Author Archives: marc meyer

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About marc meyer

Marc Meyer has been a digital marketing consultant for nearly 18 years now. Marc observes, dissects, and disseminates what brands and their customers want, how they want it, why they want it, and how to get it to them via digital means. Marc has held positions ranging from social media lead at Ernst and Young, external social media lead at Accenture to CTO at Emerson Direct and EVP of Sales and Marketing at Marblejar. Currently, Marc is the CMO and Co-founder of Digital Futures Initiative, an educational non-profit geared towards providing curriculum, content, and conversations for children, parents and educators struggling to grasp and understand the rapid pace of all things digital, mobile and social related. Thus, Marc has a unique perspective to offer those who seek his views and thoughts on everything that is digitally relevant as it pertains to all things marketing and technology related and now educational.

Listening and social media: 5 videos that drive the point home

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Humility is the defining characteristic of an unpretentious and modest person, someone who does not think that he or she is better or more important than others.

We talk so much about the art of the conversation and how this new age has spurred countless conversations where we are able to share with each other and grow and nourish ideas that could one day create endless possibilities for everyone. But what happens if the conversations are one sided? How many of the conversations out there are taking place between one willing participant and someone who is in it, to win it, so to speak, no pun intended? Are you listening? Or is conversation a dying art?

Here’s an example: Forrester Research Vice President Josh Bernoff highlights one of the five primary objectives companies successfully pursue in the Groundswell: Listening. In this example, a group of twenty-one dedicated cancer centers formed the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) to better listen to patient needs. October 11, 2007 in Chicago.

 

WHY DO WE TWEET

How many conversations take place today or are originated for the purpose of self-aggrandizement? I think more than we will ever know?  Do you think some of our finest web 2.0 thinkers are twittering for the sake of engaging in worthwhile conversations? Are they tweeting for branding purposes? How many of you comment on people’s blog or tweet, but yet bring nothing of intrinsic value to the actual conversation? How many of you don’t care if someone responds or not? Don’t all stand up at once either. Here is twitter explained for all you common folk out there, thanks Common Craft

 

I think we have an inate desire to be heard as well as to be seen and this truly does speak to this generation that I’m calling Generation U for “Generation User” as in generated content. But see, we want to be seen and heard, but rarely do we want to listen, when in actuality, that’s truly where the conversation begins and possibilities are created. Do you spend most of your time listening and reading, or do you create lots of content and vomit the information of whoever and whomever? Do you listen with the intent to understand?


 

So if that truly is the case, do we, or some of our more active purveyours of user generated content, even care about what others might think? Do they even ask what we think? If they did, I would expect the conversations to consist of them choosing to hear what they wanted to hear. God forbid it’s constructive criticism.

Ironically, Chris Brogan has written a post called 100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media in which the first thing he leads off with is… Listening That’s right listening. And not a year prior he wrote solely on the subject of…Listening

I’m sure if you were to ask some of the top social media experts, and I know of about 30 or so, I would imagine that they would collectively say it is more important to listen than it is to talk. How many would understand the importance of listening with humility though? To listen, to truly listen? The disconnect happens when two parties get together and both have these agendas, which they seem to be paying more attention to then the actual conversation itself.

I want the age of conversation to be about what we can do collectively instead of what’s in it for me. The hyper link that preceded that statement, those guys get it. And most do, but I want you, all of you, to start listening, instead of hearing, what someone has to say.

THE MORE YOU KNOW, THE MORE YOU REALIZE WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW

So if you think about, look around and look at what everyone is talking about, it’s the conversation, it’s the word of mouth marketing buzz. We talk about it from the one side but not the other, the listening aspect. The art of listening.

We have more tools than we have ever had that help us with the conversation but we need to really start listening with humility, with a deep understanding of what the person or person’s across from us, is saying. All of these social media tools allow us more access than we have ever had in our lives, to conversations. A way for us to listen and to understand. Lastly, Look what Todd Defren has to say, it’s a quick blurb, so make sure you listen!. By the way, I told Todd I would add him to my new updated list of social media experts coming out soon.

 

So what sayeth you? I’m listening. Do people hear what you are talking about? Are you talking over their heads? Or vice versa? How can you improve the dialogue?

 

 

 

Tim Russert will be sorely missed

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 Whenever someone passes away in their prime, it’s always a shock. When it’s someone who was in the public eye as much as Tim Russert was, it resonates far and wide. Yesterday, June 13th, 2008, Tim Russert passed away suddenly.

One would have to have lived in a cave not to know who Tim Russert was. Even saying “Tim Russert was” sounds odd to me. I hate it when this happens.

He was the voice to America of what we needed to take away from US politics. Tim Russert simplified things for us. I would like to imagine that if you were of the voting age, then you cared about what Tim Russert had to say. He always brought a level of stability to the noise that was our political landscape.

I’m not sure who will take his place at Meet the Press, the guess would be David Gregory, and I’m sure if it is, he will do fine, but it will take some time before the memories of Tim Russert fade. At least for me they will, what about you? Go here, If you would like to offer your condolences to Tim Russert’s family.

Emerson Direct Marketing Observations cracks Adage top 500 blogs

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The Emerson Direct marketing observations blog has cracked the Adage Power 150. The Power 150 is a ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world, It currently ranks more than 500 blogs written about all types of media and pretty much every imaginable marketing discipline.  Thank you to everyone who has contributed, and thank you to everyone who has read and reads it….Now lets get to it!

What did we do before the conversations started?

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You know, I have never had some many great meaningful discussions on so many relevant topics in all the years I have been in tech. I attribute alot of this to the buzzword of the latter part of this decade and that is the conversation. The emergence of the conversation between people wanting to work together, the collaboration of people working towards a collective goal. The customer finding his voice and the company finally listening with humility.

Mental Note: Be sure to write a piece about listening with humility. Who does that?

 Which led me to think. What the hell did we do before? What did people do with all of this great input, insight, knowledge and wisdom before, but with no real vehicles to share it. Did they write books about conversations? Not really,  Although, I know of one book where the conversations are rich and plentiful and thats the age of conversation edited by Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan.

Tell me this isn’t a great time to be talking and sharing? I know these are hard times in some respects, but from a technology, innovation, and entrepreneuial standpoint, there has never been a more optimal time make a difference and actually do a lot with what we have right now! Here’s someone that all of you should follow. Ironically his blog is called How to change the world, once you get there if you have not heard of him, it won’t take you long to appreciate what he does with his time.

Another person that really enagages in some great discussions about, well conversations is Chris Brogan, your day should consist of stopping by Chris’s blog to see what he is thinking. In fact he has a post that I’m sure we all could relate to called, Be Sexier in Person. Not that Chris is blogging about sexy he is in person, just read the post.

 

 

 

 

 

You know who else I like, who else engages in light but interesting and thought provoking conversations? Mack Collier. he lays it out there in a way thats easy to digest. In actuality there are A LOT of conversations going on out there that I would like to take part in, but my god, would I ever get anything done?

 

I think whats important to keep in mind is that we all love to talk, or we wouldn’t be blogging but you tell me what do you want to get out of your next conversation? Are you into what you can contribute or what you can take away from it? What is your favorite blog and why?

Suffice it to say, I’m glad we’re in the age of the conversation and excited about where we are headed, wherever that may be.

Last thing. While I was writing this I had Pandora on in the backround and heard the most riveting acoustic version of “One”. The song originally sung by U2 was being sang by Warren Haynes at Bonnaroo, Check it out and tell me what you think.

 

Social Media Dumbed Down

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Common Craft is a two person, husband and wife company that makes videos that are short, simple and focused on making complex ideas easy to understand.  One of those ideas/videos that I absolutely love is about social media. It’s “dumbed down” to levels that even the most stubborn, stodgy, old school, CEO can understand. They use a whiteboard-and-paper format that is designed to cut out the noise and stick to what matters. See what you think and share with others!


 

Social Media marketing, is there room for the small players? 23 talking points

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I was driving home yesterday going past hundreds of small companies that are all in the same economic boat right now. They need to drive traffic, sales, and business. And you can best believe that they are willing to try any and all things that can possibly do that. And that includes utilizing social media.  I mean we can find plenty of blog posts and articles about whether large companies can succeed using social media, and my answer would be “uhhh… yea!” 

So one of the questions I would have as a small business owner and even a medium sized in some cases would be:

1) How can I drive sales, traffic and business to my click and mortar site using any online means available?  Wow that’s a broad question. But wouldn’t you ask the same thing? Tell me what’s out there and I will use it, if it helps.

Let’s assume that you have a website and you use email. If you don’t, you can stop here because the rest won’t matter. But unless you’re reading this post at the library or you’re over at your Aunt Evelyn’s, I’m going to assume that you at least have a computer. And since you are a small to medium size business owner, you damn well better have a website! NO MATTER WHAT KIND OF BUSINESS YOU HAVE, YOU BETTER HAVE A WEBSITE.

Lets get to it, Lets go over this checklist and see if there is room in the social media marketing space for the small players.

2) Do customers use your website? If they don’t maybe it’s because they don’t know you have one. What efforts have you employed to market or optiimize your current site?

3) Do you give them any reason to go to your website? If you are not letting people know your site is out there and what it has to offer, then you can answer that question pretty easily. But is your site a marketing tool. Can customers get a better deal on a service or a product if they go there?

4) What do they do when they are there? Whats the bounce? What do your analytics tell you? You do use some type of stats package right? If you don’t what your customer does on your website, it’s the same as if you stayed in your office all day and never came out to see what was going on in your business or store. In order to understand the customer you have to see their tendencies. You have to know where they are coming from and how they found you.

5) How well do you utilize your URL on other marketing materials? You have signage, billboards, print ads, business cards, letterhead, email, Is your web address there?

6) What is your presence like locally? How well are you branded locally? Do they know you, who knows where you are locally? What efforts do you make to brand you and your company locally? The “if you build it, they will come business model”, doesn’t work too often.

7) What are your current marketing initatives like? Do you support them online? Do you have a budget? What do you use it on? Is it a print ad? Do you do anything that can drive business on a consistent basis?

8) With a limited marketing budget, what would you do with it? What DO you do with it? Is that something that even is on your mind or lips? Are the economics of what is happening right now preclude you from even thinking about budgeting for marketing? Wouldn’t this be the most opportune time to be spending?

9) Do you do any type of digital marketing now? i.e. email, seo, sem? If you don’t then that will explain your lack of any traffic on your website, along with the design you have to let people know you have a web presence.

10)  Do you know what social media is?

11)  Do you understand it? Do you know what the essential elements are of social media?

Before I go any further, lets throw something out there right now and that’s lets assume that you have answered all of these questions the “right” way. Let’s assume that you are ready to do this, you are ready to “try” some element of social media marketing. And lets hope that you’re not fighting or resisitng to try social media You’re next set of questions are going to be:

1) Is there a company or someone out there who can help me?

2) Do they have experience working with my type of company, my type of customer?

3) What guarantees do I have that this will work?

4) What will it cost? What can I expect?

5) Will it fail? What is the downside?

6) What is the upside? What, after all is said and done, will be the net result?

7) How long will it take?

8) Is it a process?

9) Is it measurable?

10) What do I look for in my results?

11) How do I pay for something like this?

12) What if it backfires?

13) Now what do we do?

 

Ok so we now have 23 talking points to get the conversation going. There are questions that small to medium sized business owners need to ask of themselves in regards to their current marketing efforts and the general state of of their advertisng efforts and there is the next set of questions that these same owners need to ask of any individual or company that comes knocking that is going to pitch them on social media marketing.

The point is this, there are so many “conversations” going on right now in regards to how corporations are wrestling with implementing social media into their marketing efforts. In fact Jeremiah Owyang recently wrote a post about the 5 questions that companies ask about social media, but it concerns large outfits and not the little guys. I think the small players are being ignored. It’s not that it can’t be done, it just needs to be very focused. Why can’t everyone participate in the conversation?

 

 

Social networking is hard work!

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Or is it? Does it make my life more fun? Is it eventful?  I’m not as bad as Tom Foremski who had 37, 240 unread emails in his account when he wrote an article about it. all I can say is wtf? Tom… Slacker! But actually Tom’s dilemna probablly mirrors others.

Maybe this is me? Courtesy of Geek and Poke titled “I have no time, I have to be social.”

Sometimes I feel like it. Actually I feel guilt if I haven’t posted anything on the blog.  But seriously, don’t you sometimes feel like you have to hit all of these social sites to a) check in and b) see whats up and c) to be dissapointed when nothing is happening? I’ve often blogged about social media saturation and in fact, asked it of my Linkedin brethren, but I had phrased the question a bit differently. It went something like this:

What do you think the formula should be for social media saturation? Have we reached it yet?

The question is really more about saturation levels in regards to how much more we can take, but the answers were more of a, has social media reached critical mass bent. In fact Jon Udell had a post titled, “Critical mass and social network fatigue” in which he wrote,

Increasingly I’ve begun to feel the same way about the various social networks. How many networks can one person join? How many different identities can one person sanely manage? How many different tagging or photo-uploading or friending protocols can one person deal with?

He wrote that over a year ago, I wonder what he feels now. The social networking stratosphere has grown exponentially since then and the problem is…

There are wayyyy too many cool apps and  new social networks out there to ignore and NOT join in the conversation! Right?

Andrew Chen writes about his view on social networking and going from zero to critical mass in which he says that there are quite a few variable involved in getting to the top, the most important being, users. So another question I would offer up is, What do new developers and entrepreneurs feel about joining such a crowded space where critical mass is imperative, cash is usually dependant on advertisers and their users are already inundated with other social nets that they are a part of????

I’m going to botrrow one more time from Andrew Chen in which he writes the following:

Does everyone remember Metcalfe’s Law? It was formulated by Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and co-founder of 3Com, who stated: The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²).

I’m cool with that. My only problem is, I want to spread myself thin. Yes sometimes I exhale as I run through logins and pw’s, and I’m always on the lookout for something new and cool but… I’m actually not sure what I’m looking for, I’m constantly looking for IT, but it has not been developed yet. Most Social Net’s are for the most part a lot alike. And maybe thats why we are members of more than one, because the one is not the ONE.  Maybe we’ll know when we get there, but for now it seems like most of us are willing to maintain out memberships in multiple social nets, even if it means working a bit to keep them updated and current.

 

Viral Message. When marketers hope we get it. Did you?

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Here is a) a great message b) a video that has the potential to be viral and c) Is well done. .When you get to the end of the video, is it what you thought the message would be?

10 reasons why you have no business launching a widget, yet.

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“Whip up some numbers that make it look like we have, like, I don’t know, a thousand HD channels.” – Cable Corp, Inc. VP

You know those DirectTV spots that have been running as of late? A bunch of suits sitting around trying to guess what the customer might want. That’s happening a lot lately. What’s funny is that in a lot of situations, these groups have some really talented people sitting at these tables and yet they blamestorm or better yet, come up with really shitty ideas that are fast-tracked. I don’t get that. How can good smart people come up with such bad stuff? That’s probablyy a whole ‘nuther blog post in and of itself but for today we’re going to talk about something that I guarantee you is on the lips of some of these aformentioned people. Widgets.

I got a great idea, lets make a widget, that should drive some major traffic!

 

You don’t have a clue do you?

Reason #1 You probablly have heard of a widget but in actuality you don’t have a clue as to what they are. Widgets are essentially cute little applications that you can run on your desktop that will entertain you, provide informtaion, keep you in the loop etc. All in little snippets.  Here’s an example.

This widget helps you find cheap gas in your area. Good luck with that.

 

 

So anyways, you’re a marketer or an executive and you’ve now heard of these and sorta seen them in action and you think, we need widgets. Which leads to:

Facebook, what’s Facebook?

Reason #2 You probably don’t even know where to put your “company created” widget. Do you even know where to put it? “ok it’s built, now what”? If you’re group created it, does your company have a Facebook presence to support it since that’s generally where they thrive? How about a blog?

My audience is…

Reason #3 To build and distribute your widget, that would mean that you know exactly who are your target audience is and know that they would benefit from a widget. How well do you know your customer?

Let’s sell something and cut to the chase!

Reason #4 You will probabally bust out the sales speak on your widget and the pitch will be oozing all over your widget because you think it’s a way to sell more product. Wrong. Widgets are about branding, are about fun and are about entertainment. Though utility driven widgets are useful, they do not have the same impact as one that needs to be shared with others.

Yea we have a website, my son built it at school..

Reason #5 If your internet presence is not where it needs to be then you really don’t need to be jumping into the mix with a widget. To begin with, how do you rank organically in the search engines. What about any type of online presence? Does it exist? It’s one thing to brand a new product, but how about establishing some branding objectives for an existing product or company? What if your outfit has some negative stuff out there in cyberspace? What’s a widget going to do?

Customer service 101 and our monthly email blast

Reason #6 If you’re not talking to your customers, then you have no idea what your customers would want from a widget. If your marketing efforts are intrusion based, then chances are your widget would be the same.  If you’re talking at them, then chances are, your widget is going to miss the mark. If your marketing efforts consist of a monthly email blast with hundreds of bounce backs, then you got it going on.

If we build it, they’ll come

Reason #7 If you think your widget is going to drive traffic and sales, then you’re missing the point. Widgets are about building brand loyalty. Successful widgets encourage, promote, gather, share, and provide ways to communicate with…ta da… your customer. And ultimately a successful widget is viral.

I heard it works, isn’t that enough?

Reason #8 You don’t know what you want, and you don’t even use them, nor do you have any familiarity about them. Ahh that makes sense, let’s do it! Doesn’t it make sense to test drive something before you adopt it? Before you launch something, shouldn’t you see if its something that you are comfortable with? Do some research, knucklehead, don’t just listen to me! Here’s a nice snippet on What is a good widget from Phil Butler.

Just do it, we’ll worry about the little stuff later

Reason #9 You can’t build it on the notion or the premise that you hope it will work. You need to have a clear idea of why you’re doing it and what your expectations are. Is your message clear or will it be? Do you know what you want the deliverables to be? How you are going to measure the results?  If building a widget is something that came up in a meeting, move onto something more tangible.

The competition is doing it and thats good enough for me

Reason #10  Widgets can be and are a logical extension of your brand, but only if you’re knee deep in the online world.  You can’t just have a brochure ware type of site and expect that to be enough to push your brand over the top with a widget supporting it. The customer, the user, that you are trying to reach, is doing more now with the tools provided, than ever before.  Widgets, blogs, pod-casts, online video, pr, and microsites/landing pages are all ways to extend the reach of your brand online. But first things first. Make sure your offline house is in order and then do the requisite online things necessary before you even think about having the conversation about launching a widget. 

Have you had success building and launching a widget? have a horror story? Know of a clueless boss? What Sayeth you?