Terry White, Chief Innovation Officer, Amway Japan

MM: In the case that I was making in our conversation, then-from a marketer’s perspective, yes. It’s about listening. Yes, it’s about having a conversation. But perhaps most importantly, it’s about the fine and polished art of argumentation. That is an intelligent, logical, rational and civil way of responding to somebody who has not, “gotten it,” yet -or who has a different point of view.

TW: And it’s completely different from “reputation.”

MM: Absolutely. Reputation tends to lead to conflict. And shouting matches.

TW: Yes.

MM: All we have to do is turn on cable TV to get our fill of that in 15 minutes.

TW: No one ever sold a packet of soap by arguing with somebody.

MM: That’s right. And media-and more specifically-most of the cable media or those “niche” kinds of programs-they sort for conflict. If there’s no conflict, there’s no story.

There’s nothing wrong with conflict, and there’s nothing wrong with sorting for conflict. But there’s more to life than conflict and polarization.

TW: Particularly if you’re trying to market a brand.

MM: Yes. It seems to me that as we begin to settle in and accept that, yes, this whole Marketing 2.0 or whatever you want to call that-It starts with a conversation with a customer about the brand and about the brand experience. But it’s also then developing the ability to engage in civil, polite argumentation around, “What is the brand, and what’s the brand experience to which you’re committed? And how do we get people more aligned with that?”

TW: Yes. I think I’d prefer the word, “discourse,” to the word “argumentation.” I think, “argumentation,” is way too loaded as a word.

MM: You’re absolutely right. I’m using a technical term here, as it really derives-again-from the Greeks.

TW: Yes. I understand that.

MM: It’s the fine art of rhetoric in public speech.

TW: Correct.

MM: But without the sophistry. Without the argument for argument’s sake.

TW: I think you’re very right. Here’s the problem that we face, then. We want to have conversations with customers. All of us do. Everyone who markets any brand is trying to have conversations with customers.

Today we’ve been enabled to do that in diverse and wonderful ways that speak more of Merlin’s magic than they do of any particular piece of technology. The problem is, Michael, that at any one point in time, there are millions of conversations going on about your brand.

MM: Right.

TW: You can’t listen to a million conversations. You can’t go and build conversation-mining tools that will go out there and tell you what everybody’s saying about you on all the blogs all around the world in all the different languages. You just can’t put a consistent logic together that allows that to happen. You can’t crunch those terabytes of data quickly enough.

MM: Right.

TW: I think the ubiquity of social media in the US and the advanced economies has evolved to a place where we get a chance to listen in to conversations. We can start or seed conversations. But once those conversations start, if you’ve done it correctly, you don’t have a chance to get your word in edgewise. There are so many people buzzing around your brand.

Yes, you have to give people the knowledge and the tools and the facts that they need to talk. They need to be able to conduct a civil discourse around something. But we can’t expect logical, rational behavior from emotional human beings in an environment where all rules are off the table.

MM: Sure.

TW: We need to understand that. I was talking to some of my colleagues from a neighboring market recently about how we use these social media tools. Somebody started ask, “Well, how do we control the conversation? What if somebody says something we don’t like?”

My response was “Get over it. There’s nothing you can do about it.” There’s no reason why you would want to intervene in that conversation. Take the time to listen. Respond to the person. Ensure that civil discourse is going on as a brand. This is not just about our brand. Ensure that civil discourse is going on. Take the opportunity to listen to what people are saying. And change your business. Change your brand to respond to what the madding crowds are telling you your brand stands for-and what your business delivers.

We are almost out of control of our brands. The only way that we can, I believe, be successful, is to design our brands effectively from the outset.

MM: Terry, that suggests three or four things. One is, it suggests that you have a social brand architecture.

TW: Yes.

MM: A brand architecture that accommodates social networks and social media as an expression of the brand.

TW: You must.

MM: It also suggests that you have many brand touch points at various places out there.

TW: Absolutely.

MM: Whether it’s Facebook or MySpace or Second Life.

TW: That’s why I want an aggregator.

MM: Yes. It also suggests that you have advocates-your sea captains. Your communication captains. Your friends-blogging on your behalf.

TW: Yes. It doesn’t have to be a formal relationship. But you allow your advocates the opportunity to blog on your behalf. Yes.

MM: Does this also entail, then, having the rank-and-file of the organization also blog?

TW: We’re back to the Clue train, aren’t we?

MM: Kind of.

TW: Yes. Your employees are already blogging. Get over it.

MM: The question is, do you want them blogging on their own private blog on their own time? Or do you want them also to be blogging on a corporate or some sort of federated blog? That is, maybe it’s not sanctioned, but it’s condoned?

TW: We do that. We encourage our employees to blog on our online blog spaces. All we ask of people is, obviously, not to be abusive or sexist or agist. To speak the truth and to be responsible for what they say. That’s the limit of the obligation we ask for from employees.

They’re just as entitled to be critical and to suggest ways we can improve as any other citizen. Yes, of course we do. The reality is, these guys are already doing it.

Our employees are already writing on their private blogs. Why would we not encourage them to write in our space too? Our Opportunity Zone blog space here in the US is a good example of that. People like to see stuff they’re thinking about written right there.

Some of those people are pretty straightforward about the ways they tell us we can improve. That’s a great thing.

MM: Terry, let’s circle back on that one notion of a social media dashboard as the bridge to start talking about these analytics.

TW: Sure.

MM: Do you want to speak to your vision of this social media dashboard? As we’ve talked about it in the past, it’s browser-based.

TW: It has to be browser-based. Because it has to deliver in real-time. It has to provide data in metaphors that are obviously intuitive for people to understand.

So that the bean counters understand them and the sales people understand them, and the high-job people understand them.