The Brian Magierski Interview, Part 2
Contributed by Rod Amis

At the end of the first part of the interview, Brian sent me to talk with the folks at ROME Corporation’s Initiative …

ROME Corporation specializes in risk management for businesses in the energy and energy-technology industries. Among its customers are Tesoro, ConocoPhillips and Southern California Edison. With offices in Austin and Houston in the US, and London in the UK, ROME’s reach, like that of its customers, spans the globe.

As mentioned in a recent edition of their newsletter, ROME Corporation has begun the ROME Institute, providing valuable information to, but also engaging with and getting valuable information from, its customers and others in the field by using the Kalivo Hub as a platform for sharing knowledge.

“Registered members of the site can start conversations list events and even program their own polls of the hub’s population,” said the article. “In other words, ping your peers about a question that’s been nagging you. The ROME Institute also takes advantage of the ‘tag cloud,’ a fairly new Web listing style that appears as a cluster of key words. While the tag cloud allows you to find your topic in an alphabetical list, the list is dynamic: the most frequently used tags appear in a larger font, giving a visual clue to the most popular or active areas of the site.”

Ann Puckett, Director of Marketing, leads the ROME Institute initiative. Asked about what had been learned since deploying the Kalivo hub at the Institute, Puckett told us: “The basic idea of reading an article and posting a comment or participating in a forum is not a new concept for our users. Unfortunately, there has never been a place for risk management professionals to connect and share information. Kalivo does an excellent job of creating a more intuitive and user-friendly way to converse with our peers and provide a personalized experience for our users. Some of the more advanced features, including RSS feeds, the tag cloud, and trackbacks, are not being used to their fullest. We continue to work on ways to educate our customers on these features. It is a learning experience for all of us.

“The best way to engage customers is to start the conversation internally. Once the conversation is started, people are more likely to participate. It is also important to make sure that your content is relevant. If you bring in a post from another website and you personally have no comment on it, then chances are nobody else will either. We use this as our litmus test for adding information to the ROME Institute.”

Puckett believes that another lesson learned while deploying the features of the Kalivo hub is maintaining a narrow focus. ROME Institute made the hub available to customers right away, she tells us, and that demonstrated trust and is making the hub one of the more popular destinations on the company’s Web site. She said the attraction comes from the hub’s ability to search, find, and manage content from across the Web, combined with a user-friendly interface that provides a rich set of tools for gathering valuable information. For risk management professionals, it opens new vistas of information and collaboration.

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While LeverageSocialMedia was speaking with Puckett, Magierski was off to a conference in New York. He returned with a new vision of how to address exactly what Puckett had shared with us: the issue of narrowing the focus of what the Kalivo Hub offered for certain clients, depending on where their needs existed. LSM went back to the well.

Magierski: We had a great conference at the AlwaysOn media event. As we build Kalivo by direct user engagement, we are certainly learning what prospective buyers think about the impact of Web 2.0 on their businesses, and where they are in adopting Web 2.0 technologies in marketing.

LSM: You remind us of the old saw about “Internet Time.” Kalivo definitely seems to be a company that means to be fast on its feet. As you look into segmenting your offerings, based on the maturity of an enterprise’s needs in the social media arena, what are the details of the new offerings you’ll roll out?

Magierski: Fortunately, Web 2.0’s development techniques, open source software tools, scripting languages and frameworks allow us to be nimble. Our broad vision is to provide companies with a Customer Engagement System, which will help them engage their customers and drive their marketing in all aspects of Social Media and Web 2.0.

Our primary need is to be an educator. We will sell consulting and advisory services to customers in order to educate them and us about what to do in Social Media Marketing. With our products, we have segmented our offerings to meet the multiple needs we hear as marketers experimenting with Social Media, namely:

• Monitor the Web for relevant information, such as competition, product feedback, and brand impact – much like companies use PR clipping services to monitor what is said about them and their market in print publications. This offering is the Kalivo Listener™, and it crawls the web regularly on behalf of a customer and produces Web Clippings™. Customers can create from one to many Listeners for different information-monitoring purposes.

• Analyze and respond to Social Media conversations and articles across the Web. Some marketers want not only to monitor the Web with the Listener, but to drill in deeper to understand the trends and volume of sentiment – namely, positive, negative, and neutral viewpoints – and which Web Clippings are influential/important versus irrelevant. This analysis will inform companies about whether and how to respond. Our Kalivo Marketer™ application, which includes the Kalivo Listener, allows companies to analyze and respond directly to external social media sites with comments to express the company’s viewpoint and engage in the conversation. The response capability is called Broadcast Response™.

• Host two-way conversations with influencers, customers, and other interested parties. Traditionally, these were forums that companies would host on their site. However, with the advent of blogging and Web 2.0 social capabilities, including tagging, RSS subscriptions, and others, the old format is stale and not nearly as rich, insightful, efficient or interactive. Plus the advent of blogging has much more pleasing interfaces for presenting and engaging in conversation. We offer the Kalivo Hub™, which is a blogging system, forum, and social network (including profiles, surveys and polls, events, etc.) all wrapped in one offering.

• If a company is ready for the entire Customer Conversation System, they can utilize the Kalivo Marketer and Kalivo Hub together, fully integrated.

Getting the product part of this for the different functional needs was important; however, we also dealt with the price-point issue to ensure marketers can experiment and adopt.

We’re planning to offer the Kalivo Listener, with a limited number of Listeners, on a self-service basis with a price point that would meet the needs of the Small and Medium business segment or an individual marketing professional’s expense budget.

We expect, as marketers begin to use the Listener, they will want to upgrade to more uses, including the analytics and response capabilities of the Kalivo Marketer. Also, as a few marketing managers begin to use the Listener on their own, we expect the entire department to eventually adopt and to then provide a more robust solution for the department or enterprise as a whole.

Likewise, our Hub pricing allows for relatively low entry-point pricing, but as the number of members of a Hub community grows, the pricing will increase with the value being created.

LSM: Is there anything else you’d like to offer about where you see the adoption of social media tools in the enterprise arena going? Please take a moment to “look over the mountaintop.”

Magierski: This is a big question, and I could probably go on forever. To keep it short, where this is all going is “marketing as conversation.” On an accelerating basis, companies must transition to this approach and away from telling customers what they want. That was Marketing 1.0.

The new way, Marketing 2.0, requires companies to listen to their customers and prospects (their market), learn through conversation and analysis, and engage by responding with what the customers want and not solely with what the company wants to give them.

Our tagline at Kalivo is “Listen. Learn. Respond.” The customer is in charge, and the Web is making this revolution happen. Whether a company engages on the Web with their customers or not, their customers are indeed engaged on the Web in an increasing number, and are influencing others – this is where the influence is happening. All companies in all industries will need to be engaging in two-way conversations with their customers in order to survive competitively and continue to add value.

LSM: Thanks for speaking with us again.
Note: Tom Parish interviewed Brian in November 2006 for Talking Portraits.