Looking ahead to a panel discussion at MediaPost’s Social Media Insider Summit next Wednesday in Key Largo, I’ve decided to go out on a somewhat futuristic ledge here and imagine how social media could dramatically alter the retail experience. Since most of this technology already exists, add in a touch of creativity and this becomes my very own “Mission: Possible.”

Knowing: “So Nice to See You Again, Ms. Shopalot”
Since many of the ideas below are dependent upon you, the shopper, sharing your social graph with retailers, let’s get the basic enabling technology out of the way. Near Field Communications (NFC) already allow for the instantaneous transfer of credit/debit card data from consumer to retailer, so sharing your social info via NFC shouldn’t be too far away. Now the fun can begin.

Personalizing: “Is that Beyoncé Wearing a Maternity Gown in Your Size?”
Now that the retailer knows who you are, opportunities for personalization abound. Electronic signage reacting to your social preferences could display your favorite celeb wearing an outfit that was on your posted shopping list or simply point to the floor or dressing room where you can find a product selection in the colors you like.

Bargaining: “Would You Like Some Friends With That?”
In the brave new social world, it won’t be the size of your closets that determines access to volume discounts. Instead, it will be the size and collective bargaining ability of your social graph. For example, a “social” wine store could provide their 10% case discount on single purchases because your social network completed the case requirement together that week.

Hearing: “OMG, Best Song Ever”
Sorry Muzak, but the days of one-size-fits-all audio at retail are soon to be over. Social retailers could tune into the preferences of individual shoppers, piping out personalized streams of music built from shared Spotify or Ping playlists. A shopper hearing their favorite jam will be pumped up and in the perfect mood for a heaping dose of retail therapy.

Surprising: “That’s the Coolest Thing I’ve Ever Seen”
Projected touch screen displays (see demo of PicoMagic at CES 2012) combined with social data could completely transform the retail shopping experience. Entire walls could become interactive, allowing shoppers to sort through vast amounts of virtual inventory that is preselected based on social preferences. Sharing and comparing also would become a snap.

Out-smarting: “Dude, Where’s My Bar?”
Social integration into products might just save us from ourselves if we’re so inclined. For example, if you check in at a bar, your car instantly will know to only start the engine after you pass the Breathalyzer on your smart phone. If you don’t pass the test, your phone will track down your nearest and most sober friends.

Rating: “That’s the Way (Uh-Huh Uh-Huh) I Like It… On Facebook”
Reviews of products and services are ubiquitous online, and it is only a matter of time until these move in-store. Now imagine that the products themselves can display reviews in real-time and highlight those from your social graph. Suddenly that banana-flavored craft beer your friends liked is just what the doctor ordered.

Klouting: “Tell You What I’m Gonna Do Just For You…”
Rewarding influential customers with superior service or free/discounted goods is nothing new, but social integration could take those perks to new heights. For example, once a retailer recognizes a customer with a high Klout score (or equivalent), discounts commensurate with their potential influence could be offered with a promise of more after the social sharing occurs.

Gaming: “Shopping is a Game, Isn’t It?”
Once a retailer can respond to your social graph, the opportunities to introduce game mechanics multiply faster than you can say “Batman: Arkham City.” Based on your in-store behavior, instant coupons could be earned or, perhaps more interestingly, virtual points could be aggregated for redemption in Farmville or another Facebook favorite.

Traveling: See You in Key Largo?
Clearly, this little imaginary excursion just scratches the surface when it comes to the true potential of integrating social media into real-world products, which is why I hope you’ll join me down in Key Largo next week along with fellow panelists like John Yi of Facebook and Lars Djuvik of Specific Media/MySpace. It should be a lot more fun than hanging from a window with a broken electronic glove…

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As part of my background research for a story on this program (see FastCompany.com), I interviewed Larry Gee, the SJSU instructor working with IBM to teach “social business” to a select group of undergrads.  I think you’ll find what Gee has to say about this business/academic collaboration quite interesting.

DN: Can you give me a little background on this program from SJSU’s perspective?
SJSU,  College of Business, has always brought innovation to the classroom so students can learn, apply, and differentiate themselves in the business world.   SJSU and IBM has a long relationship over the years.  It is only natural that ideas are bounced back and forth between us;  how we can make a difference when preparing the next generation of leaders.  Bringing social business into the classroom was one of those ideas that fit the innovation framework.

DN: Why did SJSU decide to collaborate with IBM on this project?
SJSU, College of Business,  decided to collaborate with IBM on this project because Social Business is a critical skill that students need to have to be competitive in the market place.   Social Business is a transferable skill across multiple disciplines ie business, bio-sciences, engineering, humanity & arts, etc.  Students worked on a real business problem, real time, to learn and apply social business tools and processes.

DN: Do you have collaborations with other large corporations?
Yes, we have collaborated with other large corporations such as Cisco, Google, Microsoft to name a few.

DN: If you were talking to another educator at a different university who was considering a similar collaboration, what advice would you give them?
My advice:  1) Identify key social business partner asap.  This is critical because a real life component is needed to reinforce key concept and process.  2)  Plan quickly with a clear course work and administration buy-in roadmap for execution in 60 days.  3)  Execute plan and have class up and running by next term.

DN: How are you evaluating the success of this program?
Students must be able to understand and apply social business tools/process to a real life problem.  The program success is measured on how well students learn, grasp, apply, and demonstrate how social business can be used in a business environment to increase competitive advantage or improve business process cycle time.

DN: How have students responded?
Students response has been great because they have already been exposed and used social media, Facebook, blogs, bookmarks, wiki, to name a few,  basic components of social business, at a very young age.   What is new then?  They are able to build a social business environment using various social media tools they already know and use, but this time, in a business setting.

DN: Can you speak to the advantages of having IBM experts mentor your students?
Certainly.  Having a subject matter experts available to talk, demonstrate, and relate to actual projects are key.   One can read articles and talk about them in class.  But when you are given access to the latest  materials and platform to create a social business environment then this is collaboration at its highest.  Mentor is only a few clicks away to kick around ideas and bring those ideas to reality.  This is where academia  and business intersect.

DN: Is there a risk with a program like this that it will be perceived more as a marketing ploy for IBM than a more company-neutral business course?
I don’t believe the program is a major marketing ploy but rather a  business neutral course because majority of tools and contents used were not IBM but rather current tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Bookmark, wiki, etc.  GBS, IBM Business Partner, provided the real life problem for students to do a deep dive into their social business space.

DN: Tell me where the idea for GuitarTown came from.
Soon after I moved to Nashville, I saw these little catfish sculptures around town as a public arts program, and I thought, what do catfish have to do with Nashville? So I put together a proposal. And, thanks to the vision and support of our CEO, we were able to start the GuitarTown program – it launched here in Nashville in late 2003.

DN: Why did you think this would work in Nashville?
Because Nashville is such a great music community, obviously, but there are many other aspects to this town, and I thought it would be great to be able to pull the businesses, visual artists and musicians together for a philanthropic cause; so that the 10-foot-tall sculptures would be artistically designed by visual artists, partnered with a business or corporate sponsor and then signed by a celebrity – eventually to be auctioned off for charity.

DN: How do the guitars get sold and where does the money go?
After the auction gala, the funds raised are divided among a variety of non-profit organizations in the host city, so it would stay in the community where it was happening. We’ve raised over $2 million dollars for charity and, of course, it’s great branding for Gibson and Gibson Foundation. 100% of the funds that come into Gibson Foundation from sources outside of Gibson go back out to charity, none of it goes to administrative, or fundraising, that’s all covered by corporate. We’re very fortunate. Many non-profits take up to 20%, for their admin fees so we’re very fortunate not to have to do that, and we try to support a variety of different kinds of organizations in each city.

DN: What other cities have hosted GuitarTown?
Nashville GuitarTown was the first, and then we did Austin, London, Miami, Orlando, and a smaller project, not of 10-foot-tall guitars but of regular size artistically designed ones, that was called Cleveland Rocks. Now we’re doing GuitarTown Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and that auction is on Dec. 3rd, 2011.

DN: So let’s break it down into a few components; so there’s the creation portion of it, where you have how many guitars? It varies from city to city. Usually it will be no more than 50, typically 25-50, because you can’t really have an auction, a big auction, with fewer products than that. In Nashville we did a “call for artists.” We had a panel that juried all the applications — over 150 applications, and narrowed it to the final 35-40, , but we also included some regular sized guitars, so some people who were unable to design a 10-foot-tall guitar were able to participate as well.

DN: Being associated with Gibson is a cool thing, that’s got to help.
Yes, it opens a lot of doors.

DN: So you’ve got the first phase, which is identifying the artists and announcing the program, what’s next?
Announcing the program, identifying the visual artists, and we were getting video, following a couple of the artists through the process, because it’s very interesting. You can’t do this in a day. I’ve decorated normal size guitars; it takes a good, long while just to do that. To do a 10-foot-tall guitar and to do it well, I would imagine could easily take several months, so these visual artists are doing this, really, for free. We give them a small stipend; we provide opportunities through various arts stores in the area for them to get their supplies, we encourage them to get sponsors for their project as well, because it can be costly.

DN: Is there resistance at all from the cities to say, “well wait, this is Gibson, they should be paying us for this exposure.”
We’ve never run in to anything even remotely like that. We have been welcomed with open arms for beautifying the cities and bringing positive attention.

DN: So it’s a win/win for them?
Right, and although it could be labeled as cause marketing, because it is branding with 100% of the proceeds going to charitable causes; it remains at its core a very charitable project. If we bring in $500,000, or whatever comes in, all of that will go to the designated charities.

DN: So there a display period and then an auction?
Yes. They are strategically placed around the city, or where the city has committed space. Here in Nashville I worked with Public Works to try and determine where we could place them, and we worked with one of the art schools to help keep them in good repair. They also have to be anchored down with heavy sand, and these are not small things, and so, yeah, you work with the different departments of the city. I first asked for permission from the Mayor’s office, and then I kind of figured out from there where to go with it, who to talk to and who to meet with.

DN: What’s the planning cycle for one of these?
For Nashville, I started planning either late 2003 or early 2004, I’d have to go back and look to be certain, but the first thing I did after I got various approvals, was to cold call sponsors, people and businesses I thought would be willing to sponsor the art work and to have it in front of their building. Loews Vanderbilt was the first to say yes, I remember that. And after that it was really easy. And I had help. The Country Music Hall of Fame, BMI and ASCAP were all helping with meeting and event space, we had a committee, that included people from the city as well as the art and music community. A good group of about 10 people to oversee it. We wanted it to be a community effort. And I think it really was. Each city has handled it a little differently, but that was our prototype.

DN: A lot of companies do something cool and then they walk away from it, and say, “what’s the next thing we can do?” What made you stick with this one?
Well, part of it is because the Foundation is in place and we do have this vehicle to promote charitable giving. That’s a big part of it. It’s also great PR and visibility for our iconic brand and it brings much needed attention to several charitable causes in each city.

DN: What caused you to keep going?
I think it was just the program’s success. Other cities came to us and said, “Can you do it here?” I still have people emailing me, even just last week saying, “would you consider here?”

DN: How much does one of these guitars end up going for?
It really depends. When you have one signed by Paul McCartney, and one signed by Dolly Parton, they can go for quite a lot. It depends on the art and the artist – and, of course, the buyer.

DN: So PR is one of the primary ways of measuring success?
Right. I was overseeing the events for Gibson when this started, and then I took off for a year, but stayed involved because I was very dedicated to this program. The person that took it over at that time was our head of PR and she did very well with it as well. So, there is the PR aspect, and the Foundation – the philanthropic aspect. That is very important to all of us here, that’s the key thing for me.

DN: So if a like minded company was thinking of embarking on a program that had a same idea but it was different and appropriate for them, what advice would you give them, in terms of making something like this happen?
Well I can tell you that when I wanted to make this happen I contacted someone in Chicago, I think, and asked for any guidelines that they had so that I could at least have a place to start. There are obviously some rules that we have in place about the artwork: nothing profane, nothing sexual, political or religious, no branding other than our headstock. We’re doing it to create art and raise funds for charitable causes.

I would also recommend finding an image that is meaningful to your city. Music is meaningful to many cities, and in Nashville, LA, Austin and London, it’s a big part of the culture. And find something that connects to the people’s passion. You want to get to the heartstrings of people, make them feel like they’re involved and part of something fun and meaningful.

DN: Music is so universal that you can go to so many different charities and do things like that. I would think that you would focus mainly on music education.
Most people think that and it’s certainly part of our mission, but our CEO, and the Gibson Foundation was his vision, is very philanthropic. He really wanted this to focus on children, globally, to provide opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise exist without the support Gibson Foundation provides. He feels that there is a responsibility on a corporate level give back, and he doesn’t just talk it, he walks it. He’s been very, very supportive. And Dave Berryman, the co-owner and President of the Gibson, oversees the Foundation, they’re both very, involved and very supportive of this.

DN: Tell me a bit more about the PR coverage you’ve received for GuitarTown.
It always gets coverage in every city when it’s happening. Typically a visual artist will be filmed while they’re in the process of creating the sculpture. When the celebrities come out to sign the guitars, that’s another opportunity, and there’s generally a lot of coverage of that on television, in print, on the web, everywhere. And then there’s the gala, and the gala always gets coverage because that’s a big deal.

Sometimes we’ve done red carpet for celebrities, sometimes we just throw the party. It’s all good. And everyone who comes is in great spirits, because they’re there part of something fun and know that when they’re giving, it’s going to charity.

DN: Do you find yourself, when you tell people what you do for a living, that they go, “oh my god that’s the coolest job I’ve ever heard of”?
Every job I’ve had at Gibson, I’ve had that. And here’s the funny thing, every job I’ve had here I’ve actually said, “this is the best gig in the world.” When I started with Events, I had the best gig in the world. When I was head of Entertainment Relations, I was like, “Oh this is heaven.” When I started with the Foundation, I knew it was the best. But I have thought every gig I’ve had here was the best.

DN: That’s amazing. So tell me why it makes it the best, because that just became my headline, The Best Gig in the World. What makes it the best?
You get to do good, you get to be part of something that’s making a major impact in the world, and it’s done in a company as great as Gibson. It just doesn’t get any better than that.

If you wou’d not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worth reading,
or do things worth the writing.

I believe the folks at IBM are doing a lot of things “worth the writing,” which is why I seem to be writing about them all the time.  That and the fact that they treat me like a journalist by providing access to interesting people within their organization.  One such person is Michael Riegel, VP of Academics & Startups, who provided his insights on a just announced “social business” curriculum they are coordinating with San Jose State University.  As part of something IBM calls The Great Mind Challenge, I believe this is an enlightened example of how companies can do well by doing good.

DN: Please give me a brief description of The Great Mind Challenge?
In 2012′s The Great Mind Challenge, students investigate the emerging sphere of social business using the real-world example of an IBM Business Partner. Working in teams over a period of two months, students conduct a social business assessment of the partner organization, and then build a prototype social business solution based on their recommendations. Students receive education, tuition and mentoring from social business thought leaders, authors, top executives in the social business and of course IBM social business experts. Top-performing teams during the Challenge receive prizes and the potential for internships. The social business skills program with San Jose State University was the first time this challenge was offered in the US. However, globally, over the past several years, The Great Mind Challenge has attracted over 100,000 students and hasn’t only focused on social business skills, IBM is also mentoring students in key areas of technology and engineering including analytics, programming and software development.

DN: What is the primary goal of the collaboration between IBM and SJSU?
IBM and SJSU are collaborating to help students develop market-ready, social business skills. To be successful in today’s business environment, students need to be able to demonstrate that they can turn their personal, social networking savvy skills along with the things they have learned in the classroom, into real-world business solutions. The Great Mind Challenge presents students with an opportunity to develop their collaboration and problem-solving skills while working on exciting, real-world business projects. Students who participate in the Challenge have the opportunity to be recognized for their ideas and talents, while also working to make our planet smarter through the use of social business technology.

DN: Why San Jose State? Does its location in Silicon Valley play some role?
There is a long-standing relationship between IBM and SJSU. Beyond this exceptional relationship, there is so much innovation around social business taking place in the Silicon Valley area. For example, IBM Almaden Research Center, where many of IBM’s social business researchers and consultants are pushing the envelope and helping organizations develop the necessary skills for social business adoption, while breaking down the traditional barriers that might stunt adoption success. With this in mind, SJSU was seen as a logical fit for the pilot of this social business skills challenge.

DN: What was the planning cycle for the collaboration between IBM and SJSU? When did the initial planning start and how has it evolved over time?
Planning for the project with SJSU started in Spring 2011. IBM worked through the summer recess with faculty at SJSU to develop various parts of the social business skills program, including the education (curriculum) and measurement. During the course of the program we fine-tuned the delivery of educational webinars and online feedback sessions with students. As we move into 2012, and expand the social business skills program to include universities across the country, we will continue to modify various aspects of the program to ensure students get as much from this program as they possibly can.

DN: What are the metrics for success for the new IBM/SJSU program from IBM’s perspective?
First and foremost is the delivery of market-facing social business skills. When a student tells us they were able to progress through the interview stages and finally get a job in part because of the social business skills they learnt through The Great Mind Challenge, we take this as validation for this program and IBM’s vision of a Smarter Planet engendered by social business. We also look at the number of students who successfully complete the program and were happy to see that 100% of the SJSU students made it through to the finish line.

DN: The SJSU program involves a number of participants including SJSU faculty/students, IBM employee experts as mentors and business partners as real-life test cases. Can you speak to the challenges of coordinating all these players as well as the benefits of having so many different levels of participation?
We knew at the outset that we wanted the focus for this social business skills challenge to be as rich as possible. Bringing in IBM business partners helps tell a broader story and provides students with the opportunity to explore social business from different angles, different organizations and different business needs. IBM worked closely with SJSU faculty and students to ensure that the training was appropriate and not too “vendor-centric” as to strip it of its application throughout the market. Somewhat fittingly, we don’t feel a program of this scope would have been possible without having social networking tools available, whether it was collaborating on the design of educational materials, or handling project management across businesses and faculty. That’s where IBM’s market leading social business technology created real value for the students.

DN: Since the program includes training on IBM software and promulgates a major IBM initiative (i.e. social business), is there a risk that it might be perceived as one big marketing campaign? Or asked differently, is there a fine line between doing good for the community and doing too much good for the brand?
IBM’s social business vision has a broad scope that goes beyond pure technical adoption. This is one of the messages we are trying to get across with this challenge – social networking can fundamentally change the way businesses operate and create value, but it’s not just about adopting the technology. An organization must create a business culture that fosters transparency, sharing, and trust from its leadership down to those employees out in the field. Throughout the challenge with SJSU, we also encouraged students to explore and consider a variety of social networks inside and outside the firewall. They learned that a social business isn’t just a company with a Facebook page or Twitter presence, it’s about taking advantage of social internally, melding these social networking concepts into traditional business processes to fundamentally change how we do work and create business value. Yes, we did show the students how tools like IBM Connections can be used for social networking within the firewall, but for the continued success of the program, IBM was and is focused on developing and building social business skills that are not exclusive to any one product or technology.

Final note: stay tuned for my related article about “doing well by doing good” and interview with Larry Gee, the professor at San Jose State University who is responsible for teaching the “social business” curriculum discussed above.  And as always, if you found this post of interest, feel free to subscribe to this blog.

Created with ColorSplash app

Just in case you missed this on MediaPost, here’s an overview of some interesting apps and what brands can learn from them.

I flat out love apps. Every time I discover a new one that enhances my life in some small way, I feel a burst of joy that demands sharing. Obviously, I’m not alone in my enthusiasm. Last week, Google announced the 10 billionth download of Droid apps, and Apple said they hit 18 billion downloads back in October. That’s a lot of apps to love.

Needless to say, not all of these apps are getting used. Like most, I download many more than I end up trying, let alone using regularly. No, it takes something truly special for an app to gain traction. Those that do find purchase, however, can teach numerous lessons to brands operating outside the app-happy universe.

Do One Thing Really Well
Despite Jim Collins’ advice for companies to have a “hedgehog” concept, very few brands have the discipline to stand for one thing and stick with it. Colorsplash, a beautifully restrained app, is a basic editing tool that dramatizes your photos by removing all the color and then filling in specific objects with your chosen hue.

Don’t Hang Out All By Yourself
Though the evidence is clear that tapping into social network APIs like Facebook and Twitter can build awareness and even drive sales, too few brands are doing it. Successful apps like Instagram, another photo modifying app, make ease of sharing across social networks a fundamental usage component.

There Are Still Unmet Needs to Be Found
Brands must continually strive to improve their offerings by identifying unmet needs. One trailblazing app is ZocDoc. The ingenious app allows you not only to locate nearby doctors that accept your insurance plan (in 13 US markets now) but also book an appointment at a specified time. Think OpenTable for doctors.

A Little Hand Holding Goes A Long Way
Some products are complex by nature and finding the added support you need to understand them can be challenging. Ringtones, a fun app that allows you to convert any song in your iTunes library into a ringtone, is a bit complicated at first, but knowing this, the creators also offer a great demo video that makes learning the 3 requisite steps a snap.

Extend the Utility You Already Offer to Mobile
Lots of brands offer great resources on the web that aren’t yet mobile-friendly. This is a big oversight. OpenTable.com, my favorite online restaurant reservation service, has a brilliantly functional iPhone app. Integrating nicely with iPhone GPS, this tasty app helps you find a restaurant with open tables and secure a reservation in less than a New York minute.

Form is as Important as Function
Today, having a product that works is not enough – aesthetics matter, too. To understand this notion, just look at the new Flipboard app for iPhone. The design experience is the brand. Never before has information consumption on a phone felt so joyously elegant, so positively delectable that mere words don’t do it justice.

Turn Your Customer Into the Star
For years brands have been saying the “customer is king” while spending the bulk of their marketing budget on self-congratulatory ads. Songify, a beyond-genius app that turns spoken words into a melodic song, is silly but addictive because it plays into my desire to be an acceptable, if not talented, singer rather than a tone-deaf writer.

Tap Into Your Customer’s Emotional Needs
All too often, brands focus on the practical needs of their audience, overlooking the irrationality that frequently guides behavior. One new app that appeals to our softer, whimsical side is Qwips. Built around personal voice recordings, Qwips allows you to manipulate your audio with effects and pictures sure to touch the heartstrings.

Deliver a Little Bit of Magic
Admittedly, not every brand can be Disney or Apple and find the magic in all they do. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. An app called Drinks and Cocktails delivers my kind of magic by helping me figure out what special cocktail I can make based on what’s in my liquor cabinet. The Sidecar I made Friday night was indeed heaven-sent!

Another marvel of ColorSplash.

Final Note
The average iPhone user has over 100 apps on their phone and spends over an hour a day using them. As apps become indispensible, consumer phone usage increases, as do their expectations for all mobile experiences. If your brand doesn’t have a mobile-friendly site, then you better make one fast. Beyond that, dare I suggest: ‘Appy New Year!

DN: What do you think have been the keys to SAP’s success with the SCN to-date?
First, we began with a targeted audience and a focused mission: to help developers achieve success with SAP’s platforms and solutions. Only after we had critical mass in that audience did we expand to include a broader base, with the expansion of the target audience driven by the community itself, and features and functionality prioritized based on what our target community members wanted or needed.  Essentially, we were pulled along by serving them, rather than pushing them into new directions we thought interesting, with the success of our community members always as our guide.  Over time, we expended from the base of developers, to sysadmins and IT professionals more broadly, then to business process experts and project managers who straddle IT and lines of business, to business analysts and dashboard designers, and then to include university students and professors – all drawn by community member and market needs.  We moved from basic discussion forums which were appropriate for basic Q&A, to longer-form blogs, to a wiki which is more flexible for projects and work groups… and included aspects of gamification, a career center with job board when the economy took a downturn, to an outside-in innovation crowdsourcing space. Constant evolution through monthly updates and larger advances, based on active listening and responsiveness to community feedback.

DN: What are the real advantages of having a user community?

The advantages depend on your vantage point…

Our individual members report that they are more productive, finding answers and solutions faster, and of higher quality, by being able to consult with other customer and partner members of the 2 million-plus SAP community.  Individually, they elevate their expertise, and put it on display where the quality of ideas – rather than other factors – helps people rise to the top and get positive attention.  Their careers accelerate, their professional horizons expand beyond their city, or country, or industry.  On a more visceral level, there’s also an energy that comes with connectedness; members are energized by each other, the back-and-forth of interaction, the excitement and enthusiasm, and the feeling of being part of something bigger and more important than each of us individually … it’s a contagious excitement and an immeasurable but palpable sense of belonging and shared value.

Our SAP customer companies who have employees participating in the SAP community gain open access to subject matter experts for fast implementation and issue resolution so their projects are completed faster, and with higher quality, which helps them reduce their  operations costs and total cost of operations.  From the connectedness across industries and across global commerce, they are able to increase their business and technical knowledge and insight, make business connections within the vast SAP ecosystem to expand their market influence, and have an easier time discovering, evaluating, and accessing SAP and our partner solutions for more advanced implementations. They even have a greater ability to keep up with emerging trends, and to influence SAP and its ecosystem through participation and connections.  And prospective customers in the solution evaluation cycle have the ability to interact with active SAP customers to get their unfettered feedback and advice – and to get a sense of the extraordinary value and unique benefit the SAP community provides.

SAP partners have the opportunity to establish themselves as subject matter experts, and to gain access to the entire global universe of more than 170,000 customer accounts in our installed base for more fine-tuned market insight as a way to focus their solution offerings, and to keep an eye out for sales opportunities.  They can forge relationships with other SAP partners for solution co-development and joint go-to-market, and even post-sale they can call upon a wider set of experts to help speed problem resolution.   We can also demonstrate SAP’s unusually strong commitment to the SAP partner ecosystem through all of these efforts, as well as our work and investments to generate and pass along leads to partners – it strengthens those partner ties with SAP and the value of partnering with SAP, so we gain more of the best partners to augment and extend SAP’s core.

For SAP as the host of the community, we gain faster adoption and ramp-up whenever we introduce new or upgraded products and services to the market, since our reach and influence are huge and immediate.  As a company, we gain speed, agility, better decision making, and reduce our risk because we gain rich insights into what our customers really want and value, gleaned through our direct connections and fluid feedback loops and listening posts.  We can improve  product and solution quality through our customers’ direct outside-in feedback on our products, services, processes, and  customer experiences.  We reduce the cost, complexity, and time to provide core support while maintaining high quality – and can plow those savings back into better community mechanisms and product innovation.  Those and other forms of interaction lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, better customer retention, up-sell and cross-sell opportunities on the top line, and efficiencies through cost savings on the bottom line.

DN: Would it be as useful (to you or your members) if it wasn’t so large?
There’s a certain critical mass that needs to be built in order for a community to be vibrant, diverse, distributed, and valuable.  If we had a very simple product or a homogenous market, we could deliver benefits with a small member base.  But SAP is a global company, with a vast array of products and solutions, operating in nearly every country and territory on the planet, every industry, serving every aspect of global commerce.  In order to serve our diverse market, we need a very large member base to gain access to experts in everything from Finance to HR lines of business, banking to mining to consumer-goods industries, in Europe and South America and Asia, and across every solution and sub-module of SAP’s portfolio.  We hit the tipping point at about a million individual members several years ago, and we continue to grow at about 40,000 new members each month.  Those kinds of member numbers give us depth and diversity of expertise in just about any relevant topic of interest to our SAP community.

DN: If you were advising a fellow CMO who was thinking of setting up a community today, what would tell him/her? Any shortcuts?
Without hesitation, I would advise any other CMO to lean forward and start building their community without delay, because the value far outweighs the cost, and it is the future.  However, it’s not easy, simple, or inexpensive, and it’s not something that you can build, launch, and then let go.  Community is part science – the platforms, plumbing, apps, and underlying infrastructure – and part art – the policies, practices, programs, and people-oriented components.  It’s uncharted territory, so you’ll need to navigate areas of company rules, emerging legal precedents, daily new learnings, and plenty of antibodies.  It’s not something that you can short-cut; authenticity and transparency and long-term relationships and commitments are key. Get an expert on board who has experience, form a core team to execute, and be personally involved.

DN:  Lots of communities are started (like LinkedIn groups) but very few gain traction.  Why do you think that is?
Communities take work over the long-term, and it’s clear that not everyone who starts one is expecting, anticipating, or willing to put in the time and effort to make them work.  There are hunters and farmers, and communities require aspects of both … hunters to undertake and execute big but limited-time and scope projects, launch them, and move on … short bursts of energy, big pay-offs, motivated by the adrenaline rush of achievement and covering alot of new ground fast; farmers who will toil day-after-day, pruning, nudging, nurturing over the long-term… almost imperceptibly small moves but with staying power, persistence, and timeframes of months and years.  I believe that some communities fail because they don’t take the longer-term view, expect results too fast, and don’t deliver enough value to their target audiences to warrant their members’ continued attention and deep engagement.

DN:  How do you see communities evolving in the next few years?
The platforms and tools have evolved, now, to the point where almost anyone can participate; you don’t need to be a tech guru to participate.  This means that for companies like SAP, we can move from technologist-based communities, to business-oriented communities, right on to communities of c-level members.  We will see both public and private areas where open discussions can occur, whether shared with the world or with a select group of trusted members.  We will see more companies hosting communities of their customers and partners, where those groups really set the agendas, guide the company to build products or to set standards that better suit the needs of the customers.  We will come to expect, as consumers and customers, that the brands we do business with provide the benefits to us of online communities.  And companies will see that the benefits of hosting customer communities will differentiate them, and then will be an expected way of doing business, with tremendous value to everyone who participates.

DN: What is the best case scenario for a marketing partnership?
The best case scenario for a marketing partnership is a having a common customer, goal and market. It is also important that money never change hands between partners – no referral fees, no reseller incentives.  Partners do not write partners checks.

DN: The Optimum Business Benefits program seems like a win/win/win for your brand, your partners and your customers. Are there any risk or downsides to marketing partnerships?
The Optimum Business Benefits program is a win for our brand, partners and customers.  It is important to choose your partners wisely because they become an extension of your brand so you need to be very sure before you agree to partner and market that partnership.

Risks tend to come if you haven’t chosen a partner carefully or your goals are misaligned. That’s why it’s crucial to consider: Can they offer something unique to your customers? Do they stand for the same things as your company and program?  Do they have the same values?  You need to remember that if your customer has a bad experience with one of your partners, it reflects on your company.

DN: Are there any tricks to making the most of a marketing partnership? Why do some work better than others?
Yes!  Making the most of any partnership requires clearly identifying common goals from the outset, measuring success consistently and holding each other accountable. You must regularly communicate with your partner about progress, challenges and next steps. Leave out this necessary component and the partnership simply won’t work.

It’s also important to know your partners well. You should understand where they fit both within their corporation and the industry as a whole.  From a broader perspective, you might be able to provide additional value through the creation of a partner advisory network to give them a collective voice and solicit new ideas.  This will come in handy when there are challenges to overcome. Never meet a customer or a partner for the first time under difficult circumstances – know your partners personally.

DN: Would you recommend that other marketers consider joining this kind of multi-brand program and if so, what should they do to get the most out of it?
Companies interested in joining a multi-brand program should be vocal and outgoing in terms of marketing support for the program.  The best part about multi-brand programs is that you can align with, not only the lead brand, but other companies involved and create new opportunities, offers and messages.  We have seen some of our biggest successes from grassroots activities and campaigns and recommend that all of the participating companies really engage to get the benefits.  Get in the field, get your sales people to understand the value from the beginning and make it a part of their sales training and their sales programs.  And, of course, it is important to check in, measure and build relationships.

I caught up with Ted Hong, CMO of Fandango, at The CMO Club Summit in LA this year.  Ted is a super sharp guy and has done amazing things for Fandango, having launched their nationally-recognized Bag Puppet ad campaign.  And while I guessed that mobile was important to them, I had no idea how it had literally transformed their business.  Consider the fact that this Thanksgiving weekend, 23% of Fandango’s movie ticket sales came from mobile devices (including mine!)  So as you read this interview, be sure to ask yourself, are you ready for mobile and the transformational impact it will have on your business?

DN: I was delighted to be able to use my Fandango iPhone app over the holidays to buy movie tickets while in a cab.  Can you give me a bit of background on the Fandango app?
Mobile has changed the way that people go to the movies and has sparked a huge change in the way we do business.  Since the company’s founding in 2000, Fandango has always been looking for ways to make the moviegoing experience more convenient for consumers.

In some ways, you could say our mobile roots started out in the IVR space with our toll-free phone number, 1-800-FANDANGO, launched back in 2003. We were pretty early in launching our WAP site on several carrier decks in 2005, and our WAP site was iPhone-optimized in 2007. Mobile represented about one or two percent of our overall ticket sales at the time.

The big sea-change began in March 2009 when we launched our iPhone app, and it was an immediate success. We saw more than 1 million downloads in the first 90 days. Within six months, we tripled the percentage of tickets we were selling through mobile.

Today mobile devices and tablets contribute more than 20% of our ticket sales. Consumers have downloaded our apps more than 20 million times across various platforms. We’re seeing 10 million visits per month from mobile devices and tablets, representing 40% of our overall traffic.  On Thanksgiving weekend, we saw 23% of our ticket sales on mobile devices, contributing to our best Thanksgiving holiday weekend in the company’s eleven-year history, and a 60% year-over-year increase in mobile ticket sales from last Thanksgiving.

DN: Can you give me an overview of Fandango’s other mobile-related marketing activities?
After our iPhone app launched, we pursued apps on every important platform, including Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7. Tablets are big for us – we’ve designed apps for the iPad, the Android tablet, the Kindle Fire – with tablet-specific features like “The Pulse,” which offers a real-time visual representation of our hottest ticket sales at any given moment. We’re also on connected devices like the Samsung Smart TV, TiVo and Vizio.

We aggressively market our apps on Facebook at www.facebook.com/fandango and on Twitter @Fandango. Our latest marketing campaign on Facebook has been the “Anywhere Everywhere” Sweepstakes, where fans can answer daily movie trivia questions for a chance to win some of the most popular consumer electronics that offer our apps.

DN: How important is mobile accessibility to Fandango’s business. Has this changed over the last couple of years?
Mobile has fundamentally changed our value proposition. If you are untethered from your desk, you can now take Fandango on the go. Previously, if you were at your home or at the office, you had to decide then which movie you wanted to see at that time – but thanks to mobile, you can make that moviegoing decision closer to showtime.  In order to be more helpful in that process, we added the “GoNow” feature to our mobile apps. “GoNow” allow you to easily check out the nearest theaters and nearest showtimes for the movies you want to see.

In addition to our mobile site and ticket-buying apps, Fandango has been rolling out other innovations, like our paperless and eco-friendly Mobile Ticket product, allowing fans to redeem their tickets on their phones via a mobile barcode scanned by the theater’s ticket-taker. We recently launched our Mobile Ticket program at more than 1,000 Regal Entertainment Group screens, and we have plans to provide this convenience to more than a thousand additional screens in several months to come. Before we launched the iPhone app, we would see consumers buying their tickets about four hours before showtime on average. Now it’s closer two two hours – and it some cases it’s just a few minutes.

DN: Do you expect mobile marketing (including advertising) to become a greater part of your mix in 2012 and if so, why?
Yes, because the audience is going in that direction. Advertisers are aware that mobile is a great way to reach a large, sophisticated media-and-tech-savvy audience. With Fandango’s multiple apps across various platforms and huge traffic, it’s a unique opportunity to get in front of an audience of influencers making their purchasing decisions.

DN: Since Fandango offers a highly functional WAP website that works on any smart phone, do you still need to offer phone-specific apps?
We’ll continue to support both the mobile site and our apps.  Some people are app-people and some are mobile Web-users. The apps can offer more bite-sized information and some consumers find them easier to use. Fandango’s iPhone app has recently garnered the 5-star customer rating – the highest possible ranking among customer ratings – in the iTunes App Store. On top of this, the company won three Webby Awards for its apps earlier this year. So clearly the apps are working well for us.

With an app, you are able to get the benefits of promotion in the app marketplace, if your company provides a unique value proposition.
But the advantage of the mobile site is that it shows up in the “Search” results, which allows immediate access to information and services without having to download something.  So there are benefits to both.

While doing homework for another article, I ran across a recent study by IBM called “From Stretched to Strengthened” that offers insights into the challenges facing CMO’s around the world.  The study is well worth reading, especially if you are a CMO, and stresses a number of important themes including the needs to:

• Deliver value to empowered customers
• Foster lasting connections
• Capture value, measure results

After reading the study, I reached out to IBM with some follow up questions and got in touch with Yuchan Lee, General Manager of IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management business.  I think you will agree that Mr. Lee has smart things to say about measuring ROI, using social media for research, the importance of having a clear “corporate character” and finally, the need to think long-term when it comes to customer relationship building.

DN: Is ROI the right metric for CMOs or just one of many important metrics?
It is the most important, as reflected by our CMO Study. Other than a metric based on reflecting customer up-take (e.g., revenue, satisfaction level), which most companies already measure, marketing ROI is essentially the highest level scorecard for an organization’s ability to efficiently and effectively allocate its resource to hit marketing goals.

DN: Why do you think so many CMOs struggle to demonstrate ROI?
The heart of the challenge is the nature to which marketing activities influence buying behavior, and how behavior manifest itself over time. Measuring ROI in marketing involves sifting through tons of noise in the data to connect all the pieces of evidence that influenced the purchase behavior.  This is an inexact, statistically-based science that, until recently, was too hard to tackle.

DN: Why do you think marketers have been so slow to embrace research via social channels? (i.e. only 14% mine blogs)
Before a company embraces a social channel, it must first believe it has to.  This requires a shift in strategy based on the realization that consumers are more in control and the company is losing its grip on branding.  In my experience, this shift is scary to many companies and many are slow to realize it and to turn this realization into action.  Furthermore, even if one is ready to take action, the newness of engaging social networks makes it challenging to know where to begin.

DN: Why should marketers expand their research horizons beyond traditional channels to things like blogs?
We believe traditional marketers need to expand not just research but all areas of market and customer engagement as well as demand generation to the social channels.  That’s where the center of influence for purchase decisions is and will continue to be. That’s where detailed, real-time, and unfiltered market feedback data can be best gathered and analyzed, and ultimately where the brand of a company will truly be reflected in the future (if not already!).

DN: What’s in it for the more proactive marketers who are mining new digital data sources?
Additional data, if incorporated properly, allows a company to know what is relevant to its customers — potentially down to the individual customer level.  We believe the ability of a company to deliver relevant communication in sales/marketing/services is the basic ingredient to a successful customer relationship and a prerequisite to staying in business.

DN: A lot of marketers pay lip-service to their corporate values.  Will developing a clear ‘corporate character’ really deliver competitive advantage?
Having clarity on a company’s corporate character is a necessary but not sufficient element of success.  It must be followed by execution by the organization, every day, delivering a consistent customer experience that is aligned with the corporate character.  The true reflection of the corporate character will come out quickly, most likely in social media.

DN: Your report emphasizes the need to “foster lasting connections.”  Is this goal in conflict with the typically pressing need to deliver short-term revenue?
No.  In our experience, being relevant and adding value to the customer in every communication and interaction is the common denominator for forging a lasting connection with the customer AND the ability to drive successful short-term revenue.  After all, long-term success is made up of series of short term successes!

DN: Is it harder to engage an audience than it was 5 years ago before WiFI connectivity was a conference mandatory?
Not at all. Quite the contrary.

DN: At Pivot, at least 3/4 of the audience seemed to have a laptop or iPad open while you were speaking. Do you find yourself wanting to say, hey turn those devices off and pay attention?
Absolutely not. Some of those people are tweeting about the talk; others are reading others’ tweets in the so-called Twitter back-channel. And those who are doing neither are being nice enough to occupy themselves and not visibly yawn.

DN: Would it be worth trying to get the audience to shut down their devices momentarily while you speak?
Not at all. The lecture, as a form, is bullshit. See: http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/04/18/this-is-bullshit-my-tedxnyed-talk/

DN:  Knowing that your audience is on Twitter while you speak, are you thinking while you write your speech—gee that line will make a great tweet?
No. I have always tended to talk in tweetese.

DN: Do you get any feedback from these events and if so, why kind of adjustments have you made based on this feedback?
Some things I can change: saying “uh” or “right.” Some things I can’t: I pace.

DN: Finally, tell me a little about your latest book and how you draw from it in your speeches?
Public Parts is about the value of publicness, the power we all have no with a Gutenberg press in our hands. A speech is another means of being public but what I enjoy most about it is not the speech but the conversation, when I go into the people formerly known as the audience (credit: Jay Rosen) and play Oprah. In Public Parts, I start to speculate about such talks being the basis of my next project. A book, if it comes out of it at all, would be a byproduct then.

Some time ago mass-market tomato farmers exchanged flavor for firmness, zest for bug resistance and vine ripening for carbon dioxide coloration. In their eagerness to sell, they lost their way— a cautionary tale for B2B marketers hoping to exploit social media on a grand scale. With this in mind and at the risk of providing metaphoric manure, I offer this tomato lover’s 8-step guide to growing a fruitful B2B social media program.

1. Plant the right seeds
Mass-market farmers lost their way when they put their own needs ahead of their customers.  B2B marketers who approach social media as a sales channel first will see their efforts die on the vine. Explains Trish Nettleship, Social Media Lead at AT&T Business Marketing, “The key is never starting with the platform.  Start with the consumer in mind and that will lead you to the right platform with the right purpose at the right time.”

2. Choose the proper fields
Soil matters; choose poorly and your seeds won’t take.  B2B marketers now have a myriad of social media options from the heavily harvested LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter to the lesser-plowed Slideshare, Quora, and StumbleUpon.  CMO.com just updated their helpful Social Landscape, which grades the top social platforms by their ability to engage, generate exposure, drive site traffic and enhance SEO.

3. Fertilize early and often
For B2B marketers, content is the fertilizer that insures growth.  Chip Rodgers, who heads up operations of the 2.5-million-member SAP Community Network, notes that, “it’s a virtuous cycle–content brings community which in turn, brings better and fresher content.”  Rodgers encourages marketers to “feed the community your best [content] by leveraging the experts you already have.”

4. Monitor your crop carefully
Like farming, social media requires constant attention. There are few shortcuts because as Persia Tatar, Founder of the Social Media Society explains, “The core of social media is about relationships.”  Tatar, who built a loyal following on Twitter in just 12 months, adds, “I monitor my Tweet stream and reward individuals that have engaged as brand advocates with special invitations and exclusive content.”

5. Seek organic growth
Gassing tomatoes may turn them red and hasten their trip to market but it leaves them tasteless. B2B marketers who try similar shortcuts in social media will also come up short. Realizing that their subject matter experts weren’t as experienced in social media, AT&T took the time to creating the Networking Leaders Academy.  “We now have an active corps of expert ambassadors who create social proof and digital trust in AT&T,” Nettleship reports.

6. Weed quickly
Even the best-laid seeds can fail despite careful planning.  IBM, which recently launched an “expertise locator” to make highly knowledgeable IBMers accessible to prospects and customers, prescribes an “agile development” process for social programs.  Explains Ethan McCarty, senior manager, Digital and Social Strategy at IBM, “The idea is that we try to learn quickly–when stuff doesn’t work, two weeks later we’re changing it.”

7. Harvest when ripe
Marketers who to try to sell too quickly via social will find themselves in an unappetizing situation.  On the other hand, building trust via social media and the harvest can be bountiful.  After seven years of nurturing, SAP’s Community Network is now driving traffic to webinars and direct product sales.  We’ve really cut back with list buying and traditional marketing costs,” Rodgers says.

8. Refine and renew
Social media programs, like fields, wear out and need to be refined or replaced.  Having milked this metaphor for all its worth, I turn the final spotlight back on Rodgers, who will be making his case at the upcoming B2B Corporate Social Media Summit in Philadelphia September 28-29 along with AT&T’s Nettleship.   Concludes the zesty Rodgers, “[Members are] only drawn to come back because they know your content is always fresh, relevant and compelling.” (Note: this article first appeared on MediaPost.com.)

Thanks to the support of an enlightened board member in 2003, the SAP Community Network (SCN) was able to overcome internal naysayers, and gradually grow into a 2.5 million-member social business juggernaut. Now heading community operations, Chip Rodgers, who I interviewed in advance of his presentation at the B2B Corporate Social Media Summit, the SCN sets a high standard, revealing these 9 ways to know your community is truly awesome.

1. Adding members is no longer a key performance indicator
Because communities are still considered a luxury by some executives and a risk by many (rightly or wrongly) there is tremendous pressure in the early days to achieve scale. The SAP Community Network crossed this threshold in the last 24 months. Reports Rodgers, “Around the time we got close to 2 million, we stopped emphasizing the growth of the community.”

2. Community engagement is a daily activity
“If you build it, they will come,” is pure fiction when it comes to communities, which is why most wither away. Remarkably, the SCN gets about 1.5 million unique visitors per month and 3,000 to 4,000 posts a day. “Our activity numbers are really strong,” Rodgers explains. “I think that’s something we pride ourselves on as there are other communities that may have more members but feel like ghost towns; we have vibrancy.”

3. The community jumps in to defend the brand
It is inevitable that a brand will come under criticism for one thing or another once it opens up a community. Offers Rodgers, “We see this all the time where somebody says something negative or even a little wacky.” But rather than rushing out a brand response, “what ends up happening is a lot of community members [jump in saying] ‘This is way over the line,’ or ‘Nah that’s not really true.’’”

4. You can drive your own circulation
Building and maintaining a healthy community on the scale of the SCN is expensive so there is unavoidable pressure to demonstrate value to management. Rodgers notes, “One of our KPI’s is driving activity to webinars and that turns into real pipeline opportunity dollars traceable back to activity in the community.” In effect, the community acts like a media channel, supporting other marketing efforts and ultimately, top-line sales.

5. The community willingly embraces a direct sales channel
Purists worry that connecting a community with any kind of sales channel will dilute the value of the community. While there is a risk of being too “salesy,” an inevitable by-product of a healthy community are product discussions. Seeing these, SAP set up an online store called SAP EcoHub that started within the community and is now an increasing channel that drives real leads and revenue.

6. The community impacts product development
Customer-generated ideas have long been discussed as the holy grail of community activation, but getting there can be perilous. “The last thing we wanted to do was have a bunch of people contribute ideas and then have nobody listen or act on them,” Rodgers says. Working closely with the “proactive” product teams on selective topics, he has “gotten great feedback and contributions from the community that are already incorporated in the latest solutions.”

7. The marketing group wants in
Successful communities like the SCN are often started outside of marketing departments as a form of post-sale customer service. This orientation gives the community a head start since the emphasis is on creating content of genuine value and not pure product messaging. But with the heightened interest in having robust social media programs, it is not surprising that the SAP marketing department grabbed the reins of the SCN six months ago.

8. The community drives cultural change within marketing
Rodgers, who has run the SCN for five years, might have been apprehensive when marketing subsumed his group earlier this year, but you wouldn’t know it now. “Last year, our CMO said, ‘Guys we need to learn from [the SCN] and we need to have conversations and engage with our audience. We can’t just create another email blast with a bunch of creative and an offer.’”

9. The content developed on the community profoundly improves SEO
With a staff of 12 dedicated to developing formal content like white papers, articles and solutions briefs, Rodgers is able to keep up with his ravenous community, feeding it fresh content on a daily basis. And by optimizing this content for search, starting about 2 years ago, the SCN was able to more than double monthly site traffic. “I mean it was dramatic; it was unbelievable,” Rodgers observes with a sense of pride and awe.

Final note: It’s not often you hear about a huge B2B company operating with a B2C mentality for customer engagement. For my complete interview with Chip Rodgers, see my previous post here.  You can visit the SAP Community Network at and hear Rodgers yourself at the upcoming B2B Corporate Social Media Summit in Philly on October 12th.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.

Later that week, I attended my fifth Media & Technology CEO Summit put on by my friends Tom Livaccari and Ken Shapiro, two UBS financial advisors who are about as far from the cold-calling yacker as you can get.  Long-time proponents of the approach I call Marketing as Service, The Livaccari Shapiro Wealth Management Group offers a textbook case on growing your business by selling less and doing more.

Know your Niche
For Marketing as Service programs to be effective, it’s essential to have a tightly defined target to whom you can deliver a meaningful benefit.  Having been entrepreneurs themselves in the ‘90s, it’s not surprising that Livaccari and Shapiro decided to focus their practice on advising entrepreneurs and CEOs of Internet, media and tech companies. Remembering the unique issues these entrepreneurs faced, Shapiro noted, “We always wished we could find an advisor that would in essence partner with us.”

Start Small
Since Marketing as Service programs can be costly, start small and build from success.  When Livaccari and Shapiro first realized they could help their clients by bringing them together, they started with a roundtable discussion among a few CEOs facing the same issues. The program grew quickly. Reported Shapiro, “They found [the events] so valuable that [attendees] suggested other CEOs that they thought could benefit from similar discussions in the future.”

Vary the Value Add
At the core of every successful Marketing as Service program is something of genuine value to the target.  For Livaccari and Shapiro, the value to their prospects and customers is more than just useful information.  Explained Shapiro, “Clients tell us that these summits have helped them stimulate meaningful ideas, make valuable connections and in one case even initiated a conversation with a party that later acquired their company.”

Rely on Relevance
One of the more obvious aspects of Marketing as Service is the benefit of pinpoint relevance to everyone concerned. “Because the content and the other participants in these events are so relevant to our clients and prospects’ lives we find they are eager to join us,” added Shapiro.  “This leads to these events being excellent ice breakers, which enable people to experience first-hand our consultative and value-added approach.”

Differentiate by Doing
The essential notion behind Marketing as Service is the fair exchange of value between buyer and seller, during which the seller earns the trust of the buyer by doing something meaningful instead of just talking about how good they are.

“These events are an excellent way for us to provide prospects a window into the way that we interact with clients, put their needs first and help them with a wide array of issues that are not commonly addressed by others in our field.”

Triumph with Trust
It is the mandate of any form of marketing to build trust. Without trust, there is simply no brand, especially in the financial services arena. Marketing as Service programs like Livaccari and Shapiro’s CEO Summits are particularly good at building trust.  “From these events prospects often begin a dialogue with us regarding whichever matter is most pressing to them, and over time this often leads to them becoming a client as they gain comfort with us, our approach and our thought process.”

Extend your Engagements
Done correctly, Marketing as Service programs offer unique opportunities for meaningful engagement that go well beyond a specific event.  With the goal of being recognized as “uncommon partners,” Livaccari and Shapiro have built a community of likeminded CEOs who are thus positively inclined to share what they’ve learned. “We know that as long as we put our clients’ needs first then over time they become our best sales force as they share with their friends the positive experience they have had.”

Final Note:
Having been in their client’s shoes, Livaccari and Shapiro have built a successful practice by simply doing what they wish others had done for them when they were entrepreneurs. Its not rocket science. Just smart marketing.  For more insights on their approach, see the Q&A with Shapiro on these pages.  (This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.)

Oh and if you found this content useful, feel free to subscribe via email or RSS in the box at the top of this page.  Thanks.

DN: Tell me what you call your event series and how it came into being?
The program began when more than one client asked us during the 2008 downturn if it was better to fire employees before or after Thanksgiving. Having struggled with the question ourselves when we were entrepreneurs during the internet crash in 2000, we suggested that we facilitate a roundtable discussion on this topic with a few other CEOs facing the same dilemma. They found this so valuable that they suggested other CEOs that they thought could benefit from similar discussions in the future. As this grew to 50+ CEOs at an event, we decided calling it a roundtable was a misnomer so we renamed it the Media & Technology CEO Summit.

DN: Describe the basic structure of these events.
The CEO Summits consist of a networking breakfast and then an interactive panel discussion consisting of industry leaders such as those that built Gilt Group, DoubleClick, About.com, Take 2 Interactive, and, Omnicom, to name just a few examples.

DN: What were your original goals for this program?
Our primary goal was to provide a forum that would help our clients be more successful and to reinforce for them that we go far beyond the norm to help them achieve their goals.

DN: How did you decide on your niche and what distinct value are you trying to bring to your target?
In the 90s we were both entrepreneurs of internet and tech companies ourselves and saw that we had needs that wealth management professionals were not fulfilling in a way that was of value to us.

Principally, having much of our wealth tied up in the illiquid and risky stock of our own companies, we always wished we could find an advisor that would in essence partner with us to not only conservatively manage the money we had already made, but as importantly be an additional member of our extended team of core advisors to help us think through the myriad of issues we faced while trying to build and maximize the exit value of our companies. These included everything from sophisticated wealth planning, to having a sounding board to help us think through critical business and personal issues to selecting the right M & A advisor to ultimately help us sell our companies.

Because of our experience [as entrepreneurs] we realized that if this was a problem for us then it likely was for many others. We therefore narrowly focused our practice on entrepreneurs and executives building digital media, marketing and technology companies and architected and built every component of our practice to provide them the comprehensive advice that we were not able to find when we were in their shoes.

We were confident that our unique perspective and approach would enable us to be an uncommon partner to these individuals and enable us to provide such distinct and value-added advice that would separate us from our competitors.

DN: What do you think these events say about your practice?
These CEO Summits have been a great way for us to foster a sense of community amongst our clients and other leaders in these niches. Clients tell us that these Summits have helped them stimulate meaningful ideas, make valuable connections and in one case even initiate a conversation with a party that later acquired their company.

DN: Have you been able to meet prospects and ultimately gain new customers as a result of this program?
Because our clients derive so much value from our CEO Summits they often ask if they can invite CEO friends who would similarly benefit. This ends up being a great way for new prospective clients to be introduced to us and our way of thinking. Ultimately, people hire us because the trust us, like us and believe that having us by their side with our differentiated approach will help give them the highest probability to achieve their personal, family and professional goals.

These events are an excellent way for us to provide prospects a window into the way that we interact with clients, put their needs first and help them with a wide array of issues that are not commonly addressed by others in our field. From these events prospects often begin a dialogue with us, as their situation dictates, regarding whichever matter is most pressing to them and over time this often leads to them becoming a client as they gain comfort with us and our thought process.

DN: How do track down your speakers and persuade them to come?
Speakers include clients, friends and other notable industry leaders. Because our attendees are amongst the most important and dynamic leaders in their niches, we find that speakers welcome the opportunity to participate and engage in a dialogue with them.

DN: How hard is it to get your target to show up to these events?  Does it beat cold calling?
Because the content and the other participants in these events are so relevant to our clients’ and prospects’ lives we find they are eager to join us. This leads to these events being excellent icebreakers which enable people to experience first-hand our consultative and value-added approach.

DN: Seems like these events must be time consuming to put together, especially when you consider all the pre/post event follow up you do.  Is it worth the trouble?  And if so, why?
Though these events take a tremendous amount of time and effort to organize and run, we feel they differentiate us substantially from others and are well worth the effort.

DN: How have you been able to keep the hard-sell out of these programs?
We begin each day thinking about how we can be most helpful to those with whom we interact. Because of our problem-solving mentality we never think in terms of sales cycles. We know that as long as we put our clients’ needs first then over time they become our best sales force as they share with their friends the positive experience they have had.

The funny thing about comedy is that it works ridiculously well with viral videos. Yet in the it-isn’t-creative-unless-it-sells world of B2B marketing, humor is as rare as the one-armed paperhanger, disarming us with unexpected efficacy. Trying to sell in comedy at most B2B companies is like pushing Jell-O up a hill, a raucously sloppy affair, best left for masochists or the jauntiest of jesters.

One such jester is Tim Washer. Currently the Senior Manager of Social Media for Cisco’s Service Provider division, Washer has spent the last seven years gaining guffaws where few have dared to tread. A former stand-up, Washer’s approach is indeed laughable, helping him to stand out at BDI’s recent B2B Social Communications Forum, where he revealed these seven rules of viral videos you probably shouldn’t share with your boss.

1. Strategy is for Stooges
Washer’s first big viral success happened back in 2006 while he was at IBM promoting perhaps the unfunniest of all tech products: the mainframe computer. The series called “Mainframe: The Art of Sale” which brilliantly mocks typical sales training videos, garnered hundreds of thousands of views, terabytes of press coverage and unlikely interest among college students— a happy byproduct of this effort. Reported Washer with refreshing honesty, “I never did sit down and think okay–here’s the strategy for the video.”

2. There’s No Point in Copy Points
“For a comedy video to be successful it needs to be inspired by some artistic idea versus you sitting down with a PowerPoint and saying, ‘How do we create a video that does all this for us,’” explained Washer. Recalling the spark behind his first viral hit, which had nothing to do with copy points, Washer remembered, “One time I thought, these are million dollar machines, wouldn’t it be silly if a sales person was going through the white pages, cold calling to sell the mainframes.”

3. Forget About Closing the Sale
Acknowledging the long sales cycles of complex tech products, Washer is under no delusion that his viral efforts will lead directly to sales. “I don’t think we are going to sell any products because of this video [but] hopefully we piqued curiosity.” All kidding aside, Washer firmly believes that even in B2B sales, “you are still having a very human connection with somebody at a corporation,” thus more than justifying the need for ice-breaking comedy.

4. Lower Your Expectations
Despite having created a number of viral hits for both IBM and Cisco, one thing Washer can never be accused of is over-promising. Noted a straight-faced Washer, “It is important not to burden the project with too many expectations, such as a call to action.” Instead, he prescribes a more indirect approach: Driving video viewers to a companion site like a blog rather than to a product page. By continuing with the joke, the marketer increases the chances of ongoing engagement.

5. Metrics aren’t Important
Despite having racked up over a million views for his B2B videos including one that remains on ComedyCentral.com, Washer is not a big fan of hard metrics. “We are much more thrilled if an analyst who follows us tweets about the video and just says something positive,” he offered. This emphasis on the qualitative impact of comedy is truly what drives Washer. “One of the strongest human connections you can make is to make someone else laugh.” explained the all too happy Washer.

6. Don’t Take my Partner, Please.
Acknowledging the challenges of cranking out comedy on the cheap, Washer noted that his only flops were when he had to execute without his usual partner for budgetary reasons. “One thing I have learned is the importance of collaboration,” noted Washer, who usually teams up with, funny enough, Scott Teems. “We always come up with something much better together. It’s not just getting two funny people to work together; it’s got to be chemistry, and that’s tough to find.”

7. Strive for Silly; Root for Ridiculous
Explaining his most recent effort for Cisco, the TV Support Group, Washer imagined a world of depressed TVs who had been abandoned as families turned to other devices for entertainment. “Being ridiculous will get you attention on YouTube and help you stand out,” offered the conversation-seeking Washer. “Social media is for telling interesting stories; it is not the place to go with a direct marketing message.” added the momentarily serious Washer.

Final Note

From this writer’s perspective, creating laughs is a genuine service to humanity, one that opens the door to meaningful engagements between marketers and consumers. That said, being funny is hard and it is easy to miss the mark unless you are a professional like Washer. For more of his tips, see my extensive interview on earlier on TheDrewBlog.com

DN: As an serial entrepreneur, how do know when you’re on to something?
When I can’t stop thinking about a new concept for months on end and every morning brings new scribbles in my bedside notebook. Weaker ideas tend to come and go over the course of a few days or weeks.  For better or worse, the ideas that evolve into actual ventures tend to have richer theoretical implications that imply a broad vision with many possibilities.  Ideas loaded with many possibilities can actually be a liability (where do you focus first?), but it’s what holds my interest long enough to begin the heavy lifting required to launch a venture.  I think entrepreneurs need to be intentionally naïve during the conception stages of a venture.  Down the road the skill of listening is essential—at the beginning the skill of not listening matters more.

DN: Do you see any problems with the way content is currently curated via social media?
Social curation represents an undeniable paradigm shift in the realm of content discovery, but it has important limitations.  While the people I subscribe to on Twitter and Facebook fill my stream with content that’s often of general interest, social streams lack contextual relevance to my real-time interests—i.e. the information I need right now.  There’s lots of talk about the real-time nature of Twitter, but outside of breaking news social streams are not capable of delivering what I’m uniquely interested in at a given moment.  Social streams are great for browsing,  but only contextual streams can serve my immediate needs.  My belief is that a platform that enables efficient curation into highly contextual, aggregate (i.e. from multiple sources) streams is one of the next great opportunities, and it includes all content types (from blog articles and videos, to cancer research and cars for sale).

It might be said that traditional search is the solution to discovery of content matching my real-time interests (i.e. what I need to know right now).  But traditional search suffers from a number of different problems.  First, despite recent efforts by Google and others, search is not inherently a real-time solution.  It’s unlikely that a search for theater tickets will provide you a result that includes tickets that became available five minutes earlier, let alone 5 seconds earlier.  Beyond that, search is best at providing links to websites containing content deemed relevant to the three or four words typed into a search box.  Search engines don’t routinely provide content directly, they provide links to other web pages.  Even if a search engine properly disambiguates the pages it crawled days or weeks earlier, it may not have properly disambiguated the search request, itself.  By my own definition, the term curation suggests an explicit, largely human process with a result that is real-time and unambiguous.

DN: Can you give me a preview of your latest venture, Flow.com?
The Flow’s consumer experience (available soon at iFlow.com) is all about providing a simple but powerful application that invites media and commerce publishers to directly connect with consumers looking for specific content—real-time streams of precisely what they are looking for.  We call those streams “flows” and every piece of content moving through a flow is called a “drop”.  Flows and drops can be highly structured (multiple required or optional fields—e.g. year, make and model fields of a car being sold) or minimally structured.

Publishers can reach audiences very directly, without the inefficiencies of SEO and social strategies.  Consumers get the benefit of a new, highly contextual content discovery experience that is both radically new and yet very familiar for those already using social media applications.  It brings content out of stovepiped data stores and unstructured social streams, into a common data exchange organized by the intention of both publisher and consumer.

One of the most exciting aspects of the iFlow experience is the way consumers easily “remix” real-time content from many sources into their own highly contextual “flows”.  Those flows can then be shared by their curators (and audience) both privately and publicly with minimal effort. iFlow will provide automated ways for pro-sumer curators to populate flows, but manual, drag-and-drop curation will be the norm for everyday consumers.  My grandmother’s favorite aphorism is very true for curation: “many hands make light work”.  In the end we expect to bring the art of content curation to the widest possible audience.

The same Flow platform that powers iFlow.com will also be available to application developers in a platform-as-a-service model (PaaS). Our intention is to provide mobile and web application developers access to a modern  “data exchange” that allows highly scalable data sharing between many applications.  Our belief is that next generation applications will be curating content from many other applications to provide broader, more data-rich consumer experiences.  Imagine an apartment rental iphone app providing its users lunch coupons in the neighborhood they are exploring, information about local schools and perhaps a free cocktail during happy hour—seamless access to a diversity of real-time data is the enabler.  Consider what Multiple Listing Services (MLS) did to revolutionize the real estate industry with a relatively archaic technology stack—now extend those sharing and interoperability benefits to every industry and every data type using a modern, highly scalable real-time architecture.

DN: Why do you think curation is so important right now?  Talk to me about the benefits of human curation versus algorithmic curation (i.e. Google).
Curation is all about creating context and meaning from the terabytes of largely unstructured data generated every few hours by web, mobile and enterprise applications.  There’s a place for algorithmic curation, especially when users are searching for specific facts or answers to formulaic questions.  But anyone that has searched for something like, “1973 Firebirds for sale in Brooklyn” know that search can never deliver an aggregate real-time list of 1973 Firebirds for sale in Brooklyn from many sources, only a series of websites.  Similarly, only human curation can deliver a list of “funky artist parties in San Francisco tonight” or “the most interesting jobs for javascript programmers in New Jersey”.

DN: Where do you think the time for Flow will come from?  Out of existing social?  Out of other online activities?  Out of offline activities?
Unlike the voyeurism and serendipitous browsing of social media, Flow discovery is a relatively deliberate and intentional process—discovering real-time content that consumers are explicitly seeking.  That kind of activity disrupts a variety of less efficient modes of explicit discovery, from classified and message boards to websites and disaggregated mobile apps.  I  believe people will always make time for social discovery which serves an entirely different sort of emotional need.

Where do you think the revenue opportunities are with better forms of content curation like Flow?
We have a number of models in mind, from “freemium” upgrades to both our consumer and developer applications, to App and data marketplaces.  In the long term it will be hard to avoid “promotional drops” (i.e. advertising) given the very specific contexts the Flow provides relative to social media and even search.

Give me the elevator description of PSFK
PSFK is the go to source for new ideas for creative professionals. Every month a million designers, ad folks, digital entrepreneurs and media mavens get inspired by our content.

What is your business model?  Or what do you sell and what do you give away?
We are a hybrid company – Publishing, Events, Consulting. They are symbiotic. We create content (some which is co-branded), we host events (some that get sponsored), we advise some pretty interesting brands about trends.

Would you say you are in the curation business? Explain a bit if you can.
Yes. Our job is to find new ideas and we present them up to 50 times a day on our site. For our consulting business we have given clients like Nike, Target and BMW their own PSFK. The key difference between our publishing business and consulting business is that we conduct pattern recognition on the data on our client’s PSFK’s and tell them what we think it all means.

You had some great speakers at the last conference. You must have had a lot of options to choose from, what was your process for choosing the ones you did?
I read PSFK! Honestly – I chose from the NYC projects that we were writing about – and I dropped the people behind them a line.

There is so much interesting content out there, how do you decide what content goes on your website?
Our higher aim is to inspire people to make things better.  Better business, better environment, better world, better lives. We have about 50 regular contributors to the site and they write about a wide array of subjects and geography. Their brief is to write about signs of change that lead to progress – or the people behind them.

How do you measure the effectiveness of your conferences?  Website?
The conference is still evolving. The speakers thanking me for being part of it is important as is the number of people who watch the videos after. Website effectiveness is traffic mixed with reach. How many folks passed on our stories.

Or how do you know you’ve done a good job curating content?
Traffic is better than yesterday. We sell tickets faster than the last event! It’s not always that easy. Most days we want to host an event or write stories on a topic we think are important rather than what will sell tickets/get eyeballs. I hope the audience respects that. And enjoys it.

Do you expect the need for the type of content you curate to grow over time?  If so, why?
I think more brands are wise-ing up to the need for lateral and future-forward inspiration. Consumer insights helps you optimize for today. Trends research helps you innovate for tomorrow.

Why do you think world-class curators like the New York Times are struggling when the need for quality curation is greater than ever?
Our business model is not based on paid-for advertising.  Advertising’s business model isn’t based on paid-for advertising any more. Companies need to shift quick.

DN: Thrillist has grown quite a bit since its founding.  Can you give me the highlights of this growth in terms of subscribers, markets, revenue, profitability?
We sent the first Thrillist email in 2005 to 600 friends in New York and in that first year slogged through the mud and grew to 30,000 subscribers by the end of 2006. By the end of 2008, we had expanded into seven cities and became profitable, bringing in approximately $5 million in revenue. In 2009, we launched in five additional markets and passed the one million subscription mark. And now, just a couple of months into our sixth year, we’re in 18 markets including our first international edition in London, reaching over 2.5 million subscriptions. With the acquisition of members-only online retailer JackThreads.com and the launch of localized deal site Thrillist Rewards, we’re expecting to bring in more than $40 million in revenue this year.

DN: Why do you think the Thrillist newsletter has been so successful?
As with any successful company, the winning formula is always a strong demand and a quality product. We’ve zoned in on a niche group that was previously starved for the kind of information we deliver. They were looking for trusted recommendations on where to go and what to do in their city and the best ways to spend their time and money and we do a good job delivering that.

DN: How do you decide what to feature in each of your newsletters?  What is the editorial review process?
We have a local editor on the ground in each of our markets whose main job is to scour their cities to find awesome things.  It has to be something new, unknown or under-appreciated (i.e. an underground supper club, a maker of custom shoes operating out of a warehouse in Brooklyn, or a restaurant with an off-the-menu three martini lunch special).

DN: Talk to me some more about the importance of curating great content…
When we first started out, one of the stipulations with the money we raised was that we couldn’t spend any of it on marketing. So we focused all our energy on building something that people actually liked and would want to pass along to their friends. We know how valuable our guys’ time is and we don’t want to waste it with anything but the winners, so we always put content first and make sure it’s written for the guy reading it.

DN: Newspaper and magazines have been curating content for years yet almost all are losing money.  Why do you think Thrillist has been able to be successful curating editorial content when these other info sources have not been able to make any money, especially online?
Our voice is extremely targeted to a very specific part of the male demographic. We’re not trying to reach all people in all cities. We’re zoning in on a small sector of the population, speaking to them in a voice that they trust and relate to and delivering content that they want to read, in a way they want to read it. Because of this, we’ve developed a loyal audience that trusts us and acts on our recommendations.

Photo of Ben Lerer by Thorstenroth.net

DN: Do you have a customer feedback system in place to help you measure what content is resonating?
We do have a system that collects data, click-through rates, etc. but we mostly find validation by speaking with the owners of the businesses we cover. We have stacks upon stacks of testimonials about selling-out seats, packing restaurants and huge increases in traffic to websites. We also see the companies being covered in additional press outlets and going viral across all social media platforms.

DN: Have you ever recommended something that turned out to be a bust?  If so, how did you handle this?
We’ve definitely recommended some things that were better than others — that’s part of the challenge of breaking stories. But our batting average is high and I think the audience has patience for when we miss because they really appreciate when we hit the nail on the head.

DN: Can you give me a specific example of a new restaurant or bar that you featured and the impact it had on that business
We recently covered a food truck named “Feed Your Hole,” that serves specialty hot dogs and burgers. We spoke to the owner a few days after our write-up who told us they were experiencing lines around the block and that they even had to turn away crowds of people. Prior to our write-up, they were unknown and by their opening day, there were masses of people lining up for their food. This is common feedback for us but its still awesome every time we hear it.

DN; What role does your website play in your overall marketing and customer service mix?
We recently redesigned our website but prior to that, it was mostly just used as a tool for capturing subscribers. Most of our partnerships efforts drove traffic back to the site with hopes of enticing new subscribers to sign up. Now, our website is more of a destination for users seeking local lifestyle and entertainment content but we still have lots of work to do. Basically, we know we’ve got lots of valuable content on the site but we’re still figuring out how to surface the right content to the right guys.

DN: You’ve added some new services in the last year or so.  What are they and why did you add them?
In the past, we had covered JackThreads editorially – they hosted a lot of brands that we also frequently covered and so it made sense for us to actually be able to sell these brands to our audience, instead of simply recommending them. Another recent launch is Thrillist Rewards, which gives us a chance to monetize some of the local transactions we’re able to drive every day. Our mission is the same with this as it is with our content: we want to bring guys deals that they’ll actually enjoy and are actually relevant for them. A few of our recent deals are “Unlimited Beer and Ribs at Hill Country BBQ” and “a Strip and a Strip at Robert’s and Score’s.” We are also able to help small business reach our audience beyond editorial coverage and national display advertising.

DN: How did the customer experience role come into being at Suddenlink?
Abel: There’s always been a Vice President of Customer Service who is responsible for the overall operation of our call centers. Currently we have six of those, all in the US. There was a person to oversee those call centers. The evolution of the role was from call center manager to a broader customer experience role, which started close to Gibbs’s advent and there was a recognition that there was so much more to customer service than them just calling the call centers. We knew that and by putting that all under one title we could better drive results in an area that is really important to our CEO.

DN: How close is the CEO to the customer experience process?
Abel: Our CEO frequently discusses the importance of customer service on our quarterly earnings calls. If a customer manages to get his email address and sends him an email, he personally responds to that customer. He wants the customer to know that he’s accessible like anyone else in the company to deal with any issues they’re having and to make sure they’re having the best experience possible.

DN: How do you monitor customer satisfaction?
Jones: We have three ways to measure the customer experience. First, we are part of the JD Power study and work with them to understand their perspective, what’s driving the customer experience.

Second, we have a relationship net promoter survey, which helps us understand the customer’s overall feeling about Suddenlink as a company: what level of service we provide, the professionalism of our employees and if customers would recommend us to friends or family..

Third, and most comprehensive, is our transactional net promoter survey. Each time a customer contacts us for assistance, we send an email to them that asks questions specific to their recent transaction and gives them the opportunity to score us on different attributes and describe their experience in their own words.

DN: Are performance reviews tied to customer satisfaction?
Jones: We’re getting ready to launch a career progression plan for our CSRs, which allows them to get promoted within the CSR role giving them additional pay and recognition for doing a great job. We find a lot of value in the positive comments and are working on getting all of those back to the CSRs and technicians.

DN: How do you address the detractors?
Jones: For anyone having trouble with a service or feature, we pick that up as part of the survey and it comes back into a special group in our call centers and they follow up with the customer within 48 hours. We proactively call customers back. When you first approach someone and tell them you want them to be a CSR to talk to our angriest customers you get some funny looks. But it’s actually become one of the most popular jobs because customers are blown away that you actually took time to read the survey and the fact that you followed up creates immediate promoters because it says that you care.

DN: Give me a specific example of something you’ve fixed that’s improved customer satisfaction?
Jones: We changed our arrival windows in most of our markets. Most of our customers have access to our windows now. We changed to two-hour windows from all day windows because when we saw the data we realized it was better for the customer.

DN: Do you have other examples?
Jones: We have a list of 30 or 40 things, large and small, that we fixed or are investigating how to fix. For example, in the comments in one of our regions, customers were calling in to get their DVR fixed and we sent a hit to their box and content disappeared. After seeing a few of those each week we figured out there was something systematically that we needed to fix. The CSR’s had access to a refresh code that they shouldn’t have, and without our metrics we wouldn’t have known it.

DN: How does social media fit into all this?
Jones: It’s another way to gauge the customer’s experience. Our approach initially was to listen and understand what they were saying and from there developing the right platforms and forums. Social media is another great customer touch point. It allows us to engage them directly and try to get problems fixed.

DN: Which department does social media fall under?
Gibbs: It’s in the customer experience department. First and foremost, it’s a way to hear what our customers are saying and fix those things that need to be fixed. We’ve had some marketing engagement with social media. It’s a service channel that marketing has used as well.

DN: Do people ever re-tweet about their satisfaction after the issue has been resolved?
Abel: One example is a gentleman who tweeted about a service problem. We got in touch with him and worked out the problem, and he then sent out a follow up tweet saying, “hey, great Twitter service, I’m glad you’re using this to solve problems.” We found out later that he’s an investor in Twitter and other startups and he has close to a million followers on Twitter.

DN: Over the last two or three years, has customer satisfaction increased?
Jones: If you look at our longest running customer service surveys between 2007 and 2010, we saw the number of promoters (customers rating us nine or ten) grow from 54% to almost 60%. Our detractors (someone rating us between 0 and 6) declined from 26% to 16%. So, our overall net promoter score has increased from 28 to 43, as measured by an independent research company. In our industry many companies don’t have a positive net promoter score at all. We spend time every single day on the things we can do to improve the customer experience, which should then drive the score up.

DN: Has this increased the bottom line of the company?
Abel: During a tough economy, one where we’ve seen other cable operators achieve slower growth than they were accustomed to, in the past year alone we saw the total number of households we serve grow by nearly 7,000. We believe that’s an indicator of our customer service because we don’t have the biggest marketing budgets or financial resources. The fact that we were able to grow the number of customer relationships is an indicator that (customer service is) paying off.

We also had a record year in the total number of units of service sold. We’ve added nearly 230,000 new units of service sold to customers, which is by far a record year for us. Revenue has grown very steadily too, up 8.7% between 4th quarter 2009 and 4th quarter 2010. All of those core financial metrics are improving and when we compare those to our peers who publicly report their results, our financial operating results consistently meet or exceed them, and when you look at them in aggregate, we beat their percentage growth year over year.

Founded in 2006, Marketo already has over 1,000 clients, who pay just under $30,000 per year with the goal of improving the yield of their marketing activities.  Miller and his team rejected the notion that marketing was an art form, relegating that to the “Mad Man” era, preferring to focus on “process and analysis,” and in doing so delivered to this interviewer 8 delicious ways to drive revenue.

1. Don’t call a lead before its time
For most marketers, a lead is a lead, entered into a CRM system like Salesforce and treated with equal urgency.  According to Miller’s research, this approach means that, “only 6% of leads ever close” and “only half of the sales people make their sales goals.”  Having been able to identify key buying signals, Marketo’s system separates leads into two buckets, the 20% who are “ready to buy,” and those that require nurturing.

2. Know the buying signals of your prospects
Just because a visitor to your site gives you their contact information for something like a white paper, doesn’t mean necessarily that they a qualified lead.  Explained Miller, “if somebody downloaded our webinars or thought leadership [documents], we know they’re at the early stage.”  However, reported Miller, “if you go to our website and see the detailed pricing pages or register to watch a detailed demo, you’re very likely to enter a buying cycle with us.”

3. If they give the sign, call your leads post haste
When all leads are given equal value, they naturally clog up the sales process, wasting the time of both the prospect who isn’t ready and the sales person who then becomes skeptical of all the leads, further diminishing the yield.  But if only truly qualified leads go into sales pipeline, the sales force is reading and willing to jump all over them. Added Miller, “if you show buying signs, we’re going to be dialing your phone in 3-4 minutes!”

4. Reward your marketing team more and raise quotas
At most companies, marketing generates about 30% of the leads, which means the sales force needs to be heavily incentivized to not just close but also to find the leads themselves.  “At Marketo our marketing team generates 80% of the sales pipeline,” explained Miller.  This has allowed them to “radically reduce the salesperson’s risk” and “change how [we] compensate the marketing department.”  And because Sales has better quality leads, they close at a higher rate, allowing Marketo to raise quotas and hire fewer sales staff.

5. Focus sales team on closing not educating
According to Miller’s research, at most companies “almost half of the salesperson’s time is spent on unproductive activities.”  This includes educating prospects on the category and the product.  “This is outmoded thinking,” explained Miller, since today “70% of the buying cycle is complete before the buyer wants to connect with Sales.”  Assuming you are providing all the necessary educational material online then you too can “optimize the demand chain” by only giving Sales leads that are ready to be closed.

6. Hire a CRO
After all this talk of marketing efficiency, one of the more surprising outcomes of my conversation with Miller was his suggestion that companies hire a Chief Revenue Officer and place Marketing and Sales underneath that person.  Explained Miller, whose company just hired a CRO, “I don’t believe you can have a CMO and a CRO.”  This is not “a glorified Head of Sales,” added Miller, but someone who can lead “a fundamental transformation about how you think about generating revenue.”

7. Nurture all your other leads
While the bulk of this conversation has focused on identifying and converting hot leads, this is only half the secret to Marketo’s success.  The other half is the recognition that today’s tire kickers are tomorrow’s buyer as long as you have a strong “nurturing process to educate and stay in touch with them over time,” noted Miller. He added, “a full half [of our leads] are coming from seeds we developed earlier.”

8. Invest heavily in content development
When explaining Marketo’s success to-date, Miller revealed that they invest heavily in marketing, spending three times the ratio of most companies but because of their lead conversion rate, they are also more efficient and profitable than these other companies.  A huge portion of that investment goes into content development including webinars, white papers, blogs and social media.  In addition to creating “a lot of inbound leads and SEO, [this content] also helps to build trust and credibility with buyers who are starting to perceive us as innovators and thought leaders,” explained Miller.

Final note: A magna cum laude physics major at Harvard, Miller’s desire to find the math in marketing shouldn’t be all that surprising.  What may come as a surprise is the extent of Miller’s foresight as exemplified by the fact that he “actually started writing [his] blog before writing any product.”  For more on Miller, see my follow up interview here on TheDrewBlog.com.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.

When do the games begin?
TH: The Crappy Code Games will launch in the UK, and take place over three events in March and April. The first event is at Revolution, a modern nightclub/bar in Manchester on the 17^th of March. The second event is at Revolution in London, on March 31^st, and the third event, which doubles as the Grand Finale, will take place in Brighton on April 7^th, on the first night of SQL8, which is the largest SQL community event held in the UK, and be hosted by Apple co-founder and Fusion-io Chief Scientist Steve Wozniak.

What is the idea behind the Crappy Code Games?
TH: The Crappy Code Games highlight the problem that most SQL programmers are constantly experiencing in the workplace, and demonstrates the performance and efficiency gains of Fusion-io Memory.  Badly written SQL code can really stink up an enterprise database, resulting in poor performance, increased resource allocation and ultimately system breakdown. But cleaning up crappy code hasn’t always been easy. It can mean hundreds if not thousands of man hours spent rewriting inefficient code to conform to best practices. Until now. Fusion ioMemory is so powerful, that it actually flushes away crappy code.

Where did this idea come from?
TH: Crappy Code is not a term that Fusion-io made up. If you do a Google search on Crappy SQL code, you will see that this is language that the community understands and uses to quantify this problem. We are just using this insight to engage our audience in a more entertaining way. Crappy code is the problem. Fusion is the solution, but if we talk about how great our solution is it is just marketing, and no one will pay attention. By engaging our audience through the problem, we can show people how our solution works, which is much more fun, engaging and effective.

How are you measuring success?
TH: On a number of different levels; PR impressions is certainly one, as is event attendance, which we are hoping will be around 125 SQL coders for each event, and 300 for our final event at SQL8 in Brighton. We will also be conducting pre and post interviews at each event which should gauge how well Fusion is telling their story, and how compelling it is to our audience. We also have a robust social media program, so success will also be judged by the number of followers and level of engagement we can drive through social media efforts.

Why do you think your target will respond to this promo?
TH: Because the Crappy Code Games, despite its name, actually celebrates great coding. In order to win these challenges, you have to be really good at what you do. This is a very competitive community. Every SQL coder in the UK will want to prove to their peers that they are the best. The Crappy Code Games is the perfect platform to do this. Not to mention that there are some really great prizes that you can win, like developer laptops, win-mo phones, X-box 360’s, and more.

How are American tech companies perceived in Europe?
MY: In general American tech companies and their products are very well received over here in both the UK and wider EMEA. From my personal history there is quite a good amount of UK folks that go and work for US tech companies at their HQ in product development and that can further reinforce that bridge.

Why are you starting this promo in the UK?
MY: What I find interesting is that in general the UK and Germany tend to be early adopters of new technology, especially if it makes a radical change to the value the business derives from it. That’s not to say there aren’t innovators in every European country but the others in general terms tend to wait until there are a number of good cases studies, at that point they move quickly to adopt.

Why do you think the Crappy Code Games will cut through in the UK?
MY: In the UK market there a number of major players with large budgets that dominate pretty much all traditional marketing approaches but to my mind with limited real engagement. What we are trying to do is engage in a slightly humorous way, educate and then let the prospects decide (we know how good our products are and believe in them).  Also, the technical heart of Crappy Code Games is based around some very real performance issues.

What does the fact that you are running a Crappy Code promo say about Fusion-io?
TH: It says that Fusion understands the day-to-day challenges and issues facing our customers. It also says that while our solutions are completely serious, we as a company like to have a little bit of fun.

Do you see a risk in this approach?
TH: I’d be foolish if I said no, but if we weren’t taking calculated risks, we just be one more boring,  invisible marketing program. As we see it, risk is proportional to reward. So obviously, we believe that the potential reward is greater than the potential risk.

What are you really selling?
TH: Fusion-io sells a family of NAND flash-based ioMemory technologies that offers an entirely new building block for data center applications. Containing 100 times the density of RAM, ioMemory overcomes the physical and thermal limitations of the medium and provides near limitless amounts of fully scalable memory for accelerating throughput, driving higher performance density and efficiency in applications server platforms.

What problem(s) does your product solve for your target?
TH: Fusion ioMemory reduces latency so markedly that CPU’s can be used more efficiently, enabling our customers to do far more with far less than they could with other storage technology solutions.  In a recent survey of 274 Fusion customers, 95% said they bought us for performance gains, and 75% of them experienced performance improvement of 3-10x over what they had prior to deploying Fusion.

Robert Herzog founded ZogSports a few months after watching an airplane crash into what was his office on the 96^th floor of the World Trade Center tower.  Eight years later, after growing his company from one sport to a dozen, from five hundred participants on 29 teams to sixty thousand on 4,000 teams in three markets, Herzog happily admits that, “I love what I do everyday.”  How Herzog has been able to sustain his initial enthusiasm is both instructive and inspiring, revealing 8 tips for just about any entrepreneur who actually wants to enjoy the journey.

1. Pursue your Passions

Duh, right?  After all, why would you go to the trouble of starting a business if you didn’t love the idea?  [Pause here if you’re in it for the money.]   With passion comes insight and hopefully an unmet need.  In Herzog’s case, the insight came after meeting his wife playing co-ed softball.  “I played in all these other recreational sports leagues and while I had fun with the sports aspect of it, they provided terrible customer service,” explained Herzog.  Knowing he could do better, he added “I wanted to create what I wished had existed when I was single.”

2. Make sure its Meaningful

This is one of the lofty notions that sounds good at the beginning but can be tough to sustain once an organization matures.  Recognizing a growing interest in altruism, Herzog made charity the third pillar of ZogSports along with the sports and social aspects of the service.  Herzog is understandably proud that the organization has helped raise one million for charity thus far but takes just as much joy from the sports and social aspects.  “I organize other people’s fun for a living,” explained Herzog, offering a broader perspective on what can make a job meaningful.

3. Hire the Happy

While most entrepreneurs will tell you the importance of building a team of different personalities and skill sets, few will call serious attention to the attitudes of these hires.  “When I hire people, I ask a whole series of questions about how much fun they are,” explained Herzog.  “We don’t hire people who are really uptight,” added Herzog, who considers himself the most uptight of the bunch.   “When I started Zog, I wanted to create a workplace that was fun, open and collaborative,” noted Herzog, who I witnessed greet a random team captain with outright exuberance.

4. Prepare yourself Properly

The serial entrepreneur is often content to get his/her idea off the ground and then move on, requiring a modest amount of prior experience.  Herzog, on the other hand, brought a wide range of experience to his new company, enabling him to adapt to the changing nature of his job.  “I feel like having a whole bunch of different jobs before this was incredibly helpful,” insisted Herzog.  Having been both a management and operations consultant and executive at several start-ups, Herzog “was about making things better,” which also ensured he was unlikely to get bored as the company grew.

5. Forget about Funding

Spend time with entrepreneurs and inevitably the conversation drifts back to finding VC funding.  And while not every entrepreneur is in a position to bootstrap his or her idea, don’t assume that outside funding equates to job satisfaction.  Self-funded from the start, Herzog has not sought outside investors.  Explained Herzog, “I have found that my job is so much easier because I don’t have anybody else’s money in here telling me how fast we should grow.”  Also relating this independence to his high job satisfaction, Herzog offered emphatically, “I don’t ever want to work for anybody else again!”

6. Emphasize the Experience

A lot of start-ups narrowly define their offering to the product or service at hand and in doing so miss the larger opportunity.  In the case of ZogSports, Herzog is quick to note that their business transcends sports.  “Our goal is to be the highlight of a ‘zoggers’ week,” and to do that explained Herzog means that every customer interaction from registration to the games to the post-game happy hours needs “to be overwhelmingly positive and fun.”  The end of result of this emphasis on experience is that 80-85% of the new zoggers come from positive referrals, keeping marketing costs down and CEO smiles up.

7. Live your Life

While working long hours is hard to avoid at the start-up stage, entrepreneurs who continue at this pace year after year are unlikely to say, “I love my job.”  Although Herzog admits to having worked 80-90 hours a week initially, he has avoided over-extending himself and the business since then.  “I never wanted to work that much and completely sacrifice every other aspect of my life,” explained Herzog.  A father of two, Herzog also derives helpful instruction from his family time.  Admiring his son’s

ability to be happy 24/7, Herzog explained, “I look at him and say, wow that’s just amazing, why should I dwell on this thing that’s bothering me?”

8. Grow your Goals

Like sharks, entrepreneurs have to keep moving, challenging themselves and their employees to do better.  The gleeful Herzog is no different here.  “I see my enjoyment in my job being tied to being able to grow the business and provide my staff new and exciting opportunities,” he added.  As such, Herzog is investing in new systems that will make it easier to offer a standardized experience from game to game, sport to sport and market to market.  With these systems in place, Herzog hopes to be able to expand to 15-20 markets in the next five years, a growth pace that will be hard not to love.

Final Note:

Given that he is in the business of providing “an escape from people’s daily lives,” it is little wonder that Herzog puts a premium on having a well-balanced life himself.  He also is well aware that his situation is not the norm nor easy to maintain, “I couldn’t think of a better job for me but if I didn’t have to work hard at it, I might not appreciate it.”

[Robert Herzog, Founder of ZogSports]

Van Luchene did win the Las Vegas DMO and went on to double sales in 2010.  He also expects to triple to quadruple sales in 2011 given the company’s current momentum.  Born during one of the worst travel slumps in decades and self-funded, JackRabbit is by no means an overnight success story.  Its success is the story of perseverance and experience, yielding in the process five questions every entrepreneur should ask themselves before they land their make or break account.

Have you worked out the product kinks?

While every small company dreams of winning the marquee client early on, the truth is that winning it too early can overwhelm a product or service that has not been sufficiently tested from multiple aspects.  In the case of Book Direct, Van Luchene and his team had first created the reservation service as a project for the Santa Fe Convention and Visitors Bureau, where his company is based.  Noted Van Luchene, “We were just solving it for Santa Fe with the hopes that if we could do it in one tourist-based market that it would work in others.”

But the initial solution according to Van Luchene was not quite right, “I initially put up a Travelocity white label service. We had 30,000 people use it in a month and we only sold $12,000 worth of rooms so I knew something was wrong.”  Eighteen months later, “we figured out consumers were going to the city site because they didn’t want to book with a middle man but rather directly with the hotel,” an insight that led to critical changes to the service itself.  Noted a delighted Van Luchene, “the problem that we solved for Santa Fe just happened to be a problem that resonates pretty much everywhere in the world.”

Is your revenue model right?

When starting a new company in an existing industry, the temptation is to seek revenue in the conventional fashion.  This was certainly the case with JackRabbit’s BookDirect system.  Aggregating availability and pricing data from local hotels, BookDirect initially charged on a cost-per-click basis for leads passed to participating hotels.  This approach initially seemed acceptable to the DMO’s since it limited it their upfront investment and distributed the costs to the hotels that received the most benefit.  But when tourism dropped off with the economic downturn, that approach left JackRabbit quite vulnerable.

Noted Van Luchene, “it was very painful and we had a year of reinventing our business.”  Rather than charge each hotel by reservation lead, Book Direct began leasing its reservation search engine directly to the DMO’s.  Explained Van Luchene, “now we had a great business because government tourism departments pay for the software and we list all of the hotels, who now get a huge benefit at no cost,” this in turn justifies the existence of the DMO and the membership fees they typically charge each hotel.  This new model also gave BookDirect a competitive advantage since the DMO was far more inclined to promote the service.

Are you focused more on the sizzle than the steak?

After tasting a little success, many entrepreneurs turn on the marketing hype, sometimes at the expense of their core product.  This is definitely not the case for JackRabbit Systems, whose website is a modest effort at best and marketing is a blank on the org chart.  “We’re like the shoemaker’s son who doesn’t get to wear shoes; we put all our time into making our client sites work well and look beautiful,” noted a somewhat chagrined Van Luchene.

Van Luchene went on to explain that his particular service is dependent on sales people who use their client sites, not his site to showcase the company.  “What they need from me is to put my reputation on the line by delivering a product that works,” offered Van Luchene.  He also noted that given the small size of his industry where “[the DMOs] all know and listen to each other, making my current customers happy is the best selling I can do.”

Is your organization scalable?

One of the biggest tests for entrepreneurs facing rapid growth is scalability across the organization.  After several years of preparation, Van Luchene’s team at JackRabbit was indeed ready to scale.  First, having tested the product with several DMO’s, they had already gone through the process of integrating 114 unique hotel reservation systems.  This meant that the Book Direct could be up and running for Las Vegas in under two months and add other markets with equal rapidity.

From a staffing perspective, JackRabbit relies on a virtual organizational structure with only half of the full-time employees actually working at the Santa Fe headquarters. “Everybody else is distributed all over the country since I can’t necessarily find all the programming talent in Santa Fe to do this,” explained Van Luchene.  Having learned to manage far-flung staff including a sales force that is essentially outsourced to local market media reps, JackRabbit expects to scale without the usual management and technology hiccups, growing from 6 percent to 25-30 percent share of market in the next 12-24 months.

Final Note: Not one to rest on his laurels, Van Luchene knows exactly what’s next for his company, readying a mobile solution that will allow visitors to survey their options and then complete the booking on a call directly with the hotel, a surprisingly simple solution that consumers are likely to embrace and one leaving little question about the future success of JackRabbit. This article first appeared on FastCompany.com

Establish your Foundation
Having a solid foundation that includes these five essential planning elements doesn’t guarantee success but it sure as heck increases the odds:

• Audit: A comprehensive review of competitive activity, best practices, internal risk tolerance and input from all possible stakeholders. In addition to gathering critical data, the audit serves to engage management and foster cross-departmental consensus, both of which are essential to long-term success.

• Brand voice: In all likelihood, your interns should not be the voice of your brand. Defining your brand voice takes the same strategic discipline as any other marketing effort and should result in not just identifying who can represent the brand but also establishing a clear and differentiated point-of-view.

• Resources: Despite rumors to the contrary, social media is not free. It consumes mass quantities of time for listening, responding, creating, monitoring and reporting. Resources, whether internal and or external, need to be dedicated. Ideally these resources have experience getting things done across all the departments social can and does touch.

• Product News: The old adage, “nothing kills a bad product faster than a great ad campaign” applies doubly to social media. If your product or service is not as good as it could be, either fix this first or make this the goal of your social activities. If your product is already highly competitive, then it will be still worth bringing something new to the party since social thrives around news.

• Road Map: With all these other building blocks in place, you can now prepare a clear road map, defining overall social media goals, setting priorities by channel and establishing key performance indices. A good road map should also include test elements as well as potential risks along with a roll-out schedule for selected tactics.

Create the Blueprint
With the foundation in place, we move closer to execution by creating a strong blueprint including these four critical steps:

• Design: Whether you are a billion dollar brand or an ambitious start-up, design never stops mattering. Even if it’s “just a Facebook page,” look for an aesthetic that is consistent, engaging and clearly your own.

• Keyword Research: With the search engines now tracking Facebook and Twitter, the link between SEO performance and social activity is growing stronger by the day. Make sure you know the keywords that matter.

• Editorial Calendar: Based on your keyword research, map out an “editorial calendar” that defines what content needs to be created, who will create it, where it will run first and how it will be amplified via social channels.

• Disaster Plan: Since the fit just might hit the shan when you least expect it, do yourself a favor and outline a few what if scenarios and potential responses. Even if nothing bad ever happens, you’ll sleep a lot better.

Gather your Materials

Moving up the pyramid, its time to gather all your materials and execute with earnest.  In the process, you’ll want to focus on these three areas:

• Analytics: With so many free and paid measurement tools available, measuring what matters is easier said than done.  You’ll need to work with pros to figure out what’s right for your situation.

• Content: The center building block of a strong social program, content is indeed king.  Make sure your content is engaging, enlightening and or entertaining, representing your brand in all its glory.

• Channels & Hub: Since context goes hand in hand with content, choose your channels carefully based on your target and the quality of your content.  Also, to optimize the SEO potential, archive your social content, especially Facebook and Twitter feeds on a “hub” within your website.

Measure your Progress

Since the goal of any business is to acquire and retain customers, to be taken seriously, social media must play a role in both of these areas.  Thus the penultimate building blocks of a successful social program are the following:

• SEO Improvements: With the right content in the right places being shared by the right people, a comprehensive social program will yield improved SEO results over time as long as you remember to set benchmarks at the start.

• Leads & Referrals:  While listening can yield leads and referrals can occur naturally, integrating social content into your CRM program will significantly enhance overall impact.  

Reap the Rewards

Ascending the social media pyramid is not an easy affair but it is certainly worth the trip.  Hard-earned consumer trust will be rewarded with increased loyalty, stronger word-of-mouth, higher value per customer, lower cost per acquisition and even lower churn rates.  You may even start measuring CPE or cost per engagement, given the relatively low cost of engaging fans once acquired on Facebook and Twitter.   Knowing that the original pyramids weren’t built in a day but have lasted 4,000 years, think about your social program as a permanent part of your go to market strategy and enjoy the view from the top.

1. Social Media Strategy

Although more than half of all large companies have a presence on Facebook and Twitter, fewer than 25% have a clearly defined social strategy. Tactical experimentation pleased some, but left many CEOs wondering whether social media like the mythical Rudolph could really drive results. Since yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a social strategy complete with CEO-pleasing metrics, put this on top of your shopping list — finding the expertise internally and externally to make it happen.

2. Dedicated Social Chair

In 2010, social media was treated by many marketers as a part-time affair, assigned to the junior staffers who just happened to have the most friends on Facebook. Unable to dedicate the time required, they also lacked the experience to put social media into the context of broader customer engagement, thus relegating social to a sexy but modest marketing experiment. Fixing this means assigning at least one dedicated professional who can champion social strategy internally, while coordinating execution across all the departments it can and should touch.

3. A Metric System

Given all the roles social media can play, from customer service to product development and WOM to lead gen, putting precise metrics in place is challenging even for those with well-defined strategies. That said, new tools are emerging that should make measuring results easier and well within the budgets of even the most cash-strapped operations. Startup ArgyleSocial, for example, links social media activity with “real business value,” for under $300/month.

4. An Aggregation Plan

One of the unexpected yet joyous benefits of a strong social program is its potential to significantly improve organic search results. But in order to turn social content into the gift that keeps on giving, brands need to aggregate and archive the content on their own Web sites. HubSpot, a software-as-a-service (Saas) platform, makes this process relatively easy for small business. Larger companies will seek out more robust solutions, including a surprisingly strong social offering from IBM.

5. Customer Feedback Loop

While listening to the customer has long been an important business credo, it is only lately that marketers are turning to online tools like Get Satisfaction that truly enable and track instantaneous feedback. In 2011, offering customers the ability to engage with fellow customers right on the company website will become more the rule than the exception, especially as companies come to realize that a few negative comments increase credibility and ultimately increase online sales. These conversations also enhance search results by creating tag-able content.

6. Social Business Enlightenment

In the brave new world of social business enlightenment, all businesses are social and all social is business. Even large companies will want to present all their employees, not just those in customer service and marketing, with unfettered, yet guided, access to social media tools. These employees will begin to see what the fuss is all about, quickly realizing that social isn’t just something their kids do but rather a way that generates leads, captures sales, services customers, and advocates new product development well beyond this holiday season.

If you’d like to add to this social media shopping list, just send me an email, preferably not addressed to the North Pole.

Just three years ago, you needed to be a prominent blogger like Jeff Jarvis or Bob Garfield to make an online noise loud enough to inspire a company response to a particular product or service issue. It was about that time that Thor Muller, Co-founder and CTO of Get Satisfaction, developed an online tool that would “allow anybody that same power,” to in essence, “get satisfaction by pulling the company in.”

Forty months later, Get Satisfaction is well on its way to transforming the way companies interact with consumers, turning customer service into the kind of measurably effective marketing that even John Wannamaker could have fully blessed. Gleaned from my conversation with Muller at Get Satisfaction’s San Francisco headquarters early this month, here are eight ways community driven customer service is changing the ways brands go to market.

1. Re-humanizing consumer interactions

For Muller, it is simply not enough that companies use their tools. “We really want people to change their whole approach to what it means to talk to customers,” he explained. “For a long time, maybe a hundred years, we’ve been gradually squeezing the humanity out of our interactions; scripting it, automating it, scaling it.” Instead of asking people to take a number, “Companies now have to revolve themselves around individuals.” Muller noted, adding that in doing so, “we’re making the world a better place, certainly more human!”

2. Elevating the conversation from transactions to aspirations

While traditional customer service is often about addressing transactional issues like resetting passwords, Muller believes that community-driven customer support can go much further. “Customer communities at their best are really tapping people’s deeper goals, their deeper desires,” explained Muller. This requires companies to, “rise above writing help documentation and be more of a good cocktail party host.” Muller links this change with the new staff post of Community Manager who is part therapist, part help desk and part cruise director.

3. Reducing the costs of the traditional help desk

For years, companies have sought to drive down support costs with automation and the ironic goal of minimizing human interaction with their call centers. Part of the reason Get Satisfaction has grown so quickly is that it flips this notion on its head, increasing human interaction but decreasing costs by making support more peer-to-peer driven. Noted Muller, “we’ve seen with our communities at scale typically reduce the number of [service] tickets that go to [call center] agents by 75% or so.” Muller referred me to case histories for Mint.com and Yola, both of which reduced “repetitive support by two thirds.”

4. Extending support beyond your website to Facebook

While most companies recognize the need to engage consumers on social media, only the savviest have begun to offer customer support on platforms like Facebook. For these enlightened marketers, Get Satisfaction offers a Facebook application in two distinct versions, “one for enterprises who have a lot more demand for customization/controls and one for everybody else,” noted Muller. Having a support tab on Facebook gives fans one more reason to “Like” a brand and get the information and support required to encourage and enable over-the-top evangelism.

5. Turning customer support into searchable content

Given the fundamental importance of search to customer acquisition, finding ways to improve organic search results (SEO) is a top priority for most businesses. That said, few have recognized that content generated via customer communities can do just that. Explained Muller, “somebody asks how they can use a particular camera to take better pictures, that is then indexed by Google and then next person who searches finds that conversation. Get Satisfaction] is taking something that used to be a cost center, customer service, and turning it into lead generation.”

6. Listening builds trust in and of itself

Dell famously solicited customer ideas and ended up producing a Linux based laptop that no one bought. This kind of listening and responding is not the ultimate intent of Get Satisfaction. While community members are encouraged to offer ideas, Muller does not advocate, “design by committee” or conclude that the customer is always right. “Even if [a brand doesn’t] build what I want them to build or do what I want them to do, I may be less likely to change to another product because I feel close to them,” explained Muller.

7. Integrating customer conversations with your CRM system

Many sophisticated marketers, especially in B2B, rely on well-honed CRM systems to track leads through the funnel. Get Satisfaction allows these companies to take this one step further by connecting the social web with workflow systems, trouble tickets and project management tools. Explained Muller, “Knowing who a customer is, what their buying history is, and what they care about is important to servicing them well.” Suddenly a customer complaint becomes “actionable within an organization,” given the CRM integration concluded Muller.

8. Measuring C-Sat on both a qualitative and quantitative basis

While some pundits strive to simplify customer satisfaction to one basic metric like Net Promoter, this may not be the ideal approach for your particular business. Having witnessed thousands of customer comments and complaints, Muller encourages clients to take a “more holistic approach” and “measure satisfaction in various ways.” Having developed something called a Satisfactometer, that explained Muller, “might be something fun like an emoticon and other times might be something more structured and numeric,” Get Satisfaction is delivering both sides of the measurement equation.

Final Note: Having recently hired a CEO to drive the company forward, Muller is re-focused on his true love, product development, so we can expect even more satisfying features from Get Satisfaction in the days ahead.

Q: How has guerrilla marketing evolved?

Guerrilla thinking has evolved tremendously in the last 24 months. Press seeking guerrillas have shifted away from street theater to something with online legs. Part of this is fishing where the fish are. Part of this is that if you can gain Likes or YouTube channel subscriptions, your initial contact can turn into a more lasting relationship. Part of this is the press itself—the press is more likely to wax on about a social program than a purely street program at this moment in time.

Q: What’s up with street stunts?

Frankly, I’ve never been a fan or promoter of the street stunt approach. They are typically a brief encounter with little residual value. The challenge with guerrilla has always been to provide a reasonable exchange of value between brand and consumer. In exchange for a consumer’s time, the brand must provide some value, either genuine utility or at least a good laugh. The reason the HSBC BankCab is still on the road after seven years is that the value exchange is extraordinary. First, people love to see an old Checker driving around the streets. Second, when they get in the BankCab, it is a refreshing experience complete with a truly knowledgeable cabbie. Third, HSBC customers get a free ride when engenders brand love. We recently renovated the HSBC BankCab, enabling it to run on compressed natural gas, thus making it a more “green” experience. As street programs go, this is about as good as it gets.

Q: What’s cool right now?

The most exciting area of guerrilla right now, is the social to offline movement. Skittles “Mob the Rainbow” program is one great example of this. Skittles solicits ideas from its 10 million strong Facebook fan base, which sometimes lead to hilarious offline executions. For example, fans suggested sending Valentines to a particular postal worker. Skittles did just that and produced a funny viral video which brought the program full circle. JetBlue is using its strong Twitter following in a similar fashion. Earlier this year, @JetBlue tweeted they were on a particular street corner in Manhattan giving away tickets. In a matter of minutes, 300 eager travelers showed up and of course, JetBlue got some nice ink for this as well. In this way, social media has replaced email as the ignition switch for flash mobs.

Q: How does social fit into a guerrillas plans?

Any marketer considering a physical guerrilla interaction would be crazy not to also bake in a social component. The social component should give the program legs, extending the offline interaction online. It also provides a home for videos and or photos taken of the physical interaction thus sharing these experiences with a larger audience. The social component also helps amortize the cost of the potentially expensive offline component. Finally, the social component provides an opportunity for feedback something that is not always easy to get in the physical arena.

Q: Is the physical street experience dead?

Since marketing success has often been about zigging when others zag, a few enlightened marketers will renew their emphasis on the physical experience and the true engagement opportunity it represents. Touching someone deeply often requires a physical touch. Online dating sites do the matchmaking but typically the fire doesn’t flame until the couple actually meets.

Q: What roles are left for guerrilla marketing?

Guerrilla thinking has never been dependent on one particular type of interaction. It has always been about making more out of less, breaking the ice in order to build meaningful and hopefully lasting relationships. Social marketing has proven its ability to maintain and nurture relationships but the jury is still out on its ability to generate trial from new customers.

Q: How has Renegade evolved from a guerrilla standpoint?

I see social marketing as an evolution of our long-time guerrilla practice. The goals haven’t changed but the tactics  we use continue to grow and evolve. Five years ago, three out of four incoming calls would be from clients seeking guerrilla ideas. Now those same clients are requesting social marketing ideas. The impetuous for the calls is the same—help us engage customers cost-effectively.

["Delivery.com Street Stunt in October"][]

Brian Halligan is nothing if not a dreamer. In his dream, the Redsox win the pennant every year, hundreds of thousands of small businesses use HubSpot and Boston becomes the epicenter for “modern marketing” that eschews traditional media in favor of his highly digital, “Inbound” approach. And while Halligan can’t keep his beloved Sox off the Disabled List, he is well on his way to realizing at least part of his dream, building a company that has taken small business marketing to a new, more cost-effective place.

How Halligan and his compatriots at HubSpot have gotten this far is a potent reminder of the need to think big while minding the store, blending a Puritanical work ethic with an Aerosmithian will to “Dream On.” Whether or not HubSpot and Halligan can transform Boston into the Silicon Valley of marketing, which will require an entire community of like-minded marketing services providers to take a ride north on the Metroliner, my interview yielded several location-neutral insights for any entrepreneur.

The future is coming, the future is coming

With Paul Revere-like clarity, Halligan is quick to warn of the impending doom of traditional marketing. Noted Halligan, “My whole thesis in life is that the way people market their products is broken, that TV/radio/print and interrupting people with spam messages and cold calls [doesn’t work].” “I actually think that Madison Avenue is going to crash because no one is watching those ads they’re making anymore and I want Boston to be the next generation Madison Avenue,” explained Halligan, who helped to organize Future M, a conference in early October that focused on “modern marketing,” and featured 50 or so Beantown marketing innovators.

The company on a hill

When John Winthrop famously declared Boston the “city on a hill,” he certainly anticipated the fervent city-centric loyalty of Brian Halligan. “I’m from Boston and I’m a little pissed of that Silicon Valley has out-innovated us in the PC revolution and then the internet,” exclaimed Halligan. Sharing Winthrop’s evangelistic bent, Halligan noted his desire to “revive the area in terms of the internet and around marketing,” building as big a company has he can that maintains its New England roots. Even though Halligan aspires to a West coast-style company like Google or Amazon, he makes it clear he has no interest in selling out to one of these giants and seeing the company leave town.

Not the same old song and dance

Sometimes referred to as “the Bad Boys of Boston,” the band Aerosmith made its mark by blending elements of pop, heavy metal and R&B to create their own unique sound. So too has Halligan and his team created something new by blending a number of tools “into one simple relatively easy to use package for businesses to take advantage of.” Designed to address “a massive shift in the way modern humans shop and learn,” the HubSpot platform includes software for blogging, social media monitoring, marketing analytics, email and lead nurturing. To prove HubSpot has a hit on their hands, Halligan noted that they have about 3,500 customers today up from 1400 a year ago while revenue has grown to $20 million from $7 million over the same period. And that’s got to music to Halligan’s VC backers if not to the rest of Boston.

Ask not what you can do for your company, ask what your company can do for its customers

JFK’s famous call to action inspired an entire generation to lead by doing. This notion is at the heart of HubSpot’s success, enabling and encouraging businesses “to create remarkable content that becomes like a magnet to pull people in.” Halligan calls this approach Inbound Marketing, an approach he preaches about in a book and on a blog of the same name while practicing it religiously at his own company. Noted Halligan, “we create tons and tons of blog articles, we create eBooks, we create webinars, we create a weekly TV show” all designed to draw people into HubSpot often by way of Google without having to buy keywords. Explained Halligan, “a webinar works for years and years whereas with Google ads, you just throw money at it month after month.”

Good Grade Hunting

Boston boys Damon and Affleck took Hollywood by storm with their Academy Award-winning debut. HubSpot generates good will and great leads with it highly praised “grader” tools. These free tools rate a company’s performance on keyword search, website, blogs, Facebook and even Foursquare. Offered Halligan, “if they get a crappy score, they say, ‘who are those HubSpot guys?’ and they end up in our funnel,” watching a demo, trying the software and ultimately buying. The idea according to Halligan is to “free up as much knowledge and content as you possibly can and use that knowledge to pull people into your business and try to convert them into customers.” Halligan also noted that their customers see meaningful results in 4-6 months, averaging 13% increases in sales leads that compound on a month to month basis.

More than a Feeling for Culture

The band Boston exploded onto the rock scene in the mid-seventies but after two multi-platinum albums, management issues got the best of them. Halligan is keenly aware that rapid growth brings its own set of problems and works diligently to keep the band together while bringing in fresh blood. Explained Halligan, “when you grow this fast, everything breaks—many of the systems you put in place break and you are constantly revolving and reorganizing.” Not wanting to be “just another band out of Boston” that imploded, Halligan and his cohorts put extra effort into clarifying and cultivating their corporate culture and mission. “When we do annual reviews of employees, the culture is part of that review—there are seven points in our culture and we grade them [on each],” noted Halligan. It is little wonder both employees and clients seem to sing the praises of HubSpot.

Final note: With over 80% of advertising still going through traditional media channels and a sizeable percentage of that flowing through New York-based agencies, shifting the epicenter of “modern marketing” to Boston won’t happen overnight, if at all. That doesn’t bother Halligan who has accepted this mission as his “life’s work,” and whose accomplishments to date justify further consideration. As such, I’d encourage you to read more of my interview, as I am in the end a New Yorker, too busy weeping over the Yankees’ demise to belabor this further.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com

Identify an unmet need

“I was a venture capitalist before I was doing HubSpot, and I was trying to get the portfolio companies to use modern marketing to create blogs to pull people in through the search engines, social media sites, and the blogosphere, and I had a hell of a time making that shift. I had to hire a ton of consultants and a ton of IT people and buy 6 different software packages, and it was very hard to pull off. So that was the gap I basically saw in the market and thought, ‘How do we pull all this stuff together into one simple package and then transfer as much knowledge we can from our heads to their heads and get them to shift the way they market?””

Eat your own dog food

“We are the number one user of our own product. I personally use it every day. A key part of our growth is that we are able to use the product. We feel the bugs at just the same time as our customers feel the bugs, so we fix them as quickly as we can. We know what we want in a software. We’re on the cutting edge of all this stuff. Like Dan Zarrella, for example, is one of our employees. He’s a real cutting edge kind of guy. He’s more leading edge than most, so we try to learn as much as we can from him and build it into the software so that mere mortals can use it, not just Dan Zarrella.”

Replace messaging with valuable content

“The basic idea behind inbound marketing, this marketing transformation I’m talking about, is you want to create remarkable content that becomes a magnet to pull people in. So we create tons and tons of blog articles and the blog articles I wrote 4 years ago still are like magnets, pulling people in through Google. We write eBooks. We create a weekly TV show, HubSpot TV. And we build these Graders, which are basically little tiny pieces of our product that we break off and we offer for free for people to run their site through, and they get a diagnostic on it and they get a score, and based on that score – it’s 1 to 100 – if they get a crappy score, they say, “Well who are these HubSpot guys?” and they end up in our funnel and we show them a demo, take them through a trial and they end up buying the software. So it’s very much part of our philosophy of ‘How do you free up as much knowledge and content as you possibly can and use that knowledge to pull people into your business and try to convert them into customers?’”

Build a community

“There is definitely a big community forming and we do a couple of things to foster it. We have Inbound Marketing University where you can come and there are 15 online lectures you attend – and there’s a test at the end. If you pass the test, you get a badge and you get Inbound Marketing Certified, and those have been showing up on a lot of people’s LinkedIn profiles and resonate these days– our customers are dying to hire them. The second thing is there is an Inbound Marketing LinkedIn group that is very, very active. I don’t know how many people are in there. I haven’t looked recently, but it’s quite an active group in there that’s cranking away. There is a HubSpot partner group. There are a bunch of splinter inbound marketing communities that keep popping up, and we’re just trying to do our best to keep up with them and help them and foster them, and it’s been a big part of our success.”

Inspire a compelling culture

“Culture turns out to play a huge role. When my co-founder and I started the company…in the first two years of the company we didn’t mention the word culture. It wasn’t something on top of our minds. And then about two years in, we did a survey of our employees – the Net Promoters survey. We asked them two questions. Question number 1 was “How likely are you to refer HubSpot to another friend of yours to join us?” on a scale of 0 to 10. Then the second question was “why?” When we got responses from the ‘why,’ we probably had 60 or 70 employees at this point. The two big reasons people like or loved working at HubSpot was 1 – the culture. The culture? We didn’t know we had a culture. And number 2 was that they loved their fellow employees. So at that point we were like ‘OK, it seems like we got something here.’ Why don’t we try to institutionalize the culture and make sure that that doesn’t break. So we hired one of our old professors from MIT to do a project with us to clarify the culture and clarify the mission. Then we tried to institutionalize it in the company. When we do the annual reviews of our employees, the culture is part of that review. There are 7 points in our culture and we grade them. It has become a great part of who we are. I wrote an article about our culture that has been very popular on the Internet. It is called Start up Culture Lessons from Mad Men.”

Don’t try to do it all yourself

“[If you’re starting a business, the] first thing I would find is a great co-founder. It is lonely at the top. Don’t find just any co-founder. A mistake that so many entrepreneurs make is that they find co-founders just like themselves. When you look at the special stars of the early successful teams, like Jobs and Wozniak, there are usually two people with someone who can actually build something and someone who can actually sell something. So my advice would be to find a great co-founder who would compliment you and, very early on, figure out the equity split and figure out the roles, because so many companies die because of a founder conflict.”

Be open-minded about your idea

“Another piece of advice I would give to a founder is to be very open-minded about your idea.  There is a great book called Founders at Work, written by a journalist on the west coast [Jessica Livingston]. She interviewed about 100 entrepreneurs that were successful and I would say that 90% of the entrepreneurs started out with plan A and ended up making money on plan B or C. It took them a while to meander to the idea, so don’t get too stuck on your original idea. Be very flexible and take a while to meander your way to the right idea. The third piece of advice is not to raise venture capital too early. Make sure, if you are going to do venture capital, that your incentives are in line with the VC and that you really want to swing for the fences. Once you are backed by venture capital you are committed down this path. One you become venture backed, you are committed to trying to hit a home run, and you can’t go back to being conservative.”

1. It’s Not About the Pizza

Marketers long-trained to push out messaging, often look at social media as a new channel to tell their story. A few minutes with DeLeon and they will realize the folly of this approach. In fact, I spent 40 minutes on the phone with DeLeon talking through his social media success stories before the quality of his pizza even came up. The truth is that when it comes to social media, it is simply not about the pizza. “My focus has always been on the consumer,” noted DeLeon. “Out of ten tweets, maybe only one will mention our product.”

2. It’s About Connecting with the Customer

Most companies pay lip service to customer service, hiding behind phone trees and avoiding intimate interactions. DeLeon, on the other hand, has been on a first name basis with his customers ever since his days delivering pizza. Explained DeLeon, “My whole thing is the connection with the customer—how can I help you?” Starting first with Instant Messaging then Facebook in the mid-90’s, DeLeon established tight bonds with the local college kids so much so that when they graduated, those students brought Domino’s with them into their new companies.

3. Make Deposits in the “Good Will” Bank

Many CEO’s ask their marketing head’s to focus on “things that deliver immediate ROI,” often at the expense of relationship building. DeLeon likens marketing to dating, noting that he “always includes customers in marketing pieces to give some love back after spending [their] hard earned dollars and to create very strong bonds.” These bonds were money in the bank when Domino’s faced it’s YouTube video crisis in 2009. Noted DeLeon, “because of the relationships we had with customers they had our back, so they still would order and support in confidence.”

4. Fight Social Media Fire with Social Media Water

When two young Domino’s employees in North Carolina posted a video of them cooking a pizza with cheese they’d put up their nose, Domino’s Corporate and the local franchise were both caught completely off guard. Not so DeLeon. He immediately created his own video, noting how horrific the other one was, and then follow up with anyone in Chicago who commented online about the offending video. Local bloggers and tweeters responded favorably to his outreach, acknowledging that DeLeon had been “part of the social media scene forever” and would “never let such a thing happen in his stores.” Remarkably, DeLeon’s store sales actually rose during this period while nationally Domino’s took a hit and the local NC franchise ultimately went out of business.

5. Learn To Apologize (Really Well)

Admitting a mistake often comes hard to corporate America. DeLeon, on the other hand, has turned apologizing into a PR-generating, customer-satisfying art form. When a well-known local blogger had a problem with a delivery and wrote about, DeLeon responded with an amazingly heartfelt video apology they he posted on his YouTube and Facebook pages. In the video he and his shamefaced manager invited the blogger into the store to “make things right.” DeLeon’s apology video has been watched over 125,000 times and is regularly showcased in speeches by marketing gurus Seth Godin and Jeanne Bliss.

6. Don’t Get Bogged Down by Trying to Measure Everything

Much to the chagrin of marketers, not every effort, online or otherwise, can be tied to sales. DeLeon believes that “sometimes there are too many metrics,” adding, “how much do you love your wife?” As an example, DeLeon points to a poster program in his stores that invites customers to take pictures of themselves in front of a Domino’s poster and share them with friends. “I’m not telling them to tag these or anything—just share them with your world,” noted DeLeon, who praises the program as generating good will and giving his customers something to do while they wait for their pizzas.

7. Make Each Program Your Own

Geo-based social networks like Foursquare are just emerging as powerful tools for local retailers. Not surprisingly, DeLeon was one of the first retailers to try Foursquare in Chicago, but did not settle for the norm of giving something free to the people who checked-in most at each of his stores. Instead, DeLeon challenged his “mayors” to take responsibility like a real mayor; “to do whatever [they] think [they] gotta do to keep me in business!” By putting the onus on his best customers to “represent” his stores and rewarding them by allowing them to give free pizzas to whomever they chose, DeLeon tightened his relationships and made the program his own.

8. Have Fun and Keep it Real

Fun is not a word that is heard a lot of outside of start-ups. Ramon DeLeon evaluates his own success with two questions, “am I having fun?” and “are our sales and profitability up?” The fun part for DeLeon is a constant, since he clearly loves connecting with people, whether he is on stage, behind a counter, on Facebook/Twitter/Foursquare or in his homemade video shout-outs. Regardless of the channel, DeLeon tries to be the same person and advises all others to take this approach. Concluded DeLeon, “there are real people behind these tweets and I just want to have fun with them.”

Final Note: While DeLeon could not offer actual sales figures, he noted with pride that sales growth in his stores over the last 18-months has significantly out-performed both the Chicago market and national average for Domino’s stores.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.