Before my brother, Fat, (don’t ask) lost his job, he didn’t know what Linkedin was. Fat is 53 with a stay-at-home wife, a four year old son, and a nine month old daughter. He got married for the first time at age 49 and quickly made up for lost time! He received word two weeks before Christmas that he would soon be “on the street.” It’s an understatement to say, he was motivated to find a new gig.

His soon-to-be former employer gave him a reasonable package, including a stint with an outplacement firm. At first, Fat thought all the seminars and meetings would detract from his job search. But, he attended and found it time well spent. One day, he asked, “Kathy, have you ever heard of something called Linkedin?”  To which I replied, “Yes, of course; why do ask?” He responded, “The outplacement firm wants me to use it to find a job! Seems weird to me.”

He gave it a whirl. Today, my brother is a Linkedin master. With handouts from two “Using Linkedin in your job search” seminars as his bible, he tackled a social world previously unknown to him. While he only added a total of 15 connections, he used his targeted network surgically and effectively. He:

• searched for contacts from past jobs to build a network
• found family, friends and friends of friends and reached out to them
• asked for introductions to people who might be able to help him
• found people who could give him insights into companies that had openings
• joined the right groups
• identified people who could “sponsor’ him into companies that had jobs posted on various job boards
• got the skinny on people with whom he was interviewing
• ratified information he learned from companies he interviewed with

He took to Linkedin like a snowstorm in ski country, which should not have surprised me. You can walk down the street with my brother in almost any neighborhood or city and three people will stop to slap him on the back and say “hey.” This happens in the neighborhood where we grew up and on the streets of Paris. Fat is a natural networker. He’s smart, charming and self-effacing. To him, Linkedin was a tool that let him be him to the nth degree. It was efficient and effective.

And, yes, the story has a happy ending.My brother starts a new job in a week that’s a perfect fit! Now, he is a Linkedin evangelist. Unemployment hit my extended family particularly hard. I have three nephews who have been out of work for 15 months, a sister who got laid off late last year and another one who lost her job about eight months ago. Stephen is paying it forward by sharing his knowledge and helping anyone who wants it. Another microcosm of the power of both networks and community. Oh, and family, too!

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.