Reached out to a tourist company in Hawaii this last weekend via twitter and the response was crickets. When I did reach them [via another channel] they offered a simple response… the marketing person works “standard” hours. This is an all too common tactical error that, as we become more connected, is having a greater bottom line impact. Continue reading →

Franchise compliance is not new problem, nor a simple one… independent owners, local markets & a personal p&l to live by, but in a world where each customer can reach 100s of people who trust their opinion in seconds, the “independent” excuse just doesn’t cut it anymore. So how do you bring together a single brand in a business that shares one logo and many autonomous owners to avoid a negative social onslaught? Continue reading →

With nearly one in two internet users on Facebook, hundreds of millions on twitter, forums, blogs, and niche networks social support isn’t just a great way to communicate with customers, it’s become an essential part of doing business and is nearly as expected as a phone number. But don’t worry about hiring on a whole new support team: with a creative approach, social support is more about using the benefits of the channel than investing millions — and that’s important as the flood gate of inquiries is near infinite. Continue reading →

Low cost, quick to market and a platform for engagement: of all the ways social media has impacted the way we do business, social support is perhaps the most direct and accepted business use. But social support has a flip side — for many brands it’s become a way to address the connected customer while legacy support systems, long wait times and product defects go unresolved — social support has become a crutch.

I’ve been there before myself, several times. Between acquisitions, periods of rapid growth, outsourcing of departments and a myriad of other challenges, we saw social support as the way to quickly address a bad stigma about the brand’s service, long queue times and public critique over support. But while social support provided an apparent short term fix, the truth was we were making a long term mistake and conditioning our customers to turn to the wrong venue, a very public venue, to solve something which they asked us to, and we should have been able to, solve elsewhere.

When social support is “better”, that obviously means everything else is worse Continue reading →

As social has grown become the top activity online, it’s not surprising that employers have started banning the use of sites by retail, support and genera employees. And that’s mistake.

Whether it’s leveraging motivated employees to provide a face to the brand, influencing friend circles or simply giving employees enough respect to check in now and then, there’s great opportunity in opening up social to your entire organization and focusing on educating and training rather than limiting a If productivity stinks, Facebook is merely today’s outlet for free time, and a ban will not fix the problem anymore than removing the free water cooler.nd penalizing. Continue reading →

As the buzz around social becomes stronger, many corporations coming from the era of tv and print just finished struggling through online advertising and are now finding themselves facing something completely transformative that pushes aside the principles decades of marketing experience has taught them. This has caused a reactionary response where marketers have been tasked with hitting metrics to claim victory to the stock holders, the board or just the executive team. The buying of a like has become a quick fix.

You can’t claim engagement if you’re buying it Continue reading →

Whether its chit chat on a 4-mile hike to reach an amazing view like this one or on a closed Facebook group, most of the conversations that happen about our brands takes place in a world which we as marketers have no direct access to. Yet in an attempt to become more transparent by speaking to customers, we’ve unwittingly backed into a corner and become stuck on only what is right in front of us — monitoring and “owning” the public conversations but missing the big opportunity. Continue reading →

At over 8% of US retail sales, ecommerce is no longer the wild west. Winning the sale requires a great offer but price isn’t the entire story. Customer expectations have grown and with so many options, insuring confidence, trust and validation are all vital elements to standing out ahead. Continue reading →

If we’re starting a brand new company and tomorrow you kicked off a TV campaign promoting the business you’d expect some immediate sales to walk in the door, you’d expect to hear about the efforts, but chances are you’d be downright surprised if you broke even on new sales. After decades and decades of advertising we’ve come to accept the value of building brand perception to grow business over the long haul. So why is it that so many companies’ measure social media only by the short term sales bump? Continue reading →

Just a day in and my Twitter stream resembles the comments section of a Google Plus blog post, but it’s too be expected, this is afterall a potential game changer for social. The great thing is that we won’t have to wait long, a few weeks, possibly even less to know where Google Plus stands in the market. Here are three very immediate issues I see that could break, or make, this launch when the masses come flooding in [and yes, they’re starting to creep on over Continue reading →