Why your customer strategy must focus on social thinking and not social techno

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This is not a go do post. It’s a go and think about it post. Here are three Ted Talks I originally saw on Mashable and convey an important message for your customer strategy and how you create earned media:

It is how we socialise and not technology that we need to focus on.

What makes us human is the ability to reason, to think. Information and knowledge is the raw material of this process.

The internet makes this available in abundance. It has empowered individuals like never before. We have moved from passive consumers of information to become active producers of knowledge. Just think Wikipedia and Google’s quest to bring you the most relevant, high quality information it can and how you go about your customer strategy.

  • Clay Shirkey argues that information is now created on mass, is ubiquitous, cheap and global. Citizens are real time journalists that have social power and the real connections are between individuals rather than companies and brands.
  • Stefana Broadben argues that the internet has made us more personal and that we can now become more connected.
  • Seth Godin argues in his presentation below that one person with an idea and enough passion can change the world, can create a movement. It’s the tribe that matters now.

And given that the internet is becoming more mobile, more device agnostic and more accessible, this will have greater implications for how we live – and how you set up your customer strategy in the future. Something to think about :) .

You can find the original article on Mashable.

Is your IT messing up your potential customer relationships?

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Don’t get me wrong. I love technology. I love what it brings to us and what it can do in our daily lives. But it scares me when the IT department is put in charge of a really important marketing tool. This is not good for customer relationships.

As part of our initiative to make technology and marketing work more effectively to build customer relationships, we have set up a new project Create a Website. Our point is simple.

The goal of your website is to focus on customer relationships — and either generate leads or convert sales. YOur website is not a technical coding project.

To get this right we use WordPress – a really powerful – and free content management system and the hosting we use. But this is the email I got the other day (bold added by me):

Morning Michael,

Firstly I must thank you for all the information you sent through.

I have come in today and spoken to my boss about the website the hosting and domain etc; too which she replied we already have all of that….

Our IT company has organized our host and our domain it was just a case of no one actually sat down to create the website.

I am rather upset about this as I was really excited about this project, now all the work that I have prepared for it is going to be emailed to our IT guys and they are going to do everything from them.

So once again Thank you for taking the time to prepare that information from me and I assure you if I ever need somebody for this reason I am saving your contact details and you will be the first I call!

Have a super day!

Missed customer relationship opportunity

Based on the ignorance of this boss a really important part of the marketing strategy has just gone down the loo. This company is a small business and they have just handed potentially their most vital marketing communication tool over to the IT department.

Here is what is going to happen from here on:

  • The IT will waste weeks sorted out a website from scratch trying to design a site
  • It will then site in cyber space –wasted
  • The boss will then be convinced that the web is a useless medium as there were no real results.
  • No customer relationships will be developed

And all because the site was left to the IT department – who have no idea of marketing, how to market a website  and how to build customer relationships. Ironically they may not even understand how to code a website.

So how do you set up a website to build customer relationships

When setting up a website the following questions should be looked at and reviewed:

  • How does our customer look for information?
  • What tools does our customer use to communicate with each other and others?
  • What is the point of the website: Is it a marketing site or an online brochure?
  • How do we market the site: Howe do we expect to get traffic?
  • How do we measure the effectiveness of the site?

When you are looking at the specific website details here is what I would review:

  • What open source technology can we use?
  • Is the code well designed so that Google likes it?
  • Is the code flexible and easy to use?
  • How much is it going to cost to make any changes?
  • How much can we manage in house versus outside?

The one customer relationship tool that is critical

When it comes to creating credibility and getting people to take there is one major consideration: Content.

Good compelling content is critical for a user. You need to design your content in the following way:

  • Your potential customer wants to come into your site and see a theme
  • The themed content must be relevant to what they are looking for
  • They must want to read it
  • Is it up to date
  • Is it focused on their needs rather than your own posturing (our directors are on the front page?)

The most important marketing strategy note:

The internet has caused a paradox for many marketers and how to build customer relationships. On the one side it has amplified the traditional broadcast approach. It has opened multiple means of communication for your customers.

It has also amplified your customer’s life. It has allowed them to talk to others, review things and learn about new subjects in a flash. Today they are happy to give their attention to brands that are relevant and are trustworthy.

To simply put up a website and hope that it is going to work is naive. And really hopeful. It will not work. And like all things that you demand in your business it should work. It should get results and make a difference.

How Well Do You Understand Your Social Propellers?

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Sunday is just around the corner. My wife and I decide we want a few friends around for a Sunday lunch.

But who to invite? Here is how the conversation goes …

  • I want to get my old mate from school who I met 30 years ago with his family.
  • But she wants to invite the new friend, she made at our eldest son’s school – feels that the two couples will not get on.
  • So, I suggest we invite my friend from university.
  • She thinks this is a great idea, but again, the two couples will not get on.
  • So, I suggest that invite my mate from university and you invite your friend that you met at work.
  • No, they won’t mix…. this is getting hard. Like trying manage the seating at our wedding.

And so on it goes. We spend the next half an hour trying to work out whom of our social circle will get on with each other and who we will invite for lunch.

Social Blobs versus Social Propellers

You have had the same chat that my wife and I had. I’m just lucky that we can have a civil chat on this topic as it can be quite testy.

(I’m sure there are a few divorces that have ended, because social circles are not compatible).

Yet when we go online, we create this massive social circle. A one size fits all type of circle.

We add all types of relationships to our Facebook profile from school friends, family, co-work, and so on.

Here is a quick test. Just go and look at your Facebook profile as ask yourself:

  • How many people do you actually engage with on a daily or weekly basis?
  • How many people do you trust to share different [not intimate] details with over one broadcast
  • How many comments are light hearted banter that are pretty meaningless
  • Would everyone feel comfortable if you put them all in one room

I could continue with the questions but you can see the obvious answer in this. Your network is made up of different social groups that represent different aspects of your life as shown below.

Marketing to Social Blobs

Yet as marketers and business owners, we set up our marketing strategy with a one size fits all social circle in mind – or a social blob and expect to create earned media.

Just think of MTN, Vodacom and Cell C or the Big Four South African Banks Marketing. Their ad campaigns on TV, print, radio focus on a single idea.

Even the social media from these companies is exactly the same. Twitter has become a rescue tool to ask bad brand reviewers to please DM them so they can discuss their problems in private.

As an example standard twitter account has one account: http://twitter.com/StandardBankGrp, which has to deal with the following social propellers:

  • Large Business owners
  • Medium size business owners
  • Small business owners
  • Pensioners
  • Single moms
  • Single dads
  • The newly employed
  • First time home owner
  • Students
  • And a whole lot in between

Something tells me Standard bank does not really understand their market – or do not care to know their market.

What is important is that you have to understand how each group likes to communicate. You have to understand how they engage with each other within their respective propeller. And your marketing needs to mirror this. This is when you can start creating earned media.

In real life, we do not create one massive social blob. The lunch debate is a very good example of this. We segment our lives according to our experiences and how we want to express ourselves.

We engage with our family, work colleagues; friends we’ve known most of our lives differently.

These smaller social circles show different parts of who we are and each circle has a different level of importance to us. And they don’t mix. They extend out from us in different directions – hence the idea of a propeller.

Understanding Social Propellers

As you know and can see from the example above, your customer very seldom fits into one size fit all segment – yet our marketing tends to do so. Your customers have different social propellers who socialise in very different ways.

As marketers, we need to look at our customer base and map what their social propellers look like. But what is a social propeller?

A social propeller is a map that outlines our different social networks and breaks our life down into the different ways we express ourselves.

A large part of this post was inspired by Paul Adam’s, who is a user researcher at Google. For more his thoughts on this topic you can find him here at slideshare.com. He research shows that, on average, a person has the following social propeller:

  • A person will have 4 to 6 different key social groups
  • Each group will have between 2 to 10 people in it
  • These groups stay independent of each other
  • Privacy is a really a trust issue – we share personal messages on a one-to-one basis rather than openly
  • The term friend is misleading and we do not consider most people “friends”
  • People within each group have a different weighting and role
  • An influencer is not as powerful as you’d think – influence works both ways – someone has to speak and someone has to listen

How Are You Planning Your Marketing Strategy?

If the above bullet points haven’t changed how you run your marketing strategy, then I have failed to convey the importance of knowing your target market’s social propeller. It is easy to fob this thinking off as a new marketing idea or a social media thought process.

Yet how we do our marketing is standing at a cross roads and this really does have a far deeper implication for you. This is highlighted in my post that your marketing return on investment is only about a 1.5% return and the Five New Rule of Marketing.

Perhaps the following points will pull this into a deeper perspective for you:

  • What you say about your brand is irrelevant today. Your customer — or potential customer — is going to ask a third party for advice. This may be a very close friend, an acquaintance or a review on yelp.com
  • The degree of trust given will determine the action. Your customers no longer trust traditional advertising. They know you have a bias and that you will put yourself in the best way possible. Just because a chocolate has a healthy ingredient or nutrient does not make it healthy.
  • People are happy to have others influence their decisions. We face so many choices every day and if we can outsource some of these to a reliable, trustworthy third-party, we will. Heck, just choosing a breakfast cereal can be a major decision, given how many choices you have.
  • Your choices are based on past experience, both yours and other reliable, trustworthy third parties.
  • How we want other people to perceive us will determine the choices we make.

A Social Propeller Marketing Strategy

The above points, give you a clear guideline what you need to be doing to improve the effectiveness of your next marketing or communication strategy. Here are some key things that you need to consider:

  • Break down the different social propellers in your business. These include your clients, staff, suppliers, other stake holders, management team and any other person or group of persons connected with your business.
  • Breakdown each of these groups into a new social propeller structure
  • Understand how each of these different subgroups socialise and interact and what marketing will motivate them.
  • Start Fansourcing. Find your fans, find out how they talk and then empower them
  • Understand the experience you are creating and what needs to be changed to improve the quality of this experience
  • Design your traditional and social media strategies around this platform

Good luck with this – and I have embedded Paul Adams presentation below for more insights. And, please if you know of any companies doing this well please drop us a note below.

Bridging the gap between our online and offline social network

View more presentations from Paul Adams.

5 Simple Ways To Really Launch Your Marketing Overnight.

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There is an old saying that is so overused but so true:

If you don’t change what you are doing, you are doing, you will keep getting the same results.

Personally I think that this is the definition of insanity – especially when I look at what most marketers are currently doing.

The problem with marketing is that everything has changed, and most marketers are not even aware of this. They have been trained in a traditional way and become highly effective technicians in applying the cornerstone of traditional marketing. Yet these cornerstones of traditional marketing no longer work very well.

The Traditional Marketing Model is Broken

Most marketers won’t believe me when I say that 99 % of traditional media is wasted and most marketing research does not uncover the real reasons why your customers buy. Traditional big budget marketing is no longer the powerhouse solution it used to be.

And these are the reasons for most brand manager’s existence. I guess it is hard to hear that you are no longer relevant – and we have a huge industry with a vested intrest – namely the advertsing, brand and reaserch industries. They are worth billions in any language or currency.

So What Has Changed?

Here are some of the underlying drivers of this change — and why it is important to you:

  • Your customers no longer believe what you say and no longer pays attention when you talk to them. In other words: Your Customer Knows You Are Biased
  • Marketing is not about communication channels anymore but rather an evolution in how your customer thinks and how they make buying choices.
  • Today product marketing and customer marketing are two completely different things:
    • Product marketing focuses on communicating products and benefits;
    • Customer marketing focuses on the experience.
  • Marketing is a change management process – if you want to change how people perceive you, you have to change how they experience your organisation. You have to change how you do things.
  • Too many marketers are technicians who apply a big budget, plug-and-play program that are driven by creative agencies and ideas.
  • Your marketing must mirror how your customers think and your brand must encourage a community and an customer experience.

Today’s Marketing Trap

Most marketing is about taking an idea and pushing it out through as many channels as possible – whether this is through twitter, TV, Outdoor or whatever. And this is the trap and false sense of comfort marketers get.

The simple truth is your customer doesn’t trust you and the attention they gave you in the past is no longer a guarantee – whether its on TV or on Twitter.

So how do you avoid the trap? Well, the first step is to stop broadcasting (which would effectively shut down about 95% of the marketing departments) and start applying some new rule.

The 5 Simple Marketing Rules That Will Redefine Your Marketing

Here is a guideline on what I think the top five changes you need to make:

  • Your Brand Is A Mindset. It is a customer experience: Your brand is worth something, because your customers believe it is worth something. It’s not about your product, features and benefits. It is about what it does for your customers and how that allows them to express themselves and tell their own story.
  • The Desire Already Exists: So stop trying create it with really expensive advertising campaigns. It’s time to channel it, leverage it. It’s time to get your customers involved.  This means you really need to understand how your customer thinks and understand the micro-niche is within your larger market segments. This is why earned media works so well.
  • Contextually Relevant: Your communication is no longer just the big media. It is this, the newer media’s, your staff, your customers, and every other component of your business to communicate something. The key to your communication strategy is not content, but rather being relevant to every touch point and the customer experience that is designed to create earned media.
  • Paid Versus Earned Media: Your customers and not listening to you any more. And what they say about you is far more important than what you say about you. You need to get them on board, by creating such a positive mind, blowing experience that they keep coming back to you for more — and they bring their friends with them.
  • Loyalty: The objective of your marketing campaign is to create customers who are loyal and keep coming back for more. So stop focusing on awareness, AR’s and any other relevant measurement. It’s not going to help you.

Your Marketing Must Mirror Your Customer’s Thinking

The canned marketing approach has very little impact — and way too expensive.

To make your marketing effective you need to map it around your customers thought process to create an experience that they want to talk about. In fact they must rave about it. You need to create a Customer Utopia – or as we call it RaveTopia  :)

Picture Credit

Your Customers Are NOT Dumb?

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Walter Pike makes two very good points in his 2010 Bizcommunity.com trend report about the two assumptions that traditional marketing is built on:

  1. Most marketers think their customers are ignorant
  2. That these ignorant customers believe what they are told

It’s a point well made. As a consumer you know you’re not ignorant, you don’t believe what you are told. But as marketers we forget this and believe we need to build customer loyalty by trying to control the conversation. We believe that our marketing research defined marketing strategy is spot-on. Hogwash — and customer loyalty pays the price.

Here’s the truth about today’s marketing:

  1. What other people are saying about your brand is more important than what you say about it
  2. Most marketing research is hogwash. Most purchasing decisions are impulsive acts and are based on sub-conscious desires.

I can only wonder how much advertising money has been flushed down the toilet as these marketers attempt to push past the clatter to try and develop brand awareness as opposed to customer loyalty.

I know when I was at university I was taught this product driven approach to marketing. This system belief was supported by the large multinational companies are work for is the brand manager. The truth is the product driven marketing strategies are no longer relevant. Today’s marketing strategies have to be…

Customer Powered Marketing Strategies

One my favourite marketing authors is Seth Godin. Like most people I love his books. His ideas are expressed simply and clearly. If there are two things that I have learned from these books it is this

  • To be different you have to be remarkable. Good enough doesn’t cut it anymore and being mediocre doesn’t build customer loyalty.
  • You can no longer broadcast to customers. It is time to really talk to each other with out the window dressing, fluff and string of broken promises.

So what are the implications of this change? I see…

Five Key Marketing Changes

  1. Customer Loyalty needs to be the strategic benchmark for your marketing activities. Just cos I know about you does not mean I will buy from you. There needs to be something more solid that tells you how well you’re doing and customer loyalty – when stripped of fluff and satisfaction indexes – is the way to go.
  2. Change Management is built around developing customer loyalty. Why? Two reasons:
    • Because that’s the point your business. If you’re not building customer value and getting a return on your investment, what the point?
    • The customer experience is gaining ground as a valuable marketing tool and your entire organisation has to focus on creating this experience.
  3. Customer Line of Sight. Ever action has a reaction and is something your staff what reaction their actions cause. They need to know how they are impacting the customer experience.
  4. Start Listening – Really Listening.  A loyal customer wants to talk to you. They want you to succeed and they will give you real feed back when you are open, honest and sincere. The days of broadcasting to your customer are over.
  5. Front Line Empowerment. Your customer engages with your frontline staff and this defines the experience they have. Execs have always been loath to give too much away but with the proper tools in place this front line empowerment is easily managed.

I think the point that I’m making here is that it’s time to turn your business into a marketing department. It’s easy for your customer to see through the bull and they are looking for value for themselves — not you.

After if all you have is a product and no customers, you don’t have a business. And if you do have customer’s that are not stick around and buying more from you, you are far less profitable than you could be.

This year make your marketing goal to create a real customer experience and build customer loyalty.

Picture Credit: httpf://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/ / CC BY-SA 2.0