dangerouslyawesome

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

ITS GOOD TO BE BACK! Thanks again to Stephen Smith for taking the reigns on the last 3 posts in this series (theses 17, 18, and 19). It was a much needed recharge for me, plus an opportunity to get ahead a little bit. So, without further adieu…

Thesis #20: Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

If a company makes a mistake in the woods, and there is no-one there to point a finger and laugh at them, will they correct their mistake?

Everybody makes mistakes, and it’s ok. It’s human. That’s a good thing, remember?

To be human.

Companies seem to think that their mistakes are their weakness, and do everything they can to control where their mistakes end up. Ultimately, they get found out. There are no secrets, remember?

So life hands you lemons, in the form of public ridicule for your mistakes. More likely, you planted those lemons yourself. But you’re not going to admit that.

Let’s make some lemonade.

Get over your Gelotophobia

Prior to writing this post I had no idea that this word existed, and for the first 30 seconds of knowing this word existed I was under the assumption that it had something to do with italian ice cream.

Gelotophobia is a debilitating fear of being laughed at, and doesn’t seem to have been studied extensively (if at all) in the United States. The majority of the research that has been done has been conducted in the last year.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the researchers who are putting energy into researching this affliction should look no further than commercial enterprises, and the people that found them/run them. This has to be the most common affliction of companies.

What I really mean is, the people who comprise the companies. Not just the entrepreneurs that start them.

What’s fascinating to me is that the affliction of “fear” is the is the most human emotion that companies seem to let bleed through from the people inside, to the outside world. From what we’ve seen, companies are really good at being afraid, too. They can’t quite send their high powered attorneys after someone who laughed at them, can they?

The optimist in me see that as a good thing, and if nothing else, a starting point. If we can get companies over their fear of being laughed at, the cluetrain can continue down it’s path.

Ahem full steam ahead ahem.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Note: This is a guest post from Stephen Smith, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen.

Thesis #19: Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

Harsh words. But very true, to a point.

Engage your market directly

There are examples of companies experiencing the positive and negative effects of direct communication. You can check out Dell & Zappos on your own, to get more acquainted with those examples.  I’d like to explore 3 simple rules that companies can use to guide how they share, communicate and reach out to their customers.

Rule number one: People that use a product or service like to talk to other people using that product or service. Give them a place to do it, and participate honestly and fairly. A forum is a common, and often cheap/free way to get give your customers’ dialogue a home.

This is a dead-simple way to create an FAQ (frequently asked questions) tool set for your company with “official” answers and user-generated comment. No matter how much testing you do with your product or application a clever user will find a way to use it (or misuse it) that you did not anticipate. Sometimes, if you are quick enough, these sorts of happy accidents can lead to new products to sell, increased customer loyalty, and word of mouth advertising worth more than a trip to Hawai’i. Or a marketing department.

Rule number two: Let your employees talk to your customers. @Ambercadabra pointed out a remarkable truth on Twitter the other day, and the community ran with it. With just 6 degrees of distribution via from some of Amber’s followers this question went out to over 11,000 potential watchers. Of course, not everyone attributed the quote, so it went out even further [search "trust+employee+twitter"].

This is a topic that a lot of people are thinking about.

Yet the answer to Amber’s question remains elusive. Why indeed?

Is it because the conversations that take place online are there forever and legal departments are afraid of getting the company in hot water over an “unapproved” comment or blog post?

Doesn’t this mode of thinking reveal something more basic (and perhaps a little bit sinister)?

What is your company trying to hide if the employees can’t talk to the customers?

If every employee is not on-board with your corporate vision and dedicated to the success of the company and its products/services then that means one of these things:

1. Your vision is a lie. Or impossible.
2. Your employees know that you don’t mean it, so why should they?
3. Your product or service sucks.
4. Your product or service isn’t worth the money and they know it.
5. Your employees don’t feel like they are treated fairly, because they know the customers aren’t.

It means that you can’t be trusted to communicate with your employees.

Once you have taken a good hard look at yourself, and your corporate culture, then you can take a look at this fantastic post from Beth Kanter on Social Media Strategies for Non-profits:

Set objectives based on a clear understanding of how social media changes the feedback loop between your organization and stakeholders. The key thing that is different with setting a social media objective is that it is not about reaching a mass audience and blasting your message out, it is more about reaching the influencers, developing relationships, having a conversation, and getting insights. Make your objectives “SMART” (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Bound)

Rule number three: Initiating a relationship is not an invitation to spam. Just because a customer comes to you, your company website or forum, does not mean that you can open the floodgates of special offers. Or trap them in a never-ending series of opt-ins, opt-outs, and surveys.

Clue: Customers hate this!

Don’t teach your customers to hate you. Jonathan Kranz writes at MarketingProfs Daily Fix:

Customers are quick learners. We’ve learned, for example, to ignore subscription renewal letters that come months in advance of our actual expiration date; from experience, we know that there’s no urgency – plenty of other letters will come in the next few months reminding us to renew. That’s why I’m concerned about a prevailing abuse of the word (or concept), “relationship.” As a pretext for sending me overwhelming amounts of unsolicited email, marketers tell me (in the fine print), that I’m receiving this cascade of irrelevant and irritating material because we have some kind of “relationship.” Often, I cannot recall what that “relationship” is; when did I give permission for this volume of vacuous nonsense? It turns out that by purchasing a product, I’ve initiated a “relationship.” By downloading a free case study, I’ve initiated a “relationship.” By simply making a request for more information, again, I’ve initiated a “relationship.”

A relationship is a fragile thing, a mutual thing. A relationship is to be tended by both parties involved. A relationship requires trust (see Rule number 2, above).

Remember, trust can be won and lost. This is the most incredible chance your company has ever had- a chance to tell the whole world about your story.

Are you going to blow it?

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Note: This is a guest post from Stephen Smith, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen.

Thesis #18: Companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

Changes and Opportunities

The internet has developed as an agent of change unparalleled in human history. The near-instant communication it provides to people all over the world is a more important change than even the Industrial Revolution. The internet is tearing down walls faster and faster every day:

• Citizen Journalism is reporting news faster and more honestly than the legacy organizations
• Consumer advocacy groups are creating online communities to discuss products and services
• E-mail communications can transmit a single message to millions in moments
• Amateur videographers are creating entertainment that reaches niche markets – or tens of thousands
• People are connecting in like-minded groups to pursue social agendas, commercial concerns, and education.

Consider the new tools

Twitter and its “private” counterpart, Yammer, enable a stream of instant chat, or “Tweets”. These tweets are snippets of information – what you are doing right now. Or what you are thinking about. Or sharing a link to something that you think is interesting.

In the previous post we discussed how Twitter became the focal point for the Motrin-mom fiasco. Twitter also became the clearinghouse for information about the “miracle on the Hudson”, with the very first photo made available online at TwitPic.

[via cnet] The rapid-fire spread of a close-up photo of the US Airways plane that crashed in the Hudson River Thursday resulted in the service that hosted the picture going down.

This photo, of the US Airways jet that crashed into the Hudson River Thursday, brought so much traffic to TwitPic that the site, which allows users of several mobile phones to post pictures to Twitter, saw its servers get overloaded.

(Credit: Janis Krums) TwitPic, an application that allows users to take pictures from their mobile phones and append them to Twitter posts, went down after at least 7,000 people attempted to view the photo of the airplane taken from a commuter ferry by Sarasota, Fla., resident Janis Krums. According to Noah Everett, the founder of TwitPic, who still runs the service by himself, after the photo of the plane was re-tweeted by a large number of people and then picked up by several news sites, including Silicon Alley Insider, the resulting traffic was too much for the site’s servers.

Many of the most internet-savvy, and a large number of young people, are turning to social media for their news. As Mack Collier expressed just the other day:

Which of course led to a heated debate. A debate that is likely going on in the boardrooms of collapsing newspapers across the United States.

What do we do about these customers talking to each other?

The short answer is, “You need to get out there and talk to them, too.“

The long answer has a lot more to do with how you engage these customers, in order to gain their trust. As Searls and Weinberger wrote in Cluetrain Chapter 4: Markets are Conversations:

For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations.

For a long time – nearly two generations – the sellers were in control of the conversation. The idea of a “spokesperson” came into being, that is, a person who spoke what the sellers wanted them to say. TV, radio, newspapers – all designed to push messages out to the buyers. Broad-based messages that told you, in effect, that you needed this product or service so that you could be just like everyone else. This was the seller’s ultimate goal: to create a market of uniform buyers that could be manipulated, whose behavior could be predicted, and whose money could be harvested.

Then the internet showed up and threw a monkey wrench into the mechanism.

What Marketing Departments need to know

Here are some thoughts on understanding the changes in methods of conversation:

1. Buyers want to talk to other buyers in order to share in the experience of your product or service. This is market research of the purest kind, the most valuable and the most unpredictable.
2. Sellers must learn to join in these conversations without coming across as bullies, or smarmy salesmen. Partners, parties to the discussion.
3. Sellers now have an opportunity to do something that has never been available before: to find and build a real relationship with their best buyers and advocates.

Don’t waste it.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Note: This is a guest post from Stephen Smith, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen.

Thesis #17: Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on TV are kidding themselves.

This thesis was true when it was written 10 years ago but for different reasons than it is today. The evolution of the marketspace is the biggest change in the worlds of (“big M”) Marketing and PR since the invention of television. The ubiquity of the internet generates the pre-condition for markets (read customers) to talk to each other for free. Once separated by geography, marketspaces are now connected in multiple ways in online communities.

Unsolicited feedback is the rule, not the exception

Corporations are still spending vast amounts of money on research, polling and “focus groups” but the thought-leaders are inviting their markets to provide this information, or better information, for free. On the other hand, as the “Motrin” and “The other white milk” episodes prove, companies can get vociferous and very public feedback whether they want it or not. (We will re-visit these social media firestorms again with Thesis #19)

The Social Media transformation continues

The marketspace is changing, the markets are changing, the customers have already changed. And changed again. Stay-at-home-moms used to be a special sort of target market, ripe for the broadly-cast TV advertising messages. They used to be bored and lonely. Today they represent a purchasing powerhouse that is one of the most interconnected groups in America. Social networking sites report that the SAHM groups are among the most active and most frequent users of the services. The SAHM groups, once isolated, are now spending a lot of time talking, sharing, and comparing information on every product and service available.

For more on this fascinating evolution, I recommend also reading a book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” . You can find out more about the book at the Groundswell blog. What Marketing Departments need to know

Here are the “secrets” to understanding the changes in marketspace:

1. Your market can now talk back, and to each other, in a way that was impossible during the TV era. 2. Your market is going to talk about your company, its products and services and policies, whether you like it or not – and you cannot control this discussion from the outside. 3. Your market wants a place to gather, to talk and ask questions and share answers. Give them that place or they will build their own.

As Alex wrote in Thesis #11:

…they trust each other WAY more than they trust your marketing department.

In my next post we will explore Thesis #18: how markets are now marketspaces, interconnected person-to-person virtual networks and the impact this has on Marketing.

Just under 2 months ago, I launched a micro-consulting effort that I dubbed “Unstick.me”. It’s premise was simple. Small problems, action steps, 1 hour or less.

As I said when I started, it is a work in progress. An experiment, like most everything else I do. That meant there would be changes.

First, the successes:

• With $0 spent on marketing, I have had booked and executed successful unsticking sessions.
• I launched a weekly ustream show, attended regularly by 25-30+ people. This has been a HUGE success, besides being a lot of fun. As long as I can, I will continue to grow this show.
• I went on LuckyStartups.com, a show that highlights startups. I had a great interview with their host, and the chat room for the show was really engaging as well

Now, the problems.

In short, as the reality of our economy sinks in, the tighter people’s funds are getting. They’re not stopping innovating, but they still need help.

How Unstick.me got Stuck

Herein is the problem with this sort of work. The people who can afford it often take advice, and toss it out the window. The people who can really succeed with consultations like Unstick.me provides simply cannot afford $240. Or maybe even $200. I think there are people who I can really reach, but the…uhm…sticking point has been my pricing.

So there you have it. The United States has a new president, and you have a new pricing point for Unstick.me sessions.

Effective today, I’m reducing the price of the 1 hour Unstick.me consultation to $140.

Unstick.me <3′s Coworking

It’s no secret that my passion is coworking. I’ve been an active member and contributor of the Coworking community since late 2006, when i started getting noisy about IndyHall. As IndyHall has grown, I’ve shared countless hours worth of insight, knowledge, and experiences, and in return, have had the pleasure of seeing the community flourish and a number of other very successful coworking spaces grow out of the lessons that we were able to share.

Picking my brain about coworking seems to be of interest to a lot of people, which is why I’m now offering a Coworking Special. Same 1 hour one-on-one in a format of your choice, but so long as we stick to coworking-related topics, the price drops to a $100. If you ask any of the people I’ve spent an hour or less with talking about coworking, I firmly believe that they will tell you that this is the bargain of 2009. That’s not me being arrogant. I know what other consultants charge for their time and provide less value.

Paypal baked right in

I’m also taking a new reservation system for a spin. This one requires payment in order to confirm an appointment, and is hooked right into paypal. It’s easy as pie to reserve your hour, for a coworking session or the straight up Unstick.me consultation.

So if you’ve been holding out on the Unstick.me session that you think you need, maybe now’s your shot. Have a friend or loved one who’s stuck? Sign them up. I’ll toss in something special for gifted Unstick.me sessions, just make sure to make a note in the “special comments” field of the reservation.

But what about that early adopter tax?

Steve Jobs can get away with it. I don’t think it’s fair for me to assume that I can. If you scheduled an Unstick.me session prior to Monday, January 26th 2009 and paid the full amount, please contact me for a refund of the difference. Seriously. All you need to do is ask.

I’m a huge fan of the Brains on Fire blog, especially after meeting Geno and Spike at BlogOrlando last fall. This crew is smart. Super smart. They don’t just get the cluetrain, they run circles around it.

From their latest post,

So now let me tell you why peer-to-peer works better: Because it’s peer-to-peer. I don’t care how good your intentions are if you come from inside the company, you’re still from inside the company and people aren’t going to trust you completely. You are a PR tool. You are doing your job. It’s been proven that the vast majority of people trust people “just like me.” One of my favorite things that Holly, Fiskateer #1, said to us during her training was, “I’m a crafter FIRST. And a Lead Fiskateer SECOND.” This is the honest, transparent perspective that only someone from the outside can bring. So the people in the community know where their loyalties lie. They are not part of the machine. They are part of the community.

The entire post is based on two different pathways for guiding community leadership. One is to pick a representative from within the company, and the other is to look to the community of users and empower them.

If you’ve been reading the cluetrain-a-day series, you’ll know which I (and the Cluetrain) (and Spike from Brains on Fire) recommend.

Great post, Spike!

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Thesis #16: Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

Don’t Pitch Me Bro Uploaded by chrisheuer

As we’ve established, the language of “pitch”, which includes sales, marketing, campaigns, verticals, leveraging, and more…is ineffective.

When it works, it only works when you cast a net so massive that you are working the power of numbers. If you pitch to hundreds of thousands, even millions of individuals, of course you’re going to have some rate of conversion. But that’s a ton of wasted energy. And in terms of voice, and language, is a great way to the business equivelent of laryngitis.

Why is the language of “pitch” ineffective at anything other than alienating your audience? Think about it this way. While some of us are better at it than others, we all have some innate “lie detection” built in to our communications arsenal. First line of defense? Irregular speach patterns, followed by messaging designed to obscure intent.

Now let’s examine the physiology of “the pitch”. By definition, a pitch is meant to succinctly explain

a) what you are pitching b) why it is valuable c) who you are, related to that element of value

Notice anything missing?

The ideal pitch explains how perfect your product or service is for the person being pitched to.

Unfortunately for the “pitcher”, that’s when our innate lie detection kicks in. For me, it’s the “too good to be true” meter that usually goes off the charts.

That’s usually when I turn my back. I don’t know about you, but the things that set off my lie detector send me the other way.

As soon as I hear a pitch, I assume that I’m in the middle of a bait and switch.

“Here, stay for the weekend in this beautiful ski resort. It’s free. All you need to do is sit through a 2 hour presentation about our time share offerings”.

Right. I saw that episode of South Park and I’m not buying it.

Which is why the companies that use the voice of “pitch” in all of their communications are finding that they look up from their pitch script to realize that they are talking to an empty room.

“Where did everyone go?” the pitching marketer asks.

They’re online, and they’re talking to each other.

I haven’t been happy with the readability of my blog for a really long time. It’s been a complaint amongst readers for a long time as well.

Starting today, you don’t have to read it in a feed reader to get rid of the god-awful contrast problems I had before.

I looked at a LOT of wordpress themes and even the ones that I liked were so poorly built that I couldn’t stand to work in their code to modify them.

Brian Gardner created Dropshadow, the theme that I’m using now. It was a clean theme, and the code was very nice to work with while tuning things up and adding features and content areas. Thanks, Brian.

The next redesign is the one I’m really excited about…it will be the first time I’ve ever created a custom design for my blog. I don’t have any ETA on that, but it is coming.

Thanks for enduring through that last theme’s unreadability. This change is for the better.

I’ve spent the last 3 weeks working from Cluetrain theses to explain how online communities are conversing, with and without the companies they are conversing about.

While doing some more research for case studies, I came across a research report by the Online Community Research Network from March 2008. Less than a year old, I think it’s still relevant and extremely telling about the effects of the themes we’ve been discussing. Furthermore, like the Cluetrain Manifesto before it, it’s a quantitative prediction based on historical trends of things to come. I cannot tell from their website if they have more current reports than this one available, I’d love to see the results of the year to change.

Anyway, some relevant results from the report that relate directly to the Cluetrain.

One of the questions in the survey was: What were the 1-2 compelling sources of value from your community or social media efforts that you constantly communicate? The answers followed the themes below, which also include direct pull quotes from the survey responses. There’s some solid stuff in here.

1. Community helps problem solve faster and more efficiently than Customer Support, saving our company time and money: • “Customers are able to get faster response and answers to their problem utilizing the community over contacting Customer Support.” • “Knowledge share, and hence problem solving, is more efficient due to the community model.” • “The ROI on employee time devoted to the forums far exceeds the returns on the usual support methods.” 2. Availability of information and content for specific areas of interest: • “Niche communities, focused on specific areas of interest. Market leaders on-line and in print with high cross over traffic.” • “You won’t find this content anywhere else – written by our members to raise best practice within vendors.” 3. Increases site traffic / more engaged relationship with us: • “The more we invest into community, the more organic traffic we get.” • “Our community sites get more than 3 times the engagement for solutions, capabilities and use case content than our traditional sites.” • “Views of photo albums remain the most popular area of the community. Members may not wish to participate in discussions, but they do want to see photos of their events.” • “An online discussion moderated by subject matter experts that followed an in-person event with the same moderators achieved the most participation of any attempts to engage our users.” 4. Idea Creation / What we learn from members of the community: • “We will have the opportunity to get first hand feedback on products and ideas for improvements and enhancements.” • “We discovered some problem areas in usage and service adoption that caused us to change our materials and strategy.” 5. Lead Generation / Conversion: • “Converting contacts, acquaintances, and other informal relationships into donor relationships.” • “Converting contacts into activists and issue leaders.” • “When we enlist our community members to represent us physically or virtually, our reach and conversion metrics dramatically increase.” 6. People are saving time / building skills by using our site: • “People creating and building productive relationships with people that help them improve their practice or do their work better.” • “Our community members credit participation in our community with their increased skills in using our products.” 7. Build customer loyalty: • “Community members are more likely to volunteer their time, services, advice, and financial support than non-members.” • “Employees who belong to the community almost never ‘turn over’. They are consistently the best performers out in the stores.” • “Offering a community to your clients where they can speak to you and each other significantly increases customer loyalty.” • “More connected members spread the word and come back frequently.” • “If you want to understand your stakeholders and develop the relationships, you have to think in communities.” • “Online dialogue creates a more open environment that deepens trust and team work throughout the organization.” • “Research shows that customers in a community can have a sense of involvement with the company as long as we make sure they are heard and that involvement can lead to great loyalty.” • “Our community members are actively engaged with the brand and don’t hesitate to tell us what they like, and don’t like. They feel a real sense of ownership of the brand.” • “Our ability to personally communicate with future users of our product substantially influences their perception of our company.” 8. Online community is growing our membership base: • “Our blog has increased community participation by 80% over the past year.” • “We have doubled the size of our community membership in the last 6 months. 2 years ago, only 34% of our Company’s upsells and renewals were also members of the Community. In 2007, 75% of our upsells and renewals were Community members.”

So ROI is alive and well in Social Media…

And we see a solid reinforcement that Cluetrain theses are a driving force behind the value being noted.

For more details on this report, see Bill Johnston’s blog post.

Remember when I kicked off the cluetrain series saying that I’d be turning to some of my really smart friends for input and possibly contribution? Tara Hunt was on my mind then, and she is now. She just re-posted a 3+ year old blog about being a good marketer. It was great then, and it’s great now. Excerpt below, but you MUST read the full version or else I’ll come and snap off your pinky toes. I’m serious. It’s that important.

1. A good marketer is a Community Advocate
2. A good marketer knows today’s brands aren’t built in boardrooms or ad agencies or brainstorming sessions
3. A good marketer plans a little, but changes alot
4. A good marketer doesn’t only respond to community needs today, but also knows what needs will arise tomorrow
5. A good marketer rewards the community members who stand behind him/her
6. A good marketer gets involved in the community
7. A good marketer is her/his own client
8. A good marketer knows when to back off
9. A good marketer learns to use the tools available to them
10. A good marketer never takes her/himself to seriously

Now go read the whole thing. Tara’s explications of each of these points are briliant.