Interview with Geoff Livingston Author of Marketing In The Round
06/11/2012
It is my pleasure to introduce you to the co-author of Marketing In The Round .. my friend Geoff Livingston.
One line in Geoff''s bio tells all you need to know to understand the man behind this newly release book. "He brings people together, virtually and physically to affect change and achieve higher knowledge."
In his third book, co-authored with Gini Dietrich, the focus is on integrating traditional and new media marketing elements and breaking down those stifling internal silos.
Diva Marketing/Toby: Let’s start this off with “Why this book?” Seriously, why does the world of marketing need this book now?
Geoff Livingston: When Gini Dietrich and I focused on multichannel integration, our logic centered on delivering ROI and outcomes for social media. So much of today’s conversation is about how marketers can get results from social. To us, that lack of results has more to do with siloed communications and a failure to integrate all marketing disciplines together. Integration also includes adding hard lead generation-oriented metrics from direct and advertising to the mix.
Even though that was a year, ago the problem persists. Two recent studies from the CMO Council and the CMO Survey showed that less than 10% of lead marketers are running well integrated digital campaigns [Geoff's post - What CEOs Want: Better Social Integration & Anaylics]. Integrating marketing and general understanding of diverse disciplines has become a lost art.
Diva Marketing/Toby: So many options. So little time, money and people. From your perspective, what is the most significant challenge facing the 21st century marketer?
Geoff Livingston: Without question, it’s understanding the modern stakeholder’s media experience.
Marketers think like media tools, literally. It’s as if we were media hammers. How can I get people to use my nail? How can I drive the nail home? But in reality, people walk around an entire media structure in which there are many nails, dry wall, support beams, screws, hex nuts, roofing, lights, tiles, etc. etc.
- Until we stop marketing from our perspective, but from the perspective of the true media landscape as seen by our customers, including mobile, 21st century marketers will struggle.
Diva Marketing/Toby: The visual model of Marketing In The Round is built with “marketing” as the center and let’s call them marketing functional areas (advertising, web/digital, content, direct mail, etc.) as spokes from the center. Based on your model, how do you define “marketing” that makes marketing unique from the functional tenants.
Geoff Livingston: The ability to build, maintain and administrate holistic communications and interaction strategy for an organization and its stakeholders.
Toby Bloomberg/Diva Marketing: Wondering... where do customer care, research and sales fit into the model?
Geoff Livingston: They definitely fit in frequently. When we present the Round concept live you’d see them brought into meetings frequently. They don’t usually end up at weekly meetings of the marketing group, but are an integral part of the larger customer experience, and as such, they end up attending CMO meetings almost every month if not more frequently. Ideally, everyone is closely seated together to help foster further integration.
Diva Marketing/Toby: Sounds like you’re restructuring the marketing department. Who leads the charge of Marketing In The Round if not the CMO? What skills/talents should that person have to make it work?
Geoff Livingston: It is the CMO.
That person should have a couple of skill sets. First, they are an administrator and a manager. Their job is to facilitate the marketing function from a resource and operational perspective, incentivize what had been here-to-fore silos to work together, and lead the department in its interface with other departments so that marketing acts as a networked component of the larger enterprise (as opposed to its own silo). Secondly, that person is usually a marketer themselves, and as such they need to have graduated from tactician to a strategist who can understand the value of branding, strategic approaches and tactics.
Diva Marketing/Toby: One of my favorite lines in the book is –“.. you lend that content to and
community to outlying networks ..” (p 24) The question then becomes is what’s the source of the content and community?
Geoff Livingston: Usually, it’s the company. If the company is successful in its groundswell and top down approaches you’re seeing true customer word of mouth take place and they start developing content. Stakeholder generated content creates brand and product advocacy, as well as (hopefully) inspiring media stories, speaking engagements, analyst reports and other types of traditional professional content produced independently of the company.
Diva Marketing/Toby: Coming from a research background, I appreciate the time you dedicated to consumer insights .. both traditional and social media. It seems as though the concepts of “listening” and “monitoring” had different meanings in the book. How are you defining concept of “listening” and that of “monitoring?”
Geoff Livingston: It may be an issue of semantics on our part. They are closely related.
Listening occurs before, during and after a marketing effort. But in many ways it’s the harnessing of data – big data if you would. I think hearing is the ability to decipher that data into meaningful and regular intelligence. Monitoring to me is the practice of hearing that data intelligence formally and regularly as a company. Now, that’s my opinion based on the question. Gini may have a different take on that.
Diva Marketing/Toby: I really liked the charts, worksheets and resources that you and Gini integrated throughout the book. One of the Pros under social media (p27) indicated “inexpensive form of sponsoring messages on the social platforms.” Does this refer to “blogger relations” and are you advocating paying bloggers for their posts?
Geoff Livingston: I don’t advocate paying bloggers to blog on their site. I do advocate paying people to intelligently interact with bloggers to provide useful content ideas and guest posts wherever possible.
I pay bloggers for their posts on Inspiring Generosity. Getting great content for your site requires paying talent, in my opinion. I hate people that ask me to blog for free consistently without any clear value for my effort. It’s the primary reason why I stopped blogging for Mashable. The effort outweighed the value.
Diva Marketing/Toby: Several different dashboards ideas are presented. While I think dashboards are a great way to track and analyze do it right is a time resource/commitment. If a company can only manage One dashboard what would be your suggestion?
Geoff Livingston: There is no silver bullet, unfortunately. Whatever a company selects they will end up customizing it if they want meaningful analytics for their monitoring program. Google Analytics, Radian6, Hubspot, Marketo, and Eloqua is where I’d start depending on budget, from free to full enterprise.
Diva Marketing/Toby: In your travels Geoff, what organizations did you find that were doing it well?
Geoff Livingston: Dell, the American Red Cross are the obvious ones.
Procter & Gamble does a lot better than people give them credit for. They are a brand management organization in the CMO sense, using agencies to execute tactics. I think they get social in the sense of when an agency or partner is doing a good job for them, and when they are not.
Google is doing really well, even the + network isn’t (or maybe it’s just bad press). Google clearly listens to feedback, and it seems to me they are becoming a social enterprise.
Etsy and Five Guys are brilliant at word of mouth marketing. Chrysler has proven itself to be a savvy advertising company in its current incarnation. And Apple is probably the best all around integrated multichannel marketing organization out there.
Diva Marketing/Toby: As is the tradition on Diva Marketing the last questions is yours to take and run with as you would like. What would you tell our community about integrated marketing in the round?
Geoff Livingston: This isn’t rocket science. Our book is not going to teach you black belt jujitsu. It is about the basic fundamentals of marketing together as an integrated multichannel organization. No matter how fancy your marketing strategy and tactical execution is, if you aren’t blocking and tackling, you will likely lose.
It’s a reminder about what worked before social, and what still works in the current digital marketing era, teamwork, and thinking together as collective communications team. That’s integrated strategies.
Continue the conversation with Geoff!
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Bloggy Disclaimer: I was provided with a complementary copy of Marketing In The Round. All opinions are 100% mine.
