Right before the holidays I had the honor of presenting at the All Services Social Media Conference, which was sponsored by The School of Continuing Studies at Georgetown University. The event was part of an ongoing initiative spearheaded by Colonel Kevin Arata to share social media experiences, best practices and approaches.

Lots of smart people and big thinkers presented at the conference. One of the best was Peter Klaus of Fleishman-Hillard’s Digital Media Team. He presented a case study about a program his team put together for the Department of Defense. Called That Guy, it uses an interactive social website as a pivot for a widespread campaign to curtail substance abuse in the military. One device is a set of clever interactive “trading cards’ that help a person self-identify as a specific species of “That Guy”: the comedian guy, the angry guy, the dancing guy, etc. (you know who you are!) The cards list behavior traits, link to video, provide a way to send the card to a friend who fits the description, and so on. The site uses every motivational and teaching device that appeals to its target including humor, games and even a bar calculator for those who are only motivated by their pocket book. Check it out; wonderful program.

Some other sessions were lead by Katie Paine (measurment0, Rohit Bhargava (engagement) and Andrew Krzmarzick of GovLoop.

I led a session about how to plan and build a strategic social marketing plan. The session sparked a lot of audience participation and of course, the interaction and shared learning among the participants was where the real value occurred. Representatives from across our armed services shared challenges that they face in managing and integrating disparate social media programs. I was blown away by the savvy and sophistication of the questions and insights of the group. At ComBlu, we work with a lot of experienced marketing teams of major corporations, and talk to countless others every week. Many of these conversations do not match the social media knowledge or maturation levels displayed by the mostly military audience at this conference.

I should not have been surprised. Look at the social programs the military uses for recruitment, addressing the concerns of parents and other family members, supporting the efforts of military commands, etc.These are just a few examples. There are many command social media sites, user generated communities for parents and families that are not sanctioned but supported by the military, Department of Defense programs, etc.

One observation about all this activity: just like their corporate counterparts, the military social media approach still seems to be one of “experimentation” or what we call “lots of bricks; no building”. Many public and private organizations have yet to create a social strategy mash-up. Our recent research shows that only 20% or so of major corporations exhibit a cohesive social marketing strategy. While this is starting to change, ultimately the full value of social marketing will only be realized when it is integrated and organized in a way that leverages brand value and offers stakeholders a easy, comfortable way to engage.

We’re about to release findings from some research ComBlu conducted to gather insights about the state of online community marketing. Without getting too far ahead of ourselves, let me share one observation after diving deeply into over 125 communities that were built by 45 different brands. Many companies are still taking a computer science approach to community building vs. a social science orientation.

Here’s the big insight: only a slight fraction of the brands we reviewed show any evidence of a cohesive strategy. Many seemed to still have a “build it and they will come” mentality and left the community to its own devices. This epitomizes the computer science orientation: get a platform, throw a community out there, and hope for the best. This flies in the face of using communities as a core engagement strategy.

Those communities that were high performers typically exhibited lots of best practices. This is a very important point given that the best practices are almost all some flavor of an engagement tool. And, that’s where the social science comes in. Brands build communities because they want to engage with customers and other key stakeholders. The whole point of having a branded community is to have purpose driven conversations about topics that are of genuine interest to both the company and its customers. This requires the brand to really think through how to provide multiple, meaningful paths to engagement. The brand needs to be an active participant in the community and interact in ways that resonate with members or visitors.

Conversations are two-way activities; it’s essential that the community sponsor exhibit signs of life. It’s imperative to have a strategy for what to do with feedback, ideas, and insights. One of the worst practices we saw was a community that solicited input and then used an automated response that told the person to contact customer service. Ouch. The community IS customer service! That’s what is at the heart of engagement: knowing customers and using that information to serve their needs.

Another aspect of engagement is modeling behaviors and organizing activities that make each person feel affinity with the brand. In essence, taking a social science approach to community building provides the gestalt of engagement. The community sponsor needs to unite elements in such a way that the ultimate experience can not be derived from a simple summation of its parts. It is a symbiotic bond that spawns new experiences and deepens engagement from the collective life force of the community. In the process, all parties learn and grow.

So, it’s no real surprise that those communities that offer multiple ways to engage scored high in our research. What is shocking is the number of brands that go to all the trouble of building a community and then neglect it. Instead of building a significant asset, these brands are simply using a social platform in a very tactical way. At best, this represents a huge missed opportunity; at worst, It just doesn’t do the intended job.

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.

So here’s the thing: I love American Idol. Maybe because when I was a kid I loved all the different amateur hours that were on TV…Ted Mack, Star Search, the Gong Show. I also love America’s Got Talent, mostly because it’s a two-fer: “American Idol meets The Gong Show”. Idol’s Season Eight is rapidly coming to a close, which means I’ll get a few hours of my life back. So, what does this all have to do with the price of beans? Simple. American Idol is a great microcosm for some community best practices.

Community is a place where people connect around a common purpose. American Idol brings together a huge group of people wanting to be the next big thing in music. The season takes us through try-outs, which eventually winnows down to the final 12. The community members can participate and interact with the show in a variety of ways. This process gives us a peek into community building, scaling and measurement. Here’s how:

· Great communities have an advocate base at their core. These are the people who create content, are highly productive and typically are highly rated for their efforts. Smart brands use a specific methodology to find and activate their advocate base. In our American Idol model, the contestants are akin to the group a brand would look at to find their advocates. The 100,000 that tried out this year were systematically filtered according to specific criteria. The judges, who represent the brand,  ultimately only see a few thousand of these contestants, who have already been screened by producers. This is exactly the role of an identification algorithm. It screens a large group and gets it down to a smaller group. Ultimately, the behaviors of this smaller group determine those who are truly advocates and which of those are the top tier or high performers.

· In our American Idol example, the top tier advocates are the top twelve that make it through to the 12 week elimination round. These advocates get special recognition, engage in a distinct way from the rest of the membership base and are constantly ranked and rated by both the judges (the brand) and the show’s viewers (the community membership). This is exactly how a reputation management system should work in a community.

· As the season progresses, the community members can engage with the show in a variety of ways. They can view the show, vote for their favorite contestants, download songs and videos from the show, engage through a variety of social media tools, and even see favorites from previous season’s perform on the results show. After the season is over they can see a live show of the top ten and they contribute to a charitable cause, Idol Gives Back. We call this an engagement strategy. Unfortunately, many communities that we study offer very limited ways for members to engage. The community manager fails to recognize that a membership divides into distinct personas who all engage differently inside a community and throughout the social eco-system. Without multiple ways to participate, the community can quickly become a ghost town.

· Our final node of this analogy is measurement. American Idol has a huge metric: their weekly vote count which is typically in the tens of millions. They can monitor if this count trends up or down and compare it to comparable periods from previous seasons. This is an engagement metric that goes way beyond viewership or page views, which is a typical metric that many online communities use. But Idol can also have a dashboard that shows contributions to its charity, impact on advertising revenue, sale of merchandise and records, tour revenue, etc. They can actually measure the impact of community on sales drivers or KPIs. Every community manager should be able to create correlations between community actions and KPIs or they will not have what we call a “dashboard with teeth”.

Idol is the original engagement –based TV show. Its producers devised the concept to change their music business. They had interests in finding talent, producing recordings, selling the most records they could, producing concerts, and managing the talent they have under contract. They used TV in an entirely new way: to build audiences for their new artists before ever producing a record. That’s what community should do for brands. It should be a game changer.

So anyway, I’m rooting for Adam ; let’s see if the community agrees