cgm

What's the bigger social media idea: marketing stimulus or business process innnovation?

Lately I've been so busy that I haven't even had time to recap in this blog important, conversation-triggering articles I've penned in my Advertising Age column.  I'm hoping to change that, even if I have to backtrack a bit.  Below are excerpts from perhaps my most read and "shared" (according to Ad Age metrics) article to date, and my core premise is this: the bigger idea in social media might be as much about business process innovation than next-gen communication.  Here's excerpts, and I also encourage folks to skim the comments and blog posts that either build upon or challenge the argument.

-----

What's the bigger idea: social media as marketing stimulus or social media as a way to innovate business processes?

Every brand manager or CMO should recognize that it's both -- and in a disruptive economy, you need to take advantage of both outcomes. And when the potential dividends of a marketing effort include changes to a company's process, we need to rethink the entire notion of ROI.

This isn't an easy task, as marketers typically leave things such as organizational strategy and technology implementation to other stakeholders -- keeping lines cleaner and allowing marketers to focus on, well, their areas of focus. You let technology folks do technology, quality folks do quality and service folks do service.

But social media softens the silos. It's hard to turn over a rock in social media, dip your toe into Twitter or comment on someone's blog without rethinking the fundamentals of a firm's organization, product development and even listening infrastructure. Such firsthand experience begets inspiration. Inspiration powers change. And change is needed more than ever before as we're asked to contract our resources.

Social media and communication
Social media, at the end of the day, is about reinventing communication. Executed wisely, it's a new covenant of interaction between consumer and consumers, and, more recently, consumers and business. You could even argue that it's the long-overdue realization of one-to-one marketing that we over-romanticized back in the 1990s and inexcusably put on the "direct marketing" shelf.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pete Blackshaw is exec VP of Nielsen Online Digital Strategic Services and author of 'Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000' (DoubleDay). His biweekly column looks at the relationship between marketing and customer service in the age of consumer control.

But "organizational" communication, across thousands of companies and brands, is an area so bankrupt with inefficiency and scared of change that it's hard not to wonder whether your latest Twitter "aha moment" is better shared with the chief information officer or human resources than with the marketing team

Driving innovation
Then there's innovation -- the engine of value creation and company growth. Social media is one massive feedback loop. It's chaotic on the surface, but unmistakably efficient if you consider the life cycle of vetting a good idea or absorbing the ideas of others. If you really peel the onion on what's happening across blogs, Twitter and other online communities, brands are setting up de facto listening labs that rewrite the rules of gathering and managing feedback. We're getting more ideas faster. The funnel is broadening. The filters are sharper, more immediate and grounded in deeper levels of intimacy with the product or proposition.

The end outcome, whether intentional or incidental, is a disintermediation of existing, and potentially more expensive, processes. That alone should be reason enough for the CEO to personally initiate "Social Media Day" or "CGM [consumer-generated media] Day."

Procter & Gamble's Kim Dedeker, speaking to the Advertising Research Foundation's recent Listening Summit, suggested that brands need to reinvent "how to listen" not merely to figure out how to turn on online strategy or social media, but far more importantly, to reinvent and "inspire" the entire market research department. Put another way, listening is about reinvention.

The irony here is that a free tool known as Twitter was being used in real time by many of the attendees, the resulting data streams inspiring new ideas and playback throughout the conference.

Joel Rubinson, chief research officer of the ARF, called it "an amazing record of our research transformation conference, definitely more insightful than my old-school note taking. The big idea was that listening creates a fast-learning organization, which is the only way marketing can catch up to the consumer."

Driving margins, saving money
Let's end by hitting the sweet spot of practicality. At the end of the day, our foray into social media is teaching us how to save money. Consumer-generated media and social-media-enabling tools allow us to create websites and blogs for extremely low prices -- a far cry from the multimillion-dollar websites we built when I was co-leading interactive marketing at P&G back in the 1990s. Brands including Ford, Comcast, Toyota, Southwest, Sony, Denny's and others are testing new models of customer service on platforms such as Twitter that, under the old "enterprise" rules, would have cost millions to launch or even test. It's not that everything's cheap, but the barriers to low-cost earning have plummeted.

Whether we as marketers admit it or not, our dips into the collective social-media learning lab are making it really hard to justify $5,000-a-pop conference trips where we listen, learn, interact and collect leads. One could easily argue that the collective, real-time wisdom of social media, thoughtfully absorbed, easily substitutes for attending a "live" conference. And online video makes the substitution all the more tolerable. Video is a process innovation that is rewriting all the rules of efficiency.

Across the social-media airways there's no shortage of inspired thinking about what's possible. At a time when organizations are under intense pressure to reinvent themselves -- to take lemons and make lemonade -- it might be the right time to focus our efforts, even for a moment, on the overall "business process" equation. That's probably the easiest and most obvious way to demonstrate ROI around all of these efforts.

Social Media Confessions & Choices (First Official Post of 2009)

And so this blog enters year five of its existence - hard to believe!  CGM has evolved from peripheral curiosity for companies and brands to major focus. True, the term "CGM" plays a big second fiddle to the all-encompassing term "social media," which includes media and brand initiated content (and beyond). That said, I still think the "consumer" side of the equation sets the pace in this new "age of participation." It's also what excites and energizes me!

In terms of 2008 recaps, I humbly (and introspectively) teed up both reflections and predictions.  In my latest Ad Age column, for instance, entitled "Consumers to Suffer from Social Media Indigestion in 2009," I offer a handful of predictions for the new year, many of them deeply grounded on my own personal experiences...and painpoints.  I write:

Many of us are going to wake up in 2009 wondering "what did we eat?" and "why did we devour it all so fast?" We impulsively adopted everything from hastily assembled Facebook friends and Twitter followers to groups, apps and widgets (usually while shadowing others, such as uber-early adopter Robert Scoble), yet rarely revisited them. Many of us will feel compelled to join the social media equivalent of Weight Watchers, eager to trim the excess and rediscover a modicum of don't-follow-everything discipline. Meanwhile, a new wave of "diet" apps and services from the still-revenue-hungry social media entrepreneurs will flood the market: "For $10 a month, we'll promise you a downsized, manageable, and authentic Friends list." In 2009, less may well become the new more.

On this point, I do worry we've all jumped into much of the "new" social media stuff too aggressively, often leading to an almost-compulsive need to post, twit, friend, link, and share every mundane detail of my life.  In many respects, it's hard to resist.  As an early leader and adopter -- even a published author on the topic of CGM & social media -- I almost feel an obligation and duty to "keep up with the crowd" and "walk my talk."  Despite all the Twitter banter about convenience, efficiency, empowerment, lower feedback barriers, at times it all feels a bit frenzied -- a perception perhaps biased by the fact that I now have three kids under four years.

Looking into 2009, I need to weigh in on a number of key choices:  

• Popularity versus Intimacy:  A huge friends list begets marketing opportunities (not unlike a good mailing list), and can obviously contribute to building a "personal brand," but is it really a "friends" list? It's hard to do both. Often, when I send a "Dude...let's catch up soon" blurb on Facebook I wonder whether I've cheapened or trivialized the relationship. (It feels that way on the receiving end.) Then again, I did send a wee small sign of life, right? 


• Short Form Versus Long Form:  My blog posts on ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com actually plummeted in 2008...mainly because I found myself perfecting short form messaging on Twitter, Facebook "what are you doing" forms, and Blackberry email.  I'm inclined to return to the longer format lest my Twitter-induced glorification of the "mundane" (e.g. "Hey, watched a movie tonight!") gets the better of me.  My blog played a huge role in laying foundation for my Tell 3000 book, and that's because it afforded me the opportunity to test hypotheses, write "pilot" chapters, take a big step back here and there, and the like.  I don't want to lose that discipline. Of course, like others, I can aim for that perfect symbiotic relationship between long and short form, but that also carries risks.

• Big Tent or Narrow Tent:  Social media now encompasses just about everything -- it's as much of an "organizing principle" as marketing strategy -- and that makes it more difficult to focus content choices.  I also hate the thought of simply reinterating what hundreds of others are already saying, a reality that hits me everytime I inventory the fire-hydrant of self-described "social media consultants" on my Twitter follower list.  Even on this blog, I've noticed no shortage of "topic creep." (Just look at all my categories.)  I'll need to think a bit harder about where I'd like to focus my best thinking. Since taking on my new role as Chair of the Better Busines Bureau, my obsession with the issue of marketplace Trust has jumped to the next level, and I'll likely focus attention in that area.  

Despite all this, I enter 2009 with a great sense of optimism about what's possible.  In a recent post for Nielsen's Newswire entitled "Social Media Comes of Age," I outlined a number of key developments from which I drew inspiration and motivation in 2008, from all aspects of the Obama campaign's web and voter-participation strategy and MyStarbuckIdea.com  to Intel Chairman Scott Cook's Harvard Business Review cover story on "User Contribution Systems."   I welcome any and all feedback.

Experts Offer 2009 Social Media Predictions: What Do You Think?

What's in store for 2009 on the CGM & social media front?  Social media expert and thought-leader Peter Kim assembled of group social media passionistas to tee up key predictions for the coming year.  You can read his full post here. Somehow I managed to sneak onto this esteemed list, which includes David Armano, Rohit Bhargava, Chris Brogan, Todd Defren, Jason Falls, Ann Handley, Joe Jaffe, Charlene Li, Ben McConnell, Scott Monty, Andy Sernotitz, and Greg Verdino.  (All great folks to follow on Twitter, I might add.) A few highlights include:

• "Doors are going to close all over the social web. Why? Because the money didn't come the way people thought it would." - Chris Brogan
• "The tipping point has not only *not* been reached, but could still tilt *away* from Social Media." - Todd Defren
• "Dwindling budgets suddenly make low-cost social media look like the pretty girl at the ball." - Ann Handley
• "We're going to develop a set of better metrics to help guide, direct and validate 'commitment'." - Joseph Jaffe
• "The movement is rooted in a desire to have quality, not quantity, as people cocoon in the face of the economic crisis." - Charlene Li
• "These will be cumulative events and interactions that will build brand loyalty for the companies that pay attention to them." - Scott Monty
• "The recession will force revenue results out of social technologies." - Jeremiah Owyang
• "Companies that focus on earning love will thrive during hard times, and kick ass when good times return." - Andy Sernovitz

As for my specific thoughts, I focused on three key areas.

• Social Media Indigestion:  2009 will see a "correction" in our appetite for friends, followers, and other ostensible perks of social media membership
• Service Gets Personal:  Real intimacy among friends, or in the marketing process, will dial up in importance.  Don't write off the 800 number yet. Emotion powers conversation.
• Back to Fundamentals:  2009 will be the year we resdiscover timeless truths: friendship must be earned, fame is fleeting, excess begets backlash, and it always pays to listen, and credibility is our most enduring marketing asset. (The last point is the foundation of "Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000.") 
  

My upcoming list of predictions in Ad Age echoes a few of these themes and expands a bit in other areas.  That article should drop sometime tomorrow.  Here's a embedded presentation of Peter Kim's list.  Thanks for pulling this together, Peter (Kim).

Social Media 2009

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Management Business social media 2009

Ad-Tech "Master Class" Panel: If You Had $5 to Spend Online?

Earlier this week at Ad-Tech NY I moderated a "master class" session on "Building Brands Online" which included the NY Times, Kraft, Intuit, Zappos.com, and 1800Flowers.com, My core question for the panel was very simple, and quite pertinent to this market environment.  If your goal is to sell management on the value of investing online, and you only had $5 to spend, where would you start!  The answers were telling, and provide critical context to how we think about framing our value proposition – across all Nielsen Online products.  Richard Cacciato, who blogged for Ad-Tech, offers an excellent summary of the panel, and here are a few of my topline notes. 

• Andy Markowitz, leader of digital efforts at Kraft, suggested he’s take a step back before tossing money at marketing tactics (e.g. online advertising, social media), and would invest the money in nailing key consumer insights around online behavior.  What’s the core unmet need; is there something about Kraft’s target consumer online that might ultimately push a higher level of investment. 
•  Zappos.com, recently ranked by Ad Age as one of 2008’s top marketers (after the Barack Obama campaign), took a different tack, suggesting the $5 would best be invested in customer service, call support, or even employee training.  Great experiences, user-experience director Brian Kalma explained, ultimately grow the brand on the strength of favorable word-of-mouth – evident across an expanding spectrum of CGM venues, from blogs to twitter.
• Scott Wilder, GM of Intuit’s Product Development/Online Communities, insisted the money would best be invested in product, although his definition of “product” encompassed Intuits half-a-million user strong online communities.  The big payout of getting that right, he explained, is that the users not online drive favorable word of mouth, but act as a de-facto customer support labor force.  Nine of ten questions posed by consumers about Intuit products and services are answered by other consumers, often the most connected and influential.  Scott also underscored the invaluable insights that emerge from such “user contribution systems”
•  Jeffrey Graham, head of customer insights for the NY Times talked more about some of the efficiencies of spending the $5 on online advertising on increasingly participatory platforms like the New York Times.  Importantly, Graham nicely articulated how advertising in areas rich with influencers can potentially increase odds of success.  Increasingly, consumers are looking to their peers for buying behavior guidance,  he noted, and online advertising models need to wrap around that reality.
• Lastly, Kevin Randford of 1800Flowers.com underscored that he’s use the $5 to feed his already aggressive “test and measure” learning plan, even in new areas such as mobile, where ecommerce players are increasingly breaking new ground.  1800Flowers, he explained, is learning in real-time based on user-interaction, feedback, and even spending patterns, and the key for them is to invest any incremental dollars into accelerating that learning curve in an increasingly competitive environment.

Lessons from Obama’s Digital Effort:  Lastly, we couldn’t resist the temptation to ponder whether the Obama campaign’s online/digital effort represented a breakthrough or milestone for online investment.  While there was broad consensus that the Obama campaign rewrote the script of successful online activity, each panelist viewed it slightly differently.   One point I underscored, consistent with earlier commentary on the subject. the Obama campaign created the ultimate participatory “ecosystem” between offline and online activity.  Their CRM system bordered on science (alerts were sent moments before major events or speeches…even before the celebrated Chicago victory speech and the website maximized participation and engagement…at just about every level.  If you wanted to walk the streets at knock on doors, you could download a kit, complete with numbers.  If you wanted to self-organize your own social network you could do that as well.  If you donated money, they’d often play a “victory lap” video to drive an even deeper emotional connection.  More on this later.

Tell 3000! My Book Just Launched! Keep Listening, Stay Credible!

I’m incredibly excited to announce today's release of my very first book, “Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000: Running a Business in a Consumer-Driven World.”  Published by Doubleday Business, the book is now available in most major bookstores as well as Amazon.com and other online venues.   

The book’s core question is critically important, and one I’ve been thinking about since testing new feedback models in the California legislature back in the early 1990s (and all the way up through my tenure today at Nielsen Online):  how to establish and maintain credibility by being authentic, listening and responding to customers, and forming relationships built on openness, transparency, and trust.  The growth of the web, and the unprecedented power and leverage it provides consumers, puts this question in a unique, if not urgent, context.  This Q&A from Sunday's Edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer provides helpful background on the book themes.

Ongoing Participation: Beyond just reading the book, I also hope you will participate in a sustained conversation and debate about its themes.   Toward that end, I’ve created a website entitled Tell3000.com that provides key resources, open-forums, video reviews, and most importantly, a series of audio-based consumer interviews about brand experiences that I hope to update nearly every day.  Here’s the short list of ways you can stay involved.

• Participate (provide comments, even complain) on the Tell3000 blog

• Sign-Up for Tomorrow's Nielsen and Nielsen Online sponsored webinar

• Join a Discussion in the Tell3000 Open Forums

• Join a “Tell 3000” Facebook Group Dedicated to the “Service is Marketing” Theme

• Join Me at a New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, San Francisco, or Pasadena (My Home Town) Event.  All events will be posted here.

• Follow Me on Twitter or the Tell 3000 feed of brands that respond/engage

• Send ideas or suggestions for my new bi-weekly column in Ag Age about the symbiotic relationship between “service and marketing.”  Here's my last article. Send to the following.
  

• Share your candid (even critical) reviews, or join a discussion forum related to the book themes, on Amazon. 

A much longer list is cited in my book, but an enormous and grateful thanks to all of those who provided support and encouragement,  especially my wife Erika (who's featured in this "day before launch" commemorative photo along with my three kids: Liam, Leila, and Sophia.)

Ad-Tech Diarist: Ten Questions on the "Art of Conversation"

This year's Ad-Tech, which I'm still attending, is very special.  Most importantly, the first "keynote panel" of industry experts focused on an issue that rarely gets top billing at industry confabs: the art of conversation. This is an important shift in our collective industry "attention" and "engagement," and while we're all far from finalizing the perfect white paper or case study about managing relationships with consumers in this age of consumer control, we're finally starting to talk about it, and at minimum, ask the right questions.  I was deeply honored to moderate this first diverse panel of industry experts, which included (right to left after me in the photo) Tom Asher of Levi-Strauss, Beth Thomas-Kim of Nestle, Jordan Warren of Agency.com, Todd Cunningham of MTV, and Rick Clancy of Sony Consumer Electronics.   I was also thrilled to debate, discuss, and vet out all the relevant issues in several spirited meetings and conference calls before the actual event.  (Key learning: the "conversation about the conversation"  as as important as the end result.) You can skim various blogs (or Twitter feeds or see a superb cNet News story summary) that recap the panel, but what I'd like to do here is simply list the key question we probed and discussed. I truly believe every marketer needs to hit the white-board sooner than later on these questions. 

1. In what ways does Web 2.0 or the digital space expand the boundaries and opportunities of having meaningful conversations with consumers? Does it reinforce or add value to what we are currently doing?
2. What makes conversations truly authentic and genuine?  Is blogging the answer, or is it just an entry strategy? What's the right way of setting expectations with consumers?
3. How do we keep conversation with consumers trusted and credible? In the age of consumer control, do we have a higher threshold to meet this torture test?   What is the relationship between search and brand reputation, and how is 'conversation' impacting what shows up on the shelf?  Can that be influenced?
4. If conversation is king, is customer service or consumer affairs the new marketing? What's the true value of listening and being responsive to issues consumers raise directly to the brand?  Nurturing loyalty and advocacy among enthusiasts? Garnering big insights?
5. If we agree consumer affairs is a new centerpiece of managing conversations with increasingly empowered consumers, why is this group so divorced from marketing or media planning? How do we change that?
6. How do we begin to train, or expand the wings, of customer service reps to embark upon these new conversations with consumers, even outside of the company's backyard?  Who else should be involved?  What's the right and appropriate way to enter a blog or online community and address or clarify an issue?  Or is that even appropriate?
7. Who should "own" the conversation among marketing stakeholders? Corporate Communications (Ricks' group), Consumer Affairs (Beth and Tom), the digital agency (Jordan), the research folks (Todd), or someone else?  Or is that the wrong question? How do we use conversation and social media to soften corporate boundaries and silos?
8. In what ways should employees be enrolled in conversational marketing?  In what ways can their passion and credibility be unleashed?  Are employees a more trusted ad channel? Can it go too far? 
9. What is the value of "internal" learning in this area? Can organizations become better primed to exploit the power of conversation, CGM, and social media through internal use of Web 2.0 tools, blogs, and beyond.  What can internal networks borrow from consumer innovation?
10. How does conversation impact the retail channel? What are Apple, Sony, and Levis retail store venues learning about the relationship between "service" and marketing. How does the consumer benefit from this mindset, both offline and online?
11. Bonus Question:  What can go wrong?  What if every marketer jumps into the conversation?  Nirvana or Spam 2.0?   What happens if we lose consumer trust?

Many of these themes will be tackled at many levels -- and with finer levels of granularity -- at the upcoming Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) conference entitled WOMM-U.  I provided background about this last week.  Here's more info.

Other Ad-Tech Notes:  Late last night, I was flattered to receive a special Ad-Tech industry achievement award.  I dedicated it to my recently deceased father, William Blackshaw, who taught me all that can be good in advertising -- provided we keep it trusted and credible.   Other industry achievement award winners included Rich Lefurgy and Kate Thorp, both of whom I deeply respect and admire.  My message to the audience was that if we continue to keep the consumer right smack in the center of our radar, everyone wins -- always. I still think there are so many important issues we need to pro-actively address -- privacy, word-of-mouth ethics, ad intrusion, and more -- so while awards are appreciated (even humbling), we still have so much more work to do.  But before we get too serious here, I'd be remiss not to direct folks to the full list of award winners, including "Elf Yourself," which swept three categories.

This Brand May Be Monitored for "Quality Purposes"...and Other Lessons in Consumer-Surveillance

In my ClickZ column this morning, Adapting to Consumer-Controlled Surveillance, I volunteer a dosage of tortured ambivalence about today's marketing environment:

"I often worry that in our sometime irrational exuberance over the benefits and wonders of conversation, brands are blind to what it truly means for consumers -- our coveted buyers and lifetime revenue streams -- to be constantly watching, monitoring, evaluating, and talking about us. At the end of the day, consumers are monitoring brands and companies "for quality purposes" 24/7, far more attentively than companies recording toll-free calls. And that has enormous consequences for how we promote, protect, and manage brands."

It's not that I lack excitement about "participation" and "conversation." I just worry that brands and their agencies -- and other brand stakeholders -- all to often sidestep the more difficult questions around how to truly manage and interact with consumers in this age of "consumer control." Romanticism sometimes suffocates realism. Marketing claims often simply betrays the facts.  This is big theme in my upcoming book, Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000: Running a Business in a Today's Consumer-Driven World.  This isn't to suggest I have the answers, but I do know we need to get this particular "conversation" going sooner or later.  In my column I outline six key rules and principles to warm up our thinking. They include:

• We must rethink what it means to be truly credible. In a world of 24/7 consumer surveillance, credibility is everything. Today's infrared-enabled consumer can find every chink in the brand armor. My book outlines the six drivers of brand credibility: trust, transparency, authenticity, affirmation, listening, and responsiveness. Getting these drivers right not only neutralizes the impact of piercing consumer radar but also lays a foundation for a win-win.

• We must become better listeners. Marketers must shift from a paid-media marketing model to a listening-centered marketing model wherein all early signals, whether extreme or ostensibly insignificant, are absorbed and internalized across the brand franchise. This requires both internal brand radar, and processes and tools similar to what my own firm (and many others) provide for external listening.


• We must reposition customer service as the new media department. You can put Dove Evolution, Dove Onslaught, every Doritos consumer-created Super Bowl ad, and dozens of hugely popular user-generated ad spots into a blender, and they still won't come close to filling the Olympic-sized pool of negative media in the conversational airwaves implicating bad customer service. In categories like banking and financial service, conversation indicting customer service owns upwards of 40 to 50 percent of all discussion volume. In electronics, the number is around 20 percent. The consumer-controlled surveillance culture is actively taking notes on customer service, and the narrative -- the content it creates -- can cut in either positive or negative directions depending on how well brands nurture this arena.


• We must rethink the value and importance of indirect marketing, including human resources and operations. In a surveillance culture, consumers see three levels deeper into the brand. What they see has less to do with the message's polish and more with the brand experience's foundational drivers. Products that work require a superb operational backbone. Meaningful service experiences require a service profit chain of well-trained, motivated, loyal employees. Smart, interactive, responsive online interfaces require excellent business processes.


• We must close or integrate the silos. Brands need a united, cooperative front to contend with the elevated power and leverage of the consumer-controlled surveillance culture. At some point, it's just not going to work to have PR firms, advertising firms, digital agencies, and other supplier groups messaging against or with these new currents. We can't have eight different groups managing and interpreting influencers. We probably need to refashion and recast what we mean by holistic communication.

Here's a link to the full article.

Hey! Nielsen: Where the Black Box Meets the Soap Box?

This week a site I've been working on, Hey! Nielsen, just launched to public beta.  It's 100% about CGM, and has echoes of the first "consumer expression" business I started out of P&G, PlanetFeedback.  In a nutshell, Hey! Nielsen provides a platform for consumers to rate, review, rant, react, and respond to all manner of content related to entertainment: TV, movies, music,  personalities, websites (e.g Facebook, MySpace,), and more. In the coming months, a Spanish language version of the site, Oye! Nielsen, will roll-out. Nielsen essentially wants consumers to be heard, and its not being shy in suggesting the consumer opinions and non-personally identifiable data will be shared with big decision makers in the entertainment industry. What's clear in this new age of control is that the "power to be heard" has unique and important "social currency," and certain brands (Nielsen believes it's one of them) have unique credibility, as well as years of expertise in panel management for research purposes, to be the conduit.  This is a big reason why I keep pounding away in this blog at the importance of business functions like consumer affairs in the new marketing mix; importantly, brands need to "mind their influencers," and the vast majority of them are right under their noses, eager to talk to them, with or without advertising stimuli.
Consumer Megaphone as Corporate Matchmaker:  Anyway, I just returned from a couple launch events and meetings in New York, and it's all pretty exciting -- and for many reasons beyond the obvious. This was an unusual project for Nielsen, and certainly the subject of lots of very healthy "conversation."  Although my division Nielsen BuzzMetrics played an important role in the launch (strategic consulting, BlogPulse integration, marketing tactics), the initiative was coordinated and led right smack in the center by Nielsen Communications, a group which successfully (and quickly) brought together dozens of key stakeholders throughout the company to get us to this first phase (we have much more to do).  There's an "Exportable AHA" (my new term for "takeaway") here.  Consumer expression is serving as a powerful stimulus and catalyst to unite key stakeholders in large, sometimes siloed, organizations. I see this in every "CGM 101" training session I lead at major corporations. Everyone, it seems, has a stake (perhaps even some degree of fear and apprehension) in the "new rules of consumer expression," from communications and public relations to marketing and operations.  The "vocal" consumer is what brings them together.  On more than a few occasions, workshop attendees have approached me and said my presentation represented the first time they had ever met or interacted with some of their own colleagues.  As I see it, that's both a breakthrough, and a huge opportunity.

Anyway, give the site a test run!  It's not out to become another Facebook or MySpace, but rather a very focused "open" platform on the very topics Nielsen is already tracking.  I like to think of it as the place where the "black box meets the soap box."  Also, if you know of folks who'd like to play a leadership role in this new venture, shoot me or Jennifer Geissel a message.

The Chaos Continues: Garfield on "The Post Advertising Age."

Next month I'm moderating a panel at Ad-Tech San Francisco entitled -- get this -- "The Next Big Thing: Is Advertising Still Relevant?"  The panelists I recruited represent a diversity of voices that touch and bond with consumers in far less traditional -- yet hugely promising -- ways.  Scott K. Wilder of Intuit is in charge of Intuit's massive online community of product enthusiasts; Beth Thomas-Kim is Director and Head of Consumer Services for Nestle USA (and President-Elect of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP); Paul Woolmington is a founding partner with Naked Communications; and Marti Bledsoe is an interactive marketing strategist at spot-on (read my related ClickZ story)  Resource Interactive.

Garfield Helps Write the "Discussion Guide":  Needless to say, I'm more pumped about this panel than just about any session I've moderated in recent years -- and I'm doubly pumped because I feel as though Bob Garfield just wrote a big chunk of my "discussion guide."  In tomorrow's Ad Age cover story, Garfield continues his highly provocative "conversation" about the future of advertising with Chaos Scenario 2.0: The Post Advertising Age. ....a conversation that initially started with the original Chaos Scenario and then migrated to Listenomics.  Garfield covers a ton of ground, a chunk of which validates his initial forecasts, but perhaps the most thought-provoking part of his piece lays out "five reasons the online world will not online transform traditional modes of advertising, it will largely displace them altogether."  They include:

1. People Don't Like Ads
2. But they Crave them Information
3. The Consumer is in Control..No, Really
4. Diversion of Ad Budgets
5. Pay-Per-View

But why spoil the fun with a half-baked summary.  In fact, ignore the blog blurbs on Garfield's piece like this one.  Just read it! 

Open-Source Stakeholder Management: P&G Alumni Reunion

This past weekend I attended the P&G Alumni reunion, a once-every-five-years gathering of over 500 former P&G managers put on by the P&G Alumni Network. The reunion was a great opportunity to catch up with old friends, laugh (and cry) over a few battle scars, absorb 'key learnings" from a handful of provocative panels spearheaded by some of the brightest and most accomplished minds in marketing and business management, and reflect, with humility (I was surrounded by over-achievers), on my own personal career and long-term objectives.   Reunions are a dime a dozen, but this one had a unique characteristic, and the term that kept buzzing above my head through-out the event was "Open Source Stakeholder Management." Rather than shy away from, or snub, the folks that left the company over the years, P&G clearly saw unique competitive advantage in embracing the network.   While not the official organizer of the event, P&G was an active sponsor and participant, and the company's level of engagement in the activity seemed to reflect a new corporate mindset -- one that almost parallels the attitude of companies that take a more progressive view of employees blogging. (Just think about how companies like IBM and HP view their open employee blog platforms as strategic assets.)  Throughout the event, an important message kept resonating from the P&G representatives in attendance, including the CEO, A.G. Lafley: you are not only alums, but potential partners, suppliers, co-creators, external sources (and potential pipelines) of innovation, and more.  This "Connect & Develop" principle is not only smart, but also practical -- you just never know who might be an ally or partner.  I get this feeling every time a former work colleague -- whether from P&G or the California legislature -- reaches out to me via Linked In.  Even this blog has become an incredible source of driving new connections, or refreshing old ones -- even a few I once considered permanently off my "A-List."  :-)