https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYxIGiezCn4
Published on May 13, 2014
While attending Hispanicize 2014, Ted Rubin took a moment to present his take on the Age of Influence with Community Building.
community
Customer Loyalty Management via the Customer Service Silo
All of your employees work in the marketing department, at least to some extent, and they need to understand the role they play. But to create a strong foundation for customer loyalty management, there are a few departments within your company that absolutely need to sync with marketing. Your customer service department is the most important.
Here are four ways you can leverage your customer service team to effectively manage customer loyalty, build relationships, and turn customers into fans. Think Return on Relationship… because there is no better time than when your customers reach out to you.
I am Currently a Free Agent and Open to Opportunities…
Initially I will be Consulting, Speaking, Writing, etc. More to come soon 
In the words of Collective Bias Co-Founder John Andrews…
Most C-level Executives, CMO included, view “Social” as media—but they don’t know how to interact with consumers there in a meaningful way. They want to buy CPMs or Likes—but don’t know what to do with them afterward.
CMO’s also make the mistake of assuming that the social audience has the same pain and passion points as their face-to-face or store audience. Most often that is not the case.
In order to get the real value out of Social, you must connect emotionally to the people who are there and find out what they’re looking for. CMOs are used to ads and campaigns, so that’s the place they gravitate, but even Facebook ads are only media buys. Ads are good for building initial likes, but they really are targeted to demographics just like any other ad.
The Power of Community in Social Media ~via @GenFabulous
by Chloe Jeffreys on July 11, 2013 in Coffee with Chloe, GenFabTV, Social Media – VIDEO interview below
Last year at BlogHer I had the chance to meet Ted Rubin, co-author of Return on Relationship
Creating Expert Communities with Tweetchats
In June #MMchat aka #MarketerMonday chat will be held for the 100th time!
Established July 26th, 2010 #MMchat has become a weekly tradition for an ever expanding number of CMOs, marketers and others working in and around the digital social networking space. And all of us at @TheSocialCMO were recently very pleased when #MMchat was named one of the 15 Essential Social Marketing Twitter Chats by Mashable.
One of the most elusive goals of transient social networks remains the creation of sustainable ongoing communities of interest. Tweetchats are an excellent way to not only establish such an expert community, but to also keep it engaged and growing on an ongoing basis.
If You Build It, The Leads Will Come
It’s quickly becoming the mantra of interactive strategists: lead or be led. You either lead your online community, or they will lead you. There’s no stopping the swell of communal opinion generation that has become the hallmark of our society’s online engagement.
The most die-hard critics of social media are beginning to utter: If you cant beat them, join them. But is simply joining the online community enough for a business to discover the elusive Return on Investment from social media activities? Many practitioners call this the catch 22 of the medium: overtly selling in social networks is counter-community and quickly kills your following; not selling is counter-intuitive to most business culture.
So if selling is counter-intuitive to community-building where do the leads come from? My philosophy has always been to let the leads find me! Its quite ingenious if I do say so myself! Why sell when, if done right, social media will have people lining up to ask for my service? Sound good? It is, but its not easy to achieve.
Selling the benefits of charity
Everything we do, we do because somehow it benefits us.
We go to work for the satisfaction (I hope) and because we get paid. We smile at a stranger because it feels good to be nice (and perhaps we’ll get a smile in return). We pick up litter when no one is looking because telling ourselves a story about being a good person is worth the effort.
Some people have figured out that charity is an incredible bargain. For the time and money it costs, the benefits exceed what could be attained in almost any other way. A bargain compared to chocolate, or an amusement park visit or buying a shiny new car you probably don’t need.
The Antidote to Negative Commentary
As much as we might not want to admit it, something negative about our brand will be said sometime by someone in a social network. It might be due to a change, or something out of the brand’s control or only one little misstep in many months, but chances are, that unfortunate experience will be shared. Such is the nature of information-sharing through social networks.
But it’s that same nature of social media that also gives us a powerful antidote to negative commentary – ENGAGEMENT.
We might be tempted to cover any negative feedback with a huge push of positive messaging, stating and re-stating how wonderful our products and services really are. This attempt at damage-control, however, does little if anything to protect our brand reputation. Whether or not our products and services are usually terrific doesn’t matter to the person who had a different experience with our brand, nor to those closest in their social network. What matters to them is the one unsatisfying experience they had.
This is where engagement becomes vital. We can stay disengaged and pretend nothing negative was said, but ignoring those comments won’t keep them from spreading quickly through various social networks. If we choose instead to engage with the consumer(s) making those comments, we have a huge opportunity to help positively change the perception of our brand.
Gratitude fuels community
Please DON’T buy that next book on “How to build a community,” or that yet-another-book on “Joining the conversation.” Here’s something you can do right now, right where you are, and you don’t even need a book to show you how: when that next person walks into your office, calls you on the phone, or sends you an email, stop to seriously ponder the question…
If you make a habit of focusing on things for which you’re grateful and then make it a habit of expressing that gratitude through every available media (and especially face-to-face), you’ll build that community you seek. And, hey, even if you don’t built a huge community, guess what? You’ll be grateful for the community you do have.
You might just be amazed what a lot of gratitude and a small community can do together.
Gratitude fuels community.
Trey Pennington