Tuesday, 3 October 2017

Tom Petty Dead at 66, Social Media Pays Tribute to A Rock Legend

Wikimedia Commons


Tom Petty has died at the age of 66. The rock legend, who was best known as the lead singer for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, passed away after suffering full cardiac arrest this weekend.


According to a report from TMZ, Petty was found unconscious and not breathing Sunday night and was rushed to the hospital, where he was put on life support. After arriving at UCLA Santa Monica Hospital, it was discovered that the legendary rocker had no brain activity “and a decision was made to pull life support.”


Following conflicting reports, TMZ said Monday afternoon that the musician was “still clinging to life” after the Los Angeles Police Department denied confirming his death. The Los Angeles Times later confirmed that Petty died Monday evening. “Tom Petty’s longtime manager confirmed that he died Monday evening surrounded by friends, family and bandmates,” they tweeted.




Petty rose to fame in the 1970s as the frontman for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The band, which produced hits such as “I Won’t Back Down,” “Refugee,” “American Girl” and “Free Fallin’,” was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. CBS reports that Petty played his last show Sept. 25, which concluded the band’s 40th anniversary tour. Petty told Rolling Stone last year that he thought the tour would “be the last big one.”


Many people took to social media Monday afternoon to remember the rock legend—sharing lyrics, photos and more. Take a look at the tweets below:


Social Media Remembers Legendary Rocker Tom Petty
















































Do you have a favorite memory of Tom Petty? Share it in the comments section below!


Photo credit: musicisentropy, Wikimedia Commons



Source: B2C
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10 Things Only B2B Brands with Solid Global Reach Can Understand


Back in the old days, having “global reach” meant businesses had to (literally) set up shop and ply their wares on foreign shores. Fast forward a few short generations later and practically any business can rightly claim to have a worldwide presence without ever setting foot in the places where their customers are.


To really achieve strong global reach, however, you need to develop and follow a sound brand expansion strategy first. This allows you to clearly define the image you want actual and potential customers to equate with your company or solution, as well as to set your product apart from those of your competitors.


If you take a look at global B2B brands that have managed to carve out a decent slice of both market share and mindshare in different parts of the world today, you’ll find that their brand expansion activities all boil down to the following 10 key ingredients:


#1. Local Audience and Market Segments


Named the world’s most valuable B2B brand for the second consecutive year by WPP and Kantar Millward Brown, Microsoft is a company that’s able to balance its global reach with a local focus. To help it stay locally relevant within its many different markets worldwide, the company employs a Global Readiness team that enables Microsoft to respect and comply with various geographic and cultural requirements arising from its worldwide operations.



Bing_France_


Image source: brandquarterly.com



Because customers’ priorities and experiences vary from one market to another, it’s important that you “localize” your brand expansion strategy to suit a particular area’s profile. Craft a brand message that appeals to specific niches or segments in your target region, and deliver that message in the language and tone that that particular audience uses.


#2. Identity and Values


Another global B2B brand that consistently tops rankings is General Electric (GE). The company owes much of its success maintaining its strong global presence to its uniquely recognizable brand identity and values. For an organization that offers a diverse set of products and solutions in over 180 countries, defining an overarching identity can be a bit of a challenge. That’s why GE always goes back to its brand story to communicate what it stands for.


Brand expansion requires a unique identity that your prospects and customers can readily associate with your company. Find that promise that your company alone can deliver and place it at the core of your brand’s narrative.


#3. Consistency


With operations in 220 countries and territories worldwide, logistics titan DHL is a case study in global branding consistency. During the company’s transition from domestic mail to global logistics, DHL ensured international consistency by touching all aspects of its rebranding efforts–from the color of its delivery fleet all the way to its company-wide brand ambassador employee program. Today, the entire organization strictly adheres to a set of corporate identity and design rules that govern every marketing campaign and material it uses.



DHL Rebranding


Source: retail-loyalty.org



Offering a consistent brand experience for your current and upcoming customers across borders goes beyond using the same set of colors and typography in your marketing materials. It’s about letting people experience your company as a whole, wherever they come across your brand.


#4. Logistics


Coming up with a compelling promise forms only one part of branding–being able to deliver on that promise is another. Few international B2B brands can do logistics and supply chain management quite like Intel. Aside from manufacturing industry-leading processors and chips, the company is also known for supply chain innovations that guarantee its products reach customers no matter what or where. So, carefully planning how you ensure that your solutions get delivered is a vital part of the brand expansion.


There’s an old saying that goes: “Amateurs talk tactics; professionals study logistics.”


#5. Scale and Scope


SAP is a global B2B brand with scalability at the core of its reputation. Not only does the company enable its customers to scale operations and business activities effectively, SAP itself is the end result of a massive scaling-up strategy that transformed the organization from an ERP company into the end-to-end digital solutions powerhouse that it is today.


The real measure of scalability for your brand expansion is how well your business is able to meet the demands of growth in a market–such as pursuing more opportunities or keeping up with tighter production schedules. If your organization is unable to handle scaling properly, your brand can suffer as a result.


#6. Competition


One B2B brand that’s clearly crushing its competition is Amazon, particularly its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division. With over 1 million active enterprise users under its fold, AWS clearly leads the cloud services market while rivals like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud lag way behind. Gartner points to AWS’s significant competitive advantage in terms of core services, geographic coverage, and sales strategy as the main reason why the brand has such a dominant market position.



rcpmag.com


Source: rcpmag.com



Expanding into new markets means inevitably going head-to-head against competitors (both local and foreign). Whatever your relative strengths are over your competition, these should serve as guideposts for shaping your brand expansion strategy.


#7. Outreach and Exposure


Oracle stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the world’s most valuable global B2B brands today. This is in no small part due to the level of targeted outreach and exposure the Oracle brand maintains, especially toward C-level and executive segments where brand visibility matters most. Oracle uses a combination of educational and promotional content to help position its brand as both a trusted resource and a reliable partner.


It goes without saying that social media and the Internet have leveled the playing field when it comes to brand visibility and exposure. The tools to reach out to and engage any target market on the planet are readily available out there (most of them at almost no cost). The key challenge is knowing how to use these platforms in ways that align with your brand expansion strategy.


#8. Thought Leadership and Influence


Consistently ranked as one of today’s most valuable and influential B2B brands, Salesforce is comfortably perched as the CRM market’s undisputed leader. It owes a great deal of its brand value to its reputation as an innovator (for pioneering and shaping SaaS) and as a trusted source for business and technology insights.


In the current B2B setting where the buyer mostly leads the way, the best thing you can do during brand expansion is to try and influence how your audience perceives your company’s image. Control is pretty much out of the picture. Brands that thrive today are those which their audiences view as reliable experts.


#9. Company Culture and Commitment


Cisco is a great example of an organization with its brand seamlessly weaved into its company culture. It’s “People Deal” relates the company’s mission to “connect everything, innovate everywhere, and benefit everyone” into its worldwide workforce, ensuring employee buy-in of Cisco’s values.


Brand expansion requires firm support and commitment from your team or organization. That’s because, as a Fortune report points out, company culture is “incredibly important” in building B2B relationships and hence needs to reflect your branding message, too.


#10 Barriers and Hurdles


What do you do when the government of a country you’re trying to expand into labels your company as a security threat and severely restricts operations?


That was the situation communications equipment manufacturer Huawei once found itself in when the company tried to enter the $30-billion U.S. telecom equipment market but got mostly banned because of alleged links to the Chinese military. Huawei was able to find another way to tap into its target market and is now supplying smaller (regional) U.S. carriers, with equipment sales steadily growing each year.


Regulations and restrictions are only two of the barriers to entry you need to take into account when trying to expand your brand into new markets. Language and cultural barriers can significantly influence the outcome of your brand expansion efforts, as well as factors like the costs of doing business in that region and the amount of risk you’re taking on.


The Takeaway


With the right brand expansion strategy, global reach is well within the grasp of any business, regardless of size or maturity. While we’ve focused on relatively large and well-established B2B brands in this post, the fact is that physical distance is no longer an obstacle for anyone when reaching out to your target audience and customers.


This post originally published at The Savvy Marketer.



Source: B2C
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Monday, 2 October 2017

What’s Working In Paid Social Media Advertising

As an increasing number of organizations, from large corporations to small nonprofits, move their advertising and marketing budgets into paid social media advertising, everyone is seeking to understand what’s really working and how they can stand out as platforms become more saturated with advertisers. Don’t worry—there is still enormous opportunity on social ad platforms, and the cost of running ads remains low compared with other channels.


Ready to compare successes and apply a couple new tactics to your ads? Let’s explore some of the social media advertising platforms, ad types, and strategies that we have found to be particularly successful in recent months.


Facebook Lead Form Ads


If you don’t apply any other tactic or ad type from this blog post to your paid social media advertising, that’s okay, as long as you test Facebook lead form ads. Lead form ads are exactly what they sound like: When a user clicks on your ad, a form opens up right in Facebook.


The best thing about these ads is that Facebook takes the user’s information and automatically completes the form for the user, so all the user has to do is hit the button to get your offer or sign up for your newsletter. This removes a lot of the friction with normal Facebook ads, in which the user must click the ad, be directed away from Facebook and to your site, and then fill out a form and click the download button. With Facebook lead form ads, it’s as easy as tap, tap, tap.


Building the Lead Form Ad


Setting up lead form ads in Facebook isn’t difficult. You’ll want to use Facebook’s Power Editor to build and manage lead form ads. When setting up the new campaign, set the campaign objective to Lead Generation. Then, you’re ready to create your ad set and craft your ad creative and lead forms. The form setup will look like the image below:


Whats working in paid social media advertising facebook form.png


Below are a few tips and things to test when creating lead form ads:


  • Test the ad images and headlines as you would with any other Facebook ad.

  • Create a few versions of your ad image with text overlay to catch the attention of users scanning their newsfeed. You’re much likelier to read text on an image than to read the headline or description copy of a suggested post. Example below:

Whats working in paid social media advertising.png


  • Instead of the paragraph layout option, use bullets to highlight the unique benefits of your offer—similar to landing page best practices.

  • If you toggle over to Settings on the form setup, you can update the sharing settings so that the ad can be shared and anyone can submit the form. Otherwise, only people who receive your ad directly can submit the form.

Quick tip for HubSpot users: If you have the Facebook ads add-on, new leads will automatically be imported into your contacts database. Otherwise, you should manually export leads from Facebook and import them into HubSpot or whichever customer relationship management you use so that you can nurture these new leads.


Run Ads Against Content That You Know Works


By this, I mean analyze the blogs, offers, and other content that’s already working well organically with your ideal buyer personas and run ads promoting that content. This applies to any type of social media ad you’re creating, whether it’s a Facebook lead form ad or a promoted pin on Pinterest. If a piece of content is converting well and brings in the majority of your new leads and customers, it’s a safe bet that it will resonate with your target audience as a paid ad.


What to Look for


  • Most-viewed blog posts that also have high click-through rates.

  • Premium content offers with high submission rates and/or view-to-contact rates.

  • For decision-stage offers, look for ones that actually convert leads to customers (view-to-customer rate).

  • Check what call-to-action copy is driving the highest click-through rates on the website for the offer and borrow that copy to test in your ads.

Video Is King


You’ve heard plenty of times about how huge video is for social media and paid social, and that’s not about to go away anytime soon. Short videos are king on Instagram and Facebook, and utilizing video in your paid social media ads will boost your results.


Below are a few tips and ideas for using video in your ads:


  • The first few seconds of the video are key to grabbing the user’s attention.

  • Repurpose top blog posts and your other popular content into short videos.

  • Content that is educational and inspirational typically performs best. For example, if you’re selling certifications, tell a story in your video about how a student changed his or her career and life after earning his or her certification—much more powerful than slapping some “buy now” copy on an image and calling it a day.

  • Use tracking URLs—this applies to all and any social ads you run so that you can track the effectiveness of the paid ads on your campaign.

  • Don’t have the resources to create great videos?
    • Try Facebook’s slideshow ads—you can create a slideshow using multiple images. Don’t forget to add caption copy to the images so that users can tell what the ad is about when scrolling. Check out this blog post for more information on slideshow ads. These slideshow ads can be served on Facebook and Instagram.

    • There are tons of tools out there that make video creation easy. Play around with tools such as Lumen5 or Biteable.


As with all your paid social ads, the most important thing is your targeting. If your ads aren’t reaching the right audience, it doesn’t matter how great the content is. Secondly, always be testing your targeting, ad copy, and images to base what you’re doing on data.


What has been working for you with paid social ads? Let me know in the comments, and best of luck tweaking your ad campaigns to test out these tactics!



Source: B2C
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From In-House to Outsourced: Best Practices for Contact Center Knowledge Transfer


In procuring an outsourced contact center partner, you’ve gone through the RFP process, you’ve made the site visit, you’ve narrowed down your decision, and, finally, you’ve signed the contract to make your choice official. The job of procurement might be done, but everything else is just getting started. Unless you want to throw your outsourcer in at the deep end (hint: really bad idea), then you need to turn your attention to agent training and contact center knowledge transfer.


Communicate Your Vision


Your company and its brand are unique. It can be intimidating to hand over customer care to a third-party when deciding to outsource, but you can turn that around by making sure your outsourced partner assimilates to your brand. You have a vision for the work you do, and now is the time to share it. Help new agents understand the mission and goals of their work, including both big picture goals and daily performance indicators, to ensure it will reflect in their performance. From the crafting of your RFP to the Statement of Work you develop with your new partner, your brand, your culture, your company’s voice, values, and vision must be clearly communicated.


Define Your Processes


Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know – and it is possible that gaps will only be discovered when something goes wrong. You can mitigate against this risk. When protocols are too loosely defined, knowledge transfer can easily get lost in translation, leaving agents confused and faced with a wide array of possible customer service outcomes. In rapid growth scenarios or first time outsourcing scenarios, it pays to ensure that you prioritize the development of current, accurate work instructions. Step-by-step procedures and clearly defined rules are valuable assets in establishing a successful contact center. This is especially true when processes are changed or added at any point in the project; keep your agents in the loop and be sure to keep all lines of communication wide open.


Pay Attention to Your Team’s Inherent Knowledge


Teams share information. People teach each other the best, shortest, most effective ways to do things. Processes change on the fly and people get up to speed in whatever way they can. This is how inherent knowledge becomes part of your program. And this team knowledge is often undocumented. The transfer often happens peer-to-peer and eventually “everybody just knows.” This may include nuances in certain processes, especially in uncommon call scenarios or perhaps shifts in priorities when calls hit peak volume. This can also happen when there are frequent policy changes that affect customer service. You’re going to need a robust documentation process and change management protocol to move this inherent knowledge from one team to another – whether you are outsourcing for the first time or moving your program to a new strategic partner. You must be diligent is assessing and identifying these information gaps in order to strengthen the process of contact center knowledge transfer.


Get Involved in the Training Process


The best possible thing you can do to ensure successful knowledge transfer in your contact center is to get a subject matter expert from your company on-site at your outsourced partner to deliver hands-on training – at least in the burn-in phase of a new program. Although the best contact centers will have highly skilled training programs and trainers, mentoring “from the horse’s mouth” will be especially valuable. Additionally, depending on the product or service your company offers, allow agents to get hands-on product experience. This will help them better understand and empathize with customers who call with questions and frustrations. For example, when working with a major automotive client, each year when new models were introduced our client would bring cars on site and our agents would have a chance to get in the cars and explore the vehicles and new features.


Continually Monitor Progress


Your relationship with your contact center partner should be founded on, and grounded in, a strong governance model. Out of the gate, from the award of contract, you also need a robust implementation plan that will help both of you successfully transition your program and identify any areas where knowledge transfer may have been unsuccessful. These are the two most important components to set yourself up for long-term success in the new strategic partnership – good governance and a successful transition. Your program should continually evolve – and how you manage knowledge transfer between your team and your partner’s team will be an important piece of that evolution.


Knowledge Transfer in the Contact Center


Training customer service agents is an art and science, and contact center knowledge transfer is the link that holds it all together. Strong documentation, hands-on training, clearly defined processes, and communication are all part of a successful training program to ensure a smooth transfer from in-house to outsourced contact center.


Looking for more insight on agent training? Grab your copy of What Your Outsourcer Should Tell You About Training Contact Center Agents: A Client’s Guide today!



Source: B2C
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What is Big Data and Why Does It Matter?

The term ‘Big Data’ is used to describe the huge amounts of data that inundate businesses on a day-to-day basis, whether this data is structured or otherwise. Data volume, however, is not as important as what companies actually do with it. For instance, big data can be pored over and analyzed to glean the kinds of insights that can lead to more informed decision-making.


Used correctly, in fact, Big Data can be used to track things like spread of disease much faster than more ‘traditional’ methods. Google was able to track the spread of Flu (with varying degrees of success) much faster than the CDC, around two weeks faster in fact, by tapping into the large amounts of data generated by search results.


Crazyarts / Google data used to track spread of flu – Pixabay


It is this kind of data analytics that can help drive businesses and organisations forward. A business or individual can take an amount of data from just about any source and analyze it in order to find the solutions and trends that will help your business to:


  • Reduce costs

  • Streamline operations

  • Develop new products and services

  • Make smarter decisions

Big data combined with highly efficient and powerful analytics can be a tremendous boost for any business and can help to find root causes of setbacks and failures, discover customer buying habits and determine next steps to boost sales further and even discover fraudulent behaviour within the organization itself.


That being said, stored data is only as useful as the measures taken to ensure the integrity of the data, not to mention its security. This has become more of an issue in recent years, and there are several steps that can be taken in this direction to ensure data integrity compliance.


Who uses big data


It isn’t just search giants that make use of big data, although they can make use of it to great effect. Governments, retail outlets, manufacturing companies and financial institutions, to name just a few, also find great value in analyzing large volumes of data sets.


Manufacturers, for example, fully armed with the kinds of insights that big data can provide them with are able to boost productivity and improve the quality of their products. Even waste management within manufacturing industries can be improved upon thanks to proper analyzing of collected data.


As analytical tools become more powerful and enter into common usage, more and more companies are making use of them. This adoption of SaaS technology means that companies are able to solve problems faster than before and can make business decisions that are better informed and they can make them in a shorter time and with less deliberation.


Big data in the entertainment industry


Much was made of the magic sauce that Netflix uses in its algorithms that are able to predict what its subscribers would like to watch next. Netflix themselves played their cards very close to their chests, and still do, and the rest of us were left wondering just how they managed to do it and so accurately.


Today it is not so much of a mystery, and it is something that others are doing now too – although perhaps not with the same levels of accuracy, at least not in these types of predictions since personal taste is so subjective.


Netflix was just ahead of the curve in terms of harnessing big data and being able to analyze it in order to judge what their subscribers’ individual viewing tastes were. This, in turn, led to IP acquisitions that perhaps would not have been made before, providing subscribers with the types of new shows that they actually want to see.


By collating large volumes of data and making use of high-powered analytics, Netflix very quickly became a global phenomenon.


Big data is important for many different business types, and in a world dominated by business and service provider competitiveness, collating and analyzing that data is becoming more and more important.



Source: B2C
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The Public Relations Approach is the Future of Marketing

The phrase “public relations” doesn’t accurately define the role of PR in the future.


So said the 2017 Global Communications Report, from the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism. The survey found, “87% of PR executives believe the term ‘public relations’ does not describe their future.”


Why?


The evolution of digital media has forced the integration of previously distinct marketing disciplines. The lines have blurred and functions are now interwoven.


Is this the end of the road for the public relations professional? Will the function of communications be subsumed permanently by marketing?


No, I don’t think so. It’s just the opposite.


The approach of the classically trained PR professional, who has diligently acquired technical and digital skills, is permeating marketing. This has been evident in marketing trends over the last decade, where core PR tenets have been a unifying enabler.


  • PR is the link to SEO. The influence of PR was clear in search marketing when Google became the new front page. It’s still true today. If you want to earn backlinks, you have to do something new and unique. Directory submissions and pitching to fix old broken links is often fruitless work.

  • PR steered the approach to social media. We saw PR in the rise of social media, where authenticity reigned and rejected commercialization. You can’t win over a reporter over with an advertisement, and as it turned out, readerships and social media had a lot in common.

  • PR the first to inbound marketing. The PR approach was apparent too in inbound marketing – earning attention and forgoing interruption marketing. It’s called earned media because it cannot be purchased.

These ideas are not new. For example, a 2010 survey of 966 PR professionals I led for a former employer, Vocus, drew similar conclusions. The results, in part, prompted the company’s then CEO to observe that marketing increasingly looks more like PR.


PR isn’t being subsumed by marketing – it’s influencing a better approach to marketing. PR isn’t diminishing in business value, it’s more strategic than ever. PR isn’t becoming less important – it’s becoming more important.


So, while I agree with the conclusion, that the term “public relations” might be less fitting in the future, that doesn’t in any way diminish its role in the marketing mix.


Indeed, successful businesses will seize on this as an opportunity because the future of marketing looks more like public relations.


Note: A version of this post was previously published on Sword and the Script under the title The Future of Marketing Looks More like Public Relations.


Graphic credit: 2017 Global Communications Report



Source: B2C
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Shark Tank Social Media Reactions To Qball Receiving Deal With Lori Greiner, Mark Cuban And Rohan Oza

Indiegogo


Shane Cox, from Cary, N.C., of Qball — a wireless microphone that you can throw.


The Qball is made of a light, soft, and durable foam, designed to take a beating. The microphone automatically shuts off while in flight so you don’t get any unwanted thumps or bumps over the speakers. The Qball also features our exclusive Battery-Saver feature. If no movement is detected for 10 minutes, the Qball will automatically go into standby mode to save on power. Perfect for events, conferences, classrooms, and audience engagement.



Shark Tank Social Media Reactions


















Each week on “Shark Tank,” budding entrepreneurs have the opportunity to pitch their emerging business to six multi-millionaire and billionaire investors, known as sharks: Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks; Daymond John, fashion mogul and founder of FUBU; Kevin O’Leary, self-proclaimed Mr. Wonderful and founder of O’Leary Financial Group; Barbara Corcoran, real estate maven; Lori Greiner, queen of QVC; and Robert Herjavec, technology guru and founder/CEO of the Herjavec Group. Venture capitalist Chris Sacca is also slated to appear as a guest shark this season.


“Shark Tank,” which is based on “Dragons’ Den,” is produced by Mark Burnett and first debuted in 2009. To date, the sharks have invested more than $87 million in various companies after engaging in numerous bidding wars and shark fights. A new episode airs each Friday at 9 p.m. on ABC.


What did you think of the product on Shark Tank? Let us know in the comments section.



Source: B2C
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