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.

So here’s the thing: I talk to tons of people every day. Some want to chat about community strategy; others want my grandmother’s recipe for strawberry mess. (It’s yummy) Community and cooking are equal passions of mine so people ask me about both…a lot. In either case, I never stop to consider: am I answering this question as a business professional or as a consumer. I just draw on the appropriate expertise and give my best advice and counsel. If I was having these conversations in a community, I’d gravitate towards places that congregate around community best practices or haul my virtual self to a foodie hot spot. Again, I’m the same person in either place. The only thing that changes is the topic and location.

So, I’m confused when I hear folks in the b-to-b world proclaim that social marketing doesn’t “work” in their industry, marketplace or environment. Huh? People don’t stop having conversations, seeking and making recommendations and taking the advice of known subject matter experts because they are in a b-to-b “place”. As a matter of fact, isn’t this the very essence of thought leadership, the core of b-to-b marketing? Business-to-business is not just selling auto parts to government motors. We live in a service economy where businesses sell high value services to other businesses. These businesses differentiate themselves through their human and intellectual capital and their collective thought leadership. The old-school thought leadership model was a three legged stool: conferences, publishing in third party journals and research/white papers.

Several factors have impacted this model: shrinking news holes, time starved people who can not ‘commit’ to the dense white paper you just published, dwindling conference attendance and younger decision makers who prefer newer, more social channels. This diagram shows how the thought leadership approach is changing.

Lead generation has always been and always will be a social activity. Think back to the old user groups in the tech industry that morphed into online forums and now are full blown online collaboration networks. Social media competence is a must for today’s thought leader. When was the last time you were at a conference that did not give out the conference twitter address or where the real action happened through tweet-ups? GE recently sought internal social media users to serve as mentors to others in the company. They teach each other how to set up a Linkedin account, upload video and comment on blog posts. The goal is to get people comfortable with social tools.

Today thought leaders need to think like a publisher. Content needs to be both smart and approachable. The voice should not be stiff, formal or corporate. Those days are gone. Remember, people are people whether they are reading an eBook or a recipe. Channels are a mix of traditional and new; some are even self-created. Smart b-to-b marketers have their own YouTube channel, LinkedIn groups, and Slideshare accounts. Content spreads virally through content syndication and aggregation. Giving customers and prospects tools to make this easy is a great way to deepen a relationship. Your people need to learn how to tag and re-tag content as well as create link juice. Many organizations have already figured out blogging, podcasts and webcasts, but have not figured out how to syndicate their content or grow their audience.

If done right, communities can be an ongoing research engine for thought leadership. You can use them to recruit people for surveys, gain invaluable insights and feedback that can be packaged for syndication across a variety of channels. You can use blogs and tweets for trend spotting. Many industry analysts signal what they’re working on through Twitter; ditto for reporters, trade groups, government bodies and academics. You can learn a lot about emerging trends and package your intellectual capital to leverage promising platforms.

This barely scratches the surface of how b-to-b enterprises can embrace social marketing and freshen their approach to thought leadership. If you’re interested, I have a deck on Slideshare that explores this a little more. Or, maybe you just want that recipe for strawberry mess. Here you go:

Strawberry Mess

1 pint whipping cream

1 quart fresh strawberries

2 TBS. sugar

½ cup mini marshmallows

½ cup fresh squeezed lemon juice

Remove green stems from strawberries and slice thinly. Add the 2 TBS sugar and ½ cup lemon juice. Let sit for 15 minutes.

Whip cream until stiff (Don’t do too long or it’ll turn into butter!) Fold in the strawberry mixture and the marshmallows.

Fold into a freezer-safe container. My grandmother always used the metal tray of her ice cube trays, minus the metal cube divider. But, you can use a bread pan or a smallish plastic storage container.

Freeze until solid. Take out of freezer at least 3 hours before serving. Scoop out like ice cream and go, “yum”.

Tags: thought leadership, strategy, ComBlu, social marketing, social media strategy, business-to-business marketing,

As I mentioned in a previous post, ComBlu is analyzing the state of social marketing in large corporations. One thing that is clear at this juncture is that whole industries have yet to do more than stick their little toe in the pond. Some of these industries are highly regulated and thus conservative by nature while others just seem to be stuck in an old school time warp. I can not count how often we hear things like: “We’re a b-to-b company so none of this applies to us.” But that’s a whole other topic.

What I find interesting is the disparity among companies in industries that have no obvious constraints. Take the automobile industry, for example. Ford has a long-term plan for its social marketing and will integrate it as part of its “One Ford” business strategy. Others, however, are very car model and campaign driven and appear to be blindly throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks. Even highly regulated industries have pioneers. Novartis and J&J for example are early adopters in the pharma space.

What are the cultural factors that spur one company to embrace new approaches while another keeps its hands firmly planted in its proverbial pockets? Are there clues that can predict readiness for socializing both marketing and operations? Some people have been pondering this very issue: Pharma Marketing News has a Social Media Readiness Quiz that marketers can take. Networked Insights also has a Readiness Survey. In studying cultural aspects of social business adoption, I have concluded that five key categories need to be considered.

Crisis Mode: How a company handles bad news can tell you a lot about its readiness to handle the uncertainty of social marketing.

· How does management react to bad news? Do they immediately go into spin mode or do they present an objective analysis of the situation?

· Is the organizational bias for ‘fixing the problem’ or “sweeping it under the rug”?

· Does the messenger get shot or heralded for uncovering challenges that need to be addressed?

· Is accountability an important part of the cultural fabric?

Customer Centricity: If an organization places the customer at the center of its enterprise, it probably has already adopted social business processes.

· Has the organization “busted silos” that get in the way of serving the customer?

· Is there a process for sharing customer insights and conversation threads that crosses multiple functions in an organization?

· Are departments held accountable for acting on pertinent customer information?

· Does anyone know what the voice of the customer sounds like?

· What listening channels are in place? Are they forward looking or based in past actions?

· What is done with the output form these listening channels?

Innovation: How a company approaches innovation reveals a lot about their agility and durability. It also gives clues as to how open management will be to socializing the business enterprise.

· Is innovation contained in a R&D silo?

· How are ideas generated, shared and evaluated?

· Does the company buy new products and technologies or create them internally?

· Does the company form alliances for R&D or product commercialization?

· Are a broad group of stakeholders encouraged to contribute to the innovation process? If so, how is this collaboration facilitated and managed?

Management Style: Although we thought command and control went out with the last millennium, it is stubbornly sticking around. Even in the age of information overload, some companies still hoard knowledge. Rather than empowering employees, they impose stringent controls. Does management openly share goals, mission, expectations, and results?

· Do they share both successes and failures?

· Is collaboration encouraged? Are their systems in place to facilitate the formation of work groups?

· Is it easy or difficult to work across silos in the organization?

· Does management want to hear from stakeholders or do they already know it all?

· What is the communication style of the organization? Does management interact, answer questions or rule by fiat?

Risk Tolerance. The way a company views risk is a key indicator of social marketing readiness

· Does your company try new, untested marketing approaches?

· Does the organization view progress in broad, sweeping terms or in small incremental steps?

· Are employees encouraged to take risks? Are failures recognized as learning situations or reasons for recriminations?

· Are managers free to discuss new ideas in open forums? Can they share the good, the bad and the ugly?

· Can employees speak with outside stakeholders and media without the presence of legal?

· If the industry is regulated, does legal interpret regulations or guidelines strictly or liberally?

So, is all lost if your culture blows? Not really. Logical starting points exist to get management to say yes. More on that in my next post.

Yesterday I had the good fortune to be with a couple of former NBA greats.  My nine year old son and a handful of his friends had the good luck to spend a couple of hours at Conseco Field House’s practice gym with these guys.  There was a lot of shouting and running and working on the basics. 

During a break, I asked my son, ‘Are you having fun?’.  He glared at me.  This wasn’t quite what he expected.  One of the former players yelled, “Being in the NBA is hard!  This ain’t no cakewalk!  What’s pain? (A: Lunch!)  Will you quit?  (A: Never!  We want more!  We want more!).  Not good enough!  Give me a suicide (sprint)!”

One of the players has a gold medal.  A co-captain of one of the Dream Teams.  During the break, I asked him what it took to win at that level.  Here’s the answer.  “Flawless execution, consistently of the fundamentals….as a team.  Then he added, chance favors the prepared.”  That’s what it takes.

There was something about this quote that nagged at me beyond it originating from Louis Pasteur.  It finally dawned on me last night when I read Oliver Blanchard’s blog post.  Over the past couple of months, I have been growing increasingly frustrated with marketing and a large swath of marketers.  Oliver’s blog brought it up an express elevator from my subconscious, which is where this notion has been sitting, irritating the you-know-what out of me.

Successful teams win by having a culture of ‘we’, not ‘me’ and focusing on everybody flawlessly executing the fundamentals. And they communicate and they measure. Teams that rely on trick plays, don’t communicate or measure performance effectively may win a few games but don’t consistently get to the championship.  Period.

So I was up in the middle of the night thinking about this.  Social media is a tactic.  Media is a venue, a distribution tool.  A tactic.  All of the shiny pennies being promoted as something you need to adopt to ‘join in the conversation’ are the equivalent of a few juiced up trick plays.  For some, it’s easy to pull them out when you have no game plan or your game plan isn’t working. 

The problem is trick plays only work once and usually for a very short time.  You won’t win relying on them.

By itself, social media doesn’t deserve it’s current rock star status and those who are piling onto the bandwagon are really piling onto nothing more than a little red wagon.  Again, it’s marketing tactic, not a business strategy. Note: Little red wagons also tend not to hold up well under heavy load, so beware hard hard you jump. 

If this is true, and I believe it is, where should our attention attention lie?  It belongs in what drives the relationship between marketing, operations and the marketplace.  These relationships should be socialized.  Not just one but many.  Not in an ad-hoc way but in a pragmatic and planned order. 

Why?   Social is an adjective.  In part it means to participate in activities designed to remedy or alleviate certain unfavorable conditions of life in a community.  Great communities (businesses and brands count) are organized and planned affairs.  Am I splitting hairs?  Not in the slightest.

When people work well together collaboratively, they win.  NBA team, swim club, Fortune 500 business, mom and pop shops, doesn’t matter.  The key is focus, collaboration, organization and a single shared goal.  Yes, you need tools and everybody has a slightly different role but without this approach, success is expensive and short lived.

For the purposes of this blog post not becoming horribly long, I have broken this into two steps general steps pretty much anybody should be able to get their head around. 

1. Aligning the groups involved around an organizing construct and getting buy in.  This should generally be organized as shown:

    2.   Map the activities that drive your business into nodes or ‘neighborhoods’.  Define who participates in these and why.  Some will be closer to the marketplace than others but each should be interconnected to one or another node that has ties to the marketplace.  If you map your initiatives, their audiences and participants, if you are honest and performing at a high level (i.e. you are profitable), these initiatives should loosely imitate the layout of these two diagrams.

We call this exercise ‘Urban Planning’.

Here’s an example of neighborhood mapping.

Naturally, users will gravitate towards areas of interest.  Product testing, service feedback and user collaboration are three examples that fit either the operational or marketing functions, however, the learning and outcomes of this collaboration belong to the entire entity, not just say marketing.

If this makes sense but your formal or even back-of-the napkin findings don’t align with the above general structure, please consider using this tool to aid you in your career advancement.

So why is there not more of a focus on this instead of the current fixation on social media?  Two reasons.

1.  Tactics are easier to sell than strategy, unless you understand operational strategy.  Most marketers don’t, nor do they want to.  Business strategy isn’t sexy. 

It also requires discipline and focus. Most marketers aren’t willing to invest in.  The basketball player I talked to said he spent hours a day for years working on rebounds.  Not sexy.  Tiger Woods spends hours a day, every day at the driving range.  Not sexy.  Critical to winning though.

2.  Shiny penny tactics are like drugs.  Especially the tactic du jour. They can feel really good (mistaking activity with results sometimes has this effect) and are addictive but without a good reason for taking them, they can be harmful over the long haul.

Recently, at a conference, I saw a sales guy for an agency deboned by a world class operations person.  He was hyping a simple tool as strategy (in this case, platform measurement software) and streaming buzzwords faster than I could keep count.  He was dead before he knew it and by the time he figured it out it was too late.  There was a subtle gleam in the eye of the brand ops person who had been through the wars and got social marketing and operations on a Ph.D. level.  She filleted the talking head with the precision of Freddy Kruger.

At this same conference, I overheard (as did several others who tweeted on this very topic) two marketers talking about their conference goal was to get a how to guide on setting up a blog to further promote their product and maybe get some customers to create some viral videos for them.  You can’t get any more in the weeds than this.  Enter the trick play and the marketer who sells it.

So in conclusion, ask yourself, how many trick plays are currently in your playbook?  Are you really playoff bound?

The clock is ticking…

Last year, on AMC’s cult favorite, Mad Men, creative director, Don Draper, was talking about a pitch the agency was making for American Airlines. He basically summed up the effort as having “lots of bricks, but no building”. In other words, the team had lots of random good ideas, but no cohesive strategy that was going to drive business for the airline.

What a perfect analogy for what has been happening in the social media space. Companies have been experimenting with social media tactics. In fact, they have petrie dishes all over the place. The problem is these experiments are tactical; akin to lots of random good ideas that don’t roll-up into a strategy. Many marketing teams are tricked into believing that they are growing because their experiments are evolving along with the “maturation” of social media channels. For example: a product group may start with a single Facebook page, then add some cool apps, create campaigns to drive traffic and build their fan base, and eventually run a Twitter stream on their pages. Or, they may start by posting a single YouTube video, then build a branded YouTube channel with multiple videos and “shows” and eventually become a YouTube partner and create campaigns using its contest tools.

I don’t doubt that marketing teams and agencies are learning from these experiments, but the smart companies are starting to “press pause”. Why? Because they need some urban planning. They are realizing that what they are doing on YouTube has little to do with what they are doing on FaceBook. Or worse, they’re finding that they have dueling initiatives from different product groups who are vying for the same consumers and are unwittingly dissipating each others efforts.

Urban planning organizes initiatives around customer groups instead of product groups or corporate initiatives. Customer neighborhoods are defined, building codes developed, municipal services organized, officials elected and neighborhood watch groups established.

• The neighborhood defines the special interests and needs of its designated customer group.
• The building codes establish the rules of engagement such as frequency of contact, how programs are deployed, .
• Municipal services organize and integrate the social media tools that make sense for each group.
• The elected officials determine what tools will be used and organizes the outreach and deployment from a variety of departments or product groups. They also make sure that social media approach is tightly integrated with traditional marketing channels.
• The neighborhood watch group tracks and manages all the analytics and rolls all the social media initiatives into a single, actionable dashboard.

Urban planning is even more crucial when companies have multiple community initiatives. While we’ve been seeing more companies press pause, we think more should do so. ComBlu recently started a comprehensive research project to determine who is an urban planner and who simply has a pile of bricks. Our early findings are interesting, with very few companies or brands having a solid foundation for a cohesive community strategy. So far, we have looked at 3 industries and see many commonalities across them. Unfortunately, these similarities are what not to do instead of great best practices.More on this as the research evolves..

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?