Surviving and Thriving

The Power and Pain of Change

2009-11-05T09:29:00.000-08:00

Let’s start with Andy Warhol. “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” Do you need change in your organization? A once inspiring purpose can become compromised after years of rapid growth development or economic catastrophes. A solid start-up model can become outdated by new market conditions and competition. An established brand can lose its luster or differentiation in a cluttered market space.

It’s been a year since Obama won the election with a mandate for change. As he noted, victory isn’t enough, it was “only a chance” to make needed changes. Rising from the ashes of 2009's economic nuclear winter, executives and their management teams have a chance to embrace inevitable cultural and strategic changes required to survive in 2010's new economy. I believe this applies equally to large enterprises, small businesses, and nonprofits. Nobody’s in Kansas, anymore, and the Wizard’s palace has been foreclosed.

After a brutal year or anemic revenue streams, previous “best” practices rendered useless, millions of lost jobs, and unprecedented workplace stress, every surviving organization should brace for sobering change. This presents challenges and unavoidable pain, but it’s also a great opportunity to renovate your brand, evaluate how you’ve been positioned, and examine how marketing strategies have succeeded and failed.

As a change agent, I’ve seen varying degrees of success in diverse organizational cultures. Global Knowledge found that culture change initiatives failed 66% of the time. This is a common statistic. Why? In a good article, Successful Change Management, the biggest reason for change initiative failure is employee resistance: “Fear of job loss. Fear of increased responsibility. Frustration with the process.” Resource limitations and external market conditions are also factors.

Time to be fearless. Facing change requires diligent assessment and research, to be sure; you want realistic context. However, informed intuition plays a starring role in the drama. And, as Einstein said, imagination is more important than knowledge. SixSigma and other consulting organizations consistently find that that less than half of surveyed companies have a systematic process for cultivating and using innovation in their strategy.

The change process materializes from an unpredictable alchemy of art and science no matter what the metric obsessives tell you. If you’re comfortable with that reality, then you and your team will flourish. As a primer, have your team study creativity in the workplace: check out Fast Company’s Top 25 Creative People in Business. Read poetry. Listen to music. Activate the Right Brain so that it can dance with the Left Brain. Don’t burn your analytics but create new music or you’ll be dancing to the same tune as last year; that pattern may have a high probability of disaster. Be ready to really explore new and actionable approaches. Yes, it requires risk.

Creating an actionable change initiative requires definition, research, development, testing, deployment, tracking, and adapting. This involves incisive project management as well as creative agility. Change by nature is a dynamic process, not a static state to be achieved and deified.
Focus on what needs change and for what reasons. You may also be facing a cultural change in order to achieve a brand, product, service, or strategic change. First, as Jim Collins’ team documented in Good to Great, make sure you have the right people on the bus and in the right seats, then begin. Create a clear roadmap with flexible milestones for your change initiative. And, without question, your map will change. Often.

I customize change initiatives for specific situations, but these are the top ten common denominators I experience in the typical action item equation:

Clearly define objectives (including a time line). Make sure you have all relevant input. Your key team members (and board members) also need to own this process. This step should include a merciless revisit to your last SWOT.
Listen actively and often. You see this phrase often but it’s amazingly powerful when it’s done well. There are many facets to active listening, but this process is as accessible as it is helpful.
Ask hard and unpopular questions. Accept a lack of answers. Ambiguity happens. Challenge conventional wisdom and rote patterns of thinking, brand assumptions, as well as market and competitor assumptions.
Engage all stakeholders. People must feel actively involved and not just cogs in the larger organizational gears. You can prioritize time with senior staff, but don’t overlook the front line; it will make or break you. Being a visionary is cool, but being a leader involves a reality check.
Earn stakeholder commitment. Build coalitions of early adopters to own, optimize, and evangelize the changes.
Cultivate teamwork. Cook, eat, meditate, hike together now and then. Singing Kumbaya around a cozy campfire may work for some groups; for others, it’ll be Don Julio 1942 Anejo tequila shooters and deliberate pours of Guinness pint chasers. Customize your team care and feeding appropriate for personalities and organizational culture, and include financial incentives for achieving a major change goal. Just remember the obvious: without cohesive teams that have collective investment, forget successful, sustained change.
Respect a work-life balance, but make it clear that additional effort will be expected. And personal commitment. Personal consciousness adds credibility to professional work. This may also involve personal transformation for many employees to become brand advocates (or they may want to seek alternative career opportunities elsewhere).
Communicate clearly. Even the brightest vision fails without articulate and consistent messaging. An internal communications plan can make or break a change initiative, and the plan needs to evolve over time. Meaningful change initiatives take three to eighteen months.
Eat tenacity for breakfast. Productive, sustainable change seldom happens quickly, but also be tenacious and driven enough to avoid bureaucratic delays and infatuation with processes.
Practice a sense of humor. This is non-negotiable.

Leading change is no picnic. A leader (and leadership team) must accept the need for change, effectively communicate that need, engage everyone in developing the change strategy or initiative, clearly articulate the deployment process, champion and adapt the deployment across the enterprise over time, and walk the talk. Schedule regular 30,000-foot reviews as well as ground-level assessments during the process (but don’t micro-manage). These check-ins also allow you, as an enterprise or team leader, to be seen as a role model. To paraphrase Gandhi’s famous quote, you must be the change you wish to see in your organization.

None of this is new; 2500 years ago, Heraclitus put it simply, “Nothing endures but change.” And after this past year, changing your approach to marketing communications is a priority. Avoiding it can bury you. Embracing it can help you rebound with more vitality.

The Waste Land: Marketing Ethics

2009-10-19T17:48:00.000-07:00

The recession is ending. Slowly. Many executives are, for the first time in over a year, feeling positive about 2010. The DOW passed 10,000. Are you ready to renovate your marketing strategy for the rebound? If so, be aware of the consumer climate. As Andrew Sorkin's Too Big To Fail book observes, the very heart of the business "ethics" has had a stake driven through it. Consider this: in the post-recession economy, a genuinely ethical approach to your marketing strategy and tactics could be critical to your rebound.

It's been nearly nine decades since T.S. Elliot's stark poem, The Waste Land, but increasingly fragmented personal relationships and a well-publicized lack of business ethics make Elliot's vision a relevant reminder: in our intense (or even frantic) rebound initiatives, we shouldn't ravage consumers and the media to maximize ROI at all costs. Today's media(especially the Web) risks becoming a desolate landscape populated with angry consumers and intrusive or even sleazy marketing (e.g. many inbound social media tactics).

As businesses scramble to sharpen their competitive edge, they could be slicing into the thin skin of consumers. The tentative economic recovery's increased consumer activity will be tempered by heated consumer scrutiny. The financial meltdown produced unprecedented consumer anger toward unethical behavior (in content and in delivery practices), and this anger can redirect toward overly aggressive tactics. Marketing and business development executives need to acknowledge two key points: the anger is justified and it motivates behavior (e.g. brand loyalty or brand trashing).

Reasons saturate the media to justify and fuel consumer anger. As one recent example, a criminal culture at Moody's Investor Services rewarded executives that issued fake ratings for the sake of high profit, according to a recent McClatchy investigation (and Moody's apparently punished executives who raised an ethical flag); Goldman Sachs just posted a $3.2 billion third-quarter profit. As of September 30th this year, their bonus pool was $16.7 billion, an employee average of $700,000, and executives will make millions in bonuses. This is after the firm's reckless and potentially fraudulent behavior required tax payers to save the firm's butt. So much for the "free" market concept; in reality, it's obscenely costly when cavalier unethical practices drive a company's culture. And consumers know it.

It's tempting for many owners and executives to insulate unethical (or infamous "grey area") practices with rationalizations exploring the subjectivity of ethics. My response: bull. I know of marketing agencies and corporate executives who relish finding new ways to invade our psyche with slight-of-hand, bait-and-switch, or just plain obnoxious tactics; they sacrifice ethics to the ROI metric gods. These people have even less ethical bandwidth than the real estate and Wall Street criminals who drove up home prices exponentially beyond income levels, chopped up the risky loans, secured fraudulent ratings, and sold off the junk as viable financial instruments for wildly undeserved rewards. Again, consumers know this. They taste resentment and it ain't white truffle risotto.

WOMMA and the FTC are among organizations attempting to define or regulate ethics. In fact, the FTC recently began regulating blogs. Why? Nondisclosure was more common than criminal ego on Wall Street during the past decade. If human behavior was wired with ethics, we'd never need another regulation. Ever. Anyone clamoring for deregulation is simply lobbying for unrestricted pursuit of personal gain at all costs. With the recent mess and 700 failed S&L's during the Reagan "prosperity" years, taxpayers bear those costs. And they know it.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has received deserved attention and rewarded many companies while not rewarding (or hurting) others. Do we really need lawsuits to force tobacco companies not to target kids? Well, that turned out to be a big yes. How about soft drink machines in schools when we have ample evidence about the effects of sugar and caffeine on kids (e.g. ADD, diabetes, obesity). How about violent and misogynistic games designed by arrested adolescents targeting young teen males?

As the Wall Street Journal and others attempt to quantify the value of CSR in quantitative studies, we all know damn well that CSR will become even more important in 2010. A recent McKinsey survey documents that global companies are aware of increasing consumer sensitivity and expectations regarding CSR. It should follow that if a company embraces CSR, then that company should be practicing ethical marketing and business development. Don't bet on it. An American Marketing Association's recent report, basically helps enterprises wield CSR as just another marketing weapon. The AMA report "examines three communication strategies that firms can use to mitigate the negative effects of unfavorable CSR information..." Here's a concept: stop using CSR as yet another unethical marketing strategy and walk the CSR talk; be socially responsible and ethical, then the AMA's "research" report would be unnecessary. (The AMA changed its domain name to "marketing power" dot com. Somewhere on its site resides a marketing ethics manifesto, collecting digital dust.)

The blitz of shady and sleazy marketing strategies and tactics continue to batter bruised consumers: misleading copy on banner ads with obnoxious animation, pop-up ads disguised as content or nearly full browser windows with obscured close buttons, "free" offers that (after navigating several Web pages or windows) require purchase of services or products, epidemic spam, fake content (e.g. "advertorials"), invasive forced ads preceding or in the midst of downloaded content, promotions masquerading as "discussions" on social networks, and webinars designed solely as marketing tactics veiled with transparently thin content (rather than actionable information).

Television networks are a lesson learned: for a decade they've imposed station logos and animated ads in lower thirds and screen corners DURING movies and programs. And for a decade, these networks have been losing audiences. As behavior marketing invades personal space and privacy even more, these practices infect the Web experience faster than swine flu spreads through a college dorm. Marketing could be the ultimate virus that kills the Web.

Businesses and organizations risk overloading the public with several hundred to several thousand advertising messages punching every person every day. This has been true for decades, but the Web makes this onslaught more personal and intrusive.

I refuse to patronize any product or service with an unethical or intrusive ad. (Yes, an ad can be "ethical" yet intrusive, but the awareness of unethical antics and concern for my experience as a consumer have sensitized me.) I'm not alone. Organizations, websites, blogs, and tweets will increasingly be used to push back against this type of marketing. Over 20 Yahoo groups address unethical advertising, watchdog, parent, and consumer advocacy sites are increasing. Some sites may be mild skepticism, some may be fierce.

It doesn't take academic rigor to define ethics. In a classic display of rationalization, one big agency speech addressed the "subtle shade of truth." Seriously? It's insulting to consumers. Marketing strategists (including me) know exactly when they're intruding on a website experience, invading privacy, "creatively" manipulating facts, unfairly targeting vulnerable prospects, and manufacturing misinformation with "creative" persuasion as an excuse. They know exactly and absolutely when they cross the line (even when we also know that there is some legitimate debate about how far creative license should go for promoting a result or benefit).

The Web and social media (aka another marketing venue) are challenging the concepts of ethical marketing. Social media success demands disclosure, relationships, reputation and trust, but it also makes deception exponentially easier. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are social fabrics interwoven with personal and professional communications; increasingly, this integration will make ethical marketing more visible and important to earn sustainable brand loyalty.

As a business, you should consider what it means to walk the talk about being ethical, Green, and socially responsible before consumers wield the Web's power like a sword to decapitate businesses deploying predatory or otherwise unethical marketing practices.

Marketing communications can do the right thing and succeed. There are some simple basics. Respect privacy and choice. Give genuine advice and information in genuine content. Wrap creativity around product or service truth. Support your community and customers' causes. Demonstrate respect for consumers and a healthy society. (This also means that consumers have responsibility to be informed and measured rather than clueless and voracious.)

Marketing should be a peace with consumers, not war. Media, especially the Web, can be a fertile landscape rather than a wasteland. If consumers trust that a brand acts in authentic, enlightened self interest and employs ethical practices rather than intentional deception, then a mutually beneficial relationship can earn highly visible (and profitable) brand loyalty.

Ken Grimsley
kengrimsley@live.com
www.FocusOnProgress.com

Stop! Don't Redesign Your Website!

2009-07-19T15:15:00.000-07:00

Innovate before you renovate. In this era of hip tech tools, there’s way too much emphasis on execution. Naturally it’s critical for successfully launching any great idea, but it’s not enough. Until you have created a revitalized or completely new strategy, you’re not ready for the tactic of executing website redesign. Web developers and designers will lure you with sexy eye candy. Resist. Be strategic before being tactical. To get a bit philosophical, Marcel Proust said, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

Brilliant execution won’t compensate for poor or vague innovation at the strategic level. If an big ideas are executed prior to full realization, it may never achieve its potential. I’ve seen large enterprises, small businesses, and nonprofits make the same mistake: they know that their website is outdated (either in design or content, or both), they allocate a budget, and they shop Web developers or activate their internal Web team.

What’s missing? Two things: 1) a comprehensive communications audit that examines every aspect of brand management, marketing, advertising, social networking, PR, and alliances; and 2) an updated or new strategic plan (at least for six months, preferably a twelve-month plan); this is where innovation proves vital, even at 30,000 feet.

New apps and technology for website features and functions are marketed relentlessly. Marketing and IT VPs and Directors are pressured to stay on the cutting edge of hot user interface trends, online forms, a storm of media options, and robust admin tools. Ultimately, the user experience relative to the brand experience will only succeed when a clear strategy drives the website development process, from architecture and design to media players and copywriting.

Wait, doesn't everyone do strategic planning? Not. Most organizations are tactical and reactive rather than proactive. Even the big players. In a McKinsey report surveying large enterprises, only 25% of companies used a formal strategic planning process, but 79% of executives reported greater satisfaction as a result of using the process.

First step: the audit. This can be a brand audit and/or a communications audit, which includes all marketing, social networking, PR, and all message outreach from newsletters to creative briefs. An organizational strategy review may also be valuable. The best approach combines an enhanced SWOT with 360 Evaluation competency model elements. Without honest (make that merciless) evaluation to challenge current assumptions, scrutinize recent results, and innovate fresh initiatives, no clear context exists for creating a strategic plan.

All of this may seem obvious, but in the hyper world of Internet dynamics, companies often launch Web initiatives without doing the homework and heavy lifting, i.e. developing a strategic plan with actionable recommendations. Result: redesigned websites soon need fixes to improve a vulnerable brand message, outdated value propositions, vague customer segmentation, weak product and service positioning relative to new competition, and, in the case of larger enterprises, misalignment among various company divisions and departments.

Next: strategic planning, if done well, doesn’t mean tedious meetings and expensive investments of time; in the long run, it’ll save time. Strategy is part art, part science, and all hard work, especially in this time of uncertainty. However, it's not impossible work. As one example, Dr. Courtney's book, 20/20 Foresight, defines a framework for dealing with uncertainty using a structured approach integrating past analogies and potential scenarios. There has always been ambiguity that isn't clarified with bottom-up analysis, but the recent economic crisis has changed our perception of uncertainty. The fear factor has driven more executives and directors to take the fastest shortcut to tactical plans that don't require projections and planning. The air may seem a bit thin at 30,000ft, it may seem safer at ground level. Strategic planning is daunting but viable with tenacity, creative analysis, and a large helping of imagination.

Your organization may have strengths and weaknesses for strategic capacity, but there are universal elements for success. Develop a culture of inclusive engagement in which your team contributes as committed stakeholders rather than compliant employees. Establish a creative context that enables the flow of relevant ideas. Champion individual thought and critical thinking. Encourage disagreement and be aware of cognitive distortions such as over-optimism, loss aversion, and omission bias. Include the essential basics such as insightful market research, updated competitive analysis, and optimized value propositions.

Once you have an updated brand strategy and solid marketing communications strategy established, then you have a foundation for website development. You’re ready to translate your business rules and objectives into your next generation website. You ready to consider design, features and functionality. You’re ready to more effectively select all the cool tools and techniques to drive high value prospects to your site, convert visitors to customers (or clients, donors, volunteers, partners), cultivate sustained loyalty, build deeper relationships via integration with social networking, and generate more referrals. You’ll save money with less headaches from costly revisions of revisions.

If you’re thinking that I’m a mercenary promoting my audit and strategy services, you’re right. Nevertheless, this is also a cautionary tale; I’ve witnessed considerable agony from the tactical development of websites without appropriate strategic work. Not a pretty sight. I’m not opposed to being hired for problem-solving website issues, but I’d rather be part of creating a solution. It requires vision, and that requires risk, but it's way more fun.

Ken Grimsley
www.LinkedIn.com/in/KenGrimsley
www.FocusOnProgress.com

Social Networking: Evolution and Big Macs

2009-07-17T12:19:00.000-07:00

Just when we thought the Web was bomb... social networking happened. It’s been a quantum leap, as if 4,500 years ago a Mesopotamian scribe found a MacBook Pro just as he began the second clay tablet for the Epic of Gilgamesh. During the past few years, it's been bigger news than if Beyoncé admitted to lip-syncing on SNL. Spreading faster than a TechCrunch Tweet during a Silicon Valley happy hour, social networking represents a generational advance in human communication processes. However, I haven't seen a similar advance in the quality of communication on either personal or, to the point of this blog, business levels.

Social networking transforms slowly with the mutations, natural selection and genetic drift expected in any evolutionary process. Well, it's still in the shallow end of the gene pool. That hasn't stopped many hardcore evangelists and self-appointed experts from hustling "Web 2.0+" technologies, "opportunities," conferences, and books faster than Madoff seduced victims. I'm not saying businesses shouldn't make a full commitment to social networking; I'm saying too many people have advocated too much quantity too soon, without encouraging businesses to first create a clear strategic plan for quality communication.

Accountability, accessibility, connectivity, transparency, as well as interpersonal, local, and global collaboration are all exciting possibilities and, to a significant extent, realities, but the evolutionary stage for social networking remains Neolithic. The quality-quantity struggle hasn't changed much during the past ten millennia. Human nature is wired to prefer quantity over quality.

Sure, along with 400 million+ other mainstream social networkers, I can connect with Facebook friends, network with LinkedIn colleagues, check tags on Delicious, engage in media discourse with news events or be insipidly egocentric with YouTube, and Tweet with legions of followers. I can whip out my BlackBerry smart phone with Latitude as well as CRM and ERP apps for mobile networking. I can rap neologisms cranked on a Red Bull buzz, or I can text until my thumbs freeze in some new arthritic mutation. I can easily ride the social network tidal wave with fellow Baby Boomers. (In fact, Neilson's Global Faces and Networked Places re port shows that not only are member communities growing at twice the rate of email users, but Facebook added twice as many 50-64 year-old visitors as the 18-and-under demographic.) Social networking is pervasive, easy, and tempting for everyone.

Then there’s the dark side: on a personal level, I can be assailed by unscrupulous spammers, harassed by a bitter past lover, or stalked by a fifty-something guy in Iowa pretending to be a college cheerleader in L.A. seeking to “friend” me. As a business, I can be found and more easily researched by ruthless competitors, or I can drown in a flood of eNewsetters, RSS feeds, webinars, podcasts, inquiries, and other sales pitches thinly disguised as "connecting" or information. I can also invest hundreds of hours without meaningful engagement let alone distinct ROI. A consultant colleague of mine is rated among the top five in the world for his expertise on LinkedIn and has yet to see business (i.e. money) as a result. The sheer volume of networking doesn't guarantee success; this new frontier yields far more pyrite than actual gold.

And then there's the sheer enormity of usage. In a stunning display of vacuous fascination with quantity, Tweets have become as popular as Big Macs. Both have about the same value -- cheap, instant satisfaction for undiscriminating palates. If you want big numbers like the Go Big meals, Twitter can be perfect fast junk food and just as disposable. It's like the LinkedIn "Lions" that have thousands of "connections" that in fact are numbers, not actual relationships.

The immediacy of Tweets has undeniable social value (e.g. "Let’s coordinate a street protest!" "Let's vote now!" "We've got the back door open to the Arctic Monkeys concert!"). On a business level, Tweets can be effective drivers to websites, contests, blogs, articles, reviews, new product launches or updates, and other promotions or PR tactics. The potential is clear and evolving.

The 400 million+ social network users present a massive consumer force, but this quantity also creates barriers and threats. Marketers have tremendous online tools for sharpening their competitive edge, prospecting, and creating deeper relationships with their audiences, but they must slice through unprecedented clutter with over 20 billion Web pages. Brands can be championed or savaged, justly or unjustly, and customer feedback with these large numbers can make or break a product or service more easily than anytime in history. (Bob Garfield's book, The Chaos Scenario, jumps on this with a brilliant premise.)

Blogs enjoy a massive worldwide audience of 1.6 billion Internet users, but blogs have proven wildly inconsistent for providing reliable value. Too many business or product-related bloggers are seldom fact-checked and have weak credentials. We’ve all experienced annoying, self-promoting bloggers brandishing more attitude than authentic personality, and conveying more opinion than insight or knowledge. Nonetheless, many bloggers are pushed to crank out inordinate, sometimes reckless content while they exert considerable power and influence based on a massive audience.

I think of noblesse oblige: with power comes obligation. Given the sobering power of social networking, how much responsibility do we see? Has the depth of our understanding of meaningful human communications increased with the exponential growth of blogs and Tweets? Does our creation and management of information reflect the collective power of over 100 million websites?

For my business clients, I highly recommend a judicious and strategic use of social networking in all iterations. Spontaneous thoughts can have tremendous value, but haste for the sake of volume is a mistake, especially in promoting or rating products and services. A clear online communications strategy is essential. Does your strategy thoroughly understand each of your audience segment behaviors and needs? Is there solid context for collecting comments and ratings? Will your integrated social networking matrix create an expanded community to sustain an agile, competitive, healthy brand that will motivate referrals?

The Big Picture: as personal and business users, we all need to be vigilant about the quality of this century’s communication revolution. We don’t need more fool's gold or junk food. And when Beyoncé hits her beautiful C6 falsetto note, we want to celebrate that musical quality without it being lost in shrill noise or buried in Big Macs.

Ken Grimsley
www.LinkedIn.com/in/KenGrimsley
www.FocusOnProgress.com

Brand Management in the Social Network Battlefield

2009-07-09T17:21:00.000-07:00

I recently responded to a LinkedIn question about how to prevent brands from being “diluted” by unauthorized use of logos, video, and messaging. The price of unprecedented global access via the Web is that everyone can wield control like a weapon. That doesn’t mean all goodness blossoms from the masses; Wikipedia is just one infamous example of how authentication and editing are vital to credibility.

Generally unfettered access to branding, products and messaging, and the ability to copy and paste with manipulation and different context, is like the price of the First Amendment for democracy; free speech means anybody can say anything, however brilliant or malicious.

I've found that large and small companies become concerned about a "diluted" brand in social media when their brand is already weak, at-risk, or in decline. The unfortunate boom in social media carries the burden of most booms – quantity is championed before quality becomes an established filter. Too many social media venues and tools (including blogs) mistake opinion for expertise and confuse prevalence with targeted promotion.

The social media boom is understandably messy in its infancy. Internet users have far too much control of content, including the ability to post or manipulate a company’s brand or messages. That being said, as a consultant, I encourage companies to understand the cultivation of positive engagement with highly valued target segments. Rational criticism can be a dynamic catalyst for the positive evolution of a brand, products and services.

How do these companies do it? These companies achieve victory with agile brands that will withstand the often irresponsible misuse of social media. And they listen. They embrace legitimate feedback and clearly understand how their valued customers, prospects and potential referrals communicate. In fact, a smart company will keep an open door policy by reaching out to its target market segments in continuous communication. Offering genuine value in content and articles without a sales pitch, relevant blogs, and authentic incentives will help build brand awareness and loyalty.

How do successful companies listen? The Web provides a loud if discordant voice. In Li and Bernoff's Groundswell, they suggest launching your own private community and begin brand monitoring, and they list listening strategies: Google your brand with adjectives such as "awesome" and "sucks" and do a blog search on Technorati; check comments and tags on Delicious. However and wherever your prospects, customers, partners, and competitors communicate online, that's where you want deploy active listenting tactics.

A strong brand develops resiliency with its target market. The brand can’t be easily diluted. Nevertheless, when a logo, video, or tv spot is misused, a company should address it directly with the source unless it's overtly malicious; you don’t want to engage the maniacs. Walmart and other popular brands have plenty of mean-spirited (although sometimes valid) detractors adept with Web tricks for savaging brands.

However, if the rogue posting misusing or altering the brand is creative, that company may leverage the “offensive” post with additional comments and social network promotion (if in fact it's valuable for the target audience). Sometimes grass-roots criticism or satire provides keen insight into a brand or its products and services. Lessons can be learned and a strategic response may benefit the brand’s image or alter the company’s mission. (Criticism of overseas practices had definite impact on the policies of many companies including Nike and Starbucks.)

Having a solid brand clearly defined with a consistent experience across all forms of communication, including social networking, will help ensure the brand's ability to survive serious dilution or damage in the Web's powerful, brutal, embattled landscape. To paraphrase Nietzsche, if it doesn't kill your brand, it'll make it stronger. At least, in theory.

Ken Grimsley