The following is a transcript for IMV54: The Age of Engage. The original podcast is located
here.
Announcer
Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo Podcast, brought to you by
MindComet. And now here’s your host, Paul Lewis.
Paul Lewis:
Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo. I’m your host, Paul Lewis, and today our guest is Denise Shiffman. She’s the founder of Venture Essentials, and also the author of
The Age of Engage, which I found to be a fascinating book and wanted to have her on the show. Denise, can you tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to write Age of Engage?
Denise Shiffman:
Sure, Paul. Thank you for having me on the show, first of all. And second a little bit on my background, I’ve been in marketing a little over 20 years. I grew up in a high-tech industry all the way up to Vice President of Marketing for Sun Microsystems, and then went on to run a software startup. And then after that decided I would start my own consulting company, and I’ve been doing consulting since then.
And as I started to get into the new media and blogging, I realized so much was changing in marketing – so much more than any time in my 23-year career that I figured it would be easier for everyone if I put everything in one place, put it into a book and made it very easily accessible for marketers to understand what’s going on, what these technologies and companies are doing, and how they can take advantage of it in their jobs.
Paul Lewis:
Great! I found The Age of Engage to be a fantastic book. It covers such a large subject area, really reinventing corporate communications – not even just marketing, but how do companies and organizations associate with consumers. In writing the book, how did you determine how deep to go into any topic area and what are the primary focuses and benefits.
Denise Shiffman:
That’s a really good question. It was actually a difficult decision to determine how much ground to cover, and I really truly believe – and the key point of the book is that blogs and podcasts and wikis or widgets and all this new media are no more than new channels for your message or marketing or communications. You have to have the right strategy to be able to be successful, and you have to attack these channels with the right behaviors in order to be successful.
And so I covered all of that ground in the book. I really wanted to get back to the fundamentals of marketing and what makes a company successful when they focus and they have a unique value, all the way through to how you deal with these new technologies. How do you deal with all this consumer-generated content on the web? How do you manage it? How you interact and communicate and how do you get more people attracted to you?
Paul Lewis:
Yeah, I love, both in the book and as you’ve mentioned just now, that these are unique channels, and the methods and appropriateness of different types of marketing and messaging changes and varies from traditional channels that marketers and a have a little more control over.
Denise Shiffman:
Exactly. In fact, I am as I mentioned, an old-time marketer, and I kind of got used to and enjoyed the role that we had when we got to assess the marketplace, do our research, talk to customers, and then we went craft a message and push it out to the marketplace, and then we’d sit back and wait and see what happened. Did they consume it or not? And if they didn’t, we’d start again.
But today, it’s a much more different marketplace for marketers. In fact, in some ways it’s easier. In some ways it’s harder. We have access to so much more real-time information about what our customers and prospects are thinking and saying. But we also have to engage and interact with them very early on so that we connect correctly with the broader marketplace.
And we also have to deal with the fact that not everybody agrees with us, and they can be very vocal on the web, and how do we respond to that? And how do we manage it? So, in some ways it’s harder, and in some ways it’s easier.
Paul Lewis:
Yeah, I think that is akin to those fast feedback loops, so if you can get messages out there and see reaction and respond in real time, but you have to now respond in real time. That’s becoming an expectation, and so it definitely changes the pace at which we react.
Denise Shiffman:
It changes the pace. It also changes how we hire, the kind of people we hire, what becomes more important. We need staff that is responsible for this type of communication and managing it, people who know how to communicate in sort of a natural way. A lot of times if you spend a lot of time – 20 years in a large corporation – you’re not comfortable revealing more about yourself. You’re not comfortable talking about why things went right as well is why they went wrong.
So it takes a different kind of behavior, a different kind of personality, and so we need to think about how are we staffing our organizations to make sure that we’re covering all the bases, that were getting this work done. Companies are finding today they have to create a great deal more original content, so you almost have to have a staff of writers keeping content fresh and interesting and informing the marketplace, because there’s a great expectation among consumers today that we inform them for free and then they decide if they want to interact with us.
Paul Lewis:
Right, very true. Very true. One of the things that I loved in the book is that you kind of take Apple to task in several points about some of their proprietary approaches and some of the closed-mindedness and non-inventive here thinking – which obviously Apple is currently very successful, but I have to say I agree with the points in your book as well. Why is being open to outside opinions and working in concert with these external communities so much more important today than ever before?
Denise Shiffman:
Well, today, business-to-business customers and consumers have so much more power in their hands when they’re dealing with the corporations they purchase from. They can blog about what you’re doing. They can comment, vote, rate. They can make their opinions heard, and that just wasn’t true four or five years ago. So we can get away with a lot more sitting in the ivory tower. At Apple I think is learning the hard way, it isn’t the same go around that they had with the Mac.
They’re very popular right now. Their products are doing great. They do a great job of executing on their own strategy, but you can’t do it in a vacuum anymore because consumers simply won’t allow you to. And they’ve truly berated Apple until they decided – Apple went ahead and decided they’d added developers’ platform for the iPod and the iPhone. So it’s a very different marketplace. The conversation is going on with or without you.
And if you truly want to be successful, you want to be a part of that conversation even if it’s negative. And I talk to executives every day who are really uncomfortable with this idea that people are going to say bad things about us. They’re going to tell everyone about our mistakes or our issues, and every company has lots of flaws and issues. And the point is, you can’t hide it anymore. Someone’s going to find out and announce it to the world, and even if it’s just a blogger it’s good to get picked up by the mainstream press if it’s important to enough people.
So it’s better for you to be more transparent and be the first one to get the information out there because then you’re building trust with that community even when something’s wrong. You’re building trust, and you’re letting them rely on you to get the information out. And then keep on being honest and transparent and forthright with information, and they will stay glued to what you’re saying versus maybe the gossip out there on the Internet.
Paul Lewis:
Right, and I think people are also – consumers are becoming more savvy to recognize there is always going to be good and bad reviews and information on any company. And what they’re looking for is that transparency, that openness, and a preponderance of the evidence as opposed to a few radical viewpoints, because I think you’re right, you’re always going to get those detractors, and you have to move past that.
Denise Shiffman:
I agree. And I think as human beings we have a pretty good truth meter built-in. We can get fooled for a little bit, but not for long. And we have a good sense of if someone is just out ranting and raving, that person is sort of on the outside of the envelope. They’re not the common comment of what’s going on. And I guess a lot also about comments – if you trust comments that you read on the web – well, yeah, I read more than one or two.
I read four or five if I’m about to buy a product, and that gives me a better balance. And now that there are millions of people out there commenting, you get really good balance on most products – the good and the bad. And you can get a sense for does this make sense for me to spend my money this way.
Paul Lewis:
Yeah, I talked to clients all the time about the – I call it “the age of transparency” – and that whole idea that I think at one time you could launch a product and have great marketing messages and be successful. But now your product needs to have – not only be a great product and be reliable, but you need to have great customer service and accurate billing and so many other factors because everything is transparent, and you really can’t hide behind sophisticated marketing anymore.
Denise Shiffman:
That is exactly it. in fact, in the book, The Age of Engage, I actually say "trust is more important than great products", and I truly believe it’s true. And the reality is if you just said it comes out of cash through customer service. It can even come out through financing policies the company has. There are so many customer-facing functions in corporations were people don’t realize that’s how consumers are getting a sense if you.
So sure, there’s nothing more important than being authentic and transparent today, because everybody can comment on it. Everybody can get a deeper understanding of you from your own employees who are talking to their friends who are blogging about it.
Paul Lewis:
Yeah, in the book you talk a lot about personal referrals and word-of-mouth marketing and how important that is to complement the company control channels. And you mentioned brand advocates – how can companies facilitate attracting and I'll use the word “activating” them?
Denise Shiffman:
That’s a good word, because that’s exactly what you’re doing. There are always people out there that love your product and like to talk about it. There are also people that love your product and don’t like to talk about it. The idea is is to find those people who are the talkers, who are the communicators. And one thing we do a lot of times on our little marketing surveys or when people are signing up our website, we ask them a few questions.
We need to ask them, “Do you blog? Do you comment on blogs? Do you wiki?” Get a feel for all these people out of the web. Are they out a bunch of websites? Do they social network? Are they on Facebook in MySpace or others? That will give us a sense for what kind of advocate they could turn out to be. And then we want to identify on our own branded websites who is commenting? Who is sending us emails? Who is a more active communicator? Identify those people and give them special status.
What Microsoft does is for the people they have on their network who help other customers out by telling them things they can do with a product or helping them solve problems. I mean, these people do it for free. So what Microsoft does is they give them special status. They call them MVPs. They bring them in once a year for a few days of hobnobbing with executives, and it makes them feel good about spending their free time helping out other Microsoft customers.
And I think this is a key activity for companies to do. Find out the people who are helping your customers or promoting your brand completely on their own, and then give them the tools, the widgets, the information, whatever it is they need to be better advocates for you. And also give them visibility because most people that do this for free like the recognition for what they’re doing.
Paul Lewis:
Yeah, absolutely, and I think that for many companies, this is redefining their organization. Who’s in charge of the advocates and the advocate program, and how do we activate them, and how much money should be invested there versus other channels, and where do we plug in with social networks? What do you think are some of the biggest organizational changes that large, previously well-established, industry-leading companies are going to face in this new age of engage?
Denise Shiffman:
It’s probably similar to the ones that they have faced historically, which is who reports to who? What’s the most important thing? I mean, if it was left up to me – and of course, I’m a marketing person – I’d put almost everybody under marketing so that people could learn how do you communicate to the outside world. There are lots of issues in how many companies, that we all buy from every day, deal with in terms of customer service.
Does customer service belong under marketing? How do you get the information that customer service has from talking to customers every day back into marketing? How do you deal with the fact that customer service reps aren’t always trained well enough to deal with serious issues with a customer? And a customer can turn around – when they’re pissed off at a customer service rep, they can turn around and blog about it or comment about it and start a whole huerrang on the web.
But sort of back to the broader question that you’re asking, which is sort of what is the big view? What are the big organizational changes? I think one of the biggest ones that companies are dealing with – actually, the two biggest ones are - content how do we take content from all over that company and repurpose it for the web? Because there is so much advantage you can take of material you already have and completely creating all of it as new again.
So a lot of corporations feel like they have to have high production value and keep reproducing new material, which is very expensive, so they can’t keep up with getting the new and fresh information on the web. Well, there’s content all over the company that can be repurposed for YouTube and Slideshow.net, and all of these other social environments.
And then the other big issue that companies have been facing for a long time that I was getting at a little bit earlier, which is all of this customer information that comes into different parts of the company – that comes into finance, that comes into customer service, that marketing gets through surveys and focus groups – it’s not ending up in one place.
We aren’t able to get all of our data – and also from the web and web-clicks – around each customer so that we can treat them better, so that we can give them more relevant information and know more about them. So it’s sort of a long answer to a short question.
Paul Lewis:
No, I think it’s a great answer, though. I think all of those points are extremely relevant for people to understand, because this is a complex area, and there is going to be change – all the change that’s external to the organization is causing this change internally in the organization, and organizations have to be prepared for it.
Denise Shiffman:
They do have to be prepared for it, and it does – and I said this earlier – it does change how we hire and who we hire. Another one of the things I talk about in The Age of Engage is, we really need to understand the difference between what’s proprietary and what’s not. And that’s a new skill – knowing, understanding what you must keep inside your company as sort of the crown jewels and what you can share, what you can license, what you can give away freely and be more open about.
Example I give a lot when I was an executive at Sun Microsystems, every single presentation we gave had proprietary and confidential at the bottom of the slide, even though 80% of the slides weren’t actually proprietary and confidential. They were the marketing myths, the strategy, the positioning, sort of what we wanted the marketplace to know versus the core technology that we needed to keep private until the product launched, and those kind of slides need to be up on Slideshow.net.
They need to be made into fun videos and uploaded to YouTube. That’s where you get the advantage, the word-of-mouth, the viral spread of an idea versus calling it proprietary and confidential and keeping it close to the vest.
Paul Lewis:
And I think that affects every company, no matter what they’re size – whether they’re a Sun Microsystems or a – I read on your blog that you were debating creative commons for part of it or should you use other licensing principles. So I think it affects every size from individual consulting all the way through huge Fortune 500 companies - how they do this and how they share their information.
Denise Shiffman:
It does. It’s everybody from Mom & Pop shops, to very large corporations, to people like me – individual consultants – and how we’re gonna market ourselves, how we’re gonna talk on the web. If we’re gonna do a blog, once again, how we’re gonna share our data.
Paul Lewis:
In the book, you break marketing strategy into “The Six V's.” What are those, and why is it important for marketers to really carefully consider each of them when they build their modern strategy?
Denise Shiffman:
Well, The Six Vs are venture, value, voice, verification, vicinity, and vehicle, and it would probably take me a very long time to go through all of those, so I’ll pick out a couple of them and just comment on venture. Venture is what we’ve been talking about – the organizational issues, how you’re gonna hire, how you’re gonna manage your information, and how you’re gonna get your teams to collaborate better.
But the key V to me is value, and it’s something we know as marketers, but we get too busy and we don’t get back to the strategy side. If you don’t have a unique value, a persuasive value proposition, something that draws people to you because you’re meeting a need or you’re describing a desire that people will think they need – especially in the way that Apple does it – then you’re gonna have a really tough time being successful whether it’s through traditional venues or whether it’s through new media.
So the value – that unique value is certainly the most important thing you can do in your marketing. And then vicinity I think is a critical new V. And of course I’ve said throw away the four Ps. That’s an old way of thinking about marketing. That’s an old way of organizing marketing. Today we need to think about the web first. We need to think about the user’s experience first.
Get out there and take a look at how does your user experience their life and your product as a part of their life whether it’s their working life or their personal life, and then understand where they go on the web or where they want to go and can’t go yet. And Nike’s done an amazing job thinking this way and implementing on this through the Nike Plus Technology and Community where you can – the shoe has a sensor in it – I don’t know if you’re familiar with this, Paul.
But the shoe has a sensor in it. It can track your runs and upload it to your iPod, so you have this great data source of your runs every day, every week, all year long. And then you can sync that to the Nike Plus Community which gives you another amazing data source of information and attracts you to Nike over and over and over because no only do you want to know what other people are doing when they run, you can challenge your friend who lives in another state or maybe even down the street who you don’t see that often.
You can challenge them to a run. You can prepare for a marathon and have lots of people in that community help you prepare for that marathon better. I mean, it’s an amazing thing that they really thought about their user and their experience. They thought about do they have a community to go to to help with this, and since they didn’t, they built it. And it works in this way that it brings you constantly back to Nike and it brings you back to Nike every time you need to buy a new pair of shoes.
So vicinity is really about thinking about where your users go on the web, and if they don’t have a place to go for an important subject or experience that’s important to them, then build that and create that environment, because all you’re doing is creating a platform in which they create all of the data that everybody comes back for, and that’s huge.
And I think another incredibly important V is voice. Creating, defining who you are when you speak publicly as a company. What is your style, your image, your passion? The example I like to use is Yvon Chouinard, the CEO of Patagonia, and Patagonia is a company. They have an amazingly consistent voice of who they are, what’s important to them, their style.
They really believe in helping the environment, and they’ve made a big part of their business being transparent as to what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong for the environment because that’s their passion. They decided to be transparent about how they’re dealing with it. And I think they’ve always had that authenticity as a company. And that’s been very clear in the voice they project in the marketplace.
Paul Lewis:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. That’s a very important point is in this transparency and age of engage people really can identify with you and they see if you’re trying to be something you’re not. So it’s important to be consistent and have a clear voice. Denise, this has been fantastic. I think this is a lot of really great information that our audience can definitely use. Thank you so much for being on the show. I’d like to see if you’re ready to play the Truth or Marketing section of the show?
Denise Shiffman:
I’m ready. Go ahead, Paul.
Paul Lewis:
All right – the 2008 Presidential Election will mark the first where the digital generation will probably have the largest impact at the polls. In 2008, ultimately the swing vote will be decided by adamant supporters who have reached out to their friends via social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, etcetera to really bring the vote out. What do you think? Is online going to be a huge factor in this election?
Denise Shiffman:
Well, that is a good question, and I just read an op-ed piece on that subject. I think it is. I think it is. I think that surprisingly there’s a big difference between all of these candidates and their online impact. And we’re seeing how online is affecting the polls and how word-of-mouth is affecting how these candidates are doing. I think all of the candidates could do much better in trying to be more viral and more personal online. But I do think online is gonna have a huge impact this time around.
Paul Lewis:
Okay, let’s go out two years. The year is 2010. We will see the launch of the first fully ad-supported cellular network, so people will be able to get their mobile service if they agree to their GPS maybe being known or ads being shown or text messages on their phones. Truth or marketing?
Denise Shiffman:
Oh, truth – absolutely! And in fact, I’m more excited about this than anything else going on in marketing today. There are companies already working on ad-supported networks. I can’t wait to see it happen. Open applications where developers can create applications for cell phones much more easily just as if they were developing them for computers – absolutely – coming and coming very soon.
Paul Lewis:
Awesome! Great – allright, let’s go out two more years – 2012, corporations will have shifted the majority of their ad dollars from television into online channels?
Denise Shiffman:
Majority – no. I’m gonna have to say no on that one. I think that too many of the large corporations are still putting their toe in the water, so I think we’ve got a ways to go – maybe another ten years before the majority of their ad dollars go – you know, the big ad spenders – go into online.
Paul Lewis:
Fair enough. Well, we’ve got it recorded here, so we’ll play it back in 2012. Okay, well, again Denise it has seriously been a great pleasure to have you on the show. For more information you can go to the website
ageofengage.com.
Thank you so much.
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