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Having read more about reciprocity than I ever had expected, I have come to realize the importance of this ancient and simple reflex that we developed eons ago to become the only hyper-social species without all being brothers and sister, on explaining why we behave the way we do in 21st century business environments.

The most recent aha moment came when I read “How We Know What Isn’t So,” by Thomas Gilovich, in which he describes communications as a reciprocal process – saying:

Because communication or conversation is a reciprocal process, it is not surprising that many of the needs and goals of the speaker and listener are complementary. This is well illustrated by one of the most basic goals of communication, to ensure that the act of communication is “justified.” For the speaker, this means, among other things, that his or her message should be worthy of the listener’s attention; for the listener, it means that the interaction must in some way be worthwhile. To satisfy this basic goal, it is necessary that certain preconditions be met. The message should be understandable (i.e., not assume too much knowledge on the part of the listener), and yet not be laden with too many needless details (i.e., not assume too little knowledge on the part of the listener).

Of course, that is what most companies do not understand. And that is, not surprisingly,  also what many advertisers have understood for a long time. For communications to truly work, it needs to be reciprocal – there has to be value in it somewhere. Value can come in the form of warnings (i.e, don’t use that product, it doesn’t really work), useful information (which in most cases is different from product specs), and of course entertainment (nothing beats a good story or a funny one).

Throughout most of the 20th Century corporate communications’ history, however, communications was not a reciprocal process – because companies did not have to. The only information you could get about their products and services came from them, and the only thing they wanted from you was your money. They did not care whether the communication was truly based on a “I help you now, and I know you will help me later” basis – because they did not have to.

So now that we have companies with real bad habits and a platform of participation called social media that allows people to talk to other people in conversations that are truly reciprocal – it is no wonder that 2/3rds of all buying decisions are made based on information not coming from the company selling the product or service.

The other important topic that Gilovich brings up in his book which has profound implications for corporate communicators is the effect of  “sharpening” and “leveling” of messages – he says:

What the speaker construes to be the gist of the message is emphasized or “sharpened,” whereas details thought to be less essential are de-emphasized or “leveled.” Secondhand accounts often become simpler and “cleaner” stories that are not encumbered by minor inconsistencies or ambiguous details.

The message here being – keep your communications clean, retellable, and free of unnecessary details.

One of the things I learned as a marketing consultant looking at marketers’ behavior from the outside in is that many of us all too often become very self-centered.

We get so absorbed into our own world that we start thinking of our products and services as the center of the universe (and in fact they are the center of our universe). By talking about the space we live in day in and day out we start suffering from the curse of knowledge – resulting in the fact that nobody, save for a few industry insiders, has a clue of what we’re talking about. Often times this situation gets aggravated by arcane company structures and cultural artifacts.

The problem of course is that prospects rarely think of your products as the the center of their universe, and while you babble about your products using all the fashionable industry buzzwords, your customers use much simpler terms to talk about your products. And of course, while you may think that a certain type of prospect belongs to a particular industry bucket because that is how your company is organized, rarely do they in fact fit into the buckets you put them in.

So why is it important to break out of this self-centric view of the world?

It’s simple – because most of your prospects will increasingly get the information they use to make buying decisions from friends and peers. And if they cannot reuse your information to convince their friends and peers they will make it up, and most likely mangle it. Or they will use information from a competitor that is much easier to retell and push their peers into the camp of your competitor who uses much simpler stories to describe what they do.

Marshall Ganz is the person who designed organizational systems for the Barack Obama campaign. In listening to him on NPR’s On the Media about how they motivated and coached Obama volunteers to promote their candidate and recruit other volunteers, I was struck by the following passage:

What we helped them understand is that the first thing they need to learn is how to articulate their own story, in other words, what is it that moved them to become involved and engaged, because it’s from their own story that they’re going to be able to most effectively engage others. So when people leave, they leave equipped to do that. That’s sort of the foundational piece.

And in the initial series in California, we launched 200 teams in two weekends that, with the support of four staff people, built that operation out there to the point where it could make 100,000 phone calls a day. This is like an investment in civic assets, in local communities that no political campaign has done for years.

The right benefited from being rooted in social movements, which do this because that’s what social movements do. They translate values into action; they bring people in to work together. But on the progressive side, everybody had become marketeers. Everybody’d been marketing their cause or marketing their candidates as if it was another bar of soap, transforming people from citizens into customers.

What we did was bring the citizenship back in and put the people back in charge, and then put the tools in their hands.

For me the biggest difference is not to bring the citizenship back, it’s about realizing that the power of personal stories – what motivated you to buy into this cause – is much stronger than that of talking points about the cause.

The same is true for brands, products and services. Let people tell their own narrative about why they like it instead of trying to get them to sing from the same song sheet with canned corporate speak.

Many companies seem to have legal departments that put up huge barriers to adopting communities and other social media programs that include employees, customers, prospects and even detractors. In fact some put up barriers so high that nobody can do anything in the space. Now, if your competitors cannot find a way to overcome those objections either, you may be ok, but if they do and manage to extend their business processes to leverage the power of the internal and external crowds, it may be “game over.”

Typical legal objections include the issues related to brand protection, engaging hourly workers as part of internal communities, the threat of liability for what employees say in public, having employees socialize online instead of doing work, meeting regulatory compliance requirements, and more. While most legal departments will claim that their situation is very unique, at the end of the day the issues are fairly common among many companies.

I do not think that there is one best practice on how to overcome those objections. Some companies find it easier to get legal involved upfront in the process, while others are asking legal to quantify the risks and then balancing those with the benefits or the risks of doing nothing. One good bit of common sense (as recommended in this BT case study) is to make sure that you do not overhype what you are trying to do and position it as something radically different from other programs. Many companies already have policies in place that cover things like email communications and acceptable behavior in public forums – which could possibly be extended to virtual environments without too much change.

What have you found to be working?

You brand is defined by the consumer, not by you – I think everyone can agree with that. In the same breath, most marketing pundits will add the fact that you can no longer control your brand – an assertion I am not sure goes hand in hand with the first one.

You brand gets defined by the UI (User Interface) of your company, the interface through which your customers and prospects interact with your company. That interface gets determined by pre-sale activities – i.e., advertising, retail layout, retail personnel attitude, telemarketing, sales people’s knowledge of the industry, etc -, as well as immediate post-sale activities – i.e., packaging, ease of use to set up the products, available help options, etc. -, and the long term post sale activities – i.e., telephone support, return policies, warranty policies, on-site support, etc. That makes up a lot of links in the chain that determines your brand in the mind of the consumers which your company controls.

So in effect, you do control the brand in the mind of the consumer. If some link in the chain is broken, meaning not supporting the overall brand promise you are trying to establish for your company, that is when you lose control of your brand. That is when people will start talking with one another about the fact that what you promise and what you deliver is different. Once that starts, you should focus on fixing the overall UI of your company instead of getting into communication fire-fighting mode or crisis communication mode.

You would think it would be a clear-cut answer, right? The one that wins the most delegates through the two-tiered election process wins…

Yesterday CNN announced “Texas Caucus Win Estimated” (for Obama), the New York Times today is still talking about Clinton’s big win in Texas (they do not even specify that the win was in the Texas primaries, which would technically be correct), and the Boston Globe keeps talking about her big win in the Texas primaries as well (as late as Monday). Yet as early as Thursday of last week it looked like Obama was going to win Texas with more delegates than Clinton – a ratio that even party officials were agreeing would hold through the ongoing tally for the caucus part of the election.

If a simple story, which can be backed by straight calculus, can get distorted to the point of confusing readers and voters by some of the best known media outlets – how do you think you are ever going to control the message around your worldwide innovative feature-rich, robust and scalable widget?

Let’s face it marketers, you just cannot count on people to retell a story the right way… It’s not just that you are not in control of the message (which is not a new thing) – you have to plan for it going seriously wrong.

There are some great lessons to be learned in the world of politics!

Confirming a recent survey from Arketi, a new survey commissioned by Brodeur from Marketwire found that:

• Blogs are a regular source for journalists: Over three-quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue
• Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis:
• The majority of journalists said blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested – except news quality.

Note to PR people – an increasing share of reader attention is moving to social media, and that is why you need to engage in the social media space. Two recent surveys now show that if traditional media is still your main goal, then an increasingly effective way to influence traditional media is by engaging with social media. So one way or the other, you can no longer ignore social media!

Oh, one more point – creating anemic, corporate-speak-laden, CEO blogs does not count
(via Marketing Charts)

A new report jointly produced between Forrester Research and Heidrick & Struggles paints a bleak picture of the (d)evolved CMO (Chief Marketing Officer). You can download the report here, but only after agreeing to become a “lead.”

While two thirds of CMOs want to get a higher involvement with business strategy development and increased P&L responsibility, the reality is that far too many of them are in fact disconnected from where the real action is.

Some of the findings are mind-boggling:

• Only 45% of CMOs have responsibility for product, service or solution development. Only 37.5% are responsible for pricing.
• Only 27.5% are in charge of sales  training.
• Only 25% are responsible for in-store buying experiences.
• Only 12.5% are accountable for the activities associated with customer service and support.

How can you be the Chief Market Listener and not be in charge of what customers say after they buy your product? If you are the Chief Market Officer, how can you not be in charge of deciding what gets sold in the marketplace and how much it will cost the buyer to acquire it? And if you are the Chief Customer Officer, how can you not be in charge for the in-store customer experience? The sales training issue is either a cause or effect for the ongoing rift between most sales and marketing department…

But wait, it gets worse…here is some data about their top objectives:

• Only 27.5% have “increase customer life-cycle value” as one of their top objectives.
• “Innovate” is an objective for only 40% of the survey takers
• Only 27.5% have “increase customer retention” as an objective

And just when you thought you got the extend of the sorry state of CMOs, you find this:

• Only 12% consider “personal knowledge of your customers” as one of their top 5 competencies to their personal success.
• Only 17% consider technology savviness to be one of those top 5 skills

Thankfully (sarcasm intended), more than 65% see people management as one of those top skills. But wait a minute…isn’t it leadership characteristics that get you into the C-suite? Management skills are so Industrial Revolution/last century skills…

Other interesting tidbits from the report include:

• On a scale from 1-3, with 3 being the most important, CMOs found marketing measurement (2.55) to be way more important than customer community development ((1.89) and social computing/web 2.0 tools (1.73).  That goes hand-in-hand with the fact that 92% have advertising as one of their main responsibilities.
• There is room for new industry marketing organizations, conferences and publications. Those three resources come in dead last in a list of 16 resources that CMOs ranked most valuable to their professional career development.

 The recommendations from the authors to improve the situation?

• Spend more time on career development
• Seize the opportunity to lead the organization towards customer-centricity
• Build credibility through the marketing team and leadership contributions.

How about not accepting the CMO job if it does not mean you are really the Chief Market Officer, or the Chief Customer Listener, or the Chief Voice of the Customer Officer, or the Chief Customer Lifecycle Value Owner?

Many companies are still confused about what role social media should play in their PR strategies – wondering whether social media impacts buyers or whether social media strategies can help with traditional PR efforts.

The first question relates to the information consumption that leads to buying decisions – and nobody will question that there has been a tectonic shift from traditional media to consumer generated media in this area.

The second one relates to how traditional media writers and journalists source their information. And a new survey from the Arketi Group shows that the role of social media in influencing traditional media continues to grow as well (via Shel Holtz – granted, delayed, but we never claimed to be a news service).

Some interesting tidbits from the survey:

• 84% of journalists say they would or already have used blogs as primary or secondary sources.
• 54% of journalists report to get their story ideas from blogs, 51% from RSS feeds
• 60% of journalists say they spend more than 20 hours on the Internet

So it sounds like if your company does not make a conscientious effort in trying to engage with social media channels today, you will likely find yourself the winner of an award in stealth marketing in a few years time – an award given to companies that manage to make their companies totally invisible in the marketplace.

Johnson & Johnson is suing the Red Cross and other parties over the use of the Red Cross. Talk about one heck of a juicy story. The reality is that J&J is suing the Red Cross because it is licensing the use of the Red Cross symbol to for-profit organizations, while J&J holds trademarks to the Red Cross symbol since before the Red Cross actually existed.

So what is a VP of corporate communications at J&J to do in response to such a corporate public affair’s nightmare? Send out press releases, hold press conferences, use all the traditional tools available to corporate communicators in crisis management mode? Not so for the J&J corporate com VP, Ray Jordan, who took his story to the J&J corporate blog, where he wrote up J&J’s point of view in an everyday and personal voice.

The result? A large number of comments and stories generally providing broad support for J&J’s point of view. While there are negative comments, the blog achieved what no other crisis communication’s vehicle would have delivered.

(via Johnnie Moore)

[Tags: Red Cross Johnson & Johnson J&J corporate communication crisis management]