Church of the Customer: September 2005 archives
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September 20, 2005
No Plan B
It seems I'm not alone when it comes to poor practices having to do with hard drive back-ups.
A new survey from Maxtor and Harris Interactive finds that one-third of Americans don't back up their hard drive data all and three quarters who do, don't do it very often. Why? "Not sure how to do it or believe it's too technical."
As I wrote in an earlier post, a hard drive crash recently wiped out my hard drive and with it, a lot of important data. Two weeks later, the drive is still in surgery and we're praying for some sort of data recovery. Bless me father, for my last backup was 10 months ago.
I'll no longer be a backup laggard; after some research, I bought a Buffalo Technologies 1 terabyte RAID array backup. Love it. It couldn't have been easier to set up; it took about 10 minutes to unpack and begin its back-up work. This vault-looking machine automatically backs up everything on my network every night. And 24/7 support is pretty remarkable.
Audible: A natural fit for podcasting
The smart team at Audible.com has launched a podcast called Earbuds. Besides being a great name for a podcast, it's nicely produced.
For their first show, they interviewed Jackie and I about the art and science of podcasting. Not much science to report. Other than good audio engineering, podcasting is mostly an art form whose quality is open to interpretation. As an art form, I think good podcasting means:
* The time spent planning what you'll talk about should be the equivalent, if not double, of the time you actually spend talking
* Talk about things that make you say "cool!" or "that's unbelievable!"
* Keeping punditry pithy
* Having someone fine you a quarter each time you say "ummm" or "you know"
September 19, 2005
"Their corporate jets and golden parachutes..."
Reading the news today of Dennis Kozlowski being sentenced to at least 8 years in state prison (maybe 25 total) for looting Tyco of $150 million and reaping $430 million more by covertly selling company shares while artificially inflating the stock value, I am reminded of the pivotal speech delivered by Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) at a shareholders meeting in the movie "Wall Street:"
You own the company. That's right -- you, the stockholder.
And you are all being royally screwed over by these, these bureaucrats, with their luncheons, their hunting and fishing trips, their corporate jets and golden parachutes.
Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents, each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can't figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I'll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents.
The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated.
In the last seven deals that I've been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you.
I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them!
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good.
Greed is right.
Greed works.
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind.
And greed -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
Thank you very much.
Substitute the word "greed" for "transparency" and you have a speech no longer filled with Machiavellian irony but a real cause for revolution, hope and deliverance.
Bonus: Listen to Gekko's speech here. And it wasn't that long ago that Businessweek was lauding Kozlowski as one of the "top 25 managers" in business.
September 18, 2005
Join us this Thursday
We'll be part of Microsoft's Leadership Forum webcast this Thursday, Sept. 22. Jackie and I will do an hourlong presentation on "Creating Customer Evangelists." Digital punch and cookies will be served.
It begins at 9 a.m. Pacific time (U.S. & Canada), noon Eastern.
It's free, but you must pre-register.
September 16, 2005
For the love of wiki
AdPulp smartly reminds us that wikis are a hot tool for customer evangelism to flourish. Take a look at what's already happening, wiki-wise, with Apple's brand-new Nano iPod.
I wonder, though, about the viability of creating a public wiki outside of Wikipedia. The Wikipedia entry for the iPod is massively extensive, perhaps beyond what Apple could do on its own.
Wikipedia is to public content collaboration what Google is to search.
A trend in the works?
Another TV show is mounting a word of mouth/grassroots campaign for its launch. This time it's for an NBC show called "Three Wishes," starring singer Amy Grant.
The show's producers have followed the first cardinal rule for this marketing milieu: Design word of mouth into the product. Grant travels to a different city each and grants three wishes to needy families or community groups, just like Oprah, the queen of word of mouth megahubs.
NBC has also picked up a few items from the marketing playbook of "The Purpose Driven Life:" As the New York Times explains it: "The show sent more than 7,000 DVD's of the show's first episode to ministers and other clergy members, along with a recorded message to their congregants from Ms. Grant. ("At its core, 'Three Wishes' is faith in action," she tells them.)"
Building a grassroots coalition for a TV show, a product, a service or a cause is a lot different than plastering airwaves, bus stops or front doors with marketing messages. It's not necessarily harder or more complex than all of the work that goes into a mainstream media ad campaign (work that's often complex and nuanced), it's just vastly different. I would argue that few, if any, ad agencies that support large organizations have the theology, knowledge or skills to mount a grassroots evangelism campaign.
And that's a key point: So few large organizations actually mount grassroots campaigns that when they do, it generates coverage in the New York Times. Whether "Three Wishes" is any good is another story.
September 15, 2005
Oh, the irony
Humorist Garrison Keillor, who knows a few things about making fun of people and idols, had his lawyer send a cease-and-desist letter to a Minnesota blogger for creating a t-shirt that parodies Keillor's radio show.
Keillor is a man of immense talent who, at least on the radio, displays all manner of anti-corporate folksiness. That's his (non-legal) trademark. Sending a lawyer after a humorist blogger is, in itself, a strike against it.
Plus, the word of mouth has already reached Wikipedia.
CABLE/AMA slides
For those who attended my "Creating Customer Evangelists" keynote at the "Remarkable Growth" event yesterday, sponsored by CABLE and the Nashville chapter of the American Marketing Association, the slides are here.
Many thanks to Karen Stone, Karen Williams, Marty Nord, Dan Surface and Kerry Price for the Southern hospitality : )
September 13, 2005
You say LEGO, we say LEGOS
Go to legos.com and you'll see this admonishment.
It seems the lawyers at LEGO are rather exacting in their expectations of how customers should address the High Holiness known as LEGO.
No one likes fighting with lawyers (except other lawyers) so it would be hard to imagine the marketing group at LEGO enthusiastically embracing this school-marm sternliness.
In the spirit of WOMMA's conference pitting word of mouth marketers against advertising execs, I look forward to a conference that pits marketers against lawyers.
[Hat tip: Craig Mason at Theatrefolk]
UPDATE: LEGO has since taken down this admonishment and changed the copy on the legos.com landing page to read as if it were written by real people (i.e., not lawyers : )
September 12, 2005
TV shows and evangelism
Customer evangelism is spreading to TV.
NBC is employing a customer evangelism strategy to generate buzz for the second season of its weight-loss reality show, "The Biggest Loser."
A website has been the means by which to recruit the show's 1,000 biggest fans (no pun intended). The strategy: Encourage fans to host parties this past weekend for an online advance screening of the season's premiere
episode. (The episode airs on television Sept. 13.)
From the website we learn that 6,764 party goers attended 1,003 parties. Party hosts also uploaded photos and videos as well as blog entries.
The show's message boards indicate the show has a rather passionate fan base, many of whom are interested in losing weight themselves. The grassroots strategy has been working: Last season's finale had the highest rating in its time period for NBC in three years. It's a terrific example of non-traditional marketing of a TV show.
[Hat tip to Across the Sound, the new podcast from Steve Rubel and Joe Jaffe.]
