Straight Talk Blog
Ted RubinQ&A: How to drive measurable ROI from social media NOW
Courtney Velasquez, Social Fabric Community Director, interviewed John Andrews, Collective Bias (CB) Founder/CEO, and Ted Rubin and Dave Henry of the CB Board of Advisors to understand how brands and retailers can measure social media ROI, engage in shopper listening...
Q&A: How to drive measurable ROI from social media NOW
Courtney Velasquez, Social Fabric Community Director, interviewed John Andrews, Collective Bias (CB) Founder/CEO, and Ted Rubin and Dave Henry of the CB Board of Advisors to understand how brands and retailers can measure social media ROI, engage in shopper listening...
Q&A: How to drive measurable ROI from social media NOW
Courtney Velasquez, Social Fabric Community Director, interviewed John Andrews, Collective Bias (CB) Founder/CEO, and Ted Rubin and Dave Henry of the CB Board of Advisors to understand how brands and retailers can measure social media ROI, engage in shopper listening...
You can Rock the World… through your Female Consumers
“If you figure out how to harness the power of female customers, you can rock the world,” says Aileen Lee in her recent TechCrunch guest post, “Why Women Rule the Internet.” This declaration is music to my ears and one of the primary reasons I have joined...
Social Media Strategy: What doesn’t work
You know what doesn’t work for a social media strategy? Not being social. It might sound like common sense, but all too often, being social is overlooked in a social media strategy. It’s not enough to just start accounts with all the most popular social media tools...
Authentic Feedback — are you really getting it?
Market research can be tricky because people have a tendency toward giving you the answers they think you want. It is simply human nature, and something we marketers must pay attention to. In the past, the solution to avoiding this skewed feedback has been to provide...
Make Your Customers Feel at Home
In the physical world, when our trusted and valued friends come to visit our house, we often welcome them by saying, “Come in…make yourselves at home!” In the virtual world, do you do the same thing? When customers and prospects visit your online site, do they feel...
Social Media Metrics-what meets your “Conditions of Satisfaction”?
Many people are finally realizing that social media is serious business. Not “serious” as in stuffy, fun-resistant, and devoid of personality, but “serious” as in something that is of great value to our companies and needs to be treated as such. What is one of the...
No more mixed messages: Integrate Social Media Marketing!
Social media marketing to most in the C-suite is still a campaign-based tactic, viewed and managed separately, but it really should be integrated. Social media marketing needs to be woven into the fabric of all marketing channels and strategically managed from a...
ROR: Return on Relationship™ in Education
In the last post I was honored to speak with Ted Rubin about his take on what it means for our children to achieve in life and how parents, schools and communities support that achievement. As mentioned, Mr. Rubin is the creator of the term Return on Relationship™...
“Influencers Want to be Influenced”
Let’s face it… customers don’t become influencers in order to champion brands out of the goodness of their hearts, or because of a brilliantly-designed logo or a couple coupons they can download from the internet. Customers become influencers because something about...
Return on Relationship™: The New Measure of Success
ReturnOnRelationship.com Social media is quickly becoming a way of life… and a way of business as more and more companies are realizing they need to integrate social media into their marketing strategies. We can’t, however, expect to do “business as usual” and...
Advocacy drives “Social Sampling”
Originally posted at ZuberRants Kleenex made waves with its recent “Softness Worth Sharing campaign,” which encouraged people to have FREE Kleenex sample packs sent to friends and family. Earlier this month, a reported 1 million Kleenex packs had been sent on behalf...
My Interview for the “Let Children Achieve” Blog…
Achievement expresses itself in as many unique forms as there are students. If we remove achievement from its current cookie cutter test definition, how do we define it? Read the rest if this post at Let Children Achieve
My Interview for the "Let Children Achieve" Blog…
Achievement expresses itself in as many unique forms as there are students. If we remove achievement from its current cookie cutter test definition, how do we define it? Read the rest if this post at Let Children Achieve
My Interview for the "Let Children Achieve" Blog…
Achievement expresses itself in as many unique forms as there are students. If we remove achievement from its current cookie cutter test definition, how do we define it? Read the rest if this post at Let Children Achieve
When Customer Service drops the ball, who do you call… Twitter ???
Traditional customer service certainly gets its share of bad-mouthing: endless pre-categorized “service” menu selections followed by long wait times to speak with a customer representative, plus the constant risk of getting disconnected, or the call dropping in the...
We need to ask the Moms!
Originally posted at SheSpeaks The recent Yahoo study suggesting that Dads rule the grocery shopping cart is causing a stir in the marketing community with article headlines like “Time to Rethink Your Message: Now the Cart Belongs to Daddy.” The study shows that out...
Long-term Advocacy Enhanced by Emotional Connection
One of the most valuable returns of the social media proliferation is the renewed fervor around Brand Advocacy. The truly remarkable thing about Brand Advocates is that they proactively recommend brands and productswithout getting paid…but if they are not getting...
Who Owns Your brand?
Originally posted at SheSpeaks In the past, marketing owned the brand, using a tightly controlled set of messages piped through carefully selected channels to ensure brand “ownership” through control….but that’s no longer the case. The increasing integration of...
Dads Often Set Themselves up to Get the Short-End with their Children in Divorce… Beware and Step-up!
The problem with Dads and Divorce is that the vast majority of Dads are not the custodial parent and therefore, no matter the Legal Custody status (which for many is that both have full Joint Legal Custody) in effect the Dad has little or no control on what goes on...
Build Relationships, Not Billboards!
The marketing paradigm is shifting with much greater “power to the people” facilitated by social media. If you want to continue to reach your market, it's not about advertising any more, but about building relationships. Consider the following differences:...
Brand Advocates are People Too… Nurture that Relationship!
Originally posted at ZuberRants It is true that Brand Advocates have value in part due to the reach of their relationships within and across their social networks. When they encourage their friends and colleagues to buy our products, our brand’s buying power...
Be the Change Your Customers Want You to Be!
Originally posted at SheSpeaks In today's fast-paced, ever changing environment, most brands rank poorly when it comes to customer service. We might argue that it’s to be expected, since change is now more constant than ever... but the hard truth is that if we don’t...
Proud Father
Parents do not realize when their daughter is a child, how fleeting the moments are. And in the blink of an eye, the little girl who did pirouettes (cartwheels) down the hall is dancing her way through her own life. What a joy it was then, what a joy it is now, what...
Send Your Ego to the Back Seat and Bring Your Consumers to the Front
Originally posted at SheSpeaks Thanks to the continual evolution of social media, we have a growing set of useful tools for gathering feedback about our brand reputation. Online branded communities, for example, are becoming increasingly valuable meeting spaces...
Customer Service “is” the New Marketing
Originally posted at ZuberRants Remember the old small business customer service mentality? Where pleasing the customer came FIRST, and the need to delight them was “a given” not an option? Great news – it’s back (or at least on its way back)! The democratizing...
Don’t Forget to Ask Women for Direction(s)!
Originally posted at SheSpeaks In this new social media marketing world -- where it's less about demographics and more about relationships -- one demographic still clearly matters: WOMEN. Women control 85% of household spending, and (according to Bank of America...
How do *You* define ‘Best Customer’?
Originally posted at ZuberRants Seth Godin has it exactly right when he asks in a recent blog post, "…what if you define ‘best customer’ as the person who brings you new customers through frequent referrals, and who sticks with you through thick and thin?" In other...
The Antidote to Negative Commentary
Originally posted at SheSpeaks As much as we might not want to admit it, something negative about our brand will be said sometime by someone in a social network. It might be due to a change, or something out of the brand’s control or only one little misstep in many...