Onliners Return to Start

Brand Management, DataBase Marketing, Marketing thru Operations

With thoughts on what this means for offline media and planning

I wonder how many of today’s online marketers, and particularly the evangelists in Social, have read Permission Marketing by Seth Godin (1999) or The Engaged Customer by Hans Peter Brondmo (2002).  Why?  Because these two books tell you why Interactive is different, explain how it is different, and provide the background you need to be successful at it.  For example, they explain how Social works before Social even existed in its current form.

How could these books predict the current climate?  Because “Social” – the Interactive behavior and psychology that drives it – is what happens when you create Interactivity.  These ideas are fundamental to Interactivity, they exist regardless of the tools to enable them.

Social, the tools and applications, are simply software iterations around these fundamentals.  Software continues to morph and evolve.  But the emotions and behavior driving today’s Social activity are fundamentally no different from the emotions and behavior that drove the proper use of interactivity for Marketing in CompuServe or discussion boards or e-mail discussion lists.  Community.  Sharing.  The rules and etiquette of good Interactive relationships.

What I’ve come to realize after a lot of discussions and thought is this:

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Business Prevention Committee

Analytical Culture, Marketing / Tech Interface,

Do you have a BPC (Business Prevention Committee) where you work?

The BPC may not have a formal meeting schedule, so it can be difficult to tell who is actually on the Committee.  But you can often tell who is on the BPC by looking for these signs:

1.  Person has a narrow view of the company or customer, a “my silo” thinker.  For example, a Marketing person who doesn’t care about the negative impact of a marketing program on customer service.

2.  Person is generally averse to testing new ideas, a “this is the way it has always been done” kind of personality.  BPC’ers never admit to being wrong about an idea, especially ones that have to do with “change” of some kind.

3.  Talk of performance-based measurement and compensation makes BPC’ers very nervous.  Not fans of their own skin in the game, getting a little risk on the table.  Like many bloggers, they just repeat what they read.  No data, no conviction, and no responsibility.

4.  A fundamental lack of knowledge about how the business really works.  Worse, won’t take the time to find out what they don’t know because “that’s not my job”.

The best way to go about dismantling the BPC in your company is?

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Social for Business

Brand Management, DataBase Marketing, Marketing thru Operations

Sam Decker of BazaarVoice has posted a cogent, well-supported argument on the business benefits of social applications.  Many of the themes will be familiar to readers of this blog, including the substantial cross-functional reduction of Friction that can take place when you have this kind of data, and some of the cultural issues surrounding adoption of the data-driven culture.

Here’s what I don’t get though. Many of these goals could be accomplished though customer service analysis and other data the company already has. In fact, you could argue in many cases, the data you get from internal sources would be better since you could work some of the bias out of it and correlate with actual behavior.

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