Conversational Chaos

Resisting Crowd-Sourcing My Opinion

2011-02-03T06:51:00.000-08:00

I've been a fan of Malcolm Gladwell's for quite sometime and have been monitoring with great interest and amusement the debate surrounding his discussion of social media and its role (or non-role) as a channel for the new activism. Although Gladwell acknowledges the power of the "weak ties" that are enabled by the thousands of connections made possible via Facebook, Twitter, etc., he contrasts the power of this channel to actual F2F social challenge of history. As I have preached often, the power of social networking is only realized when we embed our digital dialogue and debate with as much of our in-person behavior as possible (I don't mean emoticons) and we individually challenge opinion and invite new thought and nuance. In other words, let's not get lazy and default to "Like" versus listen and exchange.

A colleague of mine has suggested that Facebook ought to offer a "Dislike" button. That's a little better. What if we digital couch potatoes had at minimum, the opportunity to disagree easily? Would that spur a little more independent thought and engagement? I know that we marketing folk like to look for prevailing trends, but I, perhaps perversely, am rabidly curious about anomalies as well. I think it behooves any operational group: customer service, development, sales and marketing; to at least explore why a customer would vary from the norm. If 75% of a survey group is interested in a new product, but just one out of 400 respondents takes the time to not only indicate that they are NOT interested, but chooses to provide some reason, is that not worth our attention? I've always made a case that if organizations choose to be "out there" in the world of social media and networking, they must include these channels as part of their integrated marketing, customer service, etc. channel FIRST and be prepared to address, in some fashion, ALL offered opinions. (I don't necessarily mean that we have to individually address every Tweet, post, blog comment, etc.)

The bottom line is that I perhaps suffer from a case of terminal uniqueness or perhaps my ego is too large to think I can just "join the cause" or jump on the bandwagon without offering my own spin or thoughts. I expect and demand deeper conversation as a result of my digital dialogue and am not entranced by the numbers of followers or friends that I have but the quality of the engagement. To the extent possible, I attempt to extend this approach to my B2B and B2C relationships as well. Of course, we have to model the majority of our approach to the common customer denominator, but if we pay attention, I believe that the diversity of opinion is illuminating.

Look for Social Media Participants Outside of Marketing!

2010-01-28T06:25:00.000-08:00

I was a little confused by a colleague's frustration that he was the "only" one at his very large, high-technology consulting firm that was making a social media and networking effort on behalf of his organization. He is tasked with developing strategies for these channels as he is in marketing, but I was a little stunned at his claim that nobody else was engaging in digital conversation. After about five minutes, I realized that as much "out-of-the-box" and open thinking we may think we are doing as businesses regarding availing ourselves of these channels for marketing, sales and customer dialogue, we may still be constrained by our traditional approaches and silos in terms of our implementation. Folks, chat rooms, blogs, and IRQ instant-messaging were around long before Facebook, Linkedin, and YouTube were even a glimmer in the parents of those applications' developers eyes and digital social networking and conversation is happening ALL over our organizations. I thought I would make a couple of quick suggestions as to how we might harness this dialogue and encourage participation before I launched into my much delayed Predictions for 2010 Post! :)
1. Survey ALL employees about their Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Ning, blog, etc. participation and engagement.
2. Make suggestions about interesting and relevant communities, Linkedin Groups, blogs, Fan Pages, where it would be fruitful for you to have ears and members.
3. Open the channels of communication in all divisions regarding what is being "heard" and posted about your solutions and products.
4. Include your internal constitutencies and participants in your social media and networking practice metrics and measurements. If an employee in H.R. mentions her excitement about the release of a new security package in her benefits Linkedin group, it counts as exposure.
5. Consider non-traditional groups in your analysis. I was speaking with the VP of Marketing for an electrical components distributor the other day and he mentioned that one of his warehouse employees had run across some comments about the company in a contractors on-line community. I suggested that he include this type of feedback in his marketing strategy and consider doing some basic corporate communication training with the warehouse employees about ways they might respond to feedback in that network.
6. Consider including Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Skype, etc. addresses in email signatures, business cards, etc. for all employees.
7. Keep the "social" in this ever-evolving and expanding discipline. Whether every employee has a specific contriubtion role or not, it is likely that they and their networks are a rich source of information for us.

Jay Baer is quoted as saying "Remember in social media everyone's a teacher and everyone's a student."

Sources for digital dialogue and often content may often be way outside of our traditional marketing, p.r., and customer relations roles.

Warmest regards,
Lisa

Steal This Blog Post

2009-11-04T12:23:00.001-08:00

Abbie Hoffman's dissident treatise on how to survive in "Amerika" inspired a fairly tortuous train of thought for me this morning as I foraged through my various social networks in search of professionals who might be interested in hearing about the solutions and services that my company offers. Perhaps more the title than a deep analysis of Hoffman's metaphor, got me thinking about the way we are currently measuring our impact in the social media and networking world as a count of followers, ReTweets, connections, etc. rather than applying a value metric to those who read our posts, thoughts, or just subscribe. Many B2B's have jumped on the proverbial Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook bandwagons with corporate profiles and individual contributors, but are we ready and able to efficaciously measure the resources we are expending in these efforts in any other fashion that a self-congratulatory column in TweetDeck that captures mentions? A 2009 CMO study still indicates that we as business marketers and relationship specialists are still failing to leverage the voice of our customers and business intelligence in any comprehensive and effective fashion (http://www.cmocouncil.org/news/pr/2009/012609.asp). What a shame. In previous posts, I have suggested that we develop a comprehensive strategy for our social media and networking engagement that aligns with our overall marketing and business strategy; that we perform a social media risk assessment; or at the bare minimum, we listen to what our customer, competitors and others are saying about us. The tools to support these efforts are evolving, slowly, but they are becoming available at all levels of investment. And now, we have another caution in the form of the FTC guidelines for branding and advocating on-line. My strong suggestion, is that those of you who are ready to throw up your hands; leave the SMN world (as Verizon seems to be doing on Twitter); or continue to adopt a wait and see attitude, decide instead to return to the basics….

Some simple steps:

Update your Business Marketing, Sales, Customer Satisfaction, and Lead Generation Strategies to potentially incorporate the use of social media and networking. Some very simple tools are available that you may already have in your kit. For example, Hoover's subscribers can see any connections in Linkedin that they have for the company they are researching. This provides an alternative outreach method that is slightly warmer than an email campaign using a paid-list. If I am a member of the same group as a prospect, we naturally have some shared areas of interest.
Retool your messaging to be appropriate for the social media or networking applications that you decide is appropriate for your organization. Clearly, a full case study cannot be Tweeted and just Tweeting a link doesn't compel the reader to click. Try and provide the right information within the application itself and then provide a link for more.
Assess the power and cost-effectiveness of including audio/video/photos in your social media and networking campaigns. Numerous studies indicate that website conversion rates and clicks increase when multi-media is introduced in our messaging. I have tested this anecdotally in my own accounts and the Tweets and profile updates that include multi-media have a 5x number of hits versus a plain message.
Reassess your strategy and the application marketplace at minimum every six months, preferably more often. Add-on apps to all of the SMN tools are proliferating daily and are worth some attention.
Continue to refine your definition of meaningful social engagement and your processes for turning listeners or those who comment into clients and promoters.
Don't just count the numbers! Although it gives me a secret sense of pride to have a connection request granted or find someone who I consider a guru following me, I can't honestly say that I effectively mine these numbers to determine the value to my messaging efforts.

Just some humble thoughts…..Please STEAL THIS POST! J

Warmest,

Lisa Hoesel

I Have Little or NO Control Over What You/They Say

2009-09-16T17:16:00.000-07:00

I was chatting with a colleague today about some contract provision revision (like that little alliteration::)) that had to do with control over content. In today's world of digital conversation, re-Tweeting, and a multitude of ways for inserting and sharing content, the days of NDA's, contract content control, and email disclosure statements seem, well, like shutting the barn door AFTER the proverbial collateral colt has galloped. I am often finding myself in the position of asking, as my esteemed friend and associate, Umang Shah of CubedConsulting queries: "Why not?" I think that an almost metaphysical revision of our corporate digital dialogue is necessary and appropriate in an age where being "talked about" is an extremely significant factor in the recognition of our brand and presence. Although I'll stop myself short of suggesting that we dismiss our legal mavens and send NDA"s the way of word-processing teams, I will offer the following:

1. Consider suggesting, even recommending that customer collateral (as long as you have agreement from your client) is "re-peated/Tweeted", shared, emailed, posted, etc. If your reference client has been brought into your program with the appropriate staging, advocating the wide-spread dissemination of a case study about your relationship with them brings them kudos and recognition as much as it brings to you.
2. Challenge your clients to comment, suggest, invite, "talk amongst themselves". The more open that you are in your digital conversation; the more you are perceived as honest, proactive, sincerely interested in the thoughts and input of your clients.
3. Shift the balance of content to externally appropriate and available. Not only will the advance your SEO goals, but for the more casual browsers among your potential clients, it affords a much broader and rich perspective of your relationships with your clients and your corporate persona than continuing to ask them to complete the "contact" exercise. I may be a little jaded, but I like to have a lot of context at my disposal prior to providing my contact information on a corporate website.
4. Hopefully, "they" are talking about you behind your back anyway. I have posted and re-posted, shared and re-shared this point, but our objective is to be the subjective of a digital conversation, whether we have "control" over it or not. My suggestion is that we provide enough juice for people to buzz about and then we follow some strategy regarding our interaction with the same. I propose that even predominantly negative commentary provides us with rich oppportunity for demonstrating our ability to face adversity, resolve problems for our clients, and truly shine.
5. Let it Go. If we are meeting and exceeding our customer service, delivery, SLA, develoment, customer relationship goals, then the conversation about us in the Twitterverse, Blogsphere, community and social media communities should be a wonderful resource for us to mine for our more traditional collateral efforts. Again, the social media and networking applications are TOOLS NOT STRATEGIES, so our efforts should continue to focus on the internal infrastructure, workflow, and teams that create and deliver products and services themselves, not on how to control the communication about them. Right? :)

Warmest regards,
Lisa

True Tales from The Twitterverse-Where did VZ Go?

2009-09-09T07:43:00.001-07:00

In my last post, I shared, with some trepidation but more excitement, that Verizon had initiated a digital conversation with me via Twitter after an unfortunate phone-based customer service experience that I was reporting live. I've re-told this story a number of times in various environments over the last couple of weeks and have been hopeful that I would be able to report that a successful expansion of this digital dance between my internet/wireless/landline/ provider and myself. A brief re-cap:

I called the dreaded 800 number after discovering that my electronic VZ payment had not posted and I had inadvertently double-paid. I got lost and transferred and scared in customer service phone-land and began Tweeting the hold time, multiple transfers, and mounting frustration. The next day, VZ began following me on Twitter and we began "chatting".

Since our initial "introduction" Verizon and I have exchanged a couple of DM's and my ego was massaged by the following message and the fact that a Verizon FIOS technician began following me (we don't have FIOS in our little burg and I desperately want it!):

VZHelpNetworkThank you for your interest in our site. Please look at @Verizon as our SMN Strategy evolves.6:04 AM Sep 4th

Now, I'm in post-third-date-no-phone-call mode…..I know that I am one of millions served by Verizon, but I really thought we had some sparks. As Verizon is in trial-mode for their Twitter Help service, I assumed that they would be as excited about my willingness to openly and passionately share my thoughts and ideas with them. Big Sigh; lessons in humility learned; opportunity to re-affirm some basic Social Media and Networking principles for clients that I coach:

JOIN: In order to participate in a digital dialogue, you have to join the conversation. Verizon is clearly testing the conversational waters and I applaud their efforts here. Be present in the same conversational forums as your clients, prospects, and competitors.

INTRODUCE: Don't just wear the proverbial digital nametag; share some basic information about yourself beyond your name. Verizon "told" me why they were on Twitter and reaching out to me; all of us should do the same as we are reaching out to our various digital audiences.

OFFER: Bring some current news, updates, helpful suggestions, CONTENT to the party. As I have been following @VZHelpNetwork over the last couple of weeks, I can't help but notice that most of their Tweets begin with "I'm sorry you're having some trouble." It would be nice to see some links to other Verizon resources, suggestions, solutions that could inform and educate us all. I have also repeated ad nauseum in the past that if you are going to publicly dialogue with others in these applications, at least let the rest of us in on the nature of the conversation! Don't be exclusionary; use this as the opportunity to demonstrate your true helpfulness!

EXPAND: I have been suggesting to clients that they look at the networks of people that they follow or to whom they are connected for ways of expanding their audiences, prospects, clients, etc. It stands to reason that the friends, family and colleagues that are following me could very well be Verizon clients! What an opportunity for Verizon Help to turn not only me, but a host of my connections into positive testimonials for them!

LISTEN: I know, based on this experience that Verizon has begun to experience some digital ear burning, but are they just hearing the commentary of their customers or are they really listening. Some time back, I wrote about the difference between "hearing" and "listening" in the digital B2B conversation. I think that if we are going to commit to providing service via social media and networking, we really need to fine tune our "hearing" acuity and respond specifically rather than generically to questions that are posed. I don't think that we have to create specific and distinct messages for each digital dialogue, but I do think we need to do more than just acknowledge the questions of our clients and provide "templatized" responses. To the extent that our resources allow, truly individualized our response in digital conversation goes along way toward the longevity of the customer satisfaction.

I developed a somewhat tongue-in-cheek Digital Conversation Scoring System for a client as a way to relate my belief that a digital conversation should emulate as much as possible our Face-to-Face interactions:

Lisa's Digital Conversation Scoring System

I would walk across hot coals to engage you in a chat again!

I would chat with you at some length and then ask our friends to join us!

I would re-introduce myself, ask you how you have been, inquire about any new events, and either continue or excuse myself depending upon your response.

I would wait until you approached me to engage with you.

I would hide in the women's restroom or walk down a different aisle at the grocery store to avoid a conversation.

I don't know you, have never been introduced to you, and I don't know anybody who knows you so I can't have a conversation with you, although I might listen to you if I am trapped and need a cure for my insomnia.

Today, Verizon is at a three, because I do applaud their efforts and am curious about the evolution of their Twitter Trial.

Stay-tuned and as always, my warmest regards,

True Tales from the Twitterverse - The Verizon Twitter Ears are Listening!

2009-08-26T07:39:00.000-07:00

On August 24th, 2009, my phenomenally good luck with Verizon customer service ran out. I was engaged in my month-end expense filing activity and pulled up my on-line MyVerizon account only to notice that it appeared that I had NOT paid my bill. My knee-jerk, panicked reaction was to hit the "Pay Bill Now" option, as I am far too trusting of technology on occasion. After milliseconds of reflection, I recalled that I had, in fact, paid my bill on the 17th and proceeded to dive into the "to file" pile to find the confirmation number. The Twitter Tale begins:

I call the customer service number on the paper bill (I know, not very green, but I still have to file expenses in a fairly dated fashion). I chose option #1 for billing and waited. As I was multi-tasking, I enabled speaker-phone and listened to the hold music and various disclaimers for some time before the theoretically billing-questions-enabled customer service representative answered. When I explained my "double-payment" and "why was the first payment not reflected in the on-line statement" issue, I was abruptly told that I would have to be transferred to "that" department. ?. I thought option #1 was that department. After some time, the line was answered by another indiviudal, to whom I repeated my phone number (I never really get why they can't transfer the number along with the call) and my concerns and was immediately told that she did not have access to my billing records. Back to on-hold land. This is where the Twitter Tale truly begins. I actually was able to create pineapple upside-down cake batter FROM SCRATCH and get it in the oven before I decide to start Tweeting. As I am ultra-sensitive to the nuances of customer service and I have (unlike many others) had fantastic service from Verizon in the past, I don't think I was ever vitriolic, just stunned and curious about not only the initiating circumstances, but how Verizon would respond.

Tweet #1:
Luck w/Verizon Customer Service just ran out....47 min and counting on hold for simple bill ? two transfers so far!12:24 PM Aug 24th from TweetDeck

Minutes after posting this Tweet, the hold music stopped and I heard the initial IVR message regarding my various options for service, including "Press One for Billing Questions." What? Is there a time-out feature? I thought that we were looking at my billing records? Back to Tweetdeck with the following:

Tweet #2:
If Verizon had active SM Twitter Triage they could turn this now....now getting same msg about verifying acct.12:26 PM Aug 24th from TweetDeck

As part of my research for an earlier post about Social Media Risk Assessment, I created a Tweetdeck column around "Worst Customer Service." Verizon shows up daily and I have made the assumption that the individuals posting these truly nasty remarks are the exceptions. I also made the assumption that as a digitized, communications enabler, Verizon had developed a robust multi-media strategy for facilitating customer interaction in a variety of ways. (That is what I would recommend to them if they hired me to do an assessment.) So, I decided to make the best use of the hold-time and turn this experience into a metaphor around social media and networking's use in customer service practices. Thus:

Tweet #3:
Verizon customer service analysis Tweeting live right now!12:27 PM Aug 24th from TweetDeck

Tweet #4:
Verizon-1st billing transfer had to look up billing records 43 minutes later back to original account verification process?!? 51 mins now!12:28 PM Aug 24th from TweetDeck

Very shortly after this Tweet, (I had chosen Option 1, again, and repeated my phone number), my call was answered by Nicole (sp?) in Arizona. After relaying not only my initial query but my travels through the land of interminable hold and transfer-land, Nicole apologized profusely and immediately offered a couple of solution to the initial dilemna. Unfortunately, one of them would involve yet another transfer to another department and quite frankly, my time outweighed my curiosity at this point so I chose to keep the second bill payment as a credit. Nicole's apparently sincere concern regarding my experience and her immediate offer of two solutions were sufficient, however, for me to offer:

Tweet #5:
Verizon-Nicole in Arizona is the way that customer service should happen!12:33 PM Aug 24th from TweetDeck

Although not completely satisfied with the outcome (I make a lot of phone calls and abuse my Blackberry for all kinds of random and directed messaging and browsing so a double-bill pay is not insignificant), I was willing to focus more on the metaphor for social media use in customer service than flaming Verizon so I thought, "Why not test their Twitter Triage capabilities?" So I did:

Tweet #6:
Verizon-Are your digital ears burning? I challenge you to respond to this experience ! :)12:36 PM Aug 24th from TweetDeck

Clearly, Verizon does have a Twitter strategy of some sort as the next day, I received the "following" :) message:

Hi, Lisa Hoesel.
Verizon Help Network (VZHelpNetwork) is now following your tweets on Twitter.
A little information about Verizon Help Network:

179 followers234 tweetsfollowing 174 people

I have to be a little curious about the low number of people that Verizon's Twitter "Triage" group is following or is it that they just implemented a strategy, but I did feel alternately ego-stroked, a little nervous, and affirmed that establishing a conversation with customers seems to be the goal of this corporation. It is something that I have offered often in this humble blog and consult about daily. At minimum, we should all be "listening" to and for opportunities to engage with our clients, even those home-officed, low-profit (comparatively) ones. Just this "following" message inspired me to Tweet this:

Tweet #7:
@VZHelpNetwork Kudos to Verizon for initiating a conversation in response to a Tweet! Blog post to follow!about 17 hours ago from TweetDeck in reply to VZHelpNetwork

Clearly, Verizon is dipping their digital toes in the social media and networking world as a way to enhance, inform, and expand their customer service strategy. http://forums.verizon.com/t5/Verizon-at-Home-Blog/What-s-Happening-in-Customer-Service-and-Billing/bc-p/66552#M170

Even though the initiating circumstance was NOT resolved to my satisfaction, more due to my unwillingness to be transferred again and the time I had already expended on the exercise than their ability to issue a credit, I was still encouraged enough by the fact that their digital ears were burning and they did respond to let the issue drop....for now. I am stunned by the multiple transfers and have a lot of thoughts (as I always have in these circumstances) about why the information about my numbers and records can be transferred with my call and why individuals in different customer service departments are not empowered to offer true customer resolution. Overall, however, I am feeling as if I am a valued client.

What Else Can Verizon Do:
1. Really turn this experience into a customer reference profile. If Verizon's Twitter Persona takes some initiative, he/she/they could potentially use this anecdote as a way to inform their social media strategy, customer service workflow, etc. Either for internal or external purposes, I might be a good candidate for illustrating success and failure and certainly could provide a positive testimonial about pieces of this experience.
2. Do the follow-through and follow-up. Verizon is following me now, so I "assume" that they may be more than usually attentive to any future issues. Certainly, they can mine some new search words for their listening activities.
3. Continue to offer multiple conversational/customer service portals. My elderly parents DREAD calling the 800 number for Verizon and are somewhat email literate, so certainly would respond to other options for engagement.
4. Respond in the same way to the messages that I am seeing in my Worst Customer Service Tweetdeck column as they did to me. I have strongly recommended responses in some fashion to Negative Tweets in the past, and I certainly recommend it to Verizon.
5. Free wireless, Blackberry, land-line, FIOS, etc. for life...... :) Kidding.

What We the People Can Do:
1. Offer our vendors the opportunity to converse with us in a mature, non-enraged, expletive-free fashion. If we need to vent, is it really useful to our end objectives to do so in a vile, nasty fashion?
2. Find ways of communicating with our vendors that are most comfortable to us and if they are not available, ask for them.
3. Share all sides of the story, including our own errors and any positive pieces in the hope that not only will the vendor be more open to listening to our problems/concerns but that our experience may inform and improve our future conversations with them.
4. As I have suggested/strongly recommended in the past, the digital conversation should be a reflection of our face-to-face and voice-to-voice engagements. The more information that we exchange digitally and the more reasonable that we are, the better the chance that we may actually see resolution and the potential for change.

I am hoping that this Twitter Tale turns into a series....Verizon, this is your opportunity to really become the poster child for customer service in the social media and networking world!

My best, as always,
Lisa

Do We/They Really “Get” Social Media or Did We All Just Change our Titles?

2009-08-18T07:26:00.001-07:00

Okay, I'm waving the white flag today. I started playing around with the concept of a corporate "Social Media DJ" a little over a year ago (to some laughter, some scoffing, and very few, "Gee, that sounds like you might have something there Lisa's." This morning, in a strictly scientific analysis of the industry, I analyzed the landscape for social media consulting and found the following:

Results 1 - 10 of about 36,900,000 for social
media
consultant.

Results 1 - 10 of about 38,600,000 for social
network
consultant.

Results 1 - 10 of about 15,300,000 for social
media and networking
consultants.

Is it possible that my self-anointment as the Director of Customer Conversation and Social Media DJ was somehow on the right track or has the confusion, opportunity and multitude of options just generated a tidal wave of title changes and business card re-orders? In my hope that I have not contributed to any parlor trick of title-shifting without true comprehension of change and responsibilities, I'd like to offer some thoughts about the paradigm shift that I think accompanies a focus on social media and networking in the B2B customer relationship and reference world…..

It IS about engaging new audiences in a deeply compelling, open, transparent, honest, agnostic, multi-media, complex conversation with and about us in a variety of environments. Social media and networking applications and opportunities are about participating and supporting a broader and deeper dialogue with our constituencies. My ever-handy desktop Wikipedia icon tells me the following:

"A conversation is communication between multiple people. It is a social skill that is not difficult for most individuals. Conversations are the ideal form of communication in some respects, since they allow people with different views on a topic to learn from each other. A speech, on the other hand, is an oral presentation by one person directed at a group.

For a successful conversation, the partners must achieve a workable balance of contributions. A successful conversation includes mutually interesting connections between the speakers or things that the speakers know. For this to happen, those engaging in conversation must find a topic on which they both can relate to in some sense. Those engaging in conversation naturally tend to relate the other speaker's statements to themselves. They may insert aspects of their lives into their replies, to relate to the other person's opinions or points of conversation.

Conversation is indispensable for the successful accomplishment of almost all activities between people, especially the coordination of work, the formation of friendship and for learning."

If our participation in an SMN conversation focuses on "mutually interesting connections" and its objective is the "successful accomplishment of almost all activities between people" it certainly is worthy of more than a website readjustment or new customer video. Our SMN objectives to augment our brand positioning, our customer care philosophy, our entry into new markets, and our cementing of lasting relationships with our existing client base. This "conversation" affords us the opportunity to tap into an exchange of ideas about our solutions that may have been hidden from our traditional methods of communicating with our user base. Raising our hand in these new communities and discussion groups should provide us with far richer business intelligence about our competitors, customers and our own business and solutions.

I think I've answered my own question……If we are approaching the SMN conversation from the standpoint of a paradigm shift in the way that we offer, exchange, review, and synthesize intelligence about the marketplace and business that we are in, we have certainly done more than merely change our titles; we are exploring new ways of relating to the known and new "speakers" that inform our solutions and services.

Your thoughts and feedback are, as always more than encouraged and anticipated!

Warmest regards,

Lisa M. Hoesel

Click on Links Twice; Insert Links Once

2009-08-07T18:02:00.001-07:00

Often, I am so excited to share information with my colleagues, friends, and family that I hit the send, paste, publish buttons far too soon. Being an English/Poli-Sci major by secondary education, I am pretty particular about spelling and grammar, but my vision for the message that I want to convey and the perception of the material that I am sending to you does not always mesh with the way that you will perceive or even review the same material. I have been schooling myself in techniques for reviewing my blog posts, emails, HTML creations, etc. from a variety of angles and humbling myself to ask for second opinions, thoughts and feedback. The rapidity and ease with which I can publish my thoughts in abbreviated 140 character Tweets and in a flash, copy and paste a web link into an email message or share it on my Facebook profiles only exacerbates the risk. The social media and networking applications that are so prevalent today often do NOT offer a "preview" option. Once it's out there, it's out there. Let me provide an illustration:

Our company's CEO recently presented to a group of entrepreneurs at a local networking function. His presentation was phenomenally well received and post-event, published on the host's online site. Their ezine focuses on a wide variety of innovations and futuristic ideas and is quite an interesting read and platform for the genius entrepreneurs of today. We certainly wanted to promote our CEO's slide deck, presentation and thoughts as much as possible (read, "We're proud of you, Bossman!") and so immediately jumped to inserting a link to their ezine on our corporate Facebook profile…without enough review….without testing the link in a different environment…without really realizing that the message that was being sent inadvertently focused on the ezine and NOT on the presentation. Why? Because we used the homepage link for the ezine rather than the full page link. Maybe this wouldn't have been a big deal (or blog post fodder) if I hadn't happened to be posting something to our corporate Facebook profile later and happened to click on the link…and went to the home page of the ezine….which updates throughout the day with new articles about new innovations and ideas….which at that moment happened to be something called "Machine Condoms" which are rubber sleeves that one can place over the handles of public gym equipment to avoid common viruses, bacteria, and the dreaded workout flesh-eating infections. To find the presentation, I had to use the search option on the site and type in our CEO's name, which had I been a casual visitor to our Facebook site, I may not have known. (Later the ezine home page featured an article about EATING CAMEL) As I have administrative authority over the Facebook site, I immediately removed the link and later replaced the update and link with one that takes the visitor directly to the intended page and review of the presentation.

In this particular situation, a remedy was quickly applied and we are assuming, with digital fingers crossed, that no adverse consequences will be forthcoming. Imagine the possible scenarios with a different type of organization wanting to showcase their CEO's presentation and a perhaps even odder online environment: The American Medical Association Neurological Symposium speaker and a misdirected or mistyped link that takes visitors to a study on cannibalism and mad cow disease misdiagnoses; a profile bio of one of your key executives, featured in an online magazine and the current volume ALSO features an article about CEO's at the many bail-out companies; your conservative pastor's sermon included in a directory of press coverage of lawsuits against the Catholic church. The room for error is Grand Canyon-esque, given the complexity and nuance of the WEB 2.0 world and our inability to control the environments in which we are found, even when we digitally place ourselves in them.

I offer some pre-publishing pointers:

As always, think about the message that you are sending, especially in the social media and networking environment. Just because we are configuring our messages differently, doesn't mean that they shouldn't carry the same tone and branding as our standard marketing collateral. They may be shorter; friendlier; even funny, but they should still be on target and not muddied by the content surrounding them.

Click on links twice, three, four times, before you include and publish them in profiles, Tweets, email messages etc. Not only do we want to double-check our work and that the links are not broken, but often they will display differently in different environments. And the site to which we are linking may change its content often so the look and feel that was appropriate, interesting, etc. at one point during the day may NOT be later.

-Click on the links using different browsers, if you're NOT sure that your audience is all IE

-Test the links and the email messages with different versions of desktop/laptop software

-Create your messages, .pdf's, audio and video clips, and email templates in the MOST common (notice I didn't write LEAST) version of the software

Sign up for your own RSS feed; test email campaigns, Facebook Fan Clubs, etc. Review the materials, links, and posts as they will appear to your audience; not just in preview or beta mode.

Have someone else review your messaging, if possible, prior to hitting send and publish.

Look at the context to which you are connecting. Think about whether the reader's attention is focused on the context OR your content.

Spell and grammar check. (J Had to slip that one in, again.)

Conduct a Social Media Audit and Risk Assessment before venturing into the land of Twitter and Facebook, et al.

Designate more than one administrative authority that can pull the plug if necessary.

For us, the error was more or less quickly rectified and has become a source of good-natured ribbing and light-hearted Friday email banter. It could have been worse….a lot worse.

I hope you find this edifying and amusing and as always, my best until next one….

Lisa

Let Them Complain-And Then Share the Story!

2009-08-01T06:17:00.001-07:00

I was attempting a tortuous twist on the misquoted and misattributed "qu'ils mangent de la brioche" for this post, and settled for "Let Them Complain." For years, I have remarked to friends and family, that we seem to increasingly inhabit, reward and cultivate a culture of whining, complaining, lawsuits and general dissatisfaction seeking remedy or simply voice. In my years as a customer consultant, strategist, sales person, etc., I have had numerous opportunities to take courses, get coaching, be "trained" in listening skills, overcoming objections, "getting to yes", ad infinitum/nauseum and have come to the conclusion that there are some people who simply will not be satisfied, no matter what. When I overlay this conclusion with my musings on the increasing ability that our customers have to instantly and globally voice their complaints, I've been suggesting social media and networking strategies and risk assessments as critical components of our customer conversation business practices. The plethora of social medial applications that are available at literally everyone's fingertips are being accessed almost as a virtual running commentary to everyday experience with products and solutions. [The Tweetdeck search that I created around "worst customer service" for my last blog post updates so often I insist virtual whirls of smoke curl from the borders of its column!] So I started thinking if some people are going to complain no matter how diligent our efforts at solving their issue are; no proactive our social media strategy; empowered our front-line customer service personnel; comprehensive our customer relationship net may be: WHY NOT JUST LET THEM COMPLAIN AND PUBLISH IT? What if, after exhausting our best efforts for mutual resolution, we detailed in our blogs, Tweets, Facebook "customer spotlights" the exact nature of our worst customer service complaint; the steps we took to resolve it AND the ultimate dissatisfactory end?

Negative Customer Reference Recruitment-Really

Many of us spend a lot of money, time, and energy recruiting customer references that are willing to participate in case studies, press releases, talk to prospects, or record interviews and testimonials on our behalf telling everybody how wonderful we are. We record this precious evidence any way we can; devise comprehensive ways of cataloging, searching for and representing this proof that we are what we say we are and deliver our solutions and services better than any body else. Our entire focus in the customer reference practice has been the careful cultivation of the positive reference while our customer support/service teams have been attempting to fill the pipeline with current customers that may be eligible for this consideration. What I am proposing is that we utilize the same infrastructure that is in place for identifying and promoting the positive experience reported by our customers to the occasional negative, argumentative, "nothing will make me happy but a full refund" client. Why am I suggesting this? Here are some high level reasons:

It should be part of our on-going customer support assessment to collect information about our customers' negative as well as positive experience.
We need to know where the gaps are in our service.
It is interesting.
It may provide much needed comic relief: Consumer complaint to Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines

In light of my continued urging that we consider participation in the broader social media and networking customer conversations that are happening about us and around us, considering proactively publishing a negative customer reference makes sense for some additional strategic reasons. The likelihood that a person who is a chronic complainer will publicly and more vehemently report their experience outside of our 1-800 Call Us environment seems to be gaining nuclear steam. If you have implemented even the "listen" pieces of my suggested social media strategies, you have begun to analyze the customer conversation about your brand, solutions, competitors and general business environment. Hopefully, the conversation is dominated by those suggesting that our products and solutions are considered by others and we have invited those individuals to share the same story again and again. What if we applied the same principles of watchfulness and intervention to the "Worst Customer Experience with Our Brand" TweetDeck Column? What if we invited @IHATEYOU to record the reasons why they were dissatisfied with us, tell their side of the story, and offered to publish it on our website? What if we retweeted them and AGREED that we had messed up. What if we told them that we didn't care if they said that they would never use us again, that we just wanted to be honest with our customers and prospective customers and share that we didn't always perform perfectly? Maybe the following things could happen:

Best Case-They return as a customer because they are so shocked; or their deep psychological need to just vent has been satisfied.
We truly practice the principles of transparency that the SMN world has been preaching.
We avoid the ennui that we may inadvertently be introducing by publishing too many positive customer references.
We demonstrate, through the voice of our customers, that we really do do anything that we say we will to try and resolve their issues.
"Exposing" ourselves first drastically reduces the tabloid-like effect of our customer's self-filmed and self-published FLIP MINO diatribe against us.

Maybe the old 1940's political slog, "If you can't beat em; join em" applies here. My extremely scientific (J read Google) research into the reasons why people complain basically returned the following:

Complaining. Everyone complains, although clearly some people complain more than others. Even though complaining has negative connotations associated with it, there must be some benefit to complaining or people would not do it so often. Very little research within psychology has examined complaining. Robin M. Kowalski

So my bottom line for this post is:

We don't understand why some customers will complain no matter what but they will
Social media affords everybody the ability to complain much more "loudly", for longer, and to a "ginormous" audience
Worst case, poking a little bit of public fun at ourselves can't hurt anything other than our pride……right?

Regards until next time,

Lisa

How Much Would a Domino’s YouTube Cost Your Company?-The Social Media Risk Assessment

2009-07-23T15:34:00.001-07:00

The most conservative estimate of the revenue loss that Domino's may attribute to the "gross-out" employee YouTube video is $37 million. (Predictify http://www.predictify.com/q/how-much-will-dominos-pizza-llc-claim-youtube-2). The majority of my posts regarding Social Media and Networking's impact on B2B customer relations have focused on the positive side of enhancing, broadening, and exploring different conversational possibilities with existing and prospective audiences. I have touched on the ramifications of negative Tweets, responses to unfortunate customer service stories turned into blog comments and just this morning, suggested a couple of ways that United Airlines may have turned the guitar incident to their favor. I have suggested and even consulted around the idea of a Social Media Audit as a first step in assessing the impact of our audience's participation and conversation about us. It has been suggested that the gloves need to come off and I need to reach into my information technology background and push you all very hard to consider the ramifications of ignoring what your clients, competitors and the general population is saying about you directly and indirectly, out there. Thus, I strongly advocate, as an absolutely critical component of your Social Media and Networking Strategy that you conduct a Risk Assessment that has all the weight, probabilities, and response matrix of any other IT, Disaster Recovery, or Business Risk Assessment that you conduct.

The Social Media Risk Assessment

A quick Twitter search on "worst customer service" produced a CPU stuttering result (I "graffitied" the names to protect myself and the companies, but trust me, they are big players in the IT, storage, and device community. See the image above left.)

One of our tunnel vision issues, however, is that we think a negative Tweet or blog comment is the only exposure we have. An effective Twitter Triage strategy is essential, but it does not contemplate the ramifications of a self-made video by employees or customers published to YouTube, capturing, in painful detail the backroom processing truth about our pizza.

Why do you need this?

How many more Comcast-technician-sleeping stories, Domino's-inappropriately-prepared-food, United Airlines-smashed-guitar stories do we really need to recognize that the risk of one angry customer or disgruntled employee can impact our public reputation to the tune of millions. Whether or not it is malicious, the opportunity to comment negatively on the service and products that consumers receive from businesses is phenomenally easy and is the internet has become a tremendously acceptable vehicle for voicing these comments. Further, the immediacy with which we can publish our experience is closer and closer to real-time:

One-third of Americans (32%) have used a cell phone or Smartphone to access the internet for emailing, instant-messaging, or information-seeking. This level of mobile internet is up by one-third since December 2007, when 24% of Americans had ever used the internet on a mobile device. On the typical day, nearly one-fifth (19%) of Americans use the internet on a mobile device, up substantially from the 11% level recorded in December 2007. That's a growth of 73% in the 16 month interval between surveys. – Wireless Internet Report, John Harrigan, July 22, 2009 http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/12-Wireless-Internet-Use.aspx

I included a conservative loss prediction re the United Airlines "Guitar" mishap. The examples of organizations that were completely unprepared to respond effectively to the publication of less-than-satisfactory customer service stories or employee (mis) behavior are mounting on an hourly basis. Combined with the availability and acceptability of the internet as a means for communicating consumer responses, the adverse consequences of what may have been a minor case of disgruntled customer in the pre-Twitter era is now tantamount to the impact of any disruption of service, natural disaster, or cataclysmic misstep in marketing message.

The components and players

Any corporate risk assessment, IT or otherwise, includes key stakeholders such as H.R., IT, Finance. In a long-ago part of my career, I had the opportunity to educate a regional group of EDP auditors on the risks associated with the introduction of new types of long-distance transport methods available to consumers, post-Bell breakup. Point being, that new technology and its availability to different internal and external populations indicate that our social media risk assessment should be at minimum reviewed by more than the usual suspects. I have suggested that a Social Media Strategy and Audit should include as a first step a review of employees who are participating in the various networks. EVEN IF YOUR CORPORATE POLICY IS TO BLOCK ACCESS TO THESE NETWORKS AT THE OFFICE; that doesn't mean it isn't worth a review of comments by your own "family." A cursory review of the current threats and incidents should remind us that our own employees may equate to the most damaging publications in the SMN world.

The components;

Current metrics applied to D.R., IT and Financial Risk Assessment

Audiences, both internal and external, who are participants in SMN

Buckets of content that are published by you

Sites, feeds, "authorities", competitors who are relevant to your industry, brand, etc.

The players:

IT, Finance, H.R. Legal

Marketing and Sales-yes, they certainly have a bead on what is being said and how

Customer Service, Call Center, Support

Employees, contractors, partners, etc.

The formula

I will go out on a limb and offer that the same probability and threat analysis that you apply to your IT infrastructure can be repurposed for your Social Media Risk Assessment. Identify the areas of risk, assign a probability to exposure by type, ask for input re the revenue loss, damage to reputation, loss of infrastructure investment (you may need to shut down a blog, website, comment function, customer service line, Twitter profile), FTE-loss, etc and score it. If your primary call center is located in Tornado Alley, you certainly score Acts of God highly probable and can assess the damage of losing connectivity, data, and cost of going to your back-up/secondary center. The more present your organization is in the SMN world does increase the risk of exposure, but NOT being a presence or participant in the arena could contribute as significantly to the risk of negative feedback as well. Not having a website would be unthinkable today. I would suggest that very soon, it will be equally as bizarre, and remarked upon, if we do not have a Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, etc. profile and interact with our audience via those mechanisms. Playing ostrich is not a strategy, at least not a risk avoidance one. Some elements that you may want to consider as you modify your current Risk Assessment formula:

# of Followers, Subscribers, Community Members (Scope)

Scale of Network associated with #1. (Scope)

# of times Brand name, solution, organization, is currently mentioned (Probability)

Current ratio of positive v. negative comments (Probability)

Any association/referral to SMN comments in customer correspondence if available (Probability)

Ranking of each type of network, comment, etc. (Damage Valuation)

Average revenue per contract/customer/opportunity (Damage Valuation)

Productivity loss valuation (Damage Valuation)

The risk assessments that I have conducted or designed in the past have used a number of different scoring and ranking mechanisms; from Kepner Tregoe to internally designed business continuity valuations. What is important is that you acknowledge, evaluate and prepare for the tidal wave (note I did not use the word ripple) effect that even a mildly unsatisfactory report may have when Tweeted by someone with hundreds of thousands of followers who are in your target market. I strongly believe that the SMN world is fundamentally self-regulating. I think that false and bitter negative comments, accusations, and posts (as well as truly disgusting employee footage) will be disambiguated by excellent customer service. I absolutely and strenuously argue that a proactive Social Media Strategy is the best prophylactic approach to answering the challenges of our audience in the Web 2.0 world, but I also live in Western Washington and carry an umbrella, red-polka dotted rain boots, and a baseball hat in my car…..always!

My best until next time,

Lisa, Director of Customer Conversation and Social Media DJ J

Smashing Social Media-I mean Guitars

2009-07-22T07:13:00.001-07:00

I have been reading the story about the guitar damaged on a United Airlines flight and the choice of the aggrieved party to capture his trauma and broadcast via YouTube… a year later. The implications for those of us in the B2B world who are still viewing a toe-dip in the icy waters of social media as tantamount to a plunge into a shark-infested riptide, are unfortunate, to say the least. Perhaps I have been a little Pollyanna-ish in my excitement and promotion of these media to my customer relationship and reference colleagues. Perhaps my notion that this environment will be self-regulating is too naïve, assumptive of the greater good, presuming that most consumers are eager for legitimate credible exchange of information and engagement in open and honest conversation and dialogue with the companies with whom they do business. Okay, maybe a little or a lot of the prefacing comments, but before we run shrieking back into our world of 1-800 scripted customer service models, let's take a deep breath.

The United Airlines "Guitar" Story is ONE Story
United Airlines could have/should have preemptively struck, even prior to having any corporate social media strategy that contemplated triage and response to this type of incident.
The incident could have been quietly handled, as we all hope baggage issues, delayed flights, and missed connections will be OR it could have been "spun" into a marvelous customer service story complete with an acoustic Guitar version of the infamous UA commercials.

Jay Baer's blog expresses these points far more succinctly:

"I certainly believe United would have been A LOT better off dealing with this immediately and turning a negative into a positive by co-opting Carroll and his story. Consider the career-based motives of Mr. Carroll, I suspect he'd have been happy to create a positive video about United, had the $$$ and exposure been sufficient.

My fear in all this is that it will paradoxically have a chilling effect on brands engaging in social media, as they become more and more concerned about the veracity of claims. Carroll may have got his, but I'm not sure anyone will benefit but him. Certainly not United and I doubt he'll help social media customer service as a whole." A Social Media Gun to the Head, July 21st, 2009 | Written By: Jason Baer

http://ow.ly/hN0Q

Certainly, Carroll didn't keep entirely silent about the damage to his guitar prior to the release of his YouTube? Somebody at United must have been informed, called, shouted at? Was it the lack of response or compensatory action that caused this young artist to act now in such a global way? Who knows, point is that in the B2B world we now can choose to be held hostage by the possible threat of these incidents or we can do what I have advised in the past:

I know, I know, it can't possibly be that simple. J

Until next time, my regards,

Are we “listening” to or merely “hearing” our customers?

2009-07-15T06:42:00.001-07:00

As frequently annoying as my English major history is to my co-workers and friends, it sometimes directs me to nuances in our communication and presentation that although possibly nit-picky to others, at minimum provide me with fodder for blog posts. As I was contemplating some fine-tuning of a social media and networking strategy and the implications of our corporate presence in the wild world of Twitter, it occurs to me that I have been suggesting that an option for many B2B first steps into the SMN world is to "hear" what their customers and others are saying, when I really mean we should be "listening" to them. As a common practice and in our customer relationship and support efforts, we use these words interchangeably when by any definition (you can check me) they really are quite different and depending upon which word we choose as the foundation of our strategy, may have very different ramifications for our success.

Briefly, (I won't bore you with etymology or origin), Merriam-Webster Online offers that the word "hearing" is suggestive of the process and biology by which our ears receive and transmit sound. "Listening" on the other hand, intimates a higher-level neural process of interpretation. If we have a loss of "hearing", we cannot process the stimuli of audio waves; if we lose the ability to "listen", in this context, I suggest that we are missing some key messages that our customers, prospects, and others are trying to transmit. As a direction for our participation in social media and networks and our customer conversation overall, this is a key difference.

I have been writing quite a bit about "listening" to the conversation of our customers, competitors, prospects, and general audience in the SMN world a way to assess perception of our solutions, begin to respond more interactively with various audiences, and fine-tune our messages and products. As B2B's are struggling with whether they should participate in the SMN universe or not and as they do, how they should measure the success of this effort, I think we often get trapped in the numbers game of "how many mentions" "how many followers" "how many leads" "how many prospects" "how many negative v. positives tweets" etc., etc., etc. While these are valuable metrics, I believe that they only provide a slice of the customer conversational dynamic. To me, the true appeal of interacting with audiences in ways other than through "Contact us" forms on websites, is that Twitter, Facebook, etc. afford us with a deeper level of information and idea exchange that is repeatable across many demographics and platforms. Instead of just counting the web hits on our new feature release page, we can assess the tone of the conversation about the release; compare different threads from tech-Twibes to Facebook Fan groups, to closed-user communities, to general user population groups. Conversation in this fashion provides us with a much richer picture of the reaction of our audience and we are using the SAME collateral, potentially, as we would in a static post on our website. I don't think this is as subtle of a distinction as it may appear and it is one of the many reasons I am so passionate about the potential of social media and networking in the B2B world; it imbues our professional conversations with a deeper and more compelling meaning and hopefully, casts the net of relationship possibilities wider.

In a broader sense, I think that the difference between "hearing" conversations about our solutions and "listening" to them can inform our customer support, sales, and roadmap strategies in much more intelligent fashion. I am not discounting the relevance of assessing the number of clients who want us to produce a webinar about the use of one feature v. another in our product sets, but I think that we may be much better informed, prepared, and relevant to their needs if we understand their various use models or proposed implementations of the feature in which they express interest. To me, this is the difference between "hearing" what they want and "listening" to it. Listening to the dialogue around us implies that we are prepared to engage in attentive and respectful conversations. We will ask intelligent questions. We will have some level of information about the other party's interests and demographic and we will reflect that in our responses and questions back to them. We will invite other resources and people to the conversation, as appropriate. We will NOT monopolize the conversation. And most importantly, we will not assume that people have any interest in what we are saying until they indicate so, so we will not continue to go on and on to the same people when it is clear that they are looking for any way to excuse themselves from the conversations, up to and including leaving the room and "blocking" us.

Does all of this sound like basic interpersonal etiquette? As I have suggested before, the principles for success in social media and networking conversations are founded in the manners with which most of us were schooled. Be nice; raise your hand; wait your turn; ask about the other person's interests and hobbies; say please and thank you, etc., etc., etc.

As always, my warmest regards,

Merriam-Webster Online

Hearing:

1 a: the process, function, or power of perceiving sound ; specifically
: the special sense by which noises and tones are received as stimuli
b:
earshot2 a: opportunity to be heard, to present one's side of a case, or to be generally known or appreciated
b (1): a listening to arguments
(2): a preliminary examination in criminal procedure
c: a session (as of a legislative committee) in which testimony is taken from witnesses3chiefly dialect
: a piece of news

Listening:

1
: to pay attention to sound <listen to music>
2
: to hear something with thoughtful attention : give consideration <listen to a plea>
3
: to be alert to catch an expected sound <listen for his step>

So You Went and Set-Up a Corporate Twitter Account

2009-07-10T06:00:00.001-07:00

When I was 11, I decided with a friend of mine one Saturday morning that I wanted to have pierced ears. I was supposed to wait until I was 12, at which point, my mother and I were going to make a special day of the event. As a rite of passage, this was particularly important to my mother, yet in the spur-of-the-moment, often impatient "must-have-it-now" mood that has driven many of my decisions throughout life, my friend and I jumped on our bikes, rode to a strip mall beauty parlor and proceeded to bring our ears into adolescence. In keeping with my mother's hallmark graciousness and ability to flexibly accommodate my often challenging rush through adolescence, rather than insisting that the studs come out and that I wait for our special day, she let the earrings remain and I have since had a 30 + history of branding myself with a variety of statements hanging from my lobes.

In the mad rush to participate in the social media and networking universe and not be left looking like an 11-year old in a world full of teenagers, many of us are creating and implementing a corporate presence prematurely, despite advice to the contrary. As a number of my posts have suggested, the pitfalls of launching a social media profile without a strategy are numerous and the depth and breadth of the community that is immediately aware of our launch can mean that a tentative approach to participation is akin to throwing raw meat in the lion cage. In an attempt to channel the grace and ability to roll with the adolescent punches demeanor of my mother, rather than post some "I told you so's", I want to offer suggestions for making sure that your premature toe-dipping may lend itself to a more robust, sustainable engagement in the SMN conversation. So, to all of you who have jumped on the Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, blog, etc. bandwagon without waiting for our "special" moment of carefully planned profile, content and infrastructure decisions, here is your first set of earrings:

We Know You're There: It is quite likely that as soon as you have created a Twitter, Facebook or other profile that includes your company name or any information about you, that some customers who have been waiting for you are going to know about it . (Your competitors will definitely know about it!) Even the most rudimentary search engines and crawls are set-up to immediately alert your communities of interest when you have joined the conversation. Just as it was difficult to hide my newly pierced ears until the "right" moment, as soon as a Twitter account is implemented, add-on modules are designed to find it.
Say Something: Because our digital presence is increasingly obvious and discoverable, it is critical that as soon as you create a profile that you begin to do something with it. Whether the long term strategy for social media participation ends up being passive or not, posting a static account with a basic bio in it is counter to the dynamic of social media and networking ethos all together. Your customer and prospects may run across your profile one time and bookmark or create an alert for it, but if you don't begin even a minimum level of posting, or content refreshment, they will quickly delete you from their search and their interest. The virtual ear holes will close up unless they are rotated, changed, and noticeable.
Ask/Disclose: Take a proactive approach to engaging your current client base or community of interest. You've gone ahead and established your presence, rather than waiting for people to discover you (and they will) and then responding blankly when they ask what your intentions with the profile are, take the high-ground and query your established communities for what will engage them in conversation with you in these areas. My earlier posts suggest that participation in these environments provides a rich opportunity for us to break-free of our collateral ruts and respond to new and different communities of interest and information needs. One way of "masking" a too premature leap into the conversation might be to try something completely transparent and invite our current clients and prospects to provide suggestions and (gasp) content to us! In other words, take out the diamond studs and offer to let others design your new look.
Don't Be Shy: This may be repetitive, but remember, particularly in the case of Twitter, this is a CONVERSATION not a BOOK. Post questions, brief comments, ideas, "coming-soon's", etc. Get engaged in the conversation: as quickly as a negative Tweet will be passed around, honest and credible, if somewhat immaturely formulated Tweets and post will be forgiven as long as you are participating in the dialogue. What will be noted and dismissed (and discussed) is a too heavy-handed, formal marketing approach to your participation. The backlash that the thousands of sales appeals on Twitter have begun to experience should be a lesson to those thinking that a Tweet that just directs people to a lead gen page or a sales pitch is going to be enough.

The Newbie Twitter Challenge

Rather than continue to opine at the 50,000 foot level about things to do when you have set up a social media and networking presence sans a comprehensive strategy, I thought I'd issue a challenge that contemplates that four tactics outlined above. As long as you've gone and set up a profile, I challenge you to at least minimally engage your potential listeners and conversational participants by doing the following……TODAY

Search for and find a negative/positive Tweet (blog comment, article, etc.) and ReTweet it (post it, etc.) and ask for comment or respond.
Tweet the question: What would you like to see here?
Identify someone (anyone) in your organization who has responsibility for at minimum, monitoring the social media and networking communities in which you have chosen to participate. Not listening to the dialogue when you don't have a presence is unfortunate enough, but putting yourself out there without any mechanism for responding to the conversation is extremely dangerous!

Very Influential Assets™ - Part II What Are They?

2009-07-07T07:25:00.001-07:00

I am finally seeing some daylight in my inbox, voicemail, and snail mail after 10 days in Peru, and quite appropriately the avalanche of information that accumulated in my absence begs some answers relevant to Part II of my musing on the concept of Very Influential Assets ™ and how their identification and promotion in the customer relationship and reference dialogue elevates our conversation with various audiences and hopefully introduces a focus and efficiency to our attempts to delight and attract new audiences to our particular messages. As always, a big fan of the dictionary, I find all five of Merriam's top four definitions interesting in the context of VIA ™ in the B2B customer relationship world:

Influence

1 a: an ethereal fluid held to flow from the stars and to affect the actions of humans b: an emanation of occult power held to derive from stars2: an emanation of spiritual or moral force3 a: the act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command b: corrupt interference with authority for personal gain4: the power or capacity of causing an effect in indirect or intangible ways : sway5: one that exerts influence

It is axiomatic that certain pieces of evidence collateral are expected and de rigueur in sales cycles and in our marketing efforts. What I have begun to posit in this sense, is that certain of our evidence assets appear to achieve the almost "occult power" suggested by the dictionary. As I have suggested in the past, our presentation and identification of these assets has become a chicken and egg exercise in the absence of comprehensive measurement and evaluation tools for using case studies, interviews, press releases, and most importantly customer reference collateral in our sales and marketing exercises. Often, we consider an asset influential simply because it is associated with our largest clients; it was used by the majority of our sales team; or we just "believe" that it is a strategic and key piece of our information arsenal. I gingerly suggest that we often fall into the trap of believing that information that we present to our prospects and other external audiences is considered influential simply because we have "always" used certain case studies, they become known commodities and we leave it at that. In this part of the Very Influential Asset ™ series, I begin to discuss my definition of influential assets and how we might begin to mine for other pieces of evidence that have the "capacity of causing an effect in indirect or intangible ways" in our customer conversation. I make no pretension about providing an exhaustive list of potential Very Influential Assets ™, but in the spirit of this concept and breaking our traditional approach of churning out case studies. The idea here is to kick off our collective creative brain power in terms of thinking about non-traditional assets:

Customer conversation goes on in many more places than we think and influential assets are not always produced by us or our key reference clients.
Just because it isn't a pretty html page or marketing piece with our careful branding, doesn't mean it isn't influential.
Our competitors may provide us with fodder or material to which we can react or that will inspire ideas.

What are the potential buckets of Very Influential Assets ™?

Think internal and external

Think customer and non-customer

Think "People" and "Content"

VIA™ We May Already Have/Use

Okay, of course we include our existing library of audio/video interviews, case studies, press releases, survey results, data sheets, etc. But let's apply some analysis to the determination of whether they are influential or not.
The laptops of our top sales people. What hidden documents, slide decks, and email messages do our top sales people use?
Technical documentation, training, company videos. Why not? A well-scripted "how-to" guide may be a better indication of our bench strength in a sales cycle than a quote that says we provide great implementation support.

VIA™ To Consider

New customer references-always.
Communities, blogs, and networks that are focused on our industry and solution.
The Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. profiles and information from our employees.
Ditto for our customer, our vendors, and our partners.
Our competitor's blogs, websites, and collateral.
Comments and posts about our companies, solutions, people, etc. anywhere, anytime, on any topic
Negative Tweets
Comments from any employee in your organization; interviews with any employee in your organization-NOT JUST SALES, SME's, OR EXECUTIVES.
And many, many more.

My intention with this exercise has been to emphasize the hidden caches of content that social media and networking participation has exposed as customer collateral possibilities. The next parts of the series will begin to address ways in which we might assess the "very" modifier of your influential assets and how we might align our focus to elevate those assets in new ways in our customer dialogue.

I very much welcome comments and thoughts and as always, warmest regards until next time.

Twitter Time-Out or Mom, I’m really not Call/Email/IM Screening You

2009-06-15T08:52:00.001-07:00

I was put in Twitter/Email/Blackberry/IM/ etc. time-out this weekend both due to some slow connectivity issues and preparation for a trip to Peru (more on that on another blog J). As I reentered the 24/7 world to which I am rabidly addicted this morning, I was musing about the evolution of technology over my lifespan and how it has molded my expectations of my ability to instantly connect with those around me or vice versa. I did not have to walk three miles in the snow to get to school, though I did walk, and I did not carry a cell phone with me in case something happened along the way. Our home phone did not even have an answering machine, much less voice mail. If I called one of my friends, and the phone was busy, I called back later. This was the norm. At the time, it did not seem unusual at all to have to wait for a response to a question, more pointedly, to have to wait to even ask the question. In a relatively short (I'm am NOT going to tell you my age but let's say that it's less than five and more than three decades), I have come to demand instant gratification in terms of my ability to communicate, respond, have questions answered and problems solved. In turn, I have set up an expectation, both professionally and personally, that I can be reached pretty much 24/7. I believe the first time I responded to a work email at 7:00 pm on a Friday, I place one virtual foot on the slippery slope toward disappointing my friends and colleagues when I do not/cannot answer their queries or assist them immediately at any time. Friends, this is the world in which we live today. I'm sure that soc-anthrop majors of the future and psychologists of today will dine out on this for years, but the internet and its accompanying social media and networking applications have led a majority of us to share the unwritten mutual agreement that we are ONLINE NOW! I am working on the ramifications of this in my personal/professional life, but in keeping with the theme of this blog, I'd like to share some thoughts for this reality in the B2B customer relationship world. Again, as companies are making the decision to join the Twitterverse (e al), host online customer service chats, and respond to comments on blogs, a majority of their assessment should be devoted to the infrastructure, messaging and preparation necessary for their participation to be effective and not backfire. The rapidity with which our failure to answer the expectations of our audience will be repeated is virtually unrecoverable in today's world. Whether we like it or not, when we join our customers in the social media and networking world, we have signed on to some terms in an implicit, universal, and new culture SLA:

The Terms:

We are here when you are: Joining social media and networking applications and groups seems to imply that we are all conversing at the same time. We need to carefully consider the phrasing in our profiles regarding our intent for participating and responding to Tweets, comments, and queries.
We will respond when you reach out to us: Our hours of customer service and turn-around time cannot be explicit enough. Fair or not, if we decide to participate in certain networks that are designed to facilitate 24/7 conversation and information exchange, we should be prepared to respond 24/7
We will update our content and our information regularly: the social media and networking world is defined by refreshed, updated, responsorial content, not by static .pdf files.
If your server/connection/pc is not down ours isn't/aren't either: Our network issues are NOT shared by our customers. If our email, server connection, etc. goes down, and we have chosen to participate in the SMN world, our back-up infrastructure must reflect the culture of that world.
We are always in the same time zone as you are: 24/7 participation and membership means across all time zones. If I am a global business, then I necessarily must build a support infrastructure that reflects this.
We are who we say we are: I am increasingly running across B2B social media and networking participants who seem to have jumped on the bandwagon rather haphazardly. The links and profiles point to third-party service providers or content host sites rather than any real place to exchange information, thoughts, questions, or customer service problems.

As a last thought, I'll share a story about my current attempt to locate an external hard drive that I ordered early this month. For the time being, I will keep the company name anonymous, as those of you who have been reading my Tweets, blog posts, etc., know how quickly I believe our current 24/7 virtual culture can negatively impact a company's reputation and I am reluctant to do that….yet. I became concerned about not receiving the new hard drive on Thursday of last week. I pulled up my internet receipt, only to find that the email message did not include any customer service contact information or instructions about what to do in case of a problem. I went to the company's website and found an 800 number. I called the 800 number and found no customer service options in their tree. After pressing "1" for support, I left a message in "Nicole's" voice mail. I called back and pressed "2" for sales, and got "Nicole's" voice mail. I sent an email to the alias on the receipt. I did not receive an email back. I filled out a form on the website via the "contact us" option. I received an auto-generated email saying that my information had been received. I DM'd the Twitter profile, and have received no response.

Without belaboring the point any longer, my "implied" SLA with this vendor is that since they are internet-order only, I should receive a response to at least one of these attempts to contact them. And yes, the charge for the new toy has been run……

As always, my best.

Social Media Applications for Internal Communications?!? – Absolutely!

2009-06-03T16:35:00.001-07:00

I had the pleasure of having coffee this morning with a friend of mine who is a Director for Insights, a global leadership and team development resource. As the conversation wound its way through the dynamics and puzzles of social media and networking use models in the B2B world, she asked me to help her understand how customer references and SMN applications could be used for internal communications purposes. Kathy, my apologies for my profuse and enthusiastic response to your queries, but as I shared with you, I think that there are many internal communications processes that could absolutely benefit from adopting the emerging models in customer reference and relationship management as they relate to the social media and networking trends that are proliferating in the B2B world.

Kathy and I used Human Resources as a metaphor for our discussion and I will continue that mental thread here.

In the customer relationship and reference world, we are beginning to contemplate all of our client assets as potential collateral for shortening sales cycles, deepening and broadening our relationship with prospects, analyst, and other external communities. Many vendors, including References-Online, are beginning to not only offer methods by which sales and marketing teams can present assets to constituencies through email invitations, spotlights, etc., but are grasping the importance of the ability to present materials via communities of interest and social media discussion applications. In previous posts, I have indicated that conversations in these media are happening regardless of our attentiveness or participation, so it certainly behooves us to perform a social media audit/assessment on our own organizations to understand what the dialogue is outside of our traditionally unilaterally fed processes. I believe that the dynamic is identical when we are referring to an internal department such as Human Resources, conveying new policies and procedures, documents, changes in benefits, etc. to its internal constituency. Whether we like it or not, when we release a major change in health insurance and announce it using the standard corporate email memo, the "water cooler" chat that has always happened has now extended to the immediate and much farther reaching world of Twitter, blogs, Facebook status updates, etc. Not only should we be aware and open to this dialogue, but as a participant, an H.R. representative could very quickly gauge the temperature of employee response to policy change, answer questions, provide additional detail, and do this all in a more "social" "human" fashion. Certainly the methodology will vary corporate culture to corporate culture, but bear with me as I carry this idea out.

Hypothetical H.R. Situation that does not resemble any company for which I have ever worked J:

Once a week, the CEO of a large organization issues a corporate email (or blog post) to the intranet.
He/She announces exciting news, upcoming product releases, and the new enrollment period of the benefits package that will no longer include dental care for dependents.
Everybody ignores the exciting new client relationships, feature release for the premier product, etc. because they are furious about the exclusion of the dental package.
Some people send emails to the CEO; some call the H.R. department; some stew about it over their cubicle walls….
Today, most people get on Facebook, Twitter, their personal blogs, or 'unauthorized' corporate communities and rant and rave.

What would be a better alternative?

Hypothetical H.R. Situation that does not resemble any company for which I have ever worked (really this time) J

The Human Resources department has access to a "customer relationship" database in which they catalogue and link to a plethora of benefits, employment, assistance information, including templates for "spotlighting" changes in packages, advice for tricky work situations, even guidelines about telecommuting and swine flu.
As often as they feel compelled to, H.R. personnel can search for collateral that answers employee questions, send it to individuals with an email invitation or blast a piece to the corporate distribution list. Vendors such as RO will immediately provide tracking information about clicks on the emails AND individual pieces of collateral so that H.R. can begin to assess its reach and response rates.
Better yet, the H.R. team can select critical announcements of benefits assets from their database search and Tweet them under the H.R. Twitter profile, which of course all good corporate citizens follow. If they have the right system in place, the tiny URL that they have included in their Tweet is tracked similarly to content issued in the invitation email. A number of associated applications to the social media and networking tools like Twitter provide them with even more thorough analytics about their followers AND their retweets, in this case, or comments in general.
Though still unhappy about the exclusion of dental benefits for dependents, employees feel as if they have abundant information about the changes, multiple access points to share their concerns without retaliation (see post about responses to negative tweets) and may very well engage more effectively with the Human Resource department, reducing strain on them and reduced use of the Employee Assistance Plan.

Bottom line is: Yes, Kathy, I think internal communications processes can greatly benefit from customer relationship and reference modeling and social media and networking applications overall. I've used the H.R. department as a metaphor, but I think the concept applies to all types of internal and external dialogue.

To the rest of you, I, as always, welcome your feedback and comments

Until next lightning bolt strikes, my very warmest regards,

Lisa

Very Influential Asset™ Part I Introducing the Concept

2009-06-02T05:36:00.001-07:00

Customer relationship and reference programs have always been challenged with maximizing the contribution of our key client assets on budgets that seem constantly at-risk, with sporadic executive support, wide variance in effective technology, and a confusing array of measurement and success metrics. For the last seven years, I have had the pleasure of working with clients who are at wildly different stages in the maturity of their customer reference programs. Although our answers to the fundamental questions about customer "referenceability", loyalty, rewards, recruitment, etc. are very different, all customer relationship and reference professionals share the same laundry list of objectives: to identify, recruit and produce the most credible and valuable assets for their programs; to protect that collateral from overuse and fatigue; and maximize their contribution across their organizations. Wikipedia's definition of customer reference management and its focus on advocacy elucidate this common theme:

"… to improve and enhance the level of "advocacy" a set of customers displays related to a vendor's products & services. Specifically, a vendor's objective is to gain referrals and positive "word of mouth" from this advocacy…"

The broadness of this definition both as it relates to the assets that are influential in our practices and its agnosticism as it relates to the delivery of assets to various audiences. As innovative and ground-breaking as the customer reference programs with which I have had the honor of working, are, I think that the ability of customer relationship and reference technology solutions and the emergence of social media and networking as agnostic, multi-threaded customer and vendor playgrounds, demand that we take the next steps in the evaluation of our customer advocates and the content that we deliver to them. Customer reference programs have traditionally focused on very tightly controlling the communication amongst our clients and prospects. The advent of Twitter, Linkedin, etc. etc etc, as credible customer conversation forums have rendered this task nearly impossible, but somewhat paradoxically, afford us with an opportunity to identify and leverage the most influential customer participants in these communities. This thought leads me to believe that a new methodology for approaching the challenge of supporting and enhancing our customer conversations is necessary and appropriate. I have developed a concept that I believe will help tune our programs to accommodate and embrace these trends . With no further ado, I introduce the Very Influential Asset ™ or VIA ™ metaphor.

The VIA™ concept, process and methodology is designed to help customer reference and relationshp professionals target those customers, advocates, and materials that have the deepest and broadest ability to elevate and promote our brands and solutions. My definition of "asset" in this context includes any person or piece of collateral that advances our goals of educating, selling, and communicating our products or mission. By the way, although I am primarily interested in the B2B conversations, I think this concept applies to the B2C, non-profit, and even interpersonal dialogues. When we can identify and spotlight those assets that are most influential for us, our customer reference paradigm shifts from mass production of content to very specific messaging.

In previous posts to this blog, I have written about my research and exposure to the importance of identifying clients who participate in the social media and networking space and for a variety of reaosns, influence by a power of x, more prospects and observers of our brands and companies than others. Jim Watson of Razorsfish, kicked off this brainstorm for me when he spoke to the Social Media Club of Seattle and shared this thought:

"The old 'If we build it they will come' strategy is being replaced by reliance on consumer ambassadors, and finding opportunities to augment dialogue. If you have a good product and good service, even negative comments add to your credibility because they prompt other people jump to your defense."

Customer reference managers have always struggled with defending the value of collateral that they produce and present. We all believe that case studies and press releases are key ingredients in our customer reference recipes, but we have only recently begun to measure not just their effectiveness in sales cycles but their perceived value both by our internal constituencies and external recipients. Quite frankly, I think many of us are still succumbing to the belief that sheer numbers are still evidence of a successful customer reference/relationship program. Even as we have tuned our approach so that it contemplates a variety of customer experience and content, we still measure our efforts in terms of totals rather than ability to influence and contribute. We have carried this B2B myth into our participation in the social media and networking world; note the number of tools available to add followers to Twitter, as an example and the difficulty of determining which of our followers has followers of their own that meet our demographic and interest target goals.

Shifting to an emphasis on Influence, accomplishes several things:

Our customer reference resources are strained. In previous white papers and posts, I have argued that social media and networking are not strategies in and of themselves, they are tools. Our customer reference programs are already constrained by budget cuts and the availability of support personnel and infrastructure, if we focus on the number of followers that we have or the amount of content that we post, we are only perpetuating this problem. Concentrating on the customer advocates and content that are most influential for us, alleviates this strain and, has an exponential power to elevate our message.
We suffer from "dusty shelf" syndrome. Because we have focused on volume rather than value, a number of our customer assets are sitting on our virtual shelves, unused and unloved. By identifying what messages and individuals are most influential for our message and brand, not only can we avoid this perpetual archive, but we may very well be able to re-purpose content that up to now has not seemed relevant.
$. If our analysis demonstrates that particular customer advocates and certain themes in our business case, audio/video interview, etc content are more influential than others, we will be able to allocate our shrinking budgets to the VIA ™ materials that are most compelling. As obvious as this sounds, I think that we can all "get" the value of spending the majority of our time cultivating indivudals in our customer reference programs that are better connected to their peers than others. If a survey of our sales team finds that they always use one particular busienss case and that when they use it, they close the most and largest deals, wouldn't we be inclined to produce more documetns that are similar to this most influential one?

We, as customer reference and relatinship professionals, are bombarded with statistics about our customers' participation in social media and networking (see previous posts) and the absolute truth that conversation and information sharing among our constituents is overwhelmingly more important in their decision-making process than demonstrations by our sales teams. It is clear to me that the more astutely we can identify those participants who are most influential for us in these arenas, the more finely we may tune our message and concentrate our resources. In the next several of months, I will be publishing a white paper that delineates the process steps for identifying, soliciting and promoting your Very Influential Assets™. I am looking forward to your feedback on this concept and approach!

As always, warmetst regards,

Lisa

Maslow, Social Media, and Influencers

2009-05-27T04:35:00.001-07:00

I recently attended and enjoyed the Seattle Social Media Club event (#smcsea), which featured Jim Watson of Razorfish as a speaker. I have been trudging (to walk, or in this case read, with purpose) through Razorfish's annual report regarding Social Influencers and their impact on marketing. I also have run across some Tweets and other ideas about Maslow's hierarchy of needs as they relate to marketing and have been trying to wrap my brain around the identification of social media and networking participants and how we in the B2B space can maximize our messaging and conversational impact by attending to the basic psychological craving and manifest destiny that drives us all to educate, research, and participate in online dialogue. As Maslow's hierarchy is often theory 101 in marketing classes, I think that it provides an interesting and functional metaphor for our engagement in the social media and networking world.

First, some rudimentary and repetitive themes from my posts:

The applications of social media and networking are tools that should be contemplated in our overall marketing and sales strategies. Our profiles and content should be driven by our ultimate sales, educational, and conversational objectives never in the reverse.
We should have a finely tuned definition of our demographic that should be enhanced, perhaps even modified by the feedback and understanding that we gain from participation in the social media world. Although the common misperception that Tweeting or updating our corporate status on Facebook is "free", an inordinate amount of internal resource and cost can mount rapidly if we are not preparing our content to meet the specific audience pertinent to our organizations and if we do not at least have some fundamental understanding of the needs we are fulfilling.

Second, some of the latest facts:

Forrester research indicates that 75% of the online community is engaged in some sort of social media behavior.
More Forrester research (http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/2009/02/new-research-b2.html) indicates that B2B IT decision-makers have an extremely high penetration at all participation levels in social media and networking, with 91% of technology decision-makers labeled as Spectators.

In a climate so finely keyed off of maximizing our resources, I think pinpointing the spot in our Venn diagram approach to developing a message that targets the needs of these Spectators can take apply a Maslow Metaphor particularly to those participants that Razorfish would identify as influencers. Let me advance the following theory:

Let's assume that I have already gained a "following" of decision-making spectators whose profiles are the demographic that is my target. According to Razorfish, a certain number of these followers, are going to have to the nth power of impact for me as any of the rest combined. If I also accept that all humans are genetically coded to follow Maslow's hierarchy of needs fulfillment, then my goal as a B2B social media content provider is to identity my key influencers, assess their particular needs and place in the Maslow Pyramid, and provide them with content that will address those needs in order that they repeat and retweet in ways that will not only report their fulfilled needs but ideally answer needs at other levels of the hierarchy. I believe that identifying the influential constituents at each level of the pyramid and customizing content appropriately becomes the science and the art of maximizing our messaging in the social media world. My first pass matching of content and conversation to Maslow's hierarchy of needs looks something like this:

Physiological Needs = Content in the form of basic company information, solution descriptions, cost model, customer lists, mailing lists, newsletters etc.
Safety Needs = Content and responses in the form of Reference validation, invitations to secure audio/video interviews, etc.
Belongingness and Love Needs = Invitations to corporate communities, special “customer only" information, etc.
Esteem Needs = Webinar Participation/Panelist Invitations, Case Study Highlights, Success stories e.g.
Self-actualisation = Promotion as internal/external "thought leaders", Internal Guest blog posts, invitations to conferences and special executive sessions e.g.

Clearly, this is an idea in progress. Obviously, if the content that we are providing is not meeting the needs of our constituents and the conversation in which we hopefully engage them is not compelling and acknowledging of their input and value to our organizations, we are not taking full advantage of the tremendous impact and reach that is afforded us through the mechanism of social media and networking. As I noodle more on this topic, I will be asking the following questions:

How do we identify our influencers at different levels of hierarchical participation and are they often/always/sometimes at different levels of the pyramid?
Do different social media applications more appropriately support our message delivery at different levels of the hierarchy? (My preliminary answer would be yes)
Can the Maslow hierarchy of needs truly be translated into a working model for fulfilling the conversational exchange with our constituents and can its relevance be measured?

Thanks in particular to Jim Watson of Razorfish for his presentation and in general to my new friends in the social media world!

Best regards and until next post!

Lisa

Social Networking-Old School

2009-05-18T19:31:00.001-07:00

I just returned from a lovely wedding anniversary weekend in Port Townsend, WA, an eclectic community of oystermen, BnB's, and organic food coop owners. We happened to be there at the tail end of the annual Rhody-fest and were thus treated to bed races and a three-hour long parade of all the county festival Queens, the various political parties, the Shriners, and the Magic Bus! Thanks to Port Townsend for its warmth, welcome and whimsy.

As we were scoping our spot for the bed races, I struck up a conversation with a man who was wearing a Pagosa Springs, CO baseball hat (mine read Steamboat Springs, CO). My natural inclination to chat with everyone, everywhere and anytime led to the discovery that this gentlemen knew my father's college roommate, who had settled in Durango, CO many years ago and for a variety of reasons, was well known. As I reflect on the conversation and my delight at another anecdotal example of what a small world we truly inhabit, I feel compelled to remark that the social media and networking trends which so intrigue me today are truly founded in the fundamental communications skills upon which I was reared and coached by my parents, mentors and teachers, speech and debate coach of high school, and the intrinsic connection that I share with all my fellow "Twibe" members. I firmly believe that the power of the WEB 2.0 applications that extend these opportunities across time and space today are self-regulated and able to maintain a warmth and personality by embracing the principles of hospitality, grace and curiosity by which I was raised and schooled.

I previously posted about "Tweetiquette", which I think gives me some structure by which I extend my virtual hand to you and I sincerely hope that my posts and musing are marked by the joy, exuberance, and delight that I take in my social networking outreach, old school style. If I can't meet and converse with all of you F2F, I certainly hope that we all walk away from the conversation with at least the taste that we were sharing a spot along a small town parade route and uncovering connections that enhance and elevate the dialogue.

My very best,

Tweetiquette

2009-05-06T07:08:00.001-07:00

Those of us who are avid (rabid) Twitter Talkers have noticed a phenomenal increase in less personal and conversational and more SPAM-like Tweets, particularly in the last couple of weeks. I firmly believe that Twitter and other social media applications are self-regulating and the embedded ability across these platforms to unsubscribe, stop following, re-Tweet w/negative commentary and of course, publish blog posts should continue to support an open, educational, dynamic conversation. However, I recently Tweeted and am now blogging about my underlying desire to embrace some almost Emily Post era etiquette in my virtual social exchange as well as my in-person dialogue and presence. For those of you who are not of my generation or not still, even in their forties, monitored by their mothers, www.emilypost.com may give you a reference point. I offer you the following thoughts for Tweetiquette:

Lisa Channels Emily Post in a WEB 2.0 World-The First Six Tips

Use the Direct Message feature in Twitter for one-to-one conversations: As many have noted, Tweets that are primarily @ replies and not generally informative really belong in personal email messages or as Direct Messages to your intended recipient. The rest of us feel left out and in the dark when your Tweet is something like: "@janedoe I'll see u there at five" or "Great idea. Looking 4ward to hearing more." As is true at a party, it is rude and exclusive to carry on private conversations or talk about inside jokes in front of other people.
Assess Your Audience/Pause Before Posting: The ease and speed with which we can react and respond to virtual commentary and information also limits our natural "edit twice; post once" inclinations. I am as guilty as everyone else of firing off an email response prior to fully reading the thread or doing some basic research before opining. I would share several embarrassing "Reply All" anecdotes from early organizational email implementation days, but suffice it to say that as wonderful as our real-time conversation capabilities are, it is worth your personal and professional reputation to give yourself a time-out or to deliberate a little bit before your keystrokes blast your thoughts to the world.
Make it Personal: I have never been one for auto-follow features or "thank-you's" and am still an advocate of personalizing, to the extent possible, email campaigns. In my Outlook inbox alone, I delete approximately 200 unsolicited, impersonalized SPAM messages per day, not so much because the senders are not Emily Post-certified as because I only have so much bandwidth to research, respond, and contemplate all of the messages. If I really believe that my message is important, I can take the ten extra seconds to address you in a more direct fashion that is indicative of my interest in you, your solutions, and your needs; not just assume that because it is coming from me or my profile, that you have an inherent interest in hearing what I have to say.
Source Yourself: I was reading a Tweet and accompanying article about FTC guidelines around social media marketing (see @Build_a_Tribe) Not only are these thoughts critical for those of us who are WEB 2.0 conversationalists on behalf of our companies, but I think it offers some secondary lessons in netiquette transparency. Although we should continue to be cautious about specific contact information that is available to the world at large, I think it is very important to source ourselves when we are communicating in the SMN world. It is a courtesy to your reader to let them do a little bit of research about you so that they may determine their level of interest in your message AND so that it is received with the credibility it deserves.
Old English Majors Still Check Spelling: I came into the business world during the Baby Bell breakup days, so am as acronym slap-happy as the next person. I love hash tags and shortening my URL's so that I can fit all my incredible thoughts in a 140 character space, but I still try to maintain a basic conscientiousness about spelling, grammar, and the clarity of my message. I hold up a professional colleague, Toby Bloomberg, as an excellent mentor and guide for clear messaging in a rapid-fire, limited bandwidth world. Toby (@tobydiva, www.bloombergmarketing.com) is publishing a book using Twitter and represents a wonderful balance between southern, old-school, elegant charm and grace and WEB 2.0 facility. Her messages, Tweets and blog posts are clear, well-sourced, and still accessible to the internet-sensory overloaded.
Remember the BIG PICTURE: It is far too easy for me to get so focused on an individual thread or idea that I lose sight of my primary objectives. In my professional role as a Director of Customer Conversation, I am responsible for educating and consulting with clients and prospects about solutions and innovation in customer relationship and reference management. I MUST overlay my WEB 2.0 activities with this in mind or I risk my reputation and my organization's reputation because I can so easily reply to so many different topics that come across my DSL connection. Although I have personal opinions, political views, and philosophies that are mine and I am a member of personal-interest communities as well as professional ones, I need to consider my posts, Tweets, and comments in the context of my entire profile, not just my individual presence.

As always, warmest regards,

Right Time/Right Place: A "stitch in time" in an SMN World.

2009-05-01T11:23:00.001-07:00

As many of you know, I am a huge advocate of integrating an SMN strategy with existing customer relationship and reference business practices. The power of multi-threaded, real-time, credible conversations with existing and prospective clients cannot, in my opinion, be overemphasized. Whether a B2B has initiated and implemented an approach to participation in social media conversations or is just watching them, it is clear that our clients and other interested parties have been very quick to incorporate forums, communities, Tweets, et al into their research and outreach about our services and products. As I have posted previously, however, the more overzealous of us may "forget the oatmeal" or neglect to attend to our fundamental customer philosophy and processes if we shift our focus completely to posting and responding in the WEB 2.0 world. In my classic fashion, let me share a story from this morning.

For a demonstration and discussion, I needed to use the services of a tried and true vendor of ours this morning. I have always been and continue to be an advocate of their solution, customer support and roadmap. I have offered myself as a reference to them and will continue to do so. This morning, however, a glitch in the application prevented me from being able to use them. If my reference comments regarding them had been previously captured via a case study, quote, or audio/video reference interview, this vendor would have the ability to "normalize" experiences such as I had this morning and have a consistent representation of their clients' experiences that they could share with prospects and other audiences. If I had been scheduled to take a direct reference call for them this morning, although I would still be considered a positive reference for them, my usual effusiveness and enthusiasm for their solution would not have been as compelling or on target as it normally would be. Although I have not chosen to Tweet, comment, or blog about this specific vendor or situation, as someone conversant with and a consistent user and contributor to these tools, I would hazard a guess that most customers would have immediately sought answers or worse, negatively commented about the glitch. I know that this particular vendor has implemented a comprehensive and quite elegant triage system for responding to SMN client comments and questions, so this option is not unfamiliar to them. I chose the "old-school" route of reaching out to our account executive and speaking to customer service. As a side note, this method took up far more of my time and perhaps gave me less immediate satisfaction than if I had Tweeted.

So, what is my message? I'll offer just a few brief take-aways from this anecdote and my post-experience musings:

The SMN explosion has made immediate and perhaps knee-jerk very public reactions to minor and expected technical problems extremely easy. Depending upon the situation and the triage plan that we have established for responding to negative Tweets, etc., the possibility for disastrous and unrecoverable customer experiences has achieved phenomenal proportions.
Having said that, the most effective triage plan for responses to WEB 2.0 customer interactions will never obviate the need for consistent, credible, normalized customer reference collateral. I think every technology professional intrinsically knows that applications will have glitches; that downtimes are not indicative of overall solution failure; and that good vendors who respond in a timely, comprehensive fashion to problems are still worthy of our reference commentary. We should capture that reference testimony when it is most compelling, fresh, and enthusiastic.
Once again, our SMN play is NOT a strategy. Creating corporate support Twitter profiles, online discussion groups, and establishing blogs, does not replace the importance of consistent, standardized, comprehensive reference and customer relationship collateral. To reprise a really old cliché and to give you all a hint at my age, "a stitch in time saves nine" OR one comprehensive, on-line, credible reference interview may minimize the impact of nine direct reference calls or a thousand negative Tweets.

Best regards

Why Do Psychic Fairs Advertise? And Your Customers Don’t Have ESP

2009-04-29T06:15:00.001-07:00

I have always been somewhat bemused when I hear radio ads or see billboards for Psychic Fairs. My assumption is that at minimum, those who are exhibiting their "skills" don't need to be solicited to participate as they should "see" any upcoming events pertinent to their genre and those who are interested may also have an "inside" track on this type of event. In the B2B customer relationship world, on the other hand, communication and engagement with our prospects has always been a critical activity and the world of marketing is obviously predicated on finding the secret sauce that will entice participants to join our events, review our materials, and participate in discussions with us.

In my continued exploration and curiosity around the SMN explosion, however, I am seeing a clear demarcation between those companies who are taking a shotgun approach to communication, advertisement and marketing in a misguided attempt to not miss the "boat" and those companies who are assuming that their clients are active participants in communities and social media sites and they can engage strictly as observers or rely on virtual word-of-mouth that is the foundation of these mechanisms to drive customers and prospects to their more formal websites and material. As I have stressed in previous posts, I think these positions on either end of the conversational spectrum are both indicative of our failure to establish a strategy for SMN participation prior to implementing our interaction and our confusion and still trepidation about how we should play in this sandbox. In short, our customers still do not have ESP and it is an inherent responsibility to let them know that we are "out there." I might go so far as to suggest that it is hugely presumptuous and egotistical to adopt a "field of dreams" approach to our social media and networking implementation. Just as we have used traditional email campaigns, newsletters and other methods for updating clients and prospects about new features, websites, conferences, etc., we need to adopt a similar approach to evangelizing about our entry into the world of on-line communities and profiles. I think a customized social media assessment or audit is appropriate on a company by company basis, but here are a few starter steps that I might suggest once you have decided to enter the Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, social soup:

Add links to your new corporate profiles, Twitter addresses, community invitations to your website.
Include announcements of your presence and a statement of your objective in newsletters, email campaigns, blogs, etc.
Invite current clients to participate by launching a "membership drive".
Interview reference clients from any beta tests you have done with new support infrastructures or forums that have utilized social networking and publish the interviews.
Survey your clients about their participation in social networks and include their corporate Linkedin profile addresses, Twitter accounts, blog addresses, etc. in your CRM or SFA database.
Use some of the embedded communication functionality in the social network applications to evangelize and spread the word.
Ask your employees (particularly your sales, marketing and support personnel) to comb their contacts, connections, and friends for presence in social networks.
Rinse and repeat often as the growth statistics are exponential and profiles and accounts in the SMN world change far more often than email addresses.

I hope these "top of brain" initial thoughts are helpful; at minimum interesting.

Don’t Forget the Oatmeal: True Story and Metaphor for Losing Sight of the Key Ingredient When We Implement SMN Tools

2009-04-27T02:01:00.001-07:00

Last week I decided to make a batch of oatmeal cookies, an undertaking that I have completed successfully (following the good old standard Quaker lid recipe) hundreds of times. This batch, however, was an attempt to duplicate the particular crispness of a batch that my mother had prepared that had been received with accolades and raves. I gathered the ingredients, whirled them together with the trusty mixer and threw them in the oven with little concern and mostly by rote.

The first cookie sheet came out with a solid brick of baked mess end. I was puzzled and began hypothesizing that perhaps my oven temperature was a little off. I made some adjustments and threw in the second batch: same result, yet this time I began to hypothetically analyze the quality of the brown sugar and flour. Ever hopeful and certain that since I had done this successfully many, many times in the past, I threw yet a third sheet in the oven only to achieve the same disastrous results.

It was hours later that I realized that in my haste to try and duplicate my Mother's results and my inattention to the specifics of the recipe due to my assumption that I had done this so many times I had it down pat, that I had forgotten the key ingredient: the oatmeal; the fundamental POINT, glue, key, objective, focus, etc., etc., of the entire cookie.

As I have been speaking with various clients and colleagues over the past couple of weeks about metrics, tool selection, and plans for their implementation of SMN in their B2B customer relationship and reference programs, often a similar recipe mishap has emerged. Our eagerness to apply the elements of social media to our marketing and sales strategies can sometimes result in us losing sight of our primary and overarching objectives: maintaining and enhancing our current and prospective customer messaging and relationships. We can become too focused on the "shiny" factor: "X company used Box-in to add audio clips to their corporate profile. We should do that!", that we end up considering or deploying applications and tools that are not relevant or appropriate for our messaging. Worse, we may find certain new features so exciting that we implement them without any consideration of our fundamental goals and themes. I shared a story in a previous post about a company's extreme reaction to a negative Tweet. They had established a Twitter profile just because they had heard they "had to" and had given zero consideration to the reasons they may or may want a presence in this medium. The company had established no link between the profile and any existing customer relationship infrastructure; paid no heed to their marketing strategic plan; and other than creating a profile, had not even taken a stab at what SMN tool-kit objectives might be. When they found a negative Tweet about their product, their immediate inclination was to ask Twitter to shut the offender down and to specifically and directly answer his comments in a very aggressive and defensive fashion. They "forgot" that their customer relationship strategy included language about open and positive dialogue about issues and solutions, that their marketing mission was to attract and education potential new clients and audiences, and that the point of their Web 2.0 presence was the engage customers in meaningful dialogue and educational opportunities. In other words, when an unexpected result occurred, they were not positioned to respond cohesively or coherently because they hadn't followed or even really established their own "recipe".

If our customer relationship and reference objective is "oatmeal", then we should be diligent about including that ingredient in our entry to the SMN world. No matter how many times we have launched a new forum, community, blog or collateral infrastructure in the past, we should return to the fundamentals of our strategy and ensure that our social media and networking presence aligns with them consistently.

Twitter Tumult

2009-03-20T18:45:00.001-07:00

Early this morning, I was asked by a colleague to offer some advice regarding a negative (what I call a "Heat Tweet") Tweet re a client of his. This client is relatively new to the Twitter sphere and other social media mechanisms and their initial reaction was to retaliate by lodging a harassment complaint with Twitter. As I have opined before, because these applications are merely tools in what should be a much broader and comprehensive customer dialogue, we need to evolve our usage of them to align with our marketing and outreach strategies. Additionally, the rapidity with which information may be shared and the exponential number that our audiences reach when we provide content via them, makes me even more emphatic that organizations ought to consider a Social Media DJ whose primary responsibilities would be to re-craft our message and content appropriately Twitter, et al. If we issue a press release in response to a negative situation, we have a little more luxury in terms of crafting my response and messaging. Absent an overall strategy that outlines clear objectives for our participation in social sites, we are much more prone to knee-jerk reactions to feedback and elicit even more negative responses because of their wide-reaching favor.

I offer the following thoughts vis-à-vis response to negative Tweets:

Don't React. Asking Twitter to remove or suspend an account for harassment or particularly outrageous Tweets may be a moot point. In some ways, this is just common sense, but it is worthwhile to highlight the fact that if a client is particularly aggrieved, removing their ability to express themselves may aggravate them further AND given how easy it is to simply turn to another social media or networking location to express the same thoughts, it may be futile.
Participate. Acknowledging all feedback, negative or positive, speaks to an organization's credibility in terms of its customer service, consideration of input from various audiences, and it dilutes any particularly harsh criticism. Rather, I would recommend that we respond publicly in our timelines, even if our message is along fairly vanilla lines.
Deliver. By carefully responding, organizations can very quickly turn shift the focus of the community to more credible information sites, e.g., "More information about this issue can be found….." Any other tactic may be perceived as a "cover-up" and thus elevate the Tweet to a visibility and status that is undeserved.
Research. Any client who will take the time to harshly criticize is most likely a member of other networks and feeds their comments to other sites and forums. People who are passionate about social media do not typically embrace one mechanism. Do the research.
Research Again. Unsolicited Twitters should be considered an EXCELLENT resource for understanding user community perception of our solutions. Just using the various applications to do Twitter searches should be a mandate of every marketing organization. I would actually advice doing this as a piece of Phase I in an organization's plan to roll-out a corporate Twitter account.
Mean What You Say. Transparency and Credibility are key issues in current social media dialogues. Again, the rapidity with which information is exchanged via these networks also means that if we strike a false note in our messaging or we are too generic in our responses, we risk being exposed as just jumping on the Tweet bandwagon to comb for leads rather than to initiate meaningful dialogue with a variety of audiences. I suggest that not only should businesses consider corporate Tweet responses to negative messages, but also direct message the Tweeters when possible. For larger organizations, part of our implementation must be the development of tools that will receive, sort and track Tweets and direct messages and ensure that they are delivered to the appropriate groups in our organizations for follow-up. Almost worse than retaliating against a negative Tweet would be to ignore it entirely. Worse would be establishing a corporate Twitter account and just letting it run in idle.
Integrate. Organization's need to develop ways of accommodating the information delivered, exchanged, and developed for social media and networks in a centralized, scalable, accessible fashion. If I look at negative Tweets from the perspective of overcoming objections in a sales cycle, I should be integrating them into my other customer collateral and marketing tools.
Innovate. We need to consider how we engage various communities on our behalf in response to negativity. Organizations might be in "listen mode" on Twitter, but should consider actively supporting and launching customer communities in other applications. The ability to link feeds, blogs, Tweets, and Facebook Updates means that we can use all of these tools in complimentary ways. Organizations should look at their existing methods for delivering "testimony" and re-purpose content from those environments to Twitter, et al and vice versa.

Until next time….

Social Media Methodology and Metric Mania

2009-03-10T05:43:00.001-07:00

In the last couple of days, my fascination with the social media trend has turned to establishing some repeatable paradigms around measuring the effectiveness of these tools in the B2B world. I continue to opine (quite firmly), that until a strategy around an organization's use of social media and network facilities is established, developing measurement criteria about their use is a futile and misguided effort. I can't, however, help being personally curious about whether or not my footprint with these tools has any relevance and how to discover the best ways to track interaction with my various 2.0 dabblings. Let me outline some initial thoughts re methods, using my own presence as a metaphor:

What is Lisa's reason for playing in the social media world?
Education. I need to evolve my understanding and skill-set re the Twitters (and the many accompanying tool-sets that support), Blogspots, Facebooks, Linkedins, Naymz, Nings, etc etc etc.
Conversation. Both from a familial and professional standpoint, the various networks support my desire to communicate with with my professional friends and family, and colleagues across time zones, geography, and technical/technique barriers. The mechanisms available don't really care whether you are a Windows machine or an Apple, iPhone or a Blackberry, Eastern time or Pacific, etc., etc., etc.
Efficiency. Although I posit that the barriers between my professional and personal personas are and should be breaking down, the social media world affords me the luxury of taking the same content and quickly altering and adjusting it for various audiences. My brother may not be interested in deep-dives in this social media topic, but I may want to alert him to the webinar event that I am moderating or particular blog posts. I belong to professional networks that are duplicated across Linkedin and Facebook, yet my profile in Facebook is not 100% available to members of these groups while my Linkedin profile is.
Ego. I think that everybody wants to "hear" what I have to say and I don't have a global megaphone. J
Advice and Comments. Despite the last objective, I do solicit and welcome constructive criticism and pointers from both my professional and personal associations. Barring sending out a survey to everybody I know about a variety of topics, I can easily accept and review solicited and unsolicited review of my opinions and interest via these tools.
How is Lisa going to use all of these tools? (Although this seems similar to number one….bear with me)
Keep friends, family, and colleagues updated on what is going on. I really despise and question the credibility of annual Xmas letters. Social networks afford me the ability to exchange up to the minute updates and information with a variety of people. I'm also saving trees by not sending out massive paper missives at set times throughout the year. I can tailor the information being exchanged to specific people and interests. Vice-versa, I can choose to alert myself to content in which I am interested.
Determine whether anybody is interested in my opinion. By using alerts and statistics and rating and ranking, I can do some self-editing of my own content (I'm sure everyone is happy about this!) I'm currently playing with Hoot Suite and looking at "visits" to my various updates; I track my blogs for visits and commentary; I deploy various other tools of measurement for other footprints. If I mean what I say by welcoming constructive criticism, then I can use these measurements to customize my content and post about things in which people are interested rather than about things in which I think they should be.

I think that these types of questions about my personal interaction with social media and networking are very appropriate first steps for any organization that is contemplating these mechanisms as toolkits in their marketing, sales, and customer relationship practices. Just these two questions have driven me down a pretty structure path to formulating my own strategy and purpose for being "present" and certainly have enabled some filters around the various tools available for measurement.

Brian Solis' Conversation Prism Model for Social Media

2009-03-08T08:49:00.000-07:00

As I was scanning my feeds on this Sunday morning, I read with interest Brian Solis' recent blog post introducing The Conversation Prism as a way to wrap our over-stimulated brains around social media efforts. Rather than synthesize his comments and regurgitate them, I will leave it to all of you to digest the article, but my comprehension of our evolving exploration of this trend is akin to my belief in the FSM (Flying Spaghetti Monster). I believe that social media and networking provide us with marcomm and sales theology that is far broader than customer relationship approaches that we have all traditionally taken. Even CRM and SFA systems that play extremely well with anothers in terms of their ability to integrate with a variety of contact and lead generation tools and methodologies do not begin to approach the capacity of Web 2.0 functionality. Although I quite sternly advocate against social media and networking being in and of themselves a strategy, the flexibility and variety with which we may deploy these mechanisms in just, as an example, our lead generation, is indicative of the nature of the approach we should take.

PR 2.0: Introducing The Conversation Prism

Social Media DJ for Corporations

2009-03-07T16:17:00.001-08:00

When I starting spinning up my internal dialogue and musings on the social media/networking facility in corporate communications, relationships, marketing and branding, I came up with the metaphor that helped me personally frame the way I think that organization's should approach the subject: A social media DJ. As I was expanding my footprint beyond the basic networks like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc., I recognized that although the core of my message has threads across all of these spaces, that I was definitely tailoring it contingent upon the venue. I started reflecting (reminiscing) that what I was doing was in terms of picking and choosing content and ordering depending upon the network, was akin to creating mix tapes in college and today burning CD's from playlists in my ITunes library. I was using the same fundamental content or songs, to create new footprints (playlists) that would appeal to different audiences. Rather than exposing myself to claims that I suffer from a form of multiple-personality disorder, I posit that because I am presenting similar content just in different ways, I am actually acting out a virtual DJ role: looking at my life's personal and professional song list and ordering and styling it for each context.

For those you who have been the victims of my evangelism for my metaphor (and might still be raising their eyebrows), I challenge you to review your own profiles across your networks and ask yourselves if they are completely dissimilar or whether they reflect a core message that has just been spun in slightly different ways? From there, I challenge you to reflect on corporate messaging and whether or not the true objective is for marketing and sales to "play" the same songs but edit the length, fade-ins and outs, and order to fit the sales cycle, prospect profile, and particular solutions you are pitching.

I believe that we can quite quickly come to the conclusion that the viral nature of social networks, the facile way that they enable us to quickly select content from a library and "templatize" for a Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, blog, comment on a blog, etc. are precisely the role of a DJ with Web 2.0 expertise.

Have you come full-circle with me? Rock on colleagues, rock on.

Saturday Morning Twitter Play Launches New Blog

2009-03-07T14:03:00.001-08:00

I have been negligent and lazy regarding my posting. I have been so entranced by the social media and networking world lately that I have not invoked my writing muse. For this ex-English major, the world of Facebook, Twitter, etc is a dangerous one. It affords my ego the opportunity to reactively and often pompously respond to the Web 2.0 world without the more careful consideration I give to more expansive writing. As I was opening a new document to capture some stream-of-consciousness around Twitter as a business tool this morning, I saw that Word now provides a blog post template, so I thought I would capture my thoughts this way as a test.

"Social Media and Networking" has become the newest buzz phrase for organizations and individuals who want to play with the cool kids. I have been working on building a practice around how the various mechanisms in this arena can facilitate organizational customer relationships, service programs, branding, and marketing. I was Tweeting around several topics this morning and have been testing some of my theories about how Twitter in particular can be positioned as a B2B sales tool. Bear with these random thoughts and trust that I am going somewhere with this:

How B2B sales and marketing departments can utilize Twitter:

Use applications such as Tweet Beep to create alerts around your company name, employees, topics relevant to your solution or your clients.
When you get notifications that somebody is following you, check out their profile and any accompanying url's (their website, personal blog, sites of interest to them) and determine whether they are a lead for your company.
Start following them and set up Tweet Beeps for their organization, name, etc.
Check out all those people that are following THEM!

Very quickly, by following just step number two, I identified five new leads for my company that are in the appropriate vertical and appear to be a good target for our solutions. Counter-intuitively, this did not take up much time!