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One social media tip: first build a good customer experience
I recently gave a keynote talk to, let's call them, the Spatula Council of America. And after extolling the benefits of a strategy built on a good customer experience, the Q&A turned to social media. It always seems to turn to social media these days, for whatever reason, so I was ready for it.
"How should we engage our prospective users with social media?" someone asked, clearly wanting to increase the ranks of spatula users everywhere.
First build a good customer experience, I said.
"What do you think about the Twitter API?" someone else asked. (This person codes up digital spatulas all day.)
First build a good customer experience, I said.
"How should SEO relate to social media outreach?" someone asked.
First build... well, you get the idea.
Of course I'm exaggerating, since I did give some suggestions on each of these questions - even the acronyms! - and they're all legitimate questions to wrestle with.
But my overall point, first build a good customer experience, really was the thought I tried to leave the audience with. It's no use spending time, money, or effort to entice people into a product or service if it just leads to a bad experience. Why? Because those people you carefully encouraged and nudged into your circle? They go right back into the cloud, spreading the news about their bad experience.
Now consider that you first build a good customer experience. Then you do your very best to coax, wheedle, beg, encourage, and sweet-talk every prospective user in all of the cyber-internets into your destination site. Or app. Or whatever. They have a great experience and then naturally spread the word to bring more people into the fold. See, I told you - social media really works! But first you have to... you know.
This tip also applies to social media's first cousin: advertising. First build a good customer experience, then use advertising to describe that experience. Consider the language Amazon uses to describe the Kindle in its recent print ad.
Here it is, from the back page of the New York Times Book Review. The ad is designed to zip the reader's eye diagonally down-and-right starting with the attention-grabbing tag line, then past the product shot, onto these three buulets:
• Easy to read in bright sunlight.
• Over 600,000 of the most popular books, magazines, and newspapers.
• Free 3G wireless. No monthly bill. No contract.
In other words, here are the three main reasons why the Kindle user experience is better than the iPad user experience. The Kindle is more legible than the iPad in sunlight, the Kindle store has more titles available than the Apple iBook store, and the Kindle doesn't cost extra for 3G like the iPad does.
This ad is effective because it is built directly on the customer experience that Amazon already built. And it provides solutions to key unmet needs for users of the competitor's product. Like any good social media strategy, the ad simply tells the truth about the benefit that the customer experience will impart to the user. Some companies may try to use advertising, or even social media, to fool users into thinking the experience is more or better than it is. That doesn't work. Word spreads.
In your next project, then, remember to create a good experience first. Then use your favorite kind of outreach to talk about it. Spatula users everywhere will thank you.
(As always, contact me at Creative Good if I can help.)
When working on social media campaigns, I often cringe at the content the customer wants me to link to from different social media channels. I then feel compelled to drop my SM hat and put on my design/content hat and rebuild the website or landing page or rework the content they want me to promote. I completely agree with you. Start with a compelling foundation, a great experience, and then promote it.
Mark that reminds me of a company I use to work for: a competitor to UPS but instead of brown it was bright red and yellow. Wink, wink.
The advertising was pretty good. The only problem is the service wasn't up to par.
Billions of dollars later the said company has pulled out of the domestic market.
The experience wasn't there!
Great recommendation. It's fundamental, yet often absent.
I updated my blog post from yesterday, because this was so relevant to it.
Great article, Mark. I would offer this idea to you when clients get too focused on 'social media'. What they are generally asking is, "how do we get into our customers social networking circles?". Because their customers ALREADY have social network circles. Your clients are trying to get inside the circle, kind of like those Sears 'circle of trust' ads.
Well, your advice is dead on, because if they 'succeed' and get their customers into their poor customer experience, then their customers' social network circles will still function, and of course spread the bad word. Since their customers are already 'socially networked', don't bother to try and drill into their network.
Be excellent at the expeience you deliver, and you WILL become part of their social network circle, if only by recommendation and reputation. Offer the obligatory social net links after you've succeeded with them (like on the order completion page or warranty/registration signup page), not before you've even established a relationship (like at a catalog page, they haven't even bought anything yet, sheesh). Like dating, if you push too hard, all you get is 'creepy' and 'no thanks'. Build even a minimal relationship, and you will have your customers HAPPY to click through and get you your mentions.
Of course, fail and they will mention you no matter what else you do. Social networking is not new on the Internet, it's just newly pervasive. Actually, complaint forums are some of the oldest and most entrenched Internet features.
This is such sweet music to my ears! Social media has become so overused! I just saw that "Secret" (as in the "strong enough for a man" deodorant) has a Twitter feed and a Facebook page. Really?
Yes! For me, the analogy is mass-produced beer vs craft beer. The big beer companies spend billions on advertising, while the small craft brands often have to do very little marketing: the product sells itself.
It just occurred to me - I'd love to hear a success story of a company you've helped. The whole process, beginning to end with satisfied customers.
Yeah, if only things were that simple, marketers could lay off the Prozac. But what does the marketer do when he/she cannot influence the customer/user experience? The marketer has to build buzz, drive traffic, grow the brand footprint, etc ... and often he/she can't exactly turn to the product or ops folks and say, "Hey, forget this, I'm putting all my initiatives on hold until you figure out how to make this product work better for users."
Often times, the marketer has to use social media smoke and mirrors to create the illusion of chicken salad, when in fact they're peddling chicken feathers (or the other chicken thing). Of course, they don't like to do it (see Mary's comment), but often they have no choice.
Great post, 100% agree. Listening to customers shouldn't even be so hard. Social media should work BOTH ways: it's easy for a company to start a Twitter feed and entice followers with updates, deals, freebies and what not but if they don't fundamentally listen and respond to feedback they receive, it becomes just another version of direct mail. It could even just take someone in the organization dedicated to surfing legitimate user forums about the product (the back and forth that takes place between small businesses and users on Yelp is a great example).
Why don't companies identify spaces on the Internet where reasonably intelligent users express genuine issues and visit/engage them regularly? (sort of like creating the 'media diet' you talk about in your book :-) For instance, eBay could learn that customers badly want to be able to change time settings to their own timezone instead of the default Pacific time (aargh, so simple). Logitech could learn that users want a Bluetooth trackball mouse so much so that they have created a dedicated petition website. Nikon could learn that they are losing tons of business by just not providing adequate and timely supply of some of their products at retailers when frustrated valuable customers are unnecessarily waiting in line for months to buy. Even if a company has excellent reasons for consistently not making such changes, I think people soon catch on that it has a culture of not listening...hello BAD user experience! Moreover, prolonged mysterious silence irks me as a user and leads me to assume the worst i.e. org. X is selfish, obstinate and clueless. Apple can pull off this behavior but still be wildly successful and loved because like you said, it's only because their products are otherwise unparalleled and a pleasure to use - everything else becomes secondary.
Bottom line: no company or brand will engage me as a a user/consumer if I perceive it to be tone deaf. I will regard its social media with suspicion and as a source of one-way noise in my online space.