Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

How to Map to the Social Media Engagement Profile of Your Customers

Forrester’s social technographics profile can help you analyze the social profile of your customer base. As authors Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li explained in the book Groundswell, people increasingly use technology to get what they need from each other, instead of relying on companies and businesses. This is a social trend accelerated by technology. Companies are more stretched than ever on staff that delivers products and services, as well as support for them. At the same time, due to the fragmentation of media and customer interests, marketing dollars are not going as far as they used to when broadcasting was... Read more →

What is it Like?

Today I got to spend some time with several published and about to be published fiction writers in the city. Among the pieces of advice they shared with us, things like having a process, doing the work consistently, and waiting for revisions after writing the first draft, one thing stood out. How the whole point of writing -- anything -- is to produce something you'd enjoy reading. That's the first promise. When that's the kind of commitment you keep, then spending time with the characters, the plot, or the subject matter of your book for non fiction writers like me... Read more →

Real People Don't Want to Broadcast Where They Are

This short edition of notable stories starts with the results of a Pew Research study on people's attitudes toward search personalization and ad targeting, goes through some critical thinking about opinion pieces on publishing, and lands on conceptual creativity. Real People Don't Want to Broadcast Where They Are I use these trend posts as an opportunity to frame issues for action by connecting a few ideas, often accelerated or catalyzed by heavy technology adoption, with business implications. Painting a picture for the links this week is the unequivocable feedback that although people enjoy relevant content and ads, they most definitely... Read more →

How do you Design, Build, and Deliver Yourself?

There is still plenty to be said about the power of identity -- the process of designing, building, and delivering yourself. In this TED Talk, Bryan Stevenson shows us the power of sincerity. The very idea that people have just only one identity is an attempt at oversimplifying life and negates the reality of business and the opportunities with social. People and organizations have two things in common: they both spend a lot of time analyzing the past and forecasting (or hoping for) the future. Corporate connections In corporate design work, we use conversation to map the brand to understand... Read more →

54 Pearls of Marketing Wisdom

The team at HubSpot collected what 26 marketing leaders are saying about emerging trends and effective strategies into 54 pearls of marketing wisdom. Here are my big ideas. Q: How can a MARKETER best plan for the long term in MOBILE? Information access THE QUESTION TO ME IS HOW DO WE THINK ABOUT THE WAY PEOPLE ACCESS INFORMATION AND BUY GOODS AND WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS? There’s a collection of Zen koans called the Gateless Gate. Among other things, koans transcend dualism. The traditional sales process is fully dualistic - there’s a buyer, and there’s a seller. We are witnessing... Read more →

Why Read Creative, Business, and Technology Blogs

A couple of weeks ago I published a post that is still the most popular for the month of February. It was about 50 blogs for your #mustread list. The feeback I received in social networks has been tremendously positive - many of you discovered new, helpful, and diverse content. The list under the umbrella topics I outlined continues to grow. The creative side of business, business strategy, and the technology of business are emergent areas of focus where technology and humanism meet. As I said during my five minutes at Ignite Austin last March, uploading humanism is the conversation... Read more →

Help People Make Better Decisions with Your Content

[YouTube, 3:38'] Last week, Wil Reynolds, CEO SEER Interactive, shared how what we learned in the sandbox applies to search. In our second conversation we get more granular and take a pragmatic look at writing content to help people become more educated and make better decisions about a topic. The light bulb usually goes off because it is after we ask those questions that we look at the tools Google has available. The first example Wil uses is for an International MBA - he typed the words "international MBA" and got looking at the keywords that people were searching for:... Read more →

How Fab.com Raised $40 Million with Data

Last week, we talked with Robert J. Moore, CEO, RJMetrics about how to start a company by replacing your own job. This week, we're taking a look at a couple of examples of companies that are using RJMetrics to get ahead. In a behind-the-scenes post about how he raised $40 million usind data, Jason Goldberg, founder & Chief Executive Officer at Fab.com opens the kimono on his site's metrics. Fab.com started as a daily deal site and is evolving into an online destination to rival Amazon.com. RJMetrics works as follows You spend a couple of hours connecting your production database... Read more →

The Value of Thinking in a Do Culture

We live in a culture that attributes reckless indifference to theory and learning lightly. That has consequences. Why? Because everyone is leading with solutions in search of a problem -- we don't stay with problems long enough to understand them. You could say the people who win, are the ones who have the lower degree of misunderstandings today. One of my ten beliefs is that we need to recognize the value and importance of planning and serendipity. Both. Acting and executing is front and center. However, we need to think before we act (or more likely react). People worship at... Read more →

Next Gen Customer Experience, Social Customer ROI, and Why Digital Marketing Strategy is so Hard

What lessons are worth learning from in next gen customer experience? How do you calculate the ROI of providing customer service in social channels? How do you handle the complexity of finding the people who will buy your product and service via the right media? When there is so much shift from the accepted ways of doing things, observing and thinking to understand what to do next can lead to tremendous opportunity. Next Gen Customer Experience, Social Customer ROI, and Why Digital Marketing Strategy is so Hard Unless you learn to frame issues for action, you will be trapped in... Read more →