Conversational Marketing

Community Managers: Whose Best Interests Do You Serve?

by Jordan Cooper · October 26, 2010

The “Wild West” of social media is upon us. Brands are staking their ground in the proverbial gold rush – it’s an all out land grab. From small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, there are new industry positions being created left and right to quantify specific disciplines. (Typically, these job titles usually end with the word “strategist.”)

In this digital age where the public/private line is intertwined and customers are so connected, brands are feeling the pressure to add a community manager position to navigate them through this tumultuous time. (A byproduct of the “everyone else is doing it” syndrome.)

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Brand Evangelist Jobs: An Oxymoron?

by Jordan Cooper · September 17, 2010

Good morning, folks! My name is Jordan Cooper and I’m the official brand ambassador of this blog and the appointed evangelist of Social Media Explorer and the legend himself, Jason Falls. How can I help you today?

Wait … before you answer that question, I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you about the awesomeness of this blog. We’ve got killer posts here that are jaw-dropping in quality. Our content is like none other and written by authors that completely transcend the industry – like Adam what’s-his-face and Ike Spigot (or is it Faucet?).

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Online Customer Engagement is a Myth

by Eric Brown · September 10, 2010

The Social Media Echo Chamber clamors that as business owners, we need to embrace the new media, be transparent, join the conversation and engage with our customers. That sure does have a smooth and flowery pitch. Accordingly, that is how it works for your business. Launch a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter account, a blog and let the customer engagement begin. Your over-satisfied and happy customers will flock to your digital pasture with stimulating and fulfilling “engagement.”

Not So Fast With That Advice

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Six Steps For Dealing With Detractors

by Jason Falls · July 6, 2010

Dealing with detractors is perhaps one of the biggest pain points for companies just starting and even well entrenched in social media marketing. “What if someone says something bad about our company?” is often asked by brand managers, executives and more when opening their websites or even Facebook pages to conversations and interactions with consumers.

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25 Simple Ways To Earn Trust

by Jason Falls · May 31, 2010

I’ve been exploring conversational marketing lately, both for some of the talks I give and to advise clients on appropriate and effective ways to not just engage our audiences in conversation, but also persuade them. If we, as social media marketers, are not using the engagement opportunity to motivate those audiences to do something, then there’s little business purpose in having the conversations in the first place.

At Social Media Plus last week, I talked about conversational marketing and came away from the presentation thinking a lot about trust. My theory around conversational marketing is that success occurs when our genuine participation (that without marketing as motivation) earns enough trust from our audience to share information that is driven by our business. But trust is earned in a variety of ways.

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The Problem With Conversational Marketing

by Jason Falls · April 6, 2010

Social media marketing essentially evolved from The Cluetrain Manifesto assertion that markets are conversations. The world of social media then exploded and conversational platforms, tools and networks evolved. Markets are conversations … whatever that means. When you translate it into the practical, not the etherial, you have to try and figure out conversational marketing.

How do you have conversations with people with the intent of promoting a product or service? Or, to borrow Chris Heuer’s seemingly altruistic fantasy of marketing, how do you have conversations with people with the intent of helping them buy a product or service? More specifically, how do you have these conversations in mediums (social platforms) where people’s participation is theoretically predicated on the belief they don’t want to be marketed to?

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Where Social Media Monitoring Services Fail

by Jason Falls · April 2, 2010

It doesn’t matter which social media monitoring service you use. None of them do what you want them to do. They’re good at doing part of the job, but not all of it. And sadly, they probably won’t ever be good at doing all of the job because you have to do it.

Social media monitoring, whether done with free services like Google Alerts and custom searches, SocialMention.com or even freemium versions of great tools like Trackur; or using paid services like Radian6, Sysomos, Alterian, HubSpot or Scout Labs, are all software platforms. They’re computer algorithms and search spiders that collect information and put it together in a place where you can find it. Some of them do a decent job of organizing and stacking and sorting all that data so you can hit a button and get a pretty chart or graph, too.

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Apparently, It Was All About The Conversation

by Jason Falls · January 20, 2010

Forrester Research’s Social Technographics Ladder has been the cornerstone of many social media marketing efforts constructed in the last few years. The inactives-to-creators rating of how people use social media essentially shows that most people are either inactive or watch the social web; a few join networks; some collect content; a few (about the same number who join) play critic, commenting on other’s works; and a small number actually create content.

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