Twitter is the latest trend in social media, and while it is still unclear how Twitter will influence and change people and business, it is clear that something is happening around micro-blogging that is worth a closer look. If you haven’t heard of Twitter yet, Twitter is a free social-networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each other’s updates.

The tremendous growth that Twitter has experienced in the last months clearly shows that the service has traction and is increasingly attracting not just early adopters but also the average Internet user. Below you will find a comparison of traffic between twitter.com and cnn.com.

Since Twitter has a more open platform than Facebook, this increasing adoption opens up significant opportunities for businesses to tap into the online conversations of their customers and initiate micro-interactions with them.

Based on my close observation of Twitter (I wrote my first article about Twitter in March 2007), I have identified five use cases that demonstrate how businesses can use Twitter. Additionally, you can now follow the Customer Experience Labs on Twitter at   www.twitter.com/cxlabs.

The five use cases that I have identified are:

Voice of the Customer

When customers are talking, companies should listen, and while this has been difficult in the past, Twitter allows to listen to these conversations through various tools that allow to monitor online conversations. The easiest starting point is using Twitter search to search for conversations that include a certain term (i.e., your brand name). Popular brands such as Apple have a large volume of conversations, but there is probably somebody talking about your brand as well. Just open Twitter search, type in your brand name, and listen to the conversation. A more sophisticated tool for monitoring Twitter is monitter.com which allows to monitor three keywords at the same time.

Proactive Customer Service

After starting to listen to online conversations, the next step is to react to these conversations. While it is easy to say thanks to positive statements about your brand, a much higher impact is possible by providing proactive customer service when customer are complaining online. Here are some examples of customers complaining on Twitter:

AT&T…horrible service, not receiving e-mails on Blackberry, and their customer service is horrible. Oh well! Looking into verizon

I called Rogers customer service, couldn’t help me. Don’t even know if an existing customer can buy one at all, let alone price.

Intuit - What kind of customer service is that?

Acting on complaints like this on Twitter is extremely important because the nature of the system is to start conversations that in the case of complaints lead to negative word of mouth. Monitoring when customers express their negative experiences with a brand and initiating proactive customer service can restore customer satisfaction. All you need is to create a Twitter account, setup Twitter searches for relevant terms, and be ready to act when customers complain.

Recruitment

The social network and messaging features on Twitter not only allow to talk with customers but could also be used to find potential employees. Especially if you are working in a media or technology-related industry, Twitter provides an additional proactive recruitment channel and could help you find your next employee. Research In Motion, the company that develops the BlackBerry smartphone, has recently started to actively recruit employees via Twitter. Two recruiters tap into the conversations and try to identify potential candidates on Twitter. To get an impression of how this is done, you can take a look at @BB_Recruiter and @eloisewalsh and see how they publish job opportunities and interact with potential employees.

Customer Feedback

Once you have established a sufficient followership on Twitter, you can use this channel to collect instant feedback about new products, services, and ideas. Twitter allows you, through its nature of near real-time conversations, to collect instant feedback about your organization’s activities. Here is one example of a survey done by Gillette:

uncrate: Do us a solid and take this Gillette/Uncrate Answers survey http://bit.ly/MxrUo

Of course, this feedback doesn’t need to be collected openly as a Twitter conversation. Inviting customers to give feedback through a web-based survey tool like SurveyMonkey or Google Docs Forms has become really easy.

Viral Marketing

The social network features on Twitter provide a potential channel to build viral marketing campaigns. The essential point is NOT TO USE Twitter for your viral marketing campaign but to INTEGRATE Twitter into your viral marketing campaign. This means that a business should not just try to run a campaign and spread the word through Twitter but actually integrate Twitter as a channel in the campaign. If you are doing an online campaign, you can simply create a link through to Twitter with a link to Twitter that includes a certain message.

This can be done by creating a link to Twitter that includes the status update and looks like www.twitter.com/?status=Check out the Customer Experience Labs at www.customer-experience-labs.com. This presets a Twitter message and makes it easy to spread the word with your campaign. Once your campaign spreads on to Twitter and you have Twitter integrated as a campaign channel, your campaign is ready to go viral. An example is the integration of Twitter into the streaming music service grooveshark that allows listeners to share their music on Twitter. Below is a screenshot that shows the Twitter link in the lower left corner.

Some Companies that already use Twitter

The following Twitter users are companies or represent companies that use the service to interact with customers. All of them are confirmed; you can also find a complete list of major companies on Twitter.

BBC http://twitter.com/BBC

British Airways http://twitter.com/BritishAirways

Delta http://twitter.com/deltaairlines

Intuit QuickBase http://twitter.com/IntuitQuickBase

Siemens PLM Software http://twitter.com/SiemensPLM

Capgemini http://twitter.com/Capgemini

Honda http://twitter.com/Alicia_at_Honda

Vodafone Ireland http://twitter.com/VodafoneIreland

Vodafone Germany http://twitter.com/Vodafone_de

Getting Started

The steps to get active on Twitter are simple and can be done without much effort. Simply register on Twitter and you can start to follow other users. If you don’t want to start with your company’s brand name, you can simply use your own name to see how your use of Twitter evolves. If that works out well, you can switch to an account that represents your organization. Nevertheless, registering your company name now is a good idea to ensure that nobody else can use it.
Finding users to follow can be done through the integrated user search or by doing a Twitter search with your brand name and following the users who are talking about your brand. Additionally, you can set up the auto-follow functionality based on certain keywords through services like http://www.twollo.com/.

In order to work with Twitter efficiently, you can install a desktop client like TweetDeck, which offers a lot of functionality (i.e., user search, keyword search, URL shortening) and makes Twitter really easy to use.

Spread the word

If you like this article and find it helpful, I would appreciate it if you spread the word tweet about this article.

Posted in branding, marketing, trends | Permalink | 15 Comments »

Apple, Starbucks, the Mini Cooper - these brands and products are not just successful, they are cult and many marketers dream that one day they might be able to create a similar cult around one of their products or brands.

Many have tried that before, most of them have failed and when they have failed to create a cult product it is usually the result of one cause: They focus on the product instead of focusing on the product’s tribe.

Another essential question is of course: What is a cult product? A cult brands gives customers a sense of belonging within that product category and owning that product is an honor.

A cult is primarily the results of an extraordinary consumer tribe, and only secondarily of an extraordinary product.

A cult originates in the mind of people

A cult product is created in the minds of customers and if you want to create cult product, having a great product alone is simply not enough. The first thing you have to change is your language - you are not trying to create a cult product, you are trying to create a cult around your product.

A cult is the result of peoples opinion of your products and the owners of your product. Therefore you have to find a way how you can either influence people’s opinion, attract a certain kind of customers that represents your brand image and give them a sense of belonging to somewhere. Sounds complicated, but tribal marketing can help.

Everything starts with building a tribe

A tribe is basically a group of people connected to each other, to your products and your brand. Successful marketing increasingly includes the task of cultivating, nurturing and developing a tribe and its members. Instead of following the top-down approach which is the core of “brand management” , “tribal marketing” focuses on each individual that gives permission to be part of your brand and convert him into a passionate and loyal follower that will spread the marketing message for you.

The Joel On Software Tribe

Applications for tracking bugs in computer software are not a very innovative area and countless commercial and free applications are available. Nevertheless Joel Spolsky, author of the blog JoelOnSoftware, and his company FogCreek Software successfully developed and launched a product in a mature market by first building a tribe of software developers and project managers through his blog and his books. After establishing this tribe he leveraged it to promote the companies bug tracking software and also the statistics for his latest project stackoverflow.com, a wiki for software developers, demonstrate the power of his tribe to launch product that is built for it’s tribe.

The Joel On Software tribe is a community of software developers who have the desire to become better developers or better manager of software development teams.

Focus on what others think about your tribe

The value of your product is additionally influenced by what others think about you as an owner. If other people have a high opinion about your customers, your products value increases as well.

Driver Image vs. Car Image

Studies have shown that one of the essential drivers of an automotive brand image is the image that is associated with the drivers of a car. So if Porsche aims to change it’s brand image, it has to consider what other people think about Porsche drivers.

If major car manufacturer want to launch an electric car, they have to consider what other people associate with drivers of electric cars and make them members of a tribe that represents more than an electric car. Hopefully it is not “radical environmentalism” but a different lifestyle.

(Picture above left shows an article about Jennifer Aniston buying a Toyota Prius)

An expensive, exclusive product won’t create a cult

Many companies try to create a cult product by making a really expensive version so that you associate “rich and famous” with your product and they can then charge a premium. While this is a strategy to earn higher margins by targeting a segment with higher income, it won’t necessarily help you achieve a bigger following – you are merely creating a halo product.

The implications for your brand

If you decide that you want to create a cult product you should first start to think how you could create a tribe around your product.

• Who could be the first people to join that tribe?
• What would it mean to be part of that tribe?

Next you have to focus on how you can increase the reputation of your tribe members and shape the opinion of non-customers about your tribe members.

Should every company try to become a cult brand or develop a cult product?

The key to cult products is not just the product, but the tribe that surrounds it’s product and that represents it’s product. Whatever you do to build this tribe and convert indifferent customers into enthusiastic customers, there is a certain risk associated with being different. It is up to you how much you differentiate your tribe and how much you empower your tribe.

But one is certain: If you don’t dare to be different, you will never become a cult brand.

Further Reading:

• Book: Tribes -  We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin
• Tribe Management
• Harvard Business School Marketing Club conference-Cult Brands: Lessons Learned At Apple, ESPN, and PepsiCo
• Detroit’s New ‘Halo’ Cars Make Sharp Turns in These Hard Times

Posted in branding | Permalink | 2 Comments »

Everyone likes to talk about delighting customers and how to create remarkable experiences. Only a few people get actually in a position when they have deliver these experiences. Paul Hemp, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review, stepped into the role of a Waiter at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston and tells the story of his experiences when delivering world’s best service.

So what’s the key to the world-class service at Ritz Carlton?

Empowering employees […] is a sign of the respect with which the company vows to treat them. And employees are expected to treat one another the same way. Yet another Gold Standard is the corporate motto: “We are Ladies and Gentleman serving Ladies and Gentleman. In terms of human dignity, the argument goes, Ritz-Carlton customers and employees are equals. “You are service professionals, not servants,” a video we watch on company values tells us. “If you feel good about yourself, you’ll treat others, including colleagues, well”.

As I leave the hotel and walk across the Boston Common in the gathering dusk, I reflect on what I’ve learned about teaching and motivating employees to provide truly memorable service. On thing seems clear: Great customer service should be based on dynamic principles rather than a rigid formula. […]

For staff to delight customers, managers must do more than grant their employees freedom to do what is necessary, they must motivate employees to exercise that freedom.

Read the full article here or buy reprints here.

Posted in branding, customer experience | Permalink | No Comments »

Diego Rodriguez over at metacool has a nice post about his observations of Toyota Prius drivers. The key message is that there is certain behaviour of your customers regarding your product that you can’t control. But exactly this behaviour can have a serious impact on your brand and the related image.

These are chapters in building your brand (and spreading your idea) that can not be written ahead, but in a follow-up post, he comes up with a solution: rewarding brand-building behaviour.

In order to ensure that your customer are using your product in the right way or that the correct brand message gets delivered all you have to do is come up with incentives for rewarding brand-building behaviour. Diego comes up with a few examples for the Prius case and this exercise can be done for any product, service or brand.

Now the question is, how we can create ideas for rewarding brand-building behaviour? Let’s try it with these steps:

1. Identify “good” and “bad” brand-building behaviour situations
2. Identify situations, that would increase the status of your customers
3. Now mix them up and reward “good” brand-building behaviour and provide an incentive for not pursuing “bad”

The result would be a guideline (of course you don’t call it like that ), how to use the product or service and how to “life” the brand. The result is an “army of brand ambassadors” - which would open up countless new opportunities.

Posted in branding, checklist, idea worth spreading, thought in progress | Permalink | No Comments »