Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Inside Story - Show and Tell

Once upon a time (about a year ago), a client declared that their new focus would be improving the consumer experience.  One executive wanted to know how to use social media to achieve this goal, although they sold through a global distributor network and did not deal directly with the consumer.

So we scoured discussion forums and blogs and other social media sites to learn what consumers liked, didn't like and wanted.  Then we asked the distributors what they thought.  How could the manufacturer better support them so that they could better support the consumer?  Consumers, we discovered, wanted shorter repair time; they wanted repairs done right the first time, and they wanted leading edge information about the newest features and upgrades.  Delivering those benefits correlated with higher consumer satisfaction and lower churn.  Dealers wanted help.

We created a social media strategy and a new operating model that promised to give the dealers the tools to fuel their passion and to provide the experience the consumer wanted.

But the systems in place weren't "broken."  Why "fix" them?  How could we convince the majority of the executive team that the best approach was using social media platforms rather than call centers or road shows?  We developed a business case.

We told stories.

With clip art and enthusiasm, we wrote and illustrated a series of vignettes.  Carey and Caroline Consumer went through each stage of the customer lifecycle -- from becoming interested in the product through to purchasing, warranty repair issues, and ultimately deciding whether to upgrade, stay with the status quo, or move to a competitor.  At each point in the customer lifecycle, we illustrated how the proposed social media would affect the process; how it helped to shape the consumer experience, and how it influenced measurable outcomes.

We presented the stories to the C-suite.  No power point decks with bulleted lists, we used one-act plays and dramatic readings.  We employed imagination plus some prototypes and mock-ups.  It was fun; it was often times funny, and it drove home the value of the proposed social media strategy.

We hear a good deal about telling stories in social media.  But the stories are usually about how other companies are succeeding, not visionary tales about the impact of social media inside our own organization.  

Be creative.  Show and tell.  The inside story can be powerful.

What stories have you told?    

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Forget the 4 Ps of Marketing; Think the 3 Cs of Social Business

How can a traditional marketing culture cope in the new social world of business?  It can't.

Classical marketing, still taught at most business schools, misses the point.  The 4 Ps that have defined marketing activity for so long - Product, Price, Place, Promotion - work when companies and customers participate in binary communications: company to customers, customer to company.  But in a multi-channel world, inbound and outbound conversations exist for everyone, at any time, to anyone.

The 3 Cs of Social Business: Content, Customer, Channel

Social media is about engagement and relationships, two inherently unmanageable activities.  Product, price, place and promotion might drive short-term results, but long-term relationships evolve from communities of interest, from respectful discussions, and from connections that cross and take unexpected paths.  Those relationships create self-regenerating marketing engines, whether the core business is B2B, B2C or B2B2C.  The basic building blocks are no longer the 4 Ps of marketing, but the 3 Cs of social business.

Content - is both the message and the words, pictures, sounds and context that convey your message.  In a social relationship, content is the driver of engagement and often involves multiple messages, messages that get passed along (remember the old game of telephone?), and messages that are either much shorter or much longer than the traditional marketing message.  Your content imparts not only information, but also the culture of your organization.  As in any relationship, the customer needs to like you, or at least respect you, before engaging.  Consistency in messaging over time and across business units and corporate silos is critical and impossible to manage.  Content creation expands way beyond the old world Marketing Department. 

Customer - Who is your target customer???  The holy grail of marketing used to be to identify your target customer segments, then align the 4 Ps around them.  But customers have become peripatetic; they roam from one community of interest to another - both personal and professional; they surf blogs and tweets and Facebook posts and YouTube; they share what they find interesting with individuals outside your target segments.  And then one of these people you hadn't targeted is suddenly a fan and pushing you into segments even further afield from your "target."  In The Domino Project (see http://bit.ly/pEu1ta), Seth Godin suggests that publishers stop publishing books with a target audience in mind, "...the glory days of publishing to fill a niche are gone...The new frontier is to publish books that spread."  Today, Marketing needs to let customers declare themselves first, then service those customers as effectively as possible.

Channel - Social media channels present a spaghetti web of connections.  While advanced analytics are enabling more personalization, serving up ads for instance only to individuals who meet certain criteria, social media can also make it more difficult to engage.  In the old B2B world, for example, personal knowledge of customers was a sales role, not a marketing perspective.   Yet, effective use of social media channels requires knowing your customers.  Where do they hang out on-line?  In what social media communities?  What Twitter hashtags do they follow?  How do you humanize your organization to become part of the customer's personal network?  Does your culture mesh with your customer's personal and professional cultures?  Where you socialize is itself a message and a determinant of the customers likely to find you.  Who within your organization can comfortably participate in these communities?

The 3 Cs of Social Media reflect the basic change demanded of Marketing and the role of Marketing in your organization.

How is your Marketing Department changing?  Does it still exist? 

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Internal Social Networs - Behavioral Change Before ROI

Intranets are everywhere, and companies are rapidly adding social networking features - wikis, blogs, tagging... Yet satisfaction with these tools is stunningly low.  Prescient Digital reports that only 23% of executives rate 2.0 tools as good or very good, and 38% rate them as poor or very poor.  (http://ww.prescientdigital.com/articles/intranet-articles/intranet-2-0-becomes-mainstream)

Technically, a LOT of good tools are out there.  So what's going on???
  •  Tools increase efficiency
  • Tools improve productivity
  • Tools make it easier for employees to find information and the experts they need
  • Tools alone don't work
Prescient points out, "Those organizations that don't have intranet 2.0 tools are not getting executive approval to proceed as they don't have a proper plan or business case that convinces senior management of the need."  Is the failure to achieve the promised savings the reason behind the dissatisfaction of those who do have intranet 2.0 tools?

Maybe in a few cases.  But overall it's not execution or the lack of a plan or business case that is the problem.  The problem is the core need to justify internal networks with business cases.  ROI is critical, and I have written about it many times (see, for instance, http://bit.ly/internalROI), but the anticipated ROI will not be realized if the social network does not reflect fundamental shifts in organizational and interpersonal behavior.

The objective of social media is lifestyle, not initiatives (http://bit.ly/kYsQ6u)And lifestyle within the corporate walls needs to change before internal or external social media strategies have lasting and measurable value.

When Starbuck's introduced MyStarbucksIdea.com, the driver was CEO Howard Shultz's belief that the company needed to reconnect with its customers.  Look at the site (really, even for non-coffee drinkers, it is a great site).  Yes, Starbuck's is engaging its customers.  It is also engaging its baristas, those rarely listened-to front-line employees who see it all, who talk to and listen to customers, who execute the policies and operational procedures and know what works and what doesn't.  Effective social media ignores hierarchy and organizational silos.  The results probably do drive greater employee efficiency, but that is a by-product of the new social lifestyle. 

One of my favorite corporate activities was the "feel good" campaign by Canadian credit union Servus.  Servus gave 20,000 people $10 CDN and asked them to create a "Feel Good Ripple" by giving the money to someone else.  Buy flowers for the grocery store cashier; buy coffee for the person behind you in line at the drive-thru; give $10 for a lunch to a homeless shelter.  (http://www.springwise.com/financial_services/feelgoodripple/)

To have a positive impact, internal social network initiatives similarly have to change the interpersonal dynamic.  
  • Reward employees for sharing what went wrong so that others can learn.  
  • Reward people for helping others when it didn't affect their own jobs.  
  • Have people track how much time the intranet saved them, and allow them to donate that time to help someone else. 
Internal social networks work when they help corporate lifestyle and culture to change.

What has your organization done to make the intranet a lifestyle change agent?