Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Guest post by Ian Greenleigh, author of The Social Media Side Door (Fall 2013) and social strategist with Bazaarvoice. Follow him on Twitter @be3d

Products were once contained by physical ownership and access. To experience a product, you had to buy it or try it. Brands extended beyond the idea of physical products into other types of consumer exposure to companies. Non-customers have always had access to brands outside of the ownership capacity, through advertising, word of mouth, and any other manifestation of a company that didn’t require ownership of their product. But this brand experience lacked depth—you may have seen an ad for something, but without having consumed it as a product, it would be hard to argue that you really experienced it in any meaningful way.

The web and social punched a million holes through this idea. Experience has streamed through these holes and spilled out beyond physical ownership and captive audiences. People want to experience products and brands on their terms, in new ways, and meaningful experiences aren’t reliant anymore on that historically necessary condition: product ownership. Relationships between people and brands have gone from binary and transactional to complex, with a kind of depth once reserved for human relationships. Exhibit A of this shift is the Millennial generation, for which brand preference is the top online personal identifier—more important, in this respect, than religion and ethnicity.

We’re seeing a convergence of identities, brands, and products, and a decentralization and diffusion of the brand experience. It’s everywhere. Consumers watch unboxing videos of other people opening things. They listen to total strangers who know a lot, instead of just their friends and family, who may not. They stand in line for hours to get things first. They use brick-and-mortar stores as their personal showrooms, whether the retailers like it or not. They customize their shoes (and even their candy) online. In all these ways and more, they are interacting with products and brands without—or before—physically owning them, and often, without having paid a penny.

Many brands have embraced this to varying degrees. Consumers, they have realized, are their best marketers. They are the people best equipped to transmit the brand experience to other consumers so that it resonates, instead of being ignored, distrusted, and forgotten. These brands have taken steps to create more things worth experiencing and sharing. They move at the speed of social (or as close as they can get to it), putting out videos, tweeting, blogging, updating their Facebook pages more than a few times a day. Consumers are rewarding the good stuff by passing it along, and in doing so, they pass bits of the brand along with it. Companies and consumers are talking to each other beyond the call centers and points of sale for the first time in history. Real, authentic one-to-one and one-to-many communication is making relationships less transactional, and more like real relationships.

Suddenly, an idea that had applied mostly to commodities and luxury items applies to everyone. That idea? The experience you build around your product is often more important than the physical product itself. People are increasingly buying physical things due to the experiences they associate with them because the experiences that surround—but aren’t contingent on—product ownership are more frequent, accessible, and fulfilling. Consumers can get value, for example, out of reading Kate Spade’s excellent Behind the Curtain blog whether or not they’re shopping for or own any Kate Spade handbags.

Physical ownership no longer has a monopoly on meaningful experience. It’s an extension of that experience, the highest and best version of a brand. The act of purchase is being transformed from one of the only ways to access a product or meaningful brand experience, to the step consumers take to unlock the full or best experience.

Every brand is now in the experience business.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

For years I’ve written about how the 4 Ps of Marketing, Product, Place, Pricing, and Promotion represented a dated perspective of customers and markets. In an era of connected consumerism, one could argue the merits of any of “Ps” and whether or not they’re still relevant. I suppose that’s a debate for another time. Instead, I’d like to introduce of two additional Ps that will propel a decades old concept and modernize it for a social economy.

Truth be told, there are many words that can find their way into this discussion. I’m sure we can find words that begin with the same consonant. But we now live in an era where customers are more connected, informed, and empowered, and as a result, their expectations amplify and modify. To adapt, new pillars are needed whether or not they start with the letter P. Rather than run through the dictionary, I would like to share two words that I believe are more important than ever before—people and purpose.

For those who’ve followed my work over the last decade, you’ll note that I’ve often referred to “people” as the “5th P of Marketing.” It wasn’t until recently however that I finally put all of the pieces together to consider a 6th P, in this case adding “Purpose” to the mix.

While on stage at the Pivot Conference, I had an opportunity to interview Leslie Gaines-Ross, Chief Reputation Strategist at Weber Shandwick, about the real world risks and opportunities of reputation warfare in a digital age. Somewhere in the middle of the conversation people and purpose emerged as key pillars to help businesses rally teams and build communities around common interests. The importance of purpose resonated with me. I’d always pushed leaders to consider purpose as they pursued innovation, transformation and inspiration. It didn’t dawn on me until that moment however that its place amongst the other P’s was in fact overdue.

In a social economy, it’s practically absurd that this requires explanation. People should be or should have been at the center of everything. It’s been argued though that people are already at the core of each of the existing 4 P’s. But I disagree.

If we measure actions rather than intentions, it’s easy to overlook the importance of people in the mix. See, for the most part people are largely lumped into market segments, spoken to as audiences, and serviced as tickets. Honestly, we can do better. We must do better.

Understanding the needs and expectations of people inspires an important element often missing in day-to-day business strategy…empathy. It is empathy after all that unlocks ambition to do something that goes beyond the ordinary. It offers clarity to help see beyond routine roadmaps and reports. Empathy also channels aspiration to help teams strive to always do better. The result? Businesses will possess the means to develop more meaningful products and services as well as the procure confidence and resources to truly engage customers to build thriving communities.

Once you feel, really feel what people experience and what it is they need or do not know to need, innovation follows. And this is a time for innovation as people and how they connect, discover, communicate and share, is evolving. Technology continues to influence behavior and as behavior shifts, decision-making, preferences, expectations, and influence also progress. Understanding and appreciating people, and the individuals that make up our markets, teaches us how to in turn become more human…especially at a time when brands are becoming people and people are becoming brands.

At the end of the day, we are the very people we are trying to reach. You, me and the scores of people like us form the 5th P.

Purpose as the 6th P

When you work in the business of change, you eventually notice that regardless of the technology you adopt or the trends you pursue, one of the key things that’s often missing is a sense of direction or aspiration. I’m not referring to a common vision or mission statement though. Actions for the most part speak louder than words. Here, motive, objective, and resolve are paramount and they’re manifested in the leadership and its decrees to bring about real change.

I spend my time in the throes of digital transformation and as you can imagine, there’s a great deal of politics, emotion, and anxiety at work. In many cases, efforts to lead change are done so in the absence of bearing or alignment. Steps are taken simply because that’s what is supposed to happen not because a course was defined. As such, existing processes, philosophies and communications channels sometimes work against the quest to pursue the 5th and 6th P. In order to unite teams and decision makers around a common vision, that vision must be defined and it must resonate.

I’ve done my fair share of developing business transformation initiatives and seeing them through for longer than I care to count. Part of that work involves helping executives visualize and vocalize the future of customer engagement and experiences and translate this new direction as a matter of purpose. It’s imperative that this edict and the mission come from the top. For without it, change is stunted. It’s at this very point where I often see the difference between management and leadership rear its true colors. The reality is that not every executive is a leader. But like empathy, leadership is also a fundamental pillar in articulating a vision for transformation. Someone must rise to the occasion.

It’s not easy of course. It takes courage to see what others can’t and do what others cannot or won’t. You’re setting out to shock and reshape your company’s culture and to do so takes leadership, vision, and alignment to bring about sustainable change.

Start by asking and answering a few important questions:

1. What does are business stand for and what does it mean to a shifting consumer landscape now and five or ten years from now?

2. How does evolution in customer behavior and expectations affect our current business priorities and investments?

3. What are the challenges that hold back the organization from pursuing our existing and emerging goals?

4. What initiatives are underway within the organization that we can plug into, align, or reassign to pursue transformation?

5. What does the future of exemplary relationships with people (employees and customers) look like and what it is we want them to do, feel, share, and love about us?

I often think about a conversation that I had one night with good friend Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. When I asked him about his inspiration for “delivering happiness” to customers, he turned and in a calm but assertive voice explained, “Companies that focused on customers and on a higher purpose outperformed those that focused on market leadership and profitability in the long run.”

I then asked him about the importance of vision and creating a supportive culture as he set out to deliver happiness. “Your culture is your brand. Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company,” Hsieh revealed. He then shared the importance of unity in bringing about change and marching collectively in a new direction, “Customer service is about making customers happy, company culture is about making employees happy, so let’s just simplify it and at the same time, amplify our vision for our customers, employees, vendors, and peers.”

Whether or not you agree that People and Purpose officially earn a place among the traditional set of Ps is certainly open to discussion. But the impact of these two pillars in undeniable. By investing in People and Purpose, we will spark a revolution in not only business philosophy and supporting processes but more notably in the shift from a culture of management to leadership.

Part of an ongoing series dedicated to small businesses

As you read this, the business landscape is shifting right under your company’s foundation. How customers make decisions, how they discover, communicate, and share, how they influence and are influenced, is evolving considerably. In fact, customer behavior is not only changing, it’s fragmenting and opening the door to new touch points. Your business will now have to compete for the customers you know and additionally, a new breed of customers that you need to know. And, to earn their attention and ultimately their loyalty, you will need to better understand the top technology trends and how they’re impacting customer behavior.

At the heart of this customer divide is technology. But this isn’t about the technology we once knew, such as PCs, laptops, iPods, ebook readers, DVRs, etc. This change in consumerism is the inevitable result of disruptive technology and how it has affected behavior and reshaped expectations. Smart phones, social networks, apps, gamified everything, Google Glasses, self-driving cars, smart appliances, the list goes on, are placing consumers at the center of their own universe connected to one another through shared experiences. This plugged-in and always-on customers are learning to see the world differently. They’re empowered and they’re entitled. As a result, disruptive technology is grooming customers to expect information and opportunities to find them.

Everything starts with surveying the landscape for how you reach customers today and how their behavior and expectations are shifting. But this is also about the people you don’t reach now. This research will help understand how to appeal to a new type of customer as well.

If you thought that having a social media strategy and presences in the most popular social networks was enough, think again. What of adding social buttons to your website or in your email blasts? Still not enough? How about developing apps for iPhone and Android platforms? Nope. That’s not the right approach.

It takes research to truly understand how customer segmentation is materializing and how new technologies introduce opportunities to engage effectively with each group. More importantly, it takes interpretation, strategy, and a culture of innovation to recognize and prioritize these new opportunities and execute against them while windows for engagement are open.

Just like customer service, sales, and marketing, technology and your ability to translate trends into opportunities, are now part of your everyday business strategy. To what extent disruptive technology impacts your customer landscape, differs from industry to industry and it is your research that reveals where to concentrate and balance your focus and investments. To help, I’ve assembled a list of 10 current trends to evaluate . But, this is just the beginning. Use this list to build a regiment of research and innovation within your business now and over time.

10 movements to review for opportunities…

1. Social Networks from Facebook to Twitter to Google+ and how they’re connecting to influencers and businesses (note: pay attention to nicheworks as well such as Path and Instagram.)

2. Geolocation check-in services such as Foursquare and Facebook location updates to share locations and earn rewards or opportunities for discounts

3. Crowdsourced discounts and deals including Groupon and LivingSocial and what’s valued and why

4. Social commerce services like Shopkick and Armadealo and how they create personalized experiences that are worth sharing

5. Referral based solutions like Yelp, Service Magic (now HomeAdvisor), and Angie’s List to make informed decisions and how shared experiences can improve your business, products, and services

6. Gamification platforms such as Badgeville and Fangager, and why rewarding engagement improves commerce and loyalty

7. How your consumers using mobile devices today and what apps they’re installing. Also, how they’re comparing options, reviewing experiences and making decisions while mobile?

8. The online presence your business produces across a variety of platforms such as tablets, smartphones, laptops and desktops. You must realize how consumers are experiencing the online presences you create and whether or not they deliver a holistic and optimized experience for each platform.

9. The consumer clickpath based on the platform consumers are using. Are you steering experiences based on the expectations of your customers? And are you taking into consideration the device or network where the clickpath begins and ends? Are you integrating Facebook F-commerce and m-commerce into the journey?

10. The expectations of connected consumers, what they value in each channel and platform, where they engage and how your business can improve experiences and make them worthy of sharing.

What would you add?

No company is too big to fail or too small to succeed. Simply knowing your customer is one thing. The connected customers does not replace your traditional customer, they simply introduce new opportunities to grow your business. How you’re marketing, selling, and servicing customers today are in many ways missing these important customers and thus limiting your ability for engagement and growth.

Understanding how connected customers make decisions informs more meaning strategies and ultimately effective and engaging programs, products, and services. Now more than ever, the future of business isn’t created, it’s co-created.

Originally published at AT&T’s Networking Exchange Blog

Chart: Shutterstock

Alright, alright, alright, it’s Monday and time to get this week under way, whether you want to or not. I’ve got a pretty cool infographic for ya’ll today, How People Look in Google and How to Look Better. Now you may be thinking I don’t do much on the internet besides Facebook and the like, there is nothing about me on Google. Well you’d be surprised, after I Googled myself then did an internet search I found there were several links relating to me and stuff I had done that I had no idea was on the internet. None of it is bad of course, being the saint that I am, but it was interesting to find things I had done back in Middle School posted on the internet.

Lucky for me the content that appears when I Google myself is positive but that is because of a conscious effort. When it comes to Google rankings the one link you should be truly concerned about is your top hit. However only half of people own their first link on a Google search with 1 in 4 having no positive content on their first page. If you’re a professional concerned with your image Linkedin is your best friend. It ranks highest in Google so you can provide that clean innocent image using that guy. Be careful with things like Youtube and Vimeo, even though Youtube is more popular Vimeo ranks higher. Everything you do on the internet really is archived. Be careful people and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Click to enlarge

 

After weeks of trying, I’d nearly found the real person behind a Twitter bot. It wasn’t the person who started the bot–chances are, that was just a computer program. Instead, I was hunting for the woman in the profile picture, the person whose identity had been stolen. The Internet is a big place; this isn’t easy to do. But I’d tracked the photo of a short-haired, punkish 20-something–used by @Arnitamj5, a bot calling itself Arnita Barayuga–to an abandoned MySpace profile of a Dallas woman named Elizabeth. She didn’t seem to have any other Internet presence, but I found one of her old MySpace friends on Facebook, figured out that he worked at a Dallas bike shop, and called it.

“So, listen,” I told him. “This will be the weirdest call you’ll get today.”

“Today?” he said.

“Probably all month.”

Then I explained: My goal was to draw a straight line from a Twitter bot to the real, live person whose face the bot had stolen. In the daily bot wars–the one Twitter fights every day, causing constant fluctuations in follower counts even as brands’ followers remain up to 48% bot–these women are the most visible and yet least acknowledged victims. And it’s almost always women, isn’t it? Bots are like a sorority party at 3 a.m.–a massive compilation of young, pretty faces who talk a lot of nonsense. But the women they portray are actual people, somewhere in this world. Who are they? And how were their photos dislodged from their original place?

This is a mostly pointless exercise, I knew: The story behind every photo would be different. And what would one of these women say–that she’s flattered to find her face spamming everyone on Twitter? Clearly, no. But it seemed worth doing, if only to tell one story, to have one answer. So I asked Elizabeth’s old friend: Did he still know her? He did, he said, though she’s since gotten married and changed her name. He promised to pass my message along. After four days of silence, though, I did more sleuthing and found her on Facebook under her married name. Then I emailed my plea: You’ve become a bot, Elizabeth. Can we talk about it?

Silence. Can’t say I blame her.

So I started over.

Bots are cheap. The company Buy Real Marketing will sell you 1,000 of them for $17, or 25,000 for $247–meaning the value of each is about a penny. And who’s buying them? Anyone. A brand’s social media manager will never admit to it, but chances are, gigantic companies have invested in this cheap form of image building. Why wouldn’t they?

Athletes definitely do it. A publicist for some major players–people at the top of their game–told me it’s common in his world. He once tried it himself, just to see what happens. He ordered the $17 package from Buy Real Marketing, via its website buytwitterfollowers.org. “They didn’t come in right away. I thought at first I’d been scammed,” he said. “But sure enough, within three days, they just poured in. It was exactly 1,000. To me, it shook the whole foundation. It made Twitter meaningless.”

The publicist gave me the names of a few people who also bought from Buy Real Marketing, and I dug into their followers. The bots were easy to spot–and these bots, no surprise, follow plenty of other celebrities and big brands. There’s no way to know if these were purchased follows or just pure coincidence, of course, but the list is wide-ranging. One bot from this batch followed Kelly Osbourne, former Formula 1 racer Tiago Monteiro, the Huffington Post, and an “Internet marketing consultant” named Trent Partridge, among 2,000 others.

If you click on a profile photo in Twitter, the photo will open in a tab of its own–and oftentimes will be larger, or more broadly cropped. I’d drag that onto my desktop, then run it through two image search engines: Tin Eye and Google Images. Each one scours the web for visual matches. After dozens of searches, a pattern emerged: Most bot photos had a long digital tail, having been posted on dozens of sketchy porn sites or blogs devoted to the barely legal. Occasionally, I’d be able to track a photo back to what seemed like an original source–like when a bot’s photo showed up alongside many others of the same woman, all posted to the fratboy site Barstool Sports. The site claimed her name is Aurora. But when I reached out, as was always the case, nobody cared to explain where the photos came from.

Then, finally, a reliable source: I tracked two bots back to the 2009 SUNshine Girls calendar, a lingerie showcase produced by the Toronto Sun. (I guess newspapers have to make money somehow.) The calendar only offered the models’ first names, and the paper’s photo editor wouldn’t connect me with them. But after a little Internet stalking–this is how reporting works, people!–I found a connection.

One of the bots, @Karriehga, which went by the name Maralyn Estes, showed a photo of a beautiful blond with dark eyes and hair poofed back like a Kentucky prom queen. This was Amanda the SUNshine Girl. And some clever Googling led me to a blog that included her full name. That allowed me to find her Facebook page, which didn’t list an email address, but did show that she recently clicked “like” on an events planning company. I figured that’s where she now works, so I called. Amanda, it turns out, was on maternity leave. “You can leave a message, and she’ll call you back in a few weeks,” her boss Darlene told me.

I didn’t have time for that, I said. Darlene asked why. So I began to explain.

“Wait, wait, Amanda was a SUNshine Girl?” Darlene yelped, and started laughing. “I didn’t know that!”

Oh, boy. Sorry Amanda.

But after that, Darlene said she’d help me get in touch. I hung up, relieved. Then I looked at my computer screen, which still had @Karriehga up. It had just tweeted something, as these things regularly do. Usually they’re just snippets of text yanked from websites, just something to keep their profiles active.

This time, though, the tweet seemed like a warning: “Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.”

In the meantime, I contacted Buy Real Marketing. I expected this to be equally difficult, given the sketchy nature of what a company like this does. But its work is perfectly legal–in the name of viral marketing, big brands have done far worse–and so all I had to do was call a toll-free number and hit a few buttons. Then I reached a tired-sounding woman named Judy, who spoke to me on a scratchy phone connection. I identified myself as a reporter and asked to interview someone, but she volunteered herself for the task. So I asked her: Judy, who are the faces on your bots?

“These are not bots that we have on Twitter,” she said. “These are real people.”

Me: “So there are no bots?”

Judy: “No bots. Not even spam.”

Me: “I mean, I see a lot of what certainly look and function like bots. But they’re not bots?”

Judy: “They are real people. They just log in, like, once a month so they are considered active.”

Me: “I see. Are the profile faces them?”

Judy: “Yes, exactly.”

Me: “So, the pictures of the people who are on a…”

Judy: “Some of them are. We can’t really control them. These are real people, and they have their choice of freedom on what picture they place there.”

And that’s all she was giving me.

Amanda’s email showed up the next morning: “I heard you contacted my employer Darlene yesterday and would like to talk to me. I’m interested in knowing what this is all about.”

She gave me her number. I called immediately.

Amanda lives in Bowmanville, Ontario, just outside of Toronto. Her husband is a police officer there. The night before, as they puzzled over Darlene’s message to call me, her husband began telling Amanda about all the facial recognition software that’s becoming available to law enforcement. It freaked her out.

Truth be told, she’s been trying to distance herself from the SUNshine Girl thing. (We’re helping out by not publishing her last name. That’s one less Google result to worry about.) It’s not that she’s embarrassed; back in the day, she even did live promotions for the calendar. But these days she has to worry about what employers think. Darlene doesn’t care–thankfully–but Amanda used to work for the government. She figured it was best not to flaunt her past.

And now, this. In the past day, I’d found five other bots using the same photo of her.

“It’s kinda of creepy, to be honest with you. The whole thing,” she says. She’s on Twitter but rarely uses it, and had never heard of bots. “I’d like to find the source and tell them to stop using my photo, you know? Because you never know who’s going to see it, and I don’t have control over what someone’s saying. That could ruin who-knows-what.”

I told Amanda that she could report the bot as spam, and hope for the best. She said she’d do that, but that she likely wouldn’t do any more. After all, what’s there to do–sue? Sue who? She doesn’t even own the photo; it’s the Toronto Sun‘s property. But she appreciated knowing. She thanked me.

Four days later, Amanda’s bot @Karriehga was still live. It tweeted, “Let’s commit the perfect crime… I’ll steal your heart, and you steal mine.”

To say nothing of a face.

We’ve all suffered through a lunch, date, or meeting with a monologist–you know, a person who, oblivious to social cues, dominates the conversation, shows little interest in others around the table, and, when someone tries to shove in one’s oar, raises his voice to drown out the hope of a dialogue.

The question is, how to call out the offender on his obnoxious behavior when you can’t get a word in edgewise? One way is to throw his words back at him. Two Japanese researchers have created a gunlike instrument that does just that. Using the principle of delayed audio feedback, their SpeechJammer records speech and plays it back with a split-second pause, effectively stupefying and silencing the speaker.

Kazutaka Kurihara, a researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, thought up the idea after participating in a demonstration of delayed audio feedback at a local museum. “When I spoke to a microphone, my voice came back to me after a few hundred millisecond delay, then I could not continue to speak anymore,” Kurihara tells Co.Design. “Around that time, my research interest was about developing a system that controls appropriate turn-taking at discussions and was looking for technologies to enforce some discussion rules for participants. Then I came up with the gun type SpeechJammer idea utilizing DAF. That’s the destiny.” He recruited his friend, Koji Tsukada, a “gadget master” at Ochanomizu University, to help him realize the concept, consisting of a direction-sensitive mic and speaker, a distance sensor, a laser pointer, and a microcontroller.

Kurihara stresses that the intent isn’t only to shut up blabbermouths but to allow space for the less vocal to join the conversation. “Fair discussions are essential for resolving conflicts through communication,” he and Tsukada write in their paper. “However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions.” SpeechJammer was conceived to correct such abuses and allow all participants to have an equal say in proceedings.

The technology behind the idea might be overkill: Under ordinary circumstances, thrusting a mic-equipped gun into a person’s face should be enough to throw anyone off his game. But in the case of, say, the upcoming presidential debates, we can imagine it being an entirely effective (and somewhat hilarious) way to impose time restrictions.

Image: Everett Collection/Shutterstock

This past weekend, I had the privilege to attend and keynote the World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon. I spoke to a crowd of 1000 people that Chris Guillebeau and J.D. Roth had assembled for their event. Both gentlemen have a much larger overall following, but what I was witnessing, it felt, was Kevin Kelly’s famous 1000 true fans in living color.

1000 True Fans

This event is a must-attend event, if you are someone seeking to build a business of your own, especially if you’re seeking an uncompromising solopreneur lifestyle. Guillebeau and Roth attract all kinds of people who seek to live life on their terms and build business that meets their needs, interests, and criteria. And the attendees were every bit as powerful as the folks on stage. Take, for instance, the fact that this is the first conference that C.C. Chapman has paid to attend in years. I feel the same way. Jacq and I will go next year, no matter what.

The speakers reflected this, too. Jacqueline and I had a chance to talk with one of Jacq’s favorites, Danielle LaPorte, who certainly fits right into this tribe’s mindset.

It was just a very well curated, well-produced, well-attended, and passion-filled event. I’m writing this post solely to encourage you to get on the mailing list at the event’s website, so you might have a chance to get a ticket for next year. They sold out in minutes for the 2012 show.

Watching Magic

Oh, and one more thing. Some anonymous contributor (an attendee from the previous year) helped add to the profits that the event made. But Chris and J.D. didn’t bank these profits (I would have!). They put $100,000 into 1000 envelopes and handed everyone in the crowd who paid to attend $100 as an investment in them. Why? Because Chris is the author of the freakishly bestselling The $100 Startup (affiliate link), and of course, this is the perfect way to symbolize his (and J.D.’s) commitment to this tribe.

Watching 1000 people get an envelope with $100 with which to start a new dream was a touching and powerful gesture. I was truly blown away. Sure, $100 isn’t much, but have you ever attended a conference where that’s happened? Not me. And it won’t ever happen at mine, so to me, it was totally beautiful.

Hats off to Chris and JD and the over 80 volunteers and others who helped put together an amazing event. Put this on your calendar. It’s an experience you won’t soon forget.

Your customers are not only becoming increasingly social, their digital lifestyle is fueled by mobile devices. Whether it’s a smart phone or a tablet, they are masters of the small screen experience and accomplished in the art of communicating with both their thumbs and their voice. The most riveting facet of the mobile revolution is not only what we’re witnessing, it’s what we’re missing in these important times of transformation.

These connected customers or Generation C as I refer to them are critical to your organization beyond their role of consumer. They are increasingly taking over the inside of your company as your everyday workforce. So in many ways, we are the very people we’re trying to reach. And, to do so takes standardization, transformation, and empowerment. This is the dawn of the mobile enterprise and as a result, digital strategists must think beyond the idea of a social business. Now’s the time to lay the foundation for an adaptive enterprise where mobile becomes one of the pivotal screens for employee and customer engagement, communication and collaboration. Without leadership and standardization however, employees will use their mobile devices as part of their work, but do so without regard or knowledge of best practices on what to do and what not to do and how it aligns with corporate policies and security.

Chris Silva, my colleague at Altimeter Group, just released a new report, “Power to the People: Identify and Empower Your Mobile Workforce A Three-Phase Strategy to Serve Mobile Workgroups.” It was written with the intention of helping businesses better understand the state of the mobilized workforce and how to increase productivity while empowering the connected employee.

As Silva noted in his post announcing the report, “My collaborator and editor Jeremiah Owyang and I began with a hypothesis that, as the age of mobile = email has come to a close, are mobile employees being served with the proper applications to make them be more productive? Our guess was that they weren’t, and largely, rollouts are just getting started but there are already some lessons to be learned. The most important is that different roles have different needs from mobility, and determining who is using mobile today, and what their needs are from mobile is the first step to a defensible mobility plan.”

As always, a successful mobile rollout examines employee and customer expectations, business goals, and long-term trends to develop a strategy that looks beyond Blackberries, iPhones and iPads and Droids. One of Silva’s observations hits the new mobile opportunity squarely between the eyes, “Within one large law firm that we spoke with, in the course of one year, the company went from 100% BlackBerry devices for mobile users to just 5% — the other 95% were all iPhones. As mobile application ecosystems continue to flourish, supporting mobile users is no longer about email.”

In his report, Silva lays out a three step process to choose the right tools and ultimately develop the construct of a mobile and adaptive enterprise…

1. Conduct a mobility audit

2. Examine Roles

3. Partner Choice

His research encourages those leading technology strategies to start with understanding the constituencies inside the organization. As executives, technical workers, and contractors have varying needs for mobile productivity, they do share the need to stay connected and productive wherever whenever.

Silva’s research identified three common internal roles around mobile engagement…

1. Information Worker: Need = consume

2. Field/Sales Worker: Need = collaborate

3. Executive/Technical Worker: Need = compute

Consume: Users inside of organizations are looking to access corporate information on the go. These information consumers are seeking information that is accessible and digestible on their device of choice.

Collaborate: Workers may be creating information in the field, such as notes, drawings, recordings, and photos, and need a path to access and store information on corporate data stores. Current tools in place, such as Microsoft SharePoint, rank poorly among these users and IT departments due to a lack of support for popular mobile platforms.

Compute: Heavy travelers and temporary workers (like contractors) are looking to tablet devices to be the only piece of tech they carry day-to-day. An emerging class of solutions aims to give these users access to the enterprise applications, the corporate desktop, or both from the tablet or even smartphone the user is toting.

Participating organizations were then asked to rank their mobile challenges. Collaboration associated with remote/field professionals ranked at the top of the list with 61% followed by those who need access to complex computing tasks at 27%.

To help businesses grasp the state of mobile chaos within the organization, Silva leaves decision makers with three actionable steps to assess, learn, and design an informed and scalable mobile enterprise…

1. Conduct an audit for level-set: Before embarking on user identification and role analysis, the initial and most critical step is to perform a level-set. The question to answer is what are the devices and who is using them?

2. Understand user needs by conducting detailed stakeholder interviews and human factors analysis: The analysis completed in step 1 will highlight favorite tools, but as Silva cautions, they may not be the ideal choices for the long term.

3. Choose the right solution by creating a weighted partner model: Inputs form the previous two steps will help identify the platforms that demand support, as well as the groups most in need of mobility.

With all of the talk about social media and the need to create an infrastructure to support a social enterprise, we cannot overlook the importance of mobilizing the workforce. Doing so enables employees to more effectively collaborate with team members within to improve collaboration with customers externally.

I’m writing this post while visiting Antwerp, Belgium as part of the Social Business Sessions I’m hosting along with The Fusion Marketing Experience. While here, I had an opportunity to spend time with several Belgian journalists. One of the notable conversations was with Erik Verdonck of Pub, a local magazine focused on the advertising industry. The three themes we touched upon are not only timely, but representative of the challenges that face marketers and strategists around the globe.

1. A social brand is not a social business. Please explain both concepts and the difference between them.

The path from a social brand to a social business begins with recognizing the difference between the two. A social brand engages in social media with a primary emphasis of marketing. A social business is result of internal transformation where social technologies serve as the catalyst to improve internal collaboration across functions and lines of business. A social business in effect is a confluence of technology philosophy and supporting processes and work. I like to say that a social business is not something you “do,” it’s something that you become.

2. What is the main difference between the ‘Like’ button on Facebook and other direct response triggers?

Facebook’s Like button is often confused as an “Opt In” by marketers. All too frequently people who have clicked the Like button are thought of as a captive community where customers have opted in to marketing and engagement. Likes do not represent the actual size of a community, yet many organizations confuse the overall number with actual audience size.  The difference between Like and other direct response triggers is that the Like is an act of fleeting value that must be earned over and over again. Often, it’s an “in the moment” action that expresses affinity, interest,  alignment, and sometimes endorsement. And as an expression, Likes are a form of social currency and their value goes up and down with each engagement. If we approach the spirit of community from this perspective, we can then focus on delivering higher yields for each Like and as a result, foster greater reciprocity and true social commerce. Doing so will increase overall engagement and the responsiveness of the community as a whole.

Traditional response triggers are exchanges that are rooted in what I refer to as the A.R.T. of Engagement…Actions, Reactions, and Transactions. Likes represent potential reach. But businesses cannot take or assume satisfaction in these numbers as they’re reflective of the people reached and not the people who could be reached.

Contests, campaigns, gimmicks, while effective in intermittent bursts, are not sustainable nor are they indicative of organic engagement. They generate numbers but not true engagement. Facebook represents a tremendous opportunity to design and steer customer experiences. Whether it’s for marketing, service, sales, co-creation or collaborative engagement, Facebook is a social hub where the various needs, expectations and roles of customers can be met by a fully engaged social business, not just a social brand or social marketing initiative.

3. How would you measure the return of social media campaigns? What should marketers look at?

Part of the problem with social media measurement is that the metrics used to determine success are only indicative of activity and not progress or change. For example, many businesses place value on Likes, Retweets, comments, and reach. I see these as raw numbers and not as indicators for progress or change. While this activity is reflective of real-time interaction, it’s only part of a larger swathe that envelopes social media success.

I think of Euripides…”A bad ending follows a bad beginning.” Or said another way, a successful outcome follows a successful beginning. To do this, businesses must think through what success looks like and they must do so looking beyond the competition. It cannot be assumed that similar companies are thinking about Euripides. They are engaging in social media because that’s what they’re supposed to do.

In the end, we must not forget how social media ties to business objectives. We must first understand where we are and where we need to be. Developing strategies where cause and effect are the catalysts for performance inspires strategies rooted in significance whereas metrics and KPIs document real transformation. I like to think about ROI in this regard as Realization of Influence…tracking the relationship between cause and effect or the change in behavior.

As such, packaging raw numbers requires deeper consideration to demonstrate progress toward business objectives and priorities.

These can include:

- Brand Lift/Awareness
- Brand Resonance
- Advocacy
- Sales/Referrals
- Endorsements
- Sentiment/Perception Shift
- Thought Leadership
- Demand
- Trends
- Audience/Community
- Behavior
- Influence

Image Credit: Ken Murphy via BoingBoing