Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Citizens Reporting News

It was September 11, 2001, I was sitting at my computer in the office when someone said there was a freak accident in New York. We logged online to see the second plane hit the tower in the World Trade Center. Smoke and debris against a clean blue sky. Surely, we were not seeing what was happening. We had people on the ground that day. We lost contact with some staff for one whole day. Later, their reports were horrifying in their concreteness. We were not removed from the scene anymore. We could see a sea of shoes at the... Read more →

Are You Getting Engaged?

When was it not a good idea to talk with your customers as if your business depended on it? How is it ever possible to go a whole day without being of service to someone? Why would you not share tips, advice, and learning with your team? Where exactly was it deemed acceptable to base your conduct on anything but honesty and ethics? We end up having incredible discussions around tools, with little time left over to talk about the reason why we use them - to connect. Social media is about building relationships - starting with your customers, business... Read more →

5 Ways to Thank Your Customers

Forget shiny objects, including prospects, for a moment. Forget social media, networks and online opportunities. You have plenty of material to work with as it is -- your customers are already doing business with you. How about showing them some appreciation? Here are 5 things you can do to show them how grateful you are for their business: 1. Send them a thank you card after a major purchase. Better if hand written. Along those same lines, send them a birthday card with a coupon. Raise your hand if you get more than a handful of each. Exactly, you will... Read more →

Who is the Social Media Marketer of the Year?

When I launched Conversation Agent back in the summer of 2006, I had a pretty simple concept. My observation was that the line between marketing and public relations would be blurring considerably with greater adoption of social media. The idea that brands should start learning good manners, show personality, and behave is now starting to take hold. In other words, marketers would have to become better communicators, skilled at one to one relationships, just like their colleagues in public relations. I must have worked in a recession for the better part of my career as I cannot recall a time... Read more →

Twitter is a Social Network

We are the atoms within it. All living things exchange meaningful signals. They engage in conversations expressed in languages of form and color, chemicals, behavior, and sound rather that words and sentences. We do like that form of a constant stream because it so mirrors life. In some ways, even though it is digital and searchable, it is also forgiving - our short bursts do have an expiration after all. By paring down our own interactions at micro levels to a mere 140 characters, it is easier to think of and see us as social atoms, a term physicist Mark... Read more →

How to Talk with Customers Differently

You have a communication problem and your brand is suffering because of it. You speak the language of efficiency and scarcity, your customers think in terms of collaboration and story - most likely their story/experience with you and other providers. You hear what they say as a problem, when you could be listening for the opportunity it comes with. In many cases all of the ingredients are there, they just need a different mix. Or you may need to open up the kimono, let your customers tell stories about you - your brand as open-source API for the meaning they... Read more →

Your Real Job is Change

Clearly, "save as" is the impulse that got us all in the situation where we are. We believed the system was infallible - we played the probabilities with excess risk. A mess of mathematical proportions where everyone in the system had a vested interest in keeping it going as is/was. Whatever you think about it, whether you see it as the result of foolishness or that of greed, naïvete or calculated speculation, here it is. The question now then is what kind of risk do you want? Do you want to throw your arms up while you wait for a... Read more →

Why Alltop is a Great Idea

The short version of it is - Google provides you with a pile of search results, Alltop gives you all the top news as selected by all the folks who write the top sites on the Web. Aggregation without aggravation, or a starting point for your exploration journey on a number of topics. This is how the portal is described on the site. The methodology they use to find and add sites is by community. They added green and humor categories, too - we need both! I'll come clean with you, Conversation Agent was chosen for the following categories -... Read more →

You Need to Get Out More

It happens in every company, eventually the internal dynamics become more important than what happens with the customer, what he wants to talk about, what he's thinking about. Often, in fact, we prefer the detached rooms of research to a human contact. Asking while you're eyeball to eyeball, knee deep in his world, would be too simple. It happens even in FriendFeed rooms and at social media conferences. Sometimes I think these are the modern versions of rock band tours - meeting the same groupies from event to event. There is nothing wrong with having one long conversation with those... Read more →

Direct Response on Social Media

"The most important word in the vocabulary of (direct response) advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace." [David Ogilvy, 6:59"] Lee Odden at Top Rank Blog has written a very thoughtful post on direct marketing and social media marketing. As Lee writes and as we discussed yesterday here, you need to be already involved online and the content you create needs to be an expression of the value statement platform you are planning to discuss. Focusing on developing solutions based on what the audience wants, then... Read more →