Back by popular demand: Is Your Social Media Director Qualified?

You guys asked for me to re-post this piece, and your wish is my command. Share this with hiring managers, your CMO, and everyone looking into considering either creating or filling a position requiring Social Media management skills:

Tip #1: Social Media Directors should know how to do their jobs without having to ask for help every five minutes:

So I look down and the (twitter) DM reads: “Hey, can you help me out? Not sure how to do this. How do I use Twitter to gain traction for my company? Thanks!” I stare at it for a while and decide to blow it off for now, not because I have better things to do (which I do) and not because I don’t really have time to build a Twitter business plan for this person right this second (which I don’t), but because that DM comes from a newly minted Social Media Director at a fairly visible company who basically just asked me to help them hold on to a job they obviously didn’t deserve to be hired for.

I slide my Blackberry Storm into my back pocket and find myself flashbacking to 11th grade: It’s final exams time and I am in hour two of IB Biology. The essay section. One of the kids in my class is behind me, gently kicking my chair, whispering, begging me to move my scrap/notes where they can read them.

And I am almost tempted to do it.

That same conversation starts taking place in my head. I’m in a position to help someone in need. But wait… cheating is cheating. Don’t do it. But still, I feel that I should help. Arrrgh…

I reach for the blackberry, launch Twitterberry (which is not my favorite app, by the way), and respond: “Wait… You got the job, right? Don’t you know how to do this? Isn’t that why you were hired?”

For hours, no response. And then it comes. “Yeah, but I’m in a little over my head. I’ve never worked with Social Media in a business context before. “

Again. This from a Director-level individual now working for a pretty well known company.

Not cool.

I suffer through similar exchanges weekly now, and I am not happy about it. What does this trend say about what types of people are going after Social Media management jobs – and landing them with alarming frequency these days? At the very least, I am worried about how this is going to end up hurting Social Media’s legitimacy in the business world. (Watch the video for my reasoning on this specific point.)

If the video doesn’t launch, you can go watch it here. Thanks, Viddler).

Tip #2: There are three types of people currently vying for Social Media Management jobs. Be very careful whom you consider for this key position:

With this disturbing development weighing on me more and more these past few months, I’ve been thinking long and hard about what is going on in the Social Media “management” world, and I’ve basically come down to two conclusions: The first (which we’ll get back to in a few minutes) is that the qualifications of Social Media Directors may not be entirely clear to the folks interviewing and hiring applicants for those positions. The second is that as a result of this, confusion, we are now looking at three distinct types of Social Media Directors/Managers scampering about in the corporate world, some good, some okay, and some really bad.

The first type is the best type: These folks are super smart, talented, experienced in a broad range of disciplines, have an established footprint in the Social Media space (through blogs, Twitter, Ning, various communities), are recognized as thought leaders (or as emerging thought leaders), and are unquestionably passionate about what they do. Folks like Chris Brogan, Frank Eliason, Amber Naslund, Mack Collier, Beth Harte, Valeria Maltoni, etc. These are folks who are truly writing the book on how to build social media practices and smoothly integrate them in the organizations they work with.

The second type isn’t quite as savvy, but it isn’t lacking in talent, smarts and enthusiasm. These are people who basically don’t know how to be Social Media directors yet, but are learning fast. And most importantly, they are completely open about the fact that they are still in that learning stage, which means that their employers are okay with it. In spite of the fact that they are still very junior, the companies they work for saw in them a lot of potential and decided to hire them toward that end. (I dig people like this a lot.)

The third type is what I would call the bad type. Not bad as in cool, but rather… bad as in unethical, inept and unprofessional. These are the con artists. The shams. The hacks. The folks whose egos and selfishness led them to a moment in their lives when they unapologetically took a job they knew they weren’t qualified for. And now here they are: Social Media Director for Company ABC, soon to move over to Company XYZ, and so on. One position validating the next, one impressive brand on their resume justifying consideration by the next, and so it goes: A perpetual daisy chain of high profile Social Media management job built on unadulterated douchebaggery and thinly-disguised mediocrity.

(Ironically, this third group tends to be the same one that perpetuates the notion that Social Media ROI either doesn’t exist or is “unwise” to try and measure. Yeah. Convenient, isn’t it?)

Note: Having been a Social Media manager for a major brand doesn’t mean jackaloo. Don’t fall for the old name-dropping trick. Even if the applicant was indeed “Social Media VP” for superbrand XYZ, what did they accomplish while in the position? What did they actually do? Hint: You don’t want to be some idiot’s next unfortunate employer. Don’t let someone’s previous job title dazzle you. We’ve already established that any idiot  with a little game can be a Social Media Director these days. Be careful.

Tip #3: Before we go on, here are some red flags to help you identify deadbeat Social Media Directors:

A) Every time you see a major global consumer brand engaging with less than 5% of its active (vocal) customers on a popular Social Media platform like Twitter after 8-10 months of activity, you can bet that their Social Media Director belongs to that third category.

B) If every time you walk into your monthly status meeting with your new Social Media Director and ask them for the latest, they either talk to you about Google analytics, confuse you with endless spreadsheets or launch into a “Social Media takes time” monologue, chances are that they belong to that third category.

C) If you ask your Social Media Director why their efforts aren’t scaling very fast or producing the numbers you expected and they give you a story about engagement not being a numbers game, chances are that they belong in that third category.*

D) If when you ask them for real business metrics, impact analysis and (god forbid) ROI and they either give you a blank stare or explain that these things don’t apply to Social Media, they probably belong to that third category.

E) If they measure Social Media effectiveness mostly in terms of “engagement metrics” and after six months, you still don’t understand what or how they are measuring “engagement” (most likely through some arcane equation that magically merges followers, the media value of a tweet and number of blog comments), guess what: Third category.

F) And when you ask them how they plan to integrate Social Media into customer service, Human Resources, Public Relations, Marketing, Business Development or any other silo in your organization and they schedule a later meeting to address that instead of answering on the spot, guess what category they probably belong to.

The thing about that third category is that they’ll never admit that they don’t know something. Because they get by every day by producing massive amounts of bulls**t, they will automatically default to making something up on the spot or deflecting questions with well crafted excuses. That’s their most damning trait, and what gives them away every time: They always know, and they’re never wrong (except… they don’t, and they are, and now you’re wise to it).

* Simple test to prove or disprove a “depth before breadth” response:

First – On Twitter, look at the number of brand mentions vs. the number of your brand’s account mentions. Big difference? Ask why. Then ask your Social Media Director what they are doing to raise awareness for your presence in the space. Breadth matters, no matter what your overpaid hack of a Social Media honcho tells you.

Second – Look at the number of comments directly aimed at your account. 20 per day? 50 per day? Now look at how many of these requests for attention were acknowledged with some sort of reply. 100%? 80%? Less than 25%? If your Social Media Director claims that they are focusing on depth of engagement instead of breadth, yet they only respond to less than half of the handshakes thrown at them daily, maybe it’s time you found out what he/she actually does with his/her time.

Tip #4: What should you be looking for in an applicant interested in becoming your next Social Media Director ? (The only Social Media Director requisition primer you’ll ever need)

I could go on with my indictment of poser Social Media Directors all day long, but I would rather put this post to a more productive use: Since so many of these hacks are getting through the recruiting filter, why don’t we focus on helping interviewers distinguish good applicants from bad ones, starting with some traits and skills they want and need in a Social Media Director. Think of this as a checklist for would-be Social Media Directors, and please feel free to add your own suggestions by leaving a comment.

• Applicant has developed and managed marketing programs before. Not just campaigns but programs.
• Applicant has had a continuous professional presence in the Social Media space (via blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Ning or other platforms) for at least one year.
• Applicant has managed a business blog and/or business community for a minimum of one year.
• Applicant has built or managed a community for longer than one year.
• Applicant has at least two years of experience managing projects and working across organizational silos.
• Applicant has managed a brand or product line for more than one year.
• Applicant has demonstrated a strong ability to forge lasting relationships across a variety of media platforms over the course of his/her career.
• Applicant understand the difference between vertical and lateral action when it comes to customer/community engagement – and has working knowledge of how to leverage both.
• Applicant demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the Social Media space, including usage and demographic statistics for the most popular/relevant platforms as well as a few niche platforms of his/her choice.
• Applicant has managed national market research projects.
• Applicant demonstrates a thorough understanding of the nuances between Social Media platforms and the communities they serve. (Example: MySpace vs. Facebook or YouTube vs. Seesmic)
• Applicant understands the breadth of tools and methods at his/her disposal to set goals and measure success in the Social Media space. (Applicant’s toolkit is not limited to Google analytics.)
• Applicant can cite examples of companies with successful social media programs and companies with ineffective social media programs. He/she can also argue comfortably why each was either successful or unsuccessful.
• Applicant has been active on Twitter for more than 8 months.
• Applicant knows who Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang and Peter Kim are.
• Applicant is comfortable enough with business measurement methods to know the difference between financial impact (ROI) and non-financial impact. He/she also knows why the difference between the two is relevant.
• Applicant demonstrates the ability to build and manage a Social Media practice that works seamlessly with PR, product marketing, event management and customer support teams within the organization.
• Applicant has managed a work team for more than one year. He/she was responsible for the training and development of that team.
• Applicant has spent at least one year in a project management role outside of an ad agency, PR or other Marketing firm.
• Applicant can tell a personal story involving either Digg, Seesmic or both.
• Applicant has been responsible for managing a budget/P&L.
• Applicant demonstrates a high level of proficiency working with popular Social Media platforms and apps such as FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Ning, Seesmic, YouTube, FriendFeed, WordPress, FriendFeed and Tumblr.
• Applicant is capable of mapping out a basic Social Media monitoring plan on a cocktail napkin.
• Applicant is more excited about engagement, building an internal practice and finding out about your business’ pain points than he/she is about firebombing you with the full scope of their Social Media skills’ awesomeness.
• Applicant already has the framework of a Social Media plan for your company before he/she even walks through the front door, and thankfully, it doesn’t involve setting up a fan page on FaceBook.
• Applicant actually knows how to use Twitter to help your company build brand equity online and offline without having to DM people like me for newbie level help.

Your turn. What do you think is missing from this checklist?

Let me know if this is helpful. Please, please, please, for the love of puppies, STOP. Don’t hire “that guy” because his resume says he worked with Brand XYZ in Digital or Social. It isn’t enough. (Who hasn’t?) Dig deeper. Get knowledgeable about this space. Don’t get suckered into hiring an unscrupulous hack job looking for another free ride off an unsuspecting company.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

One last thing: Will this topic be covered in Red Chair executive trainings (the next one is in Portland, OR on March 11)? You bet. To register for the Portland event, click here. (The first 5 registrations get $100 off, so sign up fast!)

My Ode to Nutella – Part 2

If you missed Part 1, click here.

In honor of World Nutella Day (today is #NutellaDay) and by special request, here is some completely unauthorized Nutella-inspired nonsense. For extra credit, see if you can figure out what brands those ads were originally for.

And last but not least…

Have a great World Nutella Day, everyone.

Where Do Brands Go To Die? Part 2: The Diagnosis

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at what it takes for business managers and CMOs to come to accept that their brand is in trouble. We also discussed why it is often difficult for them to admit that they need help, and how to get over that fear-driven reflex.

Today, we are going to look at the next step in fixing a broken or distressed brand: Diagnosing the problem – which usually involves hiring a specialized firm, agency or individual with the skills, insight and experience to help you navigate through this crucial step. (If you screw this one up, everything that comes later is based on either false or incomplete assumptions – or both, so this isn’t a part of the process you want to entrust just anyone with.)

I apologize in advance if what we discuss today seems… really basic. If your brand is doing great, you probably already know this stuff. It’s common sense. It’s unlikely that you’ll learn anything new here today. But for those of you with tanking brands, going back to basics is where you need to start, so here we go:

Priority Number One: Securing the right partnership.

We’ve established that performing surgery on yourself while you’re crashing probably isn’t the best idea. You probably want to look into hiring outside help to guide you through the steps and make sure your brand rescue doesn’t end up in a complete ass-backwards disaster. (Remember that you didn’t get in trouble by being particularly good at making all the right decisions: Be humble, be smart, put your ego(s) aside, and hire a professional.)

How do you find the right person or firm? Well, once you’ve established that they aren’t in the yellow pages, you ask around. If that doesn’t work, hit the marketing and brand development blogs. Find out who the practitioners are. It’s a small community. There may only be 100 such individuals or organizations in North America, so you won’t be overwhelmed with choices. Once you’ve narrowed down your search to this level, read their blogs and e-books. Look into what they have done for other companies, who they’ve worked with, and what kinds of recommendations they are getting. If they strike a note with you, then it’s time to make contact. If not, keep looking.

Ideally, they will be in your part of the country, but if they aren’t, that’s okay too. Business travel is a part of life nowadays, and collaborative tools make it easier than ever to work remotely as well. As the world keeps getting flatter, distance becomes less relevant each day. What is most important is finding the right fit.

Speaking of fit, here are a few questions you will want to ask yourself during the interview process:

1. Does this person or firm know what they are talking about? Do they know what they’re doing? Or is all that chatter just posturing?
2. Will this person be able to work with my staff, my bosses, and our outside agencies (PR, ad, etc.), or be a giant pain?
3. Does this person or firm fit into my budget?
4. Does this person or firm have a specific method for measuring our improvement and performance right from the start?
5. Does this person appreciate the importance of delivering short term results, not just mid-to-long term results?
6. Is this person there to sell me services, or actually deliver results?

I can’t stress this enough: You want every question to be answered by a resounding YES. If your brand is in distress, 3 out of 5 won’t cut it. Not even 5 out of 6 You can’t afford to settle for “good enough” with this type of project. Not if you want to get your brand/company back on track now and… well, actually save it.

This is your litmus test for separating a good firm, agency or practitioner from the right one for your current situation.

And if you’re lucky, the one you pick won’t already be booked solid for the next six months. (Cross your fingers.)

Beginning the diagnostic process: Finding out what is actually eating away at your brand.

Okay. Now that you’ve partnered with the right talent (hopefully) and everyone has gotten acquainted, it’s time to get busy. The process typically begins with an immediate 360-degree analysis of your business and of your industry: Who buys your stuff and why? Who buys your competitors’ stuff and why? Who loves you and why? Who hates you and why? How do you engage with your customers? How are you not engaging with your customers? Which marketing tactics work for you and which ones don’t (and why)? If you used to be the market leader once, what changed? What do your employees think about your company and your products? How does this impact core aspects of your business like innovation, talent retention and sales? The list goes on, but you get the idea. Common sense stuff right? You would think. Except if your brand is in the tank, none of this may be all that obvious to the people making decisions, is it.

The trick here is two-fold: 1) You have to know what questions to ask, which isn’t always obvious when you are knee-deep in running a business every day, and 2) You have to understand exactly how to measure performance (including but not limited to R.O.I.) and put the data in the right context for each one of these elements. This type of brand mapping is one of the key components of the diagnostic step. We’ll get more into some of these in Part 3 of the series. (Like a puzzle, the analysis is composed of MANY parts, but don’t worry: It isn’t that hard to put it all together fast if you know how.)

For now, let’s tackle the first layer of the onion. The question here is simple: If you could boil down your brand’s problem to a thirty-second assessment, what would it be? To make it easy on you, I have listed the four most common answers below. There are more, but let’s keep it simple.

Here, then, are the four most common scenarios that lead to the distress and eventual death of a brand:

1. Fading brand Relevance: Many companies either go through severe downturns in relevance. Maybe you were the “it” company in your market ten years ago, but fresh newcomers have shoved you aside. Maybe you’ve grown too big and complacent. Maybe you have lost touch with your customers’ needs and fans’ expectations. In these cases, a weakened brand can drag a business down and kill it.
2. Failure to achieve brand relevance: Many companies simply never manage to transition from being a business with a logo to being an actual brand. They just haven’t found their voice yet. Their purpose. Their place. They are little more than an “also in” company. They manage to scrape by, but with budgets shrinking and new players gaining market share, time is running out.
3. Brand implosion: You talked a good game, created inspiring and engaging marketing and PR, got people all excited about you… but you didn’t keep your promises. Customers are outraged. Your name is mud. Your customers are leaving you for your competitors. Game over?
4. Brand-rich, cash-poor: Everyone loves your products and what you stand for. Your customers (fans) have made you part of their lifestyle and you get fantastic reviews across the board. Still, the balance sheet is in the red and you can’t keep your business afloat. Maybe you’re upside down on business loans, or your next round of funding dried up. Maybe your P&L is a disaster, or your parent company has lost interest in you. Whatever the case may be, your business is dying in spite of having created a true lovebrand. How do you save yourself?

In some cases, a sick brand may be looking at more than one of the above problems (most likely a coupling of either #1, #2, or #3 with #4).

More often than not, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out which of the above issues an ailing brand is dealing with. That being said, beware the hasty assumption: One symptom or scenario can hide another and distract you from your problem’s root cause. (One of the most immediate benefits of a properly administered 360 analysis is that it will either confirm or re-frame that initial assumption for you.)

Example: Company XYZ’s leadership is convinced that they are in situation #1 (fading brand relevance), and at first glance, they appear to be right. But as the 360 analysis starts to take shape, it becomes clear that the reason why the brand’s relevance has been fading for the last six years is because their customers are angry about a number of things, like inconsistent product quality, lousy customer service and frustrating warranty/exchange policies. Brand XYZ is actually in a #3 scenario (brand implosion), not a #1 scenario. The message got muddled because company XYZ hasn’t done a very good job at listening to its customers’ opinions (which is a topic we will revisit in the next couple of installments). The lesson here is obvious: One very nagging symptom can easily distract everyone and hide the true cause of a brand’s woes. Fail to render the correct diagnosis the first time, and your entire treatment will be worthless. This kind of mistake so late in the game can cost a brand a lot more than just time and money.

Note from the above example that if your brand practitioner only lives in the Marketing world, his/her usefulness will be… limited. A 360 analysis involves every department in the company, not just marketing (or traditionally “brand” related) functions.

Just like a good doctor makes sure to treat the disease rather than the symptoms, an experienced brand practitioner knows how to properly diagnose and treat the root cause of a distressed brand’s troubles as opposed to its more superficial problems.

Cause and Effect: Starting the process of connecting the dots.

As an added layer of complexity, brand practitioners don’t just have to concern themselves with the what and how questions, but also the why: “Why is this brand failing? Why are this company’s customers jumping ship? Why is its customer service so lousy? Why are its products not as popular as they once were? Why has the main topic of conversation shifted from design and user delight to price? This is the next layer of the 360 analysis: For every action, there is a reaction. If we can identify the reactions (sales slumping, customers switching to a competitor’s product, increases in returns or warranty claims), we can work our way back to the actions that brought them about. It takes a little bit of detective work, but the beauty of the 360 analysis mechanism is that it makes the process pretty swift.

As a bonus, the action-reaction relationships can be pretty easily mapped for the client. As we’ll see in Part 5 (making sure the brand doesn’t suffer a relapse), this mapping/clarifying process actually being delivered and taught to the client is absolutely fundamental to the success of any brand rescue endeavor: Once business managers fully understand the relationship between their customers’ behaviors and decisions made internally by their management team, they will be able to make inspired choices and effective course adjustments on their own once the brand practitioner is gone. A big part of helping a brand recover from a serious crisis involves teaching its stewards how to take better care of it in the future so it never happens again.

A Common Pitfall before we adjourn.

Far too many firms, agencies and consultants settle for a two step process in helping a client address a problem: Step 1 – Identify the problem. Step 2 – Address the problem with a specific solution: A new ad campaign. A new series of press releases. A new promotional campaign. Prettier packaging. A celebrity endorsement. This works well enough if you’re looking for a quick fix. A band-aid, if you will. But as soon as the campaign is over, as soon as the promotion ends, as soon as the big sale is over or the expensive celebrity spokesperson moves on to their next gig, what have you really gained? You may have enjoyed a spike in interest, a spike in sales, even, but you end up right where you started: Condemned to keep the campaign engine running constantly, which in your case may be little more than slapping lipstick on a pig. If your brand finds itself in a state of distress, chances are that you have already been playing this game for a while. We’ve already been over this in Part 1. More of the same isn’t what you want.

In order to see real traction, you have to go a step further in the process: Not just identifying a problem, but understanding what created it to begin with. Understanding the root cause. Understanding the why. Tracking the actual cause of that 7% drop in sales. That 12% drop in market share. That 30% drop in customer retention. You have to look deeper. You have to be able to map cause and effect, and answer not only what and how, but why. Then and only then, can you move on to the next step: Coming up with real solutions – the kind that will help your brand gain real momentum – rather than buying sales and influence for an all too finite amount of time.

Next week, in Part 3 of this series, we will go over how to use the 360 analysis employed during the diagnostic phase of the process to a) develop a treatment to get your brand back on track, and b) prioritize the elements of this treatment to start enjoying results immediately.

Cheers!

Where Do Brands Go To Die? Part 1: Accepting Reality

From Brand Building to Brand Rescue: What to do when things go very wrong.

Back in late 2008, Valeria Maltoni posed a great question on Conversation Agent: What happens when brands die? It was a fascinating question, and one that frankly doesn’t get enough coverage. Even now, in the middle of a global recession that may have already cost us several: Saturn, Circuit City, and perhaps even Saab, for starters.

As companies continue to bleed jobs, sales, profits, liquidity and funding, perhaps this is as good a time as any to start discussing the  topic of… well, the specter of brand death: It’s causes, dynamics, mechanism, and outcomes. How do you plan for the death of a brand? How do you manage all of its painful final stages? How do you and your customers cope with something like that? And… to give you guys a ray of hope, can a dying brand be saved? And if so, how?

I know this series will be a bit of a departure for many of you: Conversations on the BrandBuilder blog usually focus on helping businesses improve their position and reach the next level in their evolution. What we are talking about here is a bit different. We’re looking at discussing difficult moments for any company: Continuity planning. Contingency planning. Emergency care. And potentially, if nothing can be done, last rites. (Sure, I want to say that every brand CAN be saved. And I believe that. But not every brand WILL be saved.

So the question, for once, and for the duration of this series won’t be “how do I make sure my company doesn’t end up in this situation,” but “now that we’re in trouble, how do we keep our sick company or brand from actually dying?”

As with humans, companies finding themselves headed for the emergency room require two basic things in order to turn themselves around and survive: Proper diagnosis, and proper care. And as with humans, most of the time, self-diagnosis and self medicating aren’t necessarily the wisest choices – especially when you’re dealing with a life-threatening problem rather than annual sniffles. In other words, when things start to get really bad, guess what: You’re going to need to seek professional care.

You’re going to need to call for help. But let’s not jump too far ahead of ourselves here. Before a company can ask for help, it has to accept reality:

Step 1: Preliminary Diagnosis.

Typically, symptoms of a dying brand may come in the form of customer attrition, declines in sales frequency or (volume per customer), eroding market share, a negative brand image (as reported through consumer reports, customer feedback and market studies), or even decreasing investor confidence.

But before this type of rescue/turnaround partnership can take place, managers of distressed brands need to come to terms with reality: Accepting that their brand or company is in trouble. Most companies ultimately fail NOT because they couldn’t be saved, but because their leadership fails to admit that they are in trouble and need help. This is the first step in the process.

How do you know when your company or brand is in trouble? Simple: When a preponderance of symptoms from the following list start popping up in your monthly or quarterly executive meetings. The short list:

• Pricing pressures are eroding your market share (and you can’t seem to reverse the trend without lowering your prices).
• Consumer preference data indicates that you are no longer either a contender for the top 1 or 2 choices in your product category.
• Your quarterly net new customer count is either decreasing or stalled.
• You are seriously contemplating eliminating 5-20% of your workforce to reduce costs.
• Customer complaints about your brand are increasing. (Quality, service, delivery, etc.)
• You have lost several of your best (historical) customers in the last 12 months.
• Your competitors’ products are getting a lot of great press and attention. Yours are not.
• Your best talent is starting to walk away.
• You are having a very tough time recruiting talent.
• You have cut costs by moving your call centers overseas, but now your customer service department is broken.
• Despite spending an obscene amount of money on marketing, advertising or PR campaigns, your business barely matches your industry’s growth rate. (If you’re lucky.)
• At least two out of the three cardinal measurements of your sales health (Frequency of sales, Reach of sales and average sales yield) show a flat or decreasing trend YoY.*

* Corporate lingo for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of working on the client side: QoQ = Quarter over Quarter. YoY = Year over Year.

Assuming anyone in your company is actually keeping an eye on any of this. You would be surprised how many companies’ sales managers don’t measure F.R.Y. or monitor historical new customer trending, how many marketing managers have absolutely no idea what is being said about their brands or where, and how many HR managers have their hands tied even when they it becomes clear that they are not winning the talent war.

Some of this can be attributed to managerial denial, sure, but a lot of the blame can also be attributed to two other factors: a) a lack of training or sophistication when it comes to establishing adequate, actionable metrics, and/or b) a lack of resources when it comes to managing these metrics with an eye towards regular course correction.

In order to connect the dots, you have to know how to identify the dots to begin with.

Getting help isn’t about admitting defeat, it is about getting results.

In order to climb out of a hole, you have to realize that you are indeed in a hole to begin with… and that you probably need help getting out. If you can’t think of a solution on your own, it’s time to get someone who knows how to help you dig your way out.

This topic reminds me of the scene in the 1998 movie “The Edge” (“The Wild” for my European readers) in which Anthony Hopkins’ character gets stranded in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness with two companions after a terrible plane crash. Alone in the wild, the three pampered city guys find themselves in an against-all-odds survival situation. The question the three characters keep asking each other – and themselves – is simple: How in the world are we going to survive out here? With no rations, no weapons or tools, no winter gear and chased by a relentless man-eating Grizzly, the three men have to rely on each other to make it back to civilization. About mid-way through the story, as their situation seems hopeless, Anthony Hopkins’ character explains to his lone surviving companion something that is absolutely relevant to today’s discussion of brand survival:

- You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame.

- What?

- Yeah, see, they die of shame. “What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?” And so they sit there and they… die. Because they didn’t do the one thing that would save their lives.

- And what is that, Charles?

The answer in the movie is “Thinking.” The answer in the case of of rescuing a brand is the same: Thinking. The one difference being that brands don’t die because they get lost in the wilderness. They die because their stewards create an imaginary wilderness around themselves. If you’re a CEO or CMO who hasn’t figured out how to rescue yourself or your brand by now, it’s time to break out the emergency radio or start sending smoke signals. If someone doesn’t come help you get back on track soon, your brand will die, along with your career, and the only reason will have been that you were too ashamed to admit that you needed help.

Yes, brands can and do die of shame as well.

Reaching out for help is a tough sale for a lot of managers and business leaders. It requires them to admit two things they would rather not: 1. This brand is in serious trouble, and 2. I can’t fix this on my own.

The trick is to realize that asking for help is not the same thing as admitting failure. Quite the contrary. Hiring someone to help you fix something for you – or with you – is no different from hiring the best copywriter, salesperson or office manager you can find.

Here’s the thing: We are all too happy to turn to specialists when we need help in every other area of our lives: If we are sick, we go to a doctor. If we have a tooth ache, we go to a dentist. If we are out of shape, we hire a personal trainer. If we have emotional problems, we hire a therapist. If our dog misbehaves, we hire a dog trainer. We all hire people who can help us improve our lives or who can somehow help us do things we can’t do on our own. Landscapers. Attorneys. Consultants. Mechanics. Dry-cleaners. Interior decorators. Plumbers. Electricians. Life coaches. Nutritionists. Masons. Carpenters. Party planners. Accountants. Financial planners. Repairmen. Whatever. Specialists are there to fill our knowledge and skill gaps. Helping you fix a brand in crisis is no different. It’s just that there isn’t a section in the yellow pages for “brand interventionists”.

Hint: Looking for a brand specialist or marketing firm in the yellow pages is a lot like looking for a job in the wanted ads. Unless you happen to live in 1986, you are looking in the wrong place.

Likewise, looking for traditional marketing firms and ad agencies to fill your needs when it comes to the relatively new problem of brand erosion in today’s complex business world can be a risky endeavor. Old tactics don’t necessarily address new problems – at least not on their own. The toolkit has evolved. If your new advisor’s “ideas” sound awfully familiar, it’s okay to get a second opinion. Even a third. We’ll go into what to look for tomorrow.

Okay, so my brand is failing. I have to do “something.” What are my options?

While many marketing firms and departments are great at building strong brands, many fall short of expectations. It happens. Sometimes, they get too close to the company or the product and lose their ability to look at the big picture. Sometimes, they have been doing the same things for so long that they have lost touch with their customers, with new marketing tools at their disposal, or with consumer trends and tastes. These things happen. It’s just part of doing business. If – not when – this happens to your company and you find yourself in trouble, you basically have four options at your disposal:

1. Fire your CMO or Marketing department (pretty drastic and rarely the right solution, but common).
2. Spend more money on the same tactics that have failed, but pretend that you are doing something different (the definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time). This may be the most common reaction of the four.
3. Drastically cut your marketing budget. Marketing doesn’t work anyway, right? (You might as well update your resume while you’re at it. This is the worst possible thing you can do in times of crisis. Even worse than firing your CMO.)
4. Seek professional help to assist your CMO. Not just from a firm or agency that will gladly take your money to take approach #2, but from a firm, agency or specialist who will actually focus on getting measurable and immediate results for you, AND educate you in the process. Rescuing a brand needs to be as much a learning experience for your organization as it is an intervention.

The correct answer, of course, is option #4.

I cannot stress this enough: Do not hire a specialist, firm or agency that will take option #2 to get you back on track. I have seen it happen too many times, and it is the easiest trap to fall into. This will solve nothing, and waste precious resources on your end. Don’t do it.

Tomorrow, we will go over the second step in your brand intervention: Hiring a practitioner or specialized firm, and letting them help you diagnose and clarify the problems facing your brand.

Part 3 of this series will focus on developing a treatment for your brand.

In Part 4, we will go over how to best administer the treatment, and we will wrap it all up in Part 5 with long term strategies to kill the possibility of a relapse.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 2: Methods for diagnosing and understanding what is killing your brand.

Cheers.

Bringing operational wisdom to Enterprise 2.0. Maybe.

Jacob Morgan and I want to bring our wisdom and know-how to the #e2conf in Boston this spring, but we need your help.

To be clear, there’s really nothing in it for us: I speak at conferences pretty regularly, so I don’t need the exposure, and as far as I can tell, #e2conf doesn’t pay its session speakers, so Jacob and I aren’t looking for a payday. We want to be there because we feel that what we already teach companies behind closed doors is well worth sharing with the enterprise community at large, especially in the context of enterprise business planning. Not being there would be a missed opportunity for the conference, the business community, and everyone in attendance in Boston. We’re here, we’re eager to share this stuff, and this is one of the best ways for us to do so. Unfortunately, we need votes – LOTS of votes -  to make it happen.

You can view and vote for our session Enterprise Social Media: Best Practices in Development, Deployment and Integration here.

Social Media Program Development

Companies looking to get involved in social media need to start somewhere.  The first segment of our session will cover how companies need to look at developing their social media strategies while tying those strategies back to ROI or impact metrics.  We will cover everything from identifying how social media can support existing company initiatives to how new social media initiatives can be created to drive business objectives and impact the bottom line.

Social Media Program Deployment and Integration

Once the strategies are developed, the next steps is to roll them out.  This section will cover everything from how companies need to structure their teams to setting timelines and expectations for a full scale social media roll out.  This is an important topic because strategies are only as effective as their ability to be executed. Anything can look great on paper. Execution is key.

The relevance to #e2conf becomes clear when you consider the complexity of accomplishing this in an enterprise environment: Large companies are divided into a breadth of departments across various geographic locations, which presents layers of obstacles ranging from poor communications and rigid business cultures to imbalances in infrastructure and conflicting objectives across silos.  The biggest Social Media challenge of all in the enterprise space lies in properly integrating it into (and across) an entire company so that it becomes a PART of the way that company does business as opposed to becoming some short-lived external add-on.  Our session will touch on how companies in the enterprise space can (and should) properly integrate social media into existing and new business functions and processes.

Even if you aren’t planning to go to #e2conf, I would LOVE for you to take 30 seconds today to register and vote for our session. (Don’t worry, you won’t be actually registering for our session or for #e2conf. The conference just needs to be able to make sure the same person isn’t voting for the same session 500 times.) It’s out of my hands now. If we don’t get the votes, we don’t get to present. It’s that simple. I’m counting on you, my readers to help us bring some kickassery to Boston’s #e2conf this spring. Voting ends on 1/20, so don’t wait.

Cheers,

Olivier.

Happy Martin Luther King Day

Happy MLK day.

Beyond “I have a dream,” the fact that one man can help change so much just by standing up and speaking out tells you how much can be accomplished when we devote ourselves heart and soul to something we believe in.

Inspiring.

Be part of something greater than yourself.

Will the world’s best Social Media case studies please stand up?

Will the world’s best Social Media and P2P case studies of 2009 please stand up? The time to claim your place in the pantheon of business case studies has come.

I hate to call them Social Media case studies, because – well, they’re more than just Social Media. They’re word-of-mouth (WOM) case studies too. They’re Marketing case studies. They’re community case studies. (Dare I call them business case studies?) Qualifying anything as being solely “Social Media” seems so limiting, doesn’t it? At the core though, they’re all P2P case studies, really.

(No, not P2P as in Peer-to-peer. Rather, P2P as in People-to-People.)

The idea behind P2P is simple: Fostering connections (human connections) with your customers. Whether you used social media to rebuild your customer support department, community management to significantly improve customer loyalty, a WOM program to increase your net transacting customers or a series of community feedback vehicles to generate conversations and participation in your brand, program or cause, that’s P2P.

But feel free to call them Social Media case studies. We don’t mind. Whatever makes the most sense to you, to your boss, to your employees, to your customers. We know better than to get hung up on words, especially this early in the social media game.

What’s important here is is that whether you used Facebook, Twitter, blogs, email, Ning, flickr, youtube, neighborhood canvassing, special events, phone calls, face-to-face interactions, sky-writing or any combination thereof to create human to human connections around a program, campaign, cause or brand in the last year – and it worked, we want to hear about it.

If you got people to talk to people, if you earned attention instead of paying for it, if you increased sales or marketshare or share of voice using Social Media or P2P tools, we want to hear about it.

PR, customer support, community management, online reputation management, internal collaboration, co-creation: if any or all of these terms drove your projects in 2009 and you have one or more case studies to back up all that work, we want to read it.

Why? Because we are looking for the best case studies in the world. Plain and simple. And you only have a couple of weeks to get them to us if you want to make the list – and be invited to attend a summit designed specifically to bring the best social media professionals on the planet together in one place for a couple of days and talk shop.

And by that, I mean seriously talk shop. Like you never have before.

Q: What is the LikeMinds Summit?

First things first – Likeminds 2010 is divided into two distinct events. A conference, and a Summit.

> Friday February 26 is the LikeMinds Conference – Open to all, (first come, first served, so get your tickets fast) interactive format with presenters, panels, Q&A, etc. The conference will be held in Exeter (Devon, UK) just like last time.Sa

> Saturday February 27 is the LikeMinds Summit at the spectacular (and Summit-friendly) Bovey Castle (just a short drive from Exeter). Unlike the conference, the Summit will be an invitation-only event. I repeat: Unlike the conference, the LikeMinds Summit will not be open to the general public. You must be invited to attend.

How do you get invited? I’ll get to that in a second. Let me tell you what the Summit is first:

1. An Open Dialogue and RoundTable about Social Media Best Practices

On Saturday February 27th, LikeMinds will welcome key CEOs, Directors, Trustees and global thought leaders to the first Like Minds Summit, where in the luxurious settings of Bovey Castle in the middle of Dartmoor National Park, we will be providing a roundtable platform for the worldʼs leading Social Media practitioners to enjoy an open dialogue about the future of social business innovation.

2. Strategic and Operational Training for Social Media Thought Leaders

In addition, the Summit will also include advanced executive Social Media program development training (strategy, integration, management and measurement) as well moderated collaborative sessions in which attending delegates will discuss successes, challenges, and lessons learned from their own experiences in developing and managing their programs.

3. The 2010 Global ‘Best In Class’ Report

Following the event, case studies selected for the summit will be outlined in a “Best in class” report, complete with lessons-learned, best practices, and a wealth of insights aimed at helping companies draw the best possible methodologies from the year’s most successful P2P and Social Media programs. For every company present at the LikeMinds Summit, the report will present an opportunity to have their hard work acknowledged globally. For anyone not invited to attend this time around, the report will present a unique reference guide from which to draw invaluable lessons for their own programs.

The LikeMinds Summit will convene every year in February to discuss, share and celebrate the previous year’s best P2P programs from around the world.

Q: Why a Summit? Isn’t the Friday LikeMinds Conference enough?

Define ‘enough.’ When is ‘enough’ ever enough?

Two of the most frequent questions from LikeMinds 2009 attendees were “where can we go to find the best case studies,” and “where do we go to find social media best practices?” (This actually came up during the panel Q&A after my presentation on R.O.I., and again a number of times at the little social event held immediately after the close of the conference.) From the onset, the notion that no one seemed to be addressing these two questions properly bothered me. As far as I could tell, as much as case studies turned up at just about every conference from Los Angeles to Dubai, no one was really focusing on trying to a) collect the best Social Media case studies, b) evaluate them against less “solid” case studies, and c) make the best of them available – in a lessons learned format – to the scores of business and social media professionals asking for them.

All evening, I was distracted by this unanswered need. By the next morning, Trey Pennington, Drew Ellis, Scott Gould and I were already toying with the idea of creating some kind of mechanism through which that type of information might be organized and made available. Without formalizing anything, we started bouncing ideas off each other in passing… until we ended up in the spectacular hills of Dartmoor, which we wished we could have shared with all of our  peers in the Social Media world…

… And then at Bovey Castle for a bone-warming fire and proper afternoon tea (yes, with real scones – not the Starbucks stuff). It was there, at Bovey Castle, that the idea of going beyond the simple collection, evaluation and publishing of the best social media case studies first took hold. The venue was so perfect for the level of conversations necessary to properly create the framework for something like this that we started to discuss the possibility of putting on a Summit – a high level event that would bring the best minds in social media in one place to have the kinds of conversations about the space that no one had the opportunity to have:

Large conferences weren’t the ideal format because of the distractions, the noise, the constant flux of presentations, meetings, dinners, parties and running around.

Small conferences tended not to attract enough of the best minds to put more than five or six of them in the same room at the same time.

Conference calls, webinars, twitter and other remote options were nice, but hardly conducive to… well, getting anywhere.

But man, if we could get 15 or 20 of the world’s best in a place like Bovey Castle, especially after a full day at the LikeMinds Conference in Exeter, we could really get somewhere. We could spend an entire day sharing best practices, discussing what works and what doesn’t, talking about where to take Social Media and New Marketing next. We could conduct training sessions based on the attendees’ specific needs, have real Q&A discussions between people who do this better than anyone else on the planet, and focus on what matters. Not that I mind sifting through the junk to get to the gold at most conferences, but what if we eliminated the junk completely and replaced it with 100% gold? The value of that type of event – for everyone present – would be beyond measurement.

That was the idea behind the Summit.

The rest, as they say, is history. Within a few days, we had a concept. A few weeks later, we were planning the Conference, the Summit and the format of the report and other resources that would emerge from them both.

Q: Where is the 2010 LikeMinds Summit being held? (And why?)

At Bovey Castle. Yes, THE Bovey Castle we just talked about. In England. Don’t worry, it just looks extravagant. It’s really just an old English house with a lot of really cool meeting rooms, a big back yard, and a forest all around it.

Why here? Three reasons: Convenience, awesomeness and the fact that the idea for the Summit came to us there for a good reason: It’s perfect for it.

We could have decided to hold the Summit anywhere: A hotel conference room in London, an office suite in New York, a cool space in San Fransisco… The possibilities are endless.  (The content of the Summit, its relevance, its format and even the cost to attend would be exactly the same, regardless of the venue.) Since the LikeMinds conference is already taking place just a short drive from Bovey Castle, it would have been a shame not to take advantage of its proximity. 

You can find out more about Bovey Castle here.

Q: If the Summit is by invitation only, how do I get invited?

Submit your case study.

Your submission can be in almost any format: a video, slide deck or document that is either emailed to the Summit staff, or even a simple hyperlink if your case study already exists online.

Invitation to the Summit will be based on the submission of that case study along with the following  qualifying elements. These elements are intended to prove the successful use of Social Media by documenting:

- Before and after overviews of the organization, with accurate measurement (Benchmarking)
- The research that backed the program
- The breakdown of strategy, integration, management and measurement
- How teamwork was guided, across departments, organizations and with the end user
- What were the most valuable lessons learned
- The frameworks that have been created from the experience

A jury will select the top 15-20 case studies from all received submissions and will send out invitations by the end of January.

Submissions for the Like Mind Summit may be sent to summit@wearelikeminds.com

Q: When are Summit submissions due?

Closing date for application submissions is Friday 22nd January.

Q: What is the cost of attending the Summit?

1. Getting to Exeter is up to you: Car, train, bicycle, horseback, steam ship, aeroplane, rocket, teleporter… If you’re in the UK already, it’s pretty simple. If you’re flying in, I suggest Heathrow or Gatwick airport, then either renting a car (don’t forget to stop at Stonehenge on your way to Exeter) or hopping on a train. Super simple. Once in Exeter, we’ll take care of shuttling you to Bovey on Saturday morning.

2. Hotels: The LikeMinds team is pretty well connected in Devon, so hooking you up with a hotel shouldn’t be a problem. (And yes, you can actually stay at Bovey Castle. We’ve negotiated a special rate of £150 per night – which is phenomenal.*)

* Last time I was in London, I found myself paying that much for horrible little economy hotels in the worst parts of town. £150 per night at Bovey is pretty mind-blowing.

3. The events: If you are invited to attend the summit, you’re automatically comped for the LikeMinds conference on Friday, including the V.I.P dinner Friday night. The Summit will also take care of your breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea on Saturday, as well as getting you back to Exeter once the Summit adjourns. You’ll be looking at two full days with some of the brightest, most forward thinking social media thought leaders and practitioners in the world. Not just in the same room, but at the same table. With a common purpose.

4. Inclusion in the ‘Best In Class’ report: If you get selected to attend the Summit, your case study will be featured in the LikeMinds report as one of the world’s best Social Media/P2P programs of 2009.  Those of you with a few Public Relations 101 credits in college might recognize the value of that kind of exposure. (Global exposure, I might add. This dog is going to have some pretty serious legs.)

Okay, enough with the pitch already: The price of admission is £1,500. (Sorry, the Gold Ticket isn’t free.)

I could make a joke about $2,995 social media certification programs right about now, but I won’t. Oh wait.. Doh!

Submitting your case study, however, is free. Just understand that if you are serious about attending the event upon being selected, the fee will be due fairly quickly. More details on that at a later date.

Q: Where can I get more information about the event?

You can download the PDF information kit here.

You can access the (Saturday) LikeMinds Summit website here.

You can check out the (Friday) LikeMinds Conference website here.

You can surf through the 2009 LikeMinds Conference archive here.

Q: What else is there?

I don’t know. You tell me.

If you’ve worked your tail off to develop, launch, manage and get the most out of a social media or P2P program in 2009, it would be silly to blow this off. Think of submitting your case study as that final 1% effort. Not even that. More like the final 0.01% effort.

If you end up being selected, yeah, there’s a bit of cost attached to it, especially if you aren’t based in Europe. I hear ya. Budgets are tight and £1,500 outside of travel expenses is nothing to sneeze at. But do the math:

1. You’ve probably thrown away more than that on conferences last year that didn’t really didn’t yield a whole lot of value, and for some strange reason, you may be contemplating doing it again this year, just in case they get it right this time (fat chance). Flying to Vegas, to Boston, to Orlando or New York or LA, going from session to session, wondering why you even bother attending half of the presentations? Hanging out at parties with your Twitter friends? Having dinner with a few “big names?” Hindsight being 20/20, if you could go back and skip those disappointments and trade them for something solid, something like this, wouldn’t that be a better use of your budget?

I can’t answer that for you.

2. The level of access you will have at the LikeMinds Summit – assuming you are selected to attend – is unheard of. You will spend a day (two if you attend the conference as well) with people whose individual consulting time is worth more than twice the price of admission. Multiply that by all 12 or 15 or 20 of them (depending on how many companies make the cut), and you atsrt to get the picture. These are people you will be engaging with, not just sitting next to in a conference room. Not to mention me, Trey Pennington, Drew Ellis, Scott Gould and a few other brainiacs yet to be announced.

3. Inclusion in the Summit’s report/master case study/white paper even without the summit’s value is worth ten times the £1,500 fee. From exposure to recognition, it’s a no-brainer. Your company probably spends that on branded pens and keychains at trade shows. On low tier print ads if you’re a small company. Heck, for most organizations with over 100 employees, you’re talking petty cash.

How much did you spend on PR last month? How much press did that get you? I rest my case.

4. Do you know why we set the price at £1,500 instead of, say, £800? (It would have been that even if we held this thing at the Holiday Inn, by the way. Not that we would.) It isn’t greed. It’s to weed out companies and individuals who aren’t serious about what they’re doing in this space. Some companies will choose to spend that on gimmicks.  Others will invest in the future of their social media programs. We’re only interested in the latter. The price of admission, quite simply, is commitment. 

So if you feel that you belong in that second category:

If you’re an agency or firm, submit your case studies.

If you’re an organization with a story to tell, submit your case study.

If you’re a service provider, tell your clients to submit their case studies.

Spread the word. Give it your best shot. Big brands, small businesses, NGOs, Non-profits, Universities… All are welcome. This event and report only come once a year, so don’t let all of your hard work in 2009 go to waste.

You have until the 22nd of January to submit your case studies.

May the best and brightest win.

Cheers.

Hibernation over.

Wow. That was fast. 2010 is here already? What happened to 2009?

Oh… I’m sorry, that’s right. 2009 kind of sucked. Most people are glad it’s over. Me, not so. Not that 2009 rocked my world or anything, but I am a bit sad that we couldn’t make it better. Know what I mean?Starting by giving all the people who lost their jobs since H2 2008 their jobs back – or better yet, whole new jobs. Jobs they like even better. That would have been good.

Another way we could have made 2009 better might have been to come together in time of crisis instead of polarizing ourselves around issues that shouldn’t be issues to begin with – Republican vs. Democrat, Conservative vs. Progressive, Social Media vs. Traditional Media, earned attention vs. bought attention…*sigh* Seriously? 10%+ unemployment and we’re debating ideology? Seriously?  So yeah, 2009 could have gone a little smoother for everyone if we had spent more time working TOGETHER instead of against each other, or – as it were – off on our own trying to score our own little slices of pie.

We can do better than this. Much better, in fact.

I’m sad to see 2009 go, not because I liked it that much, but because for all the talking and blogging and tweeting and arguing we managed to do, we didn’t get a whole lot done. The US is still bleeding jobs. Some of my friends have been out of work for over a year. In other words, though most of us managed to pay the bills, 2009 came and went, and we didn’t solve anything. We didn’t take 2009 anywhere.  We just… talked. And tweeted. And waited for things to get better, as if that would happen all on its own: The magic economy restoring itself through… divine intervention. Truth is, 2009 came and went, and we failed to fix much of anything. Not exactly the best way to end a decade now, is it?

When I was training to be a Fusilier Marin, much of the training I was put through was intended to boost individual performance: Obstacle and confidence courses, weapons training, PT, classroom instruction, etc. The basic stuff, essentially. But the real value of the training, especially as an officer, was the portion of it that emphasized teamwork rather than individual performance. And I am not talking about “team building exercises” here. We’re way beyond the “close your eyes and fall backwards so your office mates can catch you” stuff. I’m talking more about getting dropped inside an empty 15ft-deep WWII concrete fuel tank (more like a giant concrete crater with impossibly vertical walls, in case you’re trying to paint yourself a mental image) with 6 guys and no gear with a single mission: Get yourselves out.

How the hell do you do that? It’s dark, it’s cold, you’re hungry and sleep-deprived, no one on your team has ever done it before, and you have until dawn to figure it out or you’re all flunking out of the program.

Okay… now what?

Well, I’ll tell you now what: You start working together is what. You’re in a hole (literally) and you have to get yourself out. That’s the problem  – which isn’t unlike the problems that most companies face today. So what do you do? Do you start barking out orders? Do you assert yourself as the “project leader?” Do you build a plan based on ideology? Nope. Not if you want to get out. What you do is start by clarifying the problem as a team, then coming up with ideas – as a team, hen testing the ideas – as a team. Until you figure it out. And that starts by putting your ego aside and admitting to yourself that sometimes, you are more valuable as a sturdy cog than as an inadequate hub.

Playing Rambo (in the military world as in the business world) will get you nowhere fast. Survival and success both come a lot more easily when you rely on a team – a community, even. Sure, sometimes you have to do stuff on your own, but that should be the exception rather than the rule. If one supergenius is worth his/her weight in gold, then surely a team of supergeniuses is unstoppable. Right?

Right.

So the question then is, now what?

It’s 2010. We just wasted most of 2009 arguing over healthcare, Social Media R.O.I., traditional vs. social marketing. Are we going to do the same thing in 2010? Are we going to turn 2010 into 2009 Part 2? Let’s hope not. If that’s your plan, have at it. Me, I have other plans for 2010: I am not interested in being a solo operator. I have no ambition to be the next social media or business strategy or brand management guru. I have absolutely no want to keep doing this on my own. There’s no value in it for me. (As much as I dig the recognition from time to time, I don’t need the ego trip.) None of this is about me. It is 100% about doing things better.

How we bring social media and business together in the real world isn’t through thought leadership alone. It’s through collaboration. Through teamwork. Through PRACTICAL application. You don’t get yourself out of a hole by talking about it. You get it done by actually TRYING things and learning from what works and what doesn’t until you and your team are out of the hole. That’s how it works. There is no other way. Staring up at the ledge won’t help. Barking orders won’t help. Firing your teammates won’t help. Throwing money at the hole won’t help either. Everyone has to pitch in, roll up their sleeves, and do their part. It’s bloody, messy business. Real work is hard work. It’s uncomfortable. It’s scary, even. It can be discouraging at times. But if you work as a team, eventually, you figure out how to get your teammates out, and then help them get you out as well. Everyone does. One of the things I learned about this particular exercise is that teams that can’t get themselves out were simply teams that couldn’t work together. Escaping  (Succeeding) had nothing to do with brains or talent. It was 100% about collaboration.

So instead of putting together a list of resolutions for 2010 (the list would be way too long anyway) let me instead devote myself to this: More collaboration. With you. With him. With her. Some of you might call it “engagement” and that’s fine. I find collaboration more specific: I don’t just want to “engage.” I want to work with you. I want you to work with each other. I want to see everyone working together to get ourselves out of this massive economic hole.

Our objective this year isn’t to write the ultimate white paper or publish a best-selling business book. It isn’t to properly spend the entirety of our marketing budget. It isn’t to be promoted to some cool sounding position at a Fortune 50. It’s simply this: To help create jobs. That’s it. Not to keep your own or upgrade it, but to help create jobs. Sales jobs. Manufacturing jobs. Design jobs. By helping our employers and clients become more successful. By helping them kick ass. By working with each other for each other. To hell with egos and the me me me attitude. We need results. Real results. Measurable results. Not BS.

The economy as a whole may take a while to recover, but nothing says our clients and employers can’t recover WAY ahead of the curve. And by that, I mean in the next six months. Hiring again. Expanding. Redefining their markets from the ground up. Breaking away from their “competitors”.

The keyword in 2010 won’t be “recovery.” It’ll be “landgrab.”

And the secret weapon won’t be mergers and acquisitions. It won’t be a new hot-shot CMO or CEO. It won’t be the next round of startup funding. It won’t even be the next great app (at least not for the majority of you). It will be collaboration. Teamwork. The opposite of bickering. The opposite of everyone doing their own thing in their safe little silo.

That collaboration piece, that’s where I’m putting my money in 2010. The consulting and teaching, it will be less and less solo. Expect to see me collaborate more with client project teams, with subject matter experts, with product vendors, with service providers, with peers and friends and colleagues. I can only do so much on my own.

Before I start sharing the 2010 roadmap with you guys, I wanted to at least take a day or two to emerge from my annual Christmas Holidays hibernation and get back to answering emails and voice mails, and of course wish you all a fantastic new year. (A whole new one, mind you. Not just a repeat of 2009.)

So please accept this virtual hug, handshake or kiss on the cheek, and let’s vow to make 2010 everything 2009 wasn’t, even if for many of you, 2009 was a pretty decent year.

Cheers to you all, and let’s crank this one up to 12. (11’s already been done.)

Next up this week:

The LikeMinds 2010 Summit

Chess Media Group

The Marketing in 2010 e-book

Red Chair strategic and operational training for the C-suite.

Merry Christmas! (et Joyeux Noel!)

Merry Christmas, everyone.

On the importance of creating “wow” moments.

Yesterday, I received a package in the mail. Well… through UPS, actually. The doorbell rings, I go to answer, and sitting there on my doorstep is this box. Brown waves at me, drives off, and I walk back into the house with the mysterious package under my arm. I weigh it in my hand. Too heavy for a T-shirt. Too light for a book. Too quiet for an 8lb bag of m&ms. I let Chico sniff it for explosives. Clear. Cholula sniffs for pot. Clear. Chiquita sniffs for anthrax. We’re all good. I set the box on the kitchen table, swing my ninja sword at its edges in a blur and a woosh, and voila. Inside the box, I find… this:

Now, for the sake of disclosure, I should point out that I know Kamran Popkin (@swagclub). That we are both members of Social Media Club Greenville. That he already sent me a pretty kickass “thinking cap” earlier this year (which I wear during brainstorms, but only when I need that extra little bit of je-ne-sais-quoi), and also that he had a hand in getting me to the BMW driver school this summer. And yes, Kamran and I have briefly chatted about ways in which we could work together – meaning ways in which Swag Club might come in handy with some of my clients, and with this blog, Red Chair and “the book” in 2010.

So Kamran, being the business samurai that he is, decided that showing me, rather than just telling me, what kind of power good swag and a personal touch can accomplish, sent me this pretty badass (and color-awesome) little package of goodies just in time for the Holidays.

Here is the note he sent with it, along with the flip side of his business card (the nine rules of Swag Club):

1. You don’t talk about Swag Club.
2. You don’t talk about swag club. (Unless you need great swag.)
3. The search for great swag is over only when you say “Wow – that nails it!”
4. Only two guys to a fight. Unless we need help, then we bring in the big guns. We know a guy.
5. One swag project at a time.
6. We work with no ties or socks. Even on Sundays, always workin’ but never stressin’ the work.
7. The quest for great swag goes on as long as it needs to.
8. First projects are often the start of a great relationship. Or the end of a bad one.
9. Great advice @swagclub is always free.

Badass. The front of the card is the pink dealio at the top of this post.

More on the contents of the package (aside from the handy little sanitizing gels, the portable reading light and the post-it slinky):

As simple as this little cell phone holder may be, it’s a great idea: It looks cool, it unfolds flat so it’s easy to travel with, and you can put your logo on it, which… is kind of thepoint. Anyway, very handy little desk accessory for someone with my schedule. (And yes, my phone is either a) a temple to social media narcisism, b) an exercise in accessory branding, c) a better way to mark my stuff than using a sharpie, a label or… scent, or even d) all of the above.)

Next item: This MoMa-inspired perpetual calendar. Minimalist, doesn’t require batteries, kind of cool looking on a desk. And as a bonus, it’s accented with BrandBuilder orange.

Very cool, especially since it was completely unexpected.

So here are my takeaways from this pleasant little surprise:

1. Either wow or go home.
2. Make it personal.
3. Be persistent.
4. Be relevant.
5. Be bold.
6. Make people feel like a million bucks.
7. Show people that you care.
8. Go analog.
9. If the devil is in the details, that’s where you need to be.
10. Sometimes, it isn’t about the what. It’s about the how.

You know how we like to talk about best practices? You don’t really have to look much further than this.

Guess where I’ll be going for all of my swag needs from now on.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Gaspedal’s “Word Of Mouth SuperGenius” conference is this Wednesday in Chicago

Supergenius is this Wednesday in Chicago, and guess what: I’ll be there to discuss (you guessed it) R.O.I.

What else will be going on at Supergenius? Case studies, how-to sessions, and real-world business development, marketing, WOM and Social Media lessons from companies like Starbucks, Intuit, Lego, Coca Cola, Graco, etc. It’s going to be pretty badass.

AND, since it’s GasPedal honcho Andy Sernovitz’ birthday today, please join me in wishing him a very Joyeux Anniversaire.

If you haven’t registered yet, be sure to do so asap ,procrastinator! (And be sure to use the discount code in the above image to save a few bills.)

In case you have no idea what I am going to talk about, here is the interview (audio) I did with Supergenius a few weeks ago. It covers a few things:

Go check out the rest of the deets here, and I hope to see you there.

(Now can you crank up the thermostat up there? I’m getting reports of not-very-warm weather. Cheers.)

Defining Social Media R.O.I. Once And For All: It’s all about the Benjamins.

Time to bring this post back for a second round.

This post is the continuation of a discussion started on Marketing Profs’ LinkedIn group on July 7th. (If you don’t yet subscribe to the group, consider becoming a part of it.)

Today’s video is actually two videos in one:

The first half (Part 6 of our Social Media ROI series) deals with defining ROI once and for all.

The second half (Part 7 of our Social Media ROI series) starts touching on the “how” of calculating the ROI of Social Media by outlining the investment-action-reaction-impact-return narrative.

If the video doesn’t load for you, you can go watch it here.

Let me start today’s post with a confession: Like many people in the business world, I have abused the term “ROI” from time to time. Yes, I admit it, even I have used “ROI” as a relative term on a number of occasions in the past. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.

Here are some examples of what I am talking about:

• Q: What’s the ROI of adding 100 miles to my weekly cycling training?
• A: Faster race times.

• Q: What’s the ROI of writing better blog posts?
• A: More traffic on my blog.

It’s easy to do, especially since sometimes, what you invest into something isn’t necessarily $$$. Perhaps you invested sweat. Perhaps you invested time. Perhaps you invested emotions. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that when the currency is variable, how you measure the “I” in ROI becomes variable as well. For lack of a better term, you start to refer to any kind of positive outcome as “ROI” even when you shouldn’t. It’s an easy habit to fall into, and if you aren’t careful, your definition of ROI can begin to get a little fuzzy. So I get it: I understand why this is confusing to so many folks, especially when it gets thrown into the world of Social Media.

But I’ve also spent enough time with executives (on the client side) to know that when THEY talk about ROI, the currency is NOT relative. In business terms, the currency implied in any ROI question or discussion is cold hard cash. Period.

Marketing professionals need to understand this: If the investment (the “I”) is $$$, then the return also has to be $$$. It can’t be eyeballs or impressions or clickthroughs. You have to tie your results to a $ amount. Anything short of that, and you’re not proving your value to your boss or client.

It isn’t to say that eyeballs, impressions and clickthroughs aren’t important. They are. But they’re one link (of the action-reaction-outcome narrative) shy of ROI. (They don’t tie the investment to the actual return.)

The best way to explain that narrative is this way:

$ Investment by company –> Action –> Reaction –> Non-financial impact –> Financial impact $

As explained above in the video, the relationship between a company’s investment and the return on that investment pretty much looks like this:

What happens between the investment and the financial impact (the return on that investment) is VERY important. And we’ll talk about the importance of monitoring and measuring it in order to tie the investment to the associated financial impact (and ROI) in future posts. But for now, I want to focus on the fact that eyeballs, impressions, positive WOM and social mention, even click-throughs and net new visits to websites do not constitute relevant currency when we are talking about ROI. Social media is no different here than any other business endeavor in this regard.

Impressions, eyeballs, net new visitors, etc. are forms of non-financial impact. In order to determine ROI, you have to take them to the next step: How they affect financial impact. THEN and only then can you tie the original investment to the return (financial impact/outcome).

I know that bringing “media” measurement into the ROI equation is tempting , especially for folks with agency or media measurement backgrounds. That’s what the model has been for PR, Advertising and other marketing-specific firms for decades. And again media measurement is vital here, but when it comes to calculating ROI, that type of measurement is a lot like calculating a crop’s yield by estimating how many of X number of planted seeds will germinate come harvest time. It doesn’t work that way. You have to roll up your sleeves come harvest time *and physically count what the actual yield is. You actually have to do the work. ROI isn’t about potential. It’s about actual performance.

(*Luckily there is no seasonal constraint like a “harvest” in the business world, so ROI measurement – like most performance measurement – can be continuous.)

In order to adequately determine ROI, you must first understand how all the pieces fit. You have to see the entire equation, from start to finish. There is an order to how things happen, how, and why. You have to see how A leads to B leads to C in order to understand how an investment turns into a success or a failure, and to what degree. You also have to understand that the value of a pair of eyeballs, of an impression, is subjective until that pair of eyeballs actually does something. Then the body attached to that pair of eyeballs becomes one of three things: A browser, an influencer or a transacting customer. The first two don’t actualize a financial impact (yet). The third does. That’s where we want to focus when dealing with ROI.

Though we can infer and assign an estimated $ value to browsers and influencers, these values are subjective at best , usually measured in hindsight, and subject to change at any moment for any reason. So their value still falls into the category of non-actualized potential for now. (We will look at the financial impact of influencers in an upcoming post. No worries.) For the purpose of ROI calculation, however, you want to work with cold hard numbers. Not estimates, not potential, not yet-to-happen transactions, but “actualized dollars.” Real revenue from actual sales. Financial returns you can take to the bank and tie step by step through the above chain back to the initial investment.

(Incidentally, financial impact (ROI) manifests itself either as increased revenue or cost savings. Sometimes, ROI is revenue-neutral but cut costs internally. The model I just described above applies ti revenue-generated ROI.)

All of this to say that we have to be VERY careful not to a) mistake non-financial impact with ROI, and b) not to try and redefine “ROI” when dealing with business execs. (They won’t buy into “Return on Influence” or “Return on Interest” for very long, and anyone using these terms runs the risk of losing credibility with pragmatic decision makers in the C-suite.) Social Media is fun, but this is not a game. If a client doesn’t ask about ROI, great! Awesome. They probably get how Social Media is going to help them build relationships with customers and improve everything about their business. So to them, ROI is implied. It’s understood. It isn’t something they are going to worry about anytime soon. But when a client DOES ask about ROI, you have to a) understand what they are asking, and b) know how to adequately answer their questions and put measurement systems in place that will suit their needs and particular culture.

I hope this was helpful. Next, we’ll talk about the importance of timelines in the ROI determination process. (The next piece of the puzzle.)

By the way, if the video didn’t load properly for you or if you are accessing this post from a mobile device, you can go watch the video here (thanks Viddler).

Let’s get constructive about the future of Social Media Certifications

Judging by the close to 200 pages of comments left by readers on my last post, I guess we’ve hit on a pretty hot topic this week: That of “social media certifications.” (Who knew?)

So okay, let’s talk about it.

1. Do we even need Social Media certification?

To be completely honest, I hadn’t really given the subject much thought until a few days ago. To me, it seemed far too early in the game, not just from an academic standpoint, but from a practical one: Even if we happened to need certifications or accreditation for social media practitioners, there are no standards as of yet. No agreed-upon best practices for every business function and specialty that touches Social Media. There are no PhDs in the subject. No twenty-year veterans to teach anyone the ropes. In other words, there exists today no mechanism through which a social media “practitioner” might find himself or herself truly “certified” by anyone in any truly legitimate fashion, like, say, a PR professional, attorney, nurse, or even a hairdresser are able to be certified.

Part of the problem at hand can be summed up in the following two questions:

A. A “social media certification” would certify you in what, exactly? Your ability to create a Facebook fan page? Basic blogging techniques? Twitter usage? Social media measurement? Optimizing a LinkedIn profile? I could go on and on. So the question again: Certified in what, exactly? Some kind of general “Social Media expertise?” What does that even mean? (We’ll get back to that in a bit.)

B. Who would offer these certifications/accreditation and how? Accredited universities? Business schools? Professional organizations? Guilds? Private certifying companies? State boards? Software vendors? Consulting firms? Anybody with the ability to sell an online webinar? And who would develop and teach these courses? Academics with no practical social media experience? Internet consultants? Superstar bloggers? Who decides?

Check out this video and we’ll get the conversation started afterward:

If the video doesn’t play or open for you, go here.

2. A training certificate and a certification are not the same thing.

So, first of all, it’s important to understand the distinction between a Social Media certification and Social Media training. While training is… well, just training, a certification tends to be more structured. Standards have to be applied. Testing administered. Certification is a little more complex than just sitting through training. More often than not, certification is synonymous with accreditation.

To keep things simple, I hopped over to wikipedia and find this about the word accreditation:

Accreditation is a process in which certification of competency, authority, or credibility is presented.

Organizations that issue credentials or certify third parties against official standards are themselves formally accredited by accreditation bodies (such as UKAS); hence they are sometimes known as “accredited certification bodies”.^[2] The accreditation process ensures that their certification practices are acceptable, typically meaning that they are competent to test and certify third parties, behave ethically, and employ suitable quality assurance.

One example of accreditation is the accreditation of testing laboratories and certification specialists that are permitted to issue official certificates of compliance with established standards, such as physical, chemical, forensic, quality, and security standards.^[3]

The whole purpose of certifications and accreditations isn’t for social media practitioners to learn how to be social media experts. (You aren’t going to learn that by sitting in a class.) Rather, accreditation/certification is a process by which you are tested against specific industry standard and either proven capable/qualified or not. It’s a weeding out process.

And kids, that process has nothing to do with self affirmation. What it has to do with is separating professionals (with experience that can be demonstrated through an accreditation process) from people with no experience, no skills, and lacking the necessary qualifications to take on a social media management job, no matter how many fans they have on Facebook.

In other words, if certification/accreditation truly is needed in the social media world, its purpose is solely to help companies with very little understanding of the space get some notion of whether a consultant or job applicant has a particular skill level required for the job.

If you want to distill this down to its simplest form, think of this simply as third-party testing: Having a reputable certifying body vouch for the fact that you actually know how to do something. Period. That’s it.

Note my emphasis on the word “reputable” because this is an important point we will revisit.

Note: A certification/accreditation is not a substitute for real experience, demonstrable results or professional references. But it can help validate a candidate’s skill-set, which isn’t all bad. And it can also help ensure that an individual has sat through x hours of best practices training and demonstrated an ability to apply their training to the experience they’ve already acquired in the real world.

3. Social Media Generalist Certifications vs. Professional Certifications: Rebooting the model.

Where things get a little iffy is with the structure of a social media certification. What exactly should it look like?

Currently, many “certifications” tend to look at the social media “profession” as a form of general mass of quasi-expertise ranging from how to manage a blog, start a facebook fan page and customize a twitter account to how to measure ROI and manage online communities. (Pretty big and dangerously amorphous range, from my perspective.)

What seems more logical is a slightly more operational approach to both social media training and social media certifications/accreditation: Instead of looking at Social Media as some sort of broad ranging field of study with an endless list of applications, look at Social Media as a skill-set that applies differently to each function within a business. In other words, give social media training and certs specific professional focus.

Consider that a Public Relations professional and a Customer Service professional will probably use social media (professionally) in radically different ways:

While the PR professional will probably want to be trained in online reputation management, digital brand management, online monitoring, digital crisis management and some assortment of publishing best practices, their customer service counterpart will want to be trained in online keyword monitoring, digital customer relationship management, crisis management and some light community management. Will there be some overlap? Sure. But what we are looking at here are very distinctive tracks, leading to very distinctive certifications. In other words, a social media certification for a PR professional shouldn’t look at all like a social media certification for a customer service professional, or an IT professional, or a business development professional.

The specific nature of the jobs dealing with social media requires both specific training, and specific certification/accreditation – both in specifically relevant sets of social media competencies.

No more over-arching cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all social media certifications, please. If we’re going to get serious about this (and we should), let’s get serious about it.

4. The difference between established, reputable certifying bodies and… well… the other kind.

Okay, so in light of the fact that a certification process could now be geared towards specific types of roles as opposed to some vague “social media specialist” notion, let’s look at certifying bodies that might (at some point) be able to offer these types of certification for professionals. Is it possible that perhaps an organization like PRSA might be better equipped to certify Public Relations professionals in something like digital public relations management, maybe? As opposed to, say, a newly assembled social media certifying body trying to adapt its general certification to the PR profession? Something to think about.

Something else to think about is the fact that a certification/accreditation from a reputable organization or institution is pretty crucial here. Organizations like PRSA, AMA, and others of their caliber can’t afford to do this poorly. They HAVE to take it seriously in order not to tarnish their reputations. In sharp contrast, the social media space is filled with opportunistic individuals who would have nothing to lose and a lot of potential cash to gain. All you need to start certifying unsuspecting marks is a website and a Paypal account. Just create a social media certifying body out of thin air, create a series of webinars about whatever you want, charge a registration fee, and you’re in business. These types of operations are rampant in the US already.

So the point I am trying to make is that it would be great if the AMA, PRSA and other established and respectable professional organizations that already offer certifications for their members started moving in this direction – if only to ensure a pattern of legitimacy and accountability in the social media certification/accreditation process.

We could go on and on and on with this, but this is a good place to pause and get some feedback from you guys. The comment section is officially open. Agree? Disagree? Somewhere in the middle? Let’s hear it.

Cheers.

Thanks, but no thanks: Enough with the nonsense already.

Today, I received this email from a group calling itself the International Social Media Association. ISMA for short (not to be confused with the International Society of Management Accountants – or International Sports Management Australasia for that matter):

Hope you are having a fabulous day! My name is (…) and I work with (…) and (…) for The International Social Media Association, (ISMA).

Both (…) and (…) have expressed that you are absolutely amazing. You bring so much knowledge with such excitement to the social media world. Thank you for everything you do!

ISMA would love to invite you to be on our Certification Training Webinar on Thursday, December 10th from 2pm – 3:30pm est. as our featured guest trainer! For your benefit, you will be able to get great exposure and be known as the “Obvious Expect” within your niche!

Would you be able to accept this invitation? We would be so honored.

Here is the information if you do accept. Topic:

Social Media Objectives & ROI – Session 14 (December 10, 2009)  2-3pm est
*  Setting social media objectives
*  Create social media budget
*  Tracking & measuring ROI
*  Q&A

You will need to provide a Power Point Presentation and send it to us so we can upload it onto our server and a short bio and your picture.

The training with your power point is usually 1 hour and then it is followed with a Q & A session.

Please call me at 603 xxx-xxx or e-mail me back and we can go from there. You can promote yourself and gain more exposure for you and your business, however we ask that you refrain from pitching anything.

I am looking forward to hearing from you shortly! (…) and (…) just couldn’t say enough great things about you! Can’t wait to hear from you!

Before I share my reply – which I think will be pretty self-explanatory – let me share a few thoughts with you about where this email came from and what it is really about:

First, let’s start this discussion with a little basic background: ISMA is the brain child of Mari Smith and Mark Eldridge.  Bright people, I’m sure, but not exactly the international brain trust one might expect from an organization positioning itself as a – if not the – certification body for the world of Social Media. Internationally, at that.

Now, had the team behind ISMA been composed of people like Andy Sernovitz, Jay Baer, Valeria Maltoni, Maz Nadjm, Mack Collier, Chris Brogan, Beth Harte, Jacob Morgan, Andrew Gerrard, Amber Naslund, Francois Gossieaux and Kim Brater, (or scores of others – you know who you are) I would have been inclined to sign on. But no. Mari Smith and Mark Eldridge it was. Two people who – not to belittle any of their accomplishments – don’t seem nearly enough of a thought leadership force to create an international certifying body out of thin air… and immediately charge $2,995 for their  social media certification course, which seems to be the main impetus behind ISMA. (I could be wrong, but I guess we can rule out any not-for profit status for the organization.)

And there’s the real  rub: Aside from lacking the slightest sliver of real legitimacy in the space, what exactly is this certification program? Where did it come from? Who developed it? Who is teaching it? And why exactly does it cost almost $3,000?

From what I can tell from the email I received today, “guest trainers” are developing at least some of the content, and then delivering it via webinar. In other words, anyone desperate enough for attention and validation to lend their name to an organization essentially based on… well… volunteered material solicited through a form email can become a trainer for this “international” certification program.

Come on, Mari. For $2,995 per certification, the least you could do is properly recruit, then pay your trainers, don’t you think? Maybe call them up yourself? Discuss the project and the organization with them? Set up discussions about content and best practices? You know… the basics? Do it right, and for the right reasons maybe? Work with real professionals? Build a board of advisors composed of social media professionals instead of what appears to be a mix of affiliate marketers, entrepreneurs and motivational speakers?

But no: Let’s build a site, start selling a product, and worry about the details later… like content. And let a staffer send them an email full of typos in which we bait them with terse little sales tricks? Come on. Really?

I am not impressed. As a matter of fact, no. Let me take that back. I am appalled.

Aliza Sherman has a pretty solid writeup on the ISMA and its “certification” training here. I highly recommend that you guys read it. I am in complete agreement with her on every point. Another post on the subject this week: Leigh Duncan-Durst’s post on not being Social Media Shark Bait.

Mari and Mark, I’m sorry if this seems harsh, but you are going about this all wrong:

1. You could have started with a real board of advisors. You know… made up of people who actually play a role in the advancement of Social Media. Need a starter list? Try this one. Or this one. Or even this one. I’m sure the people you selected are brilliant and successful and all, but what do they have to do with developing best practices and training programs dealing with Social Media? How do they bring any legitimacy to your organization? I don’t recognize a single name on that list. Not a single social media director or strategist from a major brand? No one from IBM? DELL? The Home Depot? Starbucks? Ogilvy? Best Buy?

2. You could have partnered with at least one reputable university (like Chris Penn did with the University of San Francisco) to at least create an academic framework for your certification – if not to put it on a path of accreditation at some point in the future.

3. You could have started by creating frameworks for best practices, legal considerations, etc. before jumping straight to selling a certification course. It would have taken some time, sure, and the organization might not have made any serious money for a year or so, but it would have built a foundation upon which to build a real certification program. The Social Media Business Council is already doing this. You could have at least partnered with those guys, sought sponsorship of some kind, worked out a similar type of membership organization to constitute a working advisory board, but no. You went straight for the sale.

4. You could at some point clarify specifically what makes you an international body, aside from the notion that adding “international” to the name sounds important. I don’t see a whole lot of foreigners on your board of advisors. Maybe I missed something, but who represents the EU? Asia? Africa? Latin America? Real international organizations, like the IAB for example, have representation in more than one country – and usually more than one continent. Did I miss something? Is there a Canadian resident in there somewhere?

5. Had you given social media management any thought whatsoever, you and your board would have also realized by now that social media management is too complex to limit to only one certification track. As social media evolves within the organization, four clear tracks begin to emerge: Social Media program development (strategy), Social Media program integration (ops), Social Media program management (execution), and Social Media measurement (analysis). The execution piece alone can be broken down into online reputation management, community management, business intelligence, customer support, human resources, etc., each requiring its own very specific training/certification course. I shouldn’t have to tell you this. The emerging specialization in social media roles is something that seems to have completely escaped you, which doesn’t bode well for your “certification” program or your level of practical understanding of a discipline you aim to make your business to certify people in.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but as I recall, Fast Company named Mari the “pied piper of Facebook,” NOT “the pied piper of the online world,” as her profile now states on the ISMA website. Accidental oversight? Who knows. But when you’re going to quote a major publication like Fast Company, it helps to be accurate with what they actually said about you. You wouldn’t want anyone to accuse you of being purposely deceptive now, would you.

Update: Thanks to Mike Rudy, the Fast Company blog reference in question has been found. In a post written on the Fast Company blog by Wendy Marx, Mari Smith is in fact mentioned as both the pied piper of Social Media (body) and the pied piper of Facebook (title). My apologies for this oversight. I didn’t realize that the description was written for the blog, not for the monthly publication.

So Mari, Mark, and the rest of you at the ISMA, at long last, here is my reply to your email:

Hi, (…).

I am honored by the kind words and your invitation, but I have to respectfully decline.

I want to be absolutely frank with you as to why I don’t feel comfortable with your request. (I don’t think it would be fair of me to simply decline and not tell you why.) It pains me to say this, but I don’t feel that your organization is currently moving in the right direction or sending the right message across the Social Media space.

As far as I can tell, you have not yet been endorsed by any of the professionals or organizations in this field whose opinion I trust and respect. Not in the US, and certainly not internationally. Providing Social Media training to companies is one thing. Providing a certification program is another. Your “international” organization seems to be based on absolutely nothing of substance, and that worries me a great deal.

With all due respect to Mari, Mark and the rest of your team, I cannot lend my name to your organization – even as a guest presenter – until I feel that you are a legitimate body, at the very least backed by a board of advisors made up of leaders in the field. To do so could be seen as an endorsement of your certification program or status as a governing body of some sort, and I don’t feel comfortable with that at this time.

I am sorry if this letter seems harsh, especially in response to an invitation, but I felt that being honest with you guys was important.

Best regards,

Olivier Blanchard

In other words, thanks, but no thanks.

So for you, my readers, here’s some advice I hope you will share with anyone desperate enough to actually consider spending $3,000 on a webinar series:

1. You don’t need to be certified in Social Media. If one day, universities or accredited bodies start issuing social media degrees or certifications and companies want to favor them, then fine. Look into one of them. But until that day comes, just do the work and let that speak for itself. And if you do need help and training, shop around. There are programs out there that don’t cost quite that much, and I can guarantee that for $3,000, you can get a custom package developed specifically for your needs. More importantly, trust me when I say this: No piece of paper is going to validate you as a social media professional. Don’t you dare waste almost $3,000 on a series of webinars and a piece of paper. Even if:

This certificate gives you the privilege of displaying the official “Certified Specialist” ISMA logo on your website and other marketing materials.

The International Social Media Association offers a full 30-Day Money Back Guarantee on it’s Social Media Certification Program.

I swear I am not making this up. Even the typos are real. (I wonder if I call right now, they’ll send me two for the price of one.)

2. If you insist on spending $3,000 on training, fine. I will fly to wherever you live, and we’ll conduct the training there  for 2 whole days, face to face, with a skype connection to my network of SMEs from around the world who will answer any and all of your questions. If you’re going to spend $3K, we’ll teach you everything you need to know, and  we’ll do it right.

But seriously. Don’t.

3. If you are really looking for real training programs that won’t shred your finances, here is a short list of resources for 2010 that you should consider before dishing out $2,995:

Jay Baer

Marketing Profs

Chris Penn

Gas Pedal

And last but not least, Red Chair (launching soon) – In the meantime, go here

Hell, if you can’t wait until 2010 and plan on being in Chicago on December 16th, you can even register for Word Of Mouth Supergenius, which will be a valuable milestone along your social media educational path. Check out the agenda: Not bad. I’ll even save you some money: When you register, enter this discount code: olivierismyhero (Disclosure: I am speaking at Supergenius, which is how I know it’s going to be a pretty solid event.)

Okay, rant over. Think before you spend, do your homework before joining  an organization or registering for anything, and you’ll probably be all right. Have a great Friday, everyone.

PS: If you really need a certificate to frame on your wall, here you go. Reading this blog post has qualified you to be a genuine Social Media Guru, as well it should. We’ll hold a graduation ceremony for everybody on Twitter later today during which I will wave my magic wand and turn you all into vizir-level social media experts. We’ll all wear funny hats and exchange secret social media handshakes.

Cheers.

Update: Mari Smith called me Friday afternoon to discuss this post. I have to give her credit for having reached out to me personally and for having been both professional and cordial during that telephone exchange.

That said, Mari and I agreed to disagree on pretty much everything about the way she and her team went about building and packaging her “organization” and the certification program it offers.

BrandBuilder post number 1,000 – Let’s talk about leadership

I agonized for a few days over what kind of brilliant advice I should share with you on this 1,000th post since the launch of the BrandBuilder blog before finally realizing that no. 1,000 is no different from 999, 1,001 or 356. So no more pondering, no more worrying about writing an epic post (the time for that will come again in due time), and no more waiting around for inspiration to strike. Today, instead of talking about social media, brand management, who does what well and who does what poorly, let’s just talk a little bit about leadership. Corporate leadership, that is.

And instead of doing all the talking, I will let people with a whole lot more experience than me give you some tips about how to become a better leader. Great stuff that transcends the typical leadership quotation mill.

Anne Mulcahy – Former CEO of Xerox

In a crisis, you have the opportunity to move quickly and change a lot – and you have to take advantage of that.

Change doesn’t happen if you don’t work at it. You’ve got to get out there, give people the straight scoop, and get buy-in. It’s not just good-looking presentations; it’s letting people ask the tough questions. It’s almost got to be done one person at a time.

There’s not a lot of room anymore for senior people to be managers. They have to be leaders. I want people to create organizations that get aligned, get passionate, get really inspired about delivering.

Stories exist at every level of the company. Whether it was saving a buck here, or doing something different for customers, everyone has a story. That creates powerful momentum – people sense that they’re able to do good things. It’s much more powerful than the precision or elegance of the strategy.

I communicate good news the same way I do the bad news. I thank people and make sure they feel a sense of recognition for their contribution. But the trick is always to to use the opportunity to talk about what’s next, to pose the next challenges. Where do we want to go? How do we want to build on it?

Margaret Heffernan – Author, The Naked Truth

Nothing kills morale like a staff’s feeling helpless. This often plays itself out when there are rumors of a new strategic shift or a major personnel move, or worse, when the papers are littered with bad news about your company. A big part of boosting morale is about constructing a haven of logic that offers individuals shelter from any storm. At its most basic, leaders have to communicate their awareness of business conditions and place their plans in that context. Each time [a CEO outlines] a future that comes true, he demonstrates his own competence and reinforces trust.

The happiest people aren’t the ones with the most money but those with a sense of purpose – a sense that they are contributing to something bigger than themselves. At least some of this has to derive from work. The purpose of a business, then, must be explicit and go beyond boosting the share price or fulfilling some bland mission statement. People want to believe that they are part of something meaningful. The sense of purpose doesn’t have to be grandiose or revolutionary, merely credible and anchored in values.

Purpose is achieved through goals, and the acid test for any leader is defining the appropriate ones. Too small, and celebrations soon ring hollow. Small goals breed cynicism. But too-big goals produce helplessness. Although it can be temporarily thrilling to rally around a big corporate slogan like “kill the competition,” the reality is that employees can’t do it alone and they can’t do it quickly.

Alignment between corporate goals and personal development has never been more critical. The more unpredictable the outside world, the more urgent the personal quest for self-determination. What employees look for in leadership is a sense that their personal journey and the company journey are part of the same story. When these goals aren’t aligned, employees tend to whine with others, eager to share their sense of anger and injustice, polluting morale. The only way to combat this and get back on track is proper feedback. Give employees the tools to influence their own fate.

Get a life. Keeping morale high is like being on a diet: It requires constant effort and is never over. New ideas, stimuli and motivation come from all around you. It’s the larger life, after all, that gives purpose to the climb.

Alan Deutschman – Senior Writer, Fast Company – writing about how IBM builds new businesses

Look for opportunities that can become profitable [billion-dollar] businesses in five to seven years. You’ll probably find them by talking to customers rather than to brilliant researchers in the labs, who are are looking further ahead.

J. Bruce Harreld – IBM

You want to celebrate failure because you learn something. You need some level of security to say ‘I screwed it up,’ and be comfortable that you won’t be fired.

Marcus Buckingham – Author, Break All The Rules

Turn anxiety into confidence. For a leader, the challenge is that in every society ever studied, the future is unstable, unknown, and therefore potentially dangerous. By far the most effective way to turn fear into confidence is to be clear – to define the future in such vivid terms that we can see where we are headed. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.

Effective leaders don’t have to be passionate, charming or brilliant. What they must be is clear – clarity is the essence of great leadership. Show us clearly who we should seek to serve, show us where our core strength lies, show us which score we should focus on and which actions we must take, and we will reward you by working our hearts out to make our better future come true.

See? Told you these folks know what they’re talking about.

Thanks to Fast Company’s March 2005 issue for providing much of today’s content. (I have quite the collection.)

Cheers.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

To celebrate thanksgiving this year, I thought I might share my Top 100 list of things I am thankful for. In no particular order:

1. Blue skies.
2. Night thunderstorms.
3. Nutella.
4. Gravity.
5. Fine English saddles.
6. Cheese.
7. Architects.
8. Seat belts.
9. Planet Earth.
10. Croissants.
11. The DOW hitting 10,000 again.
12. Satellite technology.
13. Courage.
14. Antibacterial soap.
15. Power outlets. Especially in airports.
16. Wi-Fi. Especially in airports.
17. Artists.
18. My parents.
19. The number 2 pencil.
20. The internet.
21. Emergency exits.
22. Toilet paper.
23. Skim milk.
24. Sail boats.
25. Yogurt.
26. My wife and kids.
27. France.
28. Sushi.
29. Rollercoasters.
30. Deodorant.
31. Skype.
32. My brother and sister.
33. Fishermen and farmers.
34. Helmets.
35. Petits Beurre, de LU.
36. Canon cameras and lenses.
37. My friends.
38. My enemies.
39. Bailey’s Irish creme.
40. Ice cubes.
41. My extended family.
42. Cartier.
43. Washing machines.
44. Power tools.
45. German cars.
46. Provence.
47. Extra virgin olive oil.
48. Spring.
49. Summer.
50. Fall.
51. Winter.
52. Birthdays.
53. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
54. Dental hygiene.
55. Astronomers.
56. Dogs.
57. My childhood.
58. Movies.
59. Smart phones.
60. Bespoke tailors.
61. The path less taken.
62. Triathlon.
63. Duct Tape.
64. Twitter.
65. Performance fabrics.
66. Kate Winslet.
67. Jazz.
68. Laughter.
69. French patisseries.
70. Slow motion.
71. Cormack McCarthy.
72. My readers.
73. Medical research.
74. US foreign policy in Europe since 1944.
75. A proper cup of coffee.
76. Haribo Cola-flavored gummies.
77. Blue jeans.
78. Designers (engineers and otherwise).
79. Rubber bands.
80. Paris and New York in the spring.
81. Honey.
82. Kenneth Cole, Calvin Klein, Faconnable, Yves St. Laurent and Francesco Smalto.
83. Benevolent space aliens.
84. Air travel.
85. Brave, selfless people.
86. The Mediterranean Sea.
87. The perfect gin and tonic.
88. Afternoon tea.
89. The USA.
90. England.
91. Guitars.
92. Kevlar.
93. The International Baccalaureate.
94. Cashmere and Merino wool.
95. My health.
96. Old people.
97. Laptops.
98. Traditional French cuisine.
99. Stereophonic sound.
100. Every single day.

Missing from the list again this year:

1. Alarm clocks.
2. Disease.
3. Selfishness.
4. Sociopathic bosses.
5. Celery.
6. Pollution.
7. Bigotry.
8. Cancer.
9. Religious and political extremists.
10. Poverty.
11. American Idol.
12. Adolf Hitler.
13. Easy Listening radio stations.
14. Awful advertising.
15. Land mines.
16. Plastic shopping bags.
17. SyFy Original movies.
18. Social Media hacks.
19. Rabid raccoons.
20. Long lines.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Finally delivering the Social Media playbook

Building a Social Media program is about more than presence, community management and engagement. And in spite of what some “experts” may have told you, it certainly is about more than having a Facebook page, a twitter account and some videos on YouTube.

The reality of the thing is that it takes more than that to plug social media into your business. Much more. That intern managing your tweets right now doesn’t have the experience or the skills yet. That PR superstar you just hired out of LA or New York or Boston can do some good, but no matter how hard they try, they take your social media program so far. Just like your customer service manager and your CMO and your Director of Digital Media. No matter how smart they are, they only have some of the pieces of that puzzle… and so much time to try and figure out the rest. (Not exactly a master plan, is it.)

Truly plugging Social Media into an organization – into the enterprise, even – is a complex endeavor. It isn’t purely a marketing function, nor is it purely a customer service function or a community management function or a business intelligence function. There are lots of moving parts to this, some strategic, others operational. Some analytical, others tactical: HR and Legal need to be brought up to speed on several levels (especially now that the FTC has released its guidelines for blogging and social media use), the C-suite needs to clearly understand both the opportunities and the risks associated with Social Media in order to make appropriate decisions regarding the future of their companies. Vice Presidents, directors and managers need to understand how applying certain Social Media strategies and tactics to their existing activities could yield solid results in the quarters to come. And on and on and on.

Frankly, if you haven’t worked in the enterprise space, if you haven’t spent years closely working with sales managers, marketing managers, customer service managers, product managers, engineering managers, HR managers, if you haven’t spent years reporting directly to a CEO or at least a Senior VP – in other words, if you haven’t had real experience building programs within enterprise space companies and managing brands hands-on, working across silos, even with all the blogging and tweeting experience in the world, I don’t see how you can hope to know how to build, integrate, manage and measure a 360 social media program for a company. And certainly not in the enterprise space.

It takes a very unique background and skill-set to be able to deliver this kind of thing, and very few people can actually blend 1. a deep understanding of the social media space, 2. real enterprise-class program development and management experience, and 3. 360 brand management experience, from product ideation and development all the way to end-of-life-cycle marketing communications.

People who know how to do this in the US, I can count on the fingers of one hand. There aren’t many of us yet. And given the need for companies to understand how to properly plug social media into their business (and start enjoying positive results fast), that’s a big problem.

If my “fingers of one hand” remark seems like an exaggeration, go back in time just a few months and ask every social media “consultant” or “expert” in your address book to briefly shed some light on a few random (and simple) components of a Social Media program… like how to tie R.O.I. measurement into Social Media activities, or how to structure an enterprise-wide Twitter presence. Until those few of us who know how to do this came along and spelled it out for them, it seems that the vast majority of these “experts” didn’t have a clue. Scary, considering these types of things are among the most simple components of any social media program’s structure.

To address that problem, I am partnering with a pretty solid group of experienced marketing and PR directors, Director-level social media practitioners, management consultants, business managers and other experts to bring businesses exactly this kind of knowledge in 2010, not just in a consulting format but in a training format as well. The training specifically is what I want to bring up here today because it’s the most accessible of the two – both from cost -effectiveness and timeframe perspectives. This video should help explain what we’ve been working on:

As the video explains, we’ll soon have a website, a full schedule of cities (and countries) where our full-day trainings will take place throughout 2010, along with a ton of valuable information you’ll want to check out.

Perhaps the most important component of the training program will be the content of the program itself: Essentially a social media program development, integration, management and measurement playbook. As attendees, whether you decide to take copious notes (which I suggest you do) or simply watch the presentation decks over and over again, you will essentially walk away with everything you need to build a social media program for your organizations (or your clients’ organizations for that matter).

Pretty solid, right?

As mentioned in my previous post, the plan is to launch Red Chair trainings ahead of schedule in London on December 4th instead of waiting for 2010 as originally planned. It’s a little short notice for a lot of businesses in the London area (not a whole lot of time for decision-makers to a) find out about it and b) make plans to attend), so we’ll play the schedule by ear. If we can fill up the training by then, great. If not, we’ll go back to the original schedule to give the London business community time to fit it into their calendar. No big deal. One thing I should mention about the December 4th event, however: The group discounts are insanely good. Take advantage of them now if you can. (I doubt the group discounts will be as good in 2010.)

If you want the December 4th event to happen, make sure you sign up asap. Beg your boss, call a friend, invite a client or two, whatever works. Definitely take advantage of the 1+1, 1+2 and other discounts. Click here to sign up now, or click on the image below.

Update: After receiving numerous requests for Red Chair London to be held in early 2010 instead of December 2009, we  have decided to move the event to a date that will accommodate everyone. Thanks a lot for your feedback. You guys rock. I look forward to an even bigger Red Chair event in London just in a few months.

Cheers.

UK Businesses: Two events you want to add to your calendar right away

Conferences are great. You learn stuff, you meet people, you go back to work all jazzed up and energized… But let’s be honest: There are some things you just can’t get from a conference, like real training and “how to” knowledge.

From my perspective no matter how much clarity I bring to topics like R.O.I. and social media measurement, building and managing social media programs, brand management in the era of the Social web, etc. at conferences, there is only so much I can teach you in an hour, or thirty minutes (and even 10 minutes, in some cases).

Based on feedback from a pretty big number of conference attendees over the last year, it became clear that something was missing from the picture: Think of it as a gap between the short conference format presentations and high-commitment 3-8-month long consulting engagements.

That’s when my mind flashed back to the courses I used to take from the American Management Association (AMA): Full day trainings on just about anything you might need to increase your value to your organization, from Best Practices in to “how to” courses. The format was simple: One day out of the office, learn everything you need to learn from an expert in the field, come back with copious notes, and get back to work with a valuable new skill.

Bonus: The playbook you bring back with you in the form of notes and course content. That’s yours to keep. Forever.

I loved those things. They made me smarter about the world, better at my job, and payed off in major ways – both for me and my employers… which is probably why they didn’t mind paying for them several times per year.

The single-day AMA trainings I was sent to typically used to cost my employers about $2,000 between registration, airfare, hotel and food (about the cost of going to a conference these days), which I always thought was a little steep. (Multi-day trainings went up from there.) Different value than attending a conference, sure, but in the back of my mind, I always knew the model could be streamlined and the costs made more accessible.

Long story short: It’s obvious that business managers increasingly need real social media operational training, not just neat case studies and presentations about social media tools, so I am launching a series of AMA-style trainings to address that need.  If you’re a business manager or social media practitioner and you need to learn how to better develop, integrate, manage and measure social media programs, this is for you. Though the official launch will take place in early 2010, the very first of these trainings will take place in London on December 4th:

Event Number One: Red Chair London

The course I will teach in London is designed for C-level business executives, Marketing and PR directors, Agency honchos and Social Media managers wishing to deepen their operational understanding of Social Media.

The course is designed for decision-makers and managers looking for real training on how to actually plug social media into their organizations and make it work. Not just from a strategic angle, but also from operational, tactical, and analytical standpoint. (Yes, this is what you guys have been asking for. I am finally bringing it to you.)

The day will be divided into four sessions:

1. 9:00am – 10:30am           Social Media Program Development (Strategy)
2. 10:45am – noon                 Social Media Program Integration (Operations and Planning)
3. 12:45 pm – 2:45pm          Social Media Program Management (Execution)
4. 3:00pm – 4:30pm             Social Media Program Measurement (Data analysis, benchmarking, ROI, etc.)

We will break for morning tea/coffee, lunch, and again for afternoon tea/coffee. (All included with your registration.)

Red Chair London is being kept purposely small (20 seats)  to foster a roundtable-style atmosphere for participants in which all questions will be answered, no matter how technical or complicated. I can handle it.

Registration is only £650 per person (about $999 US), and we have created some pretty awesome group discounts to make it easier for companies to send more than one manager (or client) to the event. (My advice: Pool your resources and buy group tickets instead of just individual ones.)

The best part is that attendees don’t have to fly anywhere or book a hotel. If you work in and around London, you can swing by your office early that morning, spend the rest of the day with us, and go home when we adjourn.  No flying, no hotels, no extra expenses. Simple, painless, convenient.

Although seats should go fast (we’re limited to only 20 seats), I am all about treating my readers well, so here’s a treat for you. (This isn’t on the eventbrite registration page.) The first 6 people to register using the keyword “paddington” will enjoy a special BrandBuilder discount off their ticket price.

Red Chair London will be held at the posh One Alfred Place business Club, which is the perfect venue: centrally located, beautiful meeting rooms, awesome food, providing just the right mix of business focus and comfort. If you aren’t familiar with One Alfred yet, you’re in for a treat.

All that’s left for you to do now is either register or pass the information along to your peers, bosses, colleagues, friends and clients. (Or your marketing, PR and ad agency partners if they don’t seem to know how to take your social media presence to the next level.)

Seriously, if you know someone who should attend, be their hero and send them this post’s hyperlink. Red Chair may not come back to London for quite a while. We have a lot of cities to cover in the next 12 months. Get a jump on the competition.

While we’re still putting the finishing touches on the Red Chair website, you can go register for the London training here.

Event Number 2: Like Minds Immersive

If you can’t make it  to Red Chair London or prefer a lighter version of that type of training, check out December 3rds’ Like Minds Immersive instead. (Hey, not everyone wants or needs to get a Masters in Social Media Operational Management just yet. Baby steps, right?)

Some differences:

1. It’s in Exeter, not London.
2. It’s on Thursday December 3rd (the day before Red Chair London)
3. It only lasts 3 hours
4. It’s a little easier on the finances (Only £200)
5. The content is designed to be more accessible to junior managers and folks not yet fluent in Social Media management than Red Chair London.

Who should attend Like Minds Immersive?

• Devon area business people who can’t make it to London on the 4th.
• Anyone looking to advance their strategic and operational Social Media management skills but isn’t ready for a full day of advanced training yet.
• Managers and business owners looking for structured, step-by-step how-to social media training they will be able to apply to their business right away.

You can register for Like Minds Immersive here.

Now spread the world, ye of internet fame, and help me finally bring real Social Media wisdom, best practices and savoir-faire to the world.

What’s next: Operationalizing Social Media. (Huh? What?)

Speaking at SMiB in London

The current state of conversations in regards to Social Media and Business

Okay, look. I don’t mean to step on anyone’s toes here, but how many times do business managers hungry for real Social Media know-how have to suffer through another “Social Media is what’s next” presentation before someone actually decides to help them answer real questions and solve real problems?

Yes. We get it already. Social Media is the future of now. It’s the answer to all of your old-school marketing problems. The holy grail of business growth. It’s all about people and conversations and relationships, don’t you know. Okay, fine. So now let’s get on with it: How the hell does a company actually put Social Media into play?

Before I go on, if your answer includes any of the following words, I may have to reach across the internets and smack you upside the head: FaceBook, Twitter, Blog, YouTube. (No, no, no and no.) Let’s take a giant step backwards here, because if your idea of developing a Social Media program for a company of any size essentially consists of creating a series of embassies on the most popular social platforms on the web, you haven’t just put the cart ahead of the horse, you’ve pretty much squashed it like a bug.

Let me be as clear as I can be about this: Having a Facebook fan page, a twitter account, a YouTube channel and a blog aren’t forward thinking. This is the default position now. The absolute minimum. If you aren’t already here, you’ve already shown that your business is grossly out of touch with the rest of the world (and dare I say, your market?). And by default, so are you. You’ve fallen behind. And if your company does proudly display those little social badges, if indeed you do have a presence on Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube and the blogosphere, congratulations: You’re doing the same thing everyone else is, which is to say that you are merely here.

Having a Social Media presence nowadays is merely the equivalent of what being listed in the yellow pages meant ten years ago. It simply isn’t enough to be there. And if you believe it is, you have seriously underestimated the situation.

Don’t get me wrong: The vast majority of business managers and C-suite executives still need to be shown that Social Media isn’t just a silly fad. That it is a legitimate business discipline worthy of not only investment but special attention. And perhaps most importantly, that by not understanding that Social Media fits in their business toolkit, they will begin to lose increasingly large chunks of market share (among other things) to their smarter, more strategically-minded competitors as early as H1 of 2010. These are realities and facts that still need to be conveyed to decision-makers in the business world. No question.

But the message has already reached a good number of them. So now what? You’ve convinced them to focus on Social Media, but aside from “get on facebook, twitter, youtube and blogs and start engaging,” you haven’t really given them a whole lot to go on. For the benefit of those folks, why don’t we switch gears and meet them where they want us to: In the real and complex world of “how the hell do we actually build this in our own organization?”

Let’s inject a little structure and order into the Social Media for business discussion:

First, let’s get a couple of things straight about the nature of Social Media when it comes to operations (yes, actually “doing” instead of just talking about how great it is):

1. The idea that Social Media professionals are one-size-fits-all needs to disappear. Understand that despite what you may have been told, Social Media practitioners aren’t all community managers and engagement aficionados. Some are data analysts and others are business strategists, while some specialize in operational management, market research, marketing communications or any number of commonly found business functions. Yes, that’s right: Social Media practitioners probably aren’t social media experts at all. They’re simply professionals who use social media because they understand its value to their job and organization.

The topic of incorporating social media know-how into existing organizational roles (rather than creating new layers of superfluous social media expertise to piggy-back on existing functions)  is one that we will revisit often in the coming months.

So the lesson here is that if your organization seems to a) suffer from a knowledge gap when it comes to Social Media, and b) filling that gap with dozens, if not hundreds of new employees seems daunting, don’t fret: Focus on training and development first and foremost. Don’t worry about trying to hire a bunch of unemployed marketeers with “social media” roles strategically added to their resumes in the last 18 months. That will get you nowhere fast. There’s a better way. (More on that in a minute.)

2. Effective, sustainable, scalable social media programs all have a basic underlying framework (hinted at by the X-Box Live avatars assembled in the image above.) At its simplest, you are looking at four major building blocks and operational elements:

• Social Media program development (a strategy-heavy function)
• Social Media program integration (almost exclusively an ops piece, especially in the enterprise space)
• Social Media program management (the broadest of the three, basically dealing with the execution of the program itself. Some examples of management functions are listed in the image above.)
• Social Media program measurement (an analytical function which requires little explanation given the amount of time I have already devoted to explaining FRY, ROI, and non-financial impact).

When you start actually building the structure of a Social Media program, especially for a large/enterprise space organization, things get complex fast.  But let’s learn how to walk before we start running marathons, okay? Not everyone here is ready to graduate from “isn’t social media just another marketing channel?” so we’ll move slowly out of respect for them.

First things first: Recognizing that in order to build a proper Social Media program within an organization, you must first start with the understanding that these four core elements need to be present in order for things to work properly. Just having a Social Media director and an engagement team won’t cut it. All you’re likely to end up with is a decent management piece with perhaps some light strategy,  completely accidental integration thanks to an IT guy or two, and some made-up measurement based on whatever metrics seem to be popular on the Twitternets that week. Sorry but that’s not good enough.

If a half-assed DIY-style Social Media program appeals to you, your boss and your customers, by all means, have fun with that. But if you are the type of manager or business leader with even an ounce of vision,  professionalism (and sense of self-preservation), you already know that winging it isn’t really going to produce the results you are expected to deliver.

The alternative is to try and do it right: Actually building an effective and sustainable social media program within your organization by integrating social media (embedding it, even) into every department and business function – and doing so with purpose.

That’s all fine and good, but what if you need help? (No worries. I have you covered.):

So where can you turn for help? Unfortunately, that can sometimes be hard to tell. On the one hand, you have the thousands of self-appointed Social Media “gurus” selling everything from rehashed presentation decks and derivative white papers to stale webinars about essentially nothing. (Thanks for charging me $650 for information I could have gotten for free just by reading Mashable for twenty minutes a week. Great.) And don’t even get me started on the hacks who shamelessly steal my work and that of others and try to pass it off as their own. (We know who you are. You aren’t fooling anybody.)

So how do you tell the good ones from the frauds? Experience. Luck. Savvy. In fairness, you could actually get lucky and find one who knows how to do this (with enough money and enough time, who knows,) but the odds aren’t in your favor.

You could also keep hoping that the operational knowledge you seek will emerge from the various social media conferences you keep attending. And to some extent, yes, over time, you will pick up enough nuggets to become dangerous. No question. But it could take a while. Industry conferences have their value, but real operational training isn’t usually on the menu.

And of course, you could partner with a reputable consulting firm whose team of of experts will guide you every step of the way, from choosing the right measurement tools to the way you should develop engagement strategies. If you ‘re ready for that, have found a partner you know you can work with and have the budget for it, it’s go time. But not everyone is ready or able to go that route quite yet.

A fourth option is to let those of us who know how to do this teach you how without asking you to break the bank or further burden your schedule. We aren’t talking about “boot camps” here. (The idea isn’t to throw as much information at you as we can in a few hours and see how much of it you can retain.) By the same token, you don’t want a training programs to be so light that you walk away from it with solid theoretical knowledge but no practical knowledge. There isn’t a whole lot of value to training if you can’t actually put that training to good use.  And to be honest, there’s only so much ground you can cover even with a full day of training. So a group of us put our heads together over the last few months and decided to create something to fill that gap for you and do it right. (Which is to say, do it exceptionally well.) The objective is then to blend training and consulting in a way that makes sense for everyone.

Enter the Red Chair Group:

There will be plenty of time for me to get into what the Red Chair Group is, who will be involved and what types of services we’ll offer in the coming weeks. For now, all I can tell you is that our official launch is scheduled for December of 2009, that our primary objective will be to provide expert level assistance to businesses in need of strategic and operational program management, and that geographically speaking, we will cover a lot of ground. (I haven’t been this excited about a project/venture in a very long time, so it’s pretty hard for me to keep from spilling the beans.)

To that end, one of the first things the Red Chair Group will be launching is a series of executive training programs specifically designed to teach C-suite execs, business managers and agency directors how to develop, integrate, manage and measure social media programs (what we have been talking about in this post). These trainings will be carefully structured day-long events held in major cities around the world. We are currently in talks with partners in 20 key cities to bring Red Chair events to your doorstep.

(I forgot to mention: The whole idea is to bring these training events to you so you don’t have to come to us. This is yet another way we thought we could keep your budget as intact as possible.)

Cities already being added to the 2010 schedule:

• Chicago
• San Francisco
• New York
• Seattle
• Atlanta
• Boston
• Portland
• Philadelphia
• Paris
• Houston
• Sydney
• Hong Kong
• Charlotte
• Orlando
• Toronto
• Brussels
• Tokyo

(If you want us to add your city to the list, let me know. We’ll chat.)

The first Red Chair event will be held in London on December 4th of this year. (Yes, in just a few weeks.) Click here or on the image below to register. For this venue, A+G’s Scott Gould (of #LikeMinds fame) will be joining me to cover some key topics and learning points. To provide the best possible environment for the event, we’ve secured a space at One Alfred Place, perhaps London’s coolest (and my favorite) business club.

Our schedule for the session on December 4th is pretty heavy, so we plan to promptly begin with introductions at 9:00 am and be well into the program by 9:30. To make things easier for everyone, we’ve set up some group and agency discount packages in case some of you want to buy your tickets together. I strongly encourage that companies with an interest in this level of training (especially enterprise class organizations) consider sending more than one individual.

A note about registration: Though typical Red Chair events are designed for up to 40 attendees, our London launch is limited to only 20 attendees. Since our registration process is first come-first served, you’ll want to register quickly to secure a spot. With our schedule the way it is, it could be a while before we’re back in London.

One last thing: Anyone who registers for Red Chair London will automatically be enrolled in our registration referral program. The way it works is simple: Once you’ve registered, you will be given a special discount code to give friends, colleagues and clients. If they in turn register for the event using your code, they will get 10% off their ticket price and you will get $100 back. Nice, huh? Yeah. We thought you’d like that.

I will let you know as soon as the Red Chair website is up. (We’re building it as we speak.) In the meantime, you can access Red Chair London information via EventBrite by clicking here (or the image below).

I look forward to sharing more about how the Red Chair Group’s plans to help companies of all sizes operationalize social media. I am usually a pretty quiet guy (no, really), but I have to admit that I am having a hard time containing my excitement about this: To know that businesses are finally going to be able to cut through the social media noise and BS in part thanks to Red Chair makes me feel pretty good.

2010 is definitely going to be a fun year.

Cheers.

PS: Let’s give credit where credit is due. Special thanks to Kristi Colvin and Doug Cone for the amazing work they are already doing on the Red Chair Group’s branding and website. You guys are already producing outstanding work.

The Art of Living

I keep running into this every few months or so. It always makes me smile because it’s so true:

The master in the art of living makes little distinction
between his work and his play
his labor and his leisure
his mind and his body
his education and his recreation
his love and his religion
He hardly knows which is which…
He simply pursues his vision of excellence
in whatever he does
leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing
To him he is always doing both.

- Zen Buddhist Text

If you’re any good at what you do, and by good, I mean really good, work is play.

Always.

I’m sorry that BrandBuilder blog postings have been a little scarce lately. On the one hand, I have been traveling a lot. But there’s other reason: For the last few months, I have quietly been working on some pretty exciting projects with some of my favorite people on the planet, and I should finally be allowed to start talking about them very soon.

So patience, Grasshopper. We’re almost there.

I could be wrong, but my hunch is that you’re all going to like what I have in store for you guys in 2010 and beyond.