Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
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.
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It’s Time to Get to Work. Arm Yourself with Knowledge.
Regardless of your position within an organization, if you want to see change you need to institute change. Small steps often lead to big change. You have the ability to encourage others to have the confidence and courage to follow. The one thing that I find helps is arming myself with knowledge. You don’t know what you don’t know, right? One of the things I turn to broaden my knowledge are books. It’s amazing what you can learn at such a minimal cost, if you just put the time and effort into it.
Social Media:
- Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies – by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
- Social Pollination: Escape the Hype of Social Media and Join the Companies Winning At It – by Monica L. O’Brien
- Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business – by Larry Weber
- The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media – by Paul Gillin
- Blogging for Business: Everything You Need to Know and Why You Should Care – by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos
- The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right – by Debbie Weil
- Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment – by Jim Sterne
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Tags: Books, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media | 
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How Audience Research Can Help You with Your Traditional Marketing Efforts
As traditional marketers, we have years of experience understanding our markets, what products and services they need/want, how to communicate best with them, and how they regard our brands, right?
Well, maybe not…
We have often relied on marketing research (primary or secondary), sales team feedback, customer satisfaction surveys, etc. to provide insights into those areas. The issue with most of those forms of feedback is that they tend to provide the answers we want to hear or find necessary to meet our internal business goals (either as an organization or a professional).
Audience research, on the other hand, uncovers specifically how markets use products and services, speak about them, form communities, etc. It’s like watching a pride of lions in their natural habitat. Regardless if it’s a B2B or B2C market, when we take the time to watch people in their natural – or comfortable – habitat, we will see their true behavior and opinions surface. If you haven’t done audience research, it can be quite eye-opening. But more importantly, it can’t be fabricated. As an organization it’s your choice to ignore it (at your peril, potentially) or to embrace what’s really going on in the market.
So how can audience research help traditional marketing efforts?
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Tags: Analysis, Audience Research, Branding, communications, Customer-Centric, Data, Ethnography, Marketing, Product Development, Psychographics, Serengeti Communications, Service Development, Sociographics |
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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.
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Tags: communications, integrated marketing communications, Marketing, Measurement, Messaging, Public Relations |
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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!)
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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.]
