I find some bloggers to be somewhat introverted and that they use social media as a platform to express themselves. You probably want to avoid these guys on your brand. In general, I think some personality traits are more important than skills and experience.

In a community manager, I would look for conscientiousness, agreeableness and some level of extroversion as the desirable qualities. My most important question would be if their personality naturally fits my brand’s personality? Or even more importantly, do they talk the talk and walk the walk of my customers.

As far as experience and skills are concerned, they are really not as important. These things are extremely easy to learn and they will keep changing anyway. They probably have already changed since you started thinking about it.

When he mentioned the example of Cirque De Soleil, I instantly connected it to the Blue Ocean Strategy. We are kind of talking about the same thing. Just more creativity and intuition in decision making. I will read the book and post again. But I do think that people struggle with the idea of using too much intuition in business especially in public companies with stockholder pressure and a epitite for short-term gains.

At the same time, if wall street is OK with taking ridiculous risks with “mortgage backed securities” why not take a risk with some of these other “crazy” ideas.

1. If your online business has not established specific key performance indicators beyond the basics (visits / total revenue).

2. If the decision-makers in your online business receive an auto-generated dashboard report but no analysis is done.

3. If you do not define specific KPIs for each campaign in the marketing brief before the campaign starts and try to measure success afterwards.

4. If you reach conclusions and make marketing decisions based on aggregate data and don’t break it down to understand segment behaviors.

5. If you have unexplained phenomena in one report but you assume that other reports would be reliable.

6. If your offline metrics go against the online metrics and there is no clear explanation.

7. If you believe your analytic team has everything figured out to an exact science.

1-1 relationship marketing has been my fascination until Zafar Iqbal, one my favorite MBA professors, introduced me to the amazing world of analytical tools and strategic frameworks for business sustainability. Most of these models are tend to solve marketing problems through aggregation.

Although marketing decision making needs simplified models but think there have to be models that support granularity just because we now have data. Instead of asking “what should we do with all this data” why not try to change the models that we try to fit this data into.

So today I launch my campaign against linear purchase funnel (awareness, consideration…). In know this is not new. People have been talking about it but can someone evolve a new purchase cycle instead of showing a big cloud clip-art in their power points?

“It’s not for everyone“, one agency visionary said in a panel discussion. “You have to look at your demographics“, he said. I raised my hand during the question session and I think at one point the moderator noticed me  but as you know, we all struggle with our attention-span in this age of information-overload.

I would argue that most well known brands already have plenty of consumer generated content (product reviews, rants/ raves) out there and most of it is inherently biased against them.

I think the best use of their social media dollars is to engage in the existing conversations and respond to negative content. This may serve better than taking chances with a viral campaign.

WHY? Because the viral campaigns are the top of the purchase funnel (consideration drivers at best, only if they work) while consumer opinions are consumed on demand, at the bottom of the funnel (preference validation).

EXAMPLE:
Let’s say you are a small electronics brand.

1. Consumer A is just about to click on BUY NOW and is having second thoughts. He/she  googles the product reviews just before clicking on “buy now”.

2. At the same time, Consumer B (probably 14 years old and does not have a credit card) is trying to find skateboarding tricks on You Tube and is most probably never going to consider your product.

Where should you spend you money? It’s a no-brainer. Spend it on PR and opinion management. Do not consider anything else until you post video responses to all videos showing your product not working on You Tube. Odds are, your video responses will have a higher visibility than an expansive viral campaign. That is, without burning your budget on media buys.

Imagine if you have online product demonstration videos. If you use the click-throughs and even video engagement metrics to conduct Conjoint Analysis is simple regression, imagine how accurate you can get with the customer preferences for various product features. Compare that to a survey study you are used to conduct. Where would you put your bets?