“Reach over 350 million active users on Facebook. Learn how to connect your business with real customers through Facebook Ads” – so goes the Facebook online pitch.
From a marketing viewpoint, when you look at the large public social sites such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter – are you just looking at traditional mass media advertising applied to a new channel?
Not too long ago one of the people I follow on twitter posed the rhetorical question; ‘when is the last time your loyalty programs showed it was loyal to you? ‘ Mmmm go me thinking.
Loyalty program operators, once the program is up and running, tend to focus on the ‘earn’ since this is the customer behaviour the program is meant to encourage. We like to keep track of how many points are being earned and how this translates into longer term customer value and short term profits. The CFO, who has to make balance sheet provisions for the points being accumulated by these valuable members/customers is generally single-minded in her focus on this key driver of program expense. And I am sure she often secretly hopes the points will ‘break’ before they are converted to rewards.
But this view is self serving surely. It is us watching customers behave the way we want them to behave (if we have designed the program well).
What about the ‘burn’?
(Please excuse the loyalty program jargon, ‘burn’ is shorthand for the exchange of points for rewards, also known as a ‘redemption’ i.e. when you redeem points for rewards).
We do loyalty program ‘audits’ and one of the common, generally surprising to them insights we show clients is the impact of redemptions on their program members. By looking at data from literally dozens of programs, we can safely predict what impact the redemption event has on the behaviour of your program members.
‘Redeemers’, (those members who remember receiving a reward in the last 6 months or so) versus ‘non-Redeemers’ of the same value to you;
- stay with you longer, 30% longer in credit card programs in Asia Pacific for example
- like the program more, we have seen 20% point Net Promoter Score increases, comparing cohorts before and after redemption for example
- talk about your brand positively, Colloquy found that 68% of brand champions are so because of the reward program they are engaged with
- in retail programs that issue vouchers as rewards, redeemers measurably increase their response to your point promotions, to accumulate bonus points
- in voucher programs, redeemers spend their voucher then keep spending, making redemption baskets significantly richer. The smaller the reward voucher the larger the sales lift is proportionately (within limits)
Sounds obvious I know, but I see a lot of programs where the redemption part of the process is given insufficient attention, where there is no careful (data driven) matching of the rewards available to the needs/preferences of the redeemers, where there is no use of recognition as a supplementary reward that requires no points but engages customers impressively if genuine…
And where there is no invitation to a conversation just after the redemption when customers are most likely to be open to a relationship offer from you. I am still surprised when I see consumer loyalty programs that are not tightly coupled with a branded community where customers can converse with the program and each other.
Redemption is how your program shows it is loyal to your customers, it deserves more attention than it often receives.
Loyalty Points are more valuable to customers after a redemption
I recently undertook the Net Promoter Score (NPS) certification course, the online version offered by Satmetrix. Overall, quite a good experience and the knowledge will come in handy as we work with our clients’ relationship strategies.
There is much that is ‘traditional’ CRM in the NPS program methodology (with no negative connotations implied), so my years at Peppers and Rogers Group on projects where we struggled to make companies more ‘customer-centric’ were relevant. In fact the organisational change processes outlined are very similar to the framework we built (way back in the early 2000’s) and still use for this type of project – it was originally borrowed from McKinsey and others (in my case) I think.
To successfully change the way an organisation looks after and thinks about its customers requires work. This work sets out to achieve;
- Front line staff teams that understand the rationale behind a customer-focus and the impact it has on their daily work. This includes establishing a single view of customers, i.e. a customer segmentation and treatment plans that are useful in guiding staff to treat different customers differently (and appropriately). Reichheld says basically the same thing when he says that if your segmentation framework does not explain the difference between your Detractors and your Promoters it is not useful for you.
- Staff that have the skills required to provide the new improved customer experience.
- A remuneration system that unambiguously rewards the new, desired behaviour by staff, not the old
- A management team that publicly demonstrates commitment to the changes – asks about customers first and regularly.
CRM strategy projects tended to revolve around the definition and then implementation of these deceptively simple things. Deceptive because they sound simple, but several of my projects took better than 12 months, some are still effectively going 6 years later (and not because I am a slow worker). Keeping project teams focussed for these long periods, with a lack of short term leading indicators is just plain hard.
Relationship marketing generically uses customer loyalty, value, equity and profit as measures of success, correctly so, but many of these dials take a long time to move. Making them difficult metrics, especially in the impatient environment of quarterly reporting and short-tenure CEOs.
The NPS folks make a distinction between top-down and bottom-up implementation. Top-down measures customer satisfaction with the overall relationship, bottom-up measures customer satisfaction with the particular transaction, or interaction.
Top-down does not strike me as being very different from traditional measures of customer satisfaction with a brand.
In bottom-up is the magic. Bottom-up involves mapping the customer transactional experience, identifying the moments-of-truth in that experience, then asking the NPS recommend question and ‘why?’ of enough customers at that moment of truth to get an indication of what is happening in the process. Short and sharp. As scores vary with transaction variables you can do a root cause analysis (guided by the customer verbatim responses) to determine what best to change to improve the customer experience – and therefore likelihood to recommend.
Today.
And measure how you are doing tomorrow.
The difference this regular and immediate measurement of customer reaction makes to work-force transformation projects is significant. It makes them action oriented, execution projects for customer facing staff, not consult-speak heavy management fads that will pass as long as we keep our heads down and ignore them…. especially if closing the loop requires key staff to talk with unhappy and happy customers personally and often.
Exciting.
My only, presumptuous, suggestion; the Customer Experience Management (CEM) industry has a body of tools available that could be productively integrated into bottom-up NPS. These include moment mapping, peak-end experience design and touch point mapping…. Satmetrix talk about a ‘customer corridor’ in describing the over-time interactions customers have with you, this corridor is already a consulting industry in its own right; borrow from it.
From the Satmetrix NPS Certification course
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
