I Said, OK

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.

I just saw this video from AT&T that was posted on YouTube and is apparently making the rounds. The message from AT&T is:

Listen, we know you think we suck but I we just want you to know that we’re spending all this money on our network and it’s really, really hard, OK? And we’re working really, really hard, OK? So maybe you should give us a break because we’re trying and you just don’t understand so let me try to explain it to you using social media so that you understand how much we’re really, really trying.

Here, watch for yourself:

I dunno about you, but I just have a really hard time accepting that bullshit from ANY brand. Where does that sense of entitlement and ‘Woe be Me’ bullshit come from? Come on, man! Sending MMS’ is hard? Have you seen what’s going on in Japan and Korea? 8 years ago?!

I don’t understand what AT&T thinks they’re achieving with this? Are they trying to be more real or at least their understanding of real by getting on Twitter and Facebook?

Unfortunately they’ve missed the point with the message. A real message would be:

Ya, we fucked up. We sold you a product, “more bars,” that just ain’t true. Sorry about that. Here’s what we’re doing to fix it and here’s your money back because you didn’t get what you paid for.

This, my friends at AT&T, is what the Social Web is about. It’s about doing the right thing. It’s about business practices that are based on transparency and authenticity. It’s about ownership and being honest with your customers. It’s about winning them over.

Just because you get on Twitter, hire a personable fella who says things like, “we heard you,” it doesn’t mean shit if you don’t mean it. Show us that you mean it, AT&T.

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 wrote this for the KickApps blog.

Many of our clients use KickApps to power their online communities for fans, customers or employees. While the purpose may differ, these communities often share common traits and challenges:

Q. How do I get people to participate?
Q. It looks and works great, but why aren’t people active in it?
Q. What do I do with trolls?

Creating and cultivating an online community of passionate fans and customers can deliver tremendous benefits for any brand–greater affinity and loyalty, direct marketing channel to your most passionate customers and deep insight into your customers’ likes and dislikes, to name a few. However, growing an online community is no easy task and it takes time, and more often than not, dedicated resources to make it successful.

Here are some useful resources and tips as you think about your community strategy:

1. “9 Steps to creating a successful online community,” a white paper by KickApps. You can request a copy by sending an email to info@kickapps.com.

2. Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester, compiled a list on his blog about “How to Kick Start a Community.” Here’s his list of things to consider:

a. Create compelling content on a recurring basis. (Content is a key to engagement, together with activities and having a way for people to interact with each other. Whether that’s content you create or your members, make it relevant, interesting and compelling.)
b. Reward users who fill out their profile. (This is about human nature. People are motivated by a handful of different things and we all like a pat on the back or to get something out of a relationship–material or otherwise.)
c. Invite community influencers and advocates to the community first. (Leaders will emerge, by bringing some into your community you’ll get people to follow.)
d. Encourage interaction through conversations. (If conversations don’t start on their own, it’s on you to get it started.)
e. Reward top contributors. (Again, rewarding people for their participation is a great way to tap into that very human need for reward. People will look to this and you’ll tap into another very human need–aspiration.)
f. Centralize your community around your real world events. (This is a great way of extending that experience between the offline and online world. The Phoenix Suns and U2–currently on tour–are great examples of taking advantage of this opportunity.)
g. Virtual events integrate community. (This is the activity piece of the Engagement equation I outlined earlier. Ovation TV held their 3rd Happy Hour online chat last night and got a great showing with members talking about art, photography and music.)
h. Integrate with your website and other customer touchpoints. (Ask yourself how you extend this experience through places like Facebook or Twitter. How do you extend those conversations?)
i. Encourage employees to get active. (Your employees can be your most important community members and advocates to kick start the participation. Let them be open and authentic. If that frightens you, give them guidelines to follow–here’s a great example from the CEO of Zappos about how their employees should use Twitter, note that he doesn’t talk about rules, rather he puts it into the context of their brand values, thus great authenticity from employees.)

As with most blog posts worth reading there’s as much value in the comments. My contribution was around the role of the community manager or as I prefer to call it, the Community Leader. As the host of the ‘party’ the Leader’s role in getting things started is very important. He or she needs to make people feel welcome, introduce new members to each other, lead conversations, encourage people, be a guide.

3. The Community Roundtable is another great resource. It’s an organization created by Rachel Happe and Jim Storer for community managers and social media practitioners. Roundtable members have access to a ton of great information and resources about best practices and new ideas. I think what’s most helpful about this is that everyone learns and teaches in this group. You might work for a B2B technology company like SAP but also find really interesting tips from someone at TripAdvisor, for example.

Also, the Community Maturity Model that they’ve developed is very useful when thinking about your community strategy (http://community-roundtable.com/2009/06/the-community-maturity-model/).

4. Rachel Happe’s blog, www.thesocialorganization.com, has too many excellent posts to talk about here. I really recommend that you take some time to read some of her thoughts (and of course the conversations in the comments that people leave). Here’s a good one to start with: Growing a Community is Like Making Risotto (http://www.thesocialorganization.com/2009/08/growing-a-community-is-like-making-risotto.html).

Also, check out Rachel’s webinar (hosted by KickApps) on 8 Competencies for Socializing Your Organization.

5. Bill Johnston, chief community officer at Forum One Networks, runs the Online Community Unconference and blogs here. Unconferences are a great place to spend a day with peers to discuss any thing you want about online communities. Literally. Attendees to the event develop the agenda in the morning and volunteer to lead or participate in sessions that interest them the most. Highly recommended.

6. eModeration, a KickApps partner, is the most well known provider of community management services. They work with some of the largest brands in the world and help them manage their online community efforts. If you need to outsource your community management, they’re a good place to start.

I hope this information is helpful. Feel free to share any other tips in the comments section.

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.

TechCrunch’s Mobile Crunch blog reported yesterday that Verizon Wireless is now accepting user reviews and ratings of products in their catalog. The author of the post and many of the readers that left comments seem to think this is a bad move on Verizon’s part.

I concede that it may seem strange for Verizon to be opening themselves up for potential abuse, but I see this as not just a brave move but more importantly, an extremely smart one. By doing this, Verizon goes from being just a transactional vendor to providing something that’s potentially really valuable to customers during the buying process. This translates to trust.

Most people have a love-hate relationship with mobile phone service providers (don’t we all feel like we’re constantly being screwed over by them), and this is a great way of saying to potential customers:

“We want to provide you with really helpful information about which one of our products best meet your needs and what better way of doing this than hearing it from people like yourselves rather than us.”

Just as powerful though is that Verizon gets immediate feedback and insight into what customers and prospective customers think of their products. They hear first hand what features they like and want, and dislike and don’t want. Point is, if you listen to what your customers want, you’ll always have a hit. This is exactly what the guys from Threadless have built a thriving business on. Fact is, in today’s world of the social web, any company that doesn’t care to listen to customers will find themselves looking like this in short order:

I know what you brand and media people are saying right now, “I can’t have an unruly mob take over my website and brand!” Fair point. But, there’s nothing wrong with curation, in fact, I’d argue that it’s crucial to the customer experience.

As a consumer, I want reviews that truly help me make a purchasing decision, that inform me about the pros & cons of whether a product will meet my needs. That’s true value. Having to read abuse for the sake of it is not.

Establishing the guidelines for delivering that value is crucial for any brand or web publisher, call it community rules if you’d like (CafeMom and Flickr do great jobs of this). Consumers won’t begrudge you for wanting to make sure that they get real value out of this feature. Someone saying that this particular model’s “battery life is horrible and won’t be good for travelers” is valuable, whereas, “Motorola phones suck!” isn’t. But, you have to be honest and transparent about this. Again, think real value not just fluffy reviews that blow a lot of sunshine.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. User-generated product reviews help establish better relationships with customers that emanate from trust and value
2. How are you providing more value to customers and prospective customers?
3. Set the rules of engagement, but be honest and transparent about it. Establish what the feature is for and what is acceptable and what isn’t. Use clear and straight forward language that’s easy to understand
4. Listen! Listen! Listen! To what your customers are prospects are saying and you’ll always have a hit product

I originally wrote this post for the KickApps blog.

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.

I just found the article that NMK interviewed me back in October, 2008.

“Politicians have a unique opportunity to engage with people directly through a highly interactive and cost effective channel. No longer are you bound by expensive ad buys or are you beholden to editors or news programmers, you can talk to your electorate 1:1 at anytime,” he told NMK.

US Presidential Elections Get Social, October 3, 2008

Coming out of last week’s panel on the future of social media at the Digital Media Conference 2008, I’ve been thinking more about the discussion we had and the questions from the audience.

One idea I’ve been thinking more about is that social media is as much a feature on any websites, or at least will be soon, as it is a destination. By destination I mean social networks (e.g. Facebook, MySpace and Linkedin), blogs and media sharing sites (e.g. YouTube and Flickr), etc.

The premise is that any website’s owner cares a lot about increasing the number of people who come to the website and spend more time on it. This translates into more pageviews, which equals more advertising inventory.

The fact is that the social web has broken through. People like it. They use it to interact with each other, discover new things and make new friends. What this means on a website is more engagement. In the past media has been largely a one way deal. Call it a monologue if you will. With social media we have the ability for a multilogue–a multitude of different conversations going in different directions. This means greater volume (pageviews), greater involvement with your website (people care enough to interact in your environment) and greater brand affinity and (a degree) of loyalty for those who are repetitively active.

The technology exists today to very easily and cost effectively add these features to your website. It’s a commodity. I think this is a good thing–clearly, since I work at KickApps.

So, fact #1 of the Future of Social Media = it’s no longer just a destination.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s not the future as much as it’s the present.