Finbarr McCarthy

Zombie thinking is mindlessly doing what has always been done while ignoring diminishing returns.  It might seem like an odd opener but it seems to be happening alot lately.  Consider General Motors, for many decades the ultimate blue-chip company ground into bankruptcy because of zombie thinking.  There are any number of explanations for GM’s fate, but the main reason seems to stem from the fact that they didn’t listen to their customers and continued to produce products that they didn’t want.

On a smaller scale many companies suffer from a similar fate with their online efforts.  The difficulty starts out with the assumption that online marketing is the same as traditional marketing.  This view was OK with Web 1.0, but with the phenomenal adoption of Web 2.0 all the rules have changed.

It’s difficult to define the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 in a single sentence - One simple explanation is Web 1.0 was a monologue and Web 2.0 is a dialogue.  Traditionally, brand owners created, distributed and controlled the message, it was very much a one-way feed.  Nowadays the situation is very different, consumers now have a real voice, both individually and collectively.

Yes you can try to get hip by creating a company blog, a facebook page and even a twitter account.  You can pull out your brand guidelines book and customise these pages with your company colours and fonts, but is anyone actually looking?

“People communicate with people on Social Media, not with companies”

So you decide to let some of your employees start communicating with your customers via blogs, twitter and facebook, you pull out your brand guidelines book, but you can’t find the section that deals with this, sounds familiar?

The truth is that the majority of companies have not yet gotten around to deciding how to deal with this opportunity, some have taken the step of blocking it because they don’t understand it (this happened many times before - remember companies blocking internet access and email because it was only a distraction).

The road to success with Web 2.0 is a challenging one.  If you accept the basic principle of putting your people out in front of your brand you will have many difficult questions to address.

In addition to the areas you will already have covered such as, tone of voice, phrases to own, tense etc, you will now also need to provide guidelines on grammar, personal exposure (what you can reveal about yourself), politics, religion, interests, passions, etc.  Additionally, you need to start a campaign to monitor mentions of your company on the wire and decide whether or not your policy is to respond to every post, how to deal with criticism and even what to do with positive mentions and compliments.

There is also the discomforting fact that what your employees write doesn’t get sanitised by your PR and Legal departments, this actually gets at the essence of what Web 2.0 is about, if every statement were to be sanitised through the corporate mill there may be no message left at the end of it and after all your customers are looking for human interaction not polished corporate spiel accompanied by a ten page legal disclaimer.

One company who has stepped up to this challenge particularly well is Microsoft, for many years Microsoft was the company that everyone loved to hate, over the past couple of years Microsoft has used the power of its own people to put a personal face to the company and re-vitalise the brand in the eyes of its customers.  They refer to each of their employees as “Brand Ambassadors” and give them the responsibility to represent the Microsoft brand to the world in a very personal way.  For one, I think they have achieved remarkable success.

Here are a couple of tips to guide your efforts;

• Dont ignore Web 2.0, its not going away anytime soon
• Do participate in conversations but don’t try to dominate
• Do use Buzz Monitoring Tools
• Do update your brand guidelines to set some ground-rules for your employees engaging with customers on-line
• Dont be afraid of making the odd mistake, afterall we are all human
• Do let people have a little fun with this

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” Charles Darwin

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