emergencemarketing.com

[update 12/21/2010] @fearlessweb tweeted me the following message: “@fgossieaux Your URL has been unblocked due to a false positive and should be accessible to your customers. Apologies for the inconvenience.” – hopefully done for now…

Original message:

Trend Micro is an Internet Security software company that claims to be protecting your business from viruses and spyware. They do that, and they also prevent small businesses like mine from conducting  business.

Our site, www.human1.com, which is built 100% on WordPress, and designed by some of the best people in the industry is categorized as ‘malicious’. Human 1.0 prospects and customers have alerted us of that fact for well over a month. We tried to submit for reclassification of our site, but you need to be a customer to do that. Obviously that is not something we would ever consider.

They also claim to be listening on twitter and so I engaged them there – again with limited success.

So how is it having an immediate impact on our business?

We are running two very high end workshops in January. We invested thousands of $$ to promote the events, only to find Trend Micro clients not being able to access our site. Not only can they not access our site and register, the fact that Trend Micro calls us malicious does not make for a good impression –  let’s face it, the fact that “the security system” calls us malicious is not good for our reputation. We even had a sponsor for the event pull out because of this issue…

So Trend Micro – what is it going to be? Do we need to spend more money to have our lawyer contact you? Who is the ‘malicious’ party in this case?

You are hurting business…and you should be ashamed of your business practices. Maybe you should be regulated.

Seriously…have you ever thought of that? Is your brand powered by people?

Because if it isn’t, you are missing out.

JetBlue is bringing humanity back to the airline industry, IBM got rid of its firewall and encourages every one of their 400,000 employees to start a community with outsiders about whatever they want, Xerox and Humana are enlisting their active social networkers and bloggers to participate in their product launches, even though 80% of them talk about things that have nothing to do with the company.

What are those companies doing that you are not? They are humanizing their brand – in effect powering their brand with people. And they realize that in order to do that you need to start by empowering and trusting your employees.

Check out the attached presentation to find out how they really do it.

Seriously — is it?

I have finally had a chance to catch up with some blog reading and have been struck by the number of people who focus on building social media programs to reach customers and prospects in new ways. And they use advertising metrics like engagement to decide how successful their programs are.

That is not what this current wave of innovation is all about!

While using traditional marketing programs in social media environments may yield some results, they do not leverage the social…they are plain old marketing programs that are driven by incentives, coupons, or other traditional marketing drivers. They die the minute you stop fueling them.

As some people have called it, social media a platform for participation. It’s actually a massive platform of participation that allows the social for which humans have been hardwired, to scale to the point where it makes a difference in business again – both as employees or customers/prospects.

Those companies that are successful in leveraging social media do not use it as a channel to reach audiences. They use it to turn their business processes into social processes – they power their business with people. They get all their employees and customers participate in product innovation processes, customer support processes, knowledge management processes, marketing and sales processes and others. They don’t care about engagement, because in many cases, as is the case when you try glean insights from the marketplace, engagement with the company is not even required – its the engagement among the people that counts.

If you are interested in the topic, you may want to join us for our Hyper-Social Mini Summits coming up in January, where we will be joined by companies who have done it before and brainstorm with executives on how to make that work.

Call me jaded or cranky – I don’t care – but I have had it with self-proclaimed social media experts. And not because they are one of the most ego-driven bunch of (un)innovators that I have seen in my entire career. After all, I have been able to live through the age of A-listers and following exclusionary eras of social media without getting too caught up in it. I’ve had it because they are hurting the reputation of people who truly understand this wave of innovation by giving their clients and customers bad advice.

The only thing I used to do was to follow a simple rule to help me decide whether or not to friend someone on social networking sites. Besides some other rules that I use for various sites I would not accept people who called themselves social media experts of gurus. Maybe it’s time to step that up.

So what got me so riled up? A post by Chris Kieff (who I normally enjoy reading), about what makes a social media expert. In it he describes how you cannot call yourself a social media expert unless you have a set number of followers on facebook, twitter and LinkedIn, and how you need to have a certain level of Facebook fans to qualify. In other words, another piece of bad advice for companies who are trying to recruit people to help them make sense of this current wave of innovation.

On Chris’ Facebook posting about the blog post I said “You can be all that and when a CMO comes along and asks how to leverage the social as part of lead gen or product innovation be at a total loss…or when a CIO comes along and asks how all this impacts his infrastructure (CRM, PLM, etc.) be completely clueless. Social media is about “the social” and humans know what that means…they have been hardwired to behave that way for eons. What is hard is how to embrace all this social activity into a business environment – and to do that you need a deep understanding of business processes and how business people measure success…they do not want to measure the impact of social media in customer service by the number of followers – they want to measure the impact the same way as you measure the impact of a call center…” I then added “…the metrics you use may in fact not be a good indicator to evaluate an expert…I agree that you learn by doing, we are aligned there…but in this case that is not enough. In fact there are people with huge followings that are a) business clueless and b) socially awkward – neither one of those profiles would be a good hire if you are trying to leverage the social as part of your business…”

Others, including Danny Brown weren’t quite as delicate in telling Chris that this was bad advice – and I really cannot blame them. Chris came back with a lame rebuttal, typical of self-proclaimed social media experts’ discourse with the pot calling the kettle black – calling the feedback he got coming from the “social media echo chamber.”

It is not good for our industry to tolerate people putting out bad advice – it hurts us all. Customers who listen to  that advice end up disappointed, hurt or confused. In writing our book, The Hyper-Social Organization, I talked to a well known and social-media savvy CMO who asked for my opinion about popular social media experts. Not knowing where he was going with that I played it safe and said “I know a lot of those people and I am friend with some of them, but there are many people out there who lack real business experience,” to which he responded “EXACTLY – most do not understand my business, and much less what my role is.”

That of course, is not good for the reputation of the industry as a whole.

How many dead corporate blogs have you seen out there? How many company-centric corporate-speak spewing twitter feeds? How many corporate Facebook pages with fans that come only because the company distributes coupons on its page? Those are some of the best examples of what bad advice can lead to. At least they are not hurting the companies that deploy them. But even those best case scenarios hurt those organizations and consultants that can truly help companies leverage social media as part of their business – those that understand that social media is not about the media but about the social, and those that realize that to succeed you need to power your business processes with people – not enable your marketing processes with a new social media channel.

Sorry Chris for using your posts as examples – they are the posts that made me reach my tipping point.

What do you say?

Speaking with Scott Wilder is always fun, and it was so again when I spoke with him a few weeks ago about his online community experiences. For those of you who don’t know Scott, he used to run all small business communities at Intuit. I am also fortunate to be working with Scott on various Human 1.0 projects at the moment.

In our conversation, Scott gave 10 pieces of advice for those of you who are thinking about starting communities. Based on our experiences and research, we’d say they are dead-on:

• Think about the size of your potential user universe
  According to Scott, only 5-10% of your users will join your communities – that is if you set them up right. So, if you only have 5,000 customers you cannot expect more than a few hundred people to show up. Think carefully whether you have enough value to offer the group so that it becomes a vibrant community. And before starting a community on your own platform, evaluate whether it may be better to engage with them on other platforms like YouTube or Facebook.
• Have a clear purpose for your community
  What problem is it going to solve? How is it going to help people’s life? If you cannot articulate the purpose of your community clearly, chances are that your community members will come once, be confused about what’s going on, and never come back.
• Understand the kind of technology that your audience uses
  If they don’t use wiki’s, then don’t deploy wiki-like features as part of your community. If they don’t give credibility to blogging, then don’t ask them to blog – let them have discussion threads. Not only should you deploy the type of tools that they are used to, you also need to use their language.
• Start Simple
  Don’t add too much functionality as you start your community- start simple with a few features. Scott used to make the point that if your community would not survive in a plain old discussion group, it would not survive anywhere.
• Add a  ”heartbeat” to your community
  Communities need a “Heartbeat.” You can provide that by having periodic webinars or online roundtables. Some companies also do it by having offline events and activities, while others do it by having time bound activities (e.g., this week we are looking for ideas about power supplies).
• Pay attention to moderation
  You do not need an army of them, but you need to get the right people, and realize that in the beginning of your online community you build trust through moderation. Keep the community in good shape and the conversations civil to avoid the “broken window theory” – if people will see that others can trash the place, they will do so as well. Have domain experts and make sure you don’t have explicit selling within your community.
• Make sure you capture all the value
  Even though your community may be set up in support of one business process, most communities deliver cross-functional benefits over time. So a customer support community will deliver marketing and innovation benefits. You need to capture that value and report it back to the groups that can use it in a way they understand. At Intuit they set up the community group as a cross-functional center for excellence which reported back to the various groups using their own KPI’s.
• Let the community decide what they want
  Don’t decide for them what it is you will be building. Show them your budgets and let them vote or have discussions about what they want you to do. Co-create with them and make sure that the various departments pay attention to the real voice of the customer – in the end it will help your Net Promoter Score or other metrics you use to measure customer satisfaction.
• Don’t start if you don’t have a customer-centric DNA
  If you don’t have a customer-centric culture, chances are that your online community efforts will fail. Scott believe that Intuit’s customer-centric culture is what allowed communities to be successful (e.g., the “follow me home” program, where they encourage employees to go to retail stores and follow customers who purchased Intuit products to their home to see how they use it).
• Don’t be a control freak – be transparent
  Do you trust your employees to do what’s right for the customer? Do you trust that your customers will behave themselves and help one another in your online communities? Not only that, but provide transparency in the data with both your employees and customers.

Great pieces of advice…let me know if you have others.

Interview with Scott Wilder [ 19:50 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1250)

• Awareness Community – Achieving the Hyper-Social Organization with Francois Gossieaux
  (tags: hypersocialorg)

• Meter of Fact
  Communication World article
  (tags: hypersocialorg)

• Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch – McKinsey Quarterly – High Tech – Strategy & Analysis

• Book Review: The Hyper-Social Organization by Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran | paulgillin.com

• Survey Says Facebook Feeds Narcissism [STUDY]
• Young workers distrust bosses – Telegraph
• The CMO Survey – Duke University's Fuqua School of Business->