I’ve always loved the phrase “Grandmother Research.” It’s a casual approach to gathering input about a topic of interest. The person conducting the survey asks everyone they know about the topic and then forms a point of view that reflects common wisdom. Not very scientific, but probably a good indicator of opinion trends among people you know and trust.

My personal Grandmother Research today is around the topic of social marketing and its adoption among major corporations. I’ve formed an opinion based upon experience in the marketplace and numerous conversations with other practitioners of the art. The common wisdom among this group is this: the sophistication of social marketing is rapidly evolving as the market becomes less experimental and more strategic and integrated in their approach.

Here are five emerging topics that we find interesting and encouraging:

• Engagement. Marketers understand today that engagement is a faceted process that gets better and richer over time. The old one size fits all model is giving way to more personal interaction that is based upon profile information, actions, participation patterns and feedback.
• Community Without Walls. Some organizations are firm believers in engaging in branded community sites while others stick solely to Facebook and other mass social media outlets. Some do both with very little integration between the two, although our research shows that this is starting to change. The best practice is to do both with tight integration between all social assets.
• Reputation Management. The art of rewards and recognition is following the community without walls model. Companies are beginning to understand that they need to aggregate reputation of their members and fans across the cloud. Badges should be present across the full engagement lifecycle; not just on a single property. Likewise, rewards should be tied to activities and contributions throughout the cloud, not as separate programs for each point of engagement. This integrated approach is in the seedling stage, but adoption is growing.
• Advocate Segmentation. All brand advocates are not created equal. Many organizations have forwarded a segmentation model for advocates; the most recognized is probably the one created by Forrester. A few years ago, we did a study for a client where we overlaid nearly 100 of these models and surfaced the four most common advocate types. The four (creators, critics, connectors and collectors) work well as a basic segmentation model for engagement. The trick is to understand your business objectives and aligned social engagement strategy, and then actively recruit the type of advocates who will most constantly help you achieve your goals. Your RepMan system and measurement approach should track levels of engagement by advocate type and provide insights for ongoing recruitment, engagement and campaign strategies.
• Metrics ≠ ROI. Marketers have lots of metrics, but do not know how to efficiently mash-up suites of them so they tell a story. Social engagement has three distinct pillars: feedback, advocacy and support. Each has its own associated set of metrics that come from multiple sources. The industry is starting to “get this” and approach ROI in a way that matters. For example, knowing engagement levels is a metric, but is not necessarily an indication of ROI. When combined with five or six other metrics, however, a story begins to emerge that shows how engagement can lead to revenue growth or to adoption of a more efficient business process that leads to cost savings. Many organizations are still stuck at the metric level, but the conversation is definitely focusing on true ROI.

At ComBlu, we’re excited about this new level of discussion. In fact, much of it coincides with the current work that we’re doing. Part of my Grandmother Research indicates that our growth will come in these very areas. To handle this, we’re always looking for smart people and feel blessed to have just added one such professional, Dawn Lacallade, to the ComBlu team.

As an expert in community strategy, advocate activation, social engagement and social media, Dawn brings added firepower to ComBlu. Her forte is building healthy, thriving on-line communities and integrating social media into the marketing mix.

Before joining ComBlu, Dawn was head of Social Media and Community at Solar Winds, a Network Management Software Company. In that role, she was instrumental in embedding community experience throughout the product lifecycle from innovation to support. Prior to Solar Winds, Dawn held several community positions at Dell, including Manager-Dell Ideastorm and Manager–Dell Community Forums, where she led the evolution from the focus on support forums to a broader integrated community strategy.

As a recognized thought leader in the on-line community space, Dawn is a frequent speaker at industry conferences including Community 2.0 conferences (3 times), WOMMA Summit, Microsoft High Tech Summit, Google Product Management Leadership Summit, Social Media Breakfast, e-Business Conference and guest speaker on multiple webinars. Dawn is one of the founding members of the Community Roundtable and a member of the Social Media Breakfast and the Social Media Club.

Dawn is great; I even think my grandmother will like her!

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!

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.