Game on: New CEO outlines taking Lithium to the next level

There’s been no time for Lithium’s new CEO to get settled into his office in the first few weeks of his tenancy, with the software industry veteran having been whisked around the globe as part of the online community firm’s Likes to Loves world tour.

 

But Rob Tarkoff expected nothing less when he took over the reins of a company that was named as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social CRM, and whose communities boast more than 20 million registered users for brands such as Sephora, Best Buy, Verizon and The Home Depot.

 

Social CRM is a burgeoning and exciting market – Gartner forecasting it will be a billion dollar market in the next couple of years – and Lithium is smack bang in the middle of it. And unsurprisingly it is this excitement that drew Tarkoff to the role.

 

“What attracted me about Lithium was the number of early adopters – the Geoffrey Moore crazy advocates,” he explains, a day after the London leg of his company’s world tour. “They have been attracted to Lithium because the ROI is immediate. So when you are capturing a large group of early adopters like that, the ability to move ‘across the chasm’ to the pragmatists (in the words of Moore) is a lot easier because you have real ROI stories that can translate to industries.”

 

 

Nonetheless, Tarkoff acknowledges that knowledge about social media varies wildly from business to business.

 

“We need to look at where the customers in this industry are on the social spectrum and provide them appropriate service,” he continues. “If you go to someone who is dabbling in social media and tell them they need a fully operational community that they will put all of their customer interactions into, they will say that it is entirely too disruptive to their business right now. But if you get them to start a Lithium community on Facebook, they might get fans and they might know that people have got a positive association with clicking the ‘like’ button. What they don’t know, though, is once they have populated a Facebook fan page with a million fans, what they then do with them. How they monetise them. How they create true loyalty and get them to act and interact more effectively. And that is where we are developing a really nice strategy for how to move people on the continuum of social business sophistication.”

 

And while only in the job a few weeks, Tarkoff is already putting his own stamp on things to address these kinds of issues.

 

“One of the things I’m trying to encourage within Lithium is to take a much more broad-based platform-oriented approach and provide social business solutions,” he explains. “And if you’re going to provide social business solutions you have to understand upfront strategic consulting, whether that is through us or partners. You have to understand software implementation and best practices, and you have to understand mining and managing data to product actionable ROI models so that people can more effectively sell it up the chain within their organisations. Because it is a broad spectrum.”

 

 

Tarkoff joined Lithium from Adobe Systems - where he served as senior vice president and general manager of the £600m Digital Enterprise Solutions business unit - succeeding Lithium co-founder Lyle Fong, who has taken on the role of chief strategist while continuing to serve on the board of directors. This, Tarkoff suggests, will be an important structure for the firm going forward.

 

“Lyle is an incredible talent and asset to the company and his love is thinking about the markets and the strategy and being a spokesperson for the impact of social. In my opinion there are very few people, if any, who are better at telling the story of the transformative effect of social on your business,” says the new CEO.

 

“Lyle and I had lots of conversations before I came in. I asked him what it was that he really wanted to do and he said he loves thinking about the ways in which he change the market,” he continues. “I like to think that he now gets to focus more on that, while I spend time on things that the company needs to have now, like how we scale, how we grow, how we operationalise some of the early things that we have done, how we take our gamification philosophy and make it more accessible for people who are just starting on this, and how we navigate the sales process in large companies, which is something I have been doing for a long time! If Lyle was 50% focused on disrupting the market, now he can be 75 or 100% focused on disrupting the market. That is a pretty potent combination.”

 

 

Having cut his teeth in executive positions at EMC Corporation and Documentum, Tarkoff’s move to Adobe saw him pioneer the company’s customer experience management strategy, as well as taking responsibility for Adobe’s worldwide enterprise solution partnerships, including system integration partners and strategic ISVs – all experience that will provide invaluable as he looks to take Lithium to the next level.

 

And he acknowledges that all this experience will be needed as he looks to take Lithium to the next level.

 

“When you operate under the radar, you do your thing and make mistakes and you have a passionate group of customers and advocates who keep you going and then as you scale success and you raise your profile there are new challenges,” he explains. “Everything that Lyle did to get from nothing to where we are today was extremely difficult. And now it is a different set of challenges to get to the next level. And a lot of the challenges are just about the true sense of organisational scalability, and that is not just bureaucratic processes and procedures, but also about how you maintain the culture and DNA of Lithium to want to solve complex problems and motivate customers to be passionate about these products.”

 

He continues: “We have to scale to be a company that can fight the dog fight of enterprise sales without losing the authenticity and culture of the company, because in the end, particularly in social, if that comes through, the buyers at any level in the chain will win. You can’t see our customer advocacy and say this isn’t a company that should win. We should win because we make customers successful, not because we’re doing drive-by shootings with software and dropping off a bunch of software and leaving it alone. Our success is tied to their success, with customers saying we’re too cheap relative to the value that they are creating. How often does that happen in enterprise software? I’m sure Oracle and SAP never heard that. So you look at the kernel of all of those things and you say how do you maintain that core essence but provide enough of the capabilities, skill sets, the infrastructure and scalability to win as you go forwards?”

 

And Tarkoff is taking inspiration from a company that has recently made clear its own intentions relating to the social enterprise.

 

“In many ways Salesforce.com is an example of a company that did that and I looked at [Marc] Benioff a lot as a model who did this. He persisted with the message of Cloud-based delivery of software and he said I’m not going to lose that because all of the customers are asking me to go on-premise and I’m not going to do that, I’m going to stay true to it and just going to build up the capability to deliver that and continue to show customers that this is a more effective way to deploy SFA. We will do the same for social.”

 

 

Other challenges that lie ahead for Lithium, according to Tarkoff, could be an unwantd consequence of the hyperbole that has attracted itself to the social media arena. With a manifesto built on the concept of gamfication, Tarkoff is all too aware, for example, of the damage that a backlash could do to the company’s core message.

 

“Gamification has obviously become the buzzword of the day and like any buzzword movements, there’s a real risk that the core values associated with what it really means to install and enthuse gaming principles to communities built around common interests that drive behaviour, whether that is purchase behaviour or posting content or whatever, there is a real risk that it gets diluted to the point that people give up on the concept because it is not understood how to do it right. That’s maybe the thing that we fear the most, that people will get such a fever and fervour to want to deploy this stuff that they will just be reaching for anything because they just don’t want to get fired for not having a social strategy, and then they do a bunch of thing wrong and it becomes a process of unwinding not well-thought out experiments.”

 

As such, the new CEO believes that it is incumbent on Lithium to educate the market on what it takes to be successful in social – something that is perhaps its most important goal as it enters its next chapter. “Part of our responsibility is to educate the market, and that is not just about selling products – they might buy Lithium products, they might not – but we want the entire market to be successful in this because it just creates validity and credibility for the market.”

 

But with business use of social media evolving at a robust rate, Tarkoff acknowledges that it is an “exciting time” for Lithium. The conversations and questions surrounding social media are changing – and this points to something significant, he says.

 

“Now everybody knows that social is super important,” he concludes. “Today the conversation has changed to ‘how do I engage’ and ‘with whom do I engage’ as opposed to ‘should I engage’ and ‘is this something that is really important’. And that makes it a much more actionable conversation right now. And it is also typically the kind of conversations that happen right before you hit a tornado. And that, I think, is where we are right now.”