The Buzz Bin

Jake McKee is an evangelist for online and offline community building, social media, and customer-company interaction. He has been working with online communities, fan groups, and consumer groups since the early days of the Internet, and has a rich background in Web development, community management, business strategy, and product development. Jake is the Principal at Ant’s Eye View, a Dallas-based social media and customer engagement consultancy. In a past life, Jake was the Global Community Relations Specialist for the LEGO Company, where he spent five years on the front lines of customer-company interaction.

BB: You recently launched a webinar series. What do you hope will happen as a result of this effort?

JM: Indeed I did. The first session is practical guide to pitching community concepts to upper management; not something easily done. Not yet anyway.

My hope for the podcast series is to share what I’ve learned the years about building, supporting, and selling-in community & social activities. I speak quite a bit and get lots of questions after my sessions about follow-up. For groups that aren’t quite ready to step up to developing a full-blow strategy or starting a social project, this might be a good way to dip their toes in the water.

BB: Webinars tend to be viewed as 1.0 technology. It’s great to see a healthy mix of tactics from a well known 2.0 guy. Can you expand on this?

JM: Heh. I’d actually consider myself more of a 0.0 guy. I talk a lot about building honest-to-god relationships with people, whether helping customers/users connect to each other or helping customers connect with members companies. Relationships obviously came far before the Web, but in our Web 1.0 rush to automate, separate, we tended to build the (push) communication tools that helped support our own (corporate) needs. Web 2.0 has been, in my mind, a metaphor for adding participation and interaction into the technology.

Sure, Webinars have been around for a while now and could be considered “old tech”, and that’s partially true, but so what? Email is one of the earliest Internet applications, yet we continue to use it as much as (more?) used than anything else. Secondly, webinars have benefited not only from technology improvements like VOIP, cheaper costs, etc., but they benefit from the fact that people are generally more willing to try online activities than they were the last time webinars made a big hit.

At the end of the day you’ve nailed it with your phrase above, “healthy mix of tactics”. Its not about what’s new or hot or Web 7.0, its about what makes the most sense for the goal at hand. That may be a phone call or it may be a $500k online social tool.

BB: How was it working for LEGO?

JM: LEGO was fantastic, I spent 5 years there and really came to understand what “working towards something big” really means. I’ve been doing some sort of “online social” stuff for a decade, even when “social” meant convincing clients that putting an email address on their site wasn’t going lead to the downfall of their company. (Seriously, remember these days when clients would ask, with fear in their minds, “But but but….what if people CONTACT us???”)

The opportunity to learn at LEGO was fantastic. I worked on the Community Development team, a team that spanned several countries, had me traveling the world, and taught me a metric ton about different cultures handle social connection amongst themselves and amongst other cultures.

BB: What lessons did you learn there that you’ve applied to Ant’s Eye View?

JM: All of them really!

Seriously, I found the mantras that I found myself repeating regularly at LEGO are now the same issues I deal with when working with clients. This really isn’t terribly surprising, considering the fact that social media/community is based on human interaction. Whether the topic is LEGO building amongst adult hobbyists or product design with technologists, we’re talking about human connection.

Certainly audience differences are important to consider, but my job as a consultant & strategist is to help people connect with each other. I’m a cruise director, of sorts. And like any good cruise director I need to be ready to make sure everyone involved gets what they’re hoping for out of the experience, regardless of what their interest is.

BB: What’s the biggest challenge facing corporations entering the social media realm?

JM: I’d say actually entering the realm in the first place. We’ve been taught for decades that in the “culture of business” a wall must existed between outside the company and inside. We’ve spent far too long building this wall ever thicker, ever taller, in the hopes of reducing risk. Our marketing was built around campaigns, which I liken to putting a rock in a catapult and shooting it over the wall and then measuring the splash damage to see what kind of effect it had.

Now that the walls are becoming more and more porous, the bounds between inside and outside are beginning to crumble. While customer expectation is increasing, marketers (and others) are largely unprepared to react. The perception of far too many marketers is that interacting, forming relationships with customers is scary and full of risk. Their yearly performance reviews aren’t based on things like engagement, overall satisfaction, etc. They’re being graded mostly on financial performance of individual campaigns.

BB: How long will it take to undo the Command and Control culture of the past 50 years?

JM: That’s the question of the generation, eh?

I’d like to say that it’s only a question of a few years – that after that time there will be enough consumer-demanded and marketing-accepted change that the evolution will have happened.

I fear that the reality is at least a generation or longer. The command and control culture likely started with a spiraling desire to reduce then eliminate risk. In a lawsuit-heavy culture where most big businesses are publicly traded and copyright law is …. problematic, there are much bigger issues than simply pulling the marketing team into the fold.

If we’re going to change the Command and Control culture, we’re going to have to start accepting risk (or probably mostly perceived risk) in a different way. The goal of any legal department is to work hard to reduce risk to zero, while the goal of business/marketing is find the best balance of reducing risk as low as possible while driving reward as high as possible. These two goals don’t work that well together and unfortunately the lawyers have had the ultimate trump card and marketing has largely accepted it.

Until the marketers retake the companies they work for, from customer service to product design, I doubt we’ll see much fundamental change. But maybe marketing simply has too much control of the direction of most companies today. Maybe we need a new type of leadership inside most companies, one that doesn’t focus on campaign-length thinking.

BB: What’s next for Jake McKee?

JM: What’s next is what’s past – I want to change the world. I wrote about this on my blog last week, but I truly believe that we can do so much more to enrich the lives of both ourselves and our consumers with the new technology solutions and social thinking we have available. The iPod brings music back to my life (despite how much my the music industry wants to fight that). Flickr helps me be a better photographer. Canon’s amazing customer service helps me deal with tech problems. LEGO products help enrich my niece’s life and learning.

Marketing, and by extension business overall, can impact in a positive way or a negative one. My mission continues to be one of introduction and training about companies can focus on the former and eliminate the later.