Browsing Tag

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Marketing is in the Middle: Amanda Vega

The series continues with insights from Amanda Vega a online marketing veteran who as you find out many of us can thank for really cool branded coasters in our dorm rooms.  If you haven’t yet read some of the stuff she writes, you have to take a look at it – concise and insightful.  Amanda doesn’t only blog around traditional PR and Brand activities, she has also been doing some interesting work on social media compliance which continues to gain momentum as a topic of extreme interest for individuals and companies alike.

So here’s Amanda’s take on marketing is in the middle:

What marketing roles have you had and in what markets?

Everything from Marketing Assistant, to VP of Marketing in markets coast to coast.

When you look at your career in marketing, what activities have you found most interesting/challenging?

The most interesting by far was the roll out of AOL instant messenger and the marketing activities surrounding the huge influx of AOL users from those annoying CD’s you used to find everywhere.

Additionally, since growing up in the online space (been here for over 20 years now) I’ve seen the power of using data collected from actual behavior online to create not only smarter marketing programs, but more sustainable and profitable businesses.

Based on your experience what activities do you think get the most return?

Branding and PR get the most long-term ROI. It’s sad that more companies don’t invest in them – because they are too focused on direct sales funnels.

What do you feel is the most important component of a successful marketing gig?

The ROI, of course, which has to be judged beyond sales.

How have you seen organizations change in the last 3-5 years to better support the needs of product marketers, product managers and communications teams?

I’ve seen them allow more flexibility and access to technology that help them succeed.

If you could design the perfect corporate environment for a marketer to be successful what would that be?

I’ve built it. Our company offers a completely independent work environment where work product and client happiness, not hours, are counted as success.

How far is this from reality?

It’s clearly difficult for people to do as I know of very few companies run like ours.

So what’s next?

The continued use of data collected from online user data. The demise of using things like Neilson as law in reach. Results are all that is going to matter.

——

Twitter: @amandavega
Blog A: http://www.amandavegablog.com
Blog B: http://www.socialmediacomplianceblog.com/

Many thanks to Amanda for her taking time out to provide feedback on marketing’s role from her perspective!

Social Media Club Hits the Accelerator

With the recent press release from the Social Media Club, everyone is off and running! A new board and new opportunity. So I’ve clearly gotten myself over my head again, looking for some input…. It’s not like being over my head it’s unfamiliar space for me. After my post on the Social Media Club’s execution, I’ve had a flurry of activity around here. After the dust has settled, I have now committed to figuring some stuff out and doing a little effort. Oh what crazy stuff comes from truthiness. Great opportunity, is my take and an interesting process to boot.

After several interactions and a thoughtful discussion with Chris, I’m back to doing standards work, but in the context of Social Media. Chris and I rambled for a couple of minutes on the phone, talked around some my volunteer work in standards and industry groups (X12, VICS, NEECOM, OAGi, RosettaNet and then UCC, now GS1) and shared interest which apparently gave me some street cred. So with this somewhat trivial and completely unverified experience, I’m now able to “officially” allocate some time to the group. The trust economy is indeed a strange thing.

Kinda of refreshing – add value where you can. I guess membership wasn’t a bad idea and yes the t-shirt is great!

The evidently egalitarian approach to this club is fairly refreshing. An interim group to drive the next iteration of Social Media Club was kicked off this week. The group is 42 folks with seemingly diverse skill sets, seems a little big I know. The benefit of this approach is a highly redundant skills architecture to help scale the organization, a service oriented architecture for the organizations. The loosely couple governance model is constrained to a single rule set/theme – “do good for SMC”. In near real-time the group had a list server, press release draft, a wiki and a request for research.

Do The Work

Volunteer organizations are interesting entities – passion, skills and no shortage of things to do to be successful. Same thing at SMC. Every organization I’ve ever engaged in since I was young democrat had more work to go around than folks. So in an effort to start doing the work, I thought I would kick off my participation to better understand Identity.

Social media is a changing landscape where personality, historical actions and group membership/brand association continue to impact the individual and identity. Below is a piece that Chris did a while back to help thinking about how social media and identity are innately evolving or devolving in lock step.

Fractured identity and the limited ability to aggregate access is becoming increasingly laborious set of activities for me at least. Platform fatigue, technology emergence or context changes impact where and how an individual participates, so data portability could be considered important.. That being said, it may not be the priority to focus on which would better enable adoption.

So in the interest of loosely defined research, I am lookin for a little help from my friends. What should be highest priority area of interest in standards alignment/adoption for Social Media Club? Is there another theme or standard which would return significant value to the over all community?

Here is the shortlist:

So let’s prioritize and do the work.

Comment, post or tweet.

If you post your ideas, let me know with a comment or use SMCBOARD as a tag for your post.