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Peter Hirshberg: The Future of the Cluetrain

Peter Hirshberg wrapped up today's event with a video presentation demonstrating how conversational marketing developed, how brands create culture, and how markets evolve.

"The conversational nature of everything has won out" as Peter started by relating someone saying this in a general conversation."This was unlikely and it just kind of happened. In 2003, two years before bloggers went to the political conventions, was also the year that the Cluetrain got bad reviews. The social media thing hadn't happened."
Peter went through the Amazon reviews ('that was so 1999'). Web 1.0 was about pages, Web 2.0 is about people. This has changed a lot. If you went to a blogging convention 4 years ago, people talked about bloggers vs. press. They unseated Dan Rather, the WSJ fought back with "I'd Rather Be Blogging." The lesson to take away?
1) Born again converts are the biggest believers.
2) Things Inconceivable become what you do to thrive -"what seems so obvious now was inconceivable then."

He showed a video of his interviews with residents (including shoeshine men!) in NYC four years ago, where everyone is an expert." "It was a dangerous thing..." and cut to footage of people shaking their head and  uttering expletives about the word 'blogger.'
When the world of Brands got a hold of this it got interesting.
Brands went through stages including denial and acceptance. Peter also argued with Andreas claims that visualizations weren't useful and showed a graphic of data in real time about Mattel ("A brand is anyone with a reputation and a responsibility to an audience.")

3)Not engaging is weakness, Conversation is Might
"We're consumers, human beings, deal with it... [so] we defected from marketing and sided with markets" — Doc Searls

"We're living at the beginning of an era where the idea of your audience as a competitive weapon is taking off" and showed a clip of a Hotels.com commercial.

"We're celebrating the 60th anniversary of non-conversational marketing: Radio. Radio was really one-way stuff." and showed another clip of an old Clark Gable movie ("from what we now understand as the pre-conversational marketing area."
"One of the best campaigns of the conversational marketing era, was the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign. It was integrated integrated, and included a commercial that took off on YouTube and never needed to be on TV." (The commercial won the top prize at Cannes)

He also cited www.makeupalley.com as a key influencer, where the brand didn't have the database, the blogger did!

"All of these changes take leadership" Peter pointed out. "Marketing people either get support, or they're scared sh*%tless by the people at the top." People respect those companies who put the good, bad and ugly out front. They're perceived as having a spine.

4) It's about the Enterprise
One of the greatest impacts will be on HOW business gets done. He noted Best Buy as an example of LISTENING to the Market. "What you need from leadership is the ability to listen." He used the BSN network as an example of getting employees involved by getting them to connect and collaborate in their one words.
Once employees got a network they used it to connect to each other and spontaneously solving problems, using BSN's video contest around 401k plans as a rallying point.
"When you ask people to make media, they have to figure it out and talk to one another," said Peter. "It changes the culture."  He also cited "The Case of the Employee Online Portal That Annoyed Employers" and how it's  as important to listen  internally as externally, and enabling them to take action. It's a "Loop Marketplace."

"It's easy for us to get excited about how great it all is," said Peter to wind down. "The downside is there are issues around identity and gaming. One of the wisest people I talked to..." Peter went back to video interviews on the street in NYC..."...I'd like to return to the shoeshine man":

"The blog," so said the shoeshine man, "is now about haters. All you gotta do and say something about someone and it's like a gunpowder trail It starts here and goes all the way over there!"

"We look at the world differently understanding the concept of the Global Village," said Peter. He showed a slide showing images of the incredibly connected blogosphere and Internet traffic.
"There are documents throughout history that change history, and Cluetrain fits in there" and showed a slide of Doc Searls right along with Thomas Jefferson!

Jeremiah Owyang: Getting Your Company Conversation-Ready

"Analysts love powerpoint!"

Group poll to start things off. Who is here and where are you from, from a social media perspective...

Case studies of companies doing social media right and wrong. Twitter is over capacity, always, not a good reputation for a Web 2.0 company. Companies must approach social media with the same effort of a product program. Requires a plan, strategy, resources, research, etc... all needed for a successful social media program.

Five things to think about for your social media program:
1) Who is in charge? The participants have the control. Marketers need to give it up, or suffer the community backlash.
- What can go wrong? Being too traditional, wrong measurement metrics, use push thinking.

2) Being Prepared.
- Use POST approach. P- people. O- objectives. Five for social computing (listening, talking, energizing (WOM), supporting, embracing - Dell IdeaStorm as an example of a success). S- strategy. Develop a plan, what does success look like? T- technology. Which tools to use. Blogs, Twitter, pick a good vendor last.
- Success depends on the interests of the members first. Give information the community finds valuable.
- What goes wrong? Content is too packaged, not believable. Or no one comes.

3) Dealing with Detractors.
- Have resources ready. Staff, processes, resources, etc.
- 5 types of detractors. Legit complainers, competitor, engaged critic, flamers, and troublemakers (trolls). For trolls, ignore them, or figure out how to expel them from the community.
- Listing of why they make trouble, how to recognize them, and what you should do for each type.
- What goes wrong? Sue, shut them down, disregard, freeze, don't engage.

4) Costs
- Social media programs cost $$$. GM's program cost $240k, but it had a profitable ROI.
- Prepare for costs. Labor, internal education.
- What goes wrong? Run out of steam, cloudy measurement, shuffled resources.

5) Measurement
- Need a different metric for each objective (see above).
- Example of Podtech and energizing. No single plan for
- What goes wrong? Use traditional metrics, forget the qualitative, don't measure anything, and can't improve

Best Practices
- Build internal teams first. Need an evangelist.
-- The Tower. Central person/organization that mandates all social media activities.
-- The Tire. Organization that works on the edges of the company. Not coordinated.
-- The Hub and the Spoke. Best model. Central organization with flexibility at the edges.
- Develop an Internal Air Traffic Tower. Internal resource to listen to marketplace, disperses information, and tracks all activity for measurement.
- Roles
-- Social media strategist. Organizes and supports the program. Internal facing program manager.
-- Community manager. External facing program manager. Customer support, PR, blogger relations, etc.

Recommendations
-- Act more like a host.
-- Power is in the hands of the community.
-- Use POST methodology

Group Challenge: How will you get your company conversation ready internally?

Afternoon Pics at There's a New Conversation

Some more highlights from today's stimulating speakers and conversations....

 

 

Andreas Weigend - Conversational Data

Andreas Weigend - Conversational Data
The former  Chief Scientist of Amazon.com, Andreas now "leverages the principles of the new consumer data revolution for innovating products and business models and advises some exciting startups." He also can give a lean, mean (at times, eyebrow-raising) presentation on utilizing the new world of Conversational Data to participate in a market.

To start, Andrews took a quick look at where we've come from the theses the Cluetrain established 10 years ago and how some of those tenets actually look:

• Targeting comes from a world where data was cheap. "You used to have to milk data from five digits of your zip code. We've moved to a data rich world."
• Reputations are made through how you engage in conversations.
• We get  conversational data through Prediction Markets."Why run them? It's another way of structuring conversations. How are you bidding on a contract? How sure are you? You can prove through math. And that's a market where anyone can participate. It's not top management that is always right, but the people who DO the work."
• Who knows most about the product? "The company? The retailer? No, Google!"
• People used to talk about "share of wallet. That has been replaced by another term: The Customer Network Value. How much do you influence people?"
• People are good at filtering out stuff. "People manage to ignore crap. That's a skill. What's difficult for one generation is not difficult for the newest one."
• We learn and discover through our friends.

Conversational Data:
"My assumption is that our goal is to help the end-user. And helping people make decisions is a social process."
Response: Response depends on what is heard.
Time: "The Time Scales have shrunk by orders of magnitude. Sears used to send out catalogs and prices were good for a year. Now, you go to a website, five minutes later, the price may  have changed. Time scale is a key element. What really has changed is the conversations that people are having with one another. People may be blogging in real time about my accent. There are dramatic changes in interpersonal communications. It's not only 1-1, but this pyramid of reaching people is available to everyone (Twitter, etc)."

Data:
Communications: 0)Broadcast, 1)Collect, 2) Experiment, 3) Contribute, 4) Interact, 0)Broadcast
Perspectives: Perspectives include these Sources (clicks, profile, relationships) and Metrics: Trading models.

"Now there are metrics for the customer. What have customer-centered metrics. Go to Yelp for instance. How many restaurants have you reviewed? How many people think your reviews are interesting? The individual sits at the center. How many metrics are client metrics and how many are metrics that the customer is interested in? "

How do you apply this data? E-business, firm is in the center."I'm interested in 'me-business' and you can move from e-business, to me-business to we-business."

Recommendations: "are important...and they've changed too. There used to be experts. Now there are real conversations about products."

Algorithms, These reinforce learning--there's an expected reward (state, actions, etc).

What's interesting is to take the people back in.

Conversational Data. What % of what you bought was purchased because someone talked to you about it?
How has the past, present and future characterized

• Past: given data, targeting and segmentation
• Present: given problems, get data. People contribute data. Self marketing and self promoting
• Future: Consumer Data Revolution. People expect value for themselves.

How can companies use conversational data? "Support the decision making process. Having a breadth of data supports better decisions where all parties are involved."
How do the 4P's in the Marketing Framework look today?:

• Product-get feedback. Listen. there are now digital products
• Promotion: It's now social, global and anonymous. Yelp, LikeMe, etc.
• Placement and Pricing: Google searches, data, number of places.

Beyond the Traditional Ps: Platforms, Priests (sell belief), Prostitutes (sell time), Pornographers (publish), Gamblers (sell risk), Drug dealers (sell product)

Google Analytics contain a wealth of info: What would a company do if it knew everything Google knew? 

"Look at Notes and annotated web pages When you see what people's notes are you see what they're interested in. (Analytics, gives insight ed., how popular a links
Location, Calendar, Design tolls for home, Checkout)

The question and the assignment? "How would you act tomorrow if you knew everything Google knew?"

 

Giovanni Rodriguez: The Role of Positioning in the Age of Conversation

"Are there any PR people in the room? Are any of them Puerto Rican?"

Giovanni Rodriguez, one of the founding partners of TCG, started his presentation with this question and somehow tied it into Clue 23 of The Cluetrain Manifesto. He IS that good of a weaver (see Deb Shultz) going on to say that positioning is the heart of PR. Even traditional public relations is more about relating to the media, not actually to the public (so why is it called PR instead of MR?)

But first, What is conversational media?

"It's DIY, it's space binding, fungible, inclusive, and time binding," according to Giovanni. But what is it? It can be a broad spectrum of things. And conversational media is challenging the things which we have previously held steadfast such as our identity, our role, and our method for growing valuation. This means you have to change the way you engage the market as a whole.
"You need to start thinking about motivations and rewards in order to get people to work together. You also need to think much broader in order to include your competition in the conversation."   

Five key questions that companies who wish to improve their role in conversational media should ask :

• who are we, and what is our role?
• who are they, and what is their role?
• what's our bargain with them?
• what about the rest of the market?
• what's the big idea(l)?

Giovanni cited several clients as case studies including Best Buy, Evincii, and Elephant Pharm. Each have an individual campaign to better engage the conversational market. "Today, almost anyone can join a market, and the roles that traditional constituencies once played are collapsing"

Thor Muller - Customer Service From the Outside-in

Thor Muller  - Customer Service From the Outside-In
(Get Satisfaction is a "Switzerland for customers" aka a neutral space for consumers and businesses to track and engage in conversations.)

"Customer service is a problem. 18 billions dollars are spent a year on customer services and the experience today is worse than ever. Partly because consumers can communicate instantaneously, it's almost telepathic. Meanwhile to get a simple answer out of a company is like pulling teeth. Sometimes by the time people get through to someone, they feel like they know more about the product or company than the person who answers the help line. It's also expensive to provide customer services.
Part of the issue is we've learned to think about the problem in the wrong way — companies have learned to avoid customers. But just a 5% increase in customer attention can increase profits 25-95% depending on your industry. Customer service is correlated to 50% of company growth."

"The big question we had at Get Satisfaction is: What would this look like if companies came to the customer? This sounds good but...there's a lot of noise out there.....So there are monitoring tools. And listening is Step 2 after denial. Step 3 is engaging. But nobody knows how to engage perfectly well.

The Patterns We're Seeing:
More companies recognize conversations are happening outside of their organization and are learning to integrate this information back into organization.
First example is Timbuk 2 which makes messenger bags, laptop bags, an extremely popular company in the Bay Area. They realized a long time ago people were talking about them, primarily on Flickr. There's a whole Flickr group called "What's in My Bag."  Timbuk2 realized they couldn't reproduced this easily in a traditional marketing scheme.  They started monitoring these conversations (using Get Satisfaction) and began to participate.
GS's "Overheard" allows companies to respond in a variety of ways. This combined with widgets that can be integrated into customer service page, pull conversations back into the customer service line.
Comcast is an example of a company that doesn't have much to lose. They've had plenty of negativity directed  at them. Nonetheless, they've been a leader in reaching out  to people across the web through   a team called 'Comcast Cares.'  A rep, who uses his name, has a job to reach out to their customers, to be human and to 'rehumanize' the company. Undeterred, this team enters the fray within minutes of the post. They simply reach out, assure them that someone is listening and cares, and is going to contact them from the customer service department. A customer may start out angry, but after Comcast responds, that customer is cautiously optimistic. The loop gets closed--they might not be a raving fan, but they've got someone whose optimistic, because a few people are showing their human sides
Whole Foods is another company...with more to lose.  The question is values. When issues come up such as "I love how they toss out the leftover sushi," this is not something that WF leaves unanswered. Context really matters. They're able to go in and address the specific issue, and the specific store and align the values with their customers through simple outreach.
JetBlue had a calamity on the  tarmac. It was a PR disaster. They did all the normal things in the normal channels, but they also went to where the customers are. They  made a  video, put it on JetBlue and left the commenting ON. They got thousands and thousands of comments.

The Anti Patterns: What's Clearly Not Working
Suing your customers: We call it The Streisand Affect in reference to Streisand suing a photographer. It's the instant and obvious remedy for anyone who receives a cease and desist letter. Bloggers then publish cease and desist letters and create a whole other set of problems.
Robot Voice: companies try to engage but do it in a way that feels safe by bringing over old scripts from the email system. Paypal did this...they reached out but did it in their Robot Voice. It reeks of non-human participation.
Making the customer wrong by going public with an accusation about motives: This is not a successful strategy. Any community manager who has banned a user will have their motives questions. If you have clear community guidelines  you'll have legs to stand on.
Other solutions: One of the solutions is to re frame it, establish mutual responsibility for interaction.  If the company is going to be human, the customers are treating them as consumers. Get Satisfaction has launched a "Customer-Consumer Pact."

Risks & Rewards
Control issues, public criticism are issues, but we're past that as it happens whether or not we engage.
You can get closer to customers than you've ever been able to before.

Deborah Schultz - Stop yelling & start weaving

Deb defines herself as a "Slash Queen" and and a Customer Advocate.
She starts with a Cluetrain refresher... " a powerful global conversation has begun". Today, she's gonna talk about human skills in a knowledge economy.

Today, she argues, there's an overload of information. The internet is enabling conversations between human beings, who are in different places, at the same time. 'The medium is the relationship". It's not about the technology, it's about what it allows you to do. Let's look at the human side of it! It's complex, light and diverse.
"You are connected everywhere, anytime." Are there relationships "real"? Her answer is YES. The internet gives you quality or relationships and opportunities (even though there's not a language to explain these connections yet). This can be called "relationship economy" and sometimes transactions don't even matter in this landscape.

"Relationship are hard and messy and subtle," says Deb.  "Applied to your customers, this should lead to think flexibly ad expect the unexpected from relationships with them. Think of it a relationship 'bricolage'."
Most organizations though are still transactions driven. Some of those barriers need to be broken. How?
Between networks, we weave, over and around. This is how organizations need to start thinking about their relationships.

[She suggested visualcomplexity.com as a good website to visually look at networks differently]

Skills of the weaver:

listener, connector, critic, partial geek, detective, catalyst, diplomat, juggler, approachable, intuitive, inquisitive, driven by relationships.

How do you tune these skills? Deborah gives a sampling of some useful tips, which inclued "Be real" and "catalyze" and  "Listen. Rinse. Repeat". Real life examples follow from the audience...

Deborah left the group with a question: how can you apply those skills to one of the Cluetrain thesis?

Morning Photos at There's a New Conversation

A few shots from morning mingling and Doc Searls speech...

Doc Searls - Intro, May 29

Here's Doc giving his speech about the Cluetrain Manifesto in Palo Alto.

"What does that mean that open source developers have practical motivations? As opens source code is a product of human nature, it's wild and free. Nobody owns it, anybody can improve it and everybody can use it. 
The Live Web is branching off the static web: think of the branching as one between space and time. Google Blog search makes a distinction between blogs and the web... why is that? Because the blog search is "live". And so are relationships between equals. That means solutions have to come from customers as well as vendors.
The customer should be able to express global and logical preferences outside of anyone's silo... how can we do that? How can we be able to manage our own health care data? How can we be able to inquire and relate to whole markets, on the fly? The technology is here, but "agreements" need to go both ways. It means the real relationships between truly consenting parties...  the virtual world should work just like the physical world!
This leads to the idea of VRM (vendor relationship management). The first project launched by Doc and his team is a new business model for free media (that isn't advertising!)."

To sum up:

The customer is the new platform: it's time to take sides with ourselves,, and not just those of sellers

Market are relationships

The Internet economy will grow around what we actually want

Our work has barely started.