Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Why Blog + 25 Tips to Make it Work - Free eBook

A couple of days ago we had a conversation on FriendFeed [hat tip Meryn Stol] about an "oh so 2004" argument that blogs are dead courtesy of Wired. My comment there expressed something that is being overlooked by the online community, because they have been online for so long. Blogs are evolving, but they have a place. When well written and with a point to make (read value), they're what web sites would be if you flipped them - rapid, coherent, integrated publishing that people can pull and build upon. While I don't write "intensive journalism" here, I believe there... Read more →

Employee-Customer Relations - a Real Story

I still read the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday paper. Even as it gets thinner and filled more with advertising circulars than news, I enjoy reading a few sections over breakfast. Yesterday, a story in the Currents section caught my eye. The story was about a 34-year tenured employee with Acme being fired over an incident at the store where he was taking inventory. Having forgotten his glasses, the veteran produce manager took one pair that was in display. To use them in the back (the glasses never left the store), he removed the price tag. A customer, who had shopped at... Read more →

Newspapers and Social Power

A recent (Nov/Dec 2008) survey by Gartner Inc. Analysts said that newspapers are faced with declining circulations, falling offline and online revenue, and competition from digital sources, but are failing to capitalize on their biggest supporters, their readers. [hat tip Shel Holtz] Methodology: The survey of 989 Internet users in the U.S., U.K., and Italy was aimed at understanding how consumers discover and share different types of content. It looked at the main influences on media consumption, the main factors that prompt people to look for content, the main tools people use to search, what they do when they find... Read more →

7 Things I Learned Online that I Use at Work

It's not necessary to launch a full social media marketing campaign to get the benefits of new ways of talking with customers and colleagues. Every company already has the tools it needs to do that - they're called marketing communications, public relations, and customer service. They are each powerful when the proper definitions are used. Think about it - put the relations back in with public, the communications back into marketing, and the service for customers. To help either reinforce or create a community, all you need to do is listen, hear, act on what you've heard, repeat. I can... Read more →

Immediacy

"controlling immediacy is massively important or we could pretty much exist and expire almost side by side if we take this thinking to its logical conclusion." [Charles Frith in response to a remark by Mike Rohde via 'Cross the Breeze.] I've been reflecting upon that comment globally - the impact that immediacy has on work and life, for example. 1. You get to the office, boot up your computer and you are assailed by several messages that demand immediate attention. Now just because the tool and the delivery allow those messages to arrive to you quickly, does it mean that... Read more →

Tribes and Business

[I took the test and here’s what came out for me. Indie Scenesters is one of the 3 largest tribes with 12%] I'm always interested in research, especially brand- and media-related so when Crowd DNA reached out to me, I took the time to take a look at their UK Tribes project for Channel 4. To uncover the youth tribal profiles of brands and media usage, Channel 4 commissioned a sequel to the qualitative and quantitative research study conducted by Crowd DNA in the UK. Find your Tribe, was a call answered by more than 38,000 young people since August... Read more →

How do you teach a large, process driven organization to be innovative, work organically and think socially?

This is a great question Deb Schultz asks - I, too tend to want to elevate the conversation from tactics to objectives and in this case cultural and organizational issues. We were discussing those very same basic principles she outlines in her post with Karl Long recently at SxSWi. Karl just renamed his blog the Social Capitalist - building virtuous value networks. What does social capitalist mean? Given his experience curve in the digital environment, I'm sure we'll learn a lot from the evolution of his thinking. Onto the story at hand. The background Recently, P&G got a number of... Read more →

Is Your Customer Conversation Built in?

[5:59" Steve Blank on Acting on Customer Discovery] Which one is easier? Going down market - scaling from large to medium to small - or building from the ground up? I worked with brands in both situations - the mature brand that is reinventing itself to stay relevant to the new shifts in the marketplace; and the start up that is working to look more established to appeal as reliable in competing with known companies. Both won or failed based upon one single variable: customers. Perhaps it wasn't a fair question, was it? Depending on the circumstances and the context... Read more →

The Future of the News Ecosystem

I've known Steven Johnson's work since reading Mind Wide Open. I missed his talk at SxSW, but thanks to the connection with the topic and idea, I am now reading it on his blog. [hat tip Bruno Giussani] In our conversation last week we talked about we media and the question of what would happen to the democratic process if journalists didn't have work anymore. In the past, we also discussed whether we would pay for news in a form different than newspapers. We could have some form of freemium, as suggested first by Chris Anderson - perhaps free general... Read more →

How to Really Kick Ass

"The surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to assume you know exactly how to do it." [Kathy Sierra] One of the reasons why I'm inspired by people like Kathy Sierra, Guy Kawasaki, Charlene Li, Brian Solis, Hugh MacLeod, Robert Scoble, to give a few examples, is not just that I got to know them through their writing, and meet them in real life. It's also because each one of them has had interesting evolutions in their work - what they do and how they do it. And no, it's not about the tools. It's about the people. They've... Read more →