Digital Influence Mapping Project

How B2B Socially Enables Small Medium Business

Think about all of the big brands working hard to prove out and then operationalize their best practices in social media. They (we) are all spending a fair amount of money and time to understand the ROI of social applied to many parts of the business.

And the evidence is coming in. Here’s a recent finding from a successful Facebook program from a major FMCG in the Philippines:

 “97% fans were more willing to drink (brand) after engaging with the brand on Facebook. The Page attracted a following of 1.6 million, is the top branded Philippines FB page, and sales in 2011 rose more than 9%.”

Now think about all of the small and medium-sized businesses who could also accelerate some parts of their business if they just knew more precisely where to apply their limited budgets. For every poster-child-for-social small business there are probably 100 that just don’t know what to do or cannot invest the money to do so ahead of proven results. 

How do different businesses that serve SMB actually help them succeed?

 

American Express Small Business Saturday

“American Express offers small business tools and DIY promotional material (through their OPEN program) and incentives for customers looking to shop local. These messages were presented in tandem on Small Business Saturday’s Facebook Page and @ShopSmall Twitter account. Small businesses were also encouraged to sign up for free Facebook advertising of their brands, paid for in full by American Express…." from Mashable. 

• more than 2.7 million people “Liked” the program’s Facebook page and nearly 195,000 tweets were sent in support
• An estimated 103 million Americans shopped at a small business on 2011 Small Business Saturday. American Express saw a 23% increase in transactions.

 

L’Oreal Salon Pages

“L’Oreal provided a set of tools with which salons could begin enhancing their Facebook Pages, allowing L’Oreal to measure traction and furnish content for all of its salon locations.

 Salons can set up a separate tab with a number of customizable modules that allow them to display their respective logos, business hours, a menu of services, inspirational and how-to videos (many of which will be supplied by L’Oreal), as well advertise products.

L’Oreal is supplying salons with plenty of educational resources, including a how-to book for promoting salons on Facebook and instructional videos," from Mashable

Ford Dealer Training

Ford developed custom social media marketing and communications training fro its 3200 North American Dealers. The training was delivered through the established dealer communications channel. The goal is to enable dealers to use social media to drive their own business goals – foot traffic, test drives and repeat customers. 

 

Be Of-Service 

How can big brands who serve small and medium-sized businesses help them be successful applying social media and digital marketing to their business? Can they take the learnings from their own investment and turn those lessons into helpful programs for their SMB customers to use in their own business? If these three examples are the beginning of that, where do we head next? 

Does Mary Meeker Consider LinkedIn a “Star?”

Mary Meeker, venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caulfied Byers and former Wall Street analyst, delivered her 110-slide “Internet Trends 2012” presentation at the D10 Conference. I have already seen slides from the preso show up in business presentations from some of our largest partners.

Three immediate stand out points for me:

• The “re-imagination” of so many services that will ultimately disrupt many established business models 
• The inevitability of mobile as a viable and leading ad channel
• And that LinkedIn might win the “slow but steady” vote of confidence from investors and users alike

 

Re-imagine everything

A big chunk of her presentation profiles dozens of different services or behaviors that have been disrupted by technology and behavior change. From Photography (e.g. Instagram, Hipstamatic) to Magazines (e.g. Flipboard) to Calling a Cab (e.g. Uber) – they are all in the process of being challenged by new ways of satisfying core needs. The jury may still be out on many certainly in terms of which technology startup will actually earn the leadership role, but the cumulative effect of her list is powerful. It is a reminder that market-making changes are happening across many, many sectors. Just this morning The Washington Post featured an example of “re-imagining real estate” with the site Popularise which allows community members to vote for the retail tenant in local storefronts.  

 Mobile will pay off

The criticisms of Facebook for not monetizing their platform accessed by mobile devices were overwrought. Recent decisions from Facebook like this weeks’ unbundling of premium advertising (advertisers can now buy mobile separately) point to the inevitable future – that ad revenue per user on mobile will grow and likely eclipse ad review from the desktop. Ms. Meeker points to examples in the Japanese marketplace like the mobile game maker, CyberAgent, where that is already the case.

 

LinkedIn may be the slow but steady winner

While all of the other high-profile IPOs have led to lower values, LinkedIn has grown 137% to its recent $100 share price. I am sure there are all sorts of VC-insightful explanations that I am not qualified to offer. I do think there is strength to the LinkedIn platform in the B2B space that many brands are getting wise to. Just look at your LinkedIn home page now. It serves as a business-relevant hub as good as any business magazine or portal out there.

I find it interesting that LinkedIn is increasingly popular in Europe – a not-so-fast-growing-region for social networking (compared to fast-growth markets like Indonesia, Brazil or the Philippines). Turkey is the one exception as a fast-growth market and it sits between Europe and Asia. ComScore's Top 10 Need to Knows on Social Networking puts it this way, 

 “Similar to Facebook and Twitter, the majority of LinkedIn’s audience now resides outside the U.S. While LinkedIn continues to generate the most traffic from the U.S., it shows its highest market penetration in the Netherlands, where it reached more than a quarter (27 percent) of the Dutch online population in October 2011. Western European countries also comprise five of the top ten markets for LinkedIn, showing promise for further expansion for the professional social network in Europe.”

Eric Savitz at Forbes summarized key points that Jeff Weiner, CEO at LinkedIn made at the D10 conference last week:

“Weiner: They have 161 million members, growing 2 a second. Mission is to connect all the world’s knowledge workers; global workforce is 3.3 billion people. They have three themes on the product road map: Simplify, for staters, as they upgraded mobile product to 2.0 version from 1.0. Second theme, continue to grow membership, localize – 17 languages so far. Consider to invest in monetization. And lastly, invest in everyday value propositions. Like the company’s iPad application. LinkedIn Today is another example ...”

LinkedIn’s role in professional development extends beyond recruiting and career management. It is quickly becoming a professional content  network delivering value to the jobs we hold today and those we aspire to tomorrow.

Kind of makes you ask yourself, what’s my LinkedIn strategy?

KPCB Internet Trends 2012

Welcome to Social@Ogilvy!

(this post is also found in s similar form on our new Social@Ogilvy site)

The Social Imperative

Brands will spend between 17-18% of their total marcom spend on social media within 4 years. They will spend more on social business solutions. They are seeing value and expecting more every year. 

The key reason? 90% of us look to friends and family for the most trusted recommendations on products, service and issues. 70% of us count on consumer opinions online above traditional media. And it’s only going to grow. Millennials are three times more likely than Boomers to look for a social opinion on choices they make. 

The future is brand advocacy. And it cannot be faked, gamed, or outright ‘bought.’

There are only three ways to connect with and build a strong relationship with customers and stakeholders these days. 

1. Deliver highly relevant content or service. This could be advertising, media relations or what we call ‘owned’ content (including valuable services). Now it’s all highly targeted and tailored. No more 360 degree ‘onslaughts’ of interruptive advertising. Now our messages must be deemed highly relevant to our targets to earn their attention. Lets use the ‘10 degrees’ that matter. Useful content to run a sustainable business from DuPont. Better ways to use member ‘points’ from American Express. 
2. Be discoverable in search. When people search Google, Baidu or Yandex, brands need to be there for all the topics that intersect between a person’s intent and where the brand can add some value. Ford on fuel efficiency. Hellmann’s on Real Food recipes. 
3. Earn our way into their ‘social graph.’  To succeed in social media, we must become genuinely valuable to the people we serve and earn their attention, their advocacy and their business.   Inviting people as VIPs into the launch of the new Ford Explorer in Facebook. Sparking a social conversation about the dreams of the next generation of Chinese from Johnnie Walker. Helping Hong Kong parents celebrate their baby pictures in a much bigger way from Huggies.

How we form opinions about products, services and issues is constantly changing. It’s imperative that we make social a new way we do everything.

What is Social@Ogilvy? 

Social@Ogilvy is the global, cross-discipline team of social experts from across all of Ogilvy’s businesses delivering social solutions to all parts of our clients’ business. This is new. This is bigger than before. We have been designing and executing social media marketing and communications programs for 7+ years as 360 Digital Influence – a specialty practice born out of Ogilvy Public Relations. We quickly grew to deliver social solutions for all sorts of marketing and communications clients. 

Now we have grown into Social@Ogilvy. We are a true global network with a common approach. 

Integrated Social Media Matters More 

The whole PR vs. marketing battle is moot. Social media will inform every discipline and deliver business value for the foreseeable future. Social media as a standalone specialty doesn’t make sense. All the power and potential in social based solutions comes to life when you integrate it into marcom and other functions. 

We design integrated social solutions that combine deep disciplines like crm, public relations and shopper marketing and rooted in what drives behavior.  We plan around owned, earned and paid media working together for a compound effect and at its heart our work is ‘social by design’ – phrase used now by Facebook but that captures what we do quite well. 

A Global Shift

We do believe there’s a new customer and stakeholder journey defined by the increasing impact our networks have on purchase decision and our behaviors. How we buy, vote, and form opinions has changed. We tap into our 130 friends (the Facebook average) to discover, consider, compare, decide and rave about products, services and issues.

This shift is happening in one way or another all over the world. Growth markets like China, Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey will define the next episode of social media use. They are all growing their social network use and outpacing western markets including the US. That’s why we have grown the world’s largest global team delivering solutions relevant in each local market.  

And it’s more than just marketing, we design social business solutions that use the collaboration and advocacy strengths of social media to drive value internally and in customer relationships while at the same time managing risk. 

 

Join Us

We will be participating or hosting 23 events in and outside of Social Media Week this week in NYC, London and Hong Kong not to mention a dozen other markets. Join us as we launch this new ambitious business. It's been a wild ride to get to this point and we would love to see you. You can find out more at our new Social@Ogilvy site.

Actionable 2012 Social Business Predictions: #4 Social Selling as a Service

Sales force-driven organizations are wising up to using social media to build relationships with customers. Businesses are investing in sales enablement software like Salesforce.com, iCentera and Jive that have social-related functions internally to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing and some even have ways to manage social contacts.

Sales as Content 

Sales organizations are all a-twitter about content marketing, certain the answer to closing sales is in a steady flow of just the right white papers or video talking heads. All that is right-minded in my book. The sales process, especially in B2B, starts earlier and earlier with business leaders investigating their problem online before they may have even formed the words to describe the problem exactly. Companies like IBM with their Expert Network and use of LinkedIn  are building presence and thought leadership online that tries to anticipate the business leader’s pain before it’s diagnosed. 

Sales as Service 

Thinking about content as sales “bait” is one thing (and a little insulting to the customer, I might add). Thinking about sales as a continuing service to customers and prospects is different. Instead of simply ramping up on valuable content, sales organizations who want to get into the sales cycle earlier and even build strong relationships with prospects well before closing would do better to think like IDEO. 

One of the most well-known product design firms in the world, IDEO is expert at getting to the root of customer problems whether they be rooted in usability, service, or some anthropological insight. They’re good at making life easier for customers. True, their solutions tend to be in the product and experiential like designing the Community Pharmacy for Walgreens. Beneath the actual solutions lie a relentless curiosity about behavior and behavior change, “We identify new ways to serve and support people by uncovering latent needs, behaviors, and desires.”

If a sales organization spent their energy on understanding their customer’s actual experience and behavior and then sought to deliver services that made their lives a little easier, they might end up with a great strategy for building enduring relationships. Inevitably it would actually point to creating content that is helpful to customers/prospects/influencers. So, right back to that content marketing model we are all working on just within the context of delivering service.  

It might also cause the sales organization to create tools and applications that make it easier to make a smart business decision. Pull out your iPhone. Mine is full of consumer-facing examples of new customer services from my airlines, Delta; my aspirational travel agent, Jetsetter; even my car insurance provider, Geico. IDEO would think holistically (design thinking) about the buyer’s experience and how we might overcome barriers, friction points, and emotional moats.  That is a refreshing way to state the goals of social selling. 

Do: I am all for quick hits and big solutions. I would suggest committing to a content strategy based upon delivering the most useful content possible to your customer’s decision-making process. What reports, white papers, customer testimonials would help them make a good decision? Simply putting on the buyer’s hat vs. your own seller’s hat can drive you to create more useful content. Meanwhile, try a process where you think more creatively about delivering useful services to help the selling/buying process. You can hire a consultant. You can interview customers. You can trigger some effective brainstorming to explore new service territories. 

Resources:

• IDEO Method Cards – this pack of cards introduces you to a variety of ways to apply a design approach to business problems. Flip through. Find 3 that sound promising and just try them.
• Patterns - a useful blog from IDEO on design thinking and application 

Timing: By 2nd Q it will be key to be executing on a content marketing strategy that embeds social components. By 4thQ, it would be terrific to have a utility or buyer service in place being used and tested.

(thanks to madupiyadasa for the pic)

Actionable 2012 Social Business Predictions: #1 Comprehensive Content Strategy

Timing is everything in business. Business leaders want to embrace innovations the moment before they become profitable business strategy or execution. That goes for most social media-based business solutions.

Most annual social media predictions are loose stabs at what may happen and often range from the obvious, “20-whatever is the year of mobile,” to the interesting, “2012 will/won’t be the year of Google+.”  

With hard-to-read economic indicators, business leaders don’t need broad meditations on what might happen but rather ways of more precisely anticipating change and what they might do to take advantage of that change.  For teh next few posts, I aim to deliver practical predictions complete with my suggestions on what brands ought to do. I have also narrowed my focus to quarters to help with understanding timing.  

The first in the series is a potentially big shift in marketing and communications. 

Comprehensive content marketing finds its value

With more than 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every month and the steady increase in Google searches, people are hungrily sharing content they find relevant. Still most major marketers do not have a big, grand approach to content marketing. Bright spot exceptions include American Express’ Small Business site, Open; Intel’s Free Press and General Mill’s Tablespoon.  

Many marketers predict that “content strategy” will eclipse or become the driver for advertising strategy. As the pressure continues to build on advertisers to deliver more and more relevant advertising (i.e. content) and marketers look to engage customers and stakeholders directly via social networks (i.e. content sharing platforms), we will see two efforts lead to the same result – brands adopting more sophisticated content strategies and practices to serve their customers.

There are two barriers in the way: a simple way to understand the business value of content marketing and organizational inertia. We just don’t have an easy formula to evaluate the business impact (sales + preference + brand/reputation + customer value) of great content programs. Yet everyday, we are learning about what content our customers value on Facebook. We post content. They post content. They like/comment/share on piece of content more than another and that tells what is valuable.

 

Combine the network effect of the average Facebook user (and their 130 friends) passing along content links with the “google-juice” of a great content reservoir like Open or the reach partnerships available with media companies like Vice Media (see The Creator's Project, their partnership with Intel here).

2012 will bring major marketers more usable value metrics to understand why they might shift spend from traditional marketing activities (e.g. traditional ad creative vs. new ad-as-content creative).

 

Do:The penalty for not aggressively developing a comprehensive content strategy that drives interactions with customers no matter where you meet them won’t be felt immediately. This is an innovators game and those marketers who want to rely on the reliable won’t lose their job over this one. For the marketing innovators, start by finding those topics that naturally intersect with your customers/stakeholders and the brand.

American Express helps its small business customers with content about running small business (not just how to leverage card services). General Mills goes beyond the benefits of Betty Crocker foods to offer a collection of highly shareable ‘quick recipes.’ What is that natural intersection between what customers need and the benefits of your brand or the solutions it makes possible? 

• Research what terms people use when they search for related topics
• Build content for your website, blog and social media calendar around those topics
• Connect these topics with your communications departments “message platform” so they are reinforced in their public relations efforts
• Feed the topics to the advertising team to either use in supporting copy or, gasp, to actually drive the creative concept

 

Resources:

• Content Marketing Institute - from the strategic to the mind-numbingly tactical, this content source has great suggestions for applying content marketing to business 
• Chief Content Officer group on LinkedIn – clearly a bunch of marketers have gotten the message for how important content’s role in business will be 

 

Timing: This is a marathon but one to get started in 1stQ 2012. There is a little of a first-mover advantage at stake here. I could easily argue that American Express did not own the attention of small businessmen/women, but their persistence with Open may have changed that. 

 

Three Views on B2B and Social Media in 2011

More and more B2B marketers are blending social strategies with their digital strategies which themselves are just a piece of the overall sales and marketing strategy. This layer-cake approach to "strategy" is typical for the moment and represents an artificial yet necessary attention on digital and social as those disciplines are new-ish still. The cake will settle over time to be one, integrated strategy in the future.

Over the past year, I have noticed a distinct uptick in terms of B2B marketers developing experience and cases around sales enablement, content strategies, peer recommendations each with a heavy social component. 

Adam Holden-Bache over at B2BSocialMedia posted this nugget from eMarketer within a useful post on B2B stats: 

"B2B product marketers were spending an average of 3.4% of their marketing budgets on social media in February 2010, and B2B services marketers were spending 6.5%. Respondents expected those proportions to reach 7.4% and 11%, respectively, over the next year."

So, essentially the spend will double or near-abouts. That doubling is happening despite our deep dissatisfaction in how we measure the value of these efforts. Imagine when we all get better at that....

I recently published a post on the Ogilvy SellorElse blog about the B2B buyer journey. I wanted to share that plus two other strong posts from other marketers on the latest in B2B social media marketing and communications.  

The B2B Buyer Journey Is a Social One

by John Bell

"The buyer journey begins earlier and earlier. Even before a buyer knows they will be a “buyer” they are researching a need via Google, reading what their peers are struggling with, and forming ideas for how to overcome problems or accelerate their business.

We talk in terms of demand generation and lead generation in B2B marketing. Sales is a whole other matter. But the split between sales and marketing and the entire concept of “demand generation” leave out a big piece of what customers need: business problem solving...

...No big mystery that B2B business and tech leaders do what we all do when we have questions. They use search. We have become adept at finding our own answers and ultimately this leads to a much more informed customer base. Not only that but  business leaders wrestling with the overall health of their business are online as much as the tech leaders charged with implementing systems to meet those business objectives. Yet, only 29% of reps are prepared to understand business problems..."

Read the full post: The B2B Buyer Journey Is a Social One

I have been using custom apps at more and more events lately and really like how they not only consolidate the most useful information in one place but serve as a small, specialty community for the attendees. In this post, Eric Schwartzman covers off on this phenomena and I like is brass tacks description of a tactic that works. 

 

HOW TO: Market B2B Events via Mobile

by Eric Schwartzman

"Make no mistake about it!
The killer app for B2B social media at trades events is, believe it or not, the app.
But not just any app.  Mobile apps.   More and more, attendees are using iPhone and Android apps to network digitally at events, and marketing them in the process...
...So powerful is the prospect of mobile social networking at events that a number of conference organizers have already taken a stab at building their own, branded mobile apps. So far, the results have been mixed.  Because just like any other social media channel, those that go the distance prevail...

Read the full post: HOW TO: Market B2B Events via Mobile

 

Interestingly there is not ton of strategic thinking in blogs around B2B and social media. What there is a lot of are "list" posts which scramble together "11 things" or "11 Trends" or "11 cliches" and then there are tactical instructions which are often useful (e.g. B2B and SEO, Content Marketing 101, and so forth). The following post from Niall Cook struck me as simple, strategic and useful. 

 

Three Tenets of B2B Social Media Marketing

by Niall Cook

"...‘Social’ is not the same as ‘personal’ - if the social aspect of social media is about relationships – regardless of whether they are personal (friends) or professional (business contacts) – then the important thing for the marketer to understand is how people can switch between personal and work roles throughout the day. It’s a big factor in what GyroHSR’s chief executive Rick Segal calls the ‘at work’ state of mind. People can be physically at work yet at times mentally at leisure – and vice versa – but regardless of this, when they are using social media they are still social..."

Read the full post: Three Tenets of B2B Social Media Marketing

What will Social Business Training Look Like for Us in 2011?

We have trained hundreds of people within our company and our clients to use social media effectively not just in marketing and communications (marcom) but across the enterprise. We have designed and delivered curriculum over the past 5 years that has really served to empower both the 'thinkers' and 'doers' in social media. We have wrestled with and addressed the three key challenges with affecting change through training (not "won" as there is always room for improvement):

1. Deliver experiential training that goes beyond knowledge and information - we roll up our sleeves and use social media during training to solve business problems. Its not enough to understand our planning framework or the digital crisis management system we apply or how we combine social grassroots (e.g. Facebook) with content and experience design. We run trainings around business problems in a challenge setting. That drives understanding.  

2. Add scale via an always-on, on-demand system - we launched our online Social Media Belt Training resource this year. Team members from anywhere in the world can hone their expertise by accessing dozens of training modules to understand how to activate events via social media, ensure best-practice ethics in their work, measure performance and more. Now we can reach beyond the never-ending schedule of terrestrial trainings to reach even more people. 

3. Design everything around an accredited "belt system" - People need to have goals that they recognize. Business managers need them too. Our belt-system, defined 3 years ago, has been formalized and expanded. And its being tracked.

This has all generally worked. Now the temptation is to slightly improve upon this model and continue to deliver it. After all, this has accelerated our ability to have the most experienced and expert global network of social media strategists that I know of. (This is a claim I feel confident of and have worked hard to deliver. I am keenly aware that this may draw challenges from other expert groups out there and I look forward to that challenge).

That being said, it will not be enough going forward. In the spirit of Ogilvy's "divine discontent" we must reinvent our approach to training. There are three key pressures that cause me to rethink this approach. 

Three Persistent Pressures

We have focused our training on creating "white, red and black belts" in social media throughout the agency. Our never-ending goal is to maintain every agency team member as a "white belt" with a large group of red belts and a growing group of super-expert black belts who not only design programs but execute them, as well.

1. The expanding application of social media to business - IBM held their Social Media Business Summit, more brands than ever attended the WOMMA Summit and the Marketing50 event in Boston earlier this month brought C-suiters together to wrestle with a bigger impact on business than just marketing and communications innovations. Social media affects employee policy and communications, IP protection, IP development/innovation, legal and more. Our training must expand into these areas.

2.The leadership divide - current business leaders around the world continue to wrestle with a divide of those who believe and even understand digital and social media innovation and those that remain either skeptical or intimidated by the change. No single "executive digital immersion" workshop will solve eradicate the divide. Rather there is a cycle of learning and embracing that will continue for some years until the application of social and digital become so pervasive in business to the point that we will likely stop using the words "social" or "digital" to qualify initiatives. Everything will be social and digital. 

3. We are talking 'behavior change' not new "channels" - 90% of the gifts I purchased this holiday season were researched and purchased online. Some I bought through my smartphone. Almost all were ideas I heard from family, friends and peers at least 50% of which I heard about online. I paid attention to reviews on many of them. I Googled to find variants and colors I wanted. I never went to a mall. I didn't have the chance to watch much television as I was too busy. I read 5-6 magazines religiously yet none were key to my purchases except one (Monocle). Anyhow, you get the point. My behavior is much different this year that last. My influences are more personal and more complex at the same time. Advertising plays a role but is not primary the way it once was. This means that the entire marcom "industry" will be trying to change going forward to match that change. 

One of the highlights I took away from the recent experience Ogilvy had with the Hyper Island digital training that was also highlighted in a solid article in Fast Company. That highlight was captured by my colleague, Sean MacDonald who runs a digital strategy group at Ogilvy. His point was that there are so many great thinkers/creators in the marcom disciplines who are essentially intimidated by 'digital" and "social." If we could reduce that barrier - make them more confident through knowledge and experience -  we would all reap the benefits of their seasoned expertise and creativity. While that may simply sound like a justification for more training, it also means the existing "black belts" in social have to be a bit less exclusive about their expertise and quite a bit more willing to admit that making social media principles accessible to more seasoned marcom pros will unlock more social media creativity.  

These persistent pressures and our own experience training marketing and communications professionals over the past 5 years points me towards a new training priority next year: Sleeveless Social Business Training in 2011

more on that in the next post...

When It Comes to Co-creation, Commitment Makes the Difference

Social and digital media have driven many brands to try their hand at co-creating products and services with consumers and customers. A major financial services client has set up a community of young adults to get their input for a new offering. Ford (cl) has a "your ideas" feature that collects suggestions from the crowd. Intel (cl) maintains a group of advisers known as the Intel Insiders who constantly offer input to the company specifically about social media, digital and how it impacts marketing and product use. These particular examples show brands with a decent commitment to listening and soliciting thinking from customers in a new way. 

Too many brands look at co-creating either as a gimmick, something to try once or twice, or as a fancy name for the type of research they have always done (i.e. focus groups) to ensure an investment in a product or service (or marketing campaign) will have its desired effect. 

What is the difference between focus groups (qualitative research) and co-creation? Both solicit the opinions of customers. The image of focus groups includes one-way glass, moderators, and bowls of M&Ms in the client viewing gallery. Reports are written and summarized. 2-page executive summaries get circulated inside the company. Co-creation is more direct. It brings customers into a more collaborative process with actual product managers. The intention is not simply to learn what they want. It is to have their POV help make a better, more useful product. It's less about discovering one or two useful insights (although insights abound in co-creation), than building products based upon fundamental input from those who use the service. 

Is it New?

Since co-creation looks and smells liek customer research, is it really new? Jenna Wortham covered co-creation at online shopping site, Plum Willow in her NYTimes article. Here's what I think is new or noteworthy in the best approaches to co-creation:

1. Collaboration sessions: even the image that accompanies the article - 3 interns sitting around a company conference room, laptops open and talking to a Plum Willow product person. This is not your usual focus group interaction. It is more collaborative.

2. Commitment: they may not have walked into the process knowing that they would make co-creation a part fo their product/service development but thats what it became. 

"“It went from us talking to them to us listening to them,” says Scott Stone, co-founder and head of business development at PlumWillow. “We decided we might as well institutionalize it and make it part of our culture.”
...Nearly 20 girls have cycled through the company since early this year, PlumWillow says."

3. Strategy to Remain Agile: "Agility" is clearly a term borrowed from physical characteristics denoting speed, responsiveness and the muscles and instincts to support that speed. The term has since been applied to a type of software development that is quicker and less burdened by unnecessary process. Now we are applying it to business and marketing. Many companies make a fatal error in interpreting what it takes to be agile. They see it as a more heuristic approach and therefore more based upon smart "hunches" and instinct. That seems to exclude customer input. Not so. What agility really calls for is institutionalizing customer input so well that it becomes an accepted and efficient part of the process.  

PlumWillow puts it this way, "They (interns) help keep the company nimble enough to catch and fix mistakes before they are pushed out to broader audiences, executives say..."

Does ROI Get in the Way?

I had a great conversation with Judy Walklet from Communispace when I spoke at CTAM last week. We talked about the challenges of reporting the business value (ROI) of their great communities. Their whole business is about helping organizations maintain a direct channel with a group of customers and constantly learn from that exchange. The value in higher adoption of relevant services and "failure-avoidance" may be intuitively clear yet it remains hard to measure for ROI purposes. The benefits of this type of co-creation are woven into better products, faster development times, fewer false starts or bad product implementations. How do you measure this complexity? 

While it can be done, I would argue that if business wants to embrace a more agile product development process, today they need leadership within their company to make it the priority even while the ROI dashboard struggles to fully report the impact. 

6 Trends in Brand Planning for Social Media for 2011

Here are 6 trends that we are seeing now and expect to take more of a center stage for brands going into 2011. In each case, I have spelled out where I see the immediate opportunity for brands, the "so what" if-you-will.

 

6 trends in social media 2011 by john bell

View more presentations from John Bell.

Do You Sell Products and Services or Solutions? Social Media Can Help.

Adweek shared their secret find of the Dell RFP for marketing services this past week. Not much revealed there except one surprising nugget. Dell wants to go beyond selling features and benefits

"The RFP further explains that the company would like to be seen as "delivering technology solutions that enable people everywhere to grow and thrive.""

They want to sell solutions to people's problems. Sounds sensible enough. Also surprises me that this is not every brands position. But we all know that so many brands from mobile phone manufacturers to computer companies to auto makers continue to sell as if the benefit of their product or service is self evident or as if they don't have a role to play in terms of solving new, evolving problems for consumers. many want just enough "New" to put on the package to fuel their constant churn of media spend. 

A Product/Service Focus Is Not Enough

 Lance Bettencourt wrote an interesting article in HBR Blogs on designing innovative services. 

"To recall Ted Levitt's famous admonition, the customer doesn't want a mop. What the customer wants is a clean floor. By focusing on the tool it had already invented, a mop maker would neglect to focus on the higher-potential prospect of providing a better way to solve the customer problem.

The same broader perspective is essential to service innovation, because a service, too, is simply a means to an end. As Clay Christensen and his colleagues, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review, said,"When customers find that they need to get a job done, they 'hire' products or services to do the job."  We hire a mortgage to finance a home. We hire a personal tutor to improve particular skill areas. We hire a search engine to find information on the web." 

He maps out 4 questions to help companies come up with great innovative services (services designed as solutions):

1. "Out of the many different jobs that our customers are trying to get done, which offer the ripest opportunities for service innovation?
2. If we mapped out the job the customer is trying to get done, where would we see the biggest points of inconvenience, frustration, and poor results?
3. What is our customer's experience of doing business with us, and what aspects of it could be better?
4. As a seller of products, what services could we also provide to help customers get their jobs done well?"

Social Media Can Change Us to a Solution Culture

How does any brand start to answer these questions? Research. Nothing radical in that realization. I would argue that the type of insights we can discover from listening to customers and interacting with them directly via social media is an invaluable addition to our research mix and key to the "services-to-solutions" transformation. When brands have a commitment to listening to their customers and then engaging with them - something we do for many of the brands we work with (but surprisingly not all) - not only does it tell us some of the answers to these questions like what vexes them about customer service or how that darn ball on the Dyson vacuum keeps me from getting under the couch, the act of listening helps keep us humble and willing to adapt. 

 

 

Interacting with customers via social media provides research you would be hard-pressed to get by other means. Quick, near-immediate input and feedback. Most people are fascinated with the formation of the Gatorade Mission Control center because of the way they did it - glass room, accessible to brand managers and senior brand leaders, high-profile and impossible to ignore within the hallways of Gatorade. FMCGs are usually very good at thinking about solutions. It comes across in their positioning like Axe's role as your wingman to score with the ladies. they even expand product lines to try and provide more of that "solution." 

Why don't more brands in more categories embrace becoming a solution provider? 4 reasons:

A solution focus requires additional skill sets within the organization including sympathetic researchers who know how to extract meaning and insight from many sources including social media. Embracing this requires an investment that upsets the immediate margin applecart.

Early interest in listening via social media has resided in corporate communications departments most responsible for reputation management. It has take a while for marketing, media and now product development departments to really see the opportunity in applying listening to solve customer problems

Department silos inside many big companies make it hard to implement holistic customer solutions. It takes more collaboartion across funsitons to keep the focus on the customer and her needs as she moves from consideration to purchase to using a product to successfully solve a problem. 

Apple is a bad role model. They provide a misleading view of innovation. Probably inaccurately, Apple has a reputation not for listening or innovating to provide a solution but more as a creator of markets. They are like the Stanley Kubrick of product/service providers - the independent auteur who makes the film they want to make not what the marketplace craves...yet. And their judgment is largely sound and certainly profitable. Many brands aspire to be Apple but just cannot follow that path.  Not because they are not as good but more importantly because this is not where most solutions come from.  


To serve today's B2C and B2B customer, brands can win bigger with a solution focus. Social media can be a key to adapting a new "command center" - one that is quickly responsive to customer needs, problems and hunger to "rent" products and services to provide solutions.