by Josh Bernoff

Does your company reject change?

Of course not. You love change, don’t you. Change is good. That’s how companies grow. The bigger the company, the more a little change will do it some good.

Baloney. You all know the truth. Companies are like organisms with immune systems. If you’re a change agent, you’re the antigen. Your company wants to reject you, and it’s got lots of systems to block that -- accounting systems, legal systems, management hierarchies, policies and procedures.

Social applications and their champions run afoul of this all the time. Why? Because the people in your social applications – your customers and prospects – are out of control. Who knows what they might say or do? And you want to make that a part of how your company runs? That’s what stimulates the allergic reaction.

But you can succeed. Here are our best tips, taken right from the pages of Groundswell, which could have been called, “How to be a social provocateur and still succeed within a company.”

• Start small. Don’t try to change your whole company overnight. Pick a single project, a single brand, a single group of customers, and work on that (or them). You’ll seem smaller and less threatening to the status quo. And you’ll get the chance to foul up and learn in a sheltered environment.
• Get an executive sponsor. When the you-know-what hits the fan, you’ll need somebody in a high place to cover your back. At Dell, it’s Michael Dell who gives people cover. At Unilever, it was two top executives: Babs Rangaiah and Rob Master. Who’s your sponsor? You’ll need her. Take her to lunch now and make sure you can count on her.
• Line up the stakeholders ahead of time. Will legal be blocking you? Then get a person from legal on your committee. Or a regulatory affairs guy. Or somebody from accounting, or brand management, or whomever might be threatened by what you’re doing. You want them on your side. And you want to hear their objections early, not when you’re about to launch and they can shut you down for some policy violation you didn’t even know about. In the months it takes to spec and build your application, you can win them over, or learn from them and change what you’re building as necessary.
• Set deadlines and move fast. This is how you get the objectors’ objections out of the way now. If your launch is six months off, they won’t pay attention until month five. If it’s one month off, you’ll get to their objections now. Speed also helps – you’ll be up and running before they can figure out some new reason to object. Lionel Menchaca and his team got the Direct2Dell blog up in three weeks. (This was a week later than Michael Dell wanted.)
• Seek precedents. What’s your competitor doing? Is your community, your wiki, your blog like one in another industry? Show them to your management and anyone else you need to convince. (Groundswell has 65  examples including 25 full case studies, indexed by industry, by strategy, and by geography – you might find what you’re looking for by starting with page 265.)
• Make friends. Join communities like the Social Media Club, or Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell's Society for Word of Mouth. Find people who are doing what you’re doing. Lean on them. Learn from them.
• Measure your success. The surest way to fail is to be unable to prove you accomplished anything. Decide what you’ll measure up front – buzz, conversion rates, sales, community memberships. Prove it accomplishes your objectives. And then prove your application is delivering results. (If it isn’t . . . fix it!)
• Don’t stop at one application – build! So six months have gone by. Your first application is successful. Go ahead revel in it – for ten minutes. Then build on it. You have momentum – you’ve bested all the obstacles and proved you can deliver results. The second app will be far, far easier. Doing one proves you’re a prodigy. Doing two or more will get you promoted.

What’s your best tip? Add it in the comments.

by Josh Bernoff

Jim Nail at Cymfony responded to my post on his own blog. He points out that it's hard for companies to figure out where Cymfony fits in since their own organization doesn't neeatly compartmentalize Web influence.

[W]ho in the company should have responsibility for this? And the ultimate organizational question: whose budget does it come out of?

Given today's corporate structure, there is no easy answer to this question. For example, we may find a robust discussion of customer services issues, but brand management is looking for reaction to a new marketing campaign. The finding may never cross the organizational chasms which Forrester's Peter Kim has recommended need to change in this report. Elana Anderson has also noted that marketing and customer service don't work together well.

I asked some questions, which he tried to answer. For example, does the buzz on the Net reflect people's actual opinions? Jim's reply:

In order to determine what is important, you need market influence analytics, which uses the large volumes of comments available and all the cues available in it to identify when an issue is the rising, collective voice of  a company's customers.

The second question is the predictive ability of the data. Some great work has been done already, such as this paper that correlates changes in the sales ranking of books on Amazon to waves of online chatter.

I'm still not convinced that any analytics can project the people on the Net to the whole population. It's still worth watching, but that doesn't make it the gospel.

And despite Jim's attempts to make it seem as if the Cymfony name is cool ("C and F are the hot letters these days") I think I hit a nerve . . .

by Josh Bernoff

Last week I spoke with Jim Nail, CMO of Cymfony. Cymfony proposes to measure Internet word of mouth. In the analysis of this space we did at Forrester, Cymfony came out at the top, along with Nielsen's Buzzmetrics.

One thing I like about Cymfony's approach is that they try to measure everything -- traditional media, user generated, blogs, message boards, and anything else they can get to -- in an attempt to give a complete picture. This is the next step beyond what companies like Critical Mention have done for TV mentions of products and what used to be done by clipping services.

Now Jim used to work next to me as a marketing analyst at Forrester -- partly as a result, we rapidly got into discussing not just what Cymfony does but what's the significance? The question that kept nagging at me was this: what should companies do about what they learn from services like this?

The challenge is making sense of what Jim called the "firehose" of information coming in. True -- searching Technorati for your brand every day isn't really a good way to get snapshot of what's happening out there. And it misses stuff. For example, Jim points out what he calls "The dirty little secret" of consumer-generated media is that 80% of it is in usenet groups and message boards, not blogs.

A great example is Cymfony's analysis of HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray Disc, the two competing next-generation formats for DVD. I know, from taking briefings from both groups, that they spend a lot of time talking about interactivity, amount of storage, number of studios supporting them, and so on. But, at least as of last December, consumers were talking about completely different issues, for example, that Sony (backer of Blu-Ray) had also pushed other formats that didn't catch on, like BetaMax and MiniDisc.

This appears to be typical of what I'd call the marketing disconnect. You put out your message, X, and broadcast it through the usual media and advertising channels and maybe some other channels, like your Web site. Then you listen to see if consumers are talking about X, or X-prime. But it turns out they're off on some other element of your brand entirely, call it Z, one you never thought about.

The questions in my mind remain:

1. How important is this chatter? How can you tell when it's a bunch of highly verbal geeks and when it's about to explode in your face like a diet coke bottle full of mentos?

2. How should you use the information you get from a Cymfony or BuzzMetrics?

3. Will this eventually change companies and media plans, or not? And does it vary depending on whether you're Tostitos or Dentu-Grip?

4. What were they thinking when they named it Cymfony? I keep forgetting how to spell it!

If you've used Cymfony or Buzzmetrics -- or if your brand is worrying about consumer generated media in general -- I'd love to hear from you.