BIG QUESTION: Is there any topic you’d like me to write about???

Resources

• Two Strategy Tools
• Two Elevator Pitch Exercises
• A Positioning Map Exercise
• A Super Simple Value Proposition Tool
• SWOT Analysis Model For Competitive Analysis
• A Model To Manage Loyalty Programs

Thoughts

• What Is Marketing 2.0? … The Movie!
• Integrating Experience Across Touchpoints
• Brand Rot
• Brand DNA
• Three Steps To Brand Love
• Experience Strategy & Experience Design
• A Picture Of Marketing Roles & Activities
• The Future of Marketing & Knowledge Management
• Emergence + Crowdsourcing = Insight

Explanations

• Managing The Social Media Mix
• Anatomy of a Marketing Plan
• The Creative Brief: Branding
• Internal Vs. External Marketing
• PR Cheat Sheet
• The Case Study Development Process
• Customer Satisfaction Assessment Practice
• How Does Product Marketing Inform Service Marketing?
• DIY Research Recruiting
• Emergence + Crowdsourcing = Insight

This is an image from their micro-site www.areallygoodjob.com, where you can watch the video pitches and vote on them. After checking out the site, I’ve got some mixed feelings:

Feeling #1: Happy

As a marketing 2.0 kinda guy, I appreciate the fact that this winery has found a way to crowdsource recruiting. I’ve been watching how crowdsourcing has been affecting marketing, and how it fits well with a community engagement approach. Today, big companies like Proctor and Gamble are restructured to leverage communities effectively in the name of innovation. And, younger organizations like Threadless have built business models around crowdsourcing. This is exciting because it’s evolving product development models to be more customer centered.

Feeling #2: Concern

With structural change some things get left by the wayside. This winery story puts a spotlight on the recruiting industry. which is literally changing before our eyes (granted the economy has also fueled the shift to services like LinkedIn).The question is, do recruiters offer some value that is getting lost?

Feeling #3: Patience

Along with the structural change you’re also bound to get some over-zealous applications of the new idea. Crowdsourcing is clearly not going to be effective for every kind of challenge but one way we establish the areas in which it is effective is by applying it across a wide range of situations.

Your feelings?
Having watched a bunch of the submissions, I started to feel like they’ve turned merit-based recruiting into an uninspiring popularity contest. That bugs me a little bit, though technically it’s only the top 50 candidates that are selected by the crowd. Have you watched any of the submissions? What’s your take?

The result is that people now try Google before picking up the phone. Communities spring up around products and services and often answer questions better than the experts. That’s because customers have more experience using products than customer service does. And, this fits well with my belief that communities own brands, not companies.

Now that communities are helping themselves, how can companies add value and help out? They have to listen to the conversations in the cloud (i.e. all the communities), harvest the insights, and report them back to the community so they’re easy to find using tools like Google. The problem has been that the call centers and internal customer service operations have been siloed from the communities. That’s changing.

I hate to sound like poster boy from Salesforce, but they’ve figured out how to connect internal knowledge bases to communities through cloud services. That’s what my previous post was about here. Now that they’re well on their way to cracking that nut, they’re gotten better at explaining why the Saas (software as a service) model is uniquely suited to this environment. Here’s a great video they put together that explains it better than I can:

Shedding

Brands naturally lose some customers due to shedding. Shedding occurs because of normal market fluctuations and because people’s circumstances change. For your community shedding is also a simpler and easier process than adopting. And simple math explains that if you’re shedding more than you’re adopting, your community will shrink. It is generally accepted that the cost of reducing shedding (attriction of community) is less than the cost of acquiring new customers (or supporting new adoption). That said, many companies focus on preventing shedding and neglect something that has more damaging and significant long-term costs, brand rot. It happens when companies forget about their core community after building a solid the late majority. While this might improve the experience of the main stream community for a while, and increase sales, it will eventually result in less engagement and greater shedding.

Rot

Unlike shedding, which happens at the periphery of your brand, rotting takes place at core. Products and services are constantly changing to reflect changes in the market environment. With change comes the need to learn about new features, interactions, and experiences a brand offers. It’s the core community that understands the legacy of development for the product/service best and who are positioned to share it with the next circle of the community/influence. If you stop paying attention to your core community, you won’t be able promote the perfusion of new stuff to your community. This is especially important if you’re extending existing lines, or introducing new ones.

Two Models

First, let’s look at a standard representation of community adoption. What I find a little misleading about this curve is that you might think that the x-axis represents time. In which case, it’s hard to capture the idea that it’s possible to continually grow from this inside out. In other words, once you’re through the early adoption segment you can focus entirely on the early majority.

Everett Rogers Technology Adoption Lifecycle model

Which I why I created a representation of my own:

With this representation, I’ve tried to show how brands grow from the inside, while still preserving the information about the size of each segment of adopters. Here the size of the circle represents the size of the adoption segment (in the chart above the area under the curve does this). I’ve alse added shading to indicate the emotional engement the segment has with the brand. On the left is a representation of a healthy brand and on the right there is an example of an unhealthy brand. In the healthy example, the arrows show a flow of community moving outward from each segment to replace loss at the periphery due to shedding. In the example on the right, however, the center communities have been neglected and are no longer emotionally engaged with the brand. This results in a lack of movement from innovators to early adopters, and from early adopters to the early majority, thus the arrows have been removed.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to your feedback.

I created this short video to share some of what I think distinguishes Marketing 2.0 from traditional marketing. I’ve also created a personalized version that talks more specifically about my consulting practice on the About Page of this site.

Thanks for watching and I look forward to your feedback!

1. SERVICIZE IT:  Part of what sets the device up for success is that it’s positioned to turn a product into a service. In this way, its reminiscent of the first iPod which took most of the features out of the actual device and relocated them in the management software, iTunes (the service). This may seem obvious today but at the time all the mp3 player manufactures were competing on how to get more features into the player, which was a losing proposition. In the case of the Nike+, they’ve taken the idea of defeaturing the device even further. The device itself has no display and no interactions. You simply put it in your shoe. The display of your iPod can then offer information about how far you’ve run, how many calories you’ve burned, etc.
2. ACCESSORIZE IT: One beauty of servicizing is that it also opens new revenue streams. For example, users can download PowerSongs from iTunes which will play on your iPod if you start falling behind your normal pace, or when you hit that massive hill. Now that you’ve got people online, there are also opportunities to sell them other stuff to enhance their running experience.
3. COMMUNITIZE IT: Getting users online has many benefits. Connecting the Nike+ to your iPod means that you’re connected to your community because your iPod gets synced with your computer, and your computer get synced with the internet. Now you can not only look at all your runs and highlight trends, but you can share them with your friends. Of course, your iPhone may be GPS enabled which means that it can track where you run as well. Perhaps you’ll set up a special  route in your city so that you can participate in a marathon that is a continent away in real time. And, fostering communities online is the best way to power future  product development because you’re users are the best source of market research, new ideas, innovations, etc.

Now there’s another device that may do it even better, it’s called Fitbit. What I like about Fitbit is that it goes beyong running to address the larger implications of this kind of product. In other words, why stop at running? How about walking? How long I was sitting during the day? And, how I slept? Yup, you got that last part right. How I slept. Wearing the device at night while allows it to gather information about how you’ve been sleeping. I wonder if there’s a market for PowerNappingSongs? Fitbit also presents all the infomation it collects in a digestible and intuitive way.

These two examples just go to show that there’s always more roadmap. I remember feeling like the Nike+ absolutely nailed it and that no other product would have a chance to catch up any time soon. And then, Fitbit took a step ahead. I can’t wait to see where they go from here. If you’ve got a product I encourage you to think about these two examples as you look ahead.

Promotion is often interpreted by other departments as “making it pretty” or is at the service of the sales organization. To make matters worse, organizations are siloed so these different internal organs are not well coordinated or even on same page. With increasing pressure to demonstrate ROI metrics around Promotion, marketers are less empowered and less able to bring value to the organization.

At the same time, the context in which they are operating has become more complex. New technologies offer new communication channels, and has changed the dynamics of communication. Managing the marketing mix, and optimizing it, is increasingly complex. Many traditional marketers not only don’t get the new context, but are still trying to apply a broadcast framework when they need to adopt a conversational one. This reality has degraded marketing’s reputation within organizations. That said, we need marketing more than ever at this moment, and I believe it can bring significant value to companies.

First and foremost, marketing needs to be the voice of the customer within the company. In order to do this effectively, marketers must listen to customers and empathize with them. They must do this through dialogue and by building relationships. Relationships should start with a positive interactions which lead to a sense of consistency. This in turn leads to credibility, and hopefully a sense of authenticity. From there you can start building trust and loyalty. Finally, if you do everything right people will form an emotional connection with your brand that can last a lifetime. The rub is that it’s increasingly difficult to manage this process when organizations are siloed. This is the opportunity space for marketers. Here is a good representation of how relationships are built created by David Armano, whose Logic + Emotion blog is worth checking out …. the only thing I would add to this diagram is a measure of emotional connection that increases as you climb the stairs:

Relationship Stairway

How can you do this when all you’ve got to work with is Promotion? You can’t. So how can marketers become empowered again and start building the relationships that drive business success? I think we have to start small and demonstrate the principles of what makes marketing powerful on a small scale. In the process, we need to repair relationships and open windows between siloes at the organizations we call home.

Optimization projects are often a good place to start, because they are seen as quality improvement rather than as new projects. A simple example might look at optimizing an online communications channel like a newsletter. If there is already something in place, work with the IT team to establish some baseline performance metrics. Talk with the sales team to understand what kinds of challenges they are facing and how the newsletter can support them. Identify some metrics that you could use to track the effect of potential changes. Talk with Human Resources to get access to the resources necessary to make changes, and to provide an incentive to participants. You might need to connect the Human Resources team with the IT team to create a system to track performance to compensation.

The next step is to start doing the work that only marketing can do. Go out and start talking to customers about what they want from the newsletter. You can conduct surveys, have in person interviews, talk with other industry experts, and more. You’ll obviously want to make sure that you can demonstrate that whatever tactical changes you are making tie back to your overall strategy as well. Take the intelligence and insights that you gather and represent them in your new design. If possible, include the stakeholders from other departments in the process to foster their investment in the results.

When the project gets implemented you’ll want to internally market your results back to the organization and to the customers. You’ve started building some relationships that you can take on to your next project, which will be bigger. In essence, internal marketing teams need to go up the same stairway they are trying to bring customers up.

UPDATE: Now you can listen to this post as a podcast:

I’m trying to get a blog together. I’ve gotten far enough for you to see this. Hopefully more progress will happen soon!

UPDATE: I’m adding a podcast, this is my first test post:

Roland