John Porcaro: ListenUp

Fanboys cry w00t!

John Porcaro — 2008-07-08T17:45:44-07:00

"Fanboy" was just added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (along with a personal favorite, "Mental Health Day").

w00t!

Wanna Job Doing Social Media? Do You Measure Up?

John Porcaro — 2008-07-02T17:23:57-07:00

Andy Sernovitz posted a "job description" for someone expected to do social networking for a corporation. He asked for suggestions on Twitter, and posted a response from Todd Defren. How do you measure up?

A person who blogs or understands blogging and participates in social networks and online communities, has an understanding of web TV, podcasting, wikis and social bookmarking sites, and can translate that knowledge in to recommendations for the Company. The experienced individual should understand the importance of ongoing monitoring and response speed in social networks.
A person who is comfortable teaching social media to others. (Some internal evangelizing will be required.)
A person who enjoys engaging in conversations, both on-line and off.
An excellent writer.
An independent thinker and task master.
An insistence on honesty, transparency and integrity.
A quick thinker and witty conversationalist/writer.
The ideal candidate should have a LinkedIn profile, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and should have his or her own blog already.
The candidate would be expected to create a private Content Calendar so that s/he has material to talk about based on the Company’s announcement schedules. Of course, s/he can blog about lighter topics along the way. The candidate should have the authority to conduct written or video interviews w/ execs and/or the occasional guest blog post. S/he should have companywide authority to track down anyone at any level to get answers that have been posed outside the Company.
The candidate should be focused on content creation, but s/he will also work w/ the PR Team and PR Agency to develop overall communications strategies and rapid response plans.
Recommended reading: on Twitter, the candidate should start following @Comcast_cares, @RichardatDell, @Zappos, @JetBlue, and @Southwest. The candidate should also subscribe via RSS to Jeremiah Owyang’s Web-Strategy blog as well as other PR and marketing-oriented blogs found in the AdAge Power150.

Only thing I'd add is that the person should be a good on-camera spokesperson who will resonate with your core customer (or at least the target of the content you create). You won't see me in too many of the videos on our Xbox blog because I'm a 45-year-old--not exactly someone that an audience of 14-28 year olds would identify as a "gamer." :)

The Evolving Role of Online Communities

John Porcaro — 2008-07-01T18:30:09-07:00

I had an interesting conversation today with some co-workers about the role of enthusiast communities in the videogame market. We all recognize the value of our most passionate customers who spend their own time and money to build online community sites like Evil Avatar or Gamertag Radio or Talking About Games. In fact, the last three employees I've added to the team have been bloggers or podcasters. Their desire to gather information and share it has helped make the Xbox community what it is today.

As we move into a world where every company has a blog, every journalist has dozens of RSS feeds for instant access to news and inside information, and every customer has a Facebook or MySpace page, we're left considering how best to support these influential community leaders, and how to create and distribute information that resonates with our most engaged customers (while supporting our brand goals).

Several years ago, it was inefficient to share information with customers. It was hard to create, requiring agencies and executive reviews and legal reviews, etc. It was expensive to share, buying mailing lists, paying for advertising, pitching stories to magazines that served millions of people. As online tools developed, customers were quicker to respond than companies.

A few years ago, there were lots of bloggers and small sites hosting forums and discussion groups who were scrappy enough to find bits of interesting information and publish them. Individuals appreciated the targeted information, and loved having conversations about something they were passionate with others like them. As publishers, we found that there were lots of community sites full of passionate customers who loved hearing any kind of news about an upcoming product, so we created our own blog. Perfect match: community with leveraged distribution model who only lacked information, together with a company with lots of information but no easy way to distribute it.

Then along came the Wal-Mart of videogame blogs: Aggregators who were good at finding information from lots of smaller community sites and publishing it quickly. Joystiq, Kotaku, and Destructoid became the "department store" of the videogame community, publishing rumors, reviews, opinions, news, a dozen or more times a day. Pretty soon, Joystiq joined sites like Engadget that re-defined how information is delivered, and began increasing their reach into the millions of daily readers.

Companies like ours began treating sites like Joystiq more as news sites than as a blog, and they soon learned that they had access to official and employee blogs usually reserved for community enthusiasts, as well as invitations to PR events, access to executives and pre-brief information reserved for official news sites.

Fast forward to today. I'm seeing fewer and fewer links from big news sites to smaller community sites. I'm seeing more and more publishers creating their own content, rather than the old method of distributing assets and press releases to press sites in advance. And I see individuals selectively sharing information they stumbled across on YouTube or Twitter with very small groups, maybe just a handful of Facebook or MySpace friends. I've seen podcasters realizing that it's almost impossible to grow beyond a few thousand listeners (after 63 weekly podcasts, my team realized that, and we're rethinking how best to meet the goals we originally set for that kind of content).

We've seen video become the preferred way to consume content, and we've seen the software and hardware required to create videos become available to almost anyone.

Harkens back to my days in Business School, studying perfect competitions and supply/demand curves. What happens when there's lots of information supply and everyone has access to publishing tools? In information, the only differentiator is going to be quality. Who is going to be the best at creating high quality content? Publishers. Who is going to be best at delivering high quality content? Sites with enough money to pay a full-time, qualified staff, or a few charismatic, talented, or hard-working individuals who will be the cream to rise to the top.

The next 6-12 months are going to be fascinating to watch.

Happy Fiscal New Year!

John Porcaro — 2008-06-30T18:25:07-07:00

We live our lives around Fiscal Years, here at Microsoft. Hard to believe it's FY09!!!

w00t!!

Brand Connectors Drive WOM

John Porcaro — 2008-06-30T10:52:36-07:00

I sat in on a conference call hosted by the Marketing Leadership Council, called Unleashing the Power of Word-of-Mouth Brand Advocacy, by Steve Knox from P&G Tremor. [I found a copy of a similar presentation on slideshare.net]

One thing that stood out for me is that P&G Tremor has identified an interesting segment of early adopters called “Connectors.” They make up about 10-15% of the population. Key differentiation is that they are trend “spreaders,” rather than trend setters. Trend setters do things because nobody else is doing them, and they stop when the trend becomes widespread. Trend spreaders share ideas because they get their social status by introducing new ideas to their friends. "We" vs. "me."

They also brought up something that I’ve never heard put quite so succinctly, the idea that Word of Mouth requires a message that Disrupts the Equilibrium, but that ties to the Brand Foundational Truth.

They ask the following questions:
• What is uniquely talk-able about your brand?
• What is the consumer/customer insight that is driving your brand?
• What is the disruption that creates consumer conversations?
• Have you make your brand easy to talk about?
• What triggers are you providing to allow “talk” about your brand to occur naturally?

Employee Reviews Revisited

John Porcaro — 2008-06-27T17:18:29-07:00

Four years ago, I posted about Employee Reviews. In the meantime, I've done another 8 reviews, including one that I'm working on as I speak. I've moved groups, changed bosses, added more employees. The review model has changed somewhat dramatically in the past few years. As I look back, some of the advice is the same, but some has changed.

More to the point, I've changed. I've been much more involved with our management team, I've often been in frank discussions about employees performance, and I've taken a peek behind the HR curtain and seen things that prompt me to update my tips for completing your own employee review.

Here are a few more tips that have held true for (at least) the past four years:

Doing your job really well will make you mediocre. A few years ago, Microsoft moved to a model of having all employees create agreed-upon "Commitments," a set of objectives, goals, and accountabilities, prior to the new year. The review process at the end of the year lists your Commitments, and you and your manager both have a chance to give feedback on how you did over the past year. For most people, your commitments probably look a lot like your job description. If they don’t, they probably should.

Key point: You were hired to do a job. You’re being paid to deliver results that are worth a lot of money to the company. Your reward for doing everything you committed is collecting your paycheck. If you didn’t add value beyond what is expected, you shouldn’t expect exceptional rewards. Even if you worked 80 hour weeks, sacrificed your personal life, and brought donuts in every morning, doing what’s expected isn’t enough to warrant a raise or a big bonus or a promotion.

What will get you an exceptional bonus or a promotion? Exceeding expectations in ways that add value for the company. A key point in one of my favorite books, The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers, is that you should do your job in 80% of your time at work, and spend 20% of your time doing the job you want next.

Seth said it best: Safe is Risky.

By the time you write your review, it might be too late to really influence impressions. This is especially true if you wait until the last minute, like I do… Not only are opinions formed over the entire year, but there may be cases where promotions/bonuses/rewards are decided before your review is ever read. It shouldn’t be the case, and Microsoft is trying hard to make sure that things are done far enough in advance to avoid this, but just to be sure, make sure your manager knows about your value to the organization long before your review is due.

Be visible. This is one of the hardest areas for me, and I’ve learned the hard way how not being visible can stall your progress. I love my job so much, that I get a lot of satisfaction from seeing things I’m working on come to fruition. I’d rather work independently to avoid roadblocks or approval processes that slow things down. I value flexibility over accolades, and sometimes, in the crazy world of Social Media/Community, explaining things takes longer than just doing them. I have to admit that it’s easier to give a good review to an employee if I know what they do every day. And as a leader in the org, it’s hard to fight for one employee’s advancement in the organization if I understand their value.

True confession for me: I’ve been told in the past by co-workers that they don’t understand what I’m working on, and I thought that was okay, because it didn’t involve them. Fair enough at a co-worker level. What I didn’t think about is that the leadership team, as a group, was deciding if I should be promoted, or if I should get an exceptional review bonus. Ooops. I can only imagine the conversation: “Who is John? I’m not sure I’ve ever worked with him. I’m not sure what he does.” Blank stares around the room. Not a scenario I ever want to have played out, ever.

Moments are more important than hard work. Speaking of the leadership team meetings, I’ve been in quite a few of them lately. I’ve found that all the conversations and the resulting decisions (like promotions or bonuses or awards) come down to memorable moments.

Imagine this scenario: “Who should we pick for employee of the year?” “I like John. He’s a hard worker. I’ve never seen him come in late. And he only took one week of vacation.” “Well, I like Alex. I was in a meeting with him last week, and he took charge of a sticky situation, and explained how important Social Media is in a way I’d never thought of.” “I agree. And once, we were under a deadline, and he jumped in at just the right time and offered help that changed our program from a failure to a success.” “I had one of my employees tell me how much they appreciate Tony’s ability to pull a team together. I’ve never heard anything but good things about him.” “I’d like to suggest Alyssa. A few months ago, I asked him for some feedback on a project my team was working on, and she came back with three solid ideas that we hadn’t considered, and saved us thousands of dollars. She’s really smart.” I could go on, but you get the idea.

Make every interaction you have count, especially with senior managers. If you’re only in a few meetings a year with your VP, you have more to lose by keeping your mouth shut than any risk you might fear of saying something stupid. Make sure you’re prepared, practice if you need to, but don’t ever go into a meeting where you don’t make a solid, hopefully memorable contribution.

Whom do you work with, especially at the leadership team level, that wouldn’t be able to come up with their own “moment” where you made a positive impression on them? You’ll do more for your career by focusing on creating that opportunity than you will doing a great job in isolation.

Ask for the promotion before your review. This might be more general advice than review advice, but in my experience as a manager at Microsoft, I have to admit to trying just a little bit harder to get an employee promoted when they’re open about bringing it up throughout the year, during our regular one on ones. It gives me a chance to give them feedback without the fear of offending them, since they brought it up. It also puts me in a position where if I gave them advice, and they followed it, I feel compelled to fight to get them promoted. I can only hope my current team doesn’t read this advice and use it against me…

Don't sweat the small stuff. There may be things, even in your commitments, that you didn’t do exactly like you thought. If something didn’t matter to you, and it didn’t matter to the rest of the org, chances are that it won’t matter to your manager. And if you overdo the documentation, adding pages of metrics/status updates/feedback, your manager might only skim through your review, and miss the good stuff you really want him/her to read. My MO (YMMV) is to skip the details, and only type out details that strengthen the overall message you’re presenting to your manager. At the same time, if there was a big commitment you missed, don’t forget to bring it up. I wrote a bit about that in the previous post four years ago…

Corporations and Web 2.0 Adoption

John Porcaro — 2008-06-25T18:00:02-07:00

I just added CRM for Xbox and Games for Windows to my responsibilities (in addition to Online Community), so I'm in the mode of catching up--it's been a while!

Everyone I talk to about my new role as Director of Customer and Community Relationship Management (that's a mouthful, tell me if you think of something better!) is intrigued by the idea that social networking, blogging, influencer marketing, WOM can actually live side by side with CRM and "traditional" Marcom. I've been describing it as the infusion of targeted content and the machine of CRM. The biggest challenge in WOM is distribution and reach (especially when most corporations are using the toolkit of traditional advertising), and the biggest challenge of good customer messaging is targeted, relevant content.

One of the few newsletters I allow through my mile-wide firewall at work is the Harvard Business Publishing's email update. Josh Bernoff published something I've been talking about with co-workers on our Global Marketing team--Why Web 2.0 Is No Bubble: Corporations Are Willing to Pay for It.

I am talking about companies that serve corporate social application needs. ...in many of these companies, the technology itself is positively mundane. But the startups grow because they deliver value for which they can charge a premium and get customer loyalty. The customers of these companies don't defect when something shiny and new comes along, because they like the service they're getting."

Jeff also outlines a handful of companies that are building tools to help push-start efforts, and prove the ROI. It includes my friend Sam Decker's company, Bazaarvoice, and others that are helping companies get their arms around making sense of this new space.

Every company is--or should be--grappling with making sense of what this all means to their Integrated Marketing efforts. Some will approach it using existing strategies and tools, with limited results. Others will ignore it, to their peril. Hopefully your company is going to stay ahead of the wave. My prediction is that it's only going to be possible if you're paying attention to what's going on, hiring the right people, partnering with the right firms, and investing appropriately.