Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Are *You* Truly Engaged?

It was a comment from Zoë and a title of a blog post from Chris Brogan that made me ask the question. Twitter can be tiring and pointless noise, and social media can be a bunch of chores, if the intent does not match the intention. If your involvement is not engagement, then what happens to the outcomes? As Zoë put it so well, when we approach these tools with intention and honesty, they fuel fulfilling outcomes. But when we approach them out of boredom or restlessness, we remain unfulfilled. And so we do and so do companies that are... Read more →

3 Steps to Mapping the Customer Journey

I've been reading David Lee King's book Designing the Digital Experience [courtesy of David himself] and I can tell you that many corporate Web masters could learn a thing or two about designing sites from the users' point of view. If you define the digital and customer experience from the point of view of the buyer, not the seller, there are several consideration to make. Even as marketers understand the ideas of customer journey and persona, the hard part is translating that information into truly executing on the customer experience - digital or otherwise - when we're not there. The... Read more →

P&L of New (local) Media

What happens when your local paper goes online only? It loses most of its staff, that's one outcome. I picked up the information from Fred Wilson's blog where a really good discussion around aggregating, curating, and publishing new media is under way. The P&L chart does make a fair argument for staff reductions. Yes, readers did point out that the $5-15 RPM is rather high. The pitch to make such publication possible is from Outside.in, a three-year-old company that has just rolled out a new tool to (supposedly) make pulling extra content created by local bloggers, Twitterers and lots of... Read more →

Has Web 2.0 Made You Happier? [part II]

The messages and threads in social media and networks have been pretty intense in the last week or so. I thought it appropriate to bring back a really good conversation we had last year about happiness. ________ Have all the social bookmarking services brought you closer to great content, or has it just added to your workload? Are your online relationships as productive or satisfying as your real ones? And if the answer here is "yes," do you have many real relationships? Has Web 2.0 empowered your customer service people -- or just thinned out traditional marketing and personnel budgets?... Read more →

Page 2

Google started it. Social media, especially with tools like FriendFeed, magnified it - page one is the place to be. The top of page one is especially the place to be. Those few days when Conversation Agent was at number five on AdAge Power150 many checked out this blog from that list. From number 16? Not so much. Go on Twitter and you probably check only the first screen. Same conversation with the updates on LinkedIn and Facebook. History is something we studied in school, we live very much in the here and now with social media. Something that did... Read more →

How to Write an Email that Stands Out

Especially in a crowded inbox. A couple of weeks ago, I gave a presentation about using social media for career management and development to a group of professionals who took the time to come out and connect on a Saturday morning. We had really good participation and many asked questions throughout the presentation, which makes it interesting and engaging for everyone in the room. A true conversation. Several attendees followed ups to have more conversations and with LinkedIn invitations, which I usually accept only after a face to face conversation. Right after the presentation, one person provided such wonderful feedback... Read more →

Blogging at Work if You Don't Have a Blog

Many companies and marketing communications professionals are thinking about social media. But starting a blog seems daunting. If you're among them, I'm certain you've considered who's going to write consistently, who will moderate comments, how closely you will need to watch to see if anyone comes, and you probably also worry that nobody will come at all. Blogging doesn't need to happen on blogs alone. In fact, increasingly, social media is showing us that it's very possible to do something that budget cuts and lack of feedback loops have taken away from marketing's arsenal. Something that is so valuable because... Read more →

The 7 Sins of Customer Service

You might also adapt this list to marketing - everything a business does is marketing at the end of the day. The forms you ask your customers to fill out, the minutes they wait in line, the dizzying phone recoding systems are all part of your company's brand. Few organizations are starting to pay attention to those experiences and coming up with new solutions. In mind of the innovator: taming the traps of traditional thinking, Matt May writes about the seven sins of solutions. Traditional ways of thinking prevent us from divining the most accurate—and elegant—of solutions to any problem... Read more →

CNN Loses Ground to Crowdsourced News

This is the age of the empowered user, where one single person - ok, a celebrity - can have a bigger network than a news organization. I've been watching Twitter (yes, Twitter has matured a great deal lately) and FriendFeed all weekend for information on the Iran election. At some point, Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb even wrote a post to CNN for being hours behid the news in Iran. If you think this is just the domain of geeks, maybe you have a point. However, is it good that a news organization is not paying attention to something that has... Read more →

You can no More Ignore Social Media than Answer the Phone

Some of you may have been following the events as they unfold in Iran. Many have probably watched the news on CNN, but increasingly more of you have been taking an active role in spreading the stories on Twitter. The news in Italian newspapers have a bit more depth than that on CNN or US news channels, but there is more color to it on Twitter - green to be exact. It does sound like there is a pretty sizable public relations issue with the situation in Iran. While before the widespread adoption of social media, people organizing in basements... Read more →