MackCollier.com

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Sponsored Post: CCF Introduces ‘The Conscious Consumer’

Note from Mack: This is a sponsored post from #Blogchat’s sponsor in September, Clarity Coverdale Fury.  Check out their blog here, and please follow them on Twitter.  Here’s their new post, How Brands Can Win With Conscious Consumers.

 

“My consumption impacts myself, my family, my community and the world at large. I consider issues of health, environment and social responsibilities when I make decisions.” – The Conscious Consumer

More and more people are adapting habits and behaviors that are based on shared values versus the “winner take all” mentality of our not-so-distant past. They are considering how their actions impact others and the world around them. What was once a small percentage of the population is now at a tipping point. This notion of “conscious consumption” and a more Conscious Consumer is no longer on the fringes but is heading mainstream.

American consumers who are practicing yoga or meditation, shopping organic or at Whole Foods, eating vegan or vegetarian are no longer in the millions, but rather the tens of millions. As we wrote in our definition of Conscious Consumer (you can read it above) they are being more mindful. More mindful of not only their own health and personal wellness but how their actions impact the world around them.

As we’ve written about this over the past year we have discovered a lot. Not only are consumers taking action but many companies are as well. In our backyard, General Mills has created Small Planet Foods, an offshoot that houses brands such as Food Should Taste Good, Cascadian Farms and Larabar. LifeTime Fitness has gotten into the business of conducting running and biking races by expanding on their triathlons with nationwide events like Commitment Day held on New Year’s Day. They have also purchased others like the famed Leadville series in Leadville, Colorado. And by doing so, have given themselves a platform to sell other services to an audience of fit-minded individuals. You can visit our blog and read more at blog.claritycoverdalefury.com.

To learn more we recently completed a study with Mintel. It shows just how much momentum there is behind Conscious Consumerism. Over the past month and through November we are releasing a large part of this data in a series we are calling Think. Every two weeks we issue a new Think report highlighting information and insights from the study. You can access the reports here.

Please feel free to use the information in your posts, presentations or articles.

We believe the momentum is there. The question for us is how entrepreneurs and marketers will leverage this momentum. And how consumers will take to manufacturers and service providers who adapt along with them.

We’ve enjoyed the journey, including our sponsorship of #Blogchat. And we hope that through this data we can provide you with some insights. Or maybe more importantly, some inspiration.

For more insights on the Conscious Consumer, follow us on our weekly blog.

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The Science of Happiness; What Makes You Happy and How Rock Stars Knew This All Along

I recently saw this video thanks to a share by Amy Taylor.  The video talks about a scientific study into one of the key drivers of happiness: Sharing gratitude.

As soon as I saw this, I immediately recalled Katy Perry’s Firework Video Contest.  Katy asked her fans to create a video telling the world who their ‘Firework’ was, someone that inspired them and that made them a happier person.  Basically, these were videos that thousands of Katy Perry fans created showing gratitude to the most important people in their lives.

And each video ended with the person talking about how important Katy was to them.  Katy gave her fans a way to show their appreciation for the people they care most about, and as a result, Katy gave her fans another reason to care for and love her even more.

So now we have the scientific reason why rock stars tell their fans that they love them: Because it makes them happy.  And if giving gratitude is a key driver of happiness then no doubt receiving gratitude is as well.  And I don’t know about you, but I find it easier to promote and gush about people and ideas that make me happy.

We’ve already established that connecting with your fans will help drive business growth and improve things like customer loyalty and make your marketing more efficient.  Now we have scientific proof that it will make you a happier person as well.

Sounds like a winner to me!

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How Blogs Impact Purchase Decisions, Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic!

Here’s tonight’s #Blogchat transcript (Click Transcript on the left).

Tonight (9-22-2013) at #Blogchat we’ll be chatting about how blogs impact purchase decisions.  All month long #Blogchat is sponsored by CCF.  Tonight’s topic ties into CCF’s latest blog post about the role of brands in easing the mind of consumers.  CCF also references Chiptotle’s viral video The Scarecrow, which is embedded here:

Here’s the flow for tonight’s topic, which begins at 8pm Central:

8:00-8:20 pm – When researching a purchase, are blogger reviews more or less credible than reviews from ‘professional’ site?

8:20-8:40 pm – Have you ever influenced someone via social media to buy a product? If so, what did you do?

8:40-9:00 pm – Are certain products or services easier to sell via a blog? If so, which ones?

BTW a sidenote:  CCF’s team selected this week’s topic as they did last week’s.  Last Sunday night’s #Blogchat was one of the biggest chats in the 4-year history of #blogchat.  It was a very interesting topic and discussion, and I think tonight’s chat will be equally engaging.  Please check out CCF’s newest post to help reference tonight’s topic.

So make sure you are following CCF on Twitter, and also follow Rob, who will be joining in as well.

You can follow #blogchat right here:

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3 Reasons Why Social Media Isn’t Saving Your Business

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This Thursday for the first time I’ll be speaking in two states on the same day (yeah it sounded pretty cool when I scheduled it months ago).  Thursday night I’ll be in Nashville  speaking to the Social Media Club chapter about Think Like a Rock Star.  But earlier that day I’ll be speaking at the Alabama Mountain Lakes Tourist Association’s annual meeting in Huntsville.

In Huntsville I’ll be talking about getting started using social media and how to start creating a social media strategy.  Despite what you hear in the ‘social media fishbowl’, many companies aren’t using social media and even fewer are doing so effectively.

If you want to start using social media effectively, there’s three things you need to focus on:

1 – Understanding how the people you want to reach are using social media.  The majority of people use social media as personal communication tools and to discover and share content.  Not as channels to receive marketing messages.  So if you want to connect with potential customers via social media, you need to adjust how you use social media to make it consistent with the experience your customers want and expect.    Most Social Media Marketing doesn’t fail because the brand doesn’t understand the tools, it fails because the brand doesn’t understand how its customers are using the tools.

2 – Focus on strategy, not tactics.  It’s not about using Twitter and Facebook correctly, it’s about creating a plan that helps you reach defined goals.  When I first meet with clients, one of the first things we talk about is what their goals are for using social media.  I ask them to answer this question: “What needs to happen in order for this to be a success”  If you want to launch a blog, what needs to happen in 90/180/365 days in order for you to see that the blog is ‘working’?  Asking these questions helps you decide why you want to use social media, and more importantly, what you want to accomplish via social media.

3 – Measure what matters, not what’s easiest to track.  If you start a Twitter account and you are measuring number of followers gained as your way of quantifying that your Twitter account is ‘working’ then #URDoingItWrong.  Don’t measure the metrics that are easiest to track, measure the metrics that lead to desired outcomes.  If you want to see Twitter drive sales, then figure out which metrics indicate either increased sales or an increased likelihood to buy, and track those.

 

If you want to use social media then you need to invest time in creating a solid plan and understanding the customers you want to connect with.  This is something that applies to any marketing initiative you want to begin.  What else do you think companies should focus on before they start using social media?

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Where Do You Find Rich and Valuable Content For Blogging? Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic!

Here’s the transcript for tonight’s #Blogchat, click on Transcript on the left!

Hey y’all tonight we will be discussing where we find rich and valuable content for our blogs.  Thanks again to CCF for sponsoring #Blogchat in September!  You can check out their blog and learn more about their new report on The Conscious Consumer called THINK.

#Blogchat starts at 8:00PM Central tonight (September 15th, 2013). We’ll be covering four areas with tonight’s topic:

8:00-8:15PM – What content sources do you use as research for your blog posts?

8:15-8:30PM – What makes content more valuable and trustworthy to you?

8:30-8:45PM – How do you balance facts/evidence with sharing your opinion?

8:45-9:00PM – How do you feel about corporately sponsored content?

So make sure you are following CCF on Twitter, and join us on Twitter at 8PM tonight!  Or you can follow along below!  The best part about following the chat here is I’ve filtered out the spammers so their tweets aren’t cluttering up the stream 😉

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Embracing Your Fans Shouldn’t Be a Campaign, It Should Be Your Business

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Over the last couple of years there’s been a pattern of brands running campaigns designed to ‘show our fans how much we love them’.  Typically this involves the brand surprising the fan with some sort of free gift, the fan(s) is thrilled, and this is all filmed and turned into a commercial, then promoted in case studies at conferences, white papers, etc.  The basic format is a commercial or video that says ‘We found 10 fans that love our brand, and we decided to show them how we love them right back’.

It’s great that brands are connecting with their fans and rewarding them for being fans.  It really is.  But brands should be smart enough to embrace their fans all the time, not just when the cameras are rolling.

Your brand shouldn’t embrace its fans because it could lead to good publicity, you should embrace your fans because you want to.

Fans don’t want to hear from you just when its convenient to you, they want a relationship with you.  They want constant contact and interaction.  So if you launch a ‘campaign’ designed to connect with them once or twice then disappear, you are actually hurting that relationship with your fans and making them less likely to promote you.

As I said Wednesday in #Rockstarchat, the most successful brands are the ones that make the transaction secondary to the person.  These brands want to connect with their customers and create a better experience for them and a deeper connection.  With the understanding that doing so will lead to more sales.

Your fans love you and view your brand as being their brand.  Which is why they want you to connect with them, they want you to ask them how they can help you and when they give you advice on how to make your brand better, they want you to act on that advice.

This isn’t rocket science, folks.  This is about building relationships.  Think about when someone likes you, if you only initiate contact with that person when you want to see them and if you only want to do the things that you like with them, how would that person react?  They probably wouldn’t like you for very long.  You want to show that person that you are willing to do some of the things that they like to do as well.  It can’t be only about you, there has to be some compromise.

It’s the same thing with connecting with your fans.  You can’t do it only when you can make a commercial out of it and get positive publicity.  It has to be because you love your fans, and want a closer connection with them.

That closer connection takes time and energy and a plan to develop, but its so worth it for your brand.  And before you say that you have no idea how to create a plan for connecting with your fans, remember that I wrote the book that shows you exactly how.

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How Do You ‘Activate’ Your Brands Fans?

That’s today’s #Rockstarchat topic on Twitter, and you can join in below in this very post!  Feed readers click here.

For example, think of all the brands that you would consider yourself to be a fan of.  And it could even be extended to being a fan of a TV show or a rock star.

Now think about the ones that you tell others about, and more specifically, think about the brands/shows/rock stars/teams that you are a fan of that you don’t tell others about.  What prompts us to talk about some of the things we are passionate about, and not others?

Is it that some brands give us a more interesting and compelling story to share?  Do they give us better tools to promote the brand to others?  Do they do a better job of connecting with us personally, thus giving us an extra incentive to talk about them to others?

What do you think?  Those are the points we want to talk about today during #Rockstarchat, and you can follow along right here in this post, the discussion will start at 1pm Central!

 

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#Blogchat Topic For Tonight is Using Your Blog as a Networking Tool, Co-Hosted by Dave Delaney

Here’s the #Blogchat transcript thanks to Hashtracking!

Tonight’s (Sept 8th, 2013) #Blogchat will feature Nashville’s Dave Delaney discussing with us how to use our blogs as a networking tool!  Dave just wrote a book on networking, and will have a ton of tips and tricks for us on how to leverage our blogs and social media to better connect with others.

Here’s what we’ll be discussing, starting at 8pm Central:

8:00-8:20 – Figuring out the focus of your blog

8:20-8:40 – Leveraging your blog as a way to establish thought leadership

8:40-9:00 – Using your blog as a networking tool at offline events

It should be a fabulous discussion tonight, so make sure you are following Dave on Twitter!

Also, as you know CCF is the #Blogchat sponsor for September.  CCF has just released an interesting year-long study its done into the habits and mindset of what it calls The Conscious Consumer.  You can learn more about this study at CCF’s blog, and download the report for free here.

Oh, and you can follow along with #Blogchat right here in this post:

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What’s the Identity of Your Fans?

Today at 1pm Central on Twitter we’ll be discussing how to find the identity of your fans at #RockstarChat.  It’s vitally important to understand who your fans are, because that helps shape the type of relationship you can have with them.

For example, Maker’s Mark literally calls their fans their Brand Ambassadors.  That helps shape the nature of their relationship.  Maker’s Mark treats their BAs as pseudo-salespeople for the brand, people who consider it their job to promote Maker’s Mark to other customers and bars.  So the brand focuses heavily on giving BAs promotional materials to help them better sell the brand to others.

With Fiskars and its The Fiskateers program, the focus is more on the Fiskateers themselves, and their love of scrapbooking and crafting.  Fiskars showcases the fans and the projects they create, with the understanding that doing so spreads a love of scrapbooking, and by extension, that leads to promotion of the products used to create those crafting projects.  Such as Fiskars’ iconic orange-handle scissors.

So if you are wanting to craft a formal program to facilitate an ongoing relationship with your fans, you need to consider two key questions:

1 – Who are these fans?

2 – What’s the nature of our desired relationship?

For example, let’s say your company makes a line of cooking products, and that you want to improve your marketing efforts in the Pacific Northwest.  From your market research you know that the majority of your customers are stay-at-home-moms.  Since your fans are SAHMs and the goal is to improve your marketing efforts, the nature of your desired relationship with your fans could be to leverage them as a feedback channel to learn more about what customers think of both your products and in-store marketing in the Pacific Northwest.

You could start by first identifying your fans in each state, let’s start with Oregon.  And you could then identify all the stores in the state of Oregon that carry your products, then based on the location of your fans in Oregon, ask certain fans to talk to customers in the stores in their regional area.  This would allow you to better learn what customers in Oregon not only think about your products, but how your company is marketing those products.  Then you can take this feedback and leverage it to improve your marketing efforts.

That’s just an example, we’ll deep dive into this topic today during #RockstarChat on Twitter.  Please do join us, and to make it easier on you, you can follow the chat right here!  See you at 1pn Central!

 

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#Blogchat’s Sponsor For September is CCF Plus All Topics For the Month!

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Transcript for tonight’s #Blogchat is now up!

I am thrilled to announce that CCF (Clarity Coverdale Fury) is sponsoring #Blogchat in September!  CCF is an independent, full-service marketing and advertising agency dedicated to helping its clients discover and nurture the emotional connection between their brands and their customers.  You can learn more about CCF at its website.

Additionally, CCF will be releasing a five-part series over the next few weeks into what CCF calls “The Conscious Consumer”. For the last year CCF has been studying this group of people and will be sharing what they have learned about them over the next couple of months on its blog.  You can check out CCF’s blog to read their current posts to get a bit more background into who The Conscious Consumer is.

Rob and the team at CCF have been following #Blogchat for a while now, so they are familiar with the chat and how it works, and I’m delighted to be working with them.  And along with that, here’s the topics we’ll be covering this month:

Tonight (September 1st) – Discovering Larger Trends and Ideas to Blog About.  We’ll talk about not only how you can figure out what the ‘bigger ideas’ are you want to blog about, but how to discover larger ideas and themes that others are talking about as well.  We’ll break the topic down tonight into two areas:

8:00-8:30 Central – How do you connect with others that share a common belief/idea/etc and provide them with coaching and support?  And what would that coaching and support role look like?  Via your blog, or something else?

8:30-9:00 Central – How do you keep up to date on the latest information so that you can discover larger trends?  For example, with blogging if more bloggers were using mobile devices to post, how would we discover that?  How would we research to learn about the larger trends?  And when does it reach the tipping point of becoming a trend?

 

So that’s tonight’s topic, here’s what we’ll be covering for the rest of the month:

September 8th, special co-host Dave Delaney on Using Your Blog As a Networking Tool

September 15th, Where to Find Rich and Valuable Content For Blogging

September 22nd, How Blogs Impact Purchase Decisions

September 29th, OPEN MIC!

 

So to prep for tonight, please follow CCF on Twitter as well as @Rob_Rankin, and please check out their blog.  Tonight’s #Blogchat begins at 8pm Central, as it does every Sunday night.

Also, if you are interested in sponsoring #Blogchat in November (October’s is already sold) then you can learn more about it here.

Hope to see you tonight, and if I don’t, have a great Labor Day!