Major change, the type required to embrace a more social business model and strategy, certainly needs support from the top, but it also needs support from each silo, department, line of business and functional area that will be affected by social media’s reach into the organization. Most situations that I’ve seen have involved anywhere from 8 to 40 people across an enterprise (depending on the size) and they all are in support of social media in one way or another.  It becomes a collaborative effort that everyone wants to see succeed.  Once you have skin in the game from the major players, it’s hard for them to back down from the charge.

If you’re looking to change the way you market, including the use of social media, here are a few thoughts on creating a guiding coalition:

1. The team needs to be comprised of leaders and front-line people from each functional department or line of business. If that means 4 people X 15 departments, then so be it.  If that means 5 people X 20 departments, then so be it.  There’s something to be said about small and lean teams, but if coalition is what you seek, now is not the time to skimp.
2. A guiding coalition can be comprised of many levels, but I’ve seen them include the CEO, senior management, front line sales people, members of the board of directors, customers, staff members from all levels of the organization and even strategic partners or vendors, when it’s appropriate.
3. Members need to be free to share, push and pull ideas and agree or disagree without feeling as though their boss is going to pull rank (which may happen anyway in the long run) to ensure that the ideas, concerns and perspectives required to help the project succeed are all on the table to fall to see.
4. A shared sense of urgency must permeate the group (see Failure #1 if you still need this) so that everyone gives this coalition the time, attention and energy necessary for it’s long-term success.
5. Carve out specific working times for the coalition. Some organizations will form internal or external retreats to learn about and strategize on social media while others will set a standing working group that meets regularly to push the organization forward.

Failing at the guiding coalition stage of change management usually leads to an overall neutered strategy which fails to penetrate the entirety of the organization and delivers far less than the original champions envisioned it would. 

Tomorrow we’ll cover the concept of “Lacking a Vision”…

Related posts:

1. Chaordic marketing for social media success
2. Change Management for Social Media Success
3. Failure #1: Not establishing a sense of urgency around social media (marketing)

Creating a sense of urgency requires robust leadership. Notice, I did not say ‘management’. We’re not looking for people to shepherd the existing systems – we need bold leaders to create the social business system that will take the place of the existing business system.

So, how do we go about creating a sense of urgency?  There are many tools that a leader can employ, here are just a few:

1. Facilitate a frank discussion on the realities of the market. Perhaps 90% of your customers are already on Facebook. Maybe all of your competitors have a blog but you. Maybe your entire organization is going to become unsustainable unless you build a loyal community to drastically reduce new business development costs.  You get the picture.
2. Bring in someone else to kick your company in the pants. Lest you be branded a heretic or put out to pasture for bringing all this bad news upon the company (and…we all know the quote about a prophet in his own town). Outside consultants (full disclosure: I am one) can bring a ‘global’ perspective on social media and be a credible ally to help create the sense of urgency you’re seeking.  I can think of several engagements over the past few years where we played this exact role.
3. Ask your customers. Customer feedback, especially if you’re not gathering regularly or if you’ve never explored the social media question, will give you some great insights to share and can really move a company off it’s perch when they hear that their customers say that ‘they’re out of touch and not reaching them in their channels of choice’.  That hurts…and motivates!

According to Kotter, you need upwards of 75% of the management team of a company on board with any change program in order to achieve success.  In the social media projects that we’ve seen, that’s pretty accurate.  Having all of the departments or lines of business on board, at least with the concept of social media, is key to long term success, especially if you endeavor to bring social media to their part of the organization (such as in customer service or HR or operations).

Related posts:

1. Chaordic marketing for social media success
2. Change Management for Social Media Success
3. Failure #3 – Lacking a Vision for Social Media

"Retained customers are always far more profitable than newly acquired customers. They have a better understanding of the brand’s benefit and value, and they are easier to find and communicate with."
– Christie Nordhielm, Professor, University of Michigan Ross School of Business

Most customer loyalty programs suck.

Well, maybe I was a bit harsh. Let me restate that.

Most customer loyalty programs are backwards.

Loyalty should be about the loyalty of the company to the customer, and not the other way around. Actually, commercial loyalty is mostly reciprocal. The repeat business and loyal customers that you seek will come your way…when you put a program in place that also keeps you loyal to them. The sad thing is that most loyalty programs don’t take into account this principle of reciprocity.

More to the point, the burden of loyalty rests with the company and not with the customer. Don’t give me some program where I’m the one doing all of the work all of the time, such as clipping UPCs over the period of a year or watching for when and which points will expire so I can get enough for a pair of socks. Make it so easy for me to do repeat, rewarding business with you, that you keep track of in your own system so that all I have to do is show up, buy something and feel the love.

Better yet – make purchase an optional component in your loyalty program. Loyalty is a behavior, not a transaction and it’s about time we treated it with more respect.

Think loyalty is for "some other company"? You’re leaving money on the table. (found in the sources listed below in Where Else to Look)

• On average, existing customers spend 67% more than new customers
• Acquiring a new customer can cost up to 5 – 10X more than retaining existing customers.
• A 5% increase in customer retention results in 25-100% increases in profit.

Q&A | QUESTIONS & ACTIONS

Here are a few things that you might consider to up your loyalty to your customers, and theirs to you.

1. Think of the ways that you exhibit loyalty to your customers. Short list? Work on that first.
2. Don’t make purchase the only indicator of loyalty. Facebook recommendations, word of mouth and other non-cash interactions illustrate the loyal behavior that you’re seeking as well
3. Make it easy and keep the burden of tracking data and points on you.
4. Use the data wisely. Your loyal customers are a gold mine. Use that data strategically and you’re set for life!

Where else to look?

Customer Loyalty: How to Earn It, How to Keep It >> by Jill Griffin

The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value >> by Frederick F. Reichheld

Evidence that Facebook Works as Marketing Tool >> by Jeff Cornwall [ARTICLE]

Related posts:

1. Let’s play… “How well do you know your target market”
2. Build Customers, Not Just Products
3. Failure #1: Not establishing a sense of urgency around social media (marketing)

Following are 10 actions that you can take toward developing or expanding your thought leadership:

1. Ask a Question. Thought leaders ask the most questions of their employees, customers, prospects and the market in general in order to understand the challenges, issues and opportunities that they can offer solutions to as part of their offering.  When you look at the great thought leadership content from IBM, McKinsey, Accenture, Cisco and so many others, much of it starts with a simple question about the economy, technology or unique situation that a customer or a target market is facing.  Get out and ask a question today, write about it, study it and lead your field with an innovative answer.
2. Tweet an Idea. There’s a great section in Success magazine every month called “Success in Seconds” that talks about the things that you can do in under a minute to be more productive and successful.  Tweeting a thought  leading idea is one of those things!  Keep an eye on the great ideas coming from your company, your industry, your customers or even your competitors and keep your Twitter finger ready to re-tweet or offer 140 characters of insightful commentary (with a link, of course) that will show your audience just how you think and guide them to a good idea. Remember, the leader (even a thought leader) doesn’t always have to have all of the answers, but they do have to know where to get the right answers.  Pointing (leading) people to a good idea is thought leadership too!
3. Mind Map it! I’m a huge fun of Chuck Frey and Innovation Tools and was really excited when I read his post on mind mapping for thought leadership. We’ve been mind mapping for years (see our maps here) and a majority and any thought leading concept that we develop is born in mind map form.  If you’re not familiar with mapping, I highly recommend Chuck’s book on mind mapping. Check it out and start mapping your thought leadership.  In the interest of Dogfooding, you’ll find a link to a mind map of this post at the end of the post.
4. Think. When is the last time you really sat down to “think” about something and come up with an innovative solution? Perhaps it was already this morning or perhaps it been, well, way too long.  I was in a meeting recently where someone was discussing the topic of brainstorming and how it was almost a forbidden concept in their former organization. Wow.  That’s certainly not a path to thought leadership. Take some time today to go think. Really_go_think. Then come back and follow the rest of the ideas here!
5. Mind Your Tone. I advise every marketer to read The Hero and the Outlaw by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson. However, I realize that you may be pressed for time, so let’s cut to the chase. When communicating for thought leadership, you are typically communicating to the Sage archetype, as detailed in Hero and Outlaw. Hard sell tactics and FUD (fear-uncertainty-doubt) language won’t work here. Thought leadership speaks to the Sage who enjoys the process of research, finding out more about your brand, learning about the solutions to challenges
6. Schedule a Webinar. One of the quintessential thought leadership content delivery vehicles is still the venerable webinar. In fact, according to a recent article in B2B magazine, firms like Lithium Technologies are drawing in 400 to 800 registrants per webinar and seeing participation rates of 45 to 50%. That’s HUGE inquiry generation that’s certainly helping their lead generation efforts and helping to showcase their thought leadership prowess.
7. Answer a Question on LinkedIn. This is been, and still is one of the greatest little ways to express thought leadership on micro-issues (single questions) that can have an immediate impact on your thought leadership efforts.  Not only  are you answering a direct question from someone in your market-space for whom you may have a plausible solution (part of the essential formula for thought leading content) but you can also turn that answer into a blog post or article later on.
8. Blog Something. Speaking of blogging, each blog post is a ‘thought nugget’ or social object that can serve as a lowly thought leading snippet or become as lauded as a well referenced and well-tweeted piece of content that helps you garner a significant share of voice on an issue that you’ve been mulling over.
9. Post a Slide Deck on SlideShare.net. Presented anything lately?  Take that great slide deck and put it on Slideshare.net and ‘socialize that content’! We put a bunch of slideshows on Slideshare and often get nice accolades like these were someone notices our work and shares it with their peers.  You’ve spent a lot of time putting thought leadership into your decks, why not get some social media mileage out of them?
10. Comment on Another Thought Leaders Blog. Think you’re so smart? Add to the conversation by commenting on the blog or site of another thought leader. Industry and market stewardship are hallmarks of the thought leader and active participation in the community is an essential component. Maybe you can’t speak on a panel or get in front of an audience today, but you can add to the conversation and participate in the community through blogs, forums and other industry venues.

BONUS: Mind Map of this post!

Related posts:

1. Thought leadership – more than just intellectual ping pong
2. Recognizing a Thought Leadership Moment in Your Industry
3. What’s your TLMQ? (Thought Leadership Marketing Quotient)

Flash back just 6 weeks and I can envision the product manager for the now soon-to-be-in-the-crapper Kin phone (after just 48 days!).  Yep, you heard it.  Microsoft and Verizon are closing this little project down and moving all of the engineers over to the Windows 7 phone project.  Which, all things considered, is probably a good idea.  However, this is, as Andrew Hampp and Rupal Parekh of AdAge put it, likely one of the quickest birth-to-death products, with so much publicity surrounding it no less, in modern mobile phone times.

In what may be one of the fastest launch-to-failure paths ever taken by a major marketer, Microsoft’s Kin, the company’s first phone product, is being discontinued just six weeks after its May 13 launch. As first reported by Gizmodo, the phone’s marketing and product development teams are being shifted to work on the launch of the Windows Phone 7.

I can’t help but draw some similarities in the vagaries of the language on both the part of Land Rover and Microsoft regarding their respective new products.  Granted, I realize that they’re both really freaking smart companies.  In fact, MS hit up over 50,000 teens and tweens for their opinion, according to sources cited in the aforementioned article.  Yet, they still did stupid stuff like affording the Kin no ability to download apps, share media via Twitter, schedule events on a calendar or use GPS. Brilliant.  I’m sure that Land Rover did research, focus groups and went through hours of design to come up with the Evoque, but I’m nonetheless disturbed by the vague response alluding to an alleged target market that this new aged (in my opinion, furthest thing from a f-ing Land Rover/Range Rover ever conceived) vehicle that is supposedly going to appeal to so many different people than the typical LR crowd.

“Customers can be confident that the new car will be premium, luxurious and just as special as the other Range Rover models. Its sporting looks and unique qualities will open the brand to a new group of customers who may not have considered a Range Rover product before.”

The moral of the story here is this: How well, no, really, how well do you know the (your) target market? How well do you understand who you serve? Have you gone beyond the demographics and explored the psychographics and ethnography of your audience to really understand if what you’re spending your hard-won R&D and marketing dollars on is really going to hit the bull’s-eye that you’ve painted on the backs of your unsuspecting consumers? 

Before you launch your next great masterpiece…ponder that.

Related posts:

1. When Should Thought Leaders Play Defense?
2. The Burden of Loyalty

What’s chaordic?  Good question. You don’t see the word much now, but when Dee Hock founded the VISA credit card network, he founded based on what he called a chaordic model.

The portmanteau chaordic refers to a system of governance that blends characteristics of chaos and order. The term was coined by Dee Hock the founder and former CEO of the VISA credit card association. The chaordic principles have also been used as guidelines for creating human organizations — business, nonprofit, government and hybrids—that would be neither centralized nor anarchical networks.

The chaordic system of managing enterprise-wide social media engagement is, in the spirit of choas and order, usually co-developed during the strategy process, but a simple model makes this approachable for nearly anyone.

1. A loose confederation of entities agree to certain basic principles and systems. For example, a large college might craft a series of guidelines and helpful hints or even a handbook that everyone draws insight from, but they don’t control all of the tools, content or protocols in each area.
2. Decisions are made as a governing body on the principles, but not on the inner-workings of each area’s social media presence. For example, a common policy may be crafted to handle crisis situations but corporate citizens have the ability to handle constituent engagement in their own way at any sub-crisis level.
3. The organization is held together by a common philosophy and approach. For example, an organization will get the department heads together to craft a set of common ideas on how they approach social media and then agree to adhere to those principles, rather than placing hierarchy or excessive governance in place.
4. Education trumps discipline. As with most good social media policies, like Intel’s, which states – “We expect all who participate in social media on behalf of Intel to be trained, to understand and to follow these guidelines.” – they lead with education and being helpful, rather then focusing on the punitive consequences if someone screws up.  When your team is educated, the opportunity to leverage chaordic social media marketing is amplified beyond what any command and control (antithetical to social media anyway…) system could accomplish.

In an interview with Fast Company, Dee Hock sums up, what I think is the best model for social media “governance” within an organization when he explains the VISA model.

…and that, says Hock, is exactly how it ought to be. “The better an organization is, the less obvious it is,” he says. “In Visa, we tried to create an invisible organization and keep it that way. It’s the results, not the structure or management that should be apparent.”

Related posts:

1. Failure #2: Not creating a powerful guiding coalition for social media
2. Consistency & Frequency – Ingredients for Success in Social Media & Thought Leadership
3. Failure #1: Not establishing a sense of urgency around social media (marketing)

"The evidence is overwhelming that presenting one option as a default increases the chance it will be chosen — a default eliminates the need to make a decision."
– Ned Welch, McKinsey & Company Consultant

Harness the power of the default option and fewer choices.

Do you like choices? Sure, we all do. What about too many choices? What happens when you’re faced with an annoying level of complexity in your purchase and you’d rather someone just told you which one to buy? It’s funny, I see this all of the time in coffee shops (where I work…when I’m not traveling, or in my office) when a ‘non-coffee-shop-person’ strolls up to the counter and tries to decide what to order. Seriously. Most coffee shop menus are more complicated than most restaurants. What if they had a default choice, or something that said "these are top 3 drinks that most people order…"?

The point here is to think about the default choices that people can make when purchasing your products or services (or donating to your cause). Do you make it easy for them? What is your default? Do you even have one?

This is one of several very approachable and easy to use behavioral marketing techniques that nearly any firm can employ. Even if you can’t make a ‘default option’ out of your offerings, reducing choice can lead to profitability as in the example of a grocery store offering the chance to taste a selection of 24 jams, while others were offered only 6. The greater variety drew more shoppers to sample the jams, but few made a purchase. By contrast, although fewer consumers stopped to taste the 6 jams on offer, sales from the group of 6 were more than five times higher than the group of 24.

Q&A | QUESTIONS & ACTIONS

What’s your default option? Do you have one? Can you make one, and make it easier for people to purchase?

Can you simplify your choices and improve your sales today?

WHERE ELSE TO LOOK?

A marketer’s guide to behavioral economics >> McKinsey Quarterly

When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? >> Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Related posts:

1. Capturing sales data using the new Google Forms
2. Thought Leaders Need Fewer Touches

So what, you say? Well, you may already know that social media is outsourced far less than any other type of marketing activity. The reason is that any social media effort needs to be piloted by a true steward of the brand. The steward is someone who gets the convergence of the personal nature of social media and the cultural imperative for organizations who decide to truly engage with their stakeholders. That steward, and not the outside expert, needs to be steeped in the dog food that the organization is going to be shoveling out…

By dogfooding your social media and integrated marketing efforts, you not only become familiar with the tools and technology, but realize the desired effect of becoming a more approachable and conversational culture that drives business growth in the age of conversational marketing.

One caveat: You’re not the audience. Always keep your customer in mind. Dismissing something prematurely because it doesn’t work for you internally could just be a case of dogfooding myopia!

Q&A | QUESTIONS & ACTIONS

Are you dogfooding your marketing? Even if social media or geo-marketing efforts or that cool app you want to develop are far off, you need to be acclimating your organization today to embrace the challenges of tomorrow.

Where else to look?

So much of our work involves research and reading from a variety of different resources and if there are additional resources that went into each week’s theme, we’ll share them with you here.

Related posts:

1. Random acts of social media marketing
2. NEW e-Book: 30 Marketing Ideas in 30 Days – for Entrepreneurs “Do It Yourself” Marketing Month
3. The Burden of Loyalty

Why complexity? Why now?

A study on the trucking industry some years ago by Daryl Wyckoff uncovered a “rather strange profitability pattern of trucking companies. Both small and large companies were very profitable, but the medium-sized companies were quite unprofitable.” 
The reason for the odd distribution of profitability: Complexity.

In this year’s Global CEO study from IBM, Capitalizing on Complexity, the top concern of 1,500 CEOs from around the globe is summed up as follows:

The world’s private and public sector leaders believe that a rapid escalation of “complexity” is the biggest challenge confronting them. They expect it to continue — indeed, to accelerate — in the coming years.

That says volumes.  Complexity is their number one challenge.  Outstanding.

Back to our school districts… I see it the same way here. I believe that one of the reasons that we’re seeing an influx of PR professionals and a surge in social media and new-age marketing technique interest is due, in large part, to the growing complexity of the environment that we operate in.

Complexity causes businesses to change in fundamental ways. Entrepreneurs who aren’t prepared won’t know what hit them, says Jonathan Byrnes.

Complexities? Like what?

Well, let’s look at just a few factors that I feel make things more complex:

1. Politics: Everything has become political.  With the advent of 24/7 cable networks devoted to politics and the heightened skepticism of the American public who sees everything as ‘having some agenda’ behind it, politics affects so many of our decisions.
2. Options: We now have dozens of venues, outlets, channels, tactics and techniques for everything. It’s newspapers + blogs + video + PR + parent groups + [whatever else comes up in the next 10 minutes]
3. Fragmentation: In 1965, 80 per cent of adults in the US could be
   reached with three 60 second TV spots. In 2002, it required 117 prime time commercials to produce the same result. (via Jim Stengel, Chief Marketing Officer, Procter &Gamble. 2003)
4. Changing States: Water flowing from a smooth stream to a spattering all over the sink, the seemingly inexplicable change in traffic from and even flow to a near halt and back again and other similar phenomena are all state changes.  We’re seeing the same thing slowly happen with the communication in our districts. We almost don’t know it’s happening!

These are just a few of the reasons that underly complexity – there are certainly more.  I think that you get the point.

What can we do about it?

The whole point of this post is to tune your frequency to the increase in complexity and what it’s doing to school districts, as well as other types of organizations.  I think that you’ll agree that the factors that are moving us to a more complex world are some of the same factors that are making it ever more critical for our districts to take a leading, proactive approach to parent, student, staff and community communications and dialogue (which is why social media is so important).

From here, it’s all about how you handle the complexity.  Here are a few of ideas:

• Invest in strategic communication planning, especially in the wake of new and social media.  It’s critical to understand the breadth of all of the stakeholders who need to hear from the district and the depth of resources that you have to reach them.
• Review and revise your crisis communication plan. A recent book by MIT professor Yossi Sheffi called The Resilient Enterprise highlights how organizations of all types can “manage the unmanageable”.  Now is a good time to think about how you might do the same.
• Carefully focus on understanding your district’s vulnerabilities. A recent discussion we had with a medical college who does animal research gave us some insight into the importance of doing this type of scenario planning before they went to market with their social media presence. You can’t prevent every attack on your vulnerable areas, but it’s far better to understand possible scenarios than to be caught with your guard down.

As with anything that’s complex, there’s much more to discuss on this issue.  I look forward to feedback on the issue of complexity in school district communications.

Related posts:

1. Marketing Classics: Communications and Industrial Selling (Theodore Levitt, 1967)

How often do you see the marketing department blamed for a company that has fallen on hard times or for the closure of a tech startup? Rarely, if ever, is my assessment. Save for notable blunders like New Coke, or KFC underestimating the popularity of Oprah, marketing rarely takes center stage on the front page of the local business section.

Two articles from this past weekend, one about a company that we’ve all heard of, Harley-Davidson, and another about a startup that you’ve likely never heard of, Devver.net (maker of coding tools for software developers) converge nicely on the central issue of customer development over product development and the importance of NEVER taking your eye off of the ball.

The two cases are actually very different, in that Harley is calling for wage concessions, among other things, to keep their facilities in Wisconsin. I’m sure that there’s some part of their overall basket of issues that includes labor, but seriously, when your core customer base is aging boomers (no offense), isn’t the writing on the wall, and shouldn’t customer development be at the top of your list? I feel they they’re not addressing the right problem here.

Devver is a bit more enlightened in that they realized, albeit in hindsight, that their issue was a lack of long term customer development focus. They say, and I quote:

“Our mistake at that point was to go ‘heads down’ and focus on building the accelerator while minimizing our contact with users and customers (after all, we knew how great it was and time spent talking to customers was time we could be hacking!),” writes Brinckerhoff. “We should have [been] asking, ‘Is there an even simpler version of this product that we can deliver sooner to learn more about pricing, market size, and technical challenges?’.”

I’m not advocating the marketers take the blame for anything, or that we shirk responsibility either. If we believe Peter Drucker when he said “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer,” then it seems logical that our focus should not be on the tactics, technology, labor or anything else that doesn’t support customer development.

Related posts:

1. Got Social Media? Ask Your Customers!
2. Let’s play… “How well do you know your target market”
3. Monday Marketing Moxie – Help Your Customers “Do Their Job”