Big Companies Have More Resources to Commit
That large sucking sound you hear is not from jobs leaving the US, but rather the time that disappears because of planning, executing, listening, responding and reporting on social media, time that small businesses find hard to allocate. Notes Nelleke Kloet, Marketing Director at fast-growing startup TagMan, “Social media done right requires resources in terms of money as well as people, which bigger companies have more of.”

Social Media Has Matured Into a “Must-Have” Asset
While small companies are focused on getting the right people on the bus and their next big “pivot,” thereby making social less of a priority, large companies are three times more likely to see social as a transformative proposition for their enterprise. Explains Constance Walker of PPL Electric Utilities, who weathered a storm-caused outage in 2010 by communicating to customers via social channels, “That nailed it for our management as far as the importance of social media.”

Recognizing the Need for a Designated Driver
It takes a certain level of maturity to realize that, just because you have car keys, it doesn’t mean you should get behind the wheel. In the past few years, larger companies have evolved their approach to social, replacing “twinterns” with professionals, and are four times as likely to have a designated social driver. Grant Johnston, CMO of Pegasystems, notes, “We’ve added another dedicated full-time resource to further our social media efforts, and we’re confident that this role will continue to increase.”

If Your Ears are Burning, at Least You’re Listening
As the social part of social media becomes better understood, brands come to realize that listening and responding is as important as or even more so than just talking. Interestingly, large companies are twice as likely to be monitoring 24/7 and responding in real time than small companies. Clearly, large companies like Intel have the advantage here. Explains Jennifer Lashua of Intel, who has a social team around the world, “We have the ability to monitor and moderate 24×7 and in multiple languages.”

Social Media is Not All Fun and Games
To steal a bit from Allstate’s campaign, mayhem is everywhere. This is especially true in social media, as the folks at Domino’s, Comcast and Pfizer would no doubt warn you. Large companies are increasingly aware of this fact and therefore are five times as lucky to have a disaster plan developed or in the works. Adds Greg Tirico, Senior Social Media Manager at Sage, “We are in the lucky majority of social media participants that have had the opportunity to learn from other’s mistakes. It seems very natural to have a disaster plan much like a company would put a business continuity plan in place.”

A Little Training Goes a Long Way
Only someone with a death wish would try to run a marathon without training first. This is especially true for social media, in which a little training can make a huge difference; yet, nearly half of the small companies I surveyed had no training in place. One exception to this finding was a non-profit organization called God’s Love We Deliver. Emily Findley handles social for GLWD and served up this explanation: “By training our staff in the basics of having an account, retweeting our work and sharing our posts, we’re further involving them in spreading the message about the work that we do.”

Power to the People Doesn’t Play as Well in Big Co Land
The one area in which small companies seem to be ahead is their willingness to encourage all employees to be involved in social media. In fact, while half of small companies encourage this behavior, only one-fourth of big ones do. While this may be done out of necessity for small companies, big companies that restrict access to social media nonetheless are missing out on a huge opportunity to unleash an army of advocates for what Sage’s Tirico calls an “overall customer-centric market approach.”

It’s Hard to Get Ahead, If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going
Though it is a relatively new concept, large companies are more than twice as likely to have a social media road map in place, while more than four out of 10 small companies are prepared to wing it. This is obviously a mistake. As Erin Bush of Neustar summarizes, “They don’t put the time, effort and resources against it in the proper way and they expect to see results immediately. I like to remind folks that if you have no social media presence at all, it’ll take 18 months to see results. Most companies don’t want to wait that long.”

For a full copy of  The Social Media Fitness Report or to see how socially fit your business is relative to other companies, click here.

DN: Do you think there is still skepticism among B2B marketers that social can help them achieve their business goals?
In conversations I’ve had with peers in the industry I think there’s broad agreement that social marketing can be effective in business to business. However, there’s still a major shift underway in terms of the resources aligned to social and to digital approaches in general (beyond banner advertising and search term marketing.)

DN: Are there any risks in terms of pushing messaging or ignoring customer service by having social run out of the marketing department?
Yes. More importantly, it is risky to look at “social” as somehow separate from business processes and create distinct “social” teams. I feel the same way about “digital.” The more sophisticated or mature approach is to see both social and digital as modes of interaction that can affect any business process. Our Social Business Management council has representation from sales, supply chain, product development, HR, security, legal etc in addition to marketing and communications.

I know I seem to interview folks from IBM a lot but that is only because I think they are doing so many things right especially in the area of social media.  (And oh by the way, I’m going to be interviewing another IBM’er May 3rd: Real-world B2B Social Media Marketing Success: CTAM Conversation with Ed Abrams of IBM so you can expect more to come on these pages).  This is my second interview with Ethan McCarty who holds the title of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM. As you will quickly see, Ethan gets it and as such requires little introduction.  Thanks Ethan.

DN: Most companies especially B2B struggle to develop engaging content. What’s your trick?
At IBM we are focused on quality standards for everything from videos to info-graphics to social network landing pages and tweets. We have a strong understanding of our brand that we can rely on and extend to our teams globally and even our agency partners.

DN: You mentioned  that IBM is in the process of auditing all of your social channels” — what do hope to learn from this audit?
As I mentioned, we are focused on quality standards — but also improving the signal to noise ratio on social networks. For example, reducing the number of IBM community pages on Facebook that were started with the best of intentions by IBMers around the world but then became stagnant. We’ve had really good success with this already — and it just means that someone looking to connect with IBM can find us easily and get a better experience at the end of the day.

DN: Besides regulatory risks, do you think there is anything else holding Financial Services firms back from committing more time/money to social media?
Beyond regulatory concerns, I think the inability for marketers to provide the business with a social media ROI the way we do other mediums continues to play a role in firms commitments. This seems to be the item that most of the naysayers point to.

DN: Can you shed some light on why your organization developed a disaster plan? Did you by chance have a disaster first?
No disasters. Due to the nature of our work, our company takes disaster planning very seriously. Our communications and mediums to distribute those are all included in our planning.

DN: How have you dealt with customer service related SM issues and / or recruiting via social?
For now we continue to manage social out of our marketing area. When customer service related items come up, they are assigned and resolved through members of our customer service team (call center).

DN: What are the barriers to creating highly engaging content?
It’s not that the content is not engaging so much as the topic. We’ve noticed a consistently steady rate of view, clicks, etc but not less comments. So a lot of people are consuming our content without responding/commenting. While we continue to create more compelling content, I believe consumers personal financial issues/questions/thoughts are something they are not entirely comfortable sharing with their Facebook friends. Funny that people will share details about their personal life via social channels, but are hesitant to let others see they struggle with financial literacy…

DN: Can you speak to the expected benefits of coordinating the customer experience across all communication channels?
We look to provide the same value, support, education for our consumers no matter which channel they prefer to engage us in. From a content creation standpoint, I challenge my team to the three channel test. If a piece of content is not compelling enough to be utilized in some form in at least three consumer channels, then it’s probably not worth creating.

DN: What if anything is holding you back from being in more channels?
If this is referring to social media channels, the answer is resources. (for content management, response, and compliance/regulatory review). Although. I believe this as an area we will expand upon in the future.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-disciplined social media team?
Braun: At AXA Equitable, we see the benefits of having a cross-disciplined team in driving the social media strategy and execution for our organization. Because social touches so many areas of our business, it is important to have a coordinated effort that engages all key players in our decisions around this evolving platform. This ensures we are thinking through all of the nuances that can impact our brand image, our PR strategy and how our employees, advisors and customers are engaging with our brand. While a cross-disciplined team may require more check-points along the way, the result of having collaboration and insights from all key areas of the firm ensures that we “own” the experience together.

Greene: It depends on your goal. Rather than simply using social as a tactic, the most effective brands use social as an organic part of everything they do. Therefore, a cross-discipline team, that touches many areas of the company is an effective, collaborative approach.

DN: Can you talk about the benefits of doing a social media audit?
Braun: We conducted a social media audit about a year ago and it proved extremely helpful in understanding the opportunities available to us. By looking at competitors in our industry, as well as companies in other categories, we recognized the potential of social media, which helped us set our priorities for the year ahead. It also helped us refine our social media guidelines for employees, and identify new ways to use social to proactively enhance our brand image.”

DN: What compelled you all to set up a social media training program?
Greene: With social media still being relatively new, and touching everyone either in their personal lives, or at work (and often in both places), there are no standardized rules. In fact, the rules continue to evolve almost daily. Therefore, with so much at stake with brand image and reputation in today’s fracturing marketplace, companies are well served to establish clear parameters that can be consistently applied and followed across their organizations. Otherwise, simple, sometimes innocent mistakes can happen and be disastrous to a company’s brand and reputation. When this happens, it can be very difficult to recover.

DN: What are the advantages of having a real-time dashboard?
Greene: Metrics are crucial. Listening and monitoring are really becoming the new frontier. After all, the better you become at interpreting the data, the more effective conversations you will be able to build with your social ecosystem, and the deeper the engagement you can create.

DN: Can you shed some light on how your organization came to have a disaster plan? Did you have a disaster first?
It’s all about communication. We didn’t have a disaster take place, but if one does, we feel confident in our ability to work through it because of the strong communication across departments in our company. We have social media guidelines and a community management playbook that both outline the steps to take in a crisis. My supervisor and I collaborated with people across departments to create these documents.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-discipline team in place for social media?
In my opinion, it’s not just a benefit for social media to cross departments…it’s a necessity. A tweet or a post on your company’s Facebook wall could pertain to any topic: customer service, job openings, products, services, advice, etc. It’s essential that the person in charge of your social media efforts is in touch with every department so that he/she can provide an answer to the fan/follower as quickly as possible. That’s what makes a company stand out and stay connected to their fans through social media.

DN: How are you developing such effective content at CareerBuilder?
Our team listens to the feedback coming from our fans on social media and looks over a report on that feedback on a regular basis. Also, each person creating our social content is up-to-date and informed on our industry so that we can give our audience the most relevant information.

DN: How have you been able develop to a consistent customer experience across all of your social channels?
Again, it comes back to communication. I stay in touch with our customer service team on a regular basis (at least monthly). They’ve been fully trained on our engagement tool and I keep them updated on major changes to the social platforms. We are a team, and it’s important to know that and do whatever it takes so that all admins feel that they are a part of the team, working together to achieve our social media goals. We also regularly recognize our team members for outstanding performance.

DN: Can you offer any insight to as to why you decided to streamline your accounts and address the benefits of doing so?
If someone wants to connect with us through social media, it should be very easy for them to find us and begin engaging. By having too many accounts, a company can make this harder for a user to find and connect with them. We evaluated which accounts were most important to us, and in some cases we merged them, in others we closed them. We did this with our audience in mind and what would make it easiest for them.

DN: Do you have any thoughts on why large B2C companies scored higher [on the Social Media Fitness Test] than B2B firms and smaller B2C companies?
B2B has been slower to adopt social media overall. In my opinion, it’s easier for a consumer to pick up on social media because he/she can use it and learn it on their own time. For a business to use social media, it must first consider what needs and goals it will fulfill, who will run it, what content will be shared, what metrics will be measured, etc. This takes more time, research and consideration for the business.

DN: Any thoughts on why large companies had higher “fitness” scores than small companies?
That surprises me as I think the “free” media has been explored in the past better by smaller companies. I guess with time, resources have increased and improved scores. Resources, in terms of money as well as people, resources which bigger companies have more of.

DN: Do you think social media can be even more powerful for small companies than big companies?
Yes, I think it can have better ROI for small companies and more accessible if you have limited budgets.

DN: What role does social media perform in TagMan’s overall business plan?
It’s one of the elements of the marketing mix. We ensure we know the exact role of each media and focus on that.  For example, Facebook has a specific role for employees and to get to know the people behind the company. Each Linkedin group and profile has a specific role. For example, the company LinkedIn page is about our company and the people (great for comparison to competitors business) whereas the TagMan group is about news and discussions for people working with tags.

DN: What are your goals with social media?
We use it for thought leadership mostly but we have seen, for some campaigns, it has actually worked for lead generation too. It depends on the call to action.

DN: You were among the minority in which social media has permeated all aspects of your business. What is behind your commitment to social media?
We see the benefits of social media when we run TagMan attribution reports for our clients so we know what role it can play in the marketing mix. We also use our own real-time attribution reporting for our website to help us what role it plays in our business.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having all your employees be active in social media?
All our employees are brand embassadors so they should be able to speak about your brand in the appropriate way. If you have to restrict it it actually means you have not done enough ‘marketing’ on your own employees – which is ofetn the case in larger companies. The benefits are that you can tap into their networks so more reach as well as its more genuin and not scripted which makes it more believable for the audience.

DN: Large B2C companies significantly outscored large B2B companies in this study. Why do you think this is the case?
While social has proven to have vast benefits for all companies that become adept at it, there’s little doubt that B2C organizations – especially those with millions of customers that come into daily contact with consumers – have more opportunities to show they’ve embraced this. At Pega our target-account approach differs from many other B2C organizations. That’s not to say we’re not embracing social media, because we are, but we’re leveraging it in a far more targeted way than most B2C organizations do based on the size of our audience.

DN: Can you speak to the role social media plays in Pega’s overall marketing mix?
Social has become an integral and formidable medium for us to leverage throughout marketing as we at Pega view it as part of our overall customer-centric market approach. We’re active on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn to ensure we’re engaging with our customers appropriately but also so we can continue building our brand awareness. We’ve added another dedicated full time resource to further our social media efforts and we’re confident that this role will continue to increase.

DN: You mentioned that social wasn’t gaining as much traction as you’d like. What are doing to address this?
I’m actually dedicating much more resource as traction is building faster this year.

DN: Is there a hope that if more employees are active in social that this could benefit the whole company?
We are encouraging more people to be involved in our overall social media efforts and we want to make sure the right people are engaged with customers and prospects across the whole client management lifecycle, whether it’s account executives, industry solutions, public relations, as well as ensure they know what’s appropriate and what’s not in this medium.

DN: Lots of companies especially B2B struggle to develop engaging content. Do you think this is category wide problem?
Yes. Many companies have reams of content, but it’s too centered on company promotion vs. customer and prospect engagement, when taking into consideration what stage of the buying cycle they are in (e.g. someone just surfing your Web site for the first time is not ready for a “how to pick a supplier” checklist). Also, we want to make sure we present content in the most digestible way possible. While they’ve no doubt proven useful at many things, 140 characters or 300-word blogs aren’t always the most appropriate way to do this.

I had the pleasure of catching up with Diego Pereda as part of the Social Media Fitness Study follow up interviews. Diego is the 
Social Marketing Program Manager
, Corporate Marketing and Communications at Xerox Corporation and offers a number of insights, dare i say, worth copying. Thanks Diego.

DN: B2C companies seems to be ahead of B2B brands when it comes to social media. Do you think B2B marketers are skeptical about social media?
At this point in the B2C world, social media is mission critical. Consumers have demonstrated the power of social media and social media is one of the primary ways for consumer brands to interact and engage with their target audience. For B2B companies there is not always a clear connection to how their efforts in social media will translate in business results. Therefore, skepticism still exists but there are more cases from B2B companies that have embraced Social Media and are being successful with it so it is a lot easier to make the case to a Senior Executive from a B2B company that social media is here to stay, it will help their brand, or customer engagement or reduce support cost. There are many examples of B2B companies achieving just that via Social Media such as Cisco, Intel etc.

DN: How did social became a vital part of Xerox’s marketing activities?
Xerox has been developing its social marketing practice in earnest for several years, but we really stepped on the accelerator in late 2009 via a small group of what we call “social media natives” from across our business. As the practice has grown, we’ve kept track of our approaches to the work as well as some key indicators of customer engagement on the social channels. Our emerging social media gurus are engaging with prospects and customers where it makes sense for each business, and using the dominant channels – blogs, twitter, Facebook, YouTube, customer forums, etc.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-disciplined social media team? Was this hard to set up?
We have a cross disciplinary team that has representatives from across the company but is led by the corporate marketing organization. The team was not hard to set up as it was an evolution of the first team that started to develop social media at Xerox. A multidisciplinary team is critical as it allows you to have multiple perspectives from all the various parts of the business when developing the company SM plans and strategies. For example it is important we take into consideration when we craft our social media plans that we understand how a customer engages Xerox for support (offline and online) and understand what is the best social media platform or tool to use to help customers in seek of support.

Having a broad range of perspectives at the social media table is important so that we have access to people who are in each of the businesses and therefore our plan, strategy and tactics make sense not just from a corporate or marketing perspective, but also from a support, sales and regional perspective.

DN: Very few companies have set up a “center of excellence” for SM training. Xerox has. Can you speak to the advantages of this approach?
Our Center of Excellence is chartered with developing and executing the strategy for Social Media @ Xerox. Part of the strategy for last year was to grow the expertise of Social Media within the Xerox marketing and communications community so we developed a course for all communicators at Xerox and a series of social platform guides to teach them about using the social platforms like twitter. We also created a twice-a-month virtual get together called “Blog hour” so any of our bloggers or anyone interested in blogging can join and ask questions about anything related to blogging (technical, content, etc) or just listen to bloggers share best practices, concerns, etc And the Facebook Page administrators get together (via phone conferences) quarterly and maintain a lively discussion on our internal web collaboration platform.

The benefits we have derived from the Center of Excellence efforts and activities are that we have empowered more of our marketing and communications community to get involved in social media and to do it with the benefit of training and best practices at their disposal. We have witnessed a growth on all of our major platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs) and we attribute a great deal of this growth and development of pods of social media practioners outside of the Center of Excellence to these efforts.

DN: Why do think this is so challenging for B2B marketers to create engaging content?
I think companies in the B2B space sometimes lose sight of the people making the decisions within the businesses that they are trying to reach via social media. At the end of the day whether B2C or B2B you should be producing content that will resonate with the people that that will be making some decision: purchase, recommendation, RFP decision, etc Our CMO often refers to it as B2P, Business-to-people.

DN: Only 1 in 3 B2B companies have started/completed an audit of their social media account.  What’s up with that?
I think that this is actually a good indication that B2B companies are seeing a need to audit. This is something that we are planning to do in 2012.

One of the great parts of conducting the Social Media Fitness Study is that I got to interview a number of really savvy social media practitioners.  Among these is Greg Tirico, Senior Social Media Manager for Sage, a big software solution provider for small and medium sized businesses.  Greg offers insights into the role social plays in Sage’s marketing mix and of particular note, how they grew their social footprint by 50% in a month with the help of direct mail.  Thanks Greg!

DN: Can you speak to the role social media plays in Sage’s overall marketing mix?
The principal marketing focus at Sage is to build brand awareness, particularly around a key differentiator, which is a better customer experience. To that end, social media is one tool of many that supports the objective, including online, print and broadcast advertising, web strategy, PR, employee engagement and fine tuning of every other communication touch-point, all designed to deliver a superior customer experience. With each passing marketing campaign social media becomes more integrated in our overall marketing mix. Like many organizations, our social media activities started out as a silo within the marketing organization. This was important at first as it allowed the social media practitioners at Sage to experiment with their tactics. More recently, we have seen tremendous results when social media is properly integrated with print based marketing campaigns. For example, we increased our overall Like count by 50% in less than a month through a direct mail campaign in which respondents were encouraged to share their business ambitions with us on one of our Facebook product pages. People are still contributing today even though the contest is over!

DN: What are the benefits of having social media in the marketing department?
The clearest benefit to a centralized marketing approach is the ability to quickly adapt to changes coming at us from the social networks themselves. For example, the Facebook Timeline implementation for business pages is a forced change with a tight deadline. With an organized team of Social Media Leads at Sage we are able to easily adapt to this change and make sure the marketing teams have the information they need to be as effective as possible. There are benefits to a cross disciplined team as well. Many of the customer support organizations at Sage have started to participate in our internal conversations about social media and we are strongly encouraging this level of interaction through training programs and a greater level of information sharing.

DN: What triggered the development of a disaster plan at Sage?
There is not a particular instance that drove us to the creation of a disaster plan. We are in the lucky majority of social media participants that have had the opportunity to learn from other’s mistakes. It seems very natural to have a disaster plan much like a company would put a business continuity plan in place. The effort is minimal and you can test the process with minor negative comments on Twitter or Facebook.

DN: Do you have any thoughts on why developing engaging content is so challenging for B2B companies?
Generally speaking, B2B companies are used to talking about features and benefits based on bullet points from a sell sheet. Repurposing this content, verbatim, for a social network is not what most would consider compelling content. At first, we all struggled with this. Now, those social media marketers that have been paying attention to their audience by channel understand what truly resonates.

DN: Few companies have been able to deliver a consistent experience across all social channels. How have you been able to achieve this?
Consistency can be interpreted in terms of visual identity or tone of voice. From an overall brand identity perspective, we do have guidelines for tone of voice – essentially that our tone should be friendly and conversational in support of our role as trusted advisors to our customers. However, there’s leeway to ensure that our people can adapt to their audiences. From a visual identity perspective, we have been working to bring all of our channels together under a Sage master brand. Sage is moving to a master brand from a series of product specific brands and our social media channels will absolutely reflect this. In this case, the visual reinforcement of the Sage brand across all of our social media channels will be clear to the visitor.

DN: Do you think there is still skepticism among B2B marketers that social can help them achieve their business goals?
Initially, there was skepticism in the B2B space regarding social media marketing activities. Today, the medium as a marketing tool is being embraced and many B2B companies are playing catch-up with B2C firms. The mix of individual channels is not always the same across B2B and B2C. For example, LinkedIn is an excellent source of referral traffic for many B2B firms. Conversely, Facebook is the largest source of referral traffic for B2C companies.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-discipline team to handle social media?
Social media is a function that crosses many disciplines, and failure to recognize this leads to an unnecessarily restricted team that cannot operate at its full potential. At Discovery, social media supports marketing, communications, digital, ad sales, commerce, distribution, government relations and other business units. As a result, the company benefits from having a cross-disciplined team that can add value in many different areas, instead of just one. This structure requires flexibility in reporting as well as a lot of communication and coordination across teams, but it yields a much richer social media strategy that can be successfully integrated to meet many business goals at once.

DN: What’s your trick for developing such effective content?
Effective content takes into consideration the reasons that fans are following social media accounts in the first place. Why are they there? Do they want product information? Behind-the-scenes scoops? Exclusives? Discounts? Substantive content about particular subjects? Trends? Understanding the passions and interests of your audience is the first step toward developing engaging content. Beyond that, it’s important to set a very high bar for the quality of what gets posted on social platforms. Social media teams should ask themselves, before posting, “If I were a fan of this page or account, would I be inspired to click, share, or otherwise engage with this content?” If the answer is no, then the content shouldn’t be posted. Fans will reward good content with engagement and will ignore the rest.

DN: Turns out, large B2C companies scored higher [on the Social Media Fitness Survey] than B2B firms. Do you have any thoughts on why that may be the case?
I think this is because social media is more successful as a B2C tool, with the bulk of the activity on the platforms being for personal and social reasons, rather than for professional ones (the exception being those of us who work in social media and those looking to network). From a numbers perspective, there is also more opportunity to reach people, with personal accounts far exceeding business accounts. Additionally, given the way most social platforms are designed, with the exception of LinkedIn, it’s simply easier to share content with consumers.

DN: How have you dealt with customer service related issues with social media governed by the marketing department?
While our Social Media Center of Excellence is within the Marketing organization, we are highly matrixed with teams across the company and around the world. Our extended team includes PR, product teams, HR, recruiting, and many others. It’s these relationships that allow us to be effective both proactively and reactively (when needed) on our social media networks.

DN: Can you talk about Intel’s social media disaster plan?
Intel has a process in place for constant monitoring of social media conversations about our brand. This team is located around the world, so we have the ability to monitor and moderate 24×7 and in multiple languages. We use monitoring tools to identify and escalate issues when needed; and we respond directly when needed. We have well-defined processes for crisis management, should this be necessary. Thankfully we haven’t had to put these processes in place often, but they have been tested once or twice over the past few years.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a real-time dashboard?
We launched the Intel Social Cockpit this year at CES and it’s now a key part of our social media program, enabling us to understand what’s performing well, what’s trending, and how much share of voice Intel is receiving in social conversations. At CES, we used the Social Cockpit to see what keywords were trending on top, specifically which announcements from our CEO’s keynote were getting the most attention through social networks. We then honed in on those topics and created new content (videos and photos from our booth) aligning to these. We were able to do all of this within a matter of an hour or two, which enabled us to continue fueling the dialogue with highly relevant, timely content.

DN:  Why did you decide to streamline Intel’s social media accounts?
The great part about social media is that anyone can participate. This is wonderful from an adoption perspective, but can be tricky from a message consistency, engagement, and risk perspective. A few years ago, we had hundreds of Facebook pages and Twitter handles, but we were finding that only a percent of these had high levels of engagement and large numbers of fans/followers. By streamlining (we now have just 45 Facebook pages), we are able to maximize reach and engagement by aggregating audiences together. We also used data and insights to re-architect our Twitter structure in 2011. The @Intel handle is our signature handle and is the center point for much of what Intel does on Twitter. The @Intel handle together with a set of 10 strategic handles and 40 country allows us to effectively cover a range of topics and grow our follow base while effectively managing each handle and engaging our followers.

DN: How have you been able to create a consistent customer experience across all social channels?
It’s a priority for us to both offer a consistent look and feel across our social networks as well as take advantage of the unique features each offers. For example, our Facebook page and our Google+ page currently feature similar campaign imagery; however we have optimized our Google+ page to take advantage of the Circles feature, whereas Facebook is centered around tabs. Google+ circles provide a really unique way to segment your audience. We know that a software developer wants to hear about different things than a journalist, for example, so we’re asking our followers to ‘opt-in’ to circles which represent topical areas of interest to them. Then, we communicate with that circle about those specific topics of interest. We have also developed a set of global assets which local teams integrate into their Twitter profiles. If you look at our primary handle, @Intel, as well as a country handle, @IntelBrasil for example, you’ll see that we’ve aligned the design to be consistent across both.

To help gain insight into the results of our soon to be published Social Media Fitness Study, I interviewed a number of marketing professionals including Trip Hunter, VP Brand Marketing of FUSION-IO, a recently public company that is doing really well on all fronts.  Trip, as many of you know, worked at Renegade for many years, so of course, I’m completely bias about his talents.  Nonetheless, I think you will find what he has to say quite informative and insightful.

DN: B2C companies outscored B2B companies in the Social Media Fitness study. Do you have any thoughts on why this might be the case?
B2C companies are much better at engaging with people as individuals. B2B companies market like the end consumer isn’t a human being. They are a collection of survey responses and data points. They’re not. They are real- live human beings too that get sad, and find things funny, and care about their overeating.

I also think there is a belief that the level of passion that consumers in B2C have for brands is a lot higher and more a part of ‘who they are’ than exists in B2B brands. People strongly identify with the brands in their life. They help define who they are. “I’m an apple person”, or “I drive a BMW.” You don’t hear so much someone say “I’m an HP 980 server guy”. So I think B2C brands are better positioned to capitalize on this. It is not always true, but it’s a perception among B2B that individuals don’t identify with B2B brands as much, so why bother?

DN: Do you think there is still skepticism among B2B marketers that social can help them achieve their business goals?
I do think there is skepticism here, especially among more established and mature industries, because it is difficult to find a point of view or create content that is newsworthy, or interesting, or engaging. If you can’t get people involved in your story, then you might walk away. Fusion is lucky in that it is a technology that is very innovative, and new, and because of that, techies really pay attention to our story. They are constantly talking about Fusion, and playing with our solutions, and benchmarking them against the existing status quo, and engaging with us. Their passion for Fusion is genuine, and we would be the fool not to engage and share and facilitate in the growth of that passion. A lot of people are asking a lot of questions, because what we do is so revolutionary. If we don’t answer, someone else less qualified will. By facilitating understanding, we ultimately help them find solutions for the current issues that plague traditional data storage architecture.

DN: What is social media doing for your business?
We consistently generate qualified leads through SM. When prospects ask the general community a question about Fusion, we put them directly in touch with someone at Fusion who can answer that question. More often than not, this leads to further conversations which lead to sales. As our director of social media said “I am the SM switchboard operator who connects people to the right person in the right department. I communicate with customers and potential customers directly and help them out. Our efforts are as much about customer service, if not more, than about lead generation.”

DN: Less than 1/3 of the companies surveyed had a disaster plan in place. What triggered the development of a disaster plan at FusionIO and did it work when you had to use it?

There are at least two kinds of disasters: Disasters that shake the house, and those that knock it down. Our disaster plan covers the former well. We’re working on the latter.

Disasters that shake the house happen almost everyday. Someone makes a negative or incorrect comment about us, or incorrectly compares us to a competitor. Our first negative comment through SM was back in 2009, and we have been creating our disaster plan ever since. As a result of that negative comment, we contacted the customer, helped him out, and turned him into an evangelist. He went on to make supportive and positive comments about us from then on. (see below) Recently we’ve been adding “what if” scenarios to the playbook. Being a public company, we have to be prepared.

In general, we’ve learned that the quicker we are able to respond, the more favorably things go. There’s no way to fully measure the impact of our direct communications with followers, whether they be customers, fans, or critics, but we believe it’s invaluable. Because we have been very approachable and communicative, people expect honest and quick answers from us. They know they can reach out to us via social networks and we will respond and help them.

One key component of our plan is to be measured in our response. Sometimes people just want attention-want to be recognized, and you have to know when to walk away. What we have learned is that there is a code of conduct in the community, and many times it is self regulating. Recently a guy made a video about us that wasn’t based in fact. We responded saying we would love to discuss his POV offline as is would be a rather in-depth discussion. He had no interest in doing this-he was looking for attention. But the community dealt with him, discounting his claims and eventually stopped listening. This was a huge homerun for us-So much more credible than if we are telling him he is wrong.

DN: Most companies especially B2B struggle to develop engaging content and get their customers to pitch in. How have you been able to accomplish this?
We are always trying to grow engagement with our customers, and we are not as far along as we would like to be. That said, we are so new that a broad understanding of our technology doesn’t exist yet. People want to know more, so getting them involved is not as hard as it might be for others.

We treat them like the intelligent, opinionated, passionate human beings they are. B to B companies’ customers are still consumers and human beings. We may not have the massive number of followers that consumer brands do, but our fans are just as loyal and passionate.

DN: You mentioned that you are in the process of auditing all of your social channels — what do hope to learn from this audit?
We are hoping to learn a lot of things, especially where we stand relative to our competitors. Since we sent you that answer, we have gathered some revealing numbers. Even though we’re much tinier than our largest competitor, we are gaining followers as a percentage of overall audience faster than they are, and in the area of measurement that really matters–shares–we are also ahead. People click on our links and share our content on Twitter more than they do with our largest competitor, so that is promising.

We also want to find out what we need to do better. B2C companies are known for creating very engaging content on channels such as FB and Twitter-we can learn a lot from them and how some types of B2C efforts can translate across to B2B.

As part of the qualitative portion of our soon to be released Social Media Fitness Study, I had the pleasure of catching up with Pete Abel, SVP of Corporate Communications at Suddenlink.  What I especially like about Pete is his candor.  While he and his team are doing lots of smart things with social media including the development of a cross-disciplined team, a disaster plan and a road map, he fully acknowledges that they need better metrics, a belief most of his peers share.  Enjoy the interview and stay tuned for more insights from other smart marketers in the days ahead.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-disciplined team in place to manage social media?
Starting from the premise that social media is all about having – and maintaining – conversations with customers and other stakeholders, we believe the best, most legitimate conversations are achieved when a diverse group of people participate, each bringing to the dialogue their own unique perspectives and skill sets. To be clear, our approach is not the wild west. The members of our cross-functional team are not renegades. We consult; we coordinate; we check and verify with each other. But at the end of the day, the quality of the conversation is improved – and our customers seem to be happier – when they hear from more than just one voice, or one group with one perspective.

DN: Can you tell me how Suddenlink came to have a social media disaster plan in place?
About three years ago, I was at a thirtieth birthday party for one of my nephews. In the midst of the celebration, I was notified that a disgruntled customer had opened up a Twitter account with a handle that used our company name, preceded by an expletive. Within a few hours, this customer had accumulated dozens of followers and an even longer list of tweets from other disgruntled customers. Eventually, we got our decision-makers together, formulated a reasonable response strategy, implemented it, and the crisis diminished. But that experience underscored for us just how quickly issues can surface in social media and take on a life of their own. We knew that, but we hadn’t experienced it first hand until then. From that point forward, we were compelled to become better prepared. Granted, the “disaster plan” we have in place today is not all that complicated. It’s essentially a monitoring program and communication chain, one that helps us make sure we promptly identify issues and react accordingly, with all the key people involved. But even with just those basics in place, we tend to sleep much better at night – and, I’m confident, we’re in a much better position to respond than we were three years go.

DN: Can you talk about the challenges of establishing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for social media?
We have some informal metrics in place. For instance: “How many customers are we helping each week, and of those, how many are we transforming – in the language of Fred Reichheld’s book, The Ultimate Question 2.0 – from detractors to promoters?” But we can and need to do more. Several questions remain: “What does that more look like; how do we get there; and what does it cost – not just in dollars but in human resources?” To use a semi-tired analogy, our team members often feel like they’re trying to sweep back ocean waves with brooms. How do you measure the success of an effort like that? Recently, we started reviewing tools that will help us collect, analyze, visualize, and report on the tone and trends of various conversation threads relevant to our company. From that base, we hope to establish more robust and better-informed objectives or key-performance indicators – and track our progress against them.

DN:  Could you speak to the advantages of having a social media road map in place?
After we had a reasonably sound social media program up and running, members of the team started coming up with new (and often very intriguing) ideas about what we might do next. Tina Simcox – from our customer experience team – was a particularly energetic idea generator, and she still is. Unfortunately, as with all organizations and all ideas (social media or not), we had to face the reality of limited resources and make some tough decisions. So we sat down and started mapping out the art of the possible: What are all the ideas; which of them are the most important/critical; which will deliver the nearest term bump; what do they cost; what can we do today; what might we be able to do tomorrow? The discipline of that process helped us get some of those great ideas up and running; otherwise, I fear none of them would have been implemented. Saying all that, I’ll confess, after we worked our way through the first version of the roadmap, we let it lapse. I’d guess we’re not the only organization guilty of doing so. But we need to get back to it. It’s critical to making sure we’re not resting on our laurels or running off in potentially unproductive or even counterproductive directions.

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!

• Ben & Jerry’s – example of a “heritage” brand taking advantage of timeline with old pics
• Verizon Wireless – integrating user photos into their “landscape” visual
• Redbull – fun scavenger hunt game to encourage fans to explore their timeline
• WalMart – promotes feedback and local WalMart tabs
• Natural History Museum – example of how another NYC landmark is integrating their history and archival pics into timeline
• NY Times - highlights select moments from their 160+ year history

Here is a quick check list of things you’ll need to from a design/content standpoint all of which can be done relatively easily.  My 3/5 updates are in italics:

• Find and post a primary visual (no offers) to serve as your new welcome banner.  Facebook does not wants brand to turn this visual into blatant ads and they are no longer allowing “Like” gates
• Find, back-date and post content to fill our your historical timeline (you need not do it all at once)
• Decide which four “applications” (formerly known as tabs)  you want featured just below the banner as thumbnail images since all other applications/tabs will now be hidden
• Pick a post that you want “pinned” that will remain on the left hand side of your page for up to 7 days
• You will also be able to “star” posts which will enlarge the visual associated with that post
• Review your current application/tab pages since they can now be wider (from 520 pixels to 720 pixels).  If you don’t want to revise these, they will simply float in the middle of that page
• Individuals can now send brands direct messages and brands are allowed to respond up to two times to a consumer DM

The far bigger issue/opportunity is how advertisers will be able to use Facebook to achieve their business objectives.  Since Facebook currently limits the exposure of any one post to 16% of a brand’s following, marketers will now have the opportunity to buy exposure to their full network. Lucy Jacobs, COO of Spruce Media, a company that specializes in Facebook advertising, believes this is a watershed moment, noting that “ the official lines between paid, owned and earned media are now officially gone.”  Here are a few more implications of the new Facebook Timeline for brands according to Jacobs:

• All ads in Facebook will now all begin as content posted to a Facebook Page, brands will no longer create separate ad copy. Brands will publish content and the content which drives the most engagement will gain distribution as ads through news feed and mobile.
• Facebook users will be able to “like” and engage with this page post and news feed content, initially people will like and engage with brands page post content and then brands can “amplify” this messaging through paid distibution (I.e. Ad spend) — (FB reach generator product). Facebook quoted a stat today the the average fan sees 16% of page posts updated, reach generator extends this reach to 75% for brands through paid media (reach generator product).
• FB has created a flexible, engaging and scaleable advertising model combining the best of digital and traditional advertising in one platform with close to 1BN consumers (half who log in every day). New formats will double engagement rates and traffic to Facebook pages which implies ad dollars go further. Ad Units are now an extension of content and engagement with pages drives ads to be cheaper so brands have 200x the reach to reach fans through socially aware ads.

Stay tuned. There other important implications especially for mobile advertising.  Undoubtedly you’be reading about this just about everywhere in the coming days including these helpful posts on AdAge, Mashable (thank Todd Wasserman) and MediaBistro.

Sure, baby boomers are catching on to Facebook, but I still find tremendous resistance to the notion that social media is more than another dotcom fad. To quote one such reader of my recent MediaPost article on the future of social shopping: “Sheesh. There is nothing–NOTHING–solid out there, yet, to suggest that social media (SOCIAL MEDIA!!!!) is going to have much of an impact on, well, anything.”

Clearly, this particular gentleman is fed up with all the social media hype, or perhaps he’s simply overwhelmed by the seemingly endless drivel he sees on Twitter and Facebook. But regardless, he does have an acute case of social presbyopia, one that is undoubtedly aggravated by his inability to focus on what’s happening below the surface. You, however, can avoid this problem with the following prescriptive steps.

When in doubt, scan the search results
On the surface, Google+ is a classic example of over-hype. Its rapid enrollment of 100 million users seems mythical; its purpose is not easily differentiated from Facebook; and its role in the marketing mix is still unclear. But stopping here would miss the point. If search results matter to you, as they do to 99.9% of brands, then consider who owns and operates this social network. Google is already indexing Google+ posts, quite favorably it seems, so frankly, it’s be there or be missed.

Peek beyond the pictures
After attracting over 12 million unique visitors last month, Pinterest has become the poster child of the next new thing. Given the simplicity of this online “pinboard,” which simply aggregates pictures people find “pinteresting” into virtual scrapbooks, it would be easy to dismiss it as the domain of young women with too much time on their hands. In truth, many enlightened brands like Oreck, Chobani, Mashable and GE have discovered that Pinterest is a traffic-driving dream come true.  (Shareaholic reported that Pinterest ranked 4th in referral traffic in January — just behind Google!)

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/167886/how-to-avoid-social-presbyopia.html#ixzz1ngX0hoc3

It’s time to start seeing double
Social TV is one of those emerging ideas that gives traditional couch potatoes’ fits while the CE industry and start-ups from the Valley to the Alley try to figure out how to integrate social media with TV viewing. Considering that over 12 million comments were shared socially during the Super Bowl, including a vision-blurring 10,000 tweets a second in the final three minutes, it is apparent that having a second screen open while watching TV is a new behavior worth monitoring. Clearly, waiting for the water cooler to share reviews is simply passé, and also it’s time to take a closer look at social TV apps like GetGlue and Miso.

Keep your eyes on mobile
MoSoLo is not a new neighborhood in Manhattan but rather an acronym for the dynamic combination of mobile, social and location-based applications. Unfortunately, with FourSquare’s growth out of the headlines, this trend also could be dismissed as a fad and marketers might be tempted to throw the mobile social baby out with the location-based bathwater. Bad idea. Over 50% of shoppers consulted their mobile devices while at retail this past December; therefore, having a multi-tiered mobile strategy is essential for just about any brand. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, fix that. Next, think about apps that deliver genuine value, integrate social and capitalize on mobile functionality like barcode scanning, GPS and voice.

Don’t get trapped in the current fog about blogs
Blogging, one of the early wonders of the web, has been losing steam lately, particularly among B2B marketers. Some are undoubtedly distracted by newer social channels, while others find the commitment to generating quality content on an on-going basis a bit overwhelming. Big mistake. Blogs are still among the best ways to improve natural search results, as well as provide genuinely useful information to ultimately appreciative prospects and customers.

Final Note: Optical presbyopia is far from fatal and typically corrected with glasses, contact lenses and even laser surgery. Similarly, social presbyopia is hardly terminal and can be fixed with a steady diet of social experimentation and the vision to see past the naysayers.

If this article looks familiar, it’s only because you read it on MediaPost.com.  By the way, if you liked this post, feel free to show your love by subscribing to my blog.

DN:  Can you give me a quick overview of Syniverse…
Syniverse is a quiet brand because we work behind the scenes in the mobile ecosystem. The company began as a very small department within GTE 25 years ago, and bridging the space between mobile operators is in our DNA. We’ve transitioned from serving mainly North American operators with mobile roaming capabilities to providing sophisticated interoperability and intelligence solutions to mobile service providers around the globe.

DN: So how is business?
In the past five years, we’ve grown our customer base from 330 mobile operators to more than 900 mobile service providers including operators, cable providers, ISPs and enterprises. During the same period, we’ve more than doubled our revenues.

DN:  Tell me about your customers…
A significant portion of our customer base continues to be mobile operators in all regions of the world. However, the mobile ecosystem is an interesting place that is constantly changing and expanding. Cable operators, internet service providers, enterprises and big brands are part of the mix now, and we serve each of these segments.

DN:  Right, so it’s all B2B, and I imagine it’s a long sales cycle.
It is B2B. As for the sales cycle, it’s a very high-touch interaction where we employ a consultative selling approach, so the average sale takes a few months. It’s not the type of sale made by a customer placing an order directly on a website.

DN: So how does this consultative selling work?
We work very closely in partnership with our customers and prospects to understand their business issues and proactively offer solutions to help them grow revenue, protect their brands and manage their businesses efficiently.

DN: Can you give me an overview of your marketing activities and associated metrics?
Let’s start with our website. In 2011, we completed a major refresh where we improved the navigation and added functionality to better serve additional segments. We also added much more video to illustrate use cases and our consultative approach.

Regarding metrics, we look at overall impressions, time spent on various Web pages and the pattern by which visitors navigate the website. One of our team members is dedicated to analyzing Web activity and search engine optimization programs to measure marketing effectiveness.

DN: So what other kind of data are you gathering?
We gather data to help us measure the effectiveness of our events, PR and media outreach, customer publications, and internal communications. We employ surveys to gather quantitative and qualitative feedback, measuring progress year over year or quarter over quarter. We conduct customer satisfaction surveys, which are a bit broader and help us see how we’re trending with respect to corporate performance metrics.

DN:  Some say that if you can’t measure it, you should not do it.  What do you think?
We try to find a way to assess all of our programs, so we can prioritize for the highest impact. Personally, I think you can always find ways to measure effectiveness, even if they are not obvious at first.

DN: Do you also have metrics to internal communications?
We conduct an employee satisfaction survey annually and include questions that specifically address our communication effectiveness. We’re always introducing new internal outreach programs and regularly survey our internal audience to assess usefulness and gather ideas to further add value.

DN:  What are the metrics that matter to you the most?
Because our website is the centerpiece of our communications, it is very important that we understand our trending online. Web usage data tells us a lot – not only the sheer numbers of visitors but also their usage patterns. We can then identify what is resonating with our audiences and determine where we should add content.

DN: What about harder to measure things like PR exposure?
That’s a good question. Of course we look at impressions, media mentions, numbers of speaking engagements and more. Some results can’t be quantified in the usual way but are important to our business. For example, I recently learned from two product group colleagues that visibility of the company’s capabilities gained from an interview I did for a business publication directly led to a partnership opportunity for that group.

DN: Where are you in on what a fellow CMO calls the metrics journey?
Though we have a lot of tools and measures in place, we are still in the boarding process of this journey. We would like to get a look at our trending in near real-time so that we can increase effectiveness and better serve our customers with the information they need.

DN: Do you have a metrics dashboard?
We’re in the process, as we speak, of evaluating how we’re going to report our marketing effectiveness dashboard on a consolidated basis. We have a lot of good data that we consider on a micro dashboard level, and we recognize the need to roll it up into a blended dashboard to be indicative of where we are.

DN:  So is this a dynamic challenge or what?
Yes. Since we need to address existing customers plus an expanding market that includes emerging members of the mobile ecosystem on a global basis, we need to figure out what makes the most sense to reach all our audiences. There are a myriad of channels – traditional and emerging as well – so it is important to understand and measure effectiveness. Between new segments and new marketing channels, it makes for a job that is always interesting, especially when you couple that with being in an industry like mobile, which is changing all the time. Even with very good success, you can’t ever sit back and rely on a formula. You never know when the next game changer will be introduced, so you must be one step ahead.

DN: Please speak to the advantages, to you as the CMO, of having a strong metrics program in place.
The advantage of having strong metrics in place is it helps you understand how good the creativity is and helps in conversations with the rest of the business.  So for instance, when you’re talking about changing resourcing between business lines or overall budgets you’re able to quantify the impact of your actions, maybe not to an ultimate level of precision but good enough that it lets you have a comparable type conversation to other investments the company makes.  At the end of the day, marketing is a huge line item at any company.  And so having the same level of accountability and quantification that you might have in other areas puts you at equal conversation and helps raise the credibility of the conversation.

DN:  Have you been able to move the conversation from where marketing is no longer just a cost center but is rather a revenue driver as a result of having the metrics in place?
We’re on that journey.  I’m not sure we’re completely there yet, but we’re definitely on that journey to more precisely quantify the linkage to revenue and to be able to quantify the revenue impact of different marketing approaches. Marketing is a matter of talking the customer’s language, right?  So when you are talking to sales and you can show a stack ranking of your marketing programs and their benefit, all of a sudden you’re talking their language because they stack rank their salespeople.

DN: One of the terms that you used that I really liked is the notion that creating a metrics program is a journey. Talk to me a little bit about the journey.
The revolution really is in saying, let’s not have a separate set of metrics or let’s, at the very least, connect the marketing metrics to the core bottom line revenue and costs and profit objectives.  And so that’s the journey. The measurement approach varies by type of marketing activity and channel. So the stages of the journey start with direct marketing, where the linkages and the science are the most developed. Even in B2B, if I can quantify that I’m helping create opportunities from introduction or helping move things along the pipeline, all of a sudden now you are speaking the same language that sales is.  One of the most elusive goals and one that’s still not there yet is the overall full media mix impact–what’s the cumulative impact of everything working together?

DN:  If you could measure the impact of the full media mix, what would be the benefit of that?
Other places that spend cash have ability to quantify the impact of that cash.  So in operation, it might be a cost per output or what my cost is to deliver a dollar of revenue.  And so it allows that same sort of conversation around marketing, what is the revenue impact of a dollar spent with me as I make decisions and look to optimize it–is that getting better or worse? And so it’s several layers of precision, of getting to be more precise and being able to forecast the impact of different decisions.  And then track what happens and continue to optimize– that just adds that much more credibility and confidence in making marketing decisions and the organization.

And related to that is giving you the confidence to be able to pursue it scientifically.  So we can creatively think of a few different ideas and then decide based on the risk tolerance or the level of uncertainty we’re willing to approach.  We may try a very uncertain idea at a lower spending level knowing that, okay, we’re going to take a chance on that huge one, but we’re not going to bet the farm on something that’s very unknown.  Yet we’re going to take more incremental experiments around more proven ideas.

DN: I want to make sure that we clarify language.  What’s the difference between an outcome measure and a diagnostic measure and then can you put them in a priority order relative to job security and doing your job well?
Sure.  So when I think of outcome measures, [these have] impact on revenue profits and margins.  These are the key results that the CEO and board ultimately care about.  And so those are the cardinal metrics.  Diagnostic measures are important to understand outcomes.  So for example, we look at awareness.  But my team still cringes when I say, ‘You can’t eat awareness.’   But it’s important to understand that customers do go through this buying process of awareness, consideration, purchase, all this kind of stuff.  But our goal is not to create awareness.  Our goal is to get people to buy stuff and generate revenue.  We have to understand the buying process.  We have to understand if we’re having trouble getting people to buy stuff, is it because the awareness low, do they not know about the product, or are they are trying it but not repeating it therefore the likelihood to recommend the product to others is low or the experience is bad?  When I said diagnostic metrics, these are things that help us understand what the potential actions we should take are, and the prioritization of those actions based on understanding the customer, the customer and the marketplace, and the buying process and the competition.

DN:  Do you use Net Promoter Score?
We look at likelihood to recommend, we look at it in the total likelihood and in net time basis.  But we don’t just rely on that.

DN: Do you look at the various points of contact in the customer experience and measure each of those?
We look at it both overall and after a key experience point.  So after you’ve had an interaction at a branch, after you’ve had an interaction with a business banker, after you’ve interacted with some of our online technology.  So we do — we definitely understand how they are all different.  And we’ve studied it.  So we also know that our experience scores and our recommend scores strongly correlate/predict future changes in retention and revenue.

DN:  So when you see your experience core decline, you can go to the CEO and say, ‘sales are going to be down next quarter?’
Well, maybe not quite that quickly!  We know over time if scores are trending down or scores are trending up, that will translate into a strong probability of having lower or higher revenue in the future.

DN: Give me a sense of how often you’re looking at numbers.
Well, we do have an alert mechanism.  So if poor scores are spiking, we know that pretty fast.  But generally speaking, we look at our customer experience and customer buying metrics on a monthly basis– and that’s where you see trends.

DN:  Is a commitment to a metrics space approach sort of a guarantee incrementalism
Well, that’s something that we talk about a great deal.  And I think misunderstood, it could. But I would say it’s better to spend a little bit of time on testing than to take a huge leap of faith and fail.  And usually your level of urgency is not so great that it doesn’t make sense to spend a little bit of time testing it.  It’s a lot easier to scale something up that is successful than to pull back when it’s not.

DN:  So at some point is it possible to spend too much on analytics?
At the end of the day, it’s some expensive people and some expensive technology but in the grand scheme of things that’s still, in the neighborhood of one or two percent of your budget.  And I have not talked to anybody yet who didn’t say after they started getting better analytics, they weren’t able to reallocate at least 10 percent of budget.  You spend one percent to find out that 10 percent of your budget is not working or not working as well as it could be.  And, that’s a 10 to 1 return.

DN: I’m assuming that there was a budget cut at some point in the last three years?
That’s right because everybody had one.

DN:  So were you able to predict how the marketing budget cut would impact your business?
Oh, yes.  And the level of prediction was pretty close.  I mean, not a hundred percent.  No model is completely perfect, but it’s definitely useful.

DN: What three pieces of advice do you have for CMOs about to start the metrics journey?
First, definitely have the conversation with your key partners, whether it’s your CEO, CFO or sales leaders. Figure out who is going to judge your performance and collaborate with you because most of the time CMOs can’t actually sell stuff themselves. They’re influencing sales activities. Have that conversation early on, and ask what metrics are important to them and what are the outcomes that you should focus on. And number two, I would definitely commit to a program of optimization and continuous improvement of marketing results.

And then thirdly, I would say for sure, connect to and focus on giving back to the community. And there are a number of different ways to do that– The CMO Club is one example. There are also several great CMO type organizations that exist to help CMOs share information. And you’ve got to do that, carefully. You don’t want to give away trade secrets, but there are great resources out there to help talk about common challenges, common best practices. And every CMO has got something to add to the conversation, and what you give, you get back in spades.

You can follow Dan on Twitter @wdanmarks

In the meantime, I thought it would be timely to share part of my interview late last year with Evan Greene, the CMO of the Recording Academy, the folks behind The Grammys. Greene offers savvy insights into how his team developed their new campaign, how they measure success and how they integrate social media into their campaign from the get go.  (And by the way, if you are an app fan and a music fan, you’ll probably enjoy the We are Music iPhone app.)

DN: So, what are you doing new this year?
What we’ve really tried to do is continue to find innovation both from a macro and a micro standpoint, and as you and I have talked about, it really is about feeding the conversation, finding new and exciting and engaging ways to feed the conversation all throughout the year.   As we prepare for the Grammys again this year, we will again create a campaign that gets noticed, that gets talked about across the digital and social space and becomes more and more deeply into society and pop culture.  We’re going far beyond the idea of just promoting a television show or entertainment event.  We want to make sure that our message starts from a social standpoint and we emanate from there.

So, our campaign will be something that is easily translatable across all media, both traditional and digital media. It will be accompanied by a significant mobile presence, will be a micro site accompanying it, will be an app accompanying it.  We wanna make sure that we are part of the conversation in as many relevant and organic places as possible.  And it terms of sharing specifics, were about to launch the campaign and I can tell you that in terms of what I can share, I can tell you that in the past, you know we’ve really focused on music’s inspiration and its ability to connect us to a shared community.

DN: So this year’s idea is…
Its called, “We are Music,” and it’s about creating a visual interpretation of music, because if you look at the way music shows are traditionally promoted or marketed, its very simple, its “Hey, watch “x” show and see stars.  And the challenge is that its very one-dimensional and it doesn’t really say anything about the brand itself, and a lot of these award shows share talent anyway, if you watch one show versus another, you see the same artist in two or three or four of them. So, rather than just say the same thing as everybody else, how do we differentiate ourselves? We have to differentiate ourselves by becoming part of the story of people’s lives.

DN: Tell me more.
Were focusing on the idea that when we listen to music, we surround ourselves in it, it becomes who we are, part of our DNA, an extension of our personality, inexplicably linked with our identity, and our campaign, like music itself, is a driving pulse and is infused with energy and music.  So we think that just with that kind of simple concept that is executed very dynamically, that we’ve got something that will really excite people.

DN:  You said something really interesting in your intro; you said you wanted to make sure that the campaign starts in social. Why and what do you mean by that?
I think a lot of brands take the position that they’ll come up with an idea and then create a bolt-on digital solution or a bolt-on digital extension and what we’ve really endeavored to do and we’ve kind of indoctrinated this into our DNA here at the Academy, that everything starts from a digital place, everything starts as part of the digital conversation. Because, candidly, that’s how people are really communicating these days in a more aggressive and dynamic way, and so rather than create an idea that we think makes sense for a traditional “above the line” media approach, we started from the standpoint of “let’s create something that’s meaningful and organic socially” that can then and if we can achieve that, we think that the next natural extension is to be able to extend and engage across the board.

Because it’s hard to retrofit your idea into a digital realm and have it really make perfect sense.  So if you look at what we’ve done over the last several years, not only during the Grammys, but throughout the year, we’ve really been looking for ways to continue to feed the digital conversation around us.  And that’s really all that our campaign is, it’s another way to feed the conversation, its not the end all be all, the conversation’s going on, we’re all having the conversation all throughout the year, and the digital music conversation is certainly something that we’re part of for the other 364.  So really all were doing is finding ways to, more innovative ways to engage and get people interested in the conversation.

DN: I’ve seen the stat that showed that your ratings were up 35 % in 2010 due in part to the success of your “We’re All Fans” campaign. How did it go in 2011?
I’ll tell you, after 2010’s monster numbers, we were hoping that our campaign and our 2011 efforts would be good enough to remain flat but what we found was that our ratings were up over 3% in the aggregate, which is an extraordinary number for us. And the thing that’s really been gratifying and reassuring is that while we’re up 3% in the aggregate, we were up 4% in teens and young adults.

DN: Do you have an agency that helps you stay on the cutting edge?
We’re now on our 5^th year of our AOR relationship with Chiat/Day, and many of these things that were talking about specifically related to our telecasted campaigns would not have been possible without Chiat.  We give them a brief of what we need to achieve and they do really some incredibly creative and dynamic things, so I couldn’t ask for a better creative partner than Chiat.

Looking ahead to a panel discussion at MediaPost’s Social Media Insider Summit next Wednesday in Key Largo, I’ve decided to go out on a somewhat futuristic ledge here and imagine how social media could dramatically alter the retail experience. Since most of this technology already exists, add in a touch of creativity and this becomes my very own “Mission: Possible.”

Knowing: “So Nice to See You Again, Ms. Shopalot”
Since many of the ideas below are dependent upon you, the shopper, sharing your social graph with retailers, let’s get the basic enabling technology out of the way. Near Field Communications (NFC) already allow for the instantaneous transfer of credit/debit card data from consumer to retailer, so sharing your social info via NFC shouldn’t be too far away. Now the fun can begin.

Personalizing: “Is that Beyoncé Wearing a Maternity Gown in Your Size?”
Now that the retailer knows who you are, opportunities for personalization abound. Electronic signage reacting to your social preferences could display your favorite celeb wearing an outfit that was on your posted shopping list or simply point to the floor or dressing room where you can find a product selection in the colors you like.

Bargaining: “Would You Like Some Friends With That?”
In the brave new social world, it won’t be the size of your closets that determines access to volume discounts. Instead, it will be the size and collective bargaining ability of your social graph. For example, a “social” wine store could provide their 10% case discount on single purchases because your social network completed the case requirement together that week.

Hearing: “OMG, Best Song Ever”
Sorry Muzak, but the days of one-size-fits-all audio at retail are soon to be over. Social retailers could tune into the preferences of individual shoppers, piping out personalized streams of music built from shared Spotify or Ping playlists. A shopper hearing their favorite jam will be pumped up and in the perfect mood for a heaping dose of retail therapy.

Surprising: “That’s the Coolest Thing I’ve Ever Seen”
Projected touch screen displays (see demo of PicoMagic at CES 2012) combined with social data could completely transform the retail shopping experience. Entire walls could become interactive, allowing shoppers to sort through vast amounts of virtual inventory that is preselected based on social preferences. Sharing and comparing also would become a snap.

Out-smarting: “Dude, Where’s My Bar?”
Social integration into products might just save us from ourselves if we’re so inclined. For example, if you check in at a bar, your car instantly will know to only start the engine after you pass the Breathalyzer on your smart phone. If you don’t pass the test, your phone will track down your nearest and most sober friends.

Rating: “That’s the Way (Uh-Huh Uh-Huh) I Like It… On Facebook”
Reviews of products and services are ubiquitous online, and it is only a matter of time until these move in-store. Now imagine that the products themselves can display reviews in real-time and highlight those from your social graph. Suddenly that banana-flavored craft beer your friends liked is just what the doctor ordered.

Klouting: “Tell You What I’m Gonna Do Just For You…”
Rewarding influential customers with superior service or free/discounted goods is nothing new, but social integration could take those perks to new heights. For example, once a retailer recognizes a customer with a high Klout score (or equivalent), discounts commensurate with their potential influence could be offered with a promise of more after the social sharing occurs.

Gaming: “Shopping is a Game, Isn’t It?”
Once a retailer can respond to your social graph, the opportunities to introduce game mechanics multiply faster than you can say “Batman: Arkham City.” Based on your in-store behavior, instant coupons could be earned or, perhaps more interestingly, virtual points could be aggregated for redemption in Farmville or another Facebook favorite.

Traveling: See You in Key Largo?
Clearly, this little imaginary excursion just scratches the surface when it comes to the true potential of integrating social media into real-world products, which is why I hope you’ll join me down in Key Largo next week along with fellow panelists like John Yi of Facebook and Lars Djuvik of Specific Media/MySpace. It should be a lot more fun than hanging from a window with a broken electronic glove…

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As part of my background research for a story on this program (see FastCompany.com), I interviewed Larry Gee, the SJSU instructor working with IBM to teach “social business” to a select group of undergrads.  I think you’ll find what Gee has to say about this business/academic collaboration quite interesting.

DN: Can you give me a little background on this program from SJSU’s perspective?
SJSU,  College of Business, has always brought innovation to the classroom so students can learn, apply, and differentiate themselves in the business world.   SJSU and IBM has a long relationship over the years.  It is only natural that ideas are bounced back and forth between us;  how we can make a difference when preparing the next generation of leaders.  Bringing social business into the classroom was one of those ideas that fit the innovation framework.

DN: Why did SJSU decide to collaborate with IBM on this project?
SJSU, College of Business,  decided to collaborate with IBM on this project because Social Business is a critical skill that students need to have to be competitive in the market place.   Social Business is a transferable skill across multiple disciplines ie business, bio-sciences, engineering, humanity & arts, etc.  Students worked on a real business problem, real time, to learn and apply social business tools and processes.

DN: Do you have collaborations with other large corporations?
Yes, we have collaborated with other large corporations such as Cisco, Google, Microsoft to name a few.

DN: If you were talking to another educator at a different university who was considering a similar collaboration, what advice would you give them?
My advice:  1) Identify key social business partner asap.  This is critical because a real life component is needed to reinforce key concept and process.  2)  Plan quickly with a clear course work and administration buy-in roadmap for execution in 60 days.  3)  Execute plan and have class up and running by next term.

DN: How are you evaluating the success of this program?
Students must be able to understand and apply social business tools/process to a real life problem.  The program success is measured on how well students learn, grasp, apply, and demonstrate how social business can be used in a business environment to increase competitive advantage or improve business process cycle time.

DN: How have students responded?
Students response has been great because they have already been exposed and used social media, Facebook, blogs, bookmarks, wiki, to name a few,  basic components of social business, at a very young age.   What is new then?  They are able to build a social business environment using various social media tools they already know and use, but this time, in a business setting.

DN: Can you speak to the advantages of having IBM experts mentor your students?
Certainly.  Having a subject matter experts available to talk, demonstrate, and relate to actual projects are key.   One can read articles and talk about them in class.  But when you are given access to the latest  materials and platform to create a social business environment then this is collaboration at its highest.  Mentor is only a few clicks away to kick around ideas and bring those ideas to reality.  This is where academia  and business intersect.

DN: Is there a risk with a program like this that it will be perceived more as a marketing ploy for IBM than a more company-neutral business course?
I don’t believe the program is a major marketing ploy but rather a  business neutral course because majority of tools and contents used were not IBM but rather current tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Bookmark, wiki, etc.  GBS, IBM Business Partner, provided the real life problem for students to do a deep dive into their social business space.

DN: Tell me where the idea for GuitarTown came from.
Soon after I moved to Nashville, I saw these little catfish sculptures around town as a public arts program, and I thought, what do catfish have to do with Nashville? So I put together a proposal. And, thanks to the vision and support of our CEO, we were able to start the GuitarTown program – it launched here in Nashville in late 2003.

DN: Why did you think this would work in Nashville?
Because Nashville is such a great music community, obviously, but there are many other aspects to this town, and I thought it would be great to be able to pull the businesses, visual artists and musicians together for a philanthropic cause; so that the 10-foot-tall sculptures would be artistically designed by visual artists, partnered with a business or corporate sponsor and then signed by a celebrity – eventually to be auctioned off for charity.

DN: How do the guitars get sold and where does the money go?
After the auction gala, the funds raised are divided among a variety of non-profit organizations in the host city, so it would stay in the community where it was happening. We’ve raised over $2 million dollars for charity and, of course, it’s great branding for Gibson and Gibson Foundation. 100% of the funds that come into Gibson Foundation from sources outside of Gibson go back out to charity, none of it goes to administrative, or fundraising, that’s all covered by corporate. We’re very fortunate. Many non-profits take up to 20%, for their admin fees so we’re very fortunate not to have to do that, and we try to support a variety of different kinds of organizations in each city.

DN: What other cities have hosted GuitarTown?
Nashville GuitarTown was the first, and then we did Austin, London, Miami, Orlando, and a smaller project, not of 10-foot-tall guitars but of regular size artistically designed ones, that was called Cleveland Rocks. Now we’re doing GuitarTown Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and that auction is on Dec. 3rd, 2011.

DN: So let’s break it down into a few components; so there’s the creation portion of it, where you have how many guitars? It varies from city to city. Usually it will be no more than 50, typically 25-50, because you can’t really have an auction, a big auction, with fewer products than that. In Nashville we did a “call for artists.” We had a panel that juried all the applications — over 150 applications, and narrowed it to the final 35-40, , but we also included some regular sized guitars, so some people who were unable to design a 10-foot-tall guitar were able to participate as well.

DN: Being associated with Gibson is a cool thing, that’s got to help.
Yes, it opens a lot of doors.

DN: So you’ve got the first phase, which is identifying the artists and announcing the program, what’s next?
Announcing the program, identifying the visual artists, and we were getting video, following a couple of the artists through the process, because it’s very interesting. You can’t do this in a day. I’ve decorated normal size guitars; it takes a good, long while just to do that. To do a 10-foot-tall guitar and to do it well, I would imagine could easily take several months, so these visual artists are doing this, really, for free. We give them a small stipend; we provide opportunities through various arts stores in the area for them to get their supplies, we encourage them to get sponsors for their project as well, because it can be costly.

DN: Is there resistance at all from the cities to say, “well wait, this is Gibson, they should be paying us for this exposure.”
We’ve never run in to anything even remotely like that. We have been welcomed with open arms for beautifying the cities and bringing positive attention.

DN: So it’s a win/win for them?
Right, and although it could be labeled as cause marketing, because it is branding with 100% of the proceeds going to charitable causes; it remains at its core a very charitable project. If we bring in $500,000, or whatever comes in, all of that will go to the designated charities.

DN: So there a display period and then an auction?
Yes. They are strategically placed around the city, or where the city has committed space. Here in Nashville I worked with Public Works to try and determine where we could place them, and we worked with one of the art schools to help keep them in good repair. They also have to be anchored down with heavy sand, and these are not small things, and so, yeah, you work with the different departments of the city. I first asked for permission from the Mayor’s office, and then I kind of figured out from there where to go with it, who to talk to and who to meet with.

DN: What’s the planning cycle for one of these?
For Nashville, I started planning either late 2003 or early 2004, I’d have to go back and look to be certain, but the first thing I did after I got various approvals, was to cold call sponsors, people and businesses I thought would be willing to sponsor the art work and to have it in front of their building. Loews Vanderbilt was the first to say yes, I remember that. And after that it was really easy. And I had help. The Country Music Hall of Fame, BMI and ASCAP were all helping with meeting and event space, we had a committee, that included people from the city as well as the art and music community. A good group of about 10 people to oversee it. We wanted it to be a community effort. And I think it really was. Each city has handled it a little differently, but that was our prototype.

DN: A lot of companies do something cool and then they walk away from it, and say, “what’s the next thing we can do?” What made you stick with this one?
Well, part of it is because the Foundation is in place and we do have this vehicle to promote charitable giving. That’s a big part of it. It’s also great PR and visibility for our iconic brand and it brings much needed attention to several charitable causes in each city.

DN: What caused you to keep going?
I think it was just the program’s success. Other cities came to us and said, “Can you do it here?” I still have people emailing me, even just last week saying, “would you consider here?”

DN: How much does one of these guitars end up going for?
It really depends. When you have one signed by Paul McCartney, and one signed by Dolly Parton, they can go for quite a lot. It depends on the art and the artist – and, of course, the buyer.

DN: So PR is one of the primary ways of measuring success?
Right. I was overseeing the events for Gibson when this started, and then I took off for a year, but stayed involved because I was very dedicated to this program. The person that took it over at that time was our head of PR and she did very well with it as well. So, there is the PR aspect, and the Foundation – the philanthropic aspect. That is very important to all of us here, that’s the key thing for me.

DN: So if a like minded company was thinking of embarking on a program that had a same idea but it was different and appropriate for them, what advice would you give them, in terms of making something like this happen?
Well I can tell you that when I wanted to make this happen I contacted someone in Chicago, I think, and asked for any guidelines that they had so that I could at least have a place to start. There are obviously some rules that we have in place about the artwork: nothing profane, nothing sexual, political or religious, no branding other than our headstock. We’re doing it to create art and raise funds for charitable causes.

I would also recommend finding an image that is meaningful to your city. Music is meaningful to many cities, and in Nashville, LA, Austin and London, it’s a big part of the culture. And find something that connects to the people’s passion. You want to get to the heartstrings of people, make them feel like they’re involved and part of something fun and meaningful.

DN: Music is so universal that you can go to so many different charities and do things like that. I would think that you would focus mainly on music education.
Most people think that and it’s certainly part of our mission, but our CEO, and the Gibson Foundation was his vision, is very philanthropic. He really wanted this to focus on children, globally, to provide opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise exist without the support Gibson Foundation provides. He feels that there is a responsibility on a corporate level give back, and he doesn’t just talk it, he walks it. He’s been very, very supportive. And Dave Berryman, the co-owner and President of the Gibson, oversees the Foundation, they’re both very, involved and very supportive of this.

DN: Tell me a bit more about the PR coverage you’ve received for GuitarTown.
It always gets coverage in every city when it’s happening. Typically a visual artist will be filmed while they’re in the process of creating the sculpture. When the celebrities come out to sign the guitars, that’s another opportunity, and there’s generally a lot of coverage of that on television, in print, on the web, everywhere. And then there’s the gala, and the gala always gets coverage because that’s a big deal.

Sometimes we’ve done red carpet for celebrities, sometimes we just throw the party. It’s all good. And everyone who comes is in great spirits, because they’re there part of something fun and know that when they’re giving, it’s going to charity.

DN: Do you find yourself, when you tell people what you do for a living, that they go, “oh my god that’s the coolest job I’ve ever heard of”?
Every job I’ve had at Gibson, I’ve had that. And here’s the funny thing, every job I’ve had here I’ve actually said, “this is the best gig in the world.” When I started with Events, I had the best gig in the world. When I was head of Entertainment Relations, I was like, “Oh this is heaven.” When I started with the Foundation, I knew it was the best. But I have thought every gig I’ve had here was the best.

DN: That’s amazing. So tell me why it makes it the best, because that just became my headline, The Best Gig in the World. What makes it the best?
You get to do good, you get to be part of something that’s making a major impact in the world, and it’s done in a company as great as Gibson. It just doesn’t get any better than that.

If you wou’d not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worth reading,
or do things worth the writing.

I believe the folks at IBM are doing a lot of things “worth the writing,” which is why I seem to be writing about them all the time.  That and the fact that they treat me like a journalist by providing access to interesting people within their organization.  One such person is Michael Riegel, VP of Academics & Startups, who provided his insights on a just announced “social business” curriculum they are coordinating with San Jose State University.  As part of something IBM calls The Great Mind Challenge, I believe this is an enlightened example of how companies can do well by doing good.

DN: Please give me a brief description of The Great Mind Challenge?
In 2012′s The Great Mind Challenge, students investigate the emerging sphere of social business using the real-world example of an IBM Business Partner. Working in teams over a period of two months, students conduct a social business assessment of the partner organization, and then build a prototype social business solution based on their recommendations. Students receive education, tuition and mentoring from social business thought leaders, authors, top executives in the social business and of course IBM social business experts. Top-performing teams during the Challenge receive prizes and the potential for internships. The social business skills program with San Jose State University was the first time this challenge was offered in the US. However, globally, over the past several years, The Great Mind Challenge has attracted over 100,000 students and hasn’t only focused on social business skills, IBM is also mentoring students in key areas of technology and engineering including analytics, programming and software development.

DN: What is the primary goal of the collaboration between IBM and SJSU?
IBM and SJSU are collaborating to help students develop market-ready, social business skills. To be successful in today’s business environment, students need to be able to demonstrate that they can turn their personal, social networking savvy skills along with the things they have learned in the classroom, into real-world business solutions. The Great Mind Challenge presents students with an opportunity to develop their collaboration and problem-solving skills while working on exciting, real-world business projects. Students who participate in the Challenge have the opportunity to be recognized for their ideas and talents, while also working to make our planet smarter through the use of social business technology.

DN: Why San Jose State? Does its location in Silicon Valley play some role?
There is a long-standing relationship between IBM and SJSU. Beyond this exceptional relationship, there is so much innovation around social business taking place in the Silicon Valley area. For example, IBM Almaden Research Center, where many of IBM’s social business researchers and consultants are pushing the envelope and helping organizations develop the necessary skills for social business adoption, while breaking down the traditional barriers that might stunt adoption success. With this in mind, SJSU was seen as a logical fit for the pilot of this social business skills challenge.

DN: What was the planning cycle for the collaboration between IBM and SJSU? When did the initial planning start and how has it evolved over time?
Planning for the project with SJSU started in Spring 2011. IBM worked through the summer recess with faculty at SJSU to develop various parts of the social business skills program, including the education (curriculum) and measurement. During the course of the program we fine-tuned the delivery of educational webinars and online feedback sessions with students. As we move into 2012, and expand the social business skills program to include universities across the country, we will continue to modify various aspects of the program to ensure students get as much from this program as they possibly can.

DN: What are the metrics for success for the new IBM/SJSU program from IBM’s perspective?
First and foremost is the delivery of market-facing social business skills. When a student tells us they were able to progress through the interview stages and finally get a job in part because of the social business skills they learnt through The Great Mind Challenge, we take this as validation for this program and IBM’s vision of a Smarter Planet engendered by social business. We also look at the number of students who successfully complete the program and were happy to see that 100% of the SJSU students made it through to the finish line.

DN: The SJSU program involves a number of participants including SJSU faculty/students, IBM employee experts as mentors and business partners as real-life test cases. Can you speak to the challenges of coordinating all these players as well as the benefits of having so many different levels of participation?
We knew at the outset that we wanted the focus for this social business skills challenge to be as rich as possible. Bringing in IBM business partners helps tell a broader story and provides students with the opportunity to explore social business from different angles, different organizations and different business needs. IBM worked closely with SJSU faculty and students to ensure that the training was appropriate and not too “vendor-centric” as to strip it of its application throughout the market. Somewhat fittingly, we don’t feel a program of this scope would have been possible without having social networking tools available, whether it was collaborating on the design of educational materials, or handling project management across businesses and faculty. That’s where IBM’s market leading social business technology created real value for the students.

DN: Since the program includes training on IBM software and promulgates a major IBM initiative (i.e. social business), is there a risk that it might be perceived as one big marketing campaign? Or asked differently, is there a fine line between doing good for the community and doing too much good for the brand?
IBM’s social business vision has a broad scope that goes beyond pure technical adoption. This is one of the messages we are trying to get across with this challenge – social networking can fundamentally change the way businesses operate and create value, but it’s not just about adopting the technology. An organization must create a business culture that fosters transparency, sharing, and trust from its leadership down to those employees out in the field. Throughout the challenge with SJSU, we also encouraged students to explore and consider a variety of social networks inside and outside the firewall. They learned that a social business isn’t just a company with a Facebook page or Twitter presence, it’s about taking advantage of social internally, melding these social networking concepts into traditional business processes to fundamentally change how we do work and create business value. Yes, we did show the students how tools like IBM Connections can be used for social networking within the firewall, but for the continued success of the program, IBM was and is focused on developing and building social business skills that are not exclusive to any one product or technology.

Final note: stay tuned for my related article about “doing well by doing good” and interview with Larry Gee, the professor at San Jose State University who is responsible for teaching the “social business” curriculum discussed above.  And as always, if you found this post of interest, feel free to subscribe to this blog.

Created with ColorSplash app

Just in case you missed this on MediaPost, here’s an overview of some interesting apps and what brands can learn from them.

I flat out love apps. Every time I discover a new one that enhances my life in some small way, I feel a burst of joy that demands sharing. Obviously, I’m not alone in my enthusiasm. Last week, Google announced the 10 billionth download of Droid apps, and Apple said they hit 18 billion downloads back in October. That’s a lot of apps to love.

Needless to say, not all of these apps are getting used. Like most, I download many more than I end up trying, let alone using regularly. No, it takes something truly special for an app to gain traction. Those that do find purchase, however, can teach numerous lessons to brands operating outside the app-happy universe.

Do One Thing Really Well
Despite Jim Collins’ advice for companies to have a “hedgehog” concept, very few brands have the discipline to stand for one thing and stick with it. Colorsplash, a beautifully restrained app, is a basic editing tool that dramatizes your photos by removing all the color and then filling in specific objects with your chosen hue.

Don’t Hang Out All By Yourself
Though the evidence is clear that tapping into social network APIs like Facebook and Twitter can build awareness and even drive sales, too few brands are doing it. Successful apps like Instagram, another photo modifying app, make ease of sharing across social networks a fundamental usage component.

There Are Still Unmet Needs to Be Found
Brands must continually strive to improve their offerings by identifying unmet needs. One trailblazing app is ZocDoc. The ingenious app allows you not only to locate nearby doctors that accept your insurance plan (in 13 US markets now) but also book an appointment at a specified time. Think OpenTable for doctors.

A Little Hand Holding Goes A Long Way
Some products are complex by nature and finding the added support you need to understand them can be challenging. Ringtones, a fun app that allows you to convert any song in your iTunes library into a ringtone, is a bit complicated at first, but knowing this, the creators also offer a great demo video that makes learning the 3 requisite steps a snap.

Extend the Utility You Already Offer to Mobile
Lots of brands offer great resources on the web that aren’t yet mobile-friendly. This is a big oversight. OpenTable.com, my favorite online restaurant reservation service, has a brilliantly functional iPhone app. Integrating nicely with iPhone GPS, this tasty app helps you find a restaurant with open tables and secure a reservation in less than a New York minute.

Form is as Important as Function
Today, having a product that works is not enough – aesthetics matter, too. To understand this notion, just look at the new Flipboard app for iPhone. The design experience is the brand. Never before has information consumption on a phone felt so joyously elegant, so positively delectable that mere words don’t do it justice.

Turn Your Customer Into the Star
For years brands have been saying the “customer is king” while spending the bulk of their marketing budget on self-congratulatory ads. Songify, a beyond-genius app that turns spoken words into a melodic song, is silly but addictive because it plays into my desire to be an acceptable, if not talented, singer rather than a tone-deaf writer.

Tap Into Your Customer’s Emotional Needs
All too often, brands focus on the practical needs of their audience, overlooking the irrationality that frequently guides behavior. One new app that appeals to our softer, whimsical side is Qwips. Built around personal voice recordings, Qwips allows you to manipulate your audio with effects and pictures sure to touch the heartstrings.

Deliver a Little Bit of Magic
Admittedly, not every brand can be Disney or Apple and find the magic in all they do. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. An app called Drinks and Cocktails delivers my kind of magic by helping me figure out what special cocktail I can make based on what’s in my liquor cabinet. The Sidecar I made Friday night was indeed heaven-sent!

Another marvel of ColorSplash.

Final Note
The average iPhone user has over 100 apps on their phone and spends over an hour a day using them. As apps become indispensible, consumer phone usage increases, as do their expectations for all mobile experiences. If your brand doesn’t have a mobile-friendly site, then you better make one fast. Beyond that, dare I suggest: ‘Appy New Year!

It was painful to watch. Jon Bond, the former ad giant turned social media honcho, was actually getting heckled at the Pivot Conference. A feisty crowd to begin with, Bond’s admission that he “didn’t like Twitter” was like throwing fresh meat at rabid dogs. But rather than raise their voices, they let their fingers do the shouting. So while Bond continued to speak, a steady stream of snarky tweets projected on the wall behind him, acted like foghorns essentially drowning him out.

Being a great speaker was never easy but now, with your audience likely to have a mobile device in hand and real-time access to multiple social channels, the challenges have gotten that much greater. To get a sense of the impact of social media on conference presentations, I interviewed a bunch of regulars on the social media circuit. In the process, they helped me identify these seven (somewhat snarky) new rules for public speaking in the social media era.

1. Don’t Panic if They Aren’t Looking at You
Sure it is disconcerting when you gaze out at the audience and no one looks back. But whatever you do- don’t panic. Just because they are transfixed by their mobile devices, doesn’t mean they aren’t all ears. Explained Jenny Dervin, VP of Corporate Communications at JetBlue who received raves at a recent BDI event, “I think the body language tells you if they’re paying attention – it’s far more distracting to see people whispering to each other than it is to see someone tapping on an iPad.”

2. Stifle the Temptation to Ask for a Device Moratorium
As tempting as it might be to ask your audience to shut down their devices, every speaker I talked to thought this would be a huge mistake. Former actor and speaker extraordinaire John C. Havens suggested, “I might get their undivided attention but it would be mixed with their ire at being told how to watch my presentation.”  Havens also reminded me that in the old days, “before digital devices, a lot of people would take notes on a pad,” which isn’t all that different than tapping out a tweet.

3. If You Aren’t Nervous, You Should Be Now
When I first learned public speaking, an experience advisor suggested that you “imagine the audience is naked,” to quell the initial butterflies. Today, speakers are probably better off reminding themselves that they are the naked ones. If your facts are wrong, your audiences will Google then tweet the corrected data before you can say, “I’m just sayin’.” And if that isn’t scary enough, as author and speaker Jeff Jarvis proclaims, “the lecture, as a form, is bullshit” so you better ask yourself what you’re doing up there anyway!

4. If You Don’t Speak Tweetese, It’s Time to Learn It
Let’s just imagine for the moment that your audience is absolutely riveted by your every word. Chances are some, if not many of them, will want to share your wisdom with their network, not tomorrow when they get back to the office but right at that very moment. It is for this reason today’s effective speakers are not just sharing their Twitter handles upfront but also mixing in tweetable quotes. Added Havens, “puns, sound bites and pithy phrases are [also] ways to aid in retention.”

5. Congratulations! You May Be Speaking to Millions You Can’t See
The irony of speaking in the social media era is that audience in front of you may be far less significant than the collective reach of that particular group. Explained Frank Eliason, SVP of Social Media for Citibank, “I’d much rather have the broader reach, it is one of the better measurements of speaking at events.” Havens confirmed, “odds are half of them are tweeting about my presentation and they’re helping market me!”

6. The Reviews Are In – In Real Time
Rather than waiting to ask a friend after the fact how you did, today’s skilled presenters welcome this feedback in real time. Eliason offered, “it’s fun to respond to a tweet when I am on stage and it personalizes the interaction with the audience.” JetBlue’s Dervin finds these tweets helpful as well, “I go back in the stream to see what landed, based on how many people tweeted the same quote—it’s an instant evaluation of my key messages.”

7. When All Else Fails, Surprise the Audience with Honesty
Bringing this article back full circle, Jon Bond perplexed the Pivot crowd with his admission of not liking Twitter. While this honesty may have cost him some street cred with a Twitter-loving crowd, I recently saw another speaker use honesty to extraordinary advantage. Ray Kerins, VP of Corporate Communications at Pfizer, transfixed a BDI crowd with tales of a crisis that had befallen ChapStick on Facebook the day before. By admitting that Pfizer’s social media activities were a “work in progress,” Kerins earned credibility that reverberated through the Twitterverse.

Final Note
All of those quoted above are very effective speakers, and though each has their own distinctive style, there are a few other commonalities I’d also like to point out. First, none of them depend on word-laden PowerPoint presentations. Second, most are good storytellers and use humor, often self-deprecating, to connect with their audiences. Finally, each of them manages to keep their presentations short enough to allow time for a healthy Q&A. And speaking of healthy Q&A’s, you can find my complete interviews with Dervin, Havens, Eliason and Jarvis right here on TheDrewBlog.com.

DN: What do you think have been the keys to SAP’s success with the SCN to-date?
First, we began with a targeted audience and a focused mission: to help developers achieve success with SAP’s platforms and solutions. Only after we had critical mass in that audience did we expand to include a broader base, with the expansion of the target audience driven by the community itself, and features and functionality prioritized based on what our target community members wanted or needed.  Essentially, we were pulled along by serving them, rather than pushing them into new directions we thought interesting, with the success of our community members always as our guide.  Over time, we expended from the base of developers, to sysadmins and IT professionals more broadly, then to business process experts and project managers who straddle IT and lines of business, to business analysts and dashboard designers, and then to include university students and professors – all drawn by community member and market needs.  We moved from basic discussion forums which were appropriate for basic Q&A, to longer-form blogs, to a wiki which is more flexible for projects and work groups… and included aspects of gamification, a career center with job board when the economy took a downturn, to an outside-in innovation crowdsourcing space. Constant evolution through monthly updates and larger advances, based on active listening and responsiveness to community feedback.

DN: What are the real advantages of having a user community?

The advantages depend on your vantage point…

Our individual members report that they are more productive, finding answers and solutions faster, and of higher quality, by being able to consult with other customer and partner members of the 2 million-plus SAP community.  Individually, they elevate their expertise, and put it on display where the quality of ideas – rather than other factors – helps people rise to the top and get positive attention.  Their careers accelerate, their professional horizons expand beyond their city, or country, or industry.  On a more visceral level, there’s also an energy that comes with connectedness; members are energized by each other, the back-and-forth of interaction, the excitement and enthusiasm, and the feeling of being part of something bigger and more important than each of us individually … it’s a contagious excitement and an immeasurable but palpable sense of belonging and shared value.

Our SAP customer companies who have employees participating in the SAP community gain open access to subject matter experts for fast implementation and issue resolution so their projects are completed faster, and with higher quality, which helps them reduce their  operations costs and total cost of operations.  From the connectedness across industries and across global commerce, they are able to increase their business and technical knowledge and insight, make business connections within the vast SAP ecosystem to expand their market influence, and have an easier time discovering, evaluating, and accessing SAP and our partner solutions for more advanced implementations. They even have a greater ability to keep up with emerging trends, and to influence SAP and its ecosystem through participation and connections.  And prospective customers in the solution evaluation cycle have the ability to interact with active SAP customers to get their unfettered feedback and advice – and to get a sense of the extraordinary value and unique benefit the SAP community provides.

SAP partners have the opportunity to establish themselves as subject matter experts, and to gain access to the entire global universe of more than 170,000 customer accounts in our installed base for more fine-tuned market insight as a way to focus their solution offerings, and to keep an eye out for sales opportunities.  They can forge relationships with other SAP partners for solution co-development and joint go-to-market, and even post-sale they can call upon a wider set of experts to help speed problem resolution.   We can also demonstrate SAP’s unusually strong commitment to the SAP partner ecosystem through all of these efforts, as well as our work and investments to generate and pass along leads to partners – it strengthens those partner ties with SAP and the value of partnering with SAP, so we gain more of the best partners to augment and extend SAP’s core.

For SAP as the host of the community, we gain faster adoption and ramp-up whenever we introduce new or upgraded products and services to the market, since our reach and influence are huge and immediate.  As a company, we gain speed, agility, better decision making, and reduce our risk because we gain rich insights into what our customers really want and value, gleaned through our direct connections and fluid feedback loops and listening posts.  We can improve  product and solution quality through our customers’ direct outside-in feedback on our products, services, processes, and  customer experiences.  We reduce the cost, complexity, and time to provide core support while maintaining high quality – and can plow those savings back into better community mechanisms and product innovation.  Those and other forms of interaction lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, better customer retention, up-sell and cross-sell opportunities on the top line, and efficiencies through cost savings on the bottom line.

DN: Would it be as useful (to you or your members) if it wasn’t so large?
There’s a certain critical mass that needs to be built in order for a community to be vibrant, diverse, distributed, and valuable.  If we had a very simple product or a homogenous market, we could deliver benefits with a small member base.  But SAP is a global company, with a vast array of products and solutions, operating in nearly every country and territory on the planet, every industry, serving every aspect of global commerce.  In order to serve our diverse market, we need a very large member base to gain access to experts in everything from Finance to HR lines of business, banking to mining to consumer-goods industries, in Europe and South America and Asia, and across every solution and sub-module of SAP’s portfolio.  We hit the tipping point at about a million individual members several years ago, and we continue to grow at about 40,000 new members each month.  Those kinds of member numbers give us depth and diversity of expertise in just about any relevant topic of interest to our SAP community.

DN: If you were advising a fellow CMO who was thinking of setting up a community today, what would tell him/her? Any shortcuts?
Without hesitation, I would advise any other CMO to lean forward and start building their community without delay, because the value far outweighs the cost, and it is the future.  However, it’s not easy, simple, or inexpensive, and it’s not something that you can build, launch, and then let go.  Community is part science – the platforms, plumbing, apps, and underlying infrastructure – and part art – the policies, practices, programs, and people-oriented components.  It’s uncharted territory, so you’ll need to navigate areas of company rules, emerging legal precedents, daily new learnings, and plenty of antibodies.  It’s not something that you can short-cut; authenticity and transparency and long-term relationships and commitments are key. Get an expert on board who has experience, form a core team to execute, and be personally involved.

DN:  Lots of communities are started (like LinkedIn groups) but very few gain traction.  Why do you think that is?
Communities take work over the long-term, and it’s clear that not everyone who starts one is expecting, anticipating, or willing to put in the time and effort to make them work.  There are hunters and farmers, and communities require aspects of both … hunters to undertake and execute big but limited-time and scope projects, launch them, and move on … short bursts of energy, big pay-offs, motivated by the adrenaline rush of achievement and covering alot of new ground fast; farmers who will toil day-after-day, pruning, nudging, nurturing over the long-term… almost imperceptibly small moves but with staying power, persistence, and timeframes of months and years.  I believe that some communities fail because they don’t take the longer-term view, expect results too fast, and don’t deliver enough value to their target audiences to warrant their members’ continued attention and deep engagement.

DN:  How do you see communities evolving in the next few years?
The platforms and tools have evolved, now, to the point where almost anyone can participate; you don’t need to be a tech guru to participate.  This means that for companies like SAP, we can move from technologist-based communities, to business-oriented communities, right on to communities of c-level members.  We will see both public and private areas where open discussions can occur, whether shared with the world or with a select group of trusted members.  We will see more companies hosting communities of their customers and partners, where those groups really set the agendas, guide the company to build products or to set standards that better suit the needs of the customers.  We will come to expect, as consumers and customers, that the brands we do business with provide the benefits to us of online communities.  And companies will see that the benefits of hosting customer communities will differentiate them, and then will be an expected way of doing business, with tremendous value to everyone who participates.

DN: Do you think being recognized as a good corporate citizen is increasingly important to a brand like yours? Why?
Good corporate citizenship is very important to Petco – it’s built into the fabric of our entire business. Everything we do is guided by our vision for Healthier Pets.  Happier People.  Better World.

We established our non-profit organization, the Petco Foundation, in 1999 and have since raised more than $80 million in support of some 7,500 local animal welfare partners across the country. Each year, we also help save the lives of more than 250,000 animals through adoption events in our stores.  Through the Petco Foundation, we also support spay and neuter efforts, animal-assisted therapy programs and humane education. Working hand-in-hand with the Foundation, our Petco and Unleashed by Petco stores serve as the first and largest national pet food bank in the country. Designated collection bins located in each of our stores allow customers to donate pet food that directly benefits pet parents in need in their local community.

As a company, we’re also increasingly adopting more sustainable business practices. We strongly believe that if it’s good for the planet, it’s good for pets and people, too.  Earlier this year, Petco became one of the only non-grocery store retailers to be recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as an Energy Star Leader for reducing our energy consumption by more than 10 percent across our entire business. Additionally, our Planet Petco line of products offers pet parents the ability to choose high-quality, more sustainable products that utilize recycled and reclaimed materials and renewable resources. These are just a few examples of what we do as a company today. It’s an ongoing process and we’re always striving to do more in this important area of corporate social responsibility.

DN: Is there a fine line between “doing good” as a company and talking about it so much that is seems insincere?
You absolutely have to be sincere and authentic in what you are doing and saying, and you must also be fully committed, rather than doing something only half way. A company’s goodwill efforts should be far more than just a marketing campaign. For Petco, all of our “do-gooding” is centered around what we believe is the right thing to do. The programs we create and support reflect our company’s values and the passion our associates have for people and pets.

DN: Is there a particular Petco goodwill/charitable program that you are particularly proud of?
There are many charitable programs that we get involved in, so it is hard to name just one.  A newer program that really took off this year was our National Pet Food Bank program and our National Pet Food Drive. Just in the program’s second year, this year’s drive ran for two weeks (late October-mid November) in all of our Petco and Unleashed by Petco stores. During the national drive, we encourage customers to pick up an extra bag or can of pet food during their shopping trip, or bring unopened food from home, and donate it via the collection bins in our stores. Also for the second year, Hill’s Science Diet supported our efforts by matching 100,000 pounds of donated food during the drive. In just two weeks, we collected nearly 350,000 pounds of pet food – a more than 60 percent increase over last year – to help financially strapped pet parents feed their pets during the holiday season. The Petco Foundation Pet Food Bank is a year-round program, but it’s very exciting to see how generous our customers are during the national drive leading into the holiday season.

DN: I noticed you personally are working with an organization called HABRI.  Can you talk what and why you are doing this?
Petco is excited and proud to be a founding sponsor of HABRI, the Human-Animal Bond Research Initiative. Other founding sponsors are the American Pet Products Association and Pfizer Animal Health.  We got involved because we passionately believe that pets enrich our lives and we want to help generate formal, widespread scientific recognition of the positive role pets play in our lives.  HABRI’s mission is to support research, education and other charitable activities that validate the positive impact the human-animal bond can have on the integrated health of families and communities, by consolidating, organizing and sharing existing scientific research into the human-animal bond in partnership with Purdue University.

DN: Goodwill activities seem to translate well into social media.  Have you found this to be case and/or how do you see good will programs evolving next year?
Absolutely.  We actively use social media (especially Facebook) to engage our fan base, which is now nearing 600,000 likes, to support our charitable causes.  In general, we find that goodwill posts and campaigns featuring authentic stories perform very well in social media.  Positive campaigns with an altruistic call to action perform remarkably better (up to 100 percent more feedback) in user interaction on social properties than promotional campaigns or transactional posts. Human interest stories and, of course, anything to do with pets, are the second most shared and clicked upon posts/tweets/videos.

In October, we hosted our first ever National Adoption Reunion Weekend. Fans online were asked to submit stories about how their adopted pets had changed their lives and were given the opportunity to raise funds for the Petco Foundation through Foursquare check-ins. The social portion of the campaign performed very well, driving the most organic Twitter growth and retweets for a campaign we  have seen to date, the most views on a non-commercial video on YouTube, more than 57,000 photos uploaded on Flickr and more than 3,000 likes across three blog posts. Needless to say, we were very pleased with the results.

DN: I’m a big fan of Pedigree’s “dogs rule” campaign and their pet adoption program.  Have you partnered on “good will” programs with any of the brands that you carry and if so, what are the advantages of this approach?
Every month, we host a National Adoption Weekend when adoption events are held in all of our stores across the country. Each monthly weekend event is sponsored by one of our vendor partners.  We’ve also joined forces with several of our vendor partners for in-store fundraisers to support mutual charitable interests, including Blue Buffalo for Pet Cancer Awareness and Natural Balance for National Guide Dog Month.   I think programs like this are a huge win-win when we are able to work together to help improve the lives of pets and pet parents, and when we all know the funds raised are going to important work that we mutually care about.

DN: What is the best case scenario for a marketing partnership?
The best case scenario for a marketing partnership is a having a common customer, goal and market. It is also important that money never change hands between partners – no referral fees, no reseller incentives.  Partners do not write partners checks.

DN: The Optimum Business Benefits program seems like a win/win/win for your brand, your partners and your customers. Are there any risk or downsides to marketing partnerships?
The Optimum Business Benefits program is a win for our brand, partners and customers.  It is important to choose your partners wisely because they become an extension of your brand so you need to be very sure before you agree to partner and market that partnership.

Risks tend to come if you haven’t chosen a partner carefully or your goals are misaligned. That’s why it’s crucial to consider: Can they offer something unique to your customers? Do they stand for the same things as your company and program?  Do they have the same values?  You need to remember that if your customer has a bad experience with one of your partners, it reflects on your company.

DN: Are there any tricks to making the most of a marketing partnership? Why do some work better than others?
Yes!  Making the most of any partnership requires clearly identifying common goals from the outset, measuring success consistently and holding each other accountable. You must regularly communicate with your partner about progress, challenges and next steps. Leave out this necessary component and the partnership simply won’t work.

It’s also important to know your partners well. You should understand where they fit both within their corporation and the industry as a whole.  From a broader perspective, you might be able to provide additional value through the creation of a partner advisory network to give them a collective voice and solicit new ideas.  This will come in handy when there are challenges to overcome. Never meet a customer or a partner for the first time under difficult circumstances – know your partners personally.

DN: Would you recommend that other marketers consider joining this kind of multi-brand program and if so, what should they do to get the most out of it?
Companies interested in joining a multi-brand program should be vocal and outgoing in terms of marketing support for the program.  The best part about multi-brand programs is that you can align with, not only the lead brand, but other companies involved and create new opportunities, offers and messages.  We have seen some of our biggest successes from grassroots activities and campaigns and recommend that all of the participating companies really engage to get the benefits.  Get in the field, get your sales people to understand the value from the beginning and make it a part of their sales training and their sales programs.  And, of course, it is important to check in, measure and build relationships.

I caught up with Ted Hong, CMO of Fandango, at The CMO Club Summit in LA this year.  Ted is a super sharp guy and has done amazing things for Fandango, having launched their nationally-recognized Bag Puppet ad campaign.  And while I guessed that mobile was important to them, I had no idea how it had literally transformed their business.  Consider the fact that this Thanksgiving weekend, 23% of Fandango’s movie ticket sales came from mobile devices (including mine!)  So as you read this interview, be sure to ask yourself, are you ready for mobile and the transformational impact it will have on your business?

DN: I was delighted to be able to use my Fandango iPhone app over the holidays to buy movie tickets while in a cab.  Can you give me a bit of background on the Fandango app?
Mobile has changed the way that people go to the movies and has sparked a huge change in the way we do business.  Since the company’s founding in 2000, Fandango has always been looking for ways to make the moviegoing experience more convenient for consumers.

In some ways, you could say our mobile roots started out in the IVR space with our toll-free phone number, 1-800-FANDANGO, launched back in 2003. We were pretty early in launching our WAP site on several carrier decks in 2005, and our WAP site was iPhone-optimized in 2007. Mobile represented about one or two percent of our overall ticket sales at the time.

The big sea-change began in March 2009 when we launched our iPhone app, and it was an immediate success. We saw more than 1 million downloads in the first 90 days. Within six months, we tripled the percentage of tickets we were selling through mobile.

Today mobile devices and tablets contribute more than 20% of our ticket sales. Consumers have downloaded our apps more than 20 million times across various platforms. We’re seeing 10 million visits per month from mobile devices and tablets, representing 40% of our overall traffic.  On Thanksgiving weekend, we saw 23% of our ticket sales on mobile devices, contributing to our best Thanksgiving holiday weekend in the company’s eleven-year history, and a 60% year-over-year increase in mobile ticket sales from last Thanksgiving.

DN: Can you give me an overview of Fandango’s other mobile-related marketing activities?
After our iPhone app launched, we pursued apps on every important platform, including Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7. Tablets are big for us – we’ve designed apps for the iPad, the Android tablet, the Kindle Fire – with tablet-specific features like “The Pulse,” which offers a real-time visual representation of our hottest ticket sales at any given moment. We’re also on connected devices like the Samsung Smart TV, TiVo and Vizio.

We aggressively market our apps on Facebook at www.facebook.com/fandango and on Twitter @Fandango. Our latest marketing campaign on Facebook has been the “Anywhere Everywhere” Sweepstakes, where fans can answer daily movie trivia questions for a chance to win some of the most popular consumer electronics that offer our apps.

DN: How important is mobile accessibility to Fandango’s business. Has this changed over the last couple of years?
Mobile has fundamentally changed our value proposition. If you are untethered from your desk, you can now take Fandango on the go. Previously, if you were at your home or at the office, you had to decide then which movie you wanted to see at that time – but thanks to mobile, you can make that moviegoing decision closer to showtime.  In order to be more helpful in that process, we added the “GoNow” feature to our mobile apps. “GoNow” allow you to easily check out the nearest theaters and nearest showtimes for the movies you want to see.

In addition to our mobile site and ticket-buying apps, Fandango has been rolling out other innovations, like our paperless and eco-friendly Mobile Ticket product, allowing fans to redeem their tickets on their phones via a mobile barcode scanned by the theater’s ticket-taker. We recently launched our Mobile Ticket program at more than 1,000 Regal Entertainment Group screens, and we have plans to provide this convenience to more than a thousand additional screens in several months to come. Before we launched the iPhone app, we would see consumers buying their tickets about four hours before showtime on average. Now it’s closer two two hours – and it some cases it’s just a few minutes.

DN: Do you expect mobile marketing (including advertising) to become a greater part of your mix in 2012 and if so, why?
Yes, because the audience is going in that direction. Advertisers are aware that mobile is a great way to reach a large, sophisticated media-and-tech-savvy audience. With Fandango’s multiple apps across various platforms and huge traffic, it’s a unique opportunity to get in front of an audience of influencers making their purchasing decisions.

DN: Since Fandango offers a highly functional WAP website that works on any smart phone, do you still need to offer phone-specific apps?
We’ll continue to support both the mobile site and our apps.  Some people are app-people and some are mobile Web-users. The apps can offer more bite-sized information and some consumers find them easier to use. Fandango’s iPhone app has recently garnered the 5-star customer rating – the highest possible ranking among customer ratings – in the iTunes App Store. On top of this, the company won three Webby Awards for its apps earlier this year. So clearly the apps are working well for us.

With an app, you are able to get the benefits of promotion in the app marketplace, if your company provides a unique value proposition.
But the advantage of the mobile site is that it shows up in the “Search” results, which allows immediate access to information and services without having to download something.  So there are benefits to both.

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!