ScribbleLive

Mark, "who develops the brand message? these days online branding comes from employees that blog officially/unofficially... how are organizations structured from a branding perspective?"

Maggie: "we're working with a global company that wants one message to come from marketing and and that's yelling. if they are yelling at me and not listening, they're missing out on my role."

Rohit: is your brand one message? creative story and innovation story could be different. we think of b2c and b2b, but there's also c2c (consumer to consumer) and e2c (employee to consumer). beyond employees, it could also be evangalists... the customers. the best customer can be telling others how great you are. evolution that it's okay to have different messages, but it's okay that it's not only 1 message.

Michael: frustrated that i'm in marketing department that is separate from customer care. technology people are trying to figure out how to make people use the site in another way, and that's part of the brand, but it's separated as IT. marketing departments have to lead this revolution within an organization that there's 1 customer and we have to listen to them when they say we suck.

Michael: Ii've worked for a company that part of its product sucked. we tried to promote that it didn't suck, but it did. let's not throw millions of dollars marketing something that isn't true.

Maggie: you have to live up to your brand promise (talking about quality of product) You'll hear that it sucks in sales.

Mark: how do companies listen effectively and respond?

Rohit: companies are focusing more effectively through tools like social media. it's easier to listen on a mass way. "the window of suckiness is shrinking. movies used to be able to suck for a weekend. now you twitter that something sucks right away".

Rohit: companies need to listen effectively and then scale that. it's the same challenge to releasing a product, then offering warranty support. companies do that, so there are ways of doing this on scale. smart companies will be doing more of this.

Michael: focus groups are a big waste of money. don't put any credence in them. run good web analytics, forums, participate in the discussion. you can hear loud & clear what your customers are saying.

Michael: the conversation is happening. if it's not, that's what you need to worry about (ie. why isn't anyone talking about your company/product)

Maggie: it's not just blogs/forums, you really have to pay attention to Twitter. Index anything that has some kind of mass. We find out who the influences are for a client. All blog posts are not created equal. Weigh based on rating/influence and ask if it's worth responding to based on how influential blogger/twitterer is.

Rohit: we want to listen, but we're lazy about it. we don't want to learn a new tool. #1 easiest thing is set up a Google Alert for whatever your brand is. (Guinevere notes: yes, this is really essential to listening to your audience)

Michael: use Google Analytics if you're a startup. it's free. Google Alerts are free.

audience question: would like examples who are finding influences & exploiting that (admits exploiting is bad word)

Rohit: Zappos, the online shoe store is a great example of a company that "gets it". The company lost any employee silencing policy. In Zappos, they give all new staff a culture book, created by Zappos employees. They use smart social tools like twitter/blog and let employees respond. CEO is also talking/living social media daily.

Mark asks Maggie: how is Ford using social media?

Maggie: it's early days for Ford. Right now they are trying to find the 1% influencers group and doing a blogger outreach.

Zoe from audience given the mike. She's in charge of that Ford outreach. Her advice is think of the "blogger" as a person and listen to them.

Maggie: we have a secret score that we give to rate the influencers.

Mark: peer-to-peer lending in Canada is a new concept in Canada. What's Michael's plan?

Michael: best money you can spend is telling your story to people in the media who are looking for interesting stories. we had articles in national post/globe & mail and Toronto Star and we were 5 html pages on the web.

Michael: have a community manager in your company. Theirs finds bloggers on finance and talks with them. In the process they write, or give feedback or tell them they want to be early users. I'm sure we'll make a million mistakes...

Rohit: "giving up control" should actually be "sharing control". say as a company that you're here also and we being the people who are doing this are not in charge of everything, but that's okay, we can be a part of this conversation. to have a company's person involved with community, people credit you for being there.

Maggie: Dell has an outreach team. They don't go after just a-list bloggers or influencers, they just want to listen to conversation about dell. they acknowledge positive comments and respond to negative. the negative went down with this, but overall conversation did not go down.

Rohit: one of the heads @ Dell says that "talking to customers is their day job" don't tack on social engagement, but make it someone's responsibility.

Audience question: is it possible to create a sustainable brand? online you can go from place to place with a click. attention spans are small.

Michael: it's your company's job to understand what problem you're solving for customers. start-ups are infamous for starting without understanding what problem they're solving, which is why so many aren't successful. articulate your brand within the framing of the customer brand. every employee should know what problem you're trying to solve.

Mark: when it comes to the web, there's so many tools. Where do you start?

Rohit: understand where people already are and deal w/the fact that they're not going to switch just because you have something cool to offer. smart social networks are offering the tool where u put in your gmail address or facebook account and it'll find the other people already in your network. "i don't want them to do that automatically and spam my friends, but to click a button and find friends, makes it much more interesting/useful to me". don't assume that your thing will be the only thing. it's part of an eco-system. we spend our time on multiple places. most effective realize that and don't penalize us for going to other places.

Michael: what's the metric that holds us accountable toward a spend? very few companies have a big budget that lets you do anything. most of us have a needle attached to a specific metric. that makes you be pragmatic-- what specific tactics can you employ to move that needle. #1 tactic that's been effective is to try & find partners that already have online communities that is relevant to what we're offering and do a deal.

Michael: when someone in your org. starts talking about "owning the customer" that's when it's time to leave that org.

Maggie: when we measure the impact, social media comes out of 3 areas: pr or communications/marketing/product development. some metrics they look at: PR is measure in how much coverage did you get from your activities? marketing: reducing the cost of paid search. product development: metrics there is business intelligence-- get input into product development cycle.

Mark: Club Penguin & StumbleUpon built great brands w/o spending money.

Rohit: that's still possible. Referrals and word of mouth is #1 source of growth. Social media makes that circle of trust larger. Also, build in tools that make things easily sharable, like StumbleUpon did.

Comment from audience: brand & product with StumbleUpon are indistinguishable.

Mark ask each panelist for key tip.

Rohit: one tip: make it okay to have accidental spokespeople that are not message trained and give them something to talk about

Maggie's tip: laser focus on your consumer. know exactly who you're reaching out to, listen before you join it. u can't build a brand if you don't know who wants it

Michael's tip: don't suck :) also... help your organization break down silos. get your company to think about customer in a holistic way. talk to customer care/finance/technology. every silo in company has to care about the brand.

audience member: if ppl want a hands-on 'how do i do this?" in MaRS next month, there is social tech training available.

end/applause