SMACtalk

Highly caffeinated on a Friday afternoon, Brian and I convened on Blab to catch up and discuss digital culture and transformation. In the spirit of embracing change we have completely migrated both SMACTalk and our #CloudTalk chat from Google Hangouts on Air over to Blab because of its ease of use and versatility.

SMACTalk is all about social, mobile, analytics and cloud and these topics remain top of mind for most businesses today.

Digital Transformation is a Top Priority

The C-Suite is paying close attention to the issue of digital transformation. Companies are literally disappearing due to failure to adapt to new standards and technology. It’s important that we discuss now how we survive and thrive as businesses in the digital era.

In 2008 John Antioco, CEO of the now defunct Blockbuster Video, insinuated that Netflix wasn’t even on their radar as a threat. Just six years later in 2014, Blockbuster closed its last store because it missed a critical pivot for their business. Netflix spent its early days saving on overhead by not having brick and mortar costs and ignoring the rivalry with Blockbuster in order to focus on developing their infrastructure. Their tactics proved successful.

Brian points out that a lot of brick and mortar businesses make the mistake of considering themselves not to be digital businesses. The bottom line is that all customers are living and buying in a digital world today. So digital strategy is critical for every business whether there’s a three dimensional storefront or not.

Digital Strategy is Key

It’s not enough just to embrace or to “be” digital. Businesses have to be strategic about their initiatives and what digital can do to help their bottom line.

Brian likes to say “The future of business is community.” And I say that not only is this so, but businesses need strategy in order to find and nurture advocates, reach customers and influence decisions.

As an example, Brian and I recorded this podcast using Blab but we also take pains to ensure people know how to find our website, our social profiles, our podcast elsewhere and so on. This helps us reach more people and further our business objectives. It’s strategic, not accidental.

Brian mentions running into Krista Kotrla at a recent event in Dallas. They discussed content strategy and she said that she creates content based on questions she receives from her community. This may sound elementary but it’s strategic and good for business.

If You Skip Digital, You Miss Opportunities

Again, even for brick and mortar businesses, the digital space is full of opportunities. Social listening, advertising, customer service, talent acquisition… the list of ways to leverage digital for any business is virtually endless. Any business in any vertical can use digital methods to attract and retain both internal and external advocates.

What if your business would like to have employees work remotely? There’s no way you can take advantage of the overhead savings for your business or offer this perk to your employees if you’re not using cloud technology and embracing digital capabilities.

I’m taking it one step further than community and saying, “Experience is the future of business.” I think community is one part of that but an individual’s experience with a brand is multifaceted. As customers we can preview products and services right from our mobile devices. We don’t even have to go into a store or a showroom. We can also connect with a company via their social profiles. We can ask questions, provide feedback and so on.

Small companies in particular are well positioned to leverage the digital space by adopting omnichannel practices. They can guide the buyer’s journey from beginning to end and back again. But they must be careful to see their efforts through and enforce that customer experience and relationship at every turn.

Go For The First Down, Not The Touchdown

Achieving success using digital as a vessel is about strategy and relentless execution. Brian says, “Rather than going for the first down… we go for the touchdown …we go for the hail Mary every single time. And then we can’t figure out why we can’t embrace change.” We need to understand what digital means and implement it where it makes sense. We need to know not just what’s available but what makes sense for our business initiatives.

When it comes to leveraging digital, it’s a must for every business and it’s about building blocks, not just one thing. If you have just a website, Brian says, you’re not digital. Everyone has a website these days so that’s just not going to get you or your business where you need to be. Businesses need to listen to their customers. Data from digital and social channels is an essential component for business strategy. You have to listen and be ready to make changes based on feedback. This takes a lot of time and effort but it will separate the successes from the failures.

“You walked into a car dealership and by the time you actually closed that sale, you (the customer) knew everything. You know what you wanted to pay, you knew the color, you knew the interest rate… That data is all right there and available to you,” I point out. Digital transformation is about stitching all of this together. Mobility can’t happen and cloud doesn’t work until everything is tied together. You can foster transformation in departments but there has to be an overarching strategy in order to make the business work and succeed. Digital transformation in silos will fail.

Making small changes and working together across functions and departments is what drives large scale change and success for business. We can’t keep up with digital change if we do it wrong. While speed is important, strategy can’t be sacrificed.

Brand loyalty is entrenched in experience. Businesses need to create top notch experiences and build strong communities as a formula for building long term relationships.

We’d love to see you on blab for one of our podcast recordings! Follow Brian and me on Twitter and look for our hashtag #SMACTalk.

With this episode, we proudly announce our sponsorship by SAP.

After establishing that I have no middle name and that growing up with the last name “Newman” during the Seinfeld era was interesting (and considering but discarding a rebrand to “Newman and the Fonz”) Brian and I settled in on Blab.im to record this episode.

We’ve recorded episodes via Skype and via Google Hangouts in the past. This was my first day using Blab, which Brian refers to as “the Brady Bunch version of Hangouts without all of the glitches.” While video conferencing is something I’m very experienced with, and live streaming apps are gaining popularity, I was glad to have a chance to get back into a multi-person video chatting environment. I especially enjoyed being able to engage with the viewers in the comments area.

Though Blab has been around for a couple of months already, Brian just discovered it about a week before we recorded this show. It features some robust offerings such as saving the entire Blab video session along with comments, an iOS app where both video and comments can be contributed via mobile, and links for both video and audio only that are emailed to the host of a recorded Blab session after recording. All of this makes Blab easy to use and easy to share.

The first time Brian tried the tool, Blab’s CTO jumped in on video with him and shared some tips and tricks. We love this level of attention and engagement!

How Do You Handle FOMO?

While FOMO isn’t really a problem for me (a pager wearing millennial who is willing to adopt things a little bit later than everyone else), Brian leans into this fear of missing out so that he can test things and pass his feedback on to others.

Brian points out that most people have an entire page of apps on their smartphones that they never use. His suggestion is to create a “FOMO folder” to corral all of these apps that you’re thinking about trying but haven’t gotten around to yet.

New technologies can advance the way you do things and make them better but sometimes we get focused on safety and not wanting to make changes. This has been the case, I believe, with Google Hangouts. They work and we know how to use them but they haven’t necessarily remained the best option for broadcasts.

Should Businesses Embrace FOMO?

I think “If we’re truly getting the community stuff right, what we’re doing is we’re looking at using tools that allow us to become closer to the community and closer to the people that we want to be engaged with, simultaneously creating deeper and more meaningful relationships and more loyalty to not just the content but the brand, our partners, our sponsors….” So, FOMO, for me isn’t something I look at from a personal lens but more from a business and community standpoint.

Brian says that the Blab team clearly sees things along these lines as well. There’s almost always at least one member of their team present in a user generated Blab to field questions or just to greet their community – impressive given that there are only a small number of people on the team. They also ask for genuine, constructive (negative) feedback so that they can make their product better at every turn.

What About When Your FOMO Has No (Immediate) Solution?

Facebook recently rolled out Mentions for livestreaming within the Facebook feed. But it was only made available to certain users with celebrity caliber followings. Based on this, Brian questions the long term goal for the tool. I liken this elitism to when Google Plus first came out. Only certain people received early access. Others had to ask for invitation from others. I feel the beta testing pool should be a bit more diverse in terms of experience and backgrounds of the participants.

Beta testing can’t be open to everyone but it’s frustrating and disappointing when those who aren’t celebrities are excluded on that basis alone. Facebook, in particular, is built on everyday people sharing with one another. We think perhaps it would be better if their products and testing reflected that.

Why Does FOMO Matter?

“FOMO really matters if you have access to a tool that can improve the experiences of your employees, your community, your customers and the people that ultimately allow this to be possible,” I say. We don’t talk “at” or “to” our community. We talk with them. These are the people who read and listen to our content, they interact with and mention us on social media and they enable us to reach sponsors to who support us in continuing these efforts.

Today’s sale is about education and that’s a two way street. We’re offering a learning experience to our community but they’re also providing that for us.

Brian jokes that “the only guarantee about Google Hangouts is that something will go wrong.” But his point is that in the past six years there hasn’t been an improvement to the technology. Things do actually go wrong frequently with Hangouts. Perhaps a bit of FOMO and curiosity can help us find better tools or can help our existing resources stay thirsty for improvement. In the end, the community and the customers will see benefits.

“Agile is the new launch,” if you ask me. There’s really no such thing as a traditional website or product or app launch these days. You push it live and then begin tweaking and making adjustments. FOMO for a developer or publisher or anyone creating something for community is an asset that will keep them asking how they can make the experience better for the customer.

We did an episode of #CloudTalk earlier today using Blab instead of Google Hangouts for the first time. During the hour we trended on Twitter and we generated more tweets in one hour than we have previously. The engagement level was higher and more enthusiastic. Had we been sticklers about using our previous tools, this might not have happened. FOMO in this case (wanting to take a risk and try something new) really paid off.

FOMO Can Help, But Shouldn’t Detract From Productivity.

Brian refuses to use new tools and technology that don’t save him time or improve his workflow or processes. If a new tool or app takes more time rather than helping him be more efficient, he simply won’t use it.

Almost all of our shows circle back to trust and data. While there’s an endless supply of “shiny objects” in the form of emerging tools and applications to choose from, decisions should always be rooted in research and analysis. We took a bit of a risk with this episode by changing our platform but it did pay off. If our experiment showed that the new way was less efficient or effective than what we’ve done in the past, we’d have to consider that and possibly go back to the old way because it made more sense.

We recommend being flexible and curious. It might pay off to take some small risks along the way. Just be sure to analyze how things are working and adjust your plans accordingly. Never deploy technology just for the technology’s sake. Stay focused on your customer or your community’s experience.

We’d love to get your feedback on the sound quality for this episode. If you have comments we’d love to share them with the Blab team. We also hope you have FOMO for our SMACTalk podcast! Follow Brian and me on Twitter and look for our hashtag #SMACTalk.

Technology often fails when we need it most. What should companies and brands do to be prepared before a technology failure?

There are really two areas where technology failures adversely impact business. There’s the public relations (customer facing) side of things and then there’s the technical side (internal processes). An example of the technical side of this would be when a failure led to United Airlines flights being grounded recently. That resulted in a PR crisis for the airline when customers took to their mobile devices to share the news on social media. So how should they best respond to this?

Be Transparent.

I say, “People want to be leveled with. People are looking for some level of honesty.”

It’s about transparency. Say right away that you have a problem and that you’ll keep customers posted with updates as it is resolved. Put the messages out on all available channels and keep people informed.

Brian points out that because of how connected people are via social media, a problem that might have been relatively contained from a PR standpoint in the past is not something that can be swept under the rug today. In this day and age, “It’s being done for you. If you ignore it, you let everybody else control the story. You let everybody else control the voice of what happens,” he says.

Keep Customers Informed.

One of the biggest mistakes brands make is failure to provide updates. They make the initial disclosure that there’s a problem but they don’t follow up on what they’re doing and how things are being resolved. This can stir the pot and make things worse. In a case like the United flights being grounded, they did a lot of the right things. But there have been other situations where other people’s lives were really being affected and brands failed to provide timely updates.

Efforts to respond should correlate with how big of an impact the failure could have on customers. There are various levels of severity as they relate to disruption of people’s lives. The more severe the problem is, the more important a timely and thorough response is provided. A failure with the New York Stock Exchange that affects people’s money, for instance, is more urgent than an article on a website being temporarily unavailable. Companies need to be fully aware of how any failures on their part can negatively impact people and their businesses.

“When it comes to businesses dealing with technology failures, they have to not only be prepared for them but they also have to take enough precaution….” Brian says. Plan B can even have variables so a Plan C and Plan D and so on might be necessary.

Have Good Internal Communication.

Imagine what would happen if there was not only a public relations crisis but at the same time, internal parties couldn’t effectively communicate to resolve the underlying issue? That would only compound the problem for any business. Backup and emergency communication strategies are a must in order to prevent further damage.

Brian points out that it’s a mistake for brands to keep their social communicators (customer service, community managers, etc.) out of the loop with what’s happening inside the organization. This undermines their efforts to communicate with customers and can make the brand look even worse. Emergency communication plans should also include these key players who are relaying information in real time. They don’t have to be involved in the decision making process but they should be well informed about what’s going on.

Have Processes In Place.

When a failure happens, have a planned response in order to save time and get credible information out to customers sooner. For example, if your website goes down and that’s going to negatively impact customers, have a plan in place for how you will verify the information internally and externally. Cover all necessary bases but don’t include extra steps that will cause delays in responding to customers.

“Zero downtime is acceptable anymore.” I say that people will not come back if they have a bad experience. But we are in a world where people will accept your apology. The key is to be prepared enough to respond and not leave them guessing. Internal processes are essential.

Training is of the utmost importance. A company can’t respond to a problem in a timely fashion if its employees haven’t been shown what to do and how to do it. And with so much technology driving business today, it’s critically important that departments work together to understand the tools and each other’s roles. Training needs to be thorough, real time and ongoing. All of this is just as critical for small businesses as for larger ones so efforts should be scaled accordingly.

What do you think companies should do to be prepared for technology failures? Have you experienced a failure of your own? We’d love to hear from you. Follow Brian and me on Twitter and check us out on Meerkat. We stream our SMACTalk recording sessions live there and tweet using the hashtag #SMACTalk.

#SMACTalk Episode # 32 - Employee Advocacy: You Have a Branding Problem!

What is employee advocacy? Is it social employees or perhaps employee engagement? And what should brands and companies be doing with employee advocacy? A lot of leaders wonder what employee advocacy is and employees ask themselves, “Who am I advocating for?”

Often the response to discussions and events around employee advocacy is fractional compared to other topics like social selling. For instance, Brian were part of aSocial Selling Summit and the response was tremendous because the topic is widely understood. On the other hand, we havean employee advocacy webinar coming up with panelists that are possibly more impressive than the social selling webinar, yet it’s a harder sell. I’ve concluded that this is because many people don’t understand what employee advocacy is.

A lot of employees aren’t motivated to talk about their companies on social platforms but business leaders are starting to ask them to do this.

How Can We Get Employees to See Value and Management to Have a Better Approach?

Brian says, “If your brand is hiring and firing for culture fit today, the idea of a social employee makes sense. Why would you not want to brag that you want to work [or did work] somewhere?” Part of the problem is that we’re trying to put people into little buckets where they don’t fit. Instead we should ask, “What does success look like for an employee who builds their personal brand and for a brand that empowers that employee to do things with that personal brand?” We need to take a step back and look at what success looks like for the individual and how business leaders can help them succeed.

When companies put employees into buckets, it’s often met with resistance from employees. This is compounded when company content limited or scripted. The employee is more likely to feel as though his/her audience will lack interest or connection with what’s being shared. This can also result in the company’s efforts seeming canned – as in numerous individuals sharing carbon copied material.

Brian often talks about “tools, trust and training.” What I’m seeing right now is a heavy emphasis on tools with very little dedication to trust and training. Brian says that these three things really need to be in the right order. It should start with trust, followed by training and lastly tools. Tools are there to amplify and scale great things. If you’re not great, why scale? The loyalty and enthusiasm really need to be there first.

The Future of Business is Community.

Community starts internally and then moves to customers. Leaders need to trust their employees and invest in training continually – not as a one-time effort. Too many companies offer training at onboarding and stop there. But Brian says the onus is on the employee to own and cultivate their own brands and personal education.

There’s an intersecting point between the employer and employee that I believe is what will make this work. The CEO is the purveyor of a business’ brand yet we see organizations with CEOs who have little experience and training with social media trying to fill the role. But each person who becomes a social employee becomes like a miniature CEO for your brand. Employees can reach new audiences that the business itself can’t reach. There’s no longer a hard demarcation between work and life. Each time an employee advocates online for his/her organization, those tweets and posts become part of shared presence. With this in mind, when businesses fail to provide training to employees, they’re risking employees portraying the business in a way that may be unfavorable (whether intentionally or not).

Brian points out that startups have an advantage because the relative distance between the CEO and the employee is shorter. Many larger companies don’t realize that their employees don’t even understand the brand story and message. Leaders need to simplify their stories and trust their employees.

Businesses Are Great When They Have Great Employees

Companies should support and promote their standout talent. This shouldn’t be forced it should happen naturally. But talented employees are not only attractive representation of the brand story but they’re one of the best recruiting tools in existence. When a company truly drives collaboration and makes its employees feel as though their voices matter, employees will be excited and want to take ownership. They’ll list their employer in their social bios and talk about their employer in a way that shows they are invested.

Leaders shouldn’t ask their employees to talk about content that doesn’t interest them or their audiences. But a good education on hashtags and how to use social platforms can be very helpful. Company culture needs to support everyone’s understanding of the “why” in addition to the “how.” This should all be collaborative. Brian pointed out a failure in his past where he got buy in from employees for a change but he forgot to get management buy in. He says this was a critical mistake. Everything needs to line up.

Without Trust, The Tools Will Never Work.

Brands can train their employees on how to use each social network and tools. Not everyone truly understands how Twitter works or what Periscope and Meerkat are. Education can start here.

“If you claim to have a great culture and your culture is great because of your employees, why are you not empowering them?” Brian asks. Empowered employees are much more likely to advocate for a business.

Revisiting the topic of buckets, Brian says it would be a mistake to assess a CEO, a social media staffer and a coder using the same criteria as social employees. Their stories will likely be very different and the company shouldn’t try to force them otherwise.

I believe that you can’t really force things in business and that when you do, you’ll see short term results with long term collateral damage. It can take years to rebuild trust when this happens. With the speed of technology, social is at the center. It’s the way that humans collaborate by choice. A social interaction is no less a business interaction than a phone call is. If we don’t start embracing this interaction, we’ll never get to the second phase. If we try to do this by demand or edict, the results will be paltry at best.

It’s a Philosophy Change.

Change your philosophy to create a new experience. Today’s employee wants to work for a company that cares about quality of life and about them as an individual. People not only want to make a difference but they want to be a part of something good that is bigger than themselves. When a company is genuinely on board with this, transparency can amplify it. On the other hand, when the culture is bad or the underlying cause or product isn’t good, transparency reveals it. Being scared of transparency might be an indicator that your business is lacking in one or more important qualities.

Think about what your message is and how you’re getting it out there.

We’re doinga webinar on July 9th with Charlene Li of Altimeter Group and An Le of Dynamic signal that will dive into some best practices for employee advocacy.

Sign up for the webinar and make sure to check us out onMeerkat and Periscope. We stream our SMACTalk recording sessions live there and tweet using the hashtag #SMACTalk.

For this episode, Brian and I partnered up with F-Secure, inventors of software that enables users to keep themselves private while connected to the web via mobile. They reached out via Twitter so I researched the product and the topic, finding it intriguing enough to discuss further.

Are people really aware of how secure they are (or are not) on mobile devices?

Brian says there are two types of users:

[if !supportLists]• [endif]Users that don’t really care about the security issue and/or assume they have privacy.

[if !supportLists]• [endif]Users who are overly concerned and implement the highest security settings possible just to be on the safe side.

Per Brian, mobile holds just about every piece of important information we want to have access to these days.

I did a trial with F-Secure and within the first three days there were 867 tracking attempts blocked by the solution. There were also multiple harmful sites blocked, as well as approximately two gigabytes of traffic from which the tool shielded my devices.

We know that often our activities are tracked for marketing purposes –but what about the times when we aren’t aware that we’re being tracked?

I think people just need to understand that everything starts with information. People are very trusting with the internet. In particular, we trust our internet connections to be relatively secure and my trial of F-Secure revealed that to be a mistaken assumption.

Brian points out that people seem to understand public internet access exposes them to hacking, but that in many cases, they don’t understand exactly what is vulnerable. He mentions the fact that people think of their laptops as being open to exploitations but not so much their cell phones, which is incorrect.

“It’s always best to know, and then you can make the right decision,”says Brian. He suggests starting with the highest security settings on devices (“everything off”) and then turning things on individually as warranted, rather than the other way around. Only enable access for apps and software that truly need it. In other words, weigh the risk versus reward.

Everything people do when they surf the internet is trackable. But it is possible to mask your IP address. There are tools that can help you manage that.

How do you weigh the experience of the internet versus the importance of being private?

Brian points out that many people have high privacy settings on their mobile devices for shopping sites like Amazon, but that when they visit the same sites from their computers they don’t take the same security measures. He suggests that by allowing access to some but not all of one’s data, there’s full risk with no or only partial reward.

I wanted to know what Brian thought about the security of public Wi-Fi? Is the risk worth the reward? Because public Wi-Fi is relatively unsecure, tools like F-Secure can have a big impact on that decision.

Brian says that some of his former colleagues at the Department of Defense have asked him, “Brian, who’s going to hack me? There’s nothing on my device that someone would want…”And his answer was typically something like, “There’s nothing that you think that they want… And at this exact moment it might not be something that they want.”

While Brian emphasizes the importance of taking security measures, I mention that some people shy away from tools and software that slow them down in the process. There are far fewer lightweight security options for mobile devices than for computers.

“Just because it’s your mobile device…doesn’t mean you know where all of your data is going,”Brian says. He notes that information like contacts and your location history may be accessible to others.

We’re in a world where data will set you free and it will also incriminate the heck out of you.

Everything we do can be captured. Choosing well in deciding what we opt in for is critical and it can be a daunting process. F-Secure removes some of the labor and guesswork from mobile security by having a one-click on/off setting. If you’re in a public place and don’t want to be tracked, you can quickly turn F-Secure on and be safe. On the other hand, if you’re in your own home where you’re comfortable the risk is low, you can quickly turn it off.

Brian recommends denying mobile apps’access to things like your location, camera, microphone, etc. Then, if an app requires access based on something you’re trying to do, you can go in and enable it. Look at the security settings case by case and only enable what’s necessary.

“No tool can help you fix stupid…but it can help you stop making stupid mistakes,”says Brian.

In this day and age, our mobile devices are more important to us than things like car keys. We simply can’t function without them.

An airline recently required a birth certificate for one of Brian’s daughters while his wife was traveling with the children. Neither the birth certificate nor Brian was on hand. The only way to provide this document under the circumstances was for him to take a photo of it with his mobile device and send it to his wife at the airport. This met the need—but imagine how that might have turned out without the capabilities of mobile?

Would you like to learn more or discuss this topic or this product? Brian and I would love to hear from you! Chat with us on Twitter or use the hashtag #SMACTalk to see the latest in Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud.

Also, if you’re interested in experiencing mobile freedom, follow this link and use offer code qhh42f for a free, three month trial of F-Secure Freedom!

Our compliments to F-Secure not only on their product but on their influencer marketing outreach. Their team did a great job in identifying interested parties who’d like to learn more and talk about their brand.

Tech and Tools Dominate The Future of Marketing - #SMACTALK Episode

In this week’s episode of SMACTalk (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud), Brian Fanzo and I discuss the growing importance that tools and technology are playing in the world of marketing. With Brian heading off to Social Shake Up, the annual Social Media Today event in Atlanta, we started pondering the biggest challenges that enterprises and business are having with marketing and as it turns out we firmly believe it comes down to this one thing:

Marketing historically has been a very unscientific profession. There certainly is science behind the subject as a whole, but for many companies marketing came down to a lot of trial and error. This was certainly the case before social media, digital and data became so prevalent. However, with this emergence of information and data, marketers can no longer get away with just operating on feel. We have hit a point where marketing has to be done with proper tools AND proper goals.

In this podcast we discuss how the hospitality industry has done a great job of leading this trend with their use of social data. Brands like Marriott now use social listening to make sure that brand sentiment is positive, complaints are responded to and VIP’s are given memorable experiences that they can choose to share with their communities. Brian even shares an anecdotal experience of his arrival in Atlanta…

“After showing up first thing in the morning, hours before the hotel was supposed to give me a room, I was outside Periscoping and I mentioned that the hotel didn’t have a room ready (not complaining). During my live stream the hotel entered into the conversation and thanked me for my patience and it wasn’t long after that the room was ready.”

Brian’s story was a great example of how social listening and engagement can be used as a tool to create better marketing and better customer experiences. Just consider how we are now sharing this story as earned media and how it may positively impact the brand?

However, this goes far beyond just hospitality. The need to use data and information to create better programs for marketing between brands and their consumers is critical in every industry. In the future companies aren’t going to invest in anything they cannot measure. So for marketing technologists it comes down to using tools and technology to build trust and results in their marketing efforts.

On this week’s episode of SMACTalk, I was live from IBM Amplify 2015 in beautiful San Diego California. It was my first solo episode as my co-host was amazing the crowd on Buffer Chat, but the topic no less was a fun and exciting one as I had the opportunity to interview the Chief Revenue Officer of Exchange Solutions, Bob Jewell about the impact cloud has had on their business, their clients’ business and I even managed to throw a couple of curveballs at him where we talked about employee advocacy, cloud adoption in the enterprise and then the emerging role of the Chief Revenue Officer.

For those less familiar, Exchange Solutions has built a cloud based on demand platform that allows companies to design, implement and measure loyalty programs that drive increased sales for companies around the globe. With their flexible platform they have recently migrated from a company who offered this as an end to end service, to an organization that is allowing their customers the flexibility of leveraging their platform to build their own solutions or partnering with Exchange Solutions to do the work in harmony.

Early on in the conversation I asked Mr. Jewell about how cloud has impacted their business and it was really interesting to find out that their company has been leveraging some iteration of the cloud to do their work for nearly 18 years. What made this so profound is that most consumers have no idea that cloud has been around for so long. Surprise, it has!

As we dug deeper into the conversation, it was really interesting to find out that a lot of the growth of the company has come from being able to build on the cloud giving them much more agility in their product development.

As the company moved from almost a design/build partner to a more “Self-Service” model the cloud has continued to play a key role. The Exchange Solutions platform has become something that the partners can utilize on demand to build, test, deploy and measure their programs. This is key not only to growth for them, but also their partners, which is key to sustaining their growth in the space.

As we turned off of the topic of cloud design and impact on the business, I asked Bob about his title and the role of the Chief Revenue Officer. Over the past few years we have seen Chief Data, Digital, Customer and other “C” officers emerge and the revenue officer is one of many. My question really came down to where the CRO fit in with the CMO and how they were dividing and conquering. His response was that it’s a partnership with the CRO really leading the Sales and Business Development functions and the CMO tying in the digital, social and traditional marketing roles to drive more visibility to the company. Of course, these driving forces can almost happen in either order, but in any case, I found the discussion quite interesting.

With "Customer at the Center” really at the core of the IBM Amplify event, this episode of SMACTalk was a lot of fun and other than missing the energy of Brian, we had a ton of fun discussing customer loyalty, the cloud and what the future of the customer journey may look like.

Now, tune in here to listen to the entire episode!

Brian and Dan attempt to change the current technology discussion from what’s the best technology solutions available to, what technology is my company using today and what solutions best fit in my company culture. The goal for businesses embracing technology must be around implementing the best tools and solutions to empower our employees to be most productive when solving business problems.

Brian explains his background and experiences as a technology evangelist and why he believes the focus on culture and people training and change focused him to changed his focus to teaching change more so than teaching the technology.

Culture, Processes and People often overlooked as a major factor in what technology and tools would be the best fit for a company.

Daniel discusses the mistakes many make when focusing only on the popular technology or software rather than diving in and truly understanding what’s the best solution for the business.

Using technology to match step by step offline procedures is often a problem that doesn’t allow technology to increase productivity and scale rather just doing things offline online.

Honest monday morning quarterbacking failed technology solutions reveals the root of a solutions failure which is often the software selected was wrong or the company culture wasn’t designed to leverage that solution.

Stop blaming the technology or tool for failing before you identify how the tool was trained, implemented and designed and if it would have ever been successful within the company culture.

Fear of missing out (F.O.M.O.) is something that scares many brands and yet overly excites others that causes mistakes in both cases. Brian explains why brands should let influencers or analysts like himself to test and embrace FOMO so that a brand can make the best decision.

Brian’s approach to technology is different than Daniels but they discuss why in their business it’s the perfect fit and both roles are required.

Discussion about technology like Meerkat & Periscope on how brands are adopting it and comparing it to change in software such as Microsoft Office to Google Docs and how not every brand or company can adopt all of these solutions equally.

Broadsuite Media Group leverages @SlackHQ software, Daniel and Brian explain why and how they implemented this collaboration software and it’s increased productivity and collaboration.

Other Takeaways:

• Technology is never an all or nothing solution.

• Understanding business needs and workflow is required to truly embrace and implement new technologies.

• Do brands or companies truly understand the features and benefits of new technologies today?

• Understanding what the best solution for a business problem is often times a solution that isn’t allowed or enabled within businesses today.

• Would adoption of Google Docs been hurt or limited if the requirement was every person must have a google+ account vs having a gmail email account. Understanding the value proposition and how to best tap into existing workflows is often what makes tools like Google Docs successful.

• What’s the role of “Open API’s & API Friendly Software”

• Why don’t all companies embrace Single Sign-on like Buffer & Meerkat that leverages Twitter sign-on for all users, eliminating the need for new accounts and/or passwords.

• Why don’t companies today ask employees or internal haters for feedback on what technology and tools they would like to leverage?

• Why is it acceptable for companies to settle for products and technology that are poorly designed because it’s an internal tool not customer facing?

• Are companies finally looking at features available with cloud and new technology solutions and weighing them against the legacy software that they already purchased and don’t want to throw away because the money was already spent.

• What are companies willing to give up to embrace new technology and tools?

• What does the future of dynamic or automated data integration into productivity and collaboration tools we’re leveraging today?

Companies that have strong cultures, empower their employees to leverage the technology that allows them to best solve the business needs while investing in training and procedures to eliminate risk and better embrace change!

This episode is sponsored by IBM to help companies envision a #NewWayToWork.

IBM Verse, their new revolutionary social & email solution, you can free up time for you to focus on this by calming your email. Sign Up Today at: IBM.com/Verse

As always we are grateful to be able to share our insights and views with you the listener, and welcome feedback, suggestions and open conversation at all times using the hashtag#SMACtalk.

Brian and Dan welcome special guest co-host Bryan Kramer, CEO of PureMatter Social Agency and author of “Human to Human: #H2H” as they discuss the mobile impact on the concept of “Human to Human” in business relationships and social marketing.

In this episode, Brian and Daniel along with guest co-host Bryan Kramer get into multiple topics including:

• Concept of “Shareology”

• Rise of mobile and the impact on human relations

• With 71 percent of the world on mobile, everyone becomes the media

• Legal concerns may affect the rise of live video streaming apps

• Citizen journalism’s effect on traditional news coverage

• How mobile apps like Snapchat is moving digital communication beyond traditional email

• Is Mobile technology too distracting?

• Managing an ever-increasing volume of mobile notifications to best serve you

• Importance of personalizing your online social communication

• The value of sharing quality content via mobile

This episode is sponsored by IBM to help companies envision a #NewWayToWork. IBM Verse, their new revolutionary social & email solution, can free up time for you to focus on this by calming your email. Sign Up Today at: IBM.com/Verse

As always we are grateful to be able to share our insights and views with you the listener, and welcome feedback, suggestions and open conversation at all times using the hashtag #SMACtalk.

We all know that Big Data is a hot topic. As businesses and consumers we are constantly witnessing how data can be used to better understand our customers, our operations and of course our own buying behavior.

However, big data in all of its glory isn't always so perfect. What happens when we let data become a mere support structure for proving our own bias? With so much data out there, do we fall susceptible to data skew?

While some point out that big data alone is rarely the answer (http://bloomreach.com/2014/04/we-get-it-big-data-alone-is-rarely-the-complete-answer/), the bigger question with so much data, especially unstructured data (meaning not numerical but other types of content), we may tend to use data to prove what we already believe rather than what the data is actually telling us.

In this episode of SMACtalk, Brian and I dive into this topic and discuss how data, especially unstructured data can often drive us to our preconceived notions rather than to the best answer. Further, we discuss how important it is that we consider that data may wind up telling us something different than what we thought and we need to be open to that if we truly want to achieve the benefits of big data.

Some of the examples given include how data can be misconstrued in…

• Social Media Analysis: Determining a hashtag is useful because of activity even if relevancy isn't consistent or aligned with its use.
• Hiring Decisions: using only positive data to determine that a candidate is a good one.
• Comparative Analysis: comparing two data points from different time periods to come to the conclusion of one data point being superior to another even though they aren't truly comparable.

Brian reiterates how important integrating data scientists can be into businesses that are seeking to use big data in their operations because we need those that are truly trained in how to interpret data for best outcomes and not just to prove our beliefs.

Of course just because data is available it doesn't mean our intuition isn't relevant. But what data can and should be used for is to enhance decision making, and when it is slanted to support what we want to believe, then data can become the cause of a much bigger problem.

This episode is sponsored by IBM to help companies envision a #NewWayToWork. IBM Verse, their new revolutionary social & email solution, can free up time for you to focus on this by calming your email. Sign Up Today at: IBM.com/Verse

As always we are grateful to be able to share our insights and views with you the listener, and welcome feedback, suggestions and open conversation at all times using the hashtag #SMACtalk.