16 Jun 2010
Last year Room 214 became one of two enterprise level partners of Crimson Hexagon, a leading provider of real-time market research. Crimson Hexagon is powered by technology spun primarily from Harvard University Professor and Crimson Hexagon Co-Founder, Gary King.
I recently caught up with Gary for a podcast, and am sharing a condensed version of our discussion with you as part of this post. Additionally, I’ve included my “Top 5 Things to Know” based largely on my experience and discussions with Lauren Maynard, who works with the tool almost daily as Room 214’s Director of Research.
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25 May 2010
I believe that you need to properly identify and reach out to individual influencers. It’s something we do for all of our clients. It’s an extremely important part of building relationships, and it’s a nuanced art. But people often miss the importance of understanding and reaching out to the groups or mediums most influential for a brand. Understanding the aggregate influencer is crucial to creating, honing and sharing content that really matters, and getting others to share it for you. A Complicated Journey When a brand creates a piece of information, that piece has a twisted, convoluted and often times unexpected set of adventures across the vast world of the interwebs. Once upon a time, this was the simple vision for the internet. 40 years later and things are not so simple. Interesting information about a brand can be shared on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, email, Buzz, text and a…
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23 Dec 2009
My last post revisited the “markets are conversations” principal. I proposed that companies/brands have been joining conversations in their industry, but selling themselves short if not working towards starting them. As a framework to facilitate this discussion, addressing the progression and value of brands starting conversations, see the Conversation Maturity Model below: From a social media strategy perspective, you should find this model fits well as part of, or along side, Forrester’s POST (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) approach or even Room 214′s PPLE Social Media Framework. The Value of Starting Conversations To keep this blog post digestible, I’ll summarize the model by saying the ultimate value of starting conversations is in building and sustaining your brand as a leader. Leadership, like almost everything that’s enabled your company’s success, must be earned. Each (maturity) level within the pyramid model is representative of where your brand may be in any given conversation about…
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22 Dec 2009
Social media experts are commonly asked where the market is going, or, “what do you believe the future of social media is?” I notice most offering answers are quick to disclaim “we are all learning, and nobody is really an expert” – then reasonably expound upon topics such as the integration of customer relationship management (CRM) within social media, online monitoring tools, Facebook, ROI models, etc. All worthy topics of discussion, but as one who will be humbly referring to himself as an expert among many, the topic I’m bringing to your attention now is that ofbrands starting conversations. “That’s it,” you say? “What’s so meaningful about that? Isn’t that what they are already doing?” Well, I’d say most are not. There is certainly a lot of listening going on – but many companies engaging in conversations about their brand are predominantly reacting, or at best, joining conversations (not starting them). Cluetrain…
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