I Said, OK

In an earlier post I talked about how there’s a huge opportunity for agencies and social media marketers with Tier 2 brands. I cited United and the Guitar-gate incident as an example and talked about why I don’t think it’s enough to move United into real action but there is instead with United’s smaller competitors.

Illustrating my point, here’s a great example that I came across today of a Tier 2 brand, Southwest, that’s taking full advantage of the Social Web and coming at United competitively: SOUTHWEST LUVS GUITARS (AND CONTESTS)!

Today, I bring you two things I love: musicians and a friendly competition.  I’d like to challenge all of you to send us your BEST Southwest Airlines “Grab Your Bag—It’s On” music video!

Upload your video to any video-hosting web site you please, and then post the link in the blog comments below.  A panel of sophisticated Southwest judges will award one lucky winner (and guest) two tickets to the San Jose Mariachi Festival: Concert Tribute to Cesar Chavez featuring Carlos Santana and Los Lobos.  You’ll also receive two roundtrip tickets to get you to San Jose, and a two night stay at the Wyndham Hotel and Resort in San Jose!

Sounds like a good time, huh?  Well our Chairman, President, and CEO Gary Kelly LUVs guitars, and if you will click here, you will see Gary with his guitar in an excerpt of a documentary in production called TONE.

Well played, Southwest.

So, it appears that Seth, AT&T’s blogger guy, works for its PR agency Fleishman Hillard. A question was posed on Twitter by Todd Defren about whether AT&T should have disclosed that Seth works for FH.

From a consumer’s point of view, that’s not really what’s important. For all intents and purposes Seth works for AT&T. By putting him out there as the mouth piece of AT&T, he is AT&T, so to speak. Sure, he’s a ‘blogger’ but do we expect anything impartial from he if he works for AT&T or its PR agency? I think Todd’s question in some ways has more to do with the flaws (and insecurities) of the PR industry more than what matters to customers.

The more important point to me is that AT&T is still missing the real opportunity. All they’ve done is more of the same, just a different wrapper. A different channel for the same old message and business practices.

Everyone of us knows when we’ve come across the real thing and we know when we’ve encountered bullshit. We know when the people in our social circles aren’t real. We know when advertising is bullshit. We know when PR people are doing their thing. We know. This ain’t real.

In leveraging the power of the social web the only thing matters is that AT&T is REAL about their business.

Simply put: do the right thing by your customers.

Create a great product. Sell it for what it is. Back it up and have customer service policies that put the customer first.

I’m writing this on a JetBlue flight where the TVs aren’t working. We’re all getting $15 coupons after the flight. JetBlue doesn’t have to do this. They could simply have an asterix in their advertising that says, “no guarantee of TV service.,” or nothing at all. AT&T, how about something back for all those dropped calls? Acknowledgement? A sorry? A cookie?

Using the social web successfully has to start with the business and the sooner people realize that it’s not just a marketing thing [no, boys, "it's marketing, you can say whatever you want," does not work!], the more successful they’ll be.

My problem with Seth (not him the individual but what he stands for) is two fold:

1. He’s nothing more than the same old wrapper of bullshit marketing. You see that ahead of you AT&T? It’s a giant wall of competitors and alternatives fueled by a new world competition backed by the social web.

2. The message is way off–see my earlier post. As an aside, it just hit me that maybe AT&T is being real with the message. Maybe they’re just whiny assholes, in which case, good luck my blue and orange friend. Who can benefit from this? Check this post out.

All is not lost though. Can they turn things around? Not if they stay on this path.

Look in the mirror, AT&T. Do you like what you see? Would you want to be treated that way? AT&T employees, are you proud of your work? Your company? Are you doing everything you can to build long and lasting relationships with your customers that can withstand the fiercest of competition? Say, when Verizon starts offering the iPhone?

Think about that and I’m pretty sure your next Seth video will be very different. Your next customer service call will be very different. Your next retail experience will be very different. Your next TV commercial will be very different. Your Facebook wall will start to feel very different.

Some brands suck and seem to get away with it.

These days, almost every marketer (particularly agencies and consultants) is trying to come up with Social Media strategies for you name it brand out there. It’s sometimes a game of who can scream the loudest when a big brand fucks up about how social media could save it and it should turn to social media right away.

I think it can be a waste of time from an agency’s perspective to try to win that type of business.

Here’s the thing, most brands that suck and get away with it are Tier 1 brands (e.g. United, AT&T, American, Delta, Time Warner Cable, GM, etc.), the No. 1 – 2 in a sector. Their ability, and need from their perspective, to change is far less immediate regardless of what happens on the Social Web.

I think the real opportunity for agencies is with the Tier 2 brands, the No. 3 – 5 or 6 brands. These are the brands that can benefit the most from Engagement Marketing, the Social Web and all the necessary changes that it brings to their business operations to differentiate themselves in big way and win.

Tier One Brands Don’t Need To Care (For Now).

Take United Airlines’ Guitar-gate as an example. You might have heard about Dave Carroll’s misadventures on United Airlines, the music videos he posted on YouTube and the subsequent roar of the blogosphere.

Here are a couple of posts about the guitar incident that I found particularly interesting and helped me think this through:

1. My friend Alan Wolk, a creative strategist in New York City, wrote a blog post in the aftermath of United’s Guitar-gate where he makes the following point:

“The video does, however, play up one of the biggest fears most clients have about social media: what if someone says something bad about us? How can I make sure that doesn’t happen?

And the answer I always give them is: Don’t Suck.”

I couldn’t agree more. Here’s the thing, make sure you have a good product and do the right thing by your customers and you’ll have a lot less to worry about.

2. Another is Jake McKee’s response to a post on the Vanno blog. Vanno’s contention is that United’s higher ups probably gave very little thought to al this Social Media hoopla, for a number of reasons. But ultimately, it did little to impact United’s stock price. I encourage you to read Jake’s post because he makes some very interesting points.

The point for me is, the expectation of United’s customer service is so low, I don’t think all of this really made much of an impact to United’s business in the long run.

Sure, the media wrote a lot about it and we’re all outraged, but, seriously, did you expect any better? Were people shocked? United’s been losing baggage for years. We all know it. Most of us have experienced it. We’ve probably told a bunch of people about it.

Why should they care now? People still fly United (for the time being, anyway).

Call me a cynic, but as long as we keep buying, most large corporations could care less what their customers said about them, and for some stupid reason we keep buying.

Post a video on YouTube in today’s ADD world? Big deal. The noise level will rise like it did for a few weeks around Carroll’s video then it’ll die down and the Twits and others will move onto something else.

So, no, that pressure alone isn’t going to fuel change in the near term.

“I Made My Numbers.”

United, Delta and American can offer low fares. Despite a shitty product, they are large enough (i.e. own the routes) that when they run into trouble, they simply cut prices and people will buy. People may hate every minute of the product they’ve bought but the airlines don’t really give a shit, they got you to buy and they make their quarter.

AT&T has the iPhone. We love the iPhone. We love it so much we’ll tolerate the most ridiculous level of service known to civilized people. They don’t care. They have you for at least 2 years or a termination fee. Either way: “made my numbers.”

Time Warner Cable, Comcast, RCN…you name it.

Sure, it’s not sustainable. They know it. But they also know that they’ve done a pretty good job so far of playing this game for awhile and it’s worked well. At best, something will change and maybe the sucky brand will find them some Jesus. At worst, the people making the decisions now won’t be around when they run out of juice at which point it’ll be someone else’s problem.

Again, no incentive to have a proper relationship with customers. Transparency and authenticity? Riiiiight.

The Real Opportunity.

Now, what about the Tier 2 brands? The ones without the monopolies or the ability to start price wars? The ones without massive ad budgets? The ones that actually need to treat their customers well to win them over?

The opportunity to differentiate these companies by not sucking and creating real and authentic relationships with customers is GREAT and very meaningful.

I’m talking about the Zappos’, Amazon.com, JetBlue’s and Virgin America’s of the world. By doing right by their customers, these companies have created brands that people are drawn to. A common characteristic amongst these brands is that they’ve won over customers and turned them into fans. In Spike Jones’ words, they’ve created Movements.

These brands do it without large marketing budgets–and they realize that it’s much more than just marketing. They know that in order to succeed, they have to be real, and they realize that being real is THE way that they can stand out and win.

The Social Web comes naturally to these companies because of their business culture. But this isn’t about Twitter or Facebook or some other new web service. It’s about what the Social Web means from a business perspective and that means you have to run your business accordingly–with transparency and authenticity.

It makes these businesses create a great product, because if it sucks, nothing else will matter.

It makes these businesses treat customers the right way, because if they don’t the Social Web will kill ‘em, and nothing else will matter.

When done right though, you have the most loyal customers that will keep buying, tell everyone about you and stand by you when things go wrong.

In today’s world, there’s no more powerful opportunity for a Tier 2 brand than to embrace this and radically increases their chance of success vs. the big boys.

Obama Was The Tier 2 Brand.

I think this is a big reason why Obama got elected. The product was great–that’s not negotiable. But he embraced this “Don’t Suck” philosophy–it came naturally to him–and used the Social Web as a channel to help create and grow his relationships with his constituents.

Obama was the Tier 2 candidate.

While United might not be too concerned about David Carroll’s videos and a bunch of bloggers yapping away, I can guarantee you that the growing power of the Virgin America and JetBlue brands are keeping them up at night.

I met Jennifer Jones last year when she invited me to be a guest on her Marketing Voices podcast to talk about KickApps and social media in marketing. She was kind enough to have me on again and she published the podcast today. We talked about Engagement Marketing and went over some interesting examples of how our clients are using social media and KickApps to engage with their customers. You can listen to the podcast below.

For awhile now, marketers have gotten a bit distracted by social media, the technology and all the hype. To me, social media and the social web do a few things really well, most notably, they enables an entirely new way of connecting and engaging with customers and audiences.

It’s important to remember though that they’re not a panacea to all business ills and certainly aren’t solutions for everything. They are however extremely powerful and effective at enabling engagement, and for that reason, should be considered as part of most marketing and communications strategies.

Much thanks to Jennifer for a great conversation. Oh, BTW, check out my favorite podcast by Jennifer with a Navy fighter pilot flying on the USS Nimitz.

My most recent job has me thinking about marketing agencies and the shift in marketing that has even the CMO of Unilever (not exactly the brand I think of when one talks about the internet or social media) ranting and raving about the impact of social media on marketing.

As I said in an earlier post, I find that depending on who you ask and what type of marketing they do, they’ll tell you that their discipline is the best suited to be the social media answer to all the modern marketer’s woes. To me that’s not even the point. I think that if you’re having a discussion along the lines of social media you’re having the wrong the discussion–I’ll address this point later, but first a rant on agencies.

Seriously, ask a PR agency guy what type of agency he thinks ‘gets’ social media and he’ll give you a hundred reasons why PR has all the answers. They’re the ones that have honed the fine art of reaching influencers after all. Sure, I suppose it makes sense that a social media expert from a major PR agency would NEVER do something stupid like this. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Ask an ad guy and he’ll show you a bunch of commercials they created that they put on a YouTube channel that they convinced their client to pay a minimum of $500,000 for. People really want to watch TV commercials online, don’t they?! (Disclosure: I do this quite a bit actually, I particularly like the Nike ones. Wait…I’m in marketing, of course I think ads are cool. Nevermind.)

OK, rant over.

Marketers should be looking at how they’re engaging with customers. That is, the opportunity for a brand to establish and nurture a direct, lasting and loyal relationship with a customer in ways that haven’t been possible before. Social media to me is just one of the channels in which you can engage with a customer, albeit a very effective one.

On the brand side of the business, I look at all these disciplines as ways of meeting my business objectives. I use a mix of them because they all serve different purposes and when used correctly (by a brilliant marketer), at the right time, in the right ways, in the right mix, you win.

I’m not the first to say that the social web has changed the game dramatically for brands (especially media companies). You might even be so bold as to say that people are in control now–I don’t necessarily believe that to be the case entirely, but I do believe that the dynamics have shifted and there’s no turning back. More interestingly, the change seems to be accelerating (much like global warming).

So, what’s the right type of agency or marketer to deliver this?

In my opinion, it’s one that understands and can deliver a highly evolved offering of PR, advertising, search, direct marketing, content development, programming, events and community management, all integrated into a strategy that flows through the entire backbone of a business, and a deep ability to provide technology solutions to achieve all this.

More importantly, it’s a marketer that gets that all of this requires a fundamental change in the way a company operates, the way it handles customer service, product development, partnerships, etc., and transforms this understanding into engagement strategies and tactics that feed back into a companies business objectives.

Does an agency like this exist? Not that I know of.

Can it? I think so.

I’ve been scratching my head for a while about the question of where social media should sit in an organization. I’ve learned that the way a person typically answers that depending on his or her background and point of view. A PR person will typically say, PR! (Especially if that person works at an agency.) An advertising person will usually say, ADVERTISING! You get where I’m going with this.

My auto-response answer is: marketing. As I give it more thought though, I don’t think it’s that straight forward. These days I’m thinking that it should live wherever business strategy lives and in the channels where a company delivers tactically against those strategies. Does that mean it lives everywhere? Maybe.

From my perspective, social media enables engagement. To me, it’s much more interesting to think of it as an enabling technology that serves a bigger business objective: a more effective and efficient way to serve customers.

Engagement translates to better communication and understanding of your business eco-system (customers, employees and partners), which results in better products and services, and ultimately happier customers, employees and partners. Social media happens to be a great channel for achieving that.

You have to ask where all of those things matter most within a company. I think most will come to realize that engagement has the potential to impact a company’s business at a fundamental level. I get excited about this because I believe that engagement, and social media as a technology that enables engagement, does this in pretty dramatic ways.

No, I’m not going to say that there’s a revolution at our door steps or anything silly like that. I do however believe that transparency, changes in control of communication mediums & messages and the need for authenticity, represents both a for change from business as usual, but more importantly, a HUGE opportunity for both consumers and businesses.

For me, right now, that means engagement as a business strategy is what’s more interesting, and social media as one of a mix of channels and technology for achieving those objectives is what makes sense.

So, where does it live? Marketing? Customer support? Product development? HR? PR? Partner relations? Yes, yes, and yes.

The real challenge (and opportunity) that I see is how a business integrates engagement into every aspect of its business operations where it makes sense.

About a month ago, I had a conversation with a friend who doesn’t work in the same industry as I do about a phrase that she noticed is quite pervasive amongst the social media set.

“They don’t get it.”

This is used to explain the ineptitude and shortcomings of my brethren in marketing who work at brands, enterprises and agencies or all shapes and sizes, and pertains to their lack of understanding about social media and engagement marketing.

As an outsider, that phrase just sounded condescending, at best, and arrogant and obnoxious at worst, to her.

I tried to explain, as earnestly as possible, the context in which I’ve used that phrase to describe these small minded people. I’m sorry, I mean marketers. There are, after all, so many examples of marketers at brands and agencies that don’t get this new world of transparency and authenticity. Truth is, even when they try, most attempts at engagement marketing by seasoned marketers are true fuck ups and one can only conclude that they just don’t get it. Right?!

I mean, they just don’t seem to get that the world has changed. They’re obviously just freaked out and desperate to hold on to their old ways of doing business in the same ways that Conservatives talk nostalgically about the good old days of oppression and slavery (well, you get my point).

After awhile though I started listening to what she was saying (usually a good idea in a conversation). It wasn’t whether or not people get it, rather, this industry that I work in seems to be really caught up in its own bullshit. That got me thinking. Maybe I’m living too much in my little bubble of get-it-ness and I’m missing something.

A couple of weeks after this conversation I met a guy who works at one of these ‘don’t get it’ big agencies. This guy is a classic ad guy. Knows the traditional ad business inside and out. He seems to be really good at his job and he immediately earned my respect.

We had a conversation about the transformation of the ad industry. We talked about their existing business and the fact that doing 30 second spots for TV remains their bread and butter.

Wait, hadn’t he and his Mad Men friends heard about what we in the social media industry know to be Gospel? Isn’t TV dead? Aren’t million dollar ad campaigns dead? Isn’t it all about the social web? Ugh, another guy who doesn’t get it.

But here’s the thing, I think he does.

The fact is that any big brand (the ones that my industry cohorts bitch about) are faced with a reality of today’s business. Would you throw away millions of dollars that roll in the door today to jump on a bandwagon that, yes, will become THE way of marketing in the near future but isn’t quite there today? Any executive worth anything would not say yes to that. If they do, they’re idiots.

Rather, wouldn’t you just send your best and brightest out there to learn and experiment as much as they can with these new methods, knowing full well that you’ve got to very quickly develop an expertise in this new approach to marketing?

The measure of that executive is how quickly they understand and act on the balance of allocating resources between maintaining your existing business and ensuring that the company is ready to move in a new direction when the market conditions are right.

This is exactly what my new friend appears to be doing.

So, when I was asked tonight whether I thought he ‘gets it,’ I had to think about it for a second. My answer now is, yes, he does.

More importantly, I think I finally get it too.