According to the new book, Wikibrands: Reinventing Your Company In A Customer-Driven Marketplace, by Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover, a wikibrand is a “progressive set of organizations, products, services, ideas and causes that tap the powers of customer participation, social influence, and collaboration to drive business value.”

This philosophy requires a massive organization culture shift. Wikibranding is about having the guts to allow the customer co-pilot your business. We only need to look at companies like Zappos, Dell, Southwest, FedEx, Target, and Cisco to see that wikibranding is not only possible, but it makes for a very profitable company. (Here are wikibrands by industry, if you are curious to see what your competition might be up to.)

Wikibrands not only provides the benefits of becoming a wikibrand in today’s business environment; it also walks you through how to become a successful wikibrand.

The Benefits of Wikibranding:

• Brand advocacy
• Powerful brand advocates (influencers)
• Brand insight (as well as innovation and feedback)
• Brand content
• Brand support
• Brand perception

The FLIRT Model

The FLIRT model is a strategic, executional and technological process to build an effective and engaged wikibrand.

• Focus: Organizational and strategic considerations that help determine specific areas, depth, scale, and exclusivity of collaboration.
• Language and Content: The “face,” tone and context in with your brand is presented to your potential audience.
• Incentives, Motivations, and Outreach: The intrinsic, extrinsic, and explicit rewards, motivations, and outputs that people earn for their participation.
• Rules, Guidelines, and Rituals: The explicit laws, general principles and loose customs and traditions that govern accepted engagement.
• Tools and Platforms: The technical infrastructure, collaboration, engagement, and community features and activities.

The FLIRT model also includes metrics and insights, internalization of benefits, life cycle of community, and community management.

The most important aspect of the FLIRT model is that the tactical execution of tools and platforms comes last. Too often, companies dive into the tactics first and when that strategy fails they are left believing that social business is ineffective. By following the FLIRT model, companies must lead their endeavors with strategy.

A Word to Naysayers

Are you still thinking that social business is hype? Sean and Mike provide more proof points and examples as to the reality of social business than any other book I have read on the subject. I hope you read Wikibrands and use the reference guide that will walks you through Eleven Ways to Develop a Wikibrand before your competition does.

Wikibrands is a definitive guide on the today’s business environment. The book and website will be on-going references for me.

[Disclaimer: I received a free copy of Wikibrands through McGraw-Hill’s Business Insider Program. I had the opportunity to select this book as part of the program and did so because it focuses on customer-centric business.]

Image sources: vview.co.za and Amazon.com.

Yes, it is a double entendre if you didn’t catch it.

When was the last time you asked, “what is the lifetime value of our customers?” (also known as customer lifetime value ), or –more importantly— “what is the lifetime value we offer our customers?”

Is it smart to have one without the other? I don’t think so.

Is calculating CLV a normal event for your organization? I don’t know about you, but calculating ROI seems like child’s play compared to calculating CLV.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

According to Wikipedia:

Your job as a marketer is to gather all of those figures and then do the math! Easy, right? Roll up those sleeves and get down to work. (I don’t know about you, but my head hurts & my stomach feels queasy just looking at that formula!)

Here’s the formula for the rest of us:

So then… The bigger question is what is the calculation for determining the value offered to customers? Anyone?

Buelller? Buelller? Buelller?

marketing [m.o.]: How to calculate customer lifetime value

“Do you know how much profit your customers produce over their lifetime?  “Customer lifetime value”, or “CLV”, is a valuable metric that helps you target your most profitable customer segments and understand how much you can spend to acquire them.”

ClickZ: What Should You Spend to Acquire a Customer?

“Knowing your overall profit margin allows you to guesstimate how much revenue customers must generate for different goals to be achieved. Goals will vary based on what you know about your business. How would your customers need to behave for you to break even in the first year? Is that behavior reasonable? You can adjust goals accordingly”.

ClickZ: How Are You Measuring Customers?

“Around the time of September 11, lots of folks decided they’d give airplanes a miss and turn to alternative forms of transportation. Enterprise Rent-A-Car didn’t have a logistics system to offer or track one-way rentals. But it did have a customer-centric corporate culture. So, the local managers took matters into their own hands and made one-way rentals available. One regional manager explained, ‘We knew we had to do the right thing and worry about the rest later.’

The cost to Enterprise was the displacement of thousands of its cars — operational chaos. What was the benefit? In a struggling economy, Enterprise now leads its category and is stronger this year than it was last year.

Lifetime value is not difficult to measure; it’s just math. All you need is the courage to examine the customer lifecycle and call the end to a customer life. It really gets very simple after that.”

McKinsey Quarterly: Uncovering the value of brands

“Many marketers believe brands are important because they shape customer decisions and, ultimately, create economic value. Few however, would be able to back up their beliefs with facts and figures, as little attempt has been made to measure the actual value of brands.”

MarketingProfs Daily Fix: Loyalty and Lifetime Value [Leigh Durst]

“‘Sorry. We only care about what you’ve done for us lately.’ Should you say this to a frequent traveler who has slept in one of your properties for over one year? Should you say this to a customer who has chosen your airline consistently for a decade of travel? The seasoned road warrior doesn’t need a study to tell us that this type treatment may feel slightly punitive in a manner that goes far beyond the color of the membership card.

Unfortunately, most travel and hospitality loyalty programs fail to take the natural patterns of people into consideration. Beyond this, it isn’t evident that these companies actually forecast customer lifetime value or take into consideration a value a customer’s accrued value in the establishment of loyalty programs. Unless of course, those customers accrue an incredibly high number of points…”

Brands Create Customers: Value-based brands: Overview

“Attention and pizzazz is a not a basis for customer value, and neither is glitz, glory, flash and spin. They might blitz a few eyeballs, but they don’t have what it takes to grow and sustain customers.

Value-based brands are fueled by organic, customer-generated emotion, rather than artificial campaign-generated emotion. ”

Happy Reading!

[Image Source: Forbes.com]

“If your organization’s employees aren’t on your side, it doesn’t matter how good your relationships with other publics are.” -Guth & Marsh

This is a concept that I wish most organizations would understand—especially when it comes to social media.

While many organizations are struggling with the notion of being social, they cannot idly sit by until they determine the best course of action. At the least, they need to implement a social media policy (with the help of a consultant or agency with actual social media experience, of course) as a first course of action to protect their brand. This is important because employees might be using social networks and potentially identifying themselves as employees of said brand.

In today’s social world, an organization’s publics do not end with employees or the media. There are shareholder, stakeholder, government (national, state or local), and latent publics that an organization didn’t even know existed but now come out of the woodwork because they are offended by an employee’s actions or comments, which is exactly what happened with Chipotle’s recent social media debacle.

Today, many employees feel entitled to start, build and maintain a personal brand. However, what happens when an employee’s “brand” runs counter-culture to the organization’s brand? What happens when an employee does not truly understand the concept of branding (i.e. personal branding is not traditional branding)? What happens when organizations are so busy pushing their messaging—internally and externally—that employees are confused in regards to what the organization’s brand stands for?

A lack of brand understanding and protection can be even more troublesome when you sell and own a franchise. As we saw with Domino’s, the online behavior of franchise employees can and will have a residual effect on the corporate brand, but also a ripple effect on all of the other franchisees.

Food for thought (pardon the pun), should organizations have policies that address the “off-the-clock” social activities of their employees who use social networks? What would you suggest? What have you experienced?

All Facebook: Chipotle’s Facebook Page Consumed By Cat Controversy

“Since the company and employee posted the claim that a hacker approved the post about the cat getting run over, there’s been a flurry of comments on the matter in addition to the hundreds of direct responses to the post claiming a hacker was involved.”

(Dear Chipotle: This is why your marketing, PR and social media people need to understand how technology, specifically the Internet, works. Hackers don’t “approve” they just do what it is they set out to do.)

So Good: What is Chipotle’s Social Media/PR Team THINKING?

“What did that hacker do? Steal information? Post embarrassing photos? No, they posted, from an Android phone no less, about how she just hit a cat with her car. Then, the “hacker” returned to the same Facebook thread, the morning AFTER the alleged incident to continue the conversation. What you don’t see in the screengrab above is that she even posted at 2:43 the next afternoon. Seems like a plausible story right? And by plausible of course, I mean whomever at Chipotle actually bought that story is a grade-A moron. Yet the company came out and said the story was “completely false.” Not that they were looking into it, but that nope, the wizards in their PR department were totally sure that this was a malicious Facebook hacking.”

(Don’t you just love the use of “wizards” here?! I don’t know about you, but the notion of “PR Wizards” will have me chuckling all day.)

Entrepreneur: Franchises Go Social

“Social media may be a brave new frontier, but going rogue isn’t a good idea. ’You still have a brand to maintain and a franchisor to answer to,’ Segreto says. Some larger franchises, such as Tasti D-Lite and Express Employment, actually have managers working in social media. Emerson encourages franchisees to get involved in social media, but to repurpose content that is developed by the company’s headquarters.”

Social Media Explorer: The Franchise And Social Media: SME-TV With Ruby Tuesday

“…[Ruby Tuesday] brought social media in-house because they want someone who is infused with the brand.”

[Image: Fine Art America]

When Aaron Strout tapped into a bunch of us to do a haiku regarding a brand experience we’ve had, I just couldn’t say no to the opportunity to be creative (reminds me of my 8th grade English class!) and to share a great brand experience that I recently had.

If you don’t remember, Haiku is written as 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables.

Enjoy!

Damn! Bluescreen of death.
Went MacBook Pro and iPad,
Couldn’t be happier.

For your next brand haiku, head on over to the super smart and savvy blog of the one and only Valeria Maltoni.

P.S. This goes on record as one of the shortest posts I’ve ever written!

P.P.S. Be sure to check Twitter for the hashtag #brandhaiku.

Last night on our weekly PR 2.0 chat on Twitter (anyone can join this weekly chat Wednesdays at 8pm EST. Search on hashtag #pr20cat and join in!),  we discussed branding and PR 2.0 and why PR folks (and marketers, that’s a topic on integration for another day!) need to understand branding and how it affects their interactions with constituents (or publics). 

If you’ve hung out in social media circles long enough, I am sure you’ve heard “you don’t own your brand, your customers do.” Nothing can be further from the truth and why we need to be very careful with how we phrase this as marketers, consultants, agencies, etc. 

FACT: You do own your brand and brand messaging
FACT: You don’t own relationships customers have with your brand 

I kicked off by asking people’s definitions of branding and a lot of people responded with a brand relationship definition, which is great but I think it also leads us to, as marketers implementing social media, to want to easily hand over the keys to the castle a little too easily. 

For some people it’s a chicken and egg situation. Do you love the logo or the company that produces the product/service first? Vanessa French asked me (paraphrased) “what if your mom gave you Pepsi as a kid, you’d have a relationship with Pepsi (based on emotion).” My response was “what if your mom served you Pepsi in a plastic cup and you never saw the bottle?” 

People tend to identify with a brand (i.e. logo, message, etc.) first and then they relate to it. I think it explains why there are so many fake bags (Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Kate Spade, Hermes, etc.) not to mention other products on the market. It’s not that people relate to the company that owns the brand it’s that the brand (in this case a logo) gives them a perception of inclusion without the sting of the price tag. If they truly had a relationship with the brand they would never by fakes. Unfortunately, the perception of others is what spurs on the fakes market. 

From “Driving Brand Value” by Tom Duncan & Sandra Moriarty (what I shared during the PR 2.0 chat): 

Brand relationship is driven by: 

• Trust
• Consistency
• Accessibility
• Responsiveness
• Commitment
• Affinity
• Liking

(Sounds a lot like what we talk about with social media, huh?)

Five Levels of Bonding:

• Awareness
• Identity
• Relationship
• Community
• Advocacy 

I think we also tend to mixed up brand perception with branding and brand relationship. My perception of a brand comes after my relationship with the brand. For example: 

I bought a Jaguar and it was a piece of junk that could never be fixed. The Jaguar dealer and Jaguar wouldn’t do anything about it. I bought based on the brand (awareness/identity), my relationship was affected by lack of trust, consistency, accessibility, etc. My perception is that Jaguars are bad cars. I am sharing my story (WOM) on my blog (social media). 

So, if you are Jaguar’s PR folks and I had consistent blog about this and chatted on forums, you might want to pay attention. I would hope.

The tenets of branding are still viable, but just like everything else with social media they are more visible today and brand relationships and perceptions are out in the open. 

But we DO have control over our brand and messaging! You might want to reconsider using “trust” in your brand (logo) or messaging if the case is that the brand relationships and perceptions indicate that you are not an organization to be trusted. 

By the way, Driving Brand Value was written in 1997, and yet offers lessons that we still have not learned. It’s available on Amazon starting at $0.38 USD. I suggest you snap up a copy. 

Also, grab Integrated Branding by LePla and Parker while you’re at it… 

What do you think?

[Image: David Armano]