Conversation Agent

Getting Things Done

With the new year now in full swing and the recent holidays already an almost distant memory, everyone is pushing to get things done.

The dozen calls with sales pitches I used to receive by mid-morning show the redoubled efforts - they are as many more.

There is an insistence, an urgency in the voices, the messages and the emails. Not quite desperation, but very close to it.

The type is bolder, the voice is more forceful. Everyone is shouting - pick me, buy my stuff, sign up here! The sense of urgency is good, the energy is misplaced.

Because what is louder than a shout? A whisper. Social media is a way to get next to your customer and speak only with them. Whispering is intimate. It's done up close. And it's closely related to listening.

Getting things done is good - but are they the right things?

With so much noise and so little signal these days, it's getting easier to tell what is not going to work - for those who are paying attention, who are dialed in it is quite obvious. Not so for the others. They are busy turning the volume up even louder and diminishing their returns with it.

There needs to be balance between getting things done and leading.

Whenever things swing one way, there can be a big backlash - too many leaders and nothing gets done. Too many people getting things done and nobody is leading. I included the magic quadrant up top. Feel free to use it as a reminder that it is within our control to care for the micro-interactions.

Micro-interactions become the context in which customers experience us. By customers I mean everyone you touch in a day. If we care to excel at executing the balance in small ways, we can scale to envelop entire businesses, and the marketing results that go with them.

We're human, we like to copy what others are doing - let's start by giving people the right things to copy.

Da Vinci was a Change Agent, Are You?

Leonardo da Vinci was a change agent. You probably know it already, it's worth repeating. At the time of birth, you are endowed with the same potential he had. Today, we need more than genius to make things happen though.

We need collaboration and co-creation at the highest levels. In the conceptual age, there is a lot of brain power at all levels in organizations, cities, and countries. Are we open to collaborating across such expanses? There were two readings that led me to make the connection between change and Da Vinci - they seem unrelated, but are they?

Let's take a look.

The editorial page of the January/February 2009 issue of Foreign Policy magazine is titled "our change, his (Obama) challenge". That gave me pause. I think a more apt title would have been - our challenge is change. If indeed the country voted for change, it would behoove everyone to align behind it. And that will be a challenge. We know the reality is much more complex. Individual interests, balance of power, and global relations will need careful navigating.

Everyone is looking for the magic wand in business - we probably got used to the nice returns. It's important to set a distinction between what we hope for and what we can actually execute. It's important especially to note that distinction when we think and talk about marketing and social media. It's no magic wand. You put an increasingly disciplined and scientific approach like marketing into an environment that facilitates the free form nature of humans and what do you have?

Science and art - rationality and emotion.

One would think economics rational, yet markets are so very emotional. With recent events, we also rediscovered that we're all connected. Yet those connections are welcomed only when we can make that choice on our own - who we interact with, where we buy, what we favor, follow, add, support.

Change is harder to do than it is to talk about

One year ago, Dell announced it was going to form a super agency choosing WPP as the holding company responsible to help create such venture. We talked about it here as a potential answer to the woes of client-agency relations. Casey Jones, Dell's VP of marketing, told PRWeek in 2007,

"I've been striving for integration for twenty years, and I've decided to give it up. Because integration means you're trying to glue things together that are not organically part of the same thing. We're looking for an agency relationship where PR, media, Web site analytics, creative, planning are all fixed on one objective - shareholder value for Dell."

Is dis-integration an option? Perfect-world scenarios meet real world challenges.

There is only way way I know of to face that - working through it. I'm not picking on Dell/WPP. They had a very ambitious and aggressive goal and no doubt many feathers got ruffled in the process. The change was too visible, too public to succeed. On the other hand, Dell's social media strategy is right on the money. It has grown from individual efforts and gestures. One conversation at a time.

Chapter two is how does social media revolutionize the business infrastructure?

I discussed how Dell was using social media to regain its mojo in September of 2007. From that post:

It’s 2004 you are Dell computers and you’re king of the world. But to be frank, you were also a bit boring. A year ago, Dells had the reputation as the cheap, utilitarian PC that you buy when price is everything. Dell was the ultimate commodity brand – serviceable, cost-effective, and a little dull. Along comes HP. In the course of a couple of years, HP using superior retail channels muscled past Dell to capture the number one position in the consumer PC marketplace.

So how does Dell react?

With a change in leadership – Michael Dell taking the reins of the company again and he is talking about taking a long term view of the business he helped launch. One response was to begin selling Dell through traditional retail channels. Another was to start listening to what customers are really saying about their products.

That’s when Dell turned to social media.

My conversation with Dell began after the publication of the Top Ten Reasons why your customer service fails in early July. Richard Binhammer in the corporate communications group at Dell sent me an email to volunteer his experience in using social media. [read the rest here]

The rest is the sum total of decisions that got Dell to being king of the social media execution. And I, too could be Richard @ Dell. A business needs to want to make that change for it to work. And for business I mean the people in it - at every level, collaborating and co-creating that change. That is a tougher proposition. And don't think that it's easier with services than it is with physical products. Can a company design a business through interactions?

Art and Science

Marketers are still looking for the definitive way to tie their work into business functions like market share and direct sales. The relationships between metrics, measurement and success are still quite undefined. Because now we must also start to ask - what are the right things to be measured? We are indeed all suffering from a glut of unrelated marketing messages - then again, unrelated may not be a bad thing with social media where experience is a-la-carte.

Our challenge is change. Whenever we consider writing anything, the hard part is coming up with the ideas, doing the writing is easy. Making things happen is quite the opposite - coming up with the ideas of what we don't like or want to change is fairly easy. It's the execution part that gives us pause. Yet the writing is on the wall.

In an interconnected world, it may turn out that getting change done is more art than science. It takes intuition and experience, the ability to broker - actually inspire - and attract relationships, along with superb unrelenting work. The art of conversation may just be the imperfect rescue the perfect world of expertise and science needs at the moment. 

Yes, economists will need to revise the models and methods unquestioned during the boom years. It will force them to produce new tools suited to a new era and reinvigorate their thinking by borrowing more intensively from other disciplines such as psychology and political science, writes Moises Naim, editor in chief of Foreign Policy in the closing article. 

Our marketing strategies and tactics are also bankrupt. We need not just fresh ideas to bail out the profession. We need marketers and communicators to lead the creation of what's next, not simply come up with solutions to patch what is now. We need to borrow from other disciplines and learn to be more like Da Vinci - inventors, scientists, change agents, opinion leaders. 

[Leonardo da Vinci 1515 AD depicted parabolic mirrors in his now famous cryptic diagrams]

Passion

Teams and communities are held together by the glue called passion.

This is the topic of a recent ChangeThis manifesto by Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian - a heart surgeon, Internet infopreneur, and social entrepreneur whose passion for helping children with congenital heart defects receive life-saving treatment resulted in building an online business that grows and thrives on its purpose.

Passion should be one of the 4 new P's of marketing, along with purpose. What do you think?

Product, Purpose, Passion, Performance

I've written about passion two years ago using Ferrari, the car made in my home town, as the metaphor of made in Italy: ignites passion and emotion. Which translates into high performance, by design.

The most amazing executions give us that kind of experience - or rather we infuse our own experience into them. Let's take another look at that list:

1. Vote for yourself –- know what you want and what you need and then go get it. Be confident in your skill even when you are tempted not to like what you see. We’re all kind of funny seen from the inside out.
2. Unleash your passion –- don’t let things you don’t know or don’t understand get in the way: learn them, join them. "But each time I seemed to be climbing into a roller coaster and finding myself coming through the downhill run with that sort of dazed feeling that we all know." [Enzo Ferrari]
3. Listen with one ear and forget with the other –- you are in the driver seat, you decide what makes sense keeping.
4. Stay soft on the people, including yourself –- on your way anywhere, you will meet mates and you’ll meet the other kind. To some people you’ll be but a blip on their radar, to some you’ll be a source of great inspiration. Know the difference, you are accountable for it. Remain human, don’t keep score, it bogs you down.
5. Develop stamina –- think of yourself as a marathon runner. Don’t look at the time, build on the distance. "Aerodynamics are for people who can't build engines." [Enzo Ferrari]
6. Take risks –- invest in your vision, explore the opportunities. When you go for safety, you shop at that price. "As bend followed bend, I discovered his secret. Nuvolari entered the bend somewhat earlier than my driver's instinct would have told me to." [Enzo Ferrari]
7. Design your context –- chisel away all the marble and what you have is the masterpiece. Edit down as appropriate, sculpt your experience - you decide.
8. Have a “to be” list –- be interested, adaptable, and open to new ideas, including yours. Many call this attitude, I call it spirit (Lat. spiritus = breath).
9. Stage and experience –- and you will learn something new every time. This is not rehearsal, it’s the real deal. Go at it with gusto and panache. The verb perform is built into performance.
10. Be very clear that you will succeed –- and you will.

Performance is a highly emotional business. Emotion (Lat. ex = out + motio = movement) leads to action. Passion leads to performance.

Dr. Sivasubramanian says passion is energy, it shatters barriers, it hates apathy, it shakes you up, it's positive and it comes in flavors. Passion is more - it's contagious it fuels longevity and it's satisfying. From the manifesto:

Behind every successful operation, be it business or non-profit, personal or social, small or big,
there is a person or group fired by passion. A burning ambition to see change happen or results
achieved—and unwilling to let anything stand in their way. 

Passion keeps you going. No matter how long it takes. No matter how hard the path is. 
No matter how hopeless the outcome seems.

Here's another definition of passion I found in my early authoring days. What's yours?

Real Collaboration

Real collaboration to me is where there's no need to know who's up front. Everyone is working side by side. Given the fact that we are creatures of imitation, it helps when the tone is set from the highest levels - what do you want to change in the world? Change happens whether we like it or not. It happened in the last several years. We did not like it, today.

What are we going to do about it?

With collaboration we can make that change more expansive and at the same time better focused; more responsive and less cumbersome. Collaboration also leads to community. To build a community we need to be willing to educate and connect individuals, and have the desire to take action at the appropriate times.

Marketing needs a serious reboot. In its current form it's a broken, bankrupt nuisance afflicted with the myopia of the perennial short term gratification and now starving because of it. There is no sustainability in that - it's a bubble waiting to burst, and your brand with it.

Real collaboration needs contribution, commitment and championing. To be sustainable, it needs to be embedded in the core principles that move us to action. I was reading a well-written post by Joel Makower where he is pondering the sustainable consumption conundrum and wanted to highlight a couple of points he makes about the WBCSD's newest report with my annotations:

• Innovation — "Business processes for the development of new and improved products, services, and business models are shifting to incorporate provisions for delivering maximum societal value at minimum environmental cost," says the report. We are indeed beginning to see a less packaged, more efficient world.

What does innovation look like in marketing with collaboration? If we take contribution, commitment and championing as the model - I'm thinking co-creation, co-distribution, and co-marketing. What other ideas do you have?

• Choice Influencing — this is where it gets interesting. Creating sustainable marketing practices and business models by working in partnership with consumers and other key stakeholders. The goal is to demonstrate that these practices can deliver deliver superior results at the best prices, and to use marketing communications to make that connection with choice and behavior.

Is this too idealistic? We talk about influentials, yet the needle seems to be creeping to making real change from all that influence. Could it be because we do not yet understand how to do collaboration through community and networks of influence?

• Choice Editing — Eliminating unsustainable practices, tactics, processes, and business models in partnership with other actors, such as media channels. The challenge I see immediately with this point is that of scale. Can there be mass collaboration? Only when each individual self-interest is served through making that very same choice.

When I wrote about Twitter as a social network, I highlighted how it encourages and engages certain features of our nature that are essential to our social lives - the adaptive, the imitating and the cooperative. Would these characteristics conspire to help with collaborative editing?

Marketing is about understanding what customers want and helping deliver it. But delivering the relevant response might involve having to make fundamental changes in the way the business works. Often marketing does not have real influence inside a business - especially if that happens to be a B2B. So much so, that you'd have to break the glass in case of marketing.

Can real collaboration help with delivering better insights, better products, services and experiences? Real collaboration requires more of us. Are we willing to do things differently to test that? If you have done it, feel free to borrow that seal  but only if the credit goes to the whole team and especially if that team goes across departments to start.

Happy New Year 2009

Make everything simpler.

You may feel overwhelmed by all the promises of this brand new year. How to keep them all? The answer is right in front of you: simplify. Complexity slows you down.

Do more of less. Focus on what you know is important. Resist the temptation to fill your schedule to the brim. Instead, sip the sweet moments of chance and rest.

Carry yourself gracefully and professionally.

And you will find that your voice carries farther.

There is strength in restraint and there is a time for every purpose - in business and in life. Choose wisely. I prefer to be kind to being right.

Find meaning by giving meaning.

Many are probably feeling indigestion from all the social networking and marketing. Think more attraction and purpose, less vying for positions or seeking definitions.

Social media may not be an organization per se, however is it akin to an organism where both the projects and the people need to be fulfilled. We get the kind of network we deserve, after all.

Launch and learn.

Get your ideas done. Choose fewer of them and really go at it. Set standards and find a pace for yourself - then hold yourself to them. 

Don't fear mistakes, welcome them. They will help you become more resilient and flexible - in some cases even kinder. Nothing like the fresh breeze of reality to energize our purpose. Adapt your plan to circumstances and keep going.

Action speaks louder than words. Make it positive. Teach. Lead. Learn. Love.

Best Conversations of 2008

Even the most difficult endeavors begin by taking the first step. In business, as in life, "we may convince others by our own arguments, but we can only persuade them by their own." [Joseph Joubert] Marketing is business, communications is a technology that provides the lifeblood of thriving relationships, conversation is the opportunity to get out of our own way and see things from a different perspective.

If you have been watching the social media space from where you sit and are still unconvinced that it is here to stay - take the plunge.

2009 is the year of execution

Maybe you'll discover your "why" in one of these conversations (by month).

After spending countless hours in front of this screen, I am now more than ever convinced that social media is the modern version of the telephone. It still comes down to saying, doing, or producing something valuable for your customer. And customers are ready for those companies who want to talk with them about them. The marketing conversation was always that way; so forget influentials, in viral marketing context matters.

For companies used to setting the tone by controlling the message, these may seem uncertain times. When a press statement misses Target, the online community piles on. The era of talking past each other is over - and that is valid for you, too. How do you go about revealing yourself to others - how much is appropriate, is that really you online? Your work speaks louder than words, but can you be authentic?

There is no need to build new castles or ivory towers, leading brands lead - and, if you're willing to start over with one line of your business and build a new conversation with customers, 14 year olds may think you're cool. Think of online as a blank slate, do your homework and help your company execute marketing as context building - here are 5 ideas.

With the emergence and rise of mass social media, how a blog is born may inspire you to start one of your own.The top ten reasons why your customer service fails may provide you with an incentive to explore new ways to provide support and connect with your customers. What happens when you have joined the space though? Here are ten ideas for conversation.

You should know that there is power in collaboration as well as plenty of inspiration you can orchestrate for your customers and employees. But has Web 2.0 made you happier? It's a valid question, especially as we spend more and more time online. Part of that happiness lies in the reciprocation of kindness that others extend to us. Learn how to write a business recommendation and make more friends.

With all this talk of personalization and injecting a human voice in your communications, is it fair to ask - is your business lifestreaming? After all, interests feed relationships. You could also have "fragmentation innovation." Create new options through market reputation and authority, but there needs to be an evolution of business as markets and customers don't stand still. How do you go about taking the measure of marketing conversations?

You may ask yourself, what if I fail? How do you go about connecting the dots on social media and the future? How does a company dip its toes in the conversation? Is it true that we could be designing business through interactions? The answers to these questions are ours to give. Creating a totally immersive experience seems to be where it's at. If interactions are designed to be transformative experiences, then the business where the interactions occur, will be transformed.

Are you too accessible? Many ask that question and worry. Accessibility comes down to making choices that align with our purpose - in work and in life. We also learn to look at conversation as negotiation. After all, we buy, we join, we connect on the basis of emotion. The award for most emotionally-charged tool goes to Twitter. It's immediate, short, and can be fast. Learn business uses of Twitter and keep your nose clean.

Asking the right question makes a big difference - are you using your influence? Mentoring, sharing, highlighting good causes, helping power connections that extend beyond your self are all worthy ways to use influence. There are also times when plan B is better than plan A. Regardless of what plan you choose, behaving well will reflect on your credibility, especially when in a tough economy branding matters.

With all this talk of conversation and sharing, I do wonder if you have thought of the idea and practices as organic marketing. These people have and they are beginning to show us the way, a very different kind of behavior for business. Benefit from thinking that your logo is a symbol, your product can be a social object. This outreach by Pepsi via Edelman to 25 influential bloggers was the object of fascination by many. Why pick Conversation Agent? Some asked. Maybe this year-end recap will help you see why. ROI requires focus - on execution.

There are so many choices for November that I encourage you to dig deeper, if you're so inclined. Why start a blog and 25 ways to make it work was the most saved post on Delicious and the most linked ever - with 301 saves to date. Glad I could be of service. A topic that you may overlooked, but that will take center stage in the next couple of years is the light before the storm. Crisis communications is taking on a whole new dimension with community. One thing is for sure - companies need to learn how to talk with customers differently.

Lots of choices for December as well, so I will highlight a couple of important reminders. Change the conversation, change the game is an invitation to take a look at the opportunity that awaits you. But you need trust in order to do that and remember that the future is now.

I hope you will find this content useful and adaptable to your circumstances and ideas. There are many more ways to participate and engage, as many as there are professionals interested in doing so - I've done it my way. One last word of advice. This is not the whole universe of your customers. It's becoming more important and influential, yes. But it's not all there is - you need to get out more.

Happy New Year!

Thank you

Thank you, dear readers, for your time and attention. Without you, this wouldn't be as much fun. Thanks also go to all of you who comment and those who link, Stumble, Digg, Twit, and share in other ways. I know how challenging it is to have only so many hours in a day and I am grateful that you would spend some of those precious moments here.

Thanks also go to my Twitter listeners. I'd like to get to know you, and please do not feel offended if I have not added you. I am listening and I do care, one person at a time. Thanks also go to the "friends of friends" on FriendFeed - without you, Scoble wouldn't have such large discussions (all in good fun).

A special mention goes to Marketing Profs: Daily Fix (that Ann Handley is awesome), Social Media Today (Robin Carey in particular), Marketing 2.0, and Fast Company for allowing me to type even more words than you thought possible and publish them there.

I'd like to thank the members of the Academy... ... my agent, my producer, Michael Jackson, Mickey Schulhoff and my whole family at Sony Music... I'd like to thank my family, all of my friends who have stood by me... but especially... I'd like to thank Chris Brogan, without whom I never would have hit #57 on the List of Most Influential Marketers of 2008... thank you... thank you...

Chris is one of those rare people who never misses an opportunity to talk about others - and that is why so may are talking about him. My new very special discovery from this conversation is Shannon Paul.  She writes well, she has great sense of humor and makes sense of things. Thank you, Chris for highlighting her work and thank you Shannon for doing such good work.

Thanks go to Adam Singer, one of the most enthusiastic connectors I met via Twitter. Adam pairs me with someone and two who have given me more then enough material and ideas to chew on in his social media power users and influencers - part 4.

Now for the interesting part - those who made the time to meet me in person in 2008.

Thanks go to Mark Earls for a lovely conversation over dinner (that was just rated the best new restaurant in the city, by the way). I am very grateful to Luc Debaisieaux for clearing his schedule over a weekend to spend time catching up in Brussels. We had a great time together in Antwerp courtesy of Kris Hoet. 

Grazie tante to Micheal Walsh for spending a productive afternoon in Milano - don't be a stranger now - where I also met briefly Marco Montemagno (Italy's Internet guy), and Luca Conti who sat with me on the train in regular class instead of his first class seat for the Milano-Modena tract. It made for an instructive two-hour conversation. Grazie also to Sara Borghi for meeting me for coffee and to Gianluca Diegoli for meeting me for drinks in Modena. You ought to learn Italian just to read his work

Merci to Mark Goren for a fantastic conversation over breakfast and dinner (in that order), Mitch Joel for sharing lunch with me and showing me how you do a presentation (thank you also for the book), Pinny Gniwisch for being so hospitable, Adele McAlear for arranging dinner and Andy Nulman for picking up the tab. Montreal is a true jewel - plan to visit in the summer.

Thanks to Ann Handley again for allowing me to share what I know about Web sites at the B2B MarketingProfs Forum and meet Chris Brogan, Chris Penn, and Matthew Grant. And I am grateful to Tim Brunelle who invited me twice to speak at MIMA, where I met Lee Odden (we sort of met at the Philadelphia PRSA a year earlier), Katie Konrath, and Ze Frank, among others.

There are too many to mention, so honorable mention goes to CK, Drew McLennan and Lori Magno for pulling off Blogger Social 2008. Special mentions go to Paul Soldera, Anna Farmery, Mario Vellandi, Marilyn Pratt, Steve Woodruff, Seni Thomas, Gavin Heaton, Arun Rajagopal, and Sean Howard. Thank you for making the gathering even more social.

This year I haven't attended too many conferences, so I am especially grateful to those who made the time to meet me during my travels. This might not be innovative, but I do remember you, what you are interested in, what you hold dear, what you dream about - and I will gladly play supporting role in whatever pursuit or endeavor you choose. I believe that's where the real influence is.

[image courtesy of Bryan Dalton, Mistake the Beautiful]

How did You Get What You Wanted?

"Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it." [Peter Drucker]

Here's the tricky question for you - are you reasonable as to what you want as a customer? Do you check The Consumerist and track down company executives phone numbers?

More than one year ago, I wrote about how customer service is a mindset. In that post, I highlighted a database that allowed you to skip the recorded phone trees at companies and get to a human.

Clearly, when all is well and there is a good system or process in place for the company to be responsive to your customer service requests, you probably are like me and go through the channels. When things start going South, how likely and how quickly are you to escalate your request?

Today it should be fairly easy to track any company down through a representative online. Has that made it more obvious that customer service is a mindset? On the other hand, are you more objective in your demands once you have had the opportunity to talk with a representative of that company?

On Christmas Day I got on Skype to call my family in Italy. My account is set up to auto-recharge when it dips below a certain amount so that I do not need to worry about interrupting a call to recharge - and worse, having to wait until the transfer is approved. Why it takes so long to approve an electronic transfer on a pre-approved account still mystifies me. Anyway, there I was on the phone with my sister...

... and all of a sudden, not only the auto-recharge does not happen, but the manual recharge I apply frantically runs out before I can speak with my mother. Bummer. I put in a ticket with Skype through their regular channels. The next day Skype charged me twice, once for the auto-charge that had not worked and once the manual charge. Yet the moment was gone. Well, it is a holiday. Let them come back to me.

It turns out that PeteratSkype is on Twitter and somehow found out I was making inquiries there on Christmas Day. Peter contacts me to find out how he can help. I add him to my network on Twitter to follow through with his request, but it looks like he has not added me or Twitter is broken so I cannot DM him. In my response back to Peter, you will notice that I informed him that DM was not working.

I hear back the next day. Let me make it really clear to you PeteratSkype, Twitter and the immediacy of online marketing (because this is what it is to Skype in addition to customer service) are not a let-me-try-it thing - you either do it or you don't. If you are online and ask me how you can help, my expectation is that you take action at the moment of asking, not a few days later. Expectation needs to meet experience.

Meanwhile, the response to my ticket came - three days later. In the email, the rep told me to check my balance on Skype, which at that point was doubled given the two withdrawals from Skype, and to make sure I had the latest version of the software installed, which I do. PeteratSkype sends another message on Twitter to tell me he is tracking down what happened... should I expect an answer eventually? Maybe within the week? In the New Year?

You who are reading this might think that I enjoy talking about companies stumbling through this new age of connected customers. I most certainly do not. I continue to be willing to go through channels and give companies a chance. But hey, when you reach out to me in an immediate channel that is free to you, you've got to come through with the same degree of immediacy. Show me you have a sense of urgency.

I will vote with my wallet and find other options when those companies demonstrate gross negligence of care. I no longer wish to engage in lengthy and adversarial debates over who is right. What I want is a service that works. Period. Fix the service. Customer service is the new marketing.

This is a new era of customer conversation and companies will need to learn how to execute in it or be executed right out of customer conversations - and consideration. Customers will walk away never to come back.

It is no longer efficient or worth it to fight a company over service when one can easily find another company hungry and willing to take its place and deliver. Today at Fast Company Expert blog we talk about how your company can innovate its way out of this rut and put value back in the customer experience.

What about you? Do you have a story of when you had to escalate the issue? How did you get what you wanted? Would you do that again? 

[images are from an Xbox gamer's story that ran in Engaget.com earlier this year. Yes, that is Bill Gates and his team making things right.]

Memo to Obama: Remake the Bully Pulpit

When asked what advice would you give the new President by Reader's Digest, Michael D. McCurry responded "remake the bully pulpit". McCurry, who was White House press secretary between 1995 and 1998 says:

Nothing will help your presidency or threaten its success more than how well you communicate with the American people. The "bully pulpit" of the presidency (as Theodore Roosevelt called it) needs a remake for the 21st century because we are still using communication techniques that date back to the first President Roosevelt.

He then proceeds to offer the following advice, which is also great advice for companies:

(1) abolish the practice of holding a single televised daily press briefing by the White House press secretary - instead, the presidential press secretary needs to orchestrate a great symphony of public information. More data and facts need to get out the door. Less spin and "message control."

Try this in your organization as well - let the experts comment on what they know best, explain to employees and customers your product and services with simplicity and immediacy. Quarterly CEO web casts are great but in this day and age they need to be supplemented with a robust diet of what is going on in the marketplace.

When you orchestrate a symphony of information with data, facts, stories from the trenches, you help all stakeholders see what is going on and make better decisions as supporting actors for the business.

(2) make the White House more like the West Wing - actually he recommends reality shows as a thought. More transparency will restore trust in government.

When I talk about transparency in business, I get the look, you know, that look that says, yeah, in your dreams - our competitors will copy us. There is no way they can do it better than you can. Here's why:

If you go ahead and copy what your competitors are doing without seeing what is behind their strategy, part of which is cultural, you will bomb. Aside from the fact that we know that trying to be something you are not is not such a good idea, your prospects already have your competitor in mind when they think of solving that particular problem. Go read Positioning by Al Ries & Jack Trout, it's a classic, it's still not being done by most.

(3) make sure other agencies of government and the other branches on Capitol Hill and the Supreme Court get equal time - get the media to focus on other places where critical work is happening in the name of the American people.

This means having many more competent communicators across the organization. I'm liking this one a lot as well. It may also mean that as a leader, you will need to connect that information, provide context and perspective, illuminate the issues and point to the actions.

What advice would you add for remaking the "bully pulpit"?

Bonus link: Steve Rubel points us to Obama's lessons for PR professionals and marketers - I would add for all business leaders.

7 Observations and a Challenge to Marketing Types

Seven is a prime number and the sum of the first four Fibonacci numbers. There are seven colors of the rainbow, seven days in the week, seven continents, and seven directions: north, south, east, west, up, down, center. The seven new wonders of the world voted online in what was said to be the largest poll ever included the Colosseum in Rome.

This is my response to the recent meme that has been making the rounds - thanks to Marc Meyers, Michael Haberman, Brian Branca, and Annie Hackenberger for thinking of me. You will forgive me, I tend not to follow the rules too closely.

Instead let's have a conversation about some observations on execution, which I do think will be the one must for 2009.

As we discussed yesterday, we are now using collective filtering tools and visualizations with teams and networks to discover patterns in large, complex systems faster - and trigger faster collective responses.
Twitter is just one example of how that works. There are plenty of other ways - online and off line.

1) Real depends on the point of view - for example, whether you listen to Gary Vaynerchuk or find Alfonso Cevola amazingly insightful and interesting, they are both wine guys and they both feel real. I connect better with the Italian Wine Guy, for many reasons. Do you know what's real for your customers? What's their point of view?

2) Right depends on context - we are not ready to be sold to until we're ready to buy. What's right then depends on timing and frame of mind. That's why relationships are so important and why you must have a different approach - the world is not waiting for your message anymore. It's looking for inspiration, education, engagement, connection (or dis-connection).

3) Respect is earned - why would anyone pay attention to you when you are not paying attention to them? The old ways of marketing are definitely on the decline. Respect is earned every day. People have long memories - your actions will follow you long after the troubles are gone. 

4) Truth depends on personal values - if we become better listeners, we will learn to embrace the truths of our customers and communities. Having values and beliefs of our own is important as long as we are not hardened around them or hold them as a weapon.

5) Patience is a virtue - especially if you're going to do things your way. Staying on purpose is more important than staying on message. People respond well to the former, not so readily to the latter. Better yet, make your purpose the message - it's like making the product your marketing.

6) Failure is not terminal - you might however feel like you're forever waiting at a terminal if you are so afraid to make a mistake that you're not even trying. Ask yourself: what is the worst that could happen? Nothing happens as a result of so many marketing programs. Try something different.

7) Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship - yes, even from those who tell you they "hate" people who criticize. Sweet irony, but we are terrible at taking our own advice. Craftsmanship takes time. How about all of those competitive ads? Use kind words or no words at all. Stand on your own merits.

My personal challenge to you marketing types (aren't we all in marketing these days anyway?) is:

How can we raise above the fray? How can we use our gifts and talents to lead instead of following?

How can we show respect to our customers (and each other - we are all different and bring something valuable to the table) so that we may be fully engaged and inspire engagement?

How can we work together to built a support grid for commerce and people to thrive? As Tom Peters puts so well, it's always "the people". How can we help create a better world? Not just sell one.

- Merry Christmas -

[image courtesy of Darwin Bell]