Cut to the Core

Using Social Media to Monitor Your Brand

2012-02-14T13:15:11-08:00

If you are not using social media to find out what is being said about you, your brand and your industry, here are three compelling reasons to start:

1) Many stories break on social media first!! Monitoring allows you to REACT quickly.

2) Some complaints are only made indirectly via social media channels rather than directly to you by e-mail or phone. Monitoring allows you to REVIEW such complaints.

3) Monitoring allows you to RESPOND quickly to any customer service issue.

Can you afford to be the last one to know what everyone else knows about you and your brand?

Several statistics (reported from various industry sources in 2011) present a case for establishing a monitoring system for you and your brand. These statistics, which are tracked in a variety of ways, illustrate the importance of finding and reacting to the information that is stored on social media:

Consumers reported that, before making their buying decisions, they visited social media sites (63%), search engines (72%) and blogs (58%).
Over 90% of those consumers reported that “natural” search results vs. paid results are trustworthy.
B2B decision-makers reported that they researched products and services online (69%), specifically looked at comments on social media sites (60%), and posted questions on forums (57%) and blogs (41%).
Of companies that spend six or more hours on social media, 52% reported an increase in lead generation .

According to the 2011 Social Media Industry Report by Social Media Examiner, and confirmed by other reports such as the Nielson Social Media Report, the top five Web sites that businesses need to monitor are: 1) Facebook – used by 92%, 2) Twitter – used by 84%, 3) LinkedIn – used by 71%, 4) Blogs – used by 68%, and 5) YouTube – used by 56%.

The strategy your business should use to monitor Internet sites will depend on two things: how wide an outreach your company has and the amount you can allocate from your budget. The types of strategies to stay informed about the content shared on social media, and the fees to use those strategies vary greatly:

Free search engine searches for specific sites such as Google and Yahoo
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds, sent to Google or Yahoo readers
Google alerts, which allows for the scheduling of real-time or daily/weekly reports
Software aggregation tools, such as Hootsuite or Tweet Deck, with either free or paid functions
Social media monitoring software, which although pricey, is robust and can be customized for your business needs

Whatever you do, take SOME sort of action. You definitely want to see the same information your customers and prospects see about you and your brand.

If you need assistance with a strategy, let's talk. For more information, send an e-mail message to maria@koreaccess, or visit www.koreaccess.com

Is Your Advertising More than Just a Green “Slice of Life”?

2012-01-27T14:27:35-08:00

According to advertising professionals, the declining attention span of audiences is a key factor in changes to recent advertising messages. The length of a person’s attention span depends on what a person is focused on and on what their level of interest is in a certain topic. Therefore, the normal period of focused attention fluctuates somewhere between seconds and minutes. In fact, studies, polls and data-gathering agencies report a downward trend for all types of attention spans – whether the activity is listening to a lecture, viewing a slide presentation, reading (this article!) or Web browsing.

Indeed, many companies take a bite of the green “slice of life,” but their green messaging turns out to be little more than a “sound bite” for consumer consumption...

Read the full post that started a lively stream of comments that explored the ethics of advertising practices at CSR Business Wire.

Convert Prospects into Customers with a Case Study

2011-12-14T01:06:00-08:00

Can you add value to the services you offer your customers by aiding their buying decisions through the use of a case study?

A case study, most commonly described as a cross between an article and a testimonial, analyzes an organization similar to the reader’s organization and describes how it benefited through the implementation of the preferred product or solution. Historically, in most industries, consumer surveys reveal that the endorsements in a case study are more credible than direct advertising. Furthermore, case studies are a good investment since they have high readership and are more likely to be kept as future reference sources.

Checklist:

* Use a case study to detail your product or service in action. Does the case study communicate your understanding of your customer’s problems and concerns? Does it establish you as an authority in the solution of the customer’s challenges, as well as in the implementation of the solution?

* Utilize customers similar to the buyer as your case study examples. Does your case study reduce buyer objections? Does it assure them you have the best-choice solution? Do the details of your product or service sufficiently create identification with your buyer?

* Describe your product or service in the buyer’s own real-world setting. Does your case study increase your buyer’s purchase readiness by sharing the following details of another client’s success: the client’s business objectives, the technical and business problems and challenges originally faced, the details of the chosen solution, and the benefits realized after implementation of the solution?

Marketing Messages that Clients and Prospects Consistently Identify as Unique to You

2011-11-17T06:40:26-08:00

Are your clients’ perceptions of your brand a key factor in their decisions to purchase your product or service and to remain loyal customers?

Branding gives you the opportunity, over time, to associate your organization with the benefits and values that are important and relevant to your customer. In a fast-paced, ever-changing global marketplace, your brand represents the promise of service and the expectancy of future benefits. The expectancy of these future benefits motivates buyers to place a higher value on your brand and to be willing to invest in building a relationship with you and your brand. Therefore, maximize any opportunity you have to distinguish your brand. One way to do that is to identify and to clarify your marketing communications so that your brand stands out from among all the others.

Certain aspects of your brand, if updated or enhanced, can bring additional value to you and to your customers. Examine the following areas for potential improvement: 1) the promotion of core organizational values, 2) your writing style and tone, 3) the prioritizing of content messages and 4) the cultural relevance of your brand to your niche audience.

Checklist:

* Refine the details of the core organizational values your brand promotes. Does your brand convince buyers to choose your products and services over that of your competitors? How is your core brand identity conveyed in your marketing? Do your core values connect with customer needs?

* Select a writing style and tone that speaks to your niche audience. What writing style is appropriate? Formal? Conversational? Informative? Persuasive? What terminology does your customer group recognize? Are your customers experts? Or, are they new to their field?

* Choose content relevant to the challenges your audience seeks to solve. What do you want your audience/ideal reader to think or feel? What action do you want them to take? Does your core brand identity speak to customer attitudes, preferences and likes? Do your messages promote conviction and action?

* Develop messages in media that are culturally relevant to your customers and prospects. What is the culture of your organization? How does it compare with the culture of your customers? In developing messages and choosing media, consider the strategic importance of customer orientation, competitor positioning, length of marketplace initiatives and any other factor pertinent to your core customers.

Stakeholders Respond to Communication Initiatives That Connect to Their Core

2011-10-18T02:06:00-07:00

Do Your Social Media Conversations Motivate Your Global Audience To Respond?

Today’s rapidly evolving global environment has produced the need to solve many complex challenges. Therefore, leaders, whether they act as individuals or on behalf of their organizations, must learn to lean across the borders in order to embrace certain solutions and to join international problem-solving communities and associations.

For the individuals who participate in these global networks, whether on behalf of their organizations or as part of their own personal enrichment programs, the interactions lead to networking opportunities, access to new resources, and exposure to creative ideas and solution shortcuts. For the leaders who provide vision and who understand how to motivate individuals, the result is that the individuals in their community are able to effortlessly self-organize around the group’s purpose and to help facilitate many beneficial outcomes.

Today’s successful leaders know how to achieve results through the influence of relationships. With the right mindset from leadership, the organization and all its stakeholders benefit from the helpful content and the focused attention that is provided to the community. In turn, the organization is able to cultivate core connections among its members, foster an environment of collaboration and encourage meaningful Business Media Intimacy.

Read more of Maria's thoughts regarding market leadership. Download Pinochet on Leadership - Uncensored. Your 18-page book preview. Visit Kore Access Web Page.

Short Attention Spans Have Changed Advertising Standards

2011-09-15T03:03:00-07:00

Historically, the role of advertising has been to communicate the offer of a service or product in order to inform audiences about the details of place and price. In turn, the viewers, listeners and readers who need the product or service are motivated to act on the offer. By eliciting this consumer behavior, advertising has accomplished its goal of driving selective demand for a particular brand, product or service.

Today, with the rise of competition from national and international brands causing market saturation, and with the proliferation of communication channels that compete for the attention of each audience, advertising has become more than a message about the details of the offer. The role of advertising has expanded from (just) a means to get attention to an attempt to shape and manage perceptions.

What forces have influenced this transition? What has made many advertising messages separate and distinctly independent marketing messages, messages that are not at all holistic components of the brand?

The increasing number of informational messages we are exposed to on a daily basis has been a main driver of the change. Agencies that track exposure to advertising messages report numbers that vary from hundreds of messages a day to thousands a day, depending both on what types of advertising is counted – billboards, television, print and/or Web ads – and on who is tracked – the average adult American or the American professional. Regardless of the specific numbers, the fact remains that every consumer comes into daily contact with a plethora of competing advertising messages.

The fact that this overabundance of market information causes advertising messages to compete constantly for audience attention is a key factor that leads advertisers to change the ways they approach consumers. Another leading causal factor for change, according to advertising professionals, is the declining attention span of audiences. The length of a person’s attention span depends on what a person is focused on and on what their level of interest is in a certain topic. Therefore, the normal period of focused attention fluctuates somewhere between seconds and minutes. In fact, studies, polls and data-gathering agencies report a downward trend for all types of attention spans – whether the activity is listening to a lecture, viewing a slide presentation, reading or Web browsing.

With these declining attention spans, and in an effort to maintain the effectiveness of the advertising, many advertisers have chosen to create messages that appeal to simple human emotions such as fear and greed. They argue that, by sheer time constraint, advertising cannot develop a strong cognitive/rational argument and must, instead, present a “slice of life”; therefore, the message cannot be anything but an unbalanced representation. However, some feel that this reliance on primal emotions has made advertising, in general, unethical. They say such messages have no transparency, lack depth and clarity and are thus completely disassociated from the brand, product and service values.

Have you given in to time and emotion in your messaging? How can you once again match your message to your brand?

Key Point – When emotional appeal is used in advertising, it is much too easy for audiences with different value orientations to perceive messages as more or less skewed or unethical. When that happens, your advertising message may become subject to a higher level of controversy and may even be considered a misrepresentation of stakeholder interest.

Mr. Page, Thanks for the Rank!

2011-09-08T12:45:11-07:00

Guest blogger, Rosalinda Sanquiche, is the Executive Director, Ethical Markets Media. Rosalinda’s childhood years hiking through Puerto Rico’s El Yunque National Forest informed her belief that we must engage in sustainable behaviors to preserve the magnificent world we inhabit.   She earned a masters in Environmental and Resource Policy as a George Washington Fellow at George Washington University in D.C. She is a speaker and author on environmental issues and is thrilled to work with Ethical Markets Media to promote socially and environmentally responsible behavior from an economic perspective.

Larry Page is a whiz at algorithms, ones you likely use every day -- yes, really.

When you do a web search for anything, Google has an algorithmic method of determining what you see first on the search page, and PageRank is key.

Google PageRank is a proprietary mathematical formula that implies value of a website. It can be correlated to traffic but is more importantly correlated to the quality of connections to other reputable, high-value, quality sites. A website that gets "less" traffic but offers higher-quality content and lots of active, useful links might have a high PageRank whereas a site that gets lots of traffic but has poor content might get a lower PageRank.

As per Google, "PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results."  With a website like www.ethicalmarkets.com, if anyone searches the term "ethical markets," we come up first because we have one of the few urls with those key words, because we're currently an active site with lots of pages and because we have a high Google PageRank.

In the forthcoming book, Dare to Care, the author describes Ethical Markets Media as a "typical global Internet company, ranked a 6 on Google with more than 30,000 links." The editor rightly questioned, "what does that mean?"

To those who manage traffic to a site, IT people, web managers, exec directors like me, this is important and meaningful. When reading the book, we'll think, "impressive." For everyone else, they'll probably gloss over it. It'd be nice to put the numbers on a scale, like a 6 out of 10, but that implies an arithmetic or an exponential relationship. I doubt it's even a bell curve or other standard deviation. See Wikipedia for the gritty details. The math is beyond me. We say we're a 6, but that's rounding for simplification. We're probably more like a 6.193743378+/-.025 (only Google really knows).

I've never seen a 10 (the possible max). I've never even seen an 8, though I've heard they're out there. A six is strong for our type of website (one of the 500 million variables - not porn, not sales, not .edu, and so on).

If I were re-writing the line, I'd say something like this: "a typical global Internet company with a strong PageRank 6 on Google and more than 30,000 links." The author probably doesn't need to include anything about PageRank since the term has little meaning to most people and tends to be used as a marketing tool, but as a point of pride I think it's worth mentioning. Thanks, Larry!

Mindful Marketing Practices Are on the Rise

2011-08-09T11:18:57-07:00



Do You Craft Meaningful Communications for Your Stakeholders?

Companies, once the vital backbone of our communities, provided opportunity, stability and security and were regarded as good citizens that would act in the interest of the communities they served. However, no one can deny that customers no longer automatically confer to companies the trust they used to command. Much has been written about the breakdown in this trust, once such a very valuable goodwill asset. Regardless of the arguments of theorists, one way or the other, about how to fix the problem, the final analysis is the same. At the very least, customers must consider communications from your company credible in order for those communications to stir them to action. Therefore, restoring confidence in corporations requires a new approach.

Is your company communication style outdated?

Long gone, in fact, are the ‘old school’ days of company communications. You can no longer market to customers solely on the basis of their status as consumers of your product and service. You can no longer generate public press exclusively for company shareholders. And you can no longer focus policy and performance communications toward employees only. Especially long gone are the days where effective messaging included communications that were extensions of the old corporate paradigm. That paradigm used selected messages, such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), conceived by the public relations department for the sole purpose of creating a positive “halo” around the company. The problem was that such messages did not always represent the fundamental core values at the organization, nor did they always represent true changes in company policy or purpose.

How do you need to communicate instead?

Remember that the availability of today’s technology can open all the “back doors” at your company. Such access can allow stakeholders to document and to share all kinds of information about your company over vast media channels. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before the core values of any organization are made transparent to the marketplace.

Mindful Marketing takes care of such concerns! As a first step, Mindful Marketing has you take stock of the core values that are the true cultural DNA of your organization. You will then use those values to craft your communications so that they document your core, i.e., the values that really count to you and to your company, the values that will connect your company to your clients and your customers in a very substantial and valuable way.

A Mindful Marketing Model of communications will sustain your brand over time. It will also build the trust level that is so necessary to ease transactions between your stakeholders and the communities in which your brand has impact and relevance.

Key Point – Once they are identified and established, a company’s core values facilitate the crafting of consistent communications across sectors, industries, markets and audiences that are authentic and credible stakeholders in that company. Company communications about your core values help bridge any of the gaps between the various roles (i.e. employee, customer, investor) that stakeholders may have in relation to your organization.

A Change in Mindset on the Rise in Leadership

2011-07-21T14:32:52-07:00

Why are Mindful Communications the Marketing Key to 21^st Century Success?

“Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.” John D. Rockefeller

Where do opportunities for market leadership abound in the 21^st century? In the past, companies have created market leadership by relying on the 4 Ps of the marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion), but most heavily on the uniqueness of product, the competitiveness of price and the convenience of place. Historically, the 4^th P, promotion, has been subordinate to the other three.

Why then has promotion now emerged as THE competitive advantage – if one’s intention is to gain market leadership?

Today, access to global markets has evened out the playing field for many companies. They can now show that they also provide the product and service characteristics that created world-class standards and led to sustained market leadership for companies in the past. Promotion, the placement of your product or service, is about positioning your brand in a way that will demand or attract the attention of your target audience. Such positioning influences perception, and you gain market leadership when the perception you create confirms that the core values of your company are well aligned with the values of your target audience. Communications using this type of Mindful Marketing hit all the right notes with your target audience and stakeholders. They are, after all, the authentic voice of your core values: the beliefs and truths that guide your company’s actions in the marketplace.

The opportunity to use promotion to develop your market leadership presents itself in today’s world with more frequency and with more potential power because of the following reasons:

1. The number of communication mediums has increased – from a limited number of print and radio outlets to hundreds of channels over a multitude of communication platforms.

2. The entire globe is available, and it has become a self-serve, 24/7 marketplace.

3. The real-time use of such things as cell phones, texting and streaming video has made the immediacy of information exchange commonplace.

Therefore, the availability and flow of information between you and members of your target audience generate an ever-increasing potential for success as shown by the following:

1. You can now communicate constantly with your audience.

2. Your constant communication offers an opportunity to interact with your audience.

3. Your constant communication and interaction helps to clarify and strengthen your brand.

4. Your constant communication and interaction, as well as your powerful brand, creates your leadership role in the global marketplace.

Key Point – Everything in today’s marketplace is moving and moving fast. Positioning via promotion, therefore, is a daily challenge. However, as long as you take care to remain updated, muster the courage to seize opportunity ahead of the competition and provide feedback by mindfully addressing – through your communications – the concerns of all your stakeholders, you are acting in a manner that will gain and promote your market leadership.

Online Customer Surveys are Easy with Survey Monkey

2011-06-23T02:02:00-07:00

Do you want to find out what your customers or clients want from you and your business or from your product? Technology has made the process easy, the answers accessible and, in most cases, the service FREE!

While quantitative measures, such as those discussed above, are critical to your online success, they do not reveal qualitative measures. The do not explain, for example, why buyers are motivated to buy from you and not from your competitors.

In today’s electronic age, you can get such answers through the use of online surveys and polls. These informative tools are available for free on certain online social media platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, or by invitation via e-mail from services such as Survey Monkey. Upgrades for more involved surveys are also available from Survey Monkey, as are other paid-for services.

With such ease of use and such access, you have no reason to delay gathering the opinions of your audience. In fact, we ask you to please take a moment and click here to answer our question on leadership skills.