Return on Intention

As more companies become familiar with the existence of social media and the success stories given at just about every conference held, it has become very common to hear “I would use Facebook / Twitter / Whatever, but I just never know what to say.” This problem was the cause for so many people posting “I like pickles” or “I had eggs for breakfast” on Twitter in the early days as they tried to figure out what to say. Often this lack of knowing what to post is a symptom of something bigger than understanding a new medium. Often its based on the organization not really understanding their uniqueness or their brand promise and how it fits into its customers lives. To put it another way, they don’t really understand where they fit into their market. If you make English Muffins, a product that hasn’t really changed in decades, what could you possibly have to post on Facebook? Plenty.

First – a little back story. I have this terrible habit of working late into the night… or morning… depending on how you look at it. After working past midnight a few times, getting up in the morning becomes a bit harder, so you sleep an extra hour to make up for the one that you worked through the night before. Now that you get up an hour later, you don’t get tired and go to bed when you used to and you have to wait an extra hour before you can go to sleep. Follow this path for a while and pretty soon you work until 3 or 4 in the morning and get up at 10:00.  This has been my life off and on for the past few years. This caused me to not eat breakfast anymore because after getting showered, dressed and ready for the day it was nearly lunch time. On days when I had meetings in the mornings and had to get up at a normal time I still couldn’t eat breakfast because it would make me feel ill, so I hadn’t had breakfast in years.

Recently I have been working to switch my waking hours back to a schedule that more closely resembles normal human times. Now, after being awake for a few hours, its breakfast time, not lunch time. This has presented me with the joy of breakfast food shopping and tasting, which has probably been way more fun than it really should have been. So now, after about a month of testing I have decided that English Muffins are better than bagels. Why? The nooks and crannies.

The crumb of an English Muffin are airy and full of little pockets that hold flavor. Every bite is a bit different as some of the little pockets are filled with butter, and others with raspberry jam. A bagel with cream cheese pretty much tastes the same in each bite, but an English Muffin is just a bit different. Bagels don’t have nooks and crannies. The crumb of a bagel is pretty smooth, which makes it more like most other breads. You can make interesting sandwiches with a bagel, but you can make all the same sandwiches with any other bread. The biggest difference between the English Muffin and just about all other breads you would eat for breakfast is the pocket filled crumb. This key differentiator not only makes the English Muffin a unique looking morning snack, but it also makes the taste and experience of the Muffin a unique one with the butter or jam that fills up the pockets. The point is that the English Muffin is not just about the English Muffin, but is part of my morning experience that works in concert with other factors to bring me satisfaction. When brands can stand back and see how their products and services fit into the bigger picture of their customers lives they can see how their unique features stretch beyond themselves and influence the user. With this data, the brand can start to see a bigger picture, and thats when the ideas for what kind of conversation to have with their market start to perk up like a pot of fresh coffee.

Standard economic theory says the value of a good or service is directly related to the supply of that good or service in contrast to the market’s desire for that good or service. Simple supply and demand. If there is a high supply and low demand, the value is lower. If the supply is low and demand is high, the value is higher. What does this have to do with blogging? Everything.

This isn’t just a blogging problem, but a problem for all social media channels. The early theory of social media was that anyone could publish and we as a community could produce content just as good as the broadcast media, if not better. The best part of social media channels is that you don’t have to interact with concepts, topics or brands that you don’t want to interact with. When you watch TV, you have to watch whatever commercial comes on, but on social media channels, you can pick and choose what is most relevant to you. This is where the problem starts. In order to participate you have to be able to find what is most relevant to you. With new blogs being started everyday, the supply side of equation is exploding.

Let’s say you are really into pig farming. You can stay up to date on the industry of pork farming by reading blogs that cover that market. If there are only a few blogs, then great, you can stay up on the times pretty easily. Now imagine that there are over 1,000 blogs on pork farming. You can’t read them all—you’ve got pigs to farm. So what do you read and what don’t you read? And what about all the podcasts, Facebook groups and Ning sites? You can’t keep up, and trying to becomes a time-consuming pain. Staying on top of the industry is harder now with all of the choices.

When there was one blog on the subject, it was very valuable.  There wasn’t any pain involved in keeping up when it was simple. But now if there are 100 or 1,000 blogs, you can’t read them all, so you pick a few and stick with them. Now if you read four, then each of them is only a quarter of the value that the first one was. The tragic part is that the first blog on the subject is probably still as relevant as ever. Blogging is hard work, but the value is diminished by each new entrant regardless of how hard the first blogger works.

To have a successful blog, podcast, or personal brand you have to have a reputation for providing value to your community. This hasn’t changed and never will, but now you have to work harder just to be as valuable as you were before. This becomes even more true if you are just starting out now. Building a reputation for value in a sea of competition is harder than fighting a value recession. Perhaps its time to think about that blog or podcast you’ve been meaning to start.

Usually the topic of integration in a marketing and business development context is based on the idea of integrating a cohesive message or marketing campaign through multiple channels or disciplines. The concept is to come up with the “Big Idea” that meets the strategic goals of the organization, and then deliver that big idea through all the relevant media channels like TV, radio, print and the web. This idea is for the most part sound, but its greatest problem does not lie in theory, but the ability to achieve this integration in a successful way.

The skills that it takes to make a good TV campaign and a good digital (web) campaign are very different. With TV you have writers, directors, production crews and a whole slew of technical knowledge on how to operate a camera, capture good audio and the best way to frame a shot that can take many years to learn and become effective at. In digital you have the same scenario with specialized knowledge about user experience, human computer interaction, markup and programming that isn’t found in other mediums. Because of these vast difference in technical knowledge its easy to see why there aren’t many professional service firms that can offer world class solutions in every medium. Even if you could find one, the overhead of that business would be huge just from employing such a vast labor pool that their fee structure would be out of reach for most business owners.

In years past, the concept of who should be the “lead” agency has seen a fair share of heated debate. Some say it should be the advertising guys because of their knowledge of consumers and generating the “Big Idea”. Some say it should be the PR folks because they understand how to communicate best. There has even been speculation from some of the largest advertising trade magazines that it should be the digital agencies because they have the audience and ability to track behavior better than any other discipline. At the end of the day its still not clear who the winner of this debate should be, or that there ever should or could be a clear winner. This argument does illustrate that, if nothing else, there is no agreed upon right answer.

Somewhere in the combination of the widely varying difference in skill sets from one media to another and the murky uncertainty as to who is best suited to try and work it all out, this makes creating a successful fully integrated campaign a problem of organization just as much as it is strategy. The responsibility of creating a successful endeavor falls upon the client. Over the next few years expect to see more movement as the disrupted industries of marketing and communication learn to deal with  the new digital world. It seems that on top of everything else that a client side marketing manager or CMO has on their plate a whole new level of technical complexity will now be required. This will result in either larger in house marketing staff on the client side, new planning positions on the client side to offset the need for a lead agency or a change in the agency world to take into account the new required disciplines.

I’m not sure how this will all work out, but perhaps a good idea is for both clients and agencies to ponder “what isn’t digital anymore.” Perhaps the digital agencies will go away as it becomes less of an ancillary discipline and is absorbed into business as usual, or perhaps the digital agencies will win out as they acquire the relevant knowledge traditional housed at the Advertising and PR firms. Can you hear it? Its the winds of change.

Imagine a time way back before the internet. Before television. Before indoor plumbing. The year is 1805, and you’re a baker.

In the middle of the town is a common. If you are not familiar with commons its pretty much what it sounds like, common area used by all the towns folk to keep their livestock, plant gardens, etc. The commons is where the town gathered, worked and talked about the news of the day.  To be a successful business, it made sense to put your business on the land facing the commons. Location, Location, Location, right? The age old philosophy of “go where your customers are” was very important before yellow pages and search engines. So there you are, in your bakery on the edge of the commons, accessible to anyone in town who may want a loaf of wheat bread.

Relationships were the driver of business in this time. The people who chose to buy from a particular baker most likey did so because they  built a relationship with them day after day of talking in the commons or at the bakers shop. People liked to buy from people they know. To increase bread sales, the baker could go out into the commons after the morning rush and offer discounts to try his bread, or he could start an affinity program. The baker could also hire some local kids to sell his goods for a percentage of the profit, starting an early affiliate program. No matter what the plans where to keep the business going strong, it relied on personal relationships (at least personal as in “in person”).

It would be entirely possible for the baker to bake his goods at home, and then build a stand to sell out of in the commons. By doing this he wouldn’t actually need a storefront of his own, and he could just make his money from the stand he built. This works until the customers either leave the commons to go a new area, or the commons get purchased and his stand is longer allowed to be there. In either case, the work that he put into creating his stand, and making it accessible and comfortable to customers is all lost.

Fast forward a few hundred years to today. The commons are back. There called social networks. In much the same way as our earlier ancestors, businesses are realizing that building relationships with people can pay off. All the advantages ( and disadvantage) from back then are all back, and community is the new topic to pay attention to. With all the ways you can now reach out to your customers base, the question has been raised as to whether or not a company really needs a website anymore. There are so many new services out there like Facebook and Twitter that customers spend time on that it can seem like a companies website isn’t where the people are; however, what was true in 1805 is still true today.

The point of a company having a website is to control its online domain – the space that is theirs. Thats why they are called Domain Names. Companies could spend all day on Facebook just like our baker could have spent all day in the commons, but if the commons ever became unavailable, he was out of luck. Today, the online equivalent is actually even worse. Facebook wasn’t the first social network, and may not be the last. At some point someone will create a new social network that people think is better and they will jump ship and move to that one. Facebook did it to MySpace, and MySpace did it to Friendster before that. When that day comes, then all the hard work that was poored into Facebook will be gone. I don’t mean to pick on Facebook, pick any social networking platform you want, its the same deal. 200,000 Twitter followers won’t do you much good when Twitter shuts down.

The point here is to go ahead and go out into the social media world and explore. Experiment and learn. Leverage its technology to build community and its power to build your business. Do as much as you can, but always maintain your home turf. Maintain your website. Use it to give your customers an experience that Facebook doesn’t provide them. Make it the center of your universe, just like the bread store on the edge of the commons.

This week in a meeting a client asked for us to take over their adwords accounts. Their fear is that their bounce rate from those campaigns are too high.

For the most part, this client has great organic traffic for their core offerings, so their adwords campaigns are focused on targeting markets that could benefit from their services, but who are searching for different means to solve their problems. Not a bad strategy, overall.

The problem can arise that if you drive traffic to your website to show the user a different solution that what they we’re looking for the bounce rate can be very high. Many users will see that what they searched for is not exactly what is on the page and immediately hit the back button. In this case the clients fears were justified.

So whats the right course of action? Shut down or reduce the budget on the campaigns because they don’t produce a good conversion rate? That defiantly would reduce the advertising budget without  reducing the overall number of measurable conversions. Normally that sounds great, especially in this age of accountability, but there is an underlying problem here. Sometimes the conversions cycle is so long that you can’t track it.

When we asked this client about their users and how they come to start using the program the organization offers, the most common story is “I heard about you guys, but tried other means of reaching my goals. After they all fail and I realize that there is no magic bullet to solve my problems, then I remember you guys and get signed up.” The average time between first being exposed to this client and the end user signing up for their services is 3 to 5 years. If their initial exposure to the brand is online (which most often it is) and then it takes 3 to 5 years for a “conversion”, how do you measure that? Answer: You can’t.

This is very similar to the argument of direct advertising over brand advertising. Most often you can’t directly measure how well a branding campaign works. Good branding can influence behavior, but it happens over time. On the web we like to think that everything can be measured, and we can tie it all to ROI. If something isn’t performing in black and white numbers by the end of the month, we kill the program. Unfortunately, we can’t measure everything, and we can tie less to ROI that we wold like to believe. As in this case, with a cycle of 3 to 5 years, we can’t measure it accuratly, and definatly not by the end of the month.

If we look at their bounce rate and the cost it has on their conversion rate, we would cancel the program. That’s what the numbers tell us to do. But what the customers? The people who are behind all the numbers tell us if we stop the campaigns then that initial exposure won’t exists. Without that exposure, their unmeasurable conversion cycle could be disrupted, and we wouldn’t know it for 3 to 5 years.

Number are numbers. They don’t tell us to do anything. Its the interpretation of the numbers that has meaning. Make sure your brand story and customer perspectives are taken into account when “Reading the Numbers”.

“Thank you for calling MegaCorp. All operators are busy assisting other callers. Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line. Do not hang up. Hanging up will increase your wait time as all call are answered in the order they are received. We are experiencing a high call volume right now, so please be patient.”

As of 1999, the above is the internationally recognized sign to cancel all your appointments for the next few hours and get a cup of coffee. Nothing makes you feel like a number more than being told to wait your turn in line. This is doubly so if you are calling a governmental agency. To the government, you are a number. In the US they give it to you at birth.

Customer service is becoming one of the most important parts of an organizations success. As the name implies, it is where you service your customer. If you can’t shine there then what else is there?

In this new world, you have to be on your game. There is too much competition and conversation going on not to. 20 years ago if a front line employee of yours fell asleep in your customer’s home, only a handful of people will hear about it. It would become a running joke over turkey and stuffing every year when the extended family gets together to drink—I mean, celebrate the holidays. Your company’s embarrassing botch will only be know by about 20 people. Fast forward to now, and if the same thing happens, it gets posted on YouTube and is watched by millions of people. How’s that for brand building?

A companies success lays in its reputation. Its part of the brand. If you perform well, then all goes well. If you fail and can’t recover, the word spreads. This isn’t new. This is word of mouth. The difference is now not only can you share your experiences with friends and family, you can also share it with 1,000,000 of your closest strangers.

Building a brand is done by ensuring that the customer’s expectations and experience match. If the customer expects good service and gets it, they remember you, prefer you and will do business with you again. If the customer expects bad services and gets it, at least they will remember who you are. The world as they know it is still intact. If your customers expect good service and your technician falls asleep on the couch you get a shocked customer. Shocked customers love to share their stories. The best stories in the world start with “You’re not going to believe this!” Those stories spread fast.

In the always-on world we now live in, everyone is sharing their story with the world. A world full of potential customers. This makes getting customer service right paramount. So why do most companies fail at it?

There is a problem with the system. The internet has not only made communicating with friends and expanding networks of people simple and easy, it has made us all impatient and time-starved. The world moves faster now that it did before but most customer service plans have not. If you had a problem 15 years ago, you would call the customer service line and wait to talk to someone. If you have a problem today, you still have to call the customer service line and wait. You also have the added complexity of navigating through a convoluted telephone system just to get in line to talk to a human being. In today’s super-charged world, this process takes too long.

We don’t want to sit on hold for any amount of time. Sitting on hold slows down our day. What do we do while we wait on hold? We complain to someone else. Someone who will hear us now. We’ll tweet it, or we’ll blog about it. We will make a video and post it online. By the time its our turn to talk to a customer service representative 10,000 people have heard of our problem. Then when we explain our problem to the customer service representative who schedules an appointment for a technician to come out and look at the problem. They tell us that the service tech will be there at some time within a 4 hour window. Now half of tomorrow is gone as we wait for the technician to show up. That’s decades in internet time. So we tweet about it again. We write another blog post. Now another few thousand people hear our story, and more often than not, one of them knows how to solve the problem.

GoldCorp opened its business up to the outside world and became one of the world’s largest and most successful gold mining operations. Linux was completed by a group of mostly anonymous programmers just to make a better operating system.  Wikipedia has more data than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and it was created by a bunch of amateurs. In the new web, we can solve our own problems, and most often its faster than waiting on hold for a customer service rep. We can and we do. Then we wonder where the companies that are supposed to be there for us are. The companies we gave money to. And then we stop wondering. Then we forget about those companies.

We have become tired of waiting for everything to be run up the chain of command for approval. We have become tired of waiting for a response to be vetted by legal. We want to know where the smiling salesman we bought from went, the one that made us feel like a person. We wonder when we became a number. We wonder why we talk to robots when you call the customer service line, then we wonder if it would be faster to cancel our business with that company and solve the problem ourselves.

We stop calling customer service. We complain online, we get our problems solved online and slowly the company that used to provide our services becomes less important. Most often, the company doesn’t even know there is a problem because we stopped telling them. It’s not that we stopped talking about it, we just don’t do it the way they want us to. We do it the way we want to. The fast way. Online.

Fortunately, when the internet closes a door it opens a window.

The tools and services we all use online to live our lives are open to everyone, even the people in charge of customer service. After the Comcast fiasco with the sleeping technician, Comcast got the message. They found out how poor their customer service had become. They found out in a very public and embarrassing way, but they did find out, and then set out to fix the problem using the very tools that were used to point out the problem in the first place. If you have a problem with Comcast service or equipment, just post your problem on Twitter. Comcast will see that post and contact you. For the user, nothing has changed. They still get to complain about their service if it goes wrong, but now instead of calling the 800 number and waiting 16 internet years to talk to a person the company that is responsible for the problem will contact you. You get to keep on living your life away from the sterile hold music and constant reminders of how important your call is to the company.

If I need to call my cell phone company, and there is a long wait, they don’t tell me to get in line. They tell me to leave my name and they will call me back. It may not seem like much, but being asked for your name is a lot better than assigning you a number. The rules of customer service are changing. It’s getting better for the consumer, and will be better for the companies that decide to hear the challenge, as they start to engage with their customers. Those that don’t will get left behind. It’s all free market. Evolve to add value by the customer’s definition and live. Resist the change, and go the way of the dodo. Unfortunately, we won’t wait around for the answer. We have other things to do.

This post is part of the Cluetrainplus10 Project. This project is to celebrate the book The Cluetrain Manifesto, written by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger and what has happened in the 10 years sence it was published.  The Cluetrain Manifesto is 95 theses published to direct orginations into the new world the internet is creating. I choose “85. When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn’t have such a tight rein on “your people” maybe they’d be among the people we’d turn to.”

There is quite a conversation going on right now in the marketing departments across America. There seems to be a new (well … sort of new) bright shiny object that seems to be causing some trouble. It’s called social media.
With Comcast and Zappos on Twitter and Nike on Facebook, social media is the place to be. Every day we hear about another traditional media source losing revenue or shutting down and more reports saying that advertising isn’t working the way it once did. From the other side of isle we hear the social media crowd saying that the new read/write web is the future. Social media or die, or so it goes.
Compounding the problem, there are rumblings that the top referring sites for many successful websites aren’t Google, Yahoo and MSN anymore. Now it’s Google, Twitter and Facebook. Something’s afoot. So, should all businesses rush to social media as a means to succeed, or is it all hype?
Given all this noise, it’s easy to see why so many marketers and business people are trying to figure out what a “FaceTube” is. How about advertising? We get that. Do it online? Get me some banner ads!
Social media is supposed to enable groups of people with similar interests to get together and … hang out. It seems to work great and brands want in on it. But even if the company manages to figure out the technology, then what? Well, they engage the group. Does that mean sell more stuff? Does that mean more “Top of Mind” awareness? It’s not clear, but people like it.
So it seems that customers want companies to get in on social media. Most companies seem to think they should, but they also don’t know why. The main reason is that while the internet is much more measurable than other marketing communication channels, it’s still hard to figure out if your Twitter account or YouTube video is closing sales. Many people have done amazing things for their business, brand recognition and bottom line using social media. So it stands to reason that it works and companies should do it. People like to do business with people like them, so getting involved and engaged with customers has to be a good thing, right?
Hold on a second. This conversation sounds familiar!
It seems that social media is widely regarded as “the right thing” for companies to do. There is some signs that it works but it’s hard to tie to direct sales. This sounds a lot like brand awareness advertising. We do it (or did it depending on who you are) because it was “the right thing” to do to be successful. It seemed to work, at least all the big successful companies did it, and it seemed to work. It’s just kind of hard to directly tie it to sales.
Is social media the “new” branding? Does it make a difference in this ROI driven world? What do you think?