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

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.