Church of the Customer: April 2005 archives
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April 29, 2005
Blog like Ben Roethlisberger
Ben who? Ben Roethlisberger. He's the rookie quarterback who led the Pittsburgh Steelers to a best ever 15-1 record last season and was named NFL's Rookie of the Year.
Roethlisberger has been blogging for exactly a year, albeit sparsely at first. Posts reflect his down-to-earth persona, wandering from the current weather in Pittsburgh to cleaning his house to house training his new puppy Zeus. Those posts probably won't be picked up by Sports Illustrated anytime soon but fans love it. One post generated 786 comments, but Ben tries to keep up.
Roethlisberger is wisely following the dictum of connecting with readers. Some believe that blog posts must be witty, grammar-perfect and professional. Eh. Roethlisberger proves that blogging works when it comes from the heart.
[Disclosure: I am a fervent Pittsburgh Steeler Fan. I grew up in the Steel City during the 70's and the Steel Curtain. I never miss a game on TV and I own two Terrible Towels.]
Best Buy designs evangelism into new stores
Last year, Best Buy began smartly firing 20% of its least profitable customers.
Now it's innovating in a new way: Launching three concept stores: Studio D, Escape, and eq-life. The first two were the subject of a Wall Street Journal article today. [You can find out more about eq-life on Andrea Learned's blog.]
Best Buy's idea is designing stores around a demographic: Studio D for women who make buying decisions for their households, and Escape for young, high-tech men and women. According to the WSJ, Studio D's warm lighting and cozy nooks give it a boutique-shop feel. Escape's glass-and-metal design is meant to reflect a nightclub scene.
These more experiential stores are designed for hour-long visits where friends will bring other friends to hang out and learn about electronics.
In the WSJ article, Best Buy VP James Damian comments:
"If we could build a network where our customers become evangelists, or become our sales force, what could that mean in terms of loyalty? We think that's absolutely huge."
James, I think you're on to something ; )
April 28, 2005
Absolut dumps ads for word of mouth
Beer and spirits companies in Australia are eschewing traditional big-budget advertising campaigns in launching new products. Instead they are using word-of-mouth strategies.
Link: Word-of-mouth campaign a Cut above the rest
RSS for marketers
At today's American Marketing Association workshop on blogs, Bill Flitter, the affable CMO of Pheedo, metaphorically encapsulated RSS:
RSS is Santa Claus content, delivered to you by the postal carrier, via your own personal remote control ordering system.
April 27, 2005
Meetup.com disses its customers
It's a tough job for any service to go from free to fee. It requires a delicate balance of fortitude, transparency and compassion, and Meetup.com is not alone.
The company announced recently it plans to charge for its previously free service of helping groups organize meetings via the web. A few customers, naturally, were rather tweaked about the idea.
Such as the Seattle Blogger Meetup Group... It discussed the plans at a recent meeting and the posted some comical pictures from the meeting with snarky captions about the company. Meetup's VP of Communications, Myles Weissleder, was not amused and posted a satiric message on the Meetup.com corporate blog calling the offending group "Belly'Achin Bloggers in Seattle."
This making-fun-of-customers story is, of course, making its way across the blogosphere.
One of the Seattle bloggers provides good advice on working with bloggers:
- Never, ever insult your customers, even in jest.
- Think before you blog, especially if you're a corporate blogger.
- Bloggers are the worst people in the world to insult, because they will tell the whole world about it.
[Thanks to Treb Gatte for the heads up on the story.]
April 26, 2005
Podcast: Can't get no satisfaction; creating emotional connections
A new podcast. Finally!
To listen, click on the podcast icon below.
To subscribe to our podcast, you can do one of two things:
* find us in iTunes Podcast directory under Business and click on the Subscribe button
* paste this URL
(http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChurchoftheCustomerPodcast) into a podcast
aggregator like iPodder
Note: From now on, all of our podcasts will be fed from our new podcast blog, so if you want automatic downloads, subscribe to our podcast blog.
Show topics
1. Why customer satisfaction isn't satisfactory
2. How a business drives sales through emotional connections with employees
3. Feedback
Show notes
Links to people, companies, articles, blogs, etc. mentioned in the podcast:
* Home Depot
* Hank Hill
* Home Depot Opinion
* Dictionary definitions of satisfaction
* Lyrics to Satisfaction
* Gallup Management Journal article "Getting Emotional About Brands" (paid subscription req'd)
* Gallup Management Journal article "The Constant Contact" including the CE-11 metric (paid subscription req'd)
* Gallup Management Journal article "Customer Satisfaction is the Wrong Measure" (free)
* Mini Cooper
* XO Communications
* Charlotte Metro Credit Union
* Bank of America
* Wachovia
* Southwest Airlines' "hire for skill, train for skill" philosophy
* Airline on A&E
* Arnold Schwarzenegger
* Holly Powers, The Kevin Eikenberry Group, Indianapolis
* Boris Yankov, Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria
* Mary Bjorneby, Minneapolis
* Jason Berberich, Grand Forks, ND
* David Hart, Hart & Associates Fine Art, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
* Carl Rogat, Notes4Review, Beaverton, OR
* Ryan Lisbon, Park Avenue of Wayzata, Minneapolis
* Seth Miller, Mostly Muppet blog
* Michael Chaffin, Star in the Margin blog, Pagosa Springs, CO
* Paul Peterson, Medtronic
* TiVo
* Mini the Wonder Dog
Show music
Intro/close: "G.L.S." by Salme Dahlstrom
Breaks 1, 2, 3: "Money" by Zymotic Flow
Break 4: "Alley Kat" by Robin L. Klein and Scott P. Schreer
Show length
32:46
Interview segment recording provided by Conference Calls Unlimited
Tell us what you think! Add a comment below, or send an email to talktous(AT)customerevangelists.com.
Or leave a short voicemail message on our special Podcast Feedback Line: 1-312-896-5095. Follow the prompts (our menu has not recently changed) and you'll have 3 minutes to leave your audible letter.
Find previous podcasts here.
April 22, 2005
Ad:Tech on customer evangelists
The forthcoming Ad:Tech conference in San Francisco features a panel on "Customer Evangelists: Motivating People to Talk About You" led by Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.
Panelists include reps from Microsoft, Friendster and the always-perky/sometimes-controversial Dave Balter of BzzAgent.
We won't be there but if you are, we'd love to hear what's discussed.
The soda activists at SaveSurge.org
Catching up on the SaveSurge.org guys, whom we first profiled two years ago, and mentioned here, here, and here.
This week, the Save Surge campaign was featured in an AP story that is now being picked up in media outlets across the country.
The background story: Since 2002, Eric Karkovack (pictured left) and Avery
Lund have been campaiging for the return of Surge, a lime-green
caffeinated soda discontinued by Coca-Cola. They have been petitioning the cola giant to resurrect the soft drink.
A Coke spokeman says Surge lacks enough demand, but perhaps Coke executives haven't seen eBay auctions where expired twelve-packs sell for $152.
[Photo: AP]
April 21, 2005
The Star Wars universe of citizen marketing
Fan films are a sub-set of citizen marketing, and the Star Wars series is the undisputed heavyweight champ of fan films fanaticism.
One of the more-anticipated Star Wars fan films to come along is the 40-minute homemade production called "Revelations." As News.com describes it:
Most of this work was done by an ever-changing roster of 30 to 40 volunteers online, drawn from around the world, most of whom [director Shane] Felux had never met until the first real-world screening of the movie in Baltimore last week. The soundtrack was written from scratch by a British composer sounding very much like John Williams.
Brand-centric purists might argue that citizen marketing like fan films dilutes the original intent, vision or value of a product. To the contrary; with an open-source mindset (such as George Lucas mostly embraces), citizen marketing can fuel a franchise and add to its mythology.
April 20, 2005
Giving evangelists a marketing vote
The Howard Dean-founded political advocacy group, Democracy for America, involved its members in the marketing-decision process this week.
DFA is no fan of embattled House majority leader (and golf-junket junkie) Tom DeLay, so it is launching a billboard campaign against the congressman in his home state of Texas. Rather than pay a pol big bucks for a slogan, DFA turned to its supporters; 20,000 billboard suggestions poured in.
After winnowing the list to 30 slogans, DFA asked members to vote for a favorite. A few candidates: "Tom DeLay: My Values Should be Your Values" and "We apologize for the DeLay, public service will resume shortly."
DFA tallied the votes in 24 hours' time. The top vote-getter: "Corporations spent millions to send Tom DeLay golfing, and all you got was this billboard," which DFA announced today.
Asking thousands of people to make a marketing decision may seem like a decision-by-committee nightmare. The process isn't tidy; comments to the DFA blog show not everyone was happy with the winning slogan. Then again, not everyone would be happy if DFA had rolled out a slogan unilaterally either.
In the bigger picture, involving your evangelists in multiple-choice marketing decisions can be valuable because:
* It calls on the collective knowledge of your group's most activist-oriented members, especially the buzz-spreaders
* Using citizen-like voting, it further cements an emotional ownership stake in the outcome
* It helps ensure that a few organizational leaders are not making marketing decisions in a vacuum
* It can contribute to higher-level goals, such as fundraising or sales, as voter-owners work to ensure their "ownership" rises in value
It's a democratizing force, this citizen marketing.
