Bloghound

One big question I’m hearing from marketing, PR and corporate communications executives is HOW to change their organizations in view of this marketing 2.0 tsunami. They get the “why.” Here are 10 ideas people find helpful.

1. Redefine the box: clarify the business goals, then define new approaches for accomplishing that. There are many cool new tactics but it they don’t help you realize the goal, e.g., generating leads, find those that do. Try to stay in the business objective box vs. the tactical box.
2. Revise competencies; add new roles, eliminate others: there are many traditional roles that are far less important, e.g., traditional media relations, and others that are becoming far more important, listening and participating in relevant digital conversations. Step back and assess what you need more or less of and where to add, change, phase out.
3. Change hiring process to better “see” important new qualities and skills: while many marcom organizations and PR agencies, ask people to write a press release as part of the hiring process, I’d suggest that other “tests” more relevant to today’s world. How about asking candidates to writing a point of view brief about marketing (Do they really get where it’s going and can they articulate it in a compelling, non-corporate speak way? Are they intellectually curious? Or ask a candidate to create a two minute video. Can he/she tell a compelling story?)
4. Revise performance reviews, reward systems: People won’t change behaviors unless there are incentives to do so, like getting a raise or promotion. Include important new skills into annual performance plans. If money is involved, people are more likely to change, master new ways of doing things.
5. Create “master plan” for professional development: As a manager, identify those key skills your team needs and develop a master development plan for the year. The better you do at helping people learn and change, the better you’ll be able to move into new approaches that deliver some great business benefits.
6. Rotate people in jobs so they stay “fresh,” keep the passion: It’s hard to stay passionate about a particular product or functional area. Try to rotate people into new roles every two years so that stay fresh, interested and engaged.
7. Think about marketing 2.0 “coaches” or Sherpa guides to help transition faster, bake new skills into your team: adapting new communications styles is harder than most people realize. (I hear this all the time from training marketing people in really diverse industries.) Consider using “on call” coaches or sherpa guides to help your people with their everyday work and questions. Six months of an apprentice like relationship speeds the learning curve.
8. Question assumptions in every planning cycle: things are changing fast, and will continue to do so. Question what you’re doing and where you’re allocating resources at every planning cycle.
9. Adopt an “Always in Beta” culture: some degree of experimentation is the norm. We can no longer wait for “best practices” to adopt new approaches.
10. Leverage everything: what’s interesting today is how many opportunities there are to leverage everything. How to tap your loyal blog readers to set up lead-generating Webinars. How to take ideas from your online customer communities and use them in product development, PR and sales.

Mark Rovner of Sea Change Strategies has a great guest post over at Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing blog musing about what marketers and communications professionals can learn from Buddhism:

• The whole point of everything is not to gain but to lose. Enlightenment comes when you lose your distraction, your pre-conceptions, and your obscurations.
• When you strip away clutter, brilliance ensues. When you strip away all the ifs, ands, and buts of who your organization is and what it’s all about, your true brand, in its naked accessible simplicity, can shine out.
• Clarity and openness are more important than gimmicks or cleverness. Nuff said.
• How you are is more important than what you say. It’s sort of ironic that we spend so much time fussing over “messaging” when the 3,000 other ways we reveal ourselves speak so much louder than the words we choose.

Wow. Thanks, Mark.

Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine is gorgeous. But I don’t like it. I couldn’t put my figure on why until I mapped out the articles in the October issues of Portfolio and Fortune against the “9 Themes People Like To Talk and Read About.” (See chart below.)

Too much high anxiety

While both publications run about the same number of personal stories and glitz and glam features, Portfolio, unlike Fortune, runs many articles that raise apprehension, fear, doubt and anxieties about different businesses or business trends. Consider the headlines on the Portfolio cover flap:

“Did Chiquita Finance Murder: Inside the Company’s Death-Squad Crisis,” “Starwood’s Barry Sternlicht Exacts His Revenge,” Google: The Worst News Ever for Cell-Phone Carriers.”

“Anxiety” stories once had appeal, but have lost their juice because the media and politicians have over-played the anxiety angle. Elevated security levels, retirement crises, healthcare fraud….it’s too much negativity all the time about topics people can generally do little to change. So we tune out the anxiety stories.

Too few trends

Another difference is that Fortune features five stories on “avalanches about to roll,” those big trends about to happen, compared to just two in Portfolio. These stories always appeal to business people because we like to be insiders about what’s coming next and be early in tracking big trends. Aside from having so few “avalanche” stories the Portfolio trend articles seem not so trendy — one on the PC industry in China and the other on alternative fuels for cars.

Oops we forgot the how-to and aspirations

Business people love how-to stories and a reason to believe in something or someone. Yet Portfolio has neither type of story. Fortune, on the other hand, features “How to be a Great Leader” on its October cover. Aspirational and how-to? You bet.

Being a longtime magazine junkie, I hope Portfolio can make it. Without a new tone, however, my bet is that it will be gone in 18 months.

If there are some Portfolio lovers out there, help me see what I’m missing.

The advertising industry’s obsession with tag lines is really silly — and a waste of time and money. People don’t pay that much attention to them. Another recent example is Wal-Mart’s “Save Money, Live Better.” In this week’s Ad Age article, “Who Wrote Wal-Mart’s New Tag line? Er, Everyone,” Matt Creamer sums up the silliness over taking credit for the “new” tag line.

“Just to recap Wal-Mart ends up going through two agency reviews, an embarrassing scandal and legal skirmish, only to result in an ad campaign that, while nicely executed, amounted to the excavation of a 15-year-old quote that touts savings and low prices, pretty much the marketing approach used before the review.”

Today I had the pleasure of talking with executive directors and marketing directors of assisted living facilities at the annual Mass. Assisted Living Facilities Association Conference. And I got to walk the floor of the exhibit hall and be “marketed to.”

Unlike many industries, assisted living facilities and nursing homes start at a tough place. Older people are angry that they need to move, their children are nervous and skeptical about the facilities’ marketing claims (and emotionally fraught from trying to help an angry parent). Plus just a little online research turns up scary articles like this one in Smart Money, “The 10 Things Your Assisted Living Facility Won’t Tell You.”

When a prospect’s context is one of distrust and skepticism the worst marketing approach is to come on as glib and salesy. ” (A got a whiff of that walking the trade show floor.) That canned spiel fosters distrust in a business where the only thing you’re marketing is trust. People really don’t care whether the facility has a pool, and yoga is offered as well as bridge every oFriday. People want a relationship with an organization that they can trust. They’re not buying the facility, they’re buying a relationship.

As we discussed today, that means:

• Offering frank and genuine advice, insights, and perspectives to people. Instead of the usual blah blah about being “committed to fostering an environment of quality, independent living,” tell me that these types of people are usually happy at your facility, but it’s not right for these types. Be honest, be real, help me vs. sell me.
• Sharing the names and contact information of people who have been in similar situations with one of their parents. and have first hand experience with a facility. People rather talk with people like them than a marketing or sales associated.
• Making the commitment to find different kinds of stories, and make those stories the most important part of marketing. I sat down to lunch with some nurses and heard some amazing stories from them in just 15 minutes. I also experienced how passionately and genuinely they feel about their patients. There’s some amazing marketing value in stories like these.
• Asking patients, families, nurses and aids for their ideas on what makes the facility so special. My guess is that they want to be heard, have a say, and would provide invaluable ideas. It’s important here to hear the negative as well as the positive, respectfully acknowledging the negative and learning from it. At the end of the day, the better the patient and family’s experience, the easier the marketing.
• Changing the selling model. Traditional features-and-benefits sales types hurt the industry more than help. Perhaps people with traditional sales backgrounds are the exact profile of people NOT to hire. (Those nurses might be great.)

Applause for these marketing folks who were open-minded and soaking up new ideas today. Theirs is a very difficult job — especially considering the trust hangover from the unscrupulous few who give the industry a really bad image.

In a meeting today with VML, Mike Lundgren, VML’s creative technology director, had an interesting comment about one of the big mind shift changes happening in marketing today:

“It’s not about how good you look talking about your own brand. It’s about how you make other people look good talking about your brand.”

In other words because people pay attention to people like them through Facebook, blogs, YouTube, and word of mouth, an important marketing goal should be helping people talk about your brand in ways they find easy, interesting and natural. That is more important than how YOU the company talk about your brand because people pay more attention to people like them than your company’s marketing programs.

It’s no longer messaging as usual.

Innovation isn’t happening fast enough for most executives, according to Boston Consulting Group’s fourth annual study on innovation — and there are some key implications for marketers.

Only 46 percent of the 2,500 executive surveyed said they were satisfied with returns on innovation spending. The place they think innovation is most important (listen up marketers):

• New offerings for existing customers (92%)
• Offerings that allow expansion to new new customers (85%)

The biggest obstacles to innovation: speed in going from idea to sales, risk averse cultures and overly lengthy development times.

The question for marketing is how do we tap into customer insights all the time to be constantly finding new ways to appeal to existing and new customers, and then how do we collaborate with other business functions to speed product development. How can we rip out processes that are designed to mitigate risk but actually choke the innovation process? If you have an innovative idea but it takes 18 months to bring it to market, it may not be innovative by the time it gets to market.

On a related note, the most difficult business function for marketing to collaborate with by far is IT, according to a new Forrest Research project, “Partnering for Success: The CMO-CIO Relationship.” The top challenges for marketing in working with IT, which tie right back to innovation:

• Slow time to market and speed in completing projects
• Rigid processes and an aversion or inability to change

Metaphors are one of the best ways to understand ideas and concepts. Here’s a good one: Branding is more like a salad bar than a fixed asset, says Tom Asacker over at A Clear Eye.

“It is compelling, and much simpler, to view a brand as a fixed and valuable asset, like a piece of real estate. One that simply requires protection and promotion., Instead, today’s brands should be thought of as perishable assets, like salad bars. They are marketplace offerings, which need to be constantly reinvented and refreshed to remain relevant.”

Today’s Wall St. Journal has a great article about how Narragansett Beer is successfully reviving its brand using listening tours to tap into the brand’s genuine differentiation (”the townie’s beer”), and word of mouth marketing to develop passionate customer relationships.

Writer Simona Covel interviewed me as part of her research for the piece and we had some great conversations about the value of tapping into what consumers believe a brand stands for and then engaging directly with those passionate brand believers and turning them into advocates. There’s no better example of how a company is doing this than Narragansett Beer, the official beer of the Boston Red Sox for decades, but an almost dead brand by the 1980s. Mark Hellendrung bought the rights to the brand from Pabst Brewing in 2005, and revenue is expected to reach $5 million this year.

No traditional advertising in this success story. Just savvy targeting, reviving what people love about the brand, and a disciplined word of mouth strategy, led by the CEO.

What are marketers most interested in? Buzz Marketing for Technology’s top 10 posts over the past year:

# 1 – 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

#2 – Harnessing User-Generated Content for B2B Marketing

#3 – Exclusive Interview: Malcolm Gladwell discusses Web 2.0

#4 – A Podcast with Robert Scoble on Communities, Social Media, Twitter and More

# 5 – Want more sales? Give sales something to talk about. A podcast with Lois Kelly of Foghound

#6 – How to Start a B2B Community

#7 – 150-Person Work Teams Are Dead

#8 – Calculating ROI on Web 2.0 tools

#9 – What’s Working in Lead Generation?

#10 – Marketing in a Wikinomics World, a podcast with Don Tapscott