Posted on Wed, Oct 28, 2009
Today’s Daily Bytes looks at facts from Marketing Profs summary of its new Digital Marketing Factbook, stories from ClickZ on social media success stories that are thankfully not Comcast, Jet Blue or Dell and the issues companies and individuals face in social media from Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang.
Digital Marketing Factbook: A Glimpse Inside
We sometimes don’t realize how much our web usage can change in five years. This chart put together from a recent survey conducted by the Online Publishers Association and published in the Marketing Profs Factbook clearly illustrates the shift:
The post includes some other interesting data from The Factbook which collects data collected from marketers and consumers. The topics surveyed include which digital marketing tools are most effective, what consumer actions result from email marketing, what are the most important emal marketing initiatives in 2009, the value of different digital resources in influencing purchase decisions, and how firms are using social media for marketing purposes. The post is lengthy, rich with charts and obviously a promotion to get you to buy The Factbook for $ 199.
Social Media Is Tailor-Made for SMB’s
Dave Evans in ClickZ focuses on how SMB’s are leveraging their nimbleness and agility to succeed in social media. His three examples are companies that are far bigger than the average SMB, but great examples of how ingenuity, focus and an understanding of one’s consumer can be really helpful to building a business:
Benjamin Moore, the long-lived paints and coatings company owned by Berkshire Hathaway has developed an iPhone app – ColorCapture Ben - where if you see a color you like you can scan it in and match it to a Benjamin Moore paint color. This is so cool. I could have used this when I painted much of my house. I can’t tell you how many times I had issues going to the paint store as I didn’t have the paint swatch. I also did more investigating on this application online and found out that this application has already received awards and coverage in the New York Times.
Slingshot Sports, a leading producer of wakeboards, put together a program around the online wakeboard community and ProductPulse, a Facebook and MySpace product sharing and voting application. The result was getting product design ideas from the community as well as 350,000 views from enthusiasts on Facebook.
Skullcandy, a leading maker of cool headsets and earbutds, just enterest India and leveraged Twitter to secure a good market launch.
Your Company May Own Your Tweets, Pokes, and You Tube Videos
What if an employee opens up their Facebook account on your watch? What if they are creating and uploaind You Tube videos at work? Who owns the content? You or the employee. The entire playing field of social media is a hornet’s nest of issues. Jeremiah Owyang aptly points out many of the issues and the need for companies to establish firm policies in this realm. This is a great piece and a must read for business leaders.
Posted on Fri, Oct 23, 2009
Today’s Daily Bytes starts off with some highlights from Friday morning’s Trust Summit at the Harvard Club in New York City. It also includes the collaborated thoughts from Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group on the developments in social search this week. Finally, as it is the end of the week, there is an overview of HubSpot’s Top 5 Inbound Marketing Stories of the Week.
The Trust Summit
On Friday morning at the Harvard Club in New York City, thought leaders on trust in business came together in a panel discussion attended by 300 people. The panel moderated ably by Robin Fray Carey, Co-Founder of Social Media Today, included the newer and more mature voices on the subject of “trust”.
Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, co-authors of the newly published Trust Agents represented the new voices while Charles Green and David Maister, co-authors with Robert M. Galford of The Trusted Advisor represented the more mature voices.
Together they were a symphony. And while they represented different generations, they brought everyone back to the values of what it means to be human beings engaged in business – it is delivering products and services of value to our customers. If you figure out what matters for your customer, the profits will follow.
There were a number of great sound bites that came from the breakfast meeting – many of them captured in the Tweet stream as many tweeted insights and memorable quotes in the august Harvard Hall. Here are some of the tweet-bytes:
@benjaminstrong: “what if you put your most disgruntled employee as CMO?” @chrisbrogan #trustsummit
@megwheel: Doctrine of competition, over commerce, is killing our economy. look at Detriot-treated customers&suppliers as competetiors. #trustsummit
@fredabramson: Purpose of companies is to serve society. #trustsummit
@D_Elms: Julien Smith “The reasons we trust people have always been the same ,…That’s why trust is a system.” #trustsummit
@mattingsley: If people don’t *like* working with you, you’re going to have to do all that other marketing rubbish -David Maister
@suigenerisnyc: Be willing to make mistakes in social media. Risk is worth it for the reward. @Julien #trustsummit
@sparklingruby: How interested are you in other people? “The world is filled with people-you have to develop relationship skills” #trustsummit David Maister
@michaeljoel: #TrustSummit Metrics v relationships? @chrisbrogan: Relationships provide yield over time. We need more productive numbers not more number
@DonVanDuren: #TrustSummit Metrics v relationships? @chrisbrogan: Relationships provide yield over time. We need more productive numbers not more number
@iamparris: Charlie Green: we under rate the risk of not doing the right thing. #trustsummit
@PinkIncDesign: #trustsummit success = good idea stick with it through thick & thin. Build trust. Care. Be Genuine.
@mattsnod: Charles Green: Doing the wrong is less risky than not doing the right thing. #trustsummit
@DonVanDuren: #trustsummit. Green: Doctrine of competitive advantage is anti-ethical. It’s only about ourselves. Must connect with customers/partners.
@CatherinVentura: Moneyback guarantee: You don’t have to convince your clients you’re perfect, just that you’re really trying. Maister @ #trustsummit
@missmotorcade: In advisory businesses (design, accounting, PR, etc…), providers should always give unconditional guarantees (David Meister) #trustsummit
@markb: Oh my god. @chrisbrogan just quoted Vanilla Ice. “Stop. Collaborate. And listen.” Brilliant. #trustsummit
@amandarykoff: hat about advertising? As Andy Sernovitz said: “If you have to do advertising, you’ve got a sh*$%y” product.” #trustsummit
@burnspatterson: can you be both trusted and trusting? How interested in other people are you genuinely?
@14str8: ust identified the trait that I admire most about @chrisbrogan – he is always quick to acknowledge others. #trustsummit
@DrewCM: A diversity of measures is important. A measurement is a basis for discussion. Get the dialogue going. David Maister #trustsummit
@sparklingruby: “Buddhist capitalism”- Serve others without demand for immediate gratification. Higher ROI will result. #trustsummit
@Kona_Luseni: #trustsummit; gems from Julien Smith – I urge you to be skeptical of drinking the SM koolaid. It’s an experiment. It it fails wipe it clean.
@laureni: “customer service is more marketing than marketing is marketing.” @chrisbrogan at #trustsummit
@fredabramson: RT @chrisbrogan: @fredabramson – be the priest, build the church See Trust Agents: Agent Zero). #trustsummit (re service professionals)
And one final note, one of the most striking points of this morning’s discussion was Charles Green pointing out that the competitive advantage model propagated at Harvard Business School for the last 50 years is anti-ethical as it views people as a means to an end. As an MBA student at Harvard in the mid-80’s, I was swept up in the competitive strategy movement pioneered by Michael Porter. It made sense from a purely analytical point of view. However, through the years, the analytical prism always rubbed against my undergraduate education at Georgetown University, a Jesuit university, which always emphasized the “cura personalis” – the care of each person in a community. Today at the Trust Summit, I experienced a moment of reconciliation in my educational foundations and I fully embrace the trust economy.
Top 5 Inbound Marketing Stories of the Week: Educate, Enlighten, Entertain
This week’s treasure trove of articles includes a profile of an attorney who has grown his business through a blog that educates, enlightens and entertains, 50 blogging lessons, the 3 realities of social media (covered here in Daily Bytes on Monday), SMB lessons from the Blog World Expo last week and insights on how little Google is paying attention to bad links.
Social Search: Customers Influence Search Results Over Brands
In yesterday’s Daily Bytes, I focused on Marissa Mayer, VP of Product Develop and Consumer Experiences for Google, at the Web 2.0 Summit talking about Google’s social search pact with Twitter. This was a week of social search news, with Bing and Twitter also forging a similar pact. Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group collaborated on this post to discuss the implications of these pacts and what it can mean for businesses. It is a lot to take in, but it certainly points out that if your business has been avoiding Twitter, it is time to start paying attention as it will soon become an important component of search results on your business.
Posted on Mon, Oct 19, 2009
Happy Monday! A start to a new week and a time to look at the many perspectives of social media: why it is not working at some companies and the questions you need to ask to make it work, the realities of social media, the need to integrate social media into your presentations and four strategies for social media success.
5 Things You Must Ask About Social Media
This post by Jay Deragon in The Relationship Economy blog is built off of Amy Mengel’s recent post on the five reasons why companies are failing at social media. The reasons include: 1) they can’t talk about anything other than their products, 2) they listen to customers but don’t take action, 3) they aren’t calibrated internally with the technology, 4) they are not framing risk accurately, and 5) their internal culture isn’t aligned for social media success. Jay agrees with Amy’s assessment and points out that “Marketing and messaging is no longer isolated, rather it is now a reflection of the organizational quality and effectiveness of management.” Organizational quality and effectiveness of management requires asking the right questions. The diagram below illustrates what Jay suggests as the needed framework for asking the right questions.
Organizational Effectiveness Facilitates a New System of Communicating
3 Realities of Social Media
Michael Brito writes a guest post for PR 2.0 where he focuses on his observations of social media at this juncture: 1) consumers already get it, brands are trying to figure it out; 2) brands should focus on people first, tools last, and 3) thee is no such thing as a social media expert quite yet. I totally agree that the focus should be on people first and tools last. Before you focus on tools, you need to know where your audience is and how to engage with them. And I love the comment on there is not such thing as a social medi expert “quite yet”! We are still in early days and figuring everything out.
Do speakers need to weave social media into their presentations?
This post from James Gurd in the Econsultancy blog was inspired by blog post from Jeremiah Owyang last week about integrating social media into their presentations. In contrast to Jeremiah’s “two-fisted speaking” strategy (clicker in one hand and mobile device in the other), James recommends enlisting a social media executive to help monitor the social media back-channel. He also provides some other useful pointers to manage the tweet-speak during presentations.
Four Steps to Social Media Marketing Success
This is a great post in Search Engine Watch from Erik Qualman, whose recent presentation – Social Media is Not a Fad - became a viral sensation. In the post, Erik asserts that there are four simple, yet “critical” steps to executing an effective social media strategy as illustrated below:
Four Critical Social Media Strategy Steps
Erik points out the steps are laid out in stair fashion to illustrate that companies need to start with listening and build up to the selling step.
Posted on Wed, Sep 09, 2009
Today’s Daily Bytes are late! Apologies . . . had to meet a client deadline. Today we focus on the lessons of failure, customer service, fall cleaning of your online brand and improving landing pages.
Failure
President Obama in his school children address yesterday said that “you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time.” I loved the line and tweeted it. Fred Wilson has gone one better and talked about failure’s bounty in his own career. It is a refreshing post from one of today’s most successful VC investors.
How Customer Support Organizations Must Evolve
Instead of being viewed as a cost center, customer support needs to be viewed as a strategic asset and hands on marketing support. This post from Jeremiah Owyang discusses how to do this as well as harness digital tools and platforms.
Fall Cleaning: Clean Up Your Online Brand
Very useful post and check list on how to clean up your online presence that I think is useful four seasons of the year, not just in the fall!
Landing Page Makeover Clinic #19: Lunchsense.com
This post by Roberta Rosenberg in Copyblogger.com provides more than landing page makeover advice – it is a full web makeover plan for what looks like a very interesting business. I will be curious to see how the makeover goes.