There is NO Passive Marketing with Social!

Traditionally, marketers think of outcomes like they think of the weather – you sit back and see what happens.  Suffering from the lack of true and authentic knowledge of their audiences, or any provision for real-time data or analytics, they are consigned to a passive role: spend money and hope it creates the intended outcome. [...]

May 16th, 2012 | Tags: , , , , , , | Category: Advertising, Business Intelligence, Customer, Data Mining, Innovation, Listening, Social Business Intelligence, Social Media, Social Networking | Comment

Ideal Customer Persona – made with Social Data

Some advertising agencies charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars to create what they call the “ideal customer persona”. I discussed how you can do this for FREE with Facebook in a prior post called Generating a Buyer Persona with Facebook Advertising but unfortunately you do get what you pay for.

What if there was a [...]

June 8th, 2011 | Tags: , , | Category: behavioral targeting, Customer, Innovation, Marketing, People, Social Media, Strategy | Comment

B2B Marketing needs to Curate a Vibrant Community

If you ask the members of my leadership team – they will tell you I keep talking about how I think we have B2B Marketing backward.

Let me explain …

We focus a lot of energy on the acquisition part of marketing looking for new customers and getting them up the awareness to consideration to purchase cycle. [...]

July 28th, 2010 | Category: Content Marketing, Customer, Customer Experience, Customer Support, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Strategy, Support | 18 comments

Getting a customer is not the end goal it’s the middle

In a recent speech by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research at the ITSMA Marketing Leadership forum it occurred to me that customer acquisition is no longer an “end state” for marketers its somewhere in the middle. Let me explain …

Many marketers focus their efforts on the customer acquisition angle which has the benefit of measurability [...]

June 30th, 2010 | Category: Customer, Customer Experience, Customer Support, Lead Generation, Support | 10 comments

B2B Marketers Fate Rests in the Hands of a Few

At the recent ITSMA Marketing Leadership forum I was stunned by a presentation given by Sean Geehan CEO of the Geehan Group author of the upcoming book the B2B Executive Playbook. The big eye opener for me was – B2B marketers are always tasked with getting net new customers when in reality their existing customer [...]

June 9th, 2010 | Category: Advertising, Branding, Communications, Communities, Customer, Lead Generation, Loyalty, Marketing, Strategy | 5 comments

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 | 21 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

2010 – Welcome to the Age of Customer Service

At the end of the last decade we saw Amazon snap up Zappos for $928 Million. Combining two of the most customer focused organizations I am aware of on the web and making one of the most powerful customer centric companies out there.

Social media has forever changed the balance of nature in favor of the [...]

January 5th, 2010 | Category: Communications, Customer, Customer Support, Social Media, User Generated Content | 9 comments

Is Real Time Marketing in your future?

In fact I would argue it is here today.

Take a look at one of my last post on Hey Marketer – When was the last time you talked with a customer??

And then ask yourself – how long did some of those interactions take. For Example – We resolved the issue for the person below [...]

August 20th, 2009 | Category: Customer, Social Media | 10 comments

Hey Marketer – When was the last time you talked with a customer??

It’s an odd dynamic I see in play today – in today’s ever connected environment marketers tell me they feel even more removed from direct customer interaction.

As a former sales person, I used to schedule “ride-along” time with my sales team just to get out on sales calls and hear how we position ourselves in [...]

August 12th, 2009 | Category: Customer, Sales, Social Media | 8 comments
 
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