This idea has become so ingrained in our heads the leading names in digital end almost every talk telling us how it’s our primary goal to bring knowledge to the organization less we get tempted to think this can go on forever as a silo. They’re right – and really it’s bigger than that.

Channels no longer make sense.

Five years ago it was reasonable for someone outside the digital group not to know what ecommerce stats were used by the business, the basics of how search works, or even what the value of reviews and social content was. Five years ago the web no small channel but it was still disparate on all levels.

Now the web is big. Really, really big. We have Facebook with nearly one billion people connected to a social portal. We’ve got mega retailers in category after category falling to online competitors or – and this is the crux – technology smart retail names. We use to think it was ecommerce vs traditional commerce but now we see it’s really how one supports the other. Impulse, showrooming, comparisons, it slices both ways.

To thrive everyone has to think digital – and analog – at all once.

The web isn’t a secondary channel anymore – with the power to check everything literally in the palm of the customer’s hands it should be clear that there are no channels – all that matters is the experience and whether it involves TV marketing, retail stores, customer support, or web research — the customer is pulling it all together to one conclusion: buy or move on.

Silos that exist inside the corporate office have no impact and make no excuse when someone logs online to find that their store-purchased gift card doesn’t work or goes to the store to find that the SKU they wanted is $50 more in stores.

Enough with the “we have a team for that”

When it comes to details it’s no surprise that an expert is needed but you wouldn’t hear an executive pass up a high level question about how the store works, about if TV is still driving customers, and you shouldn’t hear one about the web. But I hear it all the time. I hear the “I don’t really get that, only my kids use it, that’s not really popular, what do you mean they can search our website in store…” and litany of other comments that try to deflect the fact that many have pushed and pushed to avoid learning this new world. But it’s not going away.

It’s not an overnight issue but then again we’re not talking about ground-level details either. I’m simply saying that it’s time to throw away the “call those guys” attitude and realize that to create a great experience “those guys” have to everyone. We can’t put up walls or make excuses – the customer knows too much.

Related reading: The Struggle To Engage Across Multiple Channels Rages On

Weeks later you get a notice that a friend is mocking an article you read from the same site. Confused as to how they knew this you head to your wall only to find out all Fashion & Lifestyle blog post you’ve secretly been skimming over have been shared to everyone you know. Even your mom.

In fear you vow never to allow an app again — but then you see a photo and its funny cats — and you just have to say yes. So you click ok again…

What’s happening is “frinctionless sharing“… A genius idea (really, I mean it) from Facebook that was designed to help make sharing things you regularly use easier and less invasive. But as with so many good idea, the problem isn’t in they thought up but rather in how it was used.

There is a solution to stop this forever. And it takes just 2 extra clicks.

While sites can force you to Facebook connect in order to read their content, even require you to permit frinctionless sharing they can’t control who you share too.  So next time you get a prompt like this follow the 3 steps below.

Example App Screen from HomeMint (who I think does sharing well)

1. Click on the drop down below the text “Who can see posts…“.
2. Then select “Only Me” from the options list (or limit posts to a list you’ve created)
3. Confirm the app and you’re good to go.

The app will still be able make posts (so you gain entrance) and you’ll still see them too… but no one else. Of course other settings like your info, posts, and friends may be exposed so consider those as well.

And as a marketer I do want to remind you that not all apps are bad:

Most of the time when you connect it’s because you want to do something and sharing that makes sense — so if you believe the company is going about it in a respectful way there’s no need to lock the app away in the corner (for example at giftery.me we give you the option before we share & let you remove it in a click after we share). After all frictionless sharing is about helping improve your experience and bring your friends in… but when it’s being done wrong, well, that’s when it’s time to change.

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A note to my regular blog readers: I realize this post is a departure from my normal insight straight to the other side of the table and I promise it won’t happen often. However as more companies have started to take “frinctionless sharing” as an invitation for forced & unannounced sharing I’ve found myself answering this question far too often.

Sufficient to say we should all strive to build tools that people feel comfortable adding in a way that’s transparent so they don’t feel the need to limit us.

It seems that, to keep rates looking low and win eyeballs on third party travel sites, hotels from Vegas to Disneyland are adding in mandatory fees presented on arrival which cover the obvious and not necessarily the used (I’ve seen them for gyms, pools, etc) with no choice but to agree.

Deception exists when perceptions are not set.

It’s bad enough when you have to pay for the obvious (how many people want WiFi versus in-room coffee) but when something is mandated upfront, it must be in the buy box, the sub-total — right in front of the customer. Sticking it in the fine print of a corporate is about as transparent as making it up at the time of check-in.

The implications to brand & the bottom line are no small addon.

Gaming the customer can return a short-term gain but we must consider the long-term result that follows our experience and the reputation it creases.
Price may lead the buying process but 5 full or empty stars sit right next to it and the impact shows. I don’t have hard numbers but inline comments from TripAdvisor, Yelp, Expedia, and even Hotel sites paint a clear picture of how, after a resort fee enters the equation, negatives go up, perception of value goes down. That game causes the equation to shift.

This is not just true of hotels either. Any time a customer is forced into something after the fact — whether its required component to an electronics device not put in the box, an unexpected servicing need, or whatever, it’s going to leave a bad taste to the customer and give them a reason to cry out to the world that is always listening.

As comments shift from accolades and experiences to tips and warnings, the very issue which the resort fees are mean to skirt (pricing perception) becomes the focus as people become that much more aware, and comparison focused as they fight to understand the true (all-in) value being offered.

Social must be a part of the entire corporate culture.

While social is often caught up in the Facebook/ Twitter/ Google+ channels, it is really the buzz word that sums up focusing on reputation both as the spread of knowledge and the reality of immediate experience.

By thinking “social” outside of marketing it it’s possible to see beyond a single channel… A resort fee augments revenue and tricks sales today, but businesses to not survive on today alone thus what happens to experience, reputation, social must be just as important to sales and ops as it is to a marketing team. Companies cannot survive working in isolation.

When people are surprised by a forced cost it trumps everything else… Even if the value remains great.

This brings us to how advertising currently works.

First off I had switched devices using a service with no login so there was almost no way Carnival could have known I was looking at camping gear to either target towards me or away from me.

Second in their buy the frequency cap was obviously high enough that I kept seeing their spots. Since the creative changed frequently I’ll assume this was intended but it upped the effect.

Third advertising has become so network driven that companies often have no idea where their spot even is. I’m not entirely sure Carnival ever intended to target hard rock and pop video audiences with this ad or at all.

The big point here is that my preferences had no opportunity to make it to Carnival. Carnival does a good job engaging in social platforms but advertising (not just theirs) remains almost entirely one way and let’s face it, VEVO does not (and should not) put my camping affinity as the #1 insight to understand.

Privacy has always been cited as the block for getting smart with ads but that’s because we want everything to be done behind the scenes in a stealthy, “we tracked you and you didn’t know it” way.

One ad in to my viewing I would have gladly told Carnival to reach someone else just as I do all the time on Facebook ads with the little [x]. It’s not that they were dead wrong in reaching me, that’s going to happen, it’s that it kept happening. The same is true with TV. How many ads do you see that are totally irrelevant ans yet repetitive (and I’m not talking getting that blanket awareness effect for Coke Zero, I’m talking vocational schools when you have a PhD)? Lots and your chance to tell them? Zero. What’s the mighty “ROI” for those advertisers? Probably also near zero.

I’ve been to Brazil and the Bahamas in the last 12 months, much as we want our message to be a hit on the first impression and to figure out exactly who to reach to get the best response that’s not always possible — sometimes we don’t know who we’re reaching and sometimes who we’re reaching is not who wants our service right now.

But once we do show up the feedback loop works to tell us what to do next yet it’s not being used. We’ve got 3 variations of TVs on the market, a new type of media player every day but where’s the remote with the “no thanks” button? It’s time to build a dialogue into advertising, not to share the ad, not buy from the ad, but to make sure it’s the right ad.

With social the approach to measuring has really crept into the same process. Sure we had – and still have – a lag in getting to the right data, the naysayers who argue that if you don’t measure ROI elsewhere, why measure it here, the people who say you can’t, or shouldn’t but all said the abundance of metrics in the space have made it too tempting for companies to peer beyond the social stats and into the business results.

But what I learned through all that media buying, all that “what’s a sale” ROI analysis is that the TV / Radio / Print people had one things right… as good as metrics are, they only tell you story of how to grow those metrics and that isn’t always a part of the greater tale of what’s making you succeed.

Social metrics only count what they can see and they can’t see much.

How many of your customers make a purchase, walk out of your store elated and immediately call a friend to advocate your brand to them? How many times will you be mentioned over beers during Sunday football? Or in the mall during a shopping trip? The answer is that you don’t really know… We get indicators through surveys, customer rep interactions, but we never profess to measure the absolute number let alone bottom results that a casual mention brings. Social is no different: we’re able to access a slice of the conversations but it’s only part of the pie – and a shrinking one at that.

Measuring Word of Mouth: No one includes a track code in their conversation

The most common Social ROI calculation comes by taking the number of people who click a link from a Tweet, Facebook posts, etc and within the same cookie-measured period convert to an action of some sort whether that’s a sign up, a lead, or a sale. This is simple, logical and traditional ROI methodology and yet fundamentally misses measuring how social actually works: person to person.

Just imagine if this scenario were applied offline…

Running off of the previous sample people are mentioning brand all over the place… in the mall, around a sports game but you’d even dream that they’d include a specific reference code along with their endorsement or that when the people they told it too walked into your business they would recite that code, or much of anything about the introduction, back to you. On the web it’s the same. People don’t share links that you pick. They take your story and write their own intro, they mention you once in a longer tweet, or as a offshoot in a blog post and the more embedded the mention is, the more relevant and authentic it becomes. An affiliate link from a friend is worry little; a raving review is worth everything.

Measuring Conversations: The door is closing on what’s being said

A recent CEA survey indicated that only 26% of people believe they’re sharing anything publicly on social networks. As the demand for privacy is grows, people are cutting off read access and locking down across many tools and that means less to see, less to read. But the desire for reporting doesn’t slow just because the data is limited; instead we turn to what remains open and use that. Twitter, parts of Google+ and the open posts on Facebook. On one hand all good barometers to gleam out individual remarks and action they remain fundamentally flawed by their population bias, by their sample size and thus as an overall read the fail provide anything comprehensive.

It’s like doing research on your nation-wide customer habits by only calling people who live in Texas.

Even if you’re more sophisticated, doing backend data matching with your follower list against customers, you’ll still be left making conclusions off a fraction. Think about it: the top brands have 5, maybe 10 million fans against 10 or 20 times that many customers….  People like a page on their terms and often long after getting a product, if ever. But does that mean social was missing from the equation?

Measuring the “other “benefits: Social is more than just sales, much more.

Just as important as how we measure is what we measure and the evidence is that it’s not all about the sales. Again this is natural — the flow of social is that people who have experienced, who have a problem, who really like what we do are the ones that connect, not just those on the fence. Thus the benefits come all over… cost savings in service… reputation improvement… a boost to retention… even product development insights.

But while sales are easy to break apart, the so called “soft benefits” are no. What’s lift of knowing to put more cheese on the next pizza? How about in answering the phones quicker? These are tough questions with no direct result and it often takes months or even years for a chance to fully impact the consideration and purchase processes. So we turn back to what can see and what we always use judge marketing because face it, we’re still calling social media, and that’s sales.

So while we may remark that there’s “other benefits because we can’t quantify them per interaction, per fan, per anything into a clean dollars and cents column, ROI becomes sales on investment, reduced calls on investment, coupons printed on investment and we quickly stop considering anything else.

But it’s not just what we measure: How we influence has changed.

The sales funnel is no linear. There’s no entry point, no requirement to visit a store, order a catalog or go to a website to start thinking about a brand or a purchase. Smartphones, tablets, kiosks, mall stores, retail, ecommerce… we’ve gone from one to two to over a half dozen purchasing channels.

And how we expect to behave is shifting as a result. When you can share anything and you know your network can access everything, what matters is your spin, your opinion why waste characters on a link everyone knows or can find. Amazon gives out a $5 or $10 offer and more tweets ask people if they used it or about it than end up linking to it. If you only tracked the clicks to conversions, you’d miss success.

By following what we can see, we’re abandoning the big picture.

The danger isn’t in measuring what we can see; it’s in assuming that what we measure is what’s happening. When we have data we logically want to follow what it says but in social the data is just an indicator of what’s risen to the top, what’s public, what’s got our magic link involved.

If we make that slice our focus where does it lead us? The logical jump on making more that we can track, more of the same, more of what we say is “working”. Abandon the casual mention, forget people telling a friend, the smartphone photo in the store, the self-made pin… those don’t associate with clicks, leads or sales. Instead bring out the funnel… the offer sign up form, the coupons, and the contest.

Those aren’t bad things on their own by any stretch but are they social? Do they have correlation to opening up to interact with our customer? To show our expertise? Build our sense of value? Reposition our brand in a market that expects transparency? Or even drives people to want to tell their friend so they can try it too? By focusing on what call ROI what we’re saying is focus on what can carry through to ROI and while that’s improving, it’s the story, it’s not what social really does, it’s not where success is.

… When I was a new direct response marketer I let myself believe that the influence my message had was captured by a funnel we created, we defined and we wanted to force. Social is the inverse of that reality and it’s our job as marketers to insure everyone understands the distinction between a useful datapoint and an all-encompassing report. If the conversation becomes “do ___, it’s giving us the most customers” we’re not doing it right.

Now let’s step back and look at the other side of the picture: Just about every major brand has caught on to the idea of “engagement”, everyone wants to “have a conversation”, to “be authentic” and “get connected”. But authenticity remains a tactic relegated to a channel; it’s still social media vs marketing vs retention vs business.

This company already had a dialogue with me on Facebook that was actually pretty useful — they responded quickly, other customers even chimed in some agreeing and some suggesting that I had the wrong expectation, awesome [note: social to CRM still = huge opportunity ]. But why would they then call me and read a script to try and jam an offer down my throat?

It’s not that we should abandon every sales technique to simple have a casual chat with people but rather that we have to really accept that we’re making this shift in social channels because people have changed. No one cares if their interaction is via a Facebook post, a tweet, a cashier at the retail store or the retention team, in every case the expectation for what we as marketers call transparency is the same. Good business is good business.

So when we talk about bring social to the entire organization it doesn’t just mean get everyone a Twitter account. It’s about looking at the transformation in consumer expectations that’s happening and addressing that across the entire company because it impacts the entire process.

Had this rep opened with the same intro but asked me why I left I probably would have told him. Had he been given flexibility by his supervisors and autonomy to decide how to respond to my answer – to see if I was right to upsell now or simply file a note for later instead of being tasked with trying to close everyone no matter what into a reactivation his brand could have built goodwill and been the subject of this post in an inverse context.

Reputation isn’t made on a social network; it’s built by the product, by the service, by the value of the entire chain. Improving perception, getting reviews, driving sharing and all those related benefits that so desperately want from social means taking a social approach far outside the marketing cubes… otherwise we just fall flat on our face: one channel on its own is not change.

Like fan counts, the contest, the charity donation for every follower, the freebie for a like, all were at one point novel ideas so when we first did them it wasn’t a bad idea, we weren’t trying to reach the world, we were trying to get people who had never “faned” a brand to do so, to get our existing base to recognize that we were on this new medium so we ignored their wants and expectations in order to just get in front. But now it’s the everyday: a SoCal billboard from a company I’ve never heard of promises $25 to an organization for my Facebook click. Their name isn’t Coke or McDonalds, is the entire world really appropriate to be targeting to become a fan?

It’s time for that to all stop. Not to stop running programs but to stop running them for the sake of picking up whomever we can. It doesn’t make any sense.

Whether the platform calls it a like, a follower, a connection, a circle member or whatever what we’re talking about is brand fans, people who we can hopefully connect with around what we sell, who may share a post, who want to comment back and give us an insight and that requires a mutual relationship – they have to be interested, we have to know why they are.

With a gimmick we know exactly why the person’s following but yet we pretend that’s not it. We pretend that everyone is ready to connect with our brand and just needed a push to make it happen. So we tell the tell the team we’ve added 200,000 people this quarter who want to engage with us and meanwhile our comments all start to read “first to post” or “give more stuff away”. They’re engaging all right, just not with what we offer.

Social as a tactic is young and there’s certainly going to me times where we decide to do something to get seen but we have to remember why we’re doing this – to connect, to be a part of the conversation, to get a chance to talk to our customer. So when we read that most brands can’t beat 1% engagement rates, can’t find the “ROI” [I’ll save that for another day] the first issue we should be thinking about is who we’re even bringing in to talk to that would make those numbers change.

 

“We can fix your reputation on search engines and put good reviews first”… If you’ve turned on the radio or network TV in the past year or two you’ve heard the companies claiming to fix brand reputation by reordering results and even creating content. The ethical ones draw a line at impacting existing reviews while the bottom of the barrel doesn’t just outright admits they’re making stuff up and either way the message is clear to consumers: the review system can be gamed.

Of course gaming is not only bad companies trying to pretend to be good; scan through enough reviews and you’ll find gems like this one: “I haven’t bought this but everything XYZ makes is overpriced so I give it a one star”. Whether its brands attacking each other, service providers raking in money with promises of hiding bad reviews or consumers gone rogue in a negative [or even positive way], there’s a growing credibility problem with reviews.

There’s no doubt that reviews are downright vital…. in fact Millennials place more trust in others than friends & family, and we’re only getting started. However as reviews grow in importance, the efficacy of the system is taking a serious hit – reviews will become less trusted and now is the time for companies to tackle the problem.

1. We need to validate reviews on our sites.

When Starwood announced their review program last year what stood out was their move to validate every comment. Knowing what’s on their site is real is a powerful move, and moves the ball to trusting that they don’t filter, not that the reviews were made up.

2. Reviews must be presented authentically.

When companies re-order their reviews or even worse, just list the top ones, the entire concept becomes useless. As research has shown, it’s not the 5-star rating people want to see… it’s the reality of the product, the fact that someone has an issue with it, even if the issue is a non issue. Being honest with how we show reviews gives people a reason to believe that what we’re showing is all inclusive.

3. We need to provide a method for others to validate off of.

Amazon is as much a research site as a purchase one – etailers and content sites are not just getting reviews from their own sales / bookings. They need a way to authenticate too and that means those of us making products or selling services have to move to being more open, to provide  a mechanism identify a real customer by anyone.

This is not an easy path. If you sell in store how do insure a product review is real? If you turn away someone because they don’t validate aren’t you just encouraging them go to a third party site and make even more noise? Validation is by no means a simple process but it’s the right step to move towards to make those reviews count and to root out the problems, whether they’re negatives or positives. In the end transparency wins out.

The approach, and the comment aren’t unique this one retailer or retail at all but rather it’s just one example of the growing gap that exists between how companies operate at the point of interaction and the growing focus on customer experience in corporate.

As this discussion was taking place I could see the lines growing… and yet employees were visibly scampering around to other parts of the store, backrooms, and out the frontdoor for their current task. Some consumers waited and filed the experience away into their own head while others likely chatted about the long waits to whoever they were with on the spot or when they got home and then of course there are the few people who pulled out their smartphone and shared it with the world right then and there. But no matter how they acted, no matter what the, tickets / cashier or any other store KPI may have been, the perception of the store was impacted.

Just about every company has or is in the process of creating a team tasked with building reputation and yet these teams are often kept away from the process where impressions are actually made, left trying to leverage the good outcomes and mitigate the bad ones. For stores, call centers, even web teams, the focus is often on the same metrics they’ve known for years: items per basket, cashier efficiency, upsell dollars – drive the bottom line. It’s not the two sides are at odds with each other, it’s simply how they look at the world – social attacks experience to drive results while stores look at results to determine what to do in experience.

When the idea of social business first started to catch, we could only see as far as our team – how do we in corporate marketing get more people talking, how do we drive more reviews – agencies did this, brands did this, I did this, well did this – it was, at the time, the right way to go. But now we know better, we know that while we may say “social”, we don’t mean what happens at Facebook or Twitter, we mean what happens at the store, with the returns call center, during the tradeshow that creates the experience which will make it to Facebook.

So when we talk about bringing “social” to the entire company it doesn’t just [just] mean get everyone on Twitter to respond to questions, it’s about changing the culture, the metrics, the very way we do business. We have to think about what’s going to make our reputation against what we want out of our business – is our price point low enough to really be able to get away with long lines? Is our service really what we think it is?

Social should start in corporate, it should be managed by a team, defined and run as a part of everyday operations but that’s not where it ends.

Customers form their opinions at every interaction point and the impact of each positive or negative is huge – even if it’s never put out with a public comment that the corporate team can see. This requires a complete shift; we can’t assign reputation to a small team and leave those on the floor who actually make it ignorant of the realities of the market. To improve reviews, shares, likes – social, we have to improve the experience first.

As email has become more competitive and customers have taken to a variety of communication paths, most notably social in 2011, sends have become much more individualized with companies in the same category and channel sending very different offer types and frequencies.

Looking at the overall trend, it appears volume is up, likely as companies continue to strengthen their digital competency as well as the size of their offers.

The Volume Counts:

• Brookstone – 114
• Restoration Hardware – 55
• Bath & Body Works – 54
• Macys – 42 [includes sub brands, i.e. rewards]
• Harry & David – 41
• Victoria’s Secret – 42
• Zales – 42
• Ice.com – 39
• CircuitCity.com – 38
• Eddie Bauer – 37
• NewEgg – 34
• Pottery Barn – 32
• NFL Shop – 31
• Sports Chalet – 28
• Best Buy – 29
• Costco – 27
• Target.com – 24
• Bed, Bath & Beyond – 23
• HP – 22
• BananaRepublic – 21
• Dockers – 21
• The North Face – 18
• Zappos – 15
• See’s Candy – 15
• SiriusXM Radio – 12
• StarbucksStore.com – 11
• Quicksilver – 7
• The Art of Shaving – 7
• Mophie – 6

The misses & future opportunities:

1. Many companies repeated messages, offers and creative. While emails do go missed, trends become notable and as shoppers key in, response is reduced. By diversifying messaging points, even with the same baseline offer, activity increases to see what “different”.

Restoration Hardware is just one example having sent 4 identical titled emails in 1 day.

2. Significant oversending continues to be a wide-spread problem with Brookstone setting the bar at 114 emails in around 90 days. While more volume can drive short term sales, finding a balance helps insure list quality and continued usage throughout the season and minimum opt-out requests.

3. Only a few companies addressed mobile viewing. With the huge spike in mobile this year, the implications of being accessible are significant — increased awareness and offer usage for retail and being a direct alternative for etailers.

Harry & David and Best Buy offered a mobile links on messages improving their shot at converting shoppers on the go.

4. Almost no companies leveraged social to validate messages. By including user generated content such as user reviews, comments from other shoppers, or more abstract programs like gift tips, social can help email become more authentic and lessen the spammy nature of offer only messages.

Samsung keyed in to both reviews and Facebook chatter in one of their email sends.

Note about the data: I track emails starting in September that mention holidays through to new years. Messages are sent to a dedicated account and regularly opened to fire tracking tags but are not acted on [no purchases] to avoid segmentation changes and of course some messages do get lost in the mix, this is not scientific.