That might work (and be necessary) for TV, a channel where ad buys have to be coordinated months in advance and audience preferences don’t change too much. But for social media, where channels change near-daily and audience behavior is still in flux? We think companies should be focused primarily on experimentation and flexibility – and that plans should optimize to those goals.

Our Social Media Plan on a Page will help get you there – it’s a five-step method for creating a world-class social media experimentation strategy, one that’s grounded in enterprise priorities and audience preferences. Here’s what you’ll do:

Ground strategy in business objectives. Pick – and fully understand –  your company’s 2-5 growth priorities for the year. This guards against wasting time and money by choosing projects that don’t mesh with enterprise-wide priorities.

Assess your audience dynamics. Dig deep, and understand how and why your target audience consumes social media. Make sure you have an idea of where consumption might be headed in the future by identifying your lead users and examining their behaviors.

Identify your strategic opportunities. Explore how social media can help your company accentuate its strengths, as well as meet customer needs in ways that are difficult for competitors to replicate.

Select the highest-potential experiments. Determine which near-term experiments in social media will help position your company to take advantage of longer-term strategic opportunities in social media.

Measure your social media efforts. Use a “Return on Objectives” approach to assess if and how your social media efforts are driving business results.

MLC members, you can download the full Social Media Plan on a Page template and get started on your social plan today.

But take a step back. Marketers have been on the “engagement” treadmill for probably close to 10 years now, ever since e-mail became a viable commercial channel. Yes, in the interim, we’ve gotten a good deal closer to our consumers – in some cases, giving them a seamless, cross-channel experience both in marketing communications and customer service. We can reach them via e-mail, we can reach them via SMS, we can reach them via Facebook, we can reach them via Twitter. And the cost of hitting those touchpoints is much, much lower than in the old-media world of radio, televisions, and newspapers. But at what cost?

This year, MLC’s key B2C research effort focused on how customers have responded to the barrage of branded information marketers are throwing at them, and the results aren’t pretty: rather than feeling closer to brands, and rather than feeling more sure about their shopping decisions, they’re more confused than ever. The barrage of messages and product choice has led to all kinds of indecisive behaviors, such as endemic brand-switching and “decision spirals” in grocery aisles and retail sales floors. Customers still buy, but many make sub-optimal purchases (and, subsequently, aren’t loyal to the brands they buy), and many put off buying because they’re oversaturated with brand information.

Marketers know a lot of this, but they think that consumer indecision and brand disloyalty happens because of ineffective engagement strategies, not because the very nature of “brand engagement” itself leads to cognitive overload and sub-optimal decisionmaking. MLC members can read the full study to learn why it’s engagement itself, and not poor engagement strategies, that leads to consumer stagnation.

At the end of the day, though, competing brands are taking up more and more of your customers’ cognitive capacity, and you can’t just let them have that real estate. In the study, we advise brands to influence customers in three more targeted ways:

Help consumers advise each other. Consumer-to-consumer information cuts through better than the cacophonous noise of branded information. We profile a number of brands that are serving as consumer advice hubs, helping one-to-one product recommendations take place and bypassing traditional commercial messages.

Simplify the learning journey. Along with more choice, consumers have more variables to take into account when choosing a product. The idea of buying a big-screen television, for instance, is incredibly daunting even to consumers familiar with and conversant in technology. We profile some examples of how companies have simplified the informational component to purchase.

Allow for easier comparison. Give your consumers the tools to deal directly with product proliferation. We profile brands that have deployed simple buying guides, easy-to-remember purchase criteria (like – speaking of engagement – DeBeers’ 4C model), and easy-to-use schemas to allow customers to make the right choice for them.

Till recently, most such examples of banks using new media innovatively have come from the West. But off late, I’ve seen banks in Asia also begin to tap channels such as social media and mobile quite innovatively. Here are 3 of my favorite uses of new media across Asia

DBS Bank’s Social Media Check-in Promo

What DBS Did: Singapore-based DBS Bank recently held a month-long Facebook Places and Deals campaign in Asia for Singapore, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Jakarta, and Taipei. Anyone who owned a mobile device could participate and earn points. Participants earned points by checking-in to a DBS Bank branch through DBS Places, successfully referring a Facebook friend, and points for each Facebook friend participating in the campaign. They could then redeem these points against merchant deals throughout the campaign.

I like it because: Instead of following an ad-hoc approach to using social media, DBS used social media strategically choosing to run the campaign across Asia. Moreover, recognizing that consumers are interested in deriving tangible value from brands on social media, DBS built in merchant deals in the campaign – a great way to engage both existing bank customers as well as potential customers.

Standard Chartered’s Breeze App

What Standard Chartered Did: A global bank, Standard Chartered launched its mobile app ‘Breeze’ in Singapore, and has since rolled it out in parts of Asia. What’s different about this app? A host of innovative features and a customer-friendly intuitive interface.

For example:

• WishList allows you to create and categorize multiple savings goals, track progress, and even let your Facebook friends know what you’re saving for.
• BreezeLiving informs you of all the deals available to the bank’s customers which you can avail of via location-based coupons.
• E-Check Service allows you to sign a check electronically on your computer or iPhone and the bank will automatically print and mail the check for you.

I like it because: Besides offering standard services such as bill pay or funds transfer to customers, it provides new-in-kind value through its innovative features leading to deeper customer relationships.

I also liked how StanChart promoted Breeze – after gauging the media consumption patterns of the target audience of this app, the bank primarily promoted it through social media.  The bank previewed the app before launch to bloggers, and also held an iPad giveaway campaign.

State Bank of India’s ‘SMS Unhappy’

What SBI Did: A few months ago, India’s largest lender, State Bank of India (SBI) launched a new customer service channel  – “SMS Unhappy”.

So, how does this service work? As a consumer, if you’re unhappy with any of the bank’s services, you can simply text ‘Unhappy’ to a specified number. The Bank’s Happy Room will call you, register the complaint, and also notify you once the problem is fixed.

I like it because: With ‘SMS Unhappy’, SBI not only tapped a new channel, it successfully changed customer perceptions of the brand. Specifically, SBI has created a more customer-friendly brand image, in line with its vision.

So, how are you using online and mobile channels to differentiate your brand?

The latest tactics for breaking through increasingly high barriers to attention all have some serious limitations:

• Tactic: Create such attention-grabbing ads that consumers stop and watch or even actively seek them out (the Old Spice strategy). Limitation: There was only one Old Spice campaign last year. There’s just no process for reliably producing viral hits.

• Tactic: Encourage consumers to sign up to regular targeted communications e.g., email newsletters, mobile alerts, Twitter feeds, Facebook news feeds. Limitation: Marketing message saturation is hitting consumers’ inboxes and news feeds.  Soon it’ll be just as hard to stand out there as it is elsewhere.

• Tactic: Hyper-targeting, i.e., send such super-relevant messages that consumers take notice. Limitation: Marketers often underestimate the bar for relevance that has to be met before a consumer actually clicks on an ad. Even with new data and automation tools, hyper-targeting is still pretty hard.

Leading marketers realize this and are adding an extra strategy to the mix. Instead of doing more to get consumers’ attention, they’re doing more to get through to consumers WITHOUT their full attention.  MLC members, we recently added a set of tips on low-attention branding to our website. Here are the basic steps to take:

Redesign ads/packaging to maximize unconscious information absorption. Consumers do absorb some information even when they’re not really paying attention. Marketers are now turning to new technologies, e.g., eye tracking, pulse/sweat sensors and even brain scans, to help present information in the most compelling and natural manner.

Establish routines around product use. Product routines secure repeat purchase without the need for in-your-face reminders.  The problem is, disrupting existing habits and cementing new ones is incredibly hard.  See how one CPG managed it here.

Publish useful or entertaining content on consumers’ interests with subtle branding in the background. Instead of forcing consumers to pay attention to explicit ads, brands are creating interesting/fun content and hoping the subtle background branding will create positive associations. Learn more here.

Identify and activate consumer cravings. Better understanding of cravings also helps boost product use without the need for explicit messages around product benefits etc. Some marketers of consumable products are turning to fMRI brain scans to identify the precise moment of consumption that provides the biggest dopamine hit. Creating ads focused on these moments improves effectiveness when consumers are only half-listening.  See  how a CPG used brain scanning to identify and activate consumer cravings here.

MLC members, learn more about low-attention branding, and consider taking this anonymous 7-minute survey on future trends in marketing. We will share aggregate results with all survey takers to give you a sense of how your peers think marketing is evolving. Thank you!

Marketing’s a complicated business, and, as such, it’s easy to tell ourselves lies – whether we know it or not. We talk to marketers every day, and here are some of the biggest, most persuasive whoppers in the bunch. Got more? Let us know in comments!

1) Our customers want to be engaged, and we want to engage them. Customers (and consumers!) claim to want to be engaged, but the proof is in the pudding: in the consumer space, brand loyalty and purchase stickiness is negatively correlated with high-information “engagement” strategies, and business customers are eschewing Sales contact until nearly 60% of the purchase process is complete.

What’s the message that purchasers across the economy are sending? They don’t want to talk to you – at least, not until they’re ready. Across the board, customers and consumers are simply more trusting of third-party information than they are of “engaged” brands, and who can blame them? The key isn’t “engagement” per se – it’s useful engagement that helps people live their lives and do their jobs. Consumer brands can use their knowledge of the market to guide customers to better decisions, and business brands can leverage industry expertise to help business purchasers get the job done.

2) We need a social media team, but let’s just hire some young people – they know how to do that Twitter stuff! It’s a rational first response to a disruptive new communications technology: surely the demographic that uses the technology the most (in this case, young people) are the best possible people to help brands and companies adapt.

But doing this confuses the medium with the message, Marshall McLuhan notwithstanding. I think it’s broadly true that, as you go up the age continuum, you’re less likely to find folks familiar with the mechanics and culture of social platforms like Twitter. But this stuff is really window-dressing on a broader reality of changed consumer expectations around service and responsiveness – and customer understanding acumen isn’t a function of age. The fact is that new communications platforms are going to continually emerge, and the actual operation of those platforms are not particularly important for businesses – what is important is the big picture of a changed consumer environment.

That doesn’t mean that managing social doesn’t require a unique skillset – of course, it does – but that skillset can’t be had by hiring a bunch of interns or entry-level folks.

3) In these tough times, we need to focus our efforts on high-ROI investments and innovations. In every economic environment, we’re looking for high returns – that’s the ultimate reason we do what we do. But there’s a difference between the concept of “returns on investment” and the metric known as “ROI”. “Returns” are conceptual – they’re a reasonable, qualitative assessment of whether the cost of an investment or innovation is worth it. “ROI”, on the other hand, is a number spit out of a spreadsheet model that implicitly relies on existing market information – and, as such, is poor at assessing disruptive innovations or channel investments. When bad information goes into a model, you can expect bad information to come out – and the result is distorted decision-making, passed-up opportunities, and slow growth.

For innovation decisions, we recommend following a framework similar to Philips’ Segment-Focused Innovation Roadmap – one that privileges equally-tangible considerations like team enthusiasm, strength of segment need, and brand equity instead of focusing on the ROI question. In terms of channel investments, we’ve also observed that ROI is a poor guide to decision-making, particularly when it comes to social media. Here, we recommend an approach based on bridge metrics, not strict ROI.

4) Having more data to make decisions will remove the subjectivity from marketing. Throughout our current research on marketing automation and marketing analytics, we’ve heard one thing consistently from members: a pervasive belief that data and automation is capable of transforming marketing into a Taylorist function – one that merely processes inputs and spits out outputs in the form of automated campaigns, insights, and innovations. The abundance of data – as well as the increasing capability of automating campaigns – will allow leaders to make decisions beyond reproach, ones that don’t even involve the application of creativity – at least so the story goes.

But the reality is different. As Ana explained in this post, the proper role of data is a complimentary tool that supplements – not replaces – the exercise of judgement, creativity, and experience.

Got more lies? Fess up in comments below – we won’t judge too harshly!

Marketing to the millennials hasn’t exactly turned out to be the way marketers envisioned it. Despite their best intentions to cut into the millennial pie, marketers struggle to achieve predictable outcomes with millennials. There are two very important factors responsible for this:

• Reduced savings potential: The millennials’ entry into the work force came at a time when the recession was at its peak. Having invested in their education, only 41% of them were in full-time jobs in 2010. Their financial doldrums have forced millennials to be penny-wise and cautious while spending, making it ever harder for marketers to sell to them.

• Ability to cut off marketing: Born digital natives, and brought up in an era of democratic content, millennials choose the communication they want to listen to, and cut off noise like never before. Development of technology to block unwanted messages, coupled with their intense appetite for it, makes millennials more likely than other generations to block unwanted marketing messages altogether.

No matter how disappointing it sounds, building a lasting relationship with millennials isn’t exactly rocket science – follow these 4 simple tactics to build that lasting relationship with your millennial friends.

Be a part of their world. Well aware of their surroundings, millennials and are more likely to respond to marketing that relates to their real-world context. It’s a plus if your brand is associated with a cause that is likely to benefit the millennials’ society and environment. India’s Tata Tea through their Jaago Re (Wake Up!) campaign associated the product attribute of tea as an energizer, with awakening the youth against prevalent social evils. The campaign was a run-away success with 600,000+ individuals enrolling on the website.

Be conversational, and engaging. Millennials’ primary source of information is their personal network, and not advertising. The key for marketers is to break into their conversations, and win over brand influencers. P&G’s tremor program seeded viral messages in a network of 400,000+ mothers, that got them talking about P&G’s homecare brands.

Keep it short, simple. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandburg claims that only 11% millennials use email as a mode of communication, opting instead for texting or social networking. With reduced attention spans, and their multi-tasking nature, millennials will likely miss complex marketing messages. Make sure your key brand essence is clear, and can be summed up in shorter than a text message. You definitely want to simplify their decision journey, by being lucid and transparent in your marketing communication. MLC research has shown consumers who report simplicity during the purchase process are far more likely to repurchase and recommend.

Be functional, very functional. Turbulent economic times and lower savings prompt the millennials to max out any purchase. Products offerings that are functional, and offer maximum value for money are likely to be successful among millennials. No surprises then, that Apple sold 18.6 million iPhones – a product that can replace 19 others!  On  the discounts front, Meaghan Schaefer and Alex Gershman from Edo Interactive suggested in a recent MLC webinar that coupon usage and attitudes are increasing with the economic downturn, led by the “Millennial” and “Mom” consumer segments.

Members: In case you’re interested in knowing more about millennials, do listen to our event replay  -Millennials Ahead: Leading the Way Out of the Recession

To pick up the thread from my last post, there’s a strong parallel to the news industry and the role that a rare set of blogs are playing there.  I happen to think that Andrew Sullivan and his blog, The Dish, offer many lessons for brands that want to play curator for consumers.  Let’s unpack what makes the Dish a great curatorial blog, and then dive into how the Tory Burch brand reflects those lessons.

First off, the Dish has a defined point-of-view on the world, driven by a set of core principles.  This enables the Dish to weave a narrative through the news, which is ultimately more compelling than simply reporting the facts.

Second, the Dish creates its narrative across a limited set of key domains, but broadly within those domains.  For the Dish, that means geopolitics, social policy, global cultural phenomena and religion.  Ninety percent of curation happens within those categories.  But Sullivan and his support crew range broadly within those categories.

By defining a limited set of categories, the Dish team can credibly claim to stay abreast of the most important events and writings and content happening in those domains.  As a Dish reader, I have come to trust that the Dish will scan far and wide within those domains to find the best nuggets, bring them to the fore, and synthesize them with their principles-led worldview.  That saves me time in needing to try to read widely myself and figure out what the most interesting, accurate news is.

Third, the Dish helps me discover new nuggets that I would never have come across in my regular news consumption.  Beyond drawing from a wide range of news sources I don’t have time to read myself, the Dish runs series of Mental Health Breaks, which include a captivating video or viral hit or meme that, 75% of the time, I find to be really cool—it expands my point of view or provokes my thinking or just entertains me in a refreshing way.  The Dish’s “View from Your Window” series plays a similar function.

Fourth, the Dish gives me a sense of belonging to an exclusive community with a shared point-of-view.  It does some really brilliant things here to promote that sense of club-iness.  For example, last holiday season, the Dish made available for purchase t-shirts with four different designs.  The designs included obscure references to the Dish that only other readers of the Dish would recognize and appreciate.  It creates a great sense of insider community when I wear my t-shirt, and some random person strikes up a conversation with me because they are an avid Dish reader too.

How does the Tory Burch brand reflect these lessons?  We’ll take the four lessons in order.

First, if you spend 10 minutes browsing the Tory Burch web site, Facebook page, Twitter feed and blog, you’ll quickly appreciate that the brand has a defined point-of-view on the world. It’s a sort of fun, laid-back angle, but with a sense of flare and class.  If you’re trying to define a point-of-view for your brand, we believe shared values work well here (much more on shared values here and in greater depth for MLC members here).

Second, like the Dish, Tory Burch curates within a limited set of domains.  The domains include fashion, of course, but also travel, food and entertainment.  Moreover, within those domains, you’ll quickly see that Tory Burch isn’t simply producing content; rather, it curates experiences.  As a Burch follower, you’d more often read about tips for traveling in Milan or niche books to read than you would tips for putting together the right accessories with your Tory Burch apparel.  That’s a critical point.  To be a trusted curator, brands have to extend beyond the commercial interests in their category to curate something broader.  I believe leading curatorial brands will focus on curating experiences for consumers across their own and adjacent categories, just as Tory Burch has done.  Take a scroll through the Inspirations , Entertains or City Guides section of the blog to see what I mean.

The other thing Tory Burch does here is partner with other curators, who bring expertise and credibility, especially in categories where Burch might not be as deep.  For example, the Tory Burch blog includes guest posts from carefully chosen chefs, travel writers, and creative directors.  Again, that helps reinforce the sense of trust that consumers have that the brand will be curating the most important experiences, not just plugging products.

Third, Tory Burch curates strongly for discovery.  So, within those few domains, it ranges broadly to introduce its followers to ideas or experiences that they would not otherwise have come across.  These include interior design motifs, books, niche movies, underappreciated places to visit, and so on.  Much of this discovery curation is reinforced or augmented via the Tory Burch Twitter feed .

Finally, Tory Burch uses its blog, Facebook and Twitter presence to give a strong sense of the community of other Burch followers out there.  There’s a bit of a clubby feel to it, just like you see with the Dish.

Of course, brands aren’t the only entities that can play curator for consumers.  Celebrities and other tastemakers are filling the curatorial void pretty effectively in some categories, as well.  It’s for bold brand managers to seize the opportunity to make theirs a curatorial brand.  Our hat is off to the marketing team at Tory Burch for helping to light the way.

MLC members, for other best-in-class examples of social and mobile executions, please see MLC’s Mobile Marketing Resource Center and Social Media Showcase.

At the ANA’s Digital and Social Conference, Gap’s marketing director (Chris Gayton) and CRM director (Summer Riley) gave a very enlightening talk on their work.  Here are some of the top lessons from Gap’s approach to SoMoLo:

Don’t underestimate the importance of online/offline integration. Gap consistently uses social media to drive store traffic and traditional media to drive social traffic.

• Online to offline: Gap’s Groupon and Facebook Places promotions both drove strong foot traffic (in fact, the Groupon deal was so popular that it crashed the social buying site within the first hour).  Additionally, Gap partnered with Starbucks by putting an ad on their wi-fi home page that took you to nearby stores and offered a promotion to use in those stores. This had click-through rates three times higher than the average rates.

The key success factors with these deals are 1) ensuring store staff are aware of the deal and  2) having back-ups planned in case the deals go viral and run out (this happened with the Facebook Places deal, but Gap offered a smaller discount as a back-up).

• Offline to online: Gap ran an ad in Glamor Magazine offering 40% off items for any consumer who ‘liked’ Gap on Facebook.  The 40%-off code was redeemed in-store, enabling efficient tracking.

Use mobile to simplify consumers’ lives. As MLC’s 2011 b2c research shows, simplifying consumers’ purchase decisions is the best way to boost brand loyalty.  In fact, using social and mobile to simplify consumers’ lives has a far bigger impact on loyalty than using social/mobile to ‘engage’ consumers.  Gap has found some creative ways to simplify consumers’ purchase experience via mobile.

• Gap made it easier for consumers to use its 50% off deal on Black Friday by texting them reminders.  Consumers could text WAKEUP to Gap in order to receive a reminder on the morning of the sales.

• Gap is also partnering with Swagg, a mobile app that allows consumers to upload plastic gift cards to their phones.  This saves consumers the effort of carrying multiple cards everywhere.

Infuse gaming into the purchase experience. Making purchase decisions more fun is another way to simplify the experience.  By turning decisions into games, brands can potentially reduce consumers’ sense of anxiety at dealing with all the product choice/information out there.

• Gap’s “Say Your Price” campaign turned typically fraught value decisions into an exciting game.  Customers browsed GapMyKhakis.com, picked items, and submitted a bid for a price.  The winning bid was selected using an algorithm that managed to a target margin rate (not revealed to customers). Winning customers won coupons to redeem in store.

MLC members, for more information on simplifying consumers’ purchase decisions, please click here.

Numbers aside, location based social media is a marketer’s segmentation dream come true. Not only can you decide what campaigns and promotions you want to target to pre-defined micro-segments, but you can also customize messages by geography. You can even identify brand loyalists, through the number of people who check-in to virtual locations you own.

Assuming you’ve decided to go ahead and launch a geo-social campaign, these are 5 questions that you must ask while designing a location-based social media marketing campaign:

Does the campaign have local resonance? Geo- social media provide marketers the opportunity of the customizing their marketing, literally to the last mile. But even leading marketers like Starbucks do not geo-target or customize promotions locally. An irate customer recently wrote a blog post to say how fed-up he was to see the same Starbucks deal pop-up everywhere he went.

Are there actual customer benefits? Since most campaigns reward higher number of check-ins, customers must walk in to the location multiple times. Make sure that your customer check-in incentive matches the customer effort proportionally – you don’t want to make customers feel cheated. Pizza hut felt customer heat when it decided to restrict free breadsticks to its store mayors, that too only if they purchased other things.

Is it really expensive to run this campaign? It doesn’t have to be. It’s easy to assume that location based promotions can only be successful if significant freebies are given away. When Ben and Jerry’s offered extra scoops of ice-cream to loyalists, they demonstrated that even little incentives can result in repeat purchase, with minimal impact on profits.

Are the benefits reaching the right people? Don’t be surprised if your employees win rewards for checking-in to their work place, more than any customer. Customers got disappointed to learn that their Starbucks baristas were also the mayors of their stores and brewing themselves $1 discount coffee. While you can’t legally stop employees from checking-in, internal social media and reward policies can prevent employee misuse.

External threats like counterfeit check-ins from nearby locations could also result in false benefit claims. Foursquare is working on technology to reduce fake check-ins, and ensure only in-store check-ins count.

Can you define and measure success? Geo-social campaigns are a shiny object, and it’s easy to “join the herd” aimlessly. Make sure your chase has an end objective in mind. For example, if you want to increase brand visibility, you might want to advertise in locations with high loyalties, and measure check-ins.

Need further guidance? MLC members can explore our Mobile Marketing Resource Center that showcases some of the best-in class mobile marketing campaigns from around the world, and provides guidance on launching a mobile marketing effort.

If you believe that what is happening to the news industry may be playing out in these other industries, marketers should be fundamentally reconsidering the role of brands and therefore the way they do branding.

To boil down the Economist’s 14 page report on the news industry into six bullets:

• The era of mass news from early 1800s to about 2005 was a historical anomaly—news before the early 1800s was much more “atomized” (news came from social connections, vitriolic pamphlets printed in small runs, and from chatter at the local coffee house)
• In the past 10 years, the news scene has returned to an atomized state—the Internet and social media blew apart the mass news model by dropping production costs, commoditizing news and thereby dramatically increasing suppliers of news, while putting mass news outlets (newspapers) out of business
• The upshot: consumers of news (once again) fracture their attention across many more news sources than they used to.
• While consumers have many more news sources to choose from, they also suffer from a torrent of information coming from different sources.
• There is an opportunity for third parties to relieve this pain, and serve as filters and curators of the huge supply of news.  The best bloggers do this well (Andrew Sullivan and his blog the Dish is one of my favorite examples).  It also points up a new role for journalists and editors—many of them should shift their focus from generating the news to a more curatorial role, navigating the torrent of news and stitching together select news atoms into coherent and compelling narratives for consumers

So, why would any of this affect the role that brands play?  Well, if you step back and look at what is happening to select categories, a similar story is playing out (six bullets here, parallel to the bullets above).

• Before the rise of mass production and mass brands, consumer goods and services were provided by an “atomized” set of suppliers (think pre-Industrial Revolution cottage industries)
• In the past few years, the rise of social and mobile technologies are commoditizing many products (consumers can easily find lowest price and can easily source substitutes) and are injecting a huge dose of discoverability into consumers’ shopping, whereby they receive recommendations for brands or goods they never would have known about before
• The upshot: consumers are fracturing their walletshare across many more adjacent substitutes.  These aren’t lower priced, carbon copy substitutes for goods they regularly buy; these are substitutes that fulfill a need in a slightly different way.  Part of their value is that they aren’t mass produced—they are unusual or different or off-the-beaten path.  Here are recent examples that I’ve observed as a consumer:
  • My wife shops the Etsy bazaar to find a more unusual pair of earrings instead of going to the mall with the same old shops for the masses;
  • On the street in Chicago recently, I saw a sheet of paper taped to a lamppost with a QR code on it, advertising how a local artist can customize your shoes with special paint and a unique design—maybe consumers spend money here instead of adding a 25^th pair of name brand shoes to their collection;
  • My wife buys me a beer tasting class as a birthday gift instead of the usual name-brand apparel (see my previous blog post that spells out how Groupon is a breaker of consumer buying routines, much at the expense of mass brands).
  • In sum, mass brands in many categories suffer from a thousand tiny cuts as consumers fracture their walletshare in ways like these.
• While consumers now have many more options against which to allocate their (depressingly fixed) walletshare, they also suffer from a torrent of choices in what they could buy.  Our recent research on the consumer decision path suggests consumers are suffering from cognitive overload as a result of all this buying choice.
• There is an opportunity for third parties to help consumers deal with this pain, by serving as filters and curators to help them navigate this greatly expanded choice set.  Many entities are edging into this role already:
  • Google is using algorithms to help consumers find apparel they might like (see www.boutiques.com);
  • Some consumers are relying on their social networks to play this role;
  • Individuals are playing this role, oftentimes celebrity tastemakers (which may help account for the popularity of some celebrities on Twitter);
  • And new hybrids are arising, like Flipbook, that weave together social and algorithmic filters.

I’d argue the more powerful of curators won’t be algorithmic—they’ll be humans or have a very strong human component.  That’s because humans are better (for now, at least) at weaving together coherent and compelling narratives to make sense of these choices, and go beyond the cold buying guide.

The humans behind brands could well play this role.  In my next post, I’ll unpack what makes for a great curator, and why I think brands like Tory Burch are charting the path for a new model of branding that is better suited to categories that are dealing with a re-atomized marketplace.  Just like the news industry.

And why not? Friends and followers are the simplest social media metric we have available to us, and the one that’s most likely to track real-world engagement with a brand’s online presence. In the presence of other pros who speak the social language, they’re an easy way to benchmark a campaign’s performance.

But out in the broader business world, we’re hearing that senior executives, especially ones without social backgrounds, are finding it hard to contextualize friend/follower metrics in a way that links back to business results. Former H&R Block social media ringmaster Zena Weist explains to us the limitations of traditional social metrics:

What’s more, we’re increasingly finding that friend/follower metrics have a less-than-concrete attachment to commercial metrics. Recent MLC research indicates that the average Facebook user is a fan of around 9 brands. Combined with an average of around 150 friends, how much “engagement” is really possible in a newsfeed crowded with friend and brand updates? What’s more, we also found evidence that most friends/followers are interested primarily in discounts; unless you have a proven strategy for moving those consumers up the value chain, a strategy based on friend/follower accrual might in fact be lowering your average transaction.

So what’s the solution? Think of it this way: if you’re American and wanted to tell a European about your SAT score, you wouldn’t just tell them you got a 1300; you’d tell them that, then make some reference as to what the score means (i.e. “I got a 1300, and I got into Berkeley”). Similarly, we can’t explain social media success in self-referential terms. Bridge metrics are intermediate steps in the causation chain that leads to business outcomes. To re-use our SAT analogy, where A is the initial metric, B is the bridge metric, and C is the outcome:

a. I got a 1300 on the SAT
b. Because of this, I was able to get into UC-Berkeley
c. Because UC-Berkeley is one of the best universities in the US, I now have a 20% higher earnings ceiling than the average American (made up, but you get the idea).

Now, bridge metrics and outcomes vary by organizational priorities. For Zena at H&R Block, the key bridge metric was displacement of call center volume, which was easily quantifiable in terms of real dollars. For your brand, it may be different. But rather than present Twitter followers as evidence of social media success, we’d all be smart to think through the alternatives.

MLC will be at the DMA11 Conference—insights and discounts herein!

We know from recent research that the top reason consumers follow brands in social media is for discounts.  So, MLC members, here’s your bone—you can save 25% off the regular price to attend the Direct Marketing Association’s 2011 conference in Boston this October.  Interested?  You can find details here.

And, if you’ll permit us to be so self-promoting, there’s extra reason to attend the DMA conference this year.  We’re facilitating two different sessions at the conference—and we think you’ll be excited about both of them! (we certainly are)

First, I’ll facilitate a stellar panel of New Media Ringmasters on Monday, October 3^rd during the general DMA conference. The stars of the show will be:

• Jeanette Gibson, who heads up Cisco’s social media center of excellence
• Zena Weist, who until recently led H&R Block’s social efforts (she’s since moved to Edelman Digital)
• Michael Donnelly, new media extraordinaire from Coca Cola.

I’ll facilitate an hour-long discussion with these Ringmasters, who will field Q&A from the audience and share their perspective and learning on questions like:

• What is the Ringmaster’s role in catalyzing change in the marketing and broader organization?
• What skills, experiences and traits distinguish Ringmasters?
• How do you know when your organization is ready for a New Media Ringmaster?
• Should you groom or import a Ringmaster?
• What should the Ringmaster’s first 100 days look like?
• What hard lessons have Ringmasters learned as they’ve sought to increase their organization’s new media “IQ”?
• What advice do Ringmasters have for those aspiring to the role?

For a sneak peak on the kind of practical expertise these Ringmasters will share, give the video below a view—Zena Weist talks about her first 100 days as a director of social media with H&R Block:

Special thanks to Zena and Jenny Love at H&R Block for allowing us to come onsite to shoot this (and other) video segments.

Second, my colleague, Brent Adamson, will present at the Strategic Summit the weekend before the official conference kickoff.  He’ll bring the latest B2B insights from the Marketing Leadership Council and Sales Executive Council.  The title of the session is “Inside the Customer’s Purchase Decision: Collaborative Sales and Marketing Strategies to Steer Today’s Buying Behavior”.

The broader theme of this pre-conference summit is the role that customer intelligence plays in driving the business.  The Summit is for VPs, Directors and upper-level managers.  There’s a special discount for members who want to register – the cost to MLC members is $299, 40% savings off the $499 sticker price.  Details here.  Hurry, as the Summit discount is available only until June 24^th.

Hope to see you in Boston in October!  Questions about the DMA session?  Feel free to email me directly – pspenner@executiveboard.com.

Note: the 25% general conference discount is good for MLC members through the end of September.  The special rate on the pre-conference summit expires June 24^th.

MLC has collected best-in-class social media use policies from organizations like Intel, Best Buy, Telstra, the US Air Force. For regulated industries, we’ve created a library of policies collected from companies under greater regulatory and legal scrutiny.

From studying the policies we’ve collected from the most progressive social media organizations, we’ve isolated three key elements in all effective, well-understood social media use policies:

1. Clarity: While murky legal waters may be the norm until industry regulators catch up to the social media craze, organizations can’t let that ambiguity seep into their social media use policy. Explicitly state which actions and behaviors are unacceptable, and specify who in the organization is responsible for ensuring the code of conduct is upheld. Consider referencing common scenarios and examples to make sure it’s easy for employees to understand what’s expected.
2. Concision: There’s no need to reinvent the wheel – reference existing, inter-related policies (e.g., your company code of conduct, your record retention policy) to show employees how social media fits into your company’s larger governance approach. Aim to keep your social media use policy under one page to ensure employees can easily digest key points.
3. Common Sense: Specific guidelines should be adjusted or highlighted to accommodate the company’s industry, culture, and regulatory reporting obligations. Remember to group guidelines by type of use (e.g., on behalf of the company or for personal use) to help employees understand how expectations may differ depending on circumstance.

Based on these principles, we’ve created a just-add-water policy template – feel free to take a look and tweak as needed for your organization.

MLC members, for more on social media use policies, check out the resources above, and consider launching our Social Media Opportunity Diagnostic – if you feel like you’re lagging behind in the social space, this diagnostic will help identify areas for improvement.

Piecing together disparate bits and pieces of AdAge’s interview of Erich Marx, head of social for Nissan North America, you can see a company that’s doing almost everything right in the social space. For instance, they’re rejecting ROI as a precise metric for evaluating social executions:

Ad Age: Do you ultimately want to sell more cars through social media?

Mr. Marx: It’s not about selling vehicles tomorrow, it’s not about a $179 lease on a Nissan car — it’s about building value so if we can offer our customers something that’s of interest or of value to them — that’s a win.

Good! They’re also focusing on using existing customers as a conduit for word-of-mouth, rather than targeting the unconverted:

Ad Age: What do you see as a good opportunity for engagement?

Mr. Marx: A big opportunity is our performance cars. Any news about the GT-R or 350Z, whenever we have news about those products, the engagement and the pass-along is double and triple what we get for our other cars. Our brand has a celebrated history in performance cars, and social media gives us a chance to amplify it to a broader community.

I like it! They’re also leveraging their online presence to create tangible, consumer-friendly product innovation:

Ad Age: And what do you want to do with [your Facebook and Twitter] fans?

Mr. Marx: We’re using the community in many ways. For example, research — it’s almost like an online focus group of people who have a passion for the brand. We can use their input and apply it to future products.

Wow. Hearing a senior executive talk like is making me a little verklempt. It’s rare to hear such a total focus on the customer when talking about social media; the usual discussion involves discussions of overall footprint, conversion rates, attempts at quantifying ROI – all things that our research shows are counterproductive ways to approach the problem of social.

But wait! I promised there’d be a few nitpicks. The first is that Mr. Marx defines his goals – somewhat counter to the rest of his thoughts – as growing the brand’s footprint online:

Ad Age: What is your goal this year in social media for Nissan?

Mr. Marx: Nissan has a number of big new product launches in 2012. The goal is to grow our online presence — the number of followers on Twitter, the number of likes on Facebook.

Two things about this – first, influencing behavior in ways that link back to financial metrics should be the endgame of social engagement, rather than achieving a huge number of fans. We call these measures of more favorable customer behavior bridge metrics. They’re beneficial because they sidestep the distorting question of ROI while providing a metric for accountability that directly impacts business outcomes.

Second, defining strategy at the platform level can lead to missed opportunities at best, and can be a recipe for disaster at worst. Facebook and Twitter look dominant now, but Myspace did too in 2004, and Friendster before that. The tech sector is continually ripe for disruption – and even if those platforms remain important parts of the social landscape, others will surely gain prominence, too.

In any case, Nissan seems to be saying and doing all the right things to create a sustainable social presence. We’ll be watching to see what develops.

MLC members, for more on social media, please see our social media topic center, including resources on measurement, tactics, and strategy.

We argued that the underlying driver of the social stall for most companies is that they build their social house on sand, not bedrock.  In other words, they use social media to reinforce existing ways of creating value, rather than seeking to create new-in-kind value for their customers in ways that are uniquely suited to the advantages of social media.  These execution challenges are all the more disheartening when you think about the overinflated expectations created by the hype, which was fueled by venture capital firms, social media vendors, and rapidly growing social media platforms, all of whom had a strong economic interest in (over)hyping.

We’ve now had nearly 500 companies take MLC’s social media opportunity diagnostic (MLC members, if you haven’t taken it, you still can, and get a customized report with benchmarking data and suggestions for next steps).  Judging from the completed diagnostics, we are still finding that 9 of 10 companies are not driving business results with their social efforts. This ratio hasn’t changed across the last 18 months.

If you dig underneath the house-on-sand problem I mention above, the single greatest mistake we see marketers making is one of customer understanding.  Too many marketers don’t understand what customers are trying to accomplish in social media related to their category.  Marketers overestimate the percentage of customers who want anything to do with brands in social media in the first place, and they get the motivations wrong.  Look no further than this IBM report , page 9, for the damning evidence.

If you sense your organization might be getting this wrong, we’d suggest working through MLC’s Social Media Strategy Builder.  Over 300 members have attended a workshop on the strategy builder—based on strong member feedback, we continue to believe it’s the right sequence of principled thinking to do before putting significant effort against social media.

But more importantly, let all of this be a warning for mobile! We’re clearly in the middle of the mobile hype cycle.  Mary Meeker (you’ve doubtless seen her mobile computing deck) and the VCs, mobile agencies, mobile device makers, mobile OS owners—all of these guys have a strong incentive to hype mobile.  Have you thought about an app?  You need a mobile game!  Have you figured out your location-based check-in promotion?  It’s global!  It’s local!  It’s a dessert topping!

The hype is leading mobile to quickly become a noisy channel.  We believe the dreadful usage ratios for apps (60% of downloaded apps get used 5 times or less) will start to invade other mobile domains as they become more crowded.  That’s why we developed a tool—Hallmarks of an Enduring Mobile Marketing Execution—for MLC members to help ground mobile efforts in what will endure (much as the Social Media Strategy Builder does for social efforts).  It’s available in MLC’s new mobile marketing resource center.  We hope you’ll check it out—the tool is fairly self-explanatory, but if you’d like more details, see posts here, here and here for explanation.

Based on this, we decided to explore the impact of word of mouth in our 2011 research on consumer purchase drivers, expecting it to be a strong driver of purchase intent, purchase, and recommendation.  Yet the 6000+ responses to our survey tell a much murkier story – with evidence both supporting and questioning its impact.

In support of word of mouth’s importance, the survey shows that consumers are more likely to consult friends and family for product advice (35% of our sample did so) than use branded information (just 26% did). Beyond friends and family, 17% of consumers use sites like Yelp and Consumerist, 8% use social media, and 4% use affinity groups (e.g., communities aligned around a passion).  Consumers also report that word of mouth information is slightly more useful than branded information.

However, our regressions to date have shown no correlation between word of mouth use (on any channel) and likelihood to purchase, repurchase, or recommend – a finding that has surprised and even somewhat baffled us.  As we’ve been exploring why, we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the quality of word of mouth that is at fault. The web is increasingly flooded with word of mouth comments about products and services from anyone and everyone, often consumers with little authority or expertise. Many comments are irrelevant, inaccurate, contradictory, or just plain unintelligible. Looking for a good restaurant or hotel online now requires filtering through swathes of consumer comments – and can take fairly sophisticated analytical skills to work out who to trust and how much one bad review should matter.

This explanation is supported by another survey finding– that information clarity, i.e., how easy it is to find, prioritize, understand, and trust information, is the biggest driver of repurchase and recommendation.  The more time and effort consumers put into gathering and processing information and comparing options, the more anxious they become and the less likely they are to stick with their original intention, repurchase, or recommend.  Although they claim they’re happy with the amount of choice/information available if we ask directly, the data clearly shows an information overload problem.  Unfortunately, a large portion of online consumer comments actually make information overload worse, not better.  But not all.

The best brands are updating their word of mouth strategies to help reduce information overload. Leading companies are focusing on identifying and harnessing consumers who are naturally good at giving advice or educating well-respected consumers on how to give better advice.  Many companies are also doing more to aggregate word of mouth and highlight the most relevant comments for different users and different needs.  Brands do this by tagging consumer reviews/comments by both content and author, which enables prospective buyers to search for like-minded people offering relevant advice.

As such, we recommend a third generation of word of mouth strategies. Era 1 was just about increasing mentions of the brand (epitomized by viral videos that had little connection to products). Era 2 was about generating product recommendations from evangelists. Era 3 will be about getting consumers (ideally good teachers, but not necessarily evangelists) to give each other advice on how to buy.

We’re currently exploring best practices in this area. If you’ve done any experiments or had any successes here, please let us know! (Email abird@executiveboard.com)

MLC members, for more information on how to streamline word of mouth and highlight the best advice, please attend our 2011 meeting series on Compressing the Purchase Journey.

Register here for meetings in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Sydney and London.

One of the major themes evolving in both the B2C and B2B spaces this year has to do with the role of influencers in facilitating customer movement through the thing formerly known as the purchase funnel (see Karen’s post on how this concept is now outdated).  Learning how to influence the influencer, increasingly through the use of social media, was a key topic at SXSW, and the earliest results of our own B2B customer research show that leveraging online word of mouth earlier in the buying process can be a crucial part of “unsticking” potentially stalled deals.

Of course, not all social channels operate in the same way.  Information flows differently across Youtube than it does across a peer-to-peer online community than it does across the blogosphere.  Media communications researcher Harold Lasswell stated more than a half decade ago that the challenge is to understand “who says what to whom in what channel with what effect”; in today’s world with an even greater number of channels at our finger tips, understanding the patterns of information flow proves essential.

Yahoo recently teamed up with Cornell University to investigate just how different types of information flow across one social channel that’s undoubtedly on the radar of most marketers: Twitter.  The researchers place Twitter users into one of two camps based on the proportion of people the user follows and the proportion of tweets the user received, designating “elites” from the “ordinary” users.  Within the elite group, users can be classified as Celebrities (Barack Obama, Charlie Sheen); Media (CNN, New York Times); Organizations (The Red Cross, Whole Foods); and Blogs (insert favorite blogger here).  The full study is available online, but those looking for the Cliffnotes version can find a few interesting tidbits about “who says what to whom”:

• Information flow is not equal. No surprise that audience attention is fragmented across different content producers, but that attention is actually highly concentrated.  Though elite users account for only 0.05% of the user population, they account for almost half of all the attention within Twitter.  This begs the follow up question: how do the different elite categories listen to one another?  Turns out …
• Like follows like. Within the population of elite users, attention is highly insular.  Celebrities follow celebrities, media follow media, and bloggers follow bloggers.   I think Business Insider put it best when noting that “Twitter is clique-y”.
• Information tends to trickle. Though media elites are among the biggest producers of information, it rarely passes directly to the masses. In fact, nearly half of media-generated information first goes through an intermediary level of opinion leaders who, although they are average Twitter users, are more connected and more exposed to the media than their Twitter followers.  They’re the trusted advisors acting as the mouthpiece for the Ivory Tower media gurus.
• Some content lives longer than others. The lifespan of different content varies across user categories.  Media-generated URLs tend to die sudden deaths whereas blogger-generated content is longer-living, and tweets containing URLs with videos and music live the longest.  So while today’s news headlines are forgotten by tomorrow, Charlie Sheen will live in infamy.

MLC members, for more on social media, check out our topic center.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve had numerous discussions with members about the increasing influence of Word of Mouth (WOM) in relation to B2B purchasing decisions.

One academic study attempted to demonstrate that expert power is the most important determinant of influence inside a buying center, especially in environments involving risky purchases, as well as large purchasing committees not facing significant time pressure. The author defined expert power as an audience’s faith in a source’s knowledge. But, what defines an “expert”? In my view, any worker engaged in generating corporate value by using technology tools, processes and information is a knowledge worker, and, therefore, an expert. To build knowledge, many of these workers are increasingly leveraging tools (social media, search engines, external survey platforms, etc) and information residing outside the corporate walls and spheres of influence.

In the B2B buying space, a key source of expertise and knowledge is peer advice. Early marketing psychology studies demonstrated that: 1) WOM occurs through sources that consumers view as being credible (such as peer reference groups); and 2) WOM has a more powerful influence on consumers’ evaluation than information received through commercial sources.

I think these findings are valid in the B2B buying universe. A 2010 survey shows that buyers perceive peers as one of the most influential sources of information. This seems to be confirmed by the preliminary findings from our B2B Customer Purchasing Survey indicating that positive WOM drives confidence in the selection of the right product and the best supplier. (MLC B2B members: we will provide more information in the near future once we finalize data collection and analysis. Please contact me within the next two weeks at abostan@executiveboard.com if you want to include your customers in our B2B Customer Purchasing Survey.)

This data is important given the rising volume of on-line peer-to-peer communication. From the perspective of a purchasing decision, knowledge workers seeking information and advice from user forums, community sites, blogs, etc., can significantly influence purchasing decisions in two ways: on one hand, they are less inclined to rely on Sales representatives or marketers as the exclusive or game-changing source of information, especially in cases involving non-routine, new or riskier purchases; on the other hand, they can import the “social beliefs” inside their organization.

How can B2B marketers leverage WOM to influence purchasing decisions?

1. Enable the spread of positive WOM: While thought leadership and face-to-face relationship building still matter, marketers should put energy in enabling positive WOM through user forums and other on-line peer communities to instill an aura of credibility and trust. This means investing resources in social media, as I suggested in my previous post. I also recommend reviewing our MLC social media research identifying effective marketing strategies based on the degree of organizational maturity with social media.
2. Mitigate negative WOM: Existing studies indicate that negative WOM has a stronger influence on customers’ brand evaluation than positive WOM. Some bad news: the order of exposure to information matters: one study suggests that people don’t “average out” each piece of information acquired in their purchasing research journey. Instead, they process sequential pieces of information based on what they learned from the first source. In a world of digital “information at finger print,” it’s hard to orchestrate the order of information accessed for a purchasing decision. Some good news: not every negative message is damaging to a brand. Negative WOM significantly alters brand evaluation under the following conditions: communicator’s experience is largely consistent with the experiences of others; communication is about a specific brand/supplier/product that has a unique problem; and this problem consistently performs poorly.

Marketers cannot control what people are saying about products or suppliers in on-line peer communities. Yet, those who invested in social media strategies can, on one hand, dilute potentially negative word of mouth and, on the other hand, reinforce positive messages directly or via influencers. Building positive market sentiment in a supplier’s ability to meet specific buying expectations is critical. To accomplish this goal, marketers should acknowledge that push strategies based on marketing content and Sales’ relationship building strategies are no longer sufficient.

I would love to hear if you have B2B stories where you enabled the spread of positive communication particularly through social media channels. Please contact me at abostan@executiveboard.com .

But this media presence comes with a price: when non-profits and NGOs advertise in the wake of disasters, much of the funds they raise are “earmarked” for that particular disaster – meaning donors give specifically to relief efforts in Japan, or Haiti, or wherever the disaster is, and the money can’t be used for other purposes. In the best case, this can hamper organizational flexibility, as the amount of money raised can actually exceed needs on the ground and reduce the organization’s effectiveness in other stricken areas. But in the worst case, the money could be totally unnecessary; this seems to be the case in Japan, where, according to the charity evaluator GiveWell, evidence suggests that additional donations will not aid the relief efforts. Indeed, the Japanese Red Cross has made clear that it has enough resources to deal with the problem itself, and will direct foreign donations directly to local Japanese governments, rather than relief efforts per se.

In the wake of humanitarian disasters, the outpouring of support from individuals totally unconnected to the crisis at hand is an amazing testament to the generosity of the human soul. It’s the silver lining – however small – to the unmitigated misery that often characterizes awful events like those in Japan. But there’s a reason this support doesn’t continue unabated; people see the horrible images, give money on an impulse, and don’t return until the next disaster. So how are disaster-relief organizations converting that good will by educating their donors and encouraging them to give non-earmarked, recurring funds?

To get a sense of what the major NGOs are doing, I decided to check out the donation pages of the American Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and Save the Children.

Surprisingly, the Red Cross donation dialogue begins with an explicit invitation to earmark your gift:

Not only that, but the Red Cross lists the Japanese relief effort first on the list of earmarked causes, and it appears as though the least-restrictive category of giving is listed last. But then, on the credit card-entry page, we see this:

So, according to criteria unknown to anyone but the Red Cross, donations intended for Japan may be used elsewhere. I think this is actually a good policy, but the organization makes no apparent effort in the transactional donation process to educate donors about why it’s important to give unearmarked funds.

Save the Children, on the other hand, does a much better job of “nudging” its donors into recurring and unearmarked gifts:

There’s a big, red link to a recurring donation form at the very top of the page, and there’s no obvious place to earmark your donation for any particular world event. But still, while there’s lots of donor information throughout the rest of the site, there’s very little in the way of education on the donation page, and almost no chance that an impulse donor will understand why recurring donations are the more effective option.

In my opinion, Doctors Without Borders presents the best donation page in terms of maximizing education value:

The charity presents a clear explanation of how a donation will or won’t affect the organization’s response in Japan, gives options to continue following updates via social media, and on the left sidebar presents a suite of further educational options to the impulse donor: in-depth financial information, an explanation of where funds go, what donors can expect for their contribution, and even a graphical breakdown of expenses in 2009.

Converting impulse donors to recurring donors is a tough thing to do – emphasizing ongoing humanitarian concerns in the wake of a major disaster can dilute the call to action, and ultimately financial support. But organizations that level with their donors, like Doctors Without Borders, stand a better chance than the rest.

MLC members, if you’re looking to amp up your cause marketing, check out our agency profiles of vendors in the space.

(this is a guest post from Jonathan Grieb of the Communications Executive Council, our sister program for communicators and public relations professionals)

When crises like the events in Japan strike, corporations play a number of vital roles in helping society to respond effectively.   We, as large organizations, are an important social network that helps authorities account for those most affected.  We are a communications channel to provide critical emergency instructions to affected areas.  We are a trusted source of information in a cluttered environment.  Our resources provide the technology, supplies, and expertise to support immediate relief.  Our employees and foundations donate significant aid funds.  Our early statements shape policy discussions to minimize future disasters.  And, lastly, our collective response efforts ensure global economic continuity and minimize collateral damage.

Strong communication is at the center of all this.  While specific responses will vary by organization, it’s vital that we share ideas and best practices to serve societal (and business) interests.  I’ve started to collect a few of these priorities and ideas – please help others by sharing what you’re doing.  And let us know what questions you have for your peers. 

• Get informed – In this time of crisis, there is rapidly evolving, occasionally conflicting information on a complicated set of issues.  Communications’ ability to provide a measured report on facts and probabilities will support operational decision-making and soothe a broader set of employees.
• Ensure continued communication with affected employees, customers, and suppliers – No matter the scope of your global operations, it’s important to establish multiple outlets/channels for affected stakeholders to give and receive information.  To whatever extent possible establish an on-the-ground network, in addition to mass digital channels in case infrastructure worsens.
• Inform and prepare to discuss your response – Our information and crisis expertise may inform decisions ranging from feasibility of local operations to optimal employee donation programs from distant regions.  All companies can expect media outlets to inquire about their response and our effectiveness at telling a clear and compelling narrative is critical to our reputation and signals the state of current threat levels and responses to a mass audience.
• Mobilize employee support – Provide an outlet for employees to donate.  Articulate your positoin on any matching gifts or corporate efforts.  Keep people informed of affected parts of the business and invite people to reach out to their colleagues if possible.  This is our opportunity to be human in all of this.
• Examine policy implications – Hearings are already being held in Congress about the future of nuclear investments, but this crisis will undoubtedly launch discussions on a variety of issues that may affect your business.  The timing and nature of participation may vary, but it’s probably not bad to begin talking (or at minimum, listening) now.

Hopefully, this post can allow communicators and marketers to share what else they’re doing, what’s working, and how others are viewing the responsibility of employers in these situations. Is there a right level of transportation, housing, or financial support that we should provide employees and the broader population?  Is there anything commonly done that’s counterproductive?

No matter what the response, all of us have been distressed by the news.  By beginning this dialogue, we at MLC hope we can surface productive solutions and ideas for communicators and marketers on the frontline.