social marketing

Written by Jason Miller.

Social media is the Wild West of differing opinions. In a split second you can find yourself receiving a virtual hi-five and then immediately involved in a shootout at the OK corral. This is both the beauty and the beast of social media. It can be a marketer’s best friend or your worst enemy depending on your ability to keep your cool.

by: Rick Siegfried

Our friends at MarketingProfs hosted the most recent installation of their Digital Marketing World virtual conference series last Friday. The topic was that which no marketer can seem to get enough of these days, Social Media. It was interesting to see how social marketing has taken a profound shift from being about brand awareness to being about lead generation. Sharpening the harpoon of your social lead generation strategy is the new white whale that will be wrestled with and “white papered” to no end in this new era.

Trust me, it sounds better if you sing it with Tony Bennett’s voice and to the melody of “The Best Is Yet To Come” (here is a video of him and Diana Krall singing it — Merry Christmas and Happy New Year present from me to you).

After hearing Forrester analyst Diane Clarkson talk on “Customer Service Is the New Social Marketing” at eTail last month, I just had to ask her to share her insights here.

Diane’s work at Forrester focuses on online customer service and she’s become convinced ”social media and customer service are no longer flirting — they are getting serious.” Take a listen to this interview to hear Diane:

Pepsi is so happy with its "Refresh Project" social media marketing campaign that it has renewed funding for 2011 and will expand it to the rest of the world. This year it will give away $20 million to the good works projects that win the most supportive votes from consumers, representing "true democratization of the philanthropic process," according to a company spokesman.

As I wrote in the final part of the Roadmap to SCRM series, we are plunging into an era of community participation.

Communities are so much more than the traditional forum-like model. It is necessary to build good communities to get value and a return on the investment you put into it.

As promised, I’ve decided to share (and test) my next three rules of social media marketing, as a follow on to my last post.

These are loosely inspired by the “immutable laws” from Ries and Trout, and are based on some of the models my firm is developing. They also aim to be observations and discussion starters as much as recommendations.

by: Jennifer Rice

As I've been talking with people about Fruitful's mission to advance "conscious capitalism," it's become clear that social impact is often perceived as a nice-to-have rather than a critical component to business strategy. Here are 10 reasons why you may want to help your company rethink that notion.