In traditional marketing you can control your message. In networked marketing, not only are you not only able to control the message, you have to be instantly responsive to what the crowd is saying. An example of this is Epicurious. The great part about it is that the users write reviews of the recipes and improve them. Epicurious has to continually react. This is continuous improvement.

The other challenge is augmenting services to create better customer experiences. Say you have your kid in a day camp, and when you ask your kid what he did at camp that day, he says "Nothing." That's frustrating to a parent. At Steve and Kate's Camp, kids wear wristbands that let people take photos and upload them into the parents' computers so the parents can see what their kids have done at the end of the day.

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The purpose of our work is to open-source and make scalable best practices using cloud analytics and digital applications in the service industry, which is about 80% of the US economy. We believe there's great opportunity for entrepreneurs, for students in business schools, as well as STEM students, to be able to take a look at a framework, which we're calling Service Thinking, as a way of strategically thinking about how they will use the tools that cloud analytics and social avail for them. So in a sense we are part of a movement to get the human service and social systems to catch up with the technology in terms of its potential.

We co-authored the book Service Thinking: Seven Principles to Discover Innovative Opportunities to help people have a framework by which they can build enterprises based on some very simple principles. I won't go through all of them, but a few of the key ones are

• Co-creating values with customers, so that you become an intelligent listener, and there are tools that enable you to become an intelligent listener;
• That you allow for emergent strategy, rather than just prescriptive, and by emergent that means you have a vision, but what your services are, how they're delivered, how you price---you allow that model to evolve, co-created with the customer;
• That you are looking at the system that you are marketing in or that your product is in and that you are making improvements within a system, be it transportation, health care, education, and that you not look at yourselves as verticals, but rather as specialization integration, integrating your product or your service into a system as a specialist that does it better and therefore the idea of one vertical, one company, one set of people that you work with kind of goes by the wayside.
• The other thing that's very important is Global-Mobile-Social, that businesses are going to be built to be scalable, that they are going to be running on mobile devices which enable you to have very different offers, very different analytics when you're working on the cloud. Social is a great leverage for you in terms of understanding how to harness the enthusiasm of your most loyal users on behalf of expanding the franchise.
• Metrics. Currently most metrics were developed for a legacy system that was quite fixed and short term. I think that with the systems that we're now looking at with cloud and analytics and social, we are really looking at more sentiment analysis and we need new benchmarks that will enable marketing directors as well as enterprise developers to be able to have a great set of metrics to be able to benchmark themselves for better success in discovering innovative opportunities.

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The marketing profession has gone through enormous changes, not only in terms of all the technologies and the different tools that marketers use, but just the nature of the job, the structure of the job, the responsibilities. Thirty years ago, when I was involved in marketing, it was fairly simple. We had mass production, mass consumption, mass markets, mass media. It was fairly predictable and almost certain that if you followed certain best practices that you would be successful.

I think today marketing professionals are in a much more vulnerable position because the field is changing so much. The nature of the tools that are available is evolving, and marketing is being held to a return on investment standard that we never had before. If you have to justify every dollar spent on marketing in terms of the sale specific items, then the nature of working on a cloud, working with social, working in terms of advocates who are going to socialize your brand---these call for new metrics and a different time frame to measure results.

Rather than look at the CMO as a fixed job position, I think it's much better to look at the whole area of demand creation and demand management, which also includes the the technology, includes sales. We're looking at a function that's far broader than traditional marketing would be.

How does the marketing profession get skills that keep them current and keep them continuously learning best practices? Most marketing people are aware that they are responsible for their own careers and their career trajectory, and I think an important part of that is to stay current on the kinds of tools that will enable them to have value in the marketplace. So marketing people have to think about where they fit in terms of industry, where they fit in terms of the work environment that best suits them, but also how they add value, and you add value by your ability to use the new tools, and IBM can be a great partner in helping you to do that.

I've been privileged to see the resources that IBM makes available to people who are in the academic community who really want to innovate. I think what's very important for people in academia is just as marketing people have to stay current, academic folks, particularly in business schools, need to understand new principles of marketing and enterprise creation that business engineering provides. The way to learn that is through companies like IBM. I have to say there are very few companies that provide the level of support and partnership that IBM does to faculty, as well as the opportunities for students to get involved that allow them to show what they've learned using IBM principles and methods.