Micro Persuasion

Customer Service is the New PR

Four years ago I wrote this...

"One day CRM systems will bolt in blog monitoring functionality so these posts automatically get funneled to the right place. For now, they need to be handled onesie twosie - but handled nonetheless."

Now today Salesforce.com has added Twitter customer service tools to its already formidable suite. Forrester Analyst Jeremiah Owyang sees Twitter's future as social CRM.

However, I don't think Twitter will be the only game in town. There will be lot of venues to vent, all of which can have an impact on brand reputation as journalists discover all of this conversation through Google, Twitter Search and other search engines. GetSatisfaction.com is growing. I wrote about this in our most recent white paper (see trend one).

In addition, I cover this in my first vlog on the Edelman Facebook page (forgive the acting!). My takeaway is that this isn't just a CRM concern, but rather it requires close coordination between customer service and PR. There's a great study on this from SNCR. What's your view?

All Your Sites Belong to Us

Three major web site redesigns in the last several weeks - Facebook, iGoogle and Yahoo - have sparked outrage from a small but influential group of users. ReadWriteWeb breaks each of these down. As I read their account it occurred to me that a dramatic shift has occurred. Companies don't really own their web sites anymore. We do.

Time Magazine with its Person of the Year cover story decried 2006 as the year of You, the empowered consumer. At the time they wrote...

And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

But just two years later, something exceptional has happened. We now "own" the web even more than we did back then when all we simply did was create viable homegrown alternatives to big media sites.

Nowadays, if there's an online experience we dislike, we either demand that it be changed, use Greasemonkey to fix things ourselves or just vote with our feet. That's a major shift from the level of empowerment that we thought was remarkable even just two years ago.

Since the dawn of the decade there have been several major breakdown in systems that we thought were a sure thing. First it was our national security (September 11), then major companies failed (Enron/Worldcom) and finally, more recently, our financial system tanked (Lehman Brothers). The result is our trust in institutions continues to erode. These events might seem detached from a silly web site design, but they're not. Each encouraged people to take greater control of all aspects their lives - and to live to the fullest, even online.

No matter the site, a lot of time and effort goes into building a solid user experience. There's always a chance you're going to alienate 50% of your audience when you go through the process. But in this age - more than ever - the best approach is to redesign web sites collaboratively with consumers and all out in the open so that we really feel like the changes are ours not just yours.

That's preciely what Dell did starting late last year - and it proved smart. Others should take note.

Tiger Woods Responds to Fan's YouTube Video

This video response is brilliant marketing on the part of Electronic Arts and Tiger Woods. A fan posted on YouTube that it's possible for Woods to hit a golf ball in Tiger Woods 08 while walking on water. How does Tiger react? By showing how it's done and promoting Tiger Woods 09 in the process. It shows they listen and bring in the big guns to engage. (via John Porcaro)

LATER:: Michael Phelps is someone who gets this too. Note how he responded to his fans today on Facebook ...

Three Emerging Digital Careers to Watch

About a month ago, I wrote about three career tracks that won't exist in a few years - at least as I see it. Now let's take a look at three emerging digital jobs that will become increasingly important in the years ahead.

The Chief Customer Experience Officer (and those who work for her)

Want to know if a company is a good witch or a bad witch? It's easy. The web knows. Google, the media and online communities are littered with tales of companies that have exemplary products and customer service. However, it's often easier to find those that have been vilified for the opposite. That's the thesis of Pete Blackshaw's forthcoming book - Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000.

Here's an experiment. For fun, enter any company into this special Google search engine I set up and let me know what you find.

Brands are increasingly recognizing that customer experience is everything. They will follow the model that Zappos and others set in optimizing online and offline channels. Digital touch points, for many companies, will be the most critical. Since August 2006, customer experience job listings increased 57%, according to simplyhired. (User experience is directly related and equally important and I believe will increasingly become more integrated with the total customer experience.)

"customer Experience" trends

"customer experience" jobs

Digital Storytellers

Harvard Business Review last month noted that most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. "If they can’t, neither can anyone else," HBR posits. That's not good.

Remember, much of the developed world is coping with The Attention Crash. If a company can't tell pithy, authentic stories in the right places at the right time to the right people, someone else will. For more on this, I highly recommend the book Made to Stick.

Search may change that. Google is downplaying SEO and increasingly rewarding those who create quality content. This includes the pros/media, amateurs and brands. Blended Search - which integrates noteworthy videos, news and images with web results - is winning over users, according to Jupiter Research.

Net, as Jason Calacanis notes, there is a big market for people who know how to create or cultivate compelling content that pulls in people. To that end my employer is starting up Edelman Studios - a virtual content house that will identify online talent and pair them with brands. Many in the Hollywood community, ex-journalists and advertising/PR creatives will orient their careers in such a direction. Don't be left behind. There's plenty of need here.

Super Crunchers

Here's another book recommendation for your summer reading list (sorry, I read a lot so my clients don't have to). It's called Super Crunchers. In the book, the authors explain through case studies how companies that are able to mine through mountains of data and make it work for them usually win. Another great book on this topic is Moneyball, which I have written about before.

The digital space is the most addressable media and marketing platform ever. However, most marketers are not “quants” and data is largely under utilized by many companies.

Data mining and visualization tools reduce risk, make business more efficient and measurable. Great rewards will come to those who know how to dig into data and make sense of it all and can parse that into insights that help companies optimize the dollars they put online. Be that guy or gal.

Those are three emerging careers on my list. What's on yours? The one topic I did not cover is developers, who I suspect will continue to remain in high demand for years to come.

The Participation Ladder and Its Impact on Marketing and PR

I'm back from a brief blogging hiatus. This was my first extended break since I started this blog (Micro Persuasion turned three years old on April 19). I read a lot and thought about where I want to take this site in the next two years. If you have thoughts on this, send me an email or leave a comment. It was very refreshing to be off the treadmill for a few days. Now, it's time to get back in the blogging saddle.

One of the things I want to get back to is writing more about technology's impact on media, PR and marketing and a little less on just Web 2.0 by itself. Charlene Li from Forrester gave me just the starting point  I needed. She is out today with a new fascinating report on social technographics.

Forrester segmented the online audience into several different stratas - what they call a ladder of participation. They found that "Inactives" are by far the dominant group (52%). They're followed by spectators, joiners, critics, collectors and last but not least creators. This last cluster, according to the analyst firm, dabbles in lots of different activities but few do all of them. See the chart below for more.

This is the first report I have seen that really delves into what drives and motivates people to engage with the web. It's worth purchasing and it really has got me thinking about its impact on PR and marketing.

While extroverts get all of the attention, the thickest part of the ladder is in the vast majority of people who have no desire to participate. I imagine this number will shrink some in the years ahead, particularly as the generation that grew up with the Web enters the workforce. However, there will always be a meaty portion of the online audience that remains just that - consumers.

This got me thinking: what can the Participation Ladder teach us about PR and marketing? The answer is a lot.

If you work in either of these professions, cut the above chart out and stick it on your wall. For each program, assess where your audience sits on this continuum. Are they inactives, creators or somewhere in between? The key is to then devise the right kind of communication strategy depending on what you discover. Let's put this into action.

For example, let's say you have a start-up that has a new piece of blogging software that bloggers will love. Then you should execute a peer-to-peer program that primarily targets creators, collectors and critics while largely ignoring inactives. This means you can go guerrilla with peer-to-peer program that taps into social networks, blogging and other Web 2.0 communities. Place your chips there. Mainstream media coverage can help here too. Focus your attention on outlets that bloggers read.

However, if you have a tech product or service that has value say for all users, then clearly you want a broader mix that combines the best of new media/mainstream media, all while reflecting the ladder.

This is why I think we're really in the golden age of PR. Technology is flattening the marketing landscape, but there's always a need for smart agencies that can help guide clients in the dynamic two-way world. PR is best suited to thrive in this environment and getting the mix down is where it all starts. I am glad to be working with the leaders who are driving "PR 2.0" and this new landscape is what drives me to give my all.

The Forrester guide is the perfect skeleton, now it's PR's job to add the creative muscles and get the body moving in the right direction.

NBA Launches Social Network

The National Basketball Association has added a social network to NBA.com. The site, called Fan Voice, lets die-hards establish a profile and connect with people who like the same team, remix videos and even write game recaps.

Web 2.0's Impact: The Tourism Industry

Over the next several weeks I am going to start posting about the global medium to long-term impact Web 2.0 will have on different industry sectors. First up: travel and tourism.

According to the the Travel Industry Association, tourism generates $1.3 trillion in economic activity. And that's just in the US, folks. They say if one dollar bill equaled a second of time, then $1.3 trillion would equal over 41,000 years. That's a lot of iron. Get ready to get your share.

Before we were all connected to the broadband Internet, it was hard to get good information about a particular destination. In 1980 when I was 10 years old my parents took my brother and I on a six week trip to all the National Parks. I wrote the AAA and National Park Service by mail and waited for them anxiously to send us all the brochures and maps. Then I studied them until I knew everything about places like Bryce Canyon, Arches National Park, Crazy Horse and Mesa Verde. Until very recently most of us turned to travel agents, the Sunday newspaper and travel mags to guide us. They were our sherpas.

Flash forward to today. Beginning in the early to mid 1990s it became very easy to research destinations. Hop on to Expedia, Yahoo Travel or Travelocity and there's gobs of information to help you compare prices and make an informed decision. That's how most of us still go about planning for a trip today. Our habits are locked...or are they.

In the Web 2.0 era, the power is shifting. The authority figure is no longer the travel agent or even the media. It's us. We're empowered with technology and we're using it to catalog every place on earth using video, photos and text. We are telling it like it is and sharing it globally. Consider the following examples.

• Wikimapia: Hey, what's a wiki doing in my Google map? That's the big idea behind this killer site. They layer a Wikipedia-like service on top of a Google Map allowing everyone to label every single place on earth. In just a few months, there have been more than two million places annotated, including some places in those national parks I adore. You can even view these annotations as a layer in Google Earth.

• Flickr: One of the most popular photo sharing sites is making it easy for us to annotate every place on Earth with photos. They allow people to geotag (definition) their photos so they can show us where the shot was taken. Soon digital cameras equipped with GPS and wireless technology will do the work for us.
• Yahoo Trip Planner: Who needs a travel agent when there's 43,000 people eager to help us. That's how many full itineraries have been created on the popular site. Simply plug in a destination and there's someone who has likely created a Triptik of their vacation, which you can easily then replicate using Yahoo's tools.

Right now, while all of this information is invaluable for travelers, it's basically fun and games. I started this post talking about money and I plan to finish it that way. While Web 2.0 is wonderful for transparency and knowledge sharing, when it comes to the impact on the tourism the final chapter has not yet been written. It's all about the Benjamins.

In the very near future these hubs will enable people to monetize their wonderful contributions to our collective knowledge about destinations, hotels, flights and more. Pennies to a site like Yahoo Travel is dollars to the individual who is the highest ranked authority on the Yahoo Trip Planner site or Yahoo Answers. This sort of revenue sharing will turn everyone into a real travel agent.

Here's a future scenario...

Maryclaire730 has put together a terrific itinerary on the Yahoo Trip Planner of my home town, New York City. She highlights a three-day junket that covers the basics like the Waldorf Astoria hotel, a Broadway show as well as places off the beaten path, like Dylan's Candy Bar, which is deep in the bowels of Bloomingdales. (Who knew?) The trip plan has been rated positively by Yahoo users and there are lots of rich photos to boot. However, maryclaire730 hasn't made a dime on this.

Now imagine that Yahoo linked you back to their main travel site. If you wanted to, you could copy maryclare730's entire trip. You can book the same flights, stay in the same hotel for the same number of days, reserve the same restaurants and even get a coupon for Dylan's Candy Bar. The revenue is shared between Yahoo, the specific attractions/airlines/hotels and, yes, maryclare730. She gets a few bucks every time you link over and book all or part of her itinerary.

That is what Web 2.0 will do for travel and tourism.

Disney.com Re-Launch Has Widgets But Still No Web 2.0

Disney has finally lifted the curtain on the big Disney.com overhaul. The launch was teased in Bog Iger's keynote at CES. I opine on it in my column in this week's Advertising Age, however I didn't see it live until just now. Unfortunately, it's a walled garden that does nothing to bridge to other communities where people already publish. They clearly don't get what Web 2.0 is all about.

One of the big features that Iger touted in the keynote are Disney's widgets. Well, Disney.com definitely has widget functionality in Disney XD. It looks and feels a lot like Mac OS X Tiger. Perhaps Disney was influenced by having Steve Jobs on their board.

However, unlike YourMinis or any other similar platform, you can't add your own content. Oddly enough you can do this on My ESPN, also a Disney site. They let you add the RSS feed of your choice.

What's worse, there's no way to take the Disney widgets and embed them in your own site. Just think of how many millions of citizen marketers would be thrilled to do so! I realize this site is targeted for the younger ones, but some of the TV and movie content is for teens. And many pre-teens and teens have their own blogs and MySpace pages. Look at Jeff Jarvis' son Jake for example. He's a wizard.

As I wrote in the AdAge piece, in this new era Disney's greatest opportunities online lie not in creating bigger walled gardens but in spreading its content far and wide. This means giving rabid fans the content they want where they want it. Yes, Disney needs to get comfortable seeing Mickey and crew on blogs and YouTube. It also means that Disney will need to allow people to adapt its work so they can express their own creativity. That didn't happen and it's too bad.

More in the piece on AdAge.com.

You, the 2.0 Citizen, Is Time's Person of the Year

Well, it looks like we were off by two years. Compare the two images below. The one on the right was created by Hypergene back in 2004. The one on the left came out today. Eerily similar eh? We needed the two years. This is a shift that's bigger than blogging and citizen journalism.

 

Yes, "You" were named this year's "Person of the Year" for 2006 tonight by Time magazine. Citing the explosive growth and influence of user-generated Internet content such as blogs, video-file sharing sites and social networks and digital democracy, the magazine picked us this year Reuters reports.

"For seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time's Person of the Year for 2006 is you," Lev Grossman wrote. 

More on Time's Web site: cover story, sidebar on 15 who matter, story on citizen journalists, the Web 2.0 boom, taxonomy and a Second Life piece. Let's give ourselves a big round of applause!!!

::Later: Josh Hallett has a different take saying the cover should read "Them" as in I don't know anyone who posts on YouTube. That's all them kids.

We're Not Gonna Take It

A group of fed-up frequent fliers has set up a watchdog blog called Aircomplane to track airline industry customer service issues.

Dell Customers in China Seek Revenge Over Processorgate

For years we have put up with terrible customer service. Think about how many rude waiters, impolite sales people and clueless technicians you've come across over the years. It goes beyond rudeness and includes errors in service too. Today, however, the customer is large and in charge thanks to the Internet. Newsday covered this well over the weekend.

However, there's a new wrinkle - Flat Earth. In a flat world, service issues know no boundaries. No longer is a glitch - no matter how specialized - confined to just one corner of the world or a particular region. Thanks to the power of the Internet, citizen vigilantes take these global and overnight. And often they zero in on US companies.

Once again Dell is in the spotlight here with Processorgate - China's version of Dell Hell. In June Zhang Min bought a $1,000 notebook from Dell but it came with the wrong processor for "virtualization." He tuned into the net and found dozens of others in the same situation. Not long afterward he also found a lawyer who was ready to sue Dell, which is in the works.

Sam Flemming, a great marketing blogger I have come to know in China, is tracking the whole story. He has a timeline of the entire "processorgate" affair. Sam also notes how the customer issue jet-stream is moving from social media to the mainstream instead of in the other direction.

The ball once again is in Dell's court to address this issue on their blog, which has been renamed Direct2Dell. To their credit, Dell has come a long way since the launch of their blog and its early stumbles. They have addressed many of their issues in a forthright way. Dell also has been openly discussing their global supply chain.

I would love to see Dell pick up the baton on this issue and tackle it head on. Sure, there are legal issues present here so they will need to proceed carefully. However, this is another golden opportunity for Dell to use their blog to give their side of the story in a human voice.

Tags: china, dell, processorgate

Web Raises the Bar for Customer Service

The Times says the bar has been raised for customer service now that consumers have a big megaphone...

'AOL and Comcast executives in charge of customer service may long for the good old days when they had to deal only with a finite number of federal regulators and state attorneys general, not a universe of millions of Web-savvy customers.'

Brand You Realized

Over the past three years Rafat Ali has built a micro media empire in PaidContent.org that competes with the big boys for news scoops and often wins at that game. Now someone is wisely investing in this brand.

ContentNext Media Inc. (Rafat's company) has raised venture capital financing for pennies on what it would cost to invest in a magazine and with a greater likelihood for return. His is the latest in a series of micro media companies that has received financing.

The round of financing points to a bigger trend. Back in 1997 Tom Peters urged us all to become brands with a breakthrough piece called Brand Called You. Today it's a reality thanks to social media and a game-changer for PR. CEOs and other authority figures don't hold all the cards anymore. Now anyone can become an influential brand overnight, perhaps even inside your own company. More on this in this week's Adage.

Tags: paidcontent.org

Bloggers Need Talent Agencies

Shel Holtz brings us a ditty about an HR blogger named Cheesman who auctioned himself on eBay and snagged $7,000 to promote a company at the upcoming Society of Human Resources Management conference. The highest bidder was JobCentral. So now Monsieur Cheesman will don a JobCentral t-shirt and more.

We've been seeing more of this lately. Stowe Boyd is enjoying the new clothes that his sponsors bought him. Last year Snorestop on two occasions slapped their logo on someone's skin in return for Benjamins. I saw this coming last year, but it's escalated in the last couple of months.

Bloggers, like celebrities and sports figures are a natural choice for endorsement deals. In fact, in some circumstances they're even more credible. So I have to wonder, where are the talent agencies in all of this?

Sure, the money paid to bloggers to endorse products is nothing like the bundle that entertainers get. So I don't envision Jerry Maguire, Leigh Steinberg or the William Morris Agency repping us anytime soon. Still, there is a window for a lone gun or two to enter this market as agents to the citizen marketers.

Newspaper JV Topix.net Debuts Craigslist Rival

News aggregation site Topix.net, a joint venture between Gannett, Knight Ridder and Tribune, has started a free classified ad service that is highly contextual. This is a big move for Topix.net. It puts them squarely up against Craigslist - the giant that is eating away much of the newspaper biz' revenue base. At the same time, it curiously provides a free alternative to existing paid services these companies run independent of their Topix JV.

Topix.net searches and sifts through news from thousands of news and blog sources and categorizes them into thousands of different topical and local news pages. It's honestly one of the most useful sites on the Web. (Disclaimer: I did at one time consult to Topix, but they did not contact me on this story.)

Each news topic page includes highlighted news from Topix.net's featured partners (some of which are from outside the JV), press releases, as well as forums where anyone can write their own news story. It also aggregates content from thousands of sources. Now the news site has started a program that lets people post their own free classified ads on each of these local pages. You can see these ads on the right hand side of this page, for example.

So far, the program is limited to local pages. So you can't, for example, post an ad about a VW Beetle for sale on the relevant topic page. I can easily see that coming since the relevance is so high. You're limited to posting an ad on a certain zip code pages as well as others that are nearby.

Topix.net is soliciting ads for all of the big classified categories: housing, jobs, for sale, services, events and local shops. Once the ads are placed they appear to run indefinitely. More importantly they invite the browsers to comment on the ads or flag ones that are questionable.

The fact that Topix.net is taking free ads is a gutsy move. However, when you think about who owns the company, the ramifications are huge. In many instances Topix is wrapping a free ad service around content it doesn't own, but is aggregating. Plus as I mentioned at the top, this is a limited, but free alternative to paid sites like Careerbuilder, a site that is run by the very same JV partners. I don't expect it to crush Craigslist anytime soon, but it does convolute this market in a big way.

Technorati Tags: Careerbuilder, Classifieds, Craigslist, Gannett, Knight Ridder, Newspapers, Topix.net, Tribune

NASCAR to Name Race After a Fan

This is a brilliant idea. ESPN says that Diageo, producers of the Crown Royal whiskey brand, today will announce that one lucky consumer will win the right to have a NASCAR race named after him/her. The race will tentatively be called the "The Your Name Here 400 presented by Crown Royal" until the Daytona 500, when a grand prize winner will be chosen from a pool of 10 finalists.

Now if I were running Crown Royal marketing, I would make this more than a sweepstakes but an online competition. Hopefully it will be! For example, what if users submitted videos on YouTube talking about why the race should be named after them. The videos with the most views/highest ranking would win. Or there could be an essay contest on the Crown Royal sites where consumers can come and vote on the best entries.

Technorati Tags: Crown Royal, NASCAR, Promotions, You 400

A New Take on the Airplane Safety Video

Blogger Chris Pirillo mimics the United Airlines instructional video in this send-up on YouTube. If I worked for United Airlines I would substitute the models in the current video for the one of Chris. It's more engaging and real. (A PS to YouTube, your vids should have trackbacks too.)

Technorati Tags: YouTube

American Express Rolls Citizen Marketing Effort

American Express has launched a promotion called 15 Second Clips that invites participants to submit a 15 second ad about their lives. It's themed after My Life, My Card ads featuring celebs.

PodGuide TV, while praising this effort, is skeptical about the citizen marketing approach overall. He says that it backfired with Chevy's attempt to allow users to make their own spots. I disagree. Even though the Chevy effort resulted ads instead about gas-guzzling SUVs, we're still talking about this campaign. 

The Amex effort offers a highlight reel of the submissions as a feed (RSS). The campaign judges are acclaimed directors Martin Scorsese and M. Night Shyamalan. I like this idea lot, but I feel that Amex could have made it stronger by letting consumers judge the campaigns, not just the celebrities. In addition, they might generate more submissions by partnering with a large video community like YouTube or by letting vloggers enter via a special tag like My Life, My Card.

It should be interesting to see where this goes.

Someone Sign Nornna - and Fast

Spend any time on YouTube (as I have been doing a lot lately) and you will quickly find that Nornna is one of the brightest stars in this galaxy. Even before she earned her moment in the sun in today's New York Times, you could tell that Nornna was going places.

Nornna, in case you don't know, is a 24 year-old Wisconsin woman who everyday posts a video blog diary of her ordinary life on YouTube. Since January she has posted some astounding 700 vids. None are particularly interesting but Nornna has become a phenomenon. There's even a meme on YouTube of people recording themselves watching Nornna. She's so popular, Nornna even has her own Wikipedia entry. Norrna is a star.

Unfortunately, the rumor is that Nornna's quitting. She's going out on top like Seinfeld and "The Bus" did and Michael Jordan should have done (remember him playing for the Wizards? Exactly.) Tributes are pouring in from Nornna's fans. This is a moment for a smart marketer to team with the Divine Miss N.

Over a year ago I suggested that marketers sign bloggers to endorsement deals. It was an "out there" idea at the time. Now it's a reality. Stowe Boyd, for example, is looking for a startup to clothe him. Nornna is next. Some marketer should sign her to a deal asap. Put her in an ad. Sponsor her to publish a vlog. Or, better yet, give her free stuff. Can you spell "book deal?" Oh and once Nornna's off the block, be sure to go ink a deal with the Ask a Ninja guy. He's the next superstar.

According to Mediapost, marketers are scared to advertise on social networks. That's because they're thinking of these sites as a places to put ads, rather than a venue for finding credible and hopefully willing spokespeople.

Nornna, Stowe and Ninja are people like us. They're the most trusted among us, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. This means that as PR morphs from driving earned media to focusing more on a direct dialogue with the public, we will all need to develop a knack for identifying rising consumer stars. Put your talent director's hat on. It's show time!

Firefox Wows to Win

Tonight at the San Francisco geek dinner, Rafael Ebron from Mozilla showed me some of the entries in their Firefox Flicks competition. They were totally awesome. You could see just why Firefox was recently named one of the top 10 most powerful global brands in the world.

The Firefox marketing formula is simple: 1) own a high involvement category - browsers, 2) provide a great product that completely wows people in part because it solves problems, and 3) give the community to create, share and evangelize the product to the rest of the world.

Firefox Flicks is the latest in a line of community marketing programs (point three above) that also included a community-funded New York Times ad and a space for fans. Firefox has the future of marketing nailed. We'll be talking about them for years. For more, read the Backstage Blog.

Technorati Tags: Firefox, WOM, Word of Mouth