THINKing

Forgotten Gems

Through no fault of their own, sometimes really good posts just get overlooked. Here are a few forgotten gems you may have missed.

Grandma Says -  Southern grandmothers have often said, “there are only three times a respectable person’s name should be in the paper: when you are born, when you are married, and when you die.” This is the one area in which I part company with my grandmothers.

Brand Euthanasia -  Some brands should be allowed to die, or if that fails, then we owe it to them to kill them.

New Business Tip: Do Great Work For Current Clients -My marketing mentor, Bill Loeffler, once said the the best new business program is doing great work for current clients. He was right.

The Value Of Connections – As we have discussed before, the value of connections in business cannot be underestimated. I’m talking primarily about tight connections that you use ruthlessly to help you achieve your personal and professional goals.

To Market, To Market… -  What does buying a fat pig have to do with your business? Stick with me and all will be revealed.

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Hook Me Up With A Human

Oh, what has happened to the carbon-based organizational interface? Many organizations have digitized humans – aka carbon-based units – out of existence in their customer service operations. Now, I love digital technology as much as anyone, but it is time to bring the people back into their appropriate customer service roles, don’t you think?

Have you ever tried to reach a human at Amazon.com? When I last checked it was almost impossible to find a telephone number on the website. Just to annoy them, here is their toll free number: 800-201-7575.

Many organizations don’t even have a live person answering phones. They dump you directly into voicemail. If this happens to you, punch “0″ immediately. Some systems are programmed to ignore the first three “0s” so keep punching. This almost always gets you to a sentient being. OK, sentient may be a little strong. At least they are breathing. Sometimes if you hit the * key, you’ll be sent to the company directory.

The Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals in Business reports that in one of its survey about customer service “can’t find a human” was at the top of the list of things participants disliked. The study further showed that calling a toll free number was still a top preferred method of reaching a company, but more people are turning to the web because no one appears to be home at the phone.

The society has published an online directory containing a lot of contact information for many top companies. Use it frequently.

Another tip for hunting down a human: the Whois directory. However, truly cunning companies have removed their contact information from there, too.

Companies which continue to shirk their responsibility to their customers eventually will pay. Customer retention rates will spiral downward and new business will dry up. At least, I keep telling myself this will happen to these bad PR poster children.

If you call me, unless I’m on fire or talking with a client, I’ll answer my phone. And, if I somehow miss your call, it won’t take me 24 hours to get back to you. It’s bad PR – and inhuman – to do anything less.

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Stop Listening To Your Customers

According to Mark Cuban, you should never listen to your customers. Does he really mean this?

No,  what he is saying is that marketers must take matters into their own hands when it comes to creating a new product or improving an old one. Says Cuban,

I’m working with a company that at one point had a product that was not only best in class, but also technically far ahead of its competition.  It created a better way of offering its service and customers loved it and paid for it. Then it made a fatal  mistake.  It asked its customers what features they wanted to see in the product and they delivered on those features. Unfortunately for this company, its competitors didn’t ask customers what they wanted. Instead, they had a vision of ways that business could be done differently and as a result better.  Customers didn’t really see the value or need, until they saw the product.  When they tried it , they loved it.

He is right, as we have explained here before,

Here’s the truth: Your customers don’t know what they want. And to assume otherwise is folly. When you begin relying totally on customers to be your product development department, you are asking for serious trouble.

I’m not advocating that you stop listening to customer concerns. Au contraire.  Like Cuban, I’m saying that you must ask the right questions of your customers and then figure out what it is that they are really saying. Your customers are smart and can provide some excellent input.  It’s our job as marketers to ferret out the true meaning of that input.

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Put Away The Diamond Ring

It seems to me that many marketers are like the guy overeager to get married. That guy walks up to the first pretty girl he sees and immediately whips out the diamond ring, asking for the order, so to speak.

Marketers who ask for too much information from prospects the first time they meet is guilty of this, too.

I am always cautioning my clients about asking for too much information too soon.

If someone wants to sign up for your enewsletter, it’s OK if you initially just get an email address and a first name. That’s what I recommend. You can give the prospect the option to provide more but I only require those two elements.

As the prospect gets to know you and appreciates the content you are providing, then you can ask for a little more information.Or, if you want to provide them with some increasingly valuable content, then its appropriate to require a little deeper contact information.

FutureNow addressed this topic recently and I loved this line for their post,

Remember, it’s not about you or your sales process. Your visitors are volunteers in the process and are coming to your site with motivations and intent.

That’s dead-on. Those visitors are volunteers, there of their own accord. If you don’t provide them the information they need without asking them to marry you right away, your competition will. So, let’s put away the diamond ring until we are really sure about this whole marriage thing, OK?

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My New Business Secret Formula

We’ve talked here often about the fact that there is no marketing magic bullet. But there is a new business magic bullet, and I’m going to tell you the secret formula. Only a handful of those who read this will successfully implement within their business because it is not shiny and new.

Like most businesses, you are probably spending up to 80% of your marketing budget on bringing in new business because that’s exciting. It’s not as much fun implementing my new business secret: do great work for current customers.

But Harry, you are saying, I’d rather go out and bring home the new business buffalo than focus on my current customers. Where’s the benefit?

Let me disabuse you of the notion that there is no benefit in this hyperfocus on current customers.  Doing great work for current clients spawns so many good things for your business.

Even if you have the best salesforce in the world and they can sell anyone anything once, if your company doesn’t wow them with your service they aren’t going to buy from those superb sales folk again. Some estimates show that if you cut customer churn by just 5%, you can increase profits by at least 25%.

If that’s not reason enough, then consider these stats relating to customer retention:

• 91% of dissatisfied customers won’t return
• 96% of dissatisfied customers won’t tell you the real reason why they won’t be back
• it costs 10 times more to replace a customer than it does to keep him
• repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers

But how is doing great work for current customers the secret to my new business program, Harry?

I’m glad you asked. Here’s the key statistic that you need to internalize: referrals from repeat customers are 107% higher than from non-customers. Loyal customers talk you up to others who are like themselves. In other words, they are targeting the right customers for you and you don’t have to spend a dime.

Are you doing great work for your customers? Maybe it is time to reevaluate.

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8 Ways To Use Twitter Lists

UPDATE: We just launched our Fortune 100 Twitter list. Feel free to follow it or any of our lists mentioned below.

We talked recently about the Twitter lists set up by My Creative Team. Are you using Twitter lists? Tell us about it.

We now have a Twittering Media Outlet List, a Twittering US Journalist List, and a Twittering Canadian Journalist List. Because Hootsuite – our favorite Twitter appliance – now allows you to import your lists, we also set up a Social Media List of our favorites in that category.

We have found a number of ways to utilize Twitter lists. Let’s take a couple of minutes to think about the how-tos of lists.

1. Experts. We established our social media list for the purpose of following experts in this milieu.

2. Social media monitoring. There’s a good piece on this at Fresh Networks‘ blog.

3. Industry news monitoring. We have set up the Twittering Media Outlets list to keep up with breaking news. You also could set up niche news monitoring lists, as we are going to do for our client, Camstar Systems, so we can keep up-to-date on topics such as manufacturing execution and quality management.

4. Employees. A number of businesses, ranging from Mashable to the New York Times, have set up employee lists. This could be a good customer service tool for your company, particularly if you work for a Fortune 1000 size firm.

5. Promote Causes. NonProfit Tech 2.0 has a post about how to use Twitter lists for promoting non-profits and causes.

6. Geo-Specific Lists. My Creative Team has been listed in a number of Charlotte, NC-area Twitter lists, like this one. This is a good way to keep up with what’s happening where you live, or where you used to live.

7. News Sources. Poynter Online has a solid post telling journalists how to use Twitter lists to help streamline their jobs.  Mashable also has a piece on how journalists are using Twitter lists.

8. Job Search.  Looking for a job? Set up a list of companies for which you would like to work, so you can get a sense of the corporate culture. Add executive search contacts to the list so you can discover what jobs are available.

Those are just a few ways to use Twitter lists. Got other ideas?

Oh, before you set up your own list, there may already be one out there. Check Listorious, the directory of Twitter lists.   Here’s one we found about job searches.

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Smart Customers

Your customers are smart, but as marketers, we often misconstrue what they are telling us. We’ve written about this before but thought about it again today when I read a piece by Valeria Maltoni entitled “Your Customers Don’t Know What They Want.” Maltoni says,

Whenever you design a survey, a feedback form, write a phone script – throw away everything you know about your product and service. Your customers and prospective customers are not in your head – they don’t have your same history and assumptions about what you ask. Instead, look to capture the outcome they’re seeking. What job are they trying to do?

 It’s not that customers don’t know what they want, it is that they don’t know the possibilities.

Krispy Kreme gives us a prime example of asking the right questions and actually listening to their smart customers. They didn’t ask the customers what they wanted in a donut. They asked questions that got to the heart of the Krispy Kreme brand experience. Consumer input brought about the “Hot, Now” signs and the drive-through window.

Maltoni suggests that marketers ask questions and listen to customers for,

• indications as to how they’re solving a problem now or thinking through it
• hints that the second answer is where you should focus
• clues as to what gets their hearts racing in addition to their minds going

Listening to your customers is always good, particularly in a reccessionary period.

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Hidden Gems

OK, I’ll admit it: since Labor Day is approaching I’m taking the lazy way out today and dredging up some excellent old posts that for some reason didn’t get any traction. Have a great holiday.

Fighting For The Middle Ground

Tell Me A Story

I Spy: Top 7 Links For Online PR Espionage

Customer Diss-Service

Your Personal Brand

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Face Time

Some social media proponents would have you believe that the digital world is the new Nirvana. Guess what? Humans – the users of social media – haven’t really changed their behavior in 75,000 years. Although, we do dress better now, and we’re not all cavorting naked on the plains of the Serengeti.

Humans – being human – love social interaction, particularly of the face-to-face variety. Always have, always will. In fact, a recent survey by Forbes indicates that executives favor face-to-face meetings over the virtual kind.

A majority of executives say the recession has cut back their travel and face-to-face meetings, and they don’t like that very much. A full 84% of those surveyed say they prefer real-life interaction over digital.

Although you can’t meet with every one of your online shoppers, you can provide them some human interaction, too  They are craving this. According to an August 2009 survey conducted by Harris Interactive for human-assisted shopping site IMshopping,

77% of US Internet users who made an online purchase in the past six months would be interested in help from a real person before buying certain things on the Web. Though a majority of online shoppers reported a desire for help at least some of the time, 82% of respondents said they had not been able to get that assistance in the past. And more than one-half of that group said it had affected their purchase decision negatively—at least some of the time.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for virtual meetings and online interaction. I’m just saying that you need to understand the genetic need humans have for the tangible. It’s harder to read people during digital interactions, and you can’t build deep, meaningful relationships solely using ones and zeroes.

The same holds true for tangible marketing material. There is a time and place for everything, and now is the time for you to stand out by being more tangible to your customers and allies.

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A Fresh Wind Is Blowing

The business winds are changing direction, but there are some organizations that don’t get it and never will. The news media and big ad agencies are two industries doomed to be swept overboard if they don’t keep a weather eye out. Today, it’s about transparency and a new focus on customer service, doing what’s right for the customer. I’ve found if you do what’s right for the customer, you, too, will ride under full sail.

Let’s review a recent example of what I’m talking about in the marketing arena.  We have a client leaving another agency to come to us for a number of services, including SEO, email marketing and Google Adwords.

Old school companies try to lock clients down by tying them to agency accounts for Google Analytics, Adwords, or email marketing, or  by hooking them into proprietary content management systems and the like.  An agency which manages all of its Adwords or Analytics in a master account is not going to want to give another agency administrative access. Guess what? You can’t transfer Google Analytics accounts and you lose all the historical data. Adwords account can be transferred, but it takes an act of Congress.

When we set up client accounts – although it is less convenient for us – we set them up in the client’s name. That way, if the client ever decides to move on, we can hand over the accounts and wish them well. That’s the new, transparent, customer-oriented way to do business.

Are you old school, or are you harnessing the fresh wind?

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