Learn to Savor the Moments—and Help Your Customers Do the Same

You’ve heard the old adage “Stop tosmell the roses,” right? Well, I’ve come to learn that when life hands you those “moments,” it’s best to slow down, savor them and commit them to memory. They only come around once! And when you make a conscious effort to put yourself in that moment and really experience it with all your senses, you can recall that memory in an instant, and “re-savor” it. How can this relate to your business? Let’s try a little experiment. Close your eyes and think back to a particularly happy moment in your life. Picture where you were, what you were doing, and who was with you. What happens when you think hard about that moment? Are the details sharp and clear? I’ll bet that for those really good memories, you can even recall smells and the sense of touch or taste—things that trigger an emotional lift and make you smile. Now think about when you last had a fun experience while shopping. Perhaps you were at an event,or browsing a brick-and-mortar store… what products come to mind? What details do you remember about the experience? When you’re thinking about “branding” your business (and it doesn’t matter if you sell cupcakes or care-giving services), think about providing your customers with the kind of experiences that they will want to savor, because that’s a foot in the door to building a long-lasting relationship with them. What can you do that will make them want to stop and savor your “moments?”

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Straight Forward Suggestions for Crowdsourcing Content

Every business needs content in order to be found in search, and to differentiate them from the competition. Without quality, helpful content (and lots of it), you’re lost in a school of fish that are all the same color. Who’s going to find you? Who’s going to pick you?

The trouble with content development is that it can be expensive. Website copy, blog articles, e-books, reports—they all take time and effort (and dollars) to produce. However without them, you really can’t do an effective job of marketing your business—especially in the social age. It’s the classic chicken-or-the-egg syndrome. The more social our businesses become, the more we need that variety of content that speaks to our listeners and helps them solve their problems so we can A: get their attention, and B: develop relationships with them.

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Establish a Good Content Foundation – Invest in Your Blog

According to a January article by eMarketer, research from the social marketing software firm Awareness, Inc. shows that businesses are thinking about getting back into blogging for 2012, and it’s about time. The survey also indicated that businesses are looking at expanding their social footprint to new platforms, but I think the “getting back to basics” with blogging is a particularly good strategy.

While I truly love the relationship-building of social media, it’s often a moving target responsible for a lot of “shiny new toy” syndrome. After a while, we begin to feel like jugglers spinning plates—sooner or later something’s got to give. However, that something shouldn’t be your blog. A blog is quite simply one of the best ways to enlighten prospects about why they should do business with you, and it should be at the core of your content marketing efforts.

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Social Commerce… Shoppers Have the Power

Shoppers want to belong. They want to be heard. They crave a better buying experience. Power is shifting from the retailer to the shopper. Social commerce is filling the void between clicks and bricks to deliver this personalized experience.

Technologies are emerging to answer the challenge. Point of Presence (POP), location based proactive services, are combining with Point of Sale (POS) to influence, persuade, and guide shopping. Artificial reality and virtualization is enhancing interaction. Social media is evolving to Social Commerce to improve the in-store and more importantly the online experience.

Social commerce has been defined as “the use of social technologies to connect, listen, understand and engage to help improve the shopping experience.” I think this is how a brand can use social media, but not what Social Commerce “is.”  It seems that the Social Commerce world is fixated on what they refer to as “frictionless commerce” vs. the value of relationships and how people share, recommend, advocate… AND influence.

The vast majority of discussion I hear centers around how to create direct sales by leveraging the social graph. This is important, but needs to be the final stage, not the way things begin. The relationship has to be built first, which then opens the door to build the emotional connection.  Although most current examples reflect that the companies making the biggest inroads to increased sales are those that allow the most interaction/relationship building it seems most retailers have not been able to let go to that degree.

Brands, not retailers, are the ones doing the best job of nurturing and leveraging relationships. Seems it may be because they do not have the same pressure of next quarter performance, and the need to show direct sales to senior management, so have more leeway to nurture relationships and plan for the future.

The Social Commerce journey starts with curiosity and leads to Advocacy when relationships are allowed to grow and be nurtured. Sharing their great experiences, not just worthwhile products, is the key.  Influencers, when/if they see the value, can create group habit by including the group in the before, during, and after. What seems clear is that it is important that Brands provide the tools to allow/encourage their audience to share the fact that they are buying… via input, reviews, forums… which in turn will enable the “group effect’ to help them grow, build their brand and foster the purchasing behavior.

The Social Consumer is empowered and has influence of her own. Be certain to provide the tools that allow this consumer to leverage the new found power. She wants a dialogue and wants to be heard and recognized.  Influencers do not equal simple amplification of an offer/product value… but add depth and breadth to the relationship.

Facebook is not a channel for commerce, but a platform that can “enable” commerce. Many are mistakenly looking at FB as a channel, although most are quickly realizing this was a mistake and that people are not there to shop, but to share, recommend, and discuss… they are there to “Be Social.”

It seems to me the view/perspective I keep hearing is all about leveraging consumer’s social graph to sell more product. This is important, but when I hear the case studies, and see where true progress is being made, I hear more about interaction, engagement, and sharing… i.e. relationships. When I think about Social Commerce what seems to be the greatest opportunity is growing/nurturing the connection, participation and loyalty of a consumer, which in turn will build ROR… Return on Relationship. This is the first step required to make all this social integration sustainable and long lasting. Relationships are what will lead to the ability to sell more, not using customers to sell more product, but by facilitating/enabling feedback, sharing, reviews, and therefore build dynamic advocates who openly advocate product they love and are passionate about and influence others to do the same.

Remember… when it comes to Social Commerce, SHOPPERS HAVE THE POWER.

Ted Rubin

Beware of the Shiny New Toy Syndrome: People are Social—Not Platforms

Late last year I posted a discussion about whether or not Pinterest will replace Facebook as a social platform. The post was meant to spark conversation. It’s interesting… whenever a new platform rises (like Pinterest or Google Plus), there is always chatter about whether it will bring down the big giants.

Lots of people try out the new kid on the block, and some become die-hard converts saying: “This is GREAT! I’ll never go back to _______ (Insert Facebook, Twitter, etc.)!”  They may have been big complainers about the other platforms, just waiting for an excuse to leap away to something they perceived as a “better,” or they simply may just be intrigued by something new.

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Marketing 101 Lessons Social Marketers Shouldn’t Forget

In watching the social media revolution unfold around us over the past several years, there’s a recurring theme that keeps popping up. I see it all the time in discussions on “best practices” and in forums and blogs where marketers lament the fact that you can’t measure ROI in social and that marketing has completely changed. The “gurus” out there say it’s a brand new world—the past is past—we have to throw out the old and create the new, yada, yada, yada.

You know what I say to that? Phooey!

The number ONE reason some marketers fail when they try to use social media is that they DON’T take into account important traditional marketing lessons from the past—and I’m talking Plain Jane, Vanilla Manilla lessons that should be the bread and butter for any marketer. Social media doesn’t supplant traditional marketing practices and tenants. In fact, it enhances it when handled correctly.

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“Life isn’t about Finding Yourself. Life is about CREATING Yourself.”

The title of this post is a George Bernard Shaw quote I employ with my daughters in the hopes I will impress upon them, in a small way with a few words, what I will say here with many more words than their attention spans will allow. How many times have you heard that some person or other is on a quest to “find themselves?” Many times we hear it in relation to a young person starting out in life to find their purpose, or when an older person jokes about what they want to be when they “grow up.”

However, the older I get and the more experiences I have and relationships I develop, the more convinced I am that each individual’s purpose in life is to draw their own map. Throw out the recipe book, the paint-by-numbers kit, and anything anyone ever told you about who or what you should be—and chart your own course.

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Marketing, Digital & PR in the Social Media Blender

These are exciting times, because Social Media takes “Will it Blend?” to a whole new level with marketers. And for those of us who’ve been in the business for a while—it’s about time!

For years, marketing people and PR folks wore separate hats—had different skill sets, different agendas—even though they share a common purpose. It’s like the FBI and the CIA not talking to each other and sharing information about terrorism—dumb.

Even the birth of digital communications didn’t turn on any light bulbs at first, even made it worse by adding another silo, but the power and exponential growth of social media shows us why it is vital to string it all together.

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Permission Marketing: Why Brands Should Be(a)ware!

Social Marketing is the ultimate in Permission Marketing, and therefore it carries the ultimate marketing danger with it: taking away the permission is totally in the consumers’ control.  Brands be(a)ware!

Permission Marketing puts the power in the consumer’s hands, by requiring that the marketers send promotional messages only to consumers who have given marketers permission to do so, whether explicitly (opt-in email list, for example) or implicitly (internet search).

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