Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Influence, Context, and Triggers

I'm preparing for the Mesh panel conversation How Do You (Or Can You) Measure Online Influence? with David Armano (and others to be announced) next week. I'm looking forward to being in Toronto -- my first time -- and meeting so many of you I have corresponded with over the years. What a treat! I'm excited to be sharing the topic of influence with someone who, like me, has been on both sides of the conversation -- as person others reach out to for help in spreading a message, thus answering how do you influence the influencers?, and a professional... Read more →

Conversation Agents: Predictive Technology or Discovery Channels?

"It's not the Social Network Sites that are interesting - it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected. We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web. I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph!" [Tim Bernes-Lee] The question of an intelligent Web continues to be fore and center, and not just in technology circles, especially in a couple of very important ways: 1. semantic information -- for sentiment analysis, and to make behavioral predictions in... Read more →

Content GIGO

I was playing with the settings of my premium newsletter (available starting in June) and came across a piece of advice that is probably familiar to you, especially if you publish on the Web: If you copied your content from MS Word, the only way to fix it is to start a new campaign and add clean content. Word creates so much junk code that the tool can’t even clean it up. Which is a classic example of GIGO. That stands for garbage in, garbage out. We see it easily with code, and developers will give you fair warning not... Read more →

Return on Complaints

Conventional wisdom has it that people talk about negative experiences with products, services, or organizations with more people and more often. However, people are actually more active in telling their friends about a positive experience. In its 2010 Global Customer Service Barometer survey, American Express found that, contrary to popular belief: [...] customers are spreading the word willingly and widely when they experience good service. In fact, contrary to conventional wisdom, customers are more inclined to talk about a positive experience than complain about a negative one. Three-quarters (75%) are very likely to speak positively about a company after a... Read more →

Is Social Media Creating a Wholesale Culture?

You know, thinking in bulk. I did an experiment yesterday. With the help of a couple of search engines I ran a search for white t-shirts. This should be a fairly common item. My criteria where -- 100% cotton, fitted style for women and flattering shape for men. I'm Italian, I cannot help looking for style. Even that should be a fairly standard request. And yet, I spent hours discarding the boxy stuff, trying to get out of sites that would keep loading instead of getting me back to search, and scrolling through pages of unhelpful sites. If you're a... Read more →

You're Connected, Now What?

Meeting and friending people has become fairly easy with social networks, live events, and a gazillion ways to locate, like, and follow peers. How do you take things to the next level? What makes a connection work to your advantage? And by *your* I mean both parties involved. If you're looking to improve how you network, this post is for you. It all starts with the proper lens -- putting the emphasis on the work part of network. And a decision: what do you value? When you start making more decisions based upon what's really important and figure out a... Read more →

How do you Know When to Reach out to an Influencer?

This is one of the most frequently asked questions on influence I receive. How do you know when to reach out to an influencer? (which presupposes that you have already identified who that person/those people are for your market/industry, etc.) To be sure, many just do it with every. single. piece. of. communication. Which means they dilute their opportunity for the real ask -- a kind of cry wolf situation. You know it's a good idea to reach out to an influencer when: 1. you have real information, data that is non obvious -- this in a positive, all-is-well-with-the-world situation.... Read more →

PeerIndex Measures Your Online Social Capital

"The Web is about people connecting to each other." This is a quote from a talk Azeem Azhar gave at Lift in March of this year. PeerIndex is a technology company that developed an algorithm-based tool to help discover information on people, places, and subjects. In a hyper connected world, it's important to have filters for signal. And there are clear benefits from making the right connections to the right people. The site analyzes 6.3MM people and provides a statistical view of authority and expertise in given topics. The analysis is content- and context-driven. The company was founded in 2009... Read more →

What Would Conversation Agent Do?

I'm running a poll on Facebook to learn what topics are the most helpful to you here. Go vote now, if you want to weigh in. The road to my heart and to connecting faster with me is comments and discussions on this blog, which is my home base. After talking with and listening to many of you, I know it's time to change things a bit here. I'm taking content to where it needs to be on a more regular basis for you to use it in your work. That's my commitment to you. Where Conversation Agent is going... Read more →

How Companies Encourage Customer Dis-Loyalty

Are loyalty programs a selling point? When loyalty is disconnected from customer experience it becomes just one way to take advantage of a promotion — a big coupon. Is it worth your time and effort? Customers have plenty of coupon and discount options, often pick and choose based on instant gratification. Case in point: airlines. The idea of putting expiration dates on unused points if someone is not traveling on an a carrier for a while may sound logical. We're loss averse. But air travel is an expensive proposition — expiring points may create the opposite effect if the experience... Read more →