“Expertise” vs. “Authority”: A Modern Marketing Distinction

“Expertise IRL doesn’t necessarily add up to authority in social media,” I told a client recently. Sigh! This is always a tough sell for the Enterprise 2.0 crowd.

A tweet about a show on NPR show debating the future of network TV reminded me of how long it’s been since I watched the stuff. I tuned in for a look, and and immediately saw a “Capital E” Expert, a Dr SoAndSo, one of the competitors to CNN’s Sanjay Gupta.

“It’s not too late for a flu shot, sneeze into your sleeve if there are no Kleenexes handy and keep washing those hands!”

“Not much new news here,” I thought, tuning out. “But for sure a story I can use.”

Doctor friends aside, I don’t see many doctors professionally. They never seem to have anything to say about the simple, everyday, down-to-earth things that trouble me. I’m still searching for a way to short-cut colds and flu. Aren’t we all! Doctors and Experts are still not delivering much news we can connect to everyday life.

Years ago, I was surprised by the seemingly overnight success of the now widely advertised Airborne, a natural supplement “created by a school teacher.” A second-grade teacher, no less.

I like Airborne and can actually notice a difference that is perhaps unrelated to the extra liquid consumption. But in retrospect, I’m amazed that I ever bought Airborne in the first place.

Apparently, I failed to ask myself:

• Why would a second grade teacher need a frequent flyer medication?
• Why would anyone promote a cure for the common cold as “invented by a schoolteacher.”

Hmmm…. If anyone who’s approachable and warm can really be an expert on any subject of their choosing, Thiokol should have said this to NASA,

“But the Shuttle’s O-Rings were tested by General Mills and endorsed by Cheery O’Leary, the Cheerios friendly bee!“

No, this would never have happened.

How do warm and approachable people become confused with experts?

Going back to the question of “How do warm and approachable people become confused with experts?” It’s important to remember that good advice can indeed come from any source. Here’s the insight. The only thing you really need to know before taking non-expert advice is whether the source is authoritative, or widely seen as trustworthy. For example:

• Mentors as they are to the next generation of our world citizenry, schoolteachers are some of our society’s most trusted authorities, though not necessarily themselves doctors.
• Well-respected book reviewers on Amazon.com are considered authoritative as critical thinkers, though not necessarily themselves experts on the topics of the books they review.

The converse is not necessarily true. People who are great experts are not necessarily prepared to qualify themselves as the greatest authorities. They can go spectacularly awry by missing or over-reacting to opportunities to showcase their expertise.

For example, back in 2003, Kraft laid off around 6,000 people and took a charge of $1.2 Billion. Why? Consumers had been cutting back on cookies and crackers in favor of high-protein snacks. Believe it or not, one of the world’s leading experts on cheese, a company qualified to be an unquestioned authority on low-carb eating, the very people who spell cheese “K-R-A-F-T” are the very same people who missed the low-carb craze. Go figure.

Thankfully for dieters, there were enterprising entrepreneurs back in 2003 who glommed onto the low-carb craze and became instant authorities on what they called The Low-Carb Lifestyle. The were not doctors, they were not dietitians. They were not even experts on cheese. They were mom-and-pop businesses, promoting themselves as authorities via what were known at the time as e-Zines. And they began selling products like Tibetan Yak Cheese and Zero-Carb Cheese Straws on Amazon e-Shops.

At the time, did I or any other dieter stop to ask:

“Why am I buying Yak-cheese snacks on the advice of a retired police officer through Earth’s largest bookstore?”

No. We did not.

Expansion beyond books into new categories such as cheese helped Amazon to profitability for the first time in 2003. Instant authorities identified a solution to every problem jumped in wherever they saw a need.

And the online authority phenomenon marches on. Belly fat trimming approaches pop up everywhere on the web. Nowadays, you don’t even have to know anybody or Google anything to get diet advice from people who have singlehandedly outsmarted the doctors, the scientific experts and the entire medical establishment and can sell you a solution to all your bad eating and exercise habits with a nutritional supplement that costs $39.

But have the deep-study experts kept up with the online authorities?

Some of the experts are catching up. For example, about a year ago I wrote a post about The Economist’s and CNN’s lame coverage of cloud computing services. These expert journalists had fallen right into the insta-authority trap, and wrote the whole article about Microsoft, Google and Apple.

Back then I speculated: Are IBM and other vendors behind or inside the cloud unlucky, invisible, or simply under-sold? Now I realize that IBM and other experts may have been hobbleded by their own expertise.

Enterprise 2.0 vendors, for example, are comfortable with the assumption that they know everything about technology. Some, even the companies who run the clouds, are surprised that they’re not more successful at going viral with their messages. The smug-mugs are amazed that the amateurs and Johnnie-Come-Latelys get more attention! What the Enterprise 2.0 crowd doesn’t realize is this:

Social networking is not about expertise with technology, it is about affability with social connections.

And this explains why Microsoft, Google and Apple get more coverage than the experts from Enterprise 2.0 Land. Apple, Microsoft and Google have one key thing in common with The Economist and CNN. All day every day they’re engaging ordinary consumers online. Reporters rightly recognize a certain authority in Google, Apple and Microsoft.

But the mainstream journalists are still failing to balance their stories by looking for expertise in addition to authority. IBM and companies of that ilk have forgotten more about running clouds for businesses than these companies know. Yes, even the water-walking Google. The precise fact that Google is a such an expert in innovating makes it hard for the company to understand organizations of mere mortals who need to follow a leader one step at a time.

What’s changed now is that the likes of IBM are looking for ways of becoming an authority trusted by John Q. Public as well as an expert advisor to IT. For example, just last night I RSVP’d for a Mass Innovation Night hosted at IBM’s Waltham office. Of course there was a “Tweet This” button to put a penny in IBM’s cup of main-street relatability. Efforts like this are going to build awareness IBM’s reputation as an authority.

Bottom line: Most of the Enterprise 2.0 egg-heads should stay in the ivory towers honing their expertise at keeping the clouds aloft. Let them debate lofty arcana with their expert peers in esoteric cyber spaces. Maybe someday they’ll get a call from The Economist, the one business magazine that still believes in long-form content. But they shouldn’t confuse this with gaining business traction through social media.

Until Enterprise 2.0 realizes that expertise doesn’t deliver authority in today’s world, they won’t realize that a whole different skill set is required to tweet to Main Street.

What can enterprise IT learn from luxury fashion? It’s vital to change with the times

Luxury brands are experimenting with social marketing. Why? Bloggers now reach audiences larger than venerable publications like Vogue’s 200,000 readers.

The Financial Times had a thought-provoking story on the trend.

What next?

Apparently, bloggers like TheSartorialist, and the 13-year-old phenom, Tavi, have been invited to cover runway shows! BryanBoy was even seated in the front row, an arm’s length away from Vogue’s legendary Anna Wintour.

Why is this happening? As the Financial Times points out:

“Those who write and read blogs are mostly young, and mostly not typical consumers of high-end designer fashion. Conversely, luxury goods consumers are generally wealthier and older and, consequently, less likely to be interested in the esoteric musings of Bryanboy or Tavi.”

This point illuminates the parallel between the luxury fashion industry and the enterprise IT industry. In both industries, buying power is concentrated in the hands of the high rollers. Not everyone walking down the street with a coat on his or her back is a couture buyer. Not everyone accessing a consumer IT cloud is a purchasing equipment for a green data center. These large spenders have their own traditional muses: The fashion world has Anna Wintour; IT has Donna Scott of the Gartner Group.

Enterprise IT vendors have been cautious about expending the energy to deal with social media. Some are still wondering just how much influence the blogosphere and other social media channels have on their high-end buyers.

Unlike the enterprise IT vendors, the luxury fashion world hasn’t bogged down on whether bloggers influence sales. They’ve realized that, when outsiders peek in, they see things in a new way. Looking through this new lens is a way to see the future coming together. When interviewed by The Financial Times:

• Burberry’s creative director, Christopher Bailey, said, “(Bloggers) have a very articulate way of expressing an opinion. The difference between bloggers and traditional press is that bloggers are often talking directly to a final consumer.”
• Dasha Zukova said “Tavi’s blog is insightful, interesting and the perfect example of a young girl using technology to expand her world and then using it to expand ours.”

The Enterprise IT industry is beginning to sort out the social media scene. Computer Weekly and IBM, for example, are co-sponsoring an Award Program to name the UK’s most popular IT bloggers in 10 categories and identify the top Twitterati. IT consultants and analysts share one of the 10 categories between them.

As with luxury fashion, so with enterprise IT, an open dialog in social media opens the aperture to listening and learning from the market as a whole.

Here is an example, courtesy of @A_Ahad on Twitter. He pointed to a post on HotHardware.com about what appears to be the world’s most fashionable data center, the Pionen White Mountain Data Center.

In data center fashion, green is the new black

Jon Karlung, CEO of Sweden’s independent ISP, Bahnhof, gave eBay’s Dean Nelson a tour of the Pionen data center.

Pionen is located in a repurposed Cold War bunker behind 30 meters of solid rock in a cave perched 40 meters above sea level in the White Mountains just outside Stockholm.

Dean Nelson founded Data Center Pulse in 2008 while he was at Sun Microsystems. The organization has become a great example of social media in action in the enterprise IT community.

Data Center Pulse (DCP) is a growing, non-profit, datacenter industry community founded on the principles of sharing best practices amongst its exclusive membership. Founded in late 2008, DCP is quickly becoming an industry nexus for the explosive datacenter industry’s operators and influencers. DCP’s mission is to align end users to share information thereby influencing the industry by defining, adopting and driving best practices and next generation solutions. The DCP members are the individuals that evaluate, recommend and purchase the products and services for the datacenter. They represent billions of dollars of annual purchases that drive the IT economy.

In its first nine months of operation, the DCP enrolled its 1,000 members, bringing the DCP community into 45 countries representing over 600 companies in virtually every market segment both public and private.

Data Center Pulse represents a grass-roots view of the enterprise IT industry, but it clear that this group understands its collective purchasing power. This fall, the DCP is offering a new innovative and timely Customer Access Program (CAP).

CAP gives vendors unprecedented access to the community of datacenter decision makers and influencers while maintaining the anonymity of the members themselves Companies who seek to sell products and services for datacenters can purchase time to present to this select group of datacenter end users/influencers. The presenters can share new product information, do market research, qualify new product(s), market(s) and/or even check their own company’s strategic direction with respect to datacenters. The presentations are given through a highly interactive web interface and are archived for DCP members who cannot attend during scheduled presentation(s).

With the fresh eyes of a Tavi and the authoritative voice of an Anna Wintour, the Data Center Forum is poised to be a powerful influencer in data center fashions. Data center infrastructure vendors must come to terms with this new breed that rivals the traditional Industry Analyst firms in influence.