A unified digital marketing operation can help small and mid-size B2B companies:
Compete successfully with much larger companies
Produce a better return on investment (ROI)
Generate incremental revenue
Increase enterprise value
This short eBook describes how a unified digital marketing operation can be designed and built to fully utilize new digital marketing and communication technologies and achieve optimal demand generation performance.
“Kim Goodwin has been a prime participant in the dialog at Cooper since 1997. She has been one of the major contributors to the development of our design methodology. She is an authority on design, problem scoping, engagement management, and design documentation. Kim has labored in the trenches in a broad variety of design segments, from clinical medicine to conceptual blockbusting. She has led groups of designers, coordinating their work, and synchronizing it with the needs of some very demanding clients.
“And she has taught others to design. Many hundreds of people have gotten a taste of Kim’s clarity, patience, thoroughness, and rigor by attending her presentations and at conferences, her one-day field seminars, or her design courses. In fact, Kim has been the primary creator of training content for our very successful Cooper U classes. Over the years, her particular expertise at observation, synthesis, and communication while in charge of other design teams and honed in the classroom, led her to write this book. Much of the content and wisdom gleaned from those classes is evident here.”
It is quickly apparent that the book was produced from tried and true application, not just concepts and theory. It is filled with comprehensive examples of real product designs, that not only clearly illustrate the processes, but also gives them enormous credibility. At the same time, the foundation of the book is a deeply held conviction about design and best way to do it.
“Design is the craft of visualizing concrete solutions that serve human needs and goals within certain constraints. Design is a craft because it is neither science nor art, but somewhere in between. In order for design to be design and not art, it must serve human needs and goals. Finally, design always happens within certain constraints.”
“Goal-Directed Design encompasses the design of a product’s behavior, visual form, and physical form. Its fundamental premise is that the best way to design a successful product is to focus on achieving goals.”
“The Goal-Directed method is a set of tools and best practices developed entirely through practice in the real world. The method consists of four components: principles, patterns, process, and practices.”
After briefly discussing principles (guidelines for creating good solutions under specific circumstances) and patterns (types of solutions that tend to be useful for certain classes of problems), the book devotes almost 700 pages to a detailed description of process and practices. The process and practices are grouped into seven stages of a design project:
Getting Started
Research
Modeling
Requirements
Framework
Detailed Design
Ensuring Success
One of my initial concerns was that the process and practices described require a large team of diverse specialists, which few companies can afford, working over a relatively long total timeline. While the book states that the methodology can be scaled for smaller teams and a shorter timeline, I had my doubts. However, I recently had an opportunity to develop a project plan directly with Cooper for the design of role-based user interfaces for genomics research laboratory software, and I saw, firsthand, that the process can be effectively scaled to address limited resources and tight timelines.
Alan Cooper also writes, “This book is comprehensive in its scope, exhaustive in its depth, authoritative in its practice, and priceless in its wisdom. It will certainly become the anchor document for an entire practice. While I expect to see it on the bookshelves of every practicing designer, I further expect that it will spend the lion’s share of its time off the shelf and at the elbow of hard-working designers.”
I’ve read about 60% of the book over 24 months in a non-linear manner, and it is very possible that I will never read the complete book. However, it has taken its place with a select group of books that I refer to constantly for real-world problem solving. This is not a book to read, but rather a book to use, and I strongly recommend it for anyone involved in any function of interaction design.
Kim Goodwin discusses the seven stages of a unified experience design project in a seminar at Stanford University.
“I agree with most of the commentary that the strong fundamentals support a relatively soft landing in housing.” – Ben Bernanke at his first Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting as chairman in March 2006
“We just don’t see troubling signs yet of collateral damage [from the housing price decline] and we are not expecting much.” – Timothy Geithner then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting in September 2006
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
In early 2006 U.S. housing prices peaked and then started to decline. Increased foreclosure rates over the next couple of years led to a U.S. financial crisis in August 2008. The minutes from 2006 Federal Reserve Open Marketing Committee meetings, released in January 2012, show that the best and brightest economic minds at the Fed were behind the curve in realizing the severity of the downturn and the magnitude of its affect on U.S. financial markets. However, a small group of contrarian investors foresaw the coming crisis.
Michael Lewis previously chronicled his three years in the late 1980s as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in his first book, Liar’s Poker. That experience gives him a keen insight into mortgage-backed securities (during the 1980s, Salomon Brothers was noted for its innovation in the bond market, selling the first mortgage-backed securities). In The Big Short, he details how a few investors saw through the mass euphoria, purposely-opaque prospectuses, and misleading credit ratings to made bets that would reap billions as the U.S. mortgage derivatives markets collapsed. Michael Lewis excels at character-driven narrative, and I highly recommend the book to anyone who wants to read an interesting, well-written, entertaining story about the complexity of the bond market that contributed to the financial crisis.
However, the purpose of my writing is to examine risk and risk-management. The first three posts in this series covered, respectively, the history of risk (Part 1), the evolution of quantitative financial trading (Part 2), and the underestimated role of chance in financial markets (Part 3). In this post, I simply relay quotes from The Big Short that illustrate how the market for derivatives was perverted to a degree that amplified risk by an order of magnitude not recognized or realized by all but a few investors until after it nearly caused a global financial market collapse.
When Michael Burry bought a credit default swap based on a Long Beach Savings subprime-backed bond [effectively shorting a mortgage-backed security], he enabled Goldman Sachs to create another bond identical to the original in every respect but one: There were no actual home loans or home buyers. Only the gains and losses from the side bet on the bonds were real.
Once they [Goldman Sachs] had this package (a “synthetic CDO,” it was called, which was the term of art for a CDO composed of nothing but credit default swaps), they’d take it over to Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. “The ratings agencies didn’t really have their own CDO model,” says one former Goldman CDO trader. “The banks would send their own model to Moody’s and say, ‘How does this look?’” Somehow, roughly 80 percent of what had been risky triple-B-rated bonds now looked like triple-A-rated bonds. The other 20 percent, bearing lower credit ratings, generally were more difficult to sell, but they could, incredibly, simply be piled up in yet another heap and reprocessed yet again, into more triple-A bonds. The machine that turned 100 percent lead into an ore that was now 80 percent gold and 20 percent lead would accept the residual lead and turn 80 percent of that into gold, too.
The pretense that these loans were not all essentially the same, doomed to default en masse the moment house prices stopped rising, had justified the decisions by Moody’s and S&P to bestow triple-A-ratings on roughly 80 percent of every CDO.
It was a stunning opportunity: The market appeared to believe its own lie. It charged a lot less for insurance on a putatively safe A-rated slice of a CDO than it did for the insurance on the openly risky triple-B-rated bonds. Why pay 2 percent a year to bet directly against triple-B-rated bonds when they [investors betting on a decline in the housing market and mortgage defaults by home owners] could pay 0.5 percent a year to make effectively the same bet against the double-A-rated slice of the CDO? If they paid four times less to make what was effectively the same bet against triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, they could afford to make four times more of it.
Financial options were systematically mispriced. The market often underestimated the likelihood of extreme moves in prices. The options market also tended to presuppose that the distant future would look more like the present than it usually did. Finally, the price of an option was a function of the volatility of the underlying stock or currency or commodity, and the options market tended to rely on the recent past to determine how volatile a stock or currency or commodity might be.
The market for “synthetics” removed any constraint on the size of risk associated with subprime mortgage lending. To make a billion-dollar bet, you no longer needed to accumulate a billion dollars’ worth of actual mortgage loans. All you had to do was find someone else in the market willing to take the other side of the bet.
For more than twenty years, the bond market’s complexity had helped the Wall Street bond trader to deceive the Wall Street customer. It was now leading the bond trader to deceive himself.
Even the winning investors in the financial crisis were conflicted in their feelings. “Being short in 2007 and making money from it was fun, because we were short bad guys,” said Steve Eisman [one of the main characters in The Big Short]. “In 2008 it was the entire financial system that was at risk. We were still short. But you don’t want the system to crash. It’s sort of like the flood’s about to happen and you’re Noah. You’re on the ark. Yeah, you’re okay. But you are not happy looking out at the flood. That’s not a happy moment for Noah.”
However, was the financial crisis really the fault of a few bad guys? That’s the subject of the next post in this series.
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
“This book is about luck—or, more precisely, about how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous form in which luck is mistaken for skill—the world of [financial] trading.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is extremely smart, extremely well-read, and has studied deeply and broadly how we humans fool ourselves into believing that being in the right place at the right time is, in fact, proof that we, or others, possess above-average knowledge and skill. He has been described as an “erudite raconteur,” and this characteristic serves him well in his writing, where he interweaves interesting, entertaining stories of how people fool themselves (or are fooled by others) with rigorous explanations of why this occurs—over and over again.
A primary reason activities and events that involve human behavior cannot be modeled on physical science (see Mandelbrot’s The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices in an earlier post) is that we humans have a built-in bias to attribute our successes to skill, and our failures to bad luck. Paul E. Meehl demonstrated the “attribution bias” in his 1954 study of experts comparing their perceived abilities to their statistical ones. “It shows a substantial discrepancy between the objective record of people’s success in prediction tasks and the sincere beliefs of these people about the quality of their performance.”
Taleb is characteristically blunt in his assessment of risk managers in financial institutions.
“Corporations and financial institutions have recently created the strange position of risk manager, someone who is supposed to monitor the institution and verify that it is not to deeply involved in the business of playing Russian roulette.
“The risk managers’ job feels strange: As we said, the generator of reality is not observable. They are limited in their power to stop profitable traders from taking risks…On the other hand, the occurrence of a blowup [severe trading losses] would cause them to be responsible for it. What to do in such circumstances?
“Their focus becomes to play politics, cover themselves by issuing vaguely phrased internal memoranda that warn against risk-taking activities yet stop short of completely condemning it, lest they lose their job. (Personal note: this description could also be applied to the public pronouncements of a certain former fed chairman.)
“From the standpoint of an institution, the existence of a risk manager has less to do with actual risk reduction than it has to do with the impression of risk reduction.”
Anyone who has read a mutual fund prospectus is likely familiar with the phrase, “Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.” However, financial trading institutions routinely make decisions on the basis of past performance. One routinely used risk management tool is value at risk (VaR), defined as, “a technique used to estimate the probability of portfolio losses based on the statistical analysis of historical price trends and volatilities.” Taleb is adamant in his opposition to the use of VaR for managing risk. “An interesting problem is the ‘value at risk’ issue where people imagine that they have a way to understand the risk using ‘complicated mathematics’ and running predictions on rare events—thinking that they were able from past data to observe the probability distributions. The most interesting behavioral aspect is that those who advocate it do not seem to have tested their past predicting record, another Meehl type of problem.”
So, if the deck is so stacked against 1) accurately assessing the probability of a rare event, 2) including the consequence of a rare event in trading decisions, and 3) avoiding the madness of crowds, how did a small group of traders foresee the financial market collapse and make millions placing contrarian bets? That’s the subject of the next book.
Paul Solman interviews Nassim Taleb and Benoit Mandelbrot
Nassim Taleb urges the U.S. Congress to stop the use of Value at Risk (VaR)
“I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did. Also, when I got sick, I realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn’t know anything. They’d get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say.” – Steve Jobs reason for having Walter Isaacson write his biography
I did not intend to read this book.
I did not know Steve Jobs, but I know several people who did, including a few who worked with him. Most described the experience of working with him as 1) priceless, and 2) one that no amount of money could get them to repeat. I have heard many stories of his brilliance and brutality. I have read several books about Apple (the early years and after Jobs returned), and watched an excellent documentary on Pixar. And I don’t usually read biographies.
The fact that I did read the book is testimony to the genius of Steve Jobs (and Jeff Bezos) and the talent of Walter Isaacson. I was in a hotel room one evening having trouble falling asleep, and downloaded the first few chapters of the Kindle edition (for free) to my iPad. No one has approached Jobs’ genius for creating an immediate, exhilarating user experience in the digital age, and it’s hard to imagine he could have chosen a better biographer than Isaacson. Within fifteen minutes, I was hooked.
Isaacson clearly did his research, and the fact that Jobs gave him complete access to his life, and encouraged friends and foes (in Jobs life, many people are both) to speak honestly about their relationships and experiences with Jobs gave him the detail he needed. But his talent allows him to tell a richly textured, deeply affecting story from cover-to-cover (undoubtedly, an antiquated expression for a digital book).
As a father of an adopted son, I was especially moved by the description of an incident when Jobs, at six or seven years old, told a neighborhood girl he was adopted, to which she responded, “So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?”
“I remember running into the house, crying. And my parents said, ‘No, you have to understand.’ They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye. They said, ‘We specifically picked you out.’ Both of my parents said that and repeated it slowly for me. And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.”
Throughout the book, Isaacson reports similar details that give the reader keen insights into the events that shaped Jobs, without injecting amateur psychological suppositions. The result is great reporting delivered in a wonderful narrative. As I read the book, I realized that my image of Jobs, while accurate, was a caricature. By the end of the book, I had a fully formed picture of a brilliant, passionate, and deeply flawed human being.
Steve Jobs never read any part of the biography. He gave Walter Isaacson complete control of the story, although, after seeing the initial design for the book cover, he threatened to kill the project, until he received complete creative control of the cover design. Initially, I was amazed that someone who had guarded his privacy so closely would relinquish control of his life story. But then I realized that he simply followed the process he had used in business.
Jobs did not personally create technology, films, commercials, etc. But he carefully selected incredibly talented people, provided them the resources to create “insanely great” products, and exerted absolute control over product packaging. Steve Jobs, the book, is not insanely great, but is an informative, interesting, and worthy result of his and Walter Isaacson’s creative process.
In 2005 and 2006, I worked with a security software startup. The company had a superb technological approach that passively monitored Web application traffic, compared user activity from the most recent session with historical activity, and alerted security personnel to anomalies in user behavior that indicated fraudulent access. My initial goal was to focus the company’s marketing, which had been highly diffused, on the most promising market.
My timing was fortunate, in that several high profile security breaches had led the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFEIC) to recently issue an update to its guidelines on online customer authentication by financial institutions. This was the external driver that we used to focus our technical solution on a value proposition (fraud detection and regulatory compliance) for a specific application (online banking) in a highly regulated market (financial services).
Researching regulatory requirements for financial institutions was my first real exposure to risk assessment and management. It led me to the Basel Accords, specifically Basel II, which created an international banking standard that would guard against various types of financial and operational risks and protect the international financial system from the types of problems that might arise should a major bank or a series of banks collapse. Little did I realize, at the time, that the types of risk management practiced by global financial institutions would be tested very soon, and would be found sorely inadequate.
Since 2006, I’ve read several books about risk, in general, and, specifically, how the theoretical basis of financial risk management was circumvented, adulterated, and simply ignored by major financial institutions leading up to the global financial crisis that started to show its effects in 2007 and continues through today. This is the first in a series of posts that will review the books, and discuss the lessons I learned from each.
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
Any serious study of risk should start with this book. As the video interview with the author, Peter L. Bernstein, notes, he was an “economist, historian, and strategist.” All of these attributes are on display in this most interesting and entertaining historical survey of risk management, beginning with the invention of numbers and the writing of Liber Abaci, or Book of the Abacus, in 1202 AD by 27-year-old Leonardo Pisano, better known as Fibonacci.
The foundation of risk management is probability, or how likely or unlikely it is that a certain outcome will occur. From 1200 to 1700, many of the advancements in the science of probability were driven by men who shared two traits: a deep understanding of mathematics and a strong affinity for games of chance. In several cases, the latter trait manifested itself, quite clearly, as a gambling addiction.
But probability is only one of two indispensible (but, unfortunately, not inseparable) factors in risk management. The other is the consequence of the various outcomes, especially highly unlikely outcomes. For example, placing a $1 bet on a game of Russian Roulette, where your own head is the target, with a single bullet in a 100-chamber revolver for $100,000 has a 99% chance of success and only a 1% chance of failure (100000:1 return with a 99:1 probability of success). However, the consequence of failure—most likely death or severe brain damage—is sufficient to dissuade most people from accepting such compelling odds.
The book proceeds from 1700 to 1950 by tracing intersecting advances that contributed to a better understanding of risk from numerous disciplines including philosophy, logic, heredity, economics, statistics, chaos theory, game theory, and linear programming. Collectively, the various studies contributed to the following general understanding of risk management.
The essence of risk management lies in maximizing the areas where we have some control over the outcome while minimizing the areas where we have absolutely no control over the outcome and the linkage between effect and cause is hidden from us.
Surprisingly, at least to me, the field of investment risk management did not really start until June 1952 with the publication of a 14-page article in the Journal of Finance titled “Portfolio Selection.” Harry Markowitz, an unknown 25-year-old graduate student at the University of Chicago, authored the paper. His objective was to factor risk into the construction of a portfolio for investors who “consider expected return a desirable thing and variance of return an undesirable thing.” This led to Markowitz’s key insight of the strategic role of diversification in investment portfolio risk management.
The subject of the penultimate chapter titled “The Fantastic System of Side Bets,” is derivatives—the most sophisticated of financial instruments, the most intricate, the most arcane, and the most risky. To quote from the book, “This fantastic system of side bets is not based on old-fashioned human hunches but on calculations designed and monitored by computer wizards using abstruse mathematical formulas…developed by so-called quants, short for quantitative analysts.”
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” – Admiral James Stockdale
I recently led a 2-day offsite meeting, on the heels of a major restructuring, to align executives and middle managers across the company behind a new strategic direction and operational discipline. In preparing to lead the meeting, I reread two books that I have revisited repeatedly since my initial readings: Crossing the Chasm and Good to Great.
Good to Great is my handbook for guiding organizational change in turnaround situations. The Stockdale Paradox, succinctly stated at the beginning of this post, was an apt starting point for the meeting. In fact, I used three of the four basic practices in the chapter, “Confront the Brutal Facts,” as ground rules for group discussions:
Lead with questions, not answers.
Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.
Conduct autopsies, without blame.
The principles of focus and discipline pervade Good to Great. The “Hedgehog Concept” and “Culture of Discipline” have become fundamental to my leadership practices. And getting the right people on the bus, while essential to an ongoing enterprise, is critical to a successful turnaround.
As the book states, “First, if you begin with who, rather than what, you can more easily adapt to a changing world. Second, if you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away. Third, if you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction.”
Good to Great has taken some knocks over the past few years as some of the example companies have fallen from grace, including Circuit City and, most notably, Fannie Mae. However, of the many business books I have read, this is one of a handful that I return to again and again for direction and inspiration. To me, it is indispensible.
“By any objective measure, the amount of significant, often traumatic, change in organizations has grown tremendously over the past two decades. Although some people predict that most of the reengineering, restrategizing, mergers, downsizing, quality efforts, and cultural renewal projects will soon disappear, I think that is unlikely.”
John P. Kotter, Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School, opens his book, “Leading Change,” with this statement. In the book, he provides answers to two questions: Why do so many companies fail in their attempts to change, and is there a process to improve the probability of successful change?
As to the first question, Professor Kotter states that, “The combination of cultures that resist change and managers who have not been taught how to create change is lethal.” He supplies brief descriptions of eight common mistakes that can cause an organization to fail in its transformation efforts.
Allowing too much complacency
Failing to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition
Underestimating the power of vision
Undercommunicating the vision by a factor of 10 (or 100 or even 1,000)
Permitting obstacles to block the new vision
Failing to create short-term wins
Declaring victory too soon
Neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the corporate culture
But he spends most of the book describing an eight-step process that is the antithesis of the common mistakes.
Establishing a sense of urgency
Creating the guiding coalition
Developing a vision and strategy
Communicating the change vision
Empowering the employees for broad-based action
Generating short-term wins
Consolidating gains and producing more change
Anchoring new approaches in the culture
He concludes the book by speculating on the characteristics of organizations prepared to successfully face the future, and the relationship of lifelong learning and leadership skills that define the individual’s capacity to succeed in the future.
The book evolved from an article entitled, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail,” that was published in the March-April 1995 issue of Harvard Business Review. Unlike many books that are expanded from articles through redundancy or by adding content of questionable value, Leading Change succinctly delivers all of this information in 186 pages that should be required reading for anyone in a position of change leadership.
Hamid Ghanadan, President of The Linus Group, is one of
the brightest and most thoughtful marketing practitioners I know.He and his company specialize in
marketing to scientists, especially in the biotech and pharmaceutical
industries.I am attending a
dinner and roundtable discussion this evening on “The Future of Science
Marketing—Emerging Models for 2011 and Beyond,” hosted by The Linus Group, and
I’ll post a review within the next few days.
"The business enterprise has two and only two basic functions:
marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results, all the
rest are costs."
Peter Drucker wrote the Practice of Management, which included this
statement, in 1954. My 20+ years experience with scientific and technology
marketing is that "marketing" has at least faded, if not completely
disappeared from this statement for most companies. The five responses focus
mainly on the role of marketing in product management. No one mentions
marketing's role in generating demand and creating enterprise value.
In many science and technology companies, product management has been
separated from marketing and placed in the R&D function with an emphasis on
technology and product development. The rest of marketing is viewed, generally,
as a service function providing tactical sales support and marketing
communications. Unfortunately, marketing personnel have not done much to change
this perception.
Most surveys of CEO's concerns list many "marketing" issues
near the top, including identification and engagement with prospective
customers and loyalty and retention of present customers. However, most CEOs do
not look to marketing, but rather to sales, service and other functions, to
address these issues.
Marketing needs to demonstrate that it can
produce end-to-end results throughout the marketing value chain, and
strategically assist the CEO in meeting his or her top priorities for customer
loyalty and retention, revenue generation and enterprise value creation.
“CEOs
are more than frustrated by marketing's inability to deliver results. Has the
profession lost its relevance? Nirmalya Kumar argues that, although the
function of marketing has lost ground, the importance of marketing as a
mind-set—geared toward customer focus and market orientation—has gained momentum
across the entire organization. This book challenges marketers to change their
role from implementers of traditional marketing functions to strategic
coordinators of organization-wide initiatives aimed at profitably delivering
value to customers.”
If
marketers want the respect and responsibility so many say they deserve,
they have to change their role in the enterprise.If marketing acts like a service organization, that’s the way it will (and should) be viewed.If
you want to change the situation, expand your marketing vision, knowledge and goals.Quoting from the book, “Transformational marketing efforts should focus
on initiatives that:
profitably
deliver value to customers;
require
a high level of marketing expertise;
need
cross-functional orchestration for successful implementation; and
“A social trend in which people use technologies to get
the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions
like corporations.” – Definition of the Groundswell
Groundswell is, without a doubt, the best single book I am
aware of for understanding the power of social technologies and learning how to
use that power effectively.It is
full of data that supports its premise, and is a detailed guidebook that shows
you how to successfully navigate the best path to reach your desired social
media destination.
There are several powerful tools described in the
book.The first is the Social
Technographics profile, which is similar to demographics and psychographics but
focuses on social technology behaviors.The tool allows you to understand how social technologies are being
adopted by a group of people, which, in turn, allows you to build an
appropriate social strategy for that group (e.g., your customers).
First, it segments seven levels of social technology use
as shown below.
Second, it provides two simple Web-based tools: a consumer
profile tool and a B2B profile tool.The tools allow you to view the profile of your target group versus a
benchmark reference group.For
example, the following profile shows the behavior of U.S. small-business owners
relative to the behavior of [a representative sample of] all U.S. adults.
The profile of your target group is used in the first of a
4-step social media planning process called POST—an acronym for people, objectives, strategy and technology.Answering these questions, in this order, is the best way to
formulate a social media plan.
People: What are your customers ready for?This is determined from the social technographics profile.
Objectives: What are your goals?Following are the five primary objectives that companies
successfully pursue in the groundswell, and how they relate to business
functions.
Strategy: How do you want
relationships with your customers to change?By
answering this question, not only can you plan for the desired changes, but you
can also figure out how to measure them once the strategy is underway.
Technology: What applications
should you build?After having decided on the
people, objectives, and strategy, you can move on to select the appropriate
social technologies—blogs, wikis, social networks, etc.
Social technology is a powerful tool with the potential to
help marketing perform more effectively.Unfortunately, many marketers are, “going about their strategy
backward.They start by thinking
about technology.”In Groundswell,
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff have given marketers a guidebook to avoid the
pitfalls and chart a course to social media success.Read it, absorb it, and use it.
