dangerouslyawesome

I'm Alex Hillman, the co-founder of IndyHall and a guy who makes things better in Sunny Philadelphia.

I work on Beanstalk, Postmark, and DynamicWear.

I think technology is cool, but people are infinitely cooler.

Cluetrain-a-Day 2009: Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

ITS GOOD TO BE BACK! Thanks again to Stephen Smith for taking the reigns on the last 3 posts in this series (theses 17, 18, and 19). It was a much needed recharge for me, plus an opportunity to get ahead a little bit. So, without further adieu…

Thesis #20: Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

If a company makes a mistake in the woods, and there is no-one there to point a finger and laugh at them, will they correct their mistake?

Everybody makes mistakes, and it’s ok. It’s human. That’s a good thing, remember?

To be human.

Companies seem to think that their mistakes are their weakness, and do everything they can to control where their mistakes end up. Ultimately, they get found out. There are no secrets, remember?

So life hands you lemons, in the form of public ridicule for your mistakes. More likely, you planted those lemons yourself. But you’re not going to admit that.

Let’s make some lemonade.

Get over your Gelotophobia

Prior to writing this post I had no idea that this word existed, and for the first 30 seconds of knowing this word existed I was under the assumption that it had something to do with italian ice cream.

Gelotophobia is a debilitating fear of being laughed at, and doesn’t seem to have been studied extensively (if at all) in the United States. The majority of the research that has been done has been conducted in the last year.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the researchers who are putting energy into researching this affliction should look no further than commercial enterprises, and the people that found them/run them. This has to be the most common affliction of companies.

What I really mean is, the people who comprise the companies. Not just the entrepreneurs that start them.

What’s fascinating to me is that the affliction of “fear” is the is the most human emotion that companies seem to let bleed through from the people inside, to the outside world. From what we’ve seen, companies are really good at being afraid, too. They can’t quite send their high powered attorneys after someone who laughed at them, can they?

The optimist in me see that as a good thing, and if nothing else, a starting point. If we can get companies over their fear of being laughed at, the cluetrain can continue down it’s path.

Ahem full steam ahead ahem.

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Cluetrain-a-Day 2009: Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Note: This is a guest post from Stephen Smith, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen.

Thesis #19: Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

Harsh words. But very true, to a point.

Engage your market directly

There are examples of companies experiencing the positive and negative effects of direct communication. You can check out Dell & Zappos on your own, to get more acquainted with those examples.  I’d like to explore 3 simple rules that companies can use to guide how they share, communicate and reach out to their customers.

Rule number one: People that use a product or service like to talk to other people using that product or service. Give them a place to do it, and participate honestly and fairly. A forum is a common, and often cheap/free way to get give your customers’ dialogue a home.

This is a dead-simple way to create an FAQ (frequently asked questions) tool set for your company with “official” answers and user-generated comment. No matter how much testing you do with your product or application a clever user will find a way to use it (or misuse it) that you did not anticipate. Sometimes, if you are quick enough, these sorts of happy accidents can lead to new products to sell, increased customer loyalty, and word of mouth advertising worth more than a trip to Hawai’i. Or a marketing department.

Rule number two: Let your employees talk to your customers. @Ambercadabra pointed out a remarkable truth on Twitter the other day, and the community ran with it. With just 6 degrees of distribution via from some of Amber’s followers this question went out to over 11,000 potential watchers. Of course, not everyone attributed the quote, so it went out even further [search "trust+employee+twitter"].

This is a topic that a lot of people are thinking about.

Yet the answer to Amber’s question remains elusive. Why indeed?

Is it because the conversations that take place online are there forever and legal departments are afraid of getting the company in hot water over an “unapproved” comment or blog post?

Doesn’t this mode of thinking reveal something more basic (and perhaps a little bit sinister)?

What is your company trying to hide if the employees can’t talk to the customers?

If every employee is not on-board with your corporate vision and dedicated to the success of the company and its products/services then that means one of these things:

1. Your vision is a lie. Or impossible.
2. Your employees know that you don’t mean it, so why should they?
3. Your product or service sucks.
4. Your product or service isn’t worth the money and they know it.
5. Your employees don’t feel like they are treated fairly, because they know the customers aren’t.

It means that you can’t be trusted to communicate with your employees.

Once you have taken a good hard look at yourself, and your corporate culture, then you can take a look at this fantastic post from Beth Kanter on Social Media Strategies for Non-profits:

Set objectives based on a clear understanding of how social media changes the feedback loop between your organization and stakeholders. The key thing that is different with setting a social media objective is that it is not about reaching a mass audience and blasting your message out, it is more about reaching the influencers, developing relationships, having a conversation, and getting insights. Make your objectives “SMART” (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Bound)

Rule number three: Initiating a relationship is not an invitation to spam. Just because a customer comes to you, your company website or forum, does not mean that you can open the floodgates of special offers. Or trap them in a never-ending series of opt-ins, opt-outs, and surveys.

Clue: Customers hate this!

Don’t teach your customers to hate you. Jonathan Kranz writes at MarketingProfs Daily Fix:

Customers are quick learners. We’ve learned, for example, to ignore subscription renewal letters that come months in advance of our actual expiration date; from experience, we know that there’s no urgency – plenty of other letters will come in the next few months reminding us to renew. That’s why I’m concerned about a prevailing abuse of the word (or concept), “relationship.” As a pretext for sending me overwhelming amounts of unsolicited email, marketers tell me (in the fine print), that I’m receiving this cascade of irrelevant and irritating material because we have some kind of “relationship.” Often, I cannot recall what that “relationship” is; when did I give permission for this volume of vacuous nonsense? It turns out that by purchasing a product, I’ve initiated a “relationship.” By downloading a free case study, I’ve initiated a “relationship.” By simply making a request for more information, again, I’ve initiated a “relationship.”

A relationship is a fragile thing, a mutual thing. A relationship is to be tended by both parties involved. A relationship requires trust (see Rule number 2, above).

Remember, trust can be won and lost. This is the most incredible chance your company has ever had- a chance to tell the whole world about your story.

Are you going to blow it?

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Cluetrain-a-Day 2009: Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Note: This is a guest post from Stephen Smith, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen.

Thesis #18: Companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

Changes and Opportunities

The internet has developed as an agent of change unparalleled in human history. The near-instant communication it provides to people all over the world is a more important change than even the Industrial Revolution. The internet is tearing down walls faster and faster every day:

• Citizen Journalism is reporting news faster and more honestly than the legacy organizations
• Consumer advocacy groups are creating online communities to discuss products and services
• E-mail communications can transmit a single message to millions in moments
• Amateur videographers are creating entertainment that reaches niche markets – or tens of thousands
• People are connecting in like-minded groups to pursue social agendas, commercial concerns, and education.

Consider the new tools

Twitter and its “private” counterpart, Yammer, enable a stream of instant chat, or “Tweets”. These tweets are snippets of information – what you are doing right now. Or what you are thinking about. Or sharing a link to something that you think is interesting.

In the previous post we discussed how Twitter became the focal point for the Motrin-mom fiasco. Twitter also became the clearinghouse for information about the “miracle on the Hudson”, with the very first photo made available online at TwitPic.

[via cnet] The rapid-fire spread of a close-up photo of the US Airways plane that crashed in the Hudson River Thursday resulted in the service that hosted the picture going down.

This photo, of the US Airways jet that crashed into the Hudson River Thursday, brought so much traffic to TwitPic that the site, which allows users of several mobile phones to post pictures to Twitter, saw its servers get overloaded.

(Credit: Janis Krums) TwitPic, an application that allows users to take pictures from their mobile phones and append them to Twitter posts, went down after at least 7,000 people attempted to view the photo of the airplane taken from a commuter ferry by Sarasota, Fla., resident Janis Krums. According to Noah Everett, the founder of TwitPic, who still runs the service by himself, after the photo of the plane was re-tweeted by a large number of people and then picked up by several news sites, including Silicon Alley Insider, the resulting traffic was too much for the site’s servers.

Many of the most internet-savvy, and a large number of young people, are turning to social media for their news. As Mack Collier expressed just the other day:

Which of course led to a heated debate. A debate that is likely going on in the boardrooms of collapsing newspapers across the United States.

What do we do about these customers talking to each other?

The short answer is, “You need to get out there and talk to them, too.“

The long answer has a lot more to do with how you engage these customers, in order to gain their trust. As Searls and Weinberger wrote in Cluetrain Chapter 4: Markets are Conversations:

For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations.

For a long time – nearly two generations – the sellers were in control of the conversation. The idea of a “spokesperson” came into being, that is, a person who spoke what the sellers wanted them to say. TV, radio, newspapers – all designed to push messages out to the buyers. Broad-based messages that told you, in effect, that you needed this product or service so that you could be just like everyone else. This was the seller’s ultimate goal: to create a market of uniform buyers that could be manipulated, whose behavior could be predicted, and whose money could be harvested.

Then the internet showed up and threw a monkey wrench into the mechanism.

What Marketing Departments need to know

Here are some thoughts on understanding the changes in methods of conversation:

1. Buyers want to talk to other buyers in order to share in the experience of your product or service. This is market research of the purest kind, the most valuable and the most unpredictable.
2. Sellers must learn to join in these conversations without coming across as bullies, or smarmy salesmen. Partners, parties to the discussion.
3. Sellers now have an opportunity to do something that has never been available before: to find and build a real relationship with their best buyers and advocates.

Don’t waste it.

Join me for my next half-day coworking workshop on 2/19.
Find out details or sign up below. Save $125 (off $375) by registering before January 31st.

Cluetrain-a-Day 2009: Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on TV are kidding themselves

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Note: This is a guest post from Stephen Smith, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbbstephen.

Thesis #17: Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on TV are kidding themselves.

This thesis was true when it was written 10 years ago but for different reasons than it is today. The evolution of the marketspace is the biggest change in the worlds of (“big M”) Marketing and PR since the invention of television. The ubiquity of the internet generates the pre-condition for markets (read customers) to talk to each other for free. Once separated by geography, marketspaces are now connected in multiple ways in online communities.

Unsolicited feedback is the rule, not the exception

Corporations are still spending vast amounts of money on research, polling and “focus groups” but the thought-leaders are inviting their markets to provide this information, or better information, for free. On the other hand, as the “Motrin” and “The other white milk” episodes prove, companies can get vociferous and very public feedback whether they want it or not. (We will re-visit these social media firestorms again with Thesis #19)

The Social Media transformation continues

The marketspace is changing, the markets are changing, the customers have already changed. And changed again. Stay-at-home-moms used to be a special sort of target market, ripe for the broadly-cast TV advertising messages. They used to be bored and lonely. Today they represent a purchasing powerhouse that is one of the most interconnected groups in America. Social networking sites report that the SAHM groups are among the most active and most frequent users of the services. The SAHM groups, once isolated, are now spending a lot of time talking, sharing, and comparing information on every product and service available.

For more on this fascinating evolution, I recommend also reading a book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” . You can find out more about the book at the Groundswell blog. What Marketing Departments need to know

Here are the “secrets” to understanding the changes in marketspace:

1. Your market can now talk back, and to each other, in a way that was impossible during the TV era. 2. Your market is going to talk about your company, its products and services and policies, whether you like it or not – and you cannot control this discussion from the outside. 3. Your market wants a place to gather, to talk and ask questions and share answers. Give them that place or they will build their own.

As Alex wrote in Thesis #11:

…they trust each other WAY more than they trust your marketing department.

In my next post we will explore Thesis #18: how markets are now marketspaces, interconnected person-to-person virtual networks and the impact this has on Marketing.

Join me for my next half-day coworking workshop on 2/19.
Find out details or sign up below. Save $125 (off $375) by registering before January 31st.