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.

5. Customer Jobs Touchpoint Assesment (Texas Instruments)

Learn how marketers at Texas Instruments use customer workflow to identify the most relevant touchpoints for experience investments, honing in on opportunities currently underserved by major competitors.

4. Making the Most of Voice of the Customer

Join Tom Robson, Voice of the Customer Program Manager at Qwest Communications, as he walks through his award-winning innovations in the use of customer testimonials. In this replay, Tom discusses how Qwest created an online database of video and audio testimonial clips and integrated targeted testimonials into both the sales cycle and broader marcomm mix, leading to an average sales cycle reduction of 4 days and a saving of approximately 20 FTEs per year.

3. Targeting Pricing to Meet Corporate and Customer Needs: Case Studies

This issue brief examines companies’ methodologies for developing effective pricing models, as well as customer perceptions of these diverse pricing tactics. Specifically, companies focusing on customer pricing preferences while simultaneously striving to increase profitability may create value-added services, simplify their billing approaches, or tailor pricing strategies to specific segment preferences. Profiled companies include Georgia Power, UPS and Virgin Mobile USA.

2. Social Media Strategy Builder

The Social Media Strategy Builder is a toolkit that will help you and your social media working group construct a world-class experimentation strategy. The primary output is a presentation that provides a coherent rationale for your strategy, which you can use to inform, evangelize, and make the case for resources.

1. Vista’s Corporate-Strategy Marketing Dashboard

Learn how Vista analyzes desired marketing contribution to firm strategy, drives selection of activities and provides transparency into marketing performance.

Also, here’s our most popular studies featuring travel and leisure industry members:

• How Southwest Airlines Uses Social Media
• Frontline Employee Empowerment Protocols (Southwest Airlines)
• Brand Leverage Protocols (Disney)
• Stewarding the Brand’s Voice (Marriott)
• Strategic Marketing Dashboard (British Airways)
• Outcomes-Driven Value Propositions (Aramark)
• The Ties That Bind | Loyalty Program Design Process (Amtrak)
• The Ties That Bind | Loyalty Program Dashboard (Marriott)
• Loyalty Program Toolkit

Not surprisingly, when talking about current challenges, we had lots of conversation around the consensus-based sale – these days, you need to convince more people with different interests to agree on any purchase.  But how do you get everyone to agree to a purchase, especially if it’s the slightest bit disruptive?  Clearly, we have a stronger need for advocates inside an organization than ever before.

For Marketing to support that, one thing we need to do is engineer our content to make people want to share it.  But how?

It turns out two Wharton professors already looked at what makes people share, with an investigation of what makes people share New York Times articles.  Independent readers described articles using a number of adjectives, and then the professors looked at how likely the articles were to be in the list of top shared articles.

Short answer?  The most shared articles are those that inspire awe.

(In case you’re interested — number two: things that inspire anger, three: practical utility, four: emotionality, tied for five: anxiety and surprise, bringing in the rear: positivity.  Things that inspire sadness are much less likely to be shared.  You can find much more in the – ironically – widely shared New York Times article about the paper here)

What does it mean to be awe-inspiring?  In the New York Times, this generally meant it was a complicated, intellectual article about science, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.”  As one of the authors says, “You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”

At the highest level, here’s how the authors defined awe-inspiring: “Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.”

From a practical, B2B marketing perspective, what does this mean?  More points for commercial teaching as a strategy.  What ‘awe-inspiring’ means in a consumer context is that they’ve learned something new and fascinating about their world.

What that means in a business context is they need to learn something new and fascinating about their business.  This requires a careful cocktail of surprising rational information about issues customers care about delivered with an emotional punch to grab attention.

If you do this, your customers will tell each other about your insights.

MLC members, check out one of our upcoming sessions to learn more about how to build an insight-driven content engagement strategy.

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.

How to Enter

Entering is easy! Each entry requires two components:

1. Completion of the submission form
2. Portfolio of creative samples in a digital format, using the following guidelines:
   • Print: Minimum 250 dpi, 300+ dpi preferred (native files are also preferred, rather than cutting and pasting images into another program)
   • Web: Direct URL for all public-domain sites. For private sites, please take a screenshot in the following format:
     • In full screen mode with the website expanded as much as possible
     • Without any personal information on the page (such as login name) or any personal menu or desktop icons
     • In full color at highest resolution possible
   • Other: Highest resolution possible
3. Email completed submission forms and creative samples to mlcb2bawards@executiveboard.com

There are no entry fees and companies may submit as many entries as they want. The more you enter, the more chances you have to win.

Award Categories

Campaigns may be submitted to one or more of the following six categories:

1. Return on Investment – Biggest Bang For the BuckLet’s face it—this is all about getting results (or so the CFO keeps reminding us). Submissions will have used segment insight, messaging, and channel choice in a way that drove the greatest returns on their investments.
2. Innovation - Creatively Pushing the BoundariesWow, I didn’t think of that. Submissions will have found an innovative and impactful way to use traditional, emerging, and/or experimental channels to drive business results.
3. Sales Enablement - Integration for ImpactYou had me at hello. Submissions will show a strong coordination between the marketing and sales functions, including information sharing and campaigns that simplify the sales process.
4. B2B MarComm Excellence in a Midsized Company – Companies < $700M in RevenueMaking every dollar count. Submissions will exemplify expertise and discipline executing a marketing campaign in the resource and budget constraints of a midsized organization.
5. Thought Leadership - Teaching While Selling and ServingI learn something new every time I talk with you. Submissions demonstrate an ability to shift away from a vendor positioning towards a partner status by providing a customer or prospect insight about how they think about their business.
6. “Cool” – We Can’t Define It, but We Know It When We See ItNeed we say more? We were dazzled by a select number of submissions from our 2009 Awards that knew how to blend art and science in just the right way so that they became unforgettable.

How We Will Judge

In addition to quantitative and qualitative criteria associated with specific submission categories, all submissions will be judged across the following four principles:

1. Marketing Context – How clear the campaign’s objectives are and how much it supports the brand’s long-term positioning and broader marketing mix
2. Target Audience – How clear the target definition is and how deep an understanding of the target’s motivations the campaign exhibits
3. Message – The level of focus on customer goals, not product features, and the use of clear language, images, and proof points to drive prospective customers to act
4. Touchpoint Mix – The extent to which the campaign uses an innovative and efficient mix of emerging and traditional channels that are traceable

There will be 12 finalists selected by the Marketing Leadership Council and Marketing Leadership Roundtable.

There will be 6 winners chosen by a member panel of judges (member judges will be confirmed by August).

Finalists and winners will be notified individually in September. Public announcement and recognition of winner will occur during the 2010 Sales, Marketing, and Communications Summit.

We typically see three modes of content delivery:

1) Self-Directed –Customers spend significant time absorbing content online or connecting with peers before they ever contact the company directly.  This heightens the importance of deliberately designing interactions that make it easy for customers to digest insight and want to deepen the commercial relationship without someone physically present to make these connections explicit.   Downloading a white paper is too passive – it too easily turns into a one-off interaction where a customer absorbs content but feels no pull to move forward in the buying process.  Marketing needs to engineer self-directed insight consumption with an eye towards progressing customers along the purchase funnel.

2) Automated – Customers are clearly doing a lot of information gathering their own, but there’s still a role to play as far as what content you push through online promotions, newsletters, etc.  The problem is that most B2B marketers send the same content to everyone, but buyers now expect to get personalized offers that correspond to where they are in the buying process in real time.  The net result: a lot of clutter.   Fortunately, the rise of marketing automation technologies have made it a lot easier for suppliers to sequence content such that they hit the right people with the right content at the right time.  Content should take into account the groups you need to influence within the buying center and the stages they go through in the buying process, mapping content accordingly.

3) In-Person– One of the most potent ways to deliver teaching is in a face-to-face interaction, but it’s also the most “expensive” of the consumption options given limited time and resources from both the customer and sales rep perspectives .  There’s a very deliberate sequence to how a sales conversation should unfold to make the most of whatever face time reps manage to get.  It begins by provoking the customer, either by reframing initial assumptions or exposing areas of underappreciated risk. Then, break down the underlying problems behind this previously unknown or underappreciated issue.  Finally, build back the customer’s confidence with an eye to how your products and services solve the exposed issue.  Creating this emotional progression helps reps “choreograph” a conversation that delivers insight with greatest impact.

MLC members, learn more about engaging customers with marketing content at one of our upcoming executive networking sessions.

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:

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.

Click to Enlarge | Domino’s Pizza (NYSE: DPZ) Share Price vs. S&P 500, Dow, and Pizza Sector (PZZA) August 21, 2009 – April 13, 2010 (Red line denotes launch of new crust)

(This is a guest post by Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales leaders.)

Domino’s Pizza’s new crust has been making the company a lot of dough.  The pizza delivery chain announced a new and improved crust on December 16, and has been blitzing the airwaves with ads ever since—ads which you’ve no doubt seen many times by now.  Over that time, the firm’s share price has leapt by 84%, trouncing the S&P 500, Dow, and pizza sector.

That’s a meteoric improvement—and no doubt a relief to Dominos’ marketers, who spent “tons of time — about 18 months — and millions of dollars” experimenting with various recipes and testing them with customers, according to CMO Russell Weiner.

Those marketing dollars certainly translated into a mouthwatering share price, but what about the pizza?  Did the crust really improve by that much?

Well, I’ve tasted it.  Several times.  The verdict?  It’s a welcome improvement, but not a nearly-double-your-market-cap-in-three-months kind of improvement.  Essentially, it tastes like they took the old crust and rubbed some garlic butter on it.

So here’s the question: How did a firm spend millions of marketing dollars improving a product, settle on some pretty incremental changes, and translate that into an 84% leap in stock price?

Simple: it’s not what you sell—it’s how you sell.

Now, my point is not that Dominos’ marketing dollars didn’t result in an improved product—they almost certainly did.  But an improved product wasn’t the whole point.  The real reason the company spent millions of marketing dollars was… to say that it had spent millions of marketing dollars.  Why?  Because the message those marketing dollars convey is not only that Domino’s had perfected (or at least improved) its pizza, but also “we listened to you.”

It’s a perfect example of not selling on product features and benefits alone.  Weiner explains:

“I spent a lot of time thinking about how to change the perception of people who didn’t buy Domino’s. We talked to them, and read their blogs, and this is what they were saying. And I knew that, other than my mom, no one would care about “new and improved.” So if we just said, “Hey, this is a new and improved pizza,” we would not have gotten the doubters to try it.”

In other words, Domino’s isn’t saying, “buy our pizza because it has a garlic crust that intoxicates taste buds and stimulates serotonin production.”  Rather, they’re creating an experience around doing business with the company: “you told us our pizza tasted like cardboard, we took time to listen and made changes, so give us a try again!”