Independent Thinking » MarketingProfs

3 Ways to Strengthen Customer Experience Online

Daria Steigman — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 10:05:30 +0000

I heard Linda Ireland speak last week about how to strengthen the customer experience on social media platforms. A key point she made during the MarketingProfs Webinar is that customers are demanding–to be heard, authenticity, speed, support, interaction, reaction–and you’d better be ready to meet their needs.

Ireland also walked through 10 tips for connecting more effectively with your customers. My top three takeaways:

1. Know which platforms work best when. A blog can be a great way to connect with prospects or to educate existing customers with ongoing or evolving needs, but it’s probably not the best platform for addressing customer service issues. The more you understand where your customers are in their buying cycle and how they interact, the more proactively you can plan where you should be engaging with them.

2. Customer experience is about what happens AND how customers feel. Ireland’s point: you (the business) impact both.

3. Focus on your customers, not your competitors. Ireland glossed over this at the end of her presentation, but I think it’s the most important takeaway. Too many companies are so busy worrying about what the competition is doing that they forget why customers interact with their brand in the first place. Don’t imitate. Instead, create your own customer experience.

What’s your top tip for strengthening the customer experience online?

Photo by lulu (Flickr).

Have you signed up to receive the Independent Thinking newsletter? Now’s the time! Once a month I’ll send you exclusive, subscriber-only content highlighting interesting articles I’ve found, as well as tips on marketing, social media, and how to grow your business. Sign up today!

5 Digital Trends to Watch

Daria Steigman — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 10:05:17 +0000

If Steve Rubel is right, there are some fascinating digital trends to plan for in 2011.

During a recent MarketingProfs Webinar, Rubel highlighted 11 digital trends, including location-based services, thought leadership, and social media schizophrenia (e.g., information overload). From his list, here are five that stand out:

Attentionomics, or the concept that it’s not enough to reach people (e.g., eyeballs or numbers)–you have to grab their attention to drive behavior. A couple ways to do this: using visualizations and creating digital embassies within your social networks.
Digital Curation, which Rubel concisely defined as “separating the art from the junk.” This is a big one for me, because right now we’re focusing on aggregation far more than curation (think paper.li and similar “auto”-curation tools).
Integration Economy, or the concept that the way we communicate will demand that people collaborate more across an organization. I’ve been talking about shattering silos for a long time, so I hope Rubel’s right about this one.
Ubiquitous Social Computing, or what Rubel said involves “optimizing for mobility, not just mobile.” A couple ways to do this: designing for multiple platforms and thinking about integrating social sharing into your products.
Transmedia Storytelling, which is the concept that technology is changing the way stories are told (think Avatar, Toy Story). Rubel said that “narrative is no longer a whole,” and that we must think instead about “connecting the dots.”

What stands out for you? And what trends would you add to the list?

Photo by Phillie Casablanca (Flickr).

Being Liked Is Overrated

Daria Steigman — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 11:15:39 +0000

During a recent MarketingProfs Webinar on managing your online reputation, C.B. Whittemore said that “negative stuff isn’t all evil.” She cited a study that found that 64% of people trust social media more when there are both positive and negative comments.

This makes sense. I’m more likely to value reviews when there’s a mix of good and bad. First, the mix gives me context. Second, I have some faith that the company didn’t just flood the channel with its own evangelists.

So why are so many companies afraid of negative comments on their Facebook page, on a blog post, or in other social outposts?

Here are four reasons to embrace negative comments:

Negative comments can alert you to a problem (real or perceived) that you might not know you have. Embrace the learning opportunity.
Negative comments give you a chance to explain or clarify your position. For example, say 50 people are carping on Facebook that you won’t extend a promotion. What would happen if you said “sorry you missed this one” and offered them a code to sign up and get advance notice about your company’s next promotion?
Transparency builds trust. It’s okay to disagree with a customer, a client, or a prospect. We’re not clones.
A concerted campaign of negativity can energize your evangelists to come to your defense. (First, of course, people have to trust you.)

When I was president of my condo board, there were a couple of co-owners who didn’t like to take no for an answer. They’d call me up and state their case. I’d listen, and then politely explain why what they wanted wasn’t feasible. Then they’d come to the public meeting and ask the same question. My response: “As I told you when you called me earlier…”

If this were online, would anything have changed? I don’t think so.

Photo by Stefan Cloo (Flickr).

What is True “Social Media Integration”?

Daria Steigman — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:28:54 +0000

According to Jeremiah Owyang, true social media integration doesn’t exist.

In a fascinating keynote speech at the MarketingProfs B2B Conference last week, Owyang walked through an 8-step roadmap for integrating social media and your (corporate) Web site. The aim is to identify where you are now, where you want to be, and to move slowly and strategically forward.

The framework starts from the point of no integration and moves toward an ideal:

Do nothing (while the conversation is happening around you in other platforms).
Link outward from your Web site (i.e., send traffic away with links such as “follow us on Twitter” or “follow us on Facebook“).
Link away, but encourage sharing (i.e., “I’m now following Company X on Twitter,” which offers some social endorsement).
Extend your brand in social channels (i.e., mirror your corporate brand experience elsewhere, a.k.a. “fishing where the fish are”).
Aggregate the conversation on your Web site. (Think Skittles, which centralized discussions on its site. The downside, of course, is loss of control.)
Use social log-ins (i.e., Facebook Connect or Twitter Connect. Think H&R Block. While this may increase sign-ups, you lose the opportunity to collect e-mail addresses and other key data.)
Social log-in triggers sharing (creating a social or interactive experience that enables users to stay on the site while interacting with both the company and their friends/peers, and to recruit other people into the social network. The challenge is that this requires planning, the right technology, a solid campaign strategy, and extensive resources.) Pepsi Refresh, for example, lets people vote for their favorite ideas and share them with friends on Twitter and Facebook. Dell IdeaStorm triggers consumers to recruit friends to vote for their ideas.
Seamless integration (the idea that you won’t be able to tell the difference between your Web site and a social site).

Owyang said that seamless integration requires a fundamental change that we’re not yet ready for. “The idea of sending traffic to a .com is an old way of doing things,” said Owyang. In the future, “you’ll send traffic to people and the networks.” He also suggested that the future Web will be sorted around people and contextual situations (not URLs).

Pretty heady stuff. I’m still somewhere between Step 2 and Step 4. Where are you, and where do you want to be?

Photo by ming1967 (Flickr).

What’s Your Biggest Marketing Challenge?

Daria Steigman — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 19:14:07 +0000

I was just looking over a short report on business-to-business marketing put out by MarketingProfs and Forrester Research. According to What Works in B2B Marketing 2010, the top three challenges facing marketers are lead generation, increasing product/service awareness, and reaching decision makers.

While the first one was no surprise (lead generation is consistently one of my top challenges too), I was a bit surprised to see the other two on the list. Maybe that’s because, as a small business owner, I find that social media has made it far easier to identify and reach out to key decision makers in companies. It’s also made it easier and more cost effective for small companies to build brand awareness.

What’s your take?

7 Tips for Optimizing Your LinkedIn Brand

Daria Steigman — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:05:44 +0000

In keeping with the time constraints of busy, always on-the-go workers, MarketingProfs has created a new “Take 10” series: short, 10-minute presentations with actionable takeaways. I was smart enough to take 10 minutes out the other day to get a LinkedIn 101 refresher course from Jason Alba.

Alba offered four “do it once” tips for setting up your profile and six “do regularly” tips for keeping your brand front and center on LinkedIn. The highlights of his “do regularly” advice:

Pose a Question to your network at least once a month.
Answer Questions whenever you have a few minutes of downtime.
Join LinkedIn Groups Discussions, which let you reach an audience beyond your first degree network (or start a Groups discussion of your own).
Use Advanced Search to find prospects.
Use Company Search to gain competitive intelligence on your prospects and your competition.
Update Your Status at least weekly. (I’d actually recommend doing this more often as long you have something relevant to share—be it a useful link, a blog post, information about that killer conference you’re headed to, and so forth.)

I’d add one final “do regularly” tip: Read status updates from your network. You can do that easily by pulling in the RSS feed of all your contacts’ status updates. This is a great tool for keeping up with who has changed jobs, is sharing good news, or otherwise has something worth commenting on. I tend to skim the updates (there will be a lot), looking less at who’s connecting with whom and more at who’s sharing news. See something interesting? Click through, leave a quick comment, and become instantly top of mind.

Photo by Mario Sundar (Flickr).

5 Must-Know Things About SEO

Daria Steigman — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:08:46 +0000

Is your Web site optimized, or do you mostly just have random people dropping by?

I was on another very useful MarketingProfs Webinar yesterday, this time on the topic of SEO essentials. Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo coupled a great primer on the topic with some terrific tips and free resources for monitoring and analyzing Web sites.

Here are her 5 SEO essentials:

Make sure your Web site is indexable.
Keywords are the foundation of SEO, so it is important to identify the right keywords for your target audience. (Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a search tool that lets you identify the volume of searches associated with a particular word or phrase.)
It’s not just about identifying keywords, but also where you place them. They should appear in a number of places on the page (i.e, filename, title tag, meta tag, meta description, link text, and so forth). The best sites aim for 2-4 percent keyword density.
Inbound links help search engines rank your site, and the best inbound links are one-way. (Yahoo’s Site Explorer can help you determine your site’s link popularity.)
Your social footprint is becoming more and more important. (For example, Google Caffeine is expected to incorporate more social media links; Google’s real time search already is.)

Finally, Miller stressed that it is not enough to incorporate SEO–you have to measure it. She advises regularly (i.e., monthly or quarterly) measuring your rankings in search engines, your competitors’ rankings, and your site traffic from organic search.

Photo by mecookie (Flickr).

Insights from Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki

Daria Steigman — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 12:55:00 +0000

As some of you may know, I joined MarketingProfs last fall. There are two great values about the company/online resource: (1) community and (2) professional development. As a pro member, I have access to a vast store of case studies, reports, how-to articles, and live (and playback on-demand) Webinars. Which brings me to the point of this post.

One of my goals for this year is to participate in more Webinars–and then to pass on what I learn to you, my readers. Yesterday’s Webinar featured a conversation with Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki about doing business in 2010. Here are a few takeaways:

Everything Is Not Free–Godin pointed out that lots of things (including personal connections) aren’t free. What is free: ideas, because the middlemen are dying out.
Marketing–Kawasaki pointed out that the days of marketing to that one influential voice (think New York Times reviewer) are over. Instead, he stressed the importance of seeding your products as far and wide as possible to “build a critical mass of nobodies.” Godin added that companies must “initiate or die.”
Portable Tribes–Godin noted that people are increasingly living their lives in public, and that true communities “will follow us in our digital world.” Kawasaki countered that he really wasn’t that interested or influenced by what his friends were buying or liked. (I tend to agree with Kawasaki, but one participant raised a good point, as a marketer, about the value of that awareness.)
Customer Service–Godin called customer service “a form of marketing far more powerful than advertising.” He added that, if you can delight someone, they’ll tell others. Referring to Comcast and Best Buy‘s Twitter strategies, Kawasaki suggested that “customer service is a weapon, and the social aspect of customer service is the leading edge of the weapon.”
Passion–Godin pointed out that people are now both workers and owners (i.e., we can create and build), and he suggested that this would be the dividing line between what was and what will be. Kawasaki added that “the time to start innovating is before the recession ends.”

As a labor relations specialist before I was a business owner and communications strategist, I’m fascinated by this concept that we are both workers and owners. Chris Anderson used a similar analogy in remarks a few months ago, and I’m still trying to figure out how I can apply this concept better in my business.

Godin and Kawasaki offered some really good food for thought. Anything here inspire you?

Photo by billjacobus1 (Flickr).