Julie got this card in the mail the other day from our dry cleaner. It probably took them only a few minutes to write and send it. I think the card speaks for itself. Simple, personal, perfect. Handwritten notes still go a long way.
Five years ago, if someone from your marketing department said “Let’s market to our existing customers!” they would have risked losing their job. Why would any organization spend time or effort on customers who’ve already bought the product? Backwards you say? Not anymore. This is a winning strategy on the social web.
Social media changes the game by giving brands and organizations an unprecedented ability to target and energize their existing fans. 5 to 10 years ago, brands didn’t know who their biggest fans were or where to find and engage them. Now individuals come to you and they bring their entire social graph of trusted relationships with them. When the stars align and they start to come in droves, it’s word of mouth on fire – that’s the real power of the social web. Recognizing that, smart organizations that have a connected fan base shift their spending away from recruiting and start focusing on their existing community’s happiness and let the fans do the marketing for them.
BMW has had amazing success with it’s strategy of targeting existing Mini Cooper Owners because they understand how critical their passionate customers are for spreading ideas that promote the brand. Mini Ownership for many isn’t just about the car – it’s about being part of a subculture that has it’s own fashion, events and lifestyle. BMW made a smart move by focusing on treating their best customers as special insiders who love to be in the know and talk about the product. There’s a key lesson here for any brand with an existing community. People haven’t fundamentally changed, but the technology does change their ability to market for you so significantly that it changes where the dollars should be spent.
It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? There are a lot of people out there right now who’ve had the question thrust upon them when they weren’t ready. What would you do? Would you seek another job just like the one you had because it’s easy, familiar and safe? Or would you go and do the things that you’ve always wanted to do because they matter to you?
There’s been a strong surge in the pro-entrepreneurship movement this year urging individuals and organizations to focus on making a difference. People are starting to see how participating in the culture of entrepreneurship and doing things and working on problems that add value not only gives them a sense of fulfillment in their lives, it improves society overall. The great shaking out we’re all experiencing right now is producing new thoughts and solutions on how to go about doing what we do and finding meaning in our lives. Some call it “The New Entrepreneurship“, or “awesomeness” and some simply call it “working on stuff that matters“.
What would you do tomorrow if you were laid off today? Would you change the world?
This lecture from Seth Godin is around 2 years old, but the ideas still resonate strongly, especially in the wake of recent discussions about Chris Anderson’s new book Free and the concepts of Freemium and Freeconomics. If you’re currently writing a book, or thinking of writing a book one day, you should get a lot out of this. The core concepts to keep in mind as you’re going through this are:
Audiences are skipping TV spots with their DVRs and learning how to ignore ads on the web. Instead, they’re talking (bluntly) about products and brands on Twitter, chatting about them on Facebook and searching for the reviews and opinions of other customers on Google before they buy. Armed with free, easy-to-use tools that allow them to ask trusted friends what they think or give an unsolicited opinion to hundreds in an instant – it’s word of mouth on fire. The truth is, as people are increasingly empowered by social media, marketers are losing control.
In a lot of ways these trends are great news for the world because more customers are getting the real story and finding out from each other which products and services have real value, and which ones don’t. But where does this leave the people who’ve build honest businesses being experts in push strategies that used to work? A lot of them are scratching their heads wondering “How the hell are we going to make money now?”
If you’re one of the ones scratching your head, here’s the good news…your clients are about to need you more than ever. The bad news…in order to consistently deliver measurable value to your clients, you’re going to have to shift the way you do business in a major way. Read More
Timing is everything. Making “amazing” look easy isn’t just about talent and practice, it’s about being in tune with the environment. The surfers that really wow us and capture our attention repeatedly when the big waves come aren’t just getting in the water more than average, they’re watching weather patterns, studying the beach and trying to anticipate where the perfect break will be so that they can position themselves in just the right spot to get the best ride when the conditions are right. From the beach, seeing a great surfer catch that perfect wave seems effortless…but only because they were in the right place at the right time and were paddling like hell when they saw the wave coming.
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/knmurphy/3827402016/sizes/m/This Building43 video is a goodie. Robert Scoble does a quick 2 minute interview with Isaac Mogannam, the owner of Phat Philly Cheessteaks in the Mission District in San Francisco, CA. If you’re a restaurant or small business owner trying to figure out how to make the web work for you in your local area, this short video is worth your time.
According to Isaac, since opening a little less than a year ago, Phat Philly Cheesesteaks has gotten around 275 mostly positive reviews on Yelp and he says that it’s had a major impact on his business. He estimates that around 40-60% of his new business is driven by Yelp (woah!), and because of the size and popularity of the site, people searching for food in their local area usually find his restaurant (and everyone’s reviews) on Yelp before they find the restaurants website. That’s an important insight for any small local business – people are using the web to find out what’s good in their area and, because of the way search works, their first interaction with your brand online is often NOT your website. Instead it’ll be the popular social sites where all the chatter is happening, so you can’t afford to ignore what people are saying about you online. Because people’s first impression of you happens where the chatter is, ignoring the conversation is a big mistake.
In this interview, Isaac talks about how he’s embraced Yelp, started listening, joined the conversation and used it to his advantage to quickly build a local (and loyal) customer base. Not surprisingly, he says he did it “one customer at a time”.
This video was originally posted on Building43.
Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think and business as usual needs a new system of operating that’s more closely aligned with human nature. That’s Dan Pinks argument in a nutshell, and I think his case is strong. For those of you with some time, I’d highly recommend watching the full video. For those of you with only a few minutes, I’ve highlighted some of the main takeaways below. Enjoy.
In this TED talk, Dan argues that there’s a mismatch between what scientists know about motivation and how businesses today reward their workers, and that if we look closely at the data gathered from studies on what truly motivates people it’s clear that we need a new paradigm. Here are some of the best nuggets…He says:
“…too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science…if we really want high performance on those definitional (cognitive) tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things. To entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach
….the scientists who’ve been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It’s an approach built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, because they’re interesting, because they are part of something important. And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose.
(1.) Autonomy – the urge to direct our own lives.
(2.) Mastery – the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
(3.) Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.”
After presenting the findings of studies performed by leading scientists and economists at the London School of Economics, Dan sites some examples of how this new work paradigm is being put into practice in leading firms:
“20 Percent Time…Done, famously, at Google. Where engineers can spend 20 percent of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Okay? Radical amounts of autonomy, And at Google, as many of you know, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20 Percent Time. Things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News.”
“…an even more radical example…something called the Results Only Work Environment. The ROWE. Created by two American consultants, in place at about a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional.”
What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down.
