In my last post, I hope I convinced you why you should establish a personal presence in social media even if your company hasn’t done so yet. That was the why of social media.

This time, I’d like to concentrate on the how. I’m going to attempt to explain it by humbly offering my own initiation into social media as a guide. When I despair at ever mastering all the social media tools that exist out there, I remind myself (as I hope you will) that at its core social media is all about communication and that marketers are all expert communicators. We’ve already mastered the hardest part; the tools are something that anyone can learn.

In pursuing a personal presence in social media, I had it easier than you will. My job is to learn about how to become a better B2B marketer and to share what I learn with others. You may have to adopt a more split business personality (and do more work). You shouldn’t just get involved in social media to the extent necessary to do your day job. To get better, you should think of yourself as part of the emerging guild of B2B marketers in social media. You stand a better chance of learning more about how to accomplish your goals at work if you can engage with a community of people that face all the same challenges you face.

I think of Paul Dunay as one of the model citizens of this online B2B guild. Paul has been a B2B marketer for years for companies like BearingPoint and Avaya and has accomplished quite a bit with social media in those jobs. But his personal presence in social media is based on sharing best practices in B2B and social media generally—there’s nary a mention of his company or his day job.

So now that we have established your personal social media goal—to be a valued member of the online B2B marketing guild—let’s talk about how you go about building your presence.

I approached my initiation by thinking of it broadly in terms of communications rather than specific tools—because the sheer number of social media tools is overwhelming. There are three broad ways that marketers use social media (I go into these in more detail in this post):

Step 1. Monitor

Monitoring is finding and tracking the conversations that are occurring about B2B marketing online. Monitoring is the foundation of your personal presence. Before you can begin talking, you have to listen. You need to identify the most important influencers in you market and track those conversations.

Pick an RSS tool. One of the best ways to start is with RSS. There are a million tools out there for doing this, and you can integrate RSS feeds into your browser but I find that cluttered and distracting. I use SharpReader, which is free and open source and lets you scroll through headlines without having to read individual items, which saves a lot of time.

Now, I have to admit that I’m not a diligent RSS follower. I mostly use it as a platform for determining the blogs I like best and then follow them through good old-fashioned e-mail (the tool that most bloggers use to do this is Feedburner). SharpReader is more a reference database for the blogs that I like rather than a day-to-day tool. But it’s nice to have them all in one place.

Pick blogs to follow. Here are some important B2B blogs that I track:

• Acquiring Minds: A B2B Lead Generation Blog
• B2B Marketing POSTs by Laura Ramos
• Buzz Marketing for Technology
• CMO 2.0 Conversations
• Grow
• Junta42 Blog
• Savvy B2B Marketing Blog

Here are some important social media blogs that I track:

• Chris Brogan
• Mashable
• Social Media B2B
• Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang

There are tons more blogs out there, but I’m picky. I’m interested in good guild members who think and are willing to share.

Use Twitter for monitoring. Another way to monitor the online B2B marketing guild is through Twitter. Twitter is a fantastic tool for learning and sharing, as I explain in this post. “Following” is a non-threatening way to build up your network of contacts without having to know any of them. To me, it’s the missing link between monitoring blogs and connecting with people through social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. I’d like to be able to connect with more B2B colleagues through LinkedIn and Facebook, but sending invites to people who I only know through their blog posts or their professional credentials seems incredibly presumptuous. I won’t do it. And the few times I’ve accepted invites from people on this basis I’ve usually lived to regret it. Either we turn out to have nothing in common or they try to hit me up for work.

But Twitter lets you start to build a professional relationship without getting in each other’s face. It’s like being at a cocktail party where you see a circle of people having an interesting conversation that you can just break into—without having to know any of them or having to say something interesting. You can just listen. Even better, you’re able to send those people a signal that you think that what they have to say is interesting enough to follow. And that can be a nice ego stroke for them (if they don’t already have 40,000 followers). If they follow you, then you can start to build ties through re-tweeting and direct messages.

Pick a tool for managing Twitter. As soon as you join Twitter, however, you’ll realize how poor the site is for managing your Twitter presence. You’re better off getting a dedicated tool that lets you manage the flow of information. Here again, there are a bunch of tools available, but the one that works for most people is Tweetdeck. It’s a nicely designed dashboard that lets you create columns for different categories of tweets. For example, I have a column that does a running search for “B2B.” It’s a great source of content and for people that I may want to follow. By default, Tweetdeck has columns for tweets by the people you follow and for any direct messages (messages that only the two of you can see, not your followers) that you receive from people. The best way to figure out how to use Tweetdeck is to hover your mouse over the image that comes with each tweet you receive. You’ll see options for reply (send a message to the twitterer that everyone following you can see), re-tweet (you think the tweet you’ve received is cool so you’re sending it out to all of your followers), or send a direct message.

I started by following the bloggers I like, as well as friends and colleagues. You will find that as you start tweeting (make sure your Twitter bio mentions B2B and marketing somewhere so that people can find you through Twitter search) people will just start following you. You can accept their follows or reject them (there are many spammers out there). But finding people is tedious and time consuming.

Tools for figuring out whom to follow. Of course, there are tools for making searching for people to follow on Twitter less painful. I use a free tool called TwiPing that lets you see who is following others in your network. So for example, if you decide to follow me (@ckochster—Twitter names always have the @ in front of them), you can use TwiPing to show you all the people who follow me. You can “mass follow” my followers to instantly build up your network, or pick through the contacts individually (their bio information is included). Other good tools for bulking up your network include:

• MrTweet—Recommends people based on direct interactions that your followers have had with others outside your network.
• WeFollow
• Twitseeker—Find people based on the subjects they twitter about the most.

For more Twitter tools than you could ever possibly use, check out The Ultimate List of Twitter Tools.

I don’t believe a bigger network is necessarily better. And don’t go nuts with following others. If you follow many more people than follow you, everyone might start to think you’re a spammer. I think following between 100-200 quality B2B twitterers should give you enough to think about. (For more on Twitter etiquette, see Twitter Bible: Everything You Need To Know About Twitter.)

Step 2. Engage

When you are ready to move beyond reading others’ blogs and tweets, you can start to engage as an active member of the online B2B guild.

Use Twitter to engage through linking. Twitter is a great way to engage because the 140-character limit means that Twitter is for linking, not thinking. As you dig through the blogs, newsletters, online publications and other things you read regularly, twitter the stuff you find interesting and add a line or two of commentary. The quality of your followers will go up, because they can see what you’re interested in through your tweets, and you’ll be able to engage in more direct dialog with the members of your Twitter community. Be sure to get an account at Ping.fm so that when you twitter, you can automatically have your tweets show up on the other social networks of your choosing.

Transfer Twitter relationships to LinkedIn and Facebook. After you’ve created a link with someone on Twitter (they follow you, too) and you’ve exchanged a few direct messages, you have an excuse to invite them to connect on LinkedIn or Facebook so that you can getting to know one another better. There are all sorts of opinions about whether LinkedIn or Facebook is better for business contacts. Facebook is quickly crossing over to business from its beginnings as a personal network. But for now, LinkedIn is still considered more appropriate for business networking.

Join LinkedIn and Facebook groups and answer questions. Perhaps more important than building up the number of your connections on LinkedIn and Facebook is joining groups of like-minded professionals and engaging in conversations and answering questions. For example, we just happen to have an ITSMA group on LinkedIn that you can join. You can post news articles, ask questions, and answer other peoples’ questions. Other B2B-oriented groups on LinkedIn include:

• B2B Online Marketing
• B2B Social Media
• B2B Marketing
• Social Media Marketing Mavens
• Inbound Marketers – For Marketing Professionals

Step 3. Manage

Managing means that you take an active role in creating conversations and fostering a community. Here are some ways to do it:

Decide whether to do a blog. I’d recommend against it unless you write regularly as part of your day job. Obviously, writing is hard. Worse, there are a million marketing blogs out there already. To stand out, you really have to think and contribute unique ideas. I’ve been blogging for years, beginning when I was at CIO magazine, and I still find it difficult after all these years.

But there really is no better way to serve the guild than to start a blog. If you’re worried about having enough to say, create a blog designed to be a service to your readers. Some blogs thrive by being filters rather than thought leaders. They summarize content from other blogs and thread multiple external posts on a topic together to add more context and meaning. They also assemble subject-specific lists of content and update them as needed. A good example of this kind of blogging is Junta42, which has a post called 42+ Social Media Tools that is regularly updated with contributions from readers. These lists are great traffic drivers and make their creators very popular among guild members (who often do most of the work in the end!).

If you decide to take the plunge and start a blog, WordPress is the way to go. It’s free, open source, and incredibly rich. It has blossomed from a blogging tool into a full-blown website content management system (in fact, it is now the content management system for ITSMA.com)—though it’s still incredibly easy to use for newbies. WordPress also has a great support community. I was able to get this blog up and running in less than one hour.

Start your own online group. Besides creating online communities in business-oriented third-party hosted social media venues like LinkedIn, you can also start guild-related wikis. Wetpaint offers a nice free wiki.

Regardless of where or how you start your own group, be prepared to invest a lot of time and content. Research shows that even in vibrant online communities, fewer than 10% of members contribute any content and fewer than 2% take an active role in starting and leading discussions. For now, you’re better off taking advantage of the scale of a LinkedIn or Facebook to draw attention to your group and build it than trying to create a community on your own.

If you work in a big company and would like to be a good guild leader for your internal marketing colleagues, you should check out Yammer. Many companies are having great success using Yammer as a kind of guerilla knowledge management system.

I hope this post is helpful. It is offered in the spirit of the guild. I hope you will comment and add in your suggestions to help B2B marketers build their personal presences online. I will update the post with new links as I get them.

To be successful with social media marketing, we are going to have to become social media guinea pigs. We are accustomed to creating programs and campaigns and then standing back and observing them. Social media will demand involvement that is much more personal. That’s why it’s important for us to start building our expertise in social media today, even if social media isn’t yet at the top of our marketing agenda (and our research shows that among B2B marketers, it is not).

Here are five reasons why you need to get good at this stuff before your company does:

• Social media is real time. Social media is always on. Conversations about your company don’t stop when your call center closes or you empty your email inbox. Much of the thrill for Twitter users is the synchronous, real-time nature of this streaming flow of conversation. The river of words flows by and you can jump in or watch it disappear around the bend. That presents a big challenge for marketers trying to monitor what’s being said about their brands. You need to be involved in social media to monitor it.
• Social media is two-way. Social media is conversation and community through sharing. Social media is, by definition, two-way. That’s very different from our traditional marketing campaigns and programs, which are based in unilaterally developed messages that are broadcast—and then abandoned to fend for themselves. Social media marketing does not emerge fully formed, ready to go out and conquer the world; it is the needy kid parked on the couch who talks back and requires constant attention and support. You need to learn how to develop messages from within social media, not from outside it—and then you need to nurture those messages continuously over time.
• Social media disrupts marketing structures and processes. When you construct and control the messages and programs yourself, you can go home at the end of the day with a clear conscience. Hierarchical structures and linear processes work fine because everything has a timeline and a beginning, middle, and end (launch). Social media launches every week, or every day—and sometimes, when you least expect it. Few marketing groups are creating dedicated social media teams or roles, so most marketers will see social media intrude upon and disrupt the work patterns and expectations we have all come to understand. Developing a personal understanding of how it all works will make it less disruptive.
• Social media is a social—not a business—phenomenon. Marketing and business are joined at the hip. Changes in one automatically affect the other. But social media is developing in a separate world: popular culture. The effects on business and marketing are less direct and harder to predict and absorb. Mark Zuckerberg has made more progress in socializing the web in the last two years with Facebook than Ray Ozzie has in 20 years (anybody remember Lotus Notes and groupware?).
  The real innovation in social media is happening outside of the worlds of business and IT—and then pushing inexorably into the enterprise as employees fight to bring the ease of communication they have at home with them to work. The line between our business lives and personal lives have never been blurrier. Developing a personal presence in social media will bring that line into better focus and make your social media marketing efforts more effective.
• Social media causes fear. Buried beneath our demands for an ROI accounting of the value of social media is something more primitive: fear. Anything that has the power to destroy industries (journalism) and redefine politics (the Obama campaign—actually the Howard Dean campaign, but nobody remembers him) has the power to inspire fear. That’s because humans are hard wired to resist change (the unfamiliar could get us killed in our caveman days).
  Longtime social media evangelist Stowe Boyd points out that businesses had the same concerns about putting telephones on the desks of employees in the years after WWII (they’ll just waste people’s time, they’re a security threat, the direct link to revenue isn’t there) that they’re voicing about social media today.
  Of course, those concerns were and are legitimate, but no doubt they are also rooted in our fear that perhaps this stuff really will change all the business habits we’ve grown so comfortable with over the past century. (And for the record, the definitive ROI study on the use of telephone communications in business never arrived—the telephone moved directly to unquestioned necessity within a few years.)
  Don’t stop waiting for proof of social media ROI, but question the logic that resists doing anything until that proof arrives. Don’t assume that your company or your marketing group is being smart by waiting; assume that at least some of that resistance is grounded in fear and complacency. Even more reason to build your personal expertise while others wait.

What do you think?

It’s marketing 101: don’t hold your needs above those of your customers—and don’t defy the expectations that you set with them.

Apple has violated both of those rules this week, and I’m sure they could care less—Apple long ago concluded that their products are so much better that customers will overlook the arrogance with which they treat customers. Here’s what happened: Those customers, (like me, ordering my first smart phone ever) who ordered an iPhone 3Gs over the web last week (Apple sent me an email inviting me to order—I didn’t pursue them) were promised that they would receive their phones “by June 19.”

So far, so good. But then Apple sent out confirmation emails to its customers listing a UPS tracking number link to track the progress of the shipment. I love the e-supply chain so I clicked to see UPS’s cool codes and see where they would ship the phone on the way to me (Anchorage, AK—how cool is that?). I was happily surprised when the manifest said I would receive it on June 17.

Then, this morning I saw the TechCrunch story about how Apple is having UPS hold the iPhones at the Louisville, KY hub until Friday—Apple’s official launch date. It makes sense when viewed from the Cupertino Ivory Tower: Why would Apple want customers to get the products they have purchased before we told the world they should have them?

But of course, true to Michael Porter and Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema’s principle of business strategy: companies only do one thing really well while trying to maintain parity with competitors on the things they don’t. Apple creates great products. The rest? Meh. UPS delivers packages efficiently—it is all about operational efficiency and supply chain.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that UPS took those iPhones and delivered the heck out of them. While Apple, which is all about product, didn’t pay enough attention (as usual) to that part of the business. Which meant that after UPS announced delivery dates to its customers, Apple stepped in to put the brakes on—and ordered UPS to go slower.

Can you imagine the looks on the faces of the folks at UPS central in Louisville as the word spread that they had to mothball the phones for two days and not do what they do best—deliver packages fast?

And can you imagine the arrogance of marketers telling their customers that a launch date matters more than satisfying their needs? I can’t. Can you?

Like many, I’m a late convert to Twitter. I avoided it for defensive reasons. I’m one of those boring people that eats the same thing for lunch almost every day. So I figured I wouldn’t have much to twitter about. I also figured that Twitter would appeal mostly to young people interested in flirting with one another in 140 characters or less.

But then I tried it and I realized that the hidden power of Twitter is in another kind of human appetite: learning.

Twitter doesn’t just add another one of those annoying Web 2.0 verbs to the English vocabulary (by the way, the co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, says the correct form is “to twitter”) it adds new meaning to an oldie: to follow.

Now for an old fart like me, the concept of following someone in Twitter has a much different context and meaning than it might for, say, my daughter, who is a tween and is not on Twitter. To someone her age, the concept of following immediately conjures up the issue of personal relationships—who you hate and who you like—and status—who is popular and who isn’t.

Viewed in that context, my reaction to Twitter is the same as her’s: “Yuck.”

Follow to learn
Thankfully, adults have another context for developing relationships: communities of learning. And it’s in this sense that Twitter is a goldmine for B2B marketers. Think about it. You can seek out the best thinkers in marketing—people that you’ve paid money to go see at conferences—and listen to what they have to say anytime, for free. I quickly discovered that I didn’t have to twitter about my lunch (PB&Js most days—hey, I’ve loved them since I was 5 (see how boring this is?)) and that the people I want to hear from aren’t doing that either (though the air travel tweets get a little old—travel twittering seems to be one of the few “what I’m doing now” things that people feel is worth telling everyone about, perhaps because people generally think that traveling demonstrates importance and coolness and also because its something that some people just do an awful lot of).

The two subject areas I’m most interested in in my role at ITSMA are B2B marketing in general and social media in particular. I started following people whose blogs I like in those areas and things took off from there.

An entrée to the cocktail party
The wonderful thing about following (in the business context) on Twitter is that it’s like being at a cocktail party where you see a circle of people having an interesting conversation that you can just break into—without having to know any of them or having to say something interesting. You can just listen. Even better, you’re able to send those people a signal that you think that what they have to say is interesting enough to follow. And that can be a nice ego stroke for them (if they don’t already have 40,000 followers).

Indeed, I was surprised to see that some well-known social media and marketing experts who I think have interesting things to say followed me back after I followed them. Very cool. It gives me a way to gradually get to know them and for them to get to know me—and it’s an ego stroke to think that they might actually think I have something to teach them (or they could have their Twitter accounts set up to automatically follow those who follow them). But if they don’t follow me, who cares—it doesn’t have the same social weight attached to it as getting snubbed by the popular kids in middle school (not that that ever happened to me). Nobody knows but me. And I still get what I want most out of the relationship, which is to learn.

And I’m learning a lot. Twitter for business fills a learning gap that blogging used to fill but from which most good blogs graduated from early on: linking. I don’t think much of blogs that just post links to other stuff, unless the links are organized into useful lists, which take time. I think blogs are for thinking, not linking.

But Twitter is limited to 140 characters, so linking is pretty much the only way to add real value. And now when I do my morning research and find something interesting—but not interesting enough to spark a full blog post—I can twitter it so that others can learn what I’m learning.

Create your own ad hoc community
And to my relief, that’s exactly what others are doing with Twitter, too. Like any good social media tool, Twitter’s foundation is conversation and community through sharing. I’ve already developed what I think is a powerful network of B2B and social media thinkers that is in essence an ad hoc online community.And I have lots of people working to build that community for me. As I follow more people and more people follow me, I get constant suggestions for new people to follow who I’ve never heard of before but who have interesting things to say.

There is a nice spirit of sharing among the people I follow that is self-perpetuating and contagious. For example, after shamelessly sucking content from the people I was following for a few days, I started to feel an obligation–and a challenge–to start contributing. There’s an element of competition driving this, too. You start thinking, hey, I can find some cool stuff too, you know!

Linking to learn
I immediately started to feel a responsibility to start Twittering links that I think could help others in my position. The news, advice, and references I get each day from my Twitter “friends” is better than any Google news or blog feed. Furthermore, by seeing the occasional comments about the links, I can start to develop a point of view about the content.

Every B2B marketer interested in learning more about their profession should have a Twitter account. It’s the first step to creating a personal social media platform. More about that next time.

Have you tried Twitter yet? Tell me about your experiences so far.

I’m continuing the discussion I began in my last post about when a crisis hits a brand. Geoff Dodds, Julie Schwartz and I brainstormed the different responses customers can have to a crisis and the steps you can take to address the problems.

Breaking the promise
When a crisis hits, customers make a decision about whether the promise of a brand has been broken and whether the relationship can be repaired. There are some important factors that will influence their decision and that should be considered in any brand decisions:

Existing brand image. Well-known brands have built up trust with customers and have farther to fall when a crisis hits. Coca Cola’s disastrous introduction of New Coke nearly destroyed the company because it broke the promise of continuity and reliability that had been built up with customers over the course of decades. Meanwhile, when startup airline ValuJet suffered a series of safety problems and a fatal crash in the late 90s, it quickly changed its name to AirTran. ValuJet’s lack of widespread recognition in the marketplace meant that the switch happened with little fanfare. Today, few people remember that AirTran (while certainly not a household name, either) was once ValuJet. (ITSMA’s Brand Equity Index provides a model for understanding a brand’s current image.)

Association of blame. In the court of public opinion, customers make a decision about whether the company as a whole is to blame for the crisis or whether the crisis was the work of a few rogue individuals acting outside the norms of behavior. When Computer Associates’ CEO Sanjay Kumar and some of his senior financial managers were indicted for securities fraud in 2004 for overstating company earnings in the late 90s, customers viewed the problems as the work of a few individuals rather than a sign of corruption throughout the company.

Collateral impact. If the crisis radiates widely beyond the company and damages other companies, the impact on the brand may increase. GM’s brand reputation has suffered as its missteps have affected its many suppliers, adding fuel to critics’ assertions that GM is bringing down the U.S. auto industry as a whole.

Ethical and moral impact. If the crisis is seen as being morally averse, or causes harm in ways that seem ethically and morally averse to the average person, it will affect the pace and depth of losses. When Enron management hid the company’s losses from the public and employees—even as managers cashed in their stock—and employees’ life savings evaporated, the company became permanently associated with greed and corruption. Similarly, when executives from Enron’s auditing firm, Arthur Andersen, refused to accept full responsibility for Andersen’s role in the scandal, trust in the company imploded—along with the company itself.

Speed of response. If companies are seen to be reluctant to respond to a crisis or its complications, it could have a negative impact on customer retention. For example, when certain models of Ford’s Explorer experienced tire blowouts, Ford delayed taking action with customers, blaming the tire supplier for the problems. But customers had not bought their Explorers from a tire manufacturer; they had bought them from Ford. They expected Ford to respond immediately to their requests for help. When Ford did not respond right away, it caused serious damage to the company’s reputation with customers.

Scope of response. Customers have a tendency to “forgive” brands that take more steps to resolve a crisis than the average person can envision or may even think necessary. When Johnson & Johnson responded to the Tylenol crisis by swiftly removing all bottles from the shelves (rather than just those in the areas where tainted bottles were discovered) and promising protective packaging to prevent that kind of crisis from happening again, it actually enhanced J&J’s reputation for safety and enhanced the brand’s position with customers.

Striking the right tone. Customers become highly sensitive to a company’s marketing and advertising messages in the aftermath of a crisis. If, for example, a company responds to a crisis by aggressively marketing itself to replace lost business without addressing the crisis or its impact, the company’s brand image will suffer. Marketers need to persuade the marketplace through the media that the crisis is being dealt with professionally and properly and there is clarity around the governance of the organization. Marketers should focus on getting that message out, not directly but through the media in as controlled a way as they can.
For example, when Oracle was found to have overstated its revenues in 1991, it removed its head of finance and brought in a new CFO, who announced that the company was changing its sales practices. Always known as an aggressive sales company, Oracle changed its practices for recognizing revenues so that salespeople would not be tempted to sell software before its official delivery date could be confirmed. Meanwhile, the company kept up its emphasis on research and development so that customers would see that it was still committed to offering leading edge products. The company took a different approach with customers and prospects, saying, “We’re a new Oracle.”

Use research to understand the context

In times of crisis, research with the following groups is especially important:

Customers and prospects. Research needs to be done with customers to get an aggregate sense of the degree of continued faith in the company and its ability to deliver.

Employees. Sales and delivery people are excellent barometers of the crisis because they talk directly to customers and prospects about their fears about doing business with the company in the wake of the crisis.

Analysts and influencers. Industry and financial analysts will likely have differing opinions about the current and future prospects of the company. But companies also need to find out what is being said about the company through other channels, such as the blogosphere and in customer forums.

Make choices about a brand’s future

We see B2B companies have three choices to make for their brands in the aftermath of a crisis:

1. Retain the existing brand as is. In this case, marketers work to restore faith and credibility in the company through other means than a brand change, such as customer outreach, a change in management, change in processes, or other steps.
2. Alter the brand enough to signal a new era. In the aftermath of its accounting scandal, Computer Associates decided that shortening its name to CA and changing its logo was needed to demonstrate that the company had recovered and was taking a new direction.
3. Create a new brand identity and position. Going this route takes longer and costs more, but may be unavoidable if the crisis runs too deep.

A brand in crisis can be rescued—even enhanced
Customers and prospects are better informed than ever, thanks to the Internet and global connectivity. Companies in crisis need to act quickly. They need to act with absolute integrity and transparency in the wake of the crisis so that customers and prospects understand that the crisis was an anomaly that will be fixed. They need to do research to understand the impact of the crisis on key stakeholders and the business and prepare a response that goes beyond the expectations of these stakeholders. Through these steps, companies can rescue—and perhaps even enhance—the brand image they have so carefully cultivated.

Timing is important in making brand decisions in the wake of a crisis. Providers need to be able to predict the point at which the brand is beginning to erode irrevocably and intervene before that happens. But gaining the ability to be predictive requires research.

I had a great conversation recently with two of ITSMA’s brand gurus, Geoff Dodds and Julie Schwartz. We put ourselves in a hypothetical situation that some of you may have faced for real: when something bad happens that involves your company–think Tylenol poisonings, accounting scandals, etc.–what do you do to protect the brand image you have spent years building up from crashing down around you? And perhaps more importantly, should you let the brand crash–i.e., start fresh with a new name and image?

We agree that there are a few steps that you have to take right away before making any drastic decisions about the ultimate fate of the brand:

1. Respond quickly. Everything that a brand stands for is up for grabs during a crisis. Customers and prospects will be anxious to hear whether they were right to place their trust in the brand. And they won’t wait long before making up their minds. Quick response is critical to making sure that the perceptions attached to the crisis don’t become permanent. Before making any drastic brand decisions, it’s important to clarify what will be done to rectify the crisis and to understand the impact of the crisis on the business.

2. Be transparent. As soon as you have an action plan in place for the business, communicate it. Be open and honest about what happened and what is being done to fix the problem.

3. Assess the pace and depth of customer losses. The most important vital signs for companies to monitor in the wake of a crisis are the pace and depth of customer losses. Factors that will impact the pace and depth of losses include the following:

• Low switching costs. If the costs of switching to another provider are low, customers may panic and try to switch in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, increasing the pace and depth of losses. If switching is difficult, the pace of loss will likely be slower.
• Dire predictions from analysts. If Wall Street and/or industry analysts are outspoken in predicting that the crisis will have a substantial impact on the provider’s ability to do business now or in the future, it could precipitate a stampede.
• Level of commoditization. If the provider’s offerings are not substantively different from those of competitors, brand loyalty may be slim and customers will be vulnerable to aggressive poaching by competitors.
• Length of the crisis. If the crisis is something that can be resolved relatively quickly, press and analyst attention will likely die down quickly too, perhaps decreasing the long-term pace of customer losses. However, if the crisis results in a lengthy public investigation, the long-term impact could be severe.

Have we left anything out? Please let me know.

Next time, we’ll get into some of the specific customer reactions to a crisis.

I’ve done enough presentations about web 2.0 to see that the sessions tend to fall into one of two categories: revival meeting or therapy session. This week, I experienced both.

Most of my web 2.0 sessions are with marketers from big B2B technology companies and I often experience deep cynicism, even anger, from people who question whether web 2.0 has any value for marketing. I present the usual stats showing web 2.0 taking off generally, and ITSMA research showing increased uptake by their peers in B2B. But it doesn’t sink in. Being more of a content guy than a heckler handler, I tend to let the venting go on too long and try to address their points one by one. By the end, everyone is frustrated, including me.

But yesterday, I finally figured out what’s really going on here: fear.

I should have seen the parallel from all my years covering big IT projects–the anger that IT people absorb as they try to change the ways that people do their jobs. It stirs up some primitive emotions–and PTSD among IT people, who get frustrated with being the messenger at the receiving end of all those pot shots.

I’ve always counseled them to not take it personally, and to try to reach out to business people and let them vent their anger and get past it. But it’s hard. I get pissed when the venting starts, though I don’t think I show it.

Yesterday was different. I shared the stage with Marijean Lauzier, the CEO of Digital Influence Group, an agency that consults on Web 2.0. Marijean didn’t try to tit for tat the cynicism and saw what was behind it. When I asked her to address some of the “questions,” she took a long, dramatic pause and smiled.

Then she said: “They’ve moved our cheese! We’ve been doing what we’ve been doing for 20 years and now it’s all changing!” “Dr.” Marijean then proceeded to lead the group through the various stages of grief in the span of 20 minutes.

This is going to be hard. Web 2.0 is uncontrollable, always changing, and always on. We need time to get used to it. But as the good doctor said, we are all experts because we are expert communicators. It will come.

Thankfully, earlier in the week on Tuesday, I had my first revival meeting. This crowd was ready to go, full of enthusiasm and the frustrations were in the lack of success they were seeing in some early web 2.0 efforts, and lingering resistance from some internal skeptics. But everyone understood that there was no turning back. Because it’s not possible. The old media channels are crashing down around us.

Right now, it seems that the gap between sales and marketing is mostly papered over with technology. For example, the trend towards creating a closed-loop lead generation and nurturing process between marketing and sales is a positive step, but it seems like a bridge across the chasm rather than a true route to collaboration. Sales and marketing create a shared definition of a sales-ready lead, implement software to track leads from marketing to sales and back to marketing, and then go back to doing their respective jobs in isolation.

In typical functional fashion, sales and marketing have gravitated toward things that the other can’t or won’t do. To greatly oversimplify it, sales sells and marketing does that mysterious “creative” thing it does. Few salespeople or marketers feel qualified—or interested—in crossing over to the other side.

Many organizations we talk to are baffled about how to bridge the gap. They try to do it with golf games or off-site team-building exercises. That can help, but salespeople and marketers need more concrete reasons to work together.

It’s all about that basic mammalian instinct: empathy. It’s much easier to see the value of someone else’s work when you’ve tried to do the same thing yourself. You need to find tasks that both sales and marketing have a need for and interest in, but that make sense to share.

Our research on Account-Based Marketing has revealed a few such tasks:

• Customer understanding. In B2B, both marketers and salespeople know the value of learning about customers’ business issues and needs. And both know how to gain that understanding. But it makes sense to collaborate. Salespeople are best equipped and most motivated to understand the “now” of the account: what has already been sold to customers and what they are most likely to buy next. Marketers can use those contacts to start building a larger context—the business issues that cross functional, corporate, and vertical boundaries. Marketing needs this information to create thought leadership and marketing materials designed to reach many different clients at once.
  Salespeople may have this kind of broader perspective, but more than likely they don’t have time to gather it. However, they know (or can be convinced) that having this deeper level of information will enable them to have more intelligent conversations with executives at prospect companies, spot additional opportunities to add value, and build more trusted relationships. Why? Because it is a deeper, more thorough version of what they already are doing to make the sale.
• Sharing what works. Salespeople love to get clear, simple tips on what’s working for others. Marketing can help. By doing research within multiple accounts, marketers gain invaluable perspective on broad customer trends and best practices for reaching customers. Marketing develops an institutional memory that can help salespeople create shortcuts by identifying what has worked in the past and what has not, what resources may be appropriate, and what company assets exist that can help.

What do you think?

We’re always hearing that marketing and sales should be better aligned (whatever that means), but I see little practical advice about how to do that beyond the usual change management stuff. I don’t discount the importance of change management, but sometimes you need something more concrete—something that marketing and sales can do together that gets them working closer together without people noticing it so much.

Our research shows that we may have found something: account planning.

For a company’s most important (i.e., biggest) accounts, good account planning is essential. But sales is under all kinds of pressure these days and we’re finding that many salespeople simply don’t have the time—or the inclination—to do real in-depth research on their accounts. Sure, salespeople know the accounts—they know what the customers have spent and what they are most likely to want next. They may also know what the customers’ major business issues are—if they know how to ask.

But there’s more that can be done. Our research shows that customers don’t think their providers do a very good job of helping them with their business issues.

Marketers could help with that problem. Research is one of marketing’s greatest strength. And in big, important customers, it’s worth integrating that ability into the account planning process. We’re calling it Collaborative Account Planning.

Everyone has something to gain from collaboration in account planning. Salespeople have the opportunity to move customers through the buying process faster—and become a part of the planning process for those purchases. Marketers have the chance to eliminate much of the distance between the work they do and the outcome they desire—a clear, direct impact on the sales process. And customers have an opportunity to get help and ideas on the issues that are most pressing to them.

Obviously, not every account can receive the kind of effort we’re talking about here—where marketing does a “deep dive” into an account through primary and secondary research , interviewing customers, determining the company’s strategic goals and the competitive issues it faces within the vertical. But the research investment has a useful life beyond one specific account. Marketing can reuse the information it discovers about a strategic account with other customers in that vertical.

Eventually, marketing becomes the institutional memory for account planning, helping salespeople create shortcuts by identifying what has worked in the past and what has not, what resources may be appropriate, and what company assets exist that can help.

And the research equips marketers to use their creative abilities to do something else: help salespeople refine the value propositions for specific customers.  One of my colleagues  did this when she worked for marketing in a consulting firm. Marketing assigned her to work with sales to try to win the business of a major toy retailer. Marketers researched the company and its markets, talked with the sales account team, and interviewed several store employees and customers. Using that information, the marketers worked with the sales team to develop an account plan.

When it came time to present to the customer, salespeople used the toy retailer’s terminology, and marketers designed the proposal cover and contents to look like one of the company’s stores. When the company won the business, the toy retailer highlighted the extra effort the company made to get to know them. For marketing, it was dream—clear evidence that the work it was doing and the materials it was producing had a direct impact on the sale.

Why aren’t more companies working like this? Are you?

This post is from a real query I received from a client this week. The questions display a healthy distrust for accepted wisdom, which I like, and provide a good test of the thinking behind thought leadership marketing. See what you think of my answers:

• How did thought leadership initiatives in companies begin? Thought leadership marketing is based on the academic research publishing model, in which academics created journals built around a peer review process. The journals have boards made up of top academics in a given field. They review submissions from other academics in the field and approve them for publishing in the journal. The most famous business incarnation of this model is the Harvard Business Review, which began publishing in 1922. When the consulting industry began soon thereafter, McKinsey took the academic journal model and applied it to its marketing, which resulted in the McKinsey Quarterly.The Quarterly is the first real example of thought leadership marketing. It looks and feels like an academic journal but does not accept submissions from outside of McKinsey. Thus, while it does rely to some extent on research and peer review as an academic journal does, it is essentially a marketing vehicle because it focuses exclusively on ideas, research, and case studies generated by McKinsey consultants and an internal research group. It is staffed by editors who work exclusively for McKinsey and are not academics. The Quarterly is the first and still the most successful form of thought leadership marketing. Other companies have adopted pieces of the academic research publishing model for their own thought leadership marketing. For example, many companies carry out primary and secondary research and publish it; they may also use that research as the basis for an opinion piece that speculates, based on the research and the experience of subject matter experts, on trends in a market vertical.
• Is it only focused in knowledge intensive industries? This depends on whether the products and services themselves are knowledge intensive. In industries where the product or service is very information intensive, such as research, management consulting, technology, aerospace, etc., you will find that the importance of thought leadership marketing is greater than in industries where the products have less of a knowledge component, such as manufacturing and retailing.However, every industry has an element of thought leadership potential, because all companies are eager for information about competitors, best practices, and process improvements. This led to the explosion of the trade magazine industry during the 1960s-1980s. Even in industries with low information intensity in their products—coin-operation laundry franchises, for example—there was a trade magazine offering information about how to improve business practices. Thus, thought leadership is applicable to any industry with interest in competitive information and process improvement.
• Why did companies start focusing on it? Marketers began using thought leadership when they recognized that customers and prospects were growing weary of salespeople trying to sell them products without knowing about the business issues that customers and prospects faced. Thought leadership became a way to demonstrate knowledge of prospects’ business and vertical market issues and to suggest solutions to those issues. It became a way to build trust and interest among prospects and to build a relationship with prospects based on knowledge rather than product information. Especially in B2B, where the products and solutions are complex and usually need to be adapted/customized in some way, developing the relationship through knowledge helps demonstrate to customers that providers can go beyond the product specification sheet and help them with their business needs.
• How was it different from branding/other marketing initiatives that were carried out earlier? Thought leadership is different because it focuses on educating rather than selling. Thought leadership, done well, provides information about the prospects’ businesses and verticals that helps them determine how to address business problems they face. Thought leadership changes the dynamic from selling what you have to helping customers figure out what they need.

• Why is focus on thought leadership important for companies in knowledge intensive industries now? Thought leadership is a way to engage prospects and customers earlier in the buying cycle, in the Epiphany Phase. Especially in B2B, products and services are becoming more complex and sales cycles are getting longer. Thought leadership is a way to provide helpful information to prospects and customers early in the buying process, before they have fully articulated their needs. Early engagement builds credibility and creates a stronger relationship. Thought leadership also opens up the possibility for thought leaders to establish their companies as preferred providers by helping customers formulate the projects that become RFPs.