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…
Social Media as the Next Web
Source: GapingVoid “The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge.” – Tim Berners-Lee, Web inventor, founder, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), source For years now, we’ve talked about the evolution of Web 2.0 and an era of a more open and social web. Certainly the web has become social. As to whether or not it’s more open, well that’s for a later discussion. With our time together now, I’d like to explore the…
Calculate the ROI of Social Media
Guest Post by Jaap Favier, managing partner of The Small Circle What is the secret of bars? Why do we happily pay four times as much for beer in a bar as in a store? We pay this brand premium to be with friends. The secret of bars is that they convert our quality time into cash. Like bars, social media are places where friends meet. The best social media programs also convert the consumer’s social time into a brand…
Infographics are not a Social Media Strategy: The need for social producers
I can’t be the only one to notice this…infographics, “viral” videos, Like and Retweet campaigns, they all seem to be trying a bit too hard lately. For example, most infographics I see today are no more than visual press releases with graphical elements tied to information…and then more information…but wait, then more information. If this was just about visualizing scrolls of information, then anyone using free infographic generating tools and a list of interesting data points could make pinteresting graphics….
How the San Francisco Giants Hit a Home Run with Social Media
It wasn’t too long ago when sport industries were confounded by the openness of social media and the ability for fans and players to share experiences in real time. Now of course, times have changed and teams in every sporting league imaginable are experimenting with social media to improve relationships and experiences with fans. The San Francisco Giants are among the sports teams that are leading the way for a new genre of engagement and community building. 2010 was a…
5 Ways Strategic Social Media Can Help Small Businesses
I often write about enterprise organizations and global brands…essentially big businesses. This is the first in a series dedicated to small businesses. One of the biggest misconceptions about social media strategy is that only the big brands and enterprise organizations can afford success. The impression is bigger businesses have unlimited resources, people and budgets to execute on all new ideas. This is simply not true. Like in anything, people are focused on their jobs as they exist and anything new…
Without a Strategy, There Is No ROI
Guest post by Danna Vetter, VP, Consumer Strategies, ARAMARK – Part 3 in a series Have you ever started a meeting without an agenda? Driven your car with no destination? How about gotten surgery before diagnosing a need? While some of those options may seem like refreshing changes, it’s not the way you run your business. But that is exactly what it’s like when you start a social media campaign without a strategy that ties to real business needs. At ARAMARK, a…
Q: What’s your best advice to social media managers? A: Stop talking about social media
I recently presented at Microstrategy’s iCommerce Summit in Amsterdam on the importance of looking inside to improve how to engage on the outside. Following the event, I was invited to join Peter Gentsch of Big, Michael Buck of Dell, and Andreas Bock of Telekom. The conversation explored the importance of rethinking how businesses approach social media. Rather than driving social media strategies based on just clever ideas, campaigns, soft KPIs, and intangible results, I shared the importance of focusing on…
