6. amplifying your fans

You just experienced one of the most visible and disappointing product launches in history. Your main competitor has a burgeoning cool factor and makes fun of you—quite believably—in its commercials. Is this the time to start a social technology campaign?

If you’re Microsoft, it is.

In 2008, Microsoft’s Windows marketing was picking itself up off the mat. Despite the challenging and frustrating launch of Windows Vista, the company still had quite a few assets. When you have a ninety-plus-percent market share, there are a lot of people who use and like your product. The company decided to find those fans and get its mojo back.

One of the first things Marty Collins did when she became community manager for Windows in July 2008 was to create a YouTube channel soliciting customer videos on the theme “I’m a PC,” the very words delivered by the nerdy PC character in Apple’s ubiquitous commercials. Sure enough, thousands of videos poured in. Based on this response, Microsoft edited them together in short snippets to create a series of “I’m a PC” commercials.¹ This was the beginning of the Windows brand’s resurgence—and proof that fans were a key to Windows marketing success. As Marty described it, “We have a very strong competitor, and it has a very strong fan base. We know that a lot of times our enthusiasts will not be the loudest voice in a conversation … We created a groundswell of people that finally said, ‘I love this machine, I love this operating system.’ ”

This success in hand, the Windows team geared up for the launch of Windows 7. The prerelease beta version launched in January 2009. Using Trucast, a Web monitoring product from Visible Technologies, the community team monitored the reactions to the beta version on blogs, discussion forums, Twitter, and elsewhere. Based on online social commentary, people perceived Windows 7 as a “vast improvement.” And Marty knew that amplifying this sentiment would help accelerate the launch, planned for October. So she and her colleagues at Microsoft did three things.

First, Marty’s team collected a moderated feed of all the social posts about Windows 7 from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, and Flickr into one highly dynamic site² at www.windows.com/social. The site accumulated over three hundred thousand posts in the first five months after launch. Microsoft featured this feed on various social sites, like its Facebook page, and during the week of the Windows 7 launch, right on the Windows.com home page. Why? Because people’s voluntary, authentic, and even misspelled comments are more persuasive than a bunch of polished but hard-to-credit material that Microsoft wants to promote.

Second, the advertising team took its cues from the successful “I’m a PC” campaign and during the launch ran customer-centered television, print, and outdoor advertising focused on customer suggestions. The new campaign centered around the tagline “I’m a PC, and Windows 7 was my idea,” with specific examples of features suggested by PC owners, like faster start-up. With this campaign, Microsoft reinforced the idea that it had listened to customers in the time since Vista was released and had improved the product. This campaign was credible, in part, because of all the authentic customer activity that the company was sharing.

Finally, Microsoft found a very immediate way to get masses of its actual fans to share their enthusiasm. If you were a Windows 7 fan you could sign up to have a party in your home to show off the new features—Microsoft would send along materials, including a special prerelease Windows 7 disk signed by Steve Ballmer. (House Party, a company that creates in-home word-of-mouth programs, managed this project.) Word about the party opportunities spread through social media and before long, tens of thousands of people in fourteen different countries had signed up. Microsoft estimates that the parties reached about eight hundred thousand people, including hosts and guests. Many contributed comments like this to the company’s party central site:

Hundreds of thousands of party attendees were highly engaged with the new operating system. Research confirmed that people who had been to the parties had moved forward on the key awareness and engagement metrics that Microsoft tracks for marketing.

The success of the parties came with one unexpected result. House Party had created a video to train party hosts—a video with an ethnically mixed set of “typical” partygoers that comes off, shall we say, a little stilted and square.³ Perfect for a brand that has embraced its inner nerd. It was easy to make fun of and generated widespread ridicule. But for the same reason, it was easy to spread. The video went viral on YouTube, where it has been viewed over one million times. That’s a million people paying attention to Windows 7 features for six minutes, even as they mock Microsoft’s marketing. But that’s fine with the Windows team, since they’ve realized that their fans know as much about how to market the new operating system as they do.

the truth about word-of-mouth marketing

Does your product have fans?

If you’re Jeep or Apple or the Boston Red Sox, of course you do. But even if you’re not, there are plenty of people using your product. They like some things about you. You have good design, a good price, or good service. Or you’re close by and quick. You may not have fans like the Boston Red Sox (after all, Red Sox fans by the hundreds go to away games in Baltimore just to see them play), but you do have people willing to say nice things about you, your company, your products, and your services.

Now you can see where this fits in with the last three chapters. Remember the first three steps in IDEA: first, identify the type of people who like and talk about your products; second, deliver groundswell customer service to create more happy customers; and third, empower them with mobile information. Those activities help you identify a large enough pool of people who will potentially like you enough to talk. Energizing those fans, and amplifying their conversation is the payoff.

This is exactly what Marty Collins and Microsoft did. While less than 2 percent of the online population are Mass Connectors for PCs and software and less than 5 percent are Mass Mavens, this is still millions of people, and most of them use PCs. Our research shows that this group likes to talk on the channels that the windows.com/social site was amplifying: Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.

If you want to make that word of mouth work for you as it did for Microsoft, you’ll need to keep two things in mind.

First, the term word-of-mouth marketing, while very popular right now, is misleading. The reason: marketers generally work in terms of campaigns with a starting point and an endpoint, while word-of-mouth activities go on and on. Microsoft’s Marty Collins took the approach that the fan base could be nurtured over time. She gave them a platform and a way to persuade others. Microsoft’s house parties and advertising may have been timed to energize them during the Windows 7 launch, but Marty and Microsoft continue to cultivate their fan base.

This is hard for marketers. Fan bases take time to build. If you have as many customers as Microsoft, you can get a critical mass going in months; if your customer base is smaller, it will take longer. In any case, you’ll be out of sync with short-term-focused marketing efforts like advertising.

Instead, think of fan base cultivation as building an asset over time, in the same way you think about brand building. This means that when your fan program has done its work—when the product is launched or the campaign is over—you don’t throw those fans on the scrap heap. You cultivate them, since you’ll need them next time. Like customer service, fan base cultivation is an activity that never ends.⁴

The second thing to keep in mind is that fan programs must be run efficiently. This is not PR outreach to influential journalists and bloggers—that sort of program needs to be run with individual attention. And it’s not mass marketing either, in which you bombard your whole customer base with messages. Instead, it’s an appeal to the mass influencers we defined in chapter 3. The trick in fan marketing is to unlock the power of individuals to influence their friends, colleagues, and followers with an efficient mass program.

In this chapter, we’ll show several cases and examples of word-of-mouth marketing programs that worked for both long-term value and efficiency. But to get started with a program of this kind, you’ll have to take it one step at a time.

five steps for fan marketing

Why is marketing with fans harder than it seems? Because at a lot of companies, marketing’s main job is to turn noncustomers into customers. Once they’re customers, they go into customer service, which focuses on retention. But retention is not enough. Given the potency of empowered customers, marketing needs to focus on them every bit as much as the service department does.

Having acquired a bunch of customers, you should be doing everything possible to maintain a connection with them. You should develop a healthy obsession with what they are talking about, whom they are talking to, and what they want. Only then can you determine how best to encourage them to speak about your products.

And as Microsoft found out, what they want to talk about and where may not match up to what your marketing thinks is best. Smart companies seeing this don’t give up on word of mouth or try to fit it into a mold. They change their marketing. They may even change their products. The word of mouth of your customers is a gift. Embrace it.

Focusing much of your marketing on current customers will feel fundamentally weird to most marketers. Since you started your career, you’ve been trained to focus on reaching new customers and on generating awareness. As for outreach to existing customers, the main focus was typically to get repeat business.

To get your head in the right place, start with this: 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 the new mind-set—a mind-set that embraces empowered customers. This is the five-step method for amplifying word of mouth:

As you start on this journey, know that you’ll likely be taking all five steps. Listening to the outside perspective stimulates responses, which takes you deeper into enabling and amplifying your fans. And once you’re engaged with those fans, they will influence and change your company.

outside perspective: develop the discipline of listening

Conversing with customers is terrifying for marketers. That’s why most companies don’t do it. Marketing creates constructs like “target markets” with neat statistical work. Sure, you do focus groups, but you stay on the other side of that one-way glass. Having been paid, focus group participants are usually civil. In contrast, there are no inhibitions online—people can say anything.

What a valuable resource—real frank discussion.

The fear of engaging with customers usually springs from ignorance. Ignorance is curable. Cure it. Start listening.

Begin by analyzing where your customers are talking to each other. Is Facebook more important, or should you concentrate on discussion forums? One way to figure this out is with a peer influence analysis of your market—you can check out the ones in chapter 3 for some guidance.

Then see what people are saying. Choose a listening platform—a company that, for a fee, will help you monitor online commentary about your company and your products.⁵ Radian6 may be the most economical; others include TNS Cymfony, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, and Sysomos. Since fan marketing requires you to wade into and amplify this conversation, you’d better understand it first.

Here’s an example of how one organization turned that outside perspective into value. McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul, Minnesota, wanted to differentiate itself from larger and better-known music colleges. It hired a company called Risdall Marketing Group to analyze online conversations around music colleges. Risdall’s analysis of online monitoring reports from Radian6 indicated the key topics of conversation. Only after this step was complete could McNally Smith plunge in, connect with the people talking about music colleges, and become part of the conversation. Before this program, McNally Smith was mentioned in 2.7 percent of online conversations about music colleges; afterward, it was mentioned in 12.1 percent.⁶

This example shows two things: first, listening is not enough, you must engage to make an impact. And second, you have to keep listening to see if it’s working. But like McNally Smith, you’ll find that listening gets you familiar with what’s being said and where; it’s the first step to energizing fans.

respond: connect with customers

Listening in groundswell channels generates the urge to participate. Go ahead, connect with your customers. But too many marketers treat these channels as a checklist. It’s true, you ought to be in Twitter, on Facebook, commenting on blogs, and participating in discussion forums—your analysis gained through the outside perspective stage can tell you how to prioritize these channels.

But your presence needs to be part of a strategy to respond to others and create opportunities for others to respond to you. You should be able to (1) respond to requests for service or information (because once you appear, customers will expect this); (2) make marketing announcements (but be careful, a little of this goes a long way), and (3) engage fans with content that excites them (this is the core of fan marketing).

To do this properly, you’ll need a dedicated resource to staff this channel. That person must be able to make customer service connections, not just speak for marketing; your customers will expect it. The person operating the accounts must be able to respond quickly without authorization; a better policy is to set guidelines in advance so she can work within them.

Finally, remember that your objective here is to encourage fans. So start making notes of who’s talking about you (Twitter handles, blogs, forum participants) and get ready to reach out to them more directly. In this context, you’ll often find that people whose problem you’ve solved are the most enthusiastic, because your outreach changed them from detractors to promoters.

enable: make it easy to share

You’ve identified where your customers are talking and what they’re saying. You’ve got people in your own organization in position and responding. Only now can you get started on the effective work in fan marketing—making it easier for fans who like you to talk about you.

Your job is simply to shorten the distance between a happy customer and an encouraging comment. Here are some ways to do that:

amplify: connect customers with one another

If you publish a book, you can put a few good review quotes on the back. The ad for your movie can tell viewers that the New York Times called it a “must-see.”

But in the groundswell, every comment can be recycled. Social applications make it far easier to identify reviews and put them in places where others can see them.

We call this step “amplify” since it takes existing word of mouth and pumps up the volume. When Microsoft’s Marty Collins put the social comments about Windows 7 on the Windows home page, she vastly increased the reach of these comments. Where a person’s comment may have had ten or a hundred followers, she put it in front of tens of thousands. This is the step that makes fan marketing worthwhile by increasing the reach of messages.

Sonic Foundry, a technology vendor that sells Webcasts to corporations, is one company that turned this sort of concentration of messages to its advantage.¹⁰ Travel bans and the economic downturn of 2009 had dented the company’s prospects for its annual user conference in Madison, Wisconsin, an event that normally generated a lot of business. Sonic Foundry took advantage of its strength with video to record and broadcast interviews with members at the conference, and to Webcast the entire event. By featuring users (and retweeting their tweets), the company spread the enthusiasm of a live event to many who weren’t there in person. As a result, Sonic Foundry saw a 15 percent increase in paying conference attendees, of whom 10 percent were attending virtually over the Net.

Another way to amplify word of mouth is to make customer reviews easier to write and publish. Diane Beaudet, senior director of user engagement for the antivirus and security programs from Symantec’s Norton division, knew she had customers who loved the product—she could see them talking about it on Facebook and Twitter. But on sites featuring ratings and reviews, Norton’s ratings were decidedly mixed. Working with Zuberance, a word-of-mouth marketing company, Norton put a one-question survey in front of people visiting its Web site. Those who said they would recommend the Norton brand to others were invited to join a program called Norton Advocates. Zuberance helped Norton Advocates members to write and publish reviews on sites like Amazon and CNET. As a result, in a short time, Norton’s average ratings on those sites went from two stars to four and a half (on a five-point scale).¹¹

Amplifying has its challenges. In the case of Norton and Zuberance, some Norton Advocates members were at first rewarded with redeemable “points” for sharing promotions, but the companies quickly discontinued that element of the program to avoid the appearance that incentives were driving participation. Microsoft moderates the comments that appear on its Windows Social page to ensure that offensive material is not passed through. Some social technology experts, like Sam Decker, head of marketing for the social commerce technology vendor Bazaarvoice, counsel marketers to maintain authenticity in sourcing customer content.¹² He suggests asking whether you’d be comfortable revealing how you solicited these sorts of reviews and comments. Our view: marketers must be very careful about cherry-picking or skewing social activity that they amplify. In the case of Norton and Zuberance, for example, while the customers encouraged to submit reviews were those who were favorably inclined toward the product, the company simply led the reviewers to the doorstep of the sites and allowed them to type whatever they wanted.

Can amplifying backfire? Of course. On March 2, 2009, the candy brand Skittles replaced its home page skittles.com with feeds from social media—Tweets about Skittles, YouTube videos about Skittles, and so on. Unlike Microsoft’s efforts, there was very little moderation. On the plus side, the site saw a 1,332 percent increase in Web visitors, driven by news coverage, word of mouth, and curiosity.¹³ Of course, a lot of the activity devolved into “Look, I can tweet about Skittles and get the F-word onto their home page.” We found this stunt lacking, because brand fans were quickly overwhelmed by fame seekers.

Regardless of what techniques you use, here’s what happens when you complete the first four steps of fan marketing: you learn a lot about your customers. “Respond” doesn’t just mean helping them—it means respecting their desires for change. And this leads to the fifth step of fan marketing—changing your company.

change: revise your marketing and your products

Marketing is about resonance. Good marketers seek ideas about what resonates with customers. That’s one of the best things about fan marketing—you learn what resonates. Nearly every marketer we spoke with for this chapter told us that they were changing their marketing based on insights from customers.

Take Swarovski, an Austrian company that makes small gemstones used in jewelry, including watches. Among its main marketing tools are brochures used at jewelry shows, intended to give jewelry manufacturers ideas about how to incorporate the Swarovski gems into their designs. The company conducted an online contest for watch designs in 2008, attracting more than nine hundred innovative designs.¹⁴ The company selected the best of these and created its marketing brochure from them. If jewelry manufacturers like a design in the brochure, they contact the original designer. With this innovative program, the company has turned watch designers into Swarovski promoters, given its manufacturing customers access to a new source of creativity, and boosted the visibility of its gemstone products.

Companies are beginning to realize that empowered customers are a great source of innovative ideas. The Starbucks site mystarbucks idea.com has now generated over eighty thousand ideas for the company, of which over fifty have been implemented.¹⁵ Intuit has recruited seventeen thousand people into its TurboTax Inner Circle; the company uses them as a sounding board for new tax preparation software ideas.¹⁶ And the auto-racing organization NASCAR, taking cues from its twelve-thousand-member fan community, changed the rules for races;¹⁷ now, in a restart after a yellow caution flag, the cars start double file instead of single file. The fans love it.

Companies like to imagine they “control” their brands, but with empowered customers ready at any moment to hijack your brand identity, that concept is in danger. Embracing and amplifying the voices of your fans is one way to ally yourself with empowered customers. Just be aware that once you’ve taken this step, customers will be influencing your marketing and design decisions.

We’ll demonstrate some of these ideas with two more case studies that show the range of companies that can use fan marketing. One example comes from sports, where fans are central to everything. The other comes from pharmaceuticals, a regulated industry that requires a little more careful thinking to tap into word of mouth.

CASE STUDY

the NHL turns tweets into fan enthusiasm

Dani Muccio didn’t grow to appreciate hockey until her three sons began to play. As she watched them skate around the rink—and watched some professional players from the New York Islanders skate at camps her kids attended—she began to see the beauty of the game her husband had been trying to get her interested in for years.

Dani wanted to connect with other people who felt the same way about hockey as she did. Her idea crystallized when she attended a tweetup—an in-person meeting of Twitter members who share a common interest. Her first tweetup wasn’t about hockey, but she vowed her next one would be.

“Hockey is the red-headed stepchild of the sports world,” Dani explains. Football and baseball fans are everywhere; hockey fans need to work a bit harder to find each other. A tweetup would afford them a way to connect. So Dani started tweeting about her idea, using the hashtag #NHLTweetup.¹⁸ (Since a hashtag is a searchable term that people include in tweets, Dani knew other fans could go to search.twitter.com and search on “NHLTweetup” to find other tweets on the topic.)

Mike DiLorenzo was the director of corporate communications for the NHL at the time. He was concerned about what happens every year as the hockey playoffs begin. “Hockey fans are very tribal,” he says. At the start of the playoffs, fourteen of the thirty teams have already been eliminated. His challenge was to find ways to get fans of teams that did not qualify for the playoffs—the New York Islanders and Nashville Predators, for example—to watch games between other playoff teams. So when he saw Dani’s tweets about NHL tweetups, he knew her idea could be the spark he needed.

The first NHL tweetup was held in the NHL store in midtown Manhattan. The NHL provided the venue and included some souvenirs like signed NHL jerseys and an autographed guitar donated by Gibson. Dani got a friend to put up a Web site. Dani, Mike, and other tweeters they knew spread the word and generated the excitement. And the NHL lined up some of its sponsors: Bud Light to supply the beer and McDonald’s to deliver the food. There’s nothing like a fan to start a movement. Two hundred people showed up for the tweetup, but the impact was far greater. On the day of the tweetup, #NHLTweetup was the top trending topic on Twitter—meaning it was the most popular new topic being discussed by Twitter members. (This is like a book hitting the bestseller list—millions of Twitter members view the trending topics and then search them to see what people are talking about.) The people who came to the tweetup tweeted from their mobile phones while they were at the party. According to USA Today, the people at the New York tweetup had 21,336 followers, all of whom could be hearing about the hockey happening in New York, in real time.¹⁹

The NHL Tweetups continued in twenty-two other locations. One hundred people showed up in Nashville, even without free food. Three hundred and fifty showed up in Regina, Saskatchewan, which doesn’t even have an NHL team. Two got together in London. To test the effects of all this activity, Mike included coupons in the gift bags that went out to the local tweetups. Result: thousands of purchases and tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise sold at Shop.NHL.com.

The NHL has now created a social media department and put Mike in charge of it. Mike believes the tweetups improved hockey’s playoff ratings, and the NHL now has 355,000 followers on Twitter. Dani continues to coordinate the tweetups—it’s a labor of love for her, all volunteer work—and Mike is too smart to mess with fans on a mission. “My discovery,” he says, “is that social networks are not about Web sites … they are about creating or enhancing experiences for our fans.”

lessons from fans

You may think that sports doesn’t have much in common with your business. We’re betting it does. The NHL has a core group of avid fans of its product, many more who are casually interested, and an even larger group of potential fans who don’t care (yet). Isn’t it the same for your company?

In terms of the five-step process for amplifying word of mouth, Mike DiLorenzo learned about Dani through Twitter (outside perspective), connected with her (respond), created a place and merchandise for the New York tweetup (enable), and used the NHL Twitter account to connect others with NHLTweetup.com (amplify). With Mike now in charge of social media for the NHL, the league is likely to rethink how it markets itself based on all the social activity. When social gets into a company, the last step, change, will happen.

Fans can say just about anything about sports, and the leagues love it. Contrast this free-for-all environment with what happens in a regulated industry like financial services or pharmaceuticals. Can fan marketing work there? Yes, but you’ll have to be a little more careful.

CASE STUDY

finding fans for pharmaceuticals

You probably have no idea how paranoid drug companies are about following the rules from regulatory bodies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Fines can run to billions of dollars. Our report about using social media in the pharmaceutical industry was titled “How To Create A Social Application For Life Sciences Without Getting Fired.”²⁰ And it was aptly named, as it turned out—one marketer told me she would lose her job if I published a description of her application, even though it had been announced publicly.

So we were surprised to see that some life sciences companies were not only creating successful fan marketing programs, but doing very well with them. It’s all a matter of following the rules very carefully.

Think about it. If you’re miserable because of some disease or condition and a medical product makes things better, you’re going to want to share. The drug company can’t just create an unmoderated discussion forum and invite you to participate—you might recommend some inappropriate usage model, or fail to disclose side effects, which are exactly the activities the FDA punishes. But if you obey a few rules, the company can help you talk about your success.

People who suffer arthritic knee problems are a great example. Not only are they in agony, they worry that they’re headed down the road to knee-replacement surgery. But Genzyme makes a product called Synvisc-One that can help. It’s an artificial lubricant, injected into the knee joint once every six months. I (Josh) had heard of this product because it enabled my father, a lifelong tennis player, to continue to play at age seventy-seven. For the people it helps, it’s a godsend.

Christine Waite, the associate director of consumer marketing at Genzyme, knew that this word of mouth was waiting to be unlocked—she’d done surveys that showed that 80 percent of Synvisc-One customers were ready to recommend the product. Her problem was straightforward: awareness of Synvisc-One is low among the patients who need it, typically people fifty-five and older. (Also, Synvisc is hard to spell, which challenges people doing Web searches.)

Anyone interested in nonstandard forms of marketing in the pharmaceutical industry is a HERO, because you have to be both empowered and resourceful to get the lawyers and regulatory affairs people to okay your program. The resource Christine needed to get Synvisc-One fans talking was Andrew Levitt, the founder of HealthTalker, a company dedicated to spreading fan word of mouth for life sciences companies.

They started by emailing to a small subset of Genzyme’s database of about a hundred thousand people who have had Synvisc-One treatments or asked about it, directing people to a survey. The survey identified people who would be willing to tell others about it. Genzyme designed the invitation so that for this pilot project only a small group—four hundred fifty—of the most enthusiastic Synvisc-One fans would qualify.

Christine’s HealthTalker program directed these patients/fans to kneeconnections.com, a site where they registered and filled out a profile, including their name and address. HealthTalker then sent them an information kit plus little business-card-sized brochures to hand out to others. The program encourages HealthTalker members to come back regularly and report how many conversations they’ve had. But members get no payment. Christine wants people in the program who truly believe in the product, not just those willing to talk about it for some sort of compensation.

In pharma marketing, the objective is to educate patients and make them aware (in a way that’s fair and balanced, in compliance with FDA regulations). The patients who hear about Synvisc-One through HealthTalker members arrive at a special Web site where they can request more information, the first step in going to an orthopedist and getting treatment. Christine can track the success of the program through visits and requests for information that come from this site.

Genzyme’s HealthTalker pilot generated fifteen hundred conversations in just three months at the end of 2009. The fans in the program are talking to more and more acquaintances, not just friends and family. These are highly qualified leads—people with knee pain who are hard to identify any other way. Based on this level of success, Christine and Genzyme are expanding the program in 2010. There’s no more fervent advocate than a person who’s gotten relief from suffering.

putting it all together

Taken together, Genzyme, the NHL, and Microsoft can give you a good perspective on the long-term value of fan marketing. Word of mouth is one of the hottest trends in marketing—if you want to learn more, check out Andy Sernovitz’s book Word of Mouth Marketing²¹ or the annual conference of WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

But let’s take a step back. You’ve now completed the part of empowered that talks about outreach to customers. How does fan marketing fit in?

We’ve talked about how you need to play defense, using monitoring to see what people are saying and reaching out with service. Because at any moment, a customer you haven’t served could start to stomp on your brand very publicly. Or, you could turn that person into a fan.

We’ve talked about empowering your customers with mobile information rather than letting them find whatever happens into their iPhones, BlackBerry phones, and Androids.

And we’ve talked about how to go on the offensive, finding your fans, energizing them, and amplifying their impact on other customers and potential customers.

Any organization that wants to enable HEROes to pursue these goals has to change. It’s not enough to support these new forms of marketing and customer service. The management needs to change, to give the HEROes more autonomy. The IT department has to change, from running technology to supporting technology projects created by others. And if the company is truly serious about HERO-powered innovation, it needs to put systems in place to help HEROes collaborate with one another.

In the first half of this book, we’ve told you what to do to reach out to empowered customers. In the second half, we’ll describe how organizations full of empowered people can run without spinning out of control. It all starts with the agreement among HEROes, managers, and IT that we call the HERO Compact, as we describe in chapter 7.