Reposted from my personal blog after getting quite a lot of hits. Go figure it would happen on my personal blog.
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Wrote this to a friend who asked a question about blogging:
Mitch’s quick & easy method to blogging. Tweaked over my 5 years of blogging. It isn’t perfect, but it works with minimal effort.
Continue reading
Here’s a copy of the latest whitepaper I just authored in conjunction with my talk tomorrow at The Market Research Event in Boca.
This whitepaper discusses on the the most general, but very important Social-Intelligence use-cases for Market Researchers.
evovle24 – Whitepaper for Market Research
See ya at the event!
Next week I’ll be speaking at the Market Research Event in Boca Raton. I encourage anyone who considers themselves a thought-leader in market research, to attend and interact with my discussion.
topic: Why is Social Intelligence the disruptive force in Market Research? It’s all about context. Continue reading
It’s here, and a few selective online retailers are poised to take advantage of this new disruption come Cyber Monday.
Imagine a data pipe moving data to your ecommerce engine. Imagine this data providing real-time, geo-targeted intelligence derived from the millions of conversations occurring in social media containing highly valuable information about the brands, products, price preferences, sizes, and colors you’re carrying.
Now imagine what might happen to your conversion rate if this data also included emotive and psychographic intelligence.
Stop imagining. The disruptional force is here.
Whether you’re noticing it or not, Hyundai is rolling out their models using a smarter, faster, and more cost effective approach than their american counterparts. With it, they are also changing the way progressive companies approach innovation to leave their competitors in the dust.
The Institute for Search, Social, and Mobile Marketing (ISSMM) put on a spectacular conference in Chicago. The speaker lineup was impressive, and not just because I was one of them. Albeit, my preso was pretty awesome if I do say so myself. Check it out on Slideshare.net
I guess I would say this conference marked a fairly profound advancement in content from other social media conferences I’ve attended even over the last 6 months. Up until Converge 2012, speakers seemed to be merely showcasing various videos and other campaigns that had “gone viral”. While they were fun to watch, I’m not sure what value they provided to me as a participant there to learn how to do my job better. The other conferences seemed more or less vanity opportunities showcasing creative. I had trouble drawing insight and value.
Enter Converge 2012. Continue reading
Black Friday 2012 is going to be an important milestone in the history of the retail industry. The conversations happening right now in social media contain an incredibly valuable intelligence payload which, if properly leveraged, can create enough competitive advantage to not just win on Black Friday, but move industry positions. Imagine a store so highly optimized the experience wins a customer’s loyalty after Black Friday. Industry positions are now in play.
2012’s vulnerable retailers will have relied on what we now know to be “legacy intelligence techniques” to inform their strategies. While the various forms of focus groups and surveys provide valuable information, the retail industry should understand the context of legacy intelligence:
surveys and focus groups represent what the subject wants to tell you – the retailer
2012’s retail winners will have integrated new real-time intelligence to inform their strategy: the intelligence available by analyzing the conversations in social media. In contrast to the legacy intelligence techniques, note the critical distinction in context.
intelligence derived from social media represents what the subjects wants to tell others – the friends, family, and business associates they influence
The payload available from social media intelligence is providing 2012’s Black Friday retailers with real-time, word-of-mouth intelligence. They’re using advanced intelligence, in real-time, including predictive analytics, to optimize the core pillars of retail success:
* optimized inventory – social media conversations convey brands, products, colors, and sizes. Volume, sentiment, and emotional elements of these conversations yields a predictive payload allowing the retailer to optimize their inventory. Down to geography and store level. Now, highly optimized inventory and distribution channels can yield maximum revenue and margin.
* optimized promotions – social intelligence can provide the most effective means to optimize promotions leading up to the date your advertisements go to print. Online retailers can adjust real-time for highly optimized strategies.
* optimized competitive intelligence – social intelligence delivers word-of-mouth intelligence yielding one of the most effective forms for analyzing the strengths of your plan competitively.
Here’s a toast in advance to the retailers who will make 2012 their year to leap.
I’ve been taking advantage of the free wifi offered by many coffee shops, restaurants, and businesses all over the country for years now. The experience of accepting their use agreements has been lackluster with a creativity peak of being forwarded to the establishment’s website.
Ho-hum.
That is until I tapped the free wifi at Pappadeaux. Not only was it a simple page easy to read, it required me to give up my email address to get their free access. I gladly gave it up. Give to get.
Congrats to Pappadeaux for the genius of simplicity, effectiveness, and user experience.
I recently had an introductory meeting with a client to discuss their social business and collaboration needs. As we began talking about their business, it was relayed to me they had recently brought on a new leadership team to grow their business by taking them through a pretty significant transformation of their business.
As we explored the challenges with such a tremendous task, we focused in on the dynamic of new leadership who would need to direct and transform the culture and processes of their legacy information workers. Workers who not only were a part of the old paradigm but had probably helped shape the culture and processes that are about to be changed. This process, as you might expect, was taxing the organization.
The focus of the conversation quickly moved to how can social business concepts help the transformation. Specifically, can these tools increase the pace of adoption? The answer is yes and one of the recommendations called for leadership blogs.
Adoption can be an elusive objective with any new idea, system, or product. Blogs can not only help their adoption by “communicating down”, but more importantly, they can create a more efficient way to engage in a two-way conversation thereby creating buy-in.
In communicating down, the information workers will understand more about the new direction. Answers to important questions they will have such as: why?”, “who are you?” what’s in it for us?”, “what will this look like?”, and the “what’s in it for me?” will be unfiltered and trusted. The two-way conversation (blog comments) allows information workers to not only ask questions but can also expose new ideas. Innovation by engaging all of the workforce. Integrating the legacy with the new.
This recommendation isn’t anything new. Our brethren in social media marketing have already pioneered this path for us in terms of how a brand can create a relationship with an end customer. This recommendation just extends their findings.
I read an interesting article this morning posted by @FastCompany entitled “Email is Crushing us, Can Activity Streams Free us?”
The article’s title is absolutely right on. It’s a comment that I hear often when I speak to customers about productivity and corporate knowledge challenges. Email crushes most of us. There are a lot of theories about how to “deal” with email overload. Just google “GTD (getting things done) and email” and you’ll find a plethora of ideas for managing email. And while these are all good, they are band-aids to the problem.
The core problem with email is that it’s primary context is digital communication.
Let’s take personal email first. One of the most exciting developments for me personally was Facebook offering email addresses. As an example, mine is mitch.loder@facebook.com. Why did I think this was the coolest thing since sliced bread? Because Facebook is the first place I go when I want to be social and interact with friends. It’s convenient. And more importantly, it puts social communications in context for me.
Now let’s take the context of business email. The only context for business email is, well, email. I’m going to argue that email is one of the most outdated systems and thus costs businesses significantly. I believe almost every single email received or sent in a business setting fundamentally is communication out of context.
Back to this post. Consider this question, if every single email is out of context, then what do we have to do to be effective reading and responding to our important emails? Let’s take for example my boss has asked me a question about a balanced scorecard he just reviewed. If I’m going to respond in a way that makes me look like I’m doing my job well, I’m going to have to leave email, find that scorecard he just looked at, look some things up, think about it, maybe send an email to someone else, then go back to my bosses email and reply with my response. In the course of answering this one email to my boss, I had to “switch contexts” by switching applications several times. The premise being that the systems I’m using are not aligned to the business process I just went through and thus makes me less efficient.
I was pleased that the author cited some of the emerging social business platforms. While I think the premise of the article is good, I don’t think it accurately addressed the key issue of email. I think it addressed a use-case and I totally agree with the use case. However, enterprises would greatly benefit by addressing the context of business communications and incorporating it into business processes where it belongs. We haven’t even touched the fact that all of that knowledge exists in an email message only visible to my boss and me.
Here is the article. . It’s a great read and hopefully this post will inspire organizations to think about communication and collaboration in new ways!
human by design 