One of the first things that Sam Palmisano did after becoming CEO of IBM was to do a values gut check. Palmisano felt strongly that a refreshed values system would provide a roadmap for operating differently in a rapidly changing market environment and ultimately complete the transformation process.

The biggest challenge? Despite the fact that IBM was emerging from a long, painful decline and was newly prosperous, people were cautious and suspicious of a new vision. The company needed a way to galvanize people around hope and aspiration as opposed to fear of failure. The company also has a massive, global employee base with widely divergent views.

The answer was a highly innovative process that IBM called Jam Sessions. In a nut shell, the first one started with senior management creating a set of values that were vetted and refined through focus groups and surveys. Then, the entire employee population was invited to weigh in on the list. IBM used social media tools to gather input and analyze trends across the input. Each “value” was the topic of a single forum that was moderated by a member of the senior management team, including the CEO. Employees comments reflected the “good, the bad and the ugly.” Instead of running from the bad and the ugly, Palmisano viewed negative input as a mandate for change. Tags helped sort input, which informed the creation of a new mission and values statement. The company eventually held adjunct Jam Sessions to identify operational roadblocks to adoption of the new IBM way.

If President Obama and the United States Congress could outsource the healthcare debate, IBM would be the perfect partner. Imagine if we “jammed’ the healthcare bill. Each major tenet could be debated over a 2-3 week period and include anyone in the country who wanted to learn and participate. For example, one week, the focus could be “cost reduction”. This umbrella topic could be broken down into several sub topics such as “tort reform”, buying insurance over state lines”, “public option” , “pools”, etc. Before jumping into the jam session, the participant could view content that provides context for each topic. A few experts could debate the pros and cons of each topic and then citizens could jump into the session and comment. Following the “open jam” period, comments could be analyzed and used to create a “mission” for each topic. This mission then would be sent back out and people could give a thumbs up or down for each sub topic. Sort of a mash-up between Yelp, Ideastorm and IBM’s jam sessions.

Congress could augment this online debate with town hall meetings held simultaneously around the country in movie theaters. This approach was used by Buisness Week several years ago for its annual two day business conference. Live speakers were at various venues and teleconferenced to audiences in movie theaters around the country. Interactive devices facilitated audience participation and captured feedback instantly. This opens discussion and participation to audiences with no access to or comfort with online social tools.

The integration of on-and off-line engagement is  a best practices often missed by marketers. In this case, it also provides a very important choice for how to engage citizens.

Congress would then use this feedback to write a bill that reflects the will of the people. This of course has been one of the big criticisms of the current process: the will of the people has gotten lost in the shuffle. Another drawback of the recent debate has been the sheer size of both the House and Senate bills. A Healthcare Jam would break it down and give people an opportunity to learn in smaller bites, participate and “vote”. What a concept. It’s a little bit like “democracy in action”.

Let’s Jam!

Vegas is like being at a party in a house with no kitchen.

This statement is designed to startle your brain, which is naturally in a static state. It uses schemas to keep its carbon footprint at the bare minimum. Schemas are mental short-hand for how the world works, or for how the brain believes the world works. They allow the brain to function without exerting undue effort. Interrupting a schema stimulates thought; the brain needs to actively process the “unknown”, which stimulates conversation. Blending two disparate schemas together into a new mental model also creates the same disruptive patterns.

Academia has long embraced cognitive science as it applies to learning and rehabilitation. Now, application of cognitive science is gaining a foothold in the business world. A great example was presented recently by Steve Knox, CEO of Proctor and Gamble Tremor. They are using cognitive scientists to help understand word of mouth and why people talk.

Here are a few of the examples he gave during a presentation at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s (WOMMA) recent Summit.

Disrupting a schema: Let’s say you arrive in the UK and rent a car. Yikes. Before you arrived, you knew that you would be driving on the ‘wrong” side of the road in a car with a steering wheel on the wrong side of the car. Yet, you talk about it because it helps you resolve the disrupted equilibrium that happens when you disturb your normal mental model of driving. Eventually, you get used to this new driving pattern and do not have to actively think about it as you drive. But, when you return home, you may have to reset your “normal” driving schema.

Disrupting schemas is a way to potentially stimulate conversation and spread word of mouth.

Conceptual blend. This is where you blend two familiar schemas to create a new unfamiliar on. One of the examples that Knox used in his presentation was the I Phone. It was a phone AND a computer; the combination of which created a whole new category. People talked about it because the very combination of two familiar devices created a disruption.People normally viewed the phone and the computer as two separate, distinct devices. When a brand creates a new blend, it owns the space. It is the epitome of first mover status.

Knox cautioned the group that applying these principles requires deep knowledge of cognitive science and hard work to strike the correct balance. The key is to use the following four questions as a guide:

· What is the foundational truth of your brand.?

· What schemas are at play?

· What would disrupt a schema?

· Are there blends that make sense?

So, why does the first sentence of this post make you stop? First: our mental model of Vegas is decidedly not one of a party in someone’s house. And, secondly, every house has a kitchen, right? These disruptions can take us on an interesting path that epitomizes both the art and science of conversation. The application to the science of word of mouth marketing is interesting and intriquing.

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

Our firm, ComBlu, hosted the Midwest regional judging of the WOMMy Awards a few weeks ago, which are sponsored by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). A group of judges from agencies, not-for-profit and big brands got to determine the bronze, silver and gold winners in the engagement category. It was very interesting to see the state of the art of word-of-mouth engagement programs. The entries ran the gambit from internal stakeholder engagement to big brand extravaganzas. The winners will be announced at WOMMA’s Summit in Los Vegas in mid-November so I can’t say much more about the entries or the winners.

One of the best parts of the day was meeting our fellow judges and hearing their perspectives and different takes on the entries, the industry and their own campaigns and programs. One judge was from a local university and mentioned that they had launched a community for parents a few years ago. She relayed how much they had learned over the past few years and talked about how their skills and point of view had morphed to meet the needs of this new social medium. She told a story that occurred early-on when a colleague commented, “There’s no activity in the community this week; isn’t that great?” We laughed because in this instance, of course, “no news is bad news.”

The whole point of the community is engagement with the parents, helping them have a great experience with the university and to feel secure that their children are in good hands. A great mission for a university-sponsored community. Her colleague was applying old school thinking to a new media solution. In the past, no interaction with the parents was equated with no complaints! In the community model, however, they want action and reaction. They want to hear the good, the bad and the ugly. They want to improve parent/university relations and learn from these constituents in real time. It’s a smart strategy; these parents will have a great story to tell other parents in their networks whose kids are considering this choice for higher ed.

This judge’s story was interesting; more so than some of the entries! Not all of them really had a lesson to teach, which I think is at the essence of what an award winning program must do. Award winners should model best practices against a defined business challenge as well as demonstrate exceptional ROI. They also need to be strategically brilliant and stun us with their creativity. Not necessarily their creative, but their creative execution of a well thought through strategy.

Many of the entries did just that while others are still representative of early efforts to give social marketing a whirl. Nothing wrong with that, but I was heartened to see how far the industry has come. Many of the entries demonstrated solid business results and used some tried and true techniques in unusual or new ways. That we have tried and true techniques alone speaks volumes of the growth and evolution of this marketing discipline. I can’t wait to hear about the winners in the other categories. I’ll share more insights from our group after the awards ceremony on November 18^th.

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.

At the end of last year, we were invited by the CMO of a very huge retailer to tout our wares. Our dog-and-pony very quickly turned into a conversation with a lot of probing and debate. At one point the CMO held up my business card and said, “I get about 50,000 of these a year. I throw them in a drawer. What should make me dig through that stack to find yours and give you a call?”

After a few seconds of thought, I replied, “When you want to take your customer relationships from transaction to engagement.” This hit a chord and we left high on the promise that he wouldn’t even throw the card in the drawer.

I’ve since thought a lot about that answer. Marketers throw the word engagement around like Frisbees at the dog beach. It’s a word with lofty goals, implying a rich relationship that deepens and grows over time. By its very nature, engagement suggests a commitment. From the marketer’s perspective, commitment is good; it strengthens customer loyalty, stimulates ongoing conversation and feedback, and results in higher lifetime value. From the customer point of view, commitment deepens the brand promise. The customer develops affinity for the brand because they have a role in how it evolves and grows.

Many brands don’t understand how to truly engage with its stakeholders. They take a one size fits all approach to engaging customers. Few recognize that commitment is not easy. Hiring a team of mommy bloggers is not engagement. Building a branded community isn’t necessarily it, either. Nor is surveying customers, launching a Facebook page or producing a viral video campaign.  These things are simply tactics; they do not unto themselves matter unless they are done cohesively.

Engagement results when you find the nexus of stakeholder needs and interests and your brand’s legitimate role in fulfilling those needs. It requires the recognition that people fulfill their needs in a variety of ways and that your brand is just a part of how they approach a specific part of their life. A brilliant engagement strategy helps individuals aggregate how they approach a special interest or need. The brand thus shows its commitment by truly engaging in ways that are important to its stakeholders.

Next time I get the question about “why should I call you?” I’ll answer a little differently. This time I’d say,” When you want to help your customers pursue, organize and enhance a lifestyle that includes your brand.” We’re way past engagement now; we’re moving towards consanguinity. Ant that’s a tough tie to break.