1. Punchy Language Gets Customers’ Attention

Problem: “Marketing speak” isn’t authentic enough for the world of social media and puts customers off. Additionally, customers don’t search for Marketing’s terms online, which leads to low traffic on Websites, blogs or tweets.

New World: Use customers’ natural language.

Tip: Keep up-to-date with customers’ natural language by scanning social media chatter and tracking top search terms for your category. Harrah’s boosted Web traffic 11% by mining social media conversations for more resonant language to use on its Website.

2. Creativity is King

Problem: Marketers can get attached to good ideas and stick with them even if they are not relevant to evolving customer interests. In the fast-moving world of social media, an idea that seems cool one week may not be relevant to customer conversations the next.

New World: Flexibility is king.

Tip: Consider rewarding flexibility over originality.

3. Campaigns are Marketing’s Bread and Butter

Problem: Social media is “always on,” which means that “launch and leave” campaigns won’t work if they don’t create continued opportunities for interaction.

New World: Provide valuable content on a more frequent basis and engage in ongoing dialogue with customers.

Tip: There’s no need to hire an army for content creation. Instead, tap into existing resources (e.g., partners, external experts, customers) and use self-sustaining mechanisms for content creation (e.g., automatic aggregators/publishers, such as http://www.butterflypublisher.com/).

4. Marketers Are Talkers

Problem: Customers want to talk back and they don’t listen when you shout at them.

New World: Listen and learn before entering the conversation appropriately.

Tip: Screen for listening skills during interviews.  One company we spoke to now asks, “What was the last present your bought a friend/family member and why?” to gauge how well the candidate listens.

5. Marketing is the Brand Guardian

Problem: Marketing staff are too few to personally manage or oversee all customer conversations taking place online.

New World: Marketing shifts from brand police to brand champion and allows non-marketers to interact with customers independently.

Tip: Provide short and simple training for non-marketing staff to ensure they understand social media etiquette and reflect the brand’s values. MLC members, see how National Instruments leverages firmwide employees as a consumer listening and response network.

(Note: This is Part 1 of a 4-part series on marketing planning. Check back here every Wednesday in August for a new installment!)

Don’t know if it’s time to spend more on marketing?  Unsure how to convince the CFO?  Pat LaPointe – managing partner at NPV Marketing, a leading marketing measurement firm – recently spoke to our members about how to justify spend increases. Read on for a summary of his top tips.

NPV’s research shows that ‘historical spend’ is still the number one means of allocating marketing budget, but lacks both rigor and credibility with the CFO.  What CFOs want isn’t certainty about the ROI of marketing spend (no business investment has a certain ROI, e.g., building a new plant in a developing country), but rather clearly stated assumptions and a sound understanding of risk factors. You can make a solid business case that will pass the CFO ‘sniff test’ by taking the 5 steps below.

1. Squeeze every drop from the current spend mix.

CFOs’ top piece of advice?  “Don’t ask for more money until you’re sure you’re making the most of your current money.”  You can find extra money in your budget by identifying and reallocating spend with low returns.  One way to do this is to eliminate spend at the point of diminishing returns and below the point of critical mass (see curve below). To determine where you are on the marginal returns curve, bring together experts and key stakeholders to reach an informed judgment of what you expect to happen with the next incremental dollar of spend.

2. Prioritize opportunities for investment

Get a clear sense of where the next incremental dollar is likely to get the greatest payback across products/regions/channels. This can be done without a lot of data by ranking opportunities attractive, neutral or unattractive (relative to each other) across 3 dimensions: 1) current performance, 2) future opportunity, 3) impact of marketing/sales spend. Boost investment in opportunities that are attractive on most dimensions, maintain neutral opportunities, and fix or exit opportunities that are mostly unattractive. You may find that some of the opportunities in the fix/exit zone currently have a high level of spend, while some of those in the expand zone have low level spend.

3. Check that prioritized opportunities have “points of leverage”: Make sure additional spend in prioritized areas is likely to produce returns by ensuring the presence of at least 3 of the following:

a)     A strong value proposition,

b)    Customers that are able to switch (and be kept),

c)     Customers that are likely to be responsive to marketing,

d)    A clear, resonant, distinctive message.

4. Assess the environment: Having assessed internal issues, look at the environmental context (e.g., economic, sociopolitical, technological trends).  If you think your internal assessment of trends may be too subjective, consider hiring an economics professor from your local university.  S/he can run your sales data from the last 5-10 years against a battery of macroeconomic factors to find correlations and assess upcoming conditions.

5. Manage risk factors: Estimate the likelihood and potential impact of competitor actions as well as a host of other events (e.g., delayed advertising, strikes, bad weather etc.)  If a risk factor has a high likelihood and high impact, avoid investment or carefully manage against it.

MLC members, access the full webinar replay here or join our upcoming webinar on Avoiding the Pitfalls in Marketing Planning (Aug 18) for more tips.

The reason?

Social media enable brands to build strong customer relationships that deliver value to multiple functions e.g., new product ideas (NPD), answers to customer questions (Customer Service), or advocacy (Marketing).  Managing these shared relationships requires strong cross-functional collaboration, which only a leader with significant clout and authority can achieve.  As the customer champion, the CMO is uniquely positioned to play this role.

To drive firmwide collaboration on social media, CMOs tend to share the following core behaviors:

• Invest significant time in learning about social media and its business impact (e.g., ask youngest staff members for regular updates on emerging trends; set up extra monitors to show live feeds of social media chatter)
• Widely communicate a belief in (and rationale for) the importance of social media
• Set bold goals to encourage firmwide social media experimentation
• Align multiple functions around social media strategy

Beyond those core behaviors, however, there are many different approaches to getting executive buy-in on social media and silo-busting.  Some CMOs are personally active in social media, while others lead from behind the scenes.

Below are 4 profiles of CMO pioneers of social media.

MLC members, learn more about the CMO’s role in social media at our 2010 meeting series, “Closing the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media.” Register here.  Or, attend the webinar on July 14 with your team, where we’ll share some of the highlights from the research.  Webinar registration here.

Adversarial Leadership

Jeff opened by saying:“my job as CMO is to create tension,” and explained how he challenged the status quo and broke the rules to get action on social media at Kodak. He once asked Legal how many people he would have to annoy before he got fired. When they said a third of the company, he decided he still had plenty of leeway to push his plans through.  Similarly, when we asked how to deal with Legal’s approval processes for social media, he answered “You’re in marketing, be creative.”

He Who Dares…

One good example of Jeff putting his neck out, was the naming contest for Kodak’s waterproof camera (originally the “Zx3”). After reading an article criticizing Kodak’s unoriginal product names, Jeff decided to launch a contest for the best name and put the winners’ picture on the box. The problem was, they had just one week to choose the name. When slow Legal procedures threatened to thwart the contest, Jeff decided to ignore protocol and risk an unknown fine. The contest was tweeted just 26 hours after the article came out and generated more than 28,000 names in 4 days. “PlaySport” was chosen – an amalgamation of two entries. The contest saved Kodak $250,000 on nomenclature and created so much buzz that Marketing didn’t need to buy a single piece of advertising for 6 months. This is what Jeff calls “OPM”: Other People’s Money. And the fine from Legal? $300.

As well as sharing leadership techniques, Jeff also gave some useful color around Kodak’s social media team, processes, and strategy.

Kodak’s Social Media Team

Kodak has 14 full-time digital staff (who cover Web and SEO as well as social media), including a Chief Blogger and a Chief Listener.  In addition, it has a network of part-time bloggers and twitterers who come from all parts of the company, e.g., Sales in China, Finance in India, or HR in France.

Kodak’s Social Media Coordination

Kodak has five standardized “step and repeat” plans for coordinating social media activity around new content. The plans specify exactly what the Chief Blogger, Chief Listener, and Twitterers should do in different circumstances and vary in intensity (e.g., Plan A= one message in channel X; Plan E= multiple messages in channels X, Y, and Z.).

“The 4 Es of Social Media”

Four core principles drive Kodak’s social media strategy:

1. Engage: Reach people on a one-to-one basis. Kodak hired a Chief Listener to act as “air traffic control” and route comments to Sales/NPD/Customer Services for reply. She uses Radian6 and PeopleBrowsr to watch trends and identify comments that need a response.
2. Educate: Listen and learn. When customers said Kodak’s new camera needed a microphone jack, Kodak listened and passed the message onto NPD. The modified camera outsold its competitor 10 to 1.
3. Excite: Show customers that their input makes a difference.  Kodak’s contest to name the Zx3 drummed up a lot of excitement.
4. Evangelize: Excitement leads to advocacy. As Jeff explained, when you get people in the same direction, you don’t need control.

Finally, a few of my favorite soundbites:

On ROI

“When someone asks ‘What’s the ROI?’ ask back, ‘What’s the Return on Ignoring?’”

On risk:

“You never had control of the message. Customers always controlled the brand because they got (or didn’t get) the promise delivered. You have to give something up (control) to get something back.”

On Legal:

“Legal are there to advise, not make decisions. They don’t monitor every call or email, so why every social media interaction?”

On viral videos:

“Quit wasting your time – you can’t do it.”  Marketers tend to see viral videos as a home run, but social media is a game of building hearts and minds, not eyeballs and ears. Richer conversations have a bigger long-term pay-off.

On the future of Websites:

“They will become a hub.” Jeff uses a tool called Socialize Your Stuff to aggregate positive comments on his brands/products from across the Web on his site.

MLC members, learn more about the CMO’s role in social media at our 2010 meeting series, “Closing the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media.” Register here.  Or, attend the webinar on July 14 with your team, where we’ll share some of the highlights from the research.  Webinar registration here.

What makes Twelpforce the right social media investment for Best Buy?

“First, it meets consumer needs. We sell stuff that can be hard to understand and consumers don’t want to do all the learning themselves. Second, competitors will struggle to replicate Twelpforce because it will take a long time to gain the experience we’ve collected over the years. When we say our employees are at the center of our strategy, we prove it in an initiative like this.  The more we demonstrate our savvy and offer this support service, the less consumers are willing to waste time working these things out themselves. That gives us an edge over the competition.”

How did you accelerate network growth (of both Twelpforce staff and consumers)?

“We used traditional media, such as TV ads and point-of-purchase notes, to accelerate consumer uptake. Internally, we tapped existing employee behavior and leveraged passionates.  It wasn’t a hard sell for staff who were already on Twitter.  We said, ‘You guys are already out there, would you like to help customers in this space while you’re working?’ That helped us get to critical mass quickly.”

Are there any incentives to encourage staff to participate in Twelpforce?

“Through heavy participation in Twelpforce, staff earn the right to help provide input to some of the strategic decisions made in the social space.  We’re also seeing more and more of our Twelpforce team members stepping into experimental “social” roles in-store that they are now more prepared for.”

What training do you offer Twelpforce staff?

“At the start, coaching took a lot of time and effort.  We had to keep reiterating that Twelpforce is about helping not selling.  Now though, the @twelpforce team is largely self-governing.  Those that have been with us for a while will mentor and coach those new to the effort.  While I lead the implementation of broad-reaching tools, the 1:1 coaching is a shared responsibility across the group.  If a new employee posts something suboptimal, someone will say ‘check out this FAQ on tone’. I make myself available for help at any time, but it’s rare that I step in and handle “issues”, as those are largely handled by the team.”

How do you help staff share knowledge?

“We have a tool – www.bbyfeed.com – that captures every interaction taking place on Twelforce (and will soon be expanding to capture interactions on a variety of platforms). It has simple search features that enable staff to pull up every conversation on a specific topic.  For a retail company, turnover is a fact of life, and knowledge sharing is essential.  Additionally, staff can post extra information without being bound to 140 characters. So, if one employee says, ‘I identified a new virus and found out how to box it in,’ another might add, ‘I found this cure for it…’ while a third could say, ‘and here’s how to prevent it.’”

How do you measure the returns on Twelpforce?

“We look at cost displacement (calls avoided) and quality and speed of service, as well as revenue influenced, and positive press generated. Although Twelpforce isn’t about Marketing or PR, we still measure its value in traditional Marketing/PR terms to demonstrate its full worth.”

What role did your CMO, Barry Judge, play in setting up Twelpforce?

“Without Barry, this stuff doesn’t happen. He put his capital on the line to pilot Twelpforce when it was an unknown idea. He is largely responsible for getting senior leaders on board and getting us involved in this space.”

Speaking more broadly, how do you see social media changing the way brands market to consumers?

“Social media is about relationship building, not marketing and not even relationship-based marketing. You could say that Twelpforce is marketing without marketing. It uses other parts of the enterprise to fulfill brand promises. There is a time and place for broadcast, but it isn’t here – here it’s about providing value and relevance. We give more than we take, but ultimately that will lead to more purchases.”

Check out the latest advice on Twelpforce here: http://twitter.com/TWELPFORCE

MLC members, learn how to identify your brand’s social media “sweet spot” using our Social Media Strategy Builder.

We asked her how she did it.

How high do you think the stakes are with social media?

“Not to sound melodramatic, but it’s relevancy.  It’s ‘Will we exist or not?’  If we don’t do this, someone else will.”

What changes has USA TODAY made as a result of social media?

“We’ve had to change our mindset to put ourselves in the middle of conversations.  We now cultivate customer-to-customer interactions by allowing customers to blog on our site and post directly on our Facebook wall without editorial review, which many of our major competitors don’t allow.  On Facebook, we tee up open questions designed to spark discussion between our followers. We also have 27 online communities.”

What are you doing as a CMO?

“I’ve been getting journalists and peers onboard and reassuring everyone that our brand is strong enough to evolve and stretch in these social dimensions.  I tried to provide a vision of why we needed to change and I got my staff to provide tactical support.  I put one member of my team in charge of teaching the journalists about social media and doing the hand-holding.  I said, ‘Make training your life for the next six months.’  He literally had lunch meetings with everyone.”

How did you get buy-in for social media adoption?

“First, we did comprehensive research on our brand equity to clarify why consumers like us and understand the brand’s ability to stretch.   Everyone buys into the tenets of this brand study, so I quote it all the time. Second, I showed how our activities would drive commercial results.  I was careful not to ask for mandates or incremental resources initially.  I simply asked for access to our journalists.  Finally, I shifted one person on my own team from traditional PR to social media and cancelled our wire services.  But if anything, we now get more – and better – PR at less cost.”

How did you get journalists to change their habits?

“Like any change initiative, you find influencers. For us it was travel journalists.  We asked them to blog and then got them to share their successes and tips.  From there, social took on a life of its own for the journalists.”

How long did it take you to see traffic/results?

“We went from zero to 100 twitterers in a year and have already seen a meaningful boost in traffic to our website as a result.”

How do you keep up-to-date?

“I rely on my youngest staff.  They get the scoop on new platforms well before popular media, or even some of the online social news sites.”

MLC B2C members, learn how other CMOs are spearheading social media efforts at our 2010 meeting series “Closing the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media”. For more information or to register, click here.

Meeting Dates

17 June | New York

14 July  | Chicago

25 August | Sydney

21 September | London

12 October | San Francisco

As a very first step, companies should limit downside risks by implementing a social media policy (MLC members, click here for tips and examples).  In addition to defensive guardrails, companies should also offer simple guidelines or training to help engaged employees make the best use of social media.

Beyond this, now is a good time to redouble efforts to measure and boost employee engagement. Indeed, 46% of executives agree that surveying employee satisfaction and acting on the results is the best way to protect online reputation.

Today, a number of companies use the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) internally to measure employees’ likelihood to recommend products/services to their friends or family on a scale of 1 to 10 (more info here). Although originally designed to measure customers’ willingness to recommend a product/service, many companies have recognized the NPS as a quick way to gauge employee engagement and simplify internal satisfaction surveys (though companies should note that employee NPS scores may be lower than customer scores).

Given the rise of social media, we see a host of new uses for Employee NPS. By combining the question “How likely are you to recommend our products or services to your friends or family?” with a few demographic questions, (e.g., location, function, work arrangement, tenure, age, gender,), companies can use the data to:

1)     Identify teams/regions with high NPS scores and drive social media uptake in those areas of the company

2)     Identify teams/regions with low NPS scores for extra guidance on social media policies (e.g., obligatory training and sign-off on the policy)

3)     Isolate environmental drivers of engagement and use that knowledge to boost engagement, thus increasing positive employee involvement in social media

MLC members, see how leading companies manage employee advocacy and learn about the five major components of a successful Net Promoter Score strategy.

The best companies embrace heterogeneity instead of aiming for global consistency.  They assess each region’s individual needs in order to tailor capability goals and training accordingly.

To determine needs, companies rate local teams’ social media maturity against local consumers’ maturity and size the gap to close. Self-assessment surveys are the quickest way to determine maturity.  Ideally, questions on marketing maturity should cover agency capabilities as well as internal expertise, while questions on consumer maturity should cover how much data is available on consumers’ media preferences/habits.  Surveys are usually administered once or twice a year and should evolve as the company’s knowledge of social media grows. MLC’s Social Media Maturity Diagnostic is a good example of the kinds of questions to ask. Members can administer this survey in multiple regions at no cost.

By ranking each region’s internal (marketing) vs. external (consumer) sophistication on a simple 3-point scale (low, medium, high), companies can quickly identify leading and lagging countries. This enables central marketing to:

a)     Prioritize groups with the greatest need for improvement by identifying those in which marketers’ use of social lags farthest behind consumers’,

b)    Customize training and resources to each team’s individual needs by creating a menu of training modules,

c)     Bucket countries with similar needs/opportunities together for joint training,

d)    Identify teams pioneering particular capabilities and task them with teaching the broader organization (e.g., South Africa may be leading the way in mobile marketing, while South Korea may be advanced at online community management)

e)     Set locally relevant performance targets (rather than unrealistic standard targets) and track progress.

MLC members, for more information on global capability building, please see our webinar on Microsoft’s digital Center of Excellence.

Qwest Communications really struggled with this.  In certain markets, up to 50% of Qwest’s prospects request a customer reference before agreeing to purchase.  With no systematic approach to sourcing references, sales reps would spend an average of 4 hours (across 2 or 3 weeks) to find each reference.  Not only did this slow down the sales cycle, but reps would also burn out happy customers by over-contacting them or turn to less satisfied customers and get poor references.  Then Qwest found a creative new approach to references.

Qwest decided to record video testimonials and store them on an online database, so that sales reps could find and share a reference within minutes.  To ensure relevance, the references can be filtered by client industry, size, geography, business need, benefit achieved etc.  Qwest also cut each testimonial into bite-sized 60-second clips to encourage customers to click through.  Reps receive an automatic notification each time a customer clicks through, which enables effective follow-up.

The program has cut the time it takes reps to find a reference by 40%, leading to a sales cycle reduction of 4 days and an equivalent cost saving of 20 full time employees per year.  Beyond those benefits, soundbites from the testimonials have also enhanced a range of marcomms and reference interviews have actually boosted customer loyalty and retention.

Tom Robson – the program’s manager – has shared a few tips on how to get effective customer references:

1. Get expert, unbiased third parties to conduct the reference interviews.

2. Aim for around 85% positive comments, but publish the negative too.

3. Don’t provide incentives for participation, but do provide thanks and a nominal gift on the back-end.

Tom will be providing more tips on how to make the most of references on April 6^th, including how to identify and recruit happy customers for interviews and how to organize a reference portal.

MLC members, register here to hear Tom Robson share more on Qwest’s work on April 6^th at 11am ET (4pm UK time).

As all 3 are easier said than done, we’ve surfaced tips and tactics from the marketers behind some of last year’s best campaigns – Alcatel-Lucent, National Instruments, and Qwest Communications.

• Engaging the sales force in marcomm creation: Alcatel-Lucent’s Hotel Experience campaign received praise from MLC’s 2009 B2B Marcomm Award judges for its strong recognition by the sales force.  Jacqueline Eschbach, Marketing Manager at Alcatel-Lucent, explained how to involve Sales from the outset (Webinar replay available).   Marketing jump-starts campaign development by hosting a workshop for key sales reps to discuss early ideas.  Marketing provides different scenarios to get the discussion started, as Sales likes nothing more than correcting Marketing’s work. To resolve any disagreements and ensure the campaign is grounded in genuine voice of the customer, Alcatel-Lucent always invites a few representative customers along.  Alcatel continues to test hypotheses with reps throughout campaign development via a series of reviews.  The result is a campaign that reps believe in (400+ reps installed the campaign’s desktop sales tools) and sales and marketing messages that reinforce each other (86% of customers exposed to the campaign said they understood the value of Alcatel’s solutions).

• Maximizing cross-channel synergies: Qwest Communications’ Voice of the Customer campaign was noted for its creative use of customer references across multiple channels. The campaign began as a sales process fix: to accelerate sales, Qwest created a range of video and audio customer testimonials for sales reps to share with prospects.  Soon, however, Qwest realized that soundbites could be included in sales collateral, Web sites, and print or TV ads, while advocates themselves could be invited to speak at trade shows.  On top of this, Qwest also noticed that interviewed customers became even more loyal and has since integrated testimonial interviews into retention efforts.  Tom Robson at Qwest Communications’ will share more on this campaign during our Webinar on April 6^th at 11am ET (4pm UK time).

• Capitalizing on customer insight: National Instruments’ ‘Energizing Engineers at NIWeek’ campaign was commended for effectively tapping into the core motivations of their audience.  Deirdre Walsh, National Instruments’ Social Media Manager, explained how National Instruments always bases its entire channel and message selection on customer insight (Webinar replay available).  Deirdre’s team started by identifying customers’ key objectives (e.g., to be respected by peers) and building back from those to choose relevant platforms/content (e.g., online communities and live conferences to facilitate networking, training seminars to keep customers up-to-date with cutting-edge technologies).  By playing to customers’ core motivations in this way, National Instruments’ NIWeek campaign was able to generate more than 2,000 customer tweets in just one month.

MLC Members, learn more by registering for our Webinar on the Key Principles of Effective B2B MarComm Design on March 23^rd at 11am EDT (3pm UK time).