Wide Angle

We recently hosted a conference call that gathered progressive marketers from highly regulated industries (like pharma, financial services, and healthcare) to discuss how companies facing strict legal constraints could make the most of social media.  Here’s what they suggest: Read More »

It’s no secret that increased social media participation has given B2C marketers unprecedented access to customer data.   With just a customer email address, the right “data crawler” goes through blogs, networking sites, video sharing sites, and other social media outlets to report on a customer’s age, location, gender, social site participation and more.  Collect this data for thousands of customers and you have some potent information.

In our conversations with marketers, we’re coming across a variety of creative uses for these data sets.  At the most direct level, marketers are using social data to choose the best social media sites to invest in.  Some are discovering that their customers are spending time on social sites they (and their competitors) weren’t aware of—and are moving quickly to capitalize on these undiscovered opportunities. Read More »

If your web site was one of your sales reps—out there on the road, entering prospects’ offices, and making his best pitch—would he be a high-performer: informed, thought-provoking, and persuasive?  Or would he behave more like the typical low-performer: talking at length about your company’s history; describing products and services in an indiscriminate, “dump truck” fashion; asking unnecessary, tedious questions; making bold claims that outstrip anything your company can actually deliver on?  Read More »

Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo!, recently identified the volume of information flow as one of the largest challenges facing corporate leaders today.  In marketing, the issue is not simply one of volume but of information richness.  Well beyond the reams of rational data about customer click-thru rates, viewing behavior, etc., the emotion and human insight embedded in unstructured information available via social media (e.g., dialogues, comments, ratings) elevates this challenge for marketers above volume alone.  Read More »

It’s that time of year again – predictions and “what’s in/what’s out” lists.  Thought I’d jump onto the bandwagon by sharing some of the themes we’re hearing from leading B2C marketers as we ask them “what’s next?” for marketing.  Here are a few of the more provocative ways F1000 executives think your job is likely to change in the decade ahead. Read More »

In this day of the attention economy, most B2B companies have bolted electronic publishing houses onto the front of their marketing engines.  For many, it’s constructed out of little more than a marketing agenda, a keyword index, and reluctant technical staffers-cum-copywriters.  Given its emerging status as the divine path to high-quality sales leads, the online content manufacturing business is burgeoning across nearly every industry. But to the potential buyer conducting research online, this development has been a blessing and a curse, as picking through such a swelling mass of relevant style-over-substance content leads to frustratingly few instances of “I’m glad I read that.”  More often it leads to feelings of boredom combined with a vague sense of being misled with hype, slanted content, unsubstantiated claims, and complex arguments.  Why? Read More »

One of the most popular questions we hear from members is: “What are my peers asking you about social media?”

After spending last week speaking with members at MLC’s executive breakfast meetings, I got an earful of what’s keeping marketers up at night when it comes to social media.

The key theme:  There’s no longer any debate on if we should engage with our target audiences via social media.  The only question left is “how?”

Your peers are running up against three key challenges when it comes to answering that “how” question.  Here’s how we’re advising them on each: Read More »

In the increasingly peer-centric landscape sparked by recent excitement (and anxiety!) around social media, we find ourselves with a new operating challenge: Marketing and Communications functions find themselves at odds with (or just driving different objectives from) many of their peer functions around the corporation.

We’ve all spent too much time talking about why social media matters, and even how to exploit its power, so let me skip over that well-worn path.

Inside the enterprise, I see a culture change afoot.  As companies try to maximize their ability to capture customer voice and shape product, to drive brand and product awareness, to leverage advocacy, they are further extending themselves out beyond the “safe” boundaries of their corporate walls.  We know that social media is by nature unstructured, unreliable, and, at its most powerful, deeply unpredictable. Read More »

There’s a bubbling, burgeoning cottage industry of social media vendors out there.  Some are traditional agencies claiming social media expertise.  Others are small shop upstarts with very clever automated solutions and workflow tools.

Having now conducted dozens of consults with members who have completed their social media maturity diagnostic, we noticed a real appetite amongst members for help navigating this kaleidoscopic (is that even a word?) vendor landscape.  Read More »

Global warming be darned, it snowed in Dallas last week and temperatures never reached 50 degrees.  While I had the ‘pleasure’ of braving the elements for the week, I had the sincere pleasure of visiting with members as diverse as airlines and beauty products to discuss the impact of social media on their respective competitive landscapes.  It occurred to me that the current state of social media for most organizations is the Heisenberg principle in action: marketers can’t determine both their competitive position and relative velocity (social media adoption) with the same degree of certitude.  And right now, the equation is weighted toward velocity – everyone knows the speed (forward and fast) but very few have stopped to find their current position. Read More »