cgm

Must See TV: Twitter 1-2-3

This video below (which I discovered via the WSJ blog) captures the core essence of Twitter in simple animation.  I don't entirely agree with all the articulated "benefits" but it's well worth watching.  And while we're on the topic of Twitter, here's a link to my ClickZ column this week entitled "Customer Service Meets 'Lord of the Twitters.'"

Ad-Tech Diarist: Ten Questions on the "Art of Conversation"

This year's Ad-Tech, which I'm still attending, is very special.  Most importantly, the first "keynote panel" of industry experts focused on an issue that rarely gets top billing at industry confabs: the art of conversation. This is an important shift in our collective industry "attention" and "engagement," and while we're all far from finalizing the perfect white paper or case study about managing relationships with consumers in this age of consumer control, we're finally starting to talk about it, and at minimum, ask the right questions.  I was deeply honored to moderate this first diverse panel of industry experts, which included (right to left after me in the photo) Tom Asher of Levi-Strauss, Beth Thomas-Kim of Nestle, Jordan Warren of Agency.com, Todd Cunningham of MTV, and Rick Clancy of Sony Consumer Electronics.   I was also thrilled to debate, discuss, and vet out all the relevant issues in several spirited meetings and conference calls before the actual event.  (Key learning: the "conversation about the conversation"  as as important as the end result.) You can skim various blogs (or Twitter feeds or see a superb cNet News story summary) that recap the panel, but what I'd like to do here is simply list the key question we probed and discussed. I truly believe every marketer needs to hit the white-board sooner than later on these questions. 

1. In what ways does Web 2.0 or the digital space expand the boundaries and opportunities of having meaningful conversations with consumers? Does it reinforce or add value to what we are currently doing?
2. What makes conversations truly authentic and genuine?  Is blogging the answer, or is it just an entry strategy? What's the right way of setting expectations with consumers?
3. How do we keep conversation with consumers trusted and credible? In the age of consumer control, do we have a higher threshold to meet this torture test?   What is the relationship between search and brand reputation, and how is 'conversation' impacting what shows up on the shelf?  Can that be influenced?
4. If conversation is king, is customer service or consumer affairs the new marketing? What's the true value of listening and being responsive to issues consumers raise directly to the brand?  Nurturing loyalty and advocacy among enthusiasts? Garnering big insights?
5. If we agree consumer affairs is a new centerpiece of managing conversations with increasingly empowered consumers, why is this group so divorced from marketing or media planning? How do we change that?
6. How do we begin to train, or expand the wings, of customer service reps to embark upon these new conversations with consumers, even outside of the company's backyard?  Who else should be involved?  What's the right and appropriate way to enter a blog or online community and address or clarify an issue?  Or is that even appropriate?
7. Who should "own" the conversation among marketing stakeholders? Corporate Communications (Ricks' group), Consumer Affairs (Beth and Tom), the digital agency (Jordan), the research folks (Todd), or someone else?  Or is that the wrong question? How do we use conversation and social media to soften corporate boundaries and silos?
8. In what ways should employees be enrolled in conversational marketing?  In what ways can their passion and credibility be unleashed?  Are employees a more trusted ad channel? Can it go too far? 
9. What is the value of "internal" learning in this area? Can organizations become better primed to exploit the power of conversation, CGM, and social media through internal use of Web 2.0 tools, blogs, and beyond.  What can internal networks borrow from consumer innovation?
10. How does conversation impact the retail channel? What are Apple, Sony, and Levis retail store venues learning about the relationship between "service" and marketing. How does the consumer benefit from this mindset, both offline and online?
11. Bonus Question:  What can go wrong?  What if every marketer jumps into the conversation?  Nirvana or Spam 2.0?   What happens if we lose consumer trust?

Many of these themes will be tackled at many levels -- and with finer levels of granularity -- at the upcoming Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) conference entitled WOMM-U.  I provided background about this last week.  Here's more info.

Other Ad-Tech Notes:  Late last night, I was flattered to receive a special Ad-Tech industry achievement award.  I dedicated it to my recently deceased father, William Blackshaw, who taught me all that can be good in advertising -- provided we keep it trusted and credible.   Other industry achievement award winners included Rich Lefurgy and Kate Thorp, both of whom I deeply respect and admire.  My message to the audience was that if we continue to keep the consumer right smack in the center of our radar, everyone wins -- always. I still think there are so many important issues we need to pro-actively address -- privacy, word-of-mouth ethics, ad intrusion, and more -- so while awards are appreciated (even humbling), we still have so much more work to do.  But before we get too serious here, I'd be remiss not to direct folks to the full list of award winners, including "Elf Yourself," which swept three categories.

Interactive Marketing: "Yes We Can" (Postcard from the Ohio)

Dawn is breaking, and I'm hours away from heading to the polls for today's "make or break" Ohio primary.  (Yes, I live in Ohio - the hilltop community of Mt. Adams, Cincinnati to be exact.)  Like millions of other voters here, I've been subjected to a barrage of TV ads, media headlines, big events, small events -- you name it -- related to the primary.  I've also had the opportunity to dive fairly deep into all the candidates interactive strategies, especially the Democrats. This is the topic of this morning's Clickz Column entitled "10 Interactive Marketing Tips from Barack and Hillary."  I've been quite impressed at how all the campaigns have taken full advantage of the their websites, especially around what I like to refer to as the "Third Moment of Truth" -- enabling expression, participation, involvement.  Here's brief recap of some key takeaways:

• Win on the home (page) front. Both candidates do an excellent job providing enough well-organized content and "click to engage" choices to maximize relevance to as many visitors as possible. Even if you visit for half-a-second, you get a great feel for the things you can do on your second visit. This is important because most brands make consumers zip through multiple levels to get to what they need.
• Engage, enroll, and participate. Unlike most Super Bowl advertisers, candidates are constantly teeing up "things to do." Barack and Hillary both have similar home page utilities to "Be a Volunteer," "Vote Early in Ohio," "House a Volunteer," "Make Phone Calls" or "Find and Plan Events." This, my friends, is what's known as engagement and when millions of consumers are engaging at some level, you know it can work.
• Roll up the TV set. The political campaigns exploit TV wherever they can go, and if your consumers can get it customized, oon-demand, or tailored to specific needs or constituencies on their Web sites via video, so be it. Video persuades, and connects emotionally. Both Clinton and Obama do a superb just exploiting the power of online video on their Web sites, and this has evolved nicely in the past six months or so. They are also both getting much better and making video embeddable and sharable, and they use to power of cross-promotion to power videos hosted on YouTube such as Obama's five million views -- an growing -- "Yes We Can."
• Hablamos con todas audiencias. While most automated teller machines open their first interaction with consumers with question about English or Spanish preference, most big brands give this short shrift. "That's not the focus of our interactive strategy," they'll say. The candidates, by contrast, are doing a great job teeing up parallel content in Spanish, and it doesn't take Bill Richardson to explain why this is important. Both candidates have very strong Spanish language sites, and they've done a commendable job developing tailored content. Blog links also suggest key influencers are paying attention. Both sites also do a nice job appealing to the "long tail" of audiences out there, whether by state, ethnicity, unique need (e.g. hearing impaired) and they do this without the core site looking too all over the place.
• Win with emotion. Obama's site does a brilliant job playing consumer emotion -- even more so than Hillary's. I'm not sure if it amounts to what Chris Matthews described as a "thrill going up my leg," but close. In particular, the use of video during and after the contribution process is very effective, and it almost makes you feel like there's the "emotional wind" behind your back in the giving process. Hillary's site is a bit more functional and operational, but also scores points here and there on emotion.
• Make it simple; make it friendly. I still marvel at the impenetrable unfriendliness of typical brand feedback or survey forms. Obama and Clinton are hardly perfect here, but they at least make their forms feel inviting. Oh, and I don't feel rushed, or forced to write it down in 50 letters before the software caves in on me. It's like the folks who designed the forms have felt the pain and anger over rude employees, lame call-center scripts, and more.
• Reinforce the loyalty immediately. Both Clinton and Obama appear to have solid relationship marketing tools in place to respond immediately to feedback or financial contributions. Both are customized but I give the edge to Obama on personalization and including yet another call-to-action in the follow-up. In my follow-up e-mail, it just felt more personal. Hillary encourages pass-along (e.g. "Click here to send an email to friends and family).
• Customize the loyalty. The Obama campaign goes well beyind reinforcing the loyalty to customizing the loyalty by encouraging people who sign up or give contributions to create their own mini-portal or blog platform via mybarackobama.com. You can blog, check your Barack points, build a profile and more. In some respects, this amounts to user-controlled panel management. Hillary allows users to create their own "groups" but the Obama campaign in on to something in driving deeper, more involved action at the what I call the "Ex-Spot."
• Share the assets. Both campaigns do a nice job empowering enthusiasts to share "official" content in their own content areas. Obama has a robust and comprehensive download areas for everything from Buddy icons to button designs, while Hillary's campaign offers a host of assets to share, embed, and beyond. Key lesson here: If you want to drive buzz, provide currency.
• Blog and promote the content creators and advocates. Both sites do a great job "mashing up" content from external sources, including individual blogs. Some of these are touted in the campaign-sponsored blogs (also a smart idea), but others are featured in stand along areas like Hillary's Spotlight section

Is Customer Service the New Marketing? In CGM Land, You Bet!

Is customer service the new marketing?  That's certainly been a long-standing contention in the blog, and it's the theme of a one-day conference taking place in early February.  A firm called GetSatisfaction is the primary host, and it looks like a promising -- if not long overdue -- confab.  The timing is for this conversation is just right, and I frankly hope we'll see more of this in 2008.  My upcoming book (which I'll start previewing in future blog entries), Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000, hits this very theme right smack in the strike zone.  In particular, it makes a forceful argument that marketing in the age of consumer control needs to be completely realigned around customer service and consumer affairs.  With millions upon millions of CGM comments across the web indicting (or complimenting) varying degrees of customer service, or brand listening, there's plenty of empirical evidence to support such a direction.  The key for brands is to draw specific linkages between key dimensions of the service experience and what I like to refer to as the "CGM echo effect."   Such analysis is critical to drive investment or media-mix reallocation.  In the wireless category, for example, customer service issues related to "billing" tends to have a higher word-of-mouth or viral impact that other issues.  This became obvious to me starting in 2000 while analyzing hundreds of thousands of letters on PlanetFeedback.com and more recently across thousands of online expression venues. Certain issue hit core emotions more than others, and customer service is at it heart consumer emotion. (See article: Attention! I Don't Want Your Freakin Attention!) Conversely, brands like Amazon and online shoe seller Zappos.com tend to be rewarded by great service delivery or shipping.  (See recent NY Times story entitled Put Buyers First, What a Concept.) What's needed is a new science of "cause and effect" around the service experience that heavily factors in advocacy and word-of-mouth.  Consumer affairs and customer service departments, in partnership with marketing, can help lead that charge, and that was my hold-no-punches challenge in my October keynote to the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP).  The CGM revolution and Web 2.0, I argued, is finally lending credence and strategic relevance to consumer affairs -- so it's time to lead and set the new agenda. We'll revisit this issue at Ad-Tech San Francisco in April, so stay tuned.  (I can't attend the February conference, but I'm jealous of anyone who can.) For more fun reading on this topic, see: 

• Consumer Affairs: The New Advertising Department

• The Conversational Divide

• Postcard from the Welcome Mat: Levi's Wall of Letters

• Servicing Search: A Better Ad Model

• Postcard from the Welcome Mat: Sheraton Solicits Photo Experiences

• The Science of Talk Value

• Listening Centered Marketing

• 2006 Agency of the Year: Nobody (Max Kalehoff)

Customer Service Oldies But Goodies: "Attention? I Don't Want Your Freakin' Attention!"

Last week work overload prompted me to miss my usual deadline for my ClickZ marketing column, so my editors published an "oldie but goodie" entitled "Attention, I Don't Want Your Freakin' Attention!"  The article resurfaces at a time when the topic of customer service is elevating to a new level of debate and discourse in marketing circles. The topic is loaded with irony, and I think the pseudo "conversation" here well reflects that.  If you want to get a taste of real interactions (at least from the consumer side), you might want to peruse some of the letters and comments on PlanetFeedback.com.  Customer service ironies ooze throughout the site.  (Disclosure: I founded PlanetFeedback, and am darn proud about that!)  Other good resources for getting smarter in this area is the website of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP), as well as website of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA).   

Al Gore Pauses Green to Talk Up Consumer-Generated Media

CGM got another nice plug this weekend at the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) conference when Al Gore delivered a speech entitled "Consumer-Generated Media: The Next Advertising Paradigm."  Here's a great excerpt:

"Nothing can help your brand more, in my opinion, than helping your customers help you brand your products.  You keep control of your brand and how your brand is presented. But letting your customers express themselves and join the conversation about your product is empowering of them, respectful of them, and brings new creativity into the process that's hard to get any other way."   

While some rumbled that he focused more on themes related to his Current.tv network versus more obvious themes like Global Warming, and his recent Nobel Peace prize, he was, after all, talking to a crowd of 1200 marketers who probably needed the CGM theme pounded a bit harder.  Stuart Elliot provides a nice recap of the entire conference in his NY Times piece.

CGM & Emotion: Emotionomics, Anyone?

This morning in ClickZ I tackle the issue of brand emotion (Emotionomics, Anyone!)  Importantly, I offer a quick and easily digestible recap of a very important new book by Don Hill entitled "Emotionomics."  Billing itself as a "practical guide to understanding the emotional dynamics that determine a company's sales and productivity," the book is a very good, if not essential, read. I write:    

Feelings matter, Hill insists. More important, what people say doesn't always align with how they feel or what they ultimately do. He calls this the "say/feel gap." Marketers, therefore, need new models for accurately metering emotions. Hill argues that "making a sensory-emotional connection through superior creativity and empathy becomes the key to winning over the audiences on which profitability extends."

As for CMOs' role, Hill insists they identify which emotions "they're most eager to inspire in the target market and which they're most eager to dispel." To facilitate that exercise, he's identified six core emotions that "transcend culture, affecting every consumer in an age of global commerce," drawing from a host of existing research. Those emotions are surprise, anger, disgust, sadness, fear, and happiness.

Customer Service & Emotion:  Of all marketing media, Hill writes that nothing else is "more emotional for the consumer and more dangerous for the company" than customer service. What's really at stake "is a customer's self-worth." Here he's right on the mark.  This point is reinforced in the CGM space through the millions of consumer comments flowing directly from bad consumer experiences. Just consider the letter posted last week to PlanetFeedback in which the writer notes that she "will be posting each and every week for the rest of my life about the horrible experience I had with HERTZ...I'm going to tell everyone I know how heartless and deceitful you are."  Again, here's a link to the article.  Here's some background on Dan Hill.  Lastly, here's a related article I wrote for ClickZ entitled "Tis the Season of Brand Emotion."

The Giant Facebook Sucking Sound (continued...until I figure it out)!

Can you still hear it? I can, which is why I decided to probe a bit deeper on Facebook's site stickiness in the form of a ClickZ article today entitled "The Two Faces of Facebook."  Here I embark upon conversations with two enthusiastic users of the site, uber blogger Robert Scoble and millennial Jessica Moss (a recent University of Dayton) graduate.  While on the surface you might argue that the two represent a bit of a generational divide, you'll find more commonality in their practices and applications than dissimilarity.  Scoble, in particular, fascinated me, and I almost got the sense that Facebook might soon eclipse his own blog as a unique source of personal gravity.  Then again, it's probably too early to reach any huge conclusions here.  Says Scoble, explaining his Facebook fixation:

"It's a powerful replacement for my business card collection. That's powerful because I can now video you, reach out to you, chat with you, review your profile, all at once and in real time. This has become an extended identity system for me."

For context, he adds:

"I'm a professional networker. I want to know what's happening in the world faster than anyone else. I want to be part of the conversation. If someone says something, I want to see it first."

“Who’s My Friend? Heck if I Know!” and other Social Media Conundrums

Lately I've been getting so many darn friend and connection invites that my head is spinning. From LinkedIn to Facebook to the all-too-common (and bogus) MySpace invite from the girl "who just broke up with [her] boyfriend and is just looking for fun," it's all getting a bit crazy.  Is spam king Sanford Wallace running this gig? Or am I just reliving Groucho Marx's famous quip, "I'd never join a club that would accept me as a member."

That’s the opening paragraph of my ClickZ column today. Meaningful Relationships with Social Networks, which attempts to ask some hard questions about the credibility and intimacy of all these social networks. At some point, I argue, you just can’t say “yes” blindly to all these invites. “Friendship comes with obligations, responsibility, and some level of accountability," I write.

Marketers, I argue, need to think hard about the fine line between meaningful relationships and peripheral, or cheap, ones.   No one wants elitism, but we do want to maintain a certain degree of trust, authenticity, and "social currency" in our connections.  Social networks create an almost unrestrained desire to pad one’s network with contacts.  And yet, the broader the network, the harder it is to make meaningful connections, especially on sites that promote and encourage introductions, recommendations, and more.  Every once in a while, you find yourself in one of those awkward situations where you barely know anything about the person who a friend (or quasi friend) has asked or begged for an introduction.  All important issues for reflection.   Again, here's a link.

We're Still in Control

My message in today's ClickZ column is simple and way overdue: we're still in control. Read on!