Talking on the bathroom stall
July 10, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Getting people to talk to strangers and participate in online communities and social networks can be challenging. The number of communities that have failed is astounding.
There is no easy way to create an environment where people feel comfortable sharing and talking with new people, but a project that Nina Simon led with 13 grad students from from the University of Washington provides some lessons relevant to marketers and community managers.
The challenge to the students was to create a $300 museum exhibit within 10 weeks that would get strangers to talk to one another. A full report of the project can be found here at Nina’s wonderful Museum 2.0 blog.
Some relevant highlights:
1. Ask provocative starter questions and make it easy for people to respond. In the case of one of the museum exhibits, the grad students asked a few seed questions, like “how do you mend a broken heart,” and put them on signs behind glass. People passing by stopped and wrote replies on post-it notes, read other notes and created conversation chains and spin off questions. The lesson for business is that provocative, open ended questions that appeal to widely or deeply felt issues elicit responses and help to jump start participation. (We’ve seen too many business communities that are bland and boring. No wonder people don’t talk back!)
The whole exhibit modeled the potential for someone to respond to your query, and as it grew, the sense that you would be responded to and validated grew as well. We saw many people come back again and again to look at the post-its, point out new developments, laugh, and add their own advice.
2. Someone from the company doesn’t need to provide the advice: The team created an Advice booth and found that the best advice came from strangers helping strangers vs. staff helping strangers. (In fact, one eight year old liked being able to give advice so much that he came back the next day.) The students found that it was more beneficial for the facilitators to be “part of the experience vs. the focal point.” Good advice for companies in managing communities.
Because they were a part of the experience rather than the focal point, they could impart an air of friendliness and participation without making people feel that they had to participate. They reminded me of street vendors or great science museum cart educators, imparting an energy to the space without overwhelming it.
3. Good things come from talking on the bathroom stall. An undirected part of the project was letting people write anything they wanted on a bathroom wall, which elicited many responses, none of them offensive.
But the bathroom wall turned out to be a brilliant exhibit element. It was a release valve that let people write crude things and draw silly pictures. The bathroom wall was “anything goes” by design. And while the content on it was not as directed and compelling as that on the post-its, it served a valuable purpose. There was not a SINGLE off-topic or inappropriate submission on the post-it walls.
The bathroom lessons for business: people want to have fun and be able to be creative in unexpected ways. Mix up the ways they can participate. (Like the story about the chair in the corporate lobby.) Second, fears about people writing offensive or negative things are usually unfounded — even when you go so far as letting people write on the bathroom wall.
Top 20 countries for social networking
July 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Companies often ask how social networking differs by country. This new ComScore metrix analyzed the 1.1 billion people 15 years and older who visited at least one social networking site during May. (Excluding sites visited from mobile phones or PDAs). Russians topped the chart, with the average Russian spending 6.6 hours on social networks during the month. Italy ranked last, with just 3.2 hours.
The sound experience
July 1, 2009 By 1 Comment
The experience a person has influences word of mouth — good and bad. This week I’ve been in a Hilton Hotel in San Diego with a beautiful setting, but I’d never recommend it. There is one restaurant and the food is mediocre, which I can live with for a few days, but the canned music blaring out of a sub-standard tinny sound system is god awful.
At 6 a.m. this morning I felt assaulted, with bad early 1990s pop/rock music screaming at me. Think Alanis Morissette using a megaphone in a hallway shouting “Like rain on your wedding day.” The poor choice of music and terrible sound system gave the hotel a feeling of being dated. Worse, the sound made me not want to eat in the restaurant nor recommend the hotel. Perhaps, too, the droning sound was causing the staff’s lethargy.
Interestingly, Conrad Hotels, Hilton’s luxury brand, did a survey a few years ago confirming the importance of music in hotels and finding the musical atmosphere an essential part of guest satisfaction.
One finding:
In the restaurants, there was a surprisingly high demand for classical piano and strings, taking 33% of the votes, while other musical tastes had low showings. In public areas there was a strong desire to hear classical and jazz (82%).
The Conrad Hilton hotel study said it is “committed to monitoring and evolving musical environments to meet guest expectations.”
Until its US Hilton brands do the same, I’d suggest that silence can be golden.
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?
New research: word-of-mouth effect on sales
May 15, 2009 By Leave a Comment
A new “buzz action score” from researchers at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management shows that positive and negative online conversations are leading indicators of sales performance.
The research found that a relatively small group of people in online communities can have a substantial influence on purchase decisions, much like in face-to-face word of mouth.
Some implications for marketers:
- Tracking online conversations is becoming essential. By understanding the “buzz” — good or bad — you can can act early to either change strategies to improve performance, e.g., pricing, longer warranties, or boost performance, e.g., increase promotional budget for product receiving a high “buzz score.”
- Re-evaluate sales forecasting: rather than waiting until retailers report sales figures, you can being to get a sense of how well a product is doing real time by evaluating the buzz.
- Ask your brand ambassadors for help, either providing an assessment of the buzz you’re seeing or more actively sharing their views into online conversations. (And if you have no brand ambassador program or community, start now. These folks are invaluable to helping any brand succeed in a world where word-of mouth-is becoming so influential.)
Transparency is overrated: secrets to building corporate trust
June 27, 2008 By 2 Comments
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Forget conventional wisdom when it comes to managing corporate reputation. In fact, transparency matters the least in building stakeholder trust (employees, customers, suppliers, investors) and can actually erode trust, according to a fascinating new study by Harvard University’s Michael Pirson and Deepak Malhotra, published in the summer issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. (“Unconventional Insights for Managing Stakeholder Trust.”)
The authors studied four different organizations to find out what matters and to whom. Highlights:
- Transparency is over-rated. In fact, transparency can diminish trust depending on what is disclosed. Also, it has little relevance in terms of building trust.
- Integrity is important, but. Stakeholders close to a company (employees and customers) need to feel that the company genuinely cares for their personal well-being. Integrity alone doesn’t cut it if people feel the company is being fair but “callous.”
- Trust is built on different types of competencies. Employees and investors look for management competency. Customers and suppliers more concerned about technical and quality competency.
- Shared values is hugely important to all stakeholders: All stakeholders want to associate with organizations with values they identify with.
“We have found that that although value congruence matters most to employees, it is also an important factor for every other stakeholder group we studies. In other words, stakeholders of all types are interested in associated with organizations with whom they can identify — and with whom they perceive a match in values.”
This study has interesting implications for marketers and corporate communications professionals.
- Trust means different things to different stakeholders.
- Marketing needs to focus more on two key trust-building factors: the company’s genuine interest in their customers’ success and well being, and the company’s technical ability to deliver quality products and services.
- What beliefs? It’s essential to clearly articulate the company’s values and beliefs. (Maybe even help uncover them. ) In my experience few organizations — especially marketers — focus on these beliefs, or even know what they are. But as this study shows they are critically important to building affinity and trust with customers.
Six facts to support marketing change
April 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Getting management to buy into innovative marketing approaches can be tough.
Here are six facts to support change, based on performance data that Copernicus Marketing Consulting has collected from more than 500 marketing programs (consumer and B2B products and services.)
- 84% of programs are resulting in declining brand equity and market share.
- Customer satisfaction averages just 74%.
- Most acquisition efforts fail to reach break even.
- No more than 10% of new products succeed.
- Most sales promotions are unprofitable.
- Advertising ROI is below 4%.
For more, see the Harvard Business Review article, “Don’t Blame the Metrics” by Kevin Clancy and Randy Stone.
Perceived value: the best way to measure marketing ROI?
April 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment
[photopress:mind_the_gap_london12.jpg,full,pp_image] I feel both exhausted and encouraged from this week’s Conference Board conference on Measuring Marketing Effectiveness. Exhausted because the data shows that despite so much talk for so many years about the need for measures and ROI , we marketers have made very little progress over the past 10 years.
A 2007 ANA study found that just 11 percent surveyed said they are very satisfied or satisfied with their ability to determine marketing ROI. A soon-to-be released Conference Board study found that none of the companies surveyed feel as though they’ve “arrived” at figuring out a good way to measure marketing.
Exhausting, too, because creating approaches that provide insights and guide planning – vs. simply measuring tactics — is hard, scientific work. Companies with successful measurement systems, like Eli Lilly, Unilever, MetLife, said it takes at least three to four years to begin making real progress.
The only measure that may matter?
What was encouraging, however, is that marketing measurement innovators believe one approach is particularly valuable: measuring customer preference or perceived value, which are leading indicators of revenue, profits, and cash flow. (In other words, a measure that helps you manage and satisfy the CEO and CFO AND see glean insights to help manage vs. simply measure marketing.)
Don Sexton, professor of marketing at Columbia University believes that this is the most effective measure, yet is missing from nearly every list of marketing measures. (FYI: Don is releasing a book on the topic this fall.)
Other takeaways:
Relationship preference matters as much as product preference
Mark Kershisnik of Eli Lilly believes (and has the data to back it up) that equity can provide a measurement of both investment and performance, and the way to measure equity is by assessing product brand preference AND relationship preference.
I found this especially interesting as so many marketers focus exclusively on product preference, yet customers make decisions, particularly in the B2B landscape, on relationship factors like trust, likability, innovation.
Most common measures are meaningless: lagging indicators vs. leading indicators
Most of the common marketing metrics are, well, useless. Awareness, mind share, perception, recognition, recall, share of market, loyalty, purchase intention, cost per click, etc. may be easy to measure, but they don’t connect to business value nor do they provide indicators of what to do differently to improve performance. They are lagging indicators measuring past performance rather than leading indicators that can help diagnose where to improve brand and relationship preferences and how to monitor progress of achieving marketing objectives.
Focus on just a few things
Many marketers try to measure too many things – 30 or 40 factors. It’s impossible to properly assess that many factors – or have the resources to work on improving that many factors. Many of the speakers recommended focusing on just 3 – 4 product preference factors and 1 -2 relationship preference factors.
Getting on the same page crucial to success
All of those firms with successful measurement strategies have educated their entire leadership team so that everyone has a shared definition of marketing, marketing value, measures and metrics.
The CFO’s mantra
Kamal Sen, director of business analytics and strategic planning for Unilever in Asia, Africa, Middle East and Turkey, offered what the CFO really cares about:
- Sales is vanity.
- Profits are sanity.
- Cash is reality.
What is marketing effectiveness?
April 10, 2008 By 2 Comments
I’ll be blogging The Conference Board’s “Marketing Effectiveness Conference” next Tuesday and Wednesday in New York. There’s a great line up of speakers from companies like Citibank, Eli Lilly, Pepsi, Disney and Met Life. The conference leader is Don Sexton, professor of business and director of the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business at Columbia University.
Some of the things I’m interested in learning:
- How are leading organizations assessing the effectiveness of social media and digital strategies? Advertising Age’s Jack Neff wrote a great piece last month, “Why Mix Models Don’t Mesh with Digital,” about how many companies aren’t investing in these new areas because the budgets aren’t big enough to be factored into the marketing mix models. So because innovative approaches can’t be measured with the old tools, that’s reason not to invest? Yikes!
- How are companies taking a holistic view of what is influencing customer decisions? It seems that most companies measure silos — search, broadcast, direct, online advertising, PR, promotions. These discrete views often cloud real issues and opportunities.
- Are there different approaches for measuring B2B vs B2C? Could a B2b software company, for example, use the same strategy as Pepsi?
- If a company could only do one thing when it comes to assessing effectiveness, what should that be?
If anyone has other questions, please post them here and I’ll be sure to raise them at the conference and post the replies next week.
CMOs fail because they're not interested in customers (Takeaways from new Forrester/Heidrick & Strugggles study)
December 14, 2007 By Leave a Comment
One big reason CMOs last an average of only 21 months may be that few view customers as especially important. In a new study by Forrester Research and Heidrick & Struggles CMOs rated customer-oriented competences far down their priority lists.
When asked about which five competencies are most important to personal success:
- Less than 40% included being the voice of the customer.
- Just over 20% included listening to/interacting with customers.
- Less than 10% included personal knowledge of customers.
Yet 60% of these same marketing execs said that acquiring new customers was their top marketing objective. And more than 70% said visioning and strategic thinking were top competencies for personal success. How do you accomplish either without really understanding customers?
Also interesting: Web 2.0 trends like customer communities and social computing have the most potential to help marketers efficiently and effectively understand customers and prospects, yet marketers rated these as the least important tools for their marketing organization’s future success. A glimmer of hope — they expressed more interest in learning about these approaches than in most of the tools rated highly-important, like customer trends and Web analytics.
Remember James Carville’s famous line back in the first Bill Clinton presidential campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Adapted to marketing: “It’s the customers, stupid.”