“Twenty years from now we’ll look back and say, ‘Gee, telephone numbers were a goofy thing,’” predicts Internetologist Len Hause

Part 1 – download

Part 2 – download
In this Talking Portraits interview, Hause predicts that phone numbers will no longer be needed. After giving a summary of the evolution of telephone numbers—from simple 4-digit numbers accessed through a local exchange to today’s numbers that designate locality, region, state, and nation of origin—Hause describes how content and context (the mode of transmission) are becoming more and more orthogonal (independent of one another).

Given the number of choices we have now, including Internet voice applications that use only name-based addressing, Hause describes how and why the telephone number as we know it will give way to a futuristic persona-based system that allows us to contact one another using a names.

Bio

Len Hause is an Internetologist and founder of MashBrain where he consults on Internet marketing and technology strategies. He was a Fellow of the Technical Staff, Associate of the Science Advisory Board, and Marketing Director at Motorola where he spent more than 30 years in management roles and as an individual contributor. He has been recognized as a pioneer in the adoption of Internet protocols and culture within the Enterprise for collaboration and organizational learning. While working in the semiconductor business, he learned firsthand about the importance of the convergence of the Internet and cell phone technology.

Hause frequently participates on executive, educational, corporate, and government advisory boards and consortia. He is also an active member of Austin’s musical community. He holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University. (more…)

I recently updated my client presentation on the topic How to Do an Opportunity Assesment to Leverage Social Media at a Business. Special thanks to Susan McElhenney and John Rasco at Refreshweb for fine-tuning this.

After reading a Mashable blog post today – Data: What Are the Benefits of Social Media Marketing? — I started wondering how I can continue to refine my conversations with clients about social marketing strategies. Why? Because, according to this survey of marketing folks, Customer Engagement was at the top of the responses: 85%. So what does this mean, really? It the kind of statement that rolls off the tongue easily and sounds comforting to hear. But I think there is a lot of silent genuflecting going on about the fear of cost, fear of staffing, fear of organizational changes and so forth.

Social Engagement, another way of saying Customer Engagement, is a vague topic to discuss. Without some clear direction and leadership in the conversation, the client is often confused to the point of losing their motivation (or self-confidence) to pursue funding and defining requirements, out of fear of making a career-limiting move to support a long-term project on the web. So what happens is during a presentation you get peppered with questions that become sharper and more direct about ‘how’ are they going to measure the results of social marketing strategy.

It’s helpful to step back and think about your sales projects before heading into that first ‘group’ presentation so your time and the clients’ are well spent. It’s hard to get back to a client if your presentation runs out of gas. You can avoid this with some preplanning and thoughtful pre-sales collaboration efforts.

Let’s Talk Big-Picture First
This is a critical part of the presentation, and truthfully the pre-visit telephone calls with the client are essential to assess if they are of the right mindset to actually pursue a social marketing strategy at their business. What you want to suss out is who is the champion (or thought leader in the group) and who is responsible for the budget. These are all the usual things you do in sales, of course. But the important piece is to really get alongside them and talk about, encourage, document and direct their expectations on what can be achived over a 6- to 12-month period.

• Welcome online interaction and conversations, listen for opportunities to help
• Brand monitoring (this is now more possible with so many vendors bringing brand monitoring tools to the market. This all sounds good but it’s important to have some screen grabs of search engine results, and blog conversations where products are being discussed for the client to actually ’see’ what it means to monitor the brand on the Internet.
• Company becomes more visible. Stop fires before they start
• Monitor trends
• Emerging and hot issues
• Sentiment about products
• Conversation-starting topics
• Audience style and preferences
• Adjustments to the corporate culture to engage more with your community. This isn’t obvious at first so it’s important to bring this up repeatedly from different perspectives. Ultimately most businesses, if they are successful with social marketing, find that they have to organize themselves different to really utilize the results of their engagement with web traffic.

Here’s What We Do after the Assessment

• Continue to seed your online community thoughtfully with your educational content via blogs, Twitter, forum participation, email lists
• Monitor trends and look for insights
• Create a plan to capture and review what’s being learned from the community (and related social media channels)
• Metrics – monitoring and measuring your program
• Survey – and ask the community as it grows – what does it want? Lead and partner with the community

How We Begin

• Set goals
• Listen, and gather information
• Recommendations and strategy-setting (follow-on meetings)
• Research/discover where your prospects are online and their personas (be where they expect you to be and understand their personality motivations)
• Develop a strategy for engagement at locations where prospects exist, on your site and other websites
• Create a workflow for content creation and reuse in traditional and social marketing activities that align with your traditional marketing campaigns

One of my challenges in communicating with clients is explaining how different the workforce is today and how different the web traffic is now versus a few short years ago. The expectation or mindset that a person brings with them when they visit your website depends on their age, to a large degree.

Have you ever asked a teenager or, for that matter, someone in their 20s or early 30s the following question: What do you think about the Internet? Or, how important is the Internet to you? Something like that. When I do that with my teenager, her friends and my grown kids they give me blank stares. That’s because they grew up on the internet. They live on it, and asking that question is akin to asking a fish, What do you think of the water? It’s just part of how they live. In fact, they couldn’t easily live without it. It’s their tool for conversation moreso than the phone or email. We have an answering machine at the house and I cannot get the kids to actually listen to the messages. For the younger generation, Internet-connected mobile phones with texting are their form of connectivity.

I’m generalizing here, of course, but if you ask those same questions of folks in their 40s and 50s on up, you often find grimaces and scoffing about how much trouble it is or how much time it takes to mess with the Internet. It’s just not central to them. It’s more like getting wet and having to dry off every time they use the Internet, whereas the kids just take to it like, well, fish to water.

This is important because the younger generation has a different expectation when coming to your website. They want instant results. They respond well to Live Chat on a website. If they happen to send an email for help or a question about a product, they expect an answer in a few hours, not a day or two. I recently met with a client where we talked about how traffic to their site will be increasing as they add blogging and more forums and so forth. I said that this increase will come with an expectation from clients that if you’re that involved/engaged on the Internet, then they will assume someone will answer questions quickly. So I said, “Tell me how long it takes for someone to answer emails now.” (Note: This was a B2B company.) Everyone at the table looked at me blankly. Nobody knew.

Do you know the average amount of time it takes to respond to email in your business? What are you learning from your clients via those emails?

This is all part of the elements and channels for conversation. Let’s make 2009 the year we think about this as an opportunity, instead of ‘one more darn thing to do.’ It could impact your sales.

Tom