Digital Villager

Do you really have to be on Google+?

2011-11-08T20:40:00.000Z

Sure you have heard about it: Google+ launched its long awaited brand pages. Right now hundreds, I’d fearless say thousands of pages are being created, certainly Google has put it quite easy to create them. But the easiest task is undoubtedly “to be” on Google+, more complicated is to understand why your brand should be there, or not, and how you’re going to capitalize on in business terms. My two cents on this come in question form…

What is the point of being on Google+?

As in many cases tools come before strategies, and even worst before objectives. We just jump into the platform because everybody is doing so, over all my competitors and we don’t want to be left behind. To set up a Google+ page without a clear idea of what to do with it is a great danger, how does it fit on your social media strategy?

Is your target market on Google+?

Sure if you want to reach new customers this might be a nice opportunity, but are they really interested on what you have to offer? More intelligent would be to perform first a quick assessment of the platform, look for your brand name, your competitors’, the main discussion topics about your category. Do you want to participate on those conversations? Are they meaningful enough for the brand? Definitely Google+ user base is growing rapidly, maybe using Google+ Statistics will give you a better idea of the type of audience you’ll have on this platform.

Who is going to maintain the page?

One more social platform to consider for a community manager, who has to know or learn at thunderbolt speed the technical capabilities and advantages the platform offers, to better exploit them in benefit of the brand. Definitely rich media characteristics are ideal to showcase products and link to online stores. But I’d think it twice before start to repurpose Facebook content on Google+.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not against Google+. But I’m more for a reasoned, intelligent use of social platforms. Actually one of the best advantages of putting your brand on Google+ is SEO, without a doubt Google search crawlers give preference and rank better profiles under Google’s domain. Check the Direct Connect benefit:

Many questions, not easy answers, for more see you there: Delfin Vassallo on Google+

B2B marketing is dead

2011-10-30T22:26:00.000Z

I’ve always found a bit useless when marketing people try to limit their strategies as B2B or B2C. As persons living at the 21st century dawn we are making decisions, both personal and professional, all around the clock. Whether we are purchasing to satisfy our own needs or those of our companies, it’s always a personal choice.

I have always thought that B2B decisions are personal choices. Yes, on behalf of a company, but always personal decisions influenced by own – or peers’ – opinions and in no few cases individual emotions – or aversions. You might be analytical, rational, and even mathematical on your evaluation processes; but at the end of the day you and me are humans, social beings with bloodstreams filled of hormones.

That’s why I was really pleased when I discovered the “@ work state of mind” statement made by agency gyro. It seems to me so clear, so logical, so… human approach to our marketing communications discipline. It has never been a secret but I’ve never found someone who could say it this clear:

Strategies have less to do with marketing and much more with anthropology and behavioral science

That's why your campaign's idea has to offer that spark that emotionally connects your brand with the persons, for business or for personal decisions. I really, really love this video, hope you too.

Check it out and let you neurons be dominated by hormones:

"Ideas are the Viagra for brain" (video)

2011-10-26T18:23:00.001+01:00

On his participation at Like Minds Conference 2011 titled The Digital Riptide Chris Moss launched several thought provoking statements about creativity in business, disruptive thinking and innovation; including the title of this post. Today I found this video that sustains there’s no such thing as brain division when cognitive processes are held.

Most of his presentation went around how both brain hemispheres work, making interesting analogies with the usual corporate thinking. And how we need to treat our brain like a muscle, exercising it as much as possible with innovative ideas.

On his TEDTalk The Divided Brain Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist describes the real differences between the left and right halves of the human brain. It's not simply "emotion on the right, reason on the left" but something far more complex and interesting. The phrase that most captivated me for its analogy with digital marketing was:

“We prioritize the virtual over the real”

Would you agree? Take a look (you may want to enlarge and pause at some points, to fully appreciate the fantastic drawings):

What do you think? Discussion continues on Twitter: @DJVassallo

Photo by the talented Harry Duns

#LikeMinds Connecting Neurons

2011-10-23T15:00:00.000+01:00

Innovation, opportunity, creativity, digital tools for business, entrepreneurship… all buzzwords we listen quite often; but most of times the context, technical language or salesly tone blur our eyes. What do they really mean and which potential benefits they bring to me, or my business? Like Minds undertook the challenge of making it clear for anybody willing to immerse in the journey.

First time I knew about Like Minds was last year in Helsinki, and really got enchanted by the collaborative dynamics of the conference. A social learning concept that enables you to learn not by listening uncountable series of speakers, but by really interacting and discussing the topics with both speaker and the person next to you.

This year’s theme: Innovation+Opportunity: How to build brands, businesses and communities for tomorrow. My favourite bits – and learnings – came from three main topics:

The digital riptide

Presented by Chris Moss

A crank is just someone who has an idea until it takes off.
It’s time of business opportunity caused by disruptive technologies. We’re desperate for innovation and creativity in business – but companies just can’t find the right talent.
It’s all about pulling great teams together - everything great Chris has done, has been throughout teamwork.
The brain is like a muscle. We need to exercise it. Ideas are the viagra for the brain.

Social media adoption within organisations

Presented by Delphine Remy-Boutang, World Wide Social Media Marketing Manager at IBM.
Implementing social media has more to do with the persons, change management and corporate culture than with the social platforms themselves.

How do you control 17,000 internal blogs and 25,000+ employees with Twitter accounts? You don’t. Trust and training are the keys that led IBM to succeed and become a truly social company, where every employee’s voice supports the brand. All personal channels have disclaimers, but the individual, not the company, owns them.
They don’t use e-mail attachments, but have a place to put all files.
They have Social Business Jams, where they invite people to join and talk about a topic. The biggest one has seen 20,000 people participating, including employees, customers and partners. Massive crowdsourcing culture.
They actively promote social media usage through designated experts, the Blue IQ Program, 1,200 internal evangelists - from all parts of the business - that help their colleagues to get the most of social tools. A collaborative culture.
One employee, Luis Suarez considered “email as the place where knowledge dies” therefore he no longer uses it, in favour of social technologies.

Take a look at Delphine’s deck or follow @DelphineRB on Twitter.

Why You Can’t Grasp That Killer Idea

Presented by Chris Griffiths

We spend the majority of our time reacting to predetermined situations. Since others influence you, you’re always one step behind. Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. When most people think they’re brainstorming, they’re just reacting and analyzing. They react to one person’s suggestion.
Companies are only reacting to competitor products. They’re looking at external influences. This circle is a difficult one to break.
Many successful individuals know the power of daydreaming (or “thought experiments”).
If you restrict yourselves to your conscious minds, you limit your ability to be creative.
Rather than focusing on how to get new customers, look at how you lose ones. Make a list of what you can do to lose a customer – and circle the ones you do.
If you don’t mindmap – do it. Bill Gates is a fan.
Give yourself two hours a day to think.
Sometimes it’s about knowing what not to do, not what you should do.

That’s it, it’s all about mind mapping and creativity managing (OK OK creativity managing sounds somewhat contradictory) Follow @GriffithsThinks on Twitter

Daydreaming, creating connections between totally opposite concepts, if ideas are not teasing, disturbing, they are not worth. Let's continue discussing @DJVassallo

Photo credits: @adders & GreatBritishChefs

Social Conferences

2011-10-22T19:53:00.000+01:00

Ever had the sensation after a conference that you’ve got an extraordinary amount of information but afterwards it’s difficult to recall the important bits? Or even worst: you don’t conclude concrete outcomes? Receiving information is something totally different than learn from the information received. That’s why I like the social conference format

I read somewhere that a day after any given lesson, seminar or conference you may remember less than 50% of the information received, and after three days you barely recall 15% of what that renowned guru said, gosh what a waste of money and time! That’s the problem of unidirectional information flow at those traditional mega congresses where one single speaker talks to a 500+ overcrowded auditorium. Conclusion: you don’t actually learn anything.

If you tell me something, I may remember it. If you make me practice what you just said, I’ll learn it. If around the topic we build a dialogue where I realise how your idea benefits me, then I’ll never forget it. That’s how our learning process works, we humans are social beings, so why conferences – and education systems – haven’t been?

This is one of the many things I like from Like Minds Conferences, the social learning approach. No massive auditoriums but yes to brilliant minds as speakers with brief – no more than 20 minutes – and substantive presentations. Liked what the speaker said? Great, go and have lunch with him, share your views, discuss with table’s folks which is your take away from the presentation, the speaker for sure acknowledges the feedback.

Want to go really deep in a particular matter from conference’s topics? The Like Minds chaps have invented a formula called “Immersives”: two hours of intensive, in-depth analysis and dialogue about a concrete topic with practical applications for you.

The problem with this approach? Well, after last week’s Like Minds Conference in Exeter my neurons ended up totally fried after 3-day-non-stopping-thinking, but with the rewarding feeling of the social learning experience.

#Tweetcamp Conversations

2011-10-09T17:00:00.000+01:00

Yesterday took place the Tweetcamp London 2011, as stated by the organizers – who did an awesome job by the way – this was an opportunity to take some of those things you tweet about, and have real discussions about those topics, in person. This situation triggered some theory on my mind: How different the topics discussed online might be versus the ones we actually talked? Let’s find out.

Conversations

One of the initial questions posed by organizers was: What do you tweet about? And what kind of things you don’t? Clearly there’s a selection process regarding what you tweet and how you formulate your tweet, not everything we think ends up as a 140-character statement.

What if we make a comparison exercise between the ideas we have actually talked at the tables and the topics tweeted, gathered and analized by a social media monitoring tool. Could we learn something to apply to brand monitoring in the social landscape?

Based on what we all tweetcampers discussed (and after reviewing all this pics)

The most interesting topics in no particular order were:

Connect teams
Communication tool
Broadcasting
Apps or tools to use Twitter
Best practices to use Twitter
Business vs personal use
Private tweeting
Role of Twitter in corporate and B2B
Reciprocity
Using Twitter in events
Twitter ads
Twitter for entrepreneur networking
Impact on politics / public sector
Social customer service
Community management
Analytics / insight measurement / influence metrics
Social media and food / chocolate
Internal communications
Performing arts
Hashtags
Meeting new people
Connecting with celebrities / big leads
Engagement
Complaints on social media
Competitions

What I have been able to collect from Twitter updates exclusively, posted from the morning of Oct 8th to noon Oct 9th – 2,220 tweets circa – the summary of topics discussed at Tweetcamp looks like this:

At first sight it doesn’t seem to me that we are talking about the same event, therefore to cancel a bit of noise I eliminated the keyword tweetcamp as well as the Twitter names, this is the result:

It is evident that everybody had a fabulous day, but with the exception of “food” and “business” apparently the offline conversations weren’t reflected online.

Influencers

Who would you say was the most influential person during the Tweetcamp? @benjaminellis or @farhan perhaps? There might be several for sure, that would depend on who you were talking to, which sessions you attended, and which topics matter to you. One person can be influential for me in a specific topic, but going totally ignored by others, whose interests are different. In any case, just to give a try I pushed that button and got some names:

It has nothing to do with the quantity of tweets a person produces, we were said @GabrielleNYC tweeted the most however she doesn’t show up on the top 10.

One person’s authority can be determined by a number of factors: followers-following ratio, num of RT’s by others, num of mentions of certain keyword, num of @’s (conversations). It can be theme based authority or absolut authority in the case of celebrities, but here there wasn’t any celebrity, right? And still it can be a bit subjective, my friend @wise_marketing was test-monitoring Tweetcamp and came up with this other list of influencers:

Sentiment

Polemic as always I couldn’t leave sentiment out of this exercise. You wouldn’t say that someone tweeted any negative thing about Tweetcamp, wouldn’t you? Well here we go:

Of course they aren’t negative! Simply: algorithms can’t substitute neurons yet. No use to go deeper here, at least not on a Sunday afternoon when I wrote this just for the fun. Instead I leave you with the 100% sure feeling that all tweetcampers had at the end of the day:

See you in the digital village...

Photos by @AnnieMole & @GuyNesher

1 Moikka Suomi, 1000 Hellos London

2011-04-10T18:46:00.000+01:00

During the last three years I have been in Finland delighting myself with saunas and frozen lakes swimming, tons of salmon and weird black candies, techy geeks and great forward thinking minds, but over all I got an amazing experience and learned tons of things from Finns and Finnish business culture.

Greatest things come in unsuspected packages. I have lived in four countries during the past ten years and really thought Finland was going to be the definitive one, but when a rare opportunity arrives you just have to grab it as it comes.

An irresistible challenge as Account Director at one of the top ten social media marketing agencies in London: 1000heads Where I’ll be working with a bunch of brilliant heads developing ideas for the most amazing brands.

No goodbyes, no farewell parties, if you know me can confirm I don’t like them. In any case they’re kinda useless because I will be back & forward London-Helsinki quite often as part of my new role.

And anyway remember we are always close to each other, as inhabitants of this Global Village that we call Internet, despite physical or political boundaries the place where we work is still -and hope it will always continue- border-free and transparent. See you around digital villagers!

Keep in touch on Twitter: @DJVassallo
@1000heads The Word of Mouth People

Tap into the Hidden Social Business in Latin America

2011-03-22T19:26:00.007Z

Latin America is the second largest consumer of social media worldwide, becoming one of the regions with more digital potential for brands and agencies. According to the French social media monitoring and research firm Synthesio.
But there’s much more behind the numbers, combining them with some experiences in the area I realised how many social business opportunities are hidden in this area.

Social Media explosion in Latin America

Synthesio found out that in the area the level of social media adoption per capita ranks only second after US and Canada; it also ranks second as the highest consuming region of blogs: 61% versus a global average of 51%.

82% of Latin American web users use social media

Facebook relative dominance

With almost 100 million users in the region and 5 countries within the world top 20, Latin America’s leading country is Mexico, which also ranks 7th worldwide well ahead of countries like Canada, Spain, Italy, France or Germany. According to dosensocial, a leading social media blog in Latin America, Facebook stats as February 2011 are:

World rank: Num users:

7 Mexico 21,560,720

12 Argentina 13,154,840

13 Brazil 13,012,220

15 Colombia 12,572,540

20 Venezuela 8,046,100

But how much influence Facebook has based on its penetration? Synthesio does this precision and the picture changes drastically:

Clearly at country level the influence one Facebook campaign can have varies widely from Chile or Puerto Rico to Brazil, which absolute population is far larger (195 millions) but with an scarce 8% on this network. On the other side 8 out of 10 Brazilians have Orkut accounts, representing over a half of this network’s users.

Twitter speaks Spanish

While in US or Europe Twitter is widely used for professional networking, Latin American twitters, equivalent to 16.1% of total Twitter users, are far younger; following mainly closer friends and celebrities and talking about a variety of topics from politics to social affairs to gossip. Since Twitter launched in 2009 its interface in Spanish, users speaking this language had multiplied by 7. By the way, the account @twitter_es has 4,298,261 followers, ranked on 14th place worldwide.

Cultural factor matters... a lot

Social Media users in Latin America show a clear cultural-driven trend. They maintain strong links with their local societies rather than following a common regional behaviour; Columbians, Argentinians, Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Venezuelans…. don’t see themselves as a part of some “Latin American Unity” as frequently seen from abroad, trying to fit all them into the same box.

Consumers are 5 times more likely to buy on a site written on their own language, and this applies equally for Spanish or Portuguese languages. I’d go further: brand messages for social networks in Latin America need an extremely high localisation, even within the same language, same copywriting may have a totally different connotation in Temperley, Buenos Aires, in Polanco, Mexico City or even in east Los Angeles.

Great opportunities for European Brands and Agencies

Mostly young web users.- With an overwhelming 85% of social networkers ranging between 13-34 years, if engaging adequately, your brand has the invaluable opportunity to cultivate the loyalty of an extremely attractive market for its future.

Western culture influence.- Both the lifestyle and the models that most influence Latin American web users come from US and Europe. Since their behaviours clearly follow western world patterns, they are most likely predisposed to buy, adopt - and adapt european brands than consumers in the Middle East or certain regions of Asia.

Don’t overlook other networks.- Sonico and Hi5 were the region's leaders before the arrival of Spanish version of Facebook. But they still have deep penetration in selected countries, consider them on your strategies.

Latin American brands still have to catch up.- 53% of big Latin American companies are mentioned constantly on Twitter conversations, but very few have an official account to interact with consumers. In Colombia for example 86% of companies are mentioned on Twitter, but only 29% have account. Managed correctly your brand could easily gain valuable steps on the positioning ladder.

Poor Internet access, but…- It is true that Internet access in Latin America reaches only 34.5% of the population, but is still well ahead of other developing regions like the Middle East 29.8%, Asia 21.5% or Africa 10.9%. The answer is on mobile Internet connection, since region’s telecommunications leader América Móvil, main business of the world’s wealthiest man - Mexican Carlos Slim, and its rival - Spanish Telefónica are already considering 4G networks introduction in later 2011.

Social Media adoption at it’s best.- According to Synthesio and Nielsen social network adoption amongst Latin American web users is one if the highest, even Brazil alone surpasses, with 86% of adoption, the UK and US, both with 74%.

My initial intention was only to feature some interesting stats, but as I kept digging it was so exciting to integrate many of my direct experiences in this fascinating market. Is your brand / agency ready to conquer Latin America? Let me know!

Twitter: @DJVassallo

When earth quakes, Social Media talk

2011-03-11T18:16:00.000Z

For sure you already know about the devastating earthquake and its unfortunate consequences in Japan. Through which media you got to know it? Radio, TV or Social Media?
Technology power is unquestionable what comes to spread news on Internet, but which role the social media play on this kind of disasters?

As recently seen in Haiti and Chile cases, I think the difference in this case is that now tragedy hit one of the most technologically advanced and wired countries, not to mention it’s the world’s third biggest economy, sure because of this the viral effect multiplies exponentially.

I just saw how information twits (and mis-informative ones too), condolences, witnesses’ messages, etc, started to populate my timeline. Hashtags like #japanearthquake, #tsunami and #prayforjapan are moving impressively fast.

In emergency cases Social Media pillars don’t wait a minute, 15 minutes after the quake Google had a tsunami alert on its main page, two hours later its Missing Persons Finder was up and working in japanese language.

The immediacy facts occur overwhelms even communication media response speed. The Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun announced it’ll be updating all the news from its Facebook page, rather than at its official website, clearly exploiting incontestable word of mouth power.

In just few minutes YouTube started to populate with incredible images from the disaster, but the video most hit me, not for the shocking images but for what it represents: some guy using its own software predicted this earthquake two days ago. Obviously the video is going viral amazingly fast.

It doesn’t stop to surprise me how this events wake up the persons, more than for its velocity for the cohesion power that Social Media have on this global digital village.

And you through which medium got the news? Radio, TV or social?

Want to converse? I’m always out there: @DJVassallo

Not just monitor Social Media, get real insights

2011-02-11T18:02:00.021Z

On Social Media Week’s Thursday it was monitoring’s turn. In a breakfast hosted by We Are Social agency, Jaimie Robinson and Robin Grant offered an overview on how to choose your social media monitoring tool and how to get from it the most valuable information for your business.

What is an insight?

Interesting to start by defining this, even though it may be obvious that what you want to get from any tool is valuable knowledge to eventually support your decisions and strategies. Jaimie stressed the importance of having clear what you want to obtain from social platforms search; an insight is much more than just “interesting information to know”, it should be meaningful enough to have an impact on your business.

Social media search and analysis tools help to identify influencers and conversations but they don’t deliver insight. This only can be delivered by a person with the right expertise and after a clear understanding of the objectives to then interpret conversations. As I have said many times:

The best analytics tool is right between your ears

Choosing your tool

Second important thing is to choose correctly your monitoring tool; keeping in mind that at the moment there’s no tool that can give you everything, I’d prioritise:

Which detail level you want
Which media preferentially will be scanned
How many languages are considered
Where in the world are the conversations being held

Take into account that more than one tool may be needed. Robin summarised his parameters for choosing:

Workflow management
Social CRM capabilities
Response from single dashboard

My outcome from this meet up

What I did like was We Are Social approach to conversations’ categorisation:

Global or regional
Products
Corporate
Employees
Sponsorship
Customer views
Campaigns
Competitors

At the discussion they pointed out the importance of languages’ knowledge, from my personal perspective this is not enough: a cultural affinity is basic and over all a direct experience on the country or region’s business culture is absolutely fundamental to analyse and extract the best insights.

Maybe the only thing that didn’t look good was some evasiveness at Q&A’s time, in my opinion if you organise an event is because you’re eager to share expertise and offer valuable advise. In any case, We Are Social delivered a good presentation, many valuable viewpoints and excellent networking. Thanks guys!

Social Recruitment Debate

2011-02-08T00:18:00.000Z

Today’s most interesting topic at Social Media Week so far was the debate about Social Recruiting. From both points of view, independent recruiters and corporate ones, the agreement was that Social Recruitment has arrived to organisations to stay, whether you like it or not. “...and from now on companies have to engage with candidates in a way they have never done before” said Andy Headworth from Sirona Consulting

What social recruitment actually is?

Don’t try to elaborate complicated theoretical definitions, Social Recruitment is just the digitalisation of the recruiting process. If companies wan to have the best possible talent “they have to go out and look for the candidates where they are, and engage with them with one authentic voice” stated Becky Folb, Global Talent Acquisition Manager of Nokia.

You may think that your target as a employer most probably is not on Twitter, but with more than 500 million options to choose from, it is definitely on Facebook. Generations coming through now are on the social channels and companies must be there to engage with them.

The Attraction Strategy

The only "client” represented at the panel, Nokia explained their Attraction Strategy: “We are hoping people to know why they want to work for us when they come to us. They know us already", Becky gave a concrete example: In Malaysia Nokia needed digital marketing talent, using traditional media they got 11 cv’s in one week, not all of them totally suitable for their needs. After setting up the Facebook Speed Hiring page they received more than 300 cv’s, concluding in 44 interviews and all positions filled with extraordinary talent.

Current issues to keep in mind

'Social Media is great to amplify, the problem is on funnel's filter' Pointed out Marc Mapes Companies can’t get back to each and one of the candidates, they’re not prepared to massive answer on Social Media
What you preach on social must be what you practice in the organisation because now it'll come back to you very quickly.
The common agreement was that a strategy mix is required, the old methods are not all broken, and social isn't a magic wand.

I maybe missed a little bit some more insights from the third part in question: the job-seekers. And how they perceive the ease (or not) of using job boards vs social media in their job hunting. But all together was a very good exercise to demonstrate how Social Media, after taking posses of PR and marketing departments within organisations, now is involving HR practices as well.

Want to follow Like Minds events at Social Media Week London? Go here

Trends Marathon at Social Media Week

2011-02-05T12:55:00.000Z

On the last two years Social Media Week has gained world-wide popularity. What began just an adventure in February 2009 in New York has multiplied into a global phenomenon, just as social media is.

In 2011 Social Media Week will be present on nine cities: london, New York, Rome, Paris, San Francisco, Toronto, Hong Kong, Istanbul and São Paulo. With 500+ events during the week, from which 100 will be in London, currently the world capital of digital marketing and social media innovation.

What to wait?

Variate topics as the specialists that will present them:

Social Influence management strategies
New proposals to measure social campaigns ROI
Busting some social media myths
Updates on social media monitoring tools
Social Recruiting
Social Commerce
Social Gaming
Social CRM

How to follow the conferences?

Check the Social Media Week official blog, global or per cities.
Follow comments worldwide via Twitter and the most animated events according Foursquare with this application that merges all hashtags and check-ins; you can select the city of your interest.
Subscribe to Social Media Week channel on YouTube
Follow conferences live via Livestream
Like Social Media Week Facebook page to see live comments and to watch conferences as well. There’s one page per city too.

Jump into the conversation! I’ll be tweeting from London all news and behind the scenes gossips: @DJVassallo See you there!

Questions you won’t find on Quora

2011-01-19T17:44:00.000Z

Have you thought about Quora as a customer care platform? This Q&A social network has been bursting during the last month; users are throwing away all sort of questions, including those related with products (technical assistance, availability, satisfaction opinions) and services (quality, results obtained) Here some questions just popped-up in my mind:

Are my customers asking about me on Quora?

Find it out performing a search by brand name, category or product generic name. Chances are a thread is already open under your brand’s name or maybe your competitor’s.

Who is answering those questions?

Perhaps one of your employees with so much good will? Maybe you just stumble upon a new brand advocate you didn’t know before? You want to identify both and empower them by providing more information about product or usage, encourage them to give more feedback based on their experience.

Why customers are asking about me on Quora?

Simply, because they couldn’t find the right channel to address their concerns to you, either it doesn’t exist or can’t be easily found (think about it); or because they don’t directly trust you after getting an unsatisfactory answer or even worst: no answer at all. In any case, better to act fast to correct the situation:

Search for your brand
Find criticism, complaints and congrats (why not?)
Answer them in first person, clearly and honestly
Involve other company’s representatives to post useful information

How valuable Quora could be for customer care?

Hard to say it directly, since this network’s intention is not that, nor substituting in any way other CRM channels/programmes. But definitely it is worth to monitor brand’s performance there and surprising your customers with a satisfying answer or even better: a fulfilling brand experience.

From a quick search I found this brands doing (not surprisingly) quite nice job and with a number of followers already:

Nokia Honda Pepsi Starbucks McDonald’s

Is Quora the new Wikileaks? ;o)

Doing competitor’s brand search may reveal interesting things posted by actual or former angry employees, but watch out it can be the other way around.

Want more answers?

See you on Quora!

2011: From Intentions to Objectives

2011-01-06T18:02:00.021Z

Resolutions, purposes, intentions... you name it. That’s the topic surely at this time of the year occupies your mind. Every start of year there’s the same story, we formulate a lot of purposes based on really good intentions; but regarding Social Media I think this has exactly been the problem: having intentions not objectives.

“This year we want to be on Social Media”
“What about a promotion on Facebook?”
“Let’s do something in Twitter”

Sounds familiar? Listening all this phrases made me think if some companies are just wondering to play the Social Media game, rather than integrating in a serious way the social factor on their businesses. Maybe it’s the buzz within marketing sectors that makes them to precipitate, thinking that engaging with customers means they just “Like” the brand on Facebook.

I think the very first step is a change in our mindset, passing from the simple intentions to more structured business objectives:

Think what you want to achieve... and write it down. This makes the whole thing to feel more formal, as it is the start of any strategy.
Formulate a business objective, not a Social Media objective. What are the business goals? How many leads, sales or knowledge about the brand you want to generate? Rather than how many followers on Facebook or Twitter.
Objectives have to be measurable. Otherwise how will you know you succeeded, got close or failed? Choosing the right metrics to measure depends on the desired achievement. Which processes or tools are we going to use to measure?

Social Media is one more option in your marketing toolbox, but it’s a serious one. The tool that can give your company the definitive boost or an indefinable headache. 2011 is the right time to go from intentions to objectives.

If we don’t know where we want to go, most probably we won’t arrive anywhere.

Where are you going with your Digital Strategy?

Photo by Skëne of London

Trends and outcomes from #LeWeb 2010

2010-12-10T17:31:00.000Z

In Paris, the two days of Le Web, one of the most influential Internet conferences in Europe, went from shocking announces from Twitter and MySpace directives to blow mind entrepreneur ideas to the new trends in digital media for 2011. Just a mention on the former and my focus on the latter.

Summarising the shocking announcements

Jason Goldman, Twitter VP of Product said he’s quitting to give quality time to his family.
Mike Jones, MySpace CEO stated: “MySpace is not a Social Network” it’s an “Entertainment Network”, clearly communicating the rebranding process they had to be competitive against Facebook.
OK not so shocking though but insightful anyway (following a classic Finnish equanimity) Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia SVP Design forecasts that on 2011 the new MeeGo based Nokia devices will be really revolutionary, like nothing you have seen before.

2011 Hot trends

What’s going to be hot in 2011? My main outcomes regarding Digital Marketing and Social Media are:

1. Online influence matters a lot.- Find the way to monitor, measure and interpret how it is affecting your business. By doing less than that you are just fooling yourself.

2. Localisation of your brand/business.- To build global brands language and culture adaptation is key. Today English and Chinese are the major languages on Internet, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi and Portuguese are about to explode. If you want to be successful in 2011 go to those markets, learn their languages and adapt your brand values to their cultures.

3. Social Media means big business.- No one better than Jeremiah Owyang to outline what you should focus on:

Integrate Social Media on your corporate web, then aggregate and curate.
Invest on scalable Social Media Management Systems and the people who should manage it.
Develop ongoing dialog with your customers and leverage their Social Graphs.

My dream coming true!

Ariel Garten, CEO of Interaxon presented their project about Thought Controlled Computing. Really! No kidding, no sci-fi. This technology can really use your brainwaves to control one’s room lights, a wheelchair and of course a computer (with a funny app for iPad). My dream of having a wi-fi Internet connection chip implanted on my brain is getting closer! :o) This is something you better have to see, here the 30-min video, it really worths.

Lots of innovative ideas

There was plenty of excellent content, if you want to dig deeper on it, go to LeWeb YouTube channel and draw your own conclusions. Enjoy!

The influencer right next to me

2010-11-19T14:55:00.000Z

Without a doubt in Social Media persons are the most important element: how they interact with each other; how they get together with others that have same interests; how within this interaction they influence and are influenced in their ideas. As social beings it's natural to share information about our experiences, our motivations to do things. Are you aware of who is influencing you?

In marketing this is nothing new, word of mouth has always existed and now with digital media it only magnifies its effect. If before - and we still- were influenced by a wife or husband, friends or co-workers when making a purchasing decision, now we consider also as a valid and important input what a total stranger says in an online discussion forum. Why? Because they talk sincerely, on an horizontal one-to-one communication to me and I don't have any reason not to believe. Are those influencers talking about your brand?

The next level is when we allow to be influenced by an opinion leader. It doesn't have to be a rock star or a celebrity as in those old and fake TV testimonials, it could be anyone as long as I see him/her as an expert. A person whose authority comes from his skills or expertise.

Looking at our society's big picture there are many influencers that hold their authority by being trendsetters, widely known in their ecosystem, unknown maybe for the mainstream. Do you know who of those leading influencers are in your brand's category?

I happened to find this extraordinary documentary by Influencers Film, it's long almost 14 minutes but definitely worth of watching, take a cup of coffee, and after watching hopefully take an initiative.

Photo by Skene

Is Helsingin Sanomat offline spamming?

2010-11-03T09:44:00.000Z

We all know the rule: any unsolicited email or any kind of communication (SMS, twit, wall post...) that takes advantage of your personal data without your consent is called SPAM. Does this apply also in the offline context? If I’m receiving an “offline newsletter” called Helsingin Sanomat without being asked for it, could it be considered as SPAM?

For third day in a row I have been receiving at home a Helsingin Sanomat copy, without having requested it; ok, ok long time ago I signed up for a one-week-free trial after which I rejected the six month subscription package a kind lady offered by phone. The reason? Besides the inconvenient paper pile growing behind my door, I realized that my little but fierce four-legged house guardian was making such a scandal every time HS messenger slipped it through the mail slot, barking and messing around for at least 15 minutes, not a problem if it wouldn’t be at 4 am.

It is clear the problem newspapers have had recently, digital times are making their business to struggle. But wouldn’t be wiser to adapt themselves to the new formats and channels instead of keep pushing by all means the same old paper version? A nice infography by the Future Exploration Network suggests when newspapers in their current format will become irrelevant in several countries and why (click to enlarge)

Sure you noticed when they predict this will occur in Finland: 2021. Considering that it doesn’t mean “Hesari” will disappear at all, but its importance would be severely diminished if they don’t do something wiser than “offline spamming”.

What would you suggest as a viable strategy for HS?
Will you pay to access its website if they make all the content “pay-per-read”?

Digital Marketing dynamics are circular

2010-08-01T11:12:00.005+01:00

Fast pace business environments need an agile strategy. Internet time businesses need a new approach in the way they define their strategies and organize their digital marketing activities. This small sketch on the left was my first idea to represent how digital marketing dynamics are nowadays: circular.

Within offline marketing mindset there are some few steps to follow to guide you through its process. Let’s say you are organizing an event for your clients: planning the program, choosing location, defining who’s attending, which outcome you want they to take from you; creating invitations and merchandising with the selected theme, executing all your tactics on that day; and finally evaluating what the ROI was, satisfied clients, how many new leads you got… all these activities may be summarized in this way:

The way you work in the digital world is actually quite different. Your marketing messages are not limited to a specific place or just one activity, and most of times are working 24/7. Since you want these messages to arrive not only to your customers but their influencers as well, you have to play in several arenas at the same time but with only one consistent image.

Of course you begin planning the strategy based on your business’ objectives, then creating your concepts and choosing the right tools to exploit them; after this the involving process could reveal itself as the longest: listening, answering and engaging consumers. You are ready to measure your initial results when something unexpected pops up, a client request or suggestion, something that you may not have considered initially but worthy to consider anyway.

What do you do? While involving and measuring you have to come back and plan how to answer that issue (and you better do it fast) and incorporate a new feature or tool to accomplish it. But were you already evaluating the first metrics? Right, since all these spheres are running simultaneously you have to adapt your company’s work processes to fit in an environment like this:

Should you agree at this point that you couldn’t talk anymore about campaigns, with a predetermined starting and finishing timing, but about continuous engagement compromise, between your brand and your consumers. Is your brand ready to be competitive in the circular digital marketing age?

Augmented Reality in action

2010-07-15T14:46:00.009+01:00

During the last Like Minds Helsinki Myles Peyton from Total Immersion did a very convincing presentation about the marketing possibilities of Augmented Reality technology and how it may boost virtual shopping experiences in the future. Check it out:

Sorting out #SocialMedia monitoring labyrinth

2010-07-04T13:29:00.030+01:00

Time ago I wrote about measuring social media focusing on how to first come up to it. The issue evolves as social platforms become more complex; so approaches to monitoring are getting sophisticated as well.

Now more than ever how to choose a monitoring tool is a key issue that can determine your future analysis’ outcome.

Accessing online conversations can be easy and free using Google tools like Search, Alerts and Real Time Search. You get a general picture of what’s going on with your brand; a step further can be to use Social Mention to get results categorized by relevance and channel, with the first insights on sentiment measuring.

I think the main thing with web analytics is not the data itself, but the use you make of it. Statistics can provide you with great and unsuspected insights, if you formulate the right questions. When you begin to dig deeper, with more elaborated questions to answer, you realize what you really have: a huge pile of raw data and few ways to organize it for further analysis.

Social Media monitoring paid tools

Working in the same way than search engines, these tools crawl online conversations, cleaning, de-duplicating and organizing them so they can be analyzed deeply. I like the five criteria FreshMinds used to evaluate tools on a recent study:

Coverage - How many types of media and/or countries the tool can read?
Location of conversations - Where in the world the conversation is taking place? Can you differentiate if a tweet in Spanish was originated in Mexico, in USA or even in Spain itself?
Volume of conversations - The amount of comments is because there’s a real buzz or due re-tweets, spam, adverts? De-duplication is still a serious concern for social media monitoring.
Data latency - How long the tool takes to crawl and process conversations? How often? Will you rely on it to spot potential PR problems on time?
Sentiment - Probably the most overrated metric because gives you the perception of taking brand’s heart beat in real time. How tool’s algorithms handle the proximity of keywords and sentiment indicators?

The best analytics tool is right between your ears

I don't see yet a clear, commonly accepted standard amongst all tools, each one may have a different solution to same issues. Here is when the most advanced analytics tool comes up, the one you have between your ears; despite all that sophistication many suppliers show off, a person with the right expertise is always needed to make intelligent sense of data.

Call it mix of art and science, the combination of web analytics + social media monitoring tools + human expertise reveals as the only successful formula to provide your brand or company with a valuable insight that leads to actionable plans.

What else you want from a monitoring tool?

Ease to set up?

User friendliness?

Accuracy on a particular metric?

Photo by Ricardo Carreón

Things to think from #LikeMinds

2010-06-22T14:04:00.186+01:00

Not everyday you can get tons of insights from ultimate thought leaders. Too much things to think about, too many interesting persons to chat with, too few time. At last week's Like Minds Conversation Helsinki were presented and discussed: social platforms as a business, augmented reality latest applications, and how social media and virtual technologies are effecting our everyday life. Real Time in Real Life was meeting's motto. Some of my impressions about an inspiring event.

Pre-Like Minds Tweetup

Worth to mention Scott Gould's insights (Scott is one of the neurons behind Like Minds) during the petit comité Tweetup at Dicole the night before. With astonishing clarity he looks beyond strategies, tools and social platforms, going through this virtual jungle's final destination -and origin: People, the so often overlooked factor. Is the platform you use social? Or is it your message? Who rules: consumer or broadcaster? Actually none, what really matters here is who is listening, the connection you make amongst people is the key. By the way "People-to-People: The Future of Everything" was Scott's presentation title, which contained his Social / Broadcast Matrix that you absolutely want to analyze.

Real Time, Real Life, Virtual World

How the virtual worlds are influencing our real lives? Or I may say how real life influences virtual worlds? Oisin Lunny, Sulake UK Managing Director, exemplified how reality finds its mirror in Habbo Hotel, world's biggest teenager virtual world, practically immediately. By "creating the theater, not the play" Habbo has built its successful business model, supported by sponsored rooms, badges, ads, events and an endless list of other marketing ideas. Encountered thoughts cross my mind: great online business vs parental concern about kids inventing too many plays on virtual theaters rather than in real ones. Is there a difference between online and offline creativity motivation?

Augmented Reality

Definitely the topic that stole audience's attention. With impressive demos presented by Andy Gstoll from Wikitude and Myles Peyton from Total Immersion, Augmented Reality is fading the barrier between abstract and real. However there was a "too much flashy technology and very few practical applications" concern amongst attendees. The tool is there, what is missing is the creative mind who connects the dots from appealing content to business model to ROI. Or is it that everybody is just waiting to see who is the first advertiser to try it massively and fail?

Social + Mobile = Enhanced Experience

Geo-tagging, sharing updates, mobile accessibility to virtual information. All these technologies enable anyone to broadcast to the world own location, preferences and activities. Are they too privacy invasive? Who cares about that information? Teemu Arina made a great analogy: in Domesday Book times, gathering and sharing information about land possessors was revolutionary. Nowadays sharing mania seems so as well, but until when? When too much is too much? I think the social value of such information is changing the way we enrich our lives.

Virtual is the New Real

Still processing Joanne Jacobs mind-blowing presentation, with a holistic approach to virtuality, augmented reality and mobile. But for sure the key lapidary phrase to keep in mind is "Virtual makes reality accessible, affordable and interesting", take a closer look at her presentation below or get all her insights as they come.

Jacobs finland likeminds

View more presentations from Fresh ID.

But the most important thing to think about Like Minds Conversations is exactly what you think about all these innovations. How are you preparing yourself to use them? How your company is adapting to make the most of them?

Keep #LikeMinds in mind

Scott Gould and Drew Ellis goal is to make deep conversations accessible for everyone. I you have something interesting in mind please share it with them and with the 250 Twitter's Like Minds Helsinki, Like Minds on Facebook, Like Minds official Twitter, Like Minds on Flickr. No matter where, despite locations or cultures "the hash tag is the platform" Scott dixit, if you use the hash tag you already belong to Like Minds

7 ideas to manage criticism on Social Media

2010-06-13T14:22:00.000+01:00

You are in a convention’s coffee break, that kind of ideal moments for business networking and just met a person who presents himself as a B2B/Social Media consultant. The very next phrase this consultant says is “Are you ready to learn a lot about B2B marketing from me?”
What is your reaction?
What is your impression about this person?

If you don’t do certain kind of things in your real life relationships; why to do them in the Social Web? Where the same well-known social and business networking practices apply. I use this example because actually I did receive this direct message on Twitter after begin to follow a self proclaimed B2B/SM/Marketing consultant:

I don’t know you, but my first impression was that of an extremely arrogant person, bragging in an environment like social media where authenticity, transparency, equal status and influencing for engage more than hard selling are the rules of the game. So I expressed my opinion like this:

Only to get back almost immediately this answer:

Right away along my time line began to arrive many critics to this reaction from other peeps, qualifying this consultant as anti-professional and childish at the least, not to mention several jokes about his expertise.

Nobody’s perfect, no matter how carefully you plan your campaign execution, your messages, your blog posts, etc… there will always be someone that doesn’t agree with you or even that criticize your brand.

So how to handle criticism adequately without damaging your brand’s image? whether is your own personal brand or the one from the company you represent. I propose 7 ideas:

Never respond, twit or update status if you’re angry. Let your emotions ease and once you get calm think about the solution, never act impulsively it’s almost sure you’ll regret it later.
Always answer, no matter how difficult or embarrassing it might be, you should always give a public response to the issue. Silence implies you’re ignoring criticism, which may result in greater anger and more critics that can initiate a snowball effect, under which your brand will be buried.
Respond honestly and clearly, if mistake was yours accept it and explain how you’ll fix it. Accepting responsibility and offering the adequate reward will boost your brand’s credibility.
Answer fast, answer several times and always through the same channel the comment arrived. Ensuring both interested recipient and the whole community will receive the message.
If you can’t provide an immediate answer, due the issue’s complexity, say it openly promising you’ll soon do so. Act as fast as you can and give the answer within the next hours or a day maximum; social media is an extremely fast pace environment where a small misunderstanding may become a brand’s public relations crisis within hours, or even minutes.
Do not be defensive; it may turn against you in a bad manner. If it wasn’t your fault go to the problem roots, find out how and where the misunderstanding began and explain it clearly to the community.
Last but maybe the most significant for the future: be ready to change. If criticism is valid why not accept it and incorporate that feedback on your campaign, topic or process? You’ll win tons of trust from the community.

There’s no perfect response to online criticism and answer may depend on the type of problem and how far has gone. Have you ever faced critics to your brand, corporate or personal? How you coped with it? Have you more ideas?
Photo credit

4 simple steps to do your Digital Strategy

2010-05-24T17:28:00.011+01:00

No bla-bla, no complicated charts, no theoretical lucubration. Simple, very simple steps to visualize how and where a digital strategy should take you

Define your objectives.
Choose your tactics and tools.
Execute for engagement.
Track the results.

Click on image to see a larger version on Flickr

Photo by skene

Social Media Statistics are always outdated

2010-05-22T15:24:00.002+01:00

Sure you have been bombed more than once with tons of Social Media statistics: number of Twitter followers here and there, the most popular social platforms worldwide, astonishing figures for video uploads in You Tube, Facebook exponential growing. Below you'll find a couple of examples of incredible statistics... outdated

What most surprises now are not the figures themselves, but the speed at what they are evolving. Just few weeks ago Socialnomics published a refreshed version of its popular Social Media Revolution video, which is already outdated: Ashton Kutcher is not the most followed Twitter account anymore.

Whatever you ponder about Twitter number of users, keeping its 300,000 daily new users pace, will make your carefully designed charts be wrong. And while most of marketers are still discussing how Facebook over passed 400 million users, the actual number of profiles will soon arrive to 500 million

Is you brand prepared to cope with this voracious media? Consistence is one of the keys to succeed with your Digital Strategy. Keep focused and statistics won't overwhelm you, in the meantime enjoy some outdated numbers:

[Source: Online PhD Programs for MashableMashable.com]

3 Strategic thoughts to create an effective website

2010-05-11T19:07:00.000+01:00

What is the first step when deciding to create a website for a business? "To get a web designer" is the answer I have gotten from 99% of persons I asked during the past month. Right, but what to say when the digital artist asks for a brief in order to figure out where to begin from? "OK something that looks nice and provides all the information about my business", but about how the site will contribute to the business, nothing. How to measure its success (or lack of)? Naaahh... And for sure no one thinks about which would the most suitable platform to build it, ok, ok maybe that's already too technical. What about a way to know if the website is a truly effective marketing tool for your business? Or maybe: Is your future website tridimensional?

To guide a strategic thinking I thought on 3 main dimensions one has to consider before creating a business website, if one of these fails the whole project may do too:

Business - How the website will contribute to business' success? Will it support other marketing actions (both off or online)? Which are your Key Performance Indicators, a.k.a. based on what metrics are you going to say you succeeded? Is it just an online catalog of your offer? Or do you want people to interact with you? (you better)
Technical - Which is the platform your site will be built on? Don't be afraid of technical geekery, just tell your web designer your objectives (you have them, right?) and how people you want to use your site, sure she will come up with the appropriate solution.
Visual - Finally now you can think about site's look & feel, including your corporate visual elements. Just remember not everything that looks good on printed catalogs will be the same online, think you will be creating content to be seen over a screen, sometimes smaller than a normal A4 sheet.

Now the thing doesn't look as simple as you thought? It is indeed. If you just think about what you really need (not what you want) and which business objectives are you pursuing. Think slow and think it before you even contact any supplier.

More insights? From this presentation maybe you can get a broader vision on how to plan your Digital Marketing Strategy