The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words. ~ RACHEL NAOMI REMEN

Listening is one of the most attractive traits in a fellow human being. Interest is sexy, and shows that you want to see into the other person. Learning another’s likes, favorites and passions transforms the relationship into one of transparency and intimacy. A classic rephrasing of intimacy is In-To-Me-See.

In the world of social media marketing, listening is a critical element to the humanization of a brand, the discovery of key influencers, communities and conversations where your product or service has an audience. There are loads of tools for listening, all with different slants on the art and science of gathering intelligence. But a critical aspect of this equation is the EQ (emotional intelligence) of the analyst looking at the data (even if the tool has already performed some intuitive filtering).

To use a dating metaphor: when your date really listens to you, he/she will be tying his/her chosen topics into what you are saying, weaving the two hearts at the table, on the blanket, or on the beach together. This weaving of hearts is just as important in social media marketing, where community managers and small business owners have the mandate to engage in one-one dialogues with customers or segmented niches. Such dialogues are not simply about opening up and letting things go on a natural course. As Charlene Li says in her latest book, Open Leadership, “Being open requires more —not less—rigor and effort than being in control.” The best relationships are ACTIVE!

Listening IS Invitation

Active listening has long been a practice amongst psychologists and psychotherapists, and is no less important in the realm of social networking. To actively listen one might consider the following important actions (adapted from the Council Circle tradition of co-listening):

1) Maintain eye contact with the person speaking (In cyber-space, this means using the filters in the listening tools in an intuitive manner so as to properly segment your audience based on keywords, keyphrases AND other verticals that are attractive to that niche. sCRM is all about this CONNECTION of information from databases to extract precise lists of keywords relevant AND resonant to your audience).

2) Be relaxed but present. (Check out Jet Blue’s twitter account. Their staff are interacting with customers in an uplifting, humorous manner).

3) Be still.

4) Listen from the heart. (The heart is THE most important muscle in social media marketing!)

5) Allow the story to unfold. (The Nestle Facebook fiasco is a classic example of a Community Manager rushing in prior to thinking the consequences through).

6) Listen carefully and the person speaking will always tell you what they need.

7) It’s not your job to “fix” the person who’s working.

Common mistakes to avoid:

DON’T give advice (unless asked for). (In social networking, Community Managers/Business owners have the mandate to be problem solvers. To truly solve a problem one must listen first. The key distinction between an Advice-Giver and a Problem-Solver is ACTION!)
DON’T “swap stories” to reassure the person who is speaking
DON’T interpret the meaning of his feelings
DON’T interrupt discharge of emotion (laughter, tears, etc.)
DON’T talk very much
DON’T ask questions for your own information
ONLY ask questions to lead the person deeper into feelings & his own re/solutions.

The most common mistake: Trying to show the person speaking what a good, understanding, perceptive, kind, helpful … person, counselor, leader … you are.

Listen, listen, listen! (That’s really what we all need!)

To return to the weaving metaphor, when one weaves strands of past subjects into the current conversation, a common point of reference is established. The social fabric of the internet is one of the most dynamic environments humanity has EVER engaged in…having the tools to listen is critical (science), knowing how to listen is an art that takes practice or comes naturally. Good community managers are EXCELLENT listeners who hear the heart of their audience and give the customer what he/she wants. And that is what makes GREAT customer-centric business, the current HOT method of marketing.

David Deida, the relationship author, writes, “Who we trust in a business situation is based on how open we are. Openness is bodily openness, muscular relaxation, heart openness as opposed to hiding behind some emotional wall, and spiritual openness, which is actually feeling so fully into the moment that there’s no separation between you and the entire moment.” Openess, feeling and intuition are INHERENT traits of the successful social media marketer/networker.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Definition: A Chief Customer Officer builds relationships with customers, cultivates those relationships and grows social equity. He/she promotes a customer-centric culture in a company and removes obstacles within the company to customer satisfaction. Customer managers identify customers’ product needs, while brand managers supply products that fit those needs. In a P2P environment, such a reorganization is critical to success.

A further definition: an executive that provides the comprehensive and authoritative view of the customer and creates corporate and customer strategy at the highest levels of the company to maximize customer acquisition, retention, and profitability.

The CCO role is evolving into more of a “Chief Customer Strategy Officer,” focused primarily upon driving profitable customer strategy at all levels of the company with the express goal of acquiring, retaining, and serving the right customers for greater profits. It is no longer a “nice to have” designation; for many companies it is business critical and primary source of competitive advantage. In a telling about-face, many people have stopped complaining that a CCO is unnecessary because a company has a CMO. Instead, they are advocating an extreme position in which the CMO should be replaced with a CCO.(Source: chiefcustomerofficer.com)

In the world of the past (and present for many still), the product manager would use one-way mass marketing to push products to people. In the world of the future (and growing as a present-day reality), customer managers engage individual people or narrow segments in two way communications, building long-term relationships by promoting whichever of the company’s products a customer would value most at any given time. This is more similar to a B2B paradigm.

A customer manager is the ultimate expression of marketing (find out what the customer wants and fulfill the need) while the product (or brand) manager is more aligned with the traditional sellling mind-set (have product, find customer). Look for more movement in this area in the coming year at the enterprise level, even as companies of all sizes begin acknowledging the need for Community Managers (who are ideally aligned with their values). A major “IT” position in social business is Community Manager AND Chief Customer Officer.

(”To compete, companies must shift from pushing individual products to building long-term customer relationships.

The marketing department must be reinvented as a “customer department” that replaces the CMO with a chief customer officer, makes product and brand managers subservient to customer managers, and oversees customer-focused functions including R&D, customer service, market research, and CRM.

These changes shift the firm’s focus from product profitability to customer profitability, as measured by metrics such as customer lifetime value and customer equity. This organizational transformation will uproot entrenched interests and so must be driven from the top.” ~ Roland T. Rust, Christine Moorman and Gaurav Bhalla in Harvard Business Review, January-February 2010)

(“The key to business success, particularly in a down economy, is anticipating customer needs and continuously deepening customer relationships,” says Jeb Dasteel, CCO Council’s CCO of the Year 2009. “We’ve gotten really good at listening to customers, prioritizing feedback, and driving customer strategy at all levels.”)

(The average small/medium-biz CRM customer is 200 to 1000 employees. These are the organizations that Queener speaks of – the ones that need to understand and engage the social customer so badly.

“I don’t know if it’s a question of small vs large organizations,” he said. “Small [businesses] need to be scrappier; they don’t have the manpower.”

“When you have organizations of 200 to 1000 employees – the CIOs come from the business,” Queener said. “It’s all about moving fast-fast-fast.” ~ Brett Queener, SVP, Products, Salesforce)

Popularity: 4% [?]

Who Owns Social, Anyway?
Beats Me, but There Are a Ton of Things to
Figure Out Before We Settle on the Answer

By Pete Blackshaw

So who the heck owns social?
That’s a tricky question, not only because every business stakeholder — marketing, PR, IT, research, investor relations, media, consumer relations — seems to have a piece of social baked into their new DNA and delivery road map, but also because its definition and scope keep getting pulled in new, arguably more complicated, directions.

Indeed, take a gander at all the new terms being used to describe our new world order — social CRM, social commerce, earned media, CRM 2.0, enterprise social — and you’ll quickly find the social juggernaut becoming synonymous with that broader umbrella term known as “digital.”

Indeed, I just dug up some notes from a consulting initiative I led at Nielsen for a major marketer. Digital, I noted, “is a new enabling framework for business and marketing grounded in four related characteristics: on-demand, interactive, sensing and connected.”

Still, legitimate schizophrenia reigns around the ownership question. After all, as marketers we want leadership roles clearly defined (usually in our favor). We’re restlessly — and rhetorically — impatient with silos and the “lack of organizational integration” — even though our “what’s next” appetite inevitably feeds the frenetic front line of fragmentation.

The good news is that social media appears to be softening organizational silos, ostensibly laying a runway for that coveted yet elusive marketing goal of “integration.”

In my pre-call for the Ad Age Digital Conference panel I’m moderating — featuring NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, Dell CMO Erin Nelson and Combe VP-Director of Interactive Communications Tom Cunniff — the vexing “integration” came up repeatedly. Much of this owes the furious pace of “social innovation,” which Schiller reminded us is still in early innings. Put another way, we might need to turn over countless new rocks before we find our stride.

Nelson, who leads an impressive medley of activity from community platforms to service innovation, suggested that Dell’s biggest need is “where to place bets.” Digital and social media, she said, offers countless possibilities, but in the end you have to make choices. And boy, is she right. Combe’s Cunniff concurrently hit the integration need hard but also suggested new centers of gravity would emerge in our socially enabled world, like consumer relations.

Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with “integration,” calcified by 15 years of marketing experience, from “best practice”-heavy P&G to “start with a clean slate” web startups. Two conflicting rules reign supreme in my head: One, that which forces integration and coordination, or prematurely synthesizes, inevitably slows things down. Two, that which liberates, loosens, decentralizes and draws inspiration from external sources, or walks off the beaten path, speeds things up.

Alas, such is the dualism of social media. We want order, but we can’t stand order. Jefferson-Hamilton reincarnated.

I mean, it’s not that corporate stakeholder groups don’t trust one another. It’s just that the group typically holding the social flag most firmly thinks the other groups are too slow, have no business running the social-media show, and are putting the enterprise on the precipice of disaster through naïve embrace of social silliness like transparency and “be yourself” authenticity.

Meanwhile, agencies and supplier networks are all storming the “social media” center: PR firms see social as an extension of their birthright in influencer marketing; ad agencies see it as a new frontier of high-impact ad impressions (for example, earned media); the growing crop of word-of-mouth agencies and buzz-monitoring firms see this as birthright. It’s almost as though we have the “internal” version of Bob Garfield’s “Chaos Scenario.”

Two recent developments really up the ante for both the ownership and integration questions: social HR and social CRM. For all our hype about the wonders of managing influencers and blogger outreach, the folks scoring the biggest wins in social outreach are the HR teams leading recruiting. Indeed, for those struggling with “social ROI” look no further than the fertile fields of open-source, “all content’s a resume” web.

Then again, the HR dynamic can also muddle the marketing track, especially when the flow of a Facebook fan page quickly shifts gears from an on-equity brand message to a college recruiting pitch, or vice-versa.

The rise of “social CRM” further complicates the ownership question. Perhaps the IT or tech experts do have a legitimate claim to a space that’s increasingly ornamented with enterprise software, cloud computing, scary-sophisticated databases, and scary-high consumer expectations (mostly set by the “marketing guy” freelancing “social engagement”) regarding customer service. Social CRM is also introducing aspects of “business-process innovation” (cost-efficient crowd-sourcing, internal collaboration, integrated listening platform, and the like) that halos well above the marketing space.

So what’s a CMO to do amid all this? We’ll set some of these questions in tomorrow’s panel, but in the meantime, don’t naively assume you’ll solve the social-media “ownership” and digital “integration” questions overnight. Your best bet right now is to manage the flow, sandbag unruly currents here and there, and do everything you can to “path the passion.”

Moreover, we all need to become better internal curators and “community managers.” Not unlike a devoted greenie, we need to work really hard to manage our social “ecosystem.” This is probably less about command-and-control than in establishing thoughtful guide rails, tempered by experience, good judgment, and even the lessons of a few legal hard knocks.

We can also get a few things going that will cultivate more meaningful ownership or cooperation in the enterprise. In my experience, the leader who gets the best (and most inclusive) listening dashboard or radar in place quickly accrues the most organizational legitimacy. Listening pipes, after all, feed many mouths and can drive unity around a common purpose. (I see this all the time — especially in crisis situations, where everyone has a stake in the outcome.)

Related, credible ownership also accrues to those who start making sense of the madness through smarter metrics. I’m particularly fond of the “paid/earned” model (even in my dialogue with in Nielsen) because it lowers access barriers to social media and speaks a language others in the organization can easily understand versus “shiny new object” gobbledygook.

Lastly, CMOs can make a world of difference rethinking incentive models. We have silos because we’re all fighting for a limited budget, often at cross purposes.

So who owns social media? Beats me, but there are a ton of things we can figure out before we settle on the “silver bullet” answer.

Popularity: 4% [?]

1. Companies will expect ROI from their Social Media efforts.

2. The Social Media Specialist (Community Manager) position will become mainstream.

– As a Social Media Specialist you will be responsible for link building and socialization of our client’s online content. Familiarity with the internet, social media sites, search engines, discussion boards, blogs, video sharing sites and podcasting is an asset but a willingness to learn is essential. You must possess excellent written and verbal communication skills in order to write and edit high quality content. A background in interactive marketing or public relations is considered a plus. The ability to find solutions in order to generate measurable results for clients is necessary as well as the generation of reports on those efforts.

Job Accountabilities:
• Contribute strategy and solutions to new business efforts
• Proactively introduce new ideas for client initiatives
• Develop online outreach strategy
• Work with clients to identify the most appropriate blogs
• Establish relationship with key bloggers
• Monitor social networks for potential threats or opportunities
• Leverage social networks to build affinity with either a company, product or issue position
• Leverage video sharing sites like YouTube to advance a client’s message or image
• Conduct online research to identify Web sites and online influencers for outreach
• Conduct one-to-one outreach to site editors, writers, and other influencers
• Develop and manage online strategic partnerships for client projects
• Concept and manage paid placement opportunities, including sponsorships and search engine                  and banner advertising (organic search engine marketing)

3. Cultural shift inside of companies.

4. Social Media Monitoring will be a necessary component

5. Agencies and companies will hire data analysts:
Detailed Description of Role
Ownership/Responsibility
* Campaign set-up
* Structuring, maintaining and evolving accounts across all search engines
* Keyword Research: using a variety of research tools and own initiative
* Ensuring efficient bid management strategies to maximize campaign potential
* Testing & Optimisation – regular testing on different aspects of PPC campaigns
* Performance monitoring – keeping a check on all key performance parameters
* Identifying opportunities for improvement/growing revenue and sales

Reporting
* Daily Logging of Client Stats and Supplier Spend
* Ensuring budgets and targets are met
* Preparing weekly reports and analysis

Troubleshooting
* Ensuring campaigns are functioning correctly
* Addressing poor performing campaigns
* Ensuring visibility of key terms on the engines
* Identifying/spotting irregular behavior on the adspace/performance data

Person Specification
A highly analytical and motivated individual to join the existing Search / Social Media team. The ideal candidate must be able to perform well under pressure within in a fast-paced environment.

Skills / Experience
* Degree educated, ideally in a scientific/technical discipline
* Knowledge/experience of PPC desirable
* 1 or 2 years professional experience within a technical/analytical field is desirable
* Highly Analytical – able to absorb large amounts of data quickly to make quick decisions/provide solutions and ideas
* Exceptional attention to detail
* Driven & Motivated; we are looking for someone who is very performance driven
* Fast learner; able to quickly grasp all key tools/technology
* Innovative & creative; able to think outside the box, this role will require someone able to carry out testing and optimization across our client accounts
* Hungry to learn & enjoys a challenge
* Able to take ownership/responsibility
* Well organized, efficient and ability to meet strict deadlines
* Advanced Excel skills
* Passionate about online marketing

6. Integration of platforms and processes will be critical.

Popularity: 4% [?]