Why you need to be a Social Media

Why you need to be a Social Media Ringmaster?:

Why you need to be a Social Media Ringmaster? I came upon a Harvard Business Review article entitled, Why You Need a New-Media “Ringmaster” by Patrick Spenner , http://hbr.org/2010/12/why-you-need-a-new-media-ringmaster/ar/1 and found it to be excellent reading. I am the former CEO of a digital start up called dailymakeover.com. I have built four other start ups prior to dailymakeover.com and I held senior posts in large interactive Agencies such as Ogilvy & Mather as President, OgilvyInteractive , and Organic Online, as Managing Director of the East Coast. I feel that I have an excellent cross section of experience to comment on the need for a new breed of brand marketers. I have seen the demands that social technologies has put upon us ‘operators’ of businesses both small and large. As I entered the workforce with traditional marketing credential and education, I had to adapt to a changing business landscape, quickly. Joining Prodigy Services Company, as Director of ebusiness , I dealt with early live consumer chat rooms, we used to call them Bulletin Boards. Live communication was a real responsibility and our business faced challenges at a time when there was less tolerance for differing points of view. The stories are endless! At MapQuest, as VP of Marketing and Sales, we ended up with one of the top ten travel sites on the Internet in the 1990’s although we envisioned a B2B services company. We needed to expand fast to keep up with the demands of consumers for maps and ACCURATE driving directions. I had to figure out a way to grow revenues while servicing this unexpected consumer base. The Agencies I worked for serviced many major brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, IBM and American Express and it was our job to help them build their digital brand identities. How would we make Tommy and Tommy entertainment a reality, deal with their fan base and retail customer pre- Facebook and YouTube? My team at Localmatters.com gave consumers early list creation tools that supported local shopping to try to bring yellow page publishers around to the notion of consumer support and services. At dailymakeover.com we had a live community of women sharing beauty tips and ideas.

Slide 2:

What has been essential throughout all of these roles has been to listen and respond real time to the need, wants and desires of consumers.  If you rest, stop listening, don’t think all the time and respond all the time, you put your brand at risk.  Whether conducting business for clients or direct to consumer, I learned this fast and early in my career.  It is interesting to me that, years later, we are still looking to bring this learning into organizational charts and into the leadership structure of major corporations.  I do hope that “Ringmaster” leadership styles will breakthrough as it is essential to business growth. At first, I thought “Ringmaster” sounded a bit silly but the article really brought the point home to me.  The article explains that Ringmasters are “a new type of executive who has digital savvy and is skilled at coordinating a variety of marketing and customer-facing activities.”.  Hence the Ringmaster analogy made more sense because the definition of Ringmaster is a person who is in charge of the performances in a circus ring and “expertly choreographing talent in real time to engage the audience in a seamless, interactive experience.”, as stated in Mr. Spenner’s article. So, here is my “Ringmaster” experience to share.  At Makeover we engaged women in trying on hairstyles, accessories and cosmetics and had real time 24/7 communication with her.  We built a community of female users targeted and bound together by their interest in improving or maybe just updating their appearance.  Over time we began to understand what bound these women together and how personal the whole experience was to them.  They really wanted reinforcement about who they were and to feel good about themselves.   They wanted to meet other women and share ideas and comments.  They wanted tips and suggestions about how to plan for events and special occasions.  In order to win the hearts and minds of these women, we had to think about delivering new content to them all the time.  New brands, new products, new product reviews, styles from celebrities, styles from red carpet events, new fashion looks and trends from the street.

Slide 3:

Meanwhile we needed to figure out ways to ensure that the cost of original content delivery was profitable.  How to watch and measure the time spent online answering consumer questions, ways to convert more of the free members to paid members.  Managing paid member customer service needs and ensuring they benefited from the value of membership.  Ongoing improvements to the paid membership value proposition and finding more ways to engage her, our customer, in a meaningful way.  Ways to appeal to advertisers and business partnerships. I know, first hand, whether in a large corporation or steering a young business, Ringmaster qualities are essential and not learned in a textbook.  You need to find the endurance, build the team and the tools to listen carefully, all the time and through all customer touch points. More next week…..