Social Marketing is Important to Getting Closer

Another reminder of the size of corporatins and the importance of personal connections surfaced today with the allegation that executives at Kraft and SK Foods conspired to Let a Tomato Vendor Sell Tainted Food. There's no reported "harm" but in this case it's obvious: the system is HUGE.  The companies we rely on employ thoudands of people in them- how do we choose the ones to trust?

Will this be a crisis, or an opportunity?  Make the Kraft brand stand for something better.  Call out the awful things you have done and are doing and draw a line that no one will cross again.  While I personally think the problem of pricing of food products that are the least healthy lower than the really good choices.  Un-natural, processed food consumed far from its source is not just problematic from the 'green" perspective, it's also further separating the consumer from the tomato that actually came out of the ground- there are so many people in between, with so many trust relationships, this will be a real mess.  See also, Toyota.

How will Kraft convince me that it's just this once incident- can someone speak credibly about their processes, and show how they are going to do better in the future?  We'll need to see the people at work, the employees of Kraft who are appalled by these results.  Otherwise, they are just a press release away from making customers mistrust the brand forever.

Social Media is not a Business

Susan Murphy is right on: we're at what I would call a social media inflection point. The "try to find someone around here who gets it" phase of social media is over. We're now entering the "real opportunity phase" of social media. In terms of tactics, we're past the point where doing something crazy on Facebook or YouTube got you meta-buzz (that is, the buzz about the buzz).

I'm glad, honestly, that we can leave the hype phase behind.  This does not mean that you cannot do fun, amazing things which show your customers that you love them, or show your prospects the kind of company you are on your best days and wish you could be on your worst days.

Instead, think about how social media reduces the costs of connecting to people but also increases the likelihood of doing so.  Email reduces costs but really didn't do much to reduce barriers to reaching out and forming genuine connections.

Companies have become so large that an impossible maze of technology and physical distance now separate the person who designs a product from the person who sells it, and both of them from the person who buys it.  You'll probably never meet the person who designed your shoes, made your shoes, or marketed your shoes, or started the shoe company.  Even if you tried to find out who those people were, you would have a tough time.

These processes de-humanize our expreience of products and services.  We buy things impersonally, and in a lot of cases that's an advantage.  I don't need someone to hang over my shoulder when I buy a book i know I want. 

Yet in an age of firms that seem ever more obedient to Wall Street, institutional ownership, the 24-hour news cycle, and quarterly earnings reports, and less focused on long term financial health and customer satsfaction, I wonder if individual employees would think twice about how their actiosn affected the outcomes for the firm.

Sole-proprietorships and small businesses thrive on relationships- being close to the customer , building amazing loyalty, and knowing that the success of the business is equivalent to their long-term livelihood.  To the extent that such businesses are not driven out by the big box stores, I think we'd never see them make a short-sighted decision just to hit their numbers. 

The next challenge for social media, as I see it, is to be a technology platform for bringing all employees closer to the customer.  A place where they know who the customer is, how their jobs deliver value, and participate in expressing the company's brand.  We'd all be proud of working in a place like that.

The Human Side of Marketing

I worked on a project at Razorfish to take a research-heavy approach to redesigning online experiences.  After poring over proprietary customer research, online surveys from our client's web properties, third-party research from Forrester, specialized industry analysis from firms like Compete, and almost any piece of related information we could find.

We gave ourselves a mandate to understand the customer expereince from their perspective; if we could solve their genuine problems online we'd win their hearts and their dollars for our clients.

So much of marketing is about the funnel, interacting with customers at several "stages" to push them toward a purchase.

And yet consumers of my generation and younger have become completely desensitized to advertising.  At least, we like to think that advertising has no effect on us. 

Are we beyond the point where mass advertising actually has any effect?  Most web users know about lowermybills.com and Jaguar.  Are we really supposed to tell Jaguar that its offline image, so expensively created via television advertising, is obsolete?  I think we're seeing that online efforts need to be compatible with offline efforts, now and in the past; most brands are not starting from scratch.  The status quo matters; if you're going to start a social media campaign tomorrow, you'll need to begin with where you are today.  What do your customers know about you, what do they love?  What kinds of stories do they want to tell you, share with their friends, or participate in?

I believe answering these questions to be key to the puzzle of social media engagement.
 Brands are tired of being ignored.  They want something that's two-way, when they are used to controlling a one-way conversaton.

In the past, there was far less information competition, so many fewer messsages about what is trendy, or useful, or the best choice for a problem.  And the messages can now be changed- discussion, parody, even citicism can outrun a brand's online or offline efforts with ease. 

So is the best solution "not to play" {imdb: war games]?  No, I think the lesson is to play smart. 

PLaying smart

Let's get rid of impression-based amrketing already.  If your ad spend on TV is positively corrlated with sales, and your company is [profitable, good for you, count yourself lucky.  But if TV seems like it's too expensive for what you actually get, and all of your affluent customers skip your ads with TiVo, you want to consider something different. 

You can't just "be around" when the customer

How to run an empathic web service

I fundamentally disagree with the idea embedded in the title of this Inc. magazine profile, but How to Draw 22 Million Visitors to Your Website is a great look at Pandora, and how the company  uses its connection to its users to create product excellence and customer loyalty. 

Four elements identified in the article:

1. Be Human
2. Be Willing to Evolve
3. Listen to Your Customers
4. Don't Be Afraid to Ask for Help

And to me, this is what being an empathic company is all about.  Why are these kinds of services successful?  Actively engaging with customers- by listening, by responding to them, visiting with and empowering them- creates the kind of bond that drives 1.7 million of your customers to write to Congress about royalties.

Customers are great at being loved.  How good are you at loving them back?

The title of the article in Inc misses the point: don't just try to get to a million customers or 20 million site visits a month- though neither of those would be bad in and of itself, they aren't a measure of your success at creating a product that fills a need and builds long term value and loyalty. 

The power of unmoderated communities

One of the most impressive things about Twitter is the way that it focuses instantaneous attention and creates entirely self-organizing communities.  One of the downsides from a marketing perspective is that it is very hard to limit the influence of other users in a conversation within twitter. 

So what happens when responses to your tweets go negative?  It's not possible to silence such negativity, and drawing attention to it with a reply might feed the fire.  How can you be positive about something negative?  Here are some suggestions:

1. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: the difference between a flame war and a discussion is the way that parties seek common ground.  The more you seek common ground, the better you look and the less dramatic the negative can really be.

2. Candid, not canned:  If your twitter presence represents a company or its marketing efforts, the best thing you can do is acknowledge that your critics have a valid point.  Ignoring the voice of consumers is the story of marketing past; instead of talking only about the positives, corporate spokespeople and all their ambassadors have the power to be realistic, open-minded, and human. 

3. With great power comes great responsibility: The power to connect through "social" media isn't just an invitation to create more impressions, or free impressions, but instead to use the metaphor of person-to-person interaction for communication between people and brands/products. The more a brand uses its presence as a media buy, or another e-mail list, or a bulletin board, the worse it will be. Instead, bring forward the human parts of your company: people, who have opinions, and ideas, and  hopefully care as much about supporting and selling the product as customers do about buying and owning it. 

4. Be a good friend: When social media uses the metaphor of personal connection, the power to drive sales, pass along brand messages, and increase customer loyalty comes with certain obligations.  Just as we wouldn't stay friends with a person who talked without listening, are products so different? In friend relationships, we maintain our own personal motivations, but our friends' opinions about our actions usually matter.  They become stakeholders in our lives.  When corporations fail to take the same approach, people notice. 

I'm a little late to the party here, but this came up at work today and I really wanted to think it through.  Chrissie's Don't feed the trolls post has great ideas as well.