lead/marke | ralf schwartz

[L/M NET] Drew Neisser: Brands Need An Alternative to Facebook

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

While the rest of the industry hailed the announcement of Facebook Timeline as a great leap forward, I can’t help but wonder if Zuckerberg & Co. have pulled a fast one on brands and their fans.  In the pre-Timeline days, brands might have felt they actually owned their fans or at least had some control over the relationship.  In the post-Timeline era, it is now clear that Facebook owns these fans and brands can rent them if they want to pay for them.  And while I have no problem with Facebook “monetizing” its network, after all it needs to make the post-IPO math work, it still seems a little shocking that brands have so little control on their part in the social network.

You have 5 more days to become a visual storyteller
Pithy posts may have carried the day on the old Facebook, but Timeline puts a particular premium on images and videos. Not only is there an enlarged photo “cover” on the landing page, but photo albums are featured more prominently. Brands can also “star” images, allowing them to expand across an entire page. And while all of these changes should increase engagement, brands without an arsenal of images will need to assemble one mighty quick. (Ready or not, Facebook will convert all brands to Timeline on March 30th, 2012)

Fan acquisition costs are rising
One of the beauties of the old Facebook was that any brand could build up a following at little to no out-of-pocket expense.  Add some compelling content, throw up a “fan gate,” and you could watch those Likes rise like the national debt.  With Timeline, Facebook seems to favor paying advertisers at every turn. Sure – “fan gates” are back as of late last week after Facebook fixed a technical problem, but you can only drive traffic directly to these pages if you pay to do so or link to them via a post.  Otherwise, the default landing page is your Timeline home page and the fan gate will be on one of your secondary “tabs.”

Fan engagement costs are rising too
Prior to Timeline, brand communications were filtered through Facebook’s mysterious algorithm to an unknown subset of fans. Well, that mystery is no more. Facebook announced that marketers will be able to reach only 16% of their fan base for free. If you want to reach more fans, you’ll need to pay to do so via the “reach generator,” which enriches Facebook but not necessarily the brands that support it. A number of brands have already seen their engagement rates drop substantially after making the switch to Timeline.

If you don’t have a history, you have a few days to make one up
For illustrious brands like the New York Times and Coca-Cola with long and well-chronicled histories, Timeline is a dream come true. These brands can now publish “milestones” as far back as they want, adding a rich texture to their Facebook presence. For new and younger brands, Timeline will take a lot more creativity. Perhaps these folks will hearken back not just to the inception of the business idea, but to the conception of the founders themselves!

Pin your hopes on the weekly pinned post
With the cover photo now taking up so much prime-time real estate, much of a brand’s content will now fall below the typical screen viewing area. To help address this, brands will now be able to “pin” one particular post to the mid-left side for an entire week. Deciding what to pin will become a weekly ritual — but one that perhaps belabors a minor issue, since so few people actually return to a fan page after their first visit.

Engage - or else everyone will know you’re not
Facebook is so serious about pushing brands to become engaging storytellers that they will now make it easier for everyone to see how you’re doing. A quick click on the Likes box just below the cover photo reveals not just the number of Likes and “people talking about this” but also the most popular week, most popular city and most popular age group. A nifty little graph tracks new Likes and “people talking about this,” accenting the probable correlation between engaging content and fan growth.

The good news: managing complaints just got a lot easier
Most brands will welcome the fact that Timeline includes an optional Message tab that allows consumers to contact them directly and privately rather than just post a complaint publicly. In theory, this will help weed out the whiners who broadcast their complaints from those genuinely seeking immediate assistance. Taking unpleasant conversations “offline” is a customer service department dream come true – and should hasten the integration of social and service-related activities.  (It also appears that brands can avoid unpleasant posts altogether but electing to approve them in advance.  This sounds good but could lead to complaints escalating in other venues so brands will want to try to be as transparent as possible dealing with complaints.)

Bottom line: it’s time to develop a Plan B
Time will tell whether the new Timeline actually improves a brand’s ability to engage with its fans via Facebook. What we do know is that the cost of engagement with all your fans just went up, and that Facebook will not hesitate to impose its will upon your efforts. So while few brands can afford to be without a Facebook presence, given how much time consumers spend there, this is as good a time as any to start thinking about how you can engage YOUR fans in other less dictatorial arenas.

FYI, Renegade converted to Timeline two weeks ago.  The process is relatively easy although digging up all the old content to fill in timeline is indeed time consuming.  If you have yet to make this conversion for your company, Facebook will do it for you on March 30th!

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." Twitter: @DrewNeisser

[L/M NET] Drew Neisser “Long-Term Success is Made Up of Short-term Successes”

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

While doing homework for another article, I ran across a recent study by IBM called “From Stretched to Strengthened” that offers insights into the challenges facing CMO’s around the world.  The study is well worth reading, especially if you are a CMO, and stresses a number of important themes including the needs to:

• Deliver value to empowered customers
• Foster lasting connections
• Capture value, measure results

After reading the study, I reached out to IBM with some follow up questions and got in touch with Yuchan Lee, General Manager of IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management business.  I think you will agree that Mr. Lee has smart things to say about measuring ROI, using social media for research, the importance of having a clear “corporate character” and finally, the need to think long-term when it comes to customer relationship building.

DN: Is ROI the right metric for CMOs or just one of many important metrics? 
It is the most important, as reflected by our CMO Study. Other than a metric based on reflecting customer up-take (e.g., revenue, satisfaction level), which most companies already measure, marketing ROI is essentially the highest level scorecard for an organization’s ability to efficiently and effectively allocate its resource to hit marketing goals.

DN: Why do you think so many CMOs struggle to demonstrate ROI? 
The heart of the challenge is the nature to which marketing activities influence buying behavior, and how behavior manifest itself over time. Measuring ROI in marketing involves sifting through tons of noise in the data to connect all the pieces of evidence that influenced the purchase behavior.  This is an inexact, statistically-based science that, until recently, was too hard to tackle.

DN: Why do you think marketers have been so slow to embrace research via social channels? (i.e. only 14% mine blogs)
Before a company embraces a social channel, it must first believe it has to.  This requires a shift in strategy based on the realization that consumers are more in control and the company is losing its grip on branding.  In my experience, this shift is scary to many companies and many are slow to realize it and to turn this realization into action.  Furthermore, even if one is ready to take action, the newness of engaging social networks makes it challenging to know where to begin.

DN: Why should marketers expand their research horizons beyond traditional channels to things like blogs? 
We believe traditional marketers need to expand not just research but all areas of market and customer engagement as well as demand generation to the social channels.  That’s where the center of influence for purchase decisions is and will continue to be. That’s where detailed, real-time, and unfiltered market feedback data can be best gathered and analyzed, and ultimately where the brand of a company will truly be reflected in the future (if not already!).

DN: What’s in it for the more proactive marketers who are mining new digital data sources? 
Additional data, if incorporated properly, allows a company to know what is relevant to its customers — potentially down to the individual customer level.  We believe the ability of a company to deliver relevant communication in sales/marketing/services is the basic ingredient to a successful customer relationship and a prerequisite to staying in business.

DN: A lot of marketers pay lip-service to their corporate values.  Will developing a clear ‘corporate character’ really deliver competitive advantage? 
Having clarity on a company’s corporate character is a necessary but not sufficient element of success.  It must be followed by execution by the organization, every day, delivering a consistent customer experience that is aligned with the corporate character.  The true reflection of the corporate character will come out quickly, most likely in social media.

DN: Your report emphasizes the need to “foster lasting connections.”  Is this goal in conflict with the typically pressing need to deliver short-term revenue?
No.  In our experience, being relevant and adding value to the customer in every communication and interaction is the common denominator for forging a lasting connection with the customer AND the ability to drive successful short-term revenue.  After all, long-term success is made up of series of short term successes!

(ralf says: What I have to say you'll find there: Marketingleiters eindrucksvolle Bankrotterklärung. In German, sorry.)

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." Twitter: @DrewNeisser

[L/M NET] Drew Neisser > "Are You Waiting for a Social Media Crisis?"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:

Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

The clock barked 4:30 a.m. Or was it our dog Pinky, whose cries got us out of bed just in time to let the police in. A strange night, indeed, as a deranged neighbor climbed over fences and tried to kick in doors dressed in nothing but his underwear. As New York’s finest took “the loony” away in handcuffs, believe it or not, my wife and I went right back to sleep, knowing all our safeguards had worked. Crisis averted.

The very next day I ran into a seasoned social media executive in a particularly jocular mood. I asked, “Why the smiles?” He explained that an unfavorable video about his company had just gone viral, and now his management would have to take social media a lot more seriously. At that moment I wondered, how many companies are waiting for a social media “break-in” before they install “security?”

[L/M NET] Drew Neisser > "What’s the Difference Between Google+ and Carmageddon?"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

The northbound 405 freeway came to a standstill Sunday afternoon just before Seal Beach.  For the next twenty minutes I worried that Carmageddon was more than just clever name for a traffic jam and I would miss my flight back to New York.  Radio reports said otherwise.  In fact, it was just your run of the mill auto accident, a temporary glitch quickly forgotten.  Arriving at the terminal early, I couldn’t help but wonder if the contrasting hype versus reality of Carmageddon was an appropriate metaphor for Google+ (the new social networking service from Google that hopes to rival Facebook).

The Hype

[L/M NET] Drew Neisser > "The New Curators (of Content)"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

How Thrillist, PSFK and start-up iFlow are capitalizing on the accelerating need for content curation. (This article first appeared on FastCompany.com)
Barring the invention of a “time turner” like the one Hermione Granger sported in 3^rd Harry Potter novel, most of us will never have enough time to consume the information we might otherwise want to absorb. There’s simply too much info and too few waking hours. Enter the notion of curation, a relatively new term that is not unlike the editor of old, a trusted person or organization that filters information and aggregates it in an organized fashion for others to enjoy.

According to Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, “curation is the new way of organizing the web going forward.” And no doubt he’s right. Curious about why new curators like Thrillist and PSFK were thriving while the traditional publishing world floundered, I spent some time with their respective founders, Ben Lerer and Piers Fawkes. These conversations plus one with Eric Alterman, the founder of a new curation engine called iFlow, revealed four insights that could help you too capitalize on the curation phenomenon.

You can’t curate for everyone, so be targeted
In Brian Solis’s recent tribute on FastCompany.com to Rosenbaum’s book, Solis noted, “the social capital of a curator is earned through qualifying, filtering, and refining relevant content.” The key words here being filtering and relevance, something that Thrillist with its focus on urban males 22-30 has done exceptionally well. Explained Lerer, “we’ve zoned in on a niche group that was previously starved for the kind of information we deliver.”

Thrillist, for the uninitiated, started in 2005 with a newsletter to 600 New Yorkers and is now in 18 markets with 2.5 million subscribers. Added Lerer, “our voice is extremely targeted to a very specific part of the male demographic.”  Lerer and his fellow curators of newish nightlife have built a highly profitable business during a time when traditional publishing tanked. This was done, according to Lerer, “by zoning in on a small sector of the population and speaking to them in a voice that they trust.”

It’s not curation without a well-defined focus
The New York Times famous line “All the news that’s fit to print,” made sense when newspapers were the primary source of daily information. Now it seems more like a potential epitaph, as newspaper readership plummets in the face of more focused web-based alternatives. One of the up and coming alternatives is PFSK, which founder Fawkes described as “the go to source for new ideas for creative professionals.”

Founded in 2004, PSFK has grown from a trend-spotting website to a hybrid company that publishes content, creates events and provides consulting services to clients like Nike, Target and BMW. When asked if PSFK was in the curation business, Fawkes affirmed, “yes, our job is to find new ideas and we present them up to 50 times a day.” Reflecting on their focused approach, Fawkes added, “every month a million designers, ad folks, digital entrepreneurs and media mavens get inspired by our content.”

If the curation is good enough, it will [almost] market itself
In the new world of curation, “information becomes currency and the ability to repackage something of interest as compelling, consumable and also [as a] sharable social object is an art,” wrote Brian Solis. This perhaps is the fundamental difference between the old world newspaper and the new world of curators. New world curators can connect and engage with other curators, helping to disseminate information quickly and at little to no cost.

Ben Lerer of Thrillist recalled taking this approach out of necessity since, “one of the stipulations with the money we raised was that we couldn’t spend any of it on marketing.”  “So we focused all our energy on building something that people actually liked and would want to pass along to their friends,” explained Lerer. By “putting content first and making sure its written for the guy reading it,” Lerer and his team developed a loyal audience that in turn shared the content and or acted upon it demonstrating they too were in the know.

Human curators beat the algorithms
No matter how you many words you type into Google, you’re not going to find a recommendation you trust without clicking deep into another site. On the other hand, a quick visit to Thrillist and PSFK provides recommendations and ideas that are trustworthy without fail. When discussing the shortcomings of algorithmic curation, serial entrepreneur Eric Alterman explained, “only human curation can deliver real time content… that consumers are actually seeking.”

Seeing an opportunity in the limitations of algorithmic curation combined with the overwhelming flow of content generated via social media, Alterman is just about to launch a new curation platform called iFlow. Alterman believes that iFlow will address the problem of information overload, enabling “efficient curation into highly contextual aggregate streams [that] include all content types.” Given Alterman’s track record of turning ideas into successful companies like KickApps, his hope “to bring the art of content creation to the widest possible audience,” is anything but a pipe dream.

Final Note: While admittedly I’m no longer in Thrillist’s demographic, I became a fan in ‘08 when one of my clients wanted to connect with their readers. Seeing Lerer’s presentation at a recent PSFK event, I was simply blown away by their success in three short years. It was the quality of the presenters at this conference that got me thinking about curation and led to my conversations with Lerer, Fawkes and Alterman (see their respective interviews on TheDrewBlog.com).

(ralf says: Curation is one great way for brands and companies to become media - instead of just eg. collecting friends.
Curation is not as easy as you might think. You will need a distinctive position to inspire people to stay - and share. Curation is as easy and as difficult as building a brand. Curation is brand building!)

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." Twitter: @DrewNeisser

[L/M NET] Drew Neisser > "Driving B2B Revenue Growth"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

Most service providers like to say they “eat their own dog food.”  Not Jon Miller, co-founder and VP Marketing of Marketo. Miller prefers “drink your own champagne,” and not just because it sounds classier.  This preference is based on the stunning fact that Marketo is according to Miller, “currently the fastest growing software-as-a-service company in the world,” a feat accomplished by using their own software to turn marketing into a science.

Founded in 2006, Marketo already has over 1,000 clients, who pay just under $30,000 per year with the goal of improving the yield of their marketing activities.  Miller and his team rejected the notion that marketing was an art form, relegating that to the “Mad Man” era, preferring to focus on “process and analysis,” and in doing so delivered to this interviewer 8 delicious ways to drive revenue.

1. Don’t call a lead before its time
For most marketers, a lead is a lead, entered into a CRM system like Salesforce and treated with equal urgency.  According to Miller’s research, this approach means that, “only 6% of leads ever close” and “only half of the sales people make their sales goals.”  Having been able to identify key buying signals, Marketo’s system separates leads into two buckets, the 20% who are “ready to buy,” and those that require nurturing.

2. Know the buying signals of your prospects
Just because a visitor to your site gives you their contact information for something like a white paper, doesn’t mean necessarily that they a qualified lead.  Explained Miller, “if somebody downloaded our webinars or thought leadership [documents], we know they’re at the early stage.”  However, reported Miller, “if you go to our website and see the detailed pricing pages or register to watch a detailed demo, you’re very likely to enter a buying cycle with us.”

3. If they give the sign, call your leads post haste
When all leads are given equal value, they naturally clog up the sales process, wasting the time of both the prospect who isn’t ready and the sales person who then becomes skeptical of all the leads, further diminishing the yield.  But if only truly qualified leads go into sales pipeline, the sales force is reading and willing to jump all over them. Added Miller, “if you show buying signs, we’re going to be dialing your phone in 3-4 minutes!”

4. Reward your marketing team more and raise quotas
At most companies, marketing generates about 30% of the leads, which means the sales force needs to be heavily incentivized to not just close but also to find the leads themselves.  “At Marketo our marketing team generates 80% of the sales pipeline,” explained Miller.  This has allowed them to “radically reduce the salesperson’s risk” and “change how [we] compensate the marketing department.”  And because Sales has better quality leads, they close at a higher rate, allowing Marketo to raise quotas and hire fewer sales staff.

5. Focus sales team on closing not educating
According to Miller’s research, at most companies “almost half of the salesperson’s time is spent on unproductive activities.”  This includes educating prospects on the category and the product.  “This is outmoded thinking,” explained Miller, since today “70% of the buying cycle is complete before the buyer wants to connect with Sales.”  Assuming you are providing all the necessary educational material online then you too can “optimize the demand chain” by only giving Sales leads that are ready to be closed.

6. Hire a CRO
After all this talk of marketing efficiency, one of the more surprising outcomes of my conversation with Miller was his suggestion that companies hire a Chief Revenue Officer and place Marketing and Sales underneath that person.  Explained Miller, whose company just hired a CRO, “I don’t believe you can have a CMO and a CRO.”  This is not “a glorified Head of Sales,” added Miller, but someone who can lead “a fundamental transformation about how you think about generating revenue.”

7. Nurture all your other leads
While the bulk of this conversation has focused on identifying and converting hot leads, this is only half the secret to Marketo’s success.  The other half is the recognition that today’s tire kickers are tomorrow’s buyer as long as you have a strong “nurturing process to educate and stay in touch with them over time,” noted Miller. He added, “a full half [of our leads] are coming from seeds we developed earlier.”

8. Invest heavily in content development
When explaining Marketo’s success to-date, Miller revealed that they invest heavily in marketing, spending three times the ratio of most companies but because of their lead conversion rate, they are also more efficient and profitable than these other companies.  A huge portion of that investment goes into content development including webinars, white papers, blogs and social media.  In addition to creating “a lot of inbound leads and SEO, [this content] also helps to build trust and credibility with buyers who are starting to perceive us as innovators and thought leaders,” explained Miller.

Final note: A magna cum laude physics major at Harvard, Miller’s desire to find the math in marketing shouldn’t be all that surprising.  What may come as a surprise is the extent of Miller’s foresight as exemplified by the fact that he “actually started writing [his] blog before writing any product.”  For more on Miller, see my follow up interview here on TheDrewBlog.com.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.

(ralf says:
Take the 8 headlines and add your individual content with your own experience and expertise. The above raises the bar? Start stretching!)

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." Twitter: @DrewNeisser

[L/M NET] Drew Neisser > "What do you do with 19 million fans? Ask Oreo."

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

During The CMO Club Summit in NYC last week, Eva Press, Director, OREO joined several panelists to discuss “Engagement in the Digital Age.” After the panel, I caught up with Eva. Here’s the resulting Q&A:

DN: You and Frank Eliason of Citi seemed to be coming from opposite ends of the spectrum when it covers to using partners to help manage social media engagement. Can you speak to the advantages of working with outside partners like your digital/social media agency?

For Oreo, our agencies are truly our partners and extensions of the brand team. We work very carefully to make sure all people who work on this beloved business, whether within Kraft or an external business partner, really understand how the brand provides people with moments of childlike delight – and that spirit should be infused in everything we do. Our digital/social media agency, 360i, is expert in the social media space. So they not only must understand how to translate the essence of Oreo into language that fits on Facebook, Twitter, but they also have a broad understanding of the digital landscape. So they can keep us up to date on trends and help us discover ways to improve our ability to connect and engage with Oreo fans based on best practices and constant monitoring of the conversation around Oreo.

DN: Do you see any risks in having outside partners manage social media engagements in channels like Facebook & Twitter? And/or what have you done to mitigate those risks for Oreo?

As 360i came onboard in June, 2010, we spent a lot of time grounding the team in what Oreo stands for. And they were instrumental in helping us bring our Oreo voice to life with our global community of fans in social media. 360i leads our digital and social efforts, but they are also a key partner as we develop overall marketing plans. We work together on all tweets, Facebook posts, and other social messaging. Social media engagement is 24/7 – and being constantly engaged is even more critical with a global brand like Oreo that spans time zones across the world. You truly need a team, and we have jointly built a great social media team that is able to engage with fans in real-time. It is a team effort, and we have a tremendous amount of trust in our agency partners. That’s so important because the Oreo brand is so deeply loved and trusted.

DN: A lot of social media programs seem to be done in isolation. Can you speak to how you’ve been able to integrate social into your overall marketing initiatives and the advantages of doing so?

Today, we live in a digital world where people have access to everything a brand does. Marketers can no longer think of engaging with consumers in terms of channel or by media – whatever we say and do is seen by everyone. That actually creates a huge opportunity. Social media can help amplify the programs we are doing in other places – to make sure that an Oreo fan who may not be watching the TV show where we ran our ad has a chance to see the ad, comment on it, and share it with his or her friends. We can ensure the most loyal Oreo fans know about new products, have a chance to enter promotions, and that we’re providing fun games and social currency like our Fan of the Week program. But it only works if all of the people on the brand team and all of the agency partners recognize the value of truly integrated marketing, working together to translate ideas from traditional advertising to digital advertising to PR, to create something that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

DN: How are you measuring the success of your social media activities for Oreos?

Measurement is essential. Certainly we’re always working to understand how social media can drive business growth – and we are starting to see an impact on our business results. But it’s also critical to see how meaningfully we are engaging with our fans because Oreo is so deeply loved.

In terms of measures, we look at our social media in terms of the numbers of people who follow the brand on Twitter and “like” the brand on Facebook. But we are also looking at the engagement of those fans: how many people retweet what the brand says; how many people like or comment on a Facebook post?

Q: You mentioned the challenges of digital coupon distribution via social channels and how they can backfire into bad WOM if/when retailers don’t accept them and/or consumers can’t print them. Assuming this means you won’t be offering coupons in the future, do you see social being able to drive retail traffic or will you think of it more as a retention channel?

We are always looking to provide value to our fans, and coupons – digital or otherwise – are certainly part of our consideration set when planning. That’s true for Oreo, and Kraft Foods more broadly. But in social media, it’s important to understand your fans and take a thoughtful approach to what is meaningful to them in the context of your community. With Oreo, we have seen that our fans have responded very positively when we provide information about new products, spark conversation about the moments of childlike delight Oreo brings, or celebrate fan generated content. We feel that builds advocacy for our brand, and contributes to our business success.

(ralf says: WOW, every single one of Eva's answers you should plot on your pillow or make a poster of it. This is what really has to happen to get it done right. And Oreo's success speaks for itself.

I only may add some links to worth-of-a-fan or facebook related posts.)

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." Twitter: @DrewNeisser

[L/M NET] Drew Neisser > "Social Media Isn’t Easy (Part 2)"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

(Note: The 1st part please find after the click.)

When Oscar Wilde observed, “experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes,” he was clearly anticipating the age of social media.  Mistakes abound, some minor, others calamitous but all offering guidance for those who choose to learn from them.  Here are five more mistakes that I’ve observed, each provided with suggestions on how to fix or better yet avoid altogether.

#6 Ignore social media

One in three big brands, across a wide range of sectors have yet to commit significant time and resources to social media. Highly regulated industries like financial services and pharma are particularly cautious given the lack of clarity offered by regulatory bodies like FINRA and the SEC. Other laggards are taking the ostrich approach, hoping that social media will just walk on by and leave them in peace.

Ignoring social media for whatever reason simply won’t cut it. Doing so means the conversation is happening without you, eliminating your opportunity to respond to the negative, reinforce the positive and or close the door to a competitor who is more socially adept. If you are afraid your customers will say bad things, you’re probably right but rather than turning a blind eye, engage your detractors with honesty and fix the problems.

Ignoring social media also means you’ll have no means of fighting a social media fire if one erupts. Domino’s Pizza found this out the hard way when two young jokers thought it would be funny to make a video of themselves putting cheese up their noses and then onto a customer’s pizza. With no social media channels in place, Domino’s HQ floundered and sales dropped nationally. Meanwhile, Ramon DeLeon, the GM of six Domino’s in Chicago, used his long-developed social channels to put out the fire in his area, rallying his fans and growing his sales.

#7 Limit employee access at work

A lot of companies restrict employee access at work to sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, afraid that productivity will drop. As such, there is a limited understanding of the channels themselves as well as the business opportunities that they can create. So instead of having thousands of eyes and ears to watch, listen and learn, the knowledge remains concentrated and the opportunities limited.

The simple truth is that companies that want to make the most of social media need to have a lot of social people across just about every department. The benefits of this open approach are far reaching, allowing the organization as a whole to cast a broader net to catch fresh ideas, important trends, hidden prospects and even future employees.

One company that has benefited from this open approach is the behemoth IBM. Realizing a few years ago that their clients hire IBM because of IBMers, they made an all-out push to become a social business. Presently, IBM has over 30,000 employees on Twitter, over 200,000 on Facebook, over 200,000 on LinkedIn and over 35,000 bloggers. Add these to internal networks and a 75,000 strong network of ex-IBMers and you’ve got a massive community that creates and shares content with unrivaled speed and agility.

#8 Selling too hard

For most brands, social media is not the ideal place for the hard sell yet that hasn’t stopped many from trying. I heard a marketing director of a hospital call Twitter “a dumping ground” and a seasoned direct marketer describe social as “email on steroids.” Typically the result of trying to sell too hard too fast via social channels is nothing — no engagement, no interaction, no referrals, etc.

No one likes a blowhard and there is no quicker way to be unfollowed, unliked or just plain ignored than by tooting your own horn with relentless monotony. On the other hand, if you take your mother’s advice by “yacking less and listening more,” you’ll have lots more friends, friends who will be very interested in learning more about you when the time is right.

Keep in mind that 50% of the people who “like” or “follow” a brand, do so because they hope to get beneficial information or offers. Curate your content carefully, a bit like you might on a first or second date. Once the friendship is secure, feel free to put forth relevant offers. Skittles, in particular, has benefited immensely from an entirely soft sell approach, amassing over 15 million fans on Facebook in the process.

#9 Multiple voices

Perhaps because it is so easy to create content, some marketers feel it is okay to present completely different brand voices even on the same channel. A smarter approach is to establish your brand point-of-view upfront and to employ the various channels like instruments in an orchestra, creating a harmonious and synergistic effect. Defining what you are for and what you are against, will not only give you direction for execution but also it will give you permission to engage with your consumer on your subjects of mutual interest.

Among the best examples of this approach comes from an unlikely category — feminine hygiene. Targeting young women 14-24, Kimberly Clark launched a new line of tampons called U by Kotex. Going against the usual euphemistic approach, U by Kotex established a clear POV with a “bold honest attitude towards all things period and to call BS on everyone who doesn’t.” This POV permeated advertising and social media, helping the brand grab 20% market share and remarkably appreciative fan base. (FYI, the U by Kotex presentation was among the best at the BDI’s The Social Consumer Conference last month).

#10 Misalignment of platforms and goals

With so many different social media platforms to consider there is the natural temptation to try a bunch of them. This temptation is further reinforced by the seeming absence of costs to use these platforms and the presumed “cool factor” a brand may think their getting by using them. The simple truth is that not all of these platforms are right for every brand especially when you consider a particular brand’s objectives.

Dell has been particularly adept at aligning the platforms with specific business goals. Dell’s IdeaStorm.com gathers customer feedback and crowd-sources new product ideas. Recognizing various uses for Twitter, Dell has a variety of accounts including @DellOutlet for deals on refurbished computers and @DellCares for customer support. Dell’s Investor Relations team was among the first to use SlideShare.com, a presentation-sharing site, to present quarterly earnings. And their 24/7 “Social Media Command Center” ensures that customer complaints are heard and addressed regardless of the channel.

Final note: Acknowledging the wisdom of James Joyce when he said, “A man’s errors are his portals of discovery,” I do hope you’ll make a few mistakes of your own and share your discoveries with us all.  (This article first appeared on MediaPost.com).

(ralf says: Nothing more to add, or?)

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." Twitter: @DrewNeisser

[L/M NET] Drew Neisser > "Social Media Isn’t Easy"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

Experience is a painful teacher so why not learn from the mistakes of others and save yourself the trouble? Attending lots of conferences, I’m occasionally struck by all the lessons, good and bad, that are readily available. At one such conference recently a marketing exec presented a case so flawed I was in awe, pushing me to chronicle the 10 most common social media mistakes in glorious detail. Here are the first five:

#1 Thinking of social as just another media channel
They say that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a marketer, every new opportunity looks like yet another place to hammer home their message. Donnie Deutsch, the former mad man, just last year at the 140 Characters Conference compared the arrival of social with the arrival of cable TV in the 1980s, calling it “just another media channel.” Having sold his agency to Interpublic in 2000 for $275mm and enriched himself further as a talk show host, Donnie can be forgiven this seemingly innocuous oversight. But daily marketing practitioners can’t afford to do so.

Media channels like TV, cable or otherwise, deliver a monologue, in which advertisers shout with the hope of being heard; promise with the hope of getting a sale. Social media is a conversation in which the brand must first listen and then offer something of value in order to gain an invitation to interact. Social media is not about selling, it’s about providing a service that engages, enlightens or entertains. It’s about listening really carefully and responding with equal regard.

American Express listened for six months before they set up their first Twitter account. Through a careful listening campaign Avaya was able to beat its competitors to the punch, identifying leads and new product opportunities. Virgin Media’s London-based “tweam,” turned a complaining Stephen Fry into a staunch advocate, helping this the cable company to engage with Fry’s +1.5 million followers. All three of these examples stress the importance of listening, something that traditional media efforts did not require or allow.

#2 Leaving social media to the “twinterns”
Because social media is still in its infancy and second nature to Millennials, the tendency has been to put the social media reins in the hands of a person fresh out of school or the intern with the most friends on Facebook. One senior marketing exec told the author of Facebook for Dummies Paul Dunay that she was absolute thrilled to have hired a “twintern” to take care of her brand’s Twitter account. A startled Dunay reflected later on his blog, “When did it become okay to just give anyone off the street the keys to one of the most important assets you have … your Brand!”

The risks of this approach have become readily apparent. Nestle, a brand that has come under repeated attack by activist groups like Greenpeace, only made matters worse when junior staffers responded flippantly to negative posts on its Facebook Wall. More recently, a junior staffer at a Detroit-based social media agency lost his job and the Chrysler account for his agency, when his snide response about Detroit drivers when out on the Chrysler Twitter feed. There are many such stories and all smack of immaturity and inexperience.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against interns and in fact, they can play an invaluable and cost-effective role monitoring, reporting and even ideating responses. That said we would never rely on one to manage our own social media interactions any more than we would let them lead engagements with our clients. If you start to think of social media like your customer service activities, then you too will seek pros to lead the way.

#3 Ready, Fire, Aim
Perhaps because it’s so easy to set up a Facebook page, start a Twitter account and throw up a video on YouTube, many brands did just that, without much foresight. Many of these pages languish sadly like falling trees with no one there to listen. When a customer or prospect sees these pages, the message is unfortunately clear, here is a company that doesn’t have its act together. Such ill-planned approaches are a potent reminder that “hope is not a strategy.”

Like boxing, social media looks pretty simple to the untrained eye, but who among you would dare jump into the ring without a lot of preparation and better yet, a real plan of attack. In social media, preparation is essential to avoiding an accidental knockout. Brands must commit significant resources and, equally importantly, have a process in place for managing customer interactions, establishing an escalation policy when complaints arise.

In the past few months, a number of brands including Dell and Gatorade have made headlines by establishing a “command center” for their social media activities. Listening and responding with equal care, these brands have also established social media policies for employees and their customers, defining what each should expect from the other. These centers are staffed 24/7 and reflect a growing appreciation for the need to treat social media as a strategically guided weapon.

#4 Don’t Define Success
Consistent with the ready, fire, aim mentality often brought to social media, its not surprising that success is rarely defined at the beginning. With only 23% of companies having a strategic plan in place for social in 2010 (MarketingSherpa), many more were just jumping into the water, not knowing which way to swim or how far to go.

Ironically, defining success in social media isn’t all that hard especially when put into the context of the overall business goals. Boiling this down to basics, every business needs to do two things to survive, acquire customers and retain them. And typically the better you are at retaining customers the easier it is to acquire new ones. Well sure enough, social media can do both of these things in highly measurable ways. (These are not the only uses for social but these are the ones the c-suite cares about the most.)

Kinaxis, a Canada-based supply chain management company, has used a combination of blogging and community building to nearly triple web traffic and lead generation. U by Kotex has developed a highly engaged fan base on Facebook that in combination with provocative advertising that went viral on YouTube has helped them grow from 0% to 20% share of market.

#5 Isolate in one department
Because social media often starts as a sub-set of one department or another, there has been a bit of a battle for control at numerous companies. Many departments can make a compelling case for ownership, Marketing because they understand the voice of the brand, Customer Service because they are trained to interact with customers and Corporate Communications because blogger and influencer outreach feels a lot like PR.

These battles are unfortunate and have often left social isolated and restrained by the perspective of just one department. However, as Bonin Bough of PepsiCo explained at a recent BDI conference, “its not about ownership, its about leadership.”  To be successful, social media initiatives need to be lead by an individual or team of individuals that can rise above a particular department and then tap into all the requisite disciplines including IT.

Twelpforce, the groundbreaking Twitter-based help desk from BestBuy, provides a great example of how these cross-disciplined programs can come into being. Originated in the marketing department, the Twelpforce application was coded by an internal IT team. The Twelpforce itself is made up of 2600 BestBuy employees from all over the company including customer service. In its first year, the Twelpforce responded to over 42,000 customer inquiries at a remarkably low cost per interaction and remarkably high c-sat rate.

(This article ran first on MediaPost. Stay tuned for part 2.)

(ralf says:
The basics. For beginners. And there are still many.
Be innovative in Social Media, too. Innovative in the deepest sense of DOING IT RIGHT FOR THE FIRST TIME!)

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." Twitter: @DrewNeisser

[L/M NET] Drew Neisser > How to Double Sales By Really Trying

ralf says: Sound like a piece of cake, the below 7 steps towards success, or? You bet. I like them, because they make my Golden Rule 'Inspiration - Aspiration - Transpiration' more tangible. ... Enjoy!
(L/M NET features Drew's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

 

To me, genius is the ability to make the difficult look easy, like the prima ballerina who floats with seemingly effortless grace across the stage.  Such was the nature of my conversation with Loic Moisand, the co-founder of Synthesio, who explained how his social media monitoring company has managed to double sales three years running and expected to do the same in 2011.  It was all so matter of fact, it was as if any one could have done it, anyone that is, who followed these 7 oh so easy steps.

1. Have two heads
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped. Elbert Hubbard
Since few of us are actually born with two heads, physically or metaphorically, Moisand was lucky enough to found Synthesio back in 2006 with Thibault Hanin (CTO).  Explained Moisand, “we are two founders with two totally different profiles, he’s in charge of product development while I’m in charge of sales and consulting.”  Together they became the yin and yang of social media monitoring, ensuring that their products and services are an equal balance of hi-tech and hi-touch.

2. Be the early worm
To see things in the seed, that is genius. Lao Tzu
In 2006, a handful of people were thinking about the importance of monitoring social media for big brands as if their reputations depended on it.  Among these were the French duo, Moisand and Harin, who spent two years on product development.  “We really worked slowly,” explained Moisand who personally conducted research among 400 professionals in order “to really understand how social media could help them on a daily basis.” When they finally launched their monitoring tool in 2008, the market was just about ready for it.

3. Act global
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Born in Europe, Synthesio’s product offering was informed by its locale. “From the very beginning, our goals was to work in several languages, so we started with five,” noted Moisand.  Now covering 30 languages, it is the only truly global offering in its category.  Not surprisingly, among Synthesio’s 50 or so clients are many of the world’s top global brands, brands that rely on Synthesio’s platform to help with reputation management, customer service, product research and increasingly, in crisis situations.

4. Think local
Genius ain’t anything more than elegant common sense. Josh Billings
Few companies practice what they preach as well as Synthesio.  Wanting to help their clients connect on a global basis, they added offices in New York and London to round out their Paris headquarters.  More importantly, Synthesio is fast becoming one of its own best case histories, using their own social media management tools to drive leads.  “We currently have three to five incoming leads every day coming from many places in the world thanks to [our] community management,” explained a gleeful Moisand.

5. Just say no to self-service
The essence of genius is to know what to overlook. William James
In the world of software as a service, service is generally an afterthought and rarely a profit center.  Synthesio, on the other hand, added consulting services on top of its initial monitoring platform after about a year, a decision that has further differentiated the brand from competitors like Radian 6.  Explained Moisand, “we really want to nurture our clients and help them understand what they can do with their online reputation.” Now armed with a team of analysts and consultants, Synthesio had the wherewithal to truly help their clients navigate through the ever-changing social landscape.

6. Never lose a customer
Genius is talent set on fire by courage. Henry Van Dyke
This start-up thing is getting easier and easier, right?  Just go get the customers and then hold onto them like a famished ferret.  Exclaimed Moisand, “you spend so much time finding a client when you lose it, it’s really a nightmare.”  “That’s why we have a team of experts, to make sure [clients] have someone to talk to and just keep working with us all the time,” he added.  With this kind of attention to retention, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Synthesio keeps over 90% of its clients from year to year and Forrester awarded it a Groundswell award for best B2B Listening.

7. Don’t sleep
There is no off position on the genius switch. David Letterman
Okay maybe this entrepreneurial thing isn’t all that easy and takes significant stamina along with brains and sales skills.  Noted Moisand, “last year, I think every week there was a new tool coming to market and a new tool was dying.”  In the face of this relentless competition, Synthesio has not sought outside capital, instead guided by its motto, “money doesn’t make you smart,” they continue to find new ways to innovate with client and internal input. Acknowledging the true nature of his challenge, Moisand confessed, “we don’t sleep at night.”

Final note:
While Synthesio is hardly a household word in the US, don’t be surprised if you start to hear their name in the halls of globally ambitious American companies. And should you doubt me, just remember Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s words, “people of humor are always in some degree people of genius.” (This article first appeared on FastCompany.com ).

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." Twitter: @DrewNeisser

Drew Neisser > "We're Not in the Like Business"

Note:  I like ;): "I don’t think Net Promoter is about like, its about love" in the following interview. ... Enjoy!
(L/M NET features Drew's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

The following are highlights of my interview with Deborah Eastman, the former CMO and current GM of Global Consulting at Satmetrix, shortly after her presentation on Social Media at the Satmetrix Net Promoter® Conference. By the way, there were over 500 people at this conference with a sizable representation from a number of really big companies like Verizon Wireless, Symantec, AAA, American Express, Dell, Fidelity Investments, Merck, and Intuit.  (You will find the article inspired by this conference on MediaPost.com.)

In the off chance that Net Promoter is a new concept to you, click here. The rest of you are probably well aware of the idea that was first popularized in Fred Reicheld’s book, “the Ultimate Question,” and have seen my references to it in several past posts.

What are the challenges of integrating social media and Net Promoter?
The challenge is that if you do [integrate social and NPS®] you also need to integrate it with your CRM system so you can do NPS by segment. You need to know if they are customers or not. You need to know if they are high value customers or not. And we would advocate this is not about collecting a score, this is about improving the experience in a closed-loop process is a critical part of that.

Would it make sense to put your Net Promoter Score right up on website?
I’m not a big fan of publishing your NPS especially to your customers because, who cares! I mean, do your customers really care what your NPS is? What customers care about is what experience they get. And our personal philosophy is that Net Promoter is about building a customer-centric culture, which you deliver a positive customer experience. The result of that is a high Net Promoter Score. Focusing on the score is having the wrong conversation.

Should we anticipate Net Promoter being asked on a Facebook fan page?
We’d like to see a better integration of Net Promoter and social media. In face, we’d love to see that. The challenge, I see today is that its all about social media marketing. We [marketers] haven’t connected the dots between Net Promoter and social media in a way that allows us to really take advantage of those visitors.

In the egalitarian world of social media, even a small voice can have a big impact. Is there a risk in treating some customers better via social channels?
We have what we call “the voice according to value,” so when you think about Net Promoter as a customer feedback process, [not all customers are equal.] If I call American Airlines as an Executive Platinum member, I should get a differentiated experience from the guy that flies once a year to go visit grandma. The example I gave with Stephen Fry, is the potential brand impact that [his tweets] had differentiated him [because of] his influence not necessarily his value as an [individual] customer. That influence translates to value.

Does this same notion apply to B2B customers?
I think you should always be looking at segmentation of your customers in order to treat your customers differently. In a B2B environment you should be treating – understanding the needs of a decision maker differently than an end user. So I absolutely believe in that.

Is there any kind of equivalency between a Like on Facebook and a Net Promoter?
Like to me is opting in. I don’t think it identifies you as a Promoter or a Passive or a Detractor. You could be liking a particular thread, you could be liking the brand, [there are] all kinds of ways to like. And quite honestly, I don’t think Net Promoter is about like, its about love. When you really create a Promoter, you create an emotional connection that is closer to love than like.

Should we expect a Satmetrix plug-in that will work right on Facebook?
Not on our immediate road map. I am much more interested in integrating the voice of the customer into the closed-loop process, which is the most important part of a Net Promoter program. Having fragmented listening channels without a closed-loop process is a disadvantage for our customers. Whether or not we collect scores through Facebook or those types of things, we’ll let our customers drive us there.

A lot of people here have the title “customer experience executive,” and a lot of companies have social media people, is there a world where these folks are in all in the same department?
In my perfect world, yes! What Symantec has done is interesting–they’ve established a Social Media Council and I actually think that’s where we’ll see this go. This [type of council] brings together all of the key stakeholders which would include marketing, customers experience execs, probably include the support organization and the product org for idea generation. This would bring together multi-functional representation to be looking at social media from an enterprise perspective.

Whats happens if these departments aren’t working together?
Social media is another channel for customer experience but its fragmented [right now]. Marketing is doing their thing; service is doing their thing. To me, Starbucks would be a great example. You go to the Starbuck Facebook page — you can actually top off your Starbucks card (clearly owned by marketing) and then there’s Starbucks Ideas which is this community that consumers can provide ideas for what they want from Starbucks. But you can’t access Starbucks Ideas from their Facebook page. [That]just illustrates a siloed mentality.

A year from now, do you expect the folks here will come back with their social media stories?
I don’t know if it will move that fast. We’ll want to watch their progression with NPS. Companies like Symantec are very advanced on their Net Promoter communities so they are integrating NPS in social media channels but many of the attendees here are still early on their journey. They are still trying to figure out how to build a closed-loop process, never mind integrating it with social media.

Any final words of wisdom bringing these two worlds together?
I don’t think it is about [getting the Net Promoter] score, I think it is about creating a social experience that creates promoters. Right now we just want to get the Net Promoter guys at the table because [social media] is typically owned by marketing and treated in a very fragmented fashion and we would advocate that you want to make sure that at least that’s connected with your Net Promoter program.

FYI: Net Promoter, NPS, and Net Promoter Score are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." @DrewNeisser

Drew Neisser > "Eight Tips on Loving Your Start-Up"

Note:  Don't miss 5 Most Basic Entrepreneurial Lessons from 5 Years of Pro Bono Consultancy at my distinctive leadership blog. ... But before: Enjoy Drew's post!
(L/M NET features Drew's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

Job satisfaction need not be fleeting for entrepreneurs especially if they follow these 8 tips gleaned from an interview with ZogSports founder, Robert Herzog.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.

Robert Herzog founded ZogSports a few months after watching an airplane crash into what was his office on the 96^th floor of the World Trade Center tower.  Eight years later, after growing his company from one sport to a dozen, from five hundred participants on 29 teams to sixty thousand on 4,000 teams in three markets, Herzog happily admits that, “I love what I do everyday.”  How Herzog has been able to sustain his initial enthusiasm is both instructive and inspiring, revealing 8 tips for just about any entrepreneur who actually wants to enjoy the journey.

1. Pursue your Passions

Duh, right?  After all, why would you go to the trouble of starting a business if you didn’t love the idea?  [Pause here if you’re in it for the money.]   With passion comes insight and hopefully an unmet need.  In Herzog’s case, the insight came after meeting his wife playing co-ed softball.  “I played in all these other recreational sports leagues and while I had fun with the sports aspect of it, they provided terrible customer service,” explained Herzog.  Knowing he could do better, he added “I wanted to create what I wished had existed when I was single.”

2. Make sure its Meaningful

This is one of the lofty notions that sounds good at the beginning but can be tough to sustain once an organization matures.  Recognizing a growing interest in altruism, Herzog made charity the third pillar of ZogSports along with the sports and social aspects of the service.  Herzog is understandably proud that the organization has helped raise one million for charity thus far but takes just as much joy from the sports and social aspects.  “I organize other people’s fun for a living,” explained Herzog, offering a broader perspective on what can make a job meaningful.

3. Hire the Happy

While most entrepreneurs will tell you the importance of building a team of different personalities and skill sets, few will call serious attention to the attitudes of these hires.  “When I hire people, I ask a whole series of questions about how much fun they are,” explained Herzog.  “We don’t hire people who are really uptight,” added Herzog, who considers himself the most uptight of the bunch.   “When I started Zog, I wanted to create a workplace that was fun, open and collaborative,” noted Herzog, who I witnessed greet a random team captain with outright exuberance.

4. Prepare yourself Properly

The serial entrepreneur is often content to get his/her idea off the ground and then move on, requiring a modest amount of prior experience.  Herzog, on the other hand, brought a wide range of experience to his new company, enabling him to adapt to the changing nature of his job.  “I feel like having a whole bunch of different jobs before this was incredibly helpful,” insisted Herzog.  Having been both a management and operations consultant and executive at several start-ups, Herzog “was about making things better,” which also ensured he was unlikely to get bored as the company grew.

5. Forget about Funding

Spend time with entrepreneurs and inevitably the conversation drifts back to finding VC funding.  And while not every entrepreneur is in a position to bootstrap his or her idea, don’t assume that outside funding equates to job satisfaction.  Self-funded from the start, Herzog has not sought outside investors.  Explained Herzog, “I have found that my job is so much easier because I don’t have anybody else’s money in here telling me how fast we should grow.”  Also relating this independence to his high job satisfaction, Herzog offered emphatically, “I don’t ever want to work for anybody else again!”

6. Emphasize the Experience

A lot of start-ups narrowly define their offering to the product or service at hand and in doing so miss the larger opportunity.  In the case of ZogSports, Herzog is quick to note that their business transcends sports.  “Our goal is to be the highlight of a ‘zoggers’ week,” and to do that explained Herzog means that every customer interaction from registration to the games to the post-game happy hours needs “to be overwhelmingly positive and fun.”  The end of result of this emphasis on experience is that 80-85% of the new zoggers come from positive referrals, keeping marketing costs down and CEO smiles up.

7. Live your Life

While working long hours is hard to avoid at the start-up stage, entrepreneurs who continue at this pace year after year are unlikely to say, “I love my job.”  Although Herzog admits to having worked 80-90 hours a week initially, he has avoided over-extending himself and the business since then.  “I never wanted to work that much and completely sacrifice every other aspect of my life,” explained Herzog.  A father of two, Herzog also derives helpful instruction from his family time.  Admiring his son’s ability to be happy 24/7, Herzog explained, “I look at him and say, wow that’s just amazing, why should I dwell on this thing that’s bothering me?”

8. Grow your Goals

Like sharks, entrepreneurs have to keep moving, challenging themselves and their employees to do better.  The gleeful Herzog is no different here.  “I see my enjoyment in my job being tied to being able to grow the business and provide my staff new and exciting opportunities,” he added.  As such, Herzog is investing in new systems that will make it easier to offer a standardized experience from game to game, sport to sport and market to market.  With these systems in place, Herzog hopes to be able to expand to 15-20 markets in the next five years, a growth pace that will be hard not to love.

Final Note:

Given that he is in the business of providing “an escape from people’s daily lives,” it is little wonder that Herzog puts a premium on having a well-balanced life himself.  He also is well aware that his situation is not the norm nor easy to maintain, “I couldn’t think of a better job for me but if I didn’t have to work hard at it, I might not appreciate it.”

[Robert Herzog, Founder of ZogSports]

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." @DrewNeisser

lead/marke NET: Drew Neisser > "Breaking Down the Social Media Fences"

Note: Companies still haven't grown up to Social Media yet. Please enjoy!
(lead/marke NET proudly features Drew's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

When part of my garden fence fell down this week, my dog was delighted, my neighbor exposed, my wife mortified and my impatiens completely flattened. After spending a couple of hours jerry-rigging the crumbling wood back into place, I realized this experience was a convenient if not appropriate metaphor for the challenge marketers face in dealing with social media within their organizations.

Like a dog with a bone, consumers are thrilled with the tumbling divide between themselves and the brands they choose to engage with. Unfortunately big companies do not necessarily share this enthusiasm, treating social media as yet another channel to be managed by an existing department like marketing or corporate communications and in doing so limiting the opportunity for a truly new approach.

In fact, in a recent poll conducted by The CMO Club, a whopping 62% of CMO’s said their department leads social media. Added one of the polled CMO’s, “social networks are about engaging customers ands stakeholders so Marketing has that responsibility.” Pete Krainik, founder of The CMO Club, explained that, “marketing departments have a more strategic view of the business, customer trends and upcoming programs,” and therefore should be leading social media initiatives.

In this same survey, CMO’s acknowledged that just over 1 in 5 companies have PR/Corporate Communications leading social media. But this may be a vestige of the early days of social media. Explained one of the polled CMO’s, “responsibility started in PR/Corporate Communications but we quickly moved it to the Marketing department as community marketing became more and more important to us.” (Hmm, can’t help but think a Corp Comm head might see these as “fighting words.”)

And despite the fact the Social Media is a fence-busting hydra touching just about every aspect of a company’s business, only 11% of the CMO’s surveyed said that social media was lead by a cross-functional team. When I asked Catherine Davis, the former SVP of Marketing at Diageo about this, she explained, “Cross department collaboration can be quite complicated, particularly with new disciplines like social media.”

Complicated or not, Josh Karpf, Senior Manager of Digital Media Communications at PepsiCo, professed that “everyone has a role, marketing, communications, HR and you need a variety of skill sets from customer service to insights to editorial strategy.” Added Karpf, “you likely won’t be able to find all those experts in one function within a company.” So, while Robert Frost’s proverb “good fences make good neighbors” may be true in real life, it is not necessarily the ideal approach to dealing with social media.

Like my mortified wife, companies are less than thrilled by the collapsing fences between brand and consumer, and many are jerry-rigging solutions while they figure out a long-term plan. Noted Dan Greenfield of Bernaise Source Consulting, “PR and marketing pros seem a little conflicted; few deny the value of integrating sales, customer service and community moderation teams when building a modern day engagement strategy but most lack a clear sense of how to do it.” (Greenfield will be addressing this challenge head-on at the upcoming PR+MKTG Camp.)

And while there is little hope of recovery for my flattened impatiens, a flattened organizational structure may be just the trick for companies seeking to truly engage with consumers via social media. PepsiCo’s Karpf instructed, “it’s really about process and clearly defined roles, so the trick is finding the right team and a cohesiveness that allows the process to move forward.” Confirmed Davis, “I have always found it helpful to establish joint objectives with clearly defined roles and responsibilities.”

Instead of plopping social media into a pre-existing department structure, this author can’t help but wonder why more companies aren’t trying a new and highly collaborative approach. Despite the inherent challenges of cross-departmental collaboration, if ever there were a time to try something new, this would be it. Social media simply touches too many disciplines from customer service to PR, human resources to marketing, recruiting to sales, to rationalize keeping the old departmental fences in place. (Note: this article first appeared on MediaPost.com).

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." @DrewNeisser

lead/marke NET: Drew Neisser > "Is Net Promoter Really the Ultimate Question?"

Note: A detailed look into Net Promoter and associated questions. Please enjoy!
(lead/marke NET proudly features Drew's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

For years, I’ve been counseling clients to use Net Promoter as the metric for measuring everything from overall brand health to the success of an event, customer satisfaction to online experiences. Undoubtedly, the likelihood of recommending a product or service to a friend is really important in the scheme of things but is it sufficient to make intelligent business decisions? Can one question alone even provide a clear picture of brand loyalty? After interviewing Calvin Vass, Senior Manager of Research at CDW, a company that has turned research into an insight-revealing, decision-enhancing, revenue-generating machine, my answers to the above questions in a word, is a contrite “No!” More importantly, my interview with Vass provides an exemplary questionnaire for any business looking to use research to reveal and leverage the “voice of the customer.” 

Are you asking the right questions?

At the heart of any good research inquiry, of course, is the quality and ultimate value of the questions you ask. Over the last 11 years, CDW’s Vass has worked diligently to refine the questions his company asks, by listening to feedback from research professionals, his CDW coworkers and even the customers themselves. Rather than depend on one question, CDW’s loyalty index is based on “an approach developed by Fred Reicheld, the inventor of Net Promoter and Walker Information,” noted Vass. The questions explore, according to Vass, “different dimensions of the relationship; what the customer plans to purchase with us, if they are committed and what they would do if we went away.” Explained Vass, “Net Promoter is a one-dimensional kind of metric; one will often get better, more consistent results by asking more questions.” 

Can you identify the questions that correlate strongest to your company’s sales?

The holy grail of any research program is to find the single barometer that has the strongest correlation to business health. For some companies, Net Promoter is this barometer. For CDW, it was the combination of their Customer Loyalty Index and a highly evolved loyalty program. Through their loyalty research, CDW also discovered that customers who filled out their survey wanted to see their feedback implemented. Consequently, CDW built a system that feeds customer complaints right back to sales for prompt resolution. 

Do you segment your studies?

While Net Promoter divides customers into two camps, Promoters and Detractors, this black and white segmentation may or may not be right for your business. CDW elected to segment its market surveys into two main categories, Active Customers and Less Active Customers. The first group is surveyed quarterly and the second group is surveyed monthly. Vass explained the reason for the outreach to the second group, “we are always trying to bring them more deeply into the franchise.” 

Do you use your research to uncover new business opportunities?

 Measuring loyalty is unquestionably important but in a difficult economy, you’ll want to go deeper. Knowing that they were in a battle for “share of wallet” among even their most loyal customers, in 2009 CDW added to its research program. Explained Vass, “we asked them what types of technologies are you interested in rolling out in the next couple of months?” Through this research, CDW identified thousands of customers interested in specific offerings that were passed onto the sales team. These leads were turned into several hundred thousand quotes and orders placed, amounting to millions in additional revenue. 

Is your research department really part of the team?

One of the great byproducts of Net Promoter is that it helped bring research back into vogue, though not necessarily into every C-suite. For CDW, reviewing customer loyalty data is a top priority up and down the organization. CDW leadership reviews customer feedback quarterly, which in 2009 resulted in new customer retention initiatives. Offered Vass, “this is a priority for our Sales, Operations and Marketing departments which allows us to have a truly unified customer loyalty program.” Added Vass, “it is the overall recognition that the voice of the customer [is critical],” who sees himself as part of the customer service team versus the traditionally isolated research platoon.

Are you using research to identify problems too?

With Net Promoter, the emphasis tends to be placed on the Promoters almost at the exclusion of the Detractors. In a battle for share of wallet, he who addresses customer issues the best, wins. And oh by the way, even Promoters can have issues. To address this reality, CDW uses its research to identify and take action on negative feedback and specific problems. Calling these “hot alerts,” CDW does its best to resolve them quickly and amicably. “When we first started doing this, the customers were surprised,” explained Vass, who also noted that just resolving something as simple as a shipping problem results in higher loyalty.

Do you have a customer community to ask for guidance?

While measuring loyalty is clearly important, it can’t in and of itself increase loyalty. Building a community of customers for research, on the other hand, can do just that and much more. Knowing this, CDW has built three private communities made up of 300 small, 300 medium and 300 large business customers. In addition to asking its communities for input on advertising, product and operational issues, each community is also encouraged to talk among themselves. Reported Vass, “they can ask another member about a specific type of technology; it is a very vibrant back and forth conversation, certainly not one-way at all.” He added, “these aren’t just loyal customers but super-loyal, providing feedback other customers couldn’t.”

Final note:  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com and is currently being discussed on a Forrester Research community page.  For a bit more balance, see the video below on Why People Love Net Promoter.

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." @DrewNeisser

lead/marke NET: Drew Neisser >IBM Bigger in Social Media than Facebook?

Note: A truly interesting perspective worth a thought or two. Please enjoy!
(lead/marke NET proudly features Drew's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

Fathoming a new product from IBM via a launch event is like trying to understand the ocean by watching a wave. Nonetheless that was my task, swimming through the presentations and ultimately landing an interview with Jeffrey Schick, IBM’s VP of Social Software. Drenched in the vision Schick shared for the IBM Customer Experience Suite, it occurred to me that IBM could end up being more important to the business use and monetization of social media than Facebook.

While the comparison between IBM’s new social software solutions and Facebook could be considered all wet from the start, the mere fact that I’m discussing both in the same sentence should make you take notice. IBM is not sitting idly on the dock as web and mobile usage transform business interactions. Rather they intend to ride the wave of Web 3.0, creating and implementing the software that according to Schick, “can better connect people with people and people with information.”

Social software is not a new idea at IBM

Long before Mark Zuckerberg aggregated his Harvard friends online, IBM’ers could find their colleagues in a similar manner. According to Schick, “at IBM 15 years ago, we had a way to look up people to create a globally connected enterprise.” “Today we have approximately 500,000 people within IBM and we do about 6 million look ups a day on pages that look strikingly similar to other social network profile pages with features like blogging and photo posting,” added Schick.

IBM’s internal network served as both an incubator and torture test for its latest offering. “The idea of getting the right person over the right time at the right opportunity and yield the right result was really important,” explained Schick. So while Schick and his team watched the rise of Facebook with interest, they took greater inspiration from the technology they were already using to deliver “an exceptional work experience for employees” which also translated into better client service.

Social software for business that is as easy as Facebook

Recognizing how simple it is to publish on the web today, IBM aims to make their social software tools as easy to use as social networks like Facebook. Acknowledging the early adoption of social technology by kids, Schick noted, “now I say this stuff is so easy us old people can use it!” This simplicity of use has fundamental implications for business, “making a tremendous difference in the way that people can collaborate and share information,” added Schick.

The emphasis on ease of use also means that IBM may be able to address some of the needs of small and medium size businesses with its new offering. By taking the capabilities they’ve created for big companies and putting them on the cloud, smaller businesses may indeed be able to leverage these services and according to Schick, “easily create a community that would allow them to invite their clients and engage them.”

Reaching for more than 500 million “likes”

While pundits debate the value of a Facebook fan, IBM has no doubt about the value of its new social software portfolio. In addition to using the software to “build better client and employee relations,” Schick expects that “people can get genuine business value [from it].” While dialog is important, all of this, according to Schick, “is done to drive revenue, to create better customer satisfaction and gain some competitive advantage.”

And though IBM calls its Customer Experience Suite “new,” they are already touting case histories that prove its merit. Schick explained how the relatively small Practicing Law Institute is “leveraging the web to create communities to better engage their attorneys that take their classes.” He also explained how a large construction firm, “created a web experience that allowed them to hear the types of homes they should be building.”

Being a social organization is more than being on a social network

Though Facebook is the reigning social network, it is simply a ripple in the ocean of IBM’s vision for the new social organization. Businesses of all sizes need to think social across their intranets, extranets, the internet itself and the emerging mobile marketplace. Whether it’s about sharing information internally, with clients in a walled garden, or with prospects on their cellphones, “social is an important dimension and critical to what we’re doing,” explained Schick.

Recognizing that the social tsunami could be a bit overwhelming to its customers, IBM also tried to use itself as an example, employing a range of external and internal social tools at the launch event and online. Attendees were encouraged to tweet using the hash tag #IBMexperience while the event was streamed live online. All of the launch-related content was shown in real-time using IBM’s social media aggregator providing proof positive that IBM was indeed practicing what it preached.

Final Note: Regardless of your business size, IBM’s big move into social software should be a clear indication that every business needs a broad-reaching social strategy not just a Facebook fan page! This strategy needs to address the needs of your customers and your employees, ensuring optimal collaboration between them anytime and anywhere.  (This article first appeared on FastCompany.com)

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." @DrewNeisser

lead/marke NET: Drew Neisser > "The SIMPLE Route to Niche Marketing"

Note: I love acronyms. This one you will keep in mind, too. Enjoy!
(lead/marke NET proudly features Drew's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

Things have not been exactly rosy for the perfume industry in the last two years. Many big brands suffered huge declines in sales as consumers turned up their noses. Meanwhile Clean Perfume, an indie fragrance from NYC-based Fusion Brands, enjoyed double-digit growth, building up a remarkable fan-base on a minuscule budget. How the Clean team, including CMO Roslyn Griner, pulled this off is a potent reminder of the beauty of SIMPLE, especially when it comes to the marketing of consumer goods.

S is for Story

A number of successful niche brands like Tom’s of Maine and Nantucket Nectars have a compelling story about their creation. Clean is no different. Founder Randi Shinder, not a fan of perfumes, took notice when people commented on how good she smelled, a smell that was simply her soap. Unable to find a fragrance to match “that universal fresh out of the shower scent,” she developed her own in 2003.

That simple start launched a line of products with wonderfully evocative names, such as Fresh Laundry, Warm Cotton and Summer Linen. “Everyone can identify with the idea that you just used a bar of soap and smell really good or the smell of towels coming fresh out of the dryer,” explains Griner, “we were one of the first perfume brands to be successful on HSN because we had a wonderful story where people could imagine what it smelled like.”

I is for Involve

A lot of brands pay lip service to their fans, offering token opportunities for involvement. Clean, on the other hand, works hard at nurturing all of its fans from the lone customer to the highly influential blogger. “Be good to the people who really make your brand and reward them every once in awhile,” counseled Griner, who supports a vibrant Facebook community with contests, special offers and quick responses to inquiries.

Clean also created a product testing “advisory board” from among its Facebook fans. “We recruited people who were Warm Cotton fans to test a new type of Cotton fragrance as a disaster check, because if your real avid fans don’t like the fragrance, you’re in trouble,” advised Griner. Amazingly, over 1,000 people applied to be on the advisory board, demonstrating both the strength of their fan base and their fans unbridled enthusiasm.

M is for Minimize

With retail strategy, for smaller brands sometimes less is indeed more. Rather than striving for broad scale distribution, Clean minimized its approach, concentrating its efforts on a single outlet, Sephora, a decision that has paid off many times over. One of over 200 perfume brands on Sephora shelves, Clean is now in the Top 10, making them a priority product for this retailer. “Sephora gives us prime real estate, allows us in all of their promotions and provides huge merchandising opportunities,” explained Griner.

With such a strong retailer relationship, Clean is also able to test new products and push through large seasonal promotions. Griner noted that Clean is currently testing Bath and Body products in 25 Sephora stores, though perfumes remain their top priority. “We had amazing point-of-sale opportunities including end-caps for our summer perfume and the launch of our Outdoor Shower Fresh which gives you an indication how strong the brand is performing.”

P is for Promote

At the risk of being obvious, niche brands simply can not gain traction without some well-planned and well-executed promotions. Clean gained over 13,000 fans in two-weeks by offering a free sample to anyone who became a fan on Facebook. Clean spread the word initially via email and then encouraged referrals with a sweepstakes. With an acquisition cost of under $2.00 per fan, this program provided a cost-effective foundation for their on-going social media program.

In-store promotions at Sephora also played a crucial role in Clean’s success.  Noted Griner, “our primary drive to acquisition is through sampling so we created 30,000 gift sets, half of which sold through in two weeks!” Part of Sephora’s “Steals and Deals,” the gift set bundle was an incredible value offering three scents of Clean perfume for $10.00, enticing existing Clean fans as well as targeting new customers to try the product or share it with their friends.

L is for Leverage

Like David before them, niche brands need to make the most of their opportunities, finding leverage wherever they can. One place Clean gains leverage is through a partnership with HSN (Home Shopping Network). “We’re on HSN at least 9 times a year selling gift sets that are very different than what we sell at retail,” explained Griner. “We were a ‘Today’s Special’ two weeks ago and sold out of 17,000 gift sets, providing us a million dollar day,” she added.

In addition to the immediate sales generated, HSN also provides an extraordinary halo for Clean. A delighted Griner offered, “being on TV as much as we are with HSN, it’s basically our form of advertising.” That said, working with HSN can be challenging, explained Griner, “there is a lot of complexity but we plan this months in advance.” Griner’s team also created a scented towel to make the HSN gift set truly unique, helping to leverage the relationship.

E is for Emotion

Niche brands seem to have an inherent understanding of the emotional relationship consumers want to have with their products and respond accordingly. Offered Griner, “you have to be genuine as a brand, because people can spot fakery.” Griner believes that marketers should be careful not to delegate social media communications to outsiders who might misrepresent the brand. “The marketer has to be the one responding to the consumer,” added an emphatic Griner, “because the consumer can smell phoniness.”

In addition to honesty, Griner is a big fan of using humor. To this end, Griner created the Clean etiquette guide which offered tongue-in-cheek advice on texting, tipping and hand washing among other topics. Consumers responded with content of their own which in turn inspired bloggers and Real Simple magazine to join in on the fun. Concluded a delighted Griner, “I just think it’s about creating emotion.”

Final note: As anyone who has ever designed a marketing program will tell you, keeping it SIMPLE is anything but. Fortunately for Clean, the idea of simplicity speaks to the very essence of the brand itself. (This article first appeared on FastCompany.com).

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." @DrewNeisser

lead/marke NET: Drew Neisser > Drew's myCharity: Water Quest

Note: The full post (explaining the PS) you find here. Wanted to save you time, to spend it on donating 40 Bucks, or so. Yours, ralf. Please enjoy!
(lead/marke NET proudly features Drew's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

...

First, Twitter is more like a mass marketing vehicle building awareness but not necessarily generating action. Facebook is a more intimate place than Twitter where friends can and will engage. Email is quite effective if you have a strong list. And lo and behold, good old-fashioned 1:1 conversation proved to be the most powerful social media of all.

PS–If you found this post valuable, feel free to donate $20 which will provide clean water for 1 person for 1 year!

PSS–If you have found any of my posts valuable, feel free to donate $40 which will provide clean water for 2 people for 1 year.

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." @DrewNeisser

lead/marke NET: Drew Neisser > "Profound Advice from the Pizza Delivery Guy", pt.02

Note: This is 'Fight Social Media Fire with Social Media Water', pt.02 of "Profound Advice ...". Please read pt.01 right here. Enjoy!
(lead/marke NET proudly features Drew's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

“I’m just the guy who gets it,” offers the humble yet vivacious Ramon DeLeon when explaining his unlikely rise from delivering pizzas around Chicago’s lakeshore to delivering keynote addresses on social media around the world. What seems to be intuition for DeLeon is in fact an uncanny ability to be way ahead of the curve, to observe what’s going on with his target and adapt accordingly. DeLeon gets it in a way that is both inspiring and enlightening, offering a tasty guide to social media success.

1. It’s Not About the Pizza

Marketers long-trained to push out messaging, often look at social media as a new channel to tell their story. A few minutes with DeLeon and they will realize the folly of this approach. In fact, I spent 40 minutes on the phone with DeLeon talking through his social media success stories before the quality of his pizza even came up. The truth is that when it comes to social media, it is simply not about the pizza. “My focus has always been on the consumer,” noted DeLeon. “Out of ten tweets, maybe only one will mention our product.”

2. It’s About Connecting with the Customer

Most companies pay lip service to customer service, hiding behind phone trees and avoiding intimate interactions. DeLeon, on the other hand, has been on a first name basis with his customers ever since his days delivering pizza. Explained DeLeon, “My whole thing is the connection with the customer—how can I help you?” Starting first with Instant Messaging then Facebook in the mid-90’s, DeLeon established tight bonds with the local college kids so much so that when they graduated, those students brought Domino’s with them into their new companies.

3. Make Deposits in the “Good Will” Bank

Many CEO’s ask their marketing head’s to focus on “things that deliver immediate ROI,” often at the expense of relationship building. DeLeon likens marketing to dating, noting that he “always includes customers in marketing pieces to give some love back after spending [their] hard earned dollars and to create very strong bonds.” These bonds were money in the bank when Domino’s faced it’s YouTube video crisis in 2009. Noted DeLeon, “because of the relationships we had with customers they had our back, so they still would order and support in confidence.”

4. Fight Social Media Fire with Social Media Water

When two young Domino’s employees in North Carolina posted a video of them cooking a pizza with cheese they’d put up their nose, Domino’s Corporate and the local franchise were both caught completely off guard. Not so DeLeon. He immediately created his own video, noting how horrific the other one was, and then follow up with anyone in Chicago who commented online about the offending video. Local bloggers and tweeters responded favorably to his outreach, acknowledging that DeLeon had been “part of the social media scene forever” and would “never let such a thing happen in his stores.” Remarkably, DeLeon’s store sales actually rose during this period while nationally Domino’s took a hit and the local NC franchise ultimately went out of business.

5. Learn To Apologize (Really Well)

Admitting a mistake often comes hard to corporate America. DeLeon, on the other hand, has turned apologizing into a PR-generating, customer-satisfying art form. When a well-known local blogger had a problem with a delivery and wrote about, DeLeon responded with an amazingly heartfelt video apology they he posted on his YouTube and Facebook pages. In the video he and his shamefaced manager invited the blogger into the store to “make things right.” DeLeon’s apology video has been watched over 125,000 times and is regularly showcased in speeches by marketing gurus Seth Godin and Jeanne Bliss.

6. Don’t Get Bogged Down by Trying to Measure Everything

Much to the chagrin of marketers, not every effort, online or otherwise, can be tied to sales. DeLeon believes that “sometimes there are too many metrics,” adding, “how much do you love your wife?” As an example, DeLeon points to a poster program in his stores that invites customers to take pictures of themselves in front of a Domino’s poster and share them with friends. “I’m not telling them to tag these or anything—just share them with your world,” noted DeLeon, who praises the program as generating good will and giving his customers something to do while they wait for their pizzas.

7. Make Each Program Your Own

Geo-based social networks like Foursquare are just emerging as powerful tools for local retailers. Not surprisingly, DeLeon was one of the first retailers to try Foursquare in Chicago, but did not settle for the norm of giving something free to the people who checked-in most at each of his stores. Instead, DeLeon challenged his “mayors” to take responsibility like a real mayor; “to do whatever [they] think [they] gotta do to keep me in business!” By putting the onus on his best customers to “represent” his stores and rewarding them by allowing them to give free pizzas to whomever they chose, DeLeon tightened his relationships and made the program his own.

8. Have Fun and Keep it Real

Fun is not a word that is heard a lot of outside of start-ups. Ramon DeLeon evaluates his own success with two questions, “am I having fun?” and “are our sales and profitability up?” The fun part for DeLeon is a constant, since he clearly loves connecting with people, whether he is on stage, behind a counter, on Facebook/Twitter/Foursquare or in his homemade video shout-outs. Regardless of the channel, DeLeon tries to be the same person and advises all others to take this approach. Concluded DeLeon, “there are real people behind these tweets and I just want to have fun with them.”

Final Note: While DeLeon could not offer actual sales figures, he noted with pride that sales growth in his stores over the last 18-months has significantly out-performed both the Chicago market and national average for Domino’s stores.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." @DrewNeisser

lead/marke NET: Drew Neisser > "Profound Advice from the Pizza Delivery Guy", pt.01

Note: Great story from where everything is possible. Enjoy.
(lead/marke NET proudly features Drew's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

For want of a belt, Ramon DeLeon almost didn’t get the part-time job delivering pizzas that launched his remarkable career. Fortunately for us, he overcame this hurdle just as he has so many before and since, becoming a highly successful businessman, not to mention the most effective practitioner of social media I’ve yet to meet.

How he got from delivering pizzas to delivering keynotes on social media is a fascinating tale of chutzpah and perseverance, of street smarts and tech savvy, providing a road map for any kid from any neighborhood, anyone willing that is to start small and think big. A two-part series, this first one focuses on the business lessons gleaned from an extensive interview with Ramon a few days ago.

Borrow a Belt (i.e. Do Whatever Else it Takes to Get Started)

Looking for a part-time job while still in school, DeLeon put in a cold call to a local Domino’s store. Having already delivered newspapers in the same Chicago neighborhood, DeLeon made his case well enough over the phone that they told him to show up for work the next day at 5pm. Arriving a half-hour early only to learn he’d lose the job if he didn’t find a belt to wear, DeLeon dashed to his sister’s to borrow a frilly ribbon number two-sizes too small, thus avoiding getting fired before he had even started.

Listening to DeLeon now, it is easy to downplay the significance of this little interlude. But if you’re a kid just getting out of school, you might want to take note. DeLeon was able to get his foothold in the industry that has made him highly successful by building up a portfolio of relevant experience, in this case delivering papers. When he got the opportunity to get in the next door, he didn’t let it slip by and instead scrambled to find a belt, however ridiculous it might have made him look that first day. He did whatever it took to get started.

Find the Joy in Pleasing Customers

DeLeon credits much of his success to his parents whom he described as his “biggest role models.” When DeLeon was in elementary school, his “blue-collar parents used to buy clothing wholesale and sell it at work or to friends.” He took note of the relationships they built with their friends and customers and tried to do the same when he started delivering pizzas. He paid attention to the smallest details, even how to park unobtrusively in driveways and how to ring doorbells to the customer’s liking.

When cellphones came along, DeLeon used them to improve the delivery experience, calling when no one answered the door. It wasn’t long before he’d get calls directly, saying “hey are you working today, we want to order pizza.” Like his parents, DeLeon was building strong ties with each of his customers, ties that distinguished him from his peers. At the same time, DeLeon found joy in pleasing customers, noting with pride, “it became a high for me, the excitement, the doorbell, the kids jumping and shouting ‘the pizza guy’s here!’”

Learn to Make the Pizza

After delivering pizza with aplomb for three years, his manager asked DeLeon to arrive early and open up the store since the shift manager was going to be late. Think Lou Gehrig filling in at first base for headache-pained Wally Pipp except for one key fact, metaphorically DeLeon didn’t know how to hit or catch. When the phone started ringing and orders arriving, DeLeon and another driver had no idea how to make a pizza but somehow they did just that.

When the manager did arrive, DeLeon exclaimed, “I don’t want to be in that situation again!” Taking time before and after his delivery shifts, DeLeon learned how to make the pizza and everything else the store sold. Shortly thereafter Domino’s asked DeLeon to join their management-training program. The lesson here for any of you starting out is clear–learn the business of the business even if it isn’t your primary job. In this way, when opportunity strikes, you’ll be able to jump in like DeLeon and Gehrig, relegating the Wally Pipp’s of the world to mere footnotes.

Take the Low Performing Store

Paying his dues as an assistant manager, DeLeon was working at one of the highest volume stores in Chicago when a manager spot opened up at an underperforming location. According to DeLeon, “there were other people more qualified to take over that store but no one wanted it.” Asked why he would want such a dog, DeLeon gamely offered, “When stuff is that low, the only thing you can do is look up.” Not surprisingly, DeLeon’s willingness to take on the bigger challenge paid off.

On the first day of the job, DeLeon somewhat brashly told his District Manager that his store was going to be off the underperformers list by the end of the week, even if that meant he had to buy the pizza himself. Knowing that he couldn’t transform the store alone, DeLeon “rounded up the right people who wanted to stay and let the others go who didn’t.” Having established his business goal and then put his team in place, DeLeon started a series of guerrilla marketing activities that helped his store set a nation wide Domino’s record for most consecutive weeks of sales growth.

Final Note: Ramon DeLeon did not have the advantage of an Ivy League education or social connections that would give him a head start. On the contrary, he started out at the proverbial bottom of the barrel, delivering pizzas on a part-time basis to pay for school. How he became a pioneering practitioner of social media is all the more remarkable and part 2 of this series (to follow later this week). This article first appeared on FastCompany.com

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." @DrewNeisser

lead/marke NET: Drew Neisser > Don’t Get Those Summertime Social Media Blues

Note: This article ran also on MediaPost earlier this week. Please enjoy!
(lead/marke NET proudly features Drew's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

As we enter August and our shrinks go on vacation, it would be easy to go crazy over all the dour news related to social media. Fortress Facebook is showing cracks as 170,000 or so 26-34 year-olds defected from the network in June according to Inside Facebook. Fast-growing Foursquare, which reached its 100 millionth check-in milestone in July was doused by a Forrester study that recommended a “wait and see” approach. And 24 hours after the most beautifully orchestrated social media stunt since BK’s Whopper Sacrifice, several respectable publications were asking, “Yeah but did it sell bottles of Old Spice?”

Admittedly I do find the Facebook news a bit troubling because no one seems to know where these young folks are defecting to and if it was a temporary aberration or genuine trend. [Note: Facebook grew again in July.] As for the Forrester’s study that recommends a cautious approach to Foursquare, I’m delighted since this will leave it open for the innovators while the wait and see types sit by the sidelines and lose early adopter advantage. And just in time to restore order in the creative universe, Nielsen reported that Old Spice sales were indeed up 107% in the last month. All this said, I’d like to offer a little pep talk in what otherwise might be the dog days of social media.

Don’t Give Up on Facebook Just Yet

Considering the sheer massiveness of Facebook, it is quite likely your target is still actively engaged on the largest truly global social network. According to Comscore, in June 2010 over 130 million people within the US used Facebook. With that kind of reach, its easy to understand how some brands are using Facebook as their only website while others create ecommerce stores within the network. So the real challenge is figuring out the Facebook strategy that is right for your brand.

Venerable print pub National Geographic has attracted over 1.4 million fans on Facebook by providing a steady stream of interesting factoids. Offering his own pep talk at the Supergenius WOM conference in NYC last month, National Geo’s VP of Marketing Brendon Hart advising having a “fan first” approach specifically for Facebook. Hart advised testing a wide variety of content in order to zero in on what drives the most likes and comments. If this old brand can make hay on Facebook, certainly yours can too.

Innovative Brands Should Be Testing Location-Based Services

While the installed base of Foursquare users is admittedly small at about 2 million, now is the time for innovative brands especially those targeting millennials to be testing this and other location-based services like Gowalla, Loopt, and GetGlue. Not only will experimenting now give you a leg up on your competition when these services are more mainstream, you’ll earn special points with millennials who love the competitive nature of location-based social networking games.

Ramon DeLeon, the owner of six Domino’s Pizza restaurants in Chicago, is a legend in the social media world and an early adopter of Foursquare. Speaking at the Supergenius conference, DeLeon explained that he’s had fun experimenting with Foursquare and with letting his “mayors” take charge at his restaurants. Noted DeLeon, “I invite our mayors to do whatever they want, to make their own pizzas or eat for free.” Adding Foursquare to his already broad mix of social media including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and a blog was a “no brainer” as DeLeon wants to part of the conversation wherever his target is talking.

And Yes, This Social Media Stuff Can Drive Your Business

While the Old Spice guy making customized YouTube videos for a select group of his Twitter followers is a spectacularly innovative case, other brands are using social media to drive their businesses every day without as much fanfare. The challenge to figure out your overall goals for social media and then determine how to make the most of each of particular channel, especially the over-hyped and often misused Twitterverse.

Paull Young, Director of Digital for CharityWater.org, reported at the Supergenius conference that his organization has grown almost entirely through word-of-mouth, raising $20 million in 4 years. As the first charity with over one million followers on Twitter, CharityWater.org has inspired a “long tail” of givers, from well-known celebrities to precocious 8-year-olds, all attracted to the mission of providing clean water to the 1/6 of the world who doesn’t have it. Young noted that a Twestival to create clean water wells in Ethiopia raised $250,000 despite the fact that “[they] never ask for money directly.”

The bottom line: don’t let the summertime blues affect your vision, use this time to assess your strategy via a social media audit and get ready to break new ground this Fall.

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." @DrewNeisser