Archives for November 2010

Tuesday there are two great chats, #CustServ (which focuses on customer service) and #Leadershipchat, which…wait for it…focuses on leadership!

Here are some posts that I think offer interesting food for thought tied to these two topics. Feel free to add your own!

Customer Service

This post by David Van Toor focuses on the 5 Cs of the Customer Experience. Interestingly, the concept of the 5cs has also been discussed at length in the Integrated Marketing Chat. Can you guess why?

Marsha Collier tweeted out this post by Joseph Michelli, which reviews the Right Now Harris Interactive Customer Experience report. The post is called What you don’t know will hurt! Some very interesting insights there about what customers would pay extra for these days.

Some companies are using Klout to determine if they should respond to your customer service concern. In Kiss my Klout, Charity Hisle points out just a few problems with this approach.

Leadership

This piece by Kate Nasser, who I actually know from several different chats, is spectacular. The post treats moving from a peer to a boss and all of the complexities involved in that transition. Given our current economic environment, I would imagine this post could help a lot of people. Positions are being filled from within, not from without.

Last week we discussed vulnerability in leadership. This post by Lisa Petrilli, called Getting to the Heart of Vulnerability in Leadership, beautifully offers her personal views on the issue.

To be an effective leader (or marketer, or anything), knowing how to talk effectively to your audience is key. Suzanne Vara writes about this in a brand new post called Are You Talking To Your Audience Effectively?

Hope you enjoy these Tuesday musings and morsels!

Image by Chris Greene. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/christgr

Every Monday on Twitter, you see a hashtag for #MM or #MMChat. This stands for “Marketer Monday.” The morsels below have to do with different facets of marketing in general. Hope you enjoy! Let me know of any great marketing morsels you’ve found!

I really enjoyed this post by Heidi Cohen the first time I read it. “Listening is the New Black” summarizes her understanding of Chris Brogan’s speech at DMA in October 2010. It’s particularly apropos today because Mr. Brogan will be hosting #MMChat tonight! (@ 8 PM EST!)

Since tonight’s topic will be the role of influencers in cause marketing, I thought I’d also hearken back to one of the most amazing posts I’ve ever read – Jeff Wilson’s The Great Influence Debate

Elaine Fogel wrote an interesting post about cause marketing a few days ago. She notes, in her post for the MarketingProfs blog, that men care just as much as women do about cause marketing. The current Movember movement is a great example!

My friend Stephane wrote a really really interesting post on green marketing a few days back. This is going to become an increasingly important topic for companies and marketers in the months and years to come.

This post by Tristan Bishop (@knowledgebishop) on renewable documentation is a nice partner for Stephane’s post!

A morsel from me awhile back on affiliate marketing. It stirred up quite a conversation. Have your thoughts changed since then? As you can see, I decided to stray away from affiliate marketing for now.

Those are my morsels for you today. Hope you enjoy!

image by Dominik Gwarek. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/kikashi

Over the last couple of weeks, I have witnessed some behavior online that has really made me rub my eyes in disbelief. Considering that I primarily use Social Media for professional reasons, and thus am mostly surrounded by people who are using it for the same reasons, my expectations are pretty high. I think maybe people just need to be reminded of a few things.

1. Social Media is called Social Media because part of the idea is to be social. Being social often involves mixing it up with other people. Even though you cannot see them, hear them, or touch them, all of your comments and tweets and likes and dislikes are pinging other human beings. Unless you are pinging bots. They probably don’t care how you treat them, and it’ll only come back to bite us when they take over the world. Be nice.

2. People work really hard, and what you see online is probably just a small portion of all of the work going on. Therefore, tearing someone’s work to shreds and saying “It’s not personal” will not always work, because it will feel pretty personal to that person.

3. Negativity tends to be negative. Even if it has a justifiable point, many people define negativity as being negative. Negative makes me sad. Don’t make me sad.

4. Bashing someone for bashing someone still means you are bashing someone.

5. Fighting publicly on a Social Media platform makes any and all parties involved look bad, no matter what the scenario. Take it to the dark alley of direct messages, email communications, or a Starbucks.

6. Social Media makes your flaws visible, but it also highlights what’s good in your existence. Take a look at the whole picture of what you have going on. Hint: If you have time to be on Social Media, you’re probably doing at least okay in life.

7. People don’t live in your head. All people can go by is the words flashing on their screens. Is your meaning clear without context?

8. Envy, impatience, hyper-snarkiness, and other modes of operation similar to those listed reflect poorly on you.

9. Sharing is a really good thing. Stealing is a really bad thing. Make sure you know the fine line that separates the two.

10. Whenever you feel you are about to get in a spat with someone, it might be a good idea instead to tweet something like, “Help the poor people of Haiti fight cholera,” or, “Can we help the children of Rwanda?” There’s more to life than Blogs and Twitter. Shocking, dreadfully shocking, but true.

Did I miss anything?