I recently read the post over at The Church of the Customer, written by Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell (two of the smartest folks in this business), regarding the hoopla over at Maker’s Mark. Maker’s Mark is one brand under the umbrella of the Beam family of products. Even our friend over at Raidious, Dodge Lile, chimed in with some astute observations. It seems that Maker’s Mark had decided to dilute their product to stretch ongoing inventory, and thereby meet increasing demand. The backlash that the Maker’s Mark brand suffered through sharing this decision via their website,
The First Step in Social Business: Discovery
I recently finished reading (for the second time) the great book, Social Business By Design: Transformative Social Media Strategies for the Connected Company, by Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim. The question I often hear is “Where do we start?” The short answer is that you should start at the beginning, but how we define the beginning is probably the most critical step. How does an organization go about integrating social collaboration and social business concepts into all of their functional areas? Should it be an all or nothing effort, or should it be moderated by
Brands and Content Marketing: Beware the Hype
Michael Brito, the talented Senior Vice President of Social Business Planning at Edelman Digital (and all around good egg), recently wrote about two brands that are aggressively shifting much of their marketing focus into media centers. I find it encouraging that early corporate adopters are evolving their content marketing strategies into a much more holistic, participatory platform. Concurrent with this shift, however, there are other marketing trends that we should follow with a critical eye, and not confuse corporate media with journalism. The Trend There is a huge trend happening in the marketing industry, and
The Future Of Social IS The Future Of Marketing
I recently had the opportunity to attend ExactTarget Connections 2012, and among several panel discussions, I especially enjoyed the one entitled Social 2020: What Will Become Of Us? Moderated by the inimitable Jeff Rohrs, VP Marketing Research & Education at ExactTarget, it included Margaret Francis, VP of Social at ExactTarget, David Berkowitz, VP of Emerging Media at 360i, Stephen Tarleton, Director of Global Channel & SMB Marketing Bazaarvoice, and Sam Decker, CEO and Founder of Mass Relevance. The panel had some thought provoking insights, and some predictions, or course. As a marketer, I have my own thoughts
Alterian SDL|SM2: Social Media Intelligence
Alterian SDL|SM2 is a social media intelligence solution that provides companies with visibility into their presence in the social landscape and reveals where the relevant conversations are occurring, who is participating, and what customers think about them. Founder Mark Lancaster explains why SDL is key to your company’s online marketing efforts: This tool contains all the run of the mill functionality that most tools in the social media marketing offer, but goes that extra mile to deliver some hard to find functionality such as sentiment analysis, daily volume, key influencer and more. While many tools