Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Social Media Metrics (book review)

In thinking about metrics, it seems to me that the difficulty is not so much in measuring -- there's plenty you can measure online. So much, in fact, that the conversation needs to be about what to measure, and why. Why is especially important. Measurement has become more important for marketers in recent years, especially with the increased fragmentation of media. With digital media, once you know your objective and goals, your strategy can have measurement built right into it -- from the get go. How do you optimize the myriad ways you could execute a program? In his book... Read more →

The Lion and the Mouse of Effective Content

What's the most important thing you need to know to develop effective content? I was thinking about the various statements we hear and make these days about how engagement is king, content is queen, context is the umbrella that makes it all happen, etc. It all sounds fairly complicated. Let a person with a long corporate history tell you: simplicity works. Think about it: clarity of purpose simplifies what you want to transmit putting your message in plain words creates a stronger signal storytelling and simplicity go hand in hand and make content more sharable for that reason A week... Read more →

How to Answer the Social Phone

There are many ways to listen online, and there are as many ways to respond. Tom Asacker writes: we define ourselves both according to what we identify with and what we reject, and given the abundance of marketplace choice, we now choose interactions which we feel will produce the best story possible. As customers, that's what we do. When customers interact with us, we have an opportunity to help enhance their stories. The social Web is a set of tools that allow us to do that in many more ways that ever before, wherever our customers are. However, even the... Read more →

How to Write a Wikipedia Entry

If you run a search for anything, somewhere in the top results of the search will be a Wikipedia page. So even before Facebook decided that your company or business Wikipedia entry would make good support for community pages, you had good reason to consider a Wikipedia page. Say what you will, the site is a good source of content on the most disparate topics. What is Wikipedia? It's a free, Web-based collaborative encyclopedia in many languages. The project is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is derived by combining the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites,... Read more →

Top Ten Signs You're Drinking your Own Kool-Aid When Pitching Bloggers

I haven't done a top ten list in a while, and this one was inspired. You know, when you get pitches because you have a blog, you start developing a sense about who pitches you. Some are using the content as an excuse to meet you, which is definitely a winning approach. Joe Chernov at Eloqua and Jon Symons at Forrester do that well. You don't have to have "media" or "public relations" in the title to be good at it, either. You just need to have a desire to learn and a healthy curiosity for people, especially those you're... Read more →

Checking in as Status Symbol is not Enough

Geolocation services are not about giving us something to do, as Joe Chernov writes, although I think that's a pretty good insight. They're also about giving us something to talk about. That something is status, it comes with the territory. The sociological aspect is probably not as refined as fondness for the whimsical wedded to the devices through which we relate to the world. It runs deeper than that all the way to the human desire to mark territory. Badges are a manifestation of that desire. Take for example the Mayor's badge. You don't care much about it, until you... Read more →

Ten Books that Stand the Test of Time

Do you you do this? I regularly pass on to other people many of my business and marketing books -- mostly bought, some received as courtesy copies from publishers and authors. While I still prefer to read the physical souvenir of someone's work, in print, I don't have to hang on to all of them forever. My philosophy is that knowledge needs to flow through networks to become really valuable overall. I don't give my copies of everything away. If I really like a book and I want to hold onto it, I buy more copies for others. There are... Read more →

Social Content

Have you been watching the World Cup? I'm a football fan, so I don't count, I would be watching anyway. I could not help but notice, however, that since we can track conversations about #worldcup and the various teams on Twitter and other social networks, the chatter about the games has gone up compared to years past -- and so has the number of people watching the games, especially in the US. The conversation prompts us to want to know more about the games, so we get more engaged with them. In turn, this higher engagement prompts us to talk... Read more →

AT&T and Apple: Birds of a Feather

Apple is as open as a Soviet Gulag, AT&T is acting as if customers had no other option than to accept whatever they're offered. AT&T and Apple: birds of a feather Both companies tell us exactly what we want and what we don't want. The gap in perception, the reason why Apple is by and large loved and AT&T is universally despised rests with execution. You probably heard about or read the story of the cease and desist message sent by AT&T to a customer who had emailed AT&T CEO and Chairman Randall Stephenson with feedback repeatedly. Run a search... Read more →

Crisis Communications in Social Media: Are You Ready?

Remember the Monster's Inc. move at Domino's? In the post, I quoted a character from the movie. CDA Agent says: "We can neither confirm nor deny the presence of a human child here tonight." Do we stipulate that there are canned customers who like to receive canned messages? In this age of personalization and "Me, Inc."? If you're experienced in crisis communications, you know that rarely does a crisis explode overnight. Even in the current murky sea of dissatisfaction with the oil situation and BP, we got where we are with stakeholders because of lack of communication. There are usually... Read more →