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!

But not from the usual Vegas reasons: staying up late, losing money and drinking too much. I did none of those during the three day WOMMA 2009 Summit in sin city. My excuse is too much information and so many great conversations with little down time to process. So now, I’m in the air heading home with a little time to reflect.

Summit 2009 content was heavily focused on case studies, social marketing techniques and measurement. In fact, WOMMA debuted it’s newly published “Measurement and Metrics Guidebook”, a collaboration of some of the best thinkers in social metrics. Check out ComBlu’s chapter by Jennifer Voisard on cost deflection. I moderated a session on “Community: An Important Driver of WOM” with panelists Dawn Lacallade , chief community strategist at Solar Winds and Bill Johnston chief community officer at Forum One.

And, Steve Hershberger helped lead the live “Socializing Media” podcast which featured a conversation with some of the best thinkers in word-of-mouth. In between hallway chat and keeping up with crucial projects, I attended a half dozen sessions. Here’s some of my favorite take aways.

Measurment Keynote. WOMMA’s chair of the Measurement Council, Walter Carl, PhD, presented highlights of the above cited tome of best practices in measurement. One interesting factoid was the impact of word of mouth marketing (WOM) on revenue vs. traditional marketing communications channels. Turns out the latter does a much better job of generating short term customer acquisition and revenue generation, while WOM yields higher customer lifetime value through longer, deeper customer relationships and a significantly higher referral rate for new customers. (1.7 per traditional channels vs. 3.8 for WOM).

Anatomy of Buzz Revisted. Author Emanual Rosen gave an address on what not-for-profits can teach commercial enterprises about generating buzz. Core to his examples is the concept that human beings want to share what they create. If you give them an opportunity to co-create with you and other stakeholders, they will spread their interpretation of the activity. I think this basic tenet of self-expression as an engagement model has been forgotten in the gold rush of social media and the bright shiny object syndrome.

The View, only with academics. Keller Fay principal, Brad Fay deftly led a panel of academics who all study various aspects of engagement, influencer identification, measurement, etc. You’re thinking this was deadly, right? They were great. Here’s the line-up.

Socializing Customer Service. Sue Sunday, Microsoft, Ed Billmaier, The Scotts Company and Marie Shubin The Gallo Winery, talked customer support. These were from wildly different industries: software, wine and fertilizer yet offered a common thread: the use of customer service professionals to become the voice of the company in social platforms. The rationale: many companies that start listening programs or solicit comments through online forums and communities often get quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of conversations. The solutions: repurpose customer service representatives from call centers or email support. Not only will they be able to handle a larger volume of customer support episodes through the online platform, but they typically can offer marketing three magic things: human resources who already have deep product knowledge and are steeped in the legal, privacy and compliance imperatives of their organizations.

Cognitive Science. Another potentially deadly topic that turned out to be the absolutely best presentation I heard. This one was lead by Steve Knox of P&G’s Tremor Group. He laid out how human’s think and a process for disrupting normal perceptions that serves to get people’s attention. Using this disruption model or combining two unrelated schemas can lead to the magic that we all seek: cutting through the clutter and getting consumers to notice, buy and tell others. This is highly over simplified, and definitely worth digging deeper. Who knew 45 minutes about schemas could mesmerize!

I’ll provide more learning about some of these sessions in upcoming posts. ComBlu also previewed our research report, “The State of Online Branded Communities” which we’ll also dive into in the weeks ahead. Now that I’ve gotten these ideas out of my head, the seat is going back and I’m snoozing the rest of the way home.

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.

Consider these community facts (these are real, hard metrics from a number of brand communities but are sanitized and general for reasons of NDA).  Keep in mind, the metrics I am sharing are only the tip of the iceberg of what can and should be measured to effectively determine a community’s performance.

• A group of several hundred (less than 500) advocates in one community generate over 500,000 page views with the UGC they create.  That UGC they create offsets the need for branded content and is more effective.  Marketing pages that receive this content outperform their traditional counterparts in terms of dwell time by over 50%.
• This content has significantly increased both product use/downloads and ad impressions as measured against more traditional methods.
• This UGC is syndicated into outbound CRM messaging.  Advocate content increases the click through rate by over 40%.
• A group of only 10 advocates within a community, focused on product support, is responsible for delivering $1,000,000 in support savings (as measured by cost deflection) to the brand on an annual basis.

Using a tool ComBlu invented and has spent the last year refining called the Community Performance Index (tm), we can generate a set of performance metrics that helps the marketing and community management team to intimately understand what’s going on in their community, as well as, what is driving that activity.  It gives them the ability to deliver to management quantitative metrics as to the value of the community to the brand.

Think of it like a Community Net Promoter Score, only better…ok, maybe just more evolved than NPS since you can’t triangulate a position (i.e. measure where you are) with one datapoint (try doing it on a map and you’ll see what I mean).  But this is another blog post.  Back to topic…

Also, I  mention both ‘Advocates’ and ‘Members’ when talking about community.  Advocates are the heartbeat of any vibrant community and contrary to some positions, advocates are critical to a community’s success.  Advocates have a different role in community than general members.  Why?  They are ‘wired’ differently than the everyday person.  They are more influential because of what they know and their place in the social graph.  Tapping and engaging advocates early and asking them to play a role in the development and growth of a community is critical.

It’s important to note I am not talking about Influencers.  Here’s how we (ComBlu) make the distinction.  Influencers are people with big megaphones and reach a very large audience.  Charlene Li is a great example of an Influencer.

Advocates are everyday people equipped with microphones.  They broadcast to their social networks and peers.  ‘Andy B.’ is great example of an Advocate.

From the user’s side (either an Advocate or an everyday Community Member), the index allows the community to evolve efficiently, so that it provides a high level of utility to as many members of the community as is possible.  Using the index, it is easy to change what doesn’t work and enhance what does.  From the user’s perspective, the net result is a very positive and sticky experience.  The user wants to come back.  They want to use more of the products and services the brand offers.  They want to advocate about their experience.  They have greater affinity for the brand.  They have fun and enjoy the experience.  The community shifts from a ‘want’ to a ‘need’. 

This activity isn’t limited to just the four walls of the community either.  The content that the community members generate is aggregated and then syndicated out across the Internet, impacting the awareness of millions, even tens of millions who encounter this content; all of which is in the voice of the customer, is first hand and genuine.  Using the Performance Index, even sentiment, reach and impact can be measured.

Granted, all of the content isn’t perfectly flattering.  However, if it is a well performing community, change is a constant and dialogue is two way.  Brand bombs (negative content) is a rarity that more often than not is effectively managed by community members themselves, not the brand.  Good brands don’t hinder negative content, they learn from it and act on it.  Community members help each other have a more enjoyable experience with something they have a shared interest in.  A brand’s job is to listen and learn first.  Then act. 

That is why measuring performance is so key, so you know how and where to act.  Guessing is largely removed from the equation. 

In part three of this blog post, I’ll reveal how Community Performance Indexing works.

Advocate identification entails more than scrubbing a customer database for demographic and transactional information. Quite often my team must defend the notion of the right advocate at the right time, yet it’s hard to resist settling for the easier quantity over the more challenging quality. The end result usually pays for itself, so keep in mind the old adage: ‘You get out what you put in.’

The art of identification is really about finding your most passionate and loyal customers, and putting them at the center of your outreach efforts. All customers are not created equal. If you don’t look for specific behaviors they are hard wired to possess, you’ll find it challenging to build a powerful WOM and communication channel.

The first step is to create an advocate profile. Think about it in terms of baking a cake. Segmenting consumers by the products and services they use is the base, or flour. Flour is an important component, but alone doesn’t give you a cake. Add some sugar and chocolate, time it right, and now we’ve got something. To avoid a recipe for disaster when identifying advocates, you need the right mix of demographic targets, transactional data, brand loyalty, behavioral traits and attitude. Ever see the commercial where the mom mistakenly served a cake made with salt instead of sugar? If you didn’t, the end result was a toxic mess, and a bunch of disappointed kids.

How does this analogy relate to community? Advocates are the heartbeat of any healthy and vibrant community. Engaging with them at the right times, during community design or new product launches for example, will gain you key insights and invaluable feedback. This is why identification is so important. We have seen advocacy programs where salt was used instead of sugar, and the environment proved to be just as toxic. One community example jumps to mind. A private council of advocates was hand selected to engage directly with the brand. The council recruited another community member, who on the surface seemed like a good fit, to participate. Unfortunately the program became this individual’s soapbox, and negativity spread like wild fire.

We use this example to educate our clients on the importance of the right advocate at the right time. In future posts we’ll explore the art of identification and all its nuances. Always remember though, it starts with the proper mix. If not, you may be serving up a cake just as toxic, leaving your customers with a bitter taste versus a world class, melt-in-your-mouth delight.

There is an interesting question.  First, you have to put a definition on what social media is.

This might seem like a silly thing to do for some, but I imagine if you ask the CFO of any business (big or small) what their definition of Social Media is, you’ll get a funny look like, “Huh?  What?  Why are you wasting my time with that kind of question?  I have all this red ink and you want to talk about what?”

So here it goes.  Social Media, defined in part within Wikipedia:

“Primarily, social media depend on interactions between people as the discussion and integration of words to build shared-meaning, using technology as a conduit.

Social media utilities create opportunities for the use of both inductive and deductive logic by their users. Claims or warrants are quickly transitioned into generalizations due to the manner in which shared statements are posted and viewed by all. The speed of communication, breadth, and depth, and ability to see how the words build a case solicits the use of rhetoric. Induction is frequently used as a means to validate or authenticate different users' statements and words. Rhetoric is an important part of today’s language in social media.”

Hmmm.  Sounds like a text book entry (under GAAP Principals), so let me translate.

“People sharing insight, ideas, know how and content with one another using a variety of content mediums that reside on the Internet.”

There.  Social Media in a nutshell.

Why is the reality of social media activity important and why should our fictional CFO care?  For that matter, why should anyone else care besides the marketer? 

Why?  Because social media and the knowledge that can come out of it provides the business a significant strategic advantage.  So who else should care and why?

Well, here are a few, other than our CFO and the CMO/marketing team of course.

1.  CEO.  Social media activity is an accurate barometer of brand equity and corporate reputation.  What social media is comprised of (i.e. what’s inside of UGC) is telling as to the company’s current profitability and future performance.  How hard does the company need to work to maintain market share?  Lots goes into this analysis but social media provides a very real comparable metric to help measure whether the company’s internal metrics are accurate and why.  Being able for the CEO to provide real insight at a shareholder meeting or an analyst conference call is important.  It’s doubtful the CEO will reference his source as a social media output, but that’s not the point here.  Social media’s underlying value is.

2. COO.  Why?  Social media activity both internally and externally can indicate well the business and its resources are aligned within the marketplace to deliver on projections, plans and results.  Social media metrics can be compared with operational plans to see if the plans were realistic in the first place, on target or slightly off.  Social media tools and metrics can offer operators ‘real time’ adjustment indices if used properly.

3.  EVP of HR.  Social media isn’t limited to external venues.  How engaged is your brand and your team.  How collaborative are they (or are they capable of being based on the infrastructures and culture in which they operate)?  There are some big brands that are absolutely committed to this.  One old-line brand, a leading insurance provider even makes this a metric that is presented to the board of directors along with things like net profit.

4.  EVP of Sales.  Sales has a lot it can learn from social media.  Value proposition is best delivered from the mouths of customers themselves, as the sales department always has a primary goal-close the transaction.

5.  VP of CRM.  Once the sale is closed, who owns the customer?  Most likely the CRM team does.  They get measured on support costs, call duration in-bound requests, churn and a whole lot of other customer-stickiness metrics.  Social media helps to deflect a lot of these costs, as well as, understand what’s driving inbound requests and churn.  Microsoft gets this.

5.  EVP or VP or Product Development.  Necessity is the mother of invention.  If you want something to work a certain way, you create a work around.  Sometimes, understanding what those work arounds are helps teams innovate.  Sometimes, it’s just asking for ideas.  www.ideastorm.com is the obvious example.  There are dozens of others…good and bad (i.e. that work and don’t work).  Intuit works.  MyStarbucksidea.com doesn’t.

7.  Institutional and individual investors.  Another  part of doing good homework.  What are customers saying and how well is the brand listening?  There is an old-line manufacturing truism.  To understand how well run a manufacturing company is, simply look at it’s loading dock.  A neat and orderly loading dock says the business is on top of things.  Broken pallets, trash and disarray speaks volumes,  You’d be surprised how many savvy investors who bet (or did before the meltdown) on manufacturers did this kind of homework.  Social media can provide the same sort of insight if approached correctly.

Here’s a proof point.  This factoid was provided by my friend and colleague Barak Libai, professor at Tel Aviv University and Advisor to WOMMA and is taken from a good book by Gupta and Lehmann on "Managing Customers as Investments"  and relates to Cox Communications.

You can see that the defection rate for customers who use the product in a wider way is much lower. Much of this wider use comes from formal and informal social media activities (people helping, showing and spreading the word.  This can translate to double the lifetime value!  

Double…that’s a lot of coin, my friend.

Can social media rewrite business rules?  I am here to tell you that that it already is.  So where are you?  Ahead of the curve or behind it?

I received a comment from Deb Eastman, the CMO of Satmetrix regarding my recent blog post.  Her comment is below:

Steve, I want to clarify a miserception in your original post, M&Ms is absolutely NOT faking customer engagement.  This site is hosted on the Satmetrix Community platform and MyM&Ms used our technology to collect input from highly engaged fans.  However, Emma is an employee of myM&Ms and was responsible for engaging consumers to provide feedback on how to improve their products and overall customer experience.  They made several changes to their packaging, allowed consumers to put their faces on M&Ms and improved their customer experience based consumer input.  Consumers got the products they wanted and M&Ms increased loyalty in the process.  Everyone wins. 

It's unfortunate that budgets are currently impacting their level of engagement, but I expect we will continue to see myM&Ms engage with consumers and improve their products & services based on customer feedback.

This brand listened and acted on customer feedback.  I think most would classify this as genuine customer engagement.

Deb Eastman, CMO

Satmetrix

I would like to thank Deb Eastman for her point of view.  Since the M&M site was hosted by Satmetrix, they cannot, like many professional marketing service organizations, ensure that their counsel will be either listened to or acted upon.   Like the physician who counsels their patient to stop smoking, they simply can’t make it happen, even if it is the right thing.

Satmatrix is a well respected organization and should be applauded for fine work we see from them across the marketplace.

Deb points out that M&M’s implemented a number of key initiatives that came out of customer feedback.  This is great, but is only a start.  True engagement and subsequent performance results comes from:

1. Actively listening to the customer
2. Providing multiple ways for the customer to engage in this process
3. Organizing what was heard
4. Acting on this insight, across the business (beyond just the marketing group responsible for the initiative
5. Reporting back on what can be acted on, what can’t and why (note: Intuit does this with great success.  Intel is starting to do this in partnership with their hardware OEM’s.  Heck, even small firms have seen a more holistic approach allow them to effectively compete against much larger competitors, as well as, remember where their core advantage lies.)
6. Providing active, intrinsic rewards for involvement.  Note I said intrinsic rewards, not extrinsic.  That’s a slippery slope.  Intrinsic means:
   • Thank you’s
   • Spotlighting users
   • Articulate how their idea was integrated into the process, service or product
   • Tapping them as SME’s (subject matter experts)
   • Engaging them as mentors
7. Systematizing the process of customer engagement as part of the culture of the business, rather than a narrow program.

There are also some helpful tips for engaging influential customers (such as M&Mmbassadors) at WOMMA’s website.

Now, I am NOT saying that M&M has or has not done any of this.  Who knows, there may be a lot going on behind the scenes.  I’d love to hear from them. 

Moreover, I’d love to see this program come back…in full force…bigger and better than it ever was.  Since I am a fan of M&M’s, count me in.

Lastly, thanks to Deb at Satmetrix for her comments as well.