The Social Customer Manifesto

2007 Social Media & CRM 2.0 Professional Certification Seminar

Drumroll, please...announcing:

What: 2007 Social Media & CRM 2.0 Professional Certification Seminar
Where: San Francisco, CA
When: March 27-28, 2007
Learn more: http://www.bptpartners.com/socialmedia_agenda.aspx

On March 27th and March 28th, I'll be co-hosting a two-day professional seminar, "Social Media & CRM 2.0" along with Paul Greenberg (Author, "CRM at the Speed of Light" and principal at BPT Partners). This event will be held at the offices of our friends Fleishman-Hillard here in San Francisco. (Thanks, Fleishman!)

The 2007 Social Media & CRM 2.0 Professional Certification Seminar is endorsed by Rutgers University Center for CRM Research, CRMGuru.com, the National CRM Association, Greater China CRM and CRMA Japan.

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Topics include:

Why the new social media: Communications and the era of the social customer -- Traditional means of doing this through messaging marketing campaigns are no longer adequate. The new social media, blogging, user communities, podcasting and social networking are increasingly become tools of choice for businesses. Learn the why's, where's, and what's in the segment on the strategic framework.

The Business Blog Field Guide -- Every publication from Business Week, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal to online white papers warn businesses the blogging is not an optional endeavour. Those that don't will not survive, so we are going to give you what you need to not just survive the on rush but prosper. This module will explain how to produce a blog, what the benefits are, and what conditions you need to make it a success.

Components of Blogging -- You have the framework with the first 2 modules, now we're going to get down. You've created the environment, time for you to get what you need to know to actually write the business blog in a consistent and timely way.

Customer Communities and Social Network Analysis -- In this session, you will learn about the value of social networks, customer communities and the tools and practices to facilitate their creation and maintenance. If you do it right, your customers will be the advocates you desire and the business lifeblood you need for sustaining the kind of growth you've dreamed about - in collaboration with those customers you know to be important to your present and future.

The Theory and Practice of Podcasting -- This module will not only explain what a podcast is, why it's important to you as a business person, but how to actually produce a podcast. It will also bust some of the myths of podcasting that have already grown up around its young, explosive life. There is no form of social media that promises to meet the needs of the new generations of customers as well as this one - especially for those on the move. Imagine, having a good time creating something that can benefit your business - anytime, anywhere, any way you like? This module will give you the tools to do that.

Defining Your High Value Opportunities Using Social Media -- Now, we get down and well, sorta dirty. How does this directly apply to your business? What industry you're in, who your target markets are, will make a genuine difference in the approaches and applications of the social media tools. If you're a B2B business v. a B2C business, there will be differences in approach. If you want to use the tools for co-creation of value with your customers or for feedback retrieval and customer conversations it will make a difference. The final module will examine what those specific applications can be for specific business situations and models.

Learn more: http://www.bptpartners.com/socialmedia_agenda.aspx

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.

A Look Back At 2006 - The Customer Really Is In Charge

This is my look back at 2006 from the current issue of CRMGuru.

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Companies Are Actually Engaging in Conversations With Customers

By Christopher Carfi, Cerado Inc.

In 2004, there were a few odd shakes. Some organizations noticed them, but most ignored them, perhaps attributing them to the distant passing of large truck.

In 2005, a few small, but noticeable, cracks appeared in the fortifications that separated The Corporation from its customers.

In 2006, the cracks widened. For some organizations, portions of the fortifications began to crumble and crash to the ground, casting away long-held beliefs and practices as they fell. It was the year the reliance on one-way "control" of the customer began to give way to "conversations" in earnest.

While viewing the world through the three-sided prism of "sales," marketing" and "service" still holds as a reasonable way to characterize the breadth of CRM, these changes in customer relations affected all three areas very differently.

Sales

For some in sales, "CRM" is synonymous with Sales Force Automation (SFA). The problem is, very few customers want to be "managed" by their sales representatives. In 2006, those customers who "weren't going to take it anymore" started taking up arms.

We've entered an era rich with cheap, easy, accessible of online tools to publish in nearly any format. Consequently, 2006 saw an explosion of words, photos and videos of customers documenting their experiences with products of nearly every stripe. Did you see the photos of the exploding Dell laptop in Osaka? If you didn't, search on "dell laptop fire." Those pictures sparked Dell to recall more than 4 million laptop batteries, and the incident ultimately may cost Sony, which manufactured the batteries, hundreds of millions of dollars. Millions of customers shared their experiences with companies with the world via their personal blogs, as well as through online communities such as TripAdvisor. Consequently, salespeople have been put in the unenviable position of competing in a world where the customer is, in many cases, better-informed than they are.

Another trend that affects sales is the rise of a new type of corporate customer: the "bizsumer." These are individuals within large organizations who are making buying decisions at an individual level, oftentimes as a means to "get things done" in their groups without having to deal with the bureaucracy of their own organization.

The bizsumer is purchasing tools for project management, collaboration, business social networking and other systems at a price point that is often below the radar of centralized organizational planning—and usually delivered as an online service. (Joe Kraus, CEO of collaboration provider Jot, calls this purchasing things that are "expensable," rather than "approvable.") As such, sales has needed to embrace tactics that are much more common in the mass-market realm, such as online ordering and payment by credit card, which is a marked shift in the customer engagement process.

Marketing and PR

Of the three primary CRM areas, the areas of marketing and public relations made the most strides with respect to customer engagement. Not only startups but also behemoths such as General Motors, Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems have embraced social technologies such as blogs and podcasts in a big way, as a method of getting their message out and engaging customers in the conversation about their products. These processes of engagement with customers through social media, however, need to be done correctly, and with unassailable ethics and transparency. As an example, Wal-Mart and Edelman, a PR firm, found themselves in significant hot water in October 2006, when it came to light that a blog framed as a "grassroots" effort of regular, everyday folk ("Jim and Laura," who were driving their RV across the country, from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart and documenting it) was actually a planned marketing campaign, paid for by Wal-Mart and supported by Edelman.

It turned out that "Jim" and "Laura" were professional journalists on assignment. ("Jim" was Jim Thresher, a photojournalist for The Washington Post, and "Laura" was Laura St. Claire, a professional freelancer.) With incredible research tools at their fingertips, customers now can ferret out the truth about products and companies in only a few clicks. Despite such missteps, through social networking, other companies began to put a more human face on their organizations. An increasing number of companies are engaging with their customers directly online; answering their questions in the public square; and moving away from "marketingspeak" and toward developing deeper relationships with their customers based on actual interpersonal trust.

Beacons

And then came "support tagging." Stowe Boyd and Greg Narain, of the social application firm Blue Whale Labs, call these tags "beacons." A beacon is a post in a public place, such as a personal blog, meant to draw the attention of a service provider to an issue the customer is having with the company's products. In essence, beacons turn the service model upside down, drawing companies to the customer's site to help them, rather than forcing the customers to go through the often onerous support process prescribed by the vendor organization. (The vendor organizations respond to such beacons through diligent, often automated, monitoring of search engine results for new items containing their company name, their products or relevant phrases.)

When it works, a representative from the vendor organization, or even an individual who may be part of a larger enthusiast community, will connect with the customer in the customer's space and resolve the issue.

So I would call 2006 a sea-change year for CRM. Sales faced an ever-more-vigilant buyer. Marketing engaged with customers—and was called to task when it went overboard. Support is actually—surprise—supporting the customer, as opposed to purely being a cost center. The customer really is in charge.

(link)

Podcast: Customer Relationships, Communications and Enterprise Social Networking

Had a great conversation on Wednesday with Shel Holtz, on the For Immediate Release podcast. We chatted about the link between communications and customer relationships, and the importance of communication within an organization. We also talked at some length about where things are going with Haystack, Cerado's enterprise social networking tool.

Would love your feedback! Click here to listen.

Chevy Careens Out Of Control (Or Do They?): A Roundup Of The Tahoe / Apprentice Ad Flap

The writing has been fast-and-furious over the weekend, with opinions flying on whether Chevy royally screwed the pooch with their current ad campaign for the Chevy Tahoe, a tie-in (somehow) with the TV show The Apprentice. To summarize: Chevy has set up a site where anyone can create his or her own commercial, splicing together a number of video clips and background music supplied by Chevy. More importantly, these user-generated commercials can have text floating over the images of the creator's choosing. Therein lies the rub. It's no surprise (to anyone with an IQ above room temperature) that this has unleashed the creative juices of a number of folks who have found the perfect platform for their messages.

A couple of examples that C|Net has archived can be found here. (Go ahead, check them out if you haven't seen them. We'll be here when you get back.)

Thoughts on the situation so far:

Tara Hunt: "[Chevy] should taking advantage of the valuable (even if it is vitriolic) feedback that they are getting and use this as an opportunity to change direction and survive into the future of this community-driven market."

Doc: "Watch."

B. L. Ochman: "Proving that execs at big companies, and their agencies, don't monitor what's being said online over the weekend, Chevy left thousands of anti-Chevy consumer-made ads on the Chevy Apprentice make-your-own-commercial site this weekend."

Seth Godin: "Chevy is learning this the hard way with their Tahoe campaign... in which the best commercials are the ones that say, 'Don't buy me!'"

TechDirt: "It seems like perhaps GM understood what would happen a lot more than the so-called 'experts' give them credit for. In this day, anyone opening up such a contest has to know that it'll be used for 'anti' ads. It's happened so often that they must have expected it. In fact, by then being open about it, GM is getting even more mileage from this campaign, and making it appear that they are more open to listening to those who disagree with them...So, it's questionable as to whether or not GM was 'slow to react' or if they are simply doing everything according to plan."

AdRants: "Negative things will always be said about a brand. Understanding and accepting opposing views does far more for a brand's mojo than killing off divergent opinion. Let's hope this is what's happening at Chevy and not that the ads are still up because it's the weekend and big companies don't work weekends."

Carl: "I don't understand how otherwise rational people look at this campaign as a positive. It would be like letting people create print ads for McDonalds, and publishing all of the ads that talk about cholesterol, fat, calories, carbohydrates and fat kids. And then patting themselves on the back for letting people 'speak their mind' and for 'understanding social networking.' This campaign can only damage the brand by reinforcing the negatives. Isn't this marketing 101? The best GM can hope for is to convince all of the people who already hate the product that GM is a cool company with products they hate."

And a whole bunch more.

I think there are a few things to think about here. One perspective that that this is, in some ways, akin to the LA Times wikitorial fiasco. If that's the case...the GM didn't consider the possibility that people would create ads that were not in line with GM's vision of what should be done...then shame on GM. Any opportunity for "user-generated" media in any topic where there are strong feelings will generate the same spectrum of responses. If that's the case, GM was simply Not Thinking. Any subject that evokes passionate responses will naturally have this outcome.

A thought: Perhaps a worthwhile tactic to take in these types of situations is to proactively set up areas/categories for the primary viewpoints that are likely to emerge. In the LA Times case, setting up two wikitorials (one "pro-war" and one "anti-war") may have radically changed the outcome of their experiment. In Chevy's case, allowing the "directors" of the videos to classify them as "pro-SUV" and "anti-SUV" would have been one way to proactively address the problem. It's what Scoble did here ("Let The Venom Flow!"), and it's a very effective tactic in cases where this type of activity is likely to occur. It's going to happen. Might as well embrace it.

So, it seems from my vantage point that there are three "standard" things that Chevy could do. The options...

• Option 1: Pull the negative ads
• Option 2: Leave the negative ads, do nothing (It's the Marc Canter approach: "I don't give a damn about what anyone says about me, just spell my name right.")
• Option 3: Leave the negative ads, engage

Option 1 is the Bad option. If they go down that road, they'll get crucified.

Option 2 is an OK option. They may be called "clueless," but they'll still be getting some buzz out of the campaign. (And, pragmatically, the folks who are creating the negative ads -- as well as the individuals who find that the negative ads resonate with them -- probably aren't going to be buying an SUV anytime soon, anyway.)

Option 3 is a Pretty Good option. In addition to leaving the ads up, trying to understand what the negative-ad-creators are attempting to communicate and putting some plans in place to ACTUALLY address the concerns could rocket GM forward in this regard, if they are able to make some commitments and meet them. There's some upside here, if they get their act together.

What do you think GM should do, if anything?

UPDATE:

Chevy responds in the NYTimes (registration or bugmenot req'd). The money quote, from Chevy representative Melisa Tezanos:

"We anticipated that there would be critical submissions. You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it's part of playing in this space." (via Adrants)

So, it's at least Option 2. Wanna trade that and go for door #3, Melisa?

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As a footnote, it's worth noting that not all the ads are anti-Chevy or anti-SUV. Some are chuckleworthy. Examples:

Snakes On An SUV! (not advised for those with an aversion to profanity)
Badgerbadgerbadger (disclosure: we did this one, inspired by this)
Way too Emo (for Kathy Sierra, apparently)