After I presented at the Digital Media Summit in Toronto, Sylvia Ng, VP of Growth and Analytics at ScribbleLive, asked for an interview to discuss challenges and opportunities ahead for digital marketers. Following is her summary of our conversation. I wanted to share it with you here… In the midst of endless blogs, podcasts, tweets, instagrams, and snapchats, how does a brand or business get noticed? Creating a truly effective marketing campaign is about understanding your brand, and more importantly,…
Community is Much More Than Belonging to Something; It’s About Doing Something Together That Makes Belonging Matter
Viginia Coutinho is a dear friend who just released a new book (in Portuguese) that helps strategists think differently about social media. She is also the organizer of Upload Lisboa, a fantastic event in Portugal that focuses on innovation and disruptive technologies. Earlier in the year, she surprised me by asking if I would consider writing the foreword. Even though I don’t write much about social media these days, I couldn’t let her down. Now that her book is available,…
Q&A: The 7 Success Factors of Social Business Strategy
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…
The Adaptive Digital Strategy Framework
Guest post by Andrea Vascellari. You can follow him on Twitter @vascellari and visit his website at www.andreavascellari.com. Today we still see a large number of organizations that keep struggling to align social media and new emerging communication technologies with the overall firm strategy. Organizations should adapt, look in the mirror and recognize that they need to change because the world has changed. They should embrace new strategic frameworks to avoid getting caught up in the digital hype that hit them…
The Future of Marketing Has Little To Do With Marketing
While I don’t always have the ability to say yes to writing forewords, I do find time now and then to do so. One of the conditions however is that I’m allowed to share my thoughts, unabridged, with you here. The latest is for a new book, Share This Too, released by Wiley, the publishing house that I also worked with on #WTF, #EOB, #Engage. Thank you to my good friend Paul Fabretti for the opportunity… Without further delay, allow…
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…
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….
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…