Marketing Wisdom: Your peers share the surprising foundation that shaped their marketing efforts for 2011

One of my biggest lessons this year has been that social media engagement and success is much more about the conversations you begin and not the messages you push out. When we first implemented social and blogging last fall, we saw it as a way to replicate content in a number of areas, and I think we believed the rest would follow. What I learned [is that] the rest doesn’t follow until you engage in a conversation and provide true value. Not just message blasting to your audience.

As we learned more, we began continuing the conversations started out there with social and have seen tremendous results. Here are just a few examples:

  • Clout and mentions have increased steadily as we have seen engagement spike.
  • More customers are actively engaged than before.
  • We are able to diffuse any negative comments or service issues with quick response.
  • Sales and inbound leads have nearly doubled during this same time period.

Results speak volumes, but the conversations we have had over the past year resonate so much more.

- Carissa Newton, Delivra

Source: sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com

Talent acquisitions: Facebook’s kiss of death

When news of Gowalla’s sale to Facebook came through over the weekend, the site’s future was immediately under scrutiny. It didn’t take long for an answer to come through: while Gowalla co-founder Josh Williams might have prevaricated over the details of the deal, he certainly didn’t mince his words about what would happen next.

“Gowalla as a service will be winding down at the end of January,” he wrote in the announcement. “As we move forward, we hope some of the inspiration behind Gowalla — a fun and beautiful way to share your journey on the go — will live on at Facebook.”

Source: gigaom.com

At Walmart Labs, we’re building a big and fast data group to combine store data with social media data in some meaningful way. For example, a Wal-Mart buyer in Arkansas doesn’t know the optimal time to stock football merchandise in Wisconsin. That buyer can look to the social streams to see when people in that region are tweeting about football or their favorite teams. Monitoring social media can even help Wal-Mart find breakout products. (via Search plus social equals richer shopping experiences — Tech News and Analysis)
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At Walmart Labs, we’re building a big and fast data group to combine store data with social media data in some meaningful way. For example, a Wal-Mart buyer in Arkansas doesn’t know the optimal time to stock football merchandise in Wisconsin. That buyer can look to the social streams to see when people in that region are tweeting about football or their favorite teams. Monitoring social media can even help Wal-Mart find breakout products. (via Search plus social equals richer shopping experiences — Tech News and Analysis)

Source: gigaom.com

In the super-connected world in which we live now, people often lament about the downfall of old-fashioned face-to-face interaction. But according to Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and Square, when technology is really done right it should actually allow us to be more human, not less. “I firmly believe that the more understanding we embrace… with technology, we have more empathy,” Dorsey said in an onstage conversation with Om Malik at the GigaOM RoadMap conference held in San Francisco Thursday. Reading Twitter streams that detail the day-to-day habits of our contacts is an example of this, he said. “We can minimize conflict because you have an understanding of where people are coming from.” (via Jack Dorsey: Technology like Twitter makes us more human — Tech News and Analysis)
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In the super-connected world in which we live now, people often lament about the downfall of old-fashioned face-to-face interaction. But according to Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and Square, when technology is really done right it should actually allow us to be more human, not less.

“I firmly believe that the more understanding we embrace… with technology, we have more empathy,” Dorsey said in an onstage conversation with Om Malik at the GigaOM RoadMap conference held in San Francisco Thursday. Reading Twitter streams that detail the day-to-day habits of our contacts is an example of this, he said. “We can minimize conflict because you have an understanding of where people are coming from.” (via Jack Dorsey: Technology like Twitter makes us more human — Tech News and Analysis)

Source: gigaom.com