Conversation Agent

Being in Control of the Interaction

2012-02-09T06:00:00-05:00

I don't know about you. I wasn't terribly impressed by the Super Bowl ads this year.

With the exception of the seducing commercial of the FIAT Abarth, where they are clearly in control of the interaction, most ads seemed to have sacrificed newer creative executions for safer ones.

At the per second dollar spend, it was an understandable move. Disappointing because of the high expectations created through social media ahead of the big day.

I got many ad preview offeres from the PR Agencies working with brands this year.

A few days ahead of the game I saw that FIAT was making the rounds on Google+ and circled both FIAT corporate and FIAT U.S.A. accounts. Someone with some ingenuity would have found this older post about the 500.

The 500 was my mother's first car. How could I ever forget that. We had this white gate that separated our courtyard from the street. One day, after shopping, we got on the small incline onramp to get back in and instead of hitting the break, she accelerated. It didn't go so well for the front of the car.

Sometimes that's what happens when you're in total control of the interaction.

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Rohit Bhargava has done an in depth review of the marketing strategy behind the ads.

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Collaboration? You Must be Joking!

2012-02-08T06:00:00-05:00

I read this post by Chris Saad the other morning in response to Robert Scoble 's mention in a recent post and I keep thinking about the applicability of its concepts not just for Silicon Valley and the tech community.

It applies to marketers and communicators as well. [Posted originally on Google+]

<rant>

1. lead not just cheerlead - how many times do we copy the same concept over and over, or look at short term payoffs when the opportunities are on the making better promises side of the conversation?

2. add to the business DNA - nothing dies, not media companies, not blogging, not marketing, not PR... they just need to change based upon changing habits, taste and evolving culture. It's all good, there are plenty of very smart people who can and should collaborate across agencies and corporate departments (see #4).

3. don't just iterate, innovate - seriously, let's take a hard look at what kinds of great challenges we can help solve with creativity and ingenuity and, most of all, listening to customers. I've written about finding creative new ways to go to the movies and we're talking about reinventing a venerable brand like Sears two days ago.

4. B2C, not Ego2C - and I like his point about B2B as well. There is so much untapped opportunity there. Buyers are people, groups are people. Let's get beyond the 'not invented here' stuff and make some cool s*it.

5. users don't care - people care. People on content care. We see it here and elsewhere every day. One reason I LOVE SwissMiss et all Creative Mornings is that they are an open community for people who want to do better, more, and share what they do.

6. death is just a stage of life - amen. See #2. Learning is good. Now let's get over it and get creative with the executions. Note: creative doesn't mean it's not connected to business goals and to making better promises.

7. the arc of the universe is long but it bends toward open - anyone figured out that building a community layer with editorial imprint and marketing is the way to go? It's a cheesy title (they tell me) that is what I've been proposing for years.

8. acknowledge reality - don't bend to hype. Hype makes expectations hard to live up to. Keep your promises so you can deliver better ones. Start where you can/want to and build from there. Cathedrals, not (ivory) towers.

9. don't kill [insert archenemy] - partner with opposites and with industries that are having a changing time. You are as well, whether you admit it or not.

10. data portability - we have the looming encounter with Big Data, and it's already becoming a new fashion. Are we using the data we already have? Is it garbage? For example, do we spend time getting leads by the shovelful and none at all qualifying them, or nurturing prospects? How do we get better data in? How do we craft better queries?

</rant>

The late Italian composer/singer Fabrizio de Andre' put this in a song: si sa che la gente dà buoni consigli se non può più dare cattivo esempio. Is that the case?

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The image you see up top is the new opening slide of my 200-slide deck to guide the conversation around reThinking Business in the age of the social customer tomorrow. Yeah, you could say it means we're thinking out of the box from the image.

I wrote an ode to work, I call it the Conversation Agent Meaningful Actions manifesto. I'm planning to make that available as an on-demand print foam board or roll up poster because people tell me they usually print out my inspirational posts and hang them on the wall at work. Which is something I'm really grateful about.

I will share both the content and the ordering information. This is something I spent a lot of time thinking about and comes directly from how we feel when we do great work.

I'd actually love to open the design up to the community here, both for designs and then for choosing the three best versions to make available on demand to anyone to purchase with credit at the bottom. I know we have a few graphic designers among readers.

(I am looking for a graphic designer with strong multimedia skills for future client engagements and it would be a great way to get to know each other.)

What do you think?

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What a Difference Five Years Make

2012-02-07T06:00:00-05:00

Here I am. Writing from my heart more than my head where all the good ideas are and I get the zinger -- yeah, a personality would be great. Seriously?

Kidding.

I'm sure it would. And I have one.

I can go from Zero to Italian in no time. When appropriate.

Why do you care? Because that's just it -- online content should have a style and point of view, to get more personality it needs to have guts, and it needs to have time. Guts don't come from charts and stats, they come from people.

Time as in face time, as in skin in the game, as in relationships.

Or you're just making the seagull move -- flying in, poo-pooing all over everything, and flying out. (joke about consultants) Curb your enthusiasm!

I'm taking a risk leaving the known (yet worn) path. Are you? Do you ever take any? Is your stream all Pollyanna? Are you a Pollyanna? In that case that might work for you. Otherwise, at some point, there will be a disconnect between who you think you are (or want to be) and who others think you are.

Content is not the limp result of obsessive compulsive top ten lists. I've written quite a few myself. You just cannot resist clicking through, can you? Why people use them -- they work.

It's like gapers delay traffic, better if it just happened. It makes getting stuck in it for hours worth it if you can tweet that someone else had a worse day than you.

Human nature. We can aspire from where we're starting from.

Been there, done it

We like to talk about change -- especially when giving advice.

Change is rarely pleasant to go through, though. Yet change we must. Even at the most fundamental levels, biology, organisms are constantly moving and fighting death (Why We Lie).

Be at something for long enough, and eventually, unless you challenge yourself constantly, your plateau.

Positive challenge also comes from the community you build. Which is why corporate blogs or your business blog are not sustainable when they don't build community.

When I started this blog, there was a great community of marketing blogs and we kept building on each other's topics. Then flipping into full fledged business came in, and the community went with it.

The lesson -- communities evolve. They have lifecycles, it happens when you become a media company, too. Community is not in the comments, in the shares, in the links... it's with the people who comment, link, share.

There's evidence that exposure to economic theory breeds greed. The opposite of greed is generosity. Community breeds generosity.

Five years

Five years make a big difference in an environment that groks change (or it says it does). Imagine what happens in a business that has stabilized its trade around time-tested processes.

Content refresh or makeover is not the only thing that happens in the knowledge shift. I like the term organization because it has "organ" in it. It's a living and breathing community working together... and some would finish the sentence "or hanging apart".

Will brands achieve content fluency? The jury is out on that, and judging is what everyone will do. Human nature.

Ironically, this is why the open Web works, because it mirrors humanity.

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Where are your biggest challenges in moving your content forward? Do you have enough diversity in your team? How about building community? Have you considered distribution as part of the community? Is your POV sharp enough?

How can I help? Be specific in your question and we'll build posts about them together.

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How Would You Redesign the Sears Customer Experience?

2012-02-06T06:00:00-05:00

As a regular at Brand Autopsy, I remember the "would you miss" series of posts about brands John Moore wrote a couple of years back.

The brands discussed ranged from Denny's, Costco, Ace Hardware, Dairy Queen, Crate & Barrell, BusinessWeek, UPS, Pizza Hut, to Walgreens, Polaroid Instant Film, Advertising Age, The Cheesecake Factory, Chili's, Wells Fargo, and more.

One of the brands was Sears -- if Sears went out of business tomorrow, would any of us care?

Does Sears provide such a unique product and customer experience that we would be saddened if it didn’t exist?

How did Sears do on the emotional connection scale? The post and comments are dated March 2007.

Already, many said they would not miss Sears itself, even is at the time Sears Holdings Corporation (NASDAQ: SHLD ) parent of Kmart and Sears was the third largest broad-line retailer, with approximately $55 billion in annual revenues, and approximately 3,800 full-line and specialty retail stores in the U.S. and Canada.

Maybe you have not shopped at Sears in a while, they used to have a reliable and fairly-priced repair business as well. I used them many years ago, in 1996. Some of the company's sub brands are fairly well known -- DieHard batteries, Craftsman tools, Land's End apparel, and Kenmore appliances.

My last Sears purchase was in 1998. I did so much work on the house during that time frame that Home Depot and Lowe's became the go-to places for everything.

As for appliances, there's a local specialized store where you actually get to talk with a knowledgeable person who has time to deal with you. They deliver when they say they will, and do service with a smile. An easy choice to make.

Many customers of the giant retailer knew that the brand was in trouble at the time of the discussion, 2007. Now, almost five years later the future of the Sears brand is uncertain -- 120 Sears (and Kmart) stores are about to be shut down.

The retailer's strategy shifting to a banking model did not help foster a customer-friendly store experience. Remember the credit card offers for zero down payments on appliances?

Culture followed strategy, which meant profit first, serving people with experiences they care about second.

Size, strength, attitude

For many years, Sears enjoyed foot traffic. Its size meant availability and lots of variety. In an effort to build efficiencies and standardization into its stores, the retailer failed to harness its own sub brand strengths. Reinvention is in order, says Brand Strategy Insider, citing:

creating experiences people love, using IKEA as an example
leveraging the iconic catalog into a rich digital experience, pick one or two stories and focus on them

The proprietary sub brands are still a strength. Why not leverage them to the fullest? Kill the big box and specialize, tell a couple of stories really well and go back to making those experiences hard to miss.

Attitude as in having a strong point of view helps. Kenmore is doing a good job in social media engagement, better than the competitive set in some respects.

For example, people are more actively engaged on Kenmore’s Facebook page than most other brands’ pages in the competitive set, and the brand, for the most part, is responsive. In the last year, when I last looked at their presences, they more than doubled fans, partly through engagement.

And they more than doubled Twitter followers, also through engagement. They joined YouTube in 2006, and they do a good job with video tips. They recently rolled out Kenmore Connect, a service that answers questions about your appliances. Here's a video of the 2012 bloggers summit.

The Craftsman social media team is also doing a good job on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Are these efforts enough to help Sears re-size its opportunities by building on its strengths? Do we care if the Sears brand survives or do we just care about the sub brands?

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How can the corporation get engaged back with itself and remember to put customers first?

How would you redesign the Sears customer experience? Smaller store footprint? Specialized hubs within a store for tools and appliances and kill all other products? Go digital and channel?

Would you miss Sears? A different way of asking the question to get us thinking -- if you were Sears, would your customers miss you?

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... then I Discovered I am Actually Funny

2012-02-05T07:00:00-05:00

So, I've been thinking. What I'm doing here with this blog is not working. It's not you, it's me. Somehow I manage to scare you off to some site with LOL cats whenever you open your feed. I'm not inspiring you. Or maybe I am, and you're not telling me.

I've tried a couple of things to justify keeping up with producing researched and useful content. That only makes the scraping and copying and rewriting gremlins happy and me poor. They don't link anymore in the sphere, those bastards.

This is a departure from my usual writing style, I know.

I've been slaving on figuring out an angle for the book I seem to be researching for- well, ever, and and angle for what's next for me. In the last couple of months I did a lot of doing and experimenting.

Because I have BHAGs (= Big Audacious Hairy Goals, you were thinking baggage, weren't you?) I'm learning to fail faster and in new ways. Awesome news, getting there.

Throwing my hat in the air

I have this friend who upped and left for a stint in Pakistan and she's sending a bunch of us updates of her adventures. Her writing pops because it's full of her personality. I literally look forward to those emails.

We're all encouraging her to keep the emails, and write the book. They're filled with humanity at its best and worst times, which means we all relate.

Then, I was catching up with the always surprising weekend links from Lisa Barone and found a couple in there so worth following. Go ahead and check Lost In translation, the Bloggess has a book coming out, Let's Pretend this Never Happened...

... and it hit me -- I need to throw my hat in the air. I can do funny better than preachy, and it's a lot more entertaining to learn with a smile.

So watch out, we'll be strapping in for some interesting announcements here in the next couple of weeks. There are all kinds of things happening to my words -- they're lining up to take us places.

We're still going to learn about social technologies, brand content strategy, customer conversations, and brand influence. We're just going to get there with a different execution. Stay tuned.

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Oh, yeah, about that partial feed. I had to clamp things down because it had been grabbed by a very inappropriate circle of blogs. Why do girls have to put up with that stuff? All fixed now. (PS: I'm watching you gremlins)

(PPS: the meaty content is going to be in the Premium Newsletter that starting this week goes to $8.99 per month, so grab your subscription today, or pay more later, which I prefer).

Which brings me to the numerous offers to write or stream or give, give, give to other networks I receive.

You guys are too kind. Show me the money and we talk. As per the paragraph right above, we don't do stuff for exposure here. We're business people, so that wouldn't be appropriate, would it?

Cheers.

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Oh, and you have this awesome chance to meet in IRL next week at a fraction of the price you'll pay to meet me after that. Grab your seat today.

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Note: I blame my family for encouraging my funny side by dutifully banging fists on the floor and getting six-pack abs from laughing at my reports (I've done voices, too, but we won't go there... yet).

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The Weeds and Trees Links Edition

2012-02-04T07:00:00-05:00

Do you have poor information consumption habits?

Here's how you can tell -- if you're constantly looking for the next thing or shiny object, you're addicted to the fast growth and short term life of weeds. Some of them are pretty. All the action is up top, yet they don't grow strong. Small roots.

On the other end of the spectrum are trees.

All the action is underground, so you don't really see it while it's happening -- and at least for a while. Yet, once they grow, trees could be there for decades, stretching upward and providing a welcome respite for generations.

Weeds and trees

Is a metaphor for ideas I borrowed from my friend Peter.

This special edition of links is all about theory -- it's not the size of the library that counts it's the way it's organized. We're all way too docile to the "do" culture, until what you thought about doesn't work.

Then we revert to theory. As Peter Tunjic said:

We’ve spent the last 100 years bemoaning theory as somehow esoteric -– real “men” are practical. It’s hard to tell someone that in fact that practical knowledge becomes impractical without theory.

Theory is just another word for learning –- without it knowledge is impractical no matter what it says on the label.

I agree.

Which is why a pitch I received from a West Coast agency late last night became a one hour conversation about life, people, and meaning with a young brand manager.

Get the theory right, learn from experience, and you get the execution right.

Saturday three

The three stories that caught my eye this week are:

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A frank conversation between Dan Ariely and Malcolm Gladwell on social science. Journalist Resource reports:

What do people do with the things they read in books such as this? And my working assumption is that what they do is they talk about it. The reason people read a book like, books like ours — as opposed to novels — is that books like ours are fodder for continued thought and conversation.

[...] People are information-rich and theory-poor. If you can give them a way of organizing their experience, then their minds are wide open. Which I would not have not have necessarily thought. And if you can frame questions appropriately you can overcome all kinds of ideological — what you would have thought of — as ideological constraints.

Giving people a way of organizing their experience or a framework to think about what they do is central.

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Technology makes it too easy to keep clicking through for hours at a time. Happiness takes a little magic, writes Brian Lam, it's the most important metric in personal tech:

The first thing I did was to take back my time. I quit all the online content that was id-provoking and knee jerk. I stopped reading the stupid hyped up news stories that are press releases or rants about things that will get fixed in a week. I stopped reading the junk and about the junk that was new, but not good. I stopped reading blogs that write stories like "top 17 photos of awesome clouds by iPhone" and "EXCLUSIVE ANGRY BIRDS COMING TO FACEBOOK ON VALENTINES DAY." And corporate news that only affects the 1%. Most days, I feel like most internet writers and editors are engaging in the kind of vapid conversation you find at parties that is neither enlightening or entertaining, and where everyone is shouting and no one is saying anything. I don't have time for this.

Do you? As Lam says, Get on, make the most meaningful information and connections, and then get offline. Then, live purposefully towards happiness.

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Gina Trapani tackles the flip side of having a big audience:

Having a big audience means you're a commodity, and you get to constantly field pitches from strangers, acquaintances, former co-workers, and distant family members who you never hear from otherwise asking you to mention their new app, book, Kickstarter project, or MySpace page. People decide how important you are by your Klout score and treat you accordingly. Ad agencies look up how much your tweets are worth and recruit you to tweet on behalf of their clients for money. It's a bizarre and sometimes awkward crash course in saying "sorry, no" to the requests that just don't feel right (and most of them don't).

Trapani works with a freelancer mindset. Do you think about those professionals who are actual freelancers and consultants when you work on your programs?

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Weedy ideas are in fashion. They grow so fast, compete with solid ideas, to then die in the sun and be replaced by the next weed of an idea.

Trees are another conversation altogether. There, all the action is underground, until they are no match for the weeds.

Is your program, book, talk, practice full of weeds or are you cultivating trees?

Follow the discussion over on Conversation Agent Google+ Page.

Have a great weekend everyone.

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Do the "Work" in Network

2012-02-03T06:00:00-05:00

Technology is great. It's allowing us to do more things faster and is taking (some) cost attrition out of them. Social networs are helping more people encounter more people and opportunities than they ever thought possible.

We also know they can be distracting, and a time suck.

Who hasn't spent a whole two hours following links and reading about other people's fabulous exploits and exotic places? It feels great.

And the brain cannot tell the difference between real and imagined...

... which is goodness when we can harness that capability to visualize, dream, and be expansive. It is not so helpful when we confuse the proxy of reading advice with having done and doing the work.

Are you super connected?

Or do you just lull yourself in the illusion of being that way?

Do you have actual, real relationships based on doing things for each other with kindness and generosity? Or do you take for granted that thousands, hundreds, or even dozens of people are just waiting for you to make a request to jump at it?

Do you view all your social accounts as bank accounts you open and just start withdrawing money from without putting any in? Or do you actually view them as opportunities to be human and in conversation? Here's an example of how to write an email that stands out. To this day, a rare occurrence.

People want to help. We're social, it's encoded in our DNA. Busy people are the happiest helping others because they know more than anyone else how it works -- things don't happen in a vaccuum. Collaborating and supporting each other with real things is the best way to go about it.

If brands can be for Meaningful Actions, so can people.

DO the "work" in network.

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PS: I love you. Using this sentiment as your inspiration is a good rule of thumb to get it right.

A note on email. It feels like a conversation, its discontinuous nature makes it more like a letter. Tone is extremely hard to convey through one, especially if you don't have a relationship with the person with whom you are corresponding.

Take care of each word lest it comes across as a shot you didn't intend to take (i.e., defensive and scarcity-mindset driven).

Think like a quantum physicist -- it's possibility until your thinking precipitates it as rejection.

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I cannot believe there are no other good examples of email etiquette. When were you last impressed by a note? Have examples of or advice for successful email connections? Do share.

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It's All Invented

2012-02-02T06:00:00-05:00

We're approaching Super Bowl Sunday. I can tell from the pitches that are literally pouring in -- looking to capitalize on the buzz the ad will create through media.

How fascinating.

Especially since, although technically I do publish, I don't see myself as "media". Will you give those press releases a rest?

Here's my (free) advice to you pitching, yes, you -- think why this community exists, then explore how the brand would engage it on that basis. Should you be pitching me at all?

Building Meaningful Actions

Right now I work with businesses that want to up their game in the way they connect with customers and offer problem solving workshops to help bridge disconnects by being human in conversation and in the moment to get the most out of opportunities with social and other new technologies. Do sessions for corporations. (more on the products soon)

The irony has not escaped me, of course.

Some of the very organizations (I'm looking at you agencies) that are badly in need of communication guidance are developing those approaches. No doubt, based upon "best practices", things that have worked in the past.

And because you can cast a pretty wide net with blogs and sites today, the box is checked. Except for it isn't. Not by a long stretch.

What do you do when people approach you? And you call yourself a relationship marketing agency?

It's all invented

Visualize this: It's amateur hour (it has to be or it's a non-starter because everyone would already know what I'm about to say if it weren't. And that's not fun).

Okay, it's amateur hour, the music stops, and there are no empty chairs left. What do you do? Do you?

A. look around and try a couple of tricks until someone gives up their chair

B. ask for one more go-round and a re-count

C. take a moment to ______

Why not take a moment and fill in the blanks? We'll have a good time with this. Promise.

Hint: It's all invented.

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I was thinking about whole-brained connections earlier and remembered this post about writing killer copy by going beyond words. Which is how I thought of searching for left- and right-brained and found the magnificent image above. There are two more at the Creative Collection site linked below.

Save the pitch, do send the Mercedes.

[image via Andrew Keir]

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reThinking Business in the Age of the Social Customer

2012-02-01T06:00:00-05:00

reThinking is about learning to deconstruct and reconstruct in a way that makes more sense.

Why is is helpful? Because we're in the value and demand creation phase of work. The headlines are everywhere, average won't cut it anymore -- not for people, not for corporations.

Standing out is not about doing more of the things everyone else is doing, or doing them with more flair.

Activity does not equal results

"Clever" bumps against many filters -- they were always there, except you didn't see them, or were easier to ignore. Now you can see them, if you're paying attention, after the fact, if you weren't.

These filters are:

expectations -- the bar is rising all the time. And all you see is what other companies are doing, not the results they're actually getting. Think about it for a moment.

intentions -- the saying goes "Hell is paved with good intentions", the gap between what people intend and their intent, what they actually do is a chasm they will cross only when they have confidence you will deliver

culture -- is a complex, adaptive system, you join it, not "crack it". Also, a word on context, it's bordered and temporary. The moment you inject community in it, you have the wants, beliefs, attitudes of the people in it. How do you deal with them?

language -- speaking clearly is not easy. Language is not objective, there needs to be agreement for you to have connection. Navigating meaning is complicated by saying one thing and doing another. Playwright George Bernard Shaw claimed that "England and America are two countries divided by a common language"

beliefs -- this is a very powerful filter. Its roots are encoded all the way in the core of what makes people who they are. Their identity is in turn influenced by many factors

attitude -- this is also shaped by access to and availability of choices. You cannot control that of others, just your own. Do you have an attitude of curiosity, interest, respect? Are you exploring opportunity or fearing risk?

According to the 2011 Shift Index by Deloitte Center for the Edge, consumers are gaining more power than firms because they are quicker to adapt to disruptive technologies. It is connected individuals, not companies, that are harnessing flows and have more power because of it.

Without true listening, without a mechanism in place to be human, in conversation, and in the moment to get the most out of opportunities in social and other technologies you are not reaching your goal: trade better. And you might just be "more noise".

The Shift Index addresses Brand Disloyalty:

Brand loyalty is on the decline. Consumers today are inundated with more brands than ever before. The average supermarket in 2010 carried 38,719 stock-keeping units (SKUs), a drastic increase over prior decades.

Consumers also now have access to information from more trusted sources to evaluate brands and their purchase choices no longer rely solely on advertising claims.

Brand Disloyalty is inversely related to age: Younger consumers are less loyal to brands than older consumers. Younger consumers, born in the Internet era, generally rely less on brand names as an indicator of product reliability, turning instead to the Internet for product and service information, user reviews and feedback, as well as substitutes.

Signal is not a Hail Mary shouted at the top of your lungs in all social channels -- Twitter, check, Facebook, check, G+, check... it's not push. It's about being focused on delivering on promises made. The transparency of product information available empowers customers to make more informed decisions and compare alternatives more easily.

Will they choose you?

It's pull

As the authors of the Shift Index found, firms have untapped opportunities to reverse their declining performance by embracing pull. For more on pull, see my review of the book by John Hagel and John Seely Brown.

It's something you have control over.

Listening is something you do. Without an action attached to it, you are being filtered out. Doing needs to be selective and focused based upon your promises to be effective. Smart brands are already finding creative ways to do this.

Without visibility into preferences, feedback, knowledge, how can you make better decisions? Are you wasting precious resources? Energy, intellect, and knowledge/experience you could be putting to good use.

Our ability to grow depends upon our ability to shift from a fixed mindset -- we are who we are and our wins are attached to that identity -- to a growth mindset -- tweaking the levers that make up our identity to stretch. This is true of organizations as well.

We become what we pay attention to -- and so does business.

reThinking business is a call to action, it's a do verb. How nimble are you?

[The fixed and growth mindset concepts come from the work of psychologist Carol Dweck in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (affiliate link)]

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