Marketing Trends | Foghound

Is social media becoming PR?

April 17, 2013 By Lois Kelly 1 Comment

Is social media becoming PR?

When I started my career in public relations it was a function that tried desperately to show value and “results.” The assumption was that lots of press and “awareness” or “impressions” were good, less was less good. None of the PR measurement models correlated to business goals like sales, customer satisfaction, brand preference, competitive intelligence — or the performance drivers of those goals. PR was one of those “have to have” functions and leaders didn’t take it all that seriously. A career in PR, much like its pink cousin HR, was a “soft” career.

One of my good friends, a well known PR executive, and I use to joke that our career goal was to get out of PR because it was so hard to convince executives that it could be and should be something more than publicity and crisis communications. When I ask him how he is he jokes, “Still in PR.”

I see similarities between PR then and social media today. Instead of impressions people are measuring social media “engagement.” But to what end? How does what kind of engagement support what business goals? Alas, I see company reports that show “results” being more and more engagement. 2,000, 5,0000, 10,000 Twitter followers. 3,000 likes on the company Facebook page. 2,000 views of the latest company video on You Tube.

My question is, so what. It’s like the old publicity awareness goal. Awareness of what and how does that help what business strategy.

The potential value social strategies can bring to business is extraordinary. Data mining of unstructured social data to see ways to develop new types of products and services way ahead of competitors. Incorporating social apps into products and services to earn customer preference. Crowdsourcing to develop products and services more quickly and with much more predictable adoption rates.

These opportunities require heavy lifting. Big brain data analysts, developers, new business processes. Willingness to experiment and iterate vs. the traditional research, plan, develop, market (and publicize!) New types of external partner and developer relationships vs. “the agency.” Systems thinkers vs. project managers. You get the picture.

Most companies see social as a better way to communicate. PR on networked, social steroids.

When I was a young woman in PR the president of my company advised me. “If you really want to get ahead, make sure there’s revenue attached to your job.”

If your company wants to get the most value from social, make sure it’s attached to revenue. (Or a worthy strategic equivalent.) Not to meaningless impressions or engagement numbers.

Just sayin.

Filed Under: Communicating, Marketing trends, Public Relations, Social media strategy

Predicting behavior

March 27, 2013 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

This week behavioral scientist John Furey shares some of his scientific discoveries from his MindTime project. I’ve worked with many different behavioral models, and believe there’s something very big here for marketers, leaders, and each of us as individuals.

1. Your MindTime mapping system has been called the world’s most accurate personality test and the digital Myers Briggs of the 21^st century. For we non-scientists, what is the system based on that makes it so informative?

Personality tests such as the MBTI are based merely on describing traits and behaviors, categorizing behavioral patterns. MindTime reveals the drivers behind the behaviors and therefore why we behave the way we do, or as scientists might call it, the adaptive value of the behavior. What is significant is MindTime is looking at causation, not simply outcomes.

Understanding why people behave the way they do, rather than simply describing what they do, provides a greater ability to predict what they will do.

MindTime uses a phenomenological framework—Past, Present and Future Thinking—as a means to understand people. These basic concepts of thought— Past/Certainty, Present/Probability, and Future/Possibility—all have adaptive value; in fact, they explain almost all the concepts of the cognitive mind.

So, by measuring how people think, we can use this knowledge to predict behavior, attitudes, and even the personality traits they manifest. By knowing why a person does what s/he does, and the why and how of their strategy, we can use the knowledge in just about any environment to facilitate individual and organizational success.

2. What are the perspectives of Past, Present and Future Thinkers?

Here’s a brief snapshot of each:

3. When people get their individual maps, what insights do they learn about themselves and how does this help them professionally?

Our maps provide people with an in-depth interpretative report on their thinking style. It quickly and accurately helps a person to understand the value they bring to the world. We explain a person’s:

Communication style
Leadership style
Relationship needs
World-view
What they will resist doing. Knowing our resistances helps us navigate our limitations.

The most common comment we hear from people when they take the MindTime profile is “Aha!! That explains so much about me.” When used in team building it provides this same kind of epiphany for our understanding of others.

However, while these insights are invaluable I think there is a more significant learning that comes out of all this that impacts our professional abilities in a profound way.

We each know people who we can rely on to bring ideas, inspiration and a sense of possibility to our lives. In fact, this might describe you. We also know people who are much more likely to bring order, planning, procedures and stability to bear. They’re much more engaged in creating continuity than they are engaged in bringing change. Likewise, there are those among us who are more keenly aware of and driven to understanding the meaning of data and facts. These folks bring us depth of thought, a need for truth and trustworthiness and can be relied on to think deeply about things rather than coming up with ad lib answers to good and necessary questions.

Knowing that a person is driven towards creating order and harmony versus being driven towards opportunities and risk-taking versus being driven towards information and analysis of a situation can change the quality and value of our interactions significantly. It empowers us to manage, motivate, listen and speak in a more empathetic, or at least consciously aware, way.

Empathy, messaging, motivation, management, collaboration, roles, engagement style, motivation, change readiness, adaptability, and so on, are all positively impacted by this basic human awareness of each other.

4. How can MindTime help teams of people working together? Why do some project teams work very well and others get stuck? What could managers do to create more consistently high performing teams?

MindTime can accurately predict how well a team will function at a task or towards a goal in view of the mix of thinking styles of people on the team and the roles people are playing. It can also predict the kinds of pitfalls a given mix of thinkers will encounter, both interpersonally and in team dynamics.

MindTime helps the team understand the thinking styles of each team member so that people can understand and value different people’s contributions. Future thinkers will be focused on possibilities, while Past thinkers will want proof and certainty of ideas, and the Present thinkers will want to be able to predict outcomes. Understanding people’s thinking helps us create the right setup and awareness of what’s really going on instead of leaving us to fix what is bound to go wrong.

5. You say that how people think influences how they behave. Many of us are trying to change behavior as part of our work, like getting people to try a new product or approve a new policy. What should we know or be doing about thinking to affect behavior?

People’s thinking processes are very difficult to change so the best strategy is to figure out how we can align our objectives with a person—or group of people’s—natural inclination.

By understanding people’s motivation, which you do by understanding their thinking styles, you can align your goals with their fundamental objective (to pursue Possibilities, Probabilities, or Certainties). Alignment becomes a simpler way to elicit the desired behavior.

6. If you understand how your customers think, how does that help you market to them? Can you give us an example?

Sure, but given that you’re going to blog this why don’t I give you two visual examples and brief explanations?

This first map is of a target market for a product. Through a separate study the ads used were found to be messaging a Future audience. They contained works such as: ideas, possibility, and phrases like “What could you do?” And, ”What’s next?” Can you spot the problem here? Why did the campaign fail?

Yes, the target and messaging was to Future thinking, the audience on the other hand was very much Past and Present in its thinking. A total miss.

The second map is of a group of people recruited to help with brand innovation. These were loyal supporters, not just customers of the brand, recruited by a brand community management company. Remember here, as you look at this map, that the desired outcome was brand innovation. Innovation typically starts with Future thinking. Do you see why brands were often less than enthusiastic about results? The recruited brand community had self-selected. They were of a mind to turn up on time once a week and participate by offering their opinions, predictably Present/Past thinking people.

The conclusion was that this audience, which lacked in Future thinking, was not really innovating at all. They were discussing problems that needed solving and identifying other “new” ways that the product might fit with their needs.

7. What use of your MindTime mapping system has been the most personally fulfilling for you? What happened?

I remember a specific event. I was asked by a headmaster to work with students and faculty on the opening day of school. The Sage School was a new alternative school in Sun Valley, Idaho. On the opening day I addressed the assembled school and everyone learned the simple MindTime model and how it works. We mapped everyone in the school and spent the day practicing how to collaborate more effectively.

We learned how everybody has value to bring if we would only see it. And, by pointing out the likely pitfalls in human communication between the archetypes, we gave everyone both an awareness and tips on how to avoid them, or at least recognize them before they became an issue. I received a wonderful letter from the headmaster about a year later telling how enduring this learning had been and how it was still being used in lots of ways. That kind of work makes my life sweet in a really good way.

8. What potential application of the system would you most like to see happen?

I would support any application of MindTime that decreases violence in all of its forms and increases human empathy. That’s the driving force behind all of this work; it is an ideal shared by all of the partners in the MindTime Project.

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Note: if you self-identify as a change agent, maverick or rebel at work, Foghound invites you to take a complimentary MindTime thinking analysis test to get a personalized profile of your thinking style, leadership style, relationships needs, communications style, and what you are most likely resist doing. Click here to get your profile, which takes just a few minutes.

If you’re interested in learning more about the potential application of MindTime for your organization, contact Lois (lkelly@foghound.com) or John (john@mindtimetech.com).

Filed Under: Activating change, Communicating, Language, Leadership, Marketing trends, Organizational change Tagged With: behavioral change, customer behavior, employee attitudes, employee motivations, leadership styles, marketing research, organizational culture, Research

Has marketing become the screw aisle?

October 23, 2012 By Lois Kelly 3 Comments

Lisa was cutting my hair and talking about how she fixed her own toilet.

“The worst thing about hiring guys is that they talk so much about the job,” she said. “They get to your house and start talking about all the things they need to check, all the things that could go wrong, and how the project is probably doing to stretch out over a few weeks because the distributor might not have the right parts in stock.

“In the time it takes a guy to tell me all this I was able to go Home Depot, buy the toilet kit and finish the job.”

Empowered by her success with the toilet Lisa was now building a deck in her backyard.

“The standard sized boards made the project straightforward,” she said, “but the challenge was the screws. Have you ever walked down the screw aisle? There are hundreds, maybe thousands of different sized screws. To make matters worse you need different kinds of tools for different screws. I mean, c’mon, how many different kinds of screws do we need? Why can’t I build my deck with one or two types of screws? I really resent the screw aisle. Why do people make things so complicated?”

I closed my eyes as she started cutting again.

Screws. Financial investments. Health care plans. Government legislation. Business strategies. “Expert” advice. Diet plans. 15-step proven methodologies on everything from marketing to living a better life.

Over-complicated, over-thought and so overwhelming that most of us just freeze. The paralysis numbs us and dumbs us. Making us reliant on experts, products and services that we may or may not really need. Or, like Lisa, just making us resentful, angry and suspect.

Has marketing become the screw aisle?

I fear that it has.

While choice is a wonderful thing, have we gone too far in product extensions?

Have ‘content marketing’ emails started to sound like the guys who drive us crazy yakking about how complicated the job will be, how tough it might be to find the right parts, how they’ll have to come back again to measure and that’s going to be tough because….”

Are too many preying on people’s fear, uncertainty and doubt? Exacerbating anxiety to sell more than a person really needs?

Is our marketing building a screw aisle or making it easy — and maybe even enjoyable — for Lisa to build a beautiful deck?

Filed Under: Advertising, Marketing trends, Musings Tagged With: content marketing, Marketing, Marketing trends

New study: Corporate reputation more important than ever

January 18, 2012 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

If people don’t like your company, they’re not going to buy from you.

In a new study by my old employer, Weber Shandwick, 69% of participants aid they frequently or regularly discuss how they fell about a product they bought. 70% said they avoid buying a product if they don’t like the company that makes it. And, no surprise, 88% said that word of mouth is still most influences their opinion of a company.

More can be found here on the Forbes blog.

My take from the study: marketing (brand) and corporate communications (reputation) need to be one, or at least work a whole lot more closely than these organizations do in most large companies.

Filed Under: Advertising, Marketing trends, Public Relations, Research, Sales, Word of mouth Tagged With: Corporate reputation, word of mouth marketing

Herd or bird?

May 31, 2011 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

When it comes to attracting customers, engaging employees, and earning recognition, this one question may be the most important.

How can we move from this…..

To this….?

In today’s competitive world the most effective way to attract customers and talented employees is to offer something special and different that attracts people to seek you out. You don’t have to be an Apple or a Google. You just need to be a company that knows and cares for its tribes so well that those tribes, be they customers or employees, seek you out. Your passion for their success attracts their passion for your company.

The old way of pushing messages onto people is akin to herding cows. It’s a lot of work, costs a lot of money, you have to continually push, and the ROI stinks.

Here are some examples of why pushing and herding fails.

Most leadership training is failing

In a conversation last week Case Western business professor and author Richard Boyzatis said that most leadership development programs fail. Why? Most companies require people to take courses (herding), but they’re just not really into them. Without the attraction and motivation to learn, people don’t learn. You can require training (herding) but it’s unlikely to stick.

Most brands are becoming commodities

A study by marketing strategy firm Copernicus found that people buy on price because they view most product categories as commodities; there’s nothing attracting to them to one brand over another. None of the 51 product and service categories analyzed in the brand trends study are becoming more differentiated over time and 90 percent are declining in differentiation. So if nothing is attracting people to your brand, marketers resort to the herding strategy of promoting cost savings.

Most employees are job hunting

In a recent workplace study by Monster, human resource managers reported that employee loyalty has decreased slightly this year. Yet 82 percent of the workers surveyed said they have updated their resume in the past six months, and 59% say they’re looking for a job all the time. Challenge and inspiration trumps salary and status: When asked what they want this year, nearly half (41%) of respondents want to be challenged and inspired by their jobs; a subset also want to make a difference in their jobs (17%)

Creating an attraction strategy

So as you step back and evaluate your marketing, HR, leadership and organizational development strategies, ask “what will attract and inspire people?” A better customer experience? New ways to work that challenge people? Training that is completely out of the usual training box?

For more insights into the power of attraction, check out the book, “The Power of Pull.“ My summary of the book is here.

Filed Under: Activating change, Advertising, Communicating, Marketing trends, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: Copernicus, leadership development failure, Monster, power of attraction, Power of Pull, pull vs. push, Richard Boyzatis

Marketing assisted living homes: take two

January 17, 2011 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

The secret for marketing assisted living homes: provide an extra ordinary client experience that makes people feel good.

Indeed, this is the basic marketing principal for all services and products.

Sounds simple, but so many nursing and assisted living homes put operations first, client needs second, much like most industries. Whatever our fields, we become lulled into thinking that how we do business is the way to do business. We rarely step back and question whether there’s a better way.

So let’s step back a minute.

Do you really need to run your operations where everyone lives on the same schedule, eats the ‘right’ foods, socializes with set group activities, sleeps at the appointed times? Why must people live their last days in ways that may not fit how they lived most of their life? Does disciplined scheduling benefit your clients — or your organization, making it easier to run things?

Positive emotional experiences: good for people, good for business

New research shows that breaking away from operational norms and creating more positive emotional experiences is good for clients and good for business.

The New York Times recently wrote a fascinating article, “Giving Alzheimer’s Patient’s Their Own Way — Even Chocolate,” that explored the benefits of flexible, client-centered care, finding that positive emotional experiences disminish distress and behavioral issues, especially among people with dementia. (Note: approximately two-thirds of people living in nursing homes have some dementia.)

In fact, providing a flexible living environment that works for each patient is proving to dramatically reduced the need for anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic drugs, which often cause terrible side effects in the elderly. Flexibility means things like softer lighting, comfort foods, one-on-one vs. group activities, availability of food so people can eat when they’re hungry, encouraging clients to stay out of diapers, and personal touches, like using a perfume that the client so enjoyed earlier in her life.

The times article highlights the research. More interesting to me are the interviews and stories of Beatitudes Assisted Living in Phoenix, an innovator in client-centered alternative living. So innovative that many other facilities around the country are receiving Beatitudes training and now looking to adopt their practices.

These comforting personal touches improves behavior and enhances people’s lives because they “send messages that they can still understand; ‘it feels good, therefore I must be in a place where I’m loved,’” explained Jan Dougherty, director of family and community services at Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix.

All great marketing is the result of providing experiences that customers feel good about — and set you apart from the competition. When people — usually adult children — are making decisions for their parents, most assisted living facilities “feel” the same and provide similar services and the same promise of keeping a loved one safe and healthy.

Beatitudes sets itself apart, providing emotional benefits to its clients and their families. On top if it all Beatitudes has found that its innovative approach saves money. This is marketing at its most effective.

_________________________________

Note: I wrote a post about marketing assisted living facilities almost four years ago, and that post has become one of the most read posts since I began blogging in 2005, which tells me that the interest and desire to innovative assisted living marketing is significant. I will continue to address this topic as the demand for assisted living is increasing, as is the challenge of running profitable, client-focused assisted living facilities.

Filed Under: Activating change, Innovation, Marketing trends, Smart company stories Tagged With: assisted living marketing, marketing nursing homes

Book review: Chief Culture Officer

April 26, 2010 By Lois Kelly 1 Comment

The most important point of the excellent book “Chief Culture Officer” by Grant McCracken is this — and it’s big: Today’s fast-changing external cultural environment presents significant opportunities and dangers for companies. To manage risk and seize opportunities somebody needs to own culture — understanding patterns and uncovering insights, and helping the C-suite understand how make better decisions based on this understanding.

This isn’t traditional market research, but anthropological research for business, noticing and assessing ideas, trends, emotions that make up the life of customers and employees — and determining what these cultural shifts mean to a company. This applies not just to marketing, but to leadership, HR and workplace communications.

This understanding and empathy, Grant notes, is often viewed as a “soft competency” by executives and business schools.

“To refuse empathy is a kind of managerial malpractice. It costs us essential knowledge of our colleagues and our customers…In fact empathy is frequently the blade that finds the right insight, extracts from it the real strategic and tactical opportunity, and crafts it into a final, compelling form. Is this really a ‘soft’ skill?

Value of a Chief Culture Officer

Better informed C-suite decisions based on opportunities and risk that come from culture, both strategic and tactical decisions.

Serve as internal entrepreneur, an innovation agent

What a CCO does

Finds patterns among chaos of cultural trends and conjure what they mean to a company
Insinuates cultural knowledge into the CEO

How the chief culture officer does her or his job

Talks to anyone who will talk with you.
Figures out the thing that makes a person interesting. Find what they know best and what this means to them, how it looks to them, how it feels to them
Is open and guileless, never, ever “hipper than thous”
Treats everyone as more knowledgeable than him or herself
Is a fearless “noticer” or observer — “spotting things that defy expectation, that don’t compute.” Pays special attention to things that puzzle. Pays attention to any failure in attention.
Develops empathy, the ability to feel how another person feels, and find insights from those feelings.
Admits ignorance and asks naive questions.

Beware: what culture strategy is not cool hunting

Today’s Fast culture is a huge challenge for businesses: miss a trend or misread customers and your brand can quickly become irrelevant. Similarly, slow culture also presents opportunities and risks and is perhaps more overlooked as the “cool hunters” have no interest here at all. Grant warns us to beware of the “cool” people; they tend to be into themselves and what’s hip, not real listening, observing and empathy needed to uncover insights.

Quotes I liked

“We should think of our CEO as a Soviet-era Moscow audience and the CCO as Radio Free Europe. The CCO is trying to penetrate an air space constantly being “jammed” by other things.”
“Knowledge can stand in the way of innovation.”
“Without emotional sonar, there are many things an executive cannot know. This person in a sense is trapped in himself.”
“There is no code to “crack” culture. Just good listening.”
“We are not seeking perfection. We are seeking to construct and idea just robust enough to get us from confusion to clarity.”

This is a motivating, highly-readable book, chock full of insights, things that make you wonder, and motivation to make you want to wander more in order to notice more. It’s also so refreshing in its pragmatic approach, reminding us that culture strategy is a form of anthropological science and not about what the cool people think.

Five stars for this book.

Filed Under: Activating change, Advertising, Books, Innovation, Marketing trends Tagged With: business innovation. beelinelabs, Cheif Culture Officer, cool hunters, cultural trends on business, Grant McCracken, Innovation, marketing innovation, Research

Video marketing: Here's the Noodle

April 1, 2010 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

One of the big trends in marketing today is telling your story on video, largely because video has such an ability to convey the rational and the emotional elements of a story. Here’s my video book trailer for my new book, “Be the Noodle,” produced by First Priority Media.

More about the book can be found here. I’m just filled with so much gratitude about the response to the book. Clearly people have been looking for a book where “inspire, wisdom, and humor” are linked with end of life and dying. A big outpouring of thanks goes to Justin Evans, partner of the Montreal design firm Stress Limit Design, who created an extraordinary cover. And of course, my remarkable family. Together we can do so much, except for the singing thing.

Filed Under: Books, Communicating, Marketing trends, Word of mouth Tagged With: Be the Noodle, death and dying, Lois Kelly, terminal cancer

What's a talkable brand?

October 4, 2009 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has put out a request: What makes a brand talkable? Here’s my take.

Filed Under: Communicating, Communities, Conversational Marketing, Language, Marketing trends, Public Relations, Sales, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: Conversational Marketing, corporate video, John Chambers, Social media, WOMMA, Word of mouth, word of mouth marketing

Hiring your own beat reporter: LA Kings jump onto trend

October 1, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

If there are no media left to cover your company or sports team, what do you do to build a fan base besides Tweet and run a company blog? For the past two years our company has created independent blog properties for big companies, written by independent writers, free of any control by the client. (The blogs focus on issues relevant to the clients’ businesses.)

This week the LA Kings adopted a similar approach when it hired Rich Hammond of the Los Angeles Daily News to cover the team — not as a publicist, but as a journalist covering his sports beat but being paid by the team.

Sports teams used to have several full time “traveling beat writers” covering them. Now major league sports teams are lucky if they have one. For the LA Kings, they’ve had no one covering them, aside from spotty AP reports. (This is hockey, not major league football, but still….)

By hiring a verteran sports reporter, the Kings expect to see much more news about the team, not just about games but about player profiles, previews, etc. A steady stream to connect with the fan base and hopefully attact new ones. It’s a trend that we expect more and more companies to adopt as well.

Here’s what Rich Hammond wrote about the move:

To put it as plainly and simply as possible, I will draw a salary from the Kings, but none of the stories and/or blogs I write will be reviewed for approval by any member of the Kings’ staff. Topics will not need approval and interviews will not have any additional supervision. I have been hired to blog, write stories — including coverage of home and road games — and produce other content for the website. This is not public relations. I have been told, pointedly, by the highest levels of Kings management, that I should continue to report and write as normal.

Be certain of two things: I will not “go easy” on the Kings out of any fear of retribution, just as I will not take gratuitous shots at the team and the organization simply because I have retained the right to be critical. Things will continue on course. Praise and criticism, to the extent I feel either is warranted, will continue to be distributed fairly.

That’s out of the way. Now let me tell you what to expect. I can say, with complete confidence, that you will have better, more comprehensive Kings coverage than ever before. When the team is away on its 10-day road trip next month — and on all of its road trips — I will be there, giving up-to-the-minute updates on the blog and writing stories for the website. For the first time ever in my career, I will be able to dedicate every working hour to covering the Kings.

It will be interesting to see of the Kings do give Hammond complete editorial control. In our experience, it’s hard for “the owners” to be hands off when a writer writes something they disagree with, or knocks — legitimately – the company or product in some way. Yet research shows that people believe sources that provide the good and the not-so-good. Those souces have more credibility than the “official company spokesperson.”

And, who knows, if the Kings get this right, maybe the good karma will help them win more games too.

Filed Under: Communicating, Marketing trends, Smart company stories, Social media strategy Tagged With: blog trends, LA Kings, Rich Hammond

Google Sidewiki: 5 things businesses should do

September 29, 2009 By admin 2 Comments

Google just introduced SideWiki, which allows anyone to add information in a sidebar next to any Web page. Google positions SideWiki as a way to contribute helpful information to any site, providing additional insights to what’s on the page. Nice. They even show a nice example with John Maeda, president of RISD, adding a comment about Cooper-Hewitt.

For corporate people who have had to fight with legal and senior management to get a corporate blog or to allow people to post comments on the corporate blog, this is big news. I started saying “there is no control” of corporate information back in 2005. And now, really, there is no control.

If people don’t agree with the company’s information, they get write their views in Google Sidewiki, which appears as a browser sidebar. If they think your marketing claims are misleading, they can write that in Sidewiki. If they think a competitor’s product alternative is a better choice, up it goes. (Or should I say “side it goes” as the Google Sidewiki opens to the left side of the Web page.)

While the product was just launched , I think there are five things marketers and corporate communications people need to pay attention to:

1. Claim your Google Sidewiki for your Web site; that way your company information will always appear at the top of the wiki. Bill Hartzer has a good tutorial on how to do this.

2. Give management the heads up about Sidewiki before you’re called on the carpet for not knowing about “this.” Reassure people that there are unlikely to be a lot of bad comments, unless of course there is a reason for them. People can only add to Sidewiki if they use their full name. As bloggers have found, simply asking people for their name and a legitimate email filters out most ranters and haters.

3. Respond to people who comment in the Sidewiki, just as you would — I hope — if they commented on your company blog, forum or community. Engaging in the right way can build brand fans, correct misperceptions, and help you learn how to make your company better.

4. No corporate blog? This is the time to get one. If you have no way to easily and quickly communicate your company views via social media, you’re at risk. SideWiki is another example of making it easy for people to have a voice. They’d probably be interested in hearing from people in your company in their real person voices, too. So what are you waiting for? Make it easy for people in your company to share their views.

5. Follow the trend and follow what people write — not just on your pages, but on your competitors’, on industry sites, on blogs and online magazine pages covering your industry. SideWiki could provide some incredible intelligence for sales, marketing, customer service, and product innovation.

Here’s a video with more information. You can also follow @googlesidewiki on Twitter to see track adoption and issues. It’s too soon to tell how influential Google Sidewiki might become, but it’s not too soon to start paying attention.

Filed Under: Activating change, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: Google Sidewiki, Sidewikie, social media tools

Creating clarity from complexity.

Predicting behavior

1. Your MindTime mapping system has been called the world’s most accurate personality test and the digital Myers Briggs of the 21^st century. For we non-scientists, what is the system based on that makes it so informative?

2. What are the perspectives of Past, Present and Future Thinkers?

3. When people get their individual maps, what insights do they learn about themselves and how does this help them professionally?

4. How can MindTime help teams of people working together? Why do some project teams work very well and others get stuck? What could managers do to create more consistently high performing teams?

5. You say that how people think influences how they behave. Many of us are trying to change behavior as part of our work, like getting people to try a new product or approve a new policy. What should we know or be doing about thinking to affect behavior?

6. If you understand how your customers think, how does that help you market to them? Can you give us an example?

7. What use of your MindTime mapping system has been the most personally fulfilling for you? What happened?

8. What potential application of the system would you most like to see happen?

Has marketing become the screw aisle?

New study: Corporate reputation more important than ever

Marketing assisted living homes: take two

Positive emotional experiences: good for people, good for business