What you can learn from consumers' digital decade

by Josh Bernoff

As the decade I call the twenty-oh's ends, think on what a transformational change we have just all witnessed. Our obsession with the latest product from Google or Apple often clouds our recognition of the long-term effects. We all know where we are. But I think many of us have forgotten where we were, and just how dramatically things have changed in ten short years.

Bill Gates in 2001 called this new decade "The Digital Decade." Boy was he right.Consider:

• When the last decade began, there were 2.6 million broadband households in the US, one out of every 40 homes. Now there are 80 million, or two thirds of the population. Broadband has gone from rare to ubiquitous.
• Starting from zero, digital video recorders reached 31 million homes and HDTV reached 51 million in this decade. Together with online video and video on-demand, these gadgets have completely transformed the television experience.
• Mobile phones subscriptions are now 270 million, out of 307 million US adults residents.(For a comparison, mobile phones were in 51 million households at the start of the decade, but back then having more than one phone per household was unusual.) Back in 1999 phones were phones. Now they are iPhones, Blackberries, and Androids -- computers and internet access devices.
• Portable digital music players have reached 76% of all US households. At the start of the decade, they were in practically none, because the iPod had yet to be introduced. Mark Mulligan calls it "The Decade That Music Forgot".

And finally, it's worth noting that Google just celebrated its tenth anniversary. In 1999, most of hadn't heard of it yet. And forget social technologies -- in 1999, most of the social activity online was in chat and discussion forums.

As I look back on all this from the perspective of media and marketing, it's clear that consumer lead, media stumbles along behind, and marketers follow along behind.

2009's consumers spend 34% of their media time online. As a result, digital marketing spending has gone from $6.2 billion in 1999 to $25.6 billion, or 12% of all marketing spending, in 2009. But marketers still spend most of their energy and dollars on television, newspapers, and radio.

Within those industries, the spend shifts slower than the behavior. Newspaper sites still bring in far less than ads in the paper. Video on-demand and online video ad models are still under construction.

But what you can learn from this decade is that consumers move quickly, models move slowly, and marketing moves conservatively. When you see a technology shifting, that's the time to begin close observation of the models behind it. It will take years for those models to take hold, and in those years, you get the chance to learn. That's when you need to experiment and figure out how things work, because that's when it's cheap and the competition is hanging back. The objective is not to make money right off, but to learn the ropes. Because when the transformation happens -- and it will -- then you will have the advantage of knowledge.

The twenty-oh's were the digital decade for consumers. The twenty-teens will be the digital decade for marketers. Time to get cracking.

Note: most of these links are to Forrester Reports that are available in full to Forrester clients, or as abstracts for non-clients.

Predictions for the Groundswell in 2010 -- Twitter gets serious or gets bought

by Josh Bernoff

Emily Riley and our whole Groundswell team have just published our predictions for 2010. We serve interactive marketers, so these are marketing focused predictions. They are:

1. Companies' use of social councils will attain budgets and power.
2. Listening Platform insights will go mainstream.
3. Marketers will focus less son fuzzy social media metrics and more on real marketing metrics.
4. Twitter will become profitable or get acquired.
5. Facebook will get more hands-on to protect users' -- and its own -- interests.
6. Incompatible mobile devices and siloed social applications will shatter the social experience.

If there is one overarching theme, it's that social technology is now a mainstream part of what marketers do. Items like using Listening Platforms (e.g. Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Radian6) and a focus on metrics that matter to marketers are signs of this shift.

I'd also like to draw attention to the Twitter prediction. Twitter has been fiddling around, growing like mad without a business model, for years now. But in in 2010, growth is not sufficient. One of two things will happen. Either Twitter will have a business generating $100 million at an annualized rate by the end of 2010, or it's going to get bought by the likes of Google, Facebook, or Microsoft. I don't believe it can continue as a huge force that has no visible means of support. Do you?

What Will Be In GROUNDSWELL HEROES

by Josh Bernoff

For several months now we've been researching "Harnessing the GroundswellGroundswell HEROes", the followup book to Groundswell. The focus is on both empowered customers (think "United Breaks Guitars") and empowered employees. In both cases, the empowerment comes from the pervasive social, mobile, video-enabled, cloud-propelled technology available to them.

A funny thing happened during the research, though. We found that all the employee examples were in marketing, sales, and customer support. Why? Because those customer-facing departments have both the budgets and the desire to connect with customers using the new technologies. And they are moving forward, in most cases without much involvement from their own IT departments.

In fact, it's the urgency created by empowered customers that's driving the employees to build their own solutions. So we came to this principle:

If you want to succeed with empowered customers, you must empower your employees to solve their problems.

Whether it's Zappos, Best Buy, or Intuit, staff are building solutions to help their customers, and not just in customer service. THAT is what the new book is about. (It's a relief to have figured this out, believe me.)

Based on this, here's a revised table of contents. Look for the book next year from Harvard Business Press.

HARNESSING THE GROUNDSWELL: Empower your employees to solve customer problems

GROUNDSWELL HEROES: Harnessing the Power Shift in your Workplace and Marketplace

by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler

PART I: THE TREND

Chapter 1. Empowered people and what to do about them. How customers got so much power. Four forces: mobile, video, cloud, social. Empowering staff to solve customer problems.

PART II: YOUR CUSTOMERS

Chapter 2. Customer heroes. A new metric on the value of your customers. Customer word of mouth and media.

Chapter 3. Reimagining customer service. Customer voice. Service is now marketing. Social CRM.

Chapter 4. The mobile imperative. Pervasive information empowers customers. Using mobile information to create loyalty.

Chapter 5. Mobilizing fans. Amplifying promoters and blunting detractors. Efficient ways to enable fan voices.

PART III: YOUR PEOPLE

Chapter 6. Employee heroes. What empowered staff can do. Technology projects -- matching effort to results.

Chapter 7. Is your organization ready? Measuring employee empowerment. Do your staff feel they have permission? Are they ready to solve customer problems?

Chapter 8. Helping people work together. Collaboration and innovation tools. Social technology for the enterprise.

Chapter 9. Leadership for constant innovation. What management can do to encourage innovation and empower employees.

PART IV: YOUR TECHNOLOGY

Chapter 10. How IT can empower your people. How to say yes. Select, scale, and socialize.

Chapter 11. Empowering people safely. When to say no. Empowering people while managing risk.

PART V: YOUR FUTURE

Chapter 12. The future of the groundswell.

***

Now all we have to do is write it. Look for case studies and lots of data in the coming posts.

Note (12/21): We changed the title around the concept of HEROes (highly empowered and resourceful operatives).

Groundswell Wins AMA's Berry Prize for Best Marketing Book

Just a quick note to thank the American Marketing Association for recognizing Groundswell with its 2009 Berry-AMA book prize for the best book in Marketing.

The association recognized Groundswell with these words:

Groundswell hit a real ‘sweet spot’ with the selection committee. Not only does it deal with crucial, cutting edge set issues of importance to both large and small firms, but it does so in very pragmatic fashion. Li and Bernoff present a very well-integrated framework for dealing with the array of decisions that must be made, and they provide vivid and compelling examples of the various ‘new media’ at work.

I'm truly humbled by this award, especially since it beat out "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely, which is truly a great book. In the year and half since Groundswell was published, I've enjoyed working with lots of marketers -- that's the most rewarding thing.

I feel a debt at this moment to Charlene Li, my coauthor, and to all of you in the groundswell who continue to help me see what matters to marketers. Keep doing great work, and I'll keep writing about it.

Don't Screw Up Your Mobile Marketing Opportunity

by Josh Bernoff

From my Marketing News column.

Mobile advertising has been the coming thing for so long that some of us gave up on it. Now it’s here. In a Forrester Research survey of 176 interactive marketers in March, one in three were currently using mobile marketing, and another third were planning to do so. Of those who market with mobile, 47% will increase their budgets this year.

Mobile is so close to the customer (in her pocket!) that it’s pretty powerful if you do it right. It’s also dangerous to your brand if you do it wrong, especially since consumers are very aware that they pay for mobile phone and data services. So rather than just be a cheerleader, I’ll put down some advice here based on successful marketing campaigns.

Let’s start with adoption. As you might guess, the interest in mobile is driven by the adoption of Web browsing phones from Apple, RIM, and others. Around 26 million people, 15% of the mobile phone customers in the US, use the mobile Web at least once a month. That’s a juicy, young, affluent segment, and it’s growing. So it’s no surprise that marketers have gotten moving in reaching them.

And mobile marketing isn’t just mobile Web sites. It also includes banners on other mobile sites, short codes (like the codes you send text messages to when voting on American Idol), ads in phones’ video programming, and even little two-dimensional codes (like bar codes) that send mobile customers to Web sites when photographed.

Just as in developing social technology strategies, we recommend using the “POST” method (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology – and note that the choice of technology comes last). As my colleagues Julie Ask and Charles Golvin explored in a recent report called “The POST Method: A Systematic Approach To Mobile Strategy,” you have to start by assessing the mobile technologies your customers use. Even if you don’t have access to Forrester survey data, you can still learn from your customers’ behavior. For example, Sears found traffic from mobile phones to its sites growing, but those customers were bouncing off because the sites weren’t designed for mobile. If your site doesn’t recognize and reconfigure itself for mobile, you’ll see the same thing. As soon as you can prove that a significant number of your customers are mobile Internet users, you should do what Sears did, and build a mobile site.

After people, think about objectives – and note that mobile can serve a variety of different ones. For example, after Jiffy Lube used mobile coupons to drive foot traffic at one of its franchises, 50% of its new customers at that franchise came from the mobile promotion. Ford had a different objective; it wanted to generate awareness for its Ford Flex and used banners ads on mobile sites to generated 3.5 million impressions and a 1.4% click-through rate.

Your strategy and tactics will vary based on your target. Take AXE, Unilever’s personal-care brand for 18-to-24 year-old guys. AXE advertised on MTV and suggested a short code. Texting to the short-code generated a link to a site on “hair crisis relief.” That’s a tactic that works great with young men, but don’t try to get business executives texting –or you’ll find the yield is a whole lot lower.

So, how can you not screw this up? First, keep it simple. The more complex the process, the fewer the people who will follow it, and the less success you’ll have. The diversity of tools in mobile is tempting, and that’s the problem – you can get sucked into the technology and leave the marketing behind.

For example, in a recent case study, Neil Strother, Forrester’s expert on mobile marketing, describes how simple banner ads helped RIM sell more advanced BlackBerry devices. They started with ads on mobile sites for Yahoo! and The Weather Channel, since those mobile sites had experience with generating and dealing with large volumes of mobile usage. The banners were formatted automatically for the customer’s current device and one click led to RIM’s mobile-enhanced site. When RIM found success was correlated to those who clicked on the mobile store-locator page, they used that as a key metric for the program. Simple plan, simple execution, and simple measurement led to a successful campaign.

Second, integrate it with other media. Media can drive texting; if you’re advertising, think about how mobile could boost the engagement of your customers who took the time to read the ad. And if you’re a mobile marketer, ask yourself how your campaign fits into the overall media picture.

Third, follow the rules in the Mobile Marketing Association’s Code of Conduct to stay on the right side of the privacy line. You’re about to interact with people on a device they feel very personal about, so you’ll need a framework for treating their data right.

Finally, make sure you think a little longer-term than the average advertising manager. The advertising manager wants to think of mobile as a new medium to tap, and that’s fine. But the database marketing manager is lusting over the new contacts she can make with short codes and opt-ins. Unless both get what they need out of the campaign, you’ve wasted your mobile opportunity.

Dealing With Google's Sidewiki Land Grab

by Josh Bernoff

We just released a research note about Sidewiki for marketers (available in full to clients only).

Let's be clear. Sidewiki is a land grab -- Google has now set up real estate on every single Web site, for commentary from the masses. (Go here to sign up -- it's part of the Google toolbar.) Once a person is signed up, they can comment on any page, and see comments from others on those pages. Google uses an algorithm to decide which comments go at the top. And Google, not the site owner, decides which content must be taken down because it’s inappropriate.

The Web is full of whining from site owners about how Sidewiki, out of their control, is not fair. Get over it, folks. Regardless of whether it is fair (since when is the Web fair), you'd be better off learning to deal with it. This is quite similar to what StumbleUpon and Delicious enable, but because it's from Google and it's more visible on pages, it's a bigger deal.

Two questions and answers.

One, will it catch on? Yes. It could take a few years to get big, as Twitter did, but because it's on Google's Toolbar, has a seductive interface (a little tab on pages with comments), and can become viral as users spread it, it's going to grow.

Two, what should marketers and site owners do? First, claim your site. Second, monitor and respond to comments. (With the Sidewiki API available, it will likely soon be built into tools like Radian6.) And third, add your own social features, now.

If you add social features like ratings and reviews, comments, and forums to your brand site, your media site, and your blogs, they'll be far more convenient for visitors. They'll generate discussion, but discussion you can moderate to your own standards. And if the interesting discussion is on your site, people won't be compelled to comment with Sidewiki.

It's likely that Microsoft will build similar features in its browser, and Yahoo! and Facebook may also dive in. But Google has the first-mover advantage. If you're smart, you'll start monitoring this activity now, while it's small. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Wrong customer, or, the perils of dog food marketing

by Josh Bernoff

I used to work for a textbook company. The CEO explained to me that we used "dog food marketing." "Our buyers are students, but the decision makers are professors. So we market to profs based on the idea that their students will benefit. Like selling dog food -- you convince the owner that the dog will like it."

Look where the textbook business is now. It tried to keep those profs happy, but the students, powerless as dogs, had to deal with bloated, $120 or $300 books they'll use once. So they rebelled, creating a burgeoning used book market. The textbook guys are scrambling to create electronic versions, but those clever students with their digital skills have the edge. This is not going to end well for the textbook companies.

Most companies have at least two kinds of customers, the ones who use their products or services, and other ones that are buyers, distributors, advertisers, or other types of partners. Often those other customers, like the professors, seem more important, since they make decisions that affect hundreds of sales or thousands of dollars.

If you make macaroni, that "other customer" may be Walmart. If you make TV shows, it may be an advertiser. If you sell software, it may be the CIO. If you are a non-profit, it's the donors that support you.

Chris Anderson's new book Free is filled with models where people who use products don't pay for them. Most of these models generate some other type of customer, like an advertiser.

Dog food marketers: beware. The more time you spend on the needs of the non-user customer, the less you are focusing on the user of your products, and the more vulnerable you become. If you empower that other customer to persuade you to make decisions not in the best interests of the the people who use your products, you are striding down the path to ruin.

Where would the movie business be if it had thought its customers were theater owners, not viewers with VCRs, HBO, and iPods?

Where would the music business be if it ignored its customers' desires for electronic singles over its retailers' desires for CDs in 1999? Oh yeah, they did. They got it, but way too late. Screwed.

This applies in government and non-profits, too. If you're a non-profit that helps kids with cancer, concentrate on the kids, not the donors. If you're in government, concentrate on the people who use your highways or collect your unemployment payments. They are your customers, even if they don't pay you.

It doesn't matter if you sell insurance, shoes, or web searches. If you always worry first about the one who uses your products, she will lead you into new business models, new features, and loyalty. Social technology means you can form a relationship with that customer, even if you send your invoices to someone else.

If you worry too much about that "other" customer, he'll go into competition with you, insist on more discounts, drag you down as he goes out of business, or distract you, opening up room for competitors. User customers may have loyalty. Those other customers rarely do.

Complex distribution chains, powerful partners, and advertising subsidies are great. Just don't lose track of who is eating the dog food.

Advertising will change forever

by Josh Bernoff

Here's one of the things we do at Forrester Research: we interview as many marketers as we can about their plans, identify trends and project future likely conditions, and then we put together some numbers to make a projection. If you've ever seen a Forrester projection, it comes from a process like this.

This means that inside every projection is an idea or ten about the future. Those ideas can be powerful, and they come from research with marketers and consumers.

My colleague at Forrester, Shar Van Boskirk, just published our five-year interactive marketing forecast. The idea inside it is the real kicker.

In this recession, marketers have learned that interactive marketing is more effective, and advertising less effective, per dollar spent. While budgets for online have decreased, they decreased less than other budgets. Six out of ten marketers we surveyed agreed with the statement "we will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing." Only 7% said "we have no plans to increase our marketing budget."

Unlike the last recession, digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like advertising is inefficient, relative to digital. More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, television, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase.

The result is that digital, which will be about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets will decline.

This is huge.

It means we are all digital marketers now, since digital is at the center of many campaigns anyway.

It means media is in trouble, or at least in the middle of a transformation. For example, online video ads, which will be about $870 million this year, will grow to over $3 billion in 2014. What will this do to networks plans to put more of their shows online in places like Hulu. How will it accelerate some newspapers plans to become more and more centered around online?

And it means that social "media", which will account for $716 million this year between social network campaigns and agency fees, will generate $3 billion in five years. And this doesn't even count displays ads on social networks (which are in the display ads category.) Of all the parts of digital marketing, social network marketing one is poised for the most explosive growth.

Pundits have been declaring the end of mass media and advertising for years now. From my 14 years of experience analyzing this stuff, I've learned that things die very slowly, but there are real trends you can see. If you're in advertising, you'd better learn to speak digital, because that's the way the world is going.

Note (7/22): This was reprinted at the Ad Age site, where there are over 50 additional comments from marketers.

Seth Godin, Blogger: An Interview

Let’s face it. Seth Godin’s blog is a wondrous thing. It’s consistently No. 1 or No. 2 on the Ad Age Power 150. More importantly, it’s pure insight. At least once a day, every day, there’s a little homily on marketing, or brands, or quality, or on something else that makes you say “hmmm” or “that’s right” or even “that’s wrong” – but something that’s worth your time.

Do you have any idea how hard this is? Nobody else does this.

When I contacted Seth to interview him about his blog, he was bemused. “I don’t know how to bottle what I do,” he wrote. “I just do it.” OK, let’s admit you cannot imitate Seth – you don’t have what he’s got under that bald head of his. But I am hoping you can learn by observing some of what he does. So here goes: an email interview with Seth Godin about blogging:

The clarity of your posts tells me that you have a clear idea of your audience and what they will get out of it. On the other hand, from reading you for years now, it seems you’ll write on just about any topic. When you write a blog post, who do you imagine writing for?

There are things we do with words in mind. For example, it's easy to say, "I wonder what my cousin would like for her birthday, let's see, she's twelve..." and then go find something. There are other things we do without vocalizing. Tying your shoes, say, or picking out a bouquet of flowers. 

I don’t sit down and say, “I wonder what Josh needs?” Instead, I’ve carefully curated a voice in my head that blogs in a way that appears to resonate with people. I’m guessing (though I have no talent) it’s a lot like curating a sound on the saxophone. Training helps, listening to records helps, but mostly you blow a lot until you resonate and then repeat, prune, experiment, prune, repeat, prune until a groove occurs.

One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice. You won’t get it for a while, but you’ll get it. To one person who wrote in and said he didn’t think he had anything interesting to say, I asked him whether he was boring in person too? Boring at breakfast? Boring on a date? That boring?! Probably not.

Every blogger needs grist for the mill. In looking at your posts, they’re sometimes based on current events or other people’s blog posts (like your post on Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s book Free) but more often than not, they are just some freestanding insight. Where does this stuff come from? I can’t imagine that you sit down and it just comes pouring out. What do you read/follow/think about that stimulates this stream of insights?

How come some people can visit a place like New York and see a thousand amazing things, take hundreds of great photos (like Thomas Hawk) or even write a novel... and other people visit, eat at Applebee’s and send home a John Lennon postcard?

It's not where you go, it’s what you look for.

An insight a day is an incredible pace to keep up, but you never seem to miss. Do you write ’em in bunches and dole them out daily, or do you always have a pile that you’re working on, or do you really just write one every day?

I write at least one a day. I queue up the extras, and replace ones I don’t love with a new one. This discipline does two things... first, it treats each post as a precious opportunity (which it is) and second, it cajoles me into overcoming whatever little voice in the back of my head says, “nahhhh.”

Your blog doesn’t sell ads, and you’ve resisted becoming TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb and turning it a sort of blog/destination with multiple writers. But the blog must reward you in some way beyond the pleasure of writing. What does your blog do for you and your business?

I have a problem with the second part of the question. Two problems, actually.

First, why is it that once business gets involved, it’s assumed it’s okay to do things that aren’t fun or rewarding or kind or generous, but only things that make money?

And second, why is it assumed that people can’t do business-like activities without getting paid?

Those guys at AIG getting the big bonuses? I don’t understand the mindset that says the millions they’ve got aren’t enough, that they shouldn’t skip a quarter or two, that the work is so horrible and grinding and deadening that they couldn’t possibly consider doing it just because they’re great at it and love it...

Sorry for the rant, but the only reason I blog is because I love it. I love being able to create something that feels like a gift, giving an idea that spreads, that may improve something for someone. I’m certain (just speaking for myself) that if I figured out a way to profit from it, I’d probably be starting down the road to wondering how to maximize that profit, and if I tried to do that, I’d fail.

For example, I don’t mention Squidoo.com (a company I started) on my blog now and then because it would make me money (the mentions have so little impact as to be less than the cost of hosting), I mention it because I genuinely want to share what I’ve got, or give people a tool they will benefit from.

I think there’s plenty of room for blogs that exist to pay the blogger, or blogs that exist to turn a profit. That’s just not the kind of blog I’m writing, and I’m not the kind of blogger that could do that.

Your blog accepts trackbacks but no comments. You respond to emails but Twitter only links to each post. I sense a carefully considered set of decisions here. Can you help us to understand why it works that way?

What works for me of course won’t work for everyone. But for me, the issues are distraction, time management, the little voice of self-doubt and the desire to push through the Dip of mattering. Comments and Twitter are like a Fresnel lens. You can use them to focus attention if you’re very disciplined and very good, or, if you’re like me, you’ll end up finding your energy and attention diffused into a maelstrom, lost to the winds of inanity, anger or trivia. It’s in my DNA. I can’t do it, just as I can’t read in the car.

For those that are succeeding (and I have to confess, the number I see isn’t as big as you’d think given all the hoopla) I say mazel tov. To those that are using it as a defense mechanism, an opportunity to stay busy while not actually doing anything, I wonder if that’s a good choice.

Like Guy Kawasaki, whose blog is also full of delightful little nuggets, you could edit and reorganize your blog into a very nice book. Ever considered it?

Where, exactly, do you think Guy got the idea, Josh?

http://www.smallis.com

If I wasn’t the first bestselling author to do this, I was close. I even won a fancy audiobook award for it. It inspired Scott Adams’ book too, which is better than mine.

I have another collection coming out along these lines, but in a different format that I hope to announce soon...

I said before that people couldn’t imitate you, because they don’t have your software between their ears. But I bet there is something you’ve learned from blogging that the rest of us might be better off if we did it, too. Which of your habits should we imitate?

Oh, I think imitating my habits is a great idea. Habits like blogging often and regularly, writing down the way you think, being clear about what you think are effective tactics, ignoring the burbling crowd and not eating bacon. All of these are useful habits.

Thanks for the questions, Josh. This was fun.

 

Why marketers have trouble with full-duplex social technology

(Also published on Adage.com).

As I ponder what's so hard about social technologies for marketers, I'm reminded of the old joke about what the Grateful Dead concert fans said when the drugs wore off ("Holy cow! It's country music!"). Because I've been having my own drugs-wore-off moment about social technology lately and it goes like this:

Holy cow! It's just another communications channel!

Blogs, Twitter, Facebook -- yup, it's just another communications channel. So what is it about this channel that gets everybody's knickers in a twist?

We know about channels where you talk. We know about advertising, we know about PR, we know about direct mail and email and promotions.

We also know about channels where you listen. We call this research (surveys, focus groups) and customer service.

The problem is simple. Marketers don't understand channels where you have to talk and listen at the same time. Like one of those maddening not-full-duplex speakerphones where you can't interrupt somebody, this is what drives customers nuts. Think about it. None of those talking channels allows a response. None of those listening channels encourages actual feedback from the company.

The marketing industry's idea of a two-way communication is to put an 800 number or a web address in an ad and take orders.

This couldn't be more obvious than with email. Your company has a chance to turn its email list into a two-way communication. Except that most mass emails from companies are "do not reply". "We want to talk to you," they say. "But we don't want to hear back from you. Unless you want to place an order, and if so click here."

It's all in the name of efficiency. The people in charge of talking are in the marketing department. The people in charge of listening are in the research or service or sales department. They hardly ever talk to each other, let alone have full-duplex conversations with customers.

This won't fly in social technology because the minute you talk, people expect you to listen. And if you start to listen, you'll be tempted to talk. It's a full-duplex channel that befuddles one-way-marketers.

I won't ask you to reorganize your company to fix this, since I know that's impossible for most of you. All I'm going to ask is this. If you want to start any social technology activity, make sure you've got people in place to listen to the responses, and that you can respond to what they say. If you're blogging, you (or some of your minions) need to monitor the comments and respond. If you're Twittering, same thing. If you're present in a social network, or start a community, or ask for ideas from people, you'd better have a staff in place to respond.

This is so darn simple, but it will cause profound changes over time. Your company will seem more human. You'll learn a few things about how you're perceived, and maybe come up with a few new product ideas. And maybe you'll learn to get along with those folks in the call center. Get started. It's a good thing to learn, being conversational.