Last post, I shared some of our experience training a global team of marcom pros in social media. It's tempting to continue and expand what has been a success. Still the "three persistent pressures" and other learnings drive me to want to reinvent training. Our current program includes plenty of "roll up your sleeves" experiences. It serves both marcom strategy and skill as well as enterprise needs. We solve real business 'briefs' during our sessions. Now its time to go deeper into the experiential. Lets rip off our sleeves entirely lest they get caught in the messy machinery of social media.
Three new training tracks
1. Understand (and believe) the 6 ways digital & social changes business (not just marcom) - Even if all we do is aspire to solving marcom challenges that deliver business results (Ogilvy goes farther than this), understanding how social & digital changes many businesses will help us be more effective. It's hard to suggest a crowdsourced idea program like Ford's Your Ideas* without understanding IP legal issues and how the core product design team approaches innovation. To build a proper brand program around a new idea like IBM's Smarter Planet* how you can involve employees in spreading the word via their online and offline social graph becomes critical. Understanding employee policy and their use of social media is key.
We can't force people to "believe." That would be wrong. It is less about getting alignment around a singular belief that social media is the cat's pajamas than to work with professionals to discover what they do believe about social and digital's impact on our lives. If we design our next generation curriculum around that goal, we are helping people understand and think about these changes to arrive at their own heart-felt conclusions.
6 ways digital & social changes business
- Moving marcom from media planning to influence planning
- Empowering employees as advocates & navigating new HR issues
- Affecting the innovation process and management of IP
- Managing risk & reputation
- Building more direct customer relationships (and customer service solutions)
- Retooling for rapid, non-stop change
2. Live a day in the social life - Jeffrey F. Rayport shared a point that Facebook's Kevin Colleran made at a recent W50 event. With such a big and quick moving shift in consumer behavior as a result of adoption of all things digital and social, it only makes sense that the marcom professionals committed to understanding the customer adopt those behaviors. It's not enough to get your research team to distill the research into a 2-page brief. Nor is it enough to have a anthropology team produce a quaint 4-minute film on the social habits of teens. Here's how jeffrey/Kevin put it:
"Try living a day in your customers' media mix.For example, if your target customer spends five hours a day on Facebook; sends 120 text messages and half a dozen tweets a day from a smartphone and posts photos, videos, and blogs around the clock; "checks in" regularly using Foursquare at favorite retail locations to become "mayor"; relies on a plethora of mobile apps like Google Maps to get from one place to another, RedLaser to check prices on SKUs at Kroger or Best Buy, and Fashism to crowd-source advice from others while shopping; goes online at RueLaLa and GILT for flash sales just when the boutiques open; and subscribes to Groupon or LivingSocial for alerts on local deals, there's a good chance you might want to know what it's like to live a life like that.
There's an equally good chance that (and this was Kevin's point) knowing what it's like to live your customers' media might change the way you use marketing and media to reach, influence, and interact with your customers. It might even change what you do radically."
3. Solve the business challenge socially - I remember and anecdote from a few years ago at Unilever. Not sure of the facts behind this but in short, brand builders and brand developers where challenged to create marketing plans for the year without television. This was a test that was later rescinded. I believe the whole point was to force them to think beyond their current strengths and comfort zone. Our training workshops have always been organized around real "briefs" that must be solved by social media solutions. We simply need to expand that making it a bigger part of the interactive sessions we stage.
Many organizations will continue to have a spread of experts to novices amongst their ranks and the immersive exercise is the best way to have the group spread the knowledge while at the same time building the confidence of even the most intimidated in the team.
We made a commitment to training even before we recognized the scale of the impact of social media. Now that that is clearer we need to constantly re-tool our approach, building on what works and not being afraid to reinvent the experience.
*these brand references are all clients of Ogilvy's
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