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.

In a recent BNET post “Lying to Your Customers? Come on, Everyone’s Doing It,” author and customer advocate Christopher Elliott shares six companies who have lied to their customers: Tavern on the Green, Ford, Microsoft, Office Depot, Cablevision, and Apple.

Lies or Business As Usual?

The chef at Tavern on the Green lied about gluten free pasta. What is the big deal, right? If a diner has food allergies, it is a huge deal. While Chef Damian Cardone may not have thought too much about the “white lie,” those with gluten allergies likely suffered the consequences of their meal. Tavern on the Green’s reputation is known far and wide—making it an iconic brand. Now, it’s doors are closed after filing for bankruptcy.

A Ford engineer told NPR that the gas tanks in Ford cars register full when they are not actually full. We are currently living in a depressed economy and gas prices are soaring. With all of Ford’s efforts to be social and bring customers to the center of their organization, how does this admission affect their brand? Is stating that the gas gauge’s purpose is “giving a customer ‘a prediction’ of what will happen” enough to protect the reputation they have worked so hard to preserve? If all car manufactures have this same challenge, is it a lie or a limitation of technology?

Due to pressure, Office Depot sales people lie about stock in order to upsell customers. There is just one little problem with this sales philosophy: customers have changed. They are more likely to have done their research, reached out to friends and experts, read all of the reviews and calculated the level of risk they are comfortable with. The days of thinking customers do not know what they want are over, they know want long before they walk into a store. Upselling them from their needs will most likely make them walk on over to the competitor.

Cablevision lied to its customers about an FCC ruling allowing them to earn potentially millions in additional revenue. According to The Consumerist, the FCC is well aware of the lies. Is lying acceptable in regulated industries? Are consumers so addicted to TV that they’ll just pay the price?

Apparently, Apple employees lie to customers all of the time about things like why they shouldn’t unlock their iPhones. However, this is just one employee’s “inside scoop.” Does one bad apple mean the whole company lies? Of course not. It does indicate, however, that a larger issue might be brewing inside of corporations today. Employees can be just as much a threat to your brand reputation as customers.

The Benefits of Lying

• Sick Customers
• Reputation Challenges
• Lost Sales
• Indentured Customers
• Rogue Employees

Not to mention everything that comes along for the ride… like negative word of mouth, blog posts, tweets, reviews, etc.

Not Lying—Easier Said Than Done?

Is a little white lie—or even a big one—okay when it means more revenues? The obvious answer would be no, one would hope. But perhaps there are times when lying is a necessary evil of doing business. Who is to decide what is ethical and what isn’t?

How does a marketing or PR professional handle this internal conflict?

Additional considerations: Do you do as told to keep your job? Is counsel regarding what could go wrong enough when money is the shiny object in management’s eye? Who is the customer advocate?

[Image source: toptenz.net]

res•o•nant adj. Having a lasting presence or effect; enduring.

Anyone who has been in the business world for a while (B2B) or has been around the block a few times (B2C) is sure to have a few stories (i.e. experiences) that have left an indelible mark—positive and negative. It is when an experience lingers in one’s brain for too long that it becomes a story. We have all done it. We turn an experience with a brand into a dramatic story that includes emotion and drama. Then, human nature kicks in and we share those experiences with others.

What happens when a brand doesn’t plan for this sort of resonance? Their story becomes someone else’s story and they do not get to choose their part (hero, villain, etc.).

This is why it is essential that brands understand that every action they take (or don’t) can resonate. If they want their ideas, causes or experiences to spread, they need to understand how to harness the power of tapping into people’s desire to tell stories.

Conversation Agent: Why Visual Stories Resonate

“Changing the world is hard, and you can do that only when the ideas you present connect with people. Stories convey meaning and resonate with people. They are the hero, not you. Therefore every time you present, you’re given an opportunity to plan a journey, tune into the audience’s resonant frequency, and move to action.”

TEDxEast: Nancy Duarte Uncovers Common Structure of Greatest Communicators

“You really have the power to change the world. Deep inside of you, every single one of you has the most powerful device known to man and that’s an idea. So a single idea from the human mind, it can start a groundswell, it be a flash point for a movement and it can actually rewrite our future. But, an idea is powerless if it stays inside of you. If you never pull that idea out for others to content with, it will die with you. Now maybe some of you guys have tried to convey your idea and it wasn’t adopted it was rejected and some other mediocre or average idea was adopted and the only difference between those two is in the way it was communicated. Because if you communicate an idea in a way that resonates, change will happen and you can change the world.”

Forbes.com: Companies’ Good Deeds Resonate with Consumers

“’Consumer inspiration can start right on a company’s own campus,’ says Barber. The key is merely building good intention into the fabric of the company. ‘Companies that intertwine good actions for their workers and the world are the ones that succeed,’ Barber says.”

Rocket Watcher: The Importance of Storytelling in Marketing

“A story can be a really powerful way of illustrating the value of you product and in my experience is often the way that your prospects and customers will explain what you do to others.”

Future Lab: The Ten Truths of Branded Storytelling

“A great story is nice, yet to make money, it has to press the “buy” button in the customer’s brain. For this you need to ensure that your story “ticks” the age-old behavioural triggers like emotion, contrast, egocentricity, the power of beginnings, etc. Use them, and people will respond.”

Neuromarketing: Your Brain on Stories

“Readers are far from passive consumers of words and stories. Indeed, it appears that we dynamically activate real-world scripts that help us to comprehend a narrative—and those active scripts in turn enrich the story beyond its mere words and sentences. In this way, reading is much like remembering or imagining a vivid event.” [Wray Herbert as quoted within this post.]

Copyblogger: Your Unique Story Proposition

“To establish a relationship with readers and prospects that doesn’t rely on an all-or-nothing, one-off attempt to make a sale. You get to tell your story in small, manageable pieces, or even experiment with different ways of telling the same story, until one clearly resonates with your audience.”

Happy Reading & Watching!

[Image Source: Judith Pratt]

“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.