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New study: Corporate reputation more important than ever

January 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If people don’t like your company, they’re not going to buy from you.

In a new study by my old employer, Weber Shandwick, 69% of participants aid they frequently or regularly discuss how they fell about a product they bought. 70% said they avoid buying a product if they don’t like the company that makes it. And, no surprise, 88% said that word of mouth is still most  influences their opinion of a company.

More can be found here on the Forbes blog.

My take from the study: marketing (brand) and corporate communications (reputation) need to be one, or at least work a whole lot more closely than these organizations do in most large companies.

Filed Under: Advertising, Marketing trends, Public Relations, Research, Sales, Word of mouth Tagged With: ,

Herd or bird?

May 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment

When it comes to attracting customers, engaging employees, and earning recognition, this one question may be the most important.

How can we move from this…..

 

 

To this….?

In today’s competitive world the most effective way to attract customers and talented employees  is to offer something special and different that attracts people to seek you out. You don’t have to be an Apple or a Google. You just need to be a company that knows and cares for its tribes so well that those tribes, be they customers or employees, seek you out.  Your passion for their success attracts their passion for your company.

The old way of pushing messages onto people is akin to herding cows.  It’s a lot of work, costs a lot of money,  you have to continually push, and the ROI stinks.

Here are some examples of why pushing and herding fails.

Most leadership training is failing

In a conversation last week Case Western business professor and author Richard Boyzatis said that most leadership development programs fail. Why?  Most companies require people  to take courses (herding), but they’re just not really into them. Without the attraction and motivation to learn, people don’t learn. You can require training (herding) but it’s unlikely to stick.

Most brands are becoming commodities

A study by marketing strategy firm Copernicus found that people buy on price because they view most product categories as commodities; there’s nothing attracting to them to one brand over another. None of the 51 product and service categories analyzed in the brand trends study are becoming more differentiated over time and 90 percent are declining in differentiation. So if nothing is attracting people to your brand,  marketers resort to the herding strategy of promoting cost savings.

Most employees are job hunting

In a recent workplace study by Monster, human resource managers reported that employee loyalty has decreased slightly this year. Yet 82 percent of the workers surveyed said they have updated their resume in the past six months, and 59% say they’re looking for a job all the time.  Challenge and inspiration trumps salary and status: When asked what they want this year, nearly half (41%) of respondents want to be challenged and inspired by their jobs; a subset also want to make a difference in their jobs (17%)

Creating an attraction strategy

So as you step back and evaluate your marketing, HR, leadership and organizational development strategies, ask “what will attract and inspire people?” A better customer experience? New ways to work that challenge people? Training that is completely out of the usual training box?

For more insights into the power of attraction, check out the book, “The Power of Pull.“  My summary of the book is here.

 

Filed Under: Activating change, Advertising, Communicating, Marketing trends, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Social media obsession dies, real work starts

March 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Now that we’re getting over social media lust and obsession, it’s time to get to the real work.

As Seth Godin points out in his post today, “Bring me the stuff that’s dead, please,” the real work is focusing on what we’re saying, not how or where we’re saying it. It’s creating new value with all the tools at our disposal.  Not just using the tools willy-nilly.

Much deserved attention — and too much undeserved hype — has been spent on the need to have social media.  It’s an amazing way to communicate.  But what are you communicating?

Edward Murrow wrote more this than 60 years ago. Replace “the newest computer” with “social media’ and his advice is still relevant.

“The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem of what to say and how to say it.”

Filed Under: Activating change, Communicating, Language, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With:

Marketing assisted living homes: take two

January 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The secret for  marketing assisted living homes: provide an extra ordinary client experience that makes people feel good.

Indeed, this is the basic marketing principal  for all services and products.

Sounds simple, but so many nursing and assisted living homes put operations first, client needs second, much like most industries. Whatever our fields, we become lulled into thinking that how we do business is the way to do business.  We rarely step back and question whether there’s a better way.

So let’s step back a minute.

Do you really need to  run your operations where  everyone lives on the same schedule, eats the ‘right’ foods, socializes with set group activities, sleeps at the appointed times?  Why must people live their last days in ways that may not fit how they lived most of their life? Does disciplined scheduling benefit your clients — or your organization, making it easier to run things?

Positive emotional experiences: good for people, good for business

New research shows that breaking away from operational norms and creating more positive emotional experiences is good for clients and good for business.

The New York Times recently wrote a fascinating article, “Giving Alzheimer’s Patient’s Their Own Way — Even Chocolate,” that explored the benefits of  flexible, client-centered care, finding that positive emotional experiences disminish distress and behavioral issues, especially among people with dementia.  (Note:  approximately two-thirds of people living in nursing homes have some dementia.)

In fact, providing a flexible living environment that works for each patient is proving to  dramatically reduced the need for anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic drugs, which often cause terrible side effects in the elderly. Flexibility means things like softer lighting, comfort foods, one-on-one vs. group activities, availability of food so people can eat when they’re hungry, encouraging clients to stay out of diapers, and personal touches, like using a perfume that the client so enjoyed earlier in her life.

The times article highlights the  research. More interesting to me are the interviews and stories of  Beatitudes Assisted Living in Phoenix, an innovator in client-centered alternative living. So innovative that many other facilities around the country are receiving Beatitudes training and now looking to adopt their practices.

These comforting personal touches improves behavior and enhances people’s lives because they “send messages that they can still understand;  ‘it feels good, therefore I must be in a place where I’m loved,’” explained Jan Dougherty, director of family and community services at Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix.

All great marketing is the result of providing experiences that customers feel good about — and set you apart from the competition.  When people — usually adult children — are making decisions for their parents, most assisted living facilities “feel” the same and provide similar services and the same promise of keeping a loved one safe and healthy.

Beatitudes sets itself apart, providing emotional benefits to its clients and their families.  On top if it all Beatitudes has found that its innovative approach  saves money. This is marketing at its most effective.

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Note: I wrote a post about marketing assisted living facilities almost four years ago, and that post has become one of the most read posts since I began blogging in 2005, which tells me that the interest and desire to innovative assisted living marketing is significant.  I will continue to address this topic as the demand for assisted living is increasing, as is the challenge of running profitable, client-focused assisted living facilities.

Filed Under: Activating change, Innovation, Marketing trends, Smart company stories Tagged With: ,

Social media chaos: the customer is confused

January 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

What a social mess in big companies. Every organization seems to be creating their own social media strategy. Advertising. PR. Customer service. Direct marketing.  Sales. Product marketing. Market research. Oy veh.

Here’s the problem. The customer is getting confused. So many different company Twitter handles, Facebook pages, multiplying blogs.  Customers feel like they’re hearing from five different companies rather than one.  That’s because your five different organizations have only been thinking about their organizational strategy — without thinking about the customer strategy.

You’re not alone. I could name five big companies who this month are sitting down to try to make sense of how they’re engaging with customers. Things have gotten out of hand amid the social media exuberance. Every organization wants a “social media presence.”  And every ambitious marketing and communications professional wants social media accomplishments on their resume.

But what do customers want? If you keep one marketing New Year’s resolution, make sure you lay down an enterprise strategy for how your company/brand will connect with customers based on building a valuable relationship with the customer.

Then establish the processes, workflow, and internal rules of engagement. Keep it clear and succinct, make sure it’s easy to follow, and honor it as you honor the revenue that comes from each customer.

Then everyone can succeed.

Filed Under: Activating change, Advertising, Communicating, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: ,

Book review: Chief Culture Officer

April 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The most important point of the excellent book “Chief Culture Officer” by Grant McCracken is this — and it’s big:   Today’s fast-changing external cultural environment presents significant opportunities and dangers for companies.  To manage risk and seize opportunities somebody needs to own culture — understanding patterns and uncovering insights,  and helping the C-suite understand how make better decisions based on this understanding.

This isn’t traditional market research, but anthropological research for business, noticing and assessing ideas, trends, emotions that make up the life of customers and employees — and determining what these cultural shifts mean to a company. This applies not just to marketing, but to leadership, HR and workplace communications.

This understanding and empathy, Grant notes, is often viewed as a “soft competency” by executives and business schools.

“To refuse empathy is a kind of managerial malpractice. It costs us essential knowledge of our colleagues and our customers…In fact empathy is frequently the blade that finds the right insight, extracts from it the real strategic and tactical opportunity, and crafts it into a final, compelling form. Is this really a ‘soft’ skill?

Value of a Chief Culture Officer

  • Better informed C-suite decisions based on opportunities and risk that come from culture, both strategic and tactical decisions.
  • Serve as internal entrepreneur, an innovation agent

What a CCO does

  • Finds patterns among chaos of cultural trends and conjure what they mean to a company
  • Insinuates cultural knowledge into the CEO

How the chief culture officer does her or his job

  • Talks to anyone who will talk with you.
  • Figures out the thing that makes a person interesting.  Find what they know best and what this means to them, how it looks to them, how it feels to them
  • Is open and guileless, never, ever “hipper than thous”
  • Treats everyone as more knowledgeable than him or herself
  • Is a fearless “noticer” or observer — “spotting things that defy expectation, that don’t compute.” Pays special attention to things that puzzle. Pays attention to any failure in attention.
  • Develops empathy, the ability to feel how another person feels, and find insights from those feelings.
  • Admits ignorance and asks naive questions.

Beware: what culture strategy is not cool hunting

Today’s Fast culture is a huge challenge for businesses: miss a trend or misread customers and your brand can quickly become irrelevant. Similarly, slow culture also  presents opportunities and risks and is perhaps more overlooked as the “cool hunters” have no interest here at all.  Grant warns us to beware of the “cool” people; they tend to be into themselves and what’s hip, not real listening, observing and empathy needed to uncover insights.

Quotes I liked

  • “We should think of our CEO as a Soviet-era Moscow audience and the CCO as Radio Free Europe. The CCO is trying to penetrate an air space constantly being “jammed” by other things.”
  • “Knowledge can stand in the way of innovation.”
  • “Without emotional sonar, there are many things an executive cannot know. This person in a sense is trapped in himself.”
  • “There is no code to “crack” culture. Just good listening.”
  • “We are not seeking perfection. We are seeking to construct and idea just robust enough to get us from confusion to clarity.”

This is a motivating, highly-readable book, chock full of insights, things that make you wonder, and motivation to make you  want to wander more in order to notice more. It’s also so refreshing in its pragmatic approach, reminding us that culture strategy is a form of anthropological science and not about what the cool people think.

Five stars for this book.

Filed Under: Activating change, Advertising, Books, Innovation, Marketing trends Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Social media as predictive forecasting tool

April 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

As the interest heats up in understanding the business value of social media, there’s an interesting report out from HP Labs that shows the predictive forecasting potential of Twitter.

Sitaram Asur and Beranardo Huberman built two models to predict the box office sales of movies based on Twitter. The model for predicting first weekend box office sales was 97.3 percent accuraate and the prediction for second weekend performance was 94 percent accurate.

From meetings I’ve had recently with marketing scientists I’m convinced that we’ll be seeing many more mathematical models that will not only help quantitatively measure the return on social media engagement but will also link those measures to business metrics like sales, trial, leads.

MIT’s “Technology Review” article about these Twitter models raises an interesting question:

Can they change the demand for their film, product or service buy directly influencing the rate at which people tweet about it? In other words, can they change the future that tweeters predict?

To download the “Predicting the Future with Social Media” study click here.

Filed Under: Marketing trends, Research, Social media strategy Tagged With: , ,

Video marketing: Here's the Noodle

April 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment


One of the big trends in marketing today is telling your story on video, largely because video has such an ability to convey the rational and the emotional elements of a story.  Here’s my video book trailer for my new book, “Be the Noodle,” produced by First Priority Media.

More about the book can be found here. I’m just filled with so much gratitude about the response to the book. Clearly people have been looking for a book where “inspire, wisdom, and humor” are linked with end of life and dying. A big outpouring of thanks goes to Justin Evans, partner of the Montreal design firm Stress Limit Design, who created an extraordinary cover. And of course, my remarkable family. Together we can do so much, except for the singing thing.

Filed Under: Books, Communicating, Marketing trends, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , ,

18 ways to use social for business

March 10, 2010 By 1 Comment

Social CRM chartJPEG

Jeremiah Owang has just published a solid report on how to use social techniques and technologies for sales, customer service, CRM, innovation. In other-words, all those critical functions that help a company build stronger relationships with customers.  I found his assessment of the market readiness of CRM use cases, based on market demand and tech maturity, to be especially insightful. Here’s the report.

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management
View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Filed Under: Marketing trends, Research, Social media strategy Tagged With: , , ,

What's a talkable brand?

October 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has put out a request: What makes a brand talkable? Here’s my take.

Filed Under: Communicating, Communities, Conversational Marketing, Language, Marketing trends, Public Relations, Sales, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Hiring your own beat reporter: LA Kings jump onto trend

October 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

LA KingsJPEG

If there are no media left to cover your company or sports team, what do you do to build a fan base besides Tweet and run a company blog?  For the past two years our company has created independent blog properties for big companies, written by independent writers, free of any control by the client.  (The blogs focus on issues relevant to the clients’ businesses.)

This week the LA Kings adopted a similar approach when it hired Rich Hammond of the Los Angeles Daily News to cover the team  — not as a publicist, but as a journalist covering his sports beat but being paid by the team.

Sports teams used to have several full time “traveling beat writers” covering them. Now major league sports teams are lucky if they have one. For the LA Kings, they’ve had no one covering them, aside from spotty AP reports. (This is hockey, not major league football, but still….)

By  hiring a verteran sports reporter,  the Kings expect to see much more news about the team, not just about games but about player profiles, previews, etc.  A steady stream to connect with the fan base and hopefully attact new ones. It’s a trend that we expect more and more companies to adopt as well.

Here’s what Rich Hammond wrote about the move:

To put it as plainly and simply as possible, I will draw a salary from the Kings, but none of the stories and/or blogs I write will be reviewed for approval by any member of the Kings’ staff. Topics will not need approval and interviews will not have any additional supervision. I have been hired to blog, write stories — including coverage of home and road games — and produce other content for the website. This is not public relations. I have been told, pointedly, by the highest levels of Kings management, that I should continue to report and write as normal.

Be certain of two things: I will not “go easy” on the Kings out of any fear of retribution, just as I will not take gratuitous shots at the team and the organization simply because I have retained the right to be critical. Things will continue on course. Praise and criticism, to the extent I feel either is warranted, will continue to be distributed fairly.

That’s out of the way. Now let me tell you what to expect. I can say, with complete confidence, that you will have better, more comprehensive Kings coverage than ever before. When the team is away on its 10-day road trip next month — and on all of its road trips — I will be there, giving up-to-the-minute updates on the blog and writing stories for the website. For the first time ever in my career, I will be able to dedicate every working hour to covering the Kings.

It will be interesting to see of the Kings do give Hammond complete editorial control.  In our experience, it’s hard for “the owners” to be hands off when a writer writes something they disagree with, or knocks — legitimately – the company or product in some way.   Yet  research shows that people believe sources that provide the good and the not-so-good. Those souces have more credibility than the “official company spokesperson.”

And, who knows, if the Kings get this right, maybe the good karma will help them win more games too. :)

Filed Under: Communicating, Marketing trends, Smart company stories, Social media strategy Tagged With: , ,

Google Sidewiki: 5 things businesses should do

September 29, 2009 By 2 Comments

Google just introduced SideWiki, which allows anyone to add information in a sidebar next to any Web page. Google positions SideWiki as a way to contribute helpful information to any site, providing additional insights to what’s on the page. Nice. They even show a nice example with John Maeda, president of RISD, adding a comment about Cooper-Hewitt.

For corporate people who have had to fight with legal and senior management to get a corporate blog or to  allow people to post comments on the corporate blog, this is big news.  I started saying “there is no control” of corporate information back in 2005. And now, really, there is no control.

If people don’t agree with the company’s information, they get write their views in Google Sidewiki, which appears as a browser sidebar. If they think your marketing claims are misleading, they can write that in Sidewiki. If they think a competitor’s product alternative is a better choice, up it goes. (Or should I say “side it goes” as the Google Sidewiki opens to the left side of the Web page.)

While the product was just launched , I think there are five things marketers and corporate communications people need to pay attention to:

1.  Claim  your Google Sidewiki for your Web site; that way your company information will always appear at the top of the wiki. Bill Hartzer has a good tutorial on how to do this.

2. Give management the heads up about Sidewiki before you’re called on the carpet for not knowing about “this.” Reassure people that there are unlikely to be a lot of bad comments, unless of course there is a reason for them. People can only add to  Sidewiki if they use their full name.  As bloggers have found, simply asking people for their name and a legitimate email  filters out most ranters and haters.

3. Respond to people who comment in the Sidewiki, just as you would — I hope — if they commented on your company blog, forum or community.  Engaging in the right way can build brand fans, correct misperceptions, and help you learn how to make your company better.

4. No corporate blog? This is the time to get one. If you have no way to easily and quickly communicate your company views via social media, you’re at risk.    SideWiki is another example of making it easy for people to have a voice.  They’d probably be interested in hearing from people in your company in their real person voices, too. So what are you waiting for? Make it easy for people in your company to share their views.

5.  Follow the trend and follow what people write — not just on your pages, but on your competitors’, on industry sites, on blogs and online magazine pages covering your industry.  SideWiki could provide some incredible intelligence for sales, marketing, customer service, and product innovation.

Here’s a video with more information.  You can also follow @googlesidewiki on Twitter to see track adoption and issues. It’s too soon to tell how influential Google Sidewiki might become, but it’s not too soon to start paying attention.

Filed Under: Activating change, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: , ,

Renting eyeballs or owning the customer platform?

September 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment

raisedhands

Seth Godin nails the big, big change in marketing in his post, “The platform vs. the eyeballs”: it’s not about renting customer “eyeballs” by advertising in media, whose purpose is aggregating a big volume of eyeballs. And where you might get a .5% conversion rate.

Value comes from owning your own platform, e.g., a communities, blogs, and filling it with people who people who want to hear from you, and maybe getting 90% conversion rates.

Suddenly the new media comes along and the rules are different. You’re not renting an audience, you’re building one. You’re not exhibiting at a trade show, you’re starting your own trade show.

If you still ask, “how much traffic is there,” or “what’s the CPM?” you’re not getting it. Are you buying momentary attention or are you investing in a long term asset?

The challenge we’re seeing is that marketers are measured by old metrics, so they don’t have the time or interest to build a platform of fans.  The measure of big volumes still dominates — we have  40,000 page views a month, we had 800 people register, we had 4,000 people watch the video.

But, as Godin points out, this is momentary attention. To build interest and affinity, marketers have to give to get, constantly providing value in new ways to customers and potential customers.  They have to be more interesting to get interest.  This new fan-based marketing is expensive and hard work. But those companies who do it will ultimately realize much greater ROI on their marketing investments.

Filed Under: Communities, Innovation, Marketing trends

Social media statistics

August 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Filed Under: Marketing trends, Research Tagged With: , ,

New best practices paper on social media monitoring, engagement, measurement

June 18, 2009 By 1 Comment

We’ve just release a new study on emerging best practices in social media monitoring, engagement and measurement based on interviews with large corporations like Cisco, Intuit, GE and with the top monitoring technology providers (Visible Technologies, Radian6, Cymfony, Market Sentinel), who have fascinating stories based on existing clients and from the RFP/sales process.

(Economy be damned, one technology provider even had to fire a big brand company because its agency was basically spamming bloggers and Tweeters.)

The report includes sections on:

  • Guidelines for responding, engaging, working with legal, staffing
  • Measurement
  • Biggest surprises
  • Most common mistakes
  • Advice
  • Next steps

What I found especially interesting:

  • Universal agreement that people in companies should be engaging in social media conversations– NOT outside agencies.
  • Creating monitoring systems is straightforward; developing engagement strategies is much more complex, requiring a lot of employee education and process redesign (ex: customer service)
  • The stronger the corporate culture of trust and employee empowerment, the easier it is to implement and scale enterprise-wide monitoring and engagement approaches.
  • Insights from social media monitoring are extremely valuable, but creating the right reports to glean that value for different functions is challenging.
  • For most companies legal has not been an obstacle. But collaborating with legal is essential. (See tips on dealing with legal in the report.)
  • How few conversations require or could benefit from a response. Many companies think the cost would be exorbitant to assign people to respond to Tweets, blogs and forums, but once they analyze the data and do a business case analysis the investment for the value provides a good return on investment, whether it’s for customer service, sales, or reputation management.

To get a free copy of the report, click here.

Would love to hear  your thoughts about these best practices based on your experience. What’s missing?

Filed Under: Activating change, Conversational Marketing, Marketing trends, Research, Smart company stories, Social media strategy Tagged With: , , ,
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