Easy in concept; Challenging to do; Great to simmer on!

The brand “Xerox” is not exactly hot in this millenium.  In fact, most people would say that, after pioneering the “photocopy” machine, the best thing Xerox did was allow Steve Jobs to move beyond his Apple II platform and build the Lisa/Mac lines without lawsuit.  This birthed the modern GUI in a way Xerox never could have done.

(We’ll save for another column how Jobs could, in turn, allow Microsoft to “lift” the concept and keep it always playing catchup!)

Today’s post is about a brilliant, entertaining video series from Xerox that says we’re still around and we feel your pain!

They’re not trying to sell you a product, they just want you to be unsurprised if you hear about Xerox in one of your upcoming meetings — and to have a positive association.  This is merely following the age-old truism, know they customer.

What do you think — did it work for you? Takeaway: how can you create a smile on your customers’ face

Innovation in product + pricing = Customer Win!

Republic Wireless, one of the new players in cellular phone service, brought to the marketplace in November a combined innovation in product and pricing!

They’ve recognized that many people have wi-fi in the home, at their employer, and at their local coffee purveyor. So if you agree to connect your phone to wi-fi whenever possible, they’ll sell you unlimited text and data over the Sprint network the rest of the time for a phenomenal $19/month.

They support Android phones in the Beta phase, but given that Sprint just committed to buying something astronomical like 20 million iPhones in a multi-year period, I’m thinking Republic could be soon be advertising support for the market leading hardware — while punching AT&T below the belt on retail costs!

The takeaway:  how can you drop barriers with your customers so they see you as the coolest company earning their trust?

Do Right by the Customer = You Can Never Go Wrong

Amazon just announced something that many would consider to be revenue-suicide for a bookseller: a Lending Library. But if you think of Amazon as a hardware company, manufacturer of the Kindle, it is a stroke of brilliance.

It stems from or is supported by the Network Effect, which states that the value of the network grows in proportion to the number of nodes or members of the network.

A virtuous circle: the lending library may cut into sales of ebooks, but that will be more than eclipsed by the number of Kindles sold (and goodwill generated) by the PR from this program — which in turn drives more authors to write for the Kindle platform.

NOTE: this program took work (lots of it — in terms of analysis, marketing communications, and certainly software development) but represented no addition hardware SKU’s or stock keeping units to carry.

It is a classic example of a marketing program that any business can develop to bend or break the rules for TOMA — top of mind awareness — for customers.

How can you do right by them today?

66% of Companies have Yet to Really Engage Social Media

This just in from MarketingSherpa — prompting me to ask:

“Catching the wave” takes effort, but the risk of not doing so is potentially getting left in the dust by your competitors.

Which camp are you in?

Understanding Who Really Uses Social Media and How

With an astounding number of people using FLITY [my acronym for the kings of social media -- Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube] we businesspeople benefit tremendously by better understanding their mindset, behavior, and demographics.

I found this one quite helpful and hope you do too:

Reward your better-paying customers… NOT!

You know that subtle little arrow embedded inbetween the “E” and the “x” in the FedEx logo?  

Well it just turned 90 degrees clockwise for me — straight down.

What could prompt such a fickle customer reaction? Almost anything — customers are human, and humans are tuned to the radio station WIIFM (what’s in it for me?)

In this case, I forgot my eyeglasses in the vehicle I left at the shop late last night.

No problem, I checked with the service manager and he said he’d be happy to overnight them to me at my client site in another state — but he didn’t have any forms or boxes.

Appreciative of his help, I said “no problem — I’ll phone it in and have them bring a box and completed paperwork to make it easy” for him.

I was on the phone with 800-GoFedEx for 5 or 10 minutes providing an account number, the shop contact info, my client contact info, etc. when I heard shocking news.

It would work just fine if I wanted FedEx Ground.

But not overnight with Express!

It doesn’t make sense for me to chew the customer service rep’s ear that this made no sense… the cheaper service was easier for the customer but the more expensive overnight service made me do more work??

Indeed, I had to spend another 15 minutes with a technical support rep to accomplish what I could have done immediately with the ground service.

Shocking — clearly the CMO and COO haven’t walked in the customer shoes.

Today’s takeaway: where are your customers giving you feedback about matters that (left alone) could prompt their defection?

Factoid, Marketing Opportunity, or Both?

On the one hand, it’s amazing that 2011 is 50% over…  On the other hand, we’ve just begun an extraordinary month:

Not just because of what I prefer to call “Interdependence Day”, but because every 823 years, the days line up in the month so as to have 5 full weekends.

So yes, this can be simply your nifty factoid for the week.

Or, you can use it as an anchor to remember that “business” and “personal” are more connected than separate (in the business-to-consumer sense).  The bigger picture is to be aware of the calendar that your customers live by, especially when targeting new customer segments.

Certain holidays or points in the weekly/monthly/yearly rhythm can be particularly good — or bad! For this month: entertainment, retail, and seasonal businesses can capitalize and post monthly sales highs.

Or consider this quintessential example:

US Federal Income tax reports are due every April 15th (unless it falls on a holiday).  So if you are selling to accountants or tax preparers, the month immediately prior is a waste of your time — whereas the month afterward is golden.

Using the “calendaring lens”, what opportunities can you identify?

Dr. Juma’s Lesson on the Danger of Being a Generalist

When I was President of the local chapter of the Institute of Management Consultants a couple years back, I would regularly hear individuals introduce themselves as a “financial consultant”. A few people down the row, there would be another “financial consultant”.

Now at first glance, these people naturally got their hackles up about competitors — but drilling down in conversation with them, it turned out that the first served publicly traded multinationals, while the second specialized in funding plans for startups! There is a reason they’d never crossed paths in daily life — they aren’t competitors but have a better chance of sending work to each other as referrals.

So the lesson is to always focus on serving the special needs of your customer constituents, unlike the following where Dr. Juma can do almost everything (in fact, s/he competes with me – “Customer Attraction”!!)  The narrower your focus, the greater the possibility you’ll be seen by a non-competitor in the industry as complementary and thus a potential referral.

Consider the following billboard and I’ll be back next time with an exercise!

Tell Customers Stories of their Future [Thought Leadership]

More and more these days, we see companies engaging with customers 1:1 via blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Many companies understand the opportunity and potential with “customer engagement” — whether or not they are now doing so!

I stumbled upon this great example today demonstrating thought leadership and felt compelled to highlight it.

Sharing a lesson dating back to my anthropology professors back in the Harvard Business School executive program, we “marketers” (read: businesspersons, non-profit leaders, engineering managers, etc etc) are always most successful when we tie into the customer’s reference frame, i.e. how do they think of their world?

I leave you with the rhetorical question: are you clearly defining where your product or service “lives” in the customer’s map of their world?

What Social Media Newbies Can Learn from Web Landing Pages

It often amazes me that we humans can lose past lessons… whether it’s the Iraq/Afghan wars looking increasingly like the failed Vietnam conflict, or Western civilization recreating technologies that previous civilizations had already invented, or even World Wide Web site designers overlooking all the research that IBM et al did in the 90′s on standardization of user interfaces (imagine how difficult it would be to drive different cars whose turn signals, steering wheels, and foot pedals were in different places!)

Heck, I get frustrated when I slip on a mossy slope in my back yard that I slipped on the prior week

Against this backdrop I offer you some key learning from my decade-plus in online marketing, in order to help with social media efforts:

1. People rarely buy on the first visit/exposure (legacy data suggest 7 exposures before one extends trust to make a purchase and/or change behavior, and some have recently suggested this has increased).

2. Web sites have about 3 seconds to assure a visitor there’s a WIIFM (what’s in it for me). In other words, don’t leave — we’ve got something right up your alley!

Where’s this conversation coming from?  Well, I’ve seen a growing number of Twitter and Facebook accounts recently that introduce themselves along the lines of “ABC Cameras is the best camera store with the most fun customer service help and the best prices”. Remember the target audience? They don’t like it when people scream to promote themselves, which only sets the expectation that they’ll regularly hear about offers, specials, and generally be “advertised to”.

Am I suggesting that the problem is the account profile? Absolutely not. It’s the thinking about how to use the medium.

What can you offer the visitor besides a purchase opportunity? For ABC (above) let’s say it’s “Answers to the most common camera questions our customers bring in…” Now there’s something that would grab people, if they have any inclination towards cameras! Copy writers call this a “hook”, now quickly scribble down 10-20 examples of the questions — you can fill the answers in later.

The point is that promoting this social media account “smells” like helping people — rather than blitzing them. Bottom line: people love to buy and hate to be sold. Help them do that by interesting them rather than pouncing on them