If we focus on building conversations with customers, we become tech-proof.

Why do we focus on the tools and technology so much? Because relationships are hard.

Zappos always forgives us. That is where relationships come from.

(1) Give people a reason to talk about your brand, and (2) Make it easier for the conversation to take place, so they can tell more people, mor often. If you start with #2 (the technology), it never works.

People tend to be motivated by one of three things: (1) desire to feel smart: Give them lots of information to feel smart when they talk about you. (2) Ego: Make them feel important. Giving miles to a frequent flier is like giving a pie to the winner of a pie-eating contest. (3) Fun.

Advertising is the cost of being boring.

Word of Mouth marketing is a lifetime of customer service.

It is SO Much more fun to work at a company that people love to talk about.

Saul Colt

Give people little surprises. Tell them they’re great. Automated messages in your web app don’t cost anything, but go a long way.

Leverage other people’s platforms.

Every idea must (1) make people laugh, (2) make people think, and (3) create a genuine emotion, eve if it’s tears.

If you can’t compete with people on their own level, don’t try. Change the rules.

Any time people are scratching their head about your brand, that’s more time they are thinking about your brand.

The best reason in the world not to do things the way most people do them is that most people are not successful.

I have blind faith in my ability to get things done.

Create the remarkable experience; let someone else start the conversation, then amplify their conversation.

Spike Jones

Community: people look after each other, everyone comes together for events

There is a big difference between being a neighbor and being neighborly

Stop curating. Create. We have too many people curating.

What do you guys want? What do you guys need? What tools can we build for you that will be useful for you? (That is how you get people engaged in building a community.)

Fundamentally, it is better to find community leaders who are part of the community, and approach them with the idea of creating a community management team, then train them how to be an ambassador — instead of hiring a Community Manager. Protect them, and allow them to be leaders. Make them into rock stars in front of their peers — the people they care about.

David Rabjohns

Advocacy is the one conversation metric that most relates (statistically) to sales — in multiple industries.

Creating advocacy requires finding the passion ALREADY in your category, THEN attaching your brand to that passion.

The world does not change often, but, when it does, it changes very quickly. You must identify your advocates, and lasso their passion. You can use Net Promoter Score, or Survey Monkey, or whatever works. Look for passion on BoardReader, or wherever you can find it. You don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of money.

The biggest problem people have is that they are measuring the wrong thing.

CFOs love money, so marketers have to start conversations with CFOs about money. Show them how the thing they care about (sales) relates to the things you care about.

Rob La Gesse

If I can get someone from telling me how bad my people are, into thanking me… that’s like crack!

When I can see people in a Skype chat, I make notes about what is in their background. If they have dogs in the background, I’ll make a note, and I’ll send them dog treats — but send it later, when they don’t expect it. Completely shocking the customer.

If you tweet something nice about Rackspace, there is a good chance you will get a t-shirt saying “I tweeted about Rackspace.”

All our social media team are engineers, not marketers.

The real trick in dealing with customers is knowing their name, and knowing just enough about them that every conversation with them is a personal conversation.

It takes very little, these days, to blow people away with customer service, because we’re used to being put on hold.

Treat your customer like a friend. Do you give your friend a birthday card? Give your customer a birthday card.

Randomly call customers, just to see if there is anything they need. Being helpful and being nice.

You can’t fake great customer service. You really have to love it. You can’t teach someone how to be empathetic with customers. Customers don’t want your sympathy.

Colleen Barrett

We were simple, down-to-Earth people, and we saw a need that needed to be filled.

You are all in the customer service business, but many of you do not realize it.

I fight structure every day. I fight bureaucracy every day.

Do not come into your new job and pretend that you’re on probation, and not be yourself. We hired you because of who you are.

We treat our union people the same as our non-union people: they are all family.

Q: What is morning overview meeting? A: We study what happened the day B4. What do we need to do to be proactive daily?

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

I began the database by scouring the web to find around 50 policies in 2009, and nearly all of the subsequent 150 policies came from people submitting suggestions, all over the world.

Some of my observations and lessons about social media policies will be included in my upcoming book about enabling employees in social media at large organizations, co-authored with Susan Emerick of IBM, which will be released later this year.

I am grateful to the community for this chance to facilitate and curate.

Thank you.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

• Structure: Proper case interviews test a candidate’s ability to create structure. Strategists are constantly called to solve complex problems in domains that they may not know well. The only way to succeed is to create efficient and rigorous structures for problem-solving. Case interviews are effective at determining whether a candidate possesses the skills required to create and use such structures.
• Logic: A good case interview tests a candidate’s logic skills. With a good structure in place, can the candidate derive reasonable conclusions from the facts of the case, and determine appropriate directions to take their approach during the case? The best case interviews will also test a candidates knowledge of basic statistics, economics and strategy fundamentals.
• Mettle: Case interviews do not always have a single correct answer. In fact, the answer is not the point. This can be frustrating to a candidate, and it is critical to see how a candidate reacts to ambiguity, uncertainty, or being asked to solve a problem in a domain where they have limited experience; because those are the natural habitat of the strategist.

Giving case interviews is a skill in itself, and must be developed over time. People who are new to case interviews tend not to be very good at giving them. If you want to use case interviews to help ensure the best fit of the candidates you interview, make time to practice. And get some coaching from folks who have been doing it for a while.

You will be glad you did.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

1. Your most sophisticated — and most valuable — practitioners probably use multiple engagement tools throughout the day. I use one tool on my phone, another on my desktop, and sometimes I post directly into Twitter, depending on the task. Like most folks, if you try to make me use one tool for all of my engagement, I simply will not do it.
2. You are not capable of supporting your early adopters at the rate that engagement tools change. They will want to continually experiment with new tools that save them time and make them more effective, and you will not be able to keep up. For example, consider the recently announced partnership between Tweriod and Buffer. How will you deal with that? You’ll constantly find yourself arguing against the natural behaviors of your early adopters, and your strongest individual performers in social media.
3. No tool covers all the necessary venues. You can standardize on Buddy Media for Facebook, but what about Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.? I place this challenge last because it will slowly go away, but the above two challenges will remain.

Governance of social media should focus on delivering the right balance of empowerment with accountability. It is not necessarily about traditional IT approaches to standardization and enforcement because innovation and evolution are so very critical in this still-nascent category.

The only times I have seen a brand successfully standardize their engagement tool is when a brand deploys something like Buddy Media globally, and uses it for consistent measurement of Facebook performance, as well as a single Content Management System (CMS) for distributing Facebook content across the organization.

But that only covers Facebook.

So, maybe you try to get everyone using CoTweet, or HootSuite, or Spredfast, or whatever — but it never works.

Just try it. You’ll see.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

Consultancies like Accenture, Booz and BCG have used tools like this for years, to make it easier for their staff to quickly create compelling and clear visuals in their client projects. Nancy now brings that capability to the masses.

Microsoft tried to implement this in recent versions of PowerPoint, but the quality was never high enough, and the Microsoft charts are very difficult to customize.

Nancy also published a book for folks who need to create compelling presentations: slideology

I wish I’d thought of it.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

In any case, social media have matured; the wild west days are ending. Accountability has arrived — for measurable results tied to business goals.

If you want to succeed in social media today, you need to be able to do two things: (1) measure your business impact, and (2) make fact-based decisions using data — on the fly, in your head.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

As Dan Pecoraro stated:

“Sure, in some attribution models, maybe your 9th best campaign will look like your 11th best in another. But when it comes to good business decision making, the great campaigns will look like great campaigns, and the bad campaigns will look like bad campaigns, no matter which model you use.”

Most brands can get tremendous benefit from simply integrating measurement across their funnel, including paid media, social media, and web analytics.. Simply getting that picture in place will dramatically improve your investments across paid, owned and social media.

So, let us not distract ourselves with the 30% that is most difficult to solve completely. Instead, focus on measuring all of your media together. After all, it’s all one funnel^TM.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

1. You may encounter information which tells you that the person is in a protected group, and expose your company to a discrimination claim.
2. You may create the impression that you are a distrustful and disrespectful employer, thereby damaging your corporate reputation.
3. How would your IT Security team feel to know that your employees surrender their passwords when asked?
4. You risk creating an environment wherein your people feel empowered to violate employee privacy.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

What kind of web app could you create to give your customers something of value, establish a relationship based on trust, and keep them coming back? Bonus points if you build it atop an asset that your competitors do not possess.

2. Measurement
Do you know the attributes of your content that generate the greatest engagement or sharing? Most brands don’t. Most brands outside of the media industry don’t think about it at the level required to optimize content development at large scale.

3. Intent Research
When your marketers, or SMEs, or agency staff are writing content for the brand, they should have ready access to the latest search trends and conversation insights to understand the language that online audiences are using at that time.

Most use cases do not require the information in real-time, up-to-the-moment, but many campaigns would benefit from daily updates, if not weekly or monthly. When was the last time you wrote a press release whose keywords were informed by SEO and SEM goals, and the latest search volumes on those keywords? These tools and approaches are growing more widely understood and blogged about, but almost no large brand is executing it with consistency.

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Chris Boudreaux leads social media strategy and measurement efforts for large B2C and B2B brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.