Posts Tagged ‘Relationships’
Saturday Morning Reads: Celebrating Mom-Centric Marketing
It’s Mother’s Day weekend! Let’s celebrate moms and how they have turned marketers upside down.
As a marketer, I have been impressed with how moms have worked with companies to make their voice heard and to get companies to understand that if their needs (and the needs of their children and families!) are met with applicable solutions, they will become brand loyal. As people become as comfortable with social media tools and sharing their voices as moms, I am confident that they will follow this path and forge partnerships with the companies that serve them.
I have tapped into four wonderful moms (of all boys!), Christa Miller, Shelli Johnson, Jeannie Cusick Walters, and Becky Carroll who just also happen to be some of the smartest communicators I know. Here’s the advice they’d like to share with fellow marketers and communicators:
Christa Miller, owner of Christa M. Miller Communications and mom to two boys:
“Don’t assume that all mothers’ experiences are alike. Some are very similar, of course, but motherhood is so intensely personal that even our reasons for (example) going back to work, self-employing, or leaving the workforce altogether to stay home are not as cut and dried as the actions you see. (Mothers forget this, too.) Parenting cuts to all our deepest wishes, hopes and insecurities, our most personal life experiences and the way we see this awesome responsibility. Respect that, whether in humor or seriousness, and you’ll win my trust.”
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
There’s a Difference Between Listening to Customers & Giving Them a Voice
I just finished reading Ernan Roman’s latest book, Voice-of-the-Customer Marketing: A Revolutionary 5-Step Process to Create Customers Who Care, Spend, and Stay and I must say, this book is a gift to marketers, management and any business owners who truly cares about their customers.
I first learned about Ernan’s new book when Denise Lee Yohn interviewed him on her blog. (If you don’t read Denise’s blog, Brand as Business Bites, you should. It’s full of great branding insights!)
After reading the interview, I knew that I had to put this book on the top of my reading list because it not only embodies my beliefs on customer-centric business—it provides a process to bring the customer closer to the center of the organization.
While “voice of the customer ” research has been around for a while, Ernan shares his five-step process so that companies can put VOC research into practice. For those who might be speculative, the process is backed with solid case studies.
Listening Versus Understanding
The foundation to any well thought out social media strategy is listening. If you are familiar with social media, you know listening means using tools like Radian6, SM2 or Google Alerts to capture what people are saying about your brand on the Internet.
However, there is a lot of work that needs to take place between listening, understanding and implementing change. Listening online alone often leads to a misunderstanding of context and nuance.
Scott Rogers captures that best in his post, Listening Versus Understanding: There is a Difference.
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: Customer-Centric, Ernan Roman, Marketing Management, Marketing Research, Organization Design, Relationships, Social Media, VOC, VOC Research, Voice of the Customer, Voice of the Customer Marketing | 
7 Comments »
Saturday Morning Reads: Planning for the Customer Experience
“Unengaged Employees Don’t Create Engaged Customers” - Bruce Temkin
For the past week I have spent considerable thought on how and why marketing is broken (more on that later this week) and why it’s imperative to understand the challenges so that we, as marketing and communications employees, can fix what ails business today. Many businesses and their employees often have misperceived notions that they know what is best for their customers, even when case study after case study show why that philosophy is broken. In reality what they think is best for their customers is really just a short-term plan for what is best for them—their bottom line. Then, there are companies that truly understand why customers need to be at the center of their organization and they use that philosophy steadfastly to prosper year-after-year. Do these companies possess a magic bullet? Of course not. They succeed because they plan to provide the best customer experience—repeatedly. And that planning starts with their employees.
Customer Experience Snack: Is your trusting cup half full, or half empty? Why believing your employees fuels your prosperity engine.
“Wegmans trusts their employees because they select them with diligence and with clear success factors in mind. Then they prepare them for success – so that they can trust both their judgment and the skills that Wegmans has to develop. To enable employee belief, Wegmans invests up to 40 hours a year per person in training and career development. This enables this company to “throw out the rule book” and believe in employees’ ability to make judgment calls that are right for each customized customer situation. The only “rule” there: ‘No customer can walk away unhappy.’”
“Employees love this kind of environment—and their numbers show it. Within their industry, Wegmans has dramatically lower employee turnover rates, higher operating margins and 50% higher sales per square foot.”
(I can tell you as a Wegmans customer this philosophy has made me come to love food shopping! Seriously.)
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
How truly serious are you about being social?
Let’s pretend… Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn all go away due to lack of funding or revenues. What happens next?
If you are a social media consultant how will you advise your clients to continue their social media efforts? If you are a company how will you maintain your social media efforts?
Are you serious about social media enough to innovate or come up with another strategy to use social media to stay connected with your customers, prospects, employees, investors, etc.?
Seriously, have you thought about it?
[Phew! This goes on record for one of my shortest posts ever!]
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Tags: Facebook, innovation, LinkedIn, Relationships, Social Media, social relationships, Twitter |
31 Comments »
The Pickup Line
“A guy walks into a bar…”
Kidding.
It actually goes more like this “a communicator walks into a meeting and the VP or client says ‘I want bloggers!’” (or we want a “well known” social media consultant!)
I used ‘communicator’ because I don’t want to be accused of continually beating up the PR rank and file and because it’s not always PR folks, it’s also marketers and organizations/clients seeking social media consultants.
So what’s the pickup line you ask? “I/We LOVE your blog!”
If you have a blog I am sure you’ve heard it before. Someone wants something from you and they figure the quickest way in is to flatter your blog. What annoys me about this pickup line is the assumption that bloggers are so vane that sucking up with an insincere one-liner will make them give you what you want. A lot of us bloggers don’t blog to be self-important. We blog because it’s a space for us to share our thoughts, insights or opinions and to be a part of the community (whether that’s marketing, social media, golfing, wine, shopping, business, whatever…).
When I get this line (and my gut tells me they are insincere), I’ll usually say “Hey thanks! So tell, me what posts have you liked or disagreed with the most?” The usual reply: “er, um, ah…” Yeah, thought so. Another indication of insincerity is that they have never once commented or even tried to be a part of the community.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you want something from someone who blogs―whether it’s a blog post you seek or consulting services-don’t enter the relationship with a cheesy one-liner. It doesn’t work in a bar and it surely doesn’t work in business because no one wants to be just a person on your list. (Actually, this is just good advice for interpersonal relations…people know when they are being used, no matter how smooth, suave or smart *you* might think you are.) Relationships do matter regardless of the situation.
Next time you find yourself uttering those words, remember that you have just joined the ranks of being “that guy (or girl).” (In case you don’t know what that means… it’s the obnoxious person no one wants to be near.)
Have you heard any other one-liners recently?
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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.]
