We introduce our fourth guest blogger of our monthly series on the 25th of every month, in celebration of our 25th anniversary this year, Tom Searcy, who helps companies in finding business solutions.

Tom Searcy, co-author of  “Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company”, author of “RFPs Suck!” and founder of Hunt Big Sales, is a sought after business solutions expert for small to mid-sized companies.  Follow Tom’s thought leadership through his blog: www.huntingbigsales.com or access his resources at www.huntbigsales.com.

I remember watching a documentary on nudists when I was of an age that I couldn’t yet buy my own “nudist” magazines at the drugstore…the ones with the brown wrappers…if they even bothered wrapping them. The documentary talked about the “freedom of nudity”, its “natural state” and “the beauty of the human form.” It was confusing as hell to me- because the human form, at least the ones at the colony, were not beautiful. Even at distance and with discreetly placed black-box-blockouts, these were some pretty unattractive people. Their nudity not only put me in a position to look at things I didn’t want too, but it answered questions about people, (surgery scars, stretch marks, the body’s response to gravity over time for example), that I was not asking.

The documentary was about a microscopic sliver of the population who had made a distinct choice. But we are all living naked now. You, me, our companies, our children. We are all naked. And we will be beyond naked very soon- (BTW, I don’t know what “beyond naked” means but I think it involves Flickr™ photos of our last set of x-rays and dental records). Are you ready to live naked?

YouTube™, Flickr™, Digg™, Twitter™, Facebook™, LinkedIn™ and the rest of the usual suspects of the social media revolution are creating a naked world. Every customer experience, every shipped product and online FAQ answer, each touchpoint in the chain of your business is open for scrutiny and discussion. You may be aware of this, which puts you ahead of the huge brands out there being lampooned every day in painful and direct ways. But what is your strategy?

I work with small to mid-sized companies who are trying to grow quickly. One of the things that we work on is their market image. One of the nice things about everyone being naked is that it’s easier to do the necessary research on a prospect company before you see them. But…It works in reverse…(sometimes when I work with companies they forget this part).

Here’s what I tell my small to mid-sized companies:

• Control – You don’t have it any more, so take a deep breath and stand tall, proud and naked. You can control your integrity and your authenticity. Focus on that. Don’t focus on the buttoning-down of over point of entry and exit to your perceived brand machine. That’s like trying to grab the wind with a sack.
• It’s Never Fair – Of course attacks are unfair. No one is trying to provide a ‘fair and balanced’ story, as if there ever is one. Don’t waste time trying to make their attacks ‘fair’ by offering your point-by-point answers. The bell has rung- you are not going to un-ring it. You can just respond.
• Fast and Good – A quick response that is reasonable is much better than a slow response that is perfect. Do you see Toyota out there floundering with the slow and perfect story? That’s because slow in the naked world is by definition imperfect.
• Find Your Voice – As a writer and speaker, I go through a number of exercises to make certain I am writing in my voice. Not what I think to be the “professional and homogenized” voice. In the heralded brands around the world, one of the key elements to the rankings is their consistency and authenticity of their voice. You need to make certain that the voice is an authentic voice.
• Be 3-D – All the movies are going 3-dimensional for the same reason; the audience expects a different experience. You have to be multi-dimensional in your market message. A website with a never-changing brochure of product/service lists doesn’t cut it. Customers want the multi-dimensional experience. Give it to them. Videos, photos, blogs and ever-changing content.
• Thousand Points of Light – Your brand is no longer just the crafted message of your marketing firm. The touchpoints are now your brand- employees, customers, vendors and competitors. You have to be out there knowing what is being said. You can’t survey once a quarter and keep track of the voices. This has to be a daily part of someone’s role. Key word searches and tracking make it easier- but it has to be done constantly.

On this blog-site, you can read past entries to see what it is like to live naked. Noemi’s blogs provide examples of how ugly in can look when big companies try to hide. This is especially true for those companies who have not yet realized that the emperor not only isn’t wearing clothes, but his wardrobe has been shredded. But the question for you should be “What is my strategy for living naked?”

When thinking through your strategy, include these questions:

1. On a simple Google search of my company’s name and my name, what comes up and in what order? Is it what I want to come up? How can I change it?
2. How do we tell our story to the world at the level of customer, employee and supplier? How is the world telling our story to us in the naked world at the level of customer, employee and supplier? What does it mean about us if no one is telling our story?
3. Who are the examples of companies, regardless of industry, that we look up too in the naked world? What can we learn from them?

Fortunately for me, living in a naked world requires neither diet, nor exercise nor surgery. But it does require confidence and a strategy. What’s yours?

You do not want to be Chase Bank these days.

It has just suffered a public humiliation by a single customer whose several requests for negotiating overdraft fees went unanswered by Chase and who, despairing at the lack of response, resorted to waging a YouTube war against Chase’s customer service — or better yet, lack thereof.  In a You Tube video (watch below) Chase was called – evil.

It’s the classic tale of David winning over Goliath, a real vindication for all of us who have, at some point, been rendered completely helpless in trying to solve a need or problem whether banking, retail, warranty or other, via an 800 number, that then asks us to punch in number after number only to get more and more recorded messages that finally leads us to a “thank you for calling, goodbye,” message, without ever solving the problem in the first place.  Or, if lucky, you can leave a message for a supervisor knowing full well that chances of a return call are about the same as becoming famous overnight.

Chase can take an example from companies on the edge of consumer trends that have begun to equate social media with customer service. Those companies ‘get’ that today’s customers view social media as a communication tool for dealing directly with a company’s customer service and have created a platform for dealing with each, in real time.

But it’s not only about Chase.  Southwest got hit recently when film director Kevin Smith tweeted that the airline kicked him off a plane because he was too fat, a photo of which subsequently landed in the mainstream print and broadcast media.  Happily for Southwest, its blog, Nuts for Southwest, addressed the news story giving it a social media bullhorn in which to respond.  But the company did have to publicly apologize.

Clearly, a well-oiled company’s social media effort like Ford’s, does not wait for ignored customers to vent, offering a platform for interaction where the customer can get heard.  In other words, they have “invested” in online conversations with their customers.  Ford also understands that social media is threading its way through not only marketing and sales, but also through research and development and, most importantly in this case, customer service departments.

And then there is Comcast that “invested” in online live chats with a Comcast service representative allowing for an open forum, as well as its online community forum, where customers can get answers from fellow Comcast customers and moderators.

Another company that understands this is Best Buy.  In my blog of July 8, 2009 titled, “Sales, Service And Twitter, An Ideal Threesome” I wrote about Best Buy’s Twelpforce, which was launched on July 19, 2009 with a 500 person sales team that was to engage with consumers by Twittering away, entering into 140-character conversations with those who are both consumed with consumer electronics as well as those who needed answers to product uses or other questions. Best Buy had basically made a “pay forward” move, which now, eight months later, has the service humming away with happy customers.

The Chase video is yet another example of how social media has put the power to undo companies’ reputations in the hands of customers. Not bothering about customer care today is akin to loosing loyal customers tomorrow.  It takes people to react to people…

Recorded messages and 800 numbers are so yesterday.

(update from the January 7th blog)

Classical music got a “facelift” yesterday, thanks to the forward-thinking creative people who were behind the performance at Carnegie Hall on April 15, of the first YouTube Symphony Orchestra. “Facelift” in the sense that classical music garnered attention and respect from a generation steeped in social media, one that generally relegates classical music to “that history stuff” or the “long haired” variety of music.

I get why that generation thinks that.  If you have ever been to a Symphony Orchestra performance and looked around at the attending public, you might have noticed that there were very few ‘40 somethings’ in the audience.  Other than music students, the general audience was more composed of the over 50s kind, and that’s being generous with age.  It has something to do with the fact that music education in our public schools stopped decades ago, when the support for the arts diminished dramatically.  So it is not surprising that young adults today offer a befuddled look, when asked if they prefer Mozart or Tchaikovsky.

But for now, classical music has been jolted to new popularity by two events – one, an ingenious mash up of musicians that formed an Internet Orchestra, each of whom recorded their own video of their musical part of famed Dan Tan’s new composition in their own home or studio in some 70 countries, and the other, a very real live performance by 95 musicians who were selected out of 3,000 musicians, ages 17-55, to perform in Carnegie Hall, New York City, under the baton of conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

How wonderful is that… Just think, as Anthony Tommasini, music critic for the New York Times, put it in his review of the concert on April 16, “YouTube deserves a lot of credit.  After all, they could have sponsored a YouTube International Basketball Team.”

Indeed.

Tommasini also opinionated that this event has altered the audition process — forever.  He must have been speaking about orchestral musicians who traditionally send discs to audition for philharmonics, or even travel to audition live.

But I say that much more has been triggered. The Internet Orchestra as well as the YouTube Symphony has presented the classical music genre with a new frontier, by boldly venturing out of comfortable 2-3000 seat concert halls and onto the wide arenas of the Internet.  Not that there haven’t been concerts and Master Classes on the web to date, but never on this scale.

Maybe the web can do what the schools and concert organizations have failed to do – expose the public-at-large to the wonders of classical music.

Years ago, while at The Juilliard School as a student, there was an anecdote that circulated over and over again about how to get to Carnegie Hall. The answer clearly was not about directions, rather – “practice, practice, practice” with the implication that you will get there and make a career. Now it has resurged, this time on YouTube, with composer and organizer, Tan Dun, chanting the “same tune.”

Just imagine … a budding violinist or clarinetist or tuba player, in a remote village or town in India or China or Bolivia, practices a specially composed piece, then, when well-prepared, submits a video of their performance to the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, who will offer the first ever virtual performance. Apparently the world’s first collaborative online orchestra will perform the new work with the player’s compiled videos.

It’s worth noting that built into this concept is also a road to Carnegie Hall. Young talents can send a video performance from a list of recommended works and finalists will be chosen from the pool of submissions by a judging panel, to travel to New York City in April 2009, to participate in a performance of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra under the direction of famed conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas.

Leave it to the arts medium to be the first to tap global social media platforms to find young musicians to participate in both virtual concert performances and live on stage. The convergence is audacious and brilliant. Social media breaks down the geographical barriers that would otherwise make this collaboration an impossibility. Moreover, in the days of much anguish as to what the future of classical music will be and where will new audiences come from for that musical genre, along comes an innovative and compelling idea that will surely ignite the imagination of young talents and reverberate worldwide.

With all the persuasive concert marketers, publicists and promoters that abound, wouldn’t it be something if it turned out that YouTube found the “golden ticket?”