I took this photo on my last visit to Home Depot.  I like to use the “self-checkout” terminal that allows you to scan the bar codes on your items and pay through a credit card pad.

The system works fine—much better than the insanely complicated one in my local grocery store.  You buy some light bulbs, a jug of windshield fluid, the new doorknob for the guest room—all you have to do is scan the barcodes.

The problem the photo illustrates is that there is a fatal flaw in the system.  If you scan your debit card (or like me, a bank card which is both debit and credit card) and enter your debit card PIN number,  the system stops.  It seems that the software to handle debit cards was never implemented.

There’s a single clerk who handles six lanes of self-service, stepping in when someone is confused, or does something out of step—or, just  following the instructions on the screen, enters a PIN number.

How many times have you seen a work-around like this in a store?  The system works to a point, but some function was never implemented, and it’s left to Larry the Assistant Store Manager to walk around with some duct tape and a Sharpie and tape over a button or put some over-riding message like this one on a $800 terminal running $1 million worth of POS software.

I offer this piece of customer experience to you this morning for four reasons:

1. We’ve all seen this kind of work-around.  It’s endemic in implementations of large software / hardware systems.  The systems work, but only up to a point.   We need to learn to think and communicate internally to build systems that don’t need duct tape and Sharpies.
2. The lost productivity and increased customer frustration probably isn’t figured into the ROI, even though they are very real effects of the system.
3. By implication this photo says that the real solution—implementing debit cards or at least removing debit PIN commands from the terminals—is just such a big problem that no one can solve it.  It’s hopeless.
4. Big software systems that are implemented across enterprises are still misunderstood by most senior management.  General managers in large corporations are grocery people, or paint people or hotel people—not software managers.

We will live with these goofball work-arounds forevermore.  I’d like to see the business schools and other graduate programs begin training managers in technology as one of the two or three fundamental skills they learn in school.

With the advent of cloud computing, Web services, and service-oriented architecture, we’re into a new era of systems development.  If the Home Depot point of sale system for self-checkout were implemented today the Debit card problem might not have occurred.

Think of all the duct tape and Sharpies that would have saved.

Bookmark It

So take a moment and think of the best work your company does.

When your company does its best work who does it?  How do they do it?

Now hold a picture of that group of people and the work they do, and ask “what qualities or values do they bring to the table that makes this our best work?”  Tenacity? Brutal honesty? Synthetic creativity with others? The ability to connect everything to the business goal?

I think if you answer these two questions—who and how you do your best work– you have the core values of your company.  And if you connect these values to how you do your work—your processes—you have essentially outlined the design of your company, and from that the design of your products and services.

The business of branding products and services is slowly being commoditized as a result of the disruptive technology of social networks.  What is moving in to replace branding is strategic consulting about the design of companies and their products.

I’m pulling together a couple of different threads of notes as I write this:

Paul Isakson is a friend and colleague I check in with regularly, and a few weeks ago we met over coffee at The Spyhouse in Minneapolis.  We talked through the idea that what we as consumers truly fall in love with in a product or a company is the design—and not so much of what is called “branding.”  By design I mean: the structure that governs functioning, developing, and delivery of a product or service.

Think of this:  if you draw a line from the Macintosh, through the Applebook, the iPod, the iPhone and now the iPad you clearly see the power of Apple’s design, how it wins the allegiance of people, and builds an emotional loyalty to Apple.  These are very different products—computers, audio players, telephones, tablets.  But the share the same design philosophy—sculpturally beautiful, incredibly functional and usable, and delightful to use.   They all share a common design structure.

We love Apple because everything they try to do is beautifully designed—so we can clearly see how design is central to Apple’s reputation, and why we therefore (a lot of us, anyway) love Apple, are loyal to it, and are willing to try new products from them.

Take a minute and think about Microsoft’s medicore design philosophy: how Windows works, the GUI of the Office applications, how hard it is to install and operate new applications, the “me too” quality of Bing.

I call the emotional autonomous opinion in the consumer’s mind “reputation” rather than “brand.”   There are elements of what many people call branding—package design, trade dress, logos, naming, sexy television commercials—which may appear to be separate from the product in the design, but these are just another component of the over all user experience that creates a reputation in the customer’s mind about the product and the company.

But “design” and “reputation” are more valuable terms to use today.  If you consider the design of buying groceries at Cub Foods vs. Whole Foods, you can see how the design of each—store locations, store design, food choices, newspaper advertising, Websites—is the soul of the reputation each one has.   And we have different degrees of love and loyalty to these two reputations depending on who we are, where we live, and how we communicate with other people.

I learn I can have faith in some companies because I can trust that what they sell to me is great.  That’s a great reputation.  (I also trust that some companies build crap, and that those products will likely be crap in the future–hence a bad reputation.)

I’m working on a strategic design of a company, working with one of my strategic partners, helping them think through what their products and services should be and how they “position” themselves in the marketplace.  They are an IT firm, which is a field clearly threatened by the two biggest dangers most American businesses face:

• Commoditization – being forced to compete largely on price
• Disruptive technology—having the marketplace for products and services disrupted by a new technology that makes the company’s offerings less valuable and then obsolete.

Here are two quick examples of how these forces destroyed a company and an entire industry:

Kodak back in the 1980s thought they were in the film emulsion business.  Management tried to make better film for less money.  Then digital cameras came into the market.  Kodak figured people would print their digital photos, so they still made money on the photo paper the drug stores used to print photographs.   But even that business slowly eroded.  Kodak’s mistake was not realizing that in fact they were in the visual memories business.  While Kodak’s commercials relentlessly played on this idea of “visual memories,” inside the company they were trying to figure out how to make film emulsion cheaper.  What if the price of chemicals went up?  They weren’t focused on the customer, they were focused on what they thought was the business of Kodak.  There was a total disconnect between the brand and the reputation of Kodak when digital cameras and video cameras showed up.  If they hadn’t relied on phony branding   we might all be using $150 Kodak Flip video cameras today.

Newspapers were disrupted the Internet—Monster.com and Craig’s List pillaged the classified advertising monopoly that had provided 30% of the revenue and 80% of the net profit to the newspaper industry.  They can never get that back.  Newspapers weren’t in the news business; they were in the convenient news and advertising business.  When the Internet came along, both of those things could be done much cheaper (and in the case of classifieds, much better).

I’m working with my friends at this IT firm checking in on the design of their company.  They have done a much better job of identifying what truly makes them unique in the IT marketplace.  Many IT firms—as well as interactive and advertising agencies—are just lumps of people doing the best work they can, but losing the battle of why their people working in with their process produce anything more than a commodity.   This firm is thinking through how they can evolve the design of their services so that they are outstanding and distinctive.  If they focus on that—rather than on the snappy slogan or “brand positioning”—they will have changed the company on the inside and planning the communications of this will be much easier because, well, because it will be true.

The advertising agency business is slowly imploding from a Stalinist refusal let go of “branding.”  Marketing is not about awareness, brand positioning, and brand preference.  Put another way, only a small part of what marketing has become is about that–and for that broadcast media can be very useful.  But marketing is now in the sales and customer service businesses as well.  And ad agencies still think it’s about messaging and branding.

Instead, they should focus on strategic business consulting that works with clients to evolve the design of their products and services, and then also focuses on using their creative skills as communicators to invent language to communicate this design both inside and outside the organization—and then focuses on collaborating with clients to professionally manage the communications process.  Ad agencies already do some of these  last two tasks, but they only do it through traditional broadcasting channels (and I include most online advertising as “broadcasting.”)

There’s a lot of people at ad agencies who grew up wanting to make television commercials, and the problem is there are fewer commercials and they are worth less as the communications landscape expands and becomes more social.  Who wants to give up shooting car commercials in Marin County to planning search engine optimization strategy (that will drive actually real business leads?)

And how people communicate inside a company with each other should be the first responsibility of a communications partner.  That has to be based on the truth that is the design of the company.   Communications internally can help evolve the company so that it and its product are better designed.

A communications partner can be the critical ally in helping think through the businesses choices, the language used to frame and discuss those choices, helping communicating that internally and yes, communicate it to the outside world.

That’s not an ad agency.  That’s not a strategic consulting firm.  That’s not a public relations firm.

I think that’s a strategic communications agency.

Here are some books I’m reading that are affecting my thinking about this:

Change By Design by Tim Brown

The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen

Tactical Transparency by Shel Holtz and John C. Havens

The McKinsey Mind by Ethan A. Rasiel and Paul N. Friga

Bookmark It

All this talk about the Super Bowl television commercials has gotten me thinking about the role of television in the new social landscape.  I confess to being an NFL junkie this year, as a result of the Minnesota Vikings run at the title and my shiny new widescreen HDTV.  Our 9 year-old daughter is absorbed in this season’s American Idol (and btw, Ellen DeGeneres is absolutely a smash as the judge who replaced the wobbly Paula Abdul)

I was at a meeting last night at my church with a group that works on social justice issues.  Almost immediately someone brought up the new CBS show “Undercover Boss” which debuted on CBS right after the Super Bowl.   As  manipulative as this new “reality”television  show might be, I gotta tell you it’s really striking a chord in this time of recession—-with all the talk about lost jobs, health insurance, home prices below water.

On this first episode of Underwover Boss we saw the public spectacle of a CEO finding out his workers have to pee into coffee cans in their cars to keep on schedule.  As we talked about this last night people nodded and murmured—they were cranked.  There’s a chord in there for sure.

So my point here?  TV still works.

Just how does it work in the new social landscape?  I can tell you that “Ellen” (she was making her debut as a judge on the show) was a top ten term trending on Twitter while American Idol was on the air last night.

Clearly there are social waves of discussion to be launched by television.  the problem is more and more TV has to rely on big “tent pole” events like the NFL playoffs and American Idol to garner the mass audience.

An interesting effect is on local advertisers who appear because local television stations get some air time as part of the deal for carrying the show on its channel.  I’ve noticed more and more local advertisers working to get people to come to Websites to find out more.   Local stations also reap the harvest every Fall when there’s serious political races going on.  I’d very much like to own a local television station in the US the last two weeks of October in an even numbered year.

Tivos and DVRs of all types help spread the event out of its real-time experience, but that’s a very, very small minority of people time shifting the big shows.  (Who recorded the Vikings-New Orleans game to watch it later?)

My point is that we need these big gatherings from television.  There’s always been some special joy in watching the final episode of Seinfeld (or any episode of Seinfeld, for that matter)  Where TV can gather up enough talent and drama to make it worth our while, we’ll watch in droves.

What’s the opportunity for advertisers on television?   I think to continue to win they need to succeed at two things: they’ve got to entertain or somehow truly engage us with the quality of the content of the commercial, and second, provide a call to take the easiest, most rewarding next step.

I remember a few years back one of the car companies didn’t even both announcing it’s URL.  They just said, “Go to Google and type in ___”  For all advertisers that means asking people to go to the Web.  And then following them there, whereever they are.  For local advertisers that engagement has to come from real, attractive local opportunities–events, new products, special deals–but all within a driving distance.

The “value add” for television advertising is going to quickly move into participating and being available in social networks.  Word came today of research on people who visit brand Facebook pages.     First, lots of people are coming to store Facebook pages, and they don’t want to engage with a store clerk or buyer online.  They want deals! Discounts!  Tell me about your new products!

At the heart of these Facebook fans lie a cadre of truly loyal customers who get their jones by coming to the store’s page several times a week.  They just love the products.  (I’ll note for the record that one of the major brands cited is Victoria’s Secret, which you might think would have a big crowd of fans.  But according to Internet Retailer, Victoria’s Secret sells more online than Target.)

Television can still do a great job of providing high quality shows and advertising–it’s just less of it.  The powerful irony is the giants among television who remain standing—Ellen, Oprah, Dave, Jay, Simon–are more powerful than before because these events are scarce now.  Reality television fits this emotional mood by delivering “real” experiences that get us excited about the design and soul of products, rather than the brand blather.

Show us what you’re building and selling, and do it in an entertaining way.  We’ll find a way to make the next connection, if we’re inspired.  But it’s about the design of whatr you sell, not the branding you wrap around it.

So, okay—here it is:  my all-time favorite commercial.  It’s hysterical.  It was a winner in the 2006 Cannes Festival, from the great talents at the UK’s Bartle Bogle Hegarty.

Funny, real, beautifuly imagined—and hey, it’s for an underarm deoderant!

Axe body spray commercial

Da vid | MySpace Video

Bookmark It

Tara Hunt, author of “The Whuffie Factor” spoke this week at a Social Media Club workshop held at Best Buy Headquarters in Minneapolis.

As she spoke about her prescriptions for companies opening up to the new social Internet, she offered this discussion point:

“Identify the values that are part of communities that businesses don’t share.  Does your business share these values?  If no, why not?”

This is a central question—and fear—organizations have about “opening up” do direct dialogues with customers across the enterprise.  One problem in discussing the issue is defining what precisely do we mean by a “value?”

Here’s the example I use in presentations, and I offer here as way of explaining how companies can be disconnected by a mismatch of values with customers.  It has to do with packaging.

About 20 years ago companies began to ship products—especially electronics, toys, and office supplies—in “clamshell” plastic.  We’ve all seen it—clear, sealed plastic shells of thick, durable plastic.  There were many advantages for companies to use clamshell packaging.  Conveyor belts can be used to pack boxes instead of human beings.  It results in much less breakage in shipping.   The UPC code can be located in a standardized location not on the product itself, still allowing for easy scanning.  Employee theft can be minimized.  Product returns can be sharply reduced because products could be refused as returns since “the packaging was opened.”

All of these are virtues for the company.   None of them benefit the consumer, except possibly for some lower prices on commodities.

And we all know the big problem—the personal danger—of opening clamshell packaging.  According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, or CPSC, plastic packaging has caused more than 25,000 injuries since 2004.

Most of the injuries come not from the plastic itself, they come from the devices we use to pierce the clamshell to get to the product—knives, scissors, teeth.

Amazon got hip to the issue and starting last year all of their products ship with “free-opening clamshell” packaging.  This new form of clamshell has a hinge at the bottom with flanges at the top.  You grip the two sides at the top and the package pops open easily.  No more frustration, no more injuries.

Amazon is aligned with my values of not wanting to injure myself to get to my new stapler or television cables.

Mark Cuban, the founder of Buy.com and flamboyant owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, flamed a company over this issue in a very funny blog post.

The lesson is for companies to think through the customer experience and refuse to accept the left-brained answers only.  Real ROI is lost when the customer experience is so unintentionally bad.  And as Amazon has proved, there is real brand equity to be captured by going against the prevailing practices in order to provide a great customer experience.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Amazon announces next wave of Frustration-Free Packaging (engadget.com)
• Amazon takes on the Environment (momblognetwork.com)

Bookmark It

You’ve seen a lot of posts and articles recently foretelling the trends and technology that will be winners in 2010.

I thought I’d put out a prediction–or two–for the year 2011.

By the time the next New Year’s rolls around those of us in marketing and consulting will be talking all about how external and internal communications have to integrate with each other—and both have to align with business strategy.  And the first  part of this new trend we should consider is the internal.

Everyone talks about marketing and social media affecting the enterprise—but it’s all about how companies talk to their customers.  But we don’t talk much about internal communications—I mean, like not at all.  If you look at most corporate organization charts there isn’t even a person responsible for internal communications.

Doesn’t that seem weird?  We rely on managers in divisions, newsletters and intranets to communicate internally.  Maybe some company meetings and training.  But mostly it’s And now that the era of the Social Internet is upon us, social media will effect internal communications in two very powerful ways:

1. More and more people inside companies will be in contact with customers.  We will see tens of thousands of employees talking to customers instead of hundreds.  A lot of this will happen in what we refer to as real time– in-stores, online.   This means all those employees need to be on the same page with each other.  How does this happen?
2. Communications inside companies will organically rely on more and more on social media frameworks for communicating within the enterprise—peer to peer, one to many, many to one. So the CEO may still send out a quarterly message, but it’s going to be in a much, much larger mass of social communications.  This is also going to dramaticaly increase between companies that are strategic partners.  How does this evolve?

So, one prediction is that internal communications will be the great frontier for business communications in 2011.  And companies will be scrambling to outperform each other in building effective internal communications in order to better service customers and to become more nimble.

“Walking the walk” is going to become more and more transparent, and the only cure to get on your feet is internal communications.  It’s the new frontier.

My second prediction is that how internal communication is integrated with external communication—will be the second new discipline we’ll be talking about in 2011.

I call this integration intercomm—integrated communications from business strategy throughout the enterprise and then to customers.  Intercomm is the future art of creating and managing communications through the enterprise. This includes business strategy, branding, messaging, language and communications throughout the enterprise, strategic partners, and clients and customers.

It will be delivered in a new social world where transparency—and the resulting demand for authenticity–make this a critical problem for companies to solve.

Intercomm has to be planned and executed holistically because successes and mistakes will be amplified in real-time.  Without Intercomm companies may preserve the tidy divisions of marketing, stores, and corporate communications but at their peril.  Customers, starting with high ticket B2B markets, will demand greater access and response from the companies they might do business with.  Strategic partnerships will have to operate more seamlessly.  Switching costs for clients and customers will be pushed downward and any company’s strategy for differentiation will depend on how the walk and the talk align in real-time.

(BTW, I have one more 2011 prediction: that the word brand will slowly be replaced by the word reputation—but that’s another post)

The Social Enterprise began to emerge in glimmers first among Internet based businesses like Amazon and Dell and emerging social networks like My Space, Facebook and now Twitter.   But almost at the same time brick and mortar businesses like banks, airlines and phone companies began moving big chunks of their commerce and customer service to the Internet.

Marketing has been stretched across all of the other disciplines of the enterprise, including supply chain management and vendor relationships.    Communications has become so pervasive inside and outside the enterprise that no one discipline can coordinate the communications of the entire organization.

Among corporations, IBM is a leader in internal communications and the move to the Social Enterprise.  Here’s Jon Iwata, SVP of Marketing and Communications at IBM, talking about how social communications are become integrated into the backbone of the company:

Now we are seeing the “atomization” of communications between the enterprises and customers.   I wrote last week about Texas Instruments community for developers called E2E (translation: engineer to engineer) that allows 9,000 members to talk in forums and peer to peer with engineers throughout Texas Instruments.  The result has been a 6X increase in requests by E2E members for chip samples for prototypes.  In addition, TI gets ideas for improvements to chips from members of the E2E community.

Is this marketing? Sales? Customer service? Research and development?

You might say it’s that it’s all of those types of communication.  This kind of B2B community does contain marketing and product messaging, and yes it’s transactional, and yes TI now has a specific service relationship with the individual engineer requesting a chip sample for a product prototype.

But it’s more accurate to say that this is social communication that accomplishes many of the goals of marketing, branding, sales, customer service and so on.

It’s important to acknowledge that this kind of social relationship is both old and new.  We have to admit it is an amalgamation of the traditional organization of corporations because these organizations are comprised of people who have been trained and are experienced in these disciplines.  There’s really no one in most corporations who has specific skills in social networks and social relationships.  Some marketing people are skilled in “loyalty” marketing. Some sales people work in businesses with high customer service requirements like computers or food service.

In enterprise software companies its common for someone to hold the title of SVP-Product & Marketing—there’s a direct link between their clients and the product feature development process.  These software companies have also sponsored or worked with user groups of customers, both in listening for ideas and for providing support.  These kinds of organizational structures offer some bridge to the new social future

But it’s important to acknowledge that this is a new form of relationship between customer and corporation.

And it’s going to require an evolution in how companies communicate internally to deal best with the customer, and then deliver to the customer.  Intercomm is the discipline to make that real and internal communications is the new frontier where it will be built.

I want to post more on how Intercomm can be conceived, planned and executed in the next few days.  Please, I look forward to your comments.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The New How (oreilly.com)
• Business Applications Of Social Media Inside Organizations: Social Networks (masternewmedia.org)
• The difference between social media strategy and social media as business strategy (flowingmotion.wordpress.com)

Bookmark It

ForeSee Results has just released a research study on customer satisfaction with the top 40 Internet e-commerce Website and for mainstream retailers like Target and Best Buy it’s not great news.

The two retailing giants scored just below the average for the 40 sites, and showed little improvement in their customer satisfaction scores for the last four years.

Amazon continues to set the gold standard, achieving a score of 87 on a scale of 100 this year, the highest score ever achieved in the four years of the study.

So what? How does this matter if e-commerce is just a small fraction of total revenue for a mainstream retailer like Target? The study provides startling connections between customer satisfaction on the e-commerce channel and consumer likelihood to shop at stores, stay loyal to in future purchases, or recommend a retailer to others:

from: “Online Retailers Find a Reason to Celebrate in Dismal Economy,” 12/30/2009 ForeSee Results

Studies like this one point out successful strategies for understanding the inter-play between channels for the multi-channel retailer. As mobile and search play an even more important role in our consideration and buying processes, how can retailers build strong relationships and real loyalty?

“Customer satisfaction” is the answer, but what does that mean, other than the best value combined with best service? And if that’s all that means, how does a retailer get out of an “arms race” of features, price cuts, and whiz-bang promotions?

The answer may lie in a long-term strategy of what some call “delight.” Delight comes from being significantly and plesantly surprised–something that Amazon has been able to do by pioneering e-commerce experience and infrastructure on a massive scale. The key is the long-term committment to integrating bricks and clicks and mobile. This isn’t something that can be done by a cross-functional special committee. This has to be led from the top of the organization and made the central priority of a retailer.

That’s what Amazon does, doesn’t it?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Online holiday sales grew 5 percent despite weak economy (venturebeat.com)
• ‘Tis the Season! Online Retailers Break $27 Billion in Holiday Sales [STATS] (mashable.com)
• Survey Finds Online Shoppers More Satisfied This Year (shoppingblog.com)

Bookmark It

For six years Jake McKee led social media strategy at Lego in the US. You probably now know what a terrific job Jake and the people at Legos have done at building and bonding with a community of fans and fanatics. (McKee is currently CEO of his own agency, Ant’s Eye View)
What’s surprising is that before McKee started his social media initiatives at Legos the company’s strategy towards customers was, in his words, “Don’t. As in, don’t communicate with customers—at all!”
McKee related his experiences at the recent Supergenius Conference in Chicago held by the GasPedal folks. He described a company that in 2000 was so afraid of frivolous lawsuits over ideas that they forbade anyone in the company except the corporate communications department from communicating with customers directly.

One point he made in particular stuck with me—there was no “bell curve” of adoption of this new culture of openness. To the contrary—it was an “inverse bell curve.” And that’s got me thinking a lot about how new ideas and the new social communications environment are adopted by companies. It’s changing my thinking about change management.

The bell curve of technology adoption applies to change management, too

In “Crossing the Chasm” Geoffrey Moore developed the theory that technology adoption in any population followed the classic bell curve—innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. Moore said that in between the early adopters and the early majority there was a chasm, an unwillingness to “jump on the band wagon” which innovators and early adopters were willing to do.

Moore believed that every organization has innovators and early adopters who love new things, new ideas. They either have the smarts or the chutzpa—or both– to welcome new ideas intuitively. Their downfall is that sometimes even the smart ones fail spectacularly with new ideas. Anyone who has worked on the “bleeding edge” of technology will agree.

The early majority, according to Moore, is the key—that’s where the really smart managers are in most organizations. They’re forward thinking enough to jump on ideas they know will work, and they’re conservative enough not to stick their nose to close to fire until a new idea has proven it will likely be successful. In fact what makes these people good managers is their ability to evaluate and take action on risk—moving fast when it’s smart, and moving slow when it’s not.
So the key to the success of any new initiative in an organization, said Moore, was to “cross the chasm” by identifying, cultivating and proving to the smart managers in the early majority that the initiative is actually a great idea.
To summarize the last half of Moore’s book in a paragraph, he said there were three strategies to successfully cross the chasm: 1) Get top management to sponsor the initiative in meaningful ways, 2) build a structured process of research and development that allows the innovation to iterate and evolve and 3) build increasingly successful pilot programs that prove the real value (often ROI) to the early majority and use that success to build real enthusiasm in the company, centered on the early majority whose opinion counts the most.
What blew me away about McKee’s experience at Lego is that it was almost the opposite. He didn’t encounter a bell curve, he met with an inverse bell curve.

The inverse bell curve McKee encountered at Lego

“You had a bunch of people who were very enthusiastic about these ideas—they got it right away,” said McKee in his presentation. “And in the middle you had a bunch of people who just didn’t care—they would sit in meetings looking at their e-mail on their Blackberries under the table. And then there was a huge group of people who couldn’t stand the ideas, they actively hated them and worked against them.”
“I got tired of giving the same meeting over and over and getting the same adversarial response” he went on. “So I just stopped. I just didn’t deal with the negative people at all. I worked with the enthusiastic people, and we started building success. The lesson was: work with people who want to work with you, and build real success.”
“I was lucky in that I had a boss who have me air cover. About the tenth time I went into his office and said “Are you really sure it’s okay that I’m doing this?” he told me to stop it. He said, ‘just go do what you think you should do and I’ll get your back.’ As long as you don’t get arrested, it’s okay.”
So what are the learnings from McKee’s experience at Lego?
I think it clearly emphasizes the importance of senior management buy in. McKee needed permission from a boss who said “I’ve got your back” and meant it, and had the ability to provide that support.
I think it also means that the most important part of organizational change is getting the first steps right and building success stories that are real and meaningful for the organization. It’s okay to fail, but do it on a really small scale, then learn and iterate fast.
And probably most important is be sure you’ve got the right ideas. Know why this particular version of the change is important and in the best interests of the organization.
And regardless of the bell curve—inverse or mountain-like—you’ll be able to build successful change.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Social Media: At the Tipping Point (revenews.com)
• Stating the Obvious: Gaming the Cycle (cloudave.com)
• A Bigger Ant Hill (twittermaven.blogspot.com)
• The Customer Of The Future (slideshare.net)
• Taking the Next Hill (siliconangle.net)
• Chap010 (slideshare.net)

Bookmark It

Texas Instruments E2E social community is a brilliant success story

Devashish Saxena of Texas Instruments marketing team is something of a subversive—he and team and partners are subverting the traditional high technology marketing process.

Saxena led the development of the highly successful E2E community that Texas Instruments sponsors.  This community is more than a year old and shows off some of the incredible possibilities of how B2B businesses will succeed at social media—and I believe show greater true return on investment than most B2C efforts.

To tell the story of E2E it’s first helpful to know that Texas Instruments is not a calculator company—not much anyway.  This $32 billion company embeds its processor chips in a huge array of products—Blackberries, iPhones, microwave ovens, washers, dryers, automobiles, and on and on.

E2E is a community of about 10,000 engineers who communicate and comment on a wide range of subjects related to chips—the core of what Texas Instruments produces.  There are tens of thousands of different chips and millions of ways to use them.  E2E hosts discussions and puts client engineers in touch with TI engineers who are experts on how to use these chips.

Texas Instruments knew that as part of the marketing and sales process, many of the engineers in their client’s companies were communicating 1-to-1 with peer engineers inside TI, asking questions and asking for help with developing new products using TI chips.  The communication was largely e-mail based, and occasionally someone would pick up a phone or even make a personal visit.

The brilliance of the E2E community is that it took this huge number of client engineers and moved their questions and dialogue with TI engineers into this community.  Not only does this get more brains contributing ideas, and not only does it build the TI brand in the minds of those client engineers, but—here’s the true genius:  instead of answering a question once, the answer gets indexed by the search engines and 100 engineers can find the answer when they begin their research.

There’s an exponential power to every answer.  And when an engineer finds the answer on Google, it’s 10 times more effective than any ad could be because it deals with the specific issue that specific engineer is searching for, and because it comes from Google or Bing it carries an authenticity no ad could buy.

While a community of 10,000 may not seem like much, think of them instead as a massive high quality link generation system that is building millions upon millions of links about TI engineering across the Internet.

Devashish Saxena

Saxena shared this success story at this week’s Supergenius conference in Chicago, hosted by Gas Pedal.  These gatherings are among my favorites (Blogwell is another series of conferences they sponsor) because they feature clients talking about their own case studies.  Couple that with visits from marketing stars like John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing, and it was more than worth an extra day on the road and $750 to attend.

Saxena talked about another amazing aspect to the E2E success story, which had to do with prototyping and chip samples.   When an engineer from a potential client begins work on a new product idea, one of the big design challenges is to build a working prototype of the product.  Typically the engineer will request a “chip sample” from a company like Texas Instruments—or Intel or AMD or any other number of possible vendor/partners.  The chip sample is sent to the engineer, offering a terrific opportunity to engage that engineer in a sales dialogue—“what problem are you trying to solve?” “how can we help support?” “Is there any other research we could provide?” and so on.

Saxena and his team discovered after a year that client engineers who registered on E2E were six times as likely to ask for a chip sample, and twice as likely among all who asked for samples to go ahead with TI on product development.  That’s 12 times the return on investment in other channels of creating chip sample demand.

I asked Saxena afterwards if his boss, the head of marketing for TI John Szczsponik, was able to engage his peers in sales and even product development in integrating the discussions on E2E into the whole companies efforts.

“Absolutely that’s where we’re going and need to go in the future,” said Saxena, though he confessed, “We need to go slowly to build success.  If we brought this to all the groups in the company now we’d have a hundred cooks in the kitchen when we need to be careful and understand how to make this authentic and helpful for the customer.”

So if you were in the same situation and Saxena and Texas Instruments and you had to think through where your marketing dollars went, how much more would you spend on a community like E2E than say, advertising in a computer magazine?

There’s an even bigger win coming for TI and the E2E community and that’s when this communications community is fully integrated into not only marketing but further down the transactional process into sales and then finally into product design and business strategy.  That day is coming soon, and I think it will come in high profit niche B2B markets before it’s a mass success for B2C retailers.

The profits are there, and as technology companies constantly fight commoditization, a community like E2E is a piece of the best long-term strategy for leadership.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Apple, Texas Instruments beat earnings estimates (dailyfinance.com)
• Social Media ROI Reality Check (steffanantonas.com)
• Some Of The Top Moments For Social Media In 2009 (newmediachatter.com)

Bookmark It

Today I started a new job.

Luckily, I’ve had the chance to write my own job description. And since I’m self-employed, I know the boss has my back.

For the past three years I’ve  worked with one of the largest interactive agencies in New York City. The leadership of the company, based in Europe, is focused more and more becoming a network of interactive marketing agencies, with an emphasis on marketing. They believe that there is a lucrative future in that strategy.

I respectfully disagree.

I think it may be a good way to extract money from client budgets, at least for now. But I believe that’s missing the very very big, historical turning point about how we communicate that we’re just beginning.  As a result, yesterday I quit my job.  Vote with your feet, I say.

We can now see the tectonic shifting in the communications landscape. Yes, we’re becoming more wired and more socially active and connected online, so who we communicate with and how we communicate is much more in our own control. As a result, were listening to and watching less and less broadcasting, especially attention-interrupting advertising. Even if it’s online advertising.

I won’t spend time telling you my version of what this all means. If you’re reading this on my blog you get the general idea–especially if you got here through a Tweet or Re-Tweet.   I’m just saying that I don’t think this is a good time to be betting heavily on interactive marketing for a living. Maybe you can succeed if you offer the very best work across a wide range of services, and are willing to settle for commodity pricing on most of what you make and sell. Razorfish.  AKQA.  RG/A.

Go big or go home.

Ameriprise last week selected R/GA as their marketing agency of record (AOR) which is huge, and not just for R/GA. For the first time a digital agency is responsible for managing the brand of a large American corporation. The advertising and media agencies will be directed by R/GA. Good for them.

I believe that the growth of bandwidth and distribution of the Internet and the social networks it has spawned are in the process of becoming the primary system of communications within companies and with their customers—and more important, between their customers.

The Internet is no longer another channel from marketers to potential customers, in fact it’s value as a broadcast channel is becoming less and less important as social networks and search engines become the primary means by which we connect with companies and their brands.

The effects of this on traditional communications organization within a company are becoming disastrous.  I used to be an executive with Knight Ridder newspapers, so I know.   Marketing can’t reach customers as consistently with the “reach and frequency” of messaging through the volatile combination of broadcast media, in-store experience and online content and networks.

Money is being pissed away right now on broadcast and print media and direct mail marketing that cannot deliver the awareness and engagement they promise. People are communicating with each other too much, and when they hear marketing messages they discount them by 75% as more marketing BS.

But since we’re in a recession, management becomes more conservative. People in business tell themselves to “to do what we do best,” instead of do what’s best.   For most senior marketing managers that means relying on broadcasting messages through interruption media.

Communicating to customers is going to become much more atomic and interactive. This will require companies to begin building their communications strategies by building strong communications internally. Companies will first have to decide what “the walk” is, and then they will have to communicate and re-organize and re-vitalize themselves to actually walk that walk.

The primary way that marketing messages will be communicated in this new social landscape is through the products themselves. Every product and service will include communications with it, and the purpose of that communications will be to introduce and explain the produce and support the customer.

What I think this means is that marketing, advertising, public relations and customer service will all fall under a broad communications strategy which will be the plan by which a company will execute business strategy. This is why ideas like “design strategy” and “marketing as a service” are beginning to circulate as the primary process for selling and servicing customers.

I think there needs to be agencies or consultants to help companies think through their business strategy in this new landscape and then translate that into strong, internalized communications strategy. That’s the work that I want to do.

I think this new type of consultancy will take business away from traditional business consultants like Bain and McKinsey, who are giants of left-brained thinking, but have no emotional or creative bones in their bodies. This new business will be about aligning companies internally and then helping create and evolve the ideas and language the people of that company will use to explain and tell the story of the products and services they sell.  So it’s still creative people thinking strategically about messaging—and now, content strategy.  It’s about the on-going discussion that needs to be organized and fed by on-going content strategy.

These creative ideas should be integral to the product design and the service that supports products. I’m beginning work with clients now who are smaller companies that communicate primarily through the Internet with potential customers. Many companies like these are seeing their products and services become commodities in the new global economy. Even when they can leapfrog competition with new products and services they’ve only won short-term gains in “arms races” of technical innovations.

The only sustainable competitive advantage is for the people of the company to join together to examine and align as a company internally, and building on their existing strengths, create “the walk.” And if they can walk the walk, the rest of communications strategy follows.

(Have you noticed it’s always “management” and “employees” anytime we talk about business? That’s a relic of the 20th century we have to break apart. It’s the people of a company, working in a social collaboration that actually comprises almost all the work a company does.)

There are early adopters already in the marketplace. IBM has seized the leadership position in Information Technology through just this kind of process. If they continue their innovations in social communications they can sustain a reputation as the best choice for customers to make. That’s the beginning of what the new social enterprise walks like. Other, newer companies are doing this as well—Zappos, Best Buy, and CapGemini. And now it looks like Ameriprise, a company of more than 40,000 employees is going to try to begin this slow transformation as well.

In the midst of that movement, that’s where I want to work. It’s not a tactic or a channel. It’s about who companies are and who they need to become. Yes, that’s strategic consulting. But I think in it’s heart it’s strategic communications planning. So I’m a strategic communications planner. That’s what I do for a living now.

The thrilling part is the amazing, open collaboration of ideas I have with you. People who are thinking about this new social landscape are so generous and willing to share ideas. Some of that is frankly about personal survival, but the poetic justice of these social networks is that they naturally create collaboration, most of all among people like us who are creating them. I’ve had long talks with tremendously generous and thoughtful people like Paul Isakson, Albert Maruggi, Kip Voytek, Aya Karpinska, Joseph Reuter, Andrew Eklund, Kim Garretson, Michael Bingham and dozens of others.

I”ve heard brilliant provocative and sometimes just weird thinking on blogs and at seminars.

You know how we roll. We’re working hard every day in this open, collaborative world.

Thanks for reading this. I’ve got business cards now, so I guess this is official.

Please let me know what you think. And I’ll try to return the favor.

Related articles by Zemanta

• United Marketing Group and Teleformix Make Joint Investment in Call Center (prweb.com)
• What is Your Sustainable Competitive Advantage? (startupprofessionals.com)
• How (and Why!) to Produce and Deliver Online Video, Audio and Rich Media Webinar (prweb.com)
• What Do Baby Boomers Want From Technology? (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
• RAMP Offers Rescue Plan to Intelligent Dentists Seeking A Reliable Marketing Agency (prweb.com)

Bookmark It

Free at last! Finally I’ve joined the Apple army–I’ve got my first iPhone.,

For the past two years I’ve been shackled to an AT&T contract for a Samsung Blackjack II smart phone, which uses the Windows Mobile 7 operating system.  A few weeks ago the contract expired and on the day I went to my local AT&T shop and upgraded to the 3G iPhone.

Let me say first how much I love the phone, for all the reasons you’ve either experienced or heard about—the rich, fluid interface, the ease of adding new applications, the bazillion apps in the App store (My favorite one so far is “Flashlight,” which just turns the screen bright white so you can use the phone as—you guessed it—a flashlight.)

Now, here are five gripes I have with the phone that hit me right away.  These are obvious clear faults with the customer experience that should be easy, easy to Apple to fix.  We’ll see if they do:

1. The Keyboard.  Using the virtual touch screen keyboard can be maddening.  I’m a big guy with big fingers and I make mistakes at least once every ten keystrokes.   The problem is a little bit better when you switch to the horizontal alignment, and the auto-complete function cleans up common mistakes almost without noticing.  But the difference between a push button keyboard—even that itty-bitty one on the old Palm smart phone—is major.
2. No Flash.  None.  What the heck?  A lot of media outlets still use substantial amounts of Flash in their Websites, and of course Flash is verboten in Apple store apps, so no Flash on the iPhone.  It’s a dispute between Adobe and Apple and both sides ought to see how stupid this is.  Apple is finally allowing the firsts few apps that are allowed to use work-arounds to use Flash, but this just leads to the third major gripe I’ve got.
3. Closed system for applications.  Apple can get away with a closed, tightly controlled marketplace for applications for awhile.  But pretty soon the amount of content and the extensions available on open phone systems—here comes Google’s Android—will begin shifting the center of gravity away from iPhone and iTunes and just like AOL, Apple will have to figure out what to do in a new, open world.  I can only imagine how much better the already rich world of iTunes and the App Store would if this were truly an open system.  Apple would be to mobile apps what Amazon is e-commerce.
4. Charging the Battery.  I plug the charger into one AC outlet and it charges.  I plug it into the outlet next to it and it won’t.  I plug it into a third socket and it shows it charging, but in the morning it’s not only not charged, it’s lost power.  I went to my local Apple store, they replaced the adapter plug, but the problem persists.  Ghost in the machine.
5. iPhone Apps that won’t go horizontal.  If you haven’t seen the iPhone, one of the most beautiful, wonders delights of using it is that if you tip it sideways the screen rotates sideways as well.  This also allows you to “stretch” the screen using to fingers, the way John King did with that very cool CNN Election Map.  Reading Websites is terrific this way.  But most of the iPhone apps, including ones from bigshots like Sports Illustrated don’t have a horiztontal mode.  Irritating.

None of these five gripes makes the iPhone anything other than twice as good as the Windows Mobile 7 or Crackberry operating systems.

As mobile becomes more and more the primary interactive interface we use in daily life (and that day has already arrived for millions of people) the iPhone will blaze the trail

Hopefully with a few improvements to solve problems like these.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Adobe to release Flash player for mobile – except iPhone (cbc.ca)
• Flash Arriving by Year-End on Every Smartphone Except iPhones [Smartphones] (lifehacker.com)
• 12 iPhone Tricks You Might Not Have Known (theworldison.blogspot.com)
• Adobe Flash on iPhone and iPod Touch – There is an App For That (mwd.com)
• Smartphone showdown (money.cnn.com)

Bookmark It