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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

A Business Perspective on Engaging Customers, Creating Experiences and Building Communities Guest was Mike Dover, Co-author of WikiBrands

Related Podcast: Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Mike Dover is Managing Partner of Socialstruct Advisory Group. As Vice President, Research Operations, for New Paradigm (Moxie Insight), he led the operations for research programs for the bestselling books Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital. He also has provided review support for more than a dozen other books.

The secret to connecting with consumers in a fragmented, chaotic marketplace, then, lies in how businesses collaborate with customers. WIKIBRANDS: Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace (McGraw-Hill; January 2011) by Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover builds on a breakthrough, multimillion-dollar marketing research program initiated by Don Tapscott, technology guru and author of Grown Up Digital (McGraw-Hill), to deliver a state-of-the-art appraisal of the latest developments in customer engagement.

Social Media. Brand Collaboration. Content aggregation. Microblogging. Usergenerated content. And the list goes on… It’s been said that business is in the midst of the customer-centric marketing revolution—a trend which points toward business treating brands less like “property” and more like an extension of an organization’s values. The upshot is this: Smart companies are finally figuring out how peoples’ desire to participate is becoming a key driver of marketing success. But to be a winner in this environment, businesses have to fill this need and at the same time compete for consumers’ increasingly scarce time and shrinking attention spans. More complicated still, companies have to do all of this while also earning consumers’ trust.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe Dager: Welcome everyone; this is Joe Dager, the host of the Business 901 podcast.

With me today is Mike Dover. Mike is the co-author of "Wiki Brands," and is the managing partner of Socialstruct Advisory Group. Mike, I'm glad to have you on the show, and could you give me a brief introduction to the book and about yourself?

Mike Dover: Great, thanks for the invite, Joe. So, the book is "WikiBrands," and the subtitle is, "Reinventing Your Company in a Customer Driven Marketplace." And what we really set out to do is to talk about how to use technology to improve the authenticity of conversations that companies have with their customers.

And myself, I've been kicking around the business book game for a while; this is the 13th book that I've worked on. The first one with my name on the front, but I ran the research program behind "Wikinomics," by Don Tapscott and "Growing Up Digital."

Joe: You are very experienced in the book field?

Mike: The joke that I make, and it's sort of a metaphor, is I've spent about 10 years as Frank Sinatra's band leader, and it's my first attempt, really, to move out on the front of the stage. The downside to that metaphor, I was at another book launch and I told it, and there was a woman who was really upset that I lied about being Frank Sinatra's band leader.

Joe: Can you kind of define what you mean by WikiBrands?

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Mike: The word "wiki" came from the Hawaiian word for quick. But it's now come to mean a collaborative project. Wikipedia is the best known example, an encyclopedia put together by many people. The concept of Wikinomics is, to using mass collaboration to drive business. So what we mean here is, it's a brand that is helped developed and it's helped supported and extended by the community. It's no longer somebody up in the top of a tower, saying, "OK, let's tell people what our brand will be." They now have a lot of say into what it'll actually become.

Joe: The customer really determines your brand?

Mike: That's right. And you can't lie anymore, because the bloggers here are very good at sniffing things out. They're very good at looking for authenticity, and inauthenticity.

Joe: One of the things that you talked about in there is the engaging a customer and creating the different experiences. I think those are social media buzzwords, a little bit.

What's separates your book from all the other social media books out there?

Mike: Well, I would say that we look at a broader sense of technologies that are available, rather than just the social media platforms. Our book is not telling people to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I mean, there's a lot of really good discipline in marketing and in management that needs to be tweaked, but not completely redone. A lot of what we talk about in the book looks at things like customer forums and listening closely at the conversation is going on in there. Finding out what your customers really want by the problem solving they're doing in those.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems So, it's certainly not, we're not advising people to say, hey, throw up a Facebook page and check out social media. Nor are we telling people the most important metrics are things like, how many people do you have liking your Facebook?

Joe: You're laying out somewhat of a blueprint, as I think that it says somewhere in the book, of how to do this, and how to make these Facebook pages and Twitter pages, really pages that engage and that are user generated.

Mike: Yes. Our goal is that the reader, at the end of this, will be able to have a 90 day plan and an 18 month plan, at how to go and really change how to go about business. I was mentioning before, it's not really about just setting up social media. It's an important part, but, you know, not the only thing we're looking at.

Joe: So what's the other part besides social media?

Mike: There are a lot of other technologies that we're looking at here. We did a lot of studying on user groups in, for software. For example, SAP has a good system set up, Turbo Tax, salesforce.com and what these have are customer forums where people go in to help solve each other's problems. All three of those do a wonderful job of making a community that encourages people that don't even work at those companies to go in and be an important part of it. We interviewed this one guy, and he never did give us his last name even when we sent him a copy of the book. He just told us his name was Howard, and that he was a retired CPA.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems He was very active in the Turbo Tax, which is owned by Intuit, in their forum. What he did, because he had made over 40,000 entries in there, helping people with their tax problems.

The reason he did it was not for fame, he told us, we asked him, I said, "What encouraged you to do this?" He said he really liked solving problems. He liked helping people, especially when they were right and the IRS was wrong. It also kept him on top of the tax code, and learning things that have happened since he retired. Since when he was working as a CPA, most of his clients were wealthy. So, the people he's helping now are dealing with different areas of the tax code, like, on earned income credits that he had never actually worked on before.

Joe: Now you talked about, a couple times this problem solving type of attitude to have.

Do you think that's an important part of marketing now?

Mike: Well, it's an important part of business, absolutely. Where it comes to marketing, there's a lot of it improves after sale satisfaction, and also research and development. So if, for example, you're following the work that people like Howard are doing, if all the questions are about a particular module in your tax software, you say, "Hey, we really need to fix that up in the next version, because people are clearly confused by it." Howard also tells us that it's very rare that he finds an actual mistake in the Turbo Tax program, but when he does, they fix it immediately.

Joe: You're discussing using the problem solving with the after sales. But one of my things that I always resist a little bit when I see this on someone's literature or something, that they're always providing a solution. And it's like, how do you know what the solution is, if you don't know what my problem is? You really need to investigate my problem, to Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems have a way of marketing and selling to me that really discusses problems. Can you do that? I mean online, is kind of what you're talking about doing here a little bit.

Mike: You also can use many brains that don't actually work for you. A question I usually ask what I'm doing research interviewee is this. Usually the last one, I'll say, what has surprised you about how technologies changed your business. Sometimes you get really good answers to that. A lot of times people are saying, "They are surprised by how many people want to volunteer to help their company."

Best Buy, for example, has Twelpforce, it's a twitter account. Where people say, hey, I'm having trouble setting up, having trouble with the interface. What really surprised Best Buy is the amount of people that follow that, that have nothing to do with Best Buy. They are just people that enjoy solving problems.

When you ask, people who tend to be VP of marketing of a big company, they're motivated by things like money and status and fancy title and that sort of thing. These people are surprised with how many the brains are available. They're surprised at what motivates people to participate.

Joe: How do you start in something like that? I see companies join social media. They do a company blog and it's really just a form of advertising. Then they go jump on Facebook and make a fan page and that's difficult to create, interaction on a Facebook page sometimes. I see the best use on Twitter, as far as going back and forth on the different subject. If a company is doing that, which few of them are doing it effectively, I don't think.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems But it seems like they've just taken their out bound marketing messages and put it into the social media climate. Does the book and do you have any recommendations on how to get started in doing it differently?

Mike: Well I would say the first thing to do is really map out your whole business, so not just the marketing side. Not just your aftercare service but really everything including HR, including internal training and development. And finding out, so once you have that all mapped out, you then start looking at each area. How can we use technology to improve this? So when it comes into HR, are you monitoring your employee's networks properly to encourage and are setting up processes that will encourage them to actually use their networks to help people.

You can also find at that point, if you set up a really nice system and nobody wants to recommend the company to their associates that uncovers a bigger problem. But what you are alluded to before can be a trap that people fall into with saying, "OK. I'm going to take everything we do right now and put it on Facebook." Check a box and say, "OK, we're set up now."

That's not the way to go. People won't engage on that. It's adding very little to it and the audience can tell that you're not really putting a lot of time into it.

In a lot of cases the best corporate Twitter accounts really show the sort of personality of the company. Zappos is a good example of that. People really get the sense of, "Hey, this is a great company I want to work with." They have personality to them. I can really sense that they care about it. It's entertaining enough to actually go and follow.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe: How can, let's say like a service department, react? Because a lot of times I see a service department or someone that puts in a problem type of company site and this is what I think scares organizations a little bit. Is that then they get all these people blasting at them with all the problems, or this is not going right. They take these things into account, rather than it's just like they’re out there monitoring their brand, That's what everybody thinks I think about Twitter is that you monitor your brand and you pick up problems as you see it.

But when you put your own site and your own hash tag up there and you start responding to people, don't you just get more people using it as a vehicle to complain to you?

Mike: Well again, there is some bravery involved. I think Dell Idea Storm is a great example of that. Dell really ran into some serious problems with customer service before Michael Dell came back in to run the company. He put up idea force or Idea Storm, where people can go in and talk about their experience with Dell. In a lot of cases, they were not good experiences. So there is some bravery of putting that up and letting people see it.

But there's a good upside in coming, that you're getting great ideas from it. You're also finding out where deficiencies are in your organization.

Specifically to what you brought up with Twitter, you need some bravery as well because there's going to be somebody dirty laundry out there. But really I think the sense on Twitter is people appreciate honesty and they appreciate feedback.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems So there may be something in the company saying, "Well, sorry. You've dropped your iPhone in a puddle and it's ruined. It doesn't matter how many times you blast on Twitter, you're not supposed to be putting these things in water. It's broken."

But on the other hand, if people say hey, I've left three messages for your organization and haven't heard back from them. Twitter is a good sense, is a good solution to that.

Because you post just as publicly as the complaint, here's how you can get in touch with me directly or here's a public solution to your problem.

Joe: Now do you think that brands look at and corporations look at, let's say on the Twitter thing, if I posted because I have 7000 followers or something and some guy that's got 100, are they going to react differently?

Mike: Really, they should. I think most, most companies, if they just monitor their names, they would come up, they would come up in sort of the same frequency. I think it would be smart for them to say, "Hey, you know, this complaint comes from someone who is a little bit more influential. Maybe we should treat it, treat it more urgently or put it higher up on the triage."

Joe: I always wondered if I carried more weight when I got mad and type something in, then the other guy.

Mike: Yeah, probably. I would say that, once it's out there, people are searching for the hash tag or just the name. At that point it doesn't matter how many followers they had, but if they're looking at, you know, who to put out in front, they can say, well, you know, Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe's got thousands. And you may get bumped up to the top of the line, until they find somebody with 50,000 followers.

Joe: Is it a book that you consider an easy read, is it something that's, is it more of a workbook? Or is it just a book that kind of, you can sit down and read cover to cover?

Mike: Well, we hope that it is. We really tried to have an interesting narrative and there's some humor in it, there's some levity. You should be able to read it in a plane. We had really good coverage in the Canadian airport bookstores, which I'm pleased about. I'll tell you about that in a sec, but. It's also very well researched, we think. So we talked to hundreds of people, and we based it on a large project that we did as part of a Tapscott theme. There's more than 400 end notes in it, there's really a, it's a strong research backed book. But we didn't want it to be reading like a textbook.

Joe: I thought that, too. You talk about branding a lot, and that's been a big buzzword in the last 10, 15 years in marketing. Is branding so important to a company?

Mike: Well, it is. I think that it's, the image of the company and, in a lot of cases that was, it makes you stand up above the others. And a lot of industries, as you know, are being pushed into commoditization, and getting down to competing on price. Having a strong brand is one of the best defenses against that. Both Sean and I worked at P&G for a while. If we ever said the brand was dead, they would probably strip our alumni credentials from us.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe: You touched upon a perfect point that products are, they're commoditized, and they’re practically commoditized overnight. I go back to, and I saw he was one of the people that gave a recommendation to your book was Joseph Pine. I go back to his work in The Experience Economy, when he talks about the knowledge, and as the brand develops, the knowledge of the company becomes the most important part of it, even over the product, and that's what people pay for, and that's the strength of branding. I think that fits very well into the climate today.

Mike: Yes, and we're big fans of Joe. He worked on one of these research projects with us as well. He's best known for his book, "The Experience Economy." I think my favorite book of his deals with customer authenticity. And the real key to that is getting into saying, it's not what you say it is, it's what your brand actually is. If the marketplace reads it, or interprets it differently than what you want them to, they're right. You need to make adjustments based on that.

Joe: Since I have a Lean and Six Sigma background and we talk about words like CTQ in the marketplace and the critical to quality issues of a customer. People don't seem to address them. What's important, the key issues that are important to the customer a lot, and I think social media's a great avenue to bring them out.

Mike: Well, it's definitely what the marketplace thinks about it. They are very good at sniffing out, if you're trying to say something that isn't true. The term that we use, we didn't invent the term, but, a fake grassroots program is called Astroturf. If you try to do something that makes it look like it's the grassroots and it's not, then you're worse off not doing something in the first place. Sony ran into that one time, when they were going from Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems town to town and putting up, sort of, faux graffiti and street tagging. The people immediately found out that it was not, it was a company doing that, so they went around and had some unkind responses to that, including calling the company, phone.

Joe: I guess another question I have for you, can you measure any of this stuff? Or is this stuff just, you've got to take it for granted that it's working?

Mike: Measurement is key. Both Sean and I come from fairly long careers, we're both in our 40s, so we've certainly been in situations where you say, "The theory sounds good, but show me some numbers." We have a, there's an entire section in the book about metrics.

It comes down to a couple different areas. So, somebody comes in and says, "What's going to be my ROI, on putting technology in?" You really need to look closely at, and measure that.

So let's look, for example, if there's a complicated sale cycle, maybe somebody buying a car. There are eight steps towards them actually making the purchase, and then another four or five steps after they make the purchase. You can look at having, you know, wiki branding being part of that is, could impact a lot of different areas.

So let's say that somebody goes on to the customer forums to find out what kind of car, and looked at Yelp.com, and looked at online Blue Book. They do a lot of their research.

Then they go into the dealership and buy it, sort of the traditional way. You need to add, or proportion some of those sales to what was going online. So even if it's pushing somebody from one step of the sales process to another, that's one main area of looking at financial return.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems We could also look at things like, you know, Dell computers again, have sold a lot of revenue, just based right off of their Dell direct Twitter sales.

So, that's one area. Another one to look at is, how much is your reach improving? And the key there, it's stuff like click throughs is not the most important, how many people like your Facebook page is not that important. But it's about how much are people actually engaging on it.

So if you're running say a contest, or you're running customer polls and think like, "How many people are going to participate on that?" There's another big area for it.

Still another bucket is how much is your R and D and innovations approve it? So if by listening closely to their customers and this is similar to what I was talking about before in the software company and the development forums, you can more precisely meet the demand of your customers because you provide them with exactly what they're looking for.

Dell idea storm, that's when I found that people are really looking for a Linux based computer. So metrics can come in from that would be things like reduced inventory because you're meeting the needs closer.

Joe: So you can actually measure these engagements?

Mike: Absolutely. We're business people and we work for serious business people, so we've thought about objections to it and we addressed those in there. Hopefully as part of the plan somebody has, after reading this book, they would be able to tell. We put lots and lots of different metrics in there, I could be measuring all of them but you'd say for Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems somebody's particular dashboard, what are the top five or six we need to use to make sure that we'll get our money's worth from those. Because it's not free if you're putting together a full time equivalent or a multiple into there you need to justify how their salary and benefits money is being spent, plus the opportunity cost of them not doing what was their job previously.

Joe: What I envision is this war room type of situation that I could take the book and make my own social media war room up there for marketing and for sales and other areas.

I could put it up there and put these things up here and visualize it really well.

Mike: Well we hope so and as an author there's nothing better than seeing somebody read your book, highlighter one hand, putting a bunch of post, its and a lot times a really well used book that is the most rewarding.

Joe: Can a small business do this? I mean, we talk about Dell and others, but is this really applicable to a small business?

Mike: Yes, absolutely! Let's look at an individual boutique hotel. They can do tremendous work on this. For example, if they're active in a website like Trip Adviser. So for your listeners that don't know Trip Adviser it's basically a wading site for tourism. The hotel that I'm staying at when I'm here in New York it's covered... it's actually featured as Roger Smith hotel. They say right on the bottom of the bill on that, please give us a review on Trip Adviser. So companies if they go on there and they properly management it, but improperly management would be going on making fake reviews or making bad reviews about your customers, or your competitors.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems They're getting very good at finding those and taking them off. But let's say you that you went to look at a hotel and it's mostly five stars out of five but three people gave it a one or two out of five. You may want to go look at that and if the management has responded to those you'd be more likely to say, "All right, well that makes sense."

Maybe the person was unreasonable that made that point. Or maybe the complaint that was a benefit for you, for example, if they wanted to go to a hotel for a romantic weekend and somebody gave it a low rating because there's nothing for their kids to do there. I'm going to think, "That's great." I don't want a bunch of noisy kids in the pool when I'm down on it. So finding out what the most important sites are, the most important technologies for industry and spending time on it. You can get really good bang for your buck.

Joe: So you're saying that a small business can do these things and that they can be very active and use it to their benefits?

Mike: Yes. We know of another tourism example, it's a high end cycling tour. They used to advertise through like "Outdoor Life" and those sorts of magazines. Now all of their advertising is done just on Facebook, because people opt into it so that only people seeing these things, all right? They just have a Facebook fan page. They used to just do their rides in a few geographical areas and then somebody on the Facebook page said, "Hey, why don't you do something through Tusket and it would be wonderful if you did a cycling tour through Tusket." So they said, "All right, we'll just try it out."

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems It cost them nothing to put it up saying, "Here's what we're thinking of doing. Here's a sample itinerary." And it was sold out. So it was pure revenue that came out from it, they're meeting customer needs just by listening. And the variable cost of that was zero.

Joe: The gist of what you're saying is that the real important part of going to social media and inserting all these different things up is your ability to put time into your schedule to respond, because the response is what it's all about.

Mike: That's absolutely right. If you giving people the opportunity to speak to you and you're clearly you are not listening, then you're worse off than if you'd done nothing at all.

Joe: Now, when I read WikiBrands, I find that you challenge some different things, like the four P's, you've mentioned the four E's. Could you just touch upon the four E's?

Mike: Sure. The four P's I think everybody or all of us anyways that learned business talked to you about so the person, place, promotion and price from, as I recall he's Brian Fettestona, and he was at Ogleby One, and he compared what marketing used to be to what marketing is now is dealing with... arguing with a five year old and arguing with an 18 year old. A five year old they may kick and scream eventually they're going to do what you want. But with an 18 year old you just more advise them where to go.

Getting into the four E's, the first one we have is experience. We were trying to move far beyond the transaction. You want to get into things that are like product activation, socialization of a purchase and really focus in on your after sales service so the entire

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems experience of dealing with it becomes important. The second E is every place versus just place. So it's no longer talking about just an in store experience.

Going back to the auto example we had earlier, if at any stage along the way somebody was stymied and couldn't find information, let's say that we went to the review site and every car there is listed there except yours you might be eliminated. Or if your car is listed, it gets a very poor rating it might be eliminated from that as well. It could be at any sort of stage along the way, an opportunity for you to be picked up.

The third you go is for exchange, and that talks about the compliment to pricing. It's talking about things like dynamic pricing and how much is a umbrella worth on a dry day versus a rainy day? We'll be talking about how hotel prices change based on a lot of different characterization. Marketers are saying or asking people how much do they need to give in order for them to get the business they want.

It's not just changing money back and forth, maybe it's saying I'm willing to pay more if I could have something more customized or if I could get a shorter payment terms, that sort of thing. The fourth you use is evangelist, and that's where you're really getting people to become part of your organization and to be a supporter of yours. If there's some sort of fight that happens in online they're going to go and respond faster and more fervently than you'd be able to do on your own.

Joe: That's like you develop that relationship that you have with a cousin or your brother.

You may fight all the time at home but if there's a fight at school he walks over and helps you out.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Mike: Right. You see that as well, I mean if you were responding to a customer complaint it's harder to do that. You're bound by more rules and how to be respectful and that sort of thing than one of your evangelist maybe. So they might really go and kick up a fight for it where there is only so much you can do.

Joe: I find that there's so much content out there anymore about different companies or different products and things that it's really hard to distinguish what to read, what to look at, what to believe. I think we go back to conversation, we're more likely to ask a question on a Wiki or Twitter or Facebook and get an answer there to determine our buying, then we are to believe any type of literature is out there. Is that what you found in your research?

Mike: Yes, but it's also asynchronous. You can ask a question at two in the morning and either get responses from it, or you may go into one these sites like eHow that you could ask, "Hey, what's the best way to set up a charcoal grill?" You're getting responses to this stuff you've never seen before. Pretty much let's say that you're working on the computer and there's a strange error comment, see x000053. You don't have any idea what this means. Just cut and paste that into one of these customer support forms and someone else would have had that same problem you'd get a response to it right away. We're spoiled because there's way more information available. It wasn't that long ago where you get to wait until the next morning for a business to open up again and then all the trouble of actually going through that organization and finding out somebody that can answer your question.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe: I think we'd rather do that sometimes than sit there and go through the service department. We would rather cut and paste and find it on our own. In doing so we're going to trust someone else's judgment and be influenced by someone that's possibly not even within the company.

Mike: Yes. And a lot of cases you would be. Amazon.com is a great example of that. Look how powerful the reviewers are on Amazon.com. We interviewed one of them for the book as well and he thinks that it's an important part of his mission in life is to guide people towards the best book. If you talk about how those people are motivated, it's not for money. They're motivated for things like prestige and getting a badge since they're their top 100 Amazon reviewer. Something else Amazon is good at is the collaborative filtering, so if you like this product you'll probably like this one. I personally find that very helpful.

Joe: I think Amazon is really a model for a lot of people who are following and just a leader in the industry. I wonder if they will go off line? How are they going to ever expand?" Because there's a certain limit to what you can do online?

Mike: Well, I'm not sure whether it makes sense for them to expand offline. I think their greatest opportunity for expansion is horizontal and get more and more products. They hate it if you or I refer to them as an online bookstore because there are so many other things they already sell. I think one of the reasons their stock is so high and their stock is I think at an all-time high. It's generally within two percent of its all time high, so it's far beyond where it was even in the dot context and it's not because of the sales. It's because they have web services around it but other people can sell through Amazon. I don't know if you buy much on eBay, I don't anymore.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe: I hardly even look at eBay anymore. The first place I go on online to just about buy anything is Amazon.

Mike: Yes. Probably one of the reasons is you're much more confident you're not going to get ripped off. When I use to buy a lot things on eBay, I just started thinking, "All right there's a 10 percent chance that this thing won't show up or a five percent chance but that's just part of the deal of working with this." Whereas, with Amazon I am 100 percent sure that it will either show up or I'll be taken care of if something goes astray because they vouch for the people that are selling on the platform.

Joe: Now you also discuss nine elements of successfully building and managing a wiki brand. Could you just touch up on them?

Mike: The first one is really how the role of the CMO is changing, the Chief Marketing Officer. That gets into moving again from the four P's, this one is C's. So conviction, collaboration, and creativity, and a lot of that is coming into properly building the brand, monitoring and responding, tell the community it's developing. It's like when it's focusing on the people. A lot of times when people in companies run into trouble with technology it's because they're relying too much on the tech and not enough of putting the right people beside this. Now this gets into the third area, is looking at customer focused marketing skills. So you need to make sure that whoever is in charge of the community is not just good at the tech part of it, not just clever at doing tweets.

They're really good at listening and responding and ideally communicate in a lot of different mediums including picking up the phone if it's required and bringing in diplomatic Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems skills if required. So the fourth one is source and money allocation and that is figuring out how to properly fund these things. We talked a little bit earlier about putting the proper metrics behind it. And to get the ROI returning to it you need to put the right amount of budgets in towards it.

The fifth one is reinventing the agency. So there're still roles to be played in for having professional marketing people involved. Look at YouTube, and YouTube is a very exciting new way of video to be displayed or some other point where somebody is go and pay $12.00 just to sit in a movie theater and watch a YouTube. You still need to have the professionals in place. The sixth one you're looking at partnership building, so a lot of where the customer's ideas and marketing are coming from not just your consumers but also solution providers, different suppliers that you have available. Seventh one would be looking at video. When we talked about the different languages of communication, one of them is communicating through video. More and more it's a great way of telling a story.

So making sure that your story is available and if you have a video then you make sure it works on multiple devices. You must make sure that it works on a mobile phone because more and more people are going to be interacting with you on that. It's also important to be looking at privacy.

So there's a double edge to that. If you have tons of great granular information on your consumer you can provide a better response to them. But you also don't want to get to a point where they're saying, "Wow. This guy knows too much about me and it's getting a little bit creepy." Some people don't like companies having any information about them even if it means it can serve them better.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems The ninth way is really looking at influencers. Influencers are the people in your market that have the greatest clout. They're good at communicating; they may have the largest more vibrant social networks, so making sure they're on board is really a key to succeeding.

Joe: I think that's a great list. The one thing that I guess you touched upon just a little bit that I think that companies are starting to think about more is the risk aspect of social media. Can you just touch upon that a little bit for me?

Mike: Very important point, and I think that's partly why the public sector and regulated industries and banking are a little bit slower to embrace this because the risk rewards threshold is so high. Let's say for example T&G leaked some consumer data that would be embarrassing for them. But it wouldn't be nearly as bad as if CitiBank... somebody left a laptop behind in a cab that had lots of peoples' financial information, or really, anything in the government having that information leaked. You need to manage risk carefully. You need to be smart about doing these things. We have a whole chapter there on rules and part of that deals with what rules you have for your people to communicate on social media? The simple rule is don't put anything up there that you wouldn't want on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Don't talk about customer information. Don't talk about financial data and that sort of thing. So with all these people communicating it does provide a different problem that we've had before. So a lot of it is really good training and some trial and error but there will be some bumps along the way.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe: Would you like to mention anything about the book that maybe I didn't ask?

Mike: Well one thing that's really important is for your listeners to join us at the website which is just wiki-brands.com, and for example, a lot of times in the book we mention a video which can't appear in the book, and all of those are listed up on the website. There are also opportunities for people to get involved either as an ambassador of the book if you want to do just blogging on the book or just writing comments.

Joe: I want to thank you very much for the appearance. I find the book very fascinating and I have to mention you packed a lot of information into 300 pages.

Mike: I appreciate that. Good! Well thank you very much for the invite.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joseph T. Dager Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Ph: 260-438-0411 Fax: 260-818-2022 Email: jtdager@business901.com Web/Blog: http://www.business901.com Twitter: @business901 What others say: In the past 20 years, Joe and I have collaborated on many difficult issues. Joe's ability to combine his expertise with "out of the box" thinking is unsurpassed. He has always delivered quickly, cost effectively and with ingenuity. A brilliant mind that is always a pleasure to work with." James R. Joe Dager is President of Business901, a progressive company providing direction in areas such as Lean Marketing, Product Marketing, Product Launches and Re-Launches. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Business901 provides and implements marketing, project and performance planning methodologies in small businesses. The simplicity of a single flexible model will create clarity for your staff and as a result better execution. My goal is to allow you spend your time on the need versus the plan.

An example of how we may work: Business901 could start with a consulting style utilizing an individual from your organization or a virtual assistance that is well versed in our principles. We have capabilities to plug virtually any marketing function into your process immediately. As proficiencies develop, Business901 moves into a coach’s role supporting the process as needed. The goal of implementing a system is that the processes will become a habit and not an event.

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