Archive for December, 2009
Welcome Lisa Hoesel
Posted by umangshah in Customer Marketing, Integrated Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing on December 21st, 2009
Cubed Consulting (@cubedconsulting) is proud and excited to announce that Lisa Hoesel-Peters (@lhoesel) is the newest member of the Cubed Consulting team. Lisa has over twenty years of customer relationship, reference and technology strategic management, consulting, and execution in verticals as diverse as financial, technology, and non-profit. Lisa’s keen insight into the variety of ways that businesses can create compelling and sustainable conversations with clients, prospects and other audiences is informed by the breadth and depth of her experience as much as her avid and enthusiastic participation in social media and networking activities and analysis. Lisa’s expertise in the Small, Medium and Emerging Business markets will be a welcome compliment to Cubed Consulting. Lisa’s will serve as Director of Social Networking Strategy and can be contacted on lisa@cubedconsulting.com.
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12 “Days” of Customer Thank You Ideas that Become Gifts to Your Organization
Posted by Lisa in Customer Experience, Customer Marketing, Integrated Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing on December 17th, 2009
Please pardon the seasonal theme, particularly as we at CubedConsulting believe that relationship sustenance begins, continues, and hopefully never ends with creative and comprehensive ways of acknowledging your clients and receiving testimonial and reference collateral in return throughout the year, but it “tis the season”… If you can catch your breath at this time of year, we at least hope that you may have time to give some thought to the introduction of innovation to your customer reference and relationship programs using some of these ideas:
1. Send your Top 100 Clients a Flip Mino and ask them to record and upload a clip about your services and solutions.
2. Create a YouTube Channel and record holiday greetings from key customer service contact people. Film people you may not traditionally consider but have important customer contact roles.
3. Offer to exchange audio testimonials with vendors who are also clients.
4. Write a post for your corporate blog that singles out top clients and charitable activities in which they have participated or interesting accomplishments of theirs this past year. Don’t tie yourself to information that is solely related to their relationship with you: just acknowledge them.
5. Add rotating refreshed holiday greetings to your email signatures that single out indiviudals, companies, etc. with which/whom you do business. Create a template that your sales, marketing, customer organization can change out every day throughout the holidays (and then create one for the rest of the year)!
6. Announce your plans to launch a customer community blog with “insider” access to development roadmaps, key technical personnel, your CEO, etc. Offer a “room” or discussion thread that is not monitored by you.
7. Run a contest asking for videos of the funniest, non-traditional (but appropriate) use of your services and solutions and offer the winner a free pass to your next user conference.
8. Run a contest (with similar rules) offering the winner fifteen minutes of telephone access to your CEO.
9. Offer to include your clients’ corporate charity of choice and information about donation and participation in all of your January 2010 promotional collateral.
10. Assign a top client to an employee with whom they traditionally do not interact. Ask your employee to make a phone call or send an email thanking them for their business this year. This might demonstrate that your entire organization, not just their account and sales representatives, are committed to the relationship.
11. Add thank-you messages to all of your social media channels and make them personal. We expect that you may have sent our some holiday greetings, but use the global reach of SMN and the ability to personalize to extend this effort.
12. Take a breath. Give yourself and your clients a break by promising that you won’t ask them to take any more reference calls or be interviewed for a case study, press release, or anything else until next year! 
Our sincerest wishes for a safe, relaxing, and joyous holiday season to all of you!
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Seven Social Media Virtues
Posted by Lisa in Integrated Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing on December 7th, 2009
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins
This post began as a list of the seven deadly SINS of social media, but as I scanned my TweetDeck, various sites, and the general chatter that I monitor about and in social media sites, I decided that our role as consultants should be as focused on the positive and results-oriented possibilities of our internetworking more than critique. We have discussed and helped clients implement tactics oriented around our key success factors, and I hope this informs and enlightens that approach as much as it highlights techniques for compelling and sustainable social media and network interactions. With no further ado and much literary license re Pope Gregory’s original virtues as alternatives to the vices:
Chastity: Recruit followers and Fans and invite membership to communities you establish with the objective of creating a meaningful and valuable dialogue between you and your constituencies. The quality of the engagement is far more important than the quantity of members and followers.
Temperance: Maintain a regular schedule of blog posts, status updates, and Tweets, and avoid posting just for the sake of posting. Key messages on a consistent basis become expected and are less likely to be overlooked.
Charity: Concern and active help offered to others. Provide valuable insight to problems, offer customers communities where they can exchange best practices, ask questions and be open to constructive input.
Diligence: Develop infrastructure and guidelines around your social media strategy so that it maps to your marketing, sales and company guidelines. Make your social media effort a formal activity rather than an item on the “get-to” list.
Patience: We share with our clients many ways that you can attract and retain followers and Fans, but we also advise avoiding most automated tools that guarantee X number of followers overnight. If you do the footwork of identifying the audience you want to attract and the communities to which they belong and tag words that you include in your posts that will trigger alerts for them, you will begin to build a following.
Kindness: Stress the positive aspects of your solutions and offerings rather than delineating the failings of your competitors. The opportunity to share where you are differentiated will come in different format than 140 characters.
Humility: A strange virtue for marketing consultants to advocate, perhaps, but the social media world is very self-regulating and expects honest and real information. We earn our followers and fans, and to earn them we must offer to engage in networking dialogue rather than demand it. As you develop networks of satisfied customers, weaving their Tweets and comments into your own posts become a very effective means for getting objective testimonials about your solutions.
The most effective social media strategies are those that are clearly mindful and planned to acheive the overall goals of an organization by using new and different channels. If the strategy is clearly laid out, and these virtues are top of mind, there is no reason why the execution cannot happen at various and compelling levels of the organizaiton that may not be traditionally externally facing.
Best regards until next time, Lisa.
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Should We Allow our CEO to Tweet?
Posted by Lisa in Integrated Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing on December 1st, 2009
We’ve been asked by a lot of C-Levels lately about how much of their personal life and voice they should expose in their corporate “conversations”. Not to obfuscate too much, but our answer is invariably “it depends”. I hope that we can all agree at this point that ROI for social media has been demonstrated and at worst, agree that all organizations in all verticals are impacted by the adoption of social media and networking as mechanisms for consumers to express their opinions (United Airlines YouTube, Whole Foods, etc. etc.), but the question for many executives remains “Should I individually participate in these conversational arenas and what guidelines govern the exposure of me as an individual v. a corporate citizen?”
We can debate John Mackey’s personal opinion about health care reform until carpal tunnel sets in, but I would rather remind all of us of some basic tenets of social conversation and prudence and remember our key success factors:
1) Be genuine. Individual voice and opinion are the hallmarks of our social internetworking and in many corporations define the uniqueness, variety, and personalization that is the core of their products and services. Officers and key executives must be mindful, however, that their personal politics and opinions are perceived as representative of their corporate positions, so should be mindful of this intermingling.
2) Interact. Has your organization established policies about executive social media and networking participation and if not, perhaps you should before taking on the role yourself. We advise all of our clients to develop a social media approach that is aligned with overall corporate, marketing, sales, and customer relations strategies as a first step. The cultural etiquette and expectations of social media are that we are engaging in conversation, dialogue, and responses with our audiences, not merely unilaterally publishing facts. Although certain channels may be appropriate for CEO or officer messaging, most are more dynamic and require more attention.
3) Provide value. As truly well-thought and argued your personal opinion may be, the relevance of your topic and the content that you offer to your customers, prospects, and employees should always be the first consideration. I’ve recently been reading a number of posts on www.theconsumercollective.com that provide some very compelling statistics regarding consumers willingess to defect from brands and services not due to a reverse in perceived value, but because they feel our published opinions, thoughts, diatribes, digital “nuggets of wisdom” are quite frankly, boring.
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