emergencemarketing.com

Kimberly-Clark launched a grant program targeted at mom entrepreneurs (see article in Brandweek here). The website, HuggiesMomInspired.com, provides business resources for women who want to start a business, a way to submit your idea, and a few case studies. They are leveraging social media to get the word out.

It probably will be a somewhat successful program, but the minute they stop granting money, all will disappear – there is clearly not a movement of mom entrepreneurs going to emerge from this program. I also wonder if K-C will be able to achieve its goals – which is  “to further strengthen its relationship with its core consumers, many of whom are business-minded, social media-savvy moms.”

What’s missing from this program is the social. There is no social component in this effort at all (although I am sure that for some people leveraging social media as a channel of communications for the launch will qualify as social – it’s NOT!).

Here are some of the things that K-C could have done to make this more of a social program.

1. Socialize the Business Plan Development Process
   Turn the web site into a community for mom entrepreneurs, where business teams can form, where people can find help to refine their plans, and where they can rate plans as they proceed through some sort of gated process, the way the Cisco iPrize works.
2. Socialize the funding process
   It would be much more powerful if the program were built in a way that other companies and VC’s, who might be interested in that same tribe of mom entrepreneurs, could participate in the funding process – possibly creating multiple categories of funding and making the whole effort more valuable for all parties involved.
3. Forget the company and its product – be member-centric
   Make the community totally member-centric, with mom entrepreneurs at the center and not diapers. Sure, K-C and Huggies can be sponsors of the site, but that does not need to be front and center if your goal is to create a relationship with mom entrepreneurs.
4. Don’t use social media as a channel to get the word out – engage where the tribes hang out.
   Chances are that mom entrepreneurs are already grouping together in some online or offline communities. If so, then engage them where they already hang out. If not, then you may have found a rare opportunity to host a vendor sponsored community that could turn into a movement – one that could not be shut down even if you were to stop the grant program.

Too many social media based programs lack the social that could turn those programs into huge successes.

What do you think? Let me know.

A few weeks ago, Ed Moran and I conducted a webinar, hosted by Monster.com (disclosure: Monster.com is a client of Beeline Labs), about Social Talent Acquisition. Unfortunatelly, and as is often the case with webinars, we were not able to get to all the rich questions that came from the audience. This is the reason for this post. If you have any comments about our points of view, we would love to hear them.

Q: How would you recommend using social networks to recruit high volumes of candidates, like call center roles?

Social Media allows you to change the nature of the relationship you have with potential candidates from a transactional and episodic relationship to an ongoing relationship. In that vein you really need to shift your thinking from staffing a big  call center once to setting up ongoing relationships with a large number of people who are motivated by “wow-ing” the customer.  The next time you need to staff up a call center, those people will act as an army of volunteer recruiters for you. That could involve setting up a community for people to network with one another, or engage with them on someone else’s platform if that is where they already hang out.

Q: With all the choices of social networking, the difficulty is not only managing the social network but knowing it is working – especially when as a Recruiter we are looking to fill a position by 30 to 45 days.  How can we approach social networking knowing it is working?

First off, chances are that if you have a successful social environment, whether a community or a network, you will not be “managing” it. Most successful social environments are run by the users and members, even when they are sponsored by companies.

Social recruiting and talent acquisition is NOT about recruiting in social media – it’s about leveraging the social for which humans have been hardwired for tens on thousands of years as part of the talent acquisition process. If you recruit in social media you may have some success, but the biggest benefits will come from turning the process into a social process – one which can expand beyond online communities and social networks. Turning the process into a social process means finding others, who’s job it is not to recruit, to help you find the right talent for the opportunity you are trying to fill.

Q: can you give more specific feedback on how a company would start posting/using social networks to recruit employees?

We answered part of this question in the previous answers, but the key here is to start establishing meaningful relationships with people who potentially could help you find the right talent in the future. It could be that those people already hang out on social networks like LinkedIn or FaceBook, or maybe in more specialized communities like the ones sponsored by Monster.com’s Affinity Lab communities. It could also be that they do not have a place to hang out yet in which case you may have an opportunity to host them on your platform.

Q: How do you recommend developing social network policies, especially for employees? We need to create some type of framework so users know what is allowed and what is not allowed.

Telling your people how to behave online or in social media should not be all that different from telling them how to behave on the phone, email, or in face-to-face situations. Another factor to consider before putting out intimidating or restrictive social media policies is that most customers purchase your products and services based on TRUST – and how can you expect your customers to trust you if you cannot trust your employees.

When putting together corporate social media policies, it is a good thing to understand what others have done and also to include those employees who are active in social media in the process of crafting the policy.

Q: Which social network would you suggest for solely recruiting for a non-profit company?

Again, maybe it would be better to look at this problem from a different angle. What is the non-profit about? Is it like Love 146, which fights against child trafficking, or is it like Mensa, an organization for highly intellectual people? People with a passion for those different causes will not likely hang together and so there is not one place where you will find them.

When trying to engage in social media you need to find the tribes and where they hang out. You also need to be human-centric to a fault, and not wear your company or organization-centric (in this case non-profit) hat.

Q: Working for a real estate company, it’s hard to provide incentives in terms of reciprocity. Any advice on how to appeal on a national level for the recruitment of sales agents?

While not claiming to be real estate experts you should be able to find reciprocity everywhere. Think of the last party you went to and the conversations you had with people – if you remember them, then those conversations were reciprocal – based on value going both ways. If you don’t remember them, then it was probably a conversation that either did not interest you (non-reciprocal from your point of view) or with a people who could not stop talking about themselves.

Q: How did Fiskars communicate out of the scrapbooking community?

We interviewed the CMO of Fiskars who explained the program in detail here.

It used to be that the company with the better product won. Then came the age when the company with the better message about the product won.

Very few companies still win with on the basis of having a better product. Apple is probably one of the few that can still achieve that. Their products are cool and we buy them because coolness used to get us better mates.

Most companies can no longer win that way. Coming out with products that have new features no longer gives us a sustainable competitive advantage – either users don’t care, or if they do, competition catches up in no time.

It’s also much harder to differentiate your offering based on the story you might craft about it – as customers and prospects are now increasingly owning that story.

But so – how do companies win today?

The way companies win these days is by delivering services on top of their products that make customers go WOW.  The reason why exceptional service is the new competitive differentiator is not just because it’s easier for competitors to catch up product-wise, but because the news about exceptional service travels fast in the networks that matter – peer and friend networks where the buying decisions are increasingly being made. When people recommend products to friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, they do not focus on the features, functions and benefits the way many marketers have been trained to do – they focus on the overall experience of adopting the solution, and the exceptional qualities of that “whole” offering.

So if you are like most companies and operate in a market where it is really hard to differentiate  based on the product alone, you got to focus your attention on WOW service offerings.

What do you think? I would appreciate your input and feedback.

I recently attended the customer reference forum, which was a great event. It has been awhile since I was directly involved in managing customer reference programs, but let me tell you that this is big business – over 150 employees dedicated to the effort at Oracle, over 50 at SAP, divisions at Microsoft having 8 figure budgets just to write reference stories, some large companies having Customer Reference Officers, etc.

As I immersed myself into the issues facing customer reference managers, it dawned on me that like many other marketing processes, this one is badly due for an overhaul.

Here are two takeaways from the conversations I had at the event.

Customer Reference Programs have to be focused on the buying process, not the sales process

Most customer reference programs are standalone programs that are squarely focused on supporting the sales process and specifically the sales organization. Sure, they sometimes support PR and product management efforts as well, but those are all company-centric processes. What companies need to realize is that people increasingly buy products based on what peers, opinion leaders, and friends are telling them, and not information coming from their company. So the customer reference program needs to be focused on the buying process, and not the sales process – it needs to become customer-centric, and not company-centric.

It also needs to be fully integrated with any word-of-mouth (WOM) activity the company is trying to foster. Since customers who are acquired through WOM are much more profitable than those acquired by traditional marketing programs, companies should make that a high priority. And with customer references being the biggest asset in such efforts, the customer reference program needs to move front and center to those efforts.

The Customer Reference Program process needs to be turned into a social process.

As buying decisions are increasingly made based on information that does not come from your company, moving forward you will need an increasing number of customer references – not less. And that increasing number is not linear, it’s exponential – those with the highest number of people buzzing positively about them in the marketplace will win. Unfortunatelly, and considering historical marketing budget trends, the budgets needed to scale your customer reference programs will not allow you to scale those programs to the point where you need them. In order to reach an acceptable scale you will need to turn the whole process into a social process – one in which customer references, other employees, and non-customer references or even non-customers can get involved. You see, there are many more people who are buzzing about you than you have in your customer reference database. And there are many more employees talking with happy customers than you have in your customer reference department. You need to get them involved and let them help one another tell a better story in the marketplace – their story that is, and not yours.

So in summary, Customer Reference Programs may be more important than ever, but they need to move to the center of all marketing activities and need to be focused on the buying process, not the sales process. And in order to scale the program to where it makes a real difference, you will need to turn it into a social process.

Let me know your thoughts.

Most communities have 90% of users who are lurkers – people who may consume things from the community, but who don’t contribute. Through our yearly Tribalization of Business Study, we found that many companies who run communities consider this a problem (30% of respondents considered it an obstacle) – and that of course is a problem all by itself.

You see, not all lurkers are created equal.

While it is inevitable that larger communities will end up with 1% of their members being very active users who provide enough value for the 9% of somewhat active users, who together provide enough value for the 90% of lurkers, the largest form of participation in online communities happens to be active lurking, which according to an MIT research study can make up 40-50%  of your community membership. Active lurkers are those that may take something from the community and pass it along to others using different channels – so they participate in your word of mouth. Active lurkers also include those people who may visit a customer support community and find a solution to their problem without contributing to the community. Those people derive a lot of value from that community interaction and so does your company since they do not clog up your customer call center. Active lurkers also include those who will contact the original poster through a different channel, like telephone, email, or perhaps a face to face meeting – in effect continuing the conversation outside of the visible public side of the community, but not outside of the community itself.

Thankfully we found that 18% of companies who participated in the 2nd Annual Tribalization of Business are starting to track lurker metrics. It’s not easy to measure the impact of active lurkers, but without some sort of measure about their activity, you could miss a lot of the value that they bring to your Hyper-Social processes – especially in a world where the customer lifetime value is directly proportional with word of mouth activities.

When you think about communities, you need to think about the tribes and their members first, not just one of the public places (the online community forum) where they can interact with other tribe members. They will inevitably interact in multiple places, both virtual and physical.

There is no question that customer reference programs do work. Long employed to support sales and marketing (you cannot talk to an analyst without having customer references) efforts in the B2B space, they tap into one of the age-old Human 1.0 characteristics – the drive to mimic the behavior of others, especially of those who are perceived to be successful within our tribes.

The problem with many traditional customer reference programs is that they are based on the old marketing principles – designed for interrupt-driven company-to-prospect communications, product-centric, and non-reciprocal. It’s no surprise that in a Hyper-Social world they no longer deliver the expected results.

So what are marketers to do? As is usual in the Hyper-Social world, the answer is pretty straightforward. Here are 5 things that marketers should consider when developing Hyper-Socially enabled customer reference programs.

1. Let go of control and empower customers to tell their own stories
   At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s important to understand that the most important conversations are no longer the ones that happen between your company and its customers/prospects, but instead the conversations that happen among them. They’ve come to distrust the information that comes from your company, and with the advent of social media and communities they have much more opportunities to get information from unbiased sources (e.g., colleagues & acquaintances) that carry much more credibility. A majority of the customer stories that lead to buying decisions no longer come from your company but are instead originating within your customer tribes (online communities, industry associations, etc.). When I explained this to a marketing agency owner who also owned a print shop, he was originally skeptical, but then remembered how he had made a multimillion dollar press purchase decision not based on any information that came from the press manufacturer, but rather based on a trusted fellow print shop owner within his industry association. So if you want a successful customer reference program, you need to find ways to help your customers tell their own stories within their own networks. You don’t want to control or help them shape their story, you want to provide them with information that will help them strengthen their story and improve their status as opinion leaders within their network.
2. Make sure all your customer stories are customer-centric to a fault
   Most customer references are product- and company-centric. They are focused on confirming the features and benefits of certain product attributes more so than the customer pains and tribulations associated with successful product deployment and adoption. For the minority of customer references that will originate from your company,  you need to ensure that they are customer-centric to a fault. Not only will they carry more credibility, they will also travel better as “retellable” stories among your customer and prospect networks.
3. Think tribes, not market-segments
   It is true that in a majority of cases people will only accept customer reference stories from withing their own industry – thinking that anyone outside of their industry does not understand the issues specific to their environment. That does not mean that you should develop customer stories only around market segments. See if you can also develop them around tribes – groups of people within your industries that tend to hang together based on common behavioral characteristics. So instead of documenting a customer story for pharmaceutical CIOs, see if you can develop one for CIOs who are passionate about sustainability.
4. Don’t pay for your customer references
   On more than one occasion have I written about the cons and cons of paying people for any kind of feedback. The same is true for customer stories. If you have to pay someone for a story, it’s probably not a very strong story – definitely not one that your customer would be willing to tell his friends without being compensated for it first. So don’t put it out there. Of course, that does not mean that you should not base your customer reference program on reciprocity – you should. Allow the customer who recommends your product to give a gift to those he is recommending the product to – a small discount, or a special free feature – or make everyone feel warm and fuzzy by having reference program metrics trigger donations to worthwhile charities.
5. Forget information channels and think knowledge networks
   Most customer reference stories are written like brochures – they have the facts, the benefits (including amazing ROIs), and information about the company and its products. They are information rich and lack real knowledge. They are built to be distributed through information channels like email newsletters, traditional media outlets, and customer story aggregation web sites. The problem is that when your customers talk to colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, they do not transfer information, they transfer knowledge and stories. If you reference stories don’t have those, they will not travel along the knowledge networks where buying decisions are increasingly being made.

Customer reference programs should not be set up as standalone programs – they need to be part of your overall Hyper-Social efforts, including your word of mouth activities.

What do you think? I would appreciate your feedback on this as I will be leading a conversation on the topic at the upcoming customer reference forum.

There has been a lot of research on the value of acquiring a customer though Word of Mouth versus Traditional Marketing. One recent project, which was published in the Journal of Marketing this past September, found that the long term elasticity (defined as the percentage of change in new customer acquisition to the percentage of change in the corresponding marketing driver) for Word of Mouth is 20 times higher than the elasticity for for events and 30 times higher than the elasticity for media appearances. Another study, this one from last year, found that the lifetime value of a customer acquired through word of mouth can be twice that of the lifetime value of a customer acquired through traditional marketing. And they can bring in twice the amount of additional business through their own positive word of mouth compared to those who were acquired through traditional marketing programs.

There is no question that customers who are acquired through word of mouth will be buzzing more and longer than those who are acquired through traditional marketing means. Some companies are actually able to quantify the value of a word of mouth referral. Unfortunatelly, the knee-jerk reaction of many marketers who quantify that referral value is to use it to calculate the financial incentive that they are willing to pay to stimulate word of mouth referrals.

That is where the system breaks down.

If you give me a pure financial incentive to make a referral, I will evaluate whether it’s worth spending some of my social capital for the amount of money that you are giving me (and chances are it won’t). As Dan Ariely calls it, I will evaluate the referral transaction in my market framework. If you do not give me any financial incentive, I will evaluate making a referral in my social framework (e.g., I am actually helping the person who I am referring this product or service to? Or I am helping the company person who was helpful with me in dealing with my problem by bringing her more business?). While there is no research data that I am aware of to back this up, I believe that the financial incentive-based word of mouth will look a lot like traditional marketing-based customer acquisition programs – resulting in a lot less buzzing and lower customer lifetime value.

Now what if you were putting incentives in place that were social in nature rather than financial. Don’t give me an incentive that would trigger the evaluation of what I do in a market framework, but allow me to give a valuable gift to the person who I am referring to you. If I like your offering and you increase the value that I deliver to my friends or colleagues by referring them to you, then you have a winner.

The key to success is not by commercializing the social – it’s by making the social stronger.

What do you think?

For those who cannot see the clip and want to see the commercial , click here.

Information channels stop working when the customer is collaboratively involved in the delivery of the message. When that happens, the message (and sometimes the definition of the product and its value) changes as it is propagated through the network. Moreover, some customers will be more “important” than others, due to their location and status in the network. The message may also change in response to what the network feels the message is, or should be, or simply because of the typical sharpening (the emphasizing of what the speaker considers the gist of the message) and leveling (the de-emphasizing of those pieces considered less important) that happen to messages when they travel through networks made up of humans 1.0. Accordingly, the message might have to be clarified by the company or another interested human, or the actual propagation might force a review of what the desired message was or should be. What’s the upshot of all of this uncertainty? One clear answer is that discrete business “channels” are an endangered species.

In a networked world, where your customers, potential customers, and detractors are all nodes equally visible to every other node, there is no such opportunity for the company to control “the channel” as they might have in the past. In a Hyper-Social environment, where you don’t know who will be participating in the conversation until the conversation actually begins, it is impossible to create separate pathways where you can message a retailer, a customer, or a business partner.

That being said, you need to be aware of the topology of the networks that exist within your tribes, as differences among them call for different approaches. In some cases you will have very tightly connected members at the core of you network with others at the fringes that are less connected; in some cases you may have more evenly distributed networks; or you may even have networks that have ring networks inside of them. The tribal network characteristics will determine where you might want to position yourself within the network (if they allow you to become part of it) and how to most effectively have your content travel through them. In some cases you will want to target the members who are the most connected at the center of your network, and in some cases you will be better off by targeting those who are loosely connected to them. You should also understand the nature of the social bonds and leadership structures that exist within your Hyper-Social networks. If the leadership does not rotate on a periodic basis, or doesn’t allow for newcomers to achieve status within reasonable amount of time, that is a problem. The type of bonds that people have with one another is also an important characteristic. In certain environments, such as sites with product reviews, connectedness is not all that important, but status might be. In other environments, where people are helping one another in the context of complex problem solving, connection is an important factor that will determine how knowledge flows within those communities. In all cases you will need to gather network characteristics for active lurkers – the largest and potentially most influential participation group within your community. They are those who participate and share information with others, but do so using different channels (phone, face-to-face, or email) than the public community forums.

Another fundamental difference between channels and networks lies in what flows through them. Data and information flow through channels, whereas networks allow knowledge to flow. As John Hagel said when I talked with him: “unlike information or data flows, knowledge does not flow easily – as it relies on long-term trust-based relationships.”

There are two reasons why this is an important distinction to make – one for buyers and one for companies.

Besides the fact that as potential buyers we don’t trust the non-reciprocal communications that companies want to have with us through fixed interrupt-based channels, we turn to our trusted networks because we can gain actual knowledge about products and services – a commodity much more valuable than plain old data or information about them.

As for companies, they need to increase their external knowledge flows if they are to survive. When I spoke with John Hagel he explained how he believes that in this era of intensifying competition, we need to shift from a knowledge stock mentality, where you aggressively protect and hoard proprietary knowledge, build scalable offerings around it, and then extract value from it for the longest possible time, to a knowledge flow mentality, where you realize that what you know today has rapidly diminishing value and where you refresh your knowledge stocks by participating in knowledge flows. So the key to success in this new economic reality is to move from a transactional world to a long-term trust-based world. Examples of taking on a knowledge flow approach include letting your key customers participate in product innovation, or turning them into affiliates to allow them to help one another.

What do you think? As usual, I would be interested in your thoughts.

Some pundits will tell you that you should do away with brand messaging and positioning all together, since you cannot control it anyway. Not so fast! People need to know what bucket to put your offering in, and if they can’t, they won’t know how to assign value to what you have to offer. Tivo ended up in that pickle, with consumers not quite sure what category of products to compare the offering with. Was it more like a DVD player or was it more like a computer?

Knowing that a good positioning will impact your revenue and profits, and realizing that you still have a seat at the customer decision making table (it’s just a much more crowded table and your share of voice has significantly been reduced) you need to develop a point of view about your positioning and try to get it co-opted by your tribe. Like in most social interactions, your chances to get someone to adopt your point of view are going to increase if you involve them early on. The more say you give them in the process of co-creating your products and services, and the earlier you get them involved (preferably at the product concept stage) the more they will embrace a shared view of the brand and product positioning. An added benefit of co-creating products with your customers is that those who are involved in the design of new products will typically pay higher prices for those products .

Marketing executives have come to understand, sometimes the hard way, that brand perception is only as good as the last interaction the customer had with it. When I spoke with Mark Colombo, senior vice president of digital access marketing at FedEx he described the challenge as follows: “In the 50’s and 60’s, brands used to be built on a set of attributes. Now brands are built by customers, one experience at a time, and those experiences are, obviously, more and more online experiences.” So you cannot just convey a brand’s promise or a product’s positioning through advertising and packaging anymore, you also need to deliver against that promise across all your other customer touch-points, and at any time. That becomes especially challenging when you have complex product distribution channels, high numbers of people involved in your service delivery, or a high level of interaction between your customers and your customer service and support center. It gets further complicated by user generated touch-points that people will encounter in the form of online reviews, blogs, and online communities. All those touch-points can make or break your brand, product, or service promise and position. Like many other things in marketing, this is not something new; it’s just something that we used to get away with because our customers, prospects and detractors could not behave Hyper-Socially and hold us accountable for our actions.

The way you control a brand promise through multiple touch-points is not through elaborate process manuals that we have grown accustomed to in business. The way to do it is by embracing Hyper-Sociality and all the messiness that comes with it and allow all the people involved in the process to behave like humans. Some companies like Zappos and JetBlue achieve that through a shared values-based culture that creates a common sense of belonging among their employees. Others like Western Union achieve it by becoming customer-centric to a fault. Still others, like IBM, are doing it by encouraging all their employees to set up communities with whomever they want, wherever they want, and about anything they want.

The key to success is to embrace all four tenets of Hyper-Sociality: think tribes, knowledge networks, customer-centricity, and be willing to accept some of the messiness that comes with Hyper-Sociality.

What do you think? I would appreciate your feedback.