MackCollier.com

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Reward the Behavior You Want to Encourage

Every interaction you have with a customer creates another interaction. And in this case, not engaging with the customer also counts as an interaction.

For instance, let’s say you eat at a particular restaurant and have a wonderful meal. You’re so happy with the experience that you decide to hop on Twitter and tell the restaurant directly.

If the restaurant never responds, how does that make you feel?  Unappreciated? Invisible? It probably leaves a bit of a bad taste in your mouth, right?

On the other hand, if they respond, it feels like they value you as a customer enough to take the time to thank you, right?

I am always talking about the idea of Rewarding the Beahavior You Want to Encourage. The idea is simple; when someone does something that you want them to do, you find a way to ‘reward’ them and encourage them to do it again. If someone compliments you, you thank them. If they buy your product, you go out of your way to communicate to them that they made a smart purchase decision.  If someone comments on your blog, you respond so they will do so again.

The idea is to validate the behavior that they just engaged in.

Every Sunday night I run #Blogchat, we’ve been having #Blogchat for almost 10 years now on Twitter. Every week, someone will mention that this is their first time attending #Blogchat.

I always always ALWAYS respond to this person directly and THANK them for coming to #Blogchat. This is because I appreciate them taking the time to come to #Blogchat, but also because I want them to RETURN! If you come to a Twitter chat and no one talks to you, you’re probably not coming back, right? I go out of my way to communicate to first-timers that I appreciate them showing up, and want them to return.

Julia tweeted it was her first time joining #Blogchat, I thanked her and let her know how much I appreciated her taking the time to join us.

When you respond to others, it also sends a message to everyone else. Notice that after I reply to Julia, Zarina does as well:

I made a point to welcome Zarina when she first joined #Blogchat as well, and now she’s helping me and welcoming new members as well! This sends a message to both Julia and Zarina that they made a smart decision in joining #Blogchat, that we are going to look out for them, and help them solve their blogging problems.

 

Think about what behaviors you want your readers, clients or customers to engage in. Maybe it’s commenting on a blog post, or subscribing to your newsletter, or buying a product. In fact, let’s just run through each right now and how you can ‘reward’ that behavior.

Commenting on a blog post – This the behavior you want your readers to engage in. So how do you ‘reward’ that behavior? The most obvious way, is by RESPONDING to their comment. People leave a comment because they want other people to REACT to it. By responding, you validate to that person why they left the comment to begin with.  You ‘reward’ them with a respond and that makes them feel good about leaving the comment to begin with. It also increases the chance that they will comment AGAIN, and it communicates to everyone else that if they leave a comment, they will probably get a reply as well.

Subscribing to your newsletter –  Often when you subscribe to a newsletter, you soon find out that it’s not as valuable as you hoped it would be. So there’s a sense of ‘buyer’s remorse’. What I’ve done with my Think Like a Rock Star newsletter is I help subscribers immediately see value from the newsletter. I’ve created an email trigger funnel for new subscribers, so as soon as they subscribe, over the following 5 days, they get a total of 4, daily emails that are packed with in-depth advice on how to create and cultivate fans of their brand. This is the ‘reward’ for these subscribers engaging in the behavior that I wanted to encourage. It communicates to them that they made a smart decision in subscribing to my newsletter.

Buying a product – ‘Buyer’s remorse’ can be literal here, especially as the cost of the purchase increases. You can offset these feelings and make the buyer feel smarter about the purchase by making customer support available to them post-purchase and by staying in contact with them to make sure they know precisely how to use their new products and that they fully understand how to use all its features. Often, customers simply aren’t aware how to use a new product correctly, and if they figure out how to use the product correctly, it can greatly increase their satisfaction with the product.

 

Remember, a big part of rewarding the behavior you want to encourage comes from making the person feel SMART about engaging in the behavior that you ultimately want to encourage. If they feel smart, then they will probably have positive thoughts about interacting with you and/or your company.

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Is it Better to Have a Centralized or Decentralized Social Web?

I recently came across a Fast Company article on how Tim Berners-Lee (credited with inventing the world wide web) is creating a new service called Solid that would decentralize your data and give you more control over it. This could potentially address the data protection and privacy concerns that many of us have when it comes to surfing the modern web.

But I got to thinking about this whole idea of decentralization vs centralization when it comes to social media. On the surface, centralization seems like the way to go.  You bring everyone together where they could share their thoughts and opinions and interact.

The problem is, whenever you bring everyone together, the overall user experience eventually degrades for everyone.

I’ve been online since 1988, or for the last 30 years. In that time, online activity has followed this pattern; Decentralized>Centralized and back.  Here’s what I mean:

In 1988 when I started getting online, BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems) were all the rage. These were typically smaller groups, and hyper-local. Usually the ‘geeky’ guy in a neighborhood or city had some software on a spare computer and could use it as a pseudo server that other people could call into (on dialup 300 baud modem, natch), and usually post on a message board. It was a very decentralized structure, small groups of people, but they typically had something in common, even if it was simply geography.

These grew more popular in the coming years, and then by the early 90s, online services like Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL popped up.  These were centralized networks. They were also expensive, whereas most BBSes were free to access, these online services typically cost $25 a month for 10 hours. Yeah. But they had a lot more people, incredibly crude ASCI ‘graphics’, and other ‘perks’ of the day. Oh and CHAT ROOMS! Really big deal. Prodigy eventually folded and it was CompuServe and AOL both offering a premium service. This was actually a good thing in many ways because only people that were ‘serious’ about being on these services would pay for them. And they had a lot of message boards and chat rooms that were topic-specific, so these places developed their own communities. I remember in the late 90s there was a chat room on CompuServe that was reserved for college students. At the time I was midway through my undergrad studies so I thought it was the coolest thing in the world to participate in a chat every Sunday night with other college students from around the country. Come to think of it, that habit of chatting on Sunday nights was probably one of the factors in my wanting to have #Blogchat on Sunday nights.

But around 1996 or so, AOL got the bright idea to ditch their hourly rate, and start charging everyone a flat $25 a month fee for UNLIMITED access.  If I recall correctly, at the time both AOL and CompuServe was charging like $25 for 25 hours, with $2,50 an hour for anything over 25 hours.  So switching from that to unlimited was a huge deal.

At first, it was awesome. Then, over a few months I noticed that something started to happen.  You see, when AOL switched to unlimited access, suddenly mom and dad who had before been using the 25 hours a month access, now had unlimited, so that meant they LET THEIR KIDS get on AOL. Suddenly, all these super cool message boards and chat rooms where intelligent adults had previously had engaging conversations, were flooded by teenagers and preteens POSING as adults. Needless to say, the overall user experience degraded significantly as the UNLIMITED floodgates opening meant all these ‘adult’ forums and chats were awash in a sea of fart and sex jokes from teens who were sneaking on mom’s AOL account.

Around 2000 or so, companies like Earthlink started offering straight internet access for around the same $25 price for unlimited. This really cut into AOL’s business and eventually it folded as well.

So we’d moved from a decentralized environment (BBSes) to a centralized one (AOL and CompuServe) to…….now what?

We went decentralized again. Around 2003 or so, weblogs started to gain traction. Blogs were like our own digital islands. We could create our own space where we could discuss whatever we want. And since a lot of us were still jonesing for a way to discuss our favorite topics in a post-AOL online world, it was perfect timing. Plus the great thing about blogs was that I could go read your blog, and immediately catch up on everything in your life (well everything that you were willing to share on your blog). Basically, if I wanted to reach you, I knew to go to your blog and there you were!

The problem was…not everyone wanted to have a blog. So it created an opportunity for someone to create a way for people that didn’t want to bare their souls everyday on a blog, to still have a way to create and share content. And maybe more easily interact with the content from others.

Enter social networking. Sites like MySpace and later Facebook and Twitter gave all of us centralized platforms where we could more easily connect with each other. Plus the great thing was, these platforms at first actually enhanced our blogs. It gave us a way to more easily create content for our blogs, and also to link to content we were creating on these platforms as well.  Plus, these social networking sites gave you immediate access to SO many more people! Especially hundreds of millions of people who weren’t blogging.

From 2006-2010 was the most fun and excitement I’ve ever had in 30 hours of being online. Blogging was hot and we had these wonderful communities springing up around our blogs, then sites like Facebook and Twitter launched and we had wonderful communities and discussions there as well.  It was truly the Golden Age of social media, even if we didn’t realize it at the time.

Then…..this happened:

Ashton Kutcher killed Twitter

Yep, the celebrities found social media.

This was the equivalent of AOL offering unlimited access for the first time, resulting in a flood of preteens with fart jokes. Suddenly Oprah, Britney and the Kardashians were on Twitter. Which meant that suddenly the MEDIA flooded to social media to follow them.

And within the span of a few months, Twitter and Facebook went mainstream. Suddenly, those of us who had been on these sites since the beginning and who loved the communities we had formed there, were flooded by new users who were mainly there to e-stalk their favorite celebrities.

Then the marketers followed, and that led to wait for it…..SELF PROMOTION!

When ‘everyone’ joins a centralized platform or service, the user experience for everyone degrades significantly. It happened when everyone joined AOL and CompuServe in the 90s, it happened to social media when ‘everyone’ joined Twitter and Facebook.

I’ll be honest: Social media really hasn’t been fun for me in about 5-6 years. It truly hasn’t. I’ve written previously about the problems these sites are having with transparency and trust issues. I think we are going to see Twitter and Facebook undergo radical changes in the coming year or two, if not go away completely.

Then the questions becomes, when that happens, do we revert back to a more decentralized web, and if so, what would that look like? I think we will, and I hope we’ll see our blogs become more prominent again. The interesting thing is that as a lot of people moved to social media sites, the functionality of blogs increased dramatically. Plus, people are more comfortable with the idea of blogging now, so I am hopeful that we’ll see a bit of a blogging Renaissance soon. It’s one reason I’ve doubled down on my blogging here and I’ve been advising clients to do the same for a while now.

However, there’s an even clearer pattern of this decentralized to centralized flow that we saw in the 90s and again over the last few years. When the shift from decentralized to centralized begins, that’s when the overall user experience is the best. But once EVERYONE floods into the centralized platforms, that’s when it all starts to go downhill.

Right now feels like about where we were in 2000. AOL was getting long in the tooth, and we were starting to look for other/better options. A year or two later, the mass-migration away from AOL had begun.

I think we’re in the same place now. A lot of people want to leave the popular social media sites, but really don’t see a better option. When we do, we’re gone.

I think that day is coming sooner rather than later.

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Creating Fans Through Storytelling

One of the best ways that brands can create fans is through storytelling. Specifically, through telling stories that relate to the brand, but that also tie into themes that are important to the customer. When done effectively, storytelling also helps the customer get a better understanding of what the brand is about. Think of it as pulling back the curtain and giving us a ‘backstage pass’ to see what goes on within the brand.

Last night I talked to the Advanced Social Media class at the University of Wisconsin – River Falls, and one of the examples of creating fans through storytelling was what Robert Scoble did years ago with Channel 9 videos while he was still at Microsoft. He would take a small camcorder and just go up to the cubicles of his co-workers and ask them to explain who they are and what they do. This was wonderful storytelling because it helped us understand more about the people who worked at Microsoft, and the culture at the brand. It made it a bit easier for us to relate to the brand once we could see the faces of the people that work there, and understand more about WHY they loved working there.

More recently, look at what Whole Foods did with wiping out its Instagram feed to raise awareness of declining bee populations around the world. This was powerful storytelling that tied into themes that relate to the brand (protecting the bees that help create the foods we love), while also giving us greater insights into what the brand is passionate about. Anything that a brand can do to help its customers better understand what it stands for, will always aid in creating fans.

Another instance of storytelling is what Maersk did with its archival photos. Kerry did a wonderful podcast with Maersk’s former head of social media, Jonathan Wichmann. Wichmann explained that when he took the job, he discovered that Maersk had an archivist who had thousands upon thousands of photos associated with Maersk and its shipping containers over the last century. He asked why no one ever used the photos and the brand’s response was ‘who would care?’  So Wichmann started posting the photos on Instagram and other social media sites and they were an immediate hit. These photos helped tell the story of the brand, and also helped us understand what they do, and for how long the brand has been doing it.  All of this also made it wasier to trust the brand, especially when you consider how long they have been providing the same services.

If your brand wants to experiment in creating content that helps tell the story of your brand, think about what stories you can talk about that tell what’s important to your brand, but that aren’t entirely focused on your brand.  Whole Foods talked about why we need to pay attention to declining bee populations.  Maersk by sharing its photos was also telling the story of why the work it does is so important. Yes, the pictures were mostly about the brand, but those pictures are also the history of shipping on the sea. It helps us understand what Maersk does, and what role in plays in global commerce.

And also, think about how you can lower your guard a bit and help us understand a bit more about what your brand does and who it is. Show us the people behind your brand, like Scoble did at Microsoft. GE does this with its employees, encouraging them to go on social media and talk about the work they do, as a way to increase the quality of job applicants. People better understand the culture at GE and why people love working there, and they are more likely to apply for open positions.

Above all, this is a potential competitive advantage for your brand. By engaging in storytelling with your customers, by opening your brand to them, you make it easier for your customers to better understand your brand, and relate to it.  Which makes it easier for your customers to TRUST your brand.

And when your customers trust your brand, then they can advocate for it. Interactions lead to Understanding which leads to Trust, which leads to Advocacy.

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The Difference Between Passive and Active Fans of Your Brand

I'm thrilled that Troy Janisch asked me to speak to his Advanced Social Media class at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls tonight. His class has read Think Like a Rock Star and I'll be doing a Q&A with the students. 

One of the students asked if it was possible for a brand to have different degrees or types of fans.  It's a great question and I think it definitely is.  Let's talk a bit about some basic differences among your brand's fans. 

Your fans are as unique as your customers, but for the purposes of this post, let's break your fans down into two groups; Passive and Active.

Passive Fans - These fans love your brand, but typically will not proactively share that love. They will promote your brand, but typically they need an opening to do so. For instance, if a passive Ford fan is asked if his Ford Edge has been reliable, then he would happily endorse the vehicle. But otherwise, they aren't going to promote your brand if there's not a natural reason to do so.

Active Fans - Active fans are more 'passionate' about your brand. The active fan who owns a Ford Edge would be trying to organize a local car club just for Ford Edge owners. These fans are more motivated to act on the brand's behalf, and more likely to view themselves as being 'brand owners'. 


Perhaps the easiest way to identify the difference between passive and active fans is that passive fans are often happy to work with your brand if you contact them, whereas the active fans will typically contact your band first. They will want to know what they can do to help your brand (which they really view as THEIR brand). 

So why are some fans 'active', and others are 'passive'?  

It could simply be that some fans are introverts and some are extroverts. Introverts by nature are more likely to be passive promoters, and extroverts are more likely to be active promoters. 

Another reason for the difference between passive and active fans is the level of loyalty and devotion that the fan feels toward the brand. If the loyalty and passion a fan has for the brand is mostly rooted in the products it sells, then they may be more likely to be passive fans.

On the other hand, if a fan is loyal to the products the brand makes AND the brand itself, they could be more likely to be active fans. For instance, Patagonia makes very high-quality clothing and outdoor wear, but they also support environmental causes that Patagonia customers are very passionate about. This could motivate Patagonia fans to be more devoted to the brand and more active in promoting it.

This topic of different degrees of fans is a fascinating concept to think about. You could break it down further but you have to be careful to do so in a way that's still useful and helps explain the underlying concepts without being too confusing.  

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Social Media is Destroying Our Ability to Create Impactful Content and Meaningful Connections

Go scan your timeline on Twitter or your news feed on Facebook.  Look at the articles being shared, and more importantly, look at the headlines.

After a while, you’ll begin to notice something. The headlines are written in a way to attract people that are already on Twitter and Facebook.  This is important, because the content is created in a way to attract people from social media sites, instead of creating content that appeals to your blog’s current readers and subscribers.

Social media has trained us to chase bigger numbers.  We want to go ‘viral’, we want more social shares, we want that flood of visitors from Twitter that gives our analytics a nice hockey stick.

But there’s a trade-off in this approach, and it’s one that a lot of us haven’t really thought about. If you chase new readers, what impact does that have on your current ones?  Because when you chase new readers, you change the way you create content.  You create content that will be more likely to ‘go viral’ on Twitter and Facebook.  When in reality, you should continue to create content that your CURRENT readers love.

We rail on companies for trying to acquire new customers and ignoring their current, loyal customers.  But it could be said that we do the same thing with our own content.  We chase more shares, more visitors, when we should be delighting the people that are ALREADY reading and enjoying our content.

A few months ago I was listening to Rush Limbaugh, and he said that social media has nothing to do with the success of his radio show.  He said he built it before social media, and even now, he’s not on Twitter at all.  He does repost show updates on Facebook, but that’s all designed to drive people off Facebook and back to his website.  He said if social media went away tomorrow, it wouldn’t affect his show in the least. And he has the most popular radio show in the country.

Seth Godin really doesn’t use social media either. He blogs every day, and every one of his pithy posts gets thousands of social shares. For years he wasn’t even on social media. He now does have a Twitter account for his blog, but all it does is repost his daily blog posts.

Rush and Seth are both great marketers and both highly successful.  And neither really uses social media in any meaningful way.  Certainly, neither is creating content that’s tailored to sharing on social media. Now you can easily say that both of them built their following BEFORE Twitter and Facebook, and therefore don’t need either of them. And you’d be right. But the point is, neither is altering their content to leverage social media.

I think there’s a lesson in that for the rest of us. I was looking back at my early blogging from 2006 and 2007, before I joined Twitter or Facebook. I blogged in a completely different style, it was almost like every day I was writing a letter to friends. As a result, I had a devoted community of readers, many of which commented on every post I wrote, and we had wonderful discussions in the comments section. Then, I would go and read their blogs and leave comments as well.

When social media sites came along, the conversations for many of us moved from our blogs to those social media sites. We lament how commenting fell off a cliff on our blogs, as it was ‘just easier’ on everyone to comment on Facebook and Twitter.

But along the way, we also changed the way we created content, and that change in the way we create content had an even bigger impact on dampening the number of comments on our blogs. We stopped writing in a way to elicit conversations. We trust people that we understand, and we understand people we can connect with. Those connections start by creating content that helps us be vulnerable and accessible to our readers. Ironically, this is the very type of content that the ‘experts’ have told us not to create.  Don’t inject too much ‘personality’ into your posts, you don’t want to offend potential customers or clients. Focus solely on business, don’t blog about your passions, that’s being ‘off-topic’.

The reality is, the only true value you get from your blogging is in the connections that you make. It doesn’t matter if you are a personal blogger or if you blog for business. I can tie about 80% of the business I’ve gotten over the last 10 years of consulting to about 10 people. Those are all people that I made connections with over time, via my blog. Maybe once every 6-12 months do I get someone that I don’t know who comes to my blog from a search engine, and we end up doing business. Almost all of my customers know ME first, then trust me, then decide to do business with me.

What if there were no social media sites? What if you could only create content on your blog, and that was the only way you could connect with potential customers and potential friends?

Would that change the way you created content? Would you go from focusing on increasing social shares, to increasing subscribers and readers?

I bet you would. I know I am.

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This is Why a Brand Ambassador Program is Your Best Way to Acquire New Customers

In 2013, Forrester did a study into which forms of content were most trusted by American shoppers. In short, Forrester found that if content originates from a customer or 3rd-party source, it is far more trusted than any content that originates from a brand.

The most trusted form of content was product recommendations from friends and family (70% of shoppers trusted).  Second was professionally written online reviews (55%) and third was consumer reviews (46%).

Communications directly from the brand were far less trusted:

  • Text messages from a brand – 9%
  • Ads on websites – 10%
  • Information on mobile apps from brands – 12%
  • Social media content from brands – 15%
  • Emails from brands – 18%

Clearly, the most trusted forms of content originate from the customer, the least-trusted forms of content originate from the brand. So why do most brands spend billions on creating the least-trusted form of content, while all but ignoring the most trusted form (content from customers)?  Why don’t more brands let their marketing messages flow through their customers?

In my experience, there’s two main reasons why most companies don’t leverage customer to customer communication:

1 – Most brands prefer to advertise for customers because they want total control over messaging. It’s that simple. Even if the messaging is far less effective (driving up costs exponentially), most brands will pay more to have more control over what the message is and how it is delivered.

2 – Most brands don’t understand their customers well enough to trust them to communicate on their behalf. Almost all interactions that the average brand has with its customers flow through customer service, and then it is a numbers game. Get the customer off the line as quickly as possible and move onto the next call. A wonderful chance to better interact with and understand its customers is often lost.

 

So the most trusted content originates from customers, the least-trusted content originates from the brand.  How does your brand manage this disconnect?

By building a brand ambassador program that lets you manage the message that your customers share with other customers. A brand ambassador program is a program that allows you to have an ongoing working relationship with your most passionate customers. This comes in many forms, but one of them includes working with your customers to help them better promote your brand. Your best customers are already promoting your brand naturally, by working with them directly you can give them the tools and guidance to improve their efforts and make them more effective and efficient.

Which also improves your ability to acquire new customers, since customer recommendations are the most trusted form of content, by letting your customers engage with other customers, you gain new customers. And the best part is, the customer acquisition comes at a much lower cost than if your brand invests in traditional advertising. Plus, a brand ambassador program allows your brand to have more control over its marketing messages between customers.

Look at Patagonia’s Worn Wear program that we discussed here yesterday. Think of the positive word of mouth that this program creates for Patagonia. Patagonia has created a way to connect directly with its customers, and during its road trip stops, it also gives Patagonia customers a way to connect with each other and share their love of the Patagonia brand.

This is a great example of why it makes sense to create a customer-centric program like a brand ambassador program.  You bring your customers in touch with the brand, and with each other. Those connections spark understanding, which sparks trust, which sparks advocacy.

And that creates word of mouth. Which means your happy customers are acquiring new customers for you.

Want to create happy customers by optimizing your digital and content strategies? Check out my Digital Optimization Playbook!

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Let’s Take a Closer Look at Patagonia’s Worn Wear Road Tour

Several years ago, Patagonia started its Worn Wear program. The program was based around Patagonia’s corporate values of extending the lifespan of every garment it creates. The Worn Wear program will repair your Patagonia clothing, and if the clothing is beyond repair, it will recycle it for you.

A few years ago, Patagonia decided to take it’s Worn Wear program on the road, literally.  The company loaded up in a wooden truck and with a couple of seamstresses in tow, toured the country, repairing clothing along the way.  All for free, and not just Patagonia clothing either, any clothing you had with a rip or a ruined zipper could be mended by the Patagonia team.

Here’s a video Patagonia created to give you a sense of why they take the Worn Wear program on the road:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7muOgpX8vaQ

As you might guess, this program has been wildly successful, and has expanded to stops outside the US, and within the US the Worn Wear road trip has grown to have it’s own tour of colleges. This is a very smart move by Patagonia because it lets the company connect with millennials on college campuses that will likely be even more receptive to the company’s reuse and recycle culture.

This is the one aspect of the Worn Wear road trips that’s always fascinated me.  It’s a wonderful opportunity for the company to connect directly with its customers in a one-on-one setting, and convert them into brand advocates. As the employees are repairing the garments (for free), they are also talking to the customers about why they have the Worn Wear program, and why they believe so passionately in the value of repairing old garments rather than simply throwing them away and buying something new. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that Patagonia has to spread its culture and mission to other people, and win them over as advocates for those causes.

I recently came across a great case study that Amp Agency did as they helped Patagonia organize the road trip portion of the Worn Wear program.  Here’s some key takeaways (These numbers appear to be from just one US tour, 21 stops):

  • 88% merchandise sell-through rate during the road trip. Patagonia takes used clothing as part of the tour and sells it during stops on the road trip.
  • 11,075 tour attendees
  • 68,481 visitors to the Worn Wear landing page

What I love about the Worn Wear road trips is the ability it gives Patagonia to connect directly with current and potential customers.  The seamstresses get to hear stories from the customers about how they ripped their Patagonia coat and what it means to them.  In the process, those Patagonia workers get to give the customer back their coat almost as good as new, and along the way they get to explain what the Worn Wear program is and why it’s so important to Patagonia.

The Worn Wear road trips should be viewed as a way to build a long-term relationship with Patagonia customers who believe in the Worn Wear cause, and who will willingly spread it to other people. I’m not sure what Patagonia gives customers that have their clothing repaired during these stops. But at minimum, the brand should focus on ways to give these customers the option to mobilize on behalf of Patagonia and to tell other customers about the Worn Wear program.  Customers who have their clothing repaired by Patagonia (for free) during these Worn Wear stops are going to naturally be very appreciative toward the brand for helping them. They will be very receptive to the Worn Wear message, and will be open to telling more people about what the program is, and why it exists.

If you go to the Worn Wear landing page, you do get a pop-up invite to get email updates:

If I were advising Patagonia, I would suggest they view the road trip portion of the Worn Wear program as a way to find like-minded customers who will champion the ideals of the Worn Wear program. I would even set aside a small area where Patagonia employees can talk to customers about how they can help nurture and grow the Worn Wear program. This is a message that many people who come to the Worn Wear road stops would be receptive to. These people would want to know how they can help Patagonia grow the Worn Wear program, and Patagonia should think about how they can better give these people an opportunity to help, during these road stops.

If your company is trying to decide how to create an initiative as successful as the Worn Wear road trip, you have to understand why it works.  The Worn Wear road trip stops aren’t focused on promoting the Patagonia brand, they are focused on helping Patagonia’s customers, and communicating Patagonia’s core values to its customers.

It’s worth noting that even though this initiative isn’t specifically build to increase sales, it will do just that.  It drives sales during the events, but also gives customers who have had their garments repaired an incentive to spread positive word of mouth about the brand.  This will result in additional sales, and additional positive PR for the brand.

By putting its customers and values first, Patagonia will realize increased sales as well. What a novel idea!

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Marketing Conferences; Here’s What to Look For on Post-Event Surveys From Attendees

Marketing conferences, for the most part, are divided into two seasons; Spring and Fall. The Fall season began earlier this month, with a few big events already happening, and more on tap for October and November. So I thought this would be a good time to talk a bit about the post-event surveys that all these conferences will send out to attendees.

For the most part, these surveys are boilerplate, you answer a series of questions about the event from a scale of 1 to 5.  At the end, there will typically be a “Are there any additional comments you’d like to leave?” chance for attendees to get one last chance to speak their mind.

Typically, the feedback given in these open-ended answers falls into four catergories:

1 – The attendee talks about the event

2 – The attendee talks about themselves

3 – The attendee talks about the venue

4 – The attendee talks about the organizers

 

Obviously, there can be some overlapping among those four areas of potential feedback, and often is. But the question becomes, “Which type of attendee feedback is best?”

The answer is simple; You want your attendees to talk about themselves. You want them to tell you that attending your event sparked a positive change in their behavior.

Here’s an example of the type of feedback you want: “I had hit a wall in implementing a digital marketing strategy at my company, but the sessions at your event helped bring clarity to my efforts. I came to your event hoping to learn more about measuring results, engaging customers online, and generating better content. Three sessions stuck out in my mind, Kami Huyse’s session on Digital Marketing ROI, Mack Collier’s Think Like a Rock Star session (customer engagement) and Andy Crestodina’s session on Building Better Content. I got so much value from these and other sessions that I actually took a break from the conference on Thurs to go back to my hotel room and have a GoToMeeting session with my team to share some of the things I had learned so they could immediately start implementing those changes. I will be leading an All Hands meeting next week at my company and cannot wait to share everything I have learned. This was money well spent and I will be returning next year.”

This is the perfect post-event feedback. Note that throughout this comment, the attendee is detailing how your event made a positive impact on their work. This is what you want to see, it’s not enough to have a great event with great socializing at a cool venue.  That stuff is WAY too easy to copy and improve upon.

What’s much harder to do, is send your attendees home having solved business problems they were facing. If your event can do that, you’ll not only win their repeat business, you will get them to bring you more attendees the following year(s).

So when you realize that the best type of feedback from attendees is when they talk about themselves (ie you helped them solve their business problems), then how could you change the structure of your event so that you increase the chances of getting that type of feedback from more attendees?

For instance, you could go to your speakers and stress to them the need to focus on solving specific problems for attendees.  Have them create their presentation so that it solves particular problems, and that it clearly provides those solutions to attendees.

Another thing you could do is have one on one consulting sessions with attendees. I know the Marketing Profs events have done this in the past. Maybe schedule them for the last day as a sort of catch-all, if an attendee came to the event needing certain questions answered and still didn’t get a solution by the last day, then schedule a quick consulting session with an expert.

What about having a designated ‘note taker’ in each session who takes detailed notes and captures takeaways from each session?  Then at the end of the day/event, the summaries for each session are made available to all attendees. Or better yet, ask the speakers to provide these beforehand to give to attendees.

By focusing on trying to elicit a particular type of feedback from attendees, you can completely restructure your event in a way that provides much more value to those attendees. If you would like to work with me to improve your event in 2019, please email me as I am happy to help either in a consulting or speaking capacity.

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Trust is the Currency On Which Your Content Trades

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read it, you’re misinformed.” – Denzel Washington

I recently came across this video on YouTube about what social media usage is doing to us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKd2QVrQVIM

But it was Denzel’s quote at the start that really grabbed my attention. I’ve been saying for a while now that social media in general in headed toward a breaking point. Overall trust in major platforms like Facebook and Twitter continues to fall, as users of these platforms aren’t sure how their content is being shared and if they have equal access to everyone else’s content. I believe users were already becoming a bit tired with the platforms, but recent concerns over a lack of transparency and explanation of how our thoughts are shared and curated with others has reached a tipping point for these platforms. It’s a big part of the reason why I’ve been advising you for a while now to double-down on your blogging efforts. Too many companies use social media as its primary communications channels, and a blog is often an afterthought. If anything, that order should be reversed.  If Twitter and Facebook go away tomorrow, I will still have this blog, and that makes it the most powerful communications channel I have.

But this whole debate about where social media is headed brings up the larger issue of trust in relation to the content you create, that I create, that we all create. If you, as a content creator, aren’t trusted to create content that will be useful and relevant to your audience, then your content will be invisible. Remember yesterday I talked about how the best marketing is invisible but the worst marketing BECOMES invisible? It’s the same thing with your content. If we don’t see the value in your content, we’ll ignore it. And unfortunately, as we see in the video above, our attention spans are being ‘trained’ by social media to shrink every day. For a content creator, this means it’s even easier to pass over your content, plus it means that many of us won’t have the patience to stop for 2-3 minutes to read your post, then leave a thoughtful comment on it. Unfortunately, this is simply the way of the social media world in 2018.

I’m not sure what the answer is. I started blogging before sites like YouTube and Twitter were launched, and before Facebook became mainstream. So I started creating content in a world before 2.3 second attention spans. In a time when having thoughtful discussions in the comment section of every blog post was the norm, not the exception. I suspect it was simply easier to build trust with your audience when you could interact with them every day in an actual discussion.

And perhaps that fact hints at why there is so much distrust on social media today. It seems as if the number of deeper discussions and interactions on social media has decreased, distrust and trolling on social media has increased. We don’t talk to each other anymore, we yell at each other.

Perhaps this is part of the reason why podcasting is taking off in popularity, and has been for years. Hearing a human voice matters, and it’s a form of content you can create that, at least from one side, can replicate having an actual conversation with someone.

I do know this; Likes, ReTweets and Shares are the currency of social media, and those are not the best ways to establish trust. I will admit, I have often been guilty of RTing a link that was shared by someone I trust, without actually reading that link to verify the value of the content. I trust my friend, so if they feel the content is worthy of being shared, I do too. Maybe my friend did the same thing, maybe we all messed up together! But the trust I have for my friend was created by our personal interactions.

As you move forward with your content creation efforts heading into 2019, think about what elements make your content more trustworthy, and what could cause people to trust it less. Think of the value of your headlines, is the value promised in the headline reflected in the post itself? If not, you may be using ‘clickbait’, a quick way to lose trust.

But are you creating content that helps facilitate interactions directly with your audience. Or content that makes it easier for them to understand your voice and your point of view?

If you can do that, I believe you make it easier for us to put down our devices for a few seconds, and to actually listen to what you have to say. And that’s incredibly powerful.

 

QUESTION: If Facebook and Twitter disappeared tomorrow, how would YOU connect with your customers online? Would you have a way to do so, or did you just assume that “Facebook is my website”.  When did Noah build the Ark? Before the rains came.

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Marketing Shouldn’t be a Nuisance, it Should Be Sexy


Writing about marketing can be challenging. If it’s treated as merely a business function, writing on marketing can get very boring, very quickly. Not just for the reader, for the writer as well.

But marketing can often be so much more than it is. The best marketing is never noticed, and you could argue that the worst marketing isn’t either. The difference is, we immediately know bad marketing when we see it, but we often view great marketing as being anything but….marketing.

The challenge is, how do you teach companies to market better if they simply view marketing as a way to get more sales? And how do you create marketing that’s more interesting and even alluring to customers who have been conditioned all their lives to know that marketing is a nuisance?

I was pondering this as I came across this quote from Kathy Sierra:

“Knowledge cannot be pushed into someone’s head while they sit passively reading or listening. Knowledge is a co-creation… the learner must construct the new knowledge in his own head. And usually (or some say ALWAYS), the new knowledge must be mapped into something that’s already IN the learner’s head.”

Now obviously, Kathy’s point was concerning the learning process, and how people learn better when they do more than simply read content. If you can involve them in the process and give them a way to apply what they are reading as they are reading it, you increase learning. Basically, you learn by doing.

But the ‘co-creation’ part grabbed my attention, as did the part about mapping new knowledge to something that’s already IN the learner’s head. If you change ‘knowledge’ to ‘marketing’ and change the ‘learner’ to ‘customer’, you get: ‘marketing must be mapped to something that’s already IN the customer’s head’.

In other words, marketing must tap into something that the customer finds value and relevance in.

For example, think of the Volvo print ads from many years ago with the safety pin. That helped associate ‘safety’ with Volvo vehicles, and it’s a connection that carries over to today. The key is that customers were already interested in having a safe vehicle, so Volvo was smart enough to associate itself with something that was already important to the customer.

So in order for marketing to be effective and win the attention of the potential customer, it has to be related to something that the potential customer already values. This is the classic mistake that most companies make, they try to immediately close the sale with potential customers. A potential customer has little to no idea who you are or why they should buy from you. So obviously, you should not sell to these people UNTIL they understand who you are, what you sell and why it fits into their lives.

The key then is to market to what’s important to the customer. Volvo didn’t market their cars, they marketed safety to potential customers. That got the attention of those potential customers.

I’ve talked about this before, but in order to gain awareness with a group of customers who don’t know who you are, you must focus your marketing completely on the customer.  THAT is how you gain their attention. Once you have their attention, then you can market yourself to them. But not before.

This is why the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing to your customers. Because we view marketing as being a nuisance, but if marketing is focused on what we as customers want and need, then it becomes USEFUL to us, and we actually can seek it out. We don’t view it as marketing and we don’t even realize we are being marketed to. But if marketing is bad, we immediately notice it, and ignore it.

The best marketing is invisible. The worst marketing becomes invisible.