Posts Tagged ‘communications’
Get to Know Your Customers—It’s as Simple as a Digital Handshake
It’s 2011, do you know where your social media strategy is?
As a marketer who has been in the social media game for a while now, I understand why companies struggle with social media. There is much misunderstanding between the concept and the tools—and the benefits of either. There is confusion as to why social media tools can’t be used just like e-mail, direct mail and advertising. There are also power struggles internally for who should own social media and who has control over what is for public consumption.
What’s a Marketer To Do?
That’s the question author and social media expert Paul Chaney discusses in his latest book, “The Digital Handshake: Seven Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media.” (Paul’s first book is “Realty Blogging: Build Your Brand and Out-Smart Your Competition.”)
The answer? Start a conversation. However, the smart thing to do before diving into any conversation is to understand the new rules of communication, why they matter, and the five trends turning the business world upside down.
- Consumer Skepticism
- Fragmented Media
- Loss of Control
- Niche Marketing
- Customers are in Control
Trust me. Your customers will thank you for taking the time to understand these tectonic shifts.
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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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Opportunity Screams: Are You Listening?
Over the Christmas holiday I had a chance to read Tom Asacker’s new book, Opportunity Screams: Unlocking Hearts and Minds in Today’s Idea Economy.
Tom is also the author of another one of my favorite books, A Little Less Conversation: Connecting with Customers in a Noisy World. (By the way, if it weren’t for Valeria Maltoni, I would have never found this gem of a book nor met Tom.)
What I like about Tom’s writing—and I am sure you will too—is that he takes the most complex business challenges and marketplace shifts and breaks them down through storytelling and metaphors so that they are easily understandable and digestible. But more importantly, he provides actionable guidance.
But what I like best is that Tom concentrates on the importance of focusing on the customer. An outside-in and customer-centric perspective, if you will. The marketplace has changed (whether B2B, B2C, Non-Profit or other)—forever. Today’s customers are enlightened, empowered and educated. The question is how will you adapt to the shift? Understanding how, when and why ‘opportunity screams’ is your first step.
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Tags: book review, communications, Customer-Centric, engagement, Opportunity Screams, Social Media, Tom Asacker | 
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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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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.]
