Does your product pass Social QC?

Advocates are a whole new type of quality control: social quality control.  

If your product is fantastic, when identified and energized, your Advocates will spread the word like wildfire. Social networks and traditional word-of-mouth will start buzzing with your product, and sales will reflect your Advocates’ delight.

But your advocates won’t try to get someone to buy your sub-par product, and they certainly won’t apologize for you or your product.  Don’t try to make your Advocates do that work for you, because they won’t…and they shouldn’t have to.

The sale starts with your product, not your Advocates; your Advocates are simply the reward you get for ensuring your product is and does everything you promised it would (if not more!).  Your strongest relationships are built on trust – trust that your brand is committed to producing quality products and services – and if you don’t deliver that top-notch product, that essential trust is quickly lost.  Along with the sale. 

You might be tempted to use social media to over-highlight the best parts of your product in the hopes that the disappointing parts won’t be noticed.  But even the best social media relationships can’t perform magic… they won’t make up for a less-than-great product.

However, the good news is that when your product is strong and does carry through on your brand promises, advocates, through their social media relationships, can skyrocket your product sales.  Advocates engage, word gets out, and sales happen.  As Seth Godin said in his recent blog post, (Consider the category of ‘without apology’) People will go out of their way to buy and recommend products that don’t require an apology.”   They will go out of their way for you.  Because they want to… because your product is what it is supposed to be and has passed Social QC.

Don’t waste your time trying to hide your product flaws.  Invest your time in making a flawless product, and give your Advocates something to get excited about!

Ted Rubin

If your product is fantastic, when identified and energized your Advocates will spread the word like wildfire.

Are You Asking the Right Questions?

The surgery lasted an hour and a half longer than we expected, but they called and warned us from the operating room.  When Dr. Conter came out to explain what happened (during what was supposed to be a routine hernia repair surgery), we got answers to a question I asked several doctors last fall, following the removal of my husband’s cancerous kidney: “there seem to be some digestive issues; what might those be?”  Our surgeon found the bowel intertwined with a larger than anticipated four-pocketed hernia.  After unraveling the mess, he removed six inches of the upper bowel that couldn’t be saved, put things back where they belonged, and closed him up.  Dr. Conter remarked how amazed he was that Cliff hadn’t had a bowel obstruction, hadn’t had significant pain, and could process food at all.  We’re most grateful for the skill of this surgeon, his staff, and the fifth floor nurses at Lancaster Regional Hospital.

So, I’ve been (over)thinking, what questions might have the caught the attention of those two doctors so that this situation could have been better diagnosed?  This story could easily have had a much more unpleasant result. 

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Embracing Social Change in 2011

It seems predictive posts are all the rage right now so in my own mad style, I’ve taken a look at the tea leaves in order to share some “Sensei-riffic” (trademarking in the works) predictions for marketing, social, and the relationship between customers and brands. So rather than give you the usual obvious predictions, I am going to take a step towards the ledge and peer into the darkness. The signs I see  herald tremendous change that is just off the radar. 

So sit back, relax, and prepare to have your liberal marketing senses offended while enjoying or becoming outraged at this rum-nog fueled post! Cheers! 

Prediction 1: Social CRM will be a huge failure. 

Why? Because you cannot quantify an emotional human relationship no matter how hard you try. The quest to do so has begun anew with sCRM. To be clear its predecessor CRM is about numbers, not people. What other system does that to people? Right! The prison system! 

The same people who created CRM are now pushing sCRM. Same shit, different steaming pile. CRM completely dehumanized the customer by reducing the relationship to math. Next it is horribly lop-sided designed to deliver insight into how to get more money from a customer, not how to build a better, mutually beneficial relationship. Does it actually benefit the customer in any way? 

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