“Imagine for a moment that the only way you could get awareness, create interest, and generate a sale was to persuade an existing customer to promote your product.

What would you do?”

This is one of the many great questions posed by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler in their book Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business

(Disclosure: I did receive this book for free. Bernoff offered it via Kindle for free on his blog.)

Then, they proceed to lay out some of the facts that are the reality of the world in which we marketers live.

1. Consumers (that is, regular people) create 256 billion annual “impressions” on other people every single year (i.e. every status update and tweet)
2. Another 250 billion in the form of blog posts and comments.
3. Advertisers create just under 2 trillion impressions per year

In other words, people create 25% of the “impressions” on other people as advertisers do, but here’s the rub, as they say:

Which ones do you think they pay attention to?

If you’ve read this blog for more than one day, you are familiar with concepts like The Attention Economy and the Power of Permission.

What Bernoff and Schadler conclude is that “starting now, we want you to think about individuals as potential sources of marketing influence, either positive or negative. Your customer is a marketing channel.”

No surprise here as that is the premise of the now 2 year old classic  Community Driven Marketing.

I gues the good news is that now Forrester endorses it (sort of).

And, HOW do they propose that you actually go about doing that?

They rely on HEROes. Highly Empowered Resourceful Operative.

These are your employees…no matter where they actually sit in the organization.

In Dandelion Marketing, I called this “Make Everyone A Marketer” (see here for a case study).

But, where Bernoff and Schadler really make this book shine is not in the concepts (at least for me), it’s in the implementation.

I like their solid guidelines for what you should do to create a HERO culture, how to balance that with the needs of IT, risk, and security, and how to help create the cultural shift to enable and foster these type of mission-critical folks.

They offer up a “HEROes Pledge,” so you can make sure you are getting the right conduct from these people.

I also like the fact that they pull in data and quotes to substantiate the argument. For example:

• noted scientist Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM, in commenting about the need for speed, simply says “If you are in an organization where people don’t participate in the social media discussion both externally and internally, it slows everything down.”
• Scott Cook of Intuit says “We have a high tolerance for experiments…One of the biggest things I have learned in business is the importance of fast, cheap experiments and high velocity. If you want systemic innovation, make it fast and cheap for people to try things and painless to fail.  Experiments: most of them will fail.” And the penalty for failing? “The consequence is learning and admiration for learning.”
  (See Dandelion Marketing: High Fault Tolerant Environment.)

So, while the concepts in this book are probably not ground-breaking/earth-shattering for any longtime reader here, what it DOES provide is some solid evidence from a credible source (not that Never Stop Marketing isn’t credible, but I think Forrester-for now - can take us) that will help  you advocate for the changes you need in your organization.

For another review, check out David Berkowitz’s “12 Smart Things About Empowered.”

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