Mediaboss Marketing

The Bronx, the only one of New York Citys five boroughs that is on the American mainland, once had a sociological as well as geographical distinction. In the 1930s it was called, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted, the city without a slum. It was the one place in the whole of the nation where commercial housing was built during the Great Depression. In the third quarter of the 20th century, however, there came, particularly in the South Bronx, social regression that Moynihan described as an Armageddonic collapse that I do not believe has its equal in the history of urbanization.

Of the several causes of descent, there and elsewhere, into the intergenerational transmission of poverty, one was paramount: family disintegration. Some causes of this remain unclear, but something now seems indisputable: Among todays young adults, the success sequence is insurance against poverty. The evidence is in The Millennial Success Sequence published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies and written by Wendy Wang of the IFS and W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia and AEI.

The success sequence, previously suggested in research by, among others, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, is this: First get at least a high school diploma, then get a job, then get married, and only then have children. Wang and Wilcox, focusing on millennials ages 28 to 34, the oldest members of the nations largest generation, have found that only 3 percent who follow this sequence are poor.

A comparably stunning 55 percent of this age cohort have had children before marriage. Only 25 percent of the youngest baby boomers (those born between 1957 and 1964) did that. Eighty-six percent of the Wang-Wilcox millennials who put marriage before the baby carriage have family incomes in the middle or top third of incomes. Forty-seven percent who did not follow the sequence are in the bottom third.

One problem today, Wilcox says, is the soul-mate model of marriage, a self-centered approach that regards marriage primarily as an opportunity for personal growth and fulfillment rather than as a way to form a family. Another problem is that some of the intelligentsia see the success sequence as middle-class norms to be disparaged for being middle-class norms. And as AEI social scientist Charles Murray says, too many of the successful classes, who followed the success sequence, do not preach what they practice, preferring ecumenical niceness to being judgmental.

In healthy societies, basic values and social arrangements are not much thought about. They are of course matters expressing what sociologists call a societys world-taken-for-granted. They have, however, changed since President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed unconditional war on poverty. This word suggested a fallacious assumption: Poverty persisted only because of hitherto weak government resolve regarding the essence of war marshalling material resources.

But what if large causes of poverty are not matters of material distribution but are behavioral bad choices and the cultures that produce them? If so, policymakers must rethink their confidence in social salvation through economic abundance.

Reversing social regression using public policies to create a healthy culture is akin to nation-building abroad, an American undertaking not recently crowned with success. Wang and Wilcox recommend education focused on high-level occupational skills, subsidizing low-paying jobs, and public and private social marketing campaigns, from public schools to popular media, promoting marriage toward the end of the success sequence.

Success is, of course, more complex than adherence to the sequence. Much cultural capital often is unavailable to poor people. In J.D. Vances Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir of his rise from Appalachian poverty to Yale Law School, he recounts his experience in the recruiting process with prestigious law firms, during which he learned, among many other things he did not learn at home, use the fat spoon for soup and your shoes and belt should match. These may seem trivial matters; to upward mobility, they are not.

Much more important, however, is the success sequence. In Nathaniel Hawthornes day, as in ours, it was said that problems were so daunting that old principles must yield to new realities. Perhaps, however, unfortunate new realities are the result of the disregard of old principles. Hawthorne recommended consulting respectable old blockheads who had a death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue since yesterday morning. Ideas like getting an education, a job and a spouse before begetting children.

More here:
We know the cure for poverty but not how to apply it - New York Post

WASHINGTON The Bronx, the only one of New York Citys five boroughs that is on the American mainland, once had a sociological as well as geographical distinction.

In the 1930s it was called, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted, the city without a slum. It was the one place in the whole of the nation where commercial housing was built during the Great Depression.

In the third quarter of the 20th century, however, there came, particularly in the South Bronx, social regression that Moynihan described as an Armageddonic collapse that I do not believe has its equal in the history of urbanization.

Of the several causes of descent, there and elsewhere, into the intergenerational transmission of poverty, one was paramount: Family disintegration. Some causes of this remain unclear, but something now seems indisputable: Among todays young adults, the success sequence is insurance against poverty.

The evidence is in The Millennial Success Sequence published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies and written by Wendy Wang of the IFS and W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia and AEI.

The success sequence, previously suggested in research by, among others, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, is this: First get at least a high school diploma, then get a job, then get married, and only then have children. Wang and Wilcox, focusing on millennials ages 28 to 34, the oldest members of the nations largest generation, have found that only 3 percent who follow this sequence are poor.

A comparably stunning 55 percent of this age cohort have had children before marriage. Only 25 percent of the youngest baby boomers (those born between 1957 and 1964) did that.

Eighty-six percent of the Wang-Wilcox millennials who put marriage before the baby carriage have family incomes in the middle or top third of incomes. Forty-seven percent who did not follow the sequence are in the bottom third.

One problem today, Wilcox says, is the soul-mate model of marriage, a self-centered approach that regards marriage primarily as an opportunity for personal growth and fulfillment rather than as a way to form a family.

Another problem is that some of the intelligentsia see the success sequence as middle-class norms to be disparaged for being middle-class norms. And as AEI social scientist Charles Murray says, too many of the successful classes, who followed the success sequence, do not preach what they practice, preferring ecumenical niceness to being judgmental.

In healthy societies, basic values and social arrangements are not much thought about. They are of course matters expressing what sociologists call a societys world-taken-for-granted.

They have, however, changed since President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed unconditional war on poverty. This word suggested a fallacious assumption: Poverty persisted only because of hitherto weak government resolve regarding the essence of war marshalling material resources.

But what if large causes of poverty are not matters of material distribution but are behavioral bad choices and the cultures that produce them? If so, policymakers must rethink their confidence in social salvation through economic abundance.

Reversing social regression using public policies to create a healthy culture is akin to nation-building abroad, an American undertaking not recently crowned with success. Wang and Wilcox recommend education focused on high-level occupational skills, subsidizing low-paying jobs and public and private social marketing campaigns, from public schools to popular media, promoting marriage toward the end of the success sequence.

Success is, of course, more complex than adherence to the sequence. Much cultural capital often is unavailable to poor people. In J.D. Vances Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir of his rise from Appalachian poverty to Yale Law School, he recounts his experience in the recruiting process with prestigious law firms, during which he learned, among many other things he did not learn at home, use the fat spoon for soup and your shoes and belt should match. These may seem trivial matters; to upward mobility, they are not.

Much more important, however, is the success sequence. In Nathaniel Hawthornes day, as in ours, it was said that problems were so daunting that old principles must yield to new realities. Perhaps, however, unfortunate new realities are the result of the disregard of old principles.

Hawthorne recommended consulting respectable old blockheads who had a death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue since yesterday morning. Ideas like getting an education, a job and a spouse before begetting children.

View original post here:
The sequence to success - The Exponent Telegram (press release) (registration)

Last week, Nixon made some adjustments to its internal structure that included a round of layoffs to reposition the brand for growth.

Although there wasnt much elaboration on the positions that were cut, the brand was able to share with us which areas of the business they are strengthening moving forward specifically, Nixon will be shifting its resources to digital in both the marketing and commerce sides of the business.

The changes we are working through arent dramatic, said Nixon CEO Nick Stowe. Weve seen our consumers changing, moving much more into digital in terms of where they go to discover and learn about brands and where they go to shop. What we are seeing is as much about marketing as commerce, lots of social and some real blending of the two on platforms like Instagram.

Nixon is mirroring the fast-paced digital growth they are seeing among their retail partners, and looking at ways they can lean on those partners many of whom command mass followings of their own while also driving consumers back to Nixons own e-commerce platform, explains Stowe. Were seeing consumers look to a range of sites when they shop: Amazon is clearly the largest, but our accounts like Zumiez and Nordstrom are really important, and consumers also want to go directly to the brand, to Nixon.com.

The brand is making a significant push to move from traditional practices to a more streamlined, all-encompassing approach when it comes to e-comm. Stowe shares how the brands strategy has been realigned to meet these goals.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In terms of restructuring the brand, can you speak to what areas of the business you are looking to strengthen? Can you also give us insight into the new positions you have created / will be hiring for?

Were adding positions mainly in digital. We have a search underway for a VP of e-commerce and marketing, and have set aside several positions for that person to build out the team we have, add some new roles in digital and social marketing and super-size the e-commerce team.

In some areas, well continue to use agencies to help us, and weve seen a benefit to the right blend of internal and external expertise. Were also looking geographically, and will be adding some more support to our business in Japan, working alongside our distributor partner there, launching Nixon.com in Japan and doing more in terms of digital marketing for that market.

Well also be strengthening a new area of the business, something were excited about in terms of reaching a whole new set of consumers, and will be announcing that more formally in the next few months.

Making cuts is never easy, especially with a close knit team like yours. How did you decide which areas of the business needed to be adjusted?

Its hard to lay people off and weve tried hard to avoid it. As we looked at the organization we tried to focus on positions, not people. Some of it was just about filling gaps in terms of getting the right capabilities in place and putting in some depth.

But it was also about looking at efficiency across channels and geographies. That has mainly been about making our US wholesale business more efficient, as well as improving our overall business in Europe. Explaining that to the people affected doesnt make the news any better, but its the analysis we did and it should serve us well as we look ahead in terms of having our people and resources focused in the right places.

How much will we see Nixons marketing strategy change over the next few months with this realignment? What types of marketing is resonating with the Nixon consumer and what strategies will the brand use to leverage this?

It wont really change in terms of what the brand stands for. But youll for sure see more in terms of how we publish on the major digital platforms, and that includes social platforms like Instagram and Facebook, as well as commerce-focused platforms like Fancy. And our investment in search is also ramping up, getting sharper in the terms we use. Our goal is to get better at how we target different groups of consumers, what we publish to them, where that takes them in terms of e-commerce landing pages (ours and our partners).

E-comm is an area that most companies are looking to ramp up and it sounds like this is the case for Nixon. Can you describe what your strategy currently looks like and how you plan to modify and build it to reflect your current audiences needs? How is Nixon attracting a broader audience?

Weve had a pretty traditional e-commerce strategy up to this point. We redesigned the site for more commerce, moved it onto Demandware to get that platforms robust performance, and weve added some better imagery and more recently with The Mission, customization, which has been a huge hit for us. Some of the changes we have coming are more evolutionary: for instance, changing up content and imagery to reflect what weve seen work on social.

But our ambitions are bigger than that. The big direction for us is to move away from hierarchical navigation and much more into search. Navigating using our drop-down menus is kind of like Yahoo! back in the day, and our consumers are much more likely now to use search on the site or enter the site straight from Google search. That means they want relevant results, strong recommendations, and reviews. They want a set of products that is more curated and specific than our hierarchical navigation. Think of many more curated landing pages than we currently have, some pre-merchandised, others created on the fly.

In terms of reaching a broader audience, some of that is about targeting our growing digital advertising to new consumer segments and backing that up with the right landing experience. But our retail partners are really important for growing our audience: individually many of them have much greater reach than we do as a brand, and collectively they have orders of magnitude. We want to extend what were doing in e-commerce to help them.

Weve focused very much on our in-store experience with retailers, and now we need to focus on the in-digital experience with them, as well. That includes simple things like better digital assets to represent Nixon and our product. It should include more commercial support, like helping them always be in stock with drop-ship programs: if youre shopping on Zumiez, and you search for The Mission but they dont stock it, it would be great if we served that up. And it should include extending more service offerings to them, giving authorized dealers post-sale service benefits like free battery changes for instance.

Along with the internal restructuring, will we see an outward realignment of Nixons brand image or focus in terms of who the brand speaks to outside of the core action / adventure sports demographic? If so, what will that look like?

Youll see some new approaches to campaigns over the next few months. I dont think we need to tell many of our core audience who we are and what we do, but well continue to work really closely with our athletes in our core space. But we need to introduce the brand more broadly, particularly with some of the product that we have that is very much on-trend (like our more simplistic Time Teller or Porter watches).

Were going to ramp up our digital marketing collaborations with friends of the brand who have an audience that overlaps with ours, but that stands more outside of our core demographic; we have a few people in mind in the music and art spaces outside of core action sports. Well use imagery that reflects how they see us, and product they want to represent and share. It means publishing more to their channel and audience than we have in the past. Weve occasionally blasted our voice pretty broadly, but this time its more like an introduction from a friend. That feels like a better way to grow and reach out.

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Read the original:
CEO Nick Stowe on Nixon restructuring, updated strategy - GrindTV

Provide social customer support

"Brands need to evolve from social monitoring and social listening to social customer support. Doing this has historically been very expensive. B2B brands will likely hire dedicate staff to respond to every social interaction, while B2C brands won't have such a luxury, unless their business is focused on buying and selling products and services online. However, even then they will triage social interactions to focus on urgent requests and issues vs handling all requests. With chatbots as part of brands' social strategy, they can ensure the best support for customers, said John Forrester, Chief Marketing Officer, Inbenta.

Answer questions and provide product and service information on social channels

"Chatbots can ensure all your customers understand the products and solutions your company offers. Via social channels, chatbots can let your brand move beyond static information on websites and search to enable customers to directly discover the details about your company's offerings," said Forrester.

Utilize social channels for taking orders and driving promotions

"With chatbots, marketing teams can driving promotional offers to customers they are engaging with on social media. For instance, on Facebook messenger, once the chatbot has a conversation open, the chatbot can start new conversations with customers in the future when a promotion is available. In addition, the chatbot can directly take orders and process everything instead of forcing customers through a traditional e-commerce flow," said Forrester.

More from Forrester and Inbenta later this week, including how brands can being implementing chatbots in their social media.

Tags: chatbots, Inbenta, social commerce, social marketing, social marketing trends

Excerpt from:
Top 3 reasons to add chatbots to your social media - BizReport

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Most people who have their businesseson social media are looking hard for answers to solutions for more traffic, engagementand conversions to build their brand. While great social media strategies dont simply fall off a truck in front of your doorstep, you dont have to make it any harder than it should be.

Nathan Pirtle, social media/digital marketing specialist and founder of Work With The Coach, is one person who snatched his success from the hands of fate.Pirtle became a hard core marketer because he wasnt looking for someone elses answers, he was looking for his own. These five important tips from his personal strategy can help your brand on social media.

Related: How Social Media Marketing Generated $7 Million in Affiliate Sales for This Entrepreneur

Theres a program and an app for everything you want to do with your social marketing, from analytics data to auto posting and direct messaging. While these are important aspects to your digital marketing business, at some point you need to make sure these robotsarent the primary source of your social media activity.

One thing Pirtle is direct in announcing is his approach to being personal with people on social media. Sure, your auto-posting social media tool is helping you stay relevant and seen, but its not replying to people, nor is it responding to someones questions in real time. In short, these are mistakes which can share negative messages to your audience.

People want conversation and engagement from your brand -- from the real you. Dont allow your brand to be controlled by these automated sources because it doesnt portray your true personality. Dont get me wrong, its okay to use these tools because youre a smart marketer. However, because you are a smart marketer, you will understand when to pull back on the reins and allow a more personal touch.

Your brand pages and accounts need to understand what your audience enjoys. For Pirtle, itwas a plethora of motivational, helpfuland funny pictures or memes to get his audience engaging with his brand on a continual basis. He also advises the best way to attract more people with real content on your social account is by keeping your house (your social account) clean and orderly. If it is, people will want to stick around and listen to what you have to say.

The rule of sharing is 80/20. This means 80 percentof the time, youre sharing content to either help, entertainand/or motivate your audience. The 80 percenthas nothing to do with your brand at all. Its all about your customers and what they enjoy.

If youre having a hard time finding out what your audience is into -- let's use Facebook for this example -- you can take a look at Facebook Audience Insights. Simply type in a couple of interests youre looking for, and it will supply you with other brand pages, like yours, who are killing it with real content. Take some tips out of their playbook, and offer some similar posts on your page.

Related: Meaningful Conversations Will Keep Your Clients Coming Back for More

Most people want to have a million followers, but they dont want to follow multiple people or accounts. It just doesnt work that way. To create a large social media following with real results, you need to be both a leader and a follower of people. "You have to know how to follow in order to be able to lead, so follow everyone who is relevant to your business," Pirtle said.

Dont reject the idea of engaging with people. This is going to help your business in the long run because people will always remember a helpful conversation. Once you learn to follow the most relevant people to your brand, and you consistently give them help and guidance, you will soon find yourself leading these people. Dont be shy to follow.

There are lots of ways to measure your success on social media. Stats from analytics to learn different things about your social media accounts is a great way to build your business. However, Pirtle always measured his success based on the social engagement his brand was acquiring every day on social media.

How many people are interacting with you on a consistent basis? Learn who the key players are and who always seems to be there when you share. Anytime anyone likes, comments, retweets, etc.,you should take notice, and respond to those people.

One great way to measure success within each campaign is to set a specific goal within your brand. Perhaps you want to set a goal of 50 signups on Facebook or Twitter. You also would like to see 25 comments and at least 15 shares. These are personal engagement goals you should make for each update your brand does.

KISSmetrics shares a very helpful article on how you can measure each step of your engagement, and they include metrics of engagement like awareness, engagement, drive traffic, finding advocates and fans, and your brands voice measurement.

Its important to understand and establish a set of goals in which you can measure your engagement success on your social platform of choice. Not all social networks are the same. The people may be the same, but their behaviors on each platform are different. You want to understand the behaviors of each person on your social platform of choice. It will help you provide the best possible content for them in the future.

Related: 5 Ways to Make a Strong Impression With Every Audience

There is no social marketing tip any stronger than this -- build the relationship. This is pretty much self explanatory, and while it seems pretty hard to do, most people are susceptible to your brand on social media, providing youre not trying to hard sell them right out of the gate.

Relationship marketing creates brand loyalty and an avenue for other people like the one with whom you just built a relationship with. You spend the time, build the relationship, and establish the trust. In turn, this builds a bridge between someone who doesnt know you and your brand with the person you just created this with. You see how important it is? The reach of relationships is powerful marketing within your social community, and you should be taking advantage of it every day.

There are all kinds of social media strategies you should want to try out, but these five are the most important ones to always remember to do consistently. You have a brand name to protect and an audience who wants to learn all they can about you. Just like Pirtle, when you invest your time, moneyand knowledge into your audience, you will reap superb results with these strategies.

Jennifer Spencer is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Energent Media, a digital branding agency focused on helping entrepreneurs share their stories on top podcasts. She is a passionate storyteller, online marketer and social media speci...

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5 Winning Social Media Strategies From a Master Marketer - Entrepreneur