The Social Customer Manifesto

Prerequisites For Setting Up A Business-Driven Web 2.0 Effort

Since the beginning of the year, have been asked the following question (in various forms) time and time again: If we want to use this social media "stuff" to connect with customers, how do we get started?

At this point, it seems that the natural inclination is to jump right in and start prescribing technology (e.g. "well, let's set up a Wordpress or TypePad blog and we're done!" or "Let's get the Haystack network up this week!").  While the technology is an enabler, there are still the basic questions that need to be answered in order to get things off on the right path, and help to stack the deck in favor of success.  Today, let's concentrate on the fundamentals of what an organization needs to think about before embarking on a social media activity.

#1) Why

Why do this?  Why start a blog or a social network or other Web 2.0-oriented effort?  Sometimes, the answer is simply "In order to connect."  And, in the case of many, many blogs (and IM, and Plazes, and Twitter, etc.), that answer is sufficient.  However, as is more often the case, there are additional reasons to jump in:  better and more timely feedback from customers, the ability to connect with others working on similar problems, putting a human face on what had been historically a sterile organization, creating a framework for communications, or, most importantly, creating a platform for enabling better/broader/more timely information exchange. 

The "why" is critical.  (And, as a point of note, "because we want to explore this and get to understand it" may be the right answer.  When that's the case, make sure that expectations are set accordingly.)

#2) Who

Web 2.0 is about people.  Period.  Who are the people involved?  Who will be the primary contributors to the effort?  What are their backgrounds?  Who are they as people?  In addition, who are the other people who will be interacting with the environment, even if they don't initially contribute?  In a blog, the ratio of commenters-to-posters is large; the ratio of readers-to-commenters is astronomical.  What's in it for each of those constituencies?  Does the environment support them and provide what they need?  What value does each group derive from it?

Similarly, in a social network, there are typically a handful of "power" users, a slightly larger group of sometimes-contributors, and a huge group of people who may only be observing.  (Members of this last group are commonly referred to as "lurkers.)  What's in it for them?

#3) Where

Online gathering places are examples of the "third place" as defined by Oldenberg:  a "place" other than home or work, for democracy, civil society, and social engagement.  Is what you are putting together a destination, or a directory that sends people forth on their journeys?  (Both are relevant.)  What does the place feel like?  Is it open, or exclusive?  Is it part of a larger site, or a stand-alone entity?  How will people find it?

#4) When

Is the activity that you are proposing using social media an ongoing concern, or tied to a particular event?  Note that unless there is a large, existing group of participants, it will oftentimes take a few months, perhaps even a year, to achieve "critical mass."

It's like planting a garden.

#5) How

"How" is all about the norms of the place.  What's the tenor of the interaction?  Is it "strictly business," or relaxed?  Is it moderated, or free-wheeling?  What will participants do if their contributions are edited or deleted?  If there is a "topic," will off-topic discussions be immediately squelched, or will the interactions be free-form, like a lively dinner party?

Additionally, a key "how" item is thinking about how the site's members deal with "trolls" and spammers.  Will the be ignored? Banned?  Given a warning?  Deleted without comment?  Sent to "time out" for a period of time?

Much of the "how" derives from the "who."  The types of individuals who collectively make up the constituency of the place are the ones who will drive the "how."  Heavy-handed moderation will make the place constricting, yet too lax a policy will rapidly devolve the interactions into noise.

Want to see a guide that you can use to start conversations in your organization?  A template you can use, after the jump.

Future Is Here, Unevenly Distributed, Etc.

"It's all a million miles away from high-powered branding from the top down. You let go of the trappings of high office when you follow this path, and get down to the grassroots, taking the risk of having some ordinary, rambling conversations in the real world, instead of broadcasting brand mantras over mainstream media. There are no comforting stats of impacts-per-thousands spent this way, just the reality of a certain amount of grind. Of course it's not really a grind if you happen to like talking to people."

-Johnnie Moore, regarding Hugh (more), regarding the way it is.

Clue Implementation Unit Podcast #1

(click here to listen) (click here to subscribe to this feed)

In this, our inaugural podcast, we introduce the Clue Unit podcast format which includes these recurring sections.

1. Introduction
2. Announcements -- conferences, news, etc.
3. Focused Topical Discussion
4. Conference Chatter -- Anything goes
   
       

Today's Topics:

• The role and basis of reputation systems in online communities
• Introduction of Joost (formerly The Venice Project), and what the beta shows about the direction of the technology and social elements of the system.
• Issues concerning how much an organization should be able manipulate/remix submissions for projects that depend on user-generated content.
  

More Human Than Human

the human touch
Originally uploaded by max_thinks_sees.

"I am the jigsaw." - R.Z.

I have to disagree, relatively strongly, with a number of items in Dave Taylor's post "When Is A Blog Too Personal?" Dave writes:

"One of the great ongoing debates in the murky world of blogging is whether your weblog should be personal or professional, whether you should be revealing or private. There are, of course, many different answers and at some level the real answer is "whatever you're comfortable with", but I think it's a topic worth exploration nonetheless.

Business blogging is a different story because your goal is to convey a certain level of expertise, credibility and, yes, professionalism, and that can be counter to the idea of being too personal.

One solution is to use the "water cooler rule". If a topic isn't something you'd talk about with your supervisor hanging around the water cooler or coffee station at your office, it's probably not appropriate for your professional blog either.

That might work pretty well for you, but I don't think it goes far enough, because I can easily imagine chatting about the latest TV show or sporting event with colleagues and supervisors, but that doesn't mean it's a good fit for my business blog."

I actually think the "water cooler rule" is a pretty good one. However, Dave continues:

"I have a friend who is a professional editor and writer who is also in what she calls an "alternative relationship" where she and her husband both date other people. It works for her, but when she blogged about her relationship on her professional blog, I was shocked.

She said that "I'd rather just 'out' myself and if it turns off potential clients, I probably wouldn't have wanted to work with them anyway." I just don't see it that way. When you buy a burger from the local eatery, do you want to know the politics of the owner? When you get your car tuned up at the local garage, do you even care about the religious background of the mechanic?"

Here is where we disagree, strongly. When choosing a service provider, I absolutely want to know his or her context and worldview, biases and motivations, whenever possible.

Exhibit A: I will never get a Domino's pizza, because I disagree strongly with founder Tom Monaghan's politics.

Exhibit B: I really like the Magnolia pub, in the Haight in San Francisco. Not only do they have terrific beer, but their menu tells me this about the philosophy of the owners:

"Magnolia is proud to support sustainable agriculture as well as local farms and businesses in order to serve food that tastes better. We buy as much of our produce as possible from independent, local, organic farms based on seasonal availability. Our meat and poultry is all natural, free range, and raised without the use of hormones or antibiotics. We make sure that our seafood choices are abundant and fished or farmed in sustainable ways. In general, we buy as locally and sustainably as possible and encourage you to do the same."

So I suppose, yes, I do want to know the politics of the owner of the burger joint. (n.b. That said, there are a whole bunch of waypoints from transactions to community.)

We're all jigsaw puzzles of varying interests, history, background and, yes, skills. For some, the Joe Friday, "just the facts" approach may be what they desire from their vendors. On the other hand, many of us spend at least a third (ha, right...more like two-thirds) of our days in our "professional" skins. Do we really want to be denying all of those aspects of "who we are" a majority of our lives? I think not, so Dave, I need to respectfully disagree with your post.

Some other viewpoints on humanity and business blogging:

• Shel Holtz: "Business, Humanity and Blogs"
• Jory DesJardins: "How To Get Naked" (bonus link: Survey - Sex and Money Still Taboo)

From the archives:
The Business Blogging Field Guide (HTML, or PDF)

Channeling Aretha

Frank Rose: "PR fiascoes tend to be a sign that nobody's thinking about the customer."

From a great article by Frank Rose, regarding the Sony Playstation 3 launch.

Emerging Trends In Marketing

Yesterday I gave a presentation on emerging trends in marketing to a group of over 100 executives in Washington DC. Key topics covered were:

• The Evolution of Marketing
• How "Web 2.0" Is Affecting Business Relationships - The Customer Is In Control
• Marketing Tactics - Offline, Online
• Viral Marketing Ethics and Best Practices
• Social Networking As A Community Marketing Component

If you're not able to view the embedded slides above, you can also find the slide deck here.

Your Attention, Please

John Hagel led an interesting session on Attention. (This was at a much higher level the Steve Gillmor's Attention conversations.) The pitch:

Old scarce resource: Shelf space
New scarce resource: Time and attention

In this context, Hagel gave his "Three A's" of Attention:

• Attract - have customers seek you out
  
• Assist - how do you assist customers, pre and post purchase?
  
• Affiliate - mobilize complementary resources to deliver more value

The winners, Hagel argues, are the organizations that have the ability to orchestrate large array of resources.

He also argued the "brand promise" change that is occurring:

• Old brand promise: "We have a great product," or "We are a great vendor"
• New brand promise: "I know you, better than anyone else. You can trust me, and us."

A very interesting insight...customers have an attention deficit as well. In other words, attention cuts both ways. Not only does the vendor desire the customer's attention, but it's critical that the customer can get the vendor's attention as well. (Case in point? Think about the last time you tried to "pound out" of an interactive voicemail system and wanted the attention of a real person...)

I was fortunate enough to facilitate a session as part of the talk, and our group came up with four key insights:

1) We discussed the Edelman Trust Barometer, and that the most trusted person is "a person like me." Attention is given to those who are trusted. Ergo...determining affinity between vendor and customer, or members of a customer community, is a critical precondition in gaining trust. Those who are trusted get the attention.

2) Scarcity and exclusivity may focus attention. (Think about the "red velvet rope" at the trendy club of your choice.) The flipside of this is that exclusivity, especially fake exclusivity, is fashion and the attention fades once the bloom is off the rose.

3) There may be cases where attention is contextual (John Winsor said this very well during the session). The degree of a attention given to a particular vendor, customer or situation will also be affected by the competing alternatives for that attention at that moment in time.

4) The biggest "a-ha!" that our group arrived at was that attention between vendor and customer is not always symmetric. In other words, there are times when a customer is giving a great deal of attention to the vendor ("I have a critical issue and need to fix this right now!") and the vendor is giving little or no human attention to the customer ("Thank you for your call...your call is very important to us...your average wait time is '10' minutes...fade to Girl from Ipanema...").

Based on (4), above, we hit on the big idea of the day. Our group hypothesized that when there is an attention gap between the attention being given by the customer to the vendor vs. the attention being given by the vendor to the customer, the customer gets frustrated and becomes dissatisfied with the relationship.

Does your organization give as much attention to its customers as they give to it?

Related: On Time, Attention and Marketing

A Conversation With Eric Mattson At MarketingMonger

Eric Mattson of MarketingMonger is on a mission to have 1,000 conversations with marketers, and to present them all as podcasts. Eric writes:

"For the 20th podcast in my project, I connected with Chris Carfi of Cerado.

I first ran across Chris's blog when he published his original Social Customer Manifesto.

Then I heard interesting things about Cerado's Haystack social networking software for businesses.

So I was excited to get a chance to talk with Chris about his social customer philosophy, his entrepreneurial efforts with Cerado, Haystack's success to date and more."

A link to his summary of the call here, and have a listen to the mp3 file here.

Thanks for the invitation, Eric!

Marketers Out Of Touch With Customers

On the heels of the previous post, which has some saying "CRM is dead," comes a very interesting article by Barney Beal. Here are some points of note from the article, quoting a recent study from the CMO council. (All stats below were sourced from Barney's excellent report.) According to the study:

• Two thirds of respondents said they have no formal system for tracking marketing's role in acquiring new customers
• Over one third don't have a model of their "best" customer or opportunity
• Just under a third have no reliable data on profitability of key customers
• Nearly 50% said someone other than marketers influences the "segmentation and targeting strategy"*

Now, those points noted, there is a huge reliance on existing "CRM" systems. This, however, is frought with some problems. 33% of the respondents cited their CRM systems as their primary information source. Yet the survey found that "40% of the respondents rated their customer data systems as 'weak' or 'very weak' in timeliness and depth; availability of useful data; reports and analytics; and relevance to marketing strategies."

The whole article is here.

* - N.B. I still despise the terms "segmentation" and "targeting" in this context. The first to me seems like it refers to tearing the customer limb from limb. The second seems to indicate a viewpoint that the customer is prey that is to be stalked and bagged like a trophy elk. But I digress.

Signal vs. Noise vs. Customers

There's quite the conversation going on over at 37signals' "Signal vs. Noise" blog today, and I'm still puzzling over why said conversation is even taking place. What's going down: Matt Linderman, from 37s, today put up a post that starts like this:

Useless, absurd, must, need, appalled, just, infuriating, essential, etc.

"What could be more fun than those magnetic words that let you write poems on the fridge? How about a set of magnetic words that let you write support emails. Our kit would include the following: useless, absurd, must, need, appalled, just, infuriating, essential, oversight, pointless, confusing, nutty, and maybe some good phrases too, like 'it can’t be that hard,' 'i’m a programmer, i should know,' and 'even Blogger let’s you do that.' Of course, the whole set should be ALL CAPS too."

He then proceeds to excerpt fifteen customer emails that 37s has received, annotating each one with a snippet of text that certainly could be interpreted as an accusatory finger, highlighting what was wrong with each email that their support line had received.

After reading and re-reading the emails that Linderman posted, I'm even more puzzled. Yes, some of them contained some hyperbole. But what about the others, like this one?

"Please call me regarding my basecamp system — (615) 780-XXXX."

Yeah. Boy, I could see how that would be upsetting...a customer wanted to connect with someone at her service provider. Or how about this one?

"We NEED a web based system like Basecamp, but I cannot tell if it will be any better by reading the information you have available. I’m looking for sort of a web based excel-like program. We need to be able to see at a glance every sponsor’s name, sponsor level, address, contact info, if they’ve been billed/payed, if we need/have artwork, and if they have comments. We need to authorize up to five people for editing and another 60 or so for viewing."

Indeed. A customer clearly spelling out his requirements and needs. That customer must obviously be deluded and prone to hysterics.

The conversation plays out over 120+ comments. And then "JF" (I'm assuming Jason Fried, of 37signals) jumps in with two comments that, frankly, just seem defensive and tinged with the slightest bit of hubris, all at once.

"We’re well aware of that, we’re well aware of our cash flow, we’re well aware of our churn, we’re well aware of our signups, we’re well aware of our growth, we’re well aware of our big-picture customer satisfaction. We’re well aware of what we’re doing, thank you."

and

"120 comments in and I’m surprised we haven’t heard from a progressive thinker who might wonder if all this 'bad' stuff is actually good for business. Could these sorts of discussions actually be good for a non-traditional business like 37signals? Do sales/signups go up on days with these heated debates? Could there be a positive business motive behind all this that more traditional business observers haven’t groked?"

Now, Cerado is a customer of 37signals, in that we use Basecamp. But this last quote from Fried has given me pause, and I'm hoping it's not a canary in the coalmine. The phrase "Do sales/signups go up on days with these heated debates?" is looking at a point in time. It's solely looking at the transaction. Now, couple that with the fact that (I hope!) any rational customer would certainly entertain taking his business elsewhere if he saw his support request pilloried in the public square as an example of what not to do. Put those two data points together, and one begins to wonder if 37signals is truly doing something differently (as they continuously claim), or if it's just another business looking for the quick turn, long-term-relationships be damned.

Others talking:

Zoli Erdos
Jason Kolb
Kandace Nuckolls
Steve Portigal
Marcus Campbell
Joe Taylor Jr.

(thanks to Zoli for the tip)