Church of the Customer: July 2005 archives
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July 31, 2005
The marketing world is flat
"I loved Amazon.com until it started providing a global platform that wasn't selling only my new books but also used versions. And I am still not sure how I feel about Amazon offering sections of this book to be browsed online for free."
-- Thomas Friedman, "The World is Flat" (page 102)
Dear Tom,
You raise two questions that thousands of content creators, manufacturers, resellers -- just about everyone -- grapple with every day:
1. How much of my product/service do I give away?
2. How do I control the aftermarket for my product?
Let's start with the first question: How should you feel about Amazon making your book browseable? You should feel very, very happy.
Try-before-you-buy is tried-and-true. It's high-value. It's some of the best marketing available to you.
Just getting a book into the hands of a prospect is a victory unto itself. Whether a sampler actually buys your book is determined by an emotional connection you've previously established with the readers, such as your television appearances or your New York Times column, the book's subject matter and its relevance, or how strongly it was recommended by a trusted source. All of the other awareness stuff, like ad campaigns, is expensive and probably not very effective. Amazon makes try-before-you-buy free.
Yours is a common reaction. Every day, customer evangelism change-agents inside organizations argue against "our product is too valuable to give any of it away" proponents. It's a gray-hair inducing battle for word-of-mouth marketers.
But alas, the more you give away, the more valuable it becomes. Indeed for my book, I wish Amazon offered more than six pages (other than the table of contents and index) for its customers to sample. Perhaps an entire chapter. Two chapters. Making more pages available for Amazon customers to browse means a better chance of readers becoming engrossed in a book's message, its style and its knowledge. After all, Tom, your book is 469 pages long.
And six pages on Amazon is nothing compared to a Barnes & Noble cafe browser who might read half of your book in an afternoon, then put it back on the shelf. So, your concern seems misplaced.
Tom, your second issue of used book sales is, well, old-school. It's not about losing a $1.25 royalty. It's about spreading your message. The customer who buys and reads a used copy of your book, or borrows it from a library, could later show up at a cocktail party and casually mention during the festivities: "Have you read Friedman's 'The World is Flat?' Marvelous book. It says we need to wake up to the reality of global competition and open source development and how companies can position themselves into this new paradigm."
That's word of mouth.
So Tom, this flattened world you describe in your terrific book... it's happening to marketing and sales, too.
Your fan,
Ben
UPDATE: Gary Stein of Jupiter Research weighs in on this too, pointing toward research from Amazon (via Boing Boing and the NYT) that indicates the presence of used books on the site leads to more sales of new books. Moreover, the presence of used books does not have a big impact on the sale of new books.
July 29, 2005
Taking transparency to a new level
University of Texas business student Neville Medhora is pretty transparent about his revenue sources: On his blog, he lists all 36 sources, including total amounts earned, as a running tally since Jan. 1, including his year-end goals.
That's bold, even for a college student. The line-item revenue goals at companies are often CIA-level secret, sometimes for no apparent reason.
On his blog, Neville explains how he crashed a early-stage investment conference last month (as opposed to backstage at a Sum 41 show) and hung out with Herb Kelleher.
That tells me two things about Neville's future business career:
1. He will probably Napsterize his knowledge and data prodigiously, making communication with him easier and faster (good)
2. He is a calculated risk-taker (also good)
Neville's got moxie and is someone to watch (unless you're part of security at an investment conference).
The other kind of buzz
The Riverfront Times messes with the reality of BzzAgent, specifically about a "roach clip" that came with a box of cookies the company sent out on behalf of a client.
What the?
Exactly.
July 27, 2005
Citizen marketing begins to organize
Our friend Owen Mack at Obtanium TV emailed us today that he's launched a new citizen marketing venture: Cobrandit.
Owen calls it "documentary advertising." Whatever the term, Owen gets high-priest robes for saying on his new site: "We believe that people like you know more about brands and lifestyle than the big marketing conglomerates do."
Cobrandit has the potential to take citizen marketing into new and profitable loyalty dimensions that customers could totally identify with.
The question is: Are brands ready for the ride?
July 26, 2005
Thank you, Forbes
Forbes has come out with its Best of the Web awards, and the Church was noted as one of the Best Marketing blogs and one of the Best Small Business blogs.
Yowza, Forbes! We're very flattered, especially since we didn't know we were nominated. We suppose this means no tux is required since there's no ceremony but all the same... it's gratifying to be recognized.
In the spirit of plus-delta (one of the core tenets to customer evangelism), Forbes offers a delta (a criticism) for each winner. For the marketing award, Forbes writes of the Church: "Aggressively self-promoting." Ouch. We hope that's not the case. Is it? What is the demarcation between marketing and self-promotion?
Open wider
My dentist, Dr. Tim Dotson, just called me.
I had some old fillings replaced today. Took about an hour. Not one iota of pain. (With the nitrous oxide, it was a bit otherworldly.) Tim was calling a few hours later to make sure I was OK, free of problems, etc.
Out of the dozen or so different dentists I've visited in my life, not one has ever called after a procedure to check in.
For service providers, generating word of mouth often means doing the emotionally unexpected.
July 24, 2005
Lollapalooza's missing purpose
Woodstock was the most famous music festival. It was a hippie summit and featured some of the most dynamic folk and rock of the era.
Live Aid was a call to feed starving Africans, doubling as a rock-and-pop summit. At Live Aid, U2 cemented its status as a band with a mission and a killer arena presence.
Twenty years later, Live 8 was a call to influence the world's policymakers and help African nations overcome abject poverty. Like its predecessor, Live 8 (with free admission) attracted some of the world's top musical acts, and U2 again demonstrated its change-the-world verve and ability to rawk a festival crowd.
Farm Aid picked up the Live Aid vibe and through the years with the help of people like Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and Bob Dylan, has promoted the cause of the ever-shrinking American family-owned farm, sometimes to big crowds, sometimes not. Twenty years later, it's still an event.
Other long-running musical festivals aren't about changing the world, but they're often the yearly olympics of their genres, like MerleFest (Americana), Montreux (jazz), Chicago Blues Festival (blues), or the Great American Brass Band Festival (brass bands).
Arriving on the heels of this year's buzzworthy Live 8 festival is Lollapalooza, a weekend-long music confab in Chicago's Grant Park. With a name that means "something outstanding or unusual," Lollapalooza is a big festival. Some 30,000 people. Lots of security. Colorful, trendy graphics. And 99 percent well-heeled white people.
But what does Lollapalooza celebrate? To rally behind? To commune about? It's hard to tell. New and allternative music, perhaps, but that's not explained in any of the festival's marketing, nor does it explain the appearance of Billy Idol on the ticket.
After attending this weekend's show, Lollapalooza was really more like... a nicely organized but unfocused trade show. With a zig-zag assortment of old and new bands, some country-party, and some retro (50-year-old Billy Idol and his band were pretty tight) and prominence of sponsors like SBC (SBC?) and Budweiser, Lollapalooza was a full venue, but emotionally vacant. A Stepford festival. Cause-less. Devoid of a big-picture reason for being.
Previous incarnations of Lollapalooza have been shaky; last year's show was cancelled due to poor ticket sales. At one point, Lollapalooza had taken a six-year break.
Organizers smartly located this year's show in Chicago; Grant Park is a diamond locale. But I doubt the event's future word of mouth; in lacking the basics, such as a purpose/mission statement, defined values, and an easy-to-understand and promote positioning statement, Lollapalooza quickly adds up to a blase and expensive ($85 per ticket) trip to the park.
Nothing outstanding or unusual about that.
UPDATE: Kudos to Lolla organizers: They emailed a survey to ticket purchasers, asking for feedback in preparation for a 2006 show, including this question: "When you think of Lollapalooza, what is the first word or phrase that comes to mind?" I answered "unfocused."
July 22, 2005
Jeff Klein gets it
"I don't believe in buzz. Word of mouth is the buzz I want, but not by creating a fake scene. Consumers will be fooled by that for a couple months, but eventually you need to deliver good service, good food and good beds -- and you just can't mask it with ridiculousness."
-- Hotelier Jeff Klein, commenting on the efforts of some boutique hotels in Los Angeles to create buzz by creating celebrity-driven pool parties that usually shut out paying hotel guests from using basic hotel amenities, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal (subscription req'd).
The stealth marketing virus spreads
This time, it's from USWeb, a marketing agency.
USWeb is recruiting and paying bloggers to mention clients like Dot Flowers. Problem is, neither the bloggers, Dot Flowers or USWeb are disclosing their pay-for-play word of mouth system.
The Boston Globe rightfully questions the ethics of this effort as well as the companies' lack of transparency. (Here are two blogs apparently involved in the Dot Flowers game, replete with saccharine evangelism such as, "You can get fresh flowers delivered THE SAME DAY to anyone, anywhere in the continental USA! Holla!")
This shortcut stealth marketing program is unfortunate. Undisclosed paid referrals in an evangelist context rusts the credibility of legitimate evangelism for Dot Flowers and everyone else.
''In our opinion, paying bloggers is no different than Tiger Woods getting money to wear the
The difference, of course, is that everyone knows Nike pays Tiger Woods millions ($105 million, says Forbes) to shill the swoosh. What USWeb doesn't disclose is that bloggers are paid to shill flowers on the down-low.
If Dot Flowers is so terrific -- and perhaps it is -- why can't the company create a system for its gregarious and influential customers to spread the word online and offline voluntarily? Why not create an Amazon-like Associates program tied to specific products that generate referral fees transparently?
Be smart: Dump the circumspect pay-for-evangelism program before it destroys longer-term credibility.
''We try to be as ethical as possible," says Ed Shull, chief executive at USWeb.
Try harder.
UPDATE: A few other bloggers have written about this as well: Craig at CKP Creative takes the above-mentioned parties to task, as does Spike at Brains on Fire, who writes: "There's a difference between trying to be ethical and being ethical."
Podcast: Measuring word of mouth
In this podcast, we chat with three of the many thought-leaders who presented at the sold-out Measuring Word of Mouth conference in Chicago last week:
* Jon Berry, co-author of "The Influentials" and senior vice president of NOP World, explains the value of measuring word of mouth, a few ideas for getting started in measurement, and what exactly a "WOMUnit" is.
* Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Intelliseek, dissects the popularity of top 10 blog site Instapundit.com and how it maintains influence. Pete also explains the new features of blog-tracking service BlogPulse.
* Dr. Walter Carl, an assistant professor at Northeastern University who studies the intricacies of word of mouth, offers some surprising information about the influence of women on word of mouth and the differences between word of mouth agents and the general population.
To listen now, click on the podcast icon below.
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Show topics
1. Interview with Jon Berry (Begins at 1:00)
2. Interview with Pete Blackshaw (Begins at 9:19)
3. Interview with Dr. Walter Carl (Begins at 20:20)
4. Wrap-up (Begins at 31:18)
Show notes
Links to people, companies, articles, blogs, etc. mentioned in the podcast:
* Jon Berry, senior vice president of NOP World
* WOMunit (PDF)
* The Sopranos
* The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy
* Bush's grassroots word of mouth campaign
* WOMMA
* Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Intelliseek
* BlogPulse
* BlogPulse's Author Profile tool
* Instapundit.com's Glenn Reynolds
* Tide
* Technorati
* BlogPulse's Conversation Tracker tool
* Jeff Jarvis complains about Dell
* Dr. Walter Carl, an assistant professor at Northeastern University
* BzzAgent
* Frederick Reichheld's article in the Harvard Business Review, "The One Number You Need to Grow"
* Gary Stein
Show music
Intro/close: "G.L.S." by Salme Dahlstrom
Break 1: "912 Players" by Ernie Lake and Scott P. Schreer
Break 2: "Retro Petro" by Ernie Lake and Scott P. Schreer
Break 3: "Swing" by Ernie Lake and Scott P. Schreer
Show length
37:04
Podcast hosting provided by Conference Calls Unlimited
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