cgm

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!

The Chaos Continues: Garfield on "The Post Advertising Age."

Next month I'm moderating a panel at Ad-Tech San Francisco entitled -- get this -- "The Next Big Thing: Is Advertising Still Relevant?"  The panelists I recruited represent a diversity of voices that touch and bond with consumers in far less traditional -- yet hugely promising -- ways.  Scott K. Wilder of Intuit is in charge of Intuit's massive online community of product enthusiasts; Beth Thomas-Kim is Director and Head of Consumer Services for Nestle USA (and President-Elect of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP); Paul Woolmington is a founding partner with Naked Communications; and Marti Bledsoe is an interactive marketing strategist at spot-on (read my related ClickZ story)  Resource Interactive.

Garfield Helps Write the "Discussion Guide":  Needless to say, I'm more pumped about this panel than just about any session I've moderated in recent years -- and I'm doubly pumped because I feel as though Bob Garfield just wrote a big chunk of my "discussion guide."  In tomorrow's Ad Age cover story, Garfield continues his highly provocative "conversation" about the future of advertising with Chaos Scenario 2.0: The Post Advertising Age. ....a conversation that initially started with the original Chaos Scenario and then migrated to Listenomics.  Garfield covers a ton of ground, a chunk of which validates his initial forecasts, but perhaps the most thought-provoking part of his piece lays out "five reasons the online world will not online transform traditional modes of advertising, it will largely displace them altogether."  They include:

1. People Don't Like Ads
2. But they Crave them Information
3. The Consumer is in Control..No, Really
4. Diversion of Ad Budgets
5. Pay-Per-View

But why spoil the fun with a half-baked summary.  In fact, ignore the blog blurbs on Garfield's piece like this one.  Just read it! 

The Boston CGM Shadow Persists Leading into Super Bowl Ad Fest

Tomorrow is the Super Bowl, the biggest ad bonanza of the year, and the shadow of the Boston marketing "hoax" still persists across the web.   Big marketers have every reason to hope (and pray) the issue goes away, or at least takes a temporary siesta.  After all, who wants divided attention on some other "marketing" issue when you can have full attention.  What's clear from analyzing the buzz patterns is that while the Boston issue has reached its peak, it is still driving more conversation than the pre-buzz around the Super Bowl ads.  Even on the major video sharing sites, the Boston issue is far more dominant than anything related to the Super Bowl ads. On BlogPulse's video rankings, the Boston issue takes two of the top five video slots, including the #1 position. As of midnight this evening, it also ranks #1 on Technorati.  Quite a few variables are keeping the story alive, from debates over whether the campaign's a success (measured by awareness & reach) to the unrepentent antics of the two guys who ran around Boston putting up the devices.  Oh, and then there are all those "new" videos on YouTube offering commentary on the issue.  Even the topic of "hair" is driving some of the conversation.  While there's no question the issue will fade to the background during the Super Bowl, marketers need to think hard about the event's "latency" effect.  Tens of thousands of comments have been posted online about the Boston hoax, most in the context of "marketing" and "advertising."   This guarantees that it the issue will live in perpetuity via search results. 

CGM Meets Primetime!

Tomorrow is a really big CGM milestone for me.  I'm helping organize one of the first-ever "summits" focused exclusively on consumer-generated media.  This is part of my real job at Nielsen BuzzMetrics.  We're having 100 or so clients here in New York for a deep, extended conversation on all aspects of the measurability and actionability of CGM.  Should be fascinating as there's such a diversity of approaches to leveraging CGM.  Needless to say, I'm pumped!

The Engagement Debate: "Hot Air" or Meaningful "Conversation"

Today in Ad Age, respected blogger Steve Rubel takes a few pot shots at the "engagement" movement ("You Might as Well Be Looking for BigFoot" p. 17) He uses terms like "hot air" and "blather."  He's right on a few levels, and I've joked around with others around the office about some of the silly directions and detours the "engagement" discussion is taking, or the near impossible lack of conscensus on such a "big tent" concept.  But on another level I think Rubel misses the point.  And he's not putting this "conversation" in its proper perspective.  The ad research community has been stuck in the mud on traditional "reach and frequency" metrics longer than I've been alive, and the engagement discussion is finally pouring some fresh thinking and innovative measurement models into the mix.  And of course there isn't consensus -- it's an early conversation, and a quite meaningful one (maybe even, dare I say, a raw and "naked conversation") involving a very diverse mix of smart and passionate people.  The discussion is also unusually consumer (people, user, citizen...take your pick) centric -- e.g. how do we manage in a world of consumer-control -- and I think we all benefit by letting any conversation along those lines just flow and develop. Sure, the conversation is flowing in from a different direction -- this time from the "paid media" crowd versus the early-mover Web 2.0 crowd (of which PR firms have been commendable leaders and "conversational catalysts") -- but more voices the better. 

Jargon as Barrier to Commonality:  As a CGM evangelist, it's hard to disagree with Steve's final point that "we should focus on how we get people connected with one another and measure the number of times we helped them do so" or that we "should empower them to connect, and then get out of the way."  But to be clear -- that is, in fact, a central building block of the engagement conversation, and it's a growing theme.  Moreover, the notion of "co-creation" is not a bad starting point for moving this debate along. At the end of the day, we're all dancing around closely related concepts but with different reference points and jargon. 

Too Early To Disengage! Which leads me to my very last point. This entire "engagement" debate is a major validation of much of what Rubel has been passionately and persuasively writing about for the past few years: conversation, blogging, community, and "participating" in the conversation.  It's way to early to "disengage" brands and the very conservative research community from that promise, or lofty ideal.  What's really needed at this point is an even more ambitious convergence of all stakeholder groups, and especially the PR leaders (recall my post re: PR & marketing), on this engaging topic.  Let's stay engaged.