Posts Tagged “Innovation”

Sam Fiorella, writing in The Social CMO, put together some fresh thinking on how to disrupt publishing, drawing some parallels with the music business in Open Letter to Media Publishers. Since their comments are turned off, I’ll offer some additional thoughts here.

Sam, thanks for one of the most intelligent posts I’ve read on the disruption of print I’ve seen in ages. Reading between the lines, I’ll offer this iteration.

Read the rest of this entry »

Customers Are Smarter and Want A New Relationship | The New Economics of Business Reputation

While preparing to launch Social Business Services for B2B Sales in January 2012, I have been engaged in its Ecosystem Audit. I have plumbed online conversations about B2B Sales and Marketing adoption of social business (erstwhile social media). I have been struck by a recurring realization: a large part of Marketing and Sales as we know them is significantly out of alignment with B2B customers. Social business is permeating customer networks throughout the economy and changing customer behavior and expectations. This has created a rare opportunity for B2B marketing and sales people who understand and respond ahead of the market. If I’m right, this could be one of the most important posts you read this year.

Two quick examples of misalignment: one of Marketing’s underlying assumptions is that it is not economically feasible to have large-scale one-on-one customer conversations, so marketing must achieve scale through secondary research (and remain isolated from the customer). One of Sales’ key assumptions is that it must rely on primary one-on-one prospect/customer communications to drive value. Both of these are increasingly false, so I’ll drill down on them before offering practical recommendations for how Marketing and Sales can explore social business at a new level. Read the rest of this entry »

Fantastic Story + A Smart Business Idea

Blake Mycoskie is a gifted storyteller in his own right, and, in this South by Southwest 2011 keynote, he entertained the audience with the story of TOMS Shoes while imparting a simple but profound principle of 21st century business: discovering the meaning and potential of giving. Here are the highlights of TOMS story, which will help you appreciate the context of the blockbuster business idea.

• Read the rest of this entry »

2011 will be remembered as the year “social media” fell by the wayside, strategy became a recognized prerequisite for serious efforts, and “social business” began displacing it in boardrooms’ mindshare. “Social media,” which usually tries to use social technologies to talk at people, has been the predominant “first use” of socialtech because marketing drives most social initiatives, and marketers “communicate,” i.e. push content, to their targets. When they “listen,” they use limited legacy processes such as focus groups, email marketing, data mining and online surveys. However, none of these scratch the real itch because they emphasize the company asking individuals structured questions; they don’t allow customer to customer interaction, which is ten times more illuminating because it is spontaneous and customer-centric.

Socialtech gets there, but marketers are ambivalent about it because it means a loss of control. And more profits and career growth for marketers, but they have to let go first. It’s a leap of faith, but imminently doable.

Read the rest of this entry »

Executives from Deutsche Telekom and Concord Music will highlight the morning session of pre-conference led by Christopher S. Rollyson at the Social Networking Conference June 16 in L.A. The pre-conference is a bootcamp for directors of social networking initiatives who want to understand and practice emerging best practices for strategy, tactics and project management.

The morning session focuses on strategy, planning and management of enterprise social network initiatives and will feature several speakers who are currently leading businesses and initiatives. The afternoon will focus on practice and show live example/demos of using LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and blogging tools for marketing campaigns

The Pre-Conference morning session is an intensive onramp to planning, launching and managing effective B2B and B2C enterprise social network initiatives involving any combination of internal (private, white label) and external (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube…) platforms.

Social networks change the economics of relationships because finding, developing and maintaining relationships is far less costly… Watch the migration from Friendster=>MySpace=>Facebook=>? It was relatively fast, people are mobile… Don’t think you are getting anything for free. Even if you are not paying cash, your interactions and position are building a rich data repository for Google or whoever else is providing “free” services

The example was IBM’s corporate social responsibility and green initiative. They realized it would be incongruent or unsavory to have a (physical) conference for green initiatives in which people would burn tons of CO2 getting there, so they held it in Second Life. The sales conversion ratio was equal to physical conferences.

Pithy insights on major Web 2.0 transformation driver: reflecting on the significance of Facebook Connect and Google Friendconnect, which offer Web 2.0 single signon services