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Best Buy on social media

October 23, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Best Buy’s CMO Barry Judge shared his views on social technology today during an interview with Francois Gossieaux for the Marketing 2.0 community. Some highlights:

Value of social media

1. Dramatic improvement in quality of work through collaboration: “It’s become real clear to me that the best ideas aren’t from any person or even a small group of people. The best ideas come from collaborating among people with multiple points of view, inside and outside the company. Social technology provides the way to scale and do this.”

2. Trust: Building trust and being trusted by consumers: “The other thing I’m real clear about is the value of being transparent and open with people and sharing freely what we know. To build trust you have to be open and transparent. What you write needs to be real.”

3. Reality check, constantly monitoring what’s being said: “I have a ticker tape like feed of what’s being said about Best Buy — good and bad. It reminds everyone that the conversations are happening out there.”

4. Help realize Best Buy’s differentiator, which is its people.  “Social media is about making yourself more interesting, vulnerable, human, open. People want  a relationship with people. Also, social media helps you have more interesting conversations that help you think about ideas differently, and engage with people with similar passions.”

Social media strategies

  • Watercooler: internal forum that enables conversations on business topics
  • Loop: Red Dragon like capability where ideas are put on loop and people vote on them, and can invest in them. Helps best ideas rise to top.
  • Prediction Markets:  Best Buy internal stock market for ideas, e.g., Will Best Buy open a store in China this year? It’s a way to get information to flow throughout the company.
  • Blue Shirt Nation:  lifestyle kind of social network for employees, like MySpace. More social, while business issues discussed on Watercooler.
  • Open APIs on BestBuy.com: opened up code on bestbuy.com to developers so that they can help company build better utilities/applications for shopping at Best Buy. First large scale retailer to opne up its architecture.
  • Sharing casting tapes for commercials: people can comment on commercials as they’re being developed; we get good input about what people have to say — and people get to know more about our strategy by being involved in the advertising process.

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

Political advertising goes Broadway

October 23, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Filed Under: Political communications, Smart company stories, Word of mouth Tagged With: , ,

Savvy Auntie, First Wives World communities get it

September 9, 2008 By 1 Comment

New online communities SavvyAuntie and FirstWivesWorld are good examples of successful communities. Each:

  1. Focuses on a niche group of people who share a passionate bond:  women who love children and relish their roles as “aunties,” and women who have gone through a divorce or are in the throes.
  2. Allows people to connect with other people and ask questions, share stories, and just be social.
  3. Provides lots of helpful advice, resources, and experts on topics related to the community’s theme.
  4. Adds some fun: both have entertainment sections and some celebrity angle. (Did you know Hulk Hogan and his ex have just added a 5th team of lawyers to their divorce proceedings?)
  5. Has a fairly simple technology platform with an easy-to-use interface and lots of easy ways for people to get involved, from creating a profile and uploading photos to starting a blog or creating a group. Then again, just reading these rich, content-filled would be fulfilling for many.

In any cateogry there are always niches of opportunity. Many businesses are approaching communities too broadly, trying to serve everyone about everything, and ending up with rather bland communities that have no real community. Auntie and First Wives show the power of going narrow.

Filed Under: Communities, Smart company stories Tagged With: , ,

More dumb tag lines: United “Its Time to Fly”

August 27, 2008 By Leave a Comment

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8RdC1XcyCA[/youtube]

This is a sweet television ad from United Airlines that is totally disconnected from its business. Why is United romanticizing the flying experience at a time when planes are dirty, seats are cramped, food is terrible, and staff is grumpy? The disconnect between the promise of the ad and the actual experience is huge. Why promote an experience that you can’t deliver? That’s just dumb marketing.

Then there’s United’s new tag line: “It’s Time To Fly.” What is that suppose to mean to the customer? How does it build preference or loyalty? And doesn’t United realize that actually it’s a bad time to fly in view of greater overbooking, flight delays, rising costs, and the need to reduce our energy footprints?

At a time when airline business is bleak, this expensive and irrelevant campaign is especially appalling. What were the marketing and agency people thinking?

Southwest gets that marketing is the customer experience

Fortunately there is one airline that understands that marketing is the customer experience, not a new ad with a Robert Redford voice over or a tag line.

It’s hard to work while traveling, but Southwest’s new seating in gate areas makes it easy for me to plug in and have a little workspace to get things done. The children’s seating area is also a nice touch.

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Filed Under: Advertising, Dumb company stories, Smart company stories Tagged With: , , ,

10 Marketing 2.0 lessons from the Ryan Montbleau Band

May 28, 2008 By 5 Comments

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The Ryan Montbleau Band is an amazing up-and-coming group that knows how to use Marketing 2.0 to build a fan base and sell tickets and music, with almost no money for marketing. Here are 10 Marketing 2.0 lessons from the band for all marketers:

  1. Love what you do: passion is the center of marketing and propels all tactical components. The greater the passion, the more powerful the marketing.

2. Listen to your customers (fans): Ryan Montbleau hung out after a recent performance, talking, signing t-shirts, and genuinely connecting with fans in the lobby. I had a great conversation with him about some of his lyrics and how he’s so come to be so wise at such a young age. (Which goes back to listening and passion again; he’s in the world.)

3. Make it easy for people to help you: The band makes it easy for people to act as word of mouth advocates, inviting anyone interested to join the Bleau Crew, their street team community.

“What is the Bleau Crew, you ask? We’re a community of fans that do our best to help the band on the road, giving them time to do what they do best: make music! Projects include postering for local shows, handing out handbills, posting banners on our Myspace pages, adding new songs to our profiles, and more! Benefits include free tickets, music, and being part of something truly special. We also get personal teleporters. Awesome, I know.”

4. Go where your fans are online: (Which also makes it easy to help you again.) The band doesn’t just rely on its site or a social network. They’re all the places their fans — and potential fans are — MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, even a simple message board community aptly named Bleauboards that is thriving.

5. Reveal your points of view and personal stories so people can connect with people in band, not just band. You get a sense of the artist and person Ryan is through his blog, and you get to know all the band members through their quirky profiles. (I especially love band member Ted Wilson’s profile — and that the other members welcomed someone like him.)

6. Keep “old” marketing tactics that work: Want to stay in touch through email? Montbleau also offers a newsletter.

7. Say thank you: When a recent tee-shirt order arrived there was a a handwritten note on the order form, thanking me for supporting the band. Small touches grow fans.

8. Be distinctive, even if people can’t categorize you. Old marketing was that you had to fit into an established category or create a new category. Yet too often trying to fit in to a category blands down the product or service. In today’s super-competitive world, distinctiveness can be a powerful differentiator. So what kind of music is Montbleau? He describes himself as “something of a Martin Sexton by way of Van Morrsion and Stevie Wonder.”

9. Give away free “products”: Giving away free stuff helps people experience the “product,” have something to share as they pass along word of mouth, and  builds fan-dom. You can download for free one of the band’s most popular songs, “How Many Times,” as well as tour posters and handbills. The band is also  contributing 50 cents from each ticket to Rock The Earth, and  contributing 50 cents from each ticket to HeadCount’s “Cents for Sense” campaign until the 2008 presidential election.

10. Make it easy to buy: The band makes it easy to buy music whether it’s on their site or on MySpace, and you can buy concert tickets right on their site.

One of my favorite lyrics from Ryan’s music is:

“It’s time to ease from concentration to focus.”

This is true for so many things in life, and  relevant to marketing. It’s time we stop concentrating on the tactics and tools, and flip our focus on earning customers with all the new 2.0 tools.

PS –  Montbleau won second prize in the 2007 International Songwriter’s Competition, competing with 15,000 songs written by amateur and professional songwriters from over 100 countries.

Filed Under: Communities, Smart company stories, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , ,

MoMA: not museum marketing as usual

March 17, 2008 By 1 Comment

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How do you change the perception of museums being boring places for intellectual, rich people — and still not alienate your core market? Maybe take a page from MoMA — page A5 of today’s Wall St. Journal to be exact.

  • The full page ad thanks a sponsor, Target, for supporting free visitor nights. (There goes the price issue.)
  • Referring to a new Helvetica exhibit the ad says, “Just thinking about Helvetica totally makes us want to get down and party.” Get down and party? (There goes the stuffy museum image. And who knew type was considered art?)
  • And then the party really kicks in. “We’ll clear out a dance floor and check out the finest collection of modern art in the world. We’re going to rock out to Philip Glass all night long and gab to somebody we just met about how much Expressionism inspires us. (Museums aren’t just for art — there’s dancing, a chance to meet new people on Friday nights, and you’re likely to get inspired. Talk about adding “new features” to your brand. )

Here’s the full text. Accessible. Conversational. Strategic. Nice.

Thank you.

This is a message from MoMA to thank Target for their generous support of Target Free Friday Nights and to commemorate the arrival of our millionth free visitor this past Friday evening. It is set in 29-point Helvetica Roman, widely considered the official typeface of the twentieth century. Helvetica conveys an undeniably modern aesthetic clarity and is in fact the subject of an exhibition at MoMA. Just thinking about Helvetica totally makes us want to get down and party. Maybe its the triple Chococcino talking here, but suddenly we feel like screaming, ‘Thanks a million Target!” while mingling outside in the Sculpture Garden. Okay folks, here’s what we do: Meet us up on the third floor and check out the finest collection of modern art in the world. We’re going to rock out to Philip Glass all night long and gab to somebody we just met about how much Expressionism inspires us. Then,if the mood is right and all our planets are aligned, we’ll show our new friend what Expressionism really means. It happens every Friday from 4 – 8 p.m.

Filed Under: Activating change, Conversational Marketing, Language, Smart company stories Tagged With: , , ,

J. Crew's Drexler walks the conversational marketing talk

March 3, 2008 By 2 Comments

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J.Crew’s CEO Mickey Drexler is a great example of a CEO who lives conversational marketing, passionately listening to customers and incorporating their ideas into the business strategy.

In his Saturday N.Y. Times story, “A CEO Sells the Store,” Joe Nocera wrote:

“Visiting stores, quizzing the staff, critiquing everything in sight — and most of all, meeting customers, is at the core of how Mr. Drexler runs J. Crew. It’s also what makes him happiest.”

The story also talks about how Drexler personally follows up with customers he meets in stores. He’s intent on hearing their ideas — positive and negative. The customer is his muse, his energy, his grounding.

While CEO of the Gap Drexler lost touch with the customer, as many CEOs do, and lost his confidence. At J.Crew he’s intent on doing what he does best — visiting stores every day; reading, responding and acting on customers’ emails; and asking customers for input. He told Nocera:

“People want to be listened to and they want to be respected. Besides this is how you learn what is on their minds. What can be more important than that?”

Probably nothing. While most clothing chains are struggling, J. Crew’s 2007 revenues were up 14% and the company is profitable.

I think I’ll have to check out J. Crew’s new line of suits….and tell Mickey what I think. I know he’ll listen, and that’s a most powerful marketing strategy.

 

Filed Under: Activating change, Conversational Marketing, Leadership, Smart company stories Tagged With: , , , , ,

Eli Lilly: a corporate reputation grounded in purpose

February 10, 2008 By 2 Comments

Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly is one of those quiet companies with a good reputation and steady double-digit growth. Last week at the BRITE 08 conference at Columbia University, Mark Kershisnik, the executive director of Eli Lilly and Co. market research and US marketing services, said that Lilly’s sustainable success is rooted in a shared, common purpose that everyone in the global company is passionate about:

Developing innovations to help patients succeed in the ways they want to lead their lives,

which goes far beyond developing scientific innovations.

?“We exist to solve tough problems that help to get people healthy and earn a decent return on our investments. This is a deep-rooted belief throughout the company. This is what motivates us – not being the biggest or making the most money,” explained Mark.

One of the company’s programs that’s good for patients and good for Lilly is Oncology on Canvas, a global art competition where people confronted with cancer share their journey through their art.? More than 2,000 pieces of art from 43 countries were submitted as part of the 2006 competition, now traveling around the world. The 2008 competition is underway.

[photopress:Embrace_Life_Lilly_Oncology_on_Canvas_1_2.jpg,full,centered]

The benefit of Oncology on Canvas for Lilly goes beyond corporate citizenship.? Mark said the art has been an incredibly powerful way for Eli Lilly scientists to emotionally understand the person for whom they are developing new drug treatment.? “The art makes the patient show up in our organization in a graphical, emotional way, and helps us think about the patient on their terms, not ours.”

Lilly is a great example of what happens when a company organizes around its customers, with a passion for providing value to those customers:? financial success, sustainable innovation, low employee turnover, and a stellar corporate reputation.

PS— The visual above is titled “Embrace Life” and was a winner of the Best of the United States(3rd) in the 2006 Oncology on Canvas competition

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SAP's CMO on branding success

February 10, 2008 By Leave a Comment

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SAP’s CMO Marty Homlish, recipient of the BRITE “Big Thinker” award last week, shared his views on what it takes to build a great brand:

  1. Tell the truth about the value of the brand to customers
  2. Be relevant
  3. Be believable
  4. Exceed expectations

5.?? ?Keep your promises

What’s ahead? Homlish thinks the future of branding is the convergence of product, brand and customer experience.

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Marketing Colleges: Lessons from Dickinson College

November 19, 2007 By 3 Comments

How do you turn around a small, private liberal arts college – reducing a chronic deficit and tripling the endowment in nine years? At last week’s AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Ed Dickinson College president Will Durden shared some lessons behind Dickinson’s incredible academic and financial turnaround story.

1. All organizations need guts, passion and a vision so exciting that people want to be part of the story.

2. Successful marketing is built around a literary narrative:

  • Identify a character so powerful that it invites others in. (Dickinson tapped into the school’s founder Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the first free public clinic for psychiatry, believer that American needed a new form of learning for America.)
  • The narrative should have goals and a foil that the organization is fighting against
  • The themes in the story need to connect people with big ideas; people want to be pride that they’re connected with stories much bigger than themselves.
  • The story’s key themes have to be repeated over and over again; leaders must be passionate about the story and overcome boredom in telling the story. It takes quite a while before the story seeps into all an organization’s constituents
  • Narratives need a vocabulary book. As part of its narrative, Dickinson developed a vocabulary book with words that the college uses over and over in telling its story. Words steeped in passion and a clear vision like outrageous, unapologetically committed to liberal arts, petulant brat.

3. The other ingredient for success? No doubt it’s having an academic entrepreneur like Durden leading the organization, instilling the type of aspirations, fierce pride and passion that get people from alumni to incoming students to believe and invest.

In 1998 Dickinson’s endowment was $151 million; today it’s $336 million. The story must be working. For more on this success story, check out this chapter of the book Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Ed.

To get a sense of just how interesting Durden is, check out his YouTube “bow tie” video.

And for more about the Higher Ed marketing conference highlights, check out blog posts from Ken Steele and Michael Stoner.

Filed Under: Marketing trends, Smart company stories Tagged With: , , ,

A hospital CEO's contrarian point of view

November 2, 2007 By 1 Comment

Nothing gets people talking (and thinking) like a contrarian or counterintuitive point of view. A good example can be seen in a post today over at the Running a Hospital blog by Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. There’s a local hospital in financial trouble that none of the Boston-area hospital groups have the money to acquire and fix. Levy suggests an alternative — that the Service Employees International Union take over the hospital as they have a strong interest in hospital management and lots of cash.

“So why not approach SEIU with a proposal to have the union purchase, own and operate Carney Hospital? Let the union show how it can handle the full panoply of issues of running a hospital and demonstrate how it can profitably operate a neighborhood facility without the kind of state aid that has been pouring into Carney for all these years. Let the union negotiate contracts with the insurance companies, encourage access for low-income patients, maintain high regulatory standards for patient care, and do all the other things required of hospital management, while, of course, providing excellent working conditions for staff members and physicians.”

An innovative idea or a friendly smack at the unions who so often complain about how hospitals are managed? Hard to say, but Paul’s post will certainly be the topic of conversations in the Boston healthcare community this weekend. And there’s nothing healthier for any industry than frank, open conversations about contrarian ideas. That’s where change so often begins.

Thanks to Howard Kain, managing principal of the healthcare group at PNC for turning me on to Running a Hospital, a great example of CEO blogging — and in a highly-regulated, conservative industry like hospital management no less!

Filed Under: Communicating, Dumb company stories, Leadership, Smart company stories, Social media strategy Tagged With: , , ,

Driving Hertz customer service crazy

August 23, 2007 By 3 Comments

Yesterday I witnessed insanity at the Hertz Gold check-in counter in San Francisco. The businessman next to me wanted to change the credit card his car would be billed to. He handed the woman at the counter an American Express card. She quickly informed him that it had expired.

“Didn’t you hear me miss? I told you to put my account on that card. How many times to I need to explain it to you. I want the bill on my American Express and not my Visa. Got it? Or do I have to explain it again to you?”

“Yes, sir, I understand. But American Express is telling me that your card is not valid. So we can’t use it.”

“Lady, I don’t know what your problem is today. But put it on that card.

He finally gave her the Visa card and stormed out all indignant. The indignant part was astounding.

“Wow, you were the picture of calm with that guy,” I said. “Not sure I could have held my cool with someone like that.”

The man waiting on me said, “That’s nothing. We had a person in here this morning whose driver’s license had expired and he yelled at us for not reminding him that he had to renew it. I told him we weren’t the department of motor vehicles. But the guy continued on and said, ‘Don’t you people realize I’m a Gold Club member?’”

Like being a Gold Club member has anything to do with him taking responsibility to get his driver’s license renewed.

“How do you do it,” I asked the Hertz people at the counter. “How do you handled such crazy rants from insane people all the time?”

“It’s our job,” they said. “We stay calm and remember it’s just a job.”

Front line employees are the ones who most influence how we feel about brands. And on most days their jobs border on insanity. Maybe more of us marketers should work the front lines for even just a week a year. Seeing these unsung customer heroes at work at Hertz makes the “we try harder” tag line more meaningful than ever before.

P.S. — Oh Canada, thank you to the folks at Raincoast Books in Canada for such a nice review of Beyond Buzz. Canadians, some of the best people to have an interesting conversation with, seem to be liking what the book has to say. Merci and thanks again.

Filed Under: Smart company stories Tagged With: ,

Dupont: Word of mouth an objective, not strategy

July 2, 2007 By Leave a Comment

“Word of mouth is an objective, not a strategy or tactic. ”

That small but significant nugget came during a conversation I had last week with Gary Spangler of Dupont to prep for our July 31 presentation at ad:tech Chicago, ” Word of Mouth Marketing: Luck or Skill?” If you’re going to ad:tech, please join us.

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Smart company stories, Word of mouth Tagged With:

Wall St. Journal: Reviving a Beer Brand One Bar Stool at a Time

July 2, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Today’s Wall St. Journal has a great article about how Narragansett Beer is successfully reviving its brand using listening tours to tap into the brand’s genuine differentiation (“the townie’s beer”), and word of mouth marketing to develop passionate customer relationships.

Writer Simona Covel interviewed me as part of her research for the piece and we had some great conversations about the value of tapping into what consumers believe a brand stands for and then engaging directly with those passionate brand believers and turning them into advocates. There’s no better example of how a company is doing this than Narragansett Beer, the official beer of the Boston Red Sox for decades, but an almost dead brand by the 1980s. Mark Hellendrung bought the rights to the brand from Pabst Brewing in 2005, and revenue is expected to reach $5 million this year.

No traditional advertising in this success story. Just savvy targeting, reviving what people love about the brand, and a disciplined word of mouth strategy, led by the CEO.

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Marketing trends, Smart company stories, Word of mouth Tagged With:

“The Break Up” traditional advertising spoof

May 21, 2007 By Leave a Comment


The Break Up
Uploaded by geertdesager

Don’t miss this great video, produced for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions by Geert Desager at Bring Back the Love. It captures the change in selling and telling marketing to conversational marketing, reminding all of us that the consumer has had enough with old style techniques.

Hat tip to Tony Bloomberg over at Diva Marketing for sharing.

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