Nommunication

Marketers will have noticed that Web 2.0 is spawning dialogue in Marketing circles online, and that some people now refer to Marketing 2.0 as a distinct field of business practice and theory. It is perhaps natural that a great deal of what is written about Marketing 2.0 is by authors of blogs and online collaborations. Many are practising marketers rather than academics, but their dialog on the topic is credibly educated and, in the very dynamic area of online behaviour and marketing trends, perhaps more current than much academic publishing.

The dialog about Marketing 2.0 appears somewhat fractured and incoherent; basic assumptions in this area appear to vary among specific interest groups and industries.

One specific presumption and focus is on SaaS and the internet becoming a computing platform, and in this context marketing 2.0 becomes a variant of marketing that is specific to the IT and software business. As the Director of Marketing at Sage Software and Sun Microsystems Emmanuel Obaida has combined a business interest in SaaS and observations about media usage shifts in his prominent blogging (Obadia, 2007).

Another group’s focus is concerned with online marketing specifically. Distinguished from broader web 2.0 influenced thinking that directs CRM 2.0 to consider releasing control of dialog and relationships to consumers, these writers focus on online marketing and limit the context of marketing practice to one where the internet is the primary if not sole channel of marketing communication. Writers like Neil Patel, and Cameron Olthuis (focussing on online marketing services relative to their own online marketing practice) and Darryl Siry (focussing on web 2.0’s importance with specialty in specialty automotive marketing for Tesla Motors) specialised in tracking the latest shifts in online behaviour and online tools at a level of scrutiny that is in lead of popular internet usage, aiming to interpret the direction of flow of the rapidly-evolving medium relative to an informed practice of marketing (Patel, Saleem, Olthuis, & Fujiu, 2008; Siry, 2008). Writers at Beeline Labs’ collaborative blog and online community aim broadly to explore how the social web is becoming a part of fundamental marketing practice. The complexity of this field pulls their writing across social media and networking, software, online marketing practice and the evolution of broader marketing theory. The complexity is aimed, though, at distilling complex changes down to a comprehensible understanding of marketing in the web 2.0 era.

“A good marketer today must spend an extraordinary amount of time reading news and blogs, actively participating in the venues and mediums that your customers are engaging in and communicating through” (Siry, 2008).

Marketing 2.0 also embraces Web 2.0 practices like democratic outcomes and 2-way online exchange. As with CRM, Marketing 2.0 stresses that control shifts into the hands of consumers.

“CMR (customer management of relationships) will require modifying your traditional marketing efforts. It will demand more than promotions and advertising, and will require new tools for customer communication. A challenge for some companies will be getting a CMR strategy in line with the need to grow customer value when the advertising agencies (and their media planners) are more interested in customer acquisition and giving the brand image a makeover. Instead of fighting against CMR projects that appear to threaten their power base, marketing directors will have to recognize the transferability of their skills to CMR and learn to use these tools for more profitable media investments. Your strategy will have to include training programs to teach all personnel the objective of passing control of the relationship to the customer and the effective use of CMR tools.” (Newell, 2003)

The buzz about marketing 2.0 has quieted dramatically over the past two years. In part this owes, I suggest, to the futility of re-naming a field of business just because a tide of change (in this case web 2.0) has emerged in the external environment. But also it owes to the diversity of possible definitions for Marketing 2.0.

Compared to CRM and its spawn CRM 2.0, the broadness of the field of Marketing appears to create a diverse range of interpretations of what ‘Marketing 2.0’ might refer to. Unlike the community’s development of CRM 2.0, with Marketing 2.0 it is difficult to find coherent lessons or even a coherent identity, except what we might have predicted having examined Web 2.0 and CRM 2.0: Consistent ideas within Marketing 2.0 are basic hallmarks of Web 2.0 thinking:

    a) Organisation-wide, silo-breaking orientation to consumers is necessary, and

    b) Control of communication, strategy and the ultimate success of businesses all lies in the hands of consumers.

(I think many exceptions exist for idea (a), and I’m not so nihilistic as to completely accept idea (b), but both are valid syntheses of many people’s recent writing on Marketing 2.0 and contemporary IMC alike.)

This post is part of a developing series:

1. Web 2.0 Marketing: Consumers’ online behaviours boost brand engagement
2. Does the 2.0 revolution warrant renaming business functions?
3. Definitions and critical success factors for CRM
4. Is CRM 2.0 something new?
   
5. What is Marketing 2.0? (You are here)

References:

Newell, F. (2003). Why CRM Doesn’t Work : How to Win by Letting Customers Manage the Relationship. Bloomberg Press

Obadia, E. (2007, 23 June 2007). We’re moving from Desktop to Webtop. Marketing 2.0

Patel, N., Saleem, M., Olthuis, C., & Fujiu, R. (2008). Pronet Advertising.

Siry, D. (2008). Marketing 2.0.

I have been studying and working toward changing my career, aiming to make it more interesting, more challenging, more creative and more beneficial to the world.  It is a hard set of changes to bring into effect but I’m working at it. 

Recently the work of Stefan Sagmeister has caught my attention.

An Austrian-born designer working out of New York, Sagmeister does visual design for some interesting, high-profile clients and has built a career working for people who are
a) able to pay well for design, and
b) willing to let a designer create interesting messages and convey them in interesting ways, which is something Sagmeister is good at.

Something challenges me about Sagmeister’s work: Reflected against contemporary notions of advertising, branding and marketing communications, it is very free from the constraints of integration and brand identity and sales messages.

Sagmeister suggests that branding is outdated. Considering this assertion in the context of the emergence of user-generated content, perhaps Sagmeister’s suggestion reaches further than he intended.

Anyway, I am a willing shill for Mr Sagmeister’s work primarily because he chooses to discuss ideas such as happiness, helping people, improving people’s lives by creating design, and so on. He does this self-consciously but not arrogantly or pretentiously. Whether you like his design style or not, I think some of his ideas are likely to appeal to almost anyone.

I think whether the materials and messages marketers and advertisers place into the world has some value for the world, and has the ability to add happiness or interest to people’s lives, is something that we should consider seriously.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, a brand that people associate with great ideas and design, shared without being diminished by overt marketing messages, could have lots of potential. I suggest this is particularly true in a world where users have the ability to select mediums and messages that interest them and to recombine marketers’ attempts to create coherent, integrated communications—with entirely unpredictable results. If organisations are generous in this respect, can they compete successfully against ‘traditional’ approaches? Hmmm.

Give Stefan Sagmeister a minute of your time…

PS:  One of the art projects Sagmeister discusses, the Bubble Project by Ji Lee (a former Art Director at Saatchi & Saatchi New York, now Creative Director at Google), is an interesting implementation of user-generated content—both online and in the physical world. Brilliant results.

Online community members expect that businesses with whom they engage (or about whose products or services they network) will play some role in, or even facilitate, online dialogue. But for the business this role is a balancing act. Too much content, too much moderation or too much control will negatively affect both attitudes and traffic—to the detriment of the business.

Perhaps it is in part my affection for tex-mex, but I really like the Nacho Analogy.

Feller, K. (2008, 28 May 2008). The Chip-to-Cheese Ratio: when are corporate communities too commercial? Conversations Matter.

CRM has been regarded overall as a movement that is tremendously powerful—but predominantly unsuccessful.

No significant flaws have been revealed in the concepts underlying CRM, but rather the ability or willingness of leaders and organisations to successfully undertake CRM has been found lacking. Many authors regard CRM as, simply, a good set of tools and concepts whose application has been conducted poorly by a preponderance of businesses (White, 2003; Xu, Yen, Lin, & Chou, 2002).

“50 percent of leading brands’ heaviest buyers one year are typically not in that same group the following year, with a significant number of them leaving the brand altogether. This reveals a stunning opportunity to do a better job of raising customer commitment levels beyond those being achieved currently” (Rapacz & Reilly, 2008).

Frederick Newell is one author who is deeply critical of CRM’s track record, and quite early in the emergence of web 2.0 he proposed another re-badging of the field:

CMR (Customer Management of Relationships).

“In the world of CMR the power of defining the relationship transfers to the customer. Customers will engage in different types of dialog with suppliers, often being the ones to initiate the search for a solution. The concepts of self-service give the customer more control; the seller no longer mandates the process. There will still be targeting, but the customer may choose the target firm. In this topsy-turvy CMR world, the customer will tell us what she is interested in and not interested in, what kind of information she wants, what level of service she wants to receive, and how she wants us to communicate with her—where, when, and how often” (Newell, 2003).

Newell, and the earliest web-savvy consumers, were onto something. CMR is a concept that reappears throughout contemporary discussions of CRM 2.0.

Marketing and CRM authors have recently begun to acknowledge that the relationship is not only controlled by the consumer, but relate the quality and responsiveness of these relationships, including businesses’ consideration of customers’ needs and behaviours, to brand experience. It is noted that even for businesses pursuing sales or marketing perspectives on their business, ultimately it is customers who manage relationships, and that non-responsive or exploitive approaches to CRM can blind managers to this fact (which we might say would inherently represent a lack of consumer orientation, which we will discuss in a later section of this paper) (Ford & Nicks, 2003).

Ford proposes an integrated framework for uniting brand experience, creation/exploitation of customer relationships, and incorporating customers’ and companies’ perspectives.

“power lies with the customer and it is only by looking at markets through their eyes that businesses will succeed in building relationships” (Ford & Nicks, 2003).

Even this point, though, like the earlier dialog about relational strategies supplanting transactional strategies, becomes only a partial step to the end that is called up in the age of the social web. CRM (and IMC) perspectives on relational strategies focussed on collecting a broad range of consumer information in order to strategise and improve targeting. Discussions of this concept by authors such as Zahay retain the notion that consumer information is collected as a function of CRM in order to adjust the ways that businesses command and control their marketing efforts to maximise returns (Zahay, Peltier, Schultz, & Griffin, 2004). The further step implicit in CRM 2.0 is that control over a business’s purpose and function is largely handed over to the consumer.

The online wiki collaboration created by Paul Greenberg toward the development of the fourth edition of his book CRM at the Speed of Light, rather than helping to advance a distinct new practice, may serve to highlight some of the futility of re-naming the field. After extensive tabling and before-and-after comparisons, each of Greenberg’s points comes back to the same fundamental Web 2.0 ideas: Customers are given control of conversations, and their inputs are acted upon.

“CRM 2.0 is a business philosophy and strategy that fosters mutually beneficial conversations with customers through technology platforms, business rules, business processes, and social characteristics. It is the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation” (Greenberg, 2008).

Is CRM 2.0 anything new?

With CRM having a strong background in championing customer relationships, breaking of internal silos and overall consumer orientation, CRM stood in relatively strong stead as we shifted into the era of the social web.

Accounting for a new emphasis on consumer orientation and consumer control of communication, is CRM 2.0 a worthwhile re-naming of the field?

I suggest this is only the case if real orientation to consumers—and the adoption of an organisation-spanning mission to act on that orientation—are issues that fall solely within the domain of CRM. None of the literature or commentary appears to provide a reason that this might be so. CRM is a useful and necessary function, and its relevance is increased where businesses are conducted online, but the fundamental lessons and theory of CRM are really lessons for executive-level management. Every ‘foot soldier’ in an organisation needn’t be a CRM (or IMC) guru in order for the business to have a practical orientation toward its consumers—a general acceptance by executives and managers will lead to the right people gaining those skills and attitudes.

This post is part of a developing series:

1. Web 2.0 Marketing: Consumers’ online behaviours boost brand engagement
2. Does the 2.0 revolution warrant renaming business functions?
3. Definitions and critical success factors for CRM
4. Is CRM 2.0 something new? (You are here)
5. What is Marketing 2.0?

References

Ford, K., & Nicks, G. (2003). CRM And New Marketing: How Do We Capture The Customer Experience? Paper presented at the Market Research Society Annual Conference.

Greenberg, P. (2008). Authoring Wiki for “CRM at the Speed of Light, 4th Edition”. http://crmsol.pbwiki.com

Newell, F. (2003). Why CRM Doesn’t Work : How to Win by Letting Customers Manage the Relationship: Bloomberg Press

Rapacz, D., & Reilly, M. (2008). The New View of Relationship Marketing: Better integration to deepen brand commitment. Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications (2008), 19-25.

White, R. (2003). Customer Relationship Management. WARC Best Practice, September 2003.

Xu, Y., Yen, D. C., Lin, B., & Chou, D. C. (2002). Adopting customer relationship management technology. Industrial Management and Data Systems, 102(8/9), 442.

Zahay, D., Peltier, J., Schultz, D. E., & Griffin, A. (2004). The role of transactional versus relational data in IMC programs: Bringing customer data together. Journal of Advertising Research, 44(1), 3-18.

The building-blocks of successful CRM resonate throughout marketing and management

Broadly, organisations have long been geared toward customers in terms of setting growth strategies, marketing and sales strategies, product development and internal budgeting. But organisations were prevailingly centred upon the product or services they sold (Peppers & Rogers, 2004). Customer Relationship Management is a field that exploded in the late 1990s when businesses realised the potential of internal networks and the internet for tracking transactions of all types toward managing long-term customer relationships—to maximise customer satisfaction and engagement and, ultimately, the overall ROI for a CRM initiative ^{(see note 1 at bottom)} (Bligh & Turk, 2004).

The CRM literature is vast, spanning a range of approaches and interpretations delineated among business sectors and among camps with distinct definitions of CRM itself.

The most obvious division in the literature is the distinction between CRM as a broader concept describing organisation-wide customer orientation and CRM as a more isolated field comprising CRM technology (referred to by some authors as “CRM IS” (meaning CRM information systems) or as “eCRM” by (Lin, Lin, Huang, & Kuo, 2006)).

In a non-IT context it is be easiest (and most consistent with the origin and two decades of literature) to discuss CRM as a strategic business practice enabled by technology, with customer orientation being taken (as is predominantly the case) as a necessary precondition for successful CRM technology implementation, as we will discuss in more detail below.

Since early in the explosion of CRM, and throughout the years that have followed, lists of necessary preconditions or critical success factors for a CRM undertaking have been identified and discussed by a great range of authors in academia, business and the business media. Assessing these comprehensively would fill several books; however a more brief review does begin to reveal consistencies. The most repeated—and yet neglected—of these are reduced to a fundamental three by Phillip Bligh:

1. “CRM is not just a technology initiative; it must be approached strategically.

2. “Insight into customers and demand trends should drive CRM agendas.

3. “CRM must be implemented with an enterprise-wide perspective” (three points quoted from Bligh & Turk, 2004).

An additional necessity, repeated often and with greater urgency in the literature from recent years, is outlined well by Don Peppers:

4. “Establish one-to-one learning relationships: using data about customers, predict what each one needs next, treat them uniquely and increase mutual value with the customer” (Peppers & Rogers, 2004).

Point number one, above, points to the most common source of failure in CRM identified by businesses and the business literature. Countless business leaders have pursued the implementation of CRM in a shallow, arm’s length fashion—considering CRM to be an off-the-shelf ‘product’ that a company needs simply to install and turn on. This fails to recognise that CRM is a business function involving information that is received from customers, and more importantly it is also an orientation toward those customers with the aim of acting upon the information collected.

“[A] source of confusion related to CRM is the meaning of the term customer relationship management. Customer relationship management is actually a business transformation, not just a change in technology” (Marchand, 2006).

Point number two, above, highlights a need to move beyond a marketing perspective when engaging in meaningful CRM.

“Many marketers still think CRM is just an advanced stage of database marketing—using your customer database to find which customers would be the right ones for a specific product offering. They don’t yet understand that relationship building must start with an understanding of the customer’s needs” (Newell, 2003).

Points number two and four are explicitly linked to the necessity for pursuing relational strategies rather than transactional strategies. Relational strategies take into account lifetime cost and value with respect to the total of all interactions and transactions, whereas transactional strategy is focussed on the value of a current or next transaction (Peppers & Rogers, 2004).

“By focussing on the Customer we mean that a company’s managers and sales people should direct and orient their activities at the customer before, during and after sales. The relationship term is a way of moving companies away from having a purely “transactional” contact with customers to building broader and deeper relations that create high customer loyalty. And at the same time, create higher revenues from the lifetime relationship with the customer” (Marchand, 2006).

Point number three is perhaps the most repeated recommendation in the CRM literature. Authors point out that separate, often ‘siloed’ or even competing internal divisions such as marketing, advertising, sales, customer service, fulfilment—and even executive offices—must be united in their commitment to CRM. CRM changes the way information moves through organisations, and how information is acted upon. If this is not the case, even where every employee is sitting in front of a CRM terminal, CRM is not actually taking place. (Valentine, 2005; Xu, Yen, Lin, & Chou, 2002)

“Customer strategy helps avoid the silo effect that exists among departments in many organisations… [encouraging] department managers and employees to think first about customers and second about departmental policies.

“In many organisations, departments become fiefdoms and lose sight of their mission to support the delivery of value to customers. By contrast, high performance firms breach the walls between departments” (Bligh & Turk, 2004).

Breaching silos to create a horizontal, customer-driven organisation is a change for staff that is functional and communications-oriented (both internally and externally). But it is also a cultural shift that must be embraced by managers and executives and that must unite an organisation in defining its purpose.

CRM guides organisations to make customer relationships their primary function and to permanently overcome any thinking that makes internal structure and function appear significant by comparison.

“Customer strategy must drive customer-related policy; existing departmental rules are secondary in importance”(Bligh & Turk, 2004).

“…companies must develop a mindset and culture of customer centricity in their own people, in their products/services, their channel use and their interactions with customers. The management challenge when bringing CRM into a company is both people oriented and information based. To execute CRM effectively requires a cultural shift…” (Marchand, 2006).

But this cultural shift is not an easy one to effect throughout a large group of departments and people, and this is why enterprise-wide change—the most often cited necessity for CRM—is also the least often achieved.

“Employees’ resistance is one of the major risks associated with CRM implementation. In most companies, CRM efforts often never get off the ground because they encounter such stiff resistance from IT. In some of those failed efforts, CRM is proclaimed a new cultural initiative. Similar to TQM in the 1980s, it sounds great in theory. But what happens in practice is that management encounters so much resistance to implementing CRM as a large change management initiative that it just fizzles out” (Xu et al., 2002).

Point number four ventures right into the changes Web 2.0 is bringing to business and shines some light on the significance lurking here, but stops a half-step short of the true ethos, and the potential, of Web 2.0.

Where did this bring us?

People interested in IMC and marketing generally will be familiar with the themes and the CSFs for CRM. They are reflected in modern definitions of IMC and are ever-present in dialogues about web 2.0-era marketing.

Does CRM 2.0 move significantly beyond these?

Notes

[1]  It is important to note that the relationship between CRM and ROI has been a rocky one, at best, largely due to problems described above. Most studies report that fewer than 20% of new CRM implementations lead to positive returns, that even among those organisation that report positive results roughly half are unable to provide credible business data to assess their CRM, and that over 10% of projects never even reach a ‘live’ state. (Almquist, Heaton, & Hall, 2002; Bligh & Turk, 2004; Hansotia, 2002; Nairn, 2002)

This post is part of a developing series:

1. Web 2.0 Marketing: Consumers’ online behaviours boost brand engagement
2. Does the 2.0 revolution warrant renaming business functions?
3. Definitions and critical success factors for CRM (you are here)
4. Is CRM 2.0 something new?
5. What is Marketing 2.0?

References

Almquist, E., Heaton, C., & Hall, N. (2002). Making CRM make money. Marketing Management, 11(3), 16. (also published here)

Bligh, P., & Turk, D. (2004). CRM Unplugged : releasing CRM’s strategic value. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Hansotia, B. (2002). Gearing up for CRM: Antecedents to successful implementation. Journal of Database Marketing, 10(2), 121.

Lin, C., Lin, K., Huang, Y.-A., & Kuo, W.-L. (2006). Evaluation of Electronic Customer Relationship Management: The Critical Success Factors. The Business Review, 6(2), 206-212.

Marchand, D. (2006). Customer Relationship Management Challenging the Myth: Focus on people, not the technology. Perspectives for Managers, 131, 1-4.

Nairn, A. (2002). CRM: Helpful or full of hype? Journal of Database Marketing, 9(4), 376.

Newell, F. (2003). Why CRM Doesn’t Work : How to Win by Letting Customers Manage the Relationship: Bloomberg Press

Peppers, D., & Rogers, M. (2004). Managing Customer Relationships: A strategic framework. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Valentine, L. (2005). Rethinking CRM to make it pay. ABA Banking Journal, 97(5), 62-62.

 

Xu, Y., Yen, D. C., Lin, B., & Chou, D. C. (2002).

Adopting customer relationship management technology

. Industrial Management and Data Systems, 102(8/9), 442.

Does the business world need Marketing 2.0, CRM 2.0, and even IMC 2.0—or just ‘Customers 2.0’?

Recent changes in internet functionality and consumer online behaviour, originally described as a far-reaching change in internet communications and colloquially titled “web 2.0” by Tim O’Reilly, involve (in part) a shift from an internet serving as a largely broadcast-structured one-directional medium to an internet where users contribute and collaborate extensively. The most apparent, current hallmarks of this shift include the exploding popularity of online networking, blogs, social communities and a general increase in the level of interactivity available online. Many successful commercial websites have embraced the trend by encouraging customers to contribute content in blogs, reviews, forums and other online facilities. Video games have evolved to include team collaboration and real-time communication among any number of remotely-located players.

Web 2.0 pundits suggest that this shift in online behaviour indicates a crucial new direction in consumer behaviour that entails a pervasive and growing expectation on the part of consumers that they should be able to engage with and contribute to whatever communities or entities they make contact with online.

That this appears to be borne out by the very nature of many online success stories—businesses such as Flickr, Facebook and Amazon—has led some in the business community to consider 2.0 trends as a pivotal shift that calls for a redesign or redefinition of business functions such as customer relationship management (CRM), public relations (PR) and marketing.

The lessons that are extracted from these changes, however, reflect in many respects established theory and practice in each field. In fact, lessons for business that are being touted as changes necessitated by the advent of web 2.0 echo some of the key lessons highlighted in the field of CRM for many, many years. The past two decades’ literature on the design, implementation and conduct of CRM overlaps extensively with ‘2.0’ ideas, and these overlapping indications appear to revolve somewhat upon consumer orientation.

Web 2.0 is described by some as a revolution that necessitates a significant redesign of communication with commercially important audiences. This has led some writers to suggest that new fields of thought and practice, with new titles such as ‘Marketing 2.0’, ‘CRM 2.0’ and ‘PR 2.0’, should be adopted to denote the differences to traditional practice.

Is a shift in the field of IMC toward a new era of ‘IMC 2.0’ called for, or would this essentially be giving a new name to pre-existing best theory and best practice in marketing communications?

In my next several posts I will review CRM, CRM 2.0, Marketing 2.0 and the current state of IMC—let’s see if this leads us toward IMC 2.0…

This post is part of a developing series:

1. Web 2.0 Marketing: Consumers’ online behaviours boost brand engagement
2. Does the 2.0 revolution warrant renaming business functions? (you are here)
3. Definitions and critical success factors for CRM
4. Is CRM 2.0 something new?
   
5. What is Marketing 2.0?

Web 2.0 users’ high involvement and their expectations of online experience including rich information and opportunities to contribute or create—plus their familiarity with engaging in relationships and dialogue online—are a complex meal for some businesses to digest. Managing marketing and customer relationships in an age where consumers are active—and reachable—in a non-commercial environment is a difficult thing to get right. The fact that getting it wrong can spawn user-generated content, content that can influence your audiences for years onward, creates a critical imperative to approach online markets carefully. But the potential for the internet to become a powerful interface into people’s lives, where they engage in many ways and are cognitively engaged and contributing—possibly even contributing directly to you marketing by posting content relating to your business such as reviews, blogs and niche-interest dialogues and forum participation—makes web 2.0 an irresistibly powerful tool for marketers interested in utilising the latest in technological and social trends.

Although giving control to consumers rather than trying to control consumers is a tremendous and difficult conceptual evolution for many people to transcend, there is strong evidence for its ultimate success. By allowing people more and more to direct the services and products an organisation provides to them, to control communication and relationships, and to influence other consumers, these people are very likely to exhibit greater connections to brands than might have been imagined using conventional, ‘us-managing-them’ CRM and brand management.

“Robert B. Cialdini, author of The Psychology of Influence, reports that psychologists have long understood the consistency principle, which is needed to direct human action because the desire for consistency is a central motivator of our behavior. For example, Cialdini said, “Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment” (Cialdini, 2007)” (Rapacz & Reilly, 2008).

“Studies have consistently found that commitment fosters greater resistance to attitude change. As Ahluwalia et. al report, “Individuals who are committed to a brand, for example, have been shown to resist persuasive communications that portray the brand negatively” (Ahluwalia, 2007)” (Rapacz & Reilly, 2008).

Computing is facilitating people’s urges to contribute and express themselves, and for marketers this is a big deal: the cognitive surplus

During the past 50 years in prosperous countries people have invested their cognitive surplus – the idle, ‘functionally available’ or ‘free-thinking’ time in peoples’ days – almost entirely in the watching of television. Post-war, TV has occupied people’s cognitive surplus. This idea is put forth strongly by Clay Shirkey who teaches interactive telecommunications at NYU and serves as a popular commentator on evolving trends in online activity. Shirkey observes that the web is emerging as the new space for occupying the cognitive surplus, is poised to significantly displace TV’s role, and offers different avenues for occupying time that are importantly different from the purely passive consumption of television: On the web, in addition to observation, people can create, engage and converse

Shirkey claims that even a small shift away from purely observational free time may be a very significant shift in our society. He uses examples like online photo-sharing (at Flickr.com) and raises an important point: Pre-web 2.0, an individual engaging in the sharing of their creative photography would indicate a significant, committed activity. For people pursuing this activity, the technology provides efficiency that means real results are obtained in relatively few hours, enabling them to master their interest and generate a significant output. Today’s moderately talented amateur photographers can manage and distribute their output in a way that is so accessible, and that has such a great potential reach, that it is affecting a long-standing business—Shirkey cites a 99% drop in the average cost of stock photographs. (Elizabeth Bowie, 2008)

Very different from passive consumption of broadcast media and its advertising, engaged online activities create a setting where individuals are cognitively more active, guiding or creating or contributing – rather than just observing. Even very casual online ‘surfing’ is a far more engaged and cognitive activity than pure observation of a medium and media interface that one cannot influence or control such as TV. But with online activities becoming more and more participatory and with online technologies enabling far more sophisticated creation and input from people who are not considered experts in the field of their interest or expression, this new use of the cognitive surplus is actually time removed from the cognitive surplus itself. Becoming task-oriented and characterised by higher cognitive involvement, the time spent no longer fits with the cognitive surplus concept; it is productive and purposeful and, importantly, that it is being directed by consumers’ interests means that it is a window to their ideas and values.

For businesses, understanding that people using web 2.0 are highly involved with an activity or topic—and thereby targeting them in a way that is relevant and useful to them—makes web 2.0 importantly different from its earlier incarnation in a commercial sense. Web 2.0 is the internet with high cognitive involvement and providing facility for high levels of interactivity and expression. Because of this Web 2.0 is a unique new form media from web 1.0.

Web 2.0 sceptics might point out that the shift away from television and toward more engaged or productive (if not practical or necessary) online activities is not thus far a huge movement, but rather a gradual and fractional one. Shirkey provides an answer for this that may be more significant than even he intends: After fifty years of a strict media monoculture, even a relatively small shift in the focus of cognitive surplus time, away from purely passive consumption, may represent an extremely important change within our society. (Elizabeth Bowie, 2008)

Online contributors fuel their own brand engagement and convictions 

A hypothesis that we might grow from the beginning of Shirkey’s estimation of this change’s significance is this: Individuals’ interests and values are both satisfied and strengthened by the surplus time they invest in more engaged, involved online activities. These activities also boost their cognitive involvement (which is a concept that has received relatively little academic attention in recent years, though the antecedent, if not analogous, concept of engagement has enjoyed much attention in this context re: Web 2.0).

This notion is consistent with recent observations by Rapacz and Reilly (2008) and also with the literature on cognitive consumer involvement which indicates consumers’ cognitive involvement with a concept is both self-reinforcing and creates a receptiveness to external reinforcement where other influences (or influencers) support a hypothesis, as in Bottie et al. (2003).

And this idea highlights an immensely powerful concept for businesses whose consumers are engaging online; reflecting from a different angle the same ideas proposed by Rapacz (discussed earlier in this post):
Where consumers are creating content online that expresses their own involvement with a brand or product, their own input creates a psychological scenario that bolsters the commitment of their own ideas or causes them to defend and develop the ideas. Further, where these individuals’ ideas and interests are further reinforced by engagement in a network or community of like-thinking individuals, or even where they are called on to defend their content contribution and ideas, the individuals’ involvement with the subject (the brand or product) may be reinforced or increased.

It is observed that younger consumer groups who are heavy users of the internet—this no longer being an unusual or niche group—are heavily influenced by others with whom they interact online. “People like me” has become a tremendously powerful source of consumer information, topping surveys in many countries. Importantly, individuals identified as “opinion elites” indicate they will serve roles as influencers as much in favour of companies they do trust as in the disfavour of companies they do not. (StrategyOne, 2008)

Your dream customers

We might draw this toward a simple conclusion: Consumers creating online content or networking with your brand or product as a subject are not a threat! These people are in fact every marketer’s ‘fantasy consumers’: They are engaged, informed, likely to act as influencers and likely to have their own ideas and convictions relating to your business. These attributes are reinforced by their own online participation.

Engaging with these consumers positively will both increase those individuals’ positive engagement with your brand and increase the chance that they will represent ideas that are analogous with your organisation’s interests when collaborating and networking online.

This post is part of a developing series:

1. Web 2.0 Marketing: Consumers’ online behaviours boost brand engagement  (you are here)
2. Does the 2.0 revolution warrant renaming business functions?
3. Definitions and critical success factors for CRM
4. Is CRM 2.0 something new?  
5. What is Marketing 2.0?

References

Botti, S., McGill, A. L., & Iyengar, S. S. (2003). Preference for control and its effect on the evaluation of consumption experiences. In Advances in Consumer Research (Vol. 30, pp. 127-128).

Elizabeth Bowie, T. H., Dan Misener, and Nora Young (Writer) (2008). Clay Shirky on your “cognitive surplus”, Spark. Canada: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. (A CBC radio broadcast & podcast)

Rapacz, D., & Reilly, M. (2008). The New View of Relationship Marketing: Better integration to deepen brand commitment. Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications (2008), 19-25.

StrategyOne. (2008). Trust Barometer 2008. Edelman Trust Barometer.

Working in the non-profit sector I frequently see people challenged to create an attractive website that serves its objectives well. Recent trends in charity website design (and on the web in general) are stressing the importance of blog-type content posting an the ability to post video and other rich content. Creating such sites and doing it with an attractive overall appearance that is inviting and integrated with an overall brand identity is very hard to accomplish on a non-profit budget, but some people are doing it well.

 

Tackling a website development or redesign should involve a measured approach that refers to a strategic marketing plan, with attention to what specific objectives and their related strategies will be served by specific elements of the web design and function. And pulling it togehter in a nice wrapper calls for a survey of the landscape; here are a few examples, primarily from Canada and Australia…

Excellent Charity Websites

Caritas looks very nice and clear

Ecojustice illustrates an important basic lesson in graphic design: “select a couple of good colours and really stick to them”

Asthma UK is pretty nice (not revolutionary, but clean-looking and easy to navigate – impressive for an well-established large-ish organisation)

Design Can Change is very impressive, though this approach is a bit too image-based (vs info-based) for most organisations

CPAWS has a nice, simple look, but only at their main page. If you click-through to the British Columbia chapter there is an ugly page, but it is an example of a blog-format main-page.

Social Edge is not outstanding, but it somehow makes me want to read for a minute

Human Society - Humane Index is technically and creatively brilliant

Angkor Hospital found someone to do a nice design for this tiny, simple site

Starbright is just a really nice idea, putting web 2.0 trends to a good use, so I’ll put it in this group

Charity websites with good and bad elements

The Nature Conservancy is a bit too old-school-looking, but I do think it looks pretty nice

Greenpeace Australia has a modern, clean design and the central blog/news content is good, but the visual clutter is too heavy.

Greenpeace International is almost the same, but the clutter effect is reduced a bit by more consistent use of colour (albeit an ugly colour). This site shows one real advantage of a blog format: you can easily post video into your blog or news posts – looks current and energetic.

Australian Wildlife Conservancy is very slick and different-looking, but demands too much clicking before they give me any information

Guide Dogs US looks pretty good – but don’t they want donations?

Smith Family looks too bland, a bit like a bank website five years ago. But one thing they’ve got right: lots and lots of fundraising-oriented links and content.

WWF has a good structure and a good blog-ish style, but the menus and the banner are a let-down

Cousteau is very very simple and it looks okay for what it is. I wonder what their ’new site in 2008’ will look like?

Michael J Fox has good, unique style and colour (perhaps taken a bit too far?) but needs to provide some straightforward information to catch my interest – and the complex headlines are a barrier to visitors

ACF has good style and interesting (if a bit subdued) colour choices, but the final result is too cluttered

TLC looks very pretty, but they didn’t consider their audience well enough; the navigation is non-intuitive and there are too many PDFs

Breast Cancer Foundation is fresh and different, and really hinges on its blog format, but they slightly over-simplified and the too-pale pink colour is a mistake

Washington Area Women’s Foundation is off-beat looking yet conservative. I think I like it but I’m not sure. Putting ‘Latest videos’ on the main page is good.

Charity Websites with real problems

David Suzuki Foundation is much too busy-looking; your eyes just don’t know where to go, so ‘away’ seems like a good choice

Humane Society US has too much clutter and too many colours and buttons and logos

Western Canada Wilderness Committee just looks unattractive - but they too have gone to the popular blog format which could work okay with a slightly tidied-up design

WPSQ. Oh my. What can you say?

Cancer NSW is just too stiff and makes you click too much

Cancer Council Australia just doesn’t do it for me

Breast Cancer WA is old-school and generic looking

I hope I haven’t done offence to anyone in the latter categories - my comments are meant to be constuctive and to help people look at designs objectively and with audiences in mind - which is what we should all be doing, all the time, when working on non-profit communications.

Ask most any person what they think about online privacy and you are likely to get an answer that stresses the importance of protecting personal information. But: Review the social networking activity of your subjects and you’ll find a different story.

Users of Facebook and other social networks are posting extraordinary detail in their personal profiles, and the very nature of their networking and online interaction provides any viewer with intimate outlines of their lives and values. Yet Facebook users are likely to regard that content as somehow private and protected – or somehow separate from the issue of online privacy.

News that Facebook will let advertisers target ads based on users’ personal details – including hobbies, travel, photos and other ‘private’ information – might soon change that.

“The information made available by users can include everything from their date of birth, hobbies and interests to places and events they are planning to visit, as well as a wide variety of photographs.
“Advertisers will be able to access a special website containing this data, which will then enable them to identify their target audience with what is hoped will be a high level of accuracy.
“The ads would be different from the banner and box ads currently featured on the site, forming part of the “news feed” section which details the activities of a user’s listed “friends”.”

From WARC

The last sentence is crucial; it means that a central element of the Facebook interface, previously containing only notices about your friends’ Facebook activities, will be infiltrated with commercial content.

It is difficult to predict, however, how Facebook users will react. Most users will predictably oppose the change initially, but on the other hand users have not reacted against conventional banner ads that have been working their way into Facebook pages. Facebook’s appearance is far less obtrusively commercial than competitors like MySpace, and placing ads into the Facebook “News Feed” might not change that appearance; this strategy lets ads be insidiously well-targeted and places them in a context that almost forces users to read them, yet won’t necessarily turn Facebook into a garish side-show of flashing ads and bad design (like MySpace).

The Wall Street Journal story on this issue reveals even more depth to the topic:

“Next year, Facebook hopes to expand on the service, one person says, using algorithms to learn how receptive a person might be to an ad based on readily available information about activities and interests of not just a user but also his friends — even if the user hasn’t explicitly expressed interest in a given topic. Facebook could then target ads accordingly.”

From the Wall Street Journal

Making an online network profitable is a tightrope-walking venture. Will users permit the commercialisation not only of ‘their’ network, but of their personal details and network activity? We’ll just have to wait and see what network is growing fastest a year from now…

Andrew Keen, author of “The Cult of the Amateur”, may be mistaken and backward-looking in his criticism of the internet for being corrosive to culture – but to his credit he also has humility and a sense of humour! Keen’s blog points us to his debates with commentators more level-headed than himself, and they are giving him some harsh online punishment:

On the Guardian Keen is flayed alive by Emily Bell.

Keen’s upcoming evisceration on the Colbert Report.
>>edit: sadly there is no evisceration; politically unpredictable mainstream comic Colbert handles Keen pretty gently<<

 

Andrew Keen suggests that web 2.0, by reducing the ability of individual artists to gain high success through royalties on the sale of copies of their work, is bringing the “medievalisation” of culture (explicitly discussed by him in the CBC podcast linked from my last post).

Any shift in the corporate-established income streams of “successful artists” that would make actual performances (versus record sales) a primary source of artists’ income seems preposterous to Keen. I think Keen fails to see that the earlier shift, where a very few musicians or actors suddenly could become superstars with incredible earning power, was something that did not emerge as a cultural phenomenon – but rather a business phenomenon. No-one achieved more success from that shift than the small number of media companies who promoted and, typically, exploited the artists they promoted.

The internet has not, in the short term, changed our hunger for shallow, repetitive, cookie-cutter pop artists. But it has changed the way that many of us seek to obtain their arts. And by challenging the sales and delivery mechanisms that corporate arts magnates rested upon for so many decades the internet has not delivered a blow to culture by marginalizing artists or the arts. Rather, it is beginning to democratize the arts business. That this might topple some of the big players hardly seems like a backward step! The internet has not challenged culture or the arts. It is the corporate stranglehold on promotions and sales of the arts that has been undermined. Any reduction of Britney Spears profitability, for example, might just be an opportunity for one among thousands of hard-working, brilliant (and legitimate) artists to attract one of the dollars that would otherwise have been sucked into an RIAA-member corporation which, in fact, actively opposes anything new in arts and culture. If this is medieval, bring on the dark ages!

The media powers Keen praises are actually the source of the very cultural dilution that he fears.

 

By now most people who read anything online have heard about a book by Andrew Keen, “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture” (eg, at Audible).

Keen’s book is not well reviewed, but it its scathing criticism of the internet and user-generated content as lethal threats to culture is certainly attracting a lot of attention. Keen gives a good summary of his views in an interview on CBC’s The Sunday Edition (details at bottom).

Keen holds that traditional, professional sources of media are a meritocracy of professionals, providing an elite service to our society and serving the best information and perspectives because they are experts at doing just that. Web 2.0 content (and web-delivered content quite generally) is, on the other hand, painted by Keen in one broad stroke as amateur and irrelevant, promoted by an “oligarchy of web 2.0 activists”. The prominence of the internet and digital media is in Keen’s world a threat to our very culture, diluting the core, quality content of the arts, undermining iconic providers of information like big newspapers and networks, and assaulting us with pointless user-generated drivel.

Perhaps the greatest failing of Keen’s perspective, holding large media outlets as a higher form of information providers, lies in the nature of big media itself. Although traditional media delivery formats are challenged, the concentrated corporate ownership of media has not slowed; mainstream access to news and information comes from only a few actual sources, and those sources clearly exercise a great deal of censorship and selectivity in determining what news and culture we see and how it is presented to us. Where, exactly, does Keen’s “reliable, honest, competent media” exist?

At a Murdoch-owned newpaper like the New York Post?

On Fox News?

On a Clear Channel-owned radio station?

At an HMV outlet?

“Reliable, honest, competent media”?

To be fair, Keen himself points out that a lot of garbage flows from mass media. But unfortunately the few, ideal examples he refers to repeatedly (BBC, Guardian, NYT, NPR, etc.) are the exceptions to the mass media rule – not the the actual rulers.

Keen’s “cultural gatekeepers” are, simply, the most powerful journalists and media companies – the true oligarchy of our media and culture. I’d rather not entrust culture to a corporate journalist or CEO; thanks just the same Andrew.

Reference:
CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition.  (xml podcast feed | Andrew Keen interview mp3)

 

 

I have noticed a lot of Facebook invitations coming from friends in Canada, but hadn’t thought it was indication of a general trend. Then I checked out Google Trends.

While it is interesting that Facebook is undergoing overall international growth that makes it an emerging competitor to MySpace, it is perhaps even more interesting that certain social networks are of specific interest to people in certain, culturally similar countries. Media trends in the US and Canada are not often divergent, but these results show a startling difference:

Why Facebook might enjoy sronger growth than MySpace seems obvious to me. Facebook’s networking functions are far more innovative and user friendly, encouraging the addition of friends and facilitating the location of long-lost contacts. And Facebook is not littered with annoying ads and banners (yet). But why US-based and US-created Facebook would be attracting a larger market share specifically in Canada eludes me; perhaps it is a symptom of unpredictability and user momentum in the social network market?

 

From my perspective consumer orientation is smart business, and it is largely about giving people what they want. Sometimes we hear this definition applied to business generally, or to marketing. But business and marketing are spheres that allow a lot of behaviour that in no way gives people what they want – rather they sometimes involve exploiting peoples’ wants and needs.

Fine examples are found at every airport. Nothing inspires predatory business practices like an isolated, captive audience. The airport authority does a deal with a business wanting to open a café, and the business goes on to viciously gouge the clients at the airport. Where would people pay $8 for a tiny, bad croissant or muffin, or $10 for a stale little sandwich, but at the airport? These businesses can carry on because they do not expect any brand identification among their customers and expect no customer loyalty at all; their business names are used only at airports and they aspire only to bleeding the captives.

In economy-class seating areas the airlines themselves, particularly discount airlines, follow a similar approach to customers. They can charge their perfectly contained customers anything for a coffee or a sandwich, expecting that the customers a) select the airline based largely on ticket prices, and b) expect to be gouged.

Airports also host the largest coffee and fast food chains. These are the food and drink ‘bargains’ to watch for at airports, because they tend not to gouge customers. Brand values and loyalty are important to these businesses, and they can’t generally afford to smear their own reputations by charging jaw-drop prices at certain locations – even if the captive market would accept those prices at the moment of a sale.

A related example: In Japanese subway stations you can buy little sandwiches and lunch boxes from simple vending stands; the food is nothing special, but it is fresh and inexpensive. The subway throng is a captive audience with few other choices nearby, but it is a clientele that will walk by every day. Repeat customers are critical to the vendors, hence no gouging.

If a business is built on a vision that extends only as far as a captive market then it might do okay within that little environment, gouging customers indefinitely (but what a grubby life). Any business that has growth and positive customer relationships as part of its marketing vision needs to think more generously about the people they serve, not about how to exploit them – that is what consumer orientation and CRM and good marketing are all about!

I remember enrolling in university classes during my undergrad studies, pre-internet, and every semester being exasperated and enraged by how a fairly simple set of information – available classes or units and their schedules, and the processes involved in enrolling in them – was made to be unfathomably complex.

Shift forward to the internet age. Websites endow us with tremendous power to present information, making large volumes of data become accessible and easy to navigate. Multi-layered menus, tiered lists and links can quickly reduce an insurmountable, craggy mountain of data to a grassy little mole-hill of useful information.

A university website serves a range of communications functions, internal and external, and web technology enables us to provide multiple communications services from a single starting-point with simple navigation that directs each type of user to the information that she or he requires.

Since websites became the primary means of communication for universities another shift has occurred: University education has become a far more competitive, businesslike and profit-driven venture. This might imply an imperative for a much greater orientation toward the needs and wants of the end-user, the student; wanting to attract more students and students of the highest caliber, universities will make use of the web to present their programs, faculties and alumni in ways that readily represent the options and advantages that are offered to students.

Or – not.

Visiting universities’ websites to collect pertinent information in order to plan an education is a horribly tedious task.

Customer orientation is about giving people what they want or need. While thinking about this issue I’ve visited 60 universities’ websites seeking a specific set of information that is a typical goal of a prospective student, which I’ll explain below. In doing so I’ve received a lot of messages that I did not seek, commonly including very general content praising the grand histories, reputations and goals of various universities. Getting what I wanted ranged from (at best) an acceptable browsing experience to (quite commonly) an impossibly demanding chore.

Let’s take an example of one type of visitor to a university website: a prospective graduate-level student. The information that is relevant to this person is quite easy to outline. I’ll do that in the context of a hypothetical web navigation structure.

Audience  –  Identify your interest as a member of staff, alumni, media, current students, prospective students, researchers, parents, etc.

Study Level  –  Select undergrad, graduate, post-doctoral or another level of studies

Discipline  –  Select an area of interest from faculty, discipline or employment categories.

Degree  –  Select from offered degrees, with choices organized in user-selected schemes such as alphabetical, by career type, by specialization families (eg. marketing, IMC, PR & advertising might be a family separate from accounting or finance within a business faculty’s degrees list), etc.

Details  –  Examine the important information relating to the program of study or degree you selected, which will include:

• Entry requirements
• Fees
• Duration and scheduling options
• Specialisations and other options within the degree
• Course requirements: List classes or units that are required and/or optional
• Study unit details: For each required or optional class or unit, include brief descriptions, exactly when they are offered, prerequisites, availability, instructors (plus links to detailed study outlines)
• Faculty: Detailed individual profiles of staff who teach the core components of the program
• Careers: Examples of career outcomes for students; not just a few titles, but including examples of work topics, work environments, daily routines and salary levels
• Alumni: Individual profiles and career details of a few alumni who completed the specific degree that is being viewed
• Application: Simple instructions on how to apply for and commence the program of study

For anyone who has recently attended university this outline will seem pretty straightforward. And, I expect, it will remind people how difficult it can be to collect this basic set of information.

Some university websites serve up study information better, some worse. But I’ve yet to see an example of a university website that makes me say “yes, everything I could want to know is right here”.

Here are some examples of better websites, focusing on graduate programs:

Xavier University (MBA) 
(perhaps the best I’ve seen; a lot of detail with only a few areas missing)

University of Notre Dame (History) 
(nice presentation and menu options, but tough to get to the details)