Bloghound

Hillary Clinton is extraordinarily intelligent, ambitious, and tenacious, but many people just can’t connect emotionally with her. As Prof. Drew Weston, author of The Political Brain, says:

“After party affiliation, the most important predictors of how people vote are their feelings toward the candidates.”

Here’s my view on Hillary’s failure to connect, excerpted from Beyond Buzz:

Bill Clinton gave an inspiring, emotionally charged, off-the-cuff speech at Coretta Scott King’s funeral, peppered with one-liners that the audience boisterously applauded, including “You want to treat our friend Coretta like a role model? Then model her behavior.”

According to many observers, Senator Clinton’s remarks were more formal than her husband’s, delivered in a measured, restrained, and deliberate style. The contrast between the two Clintons was vivid, as was the audience’s reaction. They cheered Bill, while they respectfully listened to Hillary.

“I think Bill Clinton delivers inspiring addresses,” explained Theodore C. Sorensen, one of John F. Kennedy’s best-known speechwriters, wrote in The New York Times. “Hillary is more likely to deliver learned lectures.”

A few years back, I had lunch with the late MIT professor Michael Dertouzos who had just returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he had heard Mrs. Clinton speak.

“She was absolutely brilliant,” he said. “Her understanding of complex issues and her ability to get up and talk about those issues was remarkable. I don’t think anyone else at Davos came close to her in being able to articulate such cogent perspectives on today’s social, political, and economic issues.”

Yet, because Mrs. Clinton speaks formally, in full paragraphs and with little emotion, it’s often difficult to see things from her point of view and to connect with her as a person. Like many CEOs and marketing programs, Mrs. Clinton’s knowledge is substantive, but because her style lacks emotion and the language of conversations, it often fails to move us.
To succeed in a conversational world, we marketers (much like Hillary Clinton) need to reset our style so people can more easily understand our points — and get who we are as people.

Activating change needs an emotional connection.

Getting management to buy into innovative marketing approaches can be tough.

Here are six facts to support change, based on performance data that Copernicus Marketing Consulting has collected from more than 500 marketing programs (consumer and B2B products and services.)

1. 84% of programs are resulting in declining brand equity and market share.
2. Customer satisfaction averages just 74%.
3. Most acquisition efforts fail to reach break even.
4. No more than 10% of new products succeed.
5. Most sales promotions are unprofitable.
6. Advertising ROI is below 4%.

For more, see the Harvard Business Review article, “Don’t Blame the Metrics” by Kevin Clancy and Randy Stone.

Maybe it’s time to retire the war metaphor from business and marketing. “Winners” no longer defeat the competition by battling them, capturing customer share, locking customers in or making them loyal. (Sounds like some sort of waterboarding torture done to customers.) The new metaphor may be tribalism.

Widipedia’s definition of tribalism: “Due to the small size of tribes, it is always a relatively simple structure, with few (if any) significant social distinctions between individuals… it is a precondition for members of a tribe to possess a strong feeling of identity for a true tribal society to form.”

In the book Consumer Tribes editors and university professors Bernard Cova, Rob Kozinets and Avi Shankar take a deep dive to examine how tribes work and possible implications to business and marketing. Here are a few highlights I found particularly interesting:

“The allure of the primitive, of the tribal, lies in its ability to arouse our desires and passions.”

The concept of a tribe is at the same level as that of entrepreneur and craftsperson. A craftsperson is a creative person who believes in a passion and transforms this into a business idea. This passion pushes the craftsperson to share ideas and emotions with other individuals sharing the same interest, thus forming a tribe.”

Takeaway: tribes need to be built around passions. If you’re considering a business community the first question to ask: how passionate are people on this particular topic/issue? If the passion exists, in what ways do people want to tap into the issue - learning from “experts,” sharing their experiences, helping others, simply being identified with the issue in some way? What business value might there be for us to be associated with this issue?

“The most potent tribes are built in the interstices, in the margins, on the fringes.”

Takeaway: some of the most thriving business communities are likely to be around issues that aren’t “core” to your value proposition or business strategy, but tap into passions on issues that are on the edges. If a goal is to engage customers or employees, we need to open up to those fringe issues that matter to them - vs. just the messages we want to convey. There may be more value sitting on the margins than anyone inside the company realizes. Also, creating “a” community may be a flawed strategy; perhaps a better approach is facilitating many tribes or communities around many issues.

“One of the most important ways in which members of a cool tribe distinguish themselves from mass culture is through an emphasis on authenticity….Authenticity is in any case a deeply ideological discourse that denigrates popular culture and privileges the exclusive.”

Takeaway: To really connect with cool people companies have to be willing to hear people talk about why the old ways and products are lacking (or worse.) Even if we’re hosting a community, people are likely to bash beliefs and products that we hold true. If we’re going after cool and innovative, we have to be prepared to hear the negative. Second, cool people want to be insiders and have exclusive access to information, ideas, and people. For companies, this may mean embracing smaller communities, where access and inside information is granted to the cool few. Once a community gets big and accepted by the mainstream, it may no longer be a community.

“Companies do not need to send totally coherent messages to the marketplace. Consumers fill in the blanks, and they often do a better job of colouring in the picture than marketers would do.”

Takeaway: Do we spend much too much time and resources trying to perfect messages? Perhaps it’s better to get our products and services out in the market and take a more iterative approach to branding and messaging, tuning in to what our tribe members have to say. This idea is similar to what Harvard Business School marketing professor John Deighton has said for many years, “Marketers offer brand ideas to the market, but those ideas don’t truly become brands until they are accepted, adopted and made over afresh as part of the lives of those who use them.”

Tribes, influence and persuasion

In thinking about tribalism, it’s interesting to go back to a Harvard Business Review article Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Science of Psychology, wrote in 2001, titled “Harnessing the Science of Persuasion.” Many of his fundamental principles of persuasion are also principles of effective tribes, social networks, online communities, and groups.

1. The principle of liking: people like those who like them. (Uncover similarities and offer praise.)
2. The principle of reciprocity: people repay in kind. (Give what you want to receive)
3. The principle of social proof: people follow the lead of similar others. (Use peer whenever it’s available.)
4. The principle of consistency: people align with clear commitments. (Make the commitment active, public and voluntary.)
5. The principle of scarcity: people want more of what they can have less of. (Highlight unique benefits and exclusive information.)

Cialidini had one other principle, which may not be relevant in a tribal culture: The principle of authority: people defer to experts.

Perhaps we do defer to experts. But who are the experts we defer to today? Aside from those we respect and trust in our various tribes, who do we listen to? And what are the implications to marketing?

War metaphors stunt problem solving

For starters, let’s stop using the war metaphor in marketing and think in new ways. Linguists have found that people who frame problems in a militaristic manner tend to have a limited perception of the problem and how to tackle it. As noted Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff has said, “This is not language, this is the way people think.”

I’m thinking tribes. And you?

How do you change the perception of museums being boring places for intellectual, rich people — and still not alienate your core market? Maybe take a page from MoMA — page A5 of today’s Wall St. Journal to be exact.

• The full page ad thanks a sponsor, Target, for supporting free visitor nights. (There goes the price issue.)

• Referring to a new Helvetica exhibit the ad says, “Just thinking about Helvetica totally makes us want to get down and party.” Get down and party? (There goes the stuffy museum image. And who knew type was considered art?)

• And then the party really kicks in. “We’ll clear out a dance floor and check out the finest collection of modern art in the world. We’re going to rock out to Philip Glass all night long and gab to somebody we just met about how much Expressionism inspires us. (Museums aren’t just for art — there’s dancing, a chance to meet new people on Friday nights, and you’re likely to get inspired. Talk about adding “new features” to your brand. )

Here’s the full text. Accessible. Conversational. Strategic. Nice.

Thank you.

This is a message from MoMA to thank Target for their generous support of Target Free Friday Nights and to commemorate the arrival of our millionth free visitor this past Friday evening. It is set in 29-point Helvetica Roman, widely considered the official typeface of the twentieth century. Helvetica conveys an undeniably modern aesthetic clarity and is in fact the subject of an exhibition at MoMA. Just thinking about Helvetica totally makes us want to get down and party. Maybe its the triple Chococcino talking here, but suddenly we feel like screaming, ‘Thanks a million Target!” while mingling outside in the Sculpture Garden. Okay folks, here’s what we do: Meet us up on the third floor and check out the finest collection of modern art in the world. We’re going to rock out to Philip Glass all night long and gab to somebody we just met about how much Expressionism inspires us. Then,if the mood is right and all our planets are aligned, we’ll show our new friend what Expressionism really means. It happens every Friday from 4 - 8 p.m.

J.Crew’s CEO Mickey Drexler is a great example of a CEO who lives conversational marketing, passionately listening to customers and incorporating their ideas into the business strategy.

In his Saturday N.Y. Times story, “A CEO Sells the Store,” Joe Nocera wrote:

“Visiting stores, quizzing the staff, critiquing everything in sight — and most of all, meeting customers, is at the core of how Mr. Drexler runs J. Crew. It’s also what makes him happiest.”

The story also talks about how Drexler personally follows up with customers he meets in stores. He’s intent on hearing their ideas — positive and negative. The customer is his muse, his energy, his grounding.

While CEO of the Gap Drexler lost touch with the customer, as many CEOs do, and lost his confidence. At J.Crew he’s intent on doing what he does best — visiting stores every day; reading, responding and acting on customers’ emails; and asking customers for input. He told Nocera:

“People want to be listened to and they want to be respected. Besides this is how you learn what is on their minds. What can be more important than that?”

Probably nothing. While most clothing chains are struggling, J. Crew’s 2007 revenues were up 14% and the company is profitable.

I think I’ll have to check out J. Crew’s new line of suits….and tell Mickey what I think. I know he’ll listen, and that’s a most powerful marketing strategy.

There’s one big thing holding companies back from innovation, growth, attracting and keeping amazing talent, realizing the possibilities of emerging trends like social media: obstacles. (aka fears)

Reflecting on some recent experiences I see it everywhere.

• I spoke with a small group of Fortune 500 executives about social media and they zeroed in on what don’t like about social media: losing control.
• A group of brilliant IP attorneys got really involved in a session about conversational marketing, but suggested I spend much more time on one particular slide: overcoming obstacles.
• A workshop for a Fortune 50 company resulted in a powerful point of view that management, sales and marketing collaboratively created –and loved– but a then decided to stay with a safe, bland message platform. Why? The official reason was “internal politics;” the real reason was fear to have a point of view so different and evocative from the industry norms.
• A pharmaceutical company hired actors to pose as customers because they feared what real customers might say to their employees.

Going to fear school

Every year I do one big thing for my own professional development. There’s only one criteria: it needs to scare me, shake me out of my comfort zone so I really learn something.

This week I’m taking a workshop on how to design and develop transformational workshops at Kripalu. I’m the only business person among medical professors and educational activists, healers and shamans, ministers and coaches. Dropping into this touchy-feely environment where people chant in the morning instead of firing up PowerPoint made me feel very, very uncomfortable — so much so initially that I wondered whether I could learn anything at all. My own obstacles and judgments kept whispering in my ear, “Get in the car and get out of Yogi Dodge.”

Then in a session called “Going Beyond What Usually Stops Us,” David Silberkleit led us through an exercise where we had to articulate those obstacles (and the fears lurking behind them) that stop us from pushing forward to accomplish more, reach higher, take risks. Unarticulated fears/obstacles are what usually stops people. Acknowledge the obstacles, then you can go forward faster. (And David should know; he acknowledged his professional obstacles and walked away a sizable family business and inheritance — Archie Comics.)

During the program I thought about how thrilling social media is, opening up new business models, changing product development, innovation, customers service, CRM, marketing, public relations and leadership communications. Yet for so many companies and people the first step in realizing the possibilities will be acknowledging the very real obstacles of social media: eliminating job types and functions, reallocating budgets, losing control, lacking new skills, feeling irrelevant. I’m sure you can add more as there are many.

Mindset vs. toolset, human change vs. program change

Just as social media is a mind set as much as a tool set, success will require human change as much as functional and program change.

Just as we marketers know strategy and creativity, so we will need to learn how to guide our organizations through tremendous behavioral change.

So for my final project tomorrow morning I’m trying out a new workshop: “Burn Down the Obstacles.”

Oh yeah.

PS — warmest thanks to teachers Ken Nelson and Lesli Lang and my brilliant fellow workshop participants for teaching more in a week than I’d learn in a year of business conferences.

Looking back on conversations with hundreds of marketing and communications people this past year, it’s clear that a great majority understand the value of social media for marketing. Yet two things stand in the way of implementing social marketing programs: senior management resistance and an intimidation about not having the right skills.

The first issue is the most formidable and surprisingly widespread, even among executives of organizations that are innovative and creative in other ways. The desire for message control and fear of putting a company “out there” without being able to control what might be said is a much greater deterrent than I would have imagined had I not heard so many people express frustration and ask how to overcome this problem.

There’s no simple solution, but here are some suggestions.

1. Start small, quiet and don’t call what you’re doing social media, Web 2.0 or any of the phrases associated with losing control. For example: have just a few knowledgeable, articulate people in the company regularly read and respond to posts on blogs that are highly relevant to your industry. Or, start a podcast or videocast series, but call it an interview program for your Web site, interviewing customers, analysts, industry opinion leaders, your most interesting executives. After you gain success metrics, let the boss know that this is, in fact, social marketing.

2. Host a thought leadership community, with editorially independent bloggers who are influential in your industry. This gives your company a seat at the industry conversation, requires little time from your staff, and no executives need to blog. Our firm is managing several of these for large companies, such as FastForward for Fast and Mobile Messaging 2.0 for Airwide, to great benefit for the sponsoring companies.

3. Show the value to search. If you don’t have content, people can’t find you. Or you pay big bucks for paid search program.s Done right, social media programs up your Google rank and decrease paid search costs, a concept that is appealing to most execs.

4. Link to the strategic innovation and customer agendas. Many companies rank innovation and/or customer retention/loyalty as strategic priorities. If this is the case in your organization, link marketing innovations to the larger innovation agenda, or show how social networking can be a way to glean insights for the company’s innovation efforts. Similarly associate a new two-way direct customer communication channel within the customer loyalty strategic context.

5. Watch your competitors, and share what they are doing with your sr. management team. Competitor envy is a great way to get buy-in to change.

6. Have an answer to “how do we measure this?” It’s surprising how even the soft measures – visitors, page views, registrations for “special content,” downloads of e-Books, search rank elevation – will satisfy a skeptical exec. (Of course, there are ways to also measure lead gen, PR and other “traditional” marketing tactics with social media, but that’s another post.)

7. Do a weekly email digest of the most relevant blog posts in your industry for your boss and other execs. Better yet, send it to everyone in the company and your customers with some top-level analysis. Few people have time to keep up with industry information; this is a great service and is another way to educate your boss about the value of social media; it’s not just some blog hackers, but thoughtful, insightful writers/podcasters as interesting and well-informed as traditional journalists.

8. Create a private online community of customers and prospects. The “private” part is especially appealing to those fearful of public, open discussions. Better yet the insights from these communities are proving more valuable than any other customer research approach. Listen in to some podcasts with execs at HP, Cox and the National Cancer Caregivers Network over at Communispace to learn more.

9. The 6-month test request: Suggest that you do a six-month “test” of a particularly appealing, moderately budgeted social networking idea, and assess the results at the end of that time period. If it’s working, your boss agrees to continue and up the funding. If it flops, you all will have learned valuable lessons. (Then make sure you’re embarking on an idea that will deliver the intended results. Hint: a company blog is usually a bad first foray into social marketing.)

10. Stay grounded and don’t get infatuated. In discussing new approaches, stay as rational as possible and acknowledge that social marketing isn’t the be all and end all. This will reassure your boss, validate his/her beliefs, and open the way to have a conversation about getting started.

Keep in mind that the goal is to get started, not to convert senior management. And the ideas and content matter more than the tools and technology.

Hope these help. If anyone has other tips that have helped overcome the obstacles to social marketing, please share.

Asking insightful questions is clearly one of the traits of successful innovators. When explaining how they got into a new area, or hit on a ‘aha” large or small, almost all of the storytellers at the Business Innovation Factory Collaborative Innovation Summit talked about the questions they asked.

“When we arrive at the question, the answer is already near,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Here are some questions from conference speakers that led to fascinating answers and new business models.

• “How can people reduce their carbon footprint – and actually like doing so?”Robin Chase, founder and CEO of GoLoco, a service that helps people arrange to share rides between friends, neighbors, and colleagues.

• “Can a company reinvent itself unless it goes through a near death experience?” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president, Technical Strategy and Innovation, IBM
  
  
• “We were successful in changing how businesses engage with Stanford for cross-discipline research projects by asking good questions. We would create just one page with good questions and put them out to everyone in the university for Request for Proposals. Often it would take us a month to come up with questions. But by putting out the right questions, we got great proposals.” Ellen Levy, founding managing director, Silicon Valley Connect
  
  
• “What is the path of least resistance for the consumer? …Should this be a product or is it just a feature of an existing product?… Why isn’t there content for high definition TV?…Why is everyone so focused on the Internet when it comes to digital content and not on all the other places where digital content can be leveraged?” Mark Cuban, serial entrepreneur, owner of Dallas Mavericks, founder of HDNet,”Dancing with the Stars” contender

• “Why doesn’t a police chief’s son call 911 when he’s been a victim of crime? What does that say about policing?” Dean Esserman, Chief of Police, Providence, RI

• “Why couldn’t you design apartment buildings in New York that drastically reduce energy costs — for the same cost as typical buildings?”
  Architect Chris Benedict, who recently completed a 38-unit new construction project that uses 85% less energy than standard designs

• “Why can’t people get companies they pay to take their calls and treat them like human beings?” Paul English, founder, the gethuman project.

Dean Esserman, chief of the Providence, RI police force, reflected this morning at the BIF3 Collaborative Innovation Conference about the six years that have past since 9/11. Six years since Bin Laden promised to take down 100,000 American children. “He’s a man of his word,” said Esserman. “But we’ve done it for him. Over the past six years 100,000 young Americans have been murdered. We’re a land that buries its young. That’s the face of violence in America.”

Esserman explained that for a generation we’ve thought that 911 was going to solve our police issues. You have a problem, call 911, the police come. It’s a one way relationship. People talk, police receive.

The problem, says Esserman, is that crime is personal. Most people don’t call the police to report a crime. And when people do call the police they don’t tell them much because the police have become anonymous strangers.

The way to reduce crime? Essmerman believes that it’s creating community policing, where people in neighborhoods know their local cop and have a relationship with him or her, much as they did years ago.

In Providence, there’s a quiet revolution happening where the police are moving back into neighborhoods, establishing relationships where people are starting to trust their local cop. “People don’t have to know and love the uniform,” said Esserman, “just the person in it. That’s where we’re going. We want people to know their neighborhood cop.”

The results of this innovative new model? Providence crime is down for five years in a row, one of the very few cities in the country that can report a decline.

What does it take to create this type of new policing model?

Esserman said it’s because Providence has an honest mayor, who has given the police force back to the people — instead of the police force being the King’s Army, as is the case in most cities.

Another reason is clearly that Esserman is a leader who knows how to get people to buy into a new vision, and restore pride and honor in being a police officer.

While there’s a lot of interest in customer engagement, don’t forget employee engagement. And it seems most companies have. A Towers Perrin study found that just 21 percent of all US employees are fully engaged; most are frustrated and skeptical about their senior leadership, which correlates to operating profit and income, according to two recent studies.

The bottom line upsides of an engaged work force:

• 3.7 percent increase in operating margins and a 2.1 percent boost in net profit margins, according to an I. M Dulye & Co study of 41 international companies with 360,000 employees.
• 19.2 percent increase in operating income and 13.7 percent increase in net income, according to a Towers Perrin study across 50 global companies.
• 19 percent improvement in annual operating profit, 18 percent improvement in productivity and 400 percent reduction in errors at Rolls Royce Engine after committing to an employee engagement program. “It’s been like a tidal wave,” said Raj Sharma, president of the division. “Employees couldn’t believe that we’d listen to their suggestions, that decisions would involve them. And business performance is the only motivation to do this.”
• There’s a direct link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, and between customer satisfaction and financial performance, according to a study by Prof. James Oakley of Ohio State University.

What three things matter the most in engaging employees, aside from the obvious Sr. leadership commitment to involving employees? Says Julie Gebauer of Towers Perrin:

1. Rational understanding of the company’s goals and values

2. Emotional attachment to the organization

3. Willingness to go above and beyond specific job tasks

Whose job is it anyway? HR? Corporate Communications? Marketing? Probably not HR. None of four HR functions — selection, development, performance management and compensation — was found to influence employee engagement according to a study by Northwestern University Forum for People Perfrmance Management and Measurement.