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Blogging should be a core responsibility of a CEO

June 16th, 2009

Paul Levy is the CEO and President of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, and author of the blog, “Running a Hospital.”

Summary:

• Paul Levy knew nothing about health care, medicine, or running a hospital, yet he still found it fascinating. So he decided to start writing a blog.
• Paul Levy posts real time data of operations at BIDMC to brag about their success, but also to expose issues that need improvement.
• Blogging has inspiring clinicians to do better because they know their results will be seen by the public.
• Blogging should be a core part of a CEO’s duties to promote his/her organization.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Blogging, Collaboration, Podcast, Video, branding | 3 Comments »

Don’t make ads, make news

January 20th, 2009

Interview with Bob Thacker, Senior VP of Marketing and Advertising for OfficeMax, about building a new voice with their “Life is beautiful. Work can be too” campaign.

Summary:

• Office supplies are not traditionally an exciting and fun space. The category is known for big dull bland spaces that are pretty much all alike.
• OfficeMax’s “Life is beautiful. Work can be too” campaign is trying to change that viewpoint.
• ElfYourself was OfficeMax’s attempt to associate its brand with Christmas. It succeeded hugely.
• ElfYourself was one of twenty applications they tried during the holiday season. It just so happened it was the one that went hugely viral. The Web makes it cost efficient to bet on every horse.
• Make content people want to pass along.
• OfficeMax is now trying to associate its brand with fashion. First step, create a comfortable and fashionable work space during Fashion Week.
• What we want our audience to believe is this is a company that really understands work. We don’t just sell stuff.
• OfficeMax “made news” by launching “A day made better.” They gave supplies away to teachers. They created and published stories.

Full article:

One doesn’t traditionally think of an office supply store as having an industry voice, but that’s exactly what OfficeMax is trying to do with a category of dullness, grayness, and sameness, said Bob Thacker, Senior VP of Marketing and Advertising for OfficeMax. They succeeded hugely with its holiday viral application, ElfYourself, which had absolutely nothing to do with office products, but sure was fun to play with.

Changing the image of office supplies

Thacker knows that office product retailers are not an exciting group. “Office products,” said Thacker, “Are not seen as fun or exciting or places you go to shop. They’re places you go to buy things and there’s a big difference. Shopping is an experience that engages you in almost every sense and is a form of entertainment obviously created to incite people and encourage people to buy more. Our category is known for big dull bland spaces that are pretty much all alike. In the past there’s been no differentiation between the big three players. Our names are confused. Two of us have similar typefaces for a logo.”

OfficeMax’s “Life is beautiful. Work can be too” campaign is trying to change that viewpoint. The idea behind “Life is beautiful. Work can be too” is that your desk doesn’t just have to be filled with boring black boxes, they can be attractive boxes as well. Here’s the ad for the campaign.

Thacker reminds us of the mocking way the office environment is portrayed in the media. Dilbert, “The Office,” and the movie “Office Space” are our comical views of office life.  “It’s all been dumbed down to this space people view very similar to prison,” said Thacker.

In an effort to change the dullness, OfficeMax hired designers to apply their sensibilities to what are viewed as generic products but without taking away functionality or increasing price, said Thacker.

Create experiences people want to share

As for developing OfficeMax’s voice, the supply store has a lot of stuff in the works. They are planning on producing through all the traditional social media outlets, and helping people with basic office issues, like organization. They’re working with Peter Walsh, a well known organization effort.

OfficeMax is hoping to create more experiences that will go viral like ElfYourself. Thacker claims in the month of December they had more visits to ElfYourself than Facebook did, and it was the number one Web site in Australia. As much as he’d like to easily repeat that success, he knows creating something viral is not something you can build and control. For example, they tried to drum up the same excitement for a free Jonas Brothers poster, and it just didn’t work. My feeling is the lack of success is because the Jonas Brothers aren’t of interest to everyone. They don’t target the right audience. Although they may be targeting the children of the right audience. ElfYourself created something that everyone could personalize and was really fun and silly. It became something people WANTED to pass along. That’s how it became viral.

The first year they tried the ElfYourself idea it was one of twenty ideas that OfficeMax had posted over the holiday season and the Elf was the runaway hit, said Thacker. It was an effort to create some fun pass along content and to think of OfficeMax as a destination for Christmas which was a stretch at the time they knew.

But that’s what Thacker likes about the Web. You can test things out for not much money. And when things don’t work, you just move on, said Thacker. He thought it was very valuable to actually do twenty different ideas and to see which one was most successful. They had other successes of those twenty, but none that was the breakout star of ElfYourself. As Thacker jokes, “One way to win at the track is to bet on every horse.”

Creating an association with your brand and another seemingly unrelated industry

To launch the “Life is beautiful. Work can be too” OfficeMax theme, they created a fashionable work lounge during Fashion Week. OfficeMax tried to create a comfortable and attractive space for people to work, said Thacker. It’s a smart move because they wisely associated their brand with the industry of fashion. It’s also a very bold move to try to link your business with an industry that others wouldn’t even think there was a link. The danger of doing something like this is it could come and slap you in the face. But that will only happen if you don’t have an open and honest dialogue about it. If you just do marketing, and refuse to engage in conversation, then you’re going to have problems. People will question your integrity to associate yourself with fashion.

But like what OfficeMax did in trying to associate its business with Christmas (ElfYourself), they’re taking yet another leap and trying to build an association with fashion. I think there’s an even closer and obvious tie and the connection definitely opens itself up to discussion. I just hope for OfficeMax’s sake that they begin that discussion now as they’ve launched their campaign rather than having it just “in the works” as Thacker said. Right now, Thacker didn’t make it clear what the timeline for “in the works” is.

Don’t make ads, make news

“Don’t make ads, make news. Do something that people talk about, remember you for, and then give them something,” said Thacker, “And however you encounter with them make sure it’s a positive one.”

“What we want our audience to believe is this is a company that really understands work. We don’t just sell stuff,” Thacker said.

One huge promotional event that OfficeMax created that generated a lot of news has been “A day made better.” The event is a single day every year where they storm into schools and classrooms all around the country, and completely surprise teachers by giving away office supplies. The event is huge and it draws lots of interest, press, and conversation about the alarming fact that teachers are paying a significant portion of their crappy salary on office supplies. What’s most important is by creating an event like this, OfficeMax has also created all these fantastic stories that are then published on its site. Heart warming stories that OfficeMax has been responsible for creating and publishing. Plus, this nationwide chain has figured a way to connect with each and every community. Thacker also notes that while “A day made better” is a single day promotion, they do have staff that maintains that communication with the teachers and schools throughout the year.

When I asked Thacker what’s the biggest mistake he’s made in social media or building his voice, he has to admit it was OfficeMax’s attempt to associate itself with the women’s site, iVillage. “It’s already a rich site and what we brought to the table was not much more,” said Thacker trying to piece together why the project with iVillage failed.

I’m interested in seeing how OfficeMax creates its new industry voice in the space of fun and fashion. Right now a lot of it appears it’s “in the works.” Honestly, I don’t think it takes that much to start creating stories and conversing online. They’ve already begun a little bit, let’s see how quickly they get up to speed.

Filed under: Editorial, Podcast, Video, branding | No Comments »

Speed to cool

October 14th, 2008

Bill Ryan is the cofounder of Mandala, a branding and messaging services company. I sat down with Bill Ryan in his home in San Francisco to talk about how his business architects all the pieces of a company’s voice from branding to PR to messaging and to marketing.

Summary (Bill Ryan):

• Companies poorly communicate their story to those that need to hear it (e.g. analysts, bloggers, journalists, and customers)
• Nobody wrote a check because they thought your company was “interesting.” You need to get them to the point where they say, “cool.”
• You need to sell the problem or the opportunity before you sell your solution.
• The lenses for which you and your audience look at your company are completely different.
• You need to be out in front telling your company’s story before your audience does it for you, which may not be to your advantage.
• If you have a situation where there’s no market, then you need to evangelize the space, bring interest to it, and own it.
• Increase discoverability by getting to every point on the influence chain. The further back you get, the more powerful it is.
• The biggest complement you can pay to a writer is to demonstrate that you’ve read what they’ve written.

Full article:

From the individual up to the company level, we all tell stories. A company lives inside a story. The problem is there are many people who work in a company, and if you talk to five different employees, you’ll often get five different stories. That discontinuity within the organization is inevitably carried outside-to people who get pitched (e.g. press, bloggers) and everyone else.

Bill Ryan, cofounder of the branding and messaging services firm, Mandala, wanted to know how well companies communicated their “story.” Ryan talked to story recipients (e.g. analysts, VCs, and journalists) and asked them, “What percentage of companies have the ability to come in and tell you ‘what they do, why they’re different, and why you should care’ in a quick and efficient manner?” Sadly, the average response was 10% with the highest being 15%. Bad for the companies in question, great for Ryan who is in the corporate clarity business. Ryan is also a senior member of the marketing services company, Comunicano, where he leads their Words & Stories directorate.

Most people don’t have their story in place and just keep echoing their five message points, said Ryan. The most you can hope for is a long hour and a half discussion where they’ll inevitably get to the point and you’ll finally discover their story.

How fast can you get them to say, “cool”?

“Speed to cool” is Mandala’s own internal benchmark to determine how good someone’s company pitch is. During a pitch the listeners will often just nod their head and say, “Oh, interesting.” But as Ryan pointed out, “Nobody wrote a check because something was interesting.” What you’re going for is the moment in the presentation where it shifts from them saying, “interesting” to them saying, “cool.” That’s the moment they get it. Their body language changes, and they’re eager. It’s the point when the presenter can shift from just pitching, to closing. “Speed to cool is how fast can I get that audience to the point of saying, ‘cool.’ How can I get them beyond ‘interesting’ which is out of their heads and into ‘cool’ which is into their emotions and it’s all based of real value,” explained Ryan.

A solution without a problem or opportunity is irrelevant

“If you haven’t sold the problem, the fact that you have an elegant solution is irrelevant,” said Ryan, “It has to start with a sense of relevance.” There’s relevance in the sense of are you solving a business problem that they know they have. The flip side of relevance is opportunity. The Internet itself created all new opportunities. “You either have to sell the problem or you have to sell the vision of opportunity, first,” explained Ryan, “If you haven’t done that you will always stay in ‘interesting’ land.”

You have to give them a taste of the opportunities and you have to be willing to give a little bit of the secret sauce that is making you successful or as Ryan refers to it, “the gift of knowledge” marketing. Go so far as writing a book about what you know. For the person who fears giving away too much, Ryan reminds us that “management would rather bring in the consultant who wrote the book than have to actually read the book and try to implement it themselves.”

People look at your company differently than how you look at yourself, yet no one pays attention to those differences

People look at your company through five lenses. Companies look at themselves (from the inside out) through three different lenses. Bill Ryan summarizes the differences:

A company’s identity is defined by their:

• Vision – What’s the core belief that started the company and what continues to drive its innovation.
• Position – Where the company sees itself in the industry ecosphere as determined by who is the customer, how are we different, how are we pricing this thing, etc. The big vision is made practical around positioning.
• Brand voice – How you express your brand to the world. That’s not necessarily your vision because your vision may be a competitive advantage and you don’t want to share.

The world looks at your company through the following lenses:

• Relevance – Do you solve a business problem that people already have?
• Superiority – Is yours the best solution according to the criteria the customers use to make a buying decision? That can be very different as to why you think you’re the best.
• Ecosystem competency – Are you the company everyone wants to do business with? Are you a follower, or do people not know of your existence? Ryan points to Microsoft here, explaining that they score very high in this area, but not in innovation as version 1.0 of all their products IS usually poor. Later versions are where general adoption is at its highest. More importantly, Microsoft controls the environment. How savvy you are as an ecosystem player gives the perception of the strength of your company.
• The team – Who’s running this show? The strength of the company’s team plays a lot in how the company is perceived as a player in the world.
• Sustainability – Do you have what it takes to stay in business for the long haul to service your customers who will need you to be there for them?

Bridging this gap between how you define your company and how the public defines you requires you to be out in front telling your company’s story to the world. It’s a brand narrative, and you better be able to do it correctly before your audience does it for you, which might not be to your benefit. This isn’t like the old days where you just courted journalists and analysts. There are far more voices out there and it’s important that you’re out there telling your story, or as Ryan puts it “Be the shepherd of your story.” More specifically, he believes that your CEO needs to be the super shepherd telling the company story and why it’s relevant to customers.

There are two ways to tell you story, and it all depends on whether there’s a market or not. “You can either evangelize hygiene or you could sell soap,” said Ryan. If you have a situation where there’s no market, then you need to evangelize the space, bring interest to it, and own it. It’s a common mistake to only sell the product and not the market. It’s easier to just sell the product because it’s something you know. You don’t necessarily know the market. Or if you do, you definitely don’t know it as well as you know your own product.

A great example, Ryan pointed out, was McDonald’s “You deserve a break today” campaign. The campaign didn’t sell burgers. It sold the idea of eating out, specifically towards moms with kids. They were trying to grow that specific market, moms with kids eating out. Since McDonald’s already owns a percentage of the “eating out” category, they can grow their own business if they simply grow the entire category of people eating out.

Ryan is one of the earliest Internet PR players. One of his earliest clients was Yahoo! when they were still at the address www.yahoo.edu. In the early days of the Internet, nobody could see the Internet’s value. So one of Ryan’s first marketing strategies for Yahoo! was to evangelize the Internet and make the two words synonymous, Yahoo! and Internet. Jerry Yang’s early appearance on Terry Gross’ Fresh Air did not discuss the technical architecture of the Internet and search, but rather how the Internet was going to revolutionalize communications. And Yang told the story of how he got his grandmother up on email and how his relationship with his grandmother grew because of it. Ryan saw the value of that story, even if he’s not sure if Jerry had a living grandmother at the time. The net result of this positioning caused Jerry Yang and David Filo to become the poster children of the Internet. And any time anyone wanted to do a story about the Internet, they needed to get those two, or it wouldn’t be a complete story.

Be more discoverable by finding the connectors and influencers

If your company is not already on the consideration list when people are deciding to purchase a product or service in your category, you need to increase your discoverability. And doing so requires you to understand your audience and go where they live. More importantly, said Ryan, is to determine who are the people that influence them. “You want to get to every point on the influence chain. And the further back you can get, the more powerful it is,” explained Ryan.

Bill Ryan actually brought up Ken Rutkowski of KenRadio who I’ve mentioned multiple times as the ultimate connector in the tech and entertainment space. Rutkowski hosts meet ups and dinners where he brings people together. He is the connective tissue. In fact, Bill Ryan and I met during a Ken Rutkowski dinner just a few months ago. And then we were reintroduced virtually by Ken’s cohost, Andy Abramson of Comunicano, yet another connector.

“The trick is to find the Ken Rutkowski’s of the world in your particular marketplace that are creating those connections between the people who are influencing the market and the people who are actually creating the innovation. [You have to start] getting those connections made and gauging those people in thinking about your business,” Ryan said.

“You need to understand the chain of influence in your ecosystem.” While that may still involve taking a journalist out to lunch, it also involves understanding the influential bloggers and understanding how their connections fit into the sphere of influence.

“The biggest complement you can pay to a writer is to demonstrate that you’ve read what they’ve written,” said Ryan, “It has nothing to do with you agreeing with what they say. In fact, a good blogger or a good journalist will fall in love with you faster if you disagree with what them and you have a good heated argument and you talk about it, and you really go back and forth, and you listen to what they say…Let them talk, listen to what they say. They may teach you things about your business you never know about before. And if you do that, they will fall in love with you, and they will respect you,” Ryan said. The end result is you’ll learn more about your market and better be able to define the problem, the opportunity, and your story.

Filed under: Collaboration, Editorial, Podcast, Video, branding | 2 Comments »

Build company knowledge by taking conversations out of email

October 13th, 2008

Ross Mayfield is the cofounder, chairman, and president of SocialText, a social business software platform.

Summary (Ross Mayfield):

• You can’t dictate collaboration within an organization. Find a small area where it would excel, introduce it, and then roll it out in concentric circles to other groups that have interest and can provide unique value.
• Collaboration needs a clear business purpose. You can’t have collaboration without a goal.
• Take all content out of email to build a company knowledge base of the revolving door of employees, plus a back channel on what the company thinks on a given issue.
• If one significant person changes their process to be more collaborative and open, it can change the process for an entire organization
• PR has evolved to add value in conversations and be agents for collaboration. It’s not just about connecting clients with press.
• When you ask for permission to market to your audience, immediately offer some value in return.
• Even if someone’s collaboration intentions is purely to promote themselves, still engage if there’s a connection to your brand.
• Collaboration needs to involve multiple individuals within an organization and not just one person, because that one person is just a resume away from leaving and taking that company goodwill with him.

Full article:

Pushing close to 5000 followers on Twitter and a popular blog, Ross Mayfield has been a leading voice in the creation and development of collaborative media. He’s the cofounder, chairman, and president of SocialText, the first wiki developers back in 2002, said Mayfield. Today, SocialText develops and sells a social business software platform.

When Mayfield first started SocialText, before he even incorporated, he wanted to share the process of building his company by launching a company-wide blog. His coworkers had already been comfortable blogging as individuals, but now they were going to use it as an open development platform which was very rare back in 2002.

“I say ’share the process’ because one of the mistakes most people do is they think about blogging as an activity of promoting outcomes,” said Mayfield, “That’s a very different thing. It’s a press release mentality to say, ‘We have achieved this, we’re launching this, here’s the big bang message we’ve been carefully working on in the laboratory, and now it’s ready for the mass consumption.’”

You can’t dictate collaboration

Collaboration doesn’t just happen by you announcing, “OK, it’s time for everybody to collaborate.” Mayfield advises companies to find a location within the business where a public social software deployment would really excel, by prototyping in private. Meaning, what internal project can you put a social platform on top of to get people into the groove of using collaboration software and see its benefits.

The example Mayfield points to is IBM who wanted employees to engage in public blogging, but before they did, they asked employees within IBM as to what their blogging policy should be. Instead of starting an email thread that someone would have to edit, IBM set up a wiki which acted as an editable document. It also established the all important company back channel.

“If there’s a crisis communications event that happens publicly, they will first turn to that back channel, privately inside the company, before airing things out in public,” said Mayfield.

Getting people to start using a new communications tool the way you want it used is not easy. I asked Mayfield what tricks he’s seen work to increase adoption of his tools and get people more involved.

“First, you need a clear business purpose. There’s no such thing as collaboration without a goal,” said Mayfield. We both attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference and this realization was often echoed during the sessions at the conference.

In addition, you have to invest some time and money in how the tool is going to be introduced. Some people are going to need training to get comfortable with editing their thoughts on your new software in public.

Social networking: from cheating to business collaboration

People take to the software differently, depending on where you deploy it (e.g. sales and marketing vs. engineering) and who you deploy it to (e.g. baby boomers vs. the Net generation).

“The Net generation just entering the workforce. They grew up doing their homework on Facebook and that’s called cheating. They come to the workforce, that’s called collaboration,” said Mayfield.

Recognize the differences for the environment that you’re adapting the software, said Mayfield. But as you’re training internally and getting people comfortable with the software, start rolling it out in concentric circles over time. An internal group that collaborates on a project will obviously have interest in that project. But there’s also a group outside of those creators that will have interest, and can provide their own unique value. Keep an eye on those groups and over time roll it out to them. Let them participate, and then look for the interest and the connection to roll it out to the next group. This is how collaboration can just grow and grow.

One person’s process change can change that of an entire business

Over the past six years, SocialText has evolved from a wiki-only type collaboration environment for knowledge sharing to a more vertically integrated process implementation for collaboration. Mayfield explained that SocialText’s software is deployed in a way to help them more productively get their work done, and knowledge sharing is a byproduct of getting their work done.

A video game news company called 1UP.com used to handle all of its communications and processes via email. A simple request to an art director to create a graphic could be an endless thread and flurry of emails. That art director decided to change HIS process. All he did is ask that all requests and edits for his work be placed on his wiki page. When the job was done, the person would be notified with a link within the wiki page as to where to find the files. That art director created a process where there wasn’t one before. He became so successful inside the company that he went on to publicly blog for the company as well.

Take content out of email so it has value and life beyond the inbox

One of the other huge advantages of taking content out of email and onto the Web is that it has a life and value when that person leaves. There’s so much knowledge and information that’s locked into each individual’s personal knowledge management systems. Companies need to break free of each person having their own “system” and set up one that everyone is comfortable with and has value for the whole company when employees are and aren’t there. “All of Web 2.0 is just taking things out of email that existed before and adding backlinks, pings, and restructuring them in a more transparent discoverable way,” said Mayfield as he admittedly oversimplifies the Web 2.0 environment.

As a personal example, I used to work at an ad agency and I produced a ton of content for them. Proposals, ideas, concepts, etc. All of that information lived on the hard drive of my computer at work. When I left, they simply formatted the hard drive instead of saving the information for later. They later called me asking for it, and I told them it was on that hard drive. Unfortunately, they erased my three years of information I created for that company with that move.

“People are sharing more than ever,” said Mayfield, “There’s new patterns of sharing by default. You see it particularly in the ‘net generation. Cause that’s how they’ve grown up, that’s what they’ve always done. They don’t necessarily see the reasons not to.”

Mayfield brought up the CIA who presented at the Enterprise 2.0 conference (I wrote about them and conducted an interview with them as well.). The model of the CIA is the complete opposite of open collaboration-type thinking, yet that’s what they’re doing. Traditionally, the CIA has operated under a “need to know” philosophy, they are slowly switching into a “need to share” culture, yet still with levels of security clearance.

Don’t let one person in your company possess the “King of Collaboration” title

Culture change can’t be the goal of a collaboration initiative. It has to be a byproduct. Those who share will be rewarded, and those who horde will be at a disadvantage, Mayfield said.

During my interview with Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions, he stressed the need to build a network of individuals to develop your industry voice. That it was detrimental to leave that up to just one person because they’re one resume from walking out of the company with all that built up goodwill. Mayfield continued that line of thinking by repeating results from studies that show that people trust individuals within a company more than they trust brands (source: Edelman trust barometer, six out of ten countries trust individuals as peers rather than institutions as reliable and credible sources of information). In addition, half of all individuals trust a rank and file employee more than a CEO of the same company.

PR has evolved to provide value in conversations, not just connecting clients and the press

Mayfield believes that the role of PR is actually increasing and not declining. “You have a much more decentralized, fragmented media landscape that organizations need help understanding,” said Mayfield, “You have a new role of a PR person as a public actor in the conversation.” PR persons are no longer agents to allow conversations between their clients and the press, but rather people that are providing value and developing relationships within the conversation. And PR is no longer relegated to training top executives to hit the top message points, but also the entire company who has interactions at lower levels like support or developer relations.

“An overall social media strategy needs to be diverse in its tools. It needs to be diverse in its empowerment of different individuals,” said Mayfield. While most of the social media being presented by the media and pushed is very public, Mayfield sees a trend to more intimate type relations like a social communications network between PR firm and client. Or maybe new relationships between PR agents and those that they’re contacting. For example, instead of setting up two separate interviews with two different analysts, why not get both of them in a room as you’re giving your presentation and see what new rises from that interaction. For more on the importance of developing a relationship for communications, see episode #3, Build your audience by sharing their ideals and beliefs.

As I implored Mayfield to give me stories of what it takes to get people to collaborate, he straightened me out by explaining, “There’s no collaboration panacea,” said Mayfield, “It really just takes some conviction to identify what the true collaborative problem is and get agreement from a group to try to solve it and with what steps.” To start that off, Mayfield suggest looking for those people that have already taken to online collaboration outside of the organization (e.g. say they started a local social network of cat lovers). These are people that feel comfortable with social tools and are passionate being a community manager. Let them lead the charge.

Permission to market to your audience

As you’re developing a relationship with your audience, when you ask them for information like how to get a hold of them (e.g. contact information), you need to immediately reply back with some value (e.g. an invite to an event, or a trial of a product).

“[Ask yourself], ‘What can I give away to let people distribute, reuse, attribute, bring sources back to you, not just find on the Web, but carry forward into social networks,’” said Mayfield. It’s also not just your direct business, but the goodwill you bring to the environment. It’s something Mayfield has been doing for years, and he’s hoping it’s what is going to keep him afloat.

Even if people just want to promote, engage in conversation

When I asked my traditional, “What are the worst mistakes you’ve made?” question Mayfield admitted that he didn’t initially see the value of engaging with people who were obviously just interacting with him for their own ego and to push forward their own initiative. People would come on, self promote, and Mayfield would ignore them. Today he realizes “You really want to engage with every conversation that relates with your brand,” Mayfield advised, “Even if you don’t want to necessarily draw attention to the existence of a competitor.” How open is your discussion about your competition is an issue Mayfield still wrestles with today. It’s different industry by industry. A general rule of thumb about sharing information is to share the process, not the outcomes.

Filed under: Blogging, Collaboration, Podcast, Video, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

How to launch a community from nothing – podcast

August 25th, 2008

Episode five of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars Pete Krainik, who is the CEO and founder of “The CMO Club.”

Summary (Pete Krainik):

• The CMO Club filled a pent up demand for top level marketing executives that were looking for peers to lean on for advice.
• The CMO Club’s brand has risen to be defined as “content for conversation, not content for presentation.”
• Keeping CMOs interested means finding topics of discussion that cross industries.
• Launching a grass roots organization requires touch, meaning face-to-face communications, not mass mailings.
• Creating an organization means you’re going to have to take on the branding role of “the connector.”
• Competition in a very green industry is good because it provides more editorial where there is none and raises the profile for the entire category.

Full article:

Pete Krainik is the CEO, CMO, and founder of “The CMO Club” an organization for only top level marketing professionals to engage in high level discussions and concerns that CMOs are going through (CMO stands for Chief Marketing Officer, not Chief Medical Officer which is what my father, the doctor, thought it stood for.)

Hey, want to join my exclusive club? Please?

Krainik has been very fortunate to have worked in a variety of high-level marketing and executive positions at many organizations including M&M/Mars, Seybold, Avaya, and DoubleClick. The idea for The CMO Club came out of his own frustration not being able to meet any of his peers. He’d go out to dinners at events and he’d be the only CMO. There was never an opportunity for a peer discussion. Conversations would either be very basic marketing 101 or they’d be sponsored-driven pitches.

Two years ago Krainik gathered six CMO friends for a dinner just to have that high-level discussion he was so eagerly seeking. It turns out his frustration is shared by others. Over the past two years The CMO Club dinners have spread to twelve cities with dinners every other month. Krainik had his first conference in NYC with 60 CMOs (Krainik hired me to produced editorial content at the event), and this February he launched The CMO Club exclusive site that already has 735 registered and approved CMOs.

Krainik attests the early success to just good ‘ole fashioned hard work which requires meeting and calling CMOs, personal conversations, and word of mouth recommendations. Plus, his dinners are not pay-to-play sponsored dinners. People are invited because he thinks they would provide valuable content and conversation.

Oh yes, you paid for dinner, so I guess I have to listen to your company pitch

The benefit of his events is that they cut through traditional hidden agendas, said Krainik, and CMOs can address issues that affect them like rebranding, going public, and dealing with PR issues. “Who better to help me as a CMO understand the issues I have, the challenges, or the strategies I’m about to unfold, than someone who is a peer of mine and been there,” said Krainik. Everyone comes looking for those few nuggets of advice from someone who has gone through these issues and let’s them know “don’t do this, do this” or “here are some people I recommend.”

And it’s these conversations that have become the most powerful for the attendees. Krainik’s “voice” is that of the facilitator allowing those conversations to happen. In fact, the feedback he got from his first event in May was “Great event, but we want even less speakers,” said Krainik, “They wanted more discussion.”

In fact, one of the CMOs coined a phrase that’s become the moniker for The CMO Club: “It’s content for conversation, not content for presentation.”

Krainik’s success proves there’s pent up demand for a CMO support group. The role of a CMO is tenuous they cycle through companies quickly. Eighteen months at one organization for a CMO is considered a lifetime. The high turnover is not because they’re getting fired, but rather because they’re fed up and want to move on.

Benefits of The CMO Club from Jen Sanning, CMO Rainbow Rewards

CMOs can get bored quickly, so keep them interested

At this point in the conversation, Krainik and I shifted roles and I began to question him more about the issues he’s having growing The CMO Club and the brand. His number one challenge is to come up with topics and vehicles to get CMOs to want to participate and share their insight beyond the dinners. He truly wants to differentiate his organization from similar high-level executive organizations.

Topics that cross multiple industries do very well, said Krainik. For example, How do I keep great marketing stars? How do I influence change at the C-level? How do I approach social media and how do I think of it as being connected to all my other components? How do I manage globally?

At the end of each dinner Krainik sends a recap out to all the attendees. It’s an excellent way to build relations and provide extended value from an event. But he has to keep this recording of information to a minimum because one of the values of his dinners is the privacy of information.

One way he’s maintaining balance is by conducting short video interviews with a Flip camera asking CMOs at the dinner what was their number one takeaway. It has two-fold value: it respects the CMO’s time (it only takes a minute) and other CMOs love to hear what’s on other CMO’s minds. The response to these videos has been very positive.

All projects must be measured from Phil Clement, CMO, AON

Everyone loves the life of the party

This type of connecting that Pete Krainik is doing reminds me of what Ken Rutkowski and Jeff Pulver who have become known connectors in the tech industry, hosting dinners and introducing people. Both are very creative with intriguing ice breaker conversation starters at their events. Rutkowski requires attendees to bring a piece of juicy gossip nobody knows to share with others, or at the last event you had to mention someone else you just met and plug their company. Jeff Pulver turns people into human tagging and taggable objects. You write tags on stickers to describe what you think a person is like and you stick it on them.

You’ve established a brand and editorial, how do you monetize it?

Krainik is constantly thinking of ways to monetize and also bring interest, traffic, and community to his site. One way he would like to do that is through a recommendations section where CMOs can recommend talented vendors, people, products, and services. Based on some advice I received from a former colleague, I suggested Krainik put recommendations in his regular mass emails to attendees. Let them see that a specific CMO recommends this vendor, and put in the quote as to why he/she thinks that vendor is so great. That way, over time, CMOs will start to associate The CMO Club with this recommendation service.

Where is your audience?

Krainik has a very unusual issue in that there really isn’t a single area online or in the offline world that all CMOs go to. That makes it very difficult to message or reach them all. He’s trying to build a community where a community hasn’t existed before. In such situations, competition is actually very helpful because conversation and communication on the topic raises the profile of the entire industry and everyone benefits. One such competitor to The CMO Club is the CMO Summit from the CMO Council and I suggested Krainik open a dialogue with him.

When I used to work as a stand up comic, we would see this happen in the comedy industry. A new comedy club would open in town and do a lot of marketing or would get a huge headliner. The initial reaction was to think, “Oh no, this is going to destroy the smaller club.” But quite the opposite would actually happen. Smaller clubs in town would see a jump in attendance at their clubs as well because the public’s interest in the category of comedy had been piqued.

The reason people come back, said Krainik is that people are looking for those one or two valuable nuggets of information. If they get just a couple of those great nuggets or connections, then it’s all worth it.

Starting a community from scratch

For other organizations looking to create a community, Krainik said you have to start with the touch. Face to face in the beginning is critical, said Krainik. Start from that rather than thinking, ‘How can I create the site to get millions of eyeballs?’ Instead said Krainik, “Start with the touch, and then move back.”

“Marketing Health vs. Healthcare” from Leo Tokar, CMO Kaiser Permanente

Filed under: Editorial, Podcast, Video | 1 Comment »

The Social Media Fallacy

July 27th, 2008

Below is a short presentation I gave last week to the SVAMA (Silicon Valley American Marketing Association) about how social media has been sold to us through the general media and social media consultancies. The big story that’s constantly sidestepped is that you must first create great editorial content and THEN you can worry about distribution (social media).

I put together this short (6 min) Slideshare presentation to debunk the traditional way social media is being sold and offer a more sane and logical approach to developing industry voice to grow your business.

This is cross-posted on my blog, Spark Minute, but I thought it would be appropriate to launch the “Be the Voice” blog and podcast with this presentation.

I’m interested to know your opinion. Do you agree/disagree this is how it’s being sold and do you believe/not believe that the social media evangelists are sidestepping the issue of content?

Filed under: Editorial, Video, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »