Starting Out the New Year in a Posterous Style: Life Streaming

No, this is not a luxurious product or expensive commodities I’m selling you. And no, no one has paid me anything to say what I’m about to tell you. But I gotta admit that I’ve been flirting with a bifurcated heart recently. And that is instead of blogging, I’ve been “lifestreaming” on posterous.com. If you’ve never heard of Posterous or lifestreaming, you should check it out. It’s bound to revolutionize the way you organize information you want to share, store and send.

Blogging through my Gmail account is one of the many features Posterous offers. (No, Posterous didn’t pay me to write this blog post in case you’re wondering.) But I realize that if I come across a really cool news story, do some further digging into it, jot down some quick thoughts and make it available to others to jump on the same topic, Posterous does exactly that for me. The multimedia posting is even a bigger draw. You could practically post any video, images, podcast and feeds at your finger tips, again, via email.

My lifestream can be found on adamarcom.posterous.com and by sending an email to my posterous account, my lifestream post will go up instantly (between 1-2 minutes). I use Adamarcom as it’s my Twitter handle and it’s easy to remember. You can also integrate your Posterous stream with your Twitter and Facebook feeds. Honestly, I can’t find a better tool than this to help organize my virtual life three-way likeso. (And yes, Posterous supports posts on WordPress as well, though for me personally, Posterous is more of a bookmarklet style of blogging, and I’d rather keep my WordPress a bit more analytical and incisive than merely bookmarking my favorite resources and industry news, so I’ve decided to keep them separate.)

My most recent stream is on the top-growing retail sites and categories in December 2009. The information is HIGHLY RELEVANT to brands as we go into 2010. The reason is that our December holiday spending is a good indicator of commodities and information we consume regardless of the economic sentiments around us. If we visit those retailers and retail categories in spite of a slowed economy, a shrunk paycheck and a slightly damped mood, I think we’re onto some valuable insights here. A little further digging will get you into the psychographics of your customers and help you craft the best marketing strategy into the new year.

Another interesting lifestream I did was on “Eye-tracking” for those interested in SEO and SEM. If your website is a key channel of information and e-commerce for your business, Eye-tracking results are always going to be key to unlock the priorities of the different properties, elements and advertising assets happening on your website. Especially if you’re about to redesign your website in 2010, eye-tracking should definitely make it to the top of your list.

For many of us, 2010 will be a HUGE year of customer relationship building — face-to-face AND via social media. Consider Posterous and many other up-and-coming social tools (which I’d continue to keep you posted on in the days to come) that can help you do your job better.

Pizza Time! Domino’s Keeps it Real

When a company is this bold, transparent and carries such swagger to reinvent its age-old secret recipe, it’s bound to turn some heads and raise some eye-brows—but all in a very good way.

Domino’s Pizza gives itself a kick in the back when it makes a “public” confession to its customers that’s like “Yeah, we gotta suck it up to our cardboard-feel pizza crust”, and wants their customers to give them a fair shake so that they can start all over again. Literally, their chefs decide to start all over from sauces and cheese to crust and toppings. Never have I seen a turnaround team so engaged and painfully open about their reactions to customers’ feedback, but they’re surely doing the right thing and making their campaign fun and compelling to watch & follow, hence a great social media project.

Domino’s Pizza’s social media campaign involves the following steps (tactical) that brings out profound learnings (strategic) for all marketers:

Step 1:

Document what customers are saying about their pizzas (the fact that they loathe Domino’s Pizza for the various obvious reasons)

Step 2:

Engage their in-house master chefs to investigate what has gone wrong

Step 3:

Create a new recipe; reinvent the way they market their pizzas using social media

Step 4:

Re-engage their existing customers and ask them to give Domino’s another chance

Classic marketing techniques but applied in a fundamentally open, transparent, graceful yet revolutionary way. Here’s to a praise-worthy brand that truly cares, listens, acts and improves! Good job customers and great job Domino’s on directing negative customer feedback into positive energy to re-focus on creating better products.

Watch the Pizza Turnaround Campaign:

Related posts:
HubSpot's Inbound Marketing Blog on How Domino's is Using Customer Feedback and Social Media Outreach
Capturing Your Customers' Full Value

2010 will be a busy year of customer relationship building…for marketers

When Bruce Temkins of Forrester Research says on his blog (http://experiencematters.wordpress.com) that 2010 will be a busy year for customer experience, he says it right. Strategy, technology, knowing and building relationship with your customers, restoring purpose in your brand, and the list goes on, are all part and parcel of the busyness marketers will experience next year.

The other day I was a participant (@AdaMarcom) on a Twitter chat #sm38 with Charlene Li (@charleneli) and other great marketers discussing social media, she said social media will be a key differentiator for businesses in 2010, where companies/brands who do well in this arena will increase customer loyalty, I was a bit skeptical.

Yes, social media tools on websites can help differentiate your products from your competition. They will make customer experience more pleasant and welcoming. But when most companies are going on Twitter and Facebook, responding to sales inquiries and handling customer service questions, then what could have been a differentiator is now part of life (the way of doing business). Companies are expected to provide satisfactory customer service, be it via a social media tool, a mix of social media tools or over the phone and email. More so in 2010 and the years to come, given more choices and increased exposure to brands in the media (online, TV, print and events), customers are becoming more knowledgeable than ever. They’re not only becoming selective and knowledgeable about the products themselves, they’re also getting pickier than ever about their shopping experience, how companies handle their orders, and what sources/sites they’re getting their products from.

“Don’t think of social media as an incremental “thing” to be handed off to a consumer. Your social media strategy is an extension of your company’s behavior,” said James Kelly on Forbes.com’s CMO Network in an article named “CMOs: Don’t Give Up Those Brand Reins!”

Customer service experience, with a smart choice of technology and social media tools, is going to be the key differentiator of marketing success and good company behavior in 2010. May I call it the “all-around” customer service experience? When I can pick up the phone, send an email, tweet my question, post on a Facebook fan page about the product I’m considering, finding help to research the product I’m purchasing, rating my experience with the product (and the process of getting the product into my hand), YouTubing the way the product works if it’s really that cool to warrant a video of its own, I think that’s ultimate all-around customer service experience.

Customers still dominate the center-stage of product marketing; they still have the reins the last time I checked. Though Time magazine just announced the “Person of the Year” to be Ben Bernanke, I think the ultimate person of the year is “I” the customer.

Let’s end with this thought on customer loyalty, and we’ll expand on this discussion in my next post: “Real value of social media/technologies is that it creates deeper relationships. How do you measure relationships?” tweeted by @charleneli on the Twitter chat #sm38. Building strong customer relationships will help unleash the true value of social media and technologies, hence giving you the best bank for the buck you spent on achieving it.

I believe with the thinking of creating deeper relationships and measuring them, we as marketers will head the right direction in 2010.

Related posts: Are you capturing your customers' full value? 
10 Customer Service Trends in 2010
Social Media Convergence

Two sides of the table: Agency vs. Client

Seth Godin hit it on the head of the nail again. He posted a blog today and turned my thinking upside down, inside out, like no one ever has, on the subject of being a great client. “Is there such a thing?” you may ask. Of course there is. Having been on both sides of the table, trying to be innovative on the agency side, and trying to keep innovation flowing as a client, I’ve never thought about my role in the light of “fostering.” But Seth said it well, and here’s my reaction to his bullet points.

I have here counter bullets of what you’re supposed to do if you’re on the other side of the table — that you’re the innovator. I think these bullets will serve as great reminders for anyone who wants to stay innovative and to become your client’s favorite innovator:

If you’re the client…

If you’re the innovator…

Before engaging with the innovator, foster discipline among yourself and your team. Be honest about what success looks like and what your resources actually are. If you can’t write down clear ground rules about which rules are firm and which can be broken on the path to a creative solution, how can you expect the innovator to figure it out? Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe. After you write down the ground rules, revise them to eliminate constraints that are only on the list because they’ve always been on the list. Hire the right person. Don’t ask a mason to paint your house. Part of your job is to find someone who is already in the sweet spot you’re looking for, or someone who is eager and able to get there. Demand thrashing early in the process. Force innovations and decisions to be made near the beginning of the project, not in a crazy charrette at the end. Be honest about resources. While false resource constraints may help you once or twice, the people you’re working with demand your respect, which includes telling them the truth. Pay as much as you need to solve the problem, which might be more than you want to. If you pay less than that, you’ll end up wasting all your money. Why would a great innovator work cheap? Cede all issues of irrelevant personal taste to the innovator. I don’t care if you hate the curves on the new logo. Just because you write the check doesn’t mean your personal aesthetic sense is relevant. Run interference. While innovation sometimes never arrives, more often it’s there but someone in your office killed it. Raise the bar. Over and over again, raise the bar. Impossible a week ago is not good enough. You want stuff that is impossible today, because as they say at Yoyodyne, the future begins tomorrow. When you find a faux innovator, run. Don’t stick with someone who doesn’t deserve the hard work you’re doing to clear a path. Celebrate the innovator. Sure, you deserve a ton of credit. But you’ll attract more innovators and do even better work next time if innovators understand how much they benefit from working with you.

Ask what success means for your client. Tell your client what success means to you in relation to your client’s success. Lay down ground rules and lay out a road map with which you can reach a creative solution, and explain to your client how you’re going to get there. Find out what your client’s ground rules and road map to innovation is like. After writing down the ground rules, if you think some of them are getting in the way of innovation and creativity, revise them. Discuss the importance of simplicity vs. efficiency, that your client doesn’t need to sacrifice sophistication nor efficiency with simple design. Get the right people on your team, even if they’re smarter than you. Having people who are very good at what they do on your team is better than getting generalists who try hard to be good at everything. Talk about innovations and decisions with your client. Make it clear from the get-go that decisiveness and a risk-taking mindset is key to the successful execution of innovative ideas. Be honest about resources and constraints with your client. Be transparent about the truth, you’ll earn your client’s respect that way. Don’t work for cheap. You know the market price of your work, so don’t accept less and spoil market. Don’t concede to issues of irrelevant personal tastes from your client. Your client may have weird tastes and pet-peeves but your client may not be the only consumer of the product/service that you’re innovating. Your audience is king, your client is not. If you sense someone on your client’s team is consistently killing innovation, pull the person aside and have a one-on-one discussion about innovation. This is a great opportunity to “educate” someone who might not have gotten it yet. Your client may be the faux innovator, and you can’t run away from him. If the client continues to supersede your job to innovate, maybe you need to change your strategy or simply walk away.   Celebrate a good client. If your client offers you plenty of room to innovate and make things happen, you should recognize the wonderful relationship and do even better work.

About capturing your customers’ full value, read more on http://wp.me/pvnpY-85

Think What Not to Brand: 5 Things You DON’T Want Others to Say About You or Your Business

When we talk about branding, we’re really talking about how you want people, i.e. your customers, to talk about you and your service/product. And if we can get this concept down, we’ll have success on any media platform from social media to website to advertising.

• Think of 5 things you want others to say about you and your service
• Think of 5 things you DON’T want others to say about you and your service
• What does it take for people to say what you want them to say about you, but not about your competitors?
• Why should your customers trust your brand versus the others?
• What functional and emotional benefits you can offer to your customers?
• On a scale of 0-10, what would your customers rate you in terms of service satisfaction?
• On a scale of 0-10, how likely would your customers recommend or refer you to others?

Once we’ve identified these items, we can begin to discuss the language, messaging and visual image you aspire to convey through your brand.

My little annecdote: On the client loyalty surveys we conduct with customers, we always ask the following set of questions:

1. Would you recommend us?
2. Are we your top-of-mind partner?
3. Are you getting quick enough responses from us?
4. Do we demonstrate knowledge of the marketplace?
5. Are you happy with our products/services ?
6. Are you happy with the process we deliver our products and services?

Ultimately, these are brand perception questions and the answers to them can help us figure out what we need to work on for successful branding.

Fortune 100 Companies Favor Twitter Over Facebook

Image courtesy of SEOmoz’s Social Media Marketing Guide

The Affinitive blog talked about a “land grab” is happening on social media. If I may develop on this idea, I think an “attention grab” among consumer brands is fully out the gate. Imagine thousands of brands are trying to get your attention on TV, Radio, Newspapers, magazines and now – social media.

Twitter and Facebook are clearly surging as the strongest players in this great battle for attention—voted by Fortune 100 companies to say the least. According to a recenty study by Burson-Marsteller and Proof Digital, Twitter has now become the social media platform of choice among Fortune 100 companies. 54% of companies are active on Twitter, versus 29% on Facebook and 32% on corporate blogs. (Twitter experienced 3-digit surge in user growth this year, active user growth is projected to reach 18 million by end of 2009. Click here to read about Facebook growth.)

If you look at the activities companies have on these three platforms, they are actually pretty similar:

• Distribute news and updates about their company
• As an extension of their customer service
• Announce marketing promotions (promotions/deals/contests)
• Part of employee recruitment/human resources efforts (job postings)

Give or take, job postings probably don’t happen on corporate blogs as much as they do on Twitter and Facebook, and same thing for deals and promotions, which appear much more frequently on Twitter and Facebook, but not on corporate blogs.

Twitter and Facebook share various common characteristics but companies are clearly jumping onto Twitter at a much faster pace than onto Facebook. According to the study, 25 of the 54 companies that are active on Twitter are also active on Facebook. Although no specific reasons were discussed on the study as to why stronger engagement is found on Twitter vs. Facebook, there are some identified challenges about the ease of Facebook adoption from a corporate perspective:

• Facebook page setup requires time for organization and optimization
• Users need to get used to the fairly complex layout to find their way around
• Opt-in applications require users to grant access or connect
• Users are less likely to provide immediate response as they do on Twitter, which is built to capture real-time gut-reactions
• Side-bar advertisements and highlights on Facebook compete for attention

I think I can come up with more reasons, but that’s not the point here. Just like any business, companies are looking for quick and lasting ways to engage customers on a regular basis as frequently as possible. The brand has to be front-and-center, and the conversations should be the core. Twitter provides for that and makes it easy for people to hop on and use. One doesn’t need an hour to learn how to use Twitter, but Facebook can be quite involved if you want to take advantage of its full suite of features and functions.

Then again, for those who have spent enough time on Facebook and have benefited from the dynamics it offers, Facebook is still one of the most loved inventions for the connection-craved generation and brand-saavy customers…it surely has my attention and the attention of my 150 friends.

Webinars are IN, but keep common faux pas OUT

Webinars are IN these days, in case you haven’t noticed. And Twitter and Facebook names are becoming popular leave-behinds from presenters to continue their dialogues with the participants post-webinar. Preparing for a highly-engaging and interactive webinar is not much different from preparing to present like Steve Jobs. How do you keep your webinars informative, relevant and engaging? How do you make sure your audience doesn’t tune you out 5 minutes into the presentation? Here are a few webinar faux pas we can try avoid:

• Starting your webinar late – like 5 to 10 minutes late – making attendees wait or drop off.
• A moderator who has very little knowledge of the presentation content and offers no insight on the value and background of the presentation and fumbles through the transition from one presenter to another.
• Presenters are not cued properly to begin their presentation, causing awkward silences on the line. (Need a better moderator!)
• Loud or monotone presenters 
• Webinar application doesn’t allow you adjust the volume of the presenters from the listening end.
• Unsynchronized audio and visual presentations – shouldn’t they be tested prior to going live?
• A presentation with non-working audio and requires you to dial in via phone to hear the presenter. (Why bother with a webinar?)
• Questions or raised hands that aren’t responded to or addressed. 
• The webinar goes on forever, say more than 40 minutes.

Some must-have and considerations:

• A knowledgeable, communicative and assertive moderator.
• Presenters who can present effortlessly with high energy and the right tone (and volume).
• Iron out all the technical kinks prior to the webinar.
• Rehearse, test and dry run your webinar at least once before you go live.
• Keep your presentation under 30 minutes – most people’s attention span is much shorter than that.
• Provide audio AND visual in one application. (This is 2009, not 1999.)
• Engage your audience and be interactive! Answer questions as they come in (or acknowledge incoming questions and hold them until the end of the presentation).
• Poll your audience to gauge their business needs, interests and inclinations.
• Summarize lessons-learned and calls-to-action.
• Make your presentation memorable, buzz-worthy and viral.

Are You Capturing Your Customers’ Full Value?

When customers buy from me, there I’ve proven that I’ve captured all the value (and revenue) to justify the time, energy and resource spent on my customers. Ain’t I capturing all the value there is?

You might be capturing some value, but probably not all. With the rising usage of social media, do you have a marketing engagement strategy to capture all the “social revenue” made possible by sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter? Based on the customer marketing life cycle, are you interacting with your customers at every major touch point? Are you under their radar all along? If not, then somewhere along the life cycle path you might be losing out to competition.

Let’s use the customer marketing life cycle flow chart to look at these key areas of engagement: want, need, research, evaluate, buy and use.

1) Awareness (WANT vs. NEED)

Heightened awareness is now made available through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. With the many conversations, status updates, discussion groups and resource sharing happening online, be sure you’re part of the social conversations. Awareness drives engagement. The more you’ve increased your brand awareness, the more likely others will begin to engage with you (if they find your brand interesting and engagement-worthy). Be proactive and progressive in having dialogues with your customers on how you can add value to what they’re doing and try move the conversation to the next level – consideration.

2) Consideration (RESEARCH & EVALUATION)

Now that you’ve successfully guided your customers along the first part of the life cycle and brought them to come to terms with the different options, it’s time to dig in and do some research. This is the part where you can shine. Research studies, industry reports, white papers and insights that you can share with your customers will help you be part of the consideration here. If you’re engaging customers in this phase, you’re further down the road of closing a deal. But the engagement process doesn’t end here.

3) Purchase

Here’s the phase where you want to make sure customer service is achieving 100% client satisfaction. Customers who want to buy your products or services but are treated with subpar customer service during the transaction might ruin your chances for future engagement (i.e. repeat business) with them. Remember the social conversations that have brought you this point – you’ve built a relationship with your customers! Don’t let that relationship leave you or your brand. Bring it to a higher level. Be 100% certain that you’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s during this phase of transaction. Seize the opportunity as your wedding ceremony (where you give the ring and seal the deal). It should never be a mere thanks-and-goodbye. The word gets out if customer service doesn’t deliver.

4) Ownership

Ownership is the customer support phase. Are you answering the questions posed? Are you continually engaging the customers to make sure they’re liking what they’ve purchased and would recommend others to buy it? Customer loyalty is cultivated in this phase and engagement here can potentially turn into influence. You’d better watch out “influence” here as this is what new buyer behavior is all about – every customer becomes a point of influence in the social conversations. Are you capturing the influence you need to take your business to the next level?  

Do you survey your customers? Are you actively finding out whether your customers felt positive about the consideration process, purchase experience and usage of your product/service? What type of feedback are you providing to your customers when your receive their comments? As you can tell, social conversations didn’t end with ownership nor will they in the future as long as your business and brand exist. Ongoing engagement with your customers will keep you focused on the purpose of your involvement in social media and keep the energy and innovation flowing. More business to come!

Related post: 2010 will be a busy year of customer relationship building...for marketers

Achieving Geometric Growth in Revenue like Facebook

Just announced on Sept. 15, 2009:

• Facebook added another 50 million new users in 75 days, averaging 670,000 users per day.
• Facebook would do $500 million in revenues in 2009, up from an estimated $280-$300 million in 2008. (Source: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/09/15/facebook-reaches-300-million-monthly-active-users/)
• Fastest growing demographic: 35+

Envy…Is your business growing the same way? I’m not trying to toot Facebook’s horn, but there are a few lessons-learned we can glean from their geometric growth and adopt on our own terms:

• Embracing an OPEN business model
• Making friends and partners with other talented technology and creative companies
• Keeping company’s existence relevant and up-to-date
• Influencing the influential (building relationships with news media, large corporations and celebrities, etc.)
• Monetizing influence (Facebook allows ads but make them highly contextualized and relevant to the users)
• Responding to both positive and negative feedback (from users and developers)
• Maintaining a sense of urgency (never delay an announcement or decision that pertains to the wellbeing of users)

Seek Out Your Customers, Be Where They Are: Engage and Be Social

Where are your customers hanging out these days? Chances are social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. (And if your customers go to three particular tradeshows a year, and only those three tradeshows, make sure you’re there also.) With the time and resources people are spending online, everyone’s trying to figure out a way to monetize the relationships they have. But before we go into monetization, let’s think about relationships for a second.

I always think the concept of “following” vs. “followers” on Twitter is revolutionary – you’re not just friends or colleagues with people who follow you or who you follow, but you’re actually cultivating a clout – a group of followers – while you become another person’s following.

What do you do with your followers? And if your followers happen to be your customers, what would you do differently in your interactions with them online? Chances are, you will interact with each person fairly equitably. Every Tweet is posted instantaneously on every follower’s status page, so your communication with any one person is shared and displayed. (Unless you go the route of DM – where you Direct Message the person; but what’s the point of DM if you can email each other.)

So what’s the insight here? Social media compels marketers and business owners to behave differently from before – every decision and point of interaction made is in relatively full view of other people (some competitors, too). The relationship-building process becomes open, rather than competitive, i.e. you’re no longer an exclusive commodity to your customer and neither is your relationship with your customer an exclusive one because your customer can be followed by Nth number of people just like yourself.

The open nature of online communication brings us to rethink the way we’ve been doing business or marketing our products and services. Our engagement with each customer is now driven and fostered by relationships, not by hardselling or advertising. And these relationships require commitment – a commitment to continually engage our customers in meaningful and reflective conversations, continuous service/product improvement and deeper relationship building. And some of these relationships may translate into better performance or financial rewards, while others may not. (Charlene Li of Altimeter Group recently released a study on the breadth and depth of the 100 most valuable brands’ engagement across 11 different online social media channels http://www.altimetergroup.com/2009/07/engagementdb.html )

So when Topsy (a Twitter-based search engine) said on its blog today: Influence is the New Web Currency, I think that ties right back to what we’ve been saying about relationships, engagement and open communication – the three elements that make influence possible.

Instead of figuring out what our customer loyalty index is, maybe we should ask, “What’s our influence index?” to be more relevant, engaging and social.

Resources:

1) Measure your social media influence: Take the Engagement Survey http://www.engagementdb.com/Rank-Yourself

2) Check out the brand engagement report at http://www.engagementdb.com/Report