emergencemarketing.com

Yesterday I had the privilege and pleasure to  interview Marty St.George, the CMO at JetBlue (for the second time). You can listen to the podcast, which was sponsored by Microsoft, on the FastForward blog.

Here is what I wrote for the FASTforward Blog.

We started the conversation by focusing on what it takes  to achieve one of JetBlue’s original goals – bringing humanity back to the airline industry. Many companies try to embrace humanity or talk about humanizing their brands, but very few achieve that goal the way JetBlue has. Most end up with pockets of humanity or episodic programs that makes them seem human for a little period of time. JetBlue was able to scale it to the point where it has become part of the fabric of the company.

The secret?

First, they created a culture based on embracing humanity – they did not just try to make humanity an add-on to a more traditional airline business culture. Where most other airlines consider themselves in the airline operating business, seeing their jobs as flying airplanes around, JetBlue considers itself in the customer service business, and they happen to fly airplanes as part of that. Second, and in order to scale “embracing humanity” as their  company grew, they built a set of  5 core values by which they hire, train, and lead their people – Safety, Caring, Integrity, Passion, and Fun. They also realize that the company does not own the culture, nor the brand – the employees do, and every crew member is an equal owner in the culture and the brand. Subtle nuances to some traditional business thinkers, but possibly the single most important difference between a company who can truly claim to have a human face and one that is just giving it lip service.

We then talked about the importance of leadership in maintaining such a culture, and how JetBlue University is an integral part of coaching and training new leaders from within. They also have a very different concept of teaming than most traditional companies – making sure that no silos form within their organizational structure, and being very collaborative in nature. Being able to have a true  collaborative culture is another byproduct of being based on a shared mission and core values.

The 2nd part of the conversation was focused primarily on JetBlue’s embrace of Social Media. For JetBlue, Social Media is the antithesis of media – it is a direct connection/two way conversation between the customer and the brand. While they started with social media as an experiment, they now have truly made it part of the fabric of their company. Like Dell, they realize that you cannot just play by putting a toe in the water – at some point you need to go all out. And when you do it right, people do not just talk with you, they talk with one another about you – providing you with the richest learning environment.

We also touched on the messy side of embracing humanity – including how to deal with people who unfairly voice their anger and frustration in public, and how to avoid being taken hostage by others who have big social media megaphones.

Other things we talked about include:

• The importance of senior leadership involvement in onboarding new employees
• How your front line employees are your brand
• The need to keep a small business feel as your company grows
• The role of passion in the workplace and the importance of communications as part of that
• The importance of praise in embracing humanity
• How to keep the balance between being being hi-tech vs. hi-touch and still be able to claim that your brand embraces humanity
• How twitter scales as a customer service channel
• The importance of trials in airline marketing

You can listen to the podcast over at the FASTforward Blog.

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Larry Flanagan, the CMO at MasterCard was a good one.

As is usually the case with these interviews, Larry started off by giving us some context to the career that led him to become CMO at MasterCard – in his case a background that includes a stint in the advertising business, as well as client side experiences with Proctor & Gamble and L’Oreal, where he was involved with major acquisitions. He joined MasterCard 13 years ago when the brand was in dire straits, and became CMO 5 years later. Not surprisingly, one of his main yardsticks in managing global marketing campaigns for MasterCard is Marketing ROI.

MasterCard has an interesting and fairly complex business model. On the one hand, they deal with partners, for the most part banks, but also merchant partners and non-financial institutions, who are basically franchisees. On the other hand they deal with consumers, who are the carriers of the cards. That makes for a business that is not just into B2B or B2C, but also into B2C2B and B2B2C – resulting in interesting and unique challenges as it relates to balancing the marketing mix and branding.

We then talked about the challenges associated with delivering a consistent brand experience when you have as many customer touch-points as MasterCard has – most of which are not in the company’s control. Brand is especially important for MasterCard as it is fully intertwined with the value propositions to their partners. At MasterCard, just as is the case with many other companies, branding has undergone dramatic shifts over the last decades. Larry described how branding went from being a process that consisted of a one way dialog in which companies told the consumers how they should think about the brand, how it’s differentiated from competitors, what the key benefits and value proposition are, to a many-to-many process in which the brand exists in the consumer’s daily experience, and is influenced not only by what the company says, but also by what is being said in consumers’ social networks, and what friends are telling them. Larry calls this a consumer inside-out view of the brand – one in which the brand truth lies with the consumer.

What that means for marketers is that they have to think differently about the channels through which they try to influence consumers. Sometimes the best way to have a dialogue with the consumer is through third party influencers and stake-holders who enjoy a high level of trust within their communities and networks.

In Larry’s view, social media and digital technologies have ignited a revolution that has leveled the playing field between individuals and corporations. In a way, it has enabled word of mouth, which has always been one of the most successful means of influence and decision-making, to become word of mouth on steroids, with everything being amplified and traveling much faster than before. That is true in all aspects of business, not just in marketing, but also in the way we recruit and manage talent, and how job applicants select the companies they want to work for. And while we may not fully understand the long term impact of social media on our business – one thing we know for sure is that as companies we have to be part of those conversations.

One of the challenges facing marketers who are investing in these new channels and leveraging these new-found opportunities to engage with consumers, partners, and competitors, is how to measure the impact of those programs, and how to attribute value to all those new behaviors so that we can influence the ones we want. Clearly there are no good models out there to do that and Larry believes that many companies will develop proprietary models.

We then talked about an issue that is very specific to the financial sector, yet applicable to all industries – that of trust. It’s no secret that the last economic downturn have severely damaged the trust that consumers have in their financial institutions. When you are hit with a trust confidence crisis like this – how do you overcome it and how do you regain that trust? According to Larry, the key to overcome this is by first listening to the marketplace and truly understand what is going on. Next is to engage with the marketplace in a manner that is transparent and value driven. Specifically for financial services companies that means convincing consumers that they want to make their lives easier while not hiding the fact that they are for-profit commercial institutions and not charitable organizations.

Other things that we discussed include:

• The changing role of reputation management in a social media world
• The importance of listening to what is being said about your company and how to select the conversations in which you want to engage
• The skill set of people needed to successfully lead you through the current changes
• The importance of mobile applications in the marketing mix
• The role and valuation of impressions and engagement in paid media, earned media, and owned media
• The balance between global/local needs in the marketing mix

As usual, you can listen to the full podcast on the CMO 2.0 Conversation.

I’ve been a long time champion of Don Peppers’ work and so it was especially fun to conduct this CMO 2.0 Influencer Conversation with him. Don is the co-author of eight books, his latest one being Rules to Break and Laws to Follow, and he is also the co-founder of Peppers and Rogers.

We started off by having Don give an overview of his latest book, which came out last year. At a high level, the book deals with the evolving landscape of business competition and the changes that are caused by the rise of social media – with customers increasingly talking with one another.

In it, Don and his co-author Martha Rogers argue that while businesses operate under a set of assumptions that sound logical, they are, in fact, fundamentally flawed. And, as the title of their book advocates for, it’s these rules that need to be broken.

The first one is that the best measure of success for your company is current sales and profits. They think that this is a false assumption because customers don’t just buy things from you today. When they do buy things they also have an experience that changes their impression of you or their affection for you, which in turn changes the likely amount of business you’re going to get (or not get) from that customer in the future. So, the customer lifetime value goes up or down based on current buying experiences, and that is the metric companies should track – not current sales and profits.

The second rule to break, or false assumption that companies operate on, is that with the right sales and marketing efforts you can always get more customers. In reality, they argue, we have a surplus of products and services, and a shortage of customers – customers are the new scarcity and should be thought of as a productive resource the same way we think of capital or labor as productive resources. You cannot just get more customers with more marketing – there is a limit. Note that Don and Martha are not attacking the whole notion of customer acquisition, they just don’t think that it’s the only way to create value. The other side of this coin is that capital is an infinite resource – you can always get more capital.

The third rule to break, also widely accepted as truth by most businesses, is that company value can be created by offering differentiated products and services. Products and services don’t create value – customers do when they buy those products and services. Customers create value in two ways. Short term, by buying products from you now. Long term, by buying more from you later and by creating additional business for you through their referrals. So you should think of customers as productive assets.

Don then talked about a new customer-based metric that companies can use to measure the efficiency with which they are using customers to create value – Return on Customer. Return on Customer is very analogous to Return on Investment. If I have a customer who has a lifetime value of $100 and I make $5 in profit on that customer by selling him stuff during the year, and by the end of the year I’ve been able to increase his lifetime value to $110, then my Return on Customer is 15%.

We also talked about customer acquisition strategies and how you need to evaluate the total customer lifetime value when you prioritize which customers to attract. The least valuable customers come in for the most valuable offers – so having a customer acquisition strategy focused on discounts is not exactly the smartest thing to do. Research that we found as part of research for our own book, about which I will blog about separately, showed that customers who are acquired through word of mouth have not only a higher lifetime value than those acquired through traditional marketing programs, they also bring in more new business through their referrals. So, when you calculate customer lifetime value you need to include the business that will come to you because of a customer’s positive word of mouth. That is especially true in light of other research that Don mentioned, which shows that your highest spenders are not always your highest referrers.

We then talked about another important topic in all of Don’s writing – trust. Customers make most of their buying decisions based on trust, and they think that you are creating the most value for them when they trust you. So if you want to maximize the value your customers create, you need to focus on earning and keeping their trust. And you cannot have a trustworthy business unless you trust your employees.

We closed our conversation with a discussion around the evolution of CRM, and how CRM systems will have to start incorporating people’s social profile, not just their buying history with the company. Don also warned that if companies think of their CRM system as a tool to sell more things, they will fail. CRM systems should be put in place to create more value for the customers – create better offers, better delivery, or whatever will increase value for the customer.

Don had an interesting parting piece of advice for marketers:

…in the era of social media you should always step back from whatever marketing policy you’re considering, whatever kind of new idea you have and ask yourself, ‘Gee, if this became public, would it be an embarrassment to us? Would we be proud of it? Would some of our customers hold it against us?’

Because, you know what? It’s a really good chance it will become public in today’s age and if you want to protect yourself then you really have to have clean hands, not just a good alibi.

Other things we discussed include:

• How trust is a combination of intent and competence
• The impact of technology on corporate hierarchies and processes
• How successful companies of the future will have a high degree of self-organization
• The importance of culture in successful companies
• How the most influential customers don’t want to be sold to

As usual, you can listen to the podcast on the CMO 2.0 site.

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Gail Galuppo, the CMO at Western Union was both fun and refreshing. Talk about the challenge of being in charge of a legacy brand that totally had to transform itself, with the added complexity of serving 15,000 distinct customer communities. Not an easy task, for sure, but one that Gail and her team seem to enjoy thoroughly.

As usual we started off with Gail giving us some context by describing her background. In her case, she learned to put the customer at the center of all decision making while being trained on Six Sigma at GE Capital. She then had a career that took her from financial services to retail and back into financial services and which allowed her to experience various places worldwide. At Western Union, she deals with offices in 202 countries and 400,000 retail locations – six times as many retail locations as McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Citibank combined. Talk about a challenging footprint to deliver a consistent brand experience worldwide. As mentioned earlier, they serve 15,000 distinct customer communities, who behave very differently from one another – from Ghanaians in France, to Kenyans in the UK, Filipinos in Dubai and Guatemalans in the US – just to name a few. Their customers are work emigrants who send money back home.

The first marketing challenge we talked about was that of international marketing – how to operate as a global brand, while being relevant to your local communities. The job gets further complicated by the fact that even within their distinct customer communities, there are fundamental differences in needs, expectations, and lifestyles. A migrant from Puerto Rico who immigrated to the US 30 years ago has a very different lifestyle and other needs than one who’s in the country for 3 months or 3 years. And if you thought that was it – think again. They also need to appeal to both senders and receivers of money. With this many permutations and message requirements, nobody could blame you for having a marketing conniption. The way they resolve this seemingly insurmountable and massively expensive problem is in two ways – through a hyper-national brand campaign based on common consumer tribe attributes for all immigrants worldwide combined with a hyper-local set of programs focused on the separate customer communities within each country. Worldwide, their research found that the common attributes that binds all immigrant customer tribes together are pride, sacrifice, adventurism, dreams for their family members, positivity and can-do spirit. Based on that they created the Yes! campaign, the first global brand campaign for Western Union. At the same time they also continue to celebrate the differences between their consumer tribes by having hyper-local programs (like concerts with bands from their native country) that are led by people from those consumer communities – so for example, they have Chinese, Kenyan, and Togolese employees leading the local marketing efforts for those groups in France.

It would be interesting to see if you could harness this consumer tribal behavior into a true global online community. Members would be attracted to the community by what unites them worldwide and would remain in the community by what makes their own tribes unique. They could hang out in sub-communities with their own people and help one another get adjusted. Western Union could strengthen the relationship with their customers by recommending community-specific products, and services, and by providing advice. From a technology enablement perspective it certainly would work as 90% of their customers have cell phones and are over-indexed on the Internet – the community would have to have a strong SMS component to it.

Another interesting aspect of the Yes! campaign is that the primary audience for the campaign was not the actual customers, but the employees and the Western Union partners who operate the storefronts.The effort, called “Project Galvanize,” was actually meant to change the culture from one where people were thinking of customers in terms of transactions into a much more customer-centric culture. When you have 400,000 customer touch-points worldwide, it’s hard to deliver a consistent brand experience if you focus on the transactions rather than the humans and their motivations.

We also talked about the role of social media in the marketing mix. While Western Union is in the early stages of leveraging social media and communities as part of their marketing – they do have a initiative on FaceBook called World In Motion – they definitely intend on expanding that. They are monitoring what is being said about them in social media, but here too they want to take this to the next level.

Lastly we talked about growth – and whether they focus on expanding the array of services for existing customers, or look for new markets first. The answer for Western Union is both. They are coming out with a series of new mobile applications for existing customers and are also getting into the small business market – not just the generic small business market, but that part of the small business market operated by immigrants. A new consumer tribe that probably would thrive online as well.

I can totally see how Gail thinks she has the best job in the world.

Other things that we talked about include:

• The details of the Yes! campaign and how they measured progress and success
• The importance of a values-based system in managing all the possible agent scenarios worldwide
• The role of customer analytics in marketing
• The importance of integrating marketing with customer service
• The challenges related to recruiting a true diverse workforce worldwide

As usual, you can listen to the podcast on the CMO 2.0 site.

Having been a customer of Fast Company since the first release and having been an early advertiser in the magazine, I truly enjoyed having my CMO 2.0 Influencer conversation with Alan Webber, the co-founder of Fast Company, and most recently the author of a great book called Rules of Thumb.

As usual, we started by having Alan give us some context about himself – incidentally, one of his rules of thumb (#32 – “content isn’t king, context is king”). I had forgotten what the first cover of the magazine said: work is personal, computing is social, knowledge is power, and break the rules. Talk about being ahead of your time – that was 1995! That was a true manifesto which led to Fast Company becoming one of the fastest growing publications and the second largest acquisition in U.S. magazine history.

Rules of thumb pulls together 52 core lessons that Alan learned during his 40 years of working in government, academia and publishing at the Harvard Business School, as an entrepreneur at Fast Company, and as a globetrotting, global “detective,” as he describes himself, trying to make sense out of all the changes that are currently going on in business, politics, and society all over the world.

Next we touched on Alan’s Rule #15 – “every start-up needs four things: Change, Connections, Conversation, and Community” – and how that happened at Fast Company. Fast Company, of course, was one of the first companies to successfully leverage communities as part of their business model. Readers of the magazine formed a real tribe – one that wanted to hang together in the context of ideas and conversations about the trajectory of change in business, work, competition, and in individual’s careers. The tribe, as you may recall, was called Company of Friends – and like most successful communities it became a true movement, one that the company would have been hard-pressed to close down.

Bouncing around a bit we next talked about rule #42 – the survival of the fittest is the business case for diversity. Not only did they have tremendous diversity within their employee base, with people coming from all over the world, with different backgrounds, different educations, race, color, etc. , they also had a lot of diversity among their readers. The diverse employee gene pool allowed them to be very innovative – for example making them one of the earliest magazines to turn their customers into co-marketers by giving away their web content for free with the first “send this page to a friend” feature.

Next we spoke about a number of rules related to talent and leadership, including Rule #19, “memo to leaders: focus on the signal-to-noise ratio,” or Rule # 21, great leaders answer Tom Peter’s great question: “How can I capture the World’s Imagination?”, or (maybe my favorite) Rule #26, “the soft stuff is the hard stuff.” Alan sees a shift from leaders who have all the answers to leaders who know the best questions to ask. He thinks that in the wake of this economic crisis, many of us feel like we’ve been let down by those leaders who were supposed to make sound business decisions. The problem is that they did not ask the right questions and in many cases did not ask any questions. Good leaders, he explained, are those people who start out thinking they are not necessarily in positions of authority to give everybody answers. They’re in a position of authority to ask really tough questions that make their organization think very hard about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Good leaders in this period of economic retrenchment should have a mix of intelligence and humility – they don’t need to be the smartest person in the room, but they do have to be the person who’s willing to ask the hardest questions and insist on really good answers. As a leader you need to have clarity about your purpose, honesty about your values, and focus about your metrics.

Next we talked about the importance of knowledge flows and how you absolutely have to have trust within organizations for knowledge to flow. We also touched on talent being one of the key drivers in successful business and the irony associated with the fact that while most leaders will agree to that, they will also promote CFO’s before HR VP’s, and at the first signs of trouble ditch the talent in order to get their stock prices up.

Alan then spent a fair amount of time talking about a new movement he sees emerging, that of social entrepreneurship and social innovation – a topic he covers in his book as well. People are no longer waiting for governments to come up with solutions to small and big social problems – they are assembling the best of business practices with a strong social mission to tackle the problems as for-profit, non-profit, or hybrid organizations. They are baby boomers as well as young people right out of college. He believes that social entrepreneurship, which is a true global phenomenon, is changing the world.

In a way, Rules of Thumb is very much a book on leadership. It tries to get people to be leaders on their own terms, and to mint a new group of people who don’t look to others to provide the rules.

Other things we talked about include:

• The need to match left brain people with right brain people
• How most successful magazines mobilized a community that didn’t know it was a community until the magazine came out and gave it the organizing principles so people knew they belonged to a community
• How leadership is a test of character
• How you need metrics to show people how they are doing but how you cannot have too many metrics

As usually you can listen to the podcast over at the CMO 2.0 Site.

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Ted Gilvar, who is the global CMO at Monster (and also a customer of ours), was a really interesting one as I have a fairly high level of familiarity with their business. It is also fascinating to see how some themes, even though they are sometimes called by different names, are recurring among CMO’s – even when they are operating in very different lines of business.

As is customary with CMO 2.0 Conversations, Ted started off by talking about his background and the business challenges he is facing. In his case he had a life-long career on the agency side before taking on the role of CMO at Monster 2 years ago.

Having come into existence by being a classic business model disruptor, we quickly started talking about where the next disruption might come from and how to leverage innovation to get prepared for it. Not surprisingly, the biggest shift on the horizon is the advent of social media and how this allows “the social” to become part of the talent acquisition and development process again.

When they think of innovation at Monster, they think about it both from a product point of view as well as from a marketing point of view, says Ted. The biggest recent innovation on the product side was to add semantic search to refine searches – and that innovation came to Monster through an acquisition. On the marketing side, one of the more recent innovations was getting people to trial the service – even though Ted did not really call it that. That happened when they organized the “Keep America Working” tour, which offered a a free career fair to any employer who had jobs. In marketing, Ted believes that success cannot be predicted based on what happened in the past – and so you need to be willing to innovate all the time, even when looking at traditional marketing programs.

After this we spent a fair amount of time talking about the impact of social media on the talent acquisition and development process – a process that is inherently social to start with. One of the cornerstones of their social media strategy, community-based talent acquisition and development, happened through the acquisition of Affinity Labs. They host affinity-based communities centered around professions – where members can network with like-minded professionals and get inspiration to help one another further their careers. With this community-based approach, they are transforming the relationship that they have with professionals from an episodic transactional-based relationship, where you interact with them only when you are looking for a job, to an ongoing peer-to-peer community-based relationship. With the most recent recession, and people being forced through painful job/career transitions, the reciprocity that powers those communities – people wanting to help others and be helped – has been very strong. Other benefits of this community-based approach include:

• The fact that people’s profiles will not just have static career/job information but will now also contain some social context – which is very powerful.
• The fact that besides search based-matching, the process of matching people to opportunities now has an added social filter.

Another important lesson that we can take from Monster is that while they have a destination site, they also realized that they need to supplement that by being other placdes job seekers are, and so they syndicate their content to other sites. A federated approach like that allows them to get a larger share of attention from job seekers – and especially from the coveted passive seekers.

Next we talked about the impact of Monster audiences becoming increasingly digital on market segmentation and marketing programs in general. Not surprisingly, most marketing budgets at Monster are focused on digital marketing – giving you a quick and accurate sense of what works and doesn’t. Moving forward, community based marketing is expected to play an increasing role in the marketing mix.

Ted also spoke about the importance of social media monitoring and engagement as part of their marketing strategy. Seeing the fusion of marketing and customer service in social media was one of the most interesting learnings from engaging in those conversations, he said. If done properly they see social media based customer service as an opportunity to diffuse an issue before it becomes one.

We also talked about the importance of content in all aspects of marketing. When peer-to-peer communication is becoming the most important form of communication, companies like Monster need to think differently about content – developing it so that it travels in the networks that matter.

Ted also pointed to the fact that marketers should spend more time monitoring the quality of the content that they put out, not just the strategic fit. People vote on the quality of your content with their time and attention, and that is why you need to produce content worthy of consumption. It will be interesting to see the increasing role of user generated content as they go further into community-based marketing.

Other things that we discussed include:

• How they connect their traditional marketing programs with social media
• The halo effect of social endorsements in the recruiting process
• The potential benefits of adding hyperlocal community activities to their affinity-based communities
• The challenges of segmentation when you have a mass appeal and limited budgets
• The think locally act globally strategy for international markets
• The changing profile of people who staff successful marketing departments
• The dynamics of the emerging Gen Y workforce

As usually you can listen to the podcast on the CMO 2.0 site and soon we will be publishing a transcript as well.

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Marty St. George, CMO at JetBlue was truly enjoyable – especially since I am intimately familiar with the service they provide and biased in that I am a big fan of the company. JetBlue managed to turn what has essentially been a commoditized service by other airlines into a brand that is far from a commodity.

JetBlue’s original mission was to bring humanity back to the airline industry. So the first topic we tackled was how you can humanize a brand when there are so many employee touch points that can make or break that brand promise. It turns out that for JetBlue, the most important ingredient for success is having a values-based culture – one in which every single employee bases his or her actions on those values. Not surprisingly, the values that drive the JetBlue culture are fairly straightforward and easy to live by:

• Safety (the most important of course)
• Caring
• Integrity
• Fun
• Passion

All employees get screened against those values during the hiring process, go through extensive training on it after they get hired, and get constantly reminded of those values throughout their career. The end result is that everyone at JetBlue feels part of a big team, single-mindedly focused on improving the customer experience and by proxy the JetBlue business. Front line crew members are empowered to make independent decisions based on those values, and because of that values-based approach they end up with a self-enforcing culture that has built-in organizational learning. Off course, and in order to make true empowerment work for a company, you also have to have a tolerance for failure.

Marty further talked about the importance of transparency in forming a cohesive workforce – one that focuses on them (the customers) and not us (the employees). Briefing employees on how the business is doing and addressing their concerns in a timely manner is at least as important to JetBlue executives as it is to deal with investors.

Surprisingly (or maybe not because it is an effective marketing strategy in just about any other industry), one of most effective marketing techniques at JetBlue is getting customers to try the service. I say surprisingly because I would have never expected an airline marketing executive to talk about trials. But if you look at the All You Can Jet program (#aycj on twitter), where people can fly as much as they want during a 30 day period for $599, or their “JetBlue Cheeps” program (@JetBlueCheeps on Twitter), where they announce cheap fares between selected locations every Monday, that is exactly what they are doing – getting people to try the product. The results are very good because they are confident that once they get someone to fly with them, they’ll get them back again.

As usual we touched on the marketing mix impact of the fact that most of their audiences have gone digital. And since 80% of all JetBlue tickets are sold on JetBlue.com, it is not surprising that most of their marketing spend is online – with very strong marketing metrics as a result. Even though I would consider JetBlue a strong adopter of social media-based marketing and customer service, Marty believes that there is still a ton to learn and plenty of unearthed opportunities for them (and others). Twitter is an especially successful channel for them – providing both a window into the brand and as said before a tremendous source for trials and customer service-based interactions. As they engage with disgruntled twitterers they constantly have to make sure that they don’t undermine the decisions made by empowered front line employees – they do not want twitter to become a court of last appeal. Fortunately that is where a values-based culture comes back into play – they can predict 99% of all decisions made by front line employees and reinforce those decisions where needed on twitter without having to check with those decision makers.

Lastly we spend some time talking about the importance of innovation as part of JetBlue’s success. While the innovation process is informal and organic, it is part of everyone’s job to think about innovation. They also have a few avenues for customers to get involved in innovation. According to Marty, one of the key ingredients to make innovation with customers and employees work, is to be a good listener and to always provide a response – positive or negative – to every suggestion. As with many other CMOs we interviewed Marty does not believe that you need a reward system to incentivize innovation – it should all be based on a social contract.

On a closing note, Marty mentioned the simple mission statement that he has for his marketing team, the 3 B’s – “Brand, Buzz, and Butts.” You got to love simplicity when it works like this.

Other things we talked about include:

• The pros and cons of adding social media information as part of your CRM profiles
• The importance of internal review teams to allow for lateral communications and sharing of best and worst practices
• Their social media monitoring and engagement process
• How you have to stay small as you become a big company
• The importance of customer privacy and the impact of social media profiles on that privacy
• How their JD Power award, which they have won for multiple years now, is going on tour to all their local centers, much like you would have a hockey trophy going around
• Other ways through which to create passion for your brand

As usual you can listen to podcast over at the CMO 2.0 Site and soon we will publish a transcript.

As usual I had a great deal of fun conducting this CMO 2.0 Conversation with Rob Spencer from Pfizer – this one focused on innovation.

Rob started out by providing some context around his job and the innovation processes he manages at Pfizer – although he does not call them that, preferring instead “collaborative problem solving.” He helps people from all over the company tackle challenges through electronically facilitated problem solving techniques – and he does that for all sorts of problems, not just drug discovery related challenges.

The underlying process used for problem solving is actually an old one – one that he calls diverge/converge. First you define the problem, you lay out some clear goals, and you broadcast it widely . You then set up a review teams that includes technical reviewers as well as business people and you make sure that you have a good balance between people who will benefit from the solution and those who are willing to pay for any future solution. This latter concept is a very important one if you want to ensure that your solutions will get funded. Rob will typically assemble problem solving teams ranging from 200-4000 people, and occasionally will run problem solving challenges with tens of thousands of people.

Next we talked about the difference between collaborative problem solving and a social innovation process. You collaborate with people you know and they do it because it is part of their job. A social innovation process is one where people help you solve a problem without knowing one another and without it being a part of their job. Rob uses different language, based on Chris Anderson’s Long Tail concept, to mean the same thing. He talks about the head of business problem solving – which involves those people whose job it is to solve a problem in a very directed way – and the tail of problem solving – which involves electronic media to greatly expand the scope of people who may participate to groups whose job it is not to solve those problems. At Pfizer they use both the head and the tail, although there is a dominant use of directed innovation with the head of problem solving.

When we talked about breakthrough innovations at the edges Rob reminded us that innovation in health care is heavily constrained by the human genome – which is actually very small. Being bound like that by nature limits the innovations at the edges – most innovations in the health care space come from within the genome. This is why directed innovations work so well in the pharma space.

An interesting concept that Rob brought up is the importance of individual thinking in problem solving. While there are great benefits to be had from collaborative problem solving, collective individual problem solving is an important component of innovation as well. At Pfizer they try to have people first come up with individual ideas and only after that do they ask others and groups to build on and review these individual ideas.

As we have in other conversations, we also touched on the role of rewards in innovation. Rob uses recognition instead of reward. Of course there is an inevitable dichotomy when you deal with employee teams, especially with those at the head of business innovation. For them it is their job and therefore they get both rewards (in the form of salary and bonus) and recognition for solving problems. That being said, Rob reminds us that it is important not to monetize what are essentially social contracts. Monetary rewards can also be very distracting from the core business challenges at hand and add unnecessary bureaucracy to the business environment.

We also spoke about the role of constraints imposed by government regulations and patent law. Without constraints you have runaway innovation with people falling in love with every single idea that is being proposed.

Other things we talked about:

• The importance of technology to scale innovation to the far corners of your organization
• The need for proper framing of the challenge that is being considered – and the need to constraint the problem as well as expand the scope of the problem
• The benefits of scale in innovation
• How altruism may be a level above the highest level in the Maslow pyramid
• The importance of details and hard work in innovation
• How you could leverage fear to trigger altruism, but only occasionally – as opposed to good behavior which can be done chronically
• The importance of flexibility to change in promoting and recruiting people

As usual you can listen to the podcast on the CMO 2.0 site and soon we will publish a transcript.

As some of you know, Ed Moran from Deloitte and I are writing a book that will be published next spring by McGraw Hill. The working title for the book is “The Hyper-Social Enterprise – Tapping the Social Power of People to Transform Your Business.”

Not surprisingly, the book’s premise is very much inline with what I have been writing about on my blog. Here is from the overview section in our original proposal:

Whether you call it social media, social computing, the social web, or social networking – it does not matter. The importance of this latest wave of innovation to hit business is not that we have new media or new tools with which to do business. The key take-away of the changes afoot is that all business is becoming social again – whether you like it or not.

Most other books that deal with the subject approach the concept of social media from a technology- and media-centric point of view, and focus on Web 2.0 rather than Human 1.0. They also fail to explore the broader, organization-wide changes that Hyper-Sociality will have on business.

We wanted to write a book that will be informed by research from fields as diverse as evolutionary biology, evolutionary sociology, neuro-economics, and behavioral economics, but that will also draw on our own experiences as business advisers. We are also fortunate to have access to the extensive data sources from the Tribalization of Business Study, of which the 2009 version will be released shortly.

While we have an advisory board with a dozen leading academic thinkers as well as forward thinking CMOs, I will periodically post concepts that we are developing for the book on this blog. In doing so, I hope to be able to engage with a larger audience in the development and refinement of those concepts.

I just had another great CMO 2.0 Conversation – this time with Mark Gambill, the CMO at CDW. As usual we started by having Mark provide some context about his company and his focus there. In this case the company is an $8B provider of software, hardware and services to a variety of industries that has more than 400,000 customers.

The conversation then moved to how some of fundamental changes in the industry – e.g., the fact that people are making their buying decisions based on information they gain online and in social networks, that they increasingly bring their own tools to work, and that mobile devices are more and more looking like full fledged computers – is affecting marketing. Mark talked about the blurring lines between consumer and business applications and about the need to not flail as a marketer when it comes to integrating social media as part of your marketing mix.

He also talked about the need to segment customers differently and how deep consumer research allowed them to uncover six customer profiles that help them better answer the questions: “what do we stand for?”, “who do we serve?”, and “how do we win?” Interestingly enough (and we see more and more marketers follow this trend), much of the segmentation was based on behavioral characteristics of potential buyers and not traditional market segment data. Other information that came with the profiles include data on where those people like to hang out, how they prefer to receive and consume their information, who else they are listening to, and more. All of this allows them to create and distribute content – both online and offline – in a much more effective way than what they were able to do before.

We then talked about the challenges of developing a recognizable brand when you do not manufacture your own products but instead distribute those of companies that may have pretty strong brands themselves. The way CDW tackles this complex problem is by being “technostic” (meaning technology agnostic) and by positioning themselves as a trusted solution partner. They also realize that buyers establish trusted relations with people more so than with companies or organizations, and so every customer gets a dedicated account manager. With a maniacal focus on customized personal service for every customer they hope that this is what will allow them to deliver against that “trusted partner” brand promise.

We also talked fairly extensively about CDW’s commitment to and use of social media. They had started a small business community but then decided that they would be better served by engaging, as participants as well as sponsors, in places where people were already hanging out. (It is always good to speak with a marketer who resists “the not invented here syndrome” that we have witnessed so many times when companies deploy communities as part of their business processes. They feel like the only way to be successful is by hosting the community on their own platform, even if a strong community already exists on some other platform.) Mark sees social media as a meaningful way to engage people in the context of customer support, but he thinks there is a scaling issue when it comes to leveraging it for lead generation. This is something we have heard from other marketers who need hundreds of thousands, if not millions of customers to be successful. The key here may be to develop a comprehensive leader/ambassador strategy and to understand how those people will help amplify everything you do across the various platforms where your customers, prospects, and detractors hang out.

Although, as usual, we ran out of time, we did get to talk about the types of people that Mark is looking for in staffing his marketing department. Besides finding people who are a good fit from a corporate culture point of view, Mark is looking for well rounded people who, while they may not yet have the full battery of skills one might desire, can be trusted to learn them as well as embrace future skills that we don’t yet know will be valuable. Another important hiring criteria in Mark’s business is diversity. Mark is also convinced that a CMO has to increasingly become a well rounded generalist, with knowledge that goes well beyond marketing.

Other things that we discussed include:

• The importance of face-to-face meetings in customer relations
• The importance of good customer service in brand building
• How they are monitoring what is being said about them in the social media space and how they are engaging
• The importance of understanding “human 1.0″ in explaining what is happening in a web 2.0 world
• The importance of appealing to the altruistic part of the brain instead of the pleasure side of the brain when running communities
• The impact of the “green wave” on technology sales
• The importance of ROI, customer loyalty and other marketing metrics

As usual you can listen to the interview on the CMO 2.0 site and soon we will put up a transcript of the call.