Sensei Blogs

Only One Resolution: Accept Less Mediocrity

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t make resolutions. While committing yourself to some action or new behavior based on an event like the entry of a new calendar year seems logical, I find the concept flawed. Too much expectation and pressure, such as that placed on New Year’s resolutions, does not foster the right environment for change in one’s life. Often these resolutions are emotional reactions to missed opportunities, envy of others or the desire for more physical possessions. To be meaningful, resolutions must be born from life experiences, which happen throughout the year. Success is achieved when you can capitalize on that experience and desire to change or improve your circumstances when the situation is upon you.

Thus, I tend to make resolutions throughout the year not on December 31st; however, this year is a bit different. It may be because of the cumulative circumstances of this past year or my advancing age but I find myself motivated to make a single resolution for this coming New Year: accept less mediocrity. Accept less of it from my clients, my staff, my business, my peers and most of all, accept less mediocrity from myself.

Too often I’ve accepted a “job well done” compliment as a measure of success. It satisfied my ego and placated my need to be relevant. On the reverse side, I’ve accepted friendship and good will as trade for promised deliverables only half or poorly delivery. I’m not certain if it was fear of change or the fear of success that held me back, but I was too often satisfied with just enough. On occasion throughout these past few years, across my personal, social and professional experiences, I’ve found myself needing to push beyond such mediocrity and demand more to maintain my personal equilibrium and sanity. I did not pre-plan or resolve to do so, it was merely a reaction to hitting a wall or a breaking point. The surprising result was that I achieved greater personal happiness or success when I pushed through whatever personal or emotional obstacles stood in my way or that that of my colleagues. Sometimes the immediate results were negative, caused concern or hurt feelings, yet in each case the long-term result was positive because it resulted in progress. I moved forward.

Inspired, I’m publicly declaring my New Year’s resolution to accept less mediocrity. I’m going to question, demand and expect more of myself and everyone around me. Regardless of the outcome, I’ll know there were no stones left uncovered, no thoughts left unexplored and no sentiments left unexpressed. No regrets.

Have you accepted mediocrity this past year? What causes us to do so? Join me in this pledge?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Starbucks' Hijacked Twitter Campaign Could and Should Have Been Prevented

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Measuring and analyzing sentiment around a brand is becoming an important part of a business’ marketing and PR strategy. As a discipline, it seeks to understand the tone of the conversation occurring online around a business’ product, brand and/or that of its competitors. Using social media monitoring software like Lexalytics, Viralheat or Trendspotter (to name a few), marketers look for the context of social posts, the popularity of specific product-related topics, or the audience’s overall attitude as it relates to the product and brand.

Such programs are often on-going, general search-and-report type programs conducted as part of a market research or brand reputation management service. In other cases, it’s the marketing or customer service departments that are tasked with this job. In an ideal world – and in an ideal corporate structure – every department shares information in real-time and makes data available across business silos seamlessly. Yeah, right.

Back in reality, we know this situation is not common; in fact, it’s most likely the opposite of what’s really occurring. The immediacy of social media content sharing and the consumer’s ability to drive that unedited content across multiple platforms demands a rethink of this organizational failure. At a minimum, businesses must add sentiment analysis to the pre-launch stage of every social media campaign they execute. Why?

Starbucks Customers Hijack Twitter Campaign

A recent Starbucks Twitter campaign asked followers to tweet their holiday cheer on Twitter using the hashtag “#SpreadTheCheer.” A great idea except for the fact that with the 700 locations in the UK, Starbucks is embroiled in a public relations battle based on the news that it paid only 8.6 million pounds in corporate taxes over the last 14 years. With other news reporting that Starbucks in the UK planned to cut paid lunch breaks and maternity leave benefits, the public sentiment around the brand was decidedly poor. The result was a public hijacking of the holiday-cheer #hashtag campaign in protest of its corporate policies.

Not only were these Tweets seen across Twitter , they were amplified on a giant screen over a Starbucks-sponsored ice rink at London’s Natural History museum.

If the marketing team responsible for the execution of the campaign had conducted a standard sentiment analysis check before it launched, they’d have realized the potential risk before it was too late. Of course, that would mean sentiment analysis checks were part of standard pre-launch methodologies for social media campaigns or that the PR team communicates regularly with the marketing team.

<Insert soundtrack of corporate hysterical laughing here>

As much as marketers wish to deny this fact, the business brand is now firmly dictated by the sentiments and opinions shared by the general public and consumers. Social media can provide a stellar platform to amplify positive brand sentiment but it can just as easily – and more likely – disrupt corporate-directed messaging with negative social commentary. Sentiment analysis can no longer be a nice-to-have program or even a PR-specific effort; sentiment analysis must be inserted as a mandatory tactic preceding any social media effort.

Not convinced? Ask the executives as Starbucks in the UK what they think. Still not convinced? Ask the executives at McDonald’s who had their own positive-story Twitter campaign (#McDStories) hijacked by negative consumer commentary. This is not a trend; it’s a reality.

Is it realistic for a marketing team to conduct sentiment analysis before every campaign? Will budgets be made available for such a strategy? Or will businesses continue to take the risk? Join the debate in the comments below.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Stop your bitching; you're not paying for it!

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

By now you’ve probably heard that Instagram, which was purchased by Facebook three months ago, announced a rather dramatic change to its Terms of Service. As of January 16th, 2013, by using the popular photo sharing app you give Instagram perpetual rights to use and sell your photographs without payment or notification to you. That’s right, unless you cancel your subscription to this free service before that date, you will agree to have them market and sell your vacation photos, the dozens (no, hundreds) of pictures of your meals shared with friends and of course, all those cute pictures of your kids at play in local parks, parties and at home.

Who knows, your kid might be the next Gerber baby! That picture you took of your girlfriend on a Fort Lauderdale beach during spring break might be on the cover of the next Maxim magazine. How great is that, right?! “How much will I get paid?” you ask? Ah, see there’s the catch: you get paid nothing. You give them the right to “market and sell” your photographs AND give up the right to be compensated for such use. Still excited about your possible 15 minutes of pictorial fame?

Guess What? There’s No Santa Claus

Naturally, whenever some free social networking service tries to pay its electricity bill (so it can continue to offer you a free service) by selling advertisements, sharing your information or accessing the content you produce and willingly share across social platforms, everyone gets all riled up and turns to…you guessed it…the free internet to share their outrage. When a fee is placed on the use of – or access to – content, networking or images, most balk at the notion and move on. Place an advertisement in front of your content or before your video plays and everyone complains about how they’ve been inconvenienced.

Well guess what netizens, there is no Santa Claus. Facebook is a business, not a jolly man in red suit giving away candy canes and toys made by mystical elves. Who do you think pays for the servers, programmers, network engineers and bandwidth that allow you to share your silly memes, political rants and pictures of last night’s “most amazing sushi ever!”?

Culture of Entitlement

I want all of it, everything, all the time but I’m not prepared to pay for it and I
demand the best service – with a smile – on my terms.

Social media has created a culture of entitled, whiney crybabies who expect that everything will be given to them without compromise, fees or responsibility. We post pictures of ourselves drunk at bars and complain when they’re used against us at a job interview. We complain about our bosses and work environment on Twitter and seek legal advice when we’re fired for doing so. We blindly accept Terms of Service agreements without reading the fine print and then act all surprised and shocked that someone is collecting and sharing our information.

Culture of Opt-Out

As I’m writing this post, Danny Brown posted a great article called Instagram, Social Media and the Opt-Out Economy. He takes a unique look at the issue by calling out the fact Instagram is changing the rules of the game midstream, forcing you to opt out. Other services like Klout.com, who freely and without the requirement of an opt-in, track and analyse your online activity so they can build their business by selling product managers that information, require you to opt-in in order to opt-out. Nuts, right?

Certainly, the Internet has created an almost lawless Wild West-type world where everyone is trying to stake their claim to the gold in dem der hills.

Do I like the change Instagram is making to their Terms of Service? No.
Will I be opting out? Hell yes.
Do I agree with the new “opt-out mentality” that Internet firms are forcing down our throats? Not a chance.

However, I recognize that Instagram is free and so I say “stop your bitching or just stop using them.” It’s really that simple. Instagram is telling you it has to pay its bills and instead of charging you for access, it’s collecting revenue by selling your pictures. Don’t like the cost? Don’t buy it. Just don’t act so shocked that there’s a fee for services in life.

YOU'VE ALREADY AGREED TO LICENSE YOUR PHOTOS

Unregister yourself from Instagram and start using another network that you’ll not read the ToS for either. Those of you complaining clearly don't read them since you most likely have a Facebook account and so you've already given up the same rights Instagram is now asking for. From Facebook's terms of service: "For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us ... a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post."

< /endrant >

Agree? Has social media created a culture of entitlement? Join the debate in the comments below.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

2012 Video Post of Gratitude

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Well, it’s that time of the year. The time of year when we look back, take stock of our lives and plan for the next. With the latest school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, hurricanes destroying homes along the Atlantic and so much other negativity in the world, I’ve taken some comfort in acknowledging the people I’m blessed to be surrounded by and the good fortune that me, my family and my business are enjoying. When so much goes wrong in our personal and professional lives or within the greater community we live in, it's often hard to seek the good and remain positive. Yet that is the one thing that inevitably allows us to move forward, be happy and prosper again.

I didn’t believe that writing my thoughts down in a blog post would sufficiently express how truly grateful I am to these people and organizations so I recorded my sentiments, unscripted and unedited in this video blog entry. I've purposely excluded my family from this post. I'm grateful for them, their love and their support above all other things but that is a subject for another forum.

Can you identify what and who you are thankful for this year?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Customer Experience Cannot be Automated

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I’m a bit disturbed by the fact that most customer experience (CX) discussions I’ve had lately with marketers have been about marketing automation and technology. Software firms pitching clients at trade shows, on webinars or at conferences all seem to be leading with the promise that their technology will generate a greater customer experience through automated engagements tracked back to the individual user profile.

I hope the clients of these software firms understand the phrase: Caveat Emptor / Buyer Beware. Customer experience is not downloadable, it does not come out of a box and it’s not about automation. In fact, great customer experience is not a technology-driven principle at all.

So what is Customer Experience?

It's a business discipline; customer experience is something you do, not something you install.
It's corporate culture; customer experience is something you inherently think and believe, not something you schedule.

Customers are more informed, sophisticated and social, which only serves to increase the pressure on businesses to better engage and satisfy. Customers have gained a lot of control over the success of the brands they love and hate and so they’re able to demand an improved customer experience. More automation is the opposite of what is being demanded.

A Deloitte and Forbes survey of 192 U.S. executives proves that this phenomena has become a major risk for the corporation. "Social media wasn't even on the radar a few years ago, and we're now seeing it ranked among the top sources of risk, on the same level as financial risk," Henry Ristuccia, a partner in Deloitte & Touche LLP. The power of the consumer voice, as amplified via social streams is forcing businesses to improve the customer experience or risk alienating current and prospective customers who are actively seeking each other out in these channels.

More High Touch, Less High Tech

Is your customer experiencing your brand solely through technologically-based communications such as social media, email, or automated answering machines? Are campaign decisions being directed by marketing software automation? There is definitely a role for software in the Customer Experience Management (CXM) process, but it must be a supporting player, not the director. CXM software must be chosen to augment real customer experience strategies, not have it dictated by the software’s pre-configured workflow.

When architecting the experience, the only universal “best practice” in customer experience design is to consider the customer’s satisfaction with the product or engagement as THE top priority and benchmark. And since every business and customer base is different – not to mention different customer segments within that base – there is no one technology that can effectively create the customer experience for your brand. In fact, there are an infinite number of outside influences on your customers including social channels, technologies, competition and other market forces, which add greater importance to human intuition and human touch.

It’s time your business stop looking to social media managers to bolster the engagement you have with customers and look to customer experience professionals that will infuse the discipline and culture across all customer touch points with your brand.

Has customer experience become overly automated? Are we building relationships on thin and technology-based connections today? Join the debate below!

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Are You Trolling For Numbers?

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Jane Perdue asked this question on her blog this week: “Are you trolling for numbers or meaning?”

It’s a powerful question at a time where numbers seems to be judge, jury and executioner in our online marketing efforts. From simple numbers such the quantity of “Likes” and followers to numbers that purport to indicate one’s social influence to the black ‘n red numbers on a balance sheet, it’s all about the numbers today isn’t it? Strategies are crafted, decisions are made and conversations are influenced based on numbers. Business – and marketers in particular – love everything tied up in a nice little package: the number.

Notice that Jane asks if you’re trolling for numbers or meaning, which indicates they’re mutually exclusive concepts. Can’t numbers also have meaning? Albert Einstein suggested that a number, in and of itself, has no significance. Beyond representing the quantity of a group of similar objects, it has no meaning, right?

Yet there are many different kinds of numbers such as rational and irrational numbers, real and complex numbers, algebraic and transcendental numbers, perfect numbers, surreal and hyperreal numbers, and finally square and triangular numbers. In these cases, the numbers begin to represent concepts and not just quantity. So maybe the question of number vs. meaning is flawed? Maybe numbers can have meaning? As an example, numbers can represent the percentage sales increase in year-to-date revenue. If an organization collectively imposes meaning on numbers, those numbers mean something to the stakeholders.

So what’s the answer?

It doesn’t matter; the issue is not if numbers have meaning but our reliance on them, regardless of any associated meaning. The overload of data created and exchanged across a dizzying array of distribution channels, which is accessible at our fingertips and on demand, has changed the rules of the game. We can’t get away from it. We need it. We want it. We seek it out. In fact, in most cases we don’t need to find it; it finds us. The resulting interaction of data between people, between people and business, and between people and devices has made numbers – regardless of what we agree they represent – meaningless.

Gross domestic product, inflation rates and economic structures that were once cyclical and predictable are stumping the most experienced economists. The reality is numbers do, in fact, lie. Numbers direct the marketer’s attention toward current trends instead of the trend currents; what is “the now” instead of what that current activity predicts about how consumers will communicate, think or consume our products in the future.

From connections on social platforms to social influence scores, numbers have become a marketing disease causing short-sightedness in strategic thinking. What’s the cure? Stop giving numbers meaning; focus on contextual relationships and communications instead. Insight can no longer be gained by mathematical calculations or by parsing Big Data. The more data we exchange across a greater number of devices, the less meaning numbers will have and the more importance human insight and intuition must be given.

Are numbers meaningless? Are they creating short-sightedness in marketers? Is human analysis becoming more important in the face of growing artificial intelligence?

Agree/Disagree/Why?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Marketers, What Your CEO REALLY Thinks Of You

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

You’ve earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in earned media. You’ve built your Facebook fans to 10,000 in 6 months. You’ve increased the lead funnel by 15% over last year. You’re the golden child of the organization; you’ve played squash with the CEO and received the keys to the executive washroom.

All is right with the world.

Until the company’s fortunes or the economy in general takes a downturn and the marketing budget is the first to get cut and the first department to see layoffs. Your executive washroom keys are taken back; you’re shocked that you once again have to “go” with the rest of the nobodies in the organization. You bide your time and do more of the same with less. Then (Oh Happy Day!) the economy rebounds and the marketing budget is the first to reap the rewards of the loosened purse strings.

Anyone in the marketing industry for more than 10 years, be they a corporate marketing or agency professional, has experienced this phenomenon at least once. When the business or the economy suffers, just as marketing is needed the most, CEOs stop investing in it. When the company’s fiscal outlook swings “to the black” and everyone is optimistic, budgets return to normal.

To my fellow marketers, what does this universal truth say about what CEOs really think of marketing or the value they place on what you do? I’ll tell you: it says they see you a marketer, not revenue generator. Your department is a cost, not a profit center.

Do you still think that branding, brand awareness and lead generation are the goals of marketing?

“What is the value of a mother’s hug?”

AAARRRGG! A week does not go by that I don’t bang my head on my desk in frustration with the articles, presentations and social commentary I see marketers spewing about the value and importance of branding and engagement, especially in the discipline of social media.

Of course brand awareness – the first stage in the customer lifecycle – is important; without it, marketers and sales teams cannot nurture the client towards strong purchase consideration. Of course social media is important; without it, we cannot identify the opportunities and obstacles in the way of consumers’ decision-making processes. Of course content marketing is important; without it, we’re not seeding social proof into the newly-social search engines. All of these go-to strategies and tactics marketers are so found of promoting these days are important, but without a calculation that demonstrates how they’re turning the marketing department from a cost-center to a profit-center, marketers will forever be the fair-weather friend of the CEO and the board of directors.

So, are you a marketer or a profit generator?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Image Credit: George Marks

Your Product Sucks; What It Does is Amazing.

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

A common mistake that many software and product marketers make is to orient marketing collateral, Web site navigation and even brand messaging around its features and functions.

Take a look at most technical product or software web sites and you’ll quickly see a navigation button for “features.” Drill down and you’ll see a litany of sub-navigation listing each specific feature, a clever icon, a description of the feature and possibly a video tutorial on how it works. Everything a customer might want to know about the features – except why they should care.

Make no mistake; this is an ailment that many marketers suffer from. When diagnosed, I dispense a healthy dose of snark by stating,“your product features suck!” The remedy is usually met with guffaws, snorts, and hurt feelings. Undeterred, I continue with the rationale for this tough medicine; it doesn’t matter if the features are good or bad, just think they’re bad. Why? Because I’ve yet to meet a marketer faced with a bad product who doesn’t try to slap lipstick on pig. It’s meant to serve as a cue for marketers to rethink their content strategy.

With few exceptions – especially in the software industry – product features are not unique. Yes, marketers will attempt to wordsmith uniqueness into them, but in reality you can find similar features with a simple Google search.

I advise clients to orient that same collateral, Web site navigation and brand messaging around what the product’s features enable the client to do instead of what the product feature does. For example, sentiment analysis in a social monitoring platform doesn’t “identify positive and negative sentiment around brand mentions”, it “builds a better sales funnel by more efficiently identifying unsatisfied competitors' clients with the best opportunity to convert.” As a business buyer, which would you respond to more?

What’s motivating your customer?

When you ask yourself who is reading your content or visiting your site and what do they really want, it’s really a simple concept. What’s difficult is getting over your ego and obsessive need to talk about yourself or how clever your product’s features are.

Understand that when potential customers visit your Web site they already have specific questions in mind that they want answered. And if they don’t come with specific questions in mind, there are questions that are subconsciously driving how they navigate your site. For those in B2B industries for example, there are typically 3 types of users that visit your site from the same prospective customer, and each has their own unique set of questions they’re looking to have answered.

1. The Researcher – generally front-line employees or those in the trenches that have identified a problem that needs a solution. They’re looking for detailed solutions to their problems, what’s going to make their job easier, what’s going to get them that raise or promotion?

2. The Validator – typically a mid-level manager; they don’t care for solution details or demonstrations but are verifying the options provided by the Researcher in order to create cost-benefit analysis to present to their boss.

3. The Executive – spends the least amount of time on your site and are usually looking for one thing: comfort. They want to know they are not the only customer you have in their industry and that others have taken the risk and are happy.

Know that your audience is not interested in your product. They’re interested what it will enable them to do. Now go rethink and rewrite your product’s features. "They suck!"

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Announcing New Book: Influence Marketing, by Sam Fiorella & Danny Brown

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The hype around social influence has been circling around me like a cyclone for a few years now, online, in-print and in-person. I’ve been open and honest with my views on the challenges with the current methodology being used by marketers and software providers alike until someone asked me to “put your money where your mouth is.”

And so I am.

This spring Que Publishing, a publishing imprint of Pearson, will release Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing coauthored by Danny Brown and me!

Danny and I will move the conversation beyond social influence scoring and give you a start-to-finish blueprint for making influence marketing work in your organization.

Featuring case studies, empirical evidence, digital workshops and much, much more, Influence Marketing is based on successful campaigns that Danny and I have jointly and independently executed in this space. We look forward to sharing more with you in early January!

In the meantime, you can take advantage of the Cyber Monday week-long offers on Amazon.

Reserve Your Copy Today!

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Where Culture Derails Social Influence Marketing

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

During her 2005 tour of Japan, world-wide music superstar Madonna publicly praised Japan’s “Washlet,” an “intelligent” toilet that provides - among other features - posterior-cleaning water jets, hot air dry function, ambient background music and odour-masking technology. "I've missed the heated toilet seats," the pop-diva promoted upon leaving the country. She was not alone in her praise, many famous and well-connected people have gone on record promoting the virtues of the ultra-modern toilet.

It’s the earned media and public advocacy that brand marketers would die for, the type of public promotion many try to emulate when accessing social celebrities and socially-active people with high Klout scores. Find people who are perceived to have a popular voice and get them to talk about your product and their audience will beat a path to your door, open wallets in hand.

Yet, while the ingenuous toilets are found in 70% of Japanese homes, hotels and businesses, they’re one of world’s best kept secrets. Hiromichi Tabata, head of the international division at Washlet-maker TOTO does not hide the company’s desire to become a major player in international markets. They’ve been attempting to crack foreign markets, including the lucrative US market for more than 10 years with little success despite the volunteer endorsements by many internationally known celebrities and business executives. "It's because of the cultural taboo over talking about toilets," reports Tabata. "Americans avoid talking about those kinds of things so we can't expect success from word-of-mouth, even if they recognise our products are excellent.”

Influence Marketing vs. Purchase Decisions

The lesson learned from this case study is that influence marketing (marketing campaigns oriented around individuals perceived to have influence over a larger community), are ineffectual on the consumers’ purchase decisions when they are not interwoven into a more complex influence campaign that takes into account other decision-making factors such as culture, purchase lifecycle, context of the relationships between “influencers” and their audience, etc.

Too many businesses have been quick to jump on the bandwagon of early adopters such as Klout and Peerindex, allocating large marketing budgets to thin influence programs without proper consideration of the customer’s decision-making process. It’s the dichotomy of social media; it has inspired the creation and popularization of these platforms but also created an environment that generates disruptive forces in the communication paths between advocates and customers.

I’m not suggesting that social scoring platforms be ignored or thrown out; rather, I’m suggesting that the focus and blind faith being attributed them be rechanneled towards the customer’s decision-making process.

A new influence marketing blueprint is required.

Do you agree? Disagree? What might that new blueprint look like?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego