Buzz Canuck

My 11 Takeaways from Social Media Nite at JWT #SoMeNite - A Kitchen Table Chat of Peers

I had the privilege of joining an illustrious group of some of Toronto's best digital folk last night for a "kitchen table"/salon chat on what makes social media tick in Canada (#SoMeNite if following on Twitter) .

Big kudos to Laurie Dillon-Schalk @ldillonschalk and Melanie Reiffenstein @MelanieReiff of JWT @JWTCanada for ringleading such an intelligent and diverse group and an equal thumbs up to Rick Wolfe @rickwolfe of Poststone for moderating the serendipitous discussion so effectively.

Very tough to corral an audience that included:  1 media planner, 1 anthropologist, 1 analytics guru, 1 print agency, 1 software dudes, 2 media boutiques, 1 social media producer, 1 creative, 1 PR flack, 2 big agency gurus, 2 entrepreneurs, 2 strat planners and 1 HR consultant. Not only did the diversity improve the discussion but also underscored how difficult it is for a client to assuage all these competing social interests. In fact, the melting pot (or is that a Canadian mosaic) motivated me enough to kick my personal blog out of it's slumber and provide a summary of the discourse.

Beyond a smart roadmap for social media implementation in the enterprise (the key 6 steps below) here are my 11 takeaways from the discussion:

1) Bridging Chasms is Needed - we don't need as many visionaries in the business of social anymore. As David Jones @doctorjones of Proximity WW mused - CMOs pretty much appreciate by now the impact of social for their business -it's no longer "the why", it's more "the how" and "the what" that are the stumbling blocks.

And as Sara Chi @infosara indicated the biggest social hurdle and what we really need are "crusaders" that can bridge the distances between customer and companies, experts and the mainstream, the grassroots and the top ranks. Donna Papacosta @donnapapacosta mentioned one of her most effective meetings was having a simple "lifting of the veil" discussion with a CEO to educate and subsequently push social initiatives forward.

2) Social Media as a Discipline and Behaviour vs. a Tool/Tactic - David Jones @doctorjones and David Bradfield @dbradfield of Sapient Nitro emphasized too much effort is spent on how social media can be bought, traded and commerced vs. treating it as a core practice in companies that's inescapable to avoid in a connected economy. Hessie Jones @hessiejones of Due North mentioned the difficulty to accept this paradigm within the media planning and buying industry who have historically viewed media as transactional.

3) The Experts are the Cobbler's Children - the intellectual horsepower in the room was genuinely digital MENSA-level. They get it, and I'm sure could do great work for all their clients if given the full chance to roam. But as Jill Fagan @jillpfagan  mentioned, as an industry we are horrible internal communicators and sellers. Bigger effort and thinking needs to be made on how to get clients to "yes" , appreciate the value of what social brings overall to their business and establishing some paradigm on who gets to work on what as agencies, startups, software companies and consultants stumble over each other fighting for digital nickels. Wise cautions by @johnsaydam - this is not free and @ldillonschalk - don't pitch until they are ready.

4) Tension between Emotion/Creative and Analytics - the credibility to push social media forward exists on two opposite poles - as John Saydam @johnsaydam mentioned through his RIM example - the best stuff in social resonates emotionally but as David Bradfield @dbradfield supported - the institutionalization of social media as a practice requires sound analytics. I guess the perfect mind for social media is an equally balanced left brain/right brain.

5) Is Social Media the new CRM or new Dot.com? - Rick Wolfe @rickwolfe and John Reeves of Kyp interjected their years of experience and wisdom by pointing to the slow and steady progression and eventual maturation of the CRM industry from the '90s frontier mentality to the now well-established multi-billion dollar collossus. I'm of two minds here -

On the yes side " it does have CRM-esque similarities" -

    - the progression of technology has been swift

    - it's moving toward essentialness

    - a small group of experts exists within a slower-to-adopt mainstream marketplace

    - a lot of bad money is being spent in its early heydays

    - each has and/or will go through Gartner's Hype Cycle

    -the glossary and behaviour is difficult to understand for the traditional world (sometimes     intentionally so) and

    - it's potential to build business value and operationalize business processes is huge.

On the no side "this social thing is a much different beast than we've seen before" -

    - the pace of change is so swift here and continues to progress that as Jill Rosenberg     @girlfrommars mentioned "current digital will always be this fast moving, somewhat awkward,     teenager" and that a full social eveolution here may only be 5-10 years here before we move     onto the next big thing (most guesses were mobile) 

    - norms are more difficult to establish in order to standardize industry given multiple players,         mutiple technology interests and swifter-moving environment

    - the power of socializing business has much more far reaching implications than the CRMing of     business and

    - whereas previously web building and CRM programs could be compartmentalized, social     business is a cultural corporate, operational and  branding concern.

    So which side of this fence are you on?

6) Don't Overreach and Be Too Eager - as evidenced by Nicole McKinney @bcadgroup and David Bradfield's @dbradfield examples - a comfort zone needs to be established with a client before they are willing to fry bigger fish. Most digital people are quick decison makers and early adopters by instinct, they have less regard for the "large cruise ship" ecosystem that exists within a corporation to get them to take even a few degrees of turn in the right direction.

7) Listening and Being Aware is the First Step - I'm not too sure if social media adoption is a 6-step program (as proposed below) or a 12 step one akin to Alcoholics Anonymous but there is general agreement that one of the best things agencies can do for their clients is make them aware of what's happening in the digital world at large and their immediate industry. Perhaps not the best reason to move, but I think there was some consensus (with a notable exception by @sarasepehri)that competitive steps forward also lead to reappraisal and steps forward on the client front.

8) What of Canada? - David Jones @doctorjones made a great point of the lack of dynamic Canadian client personalities that are lightning rods and role models for their peers. Whereas Scott Monty (Ford), @scottmonty , Lionel Mencacha (Dell) @lionelatdell and Shiv Singh (Pepsi) @shivsingh are passionate flagbearers for US corporate adoption and senior-level understanding of social media, who speaks for Canada?

9) The Lag Effect in Canada - there was some noise about Canada's reticence to use digital and social media. There are two key distinctions here. On a user/cosnumer front, Canada is the #1 user of technology and digital media in the world (for proof here is one of my recent Wikibrands' posts "Canada Rules the Roost When It Comes to Digital"). Perhaps we use the web more as a life appliance then the sexy accessory in our wardrobe, but average Canadians have flocked to digital based on high education levels, technology appetite, high urbanization and quite frankly winter (what else you going to do when it's -30 in Winnipeg?). What is the bigger travesty and almost a crime is the risk aversion, branch plant mentality that local corporations have employed who happily operate 2-3 years behind their customers (sins put forward - lack of executive awareness of even the simple stuff, only 17% of Canadian companies measuring and non-mobile friendly sites) ?

Maybe it's Rick Wolfe's humble Canadian-ness that stops us from promoting our successes in bright lights. A great idea for a future Social Media Nite is how the industry pushes the credibility and acceleration of its efforts as a whole forward  (e.g. government leadership, petition, comprehensive training, CEOs for Social Club, putting teeth into a NxNe summit, inviting top 10 most popular twitterers to a TedXNorthTweets?).

10) Simple, Simple, Simple - as Melanie Reiffenstein @melaniereiff , Daniel Berkal @danielberkal of Palmerston Group and Noel Geer of Ngage Media emphasized - the best stuff that comes out of the web is basic, with very few moving parts and a core central focus. Data junkies, consultants, planners and pitch people need to stop debating the nuances, creating unnecessary noise and the feeling amongst their less tech-adept stakeholders that somehow they are the disgrace of the industry by not wading into the deep thickets of digital game. Let's agree on the fundamentals (don't worry - yes, you can charge for the additional features) and start embracing the needs that really count - the customer (as Laurie Dillon-Schalk @ldillonschalk so eloquently reiterated).

11) If It Wasn't Tough, Everybody Would be Doing It - when you get together with any digital posse, it's tempting to have a gripe session and we had a bit of that last night. And that's okay. It's tribal and creates a social bond between people with like experiences and a "we vs. them" zeal to change the world. But staying crabby is a dead end street. To end on a positive outtake from discussion, I'll lean on Jill Fagan's soliloquy - this is an incredible time to be a buisness person, change agent and digital expert. The shifts in business value, methods of operation and opportunities for innovation are larger than they've ever been. And as people who live and breathe this work, we are most poised to benefit disproportionately from this evolution to digitizing business, socializing culture and changing the way people live, work and play. So chill out, enjoy the ride and remember every time an executive utters "what's Twitter?" that's secretly an extra premium in your pocket.

Without giving any secrets away - the 6 steps to Social Media Maturity put forward:

Step 1 - Look & Listen

Step 2- Establish a Social Footprint

Step 3 - Engage

Step 4 - Increase Your Social Currency

Step 5 - Build Your Community

Step 6 - Aim for Social Sophistication

And the Three Star tweets of the night,

le troisieme etoile/the third star - @dbradfield  "For true success in social, companies need to move away from control models to release models"...

le deuxieme etoile/the second star - @doctorjones "My sister from another mother @hessiejones is depressing me" - I have no idea what this means but interesting

le premiere etoile/the first star - @dbradfield (what can I say he had his iPad open all night) "When social becomes a discipline, it's shared across an organization and not the domain of an individual"

Thanks again to the folks at JWT Canada, Laurie Dillon-Schalk, Rick Wolfe, Melanie Reiffenstein, Hessie Jones, Dainel Berkal, Noel Geer, 'Sarah Sephera, Jill Rosenberg, John Saydam, Sarah Chi, Bruce Runyan, John Reeves, Jill Fagan, Nicole Mckinney, David Bradfield, Donna Pappacosta, David Jones for the discussion. I look forward to the sequel .

Sean Moffitt @seanmoffitt

Maslow's Hierarchy of MO

For those 400,000+ people who become Mo Bros and MoSistas this year and the millions more that follow them, you may pass through the 8 stages of MO to become a truly self-actualized Mo. 

Where are you on this scale...

Stage 1 - Aware - 100% of us, you know about and you revel in knowing what Movember is all about

Stage 2 - Participating - 70% - you have advocated the cause at some point over the 30 days

Stage 3 - Involved - 50% - you have publicly declared interest with your profile and wallet

Stage 4 - Committed - 35% - you`re not on the sidelines, you`ve publicly shown your advocacy by growing a handsome or not so handsome Mo (or supported others madly who did - MoSistas)

Stage 5 - Engaged -20%  - you`ve built a team, became a change agent and enthusiastically rallied to troops to follow you into the cauldron of Mo-dom

Stage 6 - Champion - 10% -it wasn`t enough to build a fundraising sect, you`ve gone out of your comfort zone and hosted an event, stunt or something beyond your known circle of friends

Stage 7 - Captain - 3% - your passion has been recognized and you`ve become a bit of a local cause celebré for your Mo creativity, conviction and commitment

Stage 8 - Fanatic - 1% - consider this your full time job - likely you have a `stache tattooed permanently and have devoted 20+ hours per week to the Mo Cause before, during and after these 30 days

Wherever it is you are on this scale, we salute you!

The Engagement Octopus of Movember

       
Graphic credit to Brandon Home and Threadless

A good chunk of what has obsessed our office over the last few weeks is the launch of Movember, christened last week by a moustache-inspired art gallery Movember launch event in Toronto.  This is my third year as a committed, albeit scant blonde, MoBro (@movembersean) .

Part of the success of the Movember movement to change the face of men's health, has been in extending out well beyond the traditional circles of fundraising, in order to deliver attention, buzz and engagement.

It's open armed approach is embedded in its history - from 30 Australians having a dream (and perhaps one too many lagers), Movember has grown to a cause supported by 620,000 Mo Bros and Mo Sistas worldwide raising millions of dollars for the treatment and detection of prostate cancer worldwide. The success of Movember has not been driven by celebrity, a wealthy steward or a crisis moment; it's more been driven by word of mouth and getting people to care about and change their appearance for a cause, where they live, work and play.

Here's the impressive array of places you'll find Movember this year, consider the Movember Engagement Octopus more than 30 tentacles wide:

On the website front:

1) Movember.com - a GQ-meets-Trucker Mo designed website whose key mission to to spread news, orchestrate fundraising and share member involvement with 6 country-based offshoots.

2) Movember Registration Area - where all the fundraising begins - sign up as team captains, join a network challenge and integrate all your fundraising onto Twitter and other social arenas.

3) The Movember 5-Plex - five things you can do while on Movember.com - update on news, see how you rank across other fundraisers, get some merchandise, build out your social pages and visit a swanky and flash-based The Lodge - and amidst the stag heads and other clasically male trinkets, check out the Style Guide, some tips and facts and 5 basic Movember rules.

4) The MOSCARS - a MO-sourcing, video based competition built by Meme Labs to aggregate all the videos that flag why Mo Bros and Mo Sissas are participating in 2010, the three top videos get suited up with Movember swag.

On the Social Extensions front:

5-8) MO Social - Movember has keenly taken advantage of digital word of mouth by inhabiting the top 4 networks: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr with many country and city specific handles - next year perhaps we'll add LinkedIn - but perhaps that would make us less cool?

9) Movember Digital Challenge and Captains - we've localized and created a focus for our web interests through passioante city-based captains and assistant captains in 20 cities across North America.

10) Movember Digital Champions - the recruitment of concentric circles of 2,000 digital ambassadors in Canada - who are connected, influential and ready to MO Up  who will all congregrate at @MoChampions.

11) Movember Network Challenges - the ability to compete against peer companies, agencies and teams by activating a multi-team leaderboard within Movember.com and starting some Mo smack talk.

12) Movember MoPhone - check out iPhone apps and get your iMo on with Movember MoPhone and monitor, scrutinize and share your 30 days of follicle growth.

On the sponsor, PR and merchandise front:

13) Movember Threadless Challenge - one of my favourite causes meets one of my favourite crowdsourced websites - check out over 400 of the best Movember T-shirts you'd ever want to see, vote on and buy.

14) Movember Hockey Mos - the use of Lanny McDonald and Wendel Clark as front men is as Canadiana as maple syrup and Kraft Dinner, also take our recent poll on your picks for the best historical and current hockey Mos and which team logo derserves a MO.

15) Movember Cufflinks - grow a Mo with style with Arbitrage cufflinks .

16) Movember Shoes - get a pair of limited edition shoes from Tom's and have the coolest slicks on the block.

17) Movember T-Shirts - get some groovin' T-shirts and badge your self publicly http://www.zazzle.com/movember+tshirts  or http://www.palmercash.com/search.aspx?x=0&y=0&SearchTerm=movember.

18) Movember Mercedes-Benz Sponsorship - Mercedes-Benz is a lead sponsor for the effort and is offering up some Smart Cars for promotion and some Mercedes-Benz prizing for the key fundraisers. 

19) Movember Schick Sponsorship - check out the Schick manscaping swag available from Australia and North America in this year's effort as well as an effort to tailor your Mo at SchickMoPic.ca.

20) Movember Moo Cards - those lovable stationary cards do it again - this time get your ready made Mo Business cards and MiniCards - just ordered mine.

21) Movember Sector9 Longboards - forget the grizzly November weather - bump and grind down your local 'hood with an official Movember 'board.

22) Movember Demitasse Jewellery - attention Mo Sistas, attention Mo Sistas - get your moustache inspired jewellery and become the fashion diva of Movember.

23) Movember Canadian Club Cocktails - move over Mad Men, your season may be over but ours is just beginning - look for official and some unofficial Canadian Club cocktails inspired by Movember - having drank all of them at the Toronto launch, I highly approve.

24) Movember NHL Players - it's anticpated more than 15 NHLers will be donning a jersey and growing a Mo this Movember, as much as playoff beards are important, mid-season MOs are even more important - have a read on the Minnesota Wild's effort and it's link to the NHL effort of Hockey Fights Cancer.

25) Movember NBA Involvement - talk about a home season opener, NBA fans got their dose of Movember recently in Vancouver

26) Movember Corporate Challenges - who says bankers, lawyers and investment people don't have fun, one of the more successful efforts in Movember is getting prominent companies to raise funds as a company with an automatic company match

27) Movember Prostate Cancer and Livestrong affiliations - establishing strong ties to the representative bodies for Movember in Canada and the U.S. leaves a trail of a lot of positive goodwill and also the raison d'etre for undertaking the campaign.

On the events/experience front:

28) Movember Local Committees- it's amazing what happens when local people embedded in their communities rally their own business, organizational, trade and neighborhood groups around the Mo flag.

28) Movember Gala Parties - commune and celebrate with your MoBros and MoSistas by fundraising and joining us at the 7 Canadian gala parties and 14 US gala parties from Aspen to Victoria.

29) Movember Moustache-Inspired Art Exhibitions - the moustache has had a long and storied tradition among the elite and bourgeosie of society - why not launch our effort this year by celebrating the aesthetic of the Mo ?

30) Movember Barber Shop Shave Offs - November 1 straight edge clean shaves, remember follow Movember's five golden rules and you can't go wrong.

31) MoCupcakes - the quest to find the manliest cupcake in Canada - join our effort as a cupcaker, amateur baker or cupcake enthusiast  @MoCupcakes .

32) Movember Event Space -why wait for a gala event to pop up in your 'hood? Organize and post your own events and order a Movember party in a box .

32) Movember Prizing - compete for one of fourteen Mo grand prizes  - vie for the title of Man of Movember, Miss Movember, Lame Mo, best Mo Combo, best Mo team, best Mo fundraiser and many others http://ca.movember.com/prizes/.

The iPhone4 vs. Blackberry Torch Challenge - the "I"s Have It!

Battery Life (5 pts) - iPhone4 - 7 hours talk time, 40 hours of audio playback and 10 hours of video playback, Blackberry Torch - 5.8 hours talk time, 30 hours of audio playback, 6 hours of video playback - comparable and I will say based on the superior multimedia uses of the iPhone - it may run out earlier not based on inferior battery but based on proportionately more time spent on apps that battery hog - Apple iPhone4 -4 , Blackberry Torch - 3.

Emotional Allure (5 pts) - even my avowed Blackberry loyalist in the above video April Dunford claims the emotional tug of the Apple can be too appealing  to resist - part of this social "tidal pull" toward the iPhone has been created organically by its users, part of it by its mastery of the user experience from consideration to retail to packaging to the tech and software and part of it, by the launch of stuff and features, months sometimes years, before other competitors, it's a tough one for BB to compete against (I hear a Blackberry iPad will launch in November, once again 8 months after Apple)- I think one competitive wedge could be Blackberry opening up to social networks in a big way as Apple has resisted, but BB has invested its external operations in customer service and less about building online community, too bad - Apple iPhone4 5, Blackberry Torch 3

The Extras (10 pts) - let's see - iPhone4 has a pretty cool 3 axis gyroscope, a built in compass, 16 or 32GB of built in memory vs. Blackberry's 4GB install (that can open up to 32GB) and some other barely used but good to brag about bling....most of Blackberry Torch's features from first appearances seem like a catch up to Apple iPhone's world - beyond being cheaper and having the slider already mentioned, there doesn't seem to be remarkably different stuff on the Blackberry - iPhone4 - 8, Blackberry Torch 5

THE FINAL VERDICT - Apple iPhone's Score of 87 beats Blackberry Torch's score of 65

Here are the tech specs - Apple iPhone4  vs. Blackberry Torch

The Top 30 Group Buying Deal Programs - Rated

From the ashes of the meltdown of the 2008 and 2009 world economy comes a number of group and local deal services targeting local-based retailers and the people that shop there. It is truly the marriage between three rising trends - e-commerce, localization and social networking - wrapped up in a discount envelope. I've had no fewer than ten people ask me about the comparative strength of these services - apparently many of their sales teams are pitching superiority in their proposals.

I'm of two minds here. On one side, this is a heck of a lot better than targeting discounts and coupons through newspaper from an effectiveness, from a tracking and from a pay-for-performance standpoint. As a client interested in ROI or a retailer counting their pennies, this type of service gets a lot closer to knowing which part of your marketing spend is effective. 

On the other side, I see a nation of retailers, from high end boutiques to low end discounters, training their clientele to shop based on price and ceding over their customer lists to others in the process. Is this just a better more contemporary, socialized version of the coupon that allows more real estate to promote your offering or is this the Walmartization of local merchant economy?

That economic and moral question aside, we have reviewed and rated 30 of the top deal services based on the following criteria:

        - User Experience (20 pts)

        - Quality of Deal (20 pts)

        - Differentiation of Offering (15 pts)

        - Design (15 pts)

        - Socialness (10 pts)

        - Breadth of Deals (10 pts)

        - Number of Cities/Places (10 pts)

We'll release our ratings next week but hopefully give their founders and executive staff a chance to provide additional thoughts and highlight their strengths on their group wares. I'll individually evaluate each site in follow up posts.

In the interim, here is our preliminary rating of their Twitter presence. Twitter IQ scores were given based on number of followers, quality and frequency of posts, depth of engagement and smart Twitter behaviour (response/promote ratios, central and city-based pages):

Company	Location	Lead Account	Following	Followers	Listed	Tweets	Twitter IQ Score
Gilt	NYC	@giltgroupe	2499	11851	825	660	19
Living Social	Washington	@livingsocial	3042	7516	480	2577	19
TeamBuy	Toronto	@teambuy_toronto	1876	1704	81	793	16
Scoutmob	Atlanta	@scoutmob	4143	6077	305	2214	16
Red Flag Deals	Toronto	@redflagdeals	21	5904	246	6077	14
GroupOn	Chicago	@groupon	3	5225	359	114	14
My Daily Thread	Atlanta	@mydailythread	2001	1404	81	1312	14
Grooster	Vancouver	@groostervan	1446	1233	77	220	13
Webpiggy	Toronto	@webpiggy	2001	1073	62	1189	12
Social Buy	Los Angeles	@social_buy	931	788	42	1111	10
Scoop St.	NYC	@scoopst	363	671	60	2341	10
TippR	Seattle	@tippr	58	921	44	160	9
Twongo	North Carolina	@teamtwongo	1463	769	42	509	9
WagJag	Toronto	@wagjag	1976	1010	43	193	8
YipIt	NYC	@yipit	460	594	44	336	8
Pricebunch	Chicago	@pricebunchchi	802	297	19	63	6
DealOn	NYC	@dealonnyc	138	205	10	196	6
TownHog	San Francisco	@townhog	359	154	14	72	3
At Cost	Los Angeles	@atcostLA	266	85	10	22	3
Bloomspot	Mountain View, CA	@bloomspot	0	72	5	202	2
Home Run	San Francisco	@homerun_com	0	28	4	0	1
Adility	San Francisco	@adility	0	26	4	10	1

Congrats Gilt Groupe, Living Social, Team Buy and ScoutMob for passing our Twitter test with flying colours. Unfortunately Twitter socialness likely only counts for 3% of our total evaluation. For those who work at these companies, we'd love to evaluate your strengths firsthand, so drop us a line or leave a comment below.

We've also left 8 spots open for additions, so please provide us your best other group buying networks/websites for our total evaluation. Happy deals.

The 16 Things I Learned Writing Wikibrands

Some of you may know, we have happily finished authoring 85,000+ words of customer engagement magic entitled "Wikibrands - Reinventing Your Business in a Customer-Controlled Marketplace (McGraw-Hill)" . It's due out in the late Fall - just in time for your holiday business stockings. Of course I'm biased, but it really is good, almost gift worthy.

The shorthand I've been using to describe it is: Wikinomics, just written four years later and deeper inside business. Of course, another distinction is that we're more about providing a roadmap for engaged business and a recipe for reinvention than an academic study. In truth, as a post-modern author, the toughest work has now just begun.

For a heads up, on our central arguments, content, business cases and where we go from here, have a glimpse.

Debuting as an author with a just finished manuscript, many revelations appear and crystallize just now after the long period spent interviewing, researching and writing. Perhaps grizzled veteran writers know the vicissitudes of publishing but you've caught me fresh. In the wake of writing over late nights, during short flights and between bites, clarity has eventually come.

One of my favourite authors Hemingway once mused, "if a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

If that's true, my fellow writer Mike Dover and myself have left a virtual Northwest Passage of insight below the surface and left out of the finished book. Look forward to a "chockful of content" on our associated Wikibrands blog and wiki later this summer.

We not only have in-depth learnings about our study of interest - customer participation, online community, brand collaboration, social influence, word of mouth and grassroots marketing, but also about the process of publishing itself. When you spend three years thinking seriously about a book, studying over 200 individual subjects of interest and interviewing just as many experts, patterns emerge and insights, perhaps after a short period of confusion and dissonance, become entrenched.

Take advantage of my literary-induced sleep deprivation, here are the top sixteen things I learned about the process of putting my soul into this publishing exercise, hopefully you can apply them to your own efforts:

1) You're never more informed about your subject of interest than the day you hand in your manuscript. Like training for a marathon, your peak performance happens right before the race. Celebrate now and prepare yourself for the long slow decline out of the giddy discovery phase and deep content sifting phase and enter the "career and life getting in the way" phase. 

2) Most of your interviews will provide some level of new insight or validation - ten percent will provide gold, know which one is which wherever it comes, from and make sure they get in the book.

3) Thinking up a concept is so much easier than writing about it; the actual seed idea or kernel thought takes twenty times less time than validating, supporting, writing and providing evidence for it.

4) Continue to ask yourself - is what I'm writing here valuable to readers? will it make them think differently? will it broaden perspectives? will it help them change their environments? will it provide practicality to their day jobs? In a connected content-driven world, to earn $20 plus dollars out of someone's pocket, you need to provide utility against what is generally already available.

5) Genuinely stretching new ideas are tough to find - most new ideas have subtlety and nuance; finding different lenses into existing ideas is a majority of what good books do.

6) When you invite people to contribute - some will be important for advancing your argument, some will be important for connecting to others, some will be important for being your advocates when the book eventually comes out. Keep all those relationships going and provide reciprocal benefits

7) Positioning is key - try to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, but no broader. In our case, marketers are traditionally "book resistors" - we've taken the idea of "brand" as a key business value driver and thus, we're intending to appeal to the broader business audience, from entrepreneurs to the C-suite.

8) Supporting point #7, people do judge books by their covers - do not compromise on merely an acceptable cover, hold out for something that is iconic that explains your concept perfectly and achieves shelf impact (note: cover on Amazon and in this post are draft cover versions).

9) Involve and ask your audience - it's amazing what they know and how they can steer you away from publishing potholes. It also supports our central argument that when you get people involved at even a basic level, when listened to and treated well, they will over time become referral engines, advocates and evangelists.

10) Practitioners provide credibility and stories; experts provide sophisticated understanding and quotable quote. Include both. One of our peer books had absolutely no endnotes, it was merely personal opinion and not surprisingly, read unbelievably shallow and pompous. People want to hear the truth well told rather than just your expert musings.

11) Be prepared for long waits on interviews - the larger the company and the more senior you get, the longer you wait. Some will pleasantly surprise based on their speed of getting back to you and candour, others will massively disappoint.

12) Twitter may be a great way to get in touch with people you don't know but horrible for setting up meetings (Twitter are you listening?); on balance, good old fashioned email and LinkedIn provide much better traction for connecting with people important to your content.

13) Never underestimate the selflessness of people who love their jobs, embrace your thesis and want to help you out (thank you all that provided your valuable time with us).

14) It's an emotional rollercoaster. There will be moments in time that you won't want to finish, there will be other times when you're ready for a second book.

15) For a business book, you need to balance substance with style. Too much of the former, makes it boring; too much of the latter, makes it puffery.

16) As alluded to, most modern authors understand that actual writing is less than half the battle - the pre-writing pitch effort and the post-writing promotion effort is just as time consuming and requires a different and much more extroverted skillset. Relish your role as a personal brand brandishing your self-made arguments.

If you're thinking about writing a book,go into it with eyes open. It requires a lot of effort but at some point you need to get off the couch and just do it. The windfall in reputation, connections and speaker fees can be large; the money made on the book itself may be one of your lesser revenue lines. We are fortunate to have such great editorial and publicity staff at McGraw-Hill but plenty of self-publishing sites exist, Lulu.com and Blurb are popular faves to do-it-yourself.

Look forward to seeing you on our road trip of pre-promotion in the Fall. To be sure, Wikibrands will be jam-packed with promotion, speaking, recruiting a universe of ambassadors, creating extended content, building an awards program and involving our readers. Join our advance Facebook group and Twitter page.  I'm looking forward to the outreach, critique and exposing what we think is a valuable addition to the fabric of the conversation about engaged business. We hope you'll join us too.

Social Media is a Dirty Word and the 5 Reasons Why

 
Social media is a dirty word. There I said it. I wish the term had never been invented, never mind taken off in the minds of business, media and everyday people. It should be extricated from the records.

So you say "Calm down, Sean - it doesn't matter what you call something, they're only words".

Wrong. Words do matter. Shorthand categories and slogans have power. What's your reaction when I say "Glasnost", "Apartheid"or "War on Terror"? More specifically, why do we call TV "T.V."? Why has CRM taken off as a practice? Who defined the box of "search engine" and allowed Google to dominate it? 

See, people like to define concepts and ideas into boxes - that's why we wax poetic and really like knowing and debating whether somebody is into rap music, rock music, country music or jazz. It defines their values and who they are (and we subsequently struggle when an artist comes along that throws the regimented distinctions up in the air).

And it seems like wherever the conversation turns to engaged, more progressive marketing it gets labeled "social media". In fact,the draft toplines of our Buzz Report suggest "social media is the darling of the professional set" lexicon. 60% of professionals use it to define our cool, interesting space that my company and many other credible companies deal in. It dwarfs any other term.

Here's my 5 issues with the term "social media"'s rise to prominence:

1) It's so much more than media- by calling it a media, it really demeans its ability to build value for a company - there are a tonne of benefits "social media" provides (generating insight, user-generated content and enlisting peer-to-peer support to name a few)  that other media don't come close to delivering on. Consequently and unfortunately, when the same people that have performed so well through mass media, are encharged with social media - they try to transport the same rules, measures and practices of the previous mediums to this one. They miss out on the subtlety of how dialogue develops, how content is king, how organizations can change based on the exchange and how real customer engagement is better than transitory eyeballs and fans. It plain doesn't work.

2) It's ubiquitous to the point of meaninglessness - as we speak, there are 28,000+ people on Twitter who consider themselves experts or gurus of "social media". I'm sure there are many that are very good, but many have perhaps found themselves in mid career stress, Gen Y career ceilings or downsized from organizations and believe given low start up costs, fast learning curve and isolated examples of "instant celebrity" that they can become a "somebody" in this social media playground too. It's a liberating thought but unfortunately an incorrect one. One of the big reasons companies aren't jumping on the Klondike Gold Rush is the absence of rigourous, intensive study or practice in how to drive this list of diverse tactics for business value. There is a feeding frenzy that is starting to starve itself and are clouding how to easily to determine the best in the business to rise to the top.

3) Social media is the tool and only one of them - Social media is one sliver of the customer engagement pie. If we want to label it all as "social media" we create very little distinction between very different strategies and tactics. What of online communities? What of word of mouth? What of experiential marketing? What of influencer outreach and blogger seeding programs? What of user generated content/collaboration? These sub-segments operate under very different rules and guidelines. By being "vanilla" and calling it all social media, you easily lose the nuance.

4) Social media is what people do - it will be almost impossible for business people to catch up. In fact, more than 70% of marketers believe their customer knows just as much as they do in the realm of social media. Face reality, how are you supposed to compete in knowledge and experience with customers and prospects that could be spending 20-25 hours per week on Facebook, Twitter and other social appendages. For most of us that have other duties and a day job, you can't. Whereas you can be a pro at customer engagement or social influence marketing, you'll never be able to catch up to your audience in social media prowess. Stop trying and leave this term to the customer's domain.

5) Social media is faddishly silo - RIM's VP of Digital marketing said it best “2 years from now- if I still have a Director of Social Media - I should be fired!". By categorizing it, you allow it to be siloed into some department's job. I might agree with the notion there should be some executive accountability for it, but social media is everyone's job. Over the next few years, we'll see social media become part of what we do everyday across the company. My belief is the wheels will come off the cart and similar to how email and database marketing got subsumed into direct marketing, social media will start to take root in companies across customer service, marketing, media, research and innovation, that calling it something different will lose relevance over time.

What do you think? Is social media a curse word in your life as detestable as its predecessors "web 2.0" or "dot.com" or is it the lovable, huggable teddy bear that you embrace everyday?

Social Influence Marketing - The Big Picture

A picture says a thousand things, doesn't it.

Frontline Word of Mouth Performance Scorecard - Are You an Employee Evangelist, Advocate or Engaged Soul?

I used to call it the "smell of a place".  When you walk into a shop, a corporate head office or a boutique small business, does it appear like people love what they're doing? Are they genuinely involved in their jobs or are they merely going through the motions?

Frontline experience dictates at least half of the total experience many customers have with a company is with .

A lot of times, it's driven by the small things - next time you are at a Four Seasons look at how many of the small things are taken care of - we've come to understand that 82 items are routinely taken care of.

A lot of times, the torture test for the "smell" is what happens when the boss is not around. Take a visit to Westjet airlines for a 6:30am flight to get a handle on great customer experiences before the first coffee.

Sometimes, these experiences shake us out of our daily patterns and make us want to share them with others. Call them "acts of wow", "moments of magic" or "pursuit of excellence" but they make people buzz.

Some experiences of mine that recently to experiences going well beyond or below-the-call and have created conversations in my world:

On the positive:

1. the outright friendliness of Buffalo airport parking lot shuttle drivers
2. the lifesaving customer service and first name comfortability of my local UPS store (Sherway Gardens)
3. the welcoming appeal of my local Starbucks - free coffee when I stand too long in line and the efficiency in finding my power cord (on Kingsway and Bloor West)
4. the patience of my Netnation server support people - thanks for not thinking I was completely out to lunch on a piece of malicious code we fixed together

On the negative:

1. the arrogance of a collected series of Visa customer service people
2. the unbelievable slowness of Staples Business Depot print staff
3. the tone deafness of my Bell business phone customer service staff
4. the ineptitude of craft sellers Durie Lane to find a matching urn (perhaps no coincidence the store is now out of business)

My view of each brand has been enlightened or pockmarked by individual employees embrace of their companies and work environment, and in some cases, outright disregard.

We've developed a 100 pt.survey for clients that cesses out a score suggesting top-level front line fanship, above-service standards and customer face-to-face engagement.

Arrive at a score of 85 and you are a fully-committed, Frontline Word of Mouth Evangelist, between 70 and 85 and you are an emotionally connected Frontline Word of Mouth Advocate and  between 50 and 70 and you are a satisfied and loyal Frontline Word of Mouth Engaged Soul.

Let's not even go near under 50 as a score,  although our belief is 65-75% of frontline staff operate at this level. 

Here are 10 components to the survey:

i) Personal Assets (10 pts.) - do you have a natural set of skills that lend themselves well to frontline WOM?

ii) Company/Brand Alignment (10 pts.) - are you living the life and genuinely excited about the corporate/brand and their values?

iii) Customer Focus (10 pts.) - are you driven by trying to understand and satisfy customers?

iv) Experience Building (10 pts.) - are you committed to not only providing a service but an experience?

v) Consistency/Remarkability (10 pts.) - even on "bad days", do you still go the extra mile and get customers to rave about you?

vi) Team/Culture Builder (10 pts.) - do you improve the morale and customer service of the people around you?

vii) Passion/Problem Solving (10 pts.) - are you enthusiastic about customer interactions, even negative ones?

viii) Growth and Development (10 pts.) - are you committed to personal growth and learning?

ix) Story and Surprise Building (10 pts.) - are you creating and sharing things that people will talk about through your creativity, mastery and experimentation in your role?

x) Valued Partnership and Evangelism (10 pts.) - do you feel valued in your company and feel you can leave your personal mark?

So what's your score? more importantly, what's your frontline staff's score?

In fairness, there are a subset of questions under each category and with many companies, we add and tailor specific questions that make sense for their objectives, culture and work styles to give us a fuller view.

Ready to take a Customer Experience Fitness test? Have a spin by Agent Wildfire if you'd like to connect with us on Frontline Customer Experience WOM Audit.

The Un-Agency - A Cure for What Ails You, Brands?

Having played the roles of brand owner, agency guy and marketing services provider in my life, there is a chasm, a veritable Grand Canyon of envy, inefficiency and ineffectiveness that exists between the agency and the brand. Much like many war torn countries, I'm not too sure if any side is more noble than the other, but they are dragging each other down in the eyes of important others, to their own peril.

Consider that 2/3rds of brands have rebranded themselves in the last 3 years (at considerable expense), that only 10% of financial executives believe marketers can estimate their effort's business impact, that CMO's average lifespan is 27 months and only 32% of them even get a vote at the executive table and that the average agency lifespan on any one client is 4 years (previously a standard measured by decades); we have a problem that requires serious solutions.

Let's be honest - both these parties think differently, they chase different objectives, they are especially nice to each other in person and play the blame game when the other party isn't in the room and they spend time on trying to one-up each other - wasting time, money and credibility in the process. One is so distant from their customer, the other so aloof from the company it is intended to support. In many scenarios, it is a sick dance played out by unwilling parties.

Something has to budge in this new market landscape of tightened budgets, activist customers and justifying the value of the middleman. In our soon-to-be-released Buzz Report, we see that the top belief among marketers and agencies alike is the statement "Agencies will need to radically reinvent themselves in order to stay competitive with new world of marketing/social media strategies and tactics" - 83% strongly agree/agree with the statement. Essentially marketers are telling us - "we know this car is broken, it's just the only one we drive and we know we'll need to scrapyard it soon."

It's well acknowledged that clients are guilty of not providing actionable creative feedback, taking enough risk, tackling enough innovation, leveraging agency know-how and allowing agencies to more fully integrate themselves within a company's initiatives. They frequently play the role of police officer, scoreboard watcher and strategic quarterback and eschew the roles of change agent, innovation spark, culture changer and close confidante.

The worst sin committed on the agency front is how siloed these entities are. As indicated by the diagram above, there are 18 key roles a marketing services role/agency can play. In most agencies, you'll find at most 3-4 things they are really good at, 2-3 things they can do capably and 11-13 things they shouldn't be touching.

This would be fine if these agencies surrounded themselves with the best talent external to their company to tackle these other roles required. Frequently though, they will create the veneer of being competent in any subject to squirrel more agency fees away, much to their client's detriment. 

Here's the blow by blow:

Ad agencies - the "lead dog" in most client businesses -their forte is creative, content development, program execution and brand positioning but are often viewed as a services vendor of a few wise old men with a lot of young arms and legs and not as a true company partner. The best are massively "creative and insightful" - the other majority make pretty pictures on paper or film. In large part, they are outsourced organizational pinchitters because they can provide resources more efficiently than the company themselves but can't appreciate or choose to ignore the inner strategic and operational workings of a client and what makes them tick. Other slights - they frequently let their broadcast creative drive the creative engine, leaving plenty of alternative media to fight for the scraps left over and too much of their client conversations involve agency fees. In the worst scenarios, they treat the client with outright contempt in the name of self-promotion and creative purity.

Brand/design agency - usually the best-dressed partner at the agency dance, in this generation of iPod, they have claimed a right to fair chunk of the marketing spending chalice. They can generate significant product/package design breakthroughs but fall short of the true "knock it out of the ballpark" solutions delivered by innovation consultancies. Unquestionable artistic merits get delivered on signature projects but these groups suffer from lack of accountability, frequently design arbitrary rules that act as poor handcuffs for practitioners and can be seen as way out of step with the new age of open collaboration and crowdsourcing.

Strategy consultancies - quite adept at getting executive level of impact - they are capable of providing strong guidance on strategic direction, business models, operational changes and customer experience solutions, CEOs love this. They are without question the deepest thinkers of the agency gang and can effectively distill direction from chaos. They make for great offsites and afternoon thinktanks but unfortunately, they are nowhere to be found when implementation happens with oftentimes little practical guidance on how to apply learnings (consider SAP implementation debacles as one of their worst offences). They promote the same recommendations across the industry creating a "vanilla-ness of best practices" and they are also frequently unaware of the players/firms to get this work done or how to make their recommendations stick past organizational culture. On top of this, they charge such an exorbitant amount and their staff turnover so quickly that keeping them around over the long term becomes impractical.

Innovation & research shops - they are the dreamers and change agents, if you look at companies like Ideo, you can make the argument that these product-centric firms can have the most valuable role to play in bottom line company impact, whereas their strength is turning insight into game-changing innovation, they are usually not adept at handing their "baby" off to the market implementation team, leading to a game of "innovation broken telephone" with the agencies required to execute in market. For this reason, poorly integrated innovation shops can suck massive organizational resources for little return.

Social media hothouses - they are the "engagement people" on the leading edge of digital culture and have embraced the merits of open source, conversation marketing and social networks as a source of value to a firm, making their benefits go beyond the mere marketing realm. However they are so narrow and jingoistic in their viewpoints that they suffer from inflated self-importance, low operational discipline and little understanding of the strategic and brand implications of their work or being able to justify their efforts by performance standards.

Digital agency - they are the "online kingpins" , if you're looking for sexy or interesting digital work, there is nobody better than the web specialists, they are the creators of new engagement tools, mashups and technologies that can get noticed and impress (even entertain), they understand the Xs and Os of building great web stuff, but because they are over-romanced by technology they appreciate less the Jimmy & Joes on how this stuff gets used by real people (how many slow loading agency flash websites have I seen when I was trying to find their phone number). They are not particularly adept at mining for true customer wants or how their work can all integrate with traditional media. In most agency situations, they are not leading the brand idea, so undetermined on whether their stuff has as much stratgic savvy as it needs to build company value.

Public relations/media firms - they are the connectors and have enhanced their importance over the last few years by providing stakeholder relations and activities that breakthrough and have the real or perceived view of being authentic. See Al Ries' The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR. Leading PR firms are getting the social media stakeholder game, but the majority are still stuck on wining and dining and spinmastering the 75 journalists that matter to their world. Conversely, their media planning/buying cousins are playing the role of the "establishment" - although they make things predictably run and have the occasional breakthrough, they are playing by rules that are at least 40 years old and are almost singlehandedly the reason for propping up traditional media well past their stale date and why media hasn't shifted as quickly as it needs to into the digital realm (the stark truth - they can't easily make money in this media). They can also sometimes be fairly accused of partnering with media companies at the expense of their client interests (note the ridiculousness of upfront buys). Although both PR and media people can play along at the strategic table, oftentimes they decide to play on the periphery, tactically executing and bullhorn-ing other agency's work and being the "quiet mice" at the idea table.

Promotions/sponsorship firms - they are the just get it done  "solution chasers" and have risen in importance given the need to partner with dominant retailers and activate their environments. They have also seen their role grow given a bigger emphasis by companies creating brand experiences that affiliate with brand values (i.e. concerts or sponsored events) . They are the most pragmatic group of the agency bunch and can be seen as a no-nonsense sales driver for clients (vs. the "head in the clouds" other agencies) but frequently suffer at the marketing and executive table by being overly-gimmicky, very short term in focus without any real brand or strategic value-add, leading them to be one of the last groups to contribute after the direction has been established.

Companies deserve more, they need service providers that get this multi-variate game. They need partners that can work as equals with other partners. They need firms who can sometimes lead and sometimes comfortably follow. They need services that provide real value and credibility at the executive table. They need people and staff who engage with the world at large and not hide in their marble-floored headquarters. They need agencies vested in their success. They need an agency network equally balanced on the next 6 months as they are the next 3 years. They need ideas, strategy and action in one bundle. They need the leaders of their service firms that have at least, a passing knowledge and recognition of the value played by these 18 roles and not the stifling arrogance and pride in their own. What they need is the Un-Agency.

What is the Un-Agency? It's a co-op of equal partners managed by a key client person - a zen master generalist who can pull the appropriate agency levers. The Un-Agency is a marriage of partners that play well together and stay out of each others shorts. It's a hothouse of many ideas that get dreamed up and actually executed. It's a spider web of leading marketing services specialist talent that embeds itself deeply in a company's operations. It is low on bureaucracy and "handlers" and high on "smarts" and "action". Less powerpoint, more insight. More collaboration, less arrogance. More customer/influencer outreach, less boardroom navel gazing. More sustaining value, less flavour of the day. Perhaps paradoxically, more brilliant agency partners not less generic ones.

The Un-Agency is the Detroit Red Wings (not Washington Capitals), The New England Patriots (not Dallas Cowboys) or Boston Celtics (not LA Lakers)  of agency people - few stars, many role players and few problem childs, that know their roles and play them well. It is the refreshing 7UP of service providers vs. the over caffeinated and ubiquitous Cokes of the agency world. It is a brand-producing "whole" that is greater than the sum of its parts.

While we're at it, perhaps we should come up with a new term for agency as it has so much baggage and connotations. Even the name "agency" conjures up "guns for hire", a network of mercenaries and a level of remoteness.  How about "concierges"?  Perhaps "bespokers"? Maybe "engagement partners"?

Make no mistake though, there is plenty of very smart talent in all of these types of service partners that could deliver considerable brand performance. It's unfortunate that they are all trying to play "centre-forward" every shift and feel contempt for their other teammates...and their coach (the client) is letting it all happen. They have only a few years to figure it out before they become the traditional brand-agency network horse-and-buggy whips of the communication game and cede way to other, hungrier more promising configurations. We have got the change the smell of this place called the agency...and soon.