I never intended to become an intermediary between Marketing and IT, but somehow, even from my early days of internet marketing consulting back in the ‘90s, I ended up there. There were times when I wasn’t sure whether I was a marketing consultant or a technology consultant, but that blurring was the exact balance needed at the moment.

The field that needed this blurring became Digital Marketing. To function, a digital marketer needs to know how technology plays in defining the customer experience, in delivering strategic customer insight, and in the digital engagement itself. Technology is, quite simply, inherent in digital marketing.

The danger that comes with this is falling in love with technology, and forgetting that technology must always be subservient to purpose.

2 Problems Working With IT Solves

One example is that Marketing will often take on a technology project in the name of it being a “marketing project”, when they would be better off collaborating with the IT department. Marketing doesn’t have the technical expertise to do it well, so they end up in various sorts of trouble, often with with scaling or security. These are particularly problems with mobile and social technologies. Either the company ends up in trouble, or IT has to come in and fix up the mess, both of which aggravate the relations between the two departments.

The worst result, from a corporate perspective, is that Marketers spend their valuable time tinkering with tools rather than engaging with customers (You’ve heard of the Social Media black hole, haven’t you?).

A second example is the use of analytics tools. Marketing people all too often fall in love with their analytics tools, as if the tool will replace thinking, empathy and insight. The result is motion, commotion, and much action, but not progress. What is missing is the human-to-human connection that comes when people read past the data into the lives of their customers, and then adjust the marketing campaigns in ways that result in more conversions.

Oddly, the problem in this case is simply information overload, and that is where collaborating with IT would help.

Marketing needs to communicate KPIs and other marketing goals to IT, and let the tech department tune the analytics system to them. Then the Marketing people can spend their time doing what is most important — adjusting the campaigns to meet the KPIs, not sifting through mountains of confusing and largely irrelevant data.

Finally, taking the reverse relationship, I found in my organizations that tech didn’t hate marketing as much as lore would indicate. They just wanted a little respect. They really appreciated it, for instance, when I involved them in our website technology analysis work instead of only calling them when there was a crisis. The analysis was for marketing purposes, but the request showed respect for the expertise and capabilities of the people in the IT department.

I could give you more stories, but the moral of each is that the two working together can do more to create kick-ass customer relevance than either working separately.

Take a fresh look at your organization and see where the two departments can seamlessly work together. See how much better things will go when they do. See if you can get the collaboration started.

Related articles

• Avoid These Top Five Digital Marketing Mistakes (customerthink.com)
• Digital Marketing: What’s Next For the Digital World? (digitalvegetarian.com)
• Adobe To Acquire Digital Marketing Agency Efficient Frontier (searchengineland.com)
• The Evolution of Marketing Agencies and Consultancies (marketingprofs.com)

Thanks for visiting. Will you please rate your reading experience?

Wait, this one is even better…

We’d like your feedback.

Thank you for visiting my website. You have been randomly selected to participate in a customer satisfaction survey to let me know how I can improve your website experience.

The survey is designed to measure your entire site experience and will appear at the end of your visit.

This survey is conducted by me.

Ridiculous, isn’t it? Yet that’s what we as marketers constantly do in our efforts to gain brand recognition in a world increasingly led by social media. We poke our customers to give us better ways of serving them. Something’s wrong with this picture.

The promise of social media for marketers is the customer information it makes available.

The challenge of social media for marketers is how to use that information to create better brand experiences for the customer.

But even with social media tools, getting this information isn’t always easy. So, simple customer survey tools, like Survey Monkey, are crutches many marketing managers rely on to manage this complex task.

Why Should You Care What Customers Think?

The idea is that if you ask a customer directly what they like or want in their experience with a particular brand, the company can better meet their needs (i.e. sell them more stuff, more often).

Certainly, a high degree of customer satisfaction directly correlates to a company’s financial success on both micro– and macro-economic levels. The link between customer satisfaction, sales, and ultimately loyalty is powerful, because data often links customer satisfaction ahead of sales by approximately a week.

But slow down, cowboy. Don’t start crafting your survey questions quite yet for that big boost in sales next week…

How Can We Better Serve You?

The problem with simply asking a customer a few questions about what they liked about their brand experience  is that it doesn’t work.

One of the most eloquent examples of what customers really think when they’re taking your survey is at Laraine Herring’s blog, where she writes:

Am I satisfied with my teeth cleaning experience? Well, what were my expectations of that teeth cleaning experience? Were they reasonable or were they what I wanted rather than what I might have needed? Why can’t it be enough just to have my teeth cleaned? If the dentist stabs me in the gum with a sharp tool, I promise I’ll say something. Otherwise, just please clean my teeth. Were the heavens supposed to crack open? Should I have expected a Hallelujah chorus when she put the bite wings in for the X-rays? Did they serve me wine and cheese? Please. It’s the dentist.

How did I like my recent car’s tune-up experience? Well, actually, I would have preferred if you’d have used Bay 3 for the work as my car really is sensitive to north-facing windows. I also think the tool boxes should have been in red instead of that sad metal color, and I would have really liked it if my mechanic looked like Johnny Depp. What can I tell you about tuning up a car? Nothing. Because I. Don’t. Know. How. To. Tune. Up. A. Car. If the mechanic slashed my tires, poured oil in the gas tank, and drained and forgot to refill the radiator, I promise I’ll say something.

And, I would be remiss if I didn’t include this beauty from noozhawk.com:

Z: You can’t buy any goods or services anymore without being asked, “How did we do? Are we good enough for you?”

She: It’s very needy. It’s like that boyfriend who’s way too concerned with how he kisses. “Am I kissing you too hard? Should I peck more? What do you want me to do?”

Z: I’ll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to man-up, corporate America. I want you to own your products and your services.

She: Seriously. The entire world is not your focus group

Customers have complex motivations, and simple customer survey tools, used to excess, fail to address these needs. Routine customer surveys often damage more than they benefit a brand.

So how do marketers get more customers in this experience economy without conducting surveys?

Your focus must be on understanding and delighting the customer, which can’t happen just by putting together a survey. Most of the customer surveys I see are really focused on the needs of the business, even though they’re packaged as focusing on the needs of the customer. The customer taking the survey intuitively knows they’re not likely to see a complete change in the product service if  they don’t have any strong feelings about it one way or the other.  Surveys become like white noise.

Surveys are really putting customers in unnatural circumstances, all the while being asked to share deep feelings about a brand. It’s certainly not the best way to get the truth of how customers really feel.

How To Understand Your Customer

The social web’s transparency and powerful tools allows you, as marketers, to gain a deep level of intimacy with your customers. Web analytics allow you to track and measure many of the dimensions of a brand’s relationship with their customer that simple surveys can’t touch. There are millions of searches daily using the words and phrases related to your business. Now you can use web search engines, as well as social searches (of which Facebook analytics is excellent).

You extract the ultimate value from these searches when you seek to understand the intent behind the search. You may have all of the demographics and survey results on your market, but can you extract ‘why’ they buy from you with that data? Not likely.

To really understand your customers, you need more than a customer survey, you need to understand their behavior. For instance, if you’ve purchased Vespa Scooter accessories, you’re likely to purchase some again. If you’ve gotten Botox, you’ll probably do it again (and that, in itself says volumes about you — from a marketing aspect, that is). Getting behavioral data from customers takes some time, but is relatively much easier to gather given the social monitoring and listening tools available.

Bottom line, don’t annoy your customers with surveys. Do the work of segmenting customers. Understand your customer’s lifestyle choices and personality preferences with psychographics data. Glean the behavioral choices I wrote about in the previous paragraph from the psychographics data.

And most importantly, be sensitive to this depth of aggregate customer information you have, by showing empathy and compassionate understanding in your campaigns. This empathy creates a memorable customer experience — much stronger than answers to a simple survey after they’ve purchased your product. When customers experience the empathy in your interaction with them via a campaign or on your website, they will make their satisfaction known. Without a survey to prod them along.

Related articles

• Monitoring Relationship Status (ducttapemarketing.com)
• The folly of getting customer feedback through automated surveys (thecustomerblog.co.uk)

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A while ago, I wrote a blog post on 5 ways to measure success with social media marketing. Today I ran across a great real-world example of the difficulties marketers have when setting up and measuring meaningful metrics in social marketing from Aliza Sherman at Web Worker Daily.

I agree wholeheartedly with Aliza Sherman’s point that we are “using antiquated ways of measuring online activity and interactions. We are also hamstrung by how each site, network and tool defines and dictates measurement in their own proprietary terms.”  Don’t I know it! In my consultancy, we’ve created and re-created custom dashboards to measure the specific interactions that are important to clients. We’re reinventing the wheel all the time in this regard because of the limitations of proprietary tools.

“Here are some key points I’d like to make about the problems with social media marketing measurement. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these, and any others that may come to mind as you read this:

1. Social media is nebulous. The term “social media” can encompass many tools from the Web 2.0 era, depending on who is using the term and what they are trying to communicate. There is no definitive, well-understood, totally agreed upon definition of social media, Wikipedia be damned. Lacking clearly defined and agreed-upon terms is a big barrier to measuring anything.
2. It’s not social media, stupid. I don’t think any of us are actually trying to “measure social media,” per se. We’re looking to measure the reach or”…read the rest of the blog post on the problems with measuring social marketing here.

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• Can You Measure Social Media Returns? (pamil-visions.net)

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Ever wonder about the value-chain of location-based services ? What are the successful business models and payment schemes for location-based services? What are the trends for the mobile location services market? I found a rather pricey, but very informative report on location-based services that I think all social media marketing firms should take a good look at. You can find it here.

As someone who has worked in internet marketing for over a decade, I’ve seen location-based marketing businesses come and go. With the huge growth of social media apps, these important services seem to have gotten a boost — not to mention the approval of a variety of patents in the location-based service space.

Consumers spend a lot more time on mobile devices than ever before, and social media marketing consultants need to understand this technology and its implications inside and out. It’s not only for large corporations and government anymore.

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• Dangerous: location-based services come with risks (matei.org)
• It’s hip to be where? (blogs.chron.com)
• What you need to know about location-based services (lostremote.com)

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Image via Wikipedia

That, in itself, is not odd since I’ve been speaking at web conferences since 2002. What has been different this time is the types of conferences I’ve been asked to speak at lately. They’ve all been conferences directed at Women and particularly, Moms.

Why all of the seemingly sudden interest by corporations in marketing to multicultural women? Perhaps the stats can help tell the story:

• At $1 trillion, the purchasing power of women of color represent the 10th largest global economy — as large as Brazil’s GDP! (Source: World Bank Indicators Database, Sept 2004)
• The earning power of women of color is highest.
• Businesses owned by women of color represent the fastest growing segment of the U.S. economy.
• African-American women are the primary household decision makers.
• The ethnic beauty industry is expected to grow to $11.0 Billion by next year (2010)

Clearly, it’s easy to see why marketers are looking for ways to promote their products to a more diverse audience of women. The economic benefits are really exponential if marketers get it right and don’t market to stereotypes.

I’m honored to be considered an expert in marketing to women of color online, as a woman of color myself, who’s been involved in web marketing since 1999.

My overriding goal is to help marketers understand and target multicultural women better. I help marketers to nix stereotypes, nix generalities, engage better, build growth and loyalty.

Kudos and many thanks to the conference organizers who have asked me to speak to their largely female audiences about social media marketing on behalf of all women of color.

• Blissdom
• Touchpoint
• Blogaglicous

I’m looking forward to building a future with marketers who recognize this incredibly important market. If you’re a marketer who wants a bit more information on what multicultural women’s needs are, check out these key takeaways to our Blogalious panel on Social Media and the Woman of Color.

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Twitter is yet another example of where brands have to accept a loss of control. In this case, it is not about putting the brand in the hands of the market but in the hands of the people for whom the brand is their livelihood. A certain amount of letting go is a necessity. We will undoubtedly see a few missteps in C-tweets, and we’ll learn and move on. Ultimately, the medium may change but basics of branding still apply — both for the brands themselves and for their executive stewards: Be true, be relevant, be transparent, respect your brand and your customers, don’t make a promise you can’t keep.

Check out the rest of the blog post about C-Level Tweeting at AdAge.

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I happen to love the attention I get from personal brands. There’s nothing like feeling that you’ve been singled out to be chatted up by a Tony Hsieh — CEO of Zappos.com, or Gavy Vaynerchuk from WineLibrary.tv, or any of the many personal brands who are active on social networks.

That’s just one upside…and for me, it’s all personal.

Well, actually, as smart companies know, it’s not all personal. Good one-on-one interaction is good business.

It makes it easy for consumers to choose that company’s products and service offerings. So much beauty in social networking — companies engage in online conversations and customer communities to boost business! Who doesn’t love to feel like they’re getting personally heard from a company representative? It’s so Mom & Pop, but with much better, faster service due to the internet.

So what’s the downside?

The sole person behind a personal brand simply cannot maintain the same level of personal interaction a team who is representing a company can. So, one day a ‘lone cowboy’ personal brand may interact heavily with customers and prospects. The next day, business obligations may prevent any interaction at all.

For some customers, this is just enough for them to loudly proclaim to their social network that Company X sucks because Personal Brand at Company X ignored their pleas for product support, or whatever. You get the idea.

From a customer standpoint, personal brands can potentially cause more brand damage than good for the company. Customers demand attention when they want it, and don’t give a flying flip about anything else that may be more pressing to personal brand respresentative. Upset customers vent all over the internet. The reputation management fallout is a lot more expensive for companies than simply hiring a team to help manage their brand online.

This is all just common sense. Companies, if one of your star employees is looking to become a star on the internet, seriously consider whether it’s in your company’s best interests to support that during work hours. If you decide that your business will thrive by having one shining star out of your employees represent it, definitely develop a contingency plan — a Social Media Brand Management Plan B, if you will, in the unfortunate event of that employee’s exit from the company.

Considering the precarious nature of managing your brand via Social Media in the first place, what should your Social Media Brand Management Plan B entail? Here’s a few, for starters:

• Immediate team brand deployment to regain control of conversations regarding your brand.
• Company branded Twitter, Facebook, etc, social network accounts.
• Full access to conversations and contacts made by your previous social media star

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Geoff Livingston posted a great list of 25 ways to know whether you’ve got a strong Social Media Consultant or Agency. This was in response to the recent influx of “social media experts” entering the space who are clearly unqualified and can cause more harm than good to your business.

Some salient points for Marketing/Communications Managers to consider from his post:

• “Integrates social media as part of larger marketing strategy(example: Razorfish)
• Understands that Radian6 and other monitoring tools are vastly superior tracking tools in comparison to Technorati (which really isn’t an indicator of much these days) (example: Fleishman’s Matt Dickman)
• Understands that social media expands beyond search engine optimization tactics that lead to Diggs, Stumbles (StumbleUpon) and link baiting (example: Key Relevance’s Li Evans)
• Knows that social networking works best when they are conversing, sharing, and being human (i.e. doesn’t self-promote) (example: Jason Falls)
• Understands that social media is more than just creating and delivering content or regurgitating existing promotional copy Joseph Jaffe”

If you’re ready to start communicating with your customers via social media, choose your social media consultant with care. Check out the full article here.

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