Learning to Curate: How to Become a Modern-Day Trader in a Lost Art

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings, Social Media

Remember back in your college days when one of your friends was always listening to the latest local bands or piecing together new and interesting outfits? Well, in their own way, they were curators. You may think of museums when you think of curation, but the truth is everybody curates in some way.

Creator vs. Curator
In our digital world, you’ll sometimes see people refer to themselves as a creator or a curator. Some people do both and some prefer to do one or the other. Creators are people who make videos, write blogs, take photos, write reports, comment on blogs, actively tweet their thoughts, etc. Curators spend time finding interesting content to share with others or to use as a reference for later. They are more concerned with sharing good content and being part of the action of developing stories in the social media world. Of those people online, nearly everybody does both, but a few tend toward one or the other.

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Lessons from the Summit on Customer Engagement

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

Eric and Anika at the Summit on Customer EngagementFellow Projectliner Anika and I attended the 2009 Summit on Customer Engagement in Quincy, MA on October 19-21. We’ve finally managed to recover and really process all the great presentations on using customer input to drive corporate decisions.

Tim Thorsteinson (President of the Harris Corporation) and Sean Geehan (@seangeehan and Founder of the Geehan Group) started off The Summit by talking about how Harris drives corporate strategy through their Executive Advisory Board. Great presenters from AT&T, National Instruments, Microsoft Interoperability Council, and Intel followed with stories and advice about using advisory boards comprised of influential customers to guide and inform business decisions.

What’s stuck with me longest?

It was exciting to hear from Citrix’s Chris Fleck (@chrisfleck) about how customers’ voices can directly sway new product development. In his presentation, he mentioned that Citrix had intended to build a new Blackberry application. But, suspecting they needed more info, he blogged the question, “Do you want Citrix XenApp to run Windows apps on the iPhone?” When his post got more than 500,000 views, he used the interest to get resources assigned to building an iPhone app. By tuning into customer needs, they were able to prioritize the app that customer wanted most.

So, what’s next?

There seems to be a movement to integrate broader community-based engagement plans, like Citrix’s, with more narrowly focused advisory boards. As companies engage with customer communities, they have the chance to use community input alongside feedback from advisory boards and other councils. By posing questions to both the community and to advisory boards or internal leadership, you can find out whether there’s a single clear direction. Even when there isn’t a straightforward consensus, clear, genuine communication will let your community members and advisory board know you’re listening. Open lines of communication also mean that, if you change your mind based on the reaction from an advisory board or community, you can admit you’re wrong and amend your decision.

The big takeaway:

We came back ready to start working on coordinating advisory boards, communities, and all the other ways of engaging customers. With transparency and responsiveness, they can work together to strengthen your customer relationships—which is always the top priority around here.

Twitter Comcast “Case Study”

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Marketing Musings

One of my colleagues, Greg, told me about this story. It’s an old story about turning around a disgruntled customer using new media–Twitter! (Note: Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows users to send short blog posts of 140 characters or less to other users that follow their micro-blog.)

One Twitter user who just happened to run his own marketing blog (C.C. Chapman, Managing the Gray) was “Tweeting” about the quality of his HD picture on Comcast during a Boston Celtics game. Shortly after his micro-rant, a Comcast service professional sent him a message on Twitter asking him how he could help fix his HD reception.

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Keeping it Real

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Marketing Musings

I am attending the New Media Expo in Las Vegas for 2 1/2 days of interesting presentations from a variety of speakers.  So far I’ve heard from Michael Geoghegan, who produces Disneyland’s podcast,  Gary Vaynerchuck, podcaster for Wine Library TV, and Scott Whitney, a professional podcaster.

One common theme through their presentations was to make sure that recordings are spontaneous, passionate, and emotional.  Vaynerchuck shoots his video for tv.winelibrary.com in 20 minutes in one take every day without editing.  Geoghegan admits that he doesn’t know much about Disneyland.  When he learns a new Disneyland fact in his podcast he’s genuinely excited and interested, and it shows up in the podcast.  Whitney coaches his clients not to read from a script when he interviews them, and will stop an interview to encourage interviewees to speak from the heart.

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The Math of Viral Marketing

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Marketing Musings

In catching up on my RSS feeds over the weekend, I found myself staring at a short New York Times article that suggested a long story left unwritten. How does anyone build a viral campaign that succeeds out of any force other than blind luck?

Believe it or not, there is an equation for just that purpose:

[Be Amazing] + [Act Amazing] = [Get Amazing]

Viral is really that simple – just be worth talking about and do something worth talking about. The only catch is you have to have both to succeed. Notice also that I’ve not mentioned timing anywhere. There is a reason for this: Great campaigns always make their own timing.

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Social Networking Inside Big Businesses

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Marketing Musings, Social Media

It doesn’t have to be said that blogs, wikis, podcasting, twittering, etc. will eventually be considered a natural part of the way we communicate as individuals and is fast becoming the way that enterprise companies reach their audiences (see Forrester research). But turns out now it will be a major way big companies reach their employees and facilitate conversations between their employees too.

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