The Electronic Engagement Blog

I’m in the middle of preparing a spring course on innovation for students in our Masters of Information Systems Management program and as I’ve been researching current thinking and actions, two interesting things have come up.

First, most courses on innovation are taught by professors who have researched innovation best practices, rather than by people who innovate for a living. And while there’s great learning to be had by studying what practitioners do, it would also be great to have more practitioners teach what they know, and what they do. Especially in all things electronica (both systems and products), since these things and systems surround us every waking (and sleeping) moment. So if you’re a practitioner, I’d love to hear from you, and discuss your approaches, thoughts, successes, and cautionary tales.

The second interesting thing was an offer I received from a colleague to brainstorm course content. It was a kind and earnest offer from a good and very experienced guy (former CIO who now teaches) who put it this way: “I’d be happy to talk about this and brainstorm with you. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years and I can tell you what works and what doesn’t work as far as innovation is concerned.”

How many folks think of innovation this way, I wonder? The word “innovate,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, comes from the Latin
“in” (into) + “novus” (new): essentially, to “go into new” ideas, territory, thinking etc. And yet many people think of innovations as a list of what we know works and what we know doesn’t work.

And as we all know, it’s hard to be innovative (or appreciate innovation) when your top of mind list is “what we know works and what we know doesn’t work.”

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I’m an “n” of one, and possibly a Pollyana (which is not a bad thing, at least as the term was originally defined), but it appears to me that people are connecting for good more than ever.

Charitable giving rose from $250B in 2004 to $260B in 2005 to $295B in 2006 (Source: GivingUSA Foundation). A recent Kiplinger’s Magazine was all about Green Investing. GOOD magazine will publish it’s second anniversary issue in a few months. And take a look at what’s been going on in your grocery store.

Peter Drucker always liked nonprofits because they had to do more with less. Last October was one example. October was Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and nowhere was this more obvious than at your local grocer. The Susan G. Komen Foundation or, as it is now known, “Komen for the Cure” enlisted General Mills and many other sponsors to surround and engage shoppers with. well, breast cancer awareness.

It was physically everywhere: I remember being in the checkout line, seeing pink-bannered “DVDs for the Cure.” I bought English Muffins for the Cure. My bank had Money for The Cure. Seeing tons of facings in tons of places, I was impressed with both the scope and the coordination of the effort.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I was doing some work with a nonprofit group and wondered, how can the reach be extended electronically?

Sure, this group sends emails and has an eNewsletter and a web site that accepts online donations and all the usual stuff, but what other possibilities are there? Would they benefit from a Facebook page? Should they be using twitter? Developing their own social networking app? Be going mobile?

As we press forward into an increasingly connected world with the attendant rise in noise level, how do nonprofits compete effectively for share of voice, share of wallet and share of mind?

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I may owe Samsung an apology.

After my last post, about how my Samsung NV-10 camera stopped working and I had difficulty in getting a response from Samsung about it, I emailed Samsung again. This time, I had a response before the day was out, and it was a great response:

Fast. Clear offer of help (”Please give us a call at 1-800-SAMSUNG to speak with a live agent who will be able to assist you in troubleshooting the issue and setting up a repair…” A copy of my original email so that I can remember what I said. And few presumably helpful links.

The only thing that could still be done is follow-up. I haven’t yet responded, just to see what would happen, and haven’t heard from them again. So while this time Samsung did everything right, they could get bonus points for following up, which would help maintain the connection with customers like me who get too busy to address the issue right away.

So, so far, great. Let’s see what happens when I call for help.

More to come…

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Electronic engagement isn’t just about connections. It’s about power, too.

As consumers, we often feel good about the idea that companies take us seriously, and are customer-centric, and are all about customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, and blahdy blahdy blah blah blah.

Truth is, nice concept, really rare to see an example.

Well, in a satisfying instance of “the keyboard is mightier than the price elasticity study that suggests that our customers are so stupid they’ll actually pay us to not put on this crap that we put on their computers because we get money for it so actually it’s like getting paid twice,” Sony has announced that it will no longer charge its customers (at least, its customers who opt for the Windows Vista Business Edition — a $100 upgrade) a $50 fee to remove the bloatware/crapware/craplets. So nice of you Sony. Well done. Well, hold on, not exactly.

Seems the only reason Sony made this move is because so many blogs (engadget’s headline: “Sony Hates You”) reacted with such vehemence over the idea of Sony actually charging customers to remove crap that they didn’t ask for or want on their computers in the first place (that also, by the way, causes conflicts and poor system performance) that the company kind of had no choice.

For a nice pithy story about it, check today’s Wired blog entry.

Sony still acts like the arrogant, couldn’t-care-less-about-customers company that it is (so you’ll take off the $50 fee to remove crapware if I pay you $100 for an upgrade? Hmm, let me do some math on this…), but at least in this one instance many customers have spoken and their voices have been heard and acted upon. But only because of a critical mass of blogs that speak for customer and potential customers at large.

That’s ePower. And we’re just beginning to learn how to use it.

By the way, lest you think I’m Sony-bashing just for fun, know that I used to be a Sony evangelist — every e-thing I had was Sony — laptop, peripherals, camera, voice recorder, Clie — and it’s this kind of crap that made me stop being a customer.

ePower means that first you vote with your fingers (tell the world when you think a company is dealing unfairly), and then with your wallet (become someone else’s customer). That’s the kind of power that every company respects.

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Purely aside from the fact that I love this song, the question raised is increasingly important, and increasingly broad.

It used to be that you were the sum of what the people in your sphere of experience knew of you. And while that hasn’t essentially changed, the sphere has expanded, and now what people know of you isn’t just what they see when they see you, what they hear from you and about you, and what they know from those who know you. Now you’re everywhere, digitally.

Google yourself. What comes up? Is it right, wrong, not enough, too much? We worry a lot these days about being too electronically visible, but chances are that in some respects, you’re not visible enough. You’ve probably done more things, and more important things, than any of us know.

Seth’s Godin’s blog today makes an interesting observation: maybe resumes are old school, passe, irrelevant, last generation’s way of painting the hire-me self-portrait. His point: extraordinary people don’t have just a resume. Google them, and you find multiple points of electronic engagement with them: blogs, personal web sites, papers, photostreams — many electronic facets of who they are.

How about you? What’s out there? And is it what you want, what shows that you are extraordinary? If it’s just your Facebook page, it ain’t enough.

I won’t argue that resumes and CVs aren’t important, but as Seth says in his post, they are more reasons to reject you (the right keywords didn’t come up in our ResumeDigger software) than they are reasons to be wowed by you.

To borrow from Tom Peters, the WOW factor is huge, not just for your projects, but for your Self (in both the existential sense and the hire-me sense).

Make sure that your WOW is findable.

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I love my Audi. This is the fourth one (in a row) I’ve owned. I’ve been an Audi evangelist for, well, a lot of years. I bought my first one when it was a 5-cylinder vehicle, and bought it because (among other reasons) conventional wisdom said that you couldn’t make a 5-cylinder car and Audi said, fie on that. I loved the attitude of we’ll do what’s right regardless of conventional wisdom.

It had to go in for the big scheduled service last week. $1100 worth. Yesterday, I pulled down the sun visor and the 10% discount coupon Audi had sent me with the service reminder fell into my lap. 10%. $110. And I’d forgotten all about it. And so paid $1100 instead of $990.

On my Motorola Q right now, in my text message inbox is a Borders Mobile Coupon: 20 percent off any one item. Borders used to email me a coupon to print out, but then gave me the option for mobile coupons, which I of course jumped on. And now it’s easy for me to take advantage of a time-sensitive coupon. Borders gets my loyalty (though so do amazon, Barnes & Noble, the Carnegie Mellon bookstore, Half-Price Books, and many other bookstores, all for specific high-value reasons), my evangelism (hey, I’m telling you, right?), and most important, my action (I buy a lot of books, and 20% off is 20% off, so guess where I’ll be this afternoon).

Borders reminds me of how much they love me, on a regular basis.

The lesson is obvious. If you’re Audi, and you know I love you (I’m a 4x buyer), and I’m already electronically engaged (I pay my bill online every month), it makes way more sense to send me a mobile coupon — or even an “instant coupon” at the dealership — and remind me how much you love me, which will also help me remember why I love you.

Always remind your customers of how much you love them (it makes us remember why we love you). And the most immediate — and actionable — way is through the electronic engagement we have with each other.

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What happens when the economy goes south? Well, the obvious stuff — as consumers and as businesses we buy less, postpone major purchases, waste less, and try to develop a sense of financial aikido to defend ourselves from an unforgiving market.

One of the things we get really good at is stretching dollars by keeping more things inside our own house, our own business, our own life. My experience may be similar to yours: I try to do more things myself, which means I have more things to get done. And on an already full to-do list, that’s a challenge at home, and at work.

The popularity of the GTD (Getting Things Done) system authored by David Allen in his book and website, tells me that people are feeling the press of lotsa things to get done, and not enough time to do it all.

If you’re a marketer, the good news here may be that if you can help me get (more) things done — G(M)TD — you’ll have my business, my loyalty, and maybe even my reliance (what’s better than being indispensible to customers)?

The implications for electronic engagement are very direct: figure out how to add value to a time-ravaged customer and you get on the short list. It can be as simple as making it quick and easy to pay my bill: Audi Financial Services does this very well: in under 30 seconds I can make my monthly loan payment. Or it can be a little more comprehensive: the promise of amazon Grocery is that someday I’ll just be able to make a shopping list and check off what I need, as well as get suggested reminders (”Chris, it’s been a while since you bought Mac and Cheese: need more?”) and then just click “buy,” as opposed to the arduous, multi-click hoops I have to jump through now.

The best news is that marketing to today’s customer follows some traditional logic: you make it easy for me and you’ll have me at “hello.”

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An eMarketer newsletter late last year was headlined “CPG Starts Thinking Outside the Box,” and projected that CPG (consumer package goods) companies “will spend $920 million on all forms of Internet advertising (2007), up 33% over 2006,” with that number going to $1.81 billion by 2011.

I remember many years ago when Proctor & Gamble’s then-CEO Ed Artzt admonished ad agencies (where I was working at the time) for not “stepping up” and fulfilling the promise of what was then termed “interactive marketing” (though, if you want a counterpoint, read “Interactive Marketing: The Future & Present” AMA & NTC Books, 1995. It’s an interesting read that profiles the beginning of much of the marketing we’re seeing happening or about to happen today.). The idea then was simple: there are lots of ways to connect with the customer (and remember, this was the early ’90s) and marketers continued to rely on network TV advertising.

Today we see what in some marketers’ eyes are too many — and too confusing — options. And one of the biggest issues then becomes “who do you trust” to help sort it out?

A 2007 Forrester Report (”Help Wanted: 21st Century Agency” by Peter Kim) advises that money moving from traditional media to “new” media will increase more this year than ever. And that at the same time, marketers have decreasing confidence that advertising agencies can help them figure out and manage these new options.

In fact, only 50% of the marketing execs Forrester interviewed thought that their agencies were “well-equipped to help me deal with changes in internet advertising” (versus 95% of agency execs who thought they were), 55% thought agencies could help them deal with changes in consumer behavior (versus 80% of agency execs), and only 34% thought that agencies could help them deal with chages in consumer-generated media (versus 75% of agency execs).

So who are the new experts? And if you’re a marketer, how do you know who to trust?

Especially this year, marketers must produce the same or better results with fewer resources. Smart ones will try to engage customers electronically, at many points and on many levels, and will either help their agencies get smart about it, find other resources, or do it themselves.

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Back when my day job was advertising, the Holy Grail of advertising was WOM: word of mouth. If your spot or print ad could generate positive WOM (”buzz” in those days was something only insects did. By the way, this was only 8 years ago), it was golden.

I just blundered across an eMarketer report today entitled, “Word-of-Mouth Marketing:
Winning Friends and Influencing Customers” which notes that “64 million US adults regularly share advice on products or services, and over 25 million of them (26.4, to be exact. That’s 17.5% of the online population) wield their influence online.” In just four years, by 2011, eMarketer predicts that over 35 million adults — representing 20% of the internet population — will be online influencers.

Increasingly then, another facet of electronic engagement is going to be iWOM: internet word-of-mouth. Which forces the question, how do we as marketers go beyond “viral” and “buzz”, which to me have purposeful or “manufactured” implications, and get to real, positive word of mouth?

Obviously, the first way is to have a good product. As Bill Bernbach observed even before I got into the business, “The fastest way to kill a bad product is with good advertising.” People have expectations, they buy, they’re disappointed, they never buy again; and as an old Xerox study — I don’t have the reference handy as I’m writing this, but if you ask for it I’ll dig it up — points out, a satisfied customer tells an average of five people how satisfied he or she is, a disappointed one tells 15 people how much you suck.

Beyond that though, how do you maintain the integrity of “non-managed” word of mouth, and at the same time fuel the honest good words that are being spoken about you?

Something to think about, and something that’s going to be increasing not only in volume, but in the “real-time” nature of electronic engagement.

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I recently took my 6-year-old son to the Ringling Brothers Circus and was really impressed with the focus on the customer. Buying tickets from Ticketmaster was comparatively easy (though the nanoseconds you have to actually make the purchase could be extended), and printing out your tickets ala airline e-tickets was great, but the really impressive stuff happened upon arrival.

While we were in line to get into the arena, we passed the essential “guy selling programs” (I’m sure there’s an official title for this, I just don’t know what it is). We bought one ($7 as I recall; not cheap, not expensive: good price point) and instead of the usual take-your-money-enjoy-the-show moment he paused, looked directly at my son and me, and said “I hope you enjoy the show” with real earnestness (and, it seemed, sincerity).

A long time ago, when my then-girlfriend and I frequented a very small restaurant called the Fallen Angel, the maitre d’ there (Geoffrey: a late-20s, tall young man with a closely-cropped beard. Left to become a horse trainer. Go figure.) had a gift for not simply putting people at ease and making them feel welcome, but making it seem as though his total focus was on that moment, and on you. He took only an extra minute with each customer, but that minute of focus added disproportionately to the dining experience. This Circus Guy was like that.

And in our program was a “customer experience card” that he took another moment to ask that we fill out, so that they could continue to make the circus a better experience.

I was impressed enough with this single experience to note it, but the same thing then happened inside, when we bought the inevitable Circus Toy (one of those fiber-optic light things that twirls around. Yes, I’m a bad dad, I gave in.) and the young lady selling it did the same thing: she took a moment, focused on us, hoped that we enjoyed the show, and gave us another customer experience card.

Inside, a bit of customer experience genius. No matter where your seats are, for one hour before the start of the show, you are free to wander around the three rings, mingling with the performers, getting autographs, petting an elephant, watching jugglers, and in a way, being part of the circus. The whole evening was magic for my son, and for me.

The only thing I later wondered about was, why not close the loop? You have my email, you seem to really want me to have a good time, you want feedback, why not send me an email thanking me for attending, attach or embed a small survey (4-questions: Rate the experience, what did you like best, will you come again, would you recommend the circus to others) and give me some incentive to return next time the circus is in town (and here are those dates).

The lesson: close the loop. Remind people what a good time they had. Make it easy to do it again. Make customers evangelists. And keep your fan base not just happy, but engaged.

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