Following my last post a few folk asked me to expand on how to enable two-way comms.
To cut a long story short, if you’re a big company with loads of people wanting to talk, the only way to get scale is to empower your staff to talk to customers. Companies who’ve been around for a long time often can’t see a way to make this happen – or it’s already happening in pockets under the radar and they don’t know how to control it. The important point to remember is the same mentality and methods that’ll lead to success on the outside are those you need to apply internally first. The rest will follow.
Begin by asking yourself whether your staff are able to connect with one-another really easily. Can they find and converse with colleagues in different countries, offices, departments, at all levels? Or is communication and messaging top-down and one-way? Top-down one-way communications are distinctly unreliable. One weak link in the chain and the message gets lost; and no feedback means no improvement.
Multi-directional networked communications, on the other hand – enabled via enterprise social networking platforms, forums, wikis or other collaboration tools – equip you with armies of influencers to spread the word on your behalf.
If you fail to empower your internal advocates, you’re making life very hard and expensive for yourself.
What’s more, there are so many brains in big organisations that the knowledge, ideas and answers are always in there somewhere. The challenge is joining them up – making connections and finding ways to bring more transparency – so inspiration, participation and new behaviours spread all the way through, with newfound velocity.
As well as repairing weak, unproductive cultures and removing barriers to forward motion, the key reason it’s vital to harness collective intelligence nowadays is the quickening pace of change in the outside world. Big bureaucratic structures make sense when no radical change is taking place, but it stands to reason that a fast-changing environment calls for greater agility. Likewise, hierarchy becomes inefficient when we need more info, more interaction, quicker decision-making and rapid action.
So help your teams talk to one-another in all directions. That’s it. Those who understand the ‘markets are conversations’ mantra and how to leverage networked communications will be in there somewhere and they’ll spread their understanding like wildfire.
Universal, embedded understanding renders (expensive) control measures (and blind panic) completely unnecessary.
Despite the old ‘markets are conversations’ mantra being so well used nowadays, many organisations (particularly big ones) are still struggling to get to grips with its true meaning and what they should actually do about it.
The long and short of it is that at any given time there will be a bunch of customers out there who want to talk to you and about you. Sometimes they’ll want to complain that the product they bought was the wrong size, wrong colour, broke after a day’s use… sometimes they’ll want to praise you and thank you for such incredible service. Sometimes they just want to know when their package will arrive or when the next software release is due out.
The obvious change in recent years impacting the frequency of conversations is the ease with which anyone can share their thoughts via social channels (today it’s YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs… tomorrow something else). Reducing barriers to conversation has set the advocates free. Now everyone can share what they care about. The downside for those with something to hide is the fact the same tools have set the detractors free too.
Now that people have a platform through which their voice can be amplified, success in enabling advocates and pacifying detractors hinges on two key principles.
1. Your biggest influencers are early adopters, so focus on them relentlessly. The rest of the curve is really good at ignoring you, so don’t waste your resources. Instead listen to and converse with the early adopter crowd and they’ll market to the rest on your behalf, at no extra cost.
2. If your product or service is crap, the detractor conversations will be happening right now whether you like it or not. Priority one is to fix your product/service and priority two is to join in the conversations. Or you can flip this and start talking to the outside world openly about how exactly to fix your product/service (but you better be prepared when the floodgates open). It’s vital to tell the truth. Given it’s out there anyway, you can build trust by ‘fessing up; or destroy it by ignoring the obvious or by pumping out generic PR.
So when we say ‘markets are conversations’, if you interpret that as ‘a bunch of people want to talk to us and we should enable that’, you’ll be on the right track.
Many companies still hold a deep-seated fear of two-way conversations with their customers. The idea of enabling direction interaction with individuals seems like a massive can of worms. How can we trust our employees to speak on behalf of the company? Aren’t we inviting trouble? Couldn’t it damage our reputation? How can we control the conversations? How can we eradicate the negatives? Do we really need to be taking this risk anyway? Is it worth it?
The answer is yes. It is worth it. In fact you don’t have a choice, unless you want to drift progressively further from your customers. What’s more, the conversations are already happening and there’s nothing you can do about it. 90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know and 70% trust opinions of unknown users, so either stick your fingers in your ears shouting ‘la la la’ while your revenues dwindle; or join in and embrace the chatter as an unprecedented opportunity for growth – a platform for gaining revelatory insight and feedback in real time and for amplifying the voice of an army of promoters… your most effective and cost-efficient salesforce.
At the end of the day, it’s basic common sense that any business needs to be where its customers are. In the UK, a 2008 Nielsen survey showed 97% of the UK’s population were shopping online (Japan 97%, Germany 97%, USA 94%, South Korea 99%). As for mobile… well, eBay just did $500m through their mobile app.
Protecting reputation and retaining control isn’t what’s important. What’s important is driving profitability through innovation. Success is achievable by relinquishing control in the confidence that you have the infrastructure, strategy and toolkit in place to listen and respond to the conversation. None of those things are hard to come by [email me if you'd like to discuss: jane@resonanceblog.com].
Most people at some point question what they’re doing… where their life is going… whether they’ve achieved enough or made the correct choices. Whether they should be playing this game or jacking it all in for a beach shack. This post is for all you guys. 
I, for one, sometimes get sick of the sound of my own voice, repeating the stuff of ‘those who get it’ – as if it’s still brand new. As long as there are ‘those who don’t get it’, perhaps we still feel good about ourselves. Or maybe we’re all secretly afraid we’ve wasted our lives on a load of old bollox?
Here are a few typical state-of-play regurgitations:
- Markets are more competitive and we have more choice (long tail etc)
- Broadcast is crumbling as we filter the noise
- Marketers increasingly have to justify their budgets (and silver bullet solutions fail to deliver on promises)
- Markets are conversations
- Word of mouth recommendation is the biggest influence on purchase decisions
- People no longer trust authorities, institutions and advertising
- There has been a power shift from brand to consumer
- 360 degree, relevant, targeted, tailored, personalised blah blah
etc etc
We bang on about social media and word of mouth as if they’re actually marketing disciplines. Word of mouth is not a marketing discipline. Social media is not a marketing channel.
The reality is, they’re just more of the same thing humans – people of the world – have always done… more communicating. Not rocket science. We’ve always done it and we always will – with increasing speed and ease via technology, in our evermore fluid, diverse societies.
Unless we’re all gagged, of course we’ll share things and recommend stuff. It isn’t a phenomenon; and it doesn’t even necessarily have to be ‘harnessed’.
Okay, so there’s a general coming-around to the idea that advertising is dead. Market research is also balancing on a credibility knife-edge. Back in 2005, Simon Clift, CMO and Group VP of Unilever’s Personal Care Division, said, ‘I just don’t believe in predictive research. And we don’t use it.’
No surprise there, when you think about it. We ask people what they think, what they do and what they’ll do in the future – and take their answers as if they’re objective truths. We extract wads from brands knowing full well that’s somewhat counter to common sense, particularly as we’re in the futurist half-arsed scientist’s club and we know better.
Perhaps we need to ‘fess up and admit the truth… i.e. that we don’t have a clue. Our predictions are based precariously on platonicity. We suffer from confirmation bias, historical bias and more or less any bias you can think of that makes us think we will be and were right.
If you consider the kind of industry thinking and activity we had in the past; the kind we have in the present; and the kind we futurists have about the future… how’s about we skip all that – skip the curve – and start making things happen in line with the future beyond our current prevarications.
Maybe it’s worth considering that marketing is dead (or at least will/could/should be). That business models are people-driven. That nobody wants to have a conversation with a Brand. That there are no Us and Them divides between brands and consumers – we’re all just people. That scalability comes from putting the people of the world in control. That the complex supply chains which leverage the hoarding of knowledge for big bucks are no longer needed nor wanted (we see them falling by the day). That we marketers are no longer needed nor wanted. As individuals, we’ll control our incoming and outgoing communications ourselves; in a punk-capitalist-come-communist society (if you feel the need to name it). The knowledge of the people of the world is out there and it’s spreadable, mashable, monetizable and free. So many of our positions are no longer relevant. What a bloody fantastic opportunity!
Google has announced the launch of “Interest-based” advertising as a beta. Here’s what Google says about three important features of interest-based advertising:
- Transparency – We already clearly label most of the ads provided by Google on the AdSense partner network and on YouTube. You can click on the labels to get more information about how we serve ads, and the information we use to show you ads. This year we will expand the range of ad formats and publishers that display labels that provide a way to learn more and make choices about Google’s ad serving.
- Choice – We have built a tool called Ads Preferences Manager, which lets you view, delete, or add interest categories associated with your browser so that you can receive ads that are more interesting to you.
- Control – You can always opt out of the advertising cookie for the AdSense partner network here. To make sure that your opt-out decision is respected (and isn’t deleted if you clear the cookies from your browser), we have designed a plug-in for your browser that maintains your opt-out choice.
So, it seems we’re getting closer towards respecting people’s preferences and asking for permission. Still a way to go on the privacy front. Of course if the ads are truly relevant we won’t recognise them as ads at all.
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