I thought it was a joke. Holiday Inn in London is offering a human sheet warming service. Apparently, some staffer dresses in a fleece suit, jumps between your sheets and warms them up for you. Really? Like who wants this? They assure guests that this giant Teddy will be out from between the sheets before you pop into bed. Well, that makes me feel better.

In word-of-mouth marketing, the concept of “talkable brands” refers to the parts of the brand’s DNA that naturally stimulate conversation about its products and services. What makes brands talkable can be breakthrough design, a category game changer or just exquisite customer experience. Some brands confuse buzz with a natural innate talkability that some brands posses or work hard to develop. How?  By listening to their customers and offering cool innovations or new levels of service that actually resonate.

Holiday Inn’s human hot water bottle has certainly generated buzz. I personally have told tons of people about this ploy. Everyone has gotten a horrified look on their face and thought I was making it up. Many claimed they would never stay at a Holiday Inn again because this was just too creepy. While people are talking about Holiday Inn, the brand is not “talkable.”

So far? My favorite news story of the year.

Imagine that you are charged with launching a social media program for your product group. You ask your agency to develop a campaign. You think through the risks and rewards and go for it. Now, consider your counterparts in the other lines of business (LOB) in your organization who are doing the same thing. At any given point, each LOB may be thinking about or executing:

· Best practices

· Listening tools and campaigns

· Social media guidelines

· Outside and inside resources

· Platforms and social assets

· Research

· Advocate identification and activation

· Measurement

In fact, here’s the scary scenario: each LOB may be going down these paths separately and independently. At ComBlu, we’ve seen this over and over, and this practice is almost as prevalent today as it was during the wild, wild gold rush days of social media. Let’s think about what this really means.

· Scenario One: Group A wants a listening program and goes out and gets a license for a tool and trains some people to use it. At the same time, another group, licenses an entirely different tool and assigns one person to be the “chief listener”. Yet another group hires an agency to listen and respond for them and a fourth LOB contracts for a huge “listening study”. Yikes!

· Scenario Two: Now, these same four groups all decide they need social media guidelines. They each either develop their own or hire someone to do it for them. The result: four separate, sort of similar guidelines across four different LOBs.

· Scenario Three: Three out of these four groups all buy the same study from Forrester or another respected research firm

· Scenario Four: Two of these groups each buy a different community software platform and later decide they want to integrate their community experiences..

You get the picture. No standardization. No governance. No cost sharing. No knowledge sharing. No Center of Excellence (COE).

Many brands have Centers of Excellence for shared services and resources across their organization. A marketing department might have a COE for interactive, research, experiential, etc. And, a few are starting to add social marketing or social media to the COE approach. They are creating and sharing guidelines for listening and social media interaction, standardizing to a single community platform and listening tools, buying research once, and so on. Some are even meeting regularly to discuss best practices and parse their individual experiences with a vender, campaign or tool. But, here’s an interesting observation: they are not eating the social dog food. For the most part, the COEs are not using social tools to facilitate sharing and conversation about experiences, resources and approaches. They aren’t using rating and ranking systems to review venders or to get a view into planned programs that might provide insights or leverage between divisions, geographies or LOBs. They aren’t creating UGC or aggregating thought leadership information. They aren’t saying: “we’re in the early planning stages of research about XYZ that might benefit others. Let’s form a group and plan and co-fund it.”

One of the missions of ComBlu is to help organizations socialize their business model and supporting operations. We think brands would be better served by taking a COE approach, and using social tools to accelerate and facilitate adoption. The prize? Efficiency, effectiveness, bandwidth, cost savings and

Recently, the marketing executives interested in word of mouth marketing, viral marketing, social media and [insert your favorite term du jour here] met in Las Vegas to ponder the state of the industry and learn a few things about how to engage with customers more effectively.

As the years go by and this industry matures, people are getting smarter and common sense becomes more pervasive. 

As I sit here on Sunday morning writing this prior to heading off to what I am sure will be another glorious Indianapolis Colts victory (sorry, had to get that in), I have reflected on the culmination of events of two weeks ago.  I purposely chose not to write about the event immediately afterwards for two reasons:

1.  I was a bit cynical.  I always am after these events.  As good as they are, we have loads of work still to do.  Still, too much focus is placed on the tactic and the tool, instead of when to use the tactic and how to engage the tool, as well as, effectively measure its effectiveness.  Strategy, program integration and business based measurement (which would hold up to the glare of any qualified COO/CFO still remains elusive).  It is better though…loads.

2.  I wanted to see what bubbled up in the echo chamber post event.  I was sort of shocked to see what I had hoped to bubble up didn’t. 

Don’t get me wrong, the WOMMA event set a new standard in depth, clarity and sophistication of content, as well as, crowd size and engaged users.  We are light years from where we originally began.

The the things I had hoped to see more of included:

-Multi-channel and consistency of program integration

-More focus on long term CRM driven marketing initiatives which drive profitable engagement

-Engagement beyond lead gen.  Engagement around support and feedback.

-More focus on lessons learned and mistakes, work-arounds and sustained results

-More focus and attention on the new FTC guidelines.  This is a topic that a lot of marketers are glossing over and would wish they hadn’t.  For this conference, I truly wish more people had paid attention to this very real new set of guidelines….guidelines that have teeth and very real consequences if ignored.

I was thoroughly excited with a quiet little event that occured during the conference though.  One that I think will see greater visibility in the future.  Socializing Media:  The Podcast is a twice monthly show that I host with Blake Cahill of Visible Technologies, Jonathan Salem Baskin of Baskin Brand and Sean O’Driscoll of Ant’s Eye View.  Thus far on the show we have had Fortune 200 CEO’s, CMO’s, best selling authors, best-practice leaders in community management and industry leading analysts.  Furthermore, last week’s show had one of the best minds on CRM I have met in a while.  Not bad for an under-funded, cottage produced podcast.

At WOMMA, we taped the podcast from just outside the event rooms.  At any given time we had quite literally some of the best minds in the space, representing numerous disciplines, sitting around the table at the same time talking about meaty issues.  No fluff, no hype no singing to the choir.  It was an amazingly valuable discussion.  Some of those who stopped to listen into the show (live) took notes.   Most, however, missed the whole thing.  It is worth listening to or watching highlights of.

I am not going to give an executive summary here in this post, because you won’t watch or listen.  I think you should, so I won’t give you the same immediate gratification sought out by many.  As Lauren McCadney of CDW told me recently, most marketers seek the Miracle of Doneness.  Meaning the expectation of being finished quickly and easily trumps the end result of doing it right…which is usually longer and harder than most are willing to sign up for.

If you chose to sign up and listen or watch this podcast or others, and can put up with some of the technical glitches we continue to experience (hey, we are not professional podcasters), you will get something very worthwhile….insight on how to do social media, social marketing, customer engagement or whatever you want to call it better.

I hope you either watch the highlights or listen to the show.  Enjoy and maybe it’ll prompt you to come to the next WOMMA event and ask some tough questions yourself or possibly extend your social marketing efforts to be one of the best practice standards.

I have been thinking about the best way to open this blog post now for over a week.  Frankly, I struggled.  Every example I came up with was flat as week old Coke.  Until 3:27am this morning, when I awoke with the perfect lead in.

Prior to this brilliant lead in, let me give you the gist of why this was so important.  This last week I was speaking at the Word of Mouth Marketing conference in Vegas.  The subject of the conference was ‘Talkable Brands’.  Throughout the conference I listened for insight on what makes brands talkable.  Moreover, I had more conversations than I can count with smart brand leaders and marketing professionals on the topic.  On the flight home I was able to recall more than 30 such conversations that touched on this topic, as well as, seeing a few presentations that paid this question off.

In reviewing my three days in Vegas, here’s what I came up with as the big ah-ha.  Oddly, it has very little to do with social media, viral marketing or any such thing.

Brad Fay, COO of the Keller Fay Group stated it best. I am going to try and summarize what he said here as best I can.  Seventy seven percent of all word of mouth occurs offline.  Brand discussions fill the gaps in conversations.  Starting a conversation around a brand is an easy way to engage or move the topic of a conversation.

Couple this with the presentation made by Kathy Baughman (ComBlu), Bill Johnson (Forum One) and Dawn Lacallade (Solarwinds) where the topic was essentially be honest, be engaged and be consistent.

As I hope we all know, brands are most talkable when they deliver on a promise, which should be tied to a need.  Today, there is a huge chasm between the marketing departments who create the messaging and the other departments who are tasked with delivering products and services. Marketing campaigns, while sexy and clever, more often than not, set the rest of the organization to fail.  They fail because the hype isn’t aligned with their ability to deliver.

So with my set up done, here is my opening. 

In the 5th inning of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Chicago Cubs with two strikes under his belt, Babe Ruth called his shot.  He pointed to the outfield and indicated the third pitch would sail into the outfield. 

It’s not that he pointed.  It’s that he delivered on the promise.  He said, then did exactly what he said he’d do.  He pointed because he fundamentally believed he could smack the cover off the ball. 

What if somebody else promoted Babe calling his shot without asking Babe whether or not he could do it.  Imagine, to sell the game out, marketing creates the promotion, ‘Come see the world’s greatest hitter do the impossible….call his shot.’  Yep, people would line up in droves.  What if Babe, upon learning this said such an attempt was impossible and refused to do it. Worse, what if he never found out he’d been promoted to do this and went through the game blissfully ignorant of the promotional promise. What would happen?

Understanding this simple linkage between the brand and the business enterprise is more important than anything else marketing can create or do; more important than pity new ads, sexy new websites, shiny new apps and widgets. 

The magic bullet for customer engagement is consistency.  Only then will customers want to engage with you….consistently (see the connection?).

Consistency in performance across the enterprise that balances the marketing promise, whatever it might be and the businesses ability to deliver drives customers to return the favor creates talkable brands.

Doing it is harder than it sounds, I know. Which is why I am still shocked to see so few people attending WOMMA who are responsible for activities beyond marketing and communications.  Why no cross-functional teams working to learn how to do this?  Customer engagement and word of mouth is NOT something owned by marketing alone contrary to popular belief.

Here’s an example.  Recently, I was to attend my YPO’s forum group retreat in Miami.  We were leaving on Friday and coming back on Monday.  We booked through Orbitz during our forum group meeting.  One person joked that we all needed a little TLC.  So we selected Orbitz to book.

Later, several of us needed to move our Monday flights up until Sunday.  After 2 hours on the phone throughout the week trying to get this done (ok, it was a complex transaction…booked by one YPO member with 8 tickets paid for with another YPO member’s credit card).  One of us ended up simply abandoning the ticket and repurchasing a new $500 seat after only 20 minutes of hell.  I kept waiting on the TLC, which never came.  I ended up, tweeting the blow by blows to, partially to see what happened and partially as a frustration valve.

Sure enough, Orbitz sent me a tweet offering to help.  I sent them my email address in the clear.  Got another tweet that they had found my record but that was it.  Nothing else.  In the end the CRM team transferred me around, getting my problem out of their cue and eventually dumped me onto Delta and ran fast.  Yep, things got worse from there but hey, no longer Orbitz problem! I now belonged to Deltaaaaa.

I ended up so frustrated that I canceled the trip and forfeited my tickets and hotel deposit.  That’s how chaotic, unorganized and disjointed the experience was.

Turns out that the Orbitz TLC tagline doesn’t mean ‘Tender Loving Care’.  Instead, it seems to stand for ‘The Lowest Cost’.

If you do a Google search for Orbitz TLC, what comes up first is a paid link. Orbitz states that with their TLC program, every customer is a VIP!  However, if you audit their materials (from ads to their on hold recording to twitter to their online properties, things get confusing.  Twitter, the call center on hold and some of their branding is about a better experience (TLC) and a VIP experience.  Elsewhere it is ALL about price.  Lowest, lowest, lowest.

Either value proposition or even both is ok.  But deliver on what you CONSISTENTLY promise.  Either VIP service, low price or the best service possible at the lowest price available. 

Hey folks, coach is still coach.  Don’t spin the threadbare seats in the back of the plane as luxurious.  A confusing and at-odds marketing program will ensure a bunch of people have their expectations missed.  Say what you mean, mean what you say, be truthful and be consistent.  Southwest does a masterful job at delivering this promise.  Take a lesson.

I decided to provide a set of tips to get started, one that if tried I bet would yield greater results than any 50 million dollar ad campaign at 1/100th the cost.

Here it is: 

1. Define your objective.
2. Figure out what your brand promise is and what it means (be simple and clear), as well as, how it supports your objective.
3. Have every department head ask his or her direct reports to write into their job description what their specific role and their role’s contribution to that objective and supporting promise is. 
4. Ask them to measure their performance daily and report monthly on how they did.  (Simple daily yes and no’s will work at the start.  Did you?  No, I had an instance where I couldn’t.  What was it and why?)
5. Ask them to identify monthly the barriers within the organization that caused them to not deliver on their contribution.
6. Focus on work-arounds and solutions to these barriers, tasking the employees themselves to identify the solutions.
7. Implement and report.
8. Weave your objective and promise into everything. 
9. Create marketing messaging directly tied to the objectives and performance.
10. Integrate voice of the customer UGC directly into marketing and product venues (on and offline).

I am picking on Orbitz not because of a bad experience.  No company can deliver everything flawlessly or meet every customer’s wacky demands.  I am picking on them because they are not consistent in what they say and what they do.

In fairness, Orbitz recently removed the TLC branding from their online venues (I can see why) but the phrase still prevalent through many touch points from paid search to on-hold recordings.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether, like Babe Ruth, you step into the batter’s box and point to the outfield fence; only that you step into the batter’s box and follow through.

In the past 6–8 months, I’ve been asked the same question about a dozen times from clients and colleagues.  What platform should I build my community on?  This seemingly harmless question can spark hours of discussion and debate.  If you’re planning on starting an online community, here are a few pieces of information that you should know prior to asking this loaded question.

Know your budget.  These days, community platforms can range anywhere from free open source solutions or spending up to as high as $250K. On the low end, free or low cost options will give you bare bones functionality that will leave you having to customize the look and feel, as well as configure a hosting environment. High-end platforms will provide a set of tools that will allow you to customize your community. Some even include easy content management systems so non-technical personnel can maintain the community. Knowing how much you can afford up front will help cross some names off of your list and save you time during the evaluation process.

Brush up on your company’s data policies.  In today’s online world, data integrity, data security and customer privacy are at the top of most companies concerns when launching an online community.  Bone up on what your company’s data and security policies are before beginning to compare platforms.  If your company does not allow data to be hosted by a third party vendor, that will eliminate the software as a service (SaaS) providers.

Start small.  With all of the sexy, cool Web 2.0 functionality that’s out there today, it’s easy to go overboard during your requirements gathering sessions.  Remember to take a step back and vet the functionality against your core community objectives.  For example, a support community might not need a tool that allows you to view members in your location.  However, it definitely needs a simple to understand Q&A tool.  By narrowing your list of desired functionality to only the most relevant, you may find that the more expensive platforms may have lost some of their original appeal.

Look and feel.  A brand’s online community presence should match the look and feel of its other Web assets.  Make sure that you sample a few different examples of communities built on the same platform so that you can get a feel for how flexible the platform is.  Some platforms allow you to create custom themes or skins for your community, while others allow you to only adjust base colors and copy.  Be sure that you can live with the “template” look and feel before you commit.

Know your environment.  Let’s face it.  More often than not, the budget for an online community is going to come from somewhere other than IT.  Marketing often foots the bill.  If you are a marketer looking to build an online presence, remember to check with IT on the specifications of your current environment to be sure that they meet the basic requirements.  It never hurts to have someone from IT with you while reviewing platforms to provide you with a sanity check.

To host or not to host?  That is the question.  There are several viable SaaS models out there that will provide both hosting and development of your community.  If you decide against a SaaS model, remember to ask yourself two important questions before purchasing your platform:

1. What are the additional overhead and maintenance costs associated with hosting it myself?

2. What are the additional costs for using a third party vendor to host the community for me?  In addition, what is an acceptable service level agreement between my company and the vendor?

Deciding on which platform to use isn’t an easy one to make.  However, with a little due diligence before you get started, the process will go a lot smoother and hopefully, save me a phone call ;).

When helping brands and organizations think through community strategy, we are asked a handful of questions by almost everyone. They fall into three major categories:

· Overall approach and program design

· ROI

· Resource allocation

The first two are very specific to the mission, objectives and business drivers of the organization. To some extent, so is the third but I think the ‘gravity” rule applies. What’s that? Pauline Ores, a community whiz at IBM, is fond of saying, “Community is like gravity; it only come in one flavor.” She goes on to make the case that fundamental principles of community design apply equally across every industry. What works in tech also works in consumer products. The customization comes from the content, tools, and engagement strategy that you employ.

Here are xxx “gravity” principles that apply to community resource allocation.

· Designate a community strategist: This person is primarily responsible for:

•  Identifying business goals and aligning them with community and social marketing programs.
•  Ongoing approach and applying a best practices orientation to the program.
•  Integrating the program with other marketing and operations campaigns
•  Identifying key social marketing and community trends and separating fads from useable applications and tools
• Assuring community profitability: developing cost/benefit models and developing ROI modeling

· Assign a public community manager. This person has several responsibilities. including:

• Serving as the human face of the community. This is the go-to person for members when they want to interact with the company; not just each other.
• Engaging members in a variety of ways. This requires a comfort level with chatting with customers, understanding their concerns and being open about the probability that desired actions will actually occur in a stated time frame. In my experience, many marketers only deal with customers in the abstract. They view them as personas, objects in a video, data points or from behind the mirrored glass of a focus group. They don’t really deal with them day-to-day. The community manager needs to be comfortable in this role and can offer invaluable insights to the organization.
• Managing key community functions and activities. These include:

1. Create quarterly engagement approach
2. Maintain Reputation Management system
3. Direct other team members
4. Analyze trends and work with Community Strategist to determine implications and impact
5. Serve as community advocate for internal company audiences and business units
6. Field and manage requests from other business units for advocate or program access

• Being the voice of the brand throughout the social eco-system. The community manager should be visible both inside the branded community location as well as maintain a high profile at other social destinations.
• Managing customer advocate relations. Care and nurturing of customer advocates is essential for optimizing this strategic business asset.
• Moderating disputes and community sentiment. It is essential for the community manager to intervene as appropriate when the community is veering into negative territory or one of its members is behaving badly. Often, self policing among community members handles this before formal intervention is needed, but the manager must be aware and know when to act.

· Give an Engagement Manager responsibility for:

• Executing engagement strategies including online and offline events
• Managing ongoing recruitment and advocate on-boarding

· Appoint a community operations manager. This person could be the same one as the public community manger but has very specific skill sets. H/her is responsibility for:

• Monitoring community health and wellness. Maintaining an early warning system signals when the community is in distress or thriving. Each call for action; just different ones. This person is part strategist; part analyst.
• Moderating specific actions and activities. The majority of this can be automated if you put in the right back-end and admin tools. Someone with half a lobe working needs to watch, though.
• Overseeing everyday QA of the platform. Nothing frustrates visitors and members more than slow nav and broken tools.

· Allocate dedicated tech genius. Every organization I’ve ever worked with has a long queue for dev work. If your community is going to be successful, you’ll need more than a few forums and standard widgets. If no one inside your company’s IT department knows and understands community beyond what comes out of the shrink wrap, find a go-to outside resource that is platform agnostic, can help you choose the best platform for current and future needs and can help you scale. This person should also bring you new ideas and new social tools that can help you integrate your social presence both inside and outside of your community.

According to Forrester community expert, Jeremiah Owyang, successful community marketing requires dedicated staffing. In addition, a study by Forum One quantifies the optimal staffers for community is 6.5 FTEs. In our experience, this resource load is often too steep for organizations in the formative stages of community building. ComBlu typically takes a “build, grow, transfer” approach with our clients. We serve as an outsource for much of the heavy lifting during the early stages of community building. As we move past pilot into the growth stage, we begin knowledge transfer so an internal team can eventually take over the running and managing of its own community assets.

This model with tweaks for individual needs is the gravity rule for community resource allocation.

So here’s the thing: I talk to tons of people every day. Some want to chat about community strategy; others want my grandmother’s recipe for strawberry mess. (It’s yummy) Community and cooking are equal passions of mine so people ask me about both…a lot. In either case, I never stop to consider: am I answering this question as a business professional or as a consumer. I just draw on the appropriate expertise and give my best advice and counsel. If I was having these conversations in a community, I’d gravitate towards places that congregate around community best practices or haul my virtual self to a foodie hot spot. Again, I’m the same person in either place. The only thing that changes is the topic and location.

So, I’m confused when I hear folks in the b-to-b world proclaim that social marketing doesn’t “work” in their industry, marketplace or environment. Huh? People don’t stop having conversations, seeking and making recommendations and taking the advice of known subject matter experts because they are in a b-to-b “place”. As a matter of fact, isn’t this the very essence of thought leadership, the core of b-to-b marketing? Business-to-business is not just selling auto parts to government motors. We live in a service economy where businesses sell high value services to other businesses. These businesses differentiate themselves through their human and intellectual capital and their collective thought leadership. The old-school thought leadership model was a three legged stool: conferences, publishing in third party journals and research/white papers.

Several factors have impacted this model: shrinking news holes, time starved people who can not ‘commit’ to the dense white paper you just published, dwindling conference attendance and younger decision makers who prefer newer, more social channels. This diagram shows how the thought leadership approach is changing.

Lead generation has always been and always will be a social activity. Think back to the old user groups in the tech industry that morphed into online forums and now are full blown online collaboration networks. Social media competence is a must for today’s thought leader. When was the last time you were at a conference that did not give out the conference twitter address or where the real action happened through tweet-ups? GE recently sought internal social media users to serve as mentors to others in the company. They teach each other how to set up a Linkedin account, upload video and comment on blog posts. The goal is to get people comfortable with social tools.

Today thought leaders need to think like a publisher. Content needs to be both smart and approachable. The voice should not be stiff, formal or corporate. Those days are gone. Remember, people are people whether they are reading an eBook or a recipe. Channels are a mix of traditional and new; some are even self-created. Smart b-to-b marketers have their own YouTube channel, LinkedIn groups, and Slideshare accounts. Content spreads virally through content syndication and aggregation. Giving customers and prospects tools to make this easy is a great way to deepen a relationship. Your people need to learn how to tag and re-tag content as well as create link juice. Many organizations have already figured out blogging, podcasts and webcasts, but have not figured out how to syndicate their content or grow their audience.

If done right, communities can be an ongoing research engine for thought leadership. You can use them to recruit people for surveys, gain invaluable insights and feedback that can be packaged for syndication across a variety of channels. You can use blogs and tweets for trend spotting. Many industry analysts signal what they’re working on through Twitter; ditto for reporters, trade groups, government bodies and academics. You can learn a lot about emerging trends and package your intellectual capital to leverage promising platforms.

This barely scratches the surface of how b-to-b enterprises can embrace social marketing and freshen their approach to thought leadership. If you’re interested, I have a deck on Slideshare that explores this a little more. Or, maybe you just want that recipe for strawberry mess. Here you go:

Strawberry Mess

1 pint whipping cream

1 quart fresh strawberries

2 TBS. sugar

½ cup mini marshmallows

½ cup fresh squeezed lemon juice

Remove green stems from strawberries and slice thinly. Add the 2 TBS sugar and ½ cup lemon juice. Let sit for 15 minutes.

Whip cream until stiff (Don’t do too long or it’ll turn into butter!) Fold in the strawberry mixture and the marshmallows.

Fold into a freezer-safe container. My grandmother always used the metal tray of her ice cube trays, minus the metal cube divider. But, you can use a bread pan or a smallish plastic storage container.

Freeze until solid. Take out of freezer at least 3 hours before serving. Scoop out like ice cream and go, “yum”.

Tags: thought leadership, strategy, ComBlu, social marketing, social media strategy, business-to-business marketing,

Last week we talked about cultural readiness for social marketing. In this follow-up post, we will look at how various experts recommend getting a YES! from legal and compliance for a social marketing strategy or campaign.

Step Strategy. Few organizations that are leery of the uncertainty and lack of control inherent in social media are going to bungee jump into the water. They want to dangle their toes in the water from the safety of the pier and gradually dive in head first. The common wisdom is to start with a listening campaign, then join the conversation, and then launch a branded program. This is a fine starting point but does not go far enough. You need to fully develop your step strategy and align each step with a value proposition that matters to the person you’re selling to. For example, saying, “First we’re going to listen” is not as powerful as “ We’ve been informally following three key communities where XYZ customer segment congregates and talks. We discovered three key trends that suggest we could increase our sales by adding new colors to our line, giving our call center reps more autonomy and offering free shipping on returns. The increase in sales will far exceed the cost of doing this. We think we can gain further ROI by formalizing our listening campaign and extending it through a private customer feedback community.”

Start Internally. Many companies view social media as “cheap” and want to adopt it to augment shrinking marketing dollars. In reality, organizations can dramatically impact costs by adopting social tools internally. Not only is there great ROI, but the internal experience helps to overcome some of the hurdles for using the tools externally. Cisco is one company that reports huge gains by using an internal community structure to drive productivity and innovation. Another example is Best Buy, whose employee community Blue Shirt Nation (link) is credited with reducing employee turn-over significantly and improving customer sat scores. Once people are comfortable with social tools, extending their use to outside stakeholders is an easier sell.

Game Changer. What separates the social experimenters from the game changers? First, these companies are beyond the “do we do it?” phase and into the “what are best practices and how do we get started phase?” In addition, they understand that socializing both business operations and marketing can give them an order of magnitude advantage over those who are simply dabbling in Facebook pages. Often, the early adopters of emerging technologies or business models can disrupt and displace long term industry stalwarts. This scares the pants off of senior management. Show them examples of new upstarts that are gaining share or changing the rules of engagement for your industry and make the case for beating them at their own game. This is a true strategic business discussion that needs to be well researched. You need to illustrate how this can dramatically change the game for your company and reap long term competitive advantage and business value.

Solve a challenge. Socializing operations can solve key business challenges. Take cost of customer support, for example. The use of customer advocates as part of the support function is a tried and true strategy in the technology and telecommunications industries. IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and others have reduced their cost per support episode significantly, sometimes by as much as 65%. This would be impossible without an integrated strategy that uses both branded and organic online communities to facilitate the interchange between knowledgeable customers who are motivated to help each other. Some smart organizations are starting to form these support communities and use the feedback and user generated content to improve products and customer experience. In some instances, they use the outputs to better educate their own workforce about how and why people use their products.

Provide tools for selling up and out. The person you’re pitching will have to continue to sell to h/her peers or manager. Make it easy for them. Offer to be part of the meeting or give your boss a “no brainer” presentation that clearly lays out the opportunity, risks, rewards, costs and timeline for ROI. Make sure you include competitive analysis that demonstrates how and why this stuff works. Remember you will need multiple reasons that will resonate with multiple stakeholders and decision makers. Legal wants to know about how you will manage risks and who else in your industry has tried something like this. They want detailed case studies. Finance will want to know return ratios and how the ROI of social marketing compares to the performance of other MarCom channels. Brand managers will want to know how this will forward their brand messaging and how they can protect their brand image. The answers, of course, depend upon your objectives and approach. But if you don’t have the answers to these types of challenges, you shouldn’t be asking for a Yes!

Getting a YES! requires knowledge of what works and why for a specific application of social tools that can achieve your organization’s objectives. Being conversant in metrics that matter helps a great deal. In fact, every topic above includes some reference to metrics or ROI. The basics that apply to selling in any new program or strategy apply to social marketing or social business operations. Do your homework, make your case, pre-sell and build alliances and hope for great timing.