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Using Social Media To Build Meaningful Customer Relationships

Part II of this series looked at the undercurrent trends for which social media is cause and effect. This installment recommends how the CMO can take on corporate leadership through customer relationship development using social media. Read the full article.

Part III: CMO Guide to Social Media

Many of the shifts and changes discussed in Parts I and II are understood in piece parts throughout your business and no doubt you and your executive peers are engaged in developing strategies to respond. The CMO has a special opportunity to contribute to this effort and lead the way forward in using the power of social technology to retool the company's key stakeholder relationships - prospect, customer and employee relationships especially - from transactional to relational. This transformation should take you from providing value through the product to providing value through the relationship (the product being a central aspect of the relationship). When customers perceive their relationship with the company as valuable beyond merely the utility of the product you sell them, they will provide value to you beyond the dollars they spend on your product, entering into a dynamic, interactive and co-creative effort to help you succeed.

What's really going on underneath the market craziness of social media?

Part I of this series introduced the subject of social media as a phenomenon that is changing marketing dramatically. This installment looks more deeply at the undercurrent trends for which social media is cause and effect. Read the full article.

Part II: CMO Guide to Social Media

Before you can use the new market realities to your favor, you have to understand the changes at a deeper level than the symptoms that show up in morphing marketing plan assumptions. The key takeaway here is that social media is much, much more than just another communications channel.

CMO's Guide to Social Media (Part 1)

How Social Media is Shaping Your Leadership Opportunity

I recently gave the following presentation to The CMO Club. The subject of CMO leadership through social media is so rich that I documented my notes and included over 45 links to relevant articles and data in the eight page article, the first section of which is included below. At the end of this post is a link to the full article.

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have it rough these days. Recession marketing is always tough, but this recession happens to bring with it destabilizing forces affecting the market dynamics between many businesses and their customers. The socialization of the web is both a cause and effect of these changes and thanks to non-stop headlines about social media CMOs (and pretty much everyone in marketing) find themselves frequently responding to social media-related questions like "Do you think we should be on Facebook?", "Let's start a blog!", "Why aren't we Twittering - Tweeting... whatever you call it?"

A CMO's Guide to Social Media: How Social Media is Shaping Your Leadership Opportunities

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Marketers, Get Real

By now we all know that the day of the banner ad is past and that the formula for social marketing is being created by us. Here. Now. I believe that this reality is forcing the profession of marketing to change and that the successful marketers of the future will be leaders in their organizations, using not just communications techniques, but deploying social marketing campaigns that provide real social value all by themselves. In other words, if the recipient never takes your call to action, they would still have acquired value from you.

The very nature of that statement seems counter-intuitive to many marketers. What? Provide real value without them paying for it? Like it or not, as the age of message  bombardment passes and the social sale becomes more prevalent, marketers will need to provide social value simply to get people's attention, to prove their good will and to demonstrate that they really understand customer needs and motivations.

Case Study: U.S. Air Force Social & Traditional PR

The social media consultant's mantra lately has been "social media needs to be integrated with traditional marketing channels". While this seems self evident and I've written about it before, last week I found a great example from the U.S. Air Force I wanted to share because it provides a straightforward, best practice example of how an organization can use a single event to spark separate communications through traditional and social channels, targeting unique audiences to accomplish independent goals. The subject is the Department of Defense's decision to allow media attendance as the remains of those killed overseas are brought home to Dover Air Force Base in Maryland.

In the two different excerpts at the end of this post you'll see that the official press release from the Department of Defense Public Affairs office is directed at journalists with information of relevance to them about the new policy. It is crisp, official and factual, designed to announce what had become a controversial decision and provide information about the new rules. The blog post, by contrast, is targeted at the Air Force's Airmen employees and the general public, written by a named individual and addressing the behind-the-scenes changes that are taking place in how the Air Force communicates with the public. It is personal, humble and heartfelt, effectively putting the human spin on a challenging subject.

What is notable to me about these two examples is that while both communications sidestep the controversial aspects of the policy itself, each is effective in reaching its unique audience in a way the other channel would not be able to duplicate.

Blogging in the Long Tail - Part One: Quality vs. Quantity

"Should we write a blog?"

Whenever I introduce myself as a social media strategy consultant, this is very likely to be the first question I'm asked. My answer is always, "Maybe." I qualify my answer because blogging is a commitment of resources and doing it poorly is bad marketing, but many organizations in B2B or other specialty markets are wary for other reasons; they're used to marketing in the Long Tail economy where success isn't always a quantity game and they assume the main reason to blog is to go viral. A sign of this concern is when they say "but no one would post us to their Facebook." When they tell me this, I am always quick to assure them that no matter how arcane their subject is, if it matters to their customers then blogging on those subjects can be a powerful strategy for unearthing buried marketing treasure. Long Tail blogging means that high volume traffic numbers and viral appeal don't tell the most important part of the story and what matters is whether your blog positions you well with your most important audiences.

It's easy to get caught up in the stats, and we DO want to see the stats grow in any web communications effort, but Long Tail blogging is less about being the next viral phenom on Facebook or YouTube and more about leveraging existing web content and staff brainpower to reach a well-defined core audience in a way that more effectively positions the organization to that particular niche. This approach applies no matter how far down the tail you are. For this reason blogging in the Long Tail is a particularly powerful B2B marketing strategy in specialty areas with defined - even if narrow - audiences (e.g., chemicals processing or OEM equipment manufacturing).

Why You (Proably) Need A New Web Site to Partipate in Social Media

I've spent a lot of my career helping organizations improve their web presence and when social media first came a long I thought I would get to move on and leave web sites behind. And yet my first recommendation on virtually every new project goes something like this - Step #1: upgrade your web site! I've even developed a checklist to guide our assessment of their current site (see below).

The first few times this happened it made me uncomfortable; was I just falling back into my comfort zone? But then I began to understand the rationale behind my own recommendation at a deeper level, and it is this:

When you participate in the socialsphere your credibility (and to a great extent your success) depend heavily on your ability to express yourself genuinely and authentically. But where does your audience go to perform the "authenticity check", to compare your dialoging self against your "real" self? If you're a human being, they read your profile, meet you in a restaurant or talk to a mutual acquaintance. If you're an organization - they go to your web site and when they do this your online identity (i.e., web site) either reinforces their original opinion of you or not. To the extent your web site identity does not correlate to your social "voice" it undermines your authenticity, your credibility and thus your success.

Social Media 101 - For Marketers (and other people who speak English)

I, like everyone who does "social media' professionally, get asked to explain it a lot. I've got bunches of emails and slide decks taking a crack at the answer to What is Social Media, but I haven't been happy with any of them because they tend to focus on the little stuff, and it's the big stuff I find so interesting. Also, in getting my clients (and prospects) to the point where I can begin to actually advise them on how to incorporate social media into their global communications strategy, I have to help them understand the essence of what it is, not the details.

So, for a new client, I sat down and just wrote it out. I've been told by non-marketers and non-techies that it works pretty well to give them the big picture and put a lot of things they know about (e.g., Facebook, Twitter etc.) into a larger perspective. I share it here in the hopes others will find it useful. Feedback below welcome since I'll probably continue to evolve it for use in new fora.

Social Media 101 for Marketers

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My Plea for 2009: Share It

If you read my blog you know I believe that we still don't know the true import of the social media revolution. However, here is one thing I think we do know: social media is no longer a thing apart; it has begun to become integrated into the way the world and the  web works. It is becoming a factor in how conferences are run (and tweeted), PR is conducted (and blogged), and web sites are broadcast (RSSified). The social media community is doing a good job integrating all the these elements into the broader marketing community so that "social media" as a term is being understood more as the panoply of strategies and tactics that simply are they way marketing should be conducted in the twenty first century. I'm not the only one that thinks so.

However, I have one specific beef I'd like to call on the marketing and social media communities to help address: please share it. If every web site on the planet implemented the share feature this year, then by the end of 2009 every single web site on the planet would have become an integral part of the great social dialog going on out there; AND they'd all be investing in a simple strategy to help them build relevant traffic to their site.

Expert Advice: Humble Thyself Before the Paradigm Shift

Got an exec breathing down your neck wanting to know the ROI on your social media budget while you scramble around trying to develop monetization schemes and explain why social network ad revenue is down? Don't show her this video. Instead, grab yourself a big cup of something steamy, sit down, and watch it yourself. Watch it to be reminded that behind the curtain of the social media revolution you are monetizing your career on, is a cultural paradigm shift so fundamental that there is absolutely no way an expert or anyone else today can know what the marketing plan of the future really looks like.

Watch the video while anthropologist Michael Wesch (KSU Asst. Prof) takes you on a hour-long insightful and entertaining tour of the dynamics of social networks' popularity through the example of YouTube. The social media maven will laugh but the true expert will see that behind the fun Dr. Wesch is explaining how the social revolution in communication (not media) is building new models of human interaction and even self-identity that promise to shift our definition of community as deeply as the shift from tribe to nation state did thousands of years ago, but along entirely new dimensions (he doesn't' go that far, but I do).

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And after you've watched the video - all the way to the end, past the silly teenagers and babies spawning viral fun on a global scale to where the crotchety old man reveals his many selves and the people cry and feel betrayed to where the man who lost his child talks about how YouTube helped him live again - reflect on your own social media experience that makes you so sure you're an expert (ever mindful that even experts can disagree).