Know your RSS from your elbow

We’re big fans of Commoncraft videos here on bpodr and featured one previously about Twitter. Here’s a new one from Lee LeFever and the team on Social Media. It helps if you like ice cream. Of course, I’m one of those strange people that thinks the ONLY ice cream is vanilla. But hey, it’s all about choice.

If there is one concept that best defines the benefits of web 2.0 technology, it would be collaboration. So, whether the terms ‘PR 2.0′, ’social media’, or ’social marketing’ rock your boat or, alternatively, have you heaving over the side, it all comes down to whether you believe your internet presence should involve engaging with others for some sort of mutual benefit.

For companies, in particular, this boils down to the question of whether or not they want to collaborate with customers and partners. If a company believes its customers should form no part of a collaborative effort, then however well-dressed any implemented web 2.0 tools may be, they will add nothing but cost and problems. We can call these ’selfish companies’ and they will eventually suffer for their selfishness in the great corporate playground: nobody will want to talk to them; then nobody will bother to talk about them; and finally they’ll turn up at school reunions and nobody will even remember them.

If, on the other hand, a company recognises the true potential of breaking down the ubiquitous barriers between producer and customer - barriers so often created by traditional PR, marketing, and advertising - then the tools available thanks to web 2.0 provide a flexible range of opportunities for creating a host of mutually beneficial relationships. The playground for them will be a much more interesting place: they may even skip to the head of the queue for the tuck shop.

Mike Southon, co-author of “The Beermat Entrepreneur”, has a weekly column in the FT. It forms part of the ‘Entrepreneur’ section, which, in turn, sits at the the back of the Saturday ‘Your Money’ section. This obviously involves some newsprint origami before you reach it but it’s usually worth the effort.

I miss it occasionally and yesterday browsed the column titles on the FT web site to catch up with anything that appeared interesting. The title that immediately got my attention was ‘Reputations precede you‘. Southon rarely discusses the internet per se but here was a subject - the combination of entrepreneurs and reputation - that seemed a perfect fit for an examination of how on-line tools can enhance or damage a brand or its owners.

Here is what Southon said about reputation and the internet:

“Your reputation is defined by your case studies, which should be refreshed on your website and in your literature as often as possible.”

That’s it. Seriously. Over 700 words on reputation and entrepreneurs and not a single mention of a ‘blog’ or a ‘forum’ or a ‘podcast’. Not even a hint that a quick check of Google or Technorati (for instance) could show you what your global reputation might be.

Southon’s starting point for his column is a report issues by Coutts, bankers to the wealthy. It appears they have at least 18,000 entrepreneurs as their customers. It would also appear that those 18,000 care little for what an internet-based network of their partners, colleagues, and customers might be saying about them and their services or products. The thrust of the report is towards being in control of your PR by knowing everything about your company and then controlling the messages you deliver to ‘the media’. By ‘the media’, of course, is meant traditional press outlets. This is inevitable, since the report has been written by a PR professional at a top rank PR company with a web site that you can search for a long time without finding any evidence that the internet could form part of any integrated communications strategy.

But that’s by the way. Stuck like this in the world of reacting to the impact of traditional media means allowing your reputation management to turn like an oil tanker when what you need is the handling of a speed boat. The report’s author ends with a Japanese proverb:

“The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of an hour”.

This was from a period before your company’s share price could be irrevocably damaged in the time it takes to watch the cherry blossom fall. The proverb needs updating:

“The reputation of your brand may be determined by the speed and manner of your reaction to a blog post read by a thousand customers.”

Adam posted a few days ago about the new Starbucks initiative. An excellent post from Todd Defren highlighted some of the ways in which Starbucks will be gaining even greater customer loyalty from something that I bet some execs inside the company felt was a risky operation. To be fair, given its history and background, Starbucks is perhaps more open to this sort of project than many companies. But there would still have been the ‘wise heads’ warning of doom and destruction as people weighed in with complaints and gripes, moans and abuse.

The plan, of course, is not to encourage new customers directly but, as Todd implies, to increase existing customer loyalty. However, a serious by-product of eliciting comments from your best customers will be a raft of suggestions that will make the ‘product’ more appealing to a wider range of people. So, new customers will arrive and become loyal customers. Try mapping that process out in a spreadsheet for ROI.

I’m not sure why but Starbucks here in the UK is a second best to coffee shops like Costa and Caffe Nero. Most of the Starbucks I visit are soulless, the tables full of used cups and plates, the food unappealing, and, worst of all, the coffee generally tastes weak and has little flavour. I’ll gladly walk another half mile to reach a Costa or Caffe Nero. Both Starbucks and Caffe Nero have recently opened in my high street. The Starbucks had a head start of about three months and was packed every day. Since Caffe Nero opened, Starbucks staff walk the street with free samples to try to get customers to return. Tells you something.

However, it’s not all good news for Caffe Nero. Although I was pleased to see them opening locally, simply from the point of view of coffee quality, I was also keen to use their wi-fi service, which I’ve always been able to use ‘free’ as part of my Skype Zones subscription. Disaster struck, however, when I discovered that they have gone over to the BT enemy. No more cheap and cheerful wi-fi. Why they can’t provide free wi-fi, I don’t know. Buy a Fon, for goodness’ sake.

At the moment, there is no way to let Caffe Nero know how I feel. As a loyal customer, this doesn’t exactly make me feel great. Perhaps if I complain to a barista, I’ll get an extra stamp on my wee loyalty card. Mmm, that should do it.

Starbucks may be losing the coffee taste battle but should they install free wi-fi on the back of their social initiative, I may just have to switch to hot chocolate while working.

Perhaps you think you should get your 10th cup of coffee for free, or you would like free Wi-Fi access, or even a free birthday brew… whatever your suggestion, Starbucks want to hear it.

Starbucks have unveiled MyStarbucksIdea.com - a social community site aiming to give their customers a platform to share their ideas and suggestions, vote on the ideas they would most like to see in-store and find out what ideas Starbucks have actually implemented. It seems Starbucks have placed blogging and communicating with their customers at the core of their “New Strategic Initiatives To Transform and Innovate the Customer Experience” er, strategy.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced this week -

“We engage in millions of conversations with our customers everyday, and those conversations and ideas have helped shape the company we are today,” said Schultz. “With the launch of MyStarbucksIdea, we are extending the Starbucks community online and creating a dynamic forum that enables us to capture and act upon our customers’ best ideas.”

Starbucks seem to be doin’ it right: offering transparency for the process and what they want to do with your ideas, employee-driven content and encouraging customer engagement. If they do ‘act upon’ some of their customers ideas, it looks like Starbucks may succeed in extending the customer conversation on-line.

Regardless of how many of their customers actually choose to engage in this conversation, Starbucks are set to benefit as they gain cost-effective customer feedback, potentially improve their pubic image, and maybe even hear that gem of an idea that makes a difference to their profits.

On the back of Adam’s post about Socialprise, I read the white paper from InsideView. Like Adam, I was attracted to the term Socialprise. Unfortunately, after reading the white paper, I’m a little less enthusiastic. Here’s why.

I believe that social media and social networking are about engagement. More than anything, they provide the opportunity for conversation. In many cases, the true value lies in the fact that these conversations can now happen between people who would never have been able to converse before. Boundaries have disappeared: geographical; earnings levels; skills levels; subject matter. To name just four.

Engagement in social media is always two-way. You give; you recieve. Receiving may be take a number of forms, from learning through to making a sale. To approach it solely from an ‘I want’ point of view, however, not only leads eventually to talking to yourself in a closed room but is also a wasted opportunity. For you. For your company.

So where does InsideView’s Socialprise application SalesView fit in? Well, for a start, it’s an application, which doesn’t bode well for engagement. It sits on top of a company’s CRM system, too, which immediately rings alarm bells. Why? Because CRM is an interruptive database. (Many individual sales people will tell you that CRM is not a sales tool; that CRM is something imposed on the sales process by company financial departments. Colin Wilson at FirstBorder writes often and well about how CRM is actually part of what he calls the ‘Sales Prevention Zone’ in many companies. Disclaimer: I used to work with Colin.)

So, you have an application doing something with social media interacting with a CRM system. That smells like a Meatball Sundae to me.

I think the fundamental problem is that InsideView have started at the corporate level and don’t see sale people as indivdiuals. They use an individual sales guy in their white paper but he’s presented really as a face for CRM. He’s also called Bob, which will bring back memories of a misguided application created by Microsoft some years ago. If Bob was a real salesman trying to make his number - treating every sales period as a new start-up - he would understand that the value of the social aspect of ’socialprise’ was paramount: the social prize.

I get the feeling that SalesView is a territory management tool that gives the sales person one more reason not to engage in the conversation. It’s like a get-rich-quick scheme for sales professionals: “You know social media is out there but you don’t have the time or the wherewithal to get involved. Plug in our magical bots and alerts and you’ll be making bigger sales more often. Buy one today.” Snake oil.

If the interactions of social media were static and consisted merely of people posting their needs and wants, a Socialprise application could work. But then social media would not be social media but simply a collection of web-based wish lists that sales people could plunder for opportunities. Either InsideView is missing something or I am.

For a rather more positive outlook on Socialprise applications and SalesView, I think it’s only fair that I point you to Sarah Perez’s post at ReadWriteWeb.