The Fortunes of Permanence

Some of my least favorite people are those who text while driving. Seemingly invisible to police, I spot at least three or four every time I’m out.

They drive like they are drunk, jerking near other lanes, driving way too slow and reacting unevenly to traffic signals.  To keep from getting too peeved, I've been keeping track of what their bumper stickers (an early form of social media) say about them.

So far Obama 10, City Councilman Steve Schewel 6, McCrory 4 and Romney 2.  Guess it isn't just trailing Millennials who need to be careful about what others socially post.

The sample of course is not at all scientific. When indexed for party registration where I live, fans of Governor McCrory and former Governor Romney are more likely to be text offenders.  Traffic accidents can unexpectedly change lives in a heartbeat.  Those texts better be worth it.

One of my favorite blogs is Permanent Record, described by its author, Paul Lukas, as “an object-based history project.” If you are involved with marketing you've probably read his work on the subject as a journalist as I often did during my now-concluded 40-year career in community marketing.

Here is a link to his story on Monday about “twist ties vs. plastic clips,” a $10.6 million struggle over fiercely loyal fans of each. I’m a twist tie guy. They are more easily reclaimed for other uses.

I thought of a Permanent Record post earlier this month when I learned of Monday’s tornado where residents of Moore, Oklahoma got just 16 minutes warning before it destroyed 13,000+ homes, killing 24 people and injuring 377.

Lukas blogged about a project that took root following a devastating tornado that hit Joplin and Duquesne, Missouri on this month in 2011. After the event, more than 35,000 personal photographs were found scattered over four states and as far as 350 miles from their owners.

I know from a friend’s pain who lost most of her photographs and mementos in a flood in the late 1990s how much of a loss this was.

The Joplin tragedy spawned formation of the National Disaster Photo Rescue. Nearly half of the priceless photos and other documents have been retrieved and returned to their owners. It is the subject of the documentary film, Photos in the Wind.

I have digitized several thousand family photographs dating back nearly 100 years that captured the images of ancestors dating to the 1840s. I’ve preserved them on DVD, thumb drive and on the cloud and distributed them to my daughter, my mom and sisters, my niece and each of my nephews.

But this doesn't replace the full value of the photographs themselves which need to go in a safety deposit box. I’m really fortunate to have these.  I hope the photo rescue was activated after Hurricane Sandy and that they are already mobilized for Moore.

They are bound to be busy.  Climate change debates aside, it is probably no mistake that 69% of global losses from weather-related catastrophes take place in North America.  It has quintupled here over the past three decades.

As a line in the film trailer states – “If you could only see what this means to people.  If you could see their faces when they get back something they thought was completely gone, it will change your life.”

I suspect future generations may be saying that about a lot of things if the current state of gridlock in Congress remains.

Moving from Yelling to Touch Points

I smile whenever I recall how timid a few people in Durham, North Carolina became in the early 1990s.

This was before the Internet became commercially viable and more than a decade before sustainable social media emerged so the overarching strategy seized upon by Durham’s newly-formed community-destination marketing organization (DMO) made a few people uncomfortable.

The organization set out to defend and proactively shape the community’s brand at every touch point, an experiment that seemed foreign at the time but it worked.

White papers such as one just published shed light on why.

This squeemy reaction by a few Durham stakeholders was primarily due to condescending protests from friends in Raleigh and Chapel Hill or the news media there when these sources were “touched-up” regarding even more condescending Durham put-downs.

Lacking technologies prominent today, back then the Durham DMO could only work from clippings and other news attributions and quotes, as well as information relayed from “water-cooler” conversations.

Setting the record straight drew attention but much more often the strategy was to answer questions and concerns.  Social without media, but the strategy was also deployed prophylactically.

By the end of the 1990s this strategy had turned Durham’s image around among external pockets of nearby communities who for decades has been virulently infecting potential visitors, newcomers and relocating businesses and executives, deflecting them away from Durham.

Ironically as one did recently, unbeknownst to Durham leaders, a few we had to “touch-up” come now with hat-in-hand to Durham for favors.

The touch points the DMO addressed in this controversial approach were not just to challenge the sources of misimpressions but to respond to the questions raised in response by potential visitors, newcomers and relocating executives as well as neighbors of the these negativists who had not yet been turned.

What so many businesses and organizations and communities still don’t grasp today is that the strategy the Durham DMO stumbled upon in the early 1990s is now imperative to any marketing effort.

Somewhat easier to deploy today, it should be mainstream for any community serious about tapping into one of the most pervasive customer cohorts, the digitally connected consumer.

What are far too many communities and businesses still doing today?  In the words of John Battelle, the chairman and CEO of Federated Media Publishing, they “yell a lot.”

Instead of seeking conversations at every touch point, they buy a lot of costly  but inefficient and “interruptive advertising” - a form of yelling - to get someone’s attention.

This is the mistake the so-called “business-inspired” proposal to reshape economic development in North Carolina makes (page 246 of link.)  It not only dilutes tourism development by requiring it to market other forms as well but weds it in part to outdated elements such as advertising.

Leveraging marketing efforts makes sense but the proposal fails to grasp the difference between demand-side economic development such as tourism and supply-side efforts such as business recruitment.

Fortunately for the nation’s ears, this mandated “yelling” comes with no extra funds.  Unfortunately for North Carolinians, it will come at the expense of visitation and jobs in one of it largest economic sectors. North Carolina’s brand and marketing is not a one size fits all.

Inundated now by 10,000 advertising messages a day, the average consumer has tuned out advertising and all of this “yelling” is futile, turning off a ratio of consumers many times greater than to the few to which it may appeal.

Even brands, which are meant to be a distillation of an individual community’s personality (same with businesses and organizations,) are now touch points, according to a white paper released this month by Bazaarvoice.com.

According to Jez Frampton, CEO of Interbrand, in marketing it is no longer community or business-to-consumer (B2C,) “it’s now B & C.”  For anyone who has actually been through the many months it takes to distill a brand or personality, it really isn’t “owned by a community or business.

According to branding experts such as Bill Baker, who helped thousands of Durham residents through the process to distill one for Durham, North Carolina, a true brand or personality exists in the intersection of perceptions among external and internal stakeholders.

In a connected world, Frampton sees brands as an “interface between businesses (and communities) and human beings.”   According to the white paper, “a brand is what consumers say about it.”

This was the source of Durham’s brand tagline, “where great things happen,” which isn’t a tourism or economic development brand but one that is overarching and will evolve over time as well as support hundreds of different sub-brands suspended under that umbrella.

The white paper reworks four of the most stereotypical pillars of marketing.  It also illustrates why the various elements of branding are meant to form a blend of touch points that must be nurtured by constant vigilance and responsiveness to customers.

Community-destination marketing organizations (DMOs) should read carefully the part about Samsung monitoring and responding to questions raised on retailer sites rather than expecting the retailers to answer on their behalf or to eventually relay them.

The challenge for DMOs, or CVBs as they are often called, is that while they shape how a community is marketed, they have no say in how that brand is delivered by the thousands of individual restaurants, stores, hotels, galleries, theaters and stadiums.

Nor do DMOs control how the community performs in the spaces between these transactions and interactions so critical to unique sense of place such as along roadsides and other areas.

As retailers permit Samsung to do, businesses and government agencies would be well advised to let the DMO for their community monitor online questions and concerns posed to them and respond directly to those about the overall destination as well as redirect them and monitor responses by others.

What Altimeter Group analyst and blogger Brian Solis calls Generation C (c is for connected) has rapidly grown intolerant of lag time.

Repeated research shows that it is the community to which these visitors are first drawn.  If communities are to function at a high level as destinations with Generation C for visitor-centric economic and cultural development, these stakeholder industries must stop behaving as silos and involve the DMO at every touch point.

In the near future, it will become de rigueur for individual businesses, organizations, events and facilities in a community to provide this transparency between the individual visitor and the DMO.

It will soon become impossible to thrive as a destination unless internal stakeholders extend this transparency from the very first point at which interest in visiting has been stimulated.

This is in that early, nearly subconscious twilight prior to what Google calls the Zero Moment of Truth, through to the Ultimate Moment of Truth which is when during post-visitation, visitors share and summarize their overall experience with other and are also when they may be most open to suggestions of a repeat visit.

The visitor experience with a community must go beyond a series of Solis calls transactions.  This is not much different than what what was so controversial in Durham back in the day.  But now in a digitally connected universe, it is essential.

Tracing Partisanship

Moderates are nearly extinct in the Republican Party.  In an interview today (28.25 mark) on the Diane Rehm Show, Olympia Snowe, a Republican moderate who has just retired from the U.S. Senate seemed to date the divide only to President Obama’s administration.

But a recently published study shows that the partisanship that gridlocks Congress today actually began during the first President Bush, also a moderate Republican, after gradually growing during the the terms of conservative President Ronald Reagan.

It really picked up steam during the so-called Conservative Republican Revolution of 1994 and its subsequent attempt to remove from office a moderate-Democrat, President Bill Clinton.

Present-day partisanship reached its zenith under the second President Bush, a conservative, and has actually moderated under President Obama, considered a liberal but who by many measures has actually governed more from the center.

My take comes from an analysis that was mapped senator by senator, session by session from 1975 through 2012 by two researchers. One is Dr. James Moody a sociology researcher and leader of the Duke Network Analysis Center here in Durham, North Carolina.

He teamed up with research mathematician Dr. Peter Mucha at the main campus of the University of North Carolina, several miles south in Chapel Hill, North Carolina which is part of the same metro area north and east of one centered around North Carolina’s capital city, Raleigh (just to be non-partsian.)

To my eye, the analysis, published last month, also appears to reveal that while endangered, moderate Republicans as of 2012 may even be more apparent today than moderate Democrats, a party home to a far greater proportion of moderate voters.

The mapping also seems to reveal that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was far more divisive than the 2010 overhaul of healthcare.  It also shows that during the prior event Congress was more polarized than a previous high in 1910 but fell below that benchmark during and after the latter.

It also revealed to me more about the relatively new discipline of network science which cuts across social and physical sciences to study relationships and interactions in areas like health, culture, organizations, science and politics.

Maybe it just because I am a moderate, independent of either political party, but this statistical and behavioral analysis has certainly given me a much better appreciation of the depth and breadth of political partisanship.

Movement Inertia

Many recounting our successful defense and restoration of the Durham, North Carolina brand mistakenly assume as a community marketer that I would have had shoulder-to-shoulder support from other marketers here.

The fact is many were not my biggest fans and/or chose to only lend support behind the scenes. Some could never make the connection that the organization I led from 1989 through 2009 had the same responsibility for the community at large that they had for their individual organizations or corporations.

A few either actively worked against me or sold me out for personal gain when approached with win/lose proposals they could not resist. If having their regard (all were pleasant to my face) had been paramount, it is unlikely we would have ever succeeded.

What we did have was a social movement before there was social media. Thousands of individual Durham citizens, hundreds who we later anointed Durham Image Watchers, not only stood with us but proactively and publicly made our case.

All organizations that spearhead change are not so fortunate.

It isn't uncommon for an objective to be rendered inert by internal factions or splinter groups as we faced, often from those who should be shoulder-to-shoulder.

Just as often, groups and movements stall because supporters fall in love with the problem they are established to resolve so much that they can almost appear to seek to perpetuate it.

Here is another example.

The roots of the the women’s and antislavery movements are intertwined in the two or three decades prior to the Civil War. This was a time when U.S. Senator Willie P. Mangum from Durham was working on a series of failed compromises to save the Union.

Susan B. Anthony, who fought for both the women’s movement and to abolish slavery, and social reformer and escaped former slave Fredrick Douglass formed a friendship as early as the 1840s that is celebrated today with a statue in Rochester, New York.  There is also a bridge there affectionately known as the Freddie-Sue by many.

During the war the movements remained arm in arm and pushed for a Constitutional Amendment granting the right to vote regardless of race and gender.

But as emancipation became certain, it was Southern white women who drew the line at giving black women the right to vote.  Consequently,the two movements struggled behind the scenes with Anthony ultimately opposing ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment because it did not include women.

This strained the friendship between Anthony and Douglass but the controversy surrounding the schism traumatized the women’s movement for nearly 50 years. Its leaders - Anthony the exception - became more conservative as well as risk and conflict adverse.

In the wake of the political gridlock that resurfaced not long after the Civil War, the women's movement was left to soldier on.  It grew in popularity but was stymied internally over the decades by a fear of conflict.

Lacking an aggressive national strategy, the movement feared upsetting elected officials or even putting them on the spot. It settled for limited progress on a state by state level.  Many leaders often fell into activity traps such as speaking engagements and book tours.

That is until Alice Paul came along.

I remember when Paul died in 1977. Described by the small band who followed her lead as quiet and peaceful and almost mouse-like, Paul preferred to work behind the scenes.

She was strategic in the sense that she had no patience for what in my experience is about a third of every group that jumps from one activity trap to another needed to at least feel like they are getting something done but never solving the problem.

I think maybe they even begin to love the problem and the activity more than a solution.

Another third sits mute, while a third like Paul seize on a strategy. She gained her sensibilities as a Quaker and from time working in the women’s movement abroad.

Often more opposed than aided by others within the movement, Paul and a handful of others spearheaded the new, aggressive, national strategy that within eight years resulted in the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

This quiet Quaker wasn’t afraid of conflict or confrontation and she really knew how to rock the boat.

She didn’t get the credit she deserved until many decades later because as often happens, that went to those who quickly penned the last chapter with themselves at the center. But Paul would have been heralded by Anthony who had died just before this last push.

She didn’t stop.  She authored the first version of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and lived long enough to see it passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification in 1972, the spring before I graduated from college.

Given just seven years for ratification, it was quickly ratified by 30 states including my native Idaho which later rescinded.  Alice Paul died before knowing the outcome, just as Susan B. Anthony had prior to the Nineteen Amendment.

In the end, the ERA fell three states short of ratification, not just due to opposition by some men but again by those who should have been shoulder to shoulder, conservative women, predominantly in the South.

All of this is to say that groups often create their own inertia. Those that break through won’t get active support from those expected based on knowledge.

Those who are strategic shouldn't expect a parade. Social movements rarely involve the active participation of those you think they should but often fail for that reason.

It takes decades for the real story to come out.

Disruption and Anticipating the Zero Moment of Truth

Five years in advance of the effective date, I announced my retirement after more than twenty years as head of Durham, North Carolina’s first community-destination marketing organization (DMO.)

In large part, I hoped the long lead time would deflect the tendency for eulogies to get over the top when it comes time for an event like that.  My ego has always had plenty of nurturing so my concern instead was to place as much focus as possible on the organization’s continued sustainability.

To me, if anyone deserved to be carved into a monument or have a street name, it would have been those who made the DMO possible including those with the temerity to hire and stick by me all those years.

Accolades would have also been deserved for the late Senator Robert S. Swain of Buncombe County and Representative George W. Miller of Durham County.

In the early 1980s, Senator Swain pioneered DMOs in the North Carolina General Assembly as local tourism development authorities to be self-funded by a local-option assessment added to the bills of overnight visitors.  In turn, this was designated to fund marketing to leverage attraction of all types of visitors and ultimately to expand local tax bases.

A decade later Representative Miller embedded guidelines for use of the tax into legislative resolutions when attempts were made by many communities to subvert this formula and divert the special levy off into general funds instead.

Unfortunately, this happened throughout the state, including here in Durham as I found on arrival in 1989 when only 10% remained for the purpose intended.

Together, these two individuals are largely responsible for 80% of North Carolina’s remarkable growth in visitor-centric economic and cultural development.

In the early 1980s I was one of the first DMO execs in the nation to use a CADO minicomputer for accounting at a prior DMO start-up in Anchorage, Alaska.  That was followed by deployment office-wide of a multitasking IBM System 36 including the ability to store and access documents from throughout the office and a rudimentary form of what would become called interoffice email.

The return-on-investment in productivity had struck me as obvious but even more so the comprehensive adoption to a DMO provided a strategic advantage over competitors, advantages still not grasped in many communities today.

So in mid-1989,  when we began to set up shop in Durham, it wasn’t a leap to go with a fully-networked system.  Of course, I took some heat in the community for having terminals on each desk and the comprehensive use of intra-office email which made us one of the first to go interoffice when the web made that possible.

Even in the home of Research Triangle Park and Duke University, many took decades to grasp the advantages that could be leveraged with technology.

In Anchorage, we had also been an early-adopter of the Exxon Quip fax machine after I saw it advertised during a business trip in 1978 just before leaving the DMO in Spokane, Washington.

So naturally, when I got to Durham many years later I sounded this out with someone to whom I was referred by a board member and was told fax machines weren’t used in Durham, especially in small offices, especially in start-ups.

I quickly made assurances that we would use it with prospects across the nation and was able to secure one anyway.  Fax technology dates to the 19th century and was wireless here in the US by the 1920s.  By the 1980s it was one of a wave of disruptive technologies.

In the summer of 1989, I hadn’t yet heard of the Internet or that the first IPS had just been established to make it accessible commercially for the first time but I had hoped to fully and seamlessly integrate office technology into marketing.

With that I was a little ahead of the times but I read now that this integration is foreseen as part of what Brian Solis forecasts in his excellent new book [What’s The Future] of Business?

Within 48 months of it becoming commercially available, the Durham DMO was among the first to not only integrate the Internet into community marketing but then to rapidly make it a strategic core of our marketing.  Yes, we took some heat for that too.

I guess I was always more comfortable with the “disruptive technologies” that Dr. Clayton M. Christensen, a BYU alum who graduated from BYU three years after I did, described in his breakthrough 1997 book entitled The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Christensen’s research found that highly innovative companies fail, not for lack of great management, listening to customers, investing in R & D or improving products and service but because of what Solis calls “doing the right things over and over.”

They missed seeing the significance of or reacting to other disruptive technologies as they came along.  Oh they were aware of them and even predicted their influence but as the Heath brothers write in their new book entitled Decisive about the fall of Kodak, these companies failed to establish a “trip-wire” that would trigger a reaction when digital adoption reached a tipping point.

The role of DMOs where I spent my 40-year career in community marketing is an area where continuing and never-ending innovation is a must.  One of the very unique things about Solis’ book is that he includes links to his sources and individually to his excellent blog posts for more background.

He pointed me and other readers to an excellent white paper by Crowdtap, that can be downloaded at this link entitled The Power of Peer Influence.  The advertising element of marketing, the overall effectiveness of which is now in negative territory first began to appear in the US more than 300 years ago.

The paper’s authors glibly note that “the future of marketing will more closely resemble the last five years than the previous 300.”  Disruptive technologies are impacting marketing as much or more than any other area of business or social enterprise.

It isn’t just about technology.  I don’t know if it is on track, but Forbes noted in 2011 that between 2003 and 2013, over 70% of the Fortune 1000 companies would turnover, compared to 35% during a similar span in the 1970s and 45% in the 1990s when Christensen published his research on disruptive technologies.

Solis writes about “Digital Darwinism, when society and technology evolve faster than our ability to adapt.”  Remember, Charles Darwin found that it wasn’t the strongest who survive but those who evolve.

Solis describes “Generation C (connected)” which cuts through all age groups including mine and now represents more consumers than several cohorts combined.  Only one in five consumers is unconnected to the Internet now.

Strategically, the answer isn’t just keeping up with technology although that is “part of the answer.”  Solis lays out why marketing and other business activities must begin with more research into the customer experience.

By that he doesn’t just mean the idea of integrating experiences into products and services. The experience begins at the very beginning of the marketing experience, even before what Google calls the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT.)

Different than the many businesses, organizations and facilities that eventually benefit, a DMOs primary role is to stimulate interest, to get a community on the list for consideration long before visitor-related businesses, organizations or facilities are in a position to harvest that visitor interest.

This seminal stimulation of interest comes even before the ZMOT.  The resources in this blog are a must read for for today and tomorrow’s DMOs.