Tag: The CMO Club

CMO Insights: The CMO Club Summit

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Probably nobody in the world talks to more CMO’s than Pete Krainik, founder of The CMO Club.  I caught up with Pete last week after The CMO Club Summit in New York City and asked him for the inside scoop on CMO’s and social media.  Here’s our Q&A:

DN: There was a lot of conversation at The CMO Club Summit about social media.  Why do you think this is the case?
CMOs care about customer engagement and having a reason and vehicle for listening, having a conversation, and sharing their Brands.  Social media is simply the best way, for many brands to do this.  Every Brand has different products/services and customers so the conversation’s centered on new and game changing ideas they can build on for their industry, customer base and products.

The other big reason is about marketing mix optimization.  Every dollar and resource focused correctly is worth significantly more than before. More targets, more marketing vehicles results in more interest in getting it right.

DN: Do you expect this conversation to grow over the next 12 months or are CMOs approaching Social Media fatigue?
The conversation will grow but move from social media to social marketing and social branding.   I’ve noticed within The CMO CLUB that more and more 1-1 conversations with CMOs to think through synergies for sharing resources together.  Moving from company specific apps, communities, programs to a community of Brands approach.  Very interesting times ahead.

DN: The CMO’s at the event seemed to be at various stages of the adoption curve when it comes to social media, why do you think that is the case?
A number of reasons.  For larger, more technical B2B Brands, a smaller number of customers are leveraging social media so the call to action and priority is different than for B2C Retailers and CPG companies.  Also some companies focus on innovation leadership while others are fast followers, etc.  Finally global companies have issues of rollout and priority by region, product lines, etc.

DN: What role does social media play in the marketing of the CMO club?
Given the club is an exclusive “heads of marketing only” community with the mission of facilitating the world’s best CMO conversations, Social media has been the single more important vehicle for the growth of membership. Two out of every 3 new members in the club come from referrals and recommendations from heads of marketing in the club.

We not only use social media for communicating new posts and events from members, but the members only site itself is a community site vs. website. Everything from member blog posts, member Q/A, New CMO jobs on the market, vendor rating programs, plus content in the CMO CLUB Thought Leadership Library is contributed from members.  Social media is used to share member insights, build subgroups of interests, and listen to members.

Our weekly poll question of members has gone from 75 to 150 members per week responding, then sharing and discussing results. The value of the club is to help CMOs connect with peers, share insights, and stay sharp and competitive as heads of marketing.  Social media and our social community platform is the catalyst to make it happen.

DN: Pete closed by noting that the October 2011 CMO Club Summit in Los Angeles will have a large section focused on “CMO worthy” innovations in social media.

CMO Insights: Growing Role of Social Media

Posted on by Drew Neisser

At The CMO Club Summit last week, Grant Johnson, CMO of Pega Systems joined a panel discussion on “new innovations in customer acquisition and retention.”  After the panel, I caught up with Grant and asked him about the role of social media in Pega’s marketing plans.  Here’s the Q&A:

DN: From a marketing perspective, how important is social media to Pega right now in the overall mix of options?
Since our goal is to allow people to more easily engage with and access the Pega brand however they want, social media is becoming increasingly more important to us as a part of an integrated and multichannel marketing mix.  It’s a small spend today, but we’re spending more time and effort focusing on this, and the activity has ramped up fast.  For example, you can find all Pega news items and links to a variety of content on Twitter, where we now have nearly 1,100 followers; you can view Pega videos and educational content on YouTube; you can engage with Pega employees and peers on our Facebook page and in our Pega Forums; and you can also subscribe to our content via RSS feeds.

DN: What needs to happen at your organization for social media to become a larger priority?
The biggest challenge with social media in most organizations, including Pega, is measuring results back to customer interest and loyalty.  There’s a lot to filter through in order to separate the noise from the signal. We listen closely to our customers and have the ability to focus more on this as their needs dictate. We use mechanisms such as “likes,” “downloads” and “views” to understand the impact of social content that is created, but ultimately we’ll need to be able to better drive customer activity and engagement as a result.  Pega has historically been highly customer focused and as with many of our other initiatives, we will always adapt to their needs in order to continue helping them meet their business improvement objectives.

DN: For Pega, does social media play a role in customer service?  If not, do you see that happening any time soon?
Yes, social media also plays an important role as a medium for customer support and feedback at Pega. Our customers are very vocal in our forums about areas that they would like support in or new features they would like to see in our products. We also have an internal community called the Pega Developer Network, which allows our customers to collaborate and get help specifically with regard to their unique implementations, so as to increase their product understanding and the value of our support. We see this activity growing more in the future as social media channels become more and more common.

DN: How do you think social media could impact Pega’s business down the road?
It’s already impacting us in a positive manner, serving as a real-time and dynamic channel to communicate with customers and prospects. Today, Pega provides social media capabilities within our products, allowing developers to use social media tools to collaborate on business processes and case work. Pega also provides social media capabilities in our CRM products, including the ability to monitor social media such as Twitter and bring that feedback into a customer service setting where it can be addressed. We see two emerging trends in customer service that could impact us even more down the road: first, social media is helping us better service our customers across channels, and crowd-sourcing and self-service is becoming a reality; and, second, we believe that the ability to listen, analyze and act via social media – to actually fix broken customer service processes more quickly – will improve service delivery and customer satisfaction in the future.

Breaking Down the Social Media Fences

Posted on by Drew Neisser

When part of my garden fence fell down this week, my dog was delighted, my neighbor exposed, my wife mortified and my impatiens completely flattened. After spending a couple of hours jerry-rigging the crumbling wood back into place, I realized this experience was a convenient if not appropriate metaphor for the challenge marketers face in dealing with social media within their organizations.

Like a dog with a bone, consumers are thrilled with the tumbling divide between themselves and the brands they choose to engage with. Unfortunately big companies do not necessarily share this enthusiasm, treating social media as yet another channel to be managed by an existing department like marketing or corporate communications and in doing so limiting the opportunity for a truly new approach.

In fact, in a recent poll conducted by The CMO Club, a whopping 62% of CMO’s said their department leads social media. Added one of the polled CMO’s, “social networks are about engaging customers ands stakeholders so Marketing has that responsibility.” Pete Krainik, founder of The CMO Club, explained that, “marketing departments have a more strategic view of the business, customer trends and upcoming programs,” and therefore should be leading social media initiatives.

In this same survey, CMO’s acknowledged that just over 1 in 5 companies have PR/Corporate Communications leading social media. But this may be a vestige of the early days of social media. Explained one of the polled CMO’s, “responsibility started in PR/Corporate Communications but we quickly moved it to the Marketing department as community marketing became more and more important to us.” (Hmm, can’t help but think a Corp Comm head might see these as “fighting words.”)

And despite the fact the Social Media is a fence-busting hydra touching just about every aspect of a company’s business, only 11% of the CMO’s surveyed said that social media was lead by a cross-functional team. When I asked Catherine Davis, the former SVP of Marketing at Diageo about this, she explained, “Cross department collaboration can be quite complicated, particularly with new disciplines like social media.”

Complicated or not, Josh Karpf, Senior Manager of Digital Media Communications at PepsiCo, professed that “everyone has a role, marketing, communications, HR and you need a variety of skill sets from customer service to insights to editorial strategy.” Added Karpf, “you likely won’t be able to find all those experts in one function within a company.” So, while Robert Frost’s proverb “good fences make good neighbors” may be true in real life, it is not necessarily the ideal approach to dealing with social media.

Like my mortified wife, companies are less than thrilled by the collapsing fences between brand and consumer, and many are jerry-rigging solutions while they figure out a long-term plan. Noted Dan Greenfield of Bernaise Source Consulting, “PR and marketing pros seem a little conflicted; few deny the value of integrating sales, customer service and community moderation teams when building a modern day engagement strategy but most lack a clear sense of how to do it.” (Greenfield will be addressing this challenge head-on at the upcoming PR+MKTG Camp.)

And while there is little hope of recovery for my flattened impatiens, a flattened organizational structure may be just the trick for companies seeking to truly engage with consumers via social media. PepsiCo’s Karpf instructed, “it’s really about process and clearly defined roles, so the trick is finding the right team and a cohesiveness that allows the process to move forward.” Confirmed Davis, “I have always found it helpful to establish joint objectives with clearly defined roles and responsibilities.”

Instead of plopping social media into a pre-existing department structure, this author can’t help but wonder why more companies aren’t trying a new and highly collaborative approach. Despite the inherent challenges of cross-departmental collaboration, if ever there were a time to try something new, this would be it. Social media simply touches too many disciplines from customer service to PR, human resources to marketing, recruiting to sales, to rationalize keeping the old departmental fences in place. (Note: this article first appeared on MediaPost.com).

Cinco Ideas de Mayo

Posted on by Drew Neisser

April was a remarkable month with both Facebook and Apple making game changing introductions while gatherings of characters, developers and CMO’s provided glimpses into the goodness ahead.

1. Learn to Love the Like Button

Make no mistake about it; the Like button from Facebook is a stroke of genius for them and most likely for the online publishing world.  Just in case you missed this momentous land grab, on April 21st Facebook made its Like button available to all publishers and in the blink of an eye changed how content is shared on the internet. Over 50,000 sites jumped at the opportunity because it is a smart and easy thing to do–so easy that even I could add it to this blog in a matter of minutes.  Facebook is expecting a billion Like buttons to sprout shortly and I’m hard to pressed to think of a site that wouldn’t benefit from this simply yet powerful means of encouraging content sharing.

2. Keep Your Eyes on the iPad

I was at party for iPad developers a few weeks ago and it felt like the late ‘90s again. The party was sponsored by the HR department of Barnes & Noble, who was there trolling for developers – no doubt looking for ways to leverage this new media channel.   The energy and excitement over this new platform is akin to the early days of the Internet.  Simply whip out an iPad and people will flock to you like moths to a flame. A friend of mine recently used an iPad during a sales call and got an hour of quality time with a previously recalcitrant prospect.  Even when the novelty wears off, assuming that happens in the next 12 months, the uses of this device go well beyond gaming as the true business applications are just beginning to be explored.  Sure other “tablets” that promised a B2B revolution have been released before, but none have had the dazzling elegance and enthralling simplicity that Apple brings to the iPad.

3. Tap into the Goodness of Tweeters

Among the many things I gained from the 140 Characters conference in New York last month was a profound sense of hope.  For those of you not aligned with the Twitterverse, the 140 Characters conference assembles 140 interesting people on stage and another 1000+ in the audience to share the good, the bad and the ugly of all things Twitter.  With no PowerPoint crutches, many speakers bared their souls, enlightening us about the good deeds enabled by Twitter, from raising money for Haiti to putting prayers into the Western Wall.  Celebrity tweeters like Anne Curry and Ivanka Trump engaged with the hoi polloi in a remarkably open manner reflecting their belief that “people are inherently good.”  Maybe it’s the “retweet” function that attracts good people to Twitter, but regardless there’s a very strong Pay It Forward substrate embedded into this particular social medium.

4. Follow Twelpforce into Customer Service

As most of the marketing world is contemplating how social media fits into customer service, BestBuy is out there doing it and doing it well via TwelpForce (and I’m not just saying that because I won an iPad courtesy of BestBuy at the 140 Conference!).  Set up over a year ago, Twelpforce is “a collective force of Best Buy technology pros offering tech advice in Tweet form.”  Enter a question on Twitter about technology referencing BestBuy or Twelpforce and you’ll get a well-conceived response in short order.  They even set up their own monitoring/response tool that allows the hundreds of BestBuy employees that make up Twelpforce to respond with answers longer than 140 characters.  It is no wonder that over 25,000 twitterers are following Twelpforce.  If your company hasn’t integrated social media into customer service yet, Twelpforce offers a pretty darn good road map.

5. Channel your Chutzpah

I’ve spent a lot of time with marketers lately, interviewing them for articles and at conferences like The CMO Club Leadership Summit.  Marketers come from all walks of life, many starting in disciplines other than marketing, and the range of approaches to their positions is startling diverse.  Some are heavily analytic, others more prone to shoot from the hip.  That said the one thing that the most successful ones have in common is chutzpah.  They simply aren’t afraid to bend the rules or challenge convention or beg forgiveness in order to get an innovative program out in the market.  When the CEO of Kodak asked his CMO, Jeff Hayzlett, about the ROI of a Kodak social media initiative, Jeff’s response was, “I’ll answer you if you can tell me what’s the Return on Ignoring our customers.”  Now that’s chutzpah!  What Jeff is doing with the Kodak brand is a veritable album of innovation.

Hopefully, the shower of stimuli I absorbed in April will help your ideas bloom in May.

Notes on Social Media

Posted on by Drew Neisser

At The CMO Club Summit today, I moderated a discussion among 35+ CMOs about social media. It was really a lively conversation representing the range of experiences of these CMOs. The group divided into three segments, from novices to making their way to “kicking butt and taking names.” David Spark provides a quick overview of the discussion on TheCMOClub site (yes, the very same social network that Renegade helped create!) but I thought add some more detail given the broad interest in the topic.

Introduction to Social Media
Here’s the definition of social media marketing from Frog Design’s blog that I used to start the discussion:

Social media marketing is all marketing that utilizes the social graph of both marketer and audience (in fact, the interesting thing is that they can be one and the same) to facilitate and cultivate a conversation. Social marketing is whenever more than two individuals collaborate online or offline for content generation and distribution. Social marketers harness the viral power of social networks in order to grow both the frequency and the reach of conversations exponentially. They know how to feed the social orbit with content that catalyzes conversations. And they understand that an “architecture of participation,” that lets employees be marketers, has become paramount for turning brands into live brands.

Social Media Numbers (or why CMO’s should care)

  • 62% of consumers actively seek out and read customer reviews prior to purchase
  • 82% of consumers found reading reviews better than researching a product in-store
  • 60% of Americans use social media
  • 59% interact with companies via social media; 25% do so once a week or more
  • 93% of those that use SM believe companies should too
  • 56% feel stronger connection to companies that they interact with via SMcompanies should use social networks to solve my problems
  • 43% believe companies should use social networks to solve my problems
  • 41% believe companies should solicit feedback on their products/services
  • 37% want more ways to interact with companies

Renegade also created a Social Media IQ test for these CMO’s at CMOquiz.com which may be of interest.