Ideas and Strategies on Applied Social Media, Marketing and Business Development
On Monday, March 14, 2011 it was announced that Social Business Consulting Group, a global social media consultancy launched with 17 founding partners. I am proud to say that I have joined as one of the founding partners. I bring manufacturing, professional services and technical product experience to the team blended with social media, social selling, product management and engineering expertise. [Read more...]
Have you been noticing the number of B2B companies that are thoughtfully embracing social media? Caterpillar Inc is one of those heavy industry giants that is perhaps the last company you could imagine who would be using social media. But use it they are! Caterpillar caught my attention due to the recent purchase of a local Wisconsin-based heavy equipment company, Bucyrus International. Neither are companies that are considered on the forefront of cutting edge Web 2.0 technology or social networking. I have a connection to each and it prompted an opportunity for a social media interview. [Read more...]
In preparing a social media campaign for a Disney Institute professional development program, I evaluated the available materials that the 
marketing group was providing. Based on a traditional marketing effort the materials included email, press releases, Word of Mouth and partner promotions. They had some video but due to the Disney Brand, there were not allowed to be posted on Youtube for sharing by others.
I needed more content to share and created slide presentations (for Slideshare) and blog articles. I started to track down past attendees of the events to interview them myself via phone or using video. In order to understand the magic behind Disney and what makes these professionals evangelists online and off about customer service, the Disney leadership principles and customer experiences I needed to talk directly to a few Disney evangelists.
Of course I used social media to make some connections. I first joined the Disney Institute Alumni Group on LinkedIn to see what everyone was talking about. Then I started to network and ask questions with various people in the Group. David Balentine was one of my first connections and he said that his experienced at the Disney Institute unleashed a passion in him for customer service. He believes that everyone has a role to play in customer service and he writes about on his blog All For the Customer.
David Balentine and Family at Epcot (Photo Credit D. Balentine)
Let me first give you a little background. David is a general manager of several General Nutrition Centers (GNC) in the Atlanta area. David first visited Walt Disney World (WDW) in August 1972 and then not again until 2001. After that he had business conventions in and around WDW every other year. In 2003, he started taking his family with him.
“In 2009, I already considered myself a Disney geek, downloading Disney podcasts to my iPod, registering on numerous Disney forums and listening to Disney music on the internet day and night. We booked a 5-night stay at the Contemporary Resort. One of the days, we went to Blizzard Beach instead of one of the theme parks. We did not have any dining reservations for that evening so I stopped by the Concierge desk for assistance. I explained to the Cast Member that we didn’t have any reservations anywhere and I understood it was last minute but I wanted to have a special dinner with the family. . . . could he help me? Cary, the CM from the DC area, looked at me and said two simple words that. “Of course.” He was there to help me and how dare I think that he couldn’t help me. He didn’t say those words but that’s what he meant. He found us a table at Le Chefs de France at Epcot and we had a wonderful time.”
When David returned he started to educate himself about Disney-style customer service. Its no small wonder that continuing educating yourself is one of the leadership principles at Disney. One of the books he read was Lee Cockerell’s “Creating Magic: 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies From a Life at Disney.” After reading, he booked a course on Leadership Excellence at Disney Institute in Orlando. And that one was not his last.
Curious about David’s impressions of that first Disney Institute training, I asked about the details. The Leadership Excellence course held in November 2009 was a 3.5 day leadership principle program that closely followed the principles and tips in Creating Magic. David said that Disney looks at everything surrounding their guest. From the way the sheets are folded, to the way they clean up the resorts and parks. Cast members are graded on smiling at guests and even picking up any trash they see on the ground. After reading Lee Cockrell’s book, he wanted his operation, at least what he was responsible for, to run like Lee Cockerell talked about. He paid for this training out of his own pocket. During the sessions he attended, he found the attendees to be very diverse – large corporate, insurance businesses , Christian youth home, military, individuals, retail and business to business.
Although David manages two retail stores, he never received formal training on how to be a leader. While he loved being in direct contact with customers, he was lacking the qualities that are Disney’s guiding lights. Another concern for him was his lack of a formal degree.
“By the time [the first]course was over, I was feeling like I could run any Fortune 100 company if given the right people and enough time to do the job!” David Balentine
David Balentine during training (Photo credit D. Balentine
Its obvious that David is an evangelist for Disney and customer service. He has continued his quest for more education (another key principle in Lee Cockerell’s book) by taking a second and this fall will attend his third course. His drivers are both personal and professional, but still remains funded out of his own pocket.
“It is my goal one day to be employed by the Walt Disney Company. Until that happens, I am going to take what they have to offer and bring the level focus and energy back and apply it to our operation. There were already some processes in place because we are very customer focused. But there is always more you can do. The courses leave you with a feeling that tells you to get moving!”
David offers the following comments on this Disney training:
His key take aways were as follows:
Its clear from the interview I had with David that he was able to embrace the Disney principles at the courses he has already completed in Leadership Excellence and Quality Service. He hopes to complete People Management in 2011.
What effect has the Disney brand had on your life?
This is my continued effort to follow the Social Media Academy NCP Model (Network Contribute Participate). I choose to visit various blogs on B2B strategies, marketing, customer focused strategies, business development, engineering, product development and social media. From these collected comments, I create a post of what are the best of the week. I hope you enjoy.
I believe that the #1 factor for blog success, is the frequency of your posts. Mashable and TechCrunch, are respectably the #1 and #2 most popular social media blogs. They average over 20 posts per day. I understand they both have teams of paid writers to continuously spit out post after post…but I am constantly checking out their sites because I know they have good quality, and I know
that information will be new and constant. It is not realistic and probably not appropriate for you to be writing 20 articles per day, but you do need to consistently be writing new content. Social Media, more than ever, is truly an out of sight out of mind medium. If you aren’t continuously contributing content, or posts, or tweets…you do not exist.
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In response to the above statement I, Wendy Soucie, commented:
I also believe consistency is a factor – although if you do nothing to promote the blog it won’t matter how regular you are if no one knows it. Making sure you understand title and keywords and the role they play to get found are also high on the list.
I have done the following to generate a consistent pattern in my posting for my social media blogs:
1. Sunday is a Twitter weekly update – I generate this automatically but go back in, edit generate a tweet cloud picture and add tags, and review.
2. Monday is a Wisconsin Social Media day where I post to my secondary blog on Wisconsin business and social media issue. I also comment on some news activity from the past week or weekend. I will start posting a monthly case study interview of Wisconsin companies that are using social media, their strategies and success measurements.
3. Tuesday is a Tip and Technique day that I offer on one of the social media tools I use or train on.
4. Wednesdays are a participation and contribute day where I search for topics and comment on other peoples blogs. I either visit blogs I follow or use Google Alerts on keywords and phrases to find new conversations in the social ecosystem. I collect these comments – pick a theme and post this as a collection later on in the week.
5. Wednesday and Thursday are opinion post days. I add one to my personal blog and I add another to a column on social media I have on Madison Social Media Examiner.com (this one at least monthly)
6. Friday is thoughts on blogs day – so I take my comment compilation and post that.
7. Weekends I work on the start of articles for the next week or future.
8. Sundays I look at the posts for the week and consider some for repost on places I guest blog such as Customer Think, Social Media Today, Social Media Academy, or End Result Marketing.
I don’t always make all my deadlines, but I am hitting my minimum target of three posts a week.
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Axel Schultze had an interesting post on social competition.
“The discussions whether Social Media is a fad or why corporate executives don’t see the opportunity are pretty much history. With the inception of reporting tools, methods to measure success and models and frameworks to articulate strategies – social media entered the board rooms. And pretty quickly social media became a competitive weapon.
Competition for mind share, competition for group or community members, competition for influence. And it is also competition for better solutions co-created with the users who establish a sense of ownership and help promote the products they at least influenced. It is a competition for the more engaged support community where user support user and augment to company support team. It is competition for the smarter sales teams which may quickly develop larger and more influential social networks, with better customer relationships in those networks.”
Axel,
Here are my thoughts for the class based on some of my experiences with business over the past 6 months. Many of the SMB that I call on are waiting to see case studies, ROI, and have “prove it to me stances”. The are very reactive in their thinking. Conversations about social competition might me the best Ah ha moments to move these organizations into action. For many, they are programed to react not lead.
Teaching people to lead by engaging in social media where listening to customers sets the trends for what they do is an important aspect of this potential class.
If SMBs have this perspective, white papers and ebooks developed thru such a leadership class would be incredibly effective. I know the past classes offered did this but were they promoted enough? I think this should be a core result of each class. A recent research survey on what info c-level executives find the most value: WhitePapers and ebooks.
Another piece of information from the various presentations I have given is the concern by company execs about how much email will be in their mailbox if they engage in any social media efforts. Somehow they don’t equate social media personal connections with valid email from customers or potential customers. This needs to change if execs are to understand the much bigger picture of their customer mindset.
In such a class, I would also like to see significant time spent on benchmarking competitive intelligence, market info and strategies to manage the information that you do collect in a logical way.
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Lee Aase speaks and teaches others about social media at Social Media University Global. I love visiting his blog because I can learn something new and because I find Lee very encouraging to me personally (he is willing to share knowledge of value). He answers my comment posts (he is listening), he provides real examples (shares his experiences), he tries things himself and reports (shows us what works for him and Mayo Clinic). In this recent post, he is encouraging of using video to contribute to the blog experience. He highlighted a friend, Vince Muzik, who is doing a social media documentary on the No 1 football recruit Seantrel Henderson.
In response to his post I added:
Lee,
I wish some of my video projects were about someone as exciting as the number one recruit. They are me video blogging right now. Although my friends (via their comments) are visibly entertained by not so much my content – but how I am doing it.
I just don’t think I am that interesting. However, I am going to start interviewing people who are using social media in a business setting. Capture what they think worked and what didn’t as an alternative. My first one is going to start in January and will be on a startup called Cupcakes A-GoGo. They are using Facebook and Twitter along with traditional print advertising to get the word out. They were great fun (tasty too) to interview.
Its likely not something that a national publications would latch on to my stream but its all I have right now. SMUG still a good deal to make me use the tools and practice.
And since Lee is very engaged, he responded to my comment:
Don’t sell yourself short, Wendy. The whole idea of social media is that you don’t need to appeal to a mass audience. Your goal should be to provide relevant, helpful information and connect with a community. You’re doing some great things with your blog, tying some other platforms together. And it all comes down to using the tools to accomplish your goals. Vince is doing some interesting things,
and I just told his story because I’ve known him for a long time and he’s been stopping by for some tips and inspiration. I would welcome others doing posts here in the 400 series about how they’re using social media practically, whether others would think it’s “glamorous” or not.
- Social media networking basics for professionals (thecauseisthehabit.com)
- Twitter and Me! Why It’s The Only Social Media Tool I Use. (techcrunch.com)
