Member-to-Member

Using Social Media To Build Meaningful Customer Relationships

Part II of this series looked at the undercurrent trends for which social media is cause and effect. This installment recommends how the CMO can take on corporate leadership through customer relationship development using social media. Read the full article.

Part III: CMO Guide to Social Media

Many of the shifts and changes discussed in Parts I and II are understood in piece parts throughout your business and no doubt you and your executive peers are engaged in developing strategies to respond. The CMO has a special opportunity to contribute to this effort and lead the way forward in using the power of social technology to retool the company's key stakeholder relationships - prospect, customer and employee relationships especially - from transactional to relational. This transformation should take you from providing value through the product to providing value through the relationship (the product being a central aspect of the relationship). When customers perceive their relationship with the company as valuable beyond merely the utility of the product you sell them, they will provide value to you beyond the dollars they spend on your product, entering into a dynamic, interactive and co-creative effort to help you succeed.

What's really going on underneath the market craziness of social media?

Part I of this series introduced the subject of social media as a phenomenon that is changing marketing dramatically. This installment looks more deeply at the undercurrent trends for which social media is cause and effect. Read the full article.

Part II: CMO Guide to Social Media

Before you can use the new market realities to your favor, you have to understand the changes at a deeper level than the symptoms that show up in morphing marketing plan assumptions. The key takeaway here is that social media is much, much more than just another communications channel.

CMO's Guide to Social Media (Part 1)

How Social Media is Shaping Your Leadership Opportunity

I recently gave the following presentation to The CMO Club. The subject of CMO leadership through social media is so rich that I documented my notes and included over 45 links to relevant articles and data in the eight page article, the first section of which is included below. At the end of this post is a link to the full article.

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have it rough these days. Recession marketing is always tough, but this recession happens to bring with it destabilizing forces affecting the market dynamics between many businesses and their customers. The socialization of the web is both a cause and effect of these changes and thanks to non-stop headlines about social media CMOs (and pretty much everyone in marketing) find themselves frequently responding to social media-related questions like "Do you think we should be on Facebook?", "Let's start a blog!", "Why aren't we Twittering - Tweeting... whatever you call it?"

A CMO's Guide to Social Media: How Social Media is Shaping Your Leadership Opportunities

View more OpenOffice presentations from Dana Theus.

 

Social Media Digest #12

The best links I found this week surfing the social web.

Social Media Digest #11

This week's filter on the social web.

Social Networks Make Lousy Marketing Tools? Patience.

It turns out people like to socialize on social networks according to Knowledge Networks, but we still don't go there to buy stuff, as indicated by user opinion about advertising on social network sites. This is news?

"Social media has reached critical mass, with 83% of the Internet population now  using it - and more than half doing so on a regular basis - according to new research being released today by Knowledge Networks. But for all the media industry's hype and buzz surrounding social networks, microblogs, and other social networking platforms, the genre has failed to become much of a marketing medium, and in the opinion of the Knowledge Networks' analysts, likely never will." - Joe Mandese, MediaPost

As a social network user and marketer, I think the real potential for social networks to influence purchase decisions will remain untapped for a while longer. I believe this because I see three factors in this nascent space that have yet to mature:

Social Media Digest - #10

Interesting links tracking the social web phenomenon.

Marketers, Get Real

By now we all know that the day of the banner ad is past and that the formula for social marketing is being created by us. Here. Now. I believe that this reality is forcing the profession of marketing to change and that the successful marketers of the future will be leaders in their organizations, using not just communications techniques, but deploying social marketing campaigns that provide real social value all by themselves. In other words, if the recipient never takes your call to action, they would still have acquired value from you.

The very nature of that statement seems counter-intuitive to many marketers. What? Provide real value without them paying for it? Like it or not, as the age of message  bombardment passes and the social sale becomes more prevalent, marketers will need to provide social value simply to get people's attention, to prove their good will and to demonstrate that they really understand customer needs and motivations.

Case Study: Facebook Causes Increases My Personal Fundraising ROI 220%

I recently got older. Rather than get depressed however, I found reason to celebrate my encroaching mortality with Facebook Causes. The reason I'm writing about it is because Causes' new birthday application enabled me to garner social profit for myself and financial gain for those I'd like to help in a unique way. By evolving their cause marketing platform from an "invite your friends" model to a "run your own fundraising campaign" model, they personally helped me increase my Causes fundraising ROI by 220% and helped me raise $160 for my chosen cause, Educate Tomorrow. Based on my rather general assumptions detailed below, by creating a social marketing tool that let me build my own fundraising campaign, Facebook Causes could raise their donations revenue by as much as 93% (or $18 million).

Social Media Digest #9

What made it through the social web filter this week.