Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Taking the Measure of Marketing Conversations

We have these conversations among peers. Depending on where social media is layered inside an organization, what gets measured and valued changes. That's because there is a different way of looking at it depending on what social media is employed to achieve. It's important to know if it is clicks, impressions, relationships or conversations that matter most, as Michael Brito writes. It is even more important to know what the business is trying to accomplish before we determine which tactics to use when and which of those metrics gets measured and has validity accordingly. Michael has the advantage of having... Read more →

Does Main Stream Media Add Value?

Or is the sound bite starting to just be a distraction? I do not watch television, have not used my set for anything but the occasional enjoyment of a DVD for years. At work we have a television set in the bistro and I will catch a couple of minutes of CNN as I warm up my lunch. It exhausts me with its intense beat and brevity. No time to figure out what it's about, never mind understand implications, just a veneer approach and a continuous request for input from the audience. When did journalism become so needy? The other... Read more →

Olympic Games Off Limits

Mark Cuban has an intriguing post on The NBA and the Olympics. What he hints at is that the Olympic Games are a closed system though and through. They are closed obviously because they include only athletes that excel in a specific discipline as judged according to certain predetermined standards. They are a closed system because everything that happens in and around the games is commercialized. The sponsors pay for the privilege of controlling our viewing and merchandising experience. Will the summer games in Beijing be even more controlled? Will the curtain close on the back stories of the games?... Read more →

100 Thing Challenge

Dave Bruno, a 37-year old Californian entrepreneur, is launching into a challenge - he calls it the 100 things challenge. He's working on cutting down what he owns to 100 items total. The fascinating conversation in the comments to his post centers mostly around how he counts the items - per pair, per collection, per category? When I moved here from Italy, I brought only two suitcases containing clothes and books. Several years ago I finally disposed of the rest of my books I had stored in my family's garage. They were important enough to keep as my biggest love... Read more →

Evolutionary Hierarchy of Communication Networks

I've come across a fascinating evolutionary hierarchy of things by the Bordalier Intitute. It shows communication networks developing from cosmic networks. The diagram did make me think about Matryoshkus Russian dolls. [image of product by Art Lebedev Studio. Hat tip to Laughing Squid] The image I am using makes sense also in another respect. It represents a hierarchy in order of bit, byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte & terabyte. All it's missing is petabytes. According to Wired magazine, these are stored in the cloud. If we take the opposite approach, from the outside in, for communication networks we have: 1. Chemical... Read more →

Word Clouds

It's called Wordle and it turns every text into a word cloud. [hat tip to Bruno Giussani] Let's run an experiment, shall we? Take a communication or marketing piece you have written and run it through Worlde. What is the corresponding word cloud? Does it give you the social tags it should about the topic you covered? Here's one for the Gettysbug Address: And here's one for my post on Ten Ideas for Conversation: Now go get your own! I warn you, it is addictive. Read more →

Evolution of Business

[image of the evolution of man...] The Stanford Social Innovation review has a good article on Achieving Breakthrough Performance based on research with Bain & Company. In it, the authors talk about four management principles that are essential to creating breakthrough performance in any organization, with a focus on not for profit businesses. There are some commonalities between for profit and not for profits in the values that underscore those principles. The one distinction the authors draw is when it comes to customers - two in not for profits, clients and funders, and one in for profits, the customers who... Read more →

AP Content off Limits - Guidelines to Come

I saw the news story in the New York Times and immediately felt guilty for having even mentioned the new AP report A New Model for News. I was talking about it in the context of user experience translating into circulation online. I believe I quoted more than a few words from the report - not again will I quote, maybe I will go as far as not reading for fear that my visual memory may betray me. These are interesting times for main stream media. They are trying to figure out where they fit and how to make money.... Read more →

Create Meaning and Value

In other words connect ideas and people - that is classic content marketing in my book. I was talking with someone at lunch yesterday about this. Let's say you have a newsletter, as he does. It's packed with great information. Maybe you have two versions, a 4-page and an 8-page. The longer version tends to have quite small print. You have a good list of email addressed from customers and prospects who have given you permission to send them information. Now take that content and edit it down, break it up, make it shorter and the print bigger. Include illustrations... Read more →

Missed Marketing Opportunities

I've had this experience before - a service provider who dictates how things should be done. "Send the printed materials in shrink wrapped packets of 25, or else!" "We just want to make sure you understand how we work." That is odd, given that I pay the invoices. I am not alone. Others have experienced if not such commanding circumstances, at least disappointing ones. It's a let down on two fronts - as a customer, and as a marketer. What a wasted opportunity to win someone over and to make a good brand impression. Rich Baker talks about two instances... Read more →