Employer Branding using Real Customer Stories, Through Employee Peer-to-Peer Connectivity
Current employer branding implementations are incomplete.
Employer branding is much more than a slogan send through traditional stories to future employees.
If you want to attract the right candidate, usually hard to get candidates, you’ll have to do more than setting up branded job sites with “feel good” content. Read more 
Influencing Tribes with Peer to Peer Marketing
(Photo courtesy of Martha Lou Perritti)
Peers trust peers. Plugged-in marketers know about the Edelman Trust Barometer. But in the end there’s no rocket-science behind this. You, dear blog reader, don’t trust strangers for starters. And people in similar jobs as yours, who have something interesting to say, well… you find them interesting.
CTO’s are connected with their fellow CTO’s. CMO with CMO’s. Middle Management trusts Middle Management. You could call these circles of people “Tribes.”.
Entering the Tribe as a vendor
The question is: how do you enter that circle as a vendor? How do you enter that circle in an authentic way? In a way which is relevant to the Tribe? In a way that doesn’t damage your reputation as a vendor? Read more
Social Business Strategy – The Law of the Squeezing Social Media Networks
What happened in 2014 in the field of digital marketing can best be compared with the Law of Bernoulli.
This law is very simple to understand: put your foot on a water hose and turn on the tap. What happens next, in my imagination, is a bubble of water that appears in the hose, just like in the Tom & Jerry cartoons from my childhood. On one side of the bubble, the pressure is higher. And on the other side, at the far end, only a little bit of water comes out. Take your foot of the water hose, and “voilà”, there is again plenty of water. Agreed, Bernoulli’s law is more complex than that, but this is supposed to be Bernoulli’s law “for dummies”.
In 2014, we’ve seen that Facebook started putting both feet firmly on our social media water hoses. Where we used to enjoy delicious free organic reach for our content, with “Facebook Zero” that organic reach came to a standstill. If we want to reach our Facebook friends as a brand, an hose them down with our updates, we’ll have to pay “please-get-your-foot-of-the-water-hose”-money to Facebook.
What is less known is that not only Facebook is doing this. Other titans like Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn are taking steps in this direction.
Why do they do that? Obviously it comes down to money.
But it’s about more than just money … Read more
How have IBM, Adobe, and Dell become a Social Business? And what can a smaller company learn from them?
What can small and medium business (SMB) learn from giants such as IBM, Adobe and Dell about becoming a social business?
At first sight learning from these giants seems a crazy idea. SMB’s are different by every means. They have less budget, less employees, and certainly have different problems.
But surprisingly, when looking at how these large companies have become social businesses, there is a lot smaller companies can learn…
For this blog post I have:
- studied the social business strategies of IBM, Adobe and Dell in detail,
- mapped out a the best practices from these companies
- formulated some best practices feasible for SMBs.
Social Business has now become Inevitable and Unavoidable
When Facebook ended the “free love era”, they drastically scaled back the organic reach of brands. It seemed for many marketers as if history repeated itself.
For a few years they enjoyed the exposure the network brought. But today, if you want exposure, you’ll need to pay to play. For brands on Facebook, these are dark days. They can choose to spend more money to reach fans they had already accumulated in the past, but Facebook will likely decrease branded reach even further.
It isn’t long before other large social media networks will do the same.
What are brands to do when social media networks are choosing to reduce the freedom that brands can play on their networks?
The evolution of Facebook – signaling the era of Social 3.0
According to a new report from Simply Measured, the total engagement for the top 10 most-followed brands on Facebook has declined 40 percent year-over-year—even as brands have increased the amount of content they’re posting by 20.1 percent.
To understand a little bit on what’s happening, we need to go back a few years in the history of Facebook, and then look into the future of what is most probably going to happen. Read more
9 Key Change Management Essentials for Epic Content Marketing
What change is needed in an organization to be successful with content marketing?
Answering todays marketing challenges is a daunting task for most of us.
Not only is marketing increasingly becoming a digital environment, marketing itself is changing. Buyers demand value on top of existing products and services. They want you to inspire them, educate them, and entertain them.
Embracing a content marketing culture is the first step towards becoming a social business. It is the first step to creating marketing that people actually want.
It requires great, or small changes, depending on your current corporate culture:
- from outbound to inbound
- from self-centric to meaningful
- from classic to digital
- from art to science
Here are some of the key change management essential ingredients you need to take into account when changing a company towards a content marketing culture:
How to Embrace Digital, Social and Content as a Company?
The reactions where heartwarming. Although I knew I had a nice story, I didn’t expect these fantastic reactions.
A couple of week ago I presented to around 60 B2B decision makers. The topic was basically about the biggest challenges of marketers today, and how they can solve these challenges.
When I posted a trimmed down version of my presentation on Slideshare, I got another happy surprise. It got voted “presentation of the day” on Slideshare. I think that’s pretty cool. And that my friends, as you can imagine, made me a little bit proud and totally made my day.
Here’s what I presented… Read more
Digital Marketing Trends for 2014
As marketers, we have to “do” a lot. Just when we have social a bit under control, we need to do mobile. And just when we have our first “responsive” website ready, also this doesn’t seem to be enough. Nay, now it’s all context, big- data, gamification, customer experience and collaboration.
Pfffff.
It’s not easy today for marketers. And it won’t become any easier. How should a company deal with these changes? And how do you create new opportunities? Read more
Which Content is Most Relevant to Your Buyers?
Providing enough relevant content to buyers is one of the biggest concerns of marketers today, according to a recent study of CMI.
But how do you know which content is relevant to your buyers?
Showing business value is not differentiating
Building buyer insight is an important activity of marketers, resulting in buyer persona descriptions, or buyer insight maps as I often call them. Based on that buyer insight, content is created that shows the business value of your products or services.
The problem is that your competitors are doing the exact same thing. Read more
12 Thought Leaders in Marketing that Permanently Changed My Life
This is me in Torbole, Lake Garda, Italy
I have made a big decision in my life. Well, it’s a big decision for me at least. Already for a couple of years I have been dreaming of creating my own company, and I finally made that decision.
My wife is calling me crazy, but I’m going to do it anyway. As of January 2014 I won’t be working for an employer anymore.
It wasn’t an easy decision. I mean, I live extremely close to work, I have a decent pay, and lot’s of extra’s. But I’m going to do it.
Why am I doing this? Because I got really, really passionate about something. Read more
