This is the core driving value of 24PageBooks: Our time is too valuable to waste with filler.

BTW, if you’re not familiar with HARO, check it out. He is reinventing the PR business. And watch for an upcoming 24 book called Fire Your PR Agency: Required Reading For PR Professionals.

A prominent college professor interrupts one of his doctoral students three times during his first major presentation at a prestigious conference, effectively bullying him in public. The professor’s behavior makes many participants angry and/or uncomfortable.

Prior to social media this professor, who is a leading expert in his field, might have pissed some people off but it would probably not have affected his overall professional reputation. This time, however, those angry observers are Twittering their anger in real time. Bloggers who cover his subject matter Retweet and Post about the incident. Others who have been the subjects of this person’s arrogant behavior recount their experiences and the word spreads.

This is where it gets interesting. All of this chatter is on the ‘permanent, public record’, and it is searchable forever. Anyone considering working with this guy is going to Google him and get a sense that he has a reputation for being a cretin. His true reputation is revealed.

This is a true story. The individual, who was a Director of a prominent program in his field, was recently asked to step down. I doubt he has any idea why his reputation has suffered.

Back to marketing. Your brand can be that individual. If there are problems with your product or the way you treat your customers, your brand reputation will be tarnished permanently (unless you address those problems meaningfully and in as close to real time as possible).

Note three things implied in that last paragraph:

• Marketing no longer controls the message
• Product development and quality are integral to marketing (reputation)
  
• Customer experience is integral to marketing (reputation)
  

In social media product development, customer service and communication are inextricably bound up with each other. Companies should no longer run these as separate business functions. The only way to ensure that your brand reputation is respected is to be holistic about every aspect of the public response to your brand and products.

Forget everything you know about marketing

As a marketer this means that everything you know from the past is bullshit. Advertising, publicity, brand promotion, logos, graphic design, copywriting, hype, market research (the directed kind), everything. There are no logos in social media. No one really cares what a blog looks like as long as the info is interesting. Those people who fill their Twitter page backgrounds with pitches and links don’t get followed by me. Facebook is entirely about conversation, even photos and games are designed to encourage comment streams.

Marketing was a guessing game

Am I being glib with the ‘bullshit’ distinction? No, because its true- we never really knew ahead of time what marketing strategies and tactics would actually work. This was always the not very well-hidden ’secret’ of marketing: Marketers, in spite of all their creativity, focus groups, panels and strategic brand management, never actually know why some things work and others don’t. Until now.

The market tells us what to make and how to improve it, so listen up. Go beta.

To be a conversational marketer you have to be a part of the conversation, a participant. That means you start on the sidelines and listen to learn what others want, need, wish for and dislike. Then you go back to our company or client and you tell them so they can make those products. In the meantime you identify influencers and you share beta prototypes with them, emphasizing that these are beta because they still require the market to test them, to kick the tires, break the interface, find the bugs and suggest changes. Google, for example, excels at the beta release model, in fact they don’t take most products out of beta- they continuously improve based on input and how customers use the products.

Transparency is your only choice

During this stage you enter the conversation, making it totally clear that you are on the product team, and you convey the input back to your design team and your customer experience team. You also set them up to start listening and conversing. That’s the entire conversational marketing model.
No ads. No logo or branding. A simple name that’s memorable. No radio, TV, outdoor or banners. No girls in bikinis handing out freebies to drunken idiots.

Are we really abandoning creative? No, we’re substituting discipline.

Can you do videos and white papers? You can do anything you want as long as it adds to the conversation in a positive manner. If an ad gets you talking about the product with others then it may be valuable. However, that ad must have been conceived within the context of an existing conversation. Here’s an example:
Apple is running an iPhone ad on the back cover of New Yorker. It targets small business users and consists of an interface shot with application icons. There are call-outs to each icon that feature a quick description of the app and its small business value. I read the entire ad because I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with friends about using an iPhone to run my business from any location. Apple knows that conversation is going on and they made that ad specifically for me (and the thousands of mes out there participating in that conversation). It is a highly targeted, value-adding ad that supports the conversation.

I’d suggest that anyone in the marketing business think this through. It is not a change you have any control over. You can’t slow it down or influence it. You can learn from it and enhance it.
Join the conversation.

There is a seismic change going on in the way companies communicate with their customers and prospects. In the traditional model there are three company departments that communicate with their market, typically in a silo-ed manner:

• Product Development. Through research, including panels and focus groups, savvy product developers try out concepts with users, receiving feedback on usability, features, appearance, etc. Unfortunately this feedback is not truly unbiased because there is a selection process associated with these situations.
• Marketing. Marketing traditionally pushes out complimentary brand and product messaging, in part based on research and demographics and in part based on ‘creativity’. We market at people, not for people. Today we’re marketing with people.
• Customer Service. Customer service is viewed as problem-solving, the primary problem often being viewed as the customers themselves. The product may be imperfect but the customer caller is someone to be avoided through phone trees, referrals to automated help systems, etc.

Social media unites research, communication and service

With the advent of social media, all of these functions need to be reevaluated to the point where I’d argue that all should be eliminated in favor of a Customer Interface Department. The Customer Interface Department would be the central point in the company dedicated to understanding what customers want, what they feel about the company and the products, and how the company responds to those needs. A department that champions the customer.

Social media means businesses have ceded control to the market

There is little separation among these functions when you have access to monumental global conversations about your products and services, conversations that are unguided and honest. Being able to understand these conversations changes market research, communications and problem-solving. The social media eco-system provides all of these functions as people review, question, complain, compliment, tear apart, suggest and spread the word about products they are interested in. The company that understands this understands that they must fundamentally change the way they interact with this system.

Your choice is to respond and change now or later; but you will be changing

This is not a voluntary change in the way businesses are structured. It is the way things will work going forward. Start with this premise: Your products and service must be the best on the market or have a considerable price advantage that outweighs their defects. Given that nearly any product eventually becomes commoditized in a global digital marketplace, the former is your only competitive option.

Only best in class products and service, combined with honest engagement will make it

You cannot pay lip service to being the best, you must actually be the best. Why? Because anyone considering a purchase, whether it’s a high-end server or an electric toothbrush is going to go online and ask others what they think. The detailed responses they find will determine their buying position. And the entire decision process including their experiences interacting with your company and your people will be public and globally accessible via search.

How does social media affect us? Where do I start?

Are you wondering ow this affects your business?

How your culture is going to adjust to drastically changing internal and external relationships?

The first step is o take a look at where you are vs. where you will be.

If you’d like to have a conversation about how social media will impact your business in the near future, give me a shout at MartinEdic.com