The On-Going Conversation

A Social Reality: Choose Wisely

As human beings and social animals, we look for guidance from the people we choose to surround ourselves with; that's what we do best.

The Mobile Consumer World

We Live in a Digital World! 57% of Facebook and Twitter users have scanned a mobile bar bode at least one time within the year.

Read the full article via Fast Company

Verizon Wireless Customers: A Tech and Mobile Update

Tech: Verizon Wireless will soon drop its "New Every 2" upgrade plan, which rewards customers who renew a 2-year contract with a discount.

The Nature of Cell Phone Usage

Cell Phone Trends in 16 Countries: Source: Pew Research Center. The median % of people who own a cell phone has increased by 36% since 2002; the current median is 81%.

Social Media: Expose Your Company to the Light

As cliché as it sounds, you never know until you try.

This day in age it has become increasingly important for businesses to harness social media. You don't necessarily need a perpetual approach either, but at least give it a try and see where the outreach takes you. It is also relatively effortless and economically feasible as well; it only requires time and dedication. Not to mention, the benefits overwhelmingly outweight the time and energy that organizations must be prepared to devote towards the social ecosystem.

The social media environment is constantly evolving and changing as well. As this occurs, social media continues to become increasingly connected to business and the way in which it is conducted. Despite the juxtaposition of social media and social businesses, the phenomenon remains relatively new and wasn’t even part of the picture ten years ago. As a result, it can be challenging to decipher what is to come and where the world of social media is headed.

Regardless of the direction that social media may travel, I am intrigued by the possibility of what’s to come and where the trends will ultimately lead. However, even with excitement there comes a degree of obfuscation. One can never truly predict the course of time, and we will have to wait to see where the process goes next. Personally, I think that location-based networking services will continue to expand and increase the overall level of personal transparency. For example, Foursquare would be classified as a geographical social media network.

Moreover, if companies neglect to commence a social media strategy, they may be failing to connect with a niche portion of the population. This niche segment could potentially become customers, which may even help cultivate more customers, merely through word-of-mouth marketing.

All-in-all, I believe the benefits of social media are hard to decipher and classify. However, I wanted to showcase an assortment of ways that social networking can benefit companies of all sizes. Who knows, maybe you will experience the benefits first hand and create a tangible way of classifying your own social advantages.

The Three Benefits of Reaching Out -- Socially and Strategically

1. Transparency -- Companies now have the ability to be more open than ever and connect with customers in mere seconds. It can also function in a reverse manner, with individuals being able to communicate with companies online, aside from the barriers of an organizational hierarchy. For the most part, prospective customers want to feel as though companies have the utmost credibility and conduct business in an honest fashion. With this in mind, social media can be an avenue to accomplish this, by opening the gates of communication to any individual that would like to correspond directly with the company.

2. Awareness -- Businesses can build an online identity, which hopefully generates more involvement from ordinary individuals. Social media can also be a primary avenue for news on events, contests and information that correlates the organizational mentality and overall mantra. This will allow companies to control the message and the fashion in which they convey themselves. Ideally companies want to present themselves in a professional manner, plus social media can help document the tech savvy nature of an organization, by showcasing their ability to utilize online avenues of expression.

3. Special deals and contests -- Ann Taylor for example is using Foursquare in a recent effort to harness social media platforms. Their campaign specifically allows individuals that are mayors at specific locations in New York City, to receive 25% off of their total purchase. Depending on the successful of their campaign, they may even attempt to expand the approach to all stores nationwide. Not to mention, there are specific social media programs that will allow to trigger messages at specific times. By having the option to schedule a message, businesses can determine when they would like prospective customers to be made aware of certain information. This means that social media in a sense, is more tactical than ever.

Business can also establish credibility, integrity and a degree of trustworthiness, merely by interacting with a niche portion of the population on-line. Obviously it needs to be in a positive and helpful manner, which will help yield the results that companies are striving for. Nonetheless, a companies’ approach is generally dependant on their particular organizational mantra and overall goal structure.

All-in-all, businesses should consider commencing a social media strategy, if of course they haven’t already. The strategy doesn’t necessarily need to be perfected from the onslaught either. Through time and social participation, businesses can literally generate a social prescription for the company, which speaks from experience and contains a frame of reference for comparison.

This prescription will hopefully become a remedy for the company and involve a transformation, once businesses have an understanding of the landscape they are working with. Just remember, there isn’t necessarily an incorrect way to conduct social marketing – just give it a try and see what happens. There are no rules to abide by and the conditions are still relatively new.

Image Credit: Social Media Marketing -- Enough is Enough by: Jennifer Mattern - July 2009

Re-Evaluate Your Business Mentality

Focus on what you can to set your business apart from the competition.

It is important for each department in a business to understand where they stand in regards to overall business goals. Without having a clear grasp of what their objectives are accomplishing, do their missions and goals truly serve a purpose?

Each department should be able to define their individual goals, which generally fall within the parameters of the overall business goals at each specific company. Obviously varying departments are going to have unique goals that other aspects of the organization don’t have and vice-versa.

However the difficulty can be to define these goals and make sure they are always being strived for. They may not always be achieved with day-to-day projects, but for the most part they should always be understood and transparent to all employees, which represent a collection of business entities throughout the world.

Listed below is an assortment of goals for particular businesses, regardless of their overall concentration. It also focuses on how they can ultimately achieve lasting results and implications with the customers they interact with.

1. Authenticated experience: In a sense, employees should believe that their company is striving to create a “prescription” for specific individuals who access their website, use their services or those that could potentially become customers in the near future. This will help maximize their overall experience and generate an environment that is easy to appreciate. It will also hopefully help align their innate perspective with that of the business and establish an ambiance of comfort. Not to mention, a degree of credibility and honesty that can transform the perception that individuals have.

2. Generate customer-loyalty: Employees are responsible for creating an environment where individuals ideally remain customers and convey their appreciation to their friends and family. This correlates to a quality customer experience that sustains a degree of loyalty and focuses on the nature of customer-centricity.

3. Market the businesses specific resources: You want to present the resources that you and your business have; not only the individuals who already work with your company, but also to those who may prospectively be interested conducting business down the line. Without documenting what your company has to offer, potential customers won’t even be aware of your particular services and may consider other companies from the commencement of your conversation.

4. Business adoption: Companies should allow the capability for people to go paperless and have access to their information with the click of a mouse. This also correlates to the placement of items on a website specifically, which creates an easy to use set of circumstances. This also helps with making items more convenient for prospective customers, especially considering the busy lives that we all seem to have at the moment. Just remember, we live in a digital world that requires instant gratification. A business should try and emulate this high-paced environment, if they want to sustain and continue a level of growth, especially in this technologically driven world.

5. Reach out into the community: Companies of all sizes, mentality and focus should be involved in the local community and promote information that is applicable to their own world. This will increase the likelihood of market awareness and hopefully lead to more individuals recognizing your business through association of ideas. This also involves the interaction with local entities, in an effort to make it easier for people to access your companies’ information. This can be accomplished by utilizing a proactive approach to personal market awareness and can even stimulate a level of intrigue.

All-in-all, companies need to determine what works the best for them. We all need to remember the capitalist system we are a part of. Ultimately the decision comes down to the individuals that live in the market place. Nonetheless, businesses need to do their best to market their products, services or approach, depending on whether or not a company is for profit, not-for-profit or non-profit.

Job Search Tips in a Challenging Economy

It has become increasingly important for prospective employees to set themselves apart from the competition. Regardless of where the candidates are in their work timeline—they could be recent graduates, well-established career professionals or those looking to transition into a new career; it really doesn’t matter. 

We all in a sense need a little guidance to calm the storm of the economic conditions that we are currently facing. To some extent, I would even say the environment has arguably become more turbulent in recent months, especially with the large influx of potential individuals that are fiercely seeking employment.

Moreover, with more and more individuals battling in the job search arena, one must do all they can to showcase their talents, goals, ambitions and overall experience. I understand that it may be extremely tedious and time consuming, but we have all went through it at some point in our lives.

When you are unemployed, everyday seems to be a constant degree of uncertainty. You always seem to possess ambiguity about your future economic stability. It can also be vague and challenging to build a foundation, without having a clear vision of what the future will hold. That is why you have to plant a seed with prospective organizations, based on the infrastructure that you have already worked to establish.

This groundwork could consist of past work experience, education, volunteer opportunities and a network of individuals that you can harness. Never underestimate the power of your social networks; your connections may be more than willing to help and may even recommend you to specific positions within their company. Start the conversation and who knows, someone may be able to help you out along the way.

All-in-all, it has become increasingly necessary to establish division and separation from your competition, especially in the obfuscating job market. Without taking the initiative and responsibility on yourself, the period of dormancy may be extended and the perils of being unemployed may continue to linger on.

Personally, I think it is arguably the worst feeling the in the world—exerting all your energy and transparency for a job opportunity, and then finding out after all your hard work that they decided to pursue another candidate.

This is why you need to do what you can to set yourself apart from the opposing vultures trying to isolate the opportunity from you. With this in mind, you must showcase your skills that are applicable and pertinent to the opportunities you are striving for. Without having a clear vision of why you think you are qualified—you may potentially convey that in the interview. This could all be due to a lack of confidence and clarity about your experience and overall credentials.

As a result, job seekers need to remain confident. They also need to understand that they will eventually find an opportunity they love. It may be challenging to continue pursuing a job prospect, but don’t give up; there are good days ahead.

Image Credits: Career Realism — June 22, 2009

Corporate Blogging is Overlooked in the World of Facebook and Twitter

By: J-P De Clerck During lots of conversations with people from the business world, I notice that there still exist a lot of misconceptions about corporate blogs and their importance. Sometimes, I even have to explain what blogs actually are.I can tell them about all different kind of blogs, as Debbie Weil summarized in her book about corporate blogging, and what they can do for them. Sometimes, I have to keep it even simpler and tell them that a blog is a type of website where people can post texts, updates, photos, links, videos, audios etc. about everything they want, which blog platforms exist, that you can allow comments and can do it being a company as well. Sometimes, I have to explain it in very simple words, before I can even think of explaining the benefits of a blog. So, I will do it here as well before we go a bit further. I cannot cover all aspects of blogging in one post, nor can I cover all the benefits and tackle all misconceptions. But let me give a try. Blogs are “personal” online platforms where everyone that so desires can tell whatever he likes. This can be about the unbearable lightness of being, the frivol adventures of a Saturday night, the favourite pet or heavier themes like the social-economic situation in China or the true meaning of the works of Nietzsche. Some blogs have a clearer theme and others don’t.

Corporate blogs are blogs that were set up by companies. Not by the companies themselves, of course, because businesses are nothing more than legal entities and I never saw a company write a text. Companies are a collection of people, and corporate blogs are thus set up by PEOPLE within the companies such as the CEO, the R&D division, the guy that wrote a book, the in-house guru, the people that work within the company, marketing and PR folks, whatever. For the record: I am not covering internal blogs here. Blogs are about people and, yes, excuse me, conversations Sometimes, setting up a corporate blog (or several ones like one for the “business as a whole” and one for the in-house guru), happens from a top-down approach. Somebody says ‘we have to blog’. Sometimes, it happens within the frame of a specific action or campaign. And sometimes, it happens bottom-up: people from the company start to blog about the things they do and after a while it is picked up by more people from the company and recuperated by the management because they ‘see it going well’. Of course, this is a little simplistic and the start of every corporate blog is different, but nonetheless, it gives an idea. The reasons why companies set up a blog are very diverse (I assume here that a blog is a conscious decision, as I was just telling that is not always the case). Some do it to tell how wonderful they are. Others see it as a PR-activity. Still others do it because ‘the media’ never write about them. And there are some, who do it because it is in fashion. Here is the bad news for all those companies: that is not what blogging is about. What is it about then? It is about inbound, brands as publishers, value, relevancy, opinions, community and people. But most of all it's about giving your business a human and authentic face by letting the people within it converse. I guess that, by now, some of you are tired of the word ‘conversations’. Well, don’t blame me. I didn’t invent it, it says what it is and it’s been used in marketing literature for years now. You cannot open a book or read a post on “Marketing 2.0” without encountering the word. Lots of books about blogs have it even incorporated in the title. Think of ‘Naked Conversations’, the corporate blogging book of Robert Scobble and Shel Israel. Or Joseph Jaffe’s, ‘Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing-Weary Customers With The Power of Community, Dialogue and Partnership’. The key takeaway of The Cluetrain Manifesto To understand the term ‘conversations’, I rather refer to a different and somewhat older book (published for the first time in 2000 to be precise), when the term’ blog’ didn’t even exist (or, at least on a larger scale): ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’. From that book you actually should remember just one sentence (it doesn’t take away the fact that I advise you to read it entirely, if you haven’t done it already): ‘markets are conversations’. The authors refer to the original role of ‘the market’: a place where people come together, display their goods, talk about the weather and meanwhile, with a chat and a handshake, buy and sell all sorts of goods. At first sight it is a simple and evident comparison. But, there does hide a very important marketing reality behind it. Understanding this is like immediately understanding what corporate blogging is really about. Markets are conversations. Unfortunately companies and marketers had forgotten a little about it and they didn’t converse anymore (and they didn’t listen at all). The decline of the conversation in the commercial process has been attributed to the mass production (and communication) model that has made its ascent since the industrial revolution. It is a model that has alienated the companies and “consumers” from each other by a “we and they’ discourse. ‘We’ are the companies that manufacture products; ‘they’ are the ones who use them. And between them lies marketing: PR, commercials, communication, market research: everything companies need to have to get known and to reach the estranged “consumer”. Or, in other words: the direct ‘conversation’ had disappeared. Internet and social media force businesses to listen again Still conversations about (and with) companies take place every day, as I often write and say. When I tell a friend about a bad service I received, when I bought my new cell phone with company A. Or when I watch a commercial on the TV with my wife, where a company presents itself as ‘the specialist on the subject of x’ and we look at each other with a reaction of ‘yeah, right’. Or when a consumer sends a reader’s letter to a newspaper telling about the scandalous sales practices of energy supplier B. The truth is that conversations never really stopped. However, a lot of companies have gone through a lot of trouble to stop those conversations with the help of marketing inventions such as ‘positioning’, bombardments of mass commercials and tutti quanti. And suddenly the Internet came along; a medium without rules, where everybody can say what they want. At first, in phenomena such as news groups and the forums. And since a couple of years on blogs, the first real platforms of what now is fashionably called social media. With blogs the conversations went public. And they spread very fast. Word-of-mouth got a potential global dimension. The bad service I was just mentioning doesn’t get only one auditor but possibly thousands, through the WWW. Thus, there are conversations in abundance. Conversations of consumers tired of being lied to, to be bombed with meaningless ‘corporate speak’, to be regarded and addressed as consumers rather than as human beings, and to be addressed by companies rather than by the people of the company or badly served (“all our operators are busy and in fact we don’t really care, you will be served in 47 minutes but by all means go to our site and solve your bloody problem yourself”). Blogs as a way to re-establish what we have lost Exactly all this stuff is what corporate blogging is all about. Besides, blogs are only one of the many ways to re-establish a direct dialogue between people (instead of consumers)... and people (instead of companies). Markets are conversations, and conversations are equal dialogues between equal partners, who dare to show themselves to each other as they are in all honesty and transparency. Today’s companies daring to have these conversations via corporate blogs, amongst others, are even scarcer as you would think they are. But those who do it bear its fruits. Corporate blogs are a way of getting the inter-human dialogue going. And those dialogues are precious. You cannot talk and listen to ‘companies’ and ‘consumers’, only to people. Companies hire positioning specialists to make up an identity, often without regarding if the identity matches the perception of their customers or not. Vice versa, they hire market researchers to get any idea of who those darn customers actually are. Companies cannot speak, people can. As a matter of fact, blogs are still the most important part of any inbound and social media marketing strategy, if you ask me. There is less noise and more value. Are there more conversations? If you look at comments as conversations, certainly not. But are tweets, retweets, social bookmarks and Facebook pages or groups conversations? Watch the Twitter stream for a day, without doing anything. Markets are conversations. On many social media they are often less personal and authentic than we like to believe. Blogs are social media hubs and voices and ears if you use them well: be real, offer value and be found in the vast social media space. It's the value and authenticity that leads to...leads. From a content perspective, corporate blogs are key and they are overlooked in a world where we all look at often meaningless streams of noise. Does this mean I don't like social network sites? No. But I know their place, both from a personal and marketing perspective. Blog and get found, it's the very first step in establishing a relationship in the online world. And the best relationships move beyond the online space. J-P De Clerck

A Hypothetical Correlation or Something More?

I recently stumbled upon an on-line article released by Freakonomics entitled, “Are the Lakers a Sure Thing?” The article focused on an unexplained phenomenon, which apparently occurred during the Los Angeles Lakers period of extreme success. But could there actually be a correlation and degree of logistical credibility associated between a basketball team and the Nasdaq Stock Exchange? Especially considering is the vast geographical expanse and overall distance between Los Angeles and New York City. As a rule of thumb, I generally don’t consider myself to be superstitious. Nonetheless, I find it quite odd that one of the two prominent stock markets in the United States and the Los Angeles Lakers seemed to have a mysterious connection. The situation commenced consideration, when the Lakers were thriving as a championship team up through the conclusion of the 2007 season. It was during this time that we noticed that the stock market generally fell to the way side and was statistically minimized. However on the contrary, the markets rose when the team literally fell off the deep end and ironically enough, between 1987 and 2007, this “classification” was incorrect only a triad of times. As Ed Carson once stated, “An investor who put down $1,000 into the Nasdaq at the start of 1987 and stayed completely invested through 2007 would have ended up with $7,604, but an investor who bought the Nasdaq in years the Lakers lost and stayed in cash when the Lakers won, would have finished with $21,189.” Regardless, Carson explained that this indicator is an example of potential disaster, especially when individuals merely assume causality, amidst an unexplained correlation. How about instead of guessing on an assumed reality, we actually meticulously examine circumstances that correlate to our own businesses? We can truly strive to engage our current customers and even prospective ones, by looking at past behaviors and in a sense creating a plan from there. We shouldn’t guess and assume the type of businesses that clients want to work with; we should utilize evidence and create a business environment that they feel comfortable in, which will ultimately led to customer loyalty, and hopefully recommendations to their business colleagues and friends. With this in mind, an organization should never assume anything. Businesses should engage their customers and see the whole picture, from their innate perspective. This will show individuals that you truly care about establishing customer-loyalty, and are in a sense completely in tune with customer-centricity. You will document to them that you have their back, and in return they will drive the lane and score for you, delivering tangible results that will be mutually beneficial for both sides of the equation. Image Credits: Google Images (LA Lakers Logo)

Sustainability Faceoff: Microsoft vs. Apple

Sustainability Faceoff: Microsoft vs. Apple. http://ping.fm/wvgRx -- Source: Ariel Schwartz