There's a lot of talk about the return on investment of word-of-mouth marketing and social media lately. Maybe it's because we're all trying to find meaningful ways to justify effort and spending in the work we do in the world. In thinking about that, we ran across this phrase from Hermann Simon, author of Hidden Champions of the 21st Century, who is considered to be the Jim Collins (author of Good to Great) of the world of privately held midmarket companies: "closeness to customer."

It seems that of the hidden champions Simon has studied, 88.7 percent have the following characteristic in common: five times as many employees (25–50 percent) have regular customer contact. Compare this with larger companies that typically have only 5 to 10 percent of their employees making regular customer contact.

Think about that. Simon's hidden champions are number one or two in world market share, have less than $1 billion in revenues, and have low visibility and public awareness. An interesting—and, some might argue, odd—bunch for those of us involved in social media to learn from, for sure.

So what is the value of customer closeness? According to Simon, staying close to your most demanding customers compels performance and innovation. Strategies become driven by value, not price, so these companies can charge 10 percent to 15 percent more for their products or services. And we would bet money that employees are more engaged if they are closer to customers. It's always a signal of corporate health and profitability, in our opinion.

We have seen this at work firsthand in the movements we have cocreated with our clients. Being on a first-name basis with a larger group of your customers significantly changes the game. They are no longer your target audience; they are people, with fascinating lives. You find common passion and interests with someone you know more intimately.

So ask yourself this: How close is your company to your customers? What percentage of your employees have regular customer contact and conversation?

Advertising will not sell a bad product; it'll just make more people aware that it's a bad product. And igniting a movement will not sell a bad product either. Every marketer needs to start by making a better product. There are lots of ways to do that. One is to have a little internal team of expert that goes off and tries to make things better. But really, a more effective approach is to involve the people who are actually using the product.

One of our favorite lessons comes from Fiskars Vice President of Brand Jay Gillespie: "Today, we are constantly engaging the actual people that use our products. They are absolutely fueling better products." Read that again. Fiskars doesn't want to make a move without asking their customers first. And that's the way it should be.

The great companies of the world have understood this all along, on some gut level at least. Apple, Patagonia, USAA, Southwest Airlines—name a great company, and we'll bet you money that they don't just know their customers as well as they know a best friend; they hire their customers, too.

The world is more challenging and competitive than ever before. Innovation is not just a nice and lofty goal; it's something your customers demand.

After all, how do you measure the success of something that would never have happened? How do you measure the value of a 35 percent response rate on a 72-question survey about new products?

Setting goals is paramount for a movement. After all, you have to move toward something, right? So just for the sake of closing the loop on the case studies we've discussed throughout the book, here are some of the results.

Everyone is talking about social media in terms of numbers of Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Everyone seems in search of bodies. But what about defining success in terms of engagement? Jay Gillespie has this to say about the numbers game: "For me, it's not about the numbers; it's about growing deeper relationships."

So how do you measure the power of engagement? Since the world of business has changed so dramatically in the last decade, we have to ask the question: Has the definition of success changed? Yes. Because you can't make a difference if you cease to exist. The bottom line is the bottom line.

Meg Smith from the American Booksellers Association puts it nicely: "If it wasn't for the igniting of the IndieBound movement, there would be less books being sold in independent bookstores; and part of that is because the booksellers themselves would have less enthusiasm about what they do."

The results for Love146 don't stop with doubling the amount of money they've raised to end child-sex slavery since they changed their name and identity. It's also about connecting with an entire new audience on a deeper level. Founder Rob Morris says it all with this:

Success for the Charleston Parks Conservancy (the Park Angels movement) comes in a different package as well. According to the Executive Director Jim Martin, it's a city that now spends time working in its public spaces. "After starting the Park Angels movement in January 2008, we're now working in over 10 percent of our ... over-120 parks." And that number continues to grow. So the Charleston Parks Conservancy went from being a foundation that hosts fund-raisers to a place where citizens of Charleston can learn about the rich horticulture of their city's history by participating in the nurturing of their public spaces. How does one measure that?

Rage against the Haze accomplished amazing success. The 2006 South Carolina Youth Tobacco Survey found that South Carolina had a smoking rate drop of 16.9 percent, one of the highest in the nation. That's without any kind of mass media or tax increases on cigarettes. According to the American Lung Association, this is an unprecedented drop, and this is the state with the cheapest cigarette prices in the nation. The rest of the United States funded television and school campaigns from the $206 billion settlement, which were never implemented by the state of South Carolina. The budget got hit by a bus. And Rage lives on.

But it doesn't stop there in the results category. As Viralmentalist #11 Chris Ivan puts it:

Yes, Rage is about teens in South Carolina. It was and is a movement to give them a voice. But the lessons learned have fueled the growth of a 360-year-old tool company. And sparked one of the largest retailers in the nation to say, "Why can't we give a voice and a platform to our passionate musical instrument employees and customers?" So we ask you this: How do you measure changing someone's life?

We started the Fiskars movement in four specific cities. One of our goals was to increase sales 10 percent within the first nine months. Our online aim was to increase mentions of the brand on the Internet—beyond the Fiskateer site—by at least 10 percent.

According to the company's sales data, the Fiskateer movement doubled sales in the cities where we started as compared with cities with the same sales trends that had no Fiskateer presence. When we again tracked online references to the brand, we found that they increased 240 percent within the first four months. To date, they've increased more than 600 percent.

But it doesn't stop there with the Fiskateers, either.

Fiskateers are doing their own marketing and creating their own messages: T-shirts, bumper stickers, business cards, and RACs (random acts of crafting) in public spaces, all in the name of Fiskars. The list goes on and on. And again, instead of being the logo police and squashing those efforts, Fiskars supports and encourages them, which fuels the fire of the initiative.

Another way we measure this movement's success is by analyzing how the Fiskateer community contributes across many different departments within the company. And this translates to the things that they don't have to spend money on.

For example, Fiskars's R&D department has a direct line into members of the community, who now choose the names and colors for new products. An engineer can set up a chat or reach out to individual Fiskateers by name and reputation to gather their input and opinions. This reduces costs for focus groups and research, because the community's hand-raisers are willing and eager to share their thoughts on any particular subject. On average, R&D receives 13 new ideas for products per month—for free. Some of these get developed and produced. So Fiskateers go to the store and see a product that they had a part in developing, testing, or naming—and that good old feeling of ownership ensues.

Because Fiskateers are out there actively talking about Fiskars and its products on other web sites, blogs, and message boards, Fiskars spends less money for online ad placements. This is also true for Fiskateers who answer people's concerns and questions about Fiskars products. If someone posts a question online about a problem with a product, Fiskateers are able to respond before anyone from corporate can find it and answer. Jay Gillespie explains:

In other words, this company has a community of over 7,000 individuals who know how to troubleshoot and are more than willing to share that knowledge. On top of these things, Fiskateers show up and take care of potentially nightmarish public relations issues before the company can even prepare a formal response. Fiskateers are defenders of the brand.

By conservative estimates—because the community is playing so many roles in so many different departments—there is about a 500 percent yearly return on the value of community compared with what Fiskars spends on it. So they don't just measure the money they're making; they also measure the money they're saving and can therefore use for other things.

In the case of Best Buy's Mi11 musical instruments movement, it's too early to tell about sales results. What we do know is that engagement is running deep. For example, 12 percent of the employees in the musical instruments division applied for the leadership positions. That's unheard of for a giant retail brand like Best Buy—considering the fact that a lot of those stores-within-stores were open only a couple of months at the time. Of course, there are many other things that will be measured. Best Buy Marketing Strategy and Communication executive Jamie Plesser weighs in: "A movement will help us land the awareness challenge. It helps us deliver on credibility. A conversation is an experience in and of itself."

So open up your mind to results. Yes, we live in a world where movements need to be justified because they show up on a profit-and-loss report as a line item. Make no mistake about it, those results need to be tied to dollar signs. But in addition to that, think about the other ways a movement can be measured. And to be completely honest, some of it can't be tied to dollars. Like the story of the Fiskateers donating crafting supplies to a fellow community member whose house burned down. Or the Fiskateer who offered to be tested as a possible match when another community member found out her father needed a kidney transplant. Measure that in dollars, if you can.

As we stated in the beginning of this book, the true test of a movement's success is to create something so powerful—so meaningful—that your advocates don't want to live without it. So if your budget gets slashed, they will pick up the banner and march forward without you. That can't be quantified on a piece of paper. But the by-products of it can.

Yes, movements fight an injustice in the world. It's straightforward to see that for organizations like Love146, where the injustice lies in the horrors of child-sex slavery and exploitation. Martin Luther King Jr. fought against the injustice of inequality. That's easy to identify, too. But what is your injustice? You might think it's hard to find, but it lies in those passion conversations you have while you're collecting insights and encouraging participation.

The injustice for Fiskars was the nastiness on other crafting message boards. Because of this, they ignited a movement that celebrated crafting of all kinds from people of various skill levels with different backgrounds and beliefs—all in a safe environment.

The injustice for IndieBound and the American Booksellers Association was the homogenization of selling books in America through the Amazons and Barnes & Nobles. So they ignited a movement that celebrated the independence of those individuals who were brave enough to put a stake in the ground and contribute to their neighborhoods' uniqueness.

The Park Angels' injustice was the deterioration of the public spaces in a city proud of its history. Rage against the Haze's injustice was the tobacco industry's manipulation of teens and South Carolina's apathy to do anything about it.

Even a giant company like Best Buy can fight injustices. Theirs was the intimidating, daunting task of going into a musical instrument store and looking at that guitar or drum set. So they proved that you can sell premium brands in an environment that could celebrate and get excited about the magic associated with playing and creating music for all skill levels.

So what's your injustice? Dig. You'll find it. And when you do, don't let go. Cling to it with all you've got. Because that is your purpose and your guiding light. And without it, you have a marketing program—not a movement.

Remember: Movements move toward a goal that transcends putting money in your pocket. You might think it's cheesy, but movements change lives on several levels. And there's no reason you can't change your customers' lives for the better, whether you're out to end one of the most horrific things on the planet like the kidnapping and exploitation of kids, or you're using an orange-handled scissor to unite and celebrate people's love of crafting.

This book started by pointing out how marketers are beginning to shy away from the word campaign and are beginning to adopt and use new words like movements. But take heed in this warning: If it doesn't have all of the elements on the list, then it's not a movement. It's a campaign in sheep's clothing. And you might be able to fool a lot of the people out there, but you can't fool those who are already drawn to you. So don't even try.

Now is the time to build something that will last as long as your customers want it to. And the only way to do that is to involve them from the beginning. Movements move people to action. Movements transform companies. Movements change lives. If you're a company whose sole reason for existence is to make money, we're sad for you. Why not change your corner of the world for the better? Why not save the day for your fans? Why not start a movement and be a part of something bigger than yourself?

Now all you have to do is roll up your sleeves and get to work.