WEB 2.0, SOCIAL NETWORKING, AND CUSTOMERS IN CONTROL

Last week, we hosted our semi-annual Visionaries meeting for our lead users in the “Let Our Customers Re-Design Our Businesses” camp. Unfortunately, our timing isn’t so hot. O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit was also last week. They have more technorati. We have customer-centric business leaders who are recruiting customers to help shift their corporate cultures to become customer-adaptive. The Web 2.0 Summit is on the West Coast. We’re meeting in Boston. But we’re both talking about many of the same things: customer-created content, customers taking control, customer communities, customers designing, sharing, and voting on each others’ creations, customers acting as promoters and marketers, customers acting as problem solvers and guides, and customers creating folksonomies.

For our customer-centric visionary business executives, Web 2.0 enablement is both a boon and a curse.

On the plus side, we all want to empower customers to generate content and to roll their own solutions and share their creations with us and with their peers. We want customers in social networks to embrace our brands and our products, strut their stuff promoting our wares, and engage in guerilla marketing of our brands. We are no longer litigious when customers grab a media clip of our ads or our paid-for content and post it for all to download; instead, we are excited about the added exposure, the buzz and the advertising revenues we can all divvy up.

Customers Want to Help Shape Our Brands

One careful blogger and watcher of social networking as marketing is Staci Kramer at Paidcontent.org. Staci cites and paraphrases a “Wall Street Journal” Q&A with Mark Kingdon, the CEO of ad agency, Organic.

“For one, [Kingdon] says, social media properties are challenging marketers to get comfortable quickly with the lack of control that they have over where their content appears.” The second requirement is to get ready for and encourage dialogue. Kingdon: “We are entering the period of the open-source brand, where in order for people to feel like it is relevant to them, they have to have a part in creating it.”

Customers definitely want to help shape and control our brands to keep them authentic and relevant.

What’s Tricky about Harnessing Customers’ Contributions

What’s the downside? Our customer-centric Visionaries and e-biz execs shudder every time one of their top execs comes back from a conference with Web 2.0 religion. All of a sudden, their e-biz team is asked to support executive blogs, podcasts, wikis, tagging, customer-created content, and to provide fodder for mash ups. Once their top execs get “Web 2.0 religion” they suddenly want to be part of this “social networking” phenomenon. They want their Web sites to be the next Facebook. But they don’t really understand what social networking is, how it works, or whether it’s really relevant for their brand.

[Shameless sales pitch deleted!]
 

Comments

[Patty Seybold]

Graham!
Great Points! I agree that the brand is the feelings triggered in the customer--that's what I mean by customer experience. I would submit that its' the WHOLE experience, not just the experience with the product itself.

I also agree with you that each customer audience/segment/group has a different way they care about and interpret the brand promise--usually as it relates to their self-image and/or to what they care about...

That makes this co-creation thing so fascinating... Our job as company execs (marketers, heads of customer support, heads of R&D, head of operations) is to be authentic and truthful about the brand experience we are trying to deliver and to respond in the dance with our customers as they shape and re-shape the experience they WANT us to be offering surrounding our products and services...And I agree that different customer groups have different expectations.. that's why we try to get into customers' heads--to understand their different scenarios (what they're trying to accomplish and what they care about) vis a vis our brands.

Patty

[GrahamHill]

Patty

I prefer Tom Asacker's definition of a brand: the feelings and associated physical state that a product triggers in a customer.

In other words, a "real" brand is what the customer thinks it is, not what the marketer says it is. If the marketer thinks it is an apple, but the customer things it is a lemon, then it is a lemon. Period.

The challnge for marketers is to recognise that there are different groups of customers who have similar perceptions of what a brand really is (communities?). That doesn't mean that their carefully crafted messages need to be thrown away. But it does mean that the messages should be customised in a way appropriate for each of the groups.

And equally important, that the organisation is able to deliver against the promises made by the communications. Unfortunately, that rarely happens.
Research suggests that 80% of customers DO NOT expect brand communications' promises to be kept. And 80% of them are still disappointed when they aren't.

Graham Hill

[Patty Seybold]

Hi Randy--
Why are you assuming that the term "brand" means large commercial brands? To me a brand is the customer experience that customers have when they interact with a company, its products and the customer community that surrounds it. The company may be tiny. It doesn't need to be Coca-Cola. The customer community may BE the customer experience that young people (and us old fogies) care the most about.

Customer-created content keeps you authentic--it keeps you aligned with what customers actually care about, rather than what you are trying to foist on them.

Patty

[Patty Seybold]

Good catch, Graham!
I didn't mean for that plug to be there. I'll remove it.. And you're right, the pricing for our social networking primer is bogus. That's simply the bar we set between content that is free to all comers and content that is written for our paid subscriber base who get access to all our content and do not pay by the report.

Thanks for catching this! Patty

[GrahamHill]

Patty

I am disappointed.

At first you extol the virtues of lead-user co-creation through your LeadUserCamp. Great. Then you move on to C-types getting the 2.0 bug and causing havoc in the eBiz group. Great. Then you move on to pumping your Primer on Social Networking at a whopping USD$795 for a very thin 13 pages. Sorry, but that's just poor!

Why would anyone pay USD$795 for a primer when you can get it all for free off the Internet (just take a look at Slideshare to see what I mean), or if they are too strapped for time to do that, can get it from the man himself, Tim O'Reilly, through his "Why Web 2.0 Matters" report for only USD$375 for a very satisfying 101 pages.

I do like the stuff you talk about. It is good to have someone smart beating the drum for customers. But I am disappointed by the sales pitch.

Graham Hill

[Randy]

Patty I can not comprehend your statement that customer created content is there to help shape your brand. It is there to subvert the tired and stogy old concept of brand, turn it on its head and kick it to the curb. Web 2.0 is all about extending personal reach and furthering interpersonal connection. To suggest that web 2.0 concepts were gifted to large brands for the purposes of burning their mark onto the digital flesh of the population is laughable. ha ha ha. The kids that buy into this content creation model are interested in the people not the product. Marketers have inundated us with brands, marks, advertisements and the like that we are near blind to them. Thank you for searing my eyes so that I can no longer perceive your attempts to get my attention.