Walter Adamson

iPad2 Customer Experience from Hell

Ordering the iPad is easy and the delivery and tracking is excellent. It's what befell me when it arrived which really threw my whole prior perception of the iPad (and Apple) out the window.

I didn't own one before, I deliberately held off until the iPad 2. I had the impression, based on my iPhone, that this was something you could "give to your grandparents" and they'd love it.

That was based on it being immediately usable and intuitive. Well I know know that you can forget that romantic idea. It's like a battle from hell to get one of these things working.

Here's the saga, so far:

1. Connect to iTunes - ok that's a bit of stretch in itself for the uninitiated but that's just something to be done and set up - however, first message is something like "due to an error on your device iTunes is unable to connect";
2. Unplug and replug the USB cable, restart iTunes, and second time seems no errors, all connected;
3. Then when it finds the iPad iTunes asks something like "Is this is a new setup or do you want to sync it with your iPhone?".
   Fine I understand the question, but what are the implications? Does it mean if I sync it that forever everything I do on each is synced - every photo I delete on my iPhone is deleted from my iPad, every photo edit or note I create on my iPad is synced back to my iPhone.
   I haven't a clue, but I want to share apps so I opt to sync;
4. Now wait nearly 6 hours for the sync to complete, so no chance of experiencing my new iPad today, go to sleep and check it in the morning, that's a disappointment;
5. But wait! The iPad has a little note "Not Charging" showing - but it's connected through the USB cable. Oh dear. Google that one, and find an answer from others and then from Apple that says "yes we show that message but don't worry too much it WILL be charging slowly in the background". OK, well that's one that's going to throw the grandparent's right off track!;
6. Next morning, OK fully synced. Oh the App Store shows updates - 91 of them! Check that out - it now wants to download 91 apps for update, so what was the point of the iTunes synchronization? That takes a while, with multiple restarts as every 10 or so apps the install just hangs and says "installing" for ever;
7. NOW I can actually try it, this is 16 hours after delivery.
   Oh, this first app looks like a dog - it's just a miniture iPhone screen. OK push 2X - OH horrible, pixelated and disgusting. KIll that, delete it, but will it sync back on if it is still on my iPhone - no idea;
   Why doesn't the initial sync say "do you only want apps that are designed for the iPad?;
8. OK now have to run for a meeting, no more time to check this thing out. Pack it. Pull it out at the meeting and hit Notes - touch the screen - nothing. "Touch... touch... touch...touch touch touch" oh the meeting is getting away from me, power off, power on, Notes, touch...touch...touch...touch touch touch nothing no keyboard no nothing.
   Looking stupid by now, shove it in the bag, grab pen and pad;
9. Back to the office. Restart. Open Notes. Touch... keyboard appears, all normal!!!!;
10. OK, good. Totally frustrating but good. Now I will use the wireless keyboard I bought. On with Bluetooth - "Apple Wireless Keyboard" Not Paired. How long can you waste turning things on and off and restarting and all to no avail.
    Try any combination you like of what is off what is on first - NOT PAIRED.
11. Google search - "try reseting all Network Connections" - OK. No result, except that now my Homescreen which I had carefully cleared of all but a few apps - arranging them elsewhere - is now completely full of a random assortment of apps. Wow that is REALLY frustrating. Not only are things not working but now Apple are making me REDO things which I have done before.

That's the end of the saga so far. The legendary Apple experience.

My keyboard does not pair. My Homescreen is loaded with clutter, and I have a whole bunch of apps installed which look as ugly as hell on the iPad and I have no idea what "syncing" with my iPhone means.

If you were ever contemplating giving an iPad to a less technically astute relative, then think again. Unless you want to personally man the help desk from hell then you'd better just have them stick to a feature phone.

It's a shocking experience. As I said in the beginning - it's redefined my entire perception of the iPhone and the iPad and Apple being in the "non-tech" consumer market. How DO they sell these iPads to the "person in the street"? I wish I were that clever as I'm obviously not.

How was your first iPad experience?

Did you have similar problems?

Did you figure how to pair the "wifi" keyboard :)

Walter @adamson

Is social business just better customer service?

Debate around the role of brands has been endless, and there is no end in sight.

Is it all too complicated?

Is a brand simply something that is there when you need it, at the right "investment" cost, that you trust to deliver, and for which you have little affinity except for those reasons? Loyalty isn't a key determinent in this process - but just the tendency to buy the same brands or products is. 

Doug Garnett provides a sharp analysis in his post Humanity, Humility, Statistics & Brands. Thoughts About “How Brands Grow” by Byron Sharp. He also hits out at social media:

New media theorists seem think that a consumer loves nothing more than to spend their life searching for brand related content on Facebook while trying to learn the latest social media engine. Truth is that we spend a lot more time thinking about other things (like family, work, money, vacation, …) and don’t think about brands all that often.

According to Garnett, Sharp finds that:

• brands don't become big on the sales of their most committed customers. Rather, big brands are big because a lot of people buy a little from them;
• statistics show the 80/20 rule is wrong. This rule suggests that 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers. Research shows that isn’t true;
• statistics show that what most marketers think of as “consumer loyalty” is non-existent. What consumers do is simply have a tendency to buy from a few brands.

Those insights are based on deep and wide statistical analysis.

To me, as a simple person on the street, those insights and Garnett's comments all ring true. That's why I recommend reading his post.

How can we apply these insights to social business?

There's no doubt about the ROI success of businesses becoming more social - there are numerous and well-known examples. It also makes "human" sense that this works. Not because people are buying "brands" but because they are getting responsiveness, convenience and their tendency to keep buying is reinforced.

But isn't the buying cycle and buying behaviour changing?

Economists are reknown for basing predictions on past behaviour, and therefore often getting it completely wrong e.g. the GFC. Is this research and the book likely to suffer from the same problem? Are we in a completely new era - shaped by online and digital? It could be. That's a potential concern in marketers taking the past analysis too far - how much have things really changed?

What does this mean for social business?

Let's say things aren't going to change all that much.

What does that mean for "social business" which is something for which Doug Garnett appears to have little time? Could it mean that the essence of social business is really just about customer service? Being responsive, being perceived as trustworthy - and at its most basic that's about delivery -and having a little edge in maintaining the "tendency" to buy?

Doug Garnett is an insightful guy, you might also find his Shelf Potato blog worth reading for its pragmatic advertising and brand advice.

Do you think that there is more to social business than just great customer service?

Walter @adamson

Vodafone kills complaint form because too many complaints !!!

Would a company in crisis management choose to disable it's online customer contact because it is getting too many complaints? If the company is Vodafone then the answer is yes! I know that's almost beyond belief but it is true.

Yesterday Vodafone Australia reinstated its online contact form which it had suspended while it "while it worked through a backlog of customer inquiries".

Vodafone Australia is currently the target of a class action with over 15,000 participants. This action is due in total to Vodafone Australia's appalling service delivery - customers basically claiming they were swindled and wanting out of their contracts and Vodafone refusing to release them. It's also in the midst of a privacy scandal, first denying and then yesterday sacking staff after being "tipped off by a newspaper reporter".

The class action and the lead up to it have undoubtedly reached the highest levels of Vodafone Corporate - this isn't just a Vodafone Australia fiasco. You just wonder on what kind of magnets the Vodafone executives have been sleeping?

Australia is in the midst of a series of El Niño events, including flooding across most of Queensland - an area bigger than combined Germany and France under water (but 1/4 the population of Switzerland). These unusual events seem to include the Vodafone PR disaster plus a couple of other monsters as we start into 2011. One other was specifically in relation to the floods, where retailer Bing Lee decided to donate to the flood relief fund but only on the condition that people Liked their Facebook page!

This was slammed by the very social media to which Bing Lee had appealed. (But, surprisingly their Facebook page remained unapologetic and actually accelerated their Fans and Bing Lee then donated $10,000 to the relief fund.)

The whopper, before Vodafone, was a loud and high-profile campaign by Australia's most renown troglodyte businessman Gerry Harvey condemning people who buy online as "unAustralian"!!!

Harvey runs a very successful retail chain, but he's most known for his head-in-the-sand on all things Internet most famously declaring in 2000 that online retailing was a fad and would die. In fact he's continued on that theme for a decade, being quoted as little as a year ago saying that "online retail sales were a dead end".

Harvey was upset that overseas online purchases of less than $1000 do not attract any sales tax for Australia buyers. The Australian Tax Office says that collecting the money would cost more than they gain.

The result of Harvey's ferocious campaign is that more Australians than ever are aware of the money they can save by purchasing online, and that Harvey now faces a monstrous backlash from store shoppers. Survey's showed up to 97% of people disliked Harvey's conduct of this PR exercise. Even Harvey himself expressed regrets, having been vilified across the nation, and remarkably said that "getting involved was 'suicidal'." PR agency FD Third Person were the geniuses behind the campaign, I wonder if they were paid on press clippings as they surely would have received a bonus!

So in summary El Niño has left a trail of rain and PR disasters in its track down under. Vodafone takes the prize for the most amazing customer relations exercise of the decade - suspending their complaints form - and Gerry Harvey's unAustralian online shoppers runs a close second.

What is your biggest customer relationship disaster story, or success story, for 2011?

http://xeesm.com/walter @adamson

Getting Screwed by Scribd - why I am deleting my account

I liked Scribd and their recent upgrade including the addition of more social networking features are all welcome, even if the rendering on Chrome often comes out screwed up. 

I'd tell them about it but that's where the trouble starts - support, or lack of. Then add on top their hidden appropriation of your property and the sudden demand for payment to view and they lost me.

A saga of support, or lack of it

It started when I made a simple support request about their alerts system which was filling my inbox with irrelevant references. Nothing complicated I just wanted to find out why it didn't seem to work as I expected. Here's the history:

• sent and acknowledged 8 July - ticket #68653;
• 13th July I reply with ticket # asking how it was going;
• 15th July replied again with ticket # asking if someone was going to respond;
• no response at all - nothing, dead;
• about August 8th I decided to twitter @scridb with the details asking if there could be a response
• August 10th I received an email:
• ScribdGary, Aug 10 05:52 pm (PDT): I sincerely apologize for the delayed response. I have submitted a report to our engineering team to research this issue, and I appreciate your continued patience while they work to resolve the matter.

OK, frustrating, why did I bother, but I did at least get a reply to my Twitter effort which in itself is a bit of an experiment, and they are going to get back to me, thanks ScribdGary.

August 25th I saw an email from Scribd in my inbox, nice, I have an answer, let's see what they say:

This is an e-mail to notify you that your request (#68653) has been pending for more than 14 days, and we have not received response. We are closing this ticket at this time. To re-open and update your request, please reply to this email. Cheers, Scribd Support.

Ah?! Scribd requested me to be patient, which I was, and then canceled my request because of "inactivity", after I've been trying to get an answer for 7 weeks. Heck, this is worse than Linkedin "Support", so I gave up on Scribd "Support", deleted all my alerts, and decided that I must write a post about this experience.

Non-existent "support" wasn't driving me away

Actually I wasn't really that annoyed about the lack of support, even if I was frustrated. It gave me the topic for a blog post, and in that post I was potentially going to comment on how we have all become tolerant of a miserable level of support for our online services. Whether it be Google, or Microsoft Online, or Facebook, or Linkedin or Apple or Twitter or Scribd they've worn us down to accept non-existent support.

You can get some good response for the iTunes store and purchases, but try to get a response for other iTunes issues like software problems - the service providers all rely on their community to pick up the burden of answering you. Have you tried to get answers about Google's Picasa for example? If you have you'll know that you are just firing questions into a black hole, Google never appears, but their uber community members do try to sort you out.

So at this point I was frustrated but tolerant of Scribd's lack of support, and intended to maintain my account. I just figured that they run on a shoestring so to expect very little of them in the future.

Secret appropriations of our documents was the killer blow

However! Last week while searching a Linkedin Group I found a person had posted a link to a Scribd document they'd prepared, and said "feel free to download". I went there, found it to be useful and then hit "download". I got a message that I now had to pay!! In order to download I had to pay a daily or weekly or annual fee - up to US$59.

Now I was really frustrated, and confused:

• Was this person just scamming me to get a commission on their "free" documents, using Linkedin to post link bait? That didn't seem likely when I checked that person's profile.
• Where did this new "feature" come from and who is getting the money?
• How about my documents that I had uploaded as "public" - can others still download them for free?

Then I hit Google to search, as others somehow must know all about this even if I am in the dark.

Scribd took our documents and made others pay

Sure enough - rage and anger. 

Here is the amazing answer:

• Scribd decided arbitrarily to appropriate every subscribers public document and lock them into a "vault";
• The total 100% payment for others to download your public documents goes into Scribd's bank account.

If that alone doesn't stun you, then also consider that Scribd made no announcement and offered no opt-in. I kind of got the impression that they may have mentioned on their blog, but they certainly didn't email subscribers and they certainly did not ask their consent and for a opt-in.

I guess the reason for not notifying and asking subscribers to opt-in is obvious:

Hi, This is your friendly team at Scribd. We're offering a fabulous new feature whereby we want you to allow us to take control of all your public documents and sell downloads for a fee. Your share of fee will be zero (0)%. Please click this link to allow us to offer this service on your behalf.

Well... OK, I see the value in that for me ??!!

As a result of the flaming Scribd has come out in the last week and said something like "Sorry, we probably should have told you and also because you all seem so unhappy we've urgently implemented a feature giving you the ability to edit your uploaded documents one by one and opt them out of our vault".

You're welcome! So I have to edit my own documents OUT, one by one?

They are serious!!!!

So on the basis that Scribd has completely lost the plot I will be editing myself completely out of their system by deleting my account. You might get Scrod in Boston, but you will be Screwed by Scribd.

Goobye Scribd hullo Issuu

I'll try Issuu and see how that works, it might be a blessing in disguise if they actually have Support that works!

Were you aware that Scribd had, or was planning to appropriate your documents?

How do you think they could have managed this objective better?

If you were Scribd, does this move make sense?

What do you use instead of Scribd, is Issuu the right choice?

http://xeesm.com/walter

Related articles by Zemanta

• "I feel like Scribd used me" (ericgoldman.org)
• Scribd apologizes, pledges changes over archive fiasco (teleread.com)
• Scribd Posts A Public Apology To Vocal Critic, Then Takes It Back (techcrunch.com)
• Scribd Puts User Docs Behind A Paywall Without Them Realizing It (techdirt.com)

Update #1 My Telstra Experience FAIL

I'm following Telstra's My Telstra Experience initiative. I didn't plan to update every day, but perhaps I will have to as it has a certain momentum in the social media world even though it is a closed survey panel. 

Unfortunately the first big media exposure was a complete FAIL.

The whole mess is written up here "Hold the phoney: Telstra’s 'customer' unmasked", and you just have to ask what WERE they thinking???

Excuse my disparaging language but how did they think that bringing in a PR hack to a nightly current affairs show posing as a former disgruntled customer was ever going to work in this day and age?

You can see from the comments on the article exposing this that it has really just pulled the rug out of Telstra's efforts to convince people that My Telstra Experience was anything but yet another PR stunt. That bit is not being derogatory that's just stating the facts as revealed in the comments - universally negative.

If we think about some of the tenets of not just social media, but also customer relations, we think of openness, transparency, disclosure, and perhaps even honesty!

In posing their PR hack as a customer Telstra failed transparency, failed openness, failed to be honest, and of course failed in disclosure. I mean this was utter contempt for the public and and a complete and utter FAIL. It's hard to go on because it is just such a complete exposure of the potentially PR-based thinking behind the whole My Telstra Experience.

Time will tell whether this IS a fatal blow, right out of the gate. The campaign was less than one week old!

 As for my own "Telstra Experience", since I am interested and also a mobile phone and a landline customer, I went to sign up. My experience hit a brick wall at the first step as my browser choked on the very first page. I have all the latest Flash etc, just updated them the other day, but it couldn't break the registration system. That's just a small UI hiccup as thousands have registered, but it stopped me.

In related news Perth Now published a "Memo to David Thodey: here's what your Telstra customers want fixed" after asking for comments from its readers.

...since Telstra put out the call yesterday for customers to tell the struggling telco how to fix its woeful customer service, our readers have scrambled to join the queue. Perthnow.com.au readers ripped into Australia's big telco, slamming it for a complete lack of care, having staff who can't speak English, and of being "too far gone to fix". Instead of getting answers, Telstra got brickbats. Only a few readers gave helpful advice. Rex wasn't one of them, emailing us with: "Their prices - even with their new ones - are between 'not competitive' to 'an outright ripoff'," he said. Telstra this week admitted it didn't know how to fix its woeful service standards, so it called on customers to tell it how to do it.

There's no shortage of people with a willingness to comment. The question remains open - how willing Telstra to listen and to act and to be seen to be acting in good faith?

McKinsey scores in social media - revolution in interaction

I was vaguely tracking the Future of Influence #foi09 conference and thinking about influence in the social media, and interactions, when from Linkedin I received notice that a new News Discussion had been posted by Mike Dubrall (a fellow Certified Social Media Consultant from the Social Media Academy). In the Channels of the Future Group, Mike had posted reference to this McKinsey study - A Revolution in Interaction.

The link took me into the Strategic Thinking section of the McKinsey Quarterly online edition, to the article, but it was only available to Premium Members.

Upgrade to Premium Membership to read this article

So I thought OK I will appeal in the social media, not for a pirate copy but for an opinion or summary or connection with someone who had read the article.

Here's the result:

You can see that I twittered at 8:50am Sydney time, McKinsey McKQuarterly responded at 10:50 exactly 2 hours later, and I paid them the courtesy of an RT "thank you" at 11:32am.

I now did indeed have a guest pass to the article, and it is very insightful. More to come on that when I condense and align my views with other things happening in "interaction", "influence", and "social media".

Thanks McKinsey, you obviously have a well-oiled monitoring and response system. While many companies have an outbound "broadcast" twitter presence, few that I have tested actually listen and respond. 

There's a saying: if you are present in the social media then people expect that you are listening!

Starbucks: social media not marketing and PR initiatives

I read Elaine Wong's Why Starbucks Is the Top Brand on Facebook (Aug 12, 2009) and was enjoying it all the way to the end - but when I got to the answer to the last question I became quite excited.

Q: What are we likely to see from Starbucks on the social media front going forward? 

Here's what Alexandra Wheeler, Starbucks' digital strategy director, said:

You will see more of the same. We will only continue to grow and develop our assets in the social media space, but continue this kind of real philosophy of being where the people are but being relevant to them and providing value in those experiences. We don’t want to check the boxes and say we are in all the different channels. It’s not the right thing to do. It’s one of the reasons we were cited in the [Altimeter Group] report as the most engaging brand…It isn’t a marketing initiative. It isn’t a PR initiative. It’s cultivating and creating great consumer value and great consumer relationships. What you’ll see from Starbucks is us continuing to build and scale that up over time in a new way and new chances to converse with the brand.

I thought this answer was such a strong confirmation of all the teachings of the Social Media Academy, and it placed Marketing in the context of brand engagement NOT branding and advertising and campaigns.

Let's break it down:

• She squarely puts social media as part of an overall customer engagement and customer experience model, to be assessed, planned, executed, managed and coordinated across all of Starbucks. This is the essence of the holistic methodologies of the Social Media Academy.

• It's about helping the brand cultivate relationships and engaging with customers.

• It is not about marketing pushing branding initiatives and "messages" out into the Starbucks communities and the places and spaces in the social web where the Starbucks fans meet.

• It's about a continuous program - - and therefore a continuous investment and time and resources and effort i.e. social media is not free!

• It's about knowing which social media spaces and places are important to Starbucks, based on a proper social media assessment. These Assessments are one of the core processes taught by the Academy.

Wheeler's comments also validate a message which I have made at several events and across several sites and posts. That is, that what you see on the surface, which may appear to be a campaign even, is part of something which runs much deeper in how successful companies utilize social media. 

Whether it is Dell, or Starbucks, or Virgin America, they have very well thought out holistic programs, which require organisational change, and are managed cross-functionally with a bigger objective in mind. If you copy what you see on the surface, without understanding or doing the hard yards in planning and execution of a holistic program, then you are almost certain to fail.

And you won't see all that you have to know and do by reading articles about these companies, because they know they have a competitive advantage and how hard it is to get it right. Now you need to do your homework and catch up, if you can!

How does social media increases marketers' inhouse influence?

There was a bit of a flutter in the twitsphere to the headline "61% of marketing executives believe they are more influential now because of social media".

e.g. ianrharris: @sammutimer I find it hard to believe that 61% of marketing executives would know about social media!

But the report actually had a really important message. It wasn't the message about marketers becoming more influential internally, or even that it was because of social media.

It was WHY they had become more influential and WHY social media gave them that edge.

Advertising and marketing executives were asked if they believe the influence a company’s marketing professionals have on business decisions has increased or decreased in the last 3 years: 

- 18% said it had increased significantly;

- 43% said it had increased somewhat. 

The reason?

According to Megan Slabinski, executive director of the Creative Group, a good portion of this increased influence can be credited to marketer's early adoption and continued use of social media.

Here's the BIG message:

Social media programs, which are often overseen by marketing and communications professionals, may increase the influence that marketing has in an organization.  "Many marketers are interacting directly with customers and clients through Twitter, Facebook and other social media, which gives them immediate, firsthand knowledge of how the firm’s products and services are perceived and can be improved upon," Slabinski said.

That's enormously important because it is the power of social media for all businesses, and for all departments and functions - to connect with real feedback and the real experiences of customers, and in real time.

Imagine, if a company went out looking to buy this information they would probably not be able to afford it. But here it all is sitting there, to be listened to and acted upon (in the right way of course).

Clearly that kind of information and feedback does not belong solely within the confines of the marketing department. But good on them for taking advantage to increase their influence while the rest of the business wakes up to social media as a key element of customer engagement and the customer experience.

The next step is to now take that understanding and to build a holistic top-down social media strategy which optimises all social media inputs and communications and engagement across the company - a strategy aligned with the overall business plan.

Social media and the reinvention of marketing

We're probably in the 2nd year of trench warfare between brands, branding, marketing and social media, and while we see regular reports of battles the winner has yet to emerge from the fog of war. 

In fact the prophets of this war go back much further, including The Cluetrain Manisfesto 10 years ago, Communities Dominate Brands in 2005, and several others. It's only with the advent of new and mass social media platforms that the war has erupted on many more fronts.

Social media advocates have indeed raided the territory of brands and their agencies and owners. Major battles are now being waged over the future of brands, if any; the worth of advertising is of course also in the wars; the role of marketing is being questioned and not only questioned but redefined; and new means to achieve customer loyalty are being run up flagpoles to see who salutes.

What I see happening is that marketing as we know it is on the verge of exposing itself as irrelevant, yet marketing in its widest and perhaps purist form being reinvented. Social media is both forcing the reinvention and enabling the reinvention. Marketing will revert from branding back to supporting brands.

Terminology - brands, branding, marketing

What I find confusing, although this may be my own ignorance, is the terminology.

Perhaps not just the terminology but any common consensus on what we are talking about when we say "brand" and "branding". If we could get that agreed, then I think there are trends with which most of us would agree.

Brands

There is one strong element of the social media "push" which says that "brands are dead", and often this is sensationalised across the commercial and social media.

Surely brands will always exist, and have positive or negative or neutral business value.

One reason we know this is that the strongest advocates of the power of social media and its impact on brands would generally be considered to have established a "brand" for themselves.

So if brands are a promise, and translate to fulfilled experiences and satisfied expectations, then they will represent value to customers and return value to their owners. The delivery of the promise, the experience, is the brand depth.

Social media, as part of the total customer engagment and experience, will accelerate the rise and fall of brand value because of the power of communities. Where the brand promise is not matched by brand depth the social media will enable the relentless exposure of that weakness. Your brand is what your customers make it, and the customers and their networks are becoming more powerful and playing a bigger role in defining brands and brand value.

And what's interesting is that social media, through facilitating easier customer engagement, is empowering employees across an organisation to have a much more powerful impact on brand value. Not just in being able to "communicate" with customers and partners but in how they are empowered to communicate and how they feel about the company and product or service about which they are communicating.

In this context social media plays a very important cross-business role which embraces the whole breadth of customer engagement. It's this whole engagement and the holistic business planning and implementation which is missing from most social media discussions today.

Branding

Currently, most discussions of social media are focused purely on its relationship to branding. Yet it appears to me that in contrast to brands, which will survive, branding is the most likely victim of the rise of social media.

By branding I mean the efforts of marketers to convince you of the value of a brand, usually by trying to short-cut the rather arduous process of delivering consistently on the brand promise over time.

Of course marketers may often find themselves in inenviable positions, with dud products and enthusiastic owners who wish to make cheap grabs for market share or profit. Unfortunately most marketers and agencies embrace and even encourage these opportunities as a chance to show their "creative skills". And unfortunately it is with this brush that much "social media" is tarred today. It's essentially creative crap!

In the world of communities, social media, and comprehensive customer engagement and experience models, this kind of "branding" is as dead as the dodo.

This kind of branding also embraces the associated advertising which is equally worthless and it is this category of advertising which some social media experts proclaim to be dead.

As an advertising category I would agree - it is as dead as manipulative branding.

The Marketing Challenge

For all of its current weaknesses and current falling credibility marketing and advertising is not going to go away, except that associated with the "branding" as discussed above which will certainly self-destruct.

It's going to reinvent itself in the context of not pushing messages to a market segment, an audience, but by seeing itself as part of a total customer engagement and experience model.

This model will embrace the whole company, and the important spaces and places in the social media where relevant conversations take place. These "relevant" conversations could include any or all of conversations about the company, its products and brands, its people, partners and competitors.

When Marketing does this it will again create the link between brand promise and brand experience, and be part of the overall creation of real brand value.

Organisationally, Marketing will become a member of a real-time cross-functional team which as a whole embraces the customer engagment. This is in stark contrast to today, where most Marketing has degenerated to branding. And make no mistake, this degeneration is the big problem that has led to the undeniable trend of declining influence of advertising and marketing today. It is disconnected from the experience and total customer engagement.

There's nothing new in all this to purist and forward-thinking marketers as marketing was always intended to be only one part of a customer experience, and everything was meant to interact and to be consistent. It's just that it has mostly failed to deliver and been taken hostage by "campaigns" and short-term thinking.

The rise of social media is important because it exposes this "state of the art" for what it is - treating customers with contempt and ramming "messages" down "channels".

Future Brands, Marketing and Advertising

Branding, in the above context, is dead.

Brands will always have a place in our B2C and B2B ecosystems, and some will rise far above others, as now. The ones that rise the furthest will reinvent their Marketing function and their marketing to become a true part of the long-term engagement to build brand value through the execution of the tangible traits, through coordinated cross-organisational and social media contributions and participation.

Perhaps I'm drawing a long bow here, but I think that the expression of what I am saying is precisely illustrated by Starbucks and their attitude to marketing and social media. When recently asked about the future of social media for Starbucks Alexandra Wheeler, Digital Strategy Director, said:

You will see more of the same. We will only continue to grow and develop our assets in the social media space, but continue this kind of real philosophy of being where the people are but being relevant to them and providing value in those experiences. We don’t want to check the boxes and say we are in all the different channels. It’s not the right thing to do. It’s one of the reasons we were cited in the [Altimeter Group] report as the most engaging brand…It isn’t a marketing initiative. It isn’t a PR initiative. It’s cultivating and creating great consumer value and great consumer relationships. What you’ll see from Starbucks is us continuing to build and scale that up over time in a new way and new chances to converse with the brand.

To me that is a statement all about the brand and not at all about branding. It places marketing in the context of engaging with the brand experience and not trying to create the brand experience through campaigns and brand promises which cannot be fulfilled.

We could say "we're different to Starbucks" and no doubt you are. But to me that's like saying "we're not ready for social media" or "our customers are not ready for social media". It's not about you, in this context its about social media reshaping your approach to marketing, forcing its reinvention, whether you like it or not.

Forward thinking of better banking

The Better Banking Blog is a great read if you're interested in forward thinking about better banking and banking services.

I liked this post about community involvement in product and service development, and opening up the banking platform to mashups.

Can you imagine if a bank opened up development in such a way? What if customers could design their own widgets for desktop banking using your Internet banking platform? How about the capability to set up a mobile banking tool that brings in transactions from all your bank accounts? Again, it’s already happening, albeit without the permission of the bank and security issues being addressed.

In fact, as they point out, this may become a competitive necessity in Australia as competition is able to enter the payments and funds transfer business, which was previously restricted.

There's an obvious strategic role for social media, which is one of the points of my comment on that post. Brand promises are becoming worthless and in fact negative in the face of brand depth which fails - fails to deliver the promise and social media accelerates this failure through connectivity and transparency.

Utilising social media strategically to gain transparency, customer insights, and engagement is going to become a necessity over time. Although I'm not holding my breath that it will happen soon in Australia for banks per se as there is low competition and little incentive - but in financial services there are many opportunities.

- You can read here about the American Express Open Forum and some of their tactics.

In the social media world Wells Fargo is often quoted as a banking leader, and no doubt they are as they are doing more than twittering for sure. I'm not up with the best examples, but you might be interested to read some of the comments on this Wells Fargo blog post which are less than complimentary and show how well the whole effort has to be coordinated in a complex organisation.

I'm glad it demonstrates this mayhem as it brings home that social media "strategy" is not just some clever campaign from an Agency.  It takes a thorough assessment and sound business-like methodologies to create the strategy, and to execute, monitor, measure and improve it.

I enjoyed reading many of the posts on Better Banking and pleasantly surprised to see the forward view and progressive thinking in a sector not renown for such.