Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Six Concrete Steps to Delivering Better Customer Experiences

Bruce Temkin published a good summary of his six laws of customer experience as visualization#. The laws are: Every interaction creates a personal reaction People are instinctively self-centered Customer familiarity breeds alignment Unengaged employees don't create engaged customers Employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated You can't fake it The first three are more externally relationship-focused, while the rest are more about the inner workings of organizational culture. Bottom line: know your customers, use empathy to understand what they want to get done, help them solve problem, focus on serving customers and share their feedback with the organization. You... Read more →

How Words Matter, Content Explosion, Better Questions

Making Sense: How Words Matter The Agony of Frank Luntz. The Atlantic: He periodically comes under attack from the right for not toeing the Republican line, and has been critical of the party's right wing. "It seems like the Democrats are going so far overboard, and the Republicans are going nowhere," he tells me. "So I'm mad at both of them." Increasingly, he says, he seeks to maintain relationships with members of both parties. [...] Most of all, Luntz says, he wishes we would stop yelling at one another. Speaking in Tongues. STET: When linguists use the term “code-switching,” they... Read more →

Find the Connection in the Story

Every story is rich with compressed data. For example, aphorisms are Zip files, they need mental software to unzip. My friend Peter shared an excellent one with me: "Buy in hope. Trust in Fear." Six words that tell a new story when in this composition. Find the connection and you get to a truth. The art and craft of storytelling by whatever means, in my case preferably visually, is a constant draw. I remember the tales in Boccaccio's Decameron#, themselves shared against the backdrop of a larger story. A long time fan of Pixar (Wall-E and Ratatuille are tied in... Read more →

Are Endorsements and Recommendations Leading to Social Network Co-Ownership?

At the risk of creating another conversation layer before diving into the actual post -- what do you think about the LinkedIn mechanism for endorsements? The image is from my profile, you can see a long list of items. Many of the voters have worked with me directly, either as colleagues or agency partners, or clients, at one time or another. However, a few have not. That would explain why I received recommendations for types of work I have not actually done (and thus skipped displaying those on the profile). Part of the mechanism in place is social signal, people... Read more →

Google+ Hangout on Community Management

I just completed some research and an a POV on the benefits of integrating Google+ for a client and had good fun watching a couple of hangouts by brands. Creative teams and brand managers are starting to produce some very interesting conversations. It was later in the day when I finished and while I had my Google account open, I ran a quick search for a Hangout on commuity management and found the recording of a hangout I did about two years ago with Lynette Young for her series of Women of Google Plus. The video is still available so... Read more →

The Further You Progress, the Fewer Teachings

I've been saving this quote for a couple of years. It has been a constant reminder that it's all invented, and any innovation worth its salt has not been done before. In some cases it may work, in others, it may not. Nevertheless, it is well worth doing it anyway. The phrase encapsules the aspiration of leading in any era -- uncertainty is a feeling and concept those who went before us and those who work alongside experienced and touch every day. Two main forces are at play to keep us from acting: An addiction to information makes us data... Read more →

The Upside of B2B's Digital Transformation

57 percent of business buyers complete some form of due diligence online about a service or product beforte they come in contact with sales. With the maturity of search methods even in social, the lion share of the influence work now goes to marketing. Are business-to-business (B2B) organizations mapping their workflows, resources, and approach based on this turn of events? By the time they contact your company, customers have an already well-defined set of expectations, even in businesses where higher expenditures call for group decisions, and longer sales cycles. Yet, the truth about B2B social media adoption is that many... Read more →

Making Sense of Choices, Making Tech Tick, Making it Simpler

Making Sense of Choices The 10 Best Business Decisions of 2013. Slate: Apple’s retail stores are already insanely successful. They don’t need a retail chief who can squeeze extra dollars out of them; they need one who can build a lot more—especially in Asia—where Burberry has opened many more shops than Apple without compromising the brand’s value. Adding a woman to the executive team can’t hurt, either. We Need to Talk about TED. The Guardian: Think about it: an actual scientist who produces actual knowledge should be more like a journalist who recycles fake insights! This is beyond popularisation. This... Read more →

Content is not an End in itself, it's a Beginning

Content strategy is the writing equivalent of information architecture: a necessary framework to help you right size structural requirements and functionality for a multi-screen and multi-site/network world. Design of user experience and the parameters for governance, refreshing, and updating the content should be baked into it. The part we often neglect to address appropriately, even and especially in conjunction with a large site migration or replaforming project, is the question of content creation. How frequently, stylistically, and by whom is content going to be written, edited, published, integrated, shared, and retired or upcycled? The big content shift In many instances... Read more →

To a Mindful and Bold Year in 2014

My two words for 2014 are: mindful and bold. Every year on New Year's Day I think about one or two words that will guide me in my work. I skipped posting about it last year becuase I was in the middle of a wonderful trip back home (Modena) and a couple of different locations on the Rhein in Germany. In 2012, my two words were "bridging dis-connects". Here are my thoughts on New Year's Day for 2011, make things happen, 2010, focus on what's important, 2009, make everything simpler, and 2008, possibility is timeless. Mindful that the Word is... Read more →