Proactive or Preemptive Relationship Management (How the Domino's Fiasco Could Have Averted)

By now many of you have either seen or heard about the infamous YouTube video that was posted by two Domino's employees, and the response video that was posted by the company's US President. This begs a curious investigation into what crisis or issue management really means, and the major difference between reactive positioning, and proactive or preemptive relationship management.

In watching the employee-posted video, if you put aside the sheer idiocy and disregard for human decency, you can also see a clear desire to self-express. The female employee even qualifies this at the beginning by saying how bored she is. The other male employee, a gay man, makes a couple of references to his sexual orientation and makes it clear that he is frustrated in his own way. Does this excuse their actions? Certainly not. But it does make a case for the notion that these impostors could have just as easily been evangelists if they were truly empowered to do so. By simply giving them a voice.

When you look at the internal branding efforts from companies like American Express (OPEN), Pfizer (Health Solutions) and Dell (several programs), you realize that empowering employees to express themselves gives the brand unprecedented access to new levels of sentiment. Further, when you look at the fact that people are thrilled just to be a part of brand exchanges, you also realize that negative perceptions can be reshaped through transparent conversation. For example, over 95% of all WOM conversations, no matter how negative the sentiment was going in, inevitably turn towards the positive by simply acknowledging the consumer or employee.

So, what does this really mean? It means a few things:

- Give employees and consumers an intranet and extranet platform to speak their minds before a crisis like Domino's happens; you can respond accordingly, and best case scenario, you can develop them into superusers and "uber" brand evangelists.

- Filter out "deconstructive" elements from sheer negative ones, and keep those touch-points alive throughout ongoing conversations so that brand perception can build up its own equity in an authentic way.

- Give the public "shades of the bad"; acknowledgment and accountability breeds credibility; like people, brands are imperfect and are entitled to act imperfectly, provided they own up to it when they do.

- Use a debate context within the organization - opposing sides - to enlist and engender points of view on the outside. Arguing is good, provided there are solutions available.

So, outfit your employees with cameras. Teach them to blog. Encourage them to tweet. Give them channels of expression that allow them to not only share their insights, but build community ties around them. That way, as a brand, it's likely you'll never find yourself having to apologize for something you didn't advocate in the first place.

Suggestioneering

An incredible phenomenon has emerged and is evolving thanks in large part to folks like HP, Dell, Starbucks, Oracle, Apple & Network Solutions. It's called "Suggestioneering" (registered trademark).

Suggestioneering is product development in which communities of people, or key influencers, gather to share ideas around a product and make recommendations relating to its scalability, promotion and/or utility. In a nutshell, you make suggestions to your peers, or people you don't necessarily know but have something in common with, about the products you use, would like to use, or know about. These could be mash-up concepts, or quite simply basic product ideas. You become the point of primary influence based on your behavioral traits and your content preferences. 

This is already happening within social media. These communities are rapidly taking shape, and suggestioneering merely formalizes and aggregates this community activation to the extent that the information you seek, and the products you endorse, are tied directly to quantifiable experiences you've had, or indirectly been a part of. Essentially, you ascribe an experience around or tied to a product that gives it the ultimate contextual relevance and utility. That experiential data is then indexed and organized in such a way that enables the search process to deliver suggestions to you and your peer group instantaneously.

Here's where things get really interesting. Technographic analysis is bringing us to a new level of targeting. Peer to peer relationships are forming between people who have profiles that were previously considered to be unlikely or unmatchable, and are now driven by common interest variables that not only activate the intent to act (such as making a purchase), but demonstrate actions that supercede age or economics. This means we have opportunities to mine powerful data without having to violate individual privacy. All we have to do is ask for information, and do so in an intelligent and aspirational way. Social media, in combination with other forms of innovative media, communications methods and technologies, allow us to have this access.

One such combination of social media and digital communication sharing is, and will continue to take shape in the form of, the semantic web (artificial intelligence). This is where language or rhetoric, and its choices in use, will create and determine new variables for suggestioneering. The remarkable thing is that these variables will constantly change...because they have to. And want to. This means that your words and subsequent actions are indexed and reconfigured to that you not only build your own sphere of influence, but that this sphere will mash up and cross over into other spheres of influence, providing the most qualitative, as well as quantifiable, information sharing experience imaginable. Just imagine if ex-New York Times columnist and linguistics philosopher William Safire had this kind of information to analyze, tell stories and create dialogues with.

Stay tuned as I expand on this topic with friend and colleague Jon Samsel, SVP of Online Marketing at Bank of America...