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Alan See is a senior marketing executive and ranked the 3rd most followed CMO on Twitter. His rare ability to speak Web 2.0 and Sales 101 in the same sentence makes him a popular blogger and conference speaker. He has also served as an associate faculty member at the University of Phoenix where he facilitated courses in Marketing and Management Theory. Alan holds BBA and MBA degrees from Abilene Christian University and currently serves as Interim CMO at DocuStar.
  • 0 comments 879 reads
    Posted on 2013-03-29

    Do you fancy yourself a social media guru and communications expert? If so, you might want to make sure you are not using the following tactics because at best your audience is making fun of you, and at worst you are probably damaging your brand.

    Tactic #1: Extreme use of hashtags. People use the hashtag symbol # before a relevant keyword or phrase in their tweet to categorize those tweets and help them show more easily in Twitter Search. They also use them in their bio description in order to increase the probability of their profile being found during a keyword search. However; best practices suggests not using more than 2 hashtags in your communication. Don’t believe it? Take a look at the following:

    BP1


    I used the...

  • 4 comments 1,316 reads
    Posted on 2013-03-12

    Let’s recognize that age has little to do with ability. You’re never too young or too old if you've got talent. In the marketing world, Advertising Age and Direct Marketing News have their 40 Under 40 lists. Forbes has their 30 Under 30. This blog post counterbalances with 50 who are over 50 because to my knowledge a list of this nature has never been published.

    Now, before I present my 50 let me provide some background details. Yes, in case you are wondering, I am over 50, and this group was mainly pulled together through my personal Twitter followers. I’m currently ranked as the 3rd most followed Chief Marketing Officer on Twitter by...

  • 0 comments 1,127 reads
    Posted on 2013-03-11

    HaHa, made you look! When my kids were little they would taunt me with that phrase. It was intended as a playful insult because they tricked me into looking at something that didn’t exist. With my business team, that phrase is code speak for marketing content and messaging that creates a favorable impression catching our target audiences’ attention. And in that situation no tricks are involved, it’s all talent and by design!

    In the world of social media marketing, the “WHO’S VIEWED YOUR PROFILE?” module on LinkedIn is in my opinion, a made you look requirement for serious networkers. This feature is no trick; it’s designed to help you understand who’s been looking at your profile recently and how many times you have shown up in search results. Here are four reasons why you should like this feature and why I want to make you look at it.

    ...

  • 0 comments 712 reads
    Posted on 2013-02-22

    In 1977 I failed my initial swimming test during Plebe Summer at the United States Naval Academy. During my remedial lessons with other sinkers I still remember my instructor yelling “Mr. See, you look like a sledge hammer going through butter!” My technique needed some help; my rhythm, timing and stroke rate were creating plenty of splashing but not much forward movement. If that continued I’d soon be exhausted and drown.

    Today, I see a lot of social media activity that looks like a sledge hammer going through butter. Is your program one of them? In my opinion, here are a few elements of a social media sledge hammer at work:

    1. Extreme cross linking automation: A tweet or post on one platform automatically sends the same message across several platforms. Yes, some automation can be helpful; but when you take it to the extreme it looks and feels like spam. If you want to...

  • 0 comments 534 reads
    Posted on 2013-02-06

    The term “bootstrap” is often used to describe situations of self-reliance. It means to develop something that takes significant effort with little or no assistance. In the world of marketing, this often equates to operating with a very limited budget. The economic ruckus created by the fiscal cliff suggests 2013 will be a bootstrapping year for many marketing departments. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. economy shrank for the first time in more than three years in the fourth quarter. That means CMO’s will have plenty of opportunities to document their “how I bootstrapped the campaign” marketing stories.

    During economic uncertainty, one of the major reasons businesses go under is because they run out of cash. Cash flow is the lifeblood of every business, and in order to keep the business healthy,...

  • 1 comments 1,599 reads
    Posted on 2013-01-26

    Has rational ignorance impacted your organization’s social media activity yet? Rational ignorance is the decision not to become more informed about something because the perceived cost of the additional intelligence — in terms of both effort and expense — is more than the expected return on the knowledge gained.

    It kicks in for most of us when we believe we have reached the point of diminishing returns in relation to the value of acquiring additional insight. More than likely, your organization started its social media journey with great excitement and a willingness to invest and learn. Now that the honeymoon is over, most of your staff missed the profile page changes on LinkedIn, and it’s been months since they tweeted.

    The concept of rational ignorance, while popping up on a daily basis for most of us, is particularly consequential to a social media strategy because the social media ecosystem is still evolving at a rapid pace. In short, we now live in an age when...

  • 2 comments 1,882 reads
    Posted on 2012-08-22

    People are human and that means mistakes are bound to happen.  In fact, few of us get through the workday without making a single error, so should 99.9% be considered good enough?   Google the phrase “99.9% is good enough” and see what comes back.  For the most part you will uncover the following list (at 99.9% quality you can expect…

    • 1,314 phone calls will be misplaced by telecommunications services every minute.
    • 107 incorrect medical procedures will be performed today.
    • 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled in the next hour.
    • 810 commercial airline flights would crash every month.
    • 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written in the next 12 months.
    • 22,000...

  • 0 comments 947 reads
    Posted on 2012-08-20

    Mistakes were made. We’ve heard that before – many times. The phrase first made famous by the Nixon administration was later used and re-used by many politicians – Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, to name a few. People generally aren’t fond of admitting their mistakes. I’m not. Businesses are the same. They don’t like to talk about their mistakes, certainly not publicly – but not even within company walls. How mistakes are handled within a business says a lot about the people who lead that organization. Are mistakes seen as something to hide, deflect or feel ashamed of.

    Like them or not, mistakes are inevitable  – even the hardest working, most competent employees will make them. So what...

  • 0 comments 1,727 reads
    Posted on 2012-08-01

    I’m reading the book “The Blood of Heroes.”  It’s about the Alamo, and if you’re from the U.S., you know how that event ends.  But let’s not get ahead of the story.

    At the start of his Alamo siege, Santa Anna ordered the red flag of ‘no quarter’ to be flown, indicating that no man inside the Alamo would be taken prisoner. Despite the warning, Alamo commander William Travis rallied all but one man to stay and fight, including legendary frontiersman Davy Crockett and his...

  • 0 comments 1,121 reads
    Posted on 2012-07-16

    Do you remember HAL?  I was reminded this week of an old story that once surfaced about the heuristically programmed algorithmic computer (HAL) in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

    The story suggests that HAL was so-named to indicate that he was one step ahead of IBM.  Alphabetically “H” “A” “L” precede “I” “B” “M” by one letter; although the author of 2001, Arthur Clarke denies this legend in his book “Lost Worlds of 2001.”

    All the same, doesn’t it feel good to be one step ahead of your competition?  Many executives look to their employees to provide that extra step, but that may not always work because in their human capital management algorithm, the training and development function is...