How to Become Ubiquitous

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Harvard Business Review
8:04 AM Thursday July 14, 2011
by Dorie Clark | Comments ( 22)
This post is part of the HBR Insight Center Marketing That Works.

… I steeled myself for the onslaught: replying to the hundreds of emails that had built up while I'd been on a luxurious 12-day vacation to Spain. Like many professionals, I have a complicated relationship with holiday — coveting the idea of relaxation, while dreading the idea of being out of touch. …

The trip had been incredible — the best of Barcelona, Madrid, and Marbella — but I returned feeling guilty and slightly panicked. … And that's when I spotted Mimi, one of the most connected players in town. She smiled and walked over to my table. "How's it going?" she said. "You're everywhere."

In that moment, I realized you don't have to be present in order to be ubiquitous.

Ubiquity, of course, is a major marketing goal. You want to be top of mind for your customers, so they're calling you (not your competitors) … .  Here are four strategies to consider:

1. Schedule your social media presence. … Every few months, I'll lock myself away for an afternoon and come up with a few hundred nuggets to post on Twitter. You can schedule them weeks or months in advance via services like Hootsuite or Tweet Deck. … Similarly, you can use Wordpress or other services to schedule upcoming blog posts.
2. Respond quickly when it matters. … If you have a corporate assistant, ask him or her to monitor your email and call you if anything urgent arises. If you're a solo practitioner, shell out for a virtual assistant through a service like Elance. …
3. Enlist messengers. Perhaps the best way to seem like you're everywhere is to get other people talking about you. … Specifically ask for referrals (which "forces" people to talk about you), cultivate reporters, attend networking events, and create a robust portfolio of content, from blog posts to white papers. …
4. Go somewhere cool. Sometimes, inevitably, you'll miss something important because you're away. … You may never make [your suitors] happy — but you can at least intrigue them. "I'm on vacation" is a fairly boring, lazy-sounding excuse. But — "I apologize for the delay in getting back to you; I just got back from Puerto Rico"… is a fascinating conversation starter. So consider this your permission to go somewhere fabulous and make the best of it.

What are your strategies for becoming ubiquitous? And how do you ensure the people who matter are talking about you?

Dorie Clark

Dorie Clark is a strategy consultant who has worked with clients including Google, Yale University, and the National Park Service. She is the author of the forthcoming What's Next?: The Art of Reinventing Your Personal Brand (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012).

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A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing

Assessing its impact as well as its volume will help companies take better advantage of buzz.

McKinsey Quarterly
APRIL 2010 • Jacques Bughin, Jonathan Doogan, and Ole Jørgen Vetvik

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Consumers have always valued opinions expressed directly to them. … As consumers overwhelmed by product choices tune out the ever-growing barrage of traditional marketing, word of mouth cuts through the noise quickly and effectively.
Indeed, word of mouth¹ is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions. … And its influence will probably grow: the digital revolution has amplified and accelerated its reach to the point where word of mouth is no longer an act of intimate, one-on-one communication. …
As online communities increase in size, number, and character, marketers have come to recognize word of mouth’s growing importance. But measuring and managing it is far from easy. … Understanding how and why messages work allows marketers to craft a coordinated, consistent response that reaches the right people with the right content in the right setting. …

A consumer-driven world

… As consumers have become overloaded, they have become increasingly skeptical about traditional company-driven advertising and marketing and increasingly prefer to make purchasing decisions largely independent of what companies tell them about products.
This tectonic power shift toward consumers reflects the way people now make purchasing decisions.² Once consumers make a decision to buy a product, they start with an initial consideration set of brands formed through product experience, recommendations, or awareness-building marketing. … [Consumers] gather product information from a variety of sources and decide which brand to purchase. Their post-sales experience then informs their next purchasing decision. While word of mouth has different degrees of influence on consumers at each stage of this journey (Exhibit 1), it’s the only factor that ranks among the three biggest consumer influencers at every step.

Exhibit 1: Word of mouth is influential throughout the consumer decision journey.
It’s also the most disruptive factor. Word of mouth can prompt a consumer to consider a brand or product in a way that incremental advertising spending simply cannot. … In the mobile-phone market, for example, we have observed that the pass-on rates for key positive and negative messages can increase a company’s market share by as much as 10 percent or reduce it by 20 percent over a two-year period, all other things being equal. This effect alone makes a case for more systematically investigating and managing word of mouth.

Understanding word of mouth

While word of mouth is undeniably complex and has a multitude of potential origins and motivations, we have identified three forms of word of mouth that marketers should understand: experiential, consequential, and intentional.

Experiential

Experiential word of mouth is the most common and powerful form, typically accounting for 50 to 80 percent of word-of-mouth activity in any given product category. It results from a consumer’s direct experience with a product or service, largely when that experience deviates from what’s expected. …

Consequential

… The most common is what we call consequential word of mouth, which occurs when consumers directly exposed to traditional marketing campaigns pass on messages about them or brands they publicize. …Marketers need to consider both the direct and the pass-on effects of word of mouth when determining the message and media mix that maximizes the return on their investments.

Intentional

A less common form of word of mouth is intentional—for example, when marketers use celebrity endorsements to trigger positive buzz for product launches. …
What marketers need for all three forms of word of mouth is a way to understand and measure its impact and financial ramifications, both good and bad.

Word-of-mouth equity

A starting point has been to count the number of recommendations and dissuasions for a given product. There’s an appealing power and simplicity to this approach, but also a challenge: it’s difficult for marketers to account for variability in the power of different kinds of word-of-mouth messages. … In fact, our research shows that a high-impact recommendation—from a trusted friend conveying a relevant message, for example—is up to 50 times more likely to trigger a purchase than is a low-impact recommendation.
To assess the impact of these different kinds of recommendations, we developed a way to calculate what we call word-of-mouth equity. … By looking at the impact—as well as the volume—of these messages, this metric lets a marketer accurately test their effect on sales and market share for brands, individual campaigns, and companies as a whole (Exhibit 2). That impact—in other words, the ability of any one word-of-mouth recommendation or dissuasion to change behavior—reflects what is said, who says it, and where it is said. It also varies by product category.

Exhibit 2: By looking at impact as well as volume, marketers can measure the effects of word-of-mouth messages more accurately.

Image via WikipediaWhat’s said is the primary driver of word-of-mouth impact. Across most product categories, we found that the content of a message must address important product or service features if it is to influence consumer decisions. In the mobile-phone category, for example, design is more important than battery life. … Marketers tend to build campaigns around emotional positioning, yet we found that consumers actually tend to talk—and generate buzz—about functional messages.

The second critical driver is the identity of the person who sends a message: the word-of-mouth receiver must trust the sender and believe that he or she really knows the product or service in question. … About 8 to 10 percent of consumers are what we call influentials, whose common factor is trust and competence. Influentials typically generate three times more word-of-mouth messages than noninfluentials do, and each message has four times more impact on a recipient’s purchasing decision. About 1 percent of these people are digital influentials—most notably, bloggers—with disproportionate power.
Finally, the environment where word of mouth circulates is crucial to the power of messages. Typically, messages passed within tight, trusted networks have less reach but greater impact than those circulated through dispersed communities—in part, because there’s usually a high correlation between people whose opinions we trust and the members of networks we most value. …
Word-of-mouth equity empowers companies by allowing them to understand word of mouth’s relative impact on brand and product performance. … When Apple’s iPhone was launched in Germany, … its share of word-of-mouth volume in the mobile-phone category—or how many consumers were talking about it—was about 10 percent, or a third less than that of the market leader. Yet the iPhone had launched in other countries, and the buzz accompanying those messages in Germany was about five times more powerful than average. This meant the iPhone’s word-of-mouth equity score was 30 percent higher than that of the market leader, with three times more influentials recommending the iPhone over leading handsets. As a result, sales directly attributable to the positive word of mouth surrounding the iPhone outstripped those attributable to Apple’s paid marketing sixfold. …

Harnessing word of mouth

The rewards of pursuing excellence in word-of-mouth marketing are huge, and it can deliver a sustainable and significant competitive edge few other marketing approaches can match. … [The] incremental gain from outperforming competitors with superior television ads, … is relatively small. That’s because all companies actively manage their traditional marketing activities and all have similar knowledge. With so few companies actively managing word of mouth—the most powerful form of marketing—the potential upside is exponentially greater.
The starting point for managing word of mouth is understanding which dimensions of word-of-mouth equity are most important to a product category: the who, the what, or the where. In skincare, for example, it’s the what; in retail banks, the who. Word-of-mouth-equity analysis can detail the precise nature of a category’s influentials and pinpoint the highest-impact messages, contexts, and networks. …
… Harnessing experiential word of mouth is fundamentally about providing customers with the opportunity to share positive experiences and making the story relatable and relevant to the audience. … [Consumers] are more likely to talk about a product early in its life cycle, which is why product launches or enhancements are so crucial to generating positive word of mouth. Buzz also can be sustained after launch: …
… To create positive word of mouth that actually has impact, the customer experience must not only deviate significantly from expectations but also deviate on the dimensions that matter to the customer and that he or she is likely to talk about. For instance, while battery life is a crucial driver of satisfaction for mobile-handset consumers, they talk about it less than other product features, such as design and usability. …
Managing consequential word of mouth involves using the insights provided by word-of-mouth equity to maximize the return on marketing activities. …. In fact, McKinsey research shows that marketing-induced consumer-to-consumer word of mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising in categories as diverse as skincare and mobile phones.
Two things supercharge the creation of positive consequential word of mouth: interactivity and creativity. … One example of a company successfully harnessing this power is the UK confectioner Cadbury, whose “Glass and a Half Full” advertising campaign used creative, thoughtful, and integrated online and traditional marketing to spur consumer interaction and sales.
The campaign began with a television commercial featuring a gorilla playing drums to an iconic Phil Collins song. … The concept so engaged consumers that they were willing to go online, view the commercial, and create amateur versions of their own, triggering a torrent of YouTube imitations. Within three months of the advertisement’s appearance, the video had been viewed more than six million times online, year-on-year sales of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate had increased by more than 9 percent, and the brand’s positive perception among consumers had improved by about 20 percent.
Intentional word-of-mouth campaigns revolve around identifying influentials who become brand and product advocates. … [Ambitious] marketers can use word-of-mouth equity insights to shift from consequential to intentional campaigning.

Image via WikipediaThe type of campaign that companies choose to adopt depends on the degree to which marketers can find and target influentials. … Mobile carriers have granular customer data that can precisely locate influentials who know the category, talk to many people, and provide them with trusted opinions. That means messages can be directed at specific individuals who are most likely to spread positive word of mouth through their social networks. As a message spreads, this approach generates an exponential word-of-mouth impact, similar to the ripple effect when a pebble is dropped in a pond.

Companies unable to target influentials precisely must take a different approach. While Red Bull, for example, can’t send text messages to specific consumers, it has successfully deployed science to orchestrate effective intentional word-of-mouth campaigns. After identifying influentials among its different target segments, the energy-drink company ensures that celebrities and other opinion makers seed the right messages among consumers, often through events. While it can’t be sure who will attend, Red Bull knows that those who do will be the kinds of consumers it seeks—and that the positive messages they will relay across their own social networks can generate a superior return for its marketing investment.
Marketers have always been aware of the effect of word of mouth, and there is clearly an art to effective word-of-mouth campaigning. Yet the science behind word-of-mouth equity helps reveal how to hone and deploy that art: it shows which messages consumers are likely to pass on and the impact of those messages, allowing marketers to estimate the tangible effect word of mouth has on brand equity and sales. These insights are essential for companies that want to harness the potential of word of mouth and to realize higher returns on their marketing investments.

About the Authors

Jacques Bughin is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office, Jonathan Doogan is an associate principal in the London office, and Ole Jørgen Vetvik is a principal in the Oslo office.

Notes

¹ The term word of mouth, as used in this article, means consumer-to-consumer communication with no economic incentives. The sender may, however, reap social gratification or rewards.
² See David Court, Dave Elzinga, Susan Mulder, and Ole Jørgen Vetvik, “The consumer decision journey,” mckinseyquarterly.com, June 2009.

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Unlocking the elusive potential of social networks

To realize the marketing potential of virtual activities, you have to make them truly useful for consumers.

McKinsey Quarterly

JUNE 2010 • Michael Zeisser

There is much hype about social networks and their potential impact on marketing, so many companies are diligently establishing presences on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. Yet the true value of social networks remains unclear, and while common wisdom suggests that they should be tremendous enablers and amplifiers of word of mouth, few consumer companies have unlocked this potential. At Liberty Interactive, which comprises many specialty e-commerce companies, we wrestle daily with the question of how to realize the promise of social networks.

… When you think of word of mouth as media, it becomes a form of content, and businesses can apply tried-and-true content-management practices and metrics to it. In addition, word of mouth generated by social networks is a form of marketing that must be earned—unlike traditional advertising, which can be purchased. We therefore concluded that we could succeed only by being genuinely useful to the individuals who initiate or sustain virtual world-of-mouth conversations.

So what does it mean to be useful in a world of virtual conversations enabled by social networks? … We have … learned a few lessons that can be encapsulated in two primary insights. First, a powerful way for a brand to be useful in the virtual world is to confer social importance on its users. Second, “virtual items” are critical to stimulating social interactions that may in turn generate word of mouth.

The power of importance

An effective way for a brand to be useful in the context of social networks is to make people who originate a word-of-mouth conversation seem important within their own social environment. Recognition by peers is a powerful motivator, and brands that allow users to gain it deliver real perceived value. When users publicize that recognition, it translates into word of mouth. Companies can confer this kind of importance—for example, by issuing achievement “badges” that users can post to their Facebook profiles or by deploying leader boards or achievement scores of all types. As Web sites evolve to become increasingly dynamic experiences that let people interact in real time, the value to core users of being recognized for their prominence in a community will only increase.

We’ve also learned never to underestimate the value consumers place on opportunities to brag online about their achievements. That’s made significantly easier through the clever integration of a Web site with Facebook and Twitter. We see this phenomenon daily—for example, on the forums of our Bodybuilding.com site. When members boast of reaching their target weight or other goals with help from Bodybuilding.com workouts, we receive authentic and credible word-of-mouth endorsements at almost no cost. In fact, if recent behavioral research is accurate, these experiences can create “contagions” in which the behavior of users is mirrored by their networks of friends, amplifying the word-of-mouth effect and reflecting well on the underlying brands.

The allure of virtual items

It’s our strong intuition that virtual items play an important role in facilitating virtual word of mouth. … While the notion of virtual goods—nonphysical objects used in online communities and games—still puzzles many executives, it’s quite apparent that consumers love them. People acquire or compete for virtual items obsessively on Foursquare, Zynga, and many other sites. …

So why do consumers pay real money for online objects that don’t actually exist? Their motives reinforce our notion that users seek online importance: they purchase virtual goods primarily for self-expression (such as virtual houses or virtual gifts) and for recognition (such as virtual badges for becoming, say, the “mayor” of a bar on Foursquare). … Brands should actively experiment with ways to use virtual goods as catalysts of word-of-mouth media.

Virtual gifting is becoming an important consumer activity among Facebook members. Today, much of this activity is free, but Facebook is introducing a virtual-currency “credit” system that will allow sellers to get real dollars for their gifts and other items. In the context of a social network, it is not a stretch to conceive of virtual gifts as important objects, especially as their availability can be strictly limited. …

We’ve also found that basic laws of consumer behavior still apply: consumers love a bargain, and companies should take full advantage of social networks as powerful notification tools. Users can be alerted to sales or to the expiration of a promotion, but companies must be mindful that these feeds and tweets are designed as catalysts to generate virtual word-of-mouth media. They are not social-media junk mail, but legitimate content objects—actual pieces of media that we want the initial recipients to distribute to their friends.

One final recommendation: no gimmicks. Forget dancing monkeys, artificial contests, or stupid tricks; they add no value and waste people’s time. A commitment to being useful in social-media activities means a commitment to creating only high-quality interactions. Again, regarding word of mouth as a media product makes it easier to define what quality means for your particular activities. There are clearly many ways for brands to make themselves useful to consumers, so managing virtual word of mouth goes well beyond maintaining a Facebook page or a Twitter account. Exactly how far remains to be seen, and companies should apply an experimental mind-set, while being careful not to overinvest.

Word-of-mouth marketing through social networks could emerge as an important tool in the marketer’s arsenal. That will depend on whether marketers can tame the fundamentally unpredictable and serendipitous nature of word of mouth without losing what makes it so valuable in the first place—its authenticity.

About the Author

Michael Zeisser, an alumnus of Mckinsey’s New York office, is a senior vice president at Liberty Media.

Fast Track to Recovery

Post-recession success depends on tapping the informal aspects of an organization and avoiding the temptation to rely solely on formal systems, processes, and programs.

strategy + business magazine

by Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan

Coming out of the worst recession of modern times will, for many companies, be more challenging than navigating the downturn itself. …

Two of the skills companies most need in this nascent phase of the economic turnaround are speed and adaptability. … Unfortunately, these are not strengths of the formal, rational organization, which is typified by analysis, strategies, structures, processes, and programs codified in charts, graphs, flowcharts, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. The capabilities most vital to recovery are actually embedded in the informal organization, which is emotional, highly interactive, and cross-organizational, and encompasses personal beliefs and values, peer relationships, consensus building, emerging ideas, social networks, and communities of common interest.

In most successful turnarounds and recoveries, informal activities accelerate behavior change and improved performance beyond what would have been possible through formal efforts alone. …

As critical as the informal, “soft” side of things is, it cannot become an end unto itself; it must be viewed as an approach or a tool for accelerating and enhancing hard results. In fact, when the informal and formal are in balance and aligned, the performance improvements and strategic advantages that accrue are tough to outpace. People feel emotionally satisfied when they are recognized for steps that lead to concrete goals. And concrete goals (as well as the steps that lead there) serve as motivating points for soft enablers such as sustained commitment, unleashed creativity, and collaboration across barriers. … Here are the five most salient challenges that companies can expect to face, and the potential impact of soft skills that management should consider.

1. Sustainable lower-cost operations. Recessionary cost cutting is typically aggressive and arbitrary, with little consideration of future needs. … Hence, recessionary cost cuts are mostly temporary and the costs come back quickly. Two aspects of the informal organization can help avoid this insidious “cost creep.”

• The informal organization is integrated across organizational boundaries; as a result, it can sustain lasting collaboration that is hard for competitors to match.
• Informally supported commitment lasts longer. Because of the emotional power of motivation, people feel good about, and take pride in, sustaining lower costs. For example, rather than implementing formal cost-cutting goals to trim US$50 million in expenses, Texas Commerce Bank reframed its objective to adopt a more energizing theme: eliminating whatever annoys bankers and drives customers crazy. …

2. Competitive advantage. Competitive advantage is most powerful when it is based on the few distinctive capabilities that a company can sustain over time, such as Southwest’s point-to-point travel system (its alternative to a hub-and-spoke network). To drive consistent company-wide skills — indeed, to derive a company’s identity and maintain an advantage over rivals from a set of company-wide skills — objectives must be consistent across the organization as well as from top to bottom. Both formal and informal mechanisms are needed to instill the operational focus into the company culture.

3. Breakthrough innovation. … A lot of companies can come up with an innovative, winning product or service once or twice, but the few that manage to do so routinely have mastered two critical capabilities: identifying and cultivating creatively gifted individuals, and nourishing informal networks. Ideally, gifted individuals are planted in parts of the organization where they can extend their interactions with people who can enrich their creative ideas as well as with people who can ensure that there will be appropriate support and buy-in. …

4. Superior customer service. Enterprises that excel at delighting their customers are masters of an institutional capability for customer empathy that goes well beyond the immediate sales transaction or customer interface. … Not surprisingly, they are able to command a premium price as well as maintain a virtually unassailable market position. …

5. Collaboration in a flattening world. Most enterprises today are facing some kind of new global reality — in their marketplace, in their operating model, or in their financial or human resources options. … We can no longer rely on formal mandates plus instinct and chance to make the critical connections — many of those connections are emotionally rather than rationally determined. Therefore, business today cries out for integration of the formal and informal.

No organization wants to merely survive. Unfortunately, as we are climbing out of the recession, many organizations appear to be stuck in survival mode. … More than ever, therefore, survivors need to cultivate a spirit that is not content to drag the workforce along in a quest for transformation in critical parts of the enterprise. Transformation can be achieved only if the informal organization is unearthed to energize and refocus cultural elements in positive ways: accelerating behavior change, promoting peer-to-peer interaction, and ensuring a positive emotional commitment to grow and win again. Just as it is important to have a vision that inspires ambitions beyond next year, it is critical to have an informal organization that supports, energizes, and challenges the formal. Both informal and formal dimensions are important influencers of behaviors that determine future performance and competitive position. We need the best of both worlds.

See “Leading Outside the Lines” by Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan, s+b, Summer 2010.

Author PROFILES:

• Jon Katzenbach is a senior partner with Booz & Company, where he leads the Katzenbach Center in New York. A cofounder of Katzenbach Partners LLC, he is the author or coauthor of eight books, including Why Pride Matters More Than Money: The Power of the World’s Greatest Motivational Force (Crown Business, 2003).
• Zia Khan is vice president of strategy and evaluation at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, and a senior fellow at the Katzenbach Center.

Voice of the Customer

Pay close attention to the voice of the customer to get clued into what otherwise might have been a missed opportunity.

1to1media.com

…Today especially, with companies' intense focus on retention, getting a deeper understanding the needs and wants of active, engaged customers could provide the answers that lead to survival and prosperity.
"Consumer needs shift a lot during a recession, so the companies that can't stay focused on the needs of their customers aren't going to do well," says Bruce Temkin, principal analyst at Forrester Research. "Those who are going to do well will cut out everything that isn't important to their customers, and increase investment in areas where there are more opportunities-and to do that well requires a very clear picture of who your customers are."
Ask me anything
Being customer focused does not simplify difficult business decisions. But it does help businesses look through the magnifying glass of customer value to make more profitable decisions. Pragmatically, many companies are listening harder to their customers not just to learn how to delight and enhance their experiences, but to learn how to curtail costs without inciting rebellion. One hotelier, for example, needed to cut costs but didn't want to negatively impact the customer experience of its most valuable customers. By analyzing survey responses gathered through its Clarabridge survey tool, the hotel operator made an interesting discovery. "It had been spending this money on lobby Internet kiosks to attract and retain customers, but it turned out that their premiere customers could care less, because they bring their own laptops," says Clarabridge CEO Sid Banerjee. "So they're not worrying about spending money on Internet kiosks anymore."…
When the entire organization listens to customer input, it can find new ways to improve customer experience. InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) uses its online customer communities … to solicit customer feedback for business units that might otherwise be abstracted from the customer experience. "Some members were saying they were frustrated at having to carry a lot of cards for each loyalty program, and the idea arose that it would be great to have everything in one place," says Cassandra Jeyaram, IHG global social marketing manager. So the company started offering custom-printed cards that reproduce the membership numbers for the customer's other relationships, such as airline and rental car programs. "That certainly wasn't an opportunity we had identified on our own." So far customers in 85 countries have availed themselves of the custom cards.
True dedication to customer insight means a willingness to dig for clues to unspoken preferences. … What it needed was to uncover opportunities to build customer value. …
Detailed survey data revealed that Gaylord's guests have extremely high baseline requirements, leaving little room for error and little room to genuinely exceed expectations. Restaurant quality proved to be an area with available upside but limited reward.
It was in front desk and bellhop experience that the company found both upside potential and significant ability to affect the customer experience by making relatively minor changes, such as slightly speeding the check-in process and encouraging bellmen to offer stories about the building. "We had seen some of these things in survey data before, but we only had loose correlations, and no way to establish baselines for satisfaction or to identify upside," says Tony Bodoh, manager of operations analysis for Gaylord Entertainment. "Now, we can focus on narrow areas that impact our customers' emotional investment, in a very targeted way." The tight statistical links between feedback, customer profiles, and business history, as well as the more timely processing of survey data, make each new piece of insight more relevant, and easier to act on.
Just over a year into its voice of the customer revamp, Gaylord's Bodoh says many of the company's locations are logging record customer satisfaction scores, despite flat spending. "Our results have challenged the belief that increased customer satisfaction has diminishing returns compared to the cost of implementing changes."
Balancing people and technology
Hearing customers isn't just about what they're saying; it's also about how well you're listening. VOC programs that only focus on automation and the discovery of common keywords can easily miss out on important contributions. "Voice of the customer [technology] does not eliminate the need for smart people in your company who can apply context and insight," Forrester's Temkin says.
Dell knows that well. The PC maker's IdeaStorm site is widely regarded as an important pioneer of direct customer engagement, and has been responsible for numerous improvements in Dell's product line. … To ensure that quality ideas with wider impact are not lost, the IdeaStorm manager and several department heads review each and every concept submitted.
"We have had several business units get involved in reading detailed reports [that list] more than just the most popular ideas, and are looking into launching more sites aimed at specific customer segments," says Caroline Dietz, Dell spokesperson and former IdeaStorm manager. "We don't expect a Fortune 50 CIO is going to be posting on IdeaStorm."
Sometimes a single pair of eyes can spot what the crowd misses. Xactware, a software developer for the construction industry, gets most of its insights from one-off commentary. … "We lost control of where the feedback was going, whether it was being responded to, or even if it was going to the right people," says David Nelson, Xactware marketing project manager. "Our experience hasn't been that 500 customers all say the same thing. Lots of our changes have been implemented based on one person saying something."
Working with enterprise feedback management company Allegiance, Xactware has made it a priority to close the loop on every relevant piece of customer feedback, and has implemented countless minor but valuable adjustments to its products and business processes as a result. … Says Nelson: "It blows our customers' minds when we tell them we're acting on their feedback."
Listening Through the Keyhole
If you have something to say about InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), chances are that someone there will hear about it. The company has invested heavily in a multipronged voice of the customer initiative, including operating both public and private online customer communities, as well as a comprehensive third-party monitoring strategy.
IHG began with private, invitation-only communities for select members-generally, those with highly valuable relationships or key demographics. These communities incubate new ideas for the company through solicited research and surveys, as well as unmoderated discussion and member blog posting. "It is absolutely critical to be transparent, and to allow dissenting voices to be heard," says Jenni Kolshak, Priority Club Connect community manager at IHG. "We don't delete posts, even if they are negative about our hotels and brands. You have to have the good and the bad if you want to be believed by your customers."
Part of IHG's community team actively combs and analyzes online discussions on travel sites and blogs, as well as Twitter feeds. …
After two years of experience with private communities, IHG recently "soft launched" a public community powered by Jive Software, drawing on some of its more outspoken advocates from the private sites to seed content and discussion. IHG plans to make its executives available to offer video responses to customer questions and input, and liberally used customer-submitted designs and media in the design of the new site. "We've had a positive lift from using photos shared by our customers in our campaigns and Web designs," says Cassandra Jeyaram, IHG, global social marketing manager.
Listening to customers is not a feel-good enterprise for IHG. "The goal is to make money for the company, and if people want to participate and comment, they have to join [the loyalty program] and be logged in, which we hope will promote both participation and more room nights," Kolshak says. "This will help us create more brand affinity and identify people who are brand advocates but we haven't identified yet."

How a Bad Salad Leads to Happy Customers and What Your Business Can Learn From It

Small Biz Bee Blog

by smallbizbee

My … wife … came home from work yesterday and was bubbling over with excitement. …

“What’s up?” I ask, “Why so cheery?”

“Not much”, she says all perky like, “Just enjoying my FREE 5 berry milkshake is all"…

“Free…how’d you manage that?”

They Messed Up My Salad - It Was Great!

And from there she launches into a story about how she went to a local burger chain for lunch, and they totally screwed up her salad order, had to remake it, and it took an extra 10 minutes before she got her food.

… Recognizing they maybe needed to do some service recovery with my wife, they gave her a $10 coupon for her troubles, and the salad was free (notice the free salad didn’t carry the same weight with her as the free milkshake).

So with her new found riches she had stopped off and got a milkshake on the way home, thus the good mood.

She had been telling everyone she knew … about her “good fortune”.

In her mind, the burger joint that completely botched her salad and cost her 10 minutes out of her day, walked on water and could do no wrong, and she was even recommending them to anyone who’d listen.

What’s Can We Learn

I think this story is a good illustration of the power righting a wrong. …

It’s almost as if she was happier that they screwed up, and made it right, than if they had of done it right the first time! They turned their mistake into a positive “word of mouth” worthy event.

How to Apply This to Your Business

1. You have to be doing things right most of the time for this to work.

2. Correct all wrongs immediately, and take ownership of them (the wrong salad could have been blamed on the new cook, but instead the establishment took responsibility and didn’t place blame)

3. Sometimes, take responsibility for miniscule mistakes. Once, Starbucks gave me a free drink because it took them 1 minute to make my mocha instead of 30 seconds. This reinforces in your customers mind your high standards, and service expectations.

Why It Works

1. You’re taking ownership, and in the customers mind acknowledging they did not get something from you they should have. Too often businesses try to sweep mistakes under the rug, fearing customers will be upset, only to upset customers more by skirting the issue.

2. You give your customer a reason to come back and try you out again. Once they see you normally get it right, you’ll have won them over. They’ll know it’s a rare occurrence you aren’t perfect.

3. You give them something very easy to talk about. They’ll be singing your praises for righting a wrong, just like my wife did. And a good story like that spreads.

Try it with your own business. The next time you don’t meet a customers expectations, do some service recovery. Or better yet, use the Starbuck’s method once in a while to reinforce your extremely high standards for quality and service. See if you can get them to talk about how great you are for screwing up!