Marriott and the impact of social media: the conclusion
Marriott gave me a great opening to a speech on social media and a lesson in how anyone can create content, distribute that content and influence a brand conversation. Above the first four slides of a talk I gave at Sears.
If you’ve been here this week you know the story of my dripping hotel room ceiling and my frustration with Marriott’s initial response. But I’m pleased to report the story has a happy ending for all involved.
For starters, the ordeal gave me a brilliant opening to a speech I was making to Sears HC the next day. Perfect timing for a talk titled “The End of Us and Them,” and the thesis that media is now in the hands of two billion amateurs rather than a select group of privileged professionals.
I opened with a photo of the ceiling, thanked Sears for putting me up there, and then proceeded to reveal the early morning Tweet stream along with a video I’d shot and edited on my iPhone that morning calling out Marriott. (Truth be told I didn’t actually post the video on Youtube, but faked it in my presentation to make the point.)
Needless to say it got a great reaction and emphasized that in an age of social media, when consumers control both content and distribution, all brands need to learn a different set of rules and behaviors.
Anyway, the rest of the story worked out well on a number of accounts, too. When offered free nights and points by the Marriott (nice of them) I told them, “no thanks,” and instead requested a public apology on Twitter and a comment on this blog. The point wasn’t to embarrass anyone but simply to get the hotel to admit its mistake, acknowledge my frustration, and turn the entire mishap into a conversation from which people could learn.
It appears to have worked. The comment stream on the last post is a rich one. It questions whether one’s social footprint influences the response that they get from a brand. It reveals disappointments with service in general. It earns Marriott credit for engaging. And, perhaps most importantly, it shows that a blog post that exercises a little restraint, replacing the venom-filled rant with some productive advice, gets a slightly better reaction that one that simply vents.
Furthermore, the hotel actually suggests that there’s room for improvement in both customer service and employee responsiveness. We may even see a guest bill of rights.
Lance Misner, the manager of the Marriott Hoffman Estates, has become a reader of this blog, a Twitter user, and maybe even a convert to social media’s potential for learning, engaging and marketing.
Here, in fact, is what he’s had to say in response to my last post and his own exposure to the story playing out in the social space.
“Let me say first of all that I do not know anything about Twitter so if I sound ignorant I am. I signed up myself in order to publicly apologize. I hope that worked.”
“There are some incredible things going on in the business world as it relates to social media. This has been a real wake up call, I need to embrace these concepts and find opportunities to further market our property. In fact I am looking forward to showing your blog at my staff meeting on Tuesday.”
“I would love to pick your brain as this old dog needs to learn a few new tricks. I hope your presentation went well at Sears and if you are home, or wherever you are tonight, I hope you are able to get some rest.”
I supposed I should add that Lance also threw in a bunch of points and an upgrade to the big suite next time I’m in town.
Lessons?
We should make our issues public.
It’s smarter to offer suggestions than criticism.
We should welcome any brand or individual who tries to learn and engage.
If we want brands to deliver better service, it’s partly our responsibility to guide them there and hold them to it.
This just in: Just as I was about to post this, I got an email and phone call from Marriott headquarters letting me know they plan to use this as a learning and training experience. Not sure if it would have generated that kind of response if it weren’t posted, blogged and tweeted about, but that turns out to be just one more reason that consumers should wield their new power and brands should heed it.
Finally I made it clear to Marriott that I hoped no one employee would be called out, but that it the entire incident be turned into something positive.
Your thoughts?
Radical Collaboration
Gareth Kay at Boulder Digital Works
I just came back from Boulder Digital Works and two intense days of teaching, learning, exploring and sharing with peers (some of whom are often rivals) as part of a workshop titled “Making Digital Work.” Or what Executive Director David Slayden calls an experiment in Radical Collaboration.
BDW seems to have struck a nerve and identified a true need: digital talent. We need more young people trained in the skills that our industry now depends on. Technologists, designers, UX professionals, information architects and digital producers remain in short supply and high demand. Just as importantly, those of us well into our careers need to learn new skills and ways of thinking. BDW’s mission is to help on both fronts.
This week’s session, like all the sessions BDW runs, was inspiring, invigorating and exhausting all at once. In fact between the flight out and back, the time change, long days of presentations, discussion and debate (not to mention a few too many glasses of wine at raucous late night dinners) I’m only now recovering.
Still, I wanted to share some of the content. You can check out many of the presentations in slide form and in video form via UStream. Though the quality and camera positions aren’t ideal you can get the gist of the presentations. Personally I think you’d be better off just attending one of the sessions but if that’s not a possibility, perhaps the videos will be of some use.
This time out I also took the opportunity to get up close and personal with a number of instructors and attendees, among them Gareth Kay of Goodby Silverstein; Matt Howell of Modernista; Brian Morrissey of AdWeek (he was actually covering the event); David Slayden; Kat Egan, founder of Exopolis; Michael Tabtabai of Saatchi and Saatchi; Alistair Green of Team One; and finally Kim Laama of AKQA.
Matt Howell at Boulder Digital Works
David Slayden at Boulder Digital Works
I wish I’d had a chance to interview Dave Schiff and Alex Burnard of Crispin who masterfully presented their very cool Brammo case study, but I somehow missed them.
Anyway, ambitions for a full blown documentary gave way to the new mindset that 80 percent and now is better than 100 percent and three weeks from now. So instead here are a few less ambitious video interviews on Vimeo.
The three seen here — Gareth Kay, Matt Howell and David Slayden — are the first of six or so. Eventually I’ll get the others posted and will share links when I do. In the meantime they give you a sense of the excitement and conviction of the people involved. Let me know what you think.
Do we still need titles?
“What do you do?”
“What’s your title?”
“What department are you in?”
Unfortunately, that’s how we are defined. We are a “copywriter” or a “designer” or a “traditional” advertising type versus a “digital” advertising person. We might be a “car” guy; or worse, not a “car” guy. We could be a “client,” maybe even the “client.”
In my career I’ve been a reporter, a PR counsel, a client, an account exec, a copywriter, and a creative director. At least that’s what it said on my business card and how others categorized me.
We seem to need titles for easy categorization. Our title not only declares what we do, it frees us from responsibility for other areas of expertise. It connects us to others with the same title, making us members of a tribe. In some cases, it provides us with a sense of self-importance. It certainly determines what we get paid, though not necessarily our actual value.
For the person on the receiving end of our business cards, our title telegraphs our skill set or talent. It suggests what they can expect from us. And it allows them to place us in the proverbial hierarchy left over from the heyday of the railroad industry.
I’m not a big fan of titles, even though I have a couple of them. To me they seem less and less relevant in an age when we need multiple skills. Don’t we have to be strategists and content creators? Practice traditional and digital? Learn to be creative across all kinds of platforms?
True it’s easier to hold onto legacy systems and practices and, in this case, labels. We’ve grown dependent on them. They’re familiar and comfortable. But eventually we have to break ourselves of the crutches we continue to lean on: how we incent people, the departmentalization of our companies, the processes and systems that in some cases haven’t changed in years. Maybe even get rid of titles.
What if we just had a bunch of check boxes on our business cards: __ ideas, __ copy, __ strategy, __ collaboration, __content, __code, __SEO, __social, __optimism, __funny, __committed. Come up with your own. Whenever we gave our card out, we simply checked the appropriate boxes based on whom we were giving it to and what we might do with and for them?
What do you think? Are titles still necessary? Do they define us too narrowly? What would you put on your card?
The new creative team and getting it to work
The new creative team: with more people and more perspectives, the person at the top of the T must understand all roles and how they work together
I get asked to talk a lot about how Mullen has changed over the last couple of years, more aggressively transforming itself from an “integrated ad agency,” with all the disciplines – strategy, advertising, media, digital, social, PR, direct, analytics — under one roof to a company that has worked to become “unbound” in its thinking and approach to problem solving.
It seems that agencies everywhere are struggling to achieve their version of the above, either trying to become more digital in their thinking or more versed in conversation marketing. And it’s no surprise that advertisers, too, grapple with developing the formula for how to assemble a team of partners and allocate marketing dollars in an age when the options across paid, earned, owned and user-generated media continue to proliferate.
For me the challenge is easily defined: we can no longer buy attention. The best crafted brand stories may be memorable, but only if someone hears them. And as consumers become more inclined to speak, share, comment, update and check-in rather than listen and absorb, we need to get out of the business of telling stories and into the business of getting others to tell them for us.
So what do make if we don’t make stories? Experiences. Experiences that earn attention, invite participation, inspire co-creation, provide utility and inherently generate more content. Those experiences can be big, game changing programs like Pepsi Refresh. Or simple, more discrete events like Brandbowl. They can exist on a single platform such as Facebook, or stretch across numerous sites and communities.
But no matter what they look like, they’re more about building something than saying something. To quote Gareth Kay, “They’re not advertising ideas; they’re ideas worth advertising.” And creating them takes a different kind of thinking, a different kind of organization, and a different kind of team.
In the old days you assembled a writer and art director, gave them a brief and hoped they came up with something great. Today, you’ve got whole different mix of people on the team. You can see the challenge already. How do you get all of these people to work together seamlessly? How can you assure they comprise an interdisciplinary team rather than a multidisciplinary team? And who’s the benevolent dictator?
Here are the 10 things that I’ve found actually help.
Start with the user
Read Tim Brown’s Change by Design and you realize that anything you want to create – product, experience, environment, and process – starts with the user. From a marketer’s perspective that means understanding a customer’s relationship to content, technology and community — not just to a category or even the brand – and finding a way to add something of value.
Change the team
You can make ads with a writer and art director. But if you want to conceive and execute platforms, utility and experiences, you need IA, UX, technology, connection planning and social media working together. This is a significant change for many agencies but one that is absolutely essential. It may come with pain and resistance but what choice to you really have? The post digital days are upon us.
Place different disciplines closer to each other
In a creative organization people need to be comfortable and familiar with each other or they’re reluctant to take chances and share ideas. It helps if they sit near each other, hang out with one another and engage in an occasional game of Ping Pong. Don’t isolate departments that you want to be interdependent. Figure out how to physically unite them.
Re-write the brief
The brief has remained unchanged for years, almost always answering the question, “What do we have to say?” Better to answer questions like, “How will we get this brand talked about?” “What can we create of value?” “How will we get people to participate?” “What can we make, invent, build that’s worthy of being advertised?” Ask those kinds of questions and see what you get back.
Get everyone involved at the start
In the old days everyone was on hold until the core creative team emerged from its lair with the idea (the message, the spot, the tagline.) If you get everyone to work together from the start the thinking will be richer, the solution won’t be an ad, and the idea will transcend any one medium. The last thing you need to come up with is the message.
Appreciate everyone’s perspective
Expect some adversity and disagreement for sure. But the quicker you can get the art director to understand that the UX person isn’t trying to screw up the look but is trying to make things work better, the faster you eliminate design for design sake. I often suggest that people practice looking at a problem from their peers’ points of view before rushing to judge someone’s recommendation.
Know each others’ names
I guarantee that if your agency has more than 150 people and experiences any degree of turnover that at least half the time there are people in the room who don’t know each other. Make sure everyone introduces himself and actually says something at the beginning of a meeting. Believe it or not it increases the likelihood everyone will speak his mind and offer opinions during the meeting. It also helps counter balance the one or two vocal people who tend to dominate.
A great book filled with ideas for anyone trying to change an organization
Develop leaders who can cross the T
Whoever leads the team – traditional CD, digital CD, planner, media director — needs to understand and respect all the roles and how they work together. These new leaders may be few and far between but the worst thing you can do is let a narrow perspective drive the process. The person across the top of the “T” is the most important member of the team.
Become a learning organization
With the proliferation of technology, digital platforms, social media networks, APIs, crowdsourcing, and iPhone apps it’s impossible for any one person to keep up. You can read tech blogs, bring Google and Facebook in to present their latest and greatest, and experiment with every new platform yourself. But it’s not enough. You need a mindset and a means to keep everyone up to speed and informed of what’s new. London’s Made by Many sent 18 of its 23 employees to SxSWi for five days. That’s a commitment to learning. And one that’s likely to pay off in terms of collaboration, employee morale, and fresh thinking.
Got other ideas for how to stay relevant and change for the better? Please share.
Other content and links:
Books:
Atul Gawande: A Checklist Manifesto
Presentations:
Derek Robson, Goodby Silverstein and Partners: Agency Evolution
Crowdsourcing creativity: could this actually happen?
Imagine there are two agencies left in a pitch for a beer account. Four others have been eliminated including the incumbent.
But the client, as all clients do, asks for one more round of creative. Both agencies are pretty spent. Unbeknownst to each other, each agency decides to crowdsource its final round of creative in hopes of finding something fresh.
Fortunately, the competing shops each choose a different crowdsourcing platform. Agency A chooses to go with Victors and Spoils; Agency B signs on with AdHack. Both platforms assure that they can conduct the process secretly. Victors and Spoils is confident because it has a vetted group of creative talent from all over the world; the company knows much of its community personally and can admit to the “competition” only those who it feels bit the bill.
AdHacks is sure because it has all the legal non-disclosure documentation built into its registration along with a reputation management system that ranks past contributors for adherence to the rules.
The agencies submit their briefs; the briefs are visible only to the participants and not the public. And while anything that ends up on the web can is fair game, both agencies willingly gamble they can keep things contained.
Meanwhile, a young, bored creative team learns about the crowdsourcing request for concepts because the writer on the team is part of the V&S community. At the same time, the art director has previously submitted ideas to AdHack and hears about the call for work from them. The team comes up with a campaign that includes, TV, experiential, and social all wrapped up in a coherent theme. In order to double its chances, the duo decides to enter the same work on both platforms. Why not, right?
Agency A (the one that went with V&AS) loves the work and presents it as part of their final pitch. Agency B (who went with AdHack) thinks the idea is lame, casts it aside and goes with something else. Lo and behold, the crowdsourced campaign is the deciding factor and Agency A prevails.
Starting to sound like the Twilight Zone? Well consider this. The creative team that submitted the work was a junior team at the incumbent agency, which was cut from the pitch in the first round. However, at that agency, the team whose work won wasn’t even invited to participate as part of the pitch team; they were deemed too young inexperienced to be beer-pitch-worthy.
Last week, in Boulder, Colorado, I had long conversations with John Winsor of Victors and Spoils and James Sherrett of AdHack. We chatted about the current state of this new tactic, the quality of participating communities and the satisfaction of current clients. Crowdsourcing is still relatively new. No one really knows where it’s going, how many clients and agencies will embrace it, or how good the work will be. But one thing we did agree on is that a scenario like the one above could actually happen. I can only hope that I’m not Agency B when it does.
Photo by Michael
