Conversation Agent

Brand Matters

"Companies that place high importance on managing the economic value of their intangible assets and primarily their brands, consistently outperform basic economic measures."

[Interbrand Top Performing European Retail Brands, 2008]

I was reading an article in Ad Age about how, increasingly, the people who handle the brand inside organization are being considered for top jobs.

Brand matters. It contributes significantly to the company's value. Lived and owned rather than an afterthought - a deliberate, two-way conversation between a company and the marketplace - a brand is a powerful asset.

Especially in an increasingly crowded competitive environment. A brand that does well by its customers earns a positive reputation. It in turn translates into positive cash flow. There is a correlation.

How do we measure it? Is there a way to make it truly apparent? Start with what happens when the brand is not a valued asset inside the organization.

• the vision, mission and value statements read like those of just about any other company and nobody can possibly see how they come alive, how people live them;
• every business is a silo. It develops products or services in a vacuum, and articulates what the company does differently. There is no central core to vet new products and services against;
• the marketplace is quite confused about what it is that you deliver. There is no brand promise to fulfill, to rally around, to make decisions by;
• there is no compelling reason why or unifying idea behind why a business is in business;
• a line item that contains activities around branding is the first to be cut into oblivion, and with it potentially the company. Did I mention that there are so many choices today?

You know that these symptoms tend to seep outside the confines of the organization. We're in a connected marketplace. When we buy anything at all, we sign up to join a story. The story could be that of using the cheapest toothpaste or most convenient store, but make no mistake - we make decisions and trade offs based on brand stories and experiences all the time. 

I like the idea of exercising, but I do not like gyms - they are noisy, crowded, sometimes hardly clean and expensive. My return on effort is not there. And I do not like paying annual fees on top of monthly fees with no guarantee that I will be able to use the equipment I want, when I want it. Recently I started taking Pilates classes.

The place where I go offers the right kind of environment for me. The largest crowd you'd ever have is 5 people so the instructors have plenty of opportunity to help everyone. You book a machine online ahead of time, the hours are flexible, and the fee is flat per month - you go as many times as you can/want. The brand experience is: personable, flexible, convenient, and fun. Oh, and the reason why you'd go? It promises to make you fit, I am already seeing the results.

Do you have a brand matters story? Today at Fast Company I discuss how cost cutting choices are cutting brands short.

Now you know what to look out for and have your example in mind. How do you calculate brand value?

According to Interbrand, it is at the intersection of brand strength analysis and the role of brand analysis. You take the benchmark of your brand's ability to secure ongoing customer demand (loyalty, repurchase/reconsideration, retention) and reference that to the measure of how the brand influences customer demand.

To calculate the value, Interbrand uses financial forecasting - branded revenues minus operating costs, taxes and capital to get to intangible earnings. To separate the role of branding from things such as R&D and management expertise, they use an analytical framework. In B2B, the brand is usually one purchase driver among many. This is expressed as a percentage.

The assessment of brand strength determines the specific risk of the brand. The net present value of the forecast brand earnings discounted by the time value of money and the risk that the forecast earnings will materialize. Interbrand refers to a wide array of primary and secondary sources that are applicable to each brand. These include amongst others; Datamonitor, ACNielsen, Gartner, Hall & Partners, etc. in addition to a network of brand valuation experts. More in the report.

If this sounds fairly complicated, go back to how hard it is to explain to the organization that people do not want to buy your products or services because your brand experience and reputation are poor.

"When the value of a brand is recognized by its owner, the brand strategy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Designing Business through Interactions

Recently, I've been coming back to the question of designing business. Who does it? How is it done? Do we design business through interactions?

A long time ago, what brought us the tools we now take for granted - the mighty mouse, the flat screens, the software and hardware - was the desire to design interactions with technology. Those stories are told in Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge.

The focus of design is the end user. The enjoyment that individuals - we - gain from using well-conceived products is the hallmark of good design. We design story, an experience, and then how that transfers and translates into our lives. The meaning we derive from it.

Digital technologies designed for interaction with simple interfaces - Twitter, IM, LinkedIn questions and answers, FriendFeed, email, text messaging, even Digg and StumbleUpon to a certain degree - allow us to shorten the distance between ideas and feedback. An outcome of that is in some cases a connection. Do interactions help shape business, too?

Maybe we can ask this one differently - why wouldn't they?

There was another book that was seminal in my thinking around Designing Business, written by Clement Mok. I had the pleasure of meeting Mok at a Fast Company Real Time event in Phoenix back in 2000. Funny how things we pick up along the way are like seeds that start growing us in new directions when properly nourished.

Many of the notions in Mok's book are starting to take hold today. Throw away the org chart and put in an information architecture - what do you see? What are the interdependencies? We all understand what identity design means. It is not the domain of logos and style guides in corporate environments alone anymore. We go back to the relevance of micro interactions to feed what that is and means from the outside in.

The word "interactivity" has become a computing buzz word, but it has a meaning that illuminates and ultimate goal: to create a totally immersive experience. I would add that it infers a correlation between things and carries the ultimate goal of human communication.

If interactions are designed to be transformative experiences, then the business where the interactions occur, will be transformed.

[image adapted from a 1991 HBS report diagram in Mok's book.]

There's a Randy Pausch in Each Person

This past week, Randy Pausch, professor at Carnegie Mellon University and author of The Last Lecture [video is 76:00 minutes], died of pancreatic cancer. He was 47. [Jeremiah Owyang]

In reading the comments to posts like Jeremiah's I often see one or two that say something to the effect: "we need more people like him." This is the same thought I've had on the rare occasions when a mentor or an individual went above and beyond the inspiration meter in my life.

It would be easy to let ourselves off the hook on this one. Pausch was a smart, articulate, and cultured human being who dealt with his circumstances the best way he knew how. Who can claim all the same conditions? Why does anyone need to in order to make a difference?

How many opportunities do we miss every day to do the connective thing? Why do we often choose to focus on what's different instead of what is common? What can we do to start behaving like we mean to be inspiring, helpful, constructive? Maybe part of the answer is to become that way. I suspect that in most cases, we are distracted and off balance when the world bounces off us.

The economic model has moved to a conversation where every interaction counts. If I could design like David, I would express some of his charts as waves, others as evolving circles with downward and upward curves. We are not ever exactly in the same place - not companies, not people, not markets.

Interactions mattered to humans before. Yet today, it is the sum total of experiences people have of you as well as those you have of companies and people that drives behavior. That is at the heart of brands - where they become lovemarks. Today brands are not only trying to create an experience, but also working on closing the loop on the experience people have. The two could be different. They often are.

Economy also comes into play when we think about transactions. Our customers are not seeking interactions with us every time they buy. We do not seek interaction with everyone we meet. There is a cultural undertone to this discussion, too. I remember when I first came to the US, I thought it strange that everyone would greet you with expressions like "how are you doing?" or "how is it going?" and then not wait for the answer.

In fact, on many an occasion I learned that the person asking was using the phrase as an expression, not as a true inquiry. They really did not want to know! Think about the answers we offer, though. In the US, we generally say "good," or "well." In Europe - Italy and France specifically - we'd say "not bad." Of course, the response is situational and depends on whether you know the person or not.

Back to Pausch. His lecture linked above is about helping others achieve their childhood dreams and achieving your own dreams. I achieved my first dream twenty years ago. Since the age of six, I wanted to live and work in the US. The other big dream of mine will probably take a whole life to realize. What will get me closer to that one will be how I deal with the learnings from working to achieve other dreams. Not all dreams come true.

What dreams do you have? As Pausch said, remember that brick walls are there to train and demonstrate your resolve, not to keep you out. Some brick walls are made of flesh. If you're going to do anything pioneering, you will get arrows in the back. This is very similar to what I remind myself - you know you're onto something when you encounter opposition.

When you hold something dear, give it to someone better than you to take it forward. If you watched the video, you know to pay attention to the head fakes, they matter to the conversation.

Blog Council Unveils Disclosure Toolkit

Today the Blog Council unveils a disclosure toolkit. Before I get into what these checklists are designed to do, a word about what the council is.

It is a volunteer group of companies designed for members to share insights and experience with each other. Period. We participate in monthly conversations to learn from each other about the applications and lessons learned using social media.

We also meet face to face a few times a year. I attended the last workshop in Chicago and helped facilitate a discussion around engaging detractors - something we're all called to do from time to time. What the Blog Council is not is a trade association, or a standards body.

As I stated in a previous post, it is important to me to have a peer group of professionals on the client side just like me. We face similar issues with social media. The group members are personally impressive - each brings a list of accomplishments and a passion for conversation that is valuable to the group. And they are all generous with their time, smart and nice to boot. Many have their own blogs and social media footprint, just like me.

One of the issues we discussed that comes up often is that of disclosure. How can we help companies develop their own set of guidelines on disclosure? What has worked for the companies in the companies already using social media? The checklists that resulted were the outcome of our brainstorm and are meant to be for training purposes.

As well, the tool kit is intended as a constantly evolving body of knowledge on best practices. Clearly, we are all learning continuously thanks also to the feedback of our communities. Anyone involved in social media knows that there is no final way of doing things, just an open and long conversation.

"Blog Council members are leading by example. We're putting this out there to show everyone that disclosure is the right thing to do," said Andy Sernovitz, "Disclosure seems difficult at first, but it is actually easy to do well. We put these checklists together to make it straightforward for any company to figure out how to do the right thing."

After thinking and talking about the name for this group - Blog Council - we decided that it's a keeper. Yes, everyone is aware of the knee jerk reaction that the initial announcement provoked in the blogosphere. Whoever has been there first tends to be quite possessive of how everything is defined. With about two years of blogging and seven plus years of community building with the Fast Company network I still consider myself a newbie. The name is easy to remember even as we apply the learnings and sharing to all sorts of social media. So it stays.

There are plenty of people I should thank for my sticking with this blog and learning about social media. The excellent marketers, idea and branding gurus, context builders, business advisers, communications ninjas, new media evangelists, relationships teachers, and professionals who share their knowledge through publications. An honorable mention also goes to my friends who practice marketing in Italy. You will find all these individuals on my blog roll - a living testament to the kind of talent that is out there.

This group here, the members of the Blog Council, help me differently. They are my control, those who live my reality (or a similar one) day in, day out. There are smart consultants out there, but they do not have a desk inside a corporation like I do. They do not have the business reality I face every day to contend with. Sometimes, what they don't know makes all the difference. That's why I value these peers.

In the end the conversation is not quite about technology at all. It's about people, how we relate to our experiences and working environments. How we show up as human beings. It is my hope that these checklists will help business owners be more prepared to wade into the waters of social media alone or with the help of their agencies.

What is the Most Valuable Function Online?

That would be search. It allows you, the user, to find information and content you need and want, fast. Google gets that, and they serve your ads with it. Search also allows a site owner to figure out what people are looking for - there are services like Lijit that give you a snapshot of what people looked for on your aggregated content.

Take publications with great content and deep, digital archives, and you can see why. There are already a few search APIs out there - the New York Times announced one recently, so did NPR and TechCrunch. [hat tip to Jeff Jarvis]

If you scroll down on the Daylife page, you will see the corner dedicated to the API. One cool thing I like about their implementation is that it, like Lijit and other search APIs, allow you to see what others have found interesting. Given that peer to peer impressions are much more powerful than any content source alone, transparency in that function is a bonus.

Will the use of APIs change news? Has news changed on the basis of readers and listeners comments? What will you do with the data? How do you use the search results of your publication? Do you feed them back into the way you plan content and what your business offers?

Take a practical application for entrepreneurs - patents. There is a Google AJAX Patent Search API you can use. I am also intrigued by Jarvis' question. If you could access any data through APIs, what would you want to access and what would you do with that data?

If search is an important function, what you do with the results, the data? Will it help you take your business forward? How would you go about it? We have gotten really good at collecting and amassing enormous amounts of data. What stories will emerge when the data is actionable?

The Social Banner

Gianluca over at [mini]marketing has an interesting proposition about banners - what would happen if we made them more social?

When I looked into banners for digital advertising I was not impressed by the metrics - the number of views that translated into clicks is not at all as good as traditional trade print media. That despite, as Gianluca observes, online ads being increasingly bigger, bolder, more intrusive, dynamic and interactive. Why is that?

Could it be because we cannot interact with banners?

I just finished reading Herd by Mark Earls, a book that explains and demonstrates through stories how it is the interaction between people that makes things interesting to people, not so much the things themselves. A social event, a blog with critical mass, a Tweet that stirs more emotion at the right time are likely to draw a bigger interaction - and thus more interest than spaces without an existing conversation.

I see it here - the first comment is the hardest one. If nobody else is interested, I can hear you say to yourself, it must not be good. We had this discussion a long time ago.

What makes the banner stand out as an anachronism online? According to Gianluca:

1. It is probably the last or near to last element of the Web that does not have a permalink or a feed. I like how he puts it - it's a door to door sales person. You either buy now, or forget about it. Somehow this image conjures Willy Loman and his attempts to hold on to the way things were in the face of change.
2. It wants a one to one with you. You cannot share the banner across networks and with other people. That is a shame because applications are growing explosively on Facebook. What is your message doing there all alone? Wouldn't you like some engagement? Although Maurizio in the comments points to a Nike ad that does have a share button.
3. The banner is antisocial. It does not want to connect individuals to others who have also clicked on it.
   
4. It does not want to have a conversation. How about feedback in any form? I know we pay attention to the stars on Amazon with the reviews.
5. A banner is usually not interesting. Would you tag a banner as favorite? How about linking to it?

Maybe you do not need the data, you know that we truly hate banner ads and at best we are quite indifferent to them. What do you think? How can we get over the "make the logo bigger" syndrome?

Gianluca may be onto something with the social banner idea. Mostly because I do not think we have seen yet implementations that go much beyond mass marketing. Is the banner the :30 commercial of the Web?

Are we missing a fundamental idea of the Web here? Is there opportunity to create interactions with assets (banners and the like) that encourage engagement?

I'm warming up to the idea of using games both for educational purposes and immersion. They could be especially useful if your product is complex or your service is quite difficult to describe in less than a couple of sentences.

If it is true that online we are all one click away from each other, what are the implications for the micro?  If the banner ad is antisocial, how can we improve it? I go back to the conversation we had on marketing by context building. Here's where I see the opportunity. Apparently, so did Google.

I'd love to hear your take. I could not think of one favorite banner ad. Do you have one? Have you an example of an online ad campaign - client or agency - that worked? Here's a perfect venue to toot your horn. Bring it on.

Micropipelines and Implications for Digital Marketing

Isaac Mao has a thought-provoking post on micropipelines as unblockable infrastructure. This is how many-to-many relationships develop and work.

[image created by Isaac Mao]

The digital revolution has given us more than the opportunity to find any kind of content we want or connect with anyone - a-la one click of separation. One day we may well have artificial intelligence agents as discovery channels. In the semantic Web, pipes could talk to each other.

This indeed opens all kinds of possibilities for individuals to organize themselves. It makes the world not as flat as we'd like to think - given means, tools, geography, etc. - certainly it makes it a lot smaller.

Clay Shirky provided ample examples of such movements in his book, Here Comes Everybody. One such example is that of the music industry that used to provide a service by distributing music and images. This was their business model.

Today users themselves can post videos and share music, in ways that are far easier and more convenient for them. The music industry, however, is not ready to change its model and is fighting those very people that are passionate about spreading the word. Where could it add value? 

John Lambie of Bates 141 has a few ideas. In his presentation he moves in the direction of read/write/execute, where the customer customizes. How do marketers get ahead in this environment where the customer customizes, her device is her, he's at the center of the universe, she is her media, and commerce becomes "meCommerce"?

By being open, inviting, listening, asking, responding, sharing, questioning the macro, and observing the micro.

Digital Marketing

view presentation (tags: digital marketing)

1,800 in Extreme Scale Collaboration Game

Imagine 1,800 people collaborating in an alternate-reality game for 32 days. This was the world without oil game played in 2007.

You have this massive multiplayer collaboration through gaming that is also a competition to build a reality that looks more like our favorite game - to become more engaged with the real world.

Jane McGonigal of the Institute for the Future (IFTF) organizes this kind of reality game. She recently talked at the 2008 New Yorker Conference about Saving the World Through Game Design.

IFTF examines the past to understand where the current stories came from and take a peak into the future. They call it foresight to insight to action. Some highlights of McGonigal's talk are very applicable to where digital interaction is moving towards today.

At the earliest recording, Herodotus wrote about the invention of gaming 3,000 years ago. It was fundamentally in response to social crisis. In Libya, which is the region he writes about, they were having a famine. Dice games were played on alternate days because people were so immersed in games that they would forget to eat on those days.

This, according to Herodotus, went on for 18 years in society - eating and playing games on alternate days. Some say that this story is apocryphal. His philosophy though was that we can find moral truths in the concrete data of experience. And there are four moral truths in his recounting:

1. immersion - it's about immersing yourself in an interactive system and your engagement with other people playing games; that is the core of what would enable people to not eat. Have you ever experienced being in love to a point that you forgot to eat to be with the subject of your affection?
2. constructive response to a social problem - we could create games that try to address a social problem.
3. invented to alleviate suffering - this is a possibility. Game designers talk about games being the ultimate happiness engine. When we are playing a game, we are not suffering. This leads me to think about the whole conversation around ego and forgetting oneself during immersion.
4. feed a kind of hunger - we have a hunger for engagement. Economist Edward Castranova observed that "we are witnessing what amounts to no less than a global exodus to virtual worlds and other online gaming environments." Just to give you a scope - the average gamer spends 24 hours a week in this multiplayer reality. It's a 50-billion dollar industry. 

In societies where we're not trying to survive, we have a massive cognitive surplus says Clay Shirky in an essay on the topic. An excerpt:

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're going. That's the phase we're in now.

Read on for illustrations. Participation is better than being passive - in the long haul it promotes engagement and helps build a new body of knowledge. What would happen if we could map all of the pieces of information each one of us has about locations, issues, businesses, problems/solutions in one place?

Note to marketers and communicators: have you found all the places where readers, customers, employees have been locked out without a way to add, comment, build on, modify to customize your experience?

McGonigal hits on an observation I made several years ago. Teenagers are known to play pranks, alas sometimes not figuring out that destruction of property and nuisance are not so much fun for those they are inflicted upon. They do that because we're not so good at not having to survive the moment when they will have their rite of passage.

In tribes, you had to measure yourself against some lofty feat to become an accepted member of society. You had to show you could survive. They prepared for that. What happens when that challenge is taken away?

There are other essential elements of gaming in addition to measuring yourself against odds - knowing where you stand, getting other players to help, being recognized by the community.

An example of a game-like experience is the dashboard of your hybrid car - it gives you information on how you score against your goal of saving gas/mile. Another example is a game called chore wars where you get experience points for chores you do around the house. There are also sensor-based exercise games like Nike plus. How about a social network for your dog embedded in his collar tag?

To go back to where we started this conversation, if you go to The World Without Oil site, you will be able to view the alternative reality game archives, including lesson plans for teachers.

Would you like to play a game? Go ahead and log onto The Lost Ring.

This is a brand new alternate-reality game Jane McGonigal built in occasion of the Olympics. Nobody knows how to play it yet so if you've ever dreamed of being an Olympic champion - this is your chance. The idea is to transform the Olympic Games from a passive to an active/participatory experience. I will add - from a closed to an open system.

Are you in? 

Related links:

Six Front Pages and the Future
Using Foresight to Promote Strategy and Innovation
The Future of Advertising: Playing Games

How does a Company Dip its Toes in the Conversation?

Start with the proper attitude. There is a bit more to that, as it turns out.

There have been a lot of discussions about chief bloggers, social media experts and where blogging and social media fits inside an organization.

While establishing roles and responsibilities is important, there are a number of things an organization can do to start dipping its toes in - to use an already oft-invoked term - the conversation.

My friend Scott Monty started a new job last week. He is leading the social media efforts at Ford. A marketer by experience and trade, Scott has worked both in B2B and B2C environments.

He is my kind of professional, someone who thinks that the convergence of marketing, advertising and PR on the Web has implications - for marketers, agencies, the enterprise and the individual. Start with that thought.

Marketers, communicators, public relations professionals may all be suited to lead efforts in a new direction online (and off line), if they have the support of the leadership team or whoever runs the business. The right individuals:

(1) understand what business the company is (or should be) in - conversation is a vehicle for the exchange of information and meaning, not an end in and of itself. Underlying every piece of information that is crafted should be a robust value proposition as in why customers buy what you make and do.

(2) connect the dots for your customers and for the organization - the most critical communication role in an organization is becoming that of the diplomat with a touch of storyteller. What are all the pieces you need? How do they fit together to convey meaning and transmit value? This means having the ability to cut through the organization horizontally. It also means having the ability to edit down, simplify, translate into human speak, made concrete with examples and facts.

(3) know who your content experts are - these are the engineers, the individuals in operations, the service delivery teams, the product or service development people. All those who have expertise in what your company's core business is and a stake in crafting its future. The closer to the customers, the better understanding of the issues, the hot buttons, the learnings.

How do you get started?

While you monitor coverage of your company, begin adding listening to the conversation to it. Truly paying attention to the sentiments, issues, opinions, and kind of talk that goes on out there about your company or your industry. Get comfortable with hearing what is being said. If people are not talking about you, it may mean a number of things. They may not know about you, they may associate you with a brand or a story that does not meet their needs in perception, etc.

As you learn about the types of topics the marketplace is interested in start doing a sanity check on what you are producing. Here's a suggestion that alone will save you a lot of time, effort, and budgets. Stop writing marketing fluff. Refrain from recycling the usual, tired speak. You know which words I am talking about - thought-leader, cutting-edge, premier, expert, etc. It's not about you.

By far the most important, actually vital, part of the effort is internal. Teaching the organization to collaborate across disciplines and titles will be probably your greatest challenge. That will be followed closely by that of getting people to understand the importance of committing to the conversation. The best way to overcome the first part is to help people overcome division for collaboration. Did I mention you need to be a diplomat?

Read this First!

I've shared with many who have joined live conversations with me that not every company is ready to join. Your customers may not want this kind of opportunity. You may already be doing a good job with the tools at hand - customer service works well, people are happy, your products are the envy of the industry and you already have fans galore.

It would also be nice if things were always that way. Companies get in trouble when they take their success for granted, as theirs alone - we have a formula and we can keep doing things this way. Why? Because the market changes and new companies come in to challenge older players often with little to lose and a positive attitude to boot. They take that attitude and apply it to underserved needs.

There are some cases in which your company can't join, as Peter Kim says. The organization is not ready. It may be an issue of culture, it may be an issue of clarity and organizational identity. Social media is not a new channel for the old tired marketing fluff or talk at from the company to its audiences. Seen as another way to just ask a bunch of people to write up stuff, edit, and post it online misses the point. If you have no desire to experiment, stay the course, and learn, if you expect the same scale as in mass marketing (especially initially), this is not for you. 

Some toe dipping for the rest of us

Still reading? Ready to try a few things? In no special order, some of them will look very simple:

• hire great people and get out of their way - if you're not ready to listen to your colleagues, what makes you think you're ready to listen to your customers? Start exercising your listening muscles.
  

• learn to celebrate the right things - a product or service launch is just the beginning, not a destination. If you've done your work well, this will be requested in the marketplace. Good. Now how about staying the course? Let's not leave marketing and sales to hold the candle. How about the whole organization standing behind a product and service? Begin to appreciate accountability at every step of the way.

• read that press release as a reporter would - do you care? What clear benefits are there to users, customers, in some cases the industry at large? If a press release is the wrong medium, how else can you get the word out on an important enhancement, improvement of the customer experience, etc? Learn to think content first, then medium. This about your story. Lauren Vargas has a few ideas about that.

• join a conversation already happening to contribute - tell, don't sell. Take the opportunity to evaluate something on its merits. Share your informed opinion, give before you ask back.

• think humans first, technology second - it's a challenge with so many new tools available. Before you go ahead to make a software recommendation, for example, have you done your homework? How about a business needs analysis? Tools serve business strategy.

• be prepared to address questions, in some cases fast - challenging questions are symptoms, but they can become causes when not addressed. You want to know when you fail and frustrate so you can improve. You want to have the ability to explain why you need to say no. Your voice missing is a silence that will be filled. Why fast? Because the people who speak first are those who really care and want to give you a chance. 

• give customers ways to receive the information how they want it - this can be a blank slate if you have bandwidth. If you don't, how about trying a few things online that are not the usual brochure or sell sheet and see how it goes? That will save a tree or two and keep dead inventory to a minimum. Success will give you momentum to create new ways of having conversations around needs.

• give your customers ways to vote on your upcoming promotion - what would happen if you gave customers and prospects the heads up on your new campaign? Hint: if they'd hit the unsubscribe button before you're out of the gate, you might want to take another look at what you're offering. This option is valid if you know who your customers are.

• get to know your customers - if you don't. Sometimes there is mis-alignment between who the company thinks their customers are, and who is buying its services. This can be a problem in marketing communications, service delivery, new product development, the whole business model. Get out of the office and start joining your customers.

• start with beliefs - mission, vision, even values statements run the risk of being a mere exercise in "what" and not become a living and breathing actionable of "why". 
  

• tell stories that transmit your beliefs - share stories about your exceptional employees, community leaders, customers, even competitors when warranted.

• surprise customers (in a good way) - do something unexpected, not so much to delight, as much as a way to show appreciation for their business.

You may have noticed that I have not talked about blogging, or social networks, or wikis. These ideas are applicable to everything you do. Do you have more ideas? Add them to the comments and I will insert them in the post as an update. To which generation do your current and future customers belong? That will give you a sense of urgency on why and where.

Related posts:

Permission Marketing Revisited
The People Formerly Known as Your Customers
Taking the Measure of Marketing Conversations
100 Thing Challenge
Evolution of Business

Social Media Group Acquires Livingston Communications

Today Maggie Fox of Social Media Group, which is headquartered in Toronto and has offices in Calgary and Washington, DC and Geoff Livingston of Livingston Communications based in Washington, DC join forces.

What this means is that there will be one company, Social Media Group, which will acquire The Buzz Bin and Blog Potomac as part of the deal. The acquisition of Livingston Communications will be completed in August, 2008.

This is good news for companies starting to ramp up their social media efforts. Traditional, full service agencies have been scrambling to add social media to their suite of offerings and what I have seen so far has left me wanting. According to their release, this deal crates the largest independent social media marketing firm in North America.

Social media is not just a wrapper, a cool package that you apply to the old models - it's an entirely different way of opening communications and collaboration channels with employees and customers. New dynamics and new demands for marketers and public relations professionals. Social media engages a company from its core and is a very demanding - and rewarding - proposition. Think long term, think participatory, think "always on".

That is why it's a good idea to work with a team that understands what it feels like to be in a two-way conversation with your business. I asked Geoff to expand on the news.

In your release, you state that companies are desperate for qualified social media marketing and communications services - would you like to expand on that? Would you work with internal staff? Do you take over? What does an ideal mix look like to you today?

Geoff: Companies know they need to evolve their communications — externally and internally — towards the social form. Not necessarily as a complete switch, but more as an integrated evolution. To do that, they need strong, experience based guidance to help them bridge the gap and transform into two-way communication-based organizations.

What’s available to them on the market is often a wide range of traditional PR and ad agencies carpetbagging their “social media” practice, or consultants claiming to be social media experts. These consultants include people who have achieved personal brand fame on the Internet, but don’t understand basic marketing or business strategy and cannot really help companies transform.

Transformation is the key. It’s not a switch you turn on. For many businesses this is an educational process that requires cultural shifts. Experience guiding other organizations through that... And aligning social media to achieve actual business objectives is essential.

A couple of days ago, we talked about PR 2.0. Where do you think social media fits - is it with marketing, PR or does it depend on what the company does?

Geoff: It depends on the company. Social engagement transforms companies, and so two-way communications can affect many different aspects of the company from our PR and marketing echo chamber to workflow and talent management. That makes this a toolset that can do just about anything you like. It is very much a reflection of a company’s personality and soul.

There has been a lot of discussion around ROI. Both in terms of what return means and how to measure it. Will you support companies with the ability to research and measure the outcome of their efforts?

Geoff: We have Social Media Group’s Conversation Index to measure results at any given point of time. More importantly, we believe that performance benchmarks are set at the beginning. ROI is the result, and results have to be in mind before even the strategy is crafted.

So, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, it’s hard to go somewhere if you don’t where that is. And similarly, no communications program should ever be launched without an end goal in mind. Measurement, is simply tying benchmarks to see if the goal is being achieved. It’s common sense.

Often one of the issues I hear being discussed about is that of monitoring tools. Do you have a way to assist companies with listening and responding? What's your philosophy around how fast and when to respond?

Geoff: We have a process for this, too (painfully forged by experience). Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet for tools, but our process includes the use of Radian6, Twitter Search, Technorati and Google currently. Our system provides a daily round-up of general conversation, and also triggers crisis PR for negative posts of a certain assigned authority. It’s been working very well, and I’m pretty happy with it.

My feeling is you have to respond to a negative post within 3 hours if you hope to stymie the blood flow. Reputation is now shaped by not only negative opinion, or a response, but how fast you do it. A response two days later, while important to the blogger, is still a little late, and by then, you’ve lost your opportunity to converse with the readers, and perhaps stop the spread of negative opinion.

[image courtesy of Geoff Livingston]