Social Media: The Path to Product Innovation
February 29, 2012 by Stephanie Shkolnik
Digitally connecting with consumers is not just for basic customer service like responding to Tweets and Facebook comments and generating fans -- it is critical to your business. Social media can help a company get ahead by building a better product. True and honest feedback online enables product innovation.
A digital platform or social network, combined with compelling and meaningful content and hands-on community management, facilitates relevant conversations from your core audience with a point of view. This feedback, far too often overlooked, serves as a digital focus group. Whether positive or negative, truthful statements that carry meaningful information about brands and products are made in the comment field of your blog, Tumblr post, Facebook status or Twitter mention. These valuable comments provide data that can and should inform your product innovation department. What do people really need? What do they really want? Social enables you to learn about these things.
Stephanie Shkolnik Social Media Strategist
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To execute in-house or to hire a digital marketing agency, that is thy question
December 15, 2011 by Stephanie Shkolnik
There are marketing teams in-house, and then there are marketing agencies. If you’re in-house, you’re concerned with developing ongoing campaigns and programs to exceed the past year’s bottom line - revenue, awareness, you know the target. At an agency you’re tasked with developing innovative ideas that will enable your clients to pave the way as industry leaders, and support their day-to-day tasks to enhance their initiatives, effectively making their lives easier.
Clients often ask: Why bring in an external agency when we can hire in-house? There are pros and cons to each, and here’s what a marketing manager should consider before making a decision
In-house
Working in-house provides an immersive full-circle brand experience where it’s easier to gain access to a plethora of content, including quotes from internal members and upcoming breaking news. While the execution of certain technical tasks may be outsourced, working inter-departmentally to align ideas and develop cohesive campaigns is often simplified - and critical to success.
Working within a company provides streamlined access to content in real-time, enabling social content production at a more rapid pace, from the development to approval process. Digitaria supports these efforts by utilizing brand-centric content in a story-like format to resonate with the end consumer.
Agency Life
In the fast-paced agency life, brands have access to collective groups. While team members and point of contacts may be involved in day-to-day activities, their engagement in other agency initiatives allow them to be more open-minded, which often results in innovative thinking with a fresh approach.
Stephanie Shkolnik Social Media Strategist
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Social Crisis What? Who, Me? Prepared?
October 21, 2011 by Stephanie Shkolnik
Preparing your company for the crisis you think will never surface
Digital is ubiquitous. In your pocket, in your car, at your office, in your home, at the store. Everywhere. For consumers, the opportunity to access information, share opinions and scour the web is available 24/7. Now, #TellMeSomethingNew.
Thanks to this colorful technology-clad landscape, brands today are more susceptible to crisis than ever before. The traditional days when execs would have 24-48 hours to respond are gone. And now -- according to research firm Penn Schoen Berland of Burson Marsteller -- when it comes to data being breached, there are approximately six hours between a crisis hitting to seeing it spread to the mainstream in micro-medium, followed by amplification from social sharing and editorial coverage.
Crisis can cause severe and even fatal backlash on your company -- often resulting in brand reputation damage, lost customers, drop in stock market value and cutbacks or layoffs. Instead of waiting for a crisis to hit and "dealing with it then," develop a plan. Here are four effective steps Michael Bassik of Burson Marsteller shared at Socialize West this week:
1. Activate a new mindset - Think about what you offer and what kind of information could put your company in jeopardy. Do you manufacturer products? Host sporting events? Store data? Now think about what would happen if something was found in your product, if a customer was injured during a sporting event, or if the information you are supposed to be protecting, leaked. How do you think the public would respond in real-time, with adrenaline pumping?
Stephanie Shkolnik Social Media Strategist
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I heart iHeartRadio’s social music fest
September 27, 2011 by Stephanie Shkolnik
Despite what you might’ve heard from their famous ad campaign, what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas. But for iHeartRadio, media conglomerate Clear Channel’s social radio platform, that’s not a bad thing. Their high-profile two-day music festival last weekend, with one performance after another from top entertainers in rock, country, hip-hop and pop, was arguably the most successful social music events to date. It was certainly the largest.
Maybe it was the idea of seeing Sting, Lady Gaga, David Guetta and Rascal Flats all in one setting, but suddenly the MGM Grand didn’t seem that far from San Diego and I hit the road to be a part of Saturday’s action. The event celebrated Clear Channel’s relaunch of their social radio platform -- a collection of customized artist-inspired stations (similar to Pandora or LastFM), crossed with access to more than 800 existing Clear Channel stations nationwide. You can also share content with friends on Twitter and Facebook by checking out what they’ve been listening to.
Stephanie Shkolnik Social Media Strategist
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Augmented Reality Soon a Reality
August 15, 2011 by Stephanie Shkolnik
For decades, action films have given us ideas of how augmented reality will play into the lives of robots, (robo)cops, and extra-terrestrial invaders. Outside the multiplex and Netflix, however, it’s a bit harder to imagine how this technology can be incorporated into your daily life.
The first step in making augmented reality an actual “reality” is perfecting existing image or object recognition technology. QR (quick-response) codes--those blotchy square barcodes that still haven’t caught on with the masses--don’t have much of a future even if people do bite for a little while. Rather, object recognition is quickly getting better all the time and making them irrelevant.
Check out Google’s Goggles app--it uses object recognition to Google search information for any picture you might take (I tried this once at an art museum on an obscure Japanese woodblock painting, and was floored when it worked!). This technology has a long way to go before perfection, but steps up as the springboard to augmented reality that will shape future interactions and activities.
Stephanie Shkolnik Social Media Strategist
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Interacting with your Brand Online
July 06, 2011 by Stephanie Shkolnik
Small businesses and large corporations alike have joined the social movement in effort to have a presence online and, in a nutshell, increase sales. But what happens after you create that Twitter profile and Facebook page? And more importantly, how can businesses gain and retain quality and relevant followers?
These three simple steps will ensure your business is reaching the movers and shakers of your category:
1. Content
You’ve heard it over and over again – content is king. Like many others, you may be thinking to yourself “how do I know what content to post?”
First, posting content that resonates with your target audience is crucial. It’s especially important to speak ‘their language.’ You wouldn’t talk to a mom the same way you would to an engineer, would you? Include posts that your followers understand and are inclined to respond to, and always put yourself in the consumer’s shoes—would you be interested in your message?
Stephanie Shkolnik Social Media Strategist
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Why Mobile Matters: Optimizing the Zero Moment of Truth
June 06, 2011 by Stephanie Shkolnik
Smartphones have provided us with tools we gladly use to make purchasing decisions. When shopping for a new waffle iron (or any other item -- low tag or high), many of us bust out a smart phone and search the web for product reviews, corporate sites and more information.
Being well armed, with anywhere-access to Google and the web, has completely changed the purchasing process, a point Google’s Sam Sebastian tackled during his “Zero Moment of Truth” presentation, part of the Business of Digital Track (moderated by Digitaria CEO Dan Khabie) at Interactive Day San Diego last Wednesday.
Google adapted the Zero Moment of Truth (or ZMOT) from Proctor & Gamble’s idea of the First Moment of Truth, which occurs during the moments a shopper first encounters a product on a store shelf. The FMOT (First Moment of Truth) concept isn’t terribly old, but with consumer access to smartphones and mobile, it’s already becoming outdated.
Stephanie Shkolnik Social Media Strategist
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