5 Steps to Worry-Free Social Media ROI
Sales has always been a relationship-driven process, especially in industries like financial services, insurance, biopharma, and casino gaming. Since many of our clients operate within these industries, we’ve watched with special interest as they started the process of translating their relationships into successful social media marketing campaigns. For clients who operate in industries that are both highly regulated and distributed, it’s not as simple as hiring a smart, talented social media manager and getting started. To begin with, there’s the undeniable fact that most people have relationships with other people – not brands. Sure, they’ll “like” a brand’s Facebook page Read More
5 Social Media Tips We Learned This Week
Social media evolves and changes quickly, and even the experts learn something new every day – if they want to remain “experts”, that is. Sometimes it can seem as if the rules for social media are constantly changing. The best way for social media marketing to keep up is to try new ideas, and constantly look for new sources of information. This week, we picked up these five social media tips. What new social media tips did you learn this week? Blog as frequently as possible. Think writing a blog post once a week is enough? High-traffic blogs post new content Read More
Who Owns Your LinkedIn Contacts?
Who owns your LinkedIn profile? (Hint: it might not be you.) That was the headline on a post on this blog back in June, 2011 — and the answer we arrived at with help from a number of legal and compliance experts was, “It depends.” That leads us to a related question: who owns LinkedIn contacts — an employer or the employee? A court in England has issued an order that requires an employee who resigned to start his own consulting business to turn over all of his LinkedIn contacts to his former employer – along with receipts and contracts proving that Read More
Friday Roundup: Twits Ruin Social
Twits Can Ruin a Social Media Strategy– A campaign advisor to Senator Scott Brown and presidential candidate Mitt Romney stirred up a media firestorm for his bosses when he created a twitter account using the name @crazykhazei to make fun of Alan Khazei, who is running against Brown for the Massachusetts Senate seat that Brown now holds. The campaign aide, Eric Fehrnstrom might have stayed under the radar with his tweets – which Senator Brown says he didn’t know about – except that he made a mistake: he sent a tweet from the wrong Twitter account. The lesson for marketers: One of Read More
What to Do When Customer Service Meets Social Media: 5 Basic Lessons
In June 1984, the first online customer support forum for computer users sponsored by a computer maker opened its virtual doors on CompuServe on a Tuesday morning. Around noon on Thursday, the volume of inquiries was running about five times what the company planners had projected, and by the end of the day on Friday, it was over 8 times the anticipated volume. Although the volume has been going up steadily ever since, less than 20% of customer service inquiries were submitted digitally before 1998, and as recently as 2005, just 45% of technical support inquiries were submitted via email or landing page. Read More
Five Social Media Myths that Can Cripple Marketing
When it comes to social media, even the experts learn something new every day. Most CMO’s admit that developing the expertise they need to effectively use social media is a key priority. Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths out there that can derail almost any social media marketing plan. Here are five that come up often in talks with corporate marketing. Make sure you don’t fall for any of them! Myth #1: Social Media is free. Robert Heinlein’s famous motto TANSTAFL applies here, as everywhere else in life. (“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”) Yes, many of Read More
News roundup: Social and Digital Media’s Split Personality On Display
Here’s this week’s round-up of news stories marketers shouldn’t miss because they offer key information or lessons that multi-channel distributed marketing organizations should take to heart. All five of the selected articles demonstrate the deep divides in how companies are addressing social media — and point up why integrating the medium’s “split personality” is likely to be a key challenge for marketers as the social network grows and evolves. “Blame Grandpa” Defense Strategy Originated Online – A jury consultant working for Florida murder defendant Casey Anthony has reported that the controversial defense strategy which blamed Caylee Anthony’s grandfather originated with social Read More
Drawing the Line Online: Recorded Webinar & Presentation
This morning’s webinar with Distribion, Socialware, and LIMRA went beautifully! If you missed it, you can download the presentation here, and view the recorded webinar here. There were so many questions that panelists Chad Bockius, Edgar Rodriguez, and Stephen Selby didn’t get to all of them, so the organizers are preparing a downloadable Q&A for those that weren’t answered during the webcast. A link will be posted here as soon as that is available. Registration is now available for the next webinar in the 5-part series the three organizations are sponsoring. Reaching Your Audience Effectively: The 5W’s of Digital & Read More
Friday News Round-up: Five Stories Marketers Shouldn’t Miss
This week brought a number of interesting stories that will affect nearly anyone who uses a multi-channel distributed marketing approach to sell products or services, regardless of their industry. Here are five of the most interesting: NLRB Targets “Facebook Firings” and Social Media Policies – North Carolina law firm Nexsen Pruet publishes a monthly employment law update that always contains interesting information for managers. The July issue looks at several recent cases taken up by the National Labor Relations Board which involve blogging and social media policies. In one case discussed, the NLRB ruled that the common practice of requiring employees to sign a social media Read More
Employee Training: Step One in Preparing for a Social Media Crisis
A couple of weeks ago, lawyers from up and down the Atlantic coast of the U.S. gathered at the Marriott Marquis in New York’s Times Square for the 23rd Annual Corporate Counsel Conference. Like attorneys everywhere, the corporate lawyers gathered in New York were eager to learn more about how to handle what most believe is the inevitable day when they find themselves in the same position as McDonald’s, Delta, and Living Social – all caught up in PR crises that sped their way around the globe in only a few hours. Two of those three companies did nothing wrong. Read More
