All Aboard The #Fail Train

Maybe our patience is wearing thin. Maybe we've been through one too many phone trees and been dealt with by one too many surly, underpaid customer service clerks. Or possibly we just see the immediate results of companies responding so apologetically to scathing YouTube videos and angry Twitter tirades that we think this is our shortcut. But whatever the reasons, customers are starting to realize that the traditional customer service channels are not as satisfying as venting publicly to their social networks.

Clearly there's something cathartic about sharing our frustrations with others. And obviously we could fill a library with customer service failures. But my question is, "Is meeting customers in the social media space the answer, or only ignoring the problem?"

The Primary Customer Service Destination

As with most of the more interesting conversations your humble host of The BeanCast has these days, this one began on Twitter. Len Kendall offered the following retweet and then a short comment at the end:

RT @mzkagan: Does venting consumer outrage on Twitter actually work? You bet.http://post.ly/3mUp (Until it becomes to common?)

Now if you follow the link down, it eventually ends up at this Slate article and showcases stories about how some customers are finally finding customer service satisfaction by publicly exposing the failings of a company. Taken in context, it's all pretty impressive. Customers get out of the feedback loop and get results. Companies get a way to publicly show that they can listen. All's good. But Len's side point sticks with you, doesn't it? What does happen when it all becomes common?

The conversation on Twitter went further, though, eventually being joined by Alleigh Marre, who was dragged in because she posted the following while we were discussing:

Many brands learned this the hard way, "Twitter has emerged as a primary destination for customer comments/complaints"http://bit.ly/oiOV9

The link in the tweet goes to a Brandweek article, and highlights the fact pointed out above: "Twitter has emerged as a primary destination for customer comments and complaints." (The article is also short on insight and I have no idea what that chart from eMarketer is supposed to prove, but let's just go with the premise for now.) And if we understand this correctly, the point is that services like Twitter are not just important, but have become an essential channel for customer service.

The Real Problem Remains

Now the obvious lesson here is that companyies ignore the social media spectrum at their peril. The blogs and Twitter and Facebook and forums are where customers are turning to cause you as much headache as possible. Whether you like it or not, you need to be present.

What bothers me, though, is the underlying problem that seems to be ignored in all of this: Customers wouldn't feel the need to embarrass us en masse, if our customer service channels weren't so completely broken. And don't forget part two, which Len hinted at: What good is it to address social media as a customer service channel when we keep driving people to such venues with our lousy customer service?

I am a big fan of treating social venues as a medium for public customer service. Customer service as a whole is an under-valued branding tool, since we all should know by now that solving problems is how you turn happy customers into loyalists. And doing this publicly turbo-charges the value of these interactions. It allows the interested masses to experience results without needing to experience the problems.

But should we really be driving all our dissatisfied customers to this venue? And more importantly, to paraphrase Len's tweet again, what's going to happen when the "social" luster fades and our still-broken, lousy customer service is all we have left?

Be Social, But Also Fix What's Broken

The inevitable result of years of bad, one-on-one experience with customer service is what is happening now -- customer revolt. The case studies in the articles show that customers got fed up with long-periods of abuse and misuse at the hands of customer service reps and they turned to twitter or their blog for satisfaction. But what they are also hinting at is step two of this evolution, where customers won't even give your traditional customer service options a chance and will always and immediately go for the throat with a #yourcompanysucks tag on a vicious post.

Sure it's bratty. Sure it's unfair. Sure, the reasonable behavior is to exhaust your options with a company before trying to humiliate them. But they're not going to be reasonable anymore, because they know they'll get the run-around. They've lost faith in that option. And we, as companies, have lost trust.

So fine. We'll beef up our social efforts to meet the changing needs of the customer. But let's remember that we are probably the cause of our own problems. (Or at least the customer service discipline as a whole is the problem.) So unless we address fixing the whole system of dissatisfaction, our social efforts are like stopping a river with a Dixie cup. Because just as social customer service is a public way of showing off our good side, lots of public dissatisfaction works to the opposite effect for our brand. And all the good we do publicly is for naught, if the cable service guy shows up three days late and the phone operator tells the customer there's nothing he/she can do about that broken guitar.

Can We Blame The Audience For Agreeing

There was an interesting discussion going on this morning over on Edward Boches blog, Creativity Unbound. (For those of you who don't know him, he's the Chief Creative Officer and Chief Social Media Officer at Mullen, in Boston. And yes, I've invited him to be on The BeanCast Marketing Podcast, so expect to hear from him in the coming months.)

The basic question put out was, "Are we being too agreeable in social media settings?" In mass marketing publications and websites, debate can be quite inflammatory and event downright nasty. But Edward points out that the norm on Twitter or in blog comments seems to be predominantly one of backslapping and "good job!"

Obviously, with a premise like this, even the commenters who agreed tried to be a little disagreeable. None of us wanted to seem like foolish patsies, after all. But two things occurred to me after reading the post and follow up comments.

Social Networks Are Designed for Agreement

While debate does happen among friends, by their very design the social networks are predisposed toward forming circles of like-minded people. Same with personal blogs. It's unlikely you're going to waste time reading the opinions of an individual you don't agree with. So finding spirited disagreement in such circles is simply not the norm. Which raises the question of whether such environments are healthy if not matched to at least some mainstream engagement. As I said 

in my comments on Edward's post

:

"...the debate evolves further as to whether social networks are healthy ecosystems for ideas. We talk about Twitter replacing news sites for many of us, but are we better people if we only hear the news we want to hear, reported in ways we want to hear it?

I’ve always said that social networks are only as good as the people you follow, so I try to engage with people who disagree with me as much as with those who agree with me. But I think you raise a very good point that broader news sites and open forums still very much play an important roll in our social efforts. If we don’t pay attention to the broad audience, how can we draw people to the micro audience?"

Edward's post highlights the fact that relying too heavily on social media for engagement with our audience, creates a vacuum that can be unhealthy if not tempered with broader thinking and engagement.

Vanilla Posts Get Vanilla Responses

For me, though, the more important take-away from this discussion is an understanding that I can't blame my audience for agreeing with me, if I'm not challenging them in the first place.

Let's be honest: If we're among friends, we tend to fall into certain patterns. We feel comfortable around like-minded people, so we share thinking that fits the venue. We're also driven by pleasing our audience to keep them following us or reading our blog posts. So how can we blame our audience for being too agreeable if we're not pushing their comfort zone and making them consider new ways of thinking? Again turning to my comments on Edward's post:

"I think...this also highlights the often shirked responsibility held by bloggers/posters/whatever. I hear a lot about keywords and SEO and posting content that drives traffic. But it’s the rare blogger who challenges their own thinking, explores ideas that may be counter to the thinking of their audience and occasionally admits that they were wrong. The quality of the content is what drives the debate. We can’t blame the audience for agreeing with us when we’re posting “vanilla” ideas."

To truly get the most value we can from social media tools, we need to be part of a conversation. But too many of us confuse conversation with push messaging, followed by audience feedback. We have to remember that conversation doesn't always begin and end with us. Sometimes it needs to be sought out. And sometimes it means saying things that will spark debate.Dangerous stuff! But then, if we're not willing to risk a little danger in the social scene, why are we even bothering in the first place? Because in the end if we're not engaging in real, two-way conversation, it's just the same old push strategy in a new venue.

Thanks again to Edward Boches for sparking this particular conversation. You can follow him on Twitter by clicking here.

Results At The Expense of Value

I know I must have written or talked about this somewhere before. But today your humble host of The BeanCast engaged in an interesting discussion about balancing results and brand. And it led to some new thinking.

My Twitter conversation with Lois Geller (yes, THE Lois Geller, who you really should know...and for God's sake read her books), centered around my old harp about whether we too often rely on "what works" at the expense of "what's best."

Short-term results at the expense of long-term goals — I'm certainly guilty of this. You probably are as well. We live in an immediate society. We want to know something is working and we want to know it now. Particularly in advertising and marketing professions we are almost never praised for our long-term achievements with our campaigns. We are rewarded for what we've done today and for the promotions in front of us.

In the case of our discussion earlier today, the subject was specifically about direct marketing. But really this truth applies to branding, PR, interactive and social campaigns equally as well. Everyone wants to know that the buzz is high, that the response is a landslide and that the ROI equals truckloads of money. And let's face it, all those things are important and are part of our job descriptions. But I sometimes wonder if we go a little overboard on the mathematical evaluations of our campaigns.

Trusting Our Guts As Well As Our Brains

I know it's a little idealistic to say that sometimes we should trust our guts, but there it is. We really should trust our gut a little more. Because as tempting as it is to say, "The white envelope is clearly our best bet, because it generates that sweet spot between production costs and response to generate maximum profitability," it's still generating no lasting value for the brand. It's a friggin' white envelope with a logo. It may get opened and it may get results, but it turns our brands (and, frankly, the shops that produce these envelopes) into commodities.

The same is true of branding. As much as we want the broadcast spot that generates the most buzz on the USA Today Ad Meter, yet another crotch shot that makes us laugh does nothing to build the long-term character of our product. (That one's for you, Bill Green.) It's makes us a beer commodity, even if we're a corn chip.

Numbers Make Lousy Storytellers

I believe in results and I believe in measurement. I stake my career on these things, so I want everyone to understand that I haven't suddenly smoked crack and gone off the deep end. But it's worth considering that numbers have never, and never will, tell the whole story of customer engagement. As storytellers they suck, because they're always skipping to the end of the book and devaluing the plot line that got us there. This is a shame, because the story represents the long-term interests of the brand, even while getting us to the immediate fiscal needs of the quarter.

So what I'm saying is, always be investing. Even if the mailer can be cheaper or the spot can be funnier, be looking at what is really being communicated to the customer. Because these intangible impressions are what are building the foundation of every communication that comes after it.

Free Means Changing The Currency

If you've listened to The BeanCast Marketing Podcast this week, you've already heard me rant about this idea. But we all know I don't get over ideas very easily. So I want to explore "currency exchange" a little more.

To bring everyone up to speed, Brian Morrissey proposed on his blog that free services, like FriendFeed, intentionally make a contract with their users that says, "We will give you free access to our service, in exchange for you populating our site with content." And while at first this seems like a great idea, we find again and again that the company proves their concept, sells their concept out to the bigger fish in the pond and leaves the users hanging out to dry.

For me, this highlights some basic truths about the concept of "free." And no, I'm not debating whether Chris Anderson's book, Free, is legitimate thinking. I'll save that for another time. But Brian's post does clarify for me the following two points:

The Free "Model" is Not Universal

When we hear about the idea of giving away stuff for free in order to attract business elsewhere, there's this tendency to image we're talking about "sampling." Giving away free samples is indeed a solid business practice. You give away product in hope that the person will come back and pay the next time.

But this model cannot be overlaid on top of a "free service" business. Because when you offer a free service, there is no real path to profitability and people come to expect your service to always be free. (Online news is a perfect example.) Even if you offer premium service upgrades, those are really completely separate propositions. So the model for a free service business needs to be completely different.

Now let me say, this isn't a bad thing. Giving away a free service is a brand builder -- at least until your market becomes saturated with free offerings in your space. (And again, news is a prime example.) But it's clearly not a path to making money.

Free Services Only Work With Value Exchange

Which brings up the second insight I got from Brian's post: The only model that makes business sense for a free service is where the business gets something of value from the customer.

I called it a "currency exchange" in my comments on Brian's site. You as a business offer access, tools and bandwidth, then ask for access to the time/content/activities of your users in return.

FriendFeed seemed to understand this much quicker than Facebook and Twitter have. And Google has built an entire empire on it. You can offer a free service only if what your users are contributing can be resold in some manner. So for instance in the case of Google, content managers use Google tools in exchange for Google's access to their content and/or site traffic data for search purposes, and searchers use Google in exchange for the knowledge of their search preferences for resale. We users look at it as "free," but really Google is taking value from our activities, so it's anything but free.

Now the point was brought up on the show that Facebook, in buying FriendFeed, can't hope to make Google-style dollars from the acquisition. And I agree. But the data they hope to get from the FriendFeed version of Internet content aggregation is still much more valuable on the resale market than anything they currently have. It puts them in a much better position than Twitter, which can only aggregate random thoughts.

But no matter how you slice it, the acquisition of FriendFeed is acknowledgment by Facebook that their key to survival depends on leveraging more of a value exchange from their users. And I think it's time we stop thinking of these services as free and start understanding what this value exchange really means -- and whether we're giving away more than we bargained for in the transaction.

Branding Yourself Online

Mahalo really ought to pay me for all the promotion I'm doing for them recently.

Oh wait. They kind of are paying me. At least in Mahalo dollars. Not sure exactly the exchange rate on that, but whatever. I find it to be a symbiotic relationship no matter what the value of their imaginary currency. I need ideas to write about and talk about for The BeanCast blog and marketing podcast. They need answers to questions. Perfect fit. Like peanut butter and jelly.

So today I found a question about personal branding online. And it made me realize that there's an assumption out there that self-promotion and branding online is a science -- find the right keywords, do the right SEO and we can make anyone famous.

But while to a certain extent formulas can work, the people and products and brands who rise to the top and stay there always seem to have what in marketing we call a "USP" or Unique Selling Proposition. (Also known as Unique Selling Point.)

Success Takes a USP

Take Chris Brogran for instance. He offers savvy advice on social media and was one of the first to do so. He's a brand leader. Then there's Leo Laporte who offers access to the smartest minds in tech, blogging and podcasting. He was one of the first to do this and he does it better than just about everyone else out there. Even Justine Ezarik (iJustine to most of you) has carved out a niche for smart product reviews with a liberal amount of skin and cleavage.

You get the picture. Self promotion online takes finding a niche that is either unfulfilled or is assailable, filling that niche with a better offering, and then building out a content strategy to meet this need. Or in other words, it takes a USP and a dedicated follow-through.

Keywords and Content

So we identify the niche. We create our USP. Where do we go from there? What I say is start with the basics of keywords and content.

An online brand is only as valuable as the content we put up. So it only makes sense to build that content to match as closely as possible the things our audience is looking to find through some solid keyword research. This is how we fine tune our niche and create content that is interesting and relevant. And it makes the process of continually optimizing our content more fluid and natural.

Just remember that our content is the true key to loyal followers and search rankings. The deeper and more rich our keyword-optimized content is, the more likely we will be found by our audience. And I'm not just talking about content on our own sites. We have to do this everywhere we engage online. The object is to be everywhere our audience already is, creating pathways back to our sites.

Oh Yeah...You Need Talent

Finally, (and probably the most important element) we can't ever under-estimate the value of personal talents. Whether you want to be informational or just a flake, the Internet is essentially an entertainment medium. So for God's sake, be entertaining.

The most entertaining presentations of content always get the most views. Why do you think that even NBC, the third-place network, still trounces PBS in the ratings? It's because that content is optimized to reach the highest potential audience base, and a premium is put on the entertainment and production values.

You need to ask yourself, "Am I able to maintain the interest of my audience on a consistent basis." I can tell you from first-hand experience, the process is a lot of work. But you can't hope to play in the space without an eye toward the entertainment value of your content.

So those are my thoughts on personal branding. I'd love to have you share some more below. I think this is an interesting subject that a lot of us are still muddling through.

The Interplay Of Recency, Frequency and Strategy

Have you seen my new Mahalo Answers widget running on the homepage? Yes, when not recording The BeanCast Marketing Podcast or helping clients to marketing glory, I'm still completely addicted to being a know-it-all over at Mahalo.

But Mahalo can be a valuable experience, because every once in a while I run across a question that I think will be of interest to the readers here. This week, that (not-quite)question was:

"I am in an inside sales role and often send emails to follow-up my telephone conversations. Our company policy has been to send emails within 5-10 business days. However, I think that it would be more effective to send emails immediately (or at least within 24 hours). I am looking for objective research as to the best follow-up policy (please include links)."

What struck me most about this question was that it highlights a common misunderstanding in sales. Too often we think only about timing between contacts or the frequency of our contacts, without adequately addressing our communication strategy first. My answer (with some editing now) was as follows:

"Your question is a complicated one. But let me start by saying for further research on the subject, the marketing principle we are talking about is "recency." So searching "email" and "recency" together yields a lot of interesting data. Please note also that the term "recency" and the RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) model applies usually to customer buying behavior, but is also applicable to how and when we communicate with the customer

Now having said all this, I would first look at your strategy before deciding on increasing your recency. The reason behind your follow up is just as important as the timing. For instance, if your current follow up is just an "ask" letter, a week to 10 days later is probably a good recency. It's about reminding them, but not being intrusive. However, if your goal is to cement relationships and prove that you listened, then sometimes an immediate follow-up is warranted.

Case in point, you're selling your widget and you note during the conversation several key areas of pain that your prospect is experiencing. It would be wise to immediately send a non-promotional, personalized email that reflects back what you heard and lets them know you will be actively seeking some answers. Then a day or two later another email should go out with those answers and a reminder that you are available for further questions. Then put them in the 10-day reminder cycle unless they contact you before then. This plan ups both the frequency and the recency, because it is high-touch and personalized.

I also recommend testing. All the best research and advice (like mine above) can say one thing, but none of this research was done with your customers. Regularly break out statistically relevant test groups and see how they react. See if your test cell does better than the control group. If it does, run an ROI analysis on it to see if the new approach is cost justified. And if it still passes, roll it out as the new control methodology and come up with something new element to test against it."

My point in all this is really very simple. Recency and frequency are tools that only measure numbers. Strategy is the tool that measures relationship value with people. They can work well independently. But it's when they all work together that we find the real answers to how and when to connect with our prospects and customers.

Branding And Popular Culture

We strayed into some very interesting territory on this week's episode of The BeanCast Marketing Podcast. While discussing whether Chinese premium brands (likeLi Ning, Haier and the already present Lenovo) had a real chance to capture the hearts and dollars of American consumers, Bill Green made an impressive point:

What Makes A Good Direct Response Campaign

A phrase that gets under my skin like almost no other is when a branding agency creative director says something akin to, "If we have to do direct, we're going to do it right." Of course implying that direct creative sucks and needs a massive make-over.

First, the humble admission from one who has done plenty of direct: Direct creative DOES largely suck. Sorry to my direct friends and associates, but let's be honest. The reason we get so much flack from the rest of the industry is because we are still using creative tactics from the 1950s and hiding behind the "but it works" mantra.

Fine. Agreed. It works. And so does holding a gun to people's heads. I bet I could sell just about anything to anyone if you handed me a gun and an offer.

But all this aside, the reason I'm so bothered by the thought that somehow fixing creative will fix the image of direct, is because creative goals at the expense of "what works" will harm the entire eco-system of advertising if done incorrectly. Statements like "we're gonna do it right" ignore that the brand efforts -- the broadcast commercials and print ads and amazing web sites and all the rest of the work that usually win top creative awards -- all live on the back of the direct and sales efforts. Those advertising budgets have to come from somewhere. And "buzz metrics" don't pay the bills.

The only reason a branding effort gets to make nebulous claims of "impressions" is because somewhere down the line sales are moving in a positive direction. I'm not saying that branding doesn't contribute to the process, because it does. But actual sales move by the kinds of measurable promotions that response-based marketing achieves. While I agree that direct creative definitely needs to raise the bar, let's at least also agree that most general advertising creative directors don't have the first clue as to how that should be done. They think they do, but in practice it usually ends up as a phenomenally expensive idea that can't be cost-justified against the return on investment.

So let's be clear here: A truly awesome direct campaign is ALWAYS based on a trio of factors -- strategy, results and creative. Any evaluation of direct response work, and any effort to improve that work, needs to look at all three factors or you're simply stroking your ego.

Strategy

Clearly all advertising depends on strategy, so it's not unique that direct depends on it too. What is unique, however, is the level of this dependency.

Strategy in direct is not just about winning hearts and minds or defining messaging and media. It's also an exercise in tactical brilliance. It involves a level of targeting that can define a message down to dozens of groups, if not to the individual level. And it takes a familiarity with the creative and production elements necessary to move a person to respond. Often they are intimately involved with creative details like format and color, because that's how detailed we get in direct marketing. Knowing that certain audiences respond better to certain colors, regardless of brand pallet, is important information. Because sometimes as little as a 1% lift in response can be mean a million more dollars in revenue.

Results

And speaking of response, a direct campaign always has an eye on the goal. We start backwards from the target sales figure and figure out EXACTLY how we can best reach this. We show a clear path to the sale and we determine that optimal balance between program cost and expected return, based on the target audience, expected response rates and expected sales. We have figures for cost per acquisition and lifetime customer value, so we KNOW what the results will be before we send out the first package or air the first spot. And we are always testing and refining a program, to see how to make it better. Direct lives and dies on results. So it's never a guessing game or a vague notion of brand perception.

Creative

Now we come to creative. And given the above factors, you can see what a narrow and restrictive box it can be. It's not just that strategy is trying to tell creative what to do. It's the fact that strategy can often dictate the approaches that need to take place. And the results can often mean changing colors or images or copy or actors or even the entire layout and format.

To most people in advertising, this is the very essence of the "problem" with direct. It's creative determined by a committee. And admittedly the process is fraught with frustration. But it's also a challenge well worth fighting. Because if you can see past the limitation of the box, an amazing blending happens here. Many times it won't win a One Show Pencil, but it's work that can be truly ingenious and satisfying and it gets the job done.

And it bears repeating that despite the fact direct creative can many times offend advertising sensibilities with its stock images and pre-determined formats and 800 numbers in the bottom bar of the TV spot, we must remember that it's also held to a different standard. It doesn't need to be, nor should it be, the brand campaign. What it needs to be is a translation of the brand campaign that closes the communications loop and closes the deal.

So let's at the very least agree to disagree among the disciplines. Because without each other we'd have people feeling good about brands they don't buy and buying from brands that they couldn't care less about.

The Ever Elusive Iconic Brand

The recent Michael Jackson unpleasantness has led your humble host of The BeanCast Marketing Podcast to some interesting thinking. To be more specific, I've been contemplating our drive in advertising, and in media as a whole, to create icons.

Repeatedly during the past week leading up to the memorial extravaganza-concert-circus, the press was amazed at the level of attention the recently deceased Jackson received. You would hear again and again how, "This is the biggest memorial ever for a celebrity." And pundits wondered, "Will we ever see the like again?"

It's that last question that particularly gives me pause. Because the question is essentially, "Will we ever again see the rise of such an iconic figure?" It makes me realize that the same can be asked of brand icons. Because while brands will always rise to popularity, for them to be enduring icons takes a special blend of factors that are being increasingly hampered by a disposable economy.

The Demand for Disposability

A very basic fact of capitalism is the need for growth. Stagnation can often be the same as death in the world of business. But at certain points in this growth you reach plateaus, whether because of saturation of the market and/or increased competition. So to overcome these natural flattening periods, products and services are reconfigured to shorten the lifespan, or intentionally made obsolete by the introduction of newer products.

Now, as we all should know since this is basic economics, this creates a disposal economy, which artificially erases that line we reach when we have everything we need or want, creating the perception that we now need better. Seems like a practical approach to growth, right? Except that in order to create this constant need, you have to devalue the product. It can burn bright and short. But burning long just gets in the way.

Disposable Products Break Lasting Attachments

It's my belief that this drive to the disposable eventually infects the brands themselves. With increased competition and everyone playing this same game of making products less meaningful and more replaceable, we soften attachments. And in this softening of attachments to products, comes an inevitable softening of attachments to the brands.

Buyers become both more discriminating and more willing to part with you for the sake of the next cool thing. Which places increasing burdens on a company to consistently outdo itself to keep the customer in the fold. And I think it's pretty clear that in practice this is impossible to maintain forever.

Even if you don't play the disposable game and build a lasting product or load in value service, the disposable mindset is still there. Consumers have been conditioned to abandon the old in favor of the new and brands are easily tossed aside.

Creating the Indispensable Brand

So what does a brand need to do in order to stay relevant and present with a customer? I wish I had the catch-all answer. Obviously all the cylinders of the engine need to be firing. The product needs to be strong, the brand needs to be intriguing and you need to be aggressively enhancing your offering at all times. But I think it's also clear that brand attachment can no longer just be about a great product and a captivating identity. It needs to also extend to the entire relationship experience. And no, I'm not about to invoke the "social media" buzz phrase here. Because while brand efforts can benefit from customer interactions, what I'm suggesting goes far beyond the listening and responding model of good sales.

It's solid advertising practice to use a structured approach to the brand. We know what the unique selling proposition (USP) is and we've clearly defined the brand essence so that all messaging can directly point back to this key understanding. But this structured approach doesn't adequately account for the role of customer service and customer experience. What do we do with customer impressions of our brand that are counter to our image? How do we leverage the uncontrollable factors of customer generated excitement?

In the past (and probably even today) we invented new ideas, like Alex Wipperfurth's "brand hijack." We've also explored ad nauseum the arena of user-generated content (UGC). But I think approaches like these unnecessarily complicate and confused the issue more than help. Customers have always tried to "own" brands, this much is true. But they make poor brand managers. Most have no interest in sustaining their own user-generated excitement. So the need isn't necessarily to embrace some new paradigm where the customer owns the brand or creates the ad, as much as find ways for the brand to feed this ongoing, emotional excitement.

A great example of how this can work comes from my ever-trusty Apple. The user-generated excitement surrounding this brand has been around for years. Fan clubs, discussion boards, user-groups, listservs, podcasts -- there have been, and continue to be, thousands of these expressions of loyalty to this brand. But it wasn't until Steve Jobs returned and initiated an almost Disneyesque approach to walling off the magic and projecting a strictly managed and dictated brand image that all the hype reached a fever pitch. Why? Because as much as customers think they own this brand and want a say in the products, that's not what drew them to the brand in the first place. What drew them was this idea that they were somehow being counter-cultural in their choice. They were part of an exclusive club that always seemed to anticipate their needs. And what they really needed a leader for their club, not a mirror of their expectations.

Apple understood (and hopefully understands still) that the fuel behind the devotion was a desire to be wowed and surprised by insanely great stuff. So instead of creating a reflection of the people who use the product, they set out to create a brand that re-captured and enhanced the mystique, design excellence and simplicity that has always excited its base. It's a brand that fuels imagination rather than dictates it, and allows people to easily paint their own experience onto it.

It All Has To Work Together

There's a huge lesson to be learned here. We talk a good game about needing to get in touch with our customers, listen to their needs and respond quickly, but the more important thing over the long term is how we craft our brand to inspire our customers. Because while social media strategies will help you in the short term to create loyalty and understand the customer's experience with you, it's the branding work that will give all these diverse customers with their many varied experiences a common rallying point. It creates the opportunity to feel part of something bigger.

This is why social media darling, Zappos, is seeking help with their brand now. As much as they are a poster child as a social success story, they have no identity beyond anecdotal customer service stories. While that's great for cementing the loyalty of the customers they help and a great tale to tell, it relies too much on the continuation of customer excitement, without giving them a rallying point beyond a logo and a website. The excitement is unsustainable in this fashion and competition threatens to make them a brand easily disposed of at the next opportunity for even more excitement

Yet clearly branding alone is not enough. Everyone can recognize the United Airlines brand, but customer experience is so poor and social outreach so anemic, that everyone now assumes they will break guitars. And going back to the disposable model, without customer service that embodies the brand, people are all too willing to leave you at the first opportunity.

Being iconic is clearly tougher than ever. But not impossible. It takes a commitment to creating an entirety of experience where everything from the product to the in-bound call center to management ethics to ads you produce all work together to create an entirety of experience for the customer. A tall order to be sure, but one well worth striving for if it keeps you consistently relevant and beloved in the eyes of your customers.

Is The "New PR" Just Talking To Itself?

I was floored last night listening to This Week in Tech, episode 202.

There's no denying the show can be a bit anti-marketing. Leo Laporte and his crew are tech people, not advertising folks. But many of them (all of them, in this episode) come from a journalism/media background and do see the other side of this divide. And their insights are pretty damning.

I won't even bother to try to encapsulate the entire discussion. You really NEED to listen to the show yourself. Especially you, Brian Solis, because you were specifically called out. But I will try to encapsulate a few of the more valid points made by guest host,John Dvorak, and his panel of Becky Worley (ABC), Natali Del Conte (CBS) and Carlos Rodela (Mevio).

You Can't Fake a Relationship

Parties and Twitter banter and personal notes are all well and good, but they make poor substitutes for real friendship. No matter how much we try to pretend that the way to a journalist's heart is through being "friendly and engaging," most real journalists are not looking for friends. They are looking for facts and reliable resources for those facts. If you already happen to be a friend too, big bonus. But that comes from watching their sick kid while they run to the drug store, not by buying them drinks at the tweetup.

Solid Information and Press Releases Still Matter

Speaking of facts, journalists still appreciate a well-written, no-bull, appropriately-targeted press release. We're losing this art. In our efforts to promote, we often forget that a big part of PR is also to help the journalists we know on a regular basis. So give them the unadulterated facts. And to further this point, if you truly want to be a journalist's "friend," maybe you should consider giving them facts and info regularly that have nothing to do with promoting your client. Build the relationship in equal parts to the contact.

The True Influencers Aren't Taking Your Calls

The anecdotes in this show are so eye-opening! Because they reveal so clearly that the journalists and media people with the most street cred are also the most skeptical. They may take your free drink and eat your shrimp, but they aren't reading your blog, they're deleting your emails and they aren't returning your calls. Why? Because they can get the same information with a whole lot less BS relationship fluff from other sources.

The social media echo chamber is just that. We talk to ourselves and our adherents and congratulate ourselves for all the blog mentions. But are we really getting the best results for our clients?

Using the tech industry as an example, a single recommendation of a website by Leo Laporte or his guests during TWiT orMac Break Weekly can instantly shut the site down. And he accepts no PR solicitations. I know of very few bloggers who can achieve this feat. Which goes back to the point that nuts-and-bolts, old-school, keep-a-stream-of-facts-coming-to-the-press PR is still the key to getting on the radar of the biggest influencers. They read the news, not you.

I will say that i believe in social media, relationship-based efforts for PR and I think a lot of the ideas out there are solid and need to be pursued. But when we do it at the expense of the not-so-glorious fundamentals of PR, we are essentially hamstringing the real potential of our public relations efforts.

Definitely look for more discussion of this on The BeanCast Marketing Podcast this week. The panel includes Peter Shankmanfrom Help a Reporter Out, so I expect this will be a pretty good discussion.