Joe PesciOne of my favourite marketing 2.0 quotes of all time comes from Gary Vaynerchuk, the video blogger, who so successfully built his wine business through social marketing. He says:

There is no substitute for caring for your audience, your customer and your clients. And… you need to have an actual business model to support and sustain it.

This really is the secret of successful marketing on the social web.

If you care for your customers, offer them great products and services, exceptional customer service and an overall satisfying experience – you create a happy customer. And happy customers create more customers.

Below is the video with Gary’s interview where he said what I just said he said 😉

I’ve placed this clip on my blog before, and back then I received comments from people who said that they had a hard time making out exactly what Gary had to say.

That’s partly because the interview (by Monty Metzger) was conducted on a really busy street, and partly because Gary sounds like Joe Pesci on a marketing mission.

Since I placed this clip on my blog before, I felt obliged to add a little extra value. So you can download a PDF with an English transcript of the video, below; just in case you are having a hard time hearing exactly what Gary had to say. I had great fun puzzling it together.

Download video transcript: Gary Vaynerchuk on the secret of his success [PDF]

It’s a word I hear a lot. I even use it myself sometimes:

Leverage.

I like the word.

Leverage

Sounds and smells fluid & rubbery. But it actually means to do the opposite. It takes power and muscle to leverage one thing towards the other.

I sometimes hear people say that they want to: “Leverage the power of social media”.

Is that possible?

Well, yes it is.

But certainly not with a Quid Pro Quo attitude. I recommend trying a warm and heartfelt “Are you being served?” instead.

Trust, Relationships, and happy clients: that’s the real stuff you can leverage in social media.

Biggest opportunity B2C social mediaAmazingly, ‘social media’ still remains a mystic phenomenon for many B2C companies. This is because most B2C companies and brands traditionally market their products and services through advertising & promotion.

As a result, most companies enter into social media for all the wrong reasons. They see social media channels, such as Facebook & Twitter, as a great opportunity to get their ad or site in front of as many people as possible.

But is that really the big opportunity of social media?

[Read more…]

Mobile StrategyYesterday I participated in a panel discussion on Mobile Strategy at an event organised by EFactor – the world’s largest network for entrepreneurs. The attendees were mostly independent entrepreneurs and SME business leaders.

Despite my years as brand director for Commodore International Corp. I’m not a mobile specialist. So I was there to help us explore how businesses could fit mobile into their overall marketing 2.0 strategy.

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While I was searching in Google for the term ‘social media marketing’ Google Suggest gave me the term ‘social media marketing for dummies’. And that means people are appearantly searching for that.

Social Media Marketing Dummies

Google Suggest is a really handy tool to get a grip on long tail searches and it is also a source of inspiration for blog topics. And that’s why I am now writing this post for  ‘social media marketing for dummies’.

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IBC 2011 logo

This Friday and Saturday I’ve been invited to be part of the Design Award Jury for the Hall 1 exhibits for the 2011 annual International Broadcasting Convention at the RAI Amsterdam. Together, we will be looking for the exhibits with a strong, stylish and confident visual presence that makes for an accomplished and differentiated brand.

The IBC expects around 48,000 attendees from more than 140 countries and includes major industry speakers such as filmmaker James Cameron, Virgin Media COO Andrew Barron, Christian Hernandez, head of international business development EMEA Facebook through to pretty much everyone who is anyone in the global media and broadcast industry.

To get in the mood, I decided to check out more than 100 websites of the Hall 1 exhibitors. As marketing director of our strategy and communications 2.0 company I couldn’t resist doing a quick analysis of how these companies represent themselves online. Here’s what I found:

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Here’s a classic social media marketing cartoon, first published on Eloqua’s blog (a company for demand creation software) in a guest submission from Valeria Maltoni, business strategist. Check it out:

Eloqua Maltoni Social Media Cartoon

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Just last week, Google started testing their much talked about social network called ‘Google Plus’.

Emerald Sea painting inspiration Google Plus

At first I was really surprised to see Google launching this product under the Google brand name because ‘social’ just isn’t a part of Google’s brand DNA. Google is about search. To ‘google’ even became a verb.

So, if Google wants to grab marketshare in ‘social’ it would be logical to launch it under a different brand name, right? Just like they took a bite out of the browser market using the brand name Chrome.

But after reading this article in Wired, I understood better why Google is launching this social network under their own brand name:

Google is repositioning itself.

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This week Google started ‘field testing’ it’s new social network called Google Plus with a limited group of users. As a result, the whole internet is now talking about Google Plus.

But getting people talking about their products has never been Google’s problem.

The problem has been in developing ‘social’ products that people actually use. Products like Google Buzz and Google Wave have never been adopted by a mainstream world wide audience.

[Read more…]

Kill Trust & scare off your clientsI recently received a lot of emails from my Linkedin connections, inviting me for a new kind of professional social network. I thought it was a network visualisation tool.

Curious as I am, I click, signed-in with my Linkedin account, and take a look.

15 minutes later I deleted my account.

Why?

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