emergencemarketing.com

(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.

One other thing that came out of the Conference Board meeting is the need for a common nomenclature when referring to marketing related activities within companies. The problem is especially a big one in large companies that grew through acquisitions. When you have employees in different divisions that use the same terms to mean different things – that is a recipe for disaster.

One of the most interesting ways to cope with that problem came from MetLife, which has a program in place for every person from the Chairman on down to go to a one week executive education program on marketing strategy at a major university in Massachusetts (it sounded like the Strategic Marketing program at the Harvard Business School – which is a great program). By doing so, everyone at MetLife supposedly uses the same terminology when referring to marketing activities and goals.

That made me think of the terms used during this conference vs. some other marketing conferences I attended in the past – especially West Coast conferences. The popular terms at this conference were customer needs, positioning, marketing ROI, engagement, market research, brand attributes, brand equity, segmentation, differentiation, targeting, partnering and perceived value. Very little or hardly ever did I hear discussions about conversations, attention scarcity, lack of control, social media, platform of participation, customer empowerment, customer attraction, customer assistance, affiliating, or community-based marketing.

Now I know that I am comparing apples and oranges in many cases, but the point I am trying to make is that it must be hard for marketers to have a consistent lexicon, when the marketing thought leaders keep using different terminology.

Marry Hodder, CEO at Dabble, made a good point yesterday at the business blogging summit here in Seattle when she said that the Technorati rankings for authority are not really a measure of authority but a measure of popularity – and that measuring authority is not something that should be conceded to a web service but something that gets determined by the end user.

At one point or another everyone is struggling with how to filter content to find the relevant pieces of information. Some people believe that popularity may be the right filter. Others believe that you can only trust “real” journalists and should use that as your filter to get the right content. Some others still cling to the belief that only academic credentials, with publications and peer review, can result in the “experts” worth listening to.

The reality is that no one filter can work for all topics and at any point in time. If I am looking for customer feedback on a new product, I may not want the voice of the expert, and certainly have learned not to trust the voice of the “journalist” reviewer. If I am looking for information on cutting edge cancer treatments on the other hand, I may only trust academic types. And if I need information on a more popular topic, then popularity may well be the right filter – or ratio of blog posts to comments and trackbacks, or some other metric that determine how well a person is read, quoted, etc.

Now, another person may look at this in a whole different way. The bottom line is that the “right” filter is content-specific as well as reader-specific.

Making things even more complicated – the right filter is also time sensitive. If I have time to cull through a large amount of information then my filter may not be set as narrowly as when I am in a time-crunch.

So in a way, everybody has a personal profile that determines the right filters based on subject and moment in time. If somehow we could have web services that would match their results to my personal profile, then we would have a real cool solution.

It’s really simple when you think about it…well…maybe not

[Tags: content filtering authority popularity experts]

The Wall Street Journal had an article yesterday on the continued struggle that companies face with trying to pass knowledge from one worker to another (requires subscription).

The conundrum is that while people learn best from other people – a system that relies on employee word of mouth for knowledge transfer does not scale. In such a system, people only learn from those people they know, and in many cases there is just not enough opportunity for this type of knowledge transfer to occur (i.e., field repair workers, work at home folks, etc.).

Technology to help with knowledge management has had spotty track record so far – with the Wall Street journal citing an Bain study which ranked knowledge management tools near the bottom in effectiveness amongst 25 management tools.

Apparently some companies have had success with a brute force approach – by forcing people to document what they know in a central database. They claim a virtuous cycle with people contributing voluntarily once there is a critical mass of content in those knowledge repositories.

Perhaps the quote from Hadley Reynolds with the Delphi Group captures the real issue – “We don’t necessarily understand enough yet about optimizing the conditions for knowledge work, even though we’ve been doing it for 25 years. Most organizations are still managing as if we were in the industrial era.”

Related posts:
Building emergent business models
The shifting workforce and its new opportunities
Is it time to revive knowledge management

[Technorati Tags: knowledge management learning KM]

David Pollard over at How to Save the World has a good post on the old KM vs. the new KM. He summarizes the differences between the first wave and the second as:

“First-generation KM has vainly sought one-size fits-all integrated enterprise solutions, which are complicated to use and expensive to change, and which focus on content + collection; Second-generation KM must look instead to simple, lightweight, cheap, intuitive, stand-alone apps, which are easy to use, add or change, and which focus on context + connection. In the shift from first to second generation KM, the holy grail changes from cost savings to improvements in knowledge worker effectiveness.”

The article also contains a list of 23 human behaviors that impede the sharing of knowledge and collaboration, and how some recent organizational and technological changes do alleviate some of those impediments. The main message he conveys is:

“The challenges we face today in getting people to share what they know and to collaborate effectively are not caused or cured by technologies, they are cultural impediments. It’s extremely difficult to change people’s behaviours (they usually exist for a reason), so the solutions we find have to accommodate these behaviours, and these cultures, rather than trying to ‘fix’ them.”

While I buy most of what he’s saying, I think that he is missing a few key points. There are two main reasons why KM has not worked in the past. The first one that in most organizations it was a top-down exercise with a disproportionate amount of “perceived” benefits for the organization vs. the individual (we will build a system to make sure that we capture all “your” knowledge if you walk out the door – or if we push you out the door). The second reason is that previous KM tools and processes (i.e., best practice teams, etc.) were never integrated with people’s real work. That meant that KM became a “voluntary” extra-curricular activity – and guess what – most people don’t do that.

For KM initiatives to work, they will have to be grassroots in nature (i.e., no taxonomy but folksonomy), and will indeed have to be based on lightweight tools (including Wiki’s) that integrate with people’s daily work. And most of the “perceived” benefits of the initiative have to be for the individual.

[Technorati Tags: knowledge management KM collaboration]