Monthly Archives: October 2009

The last mile

Posted on by
1
joined-up marketing?

A voice in the wilderness?

I met with the panellists I’m with at Local Social Summit next week, and we were discussing several issues that we want to cover next week.

High on the list was a subject I’ve talked about many times before: how you attribute value to social media marketing. Over the past year, as an industry, we’re getting better and better at figuring out some things to measure in the online world itself. This is good news… but it’s not always the most important thing.

How do we track what happens at the point of sale? How we measure that ‘last mile’  is going to be critical to understand the value of social marketing – where ‘social meets local’ is a wonderful place to make that connection count.

Please come along and join us if you’d like to add to the debate – the panel details are below:

Social Media Marketing  – The Rules are Changing
With the rise of social media and powerful self-publishing tools (Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia etc) the conversation between brands and consumers has changed forever. In this session we will explore the new rules and what this means for advertising, marketing and PR. All of which have been changed in a flash and forever. We will also dig into what engagement, the conversation and the attention economy really means for marketers.
Moderator: Mike Weston
Panel:

    • Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO TrustedPlaces
    • Paul McCrudden, of the #6weeks project fame
    • Carolyn Watt, Profero
    • Nathan McDonald, Managing Partner – wearesocial

Whose line is it anyway?

Posted on by
Reply

The line between personal and professional on social networks has been much discussed already, but a new angle (for me) arose over a coffee yesterday.

As a CEO, how do you feel about the information being disseminated about your organisation by current or recently exiting employees? As Marketing Director, have you considered the description of your organisation in the Company Profile pages?

I’ve found these pages on LinkedIn to be enormously valuable in figuring out what is going on at a company I want to talk to – and understand. Take a glance at wunderloop’s profile on LinkedIn.

We’re in quite good shape here: the description of what the company does was written by one of the sales directors, so it gives a decent view. But it’s not the ‘authorised version’ per the company’s Director of Marketing.  For a start, the styling of the company as ‘wunderLOOP’ is something that really winds her up. (I’ve asked LinkedIn to change that, so it may not be visible when you visit the site).

Other companies – I won’t name and shame, but I’ve seen some great examples – are less well served by their declared profiles, which can be edited by pretty much any employee.

So far so ho-hum. But here’s the biter: my friend reflected his COO’s deep concern that the details about current employees – and more importantly recent departures and hires – had the potential to breach commercial / confidentiality interests. Are people updating their profiles giving away commercially sensitive information? Is it their data to share?

Of course, my argument is that you’re talking about public domain information being made more accessible, so no big deal, legally.

But to me this mirrors the shift of control we are seeing in marketing communications from controlled information from the organisation to crowd-sourced information. In other words, what matters is not what you, as the organisation, say about yourself so much as what others say about you.