Ford Motor company’s biggest competitive marketing weapon is a doddering 100 year old.  Actually it is about 100,000 doddering 100 year olds.

The other day I went to a meeting and the person I met drove up in his Model T.  Well, it isn’t every day you see a Model T, so it attracted a bit of attention. 

So when a throng of people gathered around, my friend was more than happy to answer every last question and show it off.  It isn’t pretty, but surely a piece of living history.

I learned that there are about 100,000 of them driving across our U.S. roads every day and driven they are.  Heck, there are about a hundred in my neck of the woods.  Their owners drive them a lot.

Unlike another friend of mine who owns a different type Ford (a GT 500 that turns more heads than the Model T), which seldom makes its way out of his well appointed garage, the Model T’s are driven a lot and pretty much all the owners are like my friend.  They love to talk about the car, the history of Ford Motors, etc.  Their knowledgeable, have great stories (like the pictures that Karl carries in the car of his grandfather in his horse and buggy on his way to buy this very car) and are generally likeable people.

Apparently, the Model T is bomb-proof.  As a lot, they were well designed, well engineered and well built.  He changes the oil, using the original glass container and changes tires using the original jack and tools, which while ancient are as functional as the day they were made. 

My friend’s has had no major work since it was bought in 1927; still it runs and runs as reliably as his other car, a Volvo.

Hmm.  A direct comparison between a new Volvo sedan and a Ford Model T, and he is serious about the correlation.  He talks about Ford value and engineering and he gives examples….on occasion, using the car.  Heck, we even got to see what real floor boards look like! 

I learned a lot in talking to Karl about Ford, some things were factual like the use of vanadium that was came from the wreckage of a race car.  Nobody in the U.S. knew how to make this metal (which was much lighter and three times stronger that traditional steel of the day).  So, Henry Ford financed and set up a steel plant to figure it out and then make vast supplies of it.  I learned that 30 types of black paint were used.  Why?  Because the car was built on an assembly line (the only one at the time) different mixtures dried at different speeds, and that, along with the parts the paint went on impacted potential choke points in the assembly line.  Don’t think in it’s day that wasn’t wicked-smart innovation.  Other things were anecdotal.   Both were interesting and informative the way no tv commercial or YouTube video ever could be.

Let me tell you that the people who were asking Karl questions very much pay attention to what he says and he answers them and advocates in a very genuine way.  To the person, they leave the conversation with Karl with a very different perspective and a very positive impression of the Ford brand. 

So Ford has 100 Ford Fiesta running as part of a social media campaign designed to drive interest in the European version of the car, which will debut here as the 2011 model.  Ford, like all of its, solvent and bankrupt competitors spends hundred millions of dollars on marketing.

I would content that while all of this is fine, spending the equivalent to one television advertisement to support an ambassador program of Model T drivers to spread the word about Ford Quality and value (remember, value is the new black), as well as, fuel a grass roots movement to the return of value.  Ford style.

It’s my guess that that such an approach would exceed the results of traditional mar/com tactics in terms of engagement metrics…by a lot.  A big bang for the buck. 

So Bill, if you read this and I hope you do, you need to focus on tapping into the passion of your customer base and utilize what drove Ford to prominence in the first place:  Innovation and quality.  It’s all found there in that 100 year old car and its loyal, passionate, visible and quite large owner base.  I bet if you asked nicely, they’d help.

Traditional approach to marketing a brand?  No.  Innovative and effective?  Yes.

But not from the usual Vegas reasons: staying up late, losing money and drinking too much. I did none of those during the three day WOMMA 2009 Summit in sin city. My excuse is too much information and so many great conversations with little down time to process. So now, I’m in the air heading home with a little time to reflect.

Summit 2009 content was heavily focused on case studies, social marketing techniques and measurement. In fact, WOMMA debuted it’s newly published “Measurement and Metrics Guidebook”, a collaboration of some of the best thinkers in social metrics. Check out ComBlu’s chapter by Jennifer Voisard on cost deflection. I moderated a session on “Community: An Important Driver of WOM” with panelists Dawn Lacallade , chief community strategist at Solar Winds and Bill Johnston chief community officer at Forum One.

And, Steve Hershberger helped lead the live “Socializing Media” podcast which featured a conversation with some of the best thinkers in word-of-mouth. In between hallway chat and keeping up with crucial projects, I attended a half dozen sessions. Here’s some of my favorite take aways.

Measurment Keynote. WOMMA’s chair of the Measurement Council, Walter Carl, PhD, presented highlights of the above cited tome of best practices in measurement. One interesting factoid was the impact of word of mouth marketing (WOM) on revenue vs. traditional marketing communications channels. Turns out the latter does a much better job of generating short term customer acquisition and revenue generation, while WOM yields higher customer lifetime value through longer, deeper customer relationships and a significantly higher referral rate for new customers. (1.7 per traditional channels vs. 3.8 for WOM).

Anatomy of Buzz Revisted. Author Emanual Rosen gave an address on what not-for-profits can teach commercial enterprises about generating buzz. Core to his examples is the concept that human beings want to share what they create. If you give them an opportunity to co-create with you and other stakeholders, they will spread their interpretation of the activity. I think this basic tenet of self-expression as an engagement model has been forgotten in the gold rush of social media and the bright shiny object syndrome.

The View, only with academics. Keller Fay principal, Brad Fay deftly led a panel of academics who all study various aspects of engagement, influencer identification, measurement, etc. You’re thinking this was deadly, right? They were great. Here’s the line-up.

Socializing Customer Service. Sue Sunday, Microsoft, Ed Billmaier, The Scotts Company and Marie Shubin The Gallo Winery, talked customer support. These were from wildly different industries: software, wine and fertilizer yet offered a common thread: the use of customer service professionals to become the voice of the company in social platforms. The rationale: many companies that start listening programs or solicit comments through online forums and communities often get quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of conversations. The solutions: repurpose customer service representatives from call centers or email support. Not only will they be able to handle a larger volume of customer support episodes through the online platform, but they typically can offer marketing three magic things: human resources who already have deep product knowledge and are steeped in the legal, privacy and compliance imperatives of their organizations.

Cognitive Science. Another potentially deadly topic that turned out to be the absolutely best presentation I heard. This one was lead by Steve Knox of P&G’s Tremor Group. He laid out how human’s think and a process for disrupting normal perceptions that serves to get people’s attention. Using this disruption model or combining two unrelated schemas can lead to the magic that we all seek: cutting through the clutter and getting consumers to notice, buy and tell others. This is highly over simplified, and definitely worth digging deeper. Who knew 45 minutes about schemas could mesmerize!

I’ll provide more learning about some of these sessions in upcoming posts. ComBlu also previewed our research report, “The State of Online Branded Communities” which we’ll also dive into in the weeks ahead. Now that I’ve gotten these ideas out of my head, the seat is going back and I’m snoozing the rest of the way home.

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.

I recently attended the latest WOMMA conference in Miami. It was an intense two days, full of knowledge transfer during various break out sessions. We explored the trends and insights of customer engagement, through community and social media. We also listened to similar stories of what was finally proving to be successful, in our ever-evolving world. But, many of these case studies were around causes that ComBlu has always pioneered. For the brands in attendance however, the information was new, exciting and even a little scary.

Brands were in the same boat, asking similar questions such as:

How do I sell this internally?

How do I monetize this?

How do I even begin!?

During a breakout session I noticed one individual was just scratching his head, looking sad of all things. I asked him what was wrong. He said, “Great. I get it. We should be doing this. ALL of this.”

Am I missing something here?

“Well, we do insurance. Who wants to talk about insurance?” he asked with dismay.

I started to think. Well, lots of people! My brain working quickly, I began to lay out an idea.

What’s important in people’s lives? What do we talk about? Family, safety, security, assets, natural disasters, buying one’s first home. I could go on. If your product is boring or un-sexy, go beyond the utility of it and create an experience. Jump right in. Be THE place for these conversations that your customers, or potential customers, are having.

Riffing off this idea, another agency representative said, “Exactly. And, you can provide a place for questions and resources. Insurance is confusing.”

He began to brighten, because now we’ve got something. I continued on.

An insurance community can be a portal for life. With a community you can stimulate everyday conversation, and become relevant to people’s lives. Give guidance, and be a comfort in times of disaster, trouble and need. Be a resource, and provide the content your customers are looking for. Listen, and get direct customer feedback that could help your process and increase satisfaction. Look at it as an opportunity, and not a problem. I could almost see the gears begin to turn in his head.

Do all of this right and you can even measure its effectiveness. You’d be amazed at what a little brand loyalty and awareness will get you. It struck me then, that for an insurer, a little customer love may just be the holy grail.

To drive it home, I began to talk about cost deflection. Eventually your members will develop their own expertise around your service offerings and processes. If engaged properly, they will begin to help each other with policy questions and other important decisions. You’ll save money in a number of areas: claims administration, customer service and support for starters.

Full on smile now. He got up in a daze, reached for his cell phone and walked away. I looked for him later, but never saw him again. Oh well, I hope I was of some help. Good luck Insurance Man.

There is a debate bubbling up on this topic.  Why?  I really have no idea. 

In March Dell was able to generate $1,000,000 in revenue and cultivate 100,000 followers for their @delloutlet handle.  Today they have 677,825 followers.

Here is a sample tweet:

“@Sc00ter Did you order it from the Outlet? DM me your order# and I can see if I can help.about 24 hours ago from HootSuite”

Some individuals out there are actually obtuse enough to be arguing that this is not a successful social media example but instead a successful ecommerce example.  Isn’t this a useless argument? 

I see a few things in the tweet that I have posted above.  Based on the groaning in the marketplace about this We are going to diagram it just like elementary school grammar.

“@Sc00ter [This is a Name, which makes it a personalized one to one, from the brand to the user message] Did you order it from the Outlet [This is a Distribution and Logistics question designed to identify the order’s point of origin from the business enterprise]? DM me your order# [this is a Unique ID Code designed to find the order in the businesses CRM or Sales Management Software system] and I can see if I can help [This is a CRM Response with a call to action].about 24 hours ago [This is a Time Stamp] from HootSuite [This is a Method of ID and Contact from the responsible party who has taken ownership of resolving the problem]”

Well, bummer.  Since there is no viral video or game involved, of course it can’t really be social media, as the agencies and pendants define it.  I say let them argue and split hairs over the latest shiny penny tactics.  Let’s focus on the bigger prize.  Maybe the Dell/Twitter example isn’t social media but maybe it’s something better, social marketing integrated with social operations.  Maybe it is something that is meaningful and useful to all parties.  Maybe we have tapped into mechanisims to finally deliver on Pepper & Roger’s Shangri-La; One to one marketing.

As compared to this.

Just because it isn’t sexy doesn’t mean it isn’t right.  It is.  The Dell example worked in creating awareness AND engagement AND affinity.  The Skittles example is just lame-brained.

The Dell and Twitter partnership is exactly what everyone should be point to as a best practice (not the only one but a darn good one) or at worst yet another viable and meaningful use of Twitter that doesn’t involve saving expats from a kidnapping or reporting and organizing election revolt in countries with dictatorial regimes.  

So yes, it is good use of social marketing and social operations…which is what keeps brands and their operating entities (the business enterprise) in business.    Being in harmony with your customer base is a very profitable and effective method of doing business.

For many, that is still the plaything of agencies and sporadic marketing managers.  I think it is time to start understanding the difference.  If you want to continue debating the meaning of the word ‘is’ (which is in this case the debate about what is or is not social media), good luck.  The rest of us are moving on.

I sometimes feel like Diogenes searching for an honest man. Only I’m looking for an honest benchmark. What’s that? A yard stick for social marketing performance that tells me if a program is doing really well or only relatively well. For example, if a community has 10,000 members and another geared to the same group with pretty much the same objectives has 25,000 members, I might be high fiving all around if I’m the community manager for the latter. BUT! Does the larger community look great only in relationship to the smaller one or are they both underperforming? If I look at the engagement levels of the 10,000 and find they are much more prolific than the 25,000, then is the smaller community actually the high performer? We could go on and on.

Social marketing is an industry in search of benchmarks that will give organizations meaningful insights about the health and wellness of their initiatives. To a degree, I agree with a recent post by Matt Rhodes about the growth of a healthy online community.. He makes the point that performance is relative to the type and purpose of a community. This is true, but benchmarks apply when we are trying to measure against peer groups. I think to get beyond the sophomoric comparison of page views as a metric to something truly meaningful, we need to use an algorithm-based approach to measurement. We need to filter multiple data points to create performances indexes. These should give us the insights we need to make surgical adjustments to community engagement and drive growth and vitality. In turn, these indexes provide a foundation for measuring performance against a peer group.

For example, we recently completed some research that looked at the differences in rewards and recognition preferences between consumer, IT Pro and developer communities. Not surprisingly, software developers have very different motivations for returning to a community and using it frequently than consumers do. Before this research, we knew this intuitively. But now my client knows very specifically, how to design reputation management systems that will resonate with the audiences it wants to engage. It also informs the selection of data points that can lead to some meaningful performance indicators. We can for example look at engagement KPIs such as UCG volume, views, posts, comments, click-throughs, peer support, etc in correlation to specific reputation management approaches. The same algorithm could be applied across a community peer group and yield benchmarks that give insights into not only what to adjust but also how to make changes.

If my score is low, I can surgically tinker to deepen engagement by changing three things about the way I reward community members. This type of approach helps me know both if my community is relatively good in a meaningful way AND if I am also really good! High fives all around.

The social marketing industry needs benchmarks to catapult it to the next stage of professionalism. I don’t think we can continue to gauge how we’re doing only in relation to our own objectives or by using metrics that are interesting, but not useful. ComBlu is looking for some smart folks who would like to collaborate on a benchmarking study for social marketing. We’re calling it the Diogenes Project. If you’re interested, contact me .In the meantime, we’ll keep searching.

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.

There is a story about the Tower of Babel in which a great tower was built in the city of Babylon thousands of years ago. 

Babylon was a cosmopolitan city, many of the citizens were very impressed with themselves.  They were very important.  They did important things.  What they did, what they said eclipsed the value of everything and everybody else. 

Across this city/state there were a myriad of languages spoken, roll all of this together and it was a very confusing and problematic place to be at the time. 

All of this self impression along with the conflicting languages caused things to go badly.

Hmmm.  Does any of this strike a cord?  Did you notice in my blog posting I deliberately mis-spelled Babel?  It’s typed as ‘Babble’.  Dictionary.com defines Babble as “to talk idly, irrationally, excessively, or foolishly; chatter or prattle.” 

Sound vaguely familiar yet?  No?  Ok, I’ll keep going.

How about this.  Earned Media.  Getting warmer?  Tagging? Uh-huh.  Uniques?  Yep.  Web 2.0?  Sure.  Tweets.  Of course.  What about this one:  Link Juice.  Ummmm.

Marketers have their own language that to others sounds like well, babble.  Try an experiment.  Set a meeting request to your company’s CFO and put in the subject line ‘Briefing on Earned Media, Tagging and Link Juice. 

See if he or she accepts or instead, declines and emails you back asking what the @#!&# it is you want to waste their time with. 

Respond saying you made a mistake.  You want to share a few cost-deflection and lost revenue earn-back strategies you’d come across.  You’ll probably get a different result.  You see, marketers speak ‘promotion’, while CFO’s speak P&L (profit and loss).  Accountants speak GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principals), VP’s of Manufacturing speak Lean or Cellular (as in Lean or Cellular Manufacturing).  A few mutants still speak Six Sigma.  Together at some level in the organization, the management committee made up of the C-level and EVP level peeps who make decisions like merge, divest, close the Scranton Office, etc. speak Revenue Center and Cost Center. 

Revenue and Cost center is an interesting language, it has two intertwined dialects.  The first, ‘Cost’ is brutal and gutteral, sort of like Gaelic.  ‘Revenue’, on the other hand is more melodious and sweet; a joy to listen to. 

Those who speak Revenue and Cost see things as, well…generating either revenue or incurring cost.  Revenue and Cost speaks only of black and whites. You as a marketer are part of that world.  Yes!  It’s true.  Unfortunately, you reside more often than not in the Cost side; not always a comfortable place.  Sales sits in the Revenue side, which can be much more fun.  The reason is metrics.  Sales can show direct contribution to revenue.  TV ads and guerilla marketing tactics usually don’t.  Sales are easy to defend.  Without hard metrics, marketing is well, squishy and couple squishy metrics with terms and definitions that others don’t get and you are on thin ice in terms of value and influence.

While the term Earned Media sounds cool and is important to help describe all of which help define the granular inner-workings of some marketing tactic, its impact or outcome, most people outside of the marketing department don’t care or even understand.  Your marketing power points cause some in the organization to spontaneously bleed from the ears (note:  this will usually cause them to exclude you from critical meetings like budget planning).

Not being understood is bad.  If they don’t understand, you’re value to the organization is diminished (imagine getting a new boss who doesn’t understand what you do.  How long will you last?). 

If those who speak Revenue and Cost can’t understand your department or your program’s value, you don’t get the opportunity to actively shape how the marketing promise is delivered. 

Those who control the business enterprise (the making of the widget, the pricing of the widget and the distribution of said widget make their decisions regarding the widget without you.  Your input falls on deaf ears.  Yikes!  Hell on earth!

So what to do?  Don’t live in the chaos of Babylon waiting for the impending doom.  Be proactive!  Learn a second language and communicate.  When we as marketers are as versatile in the other operational languages our peers speak as we are in our own language, amazing things will happen.  One:  You will start measuring your activity and results in ways that are important to others (those who speak Revenue and Cost).  Two:  Your influence and work will amplify in terms of results.  Marketing initiatives will begin to be baked into operational activities and visa versa.

What were previously siloed activities will begin to work more harmoniously (i.e. CRM and Social Marketing) and you as a marketer will cease to be viewed by the other non-marketers in the company (whom by the way out number you) as not just the creator of hokey messaging and some un-measurable brand promise but instead the gate keeper of customer loyalty, net profit generation, low-cost win-backs and heck, maybe even a cost deflection source!

Well, we are at the end of this blog posting and the four non-marketers who were reading this have already gotten their fill and left, so I will reveal the big important ah-ha.  One that trumps even decoding Revenue and Cost.

You as marketers will hold the power of the customer in your hands and strong customer demand trumps everything.  You will understand them better than anyone, you will know how to reach and keep them happy.  You will know how to convert more customers using targeted, efficient techniques and tools.  You will balance the promise of your marketing efforts with the delivery of those promises by the operation.  You will be the master of customer engagement efficiency!  You will drive profit, which you can measure and defend…and that is a very good place to be.

That is, if you like that kind of stuff.