feedback

Listen. Do You Want To Know A Secret?

For anyone of a certain age (we won’t be any more specific) those words most likely prompt a mind’s earful of a catchy tune as recorded by the Fab Four.  (If “Fab Four” is meaningless to you, skip to paragraph 2.)  The lyrics of the song, simplistic as they might be, belie one of the key — maybe even THE key criteria to successful relationship: be quiet; listen up; and you are likely to hear something of value.

Makes for a nice song.  But practically speaking, we don’t much care for the discipline that is required to really listen.

Don’t believe this?  Look around, and consider the precipitous decline in the art of conversation.  E-mail, texting, social updates (in as few as 140 characters, to boot) — all make it infinitely more easy to browse, skim, filter and create shortcuts for messaging.  Key words and optimized phrases have become the shorthand of ideas.  Seems like this used to be thought of as “hearing only what we want to hear.”

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The Power of the Brand? Ask Their Customers!

Looking to travel from the east to the west coast recently, I decided to take a look outside my normal coast-to-coast airlines United and American Airlines.

Jet Blue, with great seats and video selections, wasn’t flying around the times I needed but noticed that Virgin America was.

Having taken Virgin Atlantic for some Boston-London flights in the past, I pondered whether Virgin America was the same, or as good as (or worse than) Virgin Atlantic.

So I turned to Twitter to ask the gang if they had any thoughts. This was my Tweet:

“Thinking of taking Virgin America Boston-San Fran, any thoughts? (Have flown Virgin Atlantic, but not America)”

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Determining and Delivering the Ultimate ROI of Social Media

There is one thing that makes social media special — not to mention social — and, from a business perspective at least, it’s the one reason SM is worth investing in.

It comes in the form of the conversations that used to occur at the water-cooler or over the backyard fence, or in the good-old-fashioned (un-choreographed) town hall meetings. It is about give-and-take, and real-time feedback.

While one of the primary ways we evaluate marketing tools is in terms of how effectively a message is delivered, social calls for a new way of thinking about media. (Or, more accurately, it can actually help refocus our perspective on what constitutes successful communication. But that’s another discussion.) This is a new brand of media, made up of the fabric of relationship. This tool is far from one-way, one-sided or one-dimensional. It is about participation, collaboration and interaction.

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Reaching out to The Social CMO community

As you may have noticed from some recent tweets, The Social CMO Crew are writing a book, entitled surprisingly enough The Social CMO!

But before we embark on this illustrious effort we want to get your opinion and input. More than four hundred thousand of you now follow the various member accounts of The Social CMO Crew and I know most of you have opinions!

The structure for the first part of the book is based upon the LEADS concept which is outlined in the companion post Mastering social media is all about who LEADS!

With this in mind, we have posted the contents for the first The Social CMO book below for you to review and comment on. So please do read them through and add your comments and suggestions below.

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