Conversation Agent

The People Formerly Known as Your Customers

“The people formerly known as your audience, or the people formerly known as consumers, are now participants in the process of building your brand.”

[David Sifry from blogs as leading indicators, The Economist]

You are not in control of your brand anymore, those people you thought about as targets, audience, or consumers (all words I have a problem with) are now content creators, critics, collectors, joiners and even influential spectators.

They have an influence over the development of your brand. Your brand is personal to them.

How do you invite them to the conversation? You want to learn how to listen to those sentiments and ideas that make up your brand perception and reality in the marketplace.

There is also the other side, your brand needs to have a core attitude that embodies what your company stands for.

This is beyond humanization, it's about putting a face and a personality on your business. Today, we don't just buy a product or a service anymore, we buy how that product and service makes us feel.

How do you enroll yourself in the conversation? Learn how to listen to your own voice. Make that represent the intent and attitude of you brand in the marketplace. What kind of proof, measurement, plans do you need to participate?

Here Comes Everybody

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

[Margaret Meade]

I just finished reading Clay Shirky's amazingly useful book. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing was accurate in describing the content - the book makes sense of the way that groups are using the Internet.

To me it goes beyond that to tell the stories of individuals who have made a difference thanks to the ability to use social media tools and networks to connect with like-minded people.

While we could acknowledge that intent has been there for people to act on issue affecting their communities and countries, we are gaining a full appreciation of what those movements can do only now.

The lessons on the power of technology for social communication and sharing are valid for businesses, too. The same mechanisms that make something worth talking about go viral, can create a problem of massive proportions for a company if the opinion is of the negative kind.

I'd like to be optimistic and think that we can teach ourselves to use technology for positive ends.

In that light, some of the best case studies in the book can teach us how to go about creating value in business from open source:

• How the programming language Perl beat out AT&T's C++ - the person who teaches in the community learns twice, the person who answers questions gets an improved reputation in the community, plus the overall pattern of distributed and delayed payback (if I take care of you now, someone will take care of me later), is a very practical way of creating social capital.

• What made Linux such a winning open source project - Linus Trovalds' simple request "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)... I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise that I'll implement then :-)" The rest gave us a world-class product by lowering the cost of failure while it managed to increase the passion for participation.

• Open source reduces dramatically the cost of failure - in open systems the cost of trying something enables participants to try a lot of things, fail fast, and build on success as they go. In traditional organizations, trying anything is expensive, even if just in staff time to discuss the idea, so someone must make an attempt to filter the successes from failures in advance. That's how we get very good at what worked before.

Technology is social also because it allows us to share (with tags), then collaborate and aggregate or coordinate. This is the reverse of what we did in a one way world.

The new scope of marketing has just gotten bigger, much bigger. I talk about marketing being an ecosystem with feedback from conversations feeding forward product innovation, touching customers and employees - present, past and future - and gaining speed (in response) and momentum (in fulfilling needs while creating demand or wants).

What do you think? Have you read Clay Shirky's book? How has it changed the way you operate in your business? Are you thinking about open source research or marketing?

Improve your Company's Reputation Online

The reputation of your business is your responsibility.

As we've discussed before, your conversational index is reputation-driven, the experience you have of a business drives their reputation.

The good news is that you can have some help online, for example by hosting a positive and proactive conversation with your customers on a company blog.

While you're fixing your business process so your delivery matches or exceeds your customers' expectations you may want to consider addressing any concerns and criticism in a public forum, online.

Why online? Everyone is online. Online is easy to spot, track and measure. It boggles my mind why more companies are not listening and acting.

While many of your customers may not participate (see Forrester's ladder), you can be sure that the results of your actions will become a permanent digital record for when they will search for services like yours. You want to make those impressions good.

Whether you use blogs, community boards, or are proactive in listening and responding, there are several reasons why you'd want to act:

• The role of traditional media is not to talk about how you are improving, that is yours. Plus, what usually happens is that media may cover your flaws, but in that space you are left on the defensive without an opportunity to design the conversation around what you are doing about fixing the problems. Remember also that public relations means relations with the public, not just the media.

For example, when involved in a crisis, consider implementing a dark site where you have the chance to update the community affected as well as the public at large. How about making that site two-way? The more information you share, the less scrutiny you face - when you can, be open; when you can't, be honest.

• It gives your most vocal critics ways to channel that passion in a space you either host or join. If they did not care, they would not bother talking about you in the first place. It gives you the opportunity to address similar concerns that customers or prospects on the fence have but have not been vocal about. They are watching and keeping score, you can be sure of that.

For example, I know that some of the toughest critics of Comcast are now starting to think differently about the cable giant. That is on the strength of repeated and visible action by one person on Twitter - Frank Eliason, a customer service rep with a team at his service, and yours.

• As you are responding, you may find plenty of solid advice. When you are in a position to shift the conversation to positive, you can then receive permission to create a proactive forum for ideas. Dell has IdeaStorm. Note how they put in place a mechanism to allow the community to vote for the best ideas and a system to show you where an idea is along the process - for example, "in review."

In the end, the most important measure for reputation is trust. We discussed the recent Harris Interactive Annual Survey of US Companies at MarketingProfs DailyFix.

In some cases, the reputation of your business and your personal reputation may be one and the same. Have you looked yourself up? Aside from generating a more positive online footprint as SEO experts would recommend, what should you do to address the negative entries?

There is a crop of older and new companies that can help you keep an eye on your reputation - LexisNexis, Naymz, MyPublicInfo, Techrigy, and more. This is not advice, mind you, they are options available to you. I recommend a broader view of reputation, which is that of what others are saying about you and your business and putting your best foot forward pro-actively.

If you are seeking help in understanding and learning more about your corporate reputation, as well as assistance in measuring and managing it, you might consider also talking to the Reputation Institute. [cowgirl hat tip to Richard Binhammer]

Taking the Measure of Marketing Conversations

We have these conversations among peers. Depending on where social media is layered inside an organization, what gets measured and valued changes. That's because there is a different way of looking at it depending on what social media is employed to achieve.

It's important to know if it is clicks, impressions, relationships or conversations that matter most, as Michael Brito writes. It is even more important to know what the business is trying to accomplish before we determine which tactics to use when and which of those metrics gets measured and has validity accordingly.

Michael has the advantage of having worked on the client side and knowing about the internal challenges we face. His points (in bold) on what one can see from the outside and my commentary:

• Organizations need to be aligned in their communication strategy - every conversation each employee has with anyone about your company is a PR impression.

If the conversation is not elevated from a mere recitation of what we do (services) to one of what problems we solve (solutions) as they map to an outcome (customer results) you miss the opportunity to create a cohesive picture of what your business does.

Most importantly, you fail the "so what?" test. This matters to your brand.

• Companies need to integrate their go-to-market strategies - this is another opportunity for good brand stewardship. What is the final customer experience you want to deliver? Can you translate that into your go-to-market strategies?

Multi-channel marketing works because it integrates many different tools and options to allow prospects to auto-select on the basis of their communication preferences and listening habits.

With the integration or layering of social media, the funnel - awareness building, stimulating consideration, driving preference and purchase intent - reverses.

Brand relationships may be formed with meeting, then intensifying encounters and integrating conversations. From those actions we create bonds and eventually/potentially advocates.

• Internal communication, planning and collaboration is the key - unclear definitions of individual roles and goals can prevent an organization from having a strong, unified presence in the marketplace.

This matters to your brand as much as how customers experience your services and products matters to your reputation.

Building on Michael's points further, Harry Joiner has an excellent digest and set of recommendations and key takeaways for recession marketing. From where I sit, here is what I see:

• Leading brands lead - branding is one of the most misunderstood allies today. My simple 5 x 5 rule is that brand is the fourth word among five very important ones. Let's take a look:

needs (wants)
story
value
brand
trust

How am I doing on the order? What would you change?

This is how marketing conversations work.

I start with the customer in mind, their story, which matches their worldview, how that and what you deliver brings the value they are willing to pay for, which takes us to brand, the sum total of what you say (story) based on their outcome (needs/wants and value) and experience. This chain of dependencies then delivers trust.

• 10 ideas to make your Web site sticky matter to leveraging SEO and SEM, they also matter to increasing conversion rates. Design and usability matter in marketing conversations - how you write what you write and how that helps answer the "so what?" question can lead to engagement.

Search is very, very important in your strategies. Research for technology buyers shows that 83% use Google. Go ahead and search your business. Do you come up when you google the keywords a prospect would use?

If not, you have an opportunity to take another look at your story - the language you use - to improve your SEO. Are you buying the right keywords for an effective SEM? The more specific (differentiated and matching) the more efficient in cost and results.

When prospects find you, have you paid attention especially to whether you are asking people to sign on to download information? Research shows that you could be losing 75-85% of the people just by putting that barrier in front of them. Find other ways to measure downloads.

Here's a place where you can take advantage of participation in social media.

After the initial search, people will gravitate towards peer to peer communities to get advice and information. Peers first, experts second. Remember that if you are layering social media tools to your company Web site, your SEO improves when your content strategy is holistic and includes the whole site.

We've discussed it here before so I won't get into that now, I believe that in the future editorial impact, marketing conversations and community (peer to peer) relationships will be horizontal instead of vertical or siloed considerations as they are today.

• Content matters as much as experience does - when you create meaning and value, you earn the opportunity to have the conversation with your customers in the first place. Yes, customer service is filled with missed marketing opportunities.

I work in the technology space and what I am observing is that in addition to the further lengthening of the sales cycle, there are many more people involved on the buyer's side.

That means that it's become more demanding to fill the content needs for all of these various buyers. In some cases, they may not know exactly what they are each after (their organization is also siloed).

The technologists have very literal questions about delivery of what and how. Business executives want to know how that technology is going to help them grow the business and the effects of it on the day to day. Hint, if it is invisible, you'll need to figure out the value to them or it becomes a commodity. The controller wants to know how much it's going to cost. In operations they want to know about customer support.

Marketing conversations can help here.

That's because despite all of your efforts to be everywhere with your content - trade shows, direct marketing, permission-based newsletters, free white papers, webinars, etc. - your customers buy when they are ready. Which means you have to be there to be top of mind.

It's easier to be there when you have developed a relationship through conversation than when you are catching up with the marketplace and stretching budgets to be everywhere your prospects might be.

Back to your question of what you are trying to achieve. In the coming days and weeks we will discuss desired outcomes, how to go about layering social media tools onto multi-channel marketing strategies and ideas on measurement.

[image courtesy of Brian Solis]

Does Main Stream Media Add Value?

Or is the sound bite starting to just be a distraction? I do not watch television, have not used my set for anything but the occasional enjoyment of a DVD for years. At work we have a television set in the bistro and I will catch a couple of minutes of CNN as I warm up my lunch. It exhausts me with its intense beat and brevity.

No time to figure out what it's about, never mind understand implications, just a veneer approach and a continuous request for input from the audience. When did journalism become so needy?

The other part of the equation is that I spend the majority of the time in front of a different screen - that of a computer. When I am online, I tend to scan the publications I syndicate, and rarely spend more than thirty minutes reading the news, unless I find a good, in depth story.

A special report, or a nice piece of reporting that goes into lots of detail and coverage earns my time. That happens more rarely than I'd like, still it happens and it is highly stimulating. When enough time passed from the immediate need to report the news piece, journalists sometimes get to the part of requiring reality to explain itself.

As I've written elsewhere, Christiane Amanpour thinks that “there are some situations that one simply cannot be neutral about. Objectivity does not mean treating all sides equally. It means giving each side a hearing.” Herein lies the first lesson in thinking about news reporting - it is about being balanced in recognizing differing points of view. 

Now that I publish in a public forum, I welcome solid sources that explore facts and tell compelling stories. As main stream media is looking to use the passion of bloggers to uncover topics that are of interest to readers, as journalists use social media to do their research of the public sentiment and more, I look to main stream media to provide unassailable data points.

At the same time that main stream media is moving away from in depth coverage and reporting due to cuts in budgets and staff, they are also moving closer to the style and format of new media. Quick, snack size bites that feed but do not nourish. In that light, does in fact main stream media add value?

[image courtesy of Cox & Forkum]

Olympic Games Off Limits

Mark Cuban has an intriguing post on The NBA and the Olympics.

What he hints at is that the Olympic Games are a closed system though and through. They are closed obviously because they include only athletes that excel in a specific discipline as judged according to certain predetermined standards.

They are a closed system because everything that happens in and around the games is commercialized. The sponsors pay for the privilege of controlling our viewing and merchandising experience.

Will the summer games in Beijing be even more controlled? Will the curtain close on the back stories of the games? You know, those about the athletes and their struggles, the human angle. Or will this be an opportunity for the brand called China to carry its own torch and story to the next century as part of the global community?

Related: we had a conversation of Olympic proportions here when we talked about the new London 2012 logo.

Today at The Blog Herald, I ask whether you are a marathon blogger or a sprinter. Your answer determines how you are going about where you're going next.

100 Thing Challenge

Dave Bruno, a 37-year old Californian entrepreneur, is launching into a challenge - he calls it the 100 things challenge. He's working on cutting down what he owns to 100 items total. The fascinating conversation in the comments to his post centers mostly around how he counts the items - per pair, per collection, per category?

When I moved here from Italy, I brought only two suitcases containing clothes and books. Several years ago I finally disposed of the rest of my books I had stored in my family's garage. They were important enough to keep as my biggest love is that of learning, yet they were easy to give away after not holding them for years.

My philosophy has since been that of trading items - whenever I buy something, I give (which I prefer) or throw away something else. One spare closet has to remain empty and so it does. Yes, I park the car inside the garage without contending with piles of unused or older items. Periodically, I bring in books to work knowing that the intention is for them to not come back home again. Instead, I share them with colleagues.

I can see an economic slowdown if more of us adopt an even stricter challenge - that of not buying new stuff for one year. Imagine what wonders that would do for credit card payments and simplicity! What would be the implications of such a trend catching on for marketers?

Juliet Schor penned an interesting essay on consumerism that highlights some inverse relationship between consumerism and community. We know that we are not rational, deliberate and in control every time we buy, either.

One need only to think about brand preference to know that we make emotional connections to goods or betters. You buy Pepsi because it represents the future, Reebok shoes because the company stands for strong women. You develop a brand preference, and believe that your brand is superior in quality.

The Economist has an interesting article about the endowment effect, humankind's inner chimpanzee refusing to let go. When we own something, we associate more value with it. Hence the hesitation to letting it go. Schor states that consumption is social. The Economist adds:

Other “irrational” phenomena include:

• confirmation bias - searching for or interpreting information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions;
• the bandwagon effect - doing things because others do them; and
• framing problems - when the conclusion reached depends on the way the data are presented.

I present this information because it should affect the way we think about marketing. As Schor puts it, there are fruitful and essential linkages between production, consumption, and the environment that we should be making.

I would go further. I think there are fundamental decisions we need to make about the noise and clutter we make with our marketing communications.

Here's why:

• Too many materials confuse your brand. What does your brand stand for? There is a reason why we call them materials - they occupy space. During my career, I've done two full audits of marketing inventories: brochures, sell sheets, technical bulletins, etc. All occupying space in warehouses, many going into different directions on content.

The temptation is to think that more is more. In many instances less is more - try a short and to the point eBook instead of a long white paper; use digital versions wherever possible, do not overproduce. Most importantly, do not inflict competing materials on employees and customers.

• Too many materials confuse your employees and customers. Resist the temptation to think that your value depends on the volumes of things you produce. Instead, look at value as the ability to extract the essential elements of your brand promise and deliver those with consistency - that includes consistency of experience.

Your customers and employees care about being in a conversation with each other where you are now a participant, not the center. How does that consideration change the way you can think about materials? Your brand is a commodity if all you're doing is talk about yourself anyway.

My challenge to me and to you: what are the 100 unnecessary things that we can eliminate from our current marketing communications? They either do not work - a case of more is not more - or are inefficient. What are the activities and dynamics we could introduce to replace the ones that are not working anymore? Remember to trade one or two for one wherever possible.

We can start small. Feel free to make suggestions here in the comments. I will call this the 100 Marketing Conversations series in future posts - we will be discussing social media, social networks, events, communities and collaborative alternatives to the practices that we discontinue.

Evolutionary Hierarchy of Communication Networks

I've come across a fascinating evolutionary hierarchy of things by the Bordalier Intitute. It shows communication networks developing from cosmic networks. The diagram did make me think about Matryoshkus Russian dolls.

[image of product by Art Lebedev Studio. Hat tip to Laughing Squid]

The image I am using makes sense also in another respect. It represents a hierarchy in order of bit, byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte & terabyte. All it's missing is petabytes. According to Wired magazine, these are stored in the cloud.

If we take the opposite approach, from the outside in, for communication networks we have:

1. Chemical bonds in protolife (Gaia)
2. Cellular energy in prokaryote (Biosphere)
3. Genetic in eucariote (Biotope)
4. Central nervous system (Ecosystem)
5. Semiotic (Social Community)
6. Food Web or trophic Web in vertebrates or quadriopodes (Biotop)
7. Ritual verbal symbolic in religion (Culture)
8. Mechanical Tools (Engineering)
9. Written verbal (History)
10. Formal symbolic (Science)
11. Binary (Computer Systems)
12. Hypertext in the World Wide Web (Internet)
13. Computer to computer (Web Services)

This sequence or evolution seems to follow the path outlined in the article, where science (causation) is superseded by correlation (data analysis without hypotheses of what it might show). Is the evolution of communication networks taking us towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents as conversation agents? 

Fascinating theory or potential reality?

Word Clouds

It's called Wordle and it turns every text into a word cloud. [hat tip to Bruno Giussani] Let's run an experiment, shall we? Take a communication or marketing piece you have written and run it through Worlde. What is the corresponding word cloud? Does it give you the social tags it should about the topic you covered?

Here's one for the Gettysbug Address:

And here's one for my post on Ten Ideas for Conversation:

Now go get your own! I warn you, it is addictive.

Evolution of Business

[image of the evolution of man...]

The Stanford Social Innovation review has a good article on Achieving Breakthrough Performance based on research with Bain & Company. In it, the authors talk about four management principles that are essential to creating breakthrough performance in any organization, with a focus on not for profit businesses. There are some commonalities between for profit and not for profits in the values that underscore those principles.

The one distinction the authors draw is when it comes to customers - two in not for profits, clients and funders, and one in for profits, the customers who buy your products and services.

As I was reading, I started thinking about how those principles would loosely apply to the evolution of business with the introduction of social media dynamics. These generate both feedback and feed forward movement where people hear from other people and the result of that conversation informs what kind of next experiences we have or seek. 

1. Market reputation and authority create new options

There is more to it than just collecting testimonials and case studies with a few customers. Many more could be saying negative things about you. Digital information can be fast and is permanent. People rarely go back to amend unfavorable reviews and conversations with their peers spontaneously. This means that you need to be listening to what your customers are saying, and be a good steward for your brand(s).

Many companies and brands today are listening. So few are responding and engaging in conversations that it is still possible to break through the marketing noise using that novel button called "reply" or "comment." Resist the urge to overthink what your customers will do next - in many cases you don't even know your customers. Instead, let them teach you who they are and what matters to them.

How do you get authority online? Through participation, sharing, listening and responding where the answer may not necessarily be: your product or service.

2. Consider the costs of not doing

Businesses have gotten really good at figuring out the costs of doing things. In the current economic environment they are also squeezing many costs out of the system. While it is wise to manage expenses and build efficiencies, one cannot cut their way to greatness. Especially when the cutting is done without a real understanding of its impacts.

For example, if your business has a long sales cycle, what you cut today will not hurt until "x" months from now. If you think your business does not have a long sales cycle try and imagine how long it takes you to build relationships with your customers. There is a cost in doing the wrong things, too.

The hidden cost is that of not doing the right things. You do not see what you are losing in competitive advantage and consideration because those opportunities were not open to you in the first place.

Cutting advertising down may not hurt as bad when advertising was not working in the first place. That made it a cost - it costs you efficiencies and effectiveness. Not starting a portal where your customers have access to your front line experts and can discuss common issues and get to know each other is also a cost - a hidden one, in that it may cost you business to your competition that has those mechanisms in place.

3. Customers and markets don't stand still

Your customers' needs change and markets evolve to fill those gaps in services and products. Before Starbucks made coffee retail sexy, and profitable, the money was in growing and roasting beans as well as distributing and brewing the coffee. Then a whole industry shifted - where Starbucks actually helped create an ecosystem of profitable experiences.

Coffee is a good example also when it comes to information about pricing and market economics. Tim Harford wrote about fair trade coffee pricing strategies in his book The Undercover Economist. The book centers on free market economic theory. Fair trade coffee allows businesses to find customers who are willing to pay a bit more, if given a reason to do so. Coffee drinkers who are concerned about fair trade are less careful with their cash when buying - because they have a story that supports the pricing.

Harford explains that every well-run business would seek to charge each customer the maximum price he'd be willing to pay - and they do. If price is information, what we are buying has a perceived "x" value to us. That is what we're willing to pay for it. As a marketer, and a business person, your job is to figure out where that value has shifted to for your customers.

4. Simplicity gets results

How over engineered are your products and services? Do you need a road map just to explain how they fit together, never mind what they do? Take a look and see. Chances are your customers can remember up to three reasons why they want and need something. What are they? Start there. When you can answer those three basic questions, you will have created a more complete experience.

Setting expectations is a good way to lead to a better experience. Focus on a handful of strategic priorities - focus helps with execution. Attach short-term initiatives to those priorities and re-evaluate after you begin to achieve results. Complex contracts, operating manuals, and service agreements to fill out are marketing, too. What experience do they provide?

Make it easy for people to sign up and to sign off as well. I think there are enough examples in the marketplace today that speak to how the more a system is open, the more individuals can, and thus do, choose to be part of it.

What are your feedback and feed forward mechanisms? Is your business system open?