Connecting Expectations and Experiences

If I’m reading a book, I expect an analog experience. If I’m reading an e-book, I expect that experience to be different, even if the “medium” is still based in text. They may both be books, but they’re distinctive experiences that manifest different expectations.

If I’m staying in an inexpensive hotel, my expectation for my stay is different than if I had booked a posh suite in an exclusive hotel. I might tolerate things in a roadside motel that I wouldn’t at the Four Seasons. It’s a different set of implicit promises.

Expectations matter a great deal when it comes to the quality of any experience, any interaction. The danger area – or at least the challenge – is where expectations and experience don’t line up.

When that happens, whose fault is it? What leads to misguided expectations, or not delivering on that anticipated experience? How do you diagnose it, and what do you do about it?

This is why it’s so critical to understand what your customers *expectations* are for their experience with your brand. It’s not enough anymore for you to craft aspirations for your brand, or a vision for how you’d like to be seen.

It’s the perception and experience reality for your customers that’s defining you, and how well you level  expectation and actuality.

If there’s a disconnect between the way you see your company and the way people are talking about you, perhaps you’re in the midst of an expectation rift.

So the choice becomes: shift the expectation, or amend the experience. Each probably have their place, but I know which way I lean. How would you handle it?

Photo Credit: Daquella Manera, because it made me snicker

Get A Yardstick

Ah, measurement. How we love to have a gauge of whether what we’re doing is working or not. No more telling me that you can’t measure the impact of social media. Here’s a pile of metrics you can consider. Try benchmarking them before you start your online outreach or community efforts, and tracking them throughout and after.

Your Metrics Should Vary

As you embark on this list, you ought to work backwards. Start with your objective in mind, and from there, work back toward the measures and metrics most likely to drive toward that goal and support the intelligence you hope to gather. Measure those. You can’t and shouldn’t measure everything. You should measure the indicators and drivers of what you want to accomplish.

What You Might Measure

Revenue and Business Development: (benchmark before and after SM initiatives begin)

• Speed/length of sales cycle
• Number or % of Repeat customers
• % of Customer Retention
• Number of customer referrals (new business), net number of new leads
• Transaction value per customer
• Customer lifetime value
• Conversions from blog/email subs to leads or customers
• Website conversions for leads or sales
• Organic search rankings > converted leads
• % of Converted leads from online vs. offline sources

Potential Cost Savings:

• Shorter customer service/issue resolution time
• % of issues resolved via offline vs. online channels
• Number of support calls before/after outreach effort
• Recruiting costs through online presence (vs. recruiters)
• Training costs
• % of quarterly or annual customer/account turnover
• Overhead costs for communication (measure costs of online outreach vs. analog as compared to resolution ratios)
• Number/ ratio of viable community-driven product ideas
• Length of concept-to-development cycle (use of online community as testing/focus/idea development)

Value, Awareness, Influence

• Brand Loyalty
• Sentiment of posts online – advocates, detractors
• Share of conversation/voice
• Number and frequency of mentions in media (online or print)
• Net Promoter Score (likelihood of recommendation)
• Subscribers to blog/email/newsletter
• Comments/engagement on posted material, downloads of ebooks, etc. (interaction with content)
• Inbound links to site/blog (total as well as on-topic/relevant)
• Number of Tags, votes, social bookmarks
• Fans/followers/group members for social profiles (implication of a brand following)

A note about Cause and Influence:

For all the metrics you track, you have to realize that the path from initial contact to desired result is a winding one when it comes to marketing. Direct marketing efforts like “get postcard, enter code, buy said product” are more obviously causal and can outline a clear sales path. But in a social and online world where there are literally hundreds of touchpoints in effect at any given point, metrics themselves don’t indicate success or failure.

In most cases, it’s a combination of several factors – need, awareness, cost, sentiment, reputation, availability – that drive a business/purchase decision. So what you’re really after is not “we do X and Y happens”. What you’re after is a combination of both qualitative and quantitative measurements that – in combination over time – increase the likelihood that when a revenue decision is on the table, your business is the likely recipient. Individual metrics are snapshots of behavior, but what you’re striving for is a stronger, more consistent tie with your business for the long term.

Make no mistake that value-based metrics are as important as numbers-based ones. Awareness and loyalty aren’t immediate, but they add to the whole. In this great post by Dave Evans of ClickZ, he says (emphasis mine):

“Rather than planning a campaign with defined start and end dates and a certain spend that’s guaranteed to produce a specified exposure (reach and frequency), social media is an ongoing effort that builds and converges toward an objective. By understanding what’s happening now on the social Web and measuring over time, you can see the trend emerge. The dynamic trend, rather than static measures like reach and frequency, becomes the quantitative guidepost for your social media program.“

My Last Word…For Now

I’m going to take the last bit of this mammoth post to say something critically important. Every single metric above – every single one – is tied to something else that doesn’t have it’s own metric. It’s the strength of the relationships between people. That’s nearly impossible to put on any kind of yardstick, but it’s the underpinning of ALL of these things. Better relationships drive better business, period. You may not be able to measure the relationships themselves, but all of the metrics above are indications – the results, if you will – of how well you’ve cultivated those relationships on a human level.

So what do you think? What other metrics do you use? Still want to tell me that social media isn’t measurable?

Photo Credit: Charlyn W on Flickr

You Are Not The Benchmark

If you’re making the decisions about your business purely because you say “Well I’d pay for that”, you’re making the dangerous assumption that all of your customers, clients, potential clients, and the world at large think exactly like you do.

Perhaps more importantly, if you’re the kind of person who tends to run against the grain – if you’re the one, say, that actually paid for the Radiohead album to support the band instead of downloading it for free – that’s cool. But that doesn’t make you like everyone else.

You can be as proud as you want about the fact that you run contrary to conventional wisdom, but that might not be where the money is. In fact, it’s probably NOT where the money is. You need to know this, recognize that, and realize that if you’re in business to make money, you have to design your offerings based on what your customers and potential customers will pay for. Not just something you think is cool, and not based on your idea of what they want.

One of the reasons social media is so effective for conducting research is because of how easy and quick it is to start listening, asking questions, and paying attention to the responses. You can see, in real time, how people are responding to the products, media, and content that’s created out there. And that may completely debunk the assumptions you’ve made about what’s working and what’s not.

Part of the flaw in traditional marketing has been that it projects one perspective: that of the brand itself. It’s putting words in the mouths of your customers, telling them how to perceive you. Trouble is, they may not share your perspective. Or worse yet, you might be trying to solve the wrong problem, or missing key elements that would take your offering from okay to amazing.

How to know what they think? Ask. Listen. Then, adapt. But do break out of the idea that your way is The Way. That because your product or service is your baby, you know best what sells. Let the people paying your salary – you know, the people buying your stuff – tell *you* what your brand is to them.

Why do we keep missing this? Can we break out of this cycle of myopic and self-centered marketing, and how? What’s your take?

Home Sweet Home?

I just had an interesting conversation with David Alston when I was visiting Radian6’s office this last week, and it’s something that’s been on my mind for a long time. So I’m going to try and put it into words, just in case someone else is feeling the same thing (because I’d like to know).

I’ve been in marketing and communications for nigh on 12 years or so now, in one form or another. And I can say without reservation that social media is the first communiations approach I’ve worked within on a professional basis that finally clicked with me. Why?

customer contact

As a corporate marketer, I was always stashed in an office somewhere and given little real contact with the customers and clients to whom I was being expected to communicate. I made lots of educated assumptions for what they wanted – based on surveys, feedback forms, “brand attributes” – but I was missing the key component of real contact and honest feedback that would have let me hear about our company in our customers words.

honesty

I can’t think of another word. I feel like social media compels honesty, from both businesses and customers alike. The very act of communicating more openly strips down pretense and starts getting at the real reasons why customers and clients love or hate a company. Companies have to face their shortcomings, and likewise (gasp) customers must be accountable when they drag a brand through the mud lest that brand be paying attention and more than willing to engage and correct misconceptions.

humanity

Not in the kumbaya sense, but how I can finally stop talking in “messages” or “attributes” and start speaking like a real human being to the people that are interested in knowing about my company, helping us improve, or complimenting us. I don’t feel like a set of guidelines and bullet points, but a real person who is empowered to do what *she* does best, which is to find the right words and the right means to communicate with people on their terms. Seems simple, but it often isn’t.

broader company understanding

Especially in my role now, I feel like I have better touchpoints throughout my *own* company that help me understand what we do and why we do it. Because social media avenues encourage me to provide information on everything from customer service opportunities to business development to product improvement, we all communicate better. We’re more open and intertwined internally, and that’s something I’ve never quite felt before sitting in the marketing director’s office.

accomplishment

I’ve learned that when I’m focused on communicating and stewarding my brand with all of the above approaches, I don’t feel like anything I do is a waste of time. I’m not mired in the logistics of yet another mediocre mailing. I’m not left wondering if what I’m saying or doing is being accepted or rejected. I *see* it, every day, when I talk to people. Even the emails I go through each day make me feel like I’m moving something forward, opening another avenue for communication with someone. It feels remarkably like progress, even the little things.

I’m not even sure I’m articulating this well, but the point is that as a “marketer” this is one of the first times in my career that I felt like I had purpose, direction, and a real connection with the impact I’m having. Marketing can sometimes feel like you live inside your own brand fishbowl, and now, I’m far more organic about my approaches to things, and I feel so much less….forced.

I know this didn’t necessarily give you tactics, but for me, it shines a light on the morale aspect of making your communications, customer support, and management folks the feeling that they’re really connecting with the people they come to work for every day.

Should that part matter? What’s your take?

The Social Media Stalemate

I had an interesting discussion on Twitter the other night, prompted by this thought:

Why do companies trust their employees to answer a phone, but not to blog or get on Twitter?

It drew a flurry of responses – everything from online activities being permanently etched in Google and thereby carrying more risk, to companies just not “getting” that their employees are likely out there talking anyway, with or without permission. It’s the second part that stuck. (The actual answers to the above question are actually rather secondary at this point).

Once again, we’re at this place of what I’m affectionately calling the Social Media Stalemate.

There are piles of information out there now about the “why” of social media, and there are increasingly bold and prominent examples of the how, from our favorites like Dell and Comcast and Zappos to all of the companies that Peter Kim has been copiously collecting here.  I’m just about done with the argument that what we need is more “examples”. We have examples, what we seem to collectively lack is the stones to execute and try stuff for ourselves (there, I said it).

So this brings me here. What happens when we’re a bit of an impasse? When we’ve outlined examples, talked until we’re blue in the face about the benefits of participating in social media and pointed out the risks of ignoring it, and yet our company or client refuses to hear?

You probably know by now that I’m a proponent of doing things in baby steps, and that complete revolution is often impossible and sometimes even unwise in the face of business. So no, to those of you that may be preparing to launch into a comment storm about social media’s overhype, I’m not suggesting that we jettison everything old in favor of everything new. But doing nothing at all, digging in your heels and refusing to see what’s in front of you? That’s a tough nut to crack.

I’m all for education and teaching and learning and gradual sea change. But even I have to admit that I shake my head at some of the stale rationale I keep hearing to justify resisting the things that are so obviously changing the face of business and media as we know them, even in small ways. And I grow even more confused when what I hear as justification are things like “it’s risky” or “we don’t know if it will work” or “companies are afraid of the unknown”. I have yet to execute any substantially successful communications, marketing, community outreach, fundraising, or customer service initiative in my career that came with a guarantee of success, whether or not it had precedent.

This isn’t fishbowl validation anymore, folks. I’m not trying to preach to the converted or play kumbaya, nor am I trying to assert that social media is the end-all (and I’ve written many times about why it isn’t). Social media didn’t create the mistrust or the detractors or the risks or the issues at hand, it’s just putting them in plain sight, and putting companies in the uncomfortable (or enlightening) position to respond.

So I’m asking you. Can persistence in teaching and education pay off, and is eternal patience the only prescription (besides more cowbell)?

How much analysis and risk evaluation is enough before action is imperative?

And when all else fails, when (and HOW) do you cut bait, either as a company or an adviser? Is there a time when you as the social media champion are forced to choose your company or your cause?

I don’t have all the answers here, far from it. But I’m wondering if any of you are thinking about this like I am. Help me out?