Social Media Strategy & Engagement Marketing by Karl Long

Is the web really moving so fast that the recently, bold, innovative, interactive marketers are now the “traditional” media? Are they obsessed with RIA/Flash based “orgies” for the senses and missing the boat a little on the “new” marketing, the conversational marketing, the blog marketing, the social software etc.

I was listening to a rant the other day on Joseph Jaffe’s podcast, and the rantee kept saying a phrase that brought back memories of the heady days of the dotcom era, namely “they just don’t get it”. Now, i’ve got mixed feelings about that phrase, because in many cases it came to represent the hubris and aragonce that would sometimes creep into the culture of these agencies. But that being said, the successful interactive agencies probably have some structural and cultural problems that will get in the way of them jumping on this next wave.

From a recent report from Forester, Interactive Markters had this to say:

If that’s the marketers then what hope do the clients have? Talk about the blind leading the blind.

Mind you, if you then read this article here it seems that McKinsey is taking a leadership position in getting some old and new media leaders to get together in New York. Mind you in support of the idea that what used to be new media is now traditional take a read of this quote:

From “Yahoo to YouTube” that’s pretty funny. I wonder if anyone from technorati is going?

Tip of the Hat

Chris Lawer of the OMC group has just published what looks to be an interesting and relevant academic paper on the topic of “Customer Advocacy and Brand Development“. The blog post gives a bit of a summary on what the paper is about, but unfortunatly you can’t download a copy of the paper unless you want to buy it from this academic paper merchant.

Here’s a couple of bullet points that highlight the main points:

The only think I would ask Chris to elaborate on in his blog post is how he defines a “branded advocacy network” and “customer value drivers”. Anyway, it’s good to see work being done through the “official channels” to build real discipline around customer experience management, co-creation, and ‘new’ marketing.

It has occured to me that the hierarchy of customer experience forms an interesting foundation when thinking about modern marketing. I’ve used the term “expontential marketing” because customers co-creating value can create powerful network effects. I think this formula can provide a lens through which we can look at the success of companies like flickr, amazon.com, IKEA, 37signals etc.

Obviously these diagrams are vast simplifications of the complexity of the relationship between customers and organizations, but I think it’s a useful way to think about the tools and infrastructure you need to put in place to build an deeper and more meaningful relationships with customers. This is very much inspired by the thinking from the cluetrain manifesto, gapingvoids ideas on the microbrand, Tara Hunts Pinko marketing, and of course my ideas on micromarketing.

From: Central Office of Design

Most companies are very uncomfortable at the beginning of this diagram, and in fact I think this is one of the main reasons for “agencies” failure to innovate with clients. Ironically, clients that need to innovate, hire consultancies, and then balk at up front time exploring possibilities. As one professor told me “spend some time in the fuzzy front end, it’s a cheap place to shop”.

In the end a consultancy that is pushed too quickly to a mundane, run of the mill solution is at fault.

Tip of the Hat

Johnny Cupcakes T-Shirt
Originally uploaded by karllong.

This is from my daily t-shirt blog, tcritic but it’s also a wonderful example of a business concept, that tweaks the nose of what we think a clothing company should be. Johnny Cupcakes is the name of the company and for anyone following the Sopranos they’ve got a pretty familiar name. Can’t be Sopranos inspired as these guys have got a few stores open already, although surely a line of “johnny cakes” shirts can’t be far way. (BTW I just bought this shirt, on sale for $21).

One thing Johnny Cupcakes has done brilliantly is they’ve redefined what a clothing company could be, and specifically what a designer clothing company could be. In many ways I think they have used or have been osmatically inspired by lush, with the satirical “food store”. Imagine trying to pitch to a VC, “I’m going to start a clothing company that will have a cupcake in all it’s designs, and I’ll call it Johnny Cupcakes”. BTW they also do “cupperware parties” where they’ll show up and sell merchandise at your parties at a discount and you get a free gift. Most companies don’t look fun enough to pull that off, but these guys do. I love it.

BTW Seth, this has got to be a purple cow right?

This is an idea that kept me awake last night. I’ve been struggling for a while to try and bring together a couple of seemingly disparate concepts. Namely search engine marketing, micromarketing, and customer experience. Why would I try and do such a thing? (that’s what my dad asked as well). Well I write about customer experience at experiencecurve, and micromarketing here, and my business is currently positioned around search engine marketing, so needless to say i feel somewhat torn when writing about topics, and feel like I should be offering my clients a wider set of my skills and experience.

Anyway, my starting point for this unified theory is “Attract & Motivate”. Companies have been trying to attract customers for years, and micromarketing is another way of building that attraction over time, by leveraging conversational marketing, customer made aspects of the marketing and business, citizen media. In many ways, many people “get” the attraction side of the equation, the part that’s glossed over is the “motivation”, ie. motivating customers to interact with your company in deeper more meaningful ways by participating in the conversation, by creating citizen media, by helping make things.

I built a framework that tried to connect customer experience and motivation a few years ago, that proposes that customers have certain needs that have to be addressed before they can become a valuable participant/co-creator, and the one thing that companies need to watch out for is avoiding “demotivators” even before they think about motivation. The “demotivators” I’ve identified are “trust” and “usability”, in other words, these are not so much motivators, but enablers, lubricants of cooperation if you like. “Motivators” are actually more enablers, ie. autonomy is just about putting frameworks in place that enable customers to be creative.

I know a lot of my focus is online and blogs etc. so I’ll give you a real world example. Take IKEA, which has gained tremendous value from its customers by giving them more autonomy. When customers enter an IKEA store, they are given catalogues, tape measures, pencils, and paper, and then they are given the freedom to make their own deliveries and put their own furniture together, changing the cost structure of the value chain. It is in this way that customers become creators of value; and autonomy is the foundation of motivation.

Update: here’s a link to the PDF of the Customer Expereince Hierarchy
and if you’re really interested a PDF of the original article that was published in the Design Management Journal “Customer Loyalty and Experience Design”

Interwoven has recently got in touch with me to see if I was interested in interviewing their CMO, Bill Seawick to talk about their focus on “customer experience”. Interwoven is one of the technology companies that has become started to position its tools and services around the concept of enhancing the customer experience.

I haven’t actually spoken to anyone there yet, but I sent them some questions that I had, and I thought I would try and get some written answers, and follow it up with an audio recording of some follow up discussion. Here are some questions I’ve posed, please feel free to suggest other areas I could be asking about in the comments.

• How do you guys think about/define Customer Experience? How do you perceive the market is thinking about it? Are you in a missionary sales mode, or do your customers, I hate to use this term, “get it”?
• I’ve known about Interwoven for years, having been an web consultant during the .com boom, and interwoven has always been a technology mentioned in the same breath as vignette, broadvision, etc. So why and how does a content management company make the transition to a customer experience… focused/positioned company?
• How are your implementation/professional services aligned with understanding/supporting customer experience? Are there any tools/frameworks that you guys use to try and understand the customer a little more holistically?
• Now lots of CRM companies are making the leap to position themselves as CEM companies, do you see any issues with differentiation or problems with market perception leaning toward the CEM/CRM comparison?

Biznik.com A small Seattle based business networking site started by Dan McComb, it focuses on encouraging F2F networking, and referring business. One of the very interesting aspects of this is that “good behavior” like referring people business gets you kudos and builds your reputation.

Hmm, imagine that, rewarding people for behavior you want to encourage, sounds revolutionary. Well I’m being facetious, but it’s amazing how many web sites and especially community web sites that fail to reward the right behavior.

Biznik is pretty small right now, and I hope that they can grow and still maintain the good vibe. Right now it’s a lot of Seattle folks, but the model is just waiting to get taken into other cities.

Along the same lines, well at least social networking that claims not to suck, but without my own opinion of it, i’ve recently heard about collectiveX a “group-focused professional social network” tool. TechCrunch says, “CollectiveX is what LinkedIn should have been.”

I wrote last week about the priceless campaign by MasterCard and how they had failed to take advantage of the online marketing aspect of the campaign at all. Which considering this was a “consumer generated content” play and the whole tv campaign that was pushing people to “priceless.com” is baffling. I mean, even Chevy got more attention online than this. Anyway, my reason for following up was due to seeing a few people hitting my site from search engines on the key term “priceless”, and it turns out i’m already on page two of googles search results for the term priceless, totally crazy. I wonder how much money they spent on that campaign?

I had missed this previously, but it’s a nice little article from Slate on The End of a Played-Out Ad Campaign? Priceless.

You may have noticed the design changed slightly, i’m experimenting with a three column layout I put together that’s based on the brilliant k2 theme. If you want to download my 3 column experiment you can get it here t-critic k3_col theme. I’d be glad of any feedback.

K