Walter Adamson

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.