Note: This post is a bit more personal and off-topic than what you’d expect here, but I hope you stick around nevertheless as it covers an important part of my life and a specific project.
The start of the new year is usually a time of joy; reflecting on the past year, looking forward to what’s to come in the next and setting goals & resolutions for ourselves. For my family, the start of 2009 became a time of prayer and hope. We learned my 17-year-old cousin, who’s always been an active spirit around family and friends, was diagnosed with medulloblastoma – a highly malignant brain cancer that’s most commonly found amongst children. We were devastated. It was a huge shock to us all and we didn’t really know how to cope. (more…)
This post is part of the Guest Blog Grand Tour over at Life Without Pants – an epic two-month journey of over 50 guest posts. Want to learn more about Matt Cheuvront and see how far the rabbit hole goes? Subscribe to the Life Without Pants RSS feed and keep in touch!
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This year’s Digital Marketing Mixer was once again filled with great panels and smart people who I learned from and got to know during this 2-day event. I wrote a recap a year ago from my first MarketingProfs event, with an emphasis on people and passion, but this year for me focused around two trends – affirmation and testing.
Affirmation
I say this from more of a development standpoint. From hearing numerous panels to having 1-on-1 sit-downs with industry leaders. I’ve seen the growth from both ends of the spectrum, as talks are far past the tools and the newness of social media and deeper into what we’re actually doing right now to help businesses achieve their goals with the help of the social web.
What has this affirmed for me exactly? That the work that I and the rest of the community have put in this past year, since my last smart-people meeting, is helping move needles and shift our thinking forward with ideas and case studies on what’s working for companies today.
Testing
This second takeaway directly relates to that next level of thinking and how organizations are approaching social media today. They’re continually testing & optimizing their strategies and aren’t afraid of failing during this process.
Jay Baer summed up this thought well with this quote: (more…)
If you didn’t hear, I was busy learning and meeting some awesome people at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Chicago this past week. I had the opportunity to talk with tons of smart folks, while attending several great sessions on digital marketing, social media and communities.
As a strong advocate for communities, as well as being a co-founder of #CmtyChat, I was definitely intrigued by Thursday’s interactive session on building and nurturing your online community. The panel was led by Beth Harte and included Rachel Happe, Gretchen Harding and Mildred Center.
The super smart panel had a lot of great thoughts & ideas, but here are some of the main points taken from the session: (more…)
That we don’t know about you. Yes, that’s it.
Maybe it’s in our name; I know it is for me. Not many people know this but Sonny isn’t my real name. I know, the horror! Well, my birth name is Sandeep (sun-deep), an Indian name from the Punjabi dialect. You’re probably wondering why I don’t use it much? Well, I actually did in grade school and into high school. Even though it was much harder to pronounce than Sonny, which was the nickname given to me at a young age, I stuck with it. But it wasn’t until college that I decided to solely go by Sonny, unless it was on legal papers. Though I haven’t forgotten my roots with my real name, Sonny slowly became a part of my character, defining me and my personality.
What got me thinking about this idea is the social space that we live in and the communities we’re building. We divulge much of our personal and professional lives online – for the sake of authenticity and to build relationships with people we come across on Twitter, Facebook, our blogs, etc. (more…)
I’m sitting here at Panera Bread, my usual work-shifting spot, doing some Saturday afternoon work. My experience here is always a pleasant one – relaxing environment and nice employees (free Wi-Fi doesn’t hurt either.) But my time here today was a little different, as I sat next to a new-employee class that Panera was hosting for a handful of newbies.
They’ve been talking about the company’s history, the bread, and the passion that has gone into this business for over 20 years. What stuck out to me, as I overheard/eavesdropped/call-it-what-you-want on their training, was what the class ‘leader’ said:
We build trust through our relationships with our customers and our community.
I found it inspiring to hear a brick & mortar business, let alone a restaurant/bakery, put such precedence on this statement. Why did I find such surprise in it? One – we unfortunately don’t see such a passionate offline business with equally as passionate employees, as we do with Panera. Two – we seemingly correlate trust, relationships and community specifically with the online space.
Is the offline space that much more different than online when building trust and a passionate community? Trusting relationships are around us in our everyday lives with our family and friends, but why does it seem that when it comes to business, it’s more easily conceived online than when face-to-face with your customers?
In my opinion, business cultures have gone off base to a point where connecting with their customers as more than just a $ sign is out of the realm of possibility – and that’s where it has to start, culture. Panera has been in business since 1987 and from what I’ve seen in my dozens of visits and now with this new-employee class, they’ve instilled such a culture and passion within the business itself that it’s what every employee seemingly lives & breathes.
Kudos to Panera, but what can other brick & mortar businesses do to instill this sort of culture and to gain their customers’ trust? Do you have an experience like mine that you’d like to add?
Sound off – the floor is yours.
Today’s social media focused world is really cut up into two sides. One side is where much of the hard work, tough questions, and moving of needles reside. Those people who are looking to help further the industry, build strong communities, help innovate, and are genuine in their actions. While on the flip side, you have the people looking for shortcuts, the easy road to infamy and a legion of thousands that they probably don’t even know. The people who think it’s a numbers game. (more…)
If you weren’t around Twitter Friday afternoon, you might’ve missed that Bryan Person and I launched a new chat, #CmtyChat. Sure, there are a lot of great chats out like the original, #JournChat, but we felt the increasing need to talk about the growing business of online communities and how community managers are building, managing, and measuring those communities.
We were lucky enough to have Jim Storer as our guest for the inaugural #CmtyChat and had a great conversation centered around questions from the community:
Q1 – What are the biggest day-to-day challenges for community managers?
Q2 – Finding “allies” is a key issue for community managers. How can CMs find that support?
Q3 – Driving culture change is crucial to gaining internal support for communities. Best tips for bringing about that change?
Q4 – @RHappe just mentioned the importance of the “aha! moment” for evangelizing. What has been your aha! moment as a CM?
Q5 – @JamiePappas suggests profiling members as a way to build support/momentum for the community. Any others finding success with that?
Even better was the subsequent conversation to these questions, so I’m sure you want to get the meat of it. Lucky for us, the cool people over at WTHashtag have a great statistical overview of our chat – but more importantly, a transcript.
#CmtyChat runs every Friday from 1-2pm ET, and can follow the coversation from the hashtag and @CmtyChat, but that doesn’t mean the conversation has to stop there. I still want to hear from you. Share your thoughts and ideas to the above questions and add to the conversation.
Listening is a basic tenet in community building and communication. Ears open right? Not so much in Twitter’s case this evening. They made a ‘small change‘ to their reply settings by changing the replies tab from showing all @replies to only showing those from people that you’re following. Reading their explanation sounds very condescending as it is – who said the replies option (hence the word option) was ‘undesirable’ or ‘confusing’? Twitter obviously doesn’t listen to the community to know what we find beneficial & functional in our everyday use.
As discussed a lot already tonight (check the #FIXIT and #fixreplies hashtags), many of us found new conversations through this option, as we were able to connect with people that were talking about us who we weren’t already following. Now, they’ve taken that ‘undesirable’ option away and hindered a big part of how we were able to build connections.
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We utilize these social media tools on a daily basis. For what? To build and grow our networks and relationships within. To showcase our abilities on blogs and to bring that value into conversations with other people looking to grow from our knowledge. We look to learn ourselves, from people we connect with and the content we read. Hell, some of us want our egos stroked a bit in the process. But sometimes, just sometimes – there’s something we experience that isn’t really expected: (more…)
