CEO/CMO Perspectives on Deriving Intelligence from B2B Social Media

The Southern California Business Marketing Association (SoCal BMA) put on yet another stellar event this week. This event featured speaker Jacques Pavlenyi of IBM in a Part 2 of B2B Social Media and its impact on business leaders — and business in general.  Pavlenyi tied this topic into the recent CEO and CMO studies that IBM conducts on a regular basis — to provide some very interesting perspectives on how social media is impacting B2B marketers, and some of the challenges involved with the onslaught of data coming from social channels.  You may remember my post  reviewing Part 1 of this 2-part Executive Roundtable Series back in August.  Well, Part 2 was just as brilliant!

Pavlenyi is an excellent speaker and is so very passionate about his topic.  Here are some of the key takeaways that I noted from Part 2.  Most of my “aha” moments in Part 2 came from the two studies.  All of these studies are available (for no charge) from IBM. I highly recommend downloading them.  They are really interesting.

IBM Institute for Business Value 2012 CEO Study(1709 CEO’s surveyed across geography, industries) — points of interest:

• Out-performing CEO’s embrace flatter, more open business structures and excel at executing tough change.
• CEO’s who excel do so by creating economic value by engaging customers as individuals.  They accomplish this by ensuring better access to data, insight and then translating those findings into action.
• Out-performing organizations are twice as good at deriving value from data — and understand that this is the key to engaging customers as individuals.
• High performing organizations let big data: 1) reveal the customer you never knew, (2) lets them listen to the customers lavishly, (3) helps them to respond with focus and (4) helps them to be where their customers expect them to be (from a social media perspective).

IBM Institute for Business Value 2011 CMO Study (1700 CMO’s surveyed across geographies and industries) — points of interest:

• CMO’s are increasingly challenged by having more data and having to use technologies that their kids use to track it. They also have less time than ever to solve the problems associated with this (average CMO tenure is < 3 years).
• An overwhelming number of CMO’s are under-prepared for (1) the data explosion, (2) the amount of data from social media, (3) shifting channel device choices (mobile), and (4) shifting demographics.
• Over-performing CMO’s deliver value to empowered customers, foster lasting connections (transactional relationships no longer will cut it), and they have a focus on capturing value and measuring results.

From my viewpoint, these two studies present an interesting conundrum that is taking place within organizations today.   Successful CEO’s seem to understand the importance of being able to capture, analyze and measure data from all channels — then use the intelligence gleaned from it to treat customers as individuals, as opposed to markets and/or simple transactions.  Many CMO’s, however, seem to be so overwhelmed by the barrage of data from all of the different channels and so underwhelmed by the measurement tools, that it is hard for them to make this actually happen.  And this is impacting their customer relationships — as well as their longevity at their companies.

Yikes!

To better support these harried CMO’s, Pavlenyi pointed out that companies like IBM, Marketo, Hubspot and Salesforce/Radian6 are creating tools to help with this.  These companies support efforts to decipher, integrate and translate all of this rich data into actionable steps.  These tools better support the large amount of data derived from social media channels — the very data that allows us to understand so much more about our customers (interests, opinions, behaviors)  than any simple B2B marketing database.  There are still many free applications available that track parts of this data — but in order to get to what these over-performing CEO’s require, you need a tool that is going to help you integrate and understand the data so that you can use it to better communicate with customers.

Pavlenyi wrapped up his conversation on these two studies  by making a really important point: Because of social media, every person in an organization is now involved in creating and shaping the corporate character and furthering the development of the brand.  And Marketing leads the charge by:

• Managing the brand reputation
• Enhancing the engagement of all customers
• Expanding data collection and analytics by working across business silos for the benefit of the customer. 

Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) has been the general focus of CMOs. While the focus obviously needs to be there, it needs to be combined with a focus on the customer experience.  I know — easier said than done when you are running around with your hair on fire trying to get campaigns out the door.  Luckily, with the increasing numbers of tools (in all price ranges), there is definite hope on the horizon for managing the avalanche of data available to us from social media  — and all — marketing channels.

Kudos to the SoCal BMA for putting on another great event!  And kudos to Jacques Pavlenyi for another great — and insightful — presentation.  I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next!

Change Leadership: Running the Gauntlet with Jeffrey Hayzlett

I went to an excellent event last Thursday.  Sponsored by the Business Marketing Association, Southern California (SoCalBMA), the luncheon meeting featured Jeffrey Hayzlett, a global business speaker, former Fortune 100 CMO (Eastman Kodak) and book author.  His presentation outlined the ideas contained within his newest book, Running the Gauntlet, which is a handbook on how to embrace change within business organizations and how to navigate the minefield that most assuredly lies in wait within each company as it goes through the change process.

Hayzlett, a South Dakota native and self-proclaimed “Sometimes a Cowboy,” selected the title for his book based upon the practice of Indian tribes in the previous century of allowing a captured person one last chance of escape by running in between two lines of tribe-members with weapons (yikes!).  If the person could survive the gauntlet, they could go free.  As you can imagine, few survived.  And that’s his whole point.  He believes that driving change  in organizations is like running the gauntlet.  When conditions change, we all need to “adapt, change or die.”

One of the most compelling points of his presentation was the idea that, as business owners, we need to protect our internal “Change Leaders” as they are few and far between.  Hayzlett likened them to the white buffalo — a truly rare sight in any buffalo herd.  As they are so rare, the other buffalo tend to huddle around them to protect them from danger — and that is what we need to do with the change leaders in our organizations.  These are the people who solve problems —  those who dive in, take action, cheer-lead progress to help make change happen.  These people need to be protected and promoted.  Basically, we need to do all we can to keep them in the organization so they can continue to help our businesses grow by initiating the change process in their fearless manner.

Hayzlett also outlined some of the reasons that creating change can fail:

• Fear — of change, of failure, a new way that isn’t familiar.
• Tension over healthy debate — creating change can cause conflicting emotions, and passions can rise as issues are debated.
• The need for radical transparency — change can also highlight things that aren’t working. In order for the change to work, you have to be able to clearly see and discuss what wasn’t working before.  This can be difficult for many.
• Risk — The status quo — while not effective — can be seen as safe, or at least less risky than change.  Changing something means that you are risking the loss of what was “comfortable” with something that will be “less comfortable” but infinitely more effective.  There is also risk associated with change if the desired outcome is not immediately apparent.  I’ve seen companies that go back to the old way too quickly because of this — only to find that the old way nets the same undesirable results.

In closing, Hayzlett brought up a really interesting point about the Company Brand.   He suggested that a truly great brand became that way because the company consistently  “delivered on the promises”  made to customers.  In order for a brand to flourish, you need to put the correct people and processes in place to ensure that your company is consistently keeping your promises and delighting your customers.  Recognizing the need for change in order for improvement to occur will help you accomplish this goal.

All in all, another great event put on by the SoCalBMA.  If you are located here in Southern California, check out the Events page for upcoming events.  The organization also sponsors Webinars with great speakers — and of course, these are open to anyone, anywhere.