valeria maltoni - Servant of Chaos

Around this time of year we often see the announcement of new books being published, new music being released and new films arriving in the cinemas – all in time for the holiday season. It’s the marketer’s year end rush – our attempt to stake our claim for your attention and your wallet. But this year, there are some differences – with a number of free alternatives bypassing their claim over our hard-earned income, hoping instead to capture our imagination.

Top of my reading list this holiday season are:

What matters now: the crowdsourced eBook curated by Seth Godin. It’s a collection of thoughts from seventy “big thinkers” – from Kevin Kelly and Ariana Huffington to Jessica Hagy and David Meerman Scott.
The perfect gift for a man: another crowdsourced book – sharing stories about manhood.
How to write, publish, sell and promote your own book: a great collection of tips and ideas from Joanna Penn,

Valeria Maltoni is also pulling together a year-end, crowdsourced collection just in time for the holidays. Keep your eyes out for this – it’s due any day now!

With publishing tools now readily available, I am surprised that more brands don’t pull together some sort of publication for their customers at year end. Agencies too. It is a GREAT alternative to the staid Christmas card. And while I know that the last weeks of December are fraught with activity, going that extra step to provide your business stakeholders with an unexpected, branded gift such as an eBook shows that you understand that the new currency is not FREE but all about VALUE.

A great presentation from Valeria Maltoni on measuring how your social media communications are PERFORMING. Yes, that's right – not just "ROI" – but actual impact on the things that are important for your business.

View more documents from Valeria Maltoni.

What does this mean?

It means that YOU have to do the hard work of defining which things you want to measure and impact. You need to be actively looking at your BUSINESS STRATEGY to determine which things can remain stable and which things need to change. From there, you put in place a whole range of initiatives (some which include social media) designed to change the behaviour of your target audiences. Again – these audiences are folks that YOU need to be clear about – are you talking employees, new customers, existing customers, partners, suppliers, potential interns …

I know, you are going to ask me "can't an agency do this for me?" Of course they can. But in my view, you want to spend your hard-earned budget on creating value for your audiences. If you understand more clearly who, how and what is interesting, useful and relevant to your audiences, then you can brief your agency to deliver real value to them. It's about planning for context over placement. Remember – the clearer you are in your briefing process, the sharper results you will get. For me, forget "reach and frequency". Show me performance and business impact any day.