Turning Customers Into Social Shills

by Chris Kenton on March 1, 2013

One of the core imperatives of social marketing is engaging your customers in conversation—instead of just blanketing the market with offers and collecting conversions, social marketing focuses on active market dialog to better understand and meet the needs of customers. Your customers are already talking, the theory goes, so join the conversation. There are a lot of companies that provide the tools and technologies to support engagement, from listening tools to identify the right conversations, to community tools that help cultivate and amplify voices that add value to the dialog.

The Difference Between Social Media Monitoring and Intelligence

by Chris Kenton on March 1, 2013

There's been a lot of activity in the social media monitoring space over the past 18 months. With the rapid growth of Facebook and Twitter —and the fire hose of dialog generated there —businesses are beginning to realize they better be listening to the dialog. That's great. But as demand grows, vendors are flooding the market with whatever solutions they can patch together from a rented data feed and some basic keyword extraction tools. Slap an open source sentiment analysis tool on top and presto!, you're in business.

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Two Lessons to Learn from Facebook's Privacy Debacle

by Chris Kenton on March 1, 2013

Facebook has been running a very public gauntlet over the past few months in response to its privacy policy. Plenty of experts have been on top of this story, and Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb offers up a lot of thoughtful analysis on the implications for the web. (A good place to dive in is his discussion back in January of Zuckerberg’s initial response to the flap over their privacy changes in December.)

The Four Percent Solution for Agile Social Marketing

by Chris Kenton on March 1, 2013

We’ve worked with a lot of companies over the years developing social marketing platforms and programs. One promising trend is that we’re dealing with fewer IT folks acting as gatekeepers for web-based marketing programs. I attribute this mostly to the rise of SaaS products that reduce the complexity of integration and allow marketers to focus on strategy and execution. I’m also seeing more tech-savvy marketers gaining influence in decision-making roles, speeding adoption of marketing technology.

What’s the ROI on Social Media ROI?

by Chris Kenton on March 1, 2013

As more businesses dip their toes into social media, a growing number of marketers are trying to wade through the hype and figure out what might work for their company. It’s not easy. There are more gurus pushing more elixir for social media than anything I’ve seen since multi-level marketing. As a result, marketers are falling back once again on that trusty security blanket, ROI.

Beyond the Funnel: the Service in SaaS

by Chris Kenton on March 1, 2013

SocialRep is part of a growing sector of the software market known as SaaS, or Software as a Service. The shift toward SaaS has been growing for a decade, and along with all the adjustments to the software technology, distribution and business model, the cultural mindset of the software industry also needs to change—from venture investment to vendor operations. One of the biggest changes involves the meaning of Professional Services in a SaaS environment.

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