Online Engagement with Mike Troiano, Principal at Holland-Mark

Matthew: Hello and welcome.  Today is September 10, 2009 and you’re watching PTV Live.  Thanks everybody.  My name is Matthew Mamet and I’m at MSMamet on Twitter, and with me today is Mike Troiano, Tech venture entrepreneur, blogger at scalableintimacy.com, and you can also find him as MikeTrap on Twitter.  Welcome to the show, Mike.  Glad to have you on.

Mike: Thank you.  Glad to be here, Matthew.

Matthew: Well I just want to remind everyone before we get started that this is an interactive show.  Please talk to us on Twitter by using the PTV Live hash tag and we’ll get to your questions live; I’ll be monitoring them here on the laptop as usual. 

But before we dive in, Mike, I’m not sure I gave you the proper introduction; or I’m not sure I gave you your due.  Tell us a little more about who you are in detail and what you’re all about.

Mike: Sure.  So I kinda started off as an ad guy in New York.  I worked at a place called McCann Erickson and worked on GM and Coke, and AT&T to kinda learn the ropes of the branding space there. 

I went out to San Francisco and worked at Foote Cone & Belding, which is another big agency, on Taco Bell.  Came back east.  Went to B school in Boston and through a long chain of events, became the founder and CEO of Ogilvy and Mather Interactive.

Since then I’ve started four or five companies.  Some have had reasonable outcomes; others have ended [?] in tragic failure.

Matthew: Well that’s the nature of that game I suppose.

Mike: That’s it, that’s it, yeah, but very glad to be here today and share some thoughts.

Matthew: I’m excited to have someone on who has great experience in building brands and just brand management as well as companies and company management.  I think you bring a unique set of experiences.  I’m eager to hear them, and I’m sure everyone out there is as well.  So make sure you tweet to PTV Live and we’ll test Mike’s knowledge.

Mike: Indeed.

Matthew: So let’s start off with an easy one.  I read a blog post from a really smart guy over at scalableintimacy.com

Mike: Yes.

Matthew: and you talked a little bit about engagement which I think is a huge buzz word in the marketing world.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: I’m hearing a lot about engagement marketing, and you turn it a little bit on its head and cut through the hype a little bit and say let’s not forget that engagement is a means to an end. 

Specifically, you say that the social equity we build through participation and by that you meant Twitter followers and all the content that we create online, it creates a potential for value, but in the end it’s all about activation.  Tell me a little bit about what you meant  by that and how do you perceive that companies should be activating that potential that they acquire.

Mike: Sure.  Well there’s a lot of talk about engagement and engagement is useful and necessary, but as you say, I think of it as a means to an end.  I think if you view engagement as the end, you end up exhibiting behaviors that don’t make sense.  Like you try to…what’s the value of re-tweet?  Is there objective value in a follower or a friend on Facebook?  I think it just leads to some silliness in terms of the way companies value their participation in social media and measure its impact.

I have said on the blog several times and will say here, engagement is bullshit as an end unto itself.  The value of engagement is in creating the potential for what I think of as activation.  That is, if you’re gonna…I think of social media largely as a big cocktail party at a trade show.

There’s two strategies to having a cocktail party.  One is to be the guy who’s looking at name tags and over your shoulder trying to see if there’s someone more interesting to talk to in back of you; and sort of leading with the business card and asking for the order.

Matthew: Involvement; those people.

Mike: And then there’s people that are there and they’re trying to talk to you, and they’re trying to have a genuine conversation.  Then if the opportunity arises to do something in your mutual interests then you pursue that.  I just think the latter is a better strategy at a cocktail party and it’s the better strategy in the vast majority of social media as well.

Matthew: Yeah, I think I would agree.  You mentioned a little bit about the silliness and I think we’ve all seen the silliness that some companies go through whether they are B2B or B2C kind of doing follower drives.  We’ve all seen these campaigns where the end goal is to get as many followers or Facebook fans or whatever as possible.

You start to think to yourself, OK, so what?  Now what?

Mike: Right.  And now what…that’s the essence of activation.  So having acquire n-thousand Twitter followers, what do you do?  For me, we’re evaluating some of the software alternatives inside one of the companies I’m working with; and shot out a note the other day on Twitter to say hey, tried these two, anybody have any ideas…and you get three or four responses. 

It’s a great way to find talent.  It’s a great way to answer pretty much any question that you have certainly that the Twitter verse type of folks are well-equipped to answer. 

So that’s activation and it’s legitimate.  If in the context of a lot of rapport building and legitimate conversation, really reaching out to people to build relationships, the whole engagement thing…  In the context of a lot of that activity, it’s perfectly OK for you to ask for the order, ask for the deal in that context.

Matthew: I think I would say that the reason why is you’ve built a level of trust.  You mention legitimacy and that kind of implies authenticity and credibility, but if you ask for help and you get help, and you give help, there’s a level of trust and trust building required in order to ask someone for the order.

Mike: That’s right, that’s right.  It’s all about relationships.  I’ve always said I think there’s  a really kind of Italian sensibility in social media.  I think it’s why I’ve embraced it so fully.  I see a very kind of “you do for me, I do for you” kind of a thing which comes very naturally for some of us with lots of vows [?].

Matthew: Sure.  Actually, we had Chris Brogan here yesterday and he had a story to tell about why he does business with Blue Sky Factory which is an email marketing firm.  He talked about the fact that there’s a lot of alternatives; bigger alternatives…better, I don’t know. 

Mike: Right.

Matthew: He said I do business with Greg because I know him.  I trust him, and he’s a trust agent for me.  That’s why I work with him.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: So I trust that he’s gonna do what I need done for marketing.  That’s a big component.

Mike: I think that’s absolutely true.  I will say that like a lot of people, Chris was really the first guy that gave voice to a lot of these ideas in a genuine way.  It’s been several years ago now, but his thinking and his expression of those ideas had a big impact on me and the way I think about social media. 

Matthew: Excellent.  Moving on to our next article, another stalwart of the marketing business, Seth Godin, who recently discussed the idea that “Achievable avalanche opportunities” was the name of a blog post, that said people are far more likely to embrace a smaller goal they feel is likely to succeed rather than devote themselves day and night to the amorphous jackpot.  He
was really I think talking about the ways to activate your network as well as ways to inspire folks. 

In taking your experience both as someone who has built brands as well as companies, what are your thoughts on Seth’s opinion about setting, if I could paraphrase maybe, setting more achievable goals to a larger end rather than trying to generate a lot of buzz to a huge jackpot scenario?

Mike: I think it makes a lot of sense.  An avalanche is just a very large volume of snowflakes.  I think that when it comes to motivating people and getting them pulling in the same direction to the extent that direction is new and unfamiliar to them, I think to have some sort of early validating success is kind of management 101.  You want to have an early win to kind of validate the course for the people who are participating on the journey.

So I think it can be a feature or bug depending how it’s applied though.  You don’t want to set goals that are easily achieved just for the sake that they are easily achieved, because then you give yourself a false sense of accomplishment which is not an uncommon thing.

Matthew: Showed up for work today.  Check!

Mike: There you go.  Win! 

But I think there’s…  People need that validation.  It’s a human thing.  I think as long as you’re not going to the point that you’re not challenging yourself; a little bit of failure is a good thing.  It’s a good thing for people and it’s a good thing for organizations. 

As a father of four kids, some of whom are approaching teenager-hood, one of the things I try to encourage them is that it’s OK to fail once in a while because it means you’re pushing yourself in a direction that’s…you know, there’s something at stake.  I think it’s true for companies as well.

Matthew: Let’s apply this now to what we were just saying about activation.  How do we take this idea of setting more achievable goals and apply it to ways to activate your network.  So ideally everyone would like there n-thousands of followers to be re-tweeting and signing up for blogs, and getting more followers on the list, and being evangelists, but that’s probably not the case for most follower bases.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: There’s probably four or five really that are your follower leaders.  How do we make it so there’s more than four or five and try to activate that network?  Any thoughts or any examples you’ve seen where brands have done a good job and you can point to that and say oh, that was good?

Mike: Sure.  Let’s talk a little bit about scale to start.  I think a lot of the mistakes brands make is in not first defining the scale of what.  So when people criticize the scaleability of social media in general, I think it’s because they’re comparing the reach of a social initiative against the reach of a broadcast initiative or a more conventional model; and I think that’s an apples to oranges comparison.

I think what you’re interested in is the equivalent scale of result.  What I mean by that is, if you need to create 7,000,000 impressions in broadcast or print media in order to achieve an outcome of 700 sales, the comparative metric you care about in social is not 7,000,000 reach, it’s 700 sales. 

Matthew: Right.

Mike: So what is the comparable level of participation, engagement, outreach required in social media I think has demonstrated itself to be a much more impactful medium…

Matthew: Right.

Mike: …versus broadcast.  We were talking about Chris just a moment ago.  I remember him doing a post about BMW and Audi and how people felt about the two brands.  BMW and Audi spend a lot of money on advertising.  After Chris’ tweet, I did the numbers and like half a million people had been exposed to this notion about what other people thought about BMW or Audi.

I think that impression is a much more impactful impression than the kind of impression I get from a TV spot; because it comes from another person and it’s an authentic idea.

Matthew: It’s in an interactive medium.  You’re not just sitting there waiting for the commercial to be over.

Mike: That’s right.

Matthew: Or flipping through the magazine waiting to get to the articles.

Mike: That’s right.  You can challenge it.  You can participate in it yourself and that creates a different level of participation and engagement.  So coming back to your question…  Start by scale of what and scale of result.  What’s the nature of the result I’m trying to achieve?  It may be that if I’m trying to glean information, having the right people is more important than having the most people.

Matthew: That’s right, yep.

Mike: So making sure that my outreach efforts are you know…  Targeted is sort of an old style word, but that they’re focused on people that have either the information or the problem that I’m interested in, and making sure I do a good job of kind of separating the signal from the noise in terms of the people who follow me.  As you get past a level in Twitter of follow-ship, the signal to noise issue becomes a real issue.

Matthew: Right.

Mike: Because I think just by virtue of getting to a certain scale you become highly followed and I’m one of the people who believes in following everybody that follows me and it creates challenges.  Sometimes I wonder if it would be more productive to have the 1,000 right people as opposed to the 10,000 people.

Matthew: Do you mean that as it applies to both sides meaning following just the right 1,000 people or having the right 1,000 people follow you; or both?

Mike: I think it’s probably both.  I mean I think we…

Matthew: Does that mean you’re not gonna follow me after this?

Mike: Not you.  You’re in the right!  You’re in the zone, baby!  You’re in the core!

Matthew: Good.

Mike: No, I think the relentless pursuit of sort of numbers inside networks like Twitter is…since Scobal [sp?] dropped all of his followers, I think that idea has fallen out of favor  and I think that on balance that’s a good thing.

Now there are certain applications where the more people you have that can hear your message, the better you are.  Part of the reason I follow lots of people and the people follow me is that I can ask a question and more than not I’m gonna get a good response  or useful answer to it.

And the thousand people that are useful for Question A are a different thousand that are useful for Question B.

Matthew: Right.

Mike: Unlike an enterprise or a brand where I have a pretty focused constituency, I think  on an individual basis your needs are gonna vary over time.

Matthew: We’ve just talked a lot about focus, targeted, relevant, and signal to noise.  I want to move on to our next topic which I think is a great kind of follow on to that, which is a study that was released that says that online video tops all but Facebook in social media marketing.

What we’re seeing is that people are using video now more often than the traditional media channels — traditional for what? the past year — but you get the point.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: And I wonder is that because using a video is a better way to make an authentic, credible connection more so than that 40 characters that fly by?  So that’s the first part of the question.

The second part is in your opinion, what value do you think online video has to building an online constituency community or an online brand experience?

Mike: Right.  I think video is incredibly useful because in the 2 x 2 matrix of har
d and impactful, it’s in the upper right quadrant.

Matthew: Right.

Mike: One of the things I tell clients in the social marketing space is that a lot of times people are intimidated by the need to create all this content and you’ve got to feed the beast once you move into the social marketing space, and…

Matthew: Or just to interrupt for a second, I would even pose it that you have to feed the beast whether you’re in social media or not.  Every company needs to be creating content.  Sorry to cut you off.

Mike: No, that’s a great point.  I think that most companies create 80% of the content they need just by being.  It’s a question of being smart about capturing that content and digitizing it and putting it into forms that make it useful to you online and elsewhere. 

There’s no medium where that’s more true than video; where I can have a conversation with someone whether it’s my CTO or a sales guy or the CEO or whomever.  I can just shoot them doing what they do naturally and capture it and put it online.  So I think that’s the easy part.

In terms of the impact part, people want to connect with other people.  I don’t think people think… I mean I don’t think of Twitter as 140 characters.  I think of it as other people.  I rarely run into the 140 character limit.  I guess at some point it becomes second nature, but I do think that where I have an opportunity to listen to another human being, I prefer it like any person does.

The challenge with video can be the linearity of it.  It may only be 10 seconds of a 10 minute video that I’m interested in, but I know that your tools are among those that are helping to solve that problem. 

Matthew: Right.

Mike: If you can fix that, I think your average human being is much more comfortable participating in a video experience then they are in any kind of contrived textual experience.

Matthew: Well since you brought it up, I’ll go into the shameless plug of how we think that non-linear video or branched video is a key component to telling your story.  So thanks for bringing that up; thanks for giving me the opening.

Mike: My pleasure.

Matthew: So lets talk about our next article which is from Media Post that points to some missed opportunities by marketers in increased online conversions because they failed to serve up personalized content to web visitors. 

I have some statistics in here which I know all marketers love and enjoy.  Let’s pull them up real quick.  I don’t have my highlighted copy here.  70% of the content decisions appear on websites appear to be made by one person. 

Well, moving on.  I think that what the article essentially says is that by offering personalized content you can see a dramatic increase in conversion online.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: And it makes me think of the promise of internet marketing when internet marketing first started as a true practice within organizations seven or eight years go.  We all thought that look, using technology and technology online, at a bare minimum we’ll be able to offer up persona based content because we’ll know who they are, what their interests are, what search terms they used. 

Here we are in 2009 and we’re still talking about wouldn’t it be great if we could offer up more personalized content.  So I ask you, first of all, why haven’t we done this as a group or an industry?  And second of all, how do you think personalized content can help in marketing online today?  What should we be doing today?

Mike: Right.  Well I think the reason it’s not done more is it’s hard to do.  You shouldn’t under estimate the behavioral impact of hard.  Creating a site has its challenges; creating any site, the [unintelligible] content of a site.  When now you’re talking about creating the end versions of a site and a site that adapts based on the needs of an individual user, I think it becomes that much more difficult.

My last company, it was an insult going around. I heard someone call someone and say oh that guy is kind of a page thinker, which is really…

Matthew: What were they driving at there?

Mike: There’s someone who’s kind of mired in the first version of html based sites.

Matthew: Got it.

Mike: My name is Mike Troiano and I am a page thinker.  I’m a recovering page thinker.

But now that sites are being assembled dynamically, kind of on the fly much more, I think you’re starting to see more personalization and adaptability of the nature of the information being presented to individuals.  So I think we’re getting there gradually, but the dream of one to one marketing, which is something that’s been talked about since the 90’s, is very hard to do.  It’s very hard to realize given the tools today.

Matthew: I’ll push back a little bit on that.  I think there’s companies out there both B2B and B2C that spend a huge amount of money on their website.  They hire companies like the ones that you founded and ran, and it’s not necessarily a lack of funding for sure, but yet we still haven’t seen the technology side of the technology marketing rise as quickly as say your creative side of marketing. 

I mean, you get a lot of great websites that look great and are engaging, but they don’t have that automation behind it.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: I think that yeah, it’s hard; everything is hard.  As you said earlier on about setting more achievable goals to kind of keep moving forward, there are a lot of difficult things about cutting through the noise and getting your product or service out there in an authentic, credible, useful way.

I’m almost wondering if there’s that focus still on marketing as a creative endeavor as opposed to marketing as a technology endeavor.  I know that shift is happening all the time to balance it out more, but I want to probe about that.

Mike: I think there is some of that.  I would say that hard equals expensive.  If you look at the places that have a justifiable cost benefit analysis for the investment in individualized features.  Like when I go to Amazon, my experience is probably very different than yours. 

Matthew: Right.

Mike: Retailers tend to do a good job on individual personalization because the economic benefit of that personalization is very concrete and tangible for them.

Matthew: Yeah.

Mike: So the associated investments are more justifiable to the guy who writes the checks. 

Matthew: And easier to see very quickly too.

Mike: Right.  On a content driven website, you’re right it’s doable, but it becomes that much harder to climb the hill of individualized personalization.  In certain applications, lets say in a sales application or in many marketing applications, it can be justified, but once you get past retail where I think that’s kind of been the bedrock of individual personalization, companies have had a harder time justifying the expense; and I mean the monetary expense and in terms of complexity.

Matthew: Right. 

Mike: Which is something that not many people building these sites necessarily have experience doing.

Matthew: If there’s a bigger enemy to a marketing idea or marketing campaign than proving ROI, I don’t know what is.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: We love it; we hate it at the same time.

Mike: Right, right.  It is the fire in which we burn.

Matthew: So you mentioned sales just now which I’ll take as an opportunity to move on t our next topic which is a theme that we’ve been covering a lot on the show in the past few weeks, wh
ich is the emergence of social CRM.  Which at a very high level is the concept of these tools that marketers have been using for a while now — social media, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. — being adopted and embraced by sales teams. 

Combining what we know and love about traditional CRMs like Sales Force which are great ways to keep track of activities, contacts and deals; and bringing in the engagement mechanism of social media as well as the wealth of information.

You’ve talked a lot throughout this episode about a lot of great information out there.  I just have to ask my followers and listen to my followers and I can learn.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: So how do you envision sales organizations using this going forward and how can we use it with online video over the course of say the next three to five years?  How do you see these two things coming together or not coming together?

Mike: Right.  I coined a term “social relationship management” and there’s a lot of content on the blog — it’s scalableintimacy.com — about social relationship management or SRM, and now social CRM is kinda the term of art, so…

But I think that it’s important to understand what’s similar and what’s different than conventional CRM, conventional relationship management.

The essence of the difference is captured in the notion of weak ties. There was a sociological paper done a long time ago about the strength of weak ties.  In our personal lives, it may be that in the course of our lives we have thousands of relationships with different people and I think we see this in our professional networking contexts; and those relationships in aggregate can be incredibly valuable to us.

But we have a kind of biological limit on the unit volume of people that we can maintain active relationships with.  So one way to think of social media and its impact on business and society is it sort of enlarges the number of people with which you can maintain some kind of relationship. 

The New York Times coined the term “ambient awareness” that you maintain awareness of these people, but it’s not really a relationship.  It’s something different, but there is contact.  There’s potential for communication that’s enabled by this technology.

Matthew: Sounds a lot like, you know, sales folks would say I’ll ping them to keep us on their radar.

Mike: Right.

Matthew: These are mechanisms that they’re used to that can now be applied in aggregate, as you said.

Mike: Right.  Sales guys understand this intuitively, I think.  But I think as we move into this social CRM space, I think that it’s important to be comfortable with the value of weak ties and not to force them into strong ties.

So if you look at Salesforce.com there’s a massive infrastructure for data collection.  Salesforce.com is hungry for every detail of the person you met at Truck World.  It want phone number, address, all their Twitter ID’s; and there’s this process of sucking all that information into a CRM system and data capture is a big part of the value that conventional CRM systems create. 

When you talk about social CRM, step one is to be comfortable…all I know about this person…

Matthew: Like Ford.

Mike: Yeah, like blue boy on Twitter, and I know that they’re an advocate for Ford and so they serve my interests and I gotta be cool with that.

Matthew: Right.

Mike: To the extent that I’m like grabbing blue boy’s cookies and I’m trying to figure out, I think that’s a road to ruin. 

Matthew: It sounds a lot like the scenario you described at the beginning of the show where you’re at the conference and you’re getting the business cards, and you’re trying to ask for the order and close the deal…

Mike: That’s right.

Matthew: You’re moving beyond the level of trust that you’ve established; you’re extending beyond that and people will reject it.

Mike: That’s right.  I actually think there’s an analog in people that are struggling to apply demographic targeting techniques to social media.  If I have a product that appeals to men 18 to 24, I think of it that way; it’s kind of engrained in us as marketers that if I sell Doritos, that’s who I’m talking to.  In social media I have the ability to talk to people who like Doritos. 

Matthew: Yep.

Mike: Or people who like snack chips; and if one of them happens to be an 80-year old woman in Poughkeepsie, then so be it.  They’re a snack chip eater.  So the notion of targeting, we’ve had all these sort of demographic proxies for the people you want to talk to.

Matthew: Right, because there was no way of knowing.  You had to market in mass.

Mike: That’s right.  So if you can shed some of that baggage and reaching out to the right people in social media is a simple matter of listening to what people have to say and looking for people who have the problem your product solves; or, alternatively, putting content out there that is useful to those people and letting them come to you. 

So I think that, again, to come back to your question, I do see tremendous value in managing these weak ties.  They’re incredibly valuable to an organization, but I think part of doing that effectively in the social space means being comfortable letting go of some of the proxies for value that we all bring with us from the broadcast space.

Matthew: Well we have a question that came in I’d like to get to before we wrap up, this comes from Line Abo [?], does social media demand greater rigor regarding targeting appropriate audience versus throwing out content and seeing what sticks?  So do we think more about before we act?  You know, should we say this message at this time or is it more about feeding the beast and just keep that contact going?

Mike: I think that’s it’s important to have a contact strategy and I think that the nature of kind of figuring out what content you should be publishing is really the process of thinking back of the needs of the user, of the person you aspire to talk with.

So if you say to yourself, OK, my organization — you know, every organization has some footprint of content that they can produce and there’s a range of different things, different strategies that they have — and out there is a person that I want to talk to and that person has a range of problems and is interested in a range of information.

In the diagram of those two things, what the overlap?  If you can focus your energies on producing content in that space, then I think that a) you’re gonna attract the right kind of person to your content, and b) build a relationship with them over time because you’re helping to solve their problem. 

Matthew: Excellent.  Thank you for the question.  And I think on that note, I’ll say that that’s all the time we have for now, but I wanted to thank you again for being on the show, Mike.  I learned a lot which is always a good show when we can end with everyone learning something. 

You can always leave us feedback.  We’re always looking for feedback.  Go to permissiontv.com/itunes to leave us your feedback as a review.

Mike, I will assume that you’re gonna rush back home and leave us a five star rating.  You can always follow us online.  I’m at msmamet on Twitter and you can also follow permissiontv on Twitter. 

Mike, how can people connect with you after the show?

Mike: Scalableintimacy.com is my blog and I am at MikeTrap on Twitter and would love to hear from you all.

Matthew: Great.  Next Thursday is September 17 and we have C. C. Chapman whose  partner at the Advance
Guard and I’m looking forward to picking his brain.  So stay tuned for that.  Thanks everybody.  Have a great week.  Thanks again, Mike, I appreciate having you on the show.  We’ll see you next week everybody at 3PM.  Bye, bye.