The Semacraft Blog

I had a conversation with a client who was looking to roll out a social media campaign recently. They seemed to have all their bases covered. They had formal authority from management, great sources for content, a team of creatives working on copy and graphics, a monitoring platform…I was quite impressed.

And then I asked, ‘What happens if your Twitter account is hacked and porn related tweets are sent to you 20,000+ followers?’

There was dead silence.

It was only then that I realized how much even we had failed to emphasize this aspect of online security adequately in the recent past.

Do you know what you would do? Does your organization have a policy on how to respond to this type of situations?

Let us know what your Plan A is.

Watch this blog for a social media crisis response strategy uploading real soon.

Strategy is great. I love strategy. I live for strategy. However, without execution strategy is just wishful thinking. A picture of a great product.

Execution is when we go from picture to product and ship it. I think the risk of contracting Paralysis of Analysis for many business owners can be fairly high so a way of getting out of it as early as possible is critical. I have found that these four things help me get out of paralysis and give my strategies life by executing them. Read the rest of this entry »

Is your brand relevant?

If you’ve been in business a while, it probably is. Otherwise you’d have folded long ago. Now your brand wants to be ‘social’ and blog, tweet and get a Facebook page or YouTube channel. This is now publishing territory. Are you publishing relevant content? Is it all about your product and your brand/business? If you consider the fact that building significant loyal traffic to a blog can take 2 years, is there enough talk about yourself to keep me reading your blog for two whole years?! Read the rest of this entry »

Work for free.  It’s a radical concept isn’t it? I posed the question to friend of mine a few hours ago. It was clear by the look on their face that they thought it was an incredulous idea. “Impossible!”, they said.

I’ll put the question to you a little differently.  If all your bills were paid, would you still do what you do? Would your business still go about it’s business the same way? Would you tweet the same stuff? Post the same Facebook updates? Read the rest of this entry »

originally posted at muchiri.com

Is it the market’s business what you do after hours?  Is it the customer’s business where you sourced your raw materials, whether the CEO is faithful to his wife or even the CMO’s stand on healthcare reform? Shouldn’t all that matters be the product or service the brand promotes consistently at the perfect price, place & packaging?

Divorce rates in the UK currently stand at about 11.5% per 1,000 married couples.  In the US, the rate is at 3.5%.   When you consider that marriage rates in the US are at about 7.1% per 1,000 this means half as many people are getting divorced as are getting married.  Obviously the idea of failed marriages is not a foreign one.  And then there’s the permissive nature of today’s urban society.  So why the outrage at Tiger Woods and John Terry for infidelity?  They are not even in the marriage business! They are sports personalities!

Apparently, the consumer’s business extends to what famous people do when they are not doing what they are famous for. On this side of the new normal customers aren’t choosing which brands to be loyal to solely based on the price or quality, it’s now about the other things the brand does when it’s not ‘at work’. It’s about all the other peripheral things that have nothing to do with how the product is produced.

What do you tweet about when you’re not tweeting about your product/service? What was your last ‘unrelated’ Facebook post? What have you done for your customers lately that had nothing (or little) to do with you?

Lesson for business? There’s no clocking out. You’re at work 24/7/365. You’re not helpful only when customer’s need more information about your product or following up on a proposal you sent. It’s now all about the customer and what they think is important. If your tweets, status updates, videos and photos are all about you then you’re just a self-obsessed brand people have little time for. Find out what your customers are passionate about and become passionate about them. Be helpful on the customer’s terms.

It’s how I think it is. What do you think?