(This is a link to column I wrote for iMedia)

The importance of being human

Humanizing brands is a popular topic, but people mean different things when they use this phrase, both in terms of what it means and why you should care.

So what does “humanizing brands” mean?
Brands get created in the customers’ minds based on interactions in the marketplace. These interactions could be a good or bad recommendation from a friend or colleague, an experience with the vendor’s customer service department, an encounter with one of the company’s ads, or an exchange with one of its salespeople.

Thus, “humanizing” a brand simply means to make those customer experiences over which you have control, and which lead to a customer’s expectation of value about your brand, more human. Note that the experiences over which you don’t have control — such as word of mouth, through which people help others by recommending products or warning them to stay away — are already human.

Continue reading the article at iMedia.

While attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference and hosting a great dinner with 28 thinkers in the space on Monday night (the dinner was sponsored by Clearvale, which is our client), I got a chance to reflect on what social CRM actually means, and how many people are thinking about it in a way that is too narrow.

Let’s start off by one of my favorite quotes from Peter Drucker: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.” Ok, so creating a customer and managing the relationships with those customers should be the heartbeat of a company – we can all agree on that. That is also why Customer Relationship Management should be one of the most important processes within a company.

In the research leading to the writing of our (award winning – sorry couldn’t resist the chest thumping) book, the Hyper-Social Organization, we found that those companies that are successful in leveraging the social as part of their business, turn their business processes into social processes. So turning your CRM process into a social process makes a lot of sense.

The question is – How Do You Turn CRM Into a Social Process?

In order to answer that question, let’s peel back the various layers of the onion that make up the CRM process. And to do that it may be useful to categorize the parts of the overall process into the following elements – the actors, the processes that make up the CRM process, the places, and the data.

The actors are the people that should play a role in your overall CRM process – they don’t just  include your customers and prospects, which most companies will consider as part of their CRM process. They also include your detractors, your employees (those that interact, and those that should interact with the customers – e.g., those that share a passion with your customers), your suppliers (if you run on tight inventories and a supplier has an delivery issue, that will impact customer relationships), and your partners.

The processes that make up CRM include not just sales, marketing, and customer support, but also the buying process (most products are now being bought, not sold), the recommendation process, and the relationship management process – processes that have already gone social and been fundamentally transformed in the past decade.

The places refer to those places where you interact with your customers, or where they interact with one another while making buying decisions and sharing recommendations. They include face-to-face encounters, email, telephone, and social media environments.

The data refers too data that typically will reside in systems of record like CRM systems and financial applications. The data you keep about your customer relationship process should include customer data, transactional data, legal data, financial data, and increasingly social data.

Some people say that a CRM system that contains social data is social CRM – but when you look at all the parts of the social customer relationship process, you realize how myopic this view of social CRM is. Some consider the act of managing customer relationships in social media social CRM – an equally myopic viewpoint.

Social CRM needs to encompass all the different parts of the Customer Relationship Management Process – the Actors, the Processes, the Places and the Data.

That of course is not an easy task, and will not happen by deploying technology applications alone. Social CRM is about culture, people, and processes supported by technology.

What do you think?

I would also like to thank the people with whom I had good conversations on the topic: @elsua, @pgillin, @billives,@dankeldsen, @scratchmm, @mkrigsman, @mingk, @marklazen, @sameerpatel, @denispombriant, @absolutezero, @pitosalas, @rawn, @crmstrategies, @jyarmis, @_richardhughes, @skwilder, @debyang, @mjayliebs.

We’ve been saying it for years – you need to go where people hang out if you want to be successful in leveraging social media and communities as part of your business. And thankfully, more and more people are giving that piece of advice to their clients or employers who may be trying to figure out what to do in social media.

Increasingly there has been new “bad” advice seeping in that bit of wisdom as well. It comes in two forms:

1) Going to where they are means going to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

STOP – it is not because those sites have the most number of people that this is where conversations actually take place. Maybe they are, and maybe they are not. I am very active on all those sites, but if you want to reach me as part of my photography tribe or as part of my marketing enthusiast tribe, that is not where you will find me.

Going to where they are has nothing to do with the number of accounts – it has everything to do with the places where your tribes hang out.

2) You should never build your own community

WOW, hold on a minute — true, most vendor-hosted communities should have never been set up. And you could make the argument that most successful communities are tribe-led. But that does not mean that you need to become a extremist about that. Many customer support communities (not all) can thrive on vendor-hosted communities – look at Dell, Adobe, and Microsoft just to name a few. Communities to amplify word of mouth can be vendor hosted – look at the Fiskateers by Fiskars, or the financial analyst communities at Thomson Reuters.

The key is to find your tribes, see where they hang out, and see if there might be an opportunity for you to host them. It’s not easy, but to tell your clients or employers that they need to engage on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn just because that is where people hang out is wrong. And to tell them that they should not try to set up their own environment is probably wrong too!

Having known Paul Gillin for years, I knew this would be an informative and rich conversation. Paul is a veteran technology journalist and the author of multiple books about new media. Most recently he co-authored “Social Marketing to the Business Customer: Listen to Your B2B Market, Generate Major Account Leads, and Build Client Relationships,” a great book if you are trying to find out what best to do with social media as a B2B company. He also recently became the father of twins.

As usual, our conversation started with Paul giving us some background on his career. Paul spent most of his career as a technology journalist before he turned his whole focus to social media and published his first book, The New Influencers in 2007.

We then moved on and discussed the need for a B2B-specific book on social media. It was my experience that the lessons to be learned from social programs in B2C or B2B were the same – since successful programs don’t involve B’s talking with B’s or C’s, but people talking with people. While that is true at the highest level, Paul and his co-author Eric Schwartzman make a good case for why there is a need for a B2B specific best practices book, and they do a real good job in providing guidance to B2B marketers. The main difference in B2B and B2C marketing that calls for a different approach lies in the buying process, which is collaborative and deliberate in B2B companies vs. individual and often impulse-driven in B2C environments.

One of the most frequently used social tools in B2B environments are corporate blogs, and of course it does not take all that long to look around and see that many corporate blogs are failures – corporate-speak-laden web sites that fail to capture comments and viewers, or sometimes don’t even accept them. Paul argued that most failed blogs come from organizations that consider them, along with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, as channels through which to promote corporate messages, rather than social environments in which people have conversations with one another. Not only that, but in a recent study of resellers and system integrators, they only found 15 companies out of 100 that actually had a corporate blog – making you wonder whether those companies feel like they have nothing interesting to talk about with their partners, customers, and prospects…

Next we jumped onto the online trust issues and how some people claim that you cannot trust what you hear online. While true that it’s easier to tell a lie or spread a rumor online than it is in person, it is very hard to get a lot of people to believe it for a very long time. The crowd will usually “out” those falsehoods and that’s the reason why you don’t have big myths and big hoaxes going around online.

Social media should never be a goal, according to Paul, and you shouldn’t have a social media strategy. Instead you should have business goals and business strategies that may or may not include social media.

If social media makes sense as part of your business strategy, then there are a number of ways in which you can sell it to your executives. One is what Paul calls shock-and-awe, where you show executives how people are already talking about you in the marketplace, and how your competitors found ways to join those conversations where you didn’t. For those companies that may be smaller and may not have a lot of conversations going on around them, a stealth or guerrilla approach may be a better way to get going. Another way is to do market research and bring back an overwhelming volume of case study evidence.

Paul did not necessarily agree with my assertion that in most social environments we would eventually see the Facebook effect, where over time one community per topic becomes dominant. He believes that fragmentation in many markets will continue to exist and thrive.

You cannot turn your organization into a social organization from the top down only, nor can you become one through grass roots efforts without the support from the top – becoming a social organization requires support from all levels of the organization. There are many different variants in which organizations transition from hierarchical organizations into social organizations, and Paul took us through some of them.

We also touched on the risks associated with social media and how companies need to develop social media policies that are encouraging use rather than discouraging it, but also need to educate and train all their employees on what works and what doesn’t.

We closed the conversation by talking about Social CRM, a topic that Paul writes and speaks about frequently. Paraphrasing Paul, he said “at its core CRM is about managing relationships with customers and whether those relationships involve social media channels or not should be irrelevant – so the social is really just an unnecessary adjective.”

Well said!

Other things that we discussed include:

• An in-depth discussion on the differences between B2B and B2C marketing, especially as it relates to social marketing
• Crowd dynamics and how crowds tend to be smarter than individuals, as well as the pros and cons of crowdsourcing in marketing and innovation
• The importance of using guerrilla tactics and knowing when it can and cannot work
• A more in-depth conversation of what happened with Dell
• The impact of new communication tools and open communication on business performance
• The consumerization of new technologies and how many social technologies come into organizations through the back door
• The importance of having values and living by them in empowering your employees

As usual, you can listen to the full recording at the CMO 2.0 Site.

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?

You may recall the Tribalization of Business Study, a study sponsored by Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research, which looks at how companies leverage communities and social media as part of their business. The yearly study has come to be known as a valuable resource for companies that plan on leveraging social media and communities as part of their business, as well as a benchmarking tool for those already engaged.

We have just opened the survey for the 2010 edition (http://2010tribalizationofbusiness.com) of the study. If you are involved with communities or social media, we hope that you will join us in taking the survey and perhaps also participate in the upcoming qualitative interviews that make up the second part of the annual study.

In return for your time (the survey should take no longer than 20-25 minutes) and your valuable input, we will send you preliminary results of the complete survey results.

Who Should Participate?
If you are involved with a company’s social media programs or communities, as an executive sponsor, community manager, or outside advisor, we are looking for your feedback.

What’s in it for you?
We happily share the results of the Tribalization of Business Study with those that participate – the companies and/or individuals that are willing to share their learnings and are interested in what others are doing and what it takes to succeed. We also share our interpretations of the results through blog posts, articles, and conference presentations.

What is in it for us?
Two of the sponsoring organizations are strategy consulting companies that help clients connect their needs and problems with the best available knowledge. The other sponsoring organization is a research organization that aims to serve its members and other constituents by providing unique industry-specific insights.

What else can you do to help the industry?
Pass the survey link around to friends, peers and colleagues who are involved with communities and social media – the more people that take it, the better and more accurate the results!

Thank you for your time – we look forward to hearing from you.

[warning: rant]

I have been harping on this topic too many times, but as I recently sat through many conference sessions, and finally opened a book on communities and social media marketing that defined social marketing as “a process that empowers individuals to promote their websites, products, or services through online social channels and to communicate with with and tap into a much larger community that may have been available via traditional channels,” my hair got on fire.

I mean seriously – a channel to pimp your wares that has the potential to reach a bigger audience than TV audiences? Get real! This is bad advice.

Companies that approach social media marketing from that perspective will fail… miserably. Those that realize the real potential of social media will win… big time.

You see, social media marketing is not about you talking with an audience – it’s about them talking with one another. It’s about having a real time window in what your market is currently thinking about – what they like, what they dislike, who has the trust and who hasn’t. It’s all ABOUT THEM – NOT YOU!

Social media marketing has to be steeped in humanity and reciprocity – you give and take. And I recommend you start by giving. If you don’t, people will not only shut you off, they will punish you for not respecting the basic social rules that have ruled human societies for tens of thousands of years. People are no more likely to enjoy a twitter feed that constantly spews company information than they are enjoying a person at a party who only talks about herself.

If you really want to understand social media marketing, start thinking about how you would help a friend or colleague make a buying decision. Would you send them your corporate brochures? Would you spam them the way you do with your corporate twitter feed? Would you use the words you use in your marketing materials?

Chances are you would not.

For some stupid reason, people forget to be human when they step into the office. It is as if they leave their humanity at home and reserve it only for friends and family.

Social Media Marketing is about common sense – it’s about being real, authentic (there is another word that takes on new meaning in the corporate world), and helpful.

It’s about being human.

It’s simple – really.

[rant/end]

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.