Archive for October, 2013

1. Framing is a skill all marketers need to master. Aaker has some keen observations on why marketers can learn about the power of framing both from both Republicans, who are so good at it and also the Democrats, who are so bad.
2. Get those creative juices flowing through day dreaming.
3. And then Steve said let there be an iPhone. A great read on how the iPhone was born.
4. The end of the power of Wintel with the makers. HP recognizes MSFT and Intel as competitors.
5. Pinterest is now ready to sell you things…

Social media can be harsh. The trick is to not take it personally. For the most part we the consumer understand that the failure is invariably not that of a human but of a human created process.

Telstra, Air New Zealand, DirectTV, Virgin, and others all employ thousands of smart and committed people. People who get out of bed every morning aiming to do a great job. Invariably what lets them down are the holes created by lousy processes, poorly designed services and products, and lack of training.

I’ve never held back from expressing my dismay with service providers who fail to meet expectations. Twitter is my medium of choice. It’s not about getting the issue off my chest. Rather its value I get in the form of tips, tricks and ideas to resolve the issue from other Twitters. More than often my signals of dissatisfaction draws a response from others faster than the company in mention (if they respond at all).

While we pay these companies in modest increments – think your phone bill – the sum total is often substantial. That’s our lens on the problem. For others – think airlines – the bill can be larger and very substantial in aggregate. Either way, both share very similar characteristics when it comes to service failings.

THE SIX SERVICE FAILINGS

They aren’t proactive. When you identify the failure, be proactive. Use every means to reach the customer and resolve the issue. Telstra over the past three weeks knew they had a serious issue with my account. They knew I was overseas. So, they left me a voicemail on the account I couldn’t access. Never mind that this is the account I use to serve my customers. 

Proactive isn’t about ticking the box, its about reaching, engaging and closing the issue with the customer. This is a process issue – people are programed to process. 

They don’t recognize loyalty. Not all customers are created equal and not all loyalty programs are about loyalty. I remember trying to enter the Air New Zealand lounge on an international, multi country ticket. Because the first leg was with a partner airline – they didn’t fly to Fiji – they wouldn’t acknowledge my highest-level status with the airline and let me enter. Virgin did the same in the US. Qantas on the other hand welcomed me to their lounge, politely made the point they were going to make an exception due to the need I had, and thanked me for the many hundreds of thousands of miles I had flown with them. Qantas had clearly empowered employees to delight and take ownership of customer experience. Others hadn’t.

Customers who reward you with their loyalty expect it and aren’t interested in the fine print. Conversely, most businesses fail to not only recognize loyalty, but to indicate its value to you – a double miss. The most successful programs do – like Myer’s rewards.

They measure the response to the complaint, not the result of complaint itself. How many times do you get off the phone to be asked how the call went. What they should be looking to measure is both this and your current overall satisfaction with the service. I might, for instance, be happy with the way the person handled the call but as a result of the service failing be in the market for a new provider. 

They don’t follow through. I’ve experienced this endlessly from Telstra and Audi over the past week. We will call you back is followed by deafening silence. It appears there isn’t any pity in “be back city”. We will fix it is followed by no change at all. What is needed here is real rigor in measuring closure on commitments. Great service is defined by doing what you say you are going to do, quicker than you say you are going to do it. In short, get it right the first time.

They don’t show up. Service is an inevitable outcome of being in business. Just as life is difficult, so is business. Stuff happens. Why make it hard for people to reach you? Invariably you will find on most company’s we sites nearly every means of reaching them other than a phone number. My four chat conversations with Telstra yielded nothing other than hours of lost time. It wasn’t until we finally got a number to call them that I got to waste more time working to a resolution.

The brand promise isn’t delivered. For all the noise about customer service programs, promises and awards won, most put the brand position well ahead of their process improvements. Guided by the improvements in responses to service failings, the actual process failings persist. As a result, we walk to other brands. Little have effective listening programs in place. Virgin Australia appears to. My complaints on Twitter in the US about Virgin USA quickly got a responses from them. As did Air New Zealand. 

Ignore the social service signal at your peril. And correlate it with good social scoring – the person complaining might not be a valuable customer to you, but they could be a power influencer.

In an age where we are armed to signal dissatisfaction, companies need to address the root cause of service failings. They need powerful tools for listening and responding. And more than anything, they need to make the metrics related to total customer experience a cornerstone of brand performance. 

As service goes, so does the brand.

Social media is running to the end of its first decade. As it matures and rides the hype cycle to its inevitable conclusion new ideas are emerging. Most will be forks in the social media road but one won’t. It will be the new Social.

There’s a very good chance that will be something that hasn’t fully formed as a meme yet, but I’m going to call it “Signals” for now. Just as Facebook catapulted social media into the mainstream, Twitter will do the same for the Signal. Tweets and the sharing of moments are the currency of the Signal, just as pages and posts were to Social. Where Social was rich in content and narrative, Signals will be rich in our moments and those that surround us.

Moments will be the currency of this new era. Connected to the moments I am experiencing, you amplify and compliment them. As I watched the Lions and Wallabies play in Brisbane about the only thing absent from the ground from my seat was the match clock. As I shared my moments from the game, others signaled the time to me. The same will be true of all moments signaled – friends, family, fans, and soon, marketers will add vibrancy.

As a result we are now seeing up to 30% of new traffic on sites come from Twitter. Where as the social networks preferred to keep you inside their walled gardens, Twitter enriches your moments with a direct path to relevant content. Where Social looked to engage in a sub-stream – the comments section; Signals will engage in the stream of moments.

The list of implications is long, but here are two that became clear to me over a week of America’s Cup Racing:

First, content matters. No new news there. But it’s not the content we have for the most part been producing. The inane lists, expert perspectives, and goofy infographics that have contributed to the content tsunami have less relevance in this new era. What will matter is content relevant to the moment we are experiencing.

While marketers are going to need to generate more rich photography and video they are ultimately going to need to be even better at stimulating, curating and rewarding users for content. Take a look at Coke’s Youtube feed – its richness is in large part due to the content generated by consumers.

They are also going to have to adjust their metrics for success.

During the 2013 Americas Cup we saw some interesting patterns on the Emirates Team New Zealand site. While overall traffic to the blog and site was strong, the real news was in the connections to content via Twitter and Facebook (with many of the Facebook posts coming from Twitter). From the start to the end of the race we saw over 32 million requests on images. During racing were serving up to 20 gigabytes of data an hour. Rather than just looking at Google Analytics say, marketers are going to have to start looking at all content requests in aggregate. Site traffic and impressions only paint a fraction of the story.

At the same time, many of those links are being trafficked via old postal routes – email in particular. Upward of 50% of all links to traffic still circulate via email.

There are two other related marketing lesson in our Americas Cup experience. The smart marketers will first leverage their sponsorships through social amplifying their brand alongside that of the team. And technically never underestimate the traffic you could get – link to a content data warehouse rather than your site to avoid performance issues.

If the first lesson was that content matters the second is that what goes into the content matters more. In particular language frames. In the age of Signals, frames in the form of language manifest themselves most strongly in hashtags. They first started as a way to sort and find content. Now they are as much a form of expression.

Its easy to dismiss hashtags as nothing more than an irritant. And some are. But for the most part they’ve become a cultural meme, way to abbreviate and a form of expression. For instance, I might feel comfortable directly expressing how annoyed I am with my phone company in 140 characters. A simple #epicfail fixes that, signaling my dissatisfaction to them and my network. Marketers and their agencies are going to have to become great framers with strong systems for listening.

Hashtags are also the shortest route to what is happening. The America’s Cup apps delivered by the organizers were annoyances, frequently breaking during races and rarely loading content well. Twitter became a quick and reliable way to see what was happening and keep track of the race.

A new era is upon us. Signals will be critical currency to marketers everywhere. They will power data and analytics. They will become aggregation points for the moments that matter most of all to us. More importantly, the Signal will become a guidepost to a open Internet, letting us experience its full richness.

And that is where the smart marketers will meet us.

More and more brands are looking to anchor themselves in authenticity. This is a strategy that needs to go beyond the brand – in fact, it needs to start in the workplace.

Reading a story on Eileen Fisher in the Style issue of The New Yorker (highly recommend it) they highlight a piece from an employee brochure entitled, “To Be Oursleves”.

The underlying philosophy of our design – no constraints, freedom of expression – extends to the company itself, which is run in a loosely structured manner that allows for an open exchange of ideas. Every employee is encouraged to give input to any area, no matter what their position or expertise. The individual is valued for the total picture of who they are and what they contribute.

Live that, and you’ve got authenticity in org design and in cutlure. Which probably explains why, amongst other things, Eileen Fisher has been such a success.

One of the more challenging aspects of moving to Australia has been adopting to the pace of communications.

In the first few weeks I reported my Blackberry as not working several times, only to discover that the pace of email after hours slows to a crawl or evaporates entirely. As the productivity debate rages in the media down here, I can’t help but smile at how Australia has all but rejected the idea that just because you are tethered to the network you should be ready to work.

Compare this to the US where an email unanswered in minutes draws expressions of concern, confusion and outright outrage.

I’ve been slowing the pace of my email for two simple reasons. First, if it needs to happen real-time it is generally happening in Twitter or Chatter. Second, I’m carving my day up more into working chunks and only looking at email in specific windows. I’m also doing my best to do Saturday’s email and Internet free.

While Australian businesses should look at the velocity of their communications – they are slow by any standard, they don’t need to embrace the connectedness rife in the US. While email tempo isn’t an indicator of productivity focus is.

The question is going to be how do we increase focus and mindfulness in the workplace while maintaining our velocity.