Marketing Influence & Thought Leadership

Know me I am the social customer!

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Facebook in the Experience Economy & Cephalopods Pelagic Raptors of the Deep

Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s book, The Experience Economy 1999, was a harbinger of the end of the services economy, which according to these authors peaked some years ago. As observers of the rapidness of commoditization in nearly all markets and business they were vaticinators of the experience economy we are now realizing in social media. The social media tsunami is fueling the experience economy as people, groups, customers, partners, companies, and governments and many other organizations are interacting and forming interrelationships via the social media peer groups in new and unforeseen Web 2.0 ways.

The societal and anthropological aspects of social media peer groups are just now beginning to be understood and the ramifications of these interrelationships are just being felt. These new platforms are enabling communications that leads to interrelationships between people, and groups that has never been seen before. They now enable us to create, build, maintain and reestablish previous relationships from other points and times in our lives, and are enabling new relationships with our government, NGOs, and the companies we consume products and services from.

Enter the social media landscape: craigslist, facebook, youtube, myspace, twitter, flickr, photobucket, linkedin, digg, ning, yelp, tagged, squidoo, scribd, stumbleupon, hi5, bebo, reddit, myyearbook, technorati, caboodle, Friendster, flixster, xanga, epinions, plaxo, mybloglog, yuku, metafilter, blackplanet, care2, getsatisfaction, friendfeed, clipmarks, cafemon, newwvine, omgili, gigya, ballhipe, current, revver, ping, tribe, magnify, digo, dzone, xing, faves, tweetdeck, ecademy, twine.

(The Fifty Top Social Media Sites from Website Magazine’s Feb 2010 issue, I added craiglist)

The Good, the Bad, the I don’t care and now the Ugly

In the world of Sociobiology our father E. O. Wilson taught us about societies and behavior previously unknown to man, the hierarchy of termites, ants and other insects that have one common trait, altruism. Each member of the community communicates, interacts, behaves and performs a function that is predetermined by the community hierarchy and all are in the best interest of the community, harvesting, defending territory, nurturing eggs and gardens within. Humans don’t act like this and when presented with a new community like social media they will act in many ways that are often predictable and sometimes nefarious. What we don’t know about Facebook and many of the other sites is how humans are really acting and what the good, the bad, the I don’t care and the ugly experiences are.

The Good

Two years ago I found my long lost cousin in Australia on Facebook, wow we Skype nearly every week now. This is a good interrelationship. I have found enormous professional value in being a member of LinkedIn and my network has expanded to several hundred colleagues and professional connections. My Facebook community of friends and colleagues is mixed with both, but I would prefer that it be only my friends and that is where the line blurs. I know that HR people can profile me now on Facebook and even decide whether I am culturally fit for a potential job, this is good and bad. I could be culturally unfit just because I am too old or because of their perception of my sexual preference. This is good and bad. Facebook in particular has now become a great tool for social media marketing for small and large businesses alike in addition to non profits who want to get closer to their customers.

The Bad

The beginning of the bad is when relatives that did nothing for you suddenly appear and want to be your friend. They are the relatives that you wanted to forget, but they are still there back at you as if nothing really happened. It’s like that Rodney Dangerfield joke, “would you be friends with your relatives if you weren’t related to them?” It can get really worse if you are stalked by a former girl friend or boy friend and Facebook has many stalkers, I even had one person do what they thought was a cute video of me during the last holiday season. There is a tremendous amount of information out there on all us and it is growing every day, so be careful when you share information about traveling and other personal issues. Remember that according to statistics a high percentage of identity theft comes from your own relatives that are jealous of you. There are also many stalkers that use Facebook’s IM to get people’s attention to start a conversation; they may come from your friends networks. For example some men will IM every women they know to be single a happy mother’s day wish even if they don’t know if they are mothers or not. This just happened to one of my friends. 

I don’t care!

Then a series of old friends from high school came back into the picture, and I connected with them, but have found their world to be one that I don’t live in anymore. They talk about the little insular and provincial New England town that I was raised in and invite me to groups and events important to that town. These events aren’t important to me, I don’t live there and to be quite honest I really don’t care about them. Nor do I want to enter into relationships with people that I really have nothing to share with anymore. I am not trying to be snotty or uppity but I really don’t care about their home town lives. I don’t live there.

The Ugly

The ugly stories keep pouring in and with hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and within other social media peer groups, I bet there are hundreds if not thousands of stories like the following happening all the time. Last weekend I had lunch with a friend that hates Facebook. He claims it has wrecked his brother’s and his best friend’s marriages. In the case of his brother, his wife left a marriage of 23 years and a 14 year old daughter to be with another woman. Unfortunately, she forgot to de-friend my friend and is flaunting her new life on Facebook for all to see while abandoning her husband and daughter.

In the case of his best friend his wife also left because she found her high school sweetheart on Facebook and recently just up and left another 20 year marriage with two children to be with him. I heard the same story from my hairdresser on Monday of last week about how her sister just up and left her family. It would be easy to dismiss these situations based on unhappy marriages and the times of uncertainty that we live in today because of our broken government and financial system, but I don’t think so. Facebook and the other SMPGs are enabling communications that would have never happened before. What do you think? How many stories like this have you heard?

The Personality of Cuttlefish

Cuttlefish (Sepia sp.) are marine invertebrates and are actually are mollusks in a class called Cephalopoda which is highly adapted for swimming. They are the fastest swimmers of all marine invertebrates and employ a highly evolved jet propulsion system using water. Some species can actually propel themselves out of the water and are known as flying squids. There are only around 650 species in the class which includes squid, octopods, and nautili, the largest are the giant squid. Giant squids inhabit depths along the continental shelf to depths of 600 meters and the most famous of them the Humboldt squid range in large schools up and down the Pacific coast.

 

All cephalopods are kings of camouflage and can change their color instantly and in some cases their skin texture to match their immediate surroundings to hide from predators or lie in wait for prey.  Cuttlefish are slower swimmers than streamlined squid and leverage their small shell for bouncy along with fluid and the gas nitrogen. Light is a major factor for Cuttlefish and it regulates its bouncy the more light the less buoyant. They spend the day burrowed into the bottom and at night they become active gaining more buoyancy to swim up into the water column to hunt. Cuttlefish and squids are what is called highly adapted for raptorial feeding and carnivorous diet, they have ten arms arranged in two arrays of five around the head. Eight are short and heavy while the other two are twice as long and are called tentacles used for seizing prey.

Some Cuttlefish live at depths of more than 1200 meters and others live in shallow tide pools in our warmer oceans. These animals have the highest degree of nervous system development of all marine invertebrates which enable their mobility and carnivorous nature. They are diecous (meaning there are males and females) and they engage in copulation with normally the male seizing the female head on. Cuttlefish can display complex color changes which are thought to be directly related to behavior and most species change color when alarmed. I hope you have enjoyed this blog post and good luck selling and marketing in the millennium. And how will your behavior change the next time you log onto Facebook, will you turn a different color?

Why you need to know your Social Customers: Because they control your brand!

I am a Starwood, Marriot, Hilton member but it gets me almost nothing to be honest, I have been a United Mileage plus member twenty years, and I even have a frequent parking account. But what really frustrates me about a lot of these programs is that they don’t know who I am and many organizations are not leveraging them for competitive advantage. When I arrive at hotels they never upgrade me, and for the most part I never hear from these programs anymore. I remember a time when we got monthly statements about our activity and then they were moved to quarterly and then disappeared completely! Why because they forgot about us, their most loyal customers.

I expect more for my loyalty, don’t you? What many companies don’t understand is that they no longer control their brand, the social customer does. All of us should become social customers; this will enable us to drive up the overall quality of products and services in many companies and industries globally. Most importantly companies need to know who their social customers are; here is a real world example of how social customers are impacting business today. I am a social customer and now hundreds of people are reading my Trip Advisor hotel reviews. Here is my most recent post read by 100 people in less than a week, and so far the poor reaction to my comments about this hotel from its management.

Sheraton NYC Towers Trip Advisor Review

This was my second stay at this hotel in less than a month and I have to say it needs a major overhaul, all the way from the rooms down to the bell desk and into the club lounge. What was most scary about this place was the overall lack of security especially at 1-2am when no security people were at the elevator entry areas. I did really like the club level and the breakfast is fun and coffee nice along with the overall environment. The bar at the club was missing the martini stirrer and didn't have absolute vodka, a woman next to said “it’s always like that here.”

But let’s start at the beginning, we arrive late its 85 degrees and humid as we enter our stuffy room on the floor twenty and the air conditioner doesn't work. I call down to the desk and they say they will send up maintenance, thirty minutes passes no one arrives. We pack up our stuff and head down to the front desk this time pissed off. We ask for another room and I complain about the room assignment, the front desk attendant says "what do you expect me to check out every room to see if the air conditioner works?" I ask for a manager and he is even ruder, and guess what? I am a ten year Starwood member and our company recommends this hotel, I remind him of that, but he doesn’t care. They assign me a room above the club level, make sense? I don't think so, the next day I ask for the day manager, Zoe Cohen and she is nice and gives me 12,000 Starwood points. 

Two days later it is raining and we attempt to go out for dinner, the cab line is long and the bell captain is nowhere to be found, so I jump the line and get my own cab. The next morning we leave at 5:45 am and guess what? There is no bell person to help with anything? What is up with this? Overall a great location and it is unfortunate that all our European visitors are treated to the same level of poor service. I noticed many Italians during my two visits. The good news is our maid service was very good, but I don't think I will stay here again, because as a Starwood member I expected my room to be ready at 1AM. On my previous visit my colleague’s room wasn't ready either and we checked at 6:30PM.

Sheraton’s Response to my TripAdvisor Review

Dear Paul,

Thank you for taking the time to provide the feedback and recap of your visit here in NYC.
The content, although some of it painful is critical to our performance and garnering guest loyalty. I would like to discuss your visit in more detail if you have the time. During this conversation I will also update you on our direction for renovations that are coming soon.

We look forward to hearing back from you on how to connect.
Sincerely
Mark Sanders

Net/Net

 

Identifying and managing your social customers is paramount in the social media landscape of today and it can be a clear differentiator in many industries, in this case especially hotels as they are very vulnerable. I think it is great that Sheraton at least corresponded with me but the same lack of sincerity and thoroughness about their product and services was reflected in their response.  First of all they got my name wrong, they did not address one of my issues and a security lapse in NYC is serious. They did not recognize me as a Starwood member or even say we are making sure that the club bar is stocked an appropriately appointed with martini stirrers. I pulled the latest statistics off TripAdvisor and although the site says that 67% of travelers recommend this hotel, the number is actually closer to 57%.

The general manager was nice enough to offer the opportunity to talk with me, but to be honest; I am not too interested in communicating with you if you can’t even get my name correct. The power of social media today is the power of the community, not the power of one. If I was the manager of a large iconic hotel in the most visited city in the America I would be shocked that only 2/3^rd s of the visitors to my hotel could recommend it. TripAdisor, Yelp and many others are now the voice of the people and their voice travels globally at Internet speed. As a business, know these communities and leverage your customers loyalty in new and exciting ways that can keep them loyal and provide you with the opportunity to find new loyal customers that can enhance your brand.

 

Sheraton NYC Towers Reviews All (1,464)

67% of travelers recommend this hotel

 

·         Excellent                                             331

·         Very good                                            484

·         Average                                               275

·         Poor                                                     222

·         Terrible                                               138

 

 

 

British Petroleum Begins a New Era of Responsibility for NGOs

We all need and consume oil, and the myriad of products spawned from its ecosystem. We all share in the risk of exploiting it, some more directly than others. And then there are those neighborhoods (next to the refineries) that absorb more risk than others. And then there are the oil companies that take on the risk of exploitation, but in the case of BP we are learning about worst practices in risk management, governance and compliance, not best practices.

British Petroleum’s lack of governance and risk management combined with our own government’s absence of regulatory compliance and oversight marks the beginning of a new era.  In this new era governance, compliance and corporate social responsibility will be driven primarily by non government organizations that are the voice of the people. It has become brutally obvious that large trans-national corporations can’t govern themselves, and more importantly the collaboration between them and governments, (in this case the oil lobby) facilitates an environment of risk and recklessness in the management of natural resources.

After experiencing a near collapse of our financial system, we know now what a joke Sarbanes Oxley has become and that the government regulatory apparatus completely failed.

The hard truth is that our government is challenged to:

·         Manage our natural resources and fisheries

·         Manage our financial system

·         Manage our healthcare system

·         Manage and/or regulate the safety of our food supply

·         Manage or control our borders

British Petroleum is a trans-national corporation active in thirty countries with more than 22,000 service stations and sixteen refineries, and they upstream 2.3 million barrels of oil a day. BP reported 2009 revenues of $239 Billion, a profit of $14B so why can’t they manage their risk and govern themselves, they certainly have the resources?

BP’s Code of Conduct

“A fundamental BP commitment to comply with all applicable legal requirements and with high ethical standards”

I copied the code of conduct from their overly green and seemingly environment friendly website, but there is something about this statement that says who they are. Compliance with all legal requirements, hum what does that mean? Well it means that they will go only as far as the law of any country requires and not further. This is in essence is their problem; they need to go further than applicable legal requirements in the high risk and “high profit” business they run. Compliance with “high ethical standards” is about as vague as you can get and we know they vary with culture, country and company. So what BP is really saying is that we only go as far as we need to and we don’t go the extra mile because it might affect profitability and this is further reinforced by the following quote from their CEO Tony Hayward.

“We are responsible for our operations and we are accountable for setting and observing consistent and high standards within them. Our code of conduct, for example, provides clear expectations on behavior and compliance.”

I had a higher view of BP until the disaster in the gulf exposed their lack of governance and risk management. BP put up $500 million for a bio-fuels research center at the University of California at Berkeley and that is great, but now they have a PR and brand disaster of unprecedented magnitude on their hands. And in my view they have fueled the fire so to speak by setting up a live feed of the well leaking for weeks on end. Perhaps some good will emerge from this when all oil companies take a call to action and re-examine their risk management and governance across operations.

Enter the NGO

Non Government Organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council have now been put in a position of power and truly have the opportunity to be the voice of the people because government has failed. Those who oppose egalitarian groups and view them as zealots and extremists in some ways will rethink their role in world business. Like Exxon, BP will recover from this event and we can only hope they will live up to their responsibility in this terrible environmental disaster.  NGOs now have the power of social media at their disposal and we know that NGOs and many non- profit organizations are harnessing that power to gain influence and audience.

As a student of at the University of Massachusetts College of Food and Natural Resources I learned about the management of our planet’s resources and was taught that there are three principal approaches to managing natural resources:

·         Preservation

·         Conservation

·         Exploitation

 In the beginning many egalitarian groups advocated preservation of natural resources which was and is in direct conflict with the exploitation of our resources, the management approach still prevalent today driven by our capitalist system. This put NGOs at great odds with government and industry and their radicalism challenged many people including the scientific community. Times have certainly changed as NGOs now are important players in the global economy and can significantly impact brand reputation through their influence.

Conservation of natural resources employs management practices that enable the resource to be sustainably harvested and maintained for our children. This means that resources are not irreversibly damaged like our fisheries populations, many of which will never recover from over-harvesting and exploitation. In the case of oil, it is not a sustainable resource; there is only so much of it on our planet. That does not give license to energy harvesters to haphazardly manage operations and put other natural resources and industries at risk, such as fisheries and tourism. NGOs have a greater responsibility than ever in ensuring that large multi-nationals and governments are looking out for the best interest of their people. Join an NGO today and make your voice heard, your state senator, local representative and/or government may not be looking out for your best interest, unless of course you are in California where our governor  Arnold “just said no” to just drill baby and off shore drilling!

Further Reading: Why We Hate the Oil Companies, by John Hofmeister