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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?

While most people haven’t really yet grasped the meaning and the potential impact of the web 2.0, some are already trying to define the Web 3.0, and along with that comes the usual litany of buzzwords - let go of control, more pervasive, more intelligent, always on, we are in control, etc. (Stephen Baker from Business Week talks about it here and here, Valeria Maltoni has a very eloquent post with a great discussion here, and then of course Phil Wainewright and John Hagel were already having this debate two years ago).

One of the things that most people forget is that we always overestimate the amount of change in the short term and underestimate the amount of change in the long term.

Let’s start by taking a look at the short term. The adoption of web 2.0 is not anywhere near a done deal - with very powerful barriers to adoption standing in the way of success. Many of those barriers were the same that the web 1.0 tools and even pre-web tools faced. In fact many of those barriers are the same as the ones described in the context of innovations as far fledged as agricultural innovations in third world countries by Everett Rogers in his seminal book on adoption of innovations - Diffusion of Innovations.

Most of those barriers are from people, culture and political nature - the hardest of all to overcome (I like how Valeria calls it the Human 1.0 ability). Web 2.0 tools and processes have the potential to change organizational structures and to overhaul existing hierarchies, causing people in charge to resist those tools and come up with smoke-screens to defeat them - think security and compliance. Web 2.0 tools are social and collaborative in nature and many organizations just do not have a collaborative or social culture. And because of the collaborative nature of the tools, even self-organized groups face the classic collaboration conundrums - the white screen syndrome (how do we get started and who in the group decides how we organize ourselves in this collaborative space), and the fact that the value of the tools goes down to zero for all team members even if only one of them decides not to adopt the tools.

So with that in mind, trying to extract what the web 3.0 will look like based on what is currently happening with the web 2.0 is an exercise in futility. In fact, many of the extrapolations have been part of the innovator’s toolbox or vocabulary for a long time. Are we not overestimating the amount of change in the short term?

On the flip side, the web 3.0 could come with new forms of organizational structures, new political realities, and a new workforce - one where a new class of artisans bring their own tools to “the” work at hand. Some thinkers have painted big picture futures, including many great sci-fi authors, but also some business thinkers and magazines like Kevin Kelly, or FAST Company, just to name a few.

So, aren’t most of us underestimating the amount of change in the long term?

Giovanni Rodriguez found that the business benefits of social media are becoming quite apparent, but the pressure to stand out — and do something different — is mounting (disclosure - I am on the advisory board of Hubbub PR). He starts his excellent post by saying that: “There’s no question – the early success of peer-driven, social-media programs will put pressure on businesses to both adapt and adopt. But, for some leaders, there’s another question: in a world where everyone participates, what does it mean to lead?”

In their rush to stand out, companies and people will screw it up - let’s just hope that they don’t break it for the rest of us.

Don’t take me wrong - I am totally excited about this current wave of web innovation and a big believer in where it might lead us (as I wrote about it a few times - including here). What confuses me is the fanaticism with which the current tools are being promoted - and the associated “death of the old tools” predictions that go with it.

I already wrote what I felt about Business Week’s prediction that “email is so five minutes ago”. But the blogosphere is littered with other such examples. Take Basecamp - which is hailed as a “must use” web 2.0 collaboration tool for anyone that wants to be perceived as an insider of this current wave of innovation. More than once have I been dinged for using a Yahoo group for simple collaboration instead of Basecamp. But what’s so 2.0 about it?

If I have a Yahoo Group - I can email to the group - I do not have to ever log in to the Yahoo Group itself to participate. While Basecamp will also give me email notifications - I have to log in if I want to comment or post something. If I have multiple Yahoo groups that I want to send the same message to - I email it once to three email addresses and everybody gets it in their email inbox. In Basecamp I have to log in to each project and cut and paste my message. If I want a to put something in italic or bold in my Yahoo Group message - I click on the B or the I icon. In Basecamp I have to remember to put a * before and after the stuff I want to appear in Bold and an _ before and after the stuff I want in italic - not to mention that I have to add h1. or h2. before stuff that I want to appear bigger as a header (I guarantee you that very few people are using bold, italic, or headers in the projects that I run in Basecamp). In Yahoo groups I can organize my files in folders, in Basecamp I cannot. So what’s so 2.0 about this? Oh yeah - Basecamp has RSS feeds which you cannot have with private Yahoo Groups. But to me, project related work and alerts should come in my email inbox, and subscriptions should stay out of it and go into my RSS aggregator - a personal preference - I agree.

I am sure that Basecamp will improve over time - and although I am a firm believer that the wiki metaphor is a better collaboration metaphor than blogging - I am convinced that they will develop a loyal “mainstream” following over time. There are however collaboration lessons that were learned during the web 1.0 wave and the pre-web wave that will always stand in the way of group adoption. And the are remaining web 1.0 tools that are still working fine for certain applications - let’s not become too snobbish about this whole thing - because that will impede innovation.

In general, and for the web 2.0 tools to find broader acceptance, they will have to have much better UI’s, more depth, and be much more robust…

We knew how to do that before - why are we giving it up in this wave of product innovation?

[Technorati Tags: web 2.0 collaboration adoption]

Following the Web 2.0 conference last week, Scott Kirsner wrote a good review article in the Boston Globe yesterday on web 2.0.

He thinks that the term web 2.0 is in danger of being overused, and talking about the current hype cycle he says:

” When Silicon Valley gets excited about a meme — a Web 1.0 term for a new concept or idea — like Web 2.0, everyone gloms on and dozens of copycat companies sprout up like Tribbles. There’s also lots of wreckage, as we learned during the aftermath of Web 1.0.”

[Technorati Tags: web 2.0 innovation product innovation]