Do page views matter for your average blogger?

To me, page views on my personal blog actually matter very little, it’s more about the sharing of thoughts, hearing other viewpoints, and ultimately reaching a deeper understanding on a variety of topics…

Assuming you feel the same way I do, here are a few thoughts to consider:

• As you blog more and more, hopefully gaining a reputation as someone with at least a couple of readers, look for opportunities to take part on other sites.  I cross-post my content on CustomerThink, GovLoop, and soon somewhere else as well (will share where in the next few days).
• Do not write what others want to hear, write your true opinions, do not be afraid to be respectfully thought-provoking. 
• Invite others to share their thoughts about your post, especially those that are likely to have alternate viewpoints. The goal is to learn, to engage, to grow.
• Enable your RSS feeds to show the full post, not just the small teaser.  People are more likely to read your content if they do not have to click on a link, wait for your blog to open.  Keep it simple for your customers, your readers.

If your goal is to maximize traffic to your blog it wouldn’t hurt to consider the same tactics, though.  People want to engage with people, or organizations, not to simply be preached to from the all-knowing Oz…..  So, let me ask you…. What is important to you?

John

Is your organization supporting mobile access?

While mobile web browsing is far from the mainstream there is no denying that it has finally turned a corner.  According to data on NetMarketShare, mobile web viewing has increased from 0.69% of all traffic in May of 2009 to 1.7% in March of 2010.  While these numbers are small they represent an increase of nearly 250% in less than one year.

eMarketer estimates that mobile web browsing will be 40% of all web browsing by 2013.  While I have doubts, 20 – 25% is not without question.  Are you doing enough to prepare for this reality?

Since you’re already here, take a second and answer this poll.

I’ll share the results soon, thanks.

John

 

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The better you know your customers the happier they will be… Surprised?

No business, local government, or agency is ever surprised by this simple statement.  However, the way they do business is often very different.  Information living in silos.  Departments, teams, not communicating.  Leaders, executives, failing to communicate goals and strategies clearly.

From the time you begin marketing to potential customers through the point of sale, from the delivery of services through calls between customers and your customer service team…  With these touch points you are demonstrating your perceived value of your customers (potential and existing).  While many companies focus on great messaging and sales techniques too few companies focus on developing a complete view of their customers to maximize the relationship throughout the lifetime of this relationship.

Have you ever?

Had a problem with a product or service and called into customer support?  Maybe you had a problem with your iPod or maybe it was an issue with your voter registration.  Either way you started off by making a simple phone call to get the problem resolved.

As  you were transferred from person to person, each asking you the same basic questions, you begin to slowly realize that there is no consistent understanding of who you are, what your problems are.  This lack of understanding leads to frustration for everyone….  You do not feel the love.

MarketingProfs released some great information in a post titled Access to Customer Data = Retention, Sales, covering the importance of this complete customer view, you should give it a read.  The first paragraph says it well:

“Companies that have access to a holistic view of customer data achieve better customer service and efficiency, improved loyalty, and  more repeat business from their established customers, according to a study by Aberdeen Group and VeraCentra.”

Those of you that know me well know that my first thought is that a CRM strategy, complimented by solid tools, is key.  This article points out a  couple eye-catching stats right at the beginning:

• Best in class companies, those that excel at this whole customer view, see a 91% customer retention rate and an increase in net customer value (NCV) of 6% year over year.
• The lowest performing companies, the laggards, see a 62% retention rate and a decrease of NCV by 9% year over year.

If these number fail to get your attention you should make some popcorn and watch Sleeping Beauty as a fairly tale existence is probably more to your liking.

While I will let you read the full article, these are the key practices demonstrated by the best companies:

• 80% capture customer history and make it visible to all customer-facing staff.
• 77% have a single or primary point of contact in their company for each customer.
• 52% have a technology-based common view of the customer.
• 72% monitor customer satisfaction.

These companies are not locking data in silos, they are blasting customer information throughout the organization enabling all areas of the company to see the complete picture of the customer. 

Are you investing in the necessary strategies and tools to enable yourself to be a best of breed organization or are you satisfied with being just one of the crowd?

John

Community reward systems need more flexibility

I enjoy participating in several on-line communities and the majority of them make use of reward systems to incent the desired behaviors.  They systems are training our behaviors, at least the behaviors of newer users, to reach the desired outcomes, the goals of the community.

Many of these communities work well for a short time but their reward systems become less useful the longer a person is involved with the community.  The reason?  The community software, and the strategic thinking that goes into the solution, often fail to recognize that multiple roles exist within the system, and that the behaviors you want promoted will vary from role to role. 

While some systems have done a particularly good job on the point system, Fuze Digital for one example, none that I have seen have fully solved the problem.

While the software makers work to figure it out, make sure that you have a strategy in place that takes into account these two user types:

New users, content consumers

Your goal is to simplify the new user sign-up process and make sure that users can easily find the answers to their questions.  Remember, if you make finding their answer simple, new users may be willing to explore, so also make it simple for these user to:

• Sign-up for updates on related topics, products, solutions, ideas.  You want their permission to engage them with e-mail reminders, reminders that are on topics they are interested in.  You want excuses to remind them about the community, to bring them back.   Assign points, badges, rewards of some sort to this activity. 
• To have a mentor assigned.  While this sounds challenging, and it is, a good community manager knows who their power users are and should be able to recommend mentors for given community areas.  Again, assign points for connecting with a mentor (and assign mentors points for participating too).
• Assign points for responding to questions in your community.  Leverage e-mail, once again, to the new users.  Encourage them to come back and participate..

Even with these reminders, and the motivations of a reward system, many users will come to your community infrequently.  However, motivate, strategically, new users to get involved.

Content creators

Most communities do a good job of rewarding power users, putting rewards in place for producing content.  Remember that your strategy needs to take into account the usefulness of this content, not just the quantity of the content.  While British Researchers have demonstrated that thought leadership is often more affected by quantity over quality, do not risk this in your community.

Some great lessons from my earlier chat with Fuze Digital that I wan you to consider:

• Your rewards, your points, should be in some way given from the community.  Tie in a rating system that enables members of the community to weigh in on the quality of the content.
• Community managers should be able to boost the points for content based upon things like marketing value, value to community as a whole, etc..
• Content should be well segmented to show your overall value to the community by category.  For example, you might be an expert on the French Revolution but a novice with regards to Babylonian history.
• The frequency with which content is viewed should weigh into the value equation.  For every 5 views  of a post that answers a common support question you will will receive, on average, one fewer phone call to your support center.    That is big.

Content “Experts”

Alright, your influencers are the holy grail, a subject of much research and much debate, in the marketplace today.  How do you find and reward these users?  Well, this will be the subject of another post coming soon.   Stay tuned.

John

Chatting with Honda about social media

Alicia Jones, who is a Supervisor in the Corporate Communications department at American Honda Motor Co., Inc, was kind enough to share some thoughts with me on their usage of social media.  Honda clearly has the major channels covered, from Youtube through Flickr, and I wanted to learn more about.

Q. How does social media fit in at the highest levels of your business?  Does it feed into specific corporate goals?
A. Certainly, we’re using social media to support our business and corporate goals in a variety of ways such as launching new products, communicating corporate messages, addressing rumors, connecting with the communities in which we do business as well as connecting with our enthusiasts / racing community and more. Specifically in my area of Corporate Communications, we use it to humanize the brand, understand what is being said about the company, deliver key messages about our efforts on topics related to the environment and innovating new technologies, and as an avenue to foster relationships with journalists and bloggers. We can share more of the “small stuff” now too like stories, events or happenstance that Honda fans might like to know about but previously we didn’t have any way to share. We also use it to shine a light on some of the many nonprofit organizations we work with as well — many of which have expanding presence of their own in social media.

Q. How have efforts from other automotive companies, like those by Ford with Scott Monty, influenced your approach?
A. We watch the social media space and have learned from the case studies and examples of many companies, within automotive and outside of automotive (after all, we’re more than just a car company). It is hard to pinpoint what has really influenced our approach—that’s one of the great things about social, so many folks are willing to share and discuss what works and what doesn’t. We try – and continue to learn – to meld the best practices and counsel of many along with our own experiences for an approach that fits within Honda’s culture. It isn’t easy since we tend to be a very private company, which neither pats itself on the back nor opens up too often. But we try to strike a balance that is approachable and transparent as well as respectful and professional.

Q. What processes did you put in place to enable going social?
A. We established processes to quickly respond to issues, rumors or threats online with appropriate information as available. We also outlined how to manage customer service inquiries that come in via Twitter since those accounts are operated by our communications teams and not by our customer service division. We continue to develop processes and refine the existing ones.

Q. What social communication policies have you put in place?
A. We have had an associate (employee) policy in place since 2008, similar to many other major corporations, speaking largely to having associates be transparent of they’re affiliation to  Honda when discussing related business.

Q. Do you measure ROI today?  If yes, how?  What have been the early results?
A. That’s the Holy Grail right now. Truthfully, we don’t have solid measurement in place yet for social but it is an area we’re focusing on now. Within each social media tool we measure level of engagement as well as quantity of fans/followers of course. We’re also tracking reach for a couple of campaigns to understand how many people are speaking about it and in theory how many people are reading that consumer-generated content.

Q. How many people do you have monitoring the social channels today?
A. We have a third party company that specializes in monitoring assist us with that and we do our own spot checks internally as well.

Q. What tools are being used today? How did you go about tool selection?
A. At this time we use a variety that help us better manage and monitor including Nielsen BuzzMetrics, CoTweet, TweetGrid, UberTwitter, FlickUp and TweetDeck among others. Things are evolving everyday however and we’re looking to streamline and improve our methods.

Q. How, if at all, do your social media tools fit in with your other backend systems like CRM, Ticketing, ERP, HRIS, etc..?
A. They do not currently however this is an area we’re exploring.

Ideas come from everyone. How well are you listening?

As I noted in yesterday’s post about the power of Social Support Communities, I recently chatted with Todd Sierer, Product Manager for LabVIEW, about their Social Support Community (SSC) efforts.  I also, however, discussed their recent efforts with customer co-creation leveraging the ideation platform from Lithium Technologies.

For those of you who are unsure of what I mean by ideation platform, let me take a second and explain.  An ideation platform is simply a technology solution that enables customers to comments on, and vote for, ideas that will make the product or solution better. As I have explored in the past, companies, federal agencies, our entire government, have started leveraging ideation platforms successfully.  Included in this list are:

• HP collects, reviews, and implements customer ideas with weekly review meetings be a key part of their success.
• When the  Memorial for Flight 93 was designed, solutions from INgage Network helped this non-profit effort that required citizens, private corporations, and government agencies to work together.
• When the Federal Government recently requested citizen feedback for improvements across the government, the IdeaScale platform was used to gather feedback that is already being acted upon by agencies like the GSA.

The LabView product has one major feature release yearly as ell as one mid-year maintenance release.  The team has a clear vision for where the product needs to go, they have a vision.  However, the LabVIEW product also has an active and engaged customer community with great ideas for the product.  The challenge, how to merge the long-term vision of the product from the company perspective with the great insights of their customers.  The solution, an ideation platform.

Clearly there were concerns with deploying the solution, concerns such as:

• What if the ideas requested were not aligned with the strategic direction the company has in mind?
• What if the ideas were great but far too large to carry out in a near-term release?
• What if the ideas were all great but there were far too many to carry out, leaving customers feeling that the LabVIEW team was not really listening?

Fair concerns, of course.  To mitigate these concerns the platform was not marketed heavily to the community, at least not initially.  The LabVIEW team shared with their greatest product champions stating in May of 2009 as a kick-off for their August 2010 release.  Guess what happened:

• Within the first month 300 ideas were generated by the community, ideas are still flowing in as we speak.
• The ideas, according to the team, were fantastic.  In many cases they were minor changes that the development team had simply not realized made a big difference to the customers.
• Starting small, the LabVIEW team selected 13 of the ideas to make it into their yearly release.  These ideas, which are now coded and in their beta, will benefit the entire community.
• The team invested around 200 – 300 development hours on these efforts.  Relatively small but a great start.

The team is doing a good job.  My only words of advice for them, and for you if you start down this path:

• Be genuine.  If you are asking for feedback make sure you are willing to put the effort into delivering value to your customers on at least some of the items they are requesting.
• Carve out time in the budget to carry out these features.  Communicate clearly with customers the level of investment you are planning to put into this new way of working.
• When ideas are selected, highlight these selections.  Use it as an opportunity to publicly acknowledge the customers that have made the suggestions and an opportunity to confirm with your entire community that this is a real process, not just some marketing fluff.

Create value with your customers.

John

10 * 140,000 = 50% = SSC Success

While I do not expect the post title to make sense to you yet, it will not only make sense soon but it should impress you as well.  Today I chatted with Todd Sierer, Product Manager for LabVIEW, about their Social Support Community (SSC) efforts.

The LabVIEW team is focused on delivering great products, and great support, to their customers.  In fact, they are so passionate about these goals that all new employees begin life as a customer service representative.   All employees.

Lab view has made use of collaborative support solutions for 10 years, beginning with a discussion board, evolving into a robust support community for the last few years.  This community, made of up 140,000 registered members is extremely active, with power users spending hours a month in the community.

The results?  50% of the questions raised by their customers in the support community are answered by other LabVIEW customers.  50% of the potential workload is handled by customers, not LabView employees.  That is the kind of ROI that it is easy to put numbers too, numbers that amount to millions of dollars a year for LabView, numbers that amount to true SSC success.

John

The need for social media training is larger than ever

I had the honor of chatting with the Boston SPIN group yesterday during their monthly meeting.  The group, primarily engineering minded professionals, developers, QA, project managers, turned out to hear me discuss the topic of extending thought leadership positions via social media.  Now, to be honest with you, I had expected to have a small turnout as the phrases social media, thought leadership, personal branding, all reek of marketing and turn off many engineering folks.  I was surprised, however, to have a respectable number of somewhat skeptical folks turn out.

While the US economy has added back many IT jobs in the last two months the unemployment rate is still  high (yes, I know, insightful commentary on my part ).  Many of the technology folks in the room were either looking for work or were underemployed.  Too often this is the time that people first begin their networking efforts, far too late for it to be effective.  Start now, while you are happily employed.   It is no longer enough for engineers, or any other profession, to sly be good at their core  job competencies.  All of us must work on our writing skills, on our speaking skills, on our ability to get an idea across and to discuss, perhaps argue, our view points.

What struck me as I did my presentation and conversed with the audience was the fact that many of us are living in a world unto ourselves, far from the mainstream where people have never heard of people like Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang.  When I mentioned these thought leaders to the audience, most people had no clue who they were.  Now…. I do not favor building a country of devoted social media junkies but I do favor a society that understands the need to market their skills, their capabilities.  Many of these people have no idea how to raise awareness of who they are much less why they might want to do so.  Look, if you end up unemployed and looking for work do you want to just begin your marketing efforts then?

Here are a couple of tips to get you started, please use these now.

• Are you using LinkedIn?  If not, get on it now.  If you are, make your profile your resume.  LinkedIn is your work profile and it should always match your resume.  Do some people disagree?  Yes, but this is my blog,  not theirs.
• Raise your profile by joining groups on LinkedIn and answering questions being raised in these groups.  Spend 15 – 20 minutes a day doing this.  It does not require a lot of time.
• Join Twitter and use it, spending 5 – 10 minutes after lunch and before the end of your work day (or when you get home).  Look, I thought Twitter was nonsense before I joined it.  It is not nonsense, it is a valuable part of your social media efforts.
• Are you on Facebook?  Decide if you are going to use it for personal or professional purposes.  I recommend keeping it for personal use and not friending co-workers and others you do not know.  Keep in mind, I break this rule but it will make your life much easier if you do not.
• Setup your Google Profile.  It is free, use it.
• Make sure your profile and your photos match on every social site you use.  You want one view of who you are.

If you feel that you have more than the hour a day I’ve laid out above start a blog.  However, only start a blog if you are going to make the time to update it 3 or 4 times a week.  Keep it fresh, keep it interesting.

Take your career seriously and see if you can find a friend who already understands this social stuff.    If that doesn’t work, call me and I can help you out but, of course, I am not cheap so the friend route is always a smart starting point.

A final point for my friends in HR.  If you are not in the 38% of companies that are spending their time blocking social media access and are in the 29% of companies with a solid social usage policy please setup a social media training class for your employees.   Help them learn how to position themselves, and your company, in a professional and positive manner.  It will benefit everyone.

John

Collaborative solutions are a work in progress at Pitney Bowes

Pitney Bowes was founded in 1920 and, since that time, has built a solid business focused on mail, workflow management, customer experience, and business insight solutions.  They are clearly best known as a company that delivers solutions complimentary to the United States Postal Service.  This is an old school business. However, this old school business understands the importance of bringing new school, collaborative, strategies and solutions to their business.  They have done so for a couple of years and, while still in the early stages, are making very good strides.

Social Support Communities, Forums, led the way

While Pitney Bowes is now leveraging the major collaborative networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr) they began by launching a very simple forum solution back in April of 2008.  At the time the United States Postal Service was nearing yet another rate hike and rate hikes always result in a larger than normal number of support calls.  While the software download/upgrade is straight forward, customers call with a variety of valid questions and concerns.  The forums were released ahead of the rate hike and resulted in Pitney Bowes saving more than $300,000 in the first year, deflecting many, many calls along the way while delivering customers with the right answers in a way that worked for them.

How did Pitney Bowes decide its first year savings?  Forrester estimates that one call will be diverted for every five page views to a forum page that answers common customer support questions.  Page views that offer more general information result in one call being diverted for every twenty page views.  Are the assumptions perfect for every business situation?

 Of course not. However, these estimates offer reasonable estimates for you to answer the important questions that arise around ROI.

Pitney Bowes forums are not large in number of users or amount of traffic.  However, they do represent an active small to medium-sized community with more than 4000 registered users delivering roughly 3000 visits per week.

Remember, Pitney Bowes is still  early in its process development and they now have one person who oversees the forums, managing content, training new users.

Twitter-based support?

Ben Richard, who manages the @PBCares Twitter account, is essentially a one person show.  He does have backup for particularly busy times, or when he is on vacation or sick.  Matt Broder, Vice President of External Communications, described the perfect first social support employee when he described Ben as someone passionate about solving customer problems, empathetic to customer issues, having a good sense of humor, understanding how to be personal while businesslike.  The key, of course, is having someone who can humanize the company.

Twitter use initially began in corporate headquarters, outside of customer support.  Through the passion of lower to mid-level employees, using new tools like Twitter to listen to customers, Pitney Bowes began to listen….  A simple act, one that many struggle with.  After a couple of months, as word started to spread and volume began to increase it was decided to hand social customer support to the professionals.  In June of 2009, the @PBCares account was launched with the simple mission of listening, engaging, and helping their customers.

Pitney Bowes is an international business but social support is still primarily a US-based activity.  Ben does answer questions that arise from Europe, when he can, but this is not a focus of his role. 

Reporting, Metrics

As I noted, Pitney Bowes is still fairly immature in this respect.  Data is tracked manually and no data is pushed into other systems (like ERP, CRM, HRIS, etc..).   It is, unfortunately, a silo unto itself. Now, the good news is that data is summarized and reported throughout the company, so not all is lost.  What data is reported?  The number of conversations, RTs, mentions, positive WOM, as well as other information important to the company.

What’s next?

• Increasing communications between marketing and customer service.
• Remain focused on making happy, engaged, customers that will help with positive WOM. 
• Marketing will look to refine marketing’s approach based upon education coming from their efforts.  For example, there is a real focus on creating more helpful how-to videos.  This is a direct request from the community and a great example of a company listening to its customers.
• Pitney Bowes will also focus on creating a strategy for their efforts as well as putting policies in place so they can bring more people on board. 

John

Collaborative solutions require mobile solutions… Ready?

In my constant search for statistics I often return to the World Internet Usage site to see how the current numbers are trending.  Take a look at the chart to the left which give the current numbers, as of the end of 2009, by region.  North America, at the high-end of usage, has 76.2% of users on the web.  Africa, at the low-end, has a usage of 8.7%.  None of these numbers, I suspect, are surprising to any of you.

Drilling down deeper on the site shows you will find that the United States is fairly close to the average for North America at 76.3%.

Now, lets take a look at mobile phone penetration.  For this data I turned to Wikipedia as it has a fairly comprehensive breakdown and I could not find another source I felt more comfortable with for this data.  As of June of 2009 89% of the population of the United States have cellphones.  In Africa, and other parts of the world as well, you will generally see a far larger penetration of cellphones (often with basic SMS capabilities) than internet.

With these numbers in mind I took some time to chat with Patrik Wijkstrom, Community Architect at Juniper Networks.  They have recently deployed mobile community features from Lithium to address the growing importance of the mobile marketplace in all things collaborative, all things social.  Note that they have a medium-sized community that has been in place for more than two years.  Mobile was seen as a natural fit as often people will reach out to the community when their networks have gone down, making mobile a perfect answer for those technicians in the middle of a crisis.

How did Juniper begin a mobile roll-out?

First, using a common sense approach, they ran an internal pilot to verify that the technology worked for them and to make sure that the solution was easy to use, robust enough for their customers.  The internal pilot went well and they then moved to a limited customer roll-out at first.  However, feedback was all positive and they quickly shifted to a full deployment and all customers now have the solution available.

Mobile, Situational or Demographic driven?

I was curious to hear Patrik’s thoughts on this question as it impacts how mobile is deployed, feature sets, training, market positioning.  At this point the use is primarily situational (network down as an example) but Juniper will be monitoring this to see if use changes over time.

ROI?

Still too early to judge.  Patrik and I will chat again in a month to see if the ROI is clearer.  Clearly, offering customers a user-interface alternative  that works well for mobile is important, but it is still not clear what the ROI of the solution will be.

Keep in mind that mobile web browsing world-wide is growing.  Keep mind that, despite this growth, 97.96% of web browsing still takes place on desktops, not mobile devices.  Your customers may need, may demand, a mobile solution.  CRM, as an example, requires a mobile solution. 

Understand your customer needs.  Meet those needs.  Exceed those needs.

John