Blog

According to the 2015 Forrester brief on improving social marketing maturity, Chief Marketing Officers are being judged on three primary key performance indicators (KPIs), especially when brands measure social media. Those are: Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention and Brand Value and Reputation. In a way, that’s something we’ve been saying for a few years now. I’ve […]

Allen Blair emailed me over the weekend asking if there was a one-sheeter or set of tips for live-streaming somewhere. Allen is one of my mother’s fellow communications directors for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s districts (mom is District 12, Allen is District 9. They handle communications for road closing, weather-related road conditions, bridge naming ceremonies, construction information and […]

In 2008, Frank Eliason jumped into online conversations about Comcast and became one of the first social customer service professionals out there. Other than Lionel Menchaca at Dell and a handful of other dotted similar stories, there was no path to follow. Frank had to blaze a trail. And blaze he did. Launching the @comcastcares Twitter […]

We’re all in the business of generating leads. Whether it’s getting people to walk into your retail location or filling the top of your B2B funnel with email addresses, every single one of us benefits when we bring new customers to the table for our companies. Far be it from me to wax poetic like […]

Facebook Topic Data has been a hot button issue in the social listening space of late. Yet many brand don’t fully understand what it is or why they should consider asking for it with their listening platform. If that wasn’t bad enough, I spoke to a representative of a known social listening platform last week […]

If you’re still focused on vanity metrics for your brand, you’ve missed the boat. Vanity metrics no longer matter. They’re useless. And I’ll tell you why. Now that many social networks have developed reliable, relevant, paid solutions with never-before-seen targeting capabilities, it’s no longer necessary to focus on quantity of audience for social marketing success. Social […]

Facebook announced it was opening anonymized conversations for data analysis in March of 2015 and social listening platforms have since been scrambling to offer the feature. They’re forced to go through Facebook’s partner — DataSift — for access so seeing conversations from the world’s largest social network is typically available for an additional cost. But […]

Winging it is something I’ve become quite good at. The DNA of being able to just fly by the seat of my pants comes from my younger days in broadcasting. When the mic is on, you have to say something. And in radio, you don’t always have a script to go by. But winging it in […]

There is a huge opportunity in social technology that nobody is jumping on. I’ve lamented it before and will continue to do so. The honest truth is that whether you’re talking about social media management solutions, social listening or social analytics, no one is focused on helping small businesses. Only in the email marketing category […]

Thursday night in Chicago, I will emcee and host a panel discussion on social analytics and listening for NetBase featuring an impressive group of digital marketing minds. Rick Wion of the Kellogg Company (and once social lead for McDonalds), Jamie Kennedy of Burson-Marstellar, Scott Reitzel from Purple Strategies and Lewis Bertolucci of Humana will join me […]

A Fortune 500 social media director and I were chatting last week and she said something quite profound. We were talking about her brand’s approach to organic vs. paid social content when she nonchalantly had a mic-drop moment. She said: “We’ve stopped doing organic posts. Everything now is paid.” To the social media purist, a […]

The case studies around social listening always fascinate me. Even the tried-and-true customer service saves that make everyone feel warm and fuzzy about social media. But when a company goes beyond the reactive (what I call “monitoring”) use of social listening platforms and applies the technology to inform other business functions, I get excited. 7-11 […]