Straight Forward Suggestions for Crowdsourcing Content

Every business needs content in order to be found in search, and to differentiate them from the competition. Without quality, helpful content (and lots of it), you’re lost in a school of fish that are all the same color. Who’s going to find you? Who’s going to pick you?

The trouble with content development is that it can be expensive. Website copy, blog articles, e-books, reports—they all take time and effort (and dollars) to produce. However without them, you really can’t do an effective job of marketing your business—especially in the social age. It’s the classic chicken-or-the-egg syndrome. The more social our businesses become, the more we need that variety of content that speaks to our listeners and helps them solve their problems so we can A: get their attention, and B: develop relationships with them.

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Social PR: It’s Sink or Swim in the Age of Instant News

Scary Fact: Did you know that 56% of top brands did NOT respond to customer comments on their Facebook page in 2011? — A.T. Kearney

PR has awesome power to build, maintain and protect brands, especially now, with the ever-expanding social universe at our fingertips. This has spawned an entirely new, but totally related, subcategory to the practice of public relations that we like to call #SOcialpr, here at Strategic Objectives.

It used to be that PR Pros targeted the mainstream media to make (or stifle) news for our clients. Today, thanks to the rapidly proliferating presence, and usage, of social networks, our sphere of influence must now reach out to widely diversified communities including social influences and bloggers/citizen journalists, employees, customers, shareholders, stakeholders and consumers themselves.

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Dear [insert business name], what’s your promise?

You say you want to get closer to customers, but your actions are different than your words.

You say you want to “surprise and delight” customers, but your product development teams are too busy building against a roadmap without consideration of the 5th P of marketing…people.

Your employees are your number one asset, however the infrastructure of the organization has turned once optimistic and ambitious intrapreneurs into complacent cogs or worse, your greatest detractors.

You question the adoption of disruptive technology by your internal champions yet you’ve not tried to find the value for yourself.

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100% immersion. Why CMOs (and other C’s) need to get involved in social.

I had a stint one summer in my early twenties as an Executive Assistant to a CEO. Most of my role involved “managing” the CEO’s inbox. That meant printing out every email.

Twice a day we would have a meeting in his office. The CEO would read through the emails.  He would dictate a reply while I scribbled it down in a notebook.

Later, I would go back to my desk and type out the email, pressing send on his behalf.

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Increasing Marketing Effectiveness in the Midst of Generation C

Generation C via Brian SolisThis past week, I attended the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit, which was held in Madrid, Spain. As part of the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit, I led the Marketing Innovation Summit which brought together marketing professionals to network and discuss best practices. Of the 1,700 conference attendees, more than one thousand came from marketing backgrounds, providing a rich and in-depth conversation surrounding best practices for marketing effectiveness.

During the Marketing Innovation Summit, I focused on the idea of the Generation C (“C” for connected) customer. Today’s customer is digitally connected via an array of devices and channels and with that, consumers are far more in control than ever before. Consumer demands and expectations are great and it’s our job as marketers to evolve to meet those needs.

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Does Big Data Kill Big Thinking?

Big Data is a popular term today that references the huge volumes of business and consumer data being collected and stored by organizations, which cannot be effectively data mined due to the limitations of commonly used software tools that capture, manage, or process the data.

While first diagnosed in the science, government, healthcare and military industries, the vast volumes of consumer data being produced through social technologies has landed this reality – and this problem – on the desks of CMOs globally.

Not only is data being produced at lighting speeds, the devices used to produce, broadcast, measure, store and share that data are on the rise, which then fuels further content generation. The cycle is creating a Big Data cyclone that organizations will continue to struggle with.

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The Eleven Letter Word That Continues To Elude All CMOs And Marketers

It’s a rather simple word to say, just four syllables. It’s an easily understood word on the surface – at least I think it is. Its meaning is quite apparent the moment you hear it. Yet so many CMO’s and marketers treat this 11-letter word as if it were a 4-letter word.

And I don’t know why for the life of me.

The word that continues to elude and evade CMOs and marketers is *I*N*T*E*G*R*A*T*I*O*N.

And as anyone who knows me knows this about me – I am a Scorpio who enjoys hot chocolate in August. No wait, not that.

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The Fallacy of Information Overload

Some of you know me through my work in studying how social media and disruptive technology impact business and culture. Others have worked with me in translating insights into action and change within the enterprise.  Every now and then, I share another side of myself that evokes the aspiring social scientist in me as I explore how all of this is affecting us as individuals and human beings.

Not a day goes by when I’m not asked about whether or not the social media bubble will finally burst. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, Pinterest, this all has to be too much right? More often than not, I’m expected to assume the role of psychologist to either validate their digital existence or help individuals understand, and in some cases cope, with what is most often diagnosed as information overload.

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Badgeville Partners with Yammer to Enhance Employee Performance and Engagement

Badgeville, the gold standard for gamification, today announced a key integration that builds on its partnership with Yammer, the leading provider of enterprise social networks. With this integration, companies can enhance employee performance by leveraging Badgeville to reward high-value user behaviors across the enterprise, and showcase them in the Yammer Ticker, a real-time activity stream.

“We are committed to partnering with first-class business applications to create a powerful social layer across the enterprise, increasing visibility and insights in every corner of an organization,” said An Le, VP of Business Development, Yammer. “Badgeville’s behavior platform helps us deliver on that vision by rewarding employee performance and pulling those key milestones into Yammer where the whole company can discover them.”

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