social capital Archives - Three Over Four

03Jul 2021 by Aaron Templer No Comments

Aaron Templer Published In Marketing Profs

MarketingProfs was kind enough to publish a piece of mine, “Why Social Media Should Leave Your Marketing Department—And Where It Should Go Instead".” It's a distillation of a few chapters in my book, Leading in a Social World. In the piece I basically deconstruct social media marketing, and reconstructs it in a customer care space. TL;DR: Social constructs generate value by way of social capital. Leaders interested in generating this kind of value need to think about social groups very differently than marketing segments. It's about reciprocity and democratized relationships, very different than funnel-conversion thinking. Check it out! Aaron

01Nov 2015 by Aaron Templer

A Social Contract For The Holidays

Social Capital

A social contract is, by definition, up to all of us. Those of you with kids you know the situation. The daycare is closing, you white knuckle it during rush hour to pick them up (Why does my boss insist on dropping stuff on me late in the day! A 3:00 email about that—really?). You’re not the only working professional struggling to get there on time. You arrive to a line of idling cars, tensions can be high. Think about it from the daycare side for a moment. Late pickups have costs. Overtime for the staff, delayed hours for the janitorial crew, tired staff need to manage hungry, tired kids… it’s an issue. So what would you do if a daycare center came to you and asked to solve the problem of late…

12Apr 2013 by Aaron Templer

Not the viral you were hoping for

Social Capital, Social web, Three Over Four Approach

Don't you love the surveys like this one that pit congress approval ratings against things like lice and (worse) replacement refs? (Congress looses in a landslide in case you were wondering. You may now thank me for not using the phrase "Spoiler alert.") They're funny because they use the device of surprise. When you say something unexpected or place an element outside its usual context it makes us uncomfortable or jarred, and we laugh. The other response to an unexpected element is revulsion. Like the way a body works to expel a virus. It’s working against the system. It doesn’t fit. Kick up the heat to try to kill it, ‘cause it’s gotta go. This is what's happening to marketing across the social web. So-called social marketing doesn't work. Marketing…

17Jun 2010 by Aaron Templer 3 Comments

As branding dies leaders rise

Branding, Three Over Four Approach

[caption id="attachment_2012" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Is branding really worth saving?"][/caption] Branding (not product branding, but that enterprise-level notion of name and reputation we’re still wrestling with) is dying because we’ve run it into the ground. If you asked anyone or anything to wear as many hats, mean as many things, or be a placeholder for so many musings as contradictory (think tactics promoted as strategy), impertinent (think one-size-fits-all-contexts theories), and importance-inflated (the genocide in Rwanda is an element of a brand? Really?) as we ask of branding, it’d die too. From sheer exhaustion. It’s not the years (to paraphrase Indiana Jones). It’s the mileage. Branding started as a notion of something you could control. If you had the resources to overcome the complexity of making fires and casting iron, you could…