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I'm Moving!

Hey everyone! I've gone quiet lately but for good reason. I'm moving my marketing practice - including my social media practice - to B2B Marketing Excellence where I'll collaborate with longtime partner, Marybeth Fraser. Some of my top blog entries will be over there too, so go subscribe to their blog today. You'll see me over there soon.

Magus Consulting will keep it's doors open and allow me to grow my strategic planning practice. 

Watch my Twitter Feed for updates on these changes.

I'm excited!

Social Media Digest #14

The best links I found this week surfing the social web. Vacation notice.

Using Social Media to Build a Dynamic Brand Identity

Part IV of this series looked at the how the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) could use social media to lead their peers in streamlining the economics of their business model. This installment suggests that the true power of social media is in providing the tools build a strong, meaningful and dynamic brand identity. Read the full article.

Part V: CMO Guide to Social Media

Nurture the dynamic brand identity - the brand consciousness and conscience - through customer relationships and company behavior

Just as many marketers have been trained to view the marketer's job as focused on outbound communication, we've also been trained to equate our brand with the visual and verbal aspects of the company's identity (i.e., a logo), in other words, the pieces of that identity that have been traditionally more controllable and easier to wrap a budget around. That day is past, too, and our brand is now a function of the customer's experience with our organization more than the visual and verbal elements that trigger memories of the experience.

Using Social Media to Engage Customers and Partners in Co-Creating Your Brand

Part III of this series looked at the how the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) could use social media to lead the company in customer relationship development. This installment suggests ways the senior marketers can use their expertise in social media to lead the company into deeper adjustments to their business model and reap the rewards of cost savings, increase customer loyalty and more. Read the full article.

Part IV: CMO Guide to Social Media

Manage the brand, the brand experience, and even the brand co-creation

One of the most exciting aspects of the underlying power shifts and market changes we find ourselves living through is the way social technology can help companies adjust their business models to become better adapted to the fast-paced, margin-squeezed economy. Many of these strategies involve deepening social relationships between the company and its audiences, engaging your audiences' energy in your success and, in the process, creating many more "touchpoints" through which you can affect the customer's brand experience (without annoying them). CMOs who have been proactive in employing the "whole elephant" customer engagement strategies discussed above can become natural leaders in helping their companies take advantage of social tools and evolve their business processes throughout the entire prospect/customer lifecycle.

Social Media Digest #13

The best links I found this week surfing the social web.

Using Social Media To Build Meaningful Customer Relationships

Part II of this series looked at the undercurrent trends for which social media is cause and effect. This installment recommends how the CMO can take on corporate leadership through customer relationship development using social media. Read the full article.

Part III: CMO Guide to Social Media

Many of the shifts and changes discussed in Parts I and II are understood in piece parts throughout your business and no doubt you and your executive peers are engaged in developing strategies to respond. The CMO has a special opportunity to contribute to this effort and lead the way forward in using the power of social technology to retool the company's key stakeholder relationships - prospect, customer and employee relationships especially - from transactional to relational. This transformation should take you from providing value through the product to providing value through the relationship (the product being a central aspect of the relationship). When customers perceive their relationship with the company as valuable beyond merely the utility of the product you sell them, they will provide value to you beyond the dollars they spend on your product, entering into a dynamic, interactive and co-creative effort to help you succeed.

What's really going on underneath the market craziness of social media?

Part I of this series introduced the subject of social media as a phenomenon that is changing marketing dramatically. This installment looks more deeply at the undercurrent trends for which social media is cause and effect. Read the full article.

Part II: CMO Guide to Social Media

Before you can use the new market realities to your favor, you have to understand the changes at a deeper level than the symptoms that show up in morphing marketing plan assumptions. The key takeaway here is that social media is much, much more than just another communications channel.

CMO's Guide to Social Media (Part 1)

How Social Media is Shaping Your Leadership Opportunity

I recently gave the following presentation to The CMO Club. The subject of CMO leadership through social media is so rich that I documented my notes and included over 45 links to relevant articles and data in the eight page article, the first section of which is included below. At the end of this post is a link to the full article.

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have it rough these days. Recession marketing is always tough, but this recession happens to bring with it destabilizing forces affecting the market dynamics between many businesses and their customers. The socialization of the web is both a cause and effect of these changes and thanks to non-stop headlines about social media CMOs (and pretty much everyone in marketing) find themselves frequently responding to social media-related questions like "Do you think we should be on Facebook?", "Let's start a blog!", "Why aren't we Twittering - Tweeting... whatever you call it?"

A CMO's Guide to Social Media: How Social Media is Shaping Your Leadership Opportunities

View more OpenOffice presentations from Dana Theus.

 

Social Media Digest #12

The best links I found this week surfing the social web.

Social Media Digest #11

This week's filter on the social web.