twitter

Are you listening to your customers?

  • Monday, 16 February, 2009
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Dear CxO,

Looking for free market research and customer intelligence? Look no further than Twitter.

You may not care about social networking, you may think that Web 2.0 is not relevant to your business. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care what your customers are saying. You may choose to ignore it, but people are out there talking about you; praising you, foul-mouthing you. Go to Twitter Search, type in your company name and see what your customers really think of you.

Twitter will be bigger than porn

  • Sunday, 8 February, 2009
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I started using the internet in 1991, I returned home from my first term at university buzzing about this thing that allowed me to talk to people the other side of the world in open conversations and to send ‘electronic’ mail to folk who were also connected. And it was all free. My friends back home weren’t convinced or impressed, “Yeah but someone’s got to pay for it… I don’t see the point of it… whatever”. So I buzzed on Usenet news and ELM and Gopher in my university bubble and the nascent growth of the internet largely passed these guys by. Until 1998 when I returned home from Ghana and a particular friend had got a computer, and the internet, and he was hooked. The internet had finally reached him. And for him the internet was porn.

If the internet was briefly kidnapped by ‘eCommerce’, it is finally reclaiming it’s roots as tool for connecting people. This is the social age and this is where I return to the above mentioned friend. Email and mySpace and Facebook have largely passed him by. He recently connected with me, but not by any of the more established social networking tools, but by Twitter. And I think that is significant. People who have “not seen the point” will start to get it, the traditional media right now is full of Twitter. Facebook have realised this and have opened up their status as a challenge. Maybe not bigger than porn, but this year will certainly be the year of Twitter.

What’s your social strategy?

  • Wednesday, 28 January, 2009
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Last year Twitter grew by an incredible 752%. That is something too large to ignore. It’s not just individuals who are twittering, corporates are getting in on the act. But do they think before taking the plunge?

The tools for getting a social presence on the web are easy. Twitter is free, there’s little effort to setting up a blog, it is simple to plug in reviews and ratings with BazaarVoice. But with the tools comes commitment; you need to start listening and have a strategy for responding.

Listening

You can start listening by setting up Google News Alerts. You will be alerted whenever someone is talking about you (or your competitors, or anyone or anything you like). It can deliver alerts as a digest or as they happen. This gives you a fundamental tool to find out who is talking about you and where they are doing it.

Responding

Knowing people are talking about you is one thing, knowing what to do about it is another. Making a decision to start engaging in social media is the right thing to do, but with that decision comes responsibilities. This is where having a clearly thought-out strategy is essential.

The strategy starts with a role, someone responsible for the conversation. Jeremiah Owyang lists a number of oganisations who have a dedicated role for social computing and community management – Dell has a VP Communities & Conversations. This is not a PR role, it is not something that will have messages crafted by committee with formal sign-off before speaking. It is about having an authentic voice, speaking with honesty and personality. Using Twitter to broadcast your traditional press releases is more likely to alienate than win you friends and lovers (you want people to love your brand right?).

Your customers want to help

“But why?” is a question I’ve often heard asked when talking about social media. “Why would anyone want to comment, or write advice, or be bothered to ‘get social’ with us?” Good experiences and (especially) bad experiences bring out the passion in people. And then there are the people who just like to have their voice heard. There’s an often used ratio, 1:9:90 – for every one regular contributer there are 9 occasional contributers (commenter’s) and 90 ‘lurkers’ – see Jakob Neilsen’s post on this.

Even if they don’t engage in the conversation themselves, most people listen to the contributer – it is (usually) an authentic voice, and that authenticity is priceless. Word of mouth is more valuable than any advertising, it is by far the most trusted source for purchase ideas and information (funny how so many organisations when they ask that question, “how did you hear about us, they list their channels- TV, Radio, Press, but often leave out recommendation from a friend, or heard about you from an acquaintances, or even “I just know you”). The challenge is to harness the conversation that others are having and where appropriate engage in it in a natural and honest way.

Rather than questioning why someone wants to talk about your brand, or offer support to the community on your products for free, build a relationship with that person. They will feel all the better for being listened to. Invite them to customer panels, tell them about your ideas, and let them generate buzz about your product.

Some listening anecdotes

Here are three brief anecdotes of organisations who have started by listening and then engaged in conversation. To be contrasted with doing it the other way round.

A client we’ve been working with had been ignoring the conversation in technical forums. There was a wealth of discussion about issues with their hardware, fixes and work-arounds. Much of the comment, whilst positive about the brand overall, was negative about certain aspects of the product and customer service. They took the plunge and engaged in the conversation. A regular poster who was being particularly vocal (and getting a lot of response) was directly connected. His issue was simply addressed. He then posted to the forum how he had been listened to, and the negative experience was transformed into a positive experience. Inviting him to customer panels makes him feel even more valued.

A while back I posted about a negative experience with Norwich Union. I blogged about the experience – a few days later I had a comment from their Head of Customer Experience. I was listened to. NU had a face, we spoke and I will now sing the praises of Norwich Union (I’m still a customer). I’ve forgotten what the problem I has was all about.

Another blog was about a poor experience with the Fedex website. Their Application Development Team left a comment thanking me for the feedback, again I was listened to. This has erased the memory of the bad experience I had.

Speaking, not listening

I don’t know anything about confused.com internal operations, but my experience suggests the following. Someone suggested they get a Twitter account and they started tweeting. Only their tweets were for PR messages. They were not ready for inbound Tweets from customers about them.

I heard about confused.com from a friend as a good site to get a home insurance quote from. I tried it and had a far from satisfactory experience. I persevered (because of the personal recommendations) but after a bunch of techinical problems with the site I gave up.

I then actively sought out confused.com on Twitter, my thinking if they have an account I can give them my feedback direct (I am one of the 1 of the 1:9:90 who so many business people don’t understand. I also have almost 17 years of usability experience behind me which I would be happy to share with them – as a customer, not professionally). So I did a search for confused.com on Twitter and found them. I was pleased to see they had an account and wrote a tweet to @confused_com. But it seems twitter was just a mouth piece for their PR and all I was greeted with was silence. I heard nothing back.

I returned back to their website a few days later and tried again to get a quote, this time I had an even worse experience, the site failed to return any results to me. Again, I Twittered about it. I was creating some negative feedback, and feeling doubly annoyed. Not only was I having a crappy experience but they weren’t listening to me on a channel I expect to be heard. Now I am a small fish in the big ocean and easily ignored, but look at Motrin and you can see the consequences of not engaging in the Twitter conversation.

To their credit, Confused.com have recently sent me a private message on Twitter informing me they are going to start “more interactive twittering soon”. I look forward to that. If there is a lesson in this it is when getting onto Twitter you have to be ready to engage in the conversation that is likely to ensue.  Have a strategy before playing with the tools.

Why you should care about twitter

  • Monday, 17 November, 2008
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Motrin, a US healthcare company put on their home page a large video advert with the basic premise that mothers who carry their babies are likely to get back ache and their pain killers are right for the job. Nothing wrong with that, however the message was ill-judged “Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion…” going on to “supposedly it’s a real bonding experience”. Oh dear. That ‘s the sort of language that stokes the fire of mothers. There once was a time that they would have complained to each other at the NCT meeting (or whatever the US equivalent is), more recently a few might have blogged about it. But there is overhead in setting up a blog, and you need to think about what you write. Not so for Twitter. Twitter is low cost of entry, instant gossip.

Over the weekend Twitter has been buzzing with mums complaining about Motrin and their ad at #motrinmums. Look at the stats. From nothing to hundreds of negative sentiments in a matter of hours. Over a weekend.

(From Twitscoop)

It will be interesting to see how long before the ad is pulled. Will one person take responsibility, make the right decision (and do the right thing and apologize), or will it be a decision by committee and ultimately hurt the brand?

I started with the title “why you should care about Twitter”. Not so long ago I would talk to people about blogging and its importance to the enterprise and was told it was not relevant to that persons organisation. I’m surprised at how many CxOs I talk with today either don’t know what Twitter is or don’t seem to care. This is a good wake-up call. (Oh, and I picked this story up on Twitter via Jerimiah).

Front of wallet

  • Monday, 15 September, 2008
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Credit card companies talk about “front of wallet”. With customers having a number of cards at their disposal, how does a credit card issuer ensure that their card is the customer’s card of choice; the card they will pull out first because it is at the front of the customer’s wallet?

How do you make sure that your website is “front of wallet”? One solution is to become the wallet. In Web 1.0 many organisations tried this, branding themselves as “portals” trying to be a one stop shop to do everything. The reality was that people liked to “jam jar” their experiences. They didn’t trust one one provider who did one thing well to sell them unrelated products; that just didn’t fit in their mental jam jar. They buy insurance from an insurance site, cars from a car site. So if they wanted to buy a car they would go to Autotrader. It was not a banks place to offer car sales in their portal offering. (The value proposition to the bank of course looked good on PowerPoint, sell people cars on the banks portal web and there was a ripe market for cross selling finance and insurance at the same time).

Web 2.0 brings a new “portal” to the playground. A concept rather than a product. Thus we have iGoogle and netvibes and mash-ups. No company can become the wallet, they must resign themselves to being the cards inside. They can do this by offering rss feeds and widgets. Making their content and functionality promiscuous, divorcing it from their site and allowing the customer to consume it how and when they want it. Sadly the banks have yet to grasp this concept. Their technically savvy customers would love to have their balances and recent transactions displayed on a widget or as a feed. Sadly they listen to the masses and their inherent conservatism prevents them from such offerings, killing it with what-ifs and unfounded security concerns (“what if a husband and wife shared the home computer and the wife saw suspicious transactions…” yawn).

Anyway, so there’s Twitter. I’ve signed up to it and for a long time it just sat there I had a subscription, but out of sight and out of mind. It wasn’t at the front of my wallet. It wasn’t even in my wallet. Until I got round to putting it on iGoogle. Suddenly it is visible to me. I see it every time I log in. I get bothered by the inane, uninteresting tweets that most of the people I follow burble, but I also update my status on it (and it updates my facebook status as well). Twitter is now part of my on-line experience. It is now front of my wallet.

Unlike the banks who I visit periodically to check my balance and pay bills (in-out, no lingering). Now if my bank balance was a feed on iGoogle I’d have more of an interest to drill down into more detail. I could manage my money better. I could establish a better on-line relationship with my bank. If they gave a little away, I’d give them so much more. But for now, they are back of my wallet.

Enterprise twittering

  • Wednesday, 2 January, 2008
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I’ve been interested in Twitter for a while now – it is probably one of the flagship web 2.0 innovations, (and its Ruby on Rails). But I’ve had a problem with it; I can’t answer the question “what’s in it for me“. What is the point of Twitter? I signed up a while ago and invited a few friends, but the responses were generally along the lines of “what’s wrong with FaceBook status” (one tweet read, “[name] doesnt understand how this is any different from his IM or facebook status). This is a good question. Instant messenger can change the way an enterprise communicates – what’s wrong with IM? Why not put your status alongside your IM ID? Staying with the enterprise theme, you can’t walk into an investment bank without seeing someone scanning their blackberry. Why would an enterprise need Twitter when eyes are glued to the ‘berry?JP Rangaswami has been blogging a series of articles on Twitter – I commented on one post asking these sorts of questions. In a follow up blog, he has answered my questions. I’m beginning to see the point of Twitter – more to the point, when I’m talking to clients about enterprise 2.0, I’ve got a more compelling Twitter story to tell. So (borrowing from JP), why Twitter?

1. Publish – subscribe. Unlike email where an author publishes a note to a group of people she feels will be interested in it, with Twitter people can choose whether to subscribe to what the author writes. If they like what they read they can continue to consume the ‘tweets’. But how is this different to subscribing to a newsgroup? With a newsgroup you can only select to subscribe to the topic, not the author. Unless you use some clever filtering, you can’t choose whose words you read. And filtering takes time and is rarely straight forward; bringing on the second point for Twitter…

2. It is easy.

3. It is multi-device. Not only do I choose who I receive tweets from, I choose how I will receive them – via SMS, email, rss etc.

4. It is succint – 140 characters is not a lot of words to write with

Anyway, an enterprise example…

Today:

Jack Fiction knows something – he’s learned a great insight about a potential client. He sends a mail to people he thinks might be interested in this insight. He includes a copy to the Business Development email interest group that was set up by IS
– It is a closed circle. People not on the cc list will never learn of the insight.
– It doesn’t mean anything to them at that time. They delete the mail. It has no history.
– Many interested people are not on the IS email list
– People who are no longer interested still get sent mails to the group.

Twitter:

Jack knows something – he’s learned a great insight about a potential client. He tweets about it.

– It is public
– It has history

Jack doesn’t need to think who will be interested in what he writes; people who value what he does subscribe to his Twitter. They can see an archive of his previous tweets on his Twitter space. If they no longer want to listen to what Jack says they unsubscribe – the UI is elegant and simple.

This model assumes thats people interested in the insight know Jack in the first place, but that is generally the way that social interactions work. Let people communicate between themselves – it is far easier to choose who you want to listen to, to who you want to talk to. And in doing this it is far easier to cut out the noise.