Community intelligence

I've been thinking a lot on community intelligence and co-creation, and a number of stories have caught my eye recently:

A couple days ago,  Reveries had a great article on the 3 stages of evolution in search.

"You can look at the evolution of search as a play in three acts," says Jeff Weiner, Yahoo’s vp of search and marketing, as quoted by James Fallows in The New York Times (11/6/05).

1. Act One is the ‘public’ web, where if different people type the same query they’ll get the same results.
2. Act Two is searching for whatever you’ve filed in your own hard drive.
3. Act Three  is “social” or “community” searching, where the results are improved based on the successes of other people’s searches for the same information.

It's basically search + human intelligence. Cool stuff. Perhaps Yahoo will start giving Google a run for its money. Then this morning I came across an old but very interesting post on IFTF's Future Now blog that discusses

"whether peer-to-peer networks and other tools that facilitate "peer production" (to use Benkler's term) could help create a new role for amateurs as active contributors to science.  

The great example is NASA Clickworkers (no longer active, but described in articles in American Scientist, Space.com, BBC Tech, and elsewhere) a system that allowed volunteers to do routine analysis of Martian landscapes. The results were pretty good, and as Benkler put it, showed "how complex professional tasks that required budgeting the full time salaries of a number of highly trained individuals can be reorganized so as to be performed by tens of thousands of volunteers." (Benkler, "Coase's Penguin," 16)"

Businesses of all sizes are beginning to apply the power of community intelligence. @Last Software, a new client of mine, has incredibly active forums on their web site that enable users to showcase their designs using @Last's 3D design software, solicit feedback, get tips and tricks from other users, submit Ruby scripts for enhanced functionality, share custom-designed components and more. This loyal community of 'volunteer employees' adds value and reduces the workload for customer service and product development. LegoFactory is another great exampleof community intelligence and co-creation that I've talked about before.

I think there's a certain amount of fear among executives about this idea. I once recommended The Wisdom of Crowds to an investor client of mine, and he had such a hard time with the core premise that he put down the book in the second chapter. How could thousands or millions of untrained people come up with a solution that's equal to (or better than) the experts? But it happens every day.  The most recent data point is the finding that Wikipedia is as accurate as Encyclopedia Brittanica on science topics. (from CNN.com:)

Based on 42 articles reviewed by experts, the average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while Britannica had three.

Of eight "serious errors" the reviewers found -- including misinterpretations of important concepts -- four came from each source, the journal reported.

Unlike Britannica, which charges for its content and pays a staff of experts to research and write its articles, Wikipedia gives away its content for free and allows anyone -- amateur or professional, expert or novice -- to submit and edit entries.

If millions of unpaid volunteers can create  accurate content, provide tech support, write programs that improve the value of a product, enable cost-efficient scientific analysis and improve web search... where does that leave companies? You might consider thinking of your business as a facilitator instead of an all-knowing entity that must retain control over every aspect of the business.

Just a thought.

Missing the forest for the trees

The Good Experience blog has a great post about the difference between customer service and customer experience:

"Customer service is the job of front-line workers, servicing customer requests for help - via an 800 number, e-mail, or a retail desk. It's important to invest in good customer service, but that's just the tiniest sliver of the customer experience.

Customer experience is the job of everyone in the company. My customer experience was bad because the product, and the refund policy, are both broken. Everyone from the CEO and CFO to the product designers and manufacturing facility contributed to this bad customer experience; and as a result, they've lost a customer and generated bad word of mouth. The good customer service I received didn't - and couldn't possibly - fix the overall experience."

This is highly related to my post a couple days ago about advertising versus branding. Just as advertising is a small component of branding, customer service is a small part of experience. I suppose I could say that brand = experience. They are both multifaceted sum-totals of the various touches and connections that a customer has with your company.

"Brand" and "customer experience" are the forest; don't get hung up on any one tree. Branding is not owned by the marketing department, and customer experience is not owned by the customer service department. Think 'ecosystem.' Think grassroots economy, distributed intelligence and empowered employees. More on this in a separate post...

Madison Avenue and branding

In Bob Bly's recent post entitled "The Great Madison Avenue Branding Rip-Off,' he and friend Richard Armstrong argues:

“'Get three Madison Avenue types in a room and it’s ‘branding’ this and ‘branding’ that.  But it’s ridiculous...  it’s just one of MANY credibility factors that go into an advertisement.' 

... The conclusion: branding is just one of many CREDIBILITY factors in marketing … and credibility is just one of multiple factors in selling … so to devote your advertising to building the brand is to do something like 1/10th of the selling job it should be doing."

I've worked on both the agency and client sides of the table, and here's my take:

• Agency execs are right: the brand is paramount.
• Ed and Richard are right: credibility and reputation are paramount.

A brand is an idea in the minds of constituents (customers, employees, etc.)... and that idea is created by what a company says (marketing) and does (operations.) A brand is the sum total of what people think about your company. Sometimes it's schizophrenic, or says one thing and does another, in which case credibility is shot.

An effective brand keeps its promises. Advertising should communicate the brand promise, and operations should fulfill it. Everything should work together. Think Apple, probably the most coherent brand on the planet.

So, back to the original discussion: no, agencies are not off-base by focusing on the brand. However, I don't believe that many of them are going about it the right way. IMO, there are two core issues here: first is the fallacy of 'brand advertising', and the second is that agencies are usually not well-suited to do brand strategy.

The brand-advertising fallacy:
As a client, I was told by my (nationally recognized) ad agency: "no, we cannot do response-oriented advertising until we've run 'brand' advertising for at least 3 months." Sorry, but that sets off my bullsh*t meter. The imagery, tone of voice, tag line, copy... there are plenty of elements that can deliver the brand message in conjunction with a sales promotion. CFOs don't have the patience for so-called 'brand advertising' anymore, and marketing is now accountable for results.

Agency effectiveness in branding:
I'm probably going to take some heat for this, but I personally don't believe that a traditional ad agency can do an effective, unbiased job at brand strategy. Their primary sources of revenue are ongoing campaign development and media; the up-front strategy project is a means to an end. The objective in advertising-driven branding is to come up with a core selling point that can be communicated right now. But I have often found that the right brand strategy (ie. what the market really wants and no competitor is delivering) is not something that the client can deliver right now. I've often recommended that the client stop advertising because they're dumping money down a black hole by running ads that are not relevant to the target audience... yet they're not operationally prepared to deliver on what the customer really wants.

The brand project deliverable from an agency is an ad campaign. The project deliverable from an independent brand strategy firm is a set of recommendations for every aspect of the business -- including the internal culture -- to bring it more in alignment with the open market opportunity.

Don't get me wrong; the really good account-planning agencies do fantastic work in creating highly relevant, effective ads that reposition brands in a more positive light. It helps when the company is already delivering a positive experience but perhaps hasn't figured out how to communicate it effectively. Yet I also strongly believe that since the ad agency is an outsider with no influence over operations, they cannot initiate or effect a fundamental brand shift when it's necessary... unless they're working for a client who understands how to translate the agency's strategy into operations, and has the clout to get it done.

Yes, I admit this post is a bit biased... I am, after all, an independent brand strategist. But I started my business precisely because I experienced the difficulty in creating effective brand strategies for my clients when working for an agency. Sometimes we were grasping at straws for an ad promise that was deliverable, desirable and distinctive, and we had no opportunities to impact the core business. We took what we could get.

Final thought: branding starts with the CEO and executive team, not with advertising. And neither an agency nor an independent brand strategy firm can make a whit of impact if the executive team doesn't buy in.