Real Estate Relativity

Motivation, ability, and triggers influence users’ website behavior, according to this research paper by Stanford researcher BJ Fogg. This is important if you’re targeting specific behavioral action (e.g., filling out a lead form). Before a user takes a desired action, she must be sufficiently motivated to perform the desired action, have the ability to do so, and be appropriately triggered to take action.

Fogg’s model is fairly easy to digest. For example, let’s say you want to drive more listing appointments (the target behavior), there is a trade-off between motivation and ability. In this scenario, a user’s motivation is somewhat variable (either they are interested in the property or not). Thus, as website designer you should concentrate on the “ability” side of the equation: do you make it a simple fill-in-your-email-address form, or do you make users fill out more detailed information prior to submitting their request? On this issue, Fogg concludes:

The implication for designers is clear: Increasing motivation is not always the solution. Often increasing ability (making the behavior simpler) is the path for increasing behavior performance.

Contemplating appropriate triggers is where it gets really interesting for website designers. According to Fogg, without an appropriate trigger, targeted behavior will not occur even if motivation and ability is high. There are three elements of a successful trigger: the trigger must be noticed, the trigger is associated with the targeted behavior, and the trigger occurs WHEN we are both motivated and able to perform the targeted behavior. Fogg argues that timing is THE critical element and is often missing:

In fact, this element is so important the ancient Greeks had a name for it: kairos – the opportune moment to persuade. As I see it, the opportune moment for behavior performance is any time motivation and ability put people above the behavior activation threshold.

Poorly-timed triggers (e.g., pop-ups) generally do not drive a user to take a targeted action and can even cause a negative emotion. Thus, Fogg argues that proper triggers will align with collaborative CRM concepts (which I earlier discussed), functioning mostly as “signals” or “facilitators”. I encourage you to read Fogg’s research paper (all 7 pages) as he further details the discreet elements under motivation, ability, and triggers that influence website behavior.

Photo credit: ell brown (off to Italy)

The Gartner Hype Cycle is a useful graph for analyzing technology hype. Looking at the Gartner graph, I’ll posit we’re somewhere near the “Slope of Enlightenment” and the “Plateau of Productivity” with respect to social media. Over the past couple of years, business leaders have stepped up to the plate and faced some serious pitches while trying to figure out a sound business strategy that leverages social/emerging media. Indeed figuring out how to intelligently deploy emerging media can be like facing pitcher Stephen Strasburg.

Are augmented reality concepts a curve ball to your mobile strategy? Are emerging legal issues surrounding privacy, intellectual property ownership, open source and cloud computing licensing, etc, a change-up to your business game plan? Is the iPad a fastball?

It’s clear the pace of emerging media will continue unabated. Business leaders will continue to face a tsunami of innovation. Thus, it’s great to have a working archetype, or mantra to fall back on when analyzing whether to adopt an emerging media in your business plan. To this regard, Steve Harney has some excellent tips.

During a recent interview I had with Steve, he articulated a process he calls the “5C’s”. Harney’s list of 5C’s is a useful checklist to run through when you’re thinking about how to leverage emerging media—particularly social media—to achieve a business objective. Steve’s successful blog, Facebook page, and KCM Quick Report represent a choreographed social presence that he’s used to build a community that supports his business objectives.

Steve Harney’s 5C’s:

1. Concept: Understand the concept of what you’re trying to do. What is your brand? What do you want to be seen as? What are your core values?
2. Conviction: Have conviction to your brand. Once you have established your concept, how much conviction do you have to that brand concept? Ensure that your brand concept is translated into everything you do. The allure of emerging media—particularly social media—is that it’s omnipresent and relatively easy to deploy…and easy to get side-tracked. For example, when Steve launched his Facebook page, he decided that he did not want to dabble in Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc, because those social media activities—although fun, engaging, and playful—were not aligned with the core concepts of his brand.
3. Consistency: Let your community know that you’re there for them on a consistent basis. For Steve’s brand it’s important to blog every day and update Facebook every day. His community has come to expect this. He therefore must maintain consistency to meet this expectation.
4. Content: Focus on getting and supplying great content. Ensure that your content is strong and relevant to the community you’ve developed. Act like a curator.
5. Collaboration: Allow your community to come up with the answers. Provide an environment that promotes sharing of ideas. Bringing minds together so they can learn from themselves is the key driver to getting the community passionate about you and your brand. Actively facilitate discussions that align with the Concept of your brand.

Photo credit: david.nikonvscanon

This study focuses on how to find similarities amongst individuals using social media based on their behavioral characteristics. Finding such similarities across myriad social networks has beneficial uses: making users aware of other users with similar interests, finding users who comment on the same blogs, and enhancing already existing recommender systems (e.g., Pandora’s partnership with Facebook). Would be interesting to see a real estate application using these theories.

Facebook is at the epicenter of issues surrounding “publicity vs privacy” as marketers seek to leverage the social web to engage existing and new consumers. This CNET article is a really good summary of issues swirling around the latest changes Facebook has made to its data sharing policies. Here are the salient take-aways:

• Facebook marketing “partners” (e.g., shopping sites, news sites, etc) have seen huge jumps in referral traffic after implementing Facebook’s “social plug-ins”
• Despite the success Facebook marketing partners may experience, security issues have emerged with the implementation of these social plug-ins
• Facebook’s brand image is rising with adults 18-34 but dropping with adults 35+

Brands appear to benefit by tightly integrating Facebook into their customer outreach efforts. For example, this MediaWeek article (thanks @ReggieRPR for the heads-up) reports that Starbuck’s Facebook page is valued at $20 million. Nevertheless, the CNET article points out interesting issues that could impact Facebook’s marketer outreach efforts. The core of the issue is the inherent tension between publicity vs privacy; that is, just because someone makes something public does not mean they necessarily want it publicized. Danah Boyd in her keynote address at the 2010 SXSW Interactive made this latter point, as well as the following observations:

• Technologists’ have a mantra that “privacy is dead”, but this is not true
• People still care about privacy and the “public by default” “private through effort” dichotomy represents an inherent tension for individuals wanting to navigate online social worlds (Danah was referencing the fact that in many social networks users’ personally identifiable information and activities conducted through these social networks are rendered “public” by default and that users have to proactively change their privacy settings to make such information and activities less public or wholly private)
• Marketers should remember that just because you can “see” someone does not mean they want to be “seen” by you
• A Pew study showed that most adult social network users are privacy conscious (see related Pew study here showing that younger adults seem to be exerting even more control over their digital reputations)
• Product developers need to think through publicity-vs-privacy-vs-control issues if they want to develop and launch successful products that tap the inherent benefits of the online social world

It will be interesting to see whether consumers will or will not readily use Facebook’s social plug-ins as privacy issues continue to gain mainstream media attention. What are your views?

Photo: alancleaver_2000

Two articles recently caught my interest. The first article from the Financial Times, Smarter leaders are betting big on data (registration required) focuses on how companies use data analytics for business intelligence purposes. The best quote from this article:

Data is the new plastics

The second article from the Los Angeles Times, He’s start-ups’ best friend, profiled angel investor Ron Conway and his theories about investing in start-ups. The most telling quote from this article:

His current focus is “real-time data” companies that help people share what they’re doing instantly – using text, photos and video. “This sector is going to be huge,” he said.

As real-time data begins to inundate firms more and more by virtue of their forays into the social web and mobile world, data analytics offers a way for firms to utilize this data in novel ways to deliver more engaging and relevant experiences to their customers. For example, a firm could use data analytics in a predictive manner to dynamically deliver more relevant web pages based on consumers’ behavior throughout a firm’s website. Similarly, firms can use a service like Flowtown in conjunction with a service like First American Core Logic’s lead qualification services to gain insight into a registrant by combining their social persona with their transactional persona and then deliver relevant data and content based on this combined persona. Firms that begin to leverage data analytics will have distinct advantages over their competition in the near and long-term future.

Collaborative CRM strategies offer firms unparalleled opportunities for establishing more meaningful relationships with their customers and clients.  Mobile CRM is closely aligned to collaborative CRM concepts. This research paper characterizes collaborative CRM as:

The notion of collaborative CRM is still in discussion and has two interpretations that are often mixed…The first is closely connected with communicative CRM and focuses on interaction channels (e.g. phone, fax, e-mail, self service portals) between a company and its direct customers. The second extends the CRM concept on the level of value chains and business networks. This approach consolidates concepts of networked organizations and marketing to enable the creation of customer relations and value at a network level by sharing or pooling of network resources and capabilities…It enables producers, distributors and service providers to extend their customer acquisition, retention and development beyond their company borders and even to involve the customer directly.

Fundamental concepts of Web 2.0 and the social web such as transparency, authenticity, trust, engagement, and listening underpin collaborative CRM concepts. Similarly, customers’ demands for immediacy and relevancy in communications further support collaborative CRM. And mobile technologies have the potential to be the catalyst to firms’ implementation of collaborative CRM practices. But as pointed out in the research paper mobile technologies are not a panacea for collaborative CRM. The researchers point out that to facilitate collaborative CRM goals, existing business processes must be redesigned so as to take advantage of the unique characteristics of mobile technologies while delivering additional value to customers. Many companies are simply using mobile technologies to deliver information in a one-dimensional manner (i.e., a messaging service) as opposed to a multi-dimensional manner.

The authors conclude with several recommendations to consider when setting up a collaborative CRM strategy:

1. Set up appropriate customer segments, which allows firms to deliver individualized services
2. The CRM system must integrate mobile data (mobile sales, mobile content usage, location based services, etc)
3. Ensure customers understand that a firm’s mobile services offer enhanced value so they will make use of these services
4. Firms should consider specialized mobile CRM data analytics platforms that integrate with core CRM systems because current core CRM platforms lack sufficient sophistication to account for mobile CRM data needs

Photo credit: The Lightworks

Word of mouth marketing–WOM–can be a powerful form of marketing. Some claim it is the most powerful. Here’s a short video that hopefully highlights the potentiality of WOM power. Let me know what you think.

The Power of Word of Mouth (WOM) Marketing from Eric Bryn on Vimeo.

This research report delves into how Microsoft used a grassroots idea management system to encourage individuals who do not routinely participate in “formal” product development processes to contribute their ideas to new product development initiatives. Out of 1,491 users, 315 ideas were generated, 100 prototypes produced, with six ideas absorbed into product teams.

Microsoft approached this process in four phases: pose a challenging business problem (Microsoft posed challenges on Peer2Peer advertising, identity-based systems services, and social computing), foster community ideation, filter/refine the best ideas, and launch/integrate qualified ideas into designated product pathways. Once an idea is submitted, community participants had a chance to vote, comment, and extrapolate on those ideas. Not so surprising was the fact that development and sales/marketing personnel participated the most. Nevertheless, the researchers cited several instances where other types of participants valued the exercise because it allowed them to informally break out of their silos and contribute to an overall corporate goal.

Despite the success of the system, the researchers recommended several areas for Microsoft to improve:

• Foster meaningful participation across the broader corporate community by offering incentives that would allow individuals to justify deviating from their normal job functions
• Use business relevant criteria in the voting process, not “popularity” voting
• Measure and appreciate outcomes beyond revenue (the authors cite improved workforce ideation skills, cross-functional cooperation and pollination of ideas, and breaking down silos)
• Structure the idea submitting phase so that it cuts off at some point; some ideas that were submitted towards the end of the process were not seen or voted on
• Great ideas center around challenge problems (i.e., focus ideas around business critical issues to resolve)
• Have ideas meet some minimum threshold so as to weed out truly frivolous ideas
• Encourage product developers to review relevant ideas in the system that previously had not been acted upon; this ameliorates the perception that the system is an “idea graveyard”
• Clearly label each phase of the innovation system/process so it enables users to fully understand their contributions within each phase
• Create a support system for users whose ideas were not selected but nevertheless want to further develop them; some people are simply passionate about their idea and are willing to spend their own time developing such, and the idea management system should have a template for them to follow

A idea management system can operate as a competitive advantage for firms. By internalizing and facilitating an idea groundswell not only are firms harnessing internal talent but they’re creating valuable intellectual property assets that can potentially deliver a huge competitive advantage.

Influence on Twitter is not necessarily tied to the number of followers one has, at least this is one of the conclusions in this report on Twitter influence which came to my notice by a @papadimitriou recent tweet. The core finding: it’s more influential to have an engaged audience that actively retweets and mentions the user, and one keeps this audience engaged by frequently interacting with this audience (see common sense paragraph below).

The dataset used in the report consisted of nearly 2 billion follow links among over 54 million users who produced over 1.7 billion tweets. Here’s a link to a website the report authors set up that further describes the dataset. The report compares three measures of influence: indegree (i.e., number of followers one has), retweets, and mentions. The most followed users were news sites, sports stars, and politicians. The most retweeted were content aggregation sites like @Mashable and @TwitterTips, @GuyKawasaki, and @TheOnion. The most mentioned individuals were mostly celebrities.

The report found that retweets are primarily content driven (including both the username and link to a source), whereas mentions are mostly identity driven. In looking at retweets and mentions, individuals who were both retweeted and mentioned the most showed the highest engagement metrics (i.e., conversing with their audience), as well as posting creative and interesting tweets.

Finally, the report focused on how much influence “ordinary users” can exert within the Twittersphere. In this case, the authors looked at how completely unknown users exerted tremendous influence (as measured by retweets and/or mentions) during serious news events. By limiting their tweets to a single news topic, users like @oxfordgirl quickly gained influence.

This report, I suppose, just reinforces common sense at some level. But it’s nice to see someone crunching the numbers to reinforce one’s intuition.

Photo: soundfromwayout

This research paper focusing on the hotel industry indicates that although delighted customers have generally positively views of brands, a satisfied customer will more likely take action supportive of loyalty marketing constructs (i.e., actually book a return trip) because they have an emotional connection to the brand. Thus, the researchers suggest that marketers focus on loyalty programs that seek to instill positive emotional experiences with the brand. Such mechanics go beyond baseline experiences like prompt response times, meaningful communications, knowing where a customer is in the life-cycle of a transaction, and extend to activities that prompt a positive emotional response (like receiving a handwritten thank you card).

This research paper focuses on the influence of word of mouth (WOM) on customers’ perception of service. It’s axiomatic that negative WOM can significantly impact brand reputation. Studying the effect of WOM on such perceptions, though, is another matter. And the research article delves into some interesting bits. First, customers’ perceived service value influences their revisit intention, which in turn influences positive or negative WOM. Second, gender influences WOM. The study points out that women trend more towards a relational aspect versus men who are more trial-and-error focused:

For female customers, relational service quality will have a stronger total influence on the WOM than core service quality.

For male customers, core service quality will have a stronger total influence on WOM than relational quality.

The total effect of relational quality on WOM will be stronger for female customers than the male.

 The total effect of core quality on WOM will be stronger for male than female.

The implications seem fairly obvious: focus on delivering superior relational and core experiences. The study suggests different methods of CRM (call scripts, greetings, etc) based on gender, especially where the CRM involves human-to-human interaction. In real estate, this could trickle down to agents’ initial interactions with cusomters too: for men, generally, get right to the point, whereas for women, generally, focus on establishing a relationship first and ease into the data as relationship-focused interactions mature.

This research paper on CRM strategies used by RBC Royal Bank of Canada (Bahamas), analyzes whether the bank successfully applied the four P’s of CRM (planning, people, process, and platform). It’s well established that financial success is tied to a well executed CRM strategy which drives customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. What this research paper found was that although the bank lists CRM as a strategic initiative and policy, it has not integrated the CRM process at each customer touch point. The methodology used to correct the problem was instituting a wide-ranging customer satisfaction survey initiative to ascertain–from the customers’ viewpoints–where the service breakdowns and gaps actually occurred and to make changes accordingly at those points.

According to this MIT Technology Review article, agile groups with fluid ideation and development team dynamics routinely create more innovative products. Yet commercialization of an innovative product is another matter. Successful monetization of a product requires a disciplined approach towards continuous systems and process improvements. But herein resides a trap: once an innovative product becomes systemized, further innovation on that product can become frozen as profitability goals dictate less variance in the process. Companies like W.L. Gore & Associates seemed to have solved this dilemma.

This blog article on “controlled serendipity” spurred me to conduct a little content curating of my own, resulting in this gem of a research paper that documents how the BBC utilizes Linked Data technologies to make it easier for BBC users to navigate its vast programming database.

The first article discusses how the Web collective–the user commons if you will–is benefiting from individual efforts at curating content, done largely as a free service driven by a spirit to share.

Sharing has become a reflex action when people find an interesting video, link or story. Great content going viral isn’t new. But the sharing mentality is no longer confined to the occasional gems. It’s for everything we consume online, large or small.

I think anyone engaged in the social Web would readily agree with this sentiment. It’s what makes participating in this distributed forum so fun. The article also points out, however, that the vast content mines that exist can be somewhat difficult to navigate to find true gems. Thus, the implication is that content providers need to step up to the plate and deliver content systems that make it easier on Web “content curators”.

The research paper referenced above describes how the BBC used a concept called Named Entity Recognition (NER) to extract concepts from textual input. This allowed for more efficient human editorial input to ensure that these concepts were accurate. Once approved these “concepts” were transformed into links appearing on a Web page. This process then allowed the BBC to use the “concept links” to create user journeys through their site. All this is based on semantic web principles. The future looks bright, indeed, for those of us who constantly scour the Web for salient content.

I love it when research/theory manifests in application/practicality. In 2007, I wrote about research being conducted on semantic analysis related to social media and blogs, and now there are companies using products stemming from this type of research.

Information Week covered text analytics, describing how JetBlue uses text analytics to understand customer sentiment from email messages, which informed the airline how to draft its customer bill of rights. And KMWorld discusses how the burgeoning field of “customer experience analysis” uses text analytics to increase customer engagement and loyalty.

Customers today aren’t just customers–they’re influencers and social networkers. Across the Web at any hour, they’re sharing observations about your company’s products and services, and those of your competitors…These new modes of customer behavior make it essential for companies to move beyond traditional ways of gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer information - Information Week

For a long time, text analytics was a technology in search of a business need. Now, thanks to social media, the need is there; the question is whether the technology can ramp up fast enough to be commercial – KMWorld

Where social media in real estate sometimes has the floor manners of a dog’s breakfast, it’ll become increasingly important for real estate firms to engage in text-sentiment analysis as part of their overall CRM and customer experience efforts. Here’s a list of companies that offer text-sentiment analysis services:

• Ata Plana
• Jodange
• Radian6
• Attensity
• Clarabridge

Photo credit: mnapoleon

This research paper, Power, media culture and new media, delves into social justice issues surrounding the democratizing effects of new media. The paper points out that new media benefits (e.g., easier access to information through widespread platforms like mobile devices) are not equally shared or distributed across class, race, or national origin. The paper also implicitly points out that the use of mash-ups along with the increasing diversity of media outlets could create a “ripe” environment for effective government-sanctioned propaganda campaigns.

Similarly, the new media environment where essentially everyone can be a “content producer” offers unprecedented opportunities for government surveillance and ultimate suppression and/or obfuscation of speech by using new media outlets as viral engines to discredit speech that’s counter to government views or objectives. The author does point out some positive reverberations from new media harmonics; and this is the alignment of human rights initiatives with new media (as embodied in such organizations like Mothers Fighting for Others). Nevertheless, the paper ends with a caution that discriminatory (and by implication, repressive) actions can re-emerge in new media, despite the overarching democratizing effects of the medium.

Does this paper relate to real estate? Not directly. It’s simply a great education piece on the broader implications of our new media economy and society.

Writing a “playscript” is an incredibly powerful way to conduct a competitive business review, according to this Harvard Business Review article (subscription required). The article advocates writing a “playscript” using characters and character analysis to define your company and competitive landscape for use as a foundational element in corporate strategy development.

The article argues that “traditional” strategy tools like five forces maps and blue ocean thinking are outdated because they assume a static competitive environment as opposed to a rapidly evolving one. The article argues that by drafting a “playscript”, companies are in a much better position to map the landscape and anticipate emergent competitive forces.

In developing a playscript, the article suggests focusing on the following:

1) Draft a current playsript: Broadly describe the setting in which you operate by identifying the other characters, their motivations, what role your company plays, how this role is perceived by others; it’s important to view your role as critically as you can through the eyes of others (i.e., perception is reality); map the links among all the actors and the rules that govern them; give voice to the value your organization adds.

2) Rewrite your playscript: the goal here is to rewrite your playscript and, if possible, reinvent the playscript for an entire sector by answering such questions like “Can my organization attract new alliances to my sector where I can then leverage these alliances to add to an existing link or create a new link in a customer-centered value chain?”; determine where there’s a value need and fill this need (the article cites Intrawest as an example of a company that filled a value need by creating alliances with partners that deliver an exceptional destination living experience which has allowed Intrawest to emerge as a dominant player in managing experiential destination resorts, whereas before its focus was on developing these types of properties).

3) Future-proof your playscript: consider how changes in your customer needs will affect your company by finding the correlation between who your customers are, what they want, and how they get the things they want (the article cites IKEA as a company that’s done this well by foreseeing high volatility in the prices governing the wood it uses to make its products so it purchased forests in Poland and the Baltic states to help stabilize prices, thus allowing it to confidently focus on dominating the low cost segment of the “lifestyle furnishings” market).

Since 2005, we’ve seen many playscripts written and re-written in the real estate industry with the advent of Trulia, Zillow, Redfin, etc. Since 2007, we’ve seen new marketing and customer acquisition playscripts written and re-written via the explosion of social media and social networking. And currently we’re seeing playscripts written and re-written with the emergence of mobile applications and augmented reality. What’s your playscript that will allow you to position your firm as a dominate player in your market? How do you plan to adapt to the changing needs of your clients and customers, especially in terms of mobile solutions? Who are the dominate characters in your company, your competitors, and the industry at large? Who’d you cast as Othello, Brutas, Caesar, Puck, Mr. White, Mr. Pink, Mr. Blonde?

Photo: tanakawho

This Harvard Business Review article (subscription necessary) makes a strong case for companies to create customer strategy departments and positions. One section of the article focuses on “Customer-facing functions” and makes some great recommendations:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) responsibility should migrate away from corporate IT and into the customer strategy department since CRM helps companies assess customers needs and wants and that’s the role of customer strategists
• Market research should break-out of the marketing department silo and extend to all departments and focus bilaterally on the aggregate and the individual (for example, creating customer profiles as espoused in the book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR) with a singular focus on customer for life (CLV) and customer equity metrics to measure success (here’s a sample lifetime value of a customer analysis from the Database Marketing Institute that will help you begin thinking about CLV metrics
• Customer strategists should drive the product development process rather than the engineers; the article notes that NOKIA launched NOKIA Beta Labs in Asia and enjoys 60% market share there because, in part, this developer community helps drive the product development process, whereas in the U.S. Nokia pursued a different strategy that has far less consumer input and has suffered

Voice of the customer is not a new concept in product design and development. It’s sure refreshing to see HBR tackle this issue. What’s your view of creating a customer strategist role in a company?

Photo: ishrona

What factors influence effective cross-functional team environments that spur the greatest innovations and competitive advantage? The authors of this study (.pdf) (focusing on manufacturing) determined that baldly implementing a cross-functional team approach is not a universal good. Notably, the authors found that cross-functional teamwork involving marketing may have a negative effect (the authors noted too, however, that this finding contradicts earlier studies). The authors conclude that companies should focus cross-functional teams on product design, development, and engineering so as to yield the highest gains in terms of innovation. I’ll posit that this finding can be applied to firms outside the manufacturing industry that are focused on software development and related product development activities.

Interestingly, this study (.pdf) concludes that many marketing departments exert positive influence on a firm’s overall market innovation in the following areas: advertising, relationship management, segmentation, targeting, and positioning. Marketing departments can influence product innovations through their overarching customer knowledge and insight into trends. Thus, a way to effectively involve marketing in cross-functional teams focused on software-related product development activities is to have the marketing team drive a voice of the customer ethos throughout the ideation and development process.

This study (.pdf) delves into programmatic methodology that can be used to predict strong and weak ties between users of a social network. From a community manager’s perspective, this is important because predictive activities can alleviate some oversight tasks while intelligently satisfying the needs of community members. As an example of practical implications of their research, the authors note that:

When users make privacy choices, a system could make educated guesses about which friends fall into trusted and untrusted categories.

…and…

Consider a politician or company that wants to broadcast a message through the network such that it only passes through trusted friends.

From a marketing perspective, it’s important to understand this as way to drive customer loyalty because as social networks continue to grow, predictive systems that deliver more relevant information in meaningful ways will drive overall customer loyalty. This could be a huge value add for such social network marketing/branding services like Facebook pages.

Related post: Peering Under the Hood at Facebook

To what extent does corporate reputation affect customer loyalty? This study (.pdf, begin reading at page 28) found that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the second most important factor influencing corporate reputation (with overall competency being first). In fact, CSR was found to have a higher impact on corporate reputation than product price. The authors posit that CSR impacts customer loyalty because such corporate behavior elicits customers’ positive emotions. Left unresolved is whether a company can over-leverage such CSR activities in its push to drive customer loyalty. In other words, where is a marketing line crossed in customers’ eyes where a negative emotion is associated with a company’s overt efforts to leverage its CSR activities; is there diminishing returns on such “cause marketing” activities.

Related post: Positive Authority and Digital Reputation

What factors keep an online community happy, involved, and engaged? The authors of this study (.pdf) found four primary things influence these three factors:

• Purpose: Clearly define the purpose and values of the community space with a well-articulated and succinct statement so people who join the community know what to expect, while internally defining your (i.e., corporate) goal of the community
• Monitor: Before you can know how a community vibe ebbs and flows, you must monitor the community’s interactions, and “embrace” community leaders perhaps by elevating their status within the community
• Feedback: Implement meaningful rating systems (the authors site a rating system that reflects users’ behavior as an example of a meaningful rating system, as opposed to a simple “top ten” type system)
• Organization: Clearly guide new community members about where to go, what to do, how to get acquainted, etc, while cuing or gently nudging existing users with meaningful suggestions and topics on how the community can grow and evolve

Related post: Community crowdsourcing and innovation

To what extent does employee loyalty and commitment to a brand drive overall customer loyalty? This research paper (.pdf) tackles that question and concludes that employee attitudes toward their company have a high degree of impact on customer loyalty. What the authors essentially argue is that fostering a corporate environment that espouses a unique and positive corporate culture grounded in clearly defined values goes a long way to inspire employees to be more engaged with their company and brand.  Once this baseline is met, the authors propose that brands create internal employee engagement indexes to monitor employee sentiments toward the brand (similar in concept to consumer engagement metrics) to ensure they remain committed to the brand and ultimately the customer. Thus, the company can ensure that it’s employees are working towards increasing customer loyalty. A perfect example of this is Zappos.

Related posts:  Creating a culture of creativity and innovation and Creativity Integrity and Brand Differentiation

Trust is a major driver of customer loyalty. How does a corporate brand secure this trust following a breakdown in service delivery? The authors of this study (.pdf) ponder this question and proffer some intriguing insights. The authors argue that negative emotions experienced by a customer following a negative service experience do not necessarily change his or her attitude towards the service provider; rather, the customer simply leaves the service provider. Although losing a customer is never good, this finding is somewhat good news because it seems that customers are unlikely to carry a negative emotion for long with respect to the brand following a service break-down, thus minimizing the chance of an emotive outburst via social media that negatively affects the brand. On the flip side, a brand can enhance the trust and loyalty of its customer base if it honestly admits a mistake and vigorously works to correct such.

Related post: Trust indicators in social network marketing

Very well drafted and inciteful list of predictions for 2010. The author, Ravit Lichtenberg, delves into what will impact innovation, while opining that mobile become even more central, integrated/social search relevancy will begin to trump search aggregators like Google, and marketers will demand ROI.

Excellent discussion on measurment tactics for Google AdWords campaigns. Discusses basics of setting up a custom report in Google Analytics to tips on interpreting data.

This research paper (pdf link) explores the “viral effect” in Flickr (used as a model of social networks in general) and found that the viral effect generally stays within close proximity of the original uploaders, social links are the dominant method to share and spread a message, and popularity of pictures grows over years. The paper is not a “gentle” read, but worth your time if you want to dig in deep on data analytical methodology.

Here’s an article that details some interesting issues relative to search, recapping a Xconomy Forum on the Future of Search and Information Discovery panel recently held in Seattle. On the dais were Microsoft, Google, and a couple of University of Washington professors. Here’s some salient take-aways:

• It’s still unresolved whether vertical search will significantly impact general search
• The nexus between real-time search, consumer intent, and semantic search is where the search gold resides
• Hurricane Katrina taught Google a lesson about relevance and real time results
• Opportunities to compete with Google and Bing exist, but only on the edge or fringe such as applications that bypass search engines, employ automated content discovery mechanisms, use semantic search, or perfect mobile geo-search

Interesting quotes:

Google is like smoking cigarettes, it’s a habit that’s going to be difficult to give up. So what can you do? You have to think about the problem space. Google’s approach is to get people in and out of search engine quickly with their result. Not the right way to think about it. Right way to think about it is to think about minimizing time of completing a task, not minimize the amount of time to match a query with a url.

[O]rganize the information in a way that synthesizes the task that you want to accomplish.

Mobile is huge. Apple is the big fish at the moment. Android coming on strong. Won’t hold my breath on Microsoft.

Two things which potentially threaten us. [1] As we become bigger and older, it could become more difficult for Google to innovate…[2] Also worry about diminishment of sense of entrepreneurship.

The Wall Street Journal recently profiled calculator hobbyists who hack calculators to do weird (but ostensibly fun) things like making an Etch A Sketch, or a Tetris game, or synthesized music. The WSJ article also relates how a calculator company that was the target of some of these hacks sent cease and desist emails and letters to members of the calculator hack community for violations of intellectual property rights.

First, it’s understandable why the calculator company sought to protect its intellectual property. But there’s also an opportunity for the calculator company to foster a user community from this hack community, and the LEGO MINDSTORMS community offers an intriguing parable.

Product directors at LEGO MINDSTORMS first reacted negatively to a budding hobbyist community centered around their product, according to this MIT lecture, but have now embraced this community to drive product sales and innovation. Similarly, IBM has a developer community. And this research paper details how individuals update Google’s mapping system to make it more accurate, while this New York Times article discusses how a community of volunteer cartographers are logging details of neighorhoods.

Razorfish points out keen ways to leverage user-generated content (UGC). In the midst of all this social media mania marketers can leverage UGC to gain insight and develop relationships. A poignant take-away from the Razorfish blog post: UGC is  not problematic in it’s own right, rather it’s filtering UGC to gain actionable intelligence that will make for meaningful engagement with customers and clients to build long-term relationships with them. Best quotes from the article:

The problem isn’t with UGC, it is with the filtering, sorting and prioritization and that’s where the technology, the semantic web and also the ability to filter through the lens of a social graph is going to make a big difference.
…
Leveraging user-generated content are the same ones that marketers and sales people have been preaching for decades: 1) build relationships, and 2) provide value that fills consumers’ needs/wants.
…
Companies (and individuals) have long espoused transparency, of course, but the economic and viral advantages of tapping and responding to user-generated content are nudging us into arenas of more authentic rather than staged transparency.
…
The future of UGC global rights management will lie in solutions that strike a perfect balance between the goals of the copyright holder and that of the user.

Photo credit: jelene

In this MIT Sloan School of Management lecture on sustaining innovation, the CEO of W.L. Gore & Associates, Terri Kelly, has some great insights on how creative knowledge environments drive profitability.

W.L. Gore is a diverse and innovative company, creating products ranging from GORETEX to surgical devices. Kelly stresses to give your team the right tools, promote the right culture, maintain minimal bureaucracy, have high expectations for networking within the organization to connect and share knowledge, and recognize that leaders are “leaders” only if people actually want to follow them.

Define what you believe, define your guiding principles, define your core values, and define key disciplines. Use these four elements as the framework around which culture is nurtured, all the while recognizing that these elements must work as a system; any one element does not ensure success…it’s the interrelatedness of the components that promotes success. Culture is an active investment in terms of time, energy, and dollars, not a cost.

For W.L. Gore, this investment in culture results in amazing products like OPTIFADE hunting gear (play this game to see how it works). Obviously, W.L. Gore is doing something right. This Kelly lecture is well-worth 54 minutes of your time to gain some amazing insights.

Related post: Creating a culture of creativity and innovation

Free is not the future of business.

Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals, made this argument earlier this year at the Future of Web Apps conference. And this comment to Fried’s statement  makes a great argument based on simple economics: free is unsustainable from a product development perspective. So how does Red Hat make money by leveraging an open source system like Linux? Here’s a recent article that sheds some light on this, Red Hat is contemplating building a North American channel partner program, and it’s recently inked a deal with Amazon, and here’s an academic paper that points to three dominant ways by which to make money on open source:

• consulting and support services around the software
• derivative products built on the community project
• increased revenue in ancillary layers of the software stack

The article goes on to predict that by 2012 more than half of open source revenue generated will derive from commercial open source.

I’m in agreement with Fried, and align with Robert Scoble,

I love paying for apps. Why? Because when I do that I encourage developers to build more cool apps for me…Anyway, the main point here is that it’s not the app store that’s screwed up: it’s our expectation that developers should work for free.

Scoble’s argument also aligns with Chris Brogan,

Don’t ever feel embarrassed to charge for value. Never apologize that something costs money if you’ve determined the value of it.

Makes sense to me.

The label “social media” has lost its resonance in so far as the concept of “social media” has been reduced to a series of marketing tactics. As David Armano says in a Harvard Business Review blog article:

Let’s start with the challenges — the term “social media” itself is indicative of the state of affairs. “Media” limits our view of the movement, and brings with it the baggage of decades of advertising. Marketers are only too happy to view the social web as a new array of channels to market their goods in some shape or fashion. That’s because it’s a model they’ve used since the beginning.

Armano goes on to essentially say that “social media” represents a fundamental cultural shift. It’s a shift that started many years ago. In 2006, Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing uttered 10 words that embody this shift

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

This sentiment was re-articulated recently by Jay Thompson’s humorous, yet prescient, “Og the Caveman” parable

Back in the day, Og the Caveman would sit around the fire and talk about his day to anyone who would listen. The cave-ladies would roll their eyes while Og recounted his manly adventures, and cave-dudes would all be one upping each other with tales of who speared the bigger Mammoth…They had friends, and followers. There were popular cave-people, and there were annoying cave-people. And everything in between. Just like we have today. Only today we have whiz-bang technology tools to take our socializing and networking planet wide.

Indeed, it’s the technical infrastructure that’s a catalyst to this conversation enflamed cultural shift, most recently embodied by the battle for real-time search dominance. For example, a friend of mine recently commented on the uselessness (to him) of CNN in terms of real-time news and authority where, in the midst of the Mumbai attacks last year, the CNN anchor kept referring to Twitter as the source. Given this, my friend’s legitimate question was (still is) “So why am I wasting my time with you?” As a brand, CNN took a negative body blow.

Brands are not incognizant to this sentiment, this cultural meme, or gestalt-like shift to mine the real-time conversation core, and have launched full-bore social media marketing efforts to be part of the vein. But have these efforts been designed? Again, Armano, is on the money with this post on “filtering” the network economy and this presentation, Social Business By Design,

I especially like slide 23 where he points out an article discussing the concept of having a “Chief Social Media Officer”, which reminds me of turn-of-the-century job descriptions like Chief Electricty Officer and how irrelevant those titles were when electricity became as ubiquitous as air. So at a high-level what’s brand to do, be it a brokerage or agent brand?

As Armano demonstrates brand impressions–positive or negative–occur through many touch points, and as a brand you only have so much control. What you can control is 1) how you listen (through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blog, etc), 2) how you respond via these same channels, 3) what brand “persona” you want to convey via these listening and responding posts, 4) who you put in place to manage this process (are you serious and demonstrate that by hiring the right person for your brand versus having interns manage this process; the former indicates you’re in for the long haul whereas the latter indicates you still consider this cultural change child’s play), 5) architect your tactics by following a “designed” strategy. Here are four places to begin your strategy:

David Armano’s mind meme on design and his post on experiential design
Adam Singer on niche versus mass media
Understanding and measuring user engagement by Eric T. Petersen

Related posts: Choreographing Client Experiences on Your Website, Theatre of Cruelty in a Carnival of Real Estate, Twittering Away Your Digital Legacy

Photo credit: vkurland

Social media monitoring
Here’s a great list of conversation monitoring tools. The article points out some very interesting and straight-forward tips; I especially like the tip on this social media monitoring wiki.

Search use up, email use down
The Online Publishers Association released a study showing that consumers are spending more and more time on search  and content centered sites while dropping their use of email and instant messaging.

Social network use by mobile device
This study by AdMod shows that social networking is the most used application of iPhone and smartphones users and that Facebook is the number one accessed social networking site.

Target, 1958, oil and collage on canvas by Jasper Johns

Perfectly Competitive Innovation is a fascinating article on what drives innovation. The authors argue against the notion that patents and copyrights promote innovation. Rather, its a rich competitive environment that drives innovation.

In other words, regardless of copyright law, movies will continue to be produced as long as first run theatrical profits are sufficient to cover production costs; music will continue to be produced as long as profits from live performances are sufficient to cover production costs, books will continue to be produced as long as initial hardcover sales are sufficient to cover production costs, and financial and medical innovations will take place as long as the additional rents accruing to the first comer compensate for the R&D costs.

This sentiment was echoed by MIT Professor Eric von Hippel in a lecture where he discussed innovation occurring in kite surfing where practitioners put their innovations under a creative commons licensing scheme to thwart an attempt by manufacturers to exploit their innovations under traditional intellectual property rights law. Perfectly Competitive Innovation similarly points to many case studies and scenarios demonstrating that innovation does not necessarily need the traditional intellectual property rights rubric to thrive and survive.

Photo credit: cliff1066

According to MIT Professor Eric von Hippel’s lecture, Democratizing Innovation, manufacturers traditionally look to the center of the market to drive innovation; that is, with their penetrative questions to and analysis of this market, manufacturers think they can discern what to do in terms of innovative product development initiatives that meet consumers’ needs. What Professor von Hippel actually found is that innovation does not come from the center of the market, it comes from an extreme market fringe driven by localized users and early adopter user communities pushing the limits of an original device or prototype. As an example of this, about 22 minutes into the video, von Hippel discusses how these types of communities quickly drove up sales of Lego’s Mindstorm product, while morphing Lego’s original concepts of the product. And about 28 minutes into the video, von Hippel goes into how user groups drove innovative design in the kite surfing market while putting their design innovations under a creative commons licensing scheme which hobbled manufacturers’ attempts to exploit these innovations. This video runs a little over one hour.

Empathy, collaboration, human centered feature/functionality, storytelling, and culture are themes that drive innovation through design thinking. Core phases of design thinking: inspiration, ideation, implementation.

On inspiration of ideas: use the world as a source for new ideas; focus on research that is ethnographic, anthropological, and qualitative versus just quantitative; focus on extreme users and strive to understand their world from cognitive and emotional levels.

On ideation: build things to learn about your ideas; rapid and low cost prototyping and iteration is key; prototyping allows you, as the designer/innovator, to get a sense of what you’ve learned and refine your ideas over time with stakeholder feedback driving the process.

On implementation: use storytelling and construct a story around the ideas you have, the more likely that your idea will make it out of R&D; a story frames the idea.

Culture ties together inspiration, ideation, implementation. Culture is its own inspiration.

This is a  fascinating lecture on innovation (57 min, well worth your time).

This New York Times article on how corporations can foster innovation within their R&D departments by adopting decentralized (i.e., “federated”) approaches to funding and team structure, spurred me to conduct some research regarding this topic; here are two great finds:

TED conference speech by Charles Leadbeater on outside-in innovation and how this type of “innovation-in-use” phenomenon has profound impacts on business:

Research article discussing how universities can support and spur regional innovation; fascinating read on Georgia Tech’s success in this regard.

Related posts: Creating a culture of creativity and innovation, Innovation considerations for real estate firms

Facebook’s recent purchase of FriendFeed is a multichannel marketing boon. Mashable detailed some threats Twitter may face with respect to the FriendFeed purchase while pointing out some threats to Google too. Regardless as to how the game (err war) plays out, as a marketer you’ve just been handed another delicious marketing tool to leverage. I’ve previously written about the potential power of Facebook and Twitter as multichannel marketing tools. The basic gist of the argument is illustrated by how Dell Computer leverages Facebook and Twitter.

A quick perusal of Dell’s Twitter and Facebook landing pages demonstrates multichannel marketing at it best: Dell has Facebook pages and Twitter handles for Dell Lounge, Dell Outlet, Dell Small Business, etc. The beauty of this from a multichannel marketing strategy is that a consumer “subscribes” to a particular channel (out of a choice of many) and self-selects which topic (i.e., channel) is most important to them knowing that Dell will centralize almost all of its communication to them about this particular topic via this channel. This works well for the real-time search features of Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s how this plays out on Facebook’s new real-time search feature for “dell lounge”:

Here’s how the same search plays out on search.Twitter.com:

Here’s a Facebook search result for “delloutlet“:

Here’s a Twitter search result for the same:

As a real estate marketer you could do something like Dell by setting up niche-specific Facebook Pages and separate, corresponding, Twitter handles (for example, focusing on foreclosure investment advice in your market niche). Anyone who fans your Facebook page or subscribes to the corresponding Twitter channel has an expectation of receiving targeted advice related to the topic you’ve identified. For example, in the case of foreclosure investment advice you could update/tweet about listings, market stats, your general thoughts, etc, while cross promoting both channels (for example, on Dell’s Twitter page you will notice they promote their Facebook pages). The synergies realized between both platforms will go a long way towards reinforcing your expertise and further position you as a trusted advisor.

Art can inform business decisionmaking and processes in so many ways. And choreography is one artform that does.
Choreography is designing a series of movements to convey an expression of an idea. The best choreographers apply a scientific approach to their dance notation. These choreographers carefully map movement through time and space–in essence navigate time and space–and have their dancers execute complicated series of steps ending in a penultimate conclusion or outcome.

Your website is a mosaic, a stage where you showcase, display, and promote your content and expertise in myriad forms and elements. Your clients and potential clients must navigate your website, working through the mosaic.

Relating design to desired outcomes
You can help your website visitors navigate your website mosaic by mapping their movement through your website, choreographing their experience to end in a desired outcome. What’s your desired outcome of a visit to your listing detail page? Mortgage origination and, thus, mortgage prequalification? Driving inquiries directly to your agents in certain instances versus routing inquiries to your e-commerce team? Each desired outcome necessitates choices with respect to design, navigation, branding, calls to action, etc. If mortgage origination is more important than direct-to-agent inquiries, then your page design and architecture coupled with your calls to action will be different if direct-to-agent inquiries were the penultimate outcome.

Test, measure, refine, roll-out
Once you’ve settled on a desired outcome (or set of desired outcomes), test which set of inputs (i.e., button placement, calls to action, etc) garners the highest and most qualified response rate. This is called A/B split testing. For example, let’s say in your marketing brainstorming and competitive analysis you’ve determined that these two mortgage origination calls to action may garner highly qualified inquiries: “Qualify for a first-time home loan? Find out here” versus “Prequalify for first-time home loans now!”. To determine which is the most effective, set up a testing array. Essentially, what you’re determining through such an array is which verbiage and button placement drives the highest response and conversion rates. Once you’ve applied an A/B split test methodology to each primary element that supports a desired outcome (or set of desired outcomes) on each of your discreet website pages, and determined the optimal verbiage and placement of such, you’ve in essence created guideposts throughout your website mosaic, allowing visitors to dance through your content and data.

Photos:
ZUrigo
Ctd 2005

Deux Gros Nez, an eclectic, wonderful restaurant in Reno, Nevada, closed its doors a couple of years ago. It’s where I, as a dedicated employee of Tim Healion and Jon Jesse (then owners of Deux Gros Nez), learned about community, service, and the power of passionate brand ambassadors:

Flickr tribute

YouTube interview

A person’s thoughts on its closing

Deux Gros Nez opened its doors June 18, 1985 and began serving espresso, scones, focaccia, and frappes in a gambling town. It was open 24 hours a day, but where 99 cent breakfasts and watered down coffee were king, the Duex Gros Nez cuisine appealed not to the masses. Nevertheless, Deux Gros Nez cultivated a tribal following. This was my first lesson in niche marketing: don’t worry about the masses, worry about perfecting your niche brand and appealing to a niche audience.

This niche audience from the very beginning included lawyers, punks, doctors, architects, professional athletes, artists, etc. Each person had their own reason for frequenting Deux Gros Nez but the common unifying thread was the passion of the owners for delivering “honest” food and a dining experience that was outside the norm of a gambling town (frequent patrons were often met with a friendly greeting along with their type of coffee–brewed, espresso, cappuccino–waiting for them before they walked in because the owners knew what time they’d arrive and remembered what they liked). This was my second lesson in niche marketing: be passionate about what you do, focus on honesty, be passionate and concerned about your customers’ needs.

Part of my job was to train new hires to aspire to a high degree of customer service. The challenge was to inspire part-time employees–many of which were college students, snowboarders, and the like–to engage each customer on a one-to-one level. This was a tall order considering that only two or three employees on any one five-hour shift would have to take the orders, prepare the food, serve the food, bus the tables, ring-up orders, keep inventory, re-stock, and wear a bolo tie (purchased or homemade, the best homemade one being a hollowed-out egg run-through with a string). Sometimes we failed in our quest for customer service excellence. But many times we succeeded. And this success was embodied in creating “wow” events for Deux Gros Nez guests. For example, I would inspire our team to recognize the sound of a dropped utensil when it hit the floor. If you listen carefully, each utensil has a different tonality. This was useful when, on a crowded Friday night, a guest would invariably drop a spoon and the team member working the floor would replace the spoon before the customer asked. This created a great customer service “wow” event, marked the Deux Gros Nez brand in the mind of the guest, and created an incentive to come back. This was my third lesson in niche marketing, especially as it relates to a service industry: training and a appreciation for ensuring that your customers have the best experience goes a long way towards inspiring those customers to be your brand ambassadors.

This is not to say that Deux Gros Nez (which means “two big noses”) did not have a reputation with some people as being somewhat snobby, and that every person who dined there became a brand ambassador, but the restaurant cultivated passionate brand ambassadors worldwide, as evidenced by the fact that people flew-in from all over the world to be at the farewell party (see the Flickr tribute above). The Deux Gros Nez community continues on Facebook via The Fort group page. This was/is my fourth lesson in niche marketing: passion combined with a willingness to pursue excellence and honestly engage your customers inspires your customers to keep your brand flame alive, even when you’re gone.

Tim Healion (known as “The Chief” to all who frequented Duex Gros Nez), currently, has transferred his passion, honesty, and pursuit of excellence to one of this nation’s top professional cycling events, the Tour de Nez. Chief, thank you and keep it going.

Aligning website landing pages with targeted social media marketing channels will yield higher on-page conversions (as defined by increased showing appointments, chat requests, 1-800 number call-ins, etc). The challenge many real estate marketers face today is effectively managing the flow of social media traffic with an eye towards ROI. It’s a multichannel marketing issue, which starts with controlling user client and potential client expectations so to avoid the “mishmash syndrome”.

The mishmash syndrome occurs when all sources of traffic to your website converge without any clear indication from whence they’ve come combined with no clear indication as to what they’re to do once on the site. Confusion reigns, frustration mounts, bounces occur. In other words without controlling the expectations of the originating inbound users it’s very difficult to align on-page calls to action to users’ needs and expectations. In fact, your website may–at first glance–look something like this:

Confusing signage and message

Controlling expectations could be as simple as clearly defining what types of information you’ll engage in on a specific social media platform. For example:

• clearly indicate on your website to follow you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn for specific information
• set up a LinkedIn professional group or Facebook Page where you’ll focus your information and interaction around a specific topic like real estate investment advice in the age of REO
• begin slowly migrating your Twitter updates to centralize around a cloud of topics or invite current followers to “subscribe” to a new Twitter handle that will focus exclusively on this “topic cloud”
• start using targeted Facebook ads to drive traffic

By doing something like the above you’ll let your sphere opt-in to specific channels which thus frees you to narrowly focus on the specific themes or topics you’ve identified. Once you’ve begun engaging new or migrated followers via these defined channels you can begin tracking flows to your website and testing and optimizing the website to meet these users’ expectations.

For example, let’s assume you have a call to action on your website home page something like this: “Join our new Facebook page for real estate investment and REO advice” (as opposed to simply saying “Join us on Facebook”). As you begin to gain fans to this specific page you have a fairly high degree of confidence they’re there for a specific purpose and you could initially provide studies, market stats, reports, essentially any base level research and information regarding real estate investment and REO and ask for comments and feedback regarding these posts. This builds authority and credibility.

Once you’ve developed a healthy degree of dialogue (i.e., engagement) you can begin driving people back to your site for targeted activities, for example: “Just listed a sweet foreclosure investment property” with a link back to a landing detail page specifically targeted at this Facebook fan base and their Facebook friends, perhaps even with a welcome message like “Thanks for visiting us from Facebook, glad you’re here” (a simple script that recognizes the originating URL should do the trick nicely). And then knowing that this fan visitor is likely comfortable with “tech” perhaps your primary “contact me” call to action is a prominently displayed and colored button that says “Click this button to text me if you want to set up an appointment”, with a thank you message after the click like “Thanks for texting me, I’ll text you back shortly and we can set up an appointment. Make it a great day.”

These types of tactics go a long way to realizing a 1-to-1 dialogue. These tactics allow you to focus on a specific niche, target an engaged clientele, position you as an expert to this clientele, and close the loop in a manner that’s satisfactory to this clientele.

Related posts:
Clients are not cows
Responsiveness drives differentiation

O’Reilly on underlying Web 2.0 concepts and its future application
Excellent O’Reilly web 2.0 summary and whitepaper on Web 2.0; really good discussion on the nexus between collective intelligence and the real time web and managing the content/data flows therefrom.

[T]he Web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an “information shadow,” an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mind bending implications.

How Twitter can improve its real time search relevancy
Cogent argument as to how Twitter can improve its real time search results. Author argues for an algorithm that considers trust, authority, and relevancy, as well as hitting on some of the collective intelligence concepts discussed in the O’Reilly Web 2.0 article mentioned above.

Social network usage between Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter
Succinct analysis of a social network usage, showing cross-network usage and general demographic trends.

Chris Brogan interview
Excellent interview with Chris Brogan on how he’d run an airline and implement some social web karma; great insights, well worth the 9:58 investment of your time. The interviewer, Shashank Nigam, CEO, SimpliFlying, asks some really good questions. My comment after listening to the interview: That was seriously cool.

Semantic Web
This post re-confirms to me that the semantic web (i.e., Web 3.0) is still a ways out from being widely deployed, yet absolutely filled with so much promise and visionary thinking.

Dunkin’ Donuts
Insightful post on how Dunkin’ Donuts uses the social web to extend its brand engagement. Dunkin’ Donuts’ recently released Dunkin’ Run app is a nice, simple deployment of a social app that has a built-in ROI component: buying doughnuts.

Vyoom
Interesting TechCrunch profile of Vyoom, which is a social networking site that gives you redeemable points for your participation. The more points you accumulate, the more stuff you can buy. Not sure whether this will work as a stand-alone application/concept, but could certainly see this applied in a rewards program under a major brand (e.g., Southwest’s Rapid Rewards program).

Twitter
Interesting ideas on why Gen Y may not “get” Twitter.

Data Visualization (32 minutes): Eric Rodenbeck, founder of Stamen, discusses how data visualization allows one to tease-out non-obvious yet meaningful observations from arcane data sets. The interview also includes a short discussion on how data visualization can enhance real estate search (around 16 minutes into the interview). Jon Udell’s series is awesome, which is where I found the Rodenbeck interview.

Clay Shirky on how social web platforms have the power to change history (~17 minutes): Shirky gave this speech in May 2009 and details how platforms like Twitter can enable social change, potentially even revolutionary change. Especially excellent points made regarding mass media asymmetry.

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, interviews Trent Reznor (~45 minutes): Reznor gives some really great insights into the music industry and its nexus with “the Internet” while detailing his creative power struggles with record labels.

Social media is social what?
A call for dropping the term “media” from the phrase “social media”. Compelling argument to drop the fascination with the platforms and concentrate on the quality of the content and product.

Public relations social web tactics
Long list of new products and services pitched to a Kentucky-based director of social media (two of the brands he reps: Maker’s Mark and Knob Creek bourbons). Very interesting list of social media “newness” and implicit insight into public relations 2.0 tactics.

Interviews with semantic search pioneers
Summary of interviews with key semantic web players from Google, Ask, Hakia, Microsoft, Yahoo, and True Knowledge. Some topics: shift from “popularity” based search results to “credibility” based search results.

There is a reason I choose Southwest Airlines as my preferred airline: client attentiveness. There is a reason why I don’t pay attention to accumulating miles with a competing airline to ensure preferred boarding status but love Southwest’s Rapid Rewards program: client attentiveness. There is a reason I am a self-appointed brand ambassador for Southwest Airlines: client attentiveness.

Let me give you an example: Gate changes are a fairly routine occurrence in the airline industry and, arguably, it’s up to a passenger to ensure that he or she is aware of such occurrences. But in my opinion a company that cares about its clients would ensure that passengers are notified of a gate change. Once upon a time, I arrived at a gate, noted that my flight number was still listed, noted that there were not any delays listed, noted that I was 40 minutes early to boarding. I relaxed. Around boarding time I noticed that no one was boarding, yet my flight number was still listed. I checked my email and text alerts to see if a gate change had been sent to me. I waited another 10 minutes while the airline staff chatted amiably. I walked up to the counter. The airline staff chatted amiably. I stood there. They chatted. I stood there. They chatted. I interrupted. I received a stare and one word, “Yes?”. I asked if the flight was still boarding, and I was met with something like this: “We announced a gate change 30 minutes ago.” Amazed, I asked then why my flight number, route, and time of boarding were still listed behind them. There was no response. I then asked where the new gate was. Across the airport I was told with a hint, “You better run, or you may miss it.” Stunned, I turned to my fellow gate-waiters and announced that the flight we’d all been waiting for had a gate change and that we’d better run or we’ll miss it. I sprinted to the new gate, told the gate staff there that several other people were following me, luckily they held the plane until all the other passengers arrived. I was thanked by these passengers while I sat in my seat sweating. I was stunned. And even though I had accumulated enough “points” to achieve preferred boarding status, that was the day I decided to purge my airline miles from that company as soon as possible, stop using that airline as my preferred airline, and stop trusting that airline’s “CRM” messaging. That was the day I decided to “try” Southwest Airlines. And I have been a happy airline traveler ever since.

Accordingly, it was no surprise to me when Rob Hahn of 7DS told me that Southwest Airlines has the highest NetPromoter Score of any other airline. NetPromoter Score essentially answers one question: how likely are you to recommend me (or my service)? I recommend Southwest to everyone I meet who relates a poor airline traveling experience. I tell them my story. I have yet to experience a marginal flying experience with Southwest Airlines. Have I met individuals who’ve had an unpleasant experience with Southwest Airlines. Yes. But they are far less in number than compared to other airlines. An essential key to Southwest Airline’s success is client attentiveness.

Let me give you an example: Once upon a time, there was a gate change on a Southwest Airlines flight where a gate attendant announced the gate change via the public address system then walked to the boarding door area and announced it again and then invited us to approach the desk if we had additional questions or needed help (the physical act of stepping from behind the counter to the boarding area–breaking the client-attendant barrier if you will–got our attention). That’s client attentiveness in action. Simple but memorable. Here’s another experience: I just recently received an “anniversary” card from Southwest Airlines thanking me for being a Rapid Rewards member. The card included a coupon for a car rental discount. A minor “wow” I’ll give you that (a big “wow” would have been some additional rapid reward points <grin>). Nevertheless, the anniversary card is simple yet effective. Because when I received this card I remembered all the “wows” I’ve had with Southwest Airlines over the last year; thus, reinforcing my decision to stay with them again this year. What attentiveness have you given your clients recently?

Related reading: Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company. Why this book relates to this post: Southwest is designing its client relationship and service experience.

Photo credit: hiddedevries

Brand engagement

This presentation, The Audience is Always Right, by TBWA\ Berlin Media Arts team is one of the best I’ve seen explaining how brands need to reconstruct their core ethos pertaining to consumer communications. It delves deep into a situational analysis and then delivers some very meaningful aphorisms as guidelines:

• Start with a simple truth
• Create time, don’t try to buy time
• Tell a story that makes peoples’ conversations more interesting
• Leave room to think and ask questions by being imperfect, weird or contradictory
• Make the idea easy to find (searchable) and easy to tell (spreadable)
• Content isn’t king. Conversation is king

Online community lifecycle

This research article chronicles major research and studies on how online communities begin, mature, and evolve. The article focuses on a lifecycle analysis (inception, creation, growth, maturity, and death) and success metrics (for example, size and number of contributions and how willing any one member shares details about him or herself and how widely these details are shared). The article is very well researched and offers a compelling list of ideas marketers ought to consider when considering when, how, and why to engage consumers via social networks and other online communities.

Crowdsourcing is an important concept in the viability, pertinence, and relevancy of the social web.

A recent crowdsourcing search odyssey of mine (really a two hour drop down the Google search rabbit hole) began with a fairly innocuous @robhahn tweet:

I read recently that a 2-person combat team is four times as effective as a single shooter… anyone have any references to study of this?

This tweet intrigued me, as I thought it likely had something to do with Mr. Hahn’s insurgent marketing in real estate series. @PatrickHealy immediately stepped up to the plate:

@robhahn this should give you what you need: http://bit.ly/15eqQ4

Shortly thereafter I weighed in with this research article. But alas, Mr. Hahn was not satisfied:

@PatrickHealy close… but i’m looking for research showing 2 man team vs. 1 man ops

@ericbryn actually, wanted to see just how much more effective a 2-man fireteam is vs. solo shooter; maybe applies to agents…

Thus, inspired, I began a more substantive series of searches, which yielded these tasty tidbits, but nothing directly on point:

Discussion of information needs assessment and power of teams in edge organizations – Relevant to the insurgency series because the article discusses the shift from top-down command and control decision making to empowering teams and individuals to make relevant decisions based on timely and accurate information. Edge organizations promote a structure comprised of agile distributed networked units, which favors insurgent marketers.

How the information age has affected command decisions in USAF from Desert Storm to 2005 – Relevant to the insurgency series because the author analyzes the USAF shift from centralized to decentralized decision making. Decentralized decision making is key to enabling insurgent marketers to exploit the command and control decision making process that’s sometimes endemic with larger competitors.

Theories about net centric warfare – Relevant to the insurgency series because the article discusses how shared information resources contribute to cohesive mental models of the battlefield that results in increase combat effectiveness. Shared knowledge shared quickly enables insurgent marketers to exploit weaknesses in larger competitors’ information flow.

Discussion of basis for combat operations going to a STRYKER protocol – Relevant to the insurgency series because the report discusses how STRYKER forces are geared to respond anywhere in the world within 96 hours, stressing tactical mobility, lethality, and survivability. Insurgent marketers must strike quickly and with precision to weaken their competitors.

Uses of misinformation in war gaming operations – Relevant to the insurgency series because this article touches on how too much information causes humans to focus on the technical aspects of how the information is delivered rather than the context of the information and how this phenomenon leads to misinformation. An insurgent marketer can exploit this nuance in the sense of releasing highly relevant, highly targeted communications that are in direct contrast to a competitor that focuses on broadcast messaging. Here’s a nice quote from this article:

The gold lies in human thought—assisted by modern communication and computers, not distracted by them.

The reason why I’ve detailed this search odyssey is because I think it’s an interesting exercise in crowdsourcing and thought leadership. Mr. Hahn is a thought-leader in the real estate industry (recently securing a columnist slot within the Inman tribe). But this, in and of itself, is not enough to motivate me to spend a couple of hours helping Mr. Hahn. So what did? Yes my motivation was driven partly out of friendship. But it also has to do with sharing in the learning experience. That is, I enjoy the way he thinks through issues, the cogent arguments he makes for whatever position into which he plows his sword. Part of the way to enrich this experience–a more personal experience with his thought-leadership–is to participate in the germination of an idea. And that, I think, is at the heart of crowdsourcing–the act of helping give birth to a knew idea. The core of crowdsourcing is, essentially, the core of the social web: willingly sharing knowledge, participating in the expansion and distribution of this knowledge, and taking leaps forward together as change agents and innovation artists. Rob, happy reading.

Photo credit: rp72

Semantic technology and artificial intelligence

There’s lots of discussion lately about the semantic web and well-deserved praise over applications like Wolfram Alpha that employ semantic web theories to deliver relevant search results. In 2002, a short article discussed the concept of the “wisdom web” and highlighted many of the innovative concepts we’re seeing applied today. Future applications will likely employ intelligent agents to accomplish much of the “secretarial” type functions manually input today by humans into search engines, social networks, and other Web applications and platforms (here’s a great summary of intelligent agents in the evolution of Web applications).

What is innovation? How does one recognize it? Will I know it when I see it?

Wikipedia says:

The term innovation means a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. A distinction is typically made between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully.

Here’s a Booz, Allen & Hamilton book review of “The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation” (Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, authors) that offers an interesting perspective:

The authors disapprove, for example, of the widespread American practice of benchmarking, in which companies keep a scorecard on their competitors’ business practices to stay a step or two ahead of them. This, the Japanese would say, leads to incremental improvement, not to true creativity or knowledge creation. In a Japanese company, knowledge is thought to be internally generated from basic principles laid out by top management, then improved on by brainstorming from within the ranks and finally some amount of feedback from external sources.

A U.S. use-case example of the above is the development of the 3M Post-it note:

The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company…gives its researchers time to play around in the lab and then to “socialize” knowledge by using the office as a beta-testing site. Co-workers were skeptical when one researcher passed around his innovation, little pads of sticky-backed yellow paper. But the Post-it was the future, and it worked.

This line of reasoning resonates throughout Rob Hahn’s post insurgent marketing: as the main brand players in an industry focus on carpet bombing their competitors, insurgent type marketers exploit weaknesses. Similarly, Seth Godin touches on this concept when he references “heretical marketing.” Finally, Matthew Ferrara hits on this concept too.

Innovation cannot be trained, but it can be fostered in terms of firms encouraging the development of creative knowledge environments (the 3M example above is illustrative of this). What are you doing to foster innovation in your firm?

Photo credit: IH (40)

Metrics
Here is a great primer on RFM analysis, which I believe has applicability to social media marketing. The foundation of RFM is something that can drive the establishment of engagement metrics as well as allowing marketers to do a better job at managing the social media marketing channel.

Social media
Scoop44, an online “newspaper” founded by college students, received a two-year grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (nice to see the support of online journalism pure-plays; eventually we likely will not even make the distinction). This site is a nice blend between traditional reporting and new media functionality.

General coolness
Anyone interested in exploring and discussing graphic design issues should consider visiting this site. It’s an excellent compendium of thought-provoking topics and trends related to graphic design. Cutting through social media chatter will depend more and more on effective design to engage people once they’ve stepped past the social media veneer.