This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Way Beyond Listening: Integrating Listening Into Your Platform for ROI. This webinar was sponsored by Synthesio and featured Brian Melinat (@brianmelinat) Director of Marketing Analytics within Dell, Kristine Vick (@kristinevick) Principal in the Digital and Content team at SAS, and Ben Lapidus (@benlapidus) Senior Sales Engineer at Synthesio. We discussed nine ways companies have found to connect social media to revenue and ROI.

Here are nine ways to connect Social Media to Revenue and ultimately ROI

1. Map your social activities to all 4 stages of a customer journey: Awareness, Acquisition, Activation and Retention
2. Connect social media to all marketing campaigns to gauge response
3. Connect social media to SEO activities to increase SEO
4. Plot your social media sentiment against your NPS scores
5. Provide delightful customer support
6. Listen for Lead Gen opportunities
7. Use social for new product ideas
8. Use social media to vet pricing of new products
9. Use social media for M&A ideas in your product lines

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below. Our next webinar is titled To LinkIn or Not to LinkIn: Getting Ahead of Your Competitors with Innovative Strategies; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.

Last week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Connecting Your Enterprise: Collaboration at Scale. This webinar was sponsored by Tracx and featured Nolan Carleton (@ParsleyCarleton) Lead Consultant Program Execution at AT&T, DeShelia Spann (@DeSheliaSpann) Digital Marketing Strategist at Eaton and Danielle Gerson (@tracx) solutions engineer at Tracx. We discussed how to setup an environment that cultivates growth and scale in social media.

Here are three of the key takeaways:

1. Start Silo Busting – Most enterprises start out in a segmented environment where by multiple departments are roles are isolated from one another and using their own social media point solutions and environments. Getting those silos to come down using one software solution is the first step to greater collaboration and scale in social.
2. Engage your Employees – An obvious place to help scale your efforts once a unified social media platform is in place is leveraging your employee advocates to help get the word out.
3. Watch out for Disjointed Workflow – Nothing hurts your ability to scale like disjointed workflow such as groups publishing in a vacuum or keeping their own datasets separated from the rest of the organization.

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below. Our next webinar is titled Way Beyond Listening: Integrating Listening Into Your Platform for ROI; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.

With mid-year coming up and summertime upon us, many marketers are taking stock of the first half of the year and re-checking their Digital Marketing plans to finish out 2015 strong.

So I’d like to offer you some statistics I found eye-opening from a recent report published by Smart Insights:

• One half (50%) of businesses surveyed do not have a defined digital plan or strategy, although they are active in digital marketing.
• Nearly 60% of peoples’ time is now devoted to digital marketing activities, showing the importance of skills development in this area.

The point-counterpoint is just so stark I couldn’t help but write about this.

For any CMO, developing the skills of their team should always be a top issue. You can’t have a high performing team with spotty skills especially in the area of digital marketing. Whether that’s as simple as; how to write an effective tweet, to how to write for the web, or how to write a pay-per-click advertising the common denominator is content and writing.

Summertime is a great time to do a bunch of Lunch and Learns across your team why not consider a series of weekly lunch and learns to get the skill level across your entire team up! Here’s an infographic with more great stats – hope you enjoy!

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Social Customer Service is the New Heart of Marketing . This webinar was sponsored by Lithium and featured Dave Evans (@evansdave), the VP of Social Strategy at Lithium, Erna Alfred Liousas (@ErnaLiousas), an analyst serving B2C Marketing Professionals at Forrester Research, and Brien Hall (@BrienHall), Social Media Manager for Guest Services at AMC Theatres. We discussed why social media is becoming the primary channel for customer care.

Here are three of the key takeaways:

1. Become customer obsessed! – Forrester research predicts we are in the Age of the Customer and that in order to become customer obsessed you need to master 4 business imperatives: embracing the shift to mobile, turning big data into big insights, transforming your customer experience, and accelerating your digital transformation.
2. A majority of tweets to a brand go unanswered! – Its simple shocking since its proven that customer are more likely to buy when you respond that still companies don’t get it.
3. Social media to become the primary channel in 5 years for customer care  – We spent some time discussing the impacts on the call center, first call resolution and do we need to create separate channels just for customer care in social media.

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below. Our next webinar is titled Is the Death of Social Greatly Exaggerated?; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.

Knowing how the human mind processes information and images—and putting that knowledge to use—can help you become a more engaging and effective marketer.

Here’s a look at some fascinating facts about the human mind, from a marketing perspective.

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.