At Web 2.0 in San Francisco to hear a panel from Peter Kim, Charlene Li, and Jeremiah Owyang.

Failure Point 1: How do you get your culture involved?

Jeremiah says “this is one of biggest issues that enterprise face in terms of embracing social media”. Charlene..”Culture change requires big guns”. Focus on customer satisfaction and existing corporate goals and use social channels to support it. Models of social media embrace at organizations: “The Tire” - outside in, “The Tower” - PR or Comms drive, and “The Hub & Spoke”.

Failure Point 2: How do you make campaigns work?

Failure here is in the fact that we treat it or call it a campaign in the 1st place. This is an ongoing relationship with customers not just a campaign. Long term businesses needs to change - transformation issue again. The bottom line is that customers in the social graph want relationships and value added interaction. If a community is built, interactive, and value-added you can have a campaign but it can’t be turn on or off. Marketing needs to evolve to better include customer experience and on going community management.

Failure Point 3:How do I measure success?

Many marketers continue to use wrong metrics for success. Measure where you are, were you’ve been, where you are going. Like that. Why measure and what are you trying to accomplish, say Charlene. You need also look to the ways that message your existing channel to some extent. Pete measurement in marketing is huge fail irrespective of social media marketing. Marketing needs to have better P&L and measurements. Interesting show hands about number folks that really aren’t measuring it. Amazing. They will fail and lose funding.

Failure Point 4: Does any of this matter?

Motrin example used - many in audience were unaware of the the example. Surprising…and that failure will happen. Realize that and learn from it. It does and will increasingly grow. We are only getting started but many are still unaware of the channel, the content, and its impact. Pete mentioned that we need to remember the early days of e-commerce and where we are now.

Great job and questions from the audience. And Visible Technologies got a nice shout out that we help companies with listening and engagement.

Blake Cahill
Visible Technologies