Marketonomy

Please Donate to Relief Aid

In many ways we are becoming a world without borders--we can make friends with people from all over the planet and share ideas and information without ever meeting in person. And yet, in a time of disaster, when you can't reach out physically and help in a rescue effort, or comfort someone who has lost a child, or a husband, or a mother, you realize how distant we can be. Pain and suffering somewhere else in the world is just another part of the news cycle.

Jeremiah Owyang has been really banging the drum on every forum where he's active to inspire donations to relief agencies coming to the aid of disaster victims in China and Myanmar. He's been encouraging people on Twitter, on Facebook, and on his blog, recently posting a series of his own pictures from a trip to China.

I really respect the effort Jeremiah is making to leverage his large network of friends and colleagues to show solidarity and support for the victims of these tremendous disasters, and so I'm adding my voice in the small way I can on this blog to encourage you to make whatever donation you can to the Red Cross. Please help and make the world a little smaller.

WHIM Interview with Stowe Boyd

Some of you will recall my slow-burning project to interview innovative thought leaders in marketing technology. I posted a number of videos earlier this year, including interviews with John Girard, Matt Roche and Jack Jia, all produced by my good friends at Miner Productions for MarketingRev. There are still some videos to post, but I've been completely swamped with the SocialRep venture.

This week I've managed to get another video out of the moth balls--this one provides some great material from Stowe Boyd. On the one hand, I'm incredibly embarassed that this shoot was last year. On the other hand, I'm impressed by how well the content stands the test of time. Enjoy.

Stolen Mac Snaps Shot of Burglar

You gotta love technology. There's a story making the rounds about a New York City Apple Store employee whose quick-thinking nabbed the theives that stole her Mac and a bunch of home entertainment equipment. After her apartment was burglarized and the police came up empty, Kait Duplaga realized she could access her computer online by using a remote access feature. After accessing the computer, she used the Mac's built in camera to snap a picture of the thief, who was no doubt trying to figure out how the computer was working on its own. Kait's friends recognized the thief, the cops made the bust, and Kait got all her stuff back.

Repair Millenium Park

Jeremiah Owyang pointed to a sad story on Twitter this morning. A flashmob organized on Facebook for a waterfight at Millenium Park in Leeds, UK. The resulting storm of 350 people completely trashed the park, and the reputation of social media enthusiasts. There's an obvious way for people to repair the damage--both to the park, and to our reputations as an emerging digitally networked society. There's now a Facebook group to organize volunteers to help Repair Millenium Park and, a fund where you can donate a couple of coins to help pay for the damage. If you believe in the power of networked communities, add a dollar to help turn this story around.

How Social Media Almost Killed Me

I'm an avid mountain biker. Instead of going to the gym, I ride trails. The last time I bought a bike, I built it up piece by piece, meticulously researching every part on the internet. It took me three months to figure out exactly what I wanted, and I read hundreds of pages of blogs, forums and product reviews. This, in fact, was one of my seminal experiences in social media marketing, when I realized first-hand how much control businesses have lost over their brands.

Among the many dozens of web sites I visited, the hundreds of pages I read, the countless dialogs I had on message boards, I almost never visited the web sites of product manufacturers. I didn't care what they had to say. I didn't want to hear how they were positioning their new bike, or get spun on their latest technology boondoggle. Anything I wanted to know about bikes I wanted to hear from other riders. Who would trust a company that had just dumped $3M into their latest product upgrade to give you an honest assessment of the product's weaknesses? I'd rather hear from 20 people who bought the product and can tell me why it sucks. The only information I wanted from a manufacturer was product specs. What are the measurements of a large frame? What's the diameter of the head tube?

I wound up building my dream bike and becoming an big believer in the power of social media to transform consumer behavior. Researching products before making a purchase decision is perhaps the most powerful way the internet and social media will reshape commerce. But it can also have its drawbacks if you're not careful.

Recently I've found myself in need of new tires. It's been an especially dry spring and the trails have become hard, loose and treacherous. Although I'm an avid rider, I'm not really a gear geek. I'm not one those people that's constantly buying the latest new thing and putting it on my bike. Once I buy or build a bike, I tend to ride it until it's completely destroyed and then I move on. When it came time to buy new tires, I hadn't tried every tread pattern or developed any loyalty to a particular brand. So I fell back on my trusted advisor, the Internet. And that's when I got screwed.

When I went online, I found great deals on tires from a brand I've already used, Wilderness Trail Bikes. One tire in particular sounded good for hard, dry conditions, a tire called the Velociraptor. So I went to the product review sites, and low and behold there were 450 reviews for the Velociraptor, rendering an average score of 4.14 out of 5 stars. Impressive. I played out my usual tactic of reading a lot of negative reviews to hear what might go wrong, but the metrics were overwhelmingly positive. So I bought my new tires and put them on my bike.

First ride out, the front tires felt a little loose compared to my old tires. Everything was a little twitchy. I chalked it up to breaking in the new tread and started pushing it harder. And then I ate it. It wasn't even a tight turn or anything technical. I was just cruising along a straight line of single track and I felt the front wheel slip out. My center of gravity collapsed and then I was ripping through the rocks and dirt on my side. No major damage, just a wide and bloody stripe of trail rash from my ankle to my shoulder.

So I finished my ride and stopped by my local bike shop to talk with one of their mechanics. I walked in and said I needed some insight about tires, and the guy takes one look at my arms and legs, looks at the front tire and just shakes his head. "What are doing with that on your bike? That's outdated technology." And then he proceeds to point out all the things that have been improved in the years since that tire was invented. In fact, the tire I had replaced with the Velocirapter had been much better, which is why it suddenly felt so uncontrollable. So how did I get steered so wrong by trusting the Internet?

It turns out, if I'd paid more attention to all the tire reviews, they were years old. The site didn't make that obvious, and honestly I didn't really think about it. A tire's a tire, right? But even though there's much better technology available, Wilderness Trail Bikes is still making bank selling their highly rated and outdated tires at fire sale prices. Not only did that cost me the price of the tire, which I immediately replaced with an up-to-date Kenda Nevegal, but it cost me a lot of skin and pain--and I consider myself lucky.

Social Media is a phenomenal tool for consumers. But it's not idiot proof. It puts you in the position of being able to learn from the experiences of hundreds of others, which doesn't exactly make you an expert. The problem is what you don't know that you don't know. And that could actually kill you. At the end of the day, I'm still grateful that I can walk into my local bike shop and talk to an expert. Now I wish I'd started there in the first place.

Oh, and I won't buy another Wilderness Trail Bikes tire. They got me once. Never again.

Update: Okay. I've talked to a bunch of tire experts who agree with my assessment of the Velociraptor, but not with my conclusion that I shouldn't buy another Wilderness Trail Bikes tire. They do make some great tires. I'll just say their marketing--especially educating buyers about making the right tire choice--could be significantly improved.

Crossing the Social Media Chasm

The discussions among social media experts about emerging trends in marketing range from the ridiculous to the sublime. For all the ubiquitous two-bit pundits holding forth on the latest new definition of brand 2.0,  there are also incredibly thoughtful and provocative dialogs on practical marketing strategies among groups like the Online Community Unconference, run on the West Coast by Bill Johnson. Forrester is supporting some great work on the frontier of social media marketing, with analysts like Charlene Li, co-author of the latest social media must-read Groundswell, and Jeremiah Owyang.

But when you step out of the social media echo chamber--when you turn off Twitter and Facebook and sit down face to face with enterprise marketing teams to discuss the application of social media to immediate business and marketing objectives--the reality of how much ground we still need to cover to improve marketing's responsiveness to market changes becomes clear. It's a classic Crossing-the-Chasm adoption scenario, and we're still only establishing a beach head.

In the past few months I've been meeting with a lot of marketing organizations to discuss social media challenges and opportunities as we build our pilot program for SocialRep. There are a few visionary companies that are really diving into social media as a competitive marketing strategy. But for most companies, a couple of trends are becoming very clear.

1. In most marketing organizations, no one truly owns Social Media as a marketing function--not even the VP of Web Marketing in most cases, at least in any proactive sense. Social Media programs are championed here and there by innovators in the trenches, but there's little if any coordination among different programs, much less with general marketing strategy.

2. Few marketers can mount or defend a compelling business case for social media programs. Most get tripped up by the demand for marketing ROI and stall out, waiting for point-solution vendors to come up with an ROI story, or for someone on high to suddenly get social media religion. If you're a savvy marketer and you don’t already have a clear case for ROI, there isn’t one. If you’re planning a social media campaign to drive customer acquisition, chances are you already know how to measure the ROI. If you’re trying to build a community, or drive more market engagement, forget about ROI—you’re in the domain of Brand Equity, and it will cost you more to measure it than it will to get started building something on the cheap. Start talking to your CFO about opportunity cost and a budget for innovation. I ranted about this in depth here.

3. Many marketers still don't understand the fundamental shift that social media represents. I know that sounds hard to believe given the volume of discussion about the Shift in Control Over Brand, but there's a serious disconnect between buzz theory and practical application. Numerous times over the past few months I've connected with marcom people driving social media programs still under the impression that  conversations are generated by the outbound PR cycle--social media has just changed the venue. Natural consumer behavior is not to go online to discuss your latest technology or licensing partnership, but to dialog about why your product sucks, what consumers want next, and where can they get something better than you offer today. When you point that out, everyone gets it, but somehow that message hasn't reached critical mass in the marketing trenches. 

4. Saas has done a tremendous job in freeing marketing from the leash of IT. Eliminating the cost and risk of data integration is a huge boon to marketers and has opened the floodgates for new marketing applications. But it's an overwhelming sea of options for marketers who are finding it hard to make sense of what will really help them move the needle. I see companies spending months in paralysis of analysis over  platforms and point solutions, forums and blogs, mashups and viral video, desperate to make the "right" choice before stumbling forward. It's so much cheaper on every level to go out and fail today, get over it already. Do something cheap. Do it quick. Take your lumps and get smarter so the next time you succeed.

5. The baton is inevitably going to be passed to a new generation. You can already see the transition environment starting to merge with savvy social operators figuring out how build communities all across the web. There's a huge opportunity for tech-savvy marketers to take up positions of influence in the purchase decision-making process--particularly those who are in their 20s and social media native. But there's also a big smug factor in this demographic, and not a lot of appreciation for depth on marketing fundamentals. Companies would be smart to put together a partnership program between older and younger marketers. Tons of value to share.

I'm sure there's a lot I'm missing, which is why I'm continuing my research project to identify and interview the smartest marketing and technology people I can find and hear what they're up to. I'll be posting some more videos in the coming week. If you missed the first set of videos, you can find the first one on this post with John Girard. Then just click forward through the posts for Matt Roche and Jack Jia.

If you have suggestions on who I should interview, please let me know. I'm particularly interested right now in finding CMOs from companies that are forward-thinking on social media. Send me some introductions. Please!

Social Media in the Insurance Industry

Jeremiah Owyang has a post up today about his search for social media programs in the insurance industry. In short, he didn't find many. It's an industry that's well behind the curve of adoption--which isn't all that surprising for a profession based on risk aversion.

A few months ago, I had a long conversation with the VP of Worldwide Web Marketing for one of the largest insurance/financial businesses in the world. It was enlightening. This gentleman was quite web savvy and very much a proponent of social media. But he was fighting an uphill battle against management for anything innovative. In the end, he boiled their problem with social media down to a legal roadblock.

We can't get anything like this past legal. Their position is, 'if we know what people are saying, we're liable. It's better not to know.'

That's right, plausible deniability. I was a little incredulous. I mean, aside from the fact that legal is preventing the HUGE potential for social media to drive marketing/sales objectives in order to create some perceived firewall against liability for knowing what customers might be complaining about, plausable deniability is a tough argument to make in the age of Google. I mean, you can find out at least 70% of what's being said about you by doing a Google search. Could you really stand up in court and say you didn't know? Sorry, your honor, my head was buried in the sand.

Web 2.0 Expo and Online Community Roundtable

I spent most of the day yesterday at the Web 2.0 Expo, just looking and listening and trying to gather some impressions about the market. The sessions I attended this year were much better than last. The best session I attended was Stephan Spencer's seminar on advanced SEO techniques. Practical. Strategic. Engaging. He's coming out with a book for O'Reilly sometime in the near future. I suspect it will be a must-read.

The sessions I attended on marketing were a mixed bag. For every sharp marketer I heard parsing the native opportunities of Web 2.0, there were dozens just trawling for ways to leverage Web 2.0 to more effectively spam their market. I guess that's par for the course.

I thought the trends on the exhibition floor were interesting. Last year the dominant theme was collaboration. This year there I only noticed one company positioning themselves prominantly as a collaboration platform, but a sea of companies offering web application dev tools and anything they could stick a cloud computing badge on. I was trying to make sense of the shift when I ran into Kent Langley at the Online Community Roundtable. His take was interesting, informed as it is by his position as an IT director supporting the development of enterprise Web apps at SolutionSet. His opinion is that we've moved from the surface concepts of "hey, we can collaborate online" to the more substantial nuts and bolts of actually building web applications that work. Kent has a substantial blog post on cloud computing that is definitely worth a read. 

Thanks, Bill, for yet another great Online Community Roundtable. This month the roundtable was hosted at SixApart, and the discussion was lively. One of the most interesting debates was about what really makes a community online. Clearly the kind of dialog that happens on your Facebook wall signifies a community through discussion. But is playing Scrabulous with a total stranger a community interaction? The underlying question is what, exactly, is the glue that binds a community online? Is it simply a shared experience? Does it require some deeper interpersonal engagement? Does it require dialog--or is sharing photos on Flickr with no comments communal?

This is something that will rattle around in my head for a while. Certainly the point of reference is important. Many people are driving communities simply to build traffic they can monetize. In that sense, viral growth is more important than depth of engagement, and community is just a collection of moths to the flame. But if you're trying to build value for participants, community means something much different, and requires some kind of sustainable depth--whether it's personal, professional, or simply a shared affinity.   

Web 2.0 Expo: Bloggers vs. Reporters

I'm at the Web 2.0 Expo taking the pulse of market buzz. I haven't yet done the Exhibition Floor Trawl, which to my mind is the best source of data on what's really happening--who's exhibiting, what booths are people lining up at, how big is the crowd--but I had to post on a funny initial impression.

After sitting in on a couple of sessions I headed over to the blogger lounge to connect with some friends. The blogger launge is just a couple of doors past the media lounge, so I peaked in there first to see if I knew anyone. The difference between the media lounge and the blogger lounge was telling.

When you walk into the media lounge, it's deadly silent. There are a couple of rows of banquet tables, about half full. People diligently typing away, head down. You walk two doors down to the blogger lounge, and you can hear the buzz outside the door. Similar rows of tables, but they're all full. There are couches with people lounging with their laptops. Pandora radio is set up putting out tunes. There's a small video/sound stage setup for video interviews. But most of all, people are engaged in conversation everywhere--talking while posting, twittering, texting.

It's a striking metaphor for old vs. new media. Why the two lounges are even separate is an interesting question, and I can only speculate that enough old line reporters don't want to hang out in a cluttered social environment where there's music and conversation going on that they need their own room. Maybe it's distracting. Maybe it's annoying. But speculation aside, the different environments are a compelling symbol of the different worlds of traditional and social media.

I wonder how many of the people in the blogger lounge have defected from the media lounge.

Following the Flow of Conversation

Continuing on the theme of social media trends and implications.

One of the major themes that social media experts talk about incessantly is the shift in control over the message. In the world of mainstream media where content is created by a few and broadcast to the many, whoever controls publication controls the message. In a world of social media where anyone with access to a computer can put a message into play among millions of readers, the most compelling messages win the day.

There are a lot of fascinating implications in this shift--enough to fill an entire year of blog posts. But the trend I want to talk about right now is the changing role of PR and marketing in the influence of market dialog. Many people say PR and marketing are effectively dead, while others try to recast social media as just another new vehicle for revitalizing PR and marketing. Marketing 2.0.

Let me first say where I come down in this discussion about marketing and PR in the age of social media. The rumors of their death are greatly exaggerated. There will always be a need for companies to advocate on their own behalf--to develop and communicate a compelling market position. How that message is developed and communicated has changed forever. Unfortunately, many marketers haven't figured this out yet, and until they do marketing will continue to decline until a new generation takes over.

The problem for marketers is that they've grown up in a bubble--just like the Internet Bubble that gave rise to irrational exuberance and a general belief that business fundamentals were no longer relevant. Let's call it the Marketing Bubble. Before the Marketing Bubble, we had more than 5000 years of social media--a world in which word-of-mouth was the dominant form of commercial dialog. As the means of mass communication emerged, marketers naturally adopted new tactics for communicating with a larger market. Print. Radio. Television. Computer. Internet. Mobile.

These continuously evolving forms of communication weren't cheap. In fact, getting a message out over any of these channels was enormously expensive, which kept control over the message sharply limited to those who could afford it. The Marketing and PR we know today grew up in this world, and  evolved around the power structure of a highly controlled media. PR was never about developing relationships with customers--it was about developing relationships with publishers and reporters in order to influence customers. Marketing may have a slightly more robust claim to customer intimacy, but not much. How many marketing organizations do you know that actually own customer service? The vast amount of marketing dollars go to advertising--another practice focused on the power brokers rather than the consumers. If you can't shape the message through PR, then buy a message to piggy-back on the stream of media the market consumes.   

This is--or was--the bubble. It emerged with the tools of mass media, but was not a fundamental shift in the thousand-years trajectory of commercial dialog. Just as we had thousands of years of history of consumers discussing products among their peers before mass media, we are returning to that natural state for one very compelling, even Darwinian, reason: consumers will always seek out information from their peers because it provides an economic survival advantage. The Internet has simply provided the means for consumers to elevate their conversation to the same volume as mass media. 

Now that the bubble is bursting, Marketing and PR are mostly blind to the historical trendline; they are inclined to see social media as just another new technology like Web sites, or SMS. This is a huge problem. The Marketing and PR organizations we know today are organized not to listen and engage, but to listen just enough to craft messages and find effective channels to influence the market. Success is measured in the tiny percentage of people who took the bait on your latest campaign, rather than the development of an engaged community of customers--customers who become partners in the development and distribution of more successful products and services.

There's a lot to drill into on this concept, which I'll continue to do. But there's one important concept I want to leave off on today. Companies that are trying to figure out social media are going to their PR and Marketing agencies by default--those are the people, after all, who are supposed to understand how to communicate with customers. But a facility for social media is not an inherent strand of DNA for any marketing, advertising or PR agency--despite the cool case studies and hip 2.0 language. Communicating at customers is not the same as communicating with customers, and if you have any hope of success in social media, you need to understand how to tell the difference.