Posts Tagged Online Communities
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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Chickens and Eggs in Social Media Execution
Posted by Lisa in Customer Marketing, Integrated Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing on November 21st, 2009
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
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We Have to Change the Way We Change
Posted by Jimmy Maher in Customer Experience, Customer Marketing, Integrated Marketing Strategy on November 12th, 2009
Anybody who has ever owned an aquarium knows that you can only change a certain amount of the water at a time without upsetting the delicate bacteriological balance that keeps ammonia and nitrate levels safe for the fish. This principle might also be applied to organizations. How often have we seen sweeping changes in organizations that fail to address the issues that they have been targeted at, yet cause huge disruption and uncertainty, which eventually ripples through to the customer with unintended consequences.
In an insightful article by social entrepreneur Zenna Atkins in the Guardian online at http://bit.ly/2Eryg5, the author advises against the “big bang” approach to change, in favor of the incremental approach. Atkins argues that it is better to have multiple listening points, both internally and externally that enable an organization to be constantly aware of what is going on. This provides the necessary intelligence that allows the organization to evolve gradually to keep pace with ever changing customer needs. Listening posts might include customer and employee surveys, social media (blogs, customer forums, Twitter etc.), focus groups and direct conversations.
The bottom line – establish listening posts internally and externally. Introduce change in continuous small increments to allow your organization to become accustomed to each new state. Use the same listening posts to evaluate the success or failure of the change. Your customers and employees will be glad that you listened and acted.
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Once Again Social Media Flexes It’s Power
Posted by Jimmy Maher in Customer Experience, Social Media Marketing on September 16th, 2009
Today T-Mobile dropped it’s plan to charge $1.50 per month for paper billing. This is in response to a huge outcry by customers who vented their opposition in multiple online communities. This generated some negative publicity for T-Mobile, who might well have turned that publicity in their favor by offering a reduced bill or additional minutes for paperless subscribers. Consumers are leveraging the power of social media to broadcast their customer experience issues. The power of social media cannot be ignored and is growing rapidly.
@jimmytmaher
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