Squared R - Latest Comments

Re: Palm Springs Homes Retain Celebrity Statuses

Jholmes — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:41:25 -0000

Our GPS took us to where Marilyn's house was supposed to be but it appears to have been razed. Were we misled? Thanks.

Re: Home Staging 101

Eric Rite — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 02:32:55 -0000

What a nice redesign. I want to home staging my property in New York and sell it. Can you do that for me?

Home Staging NYC

Re: Modernism Week

Rebecca — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 13:18:18 -0000

This sounds really cool!

Re: Social Media Masterminds Orange County Meeting Minutes- Saturday, May 1

Amanda Wernick — Thu, 06 May 2010 09:35:39 -0000

Giiiirl! You Rock! Thanks for putting it all together!

Re: Brands Exploring New Homes: Smart or Selling Out?

Rob Hahn — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:03:17 -0000

Loved the post, and looking forward to chatting more about it, Rachel.

I think the Choo/H&M deal is part of the accelerating trend in America of the "disappearing middle". The people who are really hurt by this is not Jimmy Choo or H&M; it's Macy's. The great department stores who offered good stuff at good prices are going bye-bye.

But from a BRAND standpoint, Kathleen is right in one respect: luxury brands who go "slumming" are truly risking their long-term value. Tommy Hilfiger is the classic example of a brand that cashed in during a craze, then went kaput as the perception of the brand became one of "urban youth brand".

-rsh

Re: Brands Exploring New Homes: Smart or Selling Out?

Kathleen Buckley — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:15:32 -0000

Rachel-

I read this post earlier and have been thinking about it a bit. The only reason a "luxury" brand would go slumming, so to speak, would be to monetize, right? Selling 1,000,000 pairs of shoes at $150 makes a lot more money than selling 1,000 pairs of shoes at $1500 a piece. (I'm fairly certain that's right...checking my math).

So, if I owned the brand and wanted to make bank, yes cash in on the brand name and sell the quantities knowing that the brand would die probably within 10 years but who cares at that point?

Re: Who "Owns" Social Media in an Organization?

Rachel Rusnak — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:57:40 -0000

Great insights – thanks for the contributions. I definitely agree that a top-down support system is imperative!

The idea that the people most passionate about social media would “take ownership” seems like it would be a natural step, but at the same time, I believe (and agree with Mike) that there must be guidelines in place for organization-wide efforts. Going a step further, there also must be a grounded strategy in place as well, i.e. why are we blogging, what is our goal in tweeting, what do we hope to contribute and achieve through our social media efforts, how will this help our business and the consumers/clients we serve.

Again, great to hear other opinions and takes on this topic!

Re: Who "Owns" Social Media in an Organization?

David B. Thomas — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:30:16 -0000

My feelings are pretty closely aligned with Jason's, not surprising since I came from the PR team before taking on the title Social Media Manager. I also agree with David that you need passionate engagement for anything to happen.

Top-down support is essential, but I think for many organizations, getting the CEO to lead the efforts, while a worthwhile goal, isn't always going to be realistic.

Chris and I agree completely in principle, but I think at the beginning stages a company may well need someone to help drive social media policies, strategies, training and engagement. That's what I do and why my title is Social Media Manager, although I've known since the start that in somewhere between six and 24 months, that's going to sound kind of silly.

But I'll be out of business cards by then.

Re: Who "Owns" Social Media in an Organization?

Martin Walsh — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:24:24 -0000

Interesting perspectives but it would have been great to get deeper perspectives from everyone!

I am the former head of Digital Marketing for Microsoft and I’d like to provide my two cents because this is a passionate subject for me.

I am someone who was tasked with defining, developing strategy, developing capability (including training, infrastructure and operationalisation - playbooks, workflows, policies, guidelines etc) and executing digital marketing and social influence marketing at both the local and global level.

Any great customer centric organisation should have sales, customer service, channels, product development and PR etc as part of their marketing unit. If they don't, then they are not taking full advantage of the critical changes in consumer behaviour and more importantly fundamental marketing and customer experience best practices.

As I have been evangelising for the past 3-4 years, we have moved from a marketing era of ‘Information asymmetry’ to ‘Information Democracy’. Marketing used to be command and control and it was largely a monologue being broadcast through monologue style channels like TV, print, radio etc. Today, Marketing is a Dialogue and the best marketers (and companies) are those who are the best listeners. More of my insights at www.slideshare.com/martinwalsh

As such, social influence marketing should be led by the marketing function with very strong collaboration and engagement with the other functions. In most cases this can (or should) be led by the digital marketing executive as social influence marketing (SIM) is interdependent with all aspects of online channels from SEO to SEA, websites (on and off network), online analytics, online reputation management, online channel experience (ecommerce, video, podcasting, community, usability, design, chat, click to call etc), social CRM and more. It then requires very strong collaboration with the other marketing disciplines such as PR, customer service, sales, advertising, direct response, product development etc.

I will give you a small example; Online Reputation Management / Digital PR touches digital related infrastructure and capability such as your social media newsroom, SEO/SEA, analytics, social media monitoring, social CRM and your own websites & external websites to name a few. It is critical that not only is there a strategy in place for how this ties in with the overall marketing plan but importantly you have the right analytics skills, dashboards / reports, workflow between PR, management, online producers & marketers, the right social media monitoring & engagement tools and on and on.

Many cutting edge organisations have even gone further and completely redesigned their marketing function to put social media / social influence marketing at their core of customer / audience engagement and marketing and disciplines like advertising are now seen purely as a contact strategy. Dell & Ducati are great examples.

My view is initially it should be centralised to ramp up capability, learning and experience but in parallel this same team would also be charge with training and strongly influencing the traditional marketing, sales, customer service & product development units. Can you imagine an organisation trying to get ahead of the curve with digital marketing and social media / social influence marketing by just doing training programs and brining in outside ‘consultants’? It would take years and my own experience is that when push comes to shove around time and budget, marketers and agencies fall back to what they know and are comfortable with. In addition, there is a very poor understanding and expertise around online measurement and analytics and therefore you need people who have this as part of their DNA every day. As the skills, experience and discipline becomes more ingrained you can then decentralise some of the centralised capability but this will depend on whether you organisation is truly customer centric vs being product or business unit centric. An added benefit for us was that our centralised team crossed product unit boundaries and was aligned by audience so we got a dual benefit.

In my role I provided a very strong leadership, evangelising and visionary function, helping management, marketers and agencies to first understand the behavioural and environmental issues which changed the marketing fundamentals (and also that it wasn’t a fad). I then helped defined what it meant to Microsoft, developed strategy frameworks to put it into practical context, then developed training programs, brought in centralised talent to expedite capability, operationalized the capability across my teams and the other disciplines, marketers and agencies and then helped to develop campaigns and execute them.

So, the answer to the question is that for any social media / social influence marketing and digital marketing capability succeed you MUST have support from the senior leadership team (remember the relinquish control axiom) or any effort will likely fail. But, importantly you MUST have a person who understands the entire digital and traditional marketing spectrum and disciplines be responsible for leading the development of strategy, development of capability (infrastructure & talent) and the execution of social media / social influence marketing because it is interdependent with all of the other digital marketing capabilities, not mutually exclusive.

Regards,
Martin

Re: Who "Owns" Social Media in an Organization?

Joseph Kingsbury — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:39:03 -0000

Social media won't be owned by a single group. PR is a natural fit right now because relationship building is core to social media but the impact on various functions within the organization are/will be too big for one discipline to own. That includes sales, marketing, product development, customer service, IR, etc. This is both a threat and a major opportunity for PR to evolve as a facilitating function in the corporation.

Joseph Kingsbury, Text 100

Re: Who "Owns" Social Media in an Organization?

Mike Frichol — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:00:48 -0000

I agree with Chris that social media is like a phone and everyone in a company should use it. Just like phone systems are managed as a utility for all by the IT group, social media should be managed by the Marketing group who would provide usage guidelines, training, monitoring and management as a company-wide utility. Social media is primarily about customer engagement and conversations - that should be a marketing responsibility.