Reputation to Revenue

Marketing as service: Samsung and Best Buy put customers first

I love this new effort from Samsung to generate helpful user questions and answers on the BestBuy.com. As explained today in Clickz, the "Brand Answers" feature (based on technology from Bazaarvoice) has just finished a five-month trial and almost doubled views of Samsung products on the Best Buy site:

When visitors click a button on the brand's products details pages, a pop-up FAQ feature that's called "Mr. Samsung" appears. Then, visitors can read pages of questions and answers that were previously supplied by other viewers. They can also search the feature to find the content they need or something close to it.

Additionally, users can type in their own questions, which the feature says in a message will be answered within a 16-hour window. The most popular question during the test was, "Can I hang this TV on the wall?"

I love this for three reasons:

• It's all about helping customers make better purchase decisions
• It taps the wisdom of the crowd to generate more, faster, and often better answers than could easily (and affordably) be provided by Samsung employees
• It demonstrates the confidence that both partners share in testing new ideas and opening their doors to put customers first

It's obviously a consumer-focused initiative, but the principals hold true for B2B, don't you think? 

Bad service blowback - United Breaks Guitars

Lots of companies are still nervous about participating in social media; they fear negative comments, among other things. The reality, of course, is that if you're providing lousy products or service, the bad comments are coming anyway, and with an ever larger megaphone.

Example 8 million is singer/songwriter Dave Carroll's tuneful blast at United Airlines for breaking his guitar -- and then stonewalling Dave for a year against apologizing and paying damages. 

Four days after posting the video, and 1.3 million views later, United is rushing to make amends and even saying they'll use Dave's video for internal customer service training. Obviously the damage is done. And the main lesson here is not actually about social media, it's about customer service. If you're not doing the right thing, expect people to give you grief. Engaging more directly in social media might help, as Comcast is finding out, but the real answer is fix your service and don't give people reasons to shout -- or sing! 

Thanks to Marketing Pilgrim for the pointer.

Blog as hub, site as spoke

David Berkowitz (@dberkowitz) from the digital marketing agency 360i had a nice article today about building your brand with social media

He used the example of launching the agency's new Social Marketing Playbook earlier this month (which is well worth a look). The launch was a success (10,000 downloads in the first few days), and David stresses the essential back story--the hard work of the last few years building the agency's social presence through blogging, Facebook, Twitter, SlideShare, Scribd, LinkedIn, Flickr, and so on. 

It's a good story, and a great reminder that social media marketing is about ongoing and integrated presence, not individual campaigns or discrete tool-based initiatives.

But a single line--and phrase--stuck with me most: 

There was also a clear architecture for it [our social media efforts], with the blog as a hub, and all of the spokes, including our corporate site, relating coherently to the hub and to each other.

"With the blog as a hub..."

For readers at small companies or consulting on their own, the idea of the blog as hub is nothing special. You want to demonstrate expertise, regularly refresh content to drive better search performance, and minimize site maintenance workload. A blog makes perfect sense.

What about larger companies? The logic certainly remains the same. Larger companies also want to demonstrate expertise, maximize search, and minimize needless site maintenance. But big companies are too complicated to boil it all down to a blog, right? What about all those offerings, success stories, executive bios, and the rest of the content that fills endless pages on large corporate sites?

Well, maybe. But does "needing" a more traditional site to serve as a corporate archive mean it has sit at the center of marketing?

Most of the people you're trying to connect with care a lot more about your latest thinking than they do about your carefully crafted but static product, service, and solution pages. So why not push the corporate site off to the side and put the blog front and center? 

It's a radical notion for a large company, but perhaps it's just the sort of thinking that larger companies need to make a more serious commitment not just to social media, but also to the broader ideas of marketing as education, marketing as service, and marketing as community (three of my current mantras). 

Web sites can certainly support all of these ideas, and companies are livening up their sites with blogs, video feeds, and community portals, I wonder, though, if the more radical step is still necessary to make the transformation real, to fully jettison the old ideas of marketing as broadcast, promotion, and persuasion. 

What do you think?

Photo credit: poppofatticus

The joy of tweets: Twittering Rocks on Bloomsday

Normally I write about B2B marketing, thought leadership, sustainability, solutions, and other allegedly useful and important things. 

But sometimes you just have to stop and revel in the joy of sheer creativity. 

Today, June 16, is Bloomsday, the fabled day in James Joyce's pathbreaking novel Ulysses. For decades, Joyce-lovers in Dublin and worldwide have commemorated the day with all manner of readings, dramatizations, and celebrations. 

Today, befitting the Twitter-mania that has swept the planet, two devotees have merged one of the most creative bursts of the early 20th century, Ulysses, with the who-knows-where-this-is-going explosion of the early 21st, Twitter. As reported by the Associated Press:

Two devotees of "Ulysses" have adapted its 10th chapter to Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per post. Called "Wandering Rocks," the chapter is especially well-suited to Twitter because it follows 19 Dubliners going about their daily business.

For three years now, Ian Bogost, a Georgia Tech professor, and friend Ian McCarthy, a product manager at LinkedIn, have commemorated "Bloomsday" on Twitter on June 16. That date in 1904 is when the entirety of "Ulysses" takes place, chronicling the experiences of a man named Leopold Bloom.

Bogost says using Twitter "for literary performance art might help shift perspectives on the service" and get people to use it for more than self-centered musings. "Perhaps in so doing, we can shift people's interest in social media technologies from egomania and immediacy toward deliberation and cultural reflection," Bogost wrote in an e-mail from Australia.

Bogost and McCarthy have dubbed their performance "Twittering Rocks," a play on the chapter's title that could also mean Twittering is awesome. They have registered 54 of the novel's key characters as Twitter users, and Bogost built a software program that tweets their first-person utterances at the correct moments in the chapter.

"The result is a complex web of timed interactions between many characters," he said, "precisely the effect Joyce was aiming for in the novel." 

I was blown away when I read this, but I guess this type of thing is inevitable. Or, as Ulysses character StephenDedalus noted a few hours ago in one of his last Bloomsday tweets, "Show no surprise. Quite natural."

James Joyce Textorized image by maxf.

The hard questions about social media for B2B solutions providers

The skepticism about social media for B2B is pretty much gone by now. It's still pretty new for a great many companies, but the combination of legitimate success stories, overwhelming hype, and the desperate search for new ways to reach customers when the old ways work less and less has convinced all but the most recalcitrant among us that social media is at least worth a try.

But how to proceed is far from clear, especially for companies selling high-value solutions that typically require very long sales cycles with multiple influencers and decision makers in every transaction. Even for companies with a fair amount of social media experience, figuring out specifically where and how to invest in social media is a huge challenge. 

It's all well and good to dabble in blogging, Twitter, and YouTube, but creating a strategic, focused, and sustainable social media program requires answering some pretty tough questions, such as:

• Who are we really trying to reach? Do we have a clear sense of which customers, prospects, influencers, and/or other stakeholders are active in social networks, or could be -- and why it's important to reach them this way?
• How do we get their attention? Attention is the scarcest commodity, especially at the executive level where many solutions marketers are determined to engage. Do we really understand what social programs or activities or applications are most likely to succeed with the people we are trying to reach?
• Do we have the skills? Lots of people talk the social media talk, but can they really deliver? Executing with social media requires a diverse set of skills, including content development, recruitment, conversation, facilitation, analysis, and, most of all, LISTENING. Who in the organization is going to do the heavy lifting?
• How should we organize our efforts? Who should "own" social media is a big conversation topic these days, with claims coming from varying departments and types of agencies. Some suggest that the very idea of ownership goes against the democratic philosophy of social media. Do we have a solid strategy for planning, budgeting, and managing our efforts in a coordinated way? Are we confident that we're not taking too narrow or broad a view of how this might work best?
• Can we sustain the effort? Social media is generally a long term proposition; initiatives may take 6-12 months or more to gain real momentum even if they are well designed and managed. Do we have the staying power to stick with it month after month after month even if the early returns are slight?
• How do we capture real value and return on investment? How will we measure success? Do we have clearly defined and realistic objectives and metrics? How will we make sure the benefits reach across the organization?
• How can we minimize risk? Among the first question many executives ask about social media are: What if people say negative things about our company? What if one of our employees shares something proprietary or just stupid or embarrassing about our company? The reality is that social media does bring risk, but the risk is there whether we engage actively or not. How can we manage and support our activities in ways that lessen the risk and increase the reward?
• Are we culturally ready? A question that some companies don't ask is "are we really ready to open the doors and join the conversation?" The biggest challenge with social media is literally being social. It's having the mindset and the culture and the confidence to engage in open conversation, trust your colleagues and staff to do the same, accept criticism publicly, and give up the old notions of controlling the message and marketing to an audience.  

A great danger today is that, in their haste to "catch up," many companies are all of a sudden taking the social media plunge without addressing many of these essential questions. In my own recent discussions with clients and prospects, I've had a lot of questions about tools and tactics (e.g., "What should we be doing with Twitter or Facebook or online video), but less about strategy, objectives, organization, and culture.

Experimentation is fine, and even necessary given the constant innovation in social tools and channels, but taking social media requires a well-developed strategy. This seems almost too obvious to state; unfortunately, though, the hype around social media appears to have caused a lot of otherwise smart marketers to temporarily forget the basics of Marketing 101. Social media may well revolutionize the practice of marketing, but the will core objectives remain the same: serving customers, finding avenues for growth, building reputation, and supporting sales.

I'm not sure it's possible to define "best practice" for solutions marketing in such a new and fast-changing arena as social media, but answering the hard questions above will certainly go a long way toward developing a strategy with a good chance of success.

To help answer some of the hard questions, my partners and I at Solutions Insights have just published a short report, Socializing Solutions: Tapping Social Media for Solutions Success (PDF). The report includes a set of guidelines on where to focus your efforts and a basic, four-phase approach to building an integrated, sustainable program. Please check it out and pass it along. I'd love to know what you think.

Photo credit: OCLS

YouTube as corporate home page?

BooneOakley, a North-Carolina based agency, has gotten a lot of attention in the last few days by essentially shifting its corporate site to YouTube. Click on Booneoakley.com and you get to a "this is our agency" video on YouTube, complete with story of a struggling marketing director going down in flames (actually, a bloody ax) because he chose some other boring conglomerate firm instead of the oh-so-creative BooneOakley.

Embedded links in the main video connect viewers to additional company information, including a cute video thanking the Obama family for naming its new dog Bo after the company's initials.

The main video has received more than 220,000 views in its first 10 days, quite impressive for a small local firm.

It's not the first agency effort to throw out the traditional web page in favor of a more social look. Modernista! made a splash a few months back by directing visitors to its entries and feeds on various social media sites, including Wikepedia, Facebook, Delicious, and NetVibes. And any number of small firms use their blog as their main site.

The point here is not to surrender your traditional Website--although that may well be worth considering. It is rather to take more seriously the new possibilities of social media, to think differently about what matters, and to get past the inertia of last year's plan and the types of activities you've "always" done.

BtoB came out with a new marketing survey on the 2010 outlook yesterday. It was nice to see that a majority of B2B marketers expect to increase their budgets next year, but the more stunning finding to me was that majorities of marketers expect to "stay the same" in many budget categories, including print, broadcast, television, radio, telemarketing, and outdoor. Just a shade under 50 percent of the almost 500 respondents also expect to keep spending on events and direct mail the same. Surely the world has changed more than that! 

What do you think?

The new, new marketing: Health tech coalition may point the way

The buzz in marketing is all about social media, with Twitter as the flavor of the month and maybe even a tipping point in getting laggard companies to finally take the promise of social media seriously. 

I'm all for it, of course. Certainly the hype can get tiresome, and there are huge strategy and organizational questions that companies have to face with social media, but I think we're well past the stage of wondering whether there's real gold in those hills.

But social media was "new" in marketing five years ago. Back then, when I talked with clients about the promise of blogs and communities and the like for "serious" B2B marketing, I got a lot of blank stares and "really?" responses. Those days are long gone, even if many companies are just now dipping their toes into the water.

The new, new marketing incorporates social media values and tactics, but it's much more than that. It's mission-oriented, educational, and problem-solving, while also being conversational and transparent. 

In fact, I've been thinking about yet another acronym to capture the idea: Marketing that MATTERS. it's definitely on the long side, and maybe too cute, but I think the direction is right.

M - Mission-oriented, focused on a larger purpose than just selling stuff
A - Authentic, with personal and organizational integrity, and real people speaking like real people
T - Thought-provoking, with a serious purpose and making people think
T - Transparent (of course), opening the curtain and letting people see inside
E - Educational, helping people learn and solve problems vs. distracting or "just" entertaining them
R - Relationship-oriented, looking for long-term partnership, not just the the one-time sale
S - Story-driven, since that's what we remember and what makes it real

IBM's Smarter Planet campaign (which is becoming more a way of doing business than just a campaign) is a great example of this approach, and the kudos IBM is receiving are well-deserved.

GE's new Healthymagination is another move in the same direction, as was GE's earlier start with its Ecomagination initiative.

Yes these are self-serving marketing programs. Hey, it's capitalism and these are mega-corporations trying to make a buck. But there is a strong element of enlightened self-interest here. They're tackling real social issues; they're raising awareness; they're thought-provoking; they're providing at least some education, and so on. I'm not sure they''d get all A's on a Marketing that MATTERS report card, but I'm choosing to look on the bright side.

Meanwhile, we don't all have the deep pockets of IBM and GE, and have to think a bit smaller in scale.  

A new health tech coalition, the EHR Stimulus Tour, captured my eye in this regard. Motivated by the chance to capture government funding for helping doctors convert to electronic health records (EHR), an alliance of large and smaller tech firms, including Cisco, Dell, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, Nuance, Allscripts, and Citrix is organizing an educational campaign for doctors on the Stimulus legislation and the opportunities and benefits of EHR.

It's not a huge effort, and probably not one that will last for years. Tactically, though, the campaign covers a lot of useful ground in a well-designed and integrated way: a focused audience, an educational approach, a combination of live road show events and a resource microsite, a presence n Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, a set of webcasts, etc. And the alliance approach itself is a nice change from the normal solo or traditional channel approach; it adds to the "we're all pitching in to solve the problem" idea.

The program and the EHR push in general are not without controversy (see, for example, here). In looking at the bright side, though, I see enormous potential for business-society win-win with this kind of marketing approach. I wouldn't give these guys all A's either, but the Mission-orientation is a good start and the campaign provides a useful model to consider.

What do you think? And what about "Marketing that MATTERS" idea? Does that make sense, or is it just another dumb acronym?

Put everyone in marketing? Yes, and with a social spin

Harvard management guru Rosabeth Moss Kanter last week suggested: "In a Recession, Put Everyone in Marketing." The idea, of course, is that you can't just keep cutting costs endlessly, and your employees are your most important asset. When times are tough, everyone needs to contribute to growth.

It's a perfectly fine idea, although often stated as one of those age-old cliches that you don't actually take seriously: "Sure, we're all marketers. Great. Can we get back to work now?"

In fact, the recession is the perfect time to merge the basic idea of everyone supporting marketing with the mega-trend of social media.

Kanter's five suggestions for how to put everyone in marketing are all good ones, but surprisingly pre-Web 2.0. If we give them a social spin, the possibilities become a lot more interesting.

• Increase customer contact and communication. Not only should senior executives reach out more, so should employees throughout the organization. "Perhaps a personal note or a phone call to provide news or ask questions." Isn't it time to accelerate efforts to connect with customers through social networks and communities, and tap employees around the organization who are already active to lead the charge?
• Start looking for new markets now. All employees should be looking for new uses of existing products and new areas for potential customers. "This might involve sales calls, tests of a new channel, postings on Web sites targeting new areas or industry segments, sending more people to speak at industry conferences and cultivate relationship." What about tapping the social web both internally and externally to rapidly crowdsource new market ideas and opportunities, as  companies like IBM, Dell, Cisco, and others are doing with innovation jams and webstorms?
• Invest in employee morale. When morale is down, productivity suffers. Managers should do more to show employees how much they are valued. "Small tokens of appreciation and enjoyment, such as a weekend outing with families or a food festival with employee contributions... go a long way to keep people motivated." Why not really open up the organization internally with a new transparency using honest executive blogs, wide-ranging online discussion of business challenges and opportunities, and an authentic commitment from the top to respond to employee questions and concerns? If the new external marketing is all about open conversation and community, the new internal marketing should be, too.  
• Emphasize and reward small wins. Tough times make it that much more important to get new ideas from anyone and everyone in the organization, but companies too often neglect to ask or provide incentives to help the process along. "A program that actively seeks these ideas and rewards them... can strengthen the company immediately." Why not use the crowdsourcing approach noted above for an even broader effort to generate and recognize new business improvement ideas. 
• Stick with your values. Managers are often tempted to cut ethical corners in a down economy, but desperate measures often come back to haunt the company soon thereafter -- "Reminders about company values can reinforce solidarity and increase the confidence that customers have in the company." What about using the recession as the perfect opportunity to increase public commitment to management transparency and corporate social responsibility, and create new online resources such as interactive sustainability reports to demonstrate the commitment?

Kanter is right on when she suggests that getting all employees involved in knowing and caring about customers is a key to success when times are tough. This is not exactly easy when many of those employees are understandably worried most of all about their own job security and families. Fortunately, our growing experience with new social tools and programs is making it a bit easier just when we need it most. 

What do you think?

Photo credit: aleske

Acid test for social media: The lunch lady blog

Tac Anderson at NewCommBiz just posted the true test for companies working in social media: Will they let the lunch lady blog?

Tac says he often poses a question to audiences when he talks about social media: You talk to a CEO on a flight and ask him about his company's recent poor results, and get one answer. Then you run into the CEO's lunch lady at a kid's soccer game and ask her the same question. Whose answer do you believe?

One thing that we've learned about social media is that we all trust 'people like me." Whenever I give this scenario and ask the question I have NEVER had anyone pick the CEO and I've even posed this question to a room full of CEO's.

There are so many companies that are doing great things with social media right now but we haven't taken it far enough. We've enabled our marketing teams, key communication groups and our engineers and product developers but we have not yet pushed social media all the way through the company. 

We will have finally reached truly social businesses when we let the lunch lady blog.

Amen to that, but two quick comments:

First, although a number of companies are indeed doing great things with social media, we're still very early on the learning curve and even more companies are just barely getting started.

Second, the lunch lady may well already be blogging!

Photo credit: specialkrb

Learning from Gen Y

MediaPost, one of my favorite sources. launched a new blog recently, Engage: Gen Y, and the first few posts are already capturing my attention. Today's post suggested five simple rules for "snagging consumer 2.0" and they are well worth pondering even in the rarified air of high-end B2B solutions, where Gen Yers are still mostly consigned to support roles outside the orbits of purchase decision makers. 

The rules are these:

• Authenticity Trumps Celebrity
• Niche is the New Norm
• Bite-Size Communications Dominate
• Personal Utility Drives Adoption
• Consumers Own Brands

As the title says, this is consumer-oriented, but the application to B2B and solutions marketing should be clear immediately, and not just in thinking about Gen Yers. Consider the perspective of the buyers you're trying to reach in B2B:

• Authenticity: Let me speak with and learn from real experts, and get the real story. No hype allowed.
• Niche: Know my industry and my business; don't bother with your generic pitches and solutions. 
• Bite-Sized Communications: Don't waste my time! I will eventually dig into the details, but you've got to pique my interest pretty damm quick.
• Personal Utility: What's in it for me? You've got to pay attention to my personal-professional agenda as well as my company's.
• Brands: Personal and peer experience is what matters; I could care less about your carefully crafted messages and materials.

Maybe us boomers and Xers are not so different from the next generation after all. 

What do you think?