Sensei Blogs – A Business Blog With a Point of View
Socrates once said “education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel” and that’s our guiding principle, to kindle the flames of discussion and debate around business strategy, operations and leadership. We share specific points of view by experienced business analysts with the sole intent of starting conversations, not ending them.
Read MoreIntroducing: Influence Marketing, the new book by Danny Brown & Sam Fiorella
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.”
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Has Your Distinction Gone Stale?
We all nod our heads when someone talks about the need to deliver distinct, compelling value to our buyers. We just assume that our value is as distinct and compelling as it was last month, or six months ago or…. But is our value really distinct? And if it is distinct, is it compelling to our markets?
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Customer Journeys Are More Jungle Gym Than Funnel
Humans like things that make sense. Math. Logic. GPS Directions. Customer journeys are often represented in the same way. The sales funnel is so simple, in theory. We put the many prospects in the top, they travel willingly and orderly through the funnel, and POP! They exit into a converting customer. Bravo! But customer experience travels on,
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Are You A Company Or An Online Clique?
When we interact online with people that we work with and hence talk to on a regular basis, we run into a few potential pitfalls that can negatively impact customer acquisition. This is an easy problem to experience. It is natural for us to gravitate towards people we know, especially if we can share experiences and conversations
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Are You Ignoring Your Real Customer’s Buying Behavior?
My sister remembers when the “fancy” mall opened in our hometown. She and my mom would dress up to go. By the time I was ready to hang out at the mall, I trudged from one store to the next in jeans or even (oh goodness) sweat pants. After the novelty wore off, customers came as they were –
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Board governance and the social revolution: Just the beginning
I hear that the National Association of Corporate Directors has been taking baby steps toward engaging its members in social media. Plainly, this is great news. But I did say baby steps. A standard talking-point in business schools is what is called the “principal-agent” problem. It has never been more relevant than it is today. In brief,
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Customer Experience is the Only Competitive Advantage Left
What does it take to be competitive today? I see dozens of articles and books each week that claim to have the answer. Is it becoming a social business, selling your product online, or offering the lowest price? The Global Leaders of Customer Experience Management Survey reported that 85% of senior business leaders agreed that “price, delivery,
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Facebook’s New Emoticons: Fiendish Plot or Improved Customer Experience?
Last week, Facebook released a new feature that Slate magazine called a “fiendish plot.” It referenced the new emoticons that Facebook users can now tag their social status updates with. Facebook, naturally, doesn’t advertise the new feature as a fiendish plot but a customer experience improvement, calling it “a new, more visual way for people to share
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Chapter from New Influence Marketing Book Released for Download
As the official launch date of Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage, and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing nears, Danny Brown and I have been releasing teasers that highlight the work we’ve been doing over the past year. Our Google+ Community has been participating in our planning, conversations and video chats, last week we released
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Social in the C-Suite: Five Core Observations
The numbers keep coming in. Slowly, very slowly, executives in the C-suite are recognizing, at least in principle, that social media has long since ceased to be a novelty of the rising generation and become a core driver of social life and therefore economic decision-making. The process is remarkably slow for those whose chief concern is to
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The Influence Gap: Need vs. Solution
The topic of marketing accountability is a recurring theme here on Sensei Blogs and a personal passion of mine. The need for accountability in marketing was further highlighted in the results of a survey released last week by Sensei Marketing and ArCompany. During February 2013, we surveyed over 1300 marketing and public relations professionals to determine the
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Journalist Sinks to New Low; Newsjacks #BostonMarathon
Within minutes of hearing the horrible news that 3 explosions at this year’s Boston Marathon killed and injured people, I did what most of us do: I turned to Twitter. Given my experiences during similar disasters in the past, I knew I should have walked away from Twitter, but I didn’t because there were people that I
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Customer Acquisition is Harder on Twitter Than It Was Three Years Ago
When I started tweeting and blogging about three years ago, I thought it was pretty hard to “break through” and get any attention. In fact, I found Twitter so frustrating that I once tweeted, “OK, I have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than ever getting mentioned on Twitter.” I remember this frustration vividly. I’d
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Relationship Intensity and ROI Measurement
I had the honour, last week, of joining many insightful and intelligent people at the eMetrics conference in Toronto. Self-defined: eMetrics is “big data for Marketers; this is a comprehensive event dedicated to digital analytics and marketing optimization”. Some very smart speakers sharing case studies, tools and exposés on best practices, tools and, of course, metrics to
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The Intersection of Context and Customer Lifetime Value
I just ran a Google search: year of content. According to the results, some people were saying (in 2011) that 2012 would be year of content marketing, while others are saying 2013 would be that year. Pam Moore wrote a great post in June reminding us that content is not a shiny new object. I, for one,
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Opinion Is the New Black in Influence Marketing
What does it take to sell a product today? Price, features, customer advocates, paid endorsements? A mix of all of the above could be the answer, but were does a brand focus its investment? What strategy should drive the marketing mix? The power of peer-to-peer networks, facilitated by the emergence of technologies and social media, has certainly
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Why Did the Marketer Climb the Mountain?
The new Wolverine movie is coming! The new Wolverine movie is coming! Any new multi-media treatment of Marvel’s X-Men franchise – from comic books to cartoons to movies gets my immediate attention. I excitedly watch movie trailers over and over in anticipation of the upcoming main event, I mark the dates in my calendar and pre-purchase tickets
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Performance Versus Brand Marketers – Battle Rages On
Over the past few years, I’ve been both an amused spectator and a willing participant in the performance versus brand marketer wars. The debate has often produced enough drama to justify a cable television reality show. In fact, I must be careful how loudly I say that, given the fact there’s no end in sight to the
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Creativity and Customer Acquisition Can Co-Exist
I’ve had the same conversation a few different times over the last few weeks. I’ve been talking about the importance of ROI – as in, “Return on Investment” when it comes to social media, and I’ve been mentioning the fact that if you are investing a lot of money into your social media efforts without even attempting
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Rethinking Conference Sponsorships
This guest post, by Staci Diamond King, Director of Sales at Ragan Communications, is in response to a post published on this site by Sean McGinnis earlier this month entitled “Questioning the Effectiveness of Conference Sponsorships.“ *** I think Sean McGinnis hit the nail on the head with this article and it thrills me to see someone
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Social Media, Happy Customers and Missed Opportunities
What is the value of a happy customer? Is it more or less than a dissatisfied customer? Social media has trained customer service teams to be hyper-sensitive to online negativity, possibly alienating and discouraging online positivity. Online monitoring software allows for the identification of both positive and negative sentiment in online conversations, yet negativity is given the
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Of Course ROI is Tricky. You’re Not Selling.
The Social Media world has been scratching its head about Return on Investment for almost as long a social media has existed as an entity. Not only have influencers in the space been unsure as to how the actual platforms were going to make any money, it has remained an enigma as to how any business person
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Of Brands and Broken Narratives
A colleague recently asked me to take a quick look at a firm he had run across. Let’s call them BizCo. They had been around for years, many of them as a strong market leader. But they now faced a fundamentally different market than they had previously, and they were struggling. New competitors, technologies and pervasive media
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So You Think You Know Your Audience?
Knowledge and expertise are things we all seek. Whether it’s in our area of business, our golf game, a musical instrument, cooking, cleaning, raising kids…whatever our passion, we strive to become the “expert” in our fields. Many business leaders say they know their buyers. From sales and marketing to product development – we claim to know what
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Addressing the Addiction and Cost of Social Media
Have you ever found yourself asking, “Where did the last hour go?” when connecting with friends or colleagues in social networks? Social media is like a drug; just a little taste and we can’t help but want more. Social networks are the drug dealers; they facilitate our addiction to this gateway drug with one-click access to our
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Questioning the Effectiveness of Conference Sponsorships
Why do conferences accept sponsorships? I never really understood this. As a business owner, my focus is – and always will be – on the relationship I have with my customers. Introducing a sponsor into that dynamic has a very strong potential to subvert that relationship completely. Think about it for a minute… The very instant a
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Does Social Media Stunt Business Growth?
I understand that the title of this post will instantly be considered a ploy to capture attention and links; however, there’s an honest sentiment behind the question: “Does social media stunt business growth?” After reading Margie Clayman’s post Customer Acquisition: Community Versus Clique here on Sensei Blogs last week, I was left wondering about the value of
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Steering the Social Media Ship
The stories of revolutions are often brutal: someone gets marched to the guillotine, hoisted from their own petard, stood before the firing squad, or exiled to some desolate rock. There is little doubt about it, the internet and social media have brought about a true revolution in business communications, the likes of which we haven’t experienced since
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The Gamification of Experience
How many meetings have you sat in recently where the term “gamification” has come up? It’s often waved in front of an executive as either a magic elixir or a battle cry. Gamification, it is stated, is the answer to engaging customers. I like the idea of gamification…in theory. In its simplest definition, it is creating an
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Customer Acquisition: Community Versus Clique
In the world of social media, one word that you see often (maybe too often) in regards to customer acquisition and relationship maintenance is “community.” This word is often used in conjunction with other words like “relationships,” “engagement,” and “conversation.” As often as these words are used, however, I am not convinced that people truly understand how
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Must Every Company Be A Media Company?
Every company is a media company. Or it should be. That’s the cry of social and content marketers today. They point to the open and direct channel that businesses have to their consumers and the wider audience that did not exist, arguably, prior to 2004 when Chris Shipley popularized the term “social media” in his book, Clue
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