The meaning of communication is the response you get

Business to business marketing professionals are increasingly understanding the value of a content led marketing strategy. 

Charles Green, author of The Trusted Advisor says “Valuable content is the focus of all successful marketing today.”

Engaging current and potential customers through thoughtful and useful content is more powerful than above the line and direct mail. It can be delivered through channels that customers have opted into, removing its disruptive nature, and can much more effectively targeted.

I accept that writing a blog can seem like producing popcorn if are used to delivering more detailed white papers and magazine articles. I accept that a single blog can never give justice to a large and complex topic. I know that blogs are as transient as the paper we use to wrap fish and chips in.

However, I firmly believe the meaning of communication is the response you get, and one of the most effective ways to get an immediate response to a business idea is to publish it as a blog that will resonate with your customers.  

I am not for a moment advocating producing blogs for the sole purpose of provocation, but obtaining a response is a valuable outcome for blogging commercially.  Longer written pieces have their place, and sometimes anything less may seem vacuous. If you are writing to stand out and generate business, a series of regular blogs focused on the audience you want to engage with is powerful way to start. 

Blogs are low cost, fast to produce and an effective way to get some personality onto your business brand.

Don’t just take my word for it. Last week I attended a super seminar at The British library arranged by Kogan Page.

The highlight for me was two experienced and talented commercial content producers Sonja Jefferson and Sharon Tanton, who’s new book Valuable Content Marketing is much longer than this blog, and even more informed.

The social media formula for a successful investment management business

In my first blog for Visible Banking, freshly back from a productive week and a successful event in Australia- I share with investment management firms my formula for achieving success in social media.  Click here

My 3 tips for successful innovation

There are lots of blogs, articles, academic papers, seminars and conventions dedicated to explaining how enterprises should innovate. 

There are even experts, consultancy firms and people like me that have innovation in their job specification.

In fact, a whole industry has been built on the topic. Yet still it eludes most managers and their firms. So just to add to the noise, here are my top three, yes, just three tips on how to innovate in your department.

Innovate when everyone is at his or her cleverest.

We all know, without any shadow of a doubt that ‘we are all clever after the fact.’ So can there possible be any better time to innovate. When something isn’t working or has gone wrong, put your thinking caps on. I know this may sound obvious, but there is a subtle difference in thinking innovatively in this situation and just working out what the heck are we going to do to sort this mess out:

The milk has been spilt, so there is no point crying about it and it can’t get any worse. So let’s get creative, let’s ask whether we should be using milk in the first place.

Ask the people that know best what we should do.

I recently found an amazing piece of insight about a product my firm supplies through analysing unstructured social media data. I validated what I found with the last two years complaints records and found a correlation to inform a business case to change the product feature that caused all of the negative sentiment. Proud of myself I was telling a couple of colleagues in the contact centre about it, and instead of telling me how clever I was, they said ‘oh yeah, we knew that.’

We spend lots of management time and resources trying to figure out how what our customers are thinking, when those people that interact with them every day know. They understand how they feel about us and what their perceptions of us are – but do we ever ask them? Do we spend as much time asking our front line colleagues what they think our customers would think is pretty amazing instead of trying to figure out 40,000 feet from the front line?

It doesn’t matter how many ideas you have.

Successful innovation is not in having the ideas, the insight or data to support the ideas, the business case or the ROI models – it’s in the delivery.

Give the innovation task to the people that deliver. The best innovations in the world are the ones that get delivered; the ones that weren’t delivered are probably all OTE, overtaken by events.

They don’t have to be huge innovations; incremental change is the way of things. It works for Apple and Dell, 3M and GE, some of the greatest innovators in the world. Great leaps like landing a man on the moon relied on hundreds of small incremental innovations, like a pen that works in space (a pencil of you’re a Russian astronaut).

So innovation is simple:

Do it when it’s all gone tits up, ask the people closest to the most important people in the business, customers, and ask someone you know can deliver to do it.

Making investment decisions from Twitter insight – Part Two

The next study in my review builds on using social media data to inform investment decisions. It is based on the assumption that sentiment towards certain brands and goods affect a firm’s earnings and therefore inform investment decisions.

A Dynamic Model of the Effect of Online Communications on Firm Sales. (Garrett Sonnier, Leigh McAlister and Oliver Rutz)

The McAlister Study found a strong connection between online chatter and a firm’s daily sales. Making social media chatter a valuable resource for investors open to making investment decisions using customer insight to make money in the stock market.

Now as a marketing practitioner, this paper really resonates with me.

Firstly, it speaks right to the principles for Value Based Marketing that the late Peter Doyle set out in his book of the same title. The book incidentally that motivated me to want to study an MBA.

The governing objective of management in all of today's leading companies is to maximise long-term returns to shareholders. Value Based Marketing defines marketing's role as contributing to the task of shareholder value creation.

Secondly, it quantifies what marketing professionals have always known, word of mouth is powerful.

If customers are saying good things about your brand to their network (friends, family, colleagues etc), more people will buy that brand’s products. If customers dislike your price, product, promotion, people, processes or place of business, they will not only not buy from you, but tell everyone too.

Thirdly, it puts customer experience of a brand at the top of the leadership team’s agenda.

McAllister et al found that there is a significant effect of positive, negative, and neutral online communications on daily sales performance. They make the case for executives to listen to customer insight and to act on it. However, one caveat on this final point, from my own experience - combine social media insight with all the other data you have collected into a single view of those topics.

Conclusions
Listening to what is being said in social media and twitter in particular is still a relatively new development. What we are finding out about an organisation’s performance from it is not.

The single biggest take away for the C-Suite is – there is no longer anywhere to hide. Your customers and stakeholders have a collective voice and they are learning how to use it.

Your investors will recognise poor customer experience in your share price.

Click here for supporting slide deck