Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Can You Be Authentic?

"A great performance stirs ones soul, rearranges someone's molecules, turns one's being inside out. It gives you a new insight on life, a new place to stand, a new range of experiences." [Benjamin Zander] To me authentic is the expression of a company culture through marketing communication in human speak. A simple digest of complex information of what the company helps you do that makes it interesting. More storytelling and appreciative inquiry than positioning. To translate that in internal communications, it's what gives you that rise of pride in your chest when you read a memo. Less messaged, more real.... Read more →

Who is in the B2B Customer Service Elite?

BusinessWeek just published an in depth special report on customer service. It announces the 50 top companies that know how to keep employees happy, invest in technology that helps customers, and have a service mentality from the top down. The editors will let you reorder the top ten companies in a poll here. Your vote will be followed by a reorder of the ranking comparing BusinessWeek's with that of readers. Here's the ranking after I 'voted.' Amazon, that ranked number 23 on the original list, is number 10 for readers. There are also some companies, like L.L. Bean, that slip... Read more →

From the Director of Marketing Humor

Marketing is serious business, yet sometimes it's good to poke fun at very serious things to loosen up and look at things differently. Every so often it's good to laugh at ourselves. Do you have some good jokes on marketing? I proclaim today marketing humor day. Help us get over the mid-week blues. Join in the fun, leave a good marketing joke as a comment here. The most original (and in good taste) wins a copy of The Big Moo by Seth Godin. ________________ BMW Gets Blue Windscreen of Death Redmond, Wash. (SatireWire.com) — Microsoft announced this week that a... Read more →

Revisiting LinkedIn

In the last couple of weeks I spent more time learning about how new LinkedIn functionality can help me become more attuned to my professional network. It's important not to lose touch with the people you meet at events, for example, yet the connection tends to become more tenuous as time goes by - unless there is a way to continue staying in touch that does not mean an automatic subscription to a newsletter. Has anyone thought of asking for permission to send the newsletter, by the way? There are many reasons why LinkedIn can be ideal for maintaining and... Read more →

So You Want to Make Money While You Make Friends

This is not the same as monetizing your blog or social network with advertising. I've been pondering this question for several years. At times, we discussed how we could charge for Fast Company readers' network events to cover venue costs and possibly snacks, yet the path of least resistance ended up being finding a sponsor to provide the physical meeting place or pay for the snacks. Our work was simply donated to the network. Piers Fawkes [hat tip to Greg Verdino] revisits the concept in the 50/50 corporation. My experience is consistent with his - if you build a network... Read more →

Print is Far from Dead - Can New Media Rise to That Level?

In this case it's about design - of the news experience. Has it already? Every year for the past 29, the Society for News Design (SND) picks the best of print news design. This year's winners are: Akzia, bi-weekly from Moscow, with a circulation of 200,000 Expresso, a weekly news from Portugal, circulation 140,000 Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, a weekly Sunday paper from Germany, circulation 320,000 The Guardian, a daily paper from the UK, circulation 355,750 More on the official announcement here. You know what's interesting? No US papers among the winners, all European. These publications have been around for a... Read more →

W-List - Where are They Now?

It's been more than seven months since I kicked off the idea of compiling a list of women bloggers. The idea was to help spread the word on exceptional women who blog and help them network and connect with each other. Then I let the list go. It's not my list, it's everyone's list. And many who found out about it along the way changed it for the better. Two influential bloggers and good friends helped the list reach tipping point - Liz Strauss, author of Successful and Outstanding blog and Toby Bloomberg, author of Diva Marketing blog. Then Carolyn... Read more →

11 Ways to Market Like Hitchcock

[Scarlett Johansson and Javier Barden reenact Rear Window - see original trailer here. Photo from Vanity Fair USA, homage to Hitchcock.] Hitchcock made cameo appearances in his movies. He was there, yet in most instances he was not visible. His presence was most felt behind the director's camera. He used that lens to tell a story, one where the stylistic choices he made to use recurrent objects created a certain effect. You know, what kept you glued to your seat and pulled you into the screen. That effect. How can we do the same with our marketing conversations? How can... Read more →

Revealing Yourself to Others

The long time readers of this blog, will probably have figured out by now that my weeks follow some unspoken thread - the posts seem to all be part of the same conversation. Although it is not entirely by design, it is a natural part of the brand I call Conversation Agent, which is tightly connected with the work I do. It so happens that this post follows one about egos. Revealing yourself to others is an important part of the process we call "building relationships," from which we build credibility, trust and loyalty. Thus, the businesses that choose to... Read more →

Hardest Thing to Manage: Our Own Ego

I received a couple of emails recently that pointed me to Guy Kawasaki's latest venture, Alltop.com. In particular, the messages were about me being on a list under the "egos" label. Two thoughts presented themselves: I'm on a list with wow blogs, some of which should be on my reading list. Hey, maybe some of those bloggers will notice my blog and add it to their list. The hardest thing to manage is our own ego. I take no offense to the term at all. In fact, I am with Rohit Bhargava when he says that ego is part of... Read more →