New Venture Marketing

Empower African Children

For over a decade now I have had the privilege of helping Empower African Children, http://lnkd.in/-An4zS , a group of Ugandan children, orphaned by AIDs and civil strife create. These amazing children demonstrate the transforming power of education and the ability of children to show a world of possibility in their and other children's lives.  This year these children will perform some 23 cities from Pasadena to Maine. Here is the link to their performance schedule [ http://lnkd.in/adTaK6 ]. I can't recommend it enough. 
  

 

 

Marketing and Social Media Strategy: Leigh Marriner on Gamification

Leigh Marriner, Director, Business Consulting Practice, Cheskin Added Value, an incisive and strategic thinker, spoke to the class on Gamification, which she defined as "The application of gaming concepts and techniques to non-game experiences, in order to drive desired behaviors."  

Here presentation was first-rate.  Download Leigh Marriner Gamifcation

Here is the link to the video of her lecture

Lecture 2 [Oct 04 2011] 
Play in Silverlight     Play in Flash 

Also visit our class Facebook page, our Flickr and YouTube channels.

Leigh Marriner, Director, Business Consulting Practice, Cheskin talks about use of gamification in Social media.

Leigh Marriner, Director, Business Consulting Practice, Cheskin Added Value leads Cheskin business consulting practice focusing on gaming, interactive kiosk, digital music and photography. She has contributed to numerous projects, including market opportunity assessments in consumer markets for digital photography, digital music, WiFi, and mobile devices. These assessment cover a range of markets, including emerging markets in Asia. Leigh’s other engagements include understanding the role of the channel in enterprise software sales, developing brand strategy for mobile devices, and a business case for an interactive kiosk.

Leigh has more than 25 years of experience in business strategy consulting and has worked with a variety of Fortune 1000 companies in technology, financial services, and consumer goods and services. In addition, Leigh taught the Entrepreneurship course in the MBA program at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining Cheskin, Leigh was a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group and a Product Manager at WordStar. She was Vice President of Marketing for Broderbund before starting her own firm which she ran for ten years. Leigh holds a Bachelor’s Degree with honors in Economics from Wellesley College and an MBA with honors from Harvard University.

 

Marketing and Social Media Strategy: Twitter, John Jantsch

John Jantsch, creator of the Duct Tape Marketing System and Duct Tape Marketing Consulting Network , is one of the best synthesizer's and teachers of social media and we were fortunate enough to have John join us to teach about using Twitter as a market research tool.  

His presentation was excellent and for those who would like a copy of his presentation, you can get it here:  Download Twitterstanford  

 

John has been called the World’s Most Practical Small Business Expert for consistently delivering real-world, proven small business marketing ideas and strategies.  His blog was chosen as a Forbes favorite for marketing and small business and his podcast, a top-ten marketing show on iTunes, was called a “must listen” by Fast Company. John’s practical insight on small business is quoted in the Wall St. Journal, New York Times, CNNMoney and other publications.

Also visit our class Facebook page, our Flickr and YouTube channels.

 

 

Marketing and Social Media Strategy: San Francisco Symphony

 

 

 

The San Francisco Symphony is my best for the best local example of a non profit's use of social media to reach out to its fans.

Jean Shirk, Public Relations Manager for the San Francisco Symphony, gave a great presentation on how she spearheaded the Symphony’s ongoing effort to develop and craft digital and social media strategy and communication, to help attract and build new audiences for orchestral music. In 2009, she and her co-workers launched the first social network built by any major orchestra (http://community.sfsymphony.org). She launched and guides the voice and content creation for the Symphony's Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/sfsymphony), which has been cited as an industry-leading example by nonprofit social media consultants and other marketing and PR pros, as well as the SF Symphony's Facebook fan page (www.facebook.com/sfsymphony). Shirk also manages public relations and publicity efforts for the SF Symphony's concerts, events, and initiatives.

Here is a copy of her presentation:  Download Sf symphony social media

Here is the link to the video of her lecture: 

Lecture 1 Part 2 [Sep 27 2011] Also visit our class Facebook page, our Flickr and YouTube channels.  Jean Shirk, Public Relations Manager for the San Francisco Symphony Jean Shirk has more than 25 years of experience in successful and creative business management, entrepreneurship, team-building and project management, drawn from her career in music, arts and entertainment, publishing, journalism, and nonprofit organizations.  As Public Relations Manager for the San Francisco Symphony,

Top 10 Trends Affection Social Media Marketing in 2011

In the first class I review the top 10 trends affection Social Media Marketing.  These include:

•  Growing importance of social

•  Rise of integrated marketing

•  Web eco-systems as the new business model

•  Staggering growth & impact of mobile

•  Increased importance of local and location-aware

•  Increased adoption of social gaming, virtual goods

•  Breathtaking ramp in demand/supply for video

•  Rise of branded apps

•  Growing use of social media behind firewall

•  Critical importance of listening, measuring, analyzing & determining ROI

And  I also examined the impact on marketing from the shift to social media:

Web 1.0                              Web 2.0                            Social

push                                    pull                                    share

publish                                interact                              connect

top down                             bottom up                           my circle of friends

mass markets                      specific segments               individual customer

sell                                      participate                         build relationships

For those who would like a copy of my presentation, you can get it here: Download Class Night 1

For those who would like to watch the video footage of the class, Night 1 you can find it here: Lecture 1 Part 1 [Sep 27 2011] 

Here are the class readings for Night 1

Recommended:

Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Mary Meeker, "Internet Trends" (video)

Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch,McKinsey Quarterly, August 2010  (you will have to register to read)

Optional:

Web 2.0 Summit 2010, Mark Zuckerberg (video)

15 Media and Social Media Trends to Watch in 2011, Rohit Bhargava  

Once a Leader, Yahoo Now Struggles to find its way, NY Times, September 7, 2011

Also check out our class Facebook page, our Flickr and YouTube channels.

 

Marketing and Social Media Strategy (BUS 109) at Stanford Continuing Studies

We have just wrapped up another class on Marketing and Social Media Strategy, Bus 109.  This course, an intermediate class, examined how to apply new social media technologies for use in an organization's marketing strategy. It was excellent and what impressed me most was the caliber of the students from all over the world.  This year's class included several from Brazil, Spain, France, India, Mexico, Israel and Russia as well as the US.  And they were already very knowledgeable about use of new social technologies. Class participants were complemented by a stellar array of speakers on topics franing from measuring your social media's return on investment to how to use Twitter for market research.

Over the next several weeks I will be providing both video footage of each session and the slide deck from most of the speakers. 

 

The rise of social and mobile (SoMo)

I teach a Social Media Marketing course at Stanford once or twice a year, and each time I review the changes in the industry and technololgy over the past period.  This year was no different, and the changes took my breath away. The combined forces of two powerful trends, social networking and mobility (or mobile commerce) in the short span of a year  promise to unleash an even more powerful force than either of the two alone.  Together they provide the cability to deliver a truly personal connection to the Internet anytime, anywhere, whether it be sharing, shopping, learning or talking.  And while both are still in their infancy they promise to create even greater opportunities than we have seen to date.

This year was a watershed in the sales of cell phone which for the first time exceeded those of of wired phones as it did the sales of PC's.  Smart phones, hit some 26% or 115 million devices in worldwide sales of smartphone in 3Q11, according to research firm, Gartner Group.  Gartner estimates that in the US which has the greatest number of smart phone usesrs, smartphones will become the highest selling consumer electronic device, growing from 67 million in 2010 to 95 million in 2011.

This is not just an expansion of digital capabilities is a real revolution in the space of a few short years, and where it will take us in not just more of the same, but somewhere totally different.

As Tucker Hood observed some time back in the Economist in an excellent article on the The Internet Untethered, "A less obvious but more useful analogy is with the switch from the electric telegraph to the telephone in the last quarter of the 19th century. The telegraph, like the Internet, was a revolutionary communications technology that transformed social and business practices, but it could be used only by skilled operators. Its benefits became available to the public at large only when the telegraph evolved into the telephone—initially known as the “speaking telegraph”. The Internet is still in a telegraphic stage of development, in the sense that the complexity and expense of PCs prevents many people from using it. The mobile phone thus promises to do for the Internet what the telephone did for the telegraph: to make it a truly mainstream technology."

Over the coming months, I will be taking a harder look at the impact of these two new trends and the myriad of technologies shaping the world of social media marketing.

 

 

How to spot the best online community builders

An excellent post on "How to spot online community builders" by Vanessa DiMauro, CEO and Strategy Consultant, Leader Networks.  Followed by a post identifying those companies who do it best.

Social media has even more relevance for the B2B companies

Is it any wonder that social media, more often associated with celebrity Twitter, or videos the likes of “Keyboard Cat” or “Leave Britney Alone” are not as often associated with B2B marketing?

However the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.  Social media has even more relevance for the B2B companies, because the potential number of customers are smaller and more niched, the products are more complex, require more education, have longer sales cycle and can have longer pre and post sale support.

According to recent IDC research “… we are entering a time of significant cultural and process change for businesses, driven by the emergence of the social Web.” According to the IDC survey, 57% of U.S. workers now use social media for business at least once per week. And they use them primarily to acquire knowledge and ask questions from a community. 

Today managers connect to their peers within and outside of the corporate firewall and use their  connections via LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to access, filter and share information on vendors, products and services.

But there remains some misconceptions among the B2Bs with whom I speak.  Here are a few of the most often heard.

#1 Social media is not something that B2Bs do, much less their customers,

I can not think of a large B2B company that does not use some form of social media, and a great many small ones.  For the later it maybe the most cost effectiove tools they use. By now we know that the majority of the customers use, indeed rely on social tools to get answers to their questions, identify and find key products and services.  If you are not already talking to your customers via the networks your eco-system reaches, your competitors certainly are.

#2  A Facebook Page, Blog, Twitter account is a social media strategy.

These are simply tools and no more effective than the planning and effort put into them and part of a cohesive strategy of which they were selected to address a specific outcome.  I wish I could count the number of times I have been asked to come in and help a company develop an online community, blog or Twitter account without the upfront planning as to what the tool is to accomplish, how it will be measured, developed, sustained.  (A topic I will address in an upcoming blog post.)

#3  The ROI from using social media tools can not be measured

Ironically, new social media tools are among the most quantifiable of the marketing tool kit.  Digitally speaking you can measure just about everything on the web:  how many people come to your website, blog post, Facebook Fan Page, how long they stay, what action they may take.

 #4 The cost is too great to justify the return. 

All of the new tools have a cost, although it is often the time and effort required to implement them, but think about how important it is to keep a relationship going with your B2B customers, to be able to learn what they like or need AND to be able to go back to make another sale.  In fact follow on sales to existing customer are far more likely to result in success than in a new sale to a customer you do not know.  Social media tools -- when effectively applied – can deliver their cost and then some.

Social media has even more relevance to B2B companies.  They enable a B2B to extend their visibility and brand, reach niched, highly focused customers, help educate on products tht may be more complex and more costly, provide ongoing pre and post sales support, and ongoing comunication and collaboration with customers, partners and employees.

 

The Facebook Effect

I just finished David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect:  The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World," and highly recommend it.  It is the best book I have read to present the fascinating inside story of Facebook, its remarkable founder and team and to place Facebook in the context of the ever evolving and transforming world of the Internet.  David also presents one of the best discussions I have read on the difference between Google with its emphasis on computers and the organizing the world's information and Facebook, with its focus on people and the sharing of information through the "social graph", your personal network of friends, family and colleagues. That differences is not just about finding the best place to buy a camera, but in rethinking how we navigate the online world.

David, a fine and experienced industry veteran, is a senior technology writer for Fortune Magazine, and I had the priviledge of working with him many years ago on the same high tech conference.  If you haven't already read it, I highly recommend you do so.