Influential Marketing Blog

5 Ways To Solve The Crisis Of Corporate Social Responsibility

It may have been easy to miss if you don't work in the world of corporate led cause related marketing, but Corporate Social Responsibility (or CSR) programs are in the midst of a crisis. The subject of the debate mainly centers around two big issues: brand value and authenticity. On the one hand, CSR programs are attacked by shareholder groups and business investors who argue that they are a needless distraction and remove money (and value) from the investors of a business. CSR programs are also attacked by industry watchdogs and groups who argue that businesses only engage in CSR programs to create an artificial connection with consumers and claim allegiance to causes they don't really care about.

On the other side, those who work on these programs make a more idealist argument - that companies can do well and do good at the same time. That doing something positive for a community or for the planet at large is not mutually exclusive with making money. And even if it were, that the duty of organizations to do this should be seen as a necessary cost of doing business. This is not a debate that is likely to be resolved anytime in the near future, but my position is that I am a big believer in the benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility. I teach a marketing course at Georgetown University's Center for Social Impact and have worked on dozens of CSR programs in my time managing marketing campaigns for clients.

Unfortunately, CSR is in a state of crisis today. To a large degree, this crisis is self inflicted - with many brands simply jumping on the bandwagon of popular causes such as the Pink Ribbon campaign for breast cancer simply because they were fashionable. Other brands have been exposed for "greenwashing" as a way to simply tell a story of being better or more ethical without actually living up to it.

The point of this article, though, is not to focus on the negatives of CSR or to lead anyone to the conclusion that it cannot work well. Instead, my aim is to try and offer a vision for how brands and the nonprofits they work with may be able to get past some of these barriers to collaborate on some real groundbreaking CSR programs that not only deliver results in terms of a positive impact on the world, but also can be viewed within a marketing team as having a value, effectiveness and ROI worth maintianing an ongoing investment in.

To that end, here are five fundamental keys to creating successful and believable CSR programs:

1. Forge a real strategic connection. By far the biggest mistake that brands and nonprofits make is creating partnerships of convenience rather than strategy. An airline supports feeding the hungry, A clothing retailer supports more technology in schools. A bank supports breast cancer. This is not to say these aren't worthwhile causes, but the strategic link to a brand can often be missing - and without it, realizing real marketing value from a CSR program is difficult. Before committing to an effort, a brand needs to honestly assess whether the cause is the right fit ... or not.
2. More upfront involvement and ownership from causes. Though it is tempting to blame this lack of strategic vision solely on the brand, there is an element of blame for nonprofits as well. When it comes to crafting a CSR program, a nonprofit cause often takes a subordinate role because of the perception that they are getting "a favor" from the brand working with them. This is a mistake for several reasons, but most importantly because often the nonprofit is in an ideal position to advise on what people truly care about in relation to their issue and what is likely to influence their opinions. For any nonprofit that simply agrees to a do an ill-conceived campaign from a brand - not only will it not generate strong results, it may also impact your ability to get future funding and support from that brand. So if you're part of a nonprofit, get involved and be a vocal partner to the brands you work with. In the long run, they will appreciate working with you much more - and the results of your collaboration will be much stronger.
3. Shift to long term focus versus short term. It is certainly no surprise that the inclination of most marketers is to think in terms of campaigns rather than longer term partnerships. This is particularly true when you consider the average CMO's tenure is about 18 months. With all these barriers, it can be tough to do something that lasts for a long time, but when you switch causes and allegiances every year or two then it is very difficult to build a perception in the consumers mind about what you stand for. The most successful CSR programs that are held in high regard and have returned enormous value for both the brand and an associated nonprofit (if there is one) are more longstanding efforts.
4. Commit more than just financial resources. Giving money to someone is actually the easiest thing to do when it comes to CSR programs. Writing a check takes relatively little effort - what requires more effort (and belief) is TIME from the people that work for a brand. Yet this time is what makes a commitment real. Having real people working on a cause from your organization is what can inspire your people with a sense of purpose. It is also the real proof point that any customers or critics can point to as a demonstration of your real commitment to a particular cause and the fact that your commitment is real and not just greenwashing.
5. Integrate programs instead of operating in silos. In many large organizations, CSR remains its own branch on the tree - which means opportunities for integration are often missed. Yet the stories that come from a well defined and executed CSR program can help to reinforce marketing messages, offer useful talking points for customer service, and great fodder for content creation for social media groups. The point is, CSR is best utilized if it is treated as a resource that is available to the entire company to help spread the story about. This can also help to combat the perception within many organizations that CSR efforts should not be actively talked about because this would mean "patting yourself on the back." While too much self congratulation can backfire, this should not prevent brands from talking authentically about the things they are doing.

Consumer Reports & Consumerist Help Shoppers Bite Back

One of the most visible effects of the social media revolution is the relative power that is now in the hands of an individual consumer when it comes to spreading a positive or negative experience with your brand to hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people. Shoppers have a voice and it is now far stronger than the occasional review on Amazon or comment on a blog post. As the new holiday shopping season descends in the US, at least one organization is starting the season with an open call to consumers to make their voices heard.

Today Consumer Reports placed a full page ad in the USA Today asking holiday shoppers to "bite back" against retail practices that they hate. In an announcement about the campaign, the Consumer Reports team shared the following stats from a survey run on the Consumerist (a popular blog that is now part of the "Consumer Reports family") about what consumers dislike the MOST:

• 72% Stores that never open all of the checkout lanes
• 68% Fake "sales". If something is always 20% off, it's not on sale
• 67% Coupons that exclude almost everything in the store
• 52% Pushing store credit cards at the register

As we head into this holiday season, watching out for your shoppers biting back isn't just a lesson for those of us who work in retail sales. Consumer opinion will continue to drive purchase, and this will take the form of everything from idle tweets to wall posts on a fan page. Listening to conversations about your brand, products and industry and participating in the conversation is consistent advice from those who "get" social media. This holiday season for many brands, it may be even more than good advice ... it may be a necessary survival tactic.

Don't Call Me A Social Media Guy

Yesterday I hosted a conversation on Twitter all about authenticity and what that truly means. It's a buzzword, to be sure, but it was interesting that the 140 character based conversation yielded many different perceptions of what authenticity means. For most honesty was a big part of it, as was having real one on one conversations with people and not taking yourself too seriously. As I thought about my own use of social media both in building my personal brand as well as what I do for clients working my day job at a big marketing agency ... I realized that I'm not a social media guy. Social media guys (I use this term collectively, as many are girls too) are becoming easy to find - and not all that respected (warning - this video has crude language).

Social media is just one of the tools that I use on a daily basis. To focus on just that and make it my identity would be like calling a runner a "sneaker guy." They might love their sneakers, but it's still the method they use to get from where they are to where they want to be. The way I use social media is similar ... I use it for marketing. I'm a marketing guy first and foremost. It's why my blog is called Influential Marketing and why you won't ever hear my introduce myself as an expert in social media. I use it often, and do know what I'm doing - but my expertise and my career is in marketing.

I happen to believe that the future of marketing is increasingly going to require some level of knowledge and expertise in social media. But it's not the only thing. This fact completely dawned on me last night as I watched a video review about my book from a very interesting guy I met at the Blogworld Expo last month. His name is JB Glossinger and he is the creator of what is usually ranked the #1 audio podcast in the self-help category on iTunes. His use of social media is perfect to deliver his message, and on a daily basis he exhibits a mastery of using social media that many so-called "experts" simply could not. JB is not a social media guy either - but he uses it brilliantly to share his content and vision of the world.



Perhaps the real future of social media lies with people like JB. Not people who master the use of various tools and declare themselves experts of that domain, but those who have a real expertise or vision and simply use the tools that are available to them in that moment to share it with the world.

6 Ways To Protect Your Brand With Social Media

Just about every week I see an article or have a conversation with a client about the potential risks of social media and how to manage them. Quite frankly, there are many ways that social media can go wrong and cause problems for a brand, and as someone who shares advice on using social media for marketing - I can readily admit that. What I haven't seen as much discussion about is how social media could be used to protect your brand. Not fighting back after a crisis happens, but proactively as a tool to prevent people from hijacking, corrupting or negatively impacting your brand. What if you were to see social media as a way to prevent these effects instead of a potential conduit to increase them? Here are a few ideas for how you might use social media to protect your brand:

1. Register domain names and usernames. Among the most long standing of brand protection "techniques" - typically this involved registering branded domain names and ensuring that people couldn't register words or brand terms important to you and then use them without your consent. In the world of social media, where it seems a new site pops up nearly every day, how can you best manage your brand not just on the obvious social networks or popular sites like Facebook and Twitter, but the many sites that are just beginning and might be big one or two years from now? One way is to use services like NameChk or Knowem - which both allow you to check on username availability and bulk register on multiple sites. This doesn't mean you need to use every site, but sometimes just having your own terms registered so no one else can have them is half the battle.
2. Spot problems/crisis before they happen. By now it is probably not news to tell you that social media can be a great way to track conversations that matter to your brand. More and more companies big and small are realizing that watching the conversation online through real time tools like Twitter or by putting a social media monitoring program in place with a software based solution like Radian6 can help to identify potential issues before they expand into full blown crisis.
3. See who's copying your stuff. One of the things that can cause major problems for any brand is the ease with which anyone can cut and paste your information into their own site or reformat it for any purpose. This may seem nearly impossible to track when it comes to the vast expanse of the web, but tools like Tynt can help to find content that is being used without your permission. Once you find it, the ideal way to deal with this content is to not go after every "unauthorized" use, but to have a smarter policy to determine whether the use is significantly harming your brand. That way you can avoid going after the customer who illegally used your logo to start their own fan club, and focus on the real usurpers of your brand who are trying to harm it in some way.
4. Have your own place to respond. If you have ever heard the saying that the best defense is a good offense (or maybe I have that backwards), you'll understand the point of this suggestion. Often when it comes to responding to attacks or negativity in social media, the best way to respond is through your own social media sites. A press release will never be able to counter a blog post. Matching the communications channel puts you on an even playing field with those who might try to negatively impact your brand and gives you a soapbox from which to share your own point of view that can be the most effective way to get your message across.
5. Get verified and trademarked. More and more social media sites now are allowing real brands to pass through some sort of validation process in order to demonstrate that their accounts are "official." Facebook lets brands protect trademarks and Twitter has their verified accounts feature. In both cases, the sites are allowing companies a way to demonstrate to their audience on that site that the account they have is real and official. Don't underestimate the value of having your official presence on these sites as a way to have trusted interactions with your customers.
6. Find and support your biggest fans. Through sites like Ning customers can create their own online communities that relate to your brand. These are activities that your customers will likely do anyway, so why not offer them some tools and support for these communities? Doing so will not only help you to protect your brand by having some involvement in what they are doing, but often you can end up with better branded assets if you help because you are not forcing a real fan to go and grab assets from a web search and use them to create a substandard experience.

What You Don't Know About Surgeons

What if you only had to do your job once or twice per year? Apart from the tempting thought of how great your life would be without work, imagine the practical fact of how your skills that you use on a daily basis might be affected by only using them once or twice per year. How much would you forget in the time between using your skills? How much of what you do could be like riding a bike - just inherent knowledge that you'll always have? Now imagine if you were a surgeon doing procedures on patients. Seems like a fairly complicated thing - and we generally tend to trust in the surgeons that operate on us. Would it surprise you to learn that 78% of surgeons who perform ACL knee operations, for example, only do 1-2 per year? Or that of the 50 procedures an average orthopedic surgeon does per year, 30 of them are procedures he or she only does once per year?

These were some of the most interesting data points shared by Robert Winder, the CEO of VuMedi - an online community that allows surgeons to share videos of procedures that they do with other surgeons. Winder is one of the speakers at the FDA public hearings that I have also been speaking at today, all about how pharma brands should be able to use the Internet for promotion. Because these hearings are the first in over a decade, there is a lot of attention from everyone in the medical community. People have been invited to speak to share opinions on how the FDA should or should not be regulating this industry.

Whether or not you care about the hearings, the simple fact is that just about everyone in any sort of medical company is paying attention to these hearings. Thinking like a marketer, this is a dream audience for anyone who has a product to sell to the pharma industry to get in front of. As Winder shared his slides on why VuMedi is a great tool for surgeons, he also shared how pharma brands could work with his site. His presentation was on topic, but was also a very smart way to promote his site. Now just about every pharma brand that is paying attention to these hearings (which is nearly all of them) have heard about his site and how they can work with it.

What's the lesson in all this? Well, one lesson is that anything can be an opportunity to promote your brand if you use it well - even a moment as dry as an FDA hearing. The other lesson, of course, is to do a bit more research before selecting your surgeon for an ACL surgery ... :-)

100 Ideas To Save The Planet (And What They Can Teach You)

For the next three days the World Bank here in Washington DC is hosting a world changing event that few people know about. Called the Development Marketplace - it is a gathering of organizations behind 100 innovative ideas from 50 different countries on how to save the planet. The ideas can affect everything from a small village of 60 to a large population of millions. The only requirement is that the funding request from organizations participating must be less than $200,000. As I went through the list of projects that are being featured in the marketplace, there were 10 that stood out to me not only for the creativity of their solutions, but also the lessons that anyone might take away from the idea.

The best ideas solve big problems, but also offer a lesson that could apply to much more than just the situation at hand. Reading the stories of all the innovative organizations presenting at the Development Marketplace gives you a sense of hope about the world that can sometimes get lost in our daily lives. Check out the stories below, and the rest of the great projects from Development Marketplace 2009 ... these are stories and ideas worth sharing:

1. Wave Energy Converter to Mitigate Ocean-Wave Damage and Beach Erosion
Country: Dominican Republic - Project #4949
Organization: Universidad Nacional Pedro Henrique Urena (UNPHU)
Description: Waves currently cause a large degree of the devastation from storms, including destroying bridges, roads and other vital infrastructure. This project is about using wave energy converter (WEC) technology to lower the power of waves and convert some of this power into usable electric power.
Lesson: Your greatest source of energy can come from the same thing that also causes the most destruction.

2. Rate-and-Shame Project Would Raise Media Pressure On Public Officials
Country: Ukraine - Project #4886
Organization: Resource and Analysis Center "Society and Environment"
Description: Local governments in the Ukraine tend to rely on central government to take adaptation steps to deal with climate change, however the results of action (or inaction) are most felt at the local level. This effort involves creating a public rating system for climate change initiative and rating local officials on their performance, in an effort to use transparency to shame inactive officials into action.
Lesson: Giving people someone to blame can encourage action.

3. Saving Glaciers: Artisanal Industry Aims to Stop the Melt and Save Water
Country: Peru - Project #4311*
Organization: Glaciares Peru
Description: Increases in global temperature are causing the world's largest freshwater reserves -- glaciers, to melt. Tropical glaciers are most at risk, which includes those high in the Andes. This project is to build a production facility that will create a paintable white cover material that can be applied to existing black rocks near the glaciers so they do not absorb as much heat and the glaciers melting will slow.
Lesson: The best way to deal with a problem is to sometimes focus on what is right beside it.

4. Global Voices: The Vulnerable Make Videos to Speak Out on Climate Adaptation
Country: Bangladesh, Colombia, and Sri Lanka - Project #3768
Organization: Institute of Development Studies
Description: Use participatory video (PV) training to allow people without strong voices in the community to share their stories and thoughts about climate change through video to the world.
Lesson: Video can help amplify voices that are usually silent on an issue.

5. African Pastoralists to Play Out Climate Drama On The Airwaves
Country: Nigeria - Project #4556
Organization: The Smallholders Foundation
Description: Empower smallholders to produce and broadcast a 20-episode climate-change radio drama featuring a series of climate risk management strategies in the local lgbo language to air on five statewide radio stations over a one-year period, reaching more than 15 million listeners.
Lesson: Dramatizing a serious message can help it to reach your target audience.

6. Medicinal Tree Farms to Reduce Malnutrition and Malaria Infection in Cambodia
Country: Cambodia - Project #4229
Organization: Green Earch Concepts
Description: There has been a sharp rise in malarial infections due to flooding in Cambodia. Also, flooding and drought affect crop yields. Moringa trees have leaves with 25 times more iron content than spinach and high levels of beta carotene. These help increase hemoglobin levels in the blood and strengthen the immune system. The seeds may also be used for water purification. The project is to raise Moringa trees on 10 hectares of land to harvest the leaves and seeds, and conduct three clinical trials on the effectiveness of Moringa.
Lesson: Exploring a new discovery can be the best way to create hope.

7. Mobilizing Community Journalists For Participatory Disaster Risk Management
Country: Mongolia - Project #3502
Organization: Press Institute
Description: Rural residents of Mongolia are particularly vulnerable to advese effects of extreme natural events. Risk-management plans are rarely communicated to herders and other stakeholders because of the lack of extension capabilities. This project considers rural journalists as part of the community and stimulates direct involvement of journalists in risk planning and management and supports them using traditional and new media tools for disaster education.
Lesson: When you lack resources, work with those already in the community who have a similar skill set.

8. Flood Threat Launches Self-Sustaining Green-Concept Floating Village
Country: Cambodia - Project #3457
Organization: Green Earth Concepts
Description: The Tonle Sap Lake, the biggest natural lake in Southeast Asia, poses a danger due to irregular floods from the Mekong River. Floods wash out houses make from local timber and villages have no access to safe water. This project is to build 12 houses to form a self-sustained floating village equipped with utilities that conform to the climate change and lead to the independence from traditional energy forms.
Lesson: When faced with a recurring flood, the best solution is to find a way to float.

9. Rice Farmers Look to Fish Farming to Cushion the Impact of Climate Change
Country: Philippines - Project #3053
Organization: Farming Systems and Soil Resources
Description: Rainfall patterns are unpredictable in the Philippines, which results in flooding or extreme dry spells. If water from previous rains can be stored and used during dry periods, crop failure can be avoided. This project includes a number of innovations, from digging deeper and wider rainwater storage to water pumps powered by humans. There is also a "fish for fuel scheme" that allows farmers to use part of their fish harvest to pay in kind for the expenses involved in excavating the reservoir.
Lesson: Barter of "in kind" products can make progress happen where money is short.

10. Clearing Timber Blockages from Rivers Would Help Communities Progress
Country: Colombia - Project #1434
Organization: CAMIZBA
Description: Increased intensity of tropical storms and deforestation of the river basins produces immense avalanches that erode the river banks. This produces palisades that block the rivers and impede the passage of people and products. Consequently, 15 indigenous communities are left isolated. For this project, a method of using winches, pulleys and expansion bolts will be combined with ethnoeducation to make a difference. The education for indigenous communities will happen through traditional oral communications (songs, storytelling, dances) to disseminate messages about protection of the river basins through groups of women.
Lesson: In a traditional culture, the form and teller of a message are paramount.

Development Marketplace Event Guide 2009

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*Disclaimer: This project is one that a member of my extended family is working on, but I have no involvement in the project. It is one of the reasons I first heard about the Development Marketplace, however.

Passport Marketing At The Berlin Wall

Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall and people across the world are focusing on this momentous day. Last week I was in Berlin and spent an afternoon looking at remnants of the Berlin Wall and its defining place in German history. As the German chancellor from the time (Helmut Kohl) said, "we [Germans] don't have many reasons in our history to be proud, but as chancellor I have nothing to be more proud of than German reunification."

Seeking to see if an experience I had written about some time ago still existed, on a free afternoon in Berlin I headed to a place called Checkpoint Charlie, a highlight among the tourist destinations that commemorate (and commercialize) the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the war there were 300 of these "checkpoints" spread out across the perimeter of the wall. They were manned by soldiers whose job was to make sure that people did not try to cross the wall - often using deadly force to carry out their duties. Estimates range in the hundreds (or thousands, depending on whom you talk to) for the number of people who were killed by this checkpoint squad during the 28 years the wall was up. As is often the case with some of humanities worst moments, today the three remaining checkpoints are all tourist destinations.

At Checkpoint Charlie, the most frequently visited of these checkpoints, outside of the main museum on the street is a guy who will put a stamp in your passport celebrating the former separation of Germany. You usually carry your passport with you for ten years, and through that time you collect stamps from countries you visit, visas from exotic places, and a living record of where you have been and what you have seen. Most international travellers use their passports as the ultimate travel keepsake. For those travellers, getting a unique stamp from a now defunct destination is an appealing idea. For some, it may even be their sole reason for visiting.

Which leads to my marketing observation, that even in the midst of historic celebration of something as significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall ... people are always looking for a way to capture their experiences and share them with others.  This is true of travel, or any other type of experience. When you travel internationally, your passport becomes your record of the places you have been and moments you have had. Stamps in that passport are usually official, and always significant. Sometimes the most important thing you can sell to someone is a memory they were there.

See the rest of my gallery from Berlin on Flickr >>

Note: If you recognized this post, it's because I wrote about Checkpoint Charlie two years ago. This post has lots more pictures and is based on a real experience (and today is the 20th anniversary!), so I thought it worthwhile to share a revised version of it again today. If you liked this idea, you'll probably enjoy my post on philatelic marketing too. And I promise tomorrow will an all-new non-recycled post!

Why Your Business Needs A Concierge

Adrian Moore is the best concierge in the world. At least, according to British travel magazine Monacle, he is. He works at the Four Seasons in Paris, knows all the best spots and restaurants, is intimately aware of any festivals or special events in his city and is, by any account, an authority on all things about Paris. As a business traveller, I appreciate a concierge like this. Unfortunately, the majority of hotels never have anyone like Adrian. Instead, they staff their "concierge" desk with someone who was checking people in at the front desk just the week before.

In those empty cases, the so-called concierge is no better than an Internet enabled computer with access to city resources, a few travel blogs and Yelp (or another restaurant review site). The most interesting thing about Adrian Moore that I didn't mention, however, is that he also happens to be a blogger. And his blog allows him to explore his city and publish his thoughts about it. Which leads me to an interesting question - what if all concierges were bloggers?

Or, put another way to broaden this question beyond the hotel industry, what if the person who was most directly responsible for interacting with your customers used social media more often? This idea works out well for the Four Seasons in Paris with Adrian, but also has worked well for Comcast with Frank Eliason using Twitter as his tool of choice to actively and proactively help customers. Social media can help amplify the voice of any individual to help them bring a personality to a business. The concierge is a term recognized for hotels, but it is a role that many businesses could use in some way. If you had to point to someone within your organization who could be your "concierge" - who would it be?

Once you answer this, you can also answer one the biggest questions that many companies ask before starting to actively use social media -- who is the person (or people) within our organization that should start blogging, tweeting, conversing and responding on our behalf online?

It's the concierge, and if you don't have one ... go find one.

A Marketing Lesson From Michael Jackson's This Is It Film

Deconstruction is a powerful idea. All it means is taking an experience or something real and breaking it down into its individual components. Deconstructing helps you to understand something. Deconstructing tells a story. I remember the first time I saw the movie Amadeus, the Oscar winning dramatization of the life of Mozart, there was one scene that stayed with me. It was the composer Salieri describing (and deconstructing) the music of Mozart:

It helped me to understand classical music in a way I had never thought about. This weekend, as I watched the memorial documentary of Michael Jackson's planned concert tour, This Is It, I thought about that same feeling. The moment of watching something that was deconstructing a vision and a story that I hadn't quite realized the significance of until that moment. This Is It has been getting rave reviews since coming out last week and has already crossed the $100 million mark. Some are already anticipating that it is Oscar-worthy. Here's the preview, in case you haven't seen or heard about it:

What made the film most powerful for me was one moment when Michael was working with his band and rehearsing the length of a pause in a song - encouraging them to "let it simmer." Then the music was brought together with the filmed visuals that were done on a green screen and you saw how the pieces interacted. The film deconstructed the concert that never was, and gave you a vision of what it would have been.

It would be easy to write a marketing post about how this movie has been promoted and perhaps even criticize how it is turning Michael Jackson's death into a venue for moneymaking. The most powerful marketing idea I will take away from the film and experience, however, is the real power of deconstructing an experience to give people an inside look and emotional attachment to it. Deconstruction helped me understand the power of classical music, and the genius of Michael Jackson. The same concept could work equally well for deconstructing a cause such as the fight against Pneumonia and World Pneumonia Day, or sharing the vision behind an inspired marketing campaign. How could deconstruction help your marketing?