Life has changed, and is still in the process of changing for the CMO. The marketing opportunities of social, of emerging technologies, of mobile, the rising importance of content, the addition of social data to big data, and how social is changing the enterprise experience have all evolved the required skillset of the position. Since these consumer behaviors are highly unlikely to reverse, I picked the brain of Oracle VP Product Management for Cloud Social Erika Brookes for a look at what today’s CMO should seek to fully understand going forward.
The Customer Owns Your Brand
- Understand the customer is now in charge and should be the focus. Their expectation is to be respected and treated well. Anything less disappoints.
- Understand that phenomenal products and services, and personalized, hyper-attentive customer service is the new marketing.
- Understand social is how the public is choosing to engage with each other and brands, and has kicked word-of-mouth into overdrive. The public is talking about you.
- Understand social is not a megaphone for ads. Try to internalize how mistrustful of push messaging people are and that the path to drawing attention is to provide something of real value.
- Understand you’ve got to lead crowd-pleasing content creation efforts, or find people who do know how to entertain/inform.
The Marketer Must Speak API
- Understand you can no longer be comfortable in what you don’t know. You have to jump into technology head-on, knowing how it will deliver business value.
- Understand you’ll be collaborating with the CIO and IT to leverage technological advantages faster than ever. You must have a voice on tech matters and implementation.
- Understand the unprecedented gold mine of social data that, married with enterprise and 3rd party data, can paint an actionable picture of the customer.
- Understand the importance of your brand’s mobile experience and how fast it’s becoming the primary way social is accessed.
- Understand the cloud as the best technology practice for gathering, managing, analyzing and acting upon big data.
Know the Science Behind the Art
- Understand campaigns should be built around what the consumer has shown you, through data, they like.
- Understand not just social marketing, but social selling, social commerce, social service, social HR, social recruiting, and social collaboration.
- Understand the value of listening, and how to extract worthwhile data from the noise.
- Understand all of the social channels and platforms available to you, which targets are using them and how so appropriate strategies, messaging and measurement can be crafted for each.
- Understand you have to keep moving toward proving the ROI behind the spend.
You Will Likely Conduct an Internal Symphony
- Understand the changes going on inside the organization. Your role is expanding.
- Understand that an unprecedented collaboration of people, processes and technology is being called for, and it’s probably you that must conduct that symphony.
- Understand you have to communicate and align with sales for consistent brand and consumer experiences.
- Understand you’ll play a large role in finding the technology partner to insure effective execution of social, a single vendor that offers every piece of the puzzle.
- Understand that even in huge business enterprises, agility offers a competitive advantage and should be aspired to.
Below are some additional resources on the changing role of the CMO that might help you get to the future sooner rather than later.
Webinar with Oracle SVP Product Development for Cloud-Social Reggie Bradford and Forrester lead analyst David Cooperstein.
Social Spotlight Blog: Scandal! The CMO/CIO Relationship Revealed.
Video: “The changing role of the CMO.” Argyle Executive Forum’s 2013 Chief Marketing Officer Leadership Forum (New York).
@mikestiles
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