Convince and Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide

Many companies are reluctant to fully dive in to social media, either because they are afraid of losing control, or because they believe their customers aren’t using social media. The latter is especially prevalent among B2B companies, and when viewed from a purely numerical perspective they may be right. (photo by The Dana Files)

An agency client of mine - Bliss PR - works with many large financial services companies whose customers are established CFOs. Are there 50-something CFOs using social media? Of course. Do most of them congregate in typical social media outposts? Probably not.

Consequently, my advice in these circumstances is to abandon an outpost strategy in favor of a humanization strategy. Find a thought leader in the organization, and make them the star, instead of the company itself. Chris Brogan calls these folks Trust Agents, and cites Frank Eliason from Comcast, Scott Monty from Ford and others as examples.

Related: Twitter interview of Scott Monty about social media at Ford.

I mostly concur, and I think for many brands it’s smart marketing (even beyond the huge potential customer service benefits).

9 Ingredients of a Humanization Campaign

For agencies, your role in a humanization campaign is almost like a publicist. Find ways to make the designated star a thought leader:

• 1. Build and optimize a blog
• 2. Reach out to other bloggers in the category for guest posts
• 3. Syndicate content to vertical aggregation sites
• 4. Publish white papers and ebooks, and/or conduct Webinars
• 5. Create a few killer presentations and get them on SlideShare
• 6. Do at least a little video blogging to make him/her three dimensional
• 7. Hustle for speaking engagements
• 8. Get on Twitter and make sure he/she sets aside time to really engage people
• 9. Make sure current company customers know all about the initiative and are invited to partipate

By making a real person in a company the social media outreach vehicle, you can at times bypass potentially thorny legal and corporate confidence hurdles, and give the organization plausible deniability if it for some reason goes horribly wrong. “He went rogue!” they can cry.

Simultaneously, you get almost all of the benefits of a corporate-branded social media program. Honesty. Transparency. Engagement with customers.

Forrester is the king of this strategy. When was the last time you went to the Forrester Web site? Contrast that with the last time you went to Jeremiah Owyang’s site (or Peter Kim or Charlene Li before they left). See what I mean?

Does this humanization strategy work? Do you have other examples? 

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Welcome. If you like the content here, consider susbscribing to my RSS feed. You can also find me on Twitter @jaybaer

If you and/or your firm aren’t on this list, please DM @worldcomPR or send an email to:  worldcom at convince and convert dot com 

If you’re looking for a specific firm or person, you might want to find using CTRL-F (PC) or Command-F (Mac). Firm names link to their Web sites. Enjoy.

Jason Baer, Convince & Convert

 

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As discussed recently in “Why Are We So Scared of Our Customers?” and “Presto, How Social Media Makes Bad News Good” I’m seeing the fear of negativity preventing more companies from embracing social media. 

The typical social media objection is that if the company has a conversation with consumers in a public forum, the company will be forced to respond to inadequacies, and doing so will just make it worse. Consequently, many large brands are now engaged in social media “listening” campaigns, but not engaging with consumers directly. 

Sometimes Letting Go Allows You to Steer

Of course, listening is better than ignoring, but actually getting involved with your customers online doesn’t give you less control, it gives you MORE control. If you give customers a legitimate, easy-to-use mechanism for interacting with you and amongst themselves, a large component of the feedback about you is likely to end up within that mechanism. And then you can do something about it. 

Consider Comcast. What is a better circumstance for the company, listening but not engaging while customers post videos like this (which you’ve probably seen since the original has been viewed 1.35 million+ times on YouTube), or engaging and actually encouraging customer feedback and complaint via Twitter (@comcastcares)? (read bottom up for killer customer service on Twitter from Frank Eliason at Comcast)

Control Via Facilitation

Dell has a Project RED application on Facebook. Within the forums, there are several consumer complaints about Project RED and how much it actually helps Africa, versus being a craven marketing ploy. While Dell itself doesn’t appear to be engaging in the dialog, it is facilitating the conversation (with other consumers defending Dell vociferously).

And because all of this is happening on an official Dell production, they have MORE control over it than if it was happening on a blog or some other Facebook page. They could comment officially. They could take down the forums. They could reach out privately to negative commenters. 

If this conversation was taking place on some other blog, Dell’s options would be greatly curtailed.

Creating a mechanism for customer feedback using social media is the post-modern equivalent of the suggestion box. Brands that don’t do it because they don’t want to loose control don’t understand that facilitation provides control, it doesn’t eliminate it. 

What do you think? Do you have examples of brands facilitating customer dialog using social media? Your comments are my food.

 

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This recession is looking worse than Sylvester Stallone all roided up for that recent Rambo 14 (Rambo goes to the buffet for the Early Bird Special with some pals) movie.

It’s going to be bad. But for social media, it just might be the best possible circumstance. Here’s why:

1. Smart Buying

Consumer confidence is at an all-time low. We’re not exactly rushing to the nearest mall to make discretionary purchases. But because money is tight, we’ll want to make sure we make the best possible purchase when we do make them. 

Enter social media. 

Traffic is of course up for sites like Yelp, Amazon, Trip Advisor, DPreview.com and other review sites because of the impending holiday season. However, I believe sites that enable consumers to benefit from the experiences of prior customers to continue skyrocketing long after the holidays are over. 

If we’re going to part with decreasing dollars, we’re going to make sure it’s a good product first. 

2. Shared Angst

This recession is the first piece of long-lasting major bad news that has occurred in the social media era. Certainly the Iraq war qualifies as bad news, but it’s day-to-day impact on Americans has been mostly negligible, except of course for those served and their families. (Thank you for enabling me to live in a country where I can make a living writing blog posts and telling people how to do social media and send good email)

The ins and outs and ups and downs of this recession and its impact, duration, and cause are going to be a major topic of conversation in this country for two to five years. 

Enter social media. 

You can Tweet using the #recession hashtag, or send a friend a bowl of soup via a Facebook app. Seriously, we’re going to use social media to discuss and micro-analyze our deteriorating economic condition because it’s faster, more customizable, and in many cases more honest than real media.

I can talk to real people at a local restaurant about the recession, but then I’m only getting the local perspective. On Twitter, I can get the perspective of most of the country. That’s why social media will be the recession’s barber shop.

3. You’re Grounded

First the gas crunch. Then, the “if you want oxygen on your flight, it’s $20″ routine. Now, the recession. 

Companies are going to cut back on travel considerably. 

Enter social media.

The conferences and symposiums of the roaring 00s are going to be replaced by Webinars, Webcasts, UStreams, SlideShare and other forms of digital information exchange that will dominate the bummer 10s. 

If I owned a conference company, I’d be working like crazy right now to figure out a virtual delivery component, because given the quality of freely available content online, it’s getting tougher and tougher to justify an in-person experience. 

What do you think? Do you agree that the recession could actually help social media?

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A long-standing “success metric” in email marketing is the unsubscribe ratio. Like telling children that their pet fish is “just sleeping” the “unsubscribe ratio” is a euphemism.

Your unsubscribe ratio is the percentage of people who receive your email that have gotten so tired or frustrated with your program that they simply can’t take it any more. They’re fed up with your lack of relevancy, your frequency or some other shortcoming, and they’ve taken the extraordinary measure of actually clicking links and buttons to make you go away.

Unsubscribe rates have actually declined in many cases, but don’t get all cocky. It’s not because email programs have become more relevant to consumers, they’re just clicking the “spam” button, instead of using the “unsubscribe” link.

When you think about the frustration level required to actually unsubscribe, it’s disheartening that unsubscribe rates of 1 customer in 200 are often considered acceptable. If a similar number of customers walked out of a retail store yelling “I can’t take this anymore. I’ll NEVER come back,” a lot of attention would be paid to it.

Unsubscribes on Line 1

Hiding unsubscribes on a spreadsheet diminishes what it actually means for your brand. A few bright ideas to shine a light on unsubscribes:

1. For e-commerce companies, instead of tracking unsubscribes as a raw number, track the total value of all prior purchases made by unsubscribers, and put that dollar amount on the spreadsheet.

2. Each time a customer unsubscribes, send an email to the the CEO or CMO.

3. In addition to providing a CAN-SPAM mandated unsubscribe link, offer your customers an unsubscribe phone number where they can call or text message, and an unsubscribe Twitter account. Once unsubscribers start creating content instead of just hash marks in Excel, your organization will start paying attention to the cause, not the ratio.

I’m In. Who Else?

Effective immediately, I’m going to pay more attention to unsubscribes myself. At the recent Marketing Profs Digital Mixer, Gary Vaynerchuk said he is investing major resources into having team members telephone unsubscribers. I can’t go that route because I don’t have phone number for my subscribers, but wherever I can I’ll be emailing people that drop me on Twitter or via RSS.

And it’s already proving interesting. I emailed a gentleman from Norfolk who unfollowed me on Twitter (you can get unfollow notifications by using Qwitter). The text of my email is below.

Keith -

Hi there. I received a notification that you’ve unfollowed me on Twitter.

I want to do everything possible to serve my readers and my community. It would be fantastic if you could give me a sense of what you didn’t like about my tweets, or what you would have liked to see more of in them.

Thanks in advance for your feedback. It’s truly appreciated, and I hope to win you back someday.

Very best regards,

(@jaybaer)

JASON BAER
Convince & Convert
Social Media & Email Consulting
——————————————–
Blog: www.convinceandconvert.com
Twitter: @jaybaer
Ear: (602) 616-1895

Within 5 minutes I received his reply:

You were removed during a clean up of folks that did not follow me back. Twitter stills shows that you are not following me.

A perfectly reasonable explanation, and one I preferred to “your content sucks.” And now, we’re both following one another. It’s a success story.

Everyone and Every One counts

As you build your email list and your social media currency, it’s easy to view individual audience members as less than critical, because another subscriber could be just minutes away. Don’t fall for it. You don’t have to be the very best to succeed in a wired world. You just have to care the most. And I’m going to try to out-care my competition. How about you?

What Are You Doing to Out-Care the Competition? Comments, Please

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Joseph Jaffe of Jaffejuice and Crayon was the first interviewee in the Twitter 20 series from Jason Baer at Convince & Convert. 20 questions and answers live on Twitter. A twinterview.

If you sat in, I’d love your feedback and ideas in the comments below. Who would you like to see interviewed in in a future Twitter 20? Thanks for joining the conversation.

Joseph Jaffe Interview Transcript

1. @jaybaer: You’ve been in digital marketing for many years. How did you get involved in that area? Why not a fireman or an astronaut?

• @jaffejuice: Digital is the forbidden fruit…one bite & there’s no going back. Marketing’s always been in my blood; digital is the evolution.

2. @jaybaer: You’re from South Africa. What brought you to the U.S.?

• @jaffejuice: for all the wrong reasons…it was for love I will say that South Africa kicks global butt when it comes to creativity

3. @jaybaer: Your book and presentations talk a lot about “conversation marketing”. Is that really marketing? Or is it customer service?

• @jaffejuice: good twestion. It’s becoming more like customer service than traditional marketing; that said: marketing CAN be a conversation

4. @jaybaer: great interview with @comcastcares on your podcast. Hard to find good examples? Many killer conversations are invisible because they’re 1:1?

• @jaffejuice: maybe so, but 1:1 convo’s are increasingly finding their way to mainstream; also…as a proxy 1 @comcastcares = 1,000’s of 1:1’s

5. @jaybaer: What are the main impediments for companies really joining the conversation?

• @jaffejuice: first and foremost it’s about letting go in general and letting go of control specifically. Also learning to embrace negativity

6. @jaybaer: You talk about companies meeting consumers half-way in the conversation. What do you mean by that?

• @jaffejuice: It’s about partnership; working with consumers as partners; listening & responding; balance between too much & too little control

7. @jaybaer: Organizationally, who do you think should “own” conversation marketing?

• @jaffejuice: I talk a lot about “conversation depts” & a Chief Conversation officer; ideally entire org should own this; certainly NOT PR

8. @jaybaer: Because PR is about getting ink? What role do you see for agencies then in helping brands with their conversation marketing?

• @jaffejuice: you expect me to answer in under 140 chars? Presently structured, agencies are unable to deliver - commitment vs campaigns

9. @jaybaer: What’s the most overrated aspect of all this social media craziness?

• @jaffejuice: I guess it’s the fickleness & foolish search for the next big thing; coupled with a lot of overpromising and superficial delivery

10. @jaybaer: Conversely, what component or tactic are too many people overlooking in their social media and conversation marketing efforts?

• @jaffejuice: I have to fall on my sword and say Podcasting; the third place; on-demand audio; intimacy of convo with a “captive” listener etc

11. @jaybaer: On a side note, doesn’t conversation marketing preclude anything from being the next big thing? It’s about small things.

• @jaffejuice: Amen. The seeds of conversation are not magic beans

12. @jaybaer: How do you see social media and conversations fitting into the overall digital marketing universe? Or does it?

• @jaffejuice: No question that digital is a massive part of it, but many conversations do occur face-to-face; also don’t forget virtual worlds

13. @jaybaer: Do you support brands with outposts on Facebook et al? How can they build communities there?

• @jaffejuice: FB is an outpost; Fan pages don’t work; groups are great when they’re consumer supported; brands need to catalyze existing grps

14. @jaybaer: You were an agency guy at Chiat/Day. Frustrations being the digital guru?

• @jaffejuice: absolutely; working out the broom closet; removing one dagger for another wasn’t fun; org just wasn’t ready for change

15. @jaybaer: You work with a lot of big brands. Advantages o disadvantages on their ability to put your advice into action?

• @jaffejuice: I like working with big brands (e.g. Panasonic) & the small start-ups (e.g. ooVoo); both have much to gain & unique challenges 

16. @jaybaer: Talk about your firm, Crayon. http://www.crayonville.com What is the approach? How does it differ?

• @jaffejuice: we’re a strategic consultancy; most firms out there focus on execution &/or claim to understand strategy; also we walk our talk

17. @jaybaer: Crayon staff are located in many places, true? How does that work? Do you get together routinely, or is it mostly virtual?

• @jaffejuice: We’re a remote company, but try to meet at least once a week in person; for now, we’re concentrated in the North East

18. @jaybaer: You travel a TON. How do you balance that with your family, something a lot of consultants face?

• @jaffejuice: ugggh; it’s hard; next week I’m at the DMA in Vegas & then off to Mexico City; I’d rather complain when it’s not busy though

19. @jaybaer: How do you value blogging vs. podcasting vs. books vs. speaking? You said in your Podcast #111 you like it better than blogging.

• @jaffejuice: no question blogging has been more valuable than podcasting, but I <3 podcasting; book & speaking reach unduplicated audience

20. @jaybaer: Your book “Join the Conversation” http://jointheconversation.us is killer. More planned? Will long-form publishing survive?

• @jaffejuice: Talking with publisher in a few about #3 LT publishing becoming harder; so hard to break through with all the free IP out there

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Starting Soon. Follow @jaybaer and @jaffejuice to see Questions and Answers.

I’m happy to announce a new Convince and Convert initiative - Twitter 20. On a regular basis, I’ll be interviewing social media and digital marketing luminaries on Twitter and posting the interviews here for review, comment, and posterity.

140 character questions (x20).
140 character answers.
In real-time.
On Twitter.

The URL for the program (which will take you to the collection of interviews) is http://www.twitter20.com For now, it will be a category here at Convince & Convert. We may give it it’s own site soon.

Friday, October 10 (noon eastern, 9am pacific ) - Joseph Jaffe

The first Twitter 20 interview will be on Friday, October at noon eastern, 9am pacific with Joseph Jaffe (@jaffejuice) whose blog JaffeJuice is a must read (and in fact is subscribed to by 4818 folks).

A digital marketing and social media veteran, Mr. Jaffe is now the President of conversation marketing consultancy Crayon, and is the author of Join the Conversation, How to Engage Marketing-Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue, and Partnership

He’s also the author of Life After the 30 Second Spot, and produces a twice monthly podcast Across the Sound. 

I very much enjoyed Mr. Jaffe’s presentation at the ExactTarget Connections conference, and I’m honored that he’s agreed to be the first participant in the Twitter 20 interview series.

What Questions Do You Have for Joseph Jaffe? Leave Them in the Comments Below. Remember, 140 Characters or Less!

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Because of its simplicity and immediacy, Twitter enables brands to win the 1:1 battle with customers and potential customers in ways that even other social media constructs cannot. The density of Eureka! moments on Twitter is quite high, and if brands use it right, it’s the ultimate weapon for turning lemons into lemonade.

Let’s examine two recent personal examples:

Twitter Done Right, Conference Style

Recently, I was a speaker at the ExactTarget Connections conference in Indianapolis. Like all good digital marketing geeks, I was monitoring the Twitter conversation by setting up a search for “#ET08″ (the official conference hashtag) and “Exacttarget” on my Twitellator Pro iphone app. (this can also be done using http://search.twitter.com).

I come across the tweet below from Andrew Eklund, CEO of Ciceron, a Web marketing firm in Minneapolis.

Note that this conference had sold out at 1,200 attendees. A possibly soon to be disappointed Mr. Eklund was headed to the hotel from the airport. However, Dawn DeVirgilio runs the @ExactTarget Twitter account and was also monitoring conference tweets.

She rushed to the registration desk, signed up Mr. Eklund for the conference, and had a name badge and complete registration package ready and waiting by the time he made it to the hotel 15 minutes after his initial tweet.

That’s the power of Twitter-driven customer service.

Twitter Done Right, Reply Style

Social media is all about timeliness. I have an RSS feed of any tweets that mention my name or company name. Apparently, folks at the National Hockey League are doing the same thing.

My recent post about the NHL’s new ad campaign and its missing social media and digital marketing ingredients was answered almost immediately by Mike DiLorenzo, the Director of Corporate Communications for the league:

I then had a very interesting series of email exchanges with Mr. DiLorenzo about the NHL and its future social media plans. Fantastic! Talk about listening and responding with an authentic voice. To think that an NHL executive found my post through Twitter, acknowledged its merit, and then talked to me about it within 18 hours is simply extraordinary.

Twitter Done Wrong, Travel Style

I’ve spoken at a ton of conferences lately, and while I’ve been absolutely blessed with on-time airline travel, I’ve been bedeviled by a series of crappy hotel rooms. The nadir may have been the Westin in Indianapolis, where I must have had the worst room on the property. I sent out this missive via Twitter:

No response whatsoever from the hotel or Westin corporate. Given that nothing incites passion like travel, you’d think social media monitoring would be a MUST for a company like Westin. Evidently not.

I’m no Chris Brogan, Joseph Jaffe, or Jason Falls (yet), but I do have ~475 followers on Twitter (and a 92 on Twitter Grader). That’s 475 people (in theory) that saw me bitch about the Westin in Indianapolis (including at least 15 people who were staying at the same hotel). Can I determine the precise consequences for Westin as a result? No, but I don’t think it’ll help them. And I won’t be back.

Do you have stories of good or bad Twitter usage? Comment ‘em

 

You know what would be lovely? Getting my blog posts in your email>>

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