The Conversation Manager

Two years ago I first visited the word-of-mouth summit. Back then, I was fully mentally prepared to think up the full story of “The Conversation Manager”. The conference was then mainly about the Net Promoter Score and the use of Twitter in social media. After three days at the summit, I realize how quickly the world has changed. These days, businesses treat word-of-mouth marketing completely differently than then.

Here are seven things that struck me in recent days:

1. Brands are looking for influencers

The central theme of this conference was clearly working with influential people and brands. Companies understand that they have less impact through traditional means, so they are looking for new forms of mass media. Today, these are the Twitter users with thousands or even millions of followers. In this way, the amount of people you can reach is vastly increased via a more reliable source. During the summit, many different cases were presented where influencers took centre stage. The challenge here is maintaining relationships with influential customers (and not only digital celebrities). The conference clearly showed the limitations of these digital gods. They are after all less credible than a “real” customer of a company. Turning your customers into ambassadors also takes more time and resources than simply making opportunistic (mis)use of the big names.

2. Brands position clients

The nice thing about this way of working is that you have the opportunity to place your consumers more in the picture. As I wrote in my book, today it is an art to use your brand to position your customer. And not vice versa! Place your customers in the spotlight in a way that is fun and relevant to them, and they will thank you. Gratitude often results in sales. Incidentally, all cases that were presented here were backed up by some very convincing numbers demonstrating their ROI.

3. Brands still forget their employees

Unfortunately, today’s brands all too often forget their most important ambassadors: their own employees. Your biggest fans should be on your payroll. Making use of them will ensure a good ROI. Please do not forget them.

4. Private media is increasing in importance

Brands focus increasingly on their own media. Reinventing their website, creating their own customer communities, etc., is becoming increasingly important. Seems logical. Two years ago, the focus was on the social networks themselves. Today the focus is on developing a good story, having influential customers enhance this story (often through social media) and being able to leverage things from within your own private media.

5. Location-based growth rockets

Brands are increasingly making use of location-based services. Offering customers added value if they make their presence known will become increasingly common practice. I notice especially that brands and companies in the US are really much farther in this area than we are in Europe. There the moment I entered a restaurant I was immediately given a discount of $ 5 as a reward. This gives you an instant good feeling as a customer.

6. From critical incident management to proactive strategies

Most brands that are now far with conversation management owe that to a critical incident. External pressures placed this topic high on the agenda of the management. This also shows you that it is possible and that businesses also have the resources for it. Everything is just allocated differently. During the summit, I felt that more and more companies have learned from these experiences of others. This led them to start thinking proactively about how word-of-mouth can further help them and what the role of social media should be in this. A positive development!

7. Need for Conversation Manager (Centre of Excellence)

Organisations are silos. In times of social media it has become impossible to make customers happy in this structure. The problem is not solved by simply building another silo to house social media. No, more than ever, there is a need for a conversation manager who coordinates and facilitates business across all the departments. Someone who helps the departments to better understand customers and to ensure that word-of-mouth is implemented in all departments.

It's a different world now. The WOM world has grown up. The good thing is that cases are no longer about social media, but about word-of-mouth. Good times await us: as consultants in this field, as brands that are getting closer to their customers and as costumers; we are entering into a better world. I eagerly anticipate the future.

The last day of the WOMMA summit is about integrating social media into a business strategy. The question is not: “what is our strategy on Facebook and Twitter?”. The correct question is: “how can we develop a business strategy that uses the benefits of social media?”.

“Reverse mentoring” as a starting point

The difficulty in many organisations is the mental gap that occurs between the older and the younger generation. More and more digital natives are entering companies. They immediately see the benefits of social media, while running into opposition from the more senior managers. How to deal with this was the theme of the opening debate. The debate was extremely interesting and contained a number of hot shots from the social media world, including Jeremiah Owyang, social media guru; Rick Murray, President of Edelman and Erica Swallow from Mashable. They launched the concept of “Reverse Mentoring”. Set up a programme in which senior managers and a company’s digital natives get together to learn from each other. In other words, mentorship is not something that flows only from senior to junior, but vice versa as well. I strongly believe in this. Edelman has also developed a very good training programme to involve the entire company in a new way of thinking in which word-of-mouth and digitisation take centre stage. All employees are given a “belt”, ranging from white to black. Meanwhile, they already have 1,900 black belts, all people who are well trained in the art of conversation thinking.

Where to send your customer: Facebook or your website

If we then talk about connecting with customers, the question arises of where to send your customers. What should advertisers use in their TV commercials: a link to the website or a link to their Facebook page? This is a difficult question. The panel was divided in two. One group thought this should be your own website, because it is your own media, where you will probably be able to maximise your conversion rate. The other group thought Facebook, since that is where customers meet each other. After some discussion, everyone did agree that you cannot resolve everything on the known social sites. You cannot solve every customer service problem with a tweet. Sometimes you will need to make a phone call, sometimes send an email, depending on the situation. I believe that over the next two years we will see an increasing amount of integration between Facebook and websites, and perhaps other channels as well. It think that it is very important not to underestimate your own media. If you have a base somewhere from which you can share your content and connect with customers, this will certainly benefit your conversion rate. We must also ensure that we are not developing silos in our marketing thinking. The story and the content of your brand should be the same everywhere and preferably linked to each other. Your Facebook page and your website should complement each other, and must both have their own conversion goals.

Social media expose the silos of your organisation

This brings us quickly to the topic of organisational structure. During his presentation, Chris Boudreaux (Converseon) tells us about his experiences in integrating social media into the corporate strategy of his clients. His feeling concurs with what I myself experience with our customers: a company is organised into silos that unfortunately do not work together transparently enough. Marketing and customer service are two different worlds that, with the advent of social media, are now obliged to cooperate. Your customers do not care about your organisational structure and expect full cooperation within a company. Unfortunately the reality is often different, causing frustration both internally and externally. Currently, 70% of a company’s social media budget is in the hands of marketing. It is also logical that marketing is the first to use social media because it is the least complex branch within a company to experiment with. Once you start involving customers in product management, you have already entered into a more complex world.

Starting point for integrating social media into your business: corporate DNA and objectives

Before you start talking about social media, consider the DNA of your business. Are you a prize player, or rather a customer relationship player, or perhaps a product champion. Depending on your choice, your strategy will be different. It is also important to carefully define your business objectives. The combination of these things is the basis for your strategy and the role that social media can play in it.

Once you progress in your implementation project, you will be needing a “centre of excellence”, according to the man from Converseon. This centre brings together all the experts inside and outside your organisation to increase the knowledge and value of social media. Personally, I see this as the role of the Conversation Manager. Where he or she integrates word-of-mouth cross-departmentally in everything the company does. This is not only about being a great conversation manager, but also about someone who is good at facilitating people. The need for a coordinating person / department came up regularly here.

Finally, the choice is yours: do you want to become a reactive helpdesk, or create a proactive strategy

The final speech came from Jeremiah Owyang. He presented the conclusion of his last report: the career path of the social media strategist. There are two possibilities: either you reactively start giving everyone expert answers to their questions, or you proactively delineate a path. Of course, everyone's preferred route is the latter. In order to succeed here, your structure will be very important. If you work with a centralised model where all questions are routed to a single person, via word-of-mouth and social media, you cannot help but lapse into a reactive model. The correct way is to, as a conversation manager, place yourself in a central point between the services, and to facilitate them to succeed in your goals. In an ideal world, your business will turn into a company like Zappos, where every employee knows exactly what they should and shouldn’t be doing. At that moment, the conversation manager is in fact no longer needed. In the case of Zappos, I think that their CEO, Toni, is the Conversation Manager. And at the end of the story everything still comes down to corporate culture, which determines everything. How things change is quite simple, according to Jeremiah Owyang. The secret formula is as follows: first, you work out a good policy (I prefer the term “conversation guide”), then you adjust the processes (indicate clearly who is responsible for what) and then you provide non-stop training for all your people. These three steps will change the corporate culture of your organisation. In other words, it was another interesting day in which a number of hot topics around social media were tackled. The discussions on organisational structure and culture fascinate me greatly. For businesses, this is really not straightforward. The structures which have served us successfully for a 100 years, are now being called into question by all of the experts. However, it is also only natural that not everyone is a fan, which was also one of today’s conclusions.

One last tip from Jeremiah to implement change. People who have already been evangelising about social media within their companies should immediately stop doing so. Change your propaganda work into project management. Define projects and manage these like any other project in an organisation, with budgets, timings, objectives, etc. That way you will gain credibility quicker. A good tip to end on, wouldn’t you say?