Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’
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.
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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 | 
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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.)
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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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Saturday Morning Reads: Personas… Do you really know your customers?
Personas are nothing new, but they seem to be popping up in conversation more often (I am curious why, how about you?). David Meerman Scott has been talking about personas for years (a whole lot of reading here!).
I would like to caution you that personas are not just good old-fashion market segmentation. Heck no!
If you purely slice and dice your market by demographics (B2C) or firmograhics (B2B) you will be missing out on a WHOLE lot of customer information that will affect your marketing efforts and not in a positive way.
Keep Reading…
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Tags: Customer-Centric, Market Segmentation, Marketing, Social Media |
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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.]
