Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Everything is Half Off

When customers send you information, do you talk with them, listen to what they say, and try to do something about what you hear? Being half close to providing better service - the half that is part of your assumptions - is not good enough, and certainly is not going to take you from good to great. You are used to starting the conversation with your product and service and what it does first. Advertising does that, media relations to a certain extent does that, and so does still a lot of marketing communications. With customer service, you wait for... Read more →

Your News Page is the New Newsroom

I've been reading the excellent eBook by Todd Defren of Shift Communications and talking it up with people at work. We've all been witnessing the inexorable thinning out of the news print media. If you're looking for practical examples and reasons why your own news page is the new newsroom, download Todd's eBook and you'll find plenty of reasons to believe it and ways to do it. If you have a blog, chances are you already have a news room filled with links to slides you've created and uploaded on SlideShare, photographs you shared on Flickr, links and micro-thoughts you... Read more →

You're on Twitter, Now What?

Twitter can be a pretty daunting place. Now that it has become somewhat known and a celebrity in its own right, other celebrities want to associate themselves with it. Many companies and brands are now on Twitter as well. Having a Twitter account may be all the rage, however there is something to be said for the power of focus. Consider this - Twitter is searchable content a series of micro impressions a presence tool a social network an information hub an idea exchange always "on" quick, short, and not always on the mark sound bites where you provide the... Read more →

Raising an Eyebrow

[Cadbury Eyebrows Full Extended Version - The Original - By Mesa 1 - 1:08] There are times where raising an eyebrow is the right and fun thing to do [hat tip Chris Baskind]. Why have half glass-full conversations when you can have a glass and a half-full? Eyebrows are rich media, they provide a full range of information and they are interactive. Eyebrows can communicate a full range of emotion - attitude, sense of humor, skepticism, and sometimes disbelief. They work with the rest of your facial expressions. Why is body language so important? Because we don't live online -... Read more →

Think Small

Everyone wants to know how to sell better, yet everywhere we turn, we have people who want to learn to become better buyers. Directionally, these are push and pull. The question we asked yesterday was do we push through the current challenges as is, or do we alter ourselves to meet this new landscape? There is a similar tension there. There are two forces that are meeting somewhere in between to help build and shape context - that of media, which was traditionally push, and that of community, which in its nascency was pure pull. They are both changing and... Read more →

3 Things

One of the secrets to becoming successful at anything in life is persistence. We can all work hard for a while. Head down, putting in long hours with an eye to an end goal. Why is the goal important? Because in order for us to visualize getting there, we need to know where we're going. Setting goals used to be easier in marketing: write up your objectives - increased sales, higher number of orders, cross sell, etc. create a strategy brief - followed closely by a creative brief, usually set up success factors - you need to know what these... Read more →

Reinventing the Customer Relationship to Drive Growth

A couple of days ago I published a diagram by Dion Hinchcliffe. In it, he lists several ways to reinvent the customer relationship to drive growth - (1) customer communities; (2) customer self-service; (3) Marketing 2.0 (I'd be curious to read how he defines it). We talked about customer self-service in last week's post at Fast Company. Many online tools we have become accustomed to using are free to us, yet when things go wrong, we need support. That comes mostly from other tools in the online ecosystem, often with the endorsement of other users - our peers. Social media... Read more →

Online Media Bootcamp

These days I find myself answering questions about online media more frequently. I was at a breakfast with Jeff Pulver in the city recently. If you're familiar with the format of those gatherings, people meet and as they talk they tag each other with context words written on sticky notes. Online social tags in the offline world. Here are some of the tags I received during the conversations - "blog babe", "everlasting", "connector", real marketer", "conversation please". I was able to stay only for a little over one hour, but I enjoyed learning more about the format, Jeff, and the... Read more →

Acts of Marketing

Attraction is incremental. It goes hand in hand with attention. And it is acts of marketing that stimulate both. That's because they connect our aspirations with experiences we appreciate and enjoy. What seems like a long time ago, I wrote about the 4 A's of blogging: Attract, Ask, Aspire, Act. I'd like to amend that slightly. Aspire Aiming for something greater than self, wanting to make a difference. It is not just younger generations who are looking for meaning. We all are - personal and professional are bleeding into each other as we do so. Ask Asking and interacting are... Read more →

The Future of the Agency: Help Reinvent the Business

After I wrote the post if I were an agency today, I started thinking more about that side of the business. In fact, I began talking about it with my friends who are in the agency business and I came to the point in the conversation where I realized that it goes beyond just playing nice with a company and delivering an ad for a campaign that speaks to the benefits of buying a product - left brain thinking. Yes, it does begin with communicating conviction, as Hugh says in Hughtrain (do yourself a favor, read it often). I agree... Read more →