Don't ask customers for their opinion without paying attention to their answers.
It’s a great idea to show consumers considering your brand what other consumers think about it. But it’s really important to listen closely and pay attention to that stream and participate in the discussion.
This angry and ignored Malvern Star customer hasn’t just been ignored in store and on the phone, he’s also being ignored when he takes his complaint to the brand’s website.
This page could look so much better with a conciliatory comment from Malvern Star customer service, with an offer to resolve the problem on the phone or via email. It might even become a net positive result for the brand if handled well.
I’m moderating a new Digital Citizens Event coming up on Tuesday April 13th, with the theme of “Social Media for Social Good.”
Secret: I’ve never moderated at an event before (I’m usually either speaking or heckling the speakers) so this might be a refreshing change, at least for the crowd and the speakers. Please come along and heckle me — I am a large and slow-moving target.
The one frustration is it’s a topic close to my heart. I’d love to wade in with my own opinions and evidence but I hate it when other moderators do that — it’s not me you’re paying to listen to. But I’ll happy debate it with you afterwards over drinks
The evening begins with an open discussion of “what’s hot on the social web” and then we’ll get into the main topic.
If what’s hot on the social web is you, sweetie, I’d appreciate it if you could be on time.
The four speakers I’ll be wrassling are Karalee Evans, Mark Chenery and Nic McKay. We’ll then take questions and open the debate.
Bring an opinion, bring an idea, bring a question or just bring a good heckle, but please bring yourself.
Waiting to go on as Easter Bunny at my son’s childcare centre. A 2m, 100kg man in a bunny suit? Deep emotional scars for everyone.
About the speakers
Working as a communications and public relations professional for nearly ten years, Karalee Evans has developed successful communications models for the corporate and government sectors and most recently a not-for-profit organisation. During three years working for social good at headspace, Karalee developed and delivered a successful social media and marketing campaign (recently awarded Silver and Bronze at the 32nd International Caples Awards) focussed on advocating youth mental health issues.
Mark Chenery is communications manager of anti-poverty agency ActionAid Australia and former digital marketing journalist at AdNews magazine. He’ll be speaking about Project TOTO, ActionAid Australia’s attempt to give poverty a voice through social media tools such as Twitter and blogs, giving Australians an insight into the realities of poverty and to give poor and marginalised people the opportunity to tell their stories on the world stage.
Nic Mackay is currently the Managing Director of The Human Race, a social entrepreneur and a thought leader regarding the future of “corporate social responsibility”. He co-founded The Oaktree Foundation, Australia’s largest and most successful youth-run aid and development organisation, founded an Australian/South African non-profit organisation called Key Change Music, which is creating positive social change through music. Nic recently received the Rotary Club of Melbourne and Sir Albert Coates 2010 Young Achiever Awards.
I was on a speaker panel at Mobile Feast today so I suppose I can’t pretend to be in the Himalayas any longer! Yes, I’m back, though it took me a week to complete triage on 1900+ unread emails and deal with a pile of bills and other snail mail.
I’m still in the process of uploading some 8Gb of photos I took while in the Himalayas, but there are already some good shots there if you have a moment to check them out. I’ve sprinkled a few at the end of this post if you don’t have time to go to Flickr.
This was the first Mobile Feast conference, and while any new conference can use a tweak, it was a promising start for a conference that aims to help businesspeople from outside the mobile industry understand what the future of the mobile internet might look like. I was speaking on a panel predicting what future mobile content might look like, and with me on the panel where Stephen Kilsby of game developer Viva La Mobile, Jennifer Zanich from mobile social networking startup Xumii, and Christina Thurn from Walt Disney’s internet arm.
While I didn’t have to present with any slides (yay) I had a few things to say along these lines:
Youth finds its own uses for things. Young film makers took cinema – originally a fine art medium – and invented Hollywood blockbusters. Young music producers took the music production industry built for recording jazz music and used it to make something 100x bigger – rock and roll. TV and computers were both built by an older generation, then ‘hacked’ by a younger generation who did things that were new, different and world-changing. The next big generations (Y and Z) will be consuming content and services primarily via a mobile, not a desktop or laptop. They won’t grow into a desktop as they age. They will make content and services on mobile devices that are as incomprehensible to us as Jimi Hendrix was was to the men who invented the LP, but which will find millions of customers and make millions of dollars for those of us smart enough to back the right young innovators. We should stop trying to define how this generation ‘should’ use the mobile web and focus instead on observing how they use it – that’s how we’ll discover how to make the mobile blockbusters of the future.
The iPhone Appstore is the beginning of the end of the mobile ‘carrier deck’. The appstore is the mobile equivalent of the ‘My Yahoo!’ and ‘My Excite’ personalisable homepages of the late ’90s desktop internet – a necessary middle stage between the walled garden of AOL and Compuserve and the open, unrestricted access of Google. On mobile devices, the carrier deck will be replaced by a user-generated deck – a mobile homepage created by the mobile user and their sphere of friends – the content, topics and products they love/hate right now. Find the right taste-makers and mavens in the mobile youth market now if you want to get big usage of your mobile content or applications – these people are nearly free at the moment but will become more expensive as they realise the commercial power they have.
The demise of the carrier deck will also allow content and application publishers to derive some ‘long tail’ revenue. Carrier decks kill long tail revenue by burying old content/apps too deep. To illustrate the potential of long tail revenue for mobile content I pulled out my iPhone and played ‘Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century’ – a Daffy Duck cartoon made by Warner Bros. in 1952 – I’d just rented it on iTunes Store for my son to watch on my iPhone and Apple TV. 1952 and still renting? Talk about a long tail!
Carriers will soon be forced to share data revenues with content/app publishers like they do with handset manufacturers. Too much of the revenue in the mobile industry still rests with the ‘dumb pipe’ providers. Too much consumption of that data will be driven by the publishers. Critical mass will be reached sometime in the next five years, probably with a deal between social network or social messaging providers.
Apple’s total market cap recently overtook Google’s. I’ve been a user of Apple’s ‘soup to nuts’ delivery channel from content publisher tools to online content sales systems to home entertainment hardware for long enough to make this prediction with confidence: Apple will be the largest entertainment company in the world, measured by revenue, in the next five years. Feel free to remind me I said that!
Finally, what I didn’t get to say was that eight years ago this month I was busy delivering the first mobile content for an Olympic games – the Sydney Olympics 2000. So much amazing progress has happened in less than a decade!
See, in 2000 Yahoo! was angling to try and be the major online partner of the games. Though no mobile content rights were made available by the IOC, Mark Jackson and the good folks from the Sydney Olympic Organising Committee did their best to help us out. Problem: there were almost no web-enabled handsets in Australia at the time.
So we recruited and trained spokesmodels to ride visitors around Sydney in Yahoo!-branded rickshaws and offer to show them our WAP coverage and SMS alerts, driven by content licensed from local content publishers.
The content was served in an early WAP browser, was text only, woefully behind the live results available on TV, and was delivered incredibly slowly on Nokia 7110 handsets. If you were really in no hurry to get somewhere, our spokesmodels would help you login to your Yahoo! account on the handset (it took about 4-5mins per login) and set up some SMS alerts (which most users would soon turn off because not only were they out of date, SMS was punishingly expensive.) The spokesmodel could also take your photo at the Olympics in Sydney and upload it to Yahoo! Photos so you could share it with your friends… only, not until the spokesmodel returned to a desktop PC later in the day, since the handset didn’t have a camera and even a 100k image would have taken centuries to upload even if there was a way to get the image file onto the handset. My first cameraphone was a SonyEricsson T68i that had the camera as a separate plug-in device, released the following year.
From memory, I think we had 10 spokesmodels on rickshaws at any one time, each with a Nokia 7110 and we just about emptied Nokia’s stocks of 7110s – we had most of the 7110s in the country at that time. Let’s be generous and say maybe there were a hundred 7110 handsets in Australia at that time and assume all of them had been setup for WAP access (the 7110 didn’t usually come with WAP settings pre-installed) . So in August 2000, less than a decade ago, there were maybe a hundred mobile handsets in Australia capable of mobile browsing. Desperately slow browsing, in greyscale only, at very great expense and with almost no Australian-generated content or applications to browse.
Yes, we have a long way to go, but we have already come so far.
“…advertising agencies have used social media for people to create relationships with the brand only as long as it happens in the three months that their campaign is running.
… why do advertising agencies think it is okay to do this in social media?
Although you may think it’s a great idea to run a MySpace/Facebook page for a fictional character from your advertising campaign, what happens when the campaign ends?”
Great opinion from Julian Cole, one of the new marketing bloggers I’ve added to my daily feed reading this week. It’s true: advertising agencies are set-up to manage campaigns, and a campaign by definition has an end date as well as a beginning. Once you step forward into social media, there’s no stepping backward without damaging the relationship with the customer relationships you’ve built online.
Unless, of course, your advertising agency hasn’t built you any new customer relationships online. That too can happen.
Getting an agency to drive your social media can work if they understand social media, but their work needs to be delivered on a retainer basis, not a campaign basis. Otherwise, while they’re pitching you the next campaign, your customers are becoming disaffected and walking away from the online relationship you’ve created.
Another tip of the hat to Julian for this great basketball long shot from YouTube, which Julian uses nicely in an analogy on his blog.
