Conversation Agent

3 Reasons Why Your Brand will Have a Google+ Page

As I wrote a couple of years ago when FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook, there's a lesson in tools changing or disappearing for all of us who spend time with social media, interact with customers online, or guide corporate digital outreach.

Here it is: We are playing in somebody else's yard. And we can be told to go home at any time. Social media is like sharecropping. Social media is not a replacement for traditional forms of contact with your staff and customers. Don't sacrifice one for the other.

Social media is also not the answer to an ailing business or brand. While you may want to establish a presence in the more mainstream social networks, you should know how to sustain that presence beyond streaming press releases or posting the same content everywhere.

Use a buy strategy to figure out what makes most sense for your business or brand.

Amidst social media fatigue that many business owners and brand managers have been experiencing, due to a number of reasons, first among which are a lack of long term strategy, poor executions, and thus scarce results, Google recently launched Google+ Pages for brands and businesses.

Many are already talking gloom and doom.

Yes, Google will need to address critical features to attract more brands. At a minimum:

• the ability to have more than one G+ Page administrator
• integration with existing work flow tools
• a way to verify official pages (it looks like they're addressing the issue of fan-created pages)
• the ability to look under the hood on traffic through analytics

Those are simple requirements other networks either addressed directly, or let developers address. For example, Hootsuite and coTweet addressed many of these issues for Twitter.

And yes, Google has launched other products that failed to gain traction in the recent past: Wave, Sidewicki, Buzz. Skeptics are forgetting that Google is already a platform, one people are using for search -- and we still get things done through search.

Which means your brand will have a Google+ Page, and here are 3 main reasons why:

(1.) Integration with search through Direct Connect

Because Google+ is integrated on an existing platform everyone is already using to perform searches and get things done, your G+ page will come up in search. Which is why you don't want someone else to take it.

Thinking about your content strategy and how it complements (not duplicate, please) what you're doing in your other digital properties also means you can get a bit more creative.

(2.) Integration with your Website

When you create the G+ Page, the system will take you through a way to link your Website to G+. If you have a blog, that is a natural place for tha link. There are things you will be able to do on G+ that you may not do today on your blog.

Starting a hangout for a product launch, then posting a summary wrap of the questions and answers on G+ at your blog, for example. Michael Dell has been using hangout to talk to customers via his own Google profile+  since the site launched.

(3.) Audience segmentation capability

You probably already have some ways to communicate with your customers -- newsletters, product announcements or updates, etc. You can use circles to lend continuity with those customers who are on G+ into account size, or frequency of communications for lead nurturing, or maybe for a special program.

Say you want to have hangouts or threads only with a certain group for a specific occasion, maybe ramping up to a company event, you can do that by creating a circle with those customers or partners you want in, who have G+ profiles, and you're on your way.

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And it's Google, so you have integration with YouTube as well. And although they're saying there will not be advertising there, I'm thinking there will be some integration with their AdWords products.

You don't need to follow or circle someone to be able to share their posts to your G+ Page. Simply search for their profile from the page, then share there.

At first, there may be some confusion about how to tell personal profile and business page.

There is the added bonus that media companies already have Google+ Pages, so if you see a story that needs expansion or correction, or maybe you have something to add to a story, it provides a new place to offer a different angle.

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To create a page for your business or brand, use this link. Here's an easy to use photoshop template to create the images on that page.

You can find my page here.

 

[image of +Burberry]

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Launching Business and Technology Trends Series

Many business executives in large organizations are quite busy focusing on their specific deliverable and industry, and seldom have the luxury of looking beyond the quarter.

As well, startup founders are immersed in getting their product nailed and off the ground.

Part of SmallServices℠

Reading the news together is one of the SmallServices℠ I provide to clients.

Deconstructing and connecting the dots on technology (and business) trends and case stories, which contain a kernel of a trend (or more) already happened is something I do on a daily basis.

Thanks to Google, I'm not experimenting also with a brand page for my business.

Convergence

Which is why I thought it makes sense to combine the two activities, at a high level.

Today, I'm inaugurating a new Saturday series on business and technology trends. It's a way to thank loyal readers of my feed for sticking with me over the years.

Because these will mostly be links with a brief intro on why you should pay attention in my view, I'm closing the comments here.

I'll be integrating the discussion from my Google+ Page, and will be collecting these posts on a trends page on this blog for handy reference.

Saturday five

The five stories that caught my eye this week are:

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Are you starting a company, or thinking of starting one? Some food for thought in what factors make a startup cool?

Probably the must important element to becoming a cool startup, is that execution is everything. I don’t know any world changing company that is not product focused.

As The Next Web points out, getting coverage with so many sites and publications out there is cool. The real value comes from building something that solves a real problem, executing flawlessly, and doing the right thing.

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How can you make more money from your online transactions? By eliminating credit card fees. This 28-Year-Old's Startup Is Moving $350 Million And Wants To Completely Kill Credit Cards

how do I get paid through a website without paying credit card fees?  We pitched a bank, and amazingly enough they said, "We'll give it a shot."

Dwolla was built by 28-old Ben Milne, a former online merchant, for consumers. The company only takes $0.25 each transaction whether it's moving $1 or $1,000. The large percentage of their business so far is business-to-business, consumer-to-business, and business-to-consumer. 11% of their business is person-to-person. One to watch for mobile payments.

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Data mining is the new Holy Grail of marketing. Tech Blogger Starts a Company Around His Data Mining (a.k.a. Web Stalking) Skills

(Marshall) Kirkpatrick had developed over his years at ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch tools for getting scoops not by talking to sources but by tracking people online.

I've appreciated the insights Kirkpatrick brought to his RWW stories, so I'm tagging Plexus Engine as a company to watch. It's been in testing for over one year.

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With tablets, iPhones, and Androids to choose from, which device should you build your app for first? IBM found that Shoppers with iPads spend more

"The iPad user is converting -- meaning they're buying something -- almost twice as frequently as other mobile users," says John Squire, chief strategy officer at IBM Coremetrics. "Not only do they buy more frequently than other mobile users (iPhone and Android users) when they're in an online store, but they also buy more than the average PC shopper or average mobile shopper."

One consideration is that people don't carry their tablets to stores, or may not have a phone carrier enabled on their tablets because they use it mostly at home.

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You know the line from a Seth Godin book title: Small is New Big. How Google+ And Other "Little Versions Of Facebook" Solve Social Media's "Big" Problem

[...] the concept of small might turn out to be an advantage when it comes to organizing friends. A slew of smaller social networks are popping up to better capture the nuances of our offline relationships, from Foursquare (for location sharing) and LinkedIn (for professional contacts) to Instagram and Path (for photo sharing).

And we're just getting started, that's all I can say at this point. Watch this space for more in coming weeks.

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Lots of interesting angles to think about here. Follow the discussion over on Conversation Agent Google+ Page.

Have a great weekend everyone.

 

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The Impact of Decision Making on Your Business

Leave early or stay late? Wear a suit, or dress more casual? Keep that document on your desk, or file it in the pending folder? The number of decisions -- conscious or automatic -- we make every day is astounding, when you think about it.

It becomes very complicated when our decisions intersect those of others. That's where the expression right place, right time comes in.

Multiply all the other places (that may or may not be right) by the number of times (that may or may not be right) you're called to choose in social networks. What to post, when to post it, whether to respond, etc. compounded by the intended or unintended consequences of those posts in the tweets and forwards or likes of others.

Do you say the same thing many times? How many? Has everyone heard or seen you? What are the next steps?

Decision-making is a mental process

One that has consequences. An output of this process in social networks includes considerations about disclosure and trust: If disclosure is an expression of trust, it is also a creator of trust. In addition to it being a guideline enforced by the FTC.

At a personal level, the actions we choose and the opinions we share are influenced by biases, emotions, reason, and even memories. In business, we'd like to think all our decisions are made rationally after weighing pros and cons. We know better, though.

In many organizations, and not necessarily only large ones, decisions are made by committee. When biases and agendas diverge, the process is not that smooth and may result in poor trade (as in not keeping your promises).

Making good decisions

This is a very broad topic, of course. The impact of the decisions we make -- and those we don't make -- depends on several variables.

What constitutes a good decision? Why do you need to make one in the first place? How much information do you need? What's the cost of being wrong and the upside of being right? 

Some situations that have the most impact on your business are:

Making hiring decisions

This is where having a buy strategy will help you. When companies write or say that people are their number one asset, they're saying it literally -- they can trade people. Think about individual stars, for example. Stay with me here, I know it's tempting to debate that statement. We have different ground to cover.

Opinions on making good hiring decisions vary wildly. There are as many as types of leaders, or investors, involved in a business. Some sample considerations that come to mind:

• Are you a startup looking to bootstrap? Who should you have on board? 
• Is your startup looking to scale quickly? Who's the critical A-player to help with that?
• Does your agency need a full time person, or should they hire a consultant to ramp up their social media capabilities?
• Does that department need to fill a slot, or should they look for a person and then design the job around their skills/talent?
• Which critical skill/experience is missing at the top that needs to be there to grow the business?
• Should you farm the search out and what are the skills/experience of the search firm or headhunter?
• Should you change your mind about a candidate when your conditions change? I added this one, because I've seen many a decision maker or leader let their initial gut rection or ego get in the way of making a better trade later

Deciding who is a customer

Probably the second highest cost of a business after its employees is its customers. There's a cost associated with making the first trade with people and turning them into buyers. And there is a (potentially) smaller cost of turning those buyers into customers.

A few considerations:

• What's your cost per lead?
• How many of those leads become buyers?
• How many of those buyers become customers? (i.e. buy again)
• What's your attrition or cancellation rate? Here's an example of a deep dive for SaaS
• What's you cost to keep a customer? What are you getting in return as a business?
• Are you closing the gap between what you promised and what was delivered? There is a cost associated with higher brand dissonance

Deciding your query set

Besides the actual production costs if you have a product, in which case you need to weigh in economies of scale for distribution, marketing costs, etc., probably the third decision that has the most impact on your business centers around the query set.

Data is a business asset in and of itself. Without data, you don't have feedback, which is also something that is critical to your business. And there is the question of how you collect good data that matters.

For example, you can use strong attractors like good communication, what we call content in social media, dynamic communication, or what I call conversation, with a wide audience, or advocates. However you get the data, it is how you analyze it, or the query set that makes it most valuable.

So you have input data, derivative data, and you have query sets.

This then goes back to my model of influence and understanding what to look for, what to add, and whether you even understand the importance of analytics (listening, observing) and how this is linked to feedback on what you shoud stop doing or start doing.

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Hopefully this post on how to identify critical areas of impact to your business will get you thinking more clearly about the decision making process so you can be more effective.

 

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Do You Have a Buy Strategy?

When Google switched off the social sharing features in its Reader in an effort to draw together content and sharing recently, I asked: Is Google looking for greater market penetration and willingly trading the brand experience of Google Reader for greater flows?

It's a business question.

I do wonder especially in light of the recent launch of business and brand pages on Google+. And yes, I created a page for my practice to start testing some of the upcoming features slated for roll out. I'm linking my business site to that page.

In light of the G+ pages rollout, it seems to make trade sense to phase out other Google product features that are non core to its strategy. Among them, the sharing functionality.

Whenver a new service or tool rolls out, I invest a little time to experiment with it.

Instead of making that experimentation part of my sales strategy, where plenty of others are operating even while in perpetual beta, I make it part of my buy strategy.

A buy strategy

Helps you define where you can do better trade. And since your customers also have a buy strategy, a better matching of product and service promises to expectations will determine how close the asset is to value for buyers.

Higher trust brands can close that gap more quickly, no matter the platform. And more profitably. Scale is a buying strategy as much, if not more, than a sell strategy, for instance.

While your product or service may need to be based on uniform specs to keep production and delivery costs down, when you take control of your promises, you're able to keep better promises. You do that closing the loop on all promises.

Business model

Is what you use to trade promises.

When you think about Apple, for example, the company is still top of mind because it defies all "best" practices. Instead, they have the most practice at decreasing the brand dissonance and taking control of the brand's promises.

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We're used to looking at the world through the sales lens -- nothing happens until a sale is made. That may be true. The other side of the sale coin is a buy strategy.

Selecting a social network over another where to sharecrop your content, for example, is a buy strategy. Are you deliberate about your buy strategy? Do you have one?

 

[looking for a Malbec to try? My favorite is Luigi Bosca]

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What Makes Proposals Hard

How many proposals do you write a year? A month? A week?

Do you consider your internal reports and presentation decks a form of proposal?

When they're tools utilized to persuade, inform, and demonstrate, you should. Even as you do the writing or pulling together inside a department or group in an organization, you still represent that business and brand.

Which is why you would think of your proposal, report, or deck as a promise made. My definition of brand is the sum of promises made, promises kept and the unbounded expectations market.

Value is about closing the gap -- reducing the cognitive dissonance between what was promised and what was delivered. Which is where social interactions are so valuable in realigning expectations.

Thinking about the promise

The part that makes writing a proposal hard is identifying the hot buttons for the person on the receiving end -- your boss, prospect, client, partner, and their colleagues or bosses. Words have a way of getting ahead of ourselves, don't they?

As many an experienced sales professional and consultant knows, the key to a successful proposal is not perfection, it's being on point with qualifying the opportunity. The person or team on the receiving end makes an investment in time and attention, at a minimum.

Think about the proposal as your promise and you will do good trade.

Are you ready to submit?

Your proposal begins with the right question. When submitting for a speaking opportunity, that is more likely understanding the audience. Who will be there? What problems are they called to solve in their work? Which promises do they need to keep to make better ones in the future?

Are you thinking about the context of the event?

These are examples of questions I ask myself.

Although it's important to address audience make up and expectations, it's not a duality kind of world. Right or wrong really depends on closing the gap between promises made and promises kept.

Tracking promises is the third core business function.

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What makes proposals hard is what makes good case studies helpful -- the process of thinking through the promise, and managing expectations by underwriting the risk. So you can trade better and better promises and make your business stronger and more resilient.

Do you have any hot buttons when writing proposals? Where do you get stuck? Which lessons helped you get unstuck? Have you ever made a promise you knew you depended on someone else to keep? How did that turn out?

If you're a manager, investor, potential partner, buyer, what do you seek in a proposal? Are personal relationships important to even get to your door?

One more question: Should you give people exactly what they're looking for?

The comments are yours.

 

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7 Ways to Make Writing Your Creative Habit

Content is one component of the online experience — good material provides a solid platform for action while offering the reader bonus insights.

For a writer, it's about the pleasure of turning a great concept into a story worth sharing. For a business is about trading its knowledge asset to make better promises.

Many have asked me over the years: How do you face that empty screen, the blank digital canvas that stares back at you?

Day in, day out looking to come up with ideas. You power up the computer, open your program, look at the white space and what do you see?

Make creativity a habit and what you see is possibility.

Choreographer Twyla Tharp has made a career of it. You can, too.

Contrary to self defeatist thoughts — it doesn’t take extraordinary talent to be creative. It takes discipline. When you set daily routines, you have the opportunity to transform what you think a rate gift into a habit — your creative habit.

It does takes work, and it takes commitment. When you decide to blog for money it takes healthier doses of both — for example, look at what Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has done. The good news is that it is possible for you as well, if you're willing to crank up creativity.

First, you need to learn how to prepare to be creative. It’s about much more than quality of presentation, it’s about being able to bridge between what you see in your mind and what you present to the world — skill is how you build that bridge.

And you build your skill with practice. Based upon Tharp's work, I have found some ways to change my process to embrace and build upon creativity.

(1.) Immerse yourself completely in what you are doing

No multitasking, no background music, no distractions from what is in your mind. All of those activities are mere crutches that delay your moment of truth — when you start typing and the words flow onto the page. Listen to what your mind is saying.

(2.) Discover what is the one tool that feeds your creativity

Then find a way to make it portable. For a writer it may be a pen and a pad of paper to be able to jot notes. I type my posts, but I like to jot down notes anywhere I am to capture moments of inspiration.

(3.) Reveal yourself

Learn to understand your patterns, sources of inspiration, what makes your writing work. The real secret of creativity is to go back and remember. Use your memories to rediscover new ways to talk about topics. Here's me thinking about revealing yourself to others.

(4.) Start a creative box with your notes, images, and all the sensory information you need to store your ideas for when you’re ready to retrieve them to tell a story

We tend to do that in rapid fire format, it doesn’t have to be that way. Sometimes a topic becomes much better with the passing of time. The box is your preparation.

(5.) Improvise and see what happens

I wrote some of my best posts on the spur of the moment. Let your inhibitions go and just write. Want to know my secret? When I start feeling the tingling in my belly, the thought of being a little scared, I am certain I’m on to something. Trust your gut, it’s an excellent guide. If you never dare write it, you’ll never know.

(6.) Build a bridge to the next day

Never completely finish everything you have on your plate. You may notice that your moment of peak energy is just after you have written a killer post. Start another one, begin outlining the idea before you leave it for the next day. You will be glad you did, as it will be provide a launching pad for generating more material when you start working the following day. It’s a jump start. I try to work at least two days ahead of myself so I have time to edit, tighten, research, insert that inspiring phrase.

(7.) Find your very own validation squad

This is a group of people that does not have an agenda and you know will be candid with you. Seek their counsel, test drive ideas with them. Sometimes all we need is for our idea to be heard to tackle it.

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Confidence is a trait that can be earned and needs to be refreshed constantly. Make writing your creative habit and your will uncover limitless opportunities to generate content and have fun with it.

In closing, I found this TED Talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on creativity to be very engaging.

[YouTube link]

 

[first published at The Blog Herald]

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Customer Conversations on Twitter Are Good Brand Management

In digital media, listening is so much more than monitoring.

Knowing what you're listening for is half the battle, and the first ingredient in most practice. Knowing when and how to respond is more than good etiquette. It's become an integral aspect of brand management and can mean the difference between a flop -- or worse, a crisis -- and a deposit in your company's reputation bank.

It's easy to dismiss Twitter's usefulness as a tool.

That is until you figure out that on Twitter you can find mentions of your brand and you can actually connect with customers directly and provide a first line of response. In 140 characters, you won't be able to do much more. But don't underestimate the importance of that public gesture.

How to use Twitter for customer service

Many companies started integrating customer service on Twitter. This list I created is purely for customer service, but there is another important aspect of customer support, which is why in many companies there is a community evangelist role carved out.

There are also individuals who opted into community builder roles -- some in official capacity for an organization, some because that's who they are. Go ahead and promote your many customer support people on Twitter by creating a list.

Twitter is ideal for customer service because:

• You can respond to a customer question or complaint immediately after seeing it without needing to have all the facts - take the problem solving part off line. Monitoring and responding is lightening fast, and right now it will cast you in a good light, especially if your normal customer service channels are in need of repair.

• You can be proactive and let your customers know where to find you - I started a list linked above, let me know if you'd like me to add your company's team to it. This will ease some anxiety over which number to call or being on hold. Provided you don't take two days to get back to them as I described here.

• You provide the added bonus of good service/product stewardship, which in turns creates a nice halo for your company and brands. Let's face it, Twitter is the most social of social networks. People have the opportunity to humanize the brand experience over time by being helpful and personal. I do wonder if companies are developing Twitter scripts?

Your customer service in social should be fair, not special. Your team should be integrated across the spectrum of communication tools your company uses.

How do you track tweets?

There are many tools you can use to track customer conversations on Twitter. For free, you could:

• Search for key terms or your company name with Twitter Advanced Search
• Build a Yahoo! Pipe (watch the how to video here) - here's an example of how Salesforce.com uses the tool
• Get email Twitter alerts with TweetBeep
• Use TweetScan to search for key words combined with a user
• Test drive monitoring up to three key words in real time with Monitter
• Distinguish positive from negative tweets with Twitrrater
• Get sentiment, top links, and influencers with Twazzup
• Look up who's following you in TwitterKarma
• Try Twittervision to see the global nature of this tool
• Look up daily top influencers on Twitterholic - expect to see more tools on influence
• Find and filter content by influence with PostRank
• Find out how many times a term was mentioned with TweetVolume (back in beta for improvements)
• Set up Google Alerts for the terms you want to monitor - you can route them to your email, or your RSS reader
• Use the Twitter version of alerts, twilerts, delivered to your inbox
• Use Social Mention for alerts on social media sites
• Use Hashtags to learn what's happening right now
• Search what's bussing on Twitter in real time with Twitscoop
• Set up search term columns on Hootsuite
• Track conversations and terms with your team and co-Tweet
• Find a list of regular chats on Twitter

As it's the case with tools, your objectives will determine which ones are most useful to you.

Online monitoring is broader than Twitter. WebWorkerDaily pulled together some advice on how to make a monitoring dashboard to track online conversations. As Dawn explains, the real magic is in the content you're monitoring - your strategy and goals should come first.

For a fee, and for more than just monitoring on Twitter, you can utilize (order indicates from more cost effective to pricier to pricing not available):

• SpoutSocial - is a social customer relationship management tool that provides analytics and reporting
• Viral Heat - provodes analytics: statistics, influence, sentiment, viral; human intent
• UberVu - shows social mentions for all streams; analytics: volume of mentions, share of voice (over social network), accounts tagcloud, number of RTs and checkins, top languages
• Beevolve - analytics and reports include automated sentiment and tone, demographics, influencers and identifying trending issues and themes. The premium package includes advanced features
• Actionly - for tracking sentiment analysis, competitive analysis, Facebook and Twitter analytics
• Argyle Social - publishing workflows and integrated analytics
• Trackur - tracks sentiment, mentions, % increase/decrease in mentions, results sources, most active searches, trending keywords
• Lithium - web-based application that tracks social media and provides you with data on sentiment, trend spotting, buzz trend, share of voice, email alerts, customer rants and raves, as well as a platform to coordinate your response, assign tasks, add comments, and share product and marketing ideas
• Spredfast - a social customer relationship management tool that combines listening, publishing, managing and measuring social activity all from one system
• Collective Intellect - multi-dimensional analysis, blended qualitative and quantitative analysis, demographics and psychographics analysis; semantic engine is specifically designed to analyze large volumes of unstructured data, like social media, surveys, customer service data or any text-based resource
• Sugar CRM - for lead, opportunity, and account management and campaign management, email marketing
• Attensity - analyzes ongoing relevant conversations about your brands, products, competitors, and more, identify influential opinion leaders and sources, understand sentiment and issues, and keep on top of industry trends
• Spiral16 - for monitoring, collecting, and measuring the social media conversations, semantic analysis, conversation sentiment, and visualizing data in a 3D mapping so you can better understand the hubs of influencers (based on linkages) and how a message is potentially being spread
• Alteriam SM2 -for sentiment analysis (brand reference, content tone, emotion); daily volume, share of voice, competitive tracking of topics, demographics, author tags alerts with map overlay
• BrandsEye - for monitoring online reputation and tracking negative sentiment
• Sysomos - to detect sentiment, crate user-defined dashboards, text analytics for monitored topics, list of key influencers, up to 3 filters per data to drill down (age, gender, location, sentiment, time, competition, and topics)
• Cision - for themes, topics, trends, influencers, sentiment and how they compare to the competition
• Radian6 - which allows you to set up a dashboard to monitor mentions across sites and tools and shows you brand sentiment, along with location, and integrating with WebTrends and SalesForce.com
• NM Incite - leverage social media as customer insight channel, helps you identify – in near real-time –brand threats and opportunities, customer service issues, helps optimize messaging and touch points, based on customer feedback
• Vocus - used to find influencers, tracks sentiment and tone, monitors Twitter in real time, analyzes online reputation
• Cymfony - collects all forms of content, organizes and categorizes it, and provides a powerful but easy-to-use interface with data visualization and discovery features that allow you to gain valuable insights from selected discussion most relevant to your brand
• TwelveFold - formely knows as BuzzLogic, this a technology platform helps with content relevance, measuring the impact of your media, and delivering insights into trends, themes and opportunities related to your brand and marketplace
• RapLeaf - helps you understand your customers better, simplify online media planning, enhance customer databases, and manage fraud risk

This list should be a good start and it's by no means complete.

Customer service = brand management in social media

More and more companies are discovering the power of being first line responders on Twitter for customer issues. There are many examples of great brand management through customer service. Matt has aggregated a few.

Here's a list of top customer service accounts on Twitter.

If you think that one customer with two followers may not be all that important, think again. Analysts and journalists are increasingly participating actively and may pick up on a random conversation - all of a sudden, you could have what we've come to call the Streisand Effect.

So don't jump to rash conclusion. Instead, jump on Twitter and join the customer conversation. Even if your customers are not there yet, chances are that those who talk about your company and brand on Twitter will come up in search - as in search engine search [hat tip Louis Gray].

Plus, you could start from a less than ideal position and turn things around to the point that your company develops a well though-out Twitter strategy, complete with customer segmented offers like Dell did. This is a question I get asked often: What makes Dell so special?

By reaching out from beyond the shop floor, Dell took control of its promises and started to close the brand dissonance gap. That is good brand management -- and good business.

 

[image by Theron Conrey]

[updated from blog archives]

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Speaking at the WOMMA Summit

On the heels of the three-hour keynote session with attendees at Social IRL in St. Louis last Thursday, where the topic gathered excellent feedback, I'm preparing for my session at the WOMMA Summit.

Like the massive Death Star in Star Wars, the accumulation of social media fans for its own sake can create a false sense of power for today's companies. Eyeballs by another set of media (than mass) are still a danger.

Accumulating fans lulls organizations into a false sense of security. That they have a strong and resilient model upon which to trade. Business is looking for answers in all the wrong places - customers don't have them. And they should not shift their focus to expecting that they do.

Commerce is not a popularity contest. It's about relationships. These are a different kind of relationship: What people exchange instead of the asset. It's not about selling, it's about showing and telling. This is the conversation we never had about social and that we desperately need to make sense of what works and what doesn't.

 The prequel to the tactical implementations that have followed in the last couple of years.

I see there are another three excellent sessions concurrent to mine; two on customer care stories, and one on sponsorship marketing with my good friend Matt Dickman.

This year I'm particularly focused on raising the specific flag of business assets, trade, and promises. If that is your tribe, if you're planning to work on creative ways to trade your assets, to understand your promises (intended and unintended), so you can trade better ones, I'm your session.

Come find me during the conference, which I will be attending in its entirety, if you'd like to connect. It will be an exciting year filled with opportunity. And I'm already working with some businesses that understand how to trade their promise(s).

See you at WOMMA Nov. 16-18.

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I'll be working on a special dossier about trends in word of mouth marketing from the conference to share with subscribers of the Premium Newsletter in the November issue.

 

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The True Story of Paul Revere

The story goes that Paul Revere was so influential that when he rode from town to town to warn his fellow Americans about the impending British invasion, people listened to him.

Except for this is not exactly what happened.

Paul Revere was not alone on the ride. It turns out he was accompanied by two other men. All three were stopped on their way to Concord after leaving Lexington, and held by British troops. Revere's two companions escaped. When he finally escaped, Revere has no horse and had to walk all the way to Concord.

The ride sounded better, I suppose.

In the deep dive on influence I did here and at SxSW solo last March, we looked beyond some of the artificial constructs invented for special service level agreements, code for big program spends by organizations.

My work is solely focused on helping businesses trade better promises. You don't do that by making up reality. There are other circles for that kind of fiction in Dante Alighieri's work.

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I was intrigued by the relaunch of Brand Karma recently.

Many are looking at the current crisis as an opportunity to get back to real value creation. To me, value creation is about trading better promises, which in turn give strength, resilience, and edurance back to the business.

As I said last week at the keynote workshop for Social IRL, brand is one asset -- a very visible and talked about -- yet still only one among the many each business has. I define brand as the sum of promises made, promises kept and the unbounded expectations market.

 

Value is about closing the gap -- reducing the cognitive dissonance between what was promised and what was delivered. Which is where social media is so valuable in realigning expectations with the trade and integrating additional meaning into the trade. 

 

[image of Paul Revere statue]

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Giving, Getting, or Being the Inside Scoop

Which one would you prefer?

I asked the question a couple of days ago both on Twitter and in G+ and the responses where evenly split among the first two. The third was a suggestion voted in by the community on G+, namely being the inside scoop.

Most of us have an immediate gut reaction to dualistic kinds of questions -- yes and no, either/or, this or that, fight or flight.

Once we start defining the question in more specific terms, our likely choice crystallizes:

• giving news about gifts to children for Christmas
• getting new information about a deep tissue massage
• giving very bad news to a person you care about
• getting a controversial review in a prominent publication

When it comes to reviews, for example, is giving one easier than getting one? Does it depend on its nature? Maybe, partly on the nature of the person doing the giving? How about the one who's getting it? Does your answer change if we're talking about the review of your book vs. the review of your work?

If your answer was / is "it depends", you're thinking in more modern and contemporary terms: It's a choice we're called to make in different situations, at different times, with varying degrees of information at our fingertips.

The answer depends on your focus.

For example, this week, we talked about:

• best bang for the buck -- where an undefined question made me think about another question that is usually asked without definition
• top business trends -- where I pointed out that the other side of the trend coin is case studies. Which are trends seen in the rear view mirror
• trick or trade? -- where the things that scare business people the most are the same that hold the most opportunity for them
• 34 ways to spread your ideas with a blog -- where I concluded that with all its promise, blogging is no substitute for doing. It is a complement to it
• commerce and creativity -- where I said when you cannot make your social media programs work it means you don't know (yet) what the business trades
• Google draws content and sharing together -- where I pointed out that it's not just the seller's strategy we need to examine. We also need to question the buyer's strategy to do good trade

I'm fascinated by these kinds of questions because, more often than not, we live in a both/and world. It's the big ideas and the small gestures, vision and leadership and working in the background as supporting actor, moments of joy years in the making.

That's how you get to be the inside scoop.

Chocolate and pistachio for me. Who can tell me what those two towers mean?

 

[image courtesy of Wikipedia]

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