The Dominos “YouTube Adventure” last week  – when a couple made a disgusting video of what they did in making a Dominos Sub – is I think a “Rubicon” moment.  Not just for Dominos, who had already put their toe into the river of Social Media but for every enterprise. (Excellent revue here  by Frederic Lardinois from Read Write Web on what happened + Stats + Dominos response + an analysis)

All your customers, voters, members, suppliers – the public are now linked. Newsworthy events that are good and bad will spread like wildfire. Look at the “Good” event of Susan Boyle – as of this date 20 million views in less than a week!

The Rubicon is that – whether you like it or not – the public are now linked so well, that anything said about you will now spread everywhere and very quickly. This linkage, and hence the speed and immediacy of the spread, can only get wider and faster. Maybe, in a few months, events that affect you will spread instantly to everyone. What will spread the fastest of course will be the bad things.

So the new reality is that it is what others say that will matter not what you say. So your reputation – your brand – the trust you have – is now not longer easily or directly controlled by you.

You have to be swimming in this river to have any chance of protecting your name.

As with Dominos – using the new social media tools is not enough. You will have to understand and become a master of how to live and do well in thus new world.

Compared to many today, Dominos were somewhat ready. But even then – I think because they had only installed the tools but not the culture – they were awkward. They were late in catching their problem. Late in a their response. Stilted in their response – they did not understand that a scripted response is not going to help much.

They were still operating the new tools with the old culture.

They gave their CEO a script. He read from the prompter and did not make emotional contact with the audience. But Dominos still did well compared maybe to you! For do you even have the tools?

But of course it is not just about the tools. The issue is that you can no longer control. So their new plan is of course the old plan – “let’s control the store”. Their key response is to ban video cameras from their stores! This means a ban on cell phones really and how practical can that be?

The only effective response will be to get into the river with everyone else and get really good at how to behave in this new river. It will be to become so engaged that the conversation can be affected or shaped. You have to be a trusted part of the conversation to do this. You cannot just barge in.

Dominos and you will have to unlearn and put away all of what made old PR work. For all of PR up to now has used “Message” – a tightly controlled and scripted response where the text is key. Now you have to use “Presence” – an emotional message where the authenticity of the humanity of the “speaker” carries the point. Volts versus Amps.

This River will soon operate at the speed of light. To protect your name, you have to be a major presence in the river now. You have to merge with the river so that your nervous system is acutely attuned to the slightest hint of trouble. The leverage is Trust. Only a trusted player in the river will have any chance of settling down the ripples.

To have the Trust, you need to be known. To be known, you have to be a person and not an institution.The people that represent you in this river have to be free people who can be trusted. They have to have won the trust of the river. If trouble occurs, they have to respond immediately without a script. They have to be empathic and not controlled.

This role is foreign to institutions who are all about control. The answer are not the tools but the culture.

The error is to see your participation in Social Media as having the right Tools. “We use Twitter!” is a meaningless statement. Hey you can give me all the tools I would need to fix a car and I still will not be able to fix a car. Worse you can give me an airplane to fly and I will crash every time. The people who work for you in this field have to be the real deal. You would not hire a CFO who did not know her stuff?

Why simply tell your existing PR folks who know nothing about this – in fact who hate it – to take over? All of how PR, Research and Marketing has been done until now will have to be unlearned. Traditional PR, Research and Marketing folks will feel very uncomfortable and will do what all prior paradigm leaders do when confronted with the real future. They will undermine and fight it. They have to. For this is their nemesis.

The context for this decision is that the old world is dying. Here is how Coke is responding:

ATLANTA: Coca-Cola has created a new office of digital communications and social media within its public affairs and communications department. Clyde Tuggle, SVP of corporate affairs and productivity at Coke, noted “mass media is declining in importance,” when introducing the new department in a memo to staff, which the beverage manufacturer shared with PRWeek.

“Our future success depends on our continued ability to connect people to our brands and our Company all around the world, one person at a time,” Tuggle wrote. “Our new office of digital communications and social media will help us become even more comfortable and effective in these new spaces.”

The new unit will work in collaboration with global interactive marketing, IT, and consumer affairs, as well as legal and strategic security.

Adam Brown, digital communications director, and Anne Carelli, digital communications manager, will have oversight of corporate digital and social media communications efforts. Both Brown and Carelli will continue ongoing training programs, such as “Training Byte” online videos, in addition to “more robust” programs through its new PAC Institute.

The ideas in the new world that will have to be learned anew include these:

• Listen before you Speak – The New Tools allow you to hear the slightest tremor. Last week I Tweeted that I had done my taxes and that I had used QuickTax. Within minutes QuickTax had responded with a thank you. A week earlier I Tweeted that I had had a problem with accessing Ning. Within minutes a customer service person from Ning contacted me and worked over the weekend to solve my problem. If you cannot do this – you are not in the game. In future, most of your research will operate in real time without you having to ask any questions. Your new job will be to listen minute by minute and to have tools and people that can make sense of the stream. Not only to make sense of what you hear but also to shape the stream. QuickTax is responding to every mention good or bad. An early and a personal response, can settle a problem that could become a crisis. Such a strategy dramatically reduces your costs in research and brand management. Such a strategy dramatically increases your effectiveness and reduces your risks. More for less.

• Participate not Pontificate – To be heard, you have to participate. To speak, you have to lose your corporate voice. You have to lose the official tone of voice. You have to regain a human voice. This can only be done if you allow your social media staff to be themselves. They cannot be the highly controlled drones that are the standard in the corporate or bureaucratic world – many people in your organization will not be able to lose this voice. They even use it at home. Simply training old staff will not be enough. For how can you have trained people in the Shetl to be Americans?  You have to live in the New World to become a citizen. To have the new voice is to be a native of the new culture that is the very opposite of the norms of the old country. As with immigrants, it will be the kids who will get it first and they will train the others. But the Bubbies will never get it. This aspect of having the new strategy work or not is the most challenging part of all of this. In the end it means, that the old culture has to die too. Maybe in the interim, you set your unit up apart from the rest and have it report to the CEO for protection. Clayton Christenson has a lot to say about this problem. For to respond to this new reality demands that you disrupt your culture. The most difficult of all acts for a leader.

• Importance – Life or Death: This is not an add on or a side show as Newspapers found – This is all about whether you are going to live or die – As the Coke folks say but more gently than I – Mass Media is dying. So then is the entire Mass Media approach to PR and Broadcast – the God-like Voice and Moses with the Text of God from on high does not work. So how important is your reputation? How important is your business or enterprise? Adopting this new way is one of the most important decisions you will make. So also having the RIGHT PEOPLE to do this for you is the second decision you will make after deciding to cross the River. Ideally you have to have them report to the CEO. Ideally the CEO needs to become immersed as well. If I can do this, aged 59 and having spent most of my working life in institutions. Then so can you. The only issue is will. Do you have the will as a CEO to move into the future?

Caesar made the call by crossing the Rubicon to end the Republic and to begin the Empire. He had the will to stake it all. There was then no going back.

Actually it is society that has crossed the Rubicon. The new interactive and participative world is now here.

Will you cross too? This is a life or death decision for you. It’s also a winning choice. Many will not be able to make this choice. Their own culture will be too powerful. If you can, you have the advantage. The earlier you move, the better you will get at this.

The Zappos CEO has a Twitter account — @zappos. Somehow I was following his account (not something all that random for me — I check out the value-add of each ‘voice’ before I connect with them). Earlier today he tweets:

I will be randomly selecting someone to get a free pair of shoes from all @zappos followers later tonight. Thanks @pokai for the suggestion!

I remember reading the note earlier wondering if I had to fill out a form or something. I briefly checked out the Zappos site…and then just went on about my business.

Tonight I was tweeting a number of ‘rants’ as I was reading the fabulous book Power Healing, by Leo Galland (e.g. “74 percent of patients seen…for various common symptoms…no…diagnosis to explain the cause of their problems.” 74% failure rate!!!), when suddenly the following series of messages pass by.

And the free shoes winner is… @rotkapchen – congrats! @rotkapchen has 61 followers but only 3 were also following @zappos (cont..)

@marobella @paulisakson @karllong were @rokapchen ’s 3 friends! Congrats to all, thanks for playing! I will direct msg each of the winners!

I’m thinking @rotkapchen — that’s me! I’m shooting an email to my kids and a few friends when private tweets hit my phone as text messages, with instructions to provide my email address to claim my prize. I jump into the Twitter interface to send a private message back directly to the Zappos account, and minutes later I get an email with a code to go online and shop at Zappos.

I was still reeling trying to figure out exactly what I’d done when I read the tweet:

Winner was randomly selected from all @zappos followers, and up to 10 of winner’s friends also win if they also followed @zappos

This was shortly followed by:

Thanks all for playing, it was fun! Let’s do this again soon! @zappos any suggestions for making it more fun/exciting in the future!

This is not a small thing. Free pair of shoes? It’s not too often that I spend $150 on a pair of shoes! But I’ll sure have fun trying.

What was interesting was the email that I received from Zappos. In the interest of time, an existing process was obviously engaged. The fact that this process is already in place is what intrigues me the most. Check out the wording of the message, its implications and how many ways I’m given direct access to continue the conversation if I was to desire to do so (after having a horrific week trying to engage in conversations with other vendors causing me real grief):

We apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused. Let us assure
you this is not indicative of the high quality of service and products we
strive to provide our customers.

As a token of goodwill, Zappos is issuing a coupon in the amount of $xxx
for your next purchase at Zappos.

Below is the coupon code you will need to place the order.

csxxxxxxxxxx

You can use this coupon with your next order at Zappos.com anytime
within the next 90 days. To use this coupon, place the code in the space
provided at the bottom of the shopping cart page.

Please accept this as an apology for any inconvenience, and do not hesitate
to contact us if there is anything we can do to be of further assistance.
Please note, this coupon code is associated with your account and is only
valid when used with the email address attached to your account. This coupon
is not redeemable for cash and cannot be duplicated, altered or auctioned on
any web site. This coupon is non-transferable.

Sincerely,

Customer Loyalty Team

Zappos.com
Powered by Service
1-800-ZAPPOS-1 (1-800-927-7671) or
702-943-7677
e-mail: cs@zappos.com
http://www.zappos.com

Pretty much says to me, their byline “Powered by Service” is not just marketease.

Can you imagine what would happen to the GDP if this same commitment to customers and unique, direct involvement in new forms of interaction were to be embraced for ALL relationships (internal and external) by all companies? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, like with Zappos, we didn’t have to imagine it at all but could live it? Why, there probably would no longer BE a justification for a revolution at all.

And what about the others who also get to experience all of this because, simply by association, they too are winners? That’s pretty good payout for social networking. There’s already a lot of goodwill being spread around.

Now if you will excuse me, I have some shopping to do.

Postscript:
Industry colleague David Armano also wrote about this Zappos scenario and pointed out how it’s not about the tools, but about the unique ways in which they get used. Capitalizing (as is Forrester) on the crossover to Marketing audiences, he points out, it’s all about the ‘buzz’!

My point is that, no matter what you think of WalMart now, that we are predjudiced about the boonies. Smart people in all fields – not the least in Social Media – tend to have a big city bias. We too often over look the boonies and those that live and work there – how could they affect us? We all know that you have to be in the big city to know what is really going on. Of course that is why Warren Buffett is the richest man in the world!

My story today is about a man that you likely have never heard of – who lives and works in a small town that you also may never have heard of. We can never know today if he may become the Sam Walton or the Warren Buffett of media, but my bet is that if he does not then someone like him will be.

My bet is that at the heart of the real social media revolution is that if we do indeed move to a networked world then small communities will be able to stand toe to toe with the big cities.

Meet Brian Hurlburt who lives in Yarmouth Nova Scotia a small port on the southern tip of the province where the high speed ferry comes in from Portland. Brian owns a runs a Web “Something” (Yarmouthcounty.com) that tells the aggregated story of everything that happens in Yarmouth. I call it a web “something” because it is more than a web site – it is closer to the old style of really local newspaper that you might see in a western.

Until Brian, everyone had ignored Yarmouth. The fact that the domain was available told Brian that no one cared. The Province did not care – Yarmouth is off the radar in Halifax. Tourists from the US got off the ferry and drive through town and onto other more exotic places that were better known. (Nothing is really exotic in Atlantic Canada but you know what I mean) The B & B’s were all separated and isolated and could not get their message out.  So were all the social groups such as Church groups. Small business struggled to get noticed and worried about maybe a WalMart coming to town. The social capital of Yarmouth was draining away. At some point, it would no longer be a community at all.

So who is Brian Hulrburt? Is he some flash young techhie? No Brian is a regular guy who knew next to nothing about the web. Everything he now knows about how the web works he has learned by trial and error. All the fears that a church or a B & B may have about the web – he has experienced himself.

Fear is the great barrier that we all have of the new. So how Brian learned and how he is – an open and vulnerable man – is an important key to his success in bringing so many parts of his community together online. He can describe what has to be done in language and in a tone that does not judge or appear mysterious.

He also did not try and monetize the site until it was ready. He had faith that if he was able to reach a critical mass that the money would come. So he also did not carry a lot of costs himself. He could not afford to have costs involved that would force him to force the economics before the time was right.

Is this not the Craigslist model?

What he has been able to do is to aggregate the life of Yarmouth online. Aggregation in a safe and trusted place is going to be one of the key value creation processes in a world of infinite content. By not pushing the economics he has built the trust and now “owns” the space.

The underlying metrics are also emerging that will drive an economic model that benefits not just Brian but all those who inhabit the site.

In 2007 the site had 100,000 visits. Not hits, over 1 1/2 million of those, but real visits. Because of the power of aggregation, all those that live on the site have now access to al this traffic that they could never have reached on their own. The local paper reaches about 20-30,000. So Brian is reaching more and at a fraction of the cost of the paper. He also enables a growing interaction between all parties which is not possible in a paper.

This is more than Google Local or Craigslist – this is a personal aggregation that includes a filtering that is part Brian and part the client. It can therefore be trusted more than a simple mechanical aggregation. It will over time therefore have more value than a simple algorithm.

A growing part of what Brian can now offer his family of clients is the kind of measurement that conventional advertising cannot. Brian is becoming expert in analytics.

Here I think is part of the core of the new economic model. Mass Marketing needed a mass market as there was so much leakage. With no precision possible, as in WWII, only area bombing was possible. So what could a small place do like Yarmouth. Their feeble sums of money wouldn’t even be noise in the larger scheme of trying to get noticed. What Brian can offer is precision – the Long Tail in action. A B & B can see exactly who it is reaching online and can adjust to get a better focus and hence result.

This will kill the mass media alternatives. Niche + precision = high return.

For me the lessons that  I have gained from looking at Brian are these:

• Niche is where the energy is – the Value will be on the right hand side of the Long Tail
• Aggregation around niche is where the value is – the more personal the better
• Precision about what happens in the aggregated niche is what drives the economics and the return
• Power will shift from the large and diffused to the small and concentrated

I asked Brian “where is it going?” He replied by saying that “The web is changing the world. It is helping us help each other again. We can take charge of our own lives again. I want to be part of this.”

Suddenly her dispersed attention sort of gathered itself into a rising column of interest. Her neck craned, her body turned, her eyes peered intently as we passed what seemed to me to be a perfectly nondescript van.

“Did you see that?” she said excitedly, adding that the vanity plate said something about Elvis — I’d not noticed. She was peering intently into the van. I tried for a quick look, but entirely missed seeing the driver — a woman, according to my daughter, encumbered by one of those giant hairdos of yore, brilliantly blond, genus fanatica, species elvisia, ca. 1958.

All I saw was the van. All my kid saw was the Elvis attributes — Elvis happens to be one of her longest running crushes — on the license plate and inside. The thing is, given the way her attention had been deployed moments before, I have no idea how it pulled that particular bit of data from the parallel lines of traffic we were passing at 84 mph.

This jogged my memory of a theme surfacing at FASTForward08: How JP Rangaswami, Don Tapscott and others had talked about how multi-tasked kids are, how their synapses seem to have been rewired to do things we can’t do.

We — ok, I – am of the generation of the single node receptor, the seemingly receptive eye/I, waiting idly to be served up something whole to look at, to take in. I turned off my TV off in 2000 and have not looked at it for more than 210 minutes in toto since; nevertheless, I remain a sort of virtual reclined potato, lying in wait for something to actively consume my vacancy.

My daughter and her peers are not like this. They seem constantly pre-occupied, moving between ongoing processes — mySpace, texting, photoshopping, searching — and yet, somehow, they catch more. Not “more” as in all that is going on, and perhaps more worryingly, not more as in the big picture. More within that ambiance that is vital and relevant to their current and ongoing passions and curiosity.

One other thing that seems worth noting: we Boomers are voice-oriented — we listen to voices, discourses, “messages,” till we grow utterly sick of them. Kids excel in tuning voices — and not just those of their parents — out, and in. They instead have selected conversations, not via the paths of the larynx, tongue and ear — exchanges proceeding against a silent, or music-filled, background. The “openness” of the couch potato is not their openness, but they aren’t closed, either. Just differently available.

To address this sort of optative “user,” a mode of address that attempts to fill up all the space with its active, grandstanding, vocal presence is probably not going to get far.

Something moving sidelong and not so showy — less big, less direct, less controlling — might be more suitable. Something decentered, linked to or associated indirectly to what is already moving them.

The battle-cry of this mode of address could be, “It’s the metonymy, stupid!”

Where are these links to be found? In the messiness of what David Weinberger calls the “unowned order” — the unpredictable realm of data and metadata, or, in his metaphor, amid the wild hedgerows before the topiarists arrive — the realm of advanced search.

I should mention that my five-year-old, who has not yet begun to surf, twit, or google, demonstrates thinking and attentional processes that are linear, Aristotelian, and complete. We have great old-fashioned conversations, as humans once did, in the wayback days. It’s pretty cool.

I read models – I’m not prophetic. I don’t know what advertising will be replaced by, nor do I know how soon, but I do know what is more efficient: direct brokering or agents. On the internet today, the model that makes the likes of Google so successful with advertising relies heavily on bots (internet or web robots). This, at least adds some relevancy to the advertising. Bots were purported to be the kind of technology that could better serve our personal needs by delivering more relevant content – instant delivery, replacing the need to ‘find’. But we’re bombarded with these instant deliveries when we’re not ‘looking’ for them. [BTW, to avoid ads during search, I recommend using Clusty -- it was the first engine that helped me understand the power of FAST technology, almost a decade ago.]

In discussing this issue with the lawyer sitting next to me on the plane yesterday, he reminded me of the typical buying scenario: we’re looking to make a purchase, we tap into our net. We either talk to friends or we literally get online and leverage the ‘advisory’ model. On Amazon and other ecommerce sites, we read the ratings/reviews of others. We put those reviews into our own context, and draw our own conclusions. In that way, the collective of reviews serves as a brokering mechanism.

Advertising may incite awareness or interest, but it is no longer the ‘buying’ factor it was during an era of consumption most influenced by a ‘need to belong, fit in’. How many advertisements do you not act on in a day? Whether you acted or not, someone paid for the fact that you ’saw’ the ad — even if you really didn’t ’see’ it. How often are you in a buying/need state? When you are, how often is that act influenced by advertising (either past or current)? Where it may be influenced at all, did advertising cause the act or reinforce it? For all the millions of advertising dollars spent on SuperBowl XLII, how relevant were any of the products to you and did you act on any of the ads?

The only reason advertising continues to survive is that it is ‘familiar’ and it is monetized. Amazon, however, understands the value of brokering. They continue to add more and more infrastructure and facilities/services to provide incentives to those who can facilitate buying directly through their Associates model, or direct brokering. Far more efficient, their model only pays for results.

Even Forrester has been suggesting that marketing is ‘broken’ and that marketers should reinvent themselves. As part of that advice, Forrester suggests that marketing needs to take back control of their investment from agencies:

On average, agencies will influence nearly 60% of the marketing budget in 2007. The combination of anticipated spending on agency fees and measured media cover the bulk of marketing communications activities.

Marketers reported allocating an average of 17% of their budget to ad agency fees and 41% of their budget to measured media.

Advertisers spent a total of $271 billion on domestic US ads across all measured and unmeasured media channels in 2005, a 2.8% increase over 2004.

Marketers aren’t convinced that their agencies can formulate new media strategies, and agencies aren’t fully convinced themselves. Huge gaps exist between marketer and agency perceptions of ability to deal with changes in TV, Internet, and consumer-generated media

Almost all agencies (93%) believe their contributions drive their clients’ marketing success, while only 63% of marketers feel the same.

Despite the fact that agencies wield influence over a majority of the marketing budget, 76% of marketers do not measure the return on investment of their lead agency relationship.

So the majority of marketing dollars are spent on ‘outsourced’ services for which there are limited measures of success? That all sounds pretty inefficient to me.

Amazon even has a book that addresses this subject: Marketing Without Advertising, Inspire Customers to Rave About Your Business to Create Lasting Success. Ah, but if you read the reviews, one individual suggests other guerilla marketing titles.

Guerilla marketing? Described as “an unconventional system of promotions on a very low budget, by relying on time, energy and imagination instead of big marketing budgets”, the term itself seems to be well positioned for the likes of a Consumer Revolution.

P.S. Monetization was a hot topic during table discussions at last year’s FASTforward. I’m looking forward to some of the deepest conversations, with some of the smartest people I’ll get to have all year…see you there. Or, stay tuned on this Bat channel for updates and conversational relics.

Today’s post was particularly relevant in that it:

• Calls out specific shifts in marketing, many of which have very 2.0 implications
• Highlights a business model that taps into the behaviors/preferences of a very specific youth market.
• Tells a more compelling story by comparing and contrasting ‘differences’

Supporting quotes — pay particular attention to the last two:

Behavioral targeting has widely succeeded in changing the rhetoric and terminology of marketers. Rare indeed is the self-respecting behavioral advertiser who doesn’t speak in terms of having a one-to-one dialogue with customers. Yet, as Ryan Okum, president of StreetWise Concepts and Culture, explains below, moving beyond the habits of the older impressions-based marketing paradigm requires more than talk. It demands the cultivation of a new skill set.

Okum: Our focus is on online conversations and community building. We’re working with clients who are moving away from, or at least re-thinking, the ideas that behavioral targeting is strictly about serving advertising….The goal is to build a two-way environment where consumers actually go to participate.

Okum: The difference between our behavioral approach and more conventional approaches is, there’s a much more transparent execution in what we do. It’s not, as behaviorally targeting impressions is, a ‘two-way mirror’ where the marketer just looks in and eavesdrops on where consumers go online. We use analytics tools, yes, but to focus in on not just where they go, but what they do.

Okum: What marketers are shifting toward is that promotion is fundamentally more about creating conversations than reaching impressions.

Okum: [The digital channel] takes [a] philosophical as well as tactical shift. There’s a huge difference between accepting and living inside the paradigm where audiences and consumers are passive impressions to be reached with your message, and the new, conversational paradigm. The new philosophy is, you listen to the target market and give them what they want rather than making guesses about their interests and serving them up impression-based ads.