Andy Sernovitz's Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That!

Newsletter #713: The "Get Help From Your Fans" Issue

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With a little work on your end, your customers can provide feedback better than any focus group or customer service program you have in place today. Your fans are just waiting to be asked.

1> Get their opinions
2> Put them to work
3> Help them help each other
4> Check it out: Fun and inspiring business cards

1> Get their opinions

Enlist your fans' help by asking them to vote and edit your content. T-shirt company Threadless counts on its fans to find and vote for their favorite shirt designs amidst thousands of entries. Major retailers like Best Buy, Macy's, and Sears all not only encourage customers to rate and review products directly on their sites, but also ask them to rate the reviewers themselves to highlight the most helpful comments.

The Lesson: If you ask for their opinions, your fans will beat out any expensive focus group.

 

2> Put them to work

Fans in the form of volunteers and interns are great at helping complete projects or running events. Goodwill uses volunteers in many day-to-day operations and posts the opportunities throughout their stores, giving the positions unique names such as "Treasure Hunter" and "Book Worm."

The Lesson: Whether you call them volunteers or interns, you'll be surprised at how willing your fans are to help your business.

 

3> Help them help each other

Your fans can be your best customer service agents. Ikeafans.com is an unofficial and unsponsored community of 65,000+ people helping each other assemble and use Ikea products. While your fan base might not be this ambitious, you can do your part by setting up forums, encouraging discussions and rewarding your most helpful customers.

The Lesson: If one of your customers is willing to help other customers, is there a way you can make it easy for them to do it?

 

4> Check it out: Fun and inspiring business cards

It's a new year, and for some, that means one thing: new business cards. Need some inspiration or an interesting new design? Take a look at this amazing collection of various business cards on Flickr.

Learn More

You should pay me ...

I just got charged $3.50 to buy a gift certificate from a store. That's not right.

They should be paying me and thanking me instead.

When someone gives a gift certificate from your business--they are doing your marketing for you.  They are doing you a favor by bringing you a new customer, and even paying for their friend's first purchase.

You should consider how much you saved in getting a new customer--and REWARD the person who brought them to you.  Lettuce Entertain You restaurants in Chicago gets it right.  They give you a $25 gift certificate when you buy one for a friend.

Lesson: How can you encourage your customers to bring their friends?  How many gift certificates should you give away?

(A similar story from Ben and Jackie)

A name worth repeating

You need to give yourself a name or category that is memorable and repeatable. 

People can't talk about you if they can't remember your name. People can't talk about you if you do the same thing as everyone else.  (That's branding/positioning lesson #1).

Here's a classic from the Derek Sivers, sent in by Laura Roeder:

Two words, to describe your music, can change your career.

David Feder and his band Salagua-Azul always wanted to get into big music festivals. They had been performing for years, and doing OK, but the agents that book music festivals would never give them a chance.

At a show, a drunk fan said, in between songs, “You know what? You guys are HILLBILLY FLAMENCO!” The crowd laughed, and so did the band. They joked about it again on stage that night, and again on the drive home.

The next day they started to notice that they all STILL remembered those two words, “hillbilly flamenco”. It was funny, but described their music well. The crowd liked it. They decided to use it more often.

They started telling the audience, each time they played, “If you are wondering what kind of music this is, this is hillbilly flamenco!” And the end of the show, they’d ask the audience, “And when you tell your friends what kind of music you heard tonight, what kind of music is it?” The crowd would say, “HILLBILLY FLAMENCO!”

And believe it or not… it worked! People started telling their friends about this band, because it was so easy (and fun) to describe.

And then, one day, they were talking to one of those booking agents who books festivals, and told him, “This music is perfect for your festivals. This is hillbilly flamenco!” The booking agent laughed and said, “Ok - I’ve GOT to hear this!”

Now David Feder and his band are playing the festivals they always dreamed of. He told me his career took a definite turn the day they started using those two words to describe their music.

Read the original post.

Here's what David Feder sounds like:

When ad targeting goes bad

I'm a huge fan of Hulu -- because it works, but mostly because they are the first company to prove to the ailing/blind entertainment industry that there is an intelligent path to thrive (if they stop fighting the future and start getting smart).

But ... they need to do a little work on where they run the ads:

• Charities like Kiva probably don't want to be featured on the Porky's shower scene
• Children's shows like Sesame Street should not have ads at all
• HealthierUS.gov might be OK with their placement on Monty Python's Mr. Creosote.

The future of PR

Good thoughts from Valeria Maltoni on the future of PR and social media.

Good PR comes at a cost - research, the experience of knowing what's important, the relationships we build to offer content that people want to make part of their lives. New media helps do the rest - it helps reinforce the publics' decision to pay attention to you and your business. (Read the rest here.)

From a column I wrote for Smart Brief on Social Media, where I am Editor-at-Large:

PR executives make the best social media executives. There is a similar mindset. Traditional media relations requires finding the right influencers, building trust, and sharing credible, relevant stories. Translating those actions to social media — replacing reporters with the bigger community — is exactly how to run a great social media program. (Read the rest here.)

Rating the raters

Do we trust the word of mouth from people who post online reviews?  In general, yes, although there are often a few a) suspicious/fake posts from marketers and b) idiots/asses.

So how do you fix it? Use the power of reviews to review the reviews. 

• Amazon: Users rank the reviews as helpful or not, comment on the reviews, and report spam.  Amazon lists the most helpful reviews first (not the most recent).
• YouTube: Next to each review is a "thumb up/thumb down" choice and a "report as spam" link.  When you look at comments on a video, those with too many thumbs down are filtered out.

How can you let your customers handle quality control of the content on your site?

Ragan Corporate Communicators Conference May 7, Chicago

The Ragan Corporate Communicators Conference offers a one-stop educational experience for corporate communicators.

There conference includes five tracks, five pre-conference workshops, 42 sessions and two post-conference workshops where expert communicators from organizations such as ComEd, Marriott International, the Department of Defense, Mayo Clinic, IBM and Wells-Fargo will share industry insights.

I'll be keynoting the Public Relations & Marketing Communications track (Track 4), which focuses on blending traditional PR strategies with new media applications to improve word of mouth, coach executives to be willing and excited during a transition, and know how to respond to a crisis effectively.

Learn more.

Word of mouth marketing is easier than you think

Take a listen to an audio interview I did with David Spark for his Be The Voice blog. He also added a great writeup.

Click for audio. Click to read the text.

My favorite parts:

• If you have a strong personal brand or corporate brand it supersedes whatever the hot product of the day is.
• Launching word of mouth marketing requires marketers to stop thinking about what can I get for my budget.
• Once you start talking to people and they start talking back, you can never put that genie back in the bottle.
• Word of mouth is a function of customer service.
• For word of mouth to work, you need talkers, topics, and tools.
• It’s so easy to apply a little effort and get little successes to create a business case for word of mouth marketing.
• Unbury that hidden statistic that shows that a huge percentage of your customers come to you for free. Compare word of mouth marketing costs to search engine marketing costs.
• Could one person sitting on Twitter be more functional if they were on the phone?
• Find the heroes within your company and the simple wins.

Thanks, David.

Instead of a holiday card #2

Most corporate holiday cards get ignored. They look the same and all arrive at the same time.

Tina Merritt send out birthday cards instead.  Mine included a $10 Starbucks card (am I special?).

Is it a good idea?  Well... we got 100+ holiday cards this week, and this is the only one I'm blogging about.

My favorite holiday gifts

Like all executives, I received a ton of holiday gifts from vendors.  Most are the generic store-bought holiday card.  A (very few) showed real creativity, and there were some much-appreciated charitable contributions.  My favorite was from the always-smart people at PureMatter (click for closeups):

 

The best gift I gave was for my art-crazy 5-year-old: A 1,600 foot roll of newsprint from Uline, $32.