When was the last time you were your customer?
When was the last time you were your customer?
You say you’ve got social media strategy. You say you’ve got great service. You say you’re customer-focused, customer-centric, and the customer is always right.
When was the last time you tested it out?
If you manage business for more than a sole proprietorship, then give your business a service test. Set up a list of a few tasks and go test out your sales and service teams. Call them up anonymously or set up a fake email account and try your internal processes out. If you work at a small business where you’d be recognized on the phone, have a friend do it for you.
“Press 1 if you would prefer to talk to a machine.”
Back in the day when I helped to run a call center, I’d have old college friends give the team a series of calls with a list of 3 tasks to accomplish:
1. Call in with a question. The correct answer the representative should give you is X. Score them 1-5 based on how close they get it right.
2. Call in requesting an application for the product. Write down the questions the representative asks you to ensure you’re qualified. At a minimum, they should ask you these 3 questions. Score them 5 points for each question they ask.
3. Email in requesting an application. A representative should respond and try to get you on the phone. Time how long it takes between your initial email and a response from a representative. Start with 30 points and deduct one point per every 5 minutes you wait. Scores can go negative!
At the end, they’d total up the number of points and email it to me. They’d call in at different times, different days, sometimes calling in and hanging up if they’d already talked to that person recently. Based on that, we’d know who was doing their jobs more or less well. Most important, we didn’t need to rely on guesswork to assess how we were doing.
Setting up a system like this isn’t difficult at all. It requires some thought about what tasks you value the most to be measured, and it does require having some friends willing to do it (or alternately, paying strangers to do it), but beyond that, it’s just a matter of having the testing pool go out and test your team.
Go out and be your customer. See if the experience you have matches what you expect your customers to have, and then make corrections as appropriate.
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Your name is your title
Social media expert?
Marketing guru?
PR wizard?
One of the most common questions asked in the discussion about personal titles and marketing superlatives is, if we shouldn’t call ourselves experts or gurus or ninja, what should we call ourselves?
In the martial arts, there’s one title that exists at the top of the hierarchy that eclipses all others that we can look to for inspiration: the concept of meijin.
Literally, meijin means “named person”. In the context of titles, a meijin is someone who is so well-known and so respected that their name is their title. They don’t need any other title, and their name is in fact a category of its own. For example, one well-known “name as title” person is Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris needs absolutely no title – his name is his title.
Look around the digital marketing space. Does Chris Brogan need a title? Not really, no. Does Avinash Kaushik? Does Gary Vaynerchuk? Does Seth Godin? These are people whose names are their titles. Look in your own industry, your own vertical. Whose name needs no explanation?
How do you become regarded as a meijin? The answer is as simple as it is difficult: by being the absolute best at what you do until your name is synonymous with that area of expertise.
What if you need to put something else on your business cards until you’re recognized by name? Luckily, we talked about that back in October when we discussed stacking heuristics.
One final caution: avoid at all costs billing yourself as someone else. Aspiring to be the next Steve Jobs or the next Bill Gates pigeonholes your reputation as being a shadow of someone else, at best a copy, at worst a pale imitation. Even more dangerously, it confines your own mind in a prison of someone else’s thinking. Oscar Wilde said it best – be yourself, because everyone else is already taken.
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3 important questions to ask about marketing studies
Every morning, my first few tasks when I get to the office are to make a cup of coffee, fire up my RSS reader, and start digging into the day’s news. Nearly every morning, I see the same thing that makes me emote a /facepalm: a headline that reads, “New data shows…” or “New study shows…” followed by an infographic or a witty blog post.
In almost none of these articles do you ever read about the data itself, just the hasty conclusions. This is a major problem because marketers who don’t do their own research and rely on other organizations can be led badly astray, damaging their businesses. Relying on bad data and bad research is like sailing a ship by a faulty map: sooner or later, you’re going to hit an iceberg or sandbar or reef and your ship will sink.
There are three fundamental ways that data collection can go wrong. I’m going to vastly oversimplify here – I recommend reading up on Tom Webster’s blog along with the AAPOR best practices guide if you want to seriously dig in.
Selection bias is when you have a sample of the population that is non-representative of the whole population. For example, if I ask for volunteers to take a survey about, say, Jay Baer’s popularity, only people who have a strong opinion about Jay are likely to respond to the volunteer survey. Thus, my data is skewed.
Measurement bias is when you have a problem in how you measure your data. There are so many ways that measurement can go wrong. For example, if you opt-out of Klout, your Twitter handle returns the same error code as someone who was never part of the Klout database. That’s an important distinction. Doing a quick scan of the Klout API and then rushing an infographic out the door about how many people have opted-out of Klout creates bad conclusions because you have a measurement bias problem.
Finally, intervention bias gives you bad data when you’re trying to compare data. You see this most often with companies offering some kind of paid service and pushing a study to back up their claims. I ran into this with an SEO firm that was claiming its method for boosting SEO was incredibly powerful and they rushed to attribute all of the company’s SEO improvements based on their work. What they failed to account for were all of the other marketing activities that were occurring at the same time that were interfering with the data. Amusingly, after I stopped working with the company, I looked at our SEO data and saw that we were getting the same (or better) results without them.
Whenever you read marketing material disguised as content from a company trying to sell you something and offering research or data to validate it, see if their marketing material offers answers to these three questions:
1. Who did you get your data from (and how did you pick those people)?
2. How did you measure your data?
3. If you drew a conclusion from your data, how did you account for other activities messing with your results?
If the marketing material doesn’t include solid answers to these questions, then do not bet your business, your job, or your marketing budget on the conclusions being offered, because there’s every chance that either a self-serving conclusion was drawn or the data is faulty. Accept it as a nice fluffy piece of content to mark as read and move onto the next thing in your blog reader or inbox.
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Flip the coin to tell the story
It’s now the first day of February, so we’re a month into my three words of story, restoration, and compassion. All three are moving ahead very intensely, and I want to share one of the lessons I’ve learned about story.
Early on, I thought stories were just narratives. You tell what happened. This tends to lead to run-on expositions that don’t offer anything interesting. When I first chose my three words for 2012, I asked some great storytellers like Ron Ploof for advice about how to construct better stories.
One of the immediate takeaways that I got from Ron’s advice as well as others is the idea of flipping the coin. When you flip a coin, you see obvious and immediate change, change that is very difficult to ignore. The state of the coin has flipped, and you see the opposite side of what you were just looking at.
Flipping the coin automatically creates a state change, which is a key ingredient to telling a better story. At each section of the story you tell, you need to change the state of the story to keep it compelling. For example, in my recent travelogue’s first draft, there were about 8 more entries in the post, all basically saying, “STILL WAITING OMG” or some variant of that. Any of my friends who were on Twitter or IM with me that afternoon got the raw, unedited versions of those.
The thing about those lines is that they didn’t accomplish a state change besides me getting grumpier. As a result, they didn’t advance the story forward. The coin was laying there on the table, unflipped. I pruned those entries out as a result, and the end version of the story was much tighter.
Take a look at your sales and marketing copy. Take a look at your stories. If you’re not changing states as you tell the story, then your story will not be compelling at all, and you’ll lose people very quickly. If you think about it, this is consistent with every bad sales pitch you’ve had to endure. The worst sales pitches are not only when the salesman fails to take a breath, they’re also a long litany of unchanging details: this product will make you slimmer, wealthier, more attractive to the gender of your choice, etc. It introduces no conflict.
Compare this to an outstanding salesman who tells a compelling story that interweaves loss and gain, profit and debt, neglect and attraction, ugly and sexy, and you immediately understand how important that coin flip is.
Go back to your content and check it for coin flips. If the coin never turns over, you’ve got some rewriting to do.
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How to track return customers using Google Analytics
One of the most valuable people to visit your website is your existing customer. This is the person who’s already bought into you, the person who has already decided you’re worth doing business with. This person is leagues more valuable than the random pay per click visitor. Do you know what your returning customers want from your website efforts?
Here’s one way to make that determination. If you’re using Google Analytics and you have a place on your website where only returning customers go, this will help you identify and track them.
First, you’ll need to modify your Google Analytics code on that customer-only page. This can be a thank you page after someone has filled out a form or purchased something from you. It can also be the screen immediately after a login to a web service, or even a special customer-only landing page that you direct email subscribers to.
Create a custom variable on that page in Google Analytics. Here’s the format:
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',
1, // This custom var is set to slot #1. Required. You can have up to 5.
'Member Type', // The name of the custom variable. Required.
'Paying Customer', // The value of the custom variable. Required.
1 // Sets the scope to visitor-level. Required for tracking customers.
]);
Place this within your Google Analytics tracking code for that page only. You only need it on the page or pages that returning customers visit the most.
Next, you’ll want to see what your returning customers are actually doing. Create a custom traffic segment in Google Analytics and identify it by the customer variable name and value. For the example code above, it might look like this:
Congratulations, you now have a way to identify returning customers! Browse through Google Analytics data with this traffic segment on to see only those returning customers and what they did on your site, where they went, what was most popular, where they came from, and arguably most important of all: did they convert again?
If there are certain pages which returning customers visit far more than others, you may even want to think about rewriting them or focusing on them. For example, if returning customers are constantly revisiting a tech support page about a certain product, you might have an early indicator that something is wrong with the product.
Obviously, you can tailor these custom variables to anything you like. If you host a website with a variety of subscription levels, you could track to see whether Gold members visit different pages than, say, Silver members. The sky’s the limit with custom variables and your returning customers.
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Why social media is like ranch dressing
Have you ever wondered what the heck ranch dressing is? I have. It’s very tasty stuff, making almost anything better. According to Wikipedia, it was first invented in 1954 by the Henson family at their dude ranch, the Hidden Valley Ranch. Eventually, it became so popular that in 1972, it was bought by Clorox (yes, the bleach maker) and made commercially available. Internet-savvy cooks have managed to replicate the original recipe as follows:
1 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 teaspoon dried chives
1/2 teaspoon dried parsley
1/2 teaspoon dried dill weed
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper
Mix well and let sit overnight.
Ranch dressing is known for its ability to make just about anything taste better. Salad, snacks, baked potatoes, you name it, ranch dressing can probably improve it, which is why it overtook Italian dressing in 1992 as the best-selling salad dressing in the world.
It’s also known for being hideously bad for you in larger quantities, since 2 tablespoons clock in at about 145 calories, 94% of which is fat.
Finally, Clorox had to work some scary chemical magic to make it shelf-stable, since so much of the recipe is dairy-based and would otherwise spoil within days of making it. Take a look at your generally available commercial bottle of dressing and you’ll find antifungal drugs like natamycin in it. This is why it’s generally a better idea to copy the recipe above and make it at home when needed.
Here’s the thing about ranch dressing: its powers only go so far. Put ranch dressing on a salad and it makes for a better salad. If the salad is really good to begin with, you don’t need much dressing. If the salad is a pile of shredded iceberg lettuce that’s wilted, you’re going to be making ranch dressing soup in order to be able to eat it.
You can (though you shouldn’t) put ranch dressing on things like piles of paper shreddings. Again, it’ll be barely edible, but the dressing will manage to help you overcome what is otherwise something you wouldn’t eat.
So what does a very tasty salad dressing have to do with social media? In many ways, social media is just like ranch dressing:
1. You have to do a lot of crazy things to it if you’re not making it fresh yourself. The end product is okay, but not nearly as good (or good for you) as when you do it yourself.
2. It will improve just about any product or service to some degree to make it more palatable.
3. It’s bad for you in large quantities. After all, if you spend 100% of your time on social, you’re spending 0% of your time on your actual business.
4. If your product or service is bad, you can overcome it to some degree, but you and your company’s health are much better off making a better product or service first, and then adding social media to it afterwards.
Enjoy the salad and the social media!
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