Michigan Summer Smmit

Here is the group at the Michigan Summer Summit. Spread the fire. Gs

Society for Word of Mouth

Take a look at the Society for Word of Mouth.  Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba (church of the customer blog, Creating Cutomer Evangelists, and Citizen Marketers) have created a new web space where the word-of-mouth faithful can gather, connect, and access a variety of resources from case studies to research to videos. 

I am now, officially, a SWOMi having joined so I could post a comment to the question, "Is Word of Mouth Dead Among Faith-Based Audiences?"  If you're interested, you can read my take here.  Spread the fire. GS

How Social is Your Email List?

I just discovered a company called Rapleaf that can tell you how involved your customers are in social media like social networks, photo, and video sharing. 

You send them your email database and their software searches the web for user profiles established using those email addresses.  The resulting report tells you how many of your customers are involved in social media and to what extent.  By comparing email addresses to member profiles, they can also provide demographic information like sex and age.

Rapleaf sent me a sample report based on 10,000 email addresses and found...

• 8510 of them were active
• 24, 129 profiles associated with those addresses (about three profiles per address)
• Which addresses were most socially active - 338 addresses had seven or more profiles
• Which social network sites were most popular. Surprisingly Amazon was #1, followed by MySpace and Wal-Mart
• The number of "friends" associated with each address - 618 people had 50+ friends
• Widget usage among list members - 211 displayed at least one on their web real estate while 57 displayed three or more

Rapleaf helps you see and understand the promotional potential of the customers on your list.  Rather than segmenting your list according to how much each person buys (purchase potential), you could select them based on the number of social networks they participated in, or widgets they displayed, or the number of friends they had in their networks (promotional potential).  It's a way of identifying influentials that can help you leverage your most active customer evangelists.

Spread the fire. GS

The Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II

Over the weekend I read the new book from Dave Balter, founder and president of BzzAgent, the word of mouth marketing company in Boston whose 400,000 "BzzAgents" tell friends about products they like and then write reports about their encounters. 

The book is called The Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II and was an entertaining read.  Dave's writing style is light and energetic which made reading fun.  The book draws on his experience with BzzAgent in order to identify the various forces driving word-of-mouth.  While I didn't encounter much new information, the case studies were interesting and it was good to be reminded of certain, fundamental truths.

The book is largely an apologetic for BzzAgent's approach to to word-of-mouth, and that's understandable.  I also encounter a lot of skepticism about word-of-mouth--especially from large corporations that have so much invested in historical mass media approaches--and I can only imagine what Dave and his team encounter.  I especially enjoyed the logic of his argument for why agent reports can't be faked.  Solid.

You can buy the printed copy of the book at Amazon, or download the pdf version for free.  Whichever you choose, be sure to recommend the book to a few friends. Spread the fire. GS

The Shack: Another Word-of-Mouth Bestseller

On June 26 I am privileged to have lunch with William P. Young, author of The Shack. In case you don't know, The Shack is a self-published novel that has grown through word-of-mouth to reach #1 on the New York Times Paperback Fiction list.  After selling around a half million copies himself, he now has a deal with a New York publisher.

I am eager to learn more about the process by which his book found success and will share what I learn on this blog.

Spread the fire. GS

"Our Customers are Calling, Shall I Tell Them You're Not Here?"

There is a great article in Adweek titled, "Dell's Hearing Test" about how the computer manufacturer has begun listening to its customers with the help of a blog called Direct2Dell and the impact this is having on its business.  It illustrates the second part of Trialogue--Consumer to brand communication.

"But post by post, link by link Direct2Dell gained credibility from bloggers. One key reason: It didn't censor negative comments posted about problems. A post last August about the delay in shipping new In-spiron notebooks drew hundreds of comments from frustrated and irate customers. Taking the criticism when the company screws up builds authenticity, Pearson said.

"We just deal with it," he explained. 'The point is we want to hear whatever is on customers' minds.'"

Kudos to Dell for having the guts to "deal with it."  Too many companies won't and miss the extraordinary benefits.  Or, to paraphrase Garth Brooks, in order to avoid the pain of negative comments, they wind up missing the dance created by a real relationship with customers.

The single biggest hurdle to opening real relationships between brands and consumers is FEAR! 

Brands are scared of consumers and prefer the good old days when they could manipulate them from afar via mass media.  Having to actually interact with them—to take them seriously, listen to their ideas, and resolve their problems—is an entirely foreign and altogether scary proposition. 

The peasants are at the gate and some of them are carrying pitch forks.  Even so, you'd better give them an audience.  Launching cows over the wall (Monty Python reference) is not an option because you can't afford to let your customers "run away!!!!!"

Spread the fire. GS

Do Customer Evangelists Matter? Yes, About 38%

Just how much do customer evangelists contribute to your company's marketing efforts?  New YouTube metrics are beginning to quantify their impact.

The band Wheezer posted its new music video (Pork & Beans) to YouTube and within three days 2.2 million people had seen it.  Thanks to Insight, YouTube's new analytics tool, the band learned the viewer's age, sex, and other valuable demographic information.  But, and this is the part I found interesting, they also learned whether people had viewed the video from YouTube itself or via a YouTube video player embedded on an individual's Internet real estate like their MySpace page or blog.  According to the article in the LA Times...

" At first, most found the video by going to YouTube or Google, but many linked to it via technology news blogs such as Valleywag. After three days, 38% of viewers had discovered "Pork & Beans" not on YouTube but on other websites where people had posted it."

In this case the band's marketing efforts (placing the video on YouTube) accounted for 62% of views. Think of it as similar to a brand's mass marketing efforts.

However, 38% of views were the result of customer evangelists who had placed the music video on their own sites in order to share it with their friends. This is the additional lift you can get when you equip individuals to share your message with their social network.

I plan to watch this stat more closely on other videos because it suggests we can know just how much customer evangelists contribute to spreading a message.  For Wheezer, at least, they were responsible for nearly 40%.  Spread the fire. GS

Semper Fire

There is an article in the Dallas Morning News today by David McLemore titled, Marines Smash Through Recruiting Goals that says The Marine Corps intends to apply PyroMarketing.  Specifically, McLemore writes,

The Marines have taken to niche marketing with a vengeance, adding about $5 million to their advertising budget for a total this year of $157.4 million.

Besides the American Idol ad, they have set up a MySpace.com page to get viewer feedback. Soon, they will branch into pyromarketing, the latest buzz in network marketing that fine-tunes the message to a specific market.

I sent an email to the article's author asking for more information and a contact at the Marine Corps who might be able to tell me more about how they plan to apply PyroMarketing.  I would, of course, love to help in any way I can. 

I'll supply details on this blog as I get them.  Spread the fire. GS

Making Your Customers Sing

My 16-year-old and 14-year-old both think they're smarter than me.  My 9-year-old probably is.

My middle daughter, Shelby, has the voice of an angel and I love to hear her sing.  Unfortunately, while she routinely sings for others, she rarely feels like singing for me.  The other night at dinner, after learning she had been accepted into an honors choir, I asked her to sing something for me.  She refused.  I begged.  She refused.  I pleaded. She said no.  I reasoned and argued and made the best case I knew how.  I gave her all of the reasons why she should sing for me.  It was quite logical and altogether unconvincing.

"Why won't you sing for me," I asked?  "Will you sing on my birthday?"  Finally, she agreed to sing for me on my birthday.

A few minutes later Darby, my youngest, began to quietly sing a song they had all performed in a recent play.  Almost immediately Shelby joined in.  A minute later Darby stopped singing and let Shelby continue on alone and then she smiled and said, 'I knew I could make her sing."

My two girls are quite competitive with each other and Darby knew that Shelby could not stand to hear Darby sing alone.  She understood that  by singing a few lines of a familiar song, Shelby would soon join in and give me the gift she had been denying.  It was so smart and so easy.

How many times do we make my mistake as marketers?  We try to convince people to buy your stuff, we argue, and bargain, and make special offers when all we had to do was lead the way through our own actions. 

How can you convince your customers to sing?  Stop trying to convince them and try leading the way with your own behavior and see what happens.  Spread the fire. GS

Did Dell Pay to Place Its Products in CSI? Look at the Evidence.

If you thought your TiVo let you skip all the ads in the last episode of CSI (The Theory of Everything), you'd be wrong.  But if you missed the product placement for Dell, well, don't blame the folks at CSI/CBS.  They did their level best to help you catch it.  (Full disclosure.  I missed it, but my wife caught it.  Credit to Amy for this post.)

Take a look at this image captured from the episode.  To increase the chances you'd see the Dell logo on the back of Grissom's computer, they strategically placed a magnifying glass to enlarge it.  Still can't see it?  Well, you can just click to...er...uh...enlarge it.  Spread the fire.  GS