Assuming you're not following every post here, I've just spent the past couple of days at the 2008 Frost and Sullivan Sales and Marketing Mind Exchange where a bunch of us wandered from session to session to talk mostly about social media. My colleagues in this escapade were . . .
Cara Shockley: Internet Marketing Services Web Manager, Hewlett-Packard Company
Bill Kircos: Group Manager, Technology Public Relations Practice, Sales and Marketing Group, Intel Corporation
Lee Aase: Manager, National Media Relations, Research Communications and New Media, Mayo Clinic
Chris Heuer: Partner & Market Catalyst, The Conversation Group
Rick Short: Marcom Director, Indium Corporation
Christopher Curtin: VP Global Marketing New Media and Technologies, Walt Disney Company
At some point the sessions began to blend together so rather than comment on each, I thought I would summarize some of the big themes that jumped out at me starting with a short list of Objectives. This conversation sprung from comments Rick Short made about starting any blogging strategy with an end in mind. What follows isn't a shocking list of ideas, but it's a good starter list.
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The cost of not doing it (low "I" and high "R" . . . ROI). This may feel like a "what the hell" sort of objective, but it's not to be ignored.
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Efficiency of marketing communication. Blogging is a low cost publishing channel so it's a great way to extend whatever other communications objectives you already have in mind.
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Brand Value "we care". Objective by opposition . . . the conversations are going on out there anyway. Failing to be part of them nicely sends the signal that you don't care.
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Connecting with those who care. See the previous point.
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Personal face. This came up in connection with technically oriented offers/brands. Blogging gives you the opportunity to put a voice and a face to the bits and bytes.
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SEO. Social media and organic search go hand in hand. If you have nothing useful to say, this shouldn't be your first objective as you'll be found a fraud. But if you do . . .
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What you can learn. You don't have to author a blog to have a blogging/social media strategy. At the very least, it's a window on your world.
With that out of the way, here are my take-aways. Consider it a sort of Bloggers Anthem
Go to the conversations
Many of the brand holders in the various sessions were keen to talk about how to bring the conversations to them . . . either literally in the sense of hosting communities on their sites, or in attempting to manage the conversations out there. Or if they weren't interesting in doing that, they were interested in talking about those ideas. I've even been guilty of that same conceit in other businesses I've been involved with. Instead, the place to start is to go hang around in the conversations that are already
going on out there (blogs, forums, etc.). Hear the voices. Read the words. Watch the videos. Once you've got the dance steps down, you'll be in a far better position to get on the floor.
Don't comment anonymously if you represent a brand (and who doesn't)
Serve the community
The real "C" word is "community," not customers. We want our needs met, true, but perhaps the biggest need of all is the desire to belong. To be an "us." It's encoded way deep into our mammalian brains. This point is nicely illuminated by Giovanni Rodriquez . . .
For the past few weeks, I have been struggling with the way people in my tribe — marketing people, PR people, communications consultants — use the word community. There appears to be a lot of interest in creating communities that serve corporate interests, but little desire — or interest, or awareness — in serving the larger community — the world at large. The latter, I believe, is the real opportunity for business leaders in the new, always-on world. Why? Because the frenzy to create corporate communities may
only aggravate the problems that communities are trying to solve — the fracturing and atomization of society, information overload, and — as one consultant noted in a presentation yesterday at Community 2.0 — the universal need to “belong.” There’s an opportunity for businesses to become better citizens, not by exploiting the need to belong, but by providing services to people — not customers — in this difficult new world.
At Community 2.0, I moderated a panel with Craig Newmark, whose very presence at the conference — he stood out — helped me to understand this opportunity. Among the many business leaders that showed up to speak and mingle at this conference, Craig was one of the very few that serve Community with a capital “C.” I was reminded that craigslist does not own a community; rather, it serves the community. He may spell his company name (a little c) in lowercase, but it’s a quiet
way of expressing his commitment to a very big idea.
The notion of community is central to much of what new media is all about. I think we're barely into the first inning of this game so what this means for this company or that group is still to be seen. It's not an ownable idea, any more than "open source" is an ownable way to develop software. But serving your community, however you define it, is a powerful, authentic thought.
An involved community is a source of competitive advantage
One of the group participants, I think it was someone from Eloqua, said they talked about their user community when they pitched new business . . . as in their involved user community was a source of competitive advantage. Not because the own it or control it, but simply because it's there. The presence of involved customers is surely a sign of a vibrant business. For a new or emerging business, this seems like an especially powerful way to establish credibility
and authority.
The brand with the best story wins
The Cluetrain Manifesto didn't say it first, but it said it well: Markets are conversations. For so many marketers, the concept of the brand has been about static ideas about "promise of value" so that we can command price premiums and lower acquisition cost through greater customer loyalty. All good ideas. But there is a wave coming and it's churning off in all that is Web 2.0, and
it sounds a lot more like story telling than it does like speech making. Or to put it another way, before we we were all interconnected, before we were our own little intact publishing companies, the brand could control the narrative, or at least act that way secure in the knowledge that the stories being told about the brand by customers wouldn't leak out beyond a couple of hundred people at worst. So in that world, the best story was the story the brand holder told with support from carefully selected spokespeople
and proof sources.
Someone asked me the other day when I had my "aha moment" regarding user generated content (dumb term, but whatever). It came mid 2001 when someone sent me a copy of a slide deck called "Your's is a very bad hotel." If you don't know the story (there's that word), the short version is two guys showed up at a DoubleTree hotel late one night secure in the knowledge that they held reservations. Except that when they got there, it turns out
that "Night Clerk Mike" had given their rooms to someone else. The slide deck is hilarious. What wasn't so hilarious was that before the storm had subsided, a deck that had been sent to two people had been seen by millions. DoubleTree had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a retraining program. Mike lost his job. The CEO of DoubleTree's parent company had to endure countless phone calls, including some from CEOs of his competitors. The slides were discussed in business schools. It just went on and on.
And this was before anything remotely like "social media" had taken hold. This was just email. And so for a brief period of time, the DoubleTree brand story was out of control. It was being told and retold "out there" by someone else. And because there was no social media to speak of, DoubleTree had no ability to get their voice into the story.
And that's just me. And that's just one story. There are a zillion others. I have more to say on the subject of story telling but I'll save it for another time and place.
Facebook has legs
Everything follows a sign wave and the time will come when Facebook will crest, "jump the shark", or whatever term you want to use for sliding past hot to not. But that point is in the future, and in the meantime, it looks to a lot of us like it has legs. One of the many dynamics driving interest was the company's decision to open up its APIs and make it possible for anyone to build and publish applets for use inside facebook. Brilliant. This combination of tools, user generated
content, and community is a potent one. It's an idea we're exploring at DecisionStreet, and one I personally think will be big in the near future. So maybe this point starts out being about a specific platform but is more broadly about content/tools/community.
The people involved in the blogosphere are your most involved customers. Empower with lnking
Big dogs can wait (maybe) but for the rest us, this is your chance
Bill Kircos of Intel made this point and I think it's a good one. It came in response to a question about being a first-mover when it came to jumping into social media. The reality is that few if any big brand holders are likely to go first. Indeed, there are entire industries that won't go first or even second (financial services comes to mind). It is that relative void that creates a terrific opportunity for second and non-tier players to jump in and own an idea (or at least try), set an agenda, participate
in the conversatoin, and otherwise make themselves bigger participants than their relative size and resources would otherwise suggest.
Contests are Good
This seems like a small point but it really stood out during a conversation about demand generation. One example is called IdeaBlob which was launched by Advanta, which is a credit card company. Here's the deal.
ideablob.com is where entrepreneurs and small business owners can share and grow their business ideas – and have a chance to win $10,000 towards fulfilling them.
Great ideas are generated every day by people all across the country, and now these ideas have a place to live and grow. Eligible individuals can submit their business idea to ideablob.com, and based on votes from the ideablob.com online community – which includes other innovators as well as friends, family, colleagues, associates, teachers and mentors – one idea every month will win $10,000.
As individuals take part in ideablob.com’s growth, their business has the potential to grow right along with it.
Why ideablob.com? Advanta began in 1951 with an idea, less than $100 in seed money, and big dreams. Today, as a respected company with close to 1,000 employees and well over one million small business customers nationwide, we empathize with entrepreneurs and small businesses and support their growth.
It's not a hugely trafficed site, but it has lots of engaged users and is a great springboard for Advanta.
The second is an Intuit property called Jump up, which is targeted at new and emerging small businesses (not the venture funded kind, the real kind). The contest is called "I resign" and it's for people who quit their jobs to start a new business. As was the case with ideablob, users vote on the submissions.
Let me know what you think
Technorati Tags: Advanta, Bloggers Anthem, DecisionStreet, Frost and Sullivan, Giovanni Rodriguez, Ideablob, JumpUp, Lee Aase, Rick Short, Community 2.0
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