The 10 notable incidents for Social Media in 2009 – a personal review
Here we are in the run-up to Christmas and the New Year, so I thought I would jot down the things that I found amusing, noteworthy or just plain strange about the business we are in for the past year. A personal list and personal opinions…
- The “John Farnhams” were interesting – those who had several going away appearances. Telstra retired on twitter and came back, they also retired a blog and came back. I admire their capacity to learn and persist. UBank retired a community and came back on twitter where I think they do a good job, as does their CEO. IAG ran a customer co-creation site for 6 months and came back with a shiny new company called The Buzz.
- The Echo Chamber that is Sydney’s social media ecosystem got larger, got its own association and we had a great evening with MC Hammer. Proved that a mix of alcohol, egos and twitter produce embarrassing tweets as pundits strive to prove who is cool. Thank god there is not a single customer involved to see us social media gurus behave like that… hang on, where were the customers?
- We had our controversies with the real Steve Conroy (Telstra again), a lost coat campaign and the world’s best job. I am not sure if the debate about being authentic or ‘pragmatic’ in social media did much to change anyone’s views, but it did focus my thinking on the Word of Mouth Marketing Associations code of conduct. ROI – be clear who you represent, state whose opinion this is and declare your identity
- Sportsgirl launched an online customer community with some fanfare and claims of being the first, while Woolworths quietly crossed the 150,000 participant mark on their Everyday Matters, Huggies engaged thousands of Mums, Wyeth relaunched their Mum’s Club and an inner circle advisor panel, IAG designed a new insurance company with several thousand savvy customers, Essential Baby and Bub Hub continue to grow, Hungry Jack’s Burger Club members critiqued chicken nuggets… phew, thank goodness, that’s where the customers are, looking for interaction with people like them, with brands they are interested in. Go figure.
- During a presentation for Jen Storey in Brisbane I had an epiphany of sorts. There is a reluctance in many Australian companies to open up and dialog with their customers through social media that exceeds any real regulatory compliance need. It is generally couched as ‘but what happens if they say really negative stuff and it flames out of control?’ When did Australian business get to be so scared of its customers? Should they be? If they really are scared, some honest introspection about why they are not fixing the things that would cause their customers to flame is called for, surely? Perhaps we need a few good dramas to kick start conversational marketing here – Dell Hell and the Comcast sleeping service man gave these 2 companies no choice but join the conversation and they are now both cited as the profit making social media experts. Companies genuinely determined to improve their customers’ experience and engagement love social media because it is an efficient and scalable way to find out what to do and how they are doing. Companies without the will to fix things, hoping that sucker customers will not find out until it is too late should be afraid of their customers, they can now tell thousands of their peers how bad their experience is with the organisation. Be very afraid or embrace customers for goodness sake.
- I had the good fortune to work with Estee Lauder in Asia Pacific during 2009. A really classy group of people passionate about their customers. I mention this because their social media campaign strikes me as one of the best and most innovative of 2009. Free makeovers and photos to produce the best social media image you can have for your profile. Clever and shows an understanding and empathy. (Not ours btw)
- Age of Conversation 3 – the book with 300 chapters each written by a different author from around the world was completed. Money raised goes to charity, so stay tuned and buy a copy once it is published please. Look for our chapter on how we think the old media folks are looking for a 30 second spot replacement as they search for the mythical ‘influential’ who can virally sell any product their clients retain them to sell.
- Don Peppers made a welcome visit to Australia to talk about customer loyalty and Woolworths’ Everyday Rewards. His message still resonates with marketers, but I suspect implementation has not got any easier for most of us.
- The role and responsibilities of the Online Community Manager justifiably received some attention and we participated in a good round table session with other community managers in the Fairfax Sydney offices.
The Community Manager is really the VP of Customer Conversation
- And finally, in 2009 we went through the process of getting certified by Satmetrix as Net Promoter Score practitioners. We have used NPS in our community management function for several years as a ‘bottom up’ measure of how well we are doing at keeping customers interested and engaged in our communities and programs. This certification (will, it completes in Feb ‘10) confirms our understanding and gives us access to the creator’s approaches and methodologies. It was also fun to see the implementation and organisational change processes we learned for CRM (and TQM before that) are still required if we want to move customers to the centre of our company decision making.
Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year
Take this little quiz to see if your organisation is ready for a customer community or conversational marketing;
- There is a process in place to constantly measure customer satisfaction & sentiment. Not just on-line and not the annual customer satisfaction survey. Regular sampling. Y/N
- Management calls a number of customers, happy and unhappy each day or week as part of their regular duties. Y/N
- You have a social media policy for staff that as a starting point assumes they are already participating. Y/N
- You do not just monitor social media mentions and sentiment about your brands, employees jump right in and join the conversations. Y/N
- Poor customer satisfaction scores are immediately subjected to root cause analysis to determine what to do about them. The emphasis is on informed action, not measurement. Y/N
- Staff & management mix freely and regularly, it feels normal to be around each other. Y/N
- Staff have some flexibility & self-managed authority to resolve customer issues even if it costs money. Y/N
- Legal sign-off is not required for every single piece of external correspondence. Y/N
- All business meetings that discuss performance include some customer value metrics – for example, LTV, customer net present value, customer equity or even profit by segment, segment migration – some customer-centric discussion occurs, not just product stuff. Y/N
- You have a customer segmentation framework in place that separates customer advocates (fans) from critics and tries to explain the differences between the two. Y/N For example;
- Promoter is more likely to have bought product X first
- Detractor is more likely to have been acquired through the ‘Everything must go, fire sale’ campaign
- Customer terrorist is more likely to be trapped in that 2 year contract that is now really expensive compared to the prices we offer new customers.
Add up your Y’s.
If you have 6 or more, your company is ready to launch a social media initiative that will most likely work.
Why? Because this score means you are not afraid of your customers. It sounds like you may even respect and value them, a good start to a relationship that has to be trust-based to work. Companies that are afraid of their customers show it in their conversations online – it is really hard to have a natural conversation with someone who is so frightened they check with their attorney and agent before making any comments.
The emergence of a networked information economy (Yochai Benkler) has always had an interesting implication for consumer activism. It is one thing to share a scrap of information, some random thoughts, and holiday snaps with family and friends online. It is quite another to become conscious of your own power as a consumer – and the consequences of acting in concert with others.
… read more
It looks like we may be involved in a ‘bottom-up’ NPS project shortly and this has set me to refreshing my working knowledge of Net Promoter Scores, customer satisfaction measurement and Customer Experience Management (CEM).
‘Bottom-up NPS’?
One of the best resources for understanding the difference between bottom-up and top-down NPS can be found on the NPS official site (provided by Satmetrix). The case studies are particularly useful to practitioners, with the Allianz presentation being one of my favourites, though the Aviva entry has a more evocative title; “You don’t Fatten the Pig by Weighing it…”
Bottom-up NPS is about feeding customer satisfaction not just measuring it
Simplistically, bottom-up NPS requires a focus on individual customers at moments of truth in the service experience. It involves asking enough customers as close in time to the experience as possible -
- the NPS question (‘Would you recommend to family and friends?”) and
- the open-ended “Why did you give us that score?”
so that you can isolate the key drivers of bad and good experiences and fix and reinforce them respectively.
The closer the sample is to a census the better, but if you have ever been annoyed by the ubiquitous ‘Do you have a FlyBuys card?’ question when grocery shopping you will understand that with overuse the NPS question can itself become a driver of dissatisfaction. Marketing’s own uncertainty principle. So a statistical middle ground is required.
The results of the actions taken to fix / reinforce experience drivers are monitored through the on-going use of this bottom-up measurement – it is not intended to be a once a quarter snapshot, rather an analog gauge of how well you are pleasing your customers.
This is contrasted to the ‘top-down’ measurement of NPS, which is more common (also easier to do) and controversially a predictor of relative company growth. A good example is industry wide studies such as this one. Top down NPS does not pass my, ‘Specifically what do we have to do Monday morning?’ test, bottom-up NPS is all about answering that exact question. You should do both, and the 2 should meet in the middle of course.
For years now I have been a (eyes wide open) fan of SERVQUAL as a useful tool for guiding customer experience management (CEM) initiatives. This is partly because the developers of this instrument started with an analysis of the drivers of customer experience satisfaction and then set out to measure the gaps in perceived importance and actual delivery – for both customer and organisation.
With the clear objective to make sure organisations focussed actions on the areas of CEM that were either most important to customers or seen as most broken by customers. I like the action emphasis.
In the analysis of drivers they discovered that customer trust is a prerequisite to a good experience, trust built by high levels of reliability (always keep your promises). Here are the generic dimensions of service measured by SERVQUAL (aka RATER);
Now as we run the bottom-up NPS initiative and mine verbatim customer comments for drivers of customer ‘promotion’ & ‘detraction’ it will be really interesting to see if these drivers line up with the SERVQUAL dimensions. We routinely mine customer contributions for ‘actionable themes’ in our online communities but there may be a short-cut here.
A CEM approach that;
- starts with SERVQUAL to identify the largest & most important service shortfalls, currently and periodically
- confirms improvements as these are addressed through bottom-up NPS
- fine tunes process changes through bottom-up NPS
- measures the impact on brand perception with top-down NPS
May make the successful project path just that little bit shorter and more direct for your customers.
What do you think? Have you tried mixing these two instruments?
Beware of survey fatigue in your customers
The folks at Vovici have an interesting series of whitepapers on the use of surveys – and how to use them to build customer community. I found ‘Survey Rating Scale Best Practices’ particularly useful.
Please read the paper in full if this subject is interesting to you and your relationship marketing efforts, but here is a short summary of their published recommendations;
- Use 5 point scales when rating against one attribute in a ‘unipolar’ scale – for example, from ‘Not at all satisfied’ to ‘Completely satisfied’
- Use 7 points scales when rating against polar opposites in a ‘bipolar’ scale – for example ‘Extremely likely to recommend against’ through ‘Extremely likely to recommend’
- Use fully labeled scales with no numeric ratings shown. These are preferred by respondents and have higher reliability and predictive validity than numeric scales
- Exclude ‘Don’t know’ and ‘No opinion’ as a choice
- Use unipolar scales instead of bipolar scales wherever possible – they are shorter and less confusing
- list rating scales with the most negative item first – to prevent results inflation from order-effects
- Use common scales where possible rather than write your own
- Respondents need different things than analysis – you can map scales to a 0-10 scale for reporting
- Stick with common scales across your organisation so you can compare results
An example scale for a 5 point numeric – to illustrate a unipolar scale;
- Not at all satisfied
- Slightly satisfied
- Moderately satisfied
- Very satisfied
- Completely satisfied
And finally a 7 point example of a bipolar scale;
- Absolutely inappropriate
- Inappropriate
- Slightly inappropriate
- Neutral
- Slightly appropriate
- Appropriate
- Absolutely appropriate
There is a science and good experience in this process and customer relationships are too important to mess with unprepared. We recommend you do some reading before asking.
Just find out what your customers want & do that. Sorted.
It has been known for some time now that the ‘physics’ of customer loyalty has an uncertainty principle – the act of measurement changes the event you are trying to measure.
The good news in relationship marketing is that the changes our measurement efforts cause in our customers… are generally positive.
Since the 1920’s experiments in the Hawthorne Works, we have known that the “Hawthorne effect“ is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are being studied…”
More recently (2002) a study reported in HBR by Dholakia and Morwitz “How Surveys Influence Customers” looked at the impact a short survey had on a test group of customers in a financial services company,
“… A year after the survey was conducted, the customers we surveyed were more than three times as likely to have opened new accounts, were less than half as likely to have defected, and were more profitable than the customers who hadn’t been surveyed. These differences reached their maximum levels several months after the survey was done and persisted throughout the year. Even at the end of the year, surveyed customers continued to open new accounts at a faster rate and defect at a slower rate than the people in the control group.”
Amazing and a little mysterious.
But it does highlight why it is so important to ask and listen to your customers. Even better if you confirm to them that you have heard what they told you and are doing something about it. I believe that survey fatigue destroys this effect over time if you do not clearly demonstrate the implementation of some customer requests.
In the management of online communities this sometimes requires a conversation plan as this is too important to leave to chance. Our colleague; Community Girl recently blogged on her ‘10 Tips for Engaging Your Community’. Amongst the tactical tips are the plan components needed to take advantage of customer’s positive view of brands that ask and listen;
- Listen – sometimes proactively through surveys
- Respond
- Follow up
- etc…
Lessons and approaches that work on and off-line if you are sincere and actually follow through.
Before you start on a customer retention strategy that includes regular customer consultation in this way, pause. When you sincerely ask customers what they want from you, they will rarely ask for things that Marketing alone can give. They do not ask you to use less comic sans in your advertising. They ask you to change products, prices, services. Make sure your colleagues in product management, pricing, logistics, customer service… are as committed to listening and answering as you are.
“But that’s enough about me… what about you? What do you think about me?”
Source: Your most recent social gathering
Somewhere along the lines, we – as marketers – have really lost the plot. If you are reading this blog, the chances are that you already familiar with the idea that marketing is no longer a one-way (broadcast) street and that the brand is not the centre of the universe.
And as increasingly empowered consumers challenge (or just ignore) traditional marketing approaches, so the depth and varieties of this brand hubris affliction become apparent. The obvious examples are, well… obvious. It is interesting however, to observe the more subtle forms, particularly in the new social media channel channel itself.
Some examples that we have observed in and around social media:
- Designing an online community that crowds out “user space” with push messages from the brand or prioritises brand content at the expense of user content (user content generates far more traffic than brand content…)
- Customer competitions (iSnack2.0) where popular sentiment is ignored
- Ensuring that legal requirements dominate the online user experience – requiring for example, 24 hour turn-around on moderating (authorising) all comments
- Ensuring that IT requirements dominate the online registration experience or make it difficult to access or even find “social sites” sponsored by the brand
- Agonising over (& delaying) brand content as if copy should be “press release” perfect for social sites
- Allowing digital agencies to “have their heads” with the latest whiz-bang social media design – crowding out any customer impulse to contribute on-line
Now you may have observed that these questions are mostly issues of balance. However, the problem is that most of us have internalised the traditional marketing paradigm to some degree… by osmosis if nothing else. The end result is an inside-out view of the world with very little outside-in (customer) view to compensate.
And as my colleague, Tim, asks rhetorically: “Which particular day in the past 50 years did we, as marketers, wake up and find that we were afraid of our customers?”
The role of opinion leaders in viral marketing is clearing
If you are interested in generating more sales through word of mouth programs, there is a research paper that is a MUST read.
“Firm Generated Word-of-Mouth Communication: Evidence from a Field Test” by David Godes and Dina Mayzlin. Marketing Science, 2009, Vol. 28, No. 4. 19 pages.
I found this paper when I was referred to a peer review on the Web Analytics Association website, written by Jim Novo, who also blogged about this fascinating piece.
First of all, this is rigorous research, using control groups and all of the appropriate mathematics to measure real effects – something that is not always easy to do.
Second, its findings are counter intuitive in the context of ’Influentials Marketing’ (where you find the most influential people with the largest networks and encourage them to spread your word). They are not counter intuitive if you keep a social contagion principle in mind; “The strength of weak ties”
The results:
- Opinion leaders generate more sales for products with high levels of awareness, where persuasion is the critical requirement
- For new products or products with low awareness… “…you should be recruiting less loyal customers and encouraging them to talk not to their friends, but to their acquaintances. This approach appears to be contrary to the “opinion leader” or “fan” approach now thought of as best practice. Because of this, a lot of books on social marketing may need to be rewritten, at least as they pertain to generating incremental Sales…” (Jim Novo).
We can add to this the lessons learned from 2 other pieces of research we have discussed here;
- People reported to be influential by their peers are far more likely to actually be opinion leaders than people who self-report / claim to be
- If the consequences of recommendation are serious, (requiring persuasion) opinion leaders make a difference to message contagion rates and reach. If the consequences are mundane, and awareness is the challenge, traditional marketing is more effective
- ‘Susceptible’ customers are far more likely to start online theme/conversation cascades than an influencer (opinion leader). Influencers are required to extend and develop the cascade once started.
- ‘Respected’ customers – those with a mix of strong and weak ties do the heavy lifting in propagating new themes
and from 2007
- Duncan Watts and Jonah Paretti in a HBR thought piece showed that the fastest way to ’seed’ a viral marketing cascade was with awareness campaigns to strangers as the lower propagation rates were offset by higher initial awareness numbers
Seems we need to add 2 critical questions to advocacy program design;
- Does my product have good awareness levels already with persuasion the challenge? If yes, seek out peer reported opinion leaders who are heavy users already
- Are the consequences (personal costs, risk) of my product relatively high? If yes, seek out peer reported opinion leaders who are heavy users already
Else
- Recruit less loyal customers and get them to start conversations where they would not otherwise occur i.e. with strangers and acquaintances, not close friends (you get them anyway).
Get you thinking?
What strange and exhilarating times we live in… this “internet connectivity thing” in the early 21st century I mean.
In discussing the internet, Mark Pesce draws on the invention of the steam engine in 1712 – great enabler of the industrial revolution. He points out that the steam engine was originally used to pump water out of mines and that it was another 100 years before the steam engine was put to use in driving a locomotive. The implication being that “we don’t know what we don’t know” and that we early in the discovery process of how best to use this “internet thing”.
The internet, of course, had the false start of the dot.com era – driven by venture capital and over hyped expectations. We can thank this period for some enormous infrastructure investment – much like the early over investment triggered by the railways boom.
And there is no doubt that our current usage of the internet is “early days” and will be viewed as primitive in years to come. However, what strikes me is just the sheer acceleration of this process. The advent of social media in particular has witnessed a new army of millions move from passive to active media participants. This time, the innovation will have a wide base of innovators!
This is neatly described by others as the “cognitive surplus“. This term, to me, conjures up a vision of millions of crossword-playing, rubric cube solving and just plain curious folk out there descending on a new challenge – where the threshold for playing just got lowered.
Some of the early innovation is just taking existing real-world techniques and finding the optimal way to deploy them on the internet. I say “just”, but we should not underplay the lessons learned in deploying to a new channel.
A good example of this is an Australian site that we recently encountered – Ideas while you sleep – where you can outsource your brainstorming “to the cloud” (recruited Ideas Agents) literally overnight – for a fee. This site brings together not only recruited ideas agents but sound brain-storming practices from the real world and incorporated them into an online environment.
ROFL: micro-blogging on micro-blogging?
I am not sure if you noticed the release of Google’s side wiki a few weeks back? Like most Google products, easy to install and simple to use, even by the standards of instruction-reading averse people like me. Basically adds an icon on your browser bar that opens up a commenting window on the left of most web sites.
Means there can be an online discussion about a site, on the site in question, without the involvement or perhaps knowledge of the site’s author. The example above shows people discussing twitter on my twitter profile.
I am not sure what type of use this sidewiki will generate – any ideas?
Just as organisations are finally getting the message and implementing social media listening posts to monitor what the blogosphere is saying about their brand – they now have to add their own sites to the list!
I can think of several options for sidewiki use and like many things on the web we will most likely see a mixture of all of these. My random musings;
- with no evidence of moderation we may see a lot of opportunistic competitive posts on high volume sites. Unilever links on Nestle sites and vice versa?
- the spirit of Wikipedia may take root and we may see people adding intellectual value and background to sites. Could an integration of some kind with Wikipedia be on the cards for sites referenced in Wiki articles?
- I certainly expect satisfaction ratings on product and services related sites. Especially from raving fans and really upset disappointed customers. Amazon explicitly features customer ratings, we may see many sites doing the same, whether they choose to or not.
- SPAM, graffiti & with a bit of luck some humour of the ‘foo wuz here’ variety. Comments are tied to a Google account, nominally discouraging anonymous, but that is no guarantee that identity is real surely?
- I am less confident that we will see conversations that persist in the way we see them persist inside some online communities – be they communities of practice, place, interest, fans, or cults. Where is the unseen but guiding hand of the community manager/moderator that I believe is important to maintaining community health? Even Wikipedia needs editors, though their presence is light touch it is crucial.
This is an important point isn’t it? With an already amazing choice of places to chat with ‘people like me’, where will user generated content go? Will it migrate from blogs and forums to individual company sites? Will we all be blogging on Seth’s comment-less blog out of spite?
Seth's blog famously does not allow comments. LOL
We have already discussed research that shows that conversations extend and develop, become richer, when they occur within a user population that has a mixture of susceptible and expert participants. To cluster this heterogeneous group, you would think, requires a community of some kind, with a manager that keeps the community interesting and moving along or participation drops off quickly.
Interesting thought – sidewiki may give us valuable insight into the differences between managed and unmanaged forum venues, each within context (the community premise and the host site for the parasitic sidewiki).
My bet is that engaging conversations will be more likely and numerous in their own places, where community managers facilitate. Ratings and short comments / complaints will dominate on the millions of candidate sites.
One important development for brands interested in customers’ social media sentiment – keep an eye on your own site. And have a branded community, manager at the ready, where you can invite engaged customers to continue a dialogue. Offer them a venue that less resembles a blank wall and a spray paint can. Graffiti obviously fills some customer tagging need, but not the need for conversation & engagement.
Most marketers will acknowledge the importance of customer data, if not claim to be 100% ’data- driven’ in their day-to-day activities. So I like the idea that, as the title suggests, the majority of our decisions are based on hard customer data, or are driven by a desire to gather the hard data required to be data driven, (just a frisson of guilt as I say this).
I also like these traditional data marketing homilies – please forgive the lack of attribution, none of these are mine;
- Facts are facts. Statistics are more flexible. (Mark Twain I think)
- Old customer data analysts never die, they just get broken down by age and sex.
- In God we trust. Everyone else must bring data.
- For a list of ways technology has removed the personal touch from service, press 1.
And a new one that caught my attention;
- What happens in Vegas, stays in… Facebook, twitter, YouTube, Google….
We have always had a simple approach to the job of getting insight into customer needs and attitudes.
We think you should ask them.
The more you ask them, within the limits of being annoying, the better.
That is one of the reasons we got involved in the business of on-line communities with our clients. Seems to us that selling is simpler if you know what customers want to buy and for what reason. Once again, within reason.
This means that we get to read a LOT of customer generated content. But for our sins we also run a steady stream of surveys to drill down on emerging issues or issues of particular interest.
We particularly like a survey strategy that exploits volume to reveal the Crowd’s Wisdom.
We do not rely on a relatively small number of customers to rate & rank the large number of ideas produced by a healthy community (a survey strategy based on the concept of customer attention scarcity). Rather we revel in the abundance of collective attention offered inside a large community and do the opposite – we use a large number of customers to rate & rank a relatively small number of ideas then assemble the mosaic.
Statistically the results are identical but the shorter the better for surveys!
In both cases you end up knowing which ideas are;
- the most popular &
- most important to
- the largest number of customers.
This lets you focus on the right things – assuming of course that the right thing is having the largest impact on the largest number of customers. This is not always true for paradigm-changing innovations but is generally enough to be “getting on” with.
We are also working on the other part of knowing – innovation that reveals the needs you did not know you had until you see it… stay tuned
* Not sure who first said this, but credit where due; this was the tagline used by Carlson Marketing’s Decision Science division during my time with them.
ReadWriteWeb’s Guide to Online Community Management… is an interesting mashup of news, views and resources on the emerging role of Community Manager. Unfortunately not a free (open source) offering but interesting nonetheless.
I figure Community Management is one role worth keeping tabs on – afterall, we are the “least connected we will ever be” - as Don Peppers reminded several of us recently.
Let’s start with a definition…
The report presents a simple definition of a community manager (from Connie Bensen):
“A community manager is the voice of the company externally and the voice of the customers internally. The value lies in the community manager serving as a hub and having the ability to personnally connect with customers (humanise the company) and serving all departments internally (development, PR, marketing, customer service, tech support, etc)”
Some of the pearls from this report:
“The ideal community manager personality: Passionate, but without letting it get out of control. Thick-skinned, but not cruel or insensitive. Driven, but still interested in helping others. Personable, but always professional.” (Dan Gray)
In nearly all community manager job descriptions, there are four common responsibilities rolled up into the job (Jerimiah Owyang):
- A community advocate
- Brand evangelist
- Savvy communication skills, shapes editorial
- Gathers community input for future product and services
An instructive credo from Flickr (Flickr’s Ten Points to live by):
- Engage your community
- Enforce decorum
- Take responsibility for failures
- Step back and let the community support itself where appropriate
- Give freely
- Be patient
- Hire fans
- Stay calm
- Be flexible but focus on what matters
- Be visible
On the dynamics with contributors:
“Because most Web users are voyeurs more than contributors, you should think of online discussion as theatre; it’s a performance in which the community leader(s) interact with a small group of contributors for the education and amusement of the rest of us.” (Michael Mace, Rubicon Consulting). Best you get to know your fellow actors!
Some interesting advice on keeping a balance between business basics and the world of early adopters (“how not to lose your mind”):
“Identify and offer solutions for breaking down barriers between customers and corporate. This includes identifying needs that aren’t being met from the customer’s perspective and being involved in the discussion as to whether the needs are valid, if they can be met, and if they will benefit the organisation as a whole.”
A couple of things that struck me about this report:
Despite perhaps a bias to Web 2.0 companies, how different the company, community circumstances are (duh..).
The importance of passion in this role (something you don’t often see in a job description…); you need to be something of an evangelist to be successful in this role I suspect… given both its potential breadth and the change management implications often involved.
If you are going to make a difference, this is not a job for the faint hearted…
Forrester have published a pretty good taxonomy, based on the business objectives you have, for branded online communities. Communities can be set up for you to;
- Listen to your customers
- Talk to your customers
- Energise your advocates
- Support your customers (or let them support each other)
- Embrace your customers (we prefer to call this one ‘co-creation’, the objective being to include your customers in the design of new products and services)
(I note that the 2008 Forrester Groundswell Awards added 3 more types; Managing, Social Impact and Company Transformation – it is really the last of these I would like to discuss in this post)
In our experience, it is foolhardy to launch a community without serious company intention to implement 1. Listen.
Why else would a customer give you the gift of their time on your site unless it is because they expect to be listened to? So whatever else you plan to achieve with your community, be serious about listening…. and then proving you have listened by responding, doing something with the customer input. Even if that is saying ‘cannot’ and explaining why.
There can be resistance to customer input!
The reason why social media strategies cannot be quarantined into the marketing department?
It’s because (I can guarantee this) the customers will not suggest you help them by using less comic sans in your email offers.
If you genuinely ask customers for advice on how to be a better company (i.e. a more successful, engaging brand) they will suggest you change your product, your pricing, your service, something to do with your customer value proposition.
And Marketing rarely has control over these things, or the authority to change them in response to customer requests, no matter how unanimous the crowd is in asking. So you need to negotiate, persuade, convince other departments that the customers actually do know – better than you do – what customers want from your existing offerings.
This means that social media strategies, if you are really interested in an open and authentic conversation with customers, quickly become political projects, not marketing campaigns.
You open up to customers, they join the conversation, they expect you to respond and implement if you can – as in a normal conversation – and you (Marketing) cannot unless you have the support and enthusiasm of product and service managers.
Best to have a discussion and gain this support before you launch the community. So your colleagues do not think you are holding a loaded customer gun to their head later – who wants to be accused of being ‘customer-uncaring’ in this enlightened post-CRM era?
This is why the first ‘E’ in our implementation methodology; ‘ECHOES’ addresses the need to Embed customers in the processes likely to be affected by a social media implementation. Or the priceless ideas you get from your customer advocates may be strangled for the wrong reasons…
Marketing introduce a 'Surprise!' idea from their customer community
We occasionally (and happily) hear exponents of social media remind us that marketing cannot actually make up for poor products and services – (for any length of time of course), customers eventually and inevitably wake up to shonkey products. In the past, the lag between marketing claim and customers voting in mass with their wallet was often long enough for snake oil salesmen to make a good living – as long as they kept moving, negative communication was inefficient and they kept finding new customers.
They don’t make markets like that anymore.
Two relevant thoughts to share with you from a Don Peppers’ presentation last week.
Flower attracting customers
In a competitive ecosystem, flowers compete to attract the attention of bees and other insects, for pollination.
Bright colours, attractive perfumes, visually attracting structures are all part of the flower’s marketing campaigns to attract bees to their product.
Bees are attracted by the creative efforts and visit to determine the value of the flower’s offering to them – the nectar. As a by-product the flower gets the chance to continue in the business of survival.
If the bee is impressed with the nectar she will fly back to the hive and excitedly dance to tell the other worker-bees that the flower is great and where to find it. Word of Dance spreads quickly and the good value flower can expect lots of new customers and repeat visits.
If the bee does not think the nectar is any good, she does no dance for the hive, even though she was attracted by the flower’s advertising. No word of dance, no hive endorsed business volume.
Moral: in a market where customers do not talk to each other, advertising is all you need to compete. Even flowers with no nectar can attract some bees.
If customers do talk to each other, advertising is not enough, you also need good value nectar. If you have it, you get the bees dancing.
Customer sampling a flower's products and services
Does anyone doubt that customers talking to each other is now a marketing principle? Look at this Time article on the movie Bruno and start adding bee dances to your marketing plans.
Bright foliage, pity the bees did not like the nectar
“In the old days — like, until yesterday — movie studios judged the success of their big pictures by how much they grossed on the opening weekend. But in the age of Twitter, electronic word-of-mouth is immediate, as early moviegoers tweet their opinions on a film to millions of “followers.” Instant-messaging can make or break a film within 24 hours. Friday is the new weekend… Friday figures supported optimism: Brüno amassed a sensational $14.4 million. But the movie plummeted nearly 40% its second day, to $8.8 million…Brüno’s box-office decline from Friday to Saturday indicates that the film’s brand of outrage was not the sort to please most moviegoers — and that their tut-tutting got around fast. Brüno could be the first movie defeated by the Twitter effect.”
Seems most of the ‘bees’ bought tickets to other flowers they were told about by their friends the birds?
“The market for something to believe in is unlimited…” (Hugh McLeod)
And guess what, that new fangled thing – the internet and its social media offspring – just lowered the threshold on entry to that market!
The power of story-telling and the conveying of belief are critical to the survival and growth of businesses. Well, that’s what I believe. And getting involved in the blogosphere only convinces me more that there is an insatiable demand for stories to believe in.
In Seth Godins “All Marketers Are Liars – The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World” outlines five steps or assumptions that underlie successful marketing.
Step 1: Their (the customer’s) worldview and frames got there before you did; people clump together into common worldviews and your job is to find a previously undiscovered clump and frame a story for those people
Step 2: People notice only the new and then make a guess
Step 3: First impressions start the story; the challenge being that in today’s attention scarce marketplace – you never know when that first impression will occur!
Step 4: Great marketers tell stories we believe
Step 5: Marketers with authenticity thrive – the sting in the tail for those who think they can scam the system
Story telling impacts us at a very personal (perhaps even physiological) level. And for anyone involved in sales, these assumptions have an uncanny truth about them – particularly that people start their purchasing journeys with a worldview and and a predisposition to believe in something…
In our work with brands and online communities, the overarching story of the brand and the framing of the conversation are critical – but so too is listening. Our experience is that customers visit user-generated (ie their own) content way more than (3 to 4 times more) they visit brand generated content. And it is this feedback that will suggest the worldviews and the many refined sub-stories that are required to engage and inspire the various tribes within your brand community.
What’s your brand story?
Don mashing-up marketing as we watch
Don Peppers is in Sydney next week, featured at a number of public and private events and I am sure he will focus on his consistent themes; customer loyalty, return on customer, trust-based relationships … hardly stuff that is irrelevant, even in this new connected world? These are the the essence of Don’s (and Martha Rogers’) original insights, those that led to the coining of ‘1to1 Marketing’. Still fresh today.
For me, 1to1 concepts are best examined through their implementation methodology; IDIC. I would like to revisit with social media and our current projects in mind…
I: Identify customers. This was the heresy of relationship marketing, (nailed to a door somewhere on Madison Ave in my imagination); the idea that you should know each and every customer you are marketing to. Not as a generation, not as a demographic, but as a person. The contrast with mass marketing to strangers was – and still is – dramatic. With scalable identity management available through computers, we can start treating our customers as unique, real people, increase our relevance, stop squandering their dwindling attention with irrelevant offers and increase our chance of having a relationship which could lead to profitable, mutual loyalty.
This ‘knowing who you are in a relationship with’ is very important to customers. After all, they flock to social media primarily to connect with people they know really well or want to; family, colleagues and friends (the million follower stunts notwithstanding). In the early days of twitter for example, this need was explicitly met with tweet-ups! Meetup.com is still going strong.
So in social media marketing, why is this ‘Identity’ requirement so often ignored? Just because customers know each other on Facebook does not mean marketers suddenly know them by osmosis through a page, a channel, or a hash tag. The hard work of getting to know your customers remains.
I have been to numerous social media marketing conferences where the subject of presentation has been the CPM achieved. Media buyers must squirm, nothing to buy. But after that short pleasure wears off I wonder; why no mention of what comes after awareness?
Often the same presentation stresses the need to be personal, conversational, authentic, human, open – all good trust words that are meaningless unless we are sincere about also determining the identity of our customers, so we can remember them, work at a marketing relationship…
Surely customers will not allow us to reduce these most personal of channels (‘friending’ is now a verb!) to just another venue for the 30 second spot?
‘It matters less how much we know about our customers and more how much we know about each customer’ is the lesson from 1to1 marketing that Amazon, Tesco, Woolworths and other good database marketers the world over have learned to their profit.
So what comes after Identify?
D: Differentiate customers. First on their current and potential value to you (this is not a charity), then on the basis of their needs that you can or cannot satisfy. CRM data – transactional, behavioural data – is still best at inferring and predicting value. But the social, conversational platforms are great places to listen to customers tell you what they want from you. Directly and honestly. Why guess when you can know? Ties back to the need to know which customer is telling you which truth though, so Identity is important.
I: Interact with customers. Lots of choices, lots of places, all now interactive and customer controlled, if not produced. The need for engagement has increased as customer distrust of one way communications increases.
C: Customise. Your conversations, just like we do naturally when conversing with others. Customise products and services as you listen and remember what the customers that you know; tell you, vote on, rate, review and video what they want you to do to earn their endorsement and loyalty.
We think these concepts still have legs, even as we run social media projects that for example, involve teenagers designing their favourite fast food. Relevance, empathy, respect, trust are social media marketing concepts.
While he is here, Don will be helping a mate of ours, Wayne Kingston, open the Peppers & Rogers Group Australia consulting practice. We wish the new ‘PRG’ every success.
To finish off with Don’s credentials; he is on twitter @DonPeppers, writes great blogs, http://bit.ly/C7KcM and http://bit.ly/5Ph7b , posts on a video blog http://bit.ly/Y5Xqh and writes books http://bit.ly/NkrmX ; he is a walking mash-up!
See you at Don’s ADMA or American Chamber of Commerce sessions…
Smoking area ceiling mural
One of my favourite projects involved working with an Asian government organisation tasked with improving the health of their citizens – it felt good ’selling’ concepts for the greater good of a community. It also did not hurt that the whole marketing team has PhDs in health disciplines (know their stuff!) and share a passion for public service.
Their far-sighted CEO decided that social marketing could be productively supplemented with the learnings from commercial 1 to 1 marketing – to produce Citizen Relationship Management (CRM) with a focus on the individual citizen as an interactive part of her community. The parallels with “Above the Line” versus “Below the Line” are quite clear.
Well, the project opened a whole new world of marketing for me – but there are some old familiar names responsible for the definitive text of Social Marketing – Kotler and Lee. Here is their latest work.
Rather than a one way street – commercial marketing teaching these social marketers how marketing has evolved since the 1970’s – I found that Social Marketing’s focus on the customer (citizen) in the context of their community - is spot on relevant to our growing use of online brand communities through social media.
[Social Marketing is '...a practical approach that integrates the insights from individual, interpersonal and community theories and evidence. Typically the approach aims to change both the individual and the environment around the individual.']
This is where our idea that we should mash-up the best of the old and new (conversational) marketing came from.
A good example of this convergent thinking was recently published by the Australian Public Service Commission – ‘Changing Behaviour: A Public Policy Perspective’. In this recommended paper, Kotler & Lee’s 12 principles of effective social marketing are presented.
They are also a good set of principles for online community marketing…
- Take advantage of prior and existing successful campaigns (see this site for examples)
- Target people most ready for action (social marketers knew all along that you first need susceptible citizens. Interestingly, they call them ’sneezers’ rather than ‘Influentials’, consistent with the concept of the ‘contagion’ of ideas)
- Promote single, doable behaviours – one at a time
- Identify and remove barriers to behavioural change
- Bring real benefits into the present
- Highlight costs of competing behaviours
- Promote a tangible object or service to help target audiences perform the behaviour (Helplines, ‘How To’ cards etc)
- Consider non-monetary incentives in the form of recognition and appreciation
- Have a little fun with messages
- Use media channels at the point of decision making
- Get commitments and pledges
- Use prompts for sustainability
I am going to go back and take another look at this school of marketing – looks to me that us commercial marketing types can learn more than a little about community from the folks trying to persuade us to eat well, exercise more often, not smoke… generally improve the quality of our lives.
