What Social Tools Can't Tell You

Conversation monitoring tools are really pretty amazing. If you load them up with the right keywords, they can tell you everything that's being talked about regarding those subjects. And the best tools will even pipeline those conversations to the appropriate people within your organization for response.

But that's where the effectiveness of these tools end.

No matter how good your monitoring tools are, no matter how many alerts they provide and no matter how effectively they funnel tasks for action, the actual choices about how, when and even if an interaction is warranted comes down to the flawed impressions of a person or group of people. The best tools can help a bit with evaluating, but in the end the decision how to act is human. And finding a balance here is both crucial and troublesome.

I was struck by this balance this morning when The BeanCast marketing podcast was mentioned in a comment to a post. My usual mode is to thank a blogger for mentioning the show. But in this case, the blogger had accidentally forgotten to mention me in his list and a reader had reminded him of my show. The blogger in turn replied back saying that he had forgotten to list the program and that he loved our show. 

But as I was getting ready to respond, I realized that my work had already been done by a listener. People were having a conversation about my show. That's what I want. 

I love when people plug the show and I always try to turn that into a conversation, but people were already having the kind of conversation I coveted. My involvement would have been superfluous — possibly even damaging to that conversation. So I stopped myself and just enjoyed the moment.

Too many brands still use monitoring as a magic trick. I've complained about this before. Responding has become almost a badge of honor that says, "We get it!" But when people are already conversing and you interrupt them, that doesn't say you get anything. Sometimes it just says that you're rude. At least that's what MY parents told me.

Nestle found this out the hard way recently. Many more brands will find this out soon as well — and tools won't show you the way. Only wisdom, experience and training can offer these kinds of insights. So when you set up your tasking priorities for conversation monitoring, also be thinking about who you are tasking to respond, right along side what you are asking them to respond to. Because social is still about people and relationships, and the rules of real-life social engagement still apply in a digital setting.

The Unmeasurable Asset

On the last episode of The BeanCast, we got into a discussion about the power and lasting value of a brand. And something that I believe Ben Kunz said really resonated with me:

We underestimate the memory of consumers.

Marketers are constantly under pressure to evolve, and inside organizations there is usually a stream of comments that say the "look" is getting old and that the "brand" needs a refresh. But maybe this isn't the point. Or to clarify, maybe this is just more confusion between promotion and brand. Promotions need updating. Brands usually don't. Because even an old brand represents the connection to the consumer's memory and that connection lasts much longer than we think — for good or bad. (As Bill Green pointed out, people remember Enron too.)

But for me the real meat on this issue started occurring in the comments of the show notes for this episode. Some great points were made by Howie Goldfarb regarding the role of CMOs and the pressures they face.

During that conversation, Howie pointed out that CFOs hate the CMO role because they can't accurately measure performance. It all comes down to aggregate sales in the end, so a CMO is credited or blamed for a number that many times isn't even his or her direct responsibility. So is it any wonder that CMO tenures are so short?

Why Sales Can Be A Poor Measure for Marketing

That's when I posited that maybe CMOs are too beholden to the measurement of sales. Certainly we all are rewarded or penalized based on financial performance, but blaming marketing for a sales shortfall perpetuates more confusion about what a CMOs primary responsibility should be. Sales numbers are the responsibility of the sales department. Marketing's job is to preserve and nurture buyer interest and brand equity. When those objectives are confused, we wind up with brands that communicate financial objectives, rather than an interest in long-term relationships. This can generate sales in the short term, but over the long-haul people remember that your brand doesn't care. Or worse, it confuses them to the point that they no longer know who you really are.

The brand is the most valuable asset a company has and it's often viewed as nothing more than an ad campaign. Yet consider CompUSA and Circuit City. Their ad campaigns did nothing to save them, but their brands remained valuable enough to rebirth in new hands and become successful once again. Or consider the rebranding of Mr. Pibb as "Pibb Xtra." People refused to even call it by the new name and continued to order it as "Mr. Pibb," until finally they had to change back to the original name.

Brand memory lasts much longer in the consumer's mind than we give credit. Isn't that insight worth something to your organization? And shouldn't we find better ways to evaluate the person charged with protecting and preserving this asset?

I'd love to hear some opinions about this. How should the performance of a CMO be evaluated? Is it really important to distinguish what marketing does as opposed to what sales does? Should the two be more closely aligned or separated further? Have at it.

Belief Before Benefits?

I've been challenged by a debate I'm having with John Wall via email regarding a new book by Simon Sinek, called Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action.

The basic premise of the book challenges the accepted wisdom of business, and that much I like. The premise presented is quite intoxicating. Mr. Sinek promotes the idea that "Why" is more important than "How" or "What" to a brand. To quote the description on Amazon:

"Any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but very few can clearly articulate why. WHY is not money or profit — those are always results. WHY does your organization exist? WHY does it do the things it does? WHY do customers really buy from one company or another? WHY are people loyal to some leaders, but not others?

Starting with WHY works in big business and small business, in the nonprofit world and in politics. Those who start with WHY never manipulate, they inspire. And the people who follow them don't do so because they have to; they follow because they want to."

Sounds great to me. And I totally see it. People are inspired not by making a widget, but the reason you made the widget in the first place. People like the story of the couple who started a dog treat company to help other dogs avoid the dental problems of their own dog much more than the fact that the treat cleans teeth.

For me, though, the disconnect in Sinek's argument is when he moves from inspiration to marketing. As a leadership concept and even a brand driver, I agree with him. But when he says (as he did on a recent episode of Marketing Over Coffee) that brands need to move away from talking about features and benefits and begin starting with "why" you should believe, warning bells go off.

Clearly he's right that brands who start with features and benefits as a driver can often end up creating commodities, not unique brands. No matter how unique your features and benefits are, they are assailable and eventually can be challenged or even copied. However, it's also equally clear that ignoring features and benefits in a brand is where many brands experience a disconnect with reality. 

Gatorade is the poster-child of this, with their whole G Campaign. That's a campaign purely based on the "Why." It's also been a failure because it doesn't really say anything about the product. 

There are always exceptions to every rule and I realize for every Gatorade example I can throw out, there's an Apple to foil me. But we need to use common sense when it comes to ideas like Sinek's "why." I'm sure even Mr. Sinek himself would agree that pure branding has it's place, but consumers still sometimes need to understand what it does and how it works before they decide why they should buy it.

Don't Tax Affiliates, Be Affiliates

Okay, I ranted long and hard when North Carolina passed it's own legislation that caused Amazon to shut down it's affiliate program in the state. So now that Colorado has decided to be equally as stupid, let me just encapsulate my previous argument. Maybe I just used too many words before and you legislators out there just couldn't understand me. So here it is:

Being an affiliate offers your state more potential revenue than forcing out-of-state retailers to collect and pay your sales tax.

This is a shoe-string business in the first place. I know the arguments and they all make sense on paper, but for God's sake, you probably lose more money to unpaid sales tax at flea markets in your state than you do to affiliates.

But the most important thing to remember is that affiliate programs are open to everyone, including you!

Now why should this interest those in state governments? Well, in the case of Amazon you have one of the biggest potential affiliations anywhere right under your nose. You call it your library system. And it's just waiting to be tapped as a huge source of revenue.

What if every book in your online catalog, included a "buy it now" button that linked to the Amazon catalog. What would happen? Well, allow me to predict that you would quickly become the biggest affiliate in your state. Better yet, add multiple options for "buy now" and include some state book shops as well. I'm sure they'd love a kick-back program of their own.

Further, did you know that with the Amazon program, if a person clicks on your affiliate link, you are given credit for all their purchases for a period of time? This could generate millions for you over time, just by leveraging your existing investment in your library system. And that just one affiliate program. I'm sure you could find dozens of such synergies, not least of which isAdSense linking.

But instead, my friends in the NC and CO state houses, you have decided to tax. And the result is a pull-out of affiliate programs, meaning none of the revenue you expected, while effectively putting hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals out of business within your state.

Think, people! 

If you agree with the sentiments I've expressed here, please pass this post along and write posts of your own to this effect. We need to get someone in government to pay attention to this idea.

You Don't "Need" A Blog

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have a mantra in regards to blogging: Go to where you customers are already hanging out before you you try dragging them to your own content.

Not everyone needs a blog. I know that's counter to what a lot of marketing folks would say, but so be it. It's true. Not everyone is cut out for blogging and frankly there are too many blogs to begin with. And no, your markets won't crumble if you say no to corporate blogging.

Why the heresy? Here are the points of my argument:

Conversation Stimulation

Most companies don't understand the reason for blogging in the first place. They look at it as yet another channel to push out communications or opinions. Or worse yet, it's the press-release section of the site re-branded as the "blog."

In both of these cases, the company overlooks that the reason social "experts" claim you should blog is because they want you to engage in debate with, participate in a larger discussion with and/or garner advocacy and support from your targeted audience. So essentially blogging has very little to do with the message itself and more to do with participating in a conversation with the online community. So if that's the case, wouldn't it be better to find where that conversation is already happening than to try to create it from scratch?

Go To Them

Here's a simple example. A company sells dog treats. They already have a loyal population of customers who regularly post hundreds of videos on YouTube of their dogs enjoying the treat. So which is the more effective first reaction by the company: 

a) Create a blog and encourage all these users to read it?

b) Post official comments and praises in the comments sections of the video postings and maybe aggregate all these videos (with permission) on a company YouTube channel?

The users are already being loyal. They've already chosen the tool they want to use to engage with each other. Why disrupt that? Why not encourage this activity and show interest in their loyalty? Why do we always need to have them come to us, when going to them is a much stronger statement of customer engagement?

Blogging is Not Bad

I'm not saying that blogging isn't worth your time. Certainly, in the above example, also adding a blog would offer an extra hook for possible engagement and more opportunities to win over a customer's loyalty. But it's rare that this would, or should, be the first step in engaging customers. 

The first step should always be listening to see where your customers are already talking about you, then doing everything within your power to encourage as much positive buzz there as possible. Only then should you assess if you have the commitment and desire to start a blog. And more importantly, then you can gauge whether a blog is even something this audience of yours would want or read. Again, using the above example, maybe the focus on videos means that your audience would prefer a daily video clip of employees and their dogs. You'll never know until you reach out. 

So if you absolutely must, by all means start a blog. More power to you. Just go in with open eyes about it's role and realize it's probably not a front-line strategy for your social media campaign.

What Exactly Is A Brand?

This subject has been so much on my mind over the last few week's I'm pretty shocked I haven't written about it yet. But I've been contemplating and asking the question, What is a brand, anyway? How do we distill it down and quantify it's effects? How does it guide our advertising and reach our audience? How can we define it?

The reason this keeps coming up for me is the unending parade of people who don't seem to get the value of branding. Whether it's the direct marketer enamored with results or the B2B marketing director who says everything comes down to promotions and sales for them, there is a sense that branding only works for the "big-boy" consumer products companies — and even there the measurement is often suspect. And I think the reason people don't get it comes down to a basic misinterpretation of what a brand is.

Your Brand is NOT Your Ad Campaign

I won't ask anyone to raise a hand, but how many times have you heard (or said), "They have a great brand," in reference to a TV spot or magazine ad? Or how many times have you heard people trash a company for terrible branding, commenting solely on the quality of an ad?

Admittedly, we do communicate our brands through our ads. But to say a brand is good or bad based on that work alone is misleading. A company can have a perfectly acceptable brand — even an endearing brand — but still be running terrible ads. The ads themselves may help or hurt that brand, but they are not the brand.

Further, the brand can be communicated in all sorts of ways outside of advertising. Personal meetings. Point of sale experience. Customer service calls. All of the touch points with a customer are potential branding opportunities. 

So what is a brand?

Your Brand is a Feeling

We can shape a brand. We can mold a brand. We can shepherd a brand. And we can do all this with ads. But it's time to accept that a brand itself is still what the customer feels when they become aware of your message, buy your product and engage with your people. 

This is not saying that the customer owns the brand. Far from it. We are still responsible for making a brand what it is. But the brand is not a font choice, logo creation or a clever idea. Those are only tools we use to communicate a brand. The brand is bigger than all that. The brand is the equity we build in the hearts of people. 

We are transcending the tools here, which is why we use descriptive words like, "Brand Essence." We're trying to communicate a core understanding of the impressions we want to leave with our target markets. We need something that's unchanging and ongoing. 

Ad campaign will come and go and they need to come and go to keep the interest of a public with a shortened attention span. But no matter how different the ads are, they need to always be leaving the targeted individuals with a familiar feeling, building on that storehouse of equity we have been depositing in their hearts and minds.

Emotion Always Influences Buying

I've talked many times here on the blog and on The BeanCast about how buying decisions always come down to emotions. Even B2B purchasing, as fact-based and analytically as it can be, often comes down to, "I like them the best" as the tie breaker. So this is why a clear understanding of what your brand is becomes so essential. Promotions buy customers, but brands keep them coming back and maybe telling their friends and associates. Or another way to look at it is, a promotion is selling a can of soda, but a brand is buying stock in the soda company. 

Brands are an investment that pay dividends over time if managed well. We can probably survive without them. But there's a reason why those with strong, well-managed brands are such dominant players. It's not all economics of scale. It's also economics of emotion. Think about it.

Some "Free" Advice

I'm becoming more and more enamored with the ruminations of The Ad Contrarian, Bob Hoffman. His blog is always interesting and thought-provoking. And his recent piece on "Free is the New Stupid" is no exception.

The post takes on the concepts of "Free" and "The Long Tail," both promoted by author Chris Anderson in his books of the corresponding names. Bob Hoffman's argument is that the obsession with the "free" idea devalues content and is actually killing art.

While I would argue that market forces are just as much to blame for newspapers being unable to sell subscriptions online as the free model, he makes some really good points about the value side of the equation. Which led me to harp on the fact (yes, once again) that free only works if there's still a value exchange of some kind. Giving away free stuff without leading the recipient intentionally down a path of purchase is just throwing good money after bad.

Here's my response on Bob's blog:

"First, I need to say I mostly agree w/ Bob. But I think it bears saying that the backlash against 'free' is a real shame. The concept was oversold (and sold millions, I'm sure), but that doesn't make the concept trash.

The only way 'free' works is when there's a value exchange of something. We give a free item to get a lead or a name (like a direct mail offer or a tradeshow contest). We provide free content to make money on advertising (which did pretty well for TV until recently). Or in my case, I provide a free podcast in exchange for the credibility it brings me with clients and prospects (kind of like what I'm sure you get from this blog, Bob.)

Where the free concept becomes problematic is when the free part and the value exchange part become separated or just plain too nebulous. The idea of my music having no value, but my concerts will make me money is good in theory. But only if done intentionally with a clear call to action. For instance, the music is free, but getting that music requires the downloader to a page selling tickets to shows or some such thing. (Heavy handed example, but I'm just proving a point.)

We can't forget that 'free' is still the most motivating word in all of marketing, no matter the over-hyping."

By the way, I'm thinking Bob Hoffman needs to be a BeanCast guest.

What They Least Expect

There's been an interesting discussion brewing on Twitter about the value of sentiment analysis and social chatter in relations to brand planning.

Readers will know that I'm a fan of social metrics and the tools that deliver a real-time picture of consumer impressions. But over the course of a conversation on the subject started by Len Kendall, Ben Kunz and me this weekend, I surprised even myself with my level of skepticism.

My problem is not with the tools or what they reveal. I think these are becoming robust and important additions to our arsenal. My issue is what people do with these metrics. Because I think that what we are hearing people say, even in real-world conversation, is not always representative of how they are acting.

Take for instance direct mail. For year before the advent of the social media juggernaut, polls, focus groups and conversations with people on the street always showed that people hated mail and would prefer just about anything other than telemarketing as an alternative communication method. And yet, the response numbers told a different story. The real issues was untargeted mail and the mass mailings that played the numbers game. There's no doubt that the sentiment was real and that direct marketers needed to explore other options, but clearly a knee-jerk reaction based on sentiment alone would have been foolhardy.

For me this is a good reminder that what people say is not always what they do. Ben Kunz turned our conversation into an excellent blog post on the subject, so I won't try to recreate what he said so eloquently. But I do want to take this thing one step further and talk about needs.

The Expectation Rut

Ben talks a lot in his post about how sentiment needs to always be tempered with hard numbers representing actual behavior. I certainly agree with this assessment. But I also wonder whether sometime we get so caught up with with expressed consumer needs and desires as a whole that we hamper innovation and market creation.

Let me ask, who among you needed a smartphone 10 years ago? Who needed the Internet 20 years ago?

Consumer sentiment and consumer purchasing behavior is all well and good, but in many ways relying solely on these metrics is nothing more than a maintenance plan. It keeps cash flowing when times are good, and with a strong brand identity it may even spark some love and loyalty. But it's kind of like an employee-of-the-year award — this type of honor always seems to go to the person (in this case, brand) that gives us exactly what we expected.

When you invest your brand exclusively into the narrow box of consumer need you may reap acceptable rewards, but you also lock your brand into the unforgiving ruts of consumer expectations. And humans being human, they will only tolerate so much change before they rebel and your brand falls from their favor. You must give them what is expected or you are penalized.

That's why we have to leave room for vision when we analyze markets. 

Looking Beyond Need

Market creation is a risky proposition. It goes beyond expressed needs and looks at how life would be improved if this new product (or service) was introduced. It looks at how we want consumer behavior to change and mold itself around our brand, rather than the other way around. And it's a huge roll of the die that takes confidence, careful planning and a truly innovative offering.

Obviously you can fail big. But if you win, the result is a measure of loyalty that far exceeds the expected. People love to be surprised and delighted by unexpected new things. (As long as this new thing doesn't break what's already working for them, of course.) Innovation is an understanding of the consumer that's more than a reflection of their desires, but is prescient of what they never even knew they needed until they met you.

Such brands become beloved by their buyers. But more importantly, these brands afford themselves room to maneuver. Because innovation buys advocacy and ensures a certain amount of forgiveness. You aren't locked into the expected, so no one really has you pegged on solid expectations. And innovation breeds innovation, raising the stature of your brand over time.

I know we can't expect every product to be truly innovative. So the metrics of sentiment and real-world behavior are important to have at our disposal. But those who hold the keys to developing new consumer offerings would be best served by stepping out of these metrics on occasion to look not at what consumers want, but what they least expect.

Keeping Social Distributed And Ethical

Got a great email today in response to our last show. And the questions asked were so in tune with my recent speaking engagement in Pasadena, that I felt compelled to answer at length.

The main gist of the email was questioning both how companies could ever justify social network involvement without response and the ethics of pay-per-tweet. I started with the latter answer, which was the easier of the two:

"Wow! So much to comment on. But let me try to do so briefly. 

"Pay-Per-Tweet issue has been covered repeatedly on the show. In fact, Ben Kunz is particularly against it and has been on the show quite a few times addressing this.

"My only issue about any paid promotion in the social space is when you aren't saying, 'this is an ad.' And I'm not just talking about disclosing that you took a freebie or some money changed hands. I don't think disclosure is enough, because you still aren't admitting that you are doing an ad for the company. You're pretending to do a review for the product or that somehow you are immune to bias and that's disingenuous. Even a negative review becomes suspect, because people still question the fact that you kept the item. I even go so far as saying that if you give away the item as a prize you are still taking a payment for promotion of the product.

"So if you say it's an ad, you're clean. If you feel you have to justify your credibility in any way, you are straying into payola.

"As for using social media effectiveness, there's no simple way to answer this, but essentially it needs to be a distributed and transparent effort to get the most benefit. Yes, there needs to be a single, official account for tweeting the promotional links. But the real power of social is when multiple people in an organization are empowered to share their thoughts and gather followers. Sure, you need guidelines, but offering the ability to employees to be individuals shows the customer what kind of organization you really are. A great example of this is Zappos where every employee is encouraged to use social networks aggressively for the benefit of the organization.

"We also shouldn't muddy the waters by talking about response with social. Social marketing is an experiential branding tool that enhances the advertising and response efforts, but doesn't generate response. Social is about creating relationships, which can then be leveraged for response-based and sales efforts. But when Dell crows they sold $X million with 'social' they aren't being honest. They built trust with social. And then they launched a coupon campaign that was well received because of the social. But the social effort itself isn't the source of the response. The offer and message of the coupon campaign did that.

"A great example I recently heard was a charity using NPR. By all measures their NPR effort was a dog. Response was in the basement via that particular 800 number. Yet every time she canceled her NPR buy, ALL of her other efforts went down. I liken social to that story. It's not the burger, but it's the secret sauce that sells the burgers."

I still owe you readers a full-on report of my recent talk, but hopefully this does a good job of encapsulating some of the higher points of the discussion.

Evaluating An NPO Director's Success

I had a fascinating discussion last night over dinner with Dave Martinez. Dave is the executive director of the Placer Food Bank out of Roseville, CA. And during our conversation (filled with really funny stories about the struggles of keeping a food bank up and running) we turned to how his success is evaluated by his board of directors.

"Relationships," was the summation by Dave. I think the number of evaluation points he mentioned were 16. But every single one of them came down to his relationship abilities. And as he said it, everything else he had been talking about came into laser focus. All the various situations and stories he had described to me were solved with the brute force of building relationships with people and seeing where those relationships took him.

There was the neighbor associated with the local TV affiliate who agreed to be a driver, and then turned out to be a recurring spokesperson for the charity through his media connections. There were the local reservation members upset over Dave's bingo operation drawing away their casino revenues, only to be mollified by Dave's solution that would be make them both more profitable. There was the Facebook effort that continues to blossom not by a campaign drive for members, but through their engagement in conversation with the members they have and those members continuing to pass along and encourage the involvement of their friends.

I'm here in Pasadena to talk about social media and how it might help non-profit organizations. But it strikes me that the average NPO is better equipped to integrate a social media strategy than just about any business I've ever run across. It's a natural fit, because it doesn't involve any kind of paradigm shift in thinking. Instead, social is simply the digital version of what already works for them. 

It should be interesting to see how the 70+ participants in the room this afternoon respond to what I'm saying. I'm sure the same fears and doubts all businesses feel about online transparency and engagement will be present. As well they should be. (You should know by now that I'm a social pragmatist more than a social cheerleader.) But I am glad I had this conversation with Dave. It helps me to see that a lot of my premises about how social could possibly help an NPO may be right on target.

Look for a post tomorrow sharing some of the essential points from my talk. And thanks to agency Russ Reid for bringing me out for this event. It's been great so far.