Podcast: From Soviet Era CRM Command and Control to Social CRM

I recently did a couple of podcasts with Phil Wainewright to talk about the evolution of CRM from its original command and control origins to the Social CRM that companies like Helpstream are delivering today.

I have to say it was a lot of fun working with Phil on the podcast.  I’ve also got another one coming with Brent Leary.

To hear (or read) the 2 ‘casts with Phil, try these links:

-  From Soviet-Era CRM to the Social Fabric of the Web

-  Bringing the Service Ethos to Sales and Marketing

Enjoy!

Customer Service Segmentation in a Social World

Esteban Kolsky writes a great account of Paul Greenberg’s keynote for CRMe09.  By all means, give it a read to get a sense.  Paul has always done a fabulous job of boiling down what’s really important whenever he writes or talks about CRM.

The part that caught my attention was the discussion of segmentation.  It was only a short paragraph, so I’ll repeat it here:

First, Paul rightly mentioned how each of us want to personalize the experiences, and expect the organization to deliver that. The solution is not to personalize on a one-by-one basis but rather to use segmentation wisely.  And that segmentation should not be done on financial value, but rather on the concept of Referral Value.  I would have spent more time talking about segmentation as critical to the success (which I think it is).

This one got my attention because it goes to the heart of a very sensitive yin and yang Social CRM has to delve in to:

-  We must personalize the Social Experience so it is authentic and compelling.  An un-authentic experience is going to do more harm than good.

-  We can’t afford to personalize the experience for everyone when there are so many.  We have to pick and choose using some segmentation strategy.

These two are at odds with one another, at least they seem to be.  Yet, I am not easily comfortable with the notion of segmentation.  For want of a better word, segmentation just seems deflective.  Recall that deflection is the practice of trying to push customers away so they service themselves.  It cannotes the Bad Old Days of Customer Service.  Deflection is anti-Engagement, and Engagement is the watchword of Social CRM.

I recently went back over one of Paul G.’s posts on creating that personal connection, and I remember thinking, “This is perfect, but how many companies will be able to execute it?”  And then I realized it really doesn’t matter if the company can execute or not.  Companies have become peers of their customers.  If a peer can’t execute they’re soon forgotten about and new peers take their place.  Companies really don’t have a choice but to find a way to execute.  It isn’t that the market is unforgiving (though it certainly can be), it is that the market is indifferent.  It is so hard to get the market’s attention these days through any means but word of mouth that you simply can’t succeed otherwise.

Which brings me back to Esteban’s thoughts of segmentation.  Perhaps there is some sanity there, a way to succeed if only it were executed well and with care and respect for the customers.

Segmentation is all about rationing your available engagement to the places where it will do the most good.  Sorry, rationing is a strong word, but that’s what it is.  If you had unlimited resources relative to your customer’s needs, you would not need to ration. 

Now before we talk further about how to segment, let’s consider that Social CRM does tremendously extend our resources.  My customers at Helpstream tell me very commonly that their agents are able to handle 3 times as many customers as they could before Helpstream.  The beauty is that Social is a one-to-many or many-to-many interaction.  If I close a case for a customer, I have only helped that customer.  If I help someone in a Social forum, I have not only helped that person, but I have created visible public content that can help many others.  At Helpstream we routinely measure that Social Help can be worth as much as 16x more than writing another incremental Knowledge Base article. 

So before you consider segmentation, consider how much more powerful you Customer Service will be if you can convert as much of the effort spent today on cases as you can to Social Interaction in your Community.  Those 3x and 16x Social Force Multipliers leave you a lot of headroom before any rationing is necessary because you already have the resources in place to engage.

That’s a beautiful thing, but let’s continue under the assumption that at some point we still do not have enough resources to achieve the best possible Social Engagement without some sort of triage help from segmentation.

How might segmentation actually work in a Social World? 

In the Customer Serviec 1.0 world, segmentation was based on the value a customer brought to the organization.  Your best customers got better service.  The definition of “best” could be derived from your CRM system through a complex organization-centric equation that weighed factors such as:

-  How much business have they done with us in the past?

-  How much business will they do with us in the future?

-  Are they in a happy state of mind or have there been a series of crises such that we had better tread carefully?

-  Are they an important reference for us?

Interestingly, the last two points are very Social in nature.  Maybe there is hope after all!

Esteban talks about the new segmentation as being based on the concept of Referral Value.  That’s interesting to contemplate.  Perhaps it is a function of Social Reach.  Can our Social CRM system dynamically determine the Social Reach of an individual?  Is there some score based on how many channels they use (blogger, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and how often they speak?

Here is a crude Straw Man attempt to create a set of Referall Value segmentation criteria.  The idea is to segment based on the avoidance of negative word of mouth and the maximization of positive word of mouth:

-  What is the Social Reach of the person?  (Measured by channels and followers of those channels)

-  What’s their Social history?  How much ink do they have out there?  (Never mess with the United Guitar Man again, people!)

-  Do they comment on products?  Have they commented on our products?  Recently?  How broadly?  Positive or negative?

-  What is their Org Credibility in Face Space?  e.g. Does their LinkedIn profile or our CRM record show they are powerful in the Real World?  They could be a 15 year old kid otherwise.

Of course we should also be grabbing some of the original segmentation metrics (such as how much business they’ve done with us) and blending those in as well.

This is all doable, and ultimately, perhaps essential, though we are some ways from needing it urgently today.  My problem is that while I can engage in the academic exercise, I am still deeply concerned about too little engagement moreso than I am about too much and any need to ration engagement.

Today companies are behind the eightball.  They need to prove good intentions.  They need to over-perform on the engagement front.  Many of the more famous brands from a Customer Service standpoint have made over-performance a powerful tool.  Zappo’s goes to insance levels of engagement.  Nordstrom once refunded a customer for a set of tires even though Nordstrom doesn’t sell tires.  There is that crazy notion again that being successfully Social pays back more than it costs, even in situations like these.  That same unfair advantage of being positively Social works negatively.  The cost of getting a segmentation strategy wrong is very high, and we have not yet clearly established the minimum norms needed for customers that segment low on the scale.  This latter is as important as the segmentation itself and leads to what ought to be the subject of another discussion: 

What are the minimum norms of engagement needed in a Social World?

The Web Makes All Ice Cubes Icebergs

Ross Mayfield just launched a long but interesting blog post entitled, “The CRM Iceberg and Social Software.”  The gist of it is to talk about how little listening companies do to customers and contrast that with how much power there is to be gained by being social.  Ross is a member of the Enterprise Irregular group I belong to, so his post started some discussion flowing.  Another of our members pointed out that being too social can also be a bad thing.  He liked being able to rent a Hertz car without speaking to a single employee, or going through self-checkout lanes at Walmart.  Moreover, he emphasizes that making every customer interaction a one-off social event is not only not what the customer wants, but it is also outrageously expensive to deliver.

I’m absolutely on board about not wanting interaction lots of times.  I would go out of my way and pay more to use a gas pump with a credit card reader rather than go in and pay a cashier.  Same with an ATM.  BTW, I think the web is the best possible place to do that self-service and things like interactive voice menus are just too maddening.  Some kinds of self-service are too hard and they piss more off than they help.  I’m also on board with the idea that being too social can be expensive to service.  We’ve spent a lot of time at Helpstream working on that side of the equation until we have a system for customer service that leaves our customers way ahead on the ROI front.

However, I absolutely don’t want to throw out the Social Baby with the Efficiency Bathwater.  Vinnie Mirchandani commented on the thread that he would avoid social interaction, “Unless the customer wants interaction.”  Excellent refinement, Vinnie.  I would augment that with, “Unless the efficient minimal customer interaction is not working.”  If I have a problem with my self-service gas pump, I want some social interaction right now.  I’m impressed when the operator gets up out of his booth, walks over, and makes the pump work for me.
 
The problem is that so many companies have been intent on making customer interaction efficient, that they have forgotten to keep score via customer satisfaction.  They’re cutting expenses by analzing call center metrics without enough regard to what is happening as a result. There is a second problem as well.  Since Ross brought up icebergs, let’s talk icebergs.  The Old School thinks in terms of triage when it comes to customer interaction.  Give the high value customers lots of interaction.  Minimize the cost associated with low value customers.  Assume that we can actually view these customers as some being icebergs (that one will sink the ship if we hit it) and some being ice cubes.
 
Unfortunately, the web has changed that calculus quite a lot.  Communication between customers and prospects used to be a pretty high friction proposition.  Many markets went out of their way to make it even higher friction.  You have those companies where everything is a total one off, because they don’t want everyone to know what’s going on.  The web, unfortunately for that mindset, gives everyone a pretty darned big megaphone.  Every ice cube can get on Twitter or Facebook, reach out to their network, and start a viral bad mouthing meme that turns that little ice cube into a full blown iceberg.
 
Suddenly, a random airline passenger can be trouble.  The guy may not be in charge of corporate travel for a Fortune 500.  They may not run even a travel agency.  They may never even have flown first class or overseas.  They are not frequent fliers.  Yet, if you break their guitar, suddenly you have a viral PR disaster on your hands.  What is the cost of the damage that little ice cube of a customer did to your brand?
 
At the same time, you have a world where surveys indicate people don’t trust companies at all, they barely trust the pundits, and they are turning increasingly to their peers to understand what’s really going on.  They’ve just been taken advantage of too many times as companies preyed on the lack of good communication.  What is the value of being able to leverage the word of mouth of your happy customers to drive more sales?  The reduced friction of communication that the web brings has both the advantage of communicating value much faster, and the disadvantage of communicating negatives more quickly too.
 
So you can’t just motor along in your big ocean liner, secure that you have enough water tight compartments that even a small iceberg won’t sink you.  There are no water tight compartments.  Any leak fills the whole ship rapidly.  There are also no lifeboats.  Suddenly you need to take care to listen to any customer that might be a problem, if that customer wants to be heard.  You have another choice to make too.  You can force them to go somewhere else to get the word out, or you can welcome them into your own community to talk about it.
 
Either place is going to be pretty public.  That isn’t a choice you get to make.  But at least if you’re making every effort to welcome their opinion and show them you’re listening, you have a better shot at demonstrating to them (as well as to all the onlookers) that you’re trying to do a good job.  If you’ve been good to your customers, they’ll help you in this social setting to convince the unhappy customer to get happier.
 
Companies can really no longer afford to compartmentalize Customer Service and customer interaction.  They can’t count on keeping customers and prospects separate either.  That’s a pretty radical paradigm shift.  But it’s why I love Paul Greenberg’s short form definition of what Social CRM is: “The company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.”  Paul is exactly right, which I guess is why I sometimes hear him referred to as the ”Godfather of CRM.”

This loss of control is a scary dynamic that the vast majority of companies have not begun to internalize and deal with.  OTOH, it is a huge opportunity and competitive advantage for those that move ahead of the curve to embrace it while their competitors flounder.

Microhoo Gets its Parts in All the Right Places

The Microhoo deal looks good to me because the parts are in the right places.  In other words, the deal maximizes the strengths of each of the two players.  Microsoft is essentially going to be providing technology in the form of the Bing search engine and the Ad Center advertising engine.  Yahoo will provide the traffic.

What does this mean for these two companies and for Google?  Techcrunch has a good transcription of Carol Bartz and Steve Ballmer going over it.  The companies moved away from any big up front payments and have focused on ongoing revenue.  I’m sure that’s a good thing for Bartz, who is probably trying to put as solid a foundation as she can under Yahoo’s revenue. 

These articles all seem to provide a lot less detail about how Microsoft will quantify benefits, however.  I have been feeling for some time that it might be a good plan for Microsoft to divest its consumer web properties to Yahoo.  Unfortunately, Yahoo is in a lousy position to pay up.  In fact, they’re actually planning to move expenses in the form of engineers off their books and onto Microsoft’s.

The deal does, however, give Microsoft a huge shot in the arm in terms of Search share.  It leaves Microsoft and Google neatly splitting most of the remaining search share, although Google continues to have to Lion’s Share of search (about 65%).  In exchange, Microsoft will pay Yahoo a whopping 88% of the search revenue in so-called Traffic Acquisition Costs.  At least they’re simply giving up the incoming revenue rather than paying cash sweeteners.  And, the deal is for 10 years, plenty long enough to cover the tenures of Ms Bartz and Mr Ballmer.

Despite the long term of the deal, the companies have budgeted 2 years of transition just to get it all operating.  That’s a typical Microsoft development timeframe, but it certainly does not reflect living in “Internet Years.”  Hopefully that’s a conservative estimate they can beat.  If it takes 2 years to get this thing up and running there’s no telling what kind of moving target Google will be able to put up between now and then.

All in all, it seems a reasonable deal.  MSFT gets to continuing trying to steal share from GOOG with a big uptick from this deal alone.  They’ll be fighting a guerilla war from here on out.  YHOO gets an immediate revenue boost and some significant Opex relief, making their numbers look better.   There’s nothing too earth shattering here, no big acquisition, and no silver bullet against Google, but it is a credible effort.  Google, meanwhile, is going to find it harder and harder to continue to steal share.  They have regressed to the mean and will now grow at the overall rate of the market, because they are the mean with so much share.  The implication is that they need a new growth engine, and until they get one, they will need to focus on profitability through expense controls. 

As I wrote some time ago, their anti-gravity ray has failed and they are now earthbound.  The same could be said of Yahoo’s share price.  It’s a great pity for shareholders that management didn’t take that big juicy merger offer made lo these many months ago.  In the end, said management got tossed and Yahoo shareholders got a much worse deal.  OTOH, MSFT shareholders are getting most of the value at a much more reasonable price.

Seth Godin writes an interesting post about win, place, or show.  Microhoo is definitely about showing.  They’re a long ways from figuring out how to win.  Larry Dignan is a lot less kind.  He says they’re set up to be the new AOL.

What do you think?

This Twitter Post a Long Time in Coming

I’ve been collecting Twitter stories in my blog reader for several weeks.  There are gillions of them and they’re frankly clogging things up.  But I wanted to be able to go back, read them all in a sitting, and try to get some gestalt back about Twitter.  This is a long post because Twitter is a complex phenomenon, and can’t be understood in 140 character snippets.  Before we get any further, let me say that I use Twitter, and I like Twitter, but there is a lot more going on with Twitter than it seems, and that bears thinking about.

As is often the case, a lot of Twitter is about marketing and human behavior.  Deep-rooted behavior that creates strong forces that propel Twitter forward.  For a long time I have sensed those forces, but couldn’t quite put them into words. 

Probably my closest attempt was a feeling that largely what Twitter has done is to eliminate all the friction.  It is the most amazingly frictionless Social Media the world has yet seen.  Consider some of the many ways in which Twitter has eliminated friction:

-   It’s trivial to join, of course.  But having joined, there is an absolute minimum amount of effort required to “prepare your nest.”  MySpace requires quite a lot of effort.  Facebook took less, and one could argue that is a big advantage for Facebook.

-   There is no business model to get in the way.  There are no ads and no fees to keep up with.  There is spam, but so far it is easily ignored. 

-   You are left alone.  You can completely ignore Twitter, or participate completely sporadically.  You are not bombarded with messages asking you to do various things.  At best, you have messages telling you someone followed you, which are good news messages you can choose to ignore.  Once in a Blue Moon, you may get a direct message on Twitter, but you can ignore that pretty painlessly too. 

-  You don’t have to be William Shakespeare to contribute.   People alternately complain about the limitations of only being able to post 140 characters and the brilliance of forcing people to write poetry to get their point across.  It’s all very Zen.  Yet there is a simpler explanation.  If I am only writing 140 characters, how badly can I screw things up?  If I only have to get on stage and utter one line, I can get through it.  Moreover, it is socially acceptible on Twitter to write the most pedestrian of drivel.  You don’t have to be profound.  Just tell which fast food you ate for lunch.  Even if I can’t possibly write a blog post, I can do this.  I can Tweet!  Hence Fred Wilson calls it, “Blogging in less than a minute.”

-  You can make friends.  It’s easy.  Just go follow people.  Mostly they follow you back.  If you try even a little bit hard to accumulate followers, you can get quite a few.  Don’t know who to follow?  Simple, go find some popular person and just follow everyone they follow.  This works.  I’ve seen it many times.  Twitter will even suggest who to follow (a tactic some argue discourages a vibrant community).  There are endless other ways to game Twitter and get a zillion followers.   It’s much easier than SEO or the kinds of things you have to do to get a following for a blog.  It’s much easier than friending on Facebook.  Note:  I have studiously avoided these games to see what happens if you wait for the world to come to you and because I don’t value followers who follow me just because I followed them first.  I want followers who follow me because they like what I have to say or because I like what they have to say.

-  It meshes extremely well with the Mobile Web.  As a result, it has also become an awesome way to quietly pass notes in class, even at poker games.

-  For certain personality types, Twitter is positively addictive.  It is a cult to the extent that Twitter was recommended for Nobel Peace Price.  OK, I’m no Twitter hater, but come on, that’s just ridiculous.  Techcrunch is closer when they say the cycle for Twitter is curiousity followed either by abandonment or addiction.  The middle ground is missing there.

They got a lot right!  So where is the downside in all that?  

Extracting value.  There is friction around extracting value from Twitter.  It’s easy to start Twitter, but it is hard to continue because of the friction in extracting value.

Before we talk about that friction, we have to ask a fair question:  “Is there real value in Twitter?”

Once upon a time, there was a company that many in Silicon Valley were hot about.  It had top drawer VC’s, and it seemed that everywhere I went, I saw this software running on computers.  It was called PointCast, and it was dead sexy.  It had a technology hook called “Push Technology.”  It had that online webby connectedness.  It had an advertising model.  All this in 1997.  I had a chance to interview to be their VP Of Engineering, but I found the whole value proposition to be troubling.  You see, what PointCast did was to display advertising on a screensaver.  Fascinating to look at.  People love a cool screen saver.  And this one gave news and all sorts of other information interspersed with ads.  But what troubled me is that I could get all that from the Internet whenever I wanted it, and PointCast only delivered it up when I wasn’t using the computer, which triggered the screensaver.

Hello?  Ads served precisely whenever someone wasn’t using the computer?  Am I the only one who thought this was a bit silly?

Well, to make that long detour shorter, they got a $450M offer from Rupert Murdoch, which was a huge valuation at the time, they turned it down, and then the company essentially disappeared about a year later.  I guess there were others who thought it was a bit silly after all.

Is Twitter another PointCast?  Sexy at the moment, but in the end, offering no value, and hence doomed when the hype wears off?

Some feel that way, but I don’t think so.  I have personally gotten real value from Twitter despite that friction.  Twitter is an incredible newswire and real time search.  Remember the old teletypes constantly churning out news?  Remember the old paper ticker tapes for the stock market?  Twitter is all that and a lot more.  It is the fastest way to know a little bit (140 characters, remember!) about anything, and especially brand new things.  Any service that lets you find news you can’t get anywhere else is fundamentally valuable.

If I were at Twitter, I would be focused on increasing the value delivered and reducing the friction around getting that value.  As we crest the growth curve, all those people defecting are going to be problematic.  It will get increasingly expensive to bring enough new participants to offset that churn.  I’m still pondering exactly what I would do, so that will be the subject of other posts, but that would be my top priority.  Adoption friction is gone.  No need to focus further there.  It’s time to focus on reducing Value Extraction Friction.

What, then, is the “Value Extraction Friction” that Twitter faces?

-  People don’t know what Twitter is.  It’s blind men describing an elephant so far.  It is a Rohrshach.  Every writer has a different take.  Like the infamous Supreme Court quote about porn, we don’t know what Twitter is, but we’re sure if you experience it, you will recognize it, and like it.  That is a sure tip off to Value Friction.  There is no good elevator pitch for the value that everyone immediately groks and shares.   The whole microblogging thing doesn’t really tell the story of what Twitter is.  You might get me to try it by calling it “Blogging in less than a minute”, but it won’t take me long to decide, “No, not really.”

-  If you do the obvious thing and latch on to a ton of followers very easily, the signal to noise ratio on Twitter is lousy.  The more followers you have, and having a lot seems to be the thing, the less likely you are to read more than a small fraction of their Tweets.  Popular Twitterati with tens of thousands of follows are basically absentees.  When seeking followers, be careful what you wish for and clear about what you want to get out of Twitter.  OTOH, even celebrities with tons of followers sometimes hear amazing things about themselves first on Twitter.

-  You have to use search to cut through the noise.  Search invalidates the follower aspect of Twitter, though.  Plus search makes you think about what to search for.  It’s hard to search for news by defintion.  If you know what to search for, you already heard about it and want to learn more.

-  Twitter is lousy for conversations.  Admit it.  Without some external app, conversations on Twitter are disjointed and confusing.  There’s no way to stitch a conversation together manually.  The more followers you have, and the more the conversation involves people you don’t follow, the harder it gets.  Twitter is largely a “talk but don’t listen” medium.  Hmmm.  That is strikingly Old School when you think about it.

-  Despite some people feeling Twitter and its Retweets can be a big source of traffic for your blog or other properties, it is no silver bullet.  But it certainly helps.  Perhaps it is more a source of discovery than an ongoing source of traffic.  When it does drive traffic, Twitter traffic is certainly inconsistent.

-  Increasingly, thought leaders are saying though leaders shouldn’t spend their time on Twitter.  Twitter is where the unwashed go to discover what the thought leaders are saying.  It isn’t where thought leaders go to learn anything.  Just ask Robert Scoble or Jeremiah Owyang.  Or Nicholas Carr who says Twitter is turning the mighty into peasants.  

-  Twitter is wide open.  There is no privacy.  This is both a blessing and a curse.  It reduces friction right up until you need to talk about something privately, and then it forces you to go elsewhere.  As Scoble puts it, he craves intimacy at times.  It causes some to actually discourage Tweeting, particularly in the PR space.

-  As the newness wears off, Twitter is increasingly going to be gamed by the spammers.  A huge part of Google’s value is they regularly win this arms race.  It isn’t clear that Twitter has even started to build any arms yet.

-  Twitter is largely about reaching and hearing the Social Media Geeks and Early Adopters.  It still hasn’t crossed the chasm.

Right now, Twitter is stuck in what Seth Godin calls the “Fan Chasm.”  As he puts it:

There are very few products, services or organizations that are simultaneously easily approachable and quite deep. That’s an opportunity for you if you can figure out how to be both, but choosing just one is a more likely scenario. So, which are you?

Twitter is easily approachable, and not at all deep.  That’s not the end of the world.  Twitter has gone far on this much.  But if they can figure out how to do both, or if their ecosystem figures it out for them, then they’ll be the dominant social medium on the web.

Related Twittiography

Some of the more interesting posts on Twitter that accumulated but were not linked above that can now be marked off:

Umair Haque on Twitter via Dion Hinchcliffe:  Haque is one of the Digerati, often challenging others with controversial insights.  I think his post largely points to the frictionlessness of Twitter as I have, but without identifying the problem of Value Extraction Friction.  As I have decried many times elsewhere, it is typically Western, requiring black and white judgements with his 10  <this great Twitter thing> beats <this conventional wisdom>.  He would’ve done better to identify the underlying friction theme and recognize nothing was beating anything.  Rather, it was being given away.

Om Malik on Twitter Hate:  There are no end of Twitter Hate stories.  The statistics on people joining and never using/leaving Twitter are horrendous.  This is simply a reflection of the high Value Friction.  If getting Value was easy for everyone, they would stay.  The low adoption friction means Om is right.  Twitter will bounce back and forth between Love (adoption) and Hate (value).

Brian Solis on Twitter being a broadcast, not a conversational platform.

Om Malik on how most Twitter users are strikingly silent.

What Do Sarah Palin, Seth Godin, and Monopolies Like Microsoft or Google Have in Common?

Strange bedfellows:  Sarah Palin, Seth Godin, and Monopolies ala Microsoft or Google.  What do they have in common?

Seth Godin obliquely explains what is happening to Sarah Palin and the Monopolies very eloquently in his latest blog post, “The confusion.”  In that article, Godin says:

We frequently confuse internal biochemistry (caused by habits and genetics) with external events. If we didn’t, marketing wouldn’t work nearly as well.

He goes on to suggest successful marketing goes out of its way to leverage this internal biochemistry (presumably “Brain Chemistry”):

Marketers spend billions of dollars identifying common biochemical events, and then they launch products and services with stories that align with those events. As a result, we spend money on external forces in an attempt to heal internal pain. Marketers want the equation to be, “if you buy this, everything will be all right.”

But it isn’t just marketers that should recognize behavior is governed as much by ancient hard wiring of our minds as rational thinking.  It touches us in many ways.  Which brings me to the link with Sarah Palin, Microsoft, Google, and other Monopolists.

I read Dana Oshiro’s post about how Palin resigned due to hounding by journalists shortly after reading Godin’s post and the pieces clicked into place.

People who are successful get held to an increasingly high standard of behavior.  The bar raises in direct proportion to their success.  If they are successful enough, that bar culminates in it being impossible for them to measure up.  The bar goes up even faster if the success is sudden, or seems unfair to be unfair.  Sarah Palin rocketed out of nowhere when she was selected to be John McCain’s running mate.  That move was widely seen as a stunt, with McCain having selected her because his ticket needed someone who was a “first”.  In this case, Palin was making a run at being the first female Vice President of the United States.  Monopolies are certainly seen as being unfair.  So much so that our government is charged with breaking them up.

What sort of hard wired behavior accounts for a rising bias against success? 

It’s pretty easy to understand when you think about it in terms of evolutionary forces.  We love to characterize evolution as “Survival of the Fittest”, but that is an oversimplification.  It is a proxy to success, but it is not the actual definition of the success.  More precisely, evolution is a competitive arena.  Yes, there is some notion of “fitness”, but it largely equates to survival and the ability to procreate. 

Now think about it from the standpoint of a critter participating in the competition.  You want it to be a fair fight.  If someone (or something) is unfairly taking over the competition, you will want to band together the weaker groups and slow their ascent.  You attack them if you can, any way you can, because if they get too successful, it becomes impossible to stop them.  Even in the blogosphere, there have been examples of individuals who got too successful, saw the World turn against them, and they had to fall back and contemplate what was happening.

The very successful are often extremely surprised to see the mob turn against them.  They don’t understand where the heat is coming from.  In their minds, they’re doing nothing different than what they’ve always done, and they are recieving their just rewards for having done so.  Suddenly, the World wants to punish them for being good.  Unfortunately, the Internet and the rest of Modern Media have reduced the friction so much that this flip from the positive to the negative (for all of these entities started with a lot of positives or they would never have gotten far enough to be seen as threats) can happen very suddenly and it can be very intense.

Of course the Marketers are not divorced from this.  They can sell on the negativity.  That’s what sells a lot of media, for example.  So they’re going to feed it as well.

This is real Public Relations.  Successful companies and individuals have to come to grips with what they’re going to do about the phenomenon when negativity strikes.  Sarah Palin quit.  IBM changed how they did business to continue after their consent decree.  One wonders if there aren’t tactics that should have been invoked during the meteoric rise to allow the organization to get further before the antibodies were triggered?

Microsoft: Bad User Experience Is Cultural

I just lost an hour of work to Microsoft Word because it clears the clipboard every time you start it up fresh.  It’s been doing it for years.  I knew about it, but I simply forgot.  I was working on a blog post in WordPress, and decided I wouldn’t finish and wanted to transfer it to Word.  I often transfer posts to Word because it gives better spelling and grammar checking.   I would leave the doc on my Windows desktop at home, and finish when I returned.  An additional complication was that I had accidentally published the article prematurely, and so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone.  So I copied it to the clipboard, deleted it from WordPress so it would no longer be published, opened up a new Word document, and…  Shite.  It was lost.  Word cleared the clipboard.  I knew this as soon as I saw Word starting to come up, but there was no way to stop it at that point.

What idiot at Microsoft thought this would be a good idea?  What group of idiots let it continue for years?

I have a dim recollection that this is done for some sort of security reason.  There is a hack or exploit that is thwarted by deleting the clipboard’s contents before the app comes up.  But I don’t use any other app that has this behaviour.  Clearly there are better ways to avoid the security problems, because other apps have found them.  A search of the web will tell you everything from, “Word doesn’t do this, what are you talking about?” to “It only happens if you have Works installed” (I don’t), and on to, “Oh yeah, it’s stupid behavior, but you can install a pop up app that captures the clipboard for you so Word can’t destroy it.”

The great mystery to me is that this isn’t accidental behavior.  It isn’t some newly introduced bug that will be fixed shortly in a patch.  Microsoft thinks this is better, or at the very least, doesn’t care enough about the User Experience to do anything about it.  They have made a conscious and well-reasoned by their lights decision that Word should work this way.  So, probably a couple of times each year, I manage to lose some data because of it. 

That brings me to the cultural question on User Experience.  What sort of a culture would do this kind of thing?  More importantly, what sort of culture is needed to avoid it?

Microsoft is hugely driven by product management.  With a few notable exceptions (Anders H. and C # would be a good one), the PM’s make all the key customer facing decisions.  This dates back a long time ago to someone telling Bill Gates he desperately needed to get some business expertise into the company and not just let the geeks run it.  So he led with product management, and with Steve Ballmer, who came out of Consumer Packaged Goods product management.  Product Managers run the show there.  And that is the fabric of the culture that let’s Microsoft Word delete the clipboard (which is, after all, intended to facilitate integration between apps!), among many many other terrible user experience discussions.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Product Management is extremely valuable.  Product Managers are the only people in most organizations whose full time job it is to listen to customers.  That’s important!

However, that job is different than the job of a product designer.  To use a Hollywood movie metaphor, the Product Manager should be the Producer, not the Director and not the Screenwriter.  The PM will decide, “The market is ready for a good Western, because it has been a while.”  Then the Director and Screenwriter will put together Unforgiven.  They’ll get a very small group of fantastic actors (corresponding to the developers) like Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman.  Each group has to give the other group’s sufficient “turf” and artistic freedom to be successful.  Can you imagine it working if the Director had to micromanage Eastwood or Hackman too much?  Likewise, if the Producer got to far into the details of the movie, the Director could not succeed.

But there is a school that companies like Microsoft subscribe to that view User Experience as being a function of debits and credits.  If we make this change, will we sell any more copies of Microsoft Word?  There is a big deal on the table, and if we agree to change the product to suit them, even if it is a bad idea for others, we can close that deal today.  That problem does not affect enough users, so we don’t need to worry about it. 

That’s the language of dollars and cents as it applies to product design, according to this school of thought.

Thanks to Techmeme, I came across a nice article about Jonathan Ive, who is one of the key designers at Apple responsible for the iPhone and iPod.  Though they seem to surprise the writer, there are fantastic insights into what it takes to create a culture that delivers great user experience.  Trying to calculate user experience with debits and credits is most decidely not how it is done:

Ive was insistent that the key to Apple’s success was that it was not driven by money – a claim that may raise eyebrows amongst shareholders and customers – but by a complete focus on delivering just a few desirable and useful products.

Total focus.  Total focus on building insanely great products.

So how did the company decide what customers wanted – surely by using focus groups? “We don’t do focus groups,” he said firmly, explaining that they resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone.

Christopher Frayling reminded us at that point of Henry Ford’s line about what his customers would have demanded if asked – “a faster horse” – and it’s surely true that the point of innovative companies is to come up with products that customers don’t yet know they need.

Focus groups and prioritized customer driven feature lists are not the answer.  They’re too tactical and do not create conceptual integrity.  The involve detailed placement of trees rather than creation of a beautiful and healthy forest.  I touched heavily on this idea recently and on how it is insidious for Enterprise Software.  But it is even more dangerous for consumer products.

But it was the physicality of design work that Jonathan Ive was keen to stress – from the Apple design workshop full of machines, throwing off a lot of noise and dust, to visits to Japanese aluminium craftsmen to learn how that material could be crafted into a laptop casing. Yes, of course he and his team use all the latest computer-aided design tools – but he also likes to knock out a physical prototype and feel the weight of it in his hand.

He told a story about how, as a boy, he’d taken apart an old-fashioned alarm clock, and inside the spare outer casing found a mass of workings, “an entire watch factory”.

I read that as the designers are steeped in personal contact and use with the product.  Personally, I just can’t take a job working on a product unless I relate to it.  I’m an engineer, but a creator of things moreso.  There are lots of kinds of engineers, but the best love to create many things.  My own leisure time activities almost universally involve creating things–blogs, web sites, computer controlled machine tools, music, and a number of other things.  The tactility and physicality of design that Ive talks about reflects an aesthetic sense.  It’s less engineer and more like an architect (one who creates buildings, not code) in terms of the feel.

Until you have a culture with those sorts of values, and that empowers those sorts of people, your products will lack great user experience.  It doesn’t mean you can’t succeed, but don’t kid yourself that your success will be built on great user experience.  It will come from some other source.

Years ago I had a discussion with a Microsoft Product Manager who had come to a company I worked at about this.  He wanted to establish the same culture.  I described for him what I am describing here.   He responded, “Bob, you’re a great product designer, but as a company, we can’t count on being able to find enough Bobs.  So we need to use product managers instead.” 

It is much easier to use product managers to create a repeatable process.  After all, there is much less passion involved.  For many markets, it may not be worth Apple-style design.  People often wonder for Enteprise software whether it matters, for example.  But I don’t buy my PM friend’s argument.  Talent of all kinds is always scarce.  A decision to eschew finding talent for a repeatable process creates mediocrity.

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Zoli Erdos always has a humorous but wise take on the issues he blogs about.

Talk about a bad user experience:  Microsoft ad has woman vomiting.  These things would never see the light of day if the user experience cops were effective.  Valuing user experience has to be built in to the culture or it doesn’t happen.

Maybe its just Evolutionary Hardwiring that makes it so easy to get upset with Microsoft.

Effective Search Trumps Brand: Glimmerings of a Digital Renaissance

I’m just back from a week long family vacation in the Big Apple to celebrate our 25th anniversary.  It was a blast, and as always, its great to get out into the world, see new things, meet new people, and think new thoughts.  I’ll have several blog posts to share on these new thoughts, and this is the first.  It begins with a brief observation by my kids. 

We stayed at a wonderful little hotel right on Central Park South called the Helmsley Park Lane.  Lots to see and do within walking distance, and we also availed ourselves of the excellent mass transit the City has to offer.  Along the way, we wanted to maximize our sampling of the great restaurants Manhattan has to offer.  Having made sure to select choices that appealed both to adults and kids (well heck, I enjoyed our quest for best Pizza too, I must admit!), I was surprised when my kids actually started to register pity for the mega-brands.  “How can McDonalds or Burger King survive here with all this great food?” they asked.

I never thought I’d hear that.  Normally we battle to avoid having them drag us into those places.  Now they were actively pitying the mega-brands of all things.  What was up with that? 

It got me thinking about the nature of what a brand is, and kids are a great microcosm from which to think of it.  Brands are largely about two things.  One is the safety and security of knowing you’ve chosen a brand that is a known quantity.  That McDonald’s hamburger or Starbucks coffee will taste just the same no matter which store you wander in to, all over the world even.  The experience is predictable, and if you like it, you know you can seek it out almost without thinking.  The second things brands do is signal to others that you have good taste.  Brands are very much a social thing, in this respect.  We want to know our choice is a popular choice.  It makes it that much sweeter in many cases.  It allows the brands to charge a premium that is out of proportion to the real value of the product, in fact.

But somehow, this process broke down, at least a little bit, in our Manhattan soujourn.

I’ve always been a person who loves to find new things, loves choices, and in general, has been a little less brand conscious, perhaps.  But my kids are all about brand, especially when it comes to food.  Their fear is that they will be taken somewhere that has nothing they want to eat.  If you’re a parent, I’m sure you’re familiar with that concern!  They’re all about the safety, security, and predictability, which is ironic when you consider they’re young and should be trying everything under the sun before getting set in their ways.  Nevertheless, their behaviour is very obvious and easily understood, and it doesn’t just pertain to kids.

So what happened to break that mold?

They developed confidence in my iPhone, and in the research I had done in advance via Google.  Effective Search had trumped brand.  Let me explain how.

First was the research.  I spent a few hours on the Internet with Google and enrolling the whole family in the process of tracking down some great places to go for dinner.  I was respectful of the family’s preferences, and didn’t venture too far out on a culinary limb.  We only planned dinners that way, and relied on spontaneity for breakfast, lunch, and the inevitable snack or coffee when it was time to rest our weary feet.  But that spontaneity was fed by Effective Search as well.  Wherever we found ourselves, I was able to conjure up a list of food choices using Google Maps with search or the Yelp iPhone app.

The beautiful thing about Yelp is the ratings, and the ability to combine that with geo-awareness (i.e. it tapped into the iPhone’s GPS to know what was nearby) was brilliant.  Google needs to either start doing Yelp-like ratings or just buy Yelp.  It immensely adds to the whole search experience to have those ratings.  The other point I will add about the ratings is that they represent, almost subconsciously, that other function of brands, which is to signal what is popular.  

Of course this sort of approach is critical when you’re strangers in a strange land like we were in Manhattan.  And one could argue that dense urban environment begets more usefulness.  The latter, I think, is very true.  In the Pre-digital/Pre-mobile Age, people have to discover your business through either wandering in one day or hearing by word of mouth.  A dense urban environment facilitates both.  There are quite simply more people nearby than in the dispersed suburbia more common of other areas.  In the latter, we go out of our way to recreate a dense environment through the artiface of the shopping mall.

But let’s not think that the value of Effective Search ends outside that dense environment.  As a matter of fact, I’ll argue it’s even more important.  Manhattan is so competitive, and so dense, that it is hard not to find at least a few good restaurants.   As the fighter jocks like to say, it is a “target rich environment.”  Suburbia is not so blessed.  Mediocre establishments do better than they should precisely because there is less competition.  They can be big fish in small ponds.

I figured as soon as we returned to our small surfing community of Santa Cruz, California, the kids would forget all about the iPhone and Yelp.  But they didn’t.  We were sitting at breakfast the next morning (incidentally at a local pattiserie that beat anything we were able to find in Manhattan), and my son suddenly wanted to use Yelp to resolve a long running family dispute over where the best pizza in the area came from.  There’s that brand property of wanting to be seen as having made the popular choice.  As a 15 year old, my son is particularly keen on what’s popular and fashionable, or not.  Imagine his disappointment when his favorite scored lower than the rest of the family’s.  But imagine all of our surprise when we learned that the consistently best rated pizza place in the area was one we had never heard of that was not much further from our house than the other two!

I am convinced there are some essential takeaways for new ventures and small businesses from all of this.  First, your “brand” is going to be determined more by word of mouth (especially as enhanced by Social Media like Yelp) than it is by advertising.  That’s a good thing, since small businesses can’t afford much advertising.  A close corrollary is that Customer Service is going to be more important than ever, precisely because of that word of mouth.  The Internet will democratize the selection of who is good or bad, and it will spread the news like wildfire.  Make sure your news is good by treating all of your customers exceptionally well!

Second, it behooves you to spend some time thinking about how to get an Effective Search Advantage.  SEO is not going to be the answer.  Everyone is doing SEO.  You’re going to have to be more clever than that.  Ideally, you need a strategy of some kind right from your very beginnings.  For restaurants in Manhattan, geo-aware search is the thing that defines the pond’s boundaries and lets you be a big fish in that smallish pond.  It cuts through the spam.  What are other kinds of boundaries that will help you stand out in Effective Searching?

Real Time.  There is a tremendous amount of talk about Real Time on the Internet.  It’s pretty unfocused, but time establishes a boundary just like location.  What sort of business can you create where time becomes critically valuable?  The obvious one is tickets and other perishable inventory.  What do you have right now that won’t be available tomorrow to sell to those who need something right now?

Social Media:  What communities can you join and really stand out in?  Tackling this challenge can convey the dual benefits of creating boundaries to focus search in your direction as well as annointing your offerings as the popular choice by letting others weigh in with their opinions.  Social Boundaries can come in many forms.  They can be as a result of targeting a focused service like Yelp.  I’ll tell you right now I’d give a discount at my restaurant in exchange for a Yelp review no matter whether it was good or bad.  Just encourage the participation and make sure your service or product is good enough that the reviews are good.  I’d go out of my way to make sure I was plugged into every geo-aware tool I could find, in fact.  The beautiful thing is that reviews beget reviews and they’re pretty permanent.  Once you get the ball rolling it picks up speed.  You don’t have to incent reviews for very long to win.

There are bound to be lots of other ways to create boundaries like this.   Boundaries for the purpose of reducing the search space to a small enough dimension that your business can really stand out.  Seth Godin wrote a great piece today about avoiding the big domino and making sure the first small domino falls with the money and resources you have available today.  I think it captures this idea of reducing boundaries perfectly.  You don’t have the resources to start out trying to brand yourself like Coke.   The good news is that in the Digital Renaissance, it probably doesn’t even make sense to try.

Postscript:  NYC Dining Experiences, Good and Bad

Best Pizza:  We tried Totonno’s and one of the Original Ray’s (the one in Little Italy, on Prince St.).  Both were great, but Totonno’s was a revelation.  They were one of a list of pizza restaurants we had uncovered that seemed to be good candidates for the best.  What swayed me to choose Totonno’s was hearing about it in my favorite pizza cookbook “American Pie“, so I didn’t exclusively use the Internet.  Ray’s got picked so we could get a slice one day at lunch, and we knew we wanted to tour Little Italy and Chinatown, so it was convenient that this Ray’s was also one of the most highly rated.

Daniel:  My wife and I had dinner at Daniel because it was one of the top half dozen or so restaurants in Mahattan at the time I searched.  We were not disappointed!

The Good (Mitchel London), The Bad (Beauchon), and The Ugly (Fika):  As family, we love to go for pastry and coffee in the mornings.  I have to say, we had a hard time finding good pastry in Manhattan (I’ll be amazed if I don’t get lots of comments on this!).  Seemed like life would be good with Thomas Keller’s (he of the French Laundry) Beauchon nearby.  But despite the delightful appearance of the pastries, imagine our surprise to discover they were very stale.  Think Starbucks pastry stale (sorry Starbucks, love your coffee, but your pastry is terrible!).  Here is one where Yelp failed us, as Beauchon has a huge number of fabulous reviews.  Perhaps it was just a bad day.  Lucky for us, while pawing through the Beauchon reviews and trying to understand whether it had recently gone bad, I discovered a great little place right around the corner called Fika.  Great pastry and perhaps the best coffee we had in Manhattan (and we had a lot of great coffee!).  Fika was highly rated but much less well know.  It is a Swedish coffee place, and a wonderfully quaint little spot in an out of the way place.  I shouldn’t call it ugly, because it isn’t, but that fit my title.  The real outstanding choice though was Mitchel London.  The bad news is there is no place to sit, but this bakery had some amazing eats.  The kids made us get French Creullers there twice.  No place to sit?  No problem.  Buy a bag of doughnuts and head over to a nearby Starbucks for the coffee.  They don’t mind!

A tale of two Italians:  Nanni’s and Trattoria dell’Arte.  This was another surpise.  A good friend who has lived in NYC suggested Nanni’s.  Awesome little place.  I had been to Trattoria several times in the past on business trips to NYC, and loved its Antipasti–best I’ve had outside Italy.  Trattoria was a bit disappointing this trip though.  The service was indifferent, and while the Antipasti was good as always, the veal marsala and the pizza my kids ordered were good but not world-class. 

We wound up going back to Totonno’s a second night rather than try another new place.  We had a great conversation with our waitress the second time who it turns out was from San Diego and understood our mindset coming to NYC.  We chatted about what was great in NYC (pizza!  Italian) and what was still better in California (sea food, and especially sushi).  We brought up our pastry plight with her and her response was that she saw people in NYC as being more into bagels (so we had Murray’s and loved them) and saving the pastry for late night dessert rather than breakfast.

Provocation is Pragmatic, Personal, or Prescient

Provocation is an important marketing tool, some would say the only important marketing tool needed to generate buzz and awareness.  Provocation makes your story interesting, which means others will tell it for you.  Provocation is a measure of the leverage of the message.

What is provocation?  It is Marc Benioff proclaiming the End of Software for Pragmatic reasons related to ROI and cost savings.   It is Apple making fun of the PC or Larry Ellison attacking his competitors, which is very Personal.  It was Netscape proclaiming the operating system was irrelevant because of a Prescient Vision where the Browser was all you needed and the status quo was obsolete.  There is considerable overlap in all of these.  Apple certainly views itself as Presciently Visionary and has earned the right.  Benioff gets very Personal about the On-Premises vendors.  And Larry Ellison has built an extremely Pragmatic acquisition strategy.

Most companies and executives are afraid to be Provocative.  We are trained not to offend Customers, and Provocation is designed to Offend at some level or another.   Focus on getting a stream of prospects who are really fired up alongside a stream that disagree with you so much that they will spell your name correctly when they say so to the world.  Avoid a dribble of lukewarm respondents who are not offended but who have to be evangelized into action after they show up to the party. 

Provoked buyers are self starters.  Moderately interested buyers require too much prodding.  Always seek violent agreement and disagreement over indifference and inattention.

Be very deliberate in your choice of who to agree with, who to disagree with, and why in the following 5 ways:

1.  Agree with those standing next to you, in the place where the puck is coming in terms of market direction.  If you choose well, your provocation is enduring and you need not ever change it.  If the puck moves away, your message will become irrelevant and lose its power.

2.  Disagree with those standing where the puck has been and is rapidly moving away from.  Disagreeing with conventional wisdom is time honored.  People love hearing that the conventional wisdom which has been so hard to live with is actually completely wrong, so you don’t have to put up with it any longer.

3.  Agree as much as possible with those who have a strong say in whether to buy your product.  Be prepared to disagree with some of them if necessary.   Benioff’s “No Software” was brilliant.  It focused the disagreement around IT at the same time it empowered the Business to decide without IT.  Powerful Business Jiu Jitsu indeed!

4.  Agree or disagree about something that matters a lot to your market.

5.  Choose a topic that does not immediately close the sale.  This is the narrative hook that gets them to listen to the sales pitch.  It isn’t the pitch itself.  Anything too close to the pitch will be discarded as spam.  This is a subtle point, but if you analyze successfully provocative messages you’ll see that it is true.  Creating buzz and nurturing leads require different messaging.

Go forth and provoke!

The Tactics of Twitter for Marketing and Competition

Everyone wants to be seen and heard on Twitter and to have a lot of followers. From NASA, to 10 great brands that some say are creating a worse impression of their brand because of the way they are using Twitter, there are few who aren’t yet signed up. Google stands off to the side, trying to remind everyone that they could build Twitter too if they really wanted to. When Twitter goes down, there is absolute panic among the ranks of the Digerati who can’t figure out what else to do with their time. Heaven forbid FriendFeed going down at exactly the same time!

Forrester’s George Colony warns CEOs that Twitter and other Social Media are just like sex: It’s fun to talk about them, but you’ll never understand until you dive in and use them yourself (hat tip to Sarah Perez for putting me on to that post!). But use Twitter for what? What value can business really get out of Twitter other than buzz?

First thing is first — Colony is right. To understand completely, you have to Tweet. But here is another equally important point: There are two Webs out there. There is the conventional Web 1.0, and there is the Social Web. Companies that think putting up a corporate Web site and dealing with email is all that’s needed are assuming the conventional Web 1.0 experience will carry them. Guess what? Web 1.0 has likely peaked and is now over.

Take a look at the stats for creation of new Web sites and you’ll clearly see that peak. Some say that means the growth of the Web is slowing down, but I look at it differently. It means that pretty much everyone is across the chasm with respect to whether they need a Web presence. The last few late to the party got it done in a big gushing burst even though the economy was terrible (we went up this time on creation instead of down as happened right after the Dot Com bust).

That game is done. Having a corporate Web site is just table stakes and earns you no advantage whatsoever. Now the question changes from whether to be on the Web to, “How do we gain the most advantage from the web?” To maximize that advantage, your organization will have to kick up your Web presence a notch or two by embracing Social Media. You have to deal with what Steve Rubel calls the end of the Destination Web Era.

One problem with this is that a lot of Social Media has been way oversold on the hype value. “Just try it, you’ll be amazed at how well it works, you’ll see!” We’re rapidly getting to the end of that phase too. Twitter is particularly problematic. It has so much hype, so many people are trying it, but most apparently don’t find it compelling on first glance. A whopping 60% of new Twitter users don’t return againafter trying it for one month, or as the WSJ cleverly quips, “Most Twitterers are Quitters.” Obviously, it is important to go into Twitter with a game plan for how you’re going to get value from it.

 At my day job, running the products group for Helpstream, we take cutting edge Community technology and combine it with Business Process to solve known Business Problems and return a real ROI. We do that pretty well there. In fact, it is our distinctive market competency. Rather than just claiming that Community is a Silver Bullet that solves every problem and replaces every process, we try to plug it in harmoniously where it can deliver the most good. Helpstream wisely limits itself to a Customer Service focus where we can really excel, although there is a lot of value to be had for the various other business functions.

 Along the same lines of trying to use social media harmoniously with existing business processes, I thought I’d write a few notes about some ideas and practices I’ve seen involving Twitter in the areas of Marketing Lead Generation and Competitive Analysis. Twitter turns out to be an excellent vehicle for this sort of thing. Where else can you actively engage in so many interesting conversations with so little effort? Where else can you find those most willing to talk and participate in experiments as early adopters?

 Let’s start off with the competitive angle. Twitter is a wonderful information-gathering device. Set up a Twitter searchto track each of your competitors by name. You’ll notice you can get an RSS feed for the search. Plug that feed into your RSS reader, and then read what it has to say about each of your competitor’s every day. Some of it will be good, some of it will be bad, all of it will be useful. Some of it is the competitor talking about itself, but a lot of it is the competitor’s customers talking about their experience with the product. The latter is solid gold. Every now and again, you’ll also come across the odd note where some other market player is trying to interact with the conversation around your competitor. Take careful notes:

 - What are they trying to accomplish with that Tweet?

- Are they doing something you’d like to do?

- Is it working?

 In one fell swoop, you have gained access to:

 - Knowledge from customers about the customer experience associated with a competitive product, both good and bad.

- Knowledge of who the active Twitterers are in that customer base.

- Knowledge of how others are trying to join and leverage the conversation.

- Knowledge of how the competitor is promoting itself to that audience.

 Cool beans!

 Now, let’s take the next step. Besides understanding competitors and winning against them, marketing has a couple of key issues it has to solve. First, it needs an effective message to deliver. Second, it needs a list of people to deliver the message to and a means by which to get it there. Marketers try to build up their house list, typically using marketing automation software from companies like Eloqua, Marketo, or Infusionsoft (some of whom are Helpstream’s customers, BTW). How can we leverage Twitter for these goals?

 First, I hope you have a corporate Twitter account like Helpstream. Now, while you’re reading those RSS feeds associated with your competition, go follow every single person who Tweets about them. If you’re picky about not having the competitor follow you, that’s fine, don’t follow them, but trust me, they’re gonna catch on so it is a wasted effort. Information on the Web is frictionless. A good tool to help with all this following is Twittermass. Twittermass lets you set up Twitter searches, and automatically follow anyone whose Tweets are picked up by your searches. Even better, it has an option to stop following anyone who doesn’t follow you back after a few days.

 Now you are following a lot of the competitor’s customers. Plus, you’re Tweeting about your own products, and folks following you are hearing your messages now too. Pretty cool. But that’s just the competition, and they may not be the most important thing to worry about. Perhaps it’s more about the market or type of product. Whatever the issues are, make up a list of appropriate Twitter searches and follow the same strategies. You’re trying to build a network of influencers, evaluators, and potential customers.  This is a new source of leads for your house mailing list. Be sure to Tweet any webinars, white papers, blog posts, or other messaging.

Remember one absolutely critical thing: don’t view your Twitter account as yet another place to Spam. Deliver meaningful content, and make sure it isn’t just your own content. Do a good editorial job of finding content that people in your industry would be interested in and Tweeting about it. 72% of Twitter users are coming to Twitter for more than just your normal product and service blurbs.  Give them more value.  Provide content anyone in your industry can benefit from.

 Next time you’re in a meeting of any kind, ask yourself whether it would be interesting and appropriate to Tweet about it. Create some ambient intimacy around your organization. Let people see some of the inner workings. That familiarity is beneficial. It feeds the conversation and leads to new conversations. Recently, I Tweeted about a meeting we had to discuss marketing strategy with Geoffrey Moore. I had several notes come back to me wanting to know more. Likewise, I was in a meeting with one of the analyst firms and they were Tweeting sound bytes they liked from us in real time during the meeting. That’s the sort of stuff the Twitter audience thrives on. It’s the sort of thing you have to do to keep it fresh and authentic. Always give value before expecting to receive value on the Social Web.

It’s straightforward to get very systematic with Twitter, and it produces very tangible results!