You are right, the control model is becoming redundant. Power is shifting from brand owners to brand users. Almost everything that worked in the old world, doesn’t work in the social media world. That’s why it is a bit tricky

First, I enjoyed your story a lot — great meaning. Instead of characterizing the early researchers as “wrong” or “foolish”, I think this is an excellent illustration of fundamental learning in action. We start with what we know (or think we know…) then test. When things go wrong, we adjust our thinking, move up one level, then repeat. There’s nothing wrong (in my opinion) with a good-faith trial that fails.

Second, I’m just learning to “trust the tribe” through social media. From my point of view, as well as that of my Clients, the issue is one of control. In traditional “push/interruption” marketing, we were in total control of the output (or at least, that’s what we thought…). We controlled the message and the media. We controlled the timing, frequency and intensity. Then we measured our results and adjusted the mix to try to improve the outcomes. Then we SOLD, SOLD, SOLD! Features, Advantages, BENEFITS! Again, we controlled the message and delivery.

How did today’s managers rise to the top? Through exercising control over people, resources and processes to achieve results. Control has been learned and consistently reinforced. It’s internalized and “known.” We all love to “be in control.” In fact, don’t we demean someone who’s “out of control”?

Now, it seems to me, the “new” social/community architecture reverses the locus of control. The implications are clear: You (your brand, your offer) has to be relevant and meaningful to somebody. You have to matter in some way to someone. If you don’t, you’ll be ignored. If you try to push your message through, you’ll be ignored.

In other words, you have to give up control to the tribe (thanks to Seth Godin for the metaphor). Today it’s necessary to be proactively reactive.

To be relevant and meaningful, it’s critical to understand in detail and depth your intended user, their life, and the “job” they’re trying to do (i.e., be customer-centric). There’s an excellent (if somewhat dated now) article “Get Inside the Lives of Your Customers” by Patricia Seybold at Harvard Business Review (I found it on Amazon) that helps describe this process.

It’s a new (marketing) world today — one where the community has control and the supplier has to work very hard to tune in and satisfy Customer needs, wants and demands. It’s marketing’s version of the old Trust exercise: “fall back into your partner’s arms — they’ll catch you…” No more “push” — hello “pull.”

//Richard Randolph

Hence – the only way forward, I think, is to demonstrate the generic link between a given social media “state of health” and a given level of customer engagement (possibly Net Promoter Score would be a good metric here) – and then actually develop metrics that measure an organisation’s state of social media health.

How bout measuring results based on how many new customers we gained? Or how many new email addresses we captured…ads we sold, etc.

Are our sales growing, are they flat, or are they declining? To me, that is the ultimate metric of any marketing program. The rest is just chairs on the Titanic’s deck.

Jim