Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

A Meta Review of a Meta Review of My Review of Return on Relationship

Ted Rubin and Kathryn Rose wrote a book.

I wrote a book review.

Chuck Kent wrote a review of my book review, comparing it to a review by Drew Neisser.

Really, I just wanted to write a meta review of the meta review of my review of Ted's book just to write the headline above and use the image in this post. Linking to this meta review within this meta review is particularly egregious. You are welcome to keep clicking that link just to see if it ever takes you anywhere else. (Oh wait, I don't sell ads on this blog, so you won't do anything for my CPMs.)

To add a bit more to the conversation though, I'll add a few thoughts that go behind the scenes of penning the review of ROR:

1) I thought I'd just do Ted a favor and skim the book and write a little note about how everyone should go buy it. That was the actual original plan.

2) Plans changed. I wound up getting ahead of schedule with some work projects. And then it got really, really cold in New York and I didn't want to leave the apartment. And then, most importantly, I started reading ROR and found it engaging enough to read and not skim. That led me to start taking a few notes and do something I had no intention of doing: critiquing it.

3) By that logic, if climate change was really just about global warming and it was a balmy day in New York, I probably would have been walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and not getting around to writing a book review.

4) Taking the logic far enough, someone can probably blame Al Gore for inventing the internet and/or climate change, and thus Al Gore is the butterfly that flapped its wings and is responsible for Chuck Kent's meta review. If you play Six Degrees of Al Gore, it will thus lead to Chuck Kent.

5) If you play Six Degrees of Chuck Kent, it will in turn lead to Al Gore. And/or a butterfly.

6) Wait, where was I going with this?

7) Oh, right. 

8) I don't write many book reviews here. When I do, they're often not about business books. It's because the past few years, I have averaged reading more than 1.5 books per week, and well under 10% are in the business genre. Some wind up being relevant professionally without being specifically about my job, such as Your Brain at Work, which is one of the best books I have read in the past few years, and possibly ever. In the past few years, I have probably read more books about Baruch Spinoza or Pablo Escobar (those are for two VERY different reasons) than I have books that are directly connected to my job. 

9) It's quite difficult writing book reviews when I know the author. I wrote a review many years ago, not long after I started blogging, and was far more critical than I was about ROR. I still run into the author. I know he still remembers my review. He is quite good natured about it, but for years I felt awkward about it, and he did make a point of introducing me to someone at a conference by saying, "This is David, the guy who panned my book." I could do without more of those situations.

10) Chuck writes, "...My point is to stop and examine the clubbiness, ego-baiting and intellectually lazy habits that many of us (myself included), give in to in book reviews, blog posts and general content creation." It feels good to not be considered among the intellectually lazy in this one, and I appreciate Chuck's take. I still can't imagine I'll be reviewing too many books. Not all authors are as gracious as Ted and Kathryn, and if I ever get around to writing a book, after putting so much effort into it, I'm not sure how much I'd welcome any criticism - constructive or otherwise.

11) If I do write a book and it isn't universally loved and acclaimed, I will have to remember to do one thing: blame Al Gore.

Book Review: Return on Relationship by Ted Rubin and Kathryn Rose

Ted Rubin was kind enough to share a copy of his new book Return on Relationship, which he co-authored with Kathryn Rose. I’ve known Ted for years and have learned quite a bit from him, whether through seeing him present at several conferences or catching up with him one on one. He is undoubtedly one of the great leaders in social media marketing, so I was curious to see what he put together in this book – or perhaps the non-fiction version of a novella (is there a word for that?). I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Kathryn yet but hope to change that soon enough.

The book is a quick read and a useful handbook, especially for those newer to social media marketing. It doesn’t go too deep into any particular aspect but is a good survey course when it comes to using social media to build loyalty, connect with content creators, and bolster customer service. One area where it struggles is to distinguish relationship marketing from social media marketing, so those who are already current enough with how to use social media for marketing purposes won’t find too much that’s new in this book.

Undoubtedly, there are thousands and thousands of people who will find this book a tremendous resource. There’s little to argue with overall. However, I do think they can add a bit of clarity in a few areas, and rather than just offer a love fest to Ted’s latest work, I’ll share a few thoughts on areas where my perspective differs with what the authors write:

Backward or Forward?

Rubin and Rose write, “The fact that building relationships has only recently become the focal point of marketing seems a bit backward, as relationships should always be the focus of our interactions.”

That seems to miss the point that digital media, and specifically the past decade where social media usage has achieved the necessary scale, has enabled relationship marketing to happen. In the 1980s, when I was a grade school student, I wrote letters to some major corporations to alert them about product defects, such as a promised pack of bubble gum missing from a cereal box, and I often received letters in return, but that was hardly an efficient way to build relationships for the consumer or brand. Similarly, direct mail marketers accumulated a vast amount of data on their customers, but direct mail is hardly the best way for most marketers to regularly engage in personalized communication with thousands or millions of consumers.

Not Just a Social ID

They also refer to “building your Social ID,” touching on five areas in particular:

1. Responsiveness
2. Thought leadership
3. Content creation
4. Relevance
5. Demeanor

It’s a great roundup of what can impact how a brand is perceived online. Yet by calling it a Social ID, the authors risk encouraging readers to create a Social ID that is separate from the brand identity. If Time Warner Cable is incredibly responsive online – especially to someone like me with a larger than average Twitter follower count or Klout score – but can’t string a coherent sentence together over the phone, the Social ID  means nothing. Or consider whether the brand stands for thought leadership. If so, social media can be an enabler of it, and offer new distribution channels for those leading thoughts. But if the brand comes off as a thought leader online and its products lag behind, it will lose its credibility. I have experienced this first-hand at my agency, 360i. When I was one of a number of people working on our Social Marketing Playbook that we released in 2009, we knew it only mattered if we were doing some of the best work in social media marketing. Otherwise, we would have risked alienating our clients. Thoughts mean little without actions to back them up.

Measuring the Return

This is a short book, but one area where I was hoping for more is in the measurement piece. I was very excited to see this addressed, but it didn’t go nearly far enough, especially when the book’s cover urges readers to “start measuring your ROR.”

Early on in the section, the authors quote Erik Qualman who, when asked about the return on investment (ROI) of social media, retorted, “How do you measure the ROI of your phone?” That reminds me of when Charlene Li wrote in her book Open Leadership, “What is the ROI on your fire insurance policy?” Fair point. But Li, who also co-authored Groundswell, has devoted numerous pages of books and reports to then go on and help businesses actually calculate the ROI of social media.

The ROR chapter ends with a sort of tautology formatted into something resembling a haiku: “Social media drives engagement. Engagement drives loyalty. Loyalty correlates directly to increased sales.” Then it closes with “ROR = ROI.”

There are two problems with this. The first is that social media can do far more and far less than drive engagement. Social media can directly impact loyalty beyond just using proxies like engagement, and social media can at times directly contribute to sales – though it doesn’t need to for it to be effective, most of the time. And social media doesn’t necessarily drive engagement at all. I go to all too many brands’ Facebook pages that post pathetic attempts at drivel and generate practically no engagement whatsoever.

Then there’s the ROR = ROI piece. If that’s it, then I’m really confused. Why read a whole book on ROR if I already know how to calculate ROI? What’s different about ROR? From the Zen koan of an equation, I have no idea. I’d love to see this fleshed out more in a subsequent work.

Post-script:

First, Ted and Kathryn couldn't be more gracious in their reception of the review. My first reaction to Ted over email when I read the book was very simple: "I'm not the target audience." He knew that, but he still encouraged me to read and review the book, and I'm glad I took the time to go through it.

Second, Chuck Kent penned a meta-review of this review, comparing it to one written by another friend of mine and Ted's, Drew Neisser. I've enjoyed reading Drew's writing and meeting up with him over the years, and next time I see him, I'll be sure to ask him more about what he learned from ROR, as I would be surprised if I didn't miss a few gems when reading the book.

Related articles

13 Questions With The Social CMO Ted Rubin: Listening, Relationships, and The Social C-Suite

What's Your #RonR? Five Takeaways from the new book Return on Relationship

10 More Social Marketing Experts Offer Key Advice

50 Thought Provoking Social Media Wishes for 2013

Research Highlights from CES 2013

Getting Return on Relationship: a Book Review

What Mattered at CES for Marketers?

While at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas this month, I spent much of the event mulling over what mattered for marketers. As my master presentation covering the event topped 100 slides, on its way to nearly 200, it was getting out of control. There was so much happening - new technologies embodying underappricated trends, plus a lot that was getting more hype than it deserved. How could I make sense of it all?

While shaving one morning, I ran out of the bathroom and sketched out a messier version of the napkin above, one with an expletive as well. It's the Marketer Matrix, with Relevance to Marketers on the X axis and Awesomeness on the Y axis. Now, much of the show can be distilled to a single slide - albeit a slide that varies for the brand, as one marketer may need to pay a lot of attention to the connected home, while wearable computing is far more relevant for another. 

You can read much more about the Marketer Matrix, including an example of how it works, at 360i's blog.

I also posted slides from the event on Slideshare, and you're free to view and download it there, or just peruse it right here. Let me know if you have any feedback or want more color on anything in it.

CES 2013: The Year of the Connected Brand - Consumer Electronics Show Recap from David Berkowitz

Research Highlights from CES 2013

As I plow through coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show, I've found some useful research on the consumer electronics industry and the discussion around the show. Here are some of my favorite posts. Please share others in the comments or email any other submissions to me at marketersstudio (at) gmail. com. 

* Salesforce Marketing Cloud reviewed the top conversations and hashtags to see what was buzzing and who was doing the buzzing. The presentation's below, and there's also some related data as an infographic.

CES 2013 - Final Social Media Data Report from Salesforce Marketing Cloud

* Peek Analytics has a report on who's tweeting about CES and the demographics of their followers

#Ces hashtag jan 7 10 from PeekAnaltyics

* paidContent reports on TDG research showing that "Pay TV will shrink" for the first time ever (subtract points for the misleading chart that shows the Y-axis starting at 90 rather than 0; it's powerful enough without screwing up the bar chart)

* Keyhole is a new tool to monitor conversations in real-time, and you can get a good sense of what it's about by checking the tweets and top influencers from CES. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor.)

The Best Recaps and Coverage of CES

Now that I'm back from the Consumer Electronics Show, I can finally read about it. Here's a sampling of some of the best, most interesting, and most informative pieces I've read about the show:

* VentureBeat: 10 Things That Blew Our Mind at CES 2013 - yeah, there are some good ones here

* Ad Age: Seeing CES Through the Eyes of Group M's Irwin Gotlieb - one of the titans of the ad industry is also a gadget junkie and even a developer

* NY Times: Smartphones Become Life's Remote Control - 

* TechCrunch: Why CES Matters (for Now) - it's about meeting the lone geniuses trying to make it big

* Jerusalem Post: Levi Shapiro shares 5 themes from this CES

* Business Insider: TVs include facial recognition to recommend content - and soon to personalize ads

* TechCrunch: Why Samsung is the 5th Horseman of Tech

* The Verge: Awards for the Best of CES

* PC Mag: 6 People at CES 2013 Wearing Robotic Cat Ears - next year, all 150,000 attendees will be doing it 

* Digiday: What Agencies Learned at CES. I'm one of four execs included here. Ian Schafer and I seemed to have the same idea (it's hardly the first or last time for that).

* TechCocktail posts 16 Gadgets You Might Actually Buy from CES. I've bought a few of them already and others are on my wish list.

Also: I wrote a piece in Ad Age about "5 Trends Marketers Need to Watch at CES" and then scored the trends a week later.

Share your other favorite recaps in the comments, via email, or on Twitter, and I'll update this with others.

5 Trends Marketers Need to Watch at CES

I've got a new post in Ad Age today: 5 trends marketers need to watch at CES. 

The top 5:

1. TV is no longer the first screen.
2. Touch screens need new types of ads (and inputs).
3. The internet of things expands its social network.
4. As tech titans bruise each other, consumers benefit (greed is good -- for consumers).
5. Forget about product announcements. None of it will matter in February.

There's a lot of color on all of them on Ad Age.

It's the last one that seems to have generated a lot of response on Twitter, and it's the reason I needed to write the post. I noted in the column:

Looking at the 2012 recaps from Huffington Post and CNET, there's practically no correlation between what journalists loved and what consumers bought. The Nokia Lumia 900 was called the best cell phone, but Apple and Samsung were the ones winning market share. Both outlets named the HP Envy Spectre the best laptop, yet the top selling Spectre on Amazon currently ranks at number 586 in the Computers & Accessories category.

Go through those other lists. Google all the coverage. About 10% of it was interesting, and 5% of it was about anything that mattered. 

Check out the rest of the column, and let me know what you think is going to matter for brands. And if you're out at CES, say hi. I'll be easy to find - waiting on taxi and buffet and keynote lines with 140,000 others.

 

 

10 Themes from 2012's Bagels & Beer with Berky

A snapshot of a Bagels & Berky session from Atlanta; yes, the bagels are better in NY, but "Grits with Berky" doesn't have the same ring to it.

I recently shared some highlights of my pet project at 360i on 360i's blog:

At carbohydrate-crazy 360i, a number of us gather every other week late afternoon Wednesday for Beer with Berky and first thing Friday for Bagels with Berky (both abbreviated as BwB). At these sessions, anyone who shows up takes part in discussions about new technologies, media, trends, and industry news, and I – the eponymous Berky – get to serve as host and moderator.

The notes from all of this year’s sessions spanned 36 pages, with hundreds of links and dozens of supporting documents. To give you just a taste of what we’ve covered, here’s a more consolidated version. For the full effect, grab a Guinness or a bagel (or both!) while reading.

My colleague running 360i's blog did such a great job laying out the post that I'll refrain from sharing it entirely here, so check it out and let me know what you think should be a focus in 2013.