April 2011

Our Book Club choice this quarter preaches openness. Beyond The Familiar by Patrick Barwise and Sean Meehan argues that long-term growth follows from being open with your customers and also having open leadership – that is, leadership which encourage and respond to being challenged from “below”.

The authors also make the point that for some brands social media may not be a way to interact with customers, but simply a new way to listen to them.

As we all continue to understand the impact of social media on our communications, Jonathan Salem Baskin’s Histories of Social Media offers a timely perspective: that in this area, as in so many others, there’s nothing new under the sun. Understanding the historical antecedents of today’s social media can help us grasp today’s trends.

Our third book – Wikibrands by Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover – is the latest to explore how new and emerging technologies have changed consumer behaviour, and to analyse how we need to respond. We review it to find out if it can add anything new to the literature already available on the subject.

Beyond the familiar

Patrick Barwise & Sean Meehan

The promise of our book club choice this month is that it contains a practical framework that if followed will deliver long term growth through customer focus and innovation.

The secret to this, according to Barwise and Meehan is simple – to ensure that you have an open organisation – open in terms of offering a clear and relevant customer promise that you deliver reliably and that leads the market. And that occasionally you surprise and delight the customer by over delivering against.

This is dissected during the 6 chapters of the book with concrete steps suggested and plenty of case studies. Unlike many business books around for marketers at the moment this one contains examples from longterm successful businesses, not just niche rising stars.
The book is packed with advice about understanding the customer. But not just the idealised customer any brand might use as a short hand. It stresses the importance of getting under the skin of the customers that are leaving you, and how to stop disappointing them. The authors argue that where you can you should try and own the end to end customer experience and not just the part concerning your brand’s purchase. If you can’t take control of it, understanding it, and incorporating this understanding into your new product development is convincingly recommended.
They of course cover the role of social media. They point out that the most useful aspect of this for some brands is not necessarily to interact with the customer at all, but to listen to them. A brand can use insights from social media to get to really know its customers and to drive continuous improvement which will mean better conversation about the brand.
The most powerful part of the book for me is at the end in Chapter 6 – so if you are short of time, by all means start at the end.
Its here that the authors talk about leadership. An open style of leadership is essential for long term scalable success. The chapter starts with an old joke : “I don’t want any yes men around me. I want everyone to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job” – Legendary film producer Sam Goldwyn.

Without open leadership an organisation cannot hope to continue to grow in the longterm. Leadership is not just about cascading a culture down an organisation. It isn’t about putting the values you ascribe to up in the atrium or naming the meeting rooms after them. You need the culture to be owned by every layer of the company and for it to be challenged from below as well as dictated from the top. Success requires a fearlessness about challenging your boss throughout the organisation. The killer question for the chapter is “have front line staff asked you any uncomfortable questions …in the last 3 months”.

They conclude that effective management teams need to be able to argue whilst still getting along. Too many layers of management are a bad thing for Barwise and Meehan and the best place to start as a leader is probably to assume that “your people aren’t as open as you think”.
The promise of the book is if you treat it as a call to action and follow it up, business success will follow. It is certainly worth a try.

Histories of Social Media

Jonathan Salem Baskin

Social media is nothing new – the Romans were doing it.

This is according to the writings of Jonathan Salem Baskin –marketer, author and blogger. His latest book “Histories of Social Media” explains that the behaviours we all talk about so much as new – Twitter, Facebook etc etc – are actually all really based on very ancient human practices. His entertaining analysis compares jousting and duelling with pistols to arguments in chat rooms. We should all relax about negative comments and apparently vicious attacks online – it’s better than being shot at or poked with a spear.

Salem Baskin’s take on the much talked about, and generally accepted idea of the Wisdom of the Crowd is almost chilling. His historical comparison here is with the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution in the 1790s. (As you’ll remember this ended badly for Marie Antoinette.) People died for their political and religious opinions on a widespread scale but also because they simply fell under suspicion of not being revolutionary enough.
The Romans come up in reference to crowd pleasing in the Colesseum – great if you’re in the audience – not so good if you’re a Christian or a Gladiator.

All of this gels with the theory that there was never anything new about new media anyway (technology aside). Anything that succeeds does so because it delivers against basic human instincts and drives, and indeed ingrained habits from generations ago. So the 20th century may end up looking like a digression when you take the long view as social media gives us back the ability to be in touch with everyone we meet always (like you were usually if you grew up in a village in the middle ages), and Ocado delivers my essentials just as the local grocer did for your great grandma.
See http://historiesofsocialmedia.com/?page_id=107 for a daily shot of history. And get hold of his book if you like a bit of perspective on everything that seems to be changing so fast, but perhaps is just mostly back to the future.

Wikibrands

Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover

“It’s the next generation of business building that taps into the true power of social networks, brand connections and customer participation to build real value”

Yes, it’s yet another marketing book along the lines of 2005’s Wikinomics (written by colleagues of the authors of this one), and it covers familiar ground: The internet has empowered the masses and they’re not acting like compliant consumers anymore. Social media has become so huge that marketers can’t afford to ignore it. Old ways of behaving aren’t enough to be successful in the age of dialogue. Changing strategy is essential to take advantage of the opportunities – but it isn’t easy. This book claims to be both a wake-up call and an essential guide to show you how companies should behave in the new world.

We’re reviewed it to see if it adds anything significant to the debate – does it present an improved analysis of how social media has affected business now that it’s been around a while? And does it provide a clear and useful guide on how to navigate a course through this new world?
On the first point, there are a few interesting case studies here, some new, some familiar. One of the more interesting ones is from IBM, and shows how their social media strategy has been as much about employees as it has customers – and how this focus has led to a range of innovation that the company has now put serious investment behind. However, it’s a shame that so many of the case studies are about small internet start-ups and companies from high interest categories – while these are undeniably interesting, it’s harder to apply learnings from these to large, established brands and those in lower interest categories.

Of course understanding that everything has changed is one thing; knowing how to navigate a course through the new world is much harder, and the bulk of the book aims to be a manual explaining how to do it. While there is some interesting content here, the presentation and writing style means it comes across as quite hard to follow. For something that aims to be a simple guide, it manages to make things seem very complicated.
There is little mention of the part that social media plays as part of a wider communications mix (there is about half a paragraph reluctantly acknowledging the role for offline communications, customer service, and research), which serves to suggest that social media is the only way for brands to behave in the future, which is dangerously lopsided advice.

There is some good stuff in here buried within the complexity of models and the avalanche of case studies, mainly a series of principles that should be common sense but in practice far too many companies get wrong: before you begin using social media, you need objectives and a strategy. You should think carefully about having a consistent tone of voice. You should consider incentives to keep customers loyal. You need an infrastructure in place to deal with customer interaction. You should put metrics in place to ensure you understand how the strategy is working.

If you’re struggling with your social media strategy in any one of these areas, dipping into one of the individual chapters to find some guidelines and examples could be of some use. However we wouldn’t recommend reading the whole book – too much of the ground covered should already be familiar, and the structure is too complex to be the simple guide that the book promises.