#RonR… #NoLetUp!

Growing your list is not simply about numbers… it’s about adding value to what you do. In order to ensure that happens, the following are important parts of the process…

Why is Marketing best suited to manage corporate social media activities?
At the core social media activities are a function of Marketing, just as PR, Communications and Customer Service should be. Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. IMHO, the CMO should oversee all marketing, PR, communications, customer service, and customer experience management. Every touch point with the consumer needs to come under her purview. Often this is not the case—customer service and communications/pr are often siloed. This is a big mistake in the new marketing/social world since the message needs to emanate from one source. True marketers understand that they must be the lead stewards for brand, reputation, communication, and customer relationships.

Communication: We know that in order to build trust with another person there must be good, two-way communication. It’s central to our existence as human beings, yet we struggle with it every day. Multiply that struggle by the number of people in your organization, and you can begin to see just how essential communication is in building trust with your employees, vendors, partners and customers.

We talk and write a lot about what we are teaching our children and what they are learning from us – but if we only focus on one side of this teaching/learning relationship, we are missing some of the greatest examples of our lives… let’s remember all we can learn from our children.

The buzz surrounding Snapchat for brands is definitely at a high decibel level. And just like other new social apps, there are lots of tutorials and how-to articles being created on a daily basis to show you how to get the most out of the platform. But what happens after the “shiny new toy” syndrome wears off? Is the millennial audience going to get disenchanted and be looking around for the next new thing? Perhaps not, if you play your cards right.

You know that I’m big on social listening, and have been from the start. We have this incredible, unprecedented resource for learning more about our clients, customers and connections, but we have to listen to make it work. So I’ve been very pleased to see that social listening is (finally) getting some play in the marketing and sales arena.

Social spend—you can’t escape the term in the marketing world, but what does it really mean? Most of the articles and statistics you see on social spend are narrow in focus—it’s all about ad buys. From that perspective, social spend sets a new all-time high every year. In 2015, the estimated social ad spend checked in at nearly $24 billion, largely thanks to mobile advertising. This year, it will surely be even higher.

When it comes to getting to know your customers, knowing how to “look people in the eye digitally” has never been more important. Picking up the phone is often the last option for most consumers today. They can get everything they need to make a buying decision online for all but the most complex sales. So how can marketers stay close to the customer without having a lot of one-on-one interaction? How can they discover the customer’s pain points and glean enough information to say the right things without a lot of face time?

Everybody’s talking about customer experience these days, but how many companies actually follow through to ensure that their customers are getting the best experience possible? And how are they doing that?