Month: May 2010

Ford CEO Shares Executive Leadership Lesson in 140 Characters

Photo courtesy of Flickr Ford APA

One of the most valuable shifts in business communication is taking place on Twitter: a global audience can now learn from industry leaders and apply high-level advice in real time. At Amazon.com, there are 28,242 books written specifically on business strategy. Since it’s impossible to read and filter all that advice, there are competitive advantages to connecting with executives and learning from a primary source. And even more valuable to have access to a Fortune 10 executive’s insight.

On March 31, Ford Motor Company CEO Alan Mulally joined members of his management team at the New York International Auto Show for 30 minutes on Twitter. Pictured with Digital Communications Director Scott Montyand fresh from co-chairing the prestigious China Development Forum (CDF) in Beijing, Mulally was available for conversation and questions. Named one of Barron’s World’s Greatest CEOs in March, Alan Mulally’s accessibility defines Ford’s corporate culture.

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Hey, Small Business, DON’T build a website… build a Marketing Platform!

The more I talk to small and medium-size businesses, the more I hear – we need to build a better website!

Don’t do it!

In the age of Social Media and ‘doing more with less’ you don’t have to build a website anymore, nor do you have to improve it. You have to, and you CAN, build a marketing platform. So, what does this mean?

Well, for starters, as a business you need to ask yourself – “What is it I want to do next? Grow my business? Generate Leads? Or establish or improve my brand?” Once you are able to answer this question, establish who your audience is and then select the appropriate marketing strategy – Social Media comes to the rescue!

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Thoughts on propagation planning

Recently, the team at 1000 Heads have been discovering and discussing some great content out there on propogation planning.

Ivan Pollard from Naked Communications coined the term and Faris Yakob went on to, well, propagate it in a prize-winning essay for Campaign. Griffin Farley, of BBH New York, continues to develop the theory in his excellent blog, and produced the deck below which gives a neat overview of the approach and case studies behind PP.

Lessons in Propagation Planning Presentation

Lessons in Propagation Planning 2009

View more presentations from Griffin Farley.

As you can see, propagation planning is in essence word of mouth by any other name.

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My Thoughts: ‘Trust agents’ can help Memphis ‘brand’

Memphis made history on the Internet this month, as one of the world’s most respected bloggers, best-selling author Chris Brogan, spoke for the first time in our river city.

As he spoke, the audience live-tweeted, blogged and broadcast the event over the Internet, showcasing Memphis to hundreds of thousands of listeners across the globe. You can search Twitter.com (type #BroganMemphis in the search box) and you will see the incredible information that was shared on how social media give us all a big voice.

Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs in the Boston area, left Memphis a fan of our great city, though he chided us on our need to put social media to greater use. He has already shared several posts about our city to his more than 136,000 followers on Twitter. Others in attendance at the event, as well as those who follow them in social media, brought #BroganMemphis to an audience of, literally, several hundred thousand.

After hearing Brogan speak, I participated in a roundtable discussion with some incredible people who flew into town from across the country, and even Canada, to be together and talk social media. These social media “power players” not only realize the importance of social media, but they are also using it to leverage, promote and protect their brand. Needless to say, my brain is in high gear, churning and thinking of better ways to help my clients and my community.

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Why Facebook Should Quickly Improve Business Pages

Social media is radically changing the way we relate with our environment, at large. People, brands, companies all want to communicate with their ecosystems. Amongst social media platforms, Facebook is the heavyweight, whether for individuals, brands and companies.

Facebook has been initially developed for individuals and business pages were first intoduced in 2008. Now that brands and companies are flocking onto the social network, they must adapt the platform to their business needs if they want to remain relevant.

A recent article from Jeffrey Cohen detailing why Facebook is doing it wrong for B2B businesses makes me want to extend the thought and say that they are doing it wrong for all businesses.

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The Magic Middle and the Rise of the Curator

Last week, I was fortunate enough to get a walk-through of the Sponsored Tweets offering that is in beta with Twitter. It has obvious value for brands and is a sure money-maker for Twitter who is already making smart moves in monetizing their corner of the social web.

Dick Costolo explained the system’s impressive method for determining and managing relevancy of a sponsored tweet in matching it to viewers. Adding relevancy factors to Twitter will not only make it much more attractive for me as a brand but also more intuitive and meaningful as a user. This also opens up the possibility of Twitter embedding features for curating into their service.

I am a big believer in the concept of curating (which I’ll explain in more detail in a later post) as being a key part of the future of online influence because a curator can fill a role across the social web that will be needed as social graphs become more relevant/widespread and the overall sources of content continue to grow, fragment and specialize.

To play Karnak for a moment, as everyone’s streams of news and social content grow to become torrential rivers, managing them will become exceedingly difficult. Additionally, as bloggers and their readers develop longer term relationships it will become less important to keep up with their blogs and twitter feeds on a day to day basis to stay connected. That is where curators come in. They will act as the much needed funnels between the river and the reader.

This is not really revolutionary thinking here. Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop is already doing this in a certain way by aggregating top news and blogs around specific sources into customizable pages. My guy Len Kendall does this with great effect as well using his Twitter feed as one of the best sources of trends, info, random facts and fun oddities.

Which leads to the idea I’m calling the “Magic Middle.” Think of the social news cycle in three parts. Twitter is what is happening now. It is so instantaneous in nature that six to twelve hour-old tweets are about as useful as day-old bubbles. On the other end you have Google. The Internet’s elephant that never forgets. Between instant and permanent lies that Magic Middle. Part of the reason I consider it magic is that it is very rapid, but is built with the expectation of time for influencers, curators and other thoughtful folks to review, analyze and build upon the ideas in that river.

In this Magic Middle, you will be able to both combine and divide sources of information from your social graph. For example, several bloggers that I follow for social media and tech info are also fans of craft beer. How cool would it be to have a curated stream setup of “craft beer reviews and info from tech folks”? This would draw in relevant blog posts, digg’ed articles, tweets, Facebook likes, posterous comments and online reviews from across the web into a single stream. Many people feeding many sources funneled and refined into one manageable stream. That stream would also have buttons to rewind, fast forward and play.

Who will own this space? Only time will tell. Alltop certainly has a foothold there already. Digg also has track record and scalable audience that help dominate. In the meantime, I can’t wait to play in this middle ground.

Get More Sales- Today!

In the world of sales… and we are ALL in sales… everyone wants more sales. So, there is a simple way to accomplish this goal. But before I give you the simple ways to do it– here are 7 things to consider… in regards to getting more sales.

Getting more sales is more than having a power handshake. Getting more sales is more than saying someone’s first name repeated times. Getting more sales is more than a having a cool power tie. Getting more sales is more than having a snazzy PowerPoint. Getting more sales is more than cranking out lots of phone calls a day Getting more sales is more than supplying the hot ticket to game or event. Getting more sales is more than using buzzwords and acronyms. So these are things to think about when we think about getting more sales.

Now, ready for the secret?

OK… Sales is no secret at all. Sorry I wish there was one.

Here is what sales is about. Sales is a process based on trust and the building of strong human relationships. It is an art not a science. It is about giving more than getting. It is about helping more than selling. I have never “sold anyone” on anything. It goes against the very fabric of what sales is all about. There are no sales shortcuts, no gimmicks, nor anything other than trust, value, seeking to understand how to meet others needs, building relationships and living by the highest code of ethics. Sales is about doing the right thing.

So there you have it. I hope you will Get More Sales – Today but achieving more sales today– is actually a natural byproduct of a salesperson having done the things mentioned in the paragraph above– consistently– day in and day out.

What do you value in your sales efforts?

Ryan T. Sauers

www.sauersgroup.com
www.twitter.com/ryansauers

Digital Storytelling: comics, heroes, symbols and myths

Last Friday I got to combine my lit-geek and WOM-geek selves at Digital Storytelling 2010, “an afternoon of inspirational speakers and events for journalists, academics, entrepreneurs, digital experts and students” created by not on the wires and the BBC College of Journalism.

1000heads were very proud to be Headline Sponsors of such an eclectic and intelligent event. Sadly I couldn’t stay for long, but I did catch Ben Chesterton’s moving presentation of the work he’s doing with Duckrabbit, mashing up audio and photography in the Condition Critical slideshows for Médecins Sans Frontières, which tell some pretty important and powerful tales.

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Are You Measuring What’s Important?

We often talk about social media ROI being measured differently. These are different behaviors and we should be applying new and different measurement standards, right? One of my favorite demonstrations of this is K.D. Paine’s legendary acronymn HITS = How Idiots Track Success.

A recent eMarketer article asked Is the Click Still King? To the average user, there are so many ways to engage with a site. So you would think that there would be more relevant and prevalent ways of measuring success. But take a look at the top methods that both the CMO Council and Chief Marketer respondents indicated were important:

Click-throughs and website views. How very 1999.

Although, I will give the CMO Council the edge on this one, with looking at registrations, which tells you a little bit about actions taken and level of commitment to engage. That’s a positive thing. But it seems like we’re still treating the Web like a version of television, where “eyeballs” are what’s important.

Take a look farther down those charts and see some of the interesting ways of measuring success: content download, transactions, engagement (which is a little vague), and increased knowledge. Those are all methods of demonstrating effectiveness that can determine your content strategy and marketing channels moving forward. But ultimately, each time a campaign is launched, the methodology for measurement needs to be customized to the goal at hand. Click-throughs and hits are not a universal metric for every campaign.

Some metrics that might appeal to me as a marketer include:

  • Likelihood of a customer to become an advocate for my brand
  • The spread of information across the Web – especially via social tools
  • Sentiment of comments generated by a post or campaign
  • Effective integration of offline calls to action and online actions

These are just a handful of suggestions for different types of measurement. As I said, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. What are some unique and different measurement standards that you’ve seen evolving?

Scott Monty

Photo credit: raneko (Flickr)

Beyond Connections, to Building Relationships

It is news to no one that when it comes to marketing, relationships trump everything.

A challenge in the pursuit of this asset is to recognize the difference between connections and relationships. (Or, for that matter, the difference between followers or fans and relationships.)

At the risk of oversimplifying, establishing connections is relatively easy. Building and nurturing relationships is not.

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