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Thinking Differently About Influencer Marketing

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Drew Neisser

This may be the last (no promises) in my recent series of interviews on Influencer Marketing. Fortunately for you, Matt Hixson, CEO of Tellagence, brings a different perspective on all this stuff since his company develops tools that help other companies identify and then engage communities. Stay thirsty my friends as this influencer marketing party is just beginning.

Drew: First, can you give me a brief overview of what Tellagence does?
Tellagence predicts how information moves across a social network and informs anyone responsible for a brand’s content and communication what should be shared within their audience. This is accomplished by unlocking complex behavior and dynamic relationships. We have built two products that help us do this. First, Tellagence Discover allows brands to identify an audience, their interests and their choice of words. Second, Tellagence Community allows you to identify the people who will not only engage on this subject but have the greatest potential to spread a message throughout this audience.

Drew: How would you define Influencer Marketing vis-a-vis Social Media marketing?
Social media has always been about WOM and the relationships needed to be successful. In the early days of online social networks it was simple because the number of users was much smaller. You could hustle and find the people you needed to reach. Influencer marketing is the ability to focus our resources on creating the one-on-one relationships that can significantly and predictably spread the message at scale and drive responses to our calls to action.

Drew: Can you give my readers an example of an Influencer Marketing program in which Tellagence played a role?
The value Tellagence provides is simple: we are able to find individuals who may not be considered an ‘influencer’ due to say a lack of or low follower count in Twitter, but instead play a critical role in how information moves across an online social network.

One of our earliest clients was an agency representing a large fortune 500 brand. They had a decent grasp on the client’s obvious network but we were able to identify a large group of people engaging around an important subject to the brand, which they were completely unaware of. As opposed to having them mass market to this entire group we were able to identify highly targeted individuals that were critical in how this group not only received information but passed it along to the large percentage of the community. These were people who had less than 100 followers and a low influencer score but were critical and would be overlooked by most.

Drew: How should brands be evaluating Influencer programs from an ROI standpoint?
There are a couple of core outcomes most brands want in any influencer campaign. How can they get their messages to spread and how can they drive responses to their calls to action. Influencer marketing is a much more focused approach than, say social ad buys, were the idea is that by putting more effort into fewer people you drive more reach or more responses to your calls to action. The basic question is what resources (time, money, people) do you put in and how much output did it create.

Drew: Do influencer programs have a role in customer retention or is mainly about driving leads?
If you do an influencer program in the most powerful way then you move from the idea of running a campaign to building a community. The idea of community has waned a bit as there is much more pressure on CMO’s to drive results in the short term. Influencer programs can definitely do both.

Drew: Are there any risks associated with these programs and if so, how can they be mitigated?
The risk is not engaging with your online community or reaching them inefficiently and at scale. People expect to engage through social networks at all turns.

Maybe not a risk but another missed opportunity is only looking as far as a campaign. In social networks people curate their own content and streams by choosing the people they want to engage with. If you are not providing them value they turn your relationship off, either by not following you or not listening.

Drew: You said in an interview with the WSJ that what’s most important about social media data is the context in which it appears. Can you give us a little more insight about how information travels as it moves through social networks?
Context is where we believe you start, which is why we built Tellagence Discover. The conversation or debate about follower counts, social scoring, and does it make an influencer, is a sexy and emotional one. But the core of this question is answered in deep analytics. People build relationships in context, over time. As that context changes our relationships change. Once we understand those relationships by the context of language used, we build a network predicting how information moves to help the marketer.

Drew: Does Big Data play a role in all of this? If so, how?
Abstolutely. Twitter produces 1 billion tweets every 2 days. See here: https://blog.twitter.com/2013/behind-the-numbers-how-to-understand-big-moments-on-twitter

That’s some big data. The challenge for organizations is how to make sense out of all of that. What Tellagence does is help them filter out the contextual noise to get to their target audience and then filter out the broadcast noise to get to their engaged audience. Big data gives us the opportunity but it is critical to get to the relevant data within there to create value.

Influencer Marketing From an Expert

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Drew Neisser

Okay, okay, I know I have been talking a lot about next week’s panel on influencer marketing. Well, tough. I’m not even close to done. Trust me, this is a hot topic and there are experts to be consulted. Case in point, Teresa Caro, SVP, Social and Content Marketing at Engauge (just acquired by Publicis) who suggested the panel topic to MediaPost in the first place. But before we get to Teresa’s insights, here for the record is the official description of our panel which is taking place near beauteous Lake Tahoe:

Your Biggest Fans: Best Practices for Engaging Influencers

Building and maintaining relationships with influencers can be difficult and sometimes time-consuming. But, when done right, the relationships can be rewarding for both brands and for the influencers. How do you identify the key influencers for your brand? How do you maintain those relationships and what type of monetization is required to keep those influencers engaged? Join our panel of brands, agencies and social media specialists as they take you through the best practices behind influencer marketing.

Now onto the interview which I for one found particularly interesting. After all, how often does one get to use the phrase “influencer porosity” in a discussion?

Drew: How do companies begin to implement an influencer outreach program?
First off, don’t allow a tactic such as social influence marketing drive your strategies. Objectives and strategies should drive your tactics. So, the first thing to do is to define your objectives and the strategies you will use to achieve those objectives. This is especially important with influence marketing because there are so many different types of programs.

Drew: How should companies approach an influencer? Should all potential influencer relationships be thought of as a long-term commitment?
The answer to these questions all depends on your strategic framework and which social influence marketing programs you choose to deploy. And yes, because it is time intensive to identify and ramp up your influencers, we always recommend a long-term commitment, yet we understand this is not always feasible and again, depends on the program you choose to deploy based on certain objectives and strategies.

A few examples of the many approaches include:

Surprise and Delight: You already have social influencers out there talking about your brand. Why not put a program together that surprises them with samples to share with their fans or a simple gift to say thanks. This is a good way to get a sense for how an social influence marketing program would work for your brand. For several of our brands, we start here and then evolve to the next bullet.
Advocacy/Social Loyalty Program: Are you looking to evolve to more of a social loyalty program, identify your most valuable advocates and reward them appropriately? Chances are you already have a strong relationship with your Tier 1 and Tier 2 consumers and can simply reach out to them directly to ask if they are interested. It can be positioned initially as an unpublished loyalty program and a test. Once you get it right you can role it out.
3rd Party Influencers: For those brands who are looking to launch a new product or need to hit their numbers during certain seasons, incorporating paid influencers into a campaign helps to extend the reach and increase brand resonance. In this case, we spend the time to find the right influencer through organic search with the occasional 3rd party provider.

Drew: What are some best practices for understanding the influencer-fan relationship?
Let’s face it, we want to reach the influencer’s fans. An influencer’s success depends on audience satisfaction and, by proxy, so does the success of the brand within those audiences. Understand what the audience expects from the influencer. If the influencer is passionate about pure bread dogs, will a message about Rachel Ray Nutrish resonate with them? Unlikely, since this brand is focused on dog rescue. If the fans are looking to be entertained, is providing the influencer with information (which may be useful to some) going to work with this audience? Know what the influencer values and what the fans expect.

Drew: How should brands approach “influencer porosity” in terms of shaping content, building relationships, and simply starting the conversation?
It means when brands work with influencers directly they need to understand their primary and secondary channels, their role and purpose, how they flow and how they can be leveraged by the brand. The more effort you take to understand the more effective the results. When brands are working with 3rd parties, it again depends on what you are looking to achieve and through what kind of medium. If you want an influencer to review a product, you need to work with the 3rd party to let them know the type of influencer and the type of content you want. What’s fantastic about influencers now (it’ll probably evolve) is if they love your brand and they’re excited about the experience, they’ll meet their commitment and do more. We just finished up one influencer program and were excited to see the abundant number of Instagram photos… something we did not include in the contract.

Drew: How do you remain attuned to your relationships with influencers and by extension, the fans when social is constantly changing?
Channels change, people remain the same. If a brand has a long term social loyalty/advocacy program, you are going to evolve that program as you would any relationship marketing program: by asking your audience what they need and expect. With short term programs, we always recommend the 70-20-10 rule: 70% is allocated to those channels/programs that we know will allow us to hit our numbers and get our bonus check. 20% is for those areas you know you need to do. The market has already proven it works, a brand just needs to figure out how best to get it to work for them. We feel influence marketing falls in this bucket. The 10% is for those shiny objects that come by. By having a budget and a process for these channels and tactics, it allows you to test and discard (or optimize) quickly without disrupting the rest of the marketing plan.

Drew: How can brands make sure they “don’t suck” as you suggested in your Slideshare presentation?
This is more of a brand problem, one that can be exasperated by social. I’m always fond of saying that social is like alcohol: the more you drink, the more it enhances your underlying personality. Social is the same way, the more you engage in the social space, the more a brand’s faults come to the surface (and their good features too).

Drew: When setting up an influencer program what are the right metrics for success?
Success is in the eye of the beholder. Before you embark on any program, ensure you know your business objectives and you know the KPIs that align to those business objectives (share of voice, NPS (net promoter score), pre-/post- brand awareness/perception, etc. The metrics for that campaign depend on what you are looking to achieve. We had one client who simply wanted to look more innovative than another brand. We have another who wants to deepen their relationship with their audience. We have another who is media-focused and measures success based on impressions.

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.

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!