Church of the Customer: January 2006 archives
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January 31, 2006
Rules? What rules?
Are there rules to marketing?
We have our six tenets. Countless books and textbooks describing immutable laws, rules and principles arrive each year from authoritative and smart people teaching us how to market and sell stuff.
But then there's Harper Lee, who has one product: The book "To Kill A Mockingbird." Harper Lee is very publicity-shy. Doesn't blog, doesn't do tours, or press interviews (except for this rare, recent one) or anything to market herself. "To Kill A Mockingbird" is her only book.
Yet, countless people are named after her or the book's memorable characters. One trembling teen, upon meeting her at a children's essay contest mentioned in the story above, called Harper Lee "the most important person in my life."
Tom Peters wondered aloud the other day if shabby corporate performance is the result of solutions too complex to manage under stress. That companies become prisoners of the rules they or their consultants create.
Harper Lee isn't following any established rules of marketing, yet her book has sold 10 million copies since 1960.
Perhaps the only rule, if we can call it that, is to work terribly hard at creating or contributing to something that you believe will change someone's life. It seems then that the possibility of trembling admiration for your work goes beyond mere imagination.
Customer evangelism colophon
--> If you're in the Windy City, the Business Marketing Association's Chicago chapter is hosting a Feb. 16 luncheon called "Customer Evangelism: Customer Loyalty is Not Enough." I'll be speaking along with Andy Sernovitz of WOMMA, Ed Brill of IBM and Wes Sheperd of Channel Velocity. Leading this choir will be the wonderfully erudite Michael Krauss. Tickets are $45-$65. Find info and registration here.
--> "Testify: How Remarkable Companies are Creating Customer Evangelists," which we released as a free ebook awhile back, is now available as a paperback on Amazon. The 85-page book features 18 brief case studies about organizations and their customer evangelism work.
--> A few loyal podcast listeners have told us the past week they didn't know about our show with Maker's Mark CEO Bill Samuels Jr. That's likely due to our new (and separate) podcast feed and blog. If you're a fan of the podcast, bookmark the podcast blog here and the podcast feed here. If you haven't listened to the podcast, give it a shot and tell us what you think (good or bad).
The Steel Curtain of citizen marketing
Steeler Nation is an army of Steeler citizen marketers.
Fans of the NFL team are: creating photo slideshows with music, producing highlight videos, and recording tribute songs, to name a few efforts -- and it's everywhere on the web. With Super Bowl mania (or hype, depending on your perspective) reaching a crescendo this week, Steeler love is pinging from fan to fan at a dizzying pace.
Here are some of the more notable efforts among the citizen marketers:
* Steeler Fan Tribute - A photo slideshow of Steeler fans from around the world set to a Foo Fighters song. So moving, many viewers are reporting they tear up. I guess it's a 'Burgh thang.
* The Polamalu Song - A funny sendup of the old Muppets video "Mahna Mahna," set with new lyrics by Pittsburgh band Mr. Devious and dedicated to Steelers safety Troy Polamalu.
* Steelers Fight Song 2006 - A fan invites a polka band to his house and videotapes a gaggle of fans singing a new, Super Bowl version of the Steelers Polka. The video uses technology that includes a slideshow of the words in a separate window so you can sing along.
* Steeler Tribute Video - Photos from this season and audio clips from every Steelers song there is (and there is a LOT).
* Jerome "The Bus" Bettis Tribute - Photo montage of The Bus pounding in the touchdowns set to a Bettis tribute version of the retro dance hit "Double Dutch Bus."
When people who love a brand are conversant with technology, the spread of their passion is exponential. The fans assemble their media quickly, and fellow fans eat it up as fast as it's served.
The Steelers organization (and the NFL) wisely keep a safe distance from asserting any sense of ownership or control over what fans produce. The backlash would be swift, and it would serve little purpose except to dilute what is clearly worth millions of dollars in free citizen marketing.
Just imagine if this was your brand with such loyal and demonstrative evangelists. What would you do?
January 30, 2006
Lego evangelists help design products
Lego, long-time maker of cute and colorful construction blocks, is embracing its diehard customer evangelists to help develop the next-generation of its Mindstorms programmable robotics kit. So says Wired.
Lego sells 40,000 Mindstorm kits a year at $199 each -- with no advertising. They're Lego's all-time best-selling product.
For the next generation kits, which arrive in August '06, Lego scrapped its heretofore successful design and started over, basically outsourcing the design to a small team of Mindstorm expert users. Lego calls the group Mindstorms User Panel, or MUP.
Sounds like a gutsy move but better to make your own system obsolete rather than a competitor do it for you. From the article:
Inviting customers to innovate isn't just about building better products. Opening the process engenders goodwill and creates a buzz among the zealots, a critical asset for products like Mindstorms that rely on word-of-mouth evangelism.
January 27, 2006
I still say dump webinars
My previous post about focusing on podcasts/videocasts instead of webinars has generated some very thoughtful comments from people who take issue with my (and Brian's) viewpoint.
Brian Carroll says that for complex, B2B selling, webinars help customer decision-making.
Laura Bennett says there's room for both webinars and podcasts but is concerned that there are too many amateurs creating awful podcasts.
Ardath Albee says that for interactivity, webinars beat podcasts hands down.
Steve Rubel says why not do both? Run an interactive webinar then podcast it later for the time-shifters.
Ken Molay says that adoption rates of video portable media players are still too low to make video podcasts viable. He also says that podcasts are not good lead generation vehicles compared to webinars.
Mike says he would like to see a study that measures the effectiveness of blog readers and podcast listeners vs. webinars and how both correlate into leads and sales. Great idea!
All good points, and I'm really enjoying the discussion.
First off, this is not meant to be a screed against any of the fine companies and people who create webinar software systems. I just think your sector has two big challenges:
1. Most webinars are not interactive.
Theoretically, webinars should be interactive because of the platform. Problem is, most webinars I've seen (and I've seen a good deal of them) are not. The tools can be daunting to use. Or the presenter is too focused on presenting the material to do much of anything else.
What often happens is a presenter relies on text-heavy PowerPoint slides and bores participants to death. A disembodied voice narrating bad PowerPoint is the norm. Granted, it's just as easy to bore someone to death with a podcast, but it's probably a less time-consuming and expensive death.
Is live Q&A feasible with podcasting? Nope, but that seems about the only key difference in interactivity. We've done webinars ourselves, and creating interactivity is a challenge.
So if most webinars are not interactive, what's the point?
2. The ROI on webinars is too low.
It's more work to produce and market a webinar than a podcast. You must select a technology platform, spend hours learning it, prep for and test the interactivity, and spend hours practicing because the event is live. Knowing there's a few dozen or a few hundred people on the other end obviously contributes to stagefright among some people, causing the dreaded robot-voice.
Add up the time spent finding attendees, signing them up, reminding them and herding them to a place for a one-time event and what do you get? If you're lucky, 30% percent attendance from registrations. If people don't have the right software installed, or the right browser, or web connection, etc. then those numbers sink further. And shut-out attendees leave frustrated.
As for Steve's point about producing both webinars and podcasts, this is entirely possible and plausible. But if time and resources are limited and I had to choose, I would choose downloadable or on-demand podcasts or videocasts for these additional reasons:
1. Podcasts are platform-agnostic. Most webinars are not.
2. Podcasts can be served via iTunes, which is free and a great distribution system.
3. Podcasts are more likely to be spread via social media than webinars.
4. Podcasts can be interactive if listeners are directed to blog comments or an 800 number.
5. Podcasts don't require mandatory registrations with often invasive questions as many webinars do.
6. Podcasts can have audio, slides or video easily mixed in via user-friendly programs like GarageBand.
The upshot here is that podcasts could go "live" before too long. RSS/podcast pioneer Dave Winer talks about how Yahoo could make "p2p webcasting" happen. Hopefully, it won't be using a too-techie name like p2p.
Finally, I disagree that podcasts are not good for lead generation. With most webinars, 70% of attendees sign up but miss the actual event. Then they are often inundated with follow-up emails. Sometimes their name is involuntarily added to email lists.
Podcasts most certainly can have calls-to action with a phone number, website address, or email to secure a free trial, white paper, email newsletter, sample, etc. To me, that's a more customer-friendly, less aggressive selling style. And it still contains all of the necessary ingredients for marketing set up as product or service education.
Like Peter Drucker famously said, the purpose of marketing is to make selling superfluous.
January 24, 2006
Podcasts vs. webinars
Brian Critchfield of grassroots marketing firm Blueline says companies should dump their webinars for podcasts or videocasts.
I couldn't agree more. The industry average for webinar attendence is 33% of registrations. Those are OK numbers, but not great. The self-serve nature of mobile media means people can listen to podcasts /videocasts when and where they want, not tied to a computer at a specific time.
More WOMBATs, please
Here's a great summary of Betsy Weber's presentation at the WOMMA Basic Training conference on Turning Customers Into Evangelists. (You might remember Betsy and TechSmith from our Testify ebook).
I counted as least 23 ideas that Betsy shares on how her company, TechSmith, creates customer evangelists. (TechSmith is the company behind SnagIt, Camtasia and other software programs.)
And check out the nifty video interviews conducted by coBRANDit at the conference.
Technorati tags: WOMMA, WOMBAT
January 23, 2006
Marketing evangelism is where it's at
Michael Krauss, columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, writing in the American Marketing Association's Marketing News:
Marketing is not a do-it-to-the-customer, one-way process. The highest aim of marketing is to create products and stories about them that empower customers to sell for you. Don’t simply create loyal customers. Create customers who are enraptured with your product and sell for you... I didn’t realize that marketing evangelism was catching on. Now I’ve become a zealot. Marketing evangelism is where it’s at.
Why word of mouth is not a "media channel"
At times, the [WOMMA WOMBAT] conference could have been mistaken for a religious convention. Among Friday's offerings were sessions titled "Turning Customers Into Evangelists," "Word of Mouth in Faith-Based Markets" and "How to Create Brand Converts"... Marketers are now reaching out to "evangelists," who are already die-hard fans of a brand, and persuading them to spread the word through their existing social networks.
Hat tip: Your Girl in Milwaukee
McDonald's opens up
Following on the heels of a previous post about the potential benefits of McDonald's pulling back the curtains of its operations for the benefit of learning from its evangelists (and the world at large), comes word that the fast-food giant has just launched the Open for Discussion blog.
Penned by Bob Langert, the company's senior director for corporate and social responsibility, the blog will focus on exactly what his job title says. Sounds like a thoughtful start.
Hat tip: Steve Wilson
