DirecTV – great customer service to start the year off right

It’s great to start the year off with a really positive experience.  I have been a customer of DirecTV since about 1998.  Originally I joined because it was the only way to get Formula 1 racing here, and I’ve been a customer ever since.  Note I didn’t say “loyal” customer.  I love the idea of satellite mind you, it just seems so Jetsons.  But up until now, if cable came along with a good enough offer I might have been tempted.

The loyalty factor went way up a couple of weeks ago when their customer service team reversed a long standing billing error.  They did it gracefully and without complaint, even though the relatively small error went back years and compounded to a pretty significant number.  And they threw in a free service upgrade to say sorry for their mistake.

I decided to use RelevantMind to see if that positive experience showed up in online communities, compared to DISH Network.  Did it ever!

Here is the conversation volume versus Dish Network for October through December:

The sentiment around DirecTV  is very positive.  And based on my experience, if they keep up the good customer service they’ll continue to enjoy the lion’s share of online conversations.  Good work and thanks!

Nissan 370Z Launch

A friend of ours is looking for a new sports car and asked us to take a look at the conversations happening around the new Nissan370Z. This is a challenging time to launch a new car and our friend’s question was whether the positive press reviews (it made the NY Times top ten list) translated to enthusiast community interest.

The short answer is that it has. Here is a look at volume in November, notice the big spike around the launch:

 

The really good news if you are Nissan is that daily post volume is up, way up in fact. Through December 25th the daily volume is over 100 posts a day on more than 250 different communities – almost double what it was in October. And what were they talking about?

 

Probably not a big surprise that performance, power, and taking it to the track trump ride and comfort!

Are they talking about me?

Well, the question we usually get is more along the lines of “Are they talking about my brand? How about specific products?“. 

At RelevantMind our emphasis is on user communities (primarily forums and discussion groups) as opposed to other forms of social media like blogs and micro-blogs, wikis, photo and video sharing, etc.  There are many reasons for our focus but a big one is the sheer volume of conversations.  More volume means more data points and that can make all the difference, especially as you get to the product level.

Let’s take a quick look at the difference in blog versus community volume at the brand and product level.

First we looked at the topic de jour  - the iPhone.  We know it isn’t a brand but it is about the most blogged about topic over the last 3 months.  Here is how things stack up:

The volume advantage is about 3:1.  We see similar results around other hot topics like the presidential election.  Next we looked the brand level for Garmin, maker of excellent GPS units:

Now the advantage is 5:1.  If your brand doesn’t have a big base of professionally reviewed/blogged products like consumer electronics does this difference can be a lot higher.  

 Finally, let’s look at the product level.  Here is the new Garmin 705 cycling GPS unit (high on my personal “want” list):

 

Here the difference is a whopping 46:1 – now that is significant!

Social media engagement is all about connecting with your market in a positive way.  If they aren’t talking about you then it is important to look at why not, and what you can do to change things.  But it is also important to look for the conversation in the right places.

 

 

Do we really need a standard for measuring return on conversations?

For at least the past few years there has been constant buzz about online advertising measurement standards. The chatter still continues though it’s exacerbated by the additional demand for defining a social media measurement standard. Even though RelevantMind is technically in the “measurement” business, I’m not so sure there is a need for the IAB to define new standards for measurement.

Would a new standard make it easier for our sales to sell our product? Yes
Would a new standard help the majority of our customers better justify an ROI? Probably Not

Thinking about this leads me to the bigger question – Are we looking for a standard for measurement because the online advertising industry needs a standardized pricing model or are we looking for a standard that enables our clients to recognize a return on their efforts?

I’m afraid it is more likely the former, because it would be almost impossible to determine a standard for measuring all social media efforts. Why? Because not all social media communication efforts come from marketers or are directly related to sales.

The folks in customer service, product development, corporate brand, etc. we work with aren’t solely focused on sales. Of course, they’re focused on things that relate to sales, but in some cases the measurement priorities of these groups are very far before or after the sale in the funnel. (sidenote: I also think the days of the traditional sales funnel are over – but more on that another day)

This is why we take the time to better understand our clients’ objectives when kicking off an initiative – I’ve been calling this our objective-focused approach. But today I found a much better term when reading Tim Leberecht’s post, Big ideas, smaller audiences, and too many (or the wrong) metrics.

“’There is more and more emphasis by advertisers for greater return-on-objectives in campaigns, particularly in the digital space where the accountability data is so readily available,’ said Grant Prentice, Starcom USA’s director of connections research and analytics.”

Return on Objectives. It’s actually the perfect compliment for ROI (though I’m not so sure ROO rolls off the tongue as nicely). And if companies are focused on a ROO (see, sounds funny) when approaching social media then the standards of measurement will differ, but be driven by their needs as opposed to the advertising outlets’.

Hey Corporation X, it’s not all about you anymore!

It’s all about your customers. And that is scary, isn’t it?

Other than the overwhelming breadth of the social media landscape, the next big fear for companies wanting to dabble in social influence marketing comes with the realization that they will have to listen and react to the conversation. It’s always a touchy moment when a client realizes that engagement doesn’t mean forcing your message onto consumers on Facebook or via Tweets. Engagement is about having a conversation – and, for businesses, it means doing more listening than talking. This is a hard pill to swallow, as no one likes to talk more than those in marketing. And, of course, there’s also the risk of losing control of the “brand message” that they’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars crafting. But what’s the ROI on that message if it doesn’t resonate with your target audience?

In yesterday’s post – Five Plugged-in Dudes Get Fired Up About New Media at Pub Club -  Amanda Gravel, author of Social Honeycomb, offers some great commentary on the new era of corporate messaging. Quoting Mike Volpe, she says, “Mike really hit the nail on the head as he explained that there’s simply no such thing as the crafted, corporate message working anymore and that “the message” is what people are saying, regardless of what you put in a PR plan or what your client’s legal team approves.”

He’s right. We should altogether replace the term corporate messaging with community messaging since those that are “on message” will be the ones that realize it’s no longer about the corporation and are crafting their message by listening and engaging the community.

What is really the social media game-changer?

It seems the clients and prospects we’ve been working with aren’t the only ones who put all their social media eggs in the blog basket. In “Beyond the Blog,” the BusinessWeek (BW) cover story a few weeks ago, the publisher offers a “mea culpa” claiming the big time media publisher missed the boat by putting too much emphasis on blogs as the largest game-changing outlet within the social media landscape, stating “we focused on blogs as a new form of printing press, one that turned Gutenberg’s economics on its head, making everyone a potential publisher. This captured our attention, not least because this publishing revolution was already starting to rattle the skyscrapers in our media-heavy, Manhattan neighborhood.”

This makes sense. To BW, and all other publishers and media companies, the blog phenomenon changed the game, making 24/7 access and reporting a must have versus a nice to have. These days every major reporter (and almost every major company) has a blog, despite the fact that readership numbers aren’t very impressive.

In the article, BW points out that while blogs are important, only a small amount of consumers participate, citing a recent study from Forrester Research that states only a quarter of the U.S. adult online population reads a blog once a month.

That seems like a lot of work for very little return. And for the past two years I’ve wondered how companies can rely on a blog as their social media strategy. Again, I’m not knocking blogs here. (It would be ironic of me to knock the power of blogs on the blog for which I am one of the most frequent contributors.) I’m was just pleased that Business Week (my favorite magazine) finally realized that blogs, while definitely a player, are only one of many tools in the social media toolkit.

But the more I thought about the article, I began to feel like BW has once again missed the point. There will always be a new outlet popping up that is the “game changer” at one point or another. Yesterday it was the blog, today everyone is all a buzz about Twitter. But the winner won’t be the company or person that learns to monetize one of these outlets. The winner will be the company or person who learns how to maximize the value of the community conversations begin generated within these outlets.

When writing this blog post, I went back to check some facts/quotes to make sure I had it right. In doing so, I realized I’d missed something. In a special section within the article, BW asked two prominent bloggers to give their take on how old media will adjust to the new rules of social media.

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine says, “next, I think, BusinessWeek’s readers will see that social media are changing their fundamental relationship with customers to be less about serving and more about collaborating. No, I don’t mean that every product will be the product of a committee. But customers who want to talk will, and smart companies will not just listen but will engage them in decisions. This will have an impact not just on PR and image but on product design, marketing, sales, customer service—the whole company. Three years from now, I predict BusinessWeek’s cover won’t be about blogs or tools but about companies as communities.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. That’s definitely the cover story I’m anxious to see.

Tastebook – User generated publishing…

Our friends over at Tastebook asked us to test their new widget.  We are happy to help out, but I thought I’d also take a step back to reflect on the significance of what they are up to.  This is a really good example of a company that “gets” the big picture we have talked about in previous posts.

When I first saw Tastebook I thought “Okay, that is pretty cool”.  You make your own cookbook by remixing your favorite recipes from places like Epicurious and Simply Recipes along with your own.  Playing book DJ is fun and the end result is a beautiful collection of your favorite recipes.  Julie created a great Tastebook which is a good thing because my cooking knowledge is limited to toast and quesadillas (unfortunately that is not an exaggeration).

Then I started really thinking about what it meant and the implications behind what they are doing are significant.  Social media is all about giving people the tools, platforms and creative license to create a web experience “their/our way”.    And sometimes you want a physical expression of that, something you can hold in your hands or give to other people wrapped in actual gift-wrap.  Speaking for myself, when I do that I want just as much control as I have in the virtual environment.   The idea behind Tastebook is just that  - user control over my physical experience of a book.  Well done!

Now, hopefully they’ll expand to things I actually know something about, like travel. Check it out especially if cooking is your thing:

 

 

SeaWorld San Antonio Gets Social Influence Marketing

This report by Shel Israel for Global Neighbourhoods TV gives a quick overview of how  SeaWorld San Antonio used social media channels to launch the “Journey to Atlantis” last Summer. You can also find more details about the initiative here.

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Congrats SeaWorld San Antonio on a successful launch and an outstanding social influence program! The google search for”Journey to Atlantis” alone shows the popularity of user-generated content surrounding the campaign.

Do Social Shopping Sites Have Enough Traction to Stick Around?

Today iMedia Connection featured an article “Get in on the Social Shopping Craze” by Denise Zimmerman. It was interesting to read as it explores some of the same concepts we’ve been talking about with our clients and on the RelevantMind blog.This article provides a good commentary on  the social shopping landscape, but it sites Forrester as having the opinion that social shopping lacks staying power because low traffic numbers will impede its growth and market value. I could be taking this statement out of context. And I have yet to read this research, so I’m wondering how the research giant is defining social shopping as it relates to this claim. I rarely disagree with Forrester, so I imagine they aren’t including social shopping sites like Polyvore into this category as we’ve seen in our research that those sites are catching up to retail sites in terms of traffic volume. I’ll dig a little deeper and let you know what I find out. 

Amazon + Facebook = Strong Social Shopping Relationship

The news this week made it really easy to bring the discussion back to my social shopping series with all of the talk about Amazon’s social shopping deal with Facebook. Amazon is now offering two new applications to Facebook users – Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine.

Amazon Giver helps you buy gifts for friends off of their Amazon.com Wish Lists or from gift recommendations based on their Facebook profile interests and favorites.

Amazon Grapevine helps you get the word out to your friends about what you are doing on Amazon.com. Let your friends know when you add items to your public Wish List, write reviews, or tag products on Amazon.

I’ve downloaded both apps and I’m excited to test them out from a user-experience stand point, though I’m sure they’re pretty tight since Amazon rarely misses the mark. What I’m most interested in is the recommendations feature. Apparently the system uses its recommendation engine to allow users to view product recommendations generated by Amazon based upon what the other person has listed as their likes and interests on their own Facebook profile.

This is huge and depending on the integration, the Facebook application may solve my number one issue on Amazon.com – relevancy. Naturally, the recommendations on Amazon.com come from items I’ve browsed and purchased – which includes items for me AND friends and family.  Recommending I pre-order the new National Album – relevant. Recommending I buy a collection of children’s books – not so relevant. However, if properly implemented, the recommendations from Facebook should be relevant my interests and, therefore, relevant to my purchase intent.

Let’s test it out. Find me on Facebook and buy me something based on the recommendations! I’ll let you know if I like it.