Posts Tagged Business

2010 Customer Reference Forum

Posted by Lisa in 2010 Trends, Customer Experience on March 7th, 2010

I had the pleasure of attending the 2010 Customer Reference Forum in Santa Clara last week with a variety of customer reference, marketing and sales, p.r. and other professionals sharing best practices, challenges and innovations in the world of customer relationship engagement. Although the group is titled Customer Reference Forum, our focus and attention has evolved with industry trends and technology to encompass a much broader mandate and cross-functional approach. If any one theme from this conference emerged, it was that attentiveness to the customer relationship (whether current or prospective) will be the driver of all organizational activities and KPI’s. Although I raise an eyebrow at the notion that this hasn’t always been the case, suffice it to say that the dialogue at this event was geared to how all practices within our organizations can effectively join to communicate the corporate brand and mission and creatively engage a variety of internal and external voices in our dialogue. For those of you who didn’t have the chance to attend, I submit some highlight themes for your consideration:

1. “One Size Does NOT Fit All”- To noone’s surprise, B2B utilization of social media and networking applications in our customer and prospect outreach and engagement was a HUGE topic of conversation and debate. This group is savvy enough to know that a business cannot just throw up a Facebook Fan page and call their social media strategy good, so the exchanges around the SMN question were lively and varied. Every organization presenting or present, from Oracle to Microsoft is grappling with how exactly to write and implement the digital dialogue playbook. As we at Cubed have been preaching, a cookie cutter approach is not the way to go. You have to consider your audience, demographic, mission, sales and marketing objectives, etc. etc. and develop and integrated approach to social media; NOT pick the applications and retrofit them to your environment.

2. Customer Engagement Happens Everywhere- As I hinted in my opening, the idea that customer relationships are “owned” by any one discipline in your organization must be eradicated. Julie Tung, VP Global Customer Programs at Oracle, reminded us that sales, customer support, account managers, etc. do NOT own the customer; our companies do! If we have not done so already, we must begin to have a hub and spoke approach to customer engagement so that we are mining all contact with current and prospective clients and voices and remaining attentive to all information about our solutions and services and brand. If we continue to operate out of silos, we are missing out on some key opportunities to deepen and broaden our relationships.

3. Metrics, Metrics, Metrics- As I predicted, how we measure the impact of digital dialogue on revenue continues to be a moving target. Every presentation and conversation included a component around this challenge whether it was a discussion about corporate YouTube videos or how to calculate the impact of the use of collateral in reference programs. We seem to be getting better at some of the mechanics…..Rhett Livengood of Intel reminds us to “Tag, Tag, Tag”, but we are still struggling with how we measure the overall effectivness of digital engagement. What should be comforting to us all, is that the major players, Intel, RedHat, Oracle, etc. are effectively using free tools and applications to demonstrate the impact of their customer reference and social media strategies. Sean White of RedHat shared their very innovative approach to presenting case studies in the form of our self-service blog and spoke to his use of Google Analytics and some other basic tools. Laura Brooks of SatMetrix shared some new research into the notion of Networked Promoters, i.e., the quality not the quantity of our key relationships.

4. Digital Conversations must Emulate our Best F2F Practices- Nothing substitutes for the depth and breadth of information sharing afforded by a F2F conference, but we must learn to harness the energies and idea exchange of formal presentation like mechanisms AND hallway/lobby “drivebys” in our digital outreach. As organizations, we must learn to be present and listening in all venues where our prospective and current clients may be. Many of us continue to assume that the primary conversations are taking place within the conference rooms rather than at the virtual coffee break areas. Many of the attendees have established thriving communities but we are all still seeking ways to join other conversations outside of our direct influence. To really stretch the metaphor, it is no longer sufficient to sit at a roundtable behind our clearly marked name tents. We must “walk” the hallways, “join” the outside events, and walk up to people; introduce ourselves; and LISTEN to what they have to say.

Thank you Bill Lee for gathering us together again!

Warmest regards,

Lisa

http://www.customerreferenceforum.com/event2010/program_presenters.php

Social Media =Organizational Change! (socialmediatoday.com)
Avoiding the Social Media Pigeonhole (altitudebranding.com)
Facebook Insights: Using Facebook fan pages, metrics, & ads to drive traffic (slideshare.net)
Employees’ as an Overlooked Resource: 5 Ways to Equip Employees to Help with Marketing (mpdailyfix.com)
Marketing On A Shoestring Budget 5 14 09 Final (slideshare.net)

Business, Customer Experience, Customer Reference, Customer relationship management, Facebook, Google, Google Analytics, Marketing, Microsoft, Social Media, YouTube

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Seven Social Media Virtues

Posted by Lisa in Integrated Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing on December 7th, 2009

Vice	Virtue
Lust	Chastity
Gluttony	Temperance
Greed	Charity
Sloth	Diligence
Wrath	Patience
Envy	Kindness
Pride	Humility

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins

This post began as a list of the seven deadly SINS of social media, but as I scanned my TweetDeck, various sites, and the general chatter that I monitor about and in social media sites, I decided that our role as consultants should be as focused on the positive and results-oriented possibilities of our internetworking more than critique. We have discussed and helped clients implement tactics oriented around our key success factors, and I hope this informs and enlightens that approach as much as it highlights techniques for compelling and sustainable social media and network interactions. With no further ado and much literary license re Pope Gregory’s original virtues as alternatives to the vices:

Chastity: Recruit followers and Fans and invite membership to communities you establish with the objective of creating a meaningful and valuable dialogue between you and your constituencies. The quality of the engagement is far more important than the quantity of members and followers.

Temperance: Maintain a regular schedule of blog posts, status updates, and Tweets, and avoid posting just for the sake of posting. Key messages on a consistent basis become expected and are less likely to be overlooked.

Charity: Concern and active help offered to others. Provide valuable insight to problems, offer customers communities where they can exchange best practices, ask questions and be open to constructive input.

Diligence: Develop infrastructure and guidelines around your social media strategy so that it maps to your marketing, sales and company guidelines. Make your social media effort a formal activity rather than an item on the “get-to” list.

Patience: We share with our clients many ways that you can attract and retain followers and Fans, but we also advise avoiding most automated tools that guarantee X number of followers overnight. If you do the footwork of identifying the audience you want to attract and the communities to which they belong and tag words that you include in your posts that will trigger alerts for them, you will begin to build a following.

Kindness: Stress the positive aspects of your solutions and offerings rather than delineating the failings of your competitors. The opportunity to share where you are differentiated will come in different format than 140 characters.

Humility: A strange virtue for marketing consultants to advocate, perhaps, but the social media world is very self-regulating and expects honest and real information. We earn our followers and fans, and to earn them we must offer to engage in networking dialogue rather than demand it. As you develop networks of satisfied customers, weaving their Tweets and comments into your own posts become a very effective means for getting objective testimonials about your solutions.

The most effective social media strategies are those that are clearly mindful and planned to acheive the overall goals of an organization by using new and different channels. If the strategy is clearly laid out, and these virtues are top of mind, there is no reason why the execution cannot happen at various and compelling levels of the organizaiton that may not be traditionally externally facing.

Best regards until next time, Lisa.

Behavioural Marketing. (makemarketinghistory.blogspot.com)
Social Media ROI: Socialnomics (heidi-miller.com)

Add new tag, Best practice, Business, Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Online Communities, Seven deadly sins, Social Media, TweetDeck

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Should We Allow our CEO to Tweet?

Posted by Lisa in Integrated Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing on December 1st, 2009

We’ve been asked by a lot of C-Levels lately about how much of their personal life and voice they should expose in their corporate “conversations”. Not to obfuscate too much, but our answer is invariably “it depends”. I hope that we can all agree at this point that ROI for social media has been demonstrated and at worst, agree that all organizations in all verticals are impacted by the adoption of social media and networking as mechanisms for consumers to express their opinions (United Airlines YouTube, Whole Foods, etc. etc.), but the question for many executives remains “Should I individually participate in these conversational arenas and what guidelines govern the exposure of me as an individual v. a corporate citizen?”

We can debate John Mackey’s personal opinion about health care reform until carpal tunnel sets in, but I would rather remind all of us of some basic tenets of social conversation and prudence and remember our key success factors:

1) Be genuine. Individual voice and opinion are the hallmarks of our social internetworking and in many corporations define the uniqueness, variety, and personalization that is the core of their products and services. Officers and key executives must be mindful, however, that their personal politics and opinions are perceived as representative of their corporate positions, so should be mindful of this intermingling.

2) Interact. Has your organization established policies about executive social media and networking participation and if not, perhaps you should before taking on the role yourself. We advise all of our clients to develop a social media approach that is aligned with overall corporate, marketing, sales, and customer relations strategies as a first step. The cultural etiquette and expectations of social media are that we are engaging in conversation, dialogue, and responses with our audiences, not merely unilaterally publishing facts. Although certain channels may be appropriate for CEO or officer messaging, most are more dynamic and require more attention.

3) Provide value. As truly well-thought and argued your personal opinion may be, the relevance of your topic and the content that you offer to your customers, prospects, and employees should always be the first consideration. I’ve recently been reading a number of posts on www.theconsumercollective.com that provide some very compelling statistics regarding consumers willingess to defect from brands and services not due to a reverse in perceived value, but because they feel our published opinions, thoughts, diatribes, digital “nuggets of wisdom” are quite frankly, boring.

Why You Must Have a Social Media Policy (socialwebschool.com)
5 Reasons Corporations are Failing at Social Media (rachelcarterpr.blogspot.com)
5 Social Media Lessons Learned From Whole Foods (mashable.com)
10 Tips for Getting Your CEO on Twitter (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
Why Do So Many Companies Hide Their Social Media Involvement? (socialmediatoday.com)

Business, Customer relationship management, Health, Health care, John Mackey, Marketing, Social Media, Whole Foods

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Chickens and Eggs in Social Media Execution

Posted by Lisa in Customer Marketing, Integrated Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing on November 21st, 2009

As much as we love technology at Cubed Consulting, our mission is to help our clients develop comprehensive, appropriate, measurable, attainable, and sustainable customer relationship and marketing strategies. Although we enthusiastically Tweet, do status updates, ask to connect in Linkedin, and even create surveys in Facebook; we are ever cognizant that the selection of which e-playground we choose for our outreach and relationship-building is driven first by a clear understanding of our business goals and objectives. We have worked for and with both small and Fortune 100 clients who have adopted an approach to social media execution without examination of their purpose or alignment with customer relationship, sales, and marketing plans and quite frankly, made a mess of things. We spend our time helping you understand and articulate your goals first and then assist in the selection of the appropriate social media tools and measurements; posting frequency and content; and integration with other strategies, applications, and efforts. There may be some consistent truisms to corporate social media interaction, but you will never hear “Everybody MUST have a Twitter account” from us. You will get recommendations about specific tools after we analyze how best to meet your stated needs. To illustrate this approach, let’s look at a very skeletal example:

Objective: Create more corporate/brand awareness in new communities.

Tactics:

1) Traditional marketing outreach and collateral to new communities:

2) Leveraging existing or new social media outlets to establish relationships and create conversation.

a) Join New Groups in Facebook, Linkedin, etc. applications that map to new demographic profile.

b) Use Twitter Lists, hash tags, etc. to gauge and generate interest in solutions, company etc.

c) Produce audio/video/other collateral relevant to message and launch.

d) Etc.

My point is not to delineate the steps of our engagement process, but to demonstrate that the selection of tools, applications, and approach FOLLOW not DEFINE our social media decision-making. If the objective were to gauge interest in a new solution or product, we may not advise establishing a Facebook or Linkedin presence until the research around communities of interest had determined that those were the appropriate venues.

I’m looking forward to “meeting” many of you and exchanging thoughts!

Regards,

Lisa

Is social media holding you hostage? (socialmediatoday.com)
Its All About Relationships 10 09 (slideshare.net)
Twitter Lists will organize the social graph (socialmediatoday.com)

Business, Customer Engagement, Customer Marketing, Demographic profile, Facebook, LinkedIn, linkedin connections, Marketing, Online Communities, Social Media, social media consulting, Social Media Marketing, social media strategy, Social network, Twitter, twitter profile

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We Have to Change the Way We Change

Posted by Jimmy Maher in Customer Experience, Customer Marketing, Integrated Marketing Strategy on November 12th, 2009

Anybody who has ever owned an aquarium knows that you can only change a certain amount of the water at a time without upsetting the delicate bacteriological balance that keeps ammonia and nitrate levels safe for the fish. This principle might also be applied to organizations. How often have we seen sweeping changes in organizations that fail to address the issues that they have been targeted at, yet cause huge disruption and uncertainty, which eventually ripples through to the customer with unintended consequences.

In an insightful article by social entrepreneur Zenna Atkins in the Guardian online at http://bit.ly/2Eryg5, the author advises against the “big bang” approach to change, in favor of the incremental approach. Atkins argues that it is better to have multiple listening points, both internally and externally that enable an organization to be constantly aware of what is going on. This provides the necessary intelligence that allows the organization to evolve gradually to keep pace with ever changing customer needs. Listening posts might include customer and employee surveys, social media (blogs, customer forums, Twitter etc.), focus groups and direct conversations.

The bottom line – establish listening posts internally and externally. Introduce change in continuous small increments to allow your organization to become accustomed to each new state. Use the same listening posts to evaluate the success or failure of the change. Your customers and employees will be glad that you listened and acted.

Lessons from AiMA: Big Brands Discuss Social Media (socialmediatoday.com)

Author, Business, Focus group, Guardian, Online Communities, Social Media, Social network, Twitter

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The 3 Keys to Social Media Success

Posted by umangshah in Customer Experience, Customer Marketing, Integrated Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing on November 10th, 2009

Why are you on Facebook? What do you hope to accomplish by using Twitter? Do you have a plan for all those audio and video testimonials that you are creating? Does your overall web presence clearly communicate how your customers can (and should) interact with you through each channel? If not, don’t read any more of this blog post. Go figure out why you are doing what you are doing then come back and figure out how to make the most of your Social Media Marketing efforts to achieve your goals.

For the rest of us, the recipe is actually simple. It’s the preparation and execution that can get complex. We get caught up in all the possibilities that the web and Social Media offer us. In fact, when you read this blog post, don’t read too into it. Don’t try to get fancy – just stick to the basics.

1. Be Genuine – Above all, be yourself (as a person and as a corporation). Remember, that our customers are very smart and they know when we are not being real. Our customers connect with us online so they can engage us in a personal, candid dialogue. Remember, if they want to read the polished Press Release they will pick it up off the Wire. Give them more – don’t just tell them that you are great (even if you are) but instead show them what makes you so great. Maybe it’s the great people you have that work with you. Maybe it’s the high value you put on customers. Maybe it’s your quirky approach to business. Whatever it is, don’t be afraid to show the real you. (I feel like your Mom giving you a pep talk)

SIDE NOTE: It’s also ok to share the bad with the good – it demonstrates candor and establishes credibility.

2. Provide Value – What do your customers want? They may want discounts (who doesn’t). They may want information. They may want to be heard. They may want to laugh. Whatever they want, give it to them and give it often. More often than not, especially in the B2B space, the answer is not just money. Trust me, it’s not just about money – it is about a mutually beneficial relationship. In the end, Value is different for every customer and every organization. Pair what your customers want with what you can offer but figure this out quickly because, without this, your customers have no reason to engage you and, worse, they have no reason to recommend you.

3. Interact – We have spent more than a century providing static content to our customers and prospects. Our marketing message has been one way and we never knew, for sure, if anyone was listening to it. Social Media is changing all of that. We now have the ability to engage in conversations with our customers in ways we couldn’t before. We can get feedback and adjust accordingly in an instant. Social Media empowers our customers to evangelize our products and services. The best part of all of this is that our customers actually want to interact with us online. We, as a people, are spending so much more time in Social Networks than ever before. Take advantage of this trend and engage your audience and interact with them through the channels that they are already comfortable with.

In Social Media, to be successful, you don’t need a persona, you don’t need to bribe, and you don’t need to be polished – but you do need a plan.

Are you willing to do what it takes to create visibility on the Web? (buildabetterblog.com)
Introduction To Social Media (slideshare.net)
The advantages of Social Media (opencircle.co.za)

Blog, Business, Facebook, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Social network, Twitter

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Customer Reference Programs Have to Change

Posted by umangshah in Customer Marketing, Integrated Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing on September 9th, 2009

Customer Reference Programs, as we know them, are going away! There, I said it. It had to be said.

I’ve been seeing a shift in Customer Reference Programs for some time now. More and more of the traditional functions of the Reference Program seem to overlap with too many other groups within the organization and the core value seems to have faded. Furthermore, the importance of having a dedicated team to act as the conduit of Reference information seems almost antiquated especially with the explosion of Social Media. This reality has played out in the economic downturn, which has proved to be unkind to many Customer Reference Programs who have seen a reduction or, in some cases, a complete shutdown.

This isn’t news. We have been seeing the signs for some time now. In fact, as early as January 2007, Forrester Analyst, Jeremiah Owyang recognized the disruptive impact of Social Media on Corporate Customer Reference Programs in a blog post. It’s well worth the read. Essentially, the availability of product and service reviews in social media often provides prospective customers with ample information to make a decision.

As we have encouraged our customers to join our communities, they, too, have become active in other online communities and often leverage those forums to communicate with eachother without our support. In the same way, marketers must embrace New Media to engage with customers and prospects – it’s no longer an option. If Customer Reference Programs want to survive or, even better, thrive, they need to leverage New Media to connect with and connect together our customers and prospects. As always, take the time to build a proper strategy and select the vehicles that work best for your objectives.

How have you seen your Customer Reference program change in recent years?

The 5 Eras of the Social Web (marketing.blogtanker.com)

Blog, Business, Cyberspace, Facebook, Forrester Research, Jeremiah Owyang, Marketing, Social Media, Twitter, Weblogs

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Consumers Are Armed and Dangerous

Posted by Jimmy Maher in Customer Experience, Social Media Marketing on September 8th, 2009

In March 2009, Bob Garfield declared victory for the Comcast Must Die campaign. OK – Comcast is very much alive, but somewhat chastened by the grassroots campaign started in October 2007 to publicize Comcast’s poor record of customer service and arrogant attitude towards its subscribers. Over the next two years Comcast was shamed into addressing many of the issues raised by its customers and by doing so improved its overall customer service and received some positive press for its efforts – particularly its Twitter campaign.

The success of the Comcast Consumer revolt has lead to the creation of a new site http://customercircus.net/ which allows consumers to post customer service problems on a variety of service providers including Comcast.

The “Comcast Must Die” campaign really highlighted the new found power that consumers have through social media. Businesses cannot afford to ignore customer complaints and must ensure a positive customer engagement at each customer touchpoint. Angry consumers have powerful weapons at their disposal and are not afraid to use them.

Does venting consumer outrage on Twitter actually work? (slate.com)
Why Measure ROI Of Social Media? (regulargeek.com)
Comcast’s Twitter Guru Speaks (blogs.wsj.com)
Comcast Guarantees You Will Have Your Entire Day Wasted [Installations] (consumerist.com)
How will you respond to a customer complaint in the age of Social Media? (fastforwardblog.com)
Five Easy Ways to Jump Start Social Media for Your Business (sociableblog.com)

Bob Garfield, Business, Comcast, Customer Experience, Customer service, Education and Training, Feedback, Mass media, Social Media, Twitter

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