In the last few months, we’ve talked often about data over-reliance. Broadly speaking, marketers – understandably excited by the idea of Big Data telling them in real time exactly which buttons to push – are increasingly outsourcing a lot of decisions to “the data”. But this misses an important point – data, as such, can’t really tell us anything. It isn’t normative, in other words: it describes the world, but it can’t tell us how to act without some priors as to what’s important and what’s not. It’s those prior beliefs – what’s in, what’s out; what’s important for our brand, what isn’t – that can’t be outsourced to numbers alone.

That’s why this HBR piece was particularly timely. In it, two nonprofit executives talk about the difference between data and metrics. Those are two words often used interchangeably within organizations, but in fact, they’re quite different: data are just numbers relating to your business operations; metrics are numbers that, ostensibly, tie back to your core purpose as an organization. So, a piece of data might be your brand’s Facebook likes; but the real metric you’re attempting to influence with Facebook likes is brand awareness or favorability (among many potential things).

But the really important point the HBR piece makes is this: you are what you measure. What you measure is ultimately do. If you measure YouTube views, the authors say, you’ll get more of those, no question. But what you may or may not get is increased sales, higher consumer favorability, better brand awareness, or anything that resembles a meaningful business outcome.

One of my favorite MLC cases along these lines comes from Foxtrot, our pseudonym for a major North American retailer. While we see organizations using advanced data analytics for all kinds of things that may or may not make a direct impact on business results, Foxtrot’s approach is different: they decided on an outcome – higher margin purchases and bigger basket sizes – and pointed their metaphorical data gun at solving that problem. The result was not just higher revenues but, ultimately, a more valuable customer – one prepared to spend a greater percentage of their wallet with Foxtrot versus some of their more dominant competitors.

This case is absolutely worth checking out to see a principled execution of advanced analytics in practice. While the technological and mathematical wizardry is certainly cool, the coolest part is that Foxtrot’s approach ultimately influences a few of the core drivers of their business success, rather than simply providing “vanity metrics”.

Any social media professional has a go-to “disaster bag” – occasions when brands or institutions have squandered some opportunity or spewed egg on their own faces as a result of internet ineptitude. There are a few standard stories of this genre: United Breaks Guitars; a Red Cross staffer’s reference to “getting slizzerd” on the charity’s official Twitter handle; Kenneth Cole’s assertion, in the midst of civil unrest in Egypt, that “millions are in uproar in Cairo” over the brand’s new spring collection; and Chrysler’s vulgar complaint about the skill of Detroit-area drivers are all in the standard canon.

Advocates for the use of social media technology and expertise, both within organizations and from the agency world, pull liberally from this bag in presentations and conversations to convince corporate leaders of the stakes of social media and the necessity of their preferred solution. Luckily for those folks, the bag got a little bit bigger in the last few weeks, with the addition of two “social media fails” from UK-based music store HMV and the American satirical newspaper The Onion. The divergent reactions to these Twitter fiascoes illustrate what really drives perceived catastrophic failures in social media.

First, let’s talk about what happened. HMV was placed into receivership in January. As a result of the troubles the brand was obliged to lay off significant numbers of staff, one of whom commandeered the company’s Twitter handle to live-Tweet the layoffs. The Onion, live-tweeting the Oscars, was attempting to send-up the celebrity-obsessed, personality-conflict magnifying media by calling one Oscar nominee, 9-year old Quvenzhané Wallis, the c-word.

Various observers have claimed that Twitter incidents like these represent serious risks to brand perception. For instance, over on LinkedIn, Ryan Holmes, the CEO of HootSuite, posits that brands can avoid “PR debacles” like these (he uses the HMV example as the cautionary tale) by buying  the software his company sells.

But this seems like a classic case of confusing the symptoms of something with the cause. HMV is in a “PR debacle” because it is a bankrupt company in a dying industry, not because an employee tweeted something inappropriate. United got a lot of flack for breaking a guy’s guitar because people regularly have their luggage mistreated on airlines. Conversely, everyone remembers the Red Cross incident as a funny joke, because it’s the Red Cross, which does nothing but help people in need. And I’m willing to bet than in a month, everyone will have forgotten about The Onion’s offensive joke, because they make a very funny newspaper.

So here’s the thing. You can’t insulate the apparatus of communications from human error or malice. Limiting access helps but isn’t foolproof; I’m the sole owner of MLC’s Twitter account, and I have accidentally tweeted things to @CEB_MLC that were meant for my own Twitter handle. I suppose I could also go crazy and tweet all kinds of inappropriate things.

In the absence of complete control over communications, the actual factor involved in these “PR debacles” is how people already feel about the brand in question. People don’t like airlines, so they gobbled up a satirical video about mishandled luggage. But if I made a music video about a bad experience at the Apple Store, I’m willing to bet it wouldn’t become a viral sensation.

So invest away in tools and personnel to help manage your social presence and personality. Just don’t mistake a lack of outrage for actual, active goodwill.

New technology and the changing norms of office culture have led to big shifts in where people do their work these days. 26.2 million American workers teleworked on some regular basis in 2010, and the technology-obsessed blogger set has been predicting a slow shift to near-100% telework for years, now.

So it was interesting, and counterintuitive, when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced the cancellation of that company’s telecommuting program. The memo noted that “communication and collaboration” will be improved by “working side-by-side”, and that “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home”. And those reasons are the typical ones arguments in favor of working at the office: creativity and collaboration are improved with physical co-location, and unsupervised, employees produce lower-quality work.

I don’t know that the second is necessarily true; personally, I’m a much more productive worker away from the office than I am here. (I am astonished, in particular, at how much work I get done in airport lobbies.) But there’s something to be said for the first. CLC Learning and Development, MLC’s sister program for, appropriately enough, corporate learning and development professionals, talks about a concept called “network learning” – the idea that employees who work together should learn together based on the challenges they face as a group. This is a pretty radical departure from the traditional model of corporate training, which tends to view employees as atoms, trainable in a one-to-one relationship via tools like webinars, interactive modules, and lectures.

The implications of this are obvious. For “knowledge workers” – people who primarily work in the fields of symbol manipulation, who “think for a living” – learning to overcome new obstacles isn’t just part of the job, it is the job. Programmers can’t learn a programming language and stop; there are always new engineering challenges to be tackled. Lawyers can’t pass the bar once then ignore new legislation; the law constantly changes. And marketers can’t just memorize a bunch of principles and start marketing; the expectations and needs of customers are anything but static.

So, if you think for a living, you learn for a living; and if you learn for a living – as marketers do – you’ll learn much better in a collaborative, networked environment, one where knowledge flows naturally and organically. Moments of serendipity – the chance meeting in the hallway of two colleagues with compatible ideas – are nearly impossible in organizations where workers are atomized, alone in their homes.

Anyway, that’s my take. But I’m very interested to hear from people, especially those who work from home or manage those who work from home. Can marketing work telework effectively?

HBR has an interesting post this week on “Why Big Companies Can’t Innovate”. The author, Ron Ashkenas, talks to Steve Blank, an entrepreneurship expert, on the barriers big companies have to producing true innovations. He names three in particular (paraphrasing a bit):

The work of startups is inherently more creative than the work of established businesses. If you’re an established firm, his rationale goes, your main job has to be the execution of an existing business model – that’s where your marginal effort stands the biggest chance at generating returns. On the other hands, startups exist to be creative, and constantly search for niches in the market in which to make money. It’s their raison d’être, giving those firms a leg up over incumbents on innovation.

Startups have more tolerance for risk. Market discipline and managerial prerogatives shift as a company grows in headcount and capitalization. People start to care more about flows than stocks; short-term returns take precedence over longer-term (and riskier) investments.

Managers aren’t good innovators. Thriving in a large corporate environment and running a successful startup are two different skills, and are often negatively correlated, as Blank says – “internal entrepreneurs are more likely to be rebels who chafe at standard ways of doing things, don’t like to follow the rules, continually question authority, and have a high tolerance for failure.”

Given these structural impediments to real innovation by established companies, there’s a natural question: is it even possible for large companies to deliver radical innovation? Well, as Ashkenas and Blank point out, the deck is stacked against companies that try. But there are some things you can do to increase the likelihood of better outcomes.

The first is to broaden the scope of what counts as “innovation”. Lots of people have this idea of Archimedes running down the street, yelling “eureka”. But even companies with established business models that need defending can find places to innovate without radically shifting business models. As a lede to his piece, Ashkenas links to a FastCompany list of the “50 Most Innovative Companies”. While I’d have my quibbles with this list – and the very idea of creating such a list – it’s notable that lots of the innovations mentioned aren’t radical shifts to the business models of the companies profiled. For instance, Google gets it’s spot on the list for building fiber-optic internet connections in Kansas City. Using part of a massive pile of cash ($48 billion in their Q4 report) on capital expenditures that have the nice benefit of increasing demand for your core search product (which has largely remained the same), is creative, and innovative, but it doesn’t involve new business models or anything.

The second is to focus innovation efforts at a level most likely to succeed within the broader organizational context. That’s the core message of our work on radical innovation, where we suggest strategies focused on fewer, bigger, and longer-lived innovations, process design principles aimed at generating crowd-sourced quick wins, and revenue-driving tactics like switching costs to drive organizational consensus around innovative efforts, blunting in the process the status-quo bias that makes established companies bad innovators in the first place.

So can big companies innovate? Yes, but a) contingent on your ability to overcome the inertia inherent in large organizations and b) you might have to set your sights a bit lower than category-busting eureka moments.

Cristina Gomez of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales execs, generously contributed a post to our humble blog last week that I’ve been thinking hard about ever since. (Thanks, Cristina!)

The post centers on Daniel Pink’s new To Sell is Human, a book that makes the case that everyone – including people whose job title has nothing to do with it – is a salesperson. The sentiment isn’t new – “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” – but the reasons why it’s more important than ever are especially compelling.

Why? I haven’t read Pink’s book, but I’d posit a few reasons why we now live in the Persuasion Economy:

• Choice, choice, choice. Globalization, the internet, and a trend towards business model decentralization mean that alternatives are never more than click away. When there’s one widget maker (or one marketing philosophy), there’s not too much point in persuasion; when there are dozens or hundreds, you have to actively sell your ideas.
  
• The flattening of hierarchies. I’m reading a fascinating book called Moral Mazes, an ethnography of the world of corporate managers. The book is compelling for its investigation into how the organizations we work for shape our outlook on the world, but as it was written in the late 1980′s, it’s also an interesting window into a time when companies were less flat and much more hierarchical. In most companies, to some degree, control has been replaced with choice.
• A crowded mental landscape. It’s become cliche to say we live our lives in a sea of information, but it’s true. Persuasion has to be a lot better to break through the noise.

Marketing finds itself in a weird place where it must persuade on two fronts: first and primarily, it must persuade consumers and customers to make a certain choice; second, it must persuade the companies it works for that it is a valuable contributor to the corporate bottom line.

Like I said, not a lot new here except the new circumstances making such persuasion even more important. Taking Pink’s advice might not be a bad start.

Interested in learning how to build the most effective B2C marketing teams? Register for a webinar Tuesday, March 5, to find out more.

Last summer and fall, we introduced you to our 2012 research on marketing talent. Weren’t around, or don’t remember? Here’s the gist: marketing – in particular, B2C marketing organizations – have perceived that customers’ information environments are denser and more chaotic than ever. Consumers fragment their time across traditional channels like television and non-traditional channels like social and mobile. Of those two, the non-traditional channel space is notably fast-moving and unpredictable, and so – the thinking goes – the key attribute the best marketers have is agility - the ability to understand and cover multiple channels, while maintaining the capacity to pivot to new ones at a moment’s notice.

So we set out to help our members find more of these people and integrate their skills into the broader team. But what we found out was fascinating: namely, that there is no such thing as an agile marketer as our members define the term, and the marketers that look agile are actually the worst-performing marketers on the team. The other thing we found is that there is a certain quality that predicts higher-performing marketers, called “grit”. (Test yourself for it here).

Grit has broad implications for the way we build and structure our teams – and we’re hosting a webinar on Tuesday, March 5 to talk about exactly that. Interested in learning more? Register for the upcoming webinar today!

Interested in new approaches to digital measurement and analytics? Join us for a webinar on Thursday, March 7!

Company websites have allowed brands to move beyond the 30-second spot and product brochures into rich content that allows consumers to interact with and learn more.  But this explosion of content has been a double-edged sword for many digital marketers: many know in their guts that it’s great to have consumers learning about their products, but they struggle to capitalize on all of the data the websites produce and to know how the business actually benefits from the consumers’ interactions with the content.

Intel is implementing two new techniques to better manage digital measurement:

A streamlined analytics reporting system that allows Intel to focus on the data garnered from high-business-value pages.  Intel’s marketing analytics reporting team used to be burdened by giving tailored reports on each webpage’s performance metrics, regardless of the importance of the page.  This meant that these marketers spent a large portion of their time preparing reports for pages that weren’t very significant to the business, while not being able to devote as much time as they’d like to reporting on the truly important pages.  To better align resources to pages with high business value, Intel now uses a three-tier metrics reporting system: standardized metrics for almost all pages, enhanced metrics that include social data for about a fifth of pages, and custom metrics for the pages with the most business impact.

A value points system that allows Intel to measure the business impact of each page.  One of the biggest struggles with digital measurement is that there is no measure that can be used across digital properties; another is that most digital measures are lagging and measure .  Intel solves these problems by assigning value points to each piece of content based on its ability to drive commercial outcomes, and then measuring each piece’s business impact.

MLC members, join us as marketers from Intel share more about these new techniques on March 7 at 11 a.m. EST.  Register today!

Daniel Pink, the best-selling author of Drive, thinks it is. In his new book To Sell Is Human, Daniel Pink argues that in today’s innovation-driven and interconnected world, all of us (including those of us who do not sell for a living) are in fact in sales. According to Pink, one’s ability to move people or to influence them towards a particular outcome is becoming increasingly critical.

So what can B2B sellers learn from Pink’s advice to all of us who are doing sales every day whether we know it or not?

Acknowledging that the world of sales is changing, from caveat emptor (buyer beware) to caveat venditor (seller beware), Pink says that the ABC’s of selling must also change from “Always be Closing” to:

• Attunement—the ability to bring one’s actions and outlook into harmony with others and with the context you’re in.
• Buoyancy—the ability to face rejection through grittiness and positive outlook.
• Clarity—the ability to move others through surfacing problems, rather than solving them. Read More »

One of the things our B2C research last year discussed was the crowded brains of marketers. Marketing – especially functions that are more digitally-focused – has a tremendous amount of things going on. We’re looking at real-time metrics, checking our Twitter feeds, staying up on the latest tiny movements in the digital world. But the danger of this is that there’s rarely time to pull up and see the big picture – what’s going on in the consumer’s world, and why?

If this sounds familiar, here’s an idea to get a little perspective: join MLC and our partners at Iconoculture for “Big Ideas 2013″, a webinar that will take you through five key ways the consumer’s world will change in the coming year, such as:

Big Data Gets Personal. Smart brands are using customer data to truly help rather than completely annoy people, but the balance between privacy and product is more vital than ever.  How are pioneering brands leveraging these tools to capture and keep new customers?

Foodies Recalibrate. Consumers are ready to Get Real with their food and ditch the pretension and preciousness, but that doesn’t mean they want to eat nothing but Hot Pockets.  They’re ditching the mentality of “quality at all costs” and are beginning to make trade-offs for convenience, cost, and availability. Marketers need to understand the subtle shift in values that the recalibration reveals.

BRIC Saving and Spending by the Letters. As the global economy begins to recover in the next 12-18 months, be on the lookout for a resumption of explosive growth in large emerging markets like the BRIC countries. But marketers shouldn’t lump these economies together; Iconoculture will take a look at how consumer behavior differs in each.

Interested? Join us on February 27th to learn about these and other Big Ideas marketers should have in the back of their minds this year.

The biggest day of the year – for B2C marketers, at least – has come and gone (check out our ad reviews here, by the way). The price for a 30-second spot is up, but there’s some evidence that big advertisers are skipping the spend and going direct to consumers via social channels instead. Which leads to the question – in the social media-heavy, fragmented, direct-to-consumer world that many marketers believe we’re entering, is there a place for big, audacious Super Bowl ad spends?

Here’s my answer: yes.

First, I’d quibble with the premise. More personalized forms of media are indeed becoming more important to many consumers. We spend a lot more time on Facebook relative to traditional media than we did, say, in 2005. But as we’ve seen, Facebook and Twitter serve as compliments – not replacements – to television. They’re a way to share the viewing experience among a group bigger than those in your living room. All things equal, this would serve to raise the value of ad spend on “big events” like the Olympics and Super Bowl. Even assuming that the premise is correct, and that we’re indeed headed towards a future of microcultures, each with their own set of media. Doesn’t this raise the value of big events that we all still share?

Absent a future in which American football becomes precipitously less popular – a future that’s not entirely out of the question, by the way – the Super Bowl will almost certainly remain a mainstay of popular culture. And if the head injury crisis leads to a wane in football popularity, it’ll certainly be replaced with something else over time.

What I’d actually wager is that when marketers talk about Super Bowl ads not being effective anymore, it’s not a symptom of some social media techno-future. Rather, it’s that ad effectiveness is easier to measure and more accurate, and that marketers are increasingly seeing what they’re getting for all that big spend. But that isn’t because the event is less valuable; it’s because marketing’s approach was wrong all along. The fact that many brands still see huge returns from big advertising campaigns should illustrate that it’s the approach, not the event, that’s at fault.

Now I’m sure you want me to tell you how to create a great Super Bowl ad, and I’m afraid I can’t do that. I have noticed that the best ones tend to emphasize brand differentiators or, in a crowded market, just do something audacious to drive a little short-term revenue advantage (see: GoDaddy). But beyond that there’s not a lot of specific advice to be had – the important point is that marketers still have a huge window to make an impact at the Super Bowl, but they might have to work a bit harder to get it.