As we begin the last chapter of this book, I’d like you to take a moment and picture the following scenario: a leading consumer products company, let’s call it “OmniClean,” believes there is room in the market for a new hand sanitizer.
OmniClean has been monitoring online conversations throughout the world—and noticing some interesting trends. Due to a very active flu season, consumers have a heightened awareness of the importance of regularly cleaning their hands—whether through routine hand washing with whatever soap is available or using some type of gel or spray hand sanitizer.
However, with the increased amount of washing and sanitizing going on, people’s hands are really beginning to dry out—and the “solution” to avoiding the flu is now creating new problems. In particular, customers are not responding favorably to the alcohol and antiseptic smell of the hand sanitizers on the market (OmniClean currently produces both hand soaps and sanitizers), which lead to dry and “medicine smelling” hands the more often they use the products.
Fortunately, the social media and digital, marketing, and consumer relations teams at OmniClean have been completely integrated— sharing and comparing feedback, gathering insights, monitoring competitive products and sentiment.
In addition, the product innovations team has been engaging current customers through a private online community—getting a sense of what retailers are hearing in their stores about the products and competitors.
It’s very clear what aspects consumers like about the current hand sanitizers (and why they positively recommend them) and what they think is wrong or missing—and why they negatively “recommend” them far and wide via social media.
While there is consistency in the feedback, there are also a number of nuances—particularly globally. Some markets like a certain scent; others don’t. Some like the handy pocket-sized version; others think it’s wasted packaging and costs too much for what you get. Some markets actually like the “medicinal” smell of the product—as it indicates product efficacy and users “know” that it works—while others find it offensive and want something more subtle. All agree that using the product more than four or five times a day causes noticeable hand dryness, which is at odds with what they’re reading about how often they need to keep using it to stave off the flu.
Over a five-month period of time, the team formulates a new product line called “Hands Free” with different scents, package sizes, and formulations—all of which are not only less harsh on sensitive skin but also include hand moisturizers and softeners for frequent users.
Through a secure online portal, employees, consumers, customers, and partners give feedback on Hands Free throughout the process— weighing in on all aspects, including manufacturing, brand name, packaging, and marketing strategies.
Feedback is carefully cultivated and shared—with all parties seeing and hearing the impact and influence their recommendations are having.
Prior to the launch of the new line, the brand identifies key influencers in targeted markets across a variety of categories—health and beauty, medicine, lifestyle, education, parenting, aging, institutional management, and so on. The influencers are given product samples from the entire Hands Free line and information on why and how product innovations were made.
As the product officially launches, the marketplace swells in approval and eagerly embraces Hands Free. The product is highly recommended across consumer groups, retailers, and experts, and the buzz grows exponentially with each recommendation.
It’s a hit. And the feedback chain continues, giving those charged with monitoring chatter an endless loop to follow and engage.
Now, rewind all that and do over: if you look closely at the case study above, you’ll find that our fictional company OmniClean follows everything you’ve learned in this book up to this point. It’s no accident that it’s a highly recommended company, nor should it come as any surprise that their Hands Free product line is an online and offline success story.
In fact, you could call it a science.
The Science of Becoming Highly Recommended.
Cleary, the next wave coming across small, large, and multinational businesses is moving from engaging in social media to becoming true social businesses.
Here is just a sampling of what some of the world’s biggest consulting and technology companies have to say about social business and why they’re spending so much time, energy, and valuable resources on it:
Accenture, on why the company wrote a book about social media. “Through social media, massive numbers of customers are engaging in new ways with companies and each other. This is having a significant impact on businesses everywhere — whether companies know it or not. While it’s not hard to start engaging in social media, it’s challenging to effectively integrate it throughout an organization and to determine if it’s having a positive economic impact on the business.”
IBM, on why social business works. “When you integrate your business processes with the right social tools, you secure a competitive advantage and pioneer new ways of doing business.”
Oracle, on why it created a social relationship management suite, Oracle OpenWorld. “By fundamentally changing the way organizations connect with their different stakeholders, social is changing the rules of business. . . . With the Oracle Social Relationship Management Suite, we are empowering our customers to embrace this change by integrating the tools required to listen, engage, create, market, and analyze social interactions into existing applications and services.”
Salesforce, on why it established its Salesforce Marketing Cloud. “The Radian6 Social Marketing Cloud will transform how companies listen, analyze, and engage with customers and prospects on the social web. Turn millions of social conversations into dynamic engagements that strengthen customer relationships.”
Each of these organizations represents a sea change in the way Fortune 500 companies—indeed, every company—must respond to today’s evolving and sophisticated online marketplace. Throughout this book you’ve become steeped in the power of recommendations and, what’s more, the different ways to go about becoming highly recommended. Now it’s time to tie it all together, much as OmniClean did with its Hands Free sanitizer line.
While there is a growing dialogue about the importance of becoming a social business, it’s not enough—there is still too much ambiguity. There needs to be an agreed-upon focus and outcome for every department, team, stakeholder group, customer, and consumer.
That outcome is to become highly recommended.
The important thing to note about not just our fictional OmniClean company but very real, very successful companies is that they don’t just “do” social business; they are highly recommended businesses, top to bottom, inside and out.
In other words, for highly recommended businesses, social media has gone way beyond the realm of marketing and communications to impact all aspects of the organization:
HR. Highly recommended businesses aren’t just recommended for their products and services but for their business structure, values, mission, and driving philosophies as well. When you are a company that people both want to buy from and work for, then you are truly a highly recommended business in name and deed.
Marketing. The marketing department for a highly recommended business, while daily challenged and charge with near constant evolution, nonetheless finds itself no longer isolated from the average consumer but, instead, embraced by, or at least in league with, today’s sophisticated and vocal consumer.
Sales. The sales department is often one of the first to benefit from being a part of a highly recommended business. Teams know what customers want and need, and they find ways to give it to them—often before it’s even asked for.
Customer service. Companies who are highly recommended enjoy more satisfied customers and more feedback on why those customers who are dissatisfied chose to reach out—or speak out—in the first place.
Product and service innovation. Becoming highly recommended helps give R&D not only more grist for the mill in the form of recommendations, ideas, feedback, and the like but also more targeted, realistic, valuable, and trusted feedback from a vetted and loyal network.
Packaging and design. When P&D has only itself to work with, its options are limited but internal. When they have a vast network of internal and external, loyal and random social volunteers to draw from, not only is its job easier but it is also more successful each time out because it’s getting real feedback from real consumers in real time.
While it’s easy to talk about “multilevel integration” and “cross-silo expansion” in theoretical terms, we all know that evolution is hard on even the most willing companies, let alone those departments who are both adverse to change and reluctant to veer from the status quo. But evolve we must if we are to capitalize on the opportunities that social media presents for becoming highly recommended and ultimately adoptable.
The key is to focus on the benefits, both for each division or silo and the overall organization, as you evolve into a truly social business that is primed, ready, and ultimately recommendable. That should be easy to do as, across all areas (see bulleted list above), organizations become much more flexible as they actively listen and adapt to market opportunities in real time.
Even with the over-the-head obviousness of the importance of becoming social businesses, most companies today are still just scratching the surface when it comes to truly taking advantage of social media. Jumping in full force could easily become overwhelming, particularly given the specifics of your company, your individual leadership structures already in place, and the silos, divisions, and politics that currently exist.
According to Charlene Li, founding partner at Altimeter Group, “While social media is marketing focused, social business impacts all parts of the organization.”
In fact, according to a recent Ketchum/FedEx Social Business Benchmarking Study, “Social businesses are looking beyond ‘connecting with’ people to building relationships with important stakeholders in a meaningful way.”
We often forget that it’s not just burger chains and hand sanitizers and potato chip companies that drive social business. Social media has changed the economic and commercial landscape so quickly, and so profoundly, that even electric companies(!) are making the switch from traditional to social business models.
“Traditionally,” adds Ammanuel C. Moore of Baltimore Gas and Electric, “the relationship between utilities and customers has been limited to a monthly bill and sporadic phone calls. Today, however, that limited level of engagement is simply not enough. Our customers are looking for a robust, two-way dialogue, not only where it concerns storm-related power outages but to help them become more energy efficient and save money. . . . Social media allows us to interact with customers in ways that make them feel unique and important.”
As often happens after a tipping point has been reached and companies must rapidly adapt to a new, game-changing technology (remember the first few years of the Internet?), there is little existing framework in place when it comes to building a social business from the ground up.
At Zócalo Group, we naturally consider ourselves on the cutting edge of this new recommendation age—or is it the digital age? Or the social business age? See, we don’t even know what to call it, it’s so new. Yet every company we consult with seems to have a different and often drastic approach to how they will evolve into a social and highly recommended business.
What seems clear from both direct observation and reams of research is that while the direct and indirect return on investment on social media and recommendations might be difficult to measure, companies must evolve, and quickly.
While many companies make for many models, there are some distinct parallels among all highly recommended businesses:
1. Philosophy. Before you enlist a single department in your new highly recommended business model, you must consciously, and concretely, lay out your philosophy for doing so, and you must distribute it throughout the entire organization.
2. Buy-in. The entire organization, and all the departments and silos therein, need to be involved in all facets of becoming a highly recommended business.
3. Flow. Linking all the pieces and parts of your organization must occur organically. There must be a form of distribution, or a “flow,” in place, so that what one silo does successfully, everyone else can adopt and what one department does unsuccessfully, everyone else can learn from and avoid.
4. Feedback. The most highly recommended businesses don’t just monitor the online chatter about their products. They also monitor their own chatter about themselves as a company as well. Having ways to offer, provide, elicit, and absorb feedback is essential.
5. Flexibility. What every highly recommended business model must build in, and account for, is flexibility. There is simply no way to adapt to all the rapidly changing technology, platforms, mediums, and trends if you aren’t flexible enough to adapt on a dime. While that can be challenging for businesses of any size, where I see it being the most successful is in organizations where there is flexibility not just at the top, with the leadership, but in every department as well.
6. Freedom. Finally, there must be freedom within each of those departments and silos to respond to their individual network “without a net.” In other words, how being a highly recommended business will look and sound for, say, the sales representatives and their network will look and feel very different from how HR approaches being a social business. And that’s okay as long as there is an approved framework in place for how to respond in real time.
One of the dangers of evolving into a highly recommended business is that, regardless of your philosophy, mission, or values, the rest of the organization will still merely see it as marketing.
Building your business model on the above six premises is putting one foot in the right direction, but the overarching theme must, again, be about how becoming recommended impacts, improves, and, yes, inspires every department.
The question companies ask me most frequently is, “How can I visualize all this once it’s complete? What does a highly recommended business look like?” I think it’s a really good question to ask, and answer, because for one, a highly recommended business is never truly done.
You can build a product, release it onto the world, watch its life cycle evolve, and halfway through that life cycle, begin to work on the next product, service, brand, whatever. You can staff a sales department or human resources division, put it in motion, and reap the benefits, almost from day one.
Getting your people to ever feel truly comfortable about being a business based on what other people are saying can be a challenge, but they’ll soon get on board. The strongest companies, the best companies, are often those that are frequently tested and come out stronger as a result—not just as organizations but as is reflected in their products and services as well.
So here, at a glance, is what a social business can, and should, look like:
Focus on the fundamentals. Highly recommended businesses know that the fundamentals of their businesses are based on the social. In other words, people—and what they say—come first, last, and always. No matter how many departments or divisions you involve, or how inherently the social business methodology gets ingrained in the organization, don’t ignore the fundamentals of what makes a highly recommended business social. Continue to monitor—and then monitor some more—the daily and continual chatter that constitutes the facts and figures of what becoming recommended is all about.
Less is more. Every relationship counts, which is why highly recommended businesses stay in the social media business and deal in the business of one-on-one relationships. The larger the company, the more successful social monitoring gets, the more you need to drill down to each individual relationship to make it matter, make it count, and make it work. Many companies that initially foray into becoming social businesses are really just swapping out traditional marketing with social media and using the same one-way, print advertising, billboard-not-conversation mentality but doing all of it within a two-way, conversational medium.
Participation is required. Highly recommended businesses embrace participation. And yet, another big danger with setting up a highly recommended business model is to do what often happens with most new initiatives, be they mission or value statements, new corporate logos, or production manuals—that is, the companies “set it and forget it.” That would be a mistake. As you continually monitor online chatter, you can’t just record it and file it away. You must remain actively and consistently engaged in a real, meaningful, and regular way. Don’t just do good work and pat yourself on the back for it. Rather, keep up the good work, week in, week out. That’s the only way to be a social business in more than just name only.
Allow for adaptation. A highly recommended business is continually adapting, evolving, and responding to not only its growth but to the growth of the medium and the growing sophistication of its network. Within a highly recommended business, you will hear and see the signs of it everywhere: in sales meetings and when hiring new trainees and in board meetings and on conference calls. This is adaptation, happening in real time and with the complicit cooperation of your customers and consumers.
Continuously improve. Part of adaptation is growth, and part of growth is inevitably, continuously getting better. Having strategies in place to help you grow and learn from each interaction, and every iteration, will ensure that you look, and act, like a highly recommended business.
Much more than academic. Highly recommended businesses are businesses first and social second. One of the biggest blowbacks I get from the rank and file in organizations is how this is just another “trend” that is going to eat into their production schedule and result in nothing more than a new trend next year, and the year after. Work still needs to get done, and the work of most companies—unless they are, in fact, advertising or marketing agencies—is not marketing and promotion. And yet, as we’ve seen not only throughout this chapter but through this entire book, becoming recommended impacts, improves, and inspires every division, team, department, silo, you name it. It’s not just an academic exercise anymore than a taste test or a focus group or a 1-800 customer service line or a trade show or a recruiting program for college campuses. To that end, if you’re going to become a social business, have the pipelines, the strategies, and the distribution in place to put great ideas culled from all of this activity into sincere and practical motion.
Call to action. Highly recommended businesses act on the information they gather and continually integrate it into new product plans as functionality will allow. Not every idea is a bright one, but every exchange is valuable even if it results in knowing what not to do. It is not easy, or cheap, to continually monitor and interact with your online network, and it is less than effective if this is only an academic exercise (see above).
What will your own highly recommended business look like? Only time, adaptation, and evolution will tell. But here is what one social business looks like, and why.
Sometimes it’s helpful to see a line-item list that proves the benefits of a costly initiative that will mean direct change and constant monitoring. So, in that vein, if you’re still on the fence about what becoming a highly recommended business can do for you, let me provide such a list to count the many ways in which I’ve personally watched companies benefit from this revolutionary new business model.
To that end, becoming a social business will result in:
More lively—and worthwhile—internal meetings
More ownership for employees in each division
Richer chances for employees to originate and nurture unique initiatives
More frequent and stronger interactions with your customer base
Easier, and longer-lasting, hiring as a result of becoming a recommendable workplace
A richer, deeper understanding of your consumers, customers, and employees
More personalized and targeted products, brands, and services originating in real-time responses to timely consumer needs
Stronger and more consistent sales
And much, much more
By now, the evidence should be clear: the more connected you are to your customers, brand fans, cheerleaders, industry experts, and loyalists, even to your employees, the easier you are to recommend. Becoming a highly recommended company does not happen by accident; goodwill aside, this is about growing your business in demanding and rapidly evolving times.
Hopefully I’ve provided you with the proper road map to get you started on your journey to becoming highly recommended, but the most thorough blueprint would be able to flesh out only the bare bones of any specific action plan.
Every company, every culture, ever leader is unique, and to that end, your own evolution as a highly recommended business will be similarly unique. In the spirit of frequent updates in response to the latest social media platforms, trends, developments, technologies, philosophies, and practicums, I offer you an up-to-the-minute source for all things social business: www.highlyrecommendedbook.com.
As business trends emerge and new technologies appear, here is where I can update this book via blog posts, addendums, and special reports. I also welcome updates from readers as well, and I look forward to featuring many of your case studies as you share with me your progress from business to social business.
The future is here, and I pledged to do my utmost to prepare you for what’s next. For now, though, your present is ready and waiting. You don’t have to start big, but you must start. As you begin, remember to keep the focus where it belongs: on one customer, one commenter, one relationship at a time.
May you always keep this focus regardless of how successful your social business becomes and how often you are recommended and not just as a brand to follow, a rising star to look out for, a company to do business with, or simply just to work for.
Those companies that get recommended the most know the power of the individual consumers. Their customers are not just people to recommend them. They are people to design products for, devote services to, respond to, and sell to.
The companies I work with, have written about, or have even read about are not successful merely because they’ve become highly recommended businesses. They’re successful because they were businesses who adapted to a social age much as they’ve done everything: one customer at a time. They learned, they observed, they adapted, and they evolved, and now social currency is a part of their entire organization, not just the marketing department.
If you don’t appreciate employees on an individual basis, reward them, and give them ownership and opportunities to advance, you won’t magically “adopt” an attitude of appreciation for your customers simply because of a few comments on your blog or negative reviews on Yelp.
At the end of the day, social media is like one big magnifying glass that cracks open your company and lays it bare for the whole world to see. Your faults, your flaws, your generosity, and your authenticity—all will be magnified to anyone interested enough to take notice. No company is perfect, and none of the businesses in the case studies we’ve read have embraced social media without a steep and often unforgiving learning curve.
The most highly recommended businesses know how to act while under the microscope because it’s not an act. They work hard, make mistakes, apologize, learn from them, and make things right with the customers, the employees, the retailers, the journalists, the bloggers, the distributors, whatever the case may be. They can act naturally under observation because they’re not acting. They’re simply clocking in, getting to work, and doing what needs to be done, regardless of the technology, the interface, or how many people are watching.
What’s more, and here’s the biggie: the most highly recommended businesses know how to turn the magnifying glass around and use the transparency of social media to study, understand, interact with, and engage consumers on a consistent and quality basis. Some see transparency as a danger: “They’ll learn all our secrets.” Others understand it’s an opportunity: “We’ll learn all of theirs!”
The choice is yours: danger or opportunity, obstacle or freeway, failure or success. I can’t divine your future anymore than you can, but I do know this much: you’ll never know until you try.