how we communicate: not just how we say something but how we choose the tools we use to get a message across. This is as true for social media as it was for the telegraph. For example, if you…
Facebook Takes Action, Introduces Action Links to the Open Graph
In September 2011 at its f8 Developer Conference, Facebook introduced the social world to frictionless sharing and Action Verbs. With the rollout of its Open Graph, the 900 million strong social network declared that the future of engagement would be driven by both implicit and explicit actions. Explicit actions require the user to click a button such as “Like,” “Share,” “Recommend,” or “Comment.” Implicit actions on the other hand only require that the user run an app designed using the…
Inside Look: How The Boston Celtics Win in Social Media and Digital
The Boston Celtics know how to win. And while the team is now preparing for the next NBA season, Peter Stringer, Senior Director of Interactive Media is on the court every day. With 6.5 million fans on Facebook and 600k followers on Twitter, Peter’s work is just getting started. Serving customers in today’s hottest networks is one thing. Catering to a worldwide community of rabid sports fans requires in a series always-on digital arenas takes a different level of engagement…
The GM Facebook Advertising Saga Plays Out Like an Episode of Mad Men
Shortly before Facebook’s turbulent IP “uh oh”, GM announced that it was pulling its $10 million advertising budget from Facebook. Controversy erupted. Accusations ensued. Camps divided into three factions, those who support GM, those who support Facebook and those not yet ready to take a stance either way, but are paying attention. It will forever be known as “the meeting” between Facebook sales executives and General Motors Global CMO Joel Ewanick and other GM senior marketing executives. In the end,…
The 5th P of Marketing is People: Engagement begins within
Guest post by Danna Vetter, VP, Consumer Strategies, ARAMARK – Part 2 in a series There are no stronger or truer words in the business world: your people are your product. It sounds so simple, yet time and time again, companies make decisions and take action without including the pieces that make them whole. You are the sum of your parts. With the support and influence of your people, you can accomplish anything at a company. So at a large…
Facebook to Marketers, It’s Time for a Click to Action
You Like me…you really Like me. Wait. Maybe you don’t really Like me after all. According to our Facebook engagement metrics, only 1% of you actually react when we post. So, to keep the numbers up, our team posts more often, asks questions, runs polls, curates content, introduces more and more contests, and asks for your help to submit your pics and videos as part of our “user-generated” content campaigns. We measure success by the Likes, comments, shares, the number…
From Co-creation to Collaboration: 5 pillars for business success
Guest post by Steven Van Belleghem (@steven_insites) & Tom De Ruyck (@tomderuyck) In the last months, my colleague Tom De Ruyck and I did some research on structural collaboration between companies and customers. We’ve interviewed 17 C-Level executives working at 17 organizations, operating on a global scale. We wanted to get a clear view on the new evolution of structural collaboration in 2012 business live: in this article you can read our most important findings. We all know that collaboration…
Dear [insert business name], what’s your promise?
You say you want to get closer to customers, but your actions are different than your words. You say you want to “surprise and delight” customers, but your product development teams are too busy building against a roadmap without consideration of the 5th P of marketing…people. Your employees are your number one asset, however the infrastructure of the organization has turned once optimistic and ambitious intrapreneurs into complacent cogs or worse, your greatest detractors. You question the adoption of disruptive…
