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Three Companies that Started down the Trust Path with Customers First

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 ...READ MORE

Five Companies that Fix their Story to Inspire Service

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 ...READ MORE

Would CPG Brands Compete with their Own Channels for Customers?

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 ...READ MORE

Customer Issues and the Bottom Line

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 ...READ MORE

Innovation and Failure

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 ...READ MORE

Mad Men and Trust Agents

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 ...READ MORE

Fluency in Customer Conversation is a Key Business Driver

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 ...READ MORE

How to Give Your Company Service Deadlines

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 ...READ MORE

How you can get the Most out of Customer Service

We spend so much time talking about how to improve customer service that I thought one post on how to improve customer attitude would be time well spent. If you think about it, we call a customer support line only when we have a ...READ MORE

How to Map to the Social Media Engagement Profile of Your Customers

You probably already know that Forrester’s social technographics profile can help you analyze the social profile of your customer base. As authors Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li explain in the book Groundswell, people increasingly use ...READ MORE

How to Answer the Social Phone

It seems that if there are many ways to listen in the social Web, there are also many reasons with the ways to answer. Tom Asacker puts it well, we define ourselves both according to what we identify with and what we reject, and given ...READ MORE

How To Reverse Your Hard Wiring For Distraction

If you want to be charismatic, your mind can't wander while you're one-on-one with a customer or colleague. Here's a simple one-minute exercise to help you focus.READ MORE

Just Talk to Each Other--Frequently and Directly

I spent a day last week discussing some difficult issues with a leadership team I'm a part of--issues we probably should have discussed a while ago, but hadn't. As the day progressed it became clear that we had been avoiding quite a few conversations over the last year.READ MORE

Cheddar for Tweets: @HuffingtonPost's Twitter-Based Revenue Scheme

Twitter still isn't showing interest in hunting down hard cash profits, but the ever-sneaky Huffington Post has worked out how it can profit from Twitter instead: By charging to embed Tweets into its blog comments. Genius? Or ...READ MORE

How do You Find Out What Your Customers Want?

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 ...READ MORE

Developers Start to Surf Google Wave, And Love It

Weeks ago, when Google Wave was first announced, we explained why you should be terrified of it. Now Google's opened Wave up to developers, and their first impressions are being published. Wave, it seems, is a wild ride. If you've ...READ MORE

Sprint Nextel Tells Customer “No” Data

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 ...READ MORE

When it Comes to Customer Service, Action Speaks Louder than Words

Social media is rarely the work of only one person, especially when it comes to implementations done by organizations. Today however, I wanted to talk about the difference that one person made in each of three companies - even though ...READ MORE

What’s Your Moment of Truth?

Quite a few years ago, Jan Carlzon wrote a book titled Moments of Truth. At the time, Calzon was the CEO of Scandinavian Airlines Systems and had helped the company reorient itself to become customer-driven. In his own words, a ...READ MORE