The Operations and Marketing Connection has basically focused on two main concerns: The importance of understanding the mechanics of the Social Web and the Social Feedback Cycle, and the collaborative inflection-point within the larger social engagement process. Engagement has been redefined for social business as a more participative notion compared with the decidedly more passive definition of engagement, reading an ad or mechanically interacting with a micro site typically applied in traditional media, where terms like “Engagement Ad” That’s exactly not what participants on the Social Web think of as “engaging,” as the Social Web is a distinctly participation-centric place.
The final section ties the mechanical processes of the social technologies together with the acts of participation and establishes the foundational participation in the business or organization heading for success on the Social Web. The Social Feedback Cycle of the loop that connects the published experiences of current customers or other stakeholders with potential customers or other stakeholders is powered by the organization and what it produces. This is a very different proposition from a traditional view of marketing where the message is controlled by an agency and the experience is controlled in isolation by the product or services teams and others.
In other words, if Marketing is the discipline or function within an organization that defines and shapes the customer’s expectation, then Operations is the combined functional team that orients and experience by the real customers. The connection between the disciplines of marketing and operations and social media and particularly in the conversations their ratings in photos and moreover that circulate on the Social Web is this: The majority of conversations that involve a brand, product, or service are those that arise out of a difference between what was expected and what was delivered or experienced. After all, we tend to talk more about what was not expected than what was expected.
