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.

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.

This morning I had breakfast with a gentleman named Karl who is a thought leader in organizational development and human capital and an all around good fellow.  I’ve reconstructed our in this blog post because it was very insightful.

Karl:  Talked to a FT 500 company yesterday.  They are proud they have no turn-over.

Me:  So?

Karl:  I told them this was a very bad thing for them.  Very, very bad.

Me:  Why?

Karl:  Because when the economy improves the artificially retained people will leave en-mass.  You see, they are staying because of healthcare and a paycheck.  A huge chunk of their employees hate their jobs and hate their employer.  If the government ever gets to some form of universal coverage…and they will, even more people will leave.  Imagine, 20% of your work force, both customer facing and internal facing leaving within one year.  The organizational stress will be beyond belief. 

Me:  Wow.

Karl:  Yeah, and what’s worse, this company and lots of others just like it will go from being a market front runner to a market laggard because of one key thing.

Me:  What’s that?

Karl:  They have very little in the way of enterprise wide customer engagement tools that are solid and embedded into the organization.  That’s a fancy way of saying they haven’t figured out how to engage customers using both community and social marketing tools.  Note, I didn’t say social media.

Me:   Hmmm.  Tell me more.

Karl:  Well, when the collapse comes, and it will, the business won’t have an external support structure.  You see feedback and advocacy is critical to a company not becoming a commodity.  Plus they are totally measuring the wrong stuff!Companies that behave in this manner are not flat.  If they did, they’d be flat.  Size doesn’t matter, culture and focus does.  Flat organizations perform at higher levels. Period.  Let me demonstrate.

Karl takes some of the crumbs from his bagel and scatters them on the floor underneath the table.

Karl:  Hey Mike!  (the owner of the little place we met), your floor is dirty!  Mike comes over.

Mike:  Hi Karl (Karl lives in the neighborhood and goes there a lot).  What do you need?

Karl:   Floor is dirty Mike.  Thought you’d like to know.  One other thing.  Did anybody ever tell you the new menu is too hard to read?  Oh, and the new coffee blend is terrific. To die for. Can I get a pound?

Mike:  Sorry about the floor (someone comes over and sweeps up the crumbs while we are talking).  Yeah, a couple of other people told us about the menu.  Josie is picking up a new one at Signworks this afternoon.  Thanks about the coffee!  You know, I never thought about selling it.  Just serving it.  Think it would catch on?

Karl:   Totally.  Give me three pounds.  I’ll give a few away as gifts and tell a couple of people.  I bet it catches on.  I even have a name idea for you.  By the way, how much do you pay for your straws?  You use a lot of straws don’t you?

Mike:  Thanks for the idea.  Umm, no idea what I pay for straws.    Yeah, we do use a lot of them but nobody has ever asked me about my straws…

Mike leaves and Karl says to me, “See flatness.  Satisfied customer. Instant feedback and results. How many areas did we cover?”

Me:  Let’s see…floor, sign, coffee, straws.  Four.

Karl:  Wrong.  Five.  The name of the coffee.  See, big companies can’t do what Mike does.  He has five employees.  He can respond instantly.  Very flat.  Big companies are siloed and are not flat.  In fact, most are incentivized or rewarded for not being flat!  They can create artificial flatness though.  They can do this by integrating across their organization customer engagement tools.  I like the words you use:  ‘Social Marketing and Social Operations’.  To me that type and breadth of engagement means flat.  Oh, by the way, there is somebody somewhere who is obsessing over measuring their version of straws….even though in the scheme of things, counting straws doesn’t make a bit of difference.

Me:  So in essence, businesses that integrate more deeply with their stakeholders using social marketing tools will always out perform their competitors?

Karl:  Well by stakeholders, if you mean vendors, customers, employees and the like.  Yes.  General statement, but yes.  Most companies can’t or won’t make this type of change until the platform is on fire and even then for some it won’t matter.  Those that do will thrive.  You see everything is interconnected.  Marketing, customer initiatives, product development, operations don’t operate independently.  Or at least they don’t operate well independently.  Heck, you don’t even have to do it all at once.  Start the ball rolling.  As it works, it gains traction and momentum.  Pretty soon, everybody says it was ‘their’ idea.  Oh, and the people sitting in the corner counting straws.  They are quickly reduced to irrelevant quivering lumps of Jell-o.

Me:  Cool.

Karl:  Yep.  Flat is where it’s at.

I had a conversation recently that brought up this interesting question. Since I can’t stop thinking about it, here we go.

Brands continue to take the plunge into the ocean of transparency and consumer advocacy. Turning over the keys and employing user or consumer generated content into a marketing strategy is risky, but, if done correctly, the ROI is huge. This is not news. We already know this, and the reason is simple. Your customers know you. In fact, they know you better than you know yourself. Remember, perception is reality.

Not only do your customers know you, the ones that know you inside and out, have the most influence. Advocate influence directly affects your bottom line–for better or for worse. Advocates make up a critical, but very small segment of your customer base. Size doesn’t matter, because it is their personal experiences with your brand that counts.

Do you have the right set of tools to find your advocates? Ask yourself a couple of questions. Do you know how to identify the right advocate behaviors and traits in the first place? Can you put together a profile that goes beyond database marketing?

Or, are you so focused on the importance of the right demographic and transactional data, that 20-somethings and moms with active lifestyles fit your ideal? Can you apply a loyalty multiplier to understand the dollar value beyond the purchase?

Advocate identification is both an art and a science. Implement a strong methodology behind your customer profiling. Tap into the smallest percentage of your customer base that has the largest reach. Advocates are hard-wired to talk about you. Take a step further and engage with them. Those conversations will be positive and effective.

Empowering your advocates that know you best and letting them speak for you is a smart strategy, but you have to know who they are first.

Do you?

In a blog posted today by Spike Jones of Brains on Fire, titled

Social networks are not what you think they are

Spike shares some interesting facts that come out of a recent report conducted by Noshir Contractor,  Jane S. and William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University.

This group of researchers are studying nearly 60 terabytes (keep in mind 1 terabyte roughly equals 220 million pages of information) of data from EverQuest II (a popular Massive Multiplayer Online Games or MMOG) and interviewed 7,000 players of the game (which makes this one of the largest social science research projects ever performed).

Here’s an excerpt.

“Even though players could play the game with anyone, anywhere, most people played with people in their general geographic area.

“People end up playing with people nearby, often with people they already know,” Contractor said. “It’s not creating new networks. It’s reinforcing existing networks. You can talk to anyone anywhere, and yet individuals 10 kilometers away from each other are five times more likely to be partners than those who are 100 kilometers away from each other.”

This reinforces something that has started to bubble up to the surface and that is: social interaction is social science, not computer science. 

Let me say that again.  Social interaction is social science, not computer science. 

Technology, like the folks at BASF like to say doesn’t make it,   it just makes it better; or more far reaching or more efficient.  Which ever you’d like.

MMOG's and even social networks like FaceBook and Linkedin, even specialty ones like MyShutterspace.com, match.com allow users with common interests to interact and organize around those shared interests and points of view. 

Many drivers of points of view and even worldviews are fueled by geographic social trends.  For instance, if you go to Berkley, you may be a bit more liberal than say someone who attends say Texas Tech.  You are attracted to attend Berkley for the same reason; a more liberal thinking environment where you feel more at home to openly share your ideas an experiences without fear of reprisal. 

Since 99% of people are social creatures, we crave face to face interaction, as well as the same thing: to be accepted by peers.  Therefore, online social networks and interaction is an extension of what we already do…naturally. 

I have seen nothing in the research or programs I know of or am involved in that contradict this general human behavior.

Online environments as this study shows are extensions and amplifiers of social networks, not proxies.  I am posting a blog on this and will link to your post.

So what’s the aha here?  It’s the fact that you should not get caught up in the web 2.0 and social networking hype.  Employ the same planning and customer engagement best practices you would in a web 1.0 or a pre-web world. 

It’s social science, not computer science!

Remember the New Economy replaced the Old Economy cry?  Remember, we were ‘reinventing’ everything.  Didn’t turn out that way.  It was just the economy (although we may wish we had a new economy.)  People work the same way.

Apple has done an amazing job in creating an image and what used to be a customer base of passionate brand advocates.  People who were so gung ho on the brand that they would defend everything the company did, no matter what.  Today, I think they have morphed more into a company that caters to product advocates…people who love their i-phone, their i-pod, garage band, whatever.

Job’s rock-star style of ‘shock and awe’ product releases has created a double edged sword in the sense that everybody expects Apple to turn out fabulous, sexy and useful stuff.  I am going to go on record in saying that Apple’s ID (industrial design) team is legendary.  They could make a doormat sexy.  However, if it is not useful, or user-friendly the value starts to diminish.

I see a couple cracks in the dam that indicate there is trouble brewing.

1.  Apple’s twitter feed has over 24,000 followers.  It does NOT allow for @ REPLIES or RT (re-tweets).  It simply pushes out branded content with no concern or care to who is listening or why.  Marty Collins does a good job breaking this fact down.

2.  Genius bar.  If you have ever used it, unless you are a power Apple user (i.e. know exactly how to work the computer, the website and the system), in which case you mostly don’t need the genius bar in the first place, this is a horrible experience for the average Mac user.  It’s noisy, crowded, difficult to get an appointment and most people end up feeling like idiots and leave disgruntled.  Mostly because the 28 year old person on the other side of the counter (which separates you from them) has a t-shirt on that essentially says, ‘hey I am smarter than you.)  Apple wants to cultivate this image.  They believe it.

But not everybody feels this is a great experience.  On more than one occasion, I have been in a store and overheard some poor customer say either to a genius or to anybody in earshot that was listening, “Are you actually trying to make me miserable?”  or here was a real gem from the Michigan Avenue (Chicago) store “Do you think that you have me so completely that you can treat me like this and I won’t care?  Or that I have no choice?'” 

3.  Apple’s tools and marketing channels are devoid of any voice of the customer.  No UGC, no interactive tools, no learn from people like me, no easy and useful communities of other passionate users that’s integrated with the product. Instead, you find product, marketing content and white space.

In fact, I have to go to France (OK, it’s Sara France) to get to some form of consumer UCG I might find helpful.  But again, this is marketing content.  Not user content.  No way to rate or rank, share, communicate, collaborate, learn or experience. 

As marketing to consumers becomes challenging, not to mention an economy that is making virtually every shopper consider what they are buying, why and what is the value, Apple is on the verge of creating a problem for themselves.  It won’t manifest quickly I think but will come to a boil over time.

I saw this first hand a long time back when Scully headed Apple.  They (and he) knew better.  They (and he) never listened.  They spoke.  The company teetered on the brink because of that. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Apple.  I love the history, I love the overcome all odds mentality, I love the fact that they do get the product experience, every element from the packaging to the plug in.  I have many friends who are former Apple superstars.  Developers and marketers alike.

For Apple to capitalize on their still-strong fame, they need to re-think:

1.  Content only being 1 way.

2.  User Feedback and aggregation of the consumer’s content being a core strategy.

3.  Integration of the user experience into the product (think Yelp, Amazon, etc.)

4. Re-invent the store.

5.  Have a couple of marketing messages, not just bashing Microsoft.  Spotlight your customer!  Geico has a number of methods.  Sure, they are cheesy but it’s unsexy car insurance, not sexy devices.

Just a few thoughts. 

I had dinner last night with an economist formerly who is also a friend of mine and with whom I used to race bicycles.  Years ago, we were both track racers (riding in a velodrome with a heavily banked track).  Our specialty was the 500 meter kilo, a very fast and short race.  Later, we graduated to racing criteriums and one day ‘classics’ races.  In essence, we had become specialists.  Focusing on more dangerous, faster and shorter races.  Neither of us had the gas for longer or multi-stage races.  We’d been conditioned to perform differently.

My friend and I discussed the stage of the economy, covering four important topics.  The stimulus package, the credit lock, the paradox of thrift and wall street’s myopic approach to economic growth.  Each of these things alone are important and will have an impact on our economy for the next 20 years.  Together, no one knows what will really happen.  We have to look to the past for answers. 

The net is that a free market economy always rights itself, as long as it is based on a sound structure.  Unfortunately, the hunger for profit has caused Wall Street to create new financial instruments that are essentially based on nothing other than risk itself.  Derivatives of derivatives.  Not a lot different than playing Kino or Baccarat in Vegas.  Wall Street bet on black and it came up red.

Now that a big chunk of what fuels our economy (i.e. the financial sector) is no longer truly part of the free economy, what with the financial firms being nationalized and all, we are in new brand new territory.

That said, are we are more likely to be seriously hobbled again in the future by Wall Street itself or instead by the Federal Government’s ownership interests.  Truly, these two forces are at odds.  So what will happen?  Will our growth engine of the future be a Hemi or a Hybrid?

What I mean by this can be found in the outset of this blog post where I discuss cycling and the correlation my friend made.

The macro-economic trends which drive our U.S. economy, as well as, the integrated components of our economy that aren’t U.S. based but global in nature.  Not being an economist (like my friend), I don’t want to debate where macro-economics converts to micro and the interdependencies between the two.  Instead, here’s the important notion. 

As a cyclist, my friend and I focused on short, fast races and were not equipped to race longer races, say like the Tour of California.  Our economy is essentially a long race.  Wall Street has trained public companies to race short races.  Meet the quarterly guidance at all costs.  Juice the numbers, move assets, sell at a discount, just meet the numbers so our stock price doesn’t tank and keeps us from borrowing money or selling our bonds.  It’s a vicious cycle.

Getting new products to market, capitalizing on market share opportunities.  These are sprints.  Short races.  Running say Citigroup, AIG, Boeing, Microsoft.  These are long races.  As my friend reminded me, Lance Armstrong won 7 Tours.  He didn’t win every stage, or even the majority.  He won the overall race. 

If we want our economy to right itself, get the speculators and gamblers out of the business decision process.  They will always promote a sprint.  Let them gamble (they always will, we can’t stop that) but not at the cost of influencing the outcome of the longer race. 

Can the Mongols of Wall Street co-exist with their new bed fellows, the shackled and risk-adverse CEO’s, and their new bosses, the beurocrats and politicians of the federal government?  Maybe, if each understands their place on the team.  Sprinters sprint when appropriate and climbers climb when the need to.  My guess is they won’t play nicely. 

The fact is that the Feds never, every give up anything.  So I am not sure AIG will ever return to its previous form.  So, we shall see.  It’s gonna be a long and scary ride for sure.