But it might be time to stop growing bigger ears and start growing bigger hands. It might be time for brands to start integrating social media within their operations and not just their marketing or customer experience departments. We don’t really want brands to “converse” with us; just do for us.

What do I mean by this? A couple of examples.

CPG Brands at Retail
Many brands pay merchandising service organizations to go into retailers and perform audits, new product cut-in, restocking, point-of-purchase placement, etc. What if one of the point of purchase placards just had a @twitter address and said something like: “Tweet you are here, take a picture of the 8oz bottles of BrandX and get a coupon for a buy one/get one free.” How many time-stamped, geo-tagged photos and fan tweets do you think that CPG brand would get? Would this create more demand for at retail service due to an increased turn on the product? Maybe, but until someone tries it, we’ll never know.

Pizza
On Tuesday afternoon, about 4:00pm, Papa Johns sent out a tweet something like “Hungry? Order a Papa John’s pizza.” Oh, man was I ever. It was a long day and I did not have time to eat. So, I clicked on the link. Bang, right to the front page. So, from there, I had to log in.. can’t remember my password… looked it up.. got to the order page, had to decide… oh, y’know what, I’m just not that hungry.

What Papa John’s could be doing it give me the option to save a Twitter preference. Next time they send me a tweet, all I have to do is reply to it and my preferred pizza has been ordered, paid for with my save credit card, in the oven and on it’s way to my front door; all just by replying to the tweet. (I know, there are some issues with privacy and such, but maybe they could send me a DM or an email confirming I did indeed reply to and order a pizza.)

What’s missing in social media right now is that last 10 yards of connection to the customer. Sure the smart brands are listening with big ears but until they start growing bigger hands and integrate social media into their operations, social media will be the stuff of late night jokes and CNN scare stories instead of Harvard Business School case studies.

Originally published at GerardMcLean.com

It’s been a couple of months now since the life coaches and go-getters pushed out their brand of RAH RAH RAH and GO! GO! GO! for 2010. We’ve seen folks choose keywords for their life, new resolution for the year, non-resolution for the year, themes instead of resolutions and all sorts of various predictions and start-up dreams, etc.

And very little living. Only doing.

When I worked at a newspaper a long time ago* I spent about 70% of my time wandering around with my cup of coffee, talking with other people in the building; Gary in accounting, Ted, John and MB in editorial art, Jeff in photo and all the print shop and pre-print guys. Before that, when I worked at SPAR Marketing, most of my day was spent wandering around talking to people with my coffee cup. And before that, I did the same thing at Huffy.

And I got a lot done as a result.

But every year during my performance appraisal, my boss of the moment would take the opportunity to chastise and berate me on how much time I wasted walking around, talking to people instead of spending that time at my desk “producing.” And yet, each boss was amazed at my ability to produce a ton of work. No doubt they reasoned that if I could produce this much work walking around socializing, think about how much they could get out of me if I didn’t walk around.**

Here was the secret. What they saw as me wasting time, I saw as gathering stories about what mattered to people. I saw impromptu conversations over a cup of coffee as inspiration for change. I took away their frustrations and ranting as opportunities to solve organizational problems, to remove barriers. I saw my wanderings as keeping in touch with what mattered to people most, what worried them, what gave them fear. When I did “work at my desk” I worked on proposals that solved real problems and helped the organization become more efficient. I presented budget proposals that produced much more than busy work or boondoggles for management. I produced writing that talked to real issues that real people were feeling. The work seemed more real because it connected with real people, not just caricatures or stereotypes.

And that I think is the real value of all this time-wasting social media. To many, it looks like foolin’-around-time. But to those of us who know better, it is the inspiration and fuel of innovation and productivity..

*A long time ago = When the year started with 19
**About half as much, maybe less.

With the recession pulling into it’s second (or third) year, we’re seeing a lot of teams request a late Saturday morning start so they don’t have to book rooms into a hotel for Friday night. As you can imagine, accommodating this request puts a serious strain on the scheduling as most of the time, the start times are determined by the number of fields and the number of daylight hours available. While you can sometimes squeak out another field somewhere, tacking another hour of sunlight on the end of a day is impossible.

So what to do? You don’t want to turn away a team if you don’t have to, but re-writing the laws of nature to fit an economic reality is just not going to happen. When most teams are now asking for a late Saturday start, it become mathematically impossible to grant the request.

Our advice: Publish a cut off date for late Saturday start requests. Instead of trying an Early Bird discount or other pricing scheme to get teams to apply early, have a date or volume cut off. Perhaps only the first two teams for each age group can request a late Saturday start. Once those requests are used up, there are no more. And, while you are at it, do the same for multiple-team coaches. It rewards the teams with special requests to apply early without compromising the price and value of your tournament.

Be sure to promote visibly and keep track of the number of requests. Reward the requester handsomely and make it crystal clear that the reason you are honoring (or denying) the request is because they applied and paid early (or not.) Once you start doing this, competition for special considerations next year will be fierce.

I ran out of coffee filters the other day. Not a big deal, I’ll just hike to Kroger and get some more. When I got there, I saw the empty peghook that once held my filters. Moreover, there was a red tag on the hook informing me that this product would be discontinued.

Here’s why this is a big deal. A few years ago, the 53rd automatic drip coffee maker I have ever purchased in my life, died. Just quit. Arrgghh, there has to be a better way. And there was. Melitta makes this carafe and cone set that only requires hot water and gravity to make coffee. The only wrinkle is that it also requires a size 6 cone filter. But, since Kroger carried it, not a big deal. I adopted my new system. And it was great because it was so simple. It only really required gravity to work. And gravity was free.

Then someone at Kroger decided they were not selling enough #6 filters. And, without asking me, they just quit carrying them.

Amazon.com still sells the #6 and I just bought approximately 2.6 years worth of filters. Until my filters arrive, I am using paper towels to line the cone. In the event Melitta decides to quit selling the #6 cone filter altogether, I know I have 2.6 years to come up with an alternate solution to a perfectly good system. But, what I foolishly adopted outside of the normal 10-cup basket filter automatic drip coffee maker is now showing signs of that death-march to obsolescence. An inferior technology persists because it is ubiquitous.

We get change and new stuff. Really, we do. It excites us. It gets us out of bed every day. But we also have a library of 8mm reels our childhood is on that we can’t watch, a library of 8 track and cassettes our music is on that we can’t hear, a library of VHS tapes our children’s lives are on that we can’t relive and a mountain of Zip Drive cartridges our careers are on that we can’t share or pass on. We’ve seen the result of a system being brought to its knees when a tiny bit of the supply chain becomes obsolete right after we dedicate a large chunk of our lives to it.

We grew up in large families (which is why there are so many of us now clogging the ladder rungs to the top) where everything from dinner to clothes to mom’s attention was a competition with the people you lived with. Most of our families had one car and one income and choices were made based on the supply of resources. We got jobs that promised us work, retirement accounts and free benefits that seemed too good to be true. We took them and squirreled them away, believing that one day they would be gone (turns out we were right.) We’ve lived through and survived at least three recessions and a very large oil embargo. We’ve seen an explosive increase in the divorce rate. In short, we’ve been conditioned to know that free is never unlimited free. Free will run out. Free has a catch. The good times do not last. Commitments are broken every day without apology, remorse or obligation.

And now Twitter and Foursquare want to be the operations in our supply chains, somewhere between service delivery and invoicing. I can see the possibilities for several industries we do work for and it is very, very exciting. But Twitter is free, it has really no reason to be there tomorrow, no obligations, no contract with me.

As I reach for the coffee filters that are no longer there, between boiling the water and lining the cone with carefully folded paper towels, I pause and think, “What if Evan Williams decided to just quit doing Twitter?”

The two dogs here are mine that I walk three times a day. They are each about 1 1/2 years old and grew up together from pups. They hang with me at my office all day and they are rarely apart.

Charlie is a full-bred German Shepherd who weighs about 100 lbs. Sallie is the white mutt we rescued from the local Human Society. She is a bit lab, a bit of something else and more of that. She weighs in about 70 lbs.

And, despite what the photo shows, she is winning this wrestling match (nobody got hurt.)

On the afternoon “thinking/lunch” walk, we go about 1/2 mile to a undeveloped subdivision that the builder abandoned due to the current recession (silver lining!) I then take them off the leash and they run, sniff and stalk each other. And they go at each other with all the sibling love anyone who has grown up with a brother or sister close in age recognizes well.

Charlie is bigger, weighs more and has longer teeth. He can also run faster. If he choose, he could probably crush Sallie’s head. Sallie has shorter legs, is stockier and can turn and roll on a dime. But if you watch them closely, none of these features by themselves is either an advantage or a disadvantage.

When Charlie catches up with Sallie, she either veers quickly right of left or rolls on her back, sending Charlie overshooting her. By the time he turns around, she has darted away a few hundred feet. If Charlie is standing up and Sallie wants to take him out, she body-checks him against his ribs and he goes down like a sack of potatoes. If he is already on the ground, she positions her weight on his chest and he can’t get traction to roll over.

If you were to bet which dog would win in an all out wrestle, you may choose Charlie who is bigger, can run faster and has bigger teeth. But nobody told Sallie her shorter legs and stockier build was a disadvantage nor does she believe it is. So far, each wrestle has ended in a draw.

So, what is your excuse? Do you really have disadvantages in your business or have you just not fully assessed your leverage? If you are small and under-capitalized, you may just be scrappy and creative. In this current economy, do you see limitations or possibilities to embrace change?

Good business people don’t see advantages or disadvantages, only the current climate and an opportunity to leverage their assets.

We can learn a lot by paying attention to dogs. In their minds, they are each at the same time only puppies and the fiercest thing on the block. And, since they can’t understand us when we voice our opinions of them, they are unaffected by what we think is possible. To them, every fight is win-able, but not every win is achieved the same way.

Way back in the very late ’80s, I was given an intensive customer service training by my then current company which happened to be a Fortune 500 at the time. It was a week-long seminar given at great expense in order to improve the field-level communications to our customers who were retail stores such as Kmarts, Targets, Montgomery Wards, Toys R Us and the like. It took a week because there was a lot of nuance and a lot of practice.

Bear with me. I’m getting to the social media part.

The formula for customer service was fairly simple. The implementation of it was very hard to do well. Needless to say, not a lot of us were good at it at first, but we practiced, we coached, we were coached and we continued our training and re-training for several years after the week-long seminar. The formula was: H-E-A-T.

Hear them out
Empathize
Apologize
Take Responsibility

The “hear them out” part was hard for us because as operational managers, we just wanted to identify the problem quickly and solve it. All this yelling and screaming about other stuff that our poor service caused was just a waste of time. The managers who learned how to master the skill of listening and knowing when the customer ran out of steam were really, really good at solving the problems. The ones who didn’t eventually solved the issue, but the customer was still unhappy.

Patience, please; I’ll get to the social media stuff in time.

Empathy was really, really hard, even harder than listening because it was an active part and was not scripted in any way. You had to listen to what the customer was ranting on about and try to figure out what emotion was most pressing. If you got it right, you were in with the customer. If you got it wrong, not only were you really crappy at satisfying the customer, but you were a complete imbecile. The empathy was really hard and took a lot of practice. A lot.

Ok, ok.. I’m getting to the social media stuff, I really am.

The apologize part at first got our hairs to stand up. “I’m not saying sorry for something I didn’t do! What if the customer was wrong!” As it turns out, we didn’t really have to say “I’m sorry.” “I apologize for the inconvenience” would work just as well. Keep in mind this was 1988, so a company apologizing for the inconvenience was rather a new concept.

As you may have guessed, I have one more thing to cover; take responsibility for the situation. I promise that before you are done reading this blog post, I will have explained that last step and the entire H-E-A-T process in full and how it relates to the trajectory of social media. (See how I did that all in one step?)

Now, to the trajectory of social media. If you were paying attention to everything above, you may have found that the only thing even vaguely familiar about any customer service experience you have had lately is that someone at some point — maybe many points — in the conversation apologized for the inconvenience. Were you aware that was not the complete formula?

It isn’t and the apology was never intended to stand alone. In fact, when it stands alone it is utterly and completely meaningless. It is out of context and the weakest of the four touch points above. But, it is easily scriptable and placed in a customer service handbook. Over the course of twenty years, a complete and effective customer service program has been reduced down to its most easily-scripted part that has becomes a meaningless cliché; “I apologize for the inconvenience.”

Now, we see Social Media. It has glowing potential to engage customers on a new level, to raise the bar for brands to become entwined in their customer’s lifestyle, to become friends, to be fans, to be a rock star. I wanna be a rock star!

But Social Media is really, really hard to do well. The essence of what it is, how it connects, how to balance your personal identity with that of your employer, what to say, what you can’t or shouldn’t say is very, very hard to communicate to people. An effective Social Media program — like an effective Customer Service program — can’t be boiled down into a policy and procedure manual. It can’t be scripted.

Even as we become flush with the potential of social media, companies are trying to find ways of boiling down its essence into a trainable script that any monkey willing to work a minimum-wage customer service job can do. “How do we automate determining the ‘mood’ of the tweet, i.e., is the customer complaining/complimenting?” If it is a complaint, how can we quickly automate sending out a tweet apologizing for the inconvenience? What kind of “beads” will the customer accept? How can we create a plan whereby we silence the customer quickly so there is no danger of re-tweeting and twitterstorms? How can we push tweets into a system of escalation so our customer service people aren’t annoyed and bothered by the routine or “nutty” complaint? If the customer is being complimentary, how can we push them into our CRM and Facebook fan page? Remember, folks, we need to get rid of the employees tweeting because they are expensive and focus on maximizing the equity of our brand through social media.

Never mind the community part of social media. Humanizing brands is just a stupid ideal that will never happen. Why do customer think they have a right to be a fan? We sell them stuff, they give us money; that is the contract, although we will be their friend until they buy from us. Then, we’re moving on and making newer friends. That is the way sales works and that is the way sales will always work.

Social Media is on the same trajectory as customer service. About twenty or so years ago, customer service was seen as the silver bullet for customer retention. “It cost seven time more to find a new customer than to retain an existing one” was the mantra of the day. Now, it seems everyone from Facebook to Twitter to popular blogs to cell phone companies only want new customers. Customer service is an expense that is dealt with as a necessary evil and honed to its barest essentials; be invisible and when that doesn’t happen, apologize for the inconvenience. Offer beads only as a last resort.

Social media is already dying because it is already getting too expensive. The ROI can’t be proven in dollars and cents but the expenses sure can. The drive to retain the appearance of engaging in social media while trying to cut costs by automating is already well under way.

Companies still have customer service training. But, the programs mostly consist of informing the customer about the fine print they signed, avoiding escalation and obfuscating and frustrating to them to the point they just give up. Social Media training will suffer the same fate eventually. Maybe not this year or the next, but eventually it will be boiled down by efficiency experts and bean-counters and morph into a cliché much the same as what passes for customer service today. It will become an ineffective script that is easy to train to entry-level employees whose only goal is to get promoted out of the social media department.

I apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused you as a result of reading this blog post. But in all truth, you didn’t really expect any more than what I gave you, did you? It was kinda your fault for wandering in here to begin with. Didn’t you read the fine print before you opened the package?

The ASAE (American Society of Association Executives) produced the video below for their annual meeting just this past weekend. (It runs a little long, the movie beats you up a little with the message, but pay attention to the subtitles. They are really small, but perhaps the most important part of the whole piece.)

I get it; trade associations connect people together and that was the obvious point. But, the not so obvious point is that all these people who are working at trade associations during the day are spending their nights and weekends with their true passion; music.

We have seen this kind of thing before, but usually the talent is mediocre. But, these folks are darn good! The ASAE not only had the criterion of involving their members, but that the member had to have a high level of skill, proficiency and passion. Brilliant!

What does a harmonica have to do with biodiesel? Nothing except for Joe Jobe. Or a guitar with concrete or paint? For Joe Vickers and Phil Bour, the combination make perfect sense. Railroads and drum kits? Michael Fore makes it work. He probably taps out routines on his desk, driving his co-workers crazy. And there is no hiding the rapture Mike Skiados (ASAE) feels when he plays his guitar.

The Disney movie High School Musical (HSM) was a similar deafening intervention cry from kids, yet few adults paid attention to the underlying message, mostly dismissing it as bubble-gum entertainment. But the kids got it and that is what made the movie “stick.”

Social Media like Facebook gets this concept by allowing members to establish a core identity and then add interests and groups to them. More specialized sites like Meet the Boss, various Ning sites and sites like WePlay.com don’t. Neither do “gardens of brands” like Skittles or Ford. In their world, there is no room for “other interests” and no way to connect the person with them. (As an aside, the WSJ had an interesting article on fans. Worth a read… after you are done with this post and have commented/tweeted, of course.)

Anyone who doesn’t know me is surprised that among my passionate interests are newspapers, old typewriters, literature, photography, coffee, typography, dogs and harmonicas. Computers and soccer come in almost last on the list. Internet is the way I make a living and it is imperative I am knowledgeable and skilled in it, but it is not my passion. In their world, I develop Web-based properties therefore I must be a geek and only care about the latest technology. Sorry. Technology is a tool; no more, no less.

For sports organizations, the random connections that social media reveals is like gold. How many times have you approached a large brand for a sponsorship and gotten, “What does our brand/product have to do with soccer?” If you dig deeper into the social media networks like Facebook, you may well have a stronger answer. Your model is HSM and the ASAE video.

Our advice: Find the connections. The more random and strange, the better. Watch the touchlines and the space between games more intently than the games themselves at your next tournament. What are the kids doing? What are their parents doing? How many questions do your get about a particular topic? Why? Ask questions, observe behaviors. Your next sponsor may be in the non-soccer parts of the game that your sponsor’s target audience is most passionate about.

Note: This post was originally intended for just TourneyCentral, but because the medium here is also the message, we posted this on almost every brand we own. Dogs and soccer? Coffee and soccer? Marketing and soccer? Yeah, it all fits when you start looking hard enough. And, thank you Cindy Butts for the inspiration.

“Many people are at soccer matches tweeting updates to their contacts using their iPhone, Blackberry and cell phones,” says TourneyCentral President Gerard McLean, “It just makes sense that we would automate the process from a single point of contact.” He adds, “This feature of our TourneyCentral product allows tournament directors to maximize the benefits of a very effective social networking medium by pushing out their message on Twitter.”

The tweet uses the #tag of the event (i.e. #WSC is Warrior Classic, #WLI is Westlake Invitational, etc.) and shows which divisions that were updated. In addition to scores and news, the spirit center for each event will be resurrected using Twitter. The calendar of soccer tournament events is available here.

ABOUT TOURNEYCENTRAL
TourneyCentral.com provides comprehensive, event-focused, web-based solutions for youth soccer tournaments and is wholly owned by Rivershark, Inc. an Ohio Corporation. Since 1999, TourneyCentral has been producing web sites that provide youth soccer tournaments with end-to-end integrated experience management for guest teams, from marketing through scoring. In addition, the advertising tools provide the tournaments with an increased opportunity for advertising and sponsorship revenue as a result of significantly increased traffic to the web site. For more information, visit www.tourneycentral.com.

Companion and marketing partner properties consist of: The Soccer Tournament Review, a blog and iTunes podcast for tournament directors, MyTournamentSpace, a photo-sharing site linked directly into the tournament game schedule and www.ticoscore.com, a single-source database and ranking system for soccer tournaments.

TourneyCentral will be attending the NSCAA Conference in Philadelphia in January 2010.

Contact for more information
Gerard McLean
gmclean [at] rivershark.com
937-836-6255

###

At some point in the interaction, he decides he is just going to run like hell to get away. He just turns on the juice, his braces fall away and he discovers his first super-power; his ability to run really fast for long distances.

What if instead of running, Forrest stopped by the side of the road and did an ROI of his running vs not running. He would have to calculate the speed at which he would have to run to get away, factor in the weight of the leg braces, calculate the maximum speed at which he…

*BOOM*

The bullies just beat up Forrest. The movie is over, Forrest is dead and the results of the ROI are now meaningless, even if it showed that Forrest would be able to outrun the bullies as Jenny encouraged him to. Even as Jenny had faith in Forrest’s ability to run faster than the bullies could, the pressure to complete the ROI before acting would prevent him from getting away.

And that is what completing an ROI on the use of Social Media is like.

Just get up and run. Run as fast as you possibly can. If you are right and there is an ROI, then you are still ahead. If you are wrong and there is no ROI, then the marketplace might beat you up.

But if you don’t get up and run now, they will definitely beat you up. If I were you, I’d already be running.

Now, watch this video. The really smart stuff is said at the very end, but unless you watch the whole thing, you won’t know what the smart stuff is. Trust me.

Source: http://www.meshconference.com/meshtv/

For 2009, I decided I was not going to sponsor anything. I was not going to buy jerseys for soccer teams, drop in “break a leg” wishes for the local high school play, sponsor a hockey team at a local college, sponsor several indoor soccer teams, give to my alumni association, buy ads in the high school yearbook and newspaper, ante up membership fees for several trade groups, etc, etc. I saved more than several thousand dollars from my marketing budget and sales haven’t suffered.

I thought maybe I would get a call from at least one of these appreciative groups.

I got nothing.

Nobody called to ask why I stopped sponsoring. Nobody sent a letter or an email, asking if the economy was a factor in my decision not to support their group.

It really got me thinking about how local groups treat local businesses and how little it takes to keep sponsors. I quit sponsoring because I suspected nobody at the benefitting organizations really cared whether or not I was there. The only time I ever heard from these groups was when they asked for money. And, when I failed to respond, they didn’t reach out.

The solution is fairly simple; talk with your sponsors. Involve them in your success. Make them feel at home with your organization. Let them know what is going on. Most often, they sponsor you because they want you to be successful and they want to be a part of that. In this age of connection and explosion of Social Media tools, not communicating with your sponsors just indicates apathy, carelessness or arrogance.

In the meantime, I am saving my money. I am more than willing to sponsor worthwhile causes, but only those that truly appreciate my sponsorship.