They do it by talking about and engaging with topics and content that will make their customers smarter. Or they share tidbits that are fun and engaging, and share the love. These are the secrets of successful corporate blogs - and I’ll share then in less than a thousand words.
A Kodak Moment - this is what I said to myself when I saw the charts the Kodak team came up with to explain the convergence of media in their social media participation efforts, which they call Ripcurl. The ingredients to the team’s success are: transparency, fulfilling the expectation of a regular appointment with consistent content, having a team approach, and being interesting. Read their blog here and follow Tom and Jenny on Twitter. Read more about Kodak’s social media activities at The Viral Garden.
The Birth of a Blog - it took nearly as long as it takes for a child to become fully formed. Graco, a Newell Rubbermaid company, crafted its blog content based on what they thought expectant parents and parents of young children would find valuable. Then, they matched up what they heard with the company’s goals and brand’s vision. If you’re thinking about time commitment, you should budget 1-2 hours a day - writing editing, but also polling contributors. Visit their blog here and learn more about how the company measures success here. Lindsay Lebresco has since joined NY agency Converseon as social media account director.
Making a Global Impact - imagine for example monitoring a patient without wires or cables, or advances in bioscience. This is what GE’s research blog team writes about - the agent of change is that in the operating room. If it sounds a little bit heady, you probably still find it useful to know that there are people out there working to solve these very large problems. What is discussed here is very pertinent to customers. It affects many more of them.
Bonus reading:
Taking the Less Traveled Road - is par for the course for Mike Critelli, retired executive chairman of Pitney Bowes. His willingness to “see a different game” goes hand in hand with accomplishing as much as possible under the radar screen - the most successful change management requires a blend of highly-public activity and behind-the-scenes facilitation, he writes. Maybe this is not an example of how to do a corporate blog successfully, as much as it is about using one’s intellectual curiosity and honesty to frame issues so we can get into problem solving mode. Critical thinking at work.
Valeria Maltoni is a professional marketer with 20 years of real-world corporate experience across a broad array of mid-to-large sized companies, 10 of which online. Hands-on work at a Fortune 500 technology company, a technology start-up, in health care, chemical manufacturing, risk management consulting, and the non-profit sector have provided her with a wealth of experience and insights.
Now Valeria applies that knowledge to helping businesses understand how customers and communities have changed marketing, public relations, and communications - and how to build value in this new environment. She specializes in marketing communications, customer dialogue, and brand management. Conversation Agent is recognized among the world's top online marketing blogs.
Branding as a strategy means little if the customer experience is not there. If your story doesn’t align with what you do, all of the clever tactics you can come up with to follow your lofty goal will not make the cut.
Unless you can fix your story by inspiring a culture of service from the inside. You instill a belief as well as make an example of behaviors to follow throughout the organization. You know that this cannot just be a grassroots effort, it needs to come all the way from the top.
Which companies are doing that today? Here’s five that fix their story to inspire service:
1. Southwest Airlines - anyone who’s ever had the opportunity to be serviced by this airlines knows why we’re Nuts about Southwest. Personality would not be as effective without the service and that is pretty well organized.
2. Patagonia - striking conversations about your passion with employee, friends, and customers can also provide you with many more ideas on how to live a more adventurous life. Check out how their customers participate actively (pun intended).
3. Netflix - there’s something special in a good story, and even more so when there are unlimited stories to choose from. I like that they introduce themselves briefly in each post and that the conversations flow in the comments.
4. Zappos.com - this is the story of a customer service company that happens to sell (mainly) shoes. You can find their core values displayed on every page of the site and as reminders while you search - their first mantra is to deliver wow through service.
5. Whole Foods - they understand the power of a passionate team who know about the products they carry and care about making customers happy.
These companies are doing it without drama. Can you do the same?
Valeria Maltoni is a professional marketer with 20 years of real-world corporate experience across a broad array of mid-to-large sized companies, 10 of which online. Hands-on work at a Fortune 500 technology company, a technology start-up, in health care, chemical manufacturing, risk management consulting, and the non-profit sector have provided her with a wealth of experience and insights.
Now Valeria applies that knowledge to helping businesses understand how customers and communities have changed marketing, public relations, and communications - and how to build value in this new environment. She specializes in marketing communications, customer dialogue, and brand management. Conversation Agent is recognized among the world's top online marketing blogs.
AdAge writes an interesting article about going beyond online ads to eCommerce opportunities for CPG brands. Will it pay off? Services are easier to deliver online. A few product dot-bombs in the early 2000s made us keenly aware of that.
One of the companies mentioned in the article is Alice.com. Their model is to connect customers to companies directly. But this is not their main story.
According to Rebecca Thorman, PR and communications manager, the secret sauce behind the consumer value prop is what they offer to consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers. CPG manufacturers are faced with the growing challenge of how to connect and interact with consumers in efficient, targeted and value-added ways.
Retailers (like Target, Walmart, etc.) account for such a large portion of CPG sales - and hold all the data - that manufacturers are in the dark about who exactly they should be targeting. The retail “middle man” knows exactly what consumers want (and profit from it with private label brands), while manufacturers spend billions of dollars on advertising and marketing to figure it out.
Ms Thorman says that with Alice.com, manufacturers are now able to acquire the consumer data and insight they need for product development, marketing strategy and loyalty programs. Programs such as electronic couponing, sampling, focus groups and targeted offers help manufacturers reach out in the most efficient way to the correct audience. With such clear insight into consumer behaviors, Alice is able to disrupt the traditional retail market:
1) Alice provides an open platform for consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers to sell directly to consumers 2) Transforms mass-market advertising dollars into direct consumer value 3) Gives CPG manufacturers highly targeted ways to reach consumers and personalized relationships
Will the value prop move the needle for P&G? The techniques used to acquire the consumer data and insight they need for product development will have to conform to future FTC and legislative guidelines.
How will this impact P&G's expectations? We won't know until long after the rule making - once it's been tested in court. Of course, in online terms, that's an eternity. The new FTC disclosure guidelines are one thing. There's a ton of privacy legislation in the pipeline, too. That could impact the industry's primary advantage over mainstream media: objective metrics.
What concerns me about this scenario is that if regulation becomes too cumbersome, the small operators will disappear, thus leaving only large companies - and that’s not healthy, either. The ideal world would see a balance of privacy and regulation.
The fundamental question P&G raises at this time is whether their online activities would compete with those of its retail channel. Their online investment will need to pay off to continue and with the regulatory challenge all online businesses will be facing, it may be indeed a tough road to profitability.
Valeria Maltoni helps businesses understand how customers and communities have changed marketing, public relations, and communications - and how to build value in this new environment. As a communicator with 20 years of experience, 10 of which online, she specializes in marketing communications, customer dialogue, and brand management. Valeria has come to define modern business as a long and open conversation. Conversation Agent is recognized among the world's top online marketing blogs.
Many marketers spend a considerable amount of time calculating the ROI of campaigns by looking at cost per lead (CPL) or Web conversion numbers. You are probably quite smart yourself to the ways of lead nurturing and its importance in branding and customer acquisition. Those are known costs of doing business these days.
Yet many companies fall apart when it comes to opportunity costs.
Not paying enough attention to customer issues can be more costly in the long run - and by a wide margin. It’s not only the opportunity cost of not selling more to the same customers, which should be one of the results of good service and product stewardship. It’s also the out of pocket cost of trying to manage negative word of mouth.
Those opportunity costs never show up on your balance sheet, because they’re lost when:
people stopped calling because they stopped buying
you saved a couple of hundred dollars on the spreadsheet, but the new vendors are just not bringing in results
you have a steady stream of new customers replace existing ones at cheaper rates
you manage to get one of the most interesting pages on Consumerist and quite the discussion on Get Satisfaction when you could instead work for your customers delight
people stopped talking with you, but they’re talking with your competitors
Do you track your lost opportunity costs with the same fervor you reserve to expenses?
Valeria Maltoni helps businesses understand how customers and communities have changed marketing, public relations, and communications - and how to build value in this new environment. As a communicator with 20 years of experience, 10 of which online, she specializes in marketing communications, customer dialogue, and brand management. Valeria has come to define modern business as a long and open conversation. Conversation Agent is recognized among the world's top online marketing blogs.
There is a good relationship between innovation and failure. As Monica Harrington shares, Microsoft Bob gave plenty of very smart people a run for their money - and lessons to take to their next project. Those are familiar lessons. Building on Harrington’s:
1. Never underdeliver against expectations - if you work in a sales-driven organization, common especially in B2B, you will know that there is a tendency to overpromise to get in the door. That might not be such a good idea.
2. Consumers don’t care about strategy - that’s right, your customers won’t care if you have a vision. All they want is for your service or product to make their life easier.
3. A small marketing budget can do wonders - believe it or not, I do think that the potential of social media will be realized most by B2B companies. After a career spent working with them, I know how small their budgets are and how creative teams get with them.
4. If you start to get feedback from customers that your product is anything but great, don't forget that you only get one chance to make a first impression - this pint is really hard because it feels like you need to keep backing a decision made to invest time and effort in something.
5. Don’t be afraid to take risks - one of the worst habits organizations get into is that of not taking any risks, which translates into not supporting individuals who think outside the benchmark. If it’s not been done before, there are no benchmarks.
6. Place the bet on smart people who push the envelope - why do so few organizations do that? Why do so few individuals do that, too? What are three ways you can bet on smart people in your network and company today?
7. Never forget the crucial role influentials play - every industry, type of service, and product has them. Go find out who they are and engage them in the process - testing, providing feedback and input will save you from your internal conversation with additional context.
8. If it doesn't work the first time, be open to the idea that it might work down the line - sometimes it does pay to be persistent, to go back and fix the bugs or undesirable product features.
9. Don't be afraid to poke fun at yourself - loved the video of Bill Gate’s last day at Microsoft.
The times when I've learned the most, were those when things didn't go exactly as planned. What lessons have you taken from failure?
Valeria Maltoni helps businesses understand how customers and communities have changed marketing, public relations, and communications - and how to build value in this new environment. As a communicator with 20 years of experience, 10 of which online, she specializes in marketing communications, customer dialogue, and brand management. Valeria has come to define modern business as a long and open conversation. Conversation Agent is recognized among the world's top online marketing blogs.
They’re at the opposite ends of the conversation spectrum. The show context is that of media and advertising, two areas that are undergoing rapid change - some would call it a decline. Mad Men captivated the public’s imagination by its depiction of a long gone era - dare I say with a tinge of nostalgia?
While the characters of the AMC series might be fascinating in their ruthlessness, their behaviors engender the kind of dialogue that doesn’t promise best results in real life (IRL). What people like most about that characters in Mad Men is that they may be cads (male and female), but they're not a bunch of pussies.
Opinions are the currency of the social Web. That’s why the show has such a passionate following. Taking risks and trying new things has been a characteristic of the early adopters, many of whom technologists, who have made a name for themselves and created a following online.
The audience loves the fact that these non-pussies are so ruthlessly acting in their own self interest, it seems refreshing.
This is because people still don't get the emerging dynamics of 21st century business. We are so conditioned to put our own interests first, we see collaborative behavior as a degree of surrender - something we do because we think we'll benefit from the exchange. If we appear to be our customer's friend and advocate, for instance, it will give us an advantage when it comes to sell that person something.
This attitude puts us squarely in the corner of the Don Drapers of this world. It's duplicitous, and misunderstands what a Trust Agent really is.
We are rapidly approaching the point where we are so interconnected that all business relationships are ultimately a collaboration. Yes, we all have needs. This hasn't changed, and it won't. But in a 21st Century marketplace, we do not have different goals than our partners. They want to meet their needs, and we want them to, also. Even if it means we put their needs ahead of our own in the short term. Understand this principle - do it consistently and transparently - and you're a Trust Agent.
The little in-joke about America's infatuation with the lovable, irredeemable cads of Mad Men is that the characters' bad behavior won't be rewarded for long. The wealth, power, and prestige of the Old School ad agency is about to be upended by the Aquarians, forerunners of today's creative class. And there should be a lesson in that for us all.
Valeria Maltoni helps businesses understand how customers and communities have changed marketing, public relations, and communications - and how to build value in this new environment. As a communicator with 20 years of experience, 10 of which online, she specializes in marketing communications, customer dialogue, and brand management. Valeria has come to define modern business as a long and open conversation. Conversation Agent is recognized among the world's top online marketing blogs.
There is a reason why this publication is called Fast Company. The US has an even shorter attention span than many places I’ve had the fortune of spending time in. I’ve been writing about customer conversation here for more than 18 months and I don’t get tired of saying it - fluency in customer conversation is a key business driver, one that will make or break a company’s tenure at the economic table.
It’s not that service and communications are becoming less influential in marketing innovation, it’s that we’ve lost the ability to create and sustain conversations that are worth having. The ability to know what to listen for, understand, and translate into business outcomes has never been more rare - or more precious.
Fluency in customer conversation also means that internal behaviors in the development of the very products the company sells and the way it delivers services need to change. Customer experience has taken center stage. Think abut Zappos.com and Amazon. What does the first business do incredibly well? it has a tight relationship with customers that give it permission to talk with them and a story worth spreading. This is why it deserved the attention of the second business. Incidentally, they could have both been in any kind of business, they chose shoes and books to start.
Marketing cannot be solely the discipline of shaping an offer; with social media, it needs to align the offer proposition with the way its delivery is experienced in the marketplace.
A company needs to know how to answer the social phone, in addition to mapping to the social engagement profile of its customers. It’s not so much the company’s stories that connect with an audience, but the way in which a company is able to bring to life its fluency in customer conversations - it’s how people relate to each other and to the tools that best solve their problems.
A business that does a good job at capturing that connection and playing it back, will have emotional resonance in its communications. If you believe that the heart of marketing is in shaping the business, then you also know that customers are not a mere audience - they’re where your business comes to life.
Valeria Maltoni helps businesses understand how customers and communities have changed marketing, public relations, and communications - and how to build value in this new environment. As a marketer with 20 years of experience, 10 of which online, she specializes in marketing communications, customer dialogue, and brand management. Valeria has come to define modern business as a long and open conversation. Conversation Agent is recognized among the world's top online marketing blogs.
Usually it’s the customers who give you deadlines - and sometimes ultimatums - on service. Needing something done by, support within “x” time, service at “y” time and place. What would happen if you turned that concept on its head and gave yourself a deadline instead?
As Karen Leland writes in a guest post at Zen Habits, “A recently study by Dr. Piers Steel, a professor at the University of Calgary concluded that procrastination is on the rise. According to Steel’s research, in 1978 about 15 percent of the population were considered moderate procrastinators. Today that number is up to 60 percent, a four-fold increase.”
If customers procrastinate, as we’ve become more accustomed to doing for a variety of reasons, they approach the service moment more stressed and thus less tolerant and willing to be patient. The same is true for customer support functions - there might be a temptation to put off issues until it becomes putting out fires. Which in turn tends to exacerbate and strain the experience for all.
What would a company-driven deadline on customer service look like? Loosely based on Leland’s list:
1. Take advantage of the slow times to be proactive towards customers. With the help of technology, for example, you could run reports of who is scheduled for car maintenance and hasn’t called for an appointment. Call them. 2. Focus on the task at hand, especially if it will help expedite a customer’s inquiry. How many times have you been put on hold when calling the doctor’s office? Sometimes for so long that you forget when you were looking to make that appointment. How about taking the call and booking the appointment now? Route calls to other staff to be responsive to all callers.
3. Cue yourself to be responsive and mindful even if you don’t have all of the information. This is particularly hard for engineering companies - unless the answer is perfect, there is no communication.
4. Give yourself and team credit for taking action on behalf of customers. The positive momentum will also help you take other steps to be more organized, proactive, and collaborative when it comes to customer support. 5. Be decisive when it comes to solving a service issue. My mentor and former CEO had a great motto. He used to say paper is like blood, you need to keep it flowing. What Leland suggests is to do now, delegate, dump, or defer (schedule it) and it works.
Have you tried giving your company service deadlines?
You could just ask, but that wouldn’t give you a product or service worth the money you might put into it - 50 to 90% of the product and service initiatives by US companies are failures. This costs in the magnitude of $100b per year.
And that’s taking into account that these companies have adopted customer-driven thinking. Innovation needs to be outcome-driven to create breakthrough products and services, writes Anthony Ulwick in What Customers Want.
Ulwick encourages us to think about how customers see the world. They:
- buy products and services to help them get jobs done - use a set of metrics (performance measures) to judge how well a job is getting done and how a product performs
These metrics therefore make it possible for companies to approach the creation of breakthrough products and services in a systematic and predictable manner. The companies that figure out what jobs customers want to get done and how they measure success in getting the job done have a leg up.
That advantage may translate into profit. This methodology comes at a cost - that of having to think differently about innovation, learn new skills, and give up asking customers directly how they’d like to see a product improved, for example.
The author concludes the book with ten tactical tips that have helped companies overcome some intrinsic barriers to success. Among them:
1. Separate the roles and the information-related needs of marketing and development. 2. Treat the adoption of outcome-driven innovation as an investment in infrastructure. 3. Share needed information across the organization. 4. Repurpose the customer satisfaction study. 5. Treat the discovered opportunity as sacred.
Bottom line, it takes a little more than just asking to find out what customers really want. Innovation is a process and it is constantly evolved by practice.
Sharing the data you collect about a customer with that customer may be your single most important gesture of transparency - not to mention that it may give you the ability to convert more of those conversations.
I found the story while reading the Sunday edition of the Inquirer and it caught my eye. When a Sprint customer requested an itemized bill, the company refused to send the information. The answer, after some considerable waffling:
one Sprint staffer told him, "The FCC won't allow it." Another said, "No other company will provide that information."
was something akin to a slap it in the face - Sprint wouldn't provide the text-message records without a subpoena.
What on earth possessed Nextel to email such a response? I can check my itemized wireless bill online any time I wish. The company records all that data, why not share it with customers?
I don’t like the fact that US carriers double dip on charges by making us pay both for calls and text messages made as well as those we receive. What I like even less is what I’m reading about Sprint not wanting to disclose data to the very customer whose information it has.
We’re in the age of networked collaboration and customer-centricity. Those companies that will find a way to share more information with their customers, partners, and suppliers will gain a competitive advantage.
There is a good relationship between innovation and failure. As 
