Have you ever been faced with a decision and you didn’t know where to turn for advice? Increasingly, I’m finding that I am one of millions who is turning to the wisdom of crowds for help. Wisdom of crowds is based on the concept that if two heads are better than one, millions of heads are better than two. By using the collective experiences of others, my odds of weeding out the bad experiences and selecting a good experience improve significantly. It beats throwing a dart or depending on blind luck.

SXSW, a major interactive, music and film conference, is using this approach in an innovative way. By using a panel picker application that asks the “crowd” to render an opinion on proposed presentation topics, the organizers are improving the chance that the panels ultimately selected for the conference will be appealing. To see how it works, click here and you can give my submission a thumbs up.

I find myself going to many different sites that either incorporate the wisdom of crowds into their functionality, or sites built specifically around this concept. Here are some of my favorites:

• Yelp.com: This gives good summaries of restaurants with ratings and comments. It includes a location-based service in the mobile version for finding places when I’m traveling. Other similar apps are Zagat.com and Around Me.
• TripAdvisor.com: I’ve used this site for planning where to stay in places I’ve never been to before. The reader comments and ratings are useful, especially when picking a vacation spot that won’t disappoint the family.
• Amazon.com: One of the pioneers in using purchase behavior to drive a recommendation engine. It suggests books that others have read who like the same books I do.
• Angie’s List: This site takes the mystery out of hiring a local service provider, whether it’s someone to fix your back or your back porch. Driven entirely by user reviews, the recommendations are candid and useful, and sure beat a random pick from the Yellow Pages (remember them?).

What are you favorite sites? Please add them to the the list above.

As a marketer, knowing that decisions to buy from you are increasingly being made based on opinions shared on these sites is critical. Refocusing your company to deliver a great customer experience consistently is a must. And developing the organizational capability to listen to, respond to and improve based on comments will be a core competency required for the 21st century.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

A boomer CEO’s journey through social media, part 4: wisdom of crowds

Like almost everyone else using Twitter, I follow some celebrities. I find out more about who they are by reading about what they do every day, as shared via their tweets. It is interesting to me to know what it is like to be inside the locker room at the Masters, or what it is like recovering from a ride in the Tour de France, or what little things make a celebrity happy. Knowing where they eat, which bands they listen to or what it feels like to play to an exuberant crowd makes me feel like an insider.

But I also follow several marketing leaders and subject matter experts. And I really don’t care where they eat, which bands they like and how their big presentation made them feel. That’s not why I follow them. I want to learn from them professionally. I want their insights and lessons learned.

What is your Twitter personality? There isn’t a right one or a wrong one, but you have one. Is it the one you want? Is it consistent with why you tweet? Twitter is another medium to express your personal brand so give some thought to what you want your brand to stand for.

Here are some of my favorite marketing folks to follow:

• BrandDigital
• MarketingProfs
• Jennifer Aaker
• George Dearing
• Sam Decker

Who are your favorite people that you like to follow? Why?

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

Are you tweeting like a rock star?

Today’s New York Times article written at SXSW covers one of the hottest trends in social media – the use of mobile location-based services (LBS). The story, Telling Friends Where You Are (or Not), highlights the emergence of Foursquare as one of the fastest-growing social platforms and covers other platforms, such as Facebook, Google and Yelp, which also use LBS.

The combination of social networks with GPS-enabled smart phones brings both immediacy and relevancy to consumers. Whether using the capabilities to hook up with friends or to get suggestions for a great place to eat, consumers can derive a great deal of benefit.

As a marketer, recognizing the importance of location-based services is step one. Subsequent steps should then be taken. Barnes and Noble does a great job of integrating book searches with the nearest location that has the book in stock. Starbucks’ iPhone app makes it easy to find the closest spot for a caffeine fix. Several venues are creating special offers just for Foursquare users. Ask yourself the question, “When is my customer’s location relevant to my brand?” and you may be surprised by the number of occasions.

Have you had a positive experience recently with an LBS-enable brand? If so, I’d love to hear about it.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

Why mobile + social is a powerful intersection

I saw this post on Social Media Today and thought it was worth sharing. While I’m not the most active person on Twitter, I have been successful in avoiding 9 of the 10 mistakes that Mike Johansson lists. Which one do you think I make? How does your Twitter use rate on Johansson’s list?

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

10 newbie Twitter mistakes made by businesses

I ran across this article on PCMag.com recently: 10 Corporate Twitter Accounts Worth Following. It features companies that include Dell, JetBlue and Whole Foods. If you want to benchmark your company’s Twitter activity, these 10 firms would be a good place to start.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

10 corporate Twitter accounts worth following

Twitter is all the rage. But it took me a while to figure out why. I’m beginning to understand. Twitter is described on Wikipedia as “a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.”

By looking at the fundamentals of the medium it is easier to see the value and how to improve its usefulness.

1. Messages are sent only to people who choose to follow you and you allow to follow you. You receive tweets only from people you choose to follow. This self-selecting mechanism is key to its usefulness. If you like what people are sharing on Twitter, keep following them. If you don’t, stop. I was initially overwhelmed with tweets from people who chose to share things I didn’t really care about. I complained about Twitter as a tool for sharing irrelevant personal activities. But some people like to exchange that kind of information. My problem should not have been with Twitter, but with whom I chose to follow. Once I realized that and changed who I followed, Twitter became much more interesting.
2. It is a good micro-blogging tool for sharing short ideas quickly. While I finding blogging to be my preferred medium of expression, our chief digital officer prefers to share his thoughts in short bursts as they arise. Twitter is a great medium for that. Often the ideas shared via Twitter are tied to additional material posted elsewhere on the Web. Good blog posts. Interesting videos. Thought-provoking articles. Lists of new data. Books worth reading. If you find something that interests you, odds are it is interesting to your followers. My first use of Twitter was to share my new blog postings with followers who wanted the alert.
3. Twitter is real-time and mobile. This makes for a great way to facilitate impromptu “meet-ups” among people with a common interest. Whether it’s riding your bike with Lance or having a drink at a conference, Twitter can advance face-to-face connections among a network as no other platform. It can also be a real-time way of updating loved ones. One of our art directors used Twitter to update anxious family members during the birth of his first baby. Doctors are using it more routinely in similar ways. My wife keeps in touch with our son via Twitter while he tours the country with a band. Being real-time and mobile also makes Twitter a great broadcast updating system for time-sensitive calls to action. Fare deals on limited sets. Reservations for just-released concert tickets. Alerts about special shipments of fresh produce. The marketing applications are growing daily.
4. Twitter is a place to share real-time experiences, good or bad. Because it is often used this way, many companies are beginning to monitor how their brands are being discussed in real time. This has led to several positive examples of how a bad customer experience turned positive because the brand was paying attention. It is also leading to proactive customer service applications from many companies that share real-time information with their followers.

I’ll acknowledge I’m not the role model to follow when it comes to Twitter. For better ones, check out this list of Top CMOs on Twitter.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

A boomer CEO’s journey through social media, part 3: Twitter

I’ll admit it. I’m not a digital native. While I had a hand in the PC revolution and am fairly technically savvy, the explosion of social media options outstripped my capacity to understand them all. Fortunately, I’m surrounded by many digital natives and social media experts who have coached me through the fog. This is the first in a series of posts that retraces my journey from having limited “social skills” to becoming a socially adept executive.

My journey started with LinkedIn in the spring of 2007. I had been getting requests to update my contacts on Plaxo for a while, but I never saw a big reason to do so. After reading the book Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, by Keith Ferrazzi, I realized how negligent I was at staying connected with and expanding my network of business associates. So when I saw the potential of LinkedIn to help me improve in this area, I signed up. Over the past two years, LinkedIn’s functionality has increased significantly as has my use of it. Here are some of the things I use it for:

• Researching the background of someone I will be meeting soon (this was hard to do before)
  
• Following up and connecting with someone I had just met for the first time (my follow-up discipline had been marginal at best)
• Reconnecting with former associates (I was even worse at this)
  
• Sending brief updates about things that I’m working on (I never did this before)
• Querying my expanded network for insights and opinions (my posts on Attributes of an Effective Marketing Leader came from this process)
• Planning outreach activities with people in cities to which I’ll be traveling (Tripit reminds me who else is in the neighborhood)
• Sharing my perspective with others who have posed a question (a good way to make new business introductions in a highly relevant way)
• Asking for candidate referrals for positions we are trying to fill (many of our best candidates are those sent to us by our friends and colleagues)
  
• Reminding me that it has been a while since I connected with someone (it is amazing how time passes so quickly)

As you can tell, all of these activities are business related. LinkedIn is my social networking platform for my professional side. About a year ago I decided to jump into Facebook to share my personal side. While many of my Facebook friends are family members, former colleagues or college buddies, some are clients or past clients with whom I have a close personal connection. We exchange photos of our kids, share the excitement of a big event or commiserate about qualifying for an AARP card. I can stay connected with their lives in ways I never did before.

Facebook has also become a place to share the personal side of nFusion (www.facebook.com/nfusion). Part of what makes our organization such a wonderful place to work is the people on our team. We  share things that are offbeat, quirky and fun with our friends who follow us. We hope that other talented individuals and potential clients might want to get to know us better after they get to know us a little differently.

While there are other social networking venues (MySpace, Ning, Orkut to name a few), I’ve found LinkedIn and Facebook to be a great one-two combination for keeping me more connected. I imagine they are or will be for you, too.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

A boomer CEO’s journey through social media, part 1: social networks

I’ve had several conversations about Twitter with executives from different organizations over the past few weeks. The frequent response on their end was something like “you’ve got to be kidding, Twitter is stupid.” A year ago, I would have probably said the same thing. But this week I was actually irritated when I got an e-newsletter that I wanted to share with my Twitter followers and couldn’t do it easily because it had no forwarding functionality connected to Twitter!

Here are three things I’ve learned about making Twitter a useful tool.

1. Know why you use it: For me and the majority of users Twitter is a business tool for learning and sharing relevant information. For some it is a tool for getting real-time alerts from trusted brands and news sources. Yet for others it is a social networking tool for providing instant personal updates. I don’t like being overwhelmed with mundane personal trivia via Twitter, but that’s me. There are other social sites where I can stay in touch with my personal network. I prefer to use Twitter for a specific informational purpose. Which leads me to point number two…

2. Chose carefully who you follow: Robert Scoble (aka Scobleizer) is a leading expert on social media and recently penned a great post on his blog entitled You are SO unfollowed! I recently reduced the number of people I follow based on what they tweeted. If I found their tweets useful, I continued to follow them. If not, I unfollowed them. I found the benefit of Twitter improved dramatically from this process.

3. Think about the organizational uses of Twitter: A recent article in the New York Times highlighted Twitter’s use as a customer service medium. JetBlue sends me special offers that help the airline liquidate unsold, perishable inventory. The Air Force tracks public sentiment on relevant issues.

Twitter has many uses that help you connect to its growing user base. If you don’t know what they are, ask the digital natives on your team. If you don’t have any of your own digital natives, ask the ones on my team.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

Twitter really can be useful!

Today, Microsoft and Yahoo entered into a 10-year agreement in an effort to compete with Google in search marketing. At nFusion, we’ve been anticipating this agreement since talks began last year.

Read more here: http://kl.am/1P1o

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Microsoft/Yahoo deal will create opportunity for marketers

I have to admit. Some days I ask myself this question. So I was very happy to find encouragement in this little video discussion between Seth Godin and Tome Peters. I hope you find similar encouragement to continue your blog or the courage to start one.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

Why do I blog?