Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Clear Focus on Customers for Digital Growth

Organizations maintain a focus on customer acquisition (and potentially retention, although not specifically called out) strategies as represented in the results of a global survey conducted by McKinsey and published in June 2014. According to the same survey, CIOs and CEOs play a direct role in supporting and sponsoring digital initiatives. CMOs are not far behind, however. In fact, based on survey data collected by Adobe in 2013, 60 percent of marketers expect their companies will invest more in digital marketing technology this year. The visual below I used in my recent presentation at the Consumer Goods Technology Sales &... Read more →

How Ideas and Messages Spread through Social Networks

The punch line is they spread through people. It is thanks to the connections, the nodes, and the conversations and social gestures -- sharing, liking, commenting, retweeting, etc. -- that messages travel on the world wide web. In Grouped, Paul Adams lists four shifts that are making the spreading possible and visible: accessibility of information has increased and is increasing exponentially changing structure of the web; moving away from being built around content, and being rebuilt around people ability to test, accurately map, and measure social interaction quantitatively dramatic increase in our understanding of how we make decisions. The data... Read more →

Customer Acquisition in 2014

Customer acquisition in 2014 requires a blend of digital tactics. Companies are increasing digital budgets across the board, with larger, more digitally mature organizations expanding theis social media spends. [via] +++ Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here. Read more →

The Changing Face of Marketing

“It is nearly a truism that the needs and wants of the consumer are the critical issues today in creating new products and services, and developing the accompanying plans to merchandise them at a profit. But this trend—the first on my list—is still in process of evolution. The need to understand and anticipate future customers is bound to become even more essential than in the past, because the end users of almost every company’s products are shifting in makeup, location, and number at an ever-increasing rate.” [The Changing Face of Marketing, McKinsey, September 1966] [via] +++ Valeria is an experienced... Read more →

Explanations, Impressions, and Statistics

Making Sense: Alternative Explanations How to Miss By a Mile: An Alternative Look at Uber’s Potential Market Size. Bill Gurley: When you materially improve an offering, and create new features, functions, experiences, price points, and even enable new use cases, you can materially expand the market in the process. The past can be a poor guide for the future if the future offering is materially different than the past. [...] the numerous improvements with respect to the traditional model lead to a greatly enhanced total available market. How 160,000 intercepted communications led to our latest NSA story. The Washington Post:... Read more →

Do You Like You?

The most powerful conversation we can have is the one that connects us with who we are, deep down, when nobody is judging, not even us. It is the arc of this story by which we live that determines what we see when we look in the mirror. Maybe you do notice a misalignment, we are after all our worst critics. When I look at another human being, what I see is the individual behind the circumstances. Beauty takes many forms, as many as we are on this planet -- and we are many. When I came across this video,... Read more →

"Algorithms Don't Make a Newsroom"

“Algorithms don’t make a newsroom. They may make a news product — some of which are highly useful to all of us — but they don’t operate newsrooms. Journalists do that. The best ones do that without fear or favor, and they certainly don’t do it with happy-face factory guidelines. Call it feeding the happy social network, if you’d like — which was Google’s justification for eschewing truthful headlines about Brazil’s humiliation — but don’t call it news or a News Feed, and please don’t say it came out of a “newsroom.” Words have meaning.” [Ken Doctor] +++ Valeria is... Read more →

Insights into Action: the Future of Tech

Tech2021: Uploading Humanism from Valeria Maltoni When I review my search logs, I find that certain posts tend to come up again and again and generate interest over time. One I have seen recurring lately is the loosely written storyline of my contribution to the conversation on the future of tech. The slides I used are above, and here is the video of the talk. Technology and humanism meet This was the topic of my Ignite Austin presentation the same year I gave a solo talk on influence at SxSW. My goal for the presentation was to redefine the question... Read more →

Sharing Knowledge Matters More

In Creativity, Inc. Ed Catmull talks about rendering complex objects and curved surfaces with computers. We take that for granted today; yet it was a process to get there. Because the hand, is an incredibily complex "object" to try to capture and translate into arrays of numbers. To pull it off, Catmull had to draw triangles and polygons on a model, then measure the coordinates of each of their corners, then enter the data into a 3D program he had written. By displaying the connections, he formed the picture of the hand on screen. With the current focus on content,... Read more →

How to Speak Powerfully

How can we speak powerfully to bring about change in the world? If you ever felt like you're talking, but nobody is listening, Julian Treasure explains why in under 10 minutes. The seven deadly sins of speaking and things we need to avoid: Gossip - speaking ill of someone who is not present Judging - we know people who are like this in conversation Being negative - it's hard to listen when someone is negative Complaining - Treasure dubbed it the national art of the U.K.; it's viral misery Making excuses - we all know what form that takes; some... Read more →