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I'll be speaking at the Bay Area Executives Meetup this Tuesday, 2/9 in Mountain View. It's a dinner event, registration includes the meal and some fantastic wine. Right after the presentation, there will be a fundraising auction for Haiti, so you'll have the chance to bid on some great items and help a cause that desperately deserves your support.
For more information or to register, go here. The dinner is $20 in advance, $30 at the door. Hope you can make it!
Find Your Social Brand
In this time of change, companies are questioning almost everything about how they find and reach customers. As they shift their marketing plan, budget, and priorities towards social media, however, they often overlook the most critical element of all: the brand itself.
Why are so few companies and brands remarkable? What does it mean to have a truly social brand? Please join us for a compelling discussion of ideas for improving your brand and social media efforts. I'll cover the following:
This post is part of a blog panel discussion I'm having with Meredith Eaton, John Sidline, and Frank Strong. All four of us are blogging on the same topics on the same day. My first post was on the biggest lesson of 2009, and my second post on how I see marketers reacting to that challenge in 2010. This final post focuses on the outlook beyond 2010.
We love predictions. There's something about the transition from one year to another that makes us all want to try our hand at telling the future.
We're not very good at this business of predicting what's going to happen… And we're particularly bad about understanding how technology will change our world. When we predict the future, we don't imagine the next disruptive thing, we think about what we have today, just faster and better. We don't foresee the Internet; we imagine pneumatic tubes that go really, really fast.
Some great examples of smart people making spectacularly off-the-mark predictions on new technology:
Radio has no future.
-Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1897Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
-H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
-Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943640K ought to be enough for anybody.
-Bill Gates, 1981
Today, our culture and industry are clearly changing at record speed. As social technologies and new forms of communication become more popular, they are affecting how how interact and reach our audiences in fundamental ways. Chances are, however, our efforts to predict these long-term impacts are no better than those of the experts who came before us.
Now that I got that out of the way… here are my thoughts on the top trends I think will influence our business over the next five years.
I see this trend gaining momentum and forcing us to change the way we work. Almost everything we've done here as brands and companies has been relatively superficial; offering opt-in vs. opt-out, for example, or changing the way we manage and secure customer data. Compared to the challenges ahead, however, we have simply been playing at the edges of what will be a much bigger set of challenges. The issue of privacy in the Google age goes far deeper and quickly leads to thorny issues.
Who owns information and data about a customer? Under what circumstances can it be shared? If inaccurate or damaging information is shared on a website or social network controlled by a company, what are its responsibilities? Can businesses make hiring decisions based on what they find online about an individual? Companies simply aren't prepared for the cultural, legal and technological challenges they will face in the years to come. I look for customers to demand increased accountability from the brands and services they interact with, and for that challenge to shape the way we reach and market to customers.
Marketing has never been simple, but the core challenges underlying it – find, reach, and persuade customers – have always been straightforward. Certainly, as new technology and media offered us more possibilities for reaching and interacting with customers, our work has become more complex. I believe we are now, however, at a critical tipping point in terms of complexity.
Think about what is involved in having even the smallest product and business today. You still need everything you've always needed – a great product or service, a compelling message, a good understanding of your customers. But now you need a whole new set of things, all of which matter. A great website. A social presence that fits your customers. A content plan to keep them interested in your business. The ability to show up in search engines, so they can find you. Diligent tracking of your brand and reputation online, and the ability and resources to enter into conversations where necessary.
Can one person carry the load of marketing a small usiness on their own anymore? In some cases, even a small team might not be enough. We're entering the age of specialization, as even small companies turn to SEO experts, content people, web design folks, outreach marketing experts, and so on.
The challenge over the years ahead will be to manage that complexity without fragmenting resources and losing the unifying thread of customer experience.
Think of your customers as falling on a bell curve of technology and social media adoption. Companies today face overwhelming temptation to serve the top 5% of passionate, engaged, responsive customers. Over the years to come, marketers will have to learn to serve the other 95%.
The argument for serving the 5% goes something like this. After decades of wondering what our customers think of us, and paying market research experts to help us find out, we suddenly have access to the unfiltered, honest perspective of real customers. We need to do everything to understand them, and adapt our product, message and activities to suit them.
The problem: for most brands, particularly non-technology brands, that 5% is not representative of the great mass of your customers. The people who are most active on your blog, or Twitter feed, or who talk the most about you, may not behave at all like the ones who are driving your sales. But because you don't have the same access to those customers, you make it all about the 5%, and push through major changes to your brand and service to accommodate them.
Here' s a lesson we all need to learn, in this age of increased customer feedback: you can't please everyone. A while back, to prove this point, I did a few searches online that began with the words, "I hate ___." "I hate the Salvation Army" pulls up 87,000 hits; "I hate the Red Cross" 166,000. Even "I hate puppies" returns over 230,000 hits.
Successful brands will have to figure out how to temper the feedback they get online and focus on the needs of their core customers. This will be a key challenge for our business in the years to come.
Check out the other panelists:
This post is part of a blog panel discussion I'm having with Meredith Eaton, John Sidline, and Frank Strong. All four of us are blogging on the same topics on the same day. My first post was on the biggest lesson of 2009; this post focuses on how I see marketers reacting to that challenge in 2010.
If 2009 was the year when marketers saw their audiences slip out of their control, 2010 will be the year they begin to reengage them. How? Smart companies will start finding ways to take their brands into social spaces effectively… using the following approaches:
In my ongoing effort to make marketing sound as much like bad country music (is there any other kind?), I call this the Love the Ones Who Love You Back Rule. Instead of starting from the traditional marketing premise – “Whom do we most want to reach?” – companies will learn to ask, “Who cares about us today?”
Social media is fueled by passion and value. It is so much easier to start with a community that already feels some degree of connection with your brand, and then nurture and expand that passion outwards to other audiences, than it is to try to go straight to your highest-value audience. Be realistic about your brand - who really has an interest in you today? What can you do to get them to care and interact more? What is it they value, and how can you give them more of it?
In 2009, companies discovered how critical it was that they begin to play in social spaces. Typically they stayed pretty close to home, engaging in core-brand (product blogs, executive comms blogs, product-focused viral media, etc.) that tie back closely to current perceptions of their company and brand. And we’ll see much more of this in 2010, as companies get more comfortable and effective in social spaces.
More interesting, however, will be the trend towards engaging in brand-adjacent conversations. This means engaging audiences who might have no interest in your core brand, but who care about a social issue or topic in which your company has both credibility and the ability to contribute. As an example, many tech companies, including Microsoft, have active online communities focused on their work in emerging markets to help improve access to technology and education. This expands their brand concept to a new, broader audience. The key is to pick something that is related in some way to your brand and to offer real contributions – not self-serving PR or marketing content.
In 2010, I think companies will realize how limited their traditional expressions of brand have been, and start sharing the real, more compellingly social aspects of their company.
Here’s what your brand isn’t: your logo, taglines, brand statement, corporate boilerplate, product positioning, or anything with the words “framework,” “guideline,” or “policy” in it. Here’s what your brand is: your people, ideas, innovations, contributions, and motivations. Chances are, none of those are expressed in your current brand concept… or at least not expressed well.
The hardest thing for companies will be understanding that this brand shift isn't like those of the past – it can't be engineered in a conference room by your brand experts. It is more about discovering the real personality and value of your company, and figuring out how to communicate through non-intrusive interaction with your audiences. On the most fundamental level, companies are about ideas, products and people. The challenge of 2010, indeed of the next decade, will be for marketers to design and manage social experiences that express this more complex brand identity.
And leave it unlocked. In fact, it's time to take this gate completely off of its hinges. This is the gate that you are carefully shutting on your customers every time they interact with your company.
Take a quick pass through a few corporate blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages. Count the number of times you see:
We're still a lot better about paying lip service to the need to interact honestly with our customers, than we are at actually doing it. Most corporate social presences are carefully controlled and filtered, and they suffer for it.
To change this, we'll have to get past two mental blocks. First, the idea in PR and marketing that you spin away from negatives, rather than either challenge them head-on or acknowledge and apologize for them. Second, the notion that the customers who visit our emerging social presences might desert us if we discuss and link to other ideas and resources – even those of our competitors.
The gate's not working. It's not holding back our customers from discovering what we would rather ignore, and it's certainly not helping us build valuable social presences by thinking of our "user communities" as private fiefdoms.
Check out the other panelists:
This is the first post in a series for a blog panel I’m participating in with Meredith Eaton, John Sidline, and Frank Strong. Over the next few days, all four of us will blog on the same topic on the same day. This first post is on the biggest lesson we learned this year for PR and marketing.
I believe we'll remember 2009 as the year marketers lost control. The idea of control – that you can engineer a brand and message, and make people accept that brand and message – is at the heart of most people's definition of marketing. If that idea isn't dead already, it's clearly not long for this world.
How much influence did we ever really have? Maybe less than we thought. Years ago I worked for a market research company that put on focus groups. I would sit with the clients on the other side of the one-way mirror as they listened to the customers and the moderator. The focus group audiences were recruited to fit cleanly into a certain type – Young Suburban Moms, Small Business Decision Makers, or whatever. The clients were product managers or brand managers in big companies. They would sit in small, eager clusters, reacting to what they heard either with satisfaction or frustration. Mostly frustration.
"That concept is SIMPLY NOT resonating." "Let's dial up the first message in the next group." And sometimes: "Did you see what that last woman was wearing? Were those sweatpants?"
The guiding philosophy of the marketing focus group could be summed up as, We Need to Find What Works With These Damn People. If we could find just the right message – the magic brand statement, or product tagline – and deliver it in just the right way, we win the customer. This idea puts the marketer firmly in control, and it's one we've been living with for a long time. Ever since the concept of brand first surfaced in the fifties, if you were in the business of persuading customers to care about your product or company, you had to:
These simple-sounding tasks, of course, have never been simple. From the rudimentary beginnings of advertising and branding in the fifties and sixties, we progressed all the way to the current age of database marketing, one-on-one marketing, and sophisticated mega-brands. Branding and marketing became equal parts art and science, using advanced quantitative measures to track and measure customer perceptions. But as far as we'd come, the game was still: find them, tell them, tell them again.
In 2009, this stopped being enough. This was the year two related trends finally collided: customers' increased ability to interact and exchange information, and diminished tolerance for traditional push marketing. These have combined to drive a massive, and in my opinion permanent, shift in influence away from paid media and towards earned media. Technologies and social spaces will change and evolve, but this shift will endure, because it satisfies something fundamental to human beings: a craving for connection and authenticity.
You can think of paid media as what we say about ourselves, and earned media as what others say about us. A good measure of how far the balance has swung towards towards earned media: just in terms of sheer volume online, brand-generated content is now dwarfed by data feeds and social feeds about our brands… by a ratio of a least 500:1. The voice of the marketer has been drowned out by the voice of the community.
Where do we go from here? The truth is that most brands simply don't have much to say that is compelling in this new, more social age. Traditional marketing has betrayed us – our carefully crafted messaging statements and brand concepts are exactly the wrong thing here. Most brands today are flat and two-dimensional, bereft of any real personality or human interest. Even worse, many companies have entire teams – the so-called "brand cops" – dedicated to keeping these brands as sterile and uninteresting as possible.
What's ahead for us all: to be effective in social spaces, companies will have to change completely the way they think not just about their brand, but about the very act of persuasion and influence that underlies the entire marketing concept. And it will start by recognizing the obvious: we are no longer in control.
Check out the other panelists:
I'm fascinated by how much poor marketing is out there. I'm not talking just slightly off the mark, or a good idea that is poorly executed; I'm talking about totally missing the reality of how your customers think, interact, and make decisions. So much marketing seems to be flying in the face of how people actually behave. So I started thinking: what if real life really was as some marketers see it in their dreams?
Presenting: a marketing fantasy in three parts…
WORK LIFE
Several young, attractive, well-dressed men and women of various ethnic backgrounds are gathered around a conference table. A slightly older, distinguished-looking man is addressing them, a thoughtful expression on his face.
BOSS
…So as you see from this chart we have just over two months left of cash flow, and diminishing customer orders. Any suggestions?
FIRST MAN
Well, I found this website for a vendor that says their software can solve all of our problems.
BOSS, whips off his glasses:
ALL of them? Wait, how do they support this claim?
FIRST MAN
Well, they have a mission statement on their home page that says that their software is "industry-leading." And I downloaded a white paper that is… oh… 27 pages in tiny font. Also – and I think this is what convinced me – they have a Flash product demo.
WOMAN
Does it explain how the product works, what it costs, and how it would impact a business like us?
FIRST MAN
No, but it has some nice animation and features really cute little people icons.
BOSS
I'm convinced! Sign us up!
Everyone nods happily.
HOME LIFE
The setting: it's morning in the Brown household. BRAD, SHEILA, and ADORABLE CHILD are gathered around the breakfast table. The soft light of the morning sun is filtering through the window.
BRAD:
I am really liking this orange juice. It's more orange-y than regular orange juice… It's got this super orange kick to it.
SHEILA
Let me try. Oh my gosh – you can definitely taste the orange in there. I feel like I'm actually in an orange grove right now. I'm running through the trees, I can feel their leaves touching my skin now. It feels amazing.
BRAD
It feels like it's a hot day, and I'm diving into a cold, pure pool of orange juice. It feels so right, like I'm going home.
ADORABLE CHILD
I wanna twy da owanj joooz!
Everyone laughs. SHEILA wipes away a single tear of pure joy.
SHEILA
I forgive you for the affair.
TEEN LIFE
Setting: a high school. Two pretty girls are chatting in the hallway as students come and go around them.
FIRST GIRL
OH MY GOSH you have got to see some of these super-cool interactive brand assets that Brian sent me last night.
SECOND GIRL
Really? I was also interacting with some totally engaging social media brand presences last night. Did you Facebook-friend those new digital brand assets that he sent you? They sound SO fierce!
FIRST GIRL
I really like it when companies try to create edgy, teen-savvy content and rich, interactive web experiences. I feel like most brands just get me.
SECOND GIRL
Me too!!!!
They giggle and high-five for no apparent reason.
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Rules are interesting. They don't always make sense, but they usually say a lot about the people who invent them.
Rules are the trailing edge of our culture and society. First comes a new disruptive technology. Then people figure out how to use that technology, and naturally settle into commonly accepted practices. Finally, often long after, come policy and law. The sequence never changes: technology, accepted practice, regulation.
Most people know that it is illegal to record someone's voice without their consent. They don't usually know that, in most states, it is legal to videotape people without them knowing. How does this possibly make sense? It's because our statutes came out public outrage over the government wiretap abuses of the 1950s and 1960s, and lawmakers then reacted to the technology they confronted at that point. No one anticipated the rise of affordable, portable videotaping equipment decades later, and its implications on personal privacy. In most places, no one has bothered to close this hole in the law.
Corporate rule-makers don't move at that glacial pace, but they face the same limitations when they try to restrict behavior initiated by disruptive technology. Take for instance the rise of the newest type of corporate governance document: the social media policy.
Our social media lead, Chris Boudreaux, has pulled together the web's largest collection of social media policies. You'll find policies from small companies, enterprises, non-profits, news outlets, and governments. Do a quick pass through some of these and two things emerge: as a group, they are best at protecting against liability and worst at defining exactly what is encouraged or prohibited.
This makes sense. Any attempt to make rules is an exercise in trying to influence complex behavior. Rules work best when they regulate hard lines of behavior: THIS is allowed, THAT is not. Social media is all about soft, blurry lines, the loose, unpredictable interaction of people and ideas. And the technology is so new, and changing so quickly, that organizations are still struggling to understand what it means to them, and what "good" behavior is online.
So organizations do the best they can, pulling together "safe" statements designed to offer legal protection, and adding in some common-sense guidelines on accuracy, transparency, and confidentiality. Dell's Online Communication Policy is typical:
- Transparency of Origin. Dell requires that employees and other company representatives disclose their employment or association with Dell [...]
- Accurate Information. Dell employees and other company representatives may not knowingly communicate information that is untrue or deceptive. [...]
- Ethical Conduct. Dell employees and other company representatives will not conduct activities that are illegal or contrary to Dell's Corporate Code of Conduct, Privacy Policy and related policies.
- Protection of Confidential and Proprietary Information. Dell employees and other company representatives must maintain the confidentiality of information considered Dell company confidential [...]
This type of social media policy certainly has its place, because it does something important: it protects the company. You have it for the same reason you have a sexual harassment policy, or an employee code of respect, or other, similar policies: to codify into binding terms the basic rules of your organization. These policies aren't about educating employees to new things that they don't already know – does anyone really need to be told not to harass a co-worker? – but rather about forcing a level of clarity that protects the company and makes it easy to enforce the rule later.
Much harder to do, but much more interesting, is developing a set of guidelines that look past liability and address your employee's real questions about how to use social media as they do their jobs, promote the brand, and balance their personal and professional lives. Some are getting closer – check out Razorfish's guidelines – but there is still so far to go.
We work with clients to help them find the policy that best serves their needs, and most helps their employees accomplish their goals online. That ideal policy will look different for every organization, and change as your company shifts its participation in social networks over time. While developing this type of policy is hard work, it is worth it… If you haven't examined this area of your business, now is the time to get started!
It’s hard to get a clear picture of how far small businesses have gone down the social media road. Frank Reed has a great post on this topic on Marketing Pilgrim that really started me thinking about this (I posted some of this as a comment on his blog).
It really depends what survey you believe:
Two very different pictures of small business adoption. Frank does a great job of breaking down the data on the Internet2Go survey on his post, suggesting that "meaningful" social media adoption – e.g. making it a sustained, rewarding part of their business – remains relatively low among SMBs. This is the view I hold, based on years of consulting with companies selling to, and reviewing research on, the messy, heterogenous small business U.S. market.
I don’t have data to support this, but these are what I feel are the four big reasons that hold back SMB social media adoption:
Where I see a small businesses doing well with social media, it’s usually because they have a charismatic, passionate owner or manager who is great at connecting with customers. Social media didn’t make them this way. All the social media platform does is give them the way to express it and scale it in a way that lets them reach and touch more people. Customers are attracted to them and excited by their product, and they learn enough about the technology to make social media work for their business.
A great example is our favorite grocery store, Sigona’s, just down the road in Redwood City, CA. Although technically very basic, their blog attracts large numbers of customers who love their organic vegetables, grass-fed meats, and attentive customer service. Try making it all the way through their store without someone on their team starting a conversation with you. I like them, I love food, and I like the discounts they offer only on their site and blog; so I follow them. Most businesses, even those with much more polished approaches to social media, don’t have those elements; so I don’t.
What do you think? What is the right recipe for small businesses with social media?