Archive for January, 2011
Dear Bloggers: You Are Making it Too Difficult to Share Your Content
This is something that has been bothering me for over a year and I am not sure why it took me so long to write about it, because it’s really three simple things that stop me from sharing content.
I really want to put a spotlight on the smart thinking I come across that I think deserves attention, but sometimes it’s just too time consuming to do so. Perhaps others are feeling this way too? After all, we are all busy and strapped for time.
This isn’t an all-inclusive list (I am sure you could add more), it’s just my list of what stops me from sharing blog posts—even from some of the most popular and experienced bloggers. I don’t have all of the answers on how to fix this (technologically from WordPress to TypePad to Blogger), but thought I’d kick off the conversation.
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
9 Truths About Marketers
Okay, maybe not the absolute truth across the board but it is a catchy title, no? Read on.
My last two jobs have been marketing to marketers. Marketing to the market you belong to couldn’t be easier, right? Wrong. What has me thinking about this? While the hip thing right now is using social media to target marketers, I’d posit that the pool is very small. Most marketers are behind the eight ball.
Marketers come in all shapes and sizes. While you might assume that most marketers a degree in marketing, that’s simply not the case. Many marketers have degrees in English, Journalism, Engineering (yes, true!), Business Administration, Fine Arts, Sociology, etc. and some do not have a degree at all, but have a ton of business experience. Having dissimilar educational foundations leads marketers to having completely different outlooks on what marketing is and how to execute it. Some end up being great marketers and others… not so much. The other consideration is the sliding scale of dedication to the profession. For many, it is just a job and for others, it makes up who they are as a person, it is their identity. One final consideration is what silos marketers place themselves. Marketing professionals tend to like specialties versus generalities. All of these things wrapped up make for a complicated market.
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Customer-Centric: An Operational Practice, Not a Marketing Buzzword
This past weekend I had the pleasure of being introduced to Ron Shevlin, his blog Marketing Tea Party, and his recent post “The Problem With Customer-Centricity.” (Hat tip: Valeria Maltoni.)
Given that I am a proponent for customer-centricity, I could not help but add my thoughts to Ron’s post since it is at the heart of what I practice and believe as a marketer. As well, I am seeing the trend for customer-centric becoming destined for buzzword bingo and I would hate for it to become meaningless well before its benefits are recognized and experienced.
Ron offers a well thought-out case for what customer-centric is and why it may not in the best interest of an organization (be sure to read all of the comments, too). After thoughtful analysis, Ron arrives at this bottom-line:
“… All this talk of customer-centricity is an utter and complete waste of time. The term means nothing. There’s no common definition, no definitive way to measure it, and therefore, no real proof that a company that claims to be customer-centric is any better (for any of the stakeholders) than any other firm.”
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Saturday Morning Reads: Who is Protecting Your Brand?
“If your organization’s employees aren’t on your side, it doesn’t matter how good your relationships with other publics are.” -Guth & Marsh
This is a concept that I wish most organizations would understand—especially when it comes to social media.
While many organizations are struggling with the notion of being social, they cannot idly sit by until they determine the best course of action. At the least, they need to implement a social media policy (with the help of a consultant or agency with actual social media experience, of course) as a first course of action to protect their brand. This is important because employees might be using social networks and potentially identifying themselves as employees of said brand.
In today’s social world, an organization’s publics do not end with employees or the media. There are shareholder, stakeholder, government (national, state or local), and latent publics that an organization didn’t even know existed but now come out of the woodwork because they are offended by an employee’s actions or comments, which is exactly what happened with Chipotle’s recent social media debacle.
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: Branding, Branding Conflict, Chipotle, Dominos, Employees, Franchisees, Franchises, personal branding, Social Media Policy | 
1 Comment »
Social Media from the Inside Out
On January 18th I had the opportunity to spend some time with the Philadelphia Chapter of The International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) to discuss social media from an inside out perspective.
In preparing my slides, I recalled a time when I was trying to implement social media and the process I used to do so. It was about 2006 and to my surprise, I received full management and legal support for a blog—a challenge for most even today. Looking back, I was lucky that our CMO had foresight and that our management and legal teams trusted me enough to do something that most Fortune 500 companies were not doing at the time (I handled our PR, too, which probably had something to do with it).
I was worried about a change of mindset as the word of a blog spread, so I dove in as quickly as I could. I had the blog set up (with the CMO’s help), wrote a bunch of posts (legal and marketing approved, of course), and tapped into our industry thought leaders (who were all for it) for on-going content. With all of that work, you would my efforts would have been a success, right? Nope. The content was ready, but the blog sat empty. While I understood the cultural limitations of a large company and I knew the goals of our management team, I did not account for some internal resistance or the final gatekeepers who put the brakes on my hopes for being social with our customers. A big lesson learned.
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
The Harte of Marketing by Beth Harte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.theharteofmarketing.com. [If you have a question about what you can use from this blog, click on the above Creative Commons link to learn more.]
