Production Blog Reviews

How Do You Resell Your Employees

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

Share How Do You Resell Your Employees This content from: Duct Tape Marketing People come to work at your place, you hire for fit, teach them the core value and functions of the job, generally get them fired up for a while and then what? It’s a tough question, but one that is vitally important when it comes to marketing because happy, engaged, sold employees make far better brand advocates than the opposite. In doing some research on referable companies for my new book The Referral Engine , I came across a policy used by the online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos . When Zappos makes a hire, no matter the department, they go through a training class that includes spending time answering customer call center inquiries. (That’s the job that the bulk of Zappos employees fill.) At the end of their training period they are made an offer to quit. They are told they will be paid for the training period + $2,000 if they want to quit. I spoke with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh recently and he told me that initially they put this in place to weed out people that weren’t ultimately committed to the Zappos way of serving customers, but what they found was the more valuable attribute was the impact it had on the people that stayed. (By the way, few take them up on the offer.) People that turn down the $2,000, an amount that is over two weeks pay for typical call center job, go home over the weekend and think long and hard about why they want to stay. The net effect is that they resell themselves on making a commitment to the job at Zappos. (If you’re a blogger and want a free review copy of Tony’s book Delivering Happiness , due out in June, apply here .) I don’t know that I have a host of answers for what or how you should attack this one, I just know it will pay off if you do. Share your ideas for reselling your employees. How do you do it? Image credit: charlie llewellin Related Posts: 5 Ways to Make Culture a Marketing Strategy Small Business Speaker Series at CES 5 Ways to Make Next Year Your Best Yet Making Ideas Happen Why would someone come to work for you? Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others

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How Do You Resell Your Employees

Search and Rescue: How to Become Findable and Shareable in Social Media

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

Search isn’t an isolated experience. The act of looking for information is now fused with validation, which means the socialization of search will unite discovery with context and relationships. It all begins with where we purposely search for relevant content and also where we respond to interesting information that crosses our path. ComScore ’s most recent search engine ranking report offers new insight that will make us rethink how we publish content, increase its findability , and facilitate sharing. In comparing February to January, Google remained on top with 65.4 percent of all core search activity. Yahoo followed with 17 percent and Microsoft ranked third with 11.3 percent. Things become interesting when we analyze search queries as opposed to core search activity. The landscape broadens beyond traditional search. Just behind Google, but ahead of Yahoo, YouTube ranks second for search inquiries overall. In 18th and 19th place, Facebook and MySpace also make appearances in the top 20 list respectively. Perhaps most intriguing is that neither Facebook nor MySpace offer true search functionality — but they still account for increasing search activity. Facebook is up 10 percent between January and February. What does this all mean? As social networks gain in prominence, the amount of relevant information within each ecosystem increases in value and, as such, we deliberately seek content within the networks in which we engage . It’s the Journey That’s Important, Not the Destination Destination sites across the board are losing traffic and ultimately favor, simply because destinations are obsolete as intended or designed. The days of the traditional “start page” are coming to an end, only to be replaced with the “ attention dashboard ” — a dedicated application that aggregates the activity of those we follow in social networks into a series of digestible streams. TweetDeck, PeopleBrowsr, Seesmic, HootSuite, Brizzly, and Facebook each represent a new generation of attention dashboards as they funnel social feeds into one clickable view. These streams look a lot like slot machines as information flies through dedicated columns, almost blurring the text beyond legibility. But this is where attention is focused and the content that appears within it represents the future of the information life cycle. So how do we compete for attention if attention itself is learning how to adapt to a new media landscape? Our job is to ensure that information travels outside of our domains and to the communities of interest in order to create a bridge back to our hub. And, content must adapt based on consumption and sharing patterns with our existing and potential stakeholders. This is an important point and one that can’t be ignored. Social activity indicates that we are already moving away from the act of proactively traveling to traditional sites as a source of new content. With the dawn of social media, the activity that brings social graphs and networks to life is quickly changing how we discover, learn and share and it is also forever reshaping the idea of online destinations as they exist today. It all comes down to attention and understanding where it’s focused and how it is tempted, lured, or distracted to click away from it. The socialization of information is changing everything. Connect with Attention Where Attention is Focused Competing for attention is paramount. We lose most of the battles before they’re begun because we’re working against years of behavior that now represent the complete opposite of tomorrow’s consumption and sharing patterns. Everything begins with identifying where attention is focused, combined with the new laws of attraction. Gigya reviewed data from Compete from November 2009 and observed that some of the top media properties were already realizing a dominant effect in traffic from social networks. For example, USAToday receives upwards of 35 percent of its referral traffic from social networks and just over 6 percent from Google. People Magazine receives 23 percent of its referrals from social networks and 11 percent from Google. And, CNN earns 11 percent of its referral traffic from social versus 9 percent from Google. Peer-to-peer activity strongly influences the resulting behavior of impressionable nodes defining social graphs, much in the same way we rely upon trusted referrals from our real life contacts. The more something appears within the attention dashboard, the more likely it is that someone will click through. In addition, the more intriguing it seems, or the stronger the reaction it engenders among peers, also increases its enchantment and thus beguiling spectators to willfully lunge towards a shared experience, most likely triggering a public response that continues the social effect . Social Architecture and Connecting the Dots Information is already socializing and changing the behavior for how people search, find, react, and curate. The difference between our present and future is defined by the roads and bridges we build between relevance and prevalence. As content producers, our responsibility is to connect information and stories to existing and potential stakeholders. It’s also essential to package and optimize our content as social objects in order for them to work for us in our absence, when individuals actively seek content through contextual searches. In part two , we’ll look at 11 steps for optimizing your brand for sharing and social search. Originally posted in Search Engine Watch . Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter , LinkedIn , Tumblr , Google Buzz , Facebook — Please consider reading my brand new book , Enga ge ! — Get Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and The Conversation Prism : — Image Credit: Shutterstock

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Search and Rescue: How to Become Findable and Shareable in Social Media

TGC ’10: Why Twitter and Facebook Are Key for Games Marketing – Escapist Magazine

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

Nanaimo Daily News TGC '10: Why Twitter and Facebook Are Key for Games Marketing Escapist Magazine Though Ms. Beasley said that the goal of social media marketing and PR was the same as traditional methods - to get your product out in front of as many ... New Reports Underscore Benefits of Social Marketing ClickZ News Social Media Overload in Marketing Your Business or Project Black Web 2.0 Social Media: An Inside Look at the People Who Use It Retail Customer Experience mediabistro.com (blog)

Social Media: An Inside Look at the People Who Use It – Retail Customer Experience

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

Social Media: An Inside Look at the People Who Use It Retail Customer Experience The survey designates "social media users" as anyone who regularly uses Twitter, Facebook , Plaxo, YouTube, MySpace, Classmates and LinkedIn and also anyone ... Price is high for online blunders Canada.com Managing Social Interactions With Clients OfficialWire (press release) Online Reputation Management (ORM) in Social Media: A Practical Six Step ... SYS-CON Media (press release) all 14 news articles

Moving Under the Social Media Umbrella

Posted by cgseo under Social Media

Share Moving Under the Social Media Umbrella This content from: Duct Tape Marketing Big companies have rushed head long into the social media space creating social media departments and titles like Social Media Strategist, Community Manager, and Director of Conversation. You know, I’ve never been very big on job titles, but I also think stuffing social media participation into a department or job function limits the way organizations should be thinking about social media. On the other hand small businesses seem fixated on figuring out if Facebook is a more valuable play than LinkedIn – again missing what’s going on all around them. Perhaps in the beginning the new set of social tools dictated some restructuring and scrambling as people were trying to figure out what to make of this new space, but a funny thing happened on the way to those discoveries. Social media behavior just sort of poured into every corner of the business, regardless of size. The notion of social media as behavior suggests that you simply can’t contain it to a department, an activity, something more to do, even if you try. Social media activity has proven its value as a way to create awareness, trust, leads, opportunities, content, customers, employees, service, referrals, collaboration and communication in its multiple forms. Social media is an umbrella behavior that has life in some form in every department. (Hint to PR and social media consulting firms this is how you should position your work.) It might be safe to suggest that marketing has this same sort of pervasive reach and that it is the rightful home for social media integration, but there’s something less tangible, yet more pervasive about this evolving business behavior that feels more like business strategy. So, instead of planning that suggests lists of social media tactics it might be more appropriate to simply start asking – how will we be more social? How will we use social behavior to change our business, our customers, our people, our community, and our industry? Related Posts: Small Businesses Will Simply Become More Naturally Social Your social media strategy Social Media Infecting Every Aspect of Business Social Media Is a Tool, It's Not a Religion The Definition of Social Media Powered by Contextual Related Posts Like this post? Share it with others

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Moving Under the Social Media Umbrella