When helping brands and organizations think through community strategy, we are asked a handful of questions by almost everyone. They fall into three major categories:

· Overall approach and program design

· ROI

· Resource allocation

The first two are very specific to the mission, objectives and business drivers of the organization. To some extent, so is the third but I think the ‘gravity” rule applies. What’s that? Pauline Ores, a community whiz at IBM, is fond of saying, “Community is like gravity; it only come in one flavor.” She goes on to make the case that fundamental principles of community design apply equally across every industry. What works in tech also works in consumer products. The customization comes from the content, tools, and engagement strategy that you employ.

Here are xxx “gravity” principles that apply to community resource allocation.

· Designate a community strategist: This person is primarily responsible for:

•  Identifying business goals and aligning them with community and social marketing programs.
•  Ongoing approach and applying a best practices orientation to the program.
•  Integrating the program with other marketing and operations campaigns
•  Identifying key social marketing and community trends and separating fads from useable applications and tools
• Assuring community profitability: developing cost/benefit models and developing ROI modeling

· Assign a public community manager. This person has several responsibilities. including:

• Serving as the human face of the community. This is the go-to person for members when they want to interact with the company; not just each other.
• Engaging members in a variety of ways. This requires a comfort level with chatting with customers, understanding their concerns and being open about the probability that desired actions will actually occur in a stated time frame. In my experience, many marketers only deal with customers in the abstract. They view them as personas, objects in a video, data points or from behind the mirrored glass of a focus group. They don’t really deal with them day-to-day. The community manager needs to be comfortable in this role and can offer invaluable insights to the organization.
• Managing key community functions and activities. These include:

1. Create quarterly engagement approach
2. Maintain Reputation Management system
3. Direct other team members
4. Analyze trends and work with Community Strategist to determine implications and impact
5. Serve as community advocate for internal company audiences and business units
6. Field and manage requests from other business units for advocate or program access

• Being the voice of the brand throughout the social eco-system. The community manager should be visible both inside the branded community location as well as maintain a high profile at other social destinations.
• Managing customer advocate relations. Care and nurturing of customer advocates is essential for optimizing this strategic business asset.
• Moderating disputes and community sentiment. It is essential for the community manager to intervene as appropriate when the community is veering into negative territory or one of its members is behaving badly. Often, self policing among community members handles this before formal intervention is needed, but the manager must be aware and know when to act.

· Give an Engagement Manager responsibility for:

• Executing engagement strategies including online and offline events
• Managing ongoing recruitment and advocate on-boarding

· Appoint a community operations manager. This person could be the same one as the public community manger but has very specific skill sets. H/her is responsibility for:

• Monitoring community health and wellness. Maintaining an early warning system signals when the community is in distress or thriving. Each call for action; just different ones. This person is part strategist; part analyst.
• Moderating specific actions and activities. The majority of this can be automated if you put in the right back-end and admin tools. Someone with half a lobe working needs to watch, though.
• Overseeing everyday QA of the platform. Nothing frustrates visitors and members more than slow nav and broken tools.

· Allocate dedicated tech genius. Every organization I’ve ever worked with has a long queue for dev work. If your community is going to be successful, you’ll need more than a few forums and standard widgets. If no one inside your company’s IT department knows and understands community beyond what comes out of the shrink wrap, find a go-to outside resource that is platform agnostic, can help you choose the best platform for current and future needs and can help you scale. This person should also bring you new ideas and new social tools that can help you integrate your social presence both inside and outside of your community.

According to Forrester community expert, Jeremiah Owyang, successful community marketing requires dedicated staffing. In addition, a study by Forum One quantifies the optimal staffers for community is 6.5 FTEs. In our experience, this resource load is often too steep for organizations in the formative stages of community building. ComBlu typically takes a “build, grow, transfer” approach with our clients. We serve as an outsource for much of the heavy lifting during the early stages of community building. As we move past pilot into the growth stage, we begin knowledge transfer so an internal team can eventually take over the running and managing of its own community assets.

This model with tweaks for individual needs is the gravity rule for community resource allocation.

Ford Motor company’s biggest competitive marketing weapon is a doddering 100 year old.  Actually it is about 100,000 doddering 100 year olds.

The other day I went to a meeting and the person I met drove up in his Model T.  Well, it isn’t every day you see a Model T, so it attracted a bit of attention. 

So when a throng of people gathered around, my friend was more than happy to answer every last question and show it off.  It isn’t pretty, but surely a piece of living history.

I learned that there are about 100,000 of them driving across our U.S. roads every day and driven they are.  Heck, there are about a hundred in my neck of the woods.  Their owners drive them a lot.

Unlike another friend of mine who owns a different type Ford (a GT 500 that turns more heads than the Model T), which seldom makes its way out of his well appointed garage, the Model T’s are driven a lot and pretty much all the owners are like my friend.  They love to talk about the car, the history of Ford Motors, etc.  Their knowledgeable, have great stories (like the pictures that Karl carries in the car of his grandfather in his horse and buggy on his way to buy this very car) and are generally likeable people.

Apparently, the Model T is bomb-proof.  As a lot, they were well designed, well engineered and well built.  He changes the oil, using the original glass container and changes tires using the original jack and tools, which while ancient are as functional as the day they were made. 

My friend’s has had no major work since it was bought in 1927; still it runs and runs as reliably as his other car, a Volvo.

Hmm.  A direct comparison between a new Volvo sedan and a Ford Model T, and he is serious about the correlation.  He talks about Ford value and engineering and he gives examples….on occasion, using the car.  Heck, we even got to see what real floor boards look like! 

I learned a lot in talking to Karl about Ford, some things were factual like the use of vanadium that was came from the wreckage of a race car.  Nobody in the U.S. knew how to make this metal (which was much lighter and three times stronger that traditional steel of the day).  So, Henry Ford financed and set up a steel plant to figure it out and then make vast supplies of it.  I learned that 30 types of black paint were used.  Why?  Because the car was built on an assembly line (the only one at the time) different mixtures dried at different speeds, and that, along with the parts the paint went on impacted potential choke points in the assembly line.  Don’t think in it’s day that wasn’t wicked-smart innovation.  Other things were anecdotal.   Both were interesting and informative the way no tv commercial or YouTube video ever could be.

Let me tell you that the people who were asking Karl questions very much pay attention to what he says and he answers them and advocates in a very genuine way.  To the person, they leave the conversation with Karl with a very different perspective and a very positive impression of the Ford brand. 

So Ford has 100 Ford Fiesta running as part of a social media campaign designed to drive interest in the European version of the car, which will debut here as the 2011 model.  Ford, like all of its, solvent and bankrupt competitors spends hundred millions of dollars on marketing.

I would content that while all of this is fine, spending the equivalent to one television advertisement to support an ambassador program of Model T drivers to spread the word about Ford Quality and value (remember, value is the new black), as well as, fuel a grass roots movement to the return of value.  Ford style.

It’s my guess that that such an approach would exceed the results of traditional mar/com tactics in terms of engagement metrics…by a lot.  A big bang for the buck. 

So Bill, if you read this and I hope you do, you need to focus on tapping into the passion of your customer base and utilize what drove Ford to prominence in the first place:  Innovation and quality.  It’s all found there in that 100 year old car and its loyal, passionate, visible and quite large owner base.  I bet if you asked nicely, they’d help.

Traditional approach to marketing a brand?  No.  Innovative and effective?  Yes.

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.

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?

Ok, I love M&M’s.  Who doesn’t.  My two year old daughter really loves M&M’s.  To her, it’s a food group.  Me, if I was trapped on a desert island and could only take one candy, it would be M&M’s. 

I doubt I will ever be put in a position to make this kind of critical decision.  Although I sort of wonder what kind of creepy reality would force me to have to do this…but that’s another blog post.  Indulge me, it’s Friday.

I saw a tweet come through from a friend of mine, Virginia Miracle (veedub to her friends) about the M&M Mbassador program.  This factoid will be important later (veedub, not the program).

Being the good student of community, I followed the link to the Mbassador home page.  I immediately dove into the comments…before I even read the post.

There were about a half a dozen comments which oozed affinity and brand loyalty.  All sorts of love.  Several craved more interaction.  They essentially said, '”Hey M&M, here I am.  Involve me!  Work with me!  Tap me as a resource!  I’ll do anything, just don’t shut me out.”

I dove a little deeper.  Lots of comments and stories about the love people have for the melt in your mouth, not in your hand chocolate crack.

When I Googled M&M Mbassador program, there it was on the top of the list.  But there is a problem (can you find Waldo?) .

If you look carefully, I was dropped on VeeDub’s page straight from Google.  The page his hosted by SatMetrix.  C’mon guys, this sort of thing is bad form!

Here is how I got to it:

I finally went back to read the original post that was prompted by Virginia’s tweet.  Here’s how it reads:

I feel for Emma.  She sounds pretty down and out.  Reading between the lines, I’d bet that you don’t see any form of direct consumer engagement coming back anytime soon.  I hope it does.  Engaged and excited consumers who love the brand are a great way to extend understanding and product adoption and use.  Heck, just look at all of the UGC people have created on their own.

A friend and colleague of mine, Pauline Ores has a great line…”Community is like gravity'. It is the same for everything or everyone.”  Or at least it should be.  Good community works the same for Apple as it should for M&M.  That is to some degree if management gets it or understands its value. 

My guess is the folks at M&M are making a short term P&L decision.  Understand it.  Too bad.  If I see more commercials of un-dead, man-sized candies playing good cop/bad cop on TV, I’ll be even more disappointed.  That means the brand chose the easy generic impression rather than an integrated customer engagement path.

What a bummer.

Recently, I was interviewed by Tom Searcy, the President of Hunt Big Sales.  Tom has spent nearly two decades in CRM, having run and sold a large CRM call center and software business. 

His recent business, Hunt Big Sales

helps sales forces from Fortune 500 to high growth entrepreneurial businesses maximize sales activities.

Thought you might enjoy.  You can download or stream the podcast here.

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.