Technology has humanized the user experience by making it easier for people to communicate and share information.

Meanwhile, many businesses have used technology to go in the opposite direction, to dehumanize.

Look at customer service, which has sadly become a (near) robotic experience at many companies. Look at email marketing where companies send emails from an email address like “please-do-not-reply@we-hate-getting-email-from-you-com”.

Put aside all the usual stuff about social media offering great opportunities to promote your products, overturn negative experiences and build long-term relationships.

First and foremost, social media is a call for humanization in how you communicate. Social media has humanized interaction, technology has humanized the experience, but only you can humanize your business.

Here are 30 questions to ask yourself to help you humanize your business:

• How do we communicate?
  • Are we communicating in a human way?
  • What do our customers think of the way we’re communicating?
  • Are we consistent in the way we communicate?
  • Are we speaking the same language as our customers?
  • Are we enabling our customers to engage with us in a community or a dialogue (as opposed to a monologue)?
  • How do we go about transparency, authenticity and accountability?
  • How does our company culture support the humanization of our business?
  • How can we change or improve our business processes?

• How do we turn experiences into relationships?
  • How do we define our customer experience?
  • What are the things that truly matter to our customers?
  • How well are we communicating compared to other companies within and outside our industry?
  • How can we involve our customers as part of our brand?
  • In which ways are our customers sharing experiences and information about us?
  • Why are they sharing those particular experiences and pieces of information?
  • How can we promote positive interactions?
  • How do we deal with negative interactions?
  • How can we scale our communication to deal with a growing amount of customer interactions?

• How can we create value for both our customers and our business?
  • How can we leverage customer interactions for the benefit of our business?
  • How are we measuring our success in customer engagement?
  • Are we recruiting the right employees to help us humanize our business?
  • How can we empower our (first line) employees to represent our brand?
  • How are we rewarding our employees and our customers for contributing to our brand?

• How can we innovate?
  • How can we build or strengthen our customer community?
  • How can we match our products and/or services to the demand, expectations and values from the market?
  • Can we work with peers and/or competitors in our industry to provide value to the community?
  • How do we integrate online and offline communication to create a better customer experience?

I also made a SlideShare presentation with the 30 questions:

What are other things businesses can think about to humanize their business?

Photo credit: Aaron Bulger

Find more from the artist here.

A panel of judges determined the top entries and the eventual winner. This is where the campaign fell flat. The entries that were chosen as best entries sucked. They lacked edginess and creativity (some slogans had already been used by other airlines). The winning slogan was “That makes you happy”. That’s not just bad, it’s pathetic.

The way I see it, there are two outcomes. First, there’s a short-term outcome: Transavia are stuck with a sucky slogan. The long-term outcome, however, may be even worse: fewer people will be inclined to participate in the future now that their mental image of the brand has been affected.

When you set up a clever campaign like this and employ the wisdom of the crowd, you expect it to deliver some clever outcomes. When you intervene in the process, it’s because of something unlawful or because of something that’s out of character for your brand.

How you do things as a brand is determined by who you are and what you do. In the case of Transavia, that’s being lame and unexciting.

Find more from the artist here.

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a mini-series on assessing the value and effectiveness of social business. This mini-series will cover the following aspects:

• Reasons to participate in social business (covered in parts A, B and C)
• Internal considerations
• Debunking myths
• Social business in B2B environments

I’ve divided the reasons to participate in social business into two categories:

1. As-Is and To-Be
2. Company Readiness

Today, we’ll look at a company’s As-Is and To-Be considerations for getting into social business.

The first step of the analysis phase should already give you a solid idea of where you stand in the social web. Let’s revisit two key points that relate directly to your organization:

• Current Activity Are people gathering online to talk about you, your brand, your products/services, your employees, et cetera?
• Platforms Where do the people go to online to talk about you? Are they being influenced or are they the influencers? Find out whether and how they would welcome your participation.

Most importantly, really ask yourself why you’d want to participate in social business. If you’re getting into it just for the sake of doing it, you’re going to have a hard time. I’m not saying you won’t be successful, but your efforts will be less focused.

There are some that claim that if your consumers aren’t active on social media, neither should you. I don’t necessarily agree with this. That your consumers aren’t actively involved with social media now doesn’t mean they won’t in the (near) future. Part of the game of social business is being able to anticipate the future direction of your consumers and being prepared to capitalize on their movements.

To get a better idea of what your social business mileage will be, it’s important to give brutally honest questions to the following questions:

• Interest Can you tie into people’s interests, passions and/or hobbies?
• Community Are (the opinions or facts about) your brand or your products/services compelling enough for people to form or participate in a community?
• Niche Are there existing communities where your consumers are gathering right now that you can tap into?
• Showcase Can social media offer you a way to demonstrate the value or quality of your products/services?
• Expertise Does social media offer you an (extended) audience to demonstrate your knowledge, thought leadership or other innovative qualities?
• Coverage Are you already being talked about online? For example, if there are major blogs talking about you, this offers opportunities to post comments or write guest articles.
• Value Are you able to provide your consumers with information—directly or indirectly related to your products/services—that is helpful or entertaining?
• Influence Can your consumers actually influenced by social media to make purchases?

You don’t need a resounding “Yes” to all the above questions to get success in social business. However, asking yourself these questions give you an idea of how far your brand could stretch in social media.

We’ll talk more about value and effectiveness as we roll on in this series, but next week, we’ll look at assessing company readiness for social business. In the meantime, all your feedback is welcome!

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a mini-series on assessing the value and effectiveness of social business. This mini-series will cover the following aspects:

• Reasons to participate in social business
• Internal considerations
• Debunking myths
• Social business in B2B environments

I’ve divided the reasons to participate in social business into three categories:

1. Marketing
2. Reach & Community
3. Internal reasons & Reasons to avoid social business

Today, we’ll look at prevalent marketing-related reasons to participate in social business.

• Brand Management As covered in part 1 about Base-Lining, we already noticed that the social web is an excellent place for evaluating your brand. It gives you insight on the people’s knowledge and sentiment about you, plus it allows you to identify advocates as well as detractors. This gives you the opportunity to organize your marketing efforts around your findings. You can keep a close eye on what detractors are saying and respond appropriately, while driving people to the places where your brand’s advocates hang out. The latter can help you spread positive mentions to more people which will cause negative comments to be outweighed.
• Brand Awareness Through the information gathered in Part 1, you’re able to identify key platforms and tools to target prospective customers and generate targeted brand awareness.
• Reputation Building By having found the right people and the right channels, you can work to build trust and a reputation by showing your subject matter expertise. In addition, it is an opportunity to land PR opportunities in the form of interviews, videos and podcasts for instance.
• Search Engine Optimization Through the distributive nature of social media, you can generate links back to your websites or profiles when people mention your brand with a link. The effect of this will depend on the quality of the blogs/websites linking back to you (as judged by various search engines’ algorithms) but when you focus efforts on blogs/websites that have a high authority ranking and share a high degree of relevance to your brand.
• Connecting with Customers Social media offers you alternative ways to follow up with prospective customers. Say you meet someone at a conference and would like to follow up with that person. Instead of sending an email or calling that person, you could send a LinkedIn invitation and/or follow that person on Twitter. Aside from following up on the conference, these tools also allow you to get to know that person better. Once someone’s a customer, social media also offers great ways for you to stay top of mind with that person by providing high-value content from which they can directly benefit or from which you can up-sell or cross-sell at some point. Engaging with your customers on the topics they talk about give you new ways of opening up conversations that are valuable to both them and you. Finally, you can follow up on positive mentions by asking for referrals that generate more business for you.

If you have more great marketing-related reasons for getting into social business, let me hear them in the comments. Next week, we’ll look at reasons related to reach and community.

Analytics and measurement on the Web are all the rage and—from a traditional PR point of view—the number of square inches of print media coverage still matter as well. For television, this has always been a bit more complicated. You’d have to know and even then, you’ll need to acquire the tape. But what if you could monitor your brand’s mentions on TV in real-time?

While waiting in line for the Microsoft Techset party at SXSW, my buddy Jeff Mello and I met Patrick Riley and Matt Thomson from Livedash who built a great tool just for that.

What Does Livedash Do?

Livedash offers marketing analytics for televison by indexing US TV recordings to make them text-searchable. Just enter a term in the search box and it will return the mentions of the term on TV.

Here’s an example of what I got when I searched for “toyota” (click to enlarge):

Immediately you see how detailed the indexing is. Not only are the mentions displayed in a neat timeline, it allows you to filter per TV channel or per day. Per result, you can drill down to see a show’s transcript or find results from similar shows. In Google Alerts-esque fashion, you can also sign up to receive updates whenever there’s a mention of your search term(s).

If all that wasn’t enough, Livedash offers a video archive and API services to business users.

Impressions

I was intrigued when they told me about Livedash, but now I’m blown away. This is a wonderful piece of technology that’s going to give us more marketing intelligence on media mentions.

The service is still “basic” in terms of the analytics, but the guys are definitely working hard on extending and improving the service.

If you haven’t tried out Livedash, give it a shot. Let me hear it in the comments what you think!

The Online Marketing Framework is my attempt at providing an overview of what the main disciplines are, how they relate to each other, which types of activities they consist of, and what they focus on achieving. The framework is not meant to be all-inclusive and I hope to have addressed the key aspects of online marketing with it, but I definitely welcome your thoughts in the comments section.

The Online Marketing Framework is built up as follows:

• Purpose First it looks at the purpose, i.e. what should the efforts focus on achieving?
• Activities Then it describes categories of activities that look to serve each purpose.
• Disciplines Finally, it positions the driving disciplines that incorporate the activities.

Purpose

The ultimate purpose for online marketing—for commercial organizations—is to stimulate sales. However, there are underlying purposes that collectively serve the end purpose of sales. These four purposes represent what organizations should focus their efforts on:

• Awareness This one’s obvious, you want to get the word out on your brand and product.
• Attention Whereas awareness is about people getting to know you, attention goes one step further. It’s about people actually paying attention to what you’re saying (about your product).
• Relevance This refers to offering people something that is of value to them. Whether it’s a need or a desire, it’s relevant in people’s context.
• Trust People can know you, listen to you and be interested in your product, but if they don’t trust you, it’s less likely to lead to a sale.

These four purposes are essential to online marketing and the image below establishes the foundation of the framework.

Activities

Numerous activities are at a marketer’s disposal but not all of them are equally suitable for the purposes described above. However, four types of activities can be identified that have a specific focus:

• Promotion This category focuses on awareness and attention by distributing messages to an audience or a community. Examples of activities are email marketing and banner advertising.
• Attraction Here, you’re focusing on awareness and relevance by positioning your brand or product to be visible when people are looking for it (or looking for something similar). Attraction consists of search engine marketing activities like paid search, contextual advertising and SEO.
• Content Here’s where you created well-targeted, relevant content that helps build authority and/or trust. Examples of content (platforms) are blogs, instruction video and ebooks.
• Influence This refers more to a process than a certain set of activities. It consists of the things that your market expects or appreciates from you. Whether it’s delivering on your promise, being nice or helping people with their problems, the process of establishing trust and gaining the attention of your audience/community helps you build influence.

The image below depicts the added activity sets within the framework so far:

Disciplines

Disciplines are basically the key pillars of the framework. The four disciplines I identified are:

• Push Marketing Sometimes also referred to as outbound marketing, this discipline consists of efforts that focus on establishing awareness, attention and relevance. This is done mostly through paid media, such as search engine advertising and display ads.
• Pull Marketing Also referred to as inbound marketing, the efforts in pull marketing focus on awareness, relevance and trust through a combination of earned media and owned media.
• Social Media The efforts of social media focus on generating relevance, attention and trust through also a combination of earned media and owned media. Social media can also create awareness, but that is more the result of the way social media works—i.e. people spreading the word about you—rather than the result of your efforts as a marketer.
• Branding This is the discipline where efforts focus on generating awareness, attention and trust. Branding is the process of establishing a reputation and promoting yourself through the brand you’ve built.

This is how these disciplines are positioned within the framework.

This is the full Online Marketing Framework:

The idea behind the Online Marketing Framework is that there’s no single solution. The individual disciplines and activities have their strengths (and weaknesses). There’s also overlap in the disciplines and activities because there are synergy effects. For example, clever content marketing on a blog can help SEO (attraction).

The various disciplines and related activities all need to be implemented to get the best results. It is up to marketers to find the mix that is appropriate for their brand, their organization, their product and their market.

These are obviously my thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours in the comments!

It’s always important to consider the value, the relevance and the timing of your message when marketing on the web. The danger in online marketing—especially with the advent of social media—is the backlash that can arise when a certain marketing effort is not to the audience’s liking.

Some companies will enter a confrontation with the audience, while other companies will ignore the audience. But either way, there’s a moment of contact that you can seize. The amount of backlash you receive is the result of the influence of the starter. Wouldn’t you like to be able to make use of that influence to your advantage? There are more benefits to be gained in repairing any bridges that may be broken than to burn them down completely.

Understand the value of your messages to your audience. When things do go wrong, embrace the naysayers.

Social media has a funny magnifying effect. If your brand is strong, it will only be enhanced through social media. However, if your brand has a bad reputation, you’ll find that social media is capable of delivering more worms than you thought fit into the can.

Be critical and cautious when considering a social approach to your business. Social media is not the be-all end-all of your marketing.

Align your social media efforts with the strength of your brand.