While the goal of marketing is to improve customer’s overall interactions with a brand, few organizations engage directly with their customer tribes or communities and therefore miss out on leveraging what is one of its most valuable assets.

Companies also have a hard time keeping up with the latest technology or vehicle for sharing information, rarely considering the types of networks and technologies people use to access the company’s information. Probably the best example is the slow adoption by companies to optimize websites for the increasing number of mobile users. As Jacob Nielsen’s research shows, most don’t have much information or capabilities to support users (or even bother supporting users) who access sites via a smart phone. The current success rate of completing a task for mobile web use is about 64%, the same as Nielsen research measured for desktop web use in 1999. Note: the current desktop success rate is 84%.

Increasingly, customer engagement starts with the mobile device. Most people begin their online journey to learn about a company through Facebook, a company website or Google search. Companies need to rethink how to develop and manage their digital experiences. Even the most successful communities will need to be better designed for mobile and smart phones.

Talk to Your Customers

To truly create a better customer experience, not only do you have to talk directly to a customer in person, but you also need to understand the tasks they want to accomplish with your products and services. In the case of mobile devices, there’s only a small amount of real estate on a mobile device that a company can use to show off their functionality, so mobile engagement will have to focus on highlighting the critical few items people might want to know in order to take the next step to learn about your product or service.

Fortunately, it is easier to learn about people’s interests and needs and to understand their perspective than ever before. Even if you are hesitant to talk to a customer directly, you can always email them, send them a direct message on Twitter or LinkedIn, or participate in their niche communities or personal interest groups, such as Fiskateers.com, which is designed for people interested in scrap booking and other handcrafts.

Learning to Engage

It is the responsibility however, of every employee, from senior management to the front-line worker, to interact directly with customers. And today the job of most marketers is to shepherd this process along by:

1. Providing guidelines and guardrails to employees via opt-in training programs.
2. Setting up a feedback mechanism where employees can ask questions.
3. Understanding their customers tribes — who they spend time with, where they spend time, how they like to learn and how they use technology.
4. Understanding the group dynamics of these tribes — who are the leaders, the relevant influencers.
5. Partnering with tribal leaders and the not so powerful to learn about how they use your products, services, etc.
6. Developing customer engagement maps to highlight all the customer (and business partner) touch points involved when interacting with your product or your various channels.

Customer engagement needs to be part of every company’s DNA and culture! Customer interaction must be supported by and rewarded by senior management. They need to ensure that the proper mechanisms and processes needed to successfully interact with users are in place and can be modified if necessary to integrate those lessons back into the organization.

Customers = Staff?

In fact, I would recommend going one step further and integrating some of your customers into your company teams. At Intuit, for example, a few customers sat in on our staff meetings. This allowed them to better understand some of the development challenges we faced in delivering (on) all of their requests.

In 2012, engagement with customers can improve by integrating them into the different areas of your company. Consider some of these ideas:

1. Invite customers into your product development process, such as the British Telecommunication site and Giffgaff, where product ideas are tested initially in Giffgaff labs and made available to all members for a short period. If they are popular, they may be incorporated into the main product (and are withdrawn if not). The labs’ products are also beta tested by selected community members before release.
2. Incorporate them into your customer service activities — Intuit’s Small Business Community has 70% of the questions answered by users and their overall resolution rate is higher than the support website.
3. Bring them into your marketing efforts — when targeting your tribes, wouldn’t it be nice to have some help figuring out how to phrase a sentence or describe a product, or list out a how-to by someone who is actually using your product.
4. Be sure to bring them into your partner programs. Constant Contact, traditionally an email provider, has built an effective partner program consisting of all the parties needed to assist a small business’s marketing organization, such as copywriter, designers, etc. Each company provides valuable feedback on how Constant Contact can improve their training program

Perhaps most importantly, customer engagement should be embedded into a company’s products and services. General Motors’ OnStar could be a good example. Today, it mainly provides crash, roadside and emergency assistance. But imagine if GM reached out to drivers and obtained real-time feedback while they were driving via an opt-in ongoing survey with some sort of automatic diagnostic system that was part of the car. Why wait until there is an actual problem or crisis to leverage the OnStar system? Imagine, too, if OnStar leveraged its GPS system and provided information on special sales, such as Groupon or event sites, such as EventBrite.

Customer engagement does not have to take place on your company’s own branded website or via your own infrastructure. Companies can easily identify its relevant promoters — ambassadors of a sort — on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks and have these individuals answer product or services related questions. And you don’t have to pay these ambassadors. Instead, you can help support their own businesses – tools, software and consulting – be successful.

As highlighted above, customer engagement can happen on different platforms, different social networks and among different groups of people in a company. It should be looked at as a journey that is always measured and improved upon. Some companies use NetPromoter Scores to measure their success in this area. Forrester Research scores engagement based on the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy and influence an individual has with a brand over time. The goal, in addition to scoring engagement, should be to listen carefully to what users are saying and how they are saying it. At the end of the day, walking in their shoes and listening carefully to their words will be more valuable then any single score or rating.

(This first appeared at http://www.cmswire.com/)

Social media tools webinar 1 11 12

And if you have the time, you can listen to a recording of the webinar here.

While surfing the web tonight, I found Oracle’s social media policy for employees. It was dated January 2010.When I was at Intuit, I worked closely with the legal, privacy and financial teams to create something we called ‘Guidelines and Guardrails’ ™, because we wanted to provide Guidance vs. threatening employees. We also developed an opt-in training program for employees who wanted to help in figuring out what to do or not do – what they Rules of the Internet Road were.Oracle takes a similar common sense approach policy. Here’s their reference to revenue recognition. Its policy states:As a general rule, don’t discuss product upgrades or future product releases. Because of potential revenue recognition issues, it is especially important that we do not give the impression to customers or potential customers that a given product upgrade will include specific features that will be incorporated into the product within a specific time frame. See Revenue Recognition Guidelines. Any exceptions must be approved by senior management, Legal, and Revenue Recognition.Unfortunately, I cannot access or find Oracles Revenue Recognition Guidelines (highlighted above in red). After doing random sample of talking to ten people in ten different Silicon Valley companies, almost none of them could tell me where their own company’s Revenue Recognition Guidelines were located. And only half could define or provide an example of Revenue Recognition. And I have yet to see a company explain it with numbers. Some example. (Of course, I would love to see some examples of organizations that do this – there must be some)In most companies, they only provide links to revenue recognition guidelines and do not really spend time to explain the financial impact on a company.  Wikipedia defines it as:The Revenue recognition principle is a cornerstone of accrual accounting together with matching principle. They both determine the accounting period, in which revenues and expenses are recognized. According to the principle, revenues are recognized when they are (1) realised or realisable, and are (2) earned (usually when goods are transferred or services rendered), no matter when cash is received. In cash accounting – in contrast – revenues are recognized when cash is received no matter when goods or services are sold.It’s a good thing I took accounting in business school; otherwise, I would have no idea what they are talking about. Wikipedia and other sites provide examples of how to handle revenue recognition, but it’s difficult to find examples of what a violation would be and it’s financial impact.’ This becomes a bigger issue as employees play outside the company on social networks. Since it is so easy to accidentally talk about a new product features on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. And it is even easier for someone to cut and paste an excerpt of something and spread it around the Internet. So while one person is sitting back and feeling special cause they shared some cool information about a new and upcoming product feature, the company mentioned will have to allocate some revenue for the quarter the features was mentioned in. roadmap of the new feature will cause all new sales of Quickbooks to be delayed until the payroll feature is released. Employees need to be careful in what they say or offer to their customers because any commitment or promise could cause delay in recognizing revenue the current quarter or fiscal year. BUT, it is up to the finance group to properly coach employees on the impact of ‘spilling the beans’ on the web.So what does a finance person do to make sure everyone in the company understands this? Here are some key recommendations:

• Include an explanation of revenue recognition during new employee orientation
• Make it easy for employees to find information and examples (I have yet to find a company that actually puts some numbers with their words, and explains the financial impact)
• Provide some examples of what to say and not say
• Give the employee the benefit of the doubt and trust they will not do anything intentional to violate Rev Rec rules
• Think twice before editing or deleting a post or comment that has revenue recognition issues because there might be some backlash about editing a post

This last point is interesting because a company has to decide if they want to include the revenue in the quarter where the product feature was discussed. Finance people should also get the social media experts involved with new product launches so they can leverage monitoring tools to determine if an employee has accidentally shared a product road map or feature before a launch date.I also recommend visiting this site that is dedicated to Revenue Recognition issues.What’s the risk here? Your forecast and projected revenue could be impacted by just one simple blog post or statement on Twitter.

Few people talk about the importance of business partners. This is surprising considering how many companies success depend on the two or three people really jelling well together to make a company work. Some of the more obvious successes include Steve Jobs and Woz, Hewlitt and Packard, and some day, historians might even look at Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Of course, the recent movie Social Networks highlights a ‘partnership gone bad’ between Mark Zuckerburg and Eduardo Saverin. Michael Eisner recently wrote a great book, Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed, using his relationship with Frank Wells, Disney’s number two guys for many years, as a good model. In his book, he descusses the following partnerships:

• Michael Eisner and Frank Wells (Disney)
• Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathaway)
• Bill and Melinda Gates (The Gates Foundation)
• Brian Grazer and Ron Howard (Imagine Entertainment)
• Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti (Valentino)
• Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus (Home Depot)
• Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken (restauranteurs)
• Joe Torre and Don Zimmer (Yankees)
• John Angelo and Michael Godron (finance)
• Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell (Studio 54)

Eisner states that success partnerships require the ability to share, be vulnerable and speak freely. (Sounds like the same ingredients to a successful social media relationship or campaign, eh). All this is the opposite of why partnerships don’t work out: insecurity, lack of trust, fear, envy, paranoia. Some of these characteristics I have seen prevent companies from building successful teams and successful digital campaigns.Why I am talking about all this on a digital site. Cause every one’s dirty laundry can potentially be out there in public. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are great for spreadings about good gospels and bad behaviors. Just look at all the online info on Tiger Wood’s experiences in 2010. I have to admit that I kept checking Twitter to learn about all his different mistresses because every day for a few months, it seems that a new one was coming out of the wood works. The Huffington Post and Twitter helped me stay informed:Partnerships, though, are like marriages. They take work to maintain. So to reduce the amount of risk of either a potential breakup, here’s what I recommend:1. Work out a Pre-Nup beforehand — for the sake of both partners — being clear about what happens if one leaves the other.. This is really about equity ownership of the company and who owns what. (Just make sure to get things down in on paper and have a third party review it)2. Know that unlike a marriage, it’s best to have an ultimate decision maker and if the company scales, you will eventually have to have aboard.3. CEOs can’t run a company as a democracy… so even a great partnership at the top will require an ultimate decision maker4. Build some clause in about taking legal action against the other person5. Set up news feeds of your name, your partners (so you can keep track of what others think)6, Build redundancy with your and your partner’s knowledge — make sure your partner doesn’t have all the answers for a certain issue/topic7. Think about how much of your idea do you really want to hand over to another person or how much ownership do you want to retain in a company8. Write in detail each person’s responsibilityIf you don’t address the issues above, there will be  time delay in making business decisions, something no company can afford in this new digital worldOne last word: Trust your gut when thinking about establishing a partnership. Yes, treat it like a marriage, so if it doesn’t feel right in your gut, don’t worry about why you have that feeling. Just don’t go into business with that person.

The Atlantic Monthly recently ran an article describing how applicants for the Maryland Department of Corrections had to turn over their Facebook credentials for a background check. Here’s Officer Collins sharing what happened when he applied for a job. He discusses how he was asked by employer to see his personal information:The American Civil Liberties Union stepped in and challenging this request, documenting, writing a letter to them.The DOC states that this is requirement for all new applicants cause it wants to review all wall postings, etc. to determine if the person has conducted an illegal acts or is associated with less desireable groups.  In the Private Sector, this is a no-brainer. It would be a violation of an individual’s rights. The Public sector is a little more tricky unless the individual works for the CIA, is involved in National Security or guarding a government official. But what about your typical cop or law enforcement officer, like Mr. Collins. He isn’t involved in protecting the President. So it would be difficult to determine where to draw the line.My recommendation is that you make it requirement after you decide to hire or promote the individual. My thinking is that you never know what sort of national security or public safety work they would be involved in. And you would also make sure there is no discrimination involved in hire or no-hire decision.Key Points:Companies need to be cautious about asking for employee’s Twitter, Facebok or other social network log-in credentials. They also need to know that instead of playing big brother and digging into employees personal affairs (and violating their civil rights), they need to provide the proper guidance for their employees because 95% of the time, employees want to do what is right. That being said, employees — each one of them — is becoming more and more a spokesperson or a representative of the company. It will become increasingly difficult to limit what they say online.0 0 0

Many Fortune 500 companies do not give employee references. Instead, they behave like the military and only provide name, rank and serial number for an employee applying for a new job. They only give the dates of employment. They are gun-shy about giving recommendations, especially when an employee has been terminated. Their generic reference letters focus only on tenure, position and pure objective facts. Nothing is said about the employees performance.But this approach does the raise an issue about LinkedIn, where people often recommend someone by writing a little review of their performance. Obviously, most employees terminated will not seek an online reference from an employer that canned them (either with cause or without cause). So the question becomes ‘does an employer have the right to tell you that you can not write a LinkedIn reference.’ And if you do, does the employer have the right to take action against you.So, there is risk on both sides here. The employee can loose his job or be punished if he writes a recommendation. And the employer might have a law suit against them unless they specifically call out LinkedIn in employee agreement docs.Employers need to cover the LinkedIn issue in their ‘onboarding’ training when an employee joins the company. Unfortunately, very few do. It is too simple to say that managers can not do any recommendations online. Companies do not own their employees and LinkedIn is an external service. Now, I am sure the lawyers and HR managers will jump in here and say I am wrong. But unless there is specific language in an employment doc, a corporation might be challenged in a way that it will be difficult to defend itself.