A Better Business Doctrine: Part 2 – Give a shit.

Read Part 1: Assholes are bad for business.

I know what you are going to say: “Olivier, what’s up with the poopy-words all of a sudden? The other week, it was “assholes”. This week, it’s this. Didn’t your mom raise you to be a polite young man?” Answer: She tried. But sometimes, the polite version of a word just doesn’t do the job. Case in point: I could say “care.” Care about your customers. Care about designing the best products. Care about giving it your all every day. Care about taking your business into the stratosphere.

Care.

Except no. This isn’t about caring. This is about giving a shit, and yes, there is a difference.

When the word “care” no longer actually means caring.

“Caring” about something can mean a lot of different things. I can care about matching my shoes to my belt. I can care about the way my rainbow sprinkles touch the peanut butter ice cream but not the ball of Nutella ice cream underneath. I can care about maybe watching Curb Your Enthusiasm tonight, or waiting until tomorrow or next week. I can care about trying to sound pleasant on the phone, or maybe not so much. I can care about something if the conditions are right, and care less about it if circumstances change. Caring lives along a broad scale, as demonstrated by this awesome home-made graph:

But when you give a shit, that isn’t any kind of passive caring. Giving a shit means caring to the max. It means committing heart and soul to caring about something. Giving a shit is to caring what running a full-on sprint is to jogging. It is the storm to the light drizzle, the bazooka to the cork gun and the bear hug to the friendly nod. Giving a shit means you won’t sleep tonight if you screwed it up. It means you are going to take it all the way to the line. It means you are going to excel rather than settle for average… or mediocre. Giving a shit means you are driven by something more than a paycheck. It means you are driven by passion. And that, boys and girls, is some mighty strong secret sauce. Nothing can crush that. Nothing can get in its way.

When I walk into a store and talk to one of the salespeople there, I don’t want them to “care.” I want them to give a shit. The chef in the kitchen, I don’t just want him to “care”. The customer service guy on the phone, “care” is just the price of entry. You want to make your company kick ass? You have to take it a step further. That politician I just voted for? Guess what: He needs to do more than just “care.” The surgeon operating on my kids, yeah, her too, what I want her to do is actually give a shit.

When you give a shit, excuses don’t work anymore. Falling short (failing) becomes less of an option, if at all. Giving a shit means you’re invested, and that is when I know you are bringing your A-game. You aren’t just there for a paycheck, the dental plan or the free tickets to Wally World every summer. You are there because you want to be. Because you give a shit.

Look, everyone acts like they care when you interview them. “Oh yes, Mr. Jones, I really want to work here!” Right. In six months, that new hire will be spending half his day complaining to their office-mates about you, about pesky customers and their temperamental complaints, about having to work late, and about how poorly he gets paid. When you walk by his desk, you won’t even catch a glimpse of the Facebook tab or the game of computer solitaire you just interrupted. That’s what “care” will get you. And you know what? You’ll be to blame. Here’s why: Because your company culture made them that way.

When I call a company’s phone number and get an automated message telling me “… we care about your call,” what that company has just told me it doesn’t give a shit. And since companies don’t think – people do, namely executives making decisions (like having a computer answer my call instead of a human being), I know that this wasn’t an oversight. Someone made a deliberate decision to communicate to me and everyone else who calls them that the people in charge of building the company’s internal culture don’t give a shit. Way to get things off on the right foot.

The importance of creating “I give a shit” cultures.

None of this is rocket science. If you hire people who aren’t passionate about what you do, about what your company is about, or even people who don’t particularly care about their profession save getting a big fat check at the end of the week, you are going to create a culture of mediocrity. If instead you hire people who love your company, who were fans long before the job ever opened up, you will get a completely different result. Likewise, if you hire someone who is passionate about what they do, they will probably not disappoint.

A few years ago, one of my then employees admitted to me (when her bonus didn’t seem as guaranteed as she would have liked it to be) that she was considering transferring to HR. Puzzled by that admission, I asked her to elaborate. She told me “they just make straight salary over there.” I studied her for a moment, and asked her “Don’t you want to do this? If HR is something you’re interested in, why are you here?” She sighed and told me “I don’t really care what I do. I just want a steady paycheck.”

This is someone whom, if asked, would have told the CEO that she cared about her job, that she was passionate about it, that she loved it. That’s the average value of “care.”

Nb: I made sure my team hit its targets that month and the one after that, and she did, in fact, hit her bonus.

People like this are everywhere. It isn’t that they are necessarily lazy. Some are, but some are just apathetic. Doing what they do is a job. A paycheck. Nothing more. They spend their day watching the clock. They are out the door as soon as their work day is over and not a minute more. This is not the kind of employee you want. I don’t care if you are managing a hospital, a restaurant or a global brand, people like this are poison. They are engines of mediocrity, lackluster service, and lousy customer experiences. And god forbid they should become managers, or worse yet, SVPs or C-suite executives.

Imagine a CEO who doesn’t give a shit, for example. Or one who at least gives the impression, through their actions or words, that they perhaps don’t give a shit? What would that look like? What would be the impact of that type of “leadership” on the entire organization? On the brand’s reputation? On decisions being made up and down the corporate ladder inside its four walls? What kinds of ripples would this create?

Ken Lay of Enron

BP's Tony "I'd like my life back" Hayward

Now imagine a CEO who does give a shit. What would that look like? What kind of company culture would that generate? What kind of profitability and customer experience excellence would that drive?

Tony Hsieh of Zappos

Sir Richard Branson, of all things Virgin

Company cultures don’t grow from a random churn of interactions. They are engineered and designed from the inside out, deliberately, by people who give a shit. Or by people who don’t. The difference in outcomes between the two is typically fairly spectacular. We have all seen amazing companies falter under the direction of this CEO or that, solely based on their degree of giving a shit.

Why am I emphasizing that company cultures are engineered? Three reasons:

1. People who give a shit tend to hire people who also give a shit, and so on. Companies like this tend to hire carefully because they understand the importance of only hiring what you might call kindred spirits. Fans. Like-minds. They aren’t hiring as much as letting the right people into their little tribe of believers. When your entire company gives a shit, customers notice and become loyal. Why? Because they like that you give a shit, and they respect that. Besides, since you give a shit, you treat them well, which is more than anyone can say about companies that don’t give a shit about either their employees or their customers.

2. When customers like you (see 1. above), they tend to do a number of things: a) They love doing business with you, b) they do business with you as long as you keep giving a shit (which could be their own lives), and c) they recommend you to everyone they know, which in turn helps drive your business.

3. One CEO can make or break a company. Just one. Remember what happened to Apple when Steve Jobs left, back in the day? Should I mention some of Home Depot’s ups and downs? Show me a company whose CEO gives a shit, and I will show you a company about to bloom like a flower in sunlight. Show me a company whose CEO doesn’t, and I will show you a company about to race headlong into a very rough patch.

More than anything, customers instinctively know that they will eventually get screwed by someone who doesn’t really give a shit. They also instinctively know they will never get screwed by someone who does. This is important.

Even if giving a shit didn’t generate better design departments, better products, better service, better customer relations and generally healthier businesses, this point alone should catch the attention of CEOs, boards or directors, and investors alike: Consumer perceptions, trust, loyalty, these things matter in the mid-to-long term. Heck, they matter today. This very minute. Every single consumer making a purchasing decision right now is weighing one company against another. One will win. The others will lose. How are you feeling about your chances?

Leadership isn’t all about skills and experience. It’s also about attitude. And giving a shit, boys and girls, is a pretty important component of the sort of attitude we are talking about today.

The reciprocal effect of giving a shit.

Hiring people who give a shit, but not those who don't.

The above diagram illustrates the process of engineering loyalty and positive WOM (word of mouth) by sticking to a no asshole policy (see Part 1) and making sure you hire people who actually give a shit.

Note the jokers in red ink who didn’t really give a shit and are therefore not hired. The fact that they are not invited to spread their apathy and inevitable passive aggressive disdain to their coworkers and customers like a CSTD (Customer Service Transmitted Disease) ensures that your company maintains its edge.

Now let’s look at another kind of organization – one which doesn’t discriminate quite so much:

Hiring people who give a shit, and those who don't.

Note how in this alternate version, a company having allowed such individuals to breach its inner sanctum begin to spread mediocrity across their entire business, and how that trickles down into customer experiences and perceptions.

In short, giving a shit is contagious. From the CEO on down to everyone in the company and outwardly to customers. Positive attitudes and perceptions spread virally through recommendations, discussions and general perception. In the same way, not giving a shit is contagious as well, and it too spreads like a virus across departments, front-line employees, customers, and to their social and professional networks.

This is how reputations are both made and unmade, depending on what kind of culture you decide to engineer.

What are some of the obvious symptoms that a company doesn’t give a shit?

This is important, because these are common red flags. When consumers spot any of these (or several,) they know that perhaps your company doesn’t really care a whole lot about you, your loyalty, or your affection for their products or brands.

1. Customer service is outsourced. (Because nothing says “We care” like handing you off to total strangers working under contract for less than minimum wage.)

2. The recording says “your call is important to us…” which is kind of funny coming from a recording.

3. The company’s employees look at the clock more than they look at you.

4. The CEO, in the middle of a crisis, says things like “I’d like my life back.”

5. Outsourced social media accounts, especially when it comes to customer service functions.

6. When the product fails, technicians will be happy to “look at it,” and repair it for about 70% or more of the value of the product in about 6-12 weeks. This is usually followed by “you could just buy another one” type of “caring” advice.

7. False or misleading advertising.

8. The company spams your inbox, twitter feed, phone, or otherwise valuable channel.

9. The average customer has no idea who the CEO of the company is. Until they see him or her on TV, defending pretty bad decisions.

10. After several interactions with company employees or management, you begin to suspect that everyone who works there might actually be some kind of asshole.

11. Poor product design, characterized by lousy user UI/UX.

12. The manager, in an empty store or restaurant, still manages to blow off his only customers… assuming he is even there.

13. The company sells your personal information to third parties.

14. The CEO’s Twitter account, blog and/or Facebook page – all proof that he “cares,” wants to “engage” customers and feels that social media is “important” – are all managed and fed by a proxy, (or ghost writer) preferably working for an outside firm or agency. (Sorry Mr. Pandit, but you have been advised improperly on this one.)

15. More excuses than solutions, followed by buzzwords and lip service.

16. The CEO spends more time on the golf course than he does listening to customers.

And there you have it.

Three questions.

So the three questions you have to ask yourself are these:

1. What kind of company culture are my customers experiencing whenever they interact with one of my employees, colleagues, bosses, products and services? The kind that gives a shit, or the kind that clearly doesn’t?

2. What kind of company culture should I be building?

3. Once I cast aside the propaganda, tag lines, mission statements and sycophantic reports, what kind of company culture am I really building?

Be honest.  Are you setting the right example? Are you hiring the right people? Are you teaching them to give a shit? Are you rewarding them accordingly?

… Or are you banking on a mission statement to communicate to your employees that they should “care”?

Giving a shit is hard. So is kicking ass. So what?

Yeah, giving a shit is hard. It’s expensive too. It requires all sorts of investments: Financial, cultural, temporal, even emotional. (Perhaps especially the latter.) Giving a shit means that your business isn’t just about balance sheets and incremental basis points of change. It’s about creating something special for and with your customers. It’s about building the foundations of a lovebrand – like Apple, Harley Davidson, Virgin Airlines and BMW. It’s about investing in market leadership, in customer loyalty and evangelism, in your own reputation, and in the strength of your own brand. In short, it means investing in long term success, in stability in tough economic time, and in a demand vs. supply ratio that will always be in your favor. Giving a shit is an investment, yes, and not one that might immediately make sense to financial analysts, but one that pays off every time. It is the genesis of everything that ultimately makes a business successful: Professionalism. The endless pursuit of quality, of great design, of remarkable user/customer experiences.

The moment you lose that, the moment you start giving a shit a little bit less, the moment you start cutting corners, that’s when you start to screw up. When you lose that competitive edge. When you start sinking into the fat middle with everyone else. That’s when you start to lose. Before you know it, you’re stuck picking between BOGO pitches and worrying about price wars with foreign imports. I’ve worked with companies like this. You don’t want to go there, trust me. It’s ugly. It’s stressful. You wake up one morning and realize that even if you tried to give a shit anymore, you couldn’t. There wouldn’t be enough time. It wouldn’t make a difference. It might even get you fired. Everything you’ve worked for all your life is hanging on the edge, and it’s a long, hard road back too the top. Most companies never make it back. I can tell you that it’s a lot easier to never fall than to have to climb back up again, but either way, it’s a daily battle.

In fact, giving a shit is so hard that very few companies do anymore. It isn’t how the game is played any longer. “The customer is always right” is a relic of the past, isn’t it?

Or is it?

Have you listened to what people are saying about your company on Twitter and Facebook lately? Do you know what they are saying about your competitors? In a year or two, do you think companies whose leaders don’t give a shit are going to be able to compete against companies whose leaders do? If you don’t see giving a shit as a competitive advantage yet, as a differentiator, even as a normalizing agent, then at the very least see it as a matter of survival. The age of the “I don’t give a shit” CEO is done. Game over.

Time to make a change or two?

*          *          *

Since it’s June, here are this month’s three quick little announcements:

One – If you haven’t read “Social Media ROI: Managing and measuring social media efforts in your organization” yet, you will find 300 pages of insights with which to complement this article. It won’t answer all of your questions, but it will answer many of them. If anything, the book is a pretty solid reference guide for anyone responsible for a social media program or campaign. It also makes a great gift to your boss if you want him or her to finally understand how this social media stuff works for companies.

You can sample a free chapter and find out where to buy the book by checking out www.smroi.net.

Two – If you, your agency or your client plan on attending the Cannes Lionsfrom June 19-25, I am planning something a little… “unofficial” during the festival. If you are interested in being part of it, let me know.

You can send me an email, a note via LinkedIn, a Twitter DM, or a facebook message if you want to find out more. (The right hand side of the screen should provide you with my contact information.)

Three – If the book isn’t enough and you can’t make it to Cannes later this month, you can sign up for a half day of workshops in Antwerp (Belgium) on 30 June. (Right after the Lions.) The 5 one-hour sessions will begin with an executive briefing on social media strategy and integration, followed by a best practices session on building a social media-ready marketing program, followed by a PR-friendly session on digital brand management, digital reputation management and real-time crisis management, followed by a session on social media and business measurement (half R.O.I., half not R.O.I.). We will cap off the afternoon with a full hour of open Q&A. As much as like rushing through questions in 5-10 minutes at the end of a presentation, wouldn’t it be nice to devote an entire hour to an audience’s questions? Of course it would. We’re going to give it a try. Find out more program details here. Think of it as a miniRed Chair.

The cool thing about this structure is that you are free to attend the sessions that are of interest to you, and go check your emails or make a few phone if one or two of the sessions aren’t as important. The price is the same whether you attend one or all five, and we will have a 15 minute break between each one.

The afternoon of workshops is part of Social Media Day Antwerp (the Belgian arm of Mashable’s global Social Media Day event), and I can’t help but notice that the price of tickets is ridiculously low for what is being offered. Anyone can afford to come, which is a rare thing these days. (Big props to the organizers for making the event so accessible.)

The event is divided into 2 parts: The workshop in the afternoon, and the big Belgian style party in the evening. You can register for one or both (do both).

Register here: Social Media Day – Antwerp

My advice: Sign up while there are still seats available, and before #smdaybe organizers realize they forgot to add a zero at the end of the ticket prices. 

Cheers,

Olivier.

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Care or die: Because customer loyalty isn’t really rocket science.

If you don’t care about your customers (or as Gary Vaynerchuck would say, “if you don’t give a f*ck about your customers,”) you are wasting your time with social media.

Your customers aren’t wallet with legs. They are people, and here is the thing about people: People prefer to do business with people, companies and brands they like; people, companies and brands that make them feel good; people, companies and brands they trust; people, companies and brands they feel a connection with.

I don’t care how good your content is and how many people visit your site. Keep telling me how many fans and followers you have, and how many unique visitors your website gets. That all sounds great, and yeah, it looks pretty swell on paper. But the reality of your situation is this: If you don’t care about your customers, they will sense it, and they will return your apathy.

Do you know how to inspire loyalty in your customers? I’ll tell you: It isn’t by training them to expect 20% off or by sending them coupons in the mail. It isn’t by sending them rebate checks or making every tenth drink free. You inspire loyalty in your customers by demonstrating your loyalty towards your customers. That’s right: You have to give before you can receive. You, as a company, have to set the tone, and the only way to do that is to give a shit.

I walked into a Staples yesterday to buy a cartridge of ink toner. The plan: $22. I also walked out with an i-Omega portable hard drive and a few 4GB thumb drives for Red Chair. The outcome: $100+. You know how that happened? Simple: From the moment I walked into that store, its employees greeted me with smiles and treated me like they would a friend. They didn’t try to sell me anything, they didn’t push me towards any upgrades, and none of it felt contrived. They just seemed to care. Not only did the store increase its yield in this instance (and not by a mere 10-20%), it also ensured that next time I need something for the office, I will shop there instead of online or across the street at one of their competitors’ locations.

Staples loyalty verdict: Very high.

Compare that with my latest experiences at Bloom (a grocery store), where none of the people who work there even bother to make eye contact with me.

Bloom loyalty verdict: You must be joking.

Social media is not just another set of marketing channels for companies to push content and messaging. Sure, you can use it as a marketing channel (in moderation) but the power of the space is to scale those 1-1 interactions customers have around brands and the experiences they foster. Companies whose leaders and employees care tend to shine in Social Media. Companies whose employees and managers don’t care, even when they produce decent content, go nowhere in the space.

As a quick illustration of of what I mean, let us turn to Twitter: The marketing world’s 140-character “what the hell are we supposed to do with this channel” puzzle du jour.

I am going to show you two examples now. One of a beverage company that cares about its customers, and one of a beverage company that cares mostly about itself… and even talks to itself, though mostly to pat itself on the back for being like, awesome. You decide which is which.

Incidentally, it might be worth noting that one of these two companies has kind of struggled to acquire its 46,000 followers on Twitter over the last 2 years or so. The other has well over a million. Guess which is which. (Hint as to why: One focuses on customers and the other focuses on itself.)

Also, in case it wasn’t obvious, nothing says “I don’t really give a shit about you but heck, maybe you’ll buy something anyway” like an auto DM on Twitter. Don’t know what I am talking about? Here are some examples:

My favorite thing about those automated “hi, I really care” little nuggets of gold is the fact that so many of them get cut short: Look at the @Retail_City and @jobpsalms auto-DMs above. Okay, Job. I’ll “try to keep it REAL” if you d…

Way to make a good first impression in a SOCIAL medium. As executives, employees, brand ambassadors and representatives of your respective companies, do you walk around with a recording of yourself at parties and industry events? When someone shakes your hand, do you step aside so an assistant can hand them your card and deliver a 140-character sales pitch? When a client or customer walks up to you and says “hey, I’m glad I ran into you. I have a problem with the thing I bought from you,” do you respond by handing them a brochure and walking away? Of course not. So why is it that so many companies think that this is acceptable behavior in the social media space?

Give a shit. It really isn’t that complicated. If you just do that, if you start there, everything will fall into place. If you don’t give a shit, and you show it by monologuing with “content” and selling all day, guess what: You’ve already lost to the guy in your industry who takes the time to actually shake hands, and makes time for real dialog. It was always this way, but the integration of social media into the business world has amplified the effect: If as a company, you demonstrate daily that don’t give a shit about your customers, they will return the favor by not giving a shit about you. The implications are simple: The more customers care about you, the more likely it is that you will have a good quarter. The less they care about you, the more likely it is that you will have a lousy quarter. Some things, you can’t automate or outsource. Your relationship with customers is one of them. That applies to the web as well as the “in store” experience.

So here’s a thought: Instead of spending so much time working on your “content strategy,” your “digital strategy” and your “social media strategy,” why don’t you focus on your “we give a shit” strategy? Try that for a month and see what happens. Trust me, the “content,” “digital” and “social media” will take care of themselves. You will barely be able to keep up – and that will be a good thing.

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The Psychology of Failure – Part 3: The Success Fallacy

We have heard it a thousand times in meetings, political speeches, at conferences and corporate feel-good events: “Failure is not an option.” Rah-rah!

It’s a lie. Don’t believe a word of it. Failure is always an option. In fact, statistically speaking, it is the most likely option. (Probably more so if you have to remind people that it shouldn’t be.)

Believe me, I know a thing or two about failure: The failure to get an A+ on every test and in every class during my school years. The failure to score goal after goal for my team. The failure to break school records. The failure to convince Rachel Gray to go out with me in eleventh grade, or for that matter, the failure to get up the nerve to even ask her. The failure to completely master a generic American accent before I was 18. The failure to win first prize at competition after competition where I came in second or third. The failure to finish my first Ironman in under 12 hours. Professionally, I have spent the last 16 years dealing with failure as well, occasionally my own and others’. I deal with it on a daily basis. In fact, one could argue that dealing with failure is pretty much all we do:

My phone battery’s failure to give me 24 hours of juice, for example, or my Volkswagen Passat’s failure to keep rain out when its little drainage tubes get plugged with spontaneous generations of microscopic dust. The failure of Wall Street banks to remain solvent in 2008, and the US government’s failure to prevent things from getting so bad in the first place. BP’s failure to prevent one of the world’s most devastating ecological disasters, then its failure to both stop its catastrophic oil leak for months, then clean up its mess before it destroyed vast ecosystems. The failure of civility and citizenship several months ago, when Muslims looking to build a place of worship near Wall Street found out that not only did many Americans no longer care to see the distinction between “Muslim” and “Islamic Terrorist,” but also decided that Constitutional First Amendment rights no longer applied to foreigners and non-Christians. President Obama’s failure to sell to a hefty portion of Americans that something as basic as affordable and reliable healthcare is a better option than the completely ineffective “insurance” based model that barely-covered Americans overpaid for until now.

Failure is always an option, and it bears embracing that fact. Unless you work your ass off and get lucky, failure may even be your only option. What then? How will you react? How will you adapt? How will you bounce back?

The spray valve faucet story. (Short version.)

Note: If you don’t have time, skip ahead to the next section. No, really. This story adds very little to this post. It’s a personal story thrown in for the fans. you won’t miss anything if you skip it.

Years ago, I helped develop the world’s first effective water conserving spray valve for commercial kitchens. I was working for a faucet company whose luster had faded a bit over the years, and I had been hired to help restore it. It was clear from the start that “marketing” wasn’t the problem. The problem was this: Chinese manufacturers had copied our products so well that their imports were almost as good, and their prices were significantly better than ours. They were eroding our market share faster than a hurricane chews up a Florida sand bar.

We were faced with a choice: Lower our prices and become a commodity product, or improve our product’s value and continue to be the category’s premium product. Indecision for well over a decade had left the company somewhere in a falsely safe middle. We decided to go with the latter option: Improve value. First, the company created a commodity line of products to compete against the cheap imports and create a clear separation between commodity (throw-away) products and the high-end stuff that would last the life of the restaurant. Then we set our attention on the “premium” products themselves. How could we further distance their quality and performance from the cheap stuff? Almost overnight, I went from being a marketing guy to a weird blend of product designer, field anthropologist, and community listening post.

I went out to restaurant kitchens and watched how dish-rinsing spray valve were being used. I watched how they were being abused. I watched how they were being installed and repaired. I analyzed how spray valves were being specified, how they were being bought, and how resellers made money on their replacement parts. I observed. I listened. I asked questions. I took notes. I learned. Soon enough, the company’s design engineers and I started working on ideas. The project took on epic proportions. We were going to completely re-invent the category from the ground up. And over the course of a year, we that is precisely what we did.

The first thing we did was reduce the flow of water to about 1/3 of what it used to be while actually increasing rinsing performance. The impact of this particular focus for a restaurant was that they would save a significant amount of water and electricity (that water had to be heated), which meant considerable savings in utility costs over time. In fact, the valve paid for itself in under a month just in utility costs alone. (We did cost analysis studies and planned to use them in our marketing, the numbers were so good.) The impact of this feature on a larger scale was what made me truly proud: Millions of gallons of water could be saved every day in California alone. A significant amount of the energy demand of that state would also be impacted, either lowering pollution or freeing that energy to be used elsewhere on the grid (hello Nevada).

Multiply the water conservation and energy conservation impact of this product by introducing it across the United States, and it could have resulted in a pretty incredible story of how industrial ingenuity not only made restaurants kitchens more efficient and turned a fading brand back into an industry leader, but actually helped preserve the environment as well.

This wasn’t entirely an environmentally motivated project. Around that time, California had enacted strict water conservation standards for such spray valves, and the federal government was moving towards requiring these standards across all 50 states. At the time, none of our competitors had a spray valve that actually worked in water conservation mode: Sure, they could meet the flow restriction requirements, but they took 3x longer to rinse a plate than before. (Kind of like new toilets that don’t quite… you know… work the first time.) We were the only ones with a functioning low-flow spray valve that truly worked. In fact, it worked better than the normal flow sprays.

Imagine being the company in your industry that has the best product on the market. The one that cracked the code first, a full year ahead of everyone else: The battery manufacturer with the first 48-hour smart phone battery. The car company with the first $15,000 family vehicle capable of going 1,200 miles at 65mph on a single charge. That’s what we had with this spray valve.

As a bonus, we made it completely anti-bacterial. We equipped it with a built-in back-flow preventer (to stop dirty water from getting sucked into the pipes). We made it mostly out of recyclable materials. It didn’t conduct heat like its predecessors, which meant no more burns for its operators. It didn’t crack or break on impact – you could drive over it with a truck, and it simply popped back into shape. Because it was made mostly of soft materials, it could not dent pots or crack dishes. It was ergonomic and pretty fly looking. It was so cool looking that it legitimately opened up high-end residential kitchen markets to the company for the first time. And here’s the kicker: It was cheaper to manufacture than the original. This meant two things: a) The company would save money every time they manufactured this product instead of its current one, and b) those manufacturing jobs would get to stay in the US where they belonged.

So let’s recap: We built the fastest, strongest, most ergonomic, coolest looking spray valve in the world. We built into it every functional feature our market asked for. We created for it accessories and repair kits that brought all of our distributors and retailers onboard. We made it so easy to install and work on that every plumber and spec engineer we talked to in the US was enthusiastic about it. It worked better than anything on the market, was cheaper to manufacture than our existing one, exceeded government requirements, and was already creating quite a buzz months before we introduced it to the world. Its impact on the environment alone would have earned it story after story, perhaps even a few honorable mentions in product design reviews here and there. Oh, and the patents were solid, meaning the product would be difficult to copy or emulate by our pesky competitors.

We had a win on our hands. I was psyched. We tested the things for over 8 months, and they were holding up the way we thought they would.

But the product never went to market. At the eleventh hour, after almost two years of work, just weeks from beginning production, the company’s CEO decided to kill the project. We never knew why. “I just don’t like it,” was the only answer he gave us. He said it felt flimsy to him. He wanted it made out of brass. He wanted it to be heavy and strong. What we had built just wasn’t what his company was known for. In spite of all of our research, all of our testing, all of the evidence to the contrary that we had painstakingly accumulated, he didn’t think the market would go for it. He got cold feet. He killed the project.

It was one of those times when I genuinely thought I was on candid camera.

We had the holy grail of our industry: The self-sealing undersea oil pipe. The Eurostar rail system that operates in the snow. The self-correcting accelerator in a Toyota. The variable seating device that doesn’t prompt Southwest Airlines to boot Kevin Smith off one of their planes. That’s what we had, and still we failed. I failed. Because I assumed that basic common sense would prevail. I assumed that the CEO of a company, given a sure win of epic proportions, a carefully engineered once-in-a-lifetime chance to not only regain its place in the market but capture significant parts of it that it had never held, would seize on that moment and run with it. I assumed that objections like this might have surfaced earlier in the process.

What I failed to anticipate was that logic, reason, business sense and even a hint of the entrepreneurial spirit might not always prevail in the face of an unknown quantity.

If this story makes no sense to you, don’t worry, you aren’t alone. It took me years to come to terms with it. My design engineers quit the company almost immediately after the project was tabled. They were furious that their work – truly the chef d’oeuvre of their careers, a slam dunk – could be so easily cast aside against all logic and good sense. Me, I wasn’t furious. I was devastated. Crushed. Obliterated.

Imagine Steve Jobs canning iPod a month before going into mass production claiming that “Apple makes computers, not media players.” Imagine Starbucks’ CEO deciding not to expand, claiming that “takeaway coffee cheapens the coffee drinkers’ experience.” I had just handed Pfizer the cure for cancer, and they had tossed it away saying “we’re in the erection business, not the cancer-curing business.” It was madness. I couldn’t fathom it. To this day, I shake my head every time I think about it.

I held on for a few more months, my brilliant design team gone, my other product improvement projects (equally ambitious) surely destined for the same fate, and slipped into a very well concealed state of depression. Though I resented the CEO for his bizarre decision, I didn’t blame him. Somewhere inside, I knew that the fault was my own: I had failed to spot clear signs that he might feel threatened by the project’s success, that change on the whole made him uncomfortable, that he perhaps cared more about the aura of success within his familiar, comfortable world than driving major market shifts and exploring dangerous new horizons. More than anything, I had failed to recognize that the job I had been hired to do was someone else’s idea of where the company should go, not his. I should have seen the signs. In hindsight, they were obvious. I should have turned down the job to begin with. Failure was always the option. The only option. Why? Because a strong aversion to change had been engineered into the company culture for decades. In spite of all the “failure is not an option” rhetoric that made its way into quarterly meetings, it was, in fact the most likely option of all. In my youthful exuberance and eagerness to accomplish the impossible, I thought I could fix it, but I couldn’t.

I failed.

Failure isn’t what you think.

“The country is full of good coaches. What it takes to win is a bunch of interested players.”
-Don Coryell, ex-San Diego Chargers Coach

When I watch Lindsey Lohan’s battle with drug abuse and the legal system, I don’t see a troubled Hollywood starlet. I see a human being with the same degree of dysfunction in her life (albeit expressed differently) that I see in some business professionals: Though hers is focused on partying and substance abuse, then amplified by the media, it is really not that different from the mechanism that causes millions of people outside of Hollywood to fail on a daily basis as well.

I could tell you that fear is at the root of failure. The fear of failure itself, the fear of being laughed at, the fear of being fired, the fear of being punished, the fear of not making VP, the fear of not being the smartest guy in the room, the fear of being alone… Fear is an easy culprit, and I can make a solid case against it in the court of personal opinion. But fear is only part of the problem. There is another culprit at work here, and its name is denial.

Not wanting to admit that you are wrong, not wanting to admit that your company’s 2% YoY growth is the embodiment of mediocrity, not questioning the validity of the curious metrics that your agency gauge success with even though you that little voice in your head tells you that you should, not admitting that the economy isn’t the real reason why business is bad this year, sticking to the same marketing tactics year after year even if they hardly yield any results: This is denial, and denial, while perhaps not the progenitor of failure, is at the very least its cradle.

Failure also isn’t just an option; it is a choice. It lives in the decision to do nothing, in the decision to wait and see, in the decision to repeat the same mistake over and over again because that is easier than making a change, and in the decision to lie down rather than fight for victory at all cost.

“Show me a guy who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you a guy you can beat every time.”
-Lou Brock

Failure is always an option. Ask every losing team coming out of the World Cup, the Superbowl, the World Series, the Stanley Cup how much of an option it turned out to be. Ask every tennis player but two as they come out of Wimbledon or Roland Garros. Stand at the finish line of the Tour de France in Paris every year, and ask every rider there but one, whether or not failure was indeed an option. Ask the Xi-Xia when Genghis Khan showed up at their doorstep. Ask the German war machine in 1945. Ask Enron, Circuit City and Blockbuster. Ask BP. Ask the brands still struggling to understand how to incorporate social media into their activities, who in spite of enormous budgets spent with agencies and consultants in the last year, are still no closer to seeing any concrete results.

There is a point where someone like Lindsay Lohan has to stop, look in the mirror, say “this is stupid,” and go where Robert Downey Junior went with his life and career: Stop making excuses for yourself, stop living in denial, stop paying lip service to ridiculous rhetoric and clichés like “failure is not an option,” and stop playing at finding solutions. Instead look reality in the eye every morning, stop playing games, get yourself ready for battle, and fight for every inch of win, especially on days when you don’t feel like it.

Why do you think most people don’t make it in their careers? Is it for lack of talent? Is it for lack of opportunity? No. It is for lack of endurance in fighting failure. Sooner or later, they give up. They settle. They stop fighting.

“Besides pride, loyalty, discipline, heart, and mind, confidence is the key to all the locks.”
-Joe Paterno

Success, just like failure, is a choice we make daily, at every moment: Should I lie down and die today, or should I make a stand and fight? Should I crack open that bottle of gin, or go for a run and stick to water instead? Should I work on my 3-point shot another hour, or go hang out with my friends because that would be more fun? Should I spend my day trying to figure out how to make this program kick ass, or should I just let my staff find random social media metrics to report on to buy us an extra couple of months? Should I write about the truth today, or feed my readers 5 carefully crafted paragraphs of easily digestible, SEO-friendly bullshit? Should I give the appearance of winning today instead of working on winning for real in five years?

Here’s the reality of failure: It is the result of taking the easy way out, of cutting corners, of living in denial. Failure is the story born out of excuses. Humans are naturally flawed, weak, petty and lazy. If we weren’t, “discipline” wouldn’t need to be a virtue. The odds are stacked against us: Out of tens of thousands of hopefuls, only a few actors ever become movie stars. Out of hundreds of thousands of managers in corporate jobs, only a few ever become CEOs. Out of millions of young athletes, only a few ever get to win Olympic gold, Superbowl rings, or whatever prize is their sport of choice’s holy grail. Failure is always, always, always the default option. It is what happens of you don’t study, if you don’t run the ball, if you don’t take out that bunker, if you don’t make sure that your methodology is sound. It is what happens when you settle for the comfort of false security.

Failure is all around us. It is a virus we are all infected with. It eats at us a little every day until eventually, it kills us: Your health can fail you, your courage, your will, your spirit, your liver and eventually your heart. All things end in failure, and failure ends all things: No winning streak can last forever. The dinosaurs had their time. So did the steam engine, the telegraph and the cassette tape. Someday, long after humanity has moved on, even our sun will fail. Wait long enough, and failure is mathematically inevitable. But you can win for a time – Not only win, but win with style and panache. If you want to. If you care to. If you are willing to work for it and fight against your own flawed nature.

By recognizing this, by accepting the nature of failure, embracing it even, you can give yourself a gift: That “this is stupid” moment of clarity I mentioned above. That moment when you decide to stop living in denial, pretending that your life, your career, your project, your campaign, your company are doing just fine. That moment when your social media director’s latest diversionary metrics and subsequent daily dose of spin stop making sense. That moment when you realize that your agency hasn’t been selling you “social” at all – that instead, they have been selling you the same marketing campaigns that weren’t working ten years ago, only repackaged to include Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. That moment when you might even realize that you would much rather be playing golf all day than playing at being the CEO of the company daddy built.

Once you realize that failure is the most likely option of the course you are currently on, you can start to look for ways of avoiding it. You can start to look for an edge, for a way to beat the odds, for a way to actually engineer success. Not mediocrity dressed up as success, mind you. Not another brilliant version of “the emperor’s new clothes” to add to your portfolio. Not spin. A real win, with real metrics to back it up, not just the convenient ones. Real metrics like the fastest time at the finish, the most touchdowns, the most ground covered, the most products sold, the highest revenue increase in the history of the company, the highest jumps in customer loyalty, customer satisfaction (even love) and word-of-mouth recommendations. The kind of win supported by actual business performance rather than your PR department.

If your goal should be 20% YoY growth and your company is crawling along at 2%, guess what: That positive arc in your trending is still failure, no matter how it looks come review time. Your competitor beating you on price is actually your company losing on value. Price has nothing to do with it. The guy who sold you on the notion that changing your logo would refresh your “brand” should have instead suggested you refresh your relationship with customers. (Gap, I am talking to you.) The reason why you only got a 3% raise this past year while your insurance premiums went up 30% wasn’t because the economy is bad, no matter what you tell yourself and no matter how much you want to believe your boss.

The truth is that failure lives in the little lies we tell ourselves to feel better. It lives in every little compromise we make in the face of what we know is the right path. It lives in every choice to promote a sycophantic weasel rather than a true champion.  Simply put: A man who cannot face the truth of his condition cannot but fail. By association, a company whose leaders cannot face the truth of their condition cannot succeed either.

Failure and the Social Media tsunami of incompetence.

If you have ever wondered why I put so much emphasis on measurement, it is because properly measuring performance is the cure for bullshit. It’s that simple: As a triathlete, I can’t cheat the clock. As a military officer, I couldn’t cheat my unit’s  tactical situation. As a business manager, I can’t cheat my P&L. Well… not without cheating. Without lying. Without putting a spin on failure and making it sound like success. What Enron did with its books, many Social Media “professionals” are doing with their reporting, and no one seems particularly eager to call them out on it. Unfortunately, denial and lies hold us back. All of us. They hurt and weaken us as a community, as an economy, as a culture, even as a species. They too easily creep into our daily diet. They too quickly become the norm, and sooner or later, the house of cards collapses. The bubble bursts. And those who trusted in the promise of success are the ones left holding the bag.

When it is easier to be in denial than to face the truth, to spin failure into success, and when we collectively turn bullshit into an industry norm, we all pay the price. All of us.

How much money is being spent on social media integration and “strategy” right now?  How many social media “experts” advise companies today? How many big name agencies, marketing firms and consulting groups are billing major brands for their expertise?

Yet with so much “knowledge” and “insight” and “expertise,” how many major brands “do” Social well? A month ago, McDonald’s Social Media director confused foot traffic with Foursquare check-ins. Last week, I heard a member of Pepsi’s Social Media team claim to have seen significant lift in sales revenue from Social Media, yet strangely refused to provide proof. Earlier this year, global giant BP allowed its social media presence on Twitter to be usurped during its most public PR crisis ever, and Nestle discovered that its Social Media team was completely unprepared to respond when Greenpeace flooded its Facebook wall with a carefully orchestrated anti palm oil campaign. Ask Skittles where its social media “strategy” went. Closer to home, Wachovia Bank (now Wells Fargo) continues to operate a Facebook page and Twitter account while completely ignoring what is actually going on around their own brand in these same channels. See for yourselves:

Screenshot of ignored customer complaints

Screenshot of the painfully empty "information" page

Screenshot of Wachovia’s unmanaged discussion topics

Screenshot of actual comments about Wachovia

Screenshot of responses only to selected (positive) comments

Yet, in spite of the fact that the bank seems woefully unaware of the questionable management of its accounts, the bank shows up in a Mashable article titled “40 of the best twitter brands,” in which Wachovia (among other painfully horrendous social media programs mixed in with a few good ones) is featured as an example of success. Sorry, but the above screenshots (not a month old) tell a different story: Selective responses on Twitter that seem to favor positive comments while ignoring negative ones (rather than treating them as customer service opportunities), a Facebook page devoid of information like… oh, I don’t know… a company description, an address for the headquarters, some phone numbers, a website url maybe? A wall filled with angry customer comments yet no responses, a discussion page endowed with “Why Wachovia screws customers in the butt” as its most popular topic of conversation…

Forget understanding how to tie social media activity to business objectives or measure success properly… Some social media directors evidently can’t even figure out how to respond to customers on the world’s most simple social media platforms, or possibly even go as far as to give visibility to real online conversation topics to upper management. Yet, somehow, abject failures like this (not to pick on Wachovia – it is far from alone when it comes to this sort of pitiful mismanagement) are still what pass for success in this space.

Starbucks, Ford, Best Buy, Zappos, Virgin Airlines, and less than a dozen more: That is the tally of companies that didn’t settle for repackaged marketing campaign tactics, imaginary metrics, Wachovia-like account management fog, and outright spin. This is the painfully narrow minority of large businesses actually trying to figure it out with an eye towards success rather than… make-believe and unapologetic incompetence.

“Failure is not an option.” Really? Look around.

But what breaks my heart is the extent to which I have failed and continue to fail still: In spite of all my blog posts, my tweets, my appearances at conferences and other events, my interviews, my contribution to reports and articles, my presentations and even my upcoming book on how to actually develop, integrate, manage and measure social media programs (out in Q1 of 2011), I am not reaching enough companies nor reaching the ones I do reach fast enough.  I am not reaching enough executives, CMOs and CEOs. Heck, I am not reaching enough agencies and marketing firms and consultancies either. My impact is piecemeal at best, and that simply isn’t good enough.

Will I fail again? I sure as hell hope not, but I have to be honest with you… It isn’t looking good yet. Let’s wait and see what happens next. I might have to up my game considerably in 2011.

*          *          *

Afterthought:

This brilliant note from John Heaney (pulled from today’s comments) –

Olivier,

As an enthusiastic and energetic product manager, you simply discovered the corporate truism that culture trumps strategy. Every time. Apple could turn over their precise product plans for their next 4 transformative products to Dell and I could guarantee that those products would not emerge successfully from Dell’s clumsy and inept design and development process. Dell, like virtually every large tech company, simply doesn’t have the corporate culture that pursues magic and celebrates delightful failure.

To a large degree, I think the restrictive corporate cultures are ego driven. Executives strive for control, and the design and innovation process – when done well – borders on anarchy. And if the resulting product incorporates materials they don’t understand, science they’ve never grasped and aesthetics that challenge their assumptions then their ego is threatened and innovation is stifled.

And I believe that’s why we see so many mindless product extensions (mini M&M’s? really? the originals were too big?) instead of revolutionary new products.

Free the culture and you free the unlimited potential and imagination of every creative mind.

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5 reasons why the new Gap Logo is as magical as a bag of awesome.

What would happen if I adopted all of the Social Media and digital marketing BS I usually warn you about? Wonder no more. Welcome to Day 7 of the #StepfordTBB experiment.

*          *          *

This month, The Gap unveiled its new logo and I have something to say about it.

5 reasons why the new GAP logo rocks:

1. It’s new. New is always good. Look it up.

2. It’s all people are talking about. Have you seen mentions of the thing on the twitternets and the facebooks? Everybody is talking about it! Talk about an explosion in impressions!!! I swear, if the Gap had a Social Media program, they could take credit for some pretty solid proof of engagement right now.

3. It is the most copied and adopted logo in the history of October 2010. (So much so that no one noticed that Belk also changed its logo this month.) Everyone is changing their Twitter avatars to emulate the new GAP logo. Have you ever seen this happen? Here are a few examples. There are hundreds more.

Speaking of Belk: Anybody using the Belk logo for their Twitternet avatar? No.  Which is weird, because it also uses some of the same principles: Gradients of blue against a white background, with black(ish) letters. Evidently, the agency in charge of Belk’s logo redesign didn’t get the memo: Using a pretty font, a catchy tag line (or. triple. tagline. rather.), and turning a box into a half lotus of fairy wing-like awesome wasn’t necessary. A square and a default font would have done the job.

4. People are talking about the GAP now. A month ago, no one even remembered that store existed. Sure, we all remember it from the 1990’s, but when was the last time you went to the mall?

And if you still buy jeans from the Gap, don’t check out H&M. Ever. Or Express, even. Also, from what I hear, Levi’s is for old people.  Keep doing what you’re doing. All is well.

5. It is the only logo that looks like it could have been created in forty-five seconds in Microsoft Word. That’s impressive, no matter how you look at it.

A year ago, I would have written a 72,000 word dissertation on why this logo change sucks, about how it wouldn’t have made it past the first draft review, how it is actually so beyond bad as to be embarrassing, but we’re smack in the middle of the #StepfordTBB experiment so you’re in luck, Gap! This week, I think your new logo is jelly beans and rainbow hearts x infinity.

What have we learned from this? Simple:

1. Change your corporate logo every time you score a new CMO. It will give him something to do, and changing those signs and displays in every store in the country (and the world) is money well spent anyway. Think of all the stupid jobs you could have created or saved with that kind of funding. All the charities you might have endorsed. Good thing you put that cash to better use.

2. When flower-bursts are too hard, go with something corporate and squary-looking. Nothing says “I just bought my seventeenth navy-colored cotton blend sweater from the Gap” like what looks like a default logo in a Mac Paint tutorial.

3. The more average-looking, the better. You don’t want that thing to stand out. Don’t ever stand out. BMW, Apple, Starbucks, the “old” Gap… All way too flashy. Boring is good.

4. When it comes to logo design, either go with dragons and unicorns, or something you can whip up by moving a few boxes around in Powerpoint on your way to your pitch. Graphic designers are so overrated. DIY logos is the way to go! Kudos for being pioneers in that area.

5. Oh, and don’t forget to use a 45% fade effect on your blue square, but without any shadowing or semblance of depth. It always looks awesome just like that. Flat is the new deep.

 

 

left: old. right: new.

 

I know you like me better this way.

#StepfordTBB

Update: The Gap has decided to scrap their new logo. Darn. Man, that was fast!

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Apple’s new challenge: Transitioning from David to Goliath – BBC.com

Image by Keith Newton

Everyone loves an underdog. We root for them. We identify with them. And for the last few decades, one of our favorite underdog brands has been Apple, and for good reason: They made computers user-friendly. They made computers fun. They made them accessible to kids and artists and creatives. They made computers cool, from the packaging to the user experience, even down to the way we shop. The Apple brand was built on the underdog premise, on a revolutionary and pioneering spirit. On being – and thinking – different. Apple went deep instead of going wide. It wasn’t interested in being the biggest, it just wanted to be the best. And that is something that resonated with millions of users worldwide.

You see, Apple didn’t build a customer base: It built itself a tribe, a nation, a religion, even. You’re either a Mac or a PC, after all. And of the two, only one has an identity, a recognizable calling card: that ubiquitous forbidden fruit that announces to the world “I don’t play by your rules. I’m a Mac.” The rest are just… well… PC. That amorphous blend of Microsoft and IBM and Dell and HP and the rest. The little gray boxes sitting on desks. Little black laptops with the blue screens and overheating batteries and obnoxiously long boot-ups. Nothing nearly as cool as the sleek works of art you see peppering coffee shop tables with their glowing little logos that say “yes, I too am one of the cool kids.”

Then Apple changed the game again by rethinking the way we consume music, media and games with iPod. And if that wasn’t enough, Apple then set their sites on reinventing the mobile phone too. And now, with iPad, Apple stands to reinvent the way we look at computing, creating and consuming content, and may in turn very well change the publishing industry forever.

Apple’s secret hasn’t just about generating envy. There was more to the brand’s appeal than designing pretty and cool. Apple didn’t become the king of brands by just being product-focused. It engineered a culture. A belief system. It became the most popular example of what a love-brand can achieve, by making a point not to follow traditional corporate mantras of growth for the sake of growth, and of market share as a battle cry. It shifted the model. It colored outside the lines, and it made a point of inviting us all to come along and be rebels too.

Remember this?

And this?

Of course you do. We all do. These ads made Apple.

And so here’s where things get tricky: For most if not all of our adult lives, Apple has been the underdog brand. The rebel. The kid who wouldn’t sell out. Time and time again, Apple itself told us and reminded us that it was one of us. The little guy with brains and courage and the odds stacked against him. Now ponder this: What happens when the proverbial David becomes Goliath? How will Apple’s brand manage the transition from being the underdog to becoming the biggest technology company in the world?

Or rather, how is it managing that transition since, according to the BBC, Apple finally overtook Microsoft two months ago and became the biggest kid on the block?

That’s right: Apple isn’t the underdog anymore. In spite of Microsoft’s decades-long choke hold on the broad PC market, on enterprise OS licenses, digital properties like MSN, its outstanding success in the game console world with X-Box, and some activity with Windows mobile phones and Zune, Apple managed to edge them out this year, thanks to its astounding successes with iPod, iPhone, and pretty soon, iPad as well.

Now consider that Brands and cultural archetypes are often joined at the hip. Nike is the goddess of victory. Apple draws much of its contextual foundations from Judeo-Christian mythology – from its forbidden fruit logo to the David vs. Goliath narrative it injected into its marketing.  When the narrative changes, when the brand’s role shifts and archetypal points of reference dissolve, what happens to how we process emotions and attitudes towards that brand? How do we rebuild its context subconsciously?

Think about this: Apple is now bigger than Microsoft. Let that sink in for a minute. Say it out-loud:  Apple is bigger than Microsoft. What does that mean for a brand whose very identity has always been tied to being “the other” technology company?  How will public opinion shift in response to its changing role? Its new position in the market? And when the criticism starts piling up, how will Apple respond?

And believe me, it will. In fact it already has.

In the age of Social Media, where companies are expected to engage with customers, respond to attacks and manage angry users in minutes via Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms, will Apple’s notable reluctance to join the conversation and comment on attacks now come across as arrogance? Will mounting quality control problems due to its success and new requirements of scale begin to dull its once quasi-mythical luster? Will Apple become another embattled giant, much like Microsoft was when it was the one sitting on the throne?

Not that Mac fanboys will ever abandon the brand. And not that Apple will stop re-inventing how we think about technology, media, usability and devices either. Apple is the future of consumer technology, at least for the next decade. Plain and simple. That is, as long as it doesn’t forget what it felt like to be the underdog, the “other” company, the band of rebels who focused on quality instead of volume. Something to think about: It’s hard to convince consumers to “think different” when you own the market – when it’s now the other guys who think different. (I’m looking at you, SONY. Here’s your shot at a comeback.)

At any rate, all of this to say, watch what happens next. Expect Apple to find itself under attack more often. Expect more law suits, more complaints, more criticism in the press and on blogs and on the twitternets. More stories of failure and problems and concerns. Now that Apple is the king of tech, it is walking around with giant bullseye on its back – something it has never experienced before -and you can be sure that every little mistake it makes will be scrutinized and exploited for all its worth, not only by its rivals (Microsoft already started), but by anyone with a chip on their shoulder. How Apple manages their new place in the world, a world it doesn’t always play nicely with, will be interesting. Stay tuned.

And while we’re on the subject, check out this piece by BBC.com in which I am quoted saying something half-way intelligent, for once.

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Which brands do you wish you could help shine?

We’re all passionate about at least one company. One brand. One little logo or mark that got under our skin in a good way for one reason or another. My father has had a love affair with Aston martin, BMW, Smalto, Cartier, Omega, RayBan and Mont Blanc for as long as I can remember. My mother: Hermes, Celine, LeNotre, Autobianchi, Corvette and Baskin Robbins. My brother: Apple, Canon and Sony. It wasn’t always so, but brands help define us. Like it or not, they are part of our identity. The brands we choose to make our own make up a very visible outward-facing layer that gives our tastes and preferences texture, language and context: You’re either a Mac or a PC, a Canon or a Nikon, a Nike or an Adidas.

On a superficial level, the Kenneth Cole pants you wear tell an onlooker as much about you as the Starbucks cup in your hand and the Panerai watch on your wrist. But on a deeper, more emotional level, the success of a brand is something we find ourselves vested in, not just because our image may be tied to that of a company’s (its success implies our own), but because we genuinely care about the welfare of a brand which – in a very real way – is as much a part of our world as a favorite sports team, favorite artist, and even a friend or close relative.

When I was a kid, Sony was one of the brands I looked up to the most. Before Apple was Apple, Sony was – at least in my mind – the leader in electronics: Their first Walkman was the “it” product for quite some time, soon followed by their bright yellow (and other special edition colors – I had a black one) sports walkman. Their TVs and stereo systems were also among the most sought-after. Sony wasn’t necessarily first to market, but they still managed to own every market they focused on. Fast forward to 2010, and the picture changes. Sony is still here, still a major player in the electronics market, but far from the pole position it enjoyed 25 years ago. And as a childhood fan of the brand, as a life-long user of Sony products, it bothers me to no end. It isn’t as if Sony stopped making great products: Their Playstation 3 console is stellar. I am typing this blog post on a Sony VAIO that is by far the best PC/laptop I have ever owned. But… Sony’s market leadership is no more. No matter how great its products may be, it has lost its touch. Things simply aren’t the same anymore. And that can be fixed, dare I say… easily.

Sadly, the idea that brands are in a very real way living, breathing entities, that they are born, that they grow and mature and eventually die is one that seldom makes in into strategic discussions in the C-suite or in most Marketing departments. Yet it should be. Market share and sales numbers alone do not define the success and relevance of a brand. They never have. Ask Cartier. Ask Apple. Ask Starbucks and McDonald’s, even.

Everywhere I look, I see brands on the rise and brands faltering: Apple’s star has never shone brighter than it does now. Ford also weathered the storm that threatened to shatter the American auto industry less than two years ago, and came out of the gauntlet a better, smarter, cooler brand. Google hasn’t fared too badly either. They’re the lucky few. Others aren’t faring so well. Whether stalled or outright slipping downward, many brands seem to be struggling to either hold on to past glories or reach the next level in their rise to success, and it pains me. As a consumer and as a brand management guy, it actually weighs on me. I wish I could help them. I wish there were some way. Sometimes, I get lucky and I have an opportunity to help, but not often enough. Not nearly often enough. I was thinking about this in my car this morning, and started making a mental list of companies I wish I could advise, companies whose brands I wish I could help rebuild, and what I came up with looks like this:

Sony: Because it should be Apple’s biggest rival, and so easily could be. In short, Sony should own every market in which a product plugs into a wall or a USB port and emits a sound. Not only that, but the Sony brand has to restore its cohesiveness: Sony, like Apple, needs to be sought again. Its line of products can’t be scattered as it is now, its success jagged and unclear. The products are there, but there’s a lot of work to be done in terms of marketing, PR, awareness and promotion.

McDonald’s (US): Because it seems to have lost track of its own identity. Who are they trying to emulate this week? Starbucks? Strangely, this identity problem doesn’t seem to have spread to the European market. I visited three McDonald’s locations in France last month (two in Paris and one in Cannes), and the general consensus was this: “Why can’t McDonald’s be like this in the US?” The question stands: Why can’t it?  Added bonus: Why hasn’t McDonald’s penetrated grocery store and toy store markets yet?

Nike*: Because in spite of the best advertising, R&D and endorsements on the planet, it is making the same mistakes Sony did in the mid 1990s: Nike cannot hope to ride the momentum of its past success forever. Change always comes one way or another.

* This isn’t so much restoring Nike to market leadership as much as it is ensuring that it doesn’t let it slip from its fingers.

Starbucks: Because, like McDonald’s, it seems to have jumped the track. Confusion kills brands faster than bad logo redesigns, and sometimes growth can happen at the expense of everything else. Starbucks simply needs to find itself again and map out its future. Inconsistent experiences between locations (as with the McDonald’s brand) and the added confusion of non-Starbucks locations using the Starbucks logo also need to be tidied-up. I won’t even touch Seattle’s Best yet, but there’s another project.

Chevrolet: Because if Ford did it, so can Chevy. The difference between the two isn’t on the factory floor or in the design suite. Again, hard work but easy fix with the right application of market insight, leadership and courage. Chevy needs to stop thinking acting like a corporation that happens to make and sell cars, and shift its mindset to that of a company whose sole purpose is to inspire, delight and serve drivers everywhere.

Print (all brands): Because newspapers and magazines don’t have to die a slow agonizing death anymore than books do. Not anymore. Distribution and content are changing fast, but this evolution is an opportunity, not a hurdle. Change here is not the enemy. I would gladly dedicate the next five years of my life to this one thing. Companies can come and go, but print news keeps real journalism alive, and we cannot afford to let this industry fail. Not here, not now.

BP, Nestle, Monsanto, Halliburton, Eurostar, Toyota: Because they need it the most of any brand right now, and not everyone there has what it takes to turn their current situations into a string of market wins. Engineering a brand’s comeback takes a very specific skillset not everyone has in their bag of tricks.

Big Pharma (all brands – US): In the US, the model is cracked. Pharmaceutical companies don’t have the best image anymore. Their practices often seem shady. Consumer confidence could be better. In order for these brands to thrive in the next two decades, and in order to take full advantage of the changes in health care on the horizon for Americans, pharmaceutical companies need a cultural, communications and brand management overhaul. Nothing major, but the devil is in the details. Starting perhaps with a shift away from terms like “pharmaceutical” and “drug” to softer words like “medicine” and “care.”

Coca-Cola and/or Pepsi: Because market saturation doesn’t have to result in stalemate. There is still much to conquer for these brands, but they need to start thinking about how to redefine their markets, not just distract them with campaigns, PR and logo redesigns. They’ve plateaued, and something has to happen to catalyze them into rolling forward and up again.

* Again, this isn’t so much restoring either Coke or Pepsi to market leadership as much as it is preventing them from being in irons for the next ten years. They’ve reached the top. Now what?

Greenpeace: Because their message needs to get through to those who still think GreenPeace is an extremist organization. It can be at times, sure, but its role is much more complex and important to our future to allow it to continue being typecast as a bunch of crazed brick-throwing tree-huggers with unreasonable demands.

The Republican Party: Because it has lost its way, and if America is to soar again, both of its biggest political parties need to continuously force the other to new levels of excellence in order to outclass the other. The truth is that Democrats need a relevant Republican party as much as Republicans do. Rivalries keep us from growing soft and complacent. For the last ten years, the level of political discourse in the US has been slipping and frankly, it has reached an all time low. It’s embarrassing and needs to change. Our political system as it stands will continue to breed mediocrity, corruption and failure until we fix this.

Delta Airlines: Because in spite of its many flaws, Delta does some things very well and could be so much more than what it is to its passengers. I really want to see Delta become a shining example of what a major US airline could be. Quality can scale.

CNN: Simply because it could be great again. It once redefined the news business. It can and should do it again.

That’s a small selection, but a good place to start. What does your list look like?

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Before you can truly talk about Change Management, you have to focus on achieving clear vision

I love the fact that the comments my readers leave on the BrandBuilder blog are an endless source of topics for me to write about. I am seriously considering devoting one or two posts per week to either giving your brilliant opinions more exposure and/or answering your questions. And in that vein, why not start today, right now?

Here’s an astute question from Sonny Gill: in regards to characteristic n.8 in my post about “Becoming P2P: Principal characteristics of the new social business“:

Company/organizational culture is something I love getting into and am still learning a lot about.

One point of interest that intrigues me – and what you mentioned – is empowering your employees. Giving them not only the tools and structure to succeed, but empowerment and reinforcement from internal leaders – the attitude that not only spreads throughout the company but outside of the office also (as we all know, work/life intermingle so much). I say it’s intriguing because it’s such an integral part in making this culture change and a P2P business a success.

The biggest thing that companies will be asking though when reading this post, let alone your upcoming book, is ‘how the hell do we accomplish this?’ It sounds/is great, as how businesses function – internally and externally – is evolving, quick. But there’s definitely got to be a huge buy-in and sense of what a P2P culture looks and feels like.

The best way I know how to answer that question:

Don’t sell change. Ever.  Instead, sell results. That’s what execs really want anyway

As always, the old adage about leading horses to water stands firm. First, you have to realize that “companies” aren’t what you’re working with. What you’re really dealing with are people. In other words, companies don’t make decisions. People make decisions. Particularly, leaders in this instance. If the leadership within a company refuses to commit to the type of change that will yield greater success for their business in the future (and starting immediately), I can’t help them. Heck, even Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar and Dr. Phil can’t help them.

What’s important here isn’t to sell change. Nobody likes change. It’s scary, it’s risky, it’s unpredictable. You’ll never get very far selling fear, risk and uncertainty. Especially to that crowd. So you have to approach change from a very different angle: From the end result. From what they actually want to accomplish.

First things first: Uncovering the true objectives of an organization’s leadership team

Before you do anything, you want to uncover the leaders’ specific objectives (or wishes, even) and then create a picture of what the company (as an organization) will look like in this “fantasy” version of the future. This takes more work than it sounds. You would be amazed how many CEOs have absolutely no idea where they really want to be in 5 years. They’ll tend to throw around numbers that sounds good but aren’t based in reality, like… “We’re at $8.3B in revenue this year. I want to be at $12B by 2012.” Because $12B in 2012 sounds cool and the investors will love it. But that’s bullshit. It’s all about swagger, not reality.

In cases like this, when you ask the CEO how they’re going to get there, you get an equally nonsensical answer like, “we’ll sell more stuff” or “we’ll expand into new markets” or some other such generalization. No specifics. No action plan. Nothing but pipe dream. That’s dangerous and counterproductive. What you need to do is get them off the cowboy plan and get them back to reality: You have to get specific about their goals. These types of sessions aren’t about impressing anyone. They’re about getting down to business, which starts with getting back to reality.

If they want to hit $12B by 2012, fine. Work your way backwards from that. What’s it going to take? Probably some key acquisitions, first and foremost. Is that even possible? Are they in a position to pull it off without risking too much exposure? Does it even make sense to try and grow that quickly? What else do they need to do? Look for strategic partnerships? Expand distribution? Capture more market share? All of the above? Okay, you have 24 months. Show me on a 24-month schedule/timeline how you currently plan to accomplish that.

And guess what: Most of the time, that plan doesn’t actually exist.  It got as far as being turned into a few bullet points on a slide in someone’s powerpoint presentation six months ago. So you have to start from scratch and see what’s realistic and what isn’t. You have to work out all of the contingencies. It isn’t rocket science, but it takes work. And it takes organization. And it takes commitment. Before you can even get to how a company is going to address empowering their employees through a real cultural change, before a company is ready to actually pull this off across all of its departments as a matter of policy, it has to know exactly where it wants to go and what it will take to get there. Not only that, but the leadership team has to both understand and accept that such empowerment is one of the ways they will get there.

Second: Mapping out the start, the “finish” and everything in between

Growth, change and success are hard. You have to map it all out, starting with where you are, where you want to go, and all the points in between if you want to have a shot at actually pulling it off. So change management, which is really what we’re talking about here, starts with that process. And that process starts with painting a crystal clear picture of what you want the organization to look like at the end of the process. (More like a milestone than a finish line, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Now, in order to hit the numbers the CEO threw at you, you really have to be able to create a detailed snapshot of the company in this specific future. What it looks like. Where it operates. How it operates. How it is structured. How it executes on its activities. You have to not only create a snapshot of what it looks like on the outside, but also on the inside, layer by layer, like a CAT scan.

Understanding changes in cultural dynamics and the evolution of technology, you can then zoom in from the portrait/snapshot of the company to its structure, then to its processes, then to the skills of its members. From there, you can reverse-engineer the adaptive phases that the company needs to go through.  To be realistic, the example I gave you (24 months) is too short when it comes to true cultural change for a company that didn’t have much of a culture to begin with. It takes time for organizations, especially large ones, to develop the kind of social  and emotional sophistication to do this well. It takes maturity, and maturity takes time. It isn’t something you can accelerate or optimize.

In this example then, the company’s strategy would focus a lot more on acquisitions and partnerships than growth through cultural change. But it isn’t to say that a cultural evolution couldn’t begin to happen during that time period. In order for the strategic changes to be a success, a lot of internal work needs to ensure that these changes won’t become a liability when it comes to simple things like customer service, customer experiences, internal communications between divisions, brand erosion, etc. You can’t divorce culture from infrastructure. Companies that don’t understand that always fail at creating efficient (and sustainable) versions of either.

Basic Lessons to keep in mind:

Anyway… Long story short: The most important thing when trying to get buy-in is to help clarify exactly where the company wants to be in 5, 10, 20 years. Not pie-in-the-sky bullshit, but specifics. Once you have that, you can paint a clear picture of what the future of the company NEEDS to look like. Now you’ve flipped change on its head. Instead of selling uncertainty, you’re selling clarity.

Knowing where you’re going is 90% of getting there. Most company execs are so focused on meeting numbers this month and this quarter that they just aren’t able to look beyond the here and now long enough to actually drive their businesses anywhere. They’re too busy reacting to the next pothole  or turn ahead. By helping them see 1 year into the future, then 2, then 5, than 10, you can help them impact their numbers now, this quarter, this half, this fiscal year, by giving their performance context in relation to where they want to actually take their business.

That’s a big part of what I do, and everything has to start with that. Before you can get to cultural change management, you have to make sure the leadership team knows where it wants to go and what it needs to do to get there.

The caveat: Lazy execs and the reality of horses that just won’t drink

But with all of that, if the CEO and the COO and the VP of this and that just don’t want to change their ways, if they are more committed to their game of golf and corner office and third McMansion than to the success of their business, there isn’t much I can do to help them. I already know I can’t fix stupid. I’m pretty sure I can’t fix lazy either.

People have to want to be successful, and it can be hard to convince a late career exec making seven or eight figures  and eying retirement in five to ten years that success is about more than the wealth they’ve already amassed. Success is a frame of mind they either want to have or not. The biggest lesson for them is this: Success doesn’t live in the past. Memories do. Success lives in the here and now and tomorrow. It really doesn’t matter what you accomplished ten years ago. What matters is what you’re doing today, and what you’ll accomplish next. Anything else is just ego. Throw away the plaques and the trophies. They aren’t who you are.

A guy who just wants to enjoy the trappings of success but isn’t willing to work his ass off to perpetuate that success is a guy who’s given up. That kind of individual is completely worthless to me, and more importantly, to his/her organization.

Unless the rest of the management team and I can appeal to their sense of pride and self worth, and tap into the ambition that fueled them in their youth, they’re basically in the way. Folks like that either have to get back in the game or move on if you want the organization to evolve. I can’t light a fire under their ass every single day. I can do it for a while, but eventually they have to step up and want to run the ball all on their own.

So, all this to say that you won’t win them all, Sonny. Execs who have grown complacent, live in denial and refuse to accept that their companies are headed straight to the crapper in ten years are beyond being reasoned with. I’ll only get so far with them before I move on to someone who won’t waste my time.

In the end, I can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves. And since organizations are really collectives of people, you either find leadership teams made up of people who are willing to do whatever it takes to save and/or make their businesses kick ass, or management teams made up of people who are happy to pretend that everything is golden even though their business is either stalled or in the tank. Usually, the latter are the first to blame the economy or cheap imports or whatever else they can throw a cat at to explain slow, flat or negative growth rather than take the blame themselves.

I’m not a miracle worker. I wish I were, but I’m not. I help people who are serious about making their business truly successful and are looking for good honest help. The rest, I try not to waste my time with. It’s far too precious as it is.

At some point soon, I’ll actually go over how to create really solid internal cultures both from the top down (trust, leadership, mentoring and hiring practices) and from the bottom up (trust, engagement, tribe mentality, alignment with the organization’s belief system), so don’t go too far. We’ll visit this topic again.

Thanks for giving me my topic today, Sonny. Cheers.

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Don’t let rigid “branding” kill your brand

Words of genius from Damon Dimmick, over at UX Magazine:

“When corporate marketing departments dream of brand design, they only dream as far as they need.

The expensive and time consuming process of extending the brand into an interactive concept is usually pushed off until it becomes absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, by the time some serious rethinking is required, a lot of people have gotten stuck in the mud of static branding. It’s completely natural for companies to resist straying from the handful of predefined styles that were never meant to address web forms, widgets, calendars and menuing systems.

Of all the arguments for modifying brand attributes to better suit a digital experience, the most compelling is this:

The way users feel about their experience is inseparable from the way they feel about your brand.

This maxim holds true for brick-and-mortar experiences as well as for digital interactions. A restaurant with great food but incredibly long lines and a bad wait staff will experience brand damage. The user experience is bad, and people will look elsewhere. The same thing will happen if your users get baffled by confusing menus, hard-to-navigate websites and  perplexing layouts. If the user experience is bad, people will look elsewhere.

The way a user feels when they come in contact with a brand interaction point will implicitly shape their image of the brand itself.

This realization is a powerful tool for user experience professionals and can help snap clients and peers out of static thinking.”

It is helpful to remember that even the most accomplished companies have become experts at modifying brand attributes to suit interactive experiences. This is done without sacrificing brands, but rather by extending them.

Amen.

The same thinking applies to your customer service and social media touch-points (which, in some cases, may overlap). When crafting new programs and campaigns, be sure to do so not only with the organization’s framework in mind, but with the customer’s experience in mind. THAT is where the effectiveness of that campaign or program will be decided and where you brand ultimately lives. Don’t let rigid trade dress and 10-year old design “thinking” (I use the term loosely) dictate how your newest project will work, look and feel. If your branding is starting to feel dated, look at your project as an opportunity to refresh it a bit. Be smart. Don’t be a prisoner of the past.

Evolve. Adapt. Extend.

Read the rest of the article here. And for a deeper understanding, check out Jack Spade’s third brand precept (click here) and Bruce Lee’s advice on fluidity vs. rigidity (click here).

Have a great Monday, everyone.

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Saying “no” to corporate fossilization

photo by Bobby Rettew

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of spending an hour at Clemson University (go Tigers!) to chat with Bobby Rettew’s business writing class about blogs. The session was intended to focus on the hows and whys of business blogging, but one of the topics I found myself touching on was corporate resistance to blogging – and to the evolution of business communications in the emerging era of the social web. For some reason, that tangential subject has been poking at me ever since.

I originally started writing a post about the difficulty of finding your voice and place in the blogging world, about the obstacles that stand in the way of balancing being a model employee and being a business blogger, but I still couldn’t shake that resistance to change conversation going on inside my head. I must have written my intro paragraph a dozen times over before finally giving in to the need to write about what was really on my mind. So here we are.

Fortunately, it din’t take my mind long to wander back to an interview given by Publicis Groupe’s Maurice Levy to AdAge’s Scott Donaton back in 2007 that focused on that very topic: Back then, though, Levy had refered to it as the threat of corporate fossilization. Pretty cool stuff. I thought today might be as good a day as any to dust off his wisdom and share it here. (Don’t worry, the interview may not be fresh, but what Maurice has to say is. And as a bonus, revisting that piece keeps me from writing a 30,000 thesis on the subject, which is always good.)

If you’ve ever worked for or with a company that was so set in its ways that helping it get back on its feet was as tough as getting an out of shape couch potato to train for a sub 3 hour marathon finish, you’ll understand why Levy’s words as as valid today as they were before the economy tanked. The guy’s words don’t just echo what many of us experience quasi-daily, but lays them out in a way that really resonates with me. Here are my favorite bits of insight  from that interview. Just three comments from Maurice:

“I have never stabilized an organization. Crystallizing an organization is freezing the energy. In chemistry, instability is very good because it creates some combinations you don’t expect.” “Without change, there is fossilization, and that’s the worst thing that can happen.”

“Ideas are so fragile, so tenuous, that managers must destroy layers that can obscure or damage them. If you have an organization that is too administrative, you are just killing the ideas. As we say in France, when you ask a committee to draw a horse, you get a camel.”

Read the full interview here.

So there you have it. My contribution to Maurice’s observations comes in the form of prescriptive advice to execs trying to awaken their sleeping giants. This is how you start. This is how you rebuild your company culture, starting with your own mindset. Not through 10-step programs, best practices and methodologies (those come later) but by first changing the way you think about a) the dynamics of a truly vibrant company culture and b) the leadership style best suited to breathe life and power into it:

As a business leader, look for flux. Look for tangents. Look for the unexpected.

Recruit adventurously.

Give your people the freedom and flexibility to contribute in the most personal, passionate of ways.

Eliminate silos and procedures when it comes to the sharing of ideas. When it comes to dialogue. When it comes to cooperation.

Hunt down every internal communication obstacle and systematically, mercilessly crush them into oblivion.

Take the same idea, and apply it to external communications.

Decentralize “meetings”.

Deconstruct the product/services ideation process.

Empower your people to set the stage for extraordinary new products, business improvements, and creative work.

If you can’t trust your people enough to empower them, to literally give them the keys to the place, then you aren’t hiring the right people.

Your job as a leader isn’t always to “lead”. Most of the time, because you aren’t there to bark orders or stand over everyone’s shoulder, it is simply to create an environment, an ecosystem, that allows your team, your army, to do the best possible work they can. It is to create a culture that makes them want to be a part of something greater than the sum of their job description. That makes them proud to be, even.

Now repeat after me:

Ideas are fragile.

Without a steady dose of change, organizations wither and die.

These are the two little mantras you should keep chanting every time you pick up the phone or a magazine or your TV remote. They should be in the back of your mind every time you shake someone’s hand or invite them to have a seat.

Embrace instability. Welcome change. Engage uncertainty. Welcome the unknown and love it for all of its infinite number of possibilities.

And they truly are infinite.

Chew on that. Have a great Wednesday. 😉

Technorati Tags: Maurice Levy, Publicis, AdAge, AdPulp, ideas, leadership, authenticity, branding

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My ode to Nutella – Part 1

While Marketing VPs and Brand Managers are spending millions of dollars trying to craft “on brand” messages that resonate with specific demographics, consumers – empowered by digital, creative and social tools are creating their own experiences around the brands and products they love. Case in point: Ferrero’s Nutella. If you aren’t familiar with the delicious European hazelnut and cocoa spread yet, I suggest you run to the nearest grocery store and get acquainted with this chocolate-flavored nectar of the gods. (Warning: Nutella may be as addictive as crack cocaine, if not more.)

Though Nutella has garnered a pretty solid following on its Facebook fan page (over 3 million fans at last count), it still remains a fringe, slightly underground product in the United States. Squeezed between a half dozen different brands of peanut butter and a bouquet garni of jams and preserves flavors, Nutella is kind of easy to miss. Which may actually be its biggest asset: Because it isn’t widely enjoyed by everyone, Nutella lovers tend to regard their Nutellaness as special. Exclusive, even. Fans of Nutella value their passion for the unctuous chocolaty spread the way they do their love for all premium, slightly off the radar brands. So when they run into fellow fans of Nutella, sparks fly.

I have no idea if Ferrero (Nutella’s parent company) has any idea what has started to happen on twitter recently, but it’s nothing short of genius. Unprompted, Nutella fans started to discuss their love of what many affectionately call “black gold” or “chocolate heroin,” and the discussions started to snowball. Prompted by the constant Nutella discussions on Twitter, I bought a jar while at the grocery store. Evidently, others did too. Yes, you heard it right: Conversations about a product on Twitter led to an increase in sales of that product. This was completely unprompted by the Nutella product management team. This all happened purely as a peer-to-peer movement.

Not only that, but people previously unacquainted with Nutella found themselves intrigued enough by the discussions that they went out and bought their very first jars. Some (like fellow bloggers Steve Woodruff and Sonny Gill) even shared their first impressions of Nutella via video. Personally, I think that Steve’s YouTube “Nutella Newfella” idea would make a fantastic social campaign for a product like Nutella, with some pretty solid viral potential. Check it out:

Fellow Marketing honcha and blogger Kristi Colvin created a twitterface page specifically devoted to Nutella and its community of fans: www.twitterface.com/nuts-for-nutella to capture all Twitter mentions of Nutella in context . The page is even featured on twitterface’s home page. Do a google or Bing search for Nutella, and you start to find all kinds of quirky consumer-created content. Popular photo-sharing site Flickr has an extensive Nutella gallery.  This year, in honor of International Nutella Day (you bet) the Ms. Adventures to Italy blog posted 50 ways for Nutella Virgins to enjoy their first taste of the nutty nectar. And then there’s stuff like this other video posted to youtube by a Nutella fan:

Crazy? You bet. Crazy good, that is.

Interestingly, no one is being rewarded by Ferrero or Nutella for producing this kind of content. There is no contest driving this. No prize money. No vacation sweepstakes. Not even the promise of free Nutella (though Nutella does have contests). People are creating this stuff for each other. To express, share and celebrate their passion for a quirky product they feel helps define them to some extent.

When you are lucky enough to manage a brand that people around the world are that passionate about, that has garnered such a vibrant community (which generates sales and recruits new customers all on its own) and promotes your product at every turn, wouldn’t it be nice to find ways to engage that community a little bit? Maybe help it in some way? Recognize it, even?Interestingly, Nutella’s product/brand management team doesn’t seem aware that any of this is going on. Nutella’s US website gives you the opportunity to share Nutella’s site via email, and evidently, Nutella prints T-shirts, muhs and spreading knives so you can show how much you dig the stuff, to your amigos and neighbors but that’s basically it. Really? In 2009? With the fan base behind the brand? That’s it? Hello?

When your fans are doing more all on their own to promote and share your brand (and contribute to sales), maybe it’s time to revamp your Marketing strategy a little bit. Or at least… update it. Not that any of our stuff is stellar or anything (heck, it’s actually pretty awful, though in a deliciously fun way), but you can’t beat passion, peer-to-peer recommendations, and the creative energy unleashed by the social tools at our disposal today. It all works pretty well in the end… but it would work so much better if you paid attention, realized that traditional marketing  could be amplified by inspired community engagement, and… well, joined in the fun.

So come on, Nutella! We’re all having fun out here in the real world, sharing your awesome chocolaty spread with everyone we come in contact with. Are you going to join us or what? We’re ready for you. 😉

Full Disclosure: This post was fueled by several mouthfuls of Nutella.

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And on the eighth day… (A word-of-mouth primer)

So as it turns out, WOM (word-of-mouth) is at least twice as effective at influencing purchasing decisions as most forms of marketing (from PR to advertising). (Source: Nielsen)

And the beauty of Social(ized) Media platforms like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and Seesmic, is that – as connection and conversation engines, they enable, accelarate and amplify WOM.

So a) WOM is important, and b) WOM is also at the core of the crucial lateral action (peer to peer engagement) we discussed a few weeks ago. (Go here to get a recap. It’s worth the five minutes.) So even though it hasn’t been a buzzword in a couple of years, let’s bring back some much needed (and deserved) focus on it now.

Okay, here’s roughly how you create WOM out of thin air:

Step 1: Create or do something great. Not good. GREAT. (Seth Godin would call it remarkable. My kids would call it awesome. Some of my triathlon buddies would call it sick. Fred would call it rad… but he’s… well, Fred. Or Barney. Or something.)

It could be a widget. It could be a dish. It could be a work of art. It could be an act of rebellion or courage… or both. It could be a book or a song or a speech. It could be the way your customer service reps answer the phone, or how quickly your technicians can fix a problem for your customers. It could be new packaging for ketchup or a new all-natural zero-calorie sweetener. It could be a smart and edgy TV show. It could be a completely selfless act. It could be nothing more than a simple, subtle, five second memorable experience at a drive-through or at the checkout or when you walk into a public restroom. It could be a new flavor, or an old, forgotten one. It could be a social program. It could be that extra smile or one percent effort. It could be simply acknowledging customers and conversation participants on Twitter. It could be anything… as long as it is remarkable. Awesome. Sick. Rad.

As long as it is better than anything else that remotely comes close to its category – assuming there is one yet.

As long as anyone who gets to experience it is so amazed, pleasantly surprised, or otherwise affected by what it did for them that they’ll get excited about telling their friends all about it… and the cycle will repeat itself over and over and over again.

The more unique it is, the better. The more iconic, the better. The more revolutionary… um, okay. You get the idea.

People don’t get excited about boring and mundane and same-as-always.

Safe, good enough, okay and not bad don’t live in WOM’s zip code.

Step 2: Oh… wait. That’s it. Never mind. There is no step 2.

Technorati Tags: word of mouth, WOMMA, WOMBAT2, marketing, WOM

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Don’t let “branding” kill your brand

Words of genius from Damon Dimmick, over at UX Magazine:

“When corporate marketing departments dream of brand design, they only dream as far as they need. The expensive and time consuming process of extending the brand into an interactive concept is usually pushed off until it becomes absolutely necessary.”Unfortunately, by the time some serious rethinking is required, a lot of people have gotten stuck in the mud of static branding. It’s completely natural for companies to resist straying from the handful of predefined styles that were never meant to address web forms, widgets, calendars and menuing systems.

“Of all the arguments for modifying brand attributes to better suit a digital experience, the most compelling is this: The way users feel about their experience is inseparable from the way they feel about your brand.

“This maxim holds true for brick-and-mortar experiences as well as for digital interactions. A restaurant with great food but incredibly long lines and a bad wait staff will experience brand damage. The user experience is bad, and people will look elsewhere. The same thing will happen if your users get baffled by confusing menus, hard-to-read text, and perplexing layouts. The user experience is bad, and people will look elsewhere.

“The way a user feels when they come in contact with a brand interaction point will implicitly shape their image of the brand itself. This realization is a powerful tool for user experience professionals and can help snap clients and peers out of static thinking.

“It is helpful to remember that even the most accomplished companies have become experts at modifying brand attributes to suit interactive experiences. This is done without sacrificing brands, but rather by extending them.“

Amen.

Have a great Monday, everyone!

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The Danger of Not Doing What You Love, and other wisdom

http://wray-mccann.com

Call me lazy, but instead of writing something insightful for you guys today, I’m going to share some of my favorite finds from my morning’s croissant-induced online browsing.

All quotations courtesy of Pulled Quotes.

On finding out what works:

“I have no earthly idea what really works. I don’t know if it’s lunch or that powerpoint or the Christmas card I sent last year. But you know what? You have no clue what works either. I’ll keep experimenting if you will.”    –  Seth Godin

On why blogs work:

“Bloggers drive blogs, share price drives traditional media. Blogging is personal, traditional media is corporate.”    – Mark Cuban

On remembering what creativity really is:

“Creativity is an act of open disobedience against the norms. Creativity is an act of courage.“

–     Chris Bailey

On innovation, grabbing life by the horns, and not pissing your life away:

“Do things that are gaspworthy.”

That was one of the main messages delivered by Tom Peters, the influential business thinker and management guru, in his speech yesterday at Epsilon’s Integrated Marketing Symposium 2006 at the Quail Lodge in Carmel, CA.

“Do cool stuff that make people gasp,” said Peters, who looked older and angrier than in his “In Search of Excellence Days” (the book he co-authored with Richard Waterman in 1982 that was hailed by NPR as one of the Top Business Books of the Century). “Don’t piss away your life.”

He changed his speech at the last moment after having learning this week that one of his best friends has a terminal illness, Peters said.

Also noted

“Innovation comes “not from market research or focus groups, but from pissed off people.”

DM News

On passion and work:

“Whether you are Jack Welch or the Dalai Lama, it is dangerous not to do what you love. If you don’t have a level of passion that drives your thinking about what you’re doing day in and day out, there will be others out there who are passionate who will overtake and outrun you. People who care will take the initiative away from those who are half-hearted. So loving what you do is a competitive imperative, not simply a nice thing to have.”

Knowledge @ Wharton interviews Mark Thompson and Stewart Emery, co-authors along with Jerry Porras of Success Built to Last

On retaining talent:

“One of my favorite cliches is “there is no such thing as indentured servitude”. I use that line to talk about the fact that talent can’t be bought and sold. It must be retained with something more than money.”    – Fred Wilson

So there you go. Now we’re all on the same wavelength. Have a great Monday!

Technorati Tags: seth godin, fred wilson,Mark Cuban, Chris Bailey, Tom Peters, Mark Thompson, Stuart Emery, Jerry Porras, marketing wisdom, creativity, innovation, advertising, passion, marketing, blogging

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You are ALWAYS in Beta.

You’re always in beta. Always. If you think you aren’t, you’re already falling behind and bleeding relevance.

What does being in Beta mean? It means being in perpetual test mode. It means constantly asking “how could I do this better,” even when this worked just fine. How can I listen better? How could I improve customer service? How can I make my billing process smoother? How could we improve the UI/UX of our websites? How can I engage my user community even better? How could this brochure have been better?

I know what you’re thinking: Poor kid. He’s terminally obsessive-compulsive. 😀 (Actually, I’m just compulsive, not obsessive, but that’s a topic for another day.)

The point is this: The moment you start thinking that you have found the perfect model, the second you start adopting a “let’s not change anything” mentality, you’re screwed. The “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” saying I hear a lot in the South is may have been pretty good advice a hundred years ago, but it isn’t anymore. Not if you want your company to stay competitive. Not if you want to see your company grow. Not if you want to see chronic improvement in everything you do.

Check out today’s video if you haven’t already. And if it doesn’t launch for you, go watch it here. (Thanks, Viddler!)

Interestingly, the “you’re always in Beta” mindset that I am talking about today seriously reminds me of the mindset athletes and coaches get into when it comes to improving performance. Say you’re currently a 24:00 5K runner, and you want to relive your college glory days by running an 18:00 5K a year from now. How do you do it? Simple: By stressing your system one little bit at a time. By challenging your comfort zone with every run. Going from 24:00 to 23:55, then 23:50, then 23:45 for the same distance, and so on. Turning up the heat and the intensity for a few weeks, then giving your body a chance to adapt. To plateau. And then starting over with a new cycle of stress and adaptation followed by a rest period. During that time, you are constantly testing your boundaries, monitoring success and failure, learning what works and what doesn’t. (And yes, measuring your progress to know what works and what doesn’t.) Pretty basic stuff.

The alternative would be to keep running the same 5K route every day at the exact same speed, in the exact same way. What would happen? Well, you would become pretty good at running a 5K  in 24:00. Comfortable? Sure. But whatever happened to improvement? See where I am going with this?

Okay, now let’s complicate things a little bit:

As a triathlete, training and competing in what essentially amounts to three sports (swimming, cycling and running) adds some pretty substantial layers of complexity. Not only do I have to figure out how to train for three specific sports, but I have to figure out how to combine and integrate all three in a way that doesn’t lead to injury or burnout. I also have to fit all three in my already busy schedule. Then I have to consider how to time my training cycles to coincide with specific races. In addition, I have to incorporate changes in nutrition and hydration based on my workouts, my training mode, outside temperatures, etc. And if I get into my head that I am going to train for a marathon, half Ironman or full-on mac-daddy Ironman, all of these variables take on a level of complexity I can’t even begin to explain in one blog post. How much Gatorade should I drink per hour in 94 degree temperatures at 80% of my maximum heart rate? How many energy gels can I absorb per hour without getting sick to my stomach? What cadence should I adopt to sustain an average speed of 21mph for 112 miles? Only one way to find out: Test it.

And I haven’t even talked about gear. Will the improved aerodynamics gained from dropping my aerobars down 2 millimeters shave 20 seconds off my 40K time? Maybe… but as a result, will my upper body’s new angle offset my hip angle enough to reduce my power output or stress my hip flexors enough that I will start cramping up 5 miles into the run? How will I find out? There’s only one way: Getting out there and testing that theory. It’s clipboard and stopwatch time for the next six weeks.

Should I go with a disc wheel or a deep dish rim for my next race? How will I know which works better for me on a moderately hilly course in 15mph crosswinds? Only one way: I have to go test each wheel configuration on a variety of courses in completely different wind conditions. Then I’ll know what works best in specific course conditions.

Rear-mounted bottle-cages or frame-mounted? Aero helmet or regular helmet? Motion control shoes or racing flats? Test test test test test. You get the picture.

Call it an occupational benefit or a pre-existing condition, but being a triathlete kind of trains you to be in a perpetual Beta mindset. And it isn’t a stretch to jump from the world of competitive endurance sports to the world of business performance. Different application, but same principles and same basic methodology: Ask, test, observe, validate, learn, repeat.

But before you do all this – the testing, the experimentation, the analysis and learning and adaptation – you have to make a choice. You have to pick a camp. You have to decide whether you are satisfied with your business performance as it is today (“good enough” is good enough for you and your customers), or hungry for improvement.

There’s no right or wrong answer here. It doesn’t matter what camp you decide to align yourself with: The one happy with the way things are or the one looking to kick ass a little more each day. What matters is that your decision work for you. But let’s be clear about the impact that your choice will have on your business: Sticking with a “let’s not change anything” mindset will not earn you more customers, increase customer loyalty or generate more sales. Where you are today is exactly where you will be tomorrow. If you’re lucky. Eventually, perhaps not next week or next month or next year, but eventually, this mindset will seal your doom. A Beta mindset, however, will help you uncover ways to innovate, earn more customers, cut costs, increase customer and employee loyalty, improve product design and performance… You name it: Whatever the opportunity to improve, do do things better and smarter, may be, you will systematically uncover it in the same way that Apple, Nike, BMW, Cervelo, HBO, Michael Phelps, IDEO, Lance Armstrong, Comcast and Zappos have.

If you want your company to be best in class, to own a market or an industry, to be the trendsetter, the example to follow, the leader in a category, you must adopt a perpetual Beta mindset. You have to constantly stress your systems and processes. You have to turn every action into a test an look at every activity as an opportunity to experiment.You have to measure, analyze, learn, adapt and repeat the cycle over and over and over again.

Question everything.

Work harder than the next guy to build the best XYZ the world has ever seen, and then find ways to make it even better.

Perfection is a process, not a milestone.

Embrace a state of perpetual Beta.

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Engagement Paradigm: Focus on Lateral Action

So we’ve been chatting about engagement these last few days, and particularly vertical action (essentially brands addressing their communities from the top-down, and creating mechanisms through which their communities can communicate vertically with them using the same channels). When you look at corporate blogs, Twitter accounts and most branded community sites, this is mostly what you see: Vertical engagement between companies and their customers/fans/friends/users.

Likewise, the breadth and depth conversation we had last week also relates to vertical action: Brand managers, Community managers and/or Social Media managers finding ways to engage customers from a brand-to-community perspective. Even when dialog exists, even when the communication channels are truly 2-way, most of what happens is vertical: Brand-to-customer and customer-to-brand. And that’s nice, but it is only half the story: In order to understand the power of the social web, the power of communities and the power of truly engaged fans, you also have to tip your hat to lateral action.

What is lateral action? Simple: Lateral action is simply peer-to-peer engagement that happens within or across communities. A brand or community manager may have planted a seed along the way (a tweet, a blog post, a comment, a promotion, etc.), but once it has hit the community, the message/info/conversation is spread from customer to customer without having to be prompted by any official brand representative.

Another example of lateral action is WOM (word-of-mouth): Peer-to-peer recommendations are classic examples of lateral action. Rumors are examples of lateral action. Community tweetup invitations are examples of lateral action. RT’s on Twitter tend to be examples of lateral action.

Lateral action is what happens when the brand, the company, the official presence of a business gives its community the opportunity to BE a community by taking a step back and letting people share what is important to them with peers.

And lateral action is often the answer to the question raised last week about breadth and depth of engagement: Once a brand has managed to scale its community to several thousand or tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands, even), how can a team of community managers possibly engage so many people properly? It’s impossible, right? (This being the logic behind some Social Media directors’ decision to focus on depth at the cost of breadth.) Truth: Vertical action alone cannot serve the purposes of engagement (breadth mostly, but depth also) in the Social Media space… or even when it comes to fostering vibrant brand-centric communities in the “real” world. Lateral Action is the yin to Vertical Action’s yang. Lateral Action is how community engagement actually scales and transcends any breadth-related engagement limitations.

And though Lateral Action is nothing new, it is not a typical strategic mode of thinking for most Marketing professionals who have spent most of their careers working in traditional media (yes, even in the world of the web). This is why MANY Marketing folks still talk about the challenge of creating “content” even in the Social Media space. This is why advertising, messaging and marketing products are still among the first things marketers try to “plug in” when it comes to leveraging Social Media “channels.” This is all top-down thinking. Vertical Action thinking. And though it has its place here, it cannot succeed in the Social Media space without an equal (and in many cases greater) measure of Lateral Action.

Brand managers, Social Media managers, Community managers – whatever their designation may be – need to understand that their job isn’t just to produce content and constantly stimulate vertical engagement. There is only so much they can accomplish this way. What they must also do is empower their communities to manage themselves to a great extent and generate conversations and motion from within. Community members have to reach out to each other. They have to reach over to other communities. They have to share and discuss and debate and organize themselves. Brand Managers in the Social Media space have to learn how to be good hosts and patrons and supporters without being mother hens 24/7. This lateral action has to be fostered, nurtured, and built into their online and offline communities.

This is a crucial point for all brand managers to understand if they want to be successful in the age of Social Significance and Community Marketing. I hope the video and this post help you understand the difference between vertical and lateral action… and their importance our ongoing discussion of community “engagement.”

Tomorrow, we will bring our engagement discussion to a close with some far less strategic yet much more valuable advice than what we’ve touched on so far. 😉

Have a great day!

Bonus Footage: Oui, en Francais! (For my Francophone readers, a question: Since I can, should I also start shooting videos in French?) And since a few of you have asked me if I would say my name in its original French so you can hear what it sounds like – Two birds, one stone. You ask, I deliver. (And yes, I take requests.) Check it out:

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Engagement Paradigm: The Breadth vs. Depth question

Yesterday, we redefined the term “follower” on Twitter and in doing so, discovered that followers are in fact not hapless little ducklings in search of a mama duck but actually community managers in their own right with a tremendous amount of power when it comes to helping brands gain traction in the social web (and particularly in communities like Twitter).

Now that we’ve covered that subtle yet fundamental topic, let’s look a little more closely at the two main strategies behind engagement: Breadth and Depth.

Breadth and depth are essentially opposite sides of any reach strategy. One focuses on quantity while the other focuses on quality.

Breadth

When it comes to engagement in the social media space (and particularly on Twitter), a focus on breadth looks like a numbers’ game: If having 5 followers is good thing, then having 10 followers is better. If having 5,000 followers is a good thing, then having 10,000 is better. And so on. (Now remember that we redefined the term “follower” yesterday and that we aren’t talking about acumulating points here.)

So in essence, a breadth strategy would look like this: 100,000 people on Twitter mention Brand X on a regular basis. The Social Media director for Brand X sees in these 100,000 people a vibrant yet untapped community. In his mind, reaching out to every single one and getting them to “follow” Brand X on Twitter would be a great thing. By doing so, that community of 100,000 fans would have access to the Brand X feed, have the opportunity to engage with it, spread their love, RT content, ask questions, etc. And that rocks.

But the flip side of that is Brand X only has a team of 3 people managing their online communities, and that isn’t enough to truly engage with 100,000 people. So what ends up happening is: While Brand X has a community of 100,000 “followers” on Twitter, its staff just can’t create deep connections with more than a few dozen of them. So by spreading itself too thin, Brand X might come across as having very superficial “engagement” on Twitter: Lots of followers, but not a lot of meaningful interaction. That doesn’t rock, and it evidently scares a number of companies looking to truly connect with their fans in Social Media.

Depth

The flip side of breadth is depth. On Twitter, a focus on depth looks like a private party: Small numbers, a tiny community, but lots of interraction between a brand and its relatively small numer of followers. The idea here being that engagement is about building relationships and true,lasting emotional connections. Numbers are the enemy here since you just can’t be “friends” with more than a few hundred people anyway.

So in essence, a depth strategy would look like this: Out of 100,000 fans of Brand X on Twitter, Brand X chooses to only truly engage with a few hundred (or a few thousand). That’s a manageable number, and any more than that would get in the way of “true” engagement.So what rocks here is that those folks with whom Brand X truly focuses on are going to feel ultra special about their relationship with Brand X, and that’s pretty solid.

But what happens to the other 99,000 or so fans Brand X chooses not to engage with? Well… hopefully, they can talk about Brand X amongst themselves and be perfectly happy. Better yet, maybe the chosen few will go out and evangelize Brand X to the other 99,000 as… good will agents of Brand X. They have big networks anyway, so why not create a tiered system of influence within Twitter? But see… that doesn’t really work. The reality of having too narrow a depth strategy is that the other 99,000 fans feel disenfranchised by Brand X. They feel ignored. Worse yet, they opt out of following Brand X and engaging with it on twitter because they find no value in what Brand X is doing on Twitter since they don’t seem to be on the Brand X radar anyway.

The result of either too rigid a depth or breadth strategy is a stalled overall engagement strategy. On the one hand, you get numbers without purpose or value. On the other hand, you get an exclusive clique effect that doesn’t scale enough to matter. Neither is a good outcome.

Red Flag Diagnosis:

Too much breadth = 500,000 followers out of 500,000 fans but interactions with only 20 of them per day and zero impact on anything relevant relating to your business.

Too much depth = Only 5,000 followers out of 500,000 fans. Outside of your core fans, either nobody knows you’re here or  nobody cares.

(And in some awful cases, you get poor execution in both, which looks like only 5,000 followers out of 500,000 fans, and interactions with only 20 per day. Ergo: Nobody cares, and you blow off the few who do. Double-whammy.)

The Engagement Strategy Trap: Depth and Breadth are not mutually exclusive

Strangely, I still see a good number of companies choosing to focus on either breadth or depth when they should instead combine both. And frankly… I wonder why any marketing professional would ever make that mistake when it’s so clear that in order to really have an impact, you always have to combine the two (not just in social media but in most other areas as well). Unless your brand is about exclusivity (Ferrari, Cartier, Ferre) “engagement” can’t stop at your core customers. Not in Social Media, and certainly not on Twitter.

Without some measure of breadth, depth becomes an exercise in navel-gazing. It becomes an echo-chamber. It goes nowhere.You end up chatting with your clique every day and congratulating each other on a job well done. Great. Awesome. Except… not.

Without some measure of depth, breadth becomes an exercise in scale without impact: You may have an enormous following, but what is it doing for you? Nothing? Ooops. It’s back to the drawing board for you.

So… if you are a major consumer brand with an engagement strategy in the Social Media space and your hundreds of thousands of followers don’t move the ball for you in some way (increased WOM, increased traffic to your website(s), increased conversations or social mentions, increased traffic to your stores, increases in transactions – remember FRY?) then you’re wasting your time “collecting” followers instead of truly building a community.

Likewise, if you are a major consumer brand with an engagement strategy in the Social Media space and in the last 12 months of activity in the space, you’ve only managed to attract 5,000 “followers” out of your 500,000 active fans and customers on Twitter, somebody’s playing too much golf or computer solitaire or something. Your “engagement” program is barely on autopilot.

If your goal is “engagement” and you ignore the majority of your fans , you’re completely missing the boat. First: Whatever you’re doing, it isn’t creating value or relevance, and you are failing in that regard. Second, if you aren’t reaching out to your fans, acknowledging them and making new connections every day, you just don’t understand what engagement is about.

Repeat after me: Engagement without reach doesn’t work.

So the key to successful engagement in Social Media, especially on Twitter is to combine breadth and depth in a way that makes sense, and in a manner consistent with the overall goal of the strategy. Reaching out to 100,000 fans doesn’t mean all 100,000 want to chat with the Brand X team every single day. Some will engage daily. Others will engage weekly. Others monthly. Many more won’t engage at all. They’ll just listen and share and be happy to be part of the community without being particularly active. Some will crave more attention than others. It’s okay. Let your fans, your “followers,” you community tell you how much engagement they need. Let them tell you what kind of engagement they want from you. Every single person is different. There is no cookie-cutter model for engagement that works for every single person who’s a fan of your brand. Don’t sweat the depth vs. breadth. Work on both. Measure both. But most importantly, LISTEN to your fans. Invite them to join you on Twitter. Give them a reason to “follow” you so that you can have that kind of dialogue and feedback. Follow them back. If many never drop by to say hi, that’s okay. Let them dictate the pace and mode of the engagement.

And believe me, they’ll tell you if you’re dropping the ball or doing a great job. 😉

Remember that engagement isn’t about YOU. Engagement is about the value you bring to your community, and the community, not you, decides what is valuable to them. Your community on Twitter is not what you want it to be, it is what IT wants to be. (If it is 500,000 strong, embrace all 500,000 even if it seems inconvenient at first.)

So stop worrying about too much or too little, stop worrying about depth vs. breadth, and just reach out. Set up shop on Twitter, listen to what is being said, introduce yourself to folks who seem to care about you (Brand X), and start there. When people say hi, say hi back. When people ask a question, answer it. When people pay you a compliment, say “thank you.” When they complain about something, try to solve their problem. When you have something cool or valuable to share, share it. When someone wants to talk to you about their cat, count that as a blessing and understand that in that interraction lives the very essence of the bond between you, the brand you are paid to represent, and the person sharing something personal with you. This is invaluable. The conversations and relationships you foster on Twitter don’t just stop with the medium. They cross the digital/real world barrier. What happens on Twitter translates into people’s perception of you in the real world.

So like the old commercial says, get out there and touch someone. Be a courteous, engaging Twitter host, and make your time in social media count for something. You’ll be glad for it.

*      *      *

Bonus Section: Outtakes from this morning’s failed video shoot.

If you’ll notice, the end of today’s video about engagement is cut off and some of the post’s points are never actually made. Why? because of lawn mowers cranking up in the background AGAIN.  The video shoot was aborted and one of the draft/backup vids was used in the post.  Pretty annoying, but kind of funny… Kind of like all of the yard debris (pollen, grass, etc.) on my black shirt. Oh, and I hope you’ll enjoy the little background music. It was so awfully generic that I just had to add it in there for good measure. Check it out:

Have a great Tuesday, everyone.;)

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What Marketing Can Be

A little thought for today:

Marketing is usually there to help sell a product or brand, but when you actually have something real to say – something valuable, something authentic, something that matters – marketing simply turns into a means of celebrating your culture and sharing it with the world.

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Who exactly is driving the Social Media bus in the Enterprise space?

I dig Jeremiah Owyang’s blog. The guy is wicked smart, usually spot-on with everything he says, and when it comes to digital media analysis, I can’t think of anyone who does a better job (Forrester Research really scored when they landed him).  But last week, one of his posts stopped me dead in my tracks – not because he got something wrong, but because he got something so painfully right: Large consulting firms (as in the “Big Four”) are joining the social media gold rush and already looking to plant their victory flags in the enterprise space. (My words, not Jeremiah’s.)

What that version of Social Media strategy, implementation, training, execution and measurement will look like is everyone’s guess. But before we get too far into this discussion, watch this little video to get into the spirit of today’s topic:

Here’s a link to Jeremiah’s post about Social Media and the enterprise space: Click here.

The part that really jumped out at me was this point:

Large consulting firms are preparing to offer million dollar packages to enterprises for change management and social integration systems.

Incidentally, when I first read that post, I started rapid-fire-DM’ing Jeremiah on Twitter about it, but after a string of about 30 140-character comments, he politely suggested that I stop blowing up his inbox and just write a blog post about it – so here we are, and as you can tell from my relaxed demeanor in the video, I have chilled a bit about the ramifications of this whole Social Media gold rush debacle.

Even so, for the purposes of this discussion, let’s take a few steps back and put the Social Media bandwagon in perspective for you:

Prologue – Social Media becomes the marketing world’s newest buzzword. Twitter starts to explode. Everyone with half a brain sees the writing on the wall: There is money to be made in Social Media. The gold rush begins.

Phase 1 – Independent business consultants (mostly marketing consultants) start rebranding themselves as “Social Media Consultants” or “Social Media experts.” In some extreme cases, even “Social Media gurus”. They spread like locusts… By November 2008, you can’t throw a cat without hitting at least two or three Social Media experts. The epidemic reaches catastrophic proportions.

Phase 2 – Marketing firms, ad agencies and a few PR outfits start to look into this whole Social Media “thing”. Billings are shrinking and clients are asking “hey, do you guys also do Social Media?” Many of these firms stretch the truth and say “yes”. Agencies and Marketing firms now start billing clients to launch blogs, Twitter pages and Facebook groups with absolutely no concept of what they’re doing. (Overheard in the men’s room: Where does the ad go?” and “How do you write a 140-character press release anyway?”) Web analytics people get brought in to measure clickthroughs, impressions and web traffic from social sites to prove effectiveness. This methodology fails to impress. Ineffective strategic planning, poor execution and a lack of measurement insight result in  Social Media getting a bad rep in the business world.

Phase 3 – Large Consulting firms jump on the Social Media bandwagon. Better late than never, right?  There’s money to be made after all, and since they’realready the experts in everything else, why not Social Media as well? Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy… is it.

And that’s just the rub: How many people in the world really know how to strategize, implement and execute a Social Media program for a company (large or small)? I can think of maybe 50-100 in the US, and that’s stretching it.*

Now tell me how many people in the US know how to actually measure the effectiveness of Social Media programs? (Not just impact on X, but actual R.O.I.?) You can probably count them on the fingers of one hand. Maybe two.**

*/**  It won’t stop thousands of people from claiming that they can do it, but we all know where that conversation is going. ‘Nuff said.

So back to my point: If we know pretty much who belongs to the small community of truly Social Media-savvy professionals we just mentioned, and only two or three actually work for the “big four,” then who is putting these million dollar social integration packages together?

Whom within the big four is building these programs?

Whom within the big four is capable of training clients and implementing these programs/packages? Of customizing them for each individual client? For each brand, market,company culture and distinct business objective?

Whom within the big four is capable of executing on any of this? (Listening outposts, Customer Support, customer engagement, online reputation management, blogging, HR, PR, promos, true social web integration, community management, etc.)

Whom among them actually knows how to set up real measurement methodologies that look beyond web analytics? (Back to the R.O.I. discussion again.)

Will it be some guy with a digital communications background who read a few white papers about Social Media and follows a cookie-cutter methodology that a few analysts and MBAs put together, or will it be a team of Social Media-savvy pros with extensive hands-on experience (and a relevant presence) in the Social Media space?

Right now, though the latter would be 1,000 times preferable to the former, it seems pretty unlikely. What seems most likely (unless you guys prove me otherwise) is that the large consulting firms Jeremiah mentions in his post are mostly winging it, just like the rest of the Social Media hacks looking to take advantage of the Social Media gold rush.

If you disagree, that’s perfectly okay. Actually, I hope that you can prove me wrong. This is one of those rare times when I truly hope that I’ve assumed the worst and completely missed the boat. So if you want to prove me wrong, please do – and here’s how: Give me names. Tell me who the big consulting firms have hired to put these packages together and help deploy them for their clients. It’s that simple.

Once we know who they are, my quick little assessment of their “worth” in this space will be simple: Are these people we know? People who actually live and breathe this stuff? People with an ounce of credibility in this space? People who have been doing this in some way shape or form for more than… six months? Not just analysts, mind you (I know some great ones who fit the bill) but practitioners. The folks who actually DO this stuff.

If so, great.

If not, the enterprise space is about to be taken for a very expensive ride… and I don’t think I am alone in thinking that the stakes (economic, professional and contextual) are too high for this sort of nonsense to go unanswered. So… in the event that I am right, that large consulting firms are about to launch blindly and clumsily into the world of Social Media consulting, how do we come to their rescue?

1. How do we make large consulting firms realize that they have a wealth of resources out here in the real world who cold help them actually bring their social integration packages to life?
2. How do we make them understand that it is in their best interest to reach out to many of you and seek your help, advice, insights?
3. How do we give them visibility to who you are and what you have to offer, and give you the kind of access ?
4. How do we bring together large consulting firms with a need for expertise in this field with those of you who have key pieces of the Social Media puzzle they so desperately need to be effective in this space?

Am I being naive? Is this type of logical partnership strategy too much to expect from organizations that aren’t in the habit of asking for help? I don’t think so: We aren’t talking about ERP and CMS here. This isn’t a vendor-driven discussion. This is not about technology or systems integration. This is about something far more organic than that. Change Management and Social Integration don’t quite plug into a company culture as well as conventional enterprise products plug into an IT infrastructure.

So how do we fix this? How do we bring everyone to the table to actually make this work? Do we create yet another conference? Do we set up closed-door meetings with these firms in which we discuss likely candidates with specific skillsets so they can create talent pools for various contracts? Do we create a forum using the various tools at our disposal to discuss issues or trouble-shoot with them? You guys tell me. What do you think?

The forum is all yours.

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As a company, what are you really investing in?

Time for your weekly BrandBuilder reality check.

There are only two types of businesses: The ones you know are the best in their category, and… everyone else.

Advertising and marketing are nice, but too many “also in” businesses waste money on marketing and advertising when they should instead revamp one or two elements of their business that would help them actually gain market share. (The most pleasant and efficient customer service experience in your industry, a perfectly designed user interface, a 100% uptime guarantee, stunning design, impeccable ergonomics, remarkable flavor, etc.)

Advertising is basically a load of bulls**t unless you have something worth advertising to begin with. (Otherwise, what are you advertising: Hey, come buy from us! We’re the thirteenth best shoe store in the 29601!) You’re either the best at something, or you’re just another voice in the crowd getting fleeced by just another run-of-the-mill ad agency or “marketing firm.”

Before you start spending money on advertising, ask yourself what your super-special value to your users/customers/clients truly is. Maybe you have the best prices. Maybe you have the most comfortable meeting rooms. Maybe you have the most square footage of any gym in your area, or the freshest produce, or the most knowledgeable staff, or the fastest check-out. It doesn’t matter what that something is as long as it is something concrete (as opposed to another lame marketing spinfest). Is that one thing truly hitting the mark? Are you really delivering on it as well as you could? As well as you should?

Whatever your value differentiator is, whatever your brand’s value advantage is (or should be), this is what you need to invest in FIRST. Once you have that aspect of your business nailed down, THEN and only then should you even bother with advertising.

About a year ago, Seth Godin posted some great advice to college grads on his blog: Only borrow money to pay for things that increase in value. A pair of shoes or cool clothes never increase in value. An education or professional experience, however do. Great advice, especially in the crux of our current economic/credit crunch. The same applies to businesses, which is why Seth’s advice is so damn relevant to the discussion today.

Perhaps more relevant to today’s topic is a slightly tweaked version of Seth’s advice: “only invest in things that increase in value.”

Like shoes and clothes, advertising never increases in value. With advertising, you are at best buying a small percentage of the public’s attention across a very narrow sliver of space and time (and paying a premium price for it.) Before you know it, your advertising budget is gone, and so is that very expensive bubble of attention.

Investing in better products/services, better people and better processes, however, makes a whole lot more sense as these things never lose value. Great employees, great products, great customer experiences and fostering a unique relationship with your fan base are the types of things worth investing in. These are the true foundations of a great brand. These are the types of things that will help strengthen your brand equity.

Advertising rarely translates into brand equity unless these foundations exist to support it. Even so, the more solid the brand’s foundation, the less relevant advertising becomes.

Starbucks doesn’t advertise much and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Whole Foods ad anywhere, yet millions of people drop solid stacks of greenbacks there every year. I don’t shop at Target, wear Rudy Project sunglasses, drive a VW or crave a BMW because of advertising. Other than creating awareness for a product that hasn’t managed to capture anyone’s attention yet (red flag), advertising does little to impact most companies’ growth. Do they create spikes in interest, eyeballs and sales? Sure. When executed well. But growth? Over time? Nope. Growth is a completely different animal, and advertising alone, boys and girls, won’t get you there.

Building a strong reputation by developing great products, buzz-worthy experiences and generally delighting customers/users is a much stronger strategy than paying loads of cash for advertising.

Something to think about as you prioritize items on your budget for H2.

Have a great Wednesday, everyone. 🙂

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It isn’t the media, it’s you.

image by ilisu

Something Seth wrote quite a while back that still resonates with me today:

“As soon as they start using the tactics of the other guys, playing the game they play, they become them. As soon as they decide that they can buy (not earn) attention, it all changes.”

With all this talk of new vs. old media, the R.O.I. of Social Media, advertising spend and SEO, chances are that you’ve forgotten what made your company or services or products so different. So unique. So good.

Chances are that your success has driven you away from those early days, when being different from everyone else, when being better was what it was all about.

Back when taking care of every new customer was like going out on a first date.

Chances are that you’re more focused on aligning your pricing to that of your competitors now than you ever were.

Chances are that you’ve started to copy their every move. You advertise where they advertise. You offer the same services they offer. If they get a Facebook page, so do you. If they start a Twitter account, so do you. If they launch a BOGO offer, you aren’t far behind. Every day that goes by, the more like them you become. The less different and remarkable you are.

Chances are that you are slowly becoming a clone of the very people you once thought sucked.

“As soon as they start using the tactics of the other guys, playing the game they play, they become them. As soon as they decide that they can buy (not earn) attention, it all changes.”

Stop.

Take a breather.

Go back to the start.

Are your products still the best? Are they still unique? Is your company still unique? Are you who you promised yourself you would be when you started? Are you building real relationships with your customers? Do you matter?

Are you still earning attention?

If the answer is yes, congrats. You’re one of the rare few. I hope you manage to keep it up for decades to come.

If not… well, maybe it’s time to let go of the superficial tactics and get back to basics. What do you say?

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