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Don’t trust your teachers. Don’t trust me. Listen to what your grandma told you. How social media has nothing to do with social media and how nothing has changed.

Polle de Maagt (@polledemaagt) for Fontys Hogescholen

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Hello. I am Polle de Maagt.

I failed in most things during my

life (including being a rock star) but am

still trying to reach world domination.

This time by helping companies

change. Change to a company that is

about consumers and driver

conversations.

Guess that makes me a change agent.

Guess that makes Nike, KLM and

Telenet my clients of change.

Last year, I worked for a pretty modest advertising agency called Boondoggle in Amsterdam and Leuven. For Nike, Rabobank, KLM and several other cool brands.

This year, for a company that is committed to obtain world domination (whatever that means), InSites Consulting. Marketing research agency turned consulting agency.

Read this manual.

Seriously.

Read it.

Why? Because advertising is the slow lane towards world domination. And I fell in love with this girl. I moved from Amsterdam to Ghent and work from Rotterdam, London and Ghent.

Honestly, sentences like the world has changed, power has shifted to the consumer, increase your share of conversation, consumers trust each other most, shifting power from marketers to consumers, marketers are no longer in control, social media strategy and learn to lose control make me puke in

my mouth a bit.

While it is really really simple.

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It’s not about being on Facebook. Or Twitter. Yes, Twitter is huge. And Facebook even bigger. But they are both platforms, not end

goals. So it really is about if and how both can help you reach your end goal. Which is

most likely not about having a Facebook fan page and more about driving

conversations, customer retention, sales or brand value.

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It’s not about being a big brand. With big brands come big problems. Never look

for an excuse in just being a small company with

little budgets. When it comes to connecting with

consumers, real relationships work. And size, for

once, doesn’t matter.

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And it certainly isn’t about being the first mover in adopting new technology. Mobile, augmented reality, location

based services are all just awesome.

And yes, there is PR-value in being the

first Augmented Reality bakery in your

neighborhood. But is that really what

you want your consumers to talk

about?

“ “ Advertising is the fee for being unremarkable.

Robert Stephens (GeekSquad)

Not a thing changed.

(this is the listen-to-your-grandma part)

Who have you always trusted? Your peers. This is my friend Jourik. I trust him with everything that has to do with Brussels, food and women.

Customer retention has always been cheaper than acquisition. It’s cheaper to keep your current customers happy than recruit new ones.

Happy customers have always driven retention and advocacy. Take Zappos and their service philosophy. A small story about free shipping. Oh, and read Delivering Happiness.

Happiness has always been about managing expectations. Under-promise. Over-deliver. Do more than customers expect, but don’t over-do it.

A new technology every day. In the end, stories stick. Kay Mook gained the Antwerp Zoo 300K extra visitors and almost became product of the year 2009. More at http://polle.me/ccjSNL

But wait, some things did change.

Technology made things easier and opened up new possibilities and niches, like TS2AS.org. Technology made things easier. Gave us reach. Made it easy to compare.

People started to be connected always, everywhere. People started to be connected everywhere.

It was never easier to find everything about everything. Google, Wikipedia and even Twitter and Facebook.

People started to out-converse brands. Brands realized they had facilitate instead of shout.

Employees started to talk. People are more authentic, more passionate and have lower overhead cost. Period.

Company culture became increasingly important. There are so many icecream brands, but the difference is in their company culture.

People got fed-up with bad customer service and are striking back. And not with some crappy message on their blog, but with brute force.

The best advertising started to have nothing to do with advertising: Commit acts, not ads. Albert Heijn actually helps people.

The best advertising started to have nothing to do with advertising: Commit acts, not ads. Nike actually changes the way people run.

With change became new and different ways to earn money. Gym-Pact let’s people pay when they DON’t turn up in their gym.

With change came new competitors. Wakoopa once was a geek tool, now a very promising marketing research tool.

For many companies, this is pretty radical change.

Not a change that was about social media alone

A real change.

Old New

More advertising

Suboptimal fit

Creative idea

Undergoing conversation

Traditional brands

Consumer as customer

Technical benefits

Acquisition

Acts, not ads

New relevance

Smart idea

Leading conversation

Humanized brands

Consumer as co-creator

Emotional benefits

Retention

Acts not ads. Great example: the small acts of fun that were planned by Volkswagen to prove that putting a little fun in people’s lives will change behavior.

New relevance. Old Spice took ‘relevance’ to the new level.

Smart ideas. Ideas that generate business and change people’s behavior.

Leading conversations. Penguin books actually reaches out to help people to talk about them.

Humanized brands. KLM surprised customers in a personal way.

Consumer as co-creator. Telenet launched a beta product, Yelo, and improved it together with their customers.

Emotional benefits. Actimel had to overcome negative conversations to realize they had to change the way they communicated.

Retention and advocacy. The best advertising campaign I have seen in years: a small leaflet I got from Eduardo, the owner of a pretty simple B&B in Florence.

And a last one: Create things worth sharing. Think about small things worth talking about.

It’s really simple: Act human. Build upon the things you’re already doing. Think conversations. And on top of that: here’s some structure to help you out.

The three pillars of conversation management.

Observe Join Facilitate

Start with observing and listening. There are simple tools to observe what consumers are doing. Via search.twitter.com or more advanced tools. But what about customer emails?

Facilitate. Ben & Jerry’s crowdsources their marketing plan and icecream flavors via an online platform with brand fans. Photo by jason.dsilva

Join. Helping helps. Exceeding customer expectations builds loyalty (81% repeats, 63% recommends) and falling below customer expectations erodes loyalty (5%/71%).

Use pilot projects to learn and change. Telenet launched a beta product to let consumer help them eventually create a better product. Think in intrinsic, learning and change KPI’s.

Be maniacal about measuring and tweaking. Measure views, clicks, but even more important: your return on investment. Extremely simple, but effective: the Net Promoter Score.

You can forget most of the things I said in this introduction. But please, remember these 3 things.

Conversations drive business. Companies that connect with their consumers perform better. So start the conversation.

1)

To drive conversations, exceed expectations and create stuff worth sharing. Don’t plan only for life time money value, but for life time conversation value.

2)

Start with observing, but start with simple ways to drive conversations. Start monitoring, start with pilots and learn while doing.

3)

I hope I was worth sharing.

Send me an email at

polle@insites.eu or find me on

twitter at @polledemaagt.

Find the presentation at

http://polle.me/fontys11