The Marketing Consortium

Social Media: Getting the Corporate Blog on Track

With all that's been written about the opportunities, risks and "rules" of corporate blogging, I don't see a lot of value in rehashing all the conventional wisdom. If you're trying to figure out whether or how to launch a blog for your company, Debbie Weil has written a well received book that distills the important fundamentals of corporate blogging, which you can pick up on Amazon and avoid much of the confusing cross-talk and competing punditry on the Web.

What I do want to address are a few of the common complaints and frustrations that I hear from companies that have launched blogs, and have found that they haven't met expectations. They aren't getting a ton of traffic, few people comment on the entries, it takes a lot of time, and they're not really sure what to write about any more. So here are a few recommendations for getting a corporate blog on track. Notice how closely these relate to marketing fundamentals like brand positioning and messaging.

1. Choose a topic, or a narrow set of topics, to focus on. If you don't have a focus, it's like throwing seeds all over the place except in the garden patch you want to cultivate. Every once in a while something may take root, but if it's not related to your business objectives, you're wasting time and energy. One of the biggest payoffs of blogging is increased search engine positioning and traffic. So one way to help define your focus is to think about a few keywords or keyword phrases that you'd like driving traffic to your blog, and write about them. Use a little creativity and finesse to get those keywords into your blog titles, links, categories, tags and posts.

2. Take a stand. Review the topics you want to cover and try to find an angle you can be passionate and provocative about. If you don't give your readers something to chew on and debate, you can expect them to be fairly sedate. What's happening in your industry that's controversial? What sets your company apart from competitors? What dangers do you see facing your market? Again, keep your key topics in view; don't go off on a red herring that you're passionate about but that doesn't relate to your business goals.

3. Engage your peers. Chances are someone else is writing about the same issues. Find them. Comment on their blog entries. Put them on your blogroll. Write posts that trackback to their blog if they allow trackbacks. Write posts that engage or challenge them on a topic that matters. Go forth and get in the conversation; don't wait for it to come to you. If you're smart, you'll start paying attention to the chain of influence around the topics that are relevant to you, and start developing relationships with the influencers.

4. Engage your employees. Everyone has a slightly different take on your topic, and a different way of trawling the Web to find things you can link and leverage. Put together an editorial team of employees, and set a regular meeting schedule to have a brownbag lunch and discuss content. Assign people to cover keywords, or specific bloggers, and keep the team up to date on what's being discussed in the blogosphere, and where the opportunities might be today for linking and dialog.    

5. Engage your customers. Nothing filters up good ideas and new content like talking directly to customers. Interview a few of your customers or partners and ask for their take on the issues. Ask them what they want to know about. Ask them what they'd like to see if they could look inside your company for a day. Don't "profile" your customers and assume what they would say, ask them and let them surprise you. Avoid the temptation to shape your customers words into a testamonial. If you want a glowing quote, ask for a quote. But use your blog to have an honest dialog on open ground.

6. Keep a positive perspective. Yes, blogs can be a lot of work. But if your topics are really aligned with your business objectives, then it isn't just about acheiving all the benchmark metrics you laid out on a scorecard-it's about keeping you, your company and your customers abreast of what's happening and what's relevant. Even if no one comments on your site and your traffic is abysmal, it's still one of the most effective instruments for staying tuned in to the conversation that shapes your market.

I'm sure I've missed a few points. What have you learned from your own corporate blogging program? What have I forgotten?

 

Getting Started with Social Media

I had a great meeting last week that exemplified some of the challenges for businesses trying to launch social media initiatives. I was invited to a brainstorming session with a cross-functional team at a fortune-500 company. They had a very experienced team representing marketing, customer support, technical services and management. They had an active customer community, and a broad history of marketing programs to engage them on traditional one-to-many terms. They had a new web site, they had the resources and management buy-in to try something innovative, and they had pressure from competitors who were already engaging the market with user-generated content. The company already had an executive blog, though it wasn’t performing as they had hoped, and the team was planning to develop a customer forum, but wanted some earlier successes in building community involvement online.

They also had some significant challenges. With a high-technology product line, they had serious concerns about how increased information access might impact security and product safety. A long history of such concerns had shaped a corporate culture that was relatively closed, including significant constraints on public communications. And that long history of constrained corporate culture had in turn shaped many of the features common to large organizations that impede innovation.

But, like I said, this was an experienced team. They were smart, informed and genuinely excited about all the various opportunities for social media initiatives. They had researched an array of options from blogs and podcasts to forums to wikis, and they had a lot of community-building experience to draw on, most notably user groups and major events. The biggest challenge turned out to be deciding what kind of initiative to start with—one that would represent a clear move into social media, while minimizing the more substantial risks that might dead-end any future adventures in innovation.

So without belaboring the story I’ll lay out my own thoughts and recommendations, and then solicit your input.

My first advice was to focus on an initiative with minimal investment in time and money. Success is more often than not an iterative process. You’re likely to fail. So do it quick, do it cheaply, and then correct your course. Don’t set out with a big initiative that ties up a lot of resources putting all the bells and whistles into a flashy launch, unless you’re ready for a flashy failure. Social media lends itself well to this kind of iterative and learning approach. Marketers often dwell on the ROI for Social Media, and metrics are important. But as Jeremiah Owyang often says, the “I” in ROI for Social Media is so small that it’s not relevant when you’re just getting your toe in the water. If you’re just getting started in social media and you’re stuck on ROI, you’re either focused on the wrong issues, or you’re making too large an initial investment.

My second piece of advice was to choose an initiative that would engage others in the organization in the project. This will help build bridges internally—or pipes into the organization as one of the participants later phrased it—and help reduce some of the risk around communications.

My final advice was to choose something fun. Something that would engage and excite people in the organization as much as their customer community.

The first specific idea was to launch a short series of videocasts—the kind you shoot with a home video camera—interviewing some key employees about what they’re doing today that might impact future products. The key to making this kind of transparency work, is to form a team that includes someone from corporate PR to help set guidelines around what can be discussed and what can’t. The advantage with this initiative is that it’s cheap, easy to start, interesting for everyone, and will filter up one or more engaging personalities in the organization that will help social media efforts.

The second idea was to launch a product-focused blog that would dovetail with customer support and leverage product developers that have deep product insights but aren’t attached to support. This initiative is less risky, because corporate PR and customer support can choose the internal participants and train them on guidelines that would minimize unwanted disclosures. This initiative would also “build pipes” into the organization, develop personalities good at engaging the community, and enhance customer service capabilities. 

The third idea was more of a grouping of ideas that would leverage existing events. Maybe a customer contest to highlight innovative uses of the product. Maybe a blogger’s hospitality room at a major event to help identify influencers in the community. Maybe a string of videocasts leveraging the huge investment in event marketing to bring the event to a larger community.

These are just a few targeted ideas in a constellation of possibilities, and I’m interested in more input. So what are your thoughts or ideas for low-cost, low-risk initiatives to help a large organization get started with social media? Do any of these ideas resonate with you? What would you do, or what are you doing, that’s relevant?

Social Media and Customer Centricity

I've been enjoying the philosophical plane of discussion over the past week, but I'm also conscious of trying to bring the dialog back down to earth to look at the real-world implications for marketers. I have an opportunity to pull some philosophical and practical threads together today, after following some threads in the ongoing discussion about the meaning of social media which led me to Peter Kim's post on reinventing the marketing organization.

If you want to dive into the navel-gazing details of the ongoing dialog, I'm continuing to post on the issue at Marketonomy. It's a little like listening to a bunch of auto mechanics talk shop, so I'm not going to continue to flog that horse here. But Marianne Richmond made the connection between the broader evolution of social media and its impact on institutions and organizations. The shift in control over how knowledge is shaped and how it's accessed--what many are calling the democratization of information--is forcing changes in institutions from politics to education. She suggests a parallel change in business, and points over to Peter Kim's post on reinventing the marketing organization.

Peter Kim is an analyst at Forrester, and last summer completed a report called Reinventing the Marketing Organization. In a blog post that accompanied the release of the report, he invokes the enduring disconnect between what businesses say and what they do when it comes to building a customer-centric organization, and he sums up the executive summary of the report:

Today's marketing organizations are broken. Three out of four marketing departments have reorganized in the past two years. Almost 80% of marketers don't influence a critical customer interaction like customer service, and 85% don't even own the "four Ps" of marketing anymore. To regain effectiveness, marketers must transition to a Customer-Centric Marketing Organization. Doing so requires: 1) redesigning P&Ls and metrics; 2) shifting culture away from marketing communications; 3) investing in a customer relationship infrastructure; and 4) rethinking agency relationships.

Finally, he asks, why is there "so much more talk than action today around being customer-centric?" And this is where a few of the threads came together for me that bring the impact of social media right down to the front line of marketing. I wrote a comment on Peter's blog that I'll paraphrase here.

When it comes to customer centricity, I think there's a missing part of the equation that is highly relevant to what's driving social media. It's not just about "customer-centricity" per se, but about what that actually means to an organization. Businesses can be customer-centric in ways that are predatory, empowering, manipulative, supportive, exploitive, collaborative, opportunistic, or even just utilitarian.

People are engaging in social media to directly inform purchasing decisions like never before. Why? Distrust of marketing spin. People feel manipulated and exploited by advertising and marketing, and they want to see behind the spin before they invest their trust in a business or product.

Much of the literature on customer-centric metrics highlights the depersonalization of customers in ways that run in direct opposition to the trends driving social media. If you look closely at specific metrics, they are cast in the mold of Corporate Strategy--internally focused metrics that highlight efficiency. You can be incredibly efficient at doing the wrong things, a truth that is hammered home every day by mercenary marketers that drive relentlessly toward a 1.5% campaign conversion rate, while antagonizing the other 98.5% of their prospects--people they'll go back to again and again in the future, but couldn't care less about if they don't convert today.

If you're truly going to be customer-centric, you need to define what that means to your organization. If you want to be customer-centric in a way that resonates with today's highly networked customer communities, then you better define it in terms that actually have meaning for the customer.

This doesn't mean a tectonic shift in the tactical mechanisms of marketing as much as it means a shift in the attitudes companies have toward customers, and how those attitudes shape behaviors. I see many companies call themselves customer-centric while spamming their own customer lists repeatedly in order to squeeze out an extra percentage point in conversion. In a few cases they actually justify their approach by saying they're doing their customers a favor by giving them another shot at an incredible offer. Is that customer-centric? Absolutely. But not in any way that's going to help them sustain their customer base in an age of Word-of-Mouth on steroids.

Over the next few days, I'm going to post more tactical and practical information on social media. But I hope this resonates as one bridge between the philosophical debate--which can get very tedious very quickly--and the practical implications. Social media is an emerging concept that many people are trying to frame in ways that help us understand where all this networking technology is leading us. What it means in the simplest terms is this: Your customers are comparing notes. So are your partners and suppliers. That means effective transparency about everything you do and say--not just what you wrap up in a pretty bow for consumption--whether you like it or not.

Does that change the way you think about and market to your customers? If not, you're either already well-aligned with your customers, or it will take the market and not a blog to convince you otherwise. If it does change the way you think about customers, then the place to start is by asking what customer-centricity means to them. They're the ones who will be spreading the word about you.

Seeing Behind the Marketing Curtain

After writing the other day about brand in the age of social media, I've found some interesting dialogs where similar questions are being asked about how marketing changes when consumers become more aware of how marketing works. I think it was stated most succintly in one of the comments to my previous post, in which Sivaraman commented that branding is shifting from an exercise in constructing messages to an exercise in deconstructing messages. Certainly social media accelerates this process, as consumers begin to parse and often parody advertising messages.

In some senses, it has become an arms race, in which advertisers develop ever more sophisticated methods to project their message, while consumers become increasingly savvy about parrying those messages or tuning them out altogether. In fact, there's a really fascinating theory from the world of evolutionary biology that John Girard pointed out to me, that demonstrates a powerful survival advantage for members of a society that can detect cheating. If you want to geek out on the theory of Reciprocal Altruism, you can find an explanation here. But I can tell you how I see this playing out very clearly in my own experience.

I have a five year old son who has watched a lot of videos, but until recently almost no broadcast television. When he saw his first commercials, he was literally slack jawed in amazement at the frenetic assault on the senses--they really pack a lot into 30 seconds. But he was also confused, because the "plots" didn't make any sense to him. He'd ask: "Is it over?" So I explained to him that commercials were mini movies that businesses paid for in order to convince you to buy something. To my amazement, he immediately got it, and applied it to his experience of using gift money from his grandma to buy legos. And then he started asking at each commercial, "what are they trying to make me buy?"

Now, I don't know when I became aware of the manipulative arts of advertising, but I know I wasn't five. In the same way that I often wonder with amazement what a generation of engineers that grew up with computers will invent, I also wonder how a generation of business people who grew up being assailed with marketing to the point of cynicism will view the world, and what kind of marketing they'll create.

We have more tools than ever to really see behind the messages that businesses spin, and it's a frequent topic of conversation all over the Web. Tom Asacker has an interesting dialog going on at his blog today about "authenticity", and whether or not a company like Unilever can authentically position a product with an "enlightened body image" like Dove, while at the same time positioning a product that crassly objectifies women like Axe body spray. I'll let Tom frame the argument on his blog, but I think the very fact that the market is aware enough to compare Unilever's positioning over a family of brands demonstrates that people are looking behind the curtain like never before. Whether or not that actually impacts the purchasing behavior of consumers is another question altogether. 

What's interesting to me on a deeper level is the degree to which marketing has taken over the telling of our stories. Human life in society has always hinged on the telling of stories, right back to the dawn of civilization. We've always told stories to address the fundamental questions in life about who we are and what we're about. At various times in history, we've entrusted those stories to religion, to art and literature, to educators and even politicians. But in today's world, marketing has overtaken every other medium with which we tell the stories that give meaning to our lives. Consumers construct their lives by the brands they buy--whether it's the clothes they wear, the cars they drive or the places they shop. Politicians, priests, artists and writers, all know the tools of marketing, and they all speak increasingly in the language of brands, positions, and core messages.

But what happens when people begin to notice? What happens when a 5 year old starts to ask questions about what they're being sold on? What happens when a market becomes a networked community of people with a strong self-interest in pulling back the curtain on positioning and spin? Does it change anything, or does it just impact the ways in which messages are framed without really shifting consumer behavior?

Does anyone else find this interesting?

Brand Positioning in the Age of Social Media

After my last post, discussing the way in which social media encourages businesses to behave more as a member of a market community than as lord of a market domain, I started thinking about how social media impacts the development of a brand.

A few years back when I was a partner in a branding agency, I used to do a lot of brand workshops, helping companies figure out how to position and communicate their value to consumers. There's nothing quite like getting an invitation to take people out of their comfort zones to explore a new brand identity. It's part creative jam session, part psychotherapy, part business war game. And despite the overripe status ~Brand~ achieved in the pantheon of absurd marketing trends ($100M sock puppet anyone?), I've always felt that stepping back to carefully consider the image you’re portraying is an important and fundamental marketing exercise. The trouble is—and smart marketers have known this all along despite the mantra of image control on Madison Avenue—the image you promote isn’t always the image that’s received.

We had a lot of tools to help our clients understand and shape their brands, from brand awareness studies and focus groups to touch point audits that mapped the brand experience across the entire customer relationship lifecycle. So much time and money was invested in putting consumers into a petri dish. I watched Pepsi one year spend millions just, you know, thinking about the possibility of adjusting one of their labels. Focus groups in nearly a dozen major metropolitan areas tilted against it. Kraft spent 18 months noodling over an update for their leading product package. In the end, they broadened their signature blue oval by half a point. It was considered momentous.

Today, Google makes major product introductions to the public in Beta, and let's the customer identify problems and suggest new features. Companies like GM are letting consumers create commercials to shape and position the GM brand among their peers. If you thought that Chevy Tahoe campaign where consumers posted anti-SUV ads on Chevy's own site was a debacle, think again. GM is calling it a success and rolling ahead with new efforts to put commercials in the hands of consumers.

A lot of businesses are aggressively exploring the notion that they don't need a brand priest to intermediate the connection with customers. What if instead of all these carefully controlled studies and crafted messages, businesses just talked to customers and let them tell their own stories? What's the worst that can happen?

So my question to marketers today is how do you approach your brand in a world of advancing social media? What does it really mean today to "understand the customer"? Where do you find the balance between putting your own positioning into play, and engaging market communities that will position your brand on their own terms? Does this really change the practice of marketing in a meaningful way, or do you think it's just a pretty fad that will go away when we get tired of looking at consumer-generated content?

After my last post, discussing the way in which social media encourages businesses to behave more as a member of a market community than as lord of a market domain, I started thinking about how social media impacts the development of a brand.

A few years back when I was a partner in a branding agency, I used to do a lot of brand workshops, helping companies figure out how to position and communicate their value to consumers. There's nothing quite like getting an invitation to take people out of their comfort zones to explore a new brand identity. It's part creative jam session, part psychotherapy, part business war game. And despite the overripe status ~Brand~ achieved in the pantheon of absurd marketing trends ($100M sock puppet anyone?), I've always felt that stepping back to carefully consider the image you’re portraying is an important and fundamental marketing exercise. The trouble is—and smart marketers have known this all along despite the mantra of image control on Madison Avenue—the image you promote isn’t always the image that’s received.

We had a lot of tools to help our clients understand and shape their brands, from brand awareness studies and focus groups to touch point audits that mapped the brand experience across the entire customer relationship lifecycle. So much time and money was invested in putting consumers into a petri dish. I watched Pepsi one year spend millions just, you know, thinking about the possibility of adjusting one of their labels. Focus groups in nearly a dozen major metropolitan areas tilted against it. Kraft spent 18 months noodling over an update for their leading product package. In the end, they broadened their signature blue oval by half a point. It was considered momentous.

Today, Google makes major product introductions to the public in Beta, and let's the customer identify problems and suggest new features. Companies like GM are letting consumers create commercials to shape and position the GM brand among their peers. If you thought that Chevy Tahoe campaign where consumers posted anti-SUV ads on Chevy's own site was a debacle, think again. GM is calling it a success and rolling ahead with new efforts to put commercials in the hands of consumers.

A lot of businesses are aggressively exploring the notion that they don't need a brand priest to intermediate the connection with customers. What if instead of all these carefully controlled studies and crafted messages, businesses just talked to customers and let them tell their own stories? What's the worst that can happen?

So my question to marketers today is how do you approach your brand in a world of advancing social media? What does it really mean today to "understand the customer"? Where do you find the balance between putting your own positioning into play, and engaging market communities that will position your brand on their own terms? Do you see this as a fundamental shift in the practice of marketing, or do think this is all just a pretty trend that go away when we get tired of looking at consumer-generated content?

The Role of Business in a Market Community

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently researching the origins of marketing. I’m convinced that one of the reasons marketing is in so much trouble as a profession today is that we have no sense of history. How can you know where you’re headed if you don’t know where you came from? When I read about the early days of business, it helps simplify and crystallize a lot of complex and often confusing ideas about marketing’s role in business today. While a lot of things have changed dramatically since the days of caravan routes and souks, many of the most important fundamentals remain.

At its core, marketing is about establishing the conditions for an exchange of value. First you have to determine what others value that you can provide at a profit. Then you have to produce, package and deliver in a way that clearly communicates your value to buyers. Unless you have an enforceable monopoly, marketing involves negotiation with your market—often continual negotiation with the same participants over and over again. In fact, for many thousands of years, marketing was not simply a business activity, it was the most important social activity in the community. Even in the days of powerful kings and powerful churches, much of the community’s social life was shaped around the marketplace. As a business, you were part of a community, and whether you were predatory or benevolent, the market knew clearly where you stood, even if there wasn’t always a lot of choice about how to respond.

The relationship between businesses and their community changed dramatically with advances in technology, especially during the industrial revolution. Advances in manufacturing let businesses create vast surpluses that called for bigger markets, while advances in transportation allowed businesses to pursue those markets farther and farther from home. While communications technology also progressed, it didn’t move fast enough to sustain the kind of real-time word-of-mouth communication that galvanized the small market community. In effect, businesses were able to move beyond the boundaries of community that had framed their reputation for ages.

From the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the 20th, businesses were largely able to assert their own reputation through mass media communications and marketing. The way a company treated its employees and customers, the way its production impacted a community, the claims it made for its products and services, were rarely considered news worth reporting unless it involved something momentous—or catastrophic. When businesses appeared in the media at all, other than through advertising, it was more often than not part of an orchestrated public relations campaign design to shape the market’s attitudes and opinions.

For the first time in 150 years, social media is changing the balance of the equation. But unlike so many assertions and fears that this is something new and dramatic, it’s simply a return to a market balance that has existed as long as business itself. The ability of businesses to extend themselves beyond the boundaries of a networked community was a short-lived anomaly. Just as the market became global, so now has the community. Just as the members of a small community naturally monitor and discuss every aspect of the local businesses that serve them—because it is in their interest to do so—members of a company’s community, no matter how scattered they may be around the world,  now have the means to monitor and discuss the behavior and reputation of that company.

Does this change the role of marketing? You bet. Since marketing came of age as a profession at the height of industrialization, many businesses continue to have a skewed idea of the relationship between businesses and their market, and assume that marketing has always been about shaping the customer relationship unilaterally. Mass media tactics that have become characteristic of marketing are blunted in a networked community where customers are in constant dialog. Effective marketing now requires businesses to play an active role in their market community, rather than simply trying to limit the relationship to a beneficial value exchange shaped by manipulative communications.

But something else has changed, too--something that puts new emphasis on the balancing influence of community. Unlike the days before industrialization when businesses were able to aggressively enforce monopolies and sustain predatory market relations, most industries today face intense and growing competition on a global scale. That means for the first time not only do customers have the opportunity to know everything they want to know about your business, they have also have the means to choose whether or not they want to support you. For many companies, this won’t really change the way they do business. For others, it changes everything.

How Blogging Can Blow Up in Your Face

Since it's a Friday, I thought I'd keep it light today and simply resurrect a few of the best object lessons I've seen in how not to engage in social media. All of the pundits say the big challenge for businesses with social media is the loss of message control. But when you look at the evidence, it's much simpler. You just have to avoid doing something totally stupid. It's not a very high bar.

First up is McDonalds' Lincoln Fry debacle, from the 2005 Superbowl. If you don't recall this one, McDonalds put out a short series of ads that showed a french fry that had been discovered with a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. The ad sent viewers to a meticulously faked blog, supposedly written by an ordinary guy who found the Lincoln Fry and was planning to auction it off on Yahoo. It was supposed to be a humorus spin-off of the Virgin Mary Toast, which had sold on eBay for nearly $30,000, but the whole campaign came off as a deception rather than a spoof, and McDonalds was pilloried for the fraud.

I'm not certain, but I think this may mark the first time the notion that social media demands authenticity reached the mainstream. McDonalds didn't abandon the medium, however. They retrenched and later deployed internal blogs to promote executive dialog, and RSS feeds to distribute documents to franchise holders. If only everyone could learn so quickly.

Next up we have the infamous WalMarting Across America blog, in which WalMart hired its PR agency to figure out how to leverage the blogosphere to deliver a more positive WalMart message. The agency, Edelman, launched a fake blog linked to Working Families For WalMart, an astroturf front group they already ran for WalMart to counter public criticism on labor issues. The blog was put over on the public as a travelogue written by an ordinary couple cruising across America in an RV. Every night they would camp in a WalMart parking lot, and every day they would blog about all the shiny happy employees they met. See? No labor issues here.

When the whole thing blew up, which didn't take long, it not only called into question WalMart's crediblity, it thrust the very issues the blog was trying to avert back into the spotlight. Whoops. Edelman didn't fair much better--it turns out they had helped shape the ethical guidelines for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, which state, among other things, that members "rise to a higher level":

We believe that word of mouth marketers have a special relationship with consumers and must go above and beyond the normal expectations of marketing ethics and honesty.

Even if, cynicaly speaking, they didn't believe the rules they helped write, at least they could have learned from the mistake McDonalds had only just made. Especially since one of Edelman's executives had written an entry in his own blog criticising McDonalds for the fake Lincoln Fry site. You just have to shake your head and wonder.

Saving the best for last we move to the world of politics. No other area of social media has demonstrated the power of democratic content more than political blogs. As an aggregate mass of wired citizens, political bloggers and their engaged readers have broader information-gathering reach than any media conglomerate. They find details reporters miss, and they ask questions analysts often won't. If you want to know what the business blogosphere will someday be like, with highly networked, engaged and informed markets, start watching the fray on political blogs.

During the 2004 mid-term elections for U.S. Senate, Joe Lieberman (D-CT) was under attack from Ned Lamont, a dark horse candidate elevated by netroots activism. Lieberman lost his party's primary and regrouped to campaign as an Independent, determined to adopt the same tools his opponent had used so effectively. So he launched a blog. How hard could it be? Shortly after the site went live, he put his spokesman, Dan Gerstein, front and center to counter charges in the Washington Times that Lieberman, a Democrat, had accepted millions in campaign support from Republicans. The exerpt below begins in the comment section of Gerstein's original post, where Gerstein is trying to dismiss the credibility of the source of the charges.   

I hold on to this outtake as a graphic reminder of what happens when you take an old media game into the mosh pit of social media. It's like red meat to the wolves. People often complain about the tenor of social media dialog, and it's true, it can get pretty brash. But what makes it compelling is how effectively it can slice through scripted talking points and positions to reveal inconsistencies and deceptions. The bit highlighted in red was the death knell for the blog and for Gerstein's tenure.

Let me get this straight. You are asking us to disprove an anonymous, single-sourced story from a magazine of questionable credibility that not one respectable news outlet has even come close to picking up on? What's next, you want us to provide evidence that Joe Lieberman doesn't beat his wife?

Seriously, folks, I am more than happy to answer legitimate questions raised on the blog, and I apologize for not doing more of it yet (been a little busy doing a few other things), but can we please have a little perspective? Thanks.
Dan Gerstein | 09.06.06 - 8:23 pm | #

Joe Lieberman beats his wife?
Mike | 09.06.06 - 8:28 pm | #

Why does Joe beat his wife? Is it because she's a pharmaceutical lobbyist?
BluetooththeGreat | 09.06.06 - 8:31 pm | #

I don't know, blue... I just heard about it from Dan Gerstein himself.
Mike | 09.06.06 - 8:33 pm | #

Are you really suggesting that if Joe took money from Republicans then he also beats his wife? Because you know it's possible that he took money from Republicans and does not beat his wife. I don't know why this Dan Gerstein is making baseless accusations like that against Joe. Doesn't Joe have enough to worry about in this campaign (his voting record, his flip-flopping, his self-righteous personality) without jerks like Dan Gerstein making false accusations?
winklife | 09.06.06 - 8:48 pm | #

First, Joe Lieberman does NOT beat his wife. Second, I will personally look into whether or not Joe's campaign has taken a significant amount of money from registered Republicans. I don't think so. But I can make sure. How's that for transparency?
Dan Gerstein | 09.06.06 - 8:55 pm | #

First, Joe Lieberman does NOT beat his wife.

I demand proof.
NTodd, Blogsatz Eliterach | Homepage | 09.06.06 - 8:56 pm | #

Joe did not beat his wife to the lobbyist trough. My understanding is that she worked for a PR firm that represented clients with pending legislation before Congress well before Joe is being forcably retired from the Senate so that he can pursue his next career as a defense lobbyist.
JoeBlow | 09.06.06 - 9:00 pm | #

And when did Joe stop beating his wife, anyway?
NTodd, Blogsatz Eliterach | Homepage | 09.06.06 - 9:01 pm | #

As I've said, we will look into whether or not serious Republican contributions have been made to Joe's campaign. I don't think so. It may take a few days (I'm very busy), but we will post our findings on the blog. I promise.
Dan Gerstein | 09.06.06 - 9:10 pm | #

Dan, did you really claim the story to be false despite not knowing for sure whether or not there is any truth to the claim?

wow, DANGERstein strikes again...
steve | Homepage | 09.06.06 - 9:15 pm | #

As I've said, we will look into whether or not serious Republican contributions have been made to Joe's campaign. I don't think so. It may take a few days (I'm very busy), but we will post our findings on the blog. I promise.

We all wait with bated breath.

I also want to know if Joe has accepted any contributions from kitten-eating cyborgs.
NTodd, Blogsatz Eliterach | Homepage | 09.06.06 - 9:16 pm | #

The New Rules Of Customer Engagement

One of the most common questions I'm asked is "should my company do a blog?" And if it's not a blog, it's a podcast, or a wiki, or some other new social software tool, like a swiki. If you're a marketer, it's important to leverage new technologies that can help you engage your customers, but if you don't know your customers as well as you should, you'll spend a lot of time and money getting all dressed up with nowhere to go. The new rules of customer engagement may be driven by new technologies, but what matters most is the dialog they enable.

Whether or not you already have a corporate blog--in fact, even if you're already syndicating weekly podcasts from the CEO--there's one question I would ask to gauge how well you understand the new marketplace: Where do your customers or prospects meet online to talk shop, and what are they talking about? Okay, technically that's two questions. But chances are your market is already connected out there somewhere, talking about things that matter to your bottom line. Just as any good marketer should know what magazines their customers read, and what events they attend, they should also know where their customers are networked online.

If you don't have a clue where to start, the first places to look are the Web sites of magazines that serve your industry, followed by trade associations. They'll often have discussion boards of their own, or links to them if they don't. If you want to tap into more of the organic dialog you can always check what sites people are bookmarking by doing a keyword search at del.icio.us, or by searching blogs at Technorati. Once you find one good blog, follow the threads through their blogroll and comments to other sites and discussions.

If you already know where you customers are connected, the next question is: How often do you visit those places and contribute to the dialog? The world of Web2.0 is all about sharing ideas and information. For businesses, active participation in the market dialog translates into brand awareness, better search engine rankings, more traffic to your Web site, and even customer satisfaction.

One of my big hobbies is mountain biking. Recently I shelled out a lot of money for a new frame. Three months after I bought it, part of the frame broke, and when I took it to my bike shop they said the part wasn't covered under warranty. I called the manufacturer and got the same story, and ended up having to pay to get it fixed myself. So I expressed my anger and frustration on an online mountain biking forum where I'm a member. Within an hour after I posted my story, I got a response from the VP of Marketing at the manufacturer. He apologized for the runaround, and then called my bike shop to cover the cost of my repair. For $200--the cost of the repair--the company demonstrated to a community of 60,000 mountain bikers how they stand behind their products.

The interesting thing to me about that experience was that when I called the company directly, I didn't get a great response. But when I posted my experience online, they responded immediately. This is key to understanding why the social media snowball is accelerating. When customers are publicly  networked, it compells accountability that doesn't exist when the lines of communication are limited to a private channel.

What impressed me the most was how fast the manufacturer responded. Even though they don't host their own blog, or do podcasts or other forms of social media, they know exactly where their customers are talking, and they are actively participating in the conversation. If there's anything that exemplifies the new rules of engagement it's the notion that as a marketer, you're no longer up on a pedestal with a megaphone trying to shout louder than your competitors to "cut through the clutter". You need to be down in the crowd as an active participant in your market community.

Note: Daniela Barbosa has a good clip on her blog about Web 2.0, including a video clip that's getting a lot of buzz in social media circles. Check it out.  

Socializing the SuperBowl

It seems pointless to post a blog entry about marketing this morning without discussing the SuperBowl advertising phenomenon. SuperBowl Sunday is the one day of the year when people actually turn on the television to watch commercials, and they expect to see Madison Avenue pull out all the stops. The only thing more entertaining than watching the ads, which were funny this year but not all that memorable, is watching the marketing pundits analyze the commercials and the impact of social media.

In most regards, this year's commercial fest was nothing new. Ever since the monumental buzz generated by Coca-Cola's Mean Joe Green ad in 1980, a big part of the SuperBowl draw is the watercooler talk that turns the ads into a massive social event. If you can own the buzz storm, that $2.6 million dollars for a 30-second spot starts looking more reasonable. But this year also marks the entry of social media concepts into SuperBowl advertising, and this is where you can really start to see the fractures between Madison Avenue and Main Street.

This year, a few advertisers ran commercials created by consumers. Well, sort of. Chevy ran a contest among college students on the model of The Apprentice, and selected a concept from a freshman at the University of Wisconsin. But Chevy's ad agency produced the commercial, with the freshman, Katie Crabb, on the set. Dorito's on the other hand, put the call out for submissions publicly, and accepted commercials that were fully produced. The winning commercial was written, filmed and produced by a wedding photographer named Jared Cicon, who shot the ad with his own video camera and edited it on his home computer. After Dorito's selected 5 commercials to compete for the SuperBowl slot, they opened up voting to the public, and Jared's commercial aired.

What does this mean for advertising? You can hear the squirming on Madison Avenue. Simeon Roane, executive creative director at Publicis Groupe's New York office, sounded somewhat surprised at the quality of Jared's commercial when she commented for the Wall Street Journal last night:

"It's kind of scary that a consumer can come up with stuff that good."

Scary indeed. Because, you know, those consumers are so, well, Lowest Common Denominator. And as MSNBC's Allison Linn points out, any company that lets consumers make commercials is taking a big risk:

"The gamble may pay off, but such contests also carry a huge risk because there is no guarantee they will result in a commercial that’s any good."

Hmmm. I guess irony is truly dead. Having commercials produced by professional agencies is, in fact, a guarantee of quality. And if you turn your commercial over to consumers and it flops, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

“I don’t think saying it was produced by somebody in Nebraska or at home in a basement gives them an out,” said Tim Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing with Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

But the NFL, along with Doritos, seems a little more impressed with the prospects of social media. The NFL staged its own commercial contest,  in which 1700 fans pitched ideas from which a winner was chosen to be produced for the SuperBowl. The NFL's senior VP of marketing, Lisa Baird, was nervous about the prospects, but was ultimately won over.

“It’s clearly more than a fad and more than a way to get PR,” she said. “Here’s a very viable way to create authentic, sincere stories about your brand.”

And that, at the end of the day, is the fuel that is driving this social media groundswell. Authenticity. Sincerity. Consumers are tired of the clinical pitches marketing cooks up to drive them like efficient little consumer-bots to the point of purchase. It's not interesting. In fact, it's mostly annoying. We're smarter now, we're more engaged, and we're more connected. And if you can't tell a story that makes your product interesting, you better find someone who can. If it's an agency, great. Try to find one that doesn't look down their ivory tower ramparts on consumers.

But what if your customers are telling better stories than your agency? How would you know? Are you  ready to hand them the megaphone?