Corporateinklings

Customers Are Asking for Help. Who’s Answering Them?

2012-05-29T13:20:08Z

Your customers and prospects are out there and talking – about your industry, and you. Are you letting your competitors speak for you?

When customers and prospect turn to social networks for guidance, there’s an opportunity to jump in and influence the conversation. It’s more direct than most social activity, and it can pay off with new leads.

Finding where these conservations take place requires some digging; our latest market brief – Social Audits: Five Steps for Improving Your Social ROI – includes tips for uncovering these opportunities.

We’ve analyzed thousands of conversations. What we find: The top four channels are surprisingly different from each other, when it comes to advice-seeking B2B prospects and customers:

Twitter: Practitioners – especially in the security space – flock here to for quick answers to their technical problems.
LinkedIn’s Private Groups: It takes time to identify, vet, and get accepted into membership-only forums, but they’re full of executives and managers looking for strategy-forming guidance and best practices.
Quora: It’s still up-and-coming, and not every industry is there yet, but we’ve seen lots of questions about products and key influencers – and there’s still room to jump in and make your mark early on.
Competitors’ online communities: Access might be an issue, but courtesy shouldn’t be – it’s all fair game.

You can do an audit in 20 hours. If you don’t have the time – call us. Don’t waste even more time focusing on the wrong targets.

Keep Work & Life Separate? A CEO’s Counterpoint

2012-05-22T14:14:45Z

Earlier this month, Amy Bermar shared her “Three Biggest Mistakes Running a Business.” In the post, she cited the value of not doing it all and separating work from life. She heard back from a CEO we know, who offered his take on these points.

1. I believe that the amount and success of separation of work and life is a function of the nature of your business.

a. Our global business demands that we work on customer timeframes.

b. The mission critical nature of our equipment to our customers creates inherent expectations about response.

c. The nature of the job function (global sales and global service) imposes certain work characteristics.

d. People that need complete separation and don’t have the ability to intermix work and life need to find jobs and companies that fit their preferences. Lots of jobs allow for clocking in and clocking out. Other jobs require that we find time for recreation around and within the work schedule. Life stage should match work type.

e. Good companies and good leaders know how to help employees find roles that fit.

2. With respect to ‘do it all’ or focus, I feel different. We must leverage everyone in our organizations, and setting a critical few mentality slows and impairs growth in my experience.

a. Great leaders accomplish more than weak leaders.

i. Great leaders do great work breakdowns (better planning) with aligned activities in each function.

ii. Great leaders segment the work for their reports.

iii. Great leaders give lots of specific focused projects to each of their direct reports.

b. Turnarounds require that lots of things get fixed simultaneously.

i. Triage strategies are great ways to set the work plan and help to bring order to chaos.

ii. Slowing down the process of fixes leads to greater casualties.

iii. People need to find work that suits them. Emergency room work is not for everybody and it does tend to lead to burnout. Only very mature people and well balanced can spend their entire careers in emergency environments. It requires confidence and calm amid the chaos.

c. Great project management allows lots of projects, sub-projects, and tasks to get done well and quickly in a synchronized fashion.

By: A CEO We Know

Klout ≠ Influence

2012-05-16T14:37:36Z

I hope you’re ready for this … Are you sitting down?

A high Klout score does not mean you are more social-savvy or have more influence than someone with a low Klout score … (for more detail on the inner workings of Klout, check out Joanna’s post from last year).

Shocking right? This is probably the first time in the history of social measurement applications that a company has claimed that its solution does more than it actually does … (really hope that anyone in marketing is getting a chuckle out of that).

Klout comes up relatively often in conversations with clients and prospects – and the questions are usually the same:

What should we do about Klout?

How can we increase our Klout score?

My response: Why is your Klout score important to you? And what is your social media strategy?

Don’t get me wrong, I think Klout is a cool tool, but it doesn’t measure your social influence. It measures your Klout score … I have a Klout score of 38 and I got a notification that my score went up 10 points in the last 2 weeks. You want to know why? Because I wrote a blog post, developed a queue of five tweets and passed them out to colleagues asking them to tweet and mention me, or retweet my tweets. Do I really influence these people? In Klout’s eyes, yes … But in my eyes, no …

Social sentiment and influence is something that marketers and software developers have been trying to automate and measure for years now – and it feels like nobody has it down to an exact science (at least not that I’ve seen – but Radian6 is doing some really cool things). You can search Klout to try to find potential influencers, but don’t rely on the score alone. You’ll need to do your own digging.

It’s easy to doctor Klout’s system to boost your score – making a high score meaningless. And truthfully it takes away from everything we (as marketers) are trying to accomplish with social media – and that’s engagement.

Still interested in learning more about social influence? Check out this really interesting deck by Altimeter Group.

So, you want to work in PR, huh?

2012-05-14T13:40:07Z

‘Tis the season of caps and gowns, graduation parties, and what will seem like the monumental task of job hunting. Commencement speakers will tell you carpe diem, cherish your friendships, and wear your sunscreen.

That’s all great advice, but it will only get you so far in your quest for that perfect job in PR. I’d like to add in my own two cents as someone who’s braved – and survived – the PR job search many times over.

Network! Tell anyone and everyone you know that you are on the market for a job. You never know where you might find someone willing to make an introduction for you.
Be confident. Play to your strengths and be honest about what you want to improve on. No one expects you to know everything right out of school. A willingness to learn can go a long way.
Don’t take the first job that you get offered. I’m not saying to turn down your dream job just because it is the first offer you get, but I am saying to carefully evaluate your options. It may take a little longer to find the job that best suits you, but you’ll be happier for it.

Good luck, and maybe we’ll see your name on this blog soon as our next new AC.

2Moro’s Email? Will Spllng Mstkes Matter?

2012-05-11T14:28:34Z

How many more times do we need to hear about the basic rules of email? (Hint: read your email. Don’t cc: everyone. Watch your tone.)

What about spelling things correctly? Or using good grammar?

I think they’ll disappear.

I still spell-check my emails, but only after I’ve written them like texts. Then I add back in all the words that make for full sentences. It’s a huge waste of time, and I do it mostly because I fear offending someone with too-cryptic speech, or, more likely, not being understood.

In the next few years, I think the ‘norms’ of spelling and grammar will shape-shift. The Strunk-and-White brigade will be gone, and texting will become the new norm. Like almost all ‘norms’ – it may start out feeling wrong, but with enough exposure, it just slips into the background, until something else weird and wrong replaces it.

So how do we guide text-bred Millennials about how to blend emails with a natural style?

We do tell the people who work here, to assume that every email we write will be read by people we don’t know. That may make email less ‘personal’ – but it also cuts down on how much can be misinterpreted.
Assume that only the first paragraph will be read.
Pick up the phone. When there are three emails on the same topic – it means email isn’t working. Pick up the phone.