By Richard Krueger on February 6, 2010
I was pleasantly surprised to see a new design to the Facebook home page when I woke up this snowy Sat. morning. Facebook was even nice enough to bring attention to the new features. But one menu item easily accessible via the new pull down Account Tab on the upper right corner of the screen was “Credit Balance,” which takes you to credit card account balance information. While Facebook self-serve advertisers and virtual item purchasers might be familiar with Facebook’s payment system, seems like they’re making it front-and-center for a reason, readying their revenue machine for the 400-million-plus Facebook users. Can you say caching, caching!
Posted in Facebook, Sales | Tagged e-commerce, Facebook
By Michael Friedin on January 28, 2010
While not all that impressed with the iPad from a features standpoint (it does seem to be an oversized iPhone OS), you have to hand it to Apple for creating another revenue model off of its platform. The primary takeaway for me was Jobs defining and claiming ownership of the mobile device market while adding the next generation conduit into that family of products (and playfully ripping the Netbook concept in the process.)
The world used to be your Oyster. Now the world is your Apple: one that connects and collaborates on the move; yet, despite the connectivity, can be paradoxically extreme in its isolation. That ability to be remote, yet remain fluid and productive (not to mention entertained), with all of the content and functionality that is keenly addressed by Apple in its innovation trajectory, will have a profound impact on individual capacity to engage and produce. The enterprise will not lag far behind.
The iPad may not be anything more than an iPhone on steroids, but it changes the game nonetheless.
Posted in Innovation, Leadership, Media, Mobile, Strategy | Tagged apple, device, Innovation, ipad, iphone, Mobile, netbook
By Richard Krueger on January 7, 2010
A wise blogger once told me that blogging was a game won by he who publishes the most. From an obvious SEO stand-point, this paradigm holds true. By creating content that in turn gets indexed via Google and the others, your site’s rank and position will improve organically.
However, I suspect the blogger was talking beyond pure efficiencies of SEO. When one contributes to a blog on a regular basis, he/she becomes a better blogger, and, in turn, attracts a larger following. One of my New Years resolutions this year is to become a better blogger, in turn, helping AboutFaceDigital become a better resource, and perhaps even better business partner. I hope this is one resolution that won’t end up like my gym membership.
Posted in Blogging | Tagged Blogging, New Years resolution, SEO
By Paul Dunay on November 9, 2009
Whenever I ask members of sales team from around the globe what they need – the answer never changes – more case studies. Its not to say that we don’t respond but for whatever reason it takes a village to get a single case study done.
The reason the sales team loves case studies is it gives them evidence. Evidence for them to start a conversation around your solution and gauge whether there is a need with the potential buyer they are talking to.
Then how do B2B Marketers use that content with Social Media to do the same – here are 5 tricks to Marketing B2B content socially …
1) Tell good Stories – You have a new kind of marketing evolving now – a marketing that is driven by good stories. I think Story Telling is going to be a huge component of the marketers tool kit going forward since the web and social media adore good stories.
2) Make them Sticky – But not just any stories – for example boring stories of an ERP implementation aren’t going to go viral any time soon. But stories that are “sticky” will – but even if you cant have a really sticky story you can at least write about what people care about and in a way in which they will care – ex 7 Ways Facebook will Change your Life was downloaded 10,000 times in the course of a month because it’s a sticky story.
3) Think Friction Free – Think about the friction involved in the packaging of your content and find a way to remove friction from the process. Typical friction-laden processes and long registration forms are usually the culprit so think about circumventing them by uploading to sites like SlideShare give you an easy way to access an audience that can engage with your content.
4) Launch them with all available media – Think about how to maximize your reach into every available channel or media. Find a way to take the core idea and distribute into every possible niche of consumer attention – get creative and leverage that story to maximize the mileage you can get from it.
5) Measure Reach, Efficiency and Value – If you are going to go through the trouble of putting your content out there – why not gauge the effectiveness of the content by measuring how many people you reach, how efficient that reach was (did they click through to learn more, did it drive website visits up, did they register for more information on your site) and finally what value did that bring – a newly minted lead in your database is worth something and it gives you a stream of leads to nurture to the point that you can hand them to your sales team as a sales ready lead that they can close!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Content Marketing, Conversational Marketing, Social media, Thought Leadership
By Paul Dunay on November 3, 2009
Back in the year 2000, Malcolm Gladwell published his landmark book called The Tipping Point. And little did he know 9 years later he would have set the stage for how many Contact Centers handle Social Media?
Let me explain …
Many of the most Socially advanced Contact Centers today are using tools to listen in on Conversations. Conversations that are happening about their brand, conversations that are happening about their competition, and of course conversations that revolve around Customer Support! Customer Support makes for an easy anchor of any good Social Media strategy so it stands to reason that Customer Support would play a leading role when it comes to listening in on Conversations.
But today’s listening and analytical technology for social conversations are still in their infancy. So many Contact Center managers find themselves using their listening tools to find Support opportunities and then manually “cutting and pasting” them into email to send to the agent that can best handle the inquiry.
In his book, Gladwell describes “agents of change” like the Connectors who are the people who “link us up with the world”. He characterizes these individuals as having social networks of over one hundred people. And the Mavens who are “information specialists”, or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.” They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others.
So in effect the Contact Center Manager acts as the Social Agent of Change, more specifically in the role as the “Connector” linking up the worlds social requests to the best qualified Agent who then plays the role of the “Maven” or information specialist.
While this is a great role for the Contact Center to play it has 2 distinct pitfalls. First is this approach while admirable is just not scaleable. Too much manual intervention and we need to evolve the analytical tools take the place of the “Connector” role. Second we are going to need to get to a place where all this is trackable and measurable rather than unstructured workloads.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Customer Support, Social media
By Paul Dunay on October 27, 2009
Firey laptop batteries, defective chips, tainted foods, toothpaste that stains teeth – these are just some real examples of issues that struck companies recently that might have been headed off at the pass by Social Media.
When you have an issue these days – what’s the first place you go for more information? That’s right – the Internet – most likely Google but increasingly for real time information search you might use Twitter. Conversely most people don’t just pick up the phone and call a company anymore.
Some of these issues first showed up on Twitter way before they ever hit the Contact Center. Perhaps days before anyone called into the Contact Center to inquire.
With the speed of Social Media these days – wouldn’t you love to have a few day head start? Well you do – but only if you are listening.
A peer of mine said that she has seen this effect already on Twitter but she doesn’t jump at the first sighting – she waits to see at least a second sighting perhaps in a different channel (or coming from a different region) before she decides to engage.
While clearly you need to use your best judgment – you do have the opportunity to head off at the pass serious issues for your brand before they become front page news. The only caveat is, you have to be listening …
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Social media
By Paul Dunay on October 15, 2009
Many agencies today are offering Social Media services (if they aren’t they need to). But for many of them it is often hard to architect the strategy since so much of the knowledge of ‘who to go to’ for ‘what type of Social Media conversation’ is very internal knowledge.
A good Social Media strategy starts with looking at what Conversations you want to engage in, what Objectives you have for engaging in those conversations, what Strategy you will have to fulfill on those objectives and finally what Technology you will use to get there.
In order to plan that out for a client, the agency can work with them to get a sense for the Conversations a brand should be engaged in, what Objectives they should have for engaging in these conversation, what strategy will best fulfill on your objective and what technology to use. But where Agencies typically are challenged is on the “who” part of the equation – “who” will be the person best suited to represent the brand for a particular type of conversation.
Agencies have to get internally savvy fast to navigate the waters of an organization and this typically doesn’t happen overnight. Or perhaps they need to find the “super connector” within the organization who can help them articulate who to go to as point of contact for those conversations.
So when you are working with an outside agency on helping you with your Social Media strategy the best place to focus your efforts to help them is in the identification and recruitment of strong personas who can represent your brand in some very specific conversations.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Social media
By Richard Krueger on October 11, 2009
T-Mobile, who last weekend had a major outage for all SideKick owners (yes, there are still some faithful who own Sidekicks, but not for much longer). However, when I contacted customer service, they continued to feed me company lies that our data was not lost and to stay tuned for further word on the restoration efforts of our data.
Having spent more than 15 years in public relations, working for more than one major mobile provider, I could read between the lines. When I first spoke to T-Mobile customer service on Mon., they reiterated the company mantra – that all things would be restored. It was repeated again on Tues., and for the remainder of the week.
Well, you can imagine my surprise when I received an SMS alert today, Sat. First, I didn’t even realize text messaging was returned to service, so any txt message was a surprise, let alone from the mouth of the best itself. However, the link included in the TXT message was not clickable, perhaps an omen for what was to come.
Excitedly, I was awaiting word on when my mobile phone book, one which took me better than three years to build, would be brought back to life, after a full week of being assured the data would not be lost. Following are the exact words that have put me in a bad mood on this Sat night, “Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low.
Yet another example of the man sticking it to the customer. Where does the blame lie? Is it in T-Mobile. Or, perhaps Microsoft who recent acquired Danger, maker’s of the Sidekick and its Danger operating system. Well, I’m sure after all of the finger pointing one thing is for certain, the rich get richer, while Rich gets screwed again. T-Mobile, if you’re listening, a simple apology would be nice, but, why not go a step further, and do the right thing and bring back our data that we trusted you with.
Posted in Mobile | Tagged cell phone, Danger, Microsoft, Mobile, mobile data, mobile internet, Sidekick, T-Mobile
By Richard Krueger on October 7, 2009
Samepoint, a company which grew out of the need to monitor and manage what people were saying about my clients, is making its vast data pipe available to the enterprise. Let me tell you a little bit about how it started. About six months ago, my co-founder and CTO, Darren Culbreath, was asked if Samepoint has an API? Embarrassingly, we had to say no and then thought about it. Why should we have an API? What could we developers do with our API that would be dramatically different than the other search companies offering social media APIs?
So to Darren’s foresight, hard work and determination, he undertook a major effort to evaluate each and everyone. He was surprised of the diversity of options. Yahoo was cool because it had many output options. Google blog search was excellent because of the real-time nature. Technorati was great for its ranking capabilities.
However, Darren identified three gaps that were missing, in which Samepoint could bring our innovation to the test. These gaps took us 6 months to fill. Filling these gaps became our mission, which we have now delivered on. The missing elements include:
- Volume – if you want to make a real brand attribute decision, you need more than what other search engines are giving up. I need say 100,000 to get a large enough sampling of opinions.
- Diversity – as a market researcher, you want a broad spectrum of social media channels from which to gather your data. This includes comments from video sites, social networks, Twitter and other microblogs, blogs bulletin boards, review sites, etc. We found that the only way to get such a diverse representation of sources was to build it ourselves.
- Search-ability - The other gap was search. The APIs we reviewed were awesome for mashups. The gap that existed was the ability to search deeper like proximity search, fuzzy search, etc. This is so needed because the vocabulary of social media contributors is very diverse. For example, LOL means Laugh Out Loud btw is “by the way”. When looking for Brands like “Target” you can imagine the value of having enterprise search capabilities built into the API.
So, we made an API. It currently holds 100 million comments and has comments from a mix of millions of sources. It discovers about 5 million new comments per day and is equipped with an enterprise search engine as the backend. Our clients are now pulling over 100,000 records per day from the API (but can pull much more if needed).
We are all very excited about this API because it now opens the doors for us to partner with some really cool application providers. It took us six months to write our code, and thanks to Amazon, our server farm can grow with the speed of social media. You can read about the API here. If you can think of some cool features you’d like to see added, just shoot us a note at learn@samepoint.com or make a comment. Thank you all for your interest in our real-time API. To the developer community, If you think you have a need for a robust API to make your application rock, just shoot us an email. We love to collab.
Posted in Buzz Marketing, Conversational Marketing, Crowdsourcing, Enterprise 2.0, PR, Reputation Management, Reputation Monitoring, Social media, User Generated Content, Web 2.0 | Tagged Darren Culbreath, developer, real-time search, Richard Krueger, Samepoint, social media API
