image credit: debaird™ on Flickr (see below for link)

There are plenty of cliché business words and phrases I hate (“optimize,” “low-hanging fruit,” “web 2.0,” “leverage,” and so on), but none as much as two words I’ve recently decided to ban from my vocabulary and my office: 1) “Quality” and 2) “Product”.

Why I hate “quality”

I owe my contempt for “quality” to Dr. Brian Till (author of The Truth About Creating Brands People Love). During a marketing and branding seminar I took with him, Till refused to accept “quality” as a satisfactory position description or brand equity.

His point: you can always be more specific.

I might say that a Volvo is a “quality” car, but what exactly makes it “quality”? Is it simply that the wheels don’t fall off?

Is its quality about style (nope—remember “Buy Volvos. They’re boxy but they’re good.“)?

Is quality about social status (again, no)?

Or about safety (ding!)?

Volvo is a “quality” car to someone who is looking for a “safe” car. It’s a different kind of quality from what BMW offers. Or Mini. Or Kia.

You can use the word “quality” to describe just about anything that you’re selling. The upshot: using the word “quality” does nothing to differentiate you from your competitors.

It’s not enough to remove the word “quality” from marketing copy. We must purge “quality” from strategic thinking, too.

Without the distraction of “quality” (or other similar abstractions like “value”), we place our focus on what’s important—making sure our brands are relevant, unique, and simple—and leave the decision about quality up to our customers.

Why I hate “product”

On the vet’s recommendation, my dog eats Science Diet dog food. The top of the bag boasts “RESEALABLE – Keeps product fresh!”

Perhaps I’m being overly sensitive, but I don’t want to think that I’m feeding my little guy a “product.” I want to feel like I’m feeding him the best food money can buy (clearly that’s not Science Diet, but is it too much to ask to feel that way?).

Contrast “keeps product fresh” with “keeps your dog’s food fresh.” The first feels cold, detached. The second is warmer, acknowledging the relationship I have with my pet.

Referring to anything you create as a “product” immediately turns it into just another object. Marketing’s challenge is to relate what we’re selling to the deeply human wants and needs of our customers. We’re selling more than objects. We’re selling the feeling people get when they know that what they just bought will make their lives better.

I don’t mean that we need to make our marketing pitches overly emotional and sappy. Instead, I suggest we focus on what’s intrinsically human about whatever it is that we’re selling.

Take for example the latest iPhone 4S commercial about Siri. Apple doesn’t rattle off a list of features—instead they show you people interacting with the phone. They show you how to use it. They show you how it will make your life better.

Again, it’s not enough to strip the word “product” from marketing copy. A “product” is nothing more than an object to convert into money. Dog food, phones, toothpaste, colored blocks, shards of glass…it doesn’t matter.

Converting objects into money isn’t a human activity. It’s mechanistic—it has no regard for feelings or long-term consequences.

The fact is, most customers don’t see transactions as converting their money into objects. And they don’t often refer to the stuff we sell as products.

So why should we? Our job is to get into the minds of our customers—and part of that includes using the language they use.

Of course I’m making two important assumptions: 1) that you want to delight your customers, and 2) that what you’re selling really is something you care about.

If you only care that your customers buy from you, and not about what you sell or who buys it, then forget it. This article is of no use to you; in a sterile quest for dollars, you’ve missed the truly human component of doing business—the part with passion and feelings, and consequently the part that’s the most fun and the most rewarding.

No more “quality products”

The goal of removing “quality” and “product” thinking from my office is not to place undue semantic burden on our team (and admittedly, we don’t use these particular words that much, so it won’t be too tough).

Instead, I’m hoping to cause a moments of pause, moments in which we’re forced to find better, more specific, more human words to describe what we’re offering in our copy and in our strategy.

What do you think?

Image credit: debaird™ on Flickr. See original for creative commons copyright information.

Related Posts

No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: Evil, Ancient Greece, and other Marketing Stuff.

image credit LongitudeLatitude on Flickr

Perhaps I’m just piddling in semantics, but it really bothers me when the “marketing” term is applied to any and every customer-facing activity. Lately it seems that anyone with a Twitter account is considered “doing marketing.”

The McKinsey Quarterly, published by the international management consultancy McKinsey & Company, is the latest to elevate the claim that “we’re all marketers now” with an article of the same name.  In fact, authors Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill make some relatively lofty proclamations (emphasis original):

At the end of the day, customers no longer separate marketing from the product—it is the product. They don’t separate marketing from their in-store or online experience—it is the experience. In the era of engagement, marketing is the company.

While I agree with the general spirit of the authors’ conclusions, I think invoking marketing alone to address changing customer behavior is a mistake.

Let me explain.

Marketing is not the product

To say that “customers no longer separate marketing and product” (emphasis mine) is a bit of a stretch. The best marketing has always been about product, though it’s better phrased, “the product is the marketing.”

Fans of Seth Godin will remember that “product is marketing” is the central thesis to Purple Cow (taken from the Fast Company excerpt):

The old rule was this: Create safe products and combine them with great marketing. Average products for average people. That’s broken. The new rule is: Create remarkable products that the right people seek out.

Godin is right, products that are remarkable make marketing a breeze (think iPad), but most businesses still settle to produce average products for average people. Godin is also right in saying that combining average products with great marketing doesn’t always work, not because marketing and product have somehow morphed into one another, but because people are more adept at seeing through marketing that’s simply a veneer on a crappy product.

The point: consumers want remarkable products, not just marketing.

In another article, also posted in the McKinsey Quarterly, John Hayes, CMO of American Express explains it this way,

I had a conversation recently with an employee about this new age of marketing. Basically, it went like this: “As we try to go to market with your idea,” I said, “the world is going to decide whether or not this has real value, talk about it, and then position it pretty much how they want to position it.” The person responded, “OK, so we really have lost control?” I said, “Yes, that’s right. I don’t get to control everything that’s said about us.” Then I said to the person, “But understand, you’re still 100 percent accountable for the outcome.”

Gasp! People have the power to determine if our products are actually valuable? Oh no!

We must consider that when marketers lament a “loss of control” what they really mean is not just a loss of control over results, but a loss of control over consumers. They mean a loss of ability to dupe and manipulate people into buying their products.

So as marketers are finding that tactics in their old bag of tricks (think mass mediated advertising, spray-and-pray direct mail, etc.) are steadily getting less efective, they’re forced to consider how the task of marketing relates to the rest of business practice—from generating better product ideas to improving customer service.

And because marketers often have their necks on the chopping block when it comes to producing results, they’re rightly motivated to extend their influence throughout the rest of the organization.

Though I think, “If good marketing leads to higher sales, then more marketing throughout our organizations should mean more sales” is tantamount to “if one pill makes me feel a little better, then a bunch of pills will make me feel really great.”

Marketing is not the company

Perhaps the most useful conclusion of French, LaBerge, and Magill’s article is a call to take a fresh look at mapping out how customers interact with entire organizations, not just business groups (including marketing):

…companies will be better off if they stop viewing customer engagement as a series of discrete interactions and instead think about it as customers do: a set of related interactions that, added together, make up the customer experience. That perspective should stimulate fresh dialogue among members of the senior team about who should design the overall system of touch points to create compelling customer engagement, and who then builds, operates, and renews each touch point consistent with that overall vision.

We’ve seen this type of thinking manifest itself in other ways before, and we’ve seen that organizations do better when they can can break down silos between work groups (like sales and marketing).

What’s different about this approach is that the motivation is customer focused, not operations focused.  The authors are saying that it’s important to break down silos not just for efficiency’s sake, but for the sake of providing the best possible experience to customers.

Unfortunately, the authors have given the responsibility of orchestrating complete customer focus to marketing, and more specifically to the task of marketing:

To engage customers whenever and wherever they interact with a company—in a store; on the phone; responding to an e-mail, a blog post, or an online review—marketing must pervade the entire organization. [...]

As marketing becomes more pervasive, the marketing organization will increasingly be defined by a core set of tightly held responsibilities, such as branding and agency relationships, and a set of responsibilities distributed among the functions and groups best placed to manage and use the information generated by customer interactions.

But why make marketing more pervasive? Instead of reexamining the whole idea of real customer interaction, the authors have simply extended the authority and experience of marketing to communicate with customers to the whole organization.

While I agree that marketing groups seem to currently have the best tools for collecting and analyzing things like customer insights and deep data about customer habits and activities, we need to be very careful about how we define the role and scope of marketing.

Rather than morphing into “marketing organizations,” shouldn’t we strive to become “customer-focused organizations”?

The customer-focused organization

The terms “marketing” and “customer focus” send drastically different rhetorical signals.

Sure, marketing is, in some sense, “customer focused, ” but dress it up however you want—with pretty pictures and flowery copy about how much you love your customers (i.e. people who buy stuff from you)—at the end of the day, plain and simple, marketing is about selling.

Does anyone honestly believe your loyalty program, coupon, price cut, whatever, is about serving customers? No, those are about sales.

Selling is arguably the most important action in capitalist businesses, but selling doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Put another way, how many mission statements just say, “we exist to make a lot of money and that’s it”? It’s true that  many talk about “maximizing shareholder value,” (code for “make a lot of money”), but there’s usually something attached that addresses what the business does for customers.

If we accept that we can no longer separate product from marketing because marketing-as-veneer doesn’t work, then doesn’t it make sense for us to invest not in marketing, but in creating products and experiences that delight our customers?

Starting from the premise that an organization is “customer-focused” gives leaders the opportunity to say, “everything we do, all of our efforts together are about creating a product or delivering a service that will add meaning and value in the lives of our customers.”

If there’s one thing that humans share it’s our propensity and thirst for meaning. We ask “what is the meaning of life?” “Why am I here?” “What is my purpose?” Even the nihilists ponder the questions.

Meaning is what fuels organized religion and fundraisers for cancer research. Meaning is why we exchange wedding vows. It’s what fuels our understanding of morality, justice, peace and love.

Our desire for meaning doesn’t suddenly shut off when we go to work. In fact one of the chapters of Hill and Linebacks Being the Boss, a great introduction to leadership and management from the Harvard Business School Press, is devoted to appealing to a common sense of purpose—a sense of meaning—among the people you lead.

If marketing is about selling to customers, meaning is about connecting with them.

I’ll be you can guess which is closer to addressing the new era of engagement that French, LaBerge, and Magill talk about.

The author’s recommendations for action—for organizations to cut down silos in order to distribute more customer-facing activities throughout our organizations, form more councils and partnerships,  elevate the value of customer insights and gather richer data for deeper analysis, these are all good and worthy suggestions.

I just think they should be done in the name of serving the customer, not in the name of making marketing more pervasive.

So rather than say that we’re all marketers now, I think we should say that we’re all responsible for providing value to customers. How we talk about this issue really is important.

Our choice of words sends a clear signal to our shareholders, to our employees, to our customers about what we really value.

image credit LongitudeLatitude on Flickr //see original for use info

Related Posts

No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: War, Meaning, and the Future of Social Business.

image credit: World Economic Forum / photo by Moritz Hager

Nothing.

Davos has done nothing for you lately. Unless, of course, you’re one of the global elite who managed to snag an invite.

This assertion should be met with fierce resistance from the political right, especially given their penchant for the liberal economic model (in classic sense) formed most recently by Ronald Reagan. After all, it’s this approach that suggests wealth will trickle down from those Davos-going plutocrats (from Francis Fukuyama’s excellent essay in The American Interest):

Basic to the legitimacy of market capitalism is the efficient market hypothesis—that is, the notion that in a truly competitive market everyone earns something close to his or her “social” rate of return. This means, in other words, that if your investment banker earns 100,000 times as much as your plumber, it’s because he or she is contributing roughly 100,000 times as much to society’s total pool of wealth.

One could argue, as Chrystia Freeland does in her contribution to the Jan/Feb 2011 issue of The Atlantic, “And, ultimately, that is the dilemma: America really does need many of its plutocrats. We benefit from the goods they produce and the jobs they create.”

Maybe.

But we’ve seen that the trickle isn’t really getting to the middle (heaven forbid the bottom). As Freeland herself points out, 65% of US income growth between 2002 and 2007 went to the top 1% of the population.

Also troubling is that in the US, the middle class hasn’t seen their real wages grow since the 1970s.  So while the plutocrats are getting richer, the rest of us—even in times of economic prosperity—have stagnated. And while Davos-ites might be adding more greatly to society’s total pool of wealth, they’re keeping most that pool roped off from the bottom 99%.

Clearly, the efficient market hypothesis didn’t really work out like the economists said it would.

If this saga had a soundtrack, you can bet Everything Counts would be the theme song.

So in the face of growing inequality, and as Davos man himself Bruce Nussbaum points out, immiseration, what’s Davos done for you?

The Daily Mail puts this cheery spin on Davos’ ability to address inequality:

Alongside unsustainable deficits and the crisis in the eurozone, the issues to address included a ‘threespeed’ recovery (with Europe in the slow lane); ‘inequality’ as the super-rich (many in attendance) get richer and the world’s poor (not invited) get poorer; youth unemployment; mass unemployment; a food crisis; inflation; social unrest.

These were all challenges set for the global elite to discuss. Talk they did. But there was little sign of a solution, of a plan.

Perhaps it’s because our friends the plutocrats don’t really care that much.

It’s not them who are feeling the pain of our wage reductions. They’re getting richer. Especially those damn Yanks. As Stephen King (managing director of economics at HSBC, not the author) wrote in The Independent, the US economy will grow 3-4% in 2011, only because “unlike most European countries, it still believes it can carry on borrowing with no real regard for the interests of its foreign creditors.”

In light of his analysis, King frames a serious question: who pays?

Certainly not the Davos elite.

History has shown us it’s the average taxpayer, the low-wage worker, the bottom 99% that will bear the burden.

Thanks Davos.

If Davos isn’t going to do anything, who is?

Not governments. At least not directly or immediately.

In the US, we’ve wanted governments out of the market for decades, and we’ve done a good job of keeping them there. Even our most socially liberal president’s reform efforts were less than stellar to say the least.

To be fair, even when we’ve had tough regulations, we haven’t succeeded in promoting economic growth (cf. the 1980s).  Robert Samuelson explains the problem in the most recent edition of The Wilson Quarterly: because regulators often aren’t any smarter than those they regulate, they lack the ability to anticipate new problems. Without that foresight, there’s no way to tell if investor actions are dangerously risky or not.

So Davos won’t do anything, and our governments can’t, then it’s gotta be us.

If you believe our current global economic system is messed, you need to get off your butt.

We’ve stagnated for too long  to let the pattern continue. As Umair Haque puts it,

Our untrammeled path back to prosperity — should we choose to blaze it — is millions of personal revolutions made up of billions of tiny choices that reclaim our humanity from the heartless merchants of indifference, fear, anger, and vanity.

It would do us well to remember that humanity is defined by meaning, not dollars.

We have to ask ourselves hard questions: how does my product or service provide long-term value for my customers? Does providing value mean more to us than at-all-costs profits? What is the sustainability outlook, not just for our business models, but for our means of production and service delivery? Are we willing to view our employees as people, leading by transforming our businesses into truly organic organizations instead of hierarchal institutions?

It’s up to us friends, in board rooms and cubicles, to choose value over quick profit.

Are you with me?

Image credit: World Economic Forum / photo by Moritz Hager, worldeconomicforum on Flickr. See original for copyright information.

Related Posts

No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: Agents of Meaning: Let All of Your Employees Tweet.

image credit: The U.S. Army

Global capitalism in the last century has been a conquest. “It’s a dog eat dog world,” we say without much thought. Business is war. Sure the battlefields have changed, as Mark Shaefer explains, but it’s still the same fight—”trying to sell more to more people for more money more often.”

But just over a decade into the twenty-first century, are we losing the fight?

A decade with no wage growth, with return on assets of publicly traded American companies approaching zero in the next ten years, and with public sector workers railing in the face of service cuts and tax hikes. Something’s got to change.

In search for meaning

Last April, Joshua-Michéle Ross proposed two things at Stowe Boyd‘s social business edge: that cultural change precedes institutional change, and that current cultural change will shift our metaphor from “business is war” to “business is social” (thanks to the Internet and its social networks of course).

We can already see edge thinkers like Umair Haque fueling this transition. Haque’s meaning organization proposal is less about strategy, marketing, and finance, and more about significance, outcomes thinking, harmony, purpose, peace, love and ambition—descriptors that we might feel more comfortable using to describe our approach to a relationship.

Haque is right in focusing on meaning—as Bruce Sterling explained: networks are the engines of meaning. Cultural trends suggest that networks will rise, old organizational processes will fall, and we will learn to do business better.

This coming shift, as I explored in attempting to find a place for the voice of the organization in social business, means a different way of thinking about our organizations:

If business is social and not war, then organizations will be organized more like villages and less like armies.

Unlike Armies, which have centralized power systems, villages are formed by loosely connected individuals who each maintain a significant amount of autonomy. And unlike armies which set up in highly guarded camps, villages have porous relationship with outsiders, allowing them to come, go, and pass through with ease.

Getting to the village

But the village metaphor, borrowed from Stowe Boyd, may obscure some very real and difficult barriers to change. Villages leverage their social networks by relying on simple, face-to-face exchanges to accomplish work. Simple in concept, but more difficult in execution.

Big, decentralized global companies need easy-to-use, sophisticatedly designed tools to accomplish this same level of organic exchange. Sure, these tools exist (e.g. Socialtext,Telligent, Socialcast, etc.), but implementing them in a meaningful way and subsequently gaining widespread adoption is far from simple.

The problem is in order for an organization to shift from warmongering to harmony, peace and love, they have to change not just the way they think about business (a huge hurdle in itself), but also how employees do work.

We’re asking people to put down their guns crawl out of their bunkers. They will feel vulnerable.

We’re asking people to start defining what they do in relation to other people instead of in relation to their job descriptions. The will feel unsettled.

Because most people don’t like feeling vulnerable or unsettled, it’s natural that they’ll rail against this type of change, no matter what kind of suggested bottom-line benefit statemens we push across their desks.

The struggle

Business as a war is neater package than business as social. Armies maintain control through a centralized power structure. Orders from the top create order in the ranks.

Order in business as social is more fragile. Social order (and innovation, and collaboration, and, and, and…) is created and sustained in and through relationships between people.

If Capitalism’s hope is to reach for what is meaningful—to reach for harmony, purpose, peace, and love—then we must also understand that meaning will need to be defined in relationship between people.

Meaning cannot simply be a strategic imperative. Capitalism’s coming change is not just about defining meaning in our mission, vision and values, or even in the products we produce; it’s about defining meaning in every conversation in every cubicle, conference room, and corner office.

Meaning must be an infection that takes over an organization. Meaning must be present in the everyday, every minute exchange of relationships between bosses and subordinates, between coworkers, and to suppliers and customers.

Because it’s in relationship that organizational change will take place. That’s how we’ll disassemble the war machine. That’s how we’ll get to the village.

It’s not about implementing social tools or even striving for meaning in what we do. It’s about finding a way to make meaning an intergral part of doing our work in relationship to others.

Image credit: The U.S. Army, soldiersmediacenter on Flickr. See original for copyright information.

Related Posts

No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: I hate “quality” “products” (and so should you).

yes, I'm really sitting on his lap. yes, it was a little awkward.

While I was traveling home last weekend from Dallas, a few artificially bubbly college kids in festive hats asked if I wanted to take a survey. In exchange for my trouble, I’d get my photo taken with Santa and $20 off my next flight.

You know how that ended.

I quickly found out that Southwest Airlines and Microsoft had teamed up to offer “Holiday Photos on the Fly,” a promotion mainly for Windows 7. The sales pitch came in when I watched one of Santa’s elves take my photo “to the Cloud” for editing with Windows Live.

In retrospect it was all so…underwhelming.

Sure, sitting on Santa’s lap for the first time in something like 20 years was a little fun. But as Martijn Linssen pointed out on Monday, Microsoft isn’t really adding any value to our lives with their push to the Cloud:

Uploading photo’s to the Cloud? Wow, that’s so … 1990s

Editing photo’s in the Cloud? Errr yes, sure, I can see how that would make no sense at all: video and graphics always have been making a firm business case against Cloud as the inherent file size for high-quality picture and video hogs any and all bandwidth out there

The presentation showed me little of anything useful, so it’s unlikely to influence my purchasing behavior in the future.

The product is the problem

When the iPad first came out, some people stood in line just for the chance to play with one. Microsoft, on the other hand, had to bribe me with a $20 flight coupon and childhood nostalgia to watch a half-present temp click around in Windows 7.

The problem isn’t the big idea—the marketing worked perfectly.

I stopped and paid attention. The photo booth piqued my curiosity about the product. I wanted to participate. Afterwards, I wanted to share my experience and goofy photo with my friends.

But did I want to buy Windows?

Of course not. The product just isn’t that great.

All of this should sound blazingly obvious, but it’s clear that Microsoft doesn’t get it. What’s scarier is that not just Microsoft that has this problem (publishers, booksellers, the American auto industry…).

For those of you who would point out my normal Mac bias, consider that as of today (December 21, 2010), Apple’s market cap is $57.25 billion dollars higher than Microsoft’s (Apple’s ascent to the top of tech came in May 2010). Also consider that over the past year, Apple’s stock value has grown nearly 66%, while Microsoft’s has fallen 7.5%. Certainly we can’t account for that difference in terms of marketing alone.

The moral of the story

Even the best marketing can’t overcome a sub-par product.

We should always allocate our resources accordingly.

-Andrew

Related Posts

No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: What Is A Facebook Impression Worth?.

I normally love the Economist, but every once and a while the mag gets it slightly wrong. So it was for a brief article regarding WikiLeaks in the December 11th edition that told us to “Be Afraid” as we face a world where our corporate secrets are increasingly unsafe.

It’s not that the reporting was bad, that was right on (albiet painfully obvious):

The State Department has learned what the music and film industries learned long ago: that digital files are easy to copy and distribute, says Bruce Schneier, a security expert. Companies are about to make that discovery, too. There will be more leaks, and they will be embarrassing.

Facepalm.

Corporate execs are just now afraid? Everyone who understands the internet has known that this day was coming. After all, the Internet is just an agreement, a technical structure designed to copy bits of data and move them from point A to point B.

We’ve got people turning clock radios into servers now. Seriously. Someone’s alarm clock could be at the root of your company’s demise. Thanks to WikiLeaks, all the execs now understand how devastatingly real that possibility is.

The problem though, is that we shouldn’t need to be afraid.

Cue corporate paranoia anyway

Pete Blackshaw, marketing chief at NM Incite (a Nielsen & McKinsey venture) predicted that 2011 will see a rise of what he called “defensive branding” in his AdAge article last week:

While 2010 kicked off with high levels of almost irrational exuberance over social media, this month’s Twitter-powered Wikileaks attack on MasterCard, Visa and other major brands primed 2011 for higher doses of brand and corporate paranoia. [...] Highly adaptive “sense and respond” listening infrastructure will move from “nice to have” partner to social-media engagement to reputational table stakes.

Certainly Blackshaw’s take is a bit self serving (NM Incite is a social media intelligence agency), but he’s right in diagnosing paranoia. But I hold that “defensive branding” (although we may see more of it) is a bit short-sighted.

We don’t need better defense to abate our fears.

We need better business.

So as the folks who read the Economist and AdAge are scrambling to keep the lid on their secrets or defend what’s been exposed, I’d like to propose an alternative: do business so that you aren’t devastated if your secrets get out.

I’m not suggesting that we should all run with an open playbook, but what if your secrets were painfully mundane—a simple extension of what you claim your organization to be through your marketing, your public relations, and most importantly, your products?

In order to do this, we would have to commit ourselves not just to making ethical decisions, but to making decisions that create thick value.

As Umair Haque defines it, thick value is “is sustainable, meaningful value,” opposed to thin value, or “profit through economic harm to others” (e.g. banks that invested in assets that were profitable but turned out to be meaningless).

Creating thick value means that we have to seek significance in our business actions. We have to ask ourselves not only if our decisions are ethically responsible today, but if they also are sustainable and meaningful for our customers and the larger economy.

We must break our myopic focus on next quarter’s profits.

Instead, we must lift our eyes from our navels and look out over the horizon to determine how our actions today can create meaningful products and services that enrich our customer’s lives.

Thick value diminishes leak fears.

True customer focus means making customers better off. If all of your decisions—from product choices to marketing messages—are based on helping them lead a more meaningful existence, then no leak can harm you.

In fact, if you’re demonstrating thick value to customers, a leak probably won’t reveal any information that’s all that surprising.

In short it comes down to being who you say you are.

So don’t fear WikiLeaks, unless of course, you’ve got something to hide.

-Andrew

Related Posts

No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: I hate “quality” “products” (and so should you).

image credit: scottfeldstein

Family, Friends, Followers, and those I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting:

Happy Xmas.

So this is Christmas / And what have you done? / Another year over / And a new one just begun

It’s strange to me how Lennon and Ono’s protest is now a Christmas standard, covered by everyone from The Fray to Diana Ross. The words flow out easy for me, but the meaning has eroded a bit, worn by familiarity.

I guess in some ways Christmas feels worn too.

We mark time in the passing of years, one fading silently into the next. As we scratch another tally in the column of our mortal existence, we ask ourselves, “what have we done?”

With a gingerbread latte in hand, we wrap ourselves in blankets of nostalgia until we feel warm and safe.

A very merry Christmas / And a happy New Year / Let’s hope it’s a good one / Without any fear

In the midst of our traditions and of our stories of Christmases past, we look to the future with hope for something better to come. Maybe next year the economy will rebound. Maybe next year the politicians will get something done. Maybe next year there will be peace on earth.

Filled with hope, we swear resolutions for ourselves: Next year I will lose 20 pounds. Next year I won’t work so much. Next year I will spend more time with my family. Next year I will enjoy life more.

I’ll finally start my own business.

I’ll quit drinking.

I’ll get out of debt.

I’ll learn French.

Or Spanish.

I’ll get organized.

I’ll find the time to help others.

But we know that by the time Christmas comes around again, we’ll have forgotten all those resolutions.

And we know that our lack of accomplishment won’t bother us next December. As we pen our holiday letters, we’ll settle for meticulously recounting any event that’s risen slightly above the mundane.

War is over / If you want it / War is over / Now

This time of year we’re all called to take the form of Janus, to grow an extra face so that we can at once project and reflect.

This simultaneous gaze on the past and future blurs our focus on the present. More specifically, to the choices we make in the present.

When Lennon and Ono wrote “Happy Xmas”, the war wasn’t over.

But it could have been, if we wanted it to be.

Our own lives are not so different. We choose every day whom to love. Whom to hate. Whom to ignore. With whom to try more. With whom to try less.

The original Christmas story was not that different either—it’s about a God who chose to leave the comfort of heaven to be born in a stable. It’s about a God who said to humanity, “I choose you.”

But regardless what you believe, every day we have the opportunity to say to our spouses, our children, our friends, “Today I choose you. Today I choose to love you.”

We can choose whether or not to speak the words.

We can choose to end wars.

We can choose to forgive those who have hurt us.

We can choose to spend more time with the people we love.

We can choose to help someone else.

Not for Christmas’ sake. Not for resolutions’s sake. Just for today. Just for right now.

So Happy Xmas

This Christmas I’m choosing to focus on right now. On today.

Today I’m choosing to love my wife more than my work. Today I’m choosing to spend more time with my friends and my family and less time with my laptop.

Today I’m choosing what is good over what is profitable.

Just one day at a time.

So merry Christmas to you and yours, no matter what you choose.

All my very best,
Andrew

Image credit: scottfeldstein on Flickr. See original for copyright information.

Related Posts

No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: Evil, Ancient Greece, and other Marketing Stuff.

Consider this from Nes Desmond recently posted on Business Insider:

What is the value of a Facebook impression? Consider pricing today for products like e-mail and online advertising. […]

We think the Facebook impressions and interactions are worth more than e-mail cpms and less than clicks in a sponsored link. That’s a big spread, and there is plenty of room to build a great business there.

The article itself attempts to determine the value of sponsored Facebook posts on a Facebook fan page like GoFishn, certainly valuable if you’re selling ads on your Facebook wall, but a venture that’s completely worthless for the rest of us.

If you’re judging social posts by ad values, you’re wasting your time

Sure it may be nice to tell your boss that your Facebook and Twitter efforts have earned you $12,000 worth of advertising, but what good does it do you?

Consider advertising value equivalent (AVEs) which have been under fire for nearly ten years (no matter what you’ve heard, social media didn’t kill the AVE star—the concept was bad from the beginning).

PRs used to calculate the value of media placements by how much the same space would have cost them in advertising dollars. Easy to calculate, but full of holes, as the Institute for PR reports:

At this time, the Commission knows of no factual basis for this assumption. […] There is reason to believe that there is no simple way for the relationship between news stories and advertising to be compared.

In short, AVE does us no good because media and ads work differently.

In the same way, we should know enough to say that social media posts work differently from other forms of online advertising.

A better way to measure the value of social impressions

Consider that all marketing communication efforts (including advertising) are worthless unless they generate revenue down the line.

Your ad in USA Today might reach millions, but if no one buys anything from you, it doesn’t matter how much “brand awareness” you’ve built.

So the same is true of our social marketing efforts. Simply put, we need to measure how much revenue is coming to us through social venues—that’s the value of a Facebook impression, or a Twitter retweet. Not some arbitrary rate calculated from what keyword ads are selling for.

Traffic and Conversion Tracking

As Todd Defren said, “In my experience, almost every marketer who insists on measurement is ultimately quite satisfied with pretty charts.”

If you’re in marketing, you need to get off your duff, walk over to whomever holds the keys to your Google Analytics account and start talking.

In order to determine the value of a Facebook impression, you need to determine how those translate into website traffic, and ultimately how visits convert into sales.

In this simple model, the amount people are spend coming from Facebook gives you a Facebook Impression Value: 10,000 impressions that lead to $1,000 in sales mean that your Facebook impressions are worth $0.10 a piece.

A word of caution

Using this method, you can’t measure revenue from person who saw your Facebook post, left to go feed his cat, and came back, typed in your web address directly and pulled out his credit card.

(If you really wanted to know, you could pay through the nose to do the research that would enable to you discover how your Facebook posts influence buying habits).

My direct method, albeit cheap and easy, is an imperfect way to determine impress worth. It does, however, bring us closer to understanding the real value of our Facebook efforts, one that’s based on measurable revenue, and not market ad rates.

Related Posts

No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: The Paradox of Constant Connection.

image credit: dok1

Ever since Henry Ford gave us the assembly line, the business community has been addicted to process. Now after more than 100 years of shooting it up, it’s hard for us to fathom controlling our businesses in any other way than through process.

Even some social business leaders have argued for the use of process to introduce social tools in to the enterprise. As Michael Idinopulos, VP of Socialtext writes:

Process, rather than culture, is increasingly seen as the key enabler of social software in the enterprise. Rather than wringing our hands and gnashing our teeth about how to change organizational culture, we’re looking at how to insert social tools into the existing business process.

(This argument was also featured on the ReadWriteWeb Enterprise blog last week.)

But why process?

It’s not surprising that Idinopulos, with an enterprise-level product to sell to process junkies, pulls out the process argument. As he puts it himself:

We are far better at managing process than at managing organizational culture. We know how to study process, how to assess its breakdowns, how to re-engineer it, how to build tools that enable it.

Yep, we sure are. But will managing process alone really help us successfully use social tools to solve emerging business problems?

Probably not.

While I don’t think there’s anything wrong with invoking process within a social business context, I do believe we need to create a bright line between what we consider “process” and the outcomes we expect from it.

We must clearly communicate that process merely serves as a flexible platform upon which we build much more important networks of connectivity, and that social connectedness must always supersede over process.

That’s because the problems we want to solve aren’t fixable by process.

Managing process is a complex challenge, but it’s pretty straightforward—it’s something that we’ve tweaked incessantly for decades in attempt to get more out of less.

But process doesn’t help us to answer lingering questions about how post-recession business should operate. That’s because, as Dev Patnaik writes in his attempt to answer “Why Can’t Big Companies Solve Big Problems?“:

Fighting terrorism, fixing healthcare and restarting the economy aren’t just complex problems — they’re highly ambiguous [problems].

It turns out that while large companies and organizations are phenomenally good at managing complexity, they’re actually quite bad at tackling ambiguity. A complicated problem is like playing a game of chess, an ambiguous problem is like having your in-laws over to dinner for the first time. In the latter situation, it’s not the number of variables that kills you. It’s what you don’t know that you don’t know.

From two wars raging in the middle east to a healthcare overhaul that Republicans want to repeal to an economy that’s still stagnating, it’s pretty clear that we’re not fighting inefficient processes alone.

We’re fighting big, fat, hairy ambiguous problems.

Social business is structured to solve ambiguous problems.

Process exists in organizations to limit choice and narrow the chances of an unexpected outcome—to reduce errors in publications, the writer’s draft goes to the editor, the editor’s draft goes to the proofreader, etc.

But it’s clear that we need to tackle ambiguous problems with more choices, not less. Patnaik suggests that we use “hybrid” thinking to approach problems from a number of different vantages (e.g. social, economical, political, religious, etc.), but I would suggest that we also need to approach ambiguous problems with social thinking.

Psychological researchers are finding that humans can produce better solutions in socially connected groups. It’s social awareness—not individual smarts—that drives group performance. As Wired Science reports:

An early effort at defining general intelligence in groups suggests that individual brainpower contributes little to collective smarts.

Instead, it’s social awareness — the ability to pick up on emotional cues in others — that seems to determine how smart a group can be.

So then our processes must balance limiting individual choice with expanding social possibilities.

As Lee Byant so artfully put it in his E20 Summit presentation recap (emphasis mine):

In business and in public services, there seems to be a realisation that we have gone too far in trying to manage by repeatable process, and this has led to people taking less personal responsibility for outcomes. Also, given that process is often created but rarely revoked, we have seen a gradual accretion of check-box methods that are making business progressively slower, more expensive, and less customer centric. There are, of course, areas of business where repeatable process is vital, but everywhere else, it is better to hire smart people and encourage them to use their judgment to get the job done. Social tools and social business systems create the connective tissue within an organisation that can enable this to happen, safe in the knowledge that a highly connected environment provides checks and balances to prevent and/or minimise mistakes.

Process helps us to define how we might use social tools to, as Idinopulos puts it “make [our] daily processes better, faster, cheaper, and more interesting,” but ultimately it will be connectedness, not process that drives business results.

As Bryant suggests, we need to develop processes where they’re vital, but these cannot substitute for the connective cultural tissue that holds social business together. So as we begin to implement more social tools through process, it’s my hope that we do so understanding that the process is working only if it enables greater connectivity and the expansion of social possibilities.

Image credit: dok1 on Flickr. See original for copyright information.

Related Posts

No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: Business and WikiLeaks: There’s nothing to fear.

We’ve been talking about how community management is as much of an internal process as it is external for a while now, but I was glad to see some affirmation of our argument from Quy Huy and Andrew Shipilov on the Harvard Business Review blog yesterday:

Firms that lack leaders with social media skills are often tempted to outsource community management to outsiders, such as web development firms or advertising agencies. Unfortunately, this increases the risk of failure. The problem is that when community development is outsourced, the organization doesn’t learn and people inside communicate like they always did, even though the use of social media might have speeded up internal communication and flattened the hierarchies. As a result, the company is often very different from the face it portrays online, which almost always gets discovered.

A better solution is to bring in new leaders who do understand social media, which some companies do through acquisition.

The concept is also presented Lee Bryant’s Social Business Inside and Out presentation, in which Bryant compares companies who are only social on the outside to buildings that put up shiny decorations—they may attract people to your organization, but once people get up close, they will see the same cold, hard exterior walls of every other building.

In essence, it’s a facade.

The challenge is in implementation

But even if we accept that social practices between members of an organization are just as vitally important as social practices between orgs and customers, we’re still left with the long and arduous task of shifting industrial business practices to social business practices.

While Bryant and other social business leaders talk about moving social change from the edge through dedicated grassroots efforts, Huy and Shipilov suggest that we start with the middle.

To inject passion and manage inter-generational diversity, top executives should also think about co-opting a group of middle managers into using social media. In a previous research (see HBR article “In Praise of Middle Managers“), it has been found that co-opted middle managers who are trusted by their colleagues help executives implement innovative ideas because they know the “hot buttons” of their group.

It’s not as simple as “injecting” passion

There are a few fundamental assumptions that are going on here. First, Huy and Shipilov assume that we can simply “inject passion” into our organizations. While they reference John Hagel and John Seely Brown work, they miss the point that, as Hagel and Brown write,

We can pursue the passion that has lurked inside since our childhoods, bring it to the surface, and nurture it. This might mean that we redesign our careers, change fields, pursue reduced workloads, or develop the parts of our jobs that are truly meaningful and satisfying.

All this to say it’s difficult to inject a passion for accounting in someone whose real love in life is creative writing.

If you want to develop the passion of your workforce, you will most likely find that many people’s passions don’t line up with their job descriptions. If you want to increase passion among your workforce, you’re going to need to take a flexible approach to how you define job function (ideally this should start with your hiring practices; if you hire people who are passionate about what they do, there’s no need to inject it later). You will also need to take the time to help individuals focus on finding and developing what they enjoy doing in their current positions.

So it’s less like “injecting” and more like “cultivating.”

Co-opt less, Listen more

Secondly, the article seems to suggest that executives can simply co-opt middle managers to help them implement a defined plan.

While I agree that there should be a senior executive who is in charge of thinking horizontally across an organization, and while I agree that senior-level buy-in is vital, the process of change itself has to be informed and guided from the bottom up.

This means that executives must start not with co-opting, but with listening to their managers. What are their needs? What are their direct reports’ needs? How might those be solved, not by some group of social media buzzwords, but by altering work processes to make them inherently more social?

If the goal is to embrace the power of social interaction for the good of our organizations, then we must acknowledge that social organizations are flatter than industrial organizations. In social organizations, the value of the people doing work surpasses the work itself. In social organizations, the importance of title is second to the work that you actually can produce and your professional reputation for doing so.

This is to say that you can’t change an organization to be more social through the hierarchical methods just as you can’t interpret new paradigms with old ones (at least, that’s what Kuhn thought).

So what now?

As we go forward, it’s my hope that the first organizations who make the difficult switch from industrial enterprise to social business might give us a glimpse into what sorts of processes are successful in inacting such wide-sweeping change. Until then though, it seems like we should focus on investigating what’s different with this shift than other organizational shifts that preceeded it.

Because when we understand what the shift is really all about, then we can avoid the temptation to apply old systems to new processes, and we can increase our chances at success.

Related Posts

No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: I hate “quality” “products” (and so should you).