From the monthly archives:

August 2010

The Fun Of Strategic Thinking And Planning

by Jason Falls · August 30, 2010

There’s a 96-inch long white board in my office. It is where I collect my thoughts for specific projects as I’m writing, planning or producing them. It is currently full of lists and reminders for a client’s digital marketing and social media strategic plan. I go through notes from client meetings, make lists of potential strategics or tactics, throw broad concepts and ideas up, enumerate client concerns, brand values and relevant research and then I study the board for a while.

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19 comments

WANTED: Thought Fire-Starters And Status Quo Questioners

by Jason Falls · August 27, 2010

Would you like to be a regular blogger at Social Media Explorer? I’m taking suggestions (not applicants … it’s not a job) and nominees for smart thinkers, status-quo challengers, tool reviewers and people who understand social media marketing better be about business or you’ll be flipping burgers soon. I want to share this platform with thought fire-starters.

We are smarter than me.

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14 comments

Viralheat Makes More Social Media Monitoring Free

by Jason Falls · August 25, 2010

In February, we talked about social media monitoring newcomer Viralheat and how they were lowering the barrier to entry for social media monitoring by offering quality results at lower-than-typical prices. Now the rising start-up is doing even more to shake up the monitoring landscape by offering a top layer of monitoring results through its Charts feature to anyone … for free.

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21 comments

The Problem With Empowering The Customer

by Jason Falls · August 23, 2010

My friend Edward Boches had a crappy experience at a Marriott Hotel last week. Like any good content producer, he blogged about it. Social media more than any other communications mechanism before has done more for placing market control back in the hands of the consumer. The barrier to entry to the web is a pulse and scant brain waves. If you are moderately functional, you can publish.

Boches, who has far more brain waves than most of us, offered a fantastic suggestion to any business in his post. He saw through his frustration to offer up a customer bill of rights of sorts for Marriott. He suggested it look something like this:

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53 comments

How To Comment Without Selling

by Jason Falls · August 20, 2010

Someone asked me a question about blog commenting recently that I thought peculiar. It’s a question that many brands, marketers and public relations folks have asked, for sure. But for whatever reason, the question just seemed odd to me. The person asked:

“What is the best way for a corporation to comment on a blog without seeming to promote their products?”

The root of the question is the company’s desire to not be spammy with their blog comment activities online. I’m thrilled marketers are asking that question. But it still seems peculiar to me. Maybe my perspective is a bit different, but here’s how I answered:

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40 comments

Understanding And Implementing Social CRM

by Jason Falls · August 17, 2010

There’s lots of buzz around “social CRM” software, strategies and programs these days. It’s getting the kind of play “social business” did about this time last year when the analysts at Forrester jumped ship for Altimeter and Dachis. They had to invent new phrases to sell their services to the C-Suite. If you don’t have an innovative-sounding name for what you do, then I guess you don’t attract as much attention.

Social CRM is being hawked by monitoring services, market research firms, traditional sales software and — if you can believe it — Twitter applications. Brand managers, marketing managers and agencies everywhere are anxious to get them some of that social CRM, by golly. Sadly, most of them don’t even know what CRM stands for.

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33 comments

The Paradox Of Social Media Tools

by Jason Falls · August 16, 2010

For the better part of the last five years, companies, agencies, consultants and managers have been sifting through all sorts of different platforms, softwares and programs, looking for that one social media tool that will solve their company’s or client’s problem. I have personally wasted about 57 aggregate days of my life sitting through hour-long demos on everything from Twitter clients to social media monitoring platforms and CRM solutions to WordPress plugins.

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28 comments

How To Drive Tweets With Your Presentations

by Jason Falls · August 11, 2010

I joke that Dan Zarrella has too much time on his hands. The “social media scientist” has been researching the social behaviors behind many social media tools long before HubSpot noticed and gobbled him up. The insights that he’s produced from that research over the years has been a mixed batch of awesomeness that has helped build better tools and refine social media marketing behavior for more efficient use of the tools.

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20 comments

Checking In With Whrrl … At Whrrl

by Jason Falls · August 9, 2010

If you subscribe to my monthly newsletter, you know when it comes to location-based services, I’m quite partial to Whrrl. Unlike Foursquare or Gowalla, there’s more to Whrrl than checking in and getting coupons. Whrrl allows you to annotate your visit with notes, images and more to create virtual scrapbooks of your event or visit. (Think a child’s T-ball game.) When there are more Whrrl users at an event, you can tie the stories together on the location’s page and see what other users are adding to the scrapbooks.

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11 comments

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