Forget Influencing For A Minute, Be Influence-Able

Here's my thesis: companies that have lots of bloggers will end up making better products, will end up having better marketing and PR, will end up making more profit at the end of the day, and will be more likely to have more than one "hit product" and will be more likely to last 100s of years. - Robert Scoble

I agree with Robert: That companies succeed that have a rapport with their customer base, and use that dialogue to build better product.

I disagree that having companies actually lumber along for hundreds of years is a wonderful goal (Tom Peters does a better job than I at tackling the Built to Last meme) although designing companies with the capacity to evolve and recreate for hundreds is another story. And I think a lot of dialogue that Robert finds valuable should not be limited to employee blogs. Perhaps the crucial dialogue occurs at a destination topic blog (i.e. knowledge worker productivity rather than Microsoft Office), a user community hub of customer blogs, individual customer blogs (and perhaps other stakeholders' blogs in the company's ecosystem).

This all reminds me that much of the excitement I notice around business blogs seems to be: Let's locate the influencers, get them to talk about us and spread the word, thus creating buzz and then voila! we're golden. Nothing irks bloggers (they're not the only influencers, btw) more than being seen as merely convenient distribution mechanism for your meme: "We publish [our message, our manifesto], you distribute."

Marketers can focus squarely on influencing and tipping points and building buzz -- and forget a valuable part of the equation lies in being influence-able ourselves. If you focus solely on "getting the word" out, you totally miss out on the greatest competitive advantage of blogs.

But engaging customers in a dialogue isn't simple. You're perplexed why they aren't dying to yak specifically about your baby, your product - but rather prefer to talk about their burning issues.

To really know your customer, you need to become customer-centric. And their world may not (gasp) revolve around your product. In both examples below, sports and fitness are prominent in customer's lives - much more so than any single product or feature set. In another real-life example, would you rather read the ins and outs of an enterprise software company's WAN acceleration product (WANs are the networks tying together distributed global corporate offices) or spend more time learning about handling the issues of a globally distributed workplace?

Wanna know my theory on what went wrong at Nike? They probably hired professional market researchers (they didn't have pros in their "heyday") and the dialogue dried up.

We didn't do any traditional research in the way of pre-testing advertising or even product pre-testing at Nike.

A lot of lab work but nothing in front of focus groups, at least in the seven years I was there. We did - in lieu of that - get very close to consumers. We didn't jump in front of them in focus groups or other qualitative environments and say, "What do you think of this line?" or "What do you think of this commercial?" We would spend hours just getting to understand the world they live in, and then very slowly and methodically move it to a discussion about sports and fitness, then to a discussion about footwear and apparel, then to brands, and then ultimately to Nike.

Too often a lot of companies are saying, "Let's test the new package design," and just jump in front of consumers and say, "What do you think of this one, versus that one, versus that one?" when what they probably should be doing is having a very deep and insightful discussion about how they feel about the world they live in and where the brand fits or doesn't fit. - Scott Bedbury, from post "Seeking Market Validation in All the Wrong Places"

When I owned Women’s Sports & Fitness, one of the things that we noticed in some conversations with our readers was that they often found themselves being asked about products by their peers. On average, each of our readers was asked for help buying a product by 12 of their peers per year. This finding became core to our advertising sales strategy. At the time, our competitors had circulations of five or six times that of Women’s Sport & Fitness. We grew our advertising substantially by helping our advertisers recognize that our readers were more important to reach than our competitors’ readers, because they influenced so many others.

The reality was that our competitors’ readers were seeking out our readers to help them make purchasing decisions. These readers, who were not as passionate about sports, were listening to their more experienced peers. Our advertisers found that it was more important – and a lot cheaper – to engage in a dialogue with the readers of Women’s Sport & Fitness than to advertise with our competitors. It seems so logical to skip the [trend] translators [they're only 13.5% of any market population] and focus on the middle of the [innovation] diffusion curve, where the biggest number of customers resides, but a successful dialogue doesn’t happen that way. - John Winsor, from post "Nurture Relationships With the Trend Translators, Online and Offline"

So my guess is that if a Women's Sports and Fitness blog were around today it could enable a dialogue - a participatory marketing continuous feedback loop - with those influencial sportswomen. Why in the world stop at merely at spreading your word, when you're given the means to learn what makes your customers tick and continually engage and evolve along with them in order to truly build a great product customers desire?

Old marketing skill: Influence.

New marketing skill to add to your repetoire: Be influence-able.

Comments

[Jared Evans]

Please change the font on your blog. It's very difficult to read the text. I didn't bother to finish reading the entry.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Jared, I'm guessing you mean the font size - or is it the type/style that is difficult to read? I just increased the font size (damn Typepad has font size selection like choosing a T-shirt, so this is small and I had extra small - more aesthetically pleasing. I'd have preferred a size between the two....ah, well).

BTW, the fonts show up much better in RSS readers, the feed is at:
http://evelynrodriguez.typepad.com/crossroad_dispatches/index.rdf

[Jared]

Ahhh... so much better!! Thanks for the change!

[Jory Des Jardins]

Let's take this a step further and say marketers do set up a fitness blog for women. That's the easy part. Next, the marketing team needs to LIVE on that blog. Not check it out once a week and see what products are mentioned. They need to take it in and mull it over. They need to become part of that comminity. They need to post and see what resonates. They need to develop the instincts of a customer.

This is a tall order, I know. My fear is that some companies are adopting blogging, but not getting past the first 10 percent of effort required.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Great point, Jory. Here's a great quote in the linked above post, "The Competitive Advantage of Blogs" by John Winsor (http://beyondthebrand.typepad.com) from his book, Beyond the Brand:

"Apple is firmly connected to the creative graphics community, Nike has a support system of athletes, and Patagonia is connected with outdoor adventurers. With whom are you connected? Are you networked intimately enough to your group of trend translators that you can call or e-mail at any time to explore a couple of new ideas? Do you know them well enough that, if they don’t know where to find the inspiration you’re seeking, they will turn you onto their network? Not only are Apple, Nike, and Patagonia connected, but they each become a vital part of their network’s community, allowing them to find inspiration for both products and marketing consistently and much faster than their competitors."

There's other points that I left out too.

For instance, I'm sure that with employee blogs, there is an impression, an expectation that companies are listening but unless that employee has a real in with the product management team, your feedback may go nowhere. (I speak from painful personal experience, sometimes product managers pay lip service to feedback - including internal sales and others whom speak daily to customers but aren't necessarily "in charge" of product.)

Secondly, I've been in one-on-one interviews on the customer end and truly felt UNheard. I'm trying to explain what I want big picture and they want to bring the conversation back to if I like XYZ feature, which btw has nothing to do with what I just expressed.

[korulo]

Organizations desperately need to maximize shared understanding

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http://membres.lycos.fr/messengermsnfr/

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