An overwhelming sense of déjà vue is the emotion most often aroused in response to the tidal wave of enthusiasm for the marvels of “social media.” The current hype reminds me of George Santayana’s warning, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
First I want to thank Tim Malbon (@malbon) of Made By Many for his blog post drawing my attention to a recent article by David Armano in the Havard Business Review and available here.
David is a brilliant designer who has proven able to illustrate graphically and potently some of the major changes in how we see our world, and our relations with each other. I use his images, slides and quotes frequently and with gratitude as well as attribution! See below left.
David and Tim both make the valid point that the term “social media’ is being trivialized by marketers and promoters who see the emergence of such communication tools as Facebook and Twitter as nothing more than another set of distribution channels that can be used to reach and influence a customer.
Even McKinsey, the epitome of mainstream consulting, is in on the act – triumphantly and proudly claiming in a recent article, The Consumer Decision Journey, that they have (just?)discovered that “a more sophisticated approach to marketing is required – one that enables marketers to move aggressively beyond purely push-style communication, to influence consumer-driven touch points along what they have decided to call “a consumer decision journey.”
Their research with some 20,000 companies provides further proof of the cyclical, dynamic nature of the customer buying process – as opposed to the linear, funnel model that has dominated marketing thinking. Their interactive exhibit shows how the number of brands in a consideration set can vary according to the attitudes and experience of the customer (are they passive or loyal), stage in the cycle, and effects of events that trigger purchases. It’s a good article and worth a serious read.
But perhaps it is a sign of my age or a need for some summer sunshine, but I feel I have seen it all before. Around the time of the dot com bust, the corporate world was also fixating on Customer Relationship Management – spending millions on software that would enable them to personalize their messages and “manage” customer relations. Authors of the McKinsey article mentioned earlier speak about “managing word-of-mouth.”
CRM Has Only Had Limited Results - will Social Media Fare Better?
Many felt back in 2002 that CRM was not delivering on its promise and there was much soul searching as to the reasons why. In 2002, I wrote a paper on the subject called Dancing With the Customer in an attempt to dig beneath the surface and examine why CRM was unlikely to succeed despite the millions spent on it. The premises and arguments made 7 years ago could be applied with very little change to an analysis of why use of “social media” will, in general, generate the same mixed and often unsatisfactory results for those who have not really understood what's going on beneath the surface.
Back in the late 90s and early 00s we asked whether bad software design was the issue. Was the problem a technical one or was it structural? Was it the way companies are organized into functional silos that was the source of the problem? Nearly a decade later, McKinsey concludes their essay with the suggestion that organizational structure does indeed present the major impediment and that the customer-facing activities of web sites, PR, loyalty programs need to be integrated and given appropriate leadership.
Where I disagree with McKinsey
But I am sure, as I was in 2002, that the problem goes much deeper than the need for functional integration. Siloed structures reflect a culture, a shared understanding of “the ways things are or work around here.”
Again McKinsey reveals the power of implicit culture in the concluding sentence of their essay when they write “marketers need to view the change not as a loss of power over their customers but as an opportunity to be in the right place at the right time, giving them the information and support they need to make the right decisions.”
So it's not structure but culture and a deeply ingrained mindset that's the problem.If you don't fix that, no amount of tweets, followers or fans are going to make a sustained difference.
Today’s consumers don’t need to be persuaded to consume – they spend their entire day having to consume – but they can and do need to be supported. As any aid agency will tell you, people cannot be supported unless they are treated respectfully as equals and until there is a fundamental shift in mindset that sees donor and recipient, company and customer as engaged in a mutually beneficial conversation, transaction or, as I have suggested, a dance.
Social Media Is Not a Fashion but a Symptom
Social media is not a fashion or even a trend but a symptom and sign of a much deeper shift in the relationship between producer and consumer; employee and customer. It’s a fundamental mindset shift that is both enabling and being enabled by the availability of interactive, digitized media and tools.
It is, as early architects of web 1.0 and 2.0 discerned at the turn of the Millennium, about a fundamental shift in both power and perception. As Armano writes:
It never used to be called “social media”. eBay and Amazon never talked of “social media” - they talked about “service” and “community”. They spoke of the potency of The Web to smash old business models, flatten out-dated hierarchies and wrench power away from the centre and towards the edges to create new types of value exchange. Communications is but a tiny fragment of this revolution - albeit massively interesting and important - and yet it’s the campaign-flavoured, comms-focused stuff that defines - and limits - “social media” for most businesses.
In the Dancing with the Customer paper, I also focus on service and community:
So winning enterprises are those that conceive of themselves as inter-connected business webs or trading communities held together by a common customer. The customer sits at the centre of an orbit not at the end of a chain. Winning enterprises are those with the most “intelligence” – i.e. are able to sense and respond to visitor needs in real time. They are able to exchange and circulate this intelligence to all members of the community so that the visitor’s whole experience is a positive one.
So if you want to really ensure that your company or destination stays ahead of this revolution, you’ll spend less time wondering about your Facebook strategy, measuring the number of followers or even checking your Twitter grade and spend more time thinking through how you work collaboratively with others to design a profitable ecosystem that provides the deep support customers seek and deserve. For industries like tourism that are suffering the ravages of commodification, such a systems approach is the only one that will save us from self-destruction. It's also an approach that requires an unparalleled level of collaboration.
So for summer reading that is guaranteed to “change your mind”, don’t read "Twitter for Dummies" or "100 Ways to Succeed with Social Media" but revisit The Cluetrain Manifesto, or pick up Rushkoff’s prescient analysis, Life Inc., Tapscott’s Wikinomics; Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody or, perhaps, dip into the prescient, profound but much under appreciated The Support Economy by Shuboff and Maxmin to discover the scope, scale and pace of deep change that's happening out there.
Alternatively, enjoy the kids, the beach or the ice cream and come back here and pick up the Reader's Digest versions of the above and have a great summer vacation!
And remember – you are not at war; life’s a dance.
Enjoy the summer.
