Social Business: Three New Required Roles For Your Company, By Brian Vellmure

brian vellmure

TRUSTED VOICES It is our great pleasure to inaugurate the Trusted Voices section with a post from Brian Vellmure, a renowned thought leader in everything related to strategic customer focused initiatives.
The article below introduces some of the keys to success in Relationship Management. It highlights the importance of listening to our contacts in order to know them better, and creating quality and viral content that satisfies their needs, which would ultimately contribute to building “Communities of Trust”. Small companies may not yet have the resources to hire dedicated personnel for this, but integrating those concepts into the overall strategy is a great start. Read for yourself!“Longer ago than I’d like to mention, I started a series called “Three New Required Roles for your company”. As the business landscape changes, shifts in business models and design require new roles and adjustments to traditional thinking. New opportunities emerge, and businesses who understand the greater trends can profit from seizing these gaps in market awareness and efficiencies.In the first two posts of this series, I advocated incorporating two new roles into your organization.
These were:

  • The CIA Operative, which highlighted the importance of listening to what folks are saying about your company, your products and services and other key topics that are relevant to what your organization is interested in.
  • The Social Anthropologist, which highlighted a rapidly growing requirement for a skill set that has previously been relegated to studies of remote people groups, but now has potential ground breaking applications for forward looking organizations. Know your customers (and their network).

[…] Now, let’s take a look at the third and final critical role necessary for you to compete in the new business landscape: Your company’s very own Media Mogul.

I’m not talking about a web designer. I’m not talking about the Director of Marketing who comes up with good campaign ideas and glossy slicks to hand out at trade shows. I’m not talking about Press Releases.

I’m literally asking you to think about figureheads like Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Forbes, Ted Turner, etc. Get those people in your mind. Imagine them working for your company. Think about how they’d corral attention in your business domain. Keep them there and let that image frame this conversation. We’ll come back to those folks later.

There are at least 5 reasons why we need to consider this strategic hire:

  • Time is the most elusive resource for all of us. We increasingly only seek media that we want and need. Filters play an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Your customers, prospects, partners, influencers, and vendors in the same boat. If you’re not providing something that they want or need, it’s not getting through.
  • EVERYONE (including you and I) now has access to content creation tools AND significant media distribution channels. More and more individuals and organizations are hopping into the pool everyday.
  • Traditional company centric messaging is increasingly ignored, less effective, and more expensive.
  • The makeup of Internet content is rapidly moving:
    —> AWAY from text TO rich media
    —> AWAY from computer based interaction TO mobile device interaction
    —> AWAY from unidirectional communication and information consumption TO multi-directional annotated sharing, conversation, and feedback
  • Valuable Content is being syndicated at exponential reach through newly formed and evolving “Communities of Trust”.

Look at points 1 and 2. Merge them together. Time is the most elusive resource for all of us and EVERYONE has access to content creation tools AND significant media distribution channels. […]

With the inability to filter, we look for others to help us with our decisions of what media to consume. Who do we trust? People we like. People we trust. People we admire. People…like us. This is one reason why Valuable Content is being syndicated at exponential speed and reach through newly formed and evolving “Communities of Trust”.

There is a heated battle happening for attention. Those that are able to capture it, provide something extraordinary while they have it, and enable those that engage to share with their trusted circle have a huge advantage. […]

For a moment, let’s bring those media moguls we referenced earlier back to the forefront of this conversation. What is the common thread for each of them? There are probably dozens, but here’s a key one: They have consistently created (bought, or curated) compelling and interesting content consistently over time that attract people AND keep their attention. Many of them have also bought distribution channels so that they could control the content on each respective channel.

Who else is doing this, and what benefits have they reaped? […]

Blendtec – a blender manufacturer – created one of the most successful viral marketing campaigns ever and increased their retail sales by more than 700% because of it! […]

They’ve since parlayed their initial success of that “media” into the production of 96 videos capturing the attention of millions of would be customers.

In another recent stroke of genius, they leveraged the recent hype and publicity of the iPad to create this cameo appearance on YouTube, which oh, by the way, has garnered more than 6 MILLION views in just a few weeks. Here’s the video:

 

Here’s another example from BluDot, a chair manufacturer who observed a community culture in SoHo of those who liked to find interesting things on the street and take them home. In response, they came up with a creative experiment, and subsequent video:

 

But, it doesn’t have to be video. Read this article posted on the American Express OPEN site about how a university differentiated themselves by giving their prospective attendees (prospects) something useful that helped them achieve what they are trying to do. […]

You get the idea. Think along these lines. Think outside the realm of your traditional thinking. You are now a media company. […]”

To see more examples, read the full post on Brian’s blog.