Wendy Lea is the CEO of Get Satisfaction, a community-based platform that helps companies engage their customers through open and transparent conversations that increase customer satisfaction, product insight and enhance customer loyalty.
Wendy founded The Chatham Group, where she currently serves as an angel investor, strategic advisor and board member for a long list of startup companies. She also serves as a mentor to TechStars, a startup incubator based in Boulder, Colorado.
Wendy chairs the board of directors for The Forum of Women Entrepreneurs & Executives (FWE&E.org) and serves on the board of Silicon Valley Social Venture Capital (SV2.org). She was recently recognized as a Top 100 Woman of Influence in Silicon Valley.
Previously, Wendy was a co-founder of The Sales Consultancy, where she developed sales methodologies that were adopted as global standards by IBM, Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Microsoft and Oracle. Her company was acquired by Siebel Systems in 1999
America Ferrera is perhaps best known for her fearless portrayal of ‘Betty Suarez’ on ABC’s hit comedy “Ugly Betty”. This breakthrough role has earned Ferrera an Emmy®, a Golden Globe®, and Screen Actors Guild Award, as well as ALMA and Imagen Awards.
Ferrera secured her place as one of Hollywood’s most vibrant young talents with her starring role in the Patricia Cardoso film “Real Women Have Curves.” Her performance earned her a Sundance Jury Award for Best Actress, an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Debut Performance, and a Young Artist Award nomination for Best Performance for a Leading Young Actress.
Ferrera will next be seen in Ryan Piers Williams’ “The Dry Land” opposite Melissa Leo and Jason Ritter. Ferrera also executive produced the film which premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and won “Best International Film” at the 2010 Edinburgh Film Festival. The film will be released this summer by Maya Entertainment. Ferrera also recently signed on to executive produce “Pedro & Maria”, the first ever interactive telenovela for MTV.
Ferrera was last seen in Rick Famuyiwa’s “Our Family Wedding” opposite Forest Whitaker and Carlos Mencia and voiced the role of Astrid, a Viking Teenager in the Dreamworks hit animated feature “How to Train Your Dragon”
Other recent feature film work includes Warner Brothers’, “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2,” the sequel to the 2005 original. She also starred in the bilingual independent film “Towards Darkness,” which she executive produced, and Fox Searchlight’s independent film “Under The Same Moon.”
Additional credits include the Brian Jun film “Steel City,” Catherine Hardwicke’s “Lords of Dogtown,” and the 2005 Sundance Film Festival entry “How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer.” America also appeared off-Broadway in “Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead,” directed by Trip Cullman.
Ferrera currently serves as an Artist Ambassador for the global humanitarian organization Save the Children, with a focus on championing education for children in marginalized communities, both in the United States and in developing countries. America recently visited Save the Children early education programs on Navajo lands in Arizona, highlighting the importance of investments in early childhood development. She recently traveled to Mali with Save the Children and personally raised over $44,000 this spring to help build a new elementary school in Disassadeni, Mali. The school is scheduled to open in October 2010.
There’s a 96-inch long white board in my office. It is where I collect my thoughts for specific projects as I’m writing, planning or producing them. It is currently full of lists and reminders for a client’s digital marketing and social media strategic plan. I go through notes from client meetings, make lists of potential strategics or tactics, throw broad concepts and ideas up, enumerate client concerns, brand values and relevant research and then I study the board for a while.
As I was doing so last night I realized a picture of the board might be helpful for those of you out there working on strategic plans for your organization. No, we don’t all think or process information similarly, but when I see how someone else does it, I always get an idea or two. So here’s my board:
For obvious reasons, I made the image small and even blurred some of the words, but look at what you can read:
When I see the image, the first few things that pop off for me are these words:
Goals
Target
Business Goal
Primary Concerns
SEO
Insights
Core Values
Content
Needs
No, you can’t read all those because of the resolution of the image, but those are the items that pop off the board to me. There are other ideas and concepts there, tucked away in the greens and oranges and blues. (No, there’s no system to my color coding other than to separate ideas from one another.) But the important things I think about have little to do with blogs or Facebooks or even monitoring solutions. I’m focused on the task at hand: what are the client’s goals, who are they talking to, what do they want to say and what does success look like for them?
Whether or not analysts, social media bloggers or even my friends on Twitter think my client work is innovative or pioneering or even good at all matters not. The only person whose opinion does is the client. This is what I focus on when I’m writing strategic plans or thinking about overall strategies for the people I work with as a digital marketing consultant.
What about you? What do you focus on? How do you think and process? Do share. We’ll all be better for it.
The month of August has been a whirlwind that comes to an end on Monday with the launch of The Brandery. The response was pretty amazing for our inaugural class with applications coming from 15 different states and40 percent of the total applications coming from outside of the Cincinnati area.
On Monday we will welcome 6 companies to the program, 3 of which will be relocating for The Brandery. Those accepted include:
Brainrack: Founded by Senay Semere, Pepjin de Visscher and Matthew Veryser of Dayton, OH, Brainrack is a crowd-sourcing tool for organizations and for students to use while engaging in open innovation
DCreations: Founded by Darcy Crociata of Mason, OH, the company has created an application called Facebook EasyBook that creates photo/journal/scrapbooks taken from your Facebook statuses, mobile uploads, photo albums, etc., to help capture important memories that could otherwise be fleeting.
Giftiki: Founded by Justin Stanislaw and Bryan Jowers of Houston, TX, Giftiki allows users to conveniently give small gifts digitally to friends and family.
turboBOTZ: Founded by Vincent Chou and Pratap Sherquill of Chicago, IL, turboBOTZ is a service that allows video gamers to manage their game libraries as well as to buy, sell and trade video games, all within a single online site.
VenturePax: Founded by Danny Stull of West Chester, OH, VenturePax is a Web-based source of information-sharing on outdoor adventures, travel and vacation planning with strong interactivity and family oriented locations.
VenueAgent: Founded by Jocelyn and Joe Cates, VenueAgent is the first Brandery Fellow of the program. VenueAgent.com is a researching tool for planning any special event, connecting venues with qualified leads, and helping brides find love at first site.
The next 12 weeks are going to be pretty exciting and I personally cant wait to see the progress the companies have made by Demo Day on November 19th. If you want to follow the progress, be sure to check out The Brandery on Twitter and Facebook. We’ll also be updating throughout the program on The Brandery blog.
I’m at a career crossroads of sorts. After years of journalism and then public relations work, I’m stretching into marketing.
Oh, sure, I’ve done some marketing as part of my public relations practice. And I’ve learned a lot about marketing while helping my wife promote and sellFrom Incurable to Incredible: Cancer Survivors Who Beat the Odds. I’ve read a number of books about marketing. I’ve networked with some of the best marketers around.
But I’m ready to build on that foundation and expand my knowledge base. I’m finding that marketing is becoming more and more important to me in the new world of strategic communication and community building. Every time I attend a Cincinnati Social Media, New Media Cincinnati or Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) meeting, I find myself wanting to know more about marketing.
So I’m joining the American Marketing Association (AMA) in addition to PRSA. I plan to attend more AMA events. I’ve signed up for a marketing bootcamp and the Digital Non-Conference in Cincinnati. I’ll be reading yet-more marketing books.
So, just what is the difference between marketing and public relations? I turned to the classic Effective Public Relations by Cutlip, Center and Broom for some definitions:
“Marketing is the management function that identifies human needs and wants, offers products and services to satisfy those demands, and causes transactions that deliver products and services in exchange for something of value to the provider.”
“Marketing focuses on exchange relationships with customers. The result of the marketing effort is quid pro quo transactions that meet customer demands and achieve organizational economic objectives. In contrast, public relations covers a broad range of relationships and goals with many publics — employees, investors, neighbors, special-interest groups, governments, and many more.”
“Effective public relations contributes to the marketing effort by maintaining a hospitable social and political environment. For example a hospital that maintains good relationships with volunteers, nurses, physicians, employers, local government and community groups will likely enjoy success in the marketing effort to attract patients and referrals for treatment. Likewise, successful marketing and satisfied customers help build and maintain good relations with other publics, such as employees, investors, government regulatory agencies, and community leaders.”
“To achieve organizational goals, then, organizations must attend to both public relations and marketing. Each makes unique but complementary contributions to building and maintaining many relationships essential for organizational survival and growth. To ignore one is to risk failure in the other.”
Exciting times lie ahead! I’ll share a lot of what I learn and experience here as the months and years ahead unfold. Please feel free to contribute your experience with marketing on this blog as we travel this journey together.
I was doing a keynote speech for a trade show a few months ago and was asked why so many companies struggle with social media marketing. You don’t hear that people don’t “get” TV or radio. Why is social media so hard?
There are probably many different reasons for this – it is new, it is experiential, many marketers are not participants and it is free. I’m going to focus on what I see as the two biggest problems. It is new and it is free.
Social Media Marketing Problem #1 – It is new.
Social Media and social media marketing are relatively new fields. Maybe 5 – 10 years old at best. Most other forms of marketing are much, much older. They have been refined over time to “best practices” that are now the standards of the industry. The TV commercial below is a Cheer laundry detergent commercial from the 60′s. It is a full minute long and features a man from space that kind of looks like Spock. Creepy.
Over the last 50 years we have refined television commercials to know what works. We know how to sell a product effectively in 15 or 30 second spots. They are highly effective. I bet that the ROI of early commercials was tough to measure, but after years of experimenting we can deliver pretty effective TV commercials.
As we gain more experience with social media and create new metrics we’ll have a better idea of the elements of success. It just takes time.
Problem #2 – Social Media is “free”.
Sticking with the TV comparison, imagine if it was free to air TV commercials. Anyone could air any commercial on TV just by sending it in. No costs except production. What do you think would happen? First there would be TONS of ads – probably almost every business would have a tv commercial. Second, the quality level would be lower. If there is no barrier to entry or cost to play, any business with a flipcam would create an ad. Many of these ads would lack strategy or production quality.
Instead, it costs a lot of money to run a TV commercial, so brands invest a LOT in strategy and production to make sure that their commercials will deliver ROI. They plan and test prior to running and campaign so that they don’t waste their money. The content of the commercial is strategy and really well thought out.
Now, think about social media. It is “free” to run a social media campaign. So, there are TONS of social media campaigns out there, many of which are poorly thought out and don’t include any real strategy. Hey, it costs nothing to run them, so why not just launch something?
This is why many businesses don’t get results from their social media efforts. They don’t invest in the strategy and production of their social media efforts. As a result they have a social media campaign that lacks strategy and production value. If the same effort was put into social media as it was into paid media we would probably see more success. Businesses would spend some time thinking about the strategy and the content prior to launching.
A “cost to play” increases the quality of the entrants. Think about dating sites. You get more serious daters on the sites that charge vs. the ones that are free. If you have to pay for something you want to make sure that you will get what you need out of it – so you invest more in the strategy and planning.
Would you like to be a regular blogger at Social Media Explorer? I’m taking suggestions (not applicants … it’s not a job) and nominees for smart thinkers, status-quo challengers, tool reviewers and people who understand social media marketing better be about business or you’ll be flipping burgers soon. I want to share this platform with thought fire-starters.
We are smarter than me.
But I’m going to be picky. I want people who are committed to teaching social media, blogging regularly, sharing their experiences and thoughtful opinions, helping others understand not just how to use social media but what it means to be social. I don’t want guest posts from PR hacks or desperate start-up junkies hocking their product or service. I want people who have some experience, have an audience or following of their own, or can show tons of smarts otherwise and understand the responsibility and value of sharing a platform with some meagre credibility.
I’d love to have different perspectives … an agency person, an entrepreneur, a business owner, a wicked-smart business person who is a n00b to technology or social media. Perhaps even an analytics junkie, an email fiend, productivity enthusiast … even a gamer. Ideally, I’d love a lineup of 6-8 authors who can help keep the audience informed, entertained, but most certainly challenged with their thinking about social media, marketing, advertising, public relations and communications.
I am not going to stop blogging. This isn’t a cultural shift in Social Media Explorer or what it does. It’s an expansion of the resources to provide better content more frequently. It’s a call on my community to challenge the thinking: mine, yours and the echo chamber’s.
If you’re interested and meet the requirements (and don’t meet the bad ones) above, email me. Tell me why you’d like to write here, what you’d like to write about (think of it as your beat), what you think our readers will get out of your contributions and yeah, what you’ll get out of it, too. (If you need me to tell you why blogging here would be beneficial to you, then you probably won’t make the cut. Just sayin’.)
Understand that I may not pick you. I’m making room for a few, select folks. If the quality isn’t there, I owe it to this audience to not pick you. It’s not personal.
And you’re certainly welcome to not pick me, too. I’m only interested if you are.
Greg Coleman joined The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com), a leading news and opinion site, in October 2009 as the company’s President and Chief Revenue Officer. Coleman, who has more than 25 years of sales and media experience, is responsible for rapidly building upon the platform The Huffington Post has created and to work with the team to grow revenue and deepen the brand’s engagement with marketers.
Coleman, was previously President of Platform-A, AOL’s advertising business. Prior to AOL, Coleman served as President and CEO of NetSeer, a start-up company focused on next generation search and ad targeting. Before that, he was Executive Vice President of Global Sales at Yahoo!, where he was responsible for all advertising revenues worldwide, which grew from $600 million to more than $6 billion during his tenure.
Before Yahoo!, Coleman served as Senior Vice President of Reader’s Digest Association and President of U.S. Magazine Publishing, where he was responsible for the company’s magazine properties including Reader’s Digest. Coleman was the founding publisher of Memories magazine at Diamandis Communications and worked at CBS, Inc., where he spent 10 years leading advertising efforts for Women’s Day as Vice President and National Sales Manager.
Coleman is an adjunct professor at The McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, where he attended college. He is also on the board of the Advertising Council, where he was formerly Chairman.
Susan Harrington, CEO of Idealine and manager of The Circuit’s Consumer Company Circle.
Joe Glick, CEO of GlickIn.com, an online business that provides Cincinnati’s newest social experience for finding and connecting with local people, places and promotions.
Basil Yanno, CEO of Buzz360, a firm that enables its customer businesses to send targeted messages across multiple touch points – mobile phones, social networks and existing brand communications.
Both of these CEOs are smart young individuals (Joe is a Cincinnati native, Basil is a native of the Ukraine) who are effectively executing early stage business plans in the digital marketing space. GlickIn.com is marketing online directly to consumers; Buzz360 is enabling its customer businesses to market online and in store to their customers.
Susan Harrington has worked with both of these entrepreneurs, helping them effectively launch their businesses. Susan is a seasoned consumer product development professional who has brought her expertise to several online business models.
Panel
The panelists will address issues such as:
How they identified the business idea they wanted to stake their careers on;
How they assembled a team that enables them to executive effectively;
The first eight things they did to start the business;
Leveraging social media (which ones, in what %s, at what cost, with what help from outsiders, and in what overall plan?] and measuring its ROI;
Technology tools they use to execute their strategies and measure success.
If we can't laugh at ourselves, what's the point? Just be thankful I didn't pick "Tweet It" and I'm not into karaoke.
Is it funny? You tell me. But it's definitely a parody. So here's one of my favorite earworms -- dedicated to the social plaform, and cottage industry, that's grown up around it.
"Updating Your Status" 140 characters, a parting line Fingers nimble and dancing in time The fail wail flashes, No tweets go out So Mashable and Techcrunch begin to shout
We talk amongst ourselves and post cool links But does it do any good or cause you to think? Shallow and brief it adds to the chatter And we follow people who seem to matter
As we speed read old tweets, Twitter’s still down More nerds up in arms, a worldwide frown The site is free, unless you promote content Hoping and praying Twitter’s a silver bullet
Google Wave’s coming down as Facebook grows up Yet YouTube’s showing two girls, one cup? So we’re surfing, and skimming and watching news spread Life streaming is Hard. “That’s what she said.”
Refrain Updating your status Polluting the stream It’s TMI. TMI. Needy and kind of boring
We use hashtags, DMs and retweets too Drinking coffee, Redbull or Mt. Dew We’re updating our status
Yeah!
No tweetups no twitpics, no memes, no doubt How would we function, whine or pout? When bowel shaking earthquakes and other events Take place in the world, Twitter informs. People still vent.
We tell all it’s essential, a most important site. But would we pay for it? Pfft, yeah, right. We keep surfing and linking and watching news spread Did you hear the latest? Abe Vigoda’s still. not. dead.
As Foursquare gets down Facebook Places goes up Half a billion users? All your base are belong to us. Now you’re going geo-loco with your Twitter gang. I’m headed out for some coffee, do you wanna hang?
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Wendy Lea is the CEO of Get Satisfaction, a community-based platform that helps companies engage their customers through open and transparent conversations that increase customer satisfaction, product insight and enhance customer loyalty.
I’m at a career crossroads of sorts. After years of journalism and then public relations work, I’m stretching into marketing.
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