MackCollier.com

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LiveFyre comment management added, let me know what you think!

As some of you have discovered, I’ve added the LiveFyre comment management system here at MackCollier.com.  This comes after seeing both Gini and Beth add it to their blogs, and rave about how it works.  Also, I was really sold after seeing how Gini’s readers (she’s been using it for about 7 months now) love it.

The Livefyre system will make it easier to facilitate actual conversations in the comments.  When I set up this blog I specified to have comments be nested, but it doesn’t always work.  Livefyre should take care of that problem.

Also, it adds a Like button to comments, which is great and most of us are used to seeing this on other blogs and Facebook.  And speaking of Facebook, you can also post your comment directly to Facebook AND Twitter when you leave it.

I really am excited about this system, and I am only adding it because I think it will help you.  So please try it out, kick the tires, and let me know what you think.  If you hate it, it will be gone.  If you love it, it will never leave.  The heart of this blog has ALWAYS been your comments.  Anything I can do to make it easier and more valuable for you to leave comments, is what I want.

So give it a try, and let me know what you think!  Also, here is Gini’s review of LiveFyre.

Oh and PS: Jenna Langer is head of Community for LiveFyre, and she was kind enough to attend the Live #Blogchat at SXSW!  Thanks Jenna!

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Which Fast-Food Brand Has the Best Twitter Presence?

So when it comes to fast-food chains, who is the King on Twitter?  McDonald’s? BK?  Starbucks?

The answer is, it depends.  Do you place more value on followers, or engagement?  How important is following back customers on Twitter?  Do more active accounts get higher marks?

I found a list of the Top 10 fast-food brands according to QSRMagazine and then used TweetStats to track the Twitter account for each of the Top 10 brands.  I then looked at 6 categories: Followers, Following, Tweets, Replies, RTs as Replies, and How Long on Twitter.

Here’s the brands that I looked at, and their Twitter account for each:  McDonalds, Subway, Burger King, Wendy’s, Starbucks, Taco Bell, Dunkin’ Donuts, Pizza Hut, KFC, Sonic.

Here’s my assessment of how these brands are using Twitter:

Best Twitter Presence – Starbucks

Starbucks leads 2 of the 6 categories I looked at, and was 2nd in 3 others.  The Seattle-based brand has a huge lead in number of followers, Taco Bell and McDonalds were tied for 2nd on the list with just a shade over 123K followers for each.  Starbucks has over 1.4 million followers.  They also have the most tweets, have been on Twitter since August 2008), and almost 80% of the company’s tweets are replies to others.  If there was one knock against the company, it might be that they are only following 79K people, which is the most on the list, but still only a fraction of its 1.4M followers.

Most Active and Engaged: Dunkin Donuts

DD has been on Twitter since October 2008, having left the most tweets on this list (8586), and 70% of those tweets have been replies to others.  Also, they have over 78K followers, and have over 52K people they are following.  I also think it’s interesting that while DD only has a fraction of the followers that competitor Starbucks has, the rest of its stats seem to closely track with what Starbucks has done.  DD joined Twitter a couple of months after SBUX, they have more tweets, and over 70% replies, like Starbucks.

Most Disappointing Twitter Presence: Burger King

BK arguably has the most brand awareness after McDonalds, but you couldn’t tell it from the company’s Twitter account.  The chain has less than 10K followers, a full 114K behind rival McDonalds.  Of course, The King isn’t doing himself any favors, only following 327 people, with only 223 tweets and roughly 1% of those are replies.  This proves that engagement matters, if BK were more active and responsive to followers, I bet its number of followers would spike.

Here’s the complete stats and how each brand ranked:

Number of Followers:

1 – Starbucks – 1,429,917

2 – McDonalds – 123,690

3 – Taco Bell – 123,557

4 – Dunkin Donuts – 78,449

5 – Pizza Hut – 53,306

6 – Subway – 47,821

7 – KFC – 32,808

8 – Wendy’s – 18,821

9 – Sonic – 12,144

10 – Burger King – 9,523

Replies as % of Tweets

1 – Sonic – 86.11

2 – Starbucks – 78.43

3 – Dunkin Donuts – 70.42

4 – KFC – 64.08

5 – McDonalds – 59.69

6 – Pizza Hut – 57.26

7 – Wendy’s – 53.52

8 – Subway – 45

9 – Taco Bell – 12.55

10 – Burger King – 1.79

Number of Tweets

1 – Dunkin Donuts – 8,586

2 – Starbucks – 6,936

3 – McDonalds – 4,946

4 – Taco Bell – 4,251

5 – Sonic – 4,243

6 – Subway – 3,824

7 – KFC – 3,044

8 – Pizza Hut – 2,047

9 – Wendy’s – 1,779

10 – Burger King – 223

 

Takeaways from these stats:

1 – Engagement matters, and isn’t optional.  All of these chains (with the possible exception of Sonic) have national footprints, and as such have to be on Twitter, because that’s where their customers are.  If you’re a national brand with a larger customer base (especially a B2C company), then it’s required that you be active on all major social media channels, because your customers will be.

2 –  Experience matters.  Three of the 10 brands listed here have been on Twitter since 2008, and all three are in the middle or top of all stats.

3 – Social Media is growing up fast.  If you look at the Twitter accounts of these brands, you’ll see that most are actively engaging their customers.  Remember just 2-3 years ago when it was big news if ANY brand replied to a customer on Twitter?  It’s the norm now.

 

Have any of these brands connected with you on Twitter?

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Blogging Case Study: How the OpenHouse Blog Builds Engagement With Readers

One of the biggest problems that business blogs (and many personal blogs, for that matter) have is building engagement with its readers.  Today I wanted to highlight a blog that does a fantastic job of connecting with readers, the HomeGoods OpenHouse blog.

It starts with the strategy

First, the OpenHouse blog does such a good job of building engagement because it’s a focal point of the blog’s strategy.  “The strategy for HG Openhouse is for our most passionate customers to talk to other customers about the love for their homes and surroundings whether that is in the form of decorating, entertaining, organizing, gifting, etc”, explains HomeGoods’ Marketing Manager, Kristie Rogers.  “We want the bloggers to talk about what inspires them and how they make their home their happy place.”

homegoods, blog engagement, blog marketing

Note in this screenshot that you can see the pictures of three different bloggers.  The entire visual component of the blog is build around making you as comfortable as possible with the bloggers themselves.  All have their pictures posted in each post they write, and rotating on the sidebar to the right, as well.  HomeGoods wants you to get to know the OpenHouse bloggers as people, and truly understand the value of posting pictures of their bloggers.  They also make it very easy to click the bios of the bloggers and learn more about them as people.  All of this makes it easier for the readers to connect with the bloggers, which makes it more likely that they will comment on the blog.

And when readers do comment (almost every post has comments), note how the OpenHouse bloggers make a point of referring to the commenter by their first name.  Here’s a good example, note that in both the comments Cathy wrote, she referred to the commenter by their first name.  And note that Sandy picked up on this, and referred to Cathy by her first name in her comment back.  The comments begin to look less like comments, and more like letters that friends are writing to each other.

So if you are wanting to get more engagement on your blog, look at what is working for OpenHouse on its blog; Lots of pictures and bios for every blogger, encouraging interaction and comments in the posts, and referring to commenters by their first name.  All of this works together to help HomeGoods reach its blogging goal of creating interaction with its readers.

BTW this is the first in a series of posts I’ll be doing on company blogs. I’m looking for company blogs that excel in one particular area.  For example in this post, the OpenHouse blog excels at creating engagement on its blog, so that’s why it was highlighted.  If you have a favorite company blog that you would like to see me highlight next, please either leave a comment, or email me.  Also, if you think your own company blog would be a good candidate, please send me a link so I can check it out!

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Coca-Cola’s CMO talks about how the company’s marketing approach is changing

Joe Tripodi, Coca-Cola’s Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer, recently penned a great article for the HBR on how the brand’s marketing is shifting from impressions to expressions.  I wanted to focus on one point that Joe made:

Build a process that shares successes and failures quickly throughout your company.Increasing consumer expressions requires many experiments, and some will fail. Build a pipeline so you can quickly replicate your successes in other markets and share the lessons from any failures. For example, our “Happiness Machine” video was a hit on YouTube so we turned it into a TV commercial, and we’ve replicated that low-cost, viral concept in other markets.

This is vitally important, especially when you are dealing with emerging marketing areas such as social media and mobile, and within big brands.  I recently wrote about the need to facilitate feedback internally AND externally (and among both groups), and I think this is an area that brands that have more mature social media marketing efforts will definitely capitalize on.  One of the big ‘knocks’ against social media especially is that it’s said to take a lot of time to implement and execute properly.  To Joe’s point, if a feedback system/cycle is put in place internally, the outcomes discovered by one area of the company, can be shared throughout, so that there’s no need to constantly re-invent the wheel.

Check out Joe’s article, and here’s the tv commercial that resulted from the success of their YouTube spots.

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Recruiters: Should job applicants mention using Social Media?

As you might know, Beth Harte has been looking for a job for the past few months.  Recently, she shared this feedback she had gotten from a recruiter:

“Remove all of your personal speaking, writing, blogging, and social media (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, SlideShare links, etc.) items from your resume. Companies don’t give a crap about that, they only care what you will do for them. Those items are red flags letting them know that you’ll request to be out of the office speaking or on Twitter all day and that you will not be helping to solve their day-to-day problems (i.e. tactical work).”

What do you think of this advice?  And I especially want to hear from recruiters, feel free to email me if you don’t want to comment here, and I will be happy to post your thoughts anonymously.  I am sure that most of us in the ‘social media fishbowl’ will gasp at this advice, but I would really like to see if this is the advice that recruiters are giving job applicants.

Now if Beth were 21 and fresh out of college and her only social media experience was creating a Facebook profile where she shared her photos of shoe shopping and frat parties, then yes, I could see not mentioning that.  But Beth has active social media presences on Twitter, Facebook, her blog, that all work to establish Beth’s thought leadership when it comes to how businesses can leverage integrated marketing, social media, customer service, etc etc.  Also, the fact that she has over 20K followers speaks volumes to her ability to build online communities.

But anyway, I wanted to ask recruiters if this is solid advice for job applicants.  Should any job applicants be removing all social media activity from their resumes?  And those of you that are also applying for jobs, what feedback are you getting from recruiters?  As I told Beth, I can understand the recruiter saying she shouldn’t mention her speaking, but the removal of all social media activities floors me.  I don’t think it should be the focus of her resume, but I also don’t think it should be deleted completely.

Recruiters, what do you think?  Job applicants, what advice are recruiters and employers giving you about listing social media on your resume?  And BTW, I don’t care what any recruiter says, if you need a smart marketer, you should definitely hire Beth!

 

UPDATE:  We’ve had a few recruiters chime in with comments (Thanks guys!), and they seem to be agreeing with what the recruiter told Beth.  I am wondering if part of it is simply social media having a negative perception as being only personal content?  Beth creates business-oriented content on her blog and Twitter feed, so I would think that would have value for businesses that need someone who can connect with these same people.

So to ask a slightly different question to recruiters:  If Beth didn’t have ANY social media accounts/presences, but did have a business newsletter that was aimed at CMOs and brand managers that had 50,000 subscribers, should she mention that on her resume?

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What’s the REAL business value of blog comments?

Amy has an interesting post on her blog today on the value of blog comments.  In it, she writes:

I think blog comments are VERY overrated. “Social media experts” act like they are the be-all-end-all but personally I think they are insignificant for many (not all, but the majority of) companies.

If I ran an SEO blog, I’d expect comments from my peers and MAYBE a few clients.  However, if I was in charge of a blog for plumbers, I would NOT expect any comments. Plumbers are going to be out fixing sinks and such all day long, they are not going to be sitting in front of their computers waiting to weigh in on clogged toilets and whether or not industrial Drano is environmentally friendly.

Now I could easily see a plumber having a blog that created content on teaching others how to do simple plumbing upgrades/repairs on their own, and how blog comments could have value as it would let the plumber answer questions from readers and in the process, establish the plumber’s credibility and expertise with potential customers.  But I think Amy’s larger point on the true value of comments, is valid.

Companies need to understand that while comments DO have value on a blog, that value will be different for each company.  And that comments are NOT the end goal for any blogging strategy.  If any of you write for a company blog that is judged ultimately on how many comments you generate per post, I’d love to hear from you.

Let’s assume a fictional company blog has the end goal of generating more sales on its website.  So the average path that a person might take on the blog would look something like this:

1 – Arrive on blog

2 – ???

3 – ???

4 – ???

5 – Leave blog and go to website

6 – ???

7 – ???

8 – Purchase product from website

 

Let’s say this visitor commented on the blog before leaving it and going to the website and purchasing a product.  If so, that action would have taken place at #2, #3, or #4.  Probably #2 or #3.  The point is, the visitor leaving a comment is low on the totem pole of importance.  What you want to look at more closely is what happened at #4 to prompt the visitor to leave the blog and go to the website, and then what happened at #6 and #7 to prompt the person to purchase the product once they arrived on the website.

But even IF a comment happens at #2, it still has value if it moved the visitor on to the action they took at #3.  The point is, you need to understand that you can’t judge the blog’s effectiveness solely on comments per post, you need to look higher up the chain to find the value.  And it could be that for your unique blogging goals, that getting comments on the blog is more important to you.  For me,  getting more comments per post has value for me in several areas:

1 – It helps me learn from my readers, which means the content I create here is (hopefully) more useful.

2 – It gives me ideas for future posts.

3 – It helps establish for event organizers that the content I am talking about resonates with readers, so they should hire me to speak at their event.

4 – It helps establish for clients that I know how to build engagement and interaction via blogs and social media.

Now if your company’s blogging strategy is built around building engagement and your online presence, then comments on your blog has a higher value for you.  Each company’s situation is different and the only ‘one size fits all’ rule when it comes to blogs and social media is probably that there is NO ‘one size fits all’ rule 😉

So blog comments will have different value for each blogging company.  While comments are NOT the silver bullet that some social media experts claim, they aren’t totally worthless, either.

Those of you that blog for your business, what value do YOU place on comments? And I’d like to hear from business bloggers moreso than personal bloggers.  If you have a personal blog, comments are absolutely more valuable for you.  But I’d like to hear what business bloggers feel the value of comments are.

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Katy Perry’s Firework Contest Shows the Power of Fan Engagement and Empowerment

Last year, artist Katy Perry launched a contest based around her latest hit single, Firework.  Tying into the theme of the song, she asked her fans to create a video telling her who was a ‘Firework’ in their lives.  Someone that inspired them, and for what reason.  The winner and their Firework would get a trip for 4 to London to meet Katy and watch her perform in a concert there.  Thousands of videos were submitted from fans across the world, before Cory Woodard from Georgia and his mom were announced as the winners of the contest.

But let’s be honest; this is NOT a contest, it is a promotion for Katy Perry’s song Firework.  It’s just that Katy turned the promotion over to her fans.  She created a way that fans could create content that would give them a reason share their stories of the people that inspired them in their lives.  A contest built around emphasizing the themes of the song Firework, and that would galvanize and inspire her fans.  The fans would then turn and promote the video they had created to their friends and networks.  And by extension, this contest exposes more people to Katy and her music, and that creates MORE fans for Katy.

But it all starts with Katy being brave enough to put the promotion of the song in the hands of her fans.  As you watch the video above, you’ll see how passionate her fans are in the videos.  Yes, some look goofy as hell (cue dude dressed as Katy), but the underlying theme is they are all passionate about what they are doing.  Katy found a way to connect with the people that are most passionate about her, and she inspired them to share more about someone that inspires them.  She found her fans, and inspired them to share their passion with others.  Which gives those fans even more reason to love her.

When I see a rockstar connecting with and empowering their fans like this, the question I always ask is ‘Why aren’t companies doing the same thing to connect with their fans?’  And before you answer ‘Because most companies don’t have fans like rockstars do’, ask yourself if rockstars have fans because of what they are, or because of what they do.

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10 Keys to Having an Amazing Marketing and Social Media Conference

Over the past 3 years I’ve spoken at and attended a few dozen marketing and social media conferences.  Luckily, most of these events have been solid, and even when I have spoken at events, I try to stay around for the rest of the event as an attendee.  Now is the time when a lot of events are gearing up for Fall planning, so wanted to share some of what I’ve learned over the years as a conference organizer, speaker, and attendee.

How to make your event better from the speaker’s point of view:

1 – Pay your speakers. Seriously, don’t you dare ask your speakers to work for free, so that you can profit.  I put in an average of 40 hours of time in preparing and rehearsing every session I lead at an event.  That’s a full workweek of time, and any speaker would having at your event will do the same, or more.  Yet there are many events that will charge $500-$1,000 per attendee (or more), and not even offer to cover travel for speakers.  If you are charging $1,000 a head and can’t afford to compensate your speakers, then you shouldn’t be organizing events.  And no, offering a free pass is NOT considered compensation, it’s expected from the speaker’s POV.

Now sometimes you can’t pay speakers.  I get that, so what you need to do is make every effort possible to make your speakers comfortable and make them feel appreciated.  Pick them up at the airport so they don’t have to get a cab.  Leave a gift basket waiting for them in their room with a thank-you note.  Make sure they know where their room/venue is, and that they have all the equipment they need.

2 – Give speakers as much information as possible on who will be attending your event, and what they want from the speaker’s session.  Work with them to make sure that the content they are creating will be consistent with what the audience is expecting.  If the speaker is better prepared, then they will deliver better information, and the attendees will get more value from the event.  And it will save the speakers time.

3 – Make sure all Audio and Video equipment is working BEFORE the speaker arrives.  Check with each room and make sure the setup is correct.  This should be done in the morning before each day’s sessions start.  Then throughout the day have as many people as possible going to each room and making sure each speaker gets their laptop set up properly.  And check with the venue and see if they have any additional Powerpoint clickers that your speakers can use.  Most speakers will have their own, but a few always seem to need one.

4 – Introduce the speaker when their session starts.  This isn’t a huge thing, but it saves the speaker from walking around the room at 1 min prior to starting and telling the room to please be quiet because it’s time to start.  And it saves us from reading our own bio, which really isn’t something that a lot of speakers look forward to.

5 – Record each speaker’s session and offer them a copy of the video.  This is also an incentive, so if you absolutely cannot afford to pay speakers, remind them that they’ll be provided with a copy of their presentation that they can use for their own promotional purposes.

 

From the attendee’s point of view:

1 – Let the agenda dictate the speakers, not the other way around.  Too many conference mess this one up.  You need to pick speakers based on their background being suitable to the topics covered at the conference.  You don’t want to pick a ‘name’ speaker and then tell her ‘you can speak on whatever you want!’  Your attendees aren’t paying to see popular speakers, they are being sent there by their company to learn how to improve the company’s marketing and social media efforts.  You need to give them speakers that will help them learn how to do this.

2 – Give attendees the opportunity to interact before, DURING and after the sessions.  A lot of events have gotten much better about adding in networking opportunities as well as tweetups/meetups at the end of each day’s sessions.  That’s great, but you also want to build ways for attendees to interact into the actual sessions.  And it goes beyond having Q&A in the last 10 mins of each session.  At the events where I have worked with the organizers, I have always pushed for sessions that follow a ‘core conversation’ format, where the session isn’t led by a speaker, but rather a moderator or 2 that are there to facilitate a free-flowing discussion among the attendees.  Because attendees learn more by discussing with each other what they have learned.  For example, in the morning there might be separate sessions on creating a social media strategy, and the ROI of social media.  Then in the afternoon, there could be a ‘core conversation’ on how to improve the ROI of your social media strategy.  Where the attendees carry over the thoughts and questions they had from the morning’s sessions, and discuss them with the two people that led the morning’s sessions.

3 – Make sure the venue has space available where impromptu meetings can be held, and work can be done.  A happy byproduct of attendees connecting with each other, is that they might actually get some work done.  Attendees might discover a potential partnership, or they might want to connect with a speaker about hiring them.  Or some of us introverts might simply need to duck out into a quiet hallways for a few minutes on a comfy couch to check our email 😉 Big hallways are also a great place for a speaker to meet with a few attendees to give them more personalized help dealing with the topic they spoke on.  The bottom line is that you don’t want to make sure that all your attendees are in every session, you want to make sure that when they leave the event, they feel like it was a good business investment.  This year’s SXSW was easily the most valuable event I have ever been to from a business perspective, and I attended a grand total of TWO sessions in FOUR days.

4 – Encourage speakers to attend and participate in the sessions of other speakers.  Let’s be honest, not every audience feels comfortable asking questions, and there can sometimes be a lull, especially waiting for that 1st question.  If this happens, it’s a good idea to have a few speakers in the session (who are likely fellow experts on the topic of the session), that will have a good idea of some of the questions that the audience will likely have, and can jumpstart the conversation around those points.  Additionally, attendees may want to reference a point raised in another speaker’s session, during their answer.  For example, if an attendee is making a point about mobile marketing, she might reference the discussion that occurred that morning in CK’s session.

5 – Give attendees something unexpected.  The 1st Small Business Marketing Unleashed I spoke at in 2008 was held in a hotel that was a replica of The Alamo.  At one of the evening dinners at a Marketing Profs event, we were entertained by a magician.  Most events are very boring, you are shuttled from one session to another for 2-3 days.  Give attendees a unique experience, do something different to make your event stick out from the others they will attend this year.

 

What other things have stood out to you from the events you have attended?  What are some examples of events that delighted you?  What has been disappointing to you?  If you were in charge of organizing a marketing/social media event, what would YOU change?

UPDATE: Speaking of speaking, I would be remiss if I didn’t let you know that the latest LIVE #Blogchat event has just been announced!  It will be in September in Atlanta as part of #SMIATL.

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Lessons From the Bookshelf: Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead

One of the things I’ve tried to make an effort to do in 2011 is read more books.  I am lucky enough to constantly be offered review copies of books that friends and colleagues have written, but rarely have time to get to reading them.

But at the same time, I didn’t want to do a simple book review like everyone else.  So I decided instead to give you ONE key takeaway from each book.  And the first book in this series is Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead, by David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan.  Anyone that’s read my writing for any amount of time should know what a fan I am of how rockstars connect with their fans, and what companies can learn from them.

This book has a ton of great marketing and fan-empowerment examples, but the one I wanted to focus on was give your biggest fans the best experience.  Scott and Halligan detail how The Grateful Dead controlled access to their tickets at live shows (fairly unusual for a major band), so they created a way for their biggest fans to get the best seats to shows.  What they did was they held aside blocks of tickets (usually the best seats closest to the stage), and they sold these tickets to fans that reached out to them directly about ordering tickets.  Die-hard fans discovered that they could contact the band directly, send in a money order with a request for tickets, and if any from the block were still available, they would get seats.

And how was the availability of these tickets made aware to fans?  By good old-fashioned word of mouth.  Fans that had the best seats told other fans about how they got them, and word spread that way.  This also brings up another interesting point, the Dead gave their biggest fans the best seats, but they also made them work for them.  The fans that just wanted to attend the event could jump online and order tickets, or in the pre-internet days, call Ticketmaster or a similar service.  But the diehards that wanted to be near the stage had to jump through a few extra hoops to try to get there.  And this works out perfectly because the diehard fans are the ones that would WANT to make that extra effort for the better seats.

This example really resonated with me because I tried to do something similar with the tickets for the first Live #Blogchat at SXSW.  Due to the size of the location, there would only be 100ish spots available for attendees.  I wanted to make sure that as many regular #Blogchat participants as possible could attend the event, so a couple of days before tickets were available, I started asking #Blogchat regulars that would be at SXSW to DM me for info on the event.  Then when they DMed me, I let them know that tickets would be going on sale in a day or two, and asked them if they wanted me to notify them when they were available.

About 25 people (mostly #Blogchat regulars) told me they wanted to know first about the tickets being available, so when the EventBrite page went live, before tweeting out the link, I let the people that had reached out to me know about it first.  So the #Blogchat regulars that were going to be at SXSW and that made the effort to reach out to me about attending, got the first tickets.

What about your company?  Are you making any special efforts to connect with your biggest evangelists and advocates?  Are you giving them a better experience or more access to you and your products?  This was one of the many lessons I learned from reading Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead by David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan.  I think you’ll enjoy it as well.

PS: If your company has done something similar to reach out to your biggest fans/advocates and give them a better experience, please do email me about it as I am always looking for great case studies to profile here (hint hint).

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Announcing my partnership with Content Marketing Institute

I’m very excited to announce that moving forward, I will be working with CMI (Content Marketing Institute) to help them provide content marketing strategy and editorial services to clients.  CMI Founder Joe Pulizzi and CMI’s “Strategist in Residence” Robert Rose have created a wonderful team of consultants that I have a great deal of respect for, including Lisa Petrilli, Jason Falls, Jay Baer, Dianna Huff and Ardath Albee, along with myself.

This team will be called upon to help CMI provide help to clients in three areas:

  1. Content Marketing Strategy – assisting an organization to discover the power of their content and how it can help to achieve marketing goals.
  2. CMIC’s Advisory Services; designed for clients that want to engage CMIC consultants for very specific, short-term engagements across the spectrum of content marketing.
  3. Editorial and Content Production services.  For those clients that need to source editorial or writing services, CMI works with its sister company Junta42 to help source the best content marketing agencies for enterprise clients.

If you would like to learn more about CMI’s consulting services, and how to hire us, please click here.

Even though I will have an ongoing working relationship with CMI, this will not change my status as an independent consultant.  I will still be providing consulting services to companies that need help creating and executing social media and customer engagement strategies.  In fact, I still have a limited amount of time available for the current quarter, so please email me if you’d to discuss how we could work together.