Month: February 2011

Customer Service “is” the New Marketing

Remember the old small business customer service mentality?  Where pleasing the customer came FIRST, and the need to delight them was “a given” not an option?   Great news – it’s back (or at least on its way back)!

The democratizing nature of social media has returned power to the customer, making Brand Advocates one of our strongest marketing assets.  If we want to share their power (not take it!), we need to adopt customer service as the new way of marketing – or “unmarketing,” a term mentioned by Brian Solis in the introduction to his book Engage, and Scott Stratten details extensively in his blog and book UnMarketing.

Considering this power shift, the #1 question we should be asking our Brand Advocates is “How may I serve you?” Ask early and ask often.

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6 Lessons From @RedCross Social Media Crisis

A social media crisis can occur very innocently and quickly, as when a social media community manager “mistweets”, sending a message intended for one Twitter account to another.  The consequences can be humorous or disastrous:  much depends on how the “crisis” is handled.

Such a mistweet occurred with the official Red Cross Twitter account. A message was sent to the account’s more than a quarter of a million followers touting the discovery of “more beer” and boasting:  “…when we drink we do it right.  #gettingslizzerd”

A nightmare?  For most, perhaps, but for the Red Cross, expert at handling a crisis, through candor, quickness, and humor, they turned it into a positive.

6 Lessons from the Red Cross Mistweet

1.  When a crisis occurs, address it quickly.
2.  Respond to the crisis in the same forum where it occurred, as well as putting to work other available social media networks.
3.  Be honest about the mistake.
4.  Apologize for the mistake.
5.  Don’t panic.
6.  Use the moment to humanize your brand.

The Red Cross tells the story best in their blog.

Glen Gilmore

Photo credit:  JasonWatkins, Flickr

Don’t Forget to Ask Women for Direction(s)!

In this new social media marketing world — where it’s less about demographics and more about relationships — one demographic still clearly matters:  WOMEN.

Women control 85% of household spending, and (according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch)

in 2011, women’s earning power will recover from the recession far quicker than men’s earning power will.

These numbers are good news for marketers, but they need to come with a strong CAUTION statement:  just because women are a strong purchasing demographic does not mean we can pay any less attention to the relationship work required to make and keep our brands highly relevant to women.

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Measuring Influence in the Social Media World #MMchat with Joe Fernandez of Klout

It was GREAT to have @JoeFernandez the CEO of @Klout on #MMchat last night so all of you could ask questions about this standard for measuring influence on Social Media.


The level of interaction on the chat was excellent and we learned a number of new things about Klout and where it is going when @JoeFernandez took the stage on #MMchat for a tweetchat with you all about Measuring Influence in the Social Media World. Who better to talk about measuring influence than the man leading Klout the standard indicator for measuring online influence?

Please take some time to review and the transcript from last night’s #MMchat with @JoeFernandez.

Thanks to all of you #MMchat tweeps and others for joining us last night and sharing your thoughts and questions on such an important topic, for it truly is all of you who make #MarketerMonday Chat matter!

Remember #MMchat makes Mondays MARVELOUS!!

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO

Klout is necessary

Klout is in the news. The Wall Street Journal piece on Klout surely made the rounds. Klout is praised and bashed, loathed and admired. Whether good or bad, Klout is necessary.

Klout’s founder, Joe Fernadez, is both a genius and a gentleman. He recognized a need in the marketplace and has been working aggressively to satisfy that need. The business press is taking note and is given him and his company earned recognition (and venture capitalists are giving him/them the big bucks to back it up). I got to spend some one-on-one time with Joe in Indianapolis during ExactTarget’s conference last year and found him to be a delightful dinner companion and a deep thinker. I like and admire him a lot.

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4 Keys to Increasing Your Klout Score

Now that the Wall Street Journal is writing about them, you probably already know about Klout. If you’re using Hootsuite, your Klout score, and the Klout score of your followers, is front-and-center. Here are four ways you can increase your Klout score.

  1. Get important people to talk about you. Klout measures the visible vestiges of influence. Getting people who already have Klout scores to retweet your tweets or in some other way mention you enables you to ride the draft of their influence. You can find these people by using Klout’s business service. You might check out HubSpot’s listing of Twitter Elite, too. Follow them on Twitter, retweet them, and if they don’t notice you, you can use a Twitter mention to ask them to retweet you. If you’ll get important people to talk about you, you can increase your Klout score.

    2. Read more

Slow journalism

Slow journalism comes to me so naturally that I’ve taken about five years to write about it.

On Wednesday morning, the Today programme (I cannot wake up without Radio 4′s good-natured, grumble-fest; that delicate blend of warm-crumpet humour and stern, stentorian urgency is the perfect mental espresso) was so interesting that I was moved to switch off the Babyliss. Following Al Jazeera English’s rolling coverage of the Egyptian protests, Marcus Webb, director of the Slow Journalism Company, and former director of BBC Global News Richard Sambrook, were discussing the missing ‘sense of perspective’ in our always-on reporting culture.

Webb was touting his new luxury print quarterly Delayed Gratification, which:

distils three months of the UK’s political, cultural, scientific and sporting life into a witty magazine of record. A combination of almanac, essays and reportage, Delayed Gratification operates on the principles of Slow Journalism, offers an antidote to throwaway media and makes a virtue of being the last to breaking news. Its publications are beautiful, collectible and designed to be treasured.

Gosh. I delayed my gratification for all of an hour, and subscribed as soon as I got to work.

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Presenting Through the Hourglass

You have 15 minutes to deliver a presentation that was constructed for 45.

We’ve all been there. My first ever professional presentation happened in 1996 and was to convince my then SVP of Sales that we needed to build a Web site for the company. I had a great deck put together. A carefully crafted script and a slew of charts and handouts to make the case over the course of the scheduled hour. The SVP runs in late and says, “Wion. You got ten minutes. Go.” I quickly made the case as best I could. He didn’t bite. Early #fail.

In fact, I’ll never forget his words. “You’ve put together a well thought out proposal based on the amount of paper here. But mark my words…this Internet thing is a fad. In two years, no one will remember what it is.”

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Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for a Digital Age



Thanks to digital technologies and networked activity, we’re living through a global transition that is redefining how culture and commerce operate. We’re presented with the opportunity to be active participants in this process, steering ourselves into new modes of civilization, verse being just passive spectators.  But if we don’t understand the biases of the tools and mediums we’re using, we’ll risk being slaves instead of masters.

This is not the first time this has happened, but it may be the most significant one so far. Every media revolution has given the people a sneak peek of the control panel of civilization, and a chance to view the world through a new lens. When humans developed language, we were able to pass on knowledge and experiences, and allow for progress. We could both listen and speak.

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How should you treat your best customers?

Here’s what most businesses do with their best customers: They take the money.

The biggest fan of that Broadway show, the one who comes a lot and sits up front? She’s paying three times what the person just three rows back paid.

That loyal Verizon customer, the one who hasn’t traded in his phone and has a contract for six years running? He’s generating far more profit than the guy who switches every time a contract expires and a better offer comes along.

Or consider the loyal customer of a local business. The business chooses to offer new customers a coupon for half off—but makes him pay full price…

If you define “best customer” as the customer who pays you the most, then I guess it’s not surprising that the reflex instinct is to charge them more. After all, they’re happy to pay.

But what if you define “best customer” as the person who brings you new customers through frequent referrals, and who sticks with you through thick and thin? That customer, I think, is worth far more than what she might pay you in any one transaction. In fact, if you think of that customer as your best marketer instead, it might change everything.

Seth Godin