Do Your Community Members Deserve a Badge?

Social media badges are not a brand-new phenomenon. I have an impressively interactive badge on the right sidebar from the Pickens Plan community. I downloaded it because I like the community and I like the message of the badge, not because it does me any particular good. I was interested to see a new application by the Huffington Post over the weekend.

In doing research, however, I came across careless use of the term. There are quite a few writers and sites that use “badge” to identify the “this site is a member of Facebook” app like this one that you can get from many social networks. The purpose of these apps is to link you through to your page on the social network. That makes them a chiclet (note proper spelling!), not a badge as HuffPost, the Pickens Plan and others are using the term.

According to my friends at Overdrive Interactive, who have an excellent white paper on the use of chiclets, “Chiclets enable a user to quickly share web content by automatically posting articles, photos, video, and other content to their blog (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad), public bookmark page (Digg, Delicious), or social profile (Facebook, Twitter).” You can download the white paper from the Overdrive home page.

Badges have a different, and perhaps a more personal, use. CNET likens them to the efforts many of us made in Boy or Girl Scouts to collect merit badges for various accomplishments.

According to CNET, the current craze for badges started with Foresquare and the competition of its users to earn status in the community. The HuffPost application rewards its most engaged users by making their comments more visible. There are various levels of activity, which they outline on a FAQs page. For example, a member can become “Moderator” by flagging objectionable commentary on the site. As Bryan Person pointed out last week, sites are either overlooking or falling behind in the important activity of moderation. Encouraging help from their members is an excellent approach. Rewarding them in a visible way for their help seems equally desirable.
Not incidentally, the application for a badge results in the applicant linking their Facebook or Twitter account to HuffPost. The publication is cagey about how they will or won’t use that info, but the FAQs do point out that “the shift in privacy is very minimal.” Not sure exactly what that means, but it worries me about as much as people who complain that their privacy has been violated on other social networks. Social networks aren’t a place for those who zealously guard their privacy!

HuffPost is clear that its current effort is intended to increase member engagement with the site. Why can’t the concept be extended in a way that rewards members for desired behavior. That makes it like a CRM loyalty program. Why is that not a good idea? The Tesco Clubcard is the classic example of a vibrant online loyalty program, but I don’t know any firm that’s using a “proud member of” type badge as a tie-in with its loyalty program.

Maybe we’re thinking too much about social media as an acquisition tool and not enough about its potential value as a CRM tool. What are your thoughts?

Starbucks Listens--and Acts!

Earlier in the week Michael Estrin had a good advice in iMediaConnection for those who want to have a good blog, either personal or corporate. The graphic from Starbucks caught my eye. It perfectly captures the concept of a community being involved in idea generation for a brand.

I always wonder whether companies follow up on good ideas so I checked it out. Here’s what I found.
















The My Starbucks Idea site seems to be the home page of the enterprise. It’s where you can sign up to be part of the idea generation process. It’s on a SalesForce.com platform, so clearly it’s intended for CRM. Do the numbers in the Categories section represent posts and comments—5,483 for Tea & Other Drinks, for example. Probably. I checked some of them and there are active postings, comments and discussions.

The Idea page links to the Ideas in Action blog where Starbucks employees give feedback. I captured a post that’s reporting on the number of ideas launched in a given week. Posts are frequent.

What’s really interesting is that there tend to be 2 or 3 comments on those employee blog posts—agree, disagree, whatever—there are a few comments on each post. Comments on the Idea site tend to be more active, and assuming that a point for a post represents a vote, the voting is very active. My point is that there seems to be more action on the site that’s mostly UGC than on the blog where employees, chosen for their expertise according to the site, blog about what they have actually done. Worth thinking about! Does it mean that brand enthusiasts enjoy talking with one another even more than they enjoy talking directly to the brand?

All in all, it’s a site—and a concept—worth exploring. Starbucks has created a community around something everyone loves to do—telling you how they think you should run their business. They’ve found a way to involve and engage, and they are following up in a disciplined fashion.

I’m not saying any of this is particularly easy, especially the follow-up. I am saying that it’s worth seeing what you can learn from Starbucks about engaging customers in your own brand.

Harrah's Adopts Surface Computing

I’ve written about Microsoft’s surface computer before. It offers lots of opportunities for entertainment and interaction but it’s still pricey at $10,000 per unit. Also, I’ve long been fascinated by Harrah’s and their incredibly comprehensive and successful loyalty card program.

When I saw the article in CNET about Harrah’s installation of six surface computers in a bar in one of its Las Vegas casinos I read it with interest. The computers offer bar patrons a variety of applications—they can develop their own mixed drinks and send them to other patrons, watch YouTube videos, play games, and use an app called Flirt. You can see the uses on this seriously lame promotional video from Microsoft. I’m having trouble deciding whether the women or the men are most insulted by the content, but it does show the tables in action. View the video here.

The implications are broader than just empty-headed beautiful people flirting in a bar. Harrah’s has long been famous for its Total Rewards program and the way they use the resulting database to market their individual casino locations. If you know this story, your first thought is, “Data; I wonder what use they are going to make of it?” A lot of their marketing is based on knowing what individual customers do in specific casinos and marketing to their interests and needs. The surface computers are meant to fit into their databased marketing program in some way. I can’t see anything very profound from the features they currently offer, but it may be only a first step.

If you don’t know the Harrah’s story, it’s an excellent example of disciplined database marketing. If you have access to the Harvard Business Review there have been several articles by and interviews with CEO Gary Loveman since he took over in January 2003. There is a recent interview on The CEO Show with Robert Reiss. The 18-minute audio interview focuses on customer service but the importance of data about customers and how they use it at Harrah’s is frequently emphasized in the discussion. To listen, follow this link and scroll down to the March 9, 2008 interview. It’s worth it.

The Total Rewards program is deservedly famous. Take a look at its tiered strategy, which has emerged from segmentation analyses over the years. Harrah’s SVP of Relationship Marketing, David Norton, says it’s more than just a rewards program. Another way of saying that is that Harrah’s captures, mines and develops and executes marketing programs based on the customer data they capture from the program. That applies to individual customers and individual casino locations. In 2005 Norton said that 50% of Harrah’s revenue was driven by [targeted] marketing. That’s a major achievement, especially in an industry where glamorous properties, big-name entertainment and marquee chefs are the essence of strategy.

It’s about both data that drives programs and people who execute them. Gary Loveman has understood that from the beginning. It doesn’t happen overnight, but once a company puts a disciplined databased marketing program into place, it just gets better over time.

The Internet is now a chief source of data about our customers. How many of us capture and use transaction and activity data well? How many develop customer-effective programs that provide more of the kind of data we need to serve those customers better and win their undying loyalty? Very few!

Are Social Media Metrics the Future?

I’ve long been an admirer of Tesco’s Clubcard CRM program. A student recently brought to my attention an article in British publication Marketing Week that makes a larger and more important point; thanks Alisa.

If you’re not familiar with the story the Tesco Clubcard started well over a decade ago. Under the guidance of the Dunnhumby agency Tesco has expanded its offerings from simple conveniences like paying your utility bills at the store (and later on the website) to a wide product portfolio with heavy emphasis on financial services. In 2006 the Financial Times said Clubcard had over 13 million members in over a dozen countries around the globe. Some have been members for many years—consider the wealth of data Tesco has about them! It uses the data to personalize communications and offers for a huge number of subsegments. The original focus was on their quarterly Clubcard mailing; their website is now an important focus of marketing activities. Much of the information about the early days of the Tesco/Dunnhumbycollaboration has now disappeared off the web into a book, which is well worth reading, even if the Marketing Week article suggests that this is the past of customer data; other approaches are the future.

According to author Alan Mitchell:

Take Google as one example. With Google, individuals volunteer information about what they are interested in buying, and when they are interested in buying it. This provides data that Clubcard can never capture: before-the-event information about what somebody is planning to buy rather than after-the-event information about what they have bought. In marketing terms, that's nirvana - and Google is just the start.
Facebook and MySpace are other examples: individuals building profiles about themselves - personal databases - on a mass scale, to reveal information about their attitudes, preferences, circumstances, lifestyles and interests. No traditional market research or transaction-based database could ever match these personal databases once they reach maturity.

That’s not an entirely new revelation, but he says it better than most. And it’s pretty scary when you stop to consider it. Tesco’s Clubcard is best practices marketing because few, if any, other marketers have been able to emulate the scope of the data they collect or the marketing finesse with which they use it.

If the customer intent data that can be mined from social media is the future of metrics—and there’s a strong argument that it is—then most marketers are far behind the curve in terms of customer data capture and use.

It also suggests an interesting strategic question. If a marketer is behind the CRM data curve, should he try to leapfrog into the area of social media, skipping traditional CRM altogether? I don’t think so. Each is a different kind of data; each has its own uses, even though intent data may eventually turn out to be more powerful. What do you think?
Sphere: Related Content