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Engaging With Customer MVPs and Superfans

 

There are three aspects to think about when creating an MVP program for your best customers and advocates. Those three components are:

  • Identity
  • Privileges
  • Benefits

For example, here’s a post here from Porter Gale in AdAge about engaging with Superfans. The key ‘grafs are here:

These are your best and most-loyal consumers. They are the 20% of the Pareto principle (roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.) Reward them with early access, discounts and swag. They’ll let everyone know about their special treatment. Highlight and reward. Showcase fans of the week. Do be prepared in case a super fan is angry. These people may take the brand more seriously than you do and may react poorly to change. Know how to respond. Brands have made mistakes in social media — learn from them. Have a crisis plan in place. Inevitably, you’re going to mess something up and make the crowd angry. Be ready.

Do let them share. Make it super easy for fans to advocate on your behalf. Do track and optimize results. Utilize analytics to measure the results you’re getting from super fans or advocate marketing programs. With testing tools, you can see what approaches work best. Don’t pay super fans. Don’t give financial rewards or incentives to get them to recommend your brand or products. It’s inauthentic and can backfire. People who learn that they’ve been given a paid or incented recommendation are actually less likely to buy the recommended product or service, studies show.

Interestingly, Porter only really focuses on the “Benefits” part of the triangle. The other two components are as, if not more, important than the benefits you give to those influential advocates in the community.

Take, for example, the Aruba Networks MVP program (disclosure: Aruba is a client and we worked with them to develop this program). The Aruba MVP program contains all three components:

  • Identity – MVP members of the community can be easily identified by others, and each other. This adds a layer of visible, verifiable reputation to the program. Aruba does this via badges shown for the levels of their MVP program. (The Aruba program has three levels: MVP, MVP Expert and MVP Guru.)
  • Privileges – MVPs are able to participate in the community in ways that are unique to their level
  • Benefits – Yes, they do get some cool swag

As Porter notes in her article, MVPs and Superfans are elevated members of the tribe. As such, others who are new to the community need to be able to quickly and unambiguously recognize who the key voices in the community are. Similarly, because MVPs have contributed to the overall community during their involvement with it, it is important (as a good host) to recognize their contributions and enable them to easily share their passion for the organization with others.

 

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The Customer-Advertiser Arms Race

 

“Social media is all about relationships. If you want to find people’s relationships, an address book is the best place to go. It’s like if you want to rob a bank, go where the money is.” – Joe Turow

There was a fantastic segment on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday that featured Joseph Turow speaking with Terry Gross on how advertisers are tracking customers across the web, social networks and mobile. It’s most definitely worth a listen. I’ve linked both the audio segment as well as the transcript below.

Listen: http://www.npr.org/2012/02/22/147189154/how-companies-are-defining-your-worth-online

Transcript: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=147189154

 

Interview Highlights (excerpted from the NPR web site linked above)

On the categories advertisers use to track you online

“Most of them have to do with demographics like age and gender and income. Some of them have to do with where you live, which can be very specific to particular neighborhoods sometimes. Some of them are weird, like socially organic eaters, but that has to do more with how companies make inferences about how you act. … Go to a company called Acxiom on the Web. You will see a catalog of maybe 100 pages of the kinds of things that this company sells about all of us. They sell whether you look for diabetic stuff online, whether you’re interested in orthopedic products, whether you’ve gone on vacation. They will sell what kinds of credit cards you have. And all of this is perfectly legal, and it can be used for online targeting as well as offline targeting.”

On how apps can store and transmit information in your phone’s address book

“It remains to be seen how many companies took out and take out that data and what is done with them, but you can see that it could give you an enormous amount of stuff. … You can look at a person’s camera and actually turn it on if you wanted to. A person might notice that the camera’s on, but you could look at his friends or her friends and identify them if you wanted to, in a certain kind of world. You could look at the person’s photos, contact lists. That’s potentially the case with what people have been saying about the Apple iOS.”

On Twitter and other companies gathering information from people’s address books on their iPhones

“Social media is all about relationships. If you want to find people’s relationships, an address book is the best place to go. It’s like if you want to rob a bank, go where the money is.”

On Facebook

“The amount of money Facebook gets per user from advertisers is not nearly the amount of money that Google gets. But the potential is there, and that’s why Wall Street has been going after them.

“They gather everything that you do on Facebook. Facebook scarfs it all up. We know that Facebook has the ability and does target you on their website in an enormous number of ways. They don’t give your name to any of the advertisers — it’s all done anonymously. I’m not a fan of the distinction between anonymity and nonanonymity. … If you’re Joe Schmoe online or they know your real name or they give you an identification number — and so much of our lives is done online — in the end it doesn’t matter. You’re treated like a person who they know with all of the possible discriminatory activities we’ve talked about.”

On online media

“I would argue that the 20th century taught people that content is cheap. Because on television and radio it was free, in newspaper and magazines, they got huge amounts of stuff paying very little. And as a consequence, when the world starts changing and there’s a lot more competition because there’s no longer one place to get news in print, the notion of paying for a lot of people became anathema.”

On European privacy policies and an upcoming U.S. privacy policy

“They believe in privacy as [a] human right. And that’s the interesting thing about how [the upcoming] Commerce Department report is positioned: as a right. There are some advocates who don’t like what they see in the policy because they think it’s too loose. But the very fact that it’s called a right is interesting rhetorically. Some people would say they’re moving in the right direction.”

On data-mining and politics

“Politicians want to get votes. And they have begun to realize what consumer products companies realize: that if you get a lot of information about people, you can predict how they might act or what they might believe, even to the point [of thinking] ‘What kind of car do people who might vote Republican have vs. Democrats?’ And the more data points you have, the belief system is, the more likelihood that you can get on the right side of a person. So companies have evolved over the last few years that are essentially data-mining companies for various political organizations. Even the Obama campaign is perceived to be at the forefront of this stuff. If you go to their privacy policy, they take everything. When people give information about themselves for whatever reason on the Obama website, [the campaign] keeps it, they use it, they buy other information about you if they want. And on their privacy policy, it says they might share it with political organizations they consider conducive.”

photo: Kyle Cassidy

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A Grab Bag Of Links

A grab bag of interesting things that have come across the radar…

 

 

 

 

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On Customer-Driven Interactions

With all of the hue and cry around “big data,” the forward thinking folks are actually looking the other way. Here’s the ‘graf that matters:

“Much the way powerful mobile devices store your biometric information and translate your language, personalized information filters and search engines will bring you only the information you want. “This will invert the premise of marketing,” Mr. Meyerson said. The phones “will start to be your advocate, recognizing what is near and dear to you and getting it. Instead of companies speaking to you, you will reach out to companies.” (emphasis added)

From this NYTimes article: Behind IBM’s Big Predictions

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Counting “Fans” And “Followers” Is The HFCS Of Social Engagement

Earlier this month, the NYTimes took a deeper dive into the idea of “good attention vs. bad attention.” I wanted to keep the ball rolling on this idea, as it’s fundamental to thinking about social engagement with (and as) customers.

Although many of us are working in or with enterprises in a role related to connecting with customers, we need to do a shift in perspective. For right now, put on your “customer” hat; we all are customers, in addition to trying to connect with them. Through that lens, “good attention” is the type of attention you pay when something connects with you. It’s the type of attention to things you find interesting or engaging or intelligent or emotional. Conversely, “bad attention” is the attention that you pay, but you wouldn’t choose to if you had a better (or any) option.

Here are some examples of “good attention”

  • The attention you pay to any experience that you eventually tell a friend about
  • Ads that you want to watch more than once
  • Blog posts that makes you smile
  • Thoughtful Twitter followers
  • Thoughtful comments
  • Fiero!

Here are some examples of “bad attention”

  • Unsolicited email newsletters
  • Popup and pop-under ads
  • Any “interruptive” ads
  • Most display ads
  • Impressions
  • Page views
  • Spam

I struggled where to put the attention acts of “becoming a Fan” and “becoming a Follower” on this list. If you become a fan of a brand on Facebook because you like the brand, I think it’s at best a neutral. On the other hand, if you are forced to click “Like” in order to see a page’s content or to enter a one-shot contest as part of a campaign, that’s bad attention. It distorts and overloads the meaning of the word “Like” in such as way that is ultimately detrimental to an enterprise. The focus on “counting metrics” is almost always used as the starting point at measuring the impact of social engagement. But it can’t stop there.

Counting metrics are frequently used by enterprises at Stage 2 on the Social Engagement Journey. This is normal. Unfortunately, like high fructose corn syrup, counting fans and followers are the empty calories of customer engagement. They taste great at the time, but in the long run have a strong likelihood of causing damage. A focus on fan and follower counts ultimately leads to being caught in a bad attention trap.

So what can you do to move along the Journey?

  1. Think about whether you are attracting good attention or bad attention from your engagement activities
  2. Begin the transition from counting metrics to metrics that matter to both customers and your brand (like NPS)
  3. Don’t be complacent, thinking that having two million fans on your Facebook page means that you’re doing a good job at building long-lasting customer relationships with those two million individuals. It doesn’t. (Do you know how many of those two million fans are current customers of your brand? If the answer is “no, we don’t know,” then recognize that you’re likely falling into the trap of bad attention.)
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Good Attention vs. Bad Attention

The confluence of the Super Bowl and its focus on immense ad spend, coupled with speaking at last week’s NetPromoter conference triggered a thought. Are there two kinds of attention (let’s call them “Good Attention” and “Bad Attention”), in the same way that there are two kinds of profits?

We know that there are two kinds of profits. Good profits are profits that fuel growth, and come from serving customers in such a way that they are willing to recommend your organization to others. Bad profits, conversely, are the types of profits where the customer feels extorted. Bad profits help make the quarterly number in the short run, but are unsustainable. Bad profits eventually eat away at the fabric of the company, by alienating its customers and demotivating its employees. An income statement can’t tell the difference between these two types of profits. But customers can.

Therefore, are there also two kinds of attention as well? It seems to me there are. “Bad attention” is interruptive. It’s the type of attention that is so costly, because it is so bad and inefficient. Think about popover ads, think about the Flash ads you block with AdBlocker, think about the “attention” you pay to the ad that starts blasting a tune as soon as you land on a page. Those are all ways of getting attention, but it’s bad attention.

Good attention is its opposite. Good attention is the attention you garner by virtue of going above and beyond. It’s the attention you earn by delighting someone, surprising them, amusing them, or triggering an empathetic emotion.

The ROI of good attention is orders of magnitude better than the ROI of bad attention. (In fact, it approaches infinity, if you really think about it.) Good attention is the attention that results in positive word of mouth, advocates, and the creation of promoters and defenders of your brand.

Good attention and bad attention are not functions of the communication channels being used between an organization and its customers. There are huge Super Bowl ads that attract good attention (think about last year’s Darth Vader commercial from VW – that was great). Similarly, there are 1:1 conversations that attract bad attention (and there is now an increasing amount of research on how to identify fake word-of-mouth).

Maybe we can classify some of these things. Are there examples of “good attention” and “bad attention” that you’ve seen recently?

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Social Business 2012 Presentation

I’ll be speaking about social business strategy at the ASAE Technology Conference and Expo CIO Summit next week in Washington, DC. There are three key components to the conversation.

1) The Social Engagement Journey

The Journey is the recognizable progression of social engagement capabilities that a large enterprise goes through on its way to becoming a social businesses.

 

2) The Relationship Progression

While the “purchase funnel” has been well understood for years, there is a comparative dearth of conversation around how business relationships progress over time. A big tip of the hat to Dr. Michael Wu at Lithium and CRM maven Paul Greenberg for spurring the synthesis of these two previously unrelated (at least in my head) ideas.

 

3) The Social Engagement Matrix

A deep dive on the processes that come into play when customers and brands engage socially, especially when the two parties are at different relative points of view on the relationship.

While those three models are the keystones of the conversation that we’ll be having next week in DC, you can view the entire slideshow below.

Social Business 2012

Hope to see you in DC!

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This Week’s Social Business Jam

DocsearlsA number of luminaries participated on this week’s W3C Social Business Jam, including Doc Searls (pictured), Alex “Sandy” Pentland and the inventor of the web itself, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. A jam is “an online conversation among leaders in business, government and technology about the current state of social business, the future role that social technologies can play in improving the bottom line, and how social technology should evolve in order to support business objectives.”

There were a number of deep conversations, which generated over 1,100 posts on the topic of social business. The key issues explored were:

  • Mobile And Social
  • Business Process Meets Social
  • Identity Management for Social
  • Information Management
  • Seamless Integration of Social
  • Metrics For Social Business

Of the topics covered, a few rich seams emerged. Doc noted that “way back in 1995 we got hooked on the cookie as a way for sites to keep track of our relationships with them. This, along with the login/password ceremony, cemented client-server in place as the default for e-commerce (and everything else) on the Web. This not only legitimized dependent submissive-dominant relationships, but made every site into a silo, and contained our imagination about What Could Be Done as well. This is why every ‘solution,’ it seems, is yet another site/service, each of which is its own silo, even if it has open APIs, uses open standards and the rest of it.”

This is a notable point. If you contrast the key pieces of social media infrastructure today, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+, or internal collaboration tools like Yammer and Salesforce.com’s Chatter, all are their own proprietary systems. Contrast this approach to the approach of the most social of all online tools, email, or even the web and the internet itself. In all of the latter cases, a handful of fundamental, interoperable standards have enabled a thousand flowers to bloom. Can you imagine Facebook and Twitter and Google working together to insure that their systems interoperate? Fat chance. (In fact, Facebook just killed one more bit of openness, by deprecating the ability to import RSS feeds from one’s own blog into Facebook Notes.)

In the same thread as Doc’s thinking above, Charles Oppenheimer, the CEO of Prizzm (and a great, great dude who is working on “Reverse CRM” which dovetails nicely with ProjectVRM), noted that “through the history of markets, which I suppose is a lot briefer than human history, markets were the place to be social on a daily basis, and defined our interactions with the community. Especially in rural places, that is the hub. But if we work in the ‘enterprise,’ we are in the business of taking something straightforward, exchange of goods and services – into something that scales, massive, and abstract. Goodbye social, and community — and I guess that is why the web/social technology seems to be a big deal. Bringing the old stuff back.”

This is an important point, in my opinion. Social business, when done right, enables us to play both sides of the fence. We, wearing our “customer” hats, can engage with each other at a human level and, when done right, enterprises can also organize their people and processes in such a way that enables connection with customers at this same human level. It’s not an either-or any more, where interactions with enterprises need to be filled with jargon and a deflection of the “human” in order to operate at scale. Instead, smart businesses are re-tooling their processes in such a way that they can both interact at a human level and do it at scale.

You can check out everything from the Social Business Jam until December 31, 2011, at which time the online archive will no longer be available. (You’ll need to register for the site, which is free.) And of course, if we’re talking about jamming, there is only one sound track that matters…