Many companies seem to have legal departments that put up huge barriers to adopting communities and other social media programs that include employees, customers, prospects and even detractors. In fact some put up barriers so high that nobody can do anything in the space. Now, if your competitors cannot find a way to overcome those objections either, you may be ok, but if they do and manage to extend their business processes to leverage the power of the internal and external crowds, it may be “game over.”

Typical legal objections include the issues related to brand protection, engaging hourly workers as part of internal communities, the threat of liability for what employees say in public, having employees socialize online instead of doing work, meeting regulatory compliance requirements, and more. While most legal departments will claim that their situation is very unique, at the end of the day the issues are fairly common among many companies.

I do not think that there is one best practice on how to overcome those objections. Some companies find it easier to get legal involved upfront in the process, while others are asking legal to quantify the risks and then balancing those with the benefits or the risks of doing nothing. One good bit of common sense (as recommended in this BT case study) is to make sure that you do not overhype what you are trying to do and position it as something radically different from other programs. Many companies already have policies in place that cover things like email communications and acceptable behavior in public forums - which could possibly be extended to virtual environments without too much change.

What have you found to be working?

When we conducted the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study, we discovered that those companies that were most satisfied with their community efforts were those that measured the impact of their community programs on their business processes the same way they would measure the impact of any other program on those same business processes.

So if you measure the impact of a certain program by increased store sales, or by improved customer satisfaction - then measure the impact of social media programs on those business processes the same way. Even if you think the current measurements are wrong. If you do not like how customer service is being measured by the average time people spend on the phone - it does not matter. Don’t try to change it when you roll out a social media program. The fact that the current measurements are well understood and often hardwired within the company culture will ensure that people will understand and embrace your social media programs rather than marginalize them as exotic new hype-driven non-mainstream programs.

Taking this a step further - the faster you can get the various departments that benefit from your programs to co-fund them, the faster your programs will become mainstream.

All that being said - how do you measure the impact of your social media programs? What works? What doesn’t work? As we are gearing up for the next iteration of the Tribalization of Business Study, what would you like to find out?

PS - If you prefer discussing the topic instead of just commenting on it, join the Marketing 2.0 community where I started a discussion on the topic.

At last week’s Web 2.0 workshop and also with some clients recently I started noticing how people mix up communities and work teams - a distinction which I think is worth making.

Work teams work on projects which have a beginning and end, they usually have well-defined roles in those project, and they get paid for doing that work - it’s their job. To use Dan Ariely’s metaphore, they are evaluating what they do and how much they contribute in their market framework.

Communities are mostly self-organized around a shared passion or around the need for people to help others and be helped. There are few pre-defined roles, and people usually do not get paid to participate - it’s not their job. In the most successful communities, people evaluate their contributions in their social framework.

So why is that important? Because they require radically different motivators in order to work.

Take an innovation initiative within a company. There may be a core set of people in marketing and product development whose job it is to innovate. If at some point you want to externalize that innovation process to include communities with all your employees, customers and prospects, you will need to understand that the motivations of those communities are very different from those of your core innovation team. It’s not their job to innovate and they are likely to be very busy as it is. You could of course pay them to give you ideas, but considering the incentives usually used in communities that is more likely to result in poor ideas than good ones. In order for this to work you need to appeal to a higher social motive - like helping out.

Now if you can instill a higher level of passion in your regular work teams, they too will start performing at a much higher level…

After presenting at the Web 2.0 Expo last week, we have a lot of other events coming up. The first is this coming Thursday, when I will be kicking off a series of CMO 2.0 Conversations for the Marketing 2.0 Group. This first conversation will be with H&R Block’s VP of Marketing Paula Drum. You can register for that conversation here. If you have anyone you would like to recommend for a future conversation, please let me know.

After that, we will presenting the results of the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study at the BRITE conference at Columbia University on October 15-16. Following that I am getting involved with the Social Media Strategies Conference in San Francisco at the end of October. Shortly after that there will be the Society for New Communications Research Symposium here in Boston. I will try to add the buttons that will give you discounts for these events on my site in the next couple of days.

Hopefully we can find some time to connect in person at one of those events.

Shel Israel conducted an interview with me on the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study which we conducted in partnership with Deloitte and the Society for New Communications Research (where both Shel and I are Fellows).

His line of questioning made me think about issues and angles about the findings that I had not necessarily thought of before.

Thank you Shel for the opportunity!

And Shel, good luck with the new upcoming addition to your family…

Shel Israel last week asked me if companies should have a Chief Community Officer, to which I replied that communities, with the customer insights that they can provide, would allow CMOs to transform their role in that of Chief Customer Officer - representing the voice of the customer at the executive table.

That reminded me how Forrester has been pushing for the role of Chief Customer Officer for awhile - as a separate entity from the CMO.

Somehow this seems odd to me. I understand that many CMOs have been relegated to running pre-sale programs, and that many developed real bad habits in the name of promoting the brand. But does that mean that we should have a parallel organization to ensure that someone looks at the consistency of experience across all the touch-points that a customer can have with the company? Or should that become part of the CMOs role?

Maybe you need an empowered temporary team to look at all the touch-points and develop cross-organizational processes to ensure consistency across all those points, but that team should report under the CMO as (s)he should be the person responsible for the voice of customers, prospects and detractors in the marketplace.

What do you think?

There are very few social media marketing programs that scale to the point where they can truly be useful to multi-billion dollar companies. But why is that?

Part of the problem, as I have described before, is self-inflicted. Many CMO’s know they need to dabble in the space, but that is all they do - run small pilot programs that don’t make a difference. The problem with this approach is that the dynamics of small scale social media programs are very different from large scale social media campaigns. So what may work in large programs will not work in pilot programs and the lessons learned from pilot programs may not be applicable to large scale implementations.

Another self-inflicted cause is that many marketers focus on finding the silver bullet - the one program that will truly move the needle. When you have a multi-billion dollar operation, that is not likely to happen. You need to think about how to leverage social media as part of everything you do - your lead generation, your efforts in causes and disaster relief, your employee communications, etc.

But there are other constraints to the scalability of social media programs that are based on the marketplace. If Bank of America, Intuit, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and countless other companies all try to set up small business communities, they will not all work. A busy person will only be able to actively participate within a few communities - there is no way they will engage with more than a handful of them, especially not if they all have the same focus.

There may be other market constraints - such as your addressable audience through social media. But with multi-billion dollar companies that is less likely to be the case.

What do you think? Are scalability issues mostly self-inflicted or are they for real?

You’ve heard it before…people do not want to hear from companies anymore, they want to hear from other people. Well here comes some fresh data to back that up.

IBM recently released its new CEO Global Study, in which they also interviewed over 1,000 consumers to see how they buy. 53% of the respondents said they use the web to compare prices and features before buying - with 25% saying they do it from their mobile phone while shopping. One in 10 will text their friends and family while being in the store to get or share information about the product.

That trend will inevitably continue, and the only way for you to capitalize on this in the long run is by getting all your employees involved with your customers.

Someone asked me what the three most under-leveraged opportunities for companies who offer online communities are.

I answered:

• The ability for companies to engage all their constituencies in transforming their core business processes - including employees, customer champions and also their detractors.
• The ability for companies to leverage online communities in a way that enables them to truly move the needle - as I discussed here.
• And the opportunity for companies to completely transform the office of the CMO - as I discussed here.

What do you think are the three most under-leveraged opportunities in online communities and social media in general?

You’ve heard it before – most breakthrough innovations happen at the edges or at the intersections of various disciplines.

The latest wave of marketing innovation is no different – although we prefer to think about it as happening at the SEAMS™, which is an acronym that reflects the various steps that you will need to navigate through in order to truly capitalize on Marketing 2.0 potential.

As I have written in the past, the marketing end goal has not changed - it still is to create a customer. It’s everything in between to get to that goal that has changed.

Some companies will advise you to start with social media based marketing 2.0 programs by simply monitoring the new social media channels, others will build you communities that are in fact nothing more than fancy web sites – but neither of them are going to be enough to enable you to capitalize on the fundamental changes that is rocking our industry. The only way to get the full benefits from the changes afoot is by understanding how to navigate the SEAMS™ of Marketing Innovation.

Understanding the SEAMS™ of Social Media powered Marketing 2.0

Sense – the best place to start is by going beyond listening to sensing what is truly happening in the marketplace. Sensing is not just about understanding what is being said, it is understanding what is being meant and make that available as actionable knowledge to the various departments within your company – product innovation, customer support, marketing, sales, etc. Sense also means that whatever you do has to make sense for your business – it’s got to deliver real, impactful and measurable results.

Engage – the next logical step is to go beyond sensing and to start engaging your various constituencies (i.e., customers, prospects, promoters, detractors, partners, etc.) on their own turf. This is not about them engaging with or through your advertising and other marketing campaigns – this is about good old fashioned engagement – talking with one another instead of at them. If they do not have a natural hangout place, there may be an opportunity for you to host a virtual waterhole for them – but more on that later.

Activate – once you get a better handle on the new dynamics of social media and marketing 2.0, you need to devise a plan to activate your business processes with these new-found capabilities. Product innovation, customer support, PR and thought leadership, lead generation, awareness creation, and other processes can all be transformed and made to work again by externalizing them to include your various constituencies as part of the processes instead of being the target of those processes.

Measure – of course you will have to justify all this new stuff to your management and to yourself. Not only is it expected that you can measure your programs, it is also more critical than ever to understand what to measure and how to set goals. Unlike with more traditional marketing programs, where measurements do not interact with the actual programs, launching social media initiatives and marketing 2.0 programs with the wrongs measurement goals can kill or maim the program in the long run.

Storytelling – storytelling is important in all aspect of the SEAMS™ method. Whether you engage with your audiences, or get them involved as part of activating various business processes, you need stories that will be compelling and will easily be retold. Even when you are measuring the effectiveness of your programs you should always be on the lookout for interesting anecdotal stories – they will gain a life of their own and sometimes do more wonders than stats in conveying the importance and success of your efforts.

What do you think?