Web Strategy by Jeremiah

Yesterday, David Charbuck dinged me for writing for novices, and also suggested I wasn’t near the trenches.

I could have fired back, but that would have been foolish, looking at his profile, I realized he knew what he was talking about, Instead, I left a comment on his blog, and offered for him to set the bar higher by being a guest poster.

He accepted.

David is digging in at Lenovo where he’s managing the web strategy, and is fighting the good fight day to day. He took my offer, and submitted via email I think he’s certainly set the bar higher for me.

Here’s what David submitted to me, (including a thoughtful apology email) the following relevant post is all his words:

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Corporate Blogging 201 – The Risks of NQA Blog Service
by David Charbuck, A Web Strategy Guest Poster

I just took Jeremiah Owyang to task for publishing thumbsucking advice on corporate blogging — “Ask for feedback!” “Admit it when you are wrong!” — and challenged the growing legions of social media pundits to kick it up a notch with some news I could use.

So, henceforth, with no book in the works on the next evolution in the Super Transparent Corporate Social Conversational Marketing Revolution, I can declare I have no commercial ax to grind and simply want to charitably share the wealth from someone who walks the walk of corporate blogging day in and day out.

If the books are publishing “101” level advice, let this be the first in a “201” series – the next level in the curriculum, the class you take your sophomore year.

In partly pedantic jest, I suggested the type of topic I’d like to discuss is: contravening corporate policy by privately resolving a blogged customer support issue and having the blogger publically state the solution and thereby set a precedent for all future complaints

Let’s look at the scenario in less pedantic terms. The risk of a no-questions-asked (NQA) blogger appeasement policy.

Let’s say you are the corporate blogger at Newco and among your responsibilities is monitoring the blogosphere for expressions of customer joy and unhappiness. You hire a service, or you do it yourself, but eventually you are going to find a person who writes something like this:

“I just bought a new widget from Newco and it has three dead dingbats. I am a graphic designer and I must have a flawless product to do my job. I called Newco and they said their policy is only to replace widgets with five contiguous dead dingbats. This is bullshit. I am going to write a letter to the Better Business Bureau and Jeff Jarvis.”

You, the corporate blog person, check on the corporate website, and yep, there is the dead dingbat policy plain as day. This policy is essentially the same one that everyone else in the industry follows. Do you:

Acknowledge the unhappy dingbat person with a comment (Thank you for writing about Newco. I’m sorry you aren’t happy. Have a nice day.)?

Debate the blogger and cite the fact that Newco is in line with the rest of the industry with its dead dingbat policy (Sorry; suck it up)?

Invite the blogger to talk about it privately (Hey, give me a call or drop me a line.)?

Ignore the blogger?

Do you let customer service know that you have found a complaint about the dead dingbat policy in the expectation they will communicate with the blogger? Do you let PR know?

Do you arrange to have a widget with a pristine display over-nighted to the blogger in the hope it will shut him up?

Do you propose a new strategy to the business unit where users can pay more for a zero-defect widget?

Let’s say the blogger gets really upset and continues to post about the dead dingbats. Let’s say the blogger takes the case to The Consumerist or the Ripoff Report and the forums, and tells people to join him in a campaign against your company’s dumb policy. The comments on the post begin to fill with other people who hate dead dingbats. The noise level is rising. Someone in PR notices it in a Google news alert. You get an email asking if you know about this. The blogger posts your CEO’s home phone number. And calls it.

As you look for a way to make the blogger happy, you discuss the policy internally and learn that dead dingbats are a fact of life, and that due to the vagaries of manufacturing there is no such thing as a flawless, dingbat-free widget, and to identify one means hours and hours of combing through thousands of widgets to find a clean one. The bottom line is this: making flawless widgets would destroy the bottom line which is why no one in the industry guarantees it.

But the blogger doesn’t care about that. The blogger is mad and nothing is going to make him happy other than a pristine system. So you find one. You arrange to have it hand delivered by your regional manager. Along with a Tickler Bouquet and a box of chocolates.

And you ask the blogger to please keep the new machine to himself, this is a one-time special exception, so please don’t blog about it. Okay?

Ha. The blogger declares victory, tells the world that his campaign has paid off, that Newco has caved and the Customers are in Control! Congratulations: you just insured that every person who Googles: “Newco Dead Dingbat Policy” is going to hear the story of how you made an exception. And they will all expect the same

The exception is now the rule, in public, for everyone to see.

So, fellow corporate bloggers and customer service professionals. This is a question of pure situational ethics. When do you make an extraordinary gesture of customer satisfaction and when do you stick to your guns?

Have you ever stuck to your guns and regretted it (if only we had given the customer their money back ….)?

Have you ever made a concession and kept it secret?

Have you ever made a concession and changed your organization’s policy in the process?

Is No Questions Asked customer service (the kind that LL Bean and Craftsmen Tools and Nordstrom practice) a figment of some marketing consultant’s imagination?

When do you tell a blogger to pound sand?

The integration of customer service into social media marketing programs is a logical imperative and usually will follow right on the heels of integrating corporate communications. The effects of the “new Better Business Bureau” are the ones that are going to strike your organization between the eyes first. How you invite your customer service teams into the medium can spell the difference between harmony and hatred.

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Jeremiah: Thanks David for starting Corporate Blogging 201, certainly a dilemma, I’ll leave my comment in the comments below, and I encourage everyone else to as well.

I’m talking to more and more clients who are starting to budget for social media programs, this also includes hiring the right kind of people.

As you know, I hail from Hitachi Data Systems (2003-2006) as the Online Community Manager, I know the role, and what it means to connect with customers using social media tools. While I don’t officially hold that title now, I have the rare pleasure to actually do some research on the role and what it means to customers and business.

Methodology
In the last few months, I’ve interviewed nearly a dozen community managers at many companies, and compiled 16 specific job descriptions to create these 4 Tenets of Community Managers. We also had many internal discussions to whittle down what’s important and what’s not.

Companies assemble Social Media Teams
The report, entitled How to Hire for Social Computing actually outlines there are TWO roles needed for a successful social computing program. It’s available for all clients to download at will, for non-clients, you can purchase it online, and if not satisfied, benefit from the money back guarantee.

The Social Computing Strategist
The Social Media Strategist, whose job is to lead the internal charge, develops the program, gains resources, convinces management, and measures success. In the report, I reference Ed Terpening, VP of Social Media at Wells Fargo as a Social Computing Strategist,

The Community Manager
Secondly, the Community Manager, who’s job is to primarily be a community advocate Lionel Menchaca as Dell’s Community Manager as examples of best practice (big shoes to fill eh?). There are thousands of other community managers who are pushing the membrane of the corporation to reach to customers, the list grows longer every day.

What you’ll learn
This report (which is one of our products, like consulting) outlines who these people are, what do they do, where to find them, how to manage them, and how to compensate them. If you’re trying to convince your management about the validity of these roles, this report will help you.

Also, I strive to walk the talk, if you’re a client, you can leave feedback on my blog, but also leave it on the Forrester site after you login. I promise to respond to any of your questions about the report. (we allow clients to rate and leave comments on every report).

Lastly, If you’re seeking to hire or get hired as one of these social media folks, start here, and read all my On The Move posts.

Image: View a screenshot from my Facebook profile

At one time, I added many apps to experiment, but I’ll have to admit, very few I use on a regular basis. I often discuss in my presentations that our research indicates that many folks use social networks to check out others profiles.

Apparently, I need to do some housecleaning as, my kid sister wrote this on my Facebook Wall this morning: “hello big brother!! your facebook profile is a JUNKYARD!”. She’s also the little darling who told me that “I only use email to get a hold of old people like you“.

Sigh, kids. As my former boss Kevin Eves used to tell me, “so it goes”.

Before you invest time and money in a widget strategy, you better know the challenges. This applies to VCs, Web Strategists, Developers, and even Social network companies

An Objective View
In this blog, I strive to provide a balanced viewpoint of both the benefits and challenges of a web strategy, it’s easy for us to become over-hyped and then fall right into the pit of over exuberance. (See other posts tagged Challenge)

I’m moderating quite a few panels with widget developers (last week at Stanford, next week at Graphing Social, and in a few weeks at Ad:Tech) so I’ll be using many of these challenges to hold the vendors to their claims.

First, a few parameters:
Update: This list of challenges mainly applies to widgets within Social Networks, although many of the challenges afflict mobile, desktop and blog widgets.

Widgets are ‘mini-applications’ that can be embedded on other containers (such as social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, and whoever decides to join the movement) The thing is, desktop widgets have been around for some time, so this really isn’t anything new, but for the purpose of this post, I’m just going to keep those on social networks in scope.

In regards to terminology, I’m just going to use widgets as a blanket term to also include “applications” and “canvas pages” terms that developers user on Facebook’s F8 platform. I’ll clarify that on another post in the future.

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The Many Challenges of Widgets:
Each of the following hurdles can be overcome, but first, let’s identify them.

Difficult to Monetize
First and foremost, this has been the biggest challenge. For some widget developers, the money has come from investors or VCs on Sand Hill road. Secondly, I’m hearing that the CPI plague (see below) is becoming more common, and then lastly, advertising is not an effective way to monetize in social networks (read this for more).

Immature Market
Widget developers are mostly experimental, they are throwing gangly Spaghetti, Pasta, Rigatoni, and Jeremici (I just made that up) against the wall to see what will stick. In most cases, most of the half cooked pasta falls down from low users adoption, leaving a sticky residue of messy profile pages.

Overcrowding profile page
Have you seen my profile page on Facebook? It’s a mess, and with so much noise, who can compete? With there being thousands of widgets, only a few can survive on my profile page (I know there is tabbed segmentation) but really, how many do we need?

Low Barriers to Entry
A challenge for every web market, is that there are few ways to differentiate, and it’s easy for a young Russian developer or a Stanford student, or a team of Chinese engineers to quickly get in the game.

Metrics and Analytics Inconsistencies
Hardly anyone is measuring the success of their widgets in the same way, do we measure on install, activity, views, traffic, or clicks? As a result, other than Appsaholic, there’s very few industry ways to measure success.

Spammy
Sadly, I learned from a panel I managed that some of the most successful apps were the one that leaned on the social graph, no not the one that we all dream about, but in the context of email spam. Many containers are clamping down on this, as it’s best to preserve the user experience, but this could continue to be an issue.

Bastardization: Cost per Installation (CPI)
To me, this looks like one of the worst in our industry, to me, this is like ‘printing money’. Did you know some of the top developer companies sell to other developers the chance to let new widgets piggy back off successful ones by promoting them. The developer can then charge for cost per install.

Disposable and low value
Rodney Rumford first mentioned this term to me, he was describing that many widgets are simply not used more than once. These glamor widgets provide one time entertainment, or are used once and never reused –except for removing from ones profile page.

Recycled clones offer little uniqueness
Perhaps the worst plague is the “attack of the clones” in many cases, the code from widgets are created by one developer, stolen (I mean crowdsourced or collaborated) slightly modified or rebranded and then republished.

Low Utility
I’m trying to think of a widget that provides business utility, or one that improves my life other than casual communications or entertainment. Reminiscent of the web in the mid 90s, we’ve yet to see the business value.

Hard to build successfully
Specialized skill set are common among the developers, most traditional interactive firms, and most companies don’t have the skills or experience to create a widget. It’s a different game with a different mindset, the same strategies often don’t apply.

Multiple APIs strain developers
Most platforms or containers are offering their own API, although most are touting they are OpenSocial compliant (as I write this, OpenSocial is not public, it is but in beta but should be soon) yet we’ve got to wonder is it too late for there to be a common industry API if it’s already fragmented? I spoke to the Evangelist of MindKey last night and he suggested that each platform has unique APIs (like news feed APIs) that the other doesn’t share –it’s already fragmented.

Ever changing platform APIs requires attentive team
When I hosted the widget roundtable, it became very clear that the APIs on platforms are quickly changing, and sometimes without notice. For the agile developer company, they’ll be able to quickly morph with their full time resources, but for the Interactive Firm or corporate web team, they’ll likely be too slow.

Pricing may vary, lack of standards
I have the privilege of being one of the few people in the world that gets to talk to the widget developers and find out what they are charging. In many cases they don’t know what to charge (as they have strong technical skills, but are just ramping up on the business side, and they are undercharging) This will clean up this year, and we’ll start to see some benchmarks.

Poor User Experience
Dennis McDonald (via comments) suggests that the usability for widgets is often poor. With there being little standardization on the inteaction design, I’ll agree, he states: “It’s hard enough to keep track of multiple incoming data streams representing different people, sources, relationships, keywords, etc. When you try to cram too much though a widget you have a real usability problem because of the variety.”

Performance Issues
Pravda (via comments) suggests that some widgets have poor performance, and thereby causes a disrupted experience. Since widgets are hosted on third party servers, some laggards can hinder the rest of the social network experience, he states: “This is because they require additional HTTP request, and in some cases, this request delays the rest of the page. This is the reason that I am not using Meebo widget in my blog”

Lack of Brand Control
Len Kendall (via comments) suggests that some brands may be concerned where their sponsored widget may appear. In many traditional advertising deals, Coke will never want it’s advertisement near Pepsi, but with widgets, that’s unavoidable.

Add your own in comments
What other challenges of widgets did I miss? Please leave a comment and credit and link to you.

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Caveat: While I’m highlighting the challenges, it doesn’t mean they can’t be overcome, and it most cases, the value is higher than the challenge. I’m just suggesting, we shouldn’t only look at the beautiful side, but set yourself up for success by knowing what you’re in store for.

I could write a solution or a fix for all of these challenges, but that’s a post for another time, or one I’d be happy to answer for clients.