Polinchock's Ponderings

I'm Still Asking - Do we Really Want to be Friends with Brands?

Yep, I've been asking this question for a while and some recent posts/Twitter conversations stirred it up again for me. Do we really want to be friends with a brand?

Without a doubt, there are brands that we maintain more of a relationship then we do with others, but in most cases, here's what I think we want from brands:

• That they deliver. Tell me you're going to do something, I expect you to do it.
• That they listen when I have a problem. I don't want you to listen to me 24/7, but when I have a problem and reach out, I expect to hear from you within a reasonable amount of time. Reasonable depends, of course, on what my issue is, I don't actually think brands need to respond in real time to every comment someone makes. As a side note, I had some serious issues with United airlines a few weeks back and I'm still waiting to hear from their Twitter team.
• That they give me deals. My guess is that a vast majority of people who follow brands on Twitter or like them on FB do so mainly to get deals.

As I said some time ago, SM in business isn't really about friendship, it's about business. We wrap SM up in the language of friendship, but more often then not, it's about generating business. If you're following more then a few hundred people, do you really have a relationship with them? Or are these new tools just another distribution channel to get our information out? Look at how many companies still use Twitter or FB as a one-way communication tool, not And BTW, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's OK to conduct business, that's what businesses do.

But, if you're going to talk about relationships, then you need to talk about how relationships really get made. We need to really define what business friendship means. Autoresponders don't work in relationship. Hiring someone else to speak for you doesn't work in a relationship (except for Cyrano de Bergerac and that worked for the wrong person!). And honestly, you can't be friends with millions of people.

So, maybe it's time to put this entire social discussion to bed. There are lots of great companies, big and small, that people love and admire. And people liked them long before we had this whole social thing going on. They made great products. They delivered on their promises. They took care of me when I had a problem. They rewarded me for my loyalty. Companies doing that aren't social companies. They're smart companies.

Are We Overhyping this Whole Tribe Thing

Challenging Conventional Wisdom

My Social Media Blog Posts

Report: Facebook Ad Performance Is Abysmal

A few years ago, I made the observation that just because a lot of people go there, doesn't mean it's a good place to advertise. For example, almost everyone visits funeral homes, but that doesn't mean they're a good place to provide advertisements.

So now Webtrends is out with a new report that shows that maybe, just maybe, advertising on Facebook isn't really driving that much, at least as it relates to click-throughs. As they say in the article, many brands use Facebook for more then just their click-through rates, so maybe this isn't a deal breaker.

Still, putting your ads in front of people because they're there, doesn't seem to be driving business. Content without context is just noise.

UPDATE: You can go here to see more details about the report.

Facebook’s advertising business is soaring. Yet the performance of the average Facebook ad is abysmal.

At least that’s according to a new report issued by the analytics firm Webtrends that recently examined 11,000 different Facebook ad campaigns which totaled 4.5 billion impressions. Webtrends found that in 2009 the average click-through rate on Facebook was 0.063 percent. That figure slipped to 0.051 percent in 2010.

Because of that decline, CPMs on Facebook have crept upward, going from 17 cents in 2009 to 25 cents last year.

The only ad categories that were able to crack 0.1 percent click-through rates were "tabloids and blogs" (0.165 percent) and "media and entertainment" (0.154 percent). The worst performing ad category on Facebook, per Webtrends, was healthcare, which generated 0.011 percent click-through rates and an average cost-per-click of $1.27.

However, Facebook’s CPMs are still relatively low in the grand scheme of things (consider that video ads on Hulu can sometimes fetch $50 CPMs). And while many advertisers turn to Facebook to drive traffic or sell products, many traditional brands use the site for its social value, not its propensity to drive clicks.

Yet even "social ads"—at least as defined by Webtrends—are only effective for so long. “Out of the ads we measured, we found that interest-targeted ads began to burn out after three to five days,” reads the report. “Eventually the rotting CTR leads to Facebook deactivating the ad, and it’s back to the drawing board.”

Regardless, advertisers continue to flock to Facebook. According to eMarketer, ad spending on Facebook will reach $2.19 billion in the U.S. in 2011 and close to $4 billion worldwide.

Report: Facebook Ad Performance Is Abysmal.

AdScam/The Horror! : shit you need to know!.

Challenging Conventional Thinking - Polinchock's Ponderings.

Social Networks + Advertising = Amway - Polinchock's Ponderings.

Shouldn't We Make Place Special?

Last week, during the NRF Big Show, there was a lot of talk about how to change retail to be successful in today's world. I spent a lot of time with Bob Phibbs and Marge Laney walking the floor and talking about what we were seeing throughout the show.

Dozens of companies were showing mobile apps (to be truthful, they were trying to show mobile apps. Thanks to the incredibly crappy cell service at the Javits, they frequently didn't work.) and it was the hot topic of numerous presentations throughout the program. The emphasis was on putting information into the hands of the people.

And, mobile shopping tools certainly seemed to be a big part of the 2010 holiday season as well. Anecdotally, it seems that the use of cell phone based price-checking tools was on the rise this holiday shopping season. Best Buy reported lower sales and speculation was that people were looking at the items at Best Buy, but buying somewhere else. I know lots of people who do that. Yes, I do it too.

Look at some findings by a recent survey by Motorola:

A majority of retail associates (55%) said that 2010 holiday shoppers, driven by increasing availability of online shopping tools and mobile phone applications, were better connected to consumer information than in-store associates, according to a survey by Motorola Solutions.

The survey found that retailers that aren't investing in technology to stay ahead of increasingly tech-savvy shoppers are hurting their own bottom line. Nearly three in 10 (28%) store visits ended with an average of $132 unspent due to abandoned purchases driven by deal-habituated behavior, out-of-stocks, limited store associate assistance and long check-out processes.

As the Motorola survey confirms, a lot of the conversations and presentations was about how since consumers couldn't get help from the sales people on the floor, just give them the information they need on their cell phone.

There was also a great deal of conversations about making the physical retail store work and act like an online store.

Now, I'm a big of creating Oneline™ brand experiences and have also been speaking for many years about the need to e-tail your retail. So, I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't give your shoppers more information or deliver it through tools like mobile, QR codes, etc.

But, based on many conversations I've been having lately, I'm also starting to think that we're missing a big opportunity to emphasize just what makes place special. As I've said in the past, I continue to think that there's a coming trend to socialize the retail environment instead of just merchandising the real estate space. And the more we try to use the space for our purposes rather then our guests, the more they'll stay away.

Can you afford to have hundreds of thousands (or millions) of square feet of retail space and all of the expenses that go with it, and just have it act like windows for people to do online shopping? And they may not even shop online at your store! Can you continue to support online social media efforts while creating physical spaces that are almost anti-social? Sure, open up your info so that I can get it on my cell phone. But shouldn't you also hire better people and do more to train them? And create better physical spaces?

I think that retailers with physical stores need to spend a little more time looking at what makes place special. Stop trying to compete with the online world by making your places more online-like and start competing by your rules. Use place to your advantage.

Every time I go to an Apple or Lululemon store, I wonder why more retailers don't copy their model. They work. They generate great loyalty from their consumers. And they generate great return for their investors. There are plenty of other examples of retailers, big & small, that use place as an integral part of their business success.

If you're putting more effort into turning your stores into a web site, rather then capitalizing on what makes place unique, you might want to start looking for a great real estate broker to help you sell off your stores.

Motorola Survey: Shoppers better connected to information than store associates | Chain Store Age.

Download Sticky Soul - Some Thoughts from a Retail Walkabout

Riddle Me This...

More Thoughts on the Value of Place.

Polinchock's Ponderings: Customer Experience.

Polinchock's Ponderings: Retail News.

Do You Want to be a One Hit Wonder?

If you look around, there are plenty of companies that will tell you they can create videos that will go viral for you. And since the birth of youtube, that's been the holy grail of marketers -- get a video to go "viral."

Arguably, the first video to be called a viral sensation was the Evolution of Dance, which as of today, has received 158,913,650 views. It currently sits at number 8 on Youtube's most viewed videos list. It was a huge success when it came out four years ago and everyone was talking about it. Contrast Evolution of Dance 2, which has received less then 10% of the original views and think about how many times you've talked about Judson Laipply since the original video came out. Yes, Judson Laipply. That's the name of the person in the Evolution of Dance video. Bet you didn't know that.

Currently the number one video of all times on youtube with 410,894,455 views, is Baby by Justin Bieber featuring Ludacris. This video has racked up an incredible number of views in just 10 months, which is pretty impressive. Justin Bieber may be one of the few who move from one hit wonder to success via youtube.

Another thing to note in the top 10 list of youtube videos is that only 2 of them are UGC. Charlie bit my finger - again! sits at #3 with 259,233,077 views and Hahaha sits at #10 with 150,711,439 views. These 2 are almost certainly one hot wonders since it was the circumstances that made them hits. not the content alone. The other 8 are all professionally made pieces of content.

I sometimes wonder if we in the advertising business are really in-tune with what consumers are really thinking. If you look at One Club / Best of the Digital Decade > Top 10, you'll see that Subservient Chicken is at the top of the list. (To be honest, I've always been miffed about this because I used a similar technology about four years earlier, but hey, their content was more fun.) But, when I talk to students and people outside of the ad industry, none of them have ever heard of Subservient Chicken. And while it did a great deal for Crispin, I'm not sure what it did for Burger King.

So decide what you want to be. Sure, there's value in being a one hit wonder and it's easier, but I think there's more value in being something better then that. But you shouldn't confuse being a one hit wonder with being a long term success. That takes a lot more work.

Challenging Conventional Thinking

UPDATE: As I was writing my post, Fast Company came out with their piece, The Future of Advertising, which has generated a great deal of conversation the challenges facing the advertising industry. What's interesting is that the same challenges facing the biz were probably said when we moved to from print to radio; from radio to TV and every time something new arrived. I recently wrote:

Of course, there's no mention of creating better commercials that people actually want to watch. And that's the challenge with any ad that's delivered without consumer control. As long as they don't have any choice, we don't really worry much about the content.

I wonder what would happen if agencies got paid based on the Nielsen ratings for their commercials. If most people skip your commercial, you don't get paid. If it draws big numbers, you get paid a lot. Betcha' that would change the industry a lot.

Yes, technology is changing things. But have you seen any movies set in the future, say Blade Runner or Minority Report? What do you notice about those films as it relates to the future of advertising? Yep, that all of that time in the future and advertising is still pretty pervasive. In fact, it's even more pervasive then it is today. Think of those giant billboards from Blade Runner or the famous (or infamous, depending on your POV) scene where retinal scanners welcome Tom Cruise to the Gap. The only future world I can think of without pervasive advertising is the one from Brave New World and there, they train you in-vitro to be a consumer. That's pretty pervasive.

While we talk a lot about the measurement of advertising, one thing we don't do is connect advertising to sales. Yea, it's not always a direct connection, I get that. But at the end of the day, business is about selling things. What we do in advertising has to have a positive impact, doesn't it? Many of the recent hits in advertising seem to have created better opportunities for the agencies that created them then they did for the brand.

So it's time to challenge some of the conventional thinking about SM and the ad biz in general. Too often we just accept things as truth without really questioning them. In the end, we may find out that they in fact are true, but let's do some questioning for a few minutes, shall we?

• Really, You Do Control The Message. I think this where I disagree most with conventional thinking. Sure, you may not control the distribution of the message, but you start the message. You have all of the control based on the experience you deliver. People amplify the message you start. You want people to pass along a good message, give them a good experience.
• SM in business isn't really about friendship, it's about business. We wrap SM up in the language of friendship, but more often then not, it's about generating business. If you're following more then a few hundred people, do you really have a relationship with them? Or are these new tools just another distribution channel to get our information out? Look at how many companies still use Twitter or FB as a one-way communication tool, not And BTW, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's OK to conduct business, that's what businesses do.
• There is no such thing as word of mouth marketing. WOM is not a marketing strategy; it’s the outcome of a great product telling a great story. And let's not forget that many WOM programs start with the brand telling something to someone. WOM doesn't occur in a vacuum where the product just mysteriously appears and people start talking about it. If you're paying people to talk about your product, that's called advertising.
• Do we really want to be part of a tribe? I think that there are really just a small number of brands that inspire people to join their tribes. They can be big companies (like Apple or Urban Outfitters) or smaller companies (like Moosejaw or maybe a local bookstore). But I'm not sure the vast majority of companies will ever inspire people to join their tribe. We usually just want the products we use to do what they're supposed to do. By pretending all brands can create tribes, we're creating a set of expectations that the vast majority of companies just can't deliver.
• More then most industries, the advertising biz thrives on the shiny bauble syndrome. We can't wait to play with the latest tools and too often, we declare them the future of advertising. We jump from tactic to tactic all the while pretending that they are really strategies, not tactics. Just in the past few years, ad agencies have transformed themselves from ad agencies to Second Life agencies; branded entertainment companies; WOM marketing agencies and now social media agencies.
• Too many companies are using SM only at a surface level. Yep, companies like to talk about the consumer being in control, transparency and all that stuff. But are they making changes that matter throughout the organization? Whole industries -- like banking or airlines -- continue to operate in complete disregard for what's in the best interest of their customers. Their policies and procedures still show how they really feel about the people who buy their products. Hiring some folks to Tweet or handle your FB page doesn't change your business. Putting your employees and your customers above everything else, that changes your business.
• It's easy to get people to talk about you, it's much harder to get them to engage with you. When I'm speaking at events, I always joke that if I were doing my presentation naked, I could get everyone in the room to talk about me, but probably not as many people who would save a place for me at lunch. Too often we confuse talking about with engaging. Talking about can lead to engagement, but only if there's real connection behind it. Are you really delivering on your message or do you say things simply to get people talking.
• SM is a new way to engage. The tools we're using today are new, but SM is as old as people. The first cave drawings were SM. Pamphleteers were SM. It's faster and broader today, but the underlying concepts are the same as they've been for thousands of years.
• Advertising is the cost of being boring. Nope, advertising is the cost of doing business. Zappos does advertising. So does Apple (I've seen at least six Apple commercials while I've written this article). They're not boring brands, are they? Yes, some companies, like Urban Outfitters, don't do traditional advertising, but again, they're pretty few and far between. And is it advertising that's really bad or is it how we do it?
• People don't mind advertising, they mind how we deliver it. I talk a great deal about just in time marketing in my presentations. People want information about brands and products, but more and more, they want it on their own terms. What we don't want is the constant interruption of advertising. It's everywhere and it never stops. Companies that spend their time looking at how to captivate, instead of capturing their audience, will be the companies that people want to hear from.
• Social Networks + Advertising = Amway. When I was a kid, everyone knew at least one AMWAY salesperson who never stopped looking for a sale. They were constantly trying to sell you or convince you to become an AMWAY salesperson like them. We didn't like it in person and we don't like it in SM.
• If you think that listening is new, then you're already in trouble. All too often, I hear people saying that the really cool thing about SM is that it lets you listen to your customers. Some companies have even added Chief Listening Officers. But thinking that listening to your customers is a new way to engage just shows how out of touch most companies are.
• You can't force listening. Have you ever been in a conversation and you really didn't want to listen? You nod politely, you occasionally say something, but mainly, you're planning what you're going to say next. You're not really listening and having a conversation. You're simply exchanging sentences. You can't force someone to listen. And if you look at how many companies still operate today, they're not listening.
• Legacy vs. history. This will someday get it's own post, but there's a huge difference between history & legacy. Legacy holds you back. It's what keeps those policies & procedures in place, even when you know they're not right. It's the walls that you put around creating a better experience. History guides you to the future. It's knowing where you came from.
• Few like to co-create. Many like to complain. Yes, there are brands that have created tribes that want to help co-create your brand. But more often then not, people like to complain when you've done something wrong. And complain they will. When you've wronged them, they will make sure that anyone who listens will hear about what happened. Remember United Breaks Guitars?
• No man can serve two masters. In the battle between doing what's right for customers or doing what's right for the investors, the investors usually win. Again, there are a few companies who buck this trend, but mostly, companies do what's best for investors or shareholders. Banks continue to add fees to boost profits. Airlines nickel & dime customers every way they can to add to the bottom line. It's OK for companies to make money and to make even lots of money. But when they do it at the expense of customers and employees, that's when things are wrong.

For over 10 years, I've been talking about the need to create authentic, relevant and compelling brand experiences and it's even more important today. And yes, I think SM and all of the new tools available to advertisers today can have a very positive impact on business. But let's put them in the right place. Let's question what we're hearing today and really see how these tools can make our businesses better. And if you want to think that this is a new way of business, then really change your business. Lip service doesn't really do service to anyone.

ADDITIONAL READING

Polinchock's Ponderings: Social Media.

Polinchock's Ponderings: Future of Advertising.

2010 Predictions - Polinchock's Ponderings.

Are You Just Hunting?

Originally published in 2003, before the social media craze started, these are five ideas that every company should still be exploring today. I believe that these five rules are even more important in the social media world we live in today.

The Marketing Chase Continues

It’s not just a cliché, it is a new world. The problem is, if you listen to the language of marketing, it sounds a lot like the language of a hunt. It’s about capturing the audience, capturing “eyeballs.” Capture audiences everywhere and claim that as success. I know it’s not a pretty image, but I keep seeing the pictures that were used years ago to protest seal hunts—except that now the marketing community is holding the clubs and the consumers are the seals.

During the last decade, I have read business plans and heard pitches for new media formats such as advertising on postal trucks, on ATM machines, and at gas pumps. The ideas range from the ridiculous to the outrageous. What makes this even more bewildering is that in a time of media uncertainty (increased fragmentation, declining viewership), costs are going up while frequency and reach are going down.

Here are some surefire rules to help integrate your media mix to increase efficiency and efficacy.

1. Make it compelling. Is there a narrative story that the audience understands? Is there a narrative at all? What is the story that you tell to your customers every day? Could you define it? More importantly, can your audience? Make the product experience as good as the marketing experience. After the consumer leaves your event, will the message be retained during the actual consumer experience? This is probably one of the trickiest things to accomplish for those of us in the event marketing industry. After all, when we’re producing events and tours, we sometimes have a better opportunity to control the hiring of the event staff and the script that they will follow. But what happens when the consumer leaves the marketing event and experiences the real product?
2. Deliver on your message. Here’s something that I like to do, and I challenge you to see if your brand could stand up to my test. I was on the phone with a bank, trying to resolve a problem with an account. During the course of my conversation with the customer service person, I asked her to dinner. She got a little nervous, then I explained that since the bank marketing message is, “Where the right relationship is everything,” and since I wasn’t getting the satisfaction I was looking for, we must not have the right relationship. I was only trying to create a better relationship in order to improve my banking service.
3. Don’t use slogans to deliver an empty promise. Do you say that you’re committed to total customer satisfaction and then create rules of engagement that are of benefit to you and not your customers? Do you train your customer service staff to only say yes to a request after the customer has asked a certain number of times? Are you prepared to live your slogan in everything you do, and not just the easy things?
4. Make it a movement. Jim Ward, vp-marketing at Lucas Films, said recently that the next generation of brand marketing is creating a movement. Would people camp out in front of anything for up to three weeks for your product? Many companies have created movements—just listen to any Mac user talk about PCs. Is your brand a movement or simply a product? Are people passionate about your brand, your products, and your services? Do they sincerely want to share their stories of your brand with other people? Are you telling the same story with all of your employees? Are they telling the same story to your customers?
5. Be authentic. If you need more answers, talk to consumers. Be who you are and leverage what your company stands for. I recently had the opportunity to work on a product for a Fortune 100 company, helping to position them to a specific target audience. They wanted to talk about speed, but as anyone who has worked with large companies knows, speed is not one of their authentic story lines. They had many other authentic stories to tell, but it took a while for them to understand that and work with different language. Note that stories must be organic and can’t be rushed.

Remember, it’s a good story when people want to hear it, tell it, and participate in it. You can create a story that people will want to share in—once you do, your brand won’t just be a product.

Download "Are You Just Hunting?

Chief Listening Officer???

As reported in Marketing: How 'Chief Listeners' Track Brand Mentions - Advertising Age, Kodak & Dell have both hired Chief Listening Officers to help them listen to what people are saying about them.

Chief Listening Officer? Are you kidding me? You mean a company like Kodak, a company that almost completely lost its relevancy because it lost its value in the marketplace, has hired someone to listen? Because apparently no one else in the company could listen? What, is the marketing department too busy?

As I wrote here & here, the fact that we think listening is a new skill to be applied just shows us how far off the mark business is today.

Everyone should be listening. Companies shouldn't need a dedicated listener and certainly not a C level person. They should already have a customer service department who theoretically listen to customers each & every day.

And if the CMO is wondering why their average tenure is 18 months, maybe its because the companies have to hire someone to listen to their customers, something they're clearly not doing.

Brands That Push Messages Out, Now Starting To Listen - Advertising and Marketing Blog - AdPulp.com.

Chief Listening Officer - 5 Blogs Before Lunch.

Meet the Chief Listening Officer | NevilleHobson.com.

Really, You Do Control The Message

Earlier today, Giuseppe Pacheco Tweeted "You No Longer Control Your Company’s Brand" with a link to You No Longer Control Your Company's Brand | Spin Sucks. BTW, I responded to Guiseppe right away with a link to one of my earlier posts about this topic and I follow him, so I usually like his links.

Now, you know how I feel about this "you're not in control anymore" blah, blah, blah conversation. I don't buy it. I think we're still behaving like consumers and companies are still behaving like companies. Sure, there's always exceptions to the rules, but outside of SM superstars, I'm not sure that the average person is really seeing a big change in how companies are operating.

While reading around the blogs this AM, I also came across this very fun post from The Ad Contrarian: It's A Wonderful World with this:

It's obvious. They have to advertise. Advertising is what you have to do when you're failing.

This is because the internet has created a new species of human being. And these new human beings live in a wonderful world in which they have relationships with all the companies that make the products they use.

And the only time companies need to advertise to these people is when that relationship is broken and failing.

And you know what I really love? The irony that most people writing about this new world order, do so using an Apple computer. A brand that not only advertises a lot, but does very little in the way of social media they all talk about. They very much control their message. Do you remember what happened when the new iPhone was leaked? The iPhone Leak Gets Ugly: Police Raid Gizmodo Editor’s House, Confiscate Computers. That's a company that wants to control its message.

Sure, we all like to complain about companies. We like to use Twitter and our blogs and whatever to complain. But none of that is new. In fact, most of what's happening right now isn't new. We just like to think it is because who wants to talk about old things, right? As I say, those that don't know history are destined to think everything they do is new.

As I wrote in Everything Old is New Again, this is just another part of the cycle that we go through. Advertising joined the industrial revolution in the mid-50's (maybe earlier, but I'm starting with TV) and now, maybe we're heading back to the pre-industrial days. The days when it was really all about the brand experience that a company delivered.

One thing that hasn't changed is that you still control your message. People amplify the message you start. Start with a great message and that's what people will amplify. Have a bad message and that's what they'll pass along.

But pretending that you don't have any control over the message is just being lazy. It means that you're not going to try to craft a better message or experience. It means that you're going to let someone else do your job. That's not a really good way to keep your job, is it?

Be Human & Listen, This is the Best Advice We Have? - Polinchock's Ponderings.

Stop Listening to the BS - You Do Control the Message! - Polinchock's Ponderings.

You can read all of my posts about the future of customer experiences at Polinchock's Ponderings: Customer Experience.

Everything Old is New Again

For years, people built brands (really their businesses, we didn't know about brands then) by learning how to deliver a consistent experience across everything they did. The product, their service, everything was teed into their business and they're profitability. They got instant feedback from the people who were their customers and word spread, both good & bad, based on the experience that was delivered. If you think about it, it was really all viral and social marketing back then, we just didn't have the technology at we talk about today.

At the start of the 20th century, we saw the industrial revolution change how business was done. It was no longer about a handmade product made in your local town, products could now be mass produced in factories that could be very far away. The product no longer had any connection with the local community. The consumer didn't know where the product came from and, thanks to the lower costs mass-produced allowed, they probably didn't care that much about what they lost in the mass produced world.

In the middle part of the last century, branding was introduced. We created characters that became the icons of a brand. We pretended for the most part that brands had a personality and that there was something foe a real difference between product A and product B. The titans of the advertising industry created emotional reasons for us to buy a product. We heard slogans and saw characters come to life in radio and then TV. It was a new world for brands.

For 40-50 years, we build brands as a specially crafted and scripted experience. It was like being on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disney. We liked to pretend that our skipper was coming up with these lines off the top of his head, but really, it was a well scripted experience. Every touch point was carefully controlled. We didn't mind, it was still a good ride.

At the turn of this century, as the Internet boomed, we saw the rise of social media. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Amazon, Zappos. We suddenly new technologies and new brands being launched every day. We talked about building a relationship with our consumers. We talked about the transparency that the new social media world demanded. We talked about moving beyond the scripts to having a dialogue with the consumer. We talked about authenticity and engagement.

Then came the movement that said you don't control your message. Your audience controls it. You need to give up control. Be free. Allow your audience to co-create your brand. Let them be your partners in this branch new world for brands. And companies started acting like they were listening. Some companies even did listen. In my experience, most just continued doing business as usual.

Maybe we're heading back to the brand that existed before the industrial revolution. One where everything was local. One where good WOM built a company. And bad WOM buried it faster then anything else could. A world where the consumer expected and demanded to speak to the "man in charge." A world where complaints were taken seriously and dealt with as swiftly as possible. A world where your word had meaning and both buyer and seller took your word seriously.

But the honesty, transparency and need to create a great experience from beginning to end are here, possibly stronger then ever. And despite what you've heard, you do control the message.

Online Privacy, are we asking the wrong questions?.

You can read all of my posts about the future of customer experiences at Polinchock's Ponderings: Customer Experience.

Are We Out of Touch? Are Companies Really Changing?

I was on the Twitter chat for customer service last night and the topic was "How do companies with bad customer service keep going." During the hour-long chat, there was a lot of discussion about how SM is transforming companies and how it will force companies to rethink customer and employee engagement.

But as I wrote in Be Human & Listen, This is the Best Advice We Have?:

And that's the really key question. Despite the boom of SM and this discussions that companies need to open a dialogue with and listen to their customers, how many companies are making changes to their core business processes to reflect a true believe that we've entered the age of relationships.

As I listened to person after person say that SM is changing how companies are doing business, I tried to look at the retailers and companies I do business with to see if they've made any core business changes and honestly, I can't say that I've seen a lot of changes. Have you? Think of the companies you visit or shop. What core changes have they made thanks to social media? Sure, everyone likes to talk about a company like Zappos, but Zappos is an excellent company that uses SM, they're not an excellent because they use SM.

Remember the stat from The Experience Disconnect? 80% of CEO's believe their companies give superior customer service. 8% of their customers agree.

I then asked a question that I think will be part of a customer service chat in the future: Are people who participate in a Twitter chat about customer service different then the average consumer? Do we see things differently then the average consumer? Is the fact the some folks in SM have such a reputation that when they make a complaint say on Twitter, the company responds faster then they would for an average consumer? I've had some very fast responses on Twitter, but I've also had companies never reply to a question or request.

And I'm wondering if there's too much of an echo chamber in the Twitterverse. Are we really in touch with what the average consumer is doing? Are people who are not participating in Twitter chats about customer service really seeing a change in how companies respond to them? And what companies are really changing the way that they do business because of social media.

So, I'm asking that question. Can you identify companies that are fundamentally changing how they do business because of SM? And I would separate large, multinational companies from smaller, regional companies, although I'd love to have both on the list. What companies have started really treating their employees differently because of SM? How much of what we're seeing is short term vs. long terms changes?

If you have companies to add, put them in the comments below. Please add the companies and the changes they've made to their business. I will gladly share the list as it gets built.

If you believe that SM is really changing how companies do business, let's start seeing the examples. My personal experience is that most companies might be talking about the changes, but I'm not seeing the changes on the frontlines.

You can read all of my posts about the future of customer experiences at Polinchock's Ponderings: Customer Experience.

Great Question -- Why Don't Brands Create Better Experiences? - Polinchock's Ponderings.

Is This the Ad Future? Customer Service Wins Titanium in Cannes - Polinchock's Ponderings.

Another Reason to Think Oneline™ - Polinchock's Ponderings.

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