Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies (Wiley)

One of the biggest challenges for organizations today is managing the flow of information about their brands, products, and services that occurs in social media channels, including microblogs (such as Twitter), social networking sites (such as Facebook), blogs, and online forums.

More than ever, consumers use social media to spread the word about the brands they [...]

April 27th, 2010 | Category: Customer, Customer Support, Facebook, Listening, Social Media, Support, Twitter | 20 comments

Understanding the Value of Social Media Data

There is a big difference between data and insights. Technology may have given us access now to endless amounts of data from every corner of the world. But the real challenge is making sense of all this seemingly disconnected data. Data by itself is generally valueless which is why for the most part it takes [...]

April 21st, 2010 | Category: Content Marketing, Customer Support, Inbound Marketing, Listening, Monitoring | 2 comments

Customer Service is the New Marketing

Zappos was founded in 1999 and sold to Amazon for $1.2 Billion Dollars just barely over ten years later. Zappos is powered by its customer service and was built on the premise of WOWing each and every customer. It’s that WOW or should I say WOM that enhanced the value of their marketing and attracted [...]

April 15th, 2010 | Category: Branding, Customer, Customer Experience, Customer Support, Social Media, Support, User Generated Content | 22 comments

Wayne Gretzky was an Inbound Marketer

A few years ago in every presentation I made I had a slide at the front of each presentation that featured Wayne Gretzky. It was affectionately called the “Wayne Gretzky School of Marketing” slide and it was basically a photo and a single quote that said “Skate to where the puck is going not to [...]

April 13th, 2010 | Category: Blogging, Branding, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation, SEO, Social Media | 5 comments

Customers don’t care about Channels

Let’s face it at this point social media has gone mainstream. Customers are not only surfing the web looking for information but more and more they are relying on social media to get their information.

Your customers can seamlessly move from web to social to call center to your front door. But do you treat them [...]

April 8th, 2010 | Category: Blogging, Communications, Content Marketing, Customer Experience, Customer Support, Inbound Marketing, Innovation, Reputation Management, Social Media, Social Networking, Strategy, Support | 4 comments

Could Facebook become a Lead Nurturing platform?

When you think of lead nurturing platforms you typically think of firms like Eloqua, Marketo, Aprimo, LeadLife, Market2Lead, Silverpop, even Salesforce.com is getting into the lead nurturing space.

But Facebook?

Lead nurturing starts by taking many touch points and pulling them all together into one spot so you can see patterns of activity across your customer base [...]

April 6th, 2010 | Category: Advertising, Content Marketing, Data Mining, email Marketing, Events, Facebook, Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Social Media, Social Networking | 5 comments

Using Content to Build Trust in B2B Marketing

In the recent Edelman Trust Barometer report they detail out how trust is rebounding in a handful of Western countries especially in the United States where trust in business jumped 18 points to 54 percent. Which was an interesting statistic no doubt for many of us in business today.

But for me – the real story [...]

April 1st, 2010 | Category: Blogging, Branding, Buzz Marketing, Communications, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Interactive Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, Strategy, Thought Leadership | 22 comments