Touchpoint Insights, June 2009: Leveraging Social Media, Brand Commitment

How Influence Drives Employees, Customers and Consumer Behavior to Strengthen Connections With Your Brand...

1.) How Businesses Selling to Businesses are Leveraging Social Media. If you're a B2B marketer and you're not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you're late. But not too late... (Article)

2.) From the Inside Out: Crossing Your "Brand Commitment Threshold." Four steps to better delivery of a consistent, differentiated branded customer experience: Understanding and controlling the management, interpretation and delivery of your Brand. (Article)

3.) International Non-Profit Boosts Donor Revenue Potential by over 40% Donor-focused brand strategy boosts adoption, increases loyalty, and sets the stage for donor experience and brand management improvement.
(A Touchpoint Audit and Brand Mapping Case Study)

4.) Touchpoints; a Customer Experience Story. At their core, great brands express themselves with stories that are powerful, expressive and compelling. This presentation tells ours... (A Slideshare "Favorite" Presentation)

5.) Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. If you're a marketer - and/or a marketing skeptic (or cynic), you'll love this book. After all, it's what we do - and why we do what we do - isn't it? (On our Bookshelf)

How Businesses Selling to Businesses are Leveraging Social Media
If you're a B2B marketer and you're not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you're late. But not too late.

Though wildly successful at connecting people, businesses in general are still feeling their way through the options. Even though many businesses won't see immediate sales, the ability to drive awareness and positively influence your audiences is high. From micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter) to You Tube, and Facebook to LinkedIn, the range of touchpoints is broad, and the ability to measure influence and activity is high. See how firms as diverse as Accenture, IBM and Kelly Services are boosting awareness and preference by making business buyers talk, laugh and connect.

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From the Inside Out: Crossing Your "Brand Commitment Threshold."
Four steps to delivery of a branded customer experience: Understanding and controlling the management, interpretation and delivery of your Brand.

Today's customers are proactive, looking for and finding the brands they want - and leaving in heartbeat if it doesn't measure up to expectations. In fact, 87% of customers surveyed in late 2008 said they'd leave after a single negative experience. Not much room for error, is there? This is where the brand commitment threshold comes in - that point at which "The Company" cedes control of the brand to employees, whose behavior and belief is at heart of creating a branded customer experience. These four steps will show you how to drive ownership and delivery of your brand throughout your organization- from the inside out, the top down and the bottom up.

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International Non-Profit Boosts Donor Revenue Potential by over 40%
Donor-focused brand strategy boosts adoption, increases loyalty, and sets the stage for donor experience and brand management improvements.

For this international, non-profit arm of a leading Christian denomination, understanding and repositioning its brand within the context of other Church programs and secular competition raised many challenges. Through a Touchpoint audit and Brand Mapping engagement, we quantified touchpoint efficacy and donor experience, as well as audience beliefs, attitudes, wants and needs. Four major findings drove improvement initiatives for multiple segments of the Church's massive member base-across donor types, influencer groups and regions-re-connecting key audiences with the charity.

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Presentation: Touchpoints, a Customer Experience Story
At their core, great brands express themselves with stories that are powerful, expressive and compelling.

These stories marry the needs and desires of the individuals who comprise an organizations audience, while being charged with meaning and emotion. Leading brand development firms like our friends at Applied Storytelling leverage storytelling as the foundation for global brands. At MCorp Consulting, we recognize and embrace the strength of these stories. This presentation tells ours...

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On Our Bookshelf: Spent (Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior)
If you're a marketer - and/or a marketing skeptic (or cynic), you'll love this book. After all, it's what we do - and why we do what we do - isn't it?

From author Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior revisits the notion of conspicuous consumerism. Although often tongue-in-cheek, Miller nonetheless convincingly makes the case for eschewing the narcissist temptations of modern consumerism for more enlightened ways of communicating who we are to our fellow humans. But be warned - you might hate this book if you're looking for the "shortest available pop-business book" for getting consumers to buy your products. Here's where academic theory meets peacocks and Hummer's to explain why consumers (and marketers) do what we do...

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