The Quisenblog

The poet Maya Angelou perhaps said it best: “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Effective marketing has always been about storytelling, but for the longest time the stories we told appealed to the intellect and were of the “factual” variety: this detergent has 25% more cleansing power; three out of four dentists prefer this brand of toothpaste; this brand of peanut butter is free of hydrogenated oils, etc. As marketers, we were trying to plant “thoughts” about a brand or product into a prospect’s mind.

Today, the role of marketing storytelling has evolved to include feelings about brands. It is going beyond logic to enabling emotional connections that have less and less to do with the actual function of the product itself.

The strongest brands have always evoked strong emotions from its users. Kleenex. Campbell’s Soup. Jeep. Nike. Feelings build loyalty and the feeling of community.

Since the emergence of Social Media, we now have endless opportunities to learn about our customers and enrich their brand experiences.

So as part of your marketing or creative brief, why not ask simply, “How do we want our customers to feel when considering or using our product”? The answer to that simple question should open up a lot of possibilities for you. Instead of relying totally on “reason” to win a customer, you’ll think more in terms of the entire brand experience.

Some marketing gurus refer to this as “360-degree marketing,” but really, it’s an acknowledgment that in today’s world of marketing, feelings trump thoughts every time.

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Mickey On Customers, Social Media 360-degree marketing, brand communities, brand connections, brand experiences, brand feeling, brand loyalty, creative brief, Maya Angelou

This week’s social media blog posts:
Monday: Seven ways to doom a Social Media program.
Tuesday: Co-Creating with Social Media.
Wednesday: Building Brand Evangelism through Social Media.
Thursday: Social Media and Reputation Management.
Friday: Now that you’ve engaged, it’s time to re-engage.

(This is the last in our series of Social Media posts for the month of October. We welcome your feedback on the series.)

So let’s say your first foray into Social Media was a success.

You scrubbed your customer database so you have a good list. You put together an email blast with compelling creative and an intriguing offer. And you got eye-popping “open” and “conversion” rates. Congratulations!

Now before you pop that bottle of champagne, think about your next engagement with them, and how you can make it a little more meaningful.

Their first opt-in should be translated that they liked your offer, not necessarily that they are somehow “passionate” about you. This first engagement is key, but it should not be considered an unmitigated Social Media success story.

The challenge is to keep your initial “hand-raisers” opted-in. And to make your communications with them a conversation, so you find out more about them, how they view your organization and its offerings, what makes them more likely to buy from you, to convince them to serve as the conduit between their communities and you, and help you identify opportunities for deeper engagement.

It helps to think of the customers who opt-in for the first time as “trial customers.” They liked what it was you asked them to respond to. The next step though is less clear. The key is to stay relevant. A 10% off coupon may attract a lot of attention the first time you do it, but it is important to recognize this act as a conversation-starter. It will help you find out who’s interested. At that point you need to deepen the conversation.

This first engagement is an opportunity to find out more about your “hand raisers” than their email addresses or how they found you. Let’s say your first contact was a coupon you sent via email. As part of the redemption process, you could put together a quick survey to find out a little more about redeemers and what they would like to see in future communications from you. Once you know what customers are looking for, you can put together a calendar of events and mailings that will continue to be relevant for them. And the more they redeem and reciprocate the communication, the more you will inevitably learn about them. Your goal in the early stages of engagement are to learn as much as you can about your followers and continually be relevant to them to ensure continued engagement.

Once you have established this “first circle” of followers, you should be able to incite them to share with others in their communities. You can do this with “Bring a Friend” events, “two-for-one” offers or offer bounties on new customers.

An example of an organization that does a great job re-engaging with its followers is Woot.com. This is an online retailer who offers one unbelievable deal on one specific item each day, and once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.

The company built a loyal following because its community knows that even though 9 times in 10, the offer will be for something they would never buy, that 1 time in 10 will get them an unbelievable deal. Woot.com stays relevant to its community by holding to its promise (Brand Vision) of offering one unbelievable deal each day. By seeing what its customers purchased (or tried to purchase) and the velocity at which items moved, Woot is able to streamline its product offerings and leverage its buying power. In short, it becomes even more relevant to its community.

Although today marks the official end of Social Media Month, we still have more Social Media ground to cover. We’ll be sending out these posts in the coming days and weeks, so please keep an eye out for the Quisenblog.

We’d love to hear your comments on the series. Leave your comments or questions here, or email me here.

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Mickey Social Media brand loyalty, brand vision, conversations, customer engagement, relevant content

This week’s social media blog posts:
Monday: Seven ways to doom a Social Media program.
Tuesday: Co-Creating with Social Media.
Wednesday: Building Brand Evangelism through Social Media.
Thursday: Social Media and Reputation Management.
Friday: Now that you’ve engaged, it’s time to re-engage.

(This is the twentieth in our series of Social Media posts for the month of October. We look forward to your feedback on this series.)

Recent studies show that as many as 70% of American consumers do not consider themselves “brand loyal.” This means that no matter what your category, a lot of sales are going to be up for grabs on a transaction-by-transaction basis.

Often times, the deciding factor for many consumers is just knowing what other people like them choose. This is the value of communities to brands.

Communities operate in much the same way as any other organization does. It needs leaders. It needs a common purpose. It needs critical mass. It needs infrastructure. You’ll discover that online communities aren’t that difficult to form, what is difficult is keeping them engaged. This is where your brand evangelists can help.

A brand evangelist is defined by us as a customer who is not only a loyal customer, but also passionate about the brand to the point of selling others on it, with no thought of gain for themselves.

Great brands tend to gather passionate fans. The challenge is to leverage your most loyal customers’ passions to produce even greater results (and create even more evangelists). When considering how to architect a program to enable brand evangelism, it might help to consider how evangelism works. It has much more in common with multi-level marketing than it does with traditional marketing methods.

A multi-level platform traditionally eschews mass marketing in favor of distributing products or services one-to-one through its distributors’ personal networks. This allows multi-level distributors to engage their target audiences on a much different playing field. Basically it’s, “we believe in our product so much, that we want to invite you to be a part of this brand as well.” Multi-level marketers turn their audience into their colleagues.

Okay, so as marketers, you may not be in the position to make your customers your distributors, but you can use their natural energies and their passion to enhance your brand and get similar results.

Here is a rundown of the tenets that apply to brand evangelism via Social Media:

1. Brand evangelists share their personal experiences. If you’ve ever heard a multi-level marketing sales pitch, you know that a personal story is a significant component to its effectiveness. “My back doesn’t hurt anymore.” “I lost 60 pounds.” “My carpets have never been cleaner.” Whatever. Your brand evangelists are the ones who are willing to share their own experiences with your organization or brand. The weight these personal stories carry in social networks cannot be overstated.

2. Brand evangelists exhibit an unusually high level of brand pride. Across the board, brand evangelists have an incredibly high level of pride in the brand they represent. Just as the houses of Amway distributors seem to be furnished in “early Amway,” brand evangelists’ lives are plastered with the brands they represent. How can you plaster your brand all over the lives of your evangelists? Will they change their profile picture on Facebook or Twitter to your brand icons? Will they wear your t-shirts and slap your sticker on their laptops? Put a bumper sticker on their cars? Marketers should enable their ardent customers to show their brand pride.

3. Brand evangelists want to know as much as there is to know about you. They want to know the minutia of how your products are made. They want to know where your factories are. They want to know the history of the company. They want to know the names of the Chief Marketing Officer’s children. These folks are interested in the brand, and will use this wealth of information as part of their personal “story” about you.

4. Brand evangelists are looking for a place to congregate with other evangelists. What would Mary Kay Cosmetics be without its giant conventions? Whereas multi-level marketers meet up at Holiday Inns or Dollywood, brand evangelists meet up with one another online. It is one thing to have an online forum for your fans to discuss the merits of your products, but it’s a whole other thing to provide a fanatical atmosphere for your customers to share stories and participate in co-creation. Starbucks for example, does a terrific job of allowing its evangelists to connect with one another via its Facebook page.

Of all things that Social Media can help you do, perhaps nothing matches the ability to activate, inspire and enable brand evangelists.

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Mickey Social Media brand communities, brand loyalty, brand pride, community engagement, multi-level marketing, online conventions, personal experiences

This week’s social media blog posts:
Monday: Seven ways to doom a Social Media program.
Tuesday: Co-Creating with Social Media.
Wednesday: Building Brand Evangelism through Social Media.
Thursday: Social Media and Reputation Management.
Friday: Now that you’ve engaged, it’s time to re-engage.

(This is the nineteenth in our series of Social Media posts for the month of October. We look forward to your feedback on this series.)

Mars Candy Company let customers decide the newest color for M&M’s. VitaminWater is soliciting recommendations for new flavors from customers. Budweiser allowed web site visitors to vote for the commercials they wanted to see in the Super Bowl. And recently, Netflix offered $1 million to any engineers or scientists who could develop an algorithm to improve Netflix’s ability to predict what movies users would like by a modest 10 percent.

These are all well-promoted examples of companies co-creating with their customers.

We’ve talked about how the target of a Social Media campaign is not just acting as a receiver of information, but also how that audience becomes the medium through which information is passed to others, and how members have the ability to edit, comment on or add to the communication. That “add to” characteristic of Social Media serves as the basis (and the opportunity) for co-creation with customers.

Co-creation is exactly what it sounds like: the marketer is soliciting input, ideas and viewpoints from customers, with the intent of integrating some of this input into a new, improved product or service, or to provide more lifetime value to customers. It is the customers’ “seal of approval.”

The benefits of a co-creation effort are many fold. For one, you are talking with real customers who feel a connection with you. The fact that you are actively listening to them and considering their input is the ideal way to strengthen the bond between you and your customers. And because the final product has a part of “them” involved, the customers involved in co-creation are more likely to be loyal to you and evangelize on your behalf.

Another benefit is the opportunity to “get outside the ivory tower.” Talking to real customers is a perspective that’s often missed in many organizations. Focus groups or voice of the customer studies offer insights on customer behavior and attitudes, but are more of a “snapshot in time.” True co-creation is an opportunity to keep a line of communication open 24/7 with customers.

How have other companies done this? One example is a greeting card company that set up an online community where customers could share opinions on greeting card design, messaging and pricing. And Kodak created a customer blog called “A Thousand Words.” This blog allows users to contribute their own photos and the stories behind them, and each week Kodak’s team selects one for inclusion in its “Picture Wednesday” series. Over time, Kodak’s fan contributions have created a very impressive gallery.

So how do you start a co-creation plan? The first step is to identify those customers you wish to co-create with. These are primarily the high-value users of your product or service, the ones who know your products, have stuck with you for the long term and have remained “opted in” for your communications. It is imperative that you are transparent with them and tell them exactly what you have in mind. You may wish to incentivize them with special offers, the opportunity to beta test products or get the offerings before they hit the general market.

Once you’ve found your co-creators, you’ll need to create the infrastructure of a community. This can be a special web site they can log into to find information and post comments, a message board you post strictly for co-creation, a Facebook page or even an occasional email from you with a question of the day. To amplify the effectiveness of a co-creation program, consider allowing all participants to see the responses from all other participants and partake in “side conversations.”

The key thing to remember is that this is not a forum to sell or up-sell a customer. It is for feedback on how the customer feels about various elements of your product or service, insights as to what can be improved, pain points that are experienced, and what the customer is trying to accomplish when she uses your product. It is your opportunity to observe your best customers in the wild. Your role here is to enable the conversation, moderate and listen. Even at this stage, customers tend to trust one another more than they trust your company.

Don’t limit encounters with your co-creator to your marketing team. This is an opportunity to bring the full insight, knowledge and expertise of your entire organization to the creation process. Customers want to talk to the people who design products. They want to interface with customer service personnel. They are even interested on management’s perspective—as long as all these points of view are authentic and aren’t presented just to put a good face on the company or in an attempt to sell more.

Just a reminder, you can receive updates on the Quisenblog and get alerts to bonus content by following me on Twitter. Click here to receive updates.

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Mickey Social Media audience medium, brand loyalty, Budweiser, customer input, Kodak, Mars Candy, Netflix, online community, VitaminWater

This week’s social media blog posts:
Monday: The two kinds of online consumers.
Tuesday: Creating a Community, Part 1.
Wednesday: Creating a Community, Part 2.
Thursday: Social Media you can own.
Friday: Giving up control.

(This is the ninth in our series of Social Media posts for the month of October. We look forward to your feedback on this series.)

Here we are, more than a week into this series on Social Media, and we’ve hardly bothered to utter the terms “Facebook” or “Twitter.” How can that be?

Basically, because up to now, we’ve been talking about the value of Social Media and the importance of adopting a platform that is helpful, transparent, user-directed and focused on the greater needs of the customer. The one thing that’s been missing so far is a network. Where does your community gather? How does its members get information to one another? How do you find people, reach them, and have them willingly pass your information on to others in their spheres of influence?

A community is a group of people with common interests who interact with one another. This can lead to feelings of solidarity, team spirit and a collective intelligence. Community leads to connections between people and products. The challenge is to interact in a manner that comes off as mutually beneficial. One way to involve your customers as a community is to make them “co-conspirators.” Insiders. Let them into your teepee. Proudly show them how sausage is made.

That is where social networks come in. Social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have millions of users and communities who use the social networks to connect with one another. Hundreds of thousands of communities already exist in these networks. The average Facebook user, for example, belongs to more than 2 groups.

The growth of these social networks has been phenomenal. Facebook alone had 300 million users as of September—up more than 100 million since April. And Twitter just passed the 1 billion views mark.

Here are some considerations to keep in mind when thinking about creating an online community or group:

1. Make your content “Buzzworthy.” Ask, “is this something a lot of people would be interested in, or is it simply what I want everyone to know?”
2. Investigate whether communities already exist that you can be a part of or take advantage of.
3. Don’t limit yourself to a single platform, and make sure your content matches the platform.

Here’s an example of a brand that has been quite successful at building a community of its most impassioned users. The brand is Jeep. And the passionate Jeep owner wants to connect with others who feel the same way about their vehicles. So they use Jeep’s Facebook page as a gathering place where they can share pictures, swap stories and help one other source hard-to-find parts or answer performance questions.

By creating a place where its community can gather and share their passion, Jeep has also set up a framework where the bulk of the communication is between followers. These are the exchanges that over time build true brand loyalty.

In tomorrow’s post, we’ll provide an example of how you can use social sites to create a community from the ground up with your company at the center.

If you have any feedback on this or other posts, we’d love to hear it.

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Mickey Social Media brand loyalty, community participation, Jeep, online communities, online networking platforms, valuable content