Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

How to Develop a Content Strategy Process (for your blog)

Brian Solis writes about a new age for social media marketing. To me, static and often stale Web sites have been in dire need of evolution for a long time. Content formats shared in social media and networks suit the way we evaluate, talk, and socialize our decisions about products and services better, at this stage. Although we all know that it's still very early days. We're trying to retrofit how we think and organize our knowledge, recombining and building on information, as well as out humanness, in a medium that has a long way to go on mapping to... Read more →

Why Case Studies Fail You With Customers

Marketers use the term case study for a more in depth or descriptive narrative of a customer engagement, from the problem the company helped solve, to the solution used to solve it, including glowing quotes from a happy customer. So why do case studies fail you with customers? The short answer is that those were instances of success for others, and you cannot replicate exactly the same conditions that brought them there. In other words, you fail to see what was behind the implementation. Copying or relying heavily on something happened elsewhere in a different context is a waste of... Read more →

Social News: Trading Accuracy for Immediacy

Now that every person and company can virtually not only make it in the news, but make the news itself, we're bound for a bumpy ride on accuracy. There are two challenges in this scenario: 1) is that of standing out in the sheer tide of bits being shared as news in real time, 2) you may not be able to stop or correct inaccurate information once it starts spreading. Add to that the knee jerk reaction of many businesses that wish to ride the news cycle when something happens, like the recent earthquake in Haiti, and what you may... Read more →

No Limit for Better

I agree with Dan Pink, there is no limit for better. How do you get there? In his latest book, Drive, Pink suggests you do that by taking an approach that has three elements to it: 1.) Autonomy - or the desire to direct our own lives 2.) Mastery - the urge to get better and better at something that matters 3.) Purpose - the yearning to do what we do in the service larger than ourselves For starters, gaining an appreciation and understanding that people's default settings are self-directed - they actually don't need to be baby-sat - will... Read more →

What Really Affects Behavior?

[click on image to enlarge] This is the title of an article Terry Grapentine and Dianne Altman Weaver authored for the Winter 2009 issue of Marketing Research (MR). Given the audience, their focus is looking at marketing research as connected with behavioral economics. You won't find the article in the links I provided, the site has not been updated yet. Which is a shame, because it's an important piece and hope you'll tag the site to go back and read it when it becomes (hopefully) available. The authors list some of my favorite books as the premise to the renewed... Read more →

Doc Searls, The Cluetrain Manifesto, 10 Years Later

This is the mother of all conversations, to borrow from a title to a post Doc Searls wrote, which I link to down below. He's among my personal heroes for thinking about the buyer's side - and doing something about it. Something hopefully radical and, if you're paying attention, really important. He writes about independence, and about providing tools for individuals to manage relationships with organizations. Personal tools for people to collect their own data, control it, share it selectively, assert their own terms of service (TOS), and give them means to express their own demand in the open market.... Read more →

Be a Blogger, Not a Thief: Link Where Linkage is Due

Don't you hate it when someone at work steals an idea from you, then calls it their own? Of course. So why are you stealing from your fellow writers? Yes, stealing: robbing someone of traffic. Of recognition. Of the conversation which should surround their work. And that's what a lot of people are doing. Maybe not you, but you've seen this sort of lazy writing all around the web. Last week, after noticing the increase in the number of blogs tweeted that are just shells publishing links to posts written by others, I issued the call to content originality on... Read more →

Become a Marketing Superhero in 2010 - Part 3 - Power to the People!

guest post by Leigh Duncan-Durst This is the third part of my series. Part 1 and Part 2 can be found here. In this series, I've talked about the shift in marketing that will impact everyone in 2010. I also addressed 10 characteristics of Super Heroes and how important it is that Marketers exhibit those tame traits, themselves. However, there's one critical point about Super Heroes that seemed to warrant its own post. The central idea is this: Superheroes always give power to the people. Let's talk about POWER, first. If you take a glance at Wikipedia's definition of "Superhero",... Read more →

5 Sources of Thinking on New Journalism

We need to spend more time learning about what we think and why vs. repeating what others think. This will be the underlying theme of this week's posts. A great place to start developing this concept is with news media. If you look hard enough, you can find examples of new ways of thinking about journalism that are actually evolving old media into new media. How a journalist engages fans on Facebook is one way. Several veterans of old media reporting are advancing the conversation on new media. These professionals believe that online makes for better media, they understand that... Read more →

How to Humanize Travel Again

There are no tweets or Facebook fan pages that can make up for the actual experience of travel. Fresh from a trip to Europe, I'm reminded of the importance of customer care to help humanize business once again. Here are ten ideas for your consideration. 1. Use the information you have to surprise your customers pleasantly, for example giving them the forms in the right language. This may seem common sense... 2. Answer the toll free customer service/reservation number, or stop publicizing it. 3. Understand that having a fun promotional account on Twitter will actually damage your brand if you... Read more →