[1983 Apple Keynote: The 1984 Ad Introduction YouTube 6:41]
It's an expression you've probably come across, business as usual.
The other side of the no comment coin. It says volumes without saying much. Especially when communications about how the business is keeping its promises are rare.
Instead, you'd like to know how things will change, given that circumstances have changed the context.
Situations, for example, that are:
weather-related, which has been on everyone's minds on the East Coast of the U.S.
digitally-based where your online presence becomes a strong signal associated with your identity
market-linked, given that there is so much volatility around what used to work
Often communications to customers come at the tail end of extensive internal deliberations that take weeks, even months. Yet they fail to take that process into consideration for external audiences - they're a black box.
Communications and messages providing too little background either fall flat or raise more questions than they answer.
Another example. Say someone switches from corporate to agency, or vice versa; they now see things from the other side of the table. Or say they are now independent consultants running a business and making a living on billable hours.
It's less unusual now than it used to be. If you never experienced making a living as a consultant you will likely not know the cost of an hour of your time. And you will probably miss an opportunity to reciprocate for all the times that person helped you.
Things are moving too fast to still be thinking business as usual.
I was sitting in my office looking intently at the cobblestones, those in the poster of my hometown piazza hanging on the wall.
I had been asked to work on a piece of content that would need to build awareness and get leads, work for customers, and attract prospects. All at the same time. In the same piece. In other words, as my colleague put it - a boy and a girl.
Have you ever faced a situation like this one?
Wanting to be all things to all people is a sure recipe for confusion. In the desire to please, it may turn off the very people who are the most desirable - and profitable - for the business. That should have stopped me from accepting the assignment.
Experience, and lost cycles, both teach you to recognize the signs of a superior or a customer not fully understanding the implications of a request. How trying to save a dollar on production or in one place would results in headaches and lost opportunity in a more important area.
Sometimes you want to go along and get along. You are tempted to be the one to "make the logo bigger" and be done with it. Especially when you know your job includes counseling your client or boss well. And that means saying no in a way that helps them get a better answer from you.
Because going along is a cop out. You know that it's not just about that one request. The request is a symptom of a larger problem.
A warning sign that a misunderstanding on the onset, if not dealt with right away, will snowball and potentially hijack the project. That will produce poor work all around, and make everyone miserable in the process.
When this happens stop yourself from going crazy (and try to explain lack of results) down the road. You made me do it is not a good answer - not to your boss, nor to your client.
Nobody really makes you do anything you don't want to do.
(this applies beyond copy, of course)
See the problem
The first place where your copy fails you is underestimating the question:
Who is your audience?
You know who your audience is in the scenario I outlined above? Your boss or your client. And they are not the ones who will do the buying. The best way to get buy in and help the business trade is to learn to identify this disconnect early on.
You're not going to win every time. Seeing the problem will get you well on your way. If there is one area you want to become really good at it is this. Bring the right evidence and proposed course of action to the discussion.
Definition of evidence
When I talked about evidence on G+ the other day, someone asked me what I intended by evidence.
I like those kinds of questions because they show me something I take for granted, and shouldn't. Many of my readers are business owners, general managers, and heads of business units in organizations who are lookig to improve the way they present their value in the marketplace.
Marketing that makes business sense starts with knowing which asset you trade on, your promise. Evidence is information and data. You collect it for a number of reasons, for example:
they are an asset in their own right
without feedback, you don't know whether you need to do something or not
Then there is the issue of how you collect good data. Some strong attractors are communication, dynamic communication (conversation) with a wide audience (advocates), etc. However you get the data, evidence is the result of analysis, which depends on the query set.
This is why conversations are markets.
The query set determines what to look for, what to add, how this is connected with the analytics of listening and observing, which are linked to feedback on what you should start doing and what you should stop (this is also very important).
***
Learn to know both your audiences really well: By listening to the warning signs with your client and boss, and by talking with your customers and prospects regularly.
Caring for your customers can be a serious competitive advantage
You cannot claim you put your customers first until you actually do that. The money quote does not get that way without you doing a bit of "show me the money" work.
Entrepreneurs who build a business have customers - people who come back fro second and third transactions. Repeat business is based upon this kind of feedback: You show me you care, you're easy to talk with, you solve the problem.
Customer service is the best form of marketing you could ever execute, even when you call it operations, or design of experience. It's an attitude.
With every interaction, you have the opportunity to make a person whole, develop a relationship, and get a referral. That means that you helped them see you care about their needs, you are listening and hearing what they're saying, and they will win friends when they send people your way.
Not a small feat.
3 things you can do today
1. Provide exceptionally good service
That is defined by the customer, but you can get a good idea when you do. If you don't want your customers to kick at and shake the vending machine, fix it. Good service is for average people and none of your customers are average - each is a different person with different needs.
How do you scale that?
You do it by listening and hearing the request and problem when it is first presented. Lean forward, don't judge the intent, just take in the issue - then fix it. Do you know how much you lose in reputation and business by asking your customers to fill complex forms, navigate impossible phone systems, and call you back when you're ready?
Pick up the phone on the first ring, answer pleasantly, route the call as appropriate by leveraging your own internal relationships to make sure your colleague has the same sense of urgency you have. Be creative, brainstorm with the customer as necessary. Stop worrying about the form, start talking with your customer.
2. Be the person, humanize your business
I bet you if I polled you, you would tell me the names of the people you do business with - Mike the mechanic, Jim the personal trainer, Rose the hair dresser, Kathy the insurance person. They personify the brand in your eyes. As far as you're concerned, they are the company - your experience of the company depends upon the relationship you have with them.
How do you scale that?
Hire well, train better, provide incentives by rewarding the behavior of those who are customer advocates. Do you know who are the people customers love in your company? As customers we don't always provide feedback when someone is caught doing something right - we should. The feedback that comes is called referral - that we provide, if you inspire it, you hardly need to ask for it.
Say you're sorry, it's your fault. Give even the angriest or rudest customers pause. Then move to correct it. Stay in problem solving mode. That is the best way to gain credibility and diffuse rudeness. Ask questions, be interested in what input your customers are willing to give you. Customers can be rude, I know, especially in a retail setting. Don't lower your standards, be polite, pleasant, and helpful. The other customers in the story will notice both behaviors and empathize with you.
3. Overcommunicate
Let your customers know what you are doing and are going to do at every step of the way. Follow through when you say you will, educate, teach, explain what is going on. Don't just say why a problem occurred (take note, for some people this is a deal breaker), explain how you're going to fix it and when you expect it fixed.
How do you scale that? If several customers are affected, select a member from your team to be the personal concierge for each customer or each group. This will let them feel the personal touch and will allow you to communicate personally rather than impersonally.
It's also good to use the active voice and active verbs - today something happened to a group of people is harder to take than the power in your block is still out for this reason. In your communications stay positive, proactive, and responsive. If you have new information, share it.
In an interconnected world, a problem in one company can affect many more customers than the direct few. Like in the case of PJM Interconnection, as I wrote a couple of years back, they give you power, but you never heard of them.
Do you get exceptionally good service? Do feel you need to push companies to help you? When you make a requests, is the attitude of company representatives to your standards?
To me, the salient characteristic of someone with vision is the ability to see the future, and take you there. They do in such a way that when you look back, you're able to see the dots they connected as they did that.
Steve Jobs was such a visionary. Some people do their best thinking while driving, or engaging in physical activities like walking, running, others like to flip through photographs and images. Where do you do your best thinking?
Steve Jobs “stood back”: “You can’t really predict what will happen,” he said. “But you can feel the direction you’re going. And that’s about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own.”
He saw the world of personal computers, then how technology would evolve to be an extension of our lives, and led the creation of a series of products that literally disrupted the way we thought about technology.
Forget optimization. In a crowded market you need to stand above the competition with truly disruptive technology and not apart with a "me too" plan done better.
We need more visionaries
As we say in our dual panel proposal for SxSW interactive next March: Neither innovation nor best practices are good enough anymore. It is the value of your promise and the wisdom of the trade that earns your place in the market.
Disruptive technology is both meaningful -- relevant, private, and personal - *and* commercially viable (even in the early stages).
A technology is disruptive when it helps a business make and keep the best of all promises and get in exchange the things that go to making that business stronger, more resilient, and enduring.
***
The hardest part for visionaries is to sell their ideas. The best thing you can do about skeptics and naysayers is to embrace them, educate them about your roadmap, take them along, step by step. The prize is your business - the product and service that is the asset worth trading.
Conversations are markets. Vote now, add your questions and comments, and we will find a way to have the conversation. Your business depends on your vision.
People are no longer a company's best asset, they are its best technology
Collaboration needs contribution, commitment, and championing. To be sustainable, it needs to be embedded in the core principles that move us to action.
Marketing the makes business sense is also about understanding what customers want and helping deliver it. Delivering the relevant response might involve having to make fundamental changes in the way the business works.
Often marketing does not have real influence inside a business - especially if that happens to be a B2B. So much so, that you'd have to break the glass in case of marketing.
Does collaboration help with delivering better insights, better products, services, and experiences? What does collaboration mean to you?
Conversation Agent Premium Newsletter subscribers received some of my thinking on building white space vs. drilling black holes, or why next generation CEOs need to understand marketing (August issue).
White space is where something greater than a market happens. To illustrate, I will go back to a post I wrote more than 4 years ago.
It's the place between words, a slight pause before listening and after talking: Silence. Poets and philosophers have fallen in love with the idea of what is left unsaid: The space where nothing exists but the shapeless abyss.
Sometimes defined a deafening void, silence is an art. It comes with its own grammar: Forging words that go with any sound or message is no trivial thing. Silence is a dynamic and ever changing force.
It's been revealed through the study of magnetic resonance that our brain is able to hear silence and it anticipates the sound. In fact, during a pause, our cortical auditory areas are primed and lay in wait of a sound.
If silence is an art, it was an artist who shared his intuition about its sound.
In 1952, with his composition 4'33", John Cage offered three whole movements without playing one single note.
More than music, Cage's revolutionary concept was in demonstrating what a beautiful instrument our mind is.
For a full 4 minutes and 33 seconds, the pianist sat without touching one single key.
During that time, the audience could listen to the silence.
This meant anticipating a melody and, with ears primed, paying attention to all the small creaks and noises inside the music hall, normally covered by the music -- whispers, yawns, someone coughing, and the distant murmurs seeping in from the street.
Cage wanted to prove that absolute silence doesn't exist.
Even in a perfectly insulated space, we can hear the beat of our own heart. His point was to demonstrate that our lives are immersed in a sound continuum.
Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
But if it's technically true that even silence has a sound, it is also true that silence has its place.
As a useful tool in negotiating -- well timed, thoughtful silence during contract or pricing negotiations can make the difference in gaining the upper hand
As legal protection -- as spelled out in the Miranda "you have the right to remain silent..."
As an inner quality -- in spiritual practices for transformative and integral growth
As a reverential gesture -- to show respect to a person
Water will not be the only resource in scarce supply, silence will too.
From Silent Night to Simon and Garfunkel's Sound of Silence and Deep Purple's Hush, we've been humming about silence in pop culture.
We also learned about the wisdom of silence in popular sayings like "silence is golden" while we're still figuring out how to be still.
We're greeted by a stony silence after an argument, and we've occasionally enjoyed the peace and quiet of a relaxing moment.
***
I wanted to close the week with a moment of silence. A pause to make space and listen to your inner voice. Invite new ideas in, and trust your gut.
It was 1988, and I was working in a nonprofit organization doing all kinds of translation, copy writing, and layout setting work. Yes, we still used electric typewriters... we also used small screen computers: They were called Apple Macintosh.
Unlike DOS-based computers that operated with complex command keys, that one had an operating system so intuitive to use that I even taught myself PageMaker for editing publications. It made my life so much easier.
Did you see the standing ovation in the beginning of this video? That's how it felt.
You probably heard, if you were anywhere near Twitter yesterday, you probably learned the news: Apple CEO Steve Jobs resigned. His letter read:
To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:
I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.
I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.
As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.
I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.
I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.
Steve
You will find evidence of Steve Jobs' impact on Apple not just in the recently discussed company balance sheet, nor in its stock price. His influence has had much deeper ramifications in the community of users and developers, the city of Cupertino, the company's employees, partners, etc.
Steve Jobs has revolutionized how we live, work and play. A global community came together to honor his birthday, and wish him well.
Your thoughts and well wishes have been compiled, printed, and bound into a keepsake for Steve.
Apple was the subject of my own brand Haiku last November:
A single leaf;
In the closed design experience,
a brief response.
"Random leaf" is the setting, and also the reference to the season. There is no explicit poetry in this verse, which happens to satisfy the 2/3/2 essential word form. There is a leaf in the design, and there is a design experience with the brand which is a closed system. Everything is concrete.
The setting is always related in some way to the action. The system is closed, and that is the experience you get. You know it. Yet, within it, there is a voice, a surprise. Steve Jobs has now become known for responding to random emails about Apple. Absolute objectivity.
Back to the video.
On minutes 7:35-9:25 a member of the audience asks:
Q: What do we do about the press?
His answer (remember, it's 1997):
I'm sure you've had this experience. Where you change. You're growing as a person. And people tend to treat you like you were 18 months ago. And it's really frustrating sometimes. When you're growing up and you're becoming more capable and you've solved, maybe you had some personality quirks you've gotten over.
Whatever that may be. And people are still treating you the same way they were treating you like a year or 18 months ago. It's very frustrating. Well, it's the same with a company.
It's the same with the press. The press is going to have a lag time. And the best thing we can do about the press is to embrace them, do the best we can to educate them about the strategy. But we need to keep our eye on the prize.
And that is turning out some great products, communicating directly with our customers the best we can. Getting the community of people that are going to make this stuff successful like yourselves in the loop, so you know everything and is marching forward, one foot in front of the other.
The press will take care of itself. It's like the stock price. The press and the stock price will take care of themselves. By the end of this year, it's going to look quite different.
I'm like an old man now. I've seen some ups and downs. And you see enough of them, you know that's going to happen. So when you get up in the morning and the press is selling Apple short, go buy some shares. That's what I would do. That's what I have done.
In a statement last night, Apple said that it had appointed Cook, who was recruited to the company by Jobs in 1997, and had elected Jobs chairman of the board#.
***
This is why Apple has such strong brand evangelists. Unwavering product focus. This is where Steve Jobs had the most influence: In the hands of people everywhere, who, like me, found it easy to use Apple products.
A really good experience is one you go back to over and over again. When my home PC hard drive crashed a few years ago, I consolidated all of my devices - PDA and flip phone included - and switched to Apple. I never looked back.
Social networks were filled with messages about the news last night. First on Twitter, Google+, I assume Facebook as well (I don't use my personal profile much there). People sharing links to his Stanford commencement address in 2005.
Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
More than a tool, Mass Relevance is a wish many media companies and brands turned publishers express: That of scaling their conversation strategy to the point where the best content from participants is embedded right into the TV program and live digital cast in real time.
Next generation CEO Sam Decker, a veteran in digital marketing, word of mouth, and user generated content, gave me a tour of the platform recently. Sam previously grew Dell.com (consumer) to $3.5B and was founding CMO at Bazaarvoice, the leader in social commerce.
From its beginning brainstorming sessions to build the first tool, TweetRiver, Austin-based Mass Relevance currently serves media organizations and brands like NBC Sports, Cisco, Samsung, and Xbox.
With a 14-people team and 40 clients, the company is a preferred partner of Twitter media and is working on adding more services and custom technology around the TweetRiver platform.
Curation, strategy, visual rendering
The deep curation capabilities available on TweetRiver are employed to make sense of existing content volume around an event or program - for example, the Oscars, The Voice [depicted in the image here], or a sports match.
The tool allows you to filter comments, in this case tweets, by choosing from a robust set of variables, identifying the most relevant based upon the combination, and posting it to the event site and screen choosing from a series of interesting visualization templates.
All in real time, and with the ability to provide the final manual approvals. Human curation happens after the automatic filtering.
The filtering rules are very granular on purpose - to map to the proper engagement with the business. The goal is to lead to real business results. Some of the key performance indicators and measurements include time on site, page views, ad views, traffic, and conversion.
Done well, curation shows what the audience is experiencing right there and then.
A very powerful proposition.
Social content is more valuable outside the network
Which brings me to a consideration about online commenting and activity - social is non media.
It's the connective tissue, the glue that unifies, unites, and integrates digital, virtual, and physical worlds. Owned Web properties, earned commentary and coverage, and paid media - events, entertainment, etc. Its value increases when it is more closely associated with the topic it is about.
I've always maintained that a business should plan to organize its Website to reflect editorial impact, community building, and marketing principles. Curation of social content sits at the middle of a brands' digital presence.
Pricing is based upon a couple of variables. Subscriptions for the platform, which a production company could log in and use itself, for example, are based on number of users, number of streams, and volume of content hosted at Mass Relevance.
Applications can get really creative: From mobile displays, TV, mobile applications, retail endcaps, etc. This is where we're just getting started. There is opportunity to really pay off the promise of brand as publisher.
I like the idea of bridging virtual or digital with physical worlds to extend experiences. What gets your attention?
The Discovery may have had its last launch with NASA on February 24 of this year. The tech world is just getting started with its own full launch - a love affair complete with predictions, trends, and already a roster of tools and services.
Discovery is the new search
Actually better. Why? Because it capitalizes on two mechanisms that have long been the domain of strictly physical, if interrelated, experiences:
word of mouth
commercial transactions
It makes sense. People are spending more time in social networks - and getting stuff done there, too. Which means that many of the activities that used to happen in mall stores, while on the phone with friends possibly, or through just solitary search, are now happening as a social experience.
Group buying sites that encourage people to sign up for daily deals, like Groupon and Living Social, have accelerated that trend. The power of collective buying at the service of the individual. Who doesn't love a good bargain?
You know what's even better than getting one? Hunting for one.
There's a crop of other, some quite specialized, sites that plan to capitalize on the strong signals and filters currently offered in social networks to help people talk about the items they find, either ask their friends or even perfect strangers how they look with a new outfit, what they should buy, even create public visual displays or carts to share.
And if you're a guy and don't do the bargain hunting with friends, there are services that will deliver right to your doorstep.
Will discovery also be the new black?
As in putting merchants in the black by helping them manage just in time inventories better, or attract people to existing inventory, as we talked about with Milo.com a couple of months back.
In other words, rewarding them to encourage the right kind of digital behavior - just like foot traffic in stores.
The new rules of content
This is where you come in to work on how information is displayed, aggregated, filtered, and then analyzed so that it's more digestible -- and helps people share it with their friends.
In this new digital world where physical goods live in virtual stores, where search and discovery coexist in the hands of individuals and groups, relevance is even more a must for your content to work. The conversation as market works well here - becoming a relevant filter is the key to commerce.
In my recent update on filters, I talked about how the introduction of Google+ has renewed interest in:
grouping people
filtering content
For relevance to be part of the conversation, both are predicted upon three considerations:
(1.) Ethics in data collection -- full disclosure is the new transparency
(2.) Open communication -- as business is a process, so two-way communication or conversation is the lubricant that fosters ownership, and commerce
(3.) Clear language -- say what you mean, illustrate with stories, eliminate jargon, adopt the words of your community
There's a lot here, so we will be unpacking some of this in future posts. I've been talking about trends in business and technology for several years now. It's now time to bring them all together. This is what I'm thinking about and working on now.
While in the past I used Digg, Stumble Upon, and Delicious for content discovery, then Twitter, which I still use heavily, I'm currently using mainly Percolate, Eqentia (see my review here, this is a really good service), and Flipboard on iPad.
How about you? Is anyone using LinkedIn? How is that working out?
Always have been. Conversation is used to draw out the model on which business trades, to identify what is missing, and to extract what is there, what I exchange instead of the asset to build relationships.
Few realize it and trade poorly.
While we think about the implications of how businesses can continue to have people understand that, and not just trying to sell in social, I wanted to highlight five posts that show how money is the least differentiated, and least tradable of all assets.
+5
+1
In The Peter Principle for Business, we tested the idea that that every great brand gets stretched to its level of incompetence. This happens when the core competence of an organization, its ability to deliver on its promises with operation experience and expertise is in question.
Focusing the promise is about conversation as market.
+2
The idea in Sample Your Product as Often as Possible is to become a mystery shopper of your online business. File a claim with the insurance company where you work. Get an iPhone with each plan and compare notes. The more successful you become, the more you need to verify you are scaling well -- you and your people deliver what you promised.
+3
Whether you believe they are or not, Are Dads a New Market Opportunity? Consider that a poll conducted by Yahoo! last October, and reported by eMarketer, found that more fathers are in product decision-making situations more often for a number of categories.
While there are plenty of ads that cater to men only -- and we just saw several air during the Super Bowl -- few speak to dads. Conversation as market.
+4
Why Customer Service in Social is not Fair raised quite a few eyebrows. The root cause of special vs. fair treatment online comes from deep organizational disconnects. Unless your business plans to use what it learns online as an opportunity to fix internal processes, social outposts will continue to be expensive lightning rods.
Make every customer special. Conversations are markets.
This is my blog and not a public space. Critical discourse is welcomed. I will, however, delete your comment if you descend into personal attacks, inappropriate language, disrespectful behavior, or excessive self-promotion and link-baiting.
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Disclaimer
The opinions blogged herein represent only those of Valeria Maltoni and do not reflect those of her employer, persons or companies mentioned herein, or anyone else.
