Most businesses that know they need to create a customer engagement program start with good questions: How do we establish our brand promise and get it in the forefront of our customers’ minds? How do we become an essential partner with our customers? How can we best understand their everyday needs and challenges? What’s missing here, [...]

Is your business still thinking of marketing as a set of campaigns? It might be time to switch gears and start thinking more about connecting with prospects and customers via community. Today, we learned that two major brands are rethinking their strategies (also read here)

Prompted and inspired by Jay Ehret (@TheMarketingGuy), I thought I would take a look at which blogposts were the most popular in 2009 based on total pageviews. Here they are, ranked by popularity and with my own reflections:

Most consumer-driven websites unfortunately don't focus on the all-important Ask, which is the primary funnel for directing visitors toward taking an action. But there are a few things you can do to ensure that your site not only looks great but fulfills the investment you've made in your web presence.

Earlier today, Matt Singley (@mattsingley) asked a simple, but rather provocative question via Twitter: What ensued was an interesting mini-conversation about how to successfully and effectively engage with a competitor's customers through social media.

As much as it may offend our current animal-loving sensibilities, the spectacle of bear baiting was once a very popular form of entertainment (and in certain areas of the world, it remains an attraction). Basically, it involved tying a bear to a post in the middle of an arena and attacking the beast with large, trained dogs. It was also common to provoke the bear further by poking it with long, sharp prods. Cruel? Without a doubt. But I argue that the very same mentality that conjured this sport into creation remains with us today.

David Armano's post for the Harvard Business blog, Debunking Social Media Myths brought to mind something I thought about this past weekend: that social media is serving as a leverage point for guiding businesses away from the industrial/post-industrial practices that guided them in the twentieth-century.

For all who work with online communities, you should read these two exceptionally insightful blogposts from Rachel Happe and Spike Jones.

Starbucks is taking a rather interesting (and somewhat dangerous) approach to economic decline: they’re not automatically brewing decaf coffee after noon, though you can still get it upon request. My take? Good for Starbucks. I’ll go out on a limb here and say they did their homework on not only cost-savings but quantify just how [...]

There’s some spirited debate brewing around the idea of transparency and its benefits to customer service. Is it best to let the customer be ‘blissfully unaware’ of the company’s processes (essentially how it works)? Or is it better to allow them into the kitchen to see how everything is cooked? I argue strongly for the [...]