http://marketsofconversation.com/2008/12/31/

After reading a Mashable blog post today -- Data: What Are the Benefits of Social Media Marketing? -- I started wondering how I can continue to refine my conversations with clients about social marketing strategies. Why? Because, according to this survey of marketing folks, Customer Engagement was at the top of the responses: 85%. So what does this mean, really? It the kind of statement that rolls off the tongue easily and sounds comforting to hear. But I think there is a lot of silent genuflecting going on about the fear of cost, fear of staffing, fear of organizational changes and so forth.

Social Engagement, another way of saying Customer Engagement, is a vague topic to discuss. Without some clear direction and leadership in the conversation, the client is often confused to the point of losing their motivation (or self-confidence) to pursue funding and defining requirements, out of fear of making a career-limiting move to support a long-term project on the web. So what happens is during a presentation you get peppered with questions that become sharper and more direct about 'how' are they going to measure the results of social marketing strategy.

It's helpful to step back and think about your sales projects before heading into that first 'group' presentation so your time and the clients' are well spent. It's hard to get back to a client if your presentation runs out of gas. You can avoid this with some preplanning and thoughtful pre-sales collaboration efforts.

Let's Talk Big-Picture First
This is a critical part of the presentation, and truthfully the pre-visit telephone calls with the client are essential to assess if they are of the right mindset to actually pursue a social marketing strategy at their business. What you want to suss out is who is the champion (or thought leader in the group) and who is responsible for the budget. These are all the usual things you do in sales, of course. But the important piece is to really get alongside them and talk about, encourage, document and direct their expectations on what can be achived over a 6- to 12-month period.

• Welcome online interaction and conversations, listen for opportunities to help
• Brand monitoring (this is now more possible with so many vendors bringing brand monitoring tools to the market. This all sounds good but it's important to have some screen grabs of search engine results, and blog conversations where products are being discussed for the client to actually 'see' what it means to monitor the brand on the Internet.
• Company becomes more visible. Stop fires before they start
• Monitor trends
• Emerging and hot issues
• Sentiment about products
• Conversation-starting topics
• Audience style and preferences
• Adjustments to the corporate culture to engage more with your community. This isn't obvious at first so it's important to bring this up repeatedly from different perspectives. Ultimately most businesses, if they are successful with social marketing, find that they have to organize themselves different to really utilize the results of their engagement with web traffic.
  

Here's What We Do after the Assessment

• Continue to seed your online community thoughtfully with your educational content via blogs, Twitter, forum participation, email lists
• Monitor trends and look for insights
• Create a plan to capture and review what's being learned from the community (and related social media channels)
• Metrics – monitoring and measuring your program
• Survey - and ask the community as it grows - what does it want? Lead and partner with the community

How We Begin

• Set goals
• Listen, and gather information
• Recommendations and strategy-setting (follow-on meetings)
• Research/discover where your prospects are online and their personas (be where they expect you to be and understand their personality motivations)
• Develop a strategy for engagement at locations where prospects exist, on your site and other websites
• Create a workflow for content creation and reuse in traditional and social marketing activities that align with your traditional marketing campaigns
  

Thank you!

About The Show

Ken Theis
Director of Michigan Department of Information Technology

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The State of Michigan has become a pioneer in how to make IT work better and be more economically viable for its citizens. They focused on consolidating IT into one state agency, and then developing a strategic plan and an enterprise architecture to support the plan.

In 2001, the entire IT organization across the State of Michigan merged into the Michigan Department of Information Technology (MDIT), under the direction of Ken Theis. MDIT's 1,700 employees support 19 other state agencies. These agencies have a combined annual budget of $434 million, 800 business-critical applications, 55,000 desktops, and 1,300 telecom locations.

The consolidation reduced overall IT expenditures in Michigan by 34 percent, taking more than $100 million off the state budget. Some of these strategic moves included closing 23 data centers and creating three main data centers, reducing the number of email servers from 700 to 70, and centralizing one petabyte of data storage. Meanwhile, MDIT also addressed errors in programs, such as Food Stamps.

In this podcast, Ken talks about the agency's overall IT strategy, the components that comprise the enterprise architecture, the initiatives that are bringing smaller and more efficient government to the people of Michigan, and the challenge of managing IT investments.

Theis says, "If you can't measure it, you shouldn't be doing it. We continue to strive for returns on our IT investments. Sometimes the returns can be financial, and other times they might be services that benefit citizens. We're always looking to improve how we can increase the returns on our IT investments, especially in a tight economy."

Molly O'Neill
CIO of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency

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Molly O'Neill has both a technology role and a policy role at the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency. As an assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Environmental Information, she oversees the life cycle of information to support the agency's mission of protecting health and the environment. O'Neill's role as CIO includes overseeing the agency's strategic information planning, investment and information policies, enterprise architecture, and information security program.

In both her technology and policy roles, O'Neill is working toward the same goal - helping the EPA use technology to collaborate and exchange information with the widest possible network of bright minds around the world. The EPA employs about five percent of the U.S. environmental workforce. The majority of this workforce consists of people who work in state government, in consulting firms, in private industry, and in academic institutions. She says, "Environmental issues are huge. People work at the EPA because they believe in its mission. We want to reach everyone who has a thirst for knowledge about environmental issues."

In this podcast, O'Neill talks about the EPA's Web 2.0 initiatives. As she puts it, "to reach out and grab the world globally, as well as locally." She also explains how the EPA's formal process for making IT investment decisions works, and how the EPA has been at the forefront of the green data center movement.

Barry Libert
Author and chairman of the board of Mzinga


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Procter & Gamble turned to social media, not soap operas, to really connect to its customers. The Vocalpoint P&G community enlisted 850,000 stay-at-home moms to create new products and new services, such as Dawn Direct Foam.

Barry Libert, a social media visionary and the founder of Shared Insights (now Mzinga), knows how to use technology to harness the power of what he calls the crowd. Mzinga provides software as a service solution for online communities. It currently manages about 14,000 communities, and services more than one billion monthly page requests from 27 million users in 160 countries worldwide. Libert is chairman of the board of Mzinga. He and his co-authors set up a community and enlisted members to contribute to a book called We Are Smarter than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business. In fact, this is the first book that actually used an online community, based on a Web 2.0 technology from Mzinga, to help create the book. About 4,000 qualified members joined the online community and helped shape the final product. By using the same social networking tools and techniques that their book covers, Libert and his co-authors provide a practical and unique look at online community-building.

He says that building communities isn't all about tools and technologies. "The task requires good facilitation, moderation, and services that go along with them. Remember, people at eBay and Amazon make sure their respective communities work. You need a community manager. The same goes for customer communities and employee communities. Mzinga is the online equivalent to the community sherpa."

In this podcast, Libert talks about the power of communities, the differences between community and business, and the changes businesses must make if they want to build communities. 

William Hurley
Chief architect of open source strategy
BMC Software, Inc.

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In an effort to bring a consistent message about open source to customers and to partners, and to participate more actively in the open source community, BMC in 2007 hired William Hurley (aka whurley), an open source activist, inventor, and chairman of the Open Management Consortium, a non-profit organization advancing the adoption, development, and integration of open source systems management.

Whurley's role as chief architect of open source strategy has many facets to it. BMC's executives depend on guidance for anything that has to do with open source. Whurley contributes to the company's open source strategy, as well as carries it out. As an evangelist, he is the BMC open source voice at IT venues. He manages BMC's presence in the open source community by getting customers involved with it. In fact, management has encouraged whurley to maintain all of his open source community connections.

In this second of two podcasts, whurley, without mincing words, talks about a meeting that he and 30 other open source illuminaries had at Microsoft to discuss that company's position on openness. Whurley talks about what he observed at that meeting. He also discusses his challenge of maintaining the balance between BMC's marketing efforts and the involvement of BMC customers in helping to develop products that will leverage open source.

William Hurley
Chief architect of open source strategy
BMC Software, Inc.

Play Podcast (Right click to download)

In an effort to bring a consistent message about open source to customers and to partners, and to participate more actively in the open source community, BMC in 2007 hired William Hurley (aka whurley), an open source activist, IBM Master Inventor, and chairman of the Open Management Consortium, a non-profit organization advancing the adoption, development, and integration of open source systems management.

Whurley's role as chief architect of open source strategy has many facets to it. BMC's executives depend on guidance for anything that has to do with open source. Whurley contributes to the company's open source strategy, as well as carries it out. As an evangelist, he is the BMC open source voice at IT venues. He manages BMC's presence in the open source community by getting customers involved with it. In fact, management has encouraged whurley to maintain all of his open source community connections.

In the second podcast, whurley, without mincing words, will talk about a meeting that he and 30 other open source illuminaries had at Microsoft to discuss that company's position on openness. Whurley talks about what he observed at that meeting. He also discusses his challenge of maintaining the balance between BMC's marketing efforts and the involvement of BMC customers in helping to develop products that will leverage open source.

Robert Thomas
Author and Executive Director
Accenture's Institute for High Performance Business Leadership

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Almost everyone agrees that anyone who seeks to lead must get firsthand experience. Experience, however, by itself doesn't guarantee learning. What matters most is what one makes of experience, particularly traumatic and often unplanned crucible events that challenge one as a leader.

This conclusion comes from research done by Robert Thomas, executive director at Accenture's Institute of High Performance Business Leadership and an associate professor at Tuft University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Most of the information analyzed in Thomas's new book, Crucibles of Leadership: How to Learn from Experience to Become a Great Leader, comes from interviews with leaders selected on the basis of their proven ability to grow and to sustain an organization during times of trial.

In this podcast, Thomas talks about what some CEOs have learned from their crucibles, how even CIOs can leverage their crucibles to move up the ranks, and how C-level executives can help emerging leaders learn from their experiences.

Cheryl Perkins
Founder and President of Innovationedge

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Innovation can deliver a desirable experience for your customers, and sustainable growth for your company. Many companies, however, struggle with how to deliver top-line growth and true business innovation. Meanwhile, come companies have become astounded by the curveballs being thrown at them because of rising energy costs in the global economy.

Getting corporate innovation right goes beyond delivering the next generation product. Cheryl Perkins practiced a holistic innovation model while she was chief innovation officer for Kimberly-Clark. This model has become the underpinning of her strategic innovation consulting practice called Innovationedge. She says, "We started the practice to deliver a roadmap so companies can get their leadership teams focused on key priorities and capabilities so they can start to innovate."

Faisal Hoque
IT thought leader, author, and CEO of BTM Corporation

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Many CIOs grapple with how to align IT with the needs of their businesses. They have to demonstrate the value their role serves and to make sure technology works well within their businesses. Meanwhile, a mobile global workforce, the growing dependency on social media, and the push for more utility computing based on service-oriented architecture are driving businesses to converge their IT strategy with their business strategy. In a converged company, information, not the technology behind it, is what matters to all constituents the company serves. As a result, CIOs take on the new role of information officer not chief IT officer. They become more involve in strategy planning and in the governance process. Moreover, they look at how technology enables the business architecture and how the business manages the overall investment portfolio.

No one knows more about getting out of the alignment trap and moving toward convergence than Faisal Hoque, founder and CEO of BTM Corporation; founder of the BTM Institute, a not-for-profit IT think tank; and author of five books on business technology management. In fact, a decade ago, Hoque conceived and developed a unique holistic business model which looks at the relationship between business and technology in the following areas: governance, strategy and platform, enterprise architecture, investment management, and the maturity of the overall management structure. The result is a converged organization where business and technology come together to drive innovation, which, in turn, fuels growth and profitability.

In this podcast, Hoque provides an overview of the organizational and philosophy changes CIOs need to consider if they want to transition from alignment to convergence. He also talks about the BTM Institute's Business Technology Convergence Index, a five-year study that quantifies the relationship between the way global companies value their technology investments and the companies' revenues and profitability. He says, "Companies with mature converged business technology management practices, such as FedEx, UPS, and Procter & Gamble, have better financial performance than their competitors. Think about it. Today, both FedEx and UPS are information services companies, not just movers of packages and trucks."

Robert Reeg
Interim President of Global Technology and Operations
MasterCard Worldwide

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Each year, MasterCard processes more than a trillion dollars' worth of credit card transactions between its 25,000,000 acceptance locations in 210 countries worldwide. Net revenues for 2007 were $4.1 billion, a 22-percent increase versus the same period in 2006. Information technology drives MasterCard's three card business services: franchiser of acceptance locations that are guaranteed through MasterCard's network; processor of all payment transactions through the network and the final settlement of dollars with the financial institutions; and consultant offering a data warehouse of intelligence to help customers, such as merchants and banks, to make the best use of payments.

Robert Reeg, interim president of global technology and operations at MasterCard Worldwide, says that he doesn't worry about aligning IT with the business. He says, "We're one and the same. IT and the business are completely connected." In fact, Reeg leverages IT talent around the world to build and to manage MasterCard's massive network. He has even created the role of the business technologist as a way to develop future IT leaders.

In this podcast, Reeg talks about how his organization has adapted to the current economy to maintain its position in the marketplace, what processes, best practices, and new technologies are in place to manage a global organization, what role outsourcing plays in the IT operations, and how leveraging diversity can improve the innovation process.

• The Role of Metrics in Driving Interactive Performance
• Integrating New Media into the Marketing Plan
• How the Convergence of Media Online Affects Marketing and PR
• Managing your Digital Landscape
• Trends and Technologies Driving Social Interaction
• Building a High-Impact User Experience
• and More...

The conference will feature two Keynotes, Brian K. Magierski, Co-Founder & Chief Development Officer at nGenera Corporation who will address "Social Commerce and Its Impact on Business"; and Pete Hayes, Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Communications at AMD has a presentation entitled "Get into the Click-Stream: An Alternative to Driving Traffic to Your Site."

Interactive Austin promises to be the premier Interactive Marketing event in 2008, thanks to a number of supporting organizations that will be promoting the event through their networks. They include FG Squared, Live Oak 360, Apogee Search, The Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, The Interactive Marketing Association, the Austin Technology Council, and Business District Magazine.

If you have questions about the event, feel free to contact Jason Myers, publisher of Business District Magazine at Jason@abdmag.com or (512) 919-4563

I hope to see you at the JJ Pickle Center on June 19th!

Tom

Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross
Chief Reputation Strategist at Weber Shandwick

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In 2007, a major company issued a statement saying that it had dismissed its CIO for violating an important corporate policy. The nature of the corporate policy wasn't revealed. Just about every IT publication carried news of the event. For weeks IT bloggers posted comments about what the CIO could have done to be let go. Eventually, the noise level around this executive's dismissal died down, and the executive took a new job in an area outside of IT.

In this podcast, enterpriseleadership.org asked one of the world's most sought-after authorities on executive reputation to talk about how C-level executives, especially CEOs, build their reputations based on their corporate strategies, what they need to do to maintain them, and what challenges they face in developing and executing their corporate strategies.

And as those of us who have blogs tend to do, Allison turned that conversation into the topic of her next blog article.  Check it out!

Tom

Dr. Art Boni
Professor at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University

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Because of the rapidly accelerating pace of change in global business today, C-level executives in all sizes of companies need to respond quickly to changes in their business climate. Thus, executives have to be aware, not only of their own external environment, but they have to immerse themselves in their industries, and to look at society -- both nationally and globally. By understanding where changes come from or what changes to make, executives can take advantage of new opportunities. Meanwhile, executives must also focus on innovation and entrepreneurship in order to be successful. In fact, the Carnegie Mellon MBA program looks at innovation in organizations, ranging from startups to the Fortune 500 companies.

In this podcast, Dr. Art Boni, the director of the Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, talks about how entrepreneurial leadership and innovative drive corporate growth.

Here’s the deal from OpenCut.org:

OpenCut is a completely open-source film competition designed to encourage people to take professionally shot material and edit it in their own way. As there is no "one way" to tell a story, so too can stories benefit from being re-edited and re-told from many different vantage points and perspectives.

The winner of OpenCut 1.0 will receive a brand new AJA IO HD from Silverado. They will also be recognized as the "editor-of-record" at IMDB and will have their cut submitted to multiple film festivals.

Robert Shaver and I will co-edit the film with creative input on the story from Carolyn Baehr. Regardless of who wins, we'll get experience in using Final Cut Pro with RED 4k digital video, and we get to keep the results for our own use. Very exciting.

Tom

W. Hord Tipton
Former CIO, U.S. Department of the Interior

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When Hord Tipton became CIO of the U.S. Dept. of Interior, he knew he would be wrestling with some daunting IT issues, especially in security. In fact, the Department was reeling from a December 2001 court order that disconnected all Interior systems from the Internet. That order resulted in a multi-million lawsuit brought by beneficiaries of Individual Indian Trust accounts held by the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs, based in part on hackers burrowing into the Trust's accounts.

By making a good case for business systems security, Tipton managed to convince the Interior's officials to increase the $4 million annual IT network and security budget to $100 million. Tipton and his staff spent the next four years upgrading systems security and getting all of the Interior's systems reconnected to the Internet. Tipton even gave his IT staff one year to become certified in security. When he received a lot of staff resistance to his challenge, the 60-year-old Tipton did something unusual for a CIO: He became a Certified Information Systems Security Professional. This certification matched the job at hand.

Under Tipton's leadership, the U.S. Dept. of the Interior established sound IT security policies and guidelines, and initiated testing and IT security training programs throughout the agency. Now retired from government service, Tipton is a board member of ISC2, the organization that oversees the CISSP exam and maintains the credentialing process.

Patrick Gray
Author and president
Prevoyance Group

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Today's CIOs come from many disciplines outside of IT, but they all face a similar challenge -- how to take their IT organization from being a cost-centric services provider to being perceived as a valuable business partner. That's the question Patrick Gray answers in his new book, Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology. His book provides a necessary roadmap for shifting IT from an operational entity that simply manages technology, to a powerhouse that combines strategy and technology to deliver measurable business results and long-term value.

As principal and president of the Prevoyance Group, a strategic IT consulting firm, Gray has worked on this issue with clients ranging from OfficeMax to SAP. Prevoyance Group's strategic IT consulting combines applied strategy and process improvement to ensure large IT organizations measurable monetary returns.

In this podcast, Patrick Gray talks about why CIOs don't belong to the business strategy circle, how the CIO role has to change to accommodate breakthrough IT, and what CIOs should do to accelerate that change.

Tony Velleca
CIO of UST Global

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To provide end-to-end IT services and business processing outsourcing solutions for Global 2000 companies, UST Global uses a customer-centric global engagement model that combines local and off-sites resources with the cost, scale, and quality advantages of off-shore operations. This customer-centric model forms the core of the company's values of how it operates and how it serves customers.

Tony Velleca, UST Global's CIO says that the company strives to build a long-lasting strategic relationship with each customer. "We empower our employees to provide value beyond what's outlined in a customer contract."

A project portfolio management system provides the technology underpinning for the customer engagement model. Velleca says, "We can have as many as 660 projects going at the same time." The system Velleca deployed enables UST Global's personnel to prioritize company projects, and to improve the performance of those projects while reducing their costs.

Dr. Robert Miles
Author and president of Corporate Transformation Resources

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To overcome stagnant revenues, Symantec embarked on a corporate transformation integrating disconnected business subsidiaries into one cohesive business, focused on customer needs. Symantec couldn't have done this initiative without the help of Dr. Robert H. Miles, who developed the accelerate corporate transformation, or ACT, framework to enable change. He has written many books on the subject and heads up a corporate transformation consulting practice and serves as chairman of two other consulting firms that use his ACT framework.

Dr. Miles developed the ACT framework for business transformation while he was carrying out executive leadership programs for CEOs at Harvard Business School. The first version of ACT emphasized focus and execution. After spending time in Silicon Valley, Dr. Miles expanded the ACT framework to include speed and engagement. He says, "These four competencies become the bedrock of an organization's management process."

In this podcast, Dr. Miles talks about how the ACT framework can help C-level executives to plan, to launch, and to refocus corporate transformation efforts, how companies have benefited from this framework, and why speed, not necessarily agility, is the new management discipline.

Jim Buckmaster
CEO of Craigslist

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When it comes to looking for a job, an apartment, or even a good garage sale, more than 26 million unique visitors each month turn to a Craigslist.com site in one of 450 cities in 50 countries. No one can dispute the cult-like reputation that Craigslist, founded by Craig Newmark, has earned. As a company, Craigslist runs frugal with 25 employees working out of an old Victorian building in San Francisco. However, Craigslist has proven that even a well-meaning, grassroots bunch of nerds can put a big dent in the advertising profits earmarked for thousands of newspapers. Let's not forget how Craigslist, which is 25-percent owned by eBay, has changed the way many of us live and work.

So how did Craigslist, which started as Newmark's idea for a San Francisco events list 12 years, come this far? Why would a company that could be making hundreds of millions of dollars each year continue to offer a primarily free service? What drives Craigslist's quirky form of innovation and culture? These are some of the things enterpriseleadership.org asked Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist CEO. Since 2000, Buckmaster has led Craigslist to be the most-used classifieds in any medium, and one of the world's most popular Web sites.