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→ Extending Customer Conversations v1.0.1
Of course you are listening to your customers, but are you listening everywhere they’re talking?
A recent survey* of over 400 marketing executives found that 56% said their
companies have no programs to track or spread positive word-of-mouth.
Only 30% rated their companies highly in their ability to handle or resolve
customer complaints.
Despite all the hype about social media, only 16% of respondents reported that
their companies have any routine system in place for monitoring what people are
saying about them or their brands online.
Why is Social Media an increasingly important word of mouth resource?
In addition to asking a friend to recommend a product for teeth whitening, a
social media user might seek the advice of @LPT, a mom on Twitter who has
1,312 people following her (i.e., listening to her) household hints and
recommendations. That user might also check in at Real Simple’s Simply Stated
blogs, or perhaps do a short search on Facebook.
In any case, a quick check of these resources may be both faster and more
verifiable than asking a friend or colleague face-to-face.
As a result, social media has made more people more influential to a substantially
larger network of people than could typically be assembled in the offline world.
Social Media has caused a revolution in word-of-
mouth because it replicates the credibility of offline
recommendation, while extending that conversation
to exponentially more people.
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As a marketer, you still have to know where to find people like @LPT and, also,
how to maximize the utility of the information they create.
So, how do you source and use the credible, authentic, authoritative, or influential
right now? Let’s take a closer look…
Why It Matters
It’s not just kids anymore; 45% of Facebook’s US audience is 26 years of age and
older. As a matter of fact, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is
women over 55. For marketers, Facebook is less an advertising platform and more
an opinion-sample tool for consumer insights.
How Marketers Are Using This Resource
Perhaps not surprisingly, there are over 500 group results for a search of ‘iPhone’
(and, in addition, over 500 more group results for ‘iPhone 3G’). Many of these
groups have at least 1,000 members. The page with the largest membership has
383,044 fans. The folks at Apple derive incredible value from these conversations.
But, it’s not just big brands being talked about. What about a company like TOMS
Shoes? Or Toms Skildpadde (a chocolate bar company from Denmark)? Or Tom’s
of Maine?
A group for TOMS Shoes has over 4,000 members. These are people so excited
about a pair of shoes that they’ll highlight a company fan page on their Facebook
profiles for their networks to see. So, if those 4,000 TOMS fans each have around
Facebook is a free social networking website where users interact with
one another, join networks, and chat. It started among university
students, but was opened to anyone over the age of 13 in 2006, and has
quickly expanded to over 150 million active users worldwide.
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200 friends, the brand is potentially being seen by 800,000 people. That’s a lot of
shoes…
“I am addicted to TOMS! Can't get enough of them. Wear them every day
to work. Love my Tahoe Blue cord TOMS!”
“I LOVE toms shoes! They are the most comfortable shoes you can’t find
a better pair! And I love how y’all help people in need when we buy your
stuff!”
“I got some TOMS for Christmas...I love them. My daughter wants a pair
but they don't come in her size.”
What about Tom’s of Maine?
“I dig Tom's deodorant.”
“I just found out the Tom's of Maine is owned by Colgate, which is a tester
on animals. I will no longer buy Tom's of Maine's until its parent company
ends cruelty to animals.”
How to Leverage This Resource Now
Create a profile. Search not only for your brand, but for topics of interest related
to your brand. Facebook is a powerful lens into the habits and attitudes of your
customers. Even without mentioning your brand directly, there is much to learn
about your customers’ unmet needs and spontaneous thoughts. If you see
something intriguing, determine how representative the attitude or behavior is
using the complete array of resources profiled in this document.
Carefully start a group or fan page. Consider becoming a sponsor of a group or
interest that reaches your brand fans. Or, host a contest for them. Offer
something of value that people can give to their friends or post to their profiles.
Click or Google Whopper Sacrifice or Claus for interesting, appropriate, and
outside-of-the-box benchmarking.
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Why It Matters
For brands, Twitter can be a much more powerful tool than Google search for
finding relevant, actionable information. Twitter also provides an unvarnished
look at your company, product, or brand.
How Marketers Are Using This Resource
Motrin recently ran some ads that centered on new moms who carry their babies
in slings (and might therefore need Motrin). The ads likened the sling to a fashion
accessory and said that while toting a baby can be tough, it "totally makes me look
like an official mom." Some moms saw the ads as snarky pokes at motherhood
and there was an outpouring of negative comments on Twitter. 5 days later, the
ads were pulled and the makers of Motrin issued a formal apology.
Twitter helped the brand realize sooner rather than later that they were spending
a lot of money to alienate their target.
HERE ARE SOME RECENT TWEETS ABOUT SOUTHWEST AIRLINES:
“Hahaha Southwest Airlines' new promotion is the "Yes You Can"
Sale...they're even rocking the Obama font”
“Chinese New Year Parade in SF, is now "Southwest Airlines Chinese New
Year Parade." Maybe a little Southwest logo on the Dragon? Terrible.”
“flew southwest airlines from LA to Albuquerque on a business trip
yesterday-they lost my luggage-they have not been helpful AT ALL”
Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read
other users' updates (known as ‘tweets’), which are text-based posts of
up to 140 characters. In 140 characters, a user is asked “What are you
doing?” but many people use it to post links, events, and other items of
interest to them and their followers.
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How to Leverage This Resource Now
Twitter is best understood by experiencing it. Create a profile. Look for some
followers. Monitor the buzz. And most importantly, talk back.
If you want to see what people are saying about your product, service, or brand
right now, point your browser to:
Why It Matters
Unlike Facebook or MySpace, LinkedIn is not a social environment; it is strictly
business networking. But the result is that LinkedIn is the word-of-mouth engine
of the B2B world.
When it comes to business-related services such as SEO, design, outsourcing,
technology purchase and lead generation, people turn to LinkedIn. LinkedIn
currently hosts over 35 million profiles and each member can be a source of
knowledge, advice, referrals and testimonials for your business or you personally.
For example, an individual LinkedIn member with only several dozen immediate
contacts may have an extended network that totals into tens of thousands and,
potentially, millions of other members. Any announcements or “status updates”
that one member posts on their profile would be available to at least their
immediate set of contacts and could potentially be passed along to additional
members through the extended network.
LinkedIn is a B2B word-of-mouth tool mainly used for professional
networking. It can serve as an individual’s online resume´ as well as a
place to maintain contact details of ‘connections.’
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How Marketers Are Using This Resource
The three best resources on LinkedIn are:
Recommendations
Recommendations are 3rd
party endorsements and having them
on your profile is a valuable way to strengthen your relationships
and substantiate your skills and talents.
Groups
LinkedIn Groups are established organizations that are part of the
networking structure of LinkedIn.
The main value of joining a group is that it gives you access to
people you might not normally have contact with in your offline
network. This extends the reach of your network without
investing extra hours in cocktail parties and industry events.
Answers
Answers allows you to post a question and invite your network to
respond.
The questions can address virtually any issue, and often serve to
test receptivity to a new idea or expose unmet needs.
How to Leverage This Resource Now
In the unlikely event you have not setup a profile, do so, and connect to other
friends, colleagues and business partners.
Then, search your company and see what folks are saying about it. Or, use
LinkedIn as a competitive intelligence tool. Find out what your business
customers want by reading the problems posed in questions. You be the judge
of the person’s authority by simply pulling up their LinkedIn resume´ which
indicates job experience, professional affiliations, education, expertise, third
party recommendations, and, of course, their network.
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Why It Matters
Most blogs are written by everyday people with a passion. The key is that there
are an unlimited number of things people are passionate about.
Technorati’s outstanding value is its ability to estimate the authority of the blogs
it searches. Technorati Authority is derived from the number of blogs linking to a
website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati
Authority a blog has. What does this mean to you? If a large number of websites
link to a blog, you can infer that when the author talks, people listen. In turn, the
author’s audience tends to pass relevant information and links on to their
networks. Watching influencers with high authority is thus a useful beacon of
your target’s attitudes and expectations in general.
Because the blogosphere is, by definition, interactive, authors with high authority
can also serve as a source of impromptu advice and insight for your brand.
Properly managed, they can be even more, including the nucleus of a virtual
customer advisory panel.
How Marketers Are Using This Resource
The utility of Technorati can be illustrated through a theoretical example:
Perhaps you are a marketer of backpacks. In the world of parents, backpacks are
only an occasionally hot topic, specifically, around August and September of each
year. Questions such as ‘Which ones are ‘cool’?, ‘Which one will provide the most
Think of Technorati as Google for blogs. There is a blog for just about any
imaginable topic; wine, exercise balls, origami, breakfast foods, New
England B&B’s… Technorati lets you search the blogosphere in the same
way you would conduct a typical internet search.
→ Technorati
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support?’, and ‘Will my kid be made fun of if his/her backpack is on wheels?’
abound.
To a marketer of backpacks, all of these questions are potentially crucial. A quick
search shows that the term ‘backpack’ is mentioned on nearly 7,000 blogs. Is it
possible to keep track of what people are saying on all those blogs and in specific
time periods? And what about the relative influence of the bloggers in the set?
How will you know that the insights of a mom in Kentucky are vital, but the
musings of dad in Massachusetts are less important?
Through Technorati, you can easily determine that the mom is also a pediatrician
and has 200 other blogs linking to her -- and that the dad only mentioned
backpacks in context of transporting a cat.
If you go to Technorati and search the blogosphere for ‘backpack’, you will come
back with 81,269 blog results.
If you filter your search to only those blogs with ‘some authority’, you’re down to
14,149 results.
How about ‘a lot of authority’? 1,564; a little more manageable.
Finally, if you adjust your search and add a hyphen to search for ‘back-pack”, you
will find an additional 9,828 blog results which then can be further refined to
1,669 results with ‘some authority’ and 165 results with ‘a lot of authority’.
How to Leverage This Resource Now
Start by examining Technorati’s directory of topics. From there, you can do an
advanced search, similar to Google, which allows you to filter results.
Instead of just searching the term ‘backpack,’ you could also include the words
‘children’ and ‘school’ and only search blogs about ‘parenting’ and ‘education’. In
this case, Technorati returns 24 extremely relevant and highly influential insights.
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Why It Matters
YouTube has long been a hothouse for spawning cultural phenomena, including
the recent David after Dentist, viewed over 10 million times.
YouTube follows the maxim of show, don’t tell. When combined with the fact that
every YouTube video is sharable, embeddable and designed to be commented on,
it is easy to understand how it has become a standard form of internet
communication for over 70 million unique visitors a month.*
Notably, this also means that any faux pas, lie, or failure of your product will be
documented, indexed, and archived for all time. Nonetheless, it is the ideal place
to act as ‘un-marketer’; tell it like it is, show people how to use your product, or
rebut negative information.
How Marketers Are Using This Resource
PROMOTION
Will It Blend? is a viral marketing campaign consisting of a series of
infomercials demonstrating the remarkable power of Blendtec
blenders.
In the show, Tom Dickson, the Blendtec founder, attempts to “blend”
various items in order to show off the power of his gadget.
The campaign took off instantly and the company has increased sales.
One of the most popular “episodes” of Will It Blend?, features an
iPhone being pulverized and has been viewed more than 6 million
times.
YouTube is the ubiquitous video-sharing website that enables users to
view, upload, and share video clips. Although most of the content on
YouTube is uploaded by individuals, companies also use it for product
demos and news releases.
→ YouTube
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INSTRUCTION and RESEARCH
There are several videos on YouTube teaching you “how to open a can
without a can opener”. One video, only 28 seconds in length, shows a
person successfully opening a can with a large kitchen knife. Not a
word is spoken by the person in the video. All the viewers hear is the
sound of the knife cutting into the metal can. The conversation,
however begins in the comments section:
“Yeah, that’s cool, but no way to treat a knife.”
“Thank you! I agree. I was reticent to subject my henckels five
star to this, but when you're desperate…”
The Henckel comment sparked a conversation about how great the
knives are; the best, sharpest, easiest to handle, etc. Notably, the
video was not produced, sponsored or endorsed by Henckel.
How to Leverage This Resource Now
YouTube is not just about generating a hit, but adding value and observing the
needs and desires of your target.
Search for videos in your industry; among your competitors, for similar products,
for commercials, demos, or rants. Keep in mind that it’s also not about the quality
of the video, but the quality of the content. Begin by looking for relevant topics
and those that have been viewed the highest number of times.
If you’re contributing content, don’t upload just any old video; quality YouTube
content is authentic, original and typically short.
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Social media replicates personal credibility, which is the key to word-of-mouth
recommendation. This has caused more and more people to seek advice and
leave comments online as their certainty increases that they will reach the right
audience. This process has become self-reinforcing.
Brands and businesses can use social media as a learning system, an early warning
device, a product development tool, and an innovation lab.
Just as there are rules to participating in a conversation at a cocktail party, there
are rules and etiquette to participating in various social media services. If you
don’t follow them, your company or brand will be ostracized.
Because links and relationships can be measured, social media opens up the
possibility of connecting with your most influential customers. This has the
potential to result in what has, except for very large or exceptional brands, been
heretofore impossible: conversational marketing.
Do you want to dig deeper and not just listen but talk to the people that are recommending
your products and services – or those of your competitors?
Would you like to spend some time with your influencers; the people giving your
product five stars on Amazon, or the ones panning your brand on blogs like
Gizmodo, UrbanBaby, or The Consumerist?
How about starting a conversation of your own? It is faster, easier and less
expensive than traditional research.
We can help you tap into social media and utilize proven techniques to conduct
conversations that will enable you to better understand and meet the needs of
your customers, faster.
→ In Summary
→ Jump into the Conversation
→
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Goodmind is a market research firm specializing in Experience Design and
Information Design.
We take advantage of technologies that make finding great respondents and
conducting research less expensive, easier, and more actionable.
For a free social media snapshot of your brand, contact us today:
*CMO Council, Study: Giving Customer Voice More Volume. http://www.cmocouncil.org * Quantcast Audience Profile. http://www.quantcast.com/youtube.com
http://goodmind.net/contact
212.660.0110
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