Do more with less! Sound familiar? This is a statement I hear in almost every strategy and planning meeting I attend on behalf of enterprise and startup clients alike. The idea of course is to accomplish great feats, beyond the output or achievements of years gone by, without the previous resources exploited over time. Several years ago, I adopted a way of thinking to help me realize that how things are done today isn’t indicative of how they could be….
Are Businesses Invading Consumer Privacy By Listening to Social Media Conversations?
Social media represents a new frontier in customer engagement. Not only can companies participate in conversations, a dizzying array of tools now help them listen to conversations as well. This isn’t news though. Everyone understands the importance of social media in business right? We all know that customers are demanding that businesses use social media to listen to ideas, engage them in conversations, and also solve their problems when in need. As I’ve often said, the best listeners often make…
A Visual History of Book Trailers by Brian Solis
If you follow my work, you’ve probably learned that I’m becoming increasingly fond of web video. As an author, I am fascinated by the different channels and new media opportunities that have been thrust upon the world of book marketing. Over the years, I often considered how to create book-related videos that provided viewers with something beyond a traditional promo or standard author introduction. While important, they weren’t necessarily conducive for social sharing. A few years ago, I was introduced…
The 5 Pillars of New Media Strategy: There is no box!
I often share my thoughts to help global brands and enterprise organizations. But with this article, I would like to talk to the broader group of business professionals without reference to the size and shape of your company. Here and in many other media outlets, networks, and blogs around the web, social media is one of the most prevalent subjects in business today. While advice is everywhere, advice is becoming a commodity. Insight however, is precious. Let’s take this time…
Forget about Social Media for a moment. What’s your mobile strategy?
Facebook hit a billion users! Twitter is the new digital water cooler! Youtube is the future of TV! Ok, you get it right? Social media is transformative. So what? Every business that thinks about customer engagement through a technological lens will miss the very thing that will keep them in business for the long-term—the impact of technology on society and behavior and how it opens up new touch points and changes expectations as a result. Depending on your business, you…
Social media is not your saving grace: Experiences should first be defined and supported
Social media experts will tell you, and they’ll make a pretty good case too, that it is the golden key to unlocking meaningful customer relationships and the gateway to surprising and delighting them over time. So how does social media do this? Well all it takes is to listen, be part of the conversation, curate great content, run native advertisements, and oh yeah, be transparent and authentic. Done and done. Well, wrong and wrong. Social media isn’t going to save…
Mitigating Risk in Social Media Engagement
Guest post by Danna Vetter, VP, Consumer Strategies, ARAMARK – Part 4 in a series There are a lot of articles out there about what to do for your company’s social media strategy. However, there is limited information about how to train the employees that are actually representing your company on social channels. And because social media is such an open and public place, your company is potentially at risk every time your employees engage in social campaigns. At ARAMARK, a multi-billion…
What Your Business Needs to Know About Facebook’s EdgeRank
Facebook recently introduced the ability for brands to increase reach for important posts and updates, but that reach comes at a cost. The prices varies depending on how many fans you have in your community. This new feature coincided with changes to the company’s Edgerank algorithm, which is how Facebook automagically filters posts in and out of your stream. Similar to how Google’s PageRank sorts results to better match your search intention, Facebook uses Edgerank to ensure that engagement is…
L.L. Bean: The importance of relationships in CRM and social in CSR
This is a story about the bond between a brand and a customer and the importance of relationships to do good things together… Guest post by Steven Gadecki, Director of Digital Marketing at SONY Pictures Television – Follow him on Twitter My story begins when my mother bought me an L.L.Bean backpack when I first started attending Broome Community College (BCC) in Binghamton, NY. Little did I know at the time that this backpack would become the catalyst for the…
Twitter passes 200 million monthly active users; no longer a fad
I wrote my first in-depth post covering Twitter in March 2007 saying that Twitter would be the “message heard around the world.” Since then, we learned that Twitter has become a human seismograph where news no longer breaks it tweets. We learned to speak in 140 characters or less. We’ve witnessed Tweets erupt into revolutions. Hashtags are now a way of life. And, we now live in a world where if it wasn’t tweeted, it didn’t happen. Life unfolds in a digital…
