What are Branded Community Best Practices?

The eMarketer newsletter (November 10, 2010) called my attention to this study from ComBlu. It is a careful analysis of 241 branded communities. As you might expect, these are leaders by definition, and the report finds 33% of them to be High Performers, but none Stellar Performers (p. 8). That says that most of us are likely on the sidelines or in the very early stages of building a branded community.

Radian6 has a publication for those who are considering or experimenting. It has lots of good ‘how to’ info that is especially strong on the amount and type of resources required. They have 10 good questions that assess whether a branded community is for you. I’ve boiled it down to 4; you might want to read the original (pp. 5,6). Here’s my summary:

• Do you have a business goal and clear marketing objectives that specify what you want to accomplish?
• How will your community add value to the customer experience?
• Do you have the resources and expertise to support a vibrant community?
• What metrics will you use to gauge success?

The ‘resources and expertise’ issue suggests substantial experience in social media—building a Facebook community for example. If that is successful, companies tend to want their own community over which they can have total control, not have to rely on the functionality and rules of the platform. I’ve written about firms that provide community-building services (1, 2) and many other aspects; just search ‘community’


Back to the original subject; community best practices. I found this chart especially interesting. The researchers at ComBlu added 10 best practices to their 2010 list. That certainly suggests how fast the space is changing. It also suggests that there’s a big shake-out to come as we find out which are the 'best of the best' practices!


They, of course, compared adoption of their original set of practices in 2010 vs. 2009. I’ve highlighted the ones that had doubled or more in adoption. If you look at the ordering for 2009 (comments the most widely adopted practice, for example), the adoption of specific best practices has changed hugely over the past year. The suggestion there is a maturing space. Among the greatest changes are fun engagement tools, rich media (which I’d also categorize as engaging) and faceted search (people search on LinkedIn, for example). The ones that warm my heart are integration and site stats! Definitely a maturing space.

How Fiskars Turned Its Fans and Customers into Evangelists, presented by Geno Church from GasPedal on Vimeo.

There’s a lot of detail in the report about best practices by industry that you may find useful. But for those of you who believe it’s only for the large, global brands, here’s a contrary example. I wrote about the Fiskars community in early 2009. It still has much the same structure and is still clearly a customer retention effort. Don’t expect much in the way of acquisition from a community effort although blog posts written for search and tagged will bring in some people who are browsing. Mostly, though, it’s retention, and as the Fiskars example shows, it can be powerful. I ran across the video awhile ago; admittedly it’s long, but the first 18-20 minutes is the presentation and the rest is Q & A. It’s worth listening to; the point being that they’ve been at it—successfully—for awhile in what is definitely a set of niche markets.

The most important point about best practices is that they are still evolving. So don’t run out and try to implement them all. Think about what makes most sense for your customers, your brand. Are emoticons going to remain on the list for years to come? My sense is that items like that are already being replaced with activities with more strategic value!

Customer Service Still Rules!

A new customer satisfaction survey report from Accenture just crossed my desk. It’s about customer service generally, not on the Internet specifically, but that’s ok. As the report points out, we live in a multichannel world. That makes excellent customer service at all customer touchpoints essential.

Overall, the report sees three important trends:
• Globally, the perceived quality of customer service declined in 2007, although it is still rated as “good” in many countries, especially developed economies
• Customers say their expectations of quality customer service continue to increase. This is especially true in developing economies.
• Two of three respondents reported they had switched patronage during the year as a result of poor customer service; half had switched patronage in multiple industry segments as a result of poor service?
Is the Internet at least partially responsible for rising service expectations and increasing ease of switching suppliers? I think so.
And customer service does still rule. In most of the countries where data was collected, poor customer service trumped lower price as a reason for switching, often by a large amount. The exceptions were Germany and France. Interesting.
This somewhat complex chart gives more detail. It shows the importance of various factors to respondents who did switch and did not switch. Most of these factors are almost equally important; that’s worth thinking about, especially in light of the satisfaction data. It’s also worth noting that the two most important factors have to do with company representatives—their knowledge and their courtesy.

Equally important—and even less surprising—is that the higher the level of satisfaction, the less likely respondents were to switch. But look carefully. The levels of satisfaction are not that different between respondents who switched and those who did not. That’s not a new finding, but it should be worrisome to marketers.

Besides some general issues about satisfaction that we already knew, what should we take away from this study? First is that satisfaction is really important, but it doesn’t keep people from switching. And it often was not price that caused them to switch. So what did?

Two things are worth thinking about. First, the switching data looks at individual customer service factors; is it the overall customer experience that really makes the difference? Second, “price” may not capture the effects of powerful promotional offers, whether price-based or not.

Accenture’s summary points to the importance of individual customer service factors but relates it to overall customer experience. They say:

Accenture’s high performance business research has found that leading organizations enhance customer loyalty by mastering specific activities. Of these activities, our research shows providing a consistent, differentiated customer experience has the most impact on customer loyalty, which in turn contributes to growth, profitability, and shareholder value.

I’m still betting on overall customer experience as the determinant, but the power of a single really good feature—or even more one really bad aspect of customer service—cannot be denied. I suggest that this research provides a good framework for thinking about customer service and customer experience and there’s more useful data in the full report (download from this page). However, it can’t substitute for research that gets very specific about what causes customers to switch in your product category or for your own brand, as discussed in the recent post on Forrester's customer experience survey. And what if the importance factors still don’t differ a great deal? Then marketers are going to have to set some priorities based on where they are loosing customers or where they have the most chance to exceed customers’ expectations and create real loyalty. No one ever said that exceptional customer service was easy!

I'm an Avatar: Can I Help You?

Yes, perhaps they can. Since the early days of the Internet artificial intelligence experts have been touting the potential of “virtual people” to provide customer information, service and support. I’ve been writing about them for most of that time and run into the same problem each time; the firms whose products I used as examples before are no longer around. This has been a really difficult market in which to get sufficient traction to survive.

That’s why a post on Dave Jackson’s Weekly Web Tools blog a couple of weeks ago caught my eye. He focuses on small businesses and really cares about customer service, so his evaluation of some of the current services was thought-provoking.

SitePal essentially allows you to create “talking FAQs” using their avatars or customer avatars from a photo you supply. All their services are based on a one-time fee. They have 3 service packages ranging in price from $9.95 to $39.95 per month based on usage and number of avatars. Check it out for yourself, but turn the volume down; all their pages open with an audio message—that’s what they do, after all.

Live Face on Web (also opens with audio) produces those little people who walk onto your screen and start talking to you. These are essentially videos, so they have a different business model—a one-time fee for production. Prices range from $259.95 for a 15-second/50 word video to $3,281.95 for a 300 second/1,000 word video.

The difference between these live avatars (is that an oxymoron? I don’t know!) and the earlier chatterbots is that these deliver audio, either automatically or on request by the visitor. Earlier versions were chat or SMS-based. They are the “chat with a live agent” functions that you see on many ecommerce sites, just using the bot to put a face on the chat. The Marketing & Innovation Blog reviewed several of these back in March. The VirtuOz site, for example, offers several agents, each to perform a specific task, from customer service to lead generation and conversion, on your site.

MicroSoft Live Agent also offers chat-based agents. You can take them for a trial run on their site and they have a good gallery. They offer APIs so developers can customize applications for their own sites.

There are lots of solutions out there. Hopefully some of these will survive, because the possibilities of improving customer service and support in a cost-effective way are real. The early developers loved to say that these agents don’t take coffee breaks or vacations. True, and the opportunity for consistent service 365/24/7 is important. Marketers have to remember, though, that good customer service requires access to a human agent if the automated services don’t satisfy the need. The trick is getting people to use the automated services before they pick up the phone or fire up their email program.

These autoplay video avatars are intrusive and annoying to some of us (not to mention the person in the next cubicle!). However, they may be what’s needed to say, “Use the cost-effective automated support service first.” How you say “then you can access life help if you need to” without encouraging people to go directly there is a problem. I’d suggest that you probably don’t make the offer until the automated service is finished. What’s for sure is that a good plan for customer service escalation is required to keep customers happy and costs low!

Best Practices B2B Site

I recently saw a mention of Mfg.com, and since I’m fascinated by B2B marketplace sites, I took a look. Founded in 2000, it seems to be profitable and recently obtained another round of venture funding. It is commonly described as an exchange for parts and components, but they describe their model as a proprietary platform that facilitates “the complex process of sourcing and selling manufacturing services”. They recently revamped their platform to make it easy for buyers and sellers to share CAD designs to speed the sourcing process, so they are clearly a sophisticated user of technology.


What I found was also a best practices site for B2B community building. They have numerous industry-based communities, a system of news feeds in which a member can subscribe in various ways including content channels and tags, and various blogs. They offer blogging to their members and have a company blog. When I investigated the profile of frequent poster aj, I met Mfg.com’s Director of Community Content. His profile page included his other blogs, his most-used tags, and other members with profiles similar to his. Great personalization and networking! They also recognize Top Contributors on the community home page, which is another nice touch.

The site says it helps customers:

Find content. The site is content-rich and uses tags as well as content channels (the site calls them “spaces”) to organize it. There are various search options. They have a sophisticated system of RSS feeds that allows people to subscribe in various ways including tags. They also have email notification, which seems more limited in scope. They are pushing RSS, which is interesting, given how full our email inboxes are these days.

Create content. Members are asked to create profiles. They can comment on blog posts, ask questions, and receive feedback. The other content creation mechanisms are wiki-based, allowing for various types of documents that can be shared with open or closed groups. The documents allow for many types of review and comparison.

Collaborate on content. Creating wiki-based documents on the site draws colleagues of the members (who then have to become members) to collaborate on documents. And since the site is content-rich, that offers the likelihood of the new member starting the cycle all over again.

Take a close look at those three steps—find, create, collaborate. That’s social media strategy in a nutshell. Content to draw people to the site, social connectivity to increase the usefulness of the content, and collaboration to allow members to work right on the site and bring others with them. When members are not on the site, RSS feeds remind them of the value it offers to them.

This is best practices in terms of strategy as well as execution!

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?
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Customer Retention--How the Internet Has Changed It

Read the first installment (strategy) here.
Read the second installment (acquisition) here.
Read the third installment (conversion) here.

When I began to think about this series of posts, my initial reaction was that retention had changed less than acquisition and conversion. I like the Peppers and Rogers model of retention – Identify > Differentiate > Interact > Personalize. It’s a data-driven approach to retention and that’s as is should be.

Long before the Internet, marketers who were able to identify their end customers and obtain a mailing address for them sent retention mailings—letters, catalogs, and offers of all kinds. The main difference is that the Internet allows more marketers, especially traditional mass media marketers, to identify their customers and communicate with them.

I was half right. Or maybe I was right until social media burst upon the scene a year or two ago. With that the retention scene was changed just as radically—and as permanently—as acquisition and conversion.

First, there’s email. My sense is that most marketers are using it badly. We have an email list and we blast emails to it frequently. It’s cheap—so what if we only get a small open rate or smaller (and declining) click-through rate? It’s not hard to get an ROI that looks pretty good. We should be asking how it looks to our customers. Are we contacting them too often with communications of too little relevance? Do we need to go back to the chapter on Segmentation 101 and begin applying it to our electronic communications? It will take a bit more time and effort, and therefore will cost a bit more. Will it be worth it in terms of both conversions and—even more important over the long run—the image of and trust in our brands? Look in your own inbox, take a quick tally of how many commercial emails are really relevant to your needs, and answer the question for yourself.

Second, there’s social media in the broadest sense. It gives us opportunities to push content—in a totally permissioned environment—to customers. In the process, it also allows us to reach people who might become customers, but my sense is that most of the best marketer uses of social media are for customer retention.

This whole blog is about social media, so let me just give you two brief examples, both from one of my favorite best practices sites. National Geographic publications and broadcast long predate the Internet, but they moved onto it well and smoothly. Take a look at the site and see how well they do cross promotions.

But my examples are pushing content to users on other sites and pages, all in ways that drive people to the site. They always have a great selection of screen savers and I change mine often. I’d love to show you the current Madagascar hibiscus, but my desktop is too messy. What I can show you is the bar that remains at the bottom of my desktop page. That’s a constant reminder of who provided the lovely photograph that improves my pc experience and imprints the National Geographic brand in my mind.

Then there’s the widget I downloaded to another blog a couple of months ago. The Green Guide Tip of the Week widget is perfect for the “Living Green at Wellfleet Bay” blog. I had to cut the size down a bit to fit in the column, so it’s a bit

small, but it works. If you look carefully, you can see that there’s the tip itself and two more pieces of “green” content that would drive readers to the National Geographic site. What you can see is the large “Get This Widget” bar. It should be somewhere; it is one way to increase the distribution of the widget. However, it’s the largest item and it’s easy to mistake it for the content. When you click, you get HTML, which could be confusing to the non-Web 2.0-savy reader. Overall, it’s a great performance, though! Their newsletters are wonderful in terms of content, but I don’t get the sense that the content is personalized to my activities on their site.

We all need to do branding. That applies to current customers as well as prospects. We all want to bring users to our site. We want customers to return frequently to consume content, purchase goods—whatever our objectives are. We want non-customers to come to our site in a way that makes them prospects for conversion. Good Web 2.0 applications can do both, but I maintain that retention is usually the primary objective.

For retention to work we have to be present in customers’ lives in ways that are non-intrusive but that support their needs and lifestyles. We have a lot to learn, a lot to experiment with, to make that happen. I suggest that Web 2.0 applications are a great way to accomplish retention in ways that are welcomed by our customers.
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Conversion--How the Internet Has Changed It

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

There’s a simple answer to the question. Pre Internet, only B2B marketers and B2C marketers who sold multi-step products (think automobiles and life insurance, for example) had to engage in conversion marketing. Mass marketers acquired customers and perhaps they had retention programs, but most, especially consumer packaged goods marketers, didn’t have to do conversion marketing. How could they? They didn’t know who potential customers were, what they were interested in, and how to reach them. The web has changed that, dramatically and forever.

The direct marketing conversion process is still the basis. It is stated as Acquire > Qualify > Distribute > Follow Up. In direct marketing, especially B2B, distribution is especially important. Leads could be distributed to the field sales force (high cost), to an internal sales force (moderate cost), or to non-personal, usually mail, follow up (low cost). Then there were two remaining challenges. One was to nurture leads until they were at a high readiness state and then forward them to the field sales force for closure. The other was to motivate the field sales force to follow up leads. Those issues still exist, but the larger challenge for all marketers is using the Internet, especially the website, effectively in the conversion process.

The conversion process (and the retention process also) will be more effective if acquisition has been well done. That means acquiring high-potential customers, not necessarily acquiring the most customers. Successful acquisition requires targeting, as discussed in the previous post. Unless people stumble onto your website by accident, they are coming in from advertising or some other online (or offline) content. Don’t just dump them onto a home page and hope they’ll find what they need. If you can simply drive them to a product page with no chance of confusion in what they are looking for, that’s great. Often that’s not the case, and even if it is, it risks visitors taking a look and leaving without giving you a chance to capture an email address. That is an important function of a landing page. A good landing page is also promotional and moves visitors a step further in the direction of purchase.

Once the visitor moves off the landing page onto the site, the question becomes how to move the person through the site, resulting in an eventual purchase—whether that takes one visit or many. It is very useful to study the paths visitors take through your site and to try to understand what pages are moving them closer to purchase, which pages are not, and where they are leaving only to return later, and where they are abandoning for good. Commercial metrics services provide path data. They can also help you segment both identified and anonymous visitors. Different segments are likely to follow different paths and are almost certain to convert at different rates.

To help understand segments, it is helpful to create personas. Personas can be thought of as a way to put some human flesh on your segments. They help everyone from web designers to marketers develop approaches that work for each segment. Staples redesigned its site around personas. Best Buy (item 1, item 2) has used them both in site development and in developing concept retail stores.

Whatever else you do, keep in mind that most visitors don’t purchase in a single session. Metrics guru Avinash Kaushik recommends measuring “days to purchase” and “trips to purchase.” With that data in hand you can develop a meaningful contact program. That may include offering a carefully-timed incentive to close the final sale. At that point the visitor officially becomes a customer, part of your retention program.

Think carefully about what “conversion” is in your particular situation. It is always desirable to be able to track a visitor from the first contact through to a final sale. If all the activity occurs online, that’s possible. If conversion occurs offline, it can be difficult, and you may want to establish a number of metrics mileposts on the way to final conversion.

Acquisition costs a lot of money. A well thought out conversion strategy is the first step to ensuring that money has been well spent.
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RIAs Connect Marketers and Customers

Yesterday Adobe sent me a white paper about a product called Adobe Air. It looked like widgets, and I like widgets, so I opened it and read it.

No, it isn’t widgets, it’s a development platform for rich internet applications (RIAs). As I understand the difference in simple layperson’s terms, widgets provide a single piece of functionality—check the weather from your desktop, subscribe to this blog by email or RSS (see the right column), or get NFL schedules and team results on your iPhone. The thousands of widgets available connect you to a single type of functionality at your desktop or on the go, and they’ve become very popular.

RIAs seems to be a next step in Web 2.0 functionality. First an example. I downloaded the Google Analytics application, and it’s now sitting there on my desktop. By clicking on it I can get direct access to my Google Analytics account, select any of the blogs and websites I have on the account, and look at the current stats for that site. It’s just like being on Google Analytics except that I don’t have to go to the site and sign in. Because it’s easier, I check more often. That’s the same experience I’ve had with widgets and RSS feeds. Adobe has over 40 RIAs for download at present. This shows one that connects the user directly to content from NASDAC.
Cool! So I started reading a bit more. A post on ZDNet from last year, by enterprise applications expert Dion Hinchcliffe not only does a pretty good job of explaining but also puts another spin on it. There are many potential applications of RIAs inside the enterprise. The examples in the second paragraph above are all of connecting customers with your content and functions.

There are many platforms for developing RIAs. Some appear to be special-purpose, dealing with specific platforms like the popular AJAX used by so many retailers. Microsoft’s SilverLight is another developer platform that has gotten a lot of attention in recent months. They have an excellent overview of what RIAs can do for marketers and enterprises on the SilverLight site.

The good news is that RIAs are clearly an up-and-coming way of dealing directly with your customers—and making it easy for them to deal directly with you. Think about the fact that this puts your application right in front of the customer. They don’t have to go to the net and search for the information—thereby undoubtedly encountering search results and ads from your competitors. You’ve created an environment in which it’s easier to deal with you than to include your competitors in a consideration set.

The bad news is that this is not DIY in the sense of marketers doing it themselves. This involves JAVA, AJAX and all sorts of all other languages that only developers speak. So it takes some skilled work by developers to create the apps. Once that is done, it becomes easy for the marketer to deploy and the customer to use.

That may be an emerging definition of Web 2.0.
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