So it seems that there are plenty of people out there who care about customer service. Please, someone tell the companies who are cutting back on this function as times get tough.

Thanks to e-Consultancy

I read an excellent report over on e-consultancy this week about Customer Engagement.

It seems that an ‘engaged customer’ is more likely to:

• recommend a company’s products or services
• convert more readily
• purchase readily
• stay loyal

Those would seem to be ‘good’ things to aim for, wouldn’t you think? Well, the panel agreed. Only 1% of the companies questioned felt that Customer Engagement was ‘not important’, while 87% described it as ‘important’ on ‘essential’.

At the same time, only 55% of companies surveyed said that they had a defined ‘customer engagement strategy’. More worringly, about half said ‘No’ when asked whether the worsening economic situation has encourage them to place more emphasis on customer engagement.

As Jim Sterne (Chairman of the Web Analytics Association) pithily puts it: “We know the house is burning, we just can’t be bothered to call the fire brigade.”

Tags: customer engagement, e-consultancy, Jim Sterne, Web Analytics Association

It's good to talk...

Updating my previous entry, I’ve just received an email from Vodafone apologising (just five days after the original complaint and after several phone calls and emails have gone between us) for their treatment of me as a cusotmer. A good starting point.

The only concession to my concerns, however, is a one-line assurance that they do value me as a customer… quickly followed by an invitation to complete a survey on my customer survey experience.

I will direct them to an earlier post on that subject…

Bye Bye Voda?

Maybe I’m just becoming (an even grumpier) grumpy old man, but one of the things I’ve noticed as we’ve talked ourselves into recession is a steep decline in customer service.

Why is this? Some thoughts:

• as companies are becoming stressed about their future, they are giving less thought to ensuring their customers feel valued
• as staff feel their jobs are less secure, their discontent shows in the way they handle all types of customer interaction
• as I spend my money as a customer, I feel companies (and their staff) should be more grateful that I’m still spending

I don’t have any hard data to back this up, but I can relate something anecdotally.

Vodafone, my mobile service provider, have been a company I’ve unhesitatingly recommended to friends and family. I know of a few people who’ve switched to them on the basis of my enthusiastic endorsement of their customer service.

As well as my mobile phone account (with very healthy ARPU) I also bought a mobile broadband connection - which I’ve subsequently passed on to a colleague who is using it (and paying for it) in my place. We couldn’t do this formally as he is an ex-pat american, and has no credit history here. So far so good.

Except that last week Vodafone suspended my mobile phone. Why? Because the payment for the mobile broadband was overdue… by TWO DAYS. No warning, just frustration as a result of a very modest oversight.

I suspect their reaction would have been more in proportion had this happened a few months ago. But, with my contract just two months from renewal date, I feel the other networks beckoning.

I’ve seen this type of corporate response in various ways over the past few weeks (though not as dramatic) from larger companies.

Interestingly, the smaller businesses I deal with (personally and professionally) seem to be a very different story - and I believe this is an opportunity smaller businesses can seize - to show customers what great service really is, and win market share on the back of it.

Here’s hoping.

Tags: customer lifetime value, customer service, recession, vodafone

Facebook? No thanks.

Thanks to Dylan Fuller who, over in the Local Search Summit on LinkedIn drew my attention to this article. It seems that P&G are no longer interested in running advertising on Facebook. Ted McConnell, GM of Interactive marketing over at Proctor and Gamble said:

“I have a reaction to [Facebook] as a consumer advocate and an advertiser: What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”

Now there’s a hefty dose of rhetoric about the circumstances that McConnell describes, but the point is clear: he sees Facebook (and their peers) as C2C communications, not media opportunities. He feels it is arrogant to interrupt it.

I’m unsurprised by this reaction - and I tend to agree that banners on FB are not the way forward. But it’s nothing new. After all, ad placements have funded Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail …. for years - and often quite successfully.

But it’s the placements that occur outside the composition and reading of the emails that works best - i.e. the log-on or log-off pages, or the pages that confirm an email has been sent in the old style webmail accounts. Which is logical: you’re not interrupting someone in the middle of another conversation.

Several years ago, when I was at Yahoo!, I devised a campaign for Vodafone that was deliberately designed to sit inside these types of C2C interactions. There was an obvious relevance to such a campaign that fitted with the creative tone. However, these types of campaigns have always been the exception rather than the rule.

Historically advertisers have been shy of placing brand sensitive advertising near user generated content. The risk of negative association has been deemed too great. Imagine, placing your family friendly cereal brank ad next to content that celebrates gore or porn. Not an attractive proposition.

Meanwhile the low responsiveness of such placements have made the inventory generated on UGC amongst the most commodotised online.

So what is a social network to do?

Invent a new model, is what. Old skool advertising is (Sandlines believes) never going to be the way forward for such businesses. They need to figure out a way of converting the obvious engagement they build with their user communities into a commercial proposition. And the starting point to that is to consider where the exchange of value can occur that benefits all parties: the community members, the marketer - and of course the network owner.

Simple, huh?

Tags: banners, C2C, facebook, gmail, hotmail, linkedin, p&g, proctor & gamble, social media, ugc, user generated content, vodafone, web 2.0, Yahoo!

Last week I got into a discussion that started over on LinkedIn about whether simply placing ads on social networks sites was enough to claim that you are engaged in Social Media Marketing (SMM). The question was linking to a post over at Windchimes which does into more detail.

Of course, my view is that all you are doing is advertising in this instance: you are not engaged in SMM unless you are, ahem, engaging with the audience. And that takes a lot more work.

So I was interested to read that online video upstart Hulu is outgunning YouTube in terms of revenues over in the US. Forecast revenue, that is, for 2009.

This is on the back of 6m users compared to YouTube’s 83m.

That would appear to be a useful measure of the ad-revenue-value of ‘professional’ content versus user generated (or, dare I say it, pirated?) content. 14:1 - not a bad multiple… and wholly understandable.

So, the question remains: what is the revenue model for social media? Doesn’t look a lot like it’s advertising as we know it… it must come down to engagement marketing. I wish I had some great examples to share wtih you but they are still too few and far between IMHO.

Tags: hulu, linkedin, social media marketing, windchimes, youtube

I opened my copy of the Economist today and read yet another plea for Jerry Yang to step down as CEO of Yahoo!

I’ve rehearsed the arguments on this question before, but I’m more interested today in the subtext to this story: the extent to which Yahoo!’s reliance on display advertising is going to hurt them during the current economic difficulties.

It’s chastening to think how much of digital’s growth in revenue is purely from search - and yet that’s just the beginning of what the medium can deliver.

Search marketing words (both SEM and SEO) because it is by some distance the most effective way to introduce someone to what you are offering/saying… providing that they are already in the market for it. It’s all about steering someone toward your version of what they already know they want. Powerful, cost-effective and an essential weaon in the marketing arsenal. And almost totally transactional.

But what about the other side of the line?

For most businesses, it’s not just the first sale that matters - it’s the ongoing relationship that the first sale might lead to. This is very strongly the case with subscription-type businesses (e.g. utilities, mobile phones, satellite tv, magazines etc). It is also central to FMCG (or CPG as they call it in the US) marketing.

But it’s also the basis of what your local retail outlet hopes for. Or what your window cleaner relies on. In fact most businesses in the real world tend to prize the ongoing relationship past the first sale very highly.

So why has the digital economy been so hung up on the idea of paying Google (or their affiliate marketing partner) every time they want to conclude another transaction?

Of course, this is still very different from the display advertising model that Yahoo! and the like espouse. But it is, for me, crucial to digital marketing’s success in this recession - and to the rosier times that will sooner or later follow it.

If you haven’t already, start planning for it now! Google is NOT the only show in town.

Tags: affiliate marketing, aol, CPG, display advertising, FMCG, google, Jerry Yang, sem, seo, Yahoo!

I read a tale of woe from the Economist this week, about how both Virgin Atlantic and British Airways had flown into turbulence over their respective employees’ use of blogs and social networks. Seems that passengers took a dim view of being described in less than flattering terms online.

Odd that a similar furore didn’t arise when Air Babylon was published, yet the idea is essentially the same. Hence, I guess, the use of ‘Anonymous’ as the alleged source of the insider’s view.

It’s amazing how badly some organisations are dealing with the democratisation of production and distribution of content that characterise the web 2.0 world.

I recall a couple of years ago being on a panel at a marketing conference at which we were asked by a marketer from a University how he should handle the fact that students were using social networks to actually tell prospective students what life was like at his university. Should he ‘control it’?

My jaw is still bruised from it’s severe drop when a fellow panellist told him “Yes!”

That is, not just contribute to the discussion, but actually try to quash genuinely expressed views.

I wonder if the same answer would be give a couple of years later? Surely to do this is merely chasing bubbles in a water bed. You might stop them appearing in that location, but the commentary will merely appear somewhere else - and probably with deeper bitterness.

Anyone remember f***edcompany.com? I wonder if we’re due a version of that for social media snafus.

Tags: air babylon, BA, british airways, economist, facebook, fuckedcompany, snafu, social media marketing, virgin atlantic, web 2.0

JY in happier days (this January!)

Jerry Yang is taking time out from his Microsoft flip-flopping and Google adventures to visit London. He’s been speaking today at the IAB Engage conference here. Unsurprisingly he takes the view that the current recession is going to make ‘digital’ stronger.

Sandlines agrees whole-heartedly - and I’ve been saying this for some time now.

However, I can’t help but thing it will finish Yahoo! - or at least Yang’s stewardship of the once-mighty purple monster - once and for all.

What price the offer Microsoft made earlier this year? It was $35 a share. That looked rich in the spring, but now Yahoo is trading at a few cents over $10.

Tags: google, IAB, IAB Engage, Jerry Yang, Microsoft, recession, Yahoo!

Over on Razorshine, my old pal Kanani has been shopping - in the real world - and hoping that Google would help him. As the organisation dedicated to ‘…organi(sing) the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” this is perhaps not an unreasonable expectation. Especially when, as Riaz says, the new Westfield Shopping Centre has linked to Google Maps to show us how to find them. Ah well.

It raises a question that someone asked me a couple of weeks ago over a pint - and which has come up several times recently: is it possible to go up against Google and win?

Privately, many inside Microsoft would say that perhaps it isn’t - at least for Microsoft.

So if you’re going into business doing anything around the ‘organisation’ and provision of information, does that mean you should pack up and go home?

No.

Google does an outstanding job most of the time - but they are not perfect, or infallible. And, for all their 16,000+ employees, they still cannot do everything. At least, not all right now. Pick the right one of those areas and you’re in business… perhaps.

Then there’s the new semantic search technologies that are touted as the foundation of a ‘web 3.0′ world. Google, of course, will play in this sandpit, but it’s a different approach to presenting information than that which is hard coded into Google’s corporate psyche, so the jury is not quite in yet as to whether they’ll rise to the challenge.

Of course, there is also the entire ecosystem that has sprung up around the way Google makes money. One friend of mine calls this ‘feeding the monster’. Shopping comparison and much affiliate marketing could be described as falling into this bucket. And it’s a healthy one, even in a downturn.

But one of the more interesting perspectives is coming from a book I’m reading at the moment - Randall Stoss has published a near-insider’s view of Google in ‘Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know” ( I link to the ebook, but you can get it on Amazon too). And it’s a compelling view. Doubtless I will mention it again over the coming days.

It’s curious in how it compares Google’s ‘open’ view of the world with the essentially closed environment that social networking (well, mainly Facebook) is once again introducing to the web.

Just as Google wins the legal battle to index the content of pretty much any published book it likes - and extend beyond the virtual world - it’s curious that its biggest threat may well come from the web itself. Food for thought.

Tags: google, google books, google maps, Microsoft, planet google, randall stross, razorshine, semantic search, web 3.0, westfield

yesterday's news? BE MORE DEMANDING!

So it turns out I was right.

Somewhere between 8 and 9pm, Ocado kindly delivered, without direct prior warning, a copy of that day’s Times.

Thanks.

There are at least two things wrong with this:

• What value do you put on the day’s morning paper at 8pm?
• What if I’d already bought it?

In the days of concern about the amount of printed paper we get through, I’d estimate the capacity for dissapointment from this marketing gesture is about 85%. Seriously Ocado, this is a great way to turn something that *should* be a positive into a reason for a customer to feel let down instead.

Tags: ecommerce, gift horse, internet shopping, Ocado, Times