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.

Where performance is measured, performance improves. Where performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates.

-Thomas S. Monson (1927 -  )

If you can’t measure something, is it worthwhile? 

What would the NCAA Final Four be if they didn’t keep score (heck, would there even be a Final Four?!)

Would you ever diet if you never weighed yourself and only wore clothes with elastic waist bands?

Does performance matter if no one cares?

Performance is important.  But what is it?  Performance is benchmarking (having something to compare progress against), a method to actually measure or track changes and a desired outcome.  Pretty simple actually.

Think about performance in business terms.  As a customer of some brand, if you have a problem and call their help line, are disconnected twice, on hold for 20 minutes and find out when you reach someone they can’t help you, how do you measure that brand’s performance?  Is this brand experience worth it?

As an employee, what if you were 3 years behind on the development of a new product and didn’t track against any budgets?  What if you didn’t track pricing or quality? How would your company’s performance be measured?  Would you be competitive?  How would you know?

Lots of brands have communities.  Some are better developed than others, but how are these communities performing?  Does it matter?  And to whom?

Well, it does matter.  It should matter to a lot of people…people both directly and indirectly involved in that brands community.  Community can have a HUGE impact on a brand and its underlying operational components by driving results in three categories:

1.  Advocacy (both WOM and product/service consumption)

2.  Feedback 

3.  Support 

The problem is that some businesses don’t seem to understand the importance of community. They treat it like….an after thought.  Outside of three people in the marketing department, community is something that isn’t even on the radar screen. Is community as important as a patent? How about a state of the art distribution center?

For most businesses, who some operational experts call ‘laggards’, community is only viewed as another channel to push branded messaging. Other businesses, which operational experts call ‘innovators’, community is part and parcel to everything they do.

Below are two models. Which one looks like your company? Depending on how you answer (be honest), community is either a ‘thing’…marketing function and provides you limited value but one you can draw a nice neat box around.

Or instead, community in some form or fashion permeates every aspect of your business. You can’t easily define where it starts and where it stops. It just is. It’s organized and it’s everywhere.

If you say, “hey, this sort of looks like what we do”, you work for a leader. An innovator. It doesn’t matter whether you do it perfectly or not (nobody does), your business is a high performer.

The bad news is there are lots of laggards and worse, most of them don’t want to change.  The good news is innovators want to get better and some laggards just need a roadmap and some encouragement. 

So my question in this installment (one of three) is where does community reside in your organization? Are you an innovator or a laggard? In either case do you want to improve your organization’s performance?  Community is a strategic asset if deployed properly. 

In part two of this installment I’ll focus on how to measure community and then what to do with the numbers.

Ever look at a menu that has gobs of things on it and you still can’t find something that is appealing?  Yep, happens all the time-at least it does to me.

Why is this?  It’s because even though there is a lot of stuff on the menu, the right thing isn’t there, so I have to settle for what’s already there.  More times than not, when this happens, I am disappointed.

Virtually every brand has loads of products and services.  A niche product for every niche market.  Wait, isn’t this in part why GM got in trouble?  Having a bunch of brands and each brand having multiple products and each product available with a host of different options.  Sounds sort of like taking the shotgun approach to me. 

I can see it now.  A focus group convenes somewhere in Dallas, each member happily pocketing their $100.00. 

Executives sit behind the glass and hear what they want to hear.  They fly back to Michigan (coach) and close the doors and get to work.  We’ll give the people what they want!  More importantly, we’ll give them what they need!  True innovation all in one package, which just so happens to share the same chassis as the Trailblazer, seats as the Enclave and instrument dash as the Vue..but never mind that!

The result?  A very time consuming and expensive do-do egg, which arrives with a thud and then silence (remember the Aztec?)

Why is it that marketers rarely learn from their mistakes and routinely try to own the entire process, keeping it locked behind an iron door?  Ok, I get the whole ‘because open-sourcing innovation eliminates the competitive advantage and element of surprise argument.  But when you as a brand face a particularly vexing problem, why not tap advocates and uber users to help innovate?  Let them help to create the lighting in a jar.  Once the idea hits a critical mass, bring it in house and do what most successful companies do best.  Manufacture, distribute and market.

Here is an example I want to keep an eye on.  In blog post, Michael Arrington created a call to action.  We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200. Help Us Build It.

Here was his call to action:  I’m tired of waiting - I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one.  Some people raised their hands, and presto.  In a very short time (think 1/10th to 1/50th the development time of a traditional manufacturer at what I guess was 1/500,000th the cost) they went from this (the ID mockup):

to this (the alpha…where’s the can of Diet Mountain Dew? Oh, wait, there’s a Red Bull.  Phew!):

to this (yep, Apple sexy):

Some influential people watched on with growing curiosity and began to comment.  As did the people…specifically the niche that would snap this up.  Here are a few verbatims:

Chewbenator Why doesn't the Kindle look like this? 

(My insertion: Well, Amazon, why doesn’t it?)

Leomar Grullon
8:14 PM on Thu Apr 9 2009

This think looks sweet. I don't care about the specs. Do you take paypal?

Aaron Leibowitz
9:16 PM on Thu Apr 9 2009

It exists?! I thought this thing only popped up every year to give us that false glimmer of hope. It's like the oversized ipod touch I always wanted.

Eric Sheline
11:20 PM on Thu Apr 9 2009

Very excited about this! I definitely see cheap tablets (or MIDs, etc. - whatever you want to call them) as being more popular soon. There is just so much information on the web, and a tablet is the perfect device to read with while not at a desk. It just has to be fairly cheap ( <$400, less if possible), have decent battery life (5+ hours), and have a minimum 800px-1024px wide screen. I wrote up an article about this trend two weeks ago on my blog, google "Techognized" if you are interested (I do not want to be spammy by linking directly!).

tehdahl um. want. plz.

These folks represent the same type of people who would stand in line for hours to get an i-phone instead of walking into a Verizon store and immediately getting a Samsung.  Gee, I wonder if there are enough of those type of people to make a market?

So big businesses and sophisticated executives understand the concept of buy vs. build.  M&A’s happen all the time (except for the period from last October until now, unfortunately) so they can act faster.  Somebody smaller and more nimble creates something cool that is worth a lot.  The bigger guy buys them and takes it to market or makes the market bigger.

The model works.  Why don’t we apply this standard elsewhere in the business?  Why not tap advocates, subject matter experts and uber users to help with development, product support and even messaging?  Give these folks the keys and let them drive for a while.  Not only might brand avoid future Aztec’s but they might save some money (in terms of mistakes and mis-cures) along the way.  Not to mention the huge demand for a product that can be built up in advance of its launch.

But hey, what do I know?  I will keep tabs on this to see how it plays out, so more later.