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Unless your company acts as a single tribe, which most companies don’t, you don’t have a single corporate culture. Therein lies the problem with most corporate culture initiatives — they start from the wrong premise that companies are people and that they therefore can have one culture. In reality, most companies have multiple cultures which results in having competitive behavior in the wrong place — within their corporate walls instead of outside in the marketplace.

So what is going on here?

As Edward O. Wilson said in his recent book, The Social Conquest of Earth, “People must have tribes. It gives them a name in addition to their own and social meaning in a chaotic world.” Tribes have cultures, organizations don’t — unless they are one tribe. Most organizations have many tribes — you may have a developer tribe, a sales tribe, multiple customer service tribes, a cost conscious tribe, an innovator tribe, a middle management tribe, or a tribe of Belgian-American wine drinkers. Having multiple tribes means that you have multiple cultures. Tribes share common systems of beliefs and values, they have their own language, their own rituals, and their own leaders — who may in fact have no place on your management org chart. Having multiple tribes also means that you have many “us vs. them” or “insider vs. outsider” feelings, something that always happen among tribes.

And that is where the internal competition comes from…a generally unhealthy corporate state of affairs if you are competing against a competitor which behaves like a unified tribe and which can channel all their energy to compete in the marketplace or to achieve a “change the world” type goal.

So what does that mean?

For starters, most traditional corporate culture change management programs fail…since most of them start with the assumption that organizations have a culture. The other implication is that by having multiple tribes, and in some cases mutually incompatible tribes, you may waste a lot of energy on infighting instead of innovating and competing in the marketplace.

There are ways to analyze corporate tribal cultures properly, and there are also ways to align them more closely with corporate innovation and collaboration strategies, but more on that later.

I had a great CMO 2.0 Conversation yesterday with Jim Davis, the CMO at SAS (I will post the conversation in a couple of weeks). As you can imagine the topic of Big Data came up.

Having done research in the area of big data for multiple clients, and having interviewed many CIO’s and CMO’s on the topic, there are a few things that stand out in this emerging market .

1. CMO’s cannot expect results by going it alone
   Some CMO’s are buying their own technology solutions to gain actionable insights from big data.  Unfortunately, most marketing departments lack the wherewithal to deploy sophisticated technology solutions and will never achieve the promise of big data on their own. Even if they have the product management skills to deploy technology, they most likely don’t have the right data-related expertise on the team to get the actionable insights from the data.
2. CMO’s cannot rely on their agency for big data
   Agencies only see a small sliver of the customer data, that related to advertising and possibly lead gen. They do not have access to the other rich data sources that most companies have about their customers, including CRM, customer support data, bricks and mortar data, credit card data, purchasing data, etc.  So relying on only a small portion of the data will leave marketers vulnerable to competitors that can truly mine and base decisions on the comprehensive customer data set.
3. CMO’s should team up with their CIO’s to tap into the promise of big data
   The only way for the CMO to tap into the promise of big data is by teaming up with the CIO. For that relation to work, however, both will have to have a shift in behavior. CIO’s have to stop considering themselves as service providers to the marketing organization and instead set themselves up as true partners to the business — with a deep understanding of the customer facing processes and desired outcomes.  CMO’s will have to become much more disciplined in how they document requirements for technology and data analytics support. As Jim suggested, a quick way to the get CIO’s and CMO’s to align is by giving them the same goals.

What do you think? I would appreciate your input on it.

Please join me for “The 24 Hours of Innovation Event” which will take place May 15-16. It’s a non-stop marathon of innovation initiatives that promises to be be real interesting. Here is from the organizer’s web site:

The 24 Hours of Innovation is a non-stop, online marathon of innovation initiatives around the world. The event takes place during a full day and night on May 15-16 from 10.00 am to 10.00 am (CET). (as a reference: Sydney 6 pm, New York 4.00 am, Los Angeles 1.00 am)

The 24 hours are divided in time slots, each one featuring an exciting innovation ranging from an innovation award to creativity sessions, start-ups, and interviews with global thought leaders. Everyone can follow and join the 24 Hours of Innovation on www.boardofinnovation.com, from where the event will be covered cross-media on blogs, traditional media, twitter, slideshare, ustream, coveritlive, flickr, scribd, vimeo,…

My time slot will be at 8:20 EDT. I look forward to seeing you there!

(Cross-posted from the CMO 2.0 Conversation site)

Today’s CMO 2.0 Conversation with GE’s CMO Beth Comstock was packed with interesting insights. On a personal note it was certainly neat to get a one hour personal marketing tutorial from the CMO of one the largest companies in the world. By working in a real marketer’s laboratory, Beth must be one of the luckiest marketers around.

We touched on three main topics: the role of a corporate marketing group in a large diversified company with strong operating companies, how to foster innovation at GE, and general changes in marketing.

As a central corporate marketing group, Beth’s team is responsible for sales growth, innovation, and the GE brand platform. Even though the company has very diverse operating companies, her team has also been able to find opportunities for developing a customer platform (i.e., cross-sell accross business units), as well as product platforms (i.e., ecoimagination, the GE green platform, and a cross-operating-business battery project).

On the innovation side of things we touched on the importance of having a robust pipeline of innovations and on the need to have the right resources deployed across the right portfolio of innovations. We also discussed the need to kill ideas faster and the opportunity to create an innovation marketplace for ideas that may not be a good fit for the company. Beth described GE’s robust innovation process, and how they have both a formal process that very much resembles an in-house venture process as well as an online imagination network that relies much more on the wisdom of the crowd – in this case their employees. Other innovation related topics we covered include:

• how they use outside coaches and customer discovery sessions to bring outside insights into their innovation process
• the importance of including detractors in the innovation process
• how innovation is not just about technology innovation, but also about commercial innovations – and how they are constantly looking for new ideas around product, space, and business model
• the cultural changes required for fast-paced innovations and the creative tensions between being a process-driven organization and the inherent messiness and chaotic nature of innovation
• how in some cases you need to step away from traditional metrics to measure progress and success of ideas that are being incubated

We also talked about the changes afoot in marketing and how the new marketing challenge is in fact a knowledge management challenge – knowing enough about your customers so you can feed them data that will make them smarter.

On the need for new marketing skills Beth listed what she is looking for in marketers – people with new world skills, people who can simplify things and engage in customer communities, and people who can curate an experience for the customer. She also described how they set up a team of “rogue marketers” within the company, whose job it is to come up with rogue marketing techniques. It would be really interesting if at some point they would publish their findings in rogue marketing innovations.

You can listen to the podcast over at the CMO 2.0 Conversation site, in the near future we will also post the transcript from the interview.

In the recent eBook that Valeria Maltoni assembled I described the main reason for why social media may not go mainstream in the near future as follows:

For starters, many company executives don’t understand the fundamental forces that are changing their business. Sure, they realize that their cost of sales is increasing dangerously, that it is increasingly harder to engage with customers and prospects, that loyalty seems to have vanished, and that switching costs and barriers to entry do not carry the same weight as before. But what they don’t understand is that with social media as a platform for participation, people can behave the way they were hardwired to behave in the first place – humanly, tribally.

These executives think of their business as “controllable” processes that need to be optimized. And they evaluate their business in terms of assets and liabilities. Which leaves little room to truly understand the impact of the exploding mass of newly empowered individuals who are now free to hang out and share information with peers, help one another in finding the best products and services, and bad-mouth organizations and people who depart from the social norms that have made us the hypersocial (and hyper-successful) species we are.

This freedom to associate, speak and share is what is fundamentally transforming the game of business – not just the rules; but also the players, the scope of the game, the tactics and the added values.

Another way of thinking about this is that social media enabled the social messiness that characterizes humans to invade all our business processes.  You cannot fight this fundamental disruption with command and control approaches, nor can you do it through process optimization or re-engineering – which many companies have grown used to, if not addicted to.

What you need to do is to empower the people through transparency, embrace the messiness, and provide leadership to bring the best out of people. Sure some people will cheat, and others will have their own agenda of gossip, but in the end what will emerge is much more powerful than anything you can create through command and control.

In fact, we may have a perfect model to follow coming to us from the world of politics. Check out the Obama campaign and the first signs of the Obama administration. Look where it leads when you empower people through transparency, embrace the diversity and messiness, and provide clear leadership…

At last week’s Web 2.0 workshop and also with some clients recently I started noticing how people mix up communities and work teams – a distinction which I think is worth making.

Work teams work on projects which have a beginning and end, they usually have well-defined roles in those project, and they get paid for doing that work – it’s their job. To use Dan Ariely’s metaphore, they are evaluating what they do and how much they contribute in their market framework.

Communities are mostly self-organized around a shared passion or around the need for people to help others and be helped. There are few pre-defined roles, and people usually do not get paid to participate – it’s not their job. In the most successful communities, people evaluate their contributions in their social framework.

So why is that important? Because they require radically different motivators in order to work.

Take an innovation initiative within a company. There may be a core set of people in marketing and product development whose job it is to innovate. If at some point you want to externalize that innovation process to include communities with all your employees, customers and prospects, you will need to understand that the motivations of those communities are very different from those of your core innovation team. It’s not their job to innovate and they are likely to be very busy as it is. You could of course pay them to give you ideas, but considering the incentives usually used in communities that is more likely to result in poor ideas than good ones. In order for this to work you need to appeal to a higher social motive – like helping out.

Now if you can instill a higher level of passion in your regular work teams, they too will start performing at a much higher level…

You’ve heard it before – most breakthrough innovations happen at the edges or at the intersections of various disciplines.

The latest wave of marketing innovation is no different – although we prefer to think about it as happening at the SEAMS™, which is an acronym that reflects the various steps that you will need to navigate through in order to truly capitalize on Marketing 2.0 potential.

As I have written in the past, the marketing end goal has not changed – it still is to create a customer. It’s everything in between to get to that goal that has changed.

Some companies will advise you to start with social media based marketing 2.0 programs by simply monitoring the new social media channels, others will build you communities that are in fact nothing more than fancy web sites – but neither of them are going to be enough to enable you to capitalize on the fundamental changes that is rocking our industry. The only way to get the full benefits from the changes afoot is by understanding how to navigate the SEAMS™ of Marketing Innovation.

Understanding the SEAMS™ of Social Media powered Marketing 2.0

Sense – the best place to start is by going beyond listening to sensing what is truly happening in the marketplace. Sensing is not just about understanding what is being said, it is understanding what is being meant and make that available as actionable knowledge to the various departments within your company – product innovation, customer support, marketing, sales, etc. Sense also means that whatever you do has to make sense for your business – it’s got to deliver real, impactful and measurable results.

Engage – the next logical step is to go beyond sensing and to start engaging your various constituencies (i.e., customers, prospects, promoters, detractors, partners, etc.) on their own turf. This is not about them engaging with or through your advertising and other marketing campaigns – this is about good old fashioned engagement – talking with one another instead of at them. If they do not have a natural hangout place, there may be an opportunity for you to host a virtual waterhole for them – but more on that later.

Activate – once you get a better handle on the new dynamics of social media and marketing 2.0, you need to devise a plan to activate your business processes with these new-found capabilities. Product innovation, customer support, PR and thought leadership, lead generation, awareness creation, and other processes can all be transformed and made to work again by externalizing them to include your various constituencies as part of the processes instead of being the target of those processes.

Measure – of course you will have to justify all this new stuff to your management and to yourself. Not only is it expected that you can measure your programs, it is also more critical than ever to understand what to measure and how to set goals. Unlike with more traditional marketing programs, where measurements do not interact with the actual programs, launching social media initiatives and marketing 2.0 programs with the wrongs measurement goals can kill or maim the program in the long run.

Storytelling – storytelling is important in all aspect of the SEAMS™ method. Whether you engage with your audiences, or get them involved as part of activating various business processes, you need stories that will be compelling and will easily be retold. Even when you are measuring the effectiveness of your programs you should always be on the lookout for interesting anecdotal stories – they will gain a life of their own and sometimes do more wonders than stats in conveying the importance and success of your efforts.

What do you think?

With the average CMO tenure being 27 month, you wonder why there are not more companies and chief marketing officers trying to reinvent the role of the CMO. It seems like the time for the CMO 2.0 has come…

As I have written before, by developing a deep understanding of marketing 2.0 and by being able to operationalize its components in meaningful and scalable ways CMO’s could transform their own role significantly.

Marketing 2.0 means externalizing all of your marketing processes – doing marketing with all your employees, customers, partners, prospects and detractors instead of at them. Marketing success is all about co-marketing these days – co-market, co-sell, co-develop, co-invent, co-support, etc.

If done properly, marketing will work again – predictably and with decreasing costs. By executing a Marketing 2.0 strategy successfully, a CMO will not only be able to take the credit for the success of the marketing department, he or she could also regain a strategic seat at the executive table – that of chief representative of the voice of the customer within the company. Because unlike with advertising where you do some research upfront on your target audience and then “target” them, when you co-market with your audience you develop a two way conversation and a continuous market learning environment.

So how are marketers doing with that? I think it’s safe to say that there are three classes of CMO dabbling with Marketing 2.0 strategies – and a fourth category that does not believe in all this new stuff and is still slugging it out the old ways.

First is the CMO who does not get it, the one who sees how other companies gain benefits from Marketing 2.0 programs – but has no idea what the underlying forces are that make this all work. They may commission their agency to build them a “community,” not really understanding how that is different from a pretty web site, and then use the community as another vehicle through which to do marketing campaigns. Thankfully those CMO’s fail fast – but not before muddying up the waters for their peers and successors.

Then there is the CMO who sort of gets it but then again not enough. They are those people who realize the benefits that can be derived from those programs but are not yet ready to make a big bet on them. They may encourage some of their staffers to dabble with Marketing 2.0 programs, but continuously underfund those efforts so that it does not make it on their day-to-day dashboards and so that it doesn’t move the needle for their company in terms of results. They convince themselves that this is a good learning environment for the future, not realizing that the fundamentals of small scale Marketing 2.0 programs are drastically different from large scale efforts.

And then there are the bold CMO’s who realize that this is a make or break it time for marketing and are willing to go big on Marketing 2.0. They are the game-changers who will force anyone else to jump on the bandwagon or get left behind.

I will try to get some CMO 2.0 types to do open mic interviews with us in the Marketing 2.0 group soon. If you have a candidate who might be interested in doing this with us, let me know by emailing me at francois[at]marketingtwo.com. Maybe we can interview them together!

It is interesting to see how fundamental behavioral change almost always require a catastrophic event. It happens like that on every level – whether on a personal, a company, or a societal level.

On a personal level, most people will only fundamentally change their diet and exercise routines after experiencing a catastrophic event – a stroke, a heart attack or a coronary bypass. In fact, some study suggest that two years after a coronary bypass, 90% of people will revert back to their old diet habits. Maybe that event is not catastrophic enough.

On a company level, Apple and IBM would probably not have been able to become what they are right now had they not had a near-death experience.

And on a societal level, look at what happens to our oil-dependency. We know that we could wean ourselves from fossil fuel dependency in a decade or so, but serious talk about this possibility did not happen until oil prices reached levels that became painful for all of us – individuals, companies and government. And if oil prices decrease enough we could well find ourselves back in a situation where we are all fat and happy with cheap oil and not planning for the inevitable fact that we are not only going to run out of it, but that we are also ruining the environment in which we live by using it.

So if fundamental change requires a catastrophic, near-death experience, have we yet reached the point where marketers will change the way they market, or are we just not there yet? Companies shut off marketing budgets as if they had no impact anyway – and the average CMO tenure is clearly an indicator that companies think marketing is no longer working. But is it enough to fundamentally change the way we think about marketing?

What do you think?

For the second time in six months I got to listen to the Fiskateer case study at last week’s ANA Conference on Marketing Accountability. This time it was co-presented between Jay Gillespie, the VP of Marketing at Fiskars and Spike Jones, the Firestarter at Brains on Fire.

The folks at Fiskars did a lot of things right in order to build this community – they found an area of passion, scrapbooking, and they put the users at the center of their community, not their company nor their products.

In a nutshell, the Fiskateer community is a community of passionate scrapbookers who are helping one another in every aspect of the hobby – from providing social interaction guidelines for the community to finding the right tools for the job. A handful of community leaders are paid by Fiskars, all others are volunteers.

What started as a modest PR project, with a goal of recruiting 250 community members within 6 months, ended up with a movement of 5,000 passionate fiskateers in 18 months. In fact they achieved their original goal of 250 members in less than 48 hours. Another goal was for them to increase chatter by 10%, which they instead grew by 600%. They also blew past their original goal of increasing store sales by 10% and instead increased store sales by 300%.

What’s even better is that the program, which was originally funded by Fiskars at the tune of $1M, is now fully paid for by the box stores.

And just like we found with our own study on how companies leverage communities, they had some unexpected benefits from their community, including:

• The participation of the community in the R&D process
• Having the community members create better advertising than they used to
• Having community members take over much of the customer support function
• Having the community rally around the company when they had a PR crisis on their hands.

The key to success, said Fiskars’ Jay Gillespie, is to keep yourself accountable to the fans – not the company.

When companies deploy successful communities, the benefits are not level-setting; they are truly game-changing.