social media

Send Your Ego to the Back Seat and Bring Your Consumers to the Front.

Thanks to the continual evolution of social media, we have a growing set of useful tools for gathering feedback about our brand reputation.   Online branded communities, for example, are becoming increasingly valuable meeting spaces where community members and brand marketers can easily engage in meaningful conversation around specific products and services, and even the brands themselves.

This increase in brand–consumer conversation is beginning to change consumer expectations. They see that we marketers are part of their communities, and assume that we are listening, hearing, and planning product and service changes accordingly.

The problem here is that sometimes we marketers are so committed to our own brand experience that we may be resistant to change and have trouble actually hearing when our consumers are trying to ask us to change components of our brand.  In order to work around our own (natural and understandable) resistance to change, we need to take a step back from our fierce attachment to what we believe makes our brand successful.

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PR and SM According to The Social CMO PR Divas

The Crew here at @TheSocialCMO is a diverse and unique group of individuals. Lately we’ve been looking at some areas of expertise and interest that have garnered significant coverage from our bloggers such as the recent Everything you wanted to know about influence but were afraid to ask pulling together posts on a number of themes surrounding influence including Trust, Relationships, Social Capital and of course… Influence. Now we turn our attention to PR and social media and the divas who make PR magic @TheSocialCMO .

So who are @TheSocialCMO PR Divas? Well the first to join us was Amy @HowellMarketing who’s agreement to contribute to this blog with me was the first step in Lighting the Social Media Fire at The Social CMO and had she declined who knows if we’d even be blogging for you today.

Shortly after this @AnneDGallaher Owner/CEO of the Deeter Gallaher Group LLC, a Pennsylvania marketing/PR firm came on board providing insights and introductions into PR and social media as it is applied in some of the largest and best known brands in the world.

The next of @TheSocialCMO PR Divas to join us was fellow Canadian @DebWeinstein who is an internationally acclaimed PR Pro, President and Co-founder of Strategic Objectives, Canada’s most award-winning PR agency.

ReneeWarrenAnd last but not least an interesting post on How Social Media is Changing Public Relations was also contributed by our very own Renee Warren @Renee_Warren founder of Renee Warren Communications and now Spark Boutik.

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Customer Service “is” the New Marketing

Remember the old small business customer service mentality?  Where pleasing the customer came FIRST, and the need to delight them was “a given” not an option?   Great news – it’s back (or at least on its way back)!

The democratizing nature of social media has returned power to the customer, making Brand Advocates one of our strongest marketing assets.  If we want to share their power (not take it!), we need to adopt customer service as the new way of marketing – or “unmarketing,” a term mentioned by Brian Solis in the introduction to his book Engage, and Scott Stratten details extensively in his blog and book UnMarketing.

Considering this power shift, the #1 question we should be asking our Brand Advocates is “How may I serve you?” Ask early and ask often.

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Don’t Forget to Ask Women for Direction(s)!

In this new social media marketing world — where it’s less about demographics and more about relationships — one demographic still clearly matters:  WOMEN.

Women control 85% of household spending, and (according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch)

in 2011, women’s earning power will recover from the recession far quicker than men’s earning power will.

These numbers are good news for marketers, but they need to come with a strong CAUTION statement:  just because women are a strong purchasing demographic does not mean we can pay any less attention to the relationship work required to make and keep our brands highly relevant to women.

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Measuring Influence in the Social Media World #MMchat with Joe Fernandez of Klout

It was GREAT to have @JoeFernandez the CEO of @Klout on #MMchat last night so all of you could ask questions about this standard for measuring influence on Social Media.


The level of interaction on the chat was excellent and we learned a number of new things about Klout and where it is going when @JoeFernandez took the stage on #MMchat for a tweetchat with you all about Measuring Influence in the Social Media World. Who better to talk about measuring influence than the man leading Klout the standard indicator for measuring online influence?

Please take some time to review and the transcript from last night’s #MMchat with @JoeFernandez.

Thanks to all of you #MMchat tweeps and others for joining us last night and sharing your thoughts and questions on such an important topic, for it truly is all of you who make #MarketerMonday Chat matter!

Remember #MMchat makes Mondays MARVELOUS!!

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO

How do *You* define ‘Best Customer’?

Seth Godin has it exactly right when he asks in a recent blog post, “…what if you define ‘best customer’ as the person who brings you new customers through frequent referrals, and who sticks with you through thick and thin?”

In other words, what if we define “best customer” as “strongest Brand Advocate”?  How would that change the way we think about and treat our Brand Advocates?

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How to alienate a customer in just three easy steps

The really great thing about social media is this: it’s faster and easier than ever to ignore, alienate and piss off a customer!

Case in point. As quick background, I joined Weight Watchers 9 days ago (not that I’m counting). It’s not a brand I ever thought I would associate with, but, well, that Jennifer Hudson TV commercial sucked me in, to tell you the truth. I know how to lose weight (lots of experience), but counting calories has gotten tedious so I thought maybe there’s something to this whole “points” thing.

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The Antidote to Negative Commentary

As much as we might not want to admit it, something negative about our brand will be said sometime by someone in a social network.  It might be due to a change, or something out of the brand’s control or only one little misstep in many months, but chances are, that unfortunate experience will be shared.   Such is the nature of information-sharing through social networks.

But it’s that same nature of social media that also gives us a powerful antidote to negative commentary – ENGAGEMENT.

We might be tempted to cover any negative feedback with a huge push of positive messaging, stating and re-stating how wonderful our products and services really are. This attempt at damage-control, however, does little if anything to protect our brand reputation.  Whether or not our products and services are usually terrific doesn’t matter to the person who had a different experience with our brand, nor to those closest in their social network.  What matters to them is the one unsatisfying experience they had.

This is where engagement becomes vital.  We can stay disengaged and pretend nothing negative was said, but ignoring those comments won’t keep them from spreading quickly through various social networks.  If we choose instead to engage with the consumer(s) making those comments, we have a huge opportunity to help positively change the perception of our brand.

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Don’t Simply Ride the Social Media Wave… Guide it with Strategic Intent!

Social media is hot, hot, hot, and it can be tempting to just dive in and ride the social media wave without any specific plan.  That’s a great way to guarantee misjudging the swell and getting tossed around underneath the wave.  That’s what social media marketing without strategic intent will get you– possibly a few lucky “rides” for your brand messaging, but also a predominance of mis-steps and wasted time and effort.

Now that more businesses are getting on the social media marketing bandwagon, it’s no longer enough to just include a generic “use social media for marketing” line item in your brand growth strategy.  You need strategic intent. Gary Hamel defines strategic intent as “An ambitious and compelling dream which provides emotional and intellectual energy for the company and defines the journey to the future.”

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Women’s Online Communities Powerhouses of Trust

It’s becoming more and more clear that women’s online communities are the true powerhouses of trust.

Social networks have their place, but it’s the online communities that women trust the most for brand and product referrals.

New research not only backs up that claim, but hits it out of the park.

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