Emergence Marketing: May 2007 Archives

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May 23, 2007

Enterprise 2.0 adoption issues - different from collaboration adoption issues?

Yesterday I was fortunate to be the host of a really enlightening conversation on adoption issues related to enterprise 2.0 projects with Andrew McAfee, Euan Semple, Jenny Ambrozek, Jerry Bowles, and Jim McGee (you can listen to a replay of the event here). We had another session on Monday - but since we had some technical difficulties during that session the audio needs editing. I will write about that one when the audio is available.

One of the questions that crossed my mind is whether enterprise 2.0 tools (web 2.0 tools deployed within an enterprise environment) have the same barriers to adoption as traditional collaboration tools. One of the main barriers to adoption with collaboration tools is to not be able to get everyone who is working on a project to use the tools. This can happen for a variety of reasons - i.e., "the blank screen" syndrome, which happens when people do not quite know how to use the tools or organize their work within those tools, and revert back to email, face-to-face and phone instead of working within the specialized collaborative environment, or for cultural/political reasons, when people do not like the way the project is organized and boycott the use of the collaborative tools. In all those instances the value of the collaboration environment goes down to zero for all the other team members who want to use it. If some part of the work or the project lives outside of the project collaboration environment, then that environment has no more value than a person's inbox - it is not complete.

Enterprise 2.0 tools on the other hand are less project-centric and a little more individual-people-centric, meaning that even if I am the only one who is using tagging or blogging on a project, that still has value to me. I am not sure that holds true for wikis, which are true collaborative environments.

Note that we also set up a Ning social networking group for Enterprise 2.0 Ravers - feel free to join and engage in that conversation as well.

[Tags: enterprise 2.0 web 2.0 adoption ]

May 21, 2007

Enterprise 2.0 Webinar

If you get a chance, please join us for the Enterprise 2.0 webinar which I will be hosting this afternoon at 2pm. This afternoon we will have a conversation with a number of experts - including Euan Semple, Susan Scrupski, Bill Ives, Jevon McDonald, John Musser, Joe McKendrick and Lee White from GSK.

Tomorrow will be the second part at 11am ET with Andrew McAfee, Euan Semple, Jerry Bowles, Jenny Ambrozek, and JP Rangaswami.

You can find registration information at the Enterprise 2.0 RAVE site.

Those discussions will be recorded and available for replay after the conference calls are over. We will post the information on the Enterprise 2.0 Rave site as well as the FASTforward blog. Also make sure to join the Enterprise 2.0 Ravers social networking site at http://e2ravers.ning.com.

May 17, 2007

Companies need to add "Customer UI" expertise to their talent pool

And I am not talking about product UI (User Interface) - I am talking about the "company" UI from the customer's point of view. After all my poor buying experiences with companies that have very bright and dedicated people working for them, it became clear to me that most companies should hire or staff a group of independent customer advocates with UI experiences to ensure that all the touch-points through which a customer can interact with the company are all compatible with one another and are all delivering against the same promise that is being made during the pre-sale cycle. That includes packaging, in-store support/returns/etc, phone support/billing/etc., web support/shops/registration/etc, and any other way through which a customer could interact with the company after they first buy a product.

The fact that HP as a company has multiple logins for different shops, and that a "customer" case manager for one division can not handle problems the customer has with another division would go away if you would have a customer-centric company UI group who would police this stuff. The fact that my insurance company sends me statements with a different look and feel, different information in the same places, and different content for the various policies I have would go away as well. The fact that most corporate web sites are organized around the companies' divisions instead of being customer-centric would also go away...you get the point.

A good example of a company doing this right is Apple. I recently bought a new iMac for my son, as well as a new Airport Extreme to upgrade my home office network. I registered those products online, and required some support for setting up disk and printer sharing with the new Airport. I have also been using iTunes to buy my music for years. At Apple, all the touch-points reinforce the same message - we are easy and fun to work with. From the store interactions to the packaging, to the online support and registration systems, all the touch-points are perfectly tuned to one another and they all have "me" at the center.

[Tags: company UI customer service customer-centricity wom apple marketing]

May 16, 2007

Shopping 2.0

Here is a cool video that I got through Debi Jones, a new contributor to our newly launched blog on Mobile Messaging 2.0.

(here is the URL for RSS subscribers)

May 14, 2007

Being in "HP Hell" - the PC Manufacturer's Hell Sequel!

[UPDATE 05/16/07] After spending between 15-20 hours on the new computer in the last week, HP fixed their telephone lines and I got in touch with my case manager - who was very efficient. They are going to replace the whole computer. Fedex is picking up the old one today and I should have the new one next week.

[UPDATE 05/17/07] Someone from the small & medium business division emailed me to apologize for sending me two monitors - apparently this error occurred due to a system issue. She wanted to know if I "would like to keep the monitor or return it; this would be at no charge of course." I assume the return would be at no charge and not the "keep" option...sigh

Depending on how you look at it, this could be the funniest or saddest buying experience - I will let you be the judge of that. This is my story of trying to buy an HP media center PC - a fairly high end machine by desktop standards. Unfortunately there are so many "Colbert-esque" twists and turns to this story that it became really long - so I apologize for the length of this marketing horror story...but I am sure you will relate to some parts of it.

First was the actual buying experience - I decided to buy an HP Media Center from the Home Office division but did not like the monitor choices from that online store. In looking around I found what I wanted in their small and medium business division's store. Trying to buy that monitor did not exactly go as smooth as expected. Not only did I need a different account with different rules to be able to buy this product, which all by itself caused some problems as I described last week, but they shipped me two monitors - even though all my records and confirmations show that I only purchased one. You might think that was a good thing - getting a spare monitor for free. Not so, they also charged me twice (not right away, mind you, but a few days after I received the order)!

Hmmm...come to think of it, I may have stumbled across the secret HP formula for success...just send duplicate orders to your customers, charge them for it only a few days after someone accepted the order, and hope that nobody will notice :)

The real story started when I got my brand new machine on Tuesday of last week. Somehow I could not get the sound to work. I tinkered with it for a few nights thinking that it must be a classic case of "stupid user errors," but no, I could not get it to work. On Friday I finally got in touch with their support department and spend a long time online with the first technician, who took me through all her possible help screens to debug my problem. She finally told me that the system was somehow not recognizing the Soundblaster card, which her system showed as having shipped with my new computer, and that I should shut off the computer, open up the tower and re-seat the Soundblaster card. And if that did not work I should reload the drivers. ..easy, that should solve my problem.

So I did that, but never found the Soundblaster card. Thinking that perhaps Soundblaster had stopped branding their product, I decided to re-seat all the boards I could find. When that did not work I reloaded some audio drivers but not the Soundblaster drivers, as I could not find them. So I got back in touch with the award winning HP support department.

The second tech took me through many of the same steps and also some new ones. After what seemed like an eternity she finally gave up, sending me a link to all the help screens she was going through to troubleshoot my system and saying: "Francois, Please try the steps from the article if that does not resolve the issue we will take the PC for physical evaluation. This will get your issue resolved" (in quotes taken from the actual chat transcript) I thought she had not noticed that besides buying a PC with all the bells and whistles, I had also bought an in-house support plan - the type that promises to send a technician to your house or office if something does not work. So I mentioned that to her and also said that her proposed resolution was unacceptable. I also asked her how I could return the PC and inquired about further escalation possibilities. By now, the only thing she was concerned about was: "Are you ready to send the PC to our factory, so that we would physically evaluate the PC and get the issue resolved." When I asked what was included as part of the in-house service plan she answered "The in-home service would cover replacement of hardware component if any.." How she decided that this was not a hardware issue is a mystery to me - after all the first tech rep told me that it sounded like the system was not recognizing a piece of hardware....was it even there? When I asked for a manager she told me that a "quality manager" would call me back within 48 hours - which BTW still has not happened.

I can assure you that it was a lovely way to spend 3 hours on a Friday night - thank you HP!

On Saturday I took a closer look at the in-house plan that I bought, only to realize that you have to register that thing within 10 days or else it becomes null and void. I opted for the online registration. The system prompted me for some personal information and then for my products' serial numbers and product numbers. At first it would not accept the product numbers which were listed on both the computer itself and on the invoice. It presented me instead with a series of numbers that did not resemble anything that I had received from HP. I picked one anyway but then the system told me that it could not register my computer's serial number as it did not exist. Thankfully there was a human-based backup system reachable by fax which figured it out based on the numbers that the online process had rejected.

...another hour well spent on a beautiful Saturday - thank you again HP.

As you can imagine, by now I was livid...

I got a sliver of hope when I discovered the HP Marketing Excellence Blog authored by an HP VP of Marketing Strategy & Excellence who had just received some award by Brandweek for being a marketing exec who "gets it." Hooray, someone at HP was engaging in the market conversation. I left a comment on his blog saying that I wished I could congratulate him for his new award, but that while he might "get it," he had obviously not been able to instill that "getting it" into his company's culture. Since marketing is all about making sure that all the customer touch points reinforce the same marketing promise you make at the point of sale, I told him that I could not consider HP's marketing successful and worthy of an award. He approved the comment really fast and sent me an email explaining that he would see what he could do to help me. I thanked him with some additional details of my ordeal so he would have all the ammunition to get this resolved. I also lefr a message on their customer experience blog - pointing out some the problems with site incompatibilities which I had encountered and the form that did not work, but that comment has yet to be approved.

Unfortunately things did not improve after that...

When by 3pm yesterday I did not get a call from anyone, I sent the VP a quick note letting him know that I had not heard from anyone. Shortly afterwards I got a call from a senior case manager who introduced herself and gave me a phone number with two extensions, one for my case and one her personal extension - unfortunately I was on the phone when she called and so that information came to me via my voice mail box. When I called back and dialed her extension, I got a message that this extension was an invalid extension. When I dialed the extension for my case the system would hang up on me. Thinking that perhaps it had to do with my VoIP service I tried repeatedly from my cell (T-Mobile) as well as from my home phone (Verizon) - but in each case the system would keep hanging up on me. I recorded this experience, so you can listen to what it sounds like to call HP support if interested.

Not believing that this award-winning support department would do this sort of thing I kept trying, finally entering a random set of numbers which got me to by-pass the IVR and put me into the general queue for their case management service. When I finally got a live person I asked to be connected with the extension of my case manager - only to be told that he could not connect me to that extension. He asked me for all sorts of information to identify myself and subsequently transferred me to someone else who asked me for all the same information - and also unwilling to connect me to my case manager. 45 minutes later I got transferred to a third person who first asked me "how" he could help me, but then quickly sensed the mood and tried to connect me with my case manager. When that failed he asked for my number and proceeded to give me the "right" number for me to call back - which was the same number I had tried all along. I asked him to use his cell phone or some other phone to call that number himself and verify that it kept hanging up on me. He said he would, put me on hold and NEVER came back. I did receive an email from my case manager saying that she was unsuccessful in reaching me via phone (1 try!), but that I could call her back at her personal extension - that same defunct number. I tried to reply to the message but it was one of the mailboxes you cannot reply to...

...another 2 hours well spent - thank you HP!

If anyone at HP is listening, here are a couple of recommendations:

Stop your marketing - if your post-sale processes are set up to destroy your brand promise as it did for me, then all your marketing dollars are wasted resources. They will not buy customer loyalty, which is where your long term profitability will come from

Stop focusing on optimizing mind-less processes. Empower some humans to by-pass the processes and get the customer the help they deserve. Build escalation steps within your support infrastructure that includes real techies - not telephone operators who are following a set of screenshots to debug a system

Fix my problem or send someone to pack up and pick up this machine - as a small business owner I cannot afford to spend any more time on your problems, and I certainly do not want to inherit them

Buying and supporting PCs is getting worse than dealing with airlines. Even my $4-7 (for full fault tolerance) a month ISP is offering me better service.

Hopefully someone at Lenovo is paying attention - if this is how their competition deals with customers it cannot be that hard to capture all those lost souls and turn them into life-long loyal customers.

Click to hear the sound of HP support hanging up on you...

[Tags: HP customer service hp hell wom hp problems marketing]

Beyond Buzz - the next generation of word-of-mouth marketing

I have been remiss at writing about a few good books I read in the past few months. My reading list is also desperately out of date...

One book which definitely should interest any marketing practitioner is a book by my good friend Lois Kelly, who also blogs on the Foghound blog.

The book - called Beyond Buzz, The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing - is a great "how to" book with a ton of actionable ideas. The author does a great job clarifying the distinction between making meaning and making buzz. She also teaches you how to uncover interesting things about your company or product and turn them into "point of views" that people will want to talk to you about, she tells you how to organize customer listening tours, and much more. The book also provides some great frameworks and questionnaires to help you turn word-of-mouth strategies into actionable plans that will work, and not fizzle out or backfire, as many of them do.

Definitely a great book to have on your office bookshelf.

[Tags: marketing wom word of mouth marketing beyond buzz word of mouth lois kelly]

May 11, 2007

Sony delivers the worst ROI yet!

customer service hell sm.jpg [rant coming] OK, so I am in a complaining mood this week, but as a passionate marketing person it is so depressing to see how large companies deal with their customers. My last mind-bending experience is with Sony.

I bought a Viao laptop from their online store last week and picked a model/color that was in stock and that was going to ship this past Tuesday - May 8th. I even paid for the 2 day shipping upgrade as I wanted it for the weekend. On May 8 I went online to check on my order and their system now showed that my order was now not scheduled to ship until May 9th. So on May 9th I went and checked and the system showed that my brand new toy would ship that day. When I checked on May 10th I was shocked to find the system now yelling at me: "CURRENTLY OUT OF STOCK, ship date unknown". Never did I receive a notice from Sony explaining what was happening. The only thing I got from them was a useless dock that I had ordered with the PC. So I emailed them to complain about my 2 day shipping surcharge which was now meaningless and also to ask them for clarification on what was going to happen and how I could potentially cancel my order and return the dock.

36 hours later, the system is still yelling: "CURRENTLY OUT OF STOCK, Ship date unknown" and I still have to receive my first email or phone call from Sony. What did I do wrong?

Companies operating in the consumer electronics space have to know that as long as they do not screw up, people will continue to buy their brands when it's time for an upgrade. That is true for PC's, printers, cameras, you name it - heck - I bought 7 Dells before they screwed up. So how can a company, who is currently not doing that well to begin with, first screw up on their supply chain management so than a product that showed in stock suddenly goes out of stock with an unknown ship date, and secondly screw up even more by not communicating with a customer who not only paid extra for expedited shipping, but who also took the time to alert them about the fact that he was becoming irate? And did I mention that I usually buy top of the line, or should I say with tons of options that you don't really need - so over a lifetime this could mean tens of thousands of dollars to Sony just from this one customer - me.

These are the basics...this is not sophisticated management theory:
a) make sure you have a reliable supply chain
b) have an impeccable customer service process - especially when a) fails

My Return on Information with Sony is close to zero...

sigh...

[end of rant]

[Tags: customer service supply chain sony viao roi return on information]

May 10, 2007

Google maps finaly has directions from where I live to the town I was born in...

It is so funny to see how Google Maps provides directions to my home town...

Click on the map or this link to get the directions (http://tinyurl.com/2bz25m)

I especially like step #13 - Swim across the Atlantic Ocean :)

May 9, 2007

When you get a low ROI as a customer

John Hagel speaks a lot about a new type of ROI - Return On Information -, and how ROI needs to be optimized for both the company as well as for the customer. As a company, if you do not know who the top 20% of your customers are who bring in 80% of your profit, you do not have a good ROI.

As a customer, I just experienced some very low ROI situations - which really affect the way I feel about the company.

First was my cellular provider T-Mobile, which I had to call last week as some people with Cingular accounts could all of a sudden not reach me anymore. After going through the usual interactive voice response system "hell" and providing my home number, home address and last four digits of my social security I finally reached a live person, who started the conversation by asking me for my home number, home address and last four digits of my social security. I thought I was going to strangle him and when I asked him why he had to get that from me again since I had already provided all that rich information to their system - he responded that "his" system had no way of knowing that I came from that "other" system...sigh. At least he was helpful, which is sort of surprising with today's cellular providers.

Next came my buying experience with HP. I bought a new Media Center PC from their online home office store. That went smoothly...registered, used a simple password with all letters, and when I was finished I got a friendly confirmation with a $10 coupon. The problem was that I did not like the monitor choices on their site. In looking around I found what I wanted in their small & medium business online store. So I tried to log in, only to find out that my log-in credentials from the home office site did not work. I had t recreate a new account, and this time I was asked for a password that had to have a combination of letters (with at least one in Cap), numbers or special characters. This one also asked for my mother's maiden name! When I typed in the discount code I had received from HP (I know, it was the home office store - a different division), it was rejected. On Sunday, when I tried to access that account, I could not. Evidently I had forgotten what password I used, and since I had given a fake maiden name for my mother (that is none of HP's business), I could not reset my password. Since they were closed on Sunday, I had to wait until Monday to reset my password, which is when my order was scheduled to ship. When I looked at the home office division, they were open on Sunday, but I figured it was not worth the aggravation trying to call someone there to reset my password on the fort knox computer from the small and medium business division....sigh.

How much would it cost them to get systems that are customer centric instead of division centric? And what do you think their ROI (return on investment) would be to deliver a better ROI (return on information) experience for their customers?

Sigh...

[Tags: customer service HP IVR t-mobile roi return on information]

May 8, 2007

What is the state of the market for Enterprise 2.0 Tools?

Are you in the process of deploying Enterprise 2.0 Tools or thinking of doing it? Who in your organization is involved? What do you anticipate the biggest barriers to adoption to be? How will you measure success? Which process will you start with?

If you are interested in participating in a project in which we collectively come to an answer for these and other questions, then take a few minutes to fill out the Enterprise 2.0 Market Readiness Survey. We will share all the results with everyone who's interested.

And of course feel free to post it on your blog for your audiences to fill in and participate (just point them to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=937203810006).

May 3, 2007

What happens when a geek decides to travel around the world?

What do you think happens when a geek decides that he spent too much time in the office, and quits to go travel around the world with his son?

(here is a link to the video for the RSS subscribers)

6,500,000 million views on YouTube, a sponsor paying him to do it again...fame!

Very cool.

Wikify your org chart and see what happens

In the latest issue of Forbes, which is jam packed with articles on the power of networks, some better than others, they are also announcing their new Corporate Org Chart Wiki - a collaborative application that enables people to document the internal networks of any corporation.

While there is currently not much up there - the thought of having ordinary people, including company insiders and outsiders, collaborate on the creation of the real networks inside companies is a fascinating experiment. Of course, that only works if employees are not afraid to speak up - which seems to be a persistent problem in most companies.

[Tags: influence networks org chart]

May 2, 2007

Are you ready for "bigseed" marketing?

Even though most viral marketing campaigns fail - many companies are jumping on the bandwagon based on the few well-documented case studies that keep being recycled. The same Harvard Business Review quoted yesterday has another interesting forethought on the mechanics of viral marketing campaigns and how to increase their success ratios - this one by Columbia University Prof. Duncan Watts and Jonah Peretti, co-founder of the Huffington Post.

Standard viral marketing is based on an analogy with the spread of infectious diseases. If you start with a seed of individuals who spread the message by "infecting" their friends, the expected number of new infectious people generated by each one is called the "reproduction rate," or R. If R is larger than 1 then you have a successful viral marketing campaign, if it is smaller than 1 then your campaign will fizzle out.

The point that the authors are making is that unlike infectious diseases marketers have a few more controls than diseases. First they can start with a much bigger seed. And with some of the new social networking/sharing tools that enable people to more easily forward messages to friends, they can also improve their message reproduction rate. And both those factors add up. Say that you have a reproduction rate of 0.5 in your campaign and that you send it to 10,000 people, then those people would pass it on to 5,000 and those would pass it on to 2,500 and so on - eventually reaching 20,000 people, twice your original seed. By having the ability to tweak both the size of the seed and the reproduction rate, you can optimize your campaigns - even when they are not totally "viral."

One interesting piece of software that they mention is ForewardTrack, an open source applications originally designed to promote online activism. The system tracks and maps the diffusion of email forwards, political calls-to-action, and online petitions. It can trace email forwards, map the impact of blogs, and facilitate web-based sign-ups and social networking. Many commercial entities, including P&G, are now using ForwardTrack as part of their email campaigns.

Fascinating...

[Tags: viral marketing bigseed]

May 1, 2007

How to solve your R&D problems

The latest issue of the Harvard Business Review has a great forethought on how to outsource your toughest R&D problems by HBS Prof. Karim Lakhani and Lars Bo Jeppesen from the Copenhagen Business School.

The authors analyzed all the problems that were broadcasted through Innocentive from 2001 to 2004.What they found is that on average each problem got the attention of 200 people and received 10 solutions. Other findings from their research were:

Problems should be broadcasted to people in various fields as radical innovations often happen at the intersections of disciplines.

Prices are necessary, but not sufficient. While people are expecting financial rewards for solving corporations' problems, the enjoyment of taking on a novel problem was a bigger draw.

Insiders are still important. Without it you cannot formulate your problems, nor can you assess which solutions are the best ones. So you cannot replace your internal R&D staff.

Cool stuff...

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