Three Essential Building Blocks of Your Social Media Presence

What’s changed? Everything and nothing:

There are 7 billion people on the planet now, and 34 percent of the world’s population, about 2.4 billion people, had Internet access as of late 2012. That’s a big ongoing change.

People still make decisions and live their lives through stories. That will never change.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
- French proverb…

So the planet is hyper-connected by wired and wireless networks, and more people are free to exchange many more stories. How does that change anything important?
If you’re running your own business, or trying to affect real change on any scale, you have greater access to people and markets than at any time in history. We’ve entered a new epoch

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Attitudes on the use of Social Media in Healthcare Communications

Published in the Journal of Communication in Healthcare 2013 Vol. 6 No. 1
Abstract…
Social media has become a mainstay of communication between business-to-business and business-to-consumer endeavors. However, lacking is a fair and balanced discussion of the risks and benefits of utilization and implementation, in particular, within healthcare communications.
Our research objective is to assess current attitudes of healthcare, pharmaceutical and life sciences executives on the topic.
We conducted an online survey with 107 people from varying positions and perspectives within these industries. From CEO to CIO, from Marketing Director to Brand Manager, respondents are active in their positions, serve primarily the United States, and provide diversity to our sample.

When asked about whether or not marketers should be permitted to use social media to

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Journal Article Studies Preference of Social Media Professionals for Healthcare Communications

YouTube preferred over Flickr, Facebook and LinkedIn rated equal.
San Diego – The FDA may not be sure about the use of social media in healthcare communications, but the professionals within the space report they’re ready to move forward.
Today the Journal of Communication in Healthcare… published a research study that measured the attitude of healthcare, pharmaceutical, and life sciences executives on the use of social media, aiming to correct the lack of a fair and balanced discussion of the risks and benefits of using social media in healthcare communications.
Survey respondents hold positions from CEO to CIO, from Marketing Director to Brand Manager, are active in their positions, and serve primarily the United States. When asked about whether or not marketers should be permitted

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Gaining Your Experience Advantage with Three Quick Wins

As you learned in the article, Improving Customer Experience, Where Do you Start?, a robust, strategic customer experience initiative can take years of planning and implementation and require an incubation period before the changes produce visible results. And while a long-term, strategic customer experience initiative is essential for building a meaningful experience advantage, there are three key customer experience quick wins that you can implement today that will bring about improvements tomorrow:

Immediately, and personally, address your unhappy customers’ complaints.
Reward your employees for customer-first behaviors.
Give customer feedback to the stakeholders who will take action.

When implemented together these three key quick wins complete a circle of customer care that will result in measurable improvements. Here’s how to get started:
The remainder …

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Improving Customer Experience, Where Do you Start?

By its nature, customer experience touches all aspects of your business – marketing, sales, operations, finance, and maybe even your legal team. It’s an enterprise-wide strategy that focuses your entire organization on putting the customer first. And, in its entirety, customer experience can be daunting. The enormity of what should be done to improve the customer experience paralyses some companies into doing nothing at all – a tragic mistake that allows their competition to pull ahead with an experience advantage.
Who has the advantage?
An experience advantage… can be hard to define in just a word or two, but if you think about Apple, Zappos, American Express, and Southwest Airlines it becomes clear. These companies were early adopters of the customer experience discipline

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Understanding “What Great Salespeople Do”

A review on Mike Bosworth & Ben Zoldan’s new book exploring “the science of selling through emotional connection and the power of story.”…
Disclaimer: Mike Bosworth has been my sales coach for more than a dozen years and has become a good friend. I’ve coached for Solution Selling, used the strategies at my own company, and participated in one of the first Beta workshop for Storyleaders.
That being said, I think I get a better understanding of the material because I know Mike Bosworth, and I know what he means when he says something.
And although I’ve only met Ben Zoldan a few times including the workshop, his writing style and voice he contributes to their book makes us seem like we been friends for

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A Commentary on Bad TV: Who’s writing this stuff anyway?

Did you ever watch a television commercial and wonder, who wrote this stuff? I do. Every day.
I watched Al Roker (ala The Today Show) on-camera for The Office Depot open with, “Who helps businesses and kids succeed?” Really? The Office Depot help kids and business succeed? Are you giving away school and office supplies for free because you’re a commodity retailer and customers can buy what you sell from any competitor, a grocery store, a drug store or by bulk at Costco. And are you tutoring or offering free consulting because that’s what kids and businesses need to succeed, not another pen supplier. And the close – “Life’s good when the kids are happy!” Really, Al? Really?

Lipton Iced Tea… details their three

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Case Study: Recruitment Advertising for Sony Electronics

“This work was the single biggest successful effort we ever did, until the Radio hit the following month.” – Director of PR, Sony

Situation: We worked with the Director of Public Relations of an Electronics Manufacturer in the business of building large-screen television sets sold throughout the world.
Critical Business Issue: Although a market leader, the company’s greatest challenge was not being able to meet sales projections because they were not able to respond to dramatic changes in staffing requirements.
Reasons…: The company had expanded their global manufacturing plant capability and needed thousands of additional staff to run the new lines to capacity. Not running the lines at capacity meant not meeting the production projections. At times they would be required to

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Case Study: Advertising Campaign for Retail Convenience Stores

“Looking as good as the competition is important for us. I think Ideahaus did a good job of getting us in the game.” – VP of Marketing
Situation: We worked with the President and the VP of Marketing of a Convenience Store Chain operating 65 stores throughout Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.
Critical Business Issue: Most of the stores in the chain were having difficulty meeting sales goals on a consistent basis. Many stores had missed projections impacting profits of the entire company.
Reasons…: The stores were perceived as a “local” chain and not on par with national competitors. Customers surveyed perceived no differential advantage over other convenience stores. Surveys also reported their customers’ perception of them as a Gas/Bread/Milk resource, although

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