Back from the iDi conference in the US, Ian Hughes reports that even big brands are having to learn to stop shouting and start listening.

At the recent iDi Marketers Forum in New York, I was lucky enough to hear a series of talks by a number of companies, that all pointed to the same issue.

The first talk was by a lady from IBM, who was talking about how to do SEO and SEM on a global basis. The process was supposed to be relatively simple: make sure you achieve the highest page rank possible for each of your websites for each of the search terms you are interested in.

Can’t be too complicated for a giant like IBM. But it turned out they had a really big competitor that was getting in the way. How could they thwart this company that was putting lots of different links on Google and spoiling their ability to get up the search rankings? Who was this competitor?  

Oracle? Microsoft?  

No, it was IBM. They found that different divisions were controlling their own micro sites and, as a result, they were effectively competing with themselves. Take an issue like Environmentally Friendly Servers. You might have a hardware team looking to sell servers; you might have a service team trying to sell a hosted server. Because there was no consistency of focus, the thing was a mess.

And then Xerox started to talk about how you use cross channel communication including print and online for organisations such as the Maine tourist board and others.  Again, the issue seemed to be not so much the objective, but the fact that all the different internal owners needed to get themselves lined up.

What’s going on here is that ‘synchronicity’ is having to be developed where you would least expect it. When Jung first coined the term, he meant if two things were unlikely to occur together by chance, then ‘synchronicity’ is happening.

It would seem that what was unlikely to happen by chance was two different parts of the same organisation talking to each other. Servers are servers and hosting is hosting. They can’t possibly compete, right?

It’s an age-old adage this whole ‘see the world through your customers eyes’ stuff.  

And yet here are big, clever companies like IBM and Xerox finally beginning to learn it.

They learned little lessons like not starting a conversation in French but then switching to English, because you just weren’t ready for the French customer wanting to know more.  

They learned that if you have an offer that’s focused at one market and the SEO links to the page of another market then customers can become confused (especially if you are offering differential pricing!).

In short, they learned about how their customers saw them. It’s schoolboy stuff, really, but it was refreshing to hear it.

Understanding communications

At the other end of the spectrum was Martha Stewart, speaking at the co-locating TWTRCON conference.

Now admittedly, IBM’s market cap is $160bm and Martha’s is only $640m, but for me, Martha ‘got it’: she understood marketing and communications. She understands that it is her and her brand that meant everything.  

She talked about how she limits herself to tweeting five minutes a day, she talked about how powerful her blog is. And she talked about how ‘fraidy cat’ other CEOs are about tweeting.  They do the obligatory: “Hi, this is my first tweet” and then hand it over to the PR team.

What was also interesting about Martha is that she isn’t afraid to have her own style.  She admitted that she doesn’t use punctuation and SHE DOESNT MIND IF PEOPLE WRITE TO HER ALL IN CAPS WITH SPELLING MISTAKES WHATS THE POINT IN WASTING TIME IN COMMUNICATING NOE I HAVENT HAD AN EMAIL FROM MARTHER BUT I COULD IMAGEINE THAT IT MIGHT BE TOUGH TO READ.

I am going to stop that; it’s giving me a headache.

Our own corporate experience with tweeting is that our number of followers has increased 50 per cent since we stopped pressing the transmit button and started prompting a response. Since we stopped shouting and started listening.  

Since we realised it’s not about us. It’s about them. The customers . . . the reader . . . just like you.

You see, I can write the cleverest article in the world BUT if you don’t ‘get it’, if you don’t get something from it, then I am wasting our time.

With a market cap of $164bn IBM has just learned that lesson. Of course the accountants and the MBAs won’t like it but, hey! They don’t pay the bills!

Have you asked your customers what they think? They ‘get’ synchronicity, because they don’t see the world the way you do, in nice convenient silos. They point a laser through your corporate culture to pick out what they want to buy, not what you want to sell. If the two meet, BINGO! If they don’t, well, there’s always another seller. 

Ian Hughes is managing director, Consumer Intelligence. Email: ianh@consumerintel.com   Twitter: ianchughes  Facebook: ianchughes   And on LinkedIn.