Why an Experiment?
From my perspective, life is one big experiment. We are all just trying to get the formula right. In our personal lives the formula we seek may revolve around achieving happiness, security, love, acceptance, appreciation, or power – whatever we think we need to be successful at life. With social media, we’re also trying to discover the perfect formula to help us meet various marketing objectives, such as increasing revenues for the company or reducing the sales cycle. In business as in life, the perfect formula isn’t always obvious and can often take years to master.
Social Media Experimentation
When it comes to social media as a component of your marketing plan, you’ll read and hear a variety of ways you could or should be using this medium for business. But the practice of using social media for marketing objectives is still relatively new and the answers aren’t always clear. In my experience, there aren’t cookie cutter approaches to making it work either. Whether you are the ‘Social Media Czar’ for a large marketing department or you are the Marketing department, if you want to determine how social media can be incorporated into your company’s marketing plan then it’s time to don the lab coat and head for the beaker station – you’ve got some experimenting to do!
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Social Media and the New Corporate Culture
Posted by Vicki Blair on October 20, 2011How do you determine the possible business impact one employee could have by interacting with a single customer? How do you measure the cost to a company if they never know what innovative changes would reduce an exodus of long term customers? What if you were missing ways to reduce the sales cycle and improve margins? One of the things I find so fascinating about social media for business is that it addresses all of these questions and much more – often bringing with it answers in the form of ingenious solutions. Yet, what successes and wins go unrealized if your corporate culture is stymied by old-school beliefs that ignore the role social media plays in shaping today’s business?
I attended the Network Computing Architects (@NCAnet) annual conference last week. With prestigious speakers such as Nir Zuk, founder and CTO at Palo Alto Networks, and Sanjay Mirchandani, CIO of EMC Corporation, you can imagine the highly technical topics of the day. Presentations and panels energized the audience around timely and valuable topics such as cloud computing, IT security, data centers, network infrastructures, compliance, virtualization, WAN optimization and so forth. As an adjunct to the technical agenda was a CEO breakout session on a topic that cannot be ignored regardless of the business you’re in. That panel discussion was The Effect of Social Media on Business Culture in the Next Decade.
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