The same day, the Library of Congress’ Copyright Office determined that “jailbreaking” the iPhone – a process that allows users to access apps not available in Apple’s App Store – does not violate copyright laws. Apple contends that jailbreaking can harm the phone’s user experience, and leave it vulnerable to viruses; the company voids warranties of jailbroken phones. The Copyright Office, however, said in its ruling that jailbreaking is “innocuous at worst and beneficial at best.”

Regardless of your opinion on the war in Afghanistan, the ethics of leaking sensitive information to the public, or the use of products in ways that weren’t intended, these examples serve to illustrate one principle of the changing information economy: You are not in control.

Media critic Jay Rosen encapsulates this perfectly in reacting to an editor’s note that accompanied the New York Times’ coverage of the Wikileaks documents:

From an editor’s note: “At the request of the White House, The Times also urged WikiLeaks to withhold any harmful material from its Web site.”

There’s the new balance of power, right there. In the revised picture we find the state, which holds the secrets but is powerless to prevent their release; the stateless news organization, deciding how to release them; and the national newspaper in the middle, negotiating the terms of legitimacy between these two actors.

Indeed. And that new balance of power applies just as much to corporate marketers as it does governments and militaries. Power has shifted to end users; they’ll take your messages and your products and do what they want with them, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

So while you can’t control, you can listen and learn. MLC counsels our members to optimize their social experiences to listening and sustained engagement, rather than a top-down, “we say, you do” atmosphere. But engendering this connection with your customers is tough – here’s what we suggest:

1) Focus on service. Organize your efforts in social media not to blast messages at your customers, but rather to be in service to them as they interact with each other and with you. Communication cannot be primarily about the brand – customers will almost certainly detect that and react negatively.

2) Embrace the power of the medium. If you’re treating social as yet another channel in an otherwise top-down marcomm mix, rather than an engine for creating and strengthening relationships, you’re not taking advantage of the unique opportunities that social media engagement provides brands. When done right – i.e., with a focus on service – engagement on social platforms can lead to better connections between brands and customers, as well as connections between customers with the brand as the focal point.

Taking advantage of those unique opportunities requires broad cross-functional alignment and silo-busting, and in our 2010 study on social media, MLC argues that active executive leadership is essential to produce results in the space.

3) Prepare for (but don’t expect) the worst. Social media has obvious upsides, but just-as-obvious downsides. If you’re active in the space, you should absolutely have policies in place to protect essential information (intellectual property, for example), establish guardrails that limit downside risk, and have contingency plans in place for when information gets out in a way that’s not intended.

But, by the same token, don’t expect bad behavior from your customers – they can smell a suspicious brand from a mile away.

MLC members, for examples of how your peers have created dynamic and collaborative social experiences for their users, please visit our Social Media Showcase.

Now they’ve gone and outdone themselves, with a social media campaign that might be better than the TV spots. Last week, our Old Spice hero began making personalized videos for bloggers, Web celebrities, and a few average web users. Notable examples include a get-well message to Digg founder Kevin Rose, political punditry in response to George Stephanopolous, and a hilarious response to the Yahoo! Answers question “How many teeth do sharks have?”.

The videos have been a smash hit, with PCWorld calling them “the most brilliant viral ad campaign of its time”.  Total views on Old Spice’s YouTube channel are over 100 million, while Google Trends reports a huge spike in searches for Old Spice:

Click Image to Enlarge

At MLC, we never counsel members to shoot for virality in their online campaigns. What we’ve learned from discussions with countless B2C marketers is that you can check all the “viral” boxes and still have a campaign that flops. There are simply too many variables in what achieves currency on the web for any marketer to accurately predict that a campaign will go viral.

But, the subset of campaigns that do go viral do have a few of these things in common:

1) Cash. Someone may have told you that online campaigns are supposed to be cheap. Cheaper than TV, maybe, but Old Spice is spending some fairly serious money on this initiative. “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” was a sponsored trend on Twitter and the company is paying to get its branding on its YouTube channel – not to mention paying Mustafa and the video crew for long days of shooting.

2) Ego. By aiming most of the videos squarely at online influencers like Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, and Ellen DeGeneres, as well as blogs like Gizmodo, Old Spice ensured that they’d have ample access to the huge network of followers commanded by those celebrities and outlets. But they didn’t stop at focusing on big names – they shot videos for all kinds of social networking users. They also engaged the ego of communities – canvassing Reddit and the notorious 4-Chan (absolutely not safe for work) for potential questions well before shooting.

3) Anticipation. Old Spice built anticipation into the campaign in a few ways – first, the quick turnaround of the videos meant was a carrot for repeat visitors; second, there was no pattern to the responses, so a reply to Ashton Kutcher might be followed by one to WebLover222; and third, the videos themselves were so wacky that users couldn’t wait to see what would come next.

4) Paradigm Shift. The campaign challenges the way people think about several things, in the process changing the way people think about the Old Spice brand. Everything from the absurd monologues to the production-line nature of the shoot to the idea of responding to random web users leads people to think differently about Old Spice.

Like I said above – you can hit all these marks and still have a flop on your hands; the vagaries of the digital market are still too much for marketers to reliably understand. But its good to know that there are some common threads – and at least a little predictability – in what makes a campaign viral.

John posted a thought-provoking interesting survey a few weeks back, asking pharma marketers what they thought the most important elements of a social media implementation plan were, particularly in the event of a crisis. 

Here are the results (image from the Pharma Marketing Blog). Since the activities are truncated on the graph, a key is below: 

The activities: 

• Unblock corporate access to social media so employees can monitor and use applications such as Facebook while at work
• Have a sustained vision/goal
• Become a dialogue company – learn how to listen and respond, not just push messages out
• Get everyone – including marketing, regulatory people, corporate communications, C-level execs – on board
• Develop guideposts, internal and external standard operating procedures
• Train people who will be interacting directly with consumers
• Develop a moderation strategy
• Marshall necessary resources – use the best tools available
• Create a social media “Tsar” position to oversee all the company’s SM projects to assure compliance with guideline

It’s interesting that these activities all fall into two broad categories – what I’ll call “tools” and “behaviors”. Unblocking access to social media sites, training, moderation strategy, and marshaling resources – those are “tools”. But sustained  goals, becoming a “dialogue company” and breaking down functional silos – those are “behaviors”. It’s clear that the marketers who answered this survey know how to use those tools; they place much less weight on them than they do the behaviors. But not everyone can set organizational priorities and move different functions to act more cooperatively – it’s clear that respondents to John’s survey have the tools, but are looking for leadership. 

In our 2010 study for B2C marketers, Close the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media, we argue that what’s standing between marketing teams and social media success is often a lack of executive leadership. According to our data, CMO involvement in social efforts is a strong predictor of how well companies do in the space: 

For pharma and other risk-averse industries, the message is clear: if you want to mitigate downside risk while using social media to reshape the brand-to-consumer relationship, active CMO leadership is essential. 

MLC members, learn how you can more effectively lead your organization’s social media efforts at one of our upcoming Annual Executive Retreats, or attend our July 14 webinar, Building a Socially Intelligent Enterprise: Closing the CMO Leadership Gap in Social Media.

That changed recently when I spent time visiting with marketers at Ingersoll-Rand, makers of Hussmann refrigerated cases.  In this day and age, I couldn’t imagine there was a lot of innovation in the design of refrigerated cases.  Their job is pretty simple – keep stuff cold while maximizing shelf space and minimizing energy use – and people have been building them for decades.  I mean really, what’s left to do with commercial refrigerators?!?  Apparently a ton.

As I talk to marketers across industries and categories, most would do cartwheels to have the right insights that result in a handful of commercially-viable innovations.  Yet filling the top of the innovation funnel and then knowing how to filter those ideas is proving far more difficult.

Working with Strategyn and using one of the Council’s favorite frameworks, jobs and outcomes, Hussman identified fistfuls of under-served customer opportunities for their products.  In other words, among the dozens and dozens of potential innovation plays, Hussman found more than enough actionable opportunities where the customer has low satisfaction for a highly important job. 

Members, if you’d like to learn more about Ingersoll-Rand’s approach, consider joining Manlio Valdes, Vice President of Global Product Management for the Industrial Technologies Division at Ingersoll-Rand at our next Innovation Summit on July 22.  The session is hosted by W.L. Gore and includes a tour of their world-class Innovation Center.

Video: Social Media on a Shoestring

Slidedeck: Social Media on a Shoestring

“Sharpie Susan’s” goal was increase brand loyalty by leveraging brand advocates they termed “bold expressionmakers,” who are Sharpie uber-users that gravitate toward new media.  To achieve this objective, Sharpie decided to showcase content from these “bold expressionmakers” that demonstrated creative ways to use Sharpie pens in daily life.

Investment:

• $1,000 for Blog Masthead
• $20 for Blog Theme
• $895 for eLancer
• Free:  monitoring tools to listen for brand mentions

Measurement:

At the time of Susan’s presentation, Sharpie measured Total Visits, RSS Subscribers, Blog Links, Google Friends, and Comments.

Here’s what Sharpie would like to measure moving forward:

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.

Video: You Can Do It, We Can (Still) Help

Slidedeck: You Can Do It, We Can (Still) Help

The Opportunity:

Home Depot found that previously overlooked “passionates” that sat outside the brand’s historic target audience were engaging with the Home Depot brand online.  The company would try to capitalize on this organic interest to use social media as a way to differentiate itself from competitors with the goal of recapturing a group of consumers they lost during the customer service slip.

The Plan:

(1)     Leverage Front-Line Staff:  Nick notes that social media provided Home Depot with a way to engage store associates in meaningful way.  By tapping into the collective knowledge of those store associates (ex: getting garden associate to blog about how he tends to plants; creating a video of craftsman giving tips on how to build a deck), Home Depot was able to provide different-in-kind value for potential customers.

(2)     Follow Your Audience:  Home Depot found that while homedepot.com is a destination, it’s not the only destination for home improvement information.  Rather than trying to boost homedepot.com higher in the rankings (it was typically consumers 4^th or 5^th stop), Home Depot could use video syndication to bring “how to” content to websites that customers were already frequenting like YouTube and howCast.

Case-in-Point:

One of Home Depot’s biggest opportunities was providing guidance and support during natural disasters, a time when home safety and repair was already top-of-mind for customers.  Home Depot hypothesized that Twitter could help them “reach further, faster” when it came to sharing advice on how to prepare for and recover from natural disasters.

MLC members, for more information on how you can leverage social to improve customer service, please visit our Social Media Topic Center and register for our July 15 webinar, Building a Socially Intelligent Enterprise: Closing the CEO Leadership Gap in Social Media.

(photo of a Home Depot store via Flickr user neubie)

“I’m particularly intrigued by the competitive differentiation that needs be thought through—strategically—before you can start to think about ‘What am I doing on Twitter?’”

–Jennifer Lavelli, Group Executive, Worldwide Marketing, MasterCard

At MLC’s recent executive retreat in New York, Jennifer Lavelli put her finger on one of the key traits distinguishing social media exemplars (the 10% of large enterprises that are seeing real business results from their social efforts).  These exemplars are focusing their efforts on areas that could change the competitive dynamics in their category. By the way, “changing competitive dynamics” is not taking a category by storm with a viral hit.  Those results, while good, are fleeting.  By competitive dynamics, we’re talking Porter’s 5 Forces here.

And this goes well beyond the typical advice offered by social media pundits.  They will tell you to think through the business objective first, before determining which social media to engage with or build.  That’s not bad advice—its just that it isn’t enough.

If you follow that advice, you’ll be sure that whatever results you do get from social media will be aligned with your business objectives.  But alignment of results does not equal magnitude of results.  Exemplars shoot for magnitude, as well.

How are they doing that?  There are several important components, which we address in our latest research—Closing the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media.  For starters, as the title would suggest, active CMO leadership is required to help the organization elevate its social focus to a strategic level.  Beyond that, we’d suggest a simple, but powerful strategic framework that accounts for customer needs, unique strengths, and competitor capabilities.

Moreover, MLC has developed a Building Your Social Media Strategy workshop to take marketers step-by-step through the thinking behind this framework.  We like to think that this approach gets you alignment and magnitude of results.  Join Jennifer Lavelli and other MLC members at the next workshop session in New York on July 13.  Or, join us in Chicago on September 15.  Register here.

Closing the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media: If you weren’t able to join us in New York for the executive retreat where we presented this research, good news.  We are running the retreat again in Chicago (14 July), Sydney (25 August), London (21 September) and San Francisco (12 October).  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.