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Thanks for visiting. Will you please rate your reading experience?

Wait, this one is even better…

We’d like your feedback.

Thank you for visiting my website. You have been randomly selected to participate in a customer satisfaction survey to let me know how I can improve your website experience.

The survey is designed to measure your entire site experience and will appear at the end of your visit.

This survey is conducted by me.

Ridiculous, isn’t it? Yet that’s what we as marketers constantly do in our efforts to gain brand recognition in a world increasingly led by social media. We poke our customers to give us better ways of serving them. Something’s wrong with this picture.

The promise of social media for marketers is the customer information it makes available.

The challenge of social media for marketers is how to use that information to create better brand experiences for the customer.

But even with social media tools, getting this information isn’t always easy. So, simple customer survey tools, like Survey Monkey, are crutches many marketing managers rely on to manage this complex task.

Why Should You Care What Customers Think?

The idea is that if you ask a customer directly what they like or want in their experience with a particular brand, the company can better meet their needs (i.e. sell them more stuff, more often).

Certainly, a high degree of customer satisfaction directly correlates to a company’s financial success on both micro– and macro-economic levels. The link between customer satisfaction, sales, and ultimately loyalty is powerful, because data often links customer satisfaction ahead of sales by approximately a week.

But slow down, cowboy. Don’t start crafting your survey questions quite yet for that big boost in sales next week…

How Can We Better Serve You?

The problem with simply asking a customer a few questions about what they liked about their brand experience  is that it doesn’t work.

One of the most eloquent examples of what customers really think when they’re taking your survey is at Laraine Herring’s blog, where she writes:

Am I satisfied with my teeth cleaning experience? Well, what were my expectations of that teeth cleaning experience? Were they reasonable or were they what I wanted rather than what I might have needed? Why can’t it be enough just to have my teeth cleaned? If the dentist stabs me in the gum with a sharp tool, I promise I’ll say something. Otherwise, just please clean my teeth. Were the heavens supposed to crack open? Should I have expected a Hallelujah chorus when she put the bite wings in for the X-rays? Did they serve me wine and cheese? Please. It’s the dentist.

How did I like my recent car’s tune-up experience? Well, actually, I would have preferred if you’d have used Bay 3 for the work as my car really is sensitive to north-facing windows. I also think the tool boxes should have been in red instead of that sad metal color, and I would have really liked it if my mechanic looked like Johnny Depp. What can I tell you about tuning up a car? Nothing. Because I. Don’t. Know. How. To. Tune. Up. A. Car. If the mechanic slashed my tires, poured oil in the gas tank, and drained and forgot to refill the radiator, I promise I’ll say something.

And, I would be remiss if I didn’t include this beauty from noozhawk.com:

Z: You can’t buy any goods or services anymore without being asked, “How did we do? Are we good enough for you?”

She: It’s very needy. It’s like that boyfriend who’s way too concerned with how he kisses. “Am I kissing you too hard? Should I peck more? What do you want me to do?”

Z: I’ll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to man-up, corporate America. I want you to own your products and your services.

She: Seriously. The entire world is not your focus group

Customers have complex motivations, and simple customer survey tools, used to excess, fail to address these needs. Routine customer surveys often damage more than they benefit a brand.

So how do marketers get more customers in this experience economy without conducting surveys?

Your focus must be on understanding and delighting the customer, which can’t happen just by putting together a survey. Most of the customer surveys I see are really focused on the needs of the business, even though they’re packaged as focusing on the needs of the customer. The customer taking the survey intuitively knows they’re not likely to see a complete change in the product service if  they don’t have any strong feelings about it one way or the other.  Surveys become like white noise.

Surveys are really putting customers in unnatural circumstances, all the while being asked to share deep feelings about a brand. It’s certainly not the best way to get the truth of how customers really feel.

How To Understand Your Customer

The social web’s transparency and powerful tools allows you, as marketers, to gain a deep level of intimacy with your customers. Web analytics allow you to track and measure many of the dimensions of a brand’s relationship with their customer that simple surveys can’t touch. There are millions of searches daily using the words and phrases related to your business. Now you can use web search engines, as well as social searches (of which Facebook analytics is excellent).

You extract the ultimate value from these searches when you seek to understand the intent behind the search. You may have all of the demographics and survey results on your market, but can you extract ‘why’ they buy from you with that data? Not likely.

To really understand your customers, you need more than a customer survey, you need to understand their behavior. For instance, if you’ve purchased Vespa Scooter accessories, you’re likely to purchase some again. If you’ve gotten Botox, you’ll probably do it again (and that, in itself says volumes about you — from a marketing aspect, that is). Getting behavioral data from customers takes some time, but is relatively much easier to gather given the social monitoring and listening tools available.

Bottom line, don’t annoy your customers with surveys. Do the work of segmenting customers. Understand your customer’s lifestyle choices and personality preferences with psychographics data. Glean the behavioral choices I wrote about in the previous paragraph from the psychographics data.

And most importantly, be sensitive to this depth of aggregate customer information you have, by showing empathy and compassionate understanding in your campaigns. This empathy creates a memorable customer experience — much stronger than answers to a simple survey after they’ve purchased your product. When customers experience the empathy in your interaction with them via a campaign or on your website, they will make their satisfaction known. Without a survey to prod them along.

Related articles

• Monitoring Relationship Status (ducttapemarketing.com)
• The folly of getting customer feedback through automated surveys (thecustomerblog.co.uk)

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Social media, however, has changed shopper dynamics and given the customer control of their experience. There are a few companies who are managing their business outcomes by leveraging customer feedback in social media.

According to Adweek, “Apple is a spectacular example. You walk through that Apple Store and everything, from the way the sales associate captures the transaction near the display to the nature of their training bar in the back of the store. Even the way the point of purchase is organized reflects what’s important to the shopper and not what’s important to the brand. And look at their display labels: they’re not filled with technical specs. Instead they tell you what the product does for you. That’s great shopper marketing.” Read the rest of the article here.

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Register here: http://ht.ly/1WODf, & use the code UTAHLOCALS for your special Utah Locals rate.

Even though the EVO Conference theme is about women in social media, I’m personally also inviting male and young entrepreneurs or business managers from the area to join us. Liz Strauss, Carol Roth, and myself will be presenting specifically about how business has been impacted by social media, and we’ll be giving specific strategies to leverage the groundswell. Here’s an description of our workshop:

EVO Workshop: Doing Business in a Social Media World
Ready to have your mind blown? Good. We’ve got just the trio of savvy businesswomen to walk you through this three-part session. Carol Roth (carolroth.com) will discuss what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur,  Liz Strauss (successful-blog.com) will explore the importance of being irresistible and creating the irresistible offer that will keep customers coming back, and Ghennipher Weeks http://www.ghennipher.net/ will help you identify the social tools that will make the biggest impact on your business.  Bring your ideas and your best questions.

Find out more about the EVO Conference here or register now and get your Local Love here.

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A while ago, I wrote a blog post on 5 ways to measure success with social media marketing. Today I ran across a great real-world example of the difficulties marketers have when setting up and measuring meaningful metrics in social marketing from Aliza Sherman at Web Worker Daily.

I agree wholeheartedly with Aliza Sherman’s point that we are “using antiquated ways of measuring online activity and interactions. We are also hamstrung by how each site, network and tool defines and dictates measurement in their own proprietary terms.”  Don’t I know it! In my consultancy, we’ve created and re-created custom dashboards to measure the specific interactions that are important to clients. We’re reinventing the wheel all the time in this regard because of the limitations of proprietary tools.

“Here are some key points I’d like to make about the problems with social media marketing measurement. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these, and any others that may come to mind as you read this:

1. Social media is nebulous. The term “social media” can encompass many tools from the Web 2.0 era, depending on who is using the term and what they are trying to communicate. There is no definitive, well-understood, totally agreed upon definition of social media, Wikipedia be damned. Lacking clearly defined and agreed-upon terms is a big barrier to measuring anything.
2. It’s not social media, stupid. I don’t think any of us are actually trying to “measure social media,” per se. We’re looking to measure the reach or”…read the rest of the blog post on the problems with measuring social marketing here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Can You Measure Social Media Returns? (pamil-visions.net)

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Ever wonder about the value-chain of location-based services ? What are the successful business models and payment schemes for location-based services? What are the trends for the mobile location services market? I found a rather pricey, but very informative report on location-based services that I think all social media marketing firms should take a good look at. You can find it here.

As someone who has worked in internet marketing for over a decade, I’ve seen location-based marketing businesses come and go. With the huge growth of social media apps, these important services seem to have gotten a boost — not to mention the approval of a variety of patents in the location-based service space.

Consumers spend a lot more time on mobile devices than ever before, and social media marketing consultants need to understand this technology and its implications inside and out. It’s not only for large corporations and government anymore.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Dangerous: location-based services come with risks (matei.org)
• It’s hip to be where? (blogs.chron.com)
• What you need to know about location-based services (lostremote.com)

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Image by Choconancy1 via Flickr

You hear kind & loving voices on the boutique stereo speakers. Video from the CEO is playing telling you about the boutique, and all the wonderful things you’ll find there. You listen, and you’re entranced.

The visuals are heavenly and soothing, too…and just look! As you walk around, you see products from other women you recognize, or would like to get to know better, at least.

You’re so engaged, so impelled by the magnitude and quality of products at this boutique, you feel compelled to give kudos to management. So you search around a bit to find someone who works at the boutique.

No one yet.

You search a bit more.

Maybe if you open this door…Nothing.

Then it hits you. You’re there all by yourself in this huge boutique! Why aren’t there any sales people here, you wonder? You’d like to buy something here.

But wait! Did someone call your name? Yes! But it sounds very distant. You walk toward the sound and you find that it’s the owner. She’s calling to you from outside the store. She wants to talk to you. You tell her you were just inside enjoying the boutique, but she insists on talking to you outside of her lovely boutique. In fact, she prefers to talk to you from a competitor’s store!

Can you feel the frustration of this potential customer?

This may seem like the beginning to a short fiction story, but it’s a scenario I see carried out all to often with new social networks and online communities. The community manager of a new or recently updated social network community oftentimes prefers to chat with community members outside of the community entirely. Any contact with customers take place at other communities like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…all great networks, but competitors for your customer’s time. If your community manager is spending more time on these networks than your own, then your community is suffering.

In a recent Online Community Culture Survey, one of the top 5 most influential factors listed in a community’s culture was participation by the Host. And as women in social networks, this study agrees wholeheartedly with our viewpoints about the kind of networks we feel connected to. Network execs that instruct their community managers to pump out editorial information, then leave the brand community and convene elsewhere, yet expect community users to somehow feel connected with them have their heads buried in the sand.

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Image via Wikipedia

That, in itself, is not odd since I’ve been speaking at web conferences since 2002. What has been different this time is the types of conferences I’ve been asked to speak at lately. They’ve all been conferences directed at Women and particularly, Moms.

Why all of the seemingly sudden interest by corporations in marketing to multicultural women? Perhaps the stats can help tell the story:

• At $1 trillion, the purchasing power of women of color represent the 10th largest global economy — as large as Brazil’s GDP! (Source: World Bank Indicators Database, Sept 2004)
• The earning power of women of color is highest.
• Businesses owned by women of color represent the fastest growing segment of the U.S. economy.
• African-American women are the primary household decision makers.
• The ethnic beauty industry is expected to grow to $11.0 Billion by next year (2010)

Clearly, it’s easy to see why marketers are looking for ways to promote their products to a more diverse audience of women. The economic benefits are really exponential if marketers get it right and don’t market to stereotypes.

I’m honored to be considered an expert in marketing to women of color online, as a woman of color myself, who’s been involved in web marketing since 1999.

My overriding goal is to help marketers understand and target multicultural women better. I help marketers to nix stereotypes, nix generalities, engage better, build growth and loyalty.

Kudos and many thanks to the conference organizers who have asked me to speak to their largely female audiences about social media marketing on behalf of all women of color.

• Blissdom
• Touchpoint
• Blogaglicous

I’m looking forward to building a future with marketers who recognize this incredibly important market. If you’re a marketer who wants a bit more information on what multicultural women’s needs are, check out these key takeaways to our Blogalious panel on Social Media and the Woman of Color.

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In it, I share some of the best secrets I’ve learned about how bands are using social media to promote their tours and music.

If you have a band, or work in music promotion, get started using social media by using these secrets:

1. Your artist or band website: This is really your home base, the hub around which all of the other social media tools can revolve. If we were in the brick and mortar world, your own website might be the equivalent of your company’s main office. Some points you may want to consider for your site include:

• The site should be, among other things, user-friendly, creative in a way that is reflective of your band image, yet still as clear and uncluttered as possible.
• You want people who come to your site to easily find all of the vital information about your act (i.e. your bio, electronic press kit, show/tour schedule, email list sign-up, booking info, management contact, music, and merchandise, etc.). It needs to be a place for fans, yes, but also for the professionals to come for information access (for example, the press, booking agents, club and venue owners, labels, etc.).
• While you might create a blog or a conversation corner where fans can comment about your shows or whatever artist-related topic they’re up for, you might also direct them to your MySpace site instead and invite them to participate in your blog there. This will help create differentiation between those two sites.
• Your website can also be a great location for your band store. It can enable you to make your highest margins on your merchandise (T-shirts, posters, caps, etc.) and your CDs (you may want to consider having a third party handle the actual fulfillment of your CDs and merchandise, unless you have friends or fans who…continue reading here:

More about the article author, Christopher Harding: “Christopher Harding has spent 20 years as a songwriter, author, filmmaker, producer, and executive of film, TV, and music.”

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Twitter is yet another example of where brands have to accept a loss of control. In this case, it is not about putting the brand in the hands of the market but in the hands of the people for whom the brand is their livelihood. A certain amount of letting go is a necessity. We will undoubtedly see a few missteps in C-tweets, and we’ll learn and move on. Ultimately, the medium may change but basics of branding still apply — both for the brands themselves and for their executive stewards: Be true, be relevant, be transparent, respect your brand and your customers, don’t make a promise you can’t keep.

Check out the rest of the blog post about C-Level Tweeting at AdAge.

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