Participatory communication

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

It’s time to break the broadcast habit

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The habit of communicating via broadcast is hard to break. Even as some companies embrace the ethos of social media, they employ broadcast models in their efforts to participate in it. Facebook apps, for example, are a means of injecting a message into a medium used primarily for conversation. There’s nothing wrong with that; in fact, a study from the American Marketing Association suggests a lot of people like ads and apps in social networks: 47% of social network users would use their network to download coupons and 45% would be happy to get information about store promotions.

But getting a message in front of people in a manner that appeals to them isn’t the same as participating in the conversation. And even when companies do participate, a lot of that participation is forced even if it is sincere. Blogger outreach campaigns, for example, broadcast invitations to carefully selected bloggers in the hopes that they’ll help create buzz, get people talking. Again, that’s fine, and there are plenty of case studies that show blogger outreach can be done right.

Jonathan Crow’s experiment

Jonathan Crow’s experiment in driving messages through social media got me thinking about these things. Crow joined one social network after another, rapidly populating them with contacts, then tried to push out three messages through those networks. First, he wanted to identify a case study to include in a magazine interview. Second, he wanted to distribute a press release along with some blog posts. Finally, he wanted to establish some connections in Latin America in hopes of driving some business.

The results, Crow reports, were not encouraging. The first two, he says, “were unqualified failures.” He did make some Latin American contacts, thanks to the more influential members of the circles he had joined.

Crow has assembled a panel of communicators to evaluate five aspects of his experiment. Their commentary makes for good reading.

I’m not surprised that Crow’s experiment mostly failed. The whole basis of the experiment was broadcasting to an audience of contacts through the networks to which they belonged. Meanwhile, the members of those various networks aren’t engaged in a lot of individual broadcasting. They’re engaged with one another in an ongoing relationship. How much better would Crow’s results have been had he been a long-standing member of the community sharing things that interested him rather than an online Johnny Appleseed, dropping by every network he could find to try planting seeds?

Influence through example

While organizations do need to convey messages, broadcast is becoming a less and less effective way to get them across. Influence happens in conversations these days. Organizations’ best chance to ensure messages are consistent and understandable is through engagement. Albert Schweitzer wrote, “Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.” A more organic business approach to participating with customers and others online affords companies the opportunity to influence through example.

Here’s what I mean: About a year ago I posted an item to my travel blog about Park ‘N Fly, the off-airport parking service I patronize. I was not a happy guy, left standing at the curb after midnight waiting nearly an hour for a shuttle that was supposed to pick me up within five minutes of calling. The first comment to the post was from Caryn Healy, who works in sales and marketing at Park ‘N Fly. She apologized, insisted that the company was working hard to get its customer service act together, offered some free parking coupons and asked for a second chance. The comment was sincere; it was a real person talking with me. When I talk about Park ‘N Fly these days, I talk about Caryn, not my hour in the cold. And if Caryn happened to reach out to me now with information about new customer service initiatives, I’d be very receptive to them—far more so than if she cold-friended me on Facebook, the hit me with a press release.

Another example: Years ago, Adobe employed a group of tech support specialists whose job was to troll forums and message boards looking for people having problems with their Adobe products, then jump in with the solution. (I don’t know if the group still exists, but I can hope.)

The big mindshift

Still, even among most of the companies involved in social media through blogs and other networks, broadcast prevails. At Southwest Airlines, for example—a company with a very good blog, an apparent solid understanding of social media, and employees who are passionate about their employer—employee access to YouTube is blocked. That prevents employees from (among other things) commenting on videos about air travel. (A search of “Southwest Airlines” turns up 728 videos.) That’s a wasted opportunity.

This doesn’t mean companies should just turn employees loose. In fact, it means there is a critical new role for employee communications professionals to play. Internal communicators need to…

• Help employees understand the scope and nature of the social media space and the kind of impact their participation can have
• Ensure employees have access to information and resources that help them share accurate information in their posts and comments
• Clarify the organization’s positions and priorities
• Keep employees up to speed on news and issues people outside the company may be interested in or talk about

While it’s impossible to control conversations employees are engaged in, their authentic participation is what customers and others are looking for and ultimately will have a greater impact than the broadcast approach at the heart of Crow’s experiment. Organizations are made up of people and it is people who are exchanging information and ideas online. The organizations that succeed in social networks will be those that view themselves as participants, not interlopers. It’s a significant mindshift for organizations, requiring them to trust their employees and encourage access to social networks rather than block it. Even those companies not ready for that leap need to encourage those who do represent the company online to do less distribution of information in favor of dialogue. Those organizations that make the shift while still applying traditional communication models that still work, however, will be poised to win.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Customer reviews make a difference

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It was a big deal when Wal*Mart announced that all of its products would be open to customer reviews on the big-box retailer’s website. While customer reviews have long been a staple of companies like Amazon.com, Wal*Mart’s adoption of the practice signalled that online customer reviews was going mainstream.

Reserach released recently (and found via eMarketer) suggests it’s a smart move in more ways than one. The “Social Commerce 2007” study, conducted by e-consultancy and Bazaarvoice, reveals that customer reviews increases everything from site traffic to sales.

Some results from survey respondents when asked about the impact of customer-generated ratings and reviews:

• 56% said conversions increased
• 77% said site traffic increased
• 42% said the average value of an order increased
• 73% said customer retention and loyalty increased
• 59% said search engine optimization was improved

About a third of the study’s participants expressed concern about negative reviews, the biggest obstacle to greater adoption of the practice. “But retailers are finding that they can improve conversion rates, drive sales and increase customer satisfaction even if customers aren’t necessarily singing their praises all the time,” according to Linus Gregoriadis, E-consultancy’s head of research.

Another survey—last year’s MPlanet study from the American Marketing Association—indicates that consumers rely on reviews mostly for more complicated products. MPlanet also noted that the reviews are taken to heart mostly for high-priced products and consumer electronics.

Have you noticed yourself being influenced more by products accompanied by customer reviews?

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Lessig asks his readers to respond to NYT editorial

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Author Mark Helprin, writing in The New York Times, has proposed a ”perpetual copyright.” His argument revolves around the notion that other properties, like buildings, can be owned forever. Why not intellectual works?

For me, the answer is easy, as articulated by the Constitutional Law Foundation:

Patents and copyrights are grants to the holder, by the state, of monopoly powers, for a specific period of time, for a specific reason. The goal is to provide incentive for invention and art. The balancing concern is that one can stifle endeavor, raise the price of entry to enterprise, or lock away the ‘building blocks’ of science, art and innovation.

Stanford University Constitutional Law Professor Lawrence Lessig—the force behind Creative Commons—has been deluged with demands that he craft a reply. Lessig, after all, is the lawyer who argued against extending copyright before the Supreme Court and the popular hero of the public domain movement. But Lessig thinks there’s someone better positioned to write the response: us.

...why don’t you write the reply instead? Here’s a page on wiki.lessig.org. Please write an argument that puts this argument in its proper place.

Despite a concern posted to the comments of Lessig’s post that his readers don’t have the clout that would lead the Times to publish the response, Lessig’s readers have taken him up on the challenge. The wiki page already hosts several arguments; there are more in the comments section. I like this approach to tapping into the wisdom of crowds. Lessig hasn’t indicated what he plans to do with the results, but he certainly has options. He can synthesize it, add his own insights to it, and send it to the Times under the byline, “Lawrence Lessig and his readers.”

Now, if only companies would turn to their employees in the same way. Imagine an activist group launching an attack on your company, to which the CEO responds by asking employees to articulate their arguments against the group’s point of view. “I"ve opened a page on my CEO wiki. Please write an argument that puts our opponent’s argument in its proper place.”

The day may be coming. Reading through the contributions of Lessig’s readers makes it clear that there’s a lot of sound thinking out there. There’s no reason companies can’t benefit from the collective knowledge of their employees the way Lessig is from the collective intelligence of his readers.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Nothing changes everything

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I am overly tired of the “X is dead” redundancy. I understand the enthusiasm with which those who spout “X is dead” embrace what they believe in, but communication channels rarely die because of the advent of something new, even when that new thing represents a revolutionary, paradigm-changing development. Print didn’t replace face-to-face communication, after all, and television didn’t kill radio.

I’ll bet the first person to leave a comment who’s willing to take the bet $100 (US) that I’ll be able to buy a newspaper in 10 years. (We’ll exchange contact details and I promise to get in touch in a decade.) The newspaper I’m able to buy in 2017 won’t seem a lot like the newspapers we read today. It will be filled more with local content, columns, features and analysis. It will contain longer content. It’ll be smaller, exist in a market of few newspapers, and people will buy fewer of them. But dead? Not a chance.

The notion that young people aren’t reading newspapers and that attrition will spell their doom is equally silly. I read a study not too long ago that suggested kids are reading newspapers in communities where the newspapers are publishing content about (can you feel it coming?) kids. What a shock: Kids will read newspapers if they contain material that’s interesting to them and unavailable elsewhere. Kids are not inherently opposed to print. My daughter, Princess of Digital, still wants me to go with her to Borders so she can buy a (gasp) book. That’s right, she wants to read novels in book form, paper and ink and everything. Ketchum’s recent media usage study (PDF file) confirms that plenty of young people are reading newspapers.

Other things that are “dead,” according to a variety of people:

• Intranets, because all you need are employee blogs. But I wouldn’t want to use employee blogs to enroll in my benefits or find the company policy on maternity leave.
• Terrestrial radio, because podcasting and satellite radio will kill it. As long as it’s free and comes with your car, terrestrial radio will stick around. Besides, commercial radio is better in some places (like the UK) than it is in the US, where we tend to make sweeping claims based on the way things are here as though the rest of the world doesn’t exist.
• Company websites, because of RSS feeds and widgets.

All the “X is dead because of social media” memes stand in stark contrast to the “social media is dead” refrain being sung in some quarters. One blog suggests that the death threat leveled against Kathy Sierra and the ensuing blogstorm is proof of social media’s failure. The argument goes like this: Open the door to widespread conversation and inevitably the worst in people will find its way into the mix.

Of course, there’s nothing remotely new in the notion that some people are jerks and they will be jerks online with even greater vigor than off—especially when they can exercise their jerkiness from behind the mask of anonymity, as did the pond scum who threatened Kathy Sierra. Such behavior has been on display online since the days of UseNet, which goes back to 1979. Why this spells the end of social media, though, is a conclusion that I just cannot understand.

Social media itself is not new. UseNet is 28 years old. FidoNet was started 23 years ago. Nothing was more popular at America Online than its chat rooms and message boards. Consumer opinion sites like Epinions flourish. Consumer-written reviews on retail sites like Amazon.com and iTunes influence purchases.

The only thing that has changed in this era of Social Media is that barriers to entry have been obliterated making it easier for more people to participate. Posting to a Usenet discussion or creating a website used to be complex enough that these resources were accessible only to the very geeky and the very determined. Now, two minutes at blogger.com and anybody can have a website where they can engage in one of the most ancient of human behaviors: being heard.

When you think about it, paintings on cave walls were the earliest form of blogging, an effort by an individual to say, “Here’s what I did today,” a pre-language journal entry. Blogs simply amplify the content, making it available to a larger audience and enabling what we call a “conversation” to ensue about it.

Wikis make it easy for groups to come together around themes of common interest while social networks let people who otherwise would never meet one another gather in social groups. Forming communities is another ancient human endeavor.

The barriers to audio and video production and distribution have also crumbled; individuals are exercising their creativity uploading videos to video sharing sites and producing podcasts as yet more channels for personal expression.

As the technology enables more and more people to be heard—even if only by a few others—influence will increasingly transition to this venue, propelled by concurrent but unrelated shifts in trust. According to multiple studies, people increasingly believe that someone like them is the most credible source for some kinds of information.

The “social media doesn’t work” crowd echoes the sentiments of Andrew Keen, whose book “The Cult of the Amateur” rejects the ideas of community and conversation. In an interview, Keen said:

...the blogosphere has no formal editorial checks or balances and is thus structurally corrupt and corrupting. After reading my book, I doubt that any chief marketing officer of a large corporation will have the confidence to let go of their brand and allow any anonymous Internet user to corrupt it.

Keen clearly knows little about marketing or brands, since no company has ever owned its brand. They own their marks, but “brand” is defined as the way a consumer feels or what he or she thinks when he or she sees your mark or your product. Those perceptions are based upon personal experience. Think the pet food companies own the brands of their tainted product? Think again.

But aside from Keen’s ignorance of marketing’s glossary, his point is an exercise in denial. No CMO can prevent anonymous (not to mention clearly identified) Internet users from discussing their brands. In an era where more and more people are rejecting interruptive, push marketing (think DVR’s and the ability to fast-forward through commercials and commercial-free satellite radio as just two examples), CMOs who want their messages to get through had better consider participation and engagement.

CMOs don’t have to like this; it makes their efforts messy and complicated. But denying it does no good, either. To limit an organization’s communications to interruptive, one-way, top-down channels when influence is being wielded in social networks is, well, pointless.

Which is not to say that CMOs should abandon traditional marketing. People do still watch 30-second spots (I’m a big fan of the Geico ad campaign) and read newspapers (still the most trusted source of information about things that are important to people. What CMOs (and other communicators) need to understand is that social media—which is here to stay in one form or another—has been added to the mix and cannot be ignored, as much as Keen and the other pitchfork-wielding reactionaries wish it could. They also need to look at new forms of marketing that have nothing to do wish social media but focus more on brand experience.

So. Those who think newspapers are dead are wrong. Those who think social media is dead are equally wrong. And when I hear people flogging the “x is dead” theme, it’s the insistence that it’s an either-or world that ultimately cheeses me off. It has never been an “either-or” world. It’s an “and” world. Organizations that recognize this will perform better than those that do not.

Nothing changes everything.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Dell channels Digg to enter the world of co-creation

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I have to confess that I’ve had my doubts about Digg. I love the idea of people voting on the most interesting and important stories to determine their rank, but just, who are these one-percenters who submit items and ten-percenters who vote on them? And who reads Digg at all? Certainly it’s a tiny minority of the online population, not like the readership of Wikipedia voting on the most interesting encyclopedia entries. And there has been enough chatter about people being paid to submit articles to throw Digg’s value further into doubt.

But the idea rocks, and now Dell Computers has done something with it that makes sense. Lionel Menchaca, Dell’s digital media manager, gave me early notice on Friday that Dell’s IdeaStorm was set to launch, but I was just too flat-out busy to blog it. It has since gone live and several blogs have covered it, but I still want to weigh in with a few thoughts. (Lionel blogged the launch on Direct2Dell, by the way.)

The idea behind IdeaStorm is a sort of mashup between Digg and a message board. Anyone (including employees) can submit ideas to share with Dell, from product and feature requests to changes in policies. People who visit the site then vote on the ideas, creating a ranking of the most popular ideas. visitors can also comment on each idea. This represents a masterful way to extend a conversation with your publics—at least, it’ll be masterful if we see Dell adopt some of the most popular ideas.

Over on his blog, Jeremiah Owyang suggests IdeaStorm “nods to Johnathan Schwartz’s mantra that ‘intranets are anachronisms.’ The site, Jeremiah contends, puts the company and its customers in a real-time feedback loop that should speed product development. That’s true, but I don’t think it spells the end for intranets. I still don’t see how I could use it to enroll in my benefits, conduct a performance evaluation, check the cafeteria menu, find the contact information of an employee in Bangkok or check the company’s maternity leave policy. But it certainly could represent a new communication paradigm for company/customer relations (and I don’t employ the overused word paradigm lightly).

The utility of something like IdeaStorm has applications in just about every industry and business. Consider these off-the-top-of-my-head ideas, for example:

• General Motors’ Fastlane blog is, according to Vice Chairman and principal blogger Bob Lutz, a means of obtaining unfiltered feedback from the most passionate of auto enthusiasts. Lutz says the intelligence gained from the blog is informing product decisions. Imagine the kind of product feedback Lutz could get from something like IdeaStorm.
• Among other uses, a company like Baskin Robbins or Ben & Jerry’s could collaborate with customers to identify new ice cream flavors.
• Airlines could let passengers contribute posts about the most important attributes of service while flying, helping companies like United decide that maybe, just maybe, a snack is important enough to be a deciding factor in which airline to fly.
• Employees (using an intranet) could submit and vote on the most important elements of a benefits package, helping the company tailor a package that meets employee needs, attracts new employees, but also holds the line on benefits costs.

The reason the IdeaStorm concept is so potent is because the audience it attracts—unlike Digg—could represent a significant portion (maybe even a majority) of a company’s customers or other constituency. By way of example, the top post at IdeaStorm right now, which suggests free installation of the top three Linux versions on all Dell PCs, has received 15,603 votes. In the meantime, the story with the most votes on Digg’s home page, about the announced merger of XM and Sirius Radio, has garnered 772 votes.

If you had the opportunity to tell a company that matters to you what it should be doing better—and then see how other customers feel about your idea—wouldn’t you? And wouldn’t you vote on an idea you loved if it meant better products or service from a company you rely on?

Much of the blogosphere is focusing on the notion IdeaStorm represents simple copy-catting, but, like Jeremiah, I think they’re missing the point. From where I sit, Dell is adapting, not copying, an idea to business that could alter both customer perceptions of the organizaton and the way it designs and develops products. While overtly recognizing Digg for the inspiration, Dell is also entering into co-creation in its purest form.

Incidentally, oncurrent with the launch of IdeaStorm, Dell opened StudioDell, which in addition to offering Dell-produced videos allows customers to upload their video testimonials. You can also download and share videos from the site. It’s a kind of Dell-specific YouTube.

Update: Constantin Basturea points out that Dell’s IdeaStorm uses CrispyNews as its back-end. Says Constantin, “The URL (which redirects to dellideastorm.com) is dell.crispynews.com." That’s the same service that Constanin uses for the PR ranking service you can see by clicking “Add to New PR” above each of this blog’s entries.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

My BlogTalk Radio appearance: 6 p.m. PST

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Scott Baradell, the communicaitons pro behind the Media Orchard blog, will interview me on BlogTalkRadio this evening, 6 p.m. PST, 9 p.m. EST, 2 a.m. GMT (I don’t think Neville will be listening in).

This isn’t a podcast, mind you; it’s live and listeners can call in and ask questions. (Sounds a lot like radio, doesn’t it?) Details on how to participate and call in are here. If you’re around, listen in and give me a call!

Monday, January 15, 2007

Southwest wants my photos

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As a frequenty Southwest flyer, I was among those receiving an email today announcing the redesign of the airlines’ home page. The email touted the focus on the kinds of resources and tools we, the customers, need most often, and I have to admit, it is a huge improvement. But what struck me was this:

And that’s not all! To show our personality, the new home page will feature photos taken by you, our Customers. We love bringing Customers the Freedom to Fly, and we thought it would be fun to share photos of where that Freedom has taken you. Stay tuned to find out how your photographs can be submitted in the future for publication at southwest.com.

I’m guessing these photos will appear where the image of a Southwest 737 wing is displayed now. If so, that’s a nifty way to give customers some ownership of the website. This on top of the consumer-generated media contest that has customers creating “Wanna Get Away?” commercials. More good work from one of my favorite airlines.