chief customer officer

Social Business works for the Hearts of your customer first

Brands belong to everyone, not just any specific leader of a corporation or a government. ~Peter Economides

Take your passion and make it happen! ~Irene Cara

I once met a CEO who asked his CFO and CMO, “How much money and when?” I met another one, who asked, “How many hearts won and when?” If you want to build a community, try starting with Relational KPIs. It is NOT about automation. It’s about humanization. The most perennial of brands, the ones we all love, found connection via relationship.

Economic systems are often solely attached to numerical growth whereas social systems are attached to depth of connection and meaningful relationships. Perennial business is focused on social psychology vs. pure numeric results. Organically grown business is real and deep and, in the long run, far more lucrative in all respects. Humanity needs this now.

I grew up within the system of America – I am a son of corporate America and of the Church of America, both. I also grew up all over the World – I respect the spiritual and cultural traditions of the nations. The greatest organizations and individuals I met during my travels were human. H-U-M-A-N. I’ll fight to my dying breath for the mammal, for the sweat, for the emotion, for the heart. And I’ll work to my dying day for technology to be driven BY and work FOR the heart of humanity.

Karen Gritter writes, “Getting out of the “factory” and “numbers” mentality is also critical for our planet. Factory farming is destroying our soils.” Paul Farmer writes, “I work in manufacturing and I have a couple hundred people working for me and production can occur with a few mechanics and laborers because the machinery does the rest. But production done well occurs with trust and encouragement!” I would add that “factory farming” mentality is ALSO destroying our hearts.

Kate Carter of Life Chronicles (http://www.lifechronicles.org/), writes, “We at LifeChronicles love that we use technology for compassionate service to humanity-our student volunteers love that we call them Compassionate Technologists.” The robotic and the numeric MUST be “overgrown” now with flesh and filled with blood. We are human and we MUST use technologies for human ends.

Is the end goal really about numbers then? Let’s go into that mansion built by the one’s focused only on numbers and see how happy its inhabitants truly are. Now, let’s make a similar journey to the farm built by those who were focused on the heart. My hunch is that life on that farm, in spite of all the human issues, is a happier and more abundant place. And that’s the place our World needs now. A circle of Love and Trust. Not a Hierarchy of Numeric achievement.

THE FUTURE:

2012: The year the CCO (Chief Customer Officer – http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/04/the_rise_of_the_chief_customer.html) replaced the CMO, the CCO (Chief Collaboration Officer – http://www.zdnet.com/blog/collaboration/chief-collaboration-officer-hansens-cxo-challenge/1644) replaced the COO and the CSO (Chief Social Officer) replaced the CEO. We need a C-Suite that gloats over hearts won and worlds bettered vs. dollars banked and pockets lined. Once again, If you want to build a community, try starting with Relational KPIs. It is NOT about automation. It’s about humanization. The most perennial of brands, the ones we all love, found connection via relationship.

Transmedia, OnDemand and the power of listening to audiences

By Nathaniel Hansen, CEO, The Socializers

If more Marketing Managers at Fortune 500 companies/major media companies truly understood the potential of future media delivery channels like GoogleTV PAIRED WITH “content-informing-intelligence”, there would be a mass re-organization of dinosaur-age ad/marketing agencies whose teams have yet to even train in social monitoring/intelligence tools AND have none of the talent-identification capabilities that a CAA or William Morris has. Those same Marketing Managers would then turn to social business agencies for the following process:

(a) pre-product dev intelligence gathering/listening,
(b) demographic-savvy content/product design RELATED TO what is discovered/analyzed from conversations in the social fabric of the internet,
(c) Relationship Architecting with related Social Strategy to identify ideal Key Influencers (and their content), thus paving the way for seamless and swift introduction of said content into the fabric of communities hungry for it,
(d) on-going listening that creates a virtuous cycle of this process.

The future leaders of transmedia will use the process above as just one of their approaches in expanding possibility for those who interact with media, advertisers, media/content producers AND communications entities. Transmedia and the associated processes that will bring this fabulous new way of interactive relationship to programming IS the future of CONTENT IDENTIFICATION AND PRODUCTION.

Colin Donald of FUTURESCAPE.TV says it best in the following comment on an article entitled Struggling for control: The humble channel-zapper is evolving in ways that will shape television’s futurein a recent edition of The Economist magazine:

“Internet-connected TVs lead to massively increased choice and require next-generation EPGs to help viewers navigate the wealth of content.

One solution backed by many in the industry, like Rovi, is to develop social EPGs that let friends recommend TV shows and videos to each other, via social networks or via systems which use data from social networks.
However, the implications are even more radical than your article suggests.

When Futurescape.TV recently researched this nascent social TV sector, we concluded that Facebook and Twitter are already battling for key roles in the TV industry as Internet-connected televisions transform TV into a social medium.

The two social networks have an actual or potential commercial role across the entire TV value chain.

For instance:
Global pay-TV, estimated at $250bn in 2014, needs social recommendation and discovery services because these encourage viewers to subscribe to more expensive packages and buy more video-on-demand – Facebook and Twitter are both major providers of social data.

Facebook in particular has a highly developed social graph of people’s relationship with entertainment content, from the ubiquitous Like button, integrated into many broadcasters’ Web sites. Both it and Twitter own considerable, detailed data about people’s behaviour, such as discussing TV shows and sharing links to videos.

As your article described, set-top box middleware and EPG providers similarly need social network data for recommendation and discovery – the European EPG market alone will be worth $555m by 2014.

TV manufacturers’ strategy to provide video-on-demand direct to viewers also requires social recommendation, while their connected TV apps enable viewers to interact with Facebook and Twitter on home TV sets. Facebook aims to tap the $180bn worldwide TV ad market, competing with broadcasters for brand advertising – Google TV and similar Web-on-TV systems will put Facebook and Twitter targeted ads on TV screens.

Facebook and Twitter buzz affects TV ratings, while broadcasters that use the social networks for viewer engagement are effectively sharing their audiences with them.

The social networks know in real time how people react to TV programming – this is an essential supplement to Nielsen-type viewing data.

Integrating social networks with EPGs is only one manifestation of a profound and permanent change in the television industry, a change through which Facebook and Twitter are positioning themselves as major industry players.”

The teams working on Oprah’s new cable channel and on eBook sales strategy at Bertelsmann’s Random House are contending with issues related to the new possibilities in transmedia and how to make content delivery platforms lucrative for their shareholders WHILE giving users the most flexibility in interacting with their portfolios of content. Those media publishers who acknowledge the value in being customer-centric vs. product-centric in their offering AND develop platforms that allow maximum interactivity WILL win!

To quote Ali Valdez, a senior Microsoft sales leader, “Their customers will be their marketers. Their customers’ social network friends will be their new customers. Full transparency, good and bad, will drive innovation and competitive pricing. The consumer will win. Those brands that enable consumer victory will share in the bounty.”

TO SUM UP: Combining research from tools like Recorded Future, the world’s first temporal analytics engine (a video intro to Recorded Future here), and Radian6, a leading social media/network monitoring solution, media companies now have the opportunity to LISTEN to audiences that have OPTED OUT of traditional marketing channels and are OPTING INTO new, socially chosen/recommended channels. They then are able to match valuable information from conversations within the social fabric of the internet WITH market trends and probable future events to create product/service/content offerings with previously un-paralleled precision. Existing portfolios of content may be re-purposed into countless monetizable and USER-GENERATED interactive communities.

Understanding the future requires observation and listening and it is a Chief Customer Officer who will teach this to marketing staff, brand managers and community managers.

Recent video from presentation to Conservation group in California on social media

The Importance of a Customer-Centric Business Approach

Video Link: CCO vs. CMO – The value of the Chief Customer Officer

“The Realist Optimist is the most 
powerful and effective of the open 
leader archetypes, somebody who 
can see the benefits of being open 
but also understands the barriers.” 

~ Charlene Li, Open Leadership, 
published May 2010.

Focusing on the customer, listening to what he/she wants remains the number one most important first action for any organization desiring a satisfactory engagement. Social networks have initiated the world to completely personalized channels of content production, distribution and consumption. The engaged user can now create his/her own TV channel on YouTube, Google TV and numerous other video channels. The Conversation Prism is an excellent image of the variety of social networking sites available to an individual in his or her establishment of an online tribe.

When we listen to our customer, then we can select brands, products and services geared toward his/her needs. The customer-centric approach in social media specifically requires listening via social network monitoring tools like Radian6, Trackur, Compete, Webtrends and Cymphony.

A Chief Customer Officer will instruct brand manager, product managers and interactive/asset managers on the best use of energy within a given demographic/vertical after having participated in a listening project. Now more than ever, customers are becoming wiser in their choices about products and services sold online, primarily due to the vast amounts of time users spend online AND due to the phenomenon of user-selected/created channels. The mechanics of this has to do with personal choice and responsibility, along with the blossoming of sub-sub-cultures/niches beyond anything seen in previous societal configurations. Social networks allow us to know ourselves better, which in turn gives us more exact and precise opinions on what we want.

The Heart is a Critically Important Muscle in Social Marketing

The Heart is a Critically Important Muscle in Social Marketing
by Nathaniel Hansen

The socializing of media and tech is a bid by the human heart to transform the cold, hard, and un-feeling processes of “bottom-line, quantitative” thought INTO a tool for saving all that is beautiful about this planet, the human spirit and our beautiful flora/fauna. The season of the heart has arrived AND, because our tech was born from the imagination, it MUST serve that same SOURCE. Here are some steps you can take to HUMANIZE your entrance into the social fabric of the internet:

1. Discover communities closest to your heart through the use of free monitoring tools. To do this make a list of 40 keywords/keyphrases that match your heart/passion/goals. Then go to this page and find the FASTEST climbing Facebook pages associated with those keyphrases: http://bit.ly/facebook_leaderboard. “Like” these.

2. Observe the choices, challenges, impressions, and wants of the people within these Facebook pages AND other networks Most of the monitoring tools available to do this observing are listed at this wiki: http://bit.ly/social_monitoring_master_list.

3. The monitoring tools in the wiki above will acquaint you with where THE conversation about your passion is taking place in forums, blogs, amongst key influencers (tweeters and bloggers), major communities (blogs, forums, web properties) and discussion eco-systems (comments at blogs, news sites, forums). Prioritize your participation based not only on volume of those in the conversation BUT also the quality of those discussing. You may participate in a conversation with 10 world leaders in a vertical/niche and go further than you would have in the mosh-pit of a forum. Then again, that same mosh-pit may be just the place for vitalizing your type of content. This takes wisdom, 24 hours of reflection and then ACTION.

4. Closely tied to this, determine which communities and influencers most closely mirror your passion. Locate your initial foray THERE.

5. Raise up brand ambassadors, community managers and, if you are an enterprise-level business, study the exploding phenomenon of Chief Customer Officers: http://bit.ly/CCO_Harvard_report

6. Your Community Manager, Brand Ambassadors and Chief Customer Officer ought to be a blended individual, having social savvy AND passion/real experience within your vertical/niche/brand.

7. Create a BRAND BOOKLET and BEST PRACTICE MANUAL with and for your social brand leader. They ought to be the kind of person who is excited about creating this with you and have leadership traits related to the creation of this booklet.

8. Perform an analysis of the sub-culture(s) surrounding your brand and be sure to not only speak the language of these cultures but also be an innovator of that language. Your brand is more than an avatar. It is a living, breathing personality and your ambassador(s) should give his/her all for the tribe that feeds the brand.

9. Lex Sisney, the co-founder of Commission Junction, the world’s foundational affiliate software, once said to me, “Find the pain and you’ll find the money!” Knowing where lack exists IS VERY IMPORTANT in defining your offering. And knowing what makes the delivery and receiving of this offering fun is the other piece in this puzzle.

10. The humanization of brands is a massive revolution currently taking place. The CEO OF THE FUTURE is at the forefront with the customer, tweeting, blogging and on the front lines vs. the old model of being invisible and un-touchable. The CEO of the future may be reached by anyone and is listening to his/her customer. Anyone can reach the CEO of the future. The hidden CEO is a relic of the past.

11. Conversations with your audience and customer are just that. A dialogue implies that you’ve listened to what the customer is saying. And they will find that cool.

12. Your ambassadors ought to be given rewards that make sense to the niche and the need of your community and your customer. Sometimes a year’s worth of groceries is more important than a new 120″ HDTV.

13. Be a problem solver vs. just a listener. That’s the essence and one of the good things about America: we are known the world over for doing something about it once we are enrolled.

Love what you do, love your tribe, and orient around heart-centered communication.