Have you seen Jimmy Kimmel‘s Mean Tweets skit yet? I finally did when the NBA version came out a week ago (below). The tongue-in-cheek celebrity response to Twitter’s raucous social media culture pierces through a lot of hubris. Mean Tweets says what many of us involved in online community management feel. Life as an online community manager, blogger or personality today requires dealing with some idiotic nastiness that people spew on social media Geoff Livingston on Google+
Businesses think they own their products and experiences. That’s why they brand them, put their personal mark on them, and make signature experiences. The role community members play in creating and developing successful brands is a stark change. This collaborative shift is caused by technology in the form of social and mobile, and a new “we” ethos brought on by millennials. Last week, my friend Jeremiah Owyang and the Altimeter Group team released a major study called The Collaborative Economy that drove this point home. Brands continue evolving from something discussed to collaborative distribution channels built on the premise of sharing products and services. In many ways, collaboration provides an opportunity for businesses to create a new sales channel, something I …
Chart Source: CMO Survey If you think small, you stay small. That’s why companies and brands that treat social like a unique practice — a box within the larger whole — will struggle to achieve results and intangible outcomes. Building seemless customer experiences should take the fore in all strategies. Yet according to the CMO Survey, the integration gap in companies is not closing, in spite of years of research showing that cross-tactic coordination produces more sales. The struggle to achieve ROI and real business impact with new media strategies is a direct result of focusing on individual tactics. Rather than simply discuss integration, an easier approach may be to consider building from the customer’s viewpoint. Customers don’t care about …
Image by kopper. More brands and people continue filling the channels with their blogs, infographics, white paper, etc. As a result, we’re experiencing a deluge of content, most of it suffering from over-messaged, self-important corporate sales talk, or worse, shoddy workmanship. There’s no better example of this issue than our own marketing space where the effort to produce consistent content creates an ever increasing level of drivel. In fact, there’s so much “me, too” content, getting beyond a headline skim requires some real shake-up in the social media marketplace or a dramatic post. When readers find themselves inundated with ever increasing quantities of the same, creators find themselves producing content with diminishing value. The situation devolves to the point where …
As one of my projects, Vocus asked me to program the Demand Success 2013 conference (6/20-21), their first marketing conference open to the general public. Last week we announced our second major keynote, Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy Olsen on Mad Men. I was tickled that the buzz revolved around Mad Men, and not the presence of two strong ladies Moss and Arianna Huffington as the leading voices of Demand Success 2013. To me, that’s remarkable because for once female speakers at an Internet marketing conference are a non-issue. Our two primary keynotes are women, and no one cares. Why? Because they are qualified, relevant, and obvious. Geoff Livingston on Google+
