What a spectacular day it was yesterday in Boston. I did the trolley ride around town for two and a half hours and had a quick whistle stop tour of all the historic sites.
The advisory board meeting of SNCR was from 2 – 4 and we went over all the suggested topics of research that had been brought up during 2006.
What we found was that many of them hinge on identifying and measuring influence and the effect of consumer generated media on reputation.
So the consensus of opinion was that we should concentrate our main efforts on one large research project in 2007 – how to meaure influence and how online influence can affect reputation.
Marianne Richmond, who just attended the Forrester Consumer Forum sent me an email to say that several of the presentations there addressed the disconnect between for instance the message “24/7 customer support” and the message “please call back, our offices are closed.”
There were metrics and examples presented that spoke to increases in profits after these “disconnects” were fixed. But there wasn’t a metric that can take dollars spent in advertising & communications and the dollars lost by disconnects in other customer touchpoints. Seems these issues are widespread.
K.D. Payne recently joined SNCR and will be an invaluable resource for those of us involved in this project.
John Cass has some ideas already and several members suggested research partners and possible funding ideas.
I will present this to the Symposium today and get the wider group’s feedback.
A couple of projects that are already in progress – such as blogging and social media best practices – that will be completed in 2007.
And there was also agreement that we need to look into mobile blogging.
Call them mavens, influencers, “concierges of cool,” whatever; the fact is, for these key “somes” to influence your “many,” it is imperative that your creative messages resonate at the most surgical levels– with those who make it their mission to spread the word.
The benefits of using a mobile device for podcasting are clear. Mobile allows you to establish the one-to-one dialogue with the consumer anytime and anywhere.
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Sally is the author of Website Content Strategy blog: Information about the shifts in media consumption and the use of
technology in marketing and PR so business can stay in touch with
their rapidly moving audiences.
