cgm

Do Leadership & Social Media Go Hand-in-Hand? Review of Charlene Li's Book "Open Leadership"

I recently reviewed Charlene Li's new book, Open Leadership, for my Ad Age column. Here's a link and an excerpt: 

"Li argues that social media-enabled services and sites can "improve efficiency, communication and decision-making for leaders and their organizations." The book is less a sequential follow-up to her impressive "Groundswell" collaboration with former Forrester colleague Josh Bernoff than a more forceful and practical reinforcement of many of the same themes, albeit with a special emphasis on mission-critical leadership skills. Key ingredients of "open leadership" success, Li suggests, include respecting employee and customer power, sharing constantly to build trust, nurturing curiosity and humility, holding openness accountable, and (are we ready for this everyone?) forgiving failure.

"Importantly, Li aggressively takes off the table all our lame excuses for not having a credible "ROI" strategy for social media. She does acknowledges upfront that the "difficulty with today's new social technologies -- like Facebook, blogs, discussion forums and Twitter -- is that they appear to lack clear, direct benefits compared to more established relationship channels," but she then proceeds to articulate such direct benefits. She offers, for instance, ROI templates like the "New Customer Lifetime Calculation," which smartly marries traditional lifetime value metrics with new value sources, from referrals and insights to ideation and user-contribution systems and support.

Loyalty is Not Enough in the Age of Consumer Control!

This isn't a new chart, but I presented it yet again today in a speech before C-Suite executives sponsored by the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association (SFIMA) and BGT Partners and it triggered the most and best reactions.  And so I'm sharing it again. Soak in in! 

The Twenty Most Important Social Media Buzzwords for 2010

My, how the digital times are a-changin'. We're downsizing to small screens, friending the world, thinking in 140 characters and downloading -- dare I say -- "billions and billions" of apps designed to make everything we do simpler, faster and more convenient (well, we think). And so, only days into 2010, I decided to kick off the year with an Ad Age column dedicated to the most appropriate buzzwords to describe our curious stampede to the social media and mobile future.  Here's are a few excepts and favorites from the piece. Read the full-article here. Anything missing?  Send feedback here or via my Twitter account (twitter.com/pblackshaw)

• SPURNED MEDIA: Just like it sounds, earned media that goes horribly negative, invades otherwise pristine search results or bleeds into traditional media. Bad customer service is a top driver of "spurned media."

• MOBILENECKING: The alarming tendency to have our necks titled down or shifted sideways -- ever glued to our mobile device. This anywhere, anyplace epidemic is increasingly common in cars, airplanes and crosswalks. Closely related to term "Eyevoidance," where no one looks at anyone anymore.

• JACK RIPPER: The device warriors who hog outlets anywhere they can find them -- in the airport, via the USB port of a colleague's computer, even a restaurant reservation desk. They get a charge from a charge.

• WIKI WART: A bad piece of news or an embarrassing brand episode (e.g., an activist protest or a social-media campaign that backfired) that just won't go away in a brand's Wikipedia description. PR pros often give false hope to brands of removing the warts, but relentless Wikipedia editors put them right back.

• OEDIPOST COMPLEX: The curious neurosis that compels folks to sleep with their Blackberry or iPhone. The afflicted can't stop checking -- even in late hours -- for responses to tweets or blog and Facebook posts.

• BRAND TEASE: A consumer who "friends" or "fans" a brand, only to never return for a second date. Brands feed the cycle by forgetting to court the consumer with engaging, interesting or sustaining content or value.

• APPTOSTERONE: The mojo that fuels intense "mine's bigger/better" conversation about mobile apps. "Dude, you got Bump, but I've got FourSquare." Marketing techies are loaded with Apptosterone.

• TWITSTOP: A bathroom detour from a meeting or conversation in order to check e-mail, Twitter or the latest and greatest via an app. (Swear on the Bible, I don't do this ... but I'm told lots of others do.)

• DIGITAL DETOX: What we all need -- at least in doses. As we've learned, total digital immersion has side effects. Let's all pursue a roadmap for balance in 2010. (This is likely the topic of my next book, so send feedback.)

Again, here's the full article.  Love to hear your thoughts. 

Three Words Marketers Must Sing in 2010: Serve, Shrink & Simplify

In one of my last Ad Age columns for the year, I focus my attention on three critical words marketers need to embrace, repeat, and perhaps even "retweet" in 2010:  Serve, Shrink, and Simplify.  It's worth a full read, but here are a few excerpts:

Serve:  You've heard this from me before, but I'll say it again. Service is the new marketing. Serving trumps selling. If consumers are in control, we can't just sell or wrap ads around them. We need to serve their needs, solve their problems and dial up talk-worthy "brand experiences." And we must do so 24/7, as Twitter-influenced consumers increasingly expect the "service desk" to be on all the time, from the 800-number and brand "chat" line to the Facebook fan page. Serve and you'll touch the nerve.  The other good news is that more brands are getting this -- almost intuitively. That's why we're seeing a fire hydrant of service innovation taking place across brand blogs, Twitter and even iPhone apps.  Consider the implicit assumption in mega-brand Tide's new iPhone app -- the "Tide Stain Brain" -- which acts as a de facto washing consultant.

Shrink: Our screens are shrinking -- big time. With billions of "app" downloads -- certain to explode further in 2010 -- much of our attention is now fixed (often frenetically) on screens half the size of a playing card. That has big implications. We need to adapt to a smaller interface. We need to rethink design. We need to cut the clutter. We need to obsess on the power of "icons" with the compulsiveness of a Steve Jobs or an airline safety card designer. We need to translate "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" brand websites into two-inch screens. Oh, and this "shrinking" principle also applies to how we tighten and simplify copy. Twitter's 140-character limitation may seem like a climbing Everest to the "diarrhea of the mouth" crowd, but get used to it. Brevity is the soul of wit, my friends. We need to do more with less. Indeed, small is the new big.

Simplify:  Of course, we'll never win on either the "serve" or "shrink" principles unless we really simplify things for consumers. Admit it, we love complexity. We hide essential information in illegible fine-print. We're rather give consumers a 200-page "how to" manual than a simple video demo. If you want your iPhone app to sing, you darn well better build it on "add water and stir" simplicity principles. If you want your small-screen ad unit to engage, or your sponsored content to drive participation, you better think hard about stripping out the gobblygook. Just think about the upside. Consider all the micro-charges on our bank or Amex statements because Apple computers made it ridiculously simple to pay for content. Then project that to e-commerce sales, or perhaps even the riddle of how to save online content from Jack-the-"Free"-Ripper." Let there be no doubt -- simplicity sells.

Again, three words:  Serve, Shrink and Simplify.  (Full article here.) 

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.

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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.

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.

Kicking off the "Tell 3000" Book Launch With a Webinar

Time grows short.  My new book, "Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000" officially hits the bookstore Tuesday, July 8th.  The book takes a look at how marketers and brands can establish and maintain credibility in today’s consumer-driven, digital world. Launching a book is like having a party and waiting to see who shows up, and at what precise time. I'm excited and terrified at the same time.  Early buzz is really encouraging, and Amazon pre-sales certainly show signs of genuine interest.  On July 9th, I will be providing a sneak preview into book themes in a Nielsen hosted Webinar from 2-3 PM EST.  I'm deeply honored to have Beth Thomas-Kim, Director of Consumer Services, Nestle USA (and chairwoman of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals, SOCOP), and Tom Asher, Director of Consumer Relations North America, Levi Strauss & Co. join me to talk about the key book themes. As I walk through each of my "Six Drivers of Brand Credibility," Tom and Beth will offer candid reactions and perspectives based on their experience.  I'll be sharing more information about the book in the coming days, but if you want more information, here are a couple links:

• July 8th Webinar Sign-Up
• Official Book Website, Tell3000.com
• Official "Tell 3000" Blog

 

CGM Meets Primetime!

Tomorrow is a really big CGM milestone for me.  I'm helping organize one of the first-ever "summits" focused exclusively on consumer-generated media.  This is part of my real job at Nielsen BuzzMetrics.  We're having 100 or so clients here in New York for a deep, extended conversation on all aspects of the measurability and actionability of CGM.  Should be fascinating as there's such a diversity of approaches to leveraging CGM.  Needless to say, I'm pumped!

CGM, Traditional Ad Agencies, and Video-Inspired Renewal?

As I note in my ClickZ column this morning, it's been "fashionable lately to trash traditional ad agencies for being out-of-touch, out-of-the-loop, out-to-lunch, and missing-in-action on all things relevant to our unmistakable digital and 'conversational' reality."  But maybe, just maybe, that's too simple.  Maybe the advent of online video is represents a fresh opportunity for traditional agencies to reinvent themselves, and in the process, leverage and exploit their core strengths: story-telling, emotional bonding, branding.  And maybe, just maybe, consumer-generated media (CGM) is the best thing that every happened to the traditional agencies because it's demonstrating that long-form story telling has a world of potential and stickiness.   My piece, entitled "Will Video Save the Agency Star," articulates a number of reasons why I think agencies have a fighting chance.  

Super Bowl Ads, CGM, and Marketing Fusion

"Can a brand maximize ROI (define) on a major product launch or TV ad campaign without the active assistance of cross-platform "echo effect" tools, such as brand Web sites?"   This is the opening question in my most recent ClickZ column entitled "Super Bowl Advertising and Marketing Fusion: Razor's Edge."   The answer, I believe, is a big no, and this year's Super Bowl - an event marketers promote as a "word of mouth event" -- missed the mark in a big way on cross-platform marketing, which is essential for driving and nurturing consumer generated media and word of mouth.  One example I cite is Gillette Fusion, which fell short of fusing very their expensive Super Bowl ads with a meaningful online "engagement" experience.  Note how the website presently reads: "Come Back Soon to Experience It!"  This isn't to suggest Gillette TV spots didn't achieve meaningful TV "reach" levels, but rather, that the brand gave short shrift to what Stuart Elliot described in the New York Times last week as the "echo effect."  But there were other really obvious misses, including brand search engines firing blanks when users query "Super Bowl Ad."    My final takeaway from the ClickZ article is this:

• "TV advertising is hardly dead, but to work in this age of elusive consumer attention, it needs reinforcement, assistance, and, yes, an outlet for engagement. Web sites are a great place to start reengaging and, in the process, drive more fusion with marketing procedures." 

Let me end on a more upbeat note.  The good news for Gillette Fusion is that the product is just starting to get in the hands of consumers, which means it's well primed for conversation and word-of-mouth.  And I'll admit, it's a pretty good product.   Better late than never!