Sensei Blogs

3 Ways to Manage Risk in Social Environments

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(2 Jeff Wilson) — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Last week I argued that social media is creating bad customers. The post was designed to open people’s minds to the reality that social media channels create high degrees of risk for brands based on a number of factors. It detailed how social media enables poor customer behavior as easily as it enables good customer behavior.

For those that delved a bit deeper, you realized I was using bad customers as an example of risk within social channels. Bad customers will always exist and always try to game the system. Good companies will manage them effectively while poor companies will struggle. Such is life.

Social Risk and Uncertainty

Not many people are familiar with the concept of uncertainty in business, particularly its relationship to risk. If you’ve ever studied military history, you would recognize that uncertainty creates and/or amplifies risk. I will give you a simple example.

You can plan the hell out of an outdoor event, managing all the obvious risks such as theme, food quality and quantity, timing, supplier readiness and delivery, entertainment and A/V, invitations and registration along with the hundred other details that are managed by a good team and good plan. But you can never be certain of the weather, not even a week before. It will always retain a level of uncertainty adding that element of risk to the event. Do you get the big tent? Is parking going to turn to mud? How will rain impact attendance?

In this simple example, the weather uncertainty creates risk; risk that jeopardizes the event’s success and how you may choose to plan it. If it rains heavily attendance could be low. If it’s beautiful and sunny, attendance will be high.

So how is risk identified?

There are two forms of risk within social channels every marketer needs to be aware of and plan for.

Calculated Risk: Calculated risk is risk we can see, touch and smell. It can be identified, analyzed and planned for. We can see it coming but standard engagement policies are good enough to manage it. This is the stuff that our project planning typically takes into account and a good organization usually deal with this type of risk easily.
Risk Due to Uncertainty: Due to the public’s growing presence in the social space, risk created and/or amplified by uncertainty has become more prevalent. Uncertainty in social media is constantly present and can come from anywhere, at anytime and from any source. It is highly unpredictable and therefore capable of creating risk. Being difficult to spot or predict, it requires vigilance and a solid early warning system (excellent escalation process and good technology framework) to manage it.

Methods for Managing Risk in Social Channels

These three key tactics will aid you in identifying and reducing social media uncertainty and thus improving your ability to mitigate business risk.

A. Curate Knowledge from Other Parts of the Enterprise

I cannot stress enough how much insight and value can be gained from sharing knowledge across the enterprise. Sales, customer service, tech support, finance, HR, operations, product development, etc. all have knowledge of the customer and the market that will help you reduce uncertainty and manage risk. But you can’t rely on others to do it for you however; you must be willing to take a leadership role and curate this knowledge otherwise it simply will not get done.

B. Identify Trends and Patterns

The danger today is directly related to Big Data – or the likelihood we’re getting tangled up in it. We are so focused on what has transpired, we miss what’s coming. We need to stop looking at data for data sake. This is an intuition play, it’s about looking for emerging trends and patterns that produce uncertainty and amplify risk. Social data in particular can deliver some big insights if we look for greater patterns rather than focusing solely on sentiment around our brand.

C. Build a Defensible Position in the Social World

I advise all of my clients to take this three-pronged approach to social. Combined, they create an adaptable structure to identify and manage risk before it becomes a big issue.

Internal readiness: develop and build a work force comfortable with social and how to manage it effectively for your company. This requires an internal support network and enabled, outwardly connected employees.
Customer Communities: separate customers from the Great Unwashed Masses (GUM), engage, recognize and enable them. Customers will become one of your greatest early warning systems for impending risk as well as valuable allies in managing it.
Public Presence: Keep your social presence simple and focused on easily actionable measures that channel customers quickly to other parts of the enterprise – sales, service, support, HR, PR, etc. The public presence is about expedited service, not just saying thanks.

The Best Approach is the Strategic Approach

In the end, everything boils down to how well you have developed your strategy and how adaptable your organization is at managing risk. What is certain is that without a strategy in place you have eliminated your ability to reduce uncertainty and manage risk. The inevitable result will be a social program mired in issues that delivers little value to anyone.

Is your strategy designed to identify uncertainty? Do you have a risk management component to your social strategy?

Jeff Wilson - Sensei

Get Off Your Ass; Identify Your Own Influencers

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

It’s becoming clear that social influence scoring is not going away anytime soon – or ever – and so the debate over the validity of such scores and the businesses that provide them rage on. I know I’ve contributed my fair share of thoughts, dialogue, and rants on this subject and I have to say I’m rather tired of the same old debate. I’ve yet to read an article that satisfactorily explains how any software-generated score in isolation accurately dictates the real influence of an individual to measurably impact the decision-making of an audience based solely on their activity across a few social networks. Yet the providers of these scores remain in the spotlight; in fact they’re multiplying across business silos and industry verticals.

So what have we learned or accomplished?

Nothing. People are still gaming online engagement to increase their scores, marketers and HR professionals are still basing decisions on these scores and brands are still distributing product samples to those with high scores. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

So maybe it’s time we change the focus?

Can we change the public discourse from what a social influence score is or isn’t and, understanding that this virus is incurable, focus on how to successfully use it to our advantage? What would that look like?

We know, for example, that “social celebrities” who work the digital channels to get a lot of attention for their heavy social chatter and activity are popular – maybe even famous – due to their many thin connections that rank them highly by social influence scoring platforms. So if you define “influence” as the ability to amplify a message across social channels, then I guess you can call them influential and we can close the book on this discussion. However, from experience these amplifiers don’t impact short-term decision-making, which is true influence. Is there something the score can tell us anything that is important?

Can social celebrities have real influence? Of course they can. I consider bloggers who elicit many reactions as witnessed through thoughtful commentary, phone conversations and subscriptions among their audience, real influencers. There’s a dramatic difference between these two. Someone with 50,000 Twitter followers, lots of retweets and blog mentions but with little to no engagement on that blog is less influential than someone with only 5,000 Twitter followers, fewer retweets and blog mentions but consistent and meaningful debate among a targeted community within his or her blog. Most social scoring platforms – as they work today – would elevate the former with a higher score and deem them more “influential.”

Mapping Influence Marketing

What’s missing from the ongoing debate around the value of social influence scoring is the potential value in mapping the many degrees of social connections and relationships. Some are thin and vanity-driven; others are deep and meaningful, as is also the case in the traditional media and offline realms. Understanding the degree of relationship between individuals and groups is key to understanding the nature of the influence they might exert.

For example, I often tune into the Fox News broadcast when travelling though the US or watch it online when out of the US. I tune in enough to be one of the people that they claim to be a “regular viewer” and a data point in the rating statistics they use to sell advertising space. However, while I consider myself a “conservative,” the reason I tune into Fox News is the same reason I sometimes tune into America’s Next Top Model or slow down to gawk at a car wreck. I’m fascinated by the spectacle, the ugliness of humanity. I don’t tune in to educate myself or seek information in my decision-making but to gawk, a sick guilty pleasure. Fox News data crunchers and advertisers consider me someone they influence but do they? Maybe, but certainly not in the manner they intend.

Analyzing the Data

Until factors such as degree of relationship, context of engagement and sentiment of commentary are successfully interpreted and analyzed by software, the onus is on YOU to do the work. Does this make social scoring platforms worthless? No. Can they measure the nuances required? No. As I discovered in an interview with Andrew Grill from Kred.com, progress is being made. In the meantime, get off your ass and do the work.

Look for companies like Jugnoo or Kred that provide the raw data around audience engagement and use it as one metric among others you collect, vet and analyze to understand who has true influence over you target audience. I’m talking about the power to influence a purchase by a prospect, not the power to amplify a generic message to a loosely identified group of people.

Mama always told me “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” She is one smart lady.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Social Media is Creating Bad Customers

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(2 Jeff Wilson) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Do you remember the disaster called #McDStories? The now famous story of how McDonalds was hijacked on Twitter by people tweeting negative stories on their hashtag. Poor planning combined with outright naivety about the their own brand perception quickly attracted a growing, “angry” mob of real customers and trolls who completely derailed the whole McDStories campaign.

Now, I’m not a big believer in social media on the best of days and this type of story adds more weight to my argument – Social Media is Creating Bad Customers. Why? It’s simple… because people deep down are bullies or at the very least indifferent to bullying. Add to this how easily the social media public is influenced by a mob mentality and you get recipes for McDStory after McDStory.

Social Media provides the average person with 4 factors empowering bad behavior, particularly against companies.

No Guilt. There is no remorse about bullying a brand. It’s much easier to do because no one gets “hurt”.
The Mob. Lots of other people are doing it. Whether they are the instigator with a real story or a troll making them up, its easy to find others who will join you.
Relative Anonymity. Anonymity strips many people of fear. “No one will know if I say this” is the common feeling and easily overwhelms any feelings of restraint a person might normally have.
No Accountability. Probably the most significant factor is the sheer lack of accountability in anything said in social media. Without accountability as a “natural check” on actions, you get an environment devoid of any punishment.

Proceed with Caution

My first two questions to companies that ask me about social media are:

What are the risks?
What is the compelling reason for you to use social media? (And please don’t say because my competitors are…)

For me, it always boils back to risk. The more risk you have the less likely you are to succeed. Most organizations are ill prepared for customers they already have let alone a new group of social media empowered customers. Social media creates risk even in a docile customer base because it can change the natural state of behavior in a single person or group of people. A social media environment provides fertile ground for unrest and poor behavior.

More McDStories are waiting to happen. Are you one of them?
How will you manage the bad customer social media is creating?

Jeff Wilson- Sensei

The Business of Socially-Powered Boycotts

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve experienced, seen or at least heard of the many boycotts being waged against corporate brands. Currently, we’re in the throes of a campaign against Chick-fil-A, an Atlanta-based fast food restaurant for comments made by owner Dan T. Cathy that supported the “biblical definition of the family unit”…essentially speaking out against gay-marriage rights.

This came just off the heels of another social boycott campaign that erupted after Kraft Foods posted a Photoshopped advertisement of an Oero (“America’s Favorite Cookie”) stuffed with rainbow colored layers and the caption: “Proudly Support Love”. Both came on like unexpected tsunamis and quickly became the main topic of conversation across social media, television and newspapers as well as at both boardroom and kitchen tables across North America.

Boycotts are quickly becoming the weapon-of-choice for groups seeking to further their political or social agenda by targeting national companies who already have mass public attention. Social Media is simultaneously the fuel and the battleground for these wars and a new reality for businesses.

During the #bizforum Twitter debate on this subject last night, by referencing the granddaddy of all boycotts: the Boston tea party, Ric Dragon suggested that boycotts are not a new reality for business at all.

He’s right of course, boycotts are not new but they are certainly a strategy that has had new life breathed into it. Social Channels have facilitated boycott “Flash Mobs”, where almost overnight lines are drawn in the sand and tens of thousands of people line up on one side or the other. Worse, most jump on the bandwagon without any real fervent support for the cause but for peer-pressure or the entertainment value.

Today, more than ever business must anticipate the reaction to every nuance of every act, statement and belief of their employees as well as their companies. They must possess more intuitive insights into the political and cultural environment they, their government and their customers engage in or risk being on the wrong side of a social mob.

Businesses are just getting used to the idea and impact of a few public tweets about their brands and now they’re faced with the reality of socially-powered boycott threatening to take them down.

An Ounce of Prevention?

The reality is that most boycotts today are rooted in political or social beliefs and not direct opposition to the quality of a specific product or service offered by the company. Opposition to a product or service is easily managed.

Preventing political or socially-based boycotts is next to impossible unless you make it a policy to never speak or engage the public for fear of offending someone, somewhere. However, the congregation of people in communities through online social channels has forced businesses to engage these groups on social, political and emotional levels in exchange for their loyalty.

Aligning a business’ values with that of its customers is a sure fire way to generate diehard fanatics but also creates a volatile environment from which these Flash Mob boycotts can erupt.

Should businesses be taking these socially-charged boycotts seriously? Social media has become known for its short lifespan so is there any real long-term threat? Remember, cable news created the 24-hour news cycle, which social media turned into 24-minutes.

As Fred McClimans argued in last night’s debate, even if the boycott is short-lived the digital footprint of the event – and the impact on the brand’s reputation – Iives on.

Two Sides to Every ~~Debate~~ Boycott

The “same-sex kiss-in” created by activist Carly McGehee , which sparked the recent Chick-fil-A boycott was met with a “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day”, sponsored by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum joined the fray by rallying his 200,000 Twitter followers to support the chain.

When Kraft Foods posted its Oreo Cookie Gay Pride support advertisement on Facebook it garnered 157,000 likes with 40,000 shares. Yet of the20,000 comments many were negative and called for a boycott of the cookie.

Convention dictates a business avoids such controversies yet many national brands seem to court them. In honor of Pride month, Target launched a line of gay pride t-shirts and Ben & Jerry’s renamed it’s apple pie flavor “Apple-y Ever After” in the UK. Given the precedents set on Facebook and other social channels, why are these businesses not afraid of the Flash Mob boycotts? What do they know?

Is it possible that boycotts are not a punitive tactic used by the activists but a modern tactic used by savvy businesses to leverage political discord in hopes of solidifying fervent loyalty from “the other side”?

Are boycotts really a business strategy, not a political weapon?

I’m turning the debate over to you now. Should businesses ignore, avoid or embrace flash mob boycotts? Share your thoughts below. Also, check out a sampling of the arguements from last night's #bizforum debate on this issue.

Sam Fiorella - Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Why Social Media Marketers Don’t Measure Up

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I posted a short rant last week on my growing frustration with marketers fixated on social media metrics such as size of community, depth of reach, frequency of connections and sentiment while failing or refusing to measure how they impact the profitability of the business.

It generated a healthy debate within the comments, which, in part, began to rationalize why marketers are fixated on metrics vs. the profit they drive (or don’t). One commenter offered the following rationale:

Overworked - Marketers are overloaded and don’t have the time to measure life-time-value of customers
Lack of Skill - Marketers don’t have the skill or training required to link the metrics to profit
Data - The data required from other business silos to effectively show the connection is too difficult to obtain.

Are these obstacles or excuses? The fact is marketers can and must make the time to demonstrate why they’re running the campaigns they are and what value they deliver to the bottom line. Don’t know how? Hire the appropriate consultants or acquire the necessary tools to support the process. The problem isn’t lack of skill, environment or workload – it’s the courage to do the work. Here are my 3 reasons many social media marketers don’t measure up:

Laziness – Some will argue that this is a generalization but in my experience, marketers are increasingly seeking short-cuts, tools and tricks to justify the impact of their efforts. Drawing the links between social metrics and business profit requires planning and work. Short cuts need not apply.
Greed – “Marketers ruin everything” is a common criticism of the breed. They’re quick to capitalize on evolving trends and generally bastardize them. As a result, there’s a growing distain for social media among business executives, which is taking the conversation away from the positive impact it could have on their bottom line.
Pseudo Marketers – Web 2.0 has birthed a new breed of "instant-celebrity social media gurus" that are not really marketers. They’ve not been in the business trenches; don't know how marketing works within the enterprise or how to report it. They've become prolific Tweeters; gaining instant fame through their early adoption of the medium yet they’re caught flat footed, confused and often lash out when asked to prove the business value of their online chatter. They create catchy acronyms, which is really a smoke ‘n mirror effect to mask their lack of accountability.

Sure, the Internet and social media are still in their infancy and as with humans, the greatest physical change happens during the early years. Marketers respond to the change by jumping in with both feet and never asking the question: why are we doing this? What’s our goal? How do we measure success?

Technology, data collection and training can be easily addressed. The other three are marketing cancers, which are a little harder to cure in this social era. I’ll turn the debate over to you. Why don’t social media marketers “measure up”?

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

CEOs – The Blind Leading the Socially Connected

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

A report released by Domo and CEO.com this week highlights the dichotomy of online engagement: the American population has increased their adoption of social chatter in their daily activity yet the concept is barely a blip on the radar of top executives who market to these people. Only 30% of the CEOs from America’s top 500 businesses have a social media profile and most of them remain inactive or have very low activity.

By the numbers:

50 – The percentage of Americans who are actively engaged in social media regularly.

30 – The percentage of Americans who have immersed themselves in Social Media engagement daily.

70 – The percentage of executives from top 500 U.S. firms who don’t have a social media profile at all.

This statistic may not surprise many under the assumption that the workload of these CEOs is overwhelming and that they don’t have the time to waste on social media networking. Yet, they embody the vision of the firms who market to those that have – or make – the time to actively engage online.

“CEOs who shun social media risk losing touch with some of their most lucrative customers, prospects and influencers”, states Josh James, founder of Omniture (now part of Adobe) and current head of Domo.

James Sinegal, founder of Costco, one of the world’s largest retailer has cited his almost daily store visits as one of the contributing factors to his success. One can argue that he was as busy (if not busier) than any other top CEO but he made the time. He understood that the only way he could effectively lead his front line operations is to immerse himself within them; to stay connected to the interactions his customer have with their stores and employees. Aside from providing him the ability to see through the eyes of the customer, it demonstrated leadership to his employees.

Increasingly, the customer experience (CX) is either interacted or shared online and so CEOs cannot shun social media if they are to remain connected to that experience. If not to manage it directly then, at the very least to better comprehend this massive shift in how their audience thinks, engages and behaves.

Of the CEOs with social profiles LinkedIn seem to lead the pack yet, amazingly, 36 of them have 1 or 0 connection and many don’t even have their current business listed in their profiles! Facebook and Twitter fall into second place with Google+ and Pinterest a very, very distant last. Most surprising to me is that only one of the CEOs in this group maintains his own blog: John Mackey of Whole Foods.

I'm going to turn this over to you: can a socially blind CEO lead a business targeting the socially connected? Join the debate!

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Does Social Influence Scoring Drive Value to Brands | #bizforum video debate

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

There’s been so much talk about the accuracy, value or benefit of social influence scoring tools this past year; most of it about you. What does it do for you? How does it impact you? How do you game it? What’s your score? And that’s how social influence businesses like Klout like it. Keep the focus on you.

Their game is to play on the vanities of individuals, which is fuel for their “service” and bank roll. The longer and harder you play their game the more money they can generate by selling access to you. Good ole American ingenuity. In fact, they also love those who claim to “not care” because by not caring (especially when you secretly do), you don’t opt out. And by not opting out, they will continue to use your online activity and persona to make money by selling them to advertisers.

But this post is not about you (I know, don’t be too upset). The debate I’m surprised no one is having is the value (or lack thereof) of the information collected, parsed and presented as real market data by Klout for Brands? Businesses are paying top dollar to access the real influencers, which Klout claims to be able to identify but are their clients getting their money’s worth?

The #bizforum video debate experiment continues at New York City’s Internet Media Labs by exploring this topic with Ric Dragon, the author of Social Marketology and Fred McClimans, Managing Director of the McClimans Group.

What are your thoughts? Do you believe Brands are getting their money’s worth by paying for access to the Klout-annointed? Businesses have been successful at influencer-outreach programs pre-Klout but the criteria, manpower and human intuition that went into these efforts seem to have given way to the short-cut of online measurement tools.

Is this just a short-term gimmick sucking ad dollars from brands or is it a legitimate customer acquisition strategy for marketers?

Agree/Disagree? Get in on the debate via the comments below.

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Competing With Your Employee for Consumer Loyalty

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This week I’ve been exploring the conflict between employee and corporate brands here on Sensei Blogs and during our weekly Twitter debate. The discussion has taken many twists and turns touching on HR policies, corporate risk, brand strategies and even customer service; however, during this week’s #bizforum chat there was one issue that really captured my imagination. It’s the question: at what point does the brand begin to compete with the individual employee for customer loyalty?

Many marketers are working towards humanizing their brands, which has included allowing employees to actively engage with the public through social streams. In many businesses this is a group of people rather than an individual including community managers, customer service reps, marketers and/or executives. Some firms ride the coat-tails of of media-savvy personnel they acquire to represent them and whose personal brands becomes that much more influential as a result. More often than not, an employee becomes “socially-famous” while engaging the public on behalf of their employer. Whichever scenario built up the reputation of these individuals, there’s an inherent threat in their brand-sanctioned social activism.

Question: When does an employee’s brand become too powerful for the employer?
Answer: when customers become more loyal to the personality than the business or its product.

Allowing employees to shine on your business’ behalf demonstrates that you only recruit and support top talent, which in turn, reflects on your brand and values. The corporate brand benefits from association and the earned media garnered through their social engagement. Some even argue that it promotes employee loyalty and retention. So it’s a win/win right?

The Loyalty Tipping Point

Not so fast; as Stan Reeser argued this week during the #bizforum debate: a strong employee brand is antithetical to a corporate brand. Successful corporations demand loyalty to the brand or product not the employee; employees are agents for the business. They’re hired to assist the business achieve its goals. A business’ goal is to operate profitably today and establish a foundation for continued profitable operations into the future. Yes, a successful business ensures that the employee’s goals are aligned in the achievement of the corporate goal, but never forget which one is on top of the food chain.

When an employee’s performance, service or even personal habits become a hindrance to that corporate mission, corrective action must be taken. When such efforts yield no change, the individual must be terminated. When customers become more loyal to an individual than the brand, the employee becomes a potentially disruptive force to the future of the business and its ability to meet future profit goals. The risk is that the employee accepts higher remuneration or position with a competitor, causing customers loyal to them to also move the competitor.

You can argue that this was the case before social media and so there’s no real difference but there is.

1. Social Media’s intensification (maybe surprisingly) engenders greater trust and loyalty with the social personality than in the traditional employee-customer relationship. Call it the celebrity-factor; Social Media popularity broaches star-status, which is more powerful than admiration within smaller personal circles.

2. Social Media’s amplification creates loyalty in non-customers by delivering human-like connections and trust. Non-customer loyalty is evidenced when customers who would have purchased your product, end up buying from the competition because the personality they trust are representing them now.

Brand Trust Is Transferable

Kenny Rose argued this week that this is a problem of integrity, not branding. While this may be true, as he stated himself: “there’s no template” for a solution. The threat goes beyond employee integrity. It’s not even about the greed of employees. The most genuine and well-intentioned employee has personnel conflicts with their superiors, gets bored or experiences life/family changes; any of which are reasons for jumping ship. And even the most honorable person can’t stop loyal customers from following them. In fact, they seem to earn the most loyal followers.

Brand Trust – a factor decreed critical to customer acquisition and retention – is transferable when trust is given to an employee and not your brand. Trust follows its target not the brand that employed him or her.

Businesses cannot ignore Social Media engagement, so what’s the solution? They cannot encourage employees to perform poorly in order to regulate the loyalty they earn. Further, to remain competitive businesses require a good measure of such employee advocates and influencers to propel their brand.

It might be as simple as redesigning customer development strategies to safeguard brand loyalty by ensuring high-profile social employees create emotional connections between the consumer and the product - not themselves. Social Media is channel that promotes vanity. The lights and fanfare directed towards those who have earned celebrity status is blinding. Customer development strategies must be reinvented to leverage these social personalities and not be held hostage by them.

My recommendation for business strategists: focus on creating a unified customer experience across all touch points of the business. By generating fanaticism for the experience of using the product, paying their bills, receiving customer support, engaging in your community and so forth, loyalty to an individual – regardless of how durable it is – becomes just one of many equally solid connections between the customer and your brand. The risk of competing with your employee for customer loyalty is mitigated when this customer experience balance is established across your customer touch-points and you’re free to embrace social-celebrity employees.

What tactics can be deployed to mitigate the risk of socially-powerful employees stealing your customer’s loyalty?

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

BizForum Debate #58 - The Collision of Personal and Corporate Brands

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Which is Social? The Customer or the Business?

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

With the exponential growth of social platforms, the face of the customer is continuously changing. Today’s customer seeks to do business with more than a product or a service; they seek to do business with a brand that stands for something and more importantly, with the people behind the brand.

This is a statement posted by the Canadian Marketing Association in advance of their annual Social Media Conference, which is scheduled for June 13^th, 2012 at the Allstream Center in Toronto, Canada. The conference promises to “dig deeper” into the business-customer dynamics of social businesses. Among the topics covered by the various keynotes and panel discussion: The Internet’s Culture and its impact on Digital Marketing, the C-Suite Insights on “Customer Trust” and of course, the ever-present Social Media Measurement. See full agenda/speakers here.

In advance of next week’s conference, the #BizForum community will be debating social business best practices in order to get the creative juices flowing as we head into the conference. Join us Wed, June 6^th, 2012 by following the #bizforum hashtag on http://tweetchat.com/room/bizforum between 8 and 9 PM Eastern.

Sample of the concepts that will be debated:

S1: Social engagement cannot be measured by monetary metrics. Agree/Disagree?

S2: Numerical measurement of a Brand’s social activity provides irrelevant insights into engagement. Agree/Disagree?

S3: A direct link can be made between a brand’s social engagement and profit. Agree/Disagree?

S4: “Social Business” is a misnomer. Social is a marketing function, not a business function. Agree/Disagree?

S5: Social engagement does not require “trust” to be meaningful to the brand. Agree/Disagree?
S6: A Social Business must focus on internal culture before it can address online culture. Agree/Disagree?

S7: Study of customers' online behaviour patterns reveal same conclusions as offline behaviours. Agree/Disagree?

Join on #bizforum tomorrow night as we delve into these subjects and more in preparation for next week’s full day conference.

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

2012 CMA Social Media Conference

June 13 - Allstream Centre, Toronto

Social Customers Choose Social Businesses