Browsing Tag

Social Media

Social Mediocre

While this Dilbert strip is supposed to be fiction, I suspect it’s more real for some folks than it should be.  Social isn’t something you can do half way, you need to empower/trust your team members to get out into the marketplace to actively participate and learn from the people in the market.  It’s not just a marketing exercise either, you need to ask yourself additional questions and help the rest of the organization to support your products in the marketplace to improve traction from a new sales perspective and to increase the quality of service you deliver.  The questions I start with are:

  • How is sales using social media to better understand their prospects?
  • How is support using social to improve service delivery, knowledge of our customers business and their own processes?
  • How can other parts of the organization use social?
  • What can Finance, Professional Services, Development and QA do  to improve how they perform their craft and improve the customer experience?

Social Media isn’t just something for marketing, it’s something the whole organization need to embrace to better serve the market.  The emergence of the social organization is not a trend, it’s a competitive requirement.

SOCON10: Measuring Social Media for B2B: Activities Need to Drive Results

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Many thanks to the folks that attended the session I lead.  We had a great discussion on what’s important, what folks are doing and how organizations should focus on improving over time.  There still appears to be this learning curve around social media which is awesome.  SoCon10 had a bunch of new faces and folks who are looking to better understand the tools, the type of processes which are best supported via social media efforts.

As discussed in the session, here are the links to the MS&L and PR Week Survey on Social Media and the 2009-2010: Product Management Survey from Pragmatic Marketing, where several of the graphs came from.

Thanks again for the discussion and many thanks to Leonard Witt and the rest of the folks who again setup a great event at Kennesaw State for Atlanta’s marketers, interactive media crowd and journalists.

Thanks for the time to write! 10 Articles which I’m glad I posted

I’ve been working on my annual list of things I’m thankful for and one of the obvious things I am thankful for is being able to sit down and write a little.  While I haven’t had as much time as I would like and I definitely don’t have enough interesting ideas, I was able to find 10 posts which work for me and I now see them in a little different light the farther I am away from the original post date.

  1. Execution and Strategy are not just a function of big ideas, but also principles
  2. Sometimes a target market is small and that’s ok.
  3. Product Management doesn’t need to be hard, but it is more often than not.
  4. Product Roadmaps are typically not more than telling a story.
  5. There are way too many smart people and you need to listen more than you talk
  6. Social Media is changing how most of us are doing our jobs.
  7. You always need to think about how what you do is received by others.
  8. Brands and Products have to be easy to build and buy.
  9. Brands, Products and Cultures are not easily separated
  10. Increasing Market Share is a brand strategy, not a product strategy