Operations and Marketing Connection

In this post two primary topics has been covered: The importance of understanding

the mechanics of the Social Web and the Social Feedback Cycle, and the collaborative

inflection-point within the larger social engagement process. Engagement has been

redefined for social business as a more active (participative) notion compared with

the decidedly more passive definition of engagement—reading an ad or mechanically

interacting with a microsite—typically applied in traditional media, where terms like

“Engagement Ad” literally means “an ad you can click on to see more promo copy.”

That’s not what participants on the Social Web think of as “engaging,” as the Social

Web is a distinctly participation-centric place.

The final section ties the mechanical processes of the social technologies

together with the acts of participation and collaboration, and establishes the foundational

role of the entire business or organization in setting up for success on the Social

Web. The Social Feedback Cycle—the loop that connects the published experiences

of current customers or other stakeholders with potential customers or other stakeholders—

is powered by the organization and what it produces. This is a very different

proposition from a traditional view of marketing where the message is controlled by an

agency and the experience is controlled—in isolation—by the product or services teams

and others. The alignment that needs to occur between what can be loosely

be called “Operations” and the Marketing team in support of Customers. Included in

“operations” are the functional areas that control product design and manufacturing,

customer service and support policies, warranty services and similar. In other words, if

Marketing is the discipline or function within an organization that defines and shapes

the customer’s expectation, then Operations is the combined functional team that

shapes and delivers the actual customer experience.

The connection between the disciplines of marketing and operations and social

media—and in particular the conversations, ratings, photos, and more that circulate

on the Social Web—is this: The majority of conversations that involve a brand, product,

or service are those that arise out of a difference between what was expected and

what was delivered or experienced. After all, we tend to talk more about what was

not expected than what was expected. In this simple relationship between expectation

and actual experience, the folly of trying to control conversations on the Social Web

becomes clear: Conversations on the Social Web are the artifacts of the work product

of someone else—a blogger, a customer, a voter, etc.—who typically doesn’t report to

the organization desiring to gain control! You can’t control something that isn’t yours

to control.

Instead, it is by changing the product design, the service policy or similar in

order to align the experience with the expectation or to ensure the replicable delivery of

“delight,” for example, as Zappos does when it upgrades shipping to “Next Day” for

no other reason than to delightfully surprise a customer. At Zappos, it’s not just a story

of an occasional surprise upgrade that got blown out of proportion in the blogosphere.

When bloggers—and customers—rave about Zappos, it’s for good reason: Zappos creates

sufficient moments of delight that many people have experienced them and gone

on to create and share content about them It’s expensive—and Zappos isn’t always the

lowest cost shoe retailer. But in the end, delight wins. Zappos set out to build a billiondollar

business in 10 years. As a team, they did it in eight. Ultimately, it is the subsequent

customer experiences—built or reshaped with direct customer input—which will

drive future conversations and set your business or organization on the path to success.

Connect Your Team

Social media marketing is in many ways a precursor to social business. Social media

marketing is most effective when the entire business is responsible for the experiences and everyone within the organization is visibly responsible for the overall product or

service. When engagement, for example, is considered from a customer’s perspective—

when the measure for engagement is the number of new ideas submitted rather than the

time spent reading a web page—the business operates as a holistic entity rather than

a collection of insulated silos. The result is a consistent, replicable delivery experience

that can be further tuned and improved over time.

When it comes to rallying the troops to support your organization-wide effort,

there is no doubt that you’ll face some push back. Very likely, you’ll hear things like this:

• We don’t have the internal resources and time.

• We lack knowledge and expertise.

• Not till you show me the value and ROI.

• We don’t have guidelines or policies.

• It’s for young kids—not for our business.

• Our customers will start saying bad things.

You’ll hear all of this, and more. Of the first tasks you are likely to face when

implementing a social media marketing program and then pushing it in the direction of

social business is the organizational challenge of connecting the resources that you will

need. The good news is that it can be done. The not-so-good news is that it has to be

done.

When you’re a marketer, one of the immediate benefits of a social media program

is gaining an understanding of what people are saying about your brand, product,

or service (listening); analyzing what you find to extract meaning (social media

analytics) that is relevant to your work; and then developing a response program

(active listening). This information can be presented internally, and done so in a way

that is inclusive and draws a team around you. Listening is a great way to start: As

you move toward social business, it will become clear rather quickly that this is best

done through an effort that reaches across departments and pulls on the strengths

of the entire organization. Anything you can do to get others within your business

or organization interested is a plus. As a starting point, listening is the low-hanging

fruit.

Each of the above—listening, analyzing, and some aspects of responding—can be

done without any direct connection to your customers or visible presence with regard to

your business or organization on the Social Web: In others words, it’s very low risk. While

it may not be optimal, the activities around listening and analyzing, for example, can be

managed within the marketing function. With workflow-enabled analytics tools—for

example, using a listening platform that automatically routes tweets about warranty issues

to customer service—you can certainly make it easier to oversee all of this.

Building on this approach, when you move to the next step—responding to a

policy question or product feature request—you’ll be glad you pulled a larger team together and built some internal support. Otherwise, you’ll quickly discover how limited

your capabilities inside the marketing department to respond directly and meaningfully

to customers actually are, and this will threaten your success. How so?

Suppose, for example, that you see negative reviews regarding the gas mileage

of a new model car you’ve introduced, or you see those posts about an exceptional

customer service person. In the former case, you can always play the defensive role—

“True, but the mileage our car delivers is still an improvement over….” Or, you can

ignore the conversation in hopes that it will die out or at least not grow. In the case of

the exceptional employee, you can praise that particular person but beyond the benefit

of rewarding an individual—which is important, no doubt about it—what does it

really do for your business? What would help you is delivering more miles per gallon,

or knowing how to scale exceptional employees, or how to create more exceptional

employees from the start.

Ignoring, defending, and tactically responding in a one-off manner doesn’t produce

sustainable gain over the long term. Instead, the information underlying these

types of events needs to get to the product teams, to Customer Support or Human

Resource (HR) managers or whomever it is that is responsible for the experience that

is being talked about. In the case of the mileage, someone needs to determine whether

there is a design problem: Does hot weather cause mileage dips, and are your Texas

auto dealers leading in sales? Or, is it an application mismatch (such as buying a

Hummer to run back and forth to the gym or tanning salon) or simply an unrealistic

customer expectation (set by, gee, I don’t know…maybe those EPA estimates that

appear in bold type in automobile advertisements?). All of these are real examples.

To address these kinds of issues, action is required, and the action has to connect

the source of the experience to the actual solution. This generally means involving

a team beyond marketing. Otherwise—if the root cause is not addressed, the current

conversations will continue.

What you are really after—and where social business practices can actually

deliver—is in understanding, validating, and implementing the processes or process

changes needed to move the conversation in the direction that supports your business

objectives. In the case of the exceptional employee, what is this person’s history? To

whom does this person report? How can your organization encourage more people to

adopt the specific behaviors that drove the positive comments? These are the types of

issues that a holistic approach to social business can impact.

In all of these cases, the take-away is this: Faced with an issue of interest coming

off of the Social Web, your next step—armed with the conversational data and some

analysis—is likely going to take you outside of marketing. You’ll want to have a larger

team in place, so the activity of encouraging support among colleagues and internal

influencers and decisions makers must begin early.

Who is that larger team, and how do you build it? The answers may surprise

you: Your best allies may be in unlikely or prior unconsidered places. Consider, for

example, the following:

• Your legal team can help you draft social media and social computing policies

for distribution within the organization. This is great starting point for teambuilding

because you are asking your legal team to do what it does best: Keep

everyone else out of trouble.

• You can connect your customer service team through social analytics tools so

that they can easily track Twitter and similar Social Web conversations, and

using low-cost listening tools and the USAF response matrix you can enlist your

corporate training department to teach service representatives what to do.

• You can outsource the development of a relevant business application for your

Facebook business page or other community site to a qualified technology partner

(and not your cousin or an intern who will be gone in 6 weeks).

• Enlist your own customers. Most business managers are amazed at how much

assistance customers will provide when asked to do so.