VisibleGains Live Episode 44 – Larry Weber Video

[3:35]

Matthew: First question is, how important is it to an organization, a b-to-b organization more specifically, to embrace transparency online these days?

Larry: Huge. Not only should businesses be transparent but they need to be completely open with their customer base because they will not retain the customers and they won’t get new customers unless they are honest, direct and build conversations around what they do well. I’m amazed that I still go into companies and we’ll go all the way up to the C-level and the CEO or this CMO will say “”you mean somebody can say a bad thing about my product or service?”" and I’ll say yeah. And those conversations are happening anyway, why not have them on your site? That way you can answer them, say “”hey, it’s already fixed!”" if there’s a problem and move on. But transparency’s huge in the first three phases of the web there was a lot of aliases, people hiding out, we have all the famous stories of that one PR firm that was faking names to help Wal-Mart to have a better image. Then there’s the CEO from Whole Foods who that the alias that was attacking his competitor, and that just can’t happen anymore. We’ve gotta be open, transparent and let the web self-police itself.

[6:38]

Matthew: Talk a little bit more about what you mean by “”trust equity”".

Larry: Trust equity is a concept I’ve had that actually works in the real world too, the more you are open and honest you almost get points for that in customer’s minds so that if something does go wrong you’ll probably get the benefit of the doubt, right? Because you’ve just built up so much equity over time that a customer’s going to say “”hey, you know what, everybody makes a mistake”" and you were honest about it and you fixed it and that’s terrific. That’s what we need. So I think it’s about building equity, trust. I also think that it plays into a whole strategy around the web. People can’t think of the web as a channel anymore and that’s especially business-to-business. It is not brochures/advertising web. You have two strategies, that is your real life strategy and your digital strategy. And you’ve gotta understand that reputation and brand are all intertwined, and so is influence and trust equity plays into all of that.

[8:00]

Matthew: Talk about, just a little bit, what you’re seeing how those three things are coming together or already have come together and what that means for an organization.

Larry: Branding, in the past was always bought in a lot of ways so it was a lot of advertising. It was a lot of one-way broadcast messaging. Brand today is the dialogue you have with your customer or the customer base. The better the dialogue, the better the brand. The weaker the dialogue, the weaker the brand. So that’s conversation. Reputation comes out of the conversations that you’re having with your customers, potential customers, partners, etcetera. And influence comes out of the brand and the reputation working together to influence opinion. It’s my view that the future of marketing especially, no matter who you are is around the influence of opinion through content. That can be funny content, we can have funny stuff on the web, it’s ok. Serious stuff. But you’re only going to influence and change people’s minds and get a sale by, again, leveraging your openness, your trust, your directness and combining the concepts of brand, reputation, and influence. Which again, in the past 50 to 75 years were separated and they were owned by different people in the organization. That brings on a piece I don’t cover as much in the book, and I’m probably going to do that in this next book that I’m writing but it’s about how we organize. I’m still going to companies that don’t have a VP of content or a director of social media or a head of analytics and this kind of stuff. We’re still very much organized like we were in 1960, which is sort of silly.

[10:05]

Matthew: In the second major section of the book, called “”Shape Your Reputation”" you advocate for implementing what you call creative approaches to promoting dialogue. What are the steps required to do that? What are some examples that you’ve seen? Maybe talk a little from the book on effective dialogue.

Larry: First of all, everything’s driven by content. People wanna talk about things that are of interest to them. The reason the social web has taken off, and I believe is going to have more impact over time than television has had on our society as it matures, I think the social web will have that kind of impact even more. So is the, especially because of the visual on this and its nature, you have to develop and create great content so that people talk about it. Obama was very good at this when he ran for President, and I talk about that in the book. About wherever you were if you signed up you could get on your mobile device where Obama was, what he was talking about that day. If you wanted to hear the whole speech or just part of his speech you could get that. Then you could talk with other people that had interest in that same part of that speech. So there was a dialogue created by his speaking, his whereabouts, where that goes. There’s a great site for Sony called Words Move Me right now. Now Sony wants to not take all the heat from Kindle anymore. They think they have a better device than Kindle for a digital reader and the site Words Move Me is by Sony but it lets people like you and me put quotes of our favorite books on it and it’s all categorized by different categories whether that be a romance or business book or whatever. You meet other people, you talk about it, it’s passionate and it creates those dialogues that are so important to keeping people there. In the future we’re going to be measuring this kind of marketing about an engagement time, around downloads, around how much you participate, etcetera. I think it’s really important. I also use the example which I think is important for everybody to know because I think the future of all marketing, especially b-to-b is going to be about creating experiences and environments. And if you’ve been on Amazon lately, even though it’s a consumer experience I think it’s very relevant to businesses. You’re gonna say “”Larry:, get a life”". I was on Amazon for an hour and a half the other night. While I was there I got a permission-based email that said “”Dear Mr. Weber, as you know a great American author we lost earlier this year, John Updike, we noticed you bought a few of his books and we just want to let you know we’re going to post some videos Tuesday at six o’clock. Some rare shots of the author reading from his books.”" So I go, ok, that’s cool, right? So I go on, I make a drink and sit down at my computer, I watch these videos then I notice there’s other videos of other authors, I go watch those. Then what do I do, I go read some reviews of Sticks and Stones, I was mad at a guy from Taipei, who gave me only three stars instead of five stars. Then I wrote a review of Malcolm’s new book because I wondered why you can write tipping point three times in a row. And I bought six books. Four for myself and two for friends. So what did I do for an hour and a half? I was absorbed in an environment that produced commerce, that produced sharing, that produced content, everything. So that is what is marketing. That’s where we’re headed.

[16:30]

Matthew: My next question to you is if the goal is to create content of value, what does that mean, and how do we make it emotive? How do we inspire passion and interest, especially in this b-to-b setting which I’m sure you’ve heard a million times over that it’s just not that sexy, it’s just not that interesting. Is that true?

Larry: No. Because people are still people. People have emotive qualities all around them, by emotive I don’t mean crying, it’s laughing, selling, buying. Something that creates or stirs something in you. There’s phases of the web. I’m lucky enough, being as old as I am, I was lucky enough to be around when we did all the PR for HTML when Sir Tim Berners-Lee laid it on the Internet in early 1993. That was phase one of the web. We literally had business-to-business companies come to us with stacks of brochures and said just put this on the web. Second phase was the browser came around, that changed everything. So we were transactional. Third phase, social. 1997 or 1998, Friendster comes out. You start to see social, but social, believe it or not started in software companies. If any of you that are out there work for a software company knows, that usergroups were very important to the starts of most software companies. That was the first physical element of a social network around business-to-business. And what was the content? The content was how good the product was, how bad the product was, what it was good for, what would you change, what would you not change? That to me is emotive because it helps you shape a better product, shape a better customer set, and that’s just going to be a win-win situation. The fourth phase of the web which is starting right now is really a highly video-rich media, interactive video kind of world that’s going to change every way we present. It doesn’t mean text is going to go away completely. But I believe we’re going to have increasingly more video, more rich media that will try to sell, communicate, connect with you. It doesn’t have to be fancy video, it just has to be understanding, it has to be clear, it has to be content that’s relevant to your job. You will win, you will get people to watch that and comment on it and work with you around that content. I see a world where it’s going to be highly visualized, especially when you look at 2020 which is just about ten years from now, fifty percent of the workforce is gonna be 30 years old. Now you gotta go, these are going to be people highly video oriented, only know the web, complete digital natives, that is going to be the only way we’re going to communicate. You’re not going to have any newspapers in four years, you’re not going to have any nightly news in five years, and you’re not going to have any trade publications in two years. So you better start visualizing everything.

[24:20]

Matthew: The final section of the book is the “”Tools and Tactics”" where you lead off with the chapter on YouTube and this kind of gets back to a little bit where you just talk about, great quote, “”every organization needs a more video-oriented culture in order to thrive in world 2.0″” and that kind of feeds into what you were just saying about using it to talk to your employees, use it to talk to your shareholders. Use it to talk to anyone. Is it a medium that is important?

Larry: YouTube’s the most underrated social platform that we have right now. It will continue to blow out, it will get organized, it’s not just about funny videos that we watch and viral videos, it’s going to have more corporate and business-to-business communications. Even their gadgets are much more controllable now. Companies should be building libraries of visual, the way their products are being used, how they’re solving problems, throughout leadership, all these things in a more visual manner. That happens to be my favorite chapter in the book. The “”YouTube Juggernaut”" is what it’s called. I couldn’t be more higher on that, again, that use of the visualization of the web, and when he says world 2.0, that’s my encapsulation of where we’re moving in a business world. As we come out of this recession I believe there’s going to be a huge business renaissance that I think we all can partake in. Some big brands are going to die, some big brands are going to get bigger, and some new brands are going to come out of nowhere and they will not have done one dime of advertising.

[26:33]

Matthew: We did get one question from Janine Swenson who says, how to manage micro-segmenting without being overwhelmed by too much information?

Larry: You have to really balance and prioritize your micro segments. Java developers and SAP is a pretty defined area. You have to build your content around that. You have to prioritize and make sense of your audience. That’s why I say that you have to [coughing] prioritize the micro segments that are going to most effect your business. That’s why I say in the book you have to do a constituency map first, before you do any of this, so that you can prioritize the customers or constituencies that you’re going to build content around. I would not pick more than four to start with so that you can control it.

[28:00]

Matthew: We’ve got a couple of minutes left. What would you like to talk about with the final few minutes?

Larry: I think the final few minutes is that business-to-business has a huge opportunity right now to first explore where social media is evolving in their categories and really to start to brand themselves as the solution and the thought leaders in their categories. All you’ve got to do is understand that you have to organize for that properly, it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money, that it’s content driven, and that you just gotta get going. You know you’re going to make mistakes, but that’s okay as long as you’re open, transparent, and direct with what you do.