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A survey by the CMO Council released by AdAge reveals some alarming stats amid a lot of talk, although there are some shinning lights amongst the haze.
Proctor & Gamble and Unilever are leaders in ‘conversational marketing’ and understanding social media.
Last month Unilever held a word-of-mouth summit dedicated largely to understanding how social media affect its brands and Proctor & Gamble have a refreshing approach to engaging in social media.
“Aside from technology, it’s almost been a natural thing for P&G to [listen to consumers],” said Stan Joosten, innovation manager-holistic consumer communication. “What technology does for us is truly extend what we can do. For the first time ever with this technology, conversations are visible to us. … You cannot start in social media without knowing how to listen.”
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Some of the key stats from the survey of 400 executives were:
- 56% said their companies have no programs to track or propagate positive word-of-mouth
- 59% don’t compensate any employees based on improvements in customer loyalty or satisfaction
- 30% rated their companies highly in their ability to handle or resolve customer complaints
So again, it comes down to social media being a very exciting space, however, little actual action.
However, it’s not all the marketers fault, kind of, it’s more of an organisational change that’s required…
One problem for marketing executives is that they’re not clearly in charge now of managing the customer experience, customer loyalty or social media today, given that public-relations, sales, consumer-affairs and research-and-development departments all have a stake in those areas now.
In any case, this space of ‘conversational marketing’ and utilising social media is one that requires leadership internally from marketers, not from external consultants.
The only kind of consultant required to get your business ready for all this is someone focused on cultural change and change management, something Jenny Williams from the Idea Garden has been talking about for a while. (We interviewed her on Love Digital a few months back)
January 29th, 2009 on 3:25 pm
Oddly enough, everyone I meet in marketing/advertising/PR seems to have the word “strategist” in their title. And yet I don’t actually see much “strategy” – a holistic view of customer/consumer relations and an integrated approach to building those relations – being done. Is this unfair? And if it is not, what is preventing CMOs from demanding this from their employees and advisors?
Is it simply that commissioning ads is easier than driving change in your organisation where you may not have as much influence as business unit general managers?
January 29th, 2009 on 3:33 pm
Strategy/ist = the hardest thing to explain
I think you’ve hit the nail Matt. They’re comfortable, risk averse and down right lazy. Marketing Managers have fun creative roles to come up with ideas, not something as boring as change management, ha!
February 6th, 2009 on 6:06 am
I love this quote from Miko Matsumura, deputy CTO at Software AG. “For every silo, there is a tribe with its own political interest to horde things.” Therein lies the issue.
The ownership of the customer experience is spread across stake holders as you mention above. In addition, the social media experience is silo-ed across applications and platforms. It is no wonder that most resort to tactics in social media marketing.
However, as much as this beast has been around for 2-3 years, many are just starting to use it. It is difficult for most to consider it a strategy until they understand how it works. When we get better metrics that measure to core business objectives I think you’ll see strategy come into play. P&G and Unilever already had word-of-mouth strategies so social media was another vehicle to plug in. Most don’t.
February 6th, 2009 on 9:55 am
@mgoetz thanks for the input, very interesting. Why/how/what were they doing in WOM? Maybe that’s an alternate path to get clients into social:
Step 1: Do word of mouth
Step 2: Realise value
Step 3: Expand to Social Media
??