Archive for the ‘Marketing Communications’ Category
The Return on Investment (ROI) Craze Won’t Last
For over three years, I have sat back and witnessed the resurgence of a concept that seemed to be largely ignored or only found in dusty marketing books: Return on Investment.
I am referring to the buzz (or is hype a better word?) around social media ROI. What I find interesting is that marketing management is requiring social media ROI to qualify its worth before implementing it. Smart marketers know that it is impossible to determine ROI (a financial calculation) without having net profit, sales and investment numbers, which are not available without actually having done something. Could it be that demanding social media ROI is a stall tactic?
The next logical question then is if there is such a keen interest in social media ROI, why isn’t management requiring the same for all marketing, communications and branding? We should have those numbers readily available, right? (By the way, cost per lead is not the same as ROI.)
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 »
Is Your Message Understood? Five Quick Steps to Make Sure
This weekend I was reading an article in the Fall Harvard Business Review OnPoint magazine (How to Get Your Message Across edition) called “Five Ways to Sharpen Your Communication Skills” by John Baldoni. The article was interesting, but what was more interesting was the comment they selected to share in the Reader Comment section after the article.
John shares these five tips:
- Know the fundamentals (Understand the written and spoken word.)
- Think clearly about what you will say (Don’t use PowerPoint as short-hand for thinking)
- Prepare for meetings (Take the time to think about what to say before you say it.)
- Engage in discussion (Debate. Hear all viewpoints. Don’t engage in group think.)
- Listen to others (Discussion is meaningless if no one is listening. “Measure what you treasure.”)
Sounds like everything we learned in kindergarten, right? Still many marketing, public relations and communications pros struggle with these basic elements when it comes to communicating with customers, stakeholders and other employees.
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: communications, integrated marketing communications, Marketing, Measurement, Messaging, Public Relations |
3 Comments »
Customer-Focused versus Customer-Centric, Which Are You?
[Originally posted on Serengeti's Endless Plain blog on 9/16/10. I have edited some of the contents for this post.]
A post by Dawn Westerberg, “Social Media, Customer-Centric, and #IMCchat,” prompted a long response from me, so I thought I’d share my thoughts here too.
If you read THoM, you might already know that every Wednesday night I co-moderate a chat on Twitter called #IMCchat (that’s the Twitter hashtag, if you want to search Twitter), which stands for integrated marketing communications chat. If you are new to Twitter or if you haven’t been on a Twitter chat yet, I highly recommend checking them out (here’s a list of Twitter chats that Meryl Evans keeps up-to-date). Chats are a wonderful way to ask questions or engage in conversation around a topic that is of interest. It’s also great to learn, get advice and share information.
On the September 15th #IMCchat we discussed customer-centric organizations, what defines an organization that is customer-centric and examples (Best Buy, FedEx, Fiskars).
Keep Reading, There’s More Goodness!
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: Anna Barcelos, Audience Research, Customer-Centric, Customer-Focused, IMC, integrated marketing communications, Marketing, Product Development, Service Development |
8 Comments »
And the microMARKETER is…
I went from having no takers for a free copy of Greg Verdino’s new book microMARKETING to a bunch! It goes to show that timing in social media sometimes makes all of the difference (I sent my last ditch effort tweet on Friday at 3:52pm). Thank you everyone for submitting!
While there were some great examples of microMARKETING shared, there was one person who, for years, has exemplified microMARKETING at its core. And that person is Connie Reece.
Micromarketing
“Think and act small, because in the era of microcontent and microcultures the biggest marketing opportunities lie not in the one big thing but in lots and lots of small things.”
Including peas… especially petite peas. (A little pea humor is appropriate. You’ll see, keep on reading!)
Keep Reading, There’s More Goodness!
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.]
