Shel Holtz discusses the infamous example of a customer calling AOL support line and being hassled if not dangled in order to keep him as a customer –poor customer service.
This bad experience was further mangled as it spread on the blogosphere, and even on digg. The recording of the actual event was heard –I was even frustrated when listening.
It’s just a matter of time before the information is spread to the customer. Companies that hide, deceive or trick customers will suffer the wrath of a riot.
Many companies today are getting into corporate blogging, although for most corporate cultures allowing just anyone or everyone to blog is not a reality. (Although I guarantee in a few years blogs will be issued like email accounts to each and every employee).
Selecting the right corporate blogger is a daunting task, as it will make (or break) your blogging program. By selecting the wrong blogger, it could end up in disaster, or worse yet, boring and ineffective.
Also, I strongly recommend providing individual blogs rather than faceless teamblogs –yes there’s more risk, however the benefits can be greater to building a real relationship.
Your blogger needs to be a subject matter expert at the company, product, or customer need. Shel observes that some of the best bloggers are often Product Managers –I’m suprised by seeing a great CEO blogger at a larger corporation.
Blogs are really conversations, as they are two-way dialogues (even if you don’t enable comments) so understanding that the content is not a monologue/speach is key. An effective blogger will be able to compose their own content, spell check and write sensibly and effectively. They analyze what is being said and respond to other bloggers and readers. They synthesize their personal experience and compose onto a blog.
The blogger must be very interested in their subject matter, product, or even passionate about customers –if they are not, it’ll show in the quality, frequency, and folks simply won’t read it. I hope my passion for web comes across.
Great bloggers are chatty –it’s true, I’ve met many of the greats, they love to chat, converse, learn, explore and grow. This doesn’t just mean by voice, but they may often respond quickly and frequently to email. It’s possible this person may already be a public face to the company but if they can’t be ‘transparent’ then seek other places.
A great blogger is already using the web a lot, not just because they’ll be using a webtool to publish, but because they’ll need to be reading what others are saying. You’ll need to teach them how to listen –and they’ll be proactive at doing it themselves.
A good blogger will say when he’s right, a great blogger will admit when he’s wrong, and when the company and it’s products need help. This is the age of un-marketing –so they’ll need to be real, be transparent and naked.
I recommend that anyone who wants to blog start a personal blog on the side (an unrelated topic is fine) and experiment. Also, it makes sense (if you’re the one finding the corporate blogger) to request potential bloggers to submit draft posts once a week via email for a month. This will give time to analyze time, commitment, and writing style. Since this individual will become a corporate asset, you need to select an individual(s) that is committed to the company. I strongly discourage ghost writing, when customers find out, and credibility will be lost –it’s not worth the risk.
Feel free to add some points in the comments –what should you look in for a great corporate blogger?
With blogs, podcasts, videoblogs, wikis, and forums, the voice of the customer is getting louder and louder. It’s not a fad, the MySpace generation tells us that. We also know people talk about companies when they care, they are passionate either one way or another. We know that customers trust other customer opinion above all others (or at least people ‘like me’) and we know the web is the top medium at work and second most popular medium at home. Customers are starting to voice their opinion (Both good and bad) about products they use, and they are connecting to each other.
We also know folks use Google search (quite a bit) and the higher the result ranking the more likely they will click. We also know that these social media tools (like blogs) can rank very, very high, in fact in some cases, like the Dell Support query which links to Jeremy’s post which was at one point 2 and 3 rank. We’ve seen it rank higher than the actual company support site –this is a disruption and it’s not going away.
Although this has been used over and over (and there is still some debate on the actual events), Kryptonite is a company that was not listening to it’s customers.
Here’s a web strategy I see as an emerging practice for managing your corporate reputation, this is still new to many companies, but in the history of business, the companies that listen to customers survive.
Companies appear to be hiring firms to listen to the blogosphere, I’m seeing mixed results as either they don’t track CGM well or they don’t report well.
Often these companies are ‘traditional’ media tracking companies that are now extending to “consumer generated media” (the voice of the customer). I’ve seen that most of them have excellent reporting tools, although they may not know how to hunt ‘off the wire’ in the blogosphere or lack ability to dive down deeper.
Sometimes they Search Engine Marketing (SEM) firms that you would traditionally hire to craft a strategy to buy keywords for a web campaign (I’ve got some notes about that here from the Web Marketing Strategy symposium here). These companies may also be good to search the blogosphere as they flip the engines around to seek instances of keywords or phrases. Some, but not all have decent reporting engines –this is obviously a new line of business for many.
Don’t just rely on another company –you take an active role as well, you can’t just turn on the radar dish without looking out the window or opening the door.
Every single company should be watching the blogosphere and use the free tools that are available to them. Technorati, Google Blog Search, Sphere, Talkdigger, Google Search, and Opinmind for consumer products.
Setup alerts using Google Alerts and other tools to be notified instantly of instances that occur –sort of the last resort however as it may only be aiming more so at EGM not CGM. No worries, as you should be regularly following customer voices, after doing this after a few months there shouldn’t be too many surprises.
Train your product, engineering, support teams to listen to these voice, set them up with feedreaders and alerts and also provide them with regular and real time updates as you find them. An awareness session may need to occur first. If you don’t win them over, don’t panic, and don’t get frustrated, simply send them the content and believe me, if they care about customers (as the best product folks do) they’ll quickly get it. With all of this stuff, patience is a virtue for evangelists.
Product teams and employees should discuss the voice of the customer, they’re giving you direct feedback on your product, how you respond to them both in marketing and in support. This is healthy and this is good, how much money do you spend on research on focus groups for support and service? I’ll bet not much, now the customer is doing it for free.
Get books, read blogs by experts, and maybe hire a consultant. I own Cluetrain Manifesto, Naked Conversations, Seth Godin’s series, Weblog handbook, Blog Marketing and am anticipating Debbie’s book. Also, I’ve contributed to this upcoming book too by Ted D. Each of these authors has a blog, and each links to other folks like it.
From the desk of the Web Strategist, I sincerely hope that your aware of a party or riot happening right out your front door, listen to the voice of your customer!
I’ve been playing with many of these tools from my blogspot blogs, myspace, second life, youtube, google videos, I even created a login to the critisized Walmart MySpace clone!
Amanda former star of Rocketboom (and who I still think is a star) has created an unique video blog suggesting she needs a job. She’s still got a sense of humor, and had some co-writing and help from Zefrank.
Cheers to Amanda and best wishes.