Whether you completely neglected to build a website for your mobile platform or there’s a lacking call to action, there are common mobile faux pas than can result in lost loyalty, brand following and even support.

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of: Scaling Social Globally: Best Practices for Engaging with an International Audience. This webinar was sponsored by Act-On Software and featured Mike Stenberg (@stenmic), Global Vice President of Digital Marketing for Siemens, and Andrew Ashton (@AndrewLAshton) Social Media Analyst at Yum! Brands. We discussed the best practices in scaling a social media team and content on a global basis.

Here are 3 of the key take-aways:

1. Team structure matters – Andrew talked about an approach he called the Dandelion approach: having a central team that can provide training and social media tools to more distributed teams that can engage on a local level.
2. Roll out a common set of tools – Both Mike and Andrew talked about having one tool — like BrandWatch or Netbase, respectively — to give them one version of the trust across all markets. In Mike’s case, he has 160 markets to evaluate, while Andrew has 120. Strong translation capabilities and sentiment scoring were also mentioned as key features.
3. Make it feel like one social team globally – Both Mike and Andrew also highlighted that while it’s important to have the local teams engage in a dialog with clients, they also felt you needed tools like Yammer internally to help coordinate efforts and answer questions in real time coming from the local teams.

To get a copy of the slides or listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the following Storify:

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Predictions for 2015: Start Off the New Year Knowing the Future of Social. This webinar was sponsored by Act On Software and featured four all-stars on our panel: Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), the Chief Catalyst and Founder of Crowd Companies; Renee Ducre (@rducre) the Global Director of Social Business Marketing for IBM; Charlie Treadwell (@ctreadwell), the Director of Social Marketing at Symantec; and Don Bulmer (@dbulmer) the Vice President of Communication Strategy at Shell. We discussed what each person is predicting for 2015.

Here are 4 of the key take-aways:

1. The Collaborative Economy is here – so how are you planning on adapting?  The movement is well funded with over 8 billion dollars and no signs of slowing. For comparison, popular social networks were funded with just over 5 billion dollars.
2. Real time sales and service – Charlie made the point that delivering real-time content to sales and service enables our front lines interfacing with customers to create value by providing content that makes their jobs easier, answers the questions customers are asking, and sets Symantec up as the trusted expert in a real-world relationship.
3. Cause Marketing will be in vogue in 2015 – Don cited several example companies (CVS comes to my mind when I think of good cause marketing). And the numbers have been growing; cause sponsorship is predicted to exceed $1.84 billion by the end of 2014.
4. If content is king, then analytics is queen – Content marketing will continue to be “king”, and to stay competitive companies will need to become more efficient with their social analytics. NOTE: 70% of companies that have social analytics are still not using it!

To get a copy of the slides or listen to the replay please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the following Storify:

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of How to Prepare Employee Advocates for Social Selling Success. This webinar was sponsored by Everyone Social and featured Jill Rowley (@jill_rowley), Chief Evangelist and Founder of Social Selling, Kurt Shaver (@kurtshaver), Founder of the Sales Foundry and Chris Hecklinger (@cdhecklinger), Director of Client Success at Everyone Social. We discussed how to prepare your sales team to be brand advocates and use social selling techniques to break in to new accounts.

Here are 3 key take-aways:

1. Social Sales teams out perform non-social sales teams – Jill Rowley showed some great stats around social sales team – 64% of social sales teams had “total team attainment of quota” and 55% had higher renewal rates. (source: Aberdeen Group)
2. Social Selling is not a “once and done” event – Kurt discussed how to get the sales team prepared to do social selling. He states “its at least a 60-120 day plan for them to learn a new habit” and “not the classic one hour breakout session at the national sales team meeting.”
3. Follow the 411 Rule of Content – Social sharing should have a mix of content coming from various sources: 4 pieces of content coming from news and other relevant sources, 1 piece of content coming from your company and finally one piece of more personal content (cat photo etc).

To get a copy of the slides or listen to the replay please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the following Storify:

I had a chance to catch up with fellow author, Simon Sinek to discuss his book called – Start With Why at the World Business Forum held in New York at Radio City Music Hall on October 7-8. My goal was to go a bit more in-depth on how to get started for B2B marketers, hope you enjoy the interview.

For those that follow this blog but are not yet familiar with your book Start with Why, give us little background.

A few years ago, I discovered that every single organization on the planet, even our own careers always function on the same three levels: what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. Everybody knows what they do. It’s the products we sell or the services we offer. Some know how we do it. It’s whatever you call it, your differentiating value proposition, your USP, the things that you think make you different or stand out from the crowd. But very few people and very few organizations can clearly articulate why they do what they do. But why I don’t mean to make money. That’s a result. I mean what’s your purpose, what’s your cause, what’s your belief, why does your company exist. And those that understand the why can clearly communicate it have an unbalanced amount of influence and success and loyalty in the marketplace with greater ability to innovate on all the rest of it.

Can every company have a why?

Not only can a big company have a why, every company does have a why. It comes from the founder. It’s the reason why they started the company. Those that are started from market opportunity, I read this article in a magazine and I realize that those tend to be very weak and they tend to not do well. But when a human being personally suffered or people close to them personally suffered something and they found a solution to whatever that problem was and that was the birth of the company, that’s a clear purpose.

Where’s the right place for a marketer to get started?

A good place to start is when companies are formed around real problems. It has to be born out of the cause of the founder. If it wasn’t a specific problem, then that founder has their own why, and the company is formed in their own cause.   Virgin is Richard Branson. It’s the same thing. So you can usually go to the personality or the cause, the why of that founder.

How do you make it stick with the organization?

The why is the sticky part because it’s the visceral part. The why talks directly to the limbic brain, which is the part of the brain that makes decisions. It’s the emotion and feeling part of the brain. So when we start with why, that’s what makes it sticky. You can start with what and people might enjoy it for a moment. You describe the product, what it does, and it may or may not appeal to some people. But it’s the why that makes it interesting and makes people viscerally connected to it.

How do you make a strong why work in a B2B professional services organization?

The good news is that even consultants, accountants, or engineers are still human beings. So as much as they like to believe that all of their behavior is rational, it’s not. Otherwise they would only buy the cheapest product and they would never be loyal to anything. When the why is clearly communicated, it viscerally appeals to people, and they feel connected. And being a part of an organization with a clear sense of why becomes part of our self-identity. We wear the tee-shirt that they gave us at the company picnic. We don’t wear it to bed or paint the house. We wear it with pride and don’t want it to get dirty because it’s part of our self-identity.

I had a chance to catch up with Columbia Business School professor and fellow author, Rita McGrath to discuss her latest book called – The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). I also look forward to seeing her speak about this topic at the upcoming World Business Forum held in New York at Radio City Music Hall on October 7-8.

Tell us why sustainable competitive advantage really a failed notion these days?

Because it causes companies to do a lot of dysfunctional things like just focusing on the bottom line.  If you’re looking for things to stay the same and you’re looking for reasons to keep just doing what you’re doing every day, then chances are that you’re going to be taken by surprise by the changes in the environment or changes in the competitive intensity of your business or things that are just not going to take you in a positive direction.

So the assumption that change is the weird thing and stability is the normal thing is something that causes a lot of companies to get taken by surprise.  That’s why I argue that if you have this bias for sustainable (as in long-lasting, not as environmentally sustainable) it sets you up to make a lot of poor decisions in an environment that’s changing rapidly.

So how should companies think about and organize themselves to take advantage of short-term sustainable advantages?

The first big thing that companies need to do is to look at the elements of their business portfolio as an integrated whole, see that some things you’re doing that are driving today’s core business and that are going to continue to drive tomorrow’s core business.   And you should keep doing them.  Then you’ve got some things that you’re investing in which may be candidates to be part of the next generation core business, things that you’re doing today that could lead to a big, healthy business in the future.  When Apple – just to take a common example – goes from making computers to making music players, but that’s an investment in one of these new platforms.

Then you’ve got to have things that you’re working on that are what I call “options,” which are small investments you’re making today that buy you the right but not the obligation to make some kind of future investments or take advantage of some future opportunity but that you don’t necessarily have to follow through on.

What does “good” in this new age look like?

If you look in the book, there’s this set of ten growth outliers that I think get a lot of this right. The kinds of things that they’re good at doing are letting their structure change as their business opportunities change.  Things like making sure that leaders don’t get too calcified in any one role or any one spot.  Making sure that they do things fast, they make decisions quickly.  Their pace is quicker than a lot of other firms.

The problem with a lot of companies, particularly with respect to things like innovation, is that their structures were built to serve some of their business purpose in the past.  So the structure they have today was built to help deliver yesterday’s business.  When tomorrow’s business requires doing something different, you might need a different structure to go after it.  But very often, the phrase I hear all the time is it “falls between the cracks” of the existing business.  So what you want to be thinking about is building the right structure to deliver the business of the future.

What role can marketing play in helping to define a new opportunity?  Is it the classic role that marketing plays, or is it something more?

I think it’s something different, and I think the world of marketing is about to undergo the most ginormous upheaval.  And it has to do with the fact that on the one hand, the analytics that form the cornerstone of traditional marketing are really changing rapidly.  When I was doing my PhD, it was all about conjoint analysis and co-word grouping and feature-function maps.  Today with the advent of big data and the ability to combine data across many different, previous-unrelated databases, the onus on marketing to get really smart about how they use data and what discoveries they find from them is going to be very strong.  There’s going to be a huge amount of pressure for that.

So I’ll give you a specific example.  My colleague at Columbia, Oded Netzer did a big data project involving the use of the entire Edmunds database.  It was a big, involved study, but he was able to use social media mentions from the Edmunds database to identify the General Motors push to rebrand the Cadillac to be more in line with a European luxury car and less like an American family car, which is how many people were beginning to think of it.  He was able to demonstrate that that a particular set of investments actually got traction in the perception of the brand using only social media.  I think that’s totally different than a lot of the tools that are in the marketing toolkit today.

What could this mean for the average marketer’s career?  What does the ability to take advantage of these sorts of transient advantages mean for marketers?

I would suggest – don’t let yourself get stale.  My watchwords are – if you come to work every day and all you’re doing is coming to work every day, you’ve got a long-term problem!

Moreover you’ve really got to know what’s going on out there.  And I’ll give an example of a friend of mine at a big publishing company.  She’d been let go and was meeting with a friend of mine who runs the learning and development department of this particular company.  This marketing woman was saying I can’t get interviews.  Or if she got interviews, she didn’t get offers because they want to know about things like search engine optimization, big data, social, and she had never had to learn any of that stuff.  My friend meanwhile was completely outraged because she had arranged for online courses this woman could have taken advantage of, but she didn’t.  The woman just came to work and did her job.  As a consequence, she wasn’t even aware that a lot of this stuff was beginning to become a real for any company she considered going to.

So the point is I think you’d need to constantly be thinking about where are your skills in relationship to where the demand is going to be?  Are you learning new things?  Even if you don’t directly and immediately see the connection between your job and those skills, are you learning something new on a regular basis?

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Transforming Events into Meaningful Experiences: Lessons in Real-Time Marketing. We had an esteemed panel consisting of Amber Quist, the Vice President of Brand Marketing and Communications at Spredfast; Greg Weiss, the Vice President / Business Leader of Social Media at MasterCard; and Adam Buchanan, the Social Media Manager for Cabela’s. This webinar was sponsored by Spredfast.

Amber set the stage with a discussion of Real-Time Marketing (RTM) and some examples of companies doing it right. When you hear RTM, you often think about the Super Bowl Oreo moment or this year’s Arby’s tweet at the Grammy’s, and we all agreed that is a form real-time marketing, but we want to widen the aperture a little on that definition and also talk about how brands are not only engaging in real-time moments, but also how they are using content in real-time in their owned media to engage their audiences and drive their brand forward. This set the stage nicely for Greg and Adam to discuss their companies success in RTM.

Adam then discussed the intersection of RTM with User Generated Content (UGC) and how that help drive the Cabela’s experience both online ad in-store. Cabela’s is leveraging UGC by “passing their customer the microphone,” because as Adam put it: “There’s a good chance your customer’s content is better than yours.” They leverage tweets and photos online to express the joy that fishing and hunting enthusiasts have when using their products. They also created a “digital brag board” in store to showcase some of the create UGC.

Greg took over and give us an inside view of how social experiences can be “priceless.” MasterCard’s theory was built on the idea that a brand that replies to a tweet can be worth more than years of advertising. They are currently running a campaign as the latest incarnation of their landmark “priceless” campaign, which started back in 1997 (17 years ago!), and it’s called “priceless surprises.” In this campaign they have surprises like Justin Timberlake showing up at your front door or surprise tickets to go see your favorite sports team playing a game. So far they have surprised over 60,000 loyal MasterCard customers!

Now, if you have ever been on a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very “participant-driven” and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Many of the questions from our audience revolved around topics such as: How to handle the legal issues of using photos from customers? How best to organize for Real-Time Marketing? How does Real-Time Marketing work in a B2B environment?

If that piqued your interest, you may want to hear the replay of this webinar or review the slides: please click on this link. Otherwise we hope you will join us on another Social Media Today webinar! The next webinar is onAllocating Resources Across The Marketing Mix: Where to Spend Socially. Sign up for it, or view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.

With the proper planning and strategic thinking, a competitive advantage is something that your company can definitely create in today’s dynamic and fast moving marketplace of business niches.

Furthermore, your business can become particularly competitive in capturing those magical areas of competitive advantage if you can learn how to really understand your consumer market and the desires of your customers. Luckily, this can be done through the application of a more modern approach to strategic planning as we’re about to cover now.

The rewards of going through the strategic planning steps we’re about to cover cannot be understated. By learning to truly understand your customers and use that knowledge for planning your business strategy, you’ll be able to outpace your competitors, improve your brand image and develop client loyalty in a dramatic way that improves your bottom line.

Fortunately, for those who are really interested in this kind of consumer centric planning strategy, there is a detailed and highly informative new ebook I ran across from the people at Insights In Marketing which is packed with practical advice. Here is an overview of that advice.

Strategic Planning in a Nutshell

In essential terms, strategic planning involves taking advantage of expansive customer and market research to gain insights on your overall market, your competition and, most importantly, your actual customers. With this information, you can then build a thoroughly fleshed out strategy for staying ahead of the curve in terms of delivering the right products to its best possible customer as often as possible.

Strategic planning involves asking yourself some probing questions about where your business is headed, how you think it should get there and then using the answers to these questions for achieving the goals you really want to see come to fruition.

The Value of Serious Customer Research

The core of truly effective strategic planning lies in researching your customers in deep detail and really getting to know them. As the strategic planning ebook explains, there are many aspects of the research your company is going to have to do if it wants to really make an effective competitive advantage come to the fore.

The most crucial part of this data gathering will mean finding out as much of the key information about your customers as you possibly can and then using it for product development, better customer service and improved brand development.  You need to find your customers drives, desires and real passions as they relate to your niche in the marketplace.

This process really starts off with something called a consumer insights audit, which helps you understand the following essentials about your consumers:

• Their general habits
• Their most often used media and communications tools
• Their awareness of ads and their habits for viewing them
• General buying and browsing habits
• Where they consume content most often on the web
• Their use of your particular brand and how aware they are of you
• The perception your brand and product offering creates

Finding the Ideal Offer for the Ideal Customer

Through the kind of deeply targeted research of your customers that we just listed, and by applying its insights to your existing business and consumer market, what you can really hope to achieve is the holy grail of effective business promotion. This holy grail consists of finding your ideal, “perfect” customer and delivering to them the offer they absolutely perceive themselves to need for solving their problems and doing this better than any of your competitors is capable of achieving.

If you can pull this feat off, you have the effective equivalent of a secret weapon working for you. Why? Because customers who really feel like you understand them and are serving their needs will be extremely loyal to your brand for the long run and for any new offers you develop.

Furthermore, these kinds of customers will spread the word on your behalf to others who are in the same situation as them. This is the kind of marketing and promotion that’s worth a lot more than any paid advertisements and it goes a long way towards making you immune to competitors.

Developing the kind of consumer insights culture that deep research of both needs and customer psychology applied regularly will help you outpace your competitors. You don’t want to be in a race to the bottom with your competitors. Instead, you want to beat them by knowing your customers and winning their loyalty through that knowledge.

For a more in-depth look at this topic, you can check out the details in this ebook by Insights in Marketing.

The industry is constantly changing and it can be a challenge to keep up. How can you tell the difference between the skills that are necessary and those that are just hype?

Checkout Formstack’s new infographic on the “7 Skills Marketers Need to Succeed.” They studied the trends and crunched the numbers to help digital marketers prioritize their goals. You might be surprised by which marketing skills are worth developing.

Have you made Google Plus a part of your marketing strategy yet? If not, you could be missing out on a great opportunity to grow your audience. After all, it’s not every day that a social media website goes to great lengths to make your business more visible, but that’s exactly what you’ll get from Google’s services. By giving every plus profile a page rank, Google makes it easier for everyone to show up online in the search engine. And, with every comment, mention and +1 your content receives, you will rank higher on one of the most popular search engines in the world. If you don’t believe me, just check out the following infographic.

This handy guide will show you exactly why Google Plus is such a useful tool for businesses and B2B marketing. Even if you’re not sure how to get started, this infographic, provided by SmartVirtualPhoneNumber.com, will show you how to create an account and become active on the site. The more active you are, the more noticeable you will become. In addition, you’ll be able to take advantage of all the tools associated with Google’s social media service, including Google Hangouts.

If you’ve been looking for another way to reach out to potential business partners or create a larger following, Google + might just be able to provide the boost you’ve been looking for. Don’t wait any longer, make Google + a part of your business plans today!