Over the past six years, Canadian and US companies have appointed a single executive to lead customer experience efforts across a business unit or the entire company, according to a new report by Forrester Research. Most customer experience leaders sit at high levels of power at businesses across a diverse range of industries, Forrester finds.
Titles used include: “chief customer officer (CCO),” “chief client officer,” and “chief experience officer.” I prefer the title “customer engagement officer” which is outcome based.
Unwilling to stop there, hundreds of MS patients are packing their bags and flying to Poland, Bulgaria, India and Kuwait, among other places, willing to spend anywhere from $8,000 to $20,000 to get the vein-clearing treatment.
One medical ethicist describes it as an unprecedented patient revolt; another calls it a mass movement.
“I have never seen anything move so quickly, gather so much momentum,” says Kerry Bowman, a bioethicist at the University of Toronto. Social networking and other websites have popped up and “changed the face of medicine. (Patients) are watching the procedure on YouTube, they are reading testimonials. This is a huge new realm.”
The passionate pleas of MS patients are in stark contrast to the clinical — some would say cold and unreceptive — responses neurologists give as they patiently explain that Zamboni’s theory is just that, a theory, and that more study is needed.”
The Social Media Marketing Campaign News
By Howard Oliver, CEO, What If What Next, whatifwhatnext@on.aibn.com
I started this discussion in the Enterprise Software Community group on LinkedIn:
Should trade show budgets have a strong social media component?
If you are attending a big fall technology show are you allocating funds to reach out via social media to prospects and customers? Are you going to use internal resources or outsource the task to your social media agency?
Here is an excellent reply that was added:
Social media is a great marketing tool and should be worked into your overall marketing strategy. Tradeshows are part of your marketing campaign, and should be integrated with your social media campaigns as well. Its all interconnected. You use your email campaign to reach out to customers about your tradeshow. You use direct mail to notifiy your prospects and customers about your tradeshow (on the direct mail, you will refer them to your twitter and FB as well). You reach out to your twitter and facebook followers/fans to tell them about your tradeshow. Post something about it to your Linkedin contacts, and in your Linkedin groups. You should use all of the media you have at your disposal…social media being an important link in that chain.
Thanks Marilou and Mel Cades!
We can continue the discussion here. Any suggestions?
The Daily Social Media Marketing Campaign News
By Howard Oliver, CEO, What If What Next, whatifwhatnext@on.aibn.com
On the Daily Social Media Marketing Campaign News we are going to be covering the underlying technology – Cloud Computing – that makes all our posts, tweets and content sharing possible. Frankly, Cloud Computing has become very hot over the past few months and has caught my attention in a big way.
My company is becoming heavily involved in this emerging sector via a new initiative with a great team of new colleagues who have strong technical and business development backgrounds in the sector. Please visit our sister blog CloudVentures.biz for more excellent content on Cloud Computing as it evolves.
To start our coverage of the sector, here is a news piece on Microsoft:
Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer presented his vision of the company’s future in a keynote that opened the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference.
Ballmer positioned Microsoft as moving to “the cloud”. He defined “cloud computing”, as where programs live on Web servers accessible from any device with an Internet connection instead of being confined to individual computers.
His argument is to must convince developers and resellers who have spent decades investing in the PC-centric software to redirect their attention.
Ballmer described “the cloud” as an anthropomorphized being, possessed of its own logic and momentum in a way that almost requires writing that phrase in initial capital letters: “The Cloud.” His tag lines:
“The Cloud Creates New Opportunities And New Responsibilities.”
“The Cloud Learns and Helps You Learn, Decide & Take Action.”
“The Cloud Wants Smarter Devices.”
“The Cloud Enhances Your Social & Professional Interactions”
He pointed to the company’s upcoming Windows Phone 7 software will be a factor in the smart phone market. Microsoft alos still wants to put Windows in a smaller box — the “Ultra Mobile PC.”
Ballmer closed the keynote by all but commanding attendees to buy into its cloud-computing vision — “If you don’t want to move to the cloud, we’re not your folks” — before pledging that “the next 12 months will be some of our most exciting, phenomenal and incredible times together.”
The Daily Social Media Marketing Campaign News
By Howard Oliver, CEO, What If What Next, whatifwhatnext@on.aibn.com
Flipboard is a free app that scans your friends’ Facebook and Twitter posts and present the links and articles that they’ve been posting in a magazine-like layout.
Flipboard has made the way people find, view and share content across their social networks pretty easier. It allows the users to have a totally new social media experience. It gets popular news from the web that the user loves to read about. The most interesting sections are of the Twitter and Facebook.
Flipboard has made the way people find, view and share content across their social networks pretty easier. It allows the users to have a totally new social media experience. It gets popular news from the web that the user loves to read about. The most interesting sections are of the Twitter and Facebook.
From their launch release Mike McCue, Flipboard’s CEO commented: “With over 1 billion messages posted every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date. We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.”
Flipboard also lets readers easily create sections around topics or people they care about. Choose from Flipboard’s suggested sections on topics such as sports, news, tech and style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds. Or, create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter list to make Flipboard even more personal.
This App goes way beyond the now seemingly clunky Social Book marking sites like Delicious and Digg.
I can see companies giving away iPads pre-loaded with the Flipboard app to close clients to share information that would help accelerate sales cycles.
The Daily Social Media Marketing Campaign News
By Howard Oliver, CEO, What If What Next, whatifwhatnext@on.aibn.com
Half a billion people around the world are now using Facebook on a monthly basis. That means Facebook has a slightly smaller population than the continent of North America. The social network also has enough users to put 75 people on every one of the over 6.6 million square miles of Russia, the largest country in the world by landmass.
The largest number of Facebook users live in North America with 35.4 percent of the continent actively logging on to Facebook every month.
To celebrate this accomplishment, I have assembled a group of ideas on how to use Facebook for lead generation:
Facebook can improve your company’s exposure and increase the search engine rankings of your home site. Search engines consider links from Facebook as being “powerful links”. They can help form a very strong link profile for business related websites.
It is important to genuinely get involved and not just needlessly and ineffectively spam on Facebook. Users of social sites ignore irrelevant commercial content. The key to success with Facebook, like any social networking site, is to provide what the users want – useful information and interactions. Think of social media as the global water cooler. You wouldn’t impose on your friends in a social setting. It takes some creativity, a willingness to help people and sincerity to do this effectively. There is a subtlety that is required.
That being said, Facebook offers access to a large number of topic related groups that you can access and join. Find the topics that are most relevant to your business where you can become an active community member. The more targeted the group and the more active you are, the more leads you will generate. Targeted groups are the secret app of all social networking sites. We have generated a flow of leads for our business and for clients from these targeted sites.
To set a measurable goal, we recommend building a list of 100 social media originated prospects. You should view to do this in two months.
Set up your profile on Facebook. Having a profile opens up various useful features in Facebook. Above all else you will have one page that other users visit if they want to find out more about you or your service. Include a few links to your websites are landing pages.
Fill out your profile completely to earn trust. Establish a business account if you don’t already have one. Stay out of trouble by reading the Facebook rules regarding business accounts. Install appropriate applications to integrate feeds from your blog and other social media accounts into your Facebook profile. Post a professional or business casual photos of yourself to reinforce your brand. Post your newsletter subscription information and archives somewhere in your profile.
Consider obtaining a Facebook vanity URL. Add your Facebook URL to your email signature and any marketing collateral (business cards, etc.) so prospects can learn more about you.
By creating a Facebook application you can promote your business in several ways. Users will add you as a friend if your application is useful. They may also send details of your application to their own network – producing a viral effect.
Start a group or fan page for product, brand or business. Add basic information to the group or fan page such as links to company site, newsletter subscription information and newsletter archives. Post upcoming events and activities. Update your group or fan page on a regular basis and answers to questions.
Share useful articles and links to presentations and valuable resources that interest customers and prospects on your wall, to establish credibility. Combine Facebook with other social media tools like LinkedIn and Twitter.
Look for mutual contacts on your contacts’ friends lists. Find experts in your field and invite them as a guest blogger on your blog or speaker at your event.
If you’ve read through this piece to this point, I would assume you are concluding that all this takes a lot of work. You are correct. Social media are free but the labor to produce a business results is not. But, the effort is more than worthwhile. Consider the 100 Lead Project I mentioned above. Run the campaign over two months and compare the costs with your other traditional activities to create High Quality leads. You will be impressed with the results.
The Daily Social Media Marketing Campaign News
By Howard Oliver, CEO, What If What Next, whatifwhatnext@on.aibn.com
Recently, Ben and Jerry’s dropped their email marketing programme in the UK in favour of using social media sites to build their brand and interact with customers.
Should industrial and technology companies do the same? A recent prediction from Gartner claimed that “by 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.”
Generally speaking, social media is about sharing content and engaging in conversations. E-mail marketing can take those conversations and the relationships you’re building to the next level of engagement. We recommend using both in integrated campaigns. Here is an idea for integrating the two.
Email and social media can be combined by using a technique called Share-to-Social (S2S).
How does Share-To-Social work? S2S is a call to action within an email message followed by graphical links to various social networking or content sharing sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc.
A recent study by Silverpop concluded that S2S is likely to result in sharing of content with 150 to 200 people on average. In contrast, a “forward to a friend” link may reach only an additional 1 to 2 people. S2S resulted in a 24% increase in reach on average. S2S is a powerful tool to reach niche markets or influencers in a trade association, for example.
Here are a few guidelines on S2S:
Understand what motivates subscribers to share. People share because they will be rewarded (i.e. sweepstakes), it makes them feel good, it feeds their egos, it makes them feel part of a community. Your copy should reflect at least one-or-two of those drivers.
Also remember your content must be “Share Worthy” (please excuse the obscure Seinfeld reference) . For example, does the white paper you want others to pass along to their social networks meet these criteria?
- Trustworthy and authoritative
- Message content speaks to tribal groups
- Content creates value by virtue of being important, newsworthy or highly useful
- Targets the right social networks
- Is accompanied with a reward or incentive
- Identifies your key influencers
One thing to remember is to test everything. Experiment where place buttons, how well the process of S2S is explained and other production oriented issues.
The Daily Social Media Marketing Campaign News
By Howard Oliver, CEO, What If What Next, whatifwhatnext@on.aibn.com
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post I put these questions to the Greenqloud’s CEO on Facebook:
GreenQloud: I’d like to know what is your strategy and approach to using social media to launch your company: What social media is working best for you? What messaging are you using? What is the bridge from your home site to social media? What ROI are you looking for? Will social media get you in contact with people in Europe and North America? Will you make connection with other Green Play companies or work the Data Center sector? I’ll post your comments back on my blog. Thanks Howard
Eiriku kindly responded:
Social media absolutely plays a vital role in our future. First of all we need to get the word out that the IT industry is heading towards beeing one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases by 2020. Then we need to create the awareness that the future of IT is in truly green cloud computing and we are the first piece in that puzzle. Using social media helps us reach out to the consumers directly that use the services of the companies that can run their software on our public cloud. Consumer pressure will gather momentum for a truly green cloud but we also partner with forward thinking software as a service companies.
Our cloud is compatible with Amazons API’s so it will be easy to switch or to scale out to Greenqloud so it’s an easy sell. We use social media tools like Twitter to get this message across and get help from greenit advocates that post to similar topics such as #GreenIT and #cloud. We are already reaching out to other green companies and I can tell you and our friends reading this that we will be selling carbon credits from a proven source directly on http://www.facebook.com/l/28739;Greenqloud.com for your IT activities outside of the cloud or just for those who want to completely remove their carbon footprint. More on that later though
We are social entrepreneurs, the reason why we started Greenqloud is as much for the benefit of the environment as it is to our country that was hit hard by the economic crisis. Social media tools like blogging, twitter and facebook are our tools of choice at the moment.
The Daily Social Media Marketing Campaign News
By Howard Oliver, CEO, What If What Next, whatifwhatnext@on.aibn.com
We are getting active in the Cloud Computing space with several client assignments.
One company that recently caught my eye is from Iceland. Their site has a very clean design that puts focus on the social media that the company is active in.
Here is their propaganda: “GreenQloud is Truly Green™ because it is 100% powered by renewable geothermal and hydropower energy. GreenQloud can deliver hosting and storage for both markets from one place due to the multiple high speed fiber connections to Iceland.
I’ve asked their CEO to comment on their social media strategy. Stay tuned.
This blog sponsored by What If What Next, a firm offering Cost Effective Web2.0 PR and Social Media Marketing Campaigns. For more information contact us at: 905-709-8582, whatifwhatnext@on.aibn.com
