Drew Neisser, Author at The Drew Blog

Building Individual Relationships with Influencers

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Drew Neisser

“So do you think all this influencer marketing stuff is overhyped?” asked the CMO standing next to me last night. Like a veteran batter expecting and getting a curveball, I didn’t swing at this one too hard but rather went with the pitch so to speak, letting the conversation ebb and flow until it landed in just the right spot. That spot, for me, is the influencer marketing program conceived and lead by IBMer Tami Cannizzaro.

And while I’ve covered some of my learnings about the IBM program on this blog already, I hadn’t gone to the source and discussed things like how the program came into being, success metrics and the importance of not just “talking the talk” as a client. This last point above all really struck home–if you want to run an influencer program especially a B2B one, then at least one individual at the brand needs to invest the time to build individual relationships with the influencers and actively participate in their conversations. Here is my conversation with Tami which also serves as an insightful preview into our panel discussion next week at the MediaPost Social Media Insider Summit.

Drew: When did the “VIP Influencer” program you are running for IBM Smarter Commerce conferences begin, where did the idea come from and what were your expectations Year 1?
I had to think about this one, Drew! I recall speaking at a CMO Club Summit event in New York about two years ago and Ted Rubin and Margaret Molloy were sitting in the audience. They both actively tweeted my session and it received lots of great pickup by influential people in the marketing community. It hit me that we could scale this phenomenon and invite prolific social influencers to our events to extend the reach of the content beyond the four walls of the conference. In year one, my objective was simply to drive a robust social conversation that would amplify all of the great content coming out of the conference.

Drew: Did the program evolve in Year 2 (2013) and if so how?
By year two, we scaled the program to 25 influencers and hired social media reporters to amplify the content. These social reporters tweeted, wrote short blogs and created shareable video content about the event. All reporters tweeted under a branded backchannel and identified themselves as reporters hired by IBM, so it was transparent. Between the influencer community and the reporters on site, the single conference this year yielded almost 300 million impressions and trended on Twitter as well. We also added a Social Business Command Center, which brought the activity to life and helped support broader participation and competition among our influencers. (I can still be heard bragging from time to time about my stint on the leader board!)

Drew: What are the factors that guided you in putting together a list of influencers for the IBM Smarter Commerce Summits?
My social media team monitors social channels and measures those influencers with the most “signal” in our industry—tools like OneQube can help you navigate, measure and manage social relationships. We wanted to field a group of influencers who were prolific at generating content and who also had a very engaged following. Some notable people include Jay Baer, Ted Rubin, Pam Moore, Bryan Kramer, Kim Garst, and Glen Gilmore. They have an active and influential voice in the community and a daily cadence of active publishing.

Drew: Are there any pitfalls to avoid when putting together a program like this?
The hard part is that you have to depend on good faith that the investment will yield. If you have a CEO focused on ROI, it may not be immediately evident how it’s returning back to the business. I liken it to a relationship with the analyst community. Nurtured over time, these relationships help you to build traction in the market and drive momentum for your brand. The pitfall is that it takes faith—and a lot of times, that isn’t enough to garner support for the program in the first place!

Drew: I couldn’t help but notice that your VIP Influencers bonded at the event. Was this part of your plan or just a happy by-product?
The misconception exists that social is just about digital—and that interacting on Twitter or Facebook is the whole power of social media. But the biggest payoffs can happen when the physical and digital worlds merge and people from social channels like Facebook or Twitter become in-person friends, colleagues, and customers. It sounds hokey, but there is tremendous power in building community, and that, to my mind, is at the core of an influencer program: Building a community of like-minded people who know and support one another.

Drew: You personally have invested a lot of time getting to know these influencers. Is that an essential part of these kinds of programs or could a marketer try to run an influencer program like yours without being personally involved?
Outsourcing the program completely to a staff person or an agency is missing the point of an influencer program, which is to make these people part of your overall brand strategy, to treat them like VIPs and give them insider access to your strategy and brand. Influencers tend to be a passionate, entrepreneurial community. Sharing your passion for your business with them and asking for their help to accomplish this is perhaps the secret ingredient of a successful influencer program.

Drew: Clearly there are costs (time, OOP) associated with assembling an influencer program list this. Can you speak to the costs and what kind of metrics/KPIs you use to rationalize this investment?
The time and investment is significant, but it’s one of the best parts of my job. Becoming a member of the influencer community has enriched my knowledge of the industry and paid me back in a number of ways. There are also measurable success factors. We actively measure the increase in engagement for our properties. For example, years ago, we were seeing limited pickup and reach from our social efforts. Today we have surpassed over 2 billion impressions and we’ve seen a significant increase in engagement on our owned properties. Driving from owned to earned is a slow process since you need to build a community and following over time, but it is definitely measurable.

Drew: Seems to me, you are still getting “ink” from some of the influencers (like me!) How do you extend the value of your investment in an influencer program?
We’ve asked some of our influencers to be guest bloggers on an ongoing basis. We also activity promote our influencers throughout the year so they receive value from IBM. IBM has a strong social fabric—one that’s getting stronger every day—and that’s helping to extend the value of being aligned with the IBM brand.

If you had one word of advice for a brand starting an influencer program, what would it be?
If you’re going to start an influencer program, take the time to think through the process of choosing the right brand sponsor within your organization. The program need to be nurtured by someone who will invest the necessary time and personal investment. It’s not a one-shot event—it’s a strategy that will evolve over time. Ted Rubin, Chief Social Marketing Officer of Collective Bias, has coined the phrase “Return on Relationship.” I agree with his thinking here. Social business is not about making a business transaction. It’s about building a network of business relationships that will yield results over time. You’ll get as much out of the program as you put into it.

Making Your Influencer Campaign Effective

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Drew Neisser

In a recent blog post, Dan Hebert makes a compelling case that influencer marketing is hotter than Jennifer Lawrence. Though huge JLaw fans may beg to differ, those of us in the social trenches know Dan may actually be the master of understatement. Consider a couple of the many facts Hebert offers:

More than 50% of marketing and PR professionals will be allocating budgets for influence marketing strategies;
74% of marketing and PR professionals will be deploying influence marketing campaigns in the next 12 months.

Which should help explain why I’m so excited to be moderating this particular panel, “Your Biggest Fans: Best Practices for Engaging Influencers,” next week at the Media Post Social Media Insider Summit. Among the experts joining me is Kelly Tirman, Enterprise Social Marketing Strategist at Wells Fargo who is also a well-respected Mom Blogger. I caught up with Kelly over the weekend (yes, its work work work for us bloggers) and think you’ll find what she has to say about running effective influencer marketing programs quite enlightening.

Drew: Since you’re on a panel about “influencer marketing” with me, can I assume that your role covers influencer marketing for Wells Fargo and if so, can you tell me a bit about what you’re doing in that area?
Influencer Marketing is relatively new for Wells Fargo. However I’ve recently had the pleasure of working with a handful of influencers to roll out an amazing campaign for Wells Fargo that honors the 150^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

In this campaign we collaborated with several bloggers to share their own personal untold stories as part of a video series, an extension of the Untold Stories campaign. These videos are unlike anything I have even seen and I am extremely proud of this work.

Drew: Given the highly regulated nature of financial services marketing, do you have to approach influencer marketing differently than say a packaged goods brand?
Building great relationships with your legal and compliance partners are key. Other than that the same rules apply. Be honest, transparent and leverage people strengths (both internal and external partners).

Drew: How should influencer marketing fit into an overall marketing strategy?
If influencer marketing is done correctly it gives the brand a beautiful opportunity to reach an audience they might not normally reach by co-creating an experience for the customer with a network of trusted influencers. At the end of the day you need people inside your corporation that excel in vendor management, know how to collaborate and understand the value of building real relationships with influencers.

Drew: I am a bit fixated at the moment on the topic of Social ROI. What do you think are the right metrics to measure the success of an influencer program?
I understand the need for numbers. It is how we all justify and increase our budgets. I get that. But at the end of the day the only thing that really matters is the customer. You need to be where your customer is and you need to make sure their experience is solid.

Drew: You are well established in the blog-her-sphere. How does this help you do your job at Wells Fargo?
I am a tactile learner. As I participate and collaborate with other bloggers my mind is able to use those experiences as a jumping off point for new ones.

Drew: How important do you think it is that social business marketers are active like you on social channels?
Depends on why you are doing it. I officially started blogging right after Walmart launched the Eleven Moms as a way to better understand how these women were running their businesses. As I blogged I formed friendships. It was actually those relationship that taught me what I needed to know. Technology changes fast, it is the power of your tribe that keeps you all ahead of the curve.

Drew: I have heard that many moms who blog don’t like the term “mommy bloggers.” What do you prefer?
I prefer the term Mom Blogger. Like, Jenny Lawson has said in the past, “no one should be calling me mommy that isn’t my kid.” For years I felt the need to constantly remind people of who I was and what I had done within my professional career outside of being a mom blogger. However, while attending Conversations with Coca-Cola last October with friends such as Andrea Fellman of Savvy Sassy Moms I had the honor and pleasure of hearing Catherine Conners talk in depth on this subject. And thanks to that conversation I decided to own the term. I am proud of this community and the changes we have made to mainstream advertising. We have not only created conversation, we have changed it for the better.

Social ROI: Dream or Reality

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Drew Neisser

My favorite part of being a social media professional is that it requires me to be social in the old-fashioned meaning of the word and in the process I get to meet and build relationships with really smart, interesting and talented people. One of these individuals is Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan the CEO of Unmetric, with whom I had the pleasure of meeting at our first “executive salon” called Social ROI: Dream or Reality. Lux was kind enough to agree to be interviewed on the topic that hopefully will not end up being my Waterloo. I think you will find what Lux has to say about benchmarks, proxies and the elusive pursuit of direct ROI metrics quite enlightening.

Drew: What are the basic benchmarks, your company Unmetric proposes to big marketers to measure effectiveness of their social media activities?
The most fundamental measure, quite simply, is resonance. In an era where brands are publishers and markets are truly conversations (as the Cluetrain Manifesto proclaimed 14 years ago), every brand’s efforts on social media is really to resonate with the expectation of its existing and prospective customer base.

Various secondary metrics serve to qualify resonance – depending on the social network and the lens of purpose we’re looking through. For example, on Facebook, this could be qualified as resonance to a piece of micro-content a brand publishes on its Facebook page. In this case, engagement measured as a weighted function of likes, comments and shares would probably be the best surrogate for resonance.

In the Twitter ecosystem, and (say) through a customer service lens, this could be quantified as average reply time – towards resolving a customer question, or the number of times a brand needs to apologize. At Unmetric, we have a gamut of metrics for each platform – the metrics are idiosyncratic to the platform, and to the common marketing / customer service objectives it can address.

Drew: What sorts of brands are most likely to understand the nuances of social media and least likely to associate it with ROI?
I think brick and mortar and consumer brands that manage large mass media budgets would most likely ‘get it’ sooner than the rest. The reason is quite simple, really. These brands are used to a digital world where an online/mobile/digital sales transaction is rarely the final objective, simply because purchase for these brands is often in a retail store – quite distanced from the (possible) online experience that catalyzed it.

These brands have evolved from a world where attributing results to spends have always been a challenge (the classic “I know half my budget is working, but don’t know which half” comes to mind). Consumer brands are, with their mass media backgrounds, used to living with intermediate and indicative non dollar linked parameters being an objective.

For example, a TV campaign might have a stated objective of driving up unaided advertising awareness, and consequently, brand awareness and preference by a few points. Behind this objective is obviously some insight into a correlation model between awareness, preference and sales. To state the corollary – I’d expect brands that typically get or can aspire for an online transaction expect such transactions to be woven into an ROI model. These are brands that thrived in a Google Adwords defined transactional advertising world where dollar inputs are expected to translate into dollar (sales) outputs. E-commerce, services like airlines, travel and banking – all try and aspire for ROI rationale.

Drew: How would you describe your journey into the world of social and digital media metrics?
I think it was an interesting mix of scratching ones itch, serendipity, and an evolution of sorts. I guess that begs for elaboration…

In the company I previously co-founded, a data backup software firm called Vembu, I was personally driving our sales and marketing initiatives. Like every other company at the time, we set up a Facebook page, a Twitter handle, and other social media outposts. And then…silence!

We ran out of things to say; after all, data backups were the tech equivalent of a root canal treatment, and how engaging can that be. I found myself poring through the social media efforts of other firms, most notably utilitarian technology product companies, to get a better sense of how they achieved resonance with their community. That experience was the initial seed for what became EyesAndFeet, a social media platform for small and local businesses. A year and some heartaches and a few serendipitous meetings later, we re-architected the platform to move from a small business focus to a focus on large businesses and brands. Those were the initial days of Unmetric.

On a related vein, I spend the better part of the 90s working at various media agencies in the Interpublic group. At the time my team would regularly publish Share of Voice / Spend competitive intelligence reports and try and garner insights from competitive activity on mass media. By the turn of the century, we were doing the same thing with brands’ websites as well. I see Unmetric’s role as akin to that – in social media, and therefore an evolution of sorts.

Drew: What is Unmetric’s greatest strength when providing social media insights to marketers?
That’s exactly it: insights! There is so much of data out there that it is quite easy to miss the forest for the trees. Unmetric’s role is in ferreting out those data nuggets that would otherwise have escaped a team’s attention – those needles in the haystack.

Besides this intelligent outlier analysis and insight mining, we also pride ourselves on two unique things that we do: one is in the area of campaign tracking whereby we recognize the multi-platform social media campaign as being the evolution of the classic multi-media mass media campaign, and try and capture this multi-platform dimension of competitive activity. The other very unique thing about us is the way we offer content intelligence – in a way that allows brands to hone their own content strategies and publishing calendars.

Drew: How easy or difficult is measuring “Social Media ROI” in today’s competitive landscape where every brand is social?
Crazily enough, quantifying ROI typically becomes less of a demand in a crowded and competitive scenario. Television advertising is a great example of this…

Most brands in crowded sectors are plugging in far more spots and spending a lot more than ROI and optimization would dictate. The reason is simple: competitive pressure. Brands are understandably uncomfortable with simply achieving their reach and effective frequency objectives in a scenario where a competitor is hugely out-shouting them. As a consequence, the conversation shifts from ROI to Share of Voice and attention, and benchmarking ones activity levels and efficacy against a brand’s peers. Exactly the same thing will happen, and is, in some ways, happening in social media.

CMO to CEO in One Knight

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Drew Neisser

With the world abuzz about the newborn English prince George, it seems appropriate that I finally feature my interview with a real-life knight of realm, Sir Terry Leahy. Sir Terry was the CEO of Tesco, a company he helped build into a global retailing powerhouse. I caught up with him after his keynote address at the IBM Smarter Commerce Summit earlier this year where we discussed his new book, Management in 10 Words. Although this edited interview is longer than most of the ones I post, I expect you will find it well worth your time, since Sir Terry is one of a handful of CMOs who not just rose to the CEO position but also became one of the most effective in recent years.

Drew Neisser: Simple is one of my favorite words in your book. But Simple is hard, especially for big businesses. Why is that?
Sir Terry Leahy: Yes, simple isn’t easy. But, it still is the right thing to do. I think it’s a mindset. You have to accept that as organizations grow, they will become more complex. So, you got to counter that by deliberately navigating in search of simplicity. As organizations evolve, they do so around a series of decisions. And it’s when you make those decisions, you have the opportunity to choose a more simple route, as oppose to a more complex route. And in a way we have to counter the way we all educated.

In education sometimes you’re rewarded for length. I was reminded of the old Mark Twain story when his editor asked him for two pages in two days. And he came back and said, no can do. I can do ten pages in two days. But it’ll take me two weeks to do two pages! And what’s that getting at is you have to think about it. You have to think about how you can actually simplify the way you deliver a product or a service to a consumer.

Drew Neisser: With all the big data that’s out there, does this make it harder to get to simple or does it make it easier?
Sir Terry Leahy: Well it potentially makes it harder. There’s a real danger that an organization can be flooded by data. And information can get in the way of actually accessing the things that really matter for the consumer and what will really drive your organization forward, if you make decision on those things. Our data is so complex now. So, powerful. It’s even a danger that it can become detached from most ordinary people. And that can be very harmful for an organization. You want data to be more accessible and to be placed right at the heart of the organization. Right where the decision are made.

Drew Neisser: How do you get to where data becomes simple?
Sir Terry Leahy: I think it became simple once we were able to know things about customers. That was the big breakthrough for us. We had product data with the [advent of the] bar code. Which transformed our retail industry. But, we didn’t know anything about the people who bought the products.

Once we launched Club Card that allowed us to gain information about those individual customers. And their shopping habits. What they bought when they shopped. And that really illuminated the world for me because then we knew more about how customers shopped and what they needed. And what they’re interested in. We could tailor [messages.] We could target our products our services to meet those specific needs.

Drew Neisser: One of the words that you used was Courage, which is another great word. I would use the word chutzpah but that’s because I live in New York. And a lot of companies don’t have the courage to make big bets. In fact, they sort of go for incrementalism. Talk to me about the importance of courage and big bets, and the risks of such an approach.
Sir Terry Leahy: Courage is an unusual word in the context of business. But, I think it’s at the heart of business. And in fact, I think entrepreneurs would understand that. They take the biggest bet of all with their livelihood, when they start a business. But, in an organization it still applies. Many people are fearful of upsetting their boss and affecting their promotion prospects.

Actually, you’ve got to be prepared to risk everything. Even your career in order to do what you think is right in a situation in the job that you hold. One of the big bets that I made was the launch of Club Card, which gave this information around customers. In order to do it, we had to incentivise customers. That was going to cost us at the time a quarter of our entire profits. If this had gone wrong, and many predicted it would go wrong, I was finished.

Drew Neisser: So, one of the things that really distinguishes you particularly in the world of big data and CTOs is that as a marketer, you became CEO. Why do you think you were able to beat the data guy to the CEO spot, and what could marketers who aspire to be CEOs, learn from that experience?
Sir Terry Leahy: Yeah, it is unusual. And I think we need more CEOs who come from marketing or come from technology. It happens obviously in the technology industry, but outside that industry, it’s pretty rare. And, I think that’s a great shame because those are the two most valuable commodities for business systems to work with–customers and data knowledge. I was able to use Club Card and some other innovations to be the voice of the customer in the business. So, I was able to give leadership for the company from the marketing position. And that, therefore, was a small step into the CEO office.

And I think other CMOs can do that. I think that they can step forward and lead the business from the marketing position. Particularly, if they harness the customer. And the customer is the biggest power base within an organization. And if you use it in the right way, it’s hard for [a colleague from] Finance or Operations to challenge the voice of the customer. If you have the customer on your side, you’re the most powerful guy (or woman) in the organization.

Drew Neisser: Interesting. So, one of the words that’s not on your ten words, is the word intuition. And in this world of big data does intuition still have a role?
Sir Terry Leahy: I think it does. You read the psychology books like I do, and they look at how the brain works and what would probably happen is that we’ll all be better at absorbing data about the things that we work on and work in. And then we’ll have an intuitive response that seems like a gut instinct.

But, actually it’s drawing on all of that data. All of that information that you’ve been putting in there over the last weeks and months and years. And largely, that’s probably the right way for it to come. A combination of the two sides of our brain, if you like. And that’s how most people will work.

Drew Neisser: Let’s get back to the CMO for a moment. How does that CMO who’s not a data person, make sure that they are looking at the data or getting the data they need to really inform their strategies?
Sir Terry Leahy: I think the days of the CMO not being data person are passed. I don’t think you [the CMO] have to be a math genius. The technology right now is making [data] so much more accessible. It’s about the CMO who’s curious about the world around them and how they use data to inform them about that world. And that’s what CMO’s are naturally are. Their naturally interested in people. Interested in how the world works. And they just need unlock data to inform their decisions.

Drew Neisser: One of the words in your book is “Values.” Let’s talk about that. Every company that I know has values. They put them on their website. They put them on a wall in the kitchen. But, they’re not realized. They’re not activated. They’re just platitudes. How did you make sure that the values that you established for Tesco became a real part of the organization?
Sir Terry Leahy: I think you have to look at the organization. And you’ll find in the history of the organization or in the narrative of the business the core values. And if you can draw those out and articulate them and build on them, I think that’s a much more solid foundation. I think after that it’s — you obviously have to live those values. People will listen to what you say, but they’ll watch what you do. Integrity comes from a consistency between the words and the deeds.

And you’ve got to live it every day. It’s incredibly powerful in business as in any institution or organization. The foundation are a code of values that says this is what we’re here to do. And in any situation, this is how we’ll behave. And people can identify with them. It’s so much easier for people to sign up for that.

Drew Neisser: One of the words you have in the book is, “Compete.” When some companies see what their competition is doing, they try to replicate it. How do you compete and look at your competition, but make sure that you remain true to yourself?
Sir Terry Leahy: What’s interesting in the first ten years of my career, essentially I copied the competition because our competitors in my industry were outstanding firms. The best in the country. Arguably the best in the world at what they did. So, I didn’t have to look far for ideas. I just copied them.

But, what I found was as we got closer and closer to this benchmark, we could never overtake them because, you know, if you just like the original people will always choose the original. And it was only, when I stop copying the competition and started following our own customers and letting they be my lead, that we overtook them within a year.

It was an amazing thing that I learned. From that day forward I respected and learned everything I could from the competition. But, I never followed competition. All the focus was on the customer. And then what you did was much more original. Much more authentic. And customers spotted that you were doing it first and doing it for them. You weren’t doing it because some other competitor did it first.

Drew Neisser: To wrap up here, let’s talk about the future. If you were training now for the CMO job ten, fifteen years on the horizon, what would you be focused on?
Sir Terry Leahy: Well, I think it’s a really exciting time now because back when the Club Card started, Tesco was one of the first in the world using data, as soon as computers were powerful [enough.] Now, the opportunity to access data from social networks, from shopping data and from so many other things, from operations, it’s without limit. And, yet, organizations don’t use that data. They don’t bring it in and use it to inform the way products are developed, to drive the direction of the business. So, I think that still is the opportunity. How do we make business decisions on the basis of knowledge–knowledge of the world around us.

The Non-Linear ROI of Social

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Drew Neisser

I’ve spent a lot of time recently obsessing about the ROI of Social Media. Not just because current and prospective clients want to see some kind of a return on the services Renegade provides (although that’s a damn good reason in and of itself) but also because it’s a fabulously complex Kobayashi Maru-like challenge.

Consider for a moment all the roles that social media can perform for a company including customer service, recruitment, research, product development, awareness building, crowd sourcing content, referral/lead generation, and yes, even direct sales in a few cases. Now try to unbundle those roles and show straight line ROI for any of them with the exception of the last one. Good luck to you. (By the way, smarter minds that mine like Lux Narayan of Unmetric have concluded http://onforb.es/14mn0NX it’s just not possible.)

Thinking that social media could be my route to the answer, I sent out this tweet:

Rob Moore, CEO of Internet Media Labs and a fellow IBM #SmarterCommerce VIP Influencer (which has become an invaluable micro-social network!) was kind enough to respond leading to the conversation below. Rob offered a terrific example of “Non-Linear ROI” which brought us both some comfort that all the social networking stuff we do actually does pay out! If you have similar tales to share, let me know.

Drew Neisser: First, can you provide a short description of Internet Media Lab?
Rob Moore: Internet Media Labs is a NYC based new media & technology company. We build technology to help businesses and brands build and manage social relationships more effectively. We also run a cool co-working space and produce a web show, #InTheLab.

Drew Neisser: Talk to me about how you measure social ROI in terms of your own business?
Rob Moore: Social ROI for us takes many forms, and it is important for businesses to recognize that there are many forms of Social ROI that can be quantified and measured. Of course, there is the obvious – we make a social connection that becomes a buyer of one of our products or services. But there is also tangible ROI that comes in different forms: from connectors – people that introduce you to others that ultimately buy – and amplifiers, people that share our message about our products.

It has to be noted, however, that none of this happens without a significant investment in relationship building. We have amazing social relationships and networks that will have significant impact on our bottom line for years to come.

Drew Neisser: ROI in your case seems like a very non-linear non-direct marketing process. Is that a fair assessment?
Rob Moore: Absolutely. Up to this point, I would say that most of our ROI would qualify as originating from non-linear connections, i.e. someone that introduced you to someone else, that invited you to speak at a conference, that resulted in a business opportunity. That is pretty non-linear!

One important thing to recognize as well is that many of those originating relationships happen as the result of seemingly “random” intersections – the serendipity of social.

Drew Neisser: So you met Linda Bernstein (@wordwhacker), who is clearly an influencer and she has been evangelizing on your behalf which lead to various leads which you will close at some point. That sounds like ROI to me. Do you think it’s possible to actually create a model that puts a value on your nurturing of people like Linda?
Rob Moore: First of all, I need to state for the record that it would be impossible for me to put a “value” on my relationship with Linda, she falls into the PRICELESS category! But that said, you can absolutely model and attribute value to your social relationships, especially when you apply what I call “social forensics” to the analysis: mapping and identifying the true origin of that revenue you just booked.

When you are able to do that, every social relationship can be assigned a potential future value.

I want to be clear that I don’t look every person I meet on Twitter with dollar signs in my eyes. Rather, I look every new social relationship as an opportunity for mutual discovery, networking and advocacy. By being authentic and agenda free, trust is formed and friendships are created, the by-product of which is magic!!!

This works both ways for IML, by the way. We have sponsored many an event, used services, or paid commissions to people and businesses that we have met through social media. As a matter of fact, our social media ROI balance sheet is a little in the red right now – we need to do something about that!

Drew Neisser: Is this kind of networking / relationship building with influencers scalable? If so, any thoughts on how?
Rob Moore: It is scalable, but it doesn’t happen without a plan and significant commitment. My friend Angela Maiers (@AngleaMaiers) coined the phrase “Tactical Serendipity”, which I love. Tactical Serendipity means putting your self in position to take advantage of the random intersections that happen every second in social. If you can identify where you best social relationships have come from, put yourself in a position to attract more of them – you can scale great relationships if you know where to find them.

Drew Neisser: Also, you’re a seasoned vet with a proven track record which makes it a lot easier for you to network with other influencers like Linda. Could a junior person at your company have done this? Is this sort of networking something you can teach people?
Rob Moore: Yes I believe this type of networking can be taught to and mastered by almost anyone. Surely my depth of business experience has been an advantage to me as I have engaged in social, but there was a massive learning curve for me as well. I think that learning curve can be compressed, though, to accelerate success and positive outcomes. For junior people, this can be achieved through coaching and mentoring, for senior people new to social it is often just a matter applying existing skills sets and knowledge to well defined social relationship building strategy.

FINAL NOTE: This is just my opening salvo on Social ROI. Expect a lot more on this subject in the near future. There are folks out there (like Syncapse) working of formulas to calculate Social ROI and I can’t wait to dig into those…

Nice Companies Finish First

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Drew Neisser

The proper German pronunciation of my last name is actually “nicer” as is in “nicer than the other guy.” It is little wonder then that I have a natural predisposition towards nicer people, especially people like Peter Shankman who is championing the cause of being nicer on a global scale. I was lucky enough to have a video interview with Peter at the IBM Smarter Commerce Summit from which I pulled the Q&A below.

I think Peter makes a really compelling case for why niceness is not a ‘nice to have’ component of your go-to-market strategy but instead could become a ‘must have’ element to gain competitive advantage. Importantly, Peter says niceness needs to start with the CEO and then permeate the organization. Let me know if you think there’s a seat in the boardroom of your company for a Mr. Nicer.

Drew Neisser: Tell me about your new book, Nice Companies Finish First: Why Cutthroat Management Is Over.
Peter Shankman: I realized when I sold my last company that the reason the company did so well and was purchased was not because I had an e-mail newsletter, an e-mail mailing list but it was because I was nice and I had a personal relationship with all 250,000 people on this list. It sounds crazy but I realize that nice was actually the reason the company did so well.

Drew Neisser: Wait, you had a personal relationship with 250,000 thousand people?
Peter Shankman: It sounds crazy but you know when was the last time you were on a newsletter mailing list that came from a person? You know every corporate mailing newsletter comes from “do not reply”, mine came from Peter@shankman.com from the day I started to the day I sold it.

Drew Neisser: I got some of those [HARO] e-mails. So then what?
And so people would reply to me, “I know this won’t go to the owner but…” and I’d reply, “Oh, actually it did, how can I help you?” [Seeing the power of being nice] I spent the next two years really studying and interviewing companies from Fortune100s all the way down to mom-and-pop’s. We found out that the companies that focused on nice, focused on treating their employees nice, the customers nice and their clients nice, treating the environment nice, actually wind up doing anywhere from 10 percent to 30 percent higher revenue than companies that had that sort of 1980s Gordon Gecko mentality.

Drew Neisser: When it comes to being nice is this something that companies can systematize or is this more about random acts of kindness?
Peter Shankman: It’s a little bit of both; it has to start from the CEO. CEO has to understand that being nice for the sake of being nice is the greatest thing in the world, that’s what people want to do, but let’s face it, that doesn’t necessarily generate revenue. The concept of being nice for a company really comes in two parts. You want to be thought of as nice, no question about it, you want to do nice things, because this is a good thing to do, good karma and all that. But what we found in the book is that the more you do nice things the more consumers actually look at it, and say “okay you know what, as a customer I was treated really well by this company, I want to tell my friends to use this company as well.” And so what we found out is that when you combine being nice for the sake of being nice with being nice because it is profitable, you wind up making your stockholders happy as well as the customers, the [vendors] and the employees.

Drew Neisser: Who are some of the companies that you found doing nice things?
Peter Shankman: We found a food truck out there where one day a week for an hour, they give away the food to the homeless people, just because it is the right thing to do. There is a dry cleaner that if you are homeless and you have a job interview, you can bring [your clothes] and they will dry clean it for this job interview for free. My favorite example is when Morton’s steakhouse jokingly met me at the airport because I jokingly tweeted, “I want a steak” and they showed up at the airport and that generated double-digit revenue for them.

Drew Neisser: Amazing. Tell me more about the Morton’s example.
[After seeing my tweet Morton’s social team realized] he comes here a lot, he eats a lot of steak and so let’s do something nice for him. And I was so blown away [that they showed up at the airport with a free steak dinner that] I told my friends and two days later I’m on the ‘Today’ Show, and they had double-digit revenue, six months after that. It is incredible –double digit revenue growth, from showing up at the airport because some guy jokingly tweeted about it.

Drew Neisser: So let me play CMO for a moment and ask how do you scale that?
Peter Shankman: You don’t have to scale that, not everyone needs a steak at the airport. You can do something that when you show up, when you make a reservation, at Morton’s they say hey, it is a special occasion? And if it yes, it is my mother’s birthday, oh what’s her name? Nancy. They walk in, “Happy Birthday Nancy”, on the menu. It’s this little, tiny things that really make you come back.

Drew Neisser: So we have this logo behind us from the IBM logo, Smarter Commerce Conference, so how does nice and data, and big data come together?
Peter Shankman: That’s my favorite part, we have so many tools now and you can know everything about your customer before they walk in the door. But it is not enough just to know everything about the customer; you have to learn how to take advantage of that. We’ve worked with hotels to do this. You can determine when a person’s walking in to check in, are they frazzled? You know, are they tired? If they’ve had a long flight, you can see things in their body language. You can look at what they are saying online, look at what they are talking about, what are they posting–Are they angry? Are they happy? Are they sad? And if they are happy make them happier; if they are upset, make them happy. The greatest thing in the world is when you go to a hotel that you don’t expect to be treated [royally] and they do something out of the ordinary like they have a hot towel, anything like that, it really is amazing.

Drew Neisser:Now this phenomenon of niceness certainly probably parallels the rise of the service economy, what are you — how does an auto manufacturer — they make hard goods, how do they do nice?
Peter Shankman: When I worked at America Online, that was my first job out of college and it was also my first job in a big company. At that point I think they had 1800 employees and everyone had to work, in the tech-support or sales & marketing, because you know sales customer service group once for a full week before they start at their job, that’s how they learnt about the customer and things like that. And my first thought was, “Oh God, I have to work at customer service, this is going to suck.” You know what they did every Friday night, they backed up a beer truck, to the front door of the building, and they give out beer, and they give out soda and you can have whatever you wanted and the concept of treating the customer nice translated. You know if you are a big company, if you are an auto-manufacturer, well, are you treating your employees better than GM or Ford? You make [employees] want to take pride in their work because they love what they do.

Drew Neisser: So niceness starts at home.
Peter Shankman: It really doesn’t — it has to start with the CEO, if it doesn’t start with the CEO, there’s no point.

Drew Neisser: Got it. So I’ve got a group of CMOs here; do I get them to put a new line item on their marketing plan called Being Nice?
Peter Shankman: You’d be amazed; you can drop 30 percent of your marketing budget, simply being nicer. Here’s a perfect example — I was staying at a hotel in Dubai, three months ago. I get to the hotel at 6:00 pm, I’ve been out at meetings all day, I get back to my room, it’s been cleaned and there’s note, “Mr. Shankman we noticed that your toothpaste is running low, we went to the store and replaced it with the same kind you use, we thought it would make your day easier because we know how busy your schedule is.”

I was floored by that; took a picture of it and then posted on Facebook. I’m leaving two days later, the head of PR for the hotel, comes out to me, ‘Mr. Shankman just want to introduce myself, we were able to trace back in the last three days, three reservations that came in from your photo.’ And I’m thinking to myself, okay, and how much I paid for my room? Three reservations, freaking average of three days, that 39 cent tube of toothpaste netted them probably $12,000 to $15,000 in reservations. That is your line item.

Drew Neisser: Is every hotel in the world now asking you to come visit them?
Peter Shankman: You know what it is, it’s not even about — it’s about treating every employee — every customer not like they are me, but like they are anyone. The people in the back of the bus on an airline, don’t expect to board first or have their luggage come out first, what if once in a while you do?

Drew Neisser: So how does a CMO look a CEO in the eye and say, you know what, we are going to stop talking about “Price”, we need to start talking about “Nice.”
Peter Shankman: Well, you don’t have to stop talking about price, but you can start being nice. At the end of the day, what the CMO has to look at the CEO and say, ‘You know what; we’re going to do this, because it is going to generate more money and is it the right thing to do.’ Maybe you want to hear that as a CEO, maybe you don’t, but I’m telling you it’s is going to generate more money, and I’ve never met a CEO in my life who believes that cool trumps revenue. So if you come back with the concept of this is going to make more revenue, they’ll listen.

Drew Neisser: And are there tools to measure nice?
Peter Shankman: No question about it, I mean the simplest thing to measure nice — and IBM does this phenomenally is just measuring sentiment. As a customer service society, we expected to be treated like crap. Treat your customers one level above crap, doesn’t even have to be good, just one level above crap and they’ll talk about it. Go out of your way to do something amazing, they’ll share it with the world.

Final Note: this isn’t the first time I’ve discussed the power of being nice. In this blog post from 2008, I reference being nice on a list of 5 characteristics that make for great client / agency relationships. That post also mentions Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval’s book called The Power of Nice that discusses this topic way back in the pre-social media epoch!