Church of the Customer: May 2005 archives
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May 13, 2005
7 secrets to word-of-mouth success for small businesses
George Silverman, author of The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing, describes the seven secrets to word-of-mouth success for small businesses in this article from The Daily Breeze:
1) Send the same simple message through all of your communications. If it's not simple, it can't survive being passed via word of mouth.
2) Don't position your product or service as part of a general category. Get more specific. Define it by its most-needed attribute: "The dandruff shampoo that doesn't dry your hair."
3) Make your examples borderline outrageous so people will find your story worth repeating.
4) Sprinkle your materials and marketing messages with success stories from real people.
5) Offer customers multiple (but simple) ways to inquire about, investigate and order what you offer.
6) Get experts on your side by bringing them into conferences, advisory groups and seminars. Encourage them to spread the word to others.
7) Ask customers for referrals. Encourage your sales people to request referrals, recommendations and testimonials.
Link: 7 steps can lead to word-of-mouth business success
Job opening for customer evangelist role
Mathworks, a provider of technical computing and Model-Based Design software headquartered in Natick, Massachusetts, has a job opening for a "customer evangelist." This in-house position will be responsible for gathering, prioritizing, tracking, and reporting progress of requirements to one or more large customers and/or advisory boards as well as advocate customer interests internally.
Mathworks is using the phrase "customer evangelist" differently than we do, i.e., a customer who is an evangelist. But we've seen this in-house customer advocate role called "customer evangelist" before.
Asking for help, but not going overboard
I'm a steadfast QuickBooks customer. I couldn't work without it, and I upgrade every year to the most current version.
That's why I immediately opened an email from the company; it wanted my help by answering a questionnaire. After all, soliciting feedback is a central tenet to growing a community of customer evangelists.
"The survey should take you approximately 20 minutes to complete," the unsigned email said.
Oh lord. There's no way on this earth or any other that I can set aside 20 minutes (or more) to take a survey that I guess will be brimming with questions measuring my satisfaction levels. (Also a dumb idea.) I'm a devoted customer, but the company has not emotionally engaged me nor provided me with a person to whom I can focus my loyalty. Right now, loaning big, anonymous QuickBooks 20 minutes of my time is not in the cards.
However, a customer advisory board might. But a CAB requires more effort than throwing a net across all customers with an email request to complete a survey, praying for a 5 percent completion rate.
QuickBooks (and other companies of their size) would do well to pare their big customer surveys to a few questions, rely on call center to compile data on problems and opportunities and open itself up to customer advisory boards for shaping its strategic goals.
May 12, 2005
Lessons from the kettle
"Readers will likely find the book's practical advice as rudderless as its ethical principles," says Publishers Weekly of Seth Godin's new book, "All Marketers are Liars."
Ethical principles? Huh. This from a publication that cloaks all book reviews and its reviewers behind a veil of anonymity.
BzzAgent transparency
BzzAgent CEO Dave Balter just posted a company update to his blog that he sent to his investors and board of advisors.
No matter what your feelings are about BzzAgent, take a look. I think they practice a level of transparency that is remarkable for a private company.
Link: BzzAgent Investor/Advisor Update: May 2005
May 11, 2005
What makes for a good podcast?
Talk about the potential of podcasting: Jeff from Allstate emailed us to say he listened to our most recent podcast at Wrigley Field in Chicago while waiting for the start of a Cubs game.
Content portability is one of the many persuasive arguments about the power of podcasting. One of its chief difficulties is, and always will be, creating compelling content.
What's a bit easier is assembling the technology behind it. Since we have received quite a few emails inquiring about our podcasting toolset, we decided it could make for a helpful blog post. (If you are one of those people who had emailed me a technical question and I didn't respond, I can only say my dog ate it. And, I'm a bit of an email laggard.)
For our podcast "studio," we opted for what might be considered a mid- to high-range solution: professional-quality microphones, a mobile recording device, and excellent audio editing software. There are vastly less-expensive set-ups
available than what we use, but for several hundred bucks, your podcast quality is goosed
incrementally as well as the ability to edit your work.
The theology behind our podcast is unabashedly NPR-like. I'm a huge fan of NPR (Robert Siegel, you are my
hero!), so we unshyly emulate the NPR show model. That
means 10-minute segments in a 30-minute show, musical interludes and advance planning.
To make our NPR aping come alive, we use (prices are approximate):
Microphones:
Audio Technica AT3035
$199
An excellent in-studio (read: home office) mic; makes voices sound richer. If you're an amatuer musician, this baby is rock-star quality.
$79
A good mobile mic and excellent for keeping out
extraneous noise surrounding the person speaking into it.
Edirol UA-25
$239
It's not the most beautiful-looking piece of equipment
ever designed, but it seems like it could stop a bullet (good if you're at
Bloggercon caught between Dave Winer and a vendor). The beauty of this gadget?
It operates using the power of a USB connection from your laptop. It will also
take two mics... perfect for interviews, or capturing the sounds of a
completely unnecessary Bloggercon spat.
iRiver iFP-895 mp3 player/recorder
$139
This gadget is slightly bigger than a cigar lighter, but
it packs a lot more fire. Powered by one AA battery, the iRiver can capture
about 90 minutes of high-res audio. I much prefer this than recording directly
to a PC or Mac. Adam Curry says he no longer records his podcasts directly to
his laptop because of "too many heartbreaks of a computer crash in
mid-show."
Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit Pro)
$299
It can take months to explore the zillions of features in
this high-end program but for editing sound down to the micro-second level, Audition
rocks. It lets you work at a high-resolution level and save down to lower
bit-rates. There are oodles of filters for eliminating rumbles, pops and other
extraneous noises. I also use it edit the length of the musical interludes.
Now, if it just had a "ummm" or "ahhhhh" remover...
Free, baby!
I use iTunes to insert the mp3 ID tags into the file,
including a custom-created picture that would normally go where the CD cover
image resides.
Conference Calls Unlimited
Various plans available
The beauty of this set up is that all of the tools and
software are available for PC and Macs, and I often work seamlessly between the two.
Be like Netflix; don't be like Starbucks
Steve Rubel writes about how to find, listen, engage and empower online customer evangelists. He discusses how Netflix is doing this well and how Starbucks is not.
Link: Preaching to the Converted
May 10, 2005
Playing to your base
Even if you are not a country music star, there's lots to learn from this terrific case study on how to harness the power of loyal customers by channeling evangelistic fervor into
useful activities to grow the overall customer base and increase demand for products.
Link: How to Turn Entertainment Fans into Active Evangelists (Responsibly)
May 05, 2005
Are customers letting your marketing in or shutting it out?
Yankelovich, a consumer market research firm, has announced results of its 2005 Marketing Receptivity Survey, and it isn't pretty for advertising:
* Nearly 70% of consumers say they are
interested in products that enable them to block out advertising
* 56% say
they avoid buying products that overwhelm them with marketing and
advertising
* Paradoxically, 55% say they
enjoy advertising, which increased from 47% in last year's survey
How can marketers leverage positive
feelings about marketing?
* Marketing that is short and to the point: 43%
* Marketing I can choose to see when it is most convenient for me: 33%
* Marketing that is personally communicated to me by friends or experts I trust: 32%
Of course, the last item is key: Marketers should understand how their products, services and marketing generate word of mouth.
May 04, 2005
For the new marketing players
John Fox has written a visual encyclopedia of marketing that's unlike any other marketing book I've seen.
It's called "Marketing Playbook: The Manual for Growing Organizations," and it's a full-color guide with each marketing "play" (such as "Getting your resellers to carry the ball") illustrated as a one-page infographic. (I'm blurbed in the book after John showed me an early draft of the manuscript several months ago.)
Each play includes a how-to on develop strategy, what it usually costs, where it's best suited, how to launch it and a few pointers on making it work.
It should be eminently helpful for the marketing coordinator or marketing manager who's trying to make sense out of a panoply of tools and techniques.
