change

Who owns your brand?

In the past, marketing owned the brand, using a tightly controlled set of messages piped through carefully selected channels to ensure brand “ownership” through control….but that’s no longer the case.  The increasing integration of social media into our consumers’ lives has shifted brand ownership away from marketers and into the hands of the consumer.

We marketers like to think that social media is primarily a set of tools for our marketing purposes, but in reality, social media is also a strong set of tools our consumers use to share and influence opinion about our brand.   Our consumers now have “the channel of me.” Consumers’ opinions now create the “reality” of the brand — if enough consumers say negative things about your brand, your brand loses its credibility, and (thankfully) vice versa.

There are two main ways we can react to this change:  we can fight it or accept it. I highly recommend accepting it.  If we fight to retain control of our brands, we are likely to hold on so tight that we suffocate the flexibility and outward-looking awareness our brand needs for survival.

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Build Relationships, Not Billboards!

The marketing paradigm is shifting with much greater “power to the people” facilitated by social media.  If you want to continue to reach your market, it’s not about advertising any more, but about building relationships.

Consider the following differences:

Advertising Building Relationships
1.     Telling

2.     Starts with “me” (the brand, the product, the service)

3.     Focuses on “what can you give me?”

4.     Goal:  instant impact

5.     Where’s the money?

 1.     Listening, hearing, empathizing, asking,

2.     Starts with “you” (the customer’s needs, wants, interests and expectations)

3.     Focuses on “how can I serve you?”

4.     Goal: ongoing engagement

5.     Who are the people?

1. Telling vs. Listening

It may sound counterintuitive, but if you truly want to be heard above the growing social media “noise,” you need to listen.  Listen to what your consumers and potential consumers are saying before you even put one word out there:  What are they saying, what are they feeling, what are their pain points, what solutions do they need?   Then when you do “speak” (type), empathize with them and ask them questions.

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Is It Time to Shift Marketing Dollars?

There are 100 opinions on what percentage of social media should be in your 2011 marketing mix, but across every industry there’s one unified call for quantifiable ROI.

We marketers know that Return on Investment and Return on Information depend on a company’s goals. While it may be difficult to measure the short-term effectiveness of a Twitter campaign in profitability terms (ROI), it’s no excuse not to pursue an initiative or forego measurements.

Do you know the ROI of the ad on the bus bench? Or four hours on the golf course with a CEO, or the in-flight magazine ad?

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Be the Change Your Customers Want You to Be!

In today’s fast-paced, ever changing environment, most brands rank poorly when it comes to customer service. We might argue that it’s to be expected, since change is now more constant than ever… but the hard truth is that if we don’t excel in customer service, our brands will become just another nameless part of the noise out there.

Customers are no longer willing to wait around for us to get our act together, and even if they were willing, we can no longer afford extended timelines for change. Let’s put it into perspective – what if I told you not to expect to even be doing the same thing in 2 years that you are doing today?

Suddenly you can see that it is to our advantage to operate within the customers super-turbo-fast timeline now.  But how to do that and still provide excellent customer service??  Those two goals are not as diametrically opposed as they might first seem.

Customer service is not just making sure returns are processed correctly, or customer frustrations are smoothed over.  In this new social media era, customer service now carries the expectation of continually proving to your customers that you VALUE them in all stages of the sales cycle… from product conception to developing and honing brand personality and promises, to sale, to after-sale satisfaction, to the resulting repeat sales.  All to start over again in the change cycle with a re-evaluation of the product and possible reconcepting.

The key is to involve your customers in meaningful ways through all aspects of the sales cycle. Online communities are one of the best ways to do this.  Those communities set up an environment of trust among the brand, marketers, and community members, and provide the technical features required to allow the conversations to stay in the foreground and the technology in the background.

Ask your customers what they want from your brand, your products and services.  Ask your customers how you’re doing, and what they want to see changed.  Ask your customers to rate their satisfaction AND to tell you stories about their experience with your brand, products and services.

Then go do something about it.  Make the changes.  Step into the future as soon as your customers tell you what it looks like!

Seek out and embrace change – look to the future through your customers’ eyes and you just might get there before everyone else!

Ted Rubin

Ted Rubin Ted has a deep online background beginning in 1997 with Seth Godin, as CMO of e.l.f. Cosmetics, & recently as Chief Social Marketing Officer, Open Sky. Originally posted at SheSpeaks

The Power of YES

I love anticipating the smell of the Thanksgiving turkey roasting all day at home, and the lingering scent it leaves behind for a few days until my 14′ douglas fir arrives.  (Even though I’m allergic to the tree, the beauty of its’ fullness and soft evergreen needles keeps me coming back.  My husband and grandson say no more 200 lb. trees are coming in the house; we’ll see….) 

This year, my side of the family gathered at Bricker’s Pizza in Hershey for Thanksgiving; my nephew, Robbie, has worked there part-time since his college days.  Since his girlfriend’s family and our whole family convened to celebrate the holiday, we needed someplace to meet that could accommodate all of us.  Even though he’s now finished graduate school and works as a civil engineer, he still loves filling in at the pizza shop when they need help.  His gal, Lauren, is a senior at Indiana University of Pennsylvania; they’ve been dating since January, thanks to his aunt Jenny (who set them up on a blind date then). 

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Social Media and the Helen Keller Effect

Update to start 2012: Quick search for the exact phrase “Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much” for the entire year of 2011 shows close to 33,000 results still being tweeted an average of almost 3,000 twitter mentions per month!

In January 2010, The Social CMO blog you are reading and this amazing group of bloggers now affectionately known as The Social CMO Crew was formed. When putting up the blog using WordPress, as always there’s a spot for the blog subtitle and because it seemed so fitting I used a quote I had seen fly by on Twitter at that time not aware of its’ original source and it has since stuck.

Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much!

Since January 2010 this has been our rallying cry here at The Social CMO and been proven out in many ways including the creation of our #MMchat held every #MarketerMonday evening at 8:00pm. In addition as a group The Social CMO Crew now has more than a million followers that are all amazing tweeps who are continuously reading, retweeting and supporting this dynamic team of marketers as we interact across the social media sphere.

It wasn’t until months later that I was actually told that this quote was from Helen Keller, one of the most famous disabled individuals ever and avid advocate for the blind and other disenfranchised groups. I will not repeat her biography here, but you can review her entire story through her Wikipedia page. So why I am I telling you all this on Sunday in late November? It’s simple because this one phrase really captures the essence of the power of social media. That’s why I instinctively chose it for our tagline at The Social CMO and it appears that I am not the only one who has felt and been inspired by what I am calling the Helen Keller Effect on Social Media.

Yesterday I was at a chess tournament with my son and wanted to send out a tweet on my Blackberry of our tagline and Who Are We? page link as I do from time to time. It has been awhile since I had done this so didn’t have the tweet and link handy so instead thought I would just Google it to pick up my previous tweets with the link. Well much to my amazement for the next few minutes the results of this search literally flooded my small screen!

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Social media fueled political drama in the U.S.

Election Day is over here in the United States and we appear to be on the brink of a significant social change. Fueled by outrage over the financial meltdown, economic stimulus attempts, government bailouts, and the election of Barack Obama, The Tea Party Movement is upending incumbents in the name of fiscal conservatism.

Many are pointing to the role of social media channels in spreading this movement. Did social media create the Tea Party Movement, and if so, does this prove that the social web can enable dramatic social change?

Just two years after a sweeping Democratic victory, the tea-party movement re-drew the landscape again. Nurtured by online networking, it helped disparate activists across the nation link up and already push aside high-profile incumbent leaders in multiple states this year.

A thorough history of the Tea Party Movement in The Wall Street Journal is peppered with references to the use of social media in building a national movement. Let’s start with a brief summary of how social media played a role in these sweeping changes:

Blogs

The genesis of the Tea Party Movement may have been a blog by Stacy Mott, a stay-at-home mother fed up with the government’s economic policies. Enraged by the government bail-outs, she started a blog for conservative women called “Smart Girl Politics” and launched a social networking site at the same time. This and other conservative blogs were catalysts for live rallies. The content caught the attention of influential blogger and political commentator Michelle Malkin who started to write about the rallies. After a dramatic online television rant calling for a modern-day Tea Party movement by CNBC Commentator Rick Santelli, the Smart Girl blog went viral. Hundreds of other blogs popped up, creating a grassroots cry for change.

Social networking

Facebook pages started springing up locally and then nationally, uniting disparate activities. The movement initially had no budget, so Facebook served as the central directory for the party’s activities. Within a year there 2,000 Tea Party-related Facebook pages. Eventually one of the founders created a website and social networking site called The Tea Party Patriots.

Twitter

Many believe the first seeds of the movement were planted on a list of top conservatives on Twitter, dubbed #tcot” for short. This list spawned other lists and within weeks #tcot grew from 25 names to 1,500. Twitter was used to unite disparate voices and organize conference calls, town hall meetings and rallies.

Wikis

As the movement grew, organizers established wikis to provide protest advice and organizing techniques.

Fueled by these social platforms, general disenchantment coalesced into a cause, and in just a few months the movement enjoyed a stunning victory when Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts won Senator Ted Kennedy’s long-time Democratic Senate seat.

The social media revolution?

Undoubtedly social networking unified an idea among disparate interest groups with no organization and no budget. Does this amazing success discredit the much-discussed Malcom Gladwell article claiming that the weak links and lack of hierarchy could not promote such dramatic social change?

Yes and no. If you look carefully at the brief history of the Tea Party Movement, it may actually SUPPORT Gladwell’s contention.

The WSJ article shows the initial loose organizations created on social networks were eventually dismantled by in-fighting, controversy and hurt feelings. Once the euphoria of the initial change began to wear off, the social networks could not sustain the change and even the early pioneers united by blogs and Facebook became bitter and divided. Relationships among the loosely-based coalition deteriorated so quickly members began suing each other.

The real catalyst came from coverage by the traditional media. News programs on the Fox Network and articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal fueled interest in rallies. Live conference calls to organize the initiative seemed to be the linchpin between chaos and unity. Town Hall meetings and live rallies kept the momentum alive. Embarrassing content, like a racist photo-shopped images of the president, quickly went viral on the social web and actually created more divisiveness among the members.

The other important point that Gladwell was addressing was that revolutionary change requires risk to personal safety. Voting for the Tea Party Movement in the privacy of a voting booth carries the same risk as clicking a “like” button on Facebook so this is not exactly a test case for his theory.

In any event, there is no doubt that the Tea Party Movement could not have coalesced with this speed and forcefulness without social media. What are your thoughts on this Social Media Political Revolution?

Mark Schaefer

Is Social Media the Cure for Apathy?

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but somewhere over the last 50 years the majority of people in the world lost their mojo when it came to fighting for change. Didn’t matter whether the issue was big or small, even bad customer service and poor quality flourished because of the divide and conquer realities of slow one to one and the high cost of mass communication.

People grew tired and weak from being browbeaten into submission to the point where apathy set in when it came to believing in, mobilizing and exercising their power as an individual within society.

The ability for people to communicate, organize and take action around an issue or idea had become very slow, difficult and costly. Even more significantly, the poor results often seen by those who actually made the effort led many to accept “Is it really worth the bother?”

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How to “win” with social media

Wherever I go to speak, entrepreneurs and corporate marketing professionals come up to me afterward and ask, “But what do we DO with social media?”

So, forget all the fancy plans; forget the ever-unsatisfying pursuit of ROI. Please just let this video sink in. Let this one thought permeate all that you do on social media. If you will, I guarantee you that you will discover exactly what you should DO on social media.

Here’s the foundational principle at work on social media:

  • everyone wants to be heard
  • everyone wants to be understood
  • everyone wants to know his or her life matters.

You START that process by paying attention. On Twitter that starts by following the people who are following you. Period. It is just that simple. The next step is making social media about them, not you. And that starts by acknowledging their presence.

[Whenever I say something like this, someone with 250 followers will try to tell me they follow only people who add value to their own social media experience. I won’t tackle the challenges with that argument in this post, but I would encourage you to seriously think through the value system that would produce such a conclusion.]

Please watch T.J. Thyne’s famous video and then notice the people around you: acknowledge & affirm—it’s how to win with social media and in real life, too.

Trey Pennington

PS. You are AWESOME!

Refuse to Live in a Box!

Live outside the box! Let’s say it again. Live outside the box and dare to no longer be defined by the “confines of a box.”

Why is it that so many people today are defined by the proverbial “box” and quite frankly seem to like to stay in the comfortable confines of a box?

Think about it.



Most people sleep on a “bed/box” talk on a “phone/box”, email from a “blackberry/box”, type on a “laptop/box”, eat from a “drive thru/box lunch”, drive to work in a “car/box”, and then set their AM wake up call to be made from a “alarm clock.box” etc. No wonder people are so comfortable with box type thinking.

Organizations are no different than people– as organizations are made up of people.

I challenge everyone who seeks to be a leader to “live outside the box.” Furthermore, look at 2010 as it is, and see our organizational problems for what they are… etc instead of looking at them as worse than they are.

Lets focus on seeing things that others do not see and being a leader who is not adverse to trying new ways of doing things. Let’s work to find a better way to do things… and then work to make these things a reality.

Living outside the box, is uncomfortable to many who love their simple, black and white (no gray), four walls up… and “box oriented” world.
However, to compete now and the years ahead– the box has to go away and the four walls must come down to allow free energy, creativity, and unbridled ideas to occur.

What box do you face? Do you like the confines of your box?

Ryan Sauers