Church of the Customer: November 2005 archives
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November 29, 2005
Wanna spend the day with us? Read this post now!
The folks at inBubbleWrap are giving away a day with Ben and me. For free.
Click over to inBubbleWrap before tomorrow (Wednesday, Nov 30) at 10 am EST to get the details and enter the drawing. (Make sure to read the fine print as residents of some states are not eligible.)
Talking with Amazon
More Amazon customer collaboration: Threaded product discussions.
Click on the picture at left to see the threaded discussion for the book "PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives " or try your luck to see if the new feature shows up in your browser here.
Amazon is rolling out the new features fast and furious.
Update: Rick Watson on Amazon's new discussion feature: "(Amazon is the) anti-Google when it comes to simplicity. I think Jeff Bezos thinks every day 'what more can I jam on the Amazon product pages to give buyers more information.'... which is very different than what Google thinks: 'What can I take off the page to remove distractions from the buyer.' Both have merits."
November 28, 2005
Millie, the 80-year-old videoblogger
It's not just young whippersnappers creating sophisticated content for the web.
There's also Millie Garfield, 80-year old blogger and mother of uber-blogger Steve Garfield. She's been blogging for two years and her blog has been featured in a bazillion news outlets.
That Millie is blogging isn't the story here; rather, she's a rich source of ethnographic data for products and how seniors use them. With a little help from her son, she video blogs about the challenges she faces using everyday products.
If you are a brand manager for:
* Pain-relievers, dental floss, or shampoo/conditioner, watch this
* Stretch-tite, plastic wrap products, deodorant, or toothpick dispensers, watch this
* Nescafe or instant coffee, watch this
Market researchers pay handsomely for this kind of research, yet it's unclear how many companies scan the web for free Millie research. We know Coca-Cola Company doesn't.
Here's an idea: Send customers webcams to record video diaries about them and your product. Encourage honest, open and transparent feedback to post on their blogs. Not only do you receive free market research, you enhance the ever-important Google juice.
Of course, do not try this if your product sucks.
I have my lighter out, dude
It's hard to believe but it's true: The "classic rock" radio format is 20 years old.
I'm not sure if that realization makes me feel old. Or young. Nonetheless, Fred Jacobs, who invented that radio format, has put together a retrospective. Bonus: Pictures of haircuts from the 80s.
Follow the money
News that's sure to give traditional ad agencies a bigger headache: Marketing budgets commited to customer evangelism and word-of-mouth efforts are on a big upswing, according to Carl Howe at Blackfriars Communications.
Carl, who researches marketing spending, says that "Non-traditional marketing is now the third largest category of
marketing spending by companies, averaging about 14% of marketing
budgets."
That means less money spent on ads, inserts, direct mail, and the other meaningless tonnage of shotgun marketing pointed at us every day.
Jon Fine at BusinessWeek provides a good survival strategy for traditional ad agencies.
Update: Joe Jaffe asks Carl to define the budget categories. Carl does and offers up a graphic with results, including the news that non-traditional marketing budgets have risen three quarters in a row.
November 27, 2005
Customer evangelism in U.S. News & World Report
In this week's U.S. News & World Report, reporter James Pethokoukis documents the difference between customer evangelism and corporate evangelism in "Spreading the Word: Corporate evangelists recruit customers who love to create buzz about a product."
(Disclosure: Jackie and I are part of the story, for which Pethokoukis also interviewed corporate evangelists at Sun and TechSmith as well as the volunteer customer evangelists who blog about McDonald's and Vespa.)
Sun's chief evangelist Simon Phipps succinctly explains why he would fly from the Netherlands to Chicago to speak to a few dozen conference attendees about Sun's corporate philosophy: "These are people who work on software that powers huge websites that millions of people around the world depend on. There may not be many people in the room, but the effect they have on society is huge."
As Phipps aptly demonstrates, connecting with core customers, whether it's via a chief evangelist, product director or customer service manager, is a mission. Customer connection, coupled with a great product/service, is the silver bullet to generating word of mouth that sustains growth.
What's also apt is the dry-ice comment Pethokoukis extracts from McDonald's about the popular fan blog McChronicles.
McDonald's spokesperson Anna Rozenich wouldn't comment on McChronicles but she called blogs a "valuable communications tool," adding that "we appreciate that customers who related to our brand are sharing their thoughts about McDonald's with others."
How hard would it have been for the spokesperson to have said, "We love McChronicles! He does a great job of validating the stuff that works, and what we need to work on. We couldn't be more excited that he's a true McDonald's fan."
Have some soul. Tell reporters that your evangelists are the greatest customers in the world (and that you've restructured the public relations department). After all, what true evangelists crave more than anything is recognition.
Update: Pethokoukis has some additional Q&A with us on the U.S. News website this week.
Update: Jim Grisanzio of Sun takes issue with my quote in the article that "PR spinmeisters (at big companies) should be forbidden from being involved" in blogs and podcasts.
He writes: "So, just kick the guy and run, right? How brave. (He's) advocating that companies start blogs to open up yet ... simultaneously suggests that an entire group of people be excluded."
My intention with that quote was to call out the PR "spinmesiters" who distort reality to fit a corporate agenda or remove most indications of human conversation by making a company sound like it's staffed by zombies. (There's far too many marketing spinmeisters, too, and we're not shy about calling them out on this blog.)
My intention was *not* to put a giant bucket on the heads of all PR people -- just the ones who believe in "spin" rather than "inform."
November 26, 2005
ProductWiki mania
Meet ProductWiki, a wiki dedicated to collaborative content creation about products. It's unrelated to Amazon's ProductWiki except for the name. And that it launched at almost the exact same time.
If you're the scrappy entrepreneurs behind ProductWiki (the website), which has taken months of planning and long nights of work to establish, you probably wonder with some measure of resignation, "Even though we claim a trademark for our name, do we take on Amazon?"
If you're the established corporate chieftains at Amazon, which has probably spent months thinking about and planning for the ProductWiki feature, you probably wonder with some measure of resignation, "Do we take on these three guys from Canada?"
November 24, 2005
Amazon's customer collaboration, Pt. 2
Amazon's ProductWiki feature is still finding its legs (and some people are unable to see the feature so it must be a random beta), but overall: A bold start toward allowing citizen marketing to flourish. Certainly, the feature is generating interest.
For those who are unable to see the feature, the simplified toolbar provides two formatting tools (bold, italic) and a linking tool as seen in the wiki I edited for Creating Customer Evangelists. The caveat: The link tool automatically creates a new page inside Amazon's network. In other words, it creates another Amazon ProductWiki. No outside linking allowed.
So, the tools are simple but the idea is big. That's why I'd like to see Amazon:
* Create a WikiCentral page that highlights products whose wikis have been updated on daily or weekly basis, by category type, frequency of editing or by editors' picks.
* Require Real Name authentication to edit a wiki and help maintain standards of authenticity. This should help reduce incidents of unscrupulous marketers sabotaging competitors' wikis. When I added content to the "Creating Customer Evangelists" entry, the wiki automatically noted for all to see that I had edited it.
* Remove its copyright claim to wiki-created content. Right now, terms of use links to the company's generic copyright page, where it claims to own all content. It's wrong to claim ownership of content freely generated by customers.
There are hundreds of doomsday scenarios anyone can imagine with an open content-creation system like this, especially for a publicly held company like Amazon. This is the type of feature that makes corporate lawyers up their Prilosec dosage.
But clearly Amazon has been paying close attention to the rapid growth of Wikipedia and its very fast adoption rate. Wikipedia isn't perfect and I do not imagine Amazon's ProductWiki will be, either. But I think it has a chance to become the Wikipedia of the world's products.
November 22, 2005
A new kind of business book
Todd Sattersten of 800-CEO-READ and A Penny For has corralled a vivacious group of essayists to create "More Space: Nine Antidotes to Complacency in Business."
His idea: Give bloggers more space to ruminate about their business passions than what's typically found in short-format blog posts. Essayists include Jory Des Jardins, Lisa Haneberg, Rob May, Johnnie Moore, Marc Orchant, Robert Patterson, Evelyn Rodriguez, Curt Rosengren and Jeremy Wright.
The best business books are those that cause us to think differently and if they're good, inspire action; this book passes that test.
I've not finished the book yet I am:
* More excited about what we are doing here at The Church after reading Rob May's piece on "Why Business Matters"
* Trying to be more personal and less business-y (or more authentic and less plastic) as Jory Des Jardins suggests in "The Inevitability of Authenticity"
* More organized by following the advice of Marc Orchant in "Work is Broken -- Here's How We Fix It." Marc, you'll be glad to know that my email inbox is EMPTY as I write this.
"More Space" is also an experiment. Its website includes free PDFs and audio versions of every chapter. Todd created an imprint, Astronaut Projects, and shares plenty of ideas about creating and self-publishing a book. A counter tracks sales with one post showing how much the publisher makes from each distributor.
Harvard Business School chimes in with a review, calling the book "a very readable, fresh, and insightful collection [of essays]."
Amazon's customer collaboration
One of the biggest retailers in the world has opened the door to citizen marketing in a big way.
Amazon has launched ProductWiki, a route for "customer editable product information" to appear alongside most, if not all, of the items the company sells.
This looks like a big move in several ways:
* It should help Amazon sell more because each product listing can have vastly better levels of information.
* It provides shoppers greater depth of content that bypasses marketing spin.
* It provides checks and balances to what can be seriously flawed product reviews.
* It introduces the emerging concept of customer collaboration to a massive audience.
Of course, it also introduces new levels of complexity to product marketers, who will need to keep a close ear to their product wikis and participate in the collaboration.
Update: A number of people have reported they're unable to see the feature, so it must be part of a random beta. I updated this post with another screenshot with some new thoughts here.
