What excites you about customer experience?
It is not customer experience that excites me, it is the customer herself who excites me, and the relationship that will develop and lead to trust and loyalty.
listen
Develop an Acute Ability to Listen
What if your point of difference was an acute ability to listen?
What would that look like?
It always amazes me how many people cut me off mid-sentence, and don’t even let me get my answer out, after they ask me a direct question.
Yes, I recognize listening alone may not set you apart from the competition. From my experience, you may win more business using your ears and eyes than with any other marketing strategy. That’s because, with listening, you can understand your prospect, and that understanding will help you win new business.
Be careful what you ask for, you might just measure it
New media marketing is creating an undercurrent that is shifting the very foundation of business. Without a full understanding of what’s possible, a clear view to the future or an idea of the strength or extent of the market undertow, executives cautiously embrace emerging social and mobile channels based on guidance of internal champions and external pressure from competitors and customers alike. But, leaders can only lead when their vision is focused and direction is defined. The ability to execute becomes paramount and the gaps that exist between goals and capabilities must be identified and solved quickly to stay the course.
@ is the Universal Sign of Engagement
For decades, companies were very good at pushing messages into markets and talking at people rather than with them. Now companies are embracing the idea of two-way interaction. Monitoring conversations is becoming standard procedure as small and enterprise businesses alike make substantial investments in tools such as Radian6, Sprial16 and Brandtology. And, not only are companies monitoring conversations, they’re adopting social media management systems (SMMS) such as Seesmic and CoTweet to operationalize conversations and platforms such as Objective Marketer, PeopleBrowsr and Buddy Media to automate engagement campaigns.
There’s a difference between monitoring and listening and there’s certainly a difference between conversations and engagement. How social media is employed today promotes monitoring as a reporting function and conversations as a symptom of reaction. In many ways, the state of social media is eerily reminiscent of traditional marketing. We’re fooled into a sense of collaboration and co-creation because people can respond. But programs are not measured by functionality, they are valued by the value customers take away from the experience. It begs the question, is social media in actuality anti-social?
New media philosophies, while rich with good intentions, are confined by the culture of the organization they’re designed to help. Corporate culture is pervasive and planted. It is not anything that will change suddenly because of the popularity of Twitter and Facebook no matter how strong your case. Culture shock takes place because a business is subjected to the harsh reality that customers no longer support the way business is conducted.
Twitter Best Practices For Business
Twitter is a great place to do business, if you follow some simple best practices. Twitter has done a nice job of outlining core advice on the subject in their welcome center:
Life is backstory
“That’s only the tip of the iceberg,” is what we say when we want our hearers to know the challenge, problem, or opportunity is deeper, more expansive, more significant than what we see. In human interaction, what we SEE—skin color, clothes, grooming, posture, and facial expression—are only the tip of the iceberg of who a person actually is.
Just like most of an iceberg is hidden, so a human being’s backstory is out-of-sight. If you wanted to see the rest of the iceberg, you’d have to do a deep dive underneath the water (which would be very cold, I presume). You’d have to do some research, get special gear, probably make more than one trip to berg, and in general, make a serious investment.
If you want to see a human’s backstory, you’ll have to make a serious investment, too. However, you can get started right away by making a determined choice to pause before you make those snap judgements about what you see in others. Instead, run what you think about what you see through the backstory filter by reminding yourself, “There’s more to this story.” Then, temper your words and actions with compassion.
For companies, it means valuing the backstory by making a commitment to listen, explore, and discover your customers’ backstories—asking where were they before the discovered you, understanding what fears, hopes, dreams, and goals are, discovering what fuels their imaginations and actions.
When you take the time to value another’s backstory, you gain insight into why people do what they do. You’ll be better prepared to actually help them do what they want to do.
What’s your customer’s backstory? What’s yours?
Trey Pennington
Determining and Delivering the Ultimate ROI of Social Media
There is one thing that makes social media special — not to mention social — and, from a business perspective at least, it’s the one reason SM is worth investing in.
It comes in the form of the conversations that used to occur at the water-cooler or over the backyard fence, or in the good-old-fashioned (un-choreographed) town hall meetings. It is about give-and-take, and real-time feedback.
While one of the primary ways we evaluate marketing tools is in terms of how effectively a message is delivered, social calls for a new way of thinking about media. (Or, more accurately, it can actually help refocus our perspective on what constitutes successful communication. But that’s another discussion.) This is a new brand of media, made up of the fabric of relationship. This tool is far from one-way, one-sided or one-dimensional. It is about participation, collaboration and interaction.
Mastering social media is all about who LEADS!
Having been continuously inundated for the last few years with social media how to books, articles, the five steps to the ten steps of social media greatness and so on, I am now at the point of saying enough already, STOP!
Under such duress my brain has been crying out for a way to crystallize a simplified explanation of the core requirements and sequence required to assist people and businesses to master social media in a straight forward, meaningful and practical manner.
And so recently the LEADS social media concept was born and simply stated, it is an acronym for Listen, Engage, Activate, Dominate and Social mandate or just LEADS for short.