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This morning I rolled into a busy Starbucks off 148th Street in Redmond. It was a beautiful fall morning. I was there to meet Marty Collins, the head of the Community Team for Microsoft’s Windows/Windows Live programs. Marty is both a client and a friend. She’s whip-smart as it comes to community and engagement. Our collective team has been working on a labor of love (known as the ‘Clubhouse’), and it was our topic of conversation this morning.
As we plopped down, we spent a couple of minutes catching up. We talked about kids, Halloween and her friend, who having just moved to Chicago from Seattle was freaking out over some early season snow flakes.
Quickly our conversation shifted to the topic at hand. Clubhouse. If you are not familiar with Clubhouse, you might want to check it out.
In this month’s Fast Company, there is an article dubbed ‘Young Flakenstein’, in which the head of Microsoft’s new Live Labs is churning out some amazingly cool new applications. In the article, Flake states, that he sees an unparalleled collective power in Microsoft’s customers. After all, Microsoft touches over a billion computer users world wide every single day. Flake states that he sees a huge asset; the collective power of these people. The more people contribute to a site, the richer it becomes for every user. It’s here; in this collaborative network effect that he sees Microsoft’s advantage.
I do too. Here is why:
As Marty and my conversation shifted to Clubhouse, her first comment was about The Metric. We (the Microsoft dedicated team associated with this project) launched the Clubhouse in combination with a new WindiwsLive.com. The site was a pretty radical departure for Microsoft and its historically traditional approach. Reflecting on it, the idea was a pretty brave step to take, representing a decent sized line-in-the-sand for a host of people. Bet all the chips on black. If it worked…fantastic. If we were wrong, there’d be some serious explaining that would need to be done and most likely, we’d move the Community movement backwards a ways.
However, we had faith in our abilities, our advocate base, with whom we worked with to make the Clubhouse a reality and our passionate customer base. It worked. Taking a sip from her coffee, Marty said, Can you believe it? Can you believe some of these numbers? They are gigantic. I mean, the activity counts are the equivalent of a country! Imagine, all of Germany or France all working together to collaborate on something that is of shared interest and done in a way that is meaningful to everybody. Each person having a personalized and rich experience in which they give something meaningful to the community and also take something away to use elsewhere and then wanting to come back and experience more. That’s the power of community. That’s the power of the Window’s Live Clubhouse.
A friend and co-worker of mine, Sean O’Driscoll has a saying. Good customers like you. Great customers love you. But Advocates will defend you. We found that in Clubhouse, this axiom holds true related to the Microsoft products members are using every day. However, and of equal importance, we have found that this axiom also holds true for how they relate to each other. Like. Love. Defend.
The new WindowsLive.com site and its associated Clubhouse have only been online for a relatively short time. The whole concept of the Clubhouse is that everyday users use all sorts of Microsoft products for all sorts of important things. Like managing their son’s basketball team. Planning a wedding. Keeping up with family members deployed in Iraq. Creating a video and picture diary of a long anticipated trip across Europe. The value of the Clubhouse is not centered around the Microsoft Live products, but instead the users themselves and their great ideas. Ideas, examples, tutorials, people and other content are sorted and showcased in a variety of ways and places. The most obvious is on the homepage of WindowsLive.com.
One specifically clever and insightful piece of UGC created by an every-day user named Jamie had a massive impact one day shortly after launch. The content and idea he shared with the Clubhouse was thought to be pretty good. It quickly benefitted from word of mouth. People telling others about it and pointing to it. In a matter of less than one day, Jamie’s contribution racked up 11 million views. It then proceeded to shut down the portion of the Clubhouse serving Jamie’s content due to the rapid onslaught of traffic. In only a few weeks, it had generated over 30 million views and engaged, excited and helped tens of millions of people the world over do the things they wanted to do…along with understand how to be a master over the products they used rather than visa-versa.
The interesting thing about this piece of content was it wasn’t clever and distinctive or rocket science. It wasn’t even particularly even exciting. It was just the right thing at the right time. It was insightful and helpful. Jamie had other posts that got higher rankings. Others had more of a wow effect. However, Jamie knew what people needed help with. Why? He’s one of them. He interacts every day with others like him. Difference is, he has some advocate tendencies (a burning desire to help others) and he’s a little farther ahead than most on the learning curve of how to do certain things. It’s this calculus that makes him powerful…him and the thousands of others like him.
This, in my mind, is exactly how great marketing should work. It should be additive. It should be helpful. It should be genuine. It shouldn’t just include the voice of the customer; it should be the voice of the customer.
Needless to say that word of this event travelled quickly through the halls. Clubhouse members and their peer-to-peer activity were quickly setting new benchmarks for activity.
Last week, one of my colleagues, located in Denver encountered an unsolicited recommendation that included a link to Jamie’s contribution. A couple of days ago, I stumbled across a posting on Twitter suggesting that we should check out the Clubhouse, as well.
The health index (I’ll talk about Community Health Indexing in a future post) is solidly in the green and trending ever upwards. Customers are excited and engaged. They are collaborating and creating a rich set of experiences for all to experience at an unparalleled rate that I can only correlate to Wikipedia’s unprecedented success.
Can a Microsoft product change how the web is used? Can tens of millions of collaborating, inter-connected users with shared interests and passions helping one another change the web? Yes. Can it change how software is viewed and used? Yes. Can it change Microsoft’s value proposition? Yes, in fact, I believe that this shift has already begun.
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Social networking and web 2.0 technologies are powerful business models. Companies, brands and investment dollars flock to these powerful tools like moths to a flame. Recently, New Corp’s $580 million dollar investment in the social networking giant MySpace was suggested to have grown in value to a whopping $3 billion in three years. Social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn are also showing robust returns.
Not to be shortchanged, on a daily basis the news found on Techcrunch, an influential tech news source, is peppered with venture firms investing tens of millions of dollars in firms that build applications that aggregate, serve up, facilitate, distribute, track and support web 2.0 functions.
Ask any executive with a clue about technology and you’ll hear the same thing. These are important technologies to be aware of and in many cases engaged in.
So that begs the question. How are they engaging? The answer is simple. The vast majority of firms take a check-box approach to adopting these tools into their marketing mix. Moreover, marketers don’t think about the intent of choosing one technology and rejecting another with no thought to the end game. There is very little ‘strategy’ in this approach. Yet the vast majority of marketing teams default to what is essentially a blind approach to customer engagement. The net result of these efforts usually results in something like this.
If you have ever read Dilbert or seen the movie Office Space, watched the TV show Office, or worked in or with a challenged marketing department, you’ll know this is not all that far from the truth.
Tuesday 8:30am, Headquarters of Widgets R Us
Stan (the manager): Welcome to the second social media meeting for Widgets R Us. So, where do we stand people?
Sally (the marketing person): Well sir, we formed a committee between us in marketing and a couple of guys in IT.
Tim (the consultant): I also participated in pulling this material into a useful infrastructure against which we can assign the appropriate KPI’s ASAP.
Stan: Right. Moving on. Sally, were are we?
Sally: Thanks Stan, like I was saying, we pulled together a list of useful technologies that will aid us in gaining critical market share quickly. Tim helped us create a needs assessment.
Tim: As Sally says Stan, we’ve pulled together a comprehensive list of robust web technologies that will thrust Widgets R Us to the forefront of the marketplace. These dynamic tools will allow our customers to sell to themselves without even knowing they are being sold. We can insert key marketing messages and viral campaigns that will leave the competitor’s heads spinning! Here’s an article from this week’s Daily Tribune talking about Social Networking. Have you ever heard of Plaxo? It’s that. Cutting edge, Stan. Cutting edge.
Stan: Viral?
Tim: Yeah, viral. Spreads like wildfire. All we have to do is plant the ignition source and light the match and presto, gobs of people will be talking about us and hitting the website!
Sally: Stan, we have all read that new book, ‘How to create an army of loyal customers to do your bidding no matter what in ten easy steps’ I gave you a copy last week.
Stan: Umm, right… Back to this viral thing. I saw this in the news. What’s it take to make this happen?
Tim: Well, here’s the list of the technologies we’ll need to bring online. I’ll go over each one and get your input. Think of this as sort of a dot-com menu.
Sally: Blog?
Stan (reading the description): Check. We need that. Yes, we definitely need a blog.
Sally: RSS?
Stan: Umm, what’s that?
Gus (The IT Guy who has been IM’ing during the entire meeting): Really Simple Syndication.
(Tim elaborates)
Stan: Oh, yeah. Think we can find a home for that?
Sally and Tim in unison: Definitely.
Sally: Wiki?
Gus: Nope, too complicated and work intensive. We’ll never be able to deploy. Plus it is a security risk.
Sally (irritated): Risk? What kind of risk?
Stan: We can’t afford unnecessary risk right now. Skip it.
Sally: Forums?
Tim: Great place to sell and position our stuff!
Stan: Sounds good. Check.
Sally: Um, I want to throw out Twitter. It is getting a lot of press online. I am not sure what to do with it though.
Stan: Tim, right a report on Titter for us, will you?
Sally: It’s Twitter Stan.
Stan: Right. Twitter.
Sally: Moving on. Widgets?
Gus: Nope. Open source. We don’t do open source. No way. Forget it.
Sally: Community?
Tim (talking over Stan): We’ll give it its own tab on our website. Our customers will eat this stuff up!
Gus: Tab? What do you mean give it a tab? IT owns the website. We’ll need to look into that and get back to you before any tab decisions are made.
Stan: Ummm, right. Well, great. Sounds like we have a plan. Get started people. I expect to see results.
Narrator: In essence, this is what happens in some form or fashion every single day. Moreover, tactics with little thought of how they map to a single set of business objectives or how to effectively measure success are deployed by marketing teams online every day. Such disjointed approaches routinely confound and anger customers. Here’s an example:
Fast forward 1 year (which is how long it took Widgets R Us to deploy their ‘Social Media Plan of Attack’
Tom (one of Widget’s new customers): Say Jerry, I just opened the invoice for the Widget Shipment we got from WRU. They had a flyer in it promoting their new website. Something about their new community and ‘From the Desk of Stan’.
Jerry: What?
Tom: It’s their blog.
Jerry: And?
Tom: Well, two things. First, Stan’s blog postings are sort of hokey. He’s talking about their commitment to customer service; their focus on delivering the widgets the market wants blah, blah, blah. Then I went to the community page. Normally, it’s a tab but WRU has a page. With another blog.
Jerry: Look, Tom, I have a budget meeting in 5 minutes, what’s the point?
Tom: Sorry. The last order of widgets we got was the new SV-25’s. They raised the price 10% because they are supposed to be lighter. Well, they are lighter. But their metric. Metric widgets Jerry. We are in Illinois. What are we going to do with metric widgets?
Silence
Tom: Plus they are purple. It’s the plastic color. They didn’t paint them or anything. But we have purple, metric widgets Jerry. We have 45,000 purple metric widgets. The union guys in back are having a field day with this.
Jerry: Didn’t they let us know this in advance?
Tom: Well, that’s why I signed up for their community and Stan’s RSS feed. God, I would have thought they would have told us this. So anyway, I posted a blog post to Stan on this and also clicked on the feedback button in the community page.
Jerry: Well?
Tom: Nothing. Stan didn’t respond and nothing back from the community email. It’s been three days.
Jerry: Damn. We’ll send them back. Don’t pay for them. Call accounting right now and make sure no check goes out. Call Widget World. They are our second source supplier. Get them set up as our primary source. Make sure their widgets aren’t metric….or purple.
Tom: Nope, they are black. We can also get silver if we want but I’d go with black. If we order 100,000 they’ll drop ship them from their factory in China. Be here in 2 days.
Jerry: Make it happen.
Tom: Oh, one more thing. They sent us this weird email with monkeys making widgets on it. If you click on the monkey he hits the widget with a hammer. If you click on the widget it eats the monkey. They want us to pass it onto other people. Jerry, there is no way I am passing it on, it’s embarrassing.
Jerry: You have got to be kidding.
Back over at Widgets R Us
Sally: Stan, here are our numbers. This month we have had a 20% increase in site visits! We have had over 500 posts to our blog. That’s more than we can even read! Also, we have had 3,000 feedback emails. This is a 400% increase from before.
Stan: That’s great! Umm, what do the emails say?
Sally: Well, I am not quite sure. We had to set up a new email address with IT and they haven’t given us access to it yet.
Stan: Right. Well, what about my blog you’ve been writing?
Sally: There have been some postings. Mostly about the new widget.
Stan: Good or bad?
Sally (now stretching the truth): Well, some good. Mostly, some concerns about the switch to metric.
Stan (sighing): Well, if you give access to the masses to the big guy, this is what happens. They’ll take advantage of it and immediately start complaining. We make a damn good widget, Sally. Give them a while, they’ll get used to it. Just like the last one. Do me a favor, will you? Write a blog post about our commitment to excellence. Highly engineered widgets. Something like that. Oh, throw in something about the 1.5% increase in strength of the new plastic we are using. How strong it is. Plus it is purple! It’ll stand out! Something like that. Maybe this new web strategy will help to counteract the pinch we are seeing in sales. Man, this economy. We are off by 30% year to date. We need to push out some more stuff about our leadership in the industry, focus on caring, blah, blah, blah.
Sally: No problem boss. You want to read it when I am done?
Stan: Nah, just post it. I’m sure it’ll be fine.
Marketers everywhere are living this very thing every day... Some meetings are carbon copies of the one I have painted above. Others are a bit more sophisticated but the end result is the same.
About a year ago, I was sitting at a coffeehouse with an acquaintance of mine who is a special projects person who reports directly to the CEO of a Fortune 100 company in the healthcare industry. She deeply understands the impact of social media and was lamenting a senior marketing person who was advocating such a checklist approach and that the CEO needed a blog. She stressed maybe he does need one, maybe he doesn’t (he was the incoming CEO). The point is why? What’s the strategy behind this, how would that soapbox impact the other tools in their marketing arsenal? Who was his audience? Until they had their arms around a clear strategy and set of metrics, that marketing person was going to remain locked in a closet because guys pushing unbaked ideas like this without a strategic home are loose cannons.
If you can’t measure something, why do it? You have no idea if you’re succeeding or not. If you don’t have a strategy that leads to a set of business objectives that are married to your traditional business objectives, what’s the point?
Here’s an analogy to drive this point home. Why would a doctor operate on a person’s stomach? If the patient is nauseated and can’t eat, clearly it doesn’t work. So let’s dive in and see what we find. What if they didn’t use any instruments to measure the patient’s condition? How much anesthesia? What’s the patient’s blood pressure? How much blood have we given him? If you have no clue, as a patient and a doctor you have a pretty low percentage of being successful. What if the patient only had the flu? Removing part of his stomach was not necessary.
This is the same sort of dilemma that Stan is facing in the story above. He is a flying blind and is going to be faced with an unpleasant reality when his customers revolt.
Without paying attention to trends, having a clear strategy where all the pieces of the business are interlinked, a clear and actionable set of metrics (performance dashboards where things like Omniture numbers feed into and are additive, not the totality of the metrics), team members work with one another, engaged and responsible leaders, and collaborative customers whom you really understand, you’ll end up just like Stan.
Don’t be a Stan. You’ll regret it.
If you haven’t read this article, you need to. Note, it’s a free article but you need to register to get it.
How Poor Metrics Undermine Digital Marketing
I’d like to thank a couple of my friends and colleagues for adding to the idea of this story.
Emanuel Rosen (check out his upcoming book, The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited)
Sean O'Driscoll
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I hate to say it. It goes against everything in my DNA. My body screams 'noooooo!' as I write this but my mind says, 'yes, it must be said.' Especially, since I have such long and strong ties to the Apple brand. So here it goes.
Apple is on the verge (in my and a host of other's opinion) of the Apple store's undermine what is a phenomenally brilliant product experience. Here is why.
Apple can't seem to staff their stores fast enough. Consequently, their staff is not very knowledgeable and in some cases not helpful. I saw a first hand example of this in the Chicago store. A customer asked a question and a 'concierge' answered it. I was standing next to this conversation, so I heard it first hand. The person on the other side of this conversation was also a customer and interrupted, indicating that the information just provided was utterly and totally wrong. Furthermore, the customer asked the concierge what she was basing her answer on (it had to do with running Bootcamp, or partitioning the hard drive to run Windows). She couldn't answer saying only that she was new and though that was the answer. The customer she was working with asked her if she could find somebody that really knew what they were talking about to help him. He didn't want to base a purchase decision on her 'guesses.'
In yet another Apple store in a different city, a poor soul had made a Genius appointment to get his laptop fixed. He'd driven nearly three hours to get to the store and had been waiting for over 90 minutes. When they finally got to him, they told him they couldn't (or wouldn't) help him. He didn't bring his power cord. He had an older Power PC model (my guess was it was about 5 years old). It took a different voltage than the new laptops and they didn't keep those in the store. He needed to come back. I thought he was going to cry when they shoved him aside. He explained he'd taken a day off of work to come in and he couldn't afford to do it again. Couldn't they run it off of battery and look at it? Nope. Sorry. To add insult to injury, they directed him to another computer in the store to make another genius appointment....self-serve style. I was appalled.
I recently took my son in to get his Mac Mini updated with more memory, get one of our family laptops fixed (our two year old had ripped a few keys off the keyboard) and have a brand new i-pod that kept locking up looked at. Like me, my 8 year old son is a Mac fan. Understanding how things worked, I went online to make my Genius appointment a couple of days in advance. I clearly outlined by product what I needed done and booked my appointment. Since I am a paying service member, I thought things were cool. We got to the store on a Saturday morning around 11am. Now they have line queues outside the store, like in banks. We by-passed the queue of people with the same hopeful look in their eyes you see in the people standing outside of a hot night spot praying they'll get in before 3am.
We walked through the front door. The 'bouncer' immediately stopped us. 'Sorry sir, the line forms back there. It's about a 30 minute wait, fyi.' I replied, actually I shouted, 'Oh, we have a genius appointment.' The noise in the store was deafening. I have been to quieter Who concerts. He replied, 'That's fine sir, you'll still have to wait in line. We are at capacity. What's your name; I'll let them know you are here.' So we got in line. After 15 minutes, we had only inched forward. We were going to miss our appointment. I walked in the store, my son in tow, ignoring the bouncer. Walking up to the genius bar I noticed I was 8th in line. 'What's the wait?' I asked. Somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours. Sheesh. So much for an appointment. What a way to ruin our Saturday. Standing in a packed to the gills Apple store.
By the time we were up, my son was bumming heavily and I had a splitting headache from all the racket. The store was absolutely packed to the walls and with all the hard surfaces, everything was intensified. The store clearly wasn't designed for this. Squeezing through the throng of people to the counter, I placed my equipment on the counter. The genius eyed me and asked me which one I wanted help with. I answered all of them, as I had stated in my online appointment request. His response was simply, 'sorry, one piece per appointment. You can go over there to that computer to make appointments for the others.' I was shocked. He didn't care. To the guy making minimum wage on the other side of the counter, he couldn't care less how many Apples I have purchased, how much I have advocated on their behalf (and defended the brand time and again) or any such thing. I was simply some dude he needed to interface with before his lunch break. The faster he dealt with me, in whatever fashion, the better. So we had to pick between my son's computer and his i-pod. Asking an 8 year old which he wanted to work more and trying to explain why this is to a child after standing there for a couple hours sucks.
On our way out after this mediocre experience we stopped to look at i-phones. My wife had wanted one. My son says to me, 'C'mon dad, let's go. I don't want to get her one.' I asked him why. His response was telling. "Because I am mad at Apple. They don't like me. They just want our money.'
Wow.
As an adult, I couldn't help but agree with him. What do you say? I guarantee that if you took a straw poll that day in the store, with the 200 people there you'd have at least half that would agree. Apple is building a very bad bow-wave of bad will through a toxic retail experience that will have a significant negative effect on what is one of the best brands and some of the finest computer and electronics experiences (mix of product and services) that exists. Getting that bad taste out of the consumer's mouth takes a lot of time...and branding and service money.
Mr. Jobs, you take tremendous ownership in getting the product right and are known as the uber-perfectionist in every aspect from features and functions to packaging. With regard to service, you have a major issue. Somebody deserves to be fired.
Oh, a post script. Recently, I sent our baby sitter to the Apple store for a math game for my son. She had my two year old daughter with her. An Apple employee asked her to leave because she had a stroller and it took up too much space in the store…after she waited in line for 45 minutes to buy the game but didn't get it because she was asked to leave. To me, if I wanted to destroy customer gooodwill, I would have to work hard to come up with stuff worse than this.
By the way, she drove 30 minutes out of her way to get to Frye's to get the game...another angry customer in the Apple store was on his way there and tipped her off. Her comment to me was, ‘Wow, I really hated that (Apple experience). Don’t make me go back there, ok?’
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In the November 2007 issue of CRM magazine I recently read an article titled 'Have You Caught It?' The premise of this article was that Viral Marketing is striking out...but viral isn't to blame. The article starts out like this. "Disappointing numbers have convinced many marketers to decrease their viral marketing (spend) by 55% next year, but viral isn't to blame. Viral marketing is exciting, and understandably so-it's a marketer's dream that by simply planting a video, consumers will not only find it, but also spread it far and wide."
The reality is that what I quote above isn't happening. According to the article and the underlying research conducted by JupiterResearch, only 15% of viral marketers succeeded in getting consumers to promote their message. Why is this?
Ready-Fire-Aim. I have begun to call this phenomenon 'The You Tube Methodology'. Now there is nothing wrong with You Tube. On the contrary, it is a powerful and very engaging tool, when used appropriately (and there are a lot of ways to use it). I instead refer to using the venue, which is a tactical tool as a strategy and avoiding a process altogether. Bad idea. So why do certain viral videos work? Two reasons really; they resonate with their audience because they are made expressly for their audience (and many times members of the audience have a say in it or come up with the idea for the video themselves) or they are so far off the mark they are embarrassingly bad. The first example is like throwing the impossible pass to win the Super Bowl with one second left on the clock. Your team's fans go, "Wow, did you see that?!" They get the video snippit off You Tube and pass it around for days. They talk about it for days and share it with people just like them. I got a video from a friend of mine which illustrates this point. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR2ygFn-yR8 Different sport but same idea. Actually, it is the third time I had seen it in as many weeks. As a competitive cyclist, I belong to a community of riders just like me, as well as a sub set of that community that are fans of single speed mountain bikes. A very passionate group who talks about and recommends everything from nutritional aids to vacations to restaurants to you name it. This social network is spread across the country and is made up of CEO's, attorneys, doctors, airline pilots, graduate students, plumbers and even a state senator. Last week, one member of the group made a recommendation that resulted in another choosing to fly to Europe to take possession of a new Audi sports car, along with an included trip to the factory, a short vacation and a chance to drive his car on Audi's test track. Purchase value? $46,000.00. What had he had originally planned to do? Buy a used one locally. Big difference and talk about influence. How this video is spread is viral and it works. Although it is not a product focused video, it easily could be and it resonates with a specific group (are you listening Giro Helmets?).
The second example is the train wreck that doesn't resonate with anybody but it is so bad that people feel the need to share it in order to make fun of it. Any publicity is not always good publicity. There are lots of examples of these 'corporate videos' that well, just plain suck. So why do they, um, suck? Most of all, they totally miss their demographic mark and there is no call to action for feedback, voting or to get involved. There are other reasons but these two are enough for now. So what's the purpose of this post? To compel my fellow marketers to have a reason for doing something. Take a page from Seinfeld. The show about nothing. The reason it was so funny was that it resonated with people for a specific reason (we all saw part of our lives there and could relate to it), plus it was scripted! Planned out! There was a reason for a joke. It was tried out in advance!
Keep using viral tools but dump the You Tube Methodology. You'll be a lot better of and a heck of a lot more successful (and popular with your customer base).
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Recently, I got a call from a friend of mine. He’s a pretty smart guy, but he began our call like this. “Hey, I may be an idiot because I don’t understand something that seems so mind-numbingly simple. Can you help me?”
I asked him what was bothering him. He said that over the last couple of days he’s responded to a couple of surveys. One he got in the mail, another came as part of a sales receipt where he dialed into an 888 number. The third survey he had just finished and they had called him.
In each instance he had been asked a question that made no sense from his point of view. My friend owns a successful manufacturing company and has undergraduate and graduate degrees in finance, so he sees things pretty black and white.
My friend has been a loyal customer to each of the brands to whom he’d responded to the survey information, so he was happy to take the time to complete each survey.
In each survey, they asked how likely he would be to recommend their brand to others. He responded that he’d be likely to do so.
Seems simple enough, right? Wrong. In reality, as he said, he is very uncomfortable in imposing his point of view on others, unless they specifically ask him what he thinks; which is a rare occurrence, since he doesn’t tend to talk about such things regularly. Moreover, currently he isn’t recommending any of these brands to anyone. Not that he doesn’t love them; he said that he did. He just doesn’t go out of his way to do it, isn’t doing it and can’t remember the last time he did.
This concept really bothered him. He said to me, “Steve, the survey is worthless because it is going to report something that isn’t happening. They should have asked me if I was recommending them. Right?”
He continued, “It reminds me of a former salesman I had. He’d put into his sales forecasts projects he thought would close when he had no data to prove they would. He just felt good about the opportunity. In the end, he was trying to create a reality that really wasn’t there. When I got rid of him, I personally went out and met with all our key customers and asked them for their honest appraisal of us. What I heard wasn’t all pleasant but it was what was keeping us from winning all of their business, so we went away and acted on what they told us. Knowing that information was critical, it wasn’t pleasant but it was necessary. Since then, we’ve doubled our profitability and have not lost one customer. Our prices are 20% higher than our competitors. We couldn’t do this without customer advocates and we would have customer advocates without meeting their needs. We can’t meet their needs unless we know what they think.”
He’s right again. Being likely to recommend doesn’t mean you are or will. But it sure makes it easy to say “yes” and marketers feel better about reporting the fact that 85% of their customers are likely to recommend their products and services. Sounds a lot better than currently 18% of our customers actively recommend us on a regular basis, doesn’t it?
So his question to me on why this was is a good one, as was his point. What do you think? Why is the phrase ‘are you likely to recommend’ used instead of ‘are you currently recommending’? The answer might lie in the fact that if not enough people are recommending the brand. Might it be because the experience falls short and that would require real and meaningful change? Perhaps it is because the brand does little to engage them as advocates?
I couldn’t give him a good answer why there wasn’t (to use his terms) more of a ‘concrete present value’ to most of marketing. In the past, I had given this friend Fred Reichheld’s book, ‘The Ultimate Question’ as well as, a couple of others such as ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ and ‘Return on Customer’. He liked each very much but in the end, his opinion was that it easier for marketers to keep creating TV commercials with good looking actors portraying happy customers and asking if consumers might possibly be willing to do something sometime in the unspecified future than truly engaging the customer, asking tough questions and instituting real change to meet their needs and requirements.
That was my friend’s point of view. I thought that this story was worth sharing. Here is mine:
• The one word you need to know to grow is ‘are’ (as in are you recommending).
• It is time to stop talking about customer engagement and do it.
• It is time to stop thinking we know what is in the minds of our customers and invite them into the process.
• It is time to treat our best customers better than our next customer.
• It is time to stop worrying about politics of making change and act.
• It’s time to stop organizing focus groups that include people who have never bought our products and probably never will.
• It is time to stop talking to our customers and start talking with them.
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The following is an excerpt of a story that brings home the power of influence and social networking. This is an off-line example that took place back in 2004/2005. The account is written in first person and took place in the Midwestern United States. It is sort of long and I didn't want to edit it down, as it would lose some of its power. Worth the full minute it will take to read it.
During the winter, Tim invites a bunch of hard-core cyclists
over to his house for some of the most painful training sessions you could
imagine. Spinning class has nothing on this guy.
As today is officially the first full day of fall, I know
these sessions are not too far off. Rarely do riders worry about not being in
good enough shape to make it through the off-season, but with Tim, this is
definitely the case. He attracts about fifteen riders or so twice a week to
these wickedly intense hammer sessions. Each guy shows up with his road bike,
about a gallon of water and a set of rollers or magnetic trainer.
An interesting fact about Tim is that he is an absolute
fanatic about creating play lists to match the tempo of these training
sessions. Just like out on the road, we do all sorts of weird things during the
off-season to stay engaged. Tim’s play lists are famous-or rather infamous.
Usually, they are perfect for what we are doing. What I mean is there is always
some obscure song somebody likes or a new album he has managed to tap into.
They are perfect for the pain we are forced to endure…The sprint must last til the end of the song. Oooh sorry, it is the
extended version. Three more minutes. Pick up the pace boys, let’s go.
He takes pride in naming these play lists too. I have one
named after me. I love it. Tim will happily burn you ONE play list. That’s it.
After that, you have to come up with your own. Every Session, somebody is
assigned to come up with a new one for a specific set, which I explain below. Nobody wants to be outdone.
Depending on the size of the group, we either do the session
in his basement exercise room or his garage, which can hold four cars, although
he has only two. It has lots of room. I think the most people we had one day
was forty. Imagine. Inviting 8 guys to
ride a stationary trainer in a garage in the middle of a snowstorm on a
Saturday morning and 32 people you didn’t invite also show up. About half of this group you have never seen
before, but they knew somebody in the Session group. They had all heard about
it through word of mouth and decided to try it, braving the elements and their
fear of the unknown. Tim never really
gave thought as to how all of these strangers knew about the Session and found
their way to his house, nor really why they came. He was simply glad to have them.
During these Sessions, we do intervals which are lots of
short sprints sandwiched together, ladders which are longer sprints that grow
in length and intensity, spin sessions that are high RPM intervals, chases,
etc. We also linger for some time afterwards to admire someone’s new
ultra-light bike they paid way, way too much for.
During the Spring, Summer, Fall and even snow free winter
days a number of us meet for Mexican food and beers on Tuesdays and Thursdays
after an outdoor session. We are a social network of roughly 50-75 people from
all walks of life with the common bond of bicycling.
Before a winter garage session, Tim sets up a TV and his
computer, from which he runs a DVD of a Tour de France, Giro de Italia, The
Tour of Flanders or my favorite the Paris-Roubaix, also known as The Hell of
the North due its normally nasty weather and its painful difficulty. He clicks
on a play list and away we go.
Winter is now long behind us and yesterday was a long group
ride in which something very interesting occurred. I witnessed advocacy at work, first hand and
up close, as a recipient of it instead of an architect.
As everyone gathered a couple cars in the parking lot, post
ride, I asked the group, yelling over the slight din, to no one in particular,
“Hey, who here listens to one of the Session (what we call the winter training
group) play lists when you are out on your own or training at home? We had just
over 50 riders that day. People stopped, looked up at me and nearly every hand
there went up.
"Okay, so how many of you have never been to a Session?" About ten hands went up.
"Those of you who have never been to a Session,
did you know that this was a Session play list?" Everyone said yes.
"So how many of you have built play lists on your
own based on your Session play list?" Every single had went up.
I looked at my friend. "Um, Tim. Where do you get your
songs?"
He looked at me as if I were an idiot. I knew exactly where
he got them, as I had turned him onto the e-store. I rolled my eyes and said,
"humor me. It’s an experiment."
He responded, "i-Tunes."
"How many people here have had Tim tell them to
go to i-Tunes to build their Session play lists?" About thirty hands went
up.
"So how many of you took his advice?" The same
hands went up.
"Okay, how many of you started using i-Tunes because of
somebody that has either been to a Session, built a play list for a Session or
given you a Session play list?" About ten more hands went up.
"How many of you have i-Tunes and now use it
regularly?" All but three or four hands went up.
"Okay, how many of you have recommended i-Tunes to more
than ummm….ten riders, family or friends in the last month?" About
twenty-five hands stayed up. "How about five people?" Close to thirty
five. "How about three?" Back up to over forty hands.
"How many of you download more than five songs a
week?" Thirty hands.
"Every week?" Twenty hands.
"So how many of you have bought an i-Pod or a Shuffle
as a direct result of getting a play list or coming to a Session?"
Surprisingly, about twenty hands went up. Just under half of the group. “Some other mp3 player?” Five more hands.
"Based on my questions, how many of you can now
directly tie your use of i-Tunes directly or indirectly to Tim?" All but
the three or four that don’t have i-Tunes raised their hand.
"Okay, almost done guys. Based on this little
experiment, how many people, either directly or through yourself, has Tim
turned onto i-Tunes?" It was quiet for a minute or so, then the numbers
shouted out ranged from 400 to over a thousand.
"How many i-Pods is Tim responsible influencing you guys
to purchase?" The numbers ranged from twenty to one hundred.
"You three guys. The ones who don’t have i-Tunes.
Why not?" One of them responded, “ask us again tomorrow, when we have it”.
Looking at Tim, I said, “So still think you aren’t an
evangelist? Still think there isn’t power in consumer-generated media, advocate
marketing or word of mouth? Look what you did.”
His only response was, “Wow. But I never actually made a
recommendation.” My response was, “it’s not what you say sometimes, it is what
you do and just who you are. Imagine what would happen if the brand was able to
or more willing to capitalize on this.”
He paused as he sat on my bumper and said, “It would be
worth tens of millions. I see your point.” After a moment of silence, he said,
“Say, maybe I could charge for Session admissions. I think there’s a market.” I
laughed, hoisted my bike into the back of my truck and said, “C’mon. Let’s go
get a beer.”
As we got in the car, I asked him a question. “So, Mr.
Evangelist, so why do you do what you do?” Tim looked at me and sincerely
answered, “You know me man, I do whatever I do because I love it. Not because
somebody pays me. It’s all about passion. The good news is that i-Tunes has
helped these hacks to turn out decent Session play lists.
Tell Jobs to keep up the good work, will ya? We got another
winter coming up.”
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Recently, there has been a lot of chatter about the importance of social media and influential consumers. Recently, there was an article published (see 'What's Plaguing Viral Marketing', Advertising Age, July 16) in which Duncan Watts, a professor of sociology at Columbia, asserted that influential consumers don't play as much of role as earlier believed. Based on his suppositions and computer modeling, the word will spread anywhere, whether or not an influential is present. This is an oversimplification but none the less captures the essence of what he is saying. So what does this do to the notion of Behavioral Marketing and Social Media? How do such statements change the landscape?
They don't. If we are going to talk theory (and he is), my academics can beat up your academics. In the real world, theory breaks down. Quickly. The fact of the matter is that for marketers there are essentially three sources of influence. Think of them as three concentric circles. Each of these series of circles represents an area of interest for a group of people. Let's use knitting (I am not a knitter but they are out there!).
The big circle is the marketplace at large. So where does knitting fit in? It's a hobby and one that a vast number of people don't care about (all deference to the knitters). It as an interest fights with cooking, travel, pottery-making, reading, painting, gardening and even motorcycling for a portion of your awareness if you are not a hard-core knitter. If you are, you are trapped in a world of non-knitters alone. Sort of like moving to New York City and not knowing a soul....totally alone in a sea of people. You yearn for knitting companionship and of course, adding to and taking from cutting edge knitting knowledge. That brings us to the second concentric circle inside of the big one. This is community. In a community (there are lots of them, knitting is just one...check it out! https://www.ravelry.com/account/login ) people of like interest and mind gather...on and off line. At the heart of these communities exist influentials, or what we today more regularly call advocates. These people have some unique characteristics. They often have a superior technical knowledge of their area of interest, may times knowing more about a category or a brand/product than the employees a company that serves that space. They also have deeper contextual knowledge about the topic. Said another way, they can tell you how something works, they can tell you a million stories about why and they can and will show you what you want to know in a way you are best able to consume that knowledge. So there is the third circle. The advocates themselves. In a community, you either are impacted directly by and advocate or by their halo effect. Advocates make communities better. Their influence is significant, as is the thumb print they leave on a community. In the end, in the absence of any form of community, are Influentials (Advocates) important? Sure but less so that when they are engaged with community. As a marketer, the community is your venue to ply the tools of experiential marketing in such a way that you get a meaningful response-an engaged consumer.
Small is big. Communities and micro-communities float about in the sea of the marketplace. They overlap and are networked together by people, places and things. As a brand, of you align yourself with the communities that are in harmony with who you are (i.e. a knitting community and Harley Davidson don't really go...and making the argument that you can knit great sweaters for the ride is a bit of a stretch) and also align yourself with advocates who are the real thought leaders, you can't help but win....if you pay attention.
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On the eve of the Dow Jones board of directors voting to accept (or maybe
deny) Mr. Murdoch's offer to buy Dow Jones, which includes the venerable Wall
Street Journal, it struck me that News Corp maybe isn't the company name but
also its motto. With the ownership of a vast media empire that would be 'book
ended' by the social network My Space on one side and the WSJ on the other,
Murdoch would have a broad and fertile landscape to shape how people learn and
have access to information, right?
Not really. You see, News Corp. can own the venue and even work to
restrict, oops I mean direct its content. It can do this with hundreds or even
thousands of venues, but like water, if the path of communication, connectivity
and information is blocked, it will find a new path.
Obviously, the connectivity of today's world is not limited to the assets of
News Corp, Google, Yahoo! and the handful of other juggernauts we all know and
love. Interestingly, in my opinion it's the fact that these massive
corporations keep snapping up small companies, exercising their 'buy' versus
'build' mentality and prerogative that drives further innovation within the
marketplace and gives all of us individuals the opportunity to connect, learn
and share from one another.
New startups, competing services and venues allow for an unending choice for
information flow. We have seen it time and time again. Faxes were
going to be the death of courier services and mail. VCR's were going to
kill the movie industry, phones with digital cameras were going to be the death
of every other type of camera, the Internet was going to kill everything.
Companies too...When audio tapes went extinct, Memorex was supposed to be
toast, the migration from film to digital cameras was going to put Kodak out of
business in a year, blah blah, blah.
The fact is that the pace of innovation speeds up as these things occur.
New and novel ways to communicate, to connect and to learn are ALL driven by
competitive forces such as those I have mentioned. Will the acquisition
of Dow Jones allow News Corp to 'own' the market? No. The market
will move and that will be a benefit to us all.
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For me especially, the firm Brains on Fire evokes an interesting set of emotions. The reason is pretty complex. BOF (Brains on Fire) is a competitor to ComBlu. They are talented people, so they are a worthy competitor.
One of their WOM team members, Virginia Miracle (Vee Dub) used to be ComBlu's client when she oversaw WOM during her tenure at Dell. VeeDub is also a board member of WOMMA, so she helps set strategy and direction for this very important organization. She is a friend, as are her colleagues Geno and Spike. In the end, I view them as friends and kindred spirits, not competitors. I cheer loudly when they nail something or win a new client. If we were to lose in a new business pitch, I would like to see them be the winner. I enjoy every minute I spend with these folks (check out their blog, it is great...www.brainsonfire.com/blog).
So that's the set up. Recently, Spike moderated a panel at a WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association-womma.org) event in New Orleans. He threw out their practice of the 'Love Bomb'. Essentially, this is where people from all levels of the company say 'Thank You" via email to customers, people who think they are cool, etc. Short and sweet notes expressing gratitude. As Spike was on stage talking about this I was sitting next to Vee Dub and she whispered in my ear how they did this. It was the only idea I wrote down....the panel talked for over 30 minutes.
From that, here is what I imagined. What if I was a customer of some company, say Fed-Ex. What if I got an email from somebody in product development saying, "Hey, I don't know you, never met you but you just signed up for our service or you just completed a survey or you just sent $100 worth of packages. As one of the people who make Fex-Ex happen, I want to say 'Thank You.' Have a great day!" and another from a pilot saying essentially the same thing. What would I do?
I'd be floored. I'd be wowed (sure I'd wonder if it was real. Heck, I'd email them back to find out!). If they WERE real. I'd be hooked. I'd be loyal. I'd be theirs. A simple act of kindness. I'd tell EVERYONE!
Now, could Fed-Ex do this?.........like BOF? No.
Why? Attorneys.
That said, could they do this In some other 'organized' fashion (that satisfied the lawyers who do in fact control the world today)?
The answer is yes. Would this impact their market share? You bet.
How about the buzz about this? Yep.
Loyalty to Fed-Ex? Of course.
So why don't brands do such things like connect with customers?
I don't have a clue. (Actually I do, but that is another post).
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The other day I was talking with somebody who made a really smart comment that led to a fascinating debate. His point was that brands are terrified to a) embrace customers as part of the innovation process. You know, those best customers who really get it (aka Customer Advocates) and b) fire those toxic customers who do nothing but complain and eat resources. You know, those customers that no matter what you can't satisfy since their not happy unless they are unhappy? Consequently, you end up as a brand being mediocre and your customer base is shaped into a nice even bell shaped curve with a long tail of those unhappy customers who you haven't had the guts to send elsewhere.
This executive's argument was that in a world where not all customers are created equal, the brand can focus on learning from those customers who are an excellent barometer for their best customer segments, as well as, provide ways to allow for other less engaged customers to choose a less intense experience than what the advocate wants. Some companies today are actively pursuing similar plans of attack and getting great results (i.e. Intuit, Jet Blue, BMW, Nestle Power Bar, Microsoft, etc.)
His point was that the normal brand's customer base, which is that nice symmetrical bell shaped curve becomes lopsided as customer's move to the right. That is to say that a greater number of customers abandon ambivalence which is the middle of the curve and where most customers reside for one reason or another and move into a state of loyal or even advocacy. The curve begins to look more like a teardrop. If you were to calculate the lifetime value of the bell shape curve versus the teardrop the potential difference in revenue and profit is well, massive.
It was pretty simple, or so it seemed. Of course doing something is a lot harder than talking about it. After a few minutes, we coined the phrase Capitalism 2.0 following the innovation changes to the web that yielded web 2.0. I asked this individual what he planned on doing with this new found knowledge. His response was that he had a fiduciary responsibility to his customers and stockholders to form up a potential plan of action around a pilot program. We then kicked around a couple of other ideas....what if 10% of the businesses in the U.S. took up the challenge? What would this yield to the GDP? We didn't know, but agreed that it would have a material impact on our economy as a whole. All my friend knew for sure was that what we had discussed could give his customers a more meaningful brand experience, provide his team more insight and at the same time increase his profitability and market share. Seems like a win-win. I wonder why more businesses don't rally behind Capitalism 2.0. Since I have great faith in our country's 'can-do' spirit, I believe that we will in fact see this change occur.
So let me be the first to say, welcome to Capitalism 2.0.
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Well the stock market is on fire again. On Thursday, it hit another
record. Of equal but not as well reported importance was that the S&P
hit 1,500, which it hasn't done since 2000. Why is this important and
what does this have to do with marketing?
An excellent question grasshopper. The answer is measurement and
sustainment.
The stock market to some degree is a measure of the SHORT TERM health of
corporate America
(not investors because they don't really move the market...hedge funds and
institutional investors do, but that's another story). You see it is all
about measurement. Corporate America advises the market (a.k.a.
guidance). If they do what they say they are going to do, or slightly
exceed it (.i.e. perform less poorly than expected, perform better than
advised, etc.) the market reacts positively. If they don't, the market reacts
badly. Oh, the fickle market...and it is that. Then this outcome is
compounded by the media and eventually reaches consumers whose point of view of
the economy is directly impacted by this. This point of view is then
buttressed by the price of gas, the value of their 401(k), etc.
However, the true measure of corporate America's health comes from a
series of measurement points...not just the Dow. You can't directly
measure the health of anything effectively with only one data point.
Multiple data points give insight into what's going wrong, starting to go wrong
or likely to go wrong. Then certain people step in to act, be it the Fed,
the hedge fund or institutional fund managers or even the employees of
corporate American itself.
For the health and well being of companies from a marketing standpoint
(which ultimately leads to sales, profitability, etc.) we have NPS, the Net
Promoter Score. While good, it is still a single data point. For
the health of an organization to continue, you need to anticipate the
future. Brands need to look to other 'economic engines' in their
organizations (i.e. the S& | |
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