How to Create Your Unforgettable Elevator Pitch

Have you ever tried to tell someone about your online business or your idea for a business, but when you did, their eyes glazed right over?

You feel stupid or self-conscious because you know they’re bored, confused or just don’t get it.

The truth is we’re already inundated with information and overloaded with work everyday that most everything just aren’t that interesting to us.

In fact, most of us happen to think, say and do the same things everyday. We just do it with slight variations.

This is why you can’t help wanting to check your emails, tweets and text messages to see what’s fresh coming down the information pipeline.

It’s human nature.

So how do you talk about what you do in a powerful way that people will not only stop and listen but maintain their attention all the way through?

You need an elevator pitch – a way for you to instantly spark interest from your audience.

Here are a few key elements to a compelling elevator pitch.

Be specific and focus on the problem you solve

Elevator pitch is how you talk about what you do not your personal mission to change the world so focus on the specifics.

The critical mistake that most people make when asked “what do you do” is that they either go with a micro-level answer of telling people their daily tasks at their job (I do accounting) or the macro-level answer of describing the industry they’re in (I’m in IT).

The problem?

Everyone has a different perception of what a compute programmer does or what it means to be working in sales. In fact, the less specific answer you provide the more confusing it gets.

Instead of talking about abstract concepts, focus in on how you help people, specifically, the problem(s) that you solve.

It’s should not be your personal mission to change the world because most people are process-orientated, nobody really cares about what you do; it’s about HOW you do it!

It’s not about selling or using fancy words

Elevator pitch is a way to effectively wake up people from their daily routines and sparks their curiosity so they’re interested to know what you have to offer.

It is not about how you can impress people with jargons that make you sound smart (even though you’re). Great elevator pitches bring awareness to people so it makes sense to them to shift their attention to what you have to say.

Fancy words or phrases often requires your audience to “figure it out” which leads to disconnects and confusion. Stay away from them and use simple words that are easy to understand.

It should sound like something that happens in the real world that’s tangible, external, measurable and specific.

How to create unforgettable elevator pitch

Now that you know the key elements of a compelling elevator pitch, here is a simple template to use when creating your elevator pitch.

Start by saying, “you know how some people have this problem?”

Replace “this problem” with the problem or challenge that you solve.

Then continue with, “well, I offer this solution.”

Replace “this solution” with how the problem is solved.

Do not describe your business or the process of what your product does.

Here is an example.

You know some people have stuff they want to get rid off but don’t want to give it all away for free? Well I offer a website that allows them to auction anything off to the highest bidder. (eBay anyone?)

To take this even further, you could narrow it down to a specific group of people and their problems. The trick is to add some conveniences by using words such as with or without and recaps the entire pitch at the end.

You know how parents after their kids are grown want to get rid of all their baby stuff without giving it all away for nothing?

Well, I offer an online auction website that lets them sell their used baby stuff within a week or we’ll offer to buy it from them. Do you know any parents that want to get paid with their used baby stuff?

Remember, you can tailor the pitch to fit any scenarios or situation depending on your audience. This way you’ll have different versions of your elevator pitch to use when you meet a friend, an investor, a partner or a prospective customer.

So, what do you do?

[This article was published on VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner]

4 Internet Marketing Trends For 2011

by Eric Tsai

information highway

As we’re approaching the end of the 2010 there are numerous developments with businesses using social media. I had predicted that brands will need to figure out how social fits into their overall brand strategy by identifying where the leverage is with social media and how to manage it.

Online communities are now everywhere there is access and common objectives. Even social networks are interconnected themselves pushing and pulling content across various channels.

For business owners, bloggers and marketers, we have to realize that the landscape is changing and will continue to shift towards attentive reach, not frequency.

Instead of trying to reach broad targets of demographic groups, investing in paid media we find valuable organic content becoming more powerful, ranking higher by search engines and shared by passionate communities.

Need more facts to back up the growth of social media? According to Harris Interactive:

9 out of 10 (87%) online adults use social media
Highest percentage (22%) uses social media less than 1 hour per week
Highest percentage of 18-34 yr-olds (17%) uses social media 6-10 hours per week

social media usage study by Harris

It’s indicative that the evolution of social media is not just with the tools. The real “leading indicators” will be how social media gets utilized in the real world, not how marketers want it to be used.

And because we’re living in an over-communicated society with competing and conflicting information, true engagement in this on-demand world will be the biggest challenge moving forward.

I’m not just talking about getting people’s attention in marketing; I’m referring to real meaningful conversations that open up the communication channel that leads to authentic actions.

There is so much noise and deception across all media channels that it only makes sense for most people to ignore them.

Here are 4 internet marketing trends that will be maturing in the coming year:

1) The Return of Direct Marketing

The meaning of your communication is the responses you get especially on the social web where people can simply close a window, ignore a tweet or click away to other attention grabbing links.

Everyone’s got a blog, a website, Facebook page, Twitter account or Youtube Channel. So how do you stand out in a sea of sameness?

As it turns out direct response marketing is still the most effective way to test your marketing campaigns. The difference with social media is that you need to be measuring the right metrics.

It’s essentially the same concept as great salesmanship. Great marketing is great one on one sales focusing on finding out what customers want, their pain, urgency, desire and needs.

Done right you will get insights about your customers that tells you not just what they clicked on but from where, why and how. Remember, greater marketers don’t make assumptions!

Once you have meaningful data, it’s easier to craft your direct response campaign that converts better because you’ll have a list of “high quality” leads that are more likely to buy.

Without qualified leads, you’re basically playing the guessing game, driving in the dark and often a waste of time and money.

Concentrate on appealing and selling to the top 20% of the prospects that are more likely to convert. And if you can integrate your email marketing efforts with social media, you’ll gain further insights on your customer’s media habits, which can be used to optimize your next campaign.

2) The Raise of Social Metrics

Since majority of your prospective customers will not convert immediately upon getting your communication, it’s important to follow-up with email and social media because not only will you know when someone opened the email and what they’ve clicked on; you’ll also learn their social habits and sphere of influence.

The goal is to find out your customer’s “from” and “to” path to your web properties. It could be your online store, a product(s) page, your opt-in page (landing page), a sign-up to webinar or simply a Facebook page.

Ask yourself these questions:

Where are my source of traffic? How much does it cost me? (time, money and resources)
What are the demographics (age, location, habits etc…) of my traffic? Are they on social networks?
What does my customers want? Do I have the same customers online and offline?
How much time does it take for my customers to go from the original source of traffic to my web properties? And what can I do to get them to take the action I want that aligns with what they want?
What social media metrics can bring clarity to the habits of my prospective customers?

There are some nice free tools out there that will provide you with social data to get you started.

One of my favorite way to view my engagement performance is using Hootsuite’s statistics with Google Analytics and email marketing data. This allows me to view the engagement performance across social media from blog articles to emails.

For example, in the past 12 months, I generated 16,000+ clicks from my Twitter account which allows me to see what sort of topic my followers are interested in.

twitter.com/designdamage

I can then tailor my blog content to target further engagement and sharing. The same can be applied to email and this is particularly useful if you have an ecommerce site that allows you to track sales conversions.

The key here is to link metrics to actionable options that you generate for them. That’s why you want people to visit your web properties because you will have control of the environment. Everything is a test in marketing.

3) Focus Shifts from Tactical to Strategic

From the mix of clients and prospects I’ve talked with this year, most of them fall into one of the three buckets: those still experimenting with social marketing, those using social media as an add-on tool with existing marketing tactics and those integrating social as part of their efforts to be more customer-centric.

In the coming year I see more businesses moving towards wanting to be more social embracing what Jeremiah Owyang described as the “hub and spoke” social business model.

The challenge will be how to strategize, streamline, automate, budget, and measure social media and social marketing. Simply put, the one-size-fits-all volume marketing will no longer be effective.

You want more consistent, predictable campaign that can be efficiently replicated instead of one-off campaigns that requires lots of resources and attention to operate.

So how can you achieve that?

The best way is to conduct split testing across integrated campaigns. You must become gradually efficient at implementing and optimizing your campaigns focusing on frequency and delivery of real-time value.

It also requires the big picture marketing strategy, NOT just tactics. At the end it is about getting the highest return on the value you create for your customers. Start thinking about how you can earn engagement that leads to conversation that leads to revenue.

4) Video Marketing Becomes Mainstream

Are you doing any videos? Do you know that a YouTube channel is the equivalent of a Facebook profile? Do you know that online video, yes video can help with your SEO?

Let’s take a look at some data here for you to think about.

At the 2010 Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo, Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of SEO-PR revealed that:

Americans watch more videos a month on YouTube than they conduct searches on Google
A video is 50 times more likely to get a first-page Google ranking than a text page

If those finding aren’t stunning, coming from an SEO perspective check out Pew Internet Research’s recent study indicating that “7 in 10 adult internet users (69%) have used the internet to watch or download video. That represents 52% of all adults in the United States.”

Something to keep in mind is that while online video is exploding, other media channels are slowing down or shrinking!

According to a recent Edison Research’s study indicates that “during an average day, Americans age 12-24 spend two hours and 52 minutes on the internet, making the web the media format American young adults spend the most time consuming. Television closely follows with a daily average of two hours and 47 minutes.”

In addition, as opposed to TV ads, online videos are trackable and can be viewed repeatedly attracting the “long-tail” viewers while allowing you to measure the exact impact of the video and participate around it in the comments section or on blogs.

The bottom line is that although video (Youtube) marketing isn’t anything new, it’s gaining more momentum now because the cost of video production are dramatically reduced today than it was a few years ago.

You can now purchase high definition cameras (such as the Flip HD) for under $150 which creates amazing looking videos. Even the new iPhone4 has HD videos that enable everyone to become a video producer at all times.

Keep in mind that you should consider video marketing tactic to support your overall marketing campaign not the other way around if it doesn’t fit into your strategy. Success video marketing strategy focuses on attracting the right audience with a topic or theme that’s video-worthy and can be compelling!

The take away: We’re in the middle of a media evolution where technology has fundamentally changed the way we consume media and interact with one another. It’s not about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Google, iPhone or iPad; it never has been.

It’s about how these tools and platforms support what you want to achieve with your business.

Social is just a label, the real challenge is figuring out how to deliver optimal customer experience that builds meaningful relationships between you and your customers.

Am I missing anything here? Please leave your comments and questions, I’m interested to hear how you’re using internet to market your business, products or services.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/salesmanship

3 Keys to Build Your Online Community

by Eric Tsai

There has been a few interesting development recently on the social web specifically with Facebook replacing the ‘become a fan’ phrase with a ‘Like button‘ and launching ‘Community Pages‘; expect all mainstream websites to gradually adopt the like button enabling visitors to see if their friends or family like the content (peer influence) as well as the number of people liking something.

The other news is Twitter’s new tool that allows tweets to be directly embedded on third-party sites, making it easier to quote and share content .

This growing trend of the web becoming social will continue to encourage people to use it social.

The more social the web gets, the more conversations it generates resulting in a permanent record of everything and anything people talk about, including your brand. Even if you’re not online or don’t have an online business, internet will continue to record down what people say about your brand.

And reputation is word-of-mouth thus it will only benefit your business if you include your community in defining your brand. So how can brands take control of their reputation via the social web?

One solution is through community building, the foundation of your brand’s reputation.

What’s In A Community?

Think of your community as a single platform where people can all gather to interact with your brand and each other expressing their opinions about your products and services.

You don’t need thousands or even hundreds of people to start a community, it can be started with just a few people with the same interest and are willing to participate.

When building a community consider the following groups that makes up the community ecosystem:

Prospects – Interested in your product or want to learn more about it
Customers – Made a purchase already
Employees – Individuals that works for you and/or stakeholders
Vendors – You bought from them (suppliers, service providers, operating expenses)
Partners – Companies or individuals that you have business relationship with, a reseller or distributor of your products
Media – Journalist or publications that covers your industry or your product category
Regulators – Authorities or individuals that regulates your industry, could be government or non-government

If you’ve been in business for a while, you should be familiar with the groups above. The idea of having your own online community is to centralize communication via a single platform where you can empower members of your communities to interact with each other and engage with your brand.

How Communities Benefit Brands

Why would companies want to spend time, resources and money on building their community? The answer is simple, community defines your brand, demonstrates social proof and creates business opportunities.

Defining your brand – So instead of trying to control how you want people to see your brand, the ideal approach is to become part of that process by providing a dedicated community.

A platform that allows prospects, customers, peers, colleagues and stakeholders to interact with each other, ask questions about your products, comment on their service experience or simply give praises.

This is why brands are uniting their customers and fans online using platforms such as an online discussion forum, a Facebook Fan Page, or a LinkedIn Group as their primary ‘homebase’ to build their community. It’s fast, simple and easy to do.

In addition you can expand the community offline or locally adding tools such as Meetup.com, Amiando or Eventbrite. The goal is to provide easy access across multiple channels for your fans to hangout and express their feelings and ideas about your brand.

Social Proof and influence -The best way to change people’s behaviors is through peers that they trust and/or respect.

Done right, your community will become one of your most powerful marketing vehicle helping you sell via conversations and defending your brand during crisis.

This is also an emerging trend as many brands are leveraging customers and employees as brand advocates to help spread the “brand voice.”

If prospective customers read some comments on how great your services are and sees many happy customer feedbacks (via your Facebook wall, Yelp, Amazon or blog), you’re likely to move them further down the sales cycle not to mention the information can be used for marketing as well as support reference.

Even Toyota is bouncing back from it’s PR nightmare because the brand still has a strong following and they’ve earned their customer’s trust over a long time. This is why sports fans are loyal to their teams and often go to the distance to defend their teams/players because they are part of a specific team’s fan community.

Opportunities to improve – Another benefit of building an online community is over time your community will accumulate enough information to enable you to abstract valuable insights to improve your products, services and reputation.

One of the more popular approach is using crowdsourced data to help craft marketing campaigns and get the community involve to deepen the trust and create brand awareness.

And with those that are concern about negative word of mouth?

My recommendation is to have a plan in place so you can respond in a timely matter with the right social media and crisis management policies.

This way, when things go south, you can quickly pinpoint the problem and identify the proper solution to resolve the issue. In fact, it’s an opportunity to turn negative buzz to strengthen the relationship with customers.

As for managing the community it really depends on how your organization is structured for customer engagement.

For example, during presale you can task your sales team to answer pre-sale questions and have your customer support staff responsible for postsale engagement.

Then categorize and archive the Q&As to be used in the future for prospectives and customers.

You can import them into your CRM system or publish them as FAQs.

Keep in mind that managing the community should not be limited to the marketing department.

In fact, the marketing department should help facilitate the interaction to improve the brand experience by providing insights abstracted from the community to other department.

Product engineers can learn how customers are using the product, sales staff can identify the main concerns of prospective customers and marketers can better position and communicate more effectively.

If your organization needs to hire a community manager, I highly recommend following the Community Maturity Model by The Community RoundTable, a private peer network for community managers and social media practitioners.

According to The Community RoundTable, “this model does two things. First, it defines the eight competencies we think are required for successful community management. Second, it attempts – at a high level – to articulate how these competencies progress from organizations without community management that are still highly hierarchical to those that have embraced a networked business ecosystem approach to their entire organization.”

This is an excellent way of looking at what’s necessary to build a serious, large scale community.

As for small businesses, I recommend to simply focus on 1 or 2 of the competencies below that aligns with your business objectives and just keep working at it.

Use a systematic approach to nurture your community and determine how it impacts your business.

Are you ready to start building your online community?

3 Keys to Building Your Community

1) Intent vs Outcome – Know why you’re doing this, what the community is about and be prepared to respond to unexpected outcomes.

Create policies and define a clear purpose also helps to motivate members by giving meaning to participation and build collaborative work by providing a common focus.

With clarity, members will define the purpose on a common ground to grow the community.

Once trust and respect are earned from the community, members will be more incline to be loyal to your brand and what you stand for which should be beyond just a profit-making machine.

It’s a commitment between the community and its members. Your reward as a business should be fueled by the appeal you have with the community.

This is why a growing number of companies are investing in content marketing by publishing free resources to influence the perception of brand value and demonstrate expertise.

2) Communicate with Meaning and Authenticity – The key in building a meaningful community is to be authentic and stay true to you brand.

If you ask your customers what your brand means and you don’t like the answer, perhaps you need to rethink your brand strategy, marketing communication and your corporate culture.

Effective communities develop leadership teams, equip and deploy members for action, understand and engage with their community purpose to achieve impact.

Besides, if you already have customers out there, they may be waiting for you to provide a platform to speak.

Companies are humanizing themselves and to be human is to have a personality. You must accept that you will make mistakes and not everyone is going to like your personality.

However, you should be able to demonstrate expertise in whatever it is that you provide via free education and resources.

If you say what you mean and mean what you say, your community will be on your side.

3) Serve First, Sell Later – The perception of an expert is not only to have invaluable knowledge but a positive reputation. Focus on the needs of your members by making things as easy and frictionless as possible.

It’s a team effort, the community as a whole never just about one person but a collective effort to keep the community going.

The bottom line is community builds trust and it’s not related to making money.

Focusing on financial gain leads to short-term decisions based on cost that’s not sustainable for the future. A focus on the community (or the customer), on the other hand, can lead to happy customers, employees, and partners.

I thought this TEDtalk by Derek Silvers on “how to make a movement” was an interesting way to think about building a community for your brand and why leadership may be over glorified. The video is about 3 minutes long.

The take away: Brands have customers and when these customers have reasons beyond the product and services that they sell, there is a cause.

That cause is what motivates people to connect and spread your brand’s idea.

The greater the commitment to a cause the greater the commitment to the community.

Like the great American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed. It is the only thing that ever has.”

Whether it’s in a social network or a weekly local meeting, ALL brands should consider fostering relationships through community building.

For me, I have my blog and Facebook Page to build my community.

Do you have a platform to grow your community? Where should your customer go when they want to be part of what you do and what you believe in?

Why Social Media Can Improve Your Business

by Eric Tsai

After my last post on “How to use Google and Twitter to Find your Customers,” I’m following up on how to abstract value to improve your ideas.

Whether it’s for your marketing research or product innovation, the intention for gathering these data should NEVER be for spamming but to help integrate your value proposition into what people are truly interested in.

If you can become part of what people are interested in, you will have a better chance of connecting. Therefore it’s best to utilize permission marketing when executing your communication strategy.

Getting more data is great, but it’s not intended so you can just add more people to your weekly email blast.

Making quantitative analysis can help you create interesting ideas that differentiate your brand and drive actions.

So how can social media create opportunities for you?

Understand The Social Network Ecosystem

First, learn how each social network ecosystem works and the habits of the emerging “social consumers.”

Think of each social network as a town and the ecosystem is basically the infrastructure of the town.

Knowing how each social network is used is like having the map of the town.

Once you have knowledge of the streets around town, the next step is to find and connect with your customers.

This is where my last post comes in handy, if you can identify a social consumer online, he or she is more likely to have multiple social networking accounts which can help you to further profile your target audience.

This is especially helpful if you use a CRM (Customer Relationships Management) system such as GoldMine, Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.

Let’s look at B2C (business-to-consumers) social consumers; these are people that are willing to share their personal information on social networks engaging in activities such as updating their Facebook status, displaying their locations on Foursquare, leave their product reviews on Amazon or restaurant reviews on Yelp.

If you apply the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule, you can expect the power users represent 20% of the users that’s generating 80% of the activities.

Accordingly to the latest study by Chadwick Martin Bailey, “consumers who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to not only recommend, but they are also more likely to buy from those brands than they were before becoming fans/followers…The study also uncovered perceptions among consumers that those brands not engaging in social media are out of touch.”

Facebook_Twitter_consumer

The idea is to focus more on the power users that command influence within the social networks. Keep in mind connecting with “medium” and “light” users also helps to earn social proof and trust via the long-tail.

For B2B (business-to-business) the leading examples are LinkedIn, BusinessInsider, StockTwits, OpenForum by AmericanExpress and BusinessWeek’s BusinessExchange to see how businesses building communities that connects and shares information.

They represent how social network can be utilize to build a community by providing practical value whether it’s a piece of software, platform, resource center or networking destination, they give back in return to what participants put in.

I recommend doing some in-depth research to get useful data on demographics of your target audience.

Then identify the appropriate social network(s) that fits your demographics to go after.

The key to success will be your understanding of how your target social consumers think, act and make decisions.

What and who influence them?

How much research was done prior to the purchase?

What was the second or third option?

social_consumer_decision

Implementing Accountability and ROI

Now that you’ve got your customer profiles and social network(s) identified, what’s next? For businesses serious about ROI (return on investment), it’s time to increase accountability of your marketing efforts.

You can do this by using existing data or the customer insights from your research (profiling, surveys, CRM) to create campaign projections, a realistic goal that you aim for.

Then create a mix of financial and nonfinancial metrics that you NEED to measure, not what you can measure.

This is to help you understand how your marketing activities impact the bottom line and how you can optimize them by doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Make sure you track your marketing cost as well as where the money is coming from to justify true ROI and conduct performance analysis.

How much does it cost to run a local campaign vs. national campaign?

What results are you getting targeting moms instead of kids?

Can you compare the effectiveness of your marketing investments in direct marketing and affiliate marketing?

Share Your Insights

Another great use of these valuable customer data is to share the insights with your customer service representatives, sales staffs, product development engineers, design teams, or anyone that will benefit from them.

If the sales staff knows what words or questions your target audience used most frequently when talking about your product, they can craft a better sales pitch.

If product engineers realize how many different ways people actually use the products they create, they can improve and create better products.

If the design team identifies how your customers come to visit your page and where they clicked, perhaps they can increase the conversion rate on your next campaign.

You can also involve them in the insight generation process to help increase the adoption and with regular distribution of these insights, everyone will take part to improve your business incrementally.

Ultimately you want to have a holistic view of your customer data so not only do you know what they’ve purchased, but also what they think about your industry, how they talk about your brand, and why they react to your campaign a certain way.

Simply put, it all comes down to keeping up with the shifts in how people think and act as well as the technologies used.

If you’re unable to keep up then outsource part of your social media efforts to marketers, consultants or agencies; but make sure you understand the implications.

Here is an short and excellent report on how social media influences paid search by GroupM Research.

The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption

The take away: The key to effective marketing communications is to have a solid brand strategy.

It’s indicative that social media must work together as an integrated whole of your brand strategy because your brand lives day-to-day in communication platform such as sales presentations, company brochures, product packaging and now the semantic web.

Synchronizing these efforts assures consistent communication of your brand’s strategy, helping to create brand awareness and recognition of who you are and why you matter.

Moving forward, there will be an increase demand for marketing ROI as more data becomes available and new measuring tools are developed.

As always, focus on the signal instead of the noise, maximize the value of social media to improve your business beyond marketing.

What do you think?

Love to hear your thoughts and feel free to share your ROI metrics.

he study also uncovered perceptions among consumers that those brands not engaging in social media are out of touch. When asked the question “What does it say about a brand if they are not involved with sites like Facebook or Twitter?” they said the following:

The Long Tail of Trust in New Media Marketing

by Eric Tsai

In today’s fragmented media world where we all have some attention deficit in our busy lives, there are simply too many sources of information thus finding a filter that we trust is extremely important.

Most people tend to prefer value, look for key opinion leaders and trust one-on-one communication sources.

Accordingly to a recent “Purchaser Influence Survey” by EXPO provided to eMarketer, over 92% of US mom internet users trust peer review more than manufacturer’s brand information.

This data should not be a surprise because if you want recommendations for a restaurant or suggestions on buying a new cell phone, you’re pretty much going to first ask your friends.

If you’re really serious about the purchase, you will do your “homework” first by reading bunch of online reviews from Yelp to Amazon before accessing your trusted sources.

Thanks to the increasingly social web, everyone can have a voice in their sphere of influence.

As a result word-of-mouth has become the ultimate marketing arsenal for marketers to tap into their loyal customers and advocates to help spread their marketing messages through what it’s called earned media.

Earned Media vs Paid Media

As opposed to paid media where publicity are gained through advertising, earned media usually are from real people, not marketers, which explains why consumers tend to trust them more.

It’s indicative from the survey conducted by Synovate for word-of-mouth ad network PostRelease, over 50% of the word-of-mouth activity was to help a friend or family member with a purchase decision, as well as sharing information they found on the web offline.

While these finding are insightful, it’s simply a confirmation that earned media is what’s working and will continue to lead the way as we crawl out of this recession.

Obviously, there are other factors that contributes to the buying decision that aligns with the “four Ps of marketing” (price, product, promotion and placement), but there is a definite shift in the perception of value that builds on trust.

So how what does trust mean to brands today?

According to the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer from PR firm Edelman, transparent and honest practices and trustworthiness are extremely important while financial return have fallen below those factors.

One thing I must point out is that these data can be misleading because financial returns actually increased but have fallen behind other factors so there is merely a shift in value perception.

We’ve gone from push advertising to social influence marketing. Online users have learned to focus on content and ignore online banners (banner blindness) simply because display focus too much on getting attention and have failed to deliver.

The concept of getting attention as a way to create brand awareness is being seen as noise which leads to resistance.

People have caught on to the fact that more marketers are increasingly behind influential bloggers, social media rock stars and even popular portals by endorsing their content diluting the credibility of peer-to-peer networks.

Long Tail of Trust

In the ear of new media, brands have quickly learned social marketing is build on the idea that people trust their friends more than they trust authorities, but on the other hand, consumers also start to question the intend and authenticity of their social networks.

As I’ve mentioned previous in “7 Keys to Creating Social Media Strategy for Your Brand”, social proof plays a key factor as a weapon of influence, the challenge for marketers is to earn trust as skepticism remains about how long trust will last.

When it comes to trust and brand loyalty there is no silver bullet, but knowing what value proposition to focus on and how to make adjustments can help marketers to acquire high level of trust over time.

If you truly want to earn the trust of your audience, don’t get sucked into the numbers game.

How many Twitter followers, Facebook fans or Linkedin connections you have on is far less important than how you interact with them.

Instead of concentrating on how many social network participants you have, try instead to gauge success on how engage they are with your brand.

The take away: When it comes to trust, it pays to earn it over time via high targeted more personalized channel that drives engagement and loyalty.

Mass media may reach a wider audience faster but the conversion rate is low and the experience becomes de-personalize.

There is still a place for mass media, but there is growing concerns over the value and ROI in the long run.

Moving forward companies should focus on shifting towards a customer centric strategy that retains long term customer loyalty as a sustainable competitive advantage.

Unless your brand connects with the customer, your chance of earning trust will be slim.

The role of marketing is only going to become even more important and integrated closely with customer interactions.

Get back to the basics in the context of customer feedback.

It should be more about starting the conversation to understand the customer’s point of view in an holistic effort to co-create value that defines your brand strategy.

Reprioritizing Your Brand Value Propositions

by Eric Tsai

We’re almost midway through Q1 of 2010, if your business is still going through a tough time, you’re not alone. Perhaps it’s time to review your cost cutting measures or reexamine your value proposition to your customers.

McKinsey Quarterly recently published “The downturn’s new rules for marketers,” which suggests new ways to look at marketing in this post-recession era. Here are some key points from the article:

– To weather the storm, it will be necessary to identify anew who and where the profitable customers are and to prioritize the most effective marketing and sales vehicles for reaching them.

– The old tactic of focusing on historically profitable regions and customer groups will miss the mark. Instead, marketing and sales executives must reprioritize geographic markets and customer segments at every shift of economic fortune.

– Business-to-business (B2B) companies must go a step further. A fresh look at segments isn’t enough; instead, such companies must reexamine their opportunities and risks on a customer-by-customer basis.

– No matter how a company arrives at its quality assessment, the real power comes from combining that analysis with data on the reach and cost of an advertising vehicle. This combination of reach, cost, and quality helps marketers compare the impact of different vehicles on an “apples to apples” basis—the key to effective prioritzation.

– Companies that follow the playbook from past recessions will probably chase markets and segments made less attractive by the present downturn and focus too many resources on traditional marketing vehicles and frontline salespeople. To avoid these costly mistakes, marketing and sales executives must dynamically reassess their geographic, customer, advertising, and sales force priorities, with constant attention to the ever-shifting economics of this downturn.

The take away: It’s time to check under the hood of your marketing vehicles. Not just from a marketing perspective but from a brand’s perspective to focus on customer-centric strategies in order to improve the overall brand value. What’s your value to your customers? Can you differentiate? How do you stay relevant? How will your reprioritize your business opportunities? Marketing is no longer owned by the marketing department only, consider a more fluid approach in coming up with your new marketing playbook. We must adopt a marketing strategies that mimic the lives of our consumers and how they choose to interact with brands.

What Should You Consider When Integrating Social Media

by Eric Tsai

As we progress into 2010, the rapid growth of social media has allowed more access to information, consumers, communities, and experiences. This new medium has enabled a new way to communicate and share, from B2C to B2B marketers are all trying to figure out an edge. Many brands start to focus on the hybrid approach which I believe will be the next phase of digital and web marketing. The question is what role will it play in the marketing arsenal?

Here are 3 steps to consider when integrating social media to your marketing practices:

Brand Strategy Reassessment

Understand the changing habits of your customers should be the focus of your brand. Use the 80/20 rule to segment your customers and identify the difference between your old customers and new customers. The recession has permanently altered the way people think of value and the concept of trust.

According to Decitica’s new study, “Marketing to the Post-Recession Consumers,”

The effects of the Great Recession on consumer behavior are so profound that many of the assumptions underpinning consumer segmentation are no longer valid; and
Marketing strategies that do not fully recognize the diversity of consumers’ recession experiences won’t have the desired potency in the post-recession world.

Business owners should reassess existing brand strategy to gauge the shift in their industry ecosystem. Although the above report focuses on B2C, for B2B marketers, you can expect similar shift in behavior from a high level perspective.

The key is identifying the new trends in how your customers think, feel and act. Your customers may be part of the fastest growing mobile user groups or have adopted new ways to find and share information before they buy. Every person and their sphere of influence were affected by this recession, reevaluate your existing customer segmentation should be a priority. It’s time to make adjustments as to how you view your customers.

Smart companies will always shift their brand strategy to focus on customer retention by maintaining a high level of value perception. Your customers expect you to keep your brand promise and that’s just the beginning, only those that are over delivering will earn the trust over time.

Integrated Marketing and ROI

Social media’s growth is undeniable, it seems like every company has a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account not to mention all the early adopter consumers. For example, according to a report from BabyCenter, “The number of moms who use social media regularly (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, BabyCenter Community) has significantly increased from 11% to 63% since 2006; a change of 46%. 44% use social media for word-of-mouth recommendations on brands and products and 73% feel they find trustworthy information about products and services through online communities focused on their specific interests such as parenting.”

So does this mean if you sell to moms, you must get into all the social networks? Should social media marketing be your priority? Not so fast.

According to a study from MomConnection, The Parenting Group’s nationally representative research panel of 5,000 moms, “the role of social networks in moms’ lives is still largely for entertainment and personal communication; it’s not a channel where most moms are receptive to gathering product information. Only 24% of respondents have used Facebook for product information and buying advice, while 5% have used Myspace for product info, and 3% have used Twitter.”

Social networks is still growing and evolving because it’s mass media, it’s crowdsourcing and it’s here to stay. However, instead of being hype it’s moving towards ubiquity and part of the everyday mix that works alongside email and search marketing. People will continue to search for answers online and offline regardless of B2B or B2C. Every chance you get to optimize your brand’s search ranking is an opportunity to leave a bread crumb for your prospects.

Moving forward, the challenges will be to monitor, measure and manage a fully integrated campaign due to the amount of resources and time it takes to pull together the overall picture. This is precisely the reason why you don’t need to be on all the social networks or even be on it all the time. Some companies use social media as a platform for effective one on one engagement while others utilize it as a PR tool.

Whatever the role social media plays in your organization, you have to really understand how social media is driving your business. If you’re doing social media, do you know how many sales you got out of your social media app? Are you measuring the actual incremental sales from your e-commerce store? Or is social media primarily a driver for your brand value?

Both print and digital advertising costs have come down dramatically, this presents a new opportunity for a dynamic approach to hybrid marketing. You can simultaneously capture your audience via print and web advertising but the key is to identify which channel they come from to rapidly and accurately aggregate customer and prospect data. Perhaps most of your new customers reside on the internet while your existing customers still favors the traditional channel. Regardless of how you integrate your marketing campaign, remember to benchmark them so you can gauge the ROI to improve your sale funnel and lead generation capabilities.

If you goal is to build a customer engagement program, consider incorporating it with existing and new CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools that can be customized for each individual consumer. This helps to improve the ROI with more measurable data against the deliverable.

Here is “2010 Digital Marketing Outlook,” an excellent report from the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA).

Two Thousand and Ten Digital Marketing Outlook

Business Alignment

Businesses will emerge from the recession looking to further strengthen engagement and interaction with their customers. But what does “engagement” really mean? How much does it cost? And what will it take to engage a customer? If you have already done the first two steps by reassessing your brand strategy and integrate social media into your marketing campaigns, your next focus should be to develop a social media policy to protect your company and make incremental changes to improve every aspect of your business.

I’m hardly surprise when I read the new consumer poll by CMO Council and InfoPrint, that “consumers today are deluged and overloaded with a plethora of unwanted direct marketing and promotional messages that are blasted out via email, or mass-produced and mailed in vast quantities, ending up choking mail boxes and filling recycling bins. In most cases, recipients ignore, or have become immune, to standardized commercial overtures. And with the advent of the Internet, consumers are seeking product information and affirmation from trusted sources and referral networks online.”

That’s the path social media is on right now.

Instead of email and mass-produced mailers, it’s spam tweets and uninvited LinkedIn notifications. Marketers are forgetting that consumers and prospects are real people like you and me. At the end of the day when we go to the grocery store or eat out at a restaurant we want to be treated like a person not a prey. It’s shocking to me that “staying relevant, valued and connected to customers has become the number one challenge for marketers today” according to the report.

The biggest adjustment brands must realize is that in social media you’re no longer in control of the conversation instead you will turn over the brand experience to the community and let them define it. If you want people’s opinion they’ll give it to you the way they want how they want it. Social media will NOT fix a bad product or negative customer experience. What it will do is to force you to reveal your brand’s true persona, allow additional means for your customer to reach you, and capture relevant analytical data for product and service improvements.

If you read my previous post “The 12 Principles of Brand Strategy,” you’ll know that principle number 2 states that your brand is your business model. Well, if your customer’s behavior is changing, shouldn’t you adjust your business too?

Checkout these challenges to social marketing effectiveness, and you’ll understand why it’s not so simple to integrate social media into your existing marketing practice. Is it worth to invest in obtaining a large number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers? How do you convert them into sales?

There needs to be a transition and I believe hybrid marketing on a single integrated platform will be the next trend to emerge in an attempt to leveling the playing field across all social networks.

I hope you find the information helpful, share your thoughts what do you think? Have you integrated social media into your marketing strategy?

3 Brand Marketing Trends That Will Continue

by Eric Tsai

3 brand marketing trends

When you hear something enough times, it may be a fad. But when you start to see email spam about it, you know it’s a trend.

That’s the case with marketing trends such as email marketing and social media.

The problem with trends is that it’s usually a lagging indicator which means to seize the opportunity you may need to be an early adopters to reap the rewards.

If adopting new strategy and implementing fresh tactics sounds too risky, just take a look at the troubled newspaper and magazine companies and you’ll realize what I mean.

Similar to technology innovation, brand strategy is taking on an increasingly strategic role focusing not just on the bottom line but the ability to produce desirable financial outcomes. It’s no surprise that the most innovative brands also fail more frequently, it’s the nature of the tried-and-true culture.

However, it takes discipline, research, analysis and creativity to find the right fit that works for your organization. Whether you’re promoting your personal brand or your corporate brand, here are the 3 brand marketing trends to look for in 2010:

1.Brands Must Become More Social Online

It’s no secret that B2B or B2C customers have been talking about your industry and your brand. Now with social media it’s simply going to be “on the record” somewhere over the internet, searchable and conversable.

If you can deal with customers in person, why couldn’t you deal with them online?

Engagement with your audience creates brand awareness, increase brand loyalty and the opportunity to get feedback that can help to improve your product and services. Social engagement encourages crowdsourcing, use it wisely it can energize both you and your audience.

Provide transparency in what you do and demonstrate authenticity in what you say are the keys to building your online “street cred.” Organizations must look at the bigger picture and realize the emerging trend of social business branding and how it will impact all aspect of the company from internal collaboration to external engagement.

Becoming more social for brands means establishing a collaborative infrastructure within the organization to support the core brand strategy. There is no doubt that consumer wants to engage through social media so if brands don’t get into it, consumers will leave.

Ideas for action: Learn the tools of the trade in social media and (please!) put someone that cares about your brand to the task.

Research and identify where you customers are at talking about you, listen and monitor before you jump in. Analyze the conversation around any product, topics, or category and identify any detractors and advocates to take actions.

More importantly learn to communicate well online, respond on time, be clear and to the point. Provide value when interacting with your audience, focus on helping not selling and always deliver relevant and effective communications.

In addition, make sure you have a policy in place so you have a focused, consistent and cohesive approach in reacting to the situation regardless of which platform you’re using. The bottom line is that social media engagement without governance is a recipe for disaster.

It’s possible that your customers may not be on an open social network but on several discussion boards (forums/BBS), a private professional community, or even a popular blog where comments serve as dialogues. speak to your customers directly to identify where they get their information, use a survey and provide rewards if needed.

Myths to consider: We can’t quantify the ROI (return on investment), so let’s just not measure them. First of all, there are ways to measure all the marketing activities whether they’re meaningful to your organization is another story (yes you want the meaningful ones!).

The important thing is to cultivate accountability in your actions so you get results that can give you the insight to make real informed decisions.

My recommendation is to rank your marketing priorities that are most likely to pay off or generate the impact your want first. If your strategy is to aim for awareness and exposure, then put reach and volume first instead of experience and frequency.

Keep in mind that you need to be able to quantity to a certain degree so you don’t drain your marketing resource and budget.

2.Shift in Value Perception Creates Opportunities for Brands

Generic brands are nothing new especially in the grocery store where the house brands are marketed and sold side by side with the leading brands.

The economy has shifted the perception of value fundamentally into a do-more-with-less and value-for-money mode.

According to the latest IRI Times & Trends Report: Game-Changing Economy Taking Private Label to New Heights, “private label unit share has grown 1.2 points to 22.8% and dollar share has grown 0.7 points to 17.6% across all outlets in the past 12 months.” Simply put, private label brands are gaining momentum across all tiers of product categories from premium tier to value tier because they have the advantage to compete on quality as well as price.

This represents a significant opportunity for less known brands (startups, SMBs, personal brands) to compete for new businesses while leading brands still has their eyes on cutting costs (overheads, infrastructure) and reorganizing operations.

In addition with the explosion of social media, unknown brand can go viral instantly followed by awareness because brands no longer control the buying space or the conversation, it only needs credibility to explode.

Ideas for action: This is the time to take your brand to another level especially with more cost effective tools and technologies, why not take a hard look at your current setup for operations, sales and marketing?

Reallocate your investments and prioritize your marketing, branding or product development strategies.

Many out-of-your-budget marketing avenues have dropped in price dramatically, check your local advertising channels you may be in for a surprise on how cheap it is now to run radio, print and even TV ads.

It’s a good time to build your email marketing campaign, run promotion events or even redo your old website so it’s more social media friendly.

You can even try partnering with someone locally to share the cost or co-brand some offerings together. Another idea is to create a new brand allowing you to expand into other categories or verticals utilizing the resources you already have.

Brand extension can help secure new revenues and reinforce brand strength without compromising your current brand equities.

This is the time to drive appeal and awareness to build recognition. Use today’s digital communication platforms to collect meaningful customer data, conduct surveys and optimize your digital presence via social networks.

Reevaluate your brand strategy, be innovative with your products and services, create a culture that reward your people and update your performance metrics.

Myths to consider: We don’t have the time, money or resources for marketing and nobody is buying!

If you don’t have a plan to convert data to actionable insight, a process to collectively review the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, how do you know what you’re doing works?

If you don’t invest in marketing or advertising, how are you going to differentiate the unique meaning of your brand? Without differentiation you will loose pricing power and competitiveness.

If your brand isn’t even in the run for consideration, how will your customers know that you exist? And people are spending, just selectively in a timely matter. According to the American Express Spending & Saving Tracker, “amid their (consumers) cautiousness we are seeing some areas where people are willing to increase spending.”

There is a shift in how businesses and consumers are expressing their priorities, but that doesn’t mean you should be reactive, in fact I would argue that being proactive now will benefit your ROI in the long haul.

3. Community Building is Now a Priority

Moving forward, brands will have to focus on fostering their own community to own the communication distribution network.

Building a community is about connecting and sharing experiences, I’ve outlined this previously specifically in social networks, which still applies to other platform as well.

The fact is that the adoption of new communication platform (ie. email, radio) has led to a new wave of user experience in which the context (ie. direct mail, website) and the message (ie. ads, PR) must stay relevant.

If the community is trusted by the members, they will extend the trust through word-of-mouth that could mean more opportunities for brands to increase buying frequency using content or conversation marketing tactics.

Keep in mind that you should get involved in the right channel and passively direct customers to your community. Effective engagement can also lead to permission-based marketing. According to a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by ExactTarget, “One-half of consumers said unsolicited messages were unacceptable even from companies they did business with regularly. That was up from about one-quarter in 2008.” When your audience allows you to contact them, you essentially have a direct line to access a targeted customer base.

Ideas for action: For low barrier to entry options, look into building a community using one of these: Facebook fan page, Twitter account, Google group, LinkedIn group, Yahoo groups; or create your own social network (with blog, discussion forums etc.), Ning, KickApps, ThePort, SharePoint, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, Posterous, Moveable Type, SocialText, SixApart, and Pringo just to name a few.

If you’re tech or internet savvy, you can use a combination of them but I suggest to focus on becoming versed in 1-2 first then expand to others. Personally, I’m using a combination of a WordPress blog (you’re reading it now) and Twitter (@designdamage).

You can also use video sharing sites like Youtube and Vimeo to help funnel traffic to your community. Another import tip is to leverage RSS feeds to push your message from one-to-many networks.

It’s easy for someone to discover if there’s any participation in your community or not so if you’re going to have a community, you need to be there for your audience.

Dedicate a set amount of time to regularly check the activities in your community, answer questions, drive conversations and connect with members. People have short attention span especially on the internet, so make sure you work on your message (goes to number 1 above) and keep your audience interested.

The goal is to mobilize brand advocates to drive word-of-mouth for greater engagement.

Myths to consider: We’ll just hire an expert and let them do the work like how we outsource web design and SEO.

Although we’re at the age of outsource-anything today and get it done tomorrow, it’s hardly a sustainable long-term strategy especially when it’s about your brand’s core value and mission.

Too often we forget that people are at the center of any holistic effort to improve business performance and accountability.

Outsource to gurus may get things done, but you need to take the time and effort to work with them not to mention they’re hard to find, afford and keep. I’ve clean up some mess for clients before where the outsourced expert created more problems than what they were hired to solve.

This is why so many brands fail to update their websites regularly or refresh their SEO campaigns. Take the time to educate yourself some of the trends will benefit you in the long run, or get your team involve and split the workload across multiple heads.

The takeaway: The evolving marketing and media ecosystem is putting pressure on brands to innovate and evolve, or risk becoming extinct.

These trends will be here to stay and is essential for brands to be successful moving forward.

Have you made the transition yet to accommodate these trends? What are you doing to make the necessary changes to your brand strategy?

I will be reviewing the trends in digital marketing, specifically social business branding next, stay tuned.

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5 Keys to Incorporate Social Media in Your Business

by Eric Tsai

Last week BusinessWeek published its 100 Best Global Brands 2009 and to no surprise, financial brands were largely untrusted which dragged down all brands across the board with them.

Moving forward, brands are rethinking how they can win back the trust focusing on the psychological aspect of marketing and advertising in an attempt to rebuild its relationship with customers.

You can see from the gradual shift in magazine ads and TV commercials using regular everyday people to lead advertising campaigns instead of celebrities with messages such as the “we’re here for you in this economy” (Hyundai guarantee programs, Subway’s $5 foot long, Gieco’s money saving tips), or the “we stand by our product and services” (GM’s may the best car win, Carl’s Jr.’s value comparison with McDonald’s Big Mac) that centers around authenticity.

Serious Trust Issues

What’s interesting is that with more marketers embracing social media, the actual adoption bottleneck are brands themselves.

I’m not speaking about the Fortune 500s but mainly the small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs).

Why is this important? Because small businesses represent 99% of all employer firms and employ nearly half of all private sector employees, small businesses span all aspects of our economy.

Digital marketing is no longer a fad and has a solid track record of proven success even in this economy but what brands must realize is that building trust takes time and innovation.

It’s nice to see marketers are quickly to embrace social media such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, creating their own online community focusing on customer acquisition and retention.

I’m a big believer that social media is in the process of reinventing PR, marketing and advertising by integrating some of these processes into one multi-functional, all encompassing vehicle to engage consumers.

But this is not the answer to earn back the trust, in fact as I’ve mentioned before, these are simply tools and tactics that has evolved due to the shift in consumer behavior and technology innovation.

Companies should re-evaluate their brand strategy to focus on ROI and profits by doing something tangible that align with their core mission while demonstrating ethics and transparency.

Social media is like the hot new gadget that you just bought but haven’t quite figured out what all the buttons can do and the hidden features beneath it.

To some brands, they’re uncomfortable with having conversation with their customers, while others simply refuse to hear the negative comments from the community.

To marketers, some are starting to figure out how to integrate it with their existing offering, while others are grasping the idea to demonstrate ROI to their clients.

One thing is for certain, social media can help brands in accelerating its reputation (good and bad) and the real question is how to best leverage it to improve an organization as a whole.

Social Media and Business Intelligence

It’s no longer difficult to collection data on customers, data such as conversion rate, click-through rate (CTR) and eyeballs (page views) are nothing new. The real challenge is to identify useful data to help drive business success.

Analytical data are only as good as developing a strategy and execute against it not to mention taking into account broader factors such as advertising ROI, media weights, distribution, in-store activities, promotions and even closely examining competitors’ brands.

It takes an enormous amount of effort to aggregate meaningful data to build a case for cause and effect correlations between buying and not buying.

Web 2.0 and social media practices is actually a narrow focus in evaluating ROI unless your business operates primarily on the internet.

Social media marketing can certainly build influence and trust, but they should be part of a business intelligence initiative.

Businesses should consider integrating social media tactics with CRM (customer relationship management) tools in a collaborative effort to improve business processes visibility while helping customers in the process of buying.

This kind of business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, processes and social ROI, will invite the new generation of social customers (particularly Gen Y, 18-27) into the conversation (that they will own anyway).

Integrating social media into traditional channels of engagement requires risk and change management, but that’s exactly what innovation is all about – taking calculated risks, implement unconventional approach to create a trusted and transparent business environment to drive exceptional customer experience.

The goal is to streamline business processes to give the customer a voice, bounce ideas within the organization, leverage crowdsourcing to cultivate an authentic community.

Done right, this can ease the transition for organizations (new and old) into the growing social media-centric business environment that will continue to test the boundaries of trust.

And trust is what drives pricing power, profit margin and customer retention.

It is what your community thinks and shares with one another. Growing trust will be more important than growing the customer base.

transitioning

5 Keys to Incorporate Social Media

1. Transition into hybrid business model by integrating social media with existing marketing strategy that aligns to business initiatives both online and offline

Drive print/radio/TV traffic to your social network that can spark conversation with your team, or leverage hyperlocal blogs/media for regional advertising/promotional campaign to drive traffic to retail locations.

2. Identify an internal social media administrator candidate to spearhead social media strategy that can examine the processes for failures at the moments of truth

Preferably someone that truly cares about your brand that gives real feedback, not someone from an agency or an consultant that just get paid by the hour to care.

3. Provide analytical capabilities to capture customer insight and purchase processes with CRM tools to enhance visibility into key business processes performance

Cross reference social media statistics/dialogues/behaviors with CRM telesales or retail sales data to find correlation in campaign effectiveness, tie it back to ROI and resource allocation.

4. Leverage crowdsourcing to drive product and service innovation by providing a platform for ongoing engagement, evaluate customer retention

Combine email campaign, direct mail campaign and events to encourage call-to-action feedback with incentives to reward participants, identify the fans and new sources of expertise within the community for word-of-mouth marketing.

5. Pinpoint fact-based data related to more areas of the business decisions and take action to increase the success of change initiatives, create pilot programs, let the customer take control of the purchasing experience

Say one of your product sells really well during a specific time with a specific demographics, figure out why and where it’s coming from; conduct a survey to abstract relevant data on buying pattern and the source of sales reference to improve the purchase experience.

Organizations looking to transition into the social business model will need to think outside the box, get out of the comfort zone and adjust current models to find the right balance of people, process, and technology to fully realize the benefits of this emerging medium.

Are you transitioning your business into social media?

Are you experiencing success or having issue?