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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.

Business Week on Consumer Vigilantes: Customer Service, Emotion, and CGM in Focus

Business Week's 3/3 edition (available online now) features a very important cover story by Jena McGregor entitled Consumer Vigilantes: Fighting for truth, justice, and the right to speak to a manager. The issue also includes an annual ranking of "Customer Service Champs" -- many of whom, interestingly, have been profiled in either this blog or my forthcoming book, "Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000!"  -- as well as a provocative (and spot-on) op-ed by Jeff Jarvis entitled "Love the Customers Who Hate You".  Importantly, McGregor writes:

"The sting of a bad experience can cut so deep that it transforms an upset customer into an activist no longer interested in just a refund." 

As we've probed many times in this blog (see tagged links), and in nearly a dozen ClickZ columns, marketers and business executives have yet to internalize the critical symbiotic relationship between brand/service "experiences" and "media" output (and I'm not talking about paid media). McGregor's piece helps make that connection more obvious and transparent.  The propensity to speak out (hence generate CGM or social media) is inextricably tied to depth of consumer loyalty or disloyalty, and its powered by the web's growing arsenal of megaphones that seem to get even more powerful every day thanks to the advent of multi-media (e.g. video, audio, photos) as well as "I second that emotion" community and social-networking capability.    The upside of extreme loyalty and brand emotion might be found in places like Facebook's 40,000+ member Southwest Airlines group or the nearly 70,000 member "Addicted to Starbucks" group (more perspective here). The downside of extreme disloyalty and boiling emotion -- what McGregor describes as "venom-spewed tales of woe" -- can be found in tens of thousands of places on the web's digital trail, from message boards to blogs to YouTube.  (As Jarvis suggests, just go to Google and add the word "sucks" to a brand query.)

So What Next?  Business Week does a great job diagnosing the problem, and the "winners" part shines light on a host of best practices (Fairmont, Lexus, Trader Joe's, Lands End, Enterprise), but I still worry whether there's a big missing piece of the conversation around "what next."  Importantly, are the marketing leaders -- the owners of the biggest discretionary budget, and arguably the most influential drivers of change in large enterprises-- internalizing the message, and translating these new insights around consumer behavior into better "media" models.  If "service is the new marketing," as they say, what's the blueprint for re-engineering the marketing department along these lines?  How should the CMO -- or the constellation of communications agencies (media planning, advertising, PR, digital) -- be incented to move in this direction?  And will there be rewards and recognition for the mostly undervalued (and typically non-strategic "cost center") owners of the call-center, email feedback, and more?   

First Things First: Since 2000, I've attended over a dozen conferences of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals, one of the largest industry group's representing corporations and brands that own the "listening pipe." While not nearly as glamorous as the "new media" or Web 2.0 confabs and conferences, these SOCAP events always hit me like a refreshing cold-shower because they are grounded in the real nuts and bolts of listening, training the front-lines, adapting to an increasingly diverse (e.g. Spanish speakers) and demanding consumers, developing fair and consistent methods for responding to consumers, and navigating impenetrably complex legal barriers (and fear).  I have also learned that this department is consistently underfunded and under-resourced, and mostly divorced from marketing.  As boring and mundane as their work seems, it's hard not to conclude that if a company can't nail the "basics" of consumer listening they'll never get it right, or be credible, in the far more vexing and volatile social media zone. (Remember, most of the vigilantes Business Week's McGregor highlights initially reached out the company, but those experiences were poorly managed and only made the situation worse.)  So you have to start with the source.  That said, like the CMO, the consumer affairs and customer relations leaders also need to step up to the plate, a point I underscored last fall in a SOCAP keynote entitled "Wake Up and Listen to Consumer 2.0."  If they want more budget, more respect, more leeway to nurture meaningful consumer loyalty -- and hence positive word-of-mouth and CGM creation -- they need to make their case, and do so now at a time when the resource-rich marketers are dotting every third word in speeches and memos with the word "conversation."  My book lays out a host of strategies for making such a case, but short of even reading a book (or Business Week's story) business leaders simply need to take a long, hard stare at today's consumer and negotiate a new relationship.  The good news is that there's a growing laundry list of best practices in this area I like to refer to as Listening-Centered Marketing, from Dell's Ideastorm to the 800-number-all-over-the-place Zappos.com.  We're also seeing new metrics and measurement protocols (this is part of what I do in my day job) that make it far easier for brands to understand and act upon varying degrees of consumer emotion (the building block of consumer loyalty or even defection) flowing across the CGM landscape.

Final Question: And so I end this post with a simple question: how do we shift from consumer-powered "vigilantism" to company-powered "service vigilance."  Business Week's piece fires up that conversation, and I really hope it continues down the right path.

Super Bowl Multi-Tasking: Blogging, Twittering, Monitoring Hey!Nielsen, Running Polls

Talk about multi-tasking.  I'm halfway through the Super Bowl, and I've got over half-a-dozen measurement tools in front of me.  All fascinating, but also a bit frenetic.  As part of my Nielsen Online responsibilities, I'm helping oversee our Super Bowl monitoring work.  But in addition to our "official" metrics, I'm keeping my eye on just about everything, including the degree to which brands are driving offline/online synergy.  (Verdict: Ok so far, but not nearly as well as I would have expected.)  Anyway, here's what I've got open on my laptop right now:

• BrandPulse (our formal monitoring tool)
• HeyNielsen.com Super Bowl real-time panel (real time voting)
• Floodgate (a real-time blog analysis tool)
• YouTube & MySpace game sections
• Twitter (following what my friends/contacts are up to)
• Websites of just about every advertiser (plus the any mini-sites)
• Yahoo IM (trading notes every couple seconds with Emily Sobol, my colleague)

Is Customer Service the New Marketing? In CGM Land, You Bet!

Is customer service the new marketing?  That's certainly been a long-standing contention in the blog, and it's the theme of a one-day conference taking place in early February.  A firm called GetSatisfaction is the primary host, and it looks like a promising -- if not long overdue -- confab.  The timing is for this conversation is just right, and I frankly hope we'll see more of this in 2008.  My upcoming book (which I'll start previewing in future blog entries), Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000, hits this very theme right smack in the strike zone.  In particular, it makes a forceful argument that marketing in the age of consumer control needs to be completely realigned around customer service and consumer affairs.  With millions upon millions of CGM comments across the web indicting (or complimenting) varying degrees of customer service, or brand listening, there's plenty of empirical evidence to support such a direction.  The key for brands is to draw specific linkages between key dimensions of the service experience and what I like to refer to as the "CGM echo effect."   Such analysis is critical to drive investment or media-mix reallocation.  In the wireless category, for example, customer service issues related to "billing" tends to have a higher word-of-mouth or viral impact that other issues.  This became obvious to me starting in 2000 while analyzing hundreds of thousands of letters on PlanetFeedback.com and more recently across thousands of online expression venues. Certain issue hit core emotions more than others, and customer service is at it heart consumer emotion. (See article: Attention! I Don't Want Your Freakin Attention!) Conversely, brands like Amazon and online shoe seller Zappos.com tend to be rewarded by great service delivery or shipping.  (See recent NY Times story entitled Put Buyers First, What a Concept.) What's needed is a new science of "cause and effect" around the service experience that heavily factors in advocacy and word-of-mouth.  Consumer affairs and customer service departments, in partnership with marketing, can help lead that charge, and that was my hold-no-punches challenge in my October keynote to the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP).  The CGM revolution and Web 2.0, I argued, is finally lending credence and strategic relevance to consumer affairs -- so it's time to lead and set the new agenda. We'll revisit this issue at Ad-Tech San Francisco in April, so stay tuned.  (I can't attend the February conference, but I'm jealous of anyone who can.) For more fun reading on this topic, see: 

• Consumer Affairs: The New Advertising Department

• The Conversational Divide

• Postcard from the Welcome Mat: Levi's Wall of Letters

• Servicing Search: A Better Ad Model

• Postcard from the Welcome Mat: Sheraton Solicits Photo Experiences

• The Science of Talk Value

• Listening Centered Marketing

• 2006 Agency of the Year: Nobody (Max Kalehoff)

Back to the Advertising Future

My ClickZ piece this morning, inspired in no small measure by the many excellent pieces of feedback I received in my Facebook CGM Group, focuses on my latest strategy to drive smart investment online (including consumer-generated media endeavors).  The strategy is called "Back to the Advertising Future,"  and I focus on three core core foundations in marketing: focus groups, the store shelf, and television.  I write: 

Let's get back to basics. Yes, the boring, vanilla, everyday basics. When I started at Procter & Gamble, such fundamentals weighed heavily in my training like the Great Books of Western Civilization. Indeed, there was a whole science and discipline around category management (managing the shelf), TV copy effectiveness (television), and consumer understanding (focus groups). These fundamental still matter, maybe even more than ever. We just need to tweak them to fit the new environment.

Back to the Focus Group Basics:  Within the first 48 hours of starting at P&G, I was coleading live focus groups with Hispanic moms in Miami and Los Angeles. Deep, intimate listening, I learned, especially around unmet needs, really matters and translates to business success. Focus groups still matter, of course, but the universe of harvestable content has exploded across the CGM (define) universe. Offline focus groups still matter, but you often find a more honest, unprompted, unsolicited candor in the online conversation. With the explosion of audio, video, and personal Web site mash-ups, consumer expression has taken on unique new meaning, and marketers are only at the tip of the iceberg of this insight-rich conversation. Even if you're still scratching your head about the Web's role as a marketing vehicle, there's no question it's a far superior focus-group platform. The Web also has the opportunity to be far more efficient and less expensive. This is why I'm such a strong believer in CGM analytics.

Takeaway: The focus group endures, but now it's on steroids and takes place independent of marketer recruitment efforts.

Back to TV Basics:  Sure, folks are reaching for the TiVo or DVR, but let's face it: TV ads still work, and I'll bet my bambinos that Super Bowl advertisers will continue to fork out nearly $2.5 million per :30 spot in 2008. As I learned well at P&G, great TV copy works because it connects emotionally, allows persuasive "benefit visualization" (e.g., side-by-side demos), and often works around a single, engaging, dramatic big idea or insight. But lo and behold, those are the same factors driving the off-the-charts popularity with online video. Consumer-generated multimedia (CGM2) is particular persuasive and engaging online. Far from reinventing the wheel, advertisers should simply start their online exploratory by porting over proven principles from successful TV copy development and tweak them based on the medium's unique characteristics. Can my brand, for example, use the power of on-demand video to explain or demonstrate how to use products?

Takeaway: Use everything you know about TV as an accelerator to the Web's most promising new feature: online video.

Back to the Shelf Space Basics:   Brand managers live and breathe category management. If a product slips up or down the shelf or two slots to the right, millions of dollars in incremental or lost sales could be on the line -- or even a promotion to VP or marketing director. P&G's A.G. Lafley captures the essence of this principle in his "first moment of truth." What consumers see on the shelf, and where it's placed, matters. Why not apply the same logic to the online space, especially as more buyers zip through the Web research aisles before they buy? Google has built a company with a $200 billion market cap selling access to the virtual shelf in the form of advertising that hangs on the margins of search results. What about the value of the organic middle? If CGM dominates search results when you type "pampers," "tide," or "huggies" into the search box, what's that worth? It obviously depends on the favorability of the comment, or what we might call the attractiveness of the conversational packaging. Google search results are a shelf. Wikipedia results are a shelf. Brand Web site content are a shelf. And the questions we ask to build, promote, and protect shelf presence online are similar to what we ask offline:What specific steps do I need to take to improve my shelf presence? How will my product launch be impacted by early shelf results? Can I shape that?

Takeaway: Your brand standing is still your shelf landing.

   

Apple Wastes No Time In Exploiting Early iPhone Buzz & Testimonials

Why is it important to stay three steps ahead of early buzz?  Because every conversation -- every review, every post, every love letter or nasty-gram -- is material to your marketing strategy.  No one needs to send that memo to Apple computer, which continues to ride an unprecedented wave of pre-launch buzz/CGM around the iPhone.  Take a look at this morning's Apple.com startpage.  The centerpiece of the page is a list of all the positive reviews the brand has received around the iPhone -- from David Pogue of the New York Times, Walter Mosberg of the Wall Street Journal, USA Today's Edward Baig, and others.  Put simple, the brand is exploiting early buzz to drive further momentum.  Importantly, all of these media "influencers" have a material impact of broader conversation by other bloggers, and we're seeing an unprecedented number of links by top bloggers to these early reviews.  Key takeway: always stay close to the pulse of early feedback.  If it's working for you, don't hide it! 

Apple and the Website:  The other key point here is the extent to which Apple makes effective use of it's website.  If you carefully analyze Apple's buzz going as far back as the iPod and Video iPod, you'll note that the brand website has been a powerful ally in providing 'social currency" to buzz-makers and CGM creators.  Put another way, the site gets a huge number of links from bloggers, forum operators, and others. Moreover, the relevant content is always easy to find, easy to share, and often prominently featured during ideal time periods -- e.g. the start page featuring positive reviews.  Key Takeaway: Marketers still have control, and your brand website, if executed smartly, can be your best ally.

Want a Bigger Bite of the Apple?  Later today, I'm co-hosting a webinar entitled "iPhone Mania: Sales Leading Indicator or Evangelistic Hype?."  Starts at 12:30 PM today EST.  Sign up here.

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! 

Postcard from the Welcome Mat: Sheraton Solicits Photo Feedback!

I love this example by Sheraton of soliciting consumer feedback around the hotel experience, photo upload included. After all, in an age of digital cameras and mobile cameras phones, how can the lame "tell us what you think" card at hotels possibly convey the full experience of a great (or horrible) hotel experience.  This is a classic example of exploiting what I call the "Ex-Spot"...or "Moment of Experience."  Recall my earlier blurb about taking photos at Peet's Coffee.  This is also why I think consumer affairs is becoming (or needs to become) more central to the overall marketing mix.  This is a key message I intend to deliver to the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP) at their San Antonio conference this spring.  And while I'm writing about hotels, you might want to take a peek at Starwood Hotel's "TheLobby.com," a compilation of travel stories sponsored by Starwood and ElectricArtists.  Good example of the hotel industry nurturing conversation related to customer needs and interests.

Listening Centered Marketing: Intuit Taps into Online Communities

Jennifer Jones, host of PodTech's outstanding "Marketing Voices" series, just posted a terrific podcast with Scott K. Wilder of Intuit.  Wilder, friend and fellow board member on the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), heads Intuit's Quickbooks online community program, which over the past year or so has grown by leaps and bounds. Scott and I were talking the other night and he noted that Intuit communities have tens of thousands of members, and that this conversational platform acts as a de factor customer support center. Indeed, he noted, nearly 75% of all questions posted to the Quickbooks communities are answered by other community members.  Some topics, like payroll, are more robust than others.  Community members can set up profiles, and they even access to map locators, so you can find local resources, not unlike how social network sites work.

“Our goal is to build an infrastructure to help small business owners get their questions answered by other users,” explained Wilder. “Our community website is a tremendous way to learn about what small businesses need?”

In many respects, Intuit’s focus on community is an extension of founder Scott Cook’s philosophy of what he called the ‘follow-me-homes.’ Way back in the beginning, Scott asked product managers to follow consumers home (with their permission, of course) to see how they used the products. By watching and learning, and absorbing a continuous flow of feedback, Cook and team were able to make key, value-added changes to Intuit products. Interestingly, the Harvard Business School cases study on Intuit describing Cook's approach had a big impact on my thinking about the power and potential of consumer feedback loops.  The case study author, Professor James Heskett, ended up serving on the board of my first start-up out of P&G, PlanetFeedback.com, which was all about, not surprisingly, feedback loops.

Anyway, it goes without saying that Scott K. Wilder and team are sitting on a mountain of feedback.  Again, here's a link to his podcast.

My "Top Ten" List of ClickZ Articles for Today's CMO

In my latest ClickZ marketing column, I take a rare break from trying to come up with something "new and fresh."  Instead I look through the rear view mirror of my sixty or so columns and aggregate what I think are my the ten most important reads.  At times, we just need to keep internalizing the same message and lessons.  Hence..."Ten Columns Every CMO Should Read," and they are as follows:

1. "The Pocket Guide to Consumer-Generated Media"
2. "Irrational Blogguberance"
3. "Attention? I Don't Want Your Freakin' Attention!"
4. "Practice What You Search"
5. "TV is Dead, Long Live TV"
6. "The Pocket Guide to Chatterbacking"
7. "The Third Moment of Truth"
8. "Real-Beauty, Real Breakthrough in Consumer-Fortified Media"
9. "Movimiento Marketing: On the Radio Dial"
10. "Time for a New Marketing Model: Listening-Centered Marketing"

As I note in my opening, I have sought to keep my commentary focused on a few key themes I believe are mission-critical for today's CMOs. Themes like marketing in an era of consumer control and consumer-generated media; managing media fragmentation and new marketing models; and, most important, leveraging and exploiting the untapped power of listening. I've tried to be self-critical, wary of hype, and mindful of the danger of bagging the truth against a backdrop of dynamic change. If there's one area in which I've been unapologetically righteous, it's been in my message that if we further erode trust or credibility in consumers' eyes, we're toast -- end of story.