Imagine that you are charged with launching a social media program for your product group. You ask your agency to develop a campaign. You think through the risks and rewards and go for it. Now, consider your counterparts in the other lines of business (LOB) in your organization who are doing the same thing. At any given point, each LOB may be thinking about or executing:

· Best practices

· Listening tools and campaigns

· Social media guidelines

· Outside and inside resources

· Platforms and social assets

· Research

· Advocate identification and activation

· Measurement

In fact, here’s the scary scenario: each LOB may be going down these paths separately and independently. At ComBlu, we’ve seen this over and over, and this practice is almost as prevalent today as it was during the wild, wild gold rush days of social media. Let’s think about what this really means.

· Scenario One: Group A wants a listening program and goes out and gets a license for a tool and trains some people to use it. At the same time, another group, licenses an entirely different tool and assigns one person to be the “chief listener”. Yet another group hires an agency to listen and respond for them and a fourth LOB contracts for a huge “listening study”. Yikes!

· Scenario Two: Now, these same four groups all decide they need social media guidelines. They each either develop their own or hire someone to do it for them. The result: four separate, sort of similar guidelines across four different LOBs.

· Scenario Three: Three out of these four groups all buy the same study from Forrester or another respected research firm

· Scenario Four: Two of these groups each buy a different community software platform and later decide they want to integrate their community experiences..

You get the picture. No standardization. No governance. No cost sharing. No knowledge sharing. No Center of Excellence (COE).

Many brands have Centers of Excellence for shared services and resources across their organization. A marketing department might have a COE for interactive, research, experiential, etc. And, a few are starting to add social marketing or social media to the COE approach. They are creating and sharing guidelines for listening and social media interaction, standardizing to a single community platform and listening tools, buying research once, and so on. Some are even meeting regularly to discuss best practices and parse their individual experiences with a vender, campaign or tool. But, here’s an interesting observation: they are not eating the social dog food. For the most part, the COEs are not using social tools to facilitate sharing and conversation about experiences, resources and approaches. They aren’t using rating and ranking systems to review venders or to get a view into planned programs that might provide insights or leverage between divisions, geographies or LOBs. They aren’t creating UGC or aggregating thought leadership information. They aren’t saying: “we’re in the early planning stages of research about XYZ that might benefit others. Let’s form a group and plan and co-fund it.”

One of the missions of ComBlu is to help organizations socialize their business model and supporting operations. We think brands would be better served by taking a COE approach, and using social tools to accelerate and facilitate adoption. The prize? Efficiency, effectiveness, bandwidth, cost savings and

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.

I love everything about spaghetti. I love throwing it on the wall to see if it’s cooked. I love slurping the long noodles straight from my plate down my gullet. I even love wiping the excess sauce from my chin. (I’m getting hungry!) Spaghetti is a great meal but as a collaboration strategy, not so much. For that, you definitely need lasagna.

We’ve been working with a lot of folks to design and build internal communities. Some want them to drive customer experience; others want them as part of their reputation management programs. Many are most interested in using them for collaboration and knowledge management. They realize that their current cultures don’t facilitate change. As they move away from a transactional relationship with customers to being more customer-driven, they want their culture to morph into one of rapid innovation and growth. Internal communities can be an accelerant of change and offer a new model of collaboration with internal teams as well as with outside stakeholders. Communities provide a horizontal cut across the silos that stunt growth cultures.

As organizations adopt a more inclusive business model, they find that their knowledge and intellectual capital is stored in virtual vaults across the globe. This is the preverbal spaghetti bowl of resources with no elegant way to get to them. Despite spending quizillions of dollars on CMS, ERP, CRM, knowledge management systems and other ways to centralize and organize organizational knowledge, access to pertinent research, studies, background and strategy documents remains elusive Worse, the person sitting in the cube down the hall may have oodles of expertise locked in h/her head and the person who needs it has no way of knowing.

This is when my thoughts turn to lasagna. All those skinny noodles of information need to be merged into a single lasagna noodle. A well designed community can blend the best of social networking with access to multiple content management systems to yield an easier way to tap internal experts, access pertinent content in one place and manage projects and teams. The social tools of community can quickly winnow ideas and concepts, uncover and dispense with roadblocks, encourage sharing across silos and reward innovation and growth in a personal and meaningful way.

A simple but elegant design is just the starting point of any successful community. As with external communities, advocates are the heartbeat of the community. Or, maybe in this case, they’re the meat sauce! Advocates organize, mentor, collect and share information from multiple sources, step up when either leadership or expertise is needed and model new, desired behaviors. While the lasagna noodle is the unified infrastructure that provides a single platform for community functionality and content access, the advocates are the spice that gives the community its flavor and zest. Others gravitate because of their energy, but stay because they collaborate in a more meaningful, efficient way. So while I’ll continue to slurp spaghetti from time to time, I’m definitely going for the lasagna when building communities. Next week, I’ll tell you about strawberry mess.

I recently attended the Community 2.0 conference in San Francisco.  I am going to try and distill my experience down into a couple of key thoughts about what I learned.

1.  Brands have begun to understand the importance that their operation (i.e. the other elements of the business that deliver against the promise they tee up).  Granted, I think they knew these other areas were important, it is just that for the first time, operational aspects of the business can participate in brand building…using community and also social media tools.

Community infrastructure allows for dialogue and learning to occur between the parties involved.  It’s two way.  Everybody gives and takes.  Community.

Social media tools allows for a broader reach of a brand message at a lower cost than traditional mar-com tools.  Oh, if done right, they are also more measurable.

Marketers seem excited…and a bit concerned with the challenge of ‘operationalizing’ of social media and community efforts.  Why?  Their job just got more complex and more important all at the same time.

2.  Agencies still want to cram everything into the shiny penny they are selling.  Forget whether it belongs or not.

Plus, based on the tweets I saw during the presentation on risk planning that Drew Bartkiewicz gave, most agency attendees feared they would start bleeding from their ears due to the ‘blandness’ of his topic.  Another attendee from the brand side commented, half joking, he may as well been presenting the value proposition of patent law….those that ‘got it’ understood its importance and paid attention but this importance was lost on a big section of the participants-mostly because it wasn’t sexy.  In my opinion, it was their loss; the people who paid attention were smarter for it.

In the end, there were a number of terrific presenters and marketers attending that are asking smart questions.  Some great lessons learned but we still are not addressing the big issues.  Such as:

• What’s the overarching strategy for either social media or community…or both?
• How do these efforts deliver business value across the organization specifically?  What is the ‘ratio’ of activities which get applied to categories such as Advocacy, Feedback and Support and what’s the value we attribute to each of these categories, as well as, the ratio?
• How does the organization (beyond the marketing department) play a role on an ongoing basis?  How is this defined and managed?
• What are the real and hard metrics which prove value and sustainability?  How are these metrics aggregated across the organization, absorbed and acted upon?

Interestingly, and not by my design, these questions and topics marketers were focusing their questions mapped to the slides I included in my last blog post, ‘Community by the Numbers’.  I shared the draft of that blog posting to a number of people and was urged to publish the first installment during Community 2.0, which I did.

Granted, these are hard topics to tackle.  However, nothing worthwhile is easy.

Recently saw an interview with Jack Welch on Morning Joe. He commented that we need a new word for these economic times…….a descriptor that lands us somewhere between “recession” and “depression”. I guess we’re too sick to be a recession but still have too strong of a pulse for a depression. So: decession it is.

Whatever we call it, lots of conversation and content focuses on “the use of social media to save marketing dollars” during this decession.

Let’s press pause and think about this. Regardless of economic conditions, business needs drive marketing approach. Social media only makes sense IF it has a legitimate role in delivering on objectives. Too often we see companies adopting social media or building an online community because a) it needs to be crossed off a list, b) it’s ‘cheap” or c) there’s a new cool tool that is just too irresistible

The result is a mish mash instead of a strategic mash-up. Said another way, there’s lots of disconnected social media experiments that do not roll-up into a strategy. and offer few meaningful metrics against business drivers.

Isn’t this current “decession” a good time for us to not only find ways to drive marketing efficiencies but also to thoughtfully integrate social media into an overall strategy that will drive growth?

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.

Recently, I got a call from a friend of mine. He’s a pretty smart guy, but he began our call like this. “Hey, I may be an idiot because I don’t understand something that seems so mind-numbingly simple. Can you help me?” I asked him what was bothering him. He said that over the last couple of days he’s responded to a couple of surveys. One he got in the mail, another came as part of a sales receipt where he dialed into an 888 number. The third survey he had just finished and they had called him. In each instance he had been asked a question that made no sense from his point of view.

My friend owns a successful manufacturing company and has undergraduate and graduate degrees in finance, so he sees things pretty black and white. He has been a loyal customer to each of the brands to whom he’d responded to the survey information, so he was happy to take the time to complete each survey. In each survey, they asked how likely he would be to recommend their brand to others. He responded that he’d be likely to do so.

Seems simple enough, right?

Wrong.

In reality, as he said, he is very uncomfortable in imposing his point of view on others, unless they specifically ask him what he thinks; which is a rare occurrence, since he doesn’t tend to talk about such things regularly. Moreover, currently he isn’t recommending any of these brands to anyone. Not that he doesn’t love them; he said that he did. He just doesn’t go out of his way to do it, isn’t doing it and can’t remember the last time he did. This concept really bothered him.

He said to me, “Steve, the survey is worthless because it is going to report something that isn’t happening. They should have asked me if I was recommending them. Right?”

He continued, “It reminds me of a former salesman I had. He’d put into his sales forecasts projects he thought would close when he had no data to prove they would. He just felt good about the opportunity. In the end, he was trying to create a reality that really wasn’t there.

When I got rid of him, I personally went out and met with all our key customers and asked them for their honest appraisal of us. What I heard wasn’t all pleasant but it was what was keeping us from winning all of their business, so we went away and acted on what they told us.

Knowing that information was critical, it wasn’t pleasant but it was necessary. Since then, we’ve doubled our profitability and have not lost one customer. Our prices are 20% higher than our competitors. We couldn’t do this without customer advocates and we would have customer advocates without meeting their needs. We can’t meet their needs unless we know what they think.”

He’s right again. Being likely to recommend doesn’t mean you are or will. But it sure makes it easy to say “yes” and marketers feel better about reporting the fact that 85% of their customers are likely to recommend their products and services.

Sounds a lot better than currently 18% of our customers actively recommend us on a regular basis, doesn’t it? So his question to me on why this was is a good one, as was his point. What do you think?

Why is the phrase ‘are you likely to recommend’ used instead of ‘are you currently recommending’?

The answer might lie in the fact that if not enough people are recommending the brand.

Might it be because the experience falls short and that would require real and meaningful change? Perhaps it is because the brand does little to engage them as advocates? I couldn’t give him a good answer why there wasn’t (to use his terms) more of a ‘concrete present value’ to most of marketing.

In the past, I had given this friend Fred Reichheld’s book, ‘The Ultimate Question’ as well as, a couple of others such as ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ and ‘Return on Customer’.

He liked each very much but in the end, his opinion was that it easier for marketers to keep creating TV commercials with good looking actors portraying happy customers and asking if consumers might possibly be willing to do something sometime in the unspecified future than truly engaging the customer, asking tough questions and instituting real change to meet their needs and requirements. That was my friend’s point of view. I thought that this story was worth sharing.

Here is mine: The one word you need to know to grow is ‘are’ (as in are you recommending).

It is time to stop talking about customer engagement and do it.

It is time to stop thinking we know what is in the minds of our customers and invite them into the process.

It is time to treat our best customers better than our next customer.

It is time to stop worrying about politics of making change and act.

It’s time to stop organizing focus groups that include people who have never bought our products and probably never will.

It is time to stop talking to our customers and start talking with them.