If social is but a channel, then the real issue for companies lies in embracing feedback from their most important stakeholders: Their customers.
That was the focus of the Forrester Customer Experience Forum last week in New York City (photos here).

Organizations struggle with corporate barriers to moving towards their customers. Controlling the experience has long been the domain of various departments from product marketing to customer service. Giving stakeholders a voice in that process — via phones, email, mail, participation and yes, social media — has been the antithesis of many corporate cultures for decades. Yet according to Forrester, by failing to embrace their customers and bulwarking their experience, companies are denying themselves serious benefits:

• 14.4% of customers would purchase more
• 15.8% of customers would be less likely to switch brands
• 16.6% of customers would refer the brand more often

Yet in spite of these beneficial numbers, progress seems daunting. During the Chief Customer Officer panel (yes, this is apparently a title), two panelists indicated they were making progress, meeting with company executives as often as once a month or more… Once a month? That’s it?

But for every ten companies haltingly talking to and listening to their customers, there is a Virgin America. The entire company seems to be built around creating the ultimate, enjoyable (gulp) airline experience. As CEO David Cush went through his session, you couldn’t help but smile and admire the audacious brilliance of Richard Branson as he turns the American airline industry on its ear. This is how companies should be built.

Barriers to Adoption

We’ve discussed this before here on the Buzz Bin. There are serious cultural barriers to adopting social media, and in general, customer feedback (find a link to a white paper here). Siloed corporate structures prevent companies from listening to and embracing their customers.

Forrester outlined a five stage process that organizations need to go through to foster the evolutionary change towards a customer-centric organization:

1) Interest - Discuss that there may be a problem with customer interaction and that the company may need to research its stakeholders

2) Invest - Upon realizing that there is a lack of understanding about customer needs, get the company to invest in a “voice of the customer” program

3) Commit - This is where getting C-Suite buy-in is absolutely necessary for success. The company must commit to responding to customer feedback.

4) Engage - Take the feedback from customers, and apply it across the line. Change the experience.

5) Embed - Make the customer experience feedback loop and product innovation part of the actual cultural lifeblood of the organization.

According to Forrester, most American companies are either in stage one or two of the five stages. I think part of the failure to adapt has to do with the tendency to use old ways to affect change. Consider the siloesque idea of a customer department or initiative, rather than realizing customer centric behavior affects a company across the line.

Consider how David Armano and the team at Dachis are starting to address the challenges of cultural barriers to customer interaction (pictured above). They see multiple nodes touching hubs throughout an organization. Similarly, Charlene Li’s latest research is focusing on how companies embrace their customers to become socialprises.

The challenge to becoming a customer-centric organization is not as easy as simply listening. It involves reinventing many an organization’s actual structure and workflow. Cultural barriers to success cannot be underestimated.

The Social Backlash

Throughout the conference there was a very clear and present resistance to social media hype. Every single discussion around our new media certainly recognized its value as a great way to converse with customers. Every successful company featured at the Forum had some kind of social component, even if it was just listening to feedback.

But more and more, you heard executives rejecting social media as a panacea for customer ills and feedback. In fact, there were discussions about the viability of Twitter in the long term as a scaleable tool, and whether it really could supplant news organizations for information.

While companies recognize social media for its value as a toolset, they don’t see it as the cure all for an actual experience, and don’t see it as the alpha and omega for customer contact points. Instead it is one of several ways customers discuss their experiences from calls, web site chats, email, etc. There was a huge emphasis on multichannel integration of customer voices throughout the conference.

This backlash seems to me be a result of overhype. A smart communicator can see this. Customers don’t touch a company in one, singular channel. They have many touches from ads, news, web sites (standard and mobile) and packaging all the way through to the actual product experience. To think that social media is it for a company is a horrific error. And the implication of the current hype cycle would only have companies communicating in 140 character sound bytes. Thus the very natural backlash.

Related Buzz Bin Posts

• Cultural Challenge to Integration
• Moving from Siloes to Hives
• Examining Siloed Processes
• There Is No Social Media Department
• The Socialprise: A White Paper

Today’s lackluster iPhone announcement at the Apple WorldWide Developers Conference left rabid online fanatics disappointed and wanting more. The letdown has to leave many customers, potential buyers and investors wondering now that Jobs is gone as CEO, “Is this the beginning of the end?”

Perhaps what made today so disappointing was the incredible tension and excitement built up before the iPhone announcement. Instead of a great new iPhone, Apple delivered 3G S. 3G S adds some functionality, but is really the same device with a few new features.

In essence, Apple took a card out of the automobile manufacturer promo catalog between major model revisions. Say it’s new for 2009 by providing a minor feature upgrade! Heck even put a new letter on the end of the name.

So instead of fulfillment, Apple/AT&T users got a dud, and one that would cost $500 to upgrade to the maximum 3G S unit. Not the most advisable tactic for a company that wants to keep its brand evangelists happy.

When Jobs left in the 90s, Apple crashed. Many have argued the current executives are a stronger bunch, that a succession plan was in place to replace the mad genius.

First indicators show that Apple may be in for a tough road in the post Jobs era (assuming the mad genius doesn’t return). And while the WWDC was not a complete disaster, it’s going to take more than 1.0 megapixel upgrade or a price drop to keep the Nokia, Palms, Dells and HPs of the world from capitalizing on Jobs’ absence. PR is more than an announcement. It requires substantive actions that back up the hype.

Attending and participating in many conferences, I find myself dubbed a great personal brander (above, KD Paine’s picture shows me “forced” to bow my head with one of the greatest personal branders, Chris Brogan).  People always ask me how I do it, and I always decline to talk about it because of my stance on this matter. Ironically, this energy has only increased since the acquisition of Livingston Communications was announced.

Further if I tweet something even somewhat quirky or edgy – a by product of being Geoff –  it creates waves of DMs to the mentioned conversationalist about what I said.  Drama vis a vis public and private messaging ensues. Finally, there’s the light contact stalking, which has gotten to the point that I feel uncomfortable Tweeting on the weekends due to strange references that leak out in conversations.

No matter how hard I strategically avoid this movement, the Livingston personal brand has become inescapable.  And that scares the living daylights out of me.  You may be asking, “Why?”

Because I know how human I am. And I fear that my personality while clearly me and not contrived, will in some way eclipse, or worse, harm a client or my company.  Because, yeah, I do screw up just like everyone else. Further, to me the principle of communications is making my clients successful or achieving something online, not nano-fame.

In many ways my efforts to dodge the personal brand conversation really has to do with what is meaningful to my daily life. Let me list my top priorities:

• Providing strategies to successfully adapt organizational social media for the long-term
• Change the world, particularly through social cause activism
• Provide intelligent conversation and challenge the communications industry to evolve and become better
• Teaching individuals in my life how to execute social media rather than doing it for them
• Serve and market my employer through karmic efforts

Once again, I am reminded of Charles Barkley’s Role Model diatribes from the 90s. And I identify.

The personal brand is a Scarlet Letter, an unwanted, unintentional consequence of marketing my or a client’s organization, and wanting to have fantastic conversations about how online media can change the way communications works. If anything, I’ve intentionally tried to sabotage or minimize my personal brand, and yet here I am.

So, yes, maybe I really have a personal brand, but I do not find it admirable as an achievement.  Further, I don’t think it’s a good thing for a long-term enterprise social media strategy UNLESS I am committed to playing team ball. That means sacrifice. And personally I find it to be an encumbering burden that prevents me from feeling free online.

I imagine that I will continue online while the above objectives exist.  At the same time, there will always be this omnipresent level of discomfort.

A Word About Chris Brogan

I’ve given Chris a lot of grief and hazing about personal branding over the past few months.  I want to state that I think Chris Brogan is a good man who wants to do the world and the industry right. He does a lot of great things for people.

For me the conversation has been about enterprise marketing. Chris has some ideas I like and some less so, but there is more than one way to skin a cat. I want to pay respects to Chris and thank him for allowing me to have these conversations with him.

Further, he demonstrates that the personal brand does work for individual consultants.  His recent hires also show scale. It will be interesting to see how he does, and I suspect with the right help and strong back-end comms strategy and results, Chris will grow a strong boutique offering.

Issues happen. Mistakes are made.  Reputations become tarnished.  This is the way of the world, particularly when an error occurs after a company brand achieves leadership or a human being becomes famous. Sometimes gaffes or human nature takes precedence, and depending on how a company or person handles it, brands and reputations lag.

As we’ve seen time and time again, like any crisis situation, when the problem is avoided the blemish becomes more pronounced. But when it’s embraced reputation damage can be stopped, and in some cases, even improved. 

Social media can be a great delivery mechanism in these situations, from blogs to videos.  It can help reputation management with search, and defuse angry customers or perturbed fans.

Perhaps the most storied example of this is Dell’s magnificent use of its blog when laptop batteries were blowing up.  By embracing the issue, Dell went a long way to resolving the matter and diffused a lot of anger pointed at the brand.  In 2007, Steve Jobs accomplished a similar diffusion of brand angst when he acknowledged the iPhone price drop may have been an error with an open letter.

More recently, have you seen the now almost passe Lindsay Lohan video yet?  A perfect example of someone whose reputation became tarnished and is now being rehabilitated through a humorous embracing of public mishaps.  Lohan will never recover the sheen of her early stardom, but she can have an evolved reputation that takes her rough edges and wears them smooth with this kind of dialogue. Robert Downey, Jr. and MC Hammer are a great example of stars who recovered their reputations post crash.

Seesmic recently released its new Tweetdeck-esque desktop client with some fanfare, competition and even a YouTube video. Included in the promotional video is about twenty seconds plus of yours truly, or more specifically, my Twitter handle (kudos to Linda Bustos for spotting this).

The video made me laugh and reminded me of a post I wrote on brandjacking. Brandjacking is when people/entties lift brands and affiliate with them using social media very easily, and often without their permission.

Don’t get me wrong, in this particular instance I don’t care, and probably benefitted from it. But the incident does bring up several questions:

Again, I really don’t care about this particular incident. But it does highlight how brandjacking — a very common occurrence in social media — could get litigious quickly if companies aren’t careful.

“I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half.” - John Wanamaker

One of the more common questions I get is how do we justify funding social media? Increasingly, my response is how long do you keep funding marking communications in media that isn’t working (image: balance by Meagansphotos)?

It’s not that you have to grow the pie bigger. Instead, think about which half of the pie is working and which isn’t. More importantly, which forms of media are your stakeholders using that you are failing to address? My advise is to take stock of your marketing approach and reallocate resources appropriately.

Consider what people are using today for information:

So how much longer can people keep justifying the same kind of spends on traditional PR and advertising in the face of these trends and in this economy? And how much longer are people going to get away with passing social media off as experimental as opposed to simply adopting it as part of the larger communications fold.

Does anyone really think social media and Internet marketing in general are going to become less important? Consider all of the newspapers going bankrupt right now.

What do you think?

Any social media strategy worth its salt is a nod to Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” By shunning silos, social media can (and should) be integrated with traditional media, email, direct and mobile marketing efforts.

Think about it (Image: Light Chaos by Kevin Dooley). Customers, donors or any other stakeholder group receives information from a wide variety of sources. It’s the classic Positioning conundrum, where every media outlet from blogs, wikis and socnets to TV, newspapers and radio are battling for attention. In most cases, that attention has grown calloused to single touches from any organization, and from any one particular place.

At the same time, contrary to the way many discussions online could be perceived, social media alone cannot affect the kind of results organizations need. To win, most organizations need to pursue an integrated approach across diverse media. It’s flash back to the 80s and 90s when integrated marketing communications was all the rage.

A holistic strategy can help achieve communications objectives by allowing for cross-pollination amongst those who consumer multiple media. The person who only watches TV or surfs blogs is a rare one indeed. It will ensure that your community receives multiple touches in multiple mediums – the crux of your efforts to “Ask, Thank and Inform” stakeholders.

Companies have been doing this for a while now. Remember all of those great TV ads showing or even featuring social media? Doritos anyone?

These are the few basic “musts” for fluid integration within social media:

Qui Diaz contributed content to this post.

Marketing communications services are usually one of the first things to get cut in a down economy, and also one of the last things to come back (image: clearing the gate by cmaccubbin). The current freeze (more like slow flow, as contracts are starting to come in again) is something many executives and I talk about on the back channel. Most want to know when it’s going to end. I wonder if it is, or if this is just the new competitive reality.

We’ve had a big party over the past decade on credit, and now it’s time to pay the debt. In my opinion, and based on many reports I read, this downturn seems to be more of a severe correction than a true recession. Meaning this contraction of markets is forcing expenditures to be made on hard cash as opposed to speculation and credit. Even when credit flows again, organizations will be less quick to use credit to fund their business operations. In the end, that’s a good thing as businesses will be stronger for it.

In the short term — meaning the next couple of years — this type of hard competitive business environment will continue for marketing services companies, consultants and job seekers. Contracts are now starting to be doled out and some markets are starting to do better, but they are much more competitive. As the bottom becomes more secure over the next few months, the more risk adverse and those that know they have to market will also start spending. A slower ebb of business is resuming.

Some companies will take a long time to return to marketing. Why this is, I don’t know. It’s really hard to make money if your customers don’t know you’re out there. But in every down economy, some companies do this, and they pay the price in market share. What’s important is for agencies and consultants to identify these companies quickly and move forward to work with smarter organizations that understand the value of marketing services.

To effectively compete, marketing services companies and consultants alike will have to be much more customer focused. Their offerings — as many have discussed — will need to be less experimental, and more ROI oriented.

The sharp and nimble will not only make it, but they will thrive. They will capitalize on the opportunity presented now. They will offer the right kind of marketing services that distinguish their organization and create meaningful growth for their clients and partners.

It’s an interesting time. Welcome to the new competitive reality.

This Friday I will be participating in Albert Maruggi’s first “Social Media Throwdown,” a discussion about personal brands with Haji Flemings, author of Brand YU Life (image: Bliss by Bobster1985). Rather than simply say “I Don’t Care About Your Personal Brand,” in advance of this discussion I’d also like to offer LComm’s recommended corporate strategy on social media and personality, Team Social Media.

Obviously, this post will have a lot of sports metaphors in it, so I apologize to any who grow tiresome of such analogies. Before I explain the alternative Team Social Media theory, it’s important to show the weakness in personal brands from a corporate perspective.

It’s true, many, many people — including some of my most well respected colleagues in the business — subscribe to personal branding strategies for social media. Yet I cannot in good consciousness recommend to a company building a long-term social media strategy that they foster a personal brand as their primary social media outreach focus. A corporation that does this puts itself at risk.

Some of these pitfalls have already been fleshed out by Jeremiah Owyang:

Risk 1: The personal brand is a cost to the company: Why let employees build their own brand on the dime of the company or leveraging the brand of the employer?

Risk 2: The now popular employee is likely to get poached: Perhaps a common concern I hear is that competitors can easily identify the stars, and hire away these folks along with their market reputation and google juice.

Risk 3: Employee exits leaving a chasm to fill: In the modern workforce, we hear less of lifetime employees seeking pension than we do of job migrants, or career gypsies that move from company to company every few years. As a result, after they’ve built up trust with the market using social tools, they leave the company, and a gap is left that the brand can’t fill.

But there are additional risks:

Risk 4: The personal brand has a human failing, which then gets aired out in the marketplace and tarnishes the company’s entire social media effort in process. Think this can’t happen? Let’s go to sports and Barry Bonds. His steroids use has permanently tarnished the records he carries and the entire era of MLB he dominated. Another sports example, in U.S. swimming the now tarnished wunderkind Michael Phelps has hurt the team’s larger image. In hindsight, perhaps PR should have highlighted more than Phelps?

Risk 5: Similar to Risk 1: The company sacrifices building its own larger commitment to the marketplace by building a personality. In essence, building the personal brand — oops, reputation — is a distraction from the company’s real purpose, which is serving its stakeholders in the marketplace with true value. This is a basic tenant of public relations.

Risk 6: The beachhead is a bluff. Every company has their voice. But how long until people realize that seeing individuals as the only voice of the company on the Internet is an indication that the company doesn’t really care about the social web? Further, while such entities may have their beachheads set, what will they do when the personality quits? They may or may not replace that person, and if they do that person has a whole network to rebuild.

Risk 7: A solo personality can polarize customers, or push away potential prospects. A team offers different voices and tones for different stakeholders.

Teams Win, Stars Lose

We’ve seen it time in and time out in the sports world. Kobe Bryant cannot win without Shaq, Derek Fisher, and Robert Horry, and today Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum. Jordan couldn’t win without Pippen, and role players like Rodman and Cartwright. The New York Yankees can’t hire enough personal brands - err stars — to win the big crown. No, teams like the Phillies, like the Red Sox win. Yes, these teams have stars, too but they are complimented by tons of role players.

The NFL’s only undefeated championship team, the 1972 Miami Dolphins, was led by the “No-Name Defense,” QB Bob Griese and Coach Don Shula. AP photo by Lynne Sladky.

Social media is no different. Yes, you do have individuals propelling brands into the spotlight; however, the best corporate social media strategies offer teams of people interacting on the Internet. Consider some of the biggest winners so far: Dell, and the Comcast Twitter team led by ComcastCares. All of these social media efforts feature teams of voices.

Do they discourage personalities? No, you have a Lionel Menchaca at Dell, a Bob Lutz at GM. Personality, in general, is important to your marketing effort. And while unfortunately this seems to be the sole terrain of our social web, it should infect corporate communications in general.

Some personalities naturally rise to the top. They are your star, and every winning team has stars. Yet the truth of the matter is they are still team players, and they intentionally focus on building a greater whole rather a personal brand. In such cases, there are other players who can step up and fill the void. There is a Richard Binhammer at Dell, a Christopher Barger at GM. Yes, losing a star hurts, but there’s more than one on these teams. The team will go on.

With teams the corporate social media effort can survive the departure of a personality, focus on its core corporate mission, and not lose a step with its community. Further teams provide a better demonstration that the entire company is committed to social media, as opposed to “letting Bob experiment with that funny stuff.”

The community expectation is that a company/organization is in actuality more than a personality, that it is in fact a group of persons (small or large) who are offering a specific marketplace an offering. Interacting with more than one person in a company only makes sense. Social media as one small set of communication tools for customers, vendors, company/organization members and investors should be no different.

Many companies need their pilot project, beachhead or one-person test to see if social media works. But if they want to build a social media effort to last the test of time, they need to extend their efforts beyond the voice of one. A personal brand does not make for a successful long-term corporate social media plan.

I love market research. It makes marketing so much easier because it informs strategy. Every New Year seems to bring with it a bevy of new market research reports. Taking a cue from Jeremiah, here are some of the market research reports that I have read recently.

According to eMarketer, small businesses are not cutting their marketing efforts, but they are moving towards social networking (discovered on Mashable). If you are willing to enter your data into eMarketer’s database, they have a white paper on marketing through the downturn.

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere is an older report, but I did not read all five segments.  The last section is about brands, and how they are penetrating the blogosphere. Some choice statistics for consideration:

• Eighty-two percent of bloggers occasionally or frequently write reviews about brands.
• Eighty-nine percent write about brands that they love or hate.
• And here’s one that supports theories about the viral spread of information throughout the blogosphere. The top source of brand information for bloggers? Other blogs (61 percent).

From Christopher Carfi: TripAdvisor just released some statistics from it’s users.  Eighty-two percent trust customer reviews over the hotel’s description, and 70 percent trust customer reviews over professionals.

Wow! Pew Research Center for the People & The Press released one late last year that slipped under my radar. The inevitable is happening as the Internet has surpassed newspapers as a primary news outlet (40-35 percent of respondents). Seventy percent still trust TV as their primary source, but even more telling, amongst younger demographics the Internet and TV are neck and neck as the primary source of news.

This one has made the rounds quite a bit.  Adam Singer’s fun group of 49 social media statistics makes for great trivial pursuit fodder amongst the 2.0 crowd.