The CMO 2.0 conversation with Michael Mendenhall, who is currently the COO and President at Lipman and who was formally the CMO at HP and the Head of Marketing at Disney, was most informative.

Michael started his career with a small agency and later developed a rich background in corporate marketing at Disney. At HP, he learned a great deal about technology and consumer behavior, content and storytelling, and social and mobility. Most recently he became part of a group that bought Lipman, an 80 year old advertising agency, where Michael is trying to rebuild an agency with an outdated advertising model into a modern marketing, branding and digital communications consultancy.

During our conversation, Michael mentioned that one of the biggest mistakes that marketers made was to allow new media marketing to bifurcate off from the rest of the marketing group. Based on their lack of understanding on how to monetize new media, and justify ROI’s to their CFO’s and CEO’s, marketers set up  groups on the side and gave them minimal dollars to test and beta. Not only did they allow those groups to be siloed, they were also underfunded. Marketers did the same with e-cmmerce groups, which became disjointed from the people developing the corporate web site.  And they are doing it again with the social – CMO’s are once again not sure what to do with it and are under-funding those efforts in small groups on the side.  The marketing department became functionally aligned with channels – a social channel, an e-commerce channel, an m-commerce channel, etc. Agencies did the same thing, aligning themselves against those same channels – resulting in the rise of social firms, digital agencies, commerce types and mobile shops, etc. The problem with a siloed marketing department it that it forces the CMO to spend a lot of time trying to integrate all those groups so that they have one voice instead of focusing their efforts on what matters: How will I grow the business? How am I increasing share? How am I increasing margin? How am I taking share?

It also makes it difficult for the marketer to focus on the customer journey – from discovery to purchase and hopefully repeat purchase and evangelism. The customer does not think of a company as a set of siloed groups or channels and will engage with companies across all those channels at different stages of their journey. In addition, the customer will increasingly engage with touchpoints that are not controlled by the company – peers, friends and other tribal members that are out there making buying recommendations. When Lipman engages with their clients, they try to break those siloes by having every single expert at the table – the head of brand, the head of technology, the head of digital, the head of creative, and the head of media buying.

A new skill-set requirement for marketers in this digital age is the analytical skill-set – the ability to develop a 360 degree view of the customer as they go through their buying journey; the understanding that information is knowledge that gives you a competitive advantage; and the idea that raw data coming from the bricks-and-mortar transactional environments can shape R&D, as well as customer engagement, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and even shape customer loyalty. Most marketers do not reap the benefits from all the rich customer data that resides in their repositories. Understanding that opportunity will become as important for marketers as understanding the importance of the compelling story that will engage their customers and prospects. When CMO’s don’t have the wherewithal to deal with big data, they should team up with their CIO to make sense of it. The problem is that CIO’s often focus on storing the data, securing it and serving it up – not so much on providing services to help the business glean insights from it. At Lipman, Michael is trying to fill that gap by having his own Consumer Insights Group and by acting as a go-between between CMO’s and CIO’s. If you are interested in this topic, and are involved with Digital Marketing, you may consider taking the Digital Marketing 2.0 survey which we just launched with the Society for New Communications Research (or pass along the URL to the survey to a colleague - digitalmarketingtwo.com)

All that being said, marketing and advertising are not likely to be become pure technology plays – according to Michael – because what makes the difference is the content and the storytelling that you use to express your brand. Technology, which can be used to make us smarter about when, where, and how to engage with prospects and customers needs to be balanced with great content.

It’s important to understand culture, not only consumer cultures but also corporate cultures. For companies that have a considerable heritage that can be especially tricky. You want to build on that heritage, by pulling out those attributes of the heritage that are relevant in today’s marketplace, without building a museum out of your brand.  When it comes to consumer cultures, too many companies chase after the “cool factor” or the novelty – which can be very short-lived and which often detracts from building solutions that have a real purpose,relevancy, and are tied in with current initiatives.

On the future of how companies measure the impact of the relationship they have with their agency, Michael does not think that the push toward sharing risks and rewards will work, because agencies do not control the whole process that determines success. Marketers will need to monitor KPIs that the agency can actually affect, such as KPIs on the information side, and not the internal KPIs related to product success.

In closing Michael had the following words of wisdom for fellow marketers – don’t lose focus on the customer and their journey. While this may sound basic, with most companies being structured around functions and channels, and in some cases having the wrong skill-set,  that is not usually something that comes naturally.

Other things we talked about:

• How agencies have been successful at buying all the functional expertise through M&A’s but often failed to do a good job at the integration of all those functions.
• The importance of having stories that are authentic and transparent, because through technology the customer can see and hear almost everything you’re doing as a business
• How consumer data can give you insights into all aspects of the customer-buying journey – when they will buy, when they will leave you, etc.
• How most companies should focus on existing customers rather than new prospects that can cost as much as 10X in terms of customer acquisition cost
• How listening has to become a great shill for marketers
• How the trend towards purchasing creative through procurement is a real bad idea

CMO 2.0 Michael Mendenhall [ 51:26 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3450)

Dan Greller, the former CIO at Legg Mason, and currently technology innovation consultant, speaker and writer (with a great blog), was kind enough to join me for my second CIO 2.0 Conversation.

Dan has 30 years of experience managing global technology organizations, mostly within the financial services industry. Having first entered the job market when the debate between mainframe and desktop computing was raging, Dan has seen his share of technology innovation battles – which made it particularly interesting to discuss this latest battle between innovation and control taking place within most companies around adopting new technologies.

According to Dan, that balance between innovation and control has remained the hardest balance for CIO’s to manage. Between the increasing demands that organizations put on their IT departments and their CIO’s, the accelerating pace of change, and the ease with which employees can now bypass their IT department – that balance will become harder to manage, not easier.

The consumerization of IT, which refers to the phenomenon that consumer technology innovations are increasingly driving enterprise tools development, and also to the fact that many employees now expect their personal tools – their phone, tablet and home laptops – to work within their work environment, is clearly here to stay. The user experience that enterprise tools provide sorely lacks the experience that consumer services provide. Think of doing a Google search vs searching for content in your corporate knowledge management system, compare your corporate procurement process with the Amazon buying process, or look at how your corporate software provisioning differs from the experience you have in the iPhone or Android app stores. There is no comparison, and it is that difference in experience that leads to the consumerization of IT. CIO’s react to these forces in different ways – some say NO, and some put their head in the sand. Clearly neither one of those strategies is a workable strategy. Both will leave your users dissatisfied and relegate your IT department to irrelevance. CIO’s need to partner with key constituents and business unit owners and decide on strategic technical directions that match the culture of the company and deal with the risks associated with those strategies – human resource (HR) risks, compliance risks, legal risks, reputation risks, security risks, IP leakage risks, etc.

Risks are a thorny issue for many companies, and one that can stop innovations in their tracks. Many people, who by nature are averse to change, will hide behind potential risks, often unreal ones, to avoid having to deal with that change. In assessing risks, Dan suggests that people look at the Netflix manifesto about their culture, where they talk about a concept called the waterline. The way they look at decision-making and risk is that they think of their company as a boat, and they think of decisions being above or below the waterline. If a decision is below the waterline, then the risks of having something go wrong is much higher than if the decision is above the waterline.

We then talked about the changing role of IT and CIO’s as it relates to shifting their position from order takers to strategic business partners. CIO’s need to be the leaders who understand technologies and how they apply to the business. They need to be the ones that recommend and provide guidance on how to leverage social computing, mobility, universal access, cloud computing and “big data” as part of business processes.

Social computing should be on every CIO’s agenda, not because it’s a fad, but because eventually it will have to become part of every enterprise process and the systems that support them.

On the topic of measurements, Dan believes that there are two types of measurements – hard measurements and the anecdotal comparisons with peers. And while Dan is not a big proponent of hard benchmarks, which would require the ability to compare apples with apples, something that is virtually impossible in diverse organizations,  he does believe that comparisons with other people and companies in your industry are important. This makes sense in a competitive environment where the winner is the one that can stay ahead of the others. One of the most important measurement criteria for IT departments should be customer satisfaction, but that needs to be balanced with metrics that reflect the increasing strategic partnership that needs to exist between IT departments and the business units.

Culture trumps all and CIO’s should be thinking about culture as part of everything they do. It is what motivates people to do what they do, and it is what ultimately determines the effectiveness of all organizations. Dan believes that companies should listen to Daniel Pink when he says that people have three motivations, autonomy, mastery and purpose. They want to have a say in their destiny, they want to be recognized as a master in certain fields, and they want to be connected to a higher purpose. It’s important to have a culture that understands and promotes those values, both for your employees and also for your customers.

To create or change a corporate culture, you need to articulate where you want the culture to be, communicate it clearly with your employees, walk the talk, and reward and recognize behavior that supports that culture. The latter is especially important for IT departments, where metrics around on-time delivery and zero tolerance for failure have often stood in the way of creating a collaborative and innovative culture.

Dan ended the conversation with a few pieces of advice for IT professionals – don’t just focus on the bits and bytes, but focus on humans, their cultures and their biases; reach out to other disciplines like psychology and economics; think beyond your technical expertise when you think about the competencies that are needed to get your job done.

Well said.

Other things that we discussed include:

• How smart companies now deal with risks through a combination of education and guiderails rather than through policies alone
• The importance of e-discovery and archival systems in regulated markets
• The positive aspects of operating in regulated environments where everything gets recorded on business communications
• The importance for CIO’s to stay abreast of what happens to their industry by networking with peers
• How companies and individuals deal with innate human/cognitive biases like the confirmation bias

CIO 2.0 Conversation Dan Greller [ 1:01:16 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1338)

My first CIO 2.0 conversation with Shirley Cunningham, the CIO at Monsanto, was truly a 2.0 conversation. Shirley has a rich background. Hailing from Scotland, she held many positions in MIS departments (Management Information Systems) across various industries before joining Monsanto in the late 90′s through an acquisition. She became the global CIO 3 years ago.

As CIO at Monsanto, Shirley is a member of the strategy team. Becoming a member of the strategy team came with a change in role for  IT – that from being an order taker to a strategic partner sharing responsibility for the business’s growth. They morphed from being the implementers of ERP systems and other technologies to a team that now worries about customer space transformation though information and technology, advanced decisioning, and customer and product pipeline. And while the IT department at Monsanto supports all functions, most of its resources are dedicated to R&D and the customer space.

Being a strategic business partner rather than a support organization requires a deep understanding of the business – that is why over 35% of Monsanto’s R&D IT group has science backgrounds with 10% having PhD’s. They don’t just support the product development process – they are a key driver of it. This shift from being a more traditional IT department not only required a whole new level of leadership; it required a complete mindset shift. If you would have asked a random person in IT what they were doing a few years ago, they might have answered “I am an Oracle DBA.” Today, you are more likely to get the answer “I support a system that helps us collect $3.5B in revenue.”  People now think of their jobs in terms of the value that it delivers to the company, which is not just great for the company, but also energizing for the individuals. And therein lies a virtuous circle – when people are more energized, you have more innovation, more creativity and thus more energy and excitement.

They have a metric-driven culture. Not just one where they focus on understanding the cost of transaction and other classic metrics, but one where they measure the outcomes and values of technology usage. So they will measure the value of being able to assemble a genome on their product pipeline and their ability to commercialize products. A dedicated, and very agile, enterprise information management group helps them do that.

Word of mouth is very important in the agricultural space – with most of it happening in coffee shops. As some of those conversations are moving online, it will be very important for Monsanto to have a seat at those virtual coffee shop tables. That is one reason why Shirley thinks there is a lot of value in having employees be active in communities and social media. They are still in the early days, but plan on developing this capability in the future.

Monsanto is of course known for its culture of innovation – which is driven by its overarching goal to double the yield in agriculture within the next few years. They are passionate about innovations that impact sustainability and they think really big when it comes to their mission. This “change the world”  type attitude makes for a great innovation culture – one in which people constantly think beyond the boundaries. It also helps with the type of people they attract to the company.

Monsanto actually started an innovation lab – which is unencumbered by corporate standards – and where people can work on getting early proof of concepts. Employees first submit ideas to peer review, after which a VC-like board approves funding for further development.

Innovation at Monsanto is not contained to its corporate walls – they also co-innovate with suppliers and academia. Cross-enterprise innovation takes a lot of effort on both parties, and there always needs to be clear win for both of them.

Another interesting aspect of Monsanto’s culture is the fact that they are  non-hierarchical. They have been operating that way for 15 years and they seem to be one of the only companies that has been able to achieve this at scale. Solid lines and dotted lines like you would find in typical matrix organizations are non-existent – everyone has multiple solid lines. Those employees that come from more structured organizations take a while to get used to this non-hierarchical structure, but ultimately it makes for a great place to work. People know that they can walk in and talk to anyone, including the executives.

In closing Shirley had a few words of advice for executives at other companies – CIO’s need to step up and take ownership for things that they traditionally would not have done before so that they can have a bigger impact on the business, and they need to take more risks.

Well said – Shirley is clearly a 2.0 CIO.

Other things we talked about include:

• What worked and did not work with the “two-in-a-box” concept of pairing up a business leader with a technology leader
• The consumerization of IT and how all companies will have to be ready for that
• How they deal with risks, like IP leakage risks, through awareness and education
• The importance of being active on a local community basis while being a global company
• The role of rewards and recognition within an innovation culture
• The importance of a successful collaboration culture in an innovation culture
• The role of values and the importance of reinforcing those values to ensure a good corporate culture

CMO 2.0 Conversation with Shirley Cunningham [ 54:02 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3717)

I truly enjoyed my CMO 2.0 conversation with Karen Quintos, the CMO at Dell. Karen has somewhat of an unusual background for a CMO at a high tech company. She spent almost half her career in the pharmaceutical industry and did a stint in the financial services industry before landing at Dell 11 years ago – a rich background that was clearly reflected in the conversation. Karen also has a passion for being close to the customer – a good trait for any CMO.

We first talked about social media, a topic we had discussed at length with Erin Nelson, the previous CMO at Dell, and Manish Mehta, the VP of social media and communities, during an earlier CMO 2.0 Conversation. Karen confirmed that social media absolutely has to be built into the fabric of the company and that the (social) customer has to be at the core of everything. In fact, Karen believes that customer centricity is key to win in the marketplace. At Dell, they leverage social media as part of everything they do – product development, sales, marketing, HR, IT, finance, and service and support.

Karen then described the evolution of IdeaStorm, the Dell innovation communities, and how they now include Storm Session – focused and directed customer feedback sessions bound in time. Examples of successful Storm Sessions included discussions with CIO’s around virtualization, sustainability, and data center-type solutions – where customers could discuss how they think about ROI and total cost of ownership rather than just talk about technology deployment issues.

The Dell Social Monitoring Command Center, which was launched last year, is set up for employees to monitor, respond, and trend the conversations that are going on about Dell all over the world. On any given day they get upwards of 25,000 different conversations about Dell. A small team of people triage the conversations  by coding them red, orange or green, and feed them into processes like product development. Karen made the point that when it comes to social media monitoring companies need to realize that it should not be about hearing, but about listening and making sense.

“Leveraging social media cannot be a bolt-on strategy,” said Karen, “it has to be built into the culture…it cannot be someone’s second job, it cannot be something that they think of once a week. It has to be something that’s integrated into their day-to-day operations.” Right on! But amazing to hear that and then realize that more than 60% of those companies that participate in our Tribalization of Business Study (co-sponsored with Deloitte and the Society for New Communications Research) have 1 or less than a full time person associated with these efforts. Those companies need to wake up and listen to truly Hyper-Social organizations like Dell.

There are of course risks associated with social media. One of the early risks that Dell identified was to react too quickly – either latching on to negative comments first or latching on to proposed product ideas that very few people want. Sounds a lot like not giving in to the “tyranny of the minority” and instead reacting to real trends. Another risk they identified early on was around transparency – especially when eager employees don’t disclose that they work for Dell. Karen believes that many of the risks can be mitigated through training and education.

As many other CMO’s at successful Hyper-Social Organizations, Karen pointed to the importance of having simple values to ensure consistency across the multiple employee touch-points that they have with their customers – in their case be open, be transparent, be simple, and be caring.

Next we switched to the topic of culture, which Karen believes is, if not the most important, one of the most important elements in a company’s success. She considers Dell’s culture fairly young at 27 years old, but truly believes that is what guides behavior and brand. She also believes that it is extremely important to link your own culture(s) with that of your customers – especially in the B2B and public sector space, which make up 80% of Dell’s business.

An important part of culture is the culture of innovation. Over the last two years, Dell has fueled innovation not just from within but also through acquisitions. Interestingly enough, but not surprising (the world is not flat after all), Dell sees aquisitions from major innovation centers like Silicon Valley as being totally key to continue to bring the spirit of innovation within the company.

We closed the conversation by talking about a super-cool program that Dell is doing in partnership with the University of Texas – the Dell Social Innovation Competition. It’s open to higher education students around the world who have a passion for taking a social issue that they see within their community and coming up with a plan to address it. They submit ideas, business plans and videos which get voted on. The best ones get to travel to Austin where a finalist gets selected. With kids from India, Nigeria, France and the United States competing with one another, they are able to create a cauldron of diversity of thought necessary for innovation that would be hard to create in any corporate environment.

That is definitely something I would want to tell my 16 year old son about!

Other things we talked about include:

• The recommendation for companies to listen and engage with the both the good and the bad in social media, and how the sooner you engage the more successful you will be
• How Dell has training programs in place to teach people (9,000 people trained so far) how to listen and how to engage
• How to ensure that the proper experts get involved in deeply technical discussions
• The importance of trusting employees to do the right thing
• The importance of being able to trend conversations and launch more in-depth discussions with customers about important topics
• The importance of hiring people with a passion to win
• The importance of tying compensation and rewards to a set of behaviors – not just “what” behaviors, but also “how” behaviors
• The importance of social rewards in fostering the right culture
• The importance of employee rotational programs to foster innovation

CMO 2.0 Conversation with Karen Quintos [ 52:02 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2552)

If you want to meet a truly insightful CMO 2.0, meet Ted Smyth, the Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs at the McGraw-Hill Companies. Ted has a really interesting background that started with a 15 year long  career as a senior Irish diplomat. He then switched over to the world of business by joining Heinz, where he spent 20 years before joining McGraw-Hill 2 years ago. One of the main lessons learned from this diverse background is that companies have to embrace performance with purpose – you don’t want to achieve profit goals at the exclusion of what’s good for society. Young people especially, will not want to leave their persona’s at the company’s front door, they will want to continue to do good for society while being at work. Another obvious benefit of mixing do-good with company performance  is that as a company you will increase the passion of your employees in the context of their work – which is clearly a win-win proposition.

We quickly delved into the topic of innovation, a hot topic at McGraw-Hill, where many of the industries in which they operate are undergoing tectonic shifts, and many of their businesses are going through the classic innovator’s dilemma. Innovation and customer focus are two major initiatives at McGraw-Hill. They strive to delight customers and prospects, and seek out people who are brilliant, courageous, curious, competitive and driven to do so – both inside and outside the organization. Innovation at McGraw-Hill is both a grass roots as well as a top down initiative, and celebrating wins, benchmarking themselves against other innovators, and developing an understanding of societal needs is all part of their culture of innovation. Ted is a firm believer that innovation needs to be structured and attached to people’s work routine. It needs to be disciplined to succeed and you always have to be on the lookout to not just innovate according to your capabilities, realizing that sometimes you need to upgrade your capabilities to develop what customers want.

Next we talked about education and learning, an important part of McGraw-Hill’s business, and a perfect example of what Ted meant when he talked about achieving business success while also doing good for society. Learning and education are clearly becoming digital activities that can help fix the current system, which is failing our kids – with kids who are slower than average falling behind and those who are faster than average getting bored. Digital courseware helps alleviate these problems. In digital environments, teachers and educators are freed up to become coaches with the ability to provide one-on-one help for the kids. While digital learning can remove some of the social barriers that sometimes inhibit learning (e.g., humiliation for not getting it), digital learning needs to be a very social/collaborative activity in order to succeed.

We then talked about the changes in how people consume content and where they get their buying recommendations from, and how that impacts marketing. The way McGraw-Hill thinks about marketing and advertising has obviously changed, with much more activity shifting towards  thought leadership and relevance in social media. Just like other Hyper-Social Organizations, McGraw-Hill realizes that you can only ensure consistency across all the different touch points that you have with your customers by living your mission and values. They have a very clear mission - need for knowledge, need for capital, need for transparency -, and a set of values that are easy to live by – objectivity, integrity, candor, diversity (especially of thought), and independence.  These simple concepts unite all employees across all divisions and help drive consistent decision-making across different markets with different customers.

Ted finished the conversation with two words of wisdom for marketers – we need to introduce more humor and emotions in communications and better articulate great societal causes. In closing he quoted some lines from an Irish poem by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney from the Canon of Expectation that got recited at a St. Patrick’s Day event he attended the day before our interview: “I yearn for hammerblows on clinkered planks, the uncompromised report of driven thole-pins, to know there is one among us who never swerved from all his instincts told him was right action,who stood his ground in the indicative, whose boat will lift when the cloudburst happens.” That is where we as individuals, communities and companies need to be, we need to stand our ground in the indicative, and our boat will lift when the cloudburst happen. We need firmness of purpose and be able to express it emotionally, poetically and humorously – that is where communications needs to be in order to be effective in this cluttered world.

What a great way to close a conversation with a truly great human being. Thank you Ted!

Other topics we touched on:

• The importance of the fundamentals of conflict resolution in business
• The role of training in fostering innovation
• The balance between understanding unmet needs and prospects vs existing customers needs
• The importance of serendipity in innovation
• The lessons that can be learned from game designers in education
• The need to bring down silos in stimulating innovation and learning, both in education and businesses, and the importance of social networking in doing so
• Generational differences in learning
• The importance of content curation in the publishing industry
• The dynamics of the current knowledge economy

CMO 2.0 Conversation with Ted Smyth [ 58:26 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3331)

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Eran Barak, the SVP of Marketing and Community Strategy at Thomson Reuters was a good way to restart the series.

Eran has been involved with social technologies for a very long time, dating back to the precursor of ICQ (sold to AOL) when he was in college. He joined Thomson Reuters in 2004, just about the time when blogs and podcasts were becoming very popular – turning everyone into a content creator, and potentially a competitor. He quickly realized that social media was a great way to interpret content – and not just a way to syndicate/filter user generated content. Using the “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” game show analogy, Eran described how social media allows financial analysts to now have three lifelines instead of one – call on experts, call on people they trust, or rely on the crowd to analyze situations.

It’s very clear that for Thomson Reuters, Social Media is all about the social and not about media – an interesting perspective coming from a company with deep media roots. They use social media to connect their customers with one another, and not to try to raise awareness about their company in the markets they operate in.

At Thomson Reuters they take the social seriously,  applying lessons learned from the wold of epidemiology and sociology to their sales and marketing processes. Specifically they leverage the friendship paradox to penetrate accounts and to make their marketing messages go viral. The friendship paradox says that if you recommend a friend, that person will be more connected (i.e., have more friends) than yourself. So by having their sales people ask prospects to recommend others within their organization that they should talk to, they get closer to the center of decision making than by navigating through the traditional hierarchies. Thinking about the social in business outside of social media is a trend that we increasingly see happen within successful organizations. Humans have always been social, but for some reason we leave our social being at the front door of our companies. Bringing that back in business the way Thompon Reuters does it with their sales force is a powerful business driver.

The two “must have” criteria for the social to succeed in financial related businesses, according to Eran, are trust (knowing that the person you are talking to is indeed who she claims to be) and security of the interaction between people (knowing that what I am talking about and sharing will only go to who I want it to go to).

We also talked about risks associated with social media and how it is better to deal with them by educating people and make them risk intelligent rather than developing policies and rule books to try to control every possible risk contingency.

Every industry is faced with accelerating change, but the ones in which Thomson Reuters operate are seeing their core foundations shift. The innovator’s dilemma is not just a periodic occurrence, it’s a constant. Eran talked about how you innovate in an environment like that – by hiring really smart people, allow them to do crazy things, and by developing a sound acquisition strategy. At Thomson Reuters, they also leverage social media to crowdsource business and product ideas with customers.

We wrapped up the conversation by talking about the fundamental changes that are happening in marketing. What is important to Thomson Reuters’ marketing is making sure that they develop content that travels among their customers and prospects. Eran truly believes that the messages that you put out in the marketplace need to be short and simple – so people can remember them and repeat them in conversations. You need to be able to distill your value proposition to one or two sentences. If you want to turn your customers into word of mouth engines, the story needs to be so unique and compelling that people want to tell their friends. If they don’t retell your story, your marketing dollar stops with the few people that are listening to you. Spending on traditional, old school advertising and marketing programs is something Eran really cannot wrap his head around in this day and age. Marketing needs to embrace simplicity and differentiate on the basis of emotion.

Eran, who truly deserves the CMO 2.0 title,  ended the conversation with some final and very valuable words of wisdom for fellow marketers – when thinking of social media, don’t start with social media (e.g., we need a Twitter feed or a Facebook page). Think through what your strategy is and then see if you can leverage social media as part of that, and ask yourself whether you can develop a message that is compelling to the point that people will want to retell it to all their friends.

In a lot of ways not all that different from what we say in our book The Hyper-Social Organization: find you tribes and what makes them tick, and engage them where they hang out.

Other things we discussed include:

• Social media in heavily regulated markets
• The importance of having social media policies that are encouraging rather than discouraging
• How you keep a good balance between providing high quality professional content and being a curator for user-generated content and how to use social filtering to deal with the increasing “infobesity”

CMO 2.0 Conversation Eran Barak [ 56:29 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2472)