social

Being ‘More Connected’ – Key Step in Owning a Seat at the Revenue Table

In my continuing series of blog posts on gaining that proverbial “seat” at the senior management table, I have discussed the importance of being more agile and social in marketing, and throughout the entire revenue process. In this week’s post, I focus on the importance of being increasingly more “connected” in all of your marketing, sales, and revenue-oriented activities.

Of course, a sure fire way to strengthen connectivity – as well as enhance both agility and social media engagement – is adopting Revenue Performance Management (RPM). At its core, RPM is all about driving integration between the corporate functions that are so crucial to generating more revenue, but which too often operate as disconnected silos.

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10 Wins for my Business from Twitter

Through some recent debate about which social tools are best and why, I have been listening and reflecting on how my own business has been impacted.  It is one thing to spend your time researching and writing and another to spend your time helping 20+ clients win everyday in this 24/7 viral world we live in. The challenge is surfing through it all to find what works for you and your business.  Time will limit what resources companies can dedicate to the social channels.  I think some channels are better for certain businesses. Digital and social don’t mean a “one size fits all” strategy.  

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The Four Hats of The Social CMO Webinar

Join us for The Four Hats of The Social CMO webinar for a unique look at four roles emerging marketing leaders can embrace as they evolve to become Social CMOs!

As with any new disruptive technology, social networking usage in enterprise business is still in its’ infancy with marketers in a preferred position to gain advantage. CMO’s can benefit from being first movers in introducing and adopting social networking technologies to become social leaders within their organizations.

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When Social Falls Short

This post is for anyone who has had to ask (or been on the receiving end of the query) where did our social media marketing strategy go wrong?

The answer may be two-fold.

It is possible that things began to go awry when the primary focus of social media marketing shifted to numbers; that is, when the accumulation of fans, friends, followers and connections became the be-all-end-all measure of success.

Especially when compared to conventional media, social media affords such great opportunities, not the least of which is placing the world at the proverbial doorstep of any enterprise…without respect to budget.  But the instant that bolstering numbers becomes the objective, the real strength of SM has been diminished.  From the beginning, social has been about community; its dynamic growth is directly linked to the market’s desire to connect, to experience relationship, to be part of something; its lifeblood is dialogue.  Go for numbers in lieu of relationships and sacrifice results.

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Research shows Facebook emotional boost is like marriage

Do social media technologies isolate people and promote false relationships? Or are there important benefits associated with being connected to others in this way?

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project decided to examine these questions in a survey that explored people’s overall social networks and how use of these technologies is related to trust, tolerance, social support, and community and political engagement.

Among the many interesting findings, Pew reports that the social relationship “boost” received by Facebook users is equivalent to about half the total support that the average American receives as a result of being married.

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Personality matters more than platforms

When I say the phrase ’social recruiting’, what do you think of?

Agencies putting job roles on Twitter? HR building relationships through LinkedIn and trawling blogs? Or even unscrupulous recruiters creating Foursquare ‘places’ near competitors advertising new jobs? All this and more was discussed a few weeks ago at the #trulondon Social Recruiting Unconference, and very interesting it was too.

But this just blows all that out of the water.

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We want to add some talent to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigative team. Every serious candidate should have a proven track record of conceiving, reporting and writing stellar investigative pieces that provoke change. However, our ideal candidate has also cursed out an editor, had spokespeople hang up on them in anger and threatened to resign at least once because some fool wanted to screw around with their perfect lede.

We do a mix of quick hit investigative work when events call for it and mini-projects that might run for a few days. But every year we like to put together a project way too ambitious for a paper our size because we dream that one day Walt Bogdanich will have to say: “I can’t believe the Sarasota Whatever-Tribune cost me my 20th Pulitzer.” As many of you already know, those kinds of projects can be hellish, soul-sucking, doubt-inducing affairs. But if you’re the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble… well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you’re our kind of sicko.

For those unaware of Florida’s reputation, it’s arguably the best news state in the country and not just because of the great public records laws. We have all kinds of corruption, violence and scumbaggery. The 9/11 terrorists trained here. Bush read My Pet Goat here. Our elections are colossal clusterfucks. Our new governor once ran a health care company that got hit with a record fine because of rampant Medicare fraud. We have hurricanes, wildfires, tar balls, bedbugs, diseased citrus trees and an entire town overrun by giant roaches (only one of those things is made up). And we have Disney World and beaches, so bring the whole family.

Send questions, or a resume/cover letter/links to clips to my email address below. If you already have your dream job, please pass this along to someone whose skills you covet. Thanks.

Matthew Doig
Sarasota Herald-Tribune

This (which I found via the awesome FleetStreetBlues) has unsurprisingly spread like herpes through a newsroom, being retweeted and posted to Facebook pages and blogs by journalists worldwide. But what’s great is that that happened not because of some convoluted social strategy but because the copy itself is simply so ballsy, personal, disruptive and refreshing.

As Matthew Doig’s own surprise at the reaction attests, this was so successful because it is so obviously authentic to his team’s style and attitude. That’s being social – being interesting, individual and honest.

If you achieve that, the platforms will largely take care of themselves.

Have you seen any other job ads that *really* made you talk?

Molly Flatt

People and The Power of Hashtags

In these early days of 2011, contrary to the opinions of some, social networking has passed the tipping point. An interesting assertion but how do we know this?

All we can do is look at the evidence of these changes and it is mounting. We review the numerous attempts to impair internet communications and access to social media and start by sharing this quote during the crisis in Egypt.

“Clearly, what’s rattled the government is the major role that social media has played in the protests rocking the country’s cities, including Cairo.

“Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Google Docs have been used in unprecedented ways this time around — both for coordination, and for disseminating news,” Jillian York, Harvard University, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Our small, medium and large screens are filled with images from around the world starting from the ongoing revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, first the fall of #Tunisia, then #Egypt and now #Libya where it seems to only be a matter of time.

And not surprisingly, at this time even the protests in Iran and China are starting to heat up again and the governments there are clamping down quickly each time before the protest momentum can build to any significant level.

But interestingly there are also emerging examples here in North America surrounding both labor #wiunions and entertainment #oscars that are also demonstrative of the accelerating impact of social.

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The future of work

Since the start of the year, I’ve been heading up our Social Business Consultancy here at 1000heads, and I’ve been spending a lot of my time this month listening rather than talking; seeking ideas from a huge range of people on what a ’social business’ of the future really should look like and the challenges in implementing some of those changes now.

Our social consultancy clients include Mars, Heineken, Nokia, Cancer Research UK, Veria and LocateTV, so we well know that being social can mean something very different depending on what sort of company you are – the approach has to be bespoke.

However, I’m also a believer in starting with what the ideal social business might be and being bold in challenging businesses to question and evolve themselves as radically as possible.

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4 Keys to Increasing Your Klout Score

Now that the Wall Street Journal is writing about them, you probably already know about Klout. If you’re using Hootsuite, your Klout score, and the Klout score of your followers, is front-and-center. Here are four ways you can increase your Klout score.

  1. Get important people to talk about you. Klout measures the visible vestiges of influence. Getting people who already have Klout scores to retweet your tweets or in some other way mention you enables you to ride the draft of their influence. You can find these people by using Klout’s business service. You might check out HubSpot’s listing of Twitter Elite, too. Follow them on Twitter, retweet them, and if they don’t notice you, you can use a Twitter mention to ask them to retweet you. If you’ll get important people to talk about you, you can increase your Klout score.

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Why you may want to know what a wikibrand is

All of you wonderful marketers, public relations, advertising and communications folks out there who have a lock on and already have a dialed in plan for social networking and the impact it will have on your brand and/or business need to read no further. For the rest of you, I suggest you may want to learn what a wikibrand is.

After beginning the book with a short history of on brands and the phases of brand development since 1860, co-authors Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover compare the period of transition to social we are now currently in, to the Mad Men period of transition from radio/print to television.

But the power to be gained by transitioning to a wikibrand mindset really comes from recognizing and developing a better understanding of, then leading your organization across the Marketing Divide (see below graphic). Even more importantly, the book explores how marketers, through leading the migration across this divide to a social future, have the opportunity to again elevate the marketing function to it’s rightful place leading the parade of an engaged and dynamically connected company and it’s community of customers.

The Marketing Divide

Not sure if this is another Mad men reference, but the authors also lay out and detail their FLIRT concept which represents Focus, Language and content, Incentives, motivation and outreach, Rules and rituals and lastly Tools and platforms. This represents the construct Moffitt and Dover recommend to build out a wikibrand and I will leave it to the authors to further convey as they explain fully in the book.

Once you’ve mastered the concepts around flirting, it’s time to get your wikibrand show on the road with what they describe as “Incubating Your Wikibrand Community” including sharing insightful methods for community development, internalization, management and of course measurement & metrics.

Wrapping up, in his Foreword to the book, “Reinvention of the Brand” Don Tapscott suggests this may be a seminal work and I tend to agree. I say this because too many marketers out there are still treating social as an oddity and handling it with their kid gloves. If Wikibrands does nothing else(and it does), it should through the logical analysis and evolutionary brand progression provided, lead marketers still offside with social to the realization that it is far from an oddity, but rather a portal to our emerging future.

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO

Full disclosure: For purposes of transparency, we did receive a review copy of the Wikibrands book.