Church of the Customer: October 2005 archives
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October 28, 2005
Pride replaces productivity today
Productivity may be negligible today here in Chicago, but it's replaced with an abundance of pride.
That pride comes from knowing what it's like to lose for so long, the curse of Chicago's two baseball teams for much longer than anyone here cares to remember.
And that's why the Chicago White Sox's World Series victory, attained by what everyone on the team said was an unshakable chemistry, was punctuated by the lack of outrageously expensive celebrity players or even more flamboyant egos. That's very gratifying to this can-do city.
The best moment today, just a little more than a mile from here during the downtown victory parade in front of hundreds of thousands of people, was when first baseman Paul Konerko handed the final, game-winning ball over to team owner Jerry Reinsdorf. Jerry was visibly shaken by the gesture and nearly burst out in tears.
That moment spoke volumes about the value of passionate leadership.
Article round-up
Consumer Watch | Have you
heard? Stealth's the word
philly.com - Philadelphia,PA,USA
If you enlist "real people" to market your
products in their everyday encounters, aren't the rest of us real
people at risk of being deceived?
Tech Consumers Influenced
by Word of Mouth
Designtechnica - Sherwood,OR,USA
New study from Intelliseek suggests that, especially in the case of
iPods, consumers are very heavily influenced in their tech buying
decisions by personal recommendations.
Is Burger King
trying to put one over on me?
Slate -
USA
Is BK using stealth marketing to create buzz for King character masks?
Conferences are for connecting
I've been to at least five industry conferences this year, and I still think their value is meeting new people and reconnecting with old friends.
Just recently, I spoke at BlogOn: Social Media Summit. While there I met people whom I know almost exclusively via their blogs, like Jory Des Jardins, Elisa Camahort, Robb Hecht, Steve Hall, Jeff Jarvis, Mena Trott, Suw Charman, and Shel Israel.
I also met podcaster extraordinaire Cameron Reilly (all the way from Australia!) who recorded a podcast with Mena Trott (president of Six Apart), blogvangelist Steve Rubel, and myself.
Hey conference planners: How about less content and more networking.
October 27, 2005
Forbes says bloggers are the new evil-doers
Forbes has lost its mind. I hope it's temporary.
The magazine's current cover story (registration required or use the bugmenot login/password "forbesdontbug") claims that blogs "destroy brands and wreck lives. Is there any way to fight back?"
Another example for the ignominious history of "What are blogs, and why do we fear them?" journalism.
Writer Daniel Lyons admits in the article that "attack blogs are but a sliver of the rapidly expanding blogosphere," then spends 3,279 words stereotyping bloggers as "online haters" and "lynch mobs" who engage in "blood sport" to drive traffic.
As in the analog world, there's good and bad. Just this week, the NY Times reported on customer evangelist blogs, which fawn over brands and companies they love.
But Lyons takes on the qualities of the bilious, lying bloggers he "exposes" and ends up making Geraldo look reasonable.
Forbes, Forbes, Forbes... you're so much better than this.
[Hat tip: Steve Rubel]
October 25, 2005
Customer evangelist bloggers
Ben recently wrote about the McDonalds fan blog, McChronicles. By looking at his server logs, McC knows that McDonald's and its agency are listening even if they aren't communicating.
This week, a New York Times story profiled evangelist bloggers for Barq's root beer, Gatorade, Netflix, and Disney.
Sadly, it seems Coca-Cola, the maker of Barq's, was blissfully unaware of the Barq blogger.
Really? With all the free tools out there (Technorati, PubSub and BlogPulse), it seems particularly clueless today for any company, especially one with resources like the Coca-Cola Company, to be unaware of any evangelist/vigilante blog or website. Of the most important things a brand manager should be tracking every day, online commentary is easily in the top 10 list. For goodness sake, at least make it the responsibility of your agency/PR firm to provide daily or monthly reports of what customers are saying online. Forward-thinking large companies should also consider hiring an online word of mouth research firm, such as BuzzMetrics, Intelliseek, or MotiveQuest.
These days, it just seems reckless not to know about the online word of mouth of evangelists and vigilantes.
October 21, 2005
Microsoft's new masochism initiative
Microsoft WYSP: We feel your pain. Literally.
It's unclear who produced it, but they nailed the corporate video look-and-feel.
Hat tip: Gary Stein.
J. Crew's personal touch
How does a $800 million company connect personally with customers?
Handwritten notes is a nice start.
Natalie at my local J. Crew store sent me a note the other week. I was on my way to watch my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers at Joe's Bar and stopped first to return some things at J. Crew.
Natalie helped me and we chatted about the Steelers; her roommate is from Pittsburgh. Perhaps my Terrible Towel gave me away.
A few weeks later, I received Natalie's note and a $10 gift card. Nice! If Natalie was a stock, I'd invest in her.
I've spent thousands at the Gap and Banana Republic but never received a note like this. I couldn't name a single employee at those two stores.
But I'll remember Natalie.
Under relatively new CEO Mickey Drexler, J. Crew is on a roll. By the way, the cashmere wrap sweater and Italian suede flats are to die for.
The McChronicles of McDonald's, Part 2
Josh Hallett asks, what should companies do with its citizen marketers?
For a company with millions of customers, that's a big, big question. Engaging citizen marketers like the McChronicles blog as they pop up one by one is not a scalable approach for McDonald's. The same is true for other companies, whether it's Stride Rite, Verizon or Kodak. Rather, engaging citizen marketers means inviting them to join a customer community.
To create a customer community is a strategic, company-wide decision involving operations, marketing and legal. It requires executive-level decisions about the roles citizen marketers will play, giving up centralized control of message management and deciding who internally is responsible for making the idea work.
Ideally, that planning work involves a group of the early citizen marketers, too.
The genius of McDonald's is that a burger, fries and a shake are the same from
Minneapolis to Moscow, but McDonald's does not have replicant customers, so why
treat them that way? Loyalty that blossoms into customer evangelism does not come from positioning; it's earned by the value delivered plus the maintenance of the relationship.
But how do big companies with millions of customers do this?
Last summer, McDonald's caused a mini wave of buzz among marketers with the idea of "brand journalism." It was the vision of Larry Light, now the outgoing global marketing chief of McDonald's.
Back then, Light said that "identifying one brand position and communicating it in a repetitive manner is old-fashioned, out of date, out of touch." Brand journalism would tailor the company's marketing to niche audiences, not unlike like how a small community paper features the world's top stories but focuses primarily on local news. Like what blogs are today.
But a tangible asset of Light's vision never materialized.
If it had, something like community.mcdonalds.com might have been created. As far as we know, Light's plans were never shared publicly, but here's a stab of what it could be like:
The global customer community is a centralized locale for customers to practice and share their "journalism" in 100 different languages with the company and one another, similar to what McChronicles is like today but vastly more scalable. With a social media ecosystem engineered into the community's DNA, customers would connect via their interests and locales a la MySpace. With tens of thousands of customers participating in the first year or so, the community would become a growing source of knowledge for the company and its franchisees on how well specific stores, regions and countries are performing, with vast amounts of data on how to improve and innovate.
Soon, the company would recognize its potential as a laboratory for testing ideas and products among niche groups. The ROI: eliminating a good deal of research money paid to outside firms for data the community would aggregate on its own.
Over the course of the first two years, the community's value would blossom into unforeseen yet organic vines of longer-term loyalty. It would represent a new front in customer-centric marketing by appealing directly to the evangelists and true believers.
It would be unlike anything else out there among fast food companies.
October 20, 2005
Gangs of New York
Insiders Collected $1 Billion Before Refco Collapse.
The methods have changed since the early days, but the outcomes are largely the same.
What is customer evangelism?
After attending our Microsoft Leadership Forum webcast last month, Dawn Anfuso wrote an excellent synopsis today of the six tenets of customer evangelism for iMedia Connection.
(That presentation is also freely available as an on-demand webcast.)
Also today, our friend Steve Rubel used the tenets as a riff to create his own 6 tenets of blog evangelism, including a handy comparison chart. Good stuff.
