Archive for the ‘Social Leadership’ category

Open Letter to Buyer-Centric Organizations

December 20th, 2011
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The last two posts, an “Open Letter to CMOs” and an “Open Letter to Buyers” have triggered a large number of pretty intense conversations about the frustrations that you’re feeling today around the disruptive impact social media is having on your markets.  It’s disruptive, not because of the technology, but because of the impact it’s having on your relationships with your buyers, their perceptions of your organization and their desire to want to begin or continue to do business with you.  The fear and the uncertainty that you’ve shared with me is not knowing what impact this disruption will ultimately have on your company’s reputation, revenue, market share, the quantity and quality of the relationships with your buyers, if you were to just continue down the same path you’re on today.

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Posted in Complex Solutions, Social Leadership

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Open Letter to CMO’s – Social Target Marketing for Complex Sales

September 26th, 2011
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I’m not sure if you saw the “Open Letter to CMO’s” in the Social Executive Council.  The feedback we’ve received is that the post is helping to build your own business case to address the impact that social is having on the purchase behaviors in your industry, in particular those with a very complex buying/selling process.

With that in hand, many of you have now asked me to share our approach, to arm you, as the internal advocate, for the conversations you need to have within your organizations as to why social target marketing is more critical than ever.

At a high level, social target marketing is about how we can build better relationships with likely buyers to create new opportunities for our business that we’re missing out on today.

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Posted in Business Case, Complex Solutions, Enterprise Social, Marketing for CEOs, Marketing Strategy, Social Leadership

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Recent Social Executive Council Post: Open Letter to CMO’s

September 9th, 2011
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It has been awhile since I wrote my last open letter to the SEC, but my goal with these is to summarize important trends that I see consistently across the executive members within the group in a way that helps highlight major strategic challenges. Continue reading “Recent Social Executive Council Post: Open Letter to CMO’s” »

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Posted in Business Case, Complex Solutions, Enterprise Social, Marketing Strategy, Online Communities, Social Leadership

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Social Lead Generation: Why it is different from regular lead generation.

January 31st, 2011
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Lately we have been working with several clients on lead generation programs within their organization.  When they first approached us, however, their stories had a common denominator line — “we’ve tried social media but it has not yielded sales/results/ROI for our organization.”

Indeed, these days most organizations are utilizing social media in one capacity or another.  However, from a lead generation perspective, many of these same organizations have been:

  • Applying traditional activities to social lead generation (e.g. posting advertisement copy on social sites, requesting a meeting with the first interaction, etc.)
  • Incorporating social inconsistently for sales generation –ad hoc participation creates ad hoc results.
  • Focusing social media activity on popular versus strategic social sites that target a specific audience (and utilizing these sites casually rather than in a business manner).

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Posted in General Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Online Communities, Social Leadership, social marketing

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Social Business Fades Away

January 25th, 2011
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For those of us who lived through the web evolution remember the disruption on business status quo quite well…

5 Stages of Web Development

  1. Websites and Webmasters – tactical and basic
  2. Web Groups – tactical and advanced
  3. Web Strategy – Strategic and Advanced
  4. Web Functional – Every Dept. and Application had a web function
  5. Business Strategy – Web no longer became an issue, everything was web enabled – assumed

In Social Business, we are seeing the same thing….

  1. Social Media Presence on Public Social Networking Sites and Social Media Managers – Assumed
  2. Social Media Groups – Maturing – Team to manage the social function
  3. Social Strategy – Evolving – Strategic and Coordinated Across Enterprise
  4. Social Function – Emerging
  5. Business Strategy – TBD – social becomes part of the enterprise DNA

If social business strategies and functions are still evolving yet, that means that there doesn’t currently exist an industry standard for developing a social business structure. This translates into a greater risk either of failure or inability to justify investment; inconsistent performance; or a lack of measurability. In short, business impact will be continue to be ad hoc until a standardized set of industry methodologies emerge. Mature organizations need risk management and defined ROI for major investments which will drive the development.

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Posted in Enterprise Social, General Marketing, Marketing for CEOs, Marketing Strategy, Social Leadership, Social Market Research

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