Social Media Marketing: 12 Essential Tips for Success

Whether you call it Social Media or Consumer Generated Content, there’s no debate over the accelerating popularity of Internet sites and forums where consumers share opinions and experiences about every product and service imaginable. From blogs and podcasts to wikis and social networks, social media allows consumers to rate and review products, advise fellow consumers, and even make their own commercials praising or bashing businesses and brands.

The force that is driving social media is as old as business itself: word-of-mouth. Buyers have always shared advice on purchasing decisions, and consider wordof-mouth among the most trustworthy of information sources. ...

MotiveLab is a marketing agency that helps businesses incorporate social media trends and technologies into their marketing programs, from launching products and generating leads, to building customer communities and driving referrals.

Learn how to effectively engage customer communities with a new, social marketing mix.

With all the hype surrounding social media and consumer–generated content, marketers need clear and simple information to make sense of this new and powerful trend. In this short marketing brief, you'll learn:

• Why social media is here to stay, and what to do about it
• How to monitor market conversations in your own market
• How to prepare and launch social marketing initiatives
• How to integrate social media with traditional marketing programs
• Important opportunities to leverage and pitfalls to avoid

Download ebook: Social Media Marketing: 12 Essential Tips for Success

Setting the Standard for Supply Chain Performance

In today's increasingly complex retail business environment, measuring the health and performance of a company's supply chain is critical to business success, both from a cost management and a customer satisfaction standpoint. Achieving the level of measurement and visibility required, however, is a challenge in itself.Common obstacles such as metric and key performance indicator (KPI) definition, cross-departmental alignment, and lack of end-to-end metric definition can cause many measurement programs to fall short of their charter.Using a standards based framework such as the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR®) model from the Supply Chain Council can help retailers avoid many of these spans departmental functions to enforce alignment with obstacles, with an industry accepted metric hierarchy that corporate objectives.

As these supply chain complexities mount, so do supply chain breakdowns.What hasn't changed, however, is that most of these breakdowns are related to interdepartmental misalignment and miscommunication of goals, metrics, and KPIs.To oversimplify, the left hand knows not what the right hand is doing, which causes a problem the left foot thinks it can solve unbeknownst to the right foot, which has already applied its own band-aid. In this way,well-intentioned retail professionals operate in their vacuums, deal with massive amounts of data in their own ways, and use their own versions of "KPIs" to affect the measures under their immediate control. Despite their best efforts, department heads are unknowingly degrading supply chain accuracy and visibility. Poor visibility and inaccuracy make it difficult to discover new trends, address supply chain disruptions, and remodel supply chains for improvement.

Download ebook: Setting the Standard For Supply Chain Performance