There is a lot of dispiriting going on. There must be something in the air. I’ve made a list:

1. My local Caffe Nero’s not offering free wifi.

2. Companies House making it nigh impossible for you to do business with them, as their website is an entanglement of mush thats completely unusable.

3. The Chelsea Building Society devaluing houses, so on paper you have less equity and they can charge you a higher interest rate. Nice way of promoting customer retention.

4. Biscuits that you used to get in your hotel room, but you don’t now. Cut stuff from behind the scenes, not on the stage!

5. People like lawyers, accountants and public sector workers thinking they have a right to be aloof. Get your parachute chaps, you’re heading for a big fall.

6. People still trying to ’sell’ stuff. Features and benefits is just so yesterday.

7. People using social media to broadcast. In the past we just had companies doing it, now we have thousands of individuals.

8. People who just show up at work, dream all day about doing something else and never get round to it because they didn’t take time out to find their passion and purpose.

Just thought I’d dump that. Ah, feel much better now……..

The trouble with online stuff is we forget how powerful offline influencers still are. You can plot this on a continuum. At one end of the scale are the people who aren’t even online yet save email. At the other end are those people who spend most of their lives online. For those of us immersed in online activity, its easy to be consumed by it. Focusing all our efforts around online influencers. And, for us personally to be drawn into influencing online too. Online influencers with significant followers are rarely offline influencers too.

This will of course change. Our offline customers will increasingly participate in online activity and its our job to help them get there. We will all, in the next few years, gain equal status both in the physical and digital worlds. In the meantime we need to take some time out to consider how we help our offline influencers. Some questions to ponder:

1. Who are our offline and online influencers? Name them!

2. What is the real value, not perceived value, of our offline and online influencers?

3. How do we engage on a regular basis with our offline influencers and how do we make it work better?

4. How do we as a business, encourage and practically help offline influencers to start online stuff? This is not an option but an obligation. Its our responsibility.

5. How do we physically meet up with our top 25% of influencers online to cement the relationship?

Its important now to look at converging interactions between the offline and online worlds that are authentic, organic and synergised. Bringing the two sets of influencers together and connecting them could make a whole heap of difference to our businesses.

There is an increasing importance centring on the reputation of individuals within business entities and the need to ‘brand you.’ As I’ve said before people are replacing products and, like our products’ reputation, we will have to do that with our people.

Key executives will need to be known for something, though quite clearly not everything. Our people will have a high visibility offline and just as critical online. It’s one we can’t nor shouldn’t control but influence. There is a significant shift to individual reputation (some traditionalists might call this career management) but its more fundamental than that as it means working even more closely with the business than even before.

Can you see why the war for talent is going to be crucial? A knowledge based company’s reputation will not be dictated by its marketing team’s interpretation of the brands identity but it will be the sum of the reputation of the people involved in the brands evolvement.

Think John Terry and Tiger Woods. That has brought it home. Reputation damaged over night, well perhaps over several nights if the truth were known. This isn’t a bad thing. Its not another headache to contend with. It’s a great development. Transparency increases professionalism doesn’t it? Trust breeds loyalty and commitment doesn’t it? Influence shapes new things doesn’t it?

HR departments need to down tools and stop process managing and go and knock on the doors of their marketing colleagues to start banging heads together about how this is all going to work for the people they recruit and the company they work for.

Phil Zimmerman was recently quoted as saying in the future we will all get our ’15 minutes of privacy’ rather than our Andy Warhol moment. Clever thought, and sadly, perhaps true. Both professionally and personally we are all going to have to manage our online reputations. We’ll even measure and score it. We’ll leave the personal element in the bottom drawer for now.

Measurement will evolve and monitoring is here already. I believe we will be measured independently based on the following five gauges:

Content – More work is online than ever before. With wikis and cloud computing, filing cabinets are becoming a thing of the past and it’s exposed, to some degree for everyone to see. In fact, it’s important that the content is accessible rather than hidden. The quality of that content will be critical. More of us will be publishing our work online, our ideas, knowledge and opinions.

Influence – This will be about your popularity. How many people are following you? How many fans you have? How often you are mentioned or referenced in other peoples content? It’s also about how well you are connected, who you are connected to and how you influence those networks.

Trust – Part of this will be how transparent, open and whether people respect your integrity. It will be about how you deal with the positive as well as the negative issues every business has. Included will be testimonials and case studies that clients quite openly communicate across their own online sphere not your website.

Community – Having a strong community around your brand will make online reputation management easier. A robust set of people full of influencers and passionate about what you do will fight your battles on your behalf. They are more ready to forgive if you deal with problems well. They will be engaged and assist you in managing your reputation over the long run.

How you use social media – This is perhaps as much about sourcing as marketing. The sourcing of innovative solutions, using social media to co-create, participate and share information. It will also involve seeking out top suppliers and partners.

If you want to hear more about this, I’ll be speaking at this event next week: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/509178968

It goes without saying that you earn reputation. If you don’t manage your online reputation someone else will and it isn’t that coffee induced, fast food journalist out to get you. Its not shameful promotion, its now the bedrock of managing your brand and developing a community. Expect to be measuring accurately soon…..

I’m bemused. Read most of the literature on managing reputation and they talk about defending and protecting. A rather negative stance, dressed in traditional PR and pessimism.

Managing reputation is surely just as much about celebrating as well as protecting. Reputation, after all, is about your integrity and credibility. As we move from a position of reach to reputation, trust, transparency and success are as important as protecting our ass. Lets just get over ourselves for a moment.

There is a simple three step model: (I will be talking more about this here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/509178968 )

1. Monitor – your brand, products, company and key people. Make connections in the right places. Follow the appropriate people.
2. Optimise – I mean more than SEO. Optimise the relationships and connections you have made. Connect people to other people who may be interested and where is synergy with their products.
3. Engage – contribute in the spaces and places your brand and products are being talked about. Participate in the conversation. This is where prevention is better than cure. Here you have opportunities to push reputation to new levels.

Managing your reputation offline and online is about building trust to encourage a value exchange. Future measurement of influence will be based on your popularity, engagement and value to a network of people who you have a relationship with.

That’s where your reputation strategy should start, not on protecting your back. That just says a lot about your culture and attitude to business.

The first Word from ‘Hang On’ the new eBook provided by Phil Rees @ www.defacethis.com

Being distinctive defines us. Distinctive is about people (there is that word again) having a distinct idea of us in their mind. For a lot of companies, it’s easier to remain indistinctive than to become distinctive! Our product, even service is probably not as distinctive as it used to be. It’s possible its competitive edge has been backed into a corner by the plethora of new products in the market place, or, the bad ones just caught up.

Tom Peters said years ago “Ask yourself what on your turf (local and global), is clearly unusual about the services you offer.” For me, if we can’t answer that in five bullet points, we’ve lost the right to be a great business. Look at the worst bit of your sector, even your closest competitors and change the customer experience; it at least gives you a stab at the five points of distinction.

We need to almost forget about our product. It’s great isn’t it? Cheaper certainly is distinctive but how is being mediocre? Being distinctive now is about how we use design to differentiate, by building a community from our clients, being recognized for meaningful work, the passion we inspire in people, how we engage and build relationships. Get used to it. Don’t get me wrong it is about developing a sense of currency and curiosity in parallel, however, the biggest barrier to us identifying what makes us distinctive is internal not external.

Little question; is your business more like a circus or the waiting room at your doctors? We really can’t afford to be ignored by the masses and silent to the few. Don’t be known for everything but something! Distinguish by identifying your tangibility.

A shift is a shift only if it sits in reality and that’s what’s happened in marketing. Mass marketing is redundant. It used to be about reach and recognition accompanied by the blind faith that some customers would drop out of the bottom. Marketing these days is all about reputation and credibility. Let me simply explain:

Reach – Your companies profile, its market share. Broadcast was used to reach and hit millions of customers. It was about casting the net as wide as possible and occasionally you’d catch something. Sprat to catch a mackerel was the term.

Not only is this just not affordable anymore, its intrusive and interruptive. It sends a message but the wrong one. Reach is not about banging out something anymore hoping its right, where’s the economic sense in that. Reach is the complete opposite, its focused. Focused on your influencers. Its not hitting the millions. It’s the 10’s, 100’s or, if you’re fortunate, 1000’s of people in your community. The people who are fans on your company Facebook pages. The followers you have on Twitter and, just as importantly, those people on the database that are your advocates.

Recognition – You’ve heard the old saying; everyone knows the Ford brand but not everyone wants to drive one. The worst situation you can be nowadays is if people think indifferently about your brand. In essence recognition can engage the many but impact the few.

Recognition is approaching that influencer list in bite sized chunks by communicating your values, ethics and distinctive way of doing things. Its better to have a small group of people attuned to your very brand’s soul than have lots of people who are absent from you.

Reputation – The real differentiator. Influence a number of influencers and your marketing strategy is not just powerful but well on its way to being tremendously effective. Reputation is about making a remarkable impression on the people that matter.

Reputation is closely linked to credibility. You do not gain credibility by mass marketing anymore. You gain it by being transparent, trustworthy, open and by sharing. Powerful marketing now comes in having a freemium model.

I’ll be talking more about this in Exeter on the 27th May. Book here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/509178968

There is an abundance of information on the web about social media that could take a lifetime to read and be all consuming. For some of us it is! However, there is a scarcity at the moment to how to weave this into an integrated marketing campaign.

Some would have us believe that its the only way forward and its the only thing you need to reach new and existing customers. Thats far too one dimensional and we’ll all fall into the trap of traditional marketing if we take that road.

As Olivier Blanchard said at www.wearelikeminds.com in February “Your business doesn’t plug into social media, social media plugs into your business.” He is right. It’s not an attachment, neither is it the only solution. We must not miss the opportunity to really get to the route cause of why we embark on social media campaigns. We can’t also ignore that its just as important to be gregarious offline as well as online.

Before embarking on any social media activity, we all need to go back to the beginning and think about how it is going to fundamentally change, for the better, the relationships we have with customers and employees. The fact is that social media is creating new vulnerabilities and opportunities for business. That can’t be ignored. There are some big questions to ask before setting a blog up such as; how will social media define what is being delivered to the customer.

We have to remember that, even now, most of our customers and users of social media read content but don’t necessarily post it. What that means, for now, is that social media is in a state of mass consumption, not mass creation. We have a long way to go to create meaningful experiences and that, in essence, is our first task!

Just a thought provoker and I’m interested in your thoughts. If you give away stuff for free, at some point, you need to see that go beyond an increase in followers or traffic to your website/blog and turn into at least some currency, don’t you?

Whether you are posting images to flickr, publishing an eBook or participating in a collaborative software development project, you have to get past the potential position of feeling a little downbeat or worse exploited.

This culture of generosity and reciprocation built the web. The notion of sharing and obliging in participation like the Wikipedia case study is at the heart of the web’s recent success. But its also evolving. We need to see that return and perhaps thats where social media is heading. We can’t watch the founders of flickr and other organisations all profit quite nicely from something built by essentially a set of volunteers or by us spending time with someone who never returns a favour. The stakeholders need rewarding too.

If you build a community around your brand who regularly participate in developing innovative ways of doing business, that your company benefits from for free, you need to reward. The winning companies of the future will be those that build incentive frameworks around innovation that adequately ‘pay back’ those contributors whether its financial or non-financial.

Some are doing it already, Ebay, Microsoft and Amazon. But we need to develop this further and get past the less imaginative prizes and competitions structure. Royalty payments, recognition or a bit of free stuff back will be the successful models of the future.

Creating and leading a community is all very well, encouraging people to collaborate on a level playing field exciting, finding an infrastructure that supports innovation and rewards time and effort another thing. Free isn’t free at all, it comes with expectations, time lines and limitations too.

Disrupting the status quo is every leaders prime role. It’s a stark contrast to the ‘command and control’ days of previous business models. Companies need to think about disrupting their relationships with their customers. Yes I did say that! We are far too complacent about them. We need to change the game with openness, transparency and moving from a culture of ‘managing the customer database’ to sowing the seeds of creating a ‘community’ around our brand. Something that will be at the heart of every business in the future.

Look at this model I created. It’s by no means perfected….months of R & D will do that but it shows a shift from an inert account management regime to a community model that will be full of life and vibrant.

Database →                        Relationship →                 Community

You can look at www.club.lego.com/en-US/default and www.harley-davidson.com for great examples. But it won’t be easy, it means unlearning stuff that’s ingrained in our minds. After decades of disappointing relationships, we now have the ability to gain impressive inroads into true partnerships with customers that really do change the dynamics for the better.

Truth is, we are struggling to get off first base. For many it will be a leap of faith, for others a simple transition. But it does require a deliberate plan to achieve it. And. ironically it starts with the database. More on that tomorrow…..