My response to Joanna Beltowska's post on the Undercurrent blog:

I'm a long-time reader of this blog, and a big fan of Undercurrent overall. I love the analysis of how culture and strategy can end up competing for the same resources internally. But I do want to push back on the Bonobos example. 

I may be mis-characterizing what you're saying, but it sounds a lot like this: Bonobos didn't have a crisis strategy, but that's okay because they only hire good people and they have a great culture.

Maybe it's my background in corporate communications, but not having a crisis plan of any kind seems plain old lazy, and not something that can be held up as a success story.  The site crashed because of high volume at a time when high volumes can be expected? They had to drop all their other priorities to do damage control? These aren't the signs of a strategic team that plans ahead.

Crises like this happen to everyone, and I'm certainly not singling out Bonobos in any way. By all accounts they're an admired company that truly values their customers, and they did everything they had to do to get back up and running. Lastly, as you point out, they've clearly stated their commitment to learn from this set of nasty circumstances.

But you seem to be saying that strong culture can substitute for planning and strategy in a cinch. ("There was no crisis plan. Everybody just knew what to do." "The entire effort was uncoordinated.") And, in my opinion, the proof point doesn't match the thesis. As I said above, their site crashed because of high volume at a time when high volumes can be expected, and they had to drop all their priorities to do damage control. A little strategic planning (on top of their awesome culture) would have gone a long way.

Here's the intro to this week's linkpost for Edelman.ca:

Two VPs at a prominent agency stride into the boardroom of a major airline and pitch the CMO. Their 15 month campaign targets all the major travel hubs relevant to the brand, kicks off with a 15 minute high-value video segment that ties into a dedicated microsite and engages brand advocates in social media. The unifying idea is to feature the two-person teams in the cockpit of every airplane. Expected potential impressions are in the hundreds of millions. The owlish CMO listens quietly and says, “you misunderstood. We asked for a pilot program.”

Like it or loathe it, many companies are no longer making big bets on blockbuster campaigns, preferring to hedge their limited spend with small ideas that can be rapidly evolved. Call it the Google AdWords approach to marketing: launching a handful of small campaigns lets you test your ideas in a live environment, doubling down on what resonates and killing off what doesn’t perform at all. That's a new skillset for communicators, which is why this week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest examines how agencies are adopting an agile mindset to generate good ideas, and can bad ones, in real-time.

You can get a sneak peek at the links here.

I recently had the pleasure of discussing social customer service on a panel with Roger's Gina Mulic, and Booty Camp Fitness' Lisa Simone Richards. One thing I mentioned on the panel was how hard it is for customer service teams looking to go social to find a tool that jives with their workflows.

Luke Brinley-Jones had an excellent piece this morning examining in more detail exactly why customer service has been so slow to move into social:

In many companies, because Customer Services has been slow to wake up to social media, it has lost ground to other departments, such as Marketing and Communications. These now control the corporate Twitter/Facebook accounts.

The relationship between marketing and customer service inside the organization is a really important one, because in most cases customer service has to make the case internally to gain access to marketing-owned social media channels. This isn't an ideal outcome for anybody, least of all the customer who can't get the help he or she needs.

I finally managed to get down some of my thoughts on the subject in the comments:

Your point about ownership is a really good one, as in a lot of cases marketing or PR has had a first mover advantage, and are seen as the social experts internally. The downside to that is that neither of these departments have the talent or expertise to deal with social customer service issues.

PR/Comms has been remarkably successful at launching social media channels, but just aren't equipped to become a lightning rod for customer complaints, which is how a lot of customers are engaging with brands on social media. The end result is that many businesses run great engagement programs to amplify their evangelists and bla bla bla, but won't engage at all with their detractors. That's where churn happens.

One last observation: you make a great point about lack of interoperable tools for social customer service. In my work at Edelman on this very problem, I've noticed that many of the best SMMSs are built for marketing teams, and don't have any of the workflow that a customer service team really needs, like conversation history, tagging inquiries for different topics, closing tickets when they're complete. They also won't report on customer service metrics, like time to respond, volume of tickets per agent, and so on (Cotweet/Social Engage is one exception).

Most of the money for SMMSs has been coming from marketing, so that's where vendors have focused. That's going to have to change if PR/Marketing and Customer Service are going to collaborate on providing a brand experience online that is both engaging and helpful.

It's a great post, that's worth taking a few minutes to read. Check it out here: 10 reasons why customer service has failed to wake up to social media.

Here's something I haven't seen a lot of discussion about: with the switch to Timeline, Facebook will be making some brand page info public, including demographic information about their followers. That means that in the lull between campaigns, community managers will be held to account for dives in likes and follower growth.

Props to Lisa Barnett and Tia Fisher at eModeration for calling this out in their very comprehensive Timeline checklist for community managers:

While some of you may not like this, everyone can now see how vibrant your community is. Viewers can still see the number of likes, who's talking about it and who checked in - but if you click on the likes in the view and apps area (the boxes underneath the cover photo, they can now see a lot more. It will show the most popular week, city and core age group, with a lovely graph tracking people talking about and new likes. (Did you know that most of Manchester United's fans come from Jakarta, Jakarta Raya?)

Not everyone is going to appreciate this transparency but it will mean that you'll be able to benchmark yourself against your competitors.  There is the ability to move this box around within the views and apps area so it appears lower and people have to really search for it - but aren't we living in a world of transparency where community members should be able to see stats about their own community? The definition of community is an area for like-minded people, so they'll want to see if they are indeed similar to other people.

Brands today are compelled to greater transparency than ever. But I can't imagine that the average Facebook user will be particularly interested to know what the trend line looks like for follower growth over time. If anything, this is a move by Facebook to draw brands even further into an arms race, incenting them to put ever more resources into the Facebook ecosystem in order to stay ahead of each other.

Facebook grabbed everyone's attention this week with its first Facebook Marketing Conference (fMC), where it launched a bundle of new features for brands, including the expected (Timeline for brands) and the unexpected (new ad units, real-time analytics).

Any change Facebook makes will cause a ruckus, but what's changed and what games have stayed the same? To help separate out what matters from the hype, here are five big takeaways that jumped out at me. I'd love to hear yours in the comments below.

1. Facebook is the only platform with scale and advanced targeting. Facebook's massive scale advantage needs no introduction. But competing brands like Twitter are only starting to role out features for advertisers and brands that will allow them to deliver the right message to the right customer. Facebook is miles ahead in this race, and doesn't look to be slowing down any time soon.
2. The ability for brands to hide stories on their timeline is going to kick off a controversy. Consumers see trust as a purchase driver, and are demanding higher levels of transparency than ever. Brands will need to address, not hide, their history. Somebody will inevitably do the wrong thing, so expect more discussion. (Related: pinning content at the top of the brand page is just a standard feature for social networks now.)
3. Real-time analytics aren't as useful as we think. Not every team is big enough and nimble enough to implement a real-time content model. For most marketers will continue to harness listening data for program planning, and to evaluate their wins and losses.
4. Facebook is a billion strong focus group at your fingertips. The crowd will respond to your best content. Brands can test content and concepts in a live environment to see what catches on. Double down on what works by boosting it in other channels, seeding through paid media, serializing and iterating, and discard what doesn't resonate.
5. Facebook will continue to expand its scope. It hasn't yet gotten serious about providing content workflow tools for brands, nor has it put serious resources into becoming a commerce platform. Despite recent press coverage of some major retailers shutting their  stores, everyone continues to expect f-commerce to blossom (one exception noted). Taking a cut of purchases made on it's platform would be a lucrative new revenue stream for Facebook, so expect more focus on that. They're just not interested yet.

What has Facebook changed for communicators and marketers, and what do you expect to happen next?

I'm really happy with this week's Digital Digest on social media governance. Proper oversight is one of those things that is constantly getting overlooked by organizations that create a workplace social media policy and leave it at that. But there's so much more to it! Organizations that aren't considering a social media steering committee, launching pilot programs and evaluating trends, opportunities and threats on an ongoing basis are, frankly, not going to keep up.

Here's a preview of the post for the Edelman.ca blog:

A recent IBM survey of 1,700 Chief Marketing Officers paints a picture of constantly evolving challenges at the top. Today’s CMO must ensure their organizations have the expertise to make the most of channel and device proliferation, consumer co-creators, a big data explosion, and of course social media. “Today’s CMO has a pivotal role in determining how companies react to industry trends,” concludes Edelman Digital SVP Michael Brito.

But two thirds of CMOs feel unprepared for social media in their organization. To evolve their social media strategy, communications and marketing leaders need the support of a social media center of excellence. Implementing a social media governance model – a toolbox of educational resources, guidelines (see fifth item), internal experts and agency partners – is a key tool for CMO’s bringing social media into their organization. That’s why this week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest looks at how organizations are structuring and motivating their social media teams.

The full post will be up after 12 PM EST today. Check back here for the link! Update: click here for the post!

I've been throwing around a three-part model for brand supporter personas, trying to understand the different ways an organization can engage with their audiences.

Here's what I have so far. It's very rough and I still have lots of iterating to do, but would love any feedback or thoughts.

Organizations, and the people who run them, will often talk about their messaging and their brand as if they are the same thing, but they're not. They'll say, "our brand is about enabling our customers to be the best they can be." Or, "our message focuses on the promise of a greener planet."

Organizations choose their messaging, but a brand is chosen for them. Your brand is what customers love about your product, how the public understands your motivations, what they trust in your values, whether you deliver on your promises or not.

A successful company has a compelling brand that insulates them against reputational damage. And a company with a bad brand can still have strong messaging (it just won't stick).

Understanding the difference between market expectations and reailty is a core competency for communicators and marketers: as one client remarked to me recently, allow a big enough gap to form between your brand and your messaging and you are setting yourself up for campaign failure.

Bottom line: You can have really great marketing, and you can talk about what you want your brand to be, but unless you're listening to your customers and doing the research you can't talk about what your brand is.

From Fast Co. Design:

[B]rainstorming might work better if it focused not on finding solutions, but rather identifying problems. What if, during a brainstorming session, people weren’t asked to simply throw out ideas, but rather problems as well. Granted, you’ve still got the annoying problem of groupthink. But the fact is that people are usually better at finding fault than they are at finding answers. Properly harnessed, that could be a good thing. Let’s say, for example, you’re trying to invent a new computer UI. It’s much more productive to find what drives people nuts and the features that keep them from doing what they want to do than it is to find out what sort of computer they’d like to have in some idealized fantasy world. Solving such a complex problem as UI design demands a certain subtlety and depth of thought. But those solutions only begin flowing when the problem becomes interesting enough to demand new ideas. My point is that by reframing what we expect to gain from some technique such as brainstorming, we might make it far more useful.

I tried to do something like this at my work (Edelman) a little whlie ago, which I called a Painstorm. We were trying to update our approach to our website, so we put a bunch of people in a room who I knew had opinions about the current product and went through seven areas of focus, asking them to identify the pain points for each area.

It worked pretty well, and helped clarify for me what we should prioritize and what we shouldn't. But I never really felt like the idea got buy-in within the office. Overall I'd say the scope of conversation was too big to handle in one hour, and that left everybody feeling like we hadn't addressed the big issues. But maybe I didn't do a good enough job of "reframing what we expect to gain," as the author suggests. Or there may be some other flaw in focusing on the negative.

Read the full article: The Brainstorming Process Is B.S. But Can We Rework It?

Here’s a teaser for this week’s Digital Digest, the summary of digital marketing news I curate for Edelman.ca every Friday: