Two Bananas Blog

I wrote this back when Indianapolis hosted the Super Bowl, but never published it. Old thoughts, new year.

“I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER” – Groucho Marx.

First of all, my congratulations to those selected to help promote the Super Bowl in this way. Go do great things. I know some of the folks in the Social 46, and they are as diverse as the sandwiches found in the Super 46 promotion http://www.in.gov/visitindiana/super46/ . Some have lots of ham piled on, others lend towards the vegetarian options. Some will use this as a platform for self promotion. But that is the nature of this thing we call social media. And yes I have already matched some of the sandwiches with some of the people. The Super Bowl Committee chose these people for their own reasons, and it isn’t our job to second guess their choices, or their motives. Business decisions are made all the time.

What I do wonder about is the overall approach to using social media by many organizations involved in the event, including the Committee. Being the most “connected” Super Bowl is an admirable goal. But isn’t there more to this equation than the awareness factor? Or conversations? I am not privy to the marketing machinations behind the scenes, no doubt the big players are all over a tightly integrated marketing play that intelligently incorporates social components. But it seems to me that many in our City, from a business perspective, are not up to speed on how to best leverage social as part of their marketing efforts. The good news is that it will be a huge event for the city, and will boost the bottom line for many, many  businesses. In spite of all the marketing expertise out there.

Jay and others quickly pointed out the lack of disclosure guidance. Disclosure is such an important issue,  I would like to think that they assumed the 46 were disclosure savvy. One of the best examples of disclosure can be found right here in Indiana. at the Visit Indiana blog  http://www.in.gov/visitindiana/blog/index.php/ftc-disclosure/. There are some great folks over there including Jeremy Williams. Erik Deckers  is one of their bloggers, and always informs and entertains. Both of these gentlemen are social luminaries in their own right.

I wasn’t chosen as one of the Social 46, and quite frankly, if I was, I would have wondered why. I’m deeply into social technologies, but frame it in the much larger context of big picture marketing. If I have a potential client who wants to use just social media, I point them to an appropriate vendor.

For those folks who somehow have gotten hurt by being passed over by the Committee, let me tell you. There are many marketing professionals in this community that do great work, and they were not chosen to help in this way. As professionals, they understand that “celebrity” can be a double edged sword. I honestly don’t think more of Jay Baer because he is a social media celebrity, and I can’t imagine that he would think less of me for not being one. We’ve had several conversations, and they always feel comfortable, peer to peer. Jay and other folks in the spotlight have to prove their worth every time they post on their sites, make a speech, or write a book.  If we as professionals don’t look beyond the cult of personality, then we only have ourselves to blame if we fall into the illusion that celebrity trumps authority and thought leadership. Does lack of celebrity infer lack of knowledge, skills, insight, or wisdom?  Not by a long shot. Does celebrity in the sense of Klout score, followers, etc, help one in doing a great job for an employer or client? Not by a long shot.

Can celebrity help to amplify messages? Absolutely. This is the essence of why the Social 46 was created.

Will there be a huge opportunity to learn from the successes and mistakes brought about by this effort, and others? Absolutely. Why don’t we as a diverse group of professionals come up with a way to do just that?

Once upon a time there was a salesperson in your company that just killed it, quarter after quarter. They were constantly networking, connecting dots, and learning about your customer’s businesses. They probably knew more about those businesses, their fears, struggles, problems, and victories, than anyone else in your company. They had a keen sense of the market, where your company fit within that market, and could see what was coming down the road. They were the go to resource for many of your customers, even after the deal. They helped to get answers when answers were rare, solve problems, resolve license and invoice issues. They cut through all the BS. As my dad used to say, they were a real mensch. And then one day, that rock star salesperson left your company.

You might be tempted to blame it on the current darling of the party, a thing called social selling. And you might be right.

Why did they leave? They have been doing all the things that make social selling look good. As new technologies became available, they used them to support and enhance their rock star powers. The other salespeople just get dumb and dumber. Could it be that the social selling craze has polluted the airwaves, making it all the more difficult for that rock star to deflect the slings and arrows of ill conceived tactics? Could be, my friend.

Today, there is a veritable tsunami of all things social selling. When was the last time you cringed a bit at a new LinkedIn request, knowing that a pitch would soon follow that new connection? I’ve been on the receiving end of this tsunami, so much so that I created a little cheat sheet of ideas, observations, and suggestions for future sales rock stars, who might be under some pressure to become social selling mavens.

Myth #1 You aren’t a salesperson, you are a helper

You are in sales. First prize is a new Cadillac. Second prize is a set of steak knives.

Myth #2 Social selling is the new black

Whatever you’ve been told, social selling simply cannot completely replace all the other cool things a rock star salesperson does. Cold calling isn’t dead. But selling a $3000 copier is a bit different than getting someone to pull the trigger on a multimillion dollar enterprise software solution. I’ll write a check for the copier, but we probably have a team of people who make million dollar decisions. Take all advice with a grain of salt, and understand how it might fit into your world. If you really believe I’m going to make a purchase decision based on an article you’ve shared, you will get the steak knives.

Myth #3 Social selling is magic

Think of social selling as a handy platform, an ecosystem of activities, rather than a magic solution. Social selling as a new trend is a great opportunity to learn and practice basic skills, and your new tools will help you do that. But you have to become a great salesperson first.  And it is totally cool to tell me that you want my business. But do it by becoming that go to person. I like that kind of moxie.

Take the time to research my company, our products and services. And while you are at it, get to know my competitors as well. I like it when you take the time to study my company. I like it even better when you can prove it.

Focus on becoming an expert as fast as humanly possible. How you might ask? Spend more time with your sales engineers, support team, and product marketing folks. If you have a significant knowledge gap, especially if it is a technical gap, don’t try to learn just enough to think you can get by. When you interact with a prospect or customer, be upfront about your lack of knowledge. But also be very clear that you can get answers. I like answers.

Myth #4 Social selling and content marketing are like peas and rice

Don’t apologize for the retargeted ads I’m seeing, or the offers for whitepapers, infographics, and other such stuff that I might be getting in seemingly direct conflict with what I’ve already received. I understand that perhaps a handful of companies out there have the marketing chops to coordinate every interaction intelligently. I do like it when you can empathize with my plight, though.

And while we are on the subject of content, please do try and refrain from sharing the same stuff that every other salesperson from your organization shares. I know, your social media marketing team is just trying to help, but nobody likes to be carpet bombed. Resist the urge to just put something out there. Trust me, those marketing folks don’t have the quota monkey on their back. You do. Marketing and marketing content is created for the market. Great salespeople know how to fine tune it to fit my needs, help me overcome objections (once I’ve become your internal advocate) and answer questions. So get personal. I like that.

Myth #5 Social selling is for winners

Invest ten minutes of research and outreach effort for every minute of social selling activities. If you have been told that social selling is like system selling, you will lose. I can tell the difference. And I like to buy from winners.

A couple of weeks ago I was reading about the end of marketing as many of us know it. We live in a world where few things have any sense of certainty. But incredible advances in marketing and data technologies, along with associated corporate acquisitions, are bringing us into a future where uncertainty will be the exception.

I created this humble list of statements, in part as an exercise in helping me understand my own motivations for being in this business. Think of it as a true/false questionnaire, designed to get you thinking about where you stand, and where you will be when the music stops. With great power comes great responsibility. We all need to decide how we’ll use technology to achieve our marketing goals. Incremental surrender to the sheer power of marketing technology may result in dehumanization. What does it look like when marketing becomes a process, without uncertainties? Will it matter at all whether the consumer is aware of it? What role does a marketer play, aside from technician?

Two people I enjoy immensely in the social/digital/marketing arena, Jay Baer, and Mark Schaefer, both most recently discussed the use and influence of Klout. The commentary, as always, provides much value. Klout is a tool, to be used as any other might. In the hands of a master craftsman, a seasoned marketer, it can add value. To many others, it will lead to bruised knuckles, social missteps, business as usual. For example, what would and should happen when a high flying Klout personality gets front row tickets to a coveted rock concert, while a deserving veteran or sick child is denied the same seat? The blind use of Klout, or any other social scoring, must certainly be used in the context of a greater sensibility of purpose. Can Klout mean the same thing to everyone, when the Dalai Lama scores lower than Lady Gaga? God I hope not. Does Klout measure the influence of Walt Whitman, Martin Luther King, or Thoreau? Of course not. It is for the land of the living. Yet these men retain influence the world over. In the use of such technologies, we can’t delve into the core of what truly influences an individual, unless we attempt to measure them by their own words and behavior. And this will fall short, as it should.

My point is that our obsession with measuring alleged influence is showing a distinct effect of clouding the judgement of many companies.

Klout is and will be used for marketing goods and services, massaging customers, and the like. People shouldn’t get all twisted up about our new reality of measuring every little thing. Get over it. It is the future, happening right now. We have technology that measures pupil dilation, facial recognition/gesturing, and the like, that makes all this banter about social influence seem trivial. Some companies, through their marketing teams, are using essentially hidden cookies to track as much behavior as possible. Device fingerprinting is rampant. Google, Facebook, and the whole lot would love nothing more than to have you use them for all of your activities.

Why do we as so called marketing professionals so blindly waste our time on the tools, and lose sight of the social ramifications that we as willing conspirators force on customers?

It moves the equation beyond right message, right person, right time, to a place where the behavior of an individual becomes almost entirely predictable. And when a system becomes predictable, it can much more readily be controlled. What would Ray Bradbury think of this, and why do we as marketers and technologists not bring the writers, the poets, the artists, into the process of creating technologies that will become our reality?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cQ-yGCyjyM

That single sign on, a single web identity, makes life a bit easier, but we all give up so much freedom in the process. The consumer is already being literally stalked with many other marketing “tools” that frankly, we as marketing professionals should really be shunning, up in arms.

The question for me as a marketer isn’t whether a tool is sharp, but whether it should be used at all. I see very few marketers in positions of “influence” talking about that issue.

Kara, thanks so much for joining me today.

Thanks, Marty. Good to be chatting with you today.

I know that you have referenced the Dow Jones Code of Conduct in your ethics statement, but you’ve gone much further by providing some very candid details of your personal life.

Yes, I do use the Dow Jones Code of Conduct framework, and link to it my ethics statement on our site.

Can you tell me why you thought this was important? Do you think it is especially relevant to share so much in your role as a very influential commentator in the technology arena you cover?

Well a couple things.  I think I share what’s appropriate. I don’t think I am over sharing, you know, like my personal music habits or something like that, so I think I share what’s appropriate.  And if there is a big glaring issue I have of a possible conflict of interest such as Megan’s job at Google, I had actually covered the company before she went there, very heavily.  I knew it really well before it became more prominent.  Another example is AOL. Even though I had written two books on AOL some people were saying that I had a conflict.

For example, Megan, years before she and I had met, had an investment from AOL in the company she was CEO of, PlanetOut. There is nothing I can do about that investment years before, but I can explain it so readers have a chance to understand.  Now it had nothing to do with me. We weren’t involved when the investment was made but it existed so I always felt that it was really important to just give people as much information as possible. I was highly qualified to write about AOL because I had written two books about them.  I am the natural choice to comment on AOL so I just feel like that like we said if the media is suspect just lay it on the line and tell people.  That doesn’t mean you should opt out of coverage. They should know so they can make their own judgments as to whether I am being too soft on them or too hard.  We treat the readers like they are intelligent and give them all information. It doesn’t matter to me that Megan works at Google. I’m quite tough on Google compared to other reporters. That doesn’t matter to me but what matters is that they know the situation, and that they don’t feel that they don’t have full knowledge.  When they do, they can do what they want, they can comment on it. It shows respect for readers that you give them full disclosure of whatever different conflicts that are relevant or irrelevant conflicts but you have to tell them everything.

I also think we provide full disclosure in a humorous way. Walt gets asked if he get freebies from companies and he explains that he doesn’t.  Why not just explain it.  This is how it works so there are no questions about how it works versus wondering if Walt gets free things from Sony. Well he doesn’t.  This is what he does.  I think it just removes questions if you explain it up front. We are also open to answering more questions if they have them but most people, because we do such full disclosure, don’t have any more questions and we sort of cover everything, and at the same time there’s so much transparency on the web or there could be there’s an opportunity for us to do intelligent disclosure.

We think it’s really important that the reader is fully informed even if they don’t think it’s a big deal.  They just think then there’s no cause for them to have any questions about our reporting and if they do they can respond in the proper place and we respond back.  And so I didn’t think it was too much personal information. The journal has rules about stock purchasing so we tell you what stocks we have.  The journal doesn’t require reporters to tell their readers, it just tells them they can’t own them. But we’ve gone a step further. We’re like OK this is what we own, this is what we don’t own, this is what we make investment decisions on, and this is what we don’t do. And it just seems to work better that way.

The kind of letters I get from readers are astonishing, all of which are supportive.  I have not gotten one that’s been negative.  And they like it; they can’t believe it that we are being so honest with them. We do the same thing with cookie disclosures you know when you come to the site for the first time there is a yellow box and you can’t read anything until you click it that says this is what cookies are and there are cookies on this site and this is what they do and if you’d like to click here to remove the cookies. And this is just a service that removes all cookies from your computer. This is an opt out kind of thing so we say we have cookies on this site and this is what they do.  We explain what they do and then if people don’t care then they just click and go on.  If they want to we give them the ability to remove them.  Again that gives them choice, that gives them choice for what they want to do or not want to do. We give them awareness and that’s one of our biggest strengths. Disclosure is everything. And also, access to us via email is important. If you go to a lot of reporter websites you can’t find the reporter’s email. You get a box that you can reach them through, an official box or something like that, but you often never get their actual email. That’s another thing.  What the hell are you doing?  You often don’t get the actual email of the person you’re trying to reach and that’s another annoyance you know what I mean like what the hell? Like why can’t you reach the person?

Yes, I’ve experienced that and not only is it frustrating at times, it degrades the sense of reputation and trust.

Yeah, and also you know we also are very active on Twitter so there are so many ways you can contact us. You can contact us through Twitter and our email. There are plenty of ways to reach us and then we also have comments posted, feedback, and it just gives them an ability to be heard easily.

Information consumers are relying on a variety of cues out there when determining reputation.  What sorts of cues do you look for when you are trying to establish a level of reputation for an individual?  I assume you are looking beyond things like number of followers and Klout scores. Are you looking for the same things that you put out there?

It really has to do with the quality of the information they are providing. The accuracy, and the insights I get from it. I don’t care how many followers I have. I have followers because I was on the Twitter most whatever list. Hopefully people follow me because I do accurate reporting that is fair and witty and interesting.  We don’t make story choices based on the comments and number of followers or traffic at all. We don’t ignore SEO and stuff like that. There’s no reason not to do basic things that will help your story get read, but our goal is to write reports that are first and that are accurate and fair.  And it should be funny. We like to be funny.

I think a sense of humor and a sense of irreverence if you will at times is extremely important in what you do because it maintains the personality of the writer, even if at times it sounds more like opinion.

I don’t let my reporters just mouth off the way they do on other sites, I just don’t allow it. We do back up our writing with a lot of facts. If they’re going to make an assertion they have to have serious reporting on it.   You know we have two things.  One, I always couldn’t stand when I was looking at various newspapers that reporters knew a whole lot more that they never said they kept from readers.  They tell their friends or they tell each other and then in a story I would call it the to be sure quote. Take Yahoo, for example. Their revenues and their growth have declined precipitously according to their recent quarterly earnings. Sure not everybody agrees that Yahoo’s in trouble, but they had to put in some general quotes from some analysts that supports the other side. Now we don’t do that crap, that’s ridiculous.

For example, if we know Yahoo’s revenues declined and it’s a freaking traffic accident let’s be honest you know what I mean?  There’s no need to pretend that it’s not. I don’t want to just say Yahoo’s a big mess. We’ll have proof that there’s a big mess but we don’t mind saying it because it’s true and we don’t need an analyst to tell us what we can analyze ourselves.  I’ve been doing this for 20 years so I know yahoo better than anybody.  And I actually talk to the executives, I talk to their customers, I talk to their employees.  I am in a very good position to make a comment on Yahoo’s situation.

Do you find at times also that they turn the tables and come to you for counsel and advice as well at times?

Yes, some people do.  In fact for AOL they wanted a bunch of reporters’ thoughts on the Huffington Post merger. We’ve done a lot of reporting on the merger so we just gave them our thoughts on what we felt was going on there.

The mechanics of reputation is evolving in the whole social arena.  It seems like peer group influence, being able to use peer reputation, such as in Quora, is helping individuals define the value of the information that folks are putting out there. Is the move away from influence as an indicator of reputation a move in a positive direction?

It’s interesting.  I don’t use Quora that much to be honest with you but the reason it does work is because people’s names are attached to it.  I see why people would be anonymous sometimes but it just discounts the information they share on the internet. If people do get voted up and down based on the quality of what they’re saying, I kind of like that.  It’s the same thing I’m doing.  Time magazine did a piece on the 140 best Twitter feeds and I said I wanted to be number 140. But I’m never going to be number 1. So I did a humorous post on that. But one of the things, one of the quotes about me, was something along the lines of when Kara Swisher reports a rumor it usually turns out to be true.  But I don’t report a rumor. I report things I know to be true. They may not have happened yet but they are happening, they are about to happen. So I think reputation is based on quality even though there is all this noise in the blogosphere and the fog is thick. Our reputation is based on the quality of our work. People will seek that out because of all this ridiculous noise out there. Our strength is that we do really good work.  When we report something it is no accident that we are accurate. If we make a mistake we tell people.  We are very quick to disclose errors. It’s very prominent, but we don’t have to because we spend a lot of time before making sure the cake is baked correctly.

For those people who are contributing out there and who are trying to build a following based upon the quality and the insight in their work, do you think they should consider the notion that they do need a full-blown ethics statement like you’ve provided?

I don’t know why they wouldn’t.  I don’t know what the problem is.  There’s so much space on the internet so let the people decide to read it or not.  I always joke we are trying to numb people into submission because of the length of it.  Everyone has conflicts of interest, I don’t know why you can’t just say it and then people can judge you.  Like when people say I’m soft on Google because of Megan. The fact of the matter is, show me where because I can show you 27 instances out of 28 where I’m tough on Google. So where I called them thugs or I called them monopolists. Tell me what’s positive what I’m writing?  So I am able then, if they start to do that I can show them proof.  Here’s a link where I called them thugs, here’s a link saying the government should investigate them. I don’t believe that’s helping Meg’s career somehow, you know what I mean? I think that’s probably not helping Meg’s career.  I don’t think that’s the idea. I don’t care but I certainly don’t think it’s helping her career, my writing.

Early on I put my email at the bottom of the stories and people, especially reporters, would ask me why I want to hear from readers? Like well, I don’t know, I think they’re kind of smart. You know, it was interesting. They didn’t want engagement with readers at all.

I know that in the mix of analysts, journalists, and vendors, especially in the technology space, the lines sometimes get blurred a bit. I follow so many analysts via their corporate sites, blogs, Twitter, and the like, and at times it seems as if they are always on the vendor sponsored party bus. What should the analyst community be thinking about, knowing that their audience is watching this trend?

Well that’s good though don’t you think?  At least they are keeping you informed about what they are doing. I don’t necessarily think that it’s not worthy to read as long as I know where they’re coming from you know. As long as their work is accurate, the reader will usually understand that mingling is just part of the job. People pretending that they’re above the fray are ridiculous in this age or in any age really. We think is important is to engage with the reader. Sometimes if we engage with them they expect us to say thank you for your comment, and then drop it.  We’re like no, you’re wrong. That’s a shock to some of them.  If they want to engage with me guess what if it’s stupid I’m going to tell you it’s stupid. That fascinates me about the whole thing because some don’t like to enter into a conversation. It’s a two way discussion as far as I’m concerned.  And they don’t like that from me sometimes, but too bad, if they want a discussion they’re going to get a discussion.  You know sometimes people just like to mouth off. They don’t really want to take responsibility for what they say.  So we like to make them take responsibility.

So what do you think about as this whole phenomenon moves forward? You and others at All Things Digital are highly interactive, and you’ve put your reputation markers out there for everyone to see.  What do you think a new trust model might look like in this age of the virtual community?

I think you have to be available to answer questions as much as you can.  You can’t spend your whole life answering questions because you get a lot, but I think the most successful people who have the best reputation are available to answer questions and have a relationship going on with their audience. They have some kind of back and forth.  I think they lay it on the line in terms of disclosure of whom they are and where they are coming from.  I think they have to be prepared to defend what they’ve written. It doesn’t stop with the initial post and they have to keep going and I think that’s hard for reporters who are long used to writing something and then it’s done. But there has to be dialogue between you and the reader long beyond your first initial post. I mean interestingly, when Bill Keller went on his rant about Arianna Huffington, he learned this the hard way. Arianna knows how to do this very well, you know, It was like catnip to her.  She took the ball and ran with it and now she has ten columns worth of stuff so I think that it is really important to be prepared that the story doesn’t end when you say it does.  It’s a discussion versus a one way conversation, and that’s something that’s really hard for a lot of mainstream journalists.

The year is 2023. Every product, every brand, is now owned by five mega corporations. The debate about saving the rest of our solar system from even antiquated, unabashedly imbecilic advertising quickly ended for Mars, when brand banners began popping up, visible from earth with the latest Apple iSee interplanetary viewer. I mean, billboards on Mars, visible from Earth? How avant garde.

The five mega corporations entered into an agreement whereby all competition was effectively stopped. This quickly led to the merger of all brands, under the cartel of the five companies. The sale of goods and services are carefully planned to maintain maximum capital intake, rendered immune from the buffeting winds of market uncertainty. Global consumption was now managed as a gigantic financial spreadsheet, not as a battleground for Mad Men.

How did this come about? And why?

Because several years before, marketing as we knew it became irrelevant. It reached its ultimate goal, and in doing so, sealed its own fate. The tools for controlling behavior based on personalized marketing through a complex combination of artificial intelligence, neural linguistic programming, data fingerprinting, social network modeling (including crowd bullying) and other tactics meant that marketers could understand completely how to make any individual, anywhere, buy whatever they were selling. They knew that the personalized campaign, via the personal iSee device, with its custom crafted subtle changes in eyebrow movements on the spokes model would literally force Mr. Naught to buy 10 more units of Alpha Block, in the popular rosemary and rue fragrance.  Alpha Block, for those living in our Southern protected zone, is a topical cream used to block the effects of alpha emitting radioactive particulates.  It was beyond the old adage of right place, right time, right message. It was perfect. And since every corporation had the same powerful technology, competition as the basis for advertising, disappeared. Advertising simply reverted to the most powerful bait ever invented. Compulsory participation. Marketing changed from a discipline designed to elicit desired changes in consumer behavior, to the tool used to mould behavior at will.

The marketing profession does have an ultimate goal. And that goal is to get as many people as possible to buy your stuff as often as possible, above and beyond your competition. Effectively, we want to eliminate the competition. Why else would we as a collective group of professionals constantly clamor for monitoring, measurement, ROI? I mean, isn’t this the natural conclusion? Isn’t that the mantra that we all allegedly draw with our collection of colored sand? Is that it?

Now step back to the present, 2011. We are living in a time when we have device fingerprinting, persistent cookies, slick email and web based marketing software, sophisticated monitoring and measurement capabilities out our kazoos. And yes, we are now putting pressure on the phenomena we call social media to cough up the goods. We have rooms literally full of data, stored in climate controlled, secure facilities. Robust disaster recovery built right into the mix, like red vermouth in a good Manhattan. In short, we are well on our way to achieving the goal of predicting and guiding individual consumer behavior.

Or are we? And is this such a good idea?

There are two things happening out there that should give every marketer reason to think about this in a somewhat different way.

As we see the world become even more connected, especially through highly personalized devices, the users are also becoming more discerning. Right now, many marketers are eyeing the gaming craze as the new secret sauce. And this will undoubtedly become another component in our quest for world domination. But folks just don’t like the feeling of being gamed, of having been played. This is the core of the content marketing pitch, as well as the low key storyteller hustle. And as the push to provide consumers with more data relevant to their behavior (and their demographic pool) gains momentum, this will place enormous pressure on marketers to somehow give them the real deal. And what is the real deal?  It is something you as a marketer can’t really provide. Let them discuss, share, rant, sing. Just be there when they need you. You’ll be lucky if they do. Just stop trying so damned hard to throw the same old stuff out there. Stop it.

Sure, we will and should be always finding ways to better measure the results of our efforts as marketers. But what makes the phenomenon of social media fundamentally different is that we will reach a point at which in attempting to measure it, we will adversely affect the outcome. Thus, in some ways, we should be aware that the Uncertainty Principle, as proposed by Heisenberg, is a suitable allegory for how we should approach the event horizon of social media. Essentially, Heisenberg said that the act of measurement distorts the results of the measurement or observation. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be providing some markers to discuss with our CMO relative to ROI, but please think about knowing when to stop. Instead, start treating your customers, the marketplace, and the world at large as fundamentally intelligent human beings. Because they will catch on, and when they do, you have only yourself to blame for spoiling a beautiful thing.

And this isn’t 2023.

The hardest part for many corporations is the notion that they relinquish control. Control of the conversation (which historically has never been a conversation, but an oration). Measure, but don’t get caught in the uncertainty of a most certain demise.

“The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide” Fight Club

By Marty Thompson

I was fascinated with the results of a recent research study conducted by Jennifer S. Mueller, University of Pennsylvania, Jack A. Goncalo at Cornell University, ILR, and Dishan Kamdarat the Indian School of Business, in press at the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Here is the Abstract summary from their paper.

By Lynn Stafford

First Millennium BC:

Who was at the top of their game in prophecy consulting?

The entire buzz was directed at the very center of the world, high atop Mount Parnassus, at the Temple of Apollo.  Enter the Oracle of Delphi.

With auspicious clients including King Amasis of Egypt, Solon of Athens, King Croessus of Lydia, leaders of Greek city states as well as a host of other mover and shakers who sought out wisdom about what was, it was the Oracle of Delphi who was telling what would be, benefiting from a highly influential fan base reported to be in the tens of thousands.  And as if this is not impressive enough, with integrated PR and marketing created by Homer, a small word of mouth boutique, surely the Oracle was the very first, world-famous woman owned business.

While there is no exhaustive resource that identifies her approach and consulting theory, (though we do know that some of her clients reported visions, some foretold the future while others simply disappeared into the cleft overcome by fumes, loosing their sense of reality and suffering fatal consequences) we do know that she always offered up this one caveat before her clients set out to engage, lead and conquer.

“Know Thyself.”

Present Day: Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 9:45AM

Let’s jettison ahead thousands of years to consider Kenneth Cole’s now infamous tweet.

Twitter: “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo.  Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo – KC”

Oops!  Mea culpa.

Same Day: Hours later

Twitter: “Re Egypt tweet: we weren’t intending to make light of a serious situation.  We understand the sensitivity of this historic moment – KC”

Save or no save?  You make the call.  Yet it appeared on that day that this tweet might garner as much push back as was Hosni Mubarak’s steadfast refusal to leave office.  Hundreds commented on and off-line and mostly negatively.  By 12:30pm that day Kenneth Cole himself apologized on Facebook removing the tweet saying, “I have dedicated my life to raising awareness about serious social issues, and in hindsight my attempt at humor regarding a nation liberating themselves against oppression was poorly timed and absolutely inappropriate.”

The Oracle de deux banane refuses to add to the fodder on what essentially became a conversation about a gaffe in judgment or worse, moral flaw.  At the end of the day, literally, while the message’s content was sullied by ones righteous sensitivity, and what Ad Age posited as a “lack of tack” in a post titled, “Kenneth Cole Steps in It on Twitter”, who engaged in the controversy didn’t know that the Cole spring collection was online? Whatever the consequences people were talking about Kenneth Cole.  Merde!  I even pointed the browser to kennethcole.com myself.

However, to know thyself is pretty smart advice.  After all, the Cole incident could have gone the way of Mubaraks’ eventual resignation debacle – very poorly.  Surely it is not a matter of if, but rather when, some well-meaning twit attempts a tweet using snarky cleverness that ignites consumers into a frenzied, Mel Gibson moment that shifts perceptions resulting in irreparable damage to a brand.

If you’re attached to any part of the team that is responsible for “voicing” a company, it’s imperative you have a deep understanding and can articulate the DNA of the organization in such ways that are in agreement with its culture. Though not spoken, heard in the ethos where trust in brand dwells, an organizations core resonant values are always inherently present within each and every communiqué.  Who you are as a company and what you stand for underscore every touch point with the public.

If you want to engage, lead and conquer, the first commandment is to … Know Thyself.

By Lynn Stafford.

Successful real estate strategy is synonymous with Location, Location, Location.  Today, in this nascent, Mesozoic period of integrated design and build I asked myself, in the future, what will become synonymous with successful Social Media strategy?  Smart money is on Culture, Culture, Culture.

Smitten with the latest apps, trends and data (the latter always being vulnerable to misinterpretation anyway) marketers seem to be giving too much lip service to technology as strategy.  And the evidence this kind of narrow thinking is creating in the marketplace underscores the reason to rethink what truly defines a winning strategy.  More and more I hear the buzz promise of app driven campaigns without the kind of language or deep understanding that comes from building a strategy that is driven by authentic communication expressing a company’s culture as brand and brand as culture.  Consumers know what companies do; what they’re interested in discovering is if there is an alignment between them and their products and services – discovering what the company stands for and who they truly are.

Given, great technology and measurement will always serve as a if not the critical lynch pin to the success of a company’s Social Media strategy.  But perhaps those sweet buzz kisses in your client’s ear just might be serving more to tease and foster a competitive advantage than to fulfill a commitment to the one you love.

The book, Tribal Leadership – Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization, Logan, King and Fisher-Wright, asserts that, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.  Catchy huh?  And luckily for me, three things I’m enormously fond of.  More than metaphor, the concept of culture in this context is attached to the core values of an organization, people and their relationships (both internal and external) and by the language they use.

As it turns out, one study from the book (Corby and O’corrbui, 1999) found that strategies fail an estimated 70 percent of the time.  And this figure is considered a very generous estimate.  Other observations in this field suggest that as much as 80 percent of all strategies fail.

This is mind-blowing data.  And once it lands with you, you’ll never think about how important culture is to strategy again.  Consider this.  Even if there was a (-/+) of 20 on the 70 percent finding, it would mean that an organization would have no more than a 50/50 chance of succeeding with their next strategy.  And when you consider the crash and burn rate of new business ventures in tandem with the billions of dollars invested in marketing, advertising and social media campaigns that never return their investment, indeed, if culture usurps strategy, the focus of our strategy conversations must change now.

This means you get to unequivocally understand and be able to communicate your client’s culture – to truly own their DNA and envision its quality of life in popular culture.  But here’s the catch.  It’s our experience at Two Bananas that most companies don’t really have their arms around their own DNA yet alone a rock solid narrative of their own culture.  Most companies don’t know or can’t articulate what drives them.

Needless to say, this is a problem and especially for creatives.  There you are at the big table and some middle management guy says… “Hey… we’re going to have to really think outside the box!”  The problem here is that thinking outside the box implies that one knows what’s inside the box.  And again, most organizations don’t truly know what drives them outside of profit.

One of the most important pieces of evidence we look for with new clients is whether or not they are prepared to initiate and sustain their Social Media Strategy.  Our next conversation is about culture.