social

Filling the Big Content Gap

In social strategy there is always something missing and something to improve. But there’s one area where I see a big gap.

First, the good news. Brands are starting to ‘listen’ to what people are saying. There are great listening and social media management platforms available, such as Spredfast (plug disclosure…I’m an advisor). However, it’s typically a few people inside the company that are paying attention to user generated content. There’s still a long way to go to make this listening penetrate the depths of an organization to achieve what I call “Customer Oxygen”.

Then, there’s the analytics. There are a lot of ways to analyze the data of what people are saying. Many solutions are out there. The gap here is in making the analysis actionable and operational.

But then, once the listening and analysis is going, brands have the biggest challenge with content. What do they say? How do they say it? They have difficulty finding their ‘social voice’, and figuring out what to say where.
This is the big content gap.

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What is Experiential Marketing and is it Social?

What does experiential marketing entail? It entails allowing a customer/prospect to engage & interact with a brand, product, and service in sensory ways that provides an additional intimate level of experience and information.

Personal experiences help people connect to a brand & make intelligent & informed purchasing decisions. “Experiential Marketing” refers to actual customer experiences with the brand/product/service that drive sales and increase brand image and awareness.It is the difference between telling people about features of a product or service and letting them experience the benefits for themselves.

Many think of this as a totally separate form of marketing from social, but to me it is the ultimate in social marketing. It is all about experiencing a product or brand… and what could be more social. In addition the power of social is not the initial reach, but the engagement and more importantly the sharing that follows and enables a brand to reach into each individual’s social graph. How better to do that than to give a consumer an “experiential” experience to share.

Ted Rubin

Social Media and the Power of Business Etiquette

With billions of Facebook posts, tweets, and YouTube uploads, there’s never been a more appropriate time to evaluate our social graces—in real life and in social media. The relaxed communication style of emails, texting, and the public timeline can present an illusion of relationship. After one tweet, we find ourselves sharing personal information with total strangers and risking a breach of business decorum.

Inextricably woven into the art of doing business is etiquette: a combination of common courtesies, mutual respect, and common sense. Learning how to build appropriate relationships in business is crucial to business success. By focusing on three core areas—actions, appearance, and words—we can gain a clearer understanding of the messages we send to colleagues, managers, and customers.

Make it easy for people to do business with you. We all want to work with smart, perceptive, well-mannered people. If your actions and personality get in the way of your clients’ receiving what they need from you, change. Are you hard to please? Critical? Unappreciative of colleagues or vendors? You’ll lose clients and employees with a history of these behaviors.

To discover how to attract and keep clients, find the best leaders and emulate them. Notice how they lead, how they conduct business, and how they treat their team. Interestingly, people’s personalities aren’t disguised on social media channels, they’re actually magnified. When one executive showed me his 3-page resume, I smiled and said, “We might not need traditional resumes from job seekers now, we’ll just Google them. We can learn immediately who they keep company with, how disciplined they are, and if they show respect to others.”

Common courtesies in business begin with punctuality, a firm handshake, and attentive listening—online and in person. Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval have captured valuable business lessons in their book The Power of Nice, How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness. They explain that “Nice makes more money. Nice is healthier. Nice spends less time in court.”

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Confessions of a world traveler

magritte

Eric Fletcher posted a tweet saying, “World traveller @treypennington…” At first, I was a tad embarrassed, then I embraced his reference. This IS an incredible time and I am grateful for the amazing adventure life is. I’m even more thankful for the fuel powering this adventure.

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No doubt most of us think of places when we hear “world traveler,” as in Big Ben or the London Eye in London or the Eiffel Tower, River Senn, or Notre Dame in Paris. All are fantastic places and places I’ve been able to see this year. Still, there’s something else that makes those places so memorable…

London is a romantic, history-rich place with ample venues for catching up with Gemma, Caroline, Luke, Dickie, Eric, Drew, Gabrielle and many other friends. Paris is home to Loic, Thibault, Maxim, and Michelle. Devon is home territory for Scott, Andrew, John, and a whole host of people who are friends.

My journeys abroad take me face-to-face with friends—friends I met and got to know first on social media (primarily Twitter). The fuel for my “world travels” is the people of social media.

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Social media opens doors to new friends all over the place. To experience the true hidden treasure in social media, it’s vital to take advantage of opportunities to get face-to-face. Social media can fuel the initial connections and the ongoing connections; face-to-face adds immeasurable richness to the experience.

Social media not only opens the doors to new friends, it also paves the road to opportunities usually limited to folks called celebrities. For instance, because of connections and interactions facilitated by social media, I’ll spend time with Seth Godin in New York and with Zig Ziglar in Orlando…all this month and then again with Chris Brogan in Memphis next month.

Why am I sharing this with you? Because I’m a celebrity or an important person? Hardly. The point is, I’m an average person who’s having an extraordinary experience because of new friends all around the world. The tools that connected me with those friends are readily available to you. That means you have what you need to discover the open doors to whatever adventure you want.

Those of us who enjoy what can be accomplished through social media often spend a lot of time actually talking about the media. The media is fascinating. The adventure begins, though, not with the media, but with people it connects you with.

My adventure, and joy in life, is finding new friends, being with them long enough to catch a vision of their hidden treasure, help them see it and then encourage them and help them grasp it to do something.

Your adventure is probably something entirely different. You, for instance, may want to get people to consume resources with minimal impact on the environment: there are brilliant people doing unbelievably cool things around your adventure…they just probably aren’t hanging out at your local coffee shop or pub. They probably are hanging out online…and sharing what they’re learning (check out what Norway is doing about storing the CO2 deep under the sea, for instance).

Whatever your dream adventure is, there are probably whole communities of people already gathering online to talk about it. Why not jump in online and watch for your opportunity to get face-to-face with them?

Trey Pennington