I was reminded of this just yesterday on Facebook in a very personal way. Facebook has over the years received a variety of praise and criticism. Some people argue that it’s gotten too big for its britches. While I would argue the opposite. That just as this world needs a single site to collect and host the sum knowledge of humanity, here I refer to Wikipedia, the world also needs a single site where everybody can find and connect to the people they want to. That’s the true singular reason behind the rapid growth of Facebook -people searching to make and maintain connections with friends and family.

The story that hit this home so clearly and emotionally to me was the incredible discovery of a message on my Facebook account from somebody who I thought was lost to me forever. The is the story of my niece, who vanished 21 years ago somewhere in Southern California as the result of some incredible ill-conceived legal ruling by an incredibly moronic Californian custody judge. As the years went by, our side of the family moved and went international, making us hard to find. And for years it seems my niece has been searching for us. But now, because Facebook has become the single point of contact for everybody in our family, no matter where they live, she was finally able to discover her long lost father and family.

There are some miracles in life we can’t explain. The cancer patient who suddenly is cured. Or the cripple who can walk. Here we have a miracle enabled by technology. Where a person, who has felt disconnected, lost and lonely for a lifetime, can suddenly discover an entire family that they previously only dreamed of.

As we continue to look for ways to leverage social media for business, let us remember that in the end we are connecting humans to humans. Whether they are customers to suppliers, marketers to consumers, friends to friends or family to family. And it is in this vastly increasing web of very human connections that we will see global social change happen leading to the blossoming of a new moral and ethical center of businesses and of intercultural social tolerance.

He makes some very interesting points about building connections between people within the product itself. As a conversational marketing strategist, I naturally find this very relevant because, the majority of time, both products and retail experiences constantly fail to create opportunities to connect customers to customers; almost as if their marketing directors are afraid of having customers talk to each other.

But this thinking is akin to sticking one’s head in the sand, because customers ARE having these conversations everyday in forums, blogs and twitter streams, mostly without the brand’s participation. So here’s the rub, marketing directors either need to accept this fact and adjust their product, approach and ideally their entire business structure, or continue to struggle in a world that will become increasingly hostile.

Doesn’t seem much like a choice to me, but it still amazes me how many consultants and marketers alike think that old ways of doing business – make a website, buy a print, radio or TV ad – will draw people in to buy and do business. What they don’t see is that the main reason people are probably still doing business with their brands is because of:

a) previously good personal experiences,

b) lack of choice

c) Word of Mouth from other customers

and NOT from overpriced ads.

There are far more cost-efficient ways of doing business today. But it does mean accepting that change has happened and that it’s time to embrace new options. And Seth gives plenty of cases in point.

The new consumer journey

A while back, I attempted to create a model the way companies need to leverage new marketing to engage today’s consumers. I looked at a number of interesting approaches, but in the end opted to build around the idea of a marketing spiral.  I’m sure there are a number of other ways to illustrate the consumer journey other than using a spiral, but this is what I came up with. If anybody wants to take another stab at this, please do and let me know where you post it. Read on to discover how you can use this model to define your new marketing program.

Today’s consumers start with an Initial Considersation Set. Martin Lindstrom’s brain scan research in his groundbreaking book, “Buyology,” clearly shows that we all have an initial consideration set for every product category, many of which are completely unconscious. We choose a brand of shampoo simply because we are used to choosing it, or because on some unconscious level, our gut tells us that it’s better than the others for any number of reasons which we spend less than a few seconds consciously thinking about.

“It’s natural.” “It has a secret formula.” “It’s scientifically proven.” “I like the way it smells.” “It makes my hair feel nice.” “It’s cheap.” All these statements and a near infinite variety of others, which are completely personal to each individual, contribute to our initial consideration set.

Martin Lindstrom’s research also reveals that changing these ‘consideration sets’ is harder than it looks. In some cases, it even requires truly radical events. It took a global recession to turn affluent middle class shoppers into price savvy buyers. It took an end-of-the-world scenario involving climate change to get people to start considering carbon footprints when looking to buy a new car.

Advertisers historically have used creative disruption as a way to “open our minds” to another possible consideration set. For decades toothpaste that cleaned the teeth and kept them healthy was enough for us. Suddenly however, advertisers have effectively convinced us that we actually want toothpaste that doesn’t just clean, but makes them white, because we all know, white teeth are healthy teeth. The same consideration set has now been given a qualifier, healthy teeth = white teeth, so I need whitening toothpaste.

On the Internet, transparency means that marketers have to think and behave differently, because people can quite simply use Google to research a product to find out if it actually makes our teeth white, or even if white teeth are healthy teeth. Which is why where Affinity comes to play. Affinity is about building emotional connections between brand and consumer. To build affinity in today’s online world, marketers leverage social media strategies targeted around Influence and Advocacy.

Although common social media lore is that some people are better influencers than other, BzzAgents in the US has found that anybody can be an influencer. An influencer happens to be somebody you know or meet who says the right thing at the right time. You might happen across somebody on a train who is reading a book that looks interesting because a) they are laughing their head off and b) you are bored stiff reading the same old celebrity trash in the Metro. So you might think, “if I had that book, I wouldn’t have to read this lousy newspaper.” This is precisely the experience BzzAgent discovered when it sent out its agents to promote some of the latest reads. At the end of the day, building an emotional bond with consumers is all about trust. And that trust starts more often than not, through somebody else.

As we continue down the crazy funnel of consumerist choice, we move towards having Conversations. Back on our train, you’re likely start up a conversation with the book reader. “So is that a good book?” You might ask, though the roaring laughter would probably be a dead giveaway. In more structured mechanisms, brands can create opportunities for conversation using Presence & Participation, by participating in or even hosting conversations on their own blogs and in existing blogs, review sites and forums. These conversations can have a massive benefit. Your consumers get to talk to real people who speak like real people, not like an aggressive PR agent on a mission or a call centre in Bombay.

The next step in journey is to facilitate their Participation with your brand by creating Visibility & Distribution. This is achieved with seeding content and leveraging advertorial placements, content partnerships, relevant sponsorships and other forms of content generation around the brand. The key is to think like Coca-Cola. “Be everywhere the customer is thirsty.”

Use social listening to map out all of the places people are looking for content about your brand, and ensure your content is there. Going back to our toothpaste example, our toothplace marketer should find everyplace online where people might be looking for information on ‘clean and white teeth,’ then make sure they have positioned the right content to help consumers in their research.

The Engagement step is crucial. Even if the consumer walks away believing everything they heard about your brand and product, they will do more research and participate in further conversations or interactions with the brand. In fact, the higher the cost or level of complexity the product or service is, the more research consumers do.

So once you have seeded loads of content across the Internet, you need to make it easy for people to search and find it. Discovery & Search of content is so important that brands who get it spend disproportionate amounts of their budgets on search engine performance and optimization. Keyword optimization, social topic and taxonomy analysis, content submission to multiple social sharing sites, the use of rich metadata on content and content linking are all techniques that can be employed to make it easy for people to find and engage with your content.

To ensure that the content does what it needs to, i.e. convince the consumer that you have the best toothpaste for instance, it’s best to leverage the consumer’s voice as much as possible and target against consumer passions (fashion, music, film, whatever). The more relevant you can be, the more focused your message is to your audience, the more likely you will be included in their final consideration set.

In other words, if you can get a hundred ordinary people to test, record and talk about your toothpaste versus other brands, the more likely people will add it to their brand list. To ensure credibility, it’s best to foster conversations not just on your site, but on trusted forums and communities that editorially make sense for your brand.

After all of this interaction with you, your content, other customers, our buzz agents and the average guy or girl on the street, the consumer finally buys your product. Great! Job well done! On to the next one. Right? Wrong!

Winning a consumer is only the first round. Imagine what will happen if the consumer’s experience with your brand is completely not what he/she expected, or worse, is just plain awful. That disappointed consumer will write about those awful brand experiences. Other customers will jump on the brand-bashing bandwagon and the individual and collective experiences will get shared to every living person they can reach ensuring your brand is not on anybody else’s initial consideration set.

Sadly, bad reviews outnumber good reviews in just about every category. This is basic psychology really. People who feel cheated want justice. Because they are unlikely to get their money back, they will enact justice by trying to prevent others from making the same mistake. So they become detractors. Detractors can destroy a brand’s reputation online, which is why it’s important to make sure the product experience lives up to the hype. The good news however, is that detractors can be won over surprisingly easily. It often just takes a brand that is willing to listen honestly and is sincerely willing to try to do better.

Most agencies recommend social listening however as a way to find out want people are really saying about your brand, and observing as away to learn how they use your products; all with the goal of tackling negative word of mouth and to improve their marketing to consumers. The general problem with this advice is that the real reason to listen to word of mouth is not to rush into a PR campaign whenever you hear harsh criticisms, but to collect ongoing feedback and communicate these as insights to the product teams with the mandate of making better products and services. That’s the message you want to communicate. “Sorry, we listened. We are making it better.”

Naturally, if you have a great product, your toothpaste makes teeth brilliantly white, your book is a brilliant piece of literature, then social listening will give you the genuine testimonials of real consumers. Best of all, they’ll be testimonials delivered not necessarily by you, because let’s face it, how many people trust testimonials by marketers, but rather by consumers directly to consumers. All you had to do was make sure that a) you have a good product and service and b) you are in the right places having the right conversations and supplying the kind of content people need to understand and believe in your product.

Like the latest fad in fashion, Conversational and Community Marketing is all the rage in marketing today. So what’s so special about it? Do you really need to be bothered, or can you happily go about your business and ignore it?

None of us can escape the fact that the Internet has changed many things for businesses. In my earlier post, I talked about the growing importance for total transparency in everything from a company’s behavior to their pricing and profit margins. Guiding this need is the every growing Internet population of ‘Prosumers’, or rather ‘empowered shoppers.’ Although the size of the prosumer population has never been officially measured, we can figure it out by looking at people’s online behaviors.

For instance, if you look at the last years results from Forrester’s Technographics surveys, you see that:
•    10% of the UK online population read blogs
•    17% watch user generated videos
•    12% participate in discussion forums
•    and 20% read online reviews.
These are all behaviors of empowered shoppers. Let’s focus on the last point, the 20% who read reviews, which is the most common indicator of an empowered consumer.

Related US study by Forrester shows a similar breakdown of behaviors.

Nielson Netview estimates that there are 34,151,628 online Brits. So 20% of that figure is roughly 6.83 million Brits who we can classify as acting like prosumers. Granted, that still means there are still a good 27.3 million other online shoppers you could target. But consider this. If every one of the 6.83 million empowered shoppers talks to just 3 other people, your ‘informed shopper-base’ suddenly grows to 20.49 million shoppers! Suddenly, that 27.3 million has shrunk significantly. So it’s probably safest to treat everybody like a prosumer and get on with business.

Let’s look at it from another angle. What if 80% of your prosumer base doesn’t like your brand and trashes your products online? You have a serious problem on your hands, even if that 80% represents just 1% of your customer base. Because that 80% will promote their negative opinions to the rest of your customer base, encouraging them to flee in droves. On top of that, the percentage of the prosumer population is actually growing. So by next year, that 1% will increase to 2% and so on.

So what can you do about it? Well, first you can start by listening to your customers and take their pulse of how they feel about your brand. There are a number of buzz trackers and listening platforms out there, but the one I prefer, both for cost efficiency and for their ability to scan in multiple languages is that offered by Attentio. To get a quick idea of what the Attentio Brand Dashboard can do, check out their website at Attentio.com or give it a go at their public buzz monitoring site, Trendpedia.com. For some sample results, check out this review I made for Lexus a few years back while I was working at Lateral.

Excerpt from the Lexus Hybrid Debate

The Brand Dashboard continuously trawls a wide range of online sources, from blogs to forums, newsgroups and social networks, looking for certain keywords that you define, which act as flags of potentially relevant conversations. As there are literally millions of sources to scan, most listening tools work as a “present to forward” looking information source. In other words, to get the most accurate results, you need to set it up in advance and let it run for several months. Backward looking scans with Attentio are possible but are typically limited by the length of time articles and comments remain online, currently between 3-6 months on average. With Lexus, I scanned a number of keywords related to the brand, but also the names of competitor’s brands and common words used around hybrid technology. This allowed us to get a good feel for what people really thought of Lexus’ Hybrid cars.

Some companies I know, now utilize this type of data to complement their ongoing qualitative and quantitative research as it provides a higher level of reliability than what they get through focus groups and panels. After all, people are far more likely to tell what they really think in sites like TripAdvisor than in any focus group you run.

Listening however, is only the first step. You also need to be able to respond to opinions online. The most effective way of doing this is to empower and encourage every employee in your company to participate in social networks, forums and blogs where the conversations are happening (which you can also identify using your Brand Dashboard). The advantage here is that your employees are typically your best advocates. So let them talk and share their opinions and knowledge. There are examples of companies who have done this to remarkable advantage.

The first is Microsoft, where practically every employee blogs about something, most related to their specific profession. There are currently 262 officially tracked blogs in their directory across a mind-boggling array of subjects. These blogs are effectively are helping Microsoft to redefine their approach to be more “customer focus” through one on one interaction with customers. In many cases, this ability to have real conversations with customers is helping Microsoft to fix errors and improve products at a faster pace than ever before.

Another great example is Redfin, a US based estate agency. Redfin’s CEO, Glenn Kelman took the US real-estate market by storm last November when he decided to be completely transparent about the US real-estate industry. As such, he publicly exposed every dirty trick estate agencies use to sell you a property. His blog was almost a “how-to” in avoiding the cons that most British still face when trying to purchase property. With 300+% year-over-year growth in unique visitors, Redfin has been the fastest-growing major real estate website in the U.S Redfin has also increased its market-share significantly as a result of its game-changing approach.

Redfin and Microsoft are both examples of companies who have mastered Conversational Marketing.

Another surprising example was McDonald’s in New Zealand. Selling burgers is easy. Selling McDonald’s to a group of cynics and non-believers is a different proposition altogether. In 2006 this was the situation McDonald’s found itself in. No matter what it had been doing and saying over the previous years around its health, quality and nutrition initiatives, people were still viewing McDonald’s food with wariness and mistrust. Nothing seemed to stick, sink in or sway public opinion in favor of a company that was trying to break free of its past. This was hurting the organization, not only from an image standpoint, but also with regards to the bottom line. McDonald’s decided it was time to get on the front foot and set the record straight about its food and they way it behaves once and for all.

Peter Bush, the CEO of McDonald’s Australasia had the right idea. ‘If we could sit down for just five minutes and tell our story one to one with the consumer, McDonald’s wouldn’t have the brand issues we have today.’ His conversational approach become the seed to their Take a Closer Look campaign, in which people’s conversations and concerns were displayed in the ads against McDonald’s irrefutable facts. Essentially, McDonald’s leveraged conversations around its own myths as the basis to start conversations with its customers.  The result was that 70% of people who had seen the campaign believed what McDonald’s was saying. Ultimately, people reported that the ads made them feel better about eating at McDonald’s.

The New Zealand campaign was eventually followed by a larger, online initiative called Make Up Your Own Mind, in which consumers could literally ask any question to McDonald’s and they would answer it with facts. Unfortunately, when I challenged them on their continued decline of their food quality in many restaurants I visited, their answers were cut and pasted from other questions people asked, word for word, making it sound like the work of PR people. When further questioned about their support of aspartame in their Cola’s, their answer was literally right from the official apartame website: hardly a non-biased, credible source of information. The lesson here, always assume that your consumers already have done their online research. Brand sites like these are typically the last resort, not the first port of call.

Community and Conversation are often mixed in today’s marketing lingo, however they shouldn’t be. Although they are linked, they aren’t exactly the same. The McDonald’s campaign used Conversational Marketing, but it didn’t create a community. In contrast, Bugaboo strollers clearly has created a community of involved like-minded parents on its site, effectively leveraging people’s real conversations and stories within its communications to foster a sense of participation and brand ownership. When you link Conversation and Community to brand strategy, you get a robust brand platform from which you can engage today’s growing base of consumers who want to be involved in the shaping of the brand.

The resulting benefits of participation and ownership can add significant value to the brand, seeding it with real human experiences and emotion that reaches the long tail of your consumer base. Considering that 49 % of people made a purchase based on friends recommendations on social media property (Razorfish, 2008), social media can be viewed as an important channel and tool to interact, manage and enable these brand communities.

If this strategy appeals, does this mean you should run out and create a community? Not at all. What most digital agencies won’t tell you is that you actually don’t need to build your own community. In fact, unless there is a clearly unmet nascent consumer need for your community, you are much better off partnering with an existing community than building your own. Start by looking to see which fan created communities already exists around your brand. You may be surprised to find a few. Brands such as Apple, Nokia, Saab, Ford, Harley Davidson, Suzuki, Asus and many more all have dozens of fan created brand communities that you can interact and partner with. On top of this, there are thousands of niche, vertical communities around every passion you can imagine. Many of which could very well serve your existing customer’s interest and needs. And most of these verticals are heavily under-funded and some corporate partners could be very welcomed.

INQ Hong Kong Launch event

So it seems that social media has gone mobile in a big way. Yes, we all heard of those great Facebook and Twitter apps for the iPhone that just work brilliantly. And yes, you can get Facebook on other handsets as well. However, the mobile upstart, Team INQ has put together a nice piece of kit for the ever struggling mobile operator 3 that does social networking one better. It’s called the INQ¹.

The Gadget Inspectors have appropriately fallen in love with this device, as seen in their video.  And there are some pretty good reasons for it as well. Anyone who has worked in the device side of the industry will tell you that mobile phones are all about design, design and design. Not just the outside, but the software as well. 

Given that the handset itself doesn’t look that much different than let’s say, the Nokia E66, just what is it that makes this interesting? I can already hear the echoes across the blogosphere. “Ah, it’s just a gimmick!” In part, it is just a gimmick, albeit a well done one. The gimmick is that unlike Nokia, INQ has taken it’s UI to task. The icons for all of the embedded social applications are in the main screen menu, making it a quick flip to get what you want. While Nokia’s applications are well and truly hidden in submenu’s and folders. 

On top of that, there is excellent integration with its applications. Java has long been a drawback of mobile phones in that it’s a ringfenced application with limited integration. Here however, the integration is smartly done. I especially like being able to utilise Facebook as my addressbook and the automatic push of Twitter posts. It would be interesting to see just how difficult it is to set up all of one’s social accounts on the phone; an area where the iPhone excels, and the others struggle.

Packaging is another area that INQ has gotten right. While Nokia, Samsung and Sony’s packaging is sometimes stylistic and fashionable, they can also be downright corporate looking. 

With the INQ¹, they sought to “create an object of beauty – something to cherish, not chuck. All too often, packaging needs up in landfills, or recycling bins at best. While we’d like people to keep it, use it and treasure it. When we design our handsets we remix and edit internet services so that the play best on a mobile. Similarly, we remixed the idea of a box and made it into a place to display artwork.  The box art, and the illustrations on the help cards, come from people whose work we really like,” states INQ’s blog. 

The artist for this box is Yuko Shimizu who is also credited on the box itself. Other artists whose work will soon adorn future INQ handsets can be found here.

It’s all very reminiscent of the early part of the century when Nokia partnered with famous designers to create their phones. These so called Limited Editions always sold out even before hitting the stores. It does make one wonder why Nokia didn’t spin off a business producing just limited edition handsets for the design conscious, like they did with the Vertu for the ultra-rich. Instead, new upstarts are taking the thunder away from the market leaders. 

For INQ’s part however, despite a fair start, they have a long road ahead. First off, they are already a generation behind the others, who are already moving towards touch-screen phones. Secondly, their distribution is far too limited, being solely available through the mobile operator 3. Thirdly, putting one’s eggs in the social networking basket may sound like smart business today, but who can say which platforms will dominate in the next two years. And eventually, the majors will learn from these upstarts, take their own UI’s to task and reinvent them from the ground up. Or just buy out INQ. Anybody want to vote for a Sony INQ3?

There was an important and potentially market changing report released by IBM last year called ”Attaining Sustainable Growth Through Corporate Social Responsibility,” that the sustainability lobby and bloggers picked up, but marketing bloggers seems to have ignored. So here is the video on it for those who missed it.

Now, there is likely to be a belief that because of the recession, we can throw out all of this information. We can unwind our CSR efforts. Finally go back to massive cost cutting and focus on the bottom line by continuing to do business in the way we once used to, without having to worry about ethics. When it comes to the recession, ethics fly out the door. Or does it?

Consider the massive consumer and even governmental back-lash against the massively unethical behavior of the banks that threw the world economy into a tailspin. Governments are calling for more regulation and an end to runaway capitalism. While consumers are calling for a return to the old-days when bankers were trusted members of the community and knew their individual customers. Take a look at the latest Natwest campaigns on YouTube to see where that industry is headed. 

The fact is, we are entering an age where CSR will be what keeps a brand from tanking in the post-recession world. So though marketers and CEO’s might be inclined to shelve their CSR plans (for now), they may want to think twice and start using the recession as the reason to re-engineer their marketing departments and their business.

Here are four ways for companies to rethink the way they approach marketing in order to ensure coming out of the recession ahead of the competition.

Re-thinking corporate marketing

The most worrying statistic in IBM’s report is that 76% of surveyed business leaders don’t know their customer’s CSR expectations. Read another way, one could almost say that these business leaders don’t really understand their customers at all. They may have insights into the consumer’s purchasing patterns, but they don’t really know what makes them choose one product over another, let alone what they really think concerning ethical behaviour. For marketers to really understand today’s consumer market, there are some fundamental marketing behaviours that need to change.

First, marketers should no longer attempt to classify and pigeonhole customers into artificial segmentation models. These are old-fashioned research methods that belong in a previous age and should be left behind. Marketers need to recognise and identify people as individuals, each with their own unique needs and desires. Against popular perception, powerful privacy busting databases are not needed to do this. One simply has to be in a position to ask them to share the information, or better yet, to empower them with better ways to control and share their own data.
 
Second, marketers should stop thinking in terms of persuasion, selling and manipulation. Marketers have been waging psychological warfare against their customers for decades, and many still continue to do so. Armed with the latest psycho-babble from their ad agencies, they rush out to attack the individual’s sense of purpose, family, confidence, self image and integrity and to supplant it with a belief that shopping cures all ills.
 
Not content with brainwashing adults, many marketers are even falling into the legal and ethical landmine that is marketing to children, in the belief that brainwashing a future generation of consumers will ensure long-term growth. In truth, they are merely opening themselves up to an extremely litigious future, when parents of these children start class action suits against these companies for violating parental rights. The law may appear to insulate today, but laws change as quickly as the politicians who push them through. And what is legal today, necessarily won’t be tomorrow.

Third, marketers and CEO’s both need to stop thinking CSR as a public relations department or a new form of marketing opportunity. As Benetton and Marks & Spencer have learned, there is massive business growth for companies who embrace CSR, not as a new product division, or even as a communications platform, but rather as core business practice, one that runs horizontally and vertically through the organisation. One only needs to look at the runaway success of companies such as CaféDirect, Innocent Drinks, Body Shop, FairTrade labelled products and many other new players, to realise where the consumers’ money is going to be spent. These ethically focused companies will dominate the 21st century post-recession landscape.

Even the term marketing itself is out of date. A new term should be coined to more accurately describe what these departments need to do. Perhaps Customer Partnership Manager or Community Engager would be more accurate titles.

Fourth, marketers need to be empowered by CEOs to focus on delivering results annually or even bi-annually rather than quarterly. And their benchmarks shouldn’t solely be focused on sales returns. By changing the measurements for marketers, CEO’s can empower their front-line to think and act strategically over the long-term, rather than tactically over the short term.

Concepts such as, ‘the lifetime environmental and social costs of a product or service’ need to be part of the marketer’s daily vocabulary. They need to be able to think about softer but critical issues such as ‘consumer confidence’ and ‘trust’ over profit margins. The current trend of overcharging for ethical and organic products on the premise that customers will be gladly pay extra for a clean conscience is happening because marketers still prioritise their commercial imperative to endlessly increase profit. The real cost of this bi-polar thinking is a growing damage to brand reputation.

For example, there is growing resentment among consumers who buy high-priced organic products that they are being ripped off in a land grab by opportunistic supermarkets. So as one hand of a supermarket brand is trying to create a sustainable and ethical reputation by committing to FairTrade, organic and local sourcing standards, their other hand is seen as robbing customers blind. 

There is a way forward, but one which will be a bitter medicine to swallow for today’s profit obsessed marketers and CEO’s. That medicine is called total transparency, and it requires a great deal of trust and faith between the corporation and the consumer. That trust and faith can be developed at low cost using the Internet.