Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Top Conversation Agent Posts for July/August

Making Things Happen, Ten Hacks My business mentor and friend reminded me of the importance of setting the process for making your goals happen -- you get ready, set things in motion, and keep at it staying open to opportunity. Once you build momentum, the outcomes take care of themselves. [more] +++ Why on Earth Would You Still Bother with Blogging? Especially now that so many social networks are courting you with frictionless sharing. And the question of RSS readers is top of mind. Seriously, aren't there quick grunt-like posts you can do on Twitter? Schedule all your links to... Read more →

How to Thrive in the Digital Age

[YouTube 17:25 - embedding was disabled, so you will need to follow the link to watch the video] It is now normal for a human being to be connected in some form to everyone else. This highlights something we cannot possibly conjure more up of: and that is time. In some way, the story of technology is how machines have thrown away old ways that used to be terribly expensive. This is the opening of a School of Life Live talk by Tom Chatfield. Remember when the machines were incredibly cumbersome and slow? Now, increasingly the limits are with us,... Read more →

What Customers Want

A couple of days ago, I outlined the five themes on the future of social. It's no secret that although we are seeing a Renaissance in the products arena -- wearable technology, 3D printers, all kinds of sustainable materials, ways of building, modes of transport like bicycles, etc. -- we are squarely in a service economy. And more specifically, in the promise economy. That is apart from the philosophical reasons why we buy in one place vs. another -- say at Patagonia, instead of a regular sporting goods store -- or for the deep discounts -- who can resist a... Read more →

100 Questions: a Toolkit for Conversation

Connections happen in real life. While we may meet by chance or serendipity, it is by talking that we get to learn more about others, and potentially find ways to stay in touch... or not. We are somewhat familiar with ways to strike a conversation -- commenting on shared experiences like waiting for a late train/plane; checking in on the time an event kicks off; the obligatory "what do you do" at a networking mixer. Enter One Hundred Questions. It’s a toolkit for conversations by The School of Life designed to help start meaningful conversations on a variety of topics,... Read more →

The Opposite of Fluff

The latest sales figures on tablets and smartphones, the rise of Google, and rapid growth of Facebook and Twitter in the last few years say it all –- the new paradigm is caveat venditor, or let the seller beware. In the palm of their hands your customers have the tools and the access they need to create media, upload data, share content, and compare notes about your company, products and services… and those of your competitors’. It's quite common to encounter this premise or a variation of it in articles and posts nowadays. An admission so popular that it runs... Read more →

Decision Times and When to Pull the Trigger

In brief: automate everything, except strategy. Your focus should be helping people make better decisions. And faster is relative to what and why. As more of our experiences and interactions with services and brands move online through browsers and applications we become familiar with the issue of latency. Yes, we do want sites to load up quickly so we can get things done. However, as users we also have delight in the novelty of serendipity. Chief Martech Scott Brinker has a great diagram [shown above] that illustrates the mental trade off between expected and delighted. Like in all relationships, it's... Read more →

Connecting the Stream with Action: People as Conversation Agents

When I asked on Twitter about personal take aways from SxSW 2011, Andy Hayes responded along the same lines as I would have: #SXSW Lesson: that deepening connections with existing ppl is just as important as meeting new ppl. Twitter has been an integral part of the conference -- and of many lives in the last 5 years. Edward Boches also strikes a chord with the format of his happy birthday, Twitter post. Because it is about making connections -- with ideas, meaning, and people. What Bill Taylor and Alan Webber declared more than 15 years ago was alive at... Read more →

Companies that Have Managed the Convergence of IT and Marketing Well

In researching how the convergence between CIO and CMO roles is good for business, I came across quote a few startling statistics, like the one represented in this graph. A new survey of 550 marketing execs conducted by the CMO Council found that only 10 percent of marketers put a priority on improving collaboration with their IT departments this year. [1] To refer back to the five themes on the future of social, and particularly dealing with data and operational execution, the collaboration of IT and marketing, or the emergence of a bridge organization around analytics and intelligence has become... Read more →

Business Development is About Seeing the Future Before it Happens

[YouTube link] I still remember my first product company -- it was so exciting to work with something tangible; this is what it looks like, this is what it does, this is how it compares to other products, and so on. When you sell, you are dealing with an existing product (and/or service), the features and functionality, what it looks like, what it does, how it helps you do what you need to get done, etc. Business development is a different (value) proposition -- and a competence current organizations need to fully develop to succeed in growing beyond increments. It... Read more →

5 Themes on the Future of Social

Next month I'll be spending half a day with a group of professionals from New York City and the Greater Philadelphia area making sense of the future of social#. Or, as Frank Eliason (now Citi's Director of Global Social Media) put it in his event description discussing why and how companies are shifting away from social toward the next “big thing.” After the keynote, we will focus the conversation on current state of social media and how it is changing the way we work. This is where we'll get down to brass tacks and examples from a variety of experiences.... Read more →