Guest post by Greg Narain (@gregarious), co-founder of Chute, a social media platform that helps brands and publishers obtain rights to UGC content. Customer-contributed stories are not only powerful, they’re also influential and important. Yesterday, customers conveyed their stories through text and voice. Today, we’ve moved to visually rich tools like photos and videos. While compelling to look at at face value, there’s quite a bit more hidden within. Ever one of these stories affords us much more than just…
The Ultimate Moment of Truth and The Art of Digital Engagement
In 2012, Google along with Jim Lecinski published a fantastic book that explored how digital customers made decisions in what Google refers to as “The Zero Moment of Truth.” The ZMOT as it’s abbreviated, helps strategists discover relevant strategies and tactics on how to show up at the right place, at the right time and with the right content in a digital ecosystem. In a world where consumers “Google it” to begin their digital journey, ZMOT revealed that brands need…
Engagement ain’t nothing but a number – why 1% isn’t good enough
The headline calls attention to everything that’s wrong with how businesses measure engagement in social media today. Businesses that invest any level of marketing resources in networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and the like (get it?) are being groomed to focus on soft metrics instead of the relevant activity that signals the strength and worth of a community. By weighing conversations, interactions, and views, businesses are fed raw numbers that demonstrate KPIs but they do not offer the insights…
Social media is about social science not technology
In 2007, I wrote an article entitled, “Social Media is About Sociology Not Technology.” It’s a statement that after five years (and counting), I thankfully continue to see shared every day on Twitter. As time passed and experience matured, I amended that statement to now read, “Social media is about social science not technology.” Why did I change such a powerful statement? I believe that it is not only stronger now, it is also truer. See, sociology is just one…
The Rules of Smarter Engagement
To celebrate the release of my new book, The End of Business as Usual, I recently hosted a discussion on behalf of Vocus on how businesses should rethink a marketing-driven social media approach by not just engaging, but activating a market-driven strategy defined by smarter, more meaningful engagement. More than 1,000 people attended the event and while I tried to answer every question, many were left unaddressed because of time constraints. This post tackles some of the recurring questions we…
We are the 5th P: People
Part 4 in a series introducing my new book, The End of Business as Usual… It seems that adding the word “social” to any category escalates its importance. From the Social Customer to Social Commerce and from Social Business to Social CRM, the common thread that weaves everything together is people. It is people after all that are responsible for placing the social in social media. Everything else is just technology. So why is it that businesses still approach social…
Google will not run Circles around Facebook, but it gets a +1
While there are already countless articles about Google+ and many more sharing up-to-the-minute statistics to emerge from the burgeoning network, I reserved my thoughts until now. I needed time to think about it. Part FriendFeed, part Google Buzz, part Facebook, part Google.com and all of its properties, Google Plus represents a fresh approach to social engagement not seen at this level since the early days of Twitter. In the U.S., we have only a few top traditional TV networks, CBS,…
21 Rules of Engagement in Social Media
What follows is a modified excerpt from Engage!, the complete guide for businesses to build, cultivate, and measure success in the new Web. Chapter 17 Social Media is reinventing marketing, communications, and the dissemination of information. For many businesses and organizations, social networks represent hallowed grounds, bringing together customers, prospects and the people who influence their decisions in a shared, balanced, and interactive medium. While businesses now have access to these rich channels, the true promise of social media however,…
Removing the Blindfold that Prevents True Engagement and Measurement in Social Media
MarketingProfs recently published a fantastic report on the equality of B2B and B2C adoption and practice of social media. In “The State of Social Media Marketing,” the 242-page report shared how over 5,000 marketers and business professionals use social media to create award winning campaigns, measure ROI, and reach audiences. Jay Baer offers an interesting analysis at Convince and Convert. More of my thoughts on the subject of B2B and B2C social media are shared in my post, “The Business…
Market Engagement Optimization (MEO) and Net Trust Score
guest post by Chris Heuer, Creative Catalyst with AdHocnium, Director of iStrategy Labs SF and Founder of Social Media Club Source: Shutterstock The Problem with Marketing (and markets because of it) For over 15 years I have been looking at the world of marketing, advertising and public relations and seeing things a bit differently. I was not alone. Countless others also saw the real need for systemic changes, or dare I say reform, across the board. The fundamental challenge became…
