Posts Tagged LinkedIn

Chickens and Eggs in Social Media Execution

As much as we love technology at Cubed Consulting, our mission is to help our clients develop comprehensive, appropriate, measurable, attainable, and sustainable customer relationship and marketing strategies. Although we enthusiastically Tweet, do status updates, ask to connect in Linkedin, and even create surveys in Facebook; we are ever cognizant that the selection of which e-playground we choose for our outreach and relationship-building is driven first by a clear understanding of our business goals and objectives.   We have worked for and with both small and Fortune 100 clients who have adopted an approach to social media execution without examination of their purpose or alignment with customer relationship, sales, and marketing plans and quite frankly, made a mess of things.   We spend our time helping you understand and articulate your goals first and then assist in the selection of the appropriate social media tools and measurements; posting frequency and content; and integration with other strategies, applications, and efforts.    There may be some consistent truisms to corporate social media interaction, but you will never hear “Everybody MUST have a Twitter account” from us.   You will get recommendations about specific tools after we analyze how best to meet your stated needs.   To illustrate this approach, let’s look at a very skeletal example:

Objective:  Create more corporate/brand awareness in new communities.

Tactics:

1) Traditional marketing outreach and collateral to new communities:

2) Leveraging existing or new social media outlets to establish relationships and create conversation.

a) Join New Groups in Facebook, Linkedin, etc. applications that map to new demographic profile.

b) Use Twitter Lists, hash tags, etc. to gauge and generate interest in solutions, company etc.

c) Produce audio/video/other collateral relevant to message and launch.

d) Etc.

My point is not to delineate the steps of our engagement process, but to demonstrate that the selection of tools, applications, and approach FOLLOW not DEFINE our social media decision-making.   If the objective were to gauge interest in a new solution or product, we may not advise establishing a Facebook or Linkedin presence until the research around communities of interest had determined that those were the appropriate venues.

I’m looking forward to “meeting” many of you and exchanging thoughts!

Regards,

Lisa

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]


Bookmark and Share

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

1 Comment

Initial thoughts from the 2009 Customer Reference Forum

Stay tuned for a blow-by-blow of the highlights from the 2009 Customer Reference Forum (CRF) but, in the meantime, here are my initial impressions after the three day conference.

  • *Social Media is King* – The Forum was keynoted by Laura Ramos from Forrester Research.  I will be posting on this specifically  but her primary message is that Social Media is here whether people like it or not.  In fact, if you are not already involved, you are behind the curve and you risk being left behind.  Laura’s presentation was the perfect segue into my workshop on Thursday.  As you can imagine, I am going to be talking a lot more about this.
  • All of the speakers were great – Let me start by making it clear: I’m not just saying that because I was a speaker.  While I am quite happy with the workshop that Rhett Livengood and I facilitated on Social Media, all of the speakers were very interesting this year.  It is going to be a hard-fought battle for the “Top Speaker” award.  <shameless plug>Vote for Umang!</shameless plug>
  • Networking is worth the cost of admission – The Forum is largely unchanged since inception and the opportunities for professional networking have always been, by-and-far, the best part of attending.  Every year I attend, I walk away with a stack full of business cards and my head hurts (in a good way) from all the ideas I come up with in talking with the other attendees and vendors.  Speaking of which, I met a new vendor in this space, TechValidate, that really impressed me!  I am going to do a full review of their offering and will post shortly.

I am looking forward to continuing those conversations on the Customer Knowledge Sharing Network (CRKSN).  CRKSN is a set of non-competitive online communities (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) focused on Customer Reference Marketing knowledge sharing.   You should know that CRKSN is not affiliated with the CRF, which is for the best, in my opinion.  If you are interested in joining, please leave a comment and I can help you get set up. Again, stay tuned for more in-depth thoughts on the Forum in future posts.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]


Bookmark and Share

, , , , , , , , ,

4 Comments