TheSocialCMO

Building your backlist (and living with it forever)

Authors and musicians have one, certainly. This is the book you wrote seven years ago or the album from early in your career. The book keeps selling, spreading the ideas and making a difference. The album gets played on the radio, earning you new fans.

“Backlist” is what publishers call the stuff that got published a while ago, but that’s still out there, selling.

The Wizard of Oz, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits and Starsky and Hutch all live on the backlist.

Without a backlist, all book publishers would go out of business in no time. The backlist pays dividends long after the work is over.

Advertisers didn’t used to have a backlist. You paid for that magazine or newspaper or TV ad, and within just one cycle, it was gone, forever.

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Want To Build The Perfect Social Team? Here’s Who You Need

How big is your team? A simple question but increasingly a not-so-simple answer. Three years ago the answer was easy. Me.
While not quite a one-man-show (thanks to agency support) I was the only full time person at McDonald’s dedicated to social media.
Today, our social media team not only has an expanded roster, but the responsibility and execution has become diffused across the organization. I’ll write more about our setup in a future post, but given our recent growth, I’ve begun reflecting on the different skill sets that we have and where we could grow. Today instead, allow me to dream a bit about what my dream team would look like.

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The Art of Balance

I’m a klutz – or as they say in Central Pennsylvania – dopic.  So, I really admire people that are more coordinated than I am (which is pretty much everyone).  Last night, we enjoyed a date night at the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, conducted by our beloved Maestro Stuart Malina.  What made the performance particularly memorable were the additional performers on stage last evening.  “Cirque de la Symphonie” featured acrobats and aerialists who amazed the audience with choreographed moves, accompanied by the orchestra’s masterful artistry.  I was particularly enrapt with the final performance by two bronzed muscular men. Those in attendance were spellbound by their feats of strength, balance and grace.

As I watched, I wondered what propelled these athletes to choose this occupation.  What discipline and practice it must have taken to achieve such synchronicity!  The countless hours of training and experimentation, the injuries that were likely sustained are beyond my comprehension.  And I’ve wondered similar thoughts about those musicians whose performances we so look forward to as they weave their own magic, beneath the stars of the glorious Harrisburg Forum.

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5 CMOs Identify The Characteristics of Successful Teams

Strategy, no matter how insightful and comprehensive, does not insure execution. Action plans, no matter how detailed or innovative, are no guarantee goals will be realized. And every leader that has managed through crisis knows benchmarks are not the be-all-end-all measure of resources.

The market is shaped by teams that move boundaries and redefine arithmetic.

Put another way — whether in sport or enterprise, successful teams are those whose measure is greater than the proverbial sum of its parts.

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18 brilliant books on word of mouth

Remember books? Yeah, those things that are like really long blogs, made up of a massive string of tweets, which we used to call ‘sentences’. You can download them onto an ereader or, if you’re really old-school, buy them all wrapped up in paper like a sweet-smelling present from the past.

Most of us are now doing the former; last year, Amazon’s sales of ebooks outstripped those of print books for the first time. But the problem with ebooks is they’re difficult to share, and sharing is surely the moral imperative of our time. What’s more, I am a massive personal advocate of the print book as the ultimate in innovative technology (I’ll be talking more about that at an upcoming event on ‘Writing The Future’ with The Royal Society and the Arthur C Clarke Award – stay tuned).

So here at 1000heads London HQ I oversee a modest library from which any ‘Head (or trustworthy friend) can borrow. Our selections are crowdsourced internally, with an ongoing budget for purchasing any decent suggestion.

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Should you work for free?

That depends on what you mean by “work” and by “free.”

Work is what you do as a professional, when you make a promise that involves rigor and labor (physical and emotional) and risk. Work is showing up at the appointed time, whether or not you feel like it. Work is creating value on demand, and work (for the artist) means putting all of it (or most of it) on the line.

So it’s not work when you indulge your hobby and paint an oil landscape, but it’s work when you agree to paint someone’s house by next week. And it’s not work when you cook dinner for friends, but it’s work when you’re a sous chef on the line on Saturday night.

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Where Social Is Going in 2013

Here’s my prediction: Social will get the ‘third degree’ in 2013. I’m starting to see some backlash in the press about social media marketing. The avalanche of startups in the social space over the last couple years are causing VCs to hold their wallets. And Facebook’s stock recovery isn’t happening fast enough.

And so it goes. Nothing to fear. The evolution is almost predictable. Think back to the industry ‘movements’ in the 90s – such as ASP, CRM, Web 2.0, Web/TV convergence.  All of them followed a similar path, and yet, have become ‘mainstream’. ASP = Cloud. CRM = Social CRM. Web 2.0 is just the way things work on the web. And the Web/TV convergence is happening in Social TV. We had the right ideas…just a lot of creative destruction to figure things out, including the nomenclature.

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Exploring the Fifth and Sixth Ps of Marketing

For years I’ve written about how the 4 Ps of Marketing, Product, Place, Pricing, and Promotion represented a dated perspective of customers and markets. In an era of connected consumerism, one could argue the merits of any of “Ps” and whether or not they’re still relevant. I suppose that’s a debate for another time. Instead, I’d like to introduce of two additional Ps that will propel a decades old concept and modernize it for a social economy.

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Matrix Commerce is Coming Will You Be Ready?

Early in January of 2012 I found myself struggling with the general terms around multi-channel, cross channel and omni-channel to adequately describe the rapidly evolving retail and e-commerce marketplace reality we all currently face.

Searching for a term that would better capture the full complexity and many drivers impacting the business, on January 3rd 2012 in a moment of epiphany I came up with the term and concept of Matrix Commerce on which topic this whitepaper is a primer.

Matrix Commerce describes the complex construct integrating marketing, sales, sourcing, pricing, profitability, service levels, delivery and consumer perceptions. Inherent in this is the notion of complete customer centricity from many of the above items extending to include customer desires for positive social outcomes relative to cause alignment and even the sustainability performance of companies they choose to do business with.

A mouthful for sure, but while you’re chewing on that start considering the types of real time and rapid processing systems which will be required to support such multi-facetted business decisions, not to mention the reams of big and not so big data that will be necessary for companies to collect in order to make them.

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